[
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson on What Every Child Should Know About Science (WSJ: 20 Odd Questions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "100",
        "date": "2017-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/neil-degrasse-tyson-1495122652?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=122",
        "text": "Dr. Tyson\n\n\n\n has since become a tour de force in that cultural shift, a dauntless and likable crusader. Whether as the director of the American Museum of Natural History\u2019s Hayden Planetarium, the affable host of the \u201cStarTalk Radio\u201d podcast and \u201cCosmos\u201d TV series, or the author of eminently accessible books like his latest, \u201cAstrophysics for People in a Hurry,\u201d few can make abstruse scientific concepts as understandable\u2014or as inspiring. \u201cI\u2019m an educator,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t know it, I\u2019m here for you.\u201d \nHere, he shares his singular takes on the rhetorical benefits of a fountain pen and the best science-fair experiment for children. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSUPERNERD Clockwise from left: \u2018There\u2019s No Place Like Space\u2019; strawberry milkshake; The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201912 X 5\u2019; \u2018Star Walk\u2019 app; Mauna Kea Observatories; pyramids of Giza; \u2018The Big Bang Theory\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n F. Martin Ramin/The Wall Street Journal (book); Getty Images (Mauna Kea Observatories, Milkshake, Pyramids); Alamy (record); Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (\u2018The Big Bang Theory\u2019)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe best place in the world to stargaze is: the summit of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, 14,000 feet up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The most powerful optical telescopes in the world are there.\n\n\nOne travel destination everyone should see is: a total solar eclipse, wherever in the world that may take you. So the \u201cdestination\u201d is the event, not the location.\nMy travel bucket-list includes: the pyramids of Giza, Easter Island and the Inca and Aztec monuments of South America. I like basking in what generations who came centuries and millennia before me have accomplished.\nThe product design I most admire would be: the zipper, plus any machine or technical product that you can operate without first having read the instruction manual.\nOne of my pet peeves is: street lamps that also send light upward to the sky.\nThe best advice I\u2019ve ever received is: \u201cIt\u2019s not good enough to be right. You also need to be effective.\u201d Cyril deGrasse Tyson, 1928-2016.\nIf money were no object, I would buy: a space launch system to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.\nMy favorite films of all time are: \u201cThe Matrix,\u201d \u201cContact,\u201d \u201cThe Island,\u201d \u201cThe Conversation,\u201d \u201cExcalibur\u201d and \u201cAll That Jazz.\u201d These were philosophically deep, insightful, enlightening and entertaining.\nA great science-fair experiment is: the volcano concept but manifested in another way: Get a large balloon, funnel in baking soda then a cup of vinegar and quickly tie the thing shut. The balloon will self-inflate, and, if you put enough of that stuff in there, it will explode. Then you have a nice mess, which every kid loves.\nI\u2019m currently reading: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cScience and Humanism.\u201d It\u2019s a very small book, but it\u2019s giving me insight into what people were thinking 67 years ago, and I get to compare that with what people are thinking today. \nIf I could eat only one food on a voyage to Mars, it would be: pepperoni pizza and a strawberry malted milkshake. I could consume those foods day after day and never get tired of them. They\u2019re actually quite healthy\u2014there\u2019s fat, protein, carbohydrates. I might supplement it with a vitamin, but all the calorie needs are there. \nAn app I marvel at is: \u201cStar Walk.\u201d You point your smartphone downward and it shows you the constellations that haven\u2019t risen yet. The audacity of that! In my day, we had to remember what was there; now it\u2019s just handed to you.\nEvery household should have: a telescope and a microscope. \nI still remember the first time I heard: the Rolling Stones. They would always have a blues act open for them. That shows respect for where you\u2019re getting your music.\nA game-changing TV show is: \u201cThe Big Bang Theory.\u201d Twenty years ago, had you walked up to a network and said, \u201cI got an idea for a show. It\u2019s got Ph.D. scientists in it, and we\u2019ll just explore their love life and their social life,\u201d no one would make that a show. Now \u201cBig Bang Theory\u201d is the number one comedy on television, and you\u2019ve got shows\u2014\u201dScorpion,\u201d \u201cNumbers,\u201d \u201cCSI\u201d\u2014with scientists who are good looking, who have social lives. That was never previously done.\nI collect: fountain pens. If I\u2019m giving a speech, I\u2019ll write it in ink first. If you look at memorable speeches of the past, the rhythms happen to be in five- to seven-word pulses. Then you learn that a single dip of a quill got you five or seven words. It may be that the rhythm was shaped by how much ink could sit in the shaft of a quill pen. As I write, I\u2019m conscious of this. When you give a speech you don\u2019t want your sentences to be too long.\nA science book I recommend for children is: \u201cThere\u2019s No Place Like Space\u201d [from the Dr. Seuss series]. In 2006, the vote was officially taken [to classify Pluto as a dwarf planet]. In earlier editions, Pluto is listed as a planet, but then they released a new edition that says Pluto is more like these other things. If a Dr. Seuss book gets it right, the Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses the benefits of eating pizza en route to Mars and the best place on earth to stargaze. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson on What Every Child Should Know About Science (WSJ: 20 Odd Questions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "101",
        "date": "2017-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/neil-degrasse-tyson-1495122652?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=94",
        "text": "Dr. Tyson\n\n\n\n has since become a tour de force in that cultural shift, a dauntless and likable crusader. Whether as the director of the American Museum of Natural History\u2019s Hayden Planetarium, the affable host of the \u201cStarTalk Radio\u201d podcast and \u201cCosmos\u201d TV series, or the author of eminently accessible books like his latest, \u201cAstrophysics for People in a Hurry,\u201d few can make abstruse scientific concepts as understandable\u2014or as inspiring. \u201cI\u2019m an educator,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t know it, I\u2019m here for you.\u201d \nHere, he shares his singular takes on the rhetorical benefits of a fountain pen and the best science-fair experiment for children. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSUPERNERD Clockwise from left: \u2018There\u2019s No Place Like Space\u2019; strawberry milkshake; The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201912 X 5\u2019; \u2018Star Walk\u2019 app; Mauna Kea Observatories; pyramids of Giza; \u2018The Big Bang Theory\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n F. Martin Ramin/The Wall Street Journal (book); Getty Images (Mauna Kea Observatories, Milkshake, Pyramids); Alamy (record); Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (\u2018The Big Bang Theory\u2019)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe best place in the world to stargaze is: the summit of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, 14,000 feet up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The most powerful optical telescopes in the world are there.\n\n\nOne travel destination everyone should see is: a total solar eclipse, wherever in the world that may take you. So the \u201cdestination\u201d is the event, not the location.\nMy travel bucket-list includes: the pyramids of Giza, Easter Island and the Inca and Aztec monuments of South America. I like basking in what generations who came centuries and millennia before me have accomplished.\nThe product design I most admire would be: the zipper, plus any machine or technical product that you can operate without first having read the instruction manual.\nOne of my pet peeves is: street lamps that also send light upward to the sky.\nThe best advice I\u2019ve ever received is: \u201cIt\u2019s not good enough to be right. You also need to be effective.\u201d Cyril deGrasse Tyson, 1928-2016.\nIf money were no object, I would buy: a space launch system to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.\nMy favorite films of all time are: \u201cThe Matrix,\u201d \u201cContact,\u201d \u201cThe Island,\u201d \u201cThe Conversation,\u201d \u201cExcalibur\u201d and \u201cAll That Jazz.\u201d These were philosophically deep, insightful, enlightening and entertaining.\nA great science-fair experiment is: the volcano concept but manifested in another way: Get a large balloon, funnel in baking soda then a cup of vinegar and quickly tie the thing shut. The balloon will self-inflate, and, if you put enough of that stuff in there, it will explode. Then you have a nice mess, which every kid loves.\nI\u2019m currently reading: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cScience and Humanism.\u201d It\u2019s a very small book, but it\u2019s giving me insight into what people were thinking 67 years ago, and I get to compare that with what people are thinking today. \nIf I could eat only one food on a voyage to Mars, it would be: pepperoni pizza and a strawberry malted milkshake. I could consume those foods day after day and never get tired of them. They\u2019re actually quite healthy\u2014there\u2019s fat, protein, carbohydrates. I might supplement it with a vitamin, but all the calorie needs are there. \nAn app I marvel at is: \u201cStar Walk.\u201d You point your smartphone downward and it shows you the constellations that haven\u2019t risen yet. The audacity of that! In my day, we had to remember what was there; now it\u2019s just handed to you.\nEvery household should have: a telescope and a microscope. \nI still remember the first time I heard: the Rolling Stones. They would always have a blues act open for them. That shows respect for where you\u2019re getting your music.\nA game-changing TV show is: \u201cThe Big Bang Theory.\u201d Twenty years ago, had you walked up to a network and said, \u201cI got an idea for a show. It\u2019s got Ph.D. scientists in it, and we\u2019ll just explore their love life and their social life,\u201d no one would make that a show. Now \u201cBig Bang Theory\u201d is the number one comedy on television, and you\u2019ve got shows\u2014\u201dScorpion,\u201d \u201cNumbers,\u201d \u201cCSI\u201d\u2014with scientists who are good looking, who have social lives. That was never previously done.\nI collect: fountain pens. If I\u2019m giving a speech, I\u2019ll write it in ink first. If you look at memorable speeches of the past, the rhythms happen to be in five- to seven-word pulses. Then you learn that a single dip of a quill got you five or seven words. It may be that the rhythm was shaped by how much ink could sit in the shaft of a quill pen. As I write, I\u2019m conscious of this. When you give a speech you don\u2019t want your sentences to be too long.\nA science book I recommend for children is: \u201cThere\u2019s No Place Like Space\u201d [from the Dr. Seuss series]. In 2006, the vote was officially taken [to classify Pluto as a dwarf planet]. In earlier editions, Pluto is listed as a planet, but then they released a new edition that says Pluto is more like these other things. If a Dr. Seuss book gets it right, there\u2019s no excuse for anybody else.\nWe instill in children the misconception that: science is memorizing the names of things. That\u2019s an aspect of it, but it\u2019s not the core. The core is understanding objects. Get that into your 6-year-old, and you\u2019ve got nothing more to teach them. \nIf I had a month off, I would: ask the people who gave me a month off why they pulled me away from what I love the most. \n\u2014Edited from an interview by Chris Kornelis Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses the benefits of eating pizza en route to Mars and the best place on earth to stargaze. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Need a pick-me-up for your fight against the pandemic? Watch these \u201990s disaster movies. (WP: Act Four) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "102",
        "date": "2020-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/02/need-pick-me-up-your-fight-against-pandemic-watch-these-90s-disaster-movies/",
        "text": "As summer heat and bad news descend in tandem, I\u2019ve been seeking refuge from one set of disasters in another \u2014 specifically, the disaster blockbusters of July 4 weekends past.Though I initially treated \u201cIndependence Day\u201d and \u201cArmageddon\u201d as pure escapism, I emerged from my re-watches of both with a stiffer spine than I\u2019d expected. These late-\u201990s hits are fortifying to watch right now, and not just because the good guys triumph or because there\u2019s little else on offer with Hollywood on hiatus and movie theaters closed. These movies are a popcorn affirmation of two ideas that we badly need right now: first, that it\u2019s exciting and revitalizing to tackle a challenge of world-destroying dimensions, and second, that there\u2019s something we can all contribute to that effort. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightTo be clear, \u201cArmageddon\u201d and \u201cIndependence Day\u201d are not practical guides to surviving a pandemic, nor even the sort of hard science fiction, like the pandemic movie \u201cContagion,\u201d that has come to seem prescient in our current extremis. Both movies are gleeful, glorious nonsense.Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemicWhat they have in common with our current moment is that their characters face an imminent, global threat: a planet-killing asteroid in \u201cArmageddon,\u201d a voracious alien race in \u201cIndependence Day.\u201d What the movies have in common with each other is that the characters respond to these threats not with despair, not with the belief that they can wish danger away and not with a death-courting pursuit of immediate gratification, but with creativity and even joy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cArmageddon\u201d is the worse of the two movies, full of cringe-inducing moments (including one scene that involves animal crackers as a means of seduction). Yet the movie gets zip from a kind of cross-class, cross-racial solidarity as NASA astronauts and drillers, led by Bruce Willis as Harry Stamper, team up to get into space, tunnel into an asteroid bound for Earth and blow it up from within.\u201cArmageddon,\u201d in these sections, is fun because its characters are surprising, even to each other. Harry may be the kind of guy who likes to whack golf balls at boats full of Greenpeace protesters, but he\u2019s as much a highly skilled professional as he is a troll. Rockhound (Steve Buscemi) has two doctorates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but enjoys the money and pace of life on a rig. And NASA bureaucrat Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) isn\u2019t a hurdle or a prig: He\u2019s innovative, moral and brave.Yeah, the movie is, on the surface, a yarn about nuking a big rock. But it\u2019s also a celebration of a wide spectrum of Americans \u2014 at least, of American men \u2014 and an argument that they all have something to offer to their home planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIndependence Day\u201d embodies that idea even more broadly. Captain Steven Hiller (Will Smith) is torn between his dreams of joining NASA and his love for his girlfriend Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox), who works as an exotic dancer, worried that respectability politics will derail his career. David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is alienated from his Judaism and his wife, Constance Spano (Margaret Colin), whose all-consuming job as White House communications director he resents. Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) is an alcoholic veteran, traumatized by what he insists was an alien abduction.\u201cIndependence Day\u201d finds value and a use for all of them: Jasmine commandeers a big rig and saves the first lady (Mary McDonnell) from the ruins of Los Angeles; Russell leads a fleet of RV-dwellers that get Steven and an alien specimen to Area 51, then plays a crucial role in the final battle; Steven overcomes his careerism to propose to Jasmine and fly an alien spacecraft; and, in working to defeat the invaders, David comes to appreciate Constance\u2019s devotion to public service and reunites with her.Even the weaselly defense secretary (James Rebhorn) has something to offer in the end. When he joins a prayer circle led by David\u2019s father, Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch), he mentions that he\u2019s not Jewish, worrying that he won\u2019t be welcome. \u201cNobody\u2019s perfect,\u201d Julius tells him, urging him to take part. Faced with an alien invasion, the characters will take all the imperfect prayers they can get.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe covid-19 pandemic is no action movie: We can\u2019t blow up the virus or, as Steven does in the great applause scene in \u201cIndependence Day,\u201d punch our adversary in the face and deliver a killer one-liner afterward.Staying home, avoiding people we love and ordering in groceries feel more like inaction than heroics. Shutting down your business to stop the spread of the virus may feel like self-harm rather than noble sacrifice. Still, in performing these little acts of valor \u2014 in wearing masks and helping our neighbors, in finding creative ways to keep businesses alive, in denying ourselves routine pleasures and discovering new powers of self-reliance \u2014 we can save our communities and discover our best selves.The end of our fight against this invader won\u2019t be marked by giant explosions or underlined with a swelling score. But the battle against the coronavirus can be the closest we\u2019ll get to starring in a blockbuster, if we\u2019re ready for the challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWatch the latest Opinions videos:Nearly 6 in 10 Americans who are working outside their homes are concerned that they could be exposed to the virus at work and infect their families. (The Washington Post)Read more:Janet Kopenhaver: Arts and culture \u2014 even virtually \u2014 will heal our communitiesJonathan Capehart podcast: We aren\u2019t paying enough attention to the impact of the pandemic on the artsAlyssa Rosenberg: It\u2019s going to be a long time until going to the movies feels like an escape againChristopher Nolan: Movie theaters are a vital part of American social life. They will need our help. Independence Day' and 'Armageddon' are glorious nonsense. They're also a fortifying reminder that we all have something to offer in times of crisis. Opinion: Need a pick-me-up for your fight against the pandemic? Watch these \u201990s disaster movies.",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | \u2018Guardians of the Galaxy\u2019 is just fine. That\u2019s the problem. (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "103",
        "date": "2017-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/05/05/guardians-of-the-galaxy-is-just-fine-thats-the-problem/",
        "text": "This piece discusses the plot of \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.\u201d\u00a0At some point during the credits sequence for \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,\u201d I scribbled in my notebook: \u201cI wonder how much all of this cost.\u201d It\u2019s not that the sequence, which features Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) rocking out while the rest of his universe-saving companions battle with a tentacled and angry monster, wasn\u2019t charming and entertaining; it absolutely was. But it also seemed like an awful lot of fuss to go through for what was a pretty good, but not transcendent, joke. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThat observation came to sum up a lot of what I felt as I walked out of the sequel. \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2\u201d is\u00a0fine! It\u2019s fun, and I enjoyed it, and I\u2019m seeing it again with my husband over the weekend. It\u2019s also frenetic and vaguely exhausting and\u00a0loud in ways that undercut the best, most human parts of the movie. The film\u00a0is good at doing what superhero movies are supposed to do, which is offer up escalating spectacles intended to bring\u00a0audiences back for more. But that mission also stands in the way of genuine evolution within the superhero genre that would allow people working within it to tell different kinds of stories.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo explain what I mean, some basic plot points first: When we reunite with our motley, mix-tape-fueled crew, they\u2019ve been hired by a humorless, genetically engineered society called the Sovereign to protect a set of ultra-powerful batteries from said tentacle-y thing, in exchange for Gamora\u2019s (Zoe Saldana) adoptive sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan, terrific). Rocket (Bradley Cooper), being the felonious raccoon that he is, steals the batteries at the end of the gig. In response, the Sovereign hires a crew of Ravagers, among them Yondu (Michael Rooker), who raised the half-human, half-alien Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) as a child, to track the Guardians down and drag Rocket back for punishment. This task is complicated by the fact that a man going by Ego (Kurt Russell) and claiming to be Peter\u2019s father has shown up, and Peter, Gamora and Drax (Dave Bautista) have flown off with him to his homeworld to check it out. Spoiler alert: Things are not what they seem.That this is only a very partial plot summary should make my point: There is a\u00a0lot going on in \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,\u201d much of which ends up splitting up the titular team for long stretches of the movie, and doing a lot of cliffhanger-heavy editing to jump back and forth between the storylines. In the meantime, we meet the head of Ravager society (Sylvester Stallone), learn that Baby Groot is not very good about following instructions but is willing to chop off people\u2019s toes, and drone through a tour of some oddly terrible museum dioramas.This is something of a bummer, given that genuinely interesting emotional stories are unfolding inside all of this chaos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe best of these involves the fraught relationship between Gamora and Nebula. The pair are the adopted daughters of Thanos (Josh Brolin), the character who is set up to be the Big Bad in the\u00a0super-size \u201cAvengers: Infinity War\u201d team-up movie slated for next year. Both women suffered as a result of Thanos\u2019s parenting style, but Nebula retains the greatest trauma from his efforts to craft them into living weapons: Every time Nebula lost a sparring match to Gamora, Thanos replaced a part of her body with a mechanical device, hoping to improve her. The route that \u201cGuardians\u201d takes to address this sibling rivalry involves a lot of spaceship crashes and double-dealing, but the most powerful work comes out of the conversations Gamora and Nebula have about what was done to them. Gillan in particular does an excellent job with Nebula\u2019s rage, pain and obsessive determination to eliminate her father from the universe.The movie takes Rocket, who has been deeply affected by the experiments the scientists performed on him, on a similar journey. The characters continue their rough, and very funny, barrage of insulting questions about whether Rocket is a raccoon, a \u201ctrash panda\u201d or merely a really hideous puppy. But when he and Yondu are locked in a cell together, their conversation reveals that both men feel their lack of community acutely. In Rocket\u2019s case, that\u2019s left him with a self-destructive tendency to blow up his relationships (sometimes literally). Feeling strange and excluded is an entirely human story, but one that\u2019s emphasized when those experiencing it are a blue alien with a robotic fin embedded in his skull and a surgically enhanced sentient raccoon.Peter\u2019s relationship with his birth father and the alien who raised him hit some similar notes, though it\u2019s ultimately undercut by a fairly unsurprising plot reveal that\u2019s delivered in a clunky fashion born of the necessity of bringing all this ruckus in under the two-and-a-half-hour mark.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAgain, I feel the need to emphasize that everything that happens around these more emotional moments is fine. Ego\u2019s planet looks like a weird and entrancing mash-up of an Elvish palace from \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d and Angkor Wat! Watching Rocket and Yondu wreak havoc on a group of mutinous Ravagers is bloody, darkly humorous, good fun! I enjoy director James Gunn\u2019s visual sense of space! And yet it\u2019s a bummer to feel as if\u00a0the best, most sophisticated moments in \u201cGuardians\u201d have been snuck into the movie under the cover of spectacle.Superhero movies and giant blockbuster franchises are here to stay. Their box-office power and cultural influence aren\u2019t\u00a0in doubt.\u00a0So it\u2019s from this secure position that I feel as if\u00a0it\u2019s time to ask for\u00a0a bit more from them. A change in tone, like the jokey vibe that \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2\u201d brought to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is refreshing, but it\u2019s not a dramatic experimentation with the form. Men caring deeply about each other is not the same thing as actually putting a gay character in a superhero movie. Having a half-baked idea about whether superheroes should be regulated doesn\u2019t automatically count as staging a smart idea about the tradeoffs between freedom and security. I say this not because I think superhero movies are inherently schlocky and shallow, but because I believe they can be great. \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2\u201d is perfectly good at what it\u2019s trying to be. Gunn\u2019s ambitions, and Marvel\u2019s, could stand to aim higher and weirder. If this is the standard for what counts as weird or touching in a Marvel movie, the standards could be a lot more rigorous. Opinion: \u2018Guardians of the Galaxy\u2019 is just fine. That\u2019s the problem.",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | \u2018Black Panther\u2019 feels radical \u2014 but also mute when it comes to portraying America (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "104",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2018/02/22/black-panther-feels-radical-but-superheroes-can-never-lead-a-real-revolution/",
        "text": "This piece discusses the plot of \u201cBlack Panther\u201d in detail.Does a spaceship look different if the person who sees it is gazing up from a makeshift basketball court in Oakland, the cab of a salvage truck from Queens or the helipad at the apex of a Manhattan skyscraper?\u00a0Does a spaceship\u2019s sudden appearance from the sky mean something different depending\u00a0on who is at the controls? Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThese are just a few of the big questions that \u201cBlack Panther,\u201d the latest installment in the Marvel franchise, directed by Ryan Coogler, poses to viewers. Is the best way for a country to preserve its culture and maintain its autonomy\u00a0extreme isolationism, cultural hegemony or empire?\u00a0What\u00a0costs might a nation incur\u00a0if\u00a0it failed to share its resources and technological innovations with people who needed them? Can a leader simply assert moral authority after centuries of deliberate inaction by his predecessors? What\u00a0do the leaders of a wealthy, powerful, hugely technologically advanced African nation owe to their much more vulnerable neighbors and to the members of the extended African diaspora?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s incredibly exciting to see \u201cBlack Panther\u201d prove that writers and directors can advance bold propositions and ask audiences to seriously consider major foreign policy quandaries and\u00a0fractious intellectual histories without sacrificing a dollar of box-office revenue. But it\u2019s precisely because \u201cBlack Panther\u201d\u00a0is so ambitious that the movie is a useful opportunity to explore what kind of political arguments huge blockbuster franchises\u00a0still can\u2019t advance. Just because Coogler and \u201cBlack Panther\u201d have advanced our sense of the known boundaries of what a giant company such as Disney and the moviegoing market will tolerate and even embrace, and what a superhero movie can do and say, doesn\u2019t mean those boundaries don\u2019t exist.\u201cBlack Panther\u201d feels more politically specific and searching than almost any other recent franchise movie I can think of. Some Marvel movies, including \u201cCaptain America: Civil War,\u201d which introduced T\u2019Challa (Chadwick Boseman) as both the fictional nation of Wakanda\u2019s superheroic protector and its future king, have\u00a0taken issues like state monopoly on use of force\u00a0as their subjects. But far too often, as was the case with the most recent \u201cStar Wars\u201d movie, \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d blockbuster franchises keep hitting the reset buttons on their premises to\u00a0avoid tangling in thorny political issues, such as how a rebel movement turns itself into a government. In our current blockbuster age, the conventional wisdom suggests that it\u2019s best for crowd-pleasing movies to sanitize away any hint of political controversy to avoid turning off potential viewers.\u201cBlack Panther,\u201d by contrast,\u00a0is a deliberate intervention in long-running debates about the best way to achieve black liberation. Its characters represent different parts of that tradition, and as is the case in the best movies about politics, they all have valid points to make, and areas where their arguments or attempts to implement their vision break down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementT\u2019Challa\u2019s father T\u2019Chaka (John Kani) never quite answers the question his young son asks him in the preface to \u201cBlack Panther\u201d about why Wakanda \u2014 whose early leaders deliberately concealed its existence, its richness in the metal vibranium, and its increasing technological supremacy to avoid invasion \u2014 continues to hide itself from the outside world even after the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism have passed.\u00a0The idea that there was a point at which that secrecy made sense has some merit in T\u2019Chaka\u2019s telling, even if the lengths he goes to preserve that secrecy do not. T\u2019Chaka\u2019s decision to kill his brother N\u2019Jobu (Sterling K. Brown), whose experiences in Oakland, Calif., had radicalized him and convinced him that Wakandans needed to help the outside world, and to abandon his nephew, who grows up to be Erik Killmonger (Coogler\u2019s muse, Michael B. Jordan), rather than taking the boy back to Wakanda, is the original sin of \u201cBlack Panther.\u201dKillmonger is entirely justified in feeling rage and pain over being orphaned and ignored. And politically, Killmonger is correct that Wakanda\u2019s refusal to intervene even as black people around the world were being enslaved, colonized and having their resources stolen from them is a self-protective choice that came at a terrible price for those Wakanda could have helped. But Killmonger also can\u2019t imagine a vision of liberation that doesn\u2019t replicate the colonialism he hopes to avenge. His dream for Wakanda is that of previous hegemons: an empire on which the sun never sets.And T\u2019Challa spends much of the movie making decisions that are defensible in the short term, but at the expense of resolving the long-term strategic questions his country faces. The solution he reaches is ultimately the compromise his ex-girlfriend, Nakia (Lupita Nyong\u2019o), advocates:\u00a0an attempt to use Wakanda\u2019s wealth and soft power to\u00a0aid diaspora communities like the one his Uncle N\u2019Jobu was desperate to help in Oakland.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut for all \u201cBlack Panther\u201d says a great deal that has been exceptionally hard for mainstream American movies to speak aloud, there are still ideas it can\u2019t quite express.\u201cBlack Panther\u2019s\u201d strong initial financial performance overseas has pushed back against the idea that international audiences won\u2019t embrace movies with black leads. (The movie\u2019s decision to set a major action sequence in\u00a0Busan is an obvious, and at this point predictable, sop to the global market.)But domestic box office remains important to blockbusters, so \u201cBlack Panther\u201d is sometimes oddly muted when it comes to America.\u00a0CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) may first appear in the movie trying to buy a vibranium artifact from the mercenary Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis), but he quickly and without much discussion becomes one of the good guys. In \u201cBlack Panther,\u201d the CIA\u2019s many attempts to assassinate or overthrow\u00a0the leaders of African countries during the Cold War either don\u2019t lead to lingering mistrust, or part of what makes Wakanda a utopia is the idea that it would never be vulnerable to such intervention.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn \u201cBlack Panther,\u201d Killmonger\u2019s experience in the U.S. military and intelligence services can be presented as the reason that he\u2019s a terrifyingly effective fighter who knows that the best time to launch a challenge for the Wakandan throne is at a time of political transition. But \u201cBlack Panther\u201d sources his belief that Wakanda should arm diaspora communities, lead uprisings and ultimately lead a world government to the primal traumas of his father\u2019s death and his abandonment, rather than\u00a0to the doctrines he was taught in America\u2019s service. The movie seems to walk a fine line, suggesting that the United States made Killmonger a formidable antagonist but also that the country where he grew up is not responsible for the uses to which Killmonger put the skills he gained there.And \u201cBlack Panther\u201d counts some of the the cost of Wakanda\u2019s inaction without reckoning with what that indifference might mean for a Wakandan leader who wants to engage on the international stage. If Wakandan leaders could have intervened to stop or ameliorate the trans-Atlantic slave trade, prevented Belgian King Leopold\u2019s genocidal plunder of the Congo, ended apartheid rule in South Africa or intervened to halt the Rwandan genocide and simply didn\u2019t, why should any of its neighbors or any diasporic communities abroad trust T\u2019Challa\u2019s leadership and offers of help now? At moments in \u201cBlack Panther,\u201d characters like W\u2019Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya) talk about the polluting influence of\u00a0refugees and their problems with more grace but no less vehemence than the immigration restrictionists are ascendant in American politics today. How will T\u2019Challa persuade Wakandan isolationists to support his new policies and engage with outsiders some of them scorn so deeply?\u201cBlack Panther\u201d suggests that the end to Wakandan isolationism is mostly a matter of T\u2019Challa\u2019s willingness to step forward. The movie allows him to ask his father, \u201cStill we hide, Baba?\u201d But it doesn\u2019t engage with all the questions T\u2019Challa will have to answer both without and within his borders after his address at the United Nations explaining what his country really is and what he intends to do with its resources. And that\u2019s in a\u00a0movie where T\u2019Challa\u2019s chosen policy solution is a matter of soft power, rather than a radical rearrangement of the world order.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUltimately, \u201cBlack Panther\u201d does what all superhero movies do: It asks us to place faith in the goodness of individuals rather than embracing revolutionary structural change. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) addresses his family\u2019s legacy of weapons dealing not by embracing disarmament or a radically new world order, but by using his lethal technical expertise for what he perceives to be good rather than evil.\u00a0Steve Rogers\u2019s (Chris Evans) profound fundamental decency is meant to substitute for government regulation of super-powered people. No matter how hard various reboots hammer home the idea that it\u2019s perhaps not\u00a0completely healthy for a grown man to run around in a batsuit fighting a vigilante war against crime, Batman still earns our trust and distracts our attention from Gotham\u2019s institutional decay.\u00a0If a \u201cBlack Panther\u201d movie truly faced the implications of Wakanda\u2019s legacy and the depths of the challenges members of the African diaspora face around the world, the idea that one man could stand against that history and pain would seem laughable and pathetic, no matter how cool his suit was or how much heart-shaped herb he consumed.The new generation of kids who look up into the Oakland sky at the end of \u201cBlack Panther\u201d and see a spaceship\u00a0compare it to a Ducati. It\u2019s meant as praise, but it\u2019s a reminder of the fundamental nature of the Marvel universe, and of blockbuster franchises in general. No matter how big\u00a0a franchise gets, and no matter how much the success of each individual movie seems locked in,\u00a0its corporate stewards still need to confine that franchise to\u00a0ideas and proposed solutions that a broad audience can understand, even if that means reducing a world-shaking innovation to merely a very cool piece of automotive hardware.Updated:\u00a0This piece originally referred to an action sequence set in Seoul. It\u2019s set in Busan. I\u2019ve updated the post accordingly, and regret the error. Big franchises face inherent constraints in what they can say about American foreign policy. And superheroes will always ask us to trust them, rather than embracing a radical rehaul of the system. Opinion: \u2018Black Panther\u2019 feels radical \u2014 but also mute when it comes to portraying America",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Goodbye and thank you to \u2018Bones,\u2019 the show that helped make me a critic (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "105",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/03/28/goodbye-and-thank-you-to-bones-the-show-that-helped-make-me-a-critic/",
        "text": "If you\u2019re going to be a television critic, your career probably has its origins in a single show. For Uproxx\u2019s Alan Sepinwall, it was \u201cNYPD Blue,\u201d a show he wrote about \u201cobsessively \u2026 first on Usenet, then on a website I set up on the [University of Pennsylvania] campus server (where it still sits, a monument to cutting-edge web design circa 1994.)\u201d The New Yorker\u2019s Emily Nussbaum traces her origin story to \u201cBuffy the Vampire Slayer,\u201d a show that \u201cwas built on banter \u2026 mixed genres, among them horror, superhero comics, and teen romance \u2026 [and]\u00a0had a generous eye for its characters.\u201d And tonight, \u201cBones,\u201d Fox\u2019s long-running procedural about a team of federal scientists who identify badly degraded bodies and figure out what happened to the people they once were, and one of the shows that turned me into a critic, is coming to an end. I didn\u2019t start my career in journalism as a critic, in part because I didn\u2019t become a regular television-watcher until I graduated from college in 2006.\u00a0I had moved to Washington to work as a fact-checker for a political magazine. I didn\u2019t know many people, and a long relationship had just ended. I didn\u2019t have much money to go out, but I could afford a cable subscription for the first time. And so I discovered the wonder that was television syndication. To a novice television\u00a0watcher, much less television\u00a0writer, the fact that you could sit down and watch five straight hours of \u201cLaw & Order: Criminal Intent\u201d felt like a miracle.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cBones\u201d was the first relatively new show I discovered this way, and one of the first shows I learned to watch on a weekly basis. And in the process, Hart Hanson\u2019s adaptation of Kathy Reichs\u2019s novels taught me both about some of the basic building blocks of modern television and to value a lot of the things that are still important to me now that I\u2019m a professional critic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe main character, Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) is a brilliant forensic anthropologist. And while she exhibits certain characteristics that have become cliche among tough, competent female characters, including martial arts skills and mastery of a huge number of languages,\u00a0\u201cBones\u201d allowed Brennan\u00a0to be hyper-logical to the point of coldness, confident to the point of arrogance and demanding to the point of difficulty. She was a precursor for all the complicated, frustrating women I\u2019ve written about and loved in years since.Structurally, \u201cBones\u201d is a procedural series (it single-handedly sent the Washington metro area\u2019s murder rate soaring in grisly fashion). But even more so than all those \u201cLaw & Order\u201d installments, it was highly emotionally serialized.The core of that arc was the relationship between Brennan and Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz), the former sniper-turned-FBI-agent who served as Brennan\u2019s initially unwilling partner. As the pair forged a decent working relationship, then became friends, co-parent and ultimately spouses, \u201cBones\u201d elevated them above the will-they-or-won\u2019t-they dynamic; amidst all the decomposing bodies and baroque serial killers, \u201cBones\u201d painted a poignant portrait of how marriage and time can help even confident, professionally settled grown-ups grow as people. \u201cBones\u201d showed the same care to other characters, doing an especially good job with entomologist Jack Hodgins (T.J. Thyne), coroner Camille Saroyan (Tamara Taylor) \u00a0and psychologist Lance Sweets (John Francis Daly). If the cases on \u201cBones\u201d got alternately sillier or more macabre over time, the characters stayed true to trajectories.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBones\u201d was also blessed by its casting. Deschanel may be less high-profile than her sister Zooey, who is a musician and lifestyle entrepreneur\u00a0in addition to starring in \u201cNew Girl,\u201d\u00a0but she\u2019s taken Brennan\u2019s deliberately limited range and found every single nook and cranny in it. Boreanaz, who manifestly could not act when he was originally cast as the vampire-with-a-soul Angel on \u201cBuffy the Vampire Slayer,\u201d figured out his craft along the way; \u201cBones\u201d benefited hugely from Boreanaz\u2019s ability to embody tenderness, sympathy and doubt, as well as toughness and resolution. The two of them together helped me learn how to look closely at an ongoing performance, and to appreciate everything an actor does to build a character, especially over an exceptionally long period of time. Whatever those two felt about \u201cBones,\u201d I can\u2019t recall an episode where I felt like either of them phoned it in.In addition, \u201cBones\u201d was casually and consistently diverse; morally serious about the rights of murder victims and their families to have their deaths investigated and their killers identified; and full of opportunities for women to be\u00a0everything from steely to flighty, for men to be everything from charismatic to fatally socially awkward, and for them all to forge believable friendships with each other that were more believable for all the series\u2019 long-running on-screen romances. Even now, I look for shows to do at least some, if not all of these things, and \u201cBones\u201d helped teach me how to do it.Of course, now that I have been a professional critic for six years, I see \u201cBones\u201d differently. The series slipped off my radar at some point, and watching through the final season this week, I wouldn\u2019t praise it as highly as I once did. For all it did emotionally, \u201cBones\u201d isn\u2019t as intellectually ambitious as\u00a0it sometimes seems like cable shows have to be to make it on the air these days. Its visual style is meat-and-potatoes basic; the camerawork and editing\u00a0on \u201cBones\u201d never particularly hurt the show, but the house style didn\u2019t do much to elevate it either. And over the twelve years the show has been on the air, procedural shows have lost some of their critical prestige, upstaged by alternately glossy and pretentious anthology formats like that of \u201cTrue Detective,\u201d and true-crime documentary series like \u201cThe Jinx\u201d and \u201cMaking a Murderer.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut for the purposes of this column, assessing whatever place \u201cBones\u201d deserves on some ranked list isn\u2019t really the point. If \u201cBones\u201d doesn\u2019t seem like the show it felt like to me when I first discovered it, I also wouldn\u2019t be the critic I am without it. Every time I judge a Christmas episode, I\u2019ll think about \u201cThe Man in the Fallout Shelter.\u201d Every time I consider a bottle episode, I\u2019ll remember\u00a0\u201cAliens in a Spaceship,\u201d in which Brennan and Hodgins are buried underground. And every time I find a show that I tune into every week simply for the pleasure of spending time in the characters\u2019 company, I\u2019ll smile when I recall \u201cBones,\u201d which gave me one of my first TV families at the time I needed it most. Fox's procedural about gifted scientists solving grisly crimes taught me what to value in a TV show. Opinion: Goodbye and thank you to \u2018Bones,\u2019 the show that helped make me a critic",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | 22 Americans who deserve monuments more than any Confederate general (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "106",
        "date": "2017-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/11/09/22-americans-who-deserve-monuments-more-than-any-confederate-general/",
        "text": "The week after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly and citizens and cities around the country began to take down their Confederate monuments, I argued that we needed not just to empty those pedestals but also to find a new, affirmatively positive vision of America to replace them. And so I asked:\u00a0Whom would you like to see honored in place of people such as Robert E. Lee, who fought against the Union in defense of slavery? Your ideas were so wonderful that I wanted to share the best of them with everyone, and Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes drew some mockups. So here are\u00a022 Americans and groups of Americans who deserved to be recognized with statues and monuments across the land, and the cases you made for them. These submissions have been edited for clarity and accuracy. 1.\u00a0Immigrants:Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMy grandfather (a stonecutter from Axis Italy) dug coal for the war effort and later was an Alexandria city employee. Everyone we knew in Alexandria\u2019s Del Ray neighborhood was a working-class person whose family had immigrated to the United States. Irish, Italian, German, African, Russian (like my wife) \u2014 many came to the United States to make a better life not only for themselves but also for others. Immigrants help build the country and add substance to the community. We should honor more of them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2013Robert Halcombe, Aldie, Va.2.\u00a0The Women Airforce Service Pilots:I would like more recognition for the women who served as WASPs during World War II, quite a few of whom gave their lives in fulfilling their vital mission. In addition, these women had more flying experience in a wider variety of aircraft than their male counterparts. The United States has belatedly recognized their skill and contribution to the war effort, but it\u2019s time to give them a prominent memorial.\u2013Claudia Kasvin, Cincinnati3-5. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, musicians: Louis Armstrong, more than any other individual, shaped the development of America\u2019s indigenous classical music: jazz. His achievements, in turn, have influenced other forms of popular American music. He is worthy of statues anywhere. Duke Ellington is America\u2019s greatest composer, publishing hundreds of our greatest songs and longer-form compositions. He was the leader of a brilliant aggregation of American musicians, who performed his work and other American songs for several decades. He is worthy of statues anywhere music is celebrated. Ella Fitzgerald is America\u2019s first lady of song. She rose from poverty to become an unmistakable voice in jazz and popular music, capable of not only singing beautifully but also improvising brilliantly, and leading her own jazz orchestra while still a young woman.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2013Neal Snyder, San Leandro, Calif.6. Clara Barton, humanitarian:I\u2019d like to see a monument to Clara Barton in Washington. A true hero of the Civil War, Barton was on hand to nurse victims of the war\u2019s first bloodshed, and throughout the war traveled to wherever she was needed, providing care to Union and Confederate soldiers. After the war, she ran the Missing Soldiers Office, finding and identifying soldiers (again on both sides) who were missing or unidentified. And as if that weren\u2019t enough, she then went on to found the American Red Cross. There are a couple of monuments to her (notably at Antietam battlefield and Andersonville National\u00a0Historic Site in Georgia), and her home in Glen Echo is a national historic site, but her achievements should be recognized in public spaces in more cities and towns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2013Sarah Angerer, Catonsville, Md.7. Jerry Brown, politician:Jerry Brown was a two-term California governor in the 1970s and \u201980s and is serving a second two-term stint today. He also served as mayor of Oakland, Calif., and the state\u2019s attorney general. Known as \u201cGovernor Moonbeam\u201d in the \u201970s for his ideas on pursuing state-sponsored space exploration, he was also known for telling Californians to \u201clower your expectations,\u201d because he knew we couldn\u2019t count on having unlimited resources. Thus, he has continued to lead us in lowering our state\u2019s output of carbon emissions. He has spent a lifetime in public service. I haven\u2019t always been a fan, and I sometimes disagree with him, but he\u2019s as close to being a hero as anyone in my home city and state.Story continues below advertisement\u2013Harriet Buchanan, Sacramento8.\u00a0Rachel Carson, author of \u201cSilent Spring\u201d: AdvertisementRachel Carson deserves monuments because she was one of the first Americans to publicize the impact of humans on the environment.\u2013Joyce Kiyohara, Antioch, Ill.9.\u00a0Cornelius Charlton, Medal of Honor winner: I find it profoundly disturbing that the Army\u2019s biggest bases are named for Confederate generals. I would propose renaming Fort Benning in Georgia for Cornelius Charlton, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Korean War. Even though the military had been desegregated in 1948, there remained a few all-black regiments in Korea. Charlton served in the 24th Infantry Regiment, an all-black unit, and was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously by President Harry S. Truman. He was one of the last two Medal of Honor winners to serve in a segregated unit.Story continues below advertisement\u2013Richard Morgan, West New York, N.J.Advertisement10.\u00a0Cesar Chavez, farmworkers\u2019 advocate: There should be more monuments for Cesar Chavez or campesinos honoring humble, honest labor.\u2013Ricardo del Rio, San Diego11.\u00a0Shirley Chisholm, former congresswoman: Honor Shirley Chisholm, who had the courage to run for president as a black woman at a time when neither women nor blacks in general were taken seriously in politics. She was also the first black woman elected to Congress and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She visited George Wallace in the hospital after he was shot in 1972. That\u2019s the kind of courage and compassion we need to honor!Story continues below advertisement\u2013Kris Stadelman, Sunnyvale, Calif.12.\u00a0John Glenn, astronaut and public servant: John Glenn, who was brave, decent and heroic and who served the nation in the military and in the Senate.Advertisement\u2013Denise Mills, Buffalo13. Maj.\u00a0Gen. Gordon Granger:Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, who announced the emancipation and end of slavery in Texas, on June 19, 1865, in Galveston. June 19 is now celebrated each year as Juneteenth.\u2013Anne Wilburn, Houston14.\u00a0Lyndon Johnson, president: Lyndon Johnson: the president who was there when the civil rights movement came alive and basic civil rights laws were enacted. He would be a great replacement for all those old Confederate heroes.Story continues below advertisement\u2013Jim Stahl, Cleveland15.\u00a0Scott Joplin, musician: I\u2019d like to see statues for artists, writers, musicians, scientists and others who have contributed to America. When I was in Italy, I was impressed by the fact that their statues were not just of politicians. How about, for example, Scott Joplin, who contributed to America a new kind of music \u2014 ragtime! It isn\u2019t that politicians haven\u2019t contributed; it\u2019s just that we need to include other kinds of contributions, too.Advertisement\u2013Lauren Hehmeyer, Texarkana, Tex.16.\u00a0Newton Knight, Southern Unionist:Newton Knight should be honored in his home county of Jones County, Miss. He was very much ahead of his time and a patriot to the United States. He fought against the Confederacy and he instituted a multi-racial community. He also tried to defeat the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups but failed. He is a true American hero.Story continues below advertisement\u2013Eric Koszyk, Portland17.\u00a0Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts: Juliette Gordon Low has empowered millions of girls and women such as my grandmother, a Girl Scout starting in the 1910s, who went on to protest for women\u2019s suffrage, to work on Ellis Island in 1918 and to travel the world with her girlfriends throughout the 1920s before marrying my grandfather in 1934. She worked summers at a Girl Scout camp in New York into her 60s and volunteered at the Red Cross into her 90s. Thanks, JGL, for your early inspiration of one of my greatest role models.Advertisement\u2013Robin Diamond, Washington, D.C.18.\u00a0Madge Oberholtzer, literacy advocate and anti-Klan whistleblower: In 1925, her rape and murder at the hands of Indiana Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson ultimately led to a tremendous weakening of the Ku Klux Klan\u2019s power in the United States. Before dying, she gave testimony against Stephenson that caused thousands of members of Klan lodges to quit the organization. It also broke the stranglehold the Klan had on Indiana\u2019s politicians, from the governor on down.\u2013Meghan Smith, Indianapolis19.\u00a0J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientist: Physicist who\u00a0helped build the first atom bombs and then became the conscience of modern science. He was crucified by the right-wing bigotry pushed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.\u2013Peter Zimmerman, Great Falls20.\u00a0Jesse Owens, Olympian: This suggestion is for Chicago, where I grew up: Jesse Owens, who moved his family to Chicago in the 1940s and whose daughters still live there. He was the embodiment of a hero, and despite all the acclaim he received for his performance at the Berlin Olympics, he was a victim of discrimination for much of his adult life. Nonetheless, he remained a class individual and a great role model to many the children, black and white (including me), whom he spoke to in schools around the Chicago area in the 1960s.\u2013Joe Alper, Denver21.\u00a0Mark Twain:Mark Twain was a phenomenal writer and very honorable, even paying all his creditors in full after bankruptcy, which occurred because he was also what we would today call a venture capitalist. He loved science. And it is most fitting that he was born with Halley\u2019s Comet and died with it. So put a comet on the statue, too.\u2013Raelynn Manitz, Fairfax22.\u00a0Ida B. Wells, journalist and anti-lynching advocate: Not a difficult case to make.\u2013Mark Scarbecz, Memphis Readers made their case for new monuments. Opinion: 22 Americans who deserve monuments more than any Confederate general",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Of course Snoop Dogg has the right to depict Trump\u2019s assassination (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "107",
        "date": "2017-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/03/16/of-course-snoop-dogg-has-the-right-to-depict-trumps-assassination/",
        "text": "It\u2019s not exactly news that President Trump would prefer a more circumscribed news media, which he has described as \u201cthe enemy of the American people.\u201d And despite his previous success as an entertainer, he apparently doesn\u2019t think much of artists\u2019 freedom of expression, either. Early on March 15, as is his wont, Trump tweeted grumpily,\u00a0\u201cCan you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNow, if the West Coast rapper and Martha Stewart collaborator\u00a0had, in fact, discharged a weapon at the president of the United States,\u00a0he\u00a0would be in custody right now (if, in fact, he had made it out alive). But Snoop Dogg did nothing of the sort: Instead, the president was responding to a new music video in which the rapper fires a revolver at a clown who resembles Trump. The only thing that comes out of the barrel is a flag that says \u201cBang!\u201d The clown is seen a moment later, wrapped in chains, pointedly being denied a hit of marijuana by his captors.In so much that the video, for a remix of a song called \u201cLavender,\u201d is any\u00a0threat to Trump, it\u2019s to his dignity. The clown\u2019s boxy suit, flapping tie and overly large shoes are so close to what Trump actually wears that it calls attention to the president\u2019s lack of style, in the same way that Alec Baldwin\u2019s Trump impersonations suggested that Trump\u2019s florid personality and style needed no embellishment to be ridiculous. \u201cKlump,\u201d as the stand-in is called, seems dopey and ineffectual; his car is full of scantily clad women in clown makeup, and he\u2019s taken aback by the ambush. He wants to \u201cDeport all Doggs,\u201d according to a fictional cable news chyron, but the emphasis is less on Klump\u2019s menace than his goofiness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis isn\u2019t a depiction of an assassination, even a silly one. And even if it were, Snoop Dogg would have an absolute right to make it.When it comes to politics, one thing art can do that the conventional news media and politicians themselves can\u2019t is create space to talk about the impossible and the unsayable. That can mean imagining the worst possible consequences of a Christian theocracy without being labeled a hysteric, as Margaret Atwood did in \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale.\u201d It could include laying out a vision for the colonization of Mars at a moment when governments were showing less interest in space exploration, as Kim Stanley Robinson did in his Mars trilogy, which began publication in 1993.And art could also explore the motivations a character might have for wanting to kill the president of the United States, the means by which they might be successful and the ramifications of that assassination. This would be a legitimate enterprise no matter who the president is, helping audiences look at\u00a0everything from sharpening political cleavages and a deteriorating national climate, to the security arrangements around the president, to the potential fallout of such a dreadful crime.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s entirely appropriate to harbor grave worries about what it meant that Americans were lynching effigies of the first African American president, or to consider what it means that someone might fantasize about Trump\u2019s death. But any liberal who suggested that artists should go to jail for depicting Obama\u2019s assassination would be just as wrong as Trump was this week.Now, as art goes, \u201cLavender\u201d doesn\u2019t actually hit exceptionally high marks; if Snoop Dogg wants to create a genuinely effective alternate universe, he might take notes from Outkast or Janelle Monae. But he is perfectly free to make mediocre art as well as good. As usual, Trump would be better off leaving questions of law\u00a0and criticism to the professionals. Artists are supposed to give voice to the unspeakable and unimaginable. Opinion: Of course Snoop Dogg has the right to depict Trump\u2019s assassination",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | At the Oscars, stars avoided liberal stereotypes \u2014 and speaking Trump\u2019s name (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "108",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/02/27/at-the-oscars-stars-avoided-liberal-stereotypes-and-speaking-trumps-name/",
        "text": "Host Jimmy Kimmel spent the Academy Awards on Sunday trying to bait President Trump, slinging double-edged jokes \u2014 \u201cRemember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist? That\u2019s gone, thanks to him.\u201d \u2014 that cut at both the president and the\u00a0Hollywood audience.\u00a0While there were plenty of moments at the awards, the winners took a different route. Even in their most pointed speeches, the victors refused to speak Trump\u2019s name, denying him the opportunity to lash out. And they made their points about politics in ways that sometimes expanded the conversation, and sometimes missed the mark, but consistently avoided falling into solipsistic liberal stereotypes. The sharpest statements at the Academy Awards took aim at the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to restrict entry into the United States. And they came from artists who felt the impact of those policy efforts in a concrete way, rather than objecting to them abstractly.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cDividing the world into the \u2018us\u2019 and \u2018our enemies\u2019 categories creates fears. A deceitful justification for aggression and war. These wars prevent democracy and human rights in\u00a0 countries which have themselves been victims of aggression,\u201d Iranian director Asghar Farhadi\u00a0said in a statement\u00a0when his film \u201cThe Salesman\u201d won best foreign language film. He chose not to attend the ceremony out of solidarity with citizens of the other countries targeted in Trump\u2019s original executive order. \u201cFilmmakers can turn their cameras to capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions. They create empathy between us and others. An empathy which we need today more than ever.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSyrian cinematographer\u00a0Khaled Khateeb was denied access to the United States to attend the ceremony. When his film, \u201cThe White Helmets,\u201d won the Oscar for best documentary short, his colleague\u00a0Orlando von Einsiedel read a statement from\u00a0Raed Saleh, who runs the organization that is the subject of the movie, telling the audience:\u00a0\u201cOur organization is guided by a verse from the Koran: \u2018To save one life is to save all of humanity.\u2019 We have saved more than 82,000 civilian lives. I invite anyone here who hears me to work on the side of life, to stop the bloodshed in Syria and around the world.\u201d It was a direct call to action and an image of Islam very different from the one that Hollywood often promotes.\u201cO.J.: Made In America\u201d director Ezra Edelman dedicated his Academy Award for best feature documentary to Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown, O.J. Simpson\u2019s alleged victims, and also to \u201cthe victims of police violence, police brutality, racially motivated violence and criminal injustice.\u201dEdelman\u2019s insistence that his opus be viewed in a specific social and political context was in marked contrast with \u201cZootopia\u201d directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore, who presented their movie\u2019s message in soft-pedaled, blander terms when it was named best animated feature film. Howard described the movie as a way to \u201ctalk about humanity with talking animals\u201d with the goal of making \u201cthe world just a slightly better place,\u201d while Moore diluted the film\u2019s specific exploration of how bad policing can damage the civic fabric of a city into the far more generic \u201cstory of tolerance being more powerful than fear of the other.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fight over confirming Betsy DeVos as education secretary and Trump\u2019s pledge to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities have returned both issues to the partisan battlefield, and education showed up in a number of award winners\u2019 acceptance speeches, including that of Mahershala Ali, who thanked Oliver Chandler, Ron Van Lieu and Ken Washington for teaching him that \u201cYou\u2019re in service to these stories, to these characters.\u201d\u00a0Justin Paul, who picked up a best original song Oscar for his work writing \u201cCity of Stars\u201d for \u201cLa La Land,\u201d drew the most direct connection between his education in the political environment, noting: \u201cI was educated in public schools, where arts and culture were valued and recognized and resourced. And I\u2019m so grateful for all my teachers, who taught so much and gave so much to us.\u201dThe broader question of representation was a major theme of the evening. Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose play was the basis for Barry Jenkins\u2019s \u201cMoonlight,\u201d joined Jenkins onstage when \u201cMoonlight\u201d won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay to tell viewers, \u201cThis goes out to all those black and brown boys and girls and non gender-conforming who don\u2019t see themselves, we are trying to show you you, and us.\u201d It was an argument for representation not as charity, but solidarity.\u201cYou know there\u2019s one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered,\u201d Viola Davis said at the beginning of her acceptance speech for best supporting actress for her work in \u201cFences.\u201d \u201cOne place. And that\u2019s the graveyard. People ask me all the time what kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola. And I say, exhume those bodies. Exhume those stories. The stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTaraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae and Octavia Spencer, the stars of \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d didn\u2019t have to go quite that far. That movie, which explores the roles that African American women played in the American space program, taught the country about a part of a major national triumph that has been obscured by history. But Katherine Johnson, one of the \u201ccalculators,\u201d whose mathematical work was essential to American space missions, is still alive, and joined Henson, who played her, and the others onstage. Sometimes recognition of a person \u2014 or an issue \u2014 arrives before it\u2019s entirely too late. Artists occasionally missed opportunities, but they didn't embarrass themselves, either. And they refused to speak the president's name. Opinion: At the Oscars, stars avoided liberal stereotypes \u2014 and speaking Trump\u2019s name",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Ask Amy: Longtime partner\u2019s online gaming leads to more (WP: Advice) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "109",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/advice/ask-amy-longtime-partners-online-gaming-leads-to-more/2021/05/03/c6cd870a-a0c9-11eb-85fc-06664ff4489d_story.html",
        "text": "Dear Amy: My significant other (of 20 years) has had what I consider an emotional affair with a girl he met online a couple months ago, playing an online spaceship game.He swears that it is nothing, and I'm blowing things out of proportion, and she's \"just a friend.\"WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI happened to use his phone as a flashlight one night recently, and it was left open, revealing a \"chat\" session between them. He lied to her about buying things for me (although he is unemployed) and told her he loved her.Those words bother me greatly, and he continues to say it is nothing.He has broken plans with me to play other (exclusive) games with her, and if I join his group of friends to play, he shares inside jokes with her while I'm there and he ignores me.Story continues below advertisementI am trying to decide if this should be a dealbreaker, as he refuses to see my side or see that it hurts me to hear that \"I love you\" is apparently a meaningless phrase to him, that I thought was used for me and his very longtime friends.AdvertisementHow can I approach this subject with him so he hears my concerns, or should I just end things now and cut my losses?\u2014 Confused and HurtConfused and Hurt: At the risk of being obvious, I wonder if playing online \u201cspaceship\u201d games is the best use of your (unemployed) guy\u2019s time.I don\u2019t think his online friendship is necessarily a dealbreaker for your impressively long relationship, but it might be one more symptom of a larger problem between you. If your guy is depressed and foundering, he is vulnerable and looking for other ports in his personal storm.Story continues below advertisementThis is about being too immature or self-involved to recognize how his behavior affects and hurts his partner\u2019s feelings.You\u2019ve staked out your positions, but for your relationship to survive, you both should regroup and discuss ways to come together.AdvertisementDear Amy: My brother's daughter has decided to marry an ex-convict who has spent nearly half of his life in prison for rape, assault, destruction of property and other crimes.She is a grown woman in her 40s and has never been married. My brother and sister-in-law haven't said much about it, and I'm not sure what their feelings are.In the meantime, my son and his fiance are planning their wedding and have stated quite adamantly that they will not invite him to the wedding \u2014 nor will they attend any family gathering at which he is present.Story continues below advertisementI'm not sure how to handle this. It will most certainly affect our relationship with my brother and will probably put an end to our holiday dinners.On one hand, I believe that my wife and I could probably at least tolerate him, but on the other hand I will not go against my son's wishes.AdvertisementYour advice would be most appreciated.\u2014 Terribly TroubledTerribly Troubled: Your son is an adult. He is making adult-size decisions about the people he wants to have relationships with, and whom he would like to avoid. This is not only his right but also his responsibility.\u201cI will not go against my son\u2019s wishes\u201d implies that he might have a say in whatever choices you and your wife make.Story continues below advertisementYour son\u2019s choice will have a major bearing on your own life only if you give him the power to control your relationships, as well as his own.I can absolutely understand any person\u2019s choice to avoid spending time with a felon convicted of violent crimes.I can also imagine people who are perhaps a little more seasoned (you and your wife), deciding to wait and see before making a snap judgment about someone they\u2019ve never met.AdvertisementIn the future, when it comes to family gatherings, your son is going to have to make inquiries to see if this man will be present and then make his own choice.He and his fiance have every right to control the guest list for their wedding, however, and you should not interfere.Story continues below advertisementDear Amy: In the question from \"Upset and Embarrassed,\" the writer \u2014 a nurse \u2014 mentioned that her co-workers had bullied her as a \"lunch lady.\"Amy, thank you for taking the opportunity to defend and offer respect to lunch ladies! We work in the school, interact with students when we can, and \u2014 most important \u2014 we feed children.\u2014 Lunch LadyLunch Lady: My brief tribute to \u201clunch ladies\u201d was well earned, and completely sincere. Thank you for what you do.2021 by Amy Dickinson distributed by Tribune Content Agency He says \u201cI love you\u201d to someone online but says it means nothing. Ask Amy: Longtime partner\u2019s online gaming leads to more",
        "author": "Amy Dickinson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Houston\u2019s World Series Problem: The Phrase \u2018Houston, We Have a Problem\u2019 (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "110",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/houstons-world-series-problem-the-phrase-houston-we-have-a-problem-1509030847?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=22",
        "text": "Tom Hanks in the film 'Apollo 13'\n\n\n\n\u201cI literally groaned,\u201d says Ms. Martinez, 32 years old, from Humble, Texas. \u201cYou are so happy, and suddenly, so incensed.\u201d\nHouston has a problem, all right.\u00a0It\u2019s people who still think \u201cHouston, we have a problem\u201d is a clever turn of phrase. \n\nThe line\u2014a misquote of the actual 1970 warning from an Apollo 13 astronaut to mission control in Houston\u2014comes up\u00a0ad infinitum, especially\u00a0in newspaper headlines and sports broadcasts.\nThat\u2019s annoying to many Houstonians, and others, who consider it the laziest of clich\u00e9s.\n\u201cHouston, we have a problem\u201d resurfaced with regularity when the Astros nearly squandered the ALCS series against the Yankees last week before pulling it out in the decisive Game 7.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The often misquoted line from Apollo 13 astronauts\u2014\"OK, Houston, we\u2019ve had a problem here\"\u2014comes up a lot in everyday life, and that annoys a lot of Houstonians. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nShould a problem arise in the World Series between the Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston knows it will be subjected to \u201cHouston, we have a problem,\u201d again and again. The Astros won a 7-6 thriller Wednesday night to tie the series at 1-1. \nFox Sports, which is broadcasting the World Series, and Mr. Verducci, who is again part of its crew, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nA LexisNexis search shows that \u201cHouston, we have a problem\u201d has shown up in more than 12,000 news articles and broadcasts since 1982, and on at least 10 occasions in this newspaper. Part of the reason it is so overused, Houstonians suspect, is that it is one of the few things most Americans can readily recall about the nation\u2019s fourth-largest city, which is home to 2.3 million.\n\u201cMuch of this country is going to look like Houston by 2050, and people here feel pretty good about living here,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Klineberg,\n\n\n\n a Rice University sociologist who has surveyed the city\u2019s changing demographics and attitudes for 36 years. \u201cBut no one knows much about us.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Twitter account called @UghHouston is devoted to chronicling offending uses of \u201cHouston, we have a problem,\u201d and chastising guilty parties to do better.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rakesh Agrawal,\n\n\n\n chief executive of SnapStream Inc., a Houston-based software company that records thousands of hours of broadcasts and feeds clips to late-night talk shows and other clients, thought it would be amusing to track mentions of the phrase during last season\u2019s Super Bowl, held in Houston.\u00a0So he had employee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Cohn\n\n\n\n set up automated alerts for any references to \u201cHouston, we have a ...\u201d and another irksome space phrase, \u201cThe Eagle has landed.\u201d\n\u201cAnd our cup runneth over with media mentions,\u201d says Mr. Cohn, who curates the @UghHouston Twitter account.\u00a0Most tend to be sports related, he adds, and some are uninspired variations on the original, such as when\u00a0ESPN tweeted \u201cHouston, you have a pennant,\u201d after the Astros made it to the series. ESPN declined to comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Boland,\n\n\n\n who writes about the Yankees for Newsday, admits \u201cit wasn\u2019t a particularly original thought\u201d when he tweeted, \u201cHouston, you\u2019ve got a problem\u201d after the Yankees knocked out the Astros\u2019 starting pitcher in game 5 of the ALCS. The backlash didn\u2019t take long.\n\n\nTake a Look at Other Recent A-Heds The Winter Olympics Are Close, and So Is North Korea English Vigilantes Use Ladders, Sticky Letters to Exterminate the Metric System A Comedy Show Thrives by Avoiding Vulgarities\u2014Such as the Word \u2018Gosh\u2019 \n\n\n\u201cWow, I haven\u2019t seen this 178 times today. You\u2019re goooood,\u201d an Astros fan in New Hampshire replied.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Alderman,\n\n\n\n a 30-year-old Houston native living in Chicago, rolled her eyes and responded, \u201cDelete your account.\u201d \nHer suggestion for anyone contemplating the phrase: \u201cJust stop. Please, stop.\u201d\nThese now-ubiquitous words are a slight variation of the famously understated\u00a0reaction first radioed in by Apollo 13 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack Swigert\n\n\n\n during a mission to the moon in 1970 that had to be aborted. He was referring to an explosion that crippled the spacecraft and destroyed some of the crew\u2019s oxygen supplies. \nThe actual quote: \u201cOK, Houston, we\u2019ve had a problem here.\u201d\n\u201cApollo 13,\u201d a 1995 movie starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Hanks,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kevin Bacon\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Paxton,\n\n\n\n dramatized the astronauts\u2019 harrowing struggle to safely return to Earth after the accident\u2014and helped popularize the misquote.\n\u201cIt just sounded like it came off the tongue more easily,\u201d recalls\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Broyles,\n\n\n\n a Houston native and Astros fan who co-wrote the screenplay for \u201cApollo 13.\u201d \u201cWe had no idea it would become such a trope for everything.\u201d\nOne group that doesn\u2019t mind the clich\u00e9: NASA.\n\u201cWe think of it as one of our finest hours here, so much so that we just recently nam Every time the nation\u2019s fourth-largest city enters the spotlight, outsiders recycle the same lazy clich\u00e9\u2014a misquote from NASA\u2019s Apollo 13 moon mission. \u2018Houston We Have a Podcast\u2019 ",
        "author": "Miguel Bustillo and Erin Ailworth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Houston\u2019s World Series Problem: The Phrase \u2018Houston, We Have a Problem\u2019 (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "111",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/houstons-world-series-problem-the-phrase-houston-we-have-a-problem-1509030847?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=75",
        "text": "Tom Hanks in the film 'Apollo 13'\n\n\n\n\u201cI literally groaned,\u201d says Ms. Martinez, 32 years old, from Humble, Texas. \u201cYou are so happy, and suddenly, so incensed.\u201d\nHouston has a problem, all right.\u00a0It\u2019s people who still think \u201cHouston, we have a problem\u201d is a clever turn of phrase. \n\nThe line\u2014a misquote of the actual 1970 warning from an Apollo 13 astronaut to mission control in Houston\u2014comes up\u00a0ad infinitum, especially\u00a0in newspaper headlines and sports broadcasts.\nThat\u2019s annoying to many Houstonians, and others, who consider it the laziest of clich\u00e9s.\n\u201cHouston, we have a problem\u201d resurfaced with regularity when the Astros nearly squandered the ALCS series against the Yankees last week before pulling it out in the decisive Game 7.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The often misquoted line from Apollo 13 astronauts\u2014\"OK, Houston, we\u2019ve had a problem here\"\u2014comes up a lot in everyday life, and that annoys a lot of Houstonians. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nShould a problem arise in the World Series between the Astros and Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston knows it will be subjected to \u201cHouston, we have a problem,\u201d again and again. The Astros won a 7-6 thriller Wednesday night to tie the series at 1-1. \nFox Sports, which is broadcasting the World Series, and Mr. Verducci, who is again part of its crew, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nA LexisNexis search shows that \u201cHouston, we have a problem\u201d has shown up in more than 12,000 news articles and broadcasts since 1982, and on at least 10 occasions in this newspaper. Part of the reason it is so overused, Houstonians suspect, is that it is one of the few things most Americans can readily recall about the nation\u2019s fourth-largest city, which is home to 2.3 million.\n\u201cMuch of this country is going to look like Houston by 2050, and people here feel pretty good about living here,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Klineberg,\n\n\n\n a Rice University sociologist who has surveyed the city\u2019s changing demographics and attitudes for 36 years. \u201cBut no one knows much about us.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Twitter account called @UghHouston is devoted to chronicling offending uses of \u201cHouston, we have a problem,\u201d and chastising guilty parties to do better.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rakesh Agrawal,\n\n\n\n chief executive of SnapStream Inc., a Houston-based software company that records thousands of hours of broadcasts and feeds clips to late-night talk shows and other clients, thought it would be amusing to track mentions of the phrase during last season\u2019s Super Bowl, held in Houston.\u00a0So he had employee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Cohn\n\n\n\n set up automated alerts for any references to \u201cHouston, we have a ...\u201d and another irksome space phrase, \u201cThe Eagle has landed.\u201d\n\u201cAnd our cup runneth over with media mentions,\u201d says Mr. Cohn, who curates the @UghHouston Twitter account.\u00a0Most tend to be sports related, he adds, and some are uninspired variations on the original, such as when\u00a0ESPN tweeted \u201cHouston, you have a pennant,\u201d after the Astros made it to the series. ESPN declined to comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Boland,\n\n\n\n who writes about the Yankees for Newsday, admits \u201cit wasn\u2019t a particularly original thought\u201d when he tweeted, \u201cHouston, you\u2019ve got a problem\u201d after the Yankees knocked out the Astros\u2019 starting pitcher in game 5 of the ALCS. The backlash didn\u2019t take long.\n\n\nTake a Look at Other Recent A-Heds The Winter Olympics Are Close, and So Is North Korea English Vigilantes Use Ladders, Sticky Letters to Exterminate the Metric System A Comedy Show Thrives by Avoiding Vulgarities\u2014Such as the Word \u2018Gosh\u2019 \n\n\n\u201cWow, I haven\u2019t seen this 178 times today. You\u2019re goooood,\u201d an Astros fan in New Hampshire replied.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Alderman,\n\n\n\n a 30-year-old Houston native living in Chicago, rolled her eyes and responded, \u201cDelete your account.\u201d \nHer suggestion for anyone contemplating the phrase: \u201cJust stop. Please, stop.\u201d\nThese now-ubiquitous words are a slight variation of the famously understated\u00a0reaction first radioed in by Apollo 13 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack Swigert\n\n\n\n during a mission to the moon in 1970 that had to be aborted. He was referring to an explosion that crippled the spacecraft and destroyed some of the crew\u2019s oxygen supplies. \nThe actual quote: \u201cOK, Houston, we\u2019ve had a problem here.\u201d\n\u201cApollo 13,\u201d a 1995 movie starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Hanks,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kevin Bacon\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Paxton,\n\n\n\n dramatized the astronauts\u2019 harrowing struggle to safely return to Earth after the accident\u2014and helped popularize the misquote.\n\u201cIt just sounded like it came off the tongue more easily,\u201d recalls\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Broyles,\n\n\n\n a Houston native and Astros fan who co-wrote the screenplay for \u201cApollo 13.\u201d \u201cWe had no idea it would become such a trope for everything.\u201d\nOne group that doesn\u2019t mind the clich\u00e9: NASA.\n\u201cWe think of it as one of our finest hours here, so much so that we just recently nam Every time the nation\u2019s fourth-largest city enters the spotlight, outsiders recycle the same lazy clich\u00e9\u2014a misquote from NASA\u2019s Apollo 13 moon mission. \u2018Houston We Have a Podcast\u2019 ",
        "author": "Miguel Bustillo and Erin Ailworth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Less Michelin Man, More Barbarella: Space Suits Get Stylish (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "112",
        "date": "2018-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-barbarella-than-michelin-man-space-suits-get-stylish-1515606553?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=81",
        "text": "Barbarella\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a step up from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart,\n\n\n \u201d sniffs Ted Southern, president of space-gear maker Final Frontier Design in Brooklyn, who previously designed wings for Victoria\u2019s Secret runway models. \n\n\n\n\nNow, it seems, the future will finally look like it was supposed to\u2014cool. Space garb is entering a new dimension, propelled by competition among private ventures seeking to carry NASA astronauts\u2014and eventually private citizens\u2014into orbit. New technologies mean it will finally be possible to leave the planet in style. \n\n\nElon Musk\n \n\n\n\n recently revealed the sleek flight suit, topped by Daft Punk-style headgear, his company created for crews to wear inside its Dragon capsule when headed for the international space station. SpaceX says it is on track to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting laboratory as soon as this fall.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Space fashion is getting an upgrade, but it has a way to go before it can compete with some interstellar standouts immortalized in film. Photos: AIP, NASA; Video: Laura Kammerman/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nThe goal was for people to see it and think, \u201cYeah, I wanna wear that thing one day,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a video posted online.\n\u201cIt does really look cool,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Jacobs,\n\n\n\n Softgoods Design Manager at David Clark Co., NASA\u2019s go-to source for space suits. He says with space suits made under traditional government contracts, \u201cany ounce of effort spent beyond function was not money well spent.\u201d\n\n\n \n\n\nSome rocketeers maintain that down-to-earth view. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to turn a swimsuit into a space suit,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Precourt,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut and ex-head of NASA\u2019s astronaut corps, now a senior\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Orbital ATK Inc.\n\n\n official. \u201cYou have to realize what\u2019s really fantasy.\u201d\nYet even the David Clark firm is getting hip. Mr. Jacobs recently designed a trim flight suit for Boeing Co.\u2019s new space capsule that is royal blue and includes boots produced with sportswear brand Reebok. Designers there took the same approach as for mass-market athletic gear.\n\u201cIf it functions well and it doesn\u2019t look cool, we say that\u2019s a fail,\u201d says Reebok Creative Director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hobson.\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s vehicle is slated to carry people to the space station within a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nProject Mercury astronauts in 1959. Front row, left to right: Walter M. \u201cWally\u201d Schirra Jr., Donald K. \u201cDeke\u201d Slayton, John H. Glenn Jr., M. Scott Carpenter; back row: Alan B. Shepard Jr., Virgil I. \u201cGus\u201d Grissom and L. Gordon Cooper, Jr.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nA NASA spokeswoman says today\u2019s suits are \u201cmore form-fitting for ease of mobility.\u201d\nFlight suits like the new SpaceX and Boeing togs, worn during launch and re-entry, only need to protect astronauts in an emergency. That has allowed them to benefit most from new textile technologies that weigh about 40% less than their predecessors. They offer updated features such as gloves that work on touch screens.\nThe Reebok team, unabashed about aping Hollywood, tested a boot design based on ones\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sigourney Weaver\n\n\n\n wore in \u201cAliens.\u201d \n\u201cIt worked surprisingly well\u201d but proved less functional than other designs, Mr. Hobson says.\n\n\n Stylish in SpaceThe astronaut clothing on TV shows and in movies has ranged from the mod and be-caped, to the more realistic jump suits and helmets.'Star Trek''Battlestar Galactica''Lost in Space''Alien''The Martian''Gravity'Photos: Everett Collection(5); Photofest (Alien)\n\n\nFocusing on color, they also tested metallic hues, none of which proved sufficiently space-age. \u201cGetting fireproof materials in reflective is hard,\u201d he says.\nThe outfit still isn\u2019t slinky and is \u201cnot necessarily too flattering in the derri\u00e8re area,\u201d acknowledges\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Ferguson,\n\n\n\n another former astronaut, who is in charge of developing Boeing\u2019s space taxis.\n\u201cIf you look at yourself in the mirror,\u201d he says, the question is, \u201cDo I look dumb?\u201d\nHe notes that flight suits are designed mainly for sitting near the controls, so it is hard to straighten the knees, and historically their stiff joints made them awkward on Earth. With Russian models, \u201cThere\u2019s a bit of \u201cThe Hunchback of Notre Dame\u201d look,\u201d says Mr. Ferguson.\nEarly space suits, like the svelte silver ones worn by Mercury astronauts of \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d never left a capsule. Once men started stepping into space, they needed much more protection. Attire grew thicker and bulkier, and the clothes need heating and cooling systems with built-in power sources. Astronauts also don what NASA calls a \u201cMaximum Absorption Garment\u201d\u2014adult diapers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMIT and Prof. Dava Newman are using a new approach to develop the BioSuit, a flexible space suit that is pressurized with electrically activated coils embedded in the fabric.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Professor Dava Newman, MIT: Inventor, Science and Engineering Guillermo Trotti, A.I.A., Trotti and Associates, Inc. (Cambridge, MA): Design Dainese (Vincenca, Italy): Fabrication Douglas Sonders: Photography\n \n\n\n\nMicrometeors, space debris and sharp moon rocks risk puncturing garments, meaning spacewalks and lunar jaunts require textiles not seen on a catwalk.\n\u201cAny space suit\u2014it\u2019s the world\u2019s smallest spacecraft,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dava Newman,\n\n\n\n a professor of astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is working on space suit enhancements.\nA big challenge is stopping astronauts\u2019 bodies from expanding and bursting. On Earth, atmospheric pressure holds us in shape, but outer space has almost no pressure. To survive, humans need to wear suits that provide about 30% of the usual pressure at sea level.\nTraditionally, this compression has been achieved by filling an impermeable suit lining with oxygen or other gas. A stiffer outer layer on the suit holds the \u201cbladder layer\u201d in shape.\n\n\nTake a Look at Other Recent A-Heds Google\u2019s Latest Search: What Happened to Its Bikes? Want to Dress Like Kylo Ren of Star Wars? You\u2019ll Need Maternity Pants Today\u2019s Catty Question: Who Thought Cat Cafes Were a Good Idea? \n\n\nOlder versions were both bulky and clammy. The materials used\u2014mainly rubber\u2014meant suits \u201cwere like a human-shaped dishwashing glove,\u201d says Mr. Jacobs, the design manager at David Clark.\nProf. Newman at MIT is developing a new approach, in which pressure comes not from gas but from tiny electrically activated coils embedded in fabric. Her BioSuit pressure layer, in development for 15 years, is skintight and would significantly slim any orbital ensemble while providing flexibility. An eye-catching crisscross pattern covering the body looks like decoration but results from algorithms determining where pressure coils should run.\nThe BioSuit might even cross the gender barrier while crossing the sound barrier.\n\u201cAnytime you can tell a female astronaut from a male astronaut in a space suit,\u201d quips Prof. Newman, paraphrasing a former NASA director, \u201cThat\u2019s a good thing.\u201d\nWrite to Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space garb is entering a new dimension, propelled by competition among private ventures seeking to carry NASA astronauts\u2014and eventually private citizens\u2014into orbit. New technologies mean it will finally be possible to leave the planet in style. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Super Blood Wolf Moon\u2019 Makes Astronomers Howl (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "113",
        "date": "2019-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/super-blood-wolf-moon-makes-astronomers-howl-11547857498?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=17",
        "text": "Attention-getter\n\n\n\nAstronomers call it a total lunar eclipse. To Ms. Schieffelin and everybody else, it\u2019s a \u201csuper blood wolf moon.\u201d Or, depending on your online source, the equally attention-grabbing \u201csuper wolf blood moon.\u201d\nSunday\u2019s lunar event, which follows last year\u2019s more fusty-sounding \u201csuper blue blood moon\u201d eclipse, is an alignment of the sun, Earth and moon that stirs the blood of many astronomers. The now gone-viral name, not so much.\n\n\u201cMaybe I\u2019m the old guy yelling at the clouds at this point, but I hate that terminology,\u201d said Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer at the University of Redlands in Southern California. \nDr. Nordgren likes people showing an interest in the stars. But he cringes at the eclipse-related emails from friends and relatives whenever the Earth shields the moon from the sun. The subject lines, he said, inevitably shout blood and wolves instead of anything more scientific.\nYet, as Ms. Schieffelin said, it is also true \u201ca super blood wolf moon is getting everyone\u2019s attention.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSusy Markoe Schieffelin leads a \u2018sound bath\u2019 at a California beach. .\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Abby Blossom\n \n\n\n\nFor some astronomers, that isn\u2019t so bad.\n\u201cI do know some astronomers, and non-astronomers, who get annoyed by it or think it\u2019s stupid, but I\u2019m not one of them,\u201d said Zoe Learner Ponterio, the manager of the Spacecraft Planetary Imaging Facility at Cornell University. \u201cIf it gets the public excited about astronomy and it\u2019s not inaccurate, I\u2019m all for it.\u201d\nThe \u201csuper blood wolf moon\u201d has sparked headlines and celebratory events, both educational and mystical, and triggered an alignment of interests in science, superstition and commerce. \n\u201cThis sounds more at home in a vampire novel,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Hartigan,\n\n\n\n an astrophysicist at Rice University.\nOnline stores sell T-shirts with wolves baying at a big red orb. Among them: Etsy offers a \u201cFunny Super\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blood Wolf Moon Tee\n\n\n\n \u201d ($17) featuring a rainbow wolf under a moon with letters dripping in blood. The website Redbubble sells a tamer version, labeled an Astronomer gift, which also shows a big red moon and wolf shadow, but says \u201cTotal Lunar Eclipse, January 2019,\u201d ($20.73).\nNo one is sure who started saying \u201csuper blood wolf moon.\u201d Lunar eclipses have collected a host of names stretching back to ancient cultures. The Old Farmer\u2019s Almanac says \u201cwolf moon\u201d comes from Native American folklore and refers to the full moon in January.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA \u2018super blood wolf moon\u2019 T-shirt for sale.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CyberHutt\n \n\n\n\nA \u201csupermoon\u201d has in modern times referred to instances when the moon is at its closest point in its orbit to the Earth, making it look larger and brighter.\nThe term \u201cblood moon\u201d slipped into use a few years ago, according to astronomers. It refers to the moon\u2019s tint during a total lunar eclipse, showing a variety of shades from copper to brown to slightly orange.\n\u201cAll it takes is somebody somewhere to make a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n post or a tweet, and it\u2019s out there,\u201d Dr. Nordgren said. \u201cAnd good luck getting rid of it.\u201d\n\n\n Bloody Big The year's only total lunar eclipse will happen on Jan. 20 and will coincide with the appearance of a supermoon. The next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. Supermoon A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point of orbit to Earth, making it appear about 14% larger. Why lunar eclipses and supermoons occur Moon\u2019s orbit Umbra (full shadow) Earth\u2019s atmosphere causes colors in the light spectrum with shorter wavelengths to scatter more, filtering colors such as violet and blue out, making the moon appear red during the eclipse. Penumbra (partial shadow) Eclipse A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is directly in Earth\u2019s full shadow and lined up with the sun. Bloody Big The year's only total lunar eclipse will happen on Jan. 20 and will coincide with the appearance of a supermoon. The next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. Supermoon A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point of orbit to Earth, making it appear about 14% larger. Why lunar eclipses and supermoons occur Moon\u2019s orbit Umbra (full shadow) Penumbra (partial shadow) Earth\u2019s atmosphere causes colors in the light spectrum with shorter wavelengths to scatter more, filtering colors such as violet and blue out, making the moon appear red during the eclipse. Eclipse A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is directly in Earth\u2019s full shadow and lined up with the sun. Bloody Big The year's only total lunar eclipse will happen on Jan. 20 and will coincide with the appearance of a supermoon. The next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. Supermoon A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point of orbit to Earth, making it appear about 14% larger. Why lunar eclipses and supermoons occur Moon\u2019s orbit Umbra (full shadow) Scientists call it a total lunar eclipse, but everybody else has grabbed hold of its new name; \u2018Sounds more at home in a vampire novel.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want to Stand Out on Zillow? Try a Knight or a Dinosaur (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "114",
        "date": "2021-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/want-to-stand-out-on-zillow-try-a-knight-or-a-dinosaur-11631214254?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=5",
        "text": "\u201cThe homeowners and I agreed that the future buyer of this house is most likely a lighthearted person that would appreciate the humor,\u201d said broker Jonas Elber of his staging idea for the $600,000 Chattaroy, Wash., listing.\n To take the gag further, the real-estate agent came up with clever ways of positioning Mr. Bergstrom around the house: In one photo, he is in the kitchen using a sword to chop oranges and cooking with ingredients labeled \u201cpowdered dragon scales\u201d and \u201ccream of gorgon soup.\u201d In another, he is in a bathroom applying Armor All to his underarms. \n\nAs new agents flood a hot housing market\u2014there are more real-estate agents than homes for sale in the U.S.\u2014industry veterans such as Mr. Elber have had to get creative to convince sellers to list with them. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Bergstrom in real-estate listing photos for a house in Washington.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jonas and Associates\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The homeowners and I agreed that the future buyer of this house is most likely a lighthearted person that would appreciate the humor,\u2019 said broker Jonas Elber.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jonas and Associates\n \n\n\n\nReal-estate agents are also using these tactics to help sell houses that are a little odd and have trouble moving, even in such a strong market. Some feature the family dog (or their own) in photo shoots; one real-estate agent wrote descriptions of a home\u2019s features in rhyming couplets. \n\u201cIt\u2019s not just marketing the listing and making the listing itself stand out from the crowd, it\u2019s standing out as the agent that will do these things,\u201d said Rachel Gannon, a real-estate agent in Dayton, Ohio. \nMs. Gannon dressed her 9-year-old in an inflatable alien costume for the February listing of a home in Kettering, Ohio. \nAs potential buyers scrolled through the photos on Realtor.com or Zillow, they were greeted by six standard images and then, abruptly, a seventh featuring the green alien seated, book in hand, on a living room settee. A few photos later, the alien is there again drinking coffee at the dining table, hiding behind the shower curtain in the guest bath and working at a bedroom desk. \n\u201cEarth to buyers!\u201d the listing says, and includes references to an \u201cout of this world\u201d spiral staircase and an oversize garage with \u201croom to dock your spacecraft.\u201d It sold for $215,000. \nMs. Gannon said the theme was inspired by the neon green front door\u2014 the house sold in one day. Likely a result, she said, of the listing getting picked up by local news as well as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\u2019s\n\n\n \u201cNightmare on Zillow Street\u201d and Instagram\u2019s \u201cZillow Gone Wild,\u201d which curate posts for their 137,000 and 1.3 million respective followers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nReal-estate agent Rachel Gannon's 9-year-old daughter brought attention to her listing photos dressed in an inflatable alien costume.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Aaron Lee\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA visitor to the house for sale in Ohio.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Aaron Lee\n \n\n\n\nThe pages tend to focus more on houses with\u00a0unusual characteristics: A mansion in West Olive, Mich., is featured, with a 1,000-square-foot room devoted to the homeowners\u2019 collection of taxidermied mountain goats. \nMs. Gannon\u2019s 9-year-old, the alien, was perhaps the most delighted by all the attention. \u201cShe was like, \u2018Oh, my God I\u2019m famous, I could end up on \u2018Ellen,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Ms. Gannon said.\nRobert Gomez founded Jurassic Realty this past February. Taking a literal approach to his company name, the San Antonio, Texas, broker roped his wife and daughter into donning inflatable blue raptor and T-Rex costumes not only in the photographs for two listings, but also for the three-hour-long open houses.\n\u201cSome people just wanted to come by and take a picture,\u201d Mr. Gomez said. \nAfter only two days on the market, one of the listings had already received multiple offers, including one from someone who had only seen the listing online. \u201cThe main thing is to catch people\u2019s attention,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRobert Gomez\u2019s family member in an inflatable T-Rex costume in a listing photo for his Jurassic Realty agency.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jurassic Realty\n \n\n\n\nCharleston real-estate agent Elizabeth Baker often employs her clients\u2019 dogs as one way of grabbing attention. Even if they don\u2019t have dogs themselves, she\u2019ll borrow the neighbors, or use her own. \u201cIt\u2019s my little branding thing,\u201d she said. \u201cAny publicity is good publicity on a listing.\u201d\nFor the castle house listing, the broker, Mr. Elber, decided to splurge by hiring Mr. Bergstrom, who had a legitimate, rather than costume, suit of armor, and he had to pay for Mr. Bergstrom to drive the five hours from his home in Seattle to the listing site. The 100-degree weather that day upped the ante of posing for outdoor shoots wearing over 100 pounds of metal.\n\u201cI can\u2019t even open the visor by myself,\u201d Mr. Bergstrom said of the suit\u2019s unforgiving desig As real-estate agents flood a hot housing market, some are getting creative to convince sellers to list with them; \u201cThe main thing is to catch people\u2019s attention.\u201d ",
        "author": "Rachel Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Lee Carlson Bought a Piece of the Moon\u2014NASA Really Wants It Back (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "115",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-lee-carlson-bought-a-piece-of-the-moonnasa-really-wants-it-back-1495206493?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=24",
        "text": "\u201cOoh boy, that\u2019s something I\u2019d love to have,\u201d she recalls thinking, remembering the astronauts and spacewalks she watched growing up. The 62-year-old hadn\u2019t bid on anything as high as its estimate\u2014$995\u2014but the white, zippered pouch containing the moon dust was bundled in a group with a launch key for the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-14 and a black padded headrest from an Apollo command module. She decided the pieces \u201chad a story I could figure out,\u201d so she clicked once and won.\nAfter months of sleuthing that led to a legal showdown with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, she indeed figured it out: The U.S. government mistakenly sold her some of the first moon dust it had ever collected.\nAfter Apollo 11 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n took \u201cone giant leap for mankind\u201d and stepped on the moon in 1969, one of the first things he did was unzip a bag the size of a dinner plate and fill it with roughly five scoops of lunar dust and rocks. He shoved the bag into a pocket of his spacesuit and turned it over to scientists at a Houston lab. It disappeared and was eventually forgotten, even by NASA. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe pouch containing moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\n \n\n\n\nWhen Ms. Carlson sent her bag to NASA for testing, scientists realized what she had bought and refused to give it back. So last December she sued the agency and won. Now, she\u2019s planning to resell it for at least $2 million in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sotheby\u2019s\n\n\n first space-exploration sale in New York on July 20.\n\nSotheby\u2019s senior specialist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cassandra Hatton\n\n\n\n said she thinks the object could sell for millions more because NASA doesn\u2019t allow individuals to own any bits of the moon, apart from this court-ordered exception. \u201cThis is my Mona Lisa moment,\u201d Ms. Hatton said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Jeffs,\n\n\n\n a NASA spokesman, said the agency is \u201cobviously disappointed\u201d by the latest court ruling but has decided not to appeal. He added NASA thinks the bag should be on public display because it \u201crepresents the culmination of a massive national effort involving a generation of Americans, including the astronauts who risked their lives in an effort to accomplish the most significant act humankind has ever achieved.\u201d\nTracing the bag\u2019s odyssey on Earth is close to rocket science. Ms. Carlson found the listing on an online sale in March 2015 run by Texas auctioneer Gaston & Sheehan. The description didn\u2019t give away much: \u201cOne flown zippered lunar sample return bag with lunar dust (\u201cLunar Bag\u201d), 11.5 inches; tear at center. Flown Mission Unknown.\u201d After receiving her winnings, she unzipped the bag and saw a tiny tag with a part number: V36-788034.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNancy Lee Carlson bought moon dust in an online auction.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kramer Photographers\n \n\n\n\nA lawyer and former city manager in Hancock, Mich., Ms. Carlson said she knew items with serial or part numbers often have paper trails, so she took her search online and combed NASA\u2019s digital records.\nShe also called her local rock club to see if she could get the dust tested. Its president told her to call NASA, so in September 2015, she said she shipped the bag to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Months of emails followed, as Ms. Carlson\u2019s research uncovered a matching part number among the inventory on Apollo 11: \u201cV36-788-034 Decontamination bag, contingency lunar SRC.\u201d\n\n\nExplore More on Space The Future of Everything: Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? Neil deGrasse Tyson on What Every Child Should Know About Science \n\n\nMs. Carlson waited. No answer. Last May, she said she got a call from the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Kansas informing her NASA tested the bag and it indeed contained lunar dust that could be traced to samples collected during Apollo 11.\nShe learned the bag had been auctioned to make restitution in a Kansas case involving Max Ary, a former director of a museum called the Kansas Cosmosphere. He had been imprisoned for two years for stealing artifacts and selling them in space auctions. Mr. Ary\u2019s private collection\u2014including this bag\u2014had been forfeited to the U.S. Marshals Service.\nRealizing the merits of the object it didn\u2019t know it had lost, NASA, claiming it was the dust\u2019s rightful owner, asked the court to rescind the auction, according to court papers.\nLast June, Ms. Carlson sued NASA for wrongful seizure of property in U.S. District Court in Chicago. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin left his bootprint on the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Allan Needell,\n\n\n\n a curator at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, said the disconnect likely happened early on. Although the bag was labeled \u201cLunar Sample Return,\u201d he said it wasn\u2019t among the 350-plus Apollo 11-related objects Johnson Space Center sent to the Smithsonian. \nAfter the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17, la A zippered pouch containing lunar dust scooped up by Neil Armstrong was forgotten for decades before turning up at a government auction. It\u2019s potentially worth millions. ",
        "author": "Kelly Crow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Lee Carlson Bought a Piece of the Moon\u2014NASA Really Wants It Back (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "116",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-lee-carlson-bought-a-piece-of-the-moonnasa-really-wants-it-back-1495206493?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=87",
        "text": "\u201cOoh boy, that\u2019s something I\u2019d love to have,\u201d she recalls thinking, remembering the astronauts and spacewalks she watched growing up. The 62-year-old hadn\u2019t bid on anything as high as its estimate\u2014$995\u2014but the white, zippered pouch containing the moon dust was bundled in a group with a launch key for the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-14 and a black padded headrest from an Apollo command module. She decided the pieces \u201chad a story I could figure out,\u201d so she clicked once and won.\nAfter months of sleuthing that led to a legal showdown with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, she indeed figured it out: The U.S. government mistakenly sold her some of the first moon dust it had ever collected.\nAfter Apollo 11 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n took \u201cone giant leap for mankind\u201d and stepped on the moon in 1969, one of the first things he did was unzip a bag the size of a dinner plate and fill it with roughly five scoops of lunar dust and rocks. He shoved the bag into a pocket of his spacesuit and turned it over to scientists at a Houston lab. It disappeared and was eventually forgotten, even by NASA. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe pouch containing moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\n \n\n\n\nWhen Ms. Carlson sent her bag to NASA for testing, scientists realized what she had bought and refused to give it back. So last December she sued the agency and won. Now, she\u2019s planning to resell it for at least $2 million in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sotheby\u2019s\n\n\n first space-exploration sale in New York on July 20.\n\nSotheby\u2019s senior specialist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cassandra Hatton\n\n\n\n said she thinks the object could sell for millions more because NASA doesn\u2019t allow individuals to own any bits of the moon, apart from this court-ordered exception. \u201cThis is my Mona Lisa moment,\u201d Ms. Hatton said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Jeffs,\n\n\n\n a NASA spokesman, said the agency is \u201cobviously disappointed\u201d by the latest court ruling but has decided not to appeal. He added NASA thinks the bag should be on public display because it \u201crepresents the culmination of a massive national effort involving a generation of Americans, including the astronauts who risked their lives in an effort to accomplish the most significant act humankind has ever achieved.\u201d\nTracing the bag\u2019s odyssey on Earth is close to rocket science. Ms. Carlson found the listing on an online sale in March 2015 run by Texas auctioneer Gaston & Sheehan. The description didn\u2019t give away much: \u201cOne flown zippered lunar sample return bag with lunar dust (\u201cLunar Bag\u201d), 11.5 inches; tear at center. Flown Mission Unknown.\u201d After receiving her winnings, she unzipped the bag and saw a tiny tag with a part number: V36-788034.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNancy Lee Carlson bought moon dust in an online auction.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kramer Photographers\n \n\n\n\nA lawyer and former city manager in Hancock, Mich., Ms. Carlson said she knew items with serial or part numbers often have paper trails, so she took her search online and combed NASA\u2019s digital records.\nShe also called her local rock club to see if she could get the dust tested. Its president told her to call NASA, so in September 2015, she said she shipped the bag to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Months of emails followed, as Ms. Carlson\u2019s research uncovered a matching part number among the inventory on Apollo 11: \u201cV36-788-034 Decontamination bag, contingency lunar SRC.\u201d\n\n\nExplore More on Space The Future of Everything: Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? Neil deGrasse Tyson on What Every Child Should Know About Science \n\n\nMs. Carlson waited. No answer. Last May, she said she got a call from the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Kansas informing her NASA tested the bag and it indeed contained lunar dust that could be traced to samples collected during Apollo 11.\nShe learned the bag had been auctioned to make restitution in a Kansas case involving Max Ary, a former director of a museum called the Kansas Cosmosphere. He had been imprisoned for two years for stealing artifacts and selling them in space auctions. Mr. Ary\u2019s private collection\u2014including this bag\u2014had been forfeited to the U.S. Marshals Service.\nRealizing the merits of the object it didn\u2019t know it had lost, NASA, claiming it was the dust\u2019s rightful owner, asked the court to rescind the auction, according to court papers.\nLast June, Ms. Carlson sued NASA for wrongful seizure of property in U.S. District Court in Chicago. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin left his bootprint on the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Allan Needell,\n\n\n\n a curator at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, said the disconnect likely happened early on. Although the bag was labeled \u201cLunar Sample Return,\u201d he said it wasn\u2019t among the 350-plus Apollo 11-related objects Johnson Space Center sent to the Smithsonian. \nAfter the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17, la A zippered pouch containing lunar dust scooped up by Neil Armstrong was forgotten for decades before turning up at a government auction. It\u2019s potentially worth millions. ",
        "author": "Kelly Crow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Lee Carlson Bought a Piece of the Moon\u2014NASA Really Wants It Back (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "117",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-lee-carlson-bought-a-piece-of-the-moonnasa-really-wants-it-back-1495206493?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=94",
        "text": "\u201cOoh boy, that\u2019s something I\u2019d love to have,\u201d she recalls thinking, remembering the astronauts and spacewalks she watched growing up. The 62-year-old hadn\u2019t bid on anything as high as its estimate\u2014$995\u2014but the white, zippered pouch containing the moon dust was bundled in a group with a launch key for the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-14 and a black padded headrest from an Apollo command module. She decided the pieces \u201chad a story I could figure out,\u201d so she clicked once and won.\nAfter months of sleuthing that led to a legal showdown with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, she indeed figured it out: The U.S. government mistakenly sold her some of the first moon dust it had ever collected.\n\n\n\n\nAfter Apollo 11 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n took \u201cone giant leap for mankind\u201d and stepped on the moon in 1969, one of the first things he did was unzip a bag the size of a dinner plate and fill it with roughly five scoops of lunar dust and rocks. He shoved the bag into a pocket of his spacesuit and turned it over to scientists at a Houston lab. It disappeared and was eventually forgotten, even by NASA. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe pouch containing moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\n \n\n\n\nWhen Ms. Carlson sent her bag to NASA for testing, scientists realized what she had bought and refused to give it back. So last December she sued the agency and won. Now, she\u2019s planning to resell it for at least $2 million in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sotheby\u2019s\n\n\n first space-exploration sale in New York on July 20.\n\nSotheby\u2019s senior specialist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cassandra Hatton\n\n\n\n said she thinks the object could sell for millions more because NASA doesn\u2019t allow individuals to own any bits of the moon, apart from this court-ordered exception. \u201cThis is my Mona Lisa moment,\u201d Ms. Hatton said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Jeffs,\n\n\n\n a NASA spokesman, said the agency is \u201cobviously disappointed\u201d by the latest court ruling but has decided not to appeal. He added NASA thinks the bag should be on public display because it \u201crepresents the culmination of a massive national effort involving a generation of Americans, including the astronauts who risked their lives in an effort to accomplish the most significant act humankind has ever achieved.\u201d\nTracing the bag\u2019s odyssey on Earth is close to rocket science. Ms. Carlson found the listing on an online sale in March 2015 run by Texas auctioneer Gaston & Sheehan. The description didn\u2019t give away much: \u201cOne flown zippered lunar sample return bag with lunar dust (\u201cLunar Bag\u201d), 11.5 inches; tear at center. Flown Mission Unknown.\u201d After receiving her winnings, she unzipped the bag and saw a tiny tag with a part number: V36-788034.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNancy Lee Carlson bought moon dust in an online auction.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kramer Photographers\n \n\n\n\nA lawyer and former city manager in Hancock, Mich., Ms. Carlson said she knew items with serial or part numbers often have paper trails, so she took her search online and combed NASA\u2019s digital records.\nShe also called her local rock club to see if she could get the dust tested. Its president told her to call NASA, so in September 2015, she said she shipped the bag to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Months of emails followed, as Ms. Carlson\u2019s research uncovered a matching part number among the inventory on Apollo 11: \u201cV36-788-034 Decontamination bag, contingency lunar SRC.\u201d\n\n\nExplore More on Space The Future of Everything: Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? Neil deGrasse Tyson on What Every Child Should Know About Science \n\n\nMs. Carlson waited. No answer. Last May, she said she got a call from the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Kansas informing her NASA tested the bag and it indeed contained lunar dust that could be traced to samples collected during Apollo 11.\nShe learned the bag had been auctioned to make restitution in a Kansas case involving Max Ary, a former director of a museum called the Kansas Cosmosphere. He had been imprisoned for two years for stealing artifacts and selling them in space auctions. Mr. Ary\u2019s private collection\u2014including this bag\u2014had been forfeited to the U.S. Marshals Service.\nRealizing the merits of the object it didn\u2019t know it had lost, NASA, claiming it was the dust\u2019s rightful owner, asked the court to rescind the auction, according to court papers.\nLast June, Ms. Carlson sued NASA for wrongful seizure of property in U.S. District Court in Chicago. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin left his bootprint on the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Allan Needell,\n\n\n\n a curator at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, said the disconnect likely happened early on. Although the bag was labeled \u201cLunar Sample Return,\u201d he said it wasn\u2019t among the 350-plus Apollo 11-related objects Johnson Space Center sent to the Smithsonian. \nAfter the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17, landed in 1972, NASA\u2019s engineers and scientists were told to make room for the incoming space-shuttle program. Storage was tight, so, Mr. Needell said, employees boxed up seemingly minor souvenirs and took them home, tossed them out or gave them to space aficionados.\nOne of those fans was Mr. Ary, then planetarium director at a science museum in Texas. \nMr. Ary, now the director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Okla., said, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many times I was talking with one engineer or another at Johnson and they\u2019d hand me a cardboard box of stuff and say, \u2018Can you help me take this stuff out to the trash?\u2019\u00a0\u201d\nHe said he started asking if he could keep some mementos and \u201cfaintly remembers\u201d the bag being in one of those boxes he carried back to the museum. \n\u201cI had no idea it was Apollo 11,\u201d he said of the bag. \u201cIf I had, I definitely would have donated it to a museum.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDetail of the number on the pouch containing moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nDuring most of Mr. Ary\u2019s 27-year tenure in Kansas, he said the bag was in storage, in his home or at the museum.\nAccording to court papers, NASA claims it lent the bag to the Kansas museum in 1981, but NASA\u2019s court records didn\u2019t include any loan agreement to confirm the deal. The bag entered the museum\u2019s records in the early 1980s as a \u201cLunar Sample Return Bag, Flown Mission Unknown\u201d with an estimated value of $15, according to an inventory sheet the museum gave NASA to submit to the court. \nAs years passed, Mr. Ary said his personal collection and the museum\u2019s got increasingly tangled\u2014in the records and his memory\u2014and this disorganization \u201ccame back to bite me big time.\u201d\nAfter he left in 2002, museum officials discovered he had auctioned off artifacts NASA had lent to the museum or that Mr. Ary had already donated. FBI agents raided his home in 2003 and confiscated any space memorabilia they found, including the white, zippered pouch in his garage. Mr. Ary was indicted and later convicted of theft of government property and money laundering, among other things.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApollo 11 crew members in 1969; From left: Michael Collins, Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWithin weeks, the FBI got authorization to turn over Mr. Ary\u2019s seized collection to the U.S. Marshals Service to prepare for sale. A backlog of forfeited goods left them sitting in storage for another decade. By the time the marshals revived the plan to auction them, NASA told the court it no longer remembered to take another look at Mr. Ary\u2019s pieces, according to court documents. The U.S. Marshals declined to comment.\n\u201cIt\u2019s an incredible piece of history, and losing it was a colossal mistake for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joseph Gutheinz,\n\n\n\n a former special agent at NASA\u2019s Office of the Inspector General, the agency\u2019s law-enforcement arm. Mr. Gutheinz sided with Ms. Carlson in the case. \u201cThe government sold off a national treasure and then got seller\u2019s remorse,\u201d he said, \u201cbut Nancy Lee bought it fair and square.\u201d\nIn Kansas, where the case moved, U.S. District Judge\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J. Thomas Marten\n\n\n\n agreed, writing in his Dec. 14 ruling that \u201cMs. Carlson\u2019s standing as a bona fide purchaser gives her priority over NASA\u2019s asserted claim to the property.\u201d\nOn Feb. 27, Ms. Carlson and her son, Leo, and her lawyer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher McHugh\n\n\n\n pulled up to Johnson Space Center to collect her moon dust. It was her first visit, and she wished she could take a tour but felt it was too awkward to ask. \nA worker handed her a cardboard box with the bag inside. She turned it over to security guards she had hired to protect it. The court proceedings had underscored the bag\u2019s historical and financial significance, and she was too worried to keep it. \nNow, she said she hopes to use some proceeds to fund scientific and medical research. \u201cThat\u2019s why we started the space program,\u201d she said. \u201cWe wanted to go beyond.\u201d\nWrite to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com A zippered pouch containing lunar dust scooped up by Neil Armstrong was forgotten for decades before turning up at a government auction. It\u2019s potentially worth millions. ",
        "author": "Kelly Crow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Lee Carlson Bought a Piece of the Moon\u2014NASA Really Wants It Back (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "118",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-lee-carlson-bought-a-piece-of-the-moonnasa-really-wants-it-back-1495206493?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=82",
        "text": "\u201cOoh boy, that\u2019s something I\u2019d love to have,\u201d she recalls thinking, remembering the astronauts and spacewalks she watched growing up. The 62-year-old hadn\u2019t bid on anything as high as its estimate\u2014$995\u2014but the white, zippered pouch containing the moon dust was bundled in a group with a launch key for the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-14 and a black padded headrest from an Apollo command module. She decided the pieces \u201chad a story I could figure out,\u201d so she clicked once and won.\nAfter months of sleuthing that led to a legal showdown with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, she indeed figured it out: The U.S. government mistakenly sold her some of the first moon dust it had ever collected.\nAfter Apollo 11 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n took \u201cone giant leap for mankind\u201d and stepped on the moon in 1969, one of the first things he did was unzip a bag the size of a dinner plate and fill it with roughly five scoops of lunar dust and rocks. He shoved the bag into a pocket of his spacesuit and turned it over to scientists at a Houston lab. It disappeared and was eventually forgotten, even by NASA. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe pouch containing moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\n \n\n\n\nWhen Ms. Carlson sent her bag to NASA for testing, scientists realized what she had bought and refused to give it back. So last December she sued the agency and won. Now, she\u2019s planning to resell it for at least $2 million in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sotheby\u2019s\n\n\n first space-exploration sale in New York on July 20.\n\nSotheby\u2019s senior specialist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cassandra Hatton\n\n\n\n said she thinks the object could sell for millions more because NASA doesn\u2019t allow individuals to own any bits of the moon, apart from this court-ordered exception. \u201cThis is my Mona Lisa moment,\u201d Ms. Hatton said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Jeffs,\n\n\n\n a NASA spokesman, said the agency is \u201cobviously disappointed\u201d by the latest court ruling but has decided not to appeal. He added NASA thinks the bag should be on public display because it \u201crepresents the culmination of a massive national effort involving a generation of Americans, including the astronauts who risked their lives in an effort to accomplish the most significant act humankind has ever achieved.\u201d\nTracing the bag\u2019s odyssey on Earth is close to rocket science. Ms. Carlson found the listing on an online sale in March 2015 run by Texas auctioneer Gaston & Sheehan. The description didn\u2019t give away much: \u201cOne flown zippered lunar sample return bag with lunar dust (\u201cLunar Bag\u201d), 11.5 inches; tear at center. Flown Mission Unknown.\u201d After receiving her winnings, she unzipped the bag and saw a tiny tag with a part number: V36-788034.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNancy Lee Carlson bought moon dust in an online auction.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kramer Photographers\n \n\n\n\nA lawyer and former city manager in Hancock, Mich., Ms. Carlson said she knew items with serial or part numbers often have paper trails, so she took her search online and combed NASA\u2019s digital records.\nShe also called her local rock club to see if she could get the dust tested. Its president told her to call NASA, so in September 2015, she said she shipped the bag to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Months of emails followed, as Ms. Carlson\u2019s research uncovered a matching part number among the inventory on Apollo 11: \u201cV36-788-034 Decontamination bag, contingency lunar SRC.\u201d\n\n\nExplore More on Space The Future of Everything: Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? Neil deGrasse Tyson on What Every Child Should Know About Science \n\n\nMs. Carlson waited. No answer. Last May, she said she got a call from the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Kansas informing her NASA tested the bag and it indeed contained lunar dust that could be traced to samples collected during Apollo 11.\nShe learned the bag had been auctioned to make restitution in a Kansas case involving Max Ary, a former director of a museum called the Kansas Cosmosphere. He had been imprisoned for two years for stealing artifacts and selling them in space auctions. Mr. Ary\u2019s private collection\u2014including this bag\u2014had been forfeited to the U.S. Marshals Service.\nRealizing the merits of the object it didn\u2019t know it had lost, NASA, claiming it was the dust\u2019s rightful owner, asked the court to rescind the auction, according to court papers.\nLast June, Ms. Carlson sued NASA for wrongful seizure of property in U.S. District Court in Chicago. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin left his bootprint on the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Allan Needell,\n\n\n\n a curator at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, said the disconnect likely happened early on. Although the bag was labeled \u201cLunar Sample Return,\u201d he said it wasn\u2019t among the 350-plus Apollo 11-related objects Johnson Space Center sent to the Smithsonian. \nAfter the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17, la A zippered pouch containing lunar dust scooped up by Neil Armstrong was forgotten for decades before turning up at a government auction. It\u2019s potentially worth millions. ",
        "author": "Kelly Crow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Lee Carlson Bought a Piece of the Moon\u2014NASA Really Wants It Back (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "119",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-lee-carlson-bought-a-piece-of-the-moonnasa-really-wants-it-back-1495206493?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=122",
        "text": "\u201cOoh boy, that\u2019s something I\u2019d love to have,\u201d she recalls thinking, remembering the astronauts and spacewalks she watched growing up. The 62-year-old hadn\u2019t bid on anything as high as its estimate\u2014$995\u2014but the white, zippered pouch containing the moon dust was bundled in a group with a launch key for the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz T-14 and a black padded headrest from an Apollo command module. She decided the pieces \u201chad a story I could figure out,\u201d so she clicked once and won.\nAfter months of sleuthing that led to a legal showdown with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, she indeed figured it out: The U.S. government mistakenly sold her some of the first moon dust it had ever collected.\n\n\n\n\nAfter Apollo 11 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n took \u201cone giant leap for mankind\u201d and stepped on the moon in 1969, one of the first things he did was unzip a bag the size of a dinner plate and fill it with roughly five scoops of lunar dust and rocks. He shoved the bag into a pocket of his spacesuit and turned it over to scientists at a Houston lab. It disappeared and was eventually forgotten, even by NASA. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe pouch containing moon dust from the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\n \n\n\n\nWhen Ms. Carlson sent her bag to NASA for testing, scientists realized what she had bought and refused to give it back. So last December she sued the agency and won. Now, she\u2019s planning to resell it for at least $2 million in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sotheby\u2019s\n\n\n first space-exploration sale in New York on July 20.\n\nSotheby\u2019s senior specialist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cassandra Hatton\n\n\n\n said she thinks the object could sell for millions more because NASA doesn\u2019t allow individuals to own any bits of the moon, apart from this court-ordered exception. \u201cThis is my Mona Lisa moment,\u201d Ms. Hatton said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Jeffs,\n\n\n\n a NASA spokesman, said the agency is \u201cobviously disappointed\u201d by the latest court ruling but has decided not to appeal. He added NASA thinks the bag should be on public display because it \u201crepresents the culmination of a massive national effort involving a generation of Americans, including the astronauts who risked their lives in an effort to accomplish the most significant act humankind has ever achieved.\u201d\nTracing the bag\u2019s odyssey on Earth is close to rocket science. Ms. Carlson found the listing on an online sale in March 2015 run by Texas auctioneer Gaston & Sheehan. The description didn\u2019t give away much: \u201cOne flown zippered lunar sample return bag with lunar dust (\u201cLunar Bag\u201d), 11.5 inches; tear at center. Flown Mission Unknown.\u201d After receiving her winnings, she unzipped the bag and saw a tiny tag with a part number: V36-788034.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNancy Lee Carlson bought moon dust in an online auction.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kramer Photographers\n \n\n\n\nA lawyer and former city manager in Hancock, Mich., Ms. Carlson said she knew items with serial or part numbers often have paper trails, so she took her search online and combed NASA\u2019s digital records.\nShe also called her local rock club to see if she could get the dust tested. Its president told her to call NASA, so in September 2015, she said she shipped the bag to Johnson Space Center in Houston. Months of emails followed, as Ms. Carlson\u2019s research uncovered a matching part number among the inventory on Apollo 11: \u201cV36-788-034 Decontamination bag, contingency lunar SRC.\u201d\n\n\nExplore More on Space The Future of Everything: Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? Neil deGrasse Tyson on What Every Child Should Know About Science \n\n\nMs. Carlson waited. No answer. Last May, she said she got a call from the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Kansas informing her NASA tested the bag and it indeed contained lunar dust that could be traced to samples collected during Apollo 11.\nShe learned the bag had been auctioned to make restitution in a Kansas case involving Max Ary, a former director of a museum called the Kansas Cosmosphere. He had been imprisoned for two years for stealing artifacts and selling them in space auctions. Mr. Ary\u2019s private collection\u2014including this bag\u2014had been forfeited to the U.S. Marshals Service.\nRealizing the merits of the object it didn\u2019t know it had lost, NASA, claiming it was the dust\u2019s rightful owner, asked the court to rescind the auction, according to court papers.\nLast June, Ms. Carlson sued NASA for wrongful seizure of property in U.S. District Court in Chicago. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin left his bootprint on the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Allan Needell,\n\n\n\n a curator at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, said the disconnect likely happened early on. Although the bag was labeled \u201cLunar Sample Return,\u201d he said it wasn\u2019t among the 350-plus Apollo 11-related objects Johnson Space Center sent to the Smithsonian. \nAfter the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17 A zippered pouch containing lunar dust scooped up by Neil Armstrong was forgotten for decades before turning up at a government auction. It\u2019s potentially worth millions. ",
        "author": "Kelly Crow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sorry I Missed the Wedding\u2014I Forgot to Take Off My Eclipse Glasses (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "120",
        "date": "2017-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sorry-i-missed-the-weddingi-forgot-to-take-off-my-eclipse-glasses-1502205332?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=90",
        "text": "Ms. Cohen and Mr. Schembri are among the couples who have gone to great lengths to schedule their nuptials during the Aug. 21 solar eclipse, which will cast a shadow of darkness across the U.S., from Oregon to the Carolinas as the moon passes directly between the Earth and the sun. And, yes, they all hope it\u2019s a good omen.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWeddings are so cookie-cutter now,\u201d Ms. Cohen said, \u201cyou have to make sure it\u2019s something special.\u201d\n\nSome couples are astronomy nerds. Others just want a bit of solar flair. The last eclipse to traverse the continental U.S. was in 1918. \nThe once-in-a-lifetime opportunity does present some logistical challenges: corralling guests to a Monday wedding for one, repeated calls for the DJ to play the 1980s song \u201cTotal Eclipse of the Heart\u201d and dark wedding photos featuring guests in near-blackout eclipse glasses. \n\n\n Celestial Event Some couples plan to tie the knot during the Aug. 21 solar eclipse, including a couple in Wilson, Wyo. If skies are clear, the entire U.S. will be able to see at least partial obscuration. Percentage of the sun\u2019s area that will be covered by the moon during the event: 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Wilson Chicago New York San Francisco 90% Denver 90% Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Chicago Wilson New York San Francisco 90% Denver Los Angeles 90% 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Wilson Chicago New York 90% Denver San Francisco 90% Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% Portland 60% Chicago 80% Wilson San Francisco New York Denver Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 60% Houston 40% Source: NASA \n\n\nOne complication, notes Mr. Schembri, a 29-year-old astronautical engineering student, is that the glasses, which the couple will provide as wedding favors, filter out so much light that nothing but the brightest objects will be visible. That, he says, means their 30 guests aren\u2019t \u201cgoing to be able to see us.\u201d \nIn any event, Mr. Schembri is certain that he and Ms. Cohen will only have eyes for each other. That\u2019s because it\u2019s their wedding day and they\u2019re very much in love. Also, they don\u2019t plan to wear their glasses at the altar for most of the ceremony and staring at the eclipse in its partial phase could cause permanent eye damage. \nWedding guests need not worry. Ms. Cohen, a 29-year-old training manager at a car dealership, notes that safety instructions will be printed in the wedding program. \nAs long as guests don\u2019t look at the partially eclipsed sun without protective gear, \u201cthey\u2019re not in any danger at all,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ralph Chou,\n\n\n\n a professor emeritus of optometry and vision science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.\nDr. Chou added that his colleagues and astronomy enthusiasts would be \u201chorrified\u201d at the idea of splitting their attention between a wedding and the eclipse. \u201cThey\u2019re going out of their way to make sure nothing distracts them from the actual eclipse,\u201d he said.\n\n\n Jai Merrill and Beeb Ashcroft started looking for the perfect venue a year ago and say they found a spot on the so-called path of totality, in Grand Ronde, Ore. There\u2019s no alcohol being served at the wedding but they plan to open their eclipse-themed wine on their first anniversary. Photos: Beeb Ashcroft(2)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beeb Ashcroft,\n\n\n\n 33, a social-media manager from Seaside, Ore., doesn\u2019t mind sharing the spotlight. It was also a surefire way that she and fiance\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jai Merrill,\n\n\n\n a 47-year-old astronomy buff, could guarantee their families and friends didn\u2019t miss the eclipse. \nThe couple started looking for the perfect venue a year ago, cross-referencing maps of the total eclipse\u2019s predicted path on their many road trips, before settling on a church in Grand Ronde, Ore. The dream spot is on the so-called path of totality, where the sky will turn darkest, but is also big enough for all their guests. Darkness will likely permeate some of her wedding photos, but at least they will be \u201cnon-traditional,\u201d Ms. Ashcroft said. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Evan Mehne\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jazmin Pruneda\n\n\n\n decided to delay their backyard eclipse wedding in Alliance, Neb., until evening, well after the celestial spectacle. \u201cWe\u2019re not here to steal the universe\u2019s thunder, but we\u2019re here to celebrate it,\u201d said Mr. Mehne, 27, a local newspaper reporter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEvan Mehne and his bride-to-be Jazmin Pruneda. \u2018We\u2019re not here to steal the universe\u2019s thunder,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we\u2019re here to celebrate it.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kenzy Hurst Feltes/Faces n' Play{ces} Images\n \n\n\n\nThey will, however, host a viewing party and lunch earlier in the day, said Ms. Pruneda, 21, who works in information technology. Their invitations and cake topper feature a sun and moon, and they\u2019re planning on dressing in red and blue, their favorite colors, which they say will evoke the aligning orbs and make the ceremony more personal.\nThe stars aligned for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Katie Iaeger,\n\n\n\n 24, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Carroll,\n\n\n\n 27, when Mr. Carroll, a supervisor at a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Starbucks,\n\n\n entered an \u201celope at the eclipse\u201d contest, and won. The prize was a chance to be wed, with 15 guests, during the eclipse in the Galactic Gardens at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Tenn. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n WSJ's Dipti Kapadia explains how to watch the eclipse without damaging your eyes. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nThe couple will have to marry before the celestial show, however, in order to avoid being overrun by the thousands of museum visitors expected to jam the place for the big moment. \n\u201cWe both love science and space,\u201d said Ms. Iaeger, a fine-arts student at Middle Tennessee State University. \u201cNo matter what, we wanted to do it on this day.\u201d \nBack in Wyoming, Ms. Cohen and Mr. Schembri will soon start their wedding festivities in earnest, with a roadtrip next week in their white Subaru Crosstrek, which they\u2019ve named \u201cThe Spaceship,\u201d from their home in Spokane Valley, Wash., to Wyoming.\n\n\nTake a Look at Other Recent A-Heds The Man Who Wrote Those Password Rules Has a New Tip: N3v$r M1^d! Australia\u2019s Latest Political Scandal Is Completely Ridiculous Millennials Unearth an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV: the Antenna \n\n\nAt the wedding, Ms. Cohen plans to wear a shimmering silver dress that mimics moonlight. The ceremony will feature a reading entitled \u201cMoon of My Life,\u201d that the bride-to-be saw on the TV show \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d Guests will be able to pose for pictures in a photo booth with a handheld cardboard cutout of an eclipsed sun. \nThe decor will also include a handmade model meant to resemble Audrey II, the human-eating plant that appeared following an eclipse in the musical \u201cLittle Shop of Horrors.\u201d \nOne thing that will be missing from the festivities: booze. \n\u201cYou have to go through a mountain pass to get to and from the venue, and I don\u2019t want that on my conscience,\u201d said Ms. Cohen. She\u2019ll be serving lemonade with dark huckleberries\u2014meant to evoke the color of the eclipsed sun. Couples marrying on August 21 ask guests to take Monday off, wear safety specs and slow-dance to Bonnie Tyler. The \u2018path of totality.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Aren\u2019t the Droids You\u2019re Looking For: How Star Wars Obsessives Found the Actual Millennium Falcon (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "121",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-arent-the-droids-youre-looking-for-how-star-wars-obsessives-found-the-actual-millennium-falcon-1513097230?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=21",
        "text": "But Mr. Burns, and the staff at his website, Jedi News, aren\u2019t typical sci-fi fanatics. They are investigative journalists, diggers whose passion is to break news about Wookiees, lightsabers and starships.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHan Solo\n\n\n\nTens of thousands of readers flock each day to the site and others like it because they routinely beat traditional news media to the hottest Star Wars scoops. Some fan journalists have become so knowledgeable that Lucasfilm, the company that created Star Wars, now a unit of Walt Disney Co., has hired them away, including creative executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pablo Hidalgo.\n\n\n\n \u201cNext thing you know, you\u2019re at Skywalker Ranch,\u201d he said, referring to the famous California workhub of series creator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Lucas.\n\n\n\n \n\nThese citizen reporters use the gumshoe techniques depended on by the best muckrakers in their craft. They submit public record requests to uncover key information about the movies, such as the legal names of the entities producing the films. The information in turn helps Mr. Burns\u2019s team track filming locations and studios, where they hunt for leads.\nIn 2013, such a request from Jedi News led to a major story. Lucasfilm was using the pseudonym Foodles Productions Limited to produce \u201cThe Force Awakens,\u201d the 2015 film that brought the Star Wars franchise back to prominence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Millennium Falcon, parked.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Google Maps\n \n\n\n\nThis June, Jedi News landed arguably the most enviable scoop in Star Wars history. It revealed to the world the real-life location of a treasure from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: The Millennium Falcon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Han Solo\u2019s\n\n\n\n famed spaceship.\nFor Mr. Burns, this was equal parts joyful discovery and newsroom triumph. \u201cWe do a lot of investigative journalism,\u201d the Jedi News editor said. \u201cTo find that was magic.\u201d\nThe Jedi News masthead consists of eight writers and editors who work remotely around the world. They have day jobs\u2014two are IT workers and two are teachers, among other occupations\u2014but spend up to a few hours a day on Jedi business. (Mr. Burns\u2019s 8-year-old daughter, Miriam, is one of the site\u2019s Padawans and was on the red carpet last year interviewing stars before the London premier of \u201cRogue One.\u201d)\nMr. Burns insists they aren\u2019t stereotypical sci-fi fanatics. \u201cThe majority of the people are actually married with children,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nClicking on the Street View option on Google Maps offers a rendering of the spaceship\u2019s cockpit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Google Maps\n \n\n\n\nThe reporters have specialties but understand their beats often necessitate expanding their horizons. \u201cYou can\u2019t just stay within your comfort zone and say, \u2018I\u2019m only going to report on Star Wars action figures,\u2019 \u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Justin LaSalata,\n\n\n\n a Jedi News reporter who works in the IT department of a medical school.\nThe universe of Star Wars obsessives is so vast that the history of nearly every actor, prop and historical artifact has been exhaustively chronicled. Fans know that Bantha milk is blue and can recite Mr. Lucas\u2019s life story better than his biographers can.\nIf there\u2019s one icon that has captivated the hearts and minds of these die-hards, it is the distinctly shaped freighter Han Solo\u2014played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harrison Ford\n\n\n\n \u2014claimed could make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. \nMr. Burns dreamed about finding the Millennium Falcon over the years.\u00a0He spent untold hours combing through Google Maps, looking at the filming locations for any prop that might be visible. He drilled a lot of digital dry holes, never finding anything. Until last June.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChewbacca, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Han Solo in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon in the original movie, \u2018A New Hope.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThat\u2019s when an unsolicited email arrived from a tipster and Jedi News reader he didn\u2019t know. It contained a bombshell: precise instructions for how to find the Millennium Falcon on Google Maps. Mr. Burns said the loyal Star Wars fan\u2019s own hunting through Google\u2019s satellite images uncovered the \u201cpot of gold\u201d he had always sought.\n\u201cWe were flabbergasted. It was hiding in plain sight,\u201d Mr. Burns said. \u201cEven to this day it amazes me.\u201d\nThe satellite images show the prop parked, unceremoniously, in a field near Longcross Studios, about 20 miles southwest of London, where parts of the latest Star Wars episode, \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d which releases Friday, were filmed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon in flight in \u2018The Force Awakens,\u2019 the 2015 movie that brought the series back to prominence.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nJedi News published a post about the discovery and was credited internationally. Their tweet was coy: \u201cSomething fun. Go on Google maps. Type in LONGCROSS studios. Zoom in. See wh Fan journalists regularly scoop the world on news about the series, including the storage location of Han Solo\u2019s freighter. ",
        "author": "Andrew Beaton"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "122",
        "date": "2017-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sky-is-orange-how-nasa-artists-draw-planets-no-one-can-see-1490800781?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=97",
        "text": "On a planet called Kepler-16b, for instance, which orbits two stars, a space-suited\u00a0Earthling\u00a0revels in the novelty of casting two shadows, before a vista of red lands giving way to purple mountains beneath a tangerine sky.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis poster imagines a trip to Trappist-1e.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nMr. Delgado is a visual strategist at The Studio of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., one of the many artists, designers and illustrators working to produce a picture of the cosmos that in some ways doesn\u2019t actually exist. \u201cWe are trying to present a plausible reality,\u201d he says.\n\nAstronomers are finding thousands of worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. In the absence of direct images, the public knows these alien worlds only through lavish illustrations produced by NASA and ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "123",
        "date": "2017-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sky-is-orange-how-nasa-artists-draw-planets-no-one-can-see-1490800781?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=85",
        "text": "On a planet called Kepler-16b, for instance, which orbits two stars, a space-suited\u00a0Earthling\u00a0revels in the novelty of casting two shadows, before a vista of red lands giving way to purple mountains beneath a tangerine sky.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis poster imagines a trip to Trappist-1e.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nMr. Delgado is a visual strategist at The Studio of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., one of the many artists, designers and illustrators working to produce a picture of the cosmos that in some ways doesn\u2019t actually exist. \u201cWe are trying to present a plausible reality,\u201d he says.\n\nAstronomers are finding thousands of worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. In the absence of direct images, the public knows these alien worlds only through lavish illustrations produced by NASA and ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "124",
        "date": "2017-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sky-is-orange-how-nasa-artists-draw-planets-no-one-can-see-1490800781?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=126",
        "text": "On a planet called Kepler-16b, for instance, which orbits two stars, a space-suited\u00a0Earthling\u00a0revels in the novelty of casting two shadows, before a vista of red lands giving way to purple mountains beneath a tangerine sky.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis poster imagines a trip to Trappist-1e.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Delgado is a visual strategist at The Studio of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., one of the many artists, designers and illustrators working to produce a picture of the cosmos that in some ways doesn\u2019t actually exist. \u201cWe are trying to present a plausible reality,\u201d he says.\n\nAstronomers are finding thousands of worlds outside our solar system, known as exoplanets. In the absence of direct images, the public knows these alien worlds only through lavish illustrations produced by NASA and ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "World\u2019s Explorers Offer Tips for Coping With Lockdown (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "125",
        "date": "2020-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-explorers-hemmed-in-by-pandemic-discover-ways-to-cope-with-lockdown-11605199630?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=38",
        "text": "Mr. Paul says he experienced a rush of excitement when they reached the parking lot for the Gullfoss Waterfall, usually packed with tourists, and found it empty. \u201cIt feels like you are a pioneer again,\u201d he says. Isolation has been difficult for many people during the pandemic, but explorers face a special challenge. With international travel all but frozen they have had to suppress the urge to probe the world\u2019s deepest caves and densest jungles or to brave polar bears or sharks and make do with ordinary life. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFiann Paul, wearing an Icelandic sweater, poses near a waterfall in Iceland.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Fiann Paul\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Borge Ousland\n\n\n\n skied and paddled for 87 days across almost 1,000 miles of ice and water at the North Pole before flying home to Oslo shortly before the new coronavirus pandemic interrupted life in Norway. He spent the months that followed confined to the area around his suburban home in Fornebu exploring what he calls \u201cthe little world\u201d around him, cycling, camping, kayaking and picking mushrooms with his 9-year-old daughter. During a live stream discussion with fellow adventurers in May called \u201cExploring Isolation,\u201d the 58-year-old pointed out his newly circumscribed life has a bright side: \u201cThere is no polar bear going to eat me.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBorge Ousland with his daughter near their home in Oslo.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Borge Ousland\n \n\n\n\nThe discussion was organized by the Explorers Club, a century-old group based in New York City with around 3,500 members. Past luminaries include the first men to reach the North and South poles, the summit of Mount Everest and the bottom of the Mariana Trench. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Sullivan,\n\n\n\n the first American woman to walk in space, explained during the live stream how she used a guided visualization practice learned from a yoga instructor to stop her brain from racing at night during missions. She placed each of her worries inside an imaginary box and then pushed it away for the night. \u201cThey are safe there. They will stay there. I can come back to them when I need to tomorrow,\u201d she says. Astronauts have also found that, for those living in close quarters for prolonged periods, random surprises can lighten the mood, says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Deana Weibel,\n\n\n\n an Explorers Club member who studies the overlap between religious ideas and space exploration. Ms. Weibel, who lives in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., has ordered random gifts for family and friends during the pandemic. She recently called her mom in Orange County, Calif., to say that a corned-beef sandwich on rye would be arriving at the house in 15 minutes. \u201cI asked them to throw in an extra slice of bread so she could tell me later that she managed to get three meals out of it,\u201d Ms. Weibel says. You don\u2019t have to be in the Yucat\u00e1n to enjoy a good campfire, says Richard Wiese, president of the Explorers Club. Mr. Wiese, who spent time in the jungle putting satellite collars on jaguars, has discovered the joys of a fire pit in his Connecticut backyard with his wife, two 10-year-old sons and 12-year-old daughter. \u201cThere\u2019s no lack of magic that occurs around a fire,\u201d says Mr. Wiese, who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of 11 with his father. \u201cThere\u2019s a primal feeling.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Wiese, president of the Explorers Club, at a fire pit with his family in their Connecticut backyard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Wiese\n \n\n\n\nThe biggest challenge for many explorers has been surviving months cooped up with their family. Kinga Philipps, a television presenter who spends months overseas for shows like Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cLost in the Wild,\u201d has kept herself sane by hiking and camping, mostly on her own, in the mountains around Los Angeles. \u201cSometimes, just being with yourself is lovely,\u201d says Ms. Philipps, who lives with her boyfriend in Marina del Rey, Calif.\n\n\nShare your thoughtsWho was the greatest explorer of all time? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bertrand Piccard,\n\n\n\n who circumnavigated the globe by balloon and by solar-powered plane, sat down to dinner in the third week of March with his wife, his three daughters and their three boyfriends and told them they had a choice: refuse to accept the crisis and suffer, or embrace it and develop new skills. The 62-year-old Mr. Piccard says that moment in their home on a vineyard outside Lausanne, Switzerland, was like the beginning of an expedition. \u201cIt\u2019s a moment of rupture,\u201d he says. \u201cYou leave behind what you know and you enter into the unknown.\u201d For Mr. Piccard\u2019s around-the-world balloon flight, he shared a capsule for 20 days with co-pilot \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Jones\n\n\n\n surrounded by boxes of equipment, food, a parachute and a life raft. The pair, who had just 50 square feet of space to move around, survived by empathizing with each other\u2019s feelings Their grand expeditions stalled, scientists and adventurers make do with backyard fire pits, sweaters and mental-health exercises. ",
        "author": "Paul Berger"
    },
    {
        "title": "World\u2019s Explorers Offer Tips for Coping With Lockdown (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "126",
        "date": "2020-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-explorers-hemmed-in-by-pandemic-discover-ways-to-cope-with-lockdown-11605199630?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=44",
        "text": "Mr. Paul says he experienced a rush of excitement when they reached the parking lot for the Gullfoss Waterfall, usually packed with tourists, and found it empty. \u201cIt feels like you are a pioneer again,\u201d he says. Isolation has been difficult for many people during the pandemic, but explorers face a special challenge. With international travel all but frozen they have had to suppress the urge to probe the world\u2019s deepest caves and densest jungles or to brave polar bears or sharks and make do with ordinary life. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFiann Paul, wearing an Icelandic sweater, poses near a waterfall in Iceland.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Fiann Paul\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Borge Ousland\n\n\n\n skied and paddled for 87 days across almost 1,000 miles of ice and water at the North Pole before flying home to Oslo shortly before the new coronavirus pandemic interrupted life in Norway. He spent the months that followed confined to the area around his suburban home in Fornebu exploring what he calls \u201cthe little world\u201d around him, cycling, camping, kayaking and picking mushrooms with his 9-year-old daughter. During a live stream discussion with fellow adventurers in May called \u201cExploring Isolation,\u201d the 58-year-old pointed out his newly circumscribed life has a bright side: \u201cThere is no polar bear going to eat me.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBorge Ousland with his daughter near their home in Oslo.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Borge Ousland\n \n\n\n\nThe discussion was organized by the Explorers Club, a century-old group based in New York City with around 3,500 members. Past luminaries include the first men to reach the North and South poles, the summit of Mount Everest and the bottom of the Mariana Trench. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Sullivan,\n\n\n\n the first American woman to walk in space, explained during the live stream how she used a guided visualization practice learned from a yoga instructor to stop her brain from racing at night during missions. She placed each of her worries inside an imaginary box and then pushed it away for the night. \u201cThey are safe there. They will stay there. I can come back to them when I need to tomorrow,\u201d she says. Astronauts have also found that, for those living in close quarters for prolonged periods, random surprises can lighten the mood, says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Deana Weibel,\n\n\n\n an Explorers Club member who studies the overlap between religious ideas and space exploration. Ms. Weibel, who lives in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., has ordered random gifts for family and friends during the pandemic. She recently called her mom in Orange County, Calif., to say that a corned-beef sandwich on rye would be arriving at the house in 15 minutes. \u201cI asked them to throw in an extra slice of bread so she could tell me later that she managed to get three meals out of it,\u201d Ms. Weibel says. You don\u2019t have to be in the Yucat\u00e1n to enjoy a good campfire, says Richard Wiese, president of the Explorers Club. Mr. Wiese, who spent time in the jungle putting satellite collars on jaguars, has discovered the joys of a fire pit in his Connecticut backyard with his wife, two 10-year-old sons and 12-year-old daughter. \u201cThere\u2019s no lack of magic that occurs around a fire,\u201d says Mr. Wiese, who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of 11 with his father. \u201cThere\u2019s a primal feeling.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Wiese, president of the Explorers Club, at a fire pit with his family in their Connecticut backyard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Wiese\n \n\n\n\nThe biggest challenge for many explorers has been surviving months cooped up with their family. Kinga Philipps, a television presenter who spends months overseas for shows like Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cLost in the Wild,\u201d has kept herself sane by hiking and camping, mostly on her own, in the mountains around Los Angeles. \u201cSometimes, just being with yourself is lovely,\u201d says Ms. Philipps, who lives with her boyfriend in Marina del Rey, Calif.\n\n\nShare your thoughtsWho was the greatest explorer of all time? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bertrand Piccard,\n\n\n\n who circumnavigated the globe by balloon and by solar-powered plane, sat down to dinner in the third week of March with his wife, his three daughters and their three boyfriends and told them they had a choice: refuse to accept the crisis and suffer, or embrace it and develop new skills. The 62-year-old Mr. Piccard says that moment in their home on a vineyard outside Lausanne, Switzerland, was like the beginning of an expedition. \u201cIt\u2019s a moment of rupture,\u201d he says. \u201cYou leave behind what you know and you enter into the unknown.\u201d For Mr. Piccard\u2019s around-the-world balloon flight, he shared a capsule for 20 days with co-pilot \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Jones\n\n\n\n surrounded by boxes of equipment, food, a parachute and a life raft. The pair, who had just 50 square feet of space to move around, survived by empathizing with each other\u2019s feelings Their grand expeditions stalled, scientists and adventurers make do with backyard fire pits, sweaters and mental-health exercises. ",
        "author": "Paul Berger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Says He Lives in a $50,000 House. He Doesn\u2019t Talk About the Austin Mansion. (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "127",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-he-lives-in-a-50-000-house-he-doesnt-talk-about-the-austin-mansion-11640188548?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=3",
        "text": "\u201cMy primary home is literally a ~50k house in Boca Chica/Starbase that I rent from SpaceX,\u201d he tweeted this June, referring to a Texas town near the Mexican border near SpaceX\u2019s rocket-launch facility. \u201cIt\u2019s kinda awesome though.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nWhat Mr. Musk hasn\u2019t said, and what few people know, is that for roughly a year he has also been living in a waterfront estate in Austin owned by a rich friend nicknamed \u201cKenny,\u201d people familiar with the matter say\u2014a home so extravagant that it was the most expensive listed in the Texas capital when it was sold just a few years ago. \n\nMr. Musk has also engaged a series of real-estate agents to show him Austin-area mansions for purchase\u2014and toured some houses personally, some of the people say.\nThe Austin home where Mr. Musk stays is owned by Ken Howery, a billionaire in his own right who has known Mr. Musk for decades. Mr. Musk\u2019s stay is so secret that some friends of Mr. Howery said they were unaware of the arrangement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe home in Austin where people say Mr. Musk has been living.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Pictometry\n \n\n\n\nMr. Howery co-founded\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014where Mr. Musk was an executive early in his career\u2014and later, with famed investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel,\n\n\n\n co-founded Founders Fund, the venture-capital fund that has backed several of Mr. Musk\u2019s companies.\nThe three men are considered part of what has been popularly termed the \u201cPayPal Mafia,\u201d a group of former company executives who went on to further success in business. In 2017, Mr. Musk tweeted that he had swung by a party attended by actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom to say hi to Mr. Howery.\nMr. Howery served as U.S. ambassador to Sweden during the latter half of the Trump administration. Since his term ended, Mr. Howery has been traveling the world, including chasing tornadoes and other extreme weather events as a hobby, people who know him say.\nThat left his home available for Mr. Musk, who said last year that he had moved to Texas. Earlier this year, he relocated Tesla\u2019s headquarters to the outskirts of Austin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKen Howery, pictured in 2020, was U.S. ambassador to Sweden.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Barzan Dello/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nThe property includes nearly 8,000 square feet of interior space on a peninsula that juts into the Colorado River at the foot of Mount Bonnell in an exclusive Austin neighborhood, property records show. It boasts a waterfront pool, jacuzzi and private boat slip, and is protected by several sets of gates and a guardhouse as part of a development called \u201cWatersedge.\u201d\nThe mansion sold for more than $12 million in 2018; real-estate agents say it would sell for multiples of that now, a reflection of the city\u2019s booming property market. It couldn\u2019t be determined if Mr. Musk paid Mr. Howery for use of the residence. Mr. Musk is worth around $240 billion. Neither man responded to requests for comment.\nAfter publication of this story, Mr. Howery, in a text message, said: \u201cElon does not live at my home, he lives in South Texas. He stayed at the house as my guest occasionally when traveling to Austin.\u201d\nMr. Musk, also after publication of this story, told the website Insider: \u201cI don\u2019t live there and am not looking to buy a house anywhere.\u201d He subsequently tweeted, in response to a link to this story, \u201cBut what color are the pillow cases?? We must know these important details!!\u201d and \u201cI should probably live somewhere though,\u201d adding emojis in both instances.\nMr. Musk\u2019s extended stay in the Austin mansion, as well as his continued pursuit of a showcase property nearby, complicate the narrative he has cultivated. Several years ago, he was temporarily sleeping with a white, caseless pillow on the floor under his desk at Tesla\u2019s San Francisco-area factory.\nHe pledged on Twitter last year to \u201cown no house,\u201d and has followed through by selling a vast portfolio of homes.\n\u201cI do live in a $50k house,\u201d he wrote on Twitter in July. Public records show that he is registered to vote in Cameron County, Texas, near Boca Chica beach, at a home built in 1971 that occupies one-fifth of an acre. The house is owned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the records show.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe home where Elon Musk stays when he is in Cameron County, Texas, near Boca Chica beach.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Phil Kline for the Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nIn recent months, Mr. Musk and his representatives have engaged a series of Austin-based real-estate agents to hunt for a trophy property in the area, people familiar with the matter say. His personal financial advisers have sent a slew of requirements to brokers, including a desire for a large expanse of land that is currently unavailable in properties on the market, the people say.\nMr. Musk has toured several homes in person, two of the people say. Among the homes he expressed interest in, those people say, is a custom-built mansion owned by the noted jewelry designer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kendra Scott.\n\n\n\n Ms. Scott, who through a spokeswoman declined to comment, was open to a deal, but Mr. Musk was a no-show at several appointments to tour the home, one of the people said.\nParamount to Mr. Musk\u2019s concerns, say people briefed on the search, is privacy. \nThe home search is so tightly protected, the people say, that several high-end Austin home-sellers say they expect it will remain a mystery even after he purchases a property. When the most expensive listed home in Austin sold for around $39 million earlier this year to a California limited-liability corporation with connections to Mr. Musk, word buzzed around the neighborhood that Mr. Musk was the secret buyer. \nHe wasn\u2019t, says Jonny Jones, a businessman who previously owned the house and has found himself forced to shoot down the rumor.\nMichele Turnquist, a real-estate agent who represented Mr. Jones in the sale, said she continues to receive misplaced kudos. \u201cI\u2019ve had five people tell me, \u2018You know, Elon bought your listing,\u2019 \u201d Ms. Turnquist says. \u201cI tell them that if Elon bought my listing, I wouldn\u2019t know.\u201d\n\u2014Rebecca Elliott contributed to this article.\nWrite to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com The world\u2019s richest man, who said last year that he was selling physical possessions, has been living in a billionaire friend\u2019s estate and shopping for his own Texas palace ",
        "author": "Rob Copeland"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Place on Earth to Fire 3,000 Rockets Into Outer Space Is... (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "128",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-new-zealand-gateway-to-outer-space-1483982532?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=94",
        "text": "Finding an empty corner of the world isn\u2019t easy for an industry expected to launch as many as 3,000 microsatellites over the next several years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTake out flight paths of commercial airlines, shipping routes, towns and cities and the map shrinks pretty quickly. In the U.S., orbital launch sites are government owned, which represents another drawback in terms of cost and access. There\u2019s Siberia, of course, but the idea of taking commercially sensitive technology to Russia makes some executives uneasy, before factoring in difficulties in getting there. \n\n\u201cA small island nation in the middle of nowhere,\u201d said Mr. Beck, \u201cis pretty much exactly what you want.\u201d\nWelcome to New Zealand: earthquake-prone, dotted with volcanoes and containing six times as many sheep as people. The country doesn\u2019t even have a combat air force, having scrapped its warplanes about 15 years ago to save money. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew Zealand's remote Mahia Peninsula, on the east coast of the North Island.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rob Taylor/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nYet the South Pacific country has become the unlikely frontier in a drive to open a private rocket-launch site, servicing a soaring market for tiny satellites, many the size of a shoe box.\nMr. Beck, a native New Zealander whose company controls what it calls the world\u2019s first private orbital-launch complex, sees the remote location as a help rather than hindrance\u2014there is almost nothing but ocean between New Zealand and South America. That gives the company easy access to airspace, compared with the busy air and sea movements around the U.S., as well a bigger range of lucrative orbit paths.\nBudding satellite entrepreneurs swiftly encountered a problem: New Zealand hadn\u2019t expected to join the space race. Putting rockets into the skies required a regulatory framework, which the country lacked. It also needed a safeguard agreement with the U.S. to maintain secrecy around prized rocket technology. In a country averse to showiness, New Zealand\u2019s Parliament seemed surprised by the novelty.\nOn a recent day, lawmaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Clark\n\n\n\n rose to speak at the first reading of the Outer Space and High Altitude Activities Bill to croon a recital of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elton John\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRocket Man\u201d to general bemusement. \u201cShe packed my bags last night, pre-flight. Zero hour 9 a.m.,\u201d said Mr. Clark. \u201cRocket man burning out his fuse up here alone.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Bowie,\n\n\n\n Darth Vader, \u201cThe Muppet Show\u201d and \u201cPigs in Space\u201d also came up in discussions of the bill, which the government hopes will become law by mid-2017. The legislation includes setting up a regulatory agency and signing international safeguards conventions. Mr. Beck already has permission to conduct test flights of the company\u2019s rockets.\nOn the Mahia Peninsula\u2014a spit of mountainous farmland where Rocket Lab has built its launch pad\u2014the space industry\u2019s arrival hasn\u2019t come without commotion. A \u201csecret\u201d here used to mean protecting prized surf breaks and lobster-fishing sites from summer tourists.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRocket Lab Operations Manager Shane Fleming stands in front of the launch platform on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rob Taylor/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFarmers Pat and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sue O\u2019Brien,\n\n\n\n who graze sheep and cattle beside the new launch-pad access road, say Rocket Lab\u2019s arrival spawned conspiracy theories. \u201cPeople are slowly getting the mindset Rocket Lab are a great big space freight company, rather than one carrying bombs and nuclear weapons,\u201d said Mr. O\u2019Brien. \u201cThere have been some crazy questions at community meetings.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Browne,\n\n\n\n a contractor hired to repair dirt roads over Mahia\u2019s precipitous passes to turn them from farm tracks to roads safe for trucks carrying rocket fuel, said secrecy provisions enforced by Rocket Lab meant he couldn\u2019t even tell staff what they were working on, while also triggering other unexpected concerns.\n\u201cPeople like to treat the road now like a rally circuit,\u201d Mr. Browne said. \u201cThey come around a corner expecting no one to be there. A truck with a rocket is a bit of a surprise.\u201d\nFor Mahia\u2019s volunteer fire brigade, made up mostly of farmers, the prospect of a rocket accident raised eyebrows. Nigel Hall, who heads the New Zealand Fire Service here, has been carrying out practice drills and plans to have extra people on hand when Rocket Lab starts test launches early in 2017.\n\u201cThe mixing of fuel products used to launch the rocket was something new to most us,\u201d Mr. Hall said. \u201cBut we eventually reckoned if there was some kind of failure, after the bang we\u2019d just be left with what we\u2019re usually left with round here: a grass fire. There\u2019s nothing else to burn.\u201d\nRocket Lab, backed by aerospace giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , hopes to be the first company to begin commercially launching m Remote New Zealand lands a major private launch pad for satellites, thanks to being one of the last places on Earth with few commercial flights, shipping routes, cities\u2014or people. ",
        "author": "Rob Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Place on Earth to Fire 3,000 Rockets Into Outer Space Is... (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "129",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-new-zealand-gateway-to-outer-space-1483982532?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=28",
        "text": "Finding an empty corner of the world isn\u2019t easy for an industry expected to launch as many as 3,000 microsatellites over the next several years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTake out flight paths of commercial airlines, shipping routes, towns and cities and the map shrinks pretty quickly. In the U.S., orbital launch sites are government owned, which represents another drawback in terms of cost and access. There\u2019s Siberia, of course, but the idea of taking commercially sensitive technology to Russia makes some executives uneasy, before factoring in difficulties in getting there. \n\n\u201cA small island nation in the middle of nowhere,\u201d said Mr. Beck, \u201cis pretty much exactly what you want.\u201d\nWelcome to New Zealand: earthquake-prone, dotted with volcanoes and containing six times as many sheep as people. The country doesn\u2019t even have a combat air force, having scrapped its warplanes about 15 years ago to save money. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew Zealand's remote Mahia Peninsula, on the east coast of the North Island.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rob Taylor/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nYet the South Pacific country has become the unlikely frontier in a drive to open a private rocket-launch site, servicing a soaring market for tiny satellites, many the size of a shoe box.\nMr. Beck, a native New Zealander whose company controls what it calls the world\u2019s first private orbital-launch complex, sees the remote location as a help rather than hindrance\u2014there is almost nothing but ocean between New Zealand and South America. That gives the company easy access to airspace, compared with the busy air and sea movements around the U.S., as well a bigger range of lucrative orbit paths.\nBudding satellite entrepreneurs swiftly encountered a problem: New Zealand hadn\u2019t expected to join the space race. Putting rockets into the skies required a regulatory framework, which the country lacked. It also needed a safeguard agreement with the U.S. to maintain secrecy around prized rocket technology. In a country averse to showiness, New Zealand\u2019s Parliament seemed surprised by the novelty.\nOn a recent day, lawmaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Clark\n\n\n\n rose to speak at the first reading of the Outer Space and High Altitude Activities Bill to croon a recital of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elton John\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRocket Man\u201d to general bemusement. \u201cShe packed my bags last night, pre-flight. Zero hour 9 a.m.,\u201d said Mr. Clark. \u201cRocket man burning out his fuse up here alone.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Bowie,\n\n\n\n Darth Vader, \u201cThe Muppet Show\u201d and \u201cPigs in Space\u201d also came up in discussions of the bill, which the government hopes will become law by mid-2017. The legislation includes setting up a regulatory agency and signing international safeguards conventions. Mr. Beck already has permission to conduct test flights of the company\u2019s rockets.\nOn the Mahia Peninsula\u2014a spit of mountainous farmland where Rocket Lab has built its launch pad\u2014the space industry\u2019s arrival hasn\u2019t come without commotion. A \u201csecret\u201d here used to mean protecting prized surf breaks and lobster-fishing sites from summer tourists.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRocket Lab Operations Manager Shane Fleming stands in front of the launch platform on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rob Taylor/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFarmers Pat and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sue O\u2019Brien,\n\n\n\n who graze sheep and cattle beside the new launch-pad access road, say Rocket Lab\u2019s arrival spawned conspiracy theories. \u201cPeople are slowly getting the mindset Rocket Lab are a great big space freight company, rather than one carrying bombs and nuclear weapons,\u201d said Mr. O\u2019Brien. \u201cThere have been some crazy questions at community meetings.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Browne,\n\n\n\n a contractor hired to repair dirt roads over Mahia\u2019s precipitous passes to turn them from farm tracks to roads safe for trucks carrying rocket fuel, said secrecy provisions enforced by Rocket Lab meant he couldn\u2019t even tell staff what they were working on, while also triggering other unexpected concerns.\n\u201cPeople like to treat the road now like a rally circuit,\u201d Mr. Browne said. \u201cThey come around a corner expecting no one to be there. A truck with a rocket is a bit of a surprise.\u201d\nFor Mahia\u2019s volunteer fire brigade, made up mostly of farmers, the prospect of a rocket accident raised eyebrows. Nigel Hall, who heads the New Zealand Fire Service here, has been carrying out practice drills and plans to have extra people on hand when Rocket Lab starts test launches early in 2017.\n\u201cThe mixing of fuel products used to launch the rocket was something new to most us,\u201d Mr. Hall said. \u201cBut we eventually reckoned if there was some kind of failure, after the bang we\u2019d just be left with what we\u2019re usually left with round here: a grass fire. There\u2019s nothing else to burn.\u201d\nRocket Lab, backed by aerospace giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , hopes to be the first company to begin commercially launchi Remote New Zealand lands a major private launch pad for satellites, thanks to being one of the last places on Earth with few commercial flights, shipping routes, cities\u2014or people. ",
        "author": "Rob Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "During a Zoom Frog Dissection, Students Posted Vomit Emojis. Welcome to the Virtual Field Trip. (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "130",
        "date": "2020-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/during-a-zoom-frog-dissection-students-posted-vomit-emojis-welcome-to-the-virtual-field-trip-11602170147?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=36",
        "text": "A steady stream of puking emojis immediately appeared in the Zoom chat.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI feel like I am going to faint,\u201d one student wrote; \u201c*sad violin music*\u201d another typed.\n\nThe pandemic has put in-person school outings on hold, so schools around the country have traded yellow buses and parent chaperones for this contradictory concept: the virtual field trip.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhere would you like to go on a virtual field trip? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nFor a virtual field trip to the Saint Louis Zoo, classes can choose from a list of options. One is the \u201cmascot adventure\u201d\u2014if a school\u2019s mascot is a bear, an educator would take students around the zoo to introduce them to the polar bear, Kali, and grizzly bears Huckleberry and Finley, said Kimberly Hoormann, the zoo\u2019s manager of learning experiences.\nAlthough the hope is that students will feel like they are at the Saint Louis Zoo, a virtual field trip won\u2019t necessarily allow visitors to see the same animals they would see in person, said Ms. Hoormann. Virtual trips can\u2019t tour the zoo\u2019s sea lion tunnel because zoo educators can\u2019t get a Wi-Fi signal there, she said. \nSchools still have to pay $150 for a live virtual tour at the Milwaukee Art Museum, but they don\u2019t have to pay for busing to and from the building, said Amy Kirschke, director of adult, docent and school programs at the museum.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe virtual tour at the Milwaukee Art Museum compares artworks.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Milwaukee Art Museum\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe sort of always had it on our wish list to have a distance-learning program,\u201d Ms. Kirschke said. \u201cNothing like a pandemic to move that up the list of opportunities.\u201d\nTeachers have used virtual field trips before, but they have grown in popularity since schools moved to online instruction. Website traffic for VirtualFieldTrips.org has increased 30-fold since the pandemic began, said founder Dale Petersen, who produces travel videos that take students to places including the Amazon rainforest and Rome\u2019s ancient ruins. Its subscriber base has gone up from about 1,000 teachers and schools last fall to nearly 10,000 today, Ms. Petersen said.\nSince March 14, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science has reached 68,600 people through virtual programs, compared with 35,000 students and teachers in 2019, according to Director of Experiences and Partnerships Tina Martinez. The museum expanded virtual offerings to a wider audience after the pandemic hit.\nOne big plus: Location isn\u2019t a limiting factor. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAt Nueva Vista Language Academy in Delano, Calif., Vice Principal Casey Rivas, left, and Principal Joshua Herrera handed out souvenirs from a virtual field trip to France.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mercedes Silva\n \n\n\n\nAt Nueva Vista Language Academy, an elementary school in Delano, Calif., students haven\u2019t returned to in-person classes, but they have gone to Hawaii and France on virtual field trips this fall.\nIn Hawaii, they took a video tour of the Dole Plantation to learn how pineapples are grown and harvested. Fourth-grader Olivia Trigo said it surprised her to learn pineapples sprout up from the ground, growing on the central stem of a plant with long, swordlike leaves. \nThe Nueva Vista Language Academy students also explored an erupting volcano via Google Arts and Culture, a platform with content from more than 2,000 museums and archives. The virtual exhibit started from the bottom of the mountain, and the view allowed students to travel the tubes that transport lava through the volcano, eventually leading them out onto its top, said Vice Principal Casey Rivas. \n\u201cIt was really cool because we were able to see the lava flowing and a bunch of magma,\u201d said sixth-grader Mya Garcia.\nAt lunch time, Mya, Olivia and their classmates were driven to school to pick up Hawaiian leis, books and fresh pineapples in front of the school, which was decked out in Hawaiian d\u00e9cor. Principal Joshua Herrera and other administrators dressed up in leis and floral prints. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOlivia Trigo and her sister Penelope Trigo, after a virtual field trip to Hawaii.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joanna Trigo\n \n\n\n\n\u201cMy favorite part was probably getting to eat the pineapple,\u201d Olivia said.\nKristi Arbic, a first-grade teacher at Woodland Elementary in Lafayette, Ind., is teaching in person this fall, but has used her school district\u2019s virtual-reality headsets to take her class on a trip to Japan.\nSome of the first-graders almost fell backward when she asked them to look up to the top of Mount Fuji; some kept their arms outstretched as if they could touch everything they were seeing through the VR goggles. They liked to pretend they were falling off the cliffs, she said. \nKristin Casad, a parent from Long Beach, Calif., said her children enjoyed watching her son\u2019s virtual trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific with his kindergarten class last spring. A virtual visit the family took to the British Museum in summer they didn\u2019t like as much. \n\u201cMy kids found that boring, so we didn\u2019t do that tour very long,\u201d she said. \nStudents at Summit-Questa Montessori School in Davie, Fla., have virtually traveled to China and Canada on field trips this fall, said teacher Jessica Briel. \nShe also took them on a virtual trip to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Disney\u2019s\n\n\n Epcot theme park, where they took a virtual ride to get them to their next trip, a simulated safari in Africa. \u201cThere\u2019s a part when one of the animals kicks dirt up, so I would look at the camera, and some of them are, you know, swatting in front of their face,\u201d she said.\nOn a virtual trip to a Pennsylvania farm, they signed up to adopt a calf. The calf isn\u2019t born yet, but when it arrives, Ms. Briel\u2019s school will receive a note with its breed, name, mother\u2019s name and other information. Students will exchange letters with the farm to keep in touch, and at the end of the school year, they\u2019ll Zoom with the calf, she said. \nStudents looking forward to the online outings have taken to wearing their school T-shirts that they used to wear to in-person field trips on the virtual trips, Ms. Briel said. \nHer next field trip theme is outer space. In a recent hint to students about where they\u2019ll be headed, she told them they\u2019ll need to use something faster than a plane to get there\u2014virtually. \n\u201cMaybe we can use the rocket ship to fly out of Florida, fly into California, and then land on the biggest beach of all!\u201d said Elana Triplett, a 6-year-old student at the school. The pandemic has put traditional school outings on hold, so students are taking virtual field trips; meet the polar bear online ",
        "author": "Maya Goldman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Less Michelin Man, More Barbarella: Space Suits Get Stylish (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "131",
        "date": "2018-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-barbarella-than-michelin-man-space-suits-get-stylish-1515606553?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=21",
        "text": "Barbarella\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a step up from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart,\n\n\n \u201d sniffs Ted Southern, president of space-gear maker Final Frontier Design in Brooklyn, who previously designed wings for Victoria\u2019s Secret runway models. \nNow, it seems, the future will finally look like it was supposed to\u2014cool. Space garb is entering a new dimension, propelled by competition among private ventures seeking to carry NASA astronauts\u2014and eventually private citizens\u2014into orbit. New technologies mean it will finally be possible to leave the planet in style. \n\n\nElon Musk\n \n\n\n\n recently revealed the sleek flight suit, topped by Daft Punk-style headgear, his company created for crews to wear inside its Dragon capsule when headed for the international space station. SpaceX says it is on track to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting laboratory as soon as this fall.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Space fashion is getting an upgrade, but it has a way to go before it can compete with some interstellar standouts immortalized in film. Photos: AIP, NASA; Video: Laura Kammerman/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nThe goal was for people to see it and think, \u201cYeah, I wanna wear that thing one day,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a video posted online.\n\u201cIt does really look cool,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Jacobs,\n\n\n\n Softgoods Design Manager at David Clark Co., NASA\u2019s go-to source for space suits. He says with space suits made under traditional government contracts, \u201cany ounce of effort spent beyond function was not money well spent.\u201d\n\n\n \n\n\nSome rocketeers maintain that down-to-earth view. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to turn a swimsuit into a space suit,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Precourt,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut and ex-head of NASA\u2019s astronaut corps, now a senior\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Orbital ATK Inc.\n\n\n official. \u201cYou have to realize what\u2019s really fantasy.\u201d\nYet even the David Clark firm is getting hip. Mr. Jacobs recently designed a trim flight suit for Boeing Co.\u2019s new space capsule that is royal blue and includes boots produced with sportswear brand Reebok. Designers there took the same approach as for mass-market athletic gear.\n\u201cIf it functions well and it doesn\u2019t look cool, we say that\u2019s a fail,\u201d says Reebok Creative Director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hobson.\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s vehicle is slated to carry people to the space station within a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nProject Mercury astronauts in 1959. Front row, left to right: Walter M. \u201cWally\u201d Schirra Jr., Donald K. \u201cDeke\u201d Slayton, John H. Glenn Jr., M. Scott Carpenter; back row: Alan B. Shepard Jr., Virgil I. \u201cGus\u201d Grissom and L. Gordon Cooper, Jr.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nA NASA spokeswoman says today\u2019s suits are \u201cmore form-fitting for ease of mobility.\u201d\nFlight suits like the new SpaceX and Boeing togs, worn during launch and re-entry, only need to protect astronauts in an emergency. That has allowed them to benefit most from new textile technologies that weigh about 40% less than their predecessors. They offer updated features such as gloves that work on touch screens.\nThe Reebok team, unabashed about aping Hollywood, tested a boot design based on ones\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sigourney Weaver\n\n\n\n wore in \u201cAliens.\u201d \n\u201cIt worked surprisingly well\u201d but proved less functional than other designs, Mr. Hobson says.\n\n\n Stylish in SpaceThe astronaut clothing on TV shows and in movies has ranged from the mod and be-caped, to the more realistic jump suits and helmets.'Star Trek''Battlestar Galactica''Lost in Space''Alien''The Martian''Gravity'Photos: Everett Collection(5); Photofest (Alien)\n\n\nFocusing on color, they also tested metallic hues, none of which proved sufficiently space-age. \u201cGetting fireproof materials in reflective is hard,\u201d he says.\nThe outfit still isn\u2019t slinky and is \u201cnot necessarily too flattering in the derri\u00e8re area,\u201d acknowledges\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Ferguson,\n\n\n\n another former astronaut, who is in charge of developing Boeing\u2019s space taxis.\n\u201cIf you look at yourself in the mirror,\u201d he says, the question is, \u201cDo I look dumb?\u201d\nHe notes that flight suits are designed mainly for sitting near the controls, so it is hard to straighten the knees, and historically their stiff joints made them awkward on Earth. With Russian models, \u201cThere\u2019s a bit of \u201cThe Hunchback of Notre Dame\u201d look,\u201d says Mr. Ferguson.\nEarly space suits, like the svelte silver ones worn by Mercury astronauts of \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d never left a capsule. Once men started stepping into space, they needed much more protection. Attire grew thicker and bulkier, and the clothes need heating and cooling systems with built-in power sources. Astronauts also don what NASA calls a \u201cMaximum Absorption Garment\u201d\u2014adult diapers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMIT and Prof. Dava Newman are using a new approach to develop the BioSuit, a flexible space suit that is pressurized with electrically activated coils embedded in the fabric.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Professor Dava Newman, M Space garb is entering a new dimension, propelled by competition among private ventures seeking to carry NASA astronauts\u2014and eventually private citizens\u2014into orbit. New technologies mean it will finally be possible to leave the planet in style. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bernie Taupin Tells the Story Behind 1972\u2019s \u2018Rocket Man\u2019 (WSJ: Anatomy of a Song) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "132",
        "date": "2018-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-taupin-tells-the-story-behind-1972s-rocket-man-1522849896?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=69",
        "text": "Two new albums of songs by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Messrs. Taupin\n\n\n\n and John interpreted by country and pop artists will be released Friday: \u201cRestoration\u201d (UMe/Nashville), executive-produced by Mr. Taupin, and \u201cRevamp\u201d (Island). Edited from an interview.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElton John and Bernie Taupin were awarded gold records for four of their co-written albums in April 1973.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Putland/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBernie Taupin: In mid-1971, I was in England driving north to visit my parents in Lincolnshire. I had moved to the States a year earlier and hadn\u2019t been home in a while. After exiting the M-1 motorway, I had to take back roads to my parents\u2019 village. By then, the sun had set and it was pitch black. I remember the stars were out. I had recently reread Ray \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bradbury\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Illustrated Man,\u201d his 1951 collection of science-fiction short stories. My favorite was \u201cThe Rocket Man.\u201d The story is about an astronaut who spends three months at a time in his rocket away from his wife and son. He\u2019s torn. He wants to be home with his family but he also wants to be up among the stars. Eventually, his rocket falls into the sun. During my drive, I thought about the Bradbury story. I also thought about the 1970 song \u201cRocket Man\u201d that \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Rapp\n\n\n\n had written and recorded with his band, Pearls Before Swine. It was a literal retelling of the Bradbury story. What appealed to me most about the Bradbury story wasn\u2019t the character\u2019s yearning or his tragic outcome but the drudgery of being an astronaut. In \u201971, the future of space flight was exhilarating. America was putting astronauts on the moon. Yet 20 years earlier, Bradbury had envisioned future astronauts as little more than intergalactic truck drivers, burning themselves out alone far from home. Driving the back roads, I began writing a song in my head about the drudgery of being an astronaut. As I thought about how to start the song, the first verse came to me at once: \u201cShe packed my bags last night pre-flight / Zero hour 9 a.m. / And I\u2019m gonna be high as a kite by then.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWatch Elton John sing \u2018Rocket Man\u2019\n\n\n\nBut I didn\u2019t have a pad or pen in the car. I also couldn\u2019t dictate the words or call someone to take them down. That technology didn\u2019t exist yet. So I repeated the lyrics over and over. I was trying not to lose my train of thought as I raced to my parents\u2019 house. When I arrived, I rushed in without saying hello. I was hunting for a pen and paper. I had never written that way before. Usually I\u2019d come up with a line and build from there. In this case, words to an entire verse fell out of my mind and onto the page. The words had such a rhythmic cadence. Honestly, I wasn\u2019t sure if what I had written down was a verse or a chorus. But since I hadn\u2019t seen my parents in some time, I set the initial \u201cRocket Man\u201d lyrics aside. I can\u2019t recall exactly where I wrote the remaining verses or the chorus: \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s gonna be a long, long time / \u2018Till touchdown brings me round again to find / I\u2019m not the man they think I am at home / Oh no, no, no, I\u2019m a rocket man.\u201d I do know I finished the lyrics before I presented them to Elton in late \u201971. That\u2019s how we worked. My lyrics always came before Elton\u2019s music.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen I first came down to London in 1967 to look for work as a lyricist at 17, I wasn\u2019t proficient on anything. I still can\u2019t play piano. And I\u2019m not a very good guitar player. I met Elton through an ad in the New Musical Express newspaper. In the early days, before he recorded his first album in 1969, we lived at his mother\u2019s flat in the Northwood Hills section of London. There was an upright piano in the living room. I\u2019d sit on my bed in the back bedroom and write lyrics. Once I had something, I\u2019d walk down the hallway to the living room and say to Elton, \u201cHere, try this one.\u201d Then I\u2019d go back to my room to write the next song as he wrote the music to the one I had given him. It was like an assembly line, like factory work (laughs). Elton recorded his first four studio albums at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dick James\n\n\n\n and Trident studios in London. We couldn\u2019t afford to write together there because of the expense of studio time so we worked at our London flat. For \u201cHonky Ch\u00e2teau,\u201d his fifth studio album in \u201972, we lived and wrote at the Ch\u00e2teau d\u2019H\u00e9rouville outside Paris, where the album was recorded. As always, Elton and I worked there in separate spaces, with the words coming first. I probably completed the lyrics to \u201cRocket Man\u201d at the Ch\u00e2teau in late 1971, just before Elton began recording the album in January \u201972. He never questioned the meaning of any of my lyrics. He might say, \u201cI don\u2019t understand this and I don\u2019t know if I can work with it.\u201d But he never challenged my interpretation or the art of what I do. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElton John does a handstand on his piano, London 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Terry O'Neill/Ico Inspired by Ray Bradbury\u2019s tale about an astronaut, the song became an unlikely catch phrase in Trump\u2019s tweets. ",
        "author": "Marc Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bernie Taupin Tells the Story Behind 1972\u2019s \u2018Rocket Man\u2019 (WSJ: Anatomy of a Song) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "133",
        "date": "2018-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-taupin-tells-the-story-behind-1972s-rocket-man-1522849896?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=77",
        "text": "Two new albums of songs by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Messrs. Taupin\n\n\n\n and John interpreted by country and pop artists will be released Friday: \u201cRestoration\u201d (UMe/Nashville), executive-produced by Mr. Taupin, and \u201cRevamp\u201d (Island). Edited from an interview.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElton John and Bernie Taupin were awarded gold records for four of their co-written albums in April 1973.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Putland/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBernie Taupin: In mid-1971, I was in England driving north to visit my parents in Lincolnshire. I had moved to the States a year earlier and hadn\u2019t been home in a while. After exiting the M-1 motorway, I had to take back roads to my parents\u2019 village. By then, the sun had set and it was pitch black. I remember the stars were out. I had recently reread Ray \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bradbury\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Illustrated Man,\u201d his 1951 collection of science-fiction short stories. My favorite was \u201cThe Rocket Man.\u201d The story is about an astronaut who spends three months at a time in his rocket away from his wife and son. He\u2019s torn. He wants to be home with his family but he also wants to be up among the stars. Eventually, his rocket falls into the sun. During my drive, I thought about the Bradbury story. I also thought about the 1970 song \u201cRocket Man\u201d that \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Rapp\n\n\n\n had written and recorded with his band, Pearls Before Swine. It was a literal retelling of the Bradbury story. What appealed to me most about the Bradbury story wasn\u2019t the character\u2019s yearning or his tragic outcome but the drudgery of being an astronaut. In \u201971, the future of space flight was exhilarating. America was putting astronauts on the moon. Yet 20 years earlier, Bradbury had envisioned future astronauts as little more than intergalactic truck drivers, burning themselves out alone far from home. Driving the back roads, I began writing a song in my head about the drudgery of being an astronaut. As I thought about how to start the song, the first verse came to me at once: \u201cShe packed my bags last night pre-flight / Zero hour 9 a.m. / And I\u2019m gonna be high as a kite by then.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWatch Elton John sing \u2018Rocket Man\u2019\n\n\n\nBut I didn\u2019t have a pad or pen in the car. I also couldn\u2019t dictate the words or call someone to take them down. That technology didn\u2019t exist yet. So I repeated the lyrics over and over. I was trying not to lose my train of thought as I raced to my parents\u2019 house. When I arrived, I rushed in without saying hello. I was hunting for a pen and paper. I had never written that way before. Usually I\u2019d come up with a line and build from there. In this case, words to an entire verse fell out of my mind and onto the page. The words had such a rhythmic cadence. Honestly, I wasn\u2019t sure if what I had written down was a verse or a chorus. But since I hadn\u2019t seen my parents in some time, I set the initial \u201cRocket Man\u201d lyrics aside. I can\u2019t recall exactly where I wrote the remaining verses or the chorus: \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s gonna be a long, long time / \u2018Till touchdown brings me round again to find / I\u2019m not the man they think I am at home / Oh no, no, no, I\u2019m a rocket man.\u201d I do know I finished the lyrics before I presented them to Elton in late \u201971. That\u2019s how we worked. My lyrics always came before Elton\u2019s music.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen I first came down to London in 1967 to look for work as a lyricist at 17, I wasn\u2019t proficient on anything. I still can\u2019t play piano. And I\u2019m not a very good guitar player. I met Elton through an ad in the New Musical Express newspaper. In the early days, before he recorded his first album in 1969, we lived at his mother\u2019s flat in the Northwood Hills section of London. There was an upright piano in the living room. I\u2019d sit on my bed in the back bedroom and write lyrics. Once I had something, I\u2019d walk down the hallway to the living room and say to Elton, \u201cHere, try this one.\u201d Then I\u2019d go back to my room to write the next song as he wrote the music to the one I had given him. It was like an assembly line, like factory work (laughs). Elton recorded his first four studio albums at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dick James\n\n\n\n and Trident studios in London. We couldn\u2019t afford to write together there because of the expense of studio time so we worked at our London flat. For \u201cHonky Ch\u00e2teau,\u201d his fifth studio album in \u201972, we lived and wrote at the Ch\u00e2teau d\u2019H\u00e9rouville outside Paris, where the album was recorded. As always, Elton and I worked there in separate spaces, with the words coming first. I probably completed the lyrics to \u201cRocket Man\u201d at the Ch\u00e2teau in late 1971, just before Elton began recording the album in January \u201972. He never questioned the meaning of any of my lyrics. He might say, \u201cI don\u2019t understand this and I don\u2019t know if I can work with it.\u201d But he never challenged my interpretation or the art of what I do. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElton John does a handstand on his piano, London 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Terry O'Neill/Iconic Images/Gettty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn some respects, \u201cRocket Man\u201d is a song of fragments. It\u2019s a short song with four short verses and lots of air to give it an ambient feel of space. But it\u2019s not poetry. I\u2019d rather not be regarded as a poet. Unfortunately, I\u2019ve borne that cross for years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leonard Cohen\n\n\n\n is probably the only lyricist who can be called a poet. Some say \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Dylan,\n\n\n\n but I think the songs \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dylan\n\n\n\n has written that are regarded as poetry are more avant-garde, possibly in the \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Allen Ginsberg\n\n\n\n realm. I\u2019m a lyricist, and there\u2019s a big difference. My words are meant to be set to music. After I capture what\u2019s on my mind, I don\u2019t go back and over-think what I\u2019ve written. Everything I write is pretty immediate. If any of the words or lines on \u201cRocket Man\u201d were moved around, I\u2019m sure I did that before I gave Elton the lyric sheet. During the recording of \u201cRocket Man,\u201d I sat in the control booth and just observed. I felt very inadequate in the studio. I was a little intimidated by producer \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Dudgeon.\n\n\n\n He was so technically advanced. I was afraid if I said something I would be laughed at. When I heard Elton\u2019s recording of \u201cRocket Man\u201d played back for the first time on the monitor speakers, I was thrilled. It was an amazing feeling to hear my lyrics turned into something special. The music gave my words a living, beating heart. You never get that feeling solely from the words. That feeling comes from the magic of music and melody\u2014and arrangements and great musicians. When \u201cRocket Man\u201d came out in April \u201972, most people weren\u2019t aware of Pearls Before Swine\u2019s song. So critics pointed to \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Bowie\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d as an obvious influence. But Bowie\u2019s 1969 song had no relevance to me whatsoever. I wasn\u2019t listening to pop music on the radio then. I was listening to Chicago blues, hard-core country and mostly American-made music. Looking back, the only line on \u201cRocket Man\u201d that still bothers me a little is \u201cMars ain\u2019t the kind of place to raise your kids / In fact it\u2019s cold as hell.\u201d Mars\u2019s temperature is about as far from hell as you can get.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBernie Taupin and Elton John onstage in January at the Theater at Madison Square Garden for the tribute, \u2018Elton John: I\u2019m Still Standing\u2014a Grammy Salute\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kevin Mazur/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThere\u2019s also a good chance that Elton stretched out my opening chorus line. I believe I wrote, \u201cAnd I think it\u2019s gonna be a long time.\u201d Elton made it a \u201clong, long time\u201d so it would sing better. It\u2019s the same on \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bennie\n\n\n\n and the Jets.\u201d I didn\u2019t write \u201cBuh buh-buh Bennie.\u201d Those are Elton\u2019s tweaks that make our songs hits. Last September, I was home in L.A. when I saw on my phone that President Trump had used \u201cRocket Man\u201d to taunt North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un. The context bothered me. The thought that World War III could start over the use of my song title was disturbing. I also was uncomfortable that something of mine that was culturally iconic could be used in such a way. But what could I do? Sue him for cultural appropriation? As a songwriter, you\u2019re powerless to stop something like that. However, if the use of \u201cRocket Man\u201d results in peace, I will be very happy to take full credit for it. Inspired by Ray Bradbury\u2019s tale about an astronaut, the song became an unlikely catch phrase in Trump\u2019s tweets. ",
        "author": "Marc Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "A man stuck his hand in a jaguar pen at a Florida zoo, taunting the cat. He got clawed. (WP: Animals) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "134",
        "date": "2021-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/07/30/jacksonville-zoo-jaguar/",
        "text": "In his 21 years at the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department, Capt. Eric Prosswimmer said he had never responded to an animal incident taking place in the zoo \u2014 that is, until Wednesday, when a man was injured after reportedly sticking his arm inside the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens\u2019 jaguar enclosure. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightProsswimmer, a public information officer, said authorities had transported the unnamed individual \u2014 who did not sustain life-threatening injuries \u2014 to the hospital after receiving a call around 4:30 p.m.What led to this unusual event was a too-close encounter with Harry, the zoo\u2019s 12-year-old jaguar, the Florida Times-Union reported.The Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. However, Kelly Rouillard, the zoo\u2019s marketing director, told the local news outlets that the man had climbed over the waist-high safety barrier that separates visitors from the animals \u2014 then made \u201ca foolish decision\u201d to put his hand through the fence and taunt the wild cat.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt appears from witness accounts that he was looking to interact with the jaguar closer than he should have,\u201d Rouillard said to the Florida Times-Union. \u201cThat\u2019s not a wise or prudent decision. So when you do that, there are certainly potential consequences. It is fortunate that he did not sustain more injuries.\u201dAccording to WJXT News4Jax, witnesses said the incident turned gory when the jaguar clawed the man \u2014 leaving behind a trail of blood for employees to clean up while he had his armed bandaged.Rouillard told the Florida Times-Union that the zoo will not take any actions against the jaguar and would also not press charges against the man, who they do not believe was acting out of \u201cmalicious intent.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe jaguar \u201cwas acting as part of his normal behavior for a wild animal,\u201d she told the outlet. \u201cWe expect that type of behavior from wild animals and nothing will happen to him.\u201dAdvertisementHarry, who was born at Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in 2009, was involved in another violent event earlier this year \u2014 but not one involving a human.In February, the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens announced in a news release, Harry \u201ctragically killed\u201d 21-year-old Zenta \u2014 a female jaguar who was also the zoo\u2019s oldest at the time \u2014 in a holding complex after he was brought in to be examined.Despite these two bloody episodes, Roberto Salom, Mesoamerica and Costa Rica director for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, said they do not necessarily point toward the jaguar having aggressive tendencies.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe may have been under some type of stress that made him react that way,\u201d he said. \u201cIt seems like the person invaded the space of the animal, and it could be that the animal got surprised by this. He was just scared and reacted quickly to what he perceived as a threat.\u201dAdvertisementJaguars \u2014 the largest cat in the Americas \u2014 have the most powerful bite of all the wild cats in respect to their size and can hunt some 80 different species, Salom said. Yet, much like humans, they also display different personalities and moods.\u201cJust like people, they have their good days and their bad days,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe in this case it was a particularly bad day for this jaguar.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTheir behavior also varies depending on their habitat\u2019s conditions.In the wild, Salom said, jaguars are secretive, solitary and tend to escape from confrontations. However, when they are in captivity, and taking flight is not an option, their first instinct is to defend themselves.\u201cEven if it is a small animal, it can still react aggressively if they feel threatened,\u201d Salom said. \u201cPeople have to keep their distance whenever they are near wild animals, not make loud noises, not feed them because in some cases they are already stressed.\u201dAdvertisementSince 1990, incidents with captive felines have resulted in the deaths of over 130 big cats and 25 humans, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) \u2014 a global animal rights organization. Over 280 people have also suffered injuries.In the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens, however, this may have been the first from an animal ancient cultures looked up as a deity.\u201cThis would be the first time I\u2019ve heard of it,\u201d Prosswimmer said. \u201cIt could have been a lot worse.\u201d \u201cIt appears from witness accounts that he was looking to interact with the jaguar closer than he should have,\u201d the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens' marketing director told the Florida Times-Union. A man stuck his hand in a jaguar pen at a Florida zoo, taunting the cat. He got clawed.",
        "author": "Mar\u00eda Luisa Pa\u00fal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nearly 40,000 people applied to run a cat sanctuary on a Greek island  (WP: Animals) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "135",
        "date": "2018-09-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/09/25/nearly-people-applied-run-cat-sanctuary-greek-island/",
        "text": "It began in 2010, when a cat gave birth in Joan and Richard Bowell\u2019s garden on the Greek island of Syros. She had two kittens, and one was ill.The Bowells took them in and gave them names: Pepper was the mother, Tiny and Ninja the babies. The trio joined two cats the couple had brought to Syros when they moved from Denmark, Joan\u2019s native country, and the Bowells viewed it as a mere expansion of their two-person family. They now had not a small number of cats but not so many that they couldn\u2019t take the animals along when their plan to move to New York, where Richard worked with the United Nations, came to pass. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHowever, this was Greece, where cats posing against white buildings become the subjects of many postcards but not necessarily the objects of much affection. The Bowells kept finding felines bearing injuries and sicknesses and kittens, and soon the couple\u2019s acre of island idyll had become a cat sanctuary they called God\u2019s Little People. The name was not a statement about faith, they say, but about a philosophy \u2014 that cats are important as individuals, with a right to be free and to be cared for.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPeople think animals are things that you pick up and put down, and that\u2019s not how we thought about it,\u201d said Richard Bowell, 66, a writer and philosopher who is originally from London. \u201cSo we had to, at some point, make a commitment that we would never leave them or leave them in a lesser state than we kept them.\u201dAs the feline population roaming their property rose well above 60, the couple said, they realized space prevented the operation from growing much more. They wanted to finally make that move to New York, where Joan Bowell planned to establish another cat sanctuary outside the city. So on Aug. 5, she created a Facebook post soliciting applications for a modestly paid job managing God\u2019s Little People.The Bowells had posted a similar ad a few years back and gotten a couple handfuls of responses. This time, they hoped for 25, maybe 50.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin six weeks, they had nearly 40,000.Each day in August, Joan Bowell received 1,000 to 1,600 emails. She kept updating the Facebook post, emphasizing that the job was indeed real and clarifying that the tiny house provided to the manager would not accommodate families or pets brought from home and that it is a job that entails scooping poop, cleaning vomit and making \u201cheartbreaking\u201d decisions about gravely wounded or sick cats.Even so, the applications kept coming, and they came from people in more than 90 nations. Some were letters from refugees who wanted to send the pay to their families back home, and some were from women seeking to flee abusive relationships, Joan Bowell said. Several were from people who\u2019d tried to run their own cat rescues, she said.Story continues below advertisementThe Bowells enlisted a half-dozen friends to help review and sort the flood of queries, which they say astonished them. Although the position is in paradise and involves many cats, Joan Bowell said it is not exactly the \u201cdream job\u201d so many headlines about their story declared. There is lots of feeding, medicating and taking cats to the vet to be neutered or spayed, as well as posting cat photos to Facebook, and cobbling together donations. There\u2019s not much time for sleep, she said.Advertisement\u201cIt has been pretty much round-the-clock for me,\u201d said Joan Bowell, 52, an artist. \u201cThe biggest challenge is to give each of them the attention they need.\u201dAnd then there are the rescues. Richard Bowell said his wife goes to extreme lengths to save cats, recounting a time she heard a kitten stuck inside a water tank. The tank could not be opened, so the cat would have to come out a small pipe it had entered. Joan Bowell sat at the tank encouraging the cat for 12 hours, he said, and eventually she succeeded by broadcasting into the pipe a YouTube video of a mother cat calling her babies.Story continues below advertisementNot long after they started the rescue, a veterinarian on the island asked why they would bury an injured cat that was being euthanized, Richard Bowell said.\u201cAnd we said to him, \u2018Well, it\u2019s to remind ourselves of our humanity,'\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you think you can just discard things when you\u2019re finished with them, then you do it with everything.\u201dThe story of the job ad went viral, and the Bowells are in talks with filmmakers about a movie. Richard Bowell said he believes the enormous response isn\u2019t about one news report starting a spiral of coverage, or even about the Internet\u2019s infatuation with cats. He says it, too, is about humanity.Advertisement\u201cThis is bigger than just a job on a Greek island,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of wish for people to return to some level of humanity at a time when things are degenerating into such inhumanity . . . people want to see a future that can be worked toward.\u201dStory continues below advertisementEarlier this month, the Bowells had whittled the towers of applications to a handful of finalists. Among those was 62-year-old Californian Jeffyne Telson, whose husband sent her the link to the job ad in August.\u201cHe said, \u2018Jeffyne, this job has you written all over it. Are you going to wait until you\u2019re too old to try to access your dream?\u2019\u201d Telson recalled.For 21 years, Telson has run RESQCATS in Santa Barbara, which takes only strays \u2014 the cats found roaming alleys, the kittens located behind the shed. The cats like those on Greek islands, which Telson has visited three times.Advertisement\u201cI didn\u2019t do all the tourist stuff on the Greek islands. I separated myself from the tourists and walked up and down the streets looking for the kitties,\u201d Telson said. \u201cI thought, \u2018There\u2019s just so much to be done here.\u2019\u201dStory continues below advertisementSo Telson sent a letter to the Bowells, explaining that she\u2019d placed 3,000 cats and kittens in homes over the decades. Those too sick or antisocial to be adopted stay at her sanctuary; currently, it has 15 residents, including four feline leukemia patients in their own isolated area. \u201cI believe that every life is precious and worth saving,\u201d Telson wrote in her application.Her submission stood out immediately, Richard Bowell said. The Bowells traveled to Santa Barbara to meet Telson in mid-September, and he said that \u201cthere was an instant connection between Joan and Jeffyne \u2014 and the other way around.\u201d Telson, like Joan Bowell, was an artist. She, too, had never had children.\u201cIt was just a match made in heaven,\u201d Telson said.An offer, needless to say, was made and accepted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTelson said she will leave her rescue in the care of volunteers this winter, when it shuts down for the season, and spend several months in Syros. Other finalists will probably pick up the management after that, while the Bowells focus on their U.S. plans and renovating a large manor that has been offered to them in Syros. It would allow the sanctuary to expand and serve as \u201ca center for volunteers and an international center to show people how to work with cats,\u201d Richard Bowell said.Telson, who spends much of her time as president of a busy organization on administrative tasks, said she\u2019s giddy.\u201cThis will be a wonderful opportunity to spend with just cats,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd, I think, a time of reflection and gratefulness.\u201dRead more: Meet Max, the cat who lost the library but won the Internet Missing: Four cats. Reward: $100,000 How sheep with cameras got some tiny islands onto Google Street ViewLong before they conquered the Internet, cats took over the world A cat rescuer from California has been given a job that hopefuls in 90 countries sought. Nearly 40,000 people applied to run a cat sanctuary on a Greek island ",
        "author": "Karin Brulliard"
    },
    {
        "title": "People called police on this black birdwatcher so many times that he posted custom signs to explain his hobby  (WP: Animals) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "136",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/06/05/people-called-police-this-black-birdwatcher-so-many-times-that-he-posted-custom-signs-explain-his-hobby/",
        "text": "Late last month, a video of a white woman calling police to report what she described as \u201can African American man threatening my life\u201d in Manhattan\u2019s Central Park went viral. The man\u2019s alleged crime? Christian Cooper, who was at the park to watch birds, asked the woman to leash her dog, in accordance with the law. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut if this example of a white person unjustly calling police on a black person shocked millions of people who viewed it, it didn\u2019t shock Cooper. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s an African American person in America who hasn\u2019t experienced something like this at some point,\u201d Cooper, a 57-year-old science editor, told The Washington Post after the incident.And it didn\u2019t shock other black birders, scientists and naturalists. This week \u2014 as protests swelled nationwide over the deadly arrest of George Floyd and police violence \u2014 hundreds of them have taken to Twitter to describe their own experiences in the outdoors. They\u2019re calling the event #BlackBirdersWeek.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor far too long, black people in the United States have been shown that outdoor exploration activities are not for us,\u201d Corina Newsome, a co-organizer and researcher who studies seaside sparrows at Georgia Southern University, said in a video announcing the event. \u201cWell, we\u2019ve decided to change that narrative.\u201dMAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!!We at @BlackAFinSTEM are starting the inagural #BlackBirdersWeek to celebrate Black Birders and nature explorers, beginning 5/31!!!!!Follow the whole group of us here: https://t.co/I23zoT3fFh Take a look at the thread for the schedule of events! pic.twitter.com/yDsAtwR8te\u2014 Corina Newsome (@hood_naturalist) May 29, 2020\n\nWhile the effort, which has included five days of virtual events, has created a space for black people to express their love for the outdoors, it\u2019s also provided a platform for sharing painful stories. Jason Ward, host of the show \u201cBirds of North America,\u201d tweeted that he has worried his black binoculars might be confused for a gun. Nature photographers Ricky Jones and Dudley Edmondson commiserated, saying that when they\u2019re outdoors, white people actively try to avoid them.A number of striking tweets have come from Walter Kitundu, a 46-year-old artist who has a remarkable resume: recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, Carnegie Hall performer, inventor of futuristic instruments called Phonoharps \u2014 and accomplished birder. And as he shared via #BlackBirdersWeek, it\u2019s that last activity that has brought him into conflict with his community and law enforcement on several occasions. Kitundu, who lives in the Chicago area, spoke with The Washington Post about some of these experiences.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q: Who or what sparked your interest in birding?A: I think that credit goes to my grandmother for giving me a book on birds when I was about 6 or 7 years old. \u2026 It was always of interest to me as a kid. It traveled with me wherever I went, I was always aware of where it was, but it wasn\u2019t necessarily a passion.Much later on in life, I had a residency in Iceland, and I borrowed a friend\u2019s camera to document that trip. And when I returned to San Francisco, I was an artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts. I would take my breaks outside by the lagoon. And I still had that camera, so I began to photograph the gulls on the water to see if I could freeze their wings to see those shapes.Story continues below advertisementAt that exact moment, a friend of mine gave me a book on birds of Northern California. And this long-dormant interest just sort of sprang back to life, and I've been photographing birds and spending time in the wild documenting their lives and behavior ever since.A Redtail landed right next to me, 4 ft away, unafraid, and ate a caterpillar. I was hooked. Documented it\u2019s transition to adulthood. Watched it avoid hazards while avoiding my own. The police were called on me so many times I made this sign. #BlackBirdersWeek #BirdingWhileBlack pic.twitter.com/xYe7UyjlOU\u2014 Kitundu (@birdturntable) June 3, 2020\n\nQ: In 2005, you spent a lot of time following a single hawk, which you named Patch, and you tweeted that your recurring presence resulted in more than a few run-ins with the police. So many, you eventually hung up mock public service announcements announcing your presence to the communities you bird in. Can you tell me your thought process and making it?AdvertisementA: I would actually call it a PSA instead of a mock-PSA, because it was necessary. I needed people to know, in terms of trying to secure my safety as I photographed the birds. I think as a black person, as a person of color in this country, every time you walk out the door, there\u2019s always calculus running in the background about how to present, how to keep yourself safe. It\u2019s a muscle that\u2019s well exercised by people of color in this country. I can\u2019t really think of anything more wholesome than standing under a tree and watching a hummingbird build her nest, but I think if our activities fall outside of the framework of possibility that\u2019s established for us by the white imagination, then we\u2019re at risk.Story continues below advertisementI didn't have dog. I didn't have a partner. I didn't have a stroller. I didn't really fit into the generalized idea of who the park was for. And I was black in an affluent neighborhood. And I was being still for long periods of time. I feel like the white people in the park who called the police were owners of limited imaginations that were stunted by racism. Because I think if I had been a white person in the park with my camera, I would have been given credit that I knew something that they didn't or I must have had a good reason for being there.I got pulled over by the police from a hummingbird bush once. I got stopped by police on two other occasions walking through the park. And then one person had the audacity to call the police on me within earshot. I could hear him describing me to the police, and I turned around and I said to him, \u201cCan I help you?\u201d And he said, \u201cThe police will take care of you.\u201d So after that incident, that's when I went home and made that sign.AdvertisementQ: Did you notice an effect?Story continues below advertisementA: Interestingly enough, what happened was I became the bird guy \u2014 kind of a neighborhood persona. And so I\u2019d get, like, a free coffee at the coffee shop because people recognized me as a bird guy. But another interesting phenomenon happened where people who would never approach me and talk to me before would walk up to me and talk to me about the weather, or just make any sort of slight conversation. And then when they walked away, you could kind of feel them thinking like, \u2018That poster was not about me.\u2019 Like they\u2019d done their duty.It felt much better in the park for a couple of months. And then, after the hawk moved around during migration season and returned the following spring, I returned to the park and the same attitudes and tensions were present.I would never try to insinuate that people of color should have to announce themselves or justify their presence in any way. Like I said, this is one of the most wholesome things you can do \u2014 to step outside and look at nature and to be a part of it and walk through it. And to have that be suspect, I think it's just like I said, it's a failure of imagination. And it's basically racism.Preventative measures. #birdingwhileblack means taking precautions. In remote areas, and in the city, pulling over to document a bird raises eyebrows, and raises suspicions if you\u2019re black. Thankfully my car could vouch for me when the disbelievers approached. #blackbirdersweek pic.twitter.com/ACwLycAEeh\u2014 Kitundu (@birdturntable) June 3, 2020\n\nQ: You\u2019ve been photographing birds for years. You\u2019ve created an e-book with those pictures, as well as art installations that are avian-focused. What is it about birds or the experience of observing them that drives you?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: It gives me peace to be out in nature, to be observing, and I\u2019m a student of it. Some birders will try to see as many birds as possible. My goal or my practice is generally to spend a lot of time with the same bird to learn about its behavior. And so as a result, I\u2019ve learned a lot from them. If you can move into an environment and watch one bird, it will show you everything else significant going on in the environment over a period of time. Because like I always say, birds are the best birdwatchers. I mean, they have to be because their survival depends on it. So if you pay attention to them carefully, they teach you about the environment, about the landscape and you can really deepen your insights into it.Q: What has Black Birders Week meant to you? A: Birdwatching and bird photography are often very solitary activities. Even when you\u2019re in a group, you know, as a person of color, they can still be solitary activities. One of the highlights of Black Birders Week is that many of us have become visible in a way that wasn\u2019t possible before. I feel a greatly expanded sense of community. And I know that a lot of these folks have very similar stories to tell. And so there\u2019s a kind of shared understanding that now exists through hundreds of people, whereas before, it really did feel like you were doing the sort of work in isolation. \u2026 I\u2019m really grateful to the organizers for putting this together, because people had to step up and act after the incident in Central Park, and they recognized that this was necessary.Birds on final approach. Brown Pelican, Osprey, Paradise Flycatcher, Red-tailed Hawk. Birding is often a solitary activity and bird photography even more so. Glad to share these with the wider community. #BlackBirdersWeek pic.twitter.com/RHNzgTdjTJ\u2014 Kitundu (@birdturntable) June 3, 2020\n\nQ: What would you like to say to the next generation of black birders about where we go from here? Or is it the white birders, joggers and dog-walkers we should be addressing instead? AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: [White people] have a lot of work to do, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair for them to draw energy or resources from people of color at this point. There\u2019s enough that\u2019s been written. There\u2019s enough for them to look up.A lot of organizations and institutions talk about outreach and trying to figure out how to increase their numbers and get more people [of color] interested. It really isn't about that. It\u2019s about addressing the nature of those organizations, not bringing people into a space that is still riddled with the same issues and toxicity. You have to change the space. Because otherwise you're inviting people to contend with all of those issues.And if you think about all the people that were pushed out of academia or never entered these fields, because of these pressures. \u2026 It is a great loss. A loss to the fields. A loss to those institutions and to the world. We won\u2019t know the knowledge and perspectives that could have shaped the future of those institutions and the people who might now be in positions of leadership if not for the legacy and tenacity of racism in this country. I\u2019m hopeful that if the awakenings people have been claiming to have, due to both Black Birders Week and the larger cultural moment, are sustained, and acted upon, we could see meaningful cultural and structural change. Artist Walter Kitundu is one of hundreds of people participating in the inaugural \"Black Birders Week\" to highlight the racism black people face in the outdoors. People called police on this black birdwatcher so many times that he posted custom signs to explain his hobby ",
        "author": "Jason Bittel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Chance to Own a Piece of the Moon (WSJ: Art & Auctions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "137",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-chance-to-own-a-piece-of-the-moon-1543158060?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=17",
        "text": "\u201cIt was the first sample returned by a robotic spacecraft,\u201d said Purdue University history professor Michael G. Smith, who studies the Soviet space effort. \u201cThat is one of a series of impressive technical firsts for the Soviet space program.\u201d\nThe moon specks are the only official lunar samples legally in private hands, according to Cassandra Hatton, vice president and senior specialist for science and technology at Sotheby\u2019s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThree moon rocks, in detail at right, are in a case that was presented to the widow of Sergei Korolev, an architect of the Soviet space program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nBroadly speaking, material brought back from the moon belongs to the U.S. or Russian governments, which funded the space missions that brought it all to Earth. Soviet-era unmanned missions returned about 10 ounces of moon soil. Apollo astronauts brought back 842 pounds of rocks, soil and dust.\n\nWith so much space history to archive, though, NASA has struggled with fraud, theft, neglect and bureaucratic bumbling, according to an audit in October by the agency\u2019s inspector general. \u201cA significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the Agency\u2019s lack of adequate procedures,\u201d the auditors said.\nOne NASA employee, for instance, took home the prototype of the lunar \u201cbuggy\u201d that Apollo astronauts drove around the moon in the early 1970s. He parked it in his yard until a passing agency engineer noticed it. After waiting for months for NASA to file the paperwork to reclaim it, he sold it to a scrap dealer who, in turn, sold it to a private collector. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Sotheby\u2019s auction will include a complete space suit, made between 1963 and 1965, for Nasa\u2019s Gemini program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nMore recently, space agency workers inadvertently junked a bag used by Apollo 11 astronauts to collect rocks during the first moon landing. A woman purchased it at a surplus property sale and, after a legal dispute with NASA, sold it through Sotheby\u2019s for $1.8 million in 2016. Now, ownership of a vial said to contain moon dust, allegedly given by Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong to a neighbor, is embroiled in litigation.\nThe moon rocks coming up for sale at Sotheby\u2019s in New York, however, were an official gift from the Soviet government to the widow of Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of their space program. \nKorolev\u2019s identity was a government secret for decades. He pioneered space exploration from the launch of Sputnik\u2014the first satellite to orbit Earth\u2014to the missions that carried the first men and women into space. He guided development of the Russian rocket still used today to ferry U.S. astronauts to the space station.\n\u201cKorolev was an incredible presence in the Soviet space program,\u201d said Asif Siddiqi, a specialist in Russian history at Fordham University in New York. \u201cHe was its symbolic guiding light, but also a manager and engineer. When he died in 1966, it was a terrible blow from which they never really recovered.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA model or an unused copy of the Luna-16 robot craft on exhibit in Moscow in late 1970.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nFour years after Korolev died, Soviet space engineers launched the first of three successful lunar-sample return missions. On the moon, the robot craft, called Luna-16, extracted 3.5 ounces of lunar soil and brought it home. The Soviet government gave three grains of it weighing about 0.2 grams to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva in an elaborate display case, to recognize her husband\u2019s role in the space program.\nHolding a clear legal title, she sold the lunar material in its original case at Sotheby\u2019s in 1993 to an American collector for $442,500. That same collector, who wants to remain anonymous, has now consigned it for sale. Sotheby\u2019s estimates it will fetch between $700,000 and $1 million. \n\u201cIt remains to this day the only one we can sell without problems,\u201d said Ms. Hatton of Sotheby\u2019s. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to have a degree in astrophysics or be an engineer to be excited.\u201d\nAmong the other artifacts to be auctioned is the voice recorder from the first mission to carry a woman, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She orbited Earth in 1963, about 20 years before the first U.S. woman astronaut, Sally Ride, flew in space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSotheby\u2019s will auction the voice recorder from the June 1963 mission piloted by Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nOther auctions are happening amid the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions, which commenced in December 1968 with the launch of Apollo 8, the first human voyage around the moon. A few weeks ago, the family of Neil Armstrong began selling hundreds of his mementos online through Heritage Auctions. \nItems for sale include flags that Armstrong brought on the Apollo 1 Three tiny moon rocks go up for auction as the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions stirs nostalgia for the Cold War space race. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Chance to Own a Piece of the Moon (WSJ: Art & Auctions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "138",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-chance-to-own-a-piece-of-the-moon-1543158060?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=61",
        "text": "\u201cIt was the first sample returned by a robotic spacecraft,\u201d said Purdue University history professor Michael G. Smith, who studies the Soviet space effort. \u201cThat is one of a series of impressive technical firsts for the Soviet space program.\u201d\nThe moon specks are the only official lunar samples legally in private hands, according to Cassandra Hatton, vice president and senior specialist for science and technology at Sotheby\u2019s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThree moon rocks, in detail at right, are in a case that was presented to the widow of Sergei Korolev, an architect of the Soviet space program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nBroadly speaking, material brought back from the moon belongs to the U.S. or Russian governments, which funded the space missions that brought it all to Earth. Soviet-era unmanned missions returned about 10 ounces of moon soil. Apollo astronauts brought back 842 pounds of rocks, soil and dust.\n\nWith so much space history to archive, though, NASA has struggled with fraud, theft, neglect and bureaucratic bumbling, according to an audit in October by the agency\u2019s inspector general. \u201cA significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the Agency\u2019s lack of adequate procedures,\u201d the auditors said.\nOne NASA employee, for instance, took home the prototype of the lunar \u201cbuggy\u201d that Apollo astronauts drove around the moon in the early 1970s. He parked it in his yard until a passing agency engineer noticed it. After waiting for months for NASA to file the paperwork to reclaim it, he sold it to a scrap dealer who, in turn, sold it to a private collector. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Sotheby\u2019s auction will include a complete space suit, made between 1963 and 1965, for Nasa\u2019s Gemini program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nMore recently, space agency workers inadvertently junked a bag used by Apollo 11 astronauts to collect rocks during the first moon landing. A woman purchased it at a surplus property sale and, after a legal dispute with NASA, sold it through Sotheby\u2019s for $1.8 million in 2016. Now, ownership of a vial said to contain moon dust, allegedly given by Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong to a neighbor, is embroiled in litigation.\nThe moon rocks coming up for sale at Sotheby\u2019s in New York, however, were an official gift from the Soviet government to the widow of Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of their space program. \nKorolev\u2019s identity was a government secret for decades. He pioneered space exploration from the launch of Sputnik\u2014the first satellite to orbit Earth\u2014to the missions that carried the first men and women into space. He guided development of the Russian rocket still used today to ferry U.S. astronauts to the space station.\n\u201cKorolev was an incredible presence in the Soviet space program,\u201d said Asif Siddiqi, a specialist in Russian history at Fordham University in New York. \u201cHe was its symbolic guiding light, but also a manager and engineer. When he died in 1966, it was a terrible blow from which they never really recovered.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA model or an unused copy of the Luna-16 robot craft on exhibit in Moscow in late 1970.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nFour years after Korolev died, Soviet space engineers launched the first of three successful lunar-sample return missions. On the moon, the robot craft, called Luna-16, extracted 3.5 ounces of lunar soil and brought it home. The Soviet government gave three grains of it weighing about 0.2 grams to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva in an elaborate display case, to recognize her husband\u2019s role in the space program.\nHolding a clear legal title, she sold the lunar material in its original case at Sotheby\u2019s in 1993 to an American collector for $442,500. That same collector, who wants to remain anonymous, has now consigned it for sale. Sotheby\u2019s estimates it will fetch between $700,000 and $1 million. \n\u201cIt remains to this day the only one we can sell without problems,\u201d said Ms. Hatton of Sotheby\u2019s. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to have a degree in astrophysics or be an engineer to be excited.\u201d\nAmong the other artifacts to be auctioned is the voice recorder from the first mission to carry a woman, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She orbited Earth in 1963, about 20 years before the first U.S. woman astronaut, Sally Ride, flew in space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSotheby\u2019s will auction the voice recorder from the June 1963 mission piloted by Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nOther auctions are happening amid the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions, which commenced in December 1968 with the launch of Apollo 8, the first human voyage around the moon. A few weeks ago, the family of Neil Armstrong began selling hundreds of his mementos online through Heritage Auctions. \nItems for sale include flags that Armstrong brought on the Apollo 1 Three tiny moon rocks go up for auction as the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions stirs nostalgia for the Cold War space race. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Chance to Own a Piece of the Moon (WSJ: Art & Auctions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "139",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-chance-to-own-a-piece-of-the-moon-1543158060?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=67",
        "text": "\u201cIt was the first sample returned by a robotic spacecraft,\u201d said Purdue University history professor Michael G. Smith, who studies the Soviet space effort. \u201cThat is one of a series of impressive technical firsts for the Soviet space program.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe moon specks are the only official lunar samples legally in private hands, according to Cassandra Hatton, vice president and senior specialist for science and technology at Sotheby\u2019s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThree moon rocks, in detail at right, are in a case that was presented to the widow of Sergei Korolev, an architect of the Soviet space program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nBroadly speaking, material brought back from the moon belongs to the U.S. or Russian governments, which funded the space missions that brought it all to Earth. Soviet-era unmanned missions returned about 10 ounces of moon soil. Apollo astronauts brought back 842 pounds of rocks, soil and dust.\n\nWith so much space history to archive, though, NASA has struggled with fraud, theft, neglect and bureaucratic bumbling, according to an audit in October by the agency\u2019s inspector general. \u201cA significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the Agency\u2019s lack of adequate procedures,\u201d the auditors said.\nOne NASA employee, for instance, took home the prototype of the lunar \u201cbuggy\u201d that Apollo astronauts drove around the moon in the early 1970s. He parked it in his yard until a passing agency engineer noticed it. After waiting for months for NASA to file the paperwork to reclaim it, he sold it to a scrap dealer who, in turn, sold it to a private collector. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Sotheby\u2019s auction will include a complete space suit, made between 1963 and 1965, for Nasa\u2019s Gemini program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nMore recently, space agency workers inadvertently junked a bag used by Apollo 11 astronauts to collect rocks during the first moon landing. A woman purchased it at a surplus property sale and, after a legal dispute with NASA, sold it through Sotheby\u2019s for $1.8 million in 2016. Now, ownership of a vial said to contain moon dust, allegedly given by Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong to a neighbor, is embroiled in litigation.\nThe moon rocks coming up for sale at Sotheby\u2019s in New York, however, were an official gift from the Soviet government to the widow of Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of their space program. \nKorolev\u2019s identity was a government secret for decades. He pioneered space exploration from the launch of Sputnik\u2014the first satellite to orbit Earth\u2014to the missions that carried the first men and women into space. He guided development of the Russian rocket still used today to ferry U.S. astronauts to the space station.\n\u201cKorolev was an incredible presence in the Soviet space program,\u201d said Asif Siddiqi, a specialist in Russian history at Fordham University in New York. \u201cHe was its symbolic guiding light, but also a manager and engineer. When he died in 1966, it was a terrible blow from which they never really recovered.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA model or an unused copy of the Luna-16 robot craft on exhibit in Moscow in late 1970.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nFour years after Korolev died, Soviet space engineers launched the first of three successful lunar-sample return missions. On the moon, the robot craft, called Luna-16, extracted 3.5 ounces of lunar soil and brought it home. The Soviet government gave three grains of it weighing about 0.2 grams to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva in an elaborate display case, to recognize her husband\u2019s role in the space program.\nHolding a clear legal title, she sold the lunar material in its original case at Sotheby\u2019s in 1993 to an American collector for $442,500. That same collector, who wants to remain anonymous, has now consigned it for sale. Sotheby\u2019s estimates it will fetch between $700,000 and $1 million. \n\u201cIt remains to this day the only one we can sell without problems,\u201d said Ms. Hatton of Sotheby\u2019s. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to have a degree in astrophysics or be an engineer to be excited.\u201d\nAmong the other artifacts to be auctioned is the voice recorder from the first mission to carry a woman, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She orbited Earth in 1963, about 20 years before the first U.S. woman astronaut, Sally Ride, flew in space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSotheby\u2019s will auction the voice recorder from the June 1963 mission piloted by Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nOther auctions are happening amid the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions, which commenced in December 1968 with the launch of Apollo 8, the first human voyage around the moon. A few weeks ago, the family of Neil Armstrong began selling hundreds of his mementos online through Heritage Auctions. \nItems for sale include flags that Armstrong brought on the Apollo 11 moon flight, handwritten notes and his NASA flight suit. The first group of artifacts brought in more than $5.2 million, the auction house said. Two more auctions are scheduled for next year.\n\u201cThere is a particular nostalgia for the space race and the space exploration of the 1960s,\u201d said Dr. Siddiqi of Fordham. \u201cIt was a really cool and exciting time when the future in space seemed boundless.\u201d\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tAn image of the Luna-16 robot craft on exhibit in Moscow in late 1970 in this story depicted either a model of the craft or a second, unused one. A caption in an earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was the Luna-16 robot craft that collected moon rocks. (Dec. 10, 2018.)\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Three tiny moon rocks go up for auction as the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions stirs nostalgia for the Cold War space race. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Chance to Own a Piece of the Moon (WSJ: Art & Auctions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "140",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-chance-to-own-a-piece-of-the-moon-1543158060?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=82",
        "text": "\u201cIt was the first sample returned by a robotic spacecraft,\u201d said Purdue University history professor Michael G. Smith, who studies the Soviet space effort. \u201cThat is one of a series of impressive technical firsts for the Soviet space program.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe moon specks are the only official lunar samples legally in private hands, according to Cassandra Hatton, vice president and senior specialist for science and technology at Sotheby\u2019s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThree moon rocks, in detail at right, are in a case that was presented to the widow of Sergei Korolev, an architect of the Soviet space program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nBroadly speaking, material brought back from the moon belongs to the U.S. or Russian governments, which funded the space missions that brought it all to Earth. Soviet-era unmanned missions returned about 10 ounces of moon soil. Apollo astronauts brought back 842 pounds of rocks, soil and dust.\n\nWith so much space history to archive, though, NASA has struggled with fraud, theft, neglect and bureaucratic bumbling, according to an audit in October by the agency\u2019s inspector general. \u201cA significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the Agency\u2019s lack of adequate procedures,\u201d the auditors said.\nOne NASA employee, for instance, took home the prototype of the lunar \u201cbuggy\u201d that Apollo astronauts drove around the moon in the early 1970s. He parked it in his yard until a passing agency engineer noticed it. After waiting for months for NASA to file the paperwork to reclaim it, he sold it to a scrap dealer who, in turn, sold it to a private collector. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Sotheby\u2019s auction will include a complete space suit, made between 1963 and 1965, for Nasa\u2019s Gemini program.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nMore recently, space agency workers inadvertently junked a bag used by Apollo 11 astronauts to collect rocks during the first moon landing. A woman purchased it at a surplus property sale and, after a legal dispute with NASA, sold it through Sotheby\u2019s for $1.8 million in 2016. Now, ownership of a vial said to contain moon dust, allegedly given by Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong to a neighbor, is embroiled in litigation.\nThe moon rocks coming up for sale at Sotheby\u2019s in New York, however, were an official gift from the Soviet government to the widow of Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of their space program. \nKorolev\u2019s identity was a government secret for decades. He pioneered space exploration from the launch of Sputnik\u2014the first satellite to orbit Earth\u2014to the missions that carried the first men and women into space. He guided development of the Russian rocket still used today to ferry U.S. astronauts to the space station.\n\u201cKorolev was an incredible presence in the Soviet space program,\u201d said Asif Siddiqi, a specialist in Russian history at Fordham University in New York. \u201cHe was its symbolic guiding light, but also a manager and engineer. When he died in 1966, it was a terrible blow from which they never really recovered.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA model or an unused copy of the Luna-16 robot craft on exhibit in Moscow in late 1970.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nFour years after Korolev died, Soviet space engineers launched the first of three successful lunar-sample return missions. On the moon, the robot craft, called Luna-16, extracted 3.5 ounces of lunar soil and brought it home. The Soviet government gave three grains of it weighing about 0.2 grams to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva in an elaborate display case, to recognize her husband\u2019s role in the space program.\nHolding a clear legal title, she sold the lunar material in its original case at Sotheby\u2019s in 1993 to an American collector for $442,500. That same collector, who wants to remain anonymous, has now consigned it for sale. Sotheby\u2019s estimates it will fetch between $700,000 and $1 million. \n\u201cIt remains to this day the only one we can sell without problems,\u201d said Ms. Hatton of Sotheby\u2019s. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to have a degree in astrophysics or be an engineer to be excited.\u201d\nAmong the other artifacts to be auctioned is the voice recorder from the first mission to carry a woman, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She orbited Earth in 1963, about 20 years before the first U.S. woman astronaut, Sally Ride, flew in space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSotheby\u2019s will auction the voice recorder from the June 1963 mission piloted by Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sotheby\u2019s\n \n\n\n\nOther auctions are happening amid the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions, which commenced in December 1968 with the launch of Apollo 8, the first human voyage around the moon. A few weeks ago, the family of Neil Armstrong began selling hundreds of his mementos online through Heritage Auctions. \nItems for sale include flags that Armstrong brought on the Apol Three tiny moon rocks go up for auction as the 50th anniversary of NASA\u2019s lunar missions stirs nostalgia for the Cold War space race. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Academy Museum\u2019s Dramatic Opening Act (WSJ: Art & Design) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "141",
        "date": "2021-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-academy-museums-dramatic-opening-act-11629894725?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=17",
        "text": "Piano, Italy\u2019s most celebrated living architect.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeremy Liebman/Trunk Archive\n \n\n\n\nThe museum opening, years behind schedule, was postponed yet again last year when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Now exhibits are weeks away from being installed across the 300,000-square-foot museum. The historic May Company building, renamed the Saban Building in 2017 after a $50 million gift from entertainment mogul Haim Saban and his wife, Cheryl, is filled with unpacked boxes. Near the entrance, off the Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby, named for the first Black man to win an Academy Award, in 1964, exposed wires inside the Spielberg Family Gallery await double-sided monitors that will project a 10-minute montage on the history of cinema, featuring cuts from 700 films. Bruce, a 1,200-pound model from the original mold of the great white shark from Steven Spielberg\u2019s Jaws, dangles from the ceiling. Soon objects from Spike Lee\u2019s Brooklyn studio will be installed for a yearlong exhibition dedicated to the director\u2019s work. Elsewhere glass cases will be filled with Star Wars droids, iconic Oscars will be displayed in gold-framed alcoves, the Dude\u2019s bathrobe from The Big Lebowski and Claudette Colbert\u2019s Cleopatra dress will be draped in costume galleries, Dorothy\u2019s original ruby slippers arranged on a backdrop of the Yellow Brick Road.\nThe Academy\u2019s pursuit of a movie museum, after nearly a century of false starts, seemed hopelessly stalled as recently as 2010. The following year, after another failed bid to build a museum from scratch, the Academy\u2019s directors were offered the May Company building as a relatively low-cost renovation. Hudson, new on the job at the time, reached out to Piano since he\u2019d designed the most recent additions to the LACMA campus, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion, located next door and completed a year earlier.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 288-seat Ted Mann Theater in the Saban Building.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI guess at that time we had a more modest idea of this museum. We could hardly convince Renzo to do a renovation project, but maybe he would because he had done these other projects,\u201d says Hudson. \u201cWe went to Genoa. We had a little wooing. It seemed like he was entranced by the idea. He said, \u2018It\u2019s a very photogenic project\u2019 and then, in June, very quickly he unveiled [his] model.\n\n\n\u201cAnd I had a heart attack,\u201d she continues, laughing out loud. \u201cI\u2019m not a weak-stomach person, but I remember feeling sick, because I thought, This dome, this building, this other theater\u2014this isn\u2019t exactly the renovation we talked about.\u201d\n\u201cWe couldn\u2019t go backwards,\u201d says Kramer.\n\u201cYou knew it instantly, didn\u2019t you?\u201d says Hudson. \u201cYou knew both it had to be this and, Oh, my God, what was the board going to say?\u201d\nRenzo Piano\u2014the 83-year-old architect behind Osaka\u2019s Kansai International Airport, the London skyscraper the Shard and Rome\u2019s Parco della Musica concert hall complex, among other monumental projects\u2014doesn\u2019t do modest proposals. His ambitious plans for the Academy\u2019s film museum, a longtime pipe dream, may have been the key to finally getting the project done.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u201cThis wasn\u2019t about anyone\u2019s legacy. It was about the legacy of the business that we\u2019ve created, and we\u2019ve worked in, and has been so good to us\u2014a way to give back.\u201d\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Ted Sarandos\n\n\n\n\u201cIt feels like something that is going to outlive all of us,\u201d says Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix and chair of the museum\u2019s board of trustees, \u201cwhich is something everyone I\u2019ve talked to involved in this project has had in mind. This wasn\u2019t about anyone\u2019s legacy. It was about the legacy of the business that we\u2019ve created, and we\u2019ve worked in, and has been so good to us\u2014a way to give back.\u201d\nHollywood has been through big shifts in the 10 years since the Academy Museum project finally got off the ground. Streaming services now turn out Oscar contenders, predatory producers face a reckoning,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n hashtags reverberate, calling out #OscarsSoWhite. The exhibitions inside Piano\u2019s big-budget museum will grapple with all of that.\n\u201cWe\u2019re capturing, I think, the history of this art form as it\u2019s changing so rapidly,\u201d says Hudson.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Dolby Family Terrace, which has panoramic views of L.A.\n\n\n\nThe facade of the former May Company department store, designed by the local firm AC Martin and landmark-protected on three sides, has been meticulously restored by British restoration architect John Fidler (who as conservation director at English Heritage once oversaw the upkeep of Stonehenge). \u201cI\u2019m the other famous architect on the project,\u201d jokes Fidler, who moved to Los Angeles from London in 2006. Replacements for 40 percent of the 365,000 glass tiles on the building\u2019s distinctive gold cylinder, once a perfume-bottle-shaped beacon for shoppers, were sourced from the original supplier in Italy.\nPiano stripped the interior of the building, which had been converted into office space over the years, and replaced the stucco and stone back wall with a glass curtain wall covering a spine connecting gallery floors. \u201cYou see the light through the escalators,\u201d he says, \u201cso you see people moving, like a pinball that goes up and down.\u201d\nAnd he razed a rundown extension behind the original building, added in 1946, installing in its place his 26 million\u2013pound orb of concrete, glass and steel\u2014a \u201cspaceship,\u201d he calls it\u2014connected by three translucent bridges and balanced on vanishing plinths, invisibly rocking on exposed earthquake supports. \u201cYou have a building that belongs to the history of the city, and you have something that belongs to the future,\u201d says Piano. \u201cThen you start to think about how you connect those two things, and then you start to think about bridges\u2026. Instead of being a problem to have those two buildings talking to each other, it was a great opportunity to work on this like you normally work on a movie, like a sequence from light and shadow.\u201d\nThe David Geffen Theater (funded by a $25 million gift from David Geffen), with a thousand plush red seats inside the orb, will have projection capabilities for the most historic and cutting-edge types of film, from early-20th-century nitrate to the latest digital laser productions. \u201cThis will probably be the best movie theater in the world for a while,\u201d says Piano. A second smaller theater in the Saban Building, named for the late movie theater entrepreneur Ted Mann, has 288 seats.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of Renzo Piano\u2019s hand sketches of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n RPBW \u2013 Renzo Piano Building Workshop Architects\n \n\n\n\nThe Geffen Theater is designed to heighten the communal moviegoing experience, as L.A. hopefully begins welcoming back indoor crowds. \u201cWe have a thousand people coming there not just to watch a movie, but also, probably, to listen to the filmmaker,\u201d says Piano. \u201cAnd also they come there to embark on a spaceship for a different dimension\u2026because this is what the movie is; it takes you in another dimension for a couple of hours.\u201d\nPiano first burst onto the world stage in the early 1970s when he won a competition, with his then-partner Richard Rogers, to design the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Their proposal for a radically accessible cultural institution was a reaction, says Piano, \u201cto the idea of a museum [as] a dusty place.\u201d\n\u201cWe were young bad boys but not that stupid, because the idea was if we make a space that is not intimidating, people will come,\u201d he says.\nPiano has since built a career on cultural projects that welcome the widest possible audiences. His firm, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, based in Paris and Genoa, Italy, has worked on some 30 museums\u2014from the Beyeler Foundation Museum near Basel, Switzerland, and the Menil Collection in Houston to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The public plazas at the Academy Museum, beneath the Geffen Theater and above it, on the Dolby Family Terrace, were designed to be open to all, with no admission fee. (However, terrace access will be limited to ticket holders initially, due to pandemic concerns.)\n\u201cIf you make a museum like [Pompidou] with a piazza that looks like a funny ship, a vessel, in the middle of the city,\u201d he says, \u201cif you make a museum like Beyeler, with lawn all around and a lake, you create a place where people come, even if they have little to do with art. They come because they are attracted secretly, silently, without really knowing they are attracted by something.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Pedro Almod\u00f3var exhibition in the Rolex Galleries.\n\n\n\nNone of his museums, he says, have been like any other, though there\u2019s a through-line connecting them all. \u201cYou have something that you keep in yourself,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd this is what I call coherence, integrity, le fil rouge. This is something you have inside, but this is not what they call style. The style is a golden cage.\u201d\nAmong the earliest recorded references to the Academy launching a movie museum is a letter in its archive from 1927, the year it was founded. By the early 1940s, a detailed prospectus for a Museum of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences proposed an initial contribution from the Academy of $1,000 a month. Charlie Chaplin\u2019s shoes and Mary Pickford\u2019s curls were among the objects the museum hoped to display in its proposed home in the former Trocadero nightclub on Sunset Boulevard.\nA Hollywood Motion Picture and Television Museum came closer to being realized in the early 1960s when a consortium of Hollywood leaders, in partnership with Los Angeles County, settled on about four acres across from the Hollywood Bowl. Architect William Pereira, famous in Hollywood circles for designing the original Motion Picture Country House\u2014a retirement community for the industry\u2014drew up plans for a sprawling complex with soundstages, a library and a theater that would seat about 300 at an estimated cost of $16 million (the equivalent of over $140 million today). Jack Warner, Rosalind Russell and Gene Autry attended a groundbreaking ceremony in 1963. But the project sputtered after a well-publicized showdown with a heavily armed homeowner, whose refusal to move stood in the way of construction. The Academy inherited a trove of objects from the unbuilt Hollywood museum.\nThe idea of building a serious movie museum in the world capital of film continued to percolate for decades. And the museum project remained a hot topic when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathleen Kennedy,\n\n\n\n a prominent film producer (currently president of Lucasfilm) whose credits include E.T., Schindler\u2019s List and the Back to the Future franchise, among others, first joined the Academy board of governors 27 years ago.\n\u201cI feel like almost as long as I was on the Academy board\u2026the conversation around whether or not we could create an Academy museum was always on the front burner,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I think for many years there was tremendous frustration: Why in the world does Los Angeles, of all places, not have a motion picture museum that is the preeminent museum in the world for the celebration of movies? It seemed kind of crazy.\u201d\nBy 2006, the project finally appeared to be ready to go. The Academy had found a site in Hollywood, purchased for $50 million. And producer Sid Ganis, then president of the board, had narrowed the search for an architect to a few big stars, including Sir Norman Foster, the Norwegian firm Sn\u00f8hetta and Frenchman Christian de Portzamparc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThis will probably be the best movie theater in the world for a while,\u201d says Piano of the state-of-the-art domed David Geffen Theater, which seats 1,000.\n\n\n\nThe commission went to de Portzamparc, a Pritzker Prize winner who seemed especially open to ideas from the board. In the fall of 2008 de Portzamparc was in Los Angeles presenting his plans for a $400-million-plus museum, a series of minimalist boxes with giant outdoor screens. An immersion room filled with shadows and light, suggested by Steven Spielberg, would explain the origins of the projected image, \u201cwhen men moved the shadow of their hand on the wall of a rock,\u201d as de Portzamparc\u2019s website describes it. \u201cAnd while [Christian] was presenting,\u201d recalls Ganis, \u201cthat very day the stock market dropped 750 points or something like that. And that was the end of it.\u201d\nAfter the recession hit, the project seemed dead for a while, until Michael Govan, the director of LACMA, suggested launching a more modest version on his campus instead. \u201cOn Wilshire Boulevard, the equivalent of Fifth Avenue, you\u2019d have art and film\u2014how cool would that be,\u201d he says. \u201cThere was just beautiful poetry to that.\u201d\nBy the fall of 2012, Piano had traveled to L.A., sketches in tow, to meet with the Academy board. Longtime supporters of the museum effort were quick to embrace his ambitious plans for the site. \u201cWhen you\u2019ve got an artist like that, who has a clear point of view as to what the potential of that space could be, I think that really galvanized everybody to start moving forward, and it felt like a reality again,\u201d says Kennedy, who was active on the project since the beginning and became chair of the Academy\u2019s Museum Committee when it launched in 2015.\nFundraising took off after Piano\u2019s presentation. \u201cInitially the hardest part, the hardest thing that I faced was, \u2018Oh, the Academy is trying this again,\u2019 \u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Iger,\n\n\n\n who was CEO of Disney when he signed on to lead the museum\u2019s capital campaign. \u201cAnybody in L.A. who you wanted to raise money from was aware of the history of this, and there were a lot of skeptics\u2026. Until I had drawings, people didn\u2019t believe it was actually going to happen.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u201cAnybody in L.A. who you wanted to raise money from was aware of the history of this, and there were a lot of skeptics\u2026. Until I had the drawings, people didn\u2019t believe it was actually going to happen.\u201d\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Bob Iger\n\n\n\nThe museum broke ground in October 2015. Early reports projected an opening two years later. By the summer of 2019, major construction was nearing completion. An opening date was set for winter 2020. And then the pandemic shut down all of L.A. \u201cWe pulled the construction teams out of the building while we figured out what was going on here,\u201d says Kramer. They soon postponed the opening, and then postponed it again.\nWith the film world on lockdown, Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant, organized a virtual fundraiser for the Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby last year, hosted by Tyler Perry and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oprah Winfrey.\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat was supposed to be our cocktail party turned out to be a pretty fancy Zoom,\u201d says Sarandos. \u201cDave Chappelle came, and Chris Rock. I mean, people showed up.\u201d\nThe exhibitions opening this fall, designed by Los Angeles architect Kulapat Yantrasast, of wHY Architecture, in conjunction with the museum\u2019s curators, will be arranged thematically, covering the breadth of the moviemaking experience\u2014cinematography, costumes, screenwriting, sound\u2014in spaces designed for easy reconfiguration.\n\u201cI think a film museum should change\u2014the subject matter, the social issues, the museum exhibits should be able to address that,\u201d says Yantrasast.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Behold exhibition, a part of the Inventing Worlds & Characters section of Stories of Cinema.\n\n\n\nThe displays will focus on a mix of iconic and forgotten film history, addressing the dark legacy of the film world and recent controversies around race and gender at the Oscars. \u201cDoing that work is necessary for drawing the audiences we want to reach,\u201d says film historian Jacqueline Stewart, who this past winter started as the museum\u2019s new chief artistic and programming officer. \u201cIt\u2019s not just about some superficial correcting of the record; people rightly expect to have fuller histories narrated. And people want to see themselves reflected, and we\u2019ve been working really hard to make sure that happens.\u201d Stewart helped organize the special exhibit Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898\u20131971, opening next year.\nMany items displayed at the museum are on loan from the biggest names in the business. Spielberg loaned Rosebud, the child\u2019s sled from Citizen Kane that he purchased at auction in the 1980s. Leonardo DiCaprio offered choice pieces from his vintage poster collection. Martin Scorsese and his team created montages for a survey highlighting the work of his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. Pedro Almod\u00f3var co-curated an exhibition in the Rolex Galleries on the third floor devoted to his nearly 50 years making films.\nThe official opening kicks off on September 25 with the first of what will become an annual gala, atop the Dolby Family Terrace and in the Tea Room on the top floor of the Saban Building, which are connected via the Barbra Streisand Bridge. The work of Hayao Miyazaki, the reclusive Japanese animation auteur\u2014subject of the museum\u2019s first special exhibition\u2014will inform the aesthetic theme for the gala. The evening will honor Sophia Loren and Ethiopian-American filmmaker Haile Gerima. Loren, the first performer to win an Oscar for a foreign language film for her role in the 1960 war drama Two Women, has her name inscribed on a fifth-floor pillar, as part of a campaign co-led by Laura Dern honoring pioneering women in film. \u201cTo think that it will be there forever is very humbling,\u201d writes Loren via email.\nDern, who has been active on the museum board\u2014and whose annotated Blue Velvet script will be on display\u2014toured the project, in progress, with Piano over the years. \u201cWatching his passion, his process and his commitment,\u201d she writes, by email, recalling her time with Piano, \u201cnot only to hold a space that tells the story of film, but create space that is about community, collaboration and a place for people to congregate.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe distinctive gold cylinder of the Saban Building marks the main entrance to the museum.\n\n\n\nPiano, meanwhile, has been thrilled, he says, to have spent so much time immersed in the film world. Movies have captured his imagination since he was a young boy\u2014the son of a builder\u2014growing up in Genoa in the 1950s and spending Sunday afternoons watching matinee westerns. \u201cAt that time the movie was a miracle,\u201d he says.\nAs he started his career in architecture in the 1960s, after finishing his studies in Milan, he often thought of the parallels between filmmaking and his chosen profession. \u201cWhen you make a good movie you have the perfect condition to move people and to touch the profound core of people,\u201d he says. \u201cWell, architecture is not that bad, honestly\u2026[but] I have a couple of jealous relationships. One is with the filmmaker, the other one is with musicians, because I tried to play the trumpet when I was young. I was so bad that I gave up. And then what I did is that I built quite a good number of concert halls. So you go out from the door, and you come back in from the window.\u201d\nThrough the Pompidou project Piano met film director Michelangelo Antonioni, and the two became close. Years later, just before Antonioni fell ill, he had planned to shoot a film starring Sophia Loren in the cultural center Piano designed on the Pacific islands of New Caledonia. Piano also got to know director Roberto Rossellini, shortly before his untimely death, while he was shooting his last film, a documentary on the Centre Georges Pompidou, shot on its opening day, January 31, 1977.\nWhile Piano followed Rossellini around the building, the director shared some insights with the young architect. \u201cHe told me, \u2018Look, you should stop watching the building; you should watch the eyes of the people watching the building, you should watch the faces of people that look at the building,\u2019 \u201d recalls Piano. \u201cAnd you know what? Since then I [never] watch the building when I finish something. I hide myself behind a column and I watch people watching the building, and you see the reaction in their eyes, you see the reflection and you understand. And this is what I will do in Los Angeles. We have so many good columns. I will hide behind one of those columns watching people.\u201d Inside Italian architect Renzo Piano\u2019s ambitious plans for the long-awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. ",
        "author": "Jay Cheshes | Photography by Stephen Kent Johnson for WSJ. Magazine"
    },
    {
        "title": "On the High Line, Oliver Jeffers Wants You to Know What It\u2019s Like to See Earth from the Moon (WSJ: Art & Design) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "142",
        "date": "2019-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-the-high-line-oliver-jeffers-wants-you-to-know-what-its-like-to-see-earth-from-the-moon-11548361070?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=79",
        "text": "The Artist: Most kids love to draw, and some, like artist Oliver Jeffers, never stop. The 41-year-old Irishman, whose cartoonish illustrations and spindly handwriting have filled more than 15 children\u2019s picture books in a 20-year career, knew he wanted to draw professionally from age 13. Today, working in a wide range of media\u2014painting, photography, bookmaking, sculpture, performance and illustration\u2014Jeffers thematically dwells on the \u201ctwo great unknowns\u201d of our world, outer space and the depths of the ocean. In so doing, he\u2019s sold more than 10 million copies. \u201cI\u2019ve never really specified any of my books are for children as I feel it relegates non-children from reading them,\u201d he says.\nThe Latest Show: Of the 533 astronauts who\u2019ve been far enough to see Earth as a single object, all \u201ccome away with the same realization,\u201d says Jeffers. \u201cThat we\u2019re fundamentally all part of one single system. Everybody came back with a new perspective on the ways in which we\u2019re separated, the ways which these petty differences consume all our attention.\u201d It\u2019s that \u201coverview effect\u201d\u2014the way being in outer space can obviate the pettier parts of humanity\u2014that he explores in The Moon, The Earth and Us, a sculptural installation on Manhattan\u2019s High Line opening on the evening of January 24. In the passage between 15th and 16th Streets, Earthbound humans can walk among to-scale renderings of the moon and our planet, inspiration for which Jeffers cribbed from a 1968 photo from Apollo 8. An accompanying show of his space-themed paintings is on display at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery through February 16.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeffers at work on the installation.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Courtesy of Oliver Jeffers Studio\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Plot Arc: That the world is divided arbitrarily\u2014and that all borders are man-made. Jeffers hopes the sculptures, which resemble giant globes and declare in his lettering that \u201cPeople Live Here\u201d on Earth and \u201cNo One Lives Here\u201d on the moon, lead people first to question the world\u2019s factionalism. Growing up Catholic in the Northern Ireland from 1976-2002, Jeffers says he was confused about national identity from an early age. \u201cI\u2019ve always been a little suspicious of people who are overly nationalist and overly patriotic,\u201d he says. \u201cIn outer space, you can\u2019t actually see any of those borders. They live merely in our minds.\u201d\n\n\nThe Manual:Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, are the volumes that most shape his outlook. \u201cEver since I read Bryson\u2019s book, I was determined to do a solar system that was actually to scale with nothing else around it so that people could cycle or walk and get just a sense of how truly alone we are in the universe,\u201d says Jeffers. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe installation in progress.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Courtesy of Oliver Jeffers Studio\n \n\n\n\nThe Mantra: \u201cNever let the truth get in the way of a good story.\u201d To wit: \u201cI think slight exaggerations when relishing simple storytelling is part of being Irish.\u201d\nUp Next: \u201cI have a picture book coming out that was printed last year on a 200-year-old lithography machine in Paris,\u201d says Jeffers. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of a dark fable. I can\u2019t really say much more about it than that.\u201d On the evening of January 24, the artist\u2019s \u2018The Moon, The Earth and Us\u2019 installation opens on New York City\u2019s High Line ",
        "author": "Lane Florsheim"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Armory Show Review: Hey Good Lookin\u2019 (WSJ: Art Review) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "143",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/armory-show-review-new-york-art-fair-javits-center-11631300040?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=16",
        "text": "So the return of Armory, open through Sunday and moved from Piers 92/94 to the Javits Center (and from its usual spring dates to its new fall timeslot), was filled with the potential to provide a cathartic bookend to the trauma we\u2019d endured. And while the Delta variant and rising case numbers conspired against making it the metaphorical grand reopening many had hoped for, the show still did open (masks and proof of vaccination required) and it was at least a little grand.\n\n\nThe Armory Show Javits Center\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThrough Sept. 12\n\n\nThe move to Javits has massively improved the fair: Its sprawling space allows plenty of room to maneuver among the offerings from 157 international galleries, and while this means the show takes a long time to see, it never feels overwhelming.\u00a0Two-dimensional works dominated, figurative pieces seemed to take precedence over abstraction, and almost everything on view was made in the past few years. Gallerists were elated to be back and visitors were eager to buy.\n\nThe best fairs tell a story. The dozens of vignettes playing out booth by booth form a mosaic of what styles are in vogue and what ideas haunt artists\u2019 minds\u2014in other words, of what makes contemporary art contemporary. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPhyllis Stephens' My Life is a Bed of Roses (2021) at Almine Rech\n\n\n\nIn this regard, Armory falls short. The closest thing to an overarching narrative would be \u201cartists disagree.\u201d After a year of previously unfathomable hardship, it\u2019s no surprise that there is a difference of opinion about the future. Can we finally be at ease, as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phyllis Stephens\n\n\n\n suggests in her vibrantly quilted \u201cMy Life Is a Bed of Roses\u201d (2021, presented by Almine Rech), depicting a reclining woman enjoying a bottle of wine and snacks? Or is the world truly doomed, as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ai Weiwei\n\n\n\n seems to be saying in his photographs of a pitch-black chandelier made from human bones, \u201cObsidian I\u201d and \u201cII\u201d (both 2021, presented by Chambers Fine Art)?\n\n\n \n\n\n\nBut if this year\u2019s Armory Show lacks conceptual cohesion, what it has in abundance is Art That\u2019s Nice to Look At. So much art, especially contemporary art, is decidedly not Nice to Look At, and a celebration of pure aesthetic pleasure is just what we need at this moment. Everyone will leave having found works they love, and the fair has pulled this off without appealing to the lowest common denominator.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStephanie Temma Hier's \u2018Salute to a Switchblade\u2019 (2021)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bradley Ertaskiran\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSimon Vega's \u2018Space Tourist\u2019 (2021)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Maia Contemporary\n \n\n\n\nThose seeking whimsy will delight in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephanie Temma Hier\u2019s\n\n\n\n surreal food-related creations framed with glazed stoneware sculptures, especially \u201cSalute to a Switchblade\u201d (2021), at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bradley Ertaskiran\n\n\n\n : A neatly dressed butcher rips into a juicy ham with a bonesaw in a painting surrounded by two dozen apples in various states of consumption. Turning from the galley to the galactic,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sim\u00f3n Vega\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSpace Tourist\u201d (2021), at Maia Contemporary, combines Hawaiian shirts, a helmet and found objects into a charmingly rustic spacesuit while subtly critiquing the growing field of extraterrestrial tourism.\u00a0\nIf you love works with deep art-historical roots,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hugo Crosthwaite\u2019s\n\n\n\n illustrations at Pierogi can\u2019t be missed: The series \u201cUntitled (Tijuanerias)\u201d (2021) is a collection of 50 black-and-white drawings capturing the daily lives of people in his native Tijuana, Mexico, spliced together with religious and supernatural imagery. It\u2019s a smart 21st-century take on the complications of living in a border city that draws heavily from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Goya\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cLos Caprichos.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTony Matelli's \u2018Arrangement\u2019 (2021)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Maruani Mercier\n \n\n\n\nFor sheer technical brilliance, the sculptures of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tony Matelli\n\n\n\n at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maruani Mercier\n\n\n\n can\u2019t be beat: a vase of spring-fresh tulips, an orchid worthy of a county-fair blue ribbon, an elegant bouquet of calla lilies\u2014all rendered in perfect detail in bronze and steel, then flipped upside down, stems standing at attention. And there\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alison Elizabeth Taylor\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSketch for a Still Life\u201d (2020) at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Cohan,\n\n\n\n a hyper-detailed marquetry work of a nude man relaxing whose intricate wood inlay has been colored with everything from stains to photographic transfers.\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\u2028To truly get lost in images,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrea Joyce Heimer\u2019s\n\n\n\n flat, folkish paintings at Half Gallery offer captivating snapshots of rural life\u2014fish hatcheries, calving season. And\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlotte Keates\u2019s\n\n\n\n vivid, patterned interiors at Arusha Gallery are utt The marquee art fair was one of the last major New York events before Covid-19 hit the city; now it\u2019s back in a sparkling new venue. ",
        "author": "Brian P. Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Armory Show Review: Hey Good Lookin\u2019 (WSJ: Art Review) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "144",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/armory-show-review-new-york-art-fair-javits-center-11631300040?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=4",
        "text": "So the return of Armory, open through Sunday and moved from Piers 92/94 to the Javits Center (and from its usual spring dates to its new fall timeslot), was filled with the potential to provide a cathartic bookend to the trauma we\u2019d endured. And while the Delta variant and rising case numbers conspired against making it the metaphorical grand reopening many had hoped for, the show still did open (masks and proof of vaccination required) and it was at least a little grand.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Armory Show Javits Center\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThrough Sept. 12\n\n\nThe move to Javits has massively improved the fair: Its sprawling space allows plenty of room to maneuver among the offerings from 157 international galleries, and while this means the show takes a long time to see, it never feels overwhelming.\u00a0Two-dimensional works dominated, figurative pieces seemed to take precedence over abstraction, and almost everything on view was made in the past few years. Gallerists were elated to be back and visitors were eager to buy.\n\nThe best fairs tell a story. The dozens of vignettes playing out booth by booth form a mosaic of what styles are in vogue and what ideas haunt artists\u2019 minds\u2014in other words, of what makes contemporary art contemporary. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPhyllis Stephens' My Life is a Bed of Roses (2021) at Almine Rech\n\n\n\nIn this regard, Armory falls short. The closest thing to an overarching narrative would be \u201cartists disagree.\u201d After a year of previously unfathomable hardship, it\u2019s no surprise that there is a difference of opinion about the future. Can we finally be at ease, as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phyllis Stephens\n\n\n\n suggests in her vibrantly quilted \u201cMy Life Is a Bed of Roses\u201d (2021, presented by Almine Rech), depicting a reclining woman enjoying a bottle of wine and snacks? Or is the world truly doomed, as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ai Weiwei\n\n\n\n seems to be saying in his photographs of a pitch-black chandelier made from human bones, \u201cObsidian I\u201d and \u201cII\u201d (both 2021, presented by Chambers Fine Art)?\n\n\n Ai Weiwei, \u201cObsidian I\u201dAi Weiwei, \u201cObsidian II\u201dPhotos: Chambers Fine Art(2)\n\n\n\nBut if this year\u2019s Armory Show lacks conceptual cohesion, what it has in abundance is Art That\u2019s Nice to Look At. So much art, especially contemporary art, is decidedly not Nice to Look At, and a celebration of pure aesthetic pleasure is just what we need at this moment. Everyone will leave having found works they love, and the fair has pulled this off without appealing to the lowest common denominator.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStephanie Temma Hier's \u2018Salute to a Switchblade\u2019 (2021)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bradley Ertaskiran\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSimon Vega's \u2018Space Tourist\u2019 (2021)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Maia Contemporary\n \n\n\n\nThose seeking whimsy will delight in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephanie Temma Hier\u2019s\n\n\n\n surreal food-related creations framed with glazed stoneware sculptures, especially \u201cSalute to a Switchblade\u201d (2021), at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bradley Ertaskiran\n\n\n\n : A neatly dressed butcher rips into a juicy ham with a bonesaw in a painting surrounded by two dozen apples in various states of consumption. Turning from the galley to the galactic,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sim\u00f3n Vega\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSpace Tourist\u201d (2021), at Maia Contemporary, combines Hawaiian shirts, a helmet and found objects into a charmingly rustic spacesuit while subtly critiquing the growing field of extraterrestrial tourism.\u00a0\nIf you love works with deep art-historical roots,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hugo Crosthwaite\u2019s\n\n\n\n illustrations at Pierogi can\u2019t be missed: The series \u201cUntitled (Tijuanerias)\u201d (2021) is a collection of 50 black-and-white drawings capturing the daily lives of people in his native Tijuana, Mexico, spliced together with religious and supernatural imagery. It\u2019s a smart 21st-century take on the complications of living in a border city that draws heavily from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Goya\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cLos Caprichos.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTony Matelli's \u2018Arrangement\u2019 (2021)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Maruani Mercier\n \n\n\n\nFor sheer technical brilliance, the sculptures of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tony Matelli\n\n\n\n at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maruani Mercier\n\n\n\n can\u2019t be beat: a vase of spring-fresh tulips, an orchid worthy of a county-fair blue ribbon, an elegant bouquet of calla lilies\u2014all rendered in perfect detail in bronze and steel, then flipped upside down, stems standing at attention. And there\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alison Elizabeth Taylor\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSketch for a Still Life\u201d (2020) at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Cohan,\n\n\n\n a hyper-detailed marquetry work of a nude man relaxing whose intricate wood inlay has been colored with everything from stains to photographic transfers.\n\n\n Andrea Joyce Heimer at Half Gallery Andrea Joyce Heimer at Half Gallery Andrea Joyce Heimer at Half Gallery\n\n\n\n\u2028To truly get lost in images,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrea Joyce Heimer\u2019s\n\n\n\n flat, folkish paintings at Half The marquee art fair was one of the last major New York events before Covid-19 hit the city; now it\u2019s back in a sparkling new venue. ",
        "author": "Brian P. Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism\u2019 Review: Immortality and the Cosmos (WSJ: Art Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "145",
        "date": "2017-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/art-without-death-russian-cosmism-review-immortality-and-the-cosmos-1504728949?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=88",
        "text": "Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism \n\n\n\nHaus der Kulturen der Welt\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThrough Oct. 3\n\n\n\n\nMore Art Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Faith Ringgold: American People\u2019 Review: At the New Museum, the Creative Fabric of a Lengthy Career \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Lennart Anderson: A Retrospective\u2019 Review: Tutorial on an Underknown Painter\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Picasso: Painting the Blue Period\u2019 Review: Brilliant From the Beginning\nMarch 1, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe now retro-futuristic HKW is the perfect venue for the grandiosely packaged and staged, but somehow poignantly slight, \u201cArt Without Death: Russian Cosmism.\u201d It\u2019s not really an art exhibition as such\u2014with just one big dark-gray room sparsely installed with 55 mostly small paintings and drawings, two of those \u201cblack box\u201d video chambers, and a large star-shaped platform in the lobby, on which rest allegedly relevant books in both German and English. (The show also offers an ancillary timeline punctuated by little TV screens showing the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lenin\u2019s\n\n\n\n funeral and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gargarin\n\n\n\n going into orbit.) Rather, \u201cArt Without Death\u201d is an explication-by-artifact of the influence of the philosophy of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicolai Federov\n\n\n\n (1829-1903) on idealistic early modern Russian artists.\nAs the press release succinctly puts it, Federov\u2019s \u201cRussian Cosmism was a movement that called for material immortality and resurrection, as well as travel to outer space. It developed out of the spirituality of nineteenth-century Russia and a strong fascination with science and technology.\u201d The hitch in Federov\u2019s philosophy is that he was an atheist\u2014or at least he had a big falling-out over religion with onetime admirer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leo Tolstoy.\n\n\n\n Federov\u2019s brand of immortality would be accomplished without God or a spiritual afterlife. Think \u201cput a human being on Mars by 2030\u201d squared, plus the necessity of colonizing other planets, since the billions of corporeal humans brought back to life would make the New York subway at rush hour seem like midnight in the Sahara Desert.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIvan Kliun\u2019s \u2018Red Light. Spherical Composition\u2019 (1923)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n he Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki\n \n\n\n\nFederov realized the magnitude (to put it mildly) of Cosmism\u2019s central task, and called upon everybody in every profession and enterprise to make material immortality humanity\u2019s \u201ccommon project.\u201d After all, he reasoned, we struggle to overcome hunger and disease, so why don\u2019t we all get together to struggle equally if not more so to overcome the ultimate bummer, death itself? Such pie-in-the-sky (or borscht-in-the-cosmos) appealed to the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aleksandr Rodchenko\n\n\n\n (whose \u201cConstruction on White [Robots],\u201d 1920, is one of the better works in the paintings gallery),\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maria Ender\n\n\n\n (the fully abstract \u201cTranscription of Sound,\u201d 1921), and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gustavs Klucis\n\n\n\n (whose logo design from 1922 reflects Cosmism\u2019s onward-and-upward imperative).\n\nAlas, Cosmism predictably fell afoul of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stalin,\n\n\n\n who had no dictatorial use for anything beyond the here and now, especially artists\u2019 dreams of eternity. Many of its adherents were imprisoned or executed. A 2014-17 film trilogy, \u201cImmortality for All\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anton Vidokle\n\n\n\n (on constant cycle in those video rooms) looks around, in sunlighted melancholy, from Siberia to Kazakhstan and back to Moscow for traces of Cosmism\u2019s influence. The camera pans over a cemetery, a man swims with his dog, while quotes from Federov are heard in a deadpan voiceover. The books in Arseny Zhilyaev\u2019s 2017 installation, \u201cIntergalactic Mobile Fedorov Museum-Library, Berlin,\u201d strain for connections to the movement, which the exhibition as a whole tries to maintain on art-historical life-support.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAleksandr Rodchenko\u2019s \u2018Construction on White (Robots)\u2019 (1920)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki\n \n\n\n\n\u201cArt Without Death\u201d is the sixth in HKW\u2019s 15-part series of events gathered under the rubric \u201c100 Years of Now,\u201d which started in 2015 and continues into next year. The whole project, the institution says, is \u201can analysis of the present time by linking back to historical utopias.\u201d The series seems to those of us who\u2019ve seen\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wim Wenders\u2019s\n\n\n\n high-minded 1987 film, \u201cWings of Desire\u201d (angels who look like average guys come down to Earth to give advice), both typical of a German bent to philosophize somewhat opaquely about everything, and a continuing desire, particularly in Berlin itself, to come to terms with the consequences of the fall of the Wall.\nGiven the archaeological nature of the exhibition\u2019s digging around in the ruins of Cosmism, it would have been better if the works of art from the time had been more than one room\u2019s worth, and had been more carefully considered and less conveniently gotten: All the work in the conventional gallery comes from a single collection, that of the Moscow-born Greek diplomat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Costakis,\n\n\n\n which is now housed in the Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art. \nAs it is, there\u2019s an oddly forlorn feeling to an exhibition about something so wildly optimistic at its inception. In the surprisingly empty HKW (especially for an opening weekend) it was clear that nobody at all was ever materially resurrected. It also seemed like the entire population of Berlin was someplace else, too.\nMr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York. An explication-by-artifact exhibition traces the influence of the philosophy of Nicolai Federov on idealistic early modern Russian artists. ",
        "author": "Peter Plagens"
    },
    {
        "title": "Government Must Be Careful Not to Stifle Innovation When Weighing AI Restrictions, Think Tank Says (WSJ: Artificial Intelligence) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "146",
        "date": "2019-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/government-must-be-careful-not-to-stifle-innovation-when-weighing-ai-restrictions-think-tank-says-11549879200?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=79",
        "text": "Tech-industry executives, public servants and civil liberties groups are calling increasingly for bans or limits on artificial intelligence tools. The bulk of their attention has been focused on autonomous vehicles, robots and facial recognition devices. The initial hype around driverless cars, for instance, became more cautious in the wake of a fatal accident last year involving an Uber Technologies Inc. test vehicle and separate crashes by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n vehicles with driver assistance.\nHowever, exaggerated fears about the safety, privacy and security of AI systems could pressure state and federal regulators to take a heavy-handed approach to the technology and create unnecessary barriers to its development, warns the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in a report titled \u201cTen Ways the Precautionary Principle Undermines Progress in Artificial Intelligence.\u201d\n\u201cIt\u2019s so easy to imagine how a new technology can go wrong, and if you just stop there, the innovation stops there, too,\u201d Daniel Castro, an ITIF vice president who co-wrote the report, told WSJ Pro AI.\n\nMr. Castro said regulators need to approach AI with the same spirit of innovation as the internet, which focused on the Web\u2019s potential upside. That approach gave early internet developers and startups room to innovate, setting the stage for an era of economic growth led by a new digital economy, he added.\nHowever, groups like the New York University-affiliated AI Now Institute have recommended strong national laws setting out oversight of, limitations on and transparency around the development of facial recognition capabilities. Likewise, the American Civil Liberties Union has sought to ban law enforcement\u2019s use of AI-enabled facial recognition tools. \nSome regulations have been enacted. The ITIF report cites a New York state law requiring autonomous vehicle developers to pay for police escorts for road tests, a policy that raises costs and has prompted many local AI ventures to relocate. Likewise, a biometric information-privacy law in Illinois has led to lawsuits against\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook,\n\n\n Google, Shutterfly and Snapchat for scanning users\u2019 faces without their consent\u2014typically to tag them in photos, the report said. \nIn addition, U.S. Senate lawmakers in 2017 introduced the Future of Artificial Intelligence Act, which seeks to create an advisory committee on national AI issues. The committee\u2019s mandate would include setting out guidelines for a federal response to violations of existing laws by AI systems. The advisory group would also establish cultural and societal norms to address machine learning bias, among other issues. \nThe bill is currently in committee. \n\nElon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n chief executive officer of Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., stoked public fears five years ago in an online message predicting \u201csomething seriously dangerous happening\u201d as a result of AI by 2019. He doubled down on that warning last year, calling AI more dangerous than nuclear weapons at a prominent tech conference in Austin, Texas. \nThe ITIF report recommends that policymakers wait to craft targeted responses to specific AI problems as they occur.\nBernard Marr, a strategic business and technology adviser to governments and companies, said he supports fast-paced innovation but not when it allows companies to violate reasonable expectations for data privacy and security. \n\u201cRegulators are still catching up in the AI and data space, where many companies have moved ahead with little concern about exposing and exploiting data that people have given companies, often without an understanding of how their data could be used,\u201d Mr. Marr told WSJ Pro AI.\nHe said regulations such as Europe\u2019s General Data Protection Regulation privacy law, which limits the use of personal information, are trying to address these issues by ensuring companies gain permission to use people\u2019s data and clearly state how the data will be used. \nMr. Castro, who acknowledges that AI has sparked some legitimate concerns, said many AI worries are already addressed by existing laws, or can be quickly corrected by market forces. When that is not the case, he added, \u201cwe should step in with new guardrails,\u201d but always with an eye to moving forward. \nCreating laws in advance risks overreaching and curbing innovation, he said. \nWhit Andrews, a Gartner Inc. analyst, said one problem is the presence of AI in popular culture: \u201cPeople are afraid of robots, they aren\u2019t afraid of blockchain,\u201d Mr. Andrews said.\nHe said regulators should focus efforts on real-world outcomes of AI deployments rather than trying to prevent hypothetical worst-case scenarios.\nWrite to Angus Loten at angus.loten@wsj.com U.S. economic growth, social progress and global competitiveness will suffer if federal and state governments put restrictions on the development and adoption of artificial intelligence-powered products, according to an independent Washington, D.C.-based think tank. ",
        "author": "Angus Loten"
    },
    {
        "title": "Air Force Readies Launch of In-Orbit Network to Support AI Applications in Space (WSJ: Artificial Intelligence) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "147",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/air-force-readies-launch-of-in-orbit-network-to-support-ai-applications-in-space-11596099600?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=11",
        "text": "The project aims to modernize military satellites through software so they can be reprogrammed quickly\u2014for example, to take advantage of new artificial intelligence algorithms that could be used to better detect threats.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHypergiant Industries Chief Executive Ben Lamm\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Hypergiant Industries\n \n\n\n\nCurrently, it can take up to a decade to build and launch military satellites into space. Once they are in orbit, it is difficult to improve upon functionality because they primarily rely on hardware. Remote software upgrades would help military satellites keep pace with technological advancements on Earth, similar to the way software is used to make technological upgrades to mobile phones and Tesla Inc. cars. The satellites can be upgraded continuously with software instead of once or twice annually or never.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a totally different dynamic,\u201d said Air Force Major Robert Slaughter, director of Platform One, which provides enterprise technology services for the U.S. Defense Department. \u201cAfter we launch a satellite, on day one after its mission checkout, it\u2019s not going to degrade over time. It\u2019s actually going to increase its capabilities.\u201d\nMr. Slaughter declined to disclose specific AI-based applications for the technology\u2019s use by the military.\nThe Chameleon Constellation project is led by Austin, Texas-based Hypergiant, Platform One and Space Commercially Augmented Mission Platform, or SpaceCAMP, the U.S. Space Force\u2019s software development program.\nFounded in 2018, Hypergiant is backed by private-equity investors, including Align Capital and Beringer Capital, and builds technology products and services for the space and defense industries.\n\n\nMore From WSJ Pro Artificial Intelligence\n\n\n\n\nHow Insight Partners Vets AI Startups \nJanuary 24, 2022 \n\n\nDatabricks Ventures Seeks Startups Aligned With the \u2018Lakehouse\u2019\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\nThe AI-Powered Enterprise Tools Presented at CES 2022\nJanuary 7, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMilitary satellites in use today can be outfitted with cameras that could help identify potential adversarial threats such as missiles, or track the movement of military vehicles. But those satellite images must first be sent back to a command center on Earth to be analyzed by humans or by machine learning algorithms, said Ben Lamm, chief executive of Hypergiant. The time it takes to transmit the data to a ground station and analyze it, and then to give the satellite a different task, such as taking another picture from a different angle, can take more than a day.\nIn a few years, the new Chameleon Constellation satellites could automatically analyze potential threats in real time by using machine learning algorithms integrated into the satellites\u2019 software, said Quentin Donnellan, director of engineering at Hypergiant Galactic Systems, the company\u2019s space division. Newer, more sophisticated AI algorithms can replace older ones periodically through software updates, he said. \u201cThis is a problem that\u2019s been solved on Earth\u2026and we\u2019re just trying to extend that to space,\u201d he said.\nTo support the system\u2019s computing needs, one of the satellites in the constellation is expected to act as a \u201cmiddleman\u201d and will have a greater computational capacity than the rest. The other satellites can send data, such as images, to that computing node, similar to the way data is sent to a cloud-based data center on Earth. That data can then be processed and analyzed immediately using AI-based software programs without first being sent back to Earth. All satellites are expected to be outfitted with graphics processing units, one of the main computer chips used for AI systems.\nThe effort represents a significant technological undertaking in space, using computing and AI technologies that already have been proven to work on Earth, said Srinivas Bettadpur, director for the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Bettadpur isn\u2019t affiliated with the project, but said it could help military satellites better understand and detect anomalies on Earth by themselves, which isn\u2019t possible today.\n\u201cThat\u2019s the desire, to have that level of autonomy, where you can put up an instrument right away and figure out what is going on,\u201d he said.\nThe project is funded by about $100,000 from an Air Force\u2019s Small Business Innovation Research grant. The group aims to prove part of its concept next year with the goal of eventually obtaining another grant that could total about $10 million.\nWrite to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com The first in a series of up to about 36 satellites, known as Chameleon Constellation, is planned to launch on a Northrop Grumman Corp. spacecraft in February 2021. ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Air Force Readies Launch of In-Orbit Network to Support AI Applications in Space (WSJ: Artificial Intelligence) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "148",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/air-force-readies-launch-of-in-orbit-network-to-support-ai-applications-in-space-11596099600?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=42",
        "text": "The project aims to modernize military satellites through software so they can be reprogrammed quickly\u2014for example, to take advantage of new artificial intelligence algorithms that could be used to better detect threats.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHypergiant Industries Chief Executive Ben Lamm\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Hypergiant Industries\n \n\n\n\nCurrently, it can take up to a decade to build and launch military satellites into space. Once they are in orbit, it is difficult to improve upon functionality because they primarily rely on hardware. Remote software upgrades would help military satellites keep pace with technological advancements on Earth, similar to the way software is used to make technological upgrades to mobile phones and Tesla Inc. cars. The satellites can be upgraded continuously with software instead of once or twice annually or never.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a totally different dynamic,\u201d said Air Force Major Robert Slaughter, director of Platform One, which provides enterprise technology services for the U.S. Defense Department. \u201cAfter we launch a satellite, on day one after its mission checkout, it\u2019s not going to degrade over time. It\u2019s actually going to increase its capabilities.\u201d\nMr. Slaughter declined to disclose specific AI-based applications for the technology\u2019s use by the military.\nThe Chameleon Constellation project is led by Austin, Texas-based Hypergiant, Platform One and Space Commercially Augmented Mission Platform, or SpaceCAMP, the U.S. Space Force\u2019s software development program.\nFounded in 2018, Hypergiant is backed by private-equity investors, including Align Capital and Beringer Capital, and builds technology products and services for the space and defense industries.\n\n\nMore From WSJ Pro Artificial Intelligence\n\n\n\n\nHow Insight Partners Vets AI Startups \nJanuary 24, 2022 \n\n\nDatabricks Ventures Seeks Startups Aligned With the \u2018Lakehouse\u2019\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\nThe AI-Powered Enterprise Tools Presented at CES 2022\nJanuary 7, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMilitary satellites in use today can be outfitted with cameras that could help identify potential adversarial threats such as missiles, or track the movement of military vehicles. But those satellite images must first be sent back to a command center on Earth to be analyzed by humans or by machine learning algorithms, said Ben Lamm, chief executive of Hypergiant. The time it takes to transmit the data to a ground station and analyze it, and then to give the satellite a different task, such as taking another picture from a different angle, can take more than a day.\nIn a few years, the new Chameleon Constellation satellites could automatically analyze potential threats in real time by using machine learning algorithms integrated into the satellites\u2019 software, said Quentin Donnellan, director of engineering at Hypergiant Galactic Systems, the company\u2019s space division. Newer, more sophisticated AI algorithms can replace older ones periodically through software updates, he said. \u201cThis is a problem that\u2019s been solved on Earth\u2026and we\u2019re just trying to extend that to space,\u201d he said.\nTo support the system\u2019s computing needs, one of the satellites in the constellation is expected to act as a \u201cmiddleman\u201d and will have a greater computational capacity than the rest. The other satellites can send data, such as images, to that computing node, similar to the way data is sent to a cloud-based data center on Earth. That data can then be processed and analyzed immediately using AI-based software programs without first being sent back to Earth. All satellites are expected to be outfitted with graphics processing units, one of the main computer chips used for AI systems.\nThe effort represents a significant technological undertaking in space, using computing and AI technologies that already have been proven to work on Earth, said Srinivas Bettadpur, director for the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Bettadpur isn\u2019t affiliated with the project, but said it could help military satellites better understand and detect anomalies on Earth by themselves, which isn\u2019t possible today.\n\u201cThat\u2019s the desire, to have that level of autonomy, where you can put up an instrument right away and figure out what is going on,\u201d he said.\nThe project is funded by about $100,000 from an Air Force\u2019s Small Business Innovation Research grant. The group aims to prove part of its concept next year with the goal of eventually obtaining another grant that could total about $10 million.\nWrite to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com The first in a series of up to about 36 satellites, known as Chameleon Constellation, is planned to launch on a Northrop Grumman Corp. spacecraft in February 2021. ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Lost in Space,\u2019 This Time With More Company (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "149",
        "date": "2018-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/arts/television/lost-in-space-review-netflix.html",
        "text": "A Netflix reboot of the campy 1960s science-fiction series thoroughly updates the Robinson family and gives them a spaceship full of fellow travelers. A Netflix reboot of the campy 1960s science-fiction series thoroughly updates the Robinson family and gives them a spaceship full of fellow travelers. So you\u2019ve made the artistically questionable but potentially profitable decision to produce a \u201cLost in Space\u201d reboot for Netflix. (\u201cFuller House\u201d: four seasons and counting. Enough said.)",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Lost in Space,\u2019 This Time With More Company (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "150",
        "date": "2018-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/arts/television/lost-in-space-review-netflix.html",
        "text": "A Netflix reboot of the campy 1960s science-fiction series thoroughly updates the Robinson family and gives them a spaceship full of fellow travelers. A Netflix reboot of the campy 1960s science-fiction series thoroughly updates the Robinson family and gives them a spaceship full of fellow travelers. So you\u2019ve made the artistically questionable but potentially profitable decision to produce a \u201cLost in Space\u201d reboot for Netflix. (\u201cFuller House\u201d: four seasons and counting. Enough said.)",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hayden Planetarium to Reopen at Limited Capacity (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "151",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/arts/design/hayden-planetarium-reopening.html",
        "text": "With the return of the space theater at the American Museum of Natural History, New Yorkers can again add \u201cspace exploration\u201d to their travel agenda. With the return of the space theater at the American Museum of Natural History, New Yorkers can again add \u201cspace exploration\u201d to their travel agenda. The Hayden Planetarium Space Theater on Wednesday will open its doors inside the American Museum of Natural History at a limited capacity after a year of being shuttered. Although the museum reopened in September, the Planetarium remained closed until after movie theaters across the city could welcome back visitors, which was allowed earlier this month.",
        "author": "By Melissa Guerrero"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hayden Planetarium to Reopen at Limited Capacity (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "152",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/arts/design/hayden-planetarium-reopening.html",
        "text": "With the return of the space theater at the American Museum of Natural History, New Yorkers can again add \u201cspace exploration\u201d to their travel agenda. With the return of the space theater at the American Museum of Natural History, New Yorkers can again add \u201cspace exploration\u201d to their travel agenda. The Hayden Planetarium Space Theater on Wednesday will open its doors inside the American Museum of Natural History at a limited capacity after a year of being shuttered. Although the museum reopened in September, the Planetarium remained closed until after movie theaters across the city could welcome back visitors, which was allowed earlier this month.",
        "author": "By Melissa Guerrero"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hayden Planetarium to Reopen at Limited Capacity (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "153",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/arts/design/hayden-planetarium-reopening.html",
        "text": "With the return of the space theater at the American Museum of Natural History, New Yorkers can again add \u201cspace exploration\u201d to their travel agenda. With the return of the space theater at the American Museum of Natural History, New Yorkers can again add \u201cspace exploration\u201d to their travel agenda. The Hayden Planetarium Space Theater on Wednesday will open its doors inside the American Museum of Natural History at a limited capacity after a year of being shuttered. Although the museum reopened in September, the Planetarium remained closed until after movie theaters across the city could welcome back visitors, which was allowed earlier this month.",
        "author": "By Melissa Guerrero"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Monday: \u2018The Price of Everything\u2019 and \u2018Mars\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "154",
        "date": "2018-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/arts/television/whats-on-tv-monday-the-price-of-everything-and-mars.html",
        "text": "An HBO documentary spotlights the role of art in the age of consumerism. And the space exploration series \u201cMars\u201d returns on National Geographic. An HBO documentary spotlights the role of art in the age of consumerism. And the space exploration series \u201cMars\u201d returns on National Geographic. An HBO documentary spotlights the role of art in the age of consumerism. And the space exploration series \u201cMars\u201d returns on National Geographic. ",
        "author": "By Sara Aridi"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Sunday: \u2018Avenue 5\u2019 and \u20189-1-1: Lone Star\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "155",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/arts/television/whats-on-tv-sunday-avenue-5-and-9-1-1-lone-star.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s a night of premieres: A space tourism comedy debuts on HBO, a \u201c9-1-1\u201d spinoff comes to Fox, and a mystery series arrives on PBS. It\u2019s a night of premieres: A space tourism comedy debuts on HBO, a \u201c9-1-1\u201d spinoff comes to Fox, and a mystery series arrives on PBS. AVENUE 5 10 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. Armando Iannucci, the creator of \u201cVeep,\u201d returns to HBO with this new black comedy starring Hugh Laurie. Set 40 years in the future, the show takes place on Avenue 5, a luxury space cruise ship that has taken off for an eight-week journey around Saturn. The experience is exquisite, for a moment. Then the ship\u2019s system malfunctions and sets it off course, leading to delirium onboard. As the fate of the ship remains up in the air, disgruntled passengers demand answers from the captain (Laurie) and his ill-equipped crew. Josh Gad plays the clueless billionaire who owns the ship; Suzy Nakamura is his stern right-hand woman; and Zach Woods is, like his character on \u201cThe Office,\u201d essentially useless as the head of customer relations. The 10th season premiere of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM follows at 10:30.",
        "author": "By Sara Aridi"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Sunday: \u2018Avenue 5\u2019 and \u20189-1-1: Lone Star\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "156",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/arts/television/whats-on-tv-sunday-avenue-5-and-9-1-1-lone-star.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s a night of premieres: A space tourism comedy debuts on HBO, a \u201c9-1-1\u201d spinoff comes to Fox, and a mystery series arrives on PBS. It\u2019s a night of premieres: A space tourism comedy debuts on HBO, a \u201c9-1-1\u201d spinoff comes to Fox, and a mystery series arrives on PBS. AVENUE 5 10 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. Armando Iannucci, the creator of \u201cVeep,\u201d returns to HBO with this new black comedy starring Hugh Laurie. Set 40 years in the future, the show takes place on Avenue 5, a luxury space cruise ship that has taken off for an eight-week journey around Saturn. The experience is exquisite, for a moment. Then the ship\u2019s system malfunctions and sets it off course, leading to delirium onboard. As the fate of the ship remains up in the air, disgruntled passengers demand answers from the captain (Laurie) and his ill-equipped crew. Josh Gad plays the clueless billionaire who owns the ship; Suzy Nakamura is his stern right-hand woman; and Zach Woods is, like his character on \u201cThe Office,\u201d essentially useless as the head of customer relations. The 10th season premiere of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM follows at 10:30.",
        "author": "By Sara Aridi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mickey Kapp, Who Made Mixtapes for Astronauts, Dies at 88 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "157",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/arts/music/mickey-kapp-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Kapp, a record producer, became the unofficial music provider to the space-bound after forging an unlikely connection with members of the Mercury 7 crew. Mr. Kapp, a record producer, became the unofficial music provider to the space-bound after forging an unlikely connection with members of the Mercury 7 crew. Mickey Kapp, a record producer who, after forging a somewhat improbable connection with several Mercury 7 astronauts, went on to provide later space explorers with customized mixtapes to listen to during their historic flights, died on June 11 at his home in Carmel, Calif. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mickey Kapp, Who Made Mixtapes for Astronauts, Dies at 88 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "158",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/arts/music/mickey-kapp-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Kapp, a record producer, became the unofficial music provider to the space-bound after forging an unlikely connection with members of the Mercury 7 crew. Mr. Kapp, a record producer, became the unofficial music provider to the space-bound after forging an unlikely connection with members of the Mercury 7 crew. Mickey Kapp, a record producer who, after forging a somewhat improbable connection with several Mercury 7 astronauts, went on to provide later space explorers with customized mixtapes to listen to during their historic flights, died on June 11 at his home in Carmel, Calif. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geoffrey Rush Loves to Play Rogues and Fools. A Genius, Too. (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "159",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/arts/television/geoffrey-rush-loves-to-play-rogues-and-fools-a-genius-too.html",
        "text": "He talks about portraying historical figures like Einstein and his fresh turn as Barbossa in \u201cPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.\u201d He talks about portraying historical figures like Einstein and his fresh turn as Barbossa in \u201cPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.\u201d Before he caught the acting bug, Geoffrey Rush fancied himself something of a cosmologist, obsessed by space exploration and diligently studying math, physics and chemistry.",
        "author": "By Kathryn Shattuck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geoffrey Rush Loves to Play Rogues and Fools. A Genius, Too. (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "160",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/arts/television/geoffrey-rush-loves-to-play-rogues-and-fools-a-genius-too.html",
        "text": "He talks about portraying historical figures like Einstein and his fresh turn as Barbossa in \u201cPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.\u201d He talks about portraying historical figures like Einstein and his fresh turn as Barbossa in \u201cPirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.\u201d Before he caught the acting bug, Geoffrey Rush fancied himself something of a cosmologist, obsessed by space exploration and diligently studying math, physics and chemistry.",
        "author": "By Kathryn Shattuck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tavares Strachan Teams With SpaceX to Launch Satellite-Sculpture Into Orbit (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "161",
        "date": "2018-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/arts/design/spacex-enoch-tavares-strachan.html",
        "text": "The object, made of 24-karat gold, honors Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American to train as an astronaut. The object, made of 24-karat gold, honors Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American to train as an astronaut. Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. never made it on a space mission. The first African-American to train as an astronaut with NASA, he died in a supersonic jet crash in 1967, at the age of 32. But the artist Tavares Strachan is getting ready to send the astronaut into space in a manner, to honor his legacy.",
        "author": "By Jori Finkel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tavares Strachan Teams With SpaceX to Launch Satellite-Sculpture Into Orbit (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "162",
        "date": "2018-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/arts/design/spacex-enoch-tavares-strachan.html",
        "text": "The object, made of 24-karat gold, honors Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American to train as an astronaut. The object, made of 24-karat gold, honors Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American to train as an astronaut. Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. never made it on a space mission. The first African-American to train as an astronaut with NASA, he died in a supersonic jet crash in 1967, at the age of 32. But the artist Tavares Strachan is getting ready to send the astronaut into space in a manner, to honor his legacy.",
        "author": "By Jori Finkel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Art Rises in the Saudi Desert, Shadowed by Politics (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "163",
        "date": "2020-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/arts/design/Desert-X-AlUla-saudi-arabia.html",
        "text": "Some artists say Desert X AlUla is a step toward changing Saudi society. Critics call the government-funded exhibition \u201cmorally corrupt.\u201d Some artists say Desert X AlUla is a step toward changing Saudi society. Critics call the government-funded exhibition \u201cmorally corrupt.\u201d AL ULA, Saudi Arabia \u2014 The Coachella art crowd had arrived in the Saudi desert, and chic caftans in head-turning colors outnumbered abayas on the sand. At a buffet ornamented with cantaloupes carved in the shape of flowers, waiters tended a fresh-squeezed juice station and rows of dainty canap\u00e9s. Across the gold-and-russet sandstone canyon, the brawny rock formations sprouted contemporary art: an iridescent spaceshiplike sculpture, a glinting metal tunnel, a scattering of brightly painted spheres.",
        "author": "By Vivian Yee"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Thursday: \u2018High Life\u2019 and the iHeartRadio Music Festival (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "164",
        "date": "2019-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/arts/whats-on-tv-thursday-high-life-and-the-iheartradio-music-festival.html",
        "text": "Claire Denis\u2019s \u201cHigh Life\u201d is streaming on Amazon. And performances from Chance the Rapper, Alicia Keys and more air on the CW. Claire Denis\u2019s \u201cHigh Life\u201d is streaming on Amazon. And performances from Chance the Rapper, Alicia Keys and more air on the CW. HIGH LIFE (2019) Stream on Amazon; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The French director Claire Denis is known for making independent movies that tell intimate, personal stories. But on paper, her first English-language film, \u201cHigh Life,\u201d doesn\u2019t necessarily shout \u201cintimate.\u201d It\u2019s a sci-fi movie, for one thing, and it accordingly takes place in about the most vast setting possible: space. Robert Pattinson stars as Monte, a young man who has agreed to participate in an extraterrestrial mission in order to avoid the death penalty. He\u2019s traveling on a spaceship as part of a small criminal crew, bound for a black hole in deep space. Also on the ship is a troubled doctor played by Juliette Binoche; other crew members are played by Lars Eidinger and the musician Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. Their mission is derailed, in part, by an unexpected birth. \u201cAs is often the case in Denis\u2019s movies, \u2018High Life\u2019 vibrates with low-key erotic energy that can feel exciting, a little dangerous,\u201d Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. \u201cBut,\u201d she added, \u201ctoo often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard \u2014 outer and inner space, Pattinson\u2019s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then \u2014 more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.\u201d",
        "author": "By Gabe Cohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Thursday: \u2018High Life\u2019 and the iHeartRadio Music Festival (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "165",
        "date": "2019-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/arts/whats-on-tv-thursday-high-life-and-the-iheartradio-music-festival.html",
        "text": "Claire Denis\u2019s \u201cHigh Life\u201d is streaming on Amazon. And performances from Chance the Rapper, Alicia Keys and more air on the CW. Claire Denis\u2019s \u201cHigh Life\u201d is streaming on Amazon. And performances from Chance the Rapper, Alicia Keys and more air on the CW. HIGH LIFE (2019) Stream on Amazon; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. The French director Claire Denis is known for making independent movies that tell intimate, personal stories. But on paper, her first English-language film, \u201cHigh Life,\u201d doesn\u2019t necessarily shout \u201cintimate.\u201d It\u2019s a sci-fi movie, for one thing, and it accordingly takes place in about the most vast setting possible: space. Robert Pattinson stars as Monte, a young man who has agreed to participate in an extraterrestrial mission in order to avoid the death penalty. He\u2019s traveling on a spaceship as part of a small criminal crew, bound for a black hole in deep space. Also on the ship is a troubled doctor played by Juliette Binoche; other crew members are played by Lars Eidinger and the musician Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. Their mission is derailed, in part, by an unexpected birth. \u201cAs is often the case in Denis\u2019s movies, \u2018High Life\u2019 vibrates with low-key erotic energy that can feel exciting, a little dangerous,\u201d Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. \u201cBut,\u201d she added, \u201ctoo often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard \u2014 outer and inner space, Pattinson\u2019s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then \u2014 more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.\u201d",
        "author": "By Gabe Cohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: HBO\u2019s \u2018Avenue 5,\u2019 a Tale of a Fateful Trip (in Space) (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "166",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/arts/television/avenue-5-review-hbo.html",
        "text": "Armando Iannucci\u2019s new comedy, starring Hugh Laurie as the captain of an interplanetary cruise ship, is a long, long way from \u201cVeep.\u201d Armando Iannucci\u2019s new comedy, starring Hugh Laurie as the captain of an interplanetary cruise ship, is a long, long way from \u201cVeep.\u201d How far is Armando Iannucci\u2019s new HBO comedy, \u201cAvenue 5,\u201d from his previous one, \u201cVeep\u201d? About a billion miles, give or take, or the distance from earth to Saturn, where the spaceship of the title is thrown off course, greatly increasing the time its load of unlucky tourists will have to spend on their interplanetary cruise.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Architect of \u2018Concrete Acrobatics,\u2019 Dies at 92 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "167",
        "date": "2021-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/arts/design/paulo-mendes-da-rocha-dead.html",
        "text": "A Pritzker Prize winner, he was known for a muscular style often called Brazilian Brutalism, but he had a lighter touch than that label implies. A Pritzker Prize winner, he was known for a muscular style often called Brazilian Brutalism, but he had a lighter touch than that label implies. Paulo Mendes da Rocha was only 30 when he built his first major building, the Paulistano Athletic Club, in his hometown, S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil. A giant concrete disk atop wedge-shaped struts of the same gutsy material, it looked like a spaceship ready to blast off.",
        "author": "By Penelope Green"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Mandalorian\u2019 Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Hard-Boiled (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "168",
        "date": "2020-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/arts/television/mandalorian-recap-episode-2.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s episode was pure fun: 40 minutes of chase scenes, battles with giant spiders and some of the show\u2019s funniest gags to date. This week\u2019s episode was pure fun: 40 minutes of chase scenes, battles with giant spiders and some of the show\u2019s funniest gags to date. A big part of what makes the \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe so enchanting is that all its crazy creatures, robots and spacecraft have a real physical presence on-screen. Starting with the first movie in 1977, the Lucasfilm effects team has worked magic with practical effects, creating worlds where the vehicles sputter and shake, the droids creak and clank, and the aliens cast imposing shadows. Everyone and everything seems bound by the laws of gravity. That makes the action sequences more nail-biting and gives the comedy more slapstick sting.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Mandalorian\u2019 Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Hard-Boiled (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "169",
        "date": "2020-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/arts/television/mandalorian-recap-episode-2.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s episode was pure fun: 40 minutes of chase scenes, battles with giant spiders and some of the show\u2019s funniest gags to date. This week\u2019s episode was pure fun: 40 minutes of chase scenes, battles with giant spiders and some of the show\u2019s funniest gags to date. A big part of what makes the \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe so enchanting is that all its crazy creatures, robots and spacecraft have a real physical presence on-screen. Starting with the first movie in 1977, the Lucasfilm effects team has worked magic with practical effects, creating worlds where the vehicles sputter and shake, the droids creak and clank, and the aliens cast imposing shadows. Everyone and everything seems bound by the laws of gravity. That makes the action sequences more nail-biting and gives the comedy more slapstick sting.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Wednesday: \u2018Archer\u2019 and \u2018The InBetween\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "170",
        "date": "2019-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/arts/television/whats-on-tv-wednesday-archer-and-the-inbetween.html",
        "text": "\u201cArcher\u201d returns on FXX. And a new NBC drama centers on a crime-solving psychic. \u201cArcher\u201d returns on FXX. And a new NBC drama centers on a crime-solving psychic. ARCHER 10 p.m. on FXX. While this ribald animated comedy series made a name for itself as a foul-mouthed spy movie riff, the last two seasons have transposed its characters \u2014 a group of libidinous secret agents turned libidinous private investigators \u2014 into alternate realities. Season 8 imagined them as characters in a noir mystery in late-40s Los Angeles. Season 9 reinvented them on a mysterious island in the late-30s. Season 10, which carries the title \u201cArcher: 1999\u201d and debuts Wednesday night, takes its cues from vintage sci-fi. It belches the characters into the cosmos, where Archer (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) and Lana (Aisha Tyler) are imagined as a recently divorced couple who command a spacecraft. ",
        "author": "By Gabe Cohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "After \u2018Site Wars,\u2019 Lucas Museum to Land Near Space Shuttle in Los Angeles (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "171",
        "date": "2017-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/arts/design/george-lucas-will-open-museum-of-narrative-art-in-los-angeles.html",
        "text": "The \u201cStar Wars\u201d creator\u2019s decision ended San Francisco\u2019s bid for the project, which is expected to bring thousands of construction and museum jobs. The \u201cStar Wars\u201d creator\u2019s decision ended San Francisco\u2019s bid for the project, which is expected to bring thousands of construction and museum jobs. LOS ANGELES \u2014 When George Lucas spoke to Mayor Eric Garcetti about opening his Museum of Narrative Art here in Exposition Park, the filmmaker said he was captivated by the potential of being just steps away from a bevy of other museums. The California Science Center would be just next door, housing the Endeavor Space Shuttle.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Medina"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Borderline\u2019 Is Rigged, to Fantastic Effect (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "172",
        "date": "2018-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/arts/dance/borderline-review-company-wang-ramirez.html",
        "text": "Wires suspend the dancers, and our disbelief, in this premiere by Company Wang Ramirez. Wires suspend the dancers, and our disbelief, in this premiere by Company Wang Ramirez. Fred Astaire merely danced up the walls and across the ceiling. S\u00e9bastien Ramirez acts more like a superhero. Slowly pedaling his legs in the air, the French hip-hop choreographer could be an astronaut walking in outer space.",
        "author": "By Brian Seibert"
    },
    {
        "title": "8 Comic Books in Honor of Pride (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "173",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/arts/lgbt-comic-books-pride.html",
        "text": "Romance, self-discovery and a celebration of identity: Magic is in the air in these comic books and graphic novels, out now through September. Romance, self-discovery and a celebration of identity: Magic is in the air in these comic books and graphic novels, out now through September. These comic books and graphic novels tell stories that will transport readers to various worlds, from elementary school to outer space. They feature characters discovering themselves, relationship challenges and a new take on a legendary hero. All include characters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Happy Pride!",
        "author": "By George Gene Gustines"
    },
    {
        "title": "8 Comic Books in Honor of Pride (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "174",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/arts/lgbt-comic-books-pride.html",
        "text": "Romance, self-discovery and a celebration of identity: Magic is in the air in these comic books and graphic novels, out now through September. Romance, self-discovery and a celebration of identity: Magic is in the air in these comic books and graphic novels, out now through September. These comic books and graphic novels tell stories that will transport readers to various worlds, from elementary school to outer space. They feature characters discovering themselves, relationship challenges and a new take on a legendary hero. All include characters who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Happy Pride!",
        "author": "By George Gene Gustines"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Saturday: Movies About the Moon Landing (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "175",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/arts/television/whats-on-tv-saturday-movies-about-the-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with \u201cFirst Man,\u201d \u201cFor All Mankind\u201d and more. Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with \u201cFirst Man,\u201d \u201cFor All Mankind\u201d and more. FIRST MAN (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. While this Oscar-winning drama about Neil Armstrong touches on the space race and the political issues the moon landing raised at home, it focuses on the personal and professional setbacks Armstrong overcame before taking that small step in 1969. \u201cFeelings are the film\u2019s fuel,\u201d A.O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review. \u201cLike some of the ancient epics \u2018First Man\u2019 is primarily a character study, a space odyssey with a diffident and enigmatic Ulysses at its center.\" Ryan Gosling, collaborating with \u201cLa La Land\u201d director Damien Chazelle for the second time, portrays the astronaut in the years leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. The screenplay draws from James R. Hansen\u2019s biography and contrasts Armstrong\u2019s reserved, hard-to-read temperament with the larger-than-life job he has shouldered. We watch as he and his wife (Claire Foy) grieve over the loss of their daughter, prepare for the launch and wrestle with the fact that Armstrong could go down in history as the first man to walk on the moon \u2014 or perish in outer space. ",
        "author": "By Sara Aridi"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Saturday: Movies About the Moon Landing (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "176",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/arts/television/whats-on-tv-saturday-movies-about-the-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with \u201cFirst Man,\u201d \u201cFor All Mankind\u201d and more. Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing with \u201cFirst Man,\u201d \u201cFor All Mankind\u201d and more. FIRST MAN (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. While this Oscar-winning drama about Neil Armstrong touches on the space race and the political issues the moon landing raised at home, it focuses on the personal and professional setbacks Armstrong overcame before taking that small step in 1969. \u201cFeelings are the film\u2019s fuel,\u201d A.O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review. \u201cLike some of the ancient epics \u2018First Man\u2019 is primarily a character study, a space odyssey with a diffident and enigmatic Ulysses at its center.\" Ryan Gosling, collaborating with \u201cLa La Land\u201d director Damien Chazelle for the second time, portrays the astronaut in the years leading up to the Apollo 11 launch. The screenplay draws from James R. Hansen\u2019s biography and contrasts Armstrong\u2019s reserved, hard-to-read temperament with the larger-than-life job he has shouldered. We watch as he and his wife (Claire Foy) grieve over the loss of their daughter, prepare for the launch and wrestle with the fact that Armstrong could go down in history as the first man to walk on the moon \u2014 or perish in outer space. ",
        "author": "By Sara Aridi"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in November (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "177",
        "date": "2019-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/arts/television/australia-netflix-amazon-stan-november.html",
        "text": "Our picks for November, including The Queen, Queer Eye and Catastrophe Our picks for November, including The Queen, Queer Eye and Catastrophe Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for November.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in November (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "178",
        "date": "2019-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/arts/television/australia-netflix-amazon-stan-november.html",
        "text": "Our picks for November, including The Queen, Queer Eye and Catastrophe Our picks for November, including The Queen, Queer Eye and Catastrophe Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for November.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018The Dark Side of the Sun,\u2019 and, by the Way, We\u2019re Doomed (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "179",
        "date": "2017-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/arts/television/review-the-dark-side-of-the-sun-and-by-the-way-were-doomed.html",
        "text": "This documentary on the Science Channel reminds us about the inevitable catastrophe we will face the next time there are huge solar winds. This documentary on the Science Channel reminds us about the inevitable catastrophe we will face the next time there are huge solar winds. Americans\u2019 fears of nuclear annihilation well up every few decades. Early 1960s: the Cuban missile crisis. 1980s: the Soviet Union\u2019s reaction to the \u201cStar Wars\u201d defense plan. Now: \u201cWe\u2019re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years, there\u2019s no doubt about that\u201d \u2014 Stephen K. Bannon.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018The Dark Side of the Sun,\u2019 and, by the Way, We\u2019re Doomed (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "180",
        "date": "2017-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/arts/television/review-the-dark-side-of-the-sun-and-by-the-way-were-doomed.html",
        "text": "This documentary on the Science Channel reminds us about the inevitable catastrophe we will face the next time there are huge solar winds. This documentary on the Science Channel reminds us about the inevitable catastrophe we will face the next time there are huge solar winds. Americans\u2019 fears of nuclear annihilation well up every few decades. Early 1960s: the Cuban missile crisis. 1980s: the Soviet Union\u2019s reaction to the \u201cStar Wars\u201d defense plan. Now: \u201cWe\u2019re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years, there\u2019s no doubt about that\u201d \u2014 Stephen K. Bannon.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Falcon and the Winter Soldier\u2019 Is Marvel\u2019s Latest Double Act (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "181",
        "date": "2021-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/arts/television/falcon-winter-soldier-disney.html",
        "text": "The new Disney+ series, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, uses its superheroes to examine a world still on edge after a global catastrophe. The new Disney+ series, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, uses its superheroes to examine a world still on edge after a global catastrophe. When Anthony Mackie got the call that the executives at Marvel Studios wanted to meet with him shortly after the release of the 2019 superhero blockbuster \u201cAvengers: Endgame,\u201d he figured he was either getting a new gig or getting fired.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Falcon and the Winter Soldier\u2019 Is Marvel\u2019s Latest Double Act (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "182",
        "date": "2021-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/arts/television/falcon-winter-soldier-disney.html",
        "text": "The new Disney+ series, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, uses its superheroes to examine a world still on edge after a global catastrophe. The new Disney+ series, starring Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, uses its superheroes to examine a world still on edge after a global catastrophe. When Anthony Mackie got the call that the executives at Marvel Studios wanted to meet with him shortly after the release of the 2019 superhero blockbuster \u201cAvengers: Endgame,\u201d he figured he was either getting a new gig or getting fired.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson Denies Misconduct Accusations (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "183",
        "date": "2018-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/arts/neil-degrasse-tyson-sexual-misconduct.html",
        "text": "In a lengthy Facebook post responding to three women\u2019s accounts, the well-known astrophysicist described two as benign and suggested the third did not occur. In a lengthy Facebook post responding to three women\u2019s accounts, the well-known astrophysicist described two as benign and suggested the third did not occur. In a lengthy Facebook post on Saturday, the well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson disputed accounts that he had behaved inappropriately with three women, a day after the broadcasters of his show \u201cCosmos\u201d said they were investigating his conduct.",
        "author": "By Elizabeth A. Harris"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Friday: \u2018Catastrophe\u2019 and \u2018Dear White People\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "184",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/arts/television/whats-on-tv-friday-catastrophe-and-dear-white-people.html",
        "text": "Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney pick up where they left off in Season 3 of the deliriously filthy comedy \u201cCatastrophe.\u201d And \u201cDear White People\u201d becomes a TV series. Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney pick up where they left off in Season 3 of the deliriously filthy comedy \u201cCatastrophe.\u201d And \u201cDear White People\u201d becomes a TV series. \u201cCatastrophe\u201d returns for a third season in the delightfully smutty marriage between the alter egos of Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney. And \u201cDear White People\u201d brings Justin Simien\u2019s film about race relations in academia to television \u2014 and survives.",
        "author": "By Kathryn Shattuck"
    },
    {
        "title": "On This Cooking Show, the Ingredients Make You High (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "185",
        "date": "2019-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/arts/television/high-cuisine-dutch-tv.html",
        "text": "In the Dutch TV show \u201cHigh Cuisine,\u201d two chefs use mind-altering ingredients to create truly gastronomic cuisine. In the Dutch TV show \u201cHigh Cuisine,\u201d two chefs use mind-altering ingredients to create truly gastronomic cuisine. AMSTERDAM \u2014 Edibles is the word most often used for foods that make marijuana and other hallucinogens go down easy. Think pot brownies and space cakes \u2014 not exactly famous for pleasing the palate.",
        "author": "By Nina Siegal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Is Dry, Obscure, Complex? Well, It Makes for Great Comedy (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "186",
        "date": "2017-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/arts/science-podcasts-youre-the-expert-startalk.html",
        "text": "In podcasts and live shows, comedians are extracting the funny from astronomy, climate change and even the physics behind urinal cakes. In podcasts and live shows, comedians are extracting the funny from astronomy, climate change and even the physics behind urinal cakes. Jackie Faherty hates when brown dwarfs \u2014 astronomical objects with masses outweighing those of planets \u2014 are called \u201cfailed stars.\u201d",
        "author": "By Sonia Weiser"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Is Dry, Obscure, Complex? Well, It Makes for Great Comedy (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "187",
        "date": "2017-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/arts/science-podcasts-youre-the-expert-startalk.html",
        "text": "In podcasts and live shows, comedians are extracting the funny from astronomy, climate change and even the physics behind urinal cakes. In podcasts and live shows, comedians are extracting the funny from astronomy, climate change and even the physics behind urinal cakes. Jackie Faherty hates when brown dwarfs \u2014 astronomical objects with masses outweighing those of planets \u2014 are called \u201cfailed stars.\u201d",
        "author": "By Sonia Weiser"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Paint an Eclipse? Work Fast in the Dark (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "188",
        "date": "2017-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/arts/design/eclipse-painter-astronomer-.html",
        "text": "In 1918, astronomers invited the artist Howard Russell Butler to record the last total solar eclipse to cross the continental United States. In 1918, astronomers invited the artist Howard Russell Butler to record the last total solar eclipse to cross the continental United States. PRINCETON, N.J. \u2014 A third of the way through \u201cMacbeth,\u201d right after the antihero murders the king of Scotland, two noblemen look up into the sky and behold a celestial horror. \u201cBy the clock, \u2019tis day,\u201d says the Thane of Ross, \u201cAnd yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.\u201d The sun has been blotted out over the Highlands, and Ross has a sense of why; the political has become astronomical, and crimes on earth are reflected above.",
        "author": "By Jason Farago"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Sean Penn Has Space Suit, May Travel in \u2018The First\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "189",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/arts/television/the-first-review-sean-penn.html",
        "text": "The two-time Oscar winner stars in his first series, playing a Mars-bound astronaut in a Hulu production from the creator of \u201cHouse of Cards.\u201d The two-time Oscar winner stars in his first series, playing a Mars-bound astronaut in a Hulu production from the creator of \u201cHouse of Cards.\u201d The five astronauts of \u201cThe First,\u201d when they finally set off for Mars, have the usual payload of scientific experiments and shiny wrenches casually cartwheeling through zero gravity. They also carry another cargo, particular to the series: guilt, recrimination and depression, built up through eight episodes of stylish but tedious and formulaic family drama.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Sean Penn Has Space Suit, May Travel in \u2018The First\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "190",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/arts/television/the-first-review-sean-penn.html",
        "text": "The two-time Oscar winner stars in his first series, playing a Mars-bound astronaut in a Hulu production from the creator of \u201cHouse of Cards.\u201d The two-time Oscar winner stars in his first series, playing a Mars-bound astronaut in a Hulu production from the creator of \u201cHouse of Cards.\u201d The five astronauts of \u201cThe First,\u201d when they finally set off for Mars, have the usual payload of scientific experiments and shiny wrenches casually cartwheeling through zero gravity. They also carry another cargo, particular to the series: guilt, recrimination and depression, built up through eight episodes of stylish but tedious and formulaic family drama.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Gives $200 Million to National Air and Space Museum (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "191",
        "date": "2021-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/arts/design/jeff-bezos-200-million-national-air-and-space-museum.html",
        "text": "The donation will finance renovations and a new learning center at the Smithsonian museum on the National Mall. The donation will finance renovations and a new learning center at the Smithsonian museum on the National Mall. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and himself a budding astronaut, is giving $200 million to the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian said Wednesday. The Smithsonian said the donation is its biggest philanthropic gift since the Institution\u2019s founding gift from James Smithson, in 1846.",
        "author": "By Graham Bowley"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Space Odyssey: Making Art Up There (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "192",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/arts/design/eduardo-kac-inner-telescope-space.html",
        "text": "The artist Eduardo Kac and Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman on the International Space Station, have created art in space. The artist Eduardo Kac and Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman on the International Space Station, have created art in space. If you\u2019re an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, you spend much of your time running science experiments. Among the jobs for Thomas Pesquet, a 39-year-old Frenchman currently there on a six-month stint: using virtual reality to gauge the effects of zero gravity on his hand-eye coordination, trying out a suit designed to keep weightlessness from stretching out his spine, analyzing the microbes in his water and directing a robot in the Netherlands from about 240 miles up. In his spare time, he posts photos on Twitter and Instagram of what\u2019s passing beneath him: Mount Etna erupting, the artificial islands of Dubai, the Australian Outback, the entire country of Denmark.",
        "author": "By Frank Rose"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Space Odyssey: Making Art Up There (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "193",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/arts/design/eduardo-kac-inner-telescope-space.html",
        "text": "The artist Eduardo Kac and Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman on the International Space Station, have created art in space. The artist Eduardo Kac and Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman on the International Space Station, have created art in space. If you\u2019re an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, you spend much of your time running science experiments. Among the jobs for Thomas Pesquet, a 39-year-old Frenchman currently there on a six-month stint: using virtual reality to gauge the effects of zero gravity on his hand-eye coordination, trying out a suit designed to keep weightlessness from stretching out his spine, analyzing the microbes in his water and directing a robot in the Netherlands from about 240 miles up. In his spare time, he posts photos on Twitter and Instagram of what\u2019s passing beneath him: Mount Etna erupting, the artificial islands of Dubai, the Australian Outback, the entire country of Denmark.",
        "author": "By Frank Rose"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Sits for Its Portrait (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "194",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/arts/design/apollos-muse-moon-metropolitan-museum-review.html",
        "text": "A trailblazing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum explores our fascination with the moon, from the first time Galileo trained his telescope on it to the present. A trailblazing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum explores our fascination with the moon, from the first time Galileo trained his telescope on it to the present. Century after century, the moon adamantly refused to give up its secrets. The ancient Greeks and Romans generally considered it pristine, smooth and white, but did not have a good explanation for the dirty spots on its face that were visible to human eyes. Then, around 90 A.D., Plutarch wrote that those blemishes were the shadows of mountains and valleys and that the moon must be habitable. ",
        "author": "By Vicki Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Sits for Its Portrait (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "195",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/arts/design/apollos-muse-moon-metropolitan-museum-review.html",
        "text": "A trailblazing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum explores our fascination with the moon, from the first time Galileo trained his telescope on it to the present. A trailblazing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum explores our fascination with the moon, from the first time Galileo trained his telescope on it to the present. Century after century, the moon adamantly refused to give up its secrets. The ancient Greeks and Romans generally considered it pristine, smooth and white, but did not have a good explanation for the dirty spots on its face that were visible to human eyes. Then, around 90 A.D., Plutarch wrote that those blemishes were the shadows of mountains and valleys and that the moon must be habitable. ",
        "author": "By Vicki Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 command  takes off for 4-city tour through 2019 (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "196",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/02/22/apollo-11-command-takes-off-for-4-city-tour-through-2019/",
        "text": "The Smithsonian\u2019s prized Apollo 11 command module will leave the National Air and Space Museum for the first time in 46 years when it becomes the star attraction of a two-year, four-city touring exhibition, \u201cDestination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe module Columbia \u2013 the only piece of the spacecraft to complete the first mission to land a man on the moon and return him to Earth \u2013 will be the centerpiece of the exhibition that will open Oct. 14 in Houston before moving to St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Seattle. The artifacts will be on the road for the first part of a planned, multi-year renovation of the Air and Space Museum and for the 50th anniversary of the historic mission.Story continues below advertisement[Air and Space Museum\u2019s makeover estimated at $1 billion]\u201cIt did things that up until then were hardly imaginable, and it stoked tremendous excitement about the possibilities of technology in the future,\u201d Smithsonian Secretary David J. Skorton said about the Apollo 11 mission. The traveling exhibition will allow the museum \u201cto reach out to the much greater number of people in their hometowns, in their communities, so they can share the magic of the Smithsonian.\u201dAdvertisementMore than 20 objects associated with the mission and its crew members Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin will be part of the exhibition, according to Senior Curator Michael J. Neufeld. They include Aldrin\u2019s extravehicular gloves,, a medical kit, a \u201crock box\u201d used to bring back the first samples of the moon and Collins\u2019s chronograph.Story continues below advertisementThe Columbia had been on view at the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall from its opening in 1976 until last December, when it was moved to the conservation lab at the museum\u2019s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. It will be studied, conserved and stabilized for nine months before the national tour begins at the Space Center Houston.The exhibition will then travel to the Saint Louis Science Center from April 14-Sept. 3 2018 and to the Senator John Heinz History Center from Sept. 29, 2018-Feb. 18, 2019. It will be at the Museum of Flight in Seattle from March to Sept. 2, 2019, where it will celebrate the mission\u2019s 50th anniversary.AdvertisementBefore it entered the museum\u2019s collection, the Columbia command module toured all 50 states in 1970 and 1971, covering more than 26,000 miles. It then went on view in the Smithsonian\u2019s Arts and Industries Building before the current Air and Space Museum opened. \u00a0Its tour coincides with the planned start of a major renovation of the building on the Mall.Story continues below advertisementMuseum officials have engineered a special traveling crate for this four-city tour. The module and its exhibition case weigh more than 13,000 pounds.The museum will host an \u201cApollo on the Move\u201d celebration at Udvar-Hazy on March 4 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. \u00a0Visitors will be allowed inside the restoration hangar to meet staff and view the other conservation projects. Special movie screenings and family-friendly programs will highlight the event. The exhibition will visit Houston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Seattle, bringing more than 20 artifacts associated with the historic moon landing. Apollo 11 command  takes off for 4-city tour through 2019",
        "author": "Peggy McGlone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "197",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/the-most-stirring-photo-from-the-apollo-mission-wasnt-of-the-moon-it-was-of-the-earth/2019/07/15/a0bb71a4-a345-11e9-b8c8-75dae2607e60_story.html",
        "text": "The most important visual image associated with the moon landing of July 20, 1969, was not any picture of the landing itself. It was the photograph taken on Christmas Eve the previous year, 1968, when William Anders, an astronaut aboard Apollo 8, responding to mission commander Frank Borman\u2019s astonishment, grabbed a Hasselblad camera and photographed the Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOur planet, a quarter of a million miles away, had just appeared over the lunar horizon.The image, which became known as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d would go on to be a symbol of the environmentalist movement and a great rearranger of human priorities.A similar photograph had been taken two years earlier and was widely disseminated, but it didn\u2019t grip the imagination the same way. It was in black-and-white, which meant the shock of the Earth\u2019s blueness against the vast black of space couldn\u2019t register. And it was taken by a remotely controlled camera on board Lunar Orbiter 1 \u2014 one of five NASA probes which systematically photographed 99 percent of the moon\u2019s surface between 1966 and 1967.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEarthrise,\u201d the Apollo 8 image, was in color, and just as crucially, it was taken by an astronaut. Anders was there, alongside Borman and Jim Lovell, seeing what the camera saw. That made all the difference.\u201cIt was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life,\u201d Borman recalled, \u201cone that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was either black or white, but not the Earth.\u201dRelated coverage: 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11The Earth\u2019s sudden appearance from behind a moon magnified by proximity \u201cwas nothing short of a revelation,\u201d Mia Fineman wrote in the catalogue to \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,\u201d an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But what, exactly, was being revealed?The history of art (which surely includes photography) is a history of human desire. It\u2019s a history of the things we want to see, the things we want to show, and how we have wanted to see and show them. The moon, which has always been with us, deserves a prominent place in this history. Both \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse\u201d and \u201cBy the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs\u201d at the National Gallery of Art trace the waxing of our desire for lunar images since the 19th century.But it\u2019s interesting to think about what happens within art history \u2014 as within any marriage \u2014 when desire wanes, and priorities are rearranged. How much, we might ask, do we love the moon now, compared with 50 or 60 years ago?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeeing it then was something people acutely desired. They wanted it so badly that their desire pushed human ingenuity to astonishing new levels, producing a cascade of indelible images in the process.People wanted these images in the first place because the moon is mysterious. It always has been. More pressingly, they wanted them because, in the context of the Space Race and the Cold War, uncovering the secrets of the moon spoke to their pride and to the demands of winning a war of propaganda. They wanted it, finally, because it was a distraction from thinking about an explosion of racial and generational turmoil at home, and from the unfolding disaster in Vietnam, where, by 1969, U.S. troop levels stood at just under half a million, with victory looking ever more elusive, ever harder to envisage.Unlike the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementImagine an object of desire coming toward you, getting closer. (But not in person \u2014 just as a series of images.) First it appears as a distant disc, pale and flat, ripe for fantasy and projection. Suddenly it is a recognizable shape, with markings, like a cuneiform tablet or perhaps a face, getting bigger and bigger until, magnified now, it fills the frame, a voluptuous, surprisingly textured figure with volumes, protuberances and hollows.Listen on Post Reports: Sebastian Smee on an iconic photo of Mother Earth.That must have been what it was like for the global public in the 1960s as spacecraft captured images that took us closer and closer to the moon. There was something almost erotic about it: a lunar striptease.The Soviets had led the way. They had sent a dog into space, then a man, then a woman. All by 1963. Even before that, in September 1959, one of their probes, Luna 2, had become the first human-made object to touch the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUp until that point, no one had seen the dark side of the moon \u2014 the side that, because the moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits around the Earth, had always remained maddeningly invisible, like the back of your head in a world without mirrors. But about a month after Luna 2 struck the moon\u2019s surface, the Soviets launched Luna 3. Equipped with a dual-lens 35mm camera and an onboard image-processing system, the probe produced 20 photographs that capture nearly three-quarters of the moon\u2019s unmapped \u201cdark side.\u201dOne of those images, released by the usually secretive Soviets, is in the Metropolitan Museum\u2019s show and reprinted in the catalogue. Blurry and marked up with annotations, it marks, Fineman wrote, \u201ca groundbreaking moment in the history of visual culture.\u201dAlso in the history of desire. It was almost 10 years (and 16 No. 1 hits by the Beatles) before Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, allowing Anders to take \u201cEarthrise.\u201dReview: The Imax documentary \u2018Apollo 11\u2019 is a virtual round-trip ticket to the moonOur desire for the moon was waxing at that point. Since then, inevitably, it has waned. \u201cEarthrise\u201d \u2014 despite being temporarily eclipsed by those extraordinary images (the foot print, the flag-planting) of the moon landing the following year \u2014 was the turning point.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can sense the change in the words of Anders and Borman, brave astronauts who, having almost reached their hearts\u2019 desire, found themselves afflicted by \u201ca torrent of nostalgia,\u201d something almost like remorse.Said Anders: \u201cOur Earth was quite colorful, pretty, and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we\u2019d come 240,000 miles to see the moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at.\u201dToday, the wisdom latent in Anders\u2019s words is obvious. Humans have created an emergency here on Earth and need, more than anything, to solve the problem of how to be at home where we are. For all that we can do in space, we have learned enough to understand that nowhere within reach is sensibly habitable.Story continues below advertisementCertainly, nowhere else is as beautiful, as desirable. \u201cPeople from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us,\u201d Iris Murdoch wrote. And she is, of course, right.\u201cEarthrise\u201d is an image of our planet without national borders, without hierarchies, without even a right side up (the photograph as it was taken shows the moon as a vertical line on the right; it was turned on its side for publication to make it read more like an earthly horizon). It shows the Earth very far away, but \u2014 in the bigger scale of things \u2014 proximate, fragile, contingent, like the child you wave to on the other side of the departures gate.When \u201cEarthrise\u201d appeared, it inspired an essay, published on the front page of the New York Times on Christmas Day 1968 by the poet Archibald MacLeish, a veteran of World War I: \u201cTo see the earth as it truly is,\u201d he wrote, \u201csmall and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold \u2014 brothers who know now they are truly brothers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow, I wonder, must this have sounded to the soldiers fighting in Vietnam, at the height of that war? MacLeish, as a veteran of war, may well have been thinking of them.Worth noting, too, is that Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s \u201cSlaughterhouse-Five\u201d came out between the taking of \u201cEarthrise\u201d and the moon landing, and shortly before an atrocious, futile battle was fought over Hill 937 in Vietnam, dubbed the Battle of Hamburger Hill.\u201cSlaughterhouse-Five\u201d tells a story based on Vonnegut\u2019s own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden in 1945, when Allied forces firebombed that city. When, after the first night of bombing, Vonnegut, an Army private, emerged with his fellow POWs from the basement of the slaughterhouse in which they were being held captive, they found, he wrote, \u201ca moonscape.\u201dHow did NASA put a man on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.The drive to land humans on the moon was many things, so many of them positive. But hindsight suggests that it was also part of an attempted escape from reality, a sublimation, a magnificent, elaborate diversion from acute terrestrial problems. Vonnegut\u2019s literary imagery reminds us that, for all the desire we once projected onto it, and for all the many things it represents, the moon belongs where it is, and we belong here, on Earth, which we must try very hard not to transform into a moonscape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs Through Jan. 5, 2020, National Gallery of Art.Apollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography Through Sept. 22, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.How the Vietnam War changed art foreverAre nature documentaries the greatest art of our time?\u00c9douard Manet spent his final days in excruciating pain \u2014 and creating his most thrilling artThe moon landing was a giant leap for movies, too How a vision of our planet from space produced nostalgia and homesickness in a tough astronaut. The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth.",
        "author": "Sebastian Smee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "198",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/the-most-stirring-photo-from-the-apollo-mission-wasnt-of-the-moon-it-was-of-the-earth/2019/07/15/a0bb71a4-a345-11e9-b8c8-75dae2607e60_story.html",
        "text": "The most important visual image associated with the moon landing of July 20, 1969, was not any picture of the landing itself. It was the photograph taken on Christmas Eve the previous year, 1968, when William Anders, an astronaut aboard Apollo 8, responding to mission commander Frank Borman\u2019s astonishment, grabbed a Hasselblad camera and photographed the Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOur planet, a quarter of a million miles away, had just appeared over the lunar horizon.The image, which became known as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d would go on to be a symbol of the environmentalist movement and a great rearranger of human priorities.A similar photograph had been taken two years earlier and was widely disseminated, but it didn\u2019t grip the imagination the same way. It was in black-and-white, which meant the shock of the Earth\u2019s blueness against the vast black of space couldn\u2019t register. And it was taken by a remotely controlled camera on board Lunar Orbiter 1 \u2014 one of five NASA probes which systematically photographed 99 percent of the moon\u2019s surface between 1966 and 1967.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEarthrise,\u201d the Apollo 8 image, was in color, and just as crucially, it was taken by an astronaut. Anders was there, alongside Borman and Jim Lovell, seeing what the camera saw. That made all the difference.\u201cIt was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life,\u201d Borman recalled, \u201cone that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was either black or white, but not the Earth.\u201dRelated coverage: 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11The Earth\u2019s sudden appearance from behind a moon magnified by proximity \u201cwas nothing short of a revelation,\u201d Mia Fineman wrote in the catalogue to \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,\u201d an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But what, exactly, was being revealed?The history of art (which surely includes photography) is a history of human desire. It\u2019s a history of the things we want to see, the things we want to show, and how we have wanted to see and show them. The moon, which has always been with us, deserves a prominent place in this history. Both \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse\u201d and \u201cBy the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs\u201d at the National Gallery of Art trace the waxing of our desire for lunar images since the 19th century.But it\u2019s interesting to think about what happens within art history \u2014 as within any marriage \u2014 when desire wanes, and priorities are rearranged. How much, we might ask, do we love the moon now, compared with 50 or 60 years ago?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeeing it then was something people acutely desired. They wanted it so badly that their desire pushed human ingenuity to astonishing new levels, producing a cascade of indelible images in the process.People wanted these images in the first place because the moon is mysterious. It always has been. More pressingly, they wanted them because, in the context of the Space Race and the Cold War, uncovering the secrets of the moon spoke to their pride and to the demands of winning a war of propaganda. They wanted it, finally, because it was a distraction from thinking about an explosion of racial and generational turmoil at home, and from the unfolding disaster in Vietnam, where, by 1969, U.S. troop levels stood at just under half a million, with victory looking ever more elusive, ever harder to envisage.Unlike the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementImagine an object of desire coming toward you, getting closer. (But not in person \u2014 just as a series of images.) First it appears as a distant disc, pale and flat, ripe for fantasy and projection. Suddenly it is a recognizable shape, with markings, like a cuneiform tablet or perhaps a face, getting bigger and bigger until, magnified now, it fills the frame, a voluptuous, surprisingly textured figure with volumes, protuberances and hollows.Listen on Post Reports: Sebastian Smee on an iconic photo of Mother Earth.That must have been what it was like for the global public in the 1960s as spacecraft captured images that took us closer and closer to the moon. There was something almost erotic about it: a lunar striptease.The Soviets had led the way. They had sent a dog into space, then a man, then a woman. All by 1963. Even before that, in September 1959, one of their probes, Luna 2, had become the first human-made object to touch the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUp until that point, no one had seen the dark side of the moon \u2014 the side that, because the moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits around the Earth, had always remained maddeningly invisible, like the back of your head in a world without mirrors. But about a month after Luna 2 struck the moon\u2019s surface, the Soviets launched Luna 3. Equipped with a dual-lens 35mm camera and an onboard image-processing system, the probe produced 20 photographs that capture nearly three-quarters of the moon\u2019s unmapped \u201cdark side.\u201dOne of those images, released by the usually secretive Soviets, is in the Metropolitan Museum\u2019s show and reprinted in the catalogue. Blurry and marked up with annotations, it marks, Fineman wrote, \u201ca groundbreaking moment in the history of visual culture.\u201dAlso in the history of desire. It was almost 10 years (and 16 No. 1 hits by the Beatles) before Apollo 8 became the first crewed spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, allowing Anders to take \u201cEarthrise.\u201dReview: The Imax documentary \u2018Apollo 11\u2019 is a virtual round-trip ticket to the moonOur desire for the moon was waxing at that point. Since then, inevitably, it has waned. \u201cEarthrise\u201d \u2014 despite being temporarily eclipsed by those extraordinary images (the foot print, the flag-planting) of the moon landing the following year \u2014 was the turning point.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can sense the change in the words of Anders and Borman, brave astronauts who, having almost reached their hearts\u2019 desire, found themselves afflicted by \u201ca torrent of nostalgia,\u201d something almost like remorse.Said Anders: \u201cOur Earth was quite colorful, pretty, and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we\u2019d come 240,000 miles to see the moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at.\u201dToday, the wisdom latent in Anders\u2019s words is obvious. Humans have created an emergency here on Earth and need, more than anything, to solve the problem of how to be at home where we are. For all that we can do in space, we have learned enough to understand that nowhere within reach is sensibly habitable.Story continues below advertisementCertainly, nowhere else is as beautiful, as desirable. \u201cPeople from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us,\u201d Iris Murdoch wrote. And she is, of course, right.\u201cEarthrise\u201d is an image of our planet without national borders, without hierarchies, without even a right side up (the photograph as it was taken shows the moon as a vertical line on the right; it was turned on its side for publication to make it read more like an earthly horizon). It shows the Earth very far away, but \u2014 in the bigger scale of things \u2014 proximate, fragile, contingent, like the child you wave to on the other side of the departures gate.When \u201cEarthrise\u201d appeared, it inspired an essay, published on the front page of the New York Times on Christmas Day 1968 by the poet Archibald MacLeish, a veteran of World War I: \u201cTo see the earth as it truly is,\u201d he wrote, \u201csmall and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold \u2014 brothers who know now they are truly brothers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow, I wonder, must this have sounded to the soldiers fighting in Vietnam, at the height of that war? MacLeish, as a veteran of war, may well have been thinking of them.Worth noting, too, is that Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s \u201cSlaughterhouse-Five\u201d came out between the taking of \u201cEarthrise\u201d and the moon landing, and shortly before an atrocious, futile battle was fought over Hill 937 in Vietnam, dubbed the Battle of Hamburger Hill.\u201cSlaughterhouse-Five\u201d tells a story based on Vonnegut\u2019s own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden in 1945, when Allied forces firebombed that city. When, after the first night of bombing, Vonnegut, an Army private, emerged with his fellow POWs from the basement of the slaughterhouse in which they were being held captive, they found, he wrote, \u201ca moonscape.\u201dHow did NASA put a man on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.The drive to land humans on the moon was many things, so many of them positive. But hindsight suggests that it was also part of an attempted escape from reality, a sublimation, a magnificent, elaborate diversion from acute terrestrial problems. Vonnegut\u2019s literary imagery reminds us that, for all the desire we once projected onto it, and for all the many things it represents, the moon belongs where it is, and we belong here, on Earth, which we must try very hard not to transform into a moonscape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs Through Jan. 5, 2020, National Gallery of Art.Apollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography Through Sept. 22, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.How the Vietnam War changed art foreverAre nature documentaries the greatest art of our time?\u00c9douard Manet spent his final days in excruciating pain \u2014 and creating his most thrilling artThe moon landing was a giant leap for movies, too How a vision of our planet from space produced nostalgia and homesickness in a tough astronaut. The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth.",
        "author": "Sebastian Smee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Neil Armstrong\u2019s sons don\u2019t think the biopic \u2018First Man\u2019 is anti-American (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "199",
        "date": "2018-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/09/02/why-neil-armstrongs-sons-dont-think-the-biopic-first-man-is-anti-american/",
        "text": "Ryan Gosling is not an American, but he is part of a species that visited a celestial body beyond Earth.That is one perspective the Canadian used in describing the Apollo 11 mission, and specifically Neil Armstrong, whom he plays in the upcoming film \u201cFirst Man.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt depicts the 1969 mission to land men on the moon and return them safely. But the film does not show Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin unfurling and planting an American flag on the lunar surface. And its creators, including Gosling, say they view the moment as a human achievement more than an American one, and have suggested Armstrong did not believe he was an \u201cAmerican hero.\u201d \u201cFrom my interviews with his family and people that knew him, it was quite the opposite,\u201d Gosling said, according to Britain\u2019s\u00a0Telegraph newspaper.\u00a0\u201cAnd we wanted the film to reflect Neil.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPredictably, the Canadian actor\u2019s comments, paired with the omission of the Stars and Stripes, have sparked outrage, particularly in American conservative circles. The criticism, in turn, has prompted Armstrong\u2019s sons to defend the film\u2019s depiction of events and its attention to quieter, lesser-known aspects of their father\u2019s life.\u201cThis story is human and it is universal. Of course, it celebrates an America achievement. It also celebrates an achievement \u2018for all mankind,\u2019 as it says on the plaque Neil and Buzz left on the moon,\u201d according to a statement released Friday by Rick and Mark Armstrong.The statement was also attributed to \u201cFirst Man\u201d biographer James R. Hansen, according to Hollywood Reporter.Story continues below advertisementJohn McCain: How Neil Armstrong inspired a POW\u201cIt is a story about an ordinary man who makes profound sacrifices and suffers through intense loss in order to achieve the impossible,\u201d the men said. Their father died in 2012.AdvertisementSome conservative figures have taken Gosling\u2019s\u00a0Telegraph\u00a0interview as\u00a0proof of Hollywood globalism run amok,\u00a0and an outcropping of the ongoing controversy over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to protest police killing of black citizens.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) weighed in Saturday among conservatives propelling\u00a0social media calls for boycotts of the film.\u201cReally sad: Hollywood erases American flag from moon landing. This is wrong, and consistent with Leftists\u2019 disrespecting the flag & denying American exceptionalism,\u201d Cruz, who is in an\u00a0unexpectedly tight reelection race, wrote on Twitter. \u201cJFK saw that it mattered that America go to the moon \u2014 why can\u2019t Hollywood see that today?\u201dReally sad: Hollywood erases American flag from moon landing. This is wrong, and consistent with Leftists\u2019 disrespecting the flag & denying American exceptionalism. JFK saw that it mattered that America go to the moon \u2014 why can\u2019t Hollywood see that today? https://t.co/7ZGJKP4tl6\u2014 Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) September 1, 2018\n\n\u201cFox & Friends,\u201d a Fox News program favored by President Trump, discussed the issue Friday.Story continues below advertisementCo-host Pete Hegseth simply called Gosling \u201can idiot.\u201dAdvertisementAinsley Earhardt, his co-host, grimly assessed the social implications.\u201cThis is where our country is going. They don\u2019t think America is great,\u201d she said. \u201cThey want to kneel for the flag.\u201d Later in the day, #BoycottFirstMan was trending on social media.Chuck Yeager, the legendary American pilot who was the first to break the sound barrier, called leaving out the flag-planting \u201cmore Hollywood make-believe.\u201dOn Sunday Aldrin tweeted photos of the historic moment with the hashtag #proudtobeanAmerican.#proudtobeanAmerican #freedom #honor #onenation #Apollo11 #July1969 #roadtoApollo50 pic.twitter.com/gApIwLzaJw\u2014 Dr. Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) September 3, 2018\n\nDirector Damien Chazelle, who also helmed \u201cLa La Land\u201d and \u201cWhiplash,\u201d has echoed the sentiments of the Armstrong brothers on the selective storytelling.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI wanted the primary focus in that scene to be on Neil\u2019s solitary moments on the moon \u2014 his point of view as he first exited the [Lunar Module], his time spent at Little West Crater, the memories that may have crossed his mind during his lunar [exploration],\u201d he said in a statement Friday, according to Hollywood Reporter.AdvertisementThe film, which debuted this past week at the Venice Film Festival, will arrive stateside Oct. 12, and have plenty of American flags waving throughout.\u201cFirst Man\u201d does not show the flag planting, but there are several shots of the U.S. flag on the moon, Daily Beast writer Marlow Stern said after attending the screening.Ironically, the controversy may endure longer than the flag itself: Aldrin told controllers he saw the flag knocked over with a blast of spacecraft exhaust, NASA has said.Story continues below advertisementThe flag really wasn\u2019t designed to endure the blastoff, let alone the lunar environment, or lack thereof. It was purchased from a Sears store for $5.50, NASA said. Department-store flags cannot even withstand terrestrial wear and tear, like sunlight and wind, for more than a few years.On the moon, decades of extreme temperatures, ultraviolet radiation and micrometeorites have probably disintegrated the flag entirely, scientists say, and the bombardment of unfiltered sunlight has probably bleached flags left on subsequent missions stark white.AdvertisementEven the original flag planting was controversial. Debate raged over whether to raise an American flag or a banner of the United Nations. Congress forbid NASA from placing flags of other countries or international bodies on the moon during U.S.-funded missions, the agency said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the end, it was decided by Congress that this was a United States project. We were not going to make any territorial claim, but we were to let people know that we were here and put up a U.S. flag,\u201d Armstrong said, according to Newsweek. \u201cMy job was to get the flag there. I was less concerned about whether that was the right artifact to place. I let other, wiser minds than mine make those kinds of decisions.\u201dRead more:Pastor apologizes to Ariana Grande for grazing her breast at Aretha Franklin\u2019s funeral\u2018She gave us pride and a regal bar to reach\u2019: Everything that happened at Aretha Franklin\u2019s 8-hour funeral \"It celebrates an America achievement. It also celebrates an achievement 'for all mankind,' as it says on the plaque Neil and Buzz left on the moon,\u201d Armstrong's sons said. Why Neil Armstrong\u2019s sons don\u2019t think the biopic \u2018First Man\u2019 is anti-American",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The best movies about isolation that speak to our moment, from \u2018Rear Window\u2019 to \u2018Cast Away\u2019 (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "200",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies-isolation-loneliness-cast-away-martian-room-rear-window/2020/04/30/008cd7f8-895f-11ea-8ac1-bfb250876b7a_story.html",
        "text": "At the beginning of the movie \u201cRoom,\u201d Jack wakes up in the shed where he\u2019s spent every minute of his life in captivity, and greets his friends: \u201cGood morning, Wardrobe. Good morning, TV. Good morning, Sink. Good morning, Toilet. Good morning, everyone.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s hard not to feel like Jack these days, with our household objects becoming more familiar, especially through frequent 20-second meetups with our mutual acquaintance Sink. Emma Donoghue, the writer of the movie and the original novel, researched how families survive hardships. \u201cCreating your own routine, your own rituals, can help shape your time in a way that feels active and meaningful,\u201d she says via email. \u201cSo doing laundry becomes an adventure.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile virus movies such as \u201cContagion\u201d and \u201cOutbreak\u201d speak directly to our time, movies in enclosed spaces, like \u201cRoom,\u201d do so in more subtle ways. For many of us, staying at home is a privilege \u2014 the situation isn\u2019t as extreme as a film plot. But even when movies confine characters far from home, on islands or in spaceships, they show shades of our present moment \u2014 our solitariness, our resiliency, our fear of what\u2019s outside \u2014 and reveal how we might emerge from this pandemic transformed.AdvertisementMany tight settings are harder to pull off than it appears. \u201cFilm is an outdoor medium, not an indoor medium,\u201d says the screenwriting guru Robert McKee via phone from his Connecticut home. \u201cThe camera wants to move. The camera wants to go places physically that no other medium can.\u201dTV has become more cinematic recently, but its hallmark is the one-set sitcom. Theater is already a closed space. Novels are comfortable not only in rooms, but in minds. Movies beg for variety.Story continues below advertisementStill, enclosed spaces force screenwriters to get creative \u2014 and that can pay dividends. \u201cIf people are confined like that, the pressure that puts them under should crack them open in ways that nobody would see coming,\u201d says McKee, to reveal \u201cthe truth of who people are and what they really think and really feel.\u201dHere are some movies that reveal a truth or two about our circumstances, starting with how we\u2019re .\u2009.\u2009.Coping with lonelinessThe Hollywood everyman Tom Hanks is often trapped in a metaphorical every-space, be it an airport (\u201cThe Terminal\u201d), a spacecraft to the moon (\u201cApollo 13\u201d), a child\u2019s bedroom (\u201cToy Story\u201d) or an island. It\u2019s easy to forget that \u201cCast Away\u201d (2000) begins with a meditation on human interconnectedness: a series of shots from the perspective of a package, leading to a scene where Hanks\u2019s FedEx exec trains workers in post-Soviet Russia, the epitome of globalization. He thrives with others \u2014 we also see him at a party, and a proposal to his girlfriend is imminent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe irony is that Hanks ends up alone, after a plane crash, and finds his only friend, a volleyball (Wilson), in a FedEx box. At a time when deliveries are fraught and imperative, it\u2019s chilling to re-watch a movie in which packages keep this man alive in many ways, especially by maintaining his faith that one day he will return to life as a social animal.Another film about a seemingly deserted island, an inanimate friend and a brush with suicide is \u201cSwiss Army Man\u201d (2016). The bored loner Hank (Paul Dano) starts to hang himself, but a dead body named Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore and soon comes to life. As they bond, Manny exhibits some extreme bodily functions \u2014 Hank rides him like a Jet Ski, powered by his farts. But Hank teaches him that those are just part of being human: \u201cBack in civilization there\u2019s 7 billion other living people on the planet just running around, and blinking and breathing and eating and you used to be one of them.\u201d Is Manny just a projection? Is Hank reminding himself?It all speaks to a moment when many of us at home are stewing in our eccentricities and our alienation, hoping someone else out there feels the way we do. But we\u2019re recognizing that our primal needs, while normally the source of insecurities, are what makes us human. We are all strange, because the world is strange.Trying to make doAnyone who\u2019s been staring into the fridge and wondering how to assemble the remaining grocery shards into a respectable lunch might find inspiration in Matt Damon\u2019s stranded space explorer in \u201cThe Martian\u201d (2015).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019ve got to figure out a way to grow three year\u2019s worth of food here, on a planet where nothing grows,\u201d he says, and then, in a gloriously contrived moment, points to a manual with his occupation typed on it: \u201cLuckily, I\u2019m a botanist.\u201dWe hearten at his first little potato sprout, and cringe when he runs out of ketchup. (Remember this when it feels like you\u2019re the only one of your friends without sourdough starter.)The resourcefulness in space movies reflects not only what\u2019s happening inside our homes today but on a macro scale among our government scientists. The best moment in \u201cApollo 13\u201d (1995) is when the NASA engineers in Houston find dummy versions of all the tubes, sprockets and gizmos that are on board the endangered ship, dump them on a table and try to figure out what the astronauts should construct to survive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe got to find a way to make this [square thing] fit into a hole for this [round thing] using nothing but that,\u201d one says, and lo and behold, they make that square thing and that round thing fit together. The movie\u2019s continual hubbub of experts is an idealized version of a bureaucracy responding to an unexpected blow, and trying to prevent a catastrophe.Fulfilling our obligations to othersA room of jurors debating the guilt of a teen charged with murder seems to have little to do with a virus. But watching the deliberations in \u201c12 Angry Men\u201d (1957) today, it\u2019s striking to witness the same divide that\u2019s splitting our country: An increasing number become totally fine staying in confinement in the name of civic duty, while others are desperate to get back to their normal lives. The jurors test each other\u2019s patience in the name of safety, to protect people they have never met and never will. One is hankering to get to a baseball game. Another notices that the door is locked from the outside. Their puzzle is complicated but they can\u2019t leave until they figure it out.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuty becomes even more fraught in \u201cMutiny on the Bounty\u201d (1935), about a British navy crew that revolts against their tyrannical Captain Bligh. The men are at sea for two years before they can see their families again \u2014 but it\u2019s not the enclosed space that\u2019s bothersome as much as the questionable leadership it fosters.It\u2019s easy to connect the film to the coronavirus\u2019s test of political hierarchies, especially since President Trump mentioned \u201cMutiny on the Bounty\u201d in a mysterious tweet about Democratic governors. Or to tie it to the recent controversy over the Navy captain who was relieved of command after an email about his ship\u2019s covid-19 breakout became public \u2014 eventually leading the Navy secretary to resign.And it takes a pandemic to find a deeper meaning in \u201cSpeed\u201d (1994). The bus, it turns out, isn\u2019t just for banging into things and jumping over things, it\u2019s a utopian collaboration among a cross-section of L.A. citizens who just happen to end up together and save each other from demise \u2014 with the help of Keanu Reeves\u2019s clear-minded cop, who\u2019s basically their Anthony Fauci.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJan de Bont, the director of \u201cSpeed\u201d and director of photography on the similarly claustrophobic \u201cDie Hard\u201d and \u201cThe Hunt for Red October,\u201d says via phone from Los Angeles that social distancers today \u201cunderstand that they\u2019re in this together and if you don\u2019t do it you can endanger the life of other people and they can endanger your life. All three movies have a similar feeling \u2014 that you all become dependent on each other.\u201dIt\u2019s no accident that \u201cSpeed\u201d also traps characters in two other commuting vehicles, an elevator and a subway. \u201cA space that should be safe and guarding you, that becomes a dangerous space,\u201d de Bont says.\u201cI always show ceilings,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt can be safe because it\u2019s protecting us from natural disasters, but it can be oppressive like it\u2019s coming down on you. I like people to be aware of windows and doors. I want people to be aware nonstop of the limitations of the space that you\u2019re in.\u201dKeeping the danger away\u201cA Quiet Place\u201d (2018) begins with a family\u2019s terrifying trip to get medicine at a grocery store. But mainly they have to stay close to home and cannot make a sound, surrounded by super-hearing monsters. We see the newspaper headlines they\u2019ve collected: \u201cNew York City on lock down.\u201d \u201cShanghai death toll.\u201d \u201cWhat you need to know to survive.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe family, with parents played by John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, will feel familiar to those today doing what they can to keep the coronavirus out: home schooling, improvised meals, lack of privacy, calculated risks. And the ban on talking evokes our own communication breakdowns: What happens when you\u2019re pushed to the edge while unable to use every tool of expression and love?Horror movies often take place in enclosed environments \u2014 \u201cso there can be no way out,\u201d McKee points out. In \u201c10 Cloverfield Lane\u201d (2016), Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up from a car accident to discover that she\u2019s trapped in a bunker, with a man who claims he saved her life by protecting her from a world that\u2019s been attacked and now contaminated. At one point she even finds a way to make her own mask, all the while wondering the same thing we are: Is it worth taking a chance and getting out?Helping our minds escapeAlfred Hitchcock set movies in a single apartment (\u201cRope\u201d) and a single vessel (\u201cLifeboat\u201d), but the one to watch now is \u201cRear Window\u201d (1954). James Stewart is an adventure photographer in a wheelchair with a broken leg and can\u2019t help but peek into his neighbors\u2019 homes, noticing small moments and spinning them into dramas. Meanwhile, aching for distraction, we fixate on our co-workers\u2019 living rooms during Zoom calls and proclaim the power of Stanley Tucci\u2019s negroni instructional video.Advertisement\u201cRear Window\u201d also evokes the yearning of relationships during lockdown, in the photographer\u2019s romance with a socialite played by Grace Kelly. When she jokingly asks about his \u201clove life,\u201d he coyly responds, \u201cNot too active.\u201d Like co-quarantiners, their relationship eventually requires risks to move forward.The documentary \u201cThis Is Not a Film\u201d (2011) examines another restless artist cut off from his passion. We watch the famed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi during his house arrest pending a trial, as he\u2019s banned from making films. (The movie had to be smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive inside a cake.) He recruits a colleague to follow him with a camera and can\u2019t help but act out the movie he wants to make, using yellow tape to create the outline of a set on his rug \u2014 ultimately turning this existential crisis into a meditation on the need to create.Finding a new perspective on normal lifeSandra Bullock\u2019s rookie astronaut in \u201cGravity\u201d (2013) shows a methodical persistence despite being out of her element \u2014 as a fire rages on a space station, she picks up the escape pod\u2019s manual and calmly turns pages. But later, in a moment of weakness, the tragedy of her life back home overcomes her and, like many characters on this list, she starts to give up. Eventually, despite nature\u2019s powerful forces and the technical challenges of overcoming them, she chooses life.In \u201cRoom\u201d (2015), once Jack and his mother escape their shed, he wears a mask, since he\u2019s not immune to diseases, and describes the world in the only the way someone who\u2019s lived his entire life inside can. \u201cThere\u2019s doors and more doors and behind all the doors there\u2019s another inside and another outside, and things happen, happen, happen.\u201d\u201cThere\u2019s so much of place in the world,\u201d he adds. \u201cThere\u2019s less time because the time has to be spread extra thin over all the places, like butter.\u201dDonoghue \u2014 whose upcoming novel, \u201cThe Pull of the Stars,\u201d is coincidentally set during the 1918 pandemic \u2014 finds that many of us are seeing our smaller spaces \u201cmore thickly buttered with time.\u201d\u201cThis feels like a forced break to me, a convalescence,\u201d she says, adding: \u201cI\u2019m enjoying waking slow and drowsily rather than to an alarm, and when my kids ask me for something I get to say, \u2018Sure, I\u2019ll do that right now.\u2019 I just hope we can hold onto some of these insights when lockdown\u2019s over, the calendars fill up and the ticking clock starts up again.\u201dRead more:With the theatrical movie business in peril, art houses might hold the key to survivalSix rom-coms that are perfect for quarantine, now that we\u2019re in \u2018Groundhog Day\u2019\n\n Films like \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cA Quiet Place\u201d may have unfamiliar settings, but they reflect our era of social distancing. The best movies about isolation that speak to our moment, from \u2018Rear Window\u2019 to \u2018Cast Away\u2019",
        "author": "Zachary Pincus-Roth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The best movies about isolation that speak to our moment, from \u2018Rear Window\u2019 to \u2018Cast Away\u2019 (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "201",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies-isolation-loneliness-cast-away-martian-room-rear-window/2020/04/30/008cd7f8-895f-11ea-8ac1-bfb250876b7a_story.html",
        "text": "At the beginning of the movie \u201cRoom,\u201d Jack wakes up in the shed where he\u2019s spent every minute of his life in captivity, and greets his friends: \u201cGood morning, Wardrobe. Good morning, TV. Good morning, Sink. Good morning, Toilet. Good morning, everyone.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s hard not to feel like Jack these days, with our household objects becoming more familiar, especially through frequent 20-second meetups with our mutual acquaintance Sink. Emma Donoghue, the writer of the movie and the original novel, researched how families survive hardships. \u201cCreating your own routine, your own rituals, can help shape your time in a way that feels active and meaningful,\u201d she says via email. \u201cSo doing laundry becomes an adventure.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile virus movies such as \u201cContagion\u201d and \u201cOutbreak\u201d speak directly to our time, movies in enclosed spaces, like \u201cRoom,\u201d do so in more subtle ways. For many of us, staying at home is a privilege \u2014 the situation isn\u2019t as extreme as a film plot. But even when movies confine characters far from home, on islands or in spaceships, they show shades of our present moment \u2014 our solitariness, our resiliency, our fear of what\u2019s outside \u2014 and reveal how we might emerge from this pandemic transformed.AdvertisementMany tight settings are harder to pull off than it appears. \u201cFilm is an outdoor medium, not an indoor medium,\u201d says the screenwriting guru Robert McKee via phone from his Connecticut home. \u201cThe camera wants to move. The camera wants to go places physically that no other medium can.\u201dTV has become more cinematic recently, but its hallmark is the one-set sitcom. Theater is already a closed space. Novels are comfortable not only in rooms, but in minds. Movies beg for variety.Story continues below advertisementStill, enclosed spaces force screenwriters to get creative \u2014 and that can pay dividends. \u201cIf people are confined like that, the pressure that puts them under should crack them open in ways that nobody would see coming,\u201d says McKee, to reveal \u201cthe truth of who people are and what they really think and really feel.\u201dHere are some movies that reveal a truth or two about our circumstances, starting with how we\u2019re .\u2009.\u2009.Coping with lonelinessThe Hollywood everyman Tom Hanks is often trapped in a metaphorical every-space, be it an airport (\u201cThe Terminal\u201d), a spacecraft to the moon (\u201cApollo 13\u201d), a child\u2019s bedroom (\u201cToy Story\u201d) or an island. It\u2019s easy to forget that \u201cCast Away\u201d (2000) begins with a meditation on human interconnectedness: a series of shots from the perspective of a package, leading to a scene where Hanks\u2019s FedEx exec trains workers in post-Soviet Russia, the epitome of globalization. He thrives with others \u2014 we also see him at a party, and a proposal to his girlfriend is imminent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe irony is that Hanks ends up alone, after a plane crash, and finds his only friend, a volleyball (Wilson), in a FedEx box. At a time when deliveries are fraught and imperative, it\u2019s chilling to re-watch a movie in which packages keep this man alive in many ways, especially by maintaining his faith that one day he will return to life as a social animal.Another film about a seemingly deserted island, an inanimate friend and a brush with suicide is \u201cSwiss Army Man\u201d (2016). The bored loner Hank (Paul Dano) starts to hang himself, but a dead body named Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore and soon comes to life. As they bond, Manny exhibits some extreme bodily functions \u2014 Hank rides him like a Jet Ski, powered by his farts. But Hank teaches him that those are just part of being human: \u201cBack in civilization there\u2019s 7 billion other living people on the planet just running around, and blinking and breathing and eating and you used to be one of them.\u201d Is Manny just a projection? Is Hank reminding himself?It all speaks to a moment when many of us at home are stewing in our eccentricities and our alienation, hoping someone else out there feels the way we do. But we\u2019re recognizing that our primal needs, while normally the source of insecurities, are what makes us human. We are all strange, because the world is strange.Trying to make doAnyone who\u2019s been staring into the fridge and wondering how to assemble the remaining grocery shards into a respectable lunch might find inspiration in Matt Damon\u2019s stranded space explorer in \u201cThe Martian\u201d (2015).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019ve got to figure out a way to grow three year\u2019s worth of food here, on a planet where nothing grows,\u201d he says, and then, in a gloriously contrived moment, points to a manual with his occupation typed on it: \u201cLuckily, I\u2019m a botanist.\u201dWe hearten at his first little potato sprout, and cringe when he runs out of ketchup. (Remember this when it feels like you\u2019re the only one of your friends without sourdough starter.)The resourcefulness in space movies reflects not only what\u2019s happening inside our homes today but on a macro scale among our government scientists. The best moment in \u201cApollo 13\u201d (1995) is when the NASA engineers in Houston find dummy versions of all the tubes, sprockets and gizmos that are on board the endangered ship, dump them on a table and try to figure out what the astronauts should construct to survive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe got to find a way to make this [square thing] fit into a hole for this [round thing] using nothing but that,\u201d one says, and lo and behold, they make that square thing and that round thing fit together. The movie\u2019s continual hubbub of experts is an idealized version of a bureaucracy responding to an unexpected blow, and trying to prevent a catastrophe.Fulfilling our obligations to othersA room of jurors debating the guilt of a teen charged with murder seems to have little to do with a virus. But watching the deliberations in \u201c12 Angry Men\u201d (1957) today, it\u2019s striking to witness the same divide that\u2019s splitting our country: An increasing number become totally fine staying in confinement in the name of civic duty, while others are desperate to get back to their normal lives. The jurors test each other\u2019s patience in the name of safety, to protect people they have never met and never will. One is hankering to get to a baseball game. Another notices that the door is locked from the outside. Their puzzle is complicated but they can\u2019t leave until they figure it out.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuty becomes even more fraught in \u201cMutiny on the Bounty\u201d (1935), about a British navy crew that revolts against their tyrannical Captain Bligh. The men are at sea for two years before they can see their families again \u2014 but it\u2019s not the enclosed space that\u2019s bothersome as much as the questionable leadership it fosters.It\u2019s easy to connect the film to the coronavirus\u2019s test of political hierarchies, especially since President Trump mentioned \u201cMutiny on the Bounty\u201d in a mysterious tweet about Democratic governors. Or to tie it to the recent controversy over the Navy captain who was relieved of command after an email about his ship\u2019s covid-19 breakout became public \u2014 eventually leading the Navy secretary to resign.And it takes a pandemic to find a deeper meaning in \u201cSpeed\u201d (1994). The bus, it turns out, isn\u2019t just for banging into things and jumping over things, it\u2019s a utopian collaboration among a cross-section of L.A. citizens who just happen to end up together and save each other from demise \u2014 with the help of Keanu Reeves\u2019s clear-minded cop, who\u2019s basically their Anthony Fauci.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJan de Bont, the director of \u201cSpeed\u201d and director of photography on the similarly claustrophobic \u201cDie Hard\u201d and \u201cThe Hunt for Red October,\u201d says via phone from Los Angeles that social distancers today \u201cunderstand that they\u2019re in this together and if you don\u2019t do it you can endanger the life of other people and they can endanger your life. All three movies have a similar feeling \u2014 that you all become dependent on each other.\u201dIt\u2019s no accident that \u201cSpeed\u201d also traps characters in two other commuting vehicles, an elevator and a subway. \u201cA space that should be safe and guarding you, that becomes a dangerous space,\u201d de Bont says.\u201cI always show ceilings,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt can be safe because it\u2019s protecting us from natural disasters, but it can be oppressive like it\u2019s coming down on you. I like people to be aware of windows and doors. I want people to be aware nonstop of the limitations of the space that you\u2019re in.\u201dKeeping the danger away\u201cA Quiet Place\u201d (2018) begins with a family\u2019s terrifying trip to get medicine at a grocery store. But mainly they have to stay close to home and cannot make a sound, surrounded by super-hearing monsters. We see the newspaper headlines they\u2019ve collected: \u201cNew York City on lock down.\u201d \u201cShanghai death toll.\u201d \u201cWhat you need to know to survive.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe family, with parents played by John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, will feel familiar to those today doing what they can to keep the coronavirus out: home schooling, improvised meals, lack of privacy, calculated risks. And the ban on talking evokes our own communication breakdowns: What happens when you\u2019re pushed to the edge while unable to use every tool of expression and love?Horror movies often take place in enclosed environments \u2014 \u201cso there can be no way out,\u201d McKee points out. In \u201c10 Cloverfield Lane\u201d (2016), Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up from a car accident to discover that she\u2019s trapped in a bunker, with a man who claims he saved her life by protecting her from a world that\u2019s been attacked and now contaminated. At one point she even finds a way to make her own mask, all the while wondering the same thing we are: Is it worth taking a chance and getting out?Helping our minds escapeAlfred Hitchcock set movies in a single apartment (\u201cRope\u201d) and a single vessel (\u201cLifeboat\u201d), but the one to watch now is \u201cRear Window\u201d (1954). James Stewart is an adventure photographer in a wheelchair with a broken leg and can\u2019t help but peek into his neighbors\u2019 homes, noticing small moments and spinning them into dramas. Meanwhile, aching for distraction, we fixate on our co-workers\u2019 living rooms during Zoom calls and proclaim the power of Stanley Tucci\u2019s negroni instructional video.Advertisement\u201cRear Window\u201d also evokes the yearning of relationships during lockdown, in the photographer\u2019s romance with a socialite played by Grace Kelly. When she jokingly asks about his \u201clove life,\u201d he coyly responds, \u201cNot too active.\u201d Like co-quarantiners, their relationship eventually requires risks to move forward.The documentary \u201cThis Is Not a Film\u201d (2011) examines another restless artist cut off from his passion. We watch the famed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi during his house arrest pending a trial, as he\u2019s banned from making films. (The movie had to be smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival on a USB drive inside a cake.) He recruits a colleague to follow him with a camera and can\u2019t help but act out the movie he wants to make, using yellow tape to create the outline of a set on his rug \u2014 ultimately turning this existential crisis into a meditation on the need to create.Finding a new perspective on normal lifeSandra Bullock\u2019s rookie astronaut in \u201cGravity\u201d (2013) shows a methodical persistence despite being out of her element \u2014 as a fire rages on a space station, she picks up the escape pod\u2019s manual and calmly turns pages. But later, in a moment of weakness, the tragedy of her life back home overcomes her and, like many characters on this list, she starts to give up. Eventually, despite nature\u2019s powerful forces and the technical challenges of overcoming them, she chooses life.In \u201cRoom\u201d (2015), once Jack and his mother escape their shed, he wears a mask, since he\u2019s not immune to diseases, and describes the world in the only the way someone who\u2019s lived his entire life inside can. \u201cThere\u2019s doors and more doors and behind all the doors there\u2019s another inside and another outside, and things happen, happen, happen.\u201d\u201cThere\u2019s so much of place in the world,\u201d he adds. \u201cThere\u2019s less time because the time has to be spread extra thin over all the places, like butter.\u201dDonoghue \u2014 whose upcoming novel, \u201cThe Pull of the Stars,\u201d is coincidentally set during the 1918 pandemic \u2014 finds that many of us are seeing our smaller spaces \u201cmore thickly buttered with time.\u201d\u201cThis feels like a forced break to me, a convalescence,\u201d she says, adding: \u201cI\u2019m enjoying waking slow and drowsily rather than to an alarm, and when my kids ask me for something I get to say, \u2018Sure, I\u2019ll do that right now.\u2019 I just hope we can hold onto some of these insights when lockdown\u2019s over, the calendars fill up and the ticking clock starts up again.\u201dRead more:With the theatrical movie business in peril, art houses might hold the key to survivalSix rom-coms that are perfect for quarantine, now that we\u2019re in \u2018Groundhog Day\u2019\n\n Films like \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cA Quiet Place\u201d may have unfamiliar settings, but they reflect our era of social distancing. The best movies about isolation that speak to our moment, from \u2018Rear Window\u2019 to \u2018Cast Away\u2019",
        "author": "Zachary Pincus-Roth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | With theaters shuttered, virtual cinema has saved the day. For now. (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "202",
        "date": "2020-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/with-theaters-shuttered-virtual-cinema-has-saved-the-day-for-now/2020/05/06/756fc484-8f01-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html",
        "text": "When Tom Quinn and Tim League formed the film company Neon in 2017, they shared at least one mission: Even as Hollywood was being upended by the streaming giant Netflix and questions regarding the viability of bricks-and-mortar movie venues, they vowed that their films would always play in theaters.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe built our whole business on the power of cinema in theater,\u201d Quinn said recently by phone, noting that League is the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse chain. \u201cThat\u2019s everything to us, it\u2019s everything that we\u2019ve put into our release strategies, it determines every film that we buy.\u201d Neon\u2019s biggest breakthrough to date \u2014 Bong Joon-ho\u2019s \u201cParasite,\u201d which won best picture and best international feature film at the Oscars this year \u2014 exemplified Quinn\u2019s philosophy of filmgoing, which means \u201cthe communal experience of going to a theater and committing yourself to a filmmaker\u2019s vision wholeheartedly for one or two hours with no breaks.\u201d So when most American theaters closed in March, just as Neon was preparing to release its Sundance acquisition \u201cSpaceship Earth,\u201d Quinn faced an existential quandary.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt seems like a very distant memory that we were at the Academy Awards celebrating \u2018Parasite,\u2019 which was a historical Academy Award for my favorite filmmaker in the world and his masterpiece, but was really about the power of cinema.\u201d Just a few months later, he says, \u201cthat\u2019s no longer possible. And for us, we\u2019ve never released a film that wasn\u2019t built around the sacred and committed power of theaters and exhibition.\u201dSome of Quinn\u2019s fellow distributors are hanging on to their movies until they can play in theaters: A24, which had just released Kelly Reichardt\u2019s exquisite period drama \u201cFirst Cow\u201d when theaters shuttered, decided not to release the film as a streaming title. Sony Pictures Classics has made it clear that it will not be releasing any new movies digitally.\u201cWithout theatrical, the business disappears,\u201d insists Sony Classics Co-President Tom Bernard, describing the typical life cycle of a film that goes from theaters to airplanes and hotels to video-on-demand and finally to cable. \u201cAll those stops unlock value,\u201d Bernard says, \u201cbut it has to start with theaters\u201d and the reviews, trailers and audience awareness they generate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut some distributors are tinkering with the traditional theater-first formula. In the wake of coronavirus closures, small distributors like Kino Lorber, Oscilloscope, Film Movement and Music Box Films have seized an opportunity to release their films as digital links, often through art-house and independent theaters that have eagerly accepted a chance to earn some revenue and keep their homebound audiences engaged.It\u2019s an experiment that Quinn watched with interest and, after some soul-searching, has decided to join. \u201cI was grappling with the extraordinary amount of uncertainty, and asking myself how we chart a path forward and what do we do now,\u201d he recalls. \u201cAnd it dawned on me that it\u2019s more important than ever that we do our job and bring new films to market. .\u2009.\u2009. How do you do that in a virtual world with any semblance of the power of what we\u2019ve done in the last few years? That\u2019s the hard part.\u201dOn Friday, \u201cSpaceship Earth,\u201d a documentary that chronicles the two-year Biosphere 2 experiment in closed-system, self-sustained living, will open virtually across a number of on-demand platforms. Neon has also pursued partnerships with theaters, bookstores, restaurants and museums that will provide links to the film on their websites. And \u201cSpaceship Earth\u201d will be shown in a handful of drive-ins that are open for business, thanks to the glorious self-isolation of the family automobile.Biosphere 2 documentary \u2018Spaceship Earth\u2019 offers a sobering primer on crushed dreams.\u201cHonestly, I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s going to work,\u201d Quinn says, \u201cbut it\u2019s been such a wonderful distraction in this current situation. It seemed to make sense to give it a shot.\u201dQuinn is banking on \u201cSpaceship Earth\u2019s\u201d timeliness: What could be more relatable right now than a movie about a historic experiment in self-quarantining? But he\u2019s also aware of some recent streaming success stories: Oscilloscope\u2019s \u201cSaint Frances,\u201d which had just opened in theaters when they were forced to shutter, has made around $100,000 as a virtual release, reaching a much wider audience than would have been able to see it on the big screen. Similarly, \u201cBacurau,\u201d a quirky political satire from Brazil that began streaming in mid-March after a brief theatrical run in New York, has earned Kino Lorber far more than it would have in a traditional theatrical revenue-share model, according to Chairman and CEO Richard Lorber.One reason Lorber was able to pivot so quickly was that, nine months ago, he had launched Kino Now, an on-demand service that would be an \u201cart house iTunes,\u201d allowing patrons to stream or download one of the company\u2019s 3,000 foreign and indie titles. Now, that entity has become host to the company\u2019s new virtual cinema initiative Kino Marquee, which Lorber sees as a form of \u201cfilmanthropy,\u201d but also a means of self-preservation for theaters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe scourge of art houses is the limitation of the number of screens,\u201d Lorber explains. \u201cVery few have more than two or three screens, some even only have one. Distributors like ourselves often have films that open strongly but get bumped in a week because the theaters have calendars and commitments to other companies to play their films at a particular time.\u201d Virtual cinema, he notes, gives theaters a way to hold movies indefinitely. \u201cWe\u2019ve moved from a screen-scarcity environment to screen plenitude. It\u2019s almost a world of infinite screens.\u201dThat might sound promising \u2014 especially to anyone who has read a rave review of a new independent film, only to discover it has left the theater by the time they get there. But not everyone is convinced that virtual cinema is a sustainable long-term strategy. Andrew Carlin, director of theatrical distribution at Oscilloscope, is wary of theaters creating a two-tiered system, whereby they save their main auditoriums for the Sony Classics, A24s, Searchlight Pictures and Focus Features of the world, and send films from smaller companies like his into the virtual ether.\u201cIt\u2019s already a struggle getting on screens in some of these markets,\u201d Carlin says. \u201cSo if there\u2019s effectively no need to get these smaller companies on screen, it would make what is already a challenging business even more challenging.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Carlin sees a more philosophical question at hand. \u201cOver the past decade, you\u2019ve had these major streaming platforms that have spent untold billions of dollars training audiences to stay home and consume entertainment from their couches,\u201d he says. \u201cI think we need to be thoughtful about using this virtual cinema model and not providing yet another reason for keeping people at home.\u201d (This isn\u2019t just an argument in the art-house world: After the success of \u201cTrolls World Tour\u201d as a digital release, NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell said its studio would continue that strategy even after theaters reopen; the country\u2019s largest multiplex chain, AMC, promptly announced that it would refuse to show Universal movies.)It also bears noting that the most successful virtual cinema releases thus far had the advantage of being promoted in theaters before they closed; the fate of films \u201copening cold\u201d as digital titles has yet to be determined.For now, Lorber believes, virtual cinema has provided a useful tool for the post-lockdown reentry period. \u201cIn the near future, when theaters do reopen, a sold-out show will be a theater that\u2019s half full,\u201d he says. \u201cSo we think theaters will still probably want to have some supplemental income. The possibility of duplex releases \u2014 some combination of virtual and physical \u2014 gives them that option.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPast that, he observes, virtual cinema might offer audiences more time to see a highly regarded film. \u201cThe real value to the theaters is that when an art-house gem gets an inordinate amount of publicity and its footprint is bigger than its shoe size, it gets a chance to be on screen for more than a week,\u201d says Lorber.Quinn agrees that virtual cinema will be a permanent fixture within the cinematic ecosystem, if only because it provides a way to keep \u201ctrue cinephiles\u201d satisfied even after they\u2019ve left the theater \u2014 which in turn will keep them coming back.\u201cIt provides another way to engage,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd seeing more good films only begets more film watching.\u201dWith the theatrical movie business in peril, art houses might hold the key to survivalAndrew Cuomo\u2019s star turn is part of a long cinematic traditionNew movies to stream: \u2018Deerskin,\u2019 \u2018Capital in the Twenty-First Century\u2019 and more\n\n Digital releases have been a lifeline for theaters. But some fear they will turn into a noose. With theaters shuttered, virtual cinema has saved the day. For now.",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "Style Conversational Week 1384: Ta-DUH! It\u2019s a stupid-question contest (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "203",
        "date": "2020-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/05/14/style-conversational-week-1384-ta-duh-its-stupid-question-contest/",
        "text": "This week\u2019s Style Invitational contest, Week 1384, was inspired by a suggestion from Loser Dan Helming for a contest for stupid restaurant takeout orders during our social-distancing period. That seemed a bit narrow in scope, but I liked the mentally healthy, socially constructive idea, in these Trying Times, of snarkily mocking people\u2019s stupid comments in a broader context. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Invite has asked for questions many times; in fact, there\u2019s a whole page of Loser Elden Carnahan\u2019s Master Contest List, a.k.a. The Great Time Suck, for the category of \u201cQuestions.\u201d Many of the listings are for our recurring Questionable Journalism contest, which we did last week for Week 1383 and is still running through Monday, May 18, but there are also several in the dumb-question genre. From the Questions page you now can click on links not only to each contest announcement, but, on the right side of each row, to the results. Here\u2019s a selection of ink from contests in 1997 and 2014.First on the list is Week 217, back in the era of the Invite\u2019s founder, The Czar of The Style Invitational:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementReport from Week 217, in which you were asked to disprove the old maxim that there are no dumb questions. Despite our warning to the contrary, many people submitted tired old jokes, and some tired new jokes, such as why people call those things \u201chemorrhoids\u201d instead of \u201casteroids.\u201dSixth Runner-Up: Excuse me, does this pharmacy carry that \u201cdate rape\u201d drug? (Russell Beland, Springfield)Fifth Runner-Up: Why do people drive so close in front of me? Don\u2019t they realize it\u2019s dangerous? (Jerry Ewing, Fairfax)Fourth Runner-Up: Just where do you get off telling me what to do, Your Honor? (Elden Carnahan, Laurel)Third Runner-Up: Do I, like, have a shot at boinking you? (Tom Witte, Gaithersburg) [Tom\u2019s Invite specialty of sex humor, especially in the persona of a womanizing cad, was already well established by 1997; e.g., for a 1994 contest for a sentence that will never be uttered: \u201cGo ahead, have dessert. I am quite confident that sex with you will be worth a $93 dinner tab.\u201d]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSecond Runner-Up: Are you sure that\u2019s a spaceship behind the comet? Because I wouldn\u2019t want to make a mistake here. Okay, swell. Just checking. (Paul Styrene, Olney; John Kammer, Herndon) [This referred to the 1997 tragedy of the Heaven\u2019s Gate cult, whose leader persuaded 39 people to kill themselves so that they would be transported to a spaceship that he said would accompany the imminent Hale-Bopp Comet. The Invite has been trafficking in dark humor for a very long time.]First Runner-Up: If you are not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat? (Dave Ferry, Leesburg)And the winner of the demonstration-model prostate gland: If I win this week, can I have the $75 instead of the prostate gland? (Edith Eisenberg, Potomac) [Edith\u2019s win was the second and last of her blots of ink. Once you\u2019ve got the gland, why look for anything more?]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSelected honorable mentions:How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if he had a Stanley gasoline-powered wood chucker? (John Kammer, Herndon)You know when you check off on your taxes to pay for the presidential campaign and they say it won\u2019t cost you anything? Well, why can\u2019t they do that and get rid of the whole budget deficit in one fell swoop? (Paul Kocak, Syracuse, N.Y.)What color codpiece do you think goes with this outfit? (Roy Ashley, Washington)Why doesn\u2019t it tickle when I tickle myself, but it hurts when I stick a fork in my eye? (Niels Hoven, Silver Spring)Did people in the olden days realize what fuddy-duddies they were? (Andy Spitzler, Baltimore)Story continues below advertisementAre Ice-T and Ice Cube related? (Don Frese, Baltimore)What do they do with the candy cobs? (Mike Connaghan, Gaithersburg)Doesn\u2019t it count that I was thinking of you the whole time? (Elden Carnahan, Laurel)AdvertisementWhy did you sit down if the seat was up? (Joe Ponessa, Philadelphia)I know who killed Nicole Simpson. But who killed Ron Goldman? (Bob Dalton, Beaumont, Tex.)Does this crack come with a money-back guarantee? (J.F. Martin, Hoover, Ala.)Do you think Mike Nesmith might replace John if the money was right? (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge)If a hole in the street is a manhole, is a hole in a man a streethole? (Elden Carnahan, Laurel)And Last: Why should we spare you the questions about who is buried in Grant\u2019s Tomb and why you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? (Hank Wallace, Washington)Story continues below advertisementAnd then \u2026 the Czar ran a contest to answer the inking questions! (Should we, four weeks from now? I\u2019ll have to see if they look remotely promising for answers; that\u2019s not how I\u2019ll pick the winners, though. Rhetorical questions clearly wouldn\u2019t work, even if they worked for the initial contest.)AdvertisementReport from Week 220, in which we asked you to answer any of the winning Dumb Questions from Week 117 [sic!]:Third Runner-Up: Are you sure that is a UFO behind the comet? Have I ever steered you wrong? I mean, besides that castration thing. (Art Grinath, Takoma Park) [Yes, another thing the Heaven\u2019s Gate leader did.]Second Runner-Up: Do you think Mike Nesmith might replace John if the money was right? I dunno. How much money do you think it would take to get him into the casket? (Kevin Cuddihy, Fairfax)Story continues below advertisementFirst Runner-Up: Excuse me, does this pharmacy carry that \u201cdate rape\u201d drug? Yes sir, we have a new improved version. It is this watermelon-size suppository. The man takes it. (Barry Blyveis, Columbia)And the winner of the Beldar Conehead doll: Are Ice-T and Ice Cube related? Actually, they are married. But I hear it is on the rocks. (David Kleinbard, Silver Spring) Advertisement Honorable Mentions:What does the \u201cA\u201d in UVA stand for? Well, the U is for University, so the V must be for \u201cof\u201d and the A for Virginia. It\u2019s in Latin. (Russ Beland, Springfield)Why doesn\u2019t it tickle when I tickle myself, but it hurts when I stick a fork in my eye? You are obviously using the wrong fork. \u2014 Judith Martin [Miss Manners], Washington (J.F. Martin, Hoover, Ala.)Story continues below advertisementDid people in the olden days realize what fuddy-duddies they were? No. They were too busy chasing the whippersnappers off their front lawns. (Paul Styrene, Olney)Does this crack come with a money-back guarantee? C\u2019mon lady, I\u2019m a married man. I\u2019m just tryin\u2019 to fix your sink trap here. (Peyton Coyner, Afton)Do I, like, have a shot at boinking you? Sorry, I don\u2019t believe in mating outside my species. (Jennifer Hart, Arlington)Advertisement\u2014 No, I am saving myself for Tom Witte of the Style Invitational. (Tom Witte, Gaithersburg)Why should we spare you the questions about who is buried in Grant\u2019s Tomb and why you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway? Because the Czar has the greatest sense of humor in the world, and presides over the last true meritocracy. His time is not to be wasted with unoriginal spewings from lazy minds, except for the old \u201cWhy are animals made of meat?\u201d question that has been banging around the Internet and that Dave Ferry slipped past him. (Sarah Worcester, Bowie)Story continues below advertisement----And let\u2019s jump forward to 2014, with more selected ink (which were complete with links so that people in 2020 would be able to get the references):In Week 1081 the Empress asked you to give us some stupid questions that would be even funnier than the sincerely stupid ones on the Yahoo Answers site. As with last week\u2019s bad-poetry results, some entries were disqualified for not being stupid enough; the best of these was from Rob Huffman: If NASA could put a man on the moon, why couldn\u2019t they make a better fake orange juice than Tang?AdvertisementThe winner of the Inkin\u2019 Memorial: How do you say \u201cDon\u2019t claw the sofa\u201d in Siamese? (Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.)2nd place and the breast-shaped milk mug: I don\u2019t understand those \u201ctake a penny/leave a penny\u201d jars near cash registers. If you take somebody\u2019s penny and leave one of your own, then what\u2019s the point? (Scott Poyer, Annapolis, Md.)3rd place: Do these new glasses make my brain look big? \u2014 Rick Perry, Austin (Gary Crockett)4th place: Why do people argue about which came first: the chicken or the egg? Everyone knows you need a chicken to produce an egg! (Frank Mann, Washington)Past their d\u2019oh date: honorable mentionsCan I still clap along if I feel like a room without a ceiling? (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)I\u2019m a vegetarian, so I wondered if I need to take that bloody thing out of green olives. (Mae Scanlan, Washington)What\u2019s with this letter from my bank saying there\u2019s no money in my checking account? I still have LOTS of checks in my checkbook! (Art Grinath, Takoma Park, Md.)Can I save twice as much on my car insurance if I take 30 minutes? (Mark Raffman)I know chicken fingers are really made from the toes, since, duh, chickens don\u2019t have fingers. But where do the nuggets come from? Is it the stuff they \u2026 ew, is that even sanitary? (Gregory Koch, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.)Was Johns Hopkins University named for twins? (Gary F. Suggars, Baltimore, a First Offender)My prescription bottle says, \u201cDo not operate heavy machinery.\u201d Will Obamacare pay for someone to do my laundry? (Robyn Carlson, Keyser, W.Va.)How do all my neighbors get their dogs to poop into their Washington Post bags? I can never get the timing right with Ginger. Does anyone else have this problem, or is it just cockapoos? (Ivars Kuskevics. Takoma Park, Md.)If your life flashes before your eyes when you\u2019re dying, well, suppose you did a whole lot of stuff \u2014 will it be a really long flash, or it just doesn\u2019t get all the way through, or what? (Steve Honley, Washington)I want to see \u201cA Christmas Carol\u201d at Ford\u2019s Theatre, but do you really think it\u2019s safe? I heard they had a bad incident there. (Rob Wolf, Gaithersburg, Md.)Has anyone brought a stepladder up Mount Everest to set a new record? (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)Why do people sing \u201cTake Me Out to the Ball Game,\u201d when they\u2019re already at the ballgame? (John Kupiec, Fairfax, Va.) How can you tell a male hurricane from a female? (Bird Waring, Larchmont, N.Y.)Where does The Style Invitational get its jokes from? Is it the Internet? I bet it is, because sometimes I see the same stuff there that\u2019s in the Invitational. (Luther Jett, Washington Grove, Md., a First Offender)That last one could be taken in two ways: One, that, as we\u2019ve seen, jokes from the Internet occasionally wind up in the Invitational, mostly because people innocently thought of the same idea, but very, very rarely (I\u2019m looking at you, Loser Who\u2019s Still Entering) the person stole the joke. The other way to take it is that whole lists Style Invitational entries (usually from the 1990s) are ubiquitous online, like this set of neologisms, this set of new meanings for real words, and these analogies or similes from Week 120, often attributed to high school students. And at least once, both: Someone sent me \u2014 I should have saved it, because I\u2019ve forgotten the details \u2014 one of the words or analogies from one of those lists, as an Invite entry.Don\u2019t do this for Week 1384!Omission accomplished*: The results of Week 1380*Non-inking headline submitted by both Tom Witte and Jesse Frankovich Back in March, my friend Kenji Thielstrom, a regular reader of the Invitational, sent me the graphic pictured here as a contest idea: As it spells out, if you take the \u201cDem\u201d out of \u201cpandemic,\u201d you\u2019re left with \u201cpanic.\u201d Very cool idea (if, in this case, too partisan) but a very tall order to find in a word or term not only a related word, but one in the middle AND one, in parts, flanking it. Finding the word in the middle is a challenge we\u2019ve done many times, with our \u201cair quotes\u201d contests (most recently the results of Week 1355; winner, by Hildy Zampella: H\"USB\"and: Consider yourself lucky if you get it right on the first try). But we\u2019d never done the opposite \u2014 to find a word on the two sides of the deletion. (I did end up allowing the left or right half to be chopped as well.) I was sure that it would yield good material, but I had a logistical concern: how to keep the reader focused only on the letters to the sides, and not look at all at the now irrelevant material that\u2019s front and center? So I decided to do a triple contrast: (a) capital letters on the ends, lowercase for the rest; (b) boldface for the ends, lightface for the rest; and (c) actually striking out the discarded letters. It was a formatting headache that required several fixes to get totally right, but I\u2019m pleased at the results online, and hopeful for the print page, which is in smaller and sans serif type, and which we\u2019ll see in newsprint on Saturday. (Meanwhile, the new Post system I use for the Conversational doesn\u2019t even allow for strike-throughs, which is why I\u2019ll use parentheses below. Yeah, I know.) Not surprisingly, the entry pool was full of political jabs; in the final list, I found myself rearranging the order of the entries so it wouldn\u2019t be a wearying barrage of bad-leader bad-leader bad-leader. More surprisingly, the ink was spread around to nearly 40 Losers among the 51 entries (though Gary Crockett\u2019s four blots of ink squirt him past the 450-mark inexorably toward the Hall of Fame). Kevin Dopart\u2019s L(eadersh) IP \u2014 \u201cservice provided to the states by the White House\u201d gave him his 29th Invite win and, with the honorable mention for POT(ato fung) US, \u201ca blight that can ruin a country,\u201d his 1,531st blot of ink. On a saner but still very impressive level, second place Jeff Hazle, whose CLASSrooM was one of the few neologisms, rather than existing terms, among the entries, makes his 19th trip to the Losers\u2019 Circle with his 119th (and 120th) ink. And this week\u2019s other runners-up, Chuck Helwig and David Peckarsky, are relative newbies, with 12 and 36 inks, respectively, though both have scored \u201cabove the fold in the past.\u201d Also exciting: First Offender Emma Daley vaults over the One Hit Wonders charts to debut with two honorable mentions: GROcery shopPING, to feel around on the top shelf for one more mac and cheese (something that this altitude-challenged Empress knows well) and SPeaker of the hOUSE, \u201cJust because I\u2019m the only other person here doesn\u2019t mean I always want to listen to you.\u201d Super debut, Emma \u2014 bring it on! What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood agreed with me on my choices for the winner and runners-up this week, and also singled out Raymond Gallucci\u2019s BOOostER for apostate Redskins fans; Sam Mertens\u2019s PENitenCE for what the impeaching Democrats would have gotten; and William Kennard\u2019s INject household cleANER, \u201cTrump\u2019s advice, day by day.\u201d NOthing wrong with these in any WAY: The unprintables: First, I\u2019d chosen this one by Jesse Frankovich as an honorable mention but it was axed by the managing editor. I can\u2019t argue with that, though; even considering who it is, there are some things The Washington Post shouldn\u2019t say (even attributed to anonymous people) about the president of the United States: GO( **** yourse) LF: What taxpayers say when they find out what the president spends their money on.Then there was this one by Tom Witte that I\u2019d considered running online, but figured it\u2019s better here, and not just because the singular and plural didn\u2019t agree: PENItentiarieS: Something that is not always welcome where it is placed. And then we had these two from Gary Crockett: climAXES: They cause falling wood; and TumescENT: A fabric structure supported by a pole. The hits kept on coming: More covid parodies from Week 1378 on Facebook Two weeks ago, when I published about 20 song parody lyrics and videos about Life in the Age of Corona (results of Week 1378), I lamented robbing so many good songs of ink, and promised in this column that I\u2019d post some of them in the Style Invitational Devotees Facebook group in the coming days. And so I really hope you\u2019ll check out the sixteen extra parodies (including videos) that you can find by searching for #coronaparody in the group (or by, I hope, clicking right here). If you count the Likes and heart emoji and whatnot, the most popular of the 16 was this \u201cnoink\u201d by Jesse Frankovich to \u2014 what else \u2014 the Major General\u2019s Song in the voice of Covid-19 Itself: I am the very model of a novel viral pathogen;I represent how humans have incited nature\u2019s wrath again.The rapid rate at which I spread from host to host is warrantingThe people all around the world to stay at home in quarantine.To be alone for weeks on end will give a person's psyche fits,But hey, I\u2019m kinda cute with all my little reddish spiky bits.For underestimating me I have to thank the president;To say that I was serious he was a bit too hesitant.A million-plus Americans so far have tested positive;Of health and economic devastation I am causative.If Donald thinks I\u2019m beaten then he ought to do his math again \u2014I am the very model of a novel viral pathogen!----So Maryland is starting to open up this week! Could we have a June 14 Flushies picnic after all? Well, let\u2019s see what transpires \u2026 Meanwhile, see you next week. The Empress of The Style Invitational discusses this week\u2019s stupid-question contest and results of the reverse-air-quotes contest. Style Conversational Week 1384: Ta-DUH! It\u2019s a stupid-question contest",
        "author": "Pat Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "11 big revelations from Rose McGowan\u2019s memoir \u2018Brave,\u2019 including her childhood in a cult (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "204",
        "date": "2018-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/01/29/11-big-revelations-from-rose-mcgowans-memoir-brave-including-her-childhood-in-a-cult/",
        "text": "Rose McGowan has suffered some hard knocks, from a cult to homelessness to repeated abuse. The actress, director and musician, who has become a vocal women\u2019s rights advocate, opens up about her trauma in her memoir \u201cBrave,\u201d which comes out Tuesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSome of what she discloses \u2014 including allegations against Harvey Weinstein \u2014 she has discussed before, but seeing the anecdotes all in one place has a startling effect. Her life starts looking like a parade of horrors. She says she is on the other side of all that now, though, and finally in a good place. Here is a look at some of the surprising revelations from the book.She was born into a cultMcGowan\u2019s parents were living in Italy with the Children of God when she was born in 1973. She remembers it as the first but not last cult she was a part of, because she believes Hollywood is its own\u00a0sect,\u00a0with its\u00a0powerful men as the leaders. Her early memories include being beaten by cult members when she refused to say she had taken God into her heart and the day her father took a second wife. Ultimately \u2014 after the group started advocating for sexual relationships between adults and children \u2014 her father fled with his kids and second wife, leaving McGowan\u2019s mother to figure out her own escape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe was a homeless runawayClearly her home life was not entirely healthy. Once her parents both made their way back to the United States, she bounced between living with her father \u2014 an often cruel man with manic tendencies \u2014 and her mother, who had a thing for abusive men and once had McGowan committed for being a drug addict. The actress was just 13 at the time and claims she had just tried acid for the first time. McGowan says she escaped from that facility and became a teen runaway, living and starving on the streets for a year before settling with her aunt in Seattle.After McGowan and her mother moved to L.A., her mom pawned her off on an older manStory continues below advertisementMcGowan has fond memories of later moving to Los Angeles with her mother, where the two shared an apartment. The bliss was short-lived. Eventually, she says, her mom met a pathological liar and decided to move away with him, but first she asked McGowan\u2019s new 20-year-old boyfriend, William, if he would take care of her. She was 15 at the time, and she moved in with him. William turned out to be an abusive, possessive drug addict who never kept food in the house. He once choked her and dragged her around by her collar, which caused her to lose two toenails. She eventually escaped by stealing his new Ford Explorer and high-tailing it out of town.Advertisement\u201cI forged William\u2019s signature on the car\u2019s \u2018pink slip\u2019 and traded it in for a spaceship-like sports car and never looked back,\u201d she writes. \u201cThat was the end of William for me. I felt some guilt but my missing toenails reminded me that I shouldn\u2019t feel too bad.\u201dHer first love was murderedStory continues below advertisementShortly after escaping her relationship with William, McGowan says she started dating a club owner named Brett Cantor. Things seemed to be looking up for her, relationship-wise. Then, out of nowhere, he was stabbed to death. The murder is still unsolved, \u201cbut I have been trying for years to remedy that,\u201d McGowan writes.She refuses to name Harvey Weinstein and her ex-boyfriend Robert RodriguezMcGowan was one of the first stars to go public with allegations against Weinstein, but she does not want to say his name.Advertisement\u201cBy now we all know the Monster\u2019s name, but I have made a choice not to use it,\u201d she writes. \u201cI refuse to have his name in my book.\u201d Instead she refers to him as \u201cthe Studio Head,\u201d \u201cthe Monster\u201d or \u201cthe Pig Monster.\u201d She also details \u2014 in a now sadly familiar tale \u2014 her allegations that her first business meeting with him suddenly took a horrifying turn when he forced her into his \u201cJacuzzi room\u201d and performed oral sex on her against her will.Story continues below advertisementThe rest is widely known. He paid her $100,000, as the New York Times reported, and she believes blacklisted her from the industry.Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein\u2019s 30-year pattern of abuse in Hollywood.Interestingly, she also does not name her ex-boyfriend, Robert Rodriguez, who directed her in \u201cPlanet Terror\u201d in 2007 (part of a collaboration with Quentin Tarantino called \u201cGrindhouse\u201d), instead referring to him as \u201cRR,\u201d even though their relationship, while he was still married, was well-documented. She has some truly terrible stories about his jealousy and erratic behavior. One involves a kissing scene she was supposed to have with the actor Freddy Rodriguez. McGowan claims the director was so possessive, he shaved his facial hair in the same pattern as the actor so he could do the scene instead.AdvertisementRodriguez and Tarantino eventually sold the film to Weinstein.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI can\u2019t tell you what it\u2019s like to be sold into the hands of the man who had assaulted me and scarred me for life,\u201d she writes. \u201cI had to do press events with the Monster and see photos of us together, his big fat paw pulling me in to his body.\u201dMcGowan was pleased when the movie flopped.Another man McGowan leaves anonymous is her \u201cPhantoms\u201d co-star Ben Affleck. Although she called him out by name on Twitter, she refers to him only as her co-star in her book when she recounts how she says he responded to her story about Weinstein\u2019s abuse by saying, \u201cGoddamn it. I told him to stop doing that.\u201dHer first audition was terribleMcGowan was discovered by a producer and sent to audition for Gregg Araki\u2019s 1995 film \u201cThe Doom Generation,\u201d which also starred\u00a0James Duval and\u00a0Johnathon Schaech. McGowan was charmed by Araki\u2019s \u201cfun, infectious personality,\u201d but she says she was turned off by the portion of the audition that was a \u201cchemistry test\u201d with one of the male leads.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe actor was lying flat on a couch,\u201d she writes. \u201cI was made to lie on top of him. He was lying on his back and he had an erection.\u201d She does not blame the actor, saying it \u201cwasn\u2019t his fault,\u201d but says her way of dealing with the situation was by disassociating \u2014 something she had become good at by that point.The real story behind those tabloid claims of plastic surgery (and it was not a car accident)McGowan became a target on sites like Perez Hilton when her appearance seemed to change overnight. Suddenly the tabloids were claiming the actress had gone under the knife. At the time, McGowan said the change was the result of a car crash that left her needing reconstructive surgery. It turns out that was not true at all.Story continues below advertisementIn 2007, when she was recuperating from an injury she suffered on the set of \u201cPlanet Terror,\u201d she thought it was a good time to also fix a lifelong sinus problem. The operation went awry, she says, when the surgeon punctured a hole in her skin below her right eye. She needed reconstructive surgery, which left her eye looking slightly pinched, so she also had surgery on her left eye to keep things symmetrical.Advertisement\u201cI told my publicists what happened and they said to say it was a car accident,\u201d McGowan writes. \u201cLooking back, I don\u2019t know why it mattered but I took that advice. And so when I was asked by the press, that became the party line.\u201dHer relationship with Marilyn Manson was quite lovely, thank you very muchStory continues below advertisementDespite the press calling him the antichrist, the singer was a very sweet person, and the pair had a pretty boring, domestic existence, she recalls.\u201cWhen he wasn\u2019t creating electrifying music, Manson was painting watercolors of my Boston terriers while I was ordering glassware from Martha Stewart\u2019s online store,\u201d she writes.The infamous dress she wore to the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards was completely misunderstoodIn case you need a refresher on the showstopping gown McGowan wore to the awards show while accompanying Marilyn Manson, it was a sheer piece of cloth in front, which left her breasts and black thong in clear view and strands of chains across her back side. McGowan is still annoyed no one seemed to understand her reasons for wearing it. She really was not trying to be sexy.Advertisement\u201cWearing the \u2018naked dress,\u2019 as I call it, was a big middle finger to pretty much everybody,\u201d she writes. \u201cIt was a reclamation of my own body after my assault.\u201dInstead, she laments, the dress was \u201cmisinterpreted and sexualized, which was the exact opposite point I was trying to make.\u201dRose McGowan is right. Wearing black is no way to take a stand on the red carpet\u201cCharmed\u201d was not a great experienceWorking on the Aaron Spelling series was soul-crushing and exhausting, according to McGowan. In retrospect, she is shocked she worked with only one female director during her five years on the show.The mostly male crew \u201cwould snicker in disrespect when she would direct them,\u201d McGowan writes. \u201cI feel horribly about not fighting for her more, but I didn\u2019t fully understand the dynamics of what was happening. My character was too busy talking to leprechauns to have the time.\u201dWhen she met Aaron Spelling, he was drinking blue Gatorade out of a crystal goblet using a bendy strawNow that is an amazing image.Read more\u2018Are they trying to silence me?\u2019: Rose McGowan on warrant for her arrest on drug chargeWhere things stand with the growing number of Hollywood men accused of sexual misconductAfter Weinstein, Hollywood launches anti-sexual-harassment hotline She refuses to even mention the name Harvey Weinstein, though she has plenty to say about him. 11 big revelations from Rose McGowan\u2019s memoir \u2018Brave,\u2019 including her childhood in a cult",
        "author": "Stephanie Merry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Chanel remains the same. It\u2019s the customers who change. (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "205",
        "date": "2018-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/10/02/chanel-remains-the-same-its-the-customers-that-change/",
        "text": "PARIS\u00a0\u2014 Each season in recent memory, Chanel has transformed the Grand Palais into an elaborate facsimile of a real-world location that ostensibly announces the theme of the collection. But the reality is that the look of Chanel doesn\u2019t change significantly from one season to the next, from one year to another. Its consistency is its strength. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe silhouette of the signature collarless jacket is tweaked to remain current. The color palette shifts. One season, for example, is dominated by ethereal whites and dove grays, so the clothes are shown against the backdrop of a glacier \u2014 an actual hunk of ice that was shipped in for the occasion. The accessories come and go like expensive gimmicks, indulgent one-offs. The spaceship collection spawned a handbag shaped like a rocket. And so on.[Robin Givhan at Paris Fashion Week: full coverage]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s the customers who change over the years, from globe-trotting ladies who lunch, to Instagram-obsessed influencers, to black and brown hip-hop stars, to wealthy young Asians trailed by a phalanx of photographers and stylists who primp them in full view of the assembled crowd.These shifting tribes illustrate how Chanel can live in so many diverse lives and its studious courting of new generations and constituencies. Chanel can be whatever you need it to be.For spring 2019, the setting was a seaside resort. Little thatched-roof huts stood at either end of a sandy beach that had been constructed inside the Grand Palais. An enormous backdrop depicted a picture-perfect ocean. And actual waves gently lapped against the shore.Story continues below advertisementIndeed some guests arrived to find themselves gingerly hiking up tiny sand dunes to reach their seats, and others could well have ended up with water-logged stilettos if they wandered too far from theirs. And it was a cheeky stroke of humor to have former \u201cBaywatch\u201d star Pamela Anderson settled into the front row, along with regular Chanel bold-face guests such as Pharrell Williams.The models emerged and paraded along the beach. They strolled with bare feet, some heading down the shore to splash in their Chanel finery. They wore straw hats with wide brims and carried their shoes in their hands, as if they\u2019d just finished a casual waterside lunch and decided to have a stroll to take in the scenery.They were not dressed down in throwaway sundresses. The shoes they were carrying were often rather dressy heels. The message was simply that Chanel can be part of a more informal, easygoing lifestyle. Chanel may be expensive, but it doesn\u2019t have to be treated as precious.The palette was dominated by pastels. There were loose-fitting jackets and others with a wide band at the waist that gave them the look of a baseball jacket. There were pineapple prints and boxy straw bags that called to mind picnic baskets. Lacey dresses and trousers were the color of washed denim. Lightweight dresses fluttered in the man-made breeze. A black baby-doll dress topped black bike shorts. (Yes, bike shorts. So sorry. I don\u2019t make the news; I just report it.)This was a pretty Chanel collection, mostly because of its lightness and simplicity. There weren\u2019t a lot of complicated embellishments. Nothing especially overwrought. It was still fully, wholly, unquestionably Chanel. Only the setting had changed, and its customer base likely expanded.ALSO AT\u00a0PARIS FASHION WEEK:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGowns for your starring role in a costume drama \u2014 but what role do they have in your life?Lobsters, pineapples, sailboats and straitjackets: Thom Browne\u2019s vision of preppy gone madBalenciaga\u2019s big new shoulders aren\u2019t from the \u201980s. They\u2019re from the future.From Junya Watanabe and Altuzarra, two radically different visions of romanceOn the Comme des Gar\u00e7ons runway, pregnancy as metaphorA provocative designer has just blown up a 70-year-old brand. But to what end?What we talk about when we talk about \u2018effortless chic\u2019These glittery, chainmailed, mismatched clothes are difficult \u2014 but so worth itApocalyptic looks for your 2018 mood, from Rick OwensGender-blurring made as awkward as possible at Maison Margiela \u2014 but why?What exactly is Saint Laurent saying about female sexuality and empowerment here?Marine Serre is a name you\u2019ll want to remember\u2018Outside there is a war,\u2019 so Dior and Gucci offer the fashion equivalent of self-care A faux-beach runway show encourages you to take your Chanel casual. But it's still the same Chanel.   Chanel remains the same. It\u2019s the customers who change.",
        "author": "Robin Givhan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | With bouffants and silver boots, Chanel rockets back to the early Space Age (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "206",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/03/07/with-bouffants-and-silver-boots-chanel-rockets-back-to-the-early-space-age/",
        "text": "One in a series on the clothes having a moment at\u00a0Paris Fashion Week:PARIS\u00a0\u2014 Karl Lagerfeld is a showman, a provocateur, a man of the social-media age. Whether he is serving up biting opinions about Adele, mischaracterizing Meryl Streep\u2019s relationship with design houses or envisioning the staging of a runway show, the Chanel creative director knows how to capture our attention and set Instagram on fire. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company\u2019s elaborate sets in the Grand Palais have included a Paris bistro, an airport terminal, an art gallery and a grocery store. This time, after guests made their way past security checkpoints that included bag checks and identification inspections, they entered the vast exhibition hall to find a Chanel rocket centered on a launchpad. Soaring several stories toward the sky, the rocket looked like a NASA specimen from the 1960s. It was surrounded by industrial-looking cubes with looping ducts and ventilation shafts. Blinking \u201cradio towers\u201d rose up between the landscape of bleachers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe set was not so much a celebration of our current era of space exploration, in which tourist flights to Mars are the dream, but rather a look back, when scientists still puzzled over the chemistry of the moon\u2019s soil, and \u201cThe Andromeda Strain\u201d was man\u2019s great existential fear.This collection, rolled out to Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d was defined by the boots and bouffants of the 1960s\u00a0\u2014 the years when fashion was shifting away from the reserved style we saw in \u201cHidden Figures\u201d to the iconoclasm of the Youthquake.This collection included glittery knee-high boots, structured shift dresses and squared-off jackets sprinkled with sparkles. Some dresses were practically blinding \u2014 constellation patterns, Milky Way galaxies, starry night images. There were more contemporary, sporty gestures, too. They included silver backpacks, hoodies and dresses emblazoned with moon-man prints, silver trousers and quilted wraps that suggested astronaut blankets.It was a fun and delightful collection in which the theme-park atmosphere added to the joy. There was also a mood of hopefulness in it. Perhaps it was that the show served as a full-throated distraction from the many grim matters here on Earth. Or maybe it was the childlike optimism that can fuel dreams about spaceships and space travel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the models made their final march around the runway, Lagerfeld took his bows and then\u00a0\u2014 with the help of his godson Hudson Kroenig, who had walked in the show\u00a0\u2014 pressed a bright red launch button to begin a countdown. Smoke swirled around the bottom of the rocket. Lights blinked and the rocket\u2019s engines glowed. Then it appeared to lift off \u2014 the ship\u2019s tail end retracting toward the nose and toward the glass roof of the Grand Palais. And the audience cheered at the sheer kitschy, indulgent audacity of the spectacle.The lyrics to \u201cRocket Man\u201d are a bit melancholy, exploring loneliness and isolation. And the song observes how even heroes and celebrities are subject to the same moments of wistfulness as those who live their lives in near anonymity.But when the engines on a faux rocket ignite and the whole thing appears to lift skyward at the command of a ponytailed octogenarian, for at least one full minute there is nothing to do but smile.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso at Paris Fashion Week:\u00a0\n\n\nLook out! Stella McCartney is bringing back the pointy bra.\n\n\n\nLuxury fashion is desperately trying to woo millennials. That\u2019s good for everyone.Comme des Garcons wants you to think about our beauty standards. Really think.This designer wants to swaddle you in so many yards of sensual velvet this fallBalmain, unofficial designer of the Kardashians, finds inspiration in \u2026 Nirvana?The bizarre hats at the Rick Owens show were definitely unnerving. In a good way.Saint Laurent is trying too hard to be sexy, and it\u2019s just not workingYou\u2019re afraid of bold prints. Dries Van Noten will help you get over that.\u00a0At Off-White, another hot young designer who can\u2019t figure out what to say to women Liftoff! Karl Lagerfeld launched a delightful spaceship of a fall 2017 collection. With bouffants and silver boots, Chanel rockets back to the early Space Age",
        "author": "Robin Givhan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | With bouffants and silver boots, Chanel rockets back to the early Space Age (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "207",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/03/07/with-bouffants-and-silver-boots-chanel-rockets-back-to-the-early-space-age/",
        "text": "One in a series on the clothes having a moment at\u00a0Paris Fashion Week:PARIS\u00a0\u2014 Karl Lagerfeld is a showman, a provocateur, a man of the social-media age. Whether he is serving up biting opinions about Adele, mischaracterizing Meryl Streep\u2019s relationship with design houses or envisioning the staging of a runway show, the Chanel creative director knows how to capture our attention and set Instagram on fire. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company\u2019s elaborate sets in the Grand Palais have included a Paris bistro, an airport terminal, an art gallery and a grocery store. This time, after guests made their way past security checkpoints that included bag checks and identification inspections, they entered the vast exhibition hall to find a Chanel rocket centered on a launchpad. Soaring several stories toward the sky, the rocket looked like a NASA specimen from the 1960s. It was surrounded by industrial-looking cubes with looping ducts and ventilation shafts. Blinking \u201cradio towers\u201d rose up between the landscape of bleachers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe set was not so much a celebration of our current era of space exploration, in which tourist flights to Mars are the dream, but rather a look back, when scientists still puzzled over the chemistry of the moon\u2019s soil, and \u201cThe Andromeda Strain\u201d was man\u2019s great existential fear.This collection, rolled out to Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d was defined by the boots and bouffants of the 1960s\u00a0\u2014 the years when fashion was shifting away from the reserved style we saw in \u201cHidden Figures\u201d to the iconoclasm of the Youthquake.This collection included glittery knee-high boots, structured shift dresses and squared-off jackets sprinkled with sparkles. Some dresses were practically blinding \u2014 constellation patterns, Milky Way galaxies, starry night images. There were more contemporary, sporty gestures, too. They included silver backpacks, hoodies and dresses emblazoned with moon-man prints, silver trousers and quilted wraps that suggested astronaut blankets.It was a fun and delightful collection in which the theme-park atmosphere added to the joy. There was also a mood of hopefulness in it. Perhaps it was that the show served as a full-throated distraction from the many grim matters here on Earth. Or maybe it was the childlike optimism that can fuel dreams about spaceships and space travel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the models made their final march around the runway, Lagerfeld took his bows and then\u00a0\u2014 with the help of his godson Hudson Kroenig, who had walked in the show\u00a0\u2014 pressed a bright red launch button to begin a countdown. Smoke swirled around the bottom of the rocket. Lights blinked and the rocket\u2019s engines glowed. Then it appeared to lift off \u2014 the ship\u2019s tail end retracting toward the nose and toward the glass roof of the Grand Palais. And the audience cheered at the sheer kitschy, indulgent audacity of the spectacle.The lyrics to \u201cRocket Man\u201d are a bit melancholy, exploring loneliness and isolation. And the song observes how even heroes and celebrities are subject to the same moments of wistfulness as those who live their lives in near anonymity.But when the engines on a faux rocket ignite and the whole thing appears to lift skyward at the command of a ponytailed octogenarian, for at least one full minute there is nothing to do but smile.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso at Paris Fashion Week:\u00a0\n\n\nLook out! Stella McCartney is bringing back the pointy bra.\n\n\n\nLuxury fashion is desperately trying to woo millennials. That\u2019s good for everyone.Comme des Garcons wants you to think about our beauty standards. Really think.This designer wants to swaddle you in so many yards of sensual velvet this fallBalmain, unofficial designer of the Kardashians, finds inspiration in \u2026 Nirvana?The bizarre hats at the Rick Owens show were definitely unnerving. In a good way.Saint Laurent is trying too hard to be sexy, and it\u2019s just not workingYou\u2019re afraid of bold prints. Dries Van Noten will help you get over that.\u00a0At Off-White, another hot young designer who can\u2019t figure out what to say to women Liftoff! Karl Lagerfeld launched a delightful spaceship of a fall 2017 collection. With bouffants and silver boots, Chanel rockets back to the early Space Age",
        "author": "Robin Givhan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | With bouffants and silver boots, Chanel rockets back to the early Space Age (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "208",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/03/07/with-bouffants-and-silver-boots-chanel-rockets-back-to-the-early-space-age/",
        "text": "One in a series on the clothes having a moment at\u00a0Paris Fashion Week:PARIS\u00a0\u2014 Karl Lagerfeld is a showman, a provocateur, a man of the social-media age. Whether he is serving up biting opinions about Adele, mischaracterizing Meryl Streep\u2019s relationship with design houses or envisioning the staging of a runway show, the Chanel creative director knows how to capture our attention and set Instagram on fire. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company\u2019s elaborate sets in the Grand Palais have included a Paris bistro, an airport terminal, an art gallery and a grocery store. This time, after guests made their way past security checkpoints that included bag checks and identification inspections, they entered the vast exhibition hall to find a Chanel rocket centered on a launchpad. Soaring several stories toward the sky, the rocket looked like a NASA specimen from the 1960s. It was surrounded by industrial-looking cubes with looping ducts and ventilation shafts. Blinking \u201cradio towers\u201d rose up between the landscape of bleachers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe set was not so much a celebration of our current era of space exploration, in which tourist flights to Mars are the dream, but rather a look back, when scientists still puzzled over the chemistry of the moon\u2019s soil, and \u201cThe Andromeda Strain\u201d was man\u2019s great existential fear.This collection, rolled out to Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d was defined by the boots and bouffants of the 1960s\u00a0\u2014 the years when fashion was shifting away from the reserved style we saw in \u201cHidden Figures\u201d to the iconoclasm of the Youthquake.This collection included glittery knee-high boots, structured shift dresses and squared-off jackets sprinkled with sparkles. Some dresses were practically blinding \u2014 constellation patterns, Milky Way galaxies, starry night images. There were more contemporary, sporty gestures, too. They included silver backpacks, hoodies and dresses emblazoned with moon-man prints, silver trousers and quilted wraps that suggested astronaut blankets.It was a fun and delightful collection in which the theme-park atmosphere added to the joy. There was also a mood of hopefulness in it. Perhaps it was that the show served as a full-throated distraction from the many grim matters here on Earth. Or maybe it was the childlike optimism that can fuel dreams about spaceships and space travel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the models made their final march around the runway, Lagerfeld took his bows and then\u00a0\u2014 with the help of his godson Hudson Kroenig, who had walked in the show\u00a0\u2014 pressed a bright red launch button to begin a countdown. Smoke swirled around the bottom of the rocket. Lights blinked and the rocket\u2019s engines glowed. Then it appeared to lift off \u2014 the ship\u2019s tail end retracting toward the nose and toward the glass roof of the Grand Palais. And the audience cheered at the sheer kitschy, indulgent audacity of the spectacle.The lyrics to \u201cRocket Man\u201d are a bit melancholy, exploring loneliness and isolation. And the song observes how even heroes and celebrities are subject to the same moments of wistfulness as those who live their lives in near anonymity.But when the engines on a faux rocket ignite and the whole thing appears to lift skyward at the command of a ponytailed octogenarian, for at least one full minute there is nothing to do but smile.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso at Paris Fashion Week:\u00a0\n\n\nLook out! Stella McCartney is bringing back the pointy bra.\n\n\n\nLuxury fashion is desperately trying to woo millennials. That\u2019s good for everyone.Comme des Garcons wants you to think about our beauty standards. Really think.This designer wants to swaddle you in so many yards of sensual velvet this fallBalmain, unofficial designer of the Kardashians, finds inspiration in \u2026 Nirvana?The bizarre hats at the Rick Owens show were definitely unnerving. In a good way.Saint Laurent is trying too hard to be sexy, and it\u2019s just not workingYou\u2019re afraid of bold prints. Dries Van Noten will help you get over that.\u00a0At Off-White, another hot young designer who can\u2019t figure out what to say to women Liftoff! Karl Lagerfeld launched a delightful spaceship of a fall 2017 collection. With bouffants and silver boots, Chanel rockets back to the early Space Age",
        "author": "Robin Givhan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to get stuck in a barn with Anthony S. Fauci, Jamie Lee Curtis and Yo-Yo Ma (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "209",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/instagram-live-stuck-with-geoff-last-show/2021/09/15/f35b2140-14c5-11ec-9589-31ac3173c2e5_story.html",
        "text": "My original idea was more a coping mechanism than a plan. As covid-19 struck, my normal job \u2014 rambling down the highway with Sinead O\u2019Connor or tracking down witnesses to one of rock\u2019s greatest disasters as the national arts reporter \u2014 became Zoom interviews out of my house. Like so many, I immediately began to feel the loss of connection. That became the nugget of the idea. To cope, I would try to speak to an interesting artist, musician, comedian or actor every day, and we would publish the conversation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightObviously, every day was not realistic. For one thing, The Washington Post wasn\u2019t going to run a chat each day. But on a Sunday in March 2020, I phoned ZZ Top\u2019s Billy Gibbons \u2014 he was available, his publicist said \u2014 and we talked about the uncertainty of the pandemic, Prince\u2019s guitar playing and how he had ended up in a hotel room without a guitar cord. When we got off, I sent out a round of emails and found out that singer Richard Marx would be available the next day. Thankfully, around this time, two of my editors, David Malitz and Phoebe Connelly, heard what I was up to. They actually had a doable idea. What if we launched The Post\u2019s first Instagram show? We could do it twice a week as an experiment.That launched \u201cStuck With Geoff,\u201d an hour-long interview show I did more than 100 times on Instagram Live. The first one featured comedian Tiffany Haddish, who coached me on how to start a garden. Our final episode was last month, a multiguest affair with Anthony S. Fauci, comedian Jim Gaffigan, actress Jamie Lee Curtis, director Paul Feig and a closing number from mandolin master Chris Thile. We shut down \u201cStuck With Geoff\u201d because, theoretically, the pandemic was ending and I was back on the road doing my normal job, not stuck in my office barn. Travis Lyles, who runs our Instagram, has also expanded his team to the point that he\u2019s going to add other programming with reporters across our coverage areas. And, as my favorite Beatle once wrote, all things must pass.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut I\u2019m grateful I got to experiment and stay distracted. Doing \u201cStuck\u201d taught me that, during a pandemic at least, famous and accomplished people are as desperate as we are for human contact. For all that we\u2019re Zoomed out, we can actually build those connections through social media. I also learned to appreciate that even a giant institution like The Post, owned by a dude who has built a spaceship, can DIY itself into a weekly show. A key part of \u201cStuck\u201d came through nagging my daughter, Lila, who was deferring her first year of college, to craft my social media sign each week. I\u2019m grateful for the stack of them that I\u2019m keeping forever. I\u2019m also grateful to Anying Guo for her enthusiasm and editing help, and Amy Hitt for carving out the print space each week to edit and run an excerpted version of the show. So that\u2019s it.Here, for the last edition, are six guests who captured \u201cStuck With Geoff.\u201dWatch the last \u2018Stuck With Geoff\u2019Dr. FauciHow strange that an immunologist educated at Cornell University would need a private security detail during a pandemic. But for most of us, Anthony S. Fauci wasn\u2019t controversial at all. He provided reality in a sea of Twitter blather. He\u2019s also a great conversation, whether talking about the value of masks or the genius of Stanley Tucci in \u201cBig Night.\u201d When he came on for the first time, in August 2020, I took a sip of water out of my Fauci mug and asked: \u201cI assume you\u2019re not receiving any residuals from all of the products out there?\u201d He said, \u201cAbsolutely not.\u201d He also provided a glimmer of hope at a difficult moment. \u201cIt will end,\u201d he said. \u201cWe will get out of this and we will return to normal. Don\u2019t give up. Don\u2019t despair. Don\u2019t throw caution to the wind. We can end this.\u201d Fauci returned for an update on Dec. 24, his 80th birthday, and for the final show on Aug. 27. I couldn\u2019t resist asking him about his main political nemesis, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) \u201cI sort of go back to the \u2018Godfather\u2019 theme,\u201d Fauci said. \u201cIt\u2019s nothing personal. It\u2019s strictly business. But occasionally somebody goes over the line and you\u2019ve got to push back.\u201dYo-Yo MaDuring the pandemic, the world-famous cellist popped up on the Internet performing a concert at Tanglewood and on his own website. He played a solo inside a gym in western Massachusetts after receiving his second coronavirus vaccine. And he came on \u201cStuck\u201d to talk about the power of music. \u201cYou can\u2019t touch, you can\u2019t hug, you can\u2019t shake hands. But what music does, its sound moves air molecules. So when air floats across your skin and touches the hairs of your skin, that\u2019s touch. That\u2019s the closest thing to someone actually touching you. It\u2019s as if you were miniaturized and you\u2019re in the middle of a lake. But that lake is a bowl, and that vessel is holding you. That\u2019s what music can do.\u201dDionne WarwickAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere was a ragged glory to going live. Some guests had no idea how to use the medium. We usually solved this with a pre-show test. But others declined the test without understanding just how silly I might look, a live feed launched, desperately trying to invite them onto the show. It took 14 minutes to bring Marlo Thomas and Phil Donohue on. Billy Gibbons couldn\u2019t figure out his sound for a half-hour. Our viewers were treated to the ZZ Top beard and no audio. Eventually, Lila made a \u201cBe Patient\u201d sign that I could hold up. This helped. But some issues weren\u2019t technical. When it came to the singer Dionne Warwick, she arrived on the show without anything to balance her phone on. I felt bad. I wanted to beam her up a tripod. She was sweating after a few minutes and clearly bothered. But Warwick eventually got her bearing and we had an conversation that included not only her favorite cover of her own work (Luther Vandross doing \u201cA House Is Not a Home\u201d), but also her honesty in admitting that she still smokes because she likes it.Jamie Lee CurtisI got the actress\u2019s email from a mutual friend and asked whether she would come on the show. She wrote back within seconds. \u201cYes,\u201d and then, \u201cDo I seem too needy?\u201d What I loved about our chat was that Curtis did have something to promote \u2014 a new podcast dramatizing a summer camp story \u2014 but wasn\u2019t at all trying to push me to talk about it. She wanted to talk about what we\u2019ve been through, about social justice, about photography, about whether it was appropriate for me to let my son, Calvin, who is 11, watch \u201cTrading Places,\u201d which very definitely revealed to him her breasts and language he doesn\u2019t normally hear in middle school. Then I brought up \u201cHalloween,\u201d the horror movie franchise in which Curtis made her film debut in 1978. \u201cExposing a 5-year-old to a horror film is just wrong,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so I bring up your question about when to show someone. I only was, you know, kind of blushing a little because I thought, \u2018I don\u2019t know how many naked women he\u2019s seen.\u2019 And so I kind of felt a little honored that maybe I might be one of the first set of actual breasts that your son has seen in his young life.\u201dDoug E. FreshAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe beauty of \u201cStuck\u201d is that although editors Travis Lyles and Phoebe Connelly might have given suggestions, they didn\u2019t demand guests with only a certain numbers of followers. Which meant I could go after such first-timers as 92-year-old Burt Bacharach, who appeared at a piano ready to walk us through the creation of \u201cWalk on By,\u201d or one of my favorite old-school hip-hop icons, Douglas Davis or, as he\u2019s known, Doug E. Fresh. He isn\u2019t half as famous as Drake, but he was a perfect guest, showing up on my iPhone in shades and with a generous smile. My favorite moment is when he talked about what it felt like to walk through Harlem in the 1980s, past the Apollo, past Bobby Robinson\u2019s record shop, and how that led to creating \u201cthe fifth element\u201d of hip-hop: the beat box. \u201cI heard Grandmaster Flash, Spoonie Gee, Funky Four, and I say, \u2018All right, I\u2019m a do the baseline \u2014 boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.\u2019 \u201dPaul FeigPaul Feig created \u201cFreaks and Geeks\u201d and has directed some of my favorite movies, including \u201cBridesmaids\u201d and \u201cA Simple Favor.\u201d As the pandemic took hold, he created his own daily Instagram show, \u201cQuarantine Cocktail Hour.\u201d Dressed impeccably, he would open with a song and dance and then mix a special drink. It was his positive energy during a terrible moment that also made me want to have him on. So for this show, I broke out my red jacket, a slice of sartorial splendor acquired in a thrift shop in Virginia, and we teamed up. Eventually, after more than 100 episodes, Feig would have to quit his Instagram show. He had a movie to direct. I kept going.\n\n The Washington Post\u2019s first Instagram Live show, started at the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, comes to an end after 19 months. How to get stuck in a barn with Anthony S. Fauci, Jamie Lee Curtis and Yo-Yo Ma",
        "author": "Geoff Edgers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fox felt it would be \u2018extremely fraudulent\u2019 to bring back \u2018American Idol\u2019 so quickly (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "210",
        "date": "2017-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/05/15/fox-felt-it-would-be-extremely-fraudulent-to-bring-back-american-idol-so-quickly/",
        "text": "Fox executives have some complicated feelings about \u201cAmerican Idol\u201d \u2014 specifically, the recently announced rebooted version of \u201cAmerican Idol,\u201d which will air on ABC next season.After 15 seasons\u00a0on Fox, the long-running singing competition wrapped up last May. On a conference call Monday, in which Fox unveiled its new fall schedule,\u00a0Fox Television Group chief executive Dana Walden said it \u201cfeels bad\u201d knowing that the series \u2014 particularly an iconic one that\u2019s so connected to the Fox brand \u2014 is\u00a0being revived on another\u00a0network. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightABC announces revival of \u2018American Idol\u2019 next seasonAlthough Fox executives talked with producers from\u00a0FremantleMedia about bringing the show back, she said, ultimately, they felt it didn\u2019t make sense to revive a show after they spent $25 million promoting the \u201cfarewell season.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt felt \u2026 it would be extremely fraudulent to bring the show back\u00a0quickly, that our fans would not appreciate being told one thing and then have the show brought back right away,\u201d she said. \u201cWe and Fremantle\u00a0just had very different points of view.\u201dAdvertisementWalden said that after the show\u2019s ratings dropped 70 percent over four seasons (\u201cthe network was losing an enormous amount of money\u201d), they met with Fremantle producers to make some trims, or test out a new panel of judges. However, Walden said, Fremantle didn\u2019t want to start the arduous process of trying to find\u00a0new judges, and were happy with the trio of Jennifer Lopez, Harry Connick Jr. and Keith Urban \u2014 and decided they would rather \u201crest\u201d the show\u00a0rather than make significant changes.But after\u00a0the series finale aired, she said, Fremantle was \u201cdetermined to get this show back on the air as quickly as possible\u201d; Fremantle\u2019s parent company announced it lost revenue after the cancellation of \u201cIdol.\u201d While Fox kicked the idea around, executives proposed possibly bringing the series back in 2020, an \u201cappropriate\u201d amount of time off the air. Fremantle wasn\u2019t interested in waiting, she said, and thought\u00a0a new home on ABC was a good opportunity.Story continues below advertisement\"American Idol\" is one big-name show which won't be returning for a new season. Here's a look back at how it became a cultural touchstone and changed parts of the music industry. (Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)Meanwhile, Fox hopes to make an impact this fall with several new shows, including \u201cThe Gifted.\u201d The network\u2019s first Marvel series, the show chronicles an everyday suburban couple who discover their children have mutant superpowers. Futuristic sci-fi drama \u201cThe Orville,\u201d a live-action passion project from Fox\u2019s beloved animation creator Seth MacFarlane, stars MacFarlane as a commanding officer on a spaceship. And comedy \u201cGhosted,\u201d airing Sunday night after \u201cThe Simpsons,\u201d features Craig Robinson (\u201cThe Office\u201d) and Adam Scott (\u201cParks and Recreation\u201d) as a detective and a genius, respectively, who have to save the world from aliens.AdvertisementAs for Fox\u2019s recently rebooted shows \u201c24\u201d and \u201cPrison Break,\u201d neither is technically canceled, but the network doesn\u2019t have any current plans to bring them back. Ryan Murphy\u2019s horror anthology \u201cScream Queens,\u201d which lasted two seasons, is officially done. But don\u2019t feel sorry for the uber-producer\u00a0\u2014 in midseason, Fox will debut\u00a0a new Murphy drama called \u201c9-1-1,\u201d about the lives and careers of first responders.Also held for midseason: The next chapter of \u201cThe X-Files,\u201d which will return for another 10-episode revival in 2018 with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, reprising their roles as Agents Mulder and Scully.Story continues below advertisementFALL 2017 PRIME-TIME LINEUP ON FOXNew shows are in bold.MONDAY8 p.m. \u201cLucifer\u201d *9 p.m. \u201cThe Gifted\u201dTUESDAY8 p.m.\u00a0\u201cLethal Weapon\u201d *9\u00a0p.m. \u201cThe Mick\u201d *9:30 p.m. \u201cBrooklyn Nine-Nine\u201d *AdvertisementWEDNESDAY8 p.m. \u201cEmpire\u201d *9 p.m. \u201cStar\u201dTHURSDAY8 p.m. \u201cGotham\u201d *9 p.m. \u201cThe Orville\u201dFRIDAY8 p.m. \u201cHell\u2019s Kitchen\u201d9 p.m.\u00a0\u201cThe Exorcist\u201dSUNDAY7 p.m.\u00a0NFL on Fox7:30 p.m. \u201cThe OT\u201d/\u201dBob\u2019s Burgers\u201d8 p.m. \u201cThe Simpsons\u201d8:30 p.m. \u201cGhosted\u201d9 p.m. \u201cFamily Guy\u201d9:30 p.m. \u201cLast Man on Earth\u201d* Moved to a new time slotRead more:NBC\u2019s new schedule: \u2018This Is Us\u2019 will air Thursdays after \u2018Will & Grace\u2019 reboot\u2018American Idol\u2019 is coming back. Does that mean even more Ryan Seacrest?You may scoff at \u2018American Idol\u2019 now, but it changed pop culture forever Though ABC will air a rebooted version next year, Fox thought it didn't make sense to revive the show so soon. Fox felt it would be \u2018extremely fraudulent\u2019 to bring back \u2018American Idol\u2019 so quickly",
        "author": "Emily Yahr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Even in a world turned upside-down and an all-virtual Sundance, the movies survived (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "211",
        "date": "2021-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/sundance-film-festival-coda-summer-of-soul/2021/02/04/c7c2ce8e-6665-11eb-8c64-9595888caa15_story.html",
        "text": "For the first time in its history, the Sundance Film Festival went online this year, forced out of theaters in Park City, Utah, by the coronavirus. And it turns out, virtual Sundance was a lot like in-person Sundance in the most important ways.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAlthough the festival provided opportunities for talks, events and even a virtual spaceship where people\u2019s avatars could bump into each other and chat, it was the movies themselves that beckoned. The Sundance rabbit hole was no less real for being streamed instead of screened, as my informal tally of 24 films over six days suggested. And some of Sundance\u2019s most cherished verities proved gratifyingly eternal: As usual, the documentaries proved to be exceptionally strong components of the 73-film program; cardinal themes emerged (this year having to do with environmental and technological anxieties); and a crowd-pleaser is a crowd-pleaser \u2014 even when it\u2019s being shown not in a packed house but in thousands of individual houses.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year, that honor went to \u201cCODA,\u201d a heartwarming coming-of-age dramedy by Sian Heder that swept the festival\u2019s awards ceremony for dramatic features on Tuesday (it earned the audience award, grand jury prize and directing award, as well as a special citation for its ensemble cast). Tartly funny, affecting and elevated by playful Motown musical numbers, \u201cCODA\u201d features a breakout performance by Emilia Jones as a Gloucester, Mass., high school senior. Like most kids her age, Jones\u2019s character is trying to find herself amid a loving but stifling family; the fact that her parents and brother are deaf \u2014 her hearing character is the family\u2019s official translator \u2014 makes her struggle for independence more specific, but no less universal.Directed by Heder with a winning combination of sincerity and knockabout humor, and spiked with enormously appealing performances from Jones\u2019s deaf co-stars (Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant), \u201cCODA\u201d was an instant hit with viewers, critics and distributors: After a bidding war, Apple TV Plus wound up winning worldwide rights for $25\u00a0million, a Sundance record.Watching \u201cCODA\u201d epitomized the pure joy of discovery that the festival has become known \u2014 and, frankly, overhyped \u2014 for. When it was over, I couldn\u2019t wait to inform my husband that I\u2019d just seen a wonderful film. \u201cI could tell,\u201d he said dryly, referring to the laughs and sniffles he\u2019d heard from his upstairs office. Experiencing \u201cCODA\u201d in solitude served as a bittersweet reminder that nothing beats watching a movie with a crowd of people who are being similarly transported \u2014 the unspoken collective lift that proves why movies aren\u2019t truly finished until they\u2019re seen by an audience. But the fact that Apple saw value in the film means that old-fashioned (if admittedly formulaic) values such as laughter, tears, vivid characters and meaningful emotional journeys still matter in the movies, even after a year of near-existential disruption.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSundance 2021 makes it official: The weirdest movie year ever isn\u2019t even a yearI had the same feeling as I watched \u201cMass,\u201d a shatteringly powerful drama about two couples coming to terms with a tragic event they shared several years earlier. Written and directed by Fran Kranz and featuring another breathtaking ensemble performances from Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaac, Ann Dowd and Reed Birney, \u201cMass\u201d is executed with such thoughtfulness and pin-drop delicacy that it first demands a moment of silence before viewers will want to talk through the questions it raises about accountability, healing and forgiveness.With luck, \u201cMass\u201d will find the audience it deserves; in the meantime, several other acquisitions suggested a healthy market for visual storytelling \u2014 which, if 2020 taught us anything, is still as relevant as ever. Sony Pictures Classics bought the narrative feature \u201cJockey\u201d (about an aging rider grappling with professional and personal challenges), Bleecker Street picked up \u201cTogether Together,\u201d an platonic-romantic comedy starring Ed Helms as a would-be single father who befriends his pregnancy surrogate, and Netflix snagged Rebecca Hall\u2019s black-and-white period piece \u201cPassing,\u201d about an African American woman posing as White in the 1920s.As in years past, many of the hottest films at Sundance were documentaries: One of the festival\u2019s earliest sales was Neon\u2019s purchase of the masterfully executed \u201cFlee,\u201d in which filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen uses archival news footage, home movies and animation to dramatize the searing story of his childhood friend, an Afghan refugee named Amin. Juno Films picked up \u201cThe Most Beautiful Boy in the World,\u201d a haunting, tenderly mournful portrait of Bjorn Andresen, whose life was upended when at 15 he was cast by Luchino Visconti in his adaptation of \u201cDeath in Venice.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth \u201cFlee\u201d and \u201cThe Most Beautiful Boy in the World\u201d center on teenagers, who were the stars writ large at this year\u2019s Sundance, in which a number of films examined the experiences young people either in retrospect or in real time. One of the finest nonfiction films at the festival this year was \u201cCusp,\u201d in which filmmakers Isabel Bethencourt and Parker Hill plunge viewers into the carefree, chaotic, sometimes terrifying lives of three tough and irrepressible teenage girls in an unnamed Texas town.Girlhood is anything but sugar and spice in \u201cCusp,\u201d which conveys an unvarnished portrait of young women left to their own, often self-destructive, devices. But, even though they\u2019re relatively directionless, the protagonists of \u201cCusp\u201d share a recognizable brand of insecurity and swagger with the overachievers of the absorbing \u201cTry Harder!,\u201d about a highly competitive high school in San Francisco.And, despite wildly different expectations, those academically driven students have more than a little in common with their counterparts across the bay at Oakland High School, where filmmaker Peter Nicks spent a year filming graduating seniors for his intimate, often heartbreaking \u201cHomeroom.\u201d As in his previous films \u2014 \u201cThe Waiting Room,\u201d about Oakland\u2019s Highland Hospital and \u201cThe Force,\u201d about the city\u2019s police department \u2014 Nicks evinces an observant eye for institutional cultures and how they can either break or be bent by the human beings who inhabit them.\u201cHomeroom\u201d was one of the rare movies at this year\u2019s Sundance that was in a position to acknowledges the cataclysms of 2020 head-on. While most of the films had been made pre-pandemic \u2014 offering the audience an unexpectedly soothing images of life before six-foot perimeters, face masks and elbow bumps \u2014 \u201cHomeroom\u201d provided an anguishing record of how its young subjects were forced to process sudden grief and loss, first because of the spreading illness and then with the killing of George Floyd.As an invaluable time capsule of social history and public memory, \u201cHomeroom\u201d played like the sobering second cousin of \u201cSummer of Soul (.\u2009.\u2009. Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised),\u201d the directorial debut of musician Ahmir \u201cQuestlove\u201d Thompson, who excavates lost footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival \u2014 known then as \u201cBlack Woodstock\u201d \u2014 and brings the event back to life with astonishing skill and insight. (The film understandably earned both the audience and grand jury documentary awards this year; on Thursday, it was purchased by Searchlight Pictures and Hulu.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBursting with electrifying performances by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Mavis Staples and Gladys Knight and the Pips, \u201cSummer of Soul\u201d becomes something bigger than a concert film. Thanks to Thompson\u2019s alertness as a storyteller, what could have been simply a pleasing collage of sounds, images and retro-chic fashion instead became a profound interrogation of erasure and, as festival director Tabitha Jackson put it in her introduction, an act of historical reclamation. Like many of the strongest films at Sundance this year, \u201cSummer of Soul\u201d served as a reminder of the time-honored fundamentals that have always made movies worth watching. And it pointed to a cinematic future that, even in light of the difficult year just past, looks exceedingly bright.\n\n This year\u2019s festival proved that a movie can be a crowd-pleaser, without an actual crowd. Even in a world turned upside-down and an all-virtual Sundance, the movies survived",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "From mall cops to sex buddies: 14 times movies about the same thing came out at the same time (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "212",
        "date": "2018-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-mall-cops-to-sex-buddies-14-times-movies-about-the-same-thing-came-out-at-the-same-time/2018/03/22/fced5350-01fe-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html",
        "text": "America is in need of inspiration, and two separate movies will present us with the same solution: Ruth Bader Ginsburg.The upcoming documentary \u201cRBG\u201d and the Felicity Jones-starring biopic \u201cOn the Basis of Sex\u201d are the latest additions to a long history of twin films \u2014 the phenomenon in which conceptually similar projects are released around the same time. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJust in the past year, both \u201cDunkirk\u201d and \u201cDarkest Hour\u201d were about the same inspiring evacuation in World War II, while \u201cRough Night\u201d and \u201cGirls Trip\u201d depicted college friends\u2019 rowdy reunions. If you include TV, the anthology series \u201cTrust,\u201d about the 1973 kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III, begins Sunday, just a few months after \u201cAll the Money in the World\u201d took on the same subject. And there are three Sharon Tate movies in the works.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSometimes the similarities are sheer coincidence \u2014 recent animated flicks \u201cSherlock Gnomes\u201d (out this weekend) and \u201cGnome Alone\u201d (only released overseas so far) were not a response to any lack of garden gnome representation on screen. But at other times, such as with the Vietnam War-focused \u201cThe Deer Hunter\u201d and \u201cApocalypse Now,\u201d the movies align with a social movement.From White House thrillers to musicals about Jesus, here are some of the more quirky pairings of twin films.\u201cJezebel\u201d (March 1938) and \u201cGone With the Wind\u201d (December 1939)\nLegend has it that Bette Davis, who plays Julie Marsden in \u201cJezebel,\u201d was offered the lead role after she failed to land the part of Scarlett O\u2019Hara in \u201cGone With the Wind.\u201d Although the timeline is iffy \u2014 Vivien Leigh wasn\u2019t cast until late 1938 \u2014 it\u2019s easy to see how the story came to be. Both films centered on headstrong Southern belles involved in messy love affairs during the Civil War, and each won their lead and supporting actresses Academy Awards.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHarlow\u201d (May 1965) and \u201cHarlow\u201d (June 1965)\nBoth biopics centered on the life of the American actress and 1930s sex symbol Jean Harlow, who died at 26 of complications from kidney failure. The black-and-white Magna version of Harlow\u2019s life, starring Carol Lynley, received much less attention than the Carroll Baker-starring counterpart from Paramount, which came out five weeks later. Marilyn Monroe was originally cast as Harlow for Fox, but the project was sold to Paramount after the actress\u2019s death in 1962.Other twin-film biopics ",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oscar nominations 2017: Complete list of nominees; \u2018La La Land\u2019s\u2019 14 ties record (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "213",
        "date": "2017-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/01/24/oscar-nominations-2017-complete-coverage/",
        "text": "\u201cLa La Land\u201d was the big story from the nominations announcement for the 89th Academy Awards on Tuesday morning, as it garnered 14 nods, tying \u201cTitanic\u201d and \u201cAll About Eve\u201d for the most of any movie in history. The musical\u2019s nominations include best picture, best director for Damien Chazelle, leads Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, and two in one category, best song. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u2018La La Land\u2019: How one of the best movies of the year almost didn\u2019t get madeOther standouts include \u201cMoonlight,\u201d which is up for eight awards, including best picture, director (Barry Jenkins) and supporting awards for Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris. Tied with \u201cMoonlight\u201d is \u201cArrival,\u201d which wasn\u2019t singled out for acting, but is a contender for production design, cinematography and sound awards, not to mention best picture and director (Denis Villeneuve).\u201cLion,\u201d \u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d and \u201cHacksaw Ridge\u201d also had an impressive showing with six nominations a piece. Notably, Mel Gibson was nominated for his direction of \u201cHacksaw\u201d after years as a Hollywood pariah. But he\u2019ll have stiff competition in that crowded field.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Oscars ceremony, which will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, airs at 8:30 p.m. Feb. 26 on ABC.\"La La Land\" leads the pack with the most Academy Award nominations this year, but there's so much more to know. Here are the highlights of the 2017 Oscar nominations. (Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)Nominations (by movie):\n\u201cLa La Land\u201d \u2014 14\n\u201cArrival\u201d \u2014 8\n\u201cMoonlight\u201d \u2014 8\n\u201cHacksaw Ridge\u201d \u2014 6\n\u201cLion\u201d \u2014 6\n\u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d \u2014 6\n\u201cFences\u201d \u2014 4\n\u201cHell or High Water\u201d \u2014 4The list of nominations for the 89th Academy AwardsBest picture\u201cLa La Land\u201d\n\u201cMoonlight\u201d\n\u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d\n\u201cArrival\u201d\n\u201cFences\u201d\n\u201cLion\u201d\n\u201cHidden Figures\u201d\n\u201cHacksaw Ridge\u201d\n\u201cHell or High Water\u201dImmediate reaction: This race is shaping up to be a battle between the poignant drama \u201cMoonlight\u201d and the fanciful musical \u201cLa La Land,\u201d which won a record-setting seven Golden Globes earlier this month. \u201cLa La\u201d seems to have the edge given its record-tying 14 nominations.\u2018La La Land\u2019 is now among the most celebrated movies ever. Really?From \"Arrival\" to \"Moonlight,\" check out the trailers for the movies nominated for best picture at the 2017 Academy Awards. (The Washington Post)Best actress in a leading roleNatalie Portman, \u201cJackie\u201d\nEmma Stone, \u201cLa La Land\u201d\nIsabelle Huppert, \u201cElle\u201d\nMeryl Streep, \u201cFlorence Foster Jenkins\u201d\nRuth Negga, \u201cLoving\u201dImmediate reaction: Amy Adams, who starred in \u201cArrival,\u201d was snubbed in this category, but maybe it\u2019s for the best, since Adams has become the Susan Lucci of the Oscars \u2014 always a contender, never a winner. Natalie Portman\u2019s performance as Jacqueline Kennedy in \u201cJackie\u201d is going to be hard to beat, though Isabelle Huppert took home the Golden Globe over Portman for her role in a foreign film, \u201cElle.\u201d\u00a0Ruth Negga gets the only nomination for \u201cLoving.\u201dNatalie Portman and other stars from the Jacqueline Kennedy biopic \u2018Jackie\u2019 share their comments on the film. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)Best actor in a leading roleRyan Gosling, \u201cLa La Land\u201d\nCasey Affleck, \u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d\nDenzel Washington, \u201cFences\u201d\nAndrew Garfield, \u201cHacksaw Ridge\u201d\nViggo Mortensen, \u201cCaptain Fantastic\u201dImmediate reaction: Casey Affleck has won just about every award there is to win for his affecting turn as a grieving, broken man in \u201cManchester by the Sea.\u201d Will a Gotham, a Globe and countless critics\u2019 association awards add up to Oscar glory? It\u2019s looking that way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest directorDamien Chazelle, \u201cLa La Land\u201d\nBarry Jenkins, \u201cMoonlight\u201d\nDenis Villeneuve, \u201cArrival\u201d\nKenneth Lonergan, \u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d\nMel Gibson, \u201cHacksaw Ridge\u201dImmediate reaction: The question is whether Damien Chazelle can re-create his stellar Golden Globes night with another director\u2019s award. This isn\u2019t Chazelle\u2019s first Oscar nomination; he was also up for the best screenplay award in 2015 for \u201cWhiplash.\u201d Another notable mention: Mel Gibson, whose redemption is complete.How \u2018Moonlight\u2019 became one of the year\u2019s best moviesActress in a\u00a0supporting\u00a0roleViola Davis, \u201cFences\u201d\nMichelle Williams, \u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d\nOctavia Spencer, \u201cHidden Figures\u201d\nNaomie Harris, \u201cMoonlight\u201d\nNicole Kidman, \u201cLion\u201dImmediate reaction: Viola Davis could win an award for award-winning, given that she always delivers moving, thoughtful speeches. She has a good shot at giving us a little more of that brilliance thanks to her powerful performance as a put-upon wife in \u201cFences.\u201d She\u2019s also the first black actress to be nominated for three Oscars.Viola Davis makes history with her third Oscar nod. We might be in for an epic speech.Actor in a supporting roleMahershala Ali, \u201cMoonlight\u201d\nJeff Bridges, \u201cHell or High Water\u201d\nLucas Hedges, \u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d\nDev Patel, \u201cLion\u201d\nMichael Shannon, \u201cNocturnal Animals\u201dImmediate reaction: This prize should be Mahershala Ali\u2019s to lose. He was stunning as a drug dealer with a paternal streak in \u201cMoonlight.\u201d To everyone\u2019s surprise, the Golden Globes awarded Aaron Taylor-Johnson the prize instead. That clearly won\u2019t be happening again at the Oscars since Taylor-Johnson didn\u2019t even make the cut for nominees. His co-star Michael Shannon did, though.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest documentary\u201cO.J.: Made in America\u201d\n\u201c13th\u201d\n\u201cI Am Not Your Negro\u201d\n\u201cFire at Sea\u201d\n\u201cLife, Animated\u201dImmediate reaction: There were a number of exceptional documentaries about race in America this year, and the Academy noticed. \u201cO.J.: Made in America\u201d is ESPN\u2019s exhaustive, stunning 467-minute docu-series about O.J. Simpson\u2019s rise and fall; \u201c13th\u201d is Ava DuVernay\u2019s examination of racial inequality in the prison system; and \u201cI Am Not Your Negro\u201d uses the words from writer James Baldwin\u2019s unfinished book to explore how the assassinations of three civil rights activists still resonate today.ESPN\u2019s \u2018O.J.: Made in America\u2019 was nominated for a best documentary Oscar, and yes, that\u2019s allowedBest foreign language film\u201cToni Erdmann\u201d\n\u201cThe Salesman\u201d\n\u201cLand of Mine\u201d\n\u201cA Man Called Ove\u201d\n\u201cTanna\u201dImmediate reaction: If you have a few hours to spare, and a taste for absurdist humor, then it\u2019s time to check out \u201cToni Erdmann.\u201d The disarmingly funny German movie about a wacky dad trying to get his all-business daughter to loosen up could earn its writer-director, Maren Ade, her first Academy Award. Asghar Farhadi, the writer-director of \u201cThe Salesman,\u201d saw his film \u201cA Separation\u201d win this category in 2012 (and he was nominated for best original screenplay as well).Best animated feature film\u201cZootopia\u201d\n\u201cKubo and the Two Strings\u201d\n\u201cMoana\u201d\n\u201cThe Red Turtle\u201d\n\u201cMy Life as a Zucchini\u201dImmediate reaction: As always, there\u2019s a good mix of box office hits and smaller releases. \u201cZootopia\u201d was a given, with its timely subtext about acceptance and unity. That\u2019s the clear front-runner. Meanwhile, Pixar missed out with no nomination for \u201cFinding Dory.\u201d (Not to worry, though, as the studio was nominated for best animated short, for \u201cPiper.\u201d)How record-setting \u2018Zootopia\u2019 is the perfect film for this politically divisive campaign seasonBest adapted screenplay\u201cMoonlight,\u201d Barry Jenkins and Tarell McCraney\n\u201cArrival,\u201d Eric Heisserer\n\u201cLion,\u201d Luke Davies\n\u201cFences,\u201d August Wilson\n\u201cHidden Figures,\u201d Allison Schroeder and Theodore MelfiImmediate reaction: The rules on what constitutes an adapted screenplay are a little odd, but here we are. Although \u201cMoonlight\u201d is based on a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney that was never actually performed, it\u2019s still in the adapted category. (Meanwhile, \u201cJackie,\u201d based on any number of biographies about Jackie Kennedy\u2019s life, is original. Go figure.) The competition is stiffer in this category, because we all know how Hollywood loves to churn out adaptations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest original screenplay\u201cLa La Land,\u201d Damien Chazelle\n\u201cHell or High Water,\u201d Taylor Sheridan\n\u201cManchester by the Sea,\u201d Kenneth Lonergan\n\u201cThe Lobster,\u201d Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou\n\u201c20th Century Women,\u201d Mike MillsImmediate reactions: Taylor Sheridan got his start as an actor, but he\u2019s gotten a lot more attention for his brilliant, gripping scripts with no shortage of social commentary. First there was \u201cSicario\u201d in 2015, then last year\u2019s \u201cHell or High Water.\u201d He shows no sign of slowing down given that his latest (also his directorial debut) \u201cWind River\u201d just debuted at Sundance to good reviews. But can he possibly beat \u201cManchester by the Sea\u201d and \u201cLa La Land\u201d? That will be a tall order. This is the sole nomination for each of the two other movies in this category, the eccentric dark comedy \u201cThe Lobster\u201d and the coming-of-age dramedy \u201c20th Century Women.\u201dBest original song\u201cHow Far I\u2019ll Go,\u201d \u201cMoana\u201d\n\u201cCity of Stars,\u201d \u201cLa La Land\u201d\n\u201cAudition (The Fools Who Dream),\u201d \u201cLa La Land\u201d\n\u201cCan\u2019t Stop the Feeling!\u201d \u201cTrolls\u201d\n\u201cThe Empty Chair,\u201d \u201cJim: The James Foley Story\u201dImmediate reaction: You can\u2019t exactly call it a snub, but it\u2019s still a shame that the charming Irish musical \u201cSing Street\u201d \u2014 not to be confused with the animated \u201cSing\u201d \u2014\u00a0got no love from the Academy. The song \u201cDrive It Like You Stole It\u201d is at least 15 times more brilliant than Justin Timberlake\u2019s inescapable and derivative \u201cTrolls\u201d anthem. In other news, Lin-Manuel Miranda is apparently taking over the world. After getting plenty of acclaim for \u201cHamilton,\u201d he\u2019s also getting love from the Academy for his work on \u201cMoana,\u201d and if \u201cHow Far I\u2019ll Go,\u201d which he wrote, wins this category, he\u2019ll become part of the select group of people to have won an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony).With his Oscar nomination, Lin-Manuel Miranda is on the brink of an EGOTBest original score\u201cLa La Land,\u201d Justin Hurwitz\n\u201cMoonlight,\u201d Nicholas Britell\n\u201cLion,\u201d Dustin O\u2019Halloran and Hauschka\n\u201cJackie,\u201d Mica Levi\n\u201cPassengers,\u201d Thomas NewmanImmediate reaction: Come on. It\u2019s all about \u201cLa La Land.\u201d Obviously. Though it\u2019s interesting to see that the universally panned \u201cPassengers\u201d got a nod, one of two for the movie. (The other was production design.) This is composer Thomas Newman\u2019s 14th nomination. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest cinematography\u201cMoonlight,\u201d James Laxton\n\u201cLa La Land,\u201d Linus Sandgren\n\u201cArrival,\u201d Bradford Young\n\u201cSilence,\u201d Rodrigo Prieto\n\u201cLion,\u201d Greig FraserImmediate reaction: There was some stunning cinematography this year, from the showstopping opening sequence of \u201cLa La Land\u201d to the mind-bending shots of a gravity-free ascent into a spaceship in \u201cArrival.\u201d Even if that movie\u2019s director of photography, Bradford Young, doesn\u2019t win the award, he\u2019s already made history as the first African American cinematographer to be nominated for an Oscar. This has been a long time coming for the Howard University graduate, who many said was robbed when he didn\u2019t get a nod for 2014\u2019s \u201cSelma.\u201dBest production design\u201cLa La Land,\u201d David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco\n\u201cFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,\u201d Stuart Craig and Anna Pinnock\n\u201cArrival,\u201d Patrice Vermette and Paul Hotte\n\u201cHail, Caesar!,\u201d\u00a0 Jess Gonchor and Nancy Haigh\n\u201cPassengers,\u201d Guy Hendrix Dyas and Gene SerdenaImmediate reaction: Are you getting sick of all the love for \u201cLa La Land\u201d yet? Well, you\u2019re not alone. Still, the movie was pretty stunning to look at. It\u2019s also about time that David Wasco got a nomination. He\u2019s responsible for the production design for \u201cPulp Fiction,\u201d \u201cThe Royal Tenenbaums\u201d and \u201cInglourious Basterds,\u201d among others. This is one of two nominations for the Harry Potter spinoff, \u201cFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,\u201d and the sole nomination for the Coen Brothers\u2019 \u201cHail, Caesar!\u201dThe aliens in \u2018Arrival\u2019 are stunning. How do they compare to other film creatures?Best visual effects\u201cThe Jungle Book,\u201d\u00a0Robert Legato, Adam Valdez, Andrew R. Jones and Dan Lemmon\n\u201cRogue One: A Star Wars Story,\u201d\u00a0John Knoll, Mohen Leo, Hal Hickel and Neil Corbould\n\u201cDoctor Strange,\u201d\u00a0Stephane Ceretti, Richard Bluff, Vincent Cirelli and Paul Corbould\n\u201cDeepwater Horizon,\u201d\u00a0Craig Hammack, Jason Snell, Jason Billington and Burt Dalton\n\u201cKubo and the Two Strings,\u201d Steve Emerson, Oliver Jones, Brian McLean and Brad SchiffImmediate reaction: \u201cThe Jungle Book\u201d is the front-runner here, for the way the movie used CGI to bring animals to life without making them look creepy. Meanwhile, the animated film \u201cKubo and the Two Strings\u201d also made the cut, which means it\u2019s up for two Oscars (the other is best animated feature). The Star Wars spinoff \u201cRogue One\u201d is also nominated for two awards, visual effects and sound mixing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest costume design\u201cLa La Land,\u201d\u00a0Mary Zophres\n\u201cFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,\u201d\u00a0Colleen Atwood\n\u201cFlorence Foster Jenkins,\u201d\u00a0Consolata Boyle\n\u201cJackie,\u201d\u00a0Madeline Fontaine\n\u201cAllied,\u201d\u00a0Joanna JohnstonImmediate reaction: This is the second nomination for \u201cLa La Land\u201d designer Mary Zophres. But her competition is tough, especially from Madeline Fontaine of \u201cJackie,\u201d which so expertly re-created the wardrobe of the former first lady, including her iconic pink Chanel suit.Best makeup and hair styling\u201cStar Trek Beyond,\u201d\u00a0Joel Harlow and Richard Alonzo\n\u201cSuicide Squad,\u201d\u00a0Alessandro Bertolazzi, Giorgio Gregorini and Christopher Nelson\n\u201cA Man Called Ove,\u201d\u00a0Eva von Bahr and Love LarsonImmediate reaction: Which of these things is not like the other? The Swedish film \u201cA Man Called Ove,\u201d also nominated for best foreign language film, is up against two blockbusters, including the critically derided \u201cSuicide Squad.\u201dBest animated short film\u201cPiper\u201d\n\u201cPearl\u201d\n\u201cBorrowed Time\u201d\n\u201cPear Cider and Cigarettes\u201d\n\u201cBlind Vaysha\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest live action short film\u201cTimecode\u201d\n\u201cSing (Mindenki)\n\u201cSilent Nights\u201d\n\u201cEnnemis Interieurs\u201d\n\u201cLa Femme et le TGV\u201dBest documentary short subject\u201cThe White Helmets\u201d\n\u201cExtremis\u201d\n\u201cWatani: My Homeland\u201d\n\u201c4.1 Miles\u201d\n\u201cJoe\u2019s Violin\u201dBest film editing\u201cLa La Land,\u201d\u00a0Tom Cross\n\u201cMoonlight,\u201d\u00a0Nat Sanders and Joi McMillon\n\u201cHacksaw Ridge,\u201d\u00a0John Gilbert\n\u201cArrival,\u201d\u00a0Joe Walker\n\u201cHell or High Water,\u201d\u00a0Jake RobertsBest sound editing\u201cLa La Land,\u201d\u00a0Ai-Ling Lee and Mildred Iatrou Morgan\n\u201cHacksaw Ridge,\u201d\u00a0Robert Mackenzie and Andy Wright\n\u201cArrival,\u201d\u00a0Sylvain Bellemare\n\u201cSully,\u201d\u00a0Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman\n\u201cDeepwater Horizon,\u201d\u00a0Wylie Stateman and Ren\u00e9e TondelliBest sound mixing\u201cLa La Land,\u201d\u00a0Andy Nelson, Ai-Ling Lee and Steve A. Morrow\n\u201cHacksaw Ridge,\u201d\u00a0Kevin O\u2019Connell, Andy Wright, Robert Mackenzie and Peter Grace\n\u201cRogue One: A Star Wars Story,\u201d\u00a0David Parker, Christopher Scarabosio and Stuart Wilson\n\u201cArrival,\u201d\u00a0Bernard Gari\u00e9py Strobl and Claude La Haye\n\u201c13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,\u201d\u00a0Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, Jeffrey J. Haboush and Mac RuthBethonie Butler, Elahe Izadi and Emily Yahr contributed.\u00a0This post has been updated. It now includes the correct wording of the title\u00a0\u201cLife, Animated.\u201d Other standouts include \u201cArrival\u201d and \u201cMoonlight\u201d with eight nominations each. Oscar nominations 2017: Complete list of nominees; \u2018La La Land\u2019s\u2019 14 ties record",
        "author": "Stephanie Merry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Style Invitational Week 1304: What if you could wonder . . . whatever? (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "214",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/style-invitational-week-1304-what-if-you-could-wonder----whatever/2018/11/01/bf483eb0-dbbb-11e8-b732-3c72cbf131f2_story.html",
        "text": "(Click here to skip down to the winning \u201c13\u201d movies)\u25cf What if we evolved from reptiles? We would go to McDonald\u2019s and order a Big Rat and an order of flies. (Jonathan Paul)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u25cfWhat if, instead of air bags, they put sharp metal spikes on the steering column? Seat belt use would go way up. (Art Grinath) \u25cfWhat if men really did enjoy being \u201cjust held and cuddled\u201d? What would they carry in their wallets \u2014 tiny packets of Snuggle fabric softener? (Sue Lin Chong)\u25cfWhat if instead of an Easter Bunny, we had an Easter Fish? It sure would be tricky, decorating caviar. (Jean Sorensen)Here\u2019s a contest that\u2019s as wide open as they come, and I think the only time the Invite ran it was all the way back in 1995, in the pre-Empress days of the Czar. This week: Present a \u201cwhat if\u201d scenario and explain its effect, as in the examples above from Week 140.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSubmit entries at the website wapo.st/enter-invite-1304 \n(all lowercase).Winner gets the Lose Cannon,\n our Style Invitational trophy. Second place receives a Bovine Recycling Two-Pack consisting of a nice little blank-page journal of paper made from cattle dung (donated by Dave Prevar), plus a dainty, Chihuahua-size \u201ccandy cane\u201d dog chew made from beef pizzle, which is the bull\u2019s, you know, pizzle. Donated by Donna Peremes.Other runners-up \nwin our \u201cYou Gotta Play to Lose\u201d Loser Mug or our Grossery Bag,\u00a0\u201cI Got a B in Punmanship\u201d (or perhaps a new design). Honorable mentions get one of our lusted-after Loser magnets, \u201cWe\u2019ve Seen Better\u201d or \u201cIDiot Card.\u201d First Offenders receive only a smelly tree-shaped air \u201cfreshener\u201d (FirStink for their first ink). Deadline is Monday night, Nov. 12; results published Dec. 2 (online Thursday, Nov. 29). See general contest rules and guidelines at wapo.st/InvRules. The \u201cWryday the 13th\u201d headline was submitted by both Mark Raffman and Beverley Sharp; Kevin Dopart and Jesse Frankovich each submitted this week\u2019s honorable-mentions subhead. Join the Style Invitational Devotees on Facebook at on.fb.me/invdev. \u201cLike\u201d Style Invitational Ink of the Day on Face-book at bit.ly/inkofday; follow @StyleInvite on Twitter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\nThe Style Conversational The Empress's weekly online column, published late Thursday afternoon, discusses each new contest and set of results. Especially if you plan to enter, check it out at wapo.st/conv1304; this week the Empress looks back on the inking entries of Week 140, the last time we did this week's contest.And from The Style Invitational four weeks ago . . .WRYDAY THE 13TH: MOVIE REPLOTS FROM WEEK 1300To celebrate Week 1300\n, going with the debatable premise that \u201c13\u201d in a film title signifies that something will really mess up, we asked you to \u201c13\u201d a real movie and describe the plot.4th placePinocchio 13: The first wooden president finds his arms are too short to pick his nose. (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)3rd placeSnakes on a Plane 13: The would-be assassin is foiled when a gate agent questions his \u201cemotional support viper.\u201d (David Peckarsky, Tucson)2nd placeand the Hebrew Ben & Jerry\u2019s T-shirt: \n\nBad News Bears 13, Washington Nationals 6 (Ken Gallant, Sequim, Wash.)And the winner of the Lose Cannon:Basic Instinct 13: Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs, flashing her Depends. (Dave Matuskey, Sacramento)Gaffers: Honorable mentionsAll Quiet on the Western Front 13: German soldiers in World War I look up and watch their ace pilot battle a flying doghouse. (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTaxi Driver 13: Travis Bickle finds a welcoming work environment at Uber. (Mark Raffman)13 Dalmatians: The remaining pooches will stop at nothing to avenge their 88 littermates who didn\u2019t escape Cruella de Vil\u2019s fur coat factory. (Bill Dorner, Indianapolis)Animal House 13: New pledge Brett Blutarsky, a studious young man from Washington, just pumps iron and \u201cworks his tail off.\u201d (Rob Huffman, Fredericksburg, Va.)The Social Network 13: Instead of presenting the entire movie, the projectionist shows you, in random order, the parts of the movie that he thinks you will like best. (Ward Kay, Vienna, Va.)Casablanca 13: Ilsa can\u2019t escape to the United States because of a hastily passed travel ban for travelers from Morocco, upheld by a 5-4 Supreme Court. (Duncan Stevens)Story continues below advertisementCasablanca 13: Rick gently but firmly pushes Ilsa into the plane, insisting that \u201cReally, Paris was enough,\u201d as his \u201cspecial friend\u201d Louis looks on. (Rob Huffman)AdvertisementCasablanca 13: Ilsa thought she would always have it, but the 4.2-ounce bottle of Paris Eau de Parfum doesn\u2019t get past security and the plane leaves without her. She regrets it that day, the next, and for the rest of her life. (Kevin Dopart, Washington)Being There 13: An aging simpleton with a child\u2019s understanding of the world is presented as a presidential candidate \u2014 and wins! (Dave Airozo, Silver Spring, Md.)Seven Plus Six: After working his way through the Seven Deadly Sins, sociopath John Doe justifies more bizarre murders by tying them to the Six Hurtful Sins, including forgetting an anniversary and leaving the toilet seat up. (Peter Boice, Rockville, Md.)Story continues below advertisementSingin\u2019 in the Rain 13: A soaked-through Gene Kelly is left with a less than glorious feeling as he catches a nasty cold. (John McCooey, Rehoboth Beach, Del.)AdvertisementSpeed 13: Our hero must defuse a bomb on a moving Segway without letting it dip below 5 mph. (Jesse Frankovich, Grand Ledge, Mich.)The Little Mermaid 13: As Ariel saves the Prince from the sinking boat and is taking him to shore, a large fin appears behind them .\u2009.\u2009. (Dave Prevar, Annapolis, Md.)13 Shades of Grey: His promiscuity having finally caught up to him, Christian Grey exhibits symptoms of multiple venereal diseases. His urologist has never seen anything quite so .\u2009.\u2009. colorful. (Bill Dorner)Story continues below advertisementAnimal Crackers 13: Captain Spaulding is back from the dead and he wants his pajamas back. (Warren Tanabe, Annapolis, Md.)Apollo 13 13: During Elon Musk\u2019s maiden voyage, his ego becomes so big that it perforates the spaceship\u2019s hull, necessitating a dangerous rescue. (Steve Honley, Washington)Bee Movie 13: Jerry Seinfeld riffs for 72 minutes about how the number 13 looks like the letter B. (J. Larry Schott, West Plains, Mo.)Advertisement13 Pretty in Pink: Prom turns into a brawl when 13 girls turn up wearing the same pink dress. (Jane Auerbach, Los Angeles)Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 13: The boys head down to Venezuela and rob banks, but nobody cares because the currency is worthless. (Dudley Thompson, Cary, N.C.)Story continues below advertisementE.T. 13: A severe allergic reaction to peanuts ends young E.T.\u2019s life as it eats some candy left for it by the well-meaning Elliott. The boy grows up racked with guilt, sending reams of hate mail to Reese\u2019s executives. (Jeff Shirley, Richmond, Va.)Hair 13: The shining gleaming streaming flaxen waxen goes bald. (Lawrence McGuire, Waldorf, Md.)Iron Man 13: Tony Stark falls prey to a villainous plot when he orders a new suit and agrees to get the rustproofing. (Jesse Frankovich)Manhattan 13: The film ends abruptly when an old creep is finally busted for soliciting a minor. (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)AdvertisementMary Poppins 13: When Mary\u2019s umbrella tears, she reaches terminal velocity in 5.6 seconds. (David Young, Falmouth, Mass.)Story continues below advertisementPocahontas 13: She agrees to return to England with John Smith and becomes a member of Parliament, but her heritage is ridiculed by King James as just \u201chigh cheekbones.\u201d (Kevin Dopart)Field of Dreams 13: A farmer gets hauled before the Dyerville, Iowa, zoning commission for building an unauthorized recreational facility. (Duncan Stevens)James Bond 13: James meets a woman named \u201cOctopussy\u201d and .\u2009.\u2009. never mind. That\u2019s just TOO stupid. (Todd DeLap, Fairfax, Va.)Last Tango in Paris 13: At exactly the wrong time, Marlon Brando finds the refrigerator is empty. (Mark Raffman)Lady and the Tramp 13: Tramp loses interest after Animal Control rounds him up in a trap-neuter-return program. (Jeff Contompasis)AdvertisementPsycho 13: Norman Bates\u2019s status as a Korean War veteran finally gets verified, and he begins the process of submitting paperwork to Veterans Affairs seeking treatment for mental illness. (Bill Spencer, Cockeysville, Md.)Raiders of the Lost Ark 13: Indiana Jones finds the elusive ark, only to discover that all it contains is the remains of Millard Fillmore. (Steve Fahey, Kensington, Md.)The Sound of Music 13: After fleeing the Nazis and settling in the United States, all is well with the von Trapps until Stephen Miller discovers they once sought public assistance in 1945 and deports them all back to Austria. (Frank Mann, Washington)Still running \u2014 deadline Monday night, Nov. 5: Our neologism contest in which you replace two letters with two other letters. See wapo.st/invite1303. DON\u2019T MISS AN INVITE! \nSign up here to receive a once-a-week email from the Empress as soon as The Style Invitational and Style Conversational go online every Thursday, complete with links to the columns. Plus the winning \u201cthirteening\u201d of movie plots to make something go wrong. Style Invitational Week 1304: What if you could wonder . . . whatever?",
        "author": "Pat Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Style Invitational Week 1328: Hooked on \u2018classic\u2019: A sort of do-over (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "215",
        "date": "2019-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/style-invitational-week-1328-hooked-on-classic-a-sort-of-do-over/2019/04/18/92f80b22-5fc0-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "(Click here to skip down to the retelling of Bible stories and other tales by other \u201cauthors\u201d)Chapter 10 of \u201cThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,\u201d as told by Lou Reed:\nHuckleberry came from St. Petersburg, M-O,Him and Jim just drifted with the flow,Wore a dress on the down-low,Jim said, honey, go, go, go,Said, hey, Huck, take a raft to the wild side . . .\n\u2014 Frank Osen WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFour weeks ago, the Empress asked the Loser Community to \u201ctell or describe a Bible story, or another classical or folk tale .\u2009.\u2009. in the voice of a particular author or other person.\u201d And she got a lot of creative tellings of Testaments Old and New, Roman myths, fairy tales, nursery rhymes \u2014 the best of which you\u2019ll see in today\u2019s results.Story continues below advertisementBut there were also retellings of \u201cMoby Dick,\u201d \u201cGreen Eggs and Ham,\u201d the Harry Potter series .\u2009.\u2009. clearly, the E should have specified \u201cancient tale\u201d rather than a \u201cclassical\u201d one; the term was taken, understandably, to mean a \u201cclassic\u201d work, old or recent.AdvertisementBut we\u2019re coming into making-lemonade season anyway, and it would be awful to toss such good stuff. So for Week 1328: Summarize a book or play by any author, or retell a scene (or even a moment) from one, in the style of some other person, as in the example above, which was an entry in the previous contest. As in Week 1324, we\u2019re looking for a paragraph, not a page. The entries could also be in verse. If an entry you sent for Week 1324 would fit Week 1328, you may send it again.Submit entries at wapo.st/enter-invite-1328\n (all lowercase).Story continues below advertisementWinner gets the Lose Cannon,\n our Style Invitational trophy.In this week of reverence, we offer for second place a Spock prayer candle, a classic glass cylinder depicting the solemn Vulcan in front of a glowing halo, complete with a flaming Sacred Heart in front of his chest. Made in Texas and donated by the long-lived and prosperous Kevin Dopart.AdvertisementOther runners-up \nwin our \u201cYou Gotta Play to Lose\u201d Loser Mug or our \u201cWhole Fools\u201d Grossery Bag. Honorable mentions get one of our lusted-after Loser magnets, \u201cWe\u2019ve Seen Better\u201d or \u201cIDiot Card.\u201d First Offenders receive only a smelly tree-shaped air \u201cfreshener\u201d (FirStink for their first ink). Deadline is Monday night, April 29; results published May 19 in print, May 16 online. See general contest rules and guidelines at wapo.st/InvRules. The headline for this week\u2019s results is by Jesse Frankovich; William Kennard wrote the honorable-mentions subhead. Join the Style Invitational Devotees on Facebook at on.fb.me/invdev. \u201cLike\u201d Style Invitational Ink of the Day at bit.ly/inkofday; follow @StyleInvite on Twitter.Story continues below advertisementThe Style Conversational The Empress's weekly online column, published late Thursday afternoon, discusses each new contest and set of results. Especially if you plan to enter this week's contest, check it out at wapo.st/styleconv.And from The Style Invitational four weeks ago . . .AdvertisementQUIPTURE: RETOLD BIBLE STORIES & OTHER TALES FROM WEEK 1324As we note in this week\u2019s new contest, in Week 1324\n the Empress asked for a Bible story or classical or folk tale retold in the style of some particular person. Lots of people imitated Heming-way, which proved not so easy.4th place:The Creation, as told by Garrison Keillor: \u201cWell, it\u2019s been a quiet week in the formless void.\u201d (Roy Ashley, Washington)3rd place:The miracle at Cana (John 2:1-11), by Emily Dickinson:\nI taste a liquor never brewed \u2014 But how, I do not know \u2014 I swear these urns held water \u2014 justA half an hour ago! You\u2019ve saved the wedding, Nazarene \u2014 Had we but known your flair: We would have asked you \u2014 months ago \u2014 To \u2014 cater \u2014 the \u2014 affair! (Brendan Beary, Great Mills, Md.)2nd place and \u201cThe Golfer\u2019s Prayer Book\u201d: \n\nThe Tortoise and the Hare, \nby Samuel Beckett: \nHare: Shall we race? Tortoise: Yes, let\u2019s race. (The hare does not move)(Frank Mann, Washington)And the winner of the Lose Cannon: \"Oedipus Rex,\" by Allan Sherman: \nGoodbye Faddah, Hello Muddah,I slew one and wed the uddah, When my judgment got less hazy, I gouged out both my eyeballs and went crazy. (Frank Osen, Pasadena, Calif.)Burnt offerings: Honorable mentionsThe Creation. by Eminem: \nAnnoyed in the dearth of a void God unearthed and deployed from superior materiala spherical miracle and thus this terrestrial ball called Earth was formed.All in a week\u2019s worth of timethis sublime gold mine shined and in a nugget of time God worked; created celestial worlds and blessed it, then Day 7 in heaven He rested. Mic drop. Amen requested. (Will Stutzman, Millersburg, Ohio)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Creation of Eve, by Dashiell Hammett: \nHer legs didn\u2019t stop until they knocked my eyes out, and then there was more, but I didn\u2019t have any more eyes to be knocked out. \u201cHey, dumplin\u2019,\u201d I said, \u201cwhich garden are you from? \u2019Cause that rib looks familiar. (Neal Starkman, Seattle)The Creation of Eve, by Jane Austen: The operation having been performed with little inconvenience to the gentleman, as he was accustomed to dozing upon a sofa when anything disagreeable might be going on, the woman was expertly sculpted from his rib-bone, displaying all the delicacy and loveliness one might expect in the female form. As she moved to stand before him with a lightness and alacrity in her step, the man woke abruptly and turned to observe her. He found her a good deal more than tolerable, and the two presently expressed a wish to be wed as speedily as propriety would allow. (Sarah Walsh, Rockville, Md., a First Offender)Adam and Eve as told by Edgar Allan Poe:\nIn the Garden known as Eden, one without a single weed in,Grew a tree with a bad seed in: one who worked toward their downfall.\u201cThis is the lone Tree of Knowledge. Eat and know the truth \u2014 no college!Such a deal, you must acknowledge!\u201d So they ate, quite in his thrall.God appeared. \u201cThat\u2019s it! Now get out! But before you pass the wall\u2026\u201dAnd He handed Eve Midol. (Todd DeLap, Fairfax, Va.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAdam and Eve, as analyzed by Robert Mueller: The investigation uncovered that Adam did meet with a snake, and fruit was consumed. The fruit was shared with Eve. Adam and Eve subsequently concluded that they were naked and hid. Through the course of the investigation, we can neither confirm or deny the snake informed any change of opinion. (Mary McNamara, Washington)The Flood, by Marie Kondo: God had seen that humanity no longer sparked joy and decided to do a little decluttering .\u2009.\u2009. (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)Balaam\u2019s donkey, by Jeff Foxworthy: The ass sees the angel right there and stops, so Balaam gets down and beats his ass. Right there in the middle of the road! I tell my kids this and they\u2019re like, \u201cDaddy, you should read the Bible more often!\u201d An ass talking! I\u2019ll tell you, the last time I saw an ass talk was after three cans of Bush\u2019s Baked Beans. (Matt Monitto, Bristol, Conn.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavid and Goliath, by Dick Vitale: \nGoliath is a human spaceship, folks \u2014 a primetime player! At 3 cubits and a span, a true high-riser for the Philistines. And here comes David, trying to bring a W today for the Israelites \u2014 this kid might be a bench-warmer, but he\u2019s no knee-knocker. David lines up .\u2009.\u2009. slings the rock .\u2009.\u2009. OHHHHHHHHHHHHH BABY! I DON\u2019T BELIEVE IT! SLAM BAM JAM!\u201d (Jesse Rifkin, Arlington, Va., a First Offender)David and Goliath, by Napoleon Dynamite: David is pretty much my favorite king. He had great skills, like slingshot skills, psalm-writing skills, stealthiness skills. But if it was me facing Goliath, I would\u2019ve used a fricking 12-gauge. Gosh! (Paul Burnham, Gainesville, Va.) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the visit of the Magi: So these three rich guys saw a star. Yes, they were diverse, but ALL MEN! And they represented special interests: gold, obviously Wall Street; frankincense, the polluting fossil fuel industry; myrrh, death merchants of the funeral lobby profiting from climate change. Under the Green New Deal, they would have arrived not by air-fouling camels but by solar-powered sand vehicles. Under Medicare for All they would have not gone to a stable, but to a hospital. And under College for All the baby would grow up to be, not a carpenter or the Messiah, but Bernie Sanders. (William Joyner, Chapel Hill, N.C.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe miracle at Cana, by wine critic Robert Parker: Starting with virtually nothing, this vintner has crafted a tawny, luscious merlot with overtones of frankincense and myrrh that will make a believer out of even the most jaded skeptic \u2014 simply divine! A solid 95. (Mark Raffman, Reston, Va.)The first Easter, as told by local TV news: Jesus was found missing from his tomb today \u2014 but first, how to tell if your husband is watching porn on your home computer. (Roy Ashley)The Trojan Horse, by Ogden Nash: \nThe Trojans\u2019 gullibility could not have turned out worse. A shame they hadn\u2019t heard the sage advice passed down to me by my great-uncle Winthrop, namely: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and vice vers. (Elliott Shevin, Oak Park, Mich.)Story continues below advertisementThe Odyssey, by Ernest Hemingway: It was a long journey home. He was weary in a way that drinking and fishing could not fix. His dog saw him and died. (Dan Gibson-Reinemer, Alamosa, Colo., a First Offender)AdvertisementThe Emperor\u2019s New Clothes, by Donald Trump: There was this emperor who was unbelievably popular. Many people say I\u2019m even more popular, but this guy was close, okay? He decided he could walk naked down Fifth Avenue and no one would say a word. This one kid spoke up. He was a low-IQ loser. (Eric Nelkin, Silver Spring, Md.)Rumpelstiltskin, by Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Mr. Rumpelstiltskin has always been a dealmaker. And yes, he believes in the gold standard, once the foundation of this country. This purposeful misleading of the people by the media has to stop; it has never been the policy of Mr. Rumpelstiltskin to take children from their mothers. (Kevin Dopart, Washington)The Pharaoh in Exodus, as told by Gilbert & Sullivan: \nI am the very model of a mean authoritarian, I rule quite iron-fisted my society agrarian. I minimize my labor costs by holding folks in slavery, Elicit lamentations with assorted acts of knavery. I bring on plagues where boils grow all over the extremities, Won\u2019t let the people go or offer any other remedies. It prob\u2019ly would be wiser to relent and take up gardening; Perhaps I need a doctor, \u2019cause my heart is always hardening. My captives\u2019 living quarters sure aren\u2019t Doubletrees or Marriotts,But if they run away, I\u2019ll go right after them with chariots, And by the time I\u2019m finished, all my army will be carrion; I am the very model of a mean authoritarian. (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.)\nStill running \u2014 deadline Monday, April 22: our perennial bank headline contest. See wapo.st/invite1327.\nDON\u2019T MISS AN INVITE! \nSign up here to receive a once-a-week email from the Empress as soon as The Style Invitational and Style Conversational go online every Thursday, complete with links to the columns. This time, the stories to retell in another\u2019s voice don\u2019t have to be ancient. Style Invitational Week 1328: Hooked on \u2018classic\u2019: A sort of do-over",
        "author": "Pat Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Style Invitational Week 1437: One-offs \u2014 a \u2018typo\u2019 neologism contest (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "216",
        "date": "2021-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/style-invitational-week-1437-one-offs--a-typo-neologism-contest/2021/05/20/c6954f24-b777-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html",
        "text": "(Click here to skip down to the Questionable Journalism winners)Hurrito: A pre-made, pre-hardened breakfast wrap. \n(Bob Staake)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightStreeptococcus: The acting bug. (Susan Geariety)Goodzilla: A giant lizard that puts out forest fires by stamping on them.\n (Sandra Hull)Sayonada: So long, and thanks for nothing. (Mae Scanlan)We\u2019re back with yet another variation on The Style Invitational\u2019s stock in trade: the change-one-letter neologism contest. This week\u2019s contest was suggested to the Empress by Gabe Goldberg (who last appeared in the Invite when he suggested a contest in 1994): You\u2019re a fat-fingered typist: Change a word, name or phrase by either adding or substituting one letter that\u2019s adjacent (in any direction) to the original one on a regular QWERTY keyboard, or by doubling the correct letter, as in the examples above from various previous neologism contests (plus Bob Staake\u2019s own example). AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo you might (a) substitute a H for an B, as in \u201churrito\u201d above; or (b) add an E next to an R, as in \u201cStreeptococcus\u201d; or (c) repeat a letter that\u2019s already there, as in \u201cStreeptococcus\u201d and \u201cGoodzilla.\u201dSubmit up to 25 entries at wapo.st/enter-invite-1437 (no capitals in the Web address). Deadline is Monday, May 31; results appear June 20 in print, June 17 online.Winner gets the Clowning Achievement, our Style Invitational trophy. Second place receives a cute little squeeze toy of a shark that is more or less ingesting and egesting a human leg as you squeeze. This is the Official Squeeze Toy of the Internal Revenue Service. Well, that\u2019s what they\u2019re saying. Donated by Dave Prevar.Story continues below advertisementOther runners-up win their choice of our \u201cFor Best Results, Pour Into Top End\u201d Loser Mug or our \u201cWhole Fools\u201d Grossery Bag. Honorable mentions get one of our lusted-after Loser magnets, \u201cNo \u2019Bility\u201d or \u201cPunderachiever.\u201d First Offenders receive only a smelly tree-shaped air \u201cfreshener\u201d (FirStink for their first ink). See general contest rules and guidelines at wapo.st/InvRules. The headline for this week\u2019s results is by Jon Ketzner; Chris Doyle wrote the honorable-mentions subhead. Join the lively Style Invitational Devotees group on Facebook at on.fb.me/invdev; \u201clike\u201d the Style Invitational Ink of the Day on Facebook at bit.ly/inkofday; and follow @StyleInvite on Twitter.AdvertisementThe Style Conversational: The Empress\u2019s weekly online column discusses each new contest and set of results. See this week\u2019s, published late Thursday afternoon, May 20, at wapo.st/conv1437.And from The Style Invitational four weeks ago . . .Who, what, where, when, why and ha: Questionable Journalism inkWeek 1433 was the latest of our Questionable Journalism contests, in which readers chose any sentence from a current publication (most chose The Post) and wrote a question that it might answer.4th place:A. \u201cSometimes he would stand in the sitting room . . .\u201dQ. How do we know Walter Mondale was a rebel at heart? (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn, Va.)3rd place: A. \u201cThere\u2019s something about digging in the dirt, turning it, smelling it.\u201d Q. What do you like best about being a reporter for the National Enquirer? (Beverley Sharp, Montgomery, Ala.) 2nd place and the book with out-of-print Seuss stories: A. In Oklahoma, you have mesoscale convective systems, supercell storms, and big complexes that produce a lot of lightning.\u201dQ. Why does the wind come sweepin\u2019 down the plain? (Gary Crockett, Chevy Chase, Md.) And the winner of the Clowning Achievement:A. That was Frances McDormand having explosive diarrhea in a plastic bucket on a van.Q. What was the worst act on \"Celebrity America's Got Talent\"? (Jon Ketzner, Cumberland, Md.) Blanks for asking: Honorable mentionsA. Seated in a yellow plastic laundry basket attached to two thick ropes, I was lowered into the earth. The light got dimmer, the temperature colder. Q. So how was your performance review? (John Kammer, Fairfax, Va.) AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA. I just got into my car and drove around for two hours. Q. How did you win the Indy 500? (Frank Mann, Washington) A. This is how misogynistic culture is conceptualized, created, cultivated and codified. Q. How does Fox News human resources begin its new-employee training session? (Kevin Dopart, Washington)A. \u201cThere is a lot of pressure on moving all the big players certainly to go faster than they were planning.\u201d Q. Why is there a live bull on the running track? (Barbara Turner, Takoma Park, Md.) A. It\u2019s different and dignified, but it just doesn\u2019t work on many levels.Q. What do you think of Pat Boone\u2019s cover version of \u201cWAP\u201d? (Frank Osen, Pasadena, Calif.) Story continues below advertisementA. \u201cThe poster was taped to two PVC pipes that were stuck inside construction cones.\u201d Q. What punishment did Mark Zuckerberg suggest for inappropriate Facebook comments? (Sue Lin Chong, Baltimore)AdvertisementA. \u201cI hadn\u2019t seen that kind of positivity in a while. It was really cool.\u201dQ. Why were you rubbing balloons all over the cat? (Frank Osen) A. \u201cIt really has to come from within.\u201d Q. What lesson does the crew in the \u201cAlien\u201d spaceship learn the hard way? (Steve Honley, Washington)A. \u201cShe built a fortress of pillows and blankets in the guest bedroom.\u201dQ. How did Mike Lindell\u2019s wife signal that their marriage was rocky? (Stephen Dudzik, Olney, Md.) A. A man from Idaho balanced a garden hoe on his nose for nearly two hours. Q. What happens in Boise when WiFi and cable go out ? (Stu Segal, Charlotte)Story continues below advertisementA. How about the guy with the gut?Q. Emma is sick \u2014 who can we get to play the pregnant woman in tonight\u2019s performance? (Terri Berg Smith, Rockville, Md.) A. Now, a year after this pandemic began, there are masks everywhere \u2014 on door handles and in drawers. Q. What explains the recent drop in sales of pantyliners? (Chris Doyle, Denton, Tex.) AdvertisementA. Scientists are using it to study depression, anxiety and fear.Q. Do you think anyone ever rereads Trump\u2019s inaugural address? (Lee Graham, Rockville, Md.) A. Some of them are shovel-ready. Some of them are almost shovel-ready. Q. Delegate Norton, what do you think of GOP arguments against D.C. statehood? (Duncan Stevens, Vienna, Va.) Story continues below advertisementA. \u201cI\u2019d run through a brick wall for Coach.\u201d Q. Do you miss air travel since the pandemic started? (Mark Raffman, Reston)A. A modern car can easily have more than 3,000 chips. Q. Why do you often hear a crunching noise when you adjust the seat in a minivan? (John McCooey, Rehoboth Beach, Del.)A. \u201cThe withdrawal is set to begin on Friday and will be completed by May 1.\u201d Q. What\u2019s the timeline for the final stage of the nonagenarians\u2019 marriage consummation? (Leif Picoult, Rockville, Md.) AdvertisementA. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing wrong with this feature, but it\u2019s not extraordinary.\u201dQ. What comment are you liable to receive if your profile photo is an extreme close-up of your nose? (George Thompson, Springfield, Va.) Story continues below advertisementA. \u201cThis is a moral imperative, an economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities.\u201dQ. How did 10-year-old Bill Clinton ask his mother for lunch money? (Kevin Mettinger, Warrenton, Va.)A. I have an old astronaut costume I\u2019m thinking about dusting off. Q. Really, you still haven\u2019t gone wedding dress shopping? (Hannah Seidel, Alexandria, Va.)A. Pour the egg mixture over the greens, covering them evenly.Q. How were the protesters planning to disrupt the Masters tournament? (Jon Gearhart, Des Moines) A. The Alphabet board authorized the company to repurchase as much as an additional $50 billion worth of its Class C capital stock. Q. They really used a Ouija to make major business decisions? Like what? (Richard Lorentz, Woodland Hills, Calif.) AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA. The administration will propose nationwide standards for tailpipe emissions in mid-July. Q. Is it true they\u2019re planning to limit beans in school lunches? (John Kammer) A. Washington\u2019s last option is to trade down. Q. Any idea how the State Department will deal with the duvet and comforter shortage? (Todd DeLap, Fairfax, Va.) A. I shouldn\u2019t have to be afraid to express myself. Q. Why do you care that you\u2019re not allowed to use USPS as a transportation option? (Stu Segal) A. That dude was wrong. Q. What\u2019s an example of the new \u201cplain English\u201d emphasis in appellate court rulings? (Duncan Stevens) A. Cue up some ABBA and get ready to dance, because clogs are back!Q. How did Swedish plumbers respond to news of Stockholm\u2019s fatberg? (Frank Osen) A. \u201cThe United States isn\u2019t waiting.\u201dQ. What does Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield say when she cuts in line at the U.N. cafeteria? (Kevin Mettinger)AdvertisementA. \u201cIt\u2019s a big area we have to clear, and it\u2019s probably going to take more resources.\u201dQ. What did the esthetician say about waxing Your Mama\u2019s back? (Jesse Frankovich, Lansing, Mich.) A. Japanese interiors can often feel a little warmer and less clinical than their Scandinavian counterpart. Q. Why are there more proctologists in Tokyo than Copenhagen? (Frank Osen) A. \u201cSurvivors include his wife, Nancy; five children; 12 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.\u201d Q. What happened after the acrobat tried to top the Wallendas\u2019 famous tightrope pyramid stunt? (Roy Ashley, Washington)A. I know I have a lot still stored in me.Q. Why did you give just a one-star rating for that discount laxative? (Kevin Dopart) And Last:A. Number two wins it.Q. What is the main complaint among the more priggish Losers about competing in the Invitational? (Kevin Dopart) And Even Laster: A. \u201cWe are aware of the humor.\u201dQ. \u201cDoes The Style Invitational make you laugh, Your Majesty?\u201d (Gary Crockett)And Lastest of All: A. The fact is, publishers have always made highly selective judgments about who they print and who they don\u2019t. Q. What is definitely not true if this entry gets ink? (Mark Raffman) Two contests still running \u2014 deadline for both is Monday night, May 24: \u2014 Make a diorama or other funny artwork including at least one cicada or casing. See wapo.st/invite1435\n\u2014 Offer a new plot for a real movie title. wapo.st/invite1436DON\u2019T MISS AN INVITE! Sign up here to receive a once-a-week email from the Empress as soon as The Style Invitational and Style Conversational go online every Thursday, complete with links to the columns. Change a word by 1 adjacent letter on the keyboard. Plus inking \u2018Questionable Journalism.\u2019 Style Invitational Week 1437: One-offs \u2014 a \u2018typo\u2019 neologism contest",
        "author": "Pat Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Demi Moore to Matthew McConaughey, Screen Stars Are Turning to Podcasts (WSJ: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "217",
        "date": "2020-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-demi-moore-to-matthew-mcconaughey-screen-stars-are-turning-to-podcasts-11608915600?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=36",
        "text": "In the scripted drama, produced by Qcode Media, Ms. Moore plays an accountant who secretly runs a website that streams audio of women sharing their intimate desires. The original plan was to record the show with a cast on a sound stage, but when the pandemic hit, the production went online and the actors interacted with each other remotely over Zoom, from makeshift studios in closets and spare rooms at home.\n\u201cI went to different rooms and recorded myself and said, hey, which one sounds the best?\u201d Ms. Moore said in a recent Zoom call. \u201cIt ended up being my bathroom.\u201d\n\nA-list celebrities like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew McConaughey,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kristen Wiig,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rami Malek\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cynthia Erivo\n\n\n\n are turning to scripted fiction podcasts with the production qualities of TV and film\u2014just without the pictures. Alongside film, TV and theater, scripted podcasts have become a popular, somewhat pandemic-proof medium for actors and writers to tell ambitious stories.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDemi Moore says the podcast format allows chances to be taken on original stories, riskier topics and ambitious concepts.\n\n\n\nMany more will join them in 2021.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n Audible has a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Patterson\n\n\n\n series, \u201cThe Coldest Case: A Black Book Drama,\u201d planned for next year, starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aaron Paul\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Krysten Ritter\n\n\n\n of \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d fame, as well as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nathalie Emmanuel,\n\n\n\n who played Missandei in \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Spotify\n\n\n has a slate of scripted shows planned around DC Entertainment characters, with \u201cBatman Unburied\u201d premiering in 2021. Qcode, a startup podcast company that focuses on scripted shows with marquee names, such as \u201cDirty Diana,\u201d has 15 new series planned for next year.\nThe shows are part of an evolution in audio storytelling that is blurring the lines between podcasts, radio dramas and audiobooks. Audible, for example, is producing original programming starring and sometimes written by actors like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jesse Eisenberg\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daisy Ridley\n\n\n\n that doesn\u2019t have to fit any predetermined length or format. These Audible Originals could, for example, be five hours, 90 minutes or 30-minute episodic stories.\n\u201cI talk a lot about this renaissance in audio that we\u2019re seeing, but I really think it\u2019s just the beginning,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rachel Ghiazza,\n\n\n\n the executive vice president at Audible who oversees U.S. content. \u201cWe\u2019re not even close to seeing what\u2019s going to happen in the space yet.\u201d\nPicture this Actors and creators say they\u2019re drawn to the surprisingly immersive, even consuming quality of the audio medium, as well as the ability to create new worlds at a fraction of the cost and logistical headaches of telling a story on screen. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Herting,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Qcode, says the budgets for his shows are generally in the low to mid six-figure range, significantly less than the cost of mounting a TV show with the same story and cast. There\u2019s also no traveling to a set in Atlanta. There are no costumes. There aren\u2019t weeks spent away from family. Actors can record the shows from home, usually in less than a week. With lower overhead and time commitments, Ms. Moore says chances can be taken on original stories, riskier topics and ambitious concepts that would take significantly more resources to pull off on screen. \n\u201cThis just kind of opens up the amount of stories you can tell,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shana Feste,\n\n\n\n the creator of \u201cDirty Diana.\u201d \u201cNow I could tell a story in space if I wanted to. I could record it next week and it would sound like we were in space,\u201d without the need for realistic, evocative visuals. \u201cAnd that\u2019s really exciting.\u201d\nIndeed in Qcode\u2019s \u201cFrom Now,\u201d a podcast that began releasing episodes on Spotify and other major outlets last week,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Madden \n\n\n\n plays an astronaut on a spaceship that returns to Earth 35 years after it disappeared. He performed the opening moments of the show\u2014\u201cMission control, do you copy? Captain Harrow\u2019s dead! They\u2019re all dead!\u201d\u2014hunched over a desk while quarantining in a Los Angeles hotel room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Madden recorded a portion of the new sci-fi podcast, 'From Now,' from a Los Angeles hotel room.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Qcode Media\n \n\n\n\nMr. Madden, who played Robb Stark in \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d says he performed in a lot of radio dramas for BBC early in his career, and remembers walking on gravel and carpet in the studio to get different sound effects. The difference with podcasts like \u201cFrom Now\u201d is that sound effects are taken care of by sound designers and engineers, often from the TV and film industry, leaving the actor with the sole duty of performing with his voice.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian C Scripted shows are the latest step in the evolution of audio storytelling. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s been a bleak year, so our gift to you is George Clooney\u2019s thoughts on movies, murder hornets and mince pie (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "218",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/george-clooney-midnight-sky-interview/2020/12/22/df22adae-4399-11eb-975c-d17b8815a66d_story.html",
        "text": "George Clooney\u2019s on the line. It\u2019s early December, and he\u2019s calling from his house in Los Angeles, where the family\u2019s 165-pound Saint Bernard, Rosie, is barreling toward 3-year-old Alexander. (His twin sister, Ella, seems to be staying safely out of range.) Midway through his dad\u2019s conversation, Alexander starts babbling into the phone. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAlexander, say \u2018Hi, Ann,\u2019\u201d Clooney prods.\u201cHI ANN!\u201dThe niceties are dispensed with. How is Alexander? \u201cGOOD!\u201d More to the point, is Alexander being good? \u201cYEAH-VEE!\u201d Clooney translates: \u201cYes, very. He\u2019s being very good because remember we talked about Santa yesterday? What do you want from Santa?\u201d\u201cUH-HI-BE-CO-DECK-TO\u201d Clooney: \u201cA helicopter .\u2009.\u2009.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cA-PIRA-CHE-WI-LOTTA-TIES\u201d \u201c .\u2009.\u2009. a pirate's chest with a lot of toys .\u2009.\u2009.\u201d\u201cAN-FOOD-YIE-DIS!!\u201d \u201c .\u2009.\u2009. and food like this. Which is a jelly bean and a gummy bear. That\u2019s a good Christmas, if you ask me.\u201dAdvertisementIn ways large and small, the Clooney household has experienced the coronavirus pandemic like lots of other Americans: living on top of one other, spending inordinate amounts of time on Zoom, missing loved ones.\u201cWe haven\u2019t moved,\u201d Clooney says simply. \u201cWe\u2019ve been here for nine months and, you know, it\u2019s the same thing everybody goes through. I miss my parents, I want to see them, they\u2019re in Kentucky, and Amal [Clooney\u2019s wife, a human rights lawyer] misses her family. That\u2019s the hard stuff for us, and probably for everybody, a little bit.\u201d Clooney especially feels for his father, Nick, who\u2019s 87 and \u201cthe life of the party, still. .\u2009.\u2009. He\u2019s used to holding court a little bit, and he\u2019s not able to do it, which is frustrating.\u201dStory continues below advertisementEven amid the obstacles of illness spikes, lockdowns and quarantines, Clooney sounds upbeat. Which marks a definite shift from the movie he\u2019s promoting: \u201cThe Midnight Sky,\u201d which he directed and stars in, is a deeply affecting portrait of Dr. Augustine Lofthouse, a lonely astronomer who, in the aftermath of a catastrophic world event, tries desperately to reach the crew of a returning space mission to warn them of the devastation they\u2019re facing.AdvertisementAs the scientist in question, Clooney, who will turn 60 in May, is barely recognizable behind a bushy white beard; his face is sunken and his body wizened. In one of the myriad interviews he has done for the movie in recent weeks, he told the Daily Mirror that he lost nearly 30 pounds while preparing for the role, his rapid weight loss landing him in the hospital with a case of pancreatitis.From its bleak tone to its theme of planetary apocalypse \u2014 which is never specified \u2014 \u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d feels like 2020 in movie form. As the film opens, a subtitle appears saying, \u201c3 weeks after the event.\u201d This year, that could mean a global flu epidemic. It could mean wildfires, hurricanes, floods and mudslides. It could mean tribal civil conflicts that metastasized into world war. It could mean murder hornets.Story continues below advertisementClooney laughs. \u201cI like murder hornets,\u201d he says, adding that he began working on \u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d \u2014 which is adapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton\u2019s 2016 novel \u201cGood Morning, Midnight\u201d \u2014 during pre-covid times. His main reference then was nuclear paranoia. \u201cI grew up in the \u201960s, and it wasn\u2019t a question of if but when we would all blow each other into kingdom come,\u201d he notes. \u201cWe used to do duck-and-cover drills in grade school .\u2009.\u2009. so I lived with the idea that man is going to really screw this up at some point.\u201dAdvertisementIt wasn\u2019t until Clooney finished shooting that the pandemic hit. As he edited within that context, he says, the contours of the film morphed with the times. \u201cBecause you\u2019re sitting by yourself instead of being in an editing room,\u201d he explains, \u201cso everything changed a little bit as we were going. Funnily enough, we took more and more dialogue out, just because the silences felt like they were the part that mattered, the inability to communicate.\u201dWhat started out as a cautionary tale about the human race\u2019s poor stewardship of the Earth, Clooney observes, wound up reflecting what for him has been the main takeaway of 2020: \u201cUnderstanding how deeply we are in need of communication, and being aware of the people we love, and how hard that is on top of everything else, and the toll that takes.\u201d\u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d embodies before-times and after-times in other ways: Clooney filmed his part of the story in Iceland, with director of photography Martin Ruhe using a handheld 65-millimeter film camera. The setting of the outer-space story line, in which David Oyelowo, Felicity Jones, Kyle Chandler, Demi\u00e1n Bichir and Tiffany Boone play the space station\u2019s crew, was first conceived in virtual reality. \u201cYou\u2019re walking around in an empty gymnasium, but in your goggles you can see everything,\u201d Clooney explains. \u201cYou\u2019re setting shots in a world that doesn\u2019t exist, and you\u2019re going to build those pieces of the set.\u201d (\u201cThe Midnight Sky\u2019s\u201d production designer is Clooney\u2019s longtime collaborator Jim Bissell.)The film is also straddling two worlds simply in the way it\u2019s coming out: The big-screen spectacle set amid the snowy expanse of the Arctic was produced by Netflix, meaning it will mostly be seen on TVs or sundry personal devices. Clooney, whose production company was housed at Warner Bros. for 20 years, expresses disappointment with the studio for not communicating with filmmakers when they recently decided to make their 2021 slate available in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max simultaneously. But he doesn\u2019t see it as the death knell for the theatrical experience.Did Warner Bros. just kill movie theaters? Not by a long shot.\u201cThis is a moment in time,\u201d he insists. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be permanent. I\u2019m not old enough to remember, but I do know the stories of everyone who said television would bring the death of cinema, and it didn\u2019t. And I do remember \u2018VCRs will bring the death of cinema\u2019 and I remember \u2018DVDs will bring the death of cinema\u2019 and none of it was true. People still have to gather together. They still have to get out of the house, and it\u2019s still the cheapest date. You\u2019re going to get out and go see a movie and have a meal and it\u2019s a lot cheaper than going to a concert. Comedies work great in a crowd. Kids want to get away from their parents. Parents want to get away from their kids. I can\u2019t keep saying to my wife, \u2018Let's stay home and watch TV.\u2019\u2009\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhich, let\u2019s face it, is exactly what the Clooneys have been doing. He\u2019s a big fan of the addictive series \u201cYou\u201d and \u201cMoney Heist,\u201d as well as the thickly accented British shows \u201cPeaky Blinders\u201d and \u201cI Hate Suzie,\u201d both of which he makes sure to watch with his wife, who was born in Lebanon but spent most of her life in England. \u201cI literally look at Amal going, \u2018What did they just say?\u2019\u2009\u201dClooney has navigated yet another seismic change in the entertainment industry, wherein the middle-aged White guy who used to reign supreme is no longer necessarily front and center when it comes to hot projects. \u201cI\u2019m not worried about how difficult it is for middle-aged White guys,\u201d he says dismissively. \u201cThey\u2019ve done quite well over the history of time in pretty much every industry.\u201dStill, he was stung by criticisms of his last directorial effort, the 2017 comic thriller \u201cSuburbicon\u201d \u2014 set amid the integration of a White 1950s neighborhood \u2014 that took him to task for sidelining the film\u2019s Black characters. He stands by the film (\u201cThe reality is, I probably wouldn\u2019t be the best person to be telling the Black family\u2019s story\u201d), but also admits that he\u2019s on a learning curve, along with most men of his generation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m constantly having to reeducate myself,\u201d he says. \u201cI did \u2018Batman & Robin\u2019; it\u2019s a horrible movie but it wasn\u2019t a horrible experience. Joel Schumacher was a sweet guy, everybody was nice. And I ran into Alicia Silverstone [Batgirl] and she said it was the worst experience of her life. Because she\u2019d put on a couple of pounds and they were really hammering her and people were giving her a really difficult time. I didn\u2019t see it, I didn\u2019t know it and I had no idea that was her experience. My experience was just that it was a bad film and I was bad in it. But I didn\u2019t understand that it was also a terrible experience for someone. So you\u2019re constantly reassessing how other people are seeing something.\u201dHe had a similar experience watching the 1961 film \u201cBreakfast at Tiffany\u2019s\u201d recently with Amal. \u201cMy wife and I were sitting there watching it and I hadn\u2019t seen it in forever, and you can\u2019t not love Audrey Hepburn. As you\u2019re watching it, you\u2019re like, \u2018God this is so great,\u2019 and then [Mickey Rooney] comes on [playing a racist stereotype of an Asian man] and it literally shocks you.\u201d Still, he adds, \u201cIt\u2019s good that that\u2019s disturbing to us now. That means we are moving in the right direction. It\u2019s sad that it wasn\u2019t earlier, but I\u2019m very happy that at least there\u2019s an understanding that these things don\u2019t hold water anymore.\u201dClooney is slated to begin production on his next movie, an adaptation of J.R. Moehringer\u2019s memoir \u201cThe Tender Bar,\u201d in the spring. It will be the eighth movie Clooney has directed; earlier this month, Deadline Hollywood reported that Ben Affleck was in negotiations to star in the film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClooney\u2019s been scouting Boston locations \u2014 what else? \u2014 virtually. \u201cIt\u2019s very weird to have them send you pictures and you go, \u2018Yeah, I could shoot there\u2019 or \u2018We could do that,\u2019\u2009\u201d he says ruefully. He misses the serendipity that can sometimes change the whole movie. \u201cHalf the things you find are things where you\u2019re walking around and you go, \u2018No, you guys, over here,\u2019\u2009\u201d he explains. \u201cEven driving to the next location, you go, \u2018Stop, pull over, what\u2019s that?\u2019 Sometimes it gives you an idea for changing the story, sometimes it gives you an idea for a better place to put the scene. .\u2009.\u2009. The good news is that it\u2019s a really small story and it takes place mostly inside a bar. It\u2019s opened up a bit, but it\u2019s not like we\u2019re doing \u2018Lawrence of Arabia\u2019 on this one.\u201dSuddenly Clooney sounds distracted; Rosie the Saint Bernard has just charged his producing partner, Grant Heslov, as he came through the door. \u201cOh my God,\u201d he says, laughing. \u201cShe literally just hit him in the head. Are you okay?\u201dWe agree that this is probably as good a time as any to wrap up the conversation. Plus, he needs to get ready for Santa.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLike their parents, Ella and Alexander have been bingeing British TV \u2014 in their case, \u201cPeppa Pig\u201d and \u201cCharlie and Lola.\u201d Just yesterday, Clooney notes, \u201cI said to the kids, \u2018So we\u2019re going to leave milk and cookies for Santa.\u2019 And Alexander says, \u2018No, we leave milk and mince pie.\u2019 And I said, \u2018Mince pie?! Are you nuts?\u2019\u2009\u201d Clooney laughs, then delivers the perfect kicker for 2020. \u201cIt\u2019s too much.\u201dThe unbreakable gaze of Steve McQueen: \u2018I\u2019m asking you, please, look\u2019In a year of Black Death, the movies showed us Black LifeBest movies of 2020: Diverse thrills, chills, Dickensian laughs and a pandemic-friendly trip to Greece\n\n As the actor-director rolls out \u2018The Midnight Sky,\u2019 he\u2019s at home like the rest of us, bingeing on TV and family. It\u2019s been a bleak year, so our gift to you is George Clooney\u2019s thoughts on movies, murder hornets and mince pie",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "China moon mission returns to Earth, vaulting nation into ranks of space powers (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "219",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-moon-mission-space/2020/12/17/367b6a26-4022-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html",
        "text": "TAIPEI, Taiwan \u2014 Bearing two kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of lunar rock and soil, China's Chang'e-5 capsule touched down on the frozen steppes of Inner Mongolia early Thursday and vaulted China into the ranks of only three nations that have ventured to the moon and brought back samples.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe mission will provide earthbound researchers with the first fresh batch of lunar material in 44 years. The last delivery came in 1976, when the Soviet Luna 24 mission scooped up about six ounces of moon rocks and returned. The successful Chang\u2019e-5 mission, which caps a series of breakthroughs for China\u2019s space program in the past two years, has boosted Beijing\u2019s confidence. Exultant officials on Thursday turned their attention to future targets and said they were hoping to erect a manned lunar base by 2030 as a springboard for further space exploration. But other officials dismissed criticism that China seeks to reprise the Cold War-era space race that pitted the Soviet Union against the United States. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina launched its Chang\u2019e-5 mission on Nov. 24, and its lander touched down Dec. 1 near Mons R\u00fcmker, a volcanic mound on the near side of the moon. Chinese officials say the site is of a younger geological age and can provide new insights about the makeup of the moon and the universe compared with sites sampled in the 1960s and 1970s by the Soviet Union and United States \u2014 the only other countries that have obtained lunar samples.China launched the Chang'e 5 spacecraft to collect lunar rocks from a previously unexplored section of the moon on Nov. 24. (Reuters)The mission was also significant, according to Chinese space officials, because it was the first time China synchronized and docked vessels in the moon\u2019s orbit.Footage released by state media showed the Chang\u2019e-5\u2019s copper-colored return capsule nestled safely in the snow and recovery staff members celebrating next to a Chinese flag. China\u2019s ",
        "author": "Gerry Shih"
    },
    {
        "title": "China moon mission returns to Earth, vaulting nation into ranks of space powers (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "220",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-moon-mission-space/2020/12/17/367b6a26-4022-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html",
        "text": "TAIPEI, Taiwan \u2014 Bearing two kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of lunar rock and soil, China's Chang'e-5 capsule touched down on the frozen steppes of Inner Mongolia early Thursday and vaulted China into the ranks of only three nations that have ventured to the moon and brought back samples.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe mission will provide earthbound researchers with the first fresh batch of lunar material in 44 years. The last delivery came in 1976, when the Soviet Luna 24 mission scooped up about six ounces of moon rocks and returned. The successful Chang\u2019e-5 mission, which caps a series of breakthroughs for China\u2019s space program in the past two years, has boosted Beijing\u2019s confidence. Exultant officials on Thursday turned their attention to future targets and said they were hoping to erect a manned lunar base by 2030 as a springboard for further space exploration. But other officials dismissed criticism that China seeks to reprise the Cold War-era space race that pitted the Soviet Union against the United States. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina launched its Chang\u2019e-5 mission on Nov. 24, and its lander touched down Dec. 1 near Mons R\u00fcmker, a volcanic mound on the near side of the moon. Chinese officials say the site is of a younger geological age and can provide new insights about the makeup of the moon and the universe compared with sites sampled in the 1960s and 1970s by the Soviet Union and United States \u2014 the only other countries that have obtained lunar samples.China launched the Chang'e 5 spacecraft to collect lunar rocks from a previously unexplored section of the moon on Nov. 24. (Reuters)The mission was also significant, according to Chinese space officials, because it was the first time China synchronized and docked vessels in the moon\u2019s orbit.Footage released by state media showed the Chang\u2019e-5\u2019s copper-colored return capsule nestled safely in the snow and recovery staff members celebrating next to a Chinese flag. China\u2019s ",
        "author": "Gerry Shih"
    },
    {
        "title": "China moon mission returns to Earth, vaulting nation into ranks of space powers (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "221",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-moon-mission-space/2020/12/17/367b6a26-4022-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html",
        "text": "TAIPEI, Taiwan \u2014 Bearing two kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of lunar rock and soil, China's Chang'e-5 capsule touched down on the frozen steppes of Inner Mongolia early Thursday and vaulted China into the ranks of only three nations that have ventured to the moon and brought back samples.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe mission will provide earthbound researchers with the first fresh batch of lunar material in 44 years. The last delivery came in 1976, when the Soviet Luna 24 mission scooped up about six ounces of moon rocks and returned. The successful Chang\u2019e-5 mission, which caps a series of breakthroughs for China\u2019s space program in the past two years, has boosted Beijing\u2019s confidence. Exultant officials on Thursday turned their attention to future targets and said they were hoping to erect a manned lunar base by 2030 as a springboard for further space exploration. But other officials dismissed criticism that China seeks to reprise the Cold War-era space race that pitted the Soviet Union against the United States. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina launched its Chang\u2019e-5 mission on Nov. 24, and its lander touched down Dec. 1 near Mons R\u00fcmker, a volcanic mound on the near side of the moon. Chinese officials say the site is of a younger geological age and can provide new insights about the makeup of the moon and the universe compared with sites sampled in the 1960s and 1970s by the Soviet Union and United States \u2014 the only other countries that have obtained lunar samples.China launched the Chang'e 5 spacecraft to collect lunar rocks from a previously unexplored section of the moon on Nov. 24. (Reuters)The mission was also significant, according to Chinese space officials, because it was the first time China synchronized and docked vessels in the moon\u2019s orbit.Footage released by state media showed the Chang\u2019e-5\u2019s copper-colored return capsule nestled safely in the snow and recovery staff members celebrating next to a Chinese flag. China\u2019s ",
        "author": "Gerry Shih"
    },
    {
        "title": "China moon mission returns to Earth, vaulting nation into ranks of space powers (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "222",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-moon-mission-space/2020/12/17/367b6a26-4022-11eb-b58b-1623f6267960_story.html",
        "text": "TAIPEI, Taiwan \u2014 Bearing two kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of lunar rock and soil, China's Chang'e-5 capsule touched down on the frozen steppes of Inner Mongolia early Thursday and vaulted China into the ranks of only three nations that have ventured to the moon and brought back samples.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe mission will provide earthbound researchers with the first fresh batch of lunar material in 44 years. The last delivery came in 1976, when the Soviet Luna 24 mission scooped up about six ounces of moon rocks and returned. The successful Chang\u2019e-5 mission, which caps a series of breakthroughs for China\u2019s space program in the past two years, has boosted Beijing\u2019s confidence. Exultant officials on Thursday turned their attention to future targets and said they were hoping to erect a manned lunar base by 2030 as a springboard for further space exploration. But other officials dismissed criticism that China seeks to reprise the Cold War-era space race that pitted the Soviet Union against the United States. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina launched its Chang\u2019e-5 mission on Nov. 24, and its lander touched down Dec. 1 near Mons R\u00fcmker, a volcanic mound on the near side of the moon. Chinese officials say the site is of a younger geological age and can provide new insights about the makeup of the moon and the universe compared with sites sampled in the 1960s and 1970s by the Soviet Union and United States \u2014 the only other countries that have obtained lunar samples.China launched the Chang'e 5 spacecraft to collect lunar rocks from a previously unexplored section of the moon on Nov. 24. (Reuters)The mission was also significant, according to Chinese space officials, because it was the first time China synchronized and docked vessels in the moon\u2019s orbit.Footage released by state media showed the Chang\u2019e-5\u2019s copper-colored return capsule nestled safely in the snow and recovery staff members celebrating next to a Chinese flag. China\u2019s ",
        "author": "Gerry Shih"
    },
    {
        "title": "South Korea successfully launches its first rocket, fails to place test satellite  (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "223",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/21/south-korea-successfully-launches-its-first-rocket-fails-place-test-satellite/",
        "text": "South Korea took a step forward in its space program Thursday when it launched its first domestically produced space rocket.The 154-foot KSLV-II Nuri \u2014 meaning \u201cworld\u201d \u2014 took off at 5 p.m. local time. One of its goals is to carry 1.5-ton payloads into space and place them up to 800 kilometers (500 miles) above Earth to experiment for plans to launch satellites \u2014 for advanced communication, surveillance, navigation and lunar probes, the Reuters news agency reported. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough the rocket successfully reached its target altitude, it failed to place the test satellite into orbit. Reuters reported that the final stage of the rocket began shutting down nearly a minute too early, preventing the payload from hitting the required speed for its target orbit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cUnfortunately, we did not fully reach our goal,\u201d President Moon Jae-in said in a speech after watching the launch from the space center. Still, he said it would not be long before a successful launch is possible. \u201cThe \u2018Korea Space Age\u2019 is approaching,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn a briefing, Lim Hye-sook, the nation\u2019s science minister, said that while the launch \u201cleft some disappointment,\u201d it was still significant to confirm that the core technology is secure.The Korea Aerospace Research Institute said that up to five test launches may be necessary. The next one is scheduled for May 19.The launch has military capability implications for South Korea, which has been ramping up its weapons development and increasing its defense spending in an effort to decrease its military dependence on the United States.Story continues below advertisementSouth Korea has announced plans to develop military satellites, which would be used to monitor North Korea. Thursday\u2019s rocket test comes at a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula, with dueling weapons tests and displays of new technologies in recent weeks.In May, South Korea became the 10th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a listed set of principles to guide international cooperation for lunar exploration via NASA\u2019s program to return astronauts \u2014 including the first woman and first person of color \u2014 to the moon.Moon has expressed ambitious goals for South Korea\u2019s space program over the next decade, including the placement of a South Korea-launched unmanned spacecraft on the moon by 2030.Michelle Ye Hee Lee in Seoul contributed to this report. The nation's space plans include launching satellites for communication, surveillance, navigation and lunar probes. South Korea successfully launches its first rocket, fails to place test satellite ",
        "author": "Sammy Westfall"
    },
    {
        "title": "South Korea successfully launches its first rocket, fails to place test satellite  (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "224",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/21/south-korea-successfully-launches-its-first-rocket-fails-place-test-satellite/",
        "text": "South Korea took a step forward in its space program Thursday when it launched its first domestically produced space rocket.The 154-foot KSLV-II Nuri \u2014 meaning \u201cworld\u201d \u2014 took off at 5 p.m. local time. One of its goals is to carry 1.5-ton payloads into space and place them up to 800 kilometers (500 miles) above Earth to experiment for plans to launch satellites \u2014 for advanced communication, surveillance, navigation and lunar probes, the Reuters news agency reported. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough the rocket successfully reached its target altitude, it failed to place the test satellite into orbit. Reuters reported that the final stage of the rocket began shutting down nearly a minute too early, preventing the payload from hitting the required speed for its target orbit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cUnfortunately, we did not fully reach our goal,\u201d President Moon Jae-in said in a speech after watching the launch from the space center. Still, he said it would not be long before a successful launch is possible. \u201cThe \u2018Korea Space Age\u2019 is approaching,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn a briefing, Lim Hye-sook, the nation\u2019s science minister, said that while the launch \u201cleft some disappointment,\u201d it was still significant to confirm that the core technology is secure.The Korea Aerospace Research Institute said that up to five test launches may be necessary. The next one is scheduled for May 19.The launch has military capability implications for South Korea, which has been ramping up its weapons development and increasing its defense spending in an effort to decrease its military dependence on the United States.Story continues below advertisementSouth Korea has announced plans to develop military satellites, which would be used to monitor North Korea. Thursday\u2019s rocket test comes at a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula, with dueling weapons tests and displays of new technologies in recent weeks.In May, South Korea became the 10th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a listed set of principles to guide international cooperation for lunar exploration via NASA\u2019s program to return astronauts \u2014 including the first woman and first person of color \u2014 to the moon.Moon has expressed ambitious goals for South Korea\u2019s space program over the next decade, including the placement of a South Korea-launched unmanned spacecraft on the moon by 2030.Michelle Ye Hee Lee in Seoul contributed to this report. The nation's space plans include launching satellites for communication, surveillance, navigation and lunar probes. South Korea successfully launches its first rocket, fails to place test satellite ",
        "author": "Sammy Westfall"
    },
    {
        "title": "South Korea successfully launches its first rocket, fails to place test satellite  (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "225",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/21/south-korea-successfully-launches-its-first-rocket-fails-place-test-satellite/",
        "text": "South Korea took a step forward in its space program Thursday when it launched its first domestically produced space rocket.The 154-foot KSLV-II Nuri \u2014 meaning \u201cworld\u201d \u2014 took off at 5 p.m. local time. One of its goals is to carry 1.5-ton payloads into space and place them up to 800 kilometers (500 miles) above Earth to experiment for plans to launch satellites \u2014 for advanced communication, surveillance, navigation and lunar probes, the Reuters news agency reported. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough the rocket successfully reached its target altitude, it failed to place the test satellite into orbit. Reuters reported that the final stage of the rocket began shutting down nearly a minute too early, preventing the payload from hitting the required speed for its target orbit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cUnfortunately, we did not fully reach our goal,\u201d President Moon Jae-in said in a speech after watching the launch from the space center. Still, he said it would not be long before a successful launch is possible. \u201cThe \u2018Korea Space Age\u2019 is approaching,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn a briefing, Lim Hye-sook, the nation\u2019s science minister, said that while the launch \u201cleft some disappointment,\u201d it was still significant to confirm that the core technology is secure.The Korea Aerospace Research Institute said that up to five test launches may be necessary. The next one is scheduled for May 19.The launch has military capability implications for South Korea, which has been ramping up its weapons development and increasing its defense spending in an effort to decrease its military dependence on the United States.Story continues below advertisementSouth Korea has announced plans to develop military satellites, which would be used to monitor North Korea. Thursday\u2019s rocket test comes at a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula, with dueling weapons tests and displays of new technologies in recent weeks.In May, South Korea became the 10th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a listed set of principles to guide international cooperation for lunar exploration via NASA\u2019s program to return astronauts \u2014 including the first woman and first person of color \u2014 to the moon.Moon has expressed ambitious goals for South Korea\u2019s space program over the next decade, including the placement of a South Korea-launched unmanned spacecraft on the moon by 2030.Michelle Ye Hee Lee in Seoul contributed to this report. The nation's space plans include launching satellites for communication, surveillance, navigation and lunar probes. South Korea successfully launches its first rocket, fails to place test satellite ",
        "author": "Sammy Westfall"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitions (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "226",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/moon-mission-is-a-signal-of-indias-growing-space-ambitions/2019/07/12/91ba2ad6-a1d0-11e9-a767-d7ab84aef3e9_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 When a rocket blasts off from an island in the Bay of Bengal in the coming days, it will carry not only a moon rover but a nation\u2019s growing ambitions in space.On Monday, India will embark on its most complex space odyssey to date with the launch of its second lunar mission.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChandrayaan-2, whose launch is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region in the first week of September. The region is crucial, scientists say, as there is a possibility of the presence of water and craters that contain fossil records of the early solar system.Chaitanya Giri, a fellow at the space and ocean studies program at Gateway House, a think tank in Mumbai, said it would be the first landing of any spacecraft on the lunar south pole.\u00a0AdvertisementThis 3D animation shows how India's Chandrayaan-2 will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region. (Press Information Bureau)Story continues below advertisementThe mission consists of a lander named Vikram, after the first chief of India\u2019s space organization, and a rover called Pragyan, which means \u201cwisdom\u201d in Sanskrit.\u00a0\u00a0If successful, the mission will advance understanding of the moon and \u201cbenefit India and humanity as a whole,\u201d according to the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO. Its chief, K. Sivan, told NDTV news that Vikram\u2019s 15-minute descent \u201cwill be the most terrifying moments as we have never undertaken such a complex mission.\u201dThe country\u2019s first deep-space mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008, was\u00a0instrumental in the discovery of water on the moon\u2019s surface. The chairman of ISRO declined to comment further, citing a \u201chectic schedule\u201d before the launch.India shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi saysChandrayaan-2, whose launch is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region. (Press Information Bureau)Although India\u2019s space program began as early as the 1960s, it has gained new prominence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The nationalist leader swept to reelection in May after a campaign focused on security and patriotic rhetoric. Modi has promoted the space program as a symbol of the country\u2019s rising stature internationally and a bulwark of its defense capabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe lunar mission isn\u2019t the only one on the horizon. By 2022, the Indian space agency plans to send a manned mission to space or an Indian astronaut to space.\u201cIndia has started to make decisions that will make that country a major space power,\u201d\u00a0wrote Mark Whittington, author of two space-exploration studies. To be a major player on the world stage, India had realized it needs a \u201cvigorous space program,\u201d\u00a0he said.During his election campaign in March, Modi made a\u00a0sudden televised address to the nation to disclose that India had become the fourth country to shoot down a low-orbit satellite with a missile \u2014 an advanced defense capability matched only by the United States, China and Russia.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisementComing on the heels of one of the worst cross-border conflicts with archrival Pakistan in recent times, the missile test was seen by security analysts as a significant policy shift for New Delhi, which has sought to portray itself as a responsible international actor.AdvertisementThe test, however, displeased NASA, whose administrator called it \u201cunacceptable,\u201d given that debris could potentially harm the International Space Station.India\u2019s Modi won reelection in a landslide. Here\u2019s what he could do next.Critics of India\u2019s space aspirations question whether a developing country can afford to spend millions on space exploration. Vikram Sarabhai, considered the father of the country\u2019s space program, has said in response that \u201cto play a meaningful role nationally and in the community of nations,\u201d India needs to apply \u201cadvanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOthers have highlighted the cost-effectiveness of India\u2019s space explorations compared with those of the United States.India\u2019s first\u00a0Mars satellite cost less than the budget of the space movie, \u201cGravity.\u201d At $141 million, the cost of the current lunar mission is far less than the $25 billionspent by the United States on its Apollo program. Both the Mars and moon missions combined amount to less than the $408 million India spent building a giant statue of a freedom-era leader last year. In a famous image from 1981, India trotted out its first communication satellite, APPLE, on a\u00a0bullock cart.AdvertisementIndia has increased its budget spending on space by 11 percent this year to\u00a0$1.8 billion, although it remains\u00a0far below what NASA or China spends.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementExperts say India\u2019s focus on its space program reflects the aspirations of its young population. Giri says that scientific innovation, the invention of new technology and the development of a highly skilled labor force could help India become a $5 trillion economy by 2024, a goal the Modi government has said it will attempt to reach.\u00a0\u00a0India shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia becomes first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit, joins elite global space clubIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news Chandrayaan-2 rover will\u00a0attempt to land on the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region in the first week of September. India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitions",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitions (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "227",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/moon-mission-is-a-signal-of-indias-growing-space-ambitions/2019/07/12/91ba2ad6-a1d0-11e9-a767-d7ab84aef3e9_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 When a rocket blasts off from an island in the Bay of Bengal in the coming days, it will carry not only a moon rover but a nation\u2019s growing ambitions in space.On Monday, India will embark on its most complex space odyssey to date with the launch of its second lunar mission.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChandrayaan-2, whose launch is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region in the first week of September. The region is crucial, scientists say, as there is a possibility of the presence of water and craters that contain fossil records of the early solar system.Chaitanya Giri, a fellow at the space and ocean studies program at Gateway House, a think tank in Mumbai, said it would be the first landing of any spacecraft on the lunar south pole.\u00a0AdvertisementThis 3D animation shows how India's Chandrayaan-2 will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region. (Press Information Bureau)Story continues below advertisementThe mission consists of a lander named Vikram, after the first chief of India\u2019s space organization, and a rover called Pragyan, which means \u201cwisdom\u201d in Sanskrit.\u00a0\u00a0If successful, the mission will advance understanding of the moon and \u201cbenefit India and humanity as a whole,\u201d according to the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO. Its chief, K. Sivan, told NDTV news that Vikram\u2019s 15-minute descent \u201cwill be the most terrifying moments as we have never undertaken such a complex mission.\u201dThe country\u2019s first deep-space mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008, was\u00a0instrumental in the discovery of water on the moon\u2019s surface. The chairman of ISRO declined to comment further, citing a \u201chectic schedule\u201d before the launch.India shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi saysChandrayaan-2, whose launch is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region. (Press Information Bureau)Although India\u2019s space program began as early as the 1960s, it has gained new prominence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The nationalist leader swept to reelection in May after a campaign focused on security and patriotic rhetoric. Modi has promoted the space program as a symbol of the country\u2019s rising stature internationally and a bulwark of its defense capabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe lunar mission isn\u2019t the only one on the horizon. By 2022, the Indian space agency plans to send a manned mission to space or an Indian astronaut to space.\u201cIndia has started to make decisions that will make that country a major space power,\u201d\u00a0wrote Mark Whittington, author of two space-exploration studies. To be a major player on the world stage, India had realized it needs a \u201cvigorous space program,\u201d\u00a0he said.During his election campaign in March, Modi made a\u00a0sudden televised address to the nation to disclose that India had become the fourth country to shoot down a low-orbit satellite with a missile \u2014 an advanced defense capability matched only by the United States, China and Russia.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisementComing on the heels of one of the worst cross-border conflicts with archrival Pakistan in recent times, the missile test was seen by security analysts as a significant policy shift for New Delhi, which has sought to portray itself as a responsible international actor.AdvertisementThe test, however, displeased NASA, whose administrator called it \u201cunacceptable,\u201d given that debris could potentially harm the International Space Station.India\u2019s Modi won reelection in a landslide. Here\u2019s what he could do next.Critics of India\u2019s space aspirations question whether a developing country can afford to spend millions on space exploration. Vikram Sarabhai, considered the father of the country\u2019s space program, has said in response that \u201cto play a meaningful role nationally and in the community of nations,\u201d India needs to apply \u201cadvanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOthers have highlighted the cost-effectiveness of India\u2019s space explorations compared with those of the United States.India\u2019s first\u00a0Mars satellite cost less than the budget of the space movie, \u201cGravity.\u201d At $141 million, the cost of the current lunar mission is far less than the $25 billionspent by the United States on its Apollo program. Both the Mars and moon missions combined amount to less than the $408 million India spent building a giant statue of a freedom-era leader last year. In a famous image from 1981, India trotted out its first communication satellite, APPLE, on a\u00a0bullock cart.AdvertisementIndia has increased its budget spending on space by 11 percent this year to\u00a0$1.8 billion, although it remains\u00a0far below what NASA or China spends.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementExperts say India\u2019s focus on its space program reflects the aspirations of its young population. Giri says that scientific innovation, the invention of new technology and the development of a highly skilled labor force could help India become a $5 trillion economy by 2024, a goal the Modi government has said it will attempt to reach.\u00a0\u00a0India shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia becomes first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit, joins elite global space clubIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news Chandrayaan-2 rover will\u00a0attempt to land on the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region in the first week of September. India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitions",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitions (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "228",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/moon-mission-is-a-signal-of-indias-growing-space-ambitions/2019/07/12/91ba2ad6-a1d0-11e9-a767-d7ab84aef3e9_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 When a rocket blasts off from an island in the Bay of Bengal in the coming days, it will carry not only a moon rover but a nation\u2019s growing ambitions in space.On Monday, India will embark on its most complex space odyssey to date with the launch of its second lunar mission.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChandrayaan-2, whose launch is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region in the first week of September. The region is crucial, scientists say, as there is a possibility of the presence of water and craters that contain fossil records of the early solar system.Chaitanya Giri, a fellow at the space and ocean studies program at Gateway House, a think tank in Mumbai, said it would be the first landing of any spacecraft on the lunar south pole.\u00a0AdvertisementThis 3D animation shows how India's Chandrayaan-2 will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region. (Press Information Bureau)Story continues below advertisementThe mission consists of a lander named Vikram, after the first chief of India\u2019s space organization, and a rover called Pragyan, which means \u201cwisdom\u201d in Sanskrit.\u00a0\u00a0If successful, the mission will advance understanding of the moon and \u201cbenefit India and humanity as a whole,\u201d according to the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO. Its chief, K. Sivan, told NDTV news that Vikram\u2019s 15-minute descent \u201cwill be the most terrifying moments as we have never undertaken such a complex mission.\u201dThe country\u2019s first deep-space mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008, was\u00a0instrumental in the discovery of water on the moon\u2019s surface. The chairman of ISRO declined to comment further, citing a \u201chectic schedule\u201d before the launch.India shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi saysChandrayaan-2, whose launch is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, will attempt to soft-land onto the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region. (Press Information Bureau)Although India\u2019s space program began as early as the 1960s, it has gained new prominence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The nationalist leader swept to reelection in May after a campaign focused on security and patriotic rhetoric. Modi has promoted the space program as a symbol of the country\u2019s rising stature internationally and a bulwark of its defense capabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe lunar mission isn\u2019t the only one on the horizon. By 2022, the Indian space agency plans to send a manned mission to space or an Indian astronaut to space.\u201cIndia has started to make decisions that will make that country a major space power,\u201d\u00a0wrote Mark Whittington, author of two space-exploration studies. To be a major player on the world stage, India had realized it needs a \u201cvigorous space program,\u201d\u00a0he said.During his election campaign in March, Modi made a\u00a0sudden televised address to the nation to disclose that India had become the fourth country to shoot down a low-orbit satellite with a missile \u2014 an advanced defense capability matched only by the United States, China and Russia.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisementComing on the heels of one of the worst cross-border conflicts with archrival Pakistan in recent times, the missile test was seen by security analysts as a significant policy shift for New Delhi, which has sought to portray itself as a responsible international actor.AdvertisementThe test, however, displeased NASA, whose administrator called it \u201cunacceptable,\u201d given that debris could potentially harm the International Space Station.India\u2019s Modi won reelection in a landslide. Here\u2019s what he could do next.Critics of India\u2019s space aspirations question whether a developing country can afford to spend millions on space exploration. Vikram Sarabhai, considered the father of the country\u2019s space program, has said in response that \u201cto play a meaningful role nationally and in the community of nations,\u201d India needs to apply \u201cadvanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOthers have highlighted the cost-effectiveness of India\u2019s space explorations compared with those of the United States.India\u2019s first\u00a0Mars satellite cost less than the budget of the space movie, \u201cGravity.\u201d At $141 million, the cost of the current lunar mission is far less than the $25 billionspent by the United States on its Apollo program. Both the Mars and moon missions combined amount to less than the $408 million India spent building a giant statue of a freedom-era leader last year. In a famous image from 1981, India trotted out its first communication satellite, APPLE, on a\u00a0bullock cart.AdvertisementIndia has increased its budget spending on space by 11 percent this year to\u00a0$1.8 billion, although it remains\u00a0far below what NASA or China spends.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementExperts say India\u2019s focus on its space program reflects the aspirations of its young population. Giri says that scientific innovation, the invention of new technology and the development of a highly skilled labor force could help India become a $5 trillion economy by 2024, a goal the Modi government has said it will attempt to reach.\u00a0\u00a0India shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia becomes first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit, joins elite global space clubIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news Chandrayaan-2 rover will\u00a0attempt to land on the moon\u2019s uncharted south pole region in the first week of September. India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitions",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon\u00a0appears to have failed (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "229",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-attempts-to-become-the-fourth-nation-to-land-on-the-moon/2019/09/06/2533b3da-d0bc-11e9-9031-519885a08a86_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon went awry early Saturday when the country\u2019s space agency lost contact with the lander as it neared the lunar site, minutes before touchdown was expected.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHours later, there was still no official word on whether signals disappeared because of a problem on the lander or because it crashed onto the surface of the moon, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an address to the nation Saturday morning, indicated that the mission had failed. \u201cWe came very close but we need to cover more ground,\u201d Modi said. \u201cOur determination to touch the moon has become even stronger.\u201d#WATCH PM Narendra Modi hugged and consoled ISRO Chief K Sivan after he(Sivan) broke down. #Chandrayaan2 pic.twitter.com/R1d0C4LjAh\u2014 ANI (@ANI) September 7, 2019\n\nLaunched in July, Chandrayaan-2 had successfully completed Earth and moon orbits and was set to execute a controlled landing on the lunar south pole, a previously unexplored region.Story continues below advertisementThe incident could now set back\u00a0India\u2019s growing space ambitions, seen as a reflection of the aspirations of its young population.\u00a0AdvertisementIn the tense moments leading to the descent, a live broadcast from the space agency\u2019s control room showed rows of scientists with headphones sitting in front of computers. About 10 minutes after the lander began its descent, the commentary went quiet as officials talked among themselves with concern.\u00a0K. Sivan, head of the space agency, announced that communication with the lander had been lost.\u00a0Of the 38 soft-landing attempts made on the moon, only about half have succeeded.\u00a0In April, Israel attempted to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface, only to fail in the final moments. India had hoped its Chandrayaan-2 mission would make it the fourth nation to land on the moon after the United States, Russia and China.Story continues below advertisementPallava Bagla, science editor of news channel NDTV, said the mission would not be considered a failure. Pointing to Chandrayaan-2\u2019s orbiter, which has a mission life of a year, he said, \u201cFifty\u00a0percent of the mission is already successful and functional.\u201dAdvertisementThe orbiter carries eight scientific experiments for mapping the lunar surface and studying the outer atmosphere of the moon.\u00a0Experts had warned that landing Vikram, named after the country\u2019s first space agency chief, would be challenging.\u201cProper soft landing is the most crucial part of the exercise,\u201d said Patrick Das Gupta, a professor in the physics and astrophysics department at Delhi University. \u201cFrom an altitude of 21 miles to zero height is the most scary time.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSivan had called the landing maneuver \u201c15 minutes of terror\u201d in a television news interview.The mission has been a source of immense national pride. Social media erupted in support of the space agency and its scientists despite the setback.\u201cBe courageous,\u201d Modi told the scientists in the control room, in a moment that was broadcast across Indian public television and live-streamed online. \u201cThis is not a small achievement. The country is proud of you.\u201d\u00a0The success of the moon mission news could have helped take some heat off the Modi government, which is grappling with an increasingly gloomy economic scenario marred by\u00a0poor GDP figures and\u00a0high unemployment rates.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndia\u2019s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008,\u00a0was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on the lunar surface. The current mission would have looked for the presence of water.India\u2019s mission comes as other nations and companies are eyeing the lunar surface. This year, China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a first, and has plans to land another craft in the coming months.NASA is desperately trying to return to the moon \u2014 and had hoped to do so this year. Last year, the space agency chose nine companies to be eligible to bid on contracts to fly science experts to the lunar surface. At the time, NASA officials said they were pressing the companies to have a real sense of urgency.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters this year. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementMeanwhile, the Trump White House has directed the U.S. space agency to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, an aggressive timeline many think will be difficult to achieve.One of the successes of India\u2019s space program has been its cost-effectiveness. Chandrayaan-2 cost $141\u00a0million, a small fraction of what the United States spent on its historic Apollo moon mission.India also has begun preparations\u00a0to send a manned mission to space by 2022.\u00a0Christian Davenport in Washington contributed to this report.India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsNew Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launchWe have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.Today\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The space agency lost contact with the lander moments before the scheduled soft-landing on the lunar south pole. India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon\u00a0appears to have failed",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon\u00a0appears to have failed (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "230",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-attempts-to-become-the-fourth-nation-to-land-on-the-moon/2019/09/06/2533b3da-d0bc-11e9-9031-519885a08a86_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon went awry early Saturday when the country\u2019s space agency lost contact with the lander as it neared the lunar site, minutes before touchdown was expected.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHours later, there was still no official word on whether signals disappeared because of a problem on the lander or because it crashed onto the surface of the moon, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an address to the nation Saturday morning, indicated that the mission had failed. \u201cWe came very close but we need to cover more ground,\u201d Modi said. \u201cOur determination to touch the moon has become even stronger.\u201d#WATCH PM Narendra Modi hugged and consoled ISRO Chief K Sivan after he(Sivan) broke down. #Chandrayaan2 pic.twitter.com/R1d0C4LjAh\u2014 ANI (@ANI) September 7, 2019\n\nLaunched in July, Chandrayaan-2 had successfully completed Earth and moon orbits and was set to execute a controlled landing on the lunar south pole, a previously unexplored region.Story continues below advertisementThe incident could now set back\u00a0India\u2019s growing space ambitions, seen as a reflection of the aspirations of its young population.\u00a0AdvertisementIn the tense moments leading to the descent, a live broadcast from the space agency\u2019s control room showed rows of scientists with headphones sitting in front of computers. About 10 minutes after the lander began its descent, the commentary went quiet as officials talked among themselves with concern.\u00a0K. Sivan, head of the space agency, announced that communication with the lander had been lost.\u00a0Of the 38 soft-landing attempts made on the moon, only about half have succeeded.\u00a0In April, Israel attempted to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface, only to fail in the final moments. India had hoped its Chandrayaan-2 mission would make it the fourth nation to land on the moon after the United States, Russia and China.Story continues below advertisementPallava Bagla, science editor of news channel NDTV, said the mission would not be considered a failure. Pointing to Chandrayaan-2\u2019s orbiter, which has a mission life of a year, he said, \u201cFifty\u00a0percent of the mission is already successful and functional.\u201dAdvertisementThe orbiter carries eight scientific experiments for mapping the lunar surface and studying the outer atmosphere of the moon.\u00a0Experts had warned that landing Vikram, named after the country\u2019s first space agency chief, would be challenging.\u201cProper soft landing is the most crucial part of the exercise,\u201d said Patrick Das Gupta, a professor in the physics and astrophysics department at Delhi University. \u201cFrom an altitude of 21 miles to zero height is the most scary time.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSivan had called the landing maneuver \u201c15 minutes of terror\u201d in a television news interview.The mission has been a source of immense national pride. Social media erupted in support of the space agency and its scientists despite the setback.\u201cBe courageous,\u201d Modi told the scientists in the control room, in a moment that was broadcast across Indian public television and live-streamed online. \u201cThis is not a small achievement. The country is proud of you.\u201d\u00a0The success of the moon mission news could have helped take some heat off the Modi government, which is grappling with an increasingly gloomy economic scenario marred by\u00a0poor GDP figures and\u00a0high unemployment rates.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndia\u2019s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008,\u00a0was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on the lunar surface. The current mission would have looked for the presence of water.India\u2019s mission comes as other nations and companies are eyeing the lunar surface. This year, China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a first, and has plans to land another craft in the coming months.NASA is desperately trying to return to the moon \u2014 and had hoped to do so this year. Last year, the space agency chose nine companies to be eligible to bid on contracts to fly science experts to the lunar surface. At the time, NASA officials said they were pressing the companies to have a real sense of urgency.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters this year. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementMeanwhile, the Trump White House has directed the U.S. space agency to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, an aggressive timeline many think will be difficult to achieve.One of the successes of India\u2019s space program has been its cost-effectiveness. Chandrayaan-2 cost $141\u00a0million, a small fraction of what the United States spent on its historic Apollo moon mission.India also has begun preparations\u00a0to send a manned mission to space by 2022.\u00a0Christian Davenport in Washington contributed to this report.India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsNew Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launchWe have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.Today\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The space agency lost contact with the lander moments before the scheduled soft-landing on the lunar south pole. India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon\u00a0appears to have failed",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon\u00a0appears to have failed (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "231",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-attempts-to-become-the-fourth-nation-to-land-on-the-moon/2019/09/06/2533b3da-d0bc-11e9-9031-519885a08a86_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon went awry early Saturday when the country\u2019s space agency lost contact with the lander as it neared the lunar site, minutes before touchdown was expected.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHours later, there was still no official word on whether signals disappeared because of a problem on the lander or because it crashed onto the surface of the moon, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in an address to the nation Saturday morning, indicated that the mission had failed. \u201cWe came very close but we need to cover more ground,\u201d Modi said. \u201cOur determination to touch the moon has become even stronger.\u201d#WATCH PM Narendra Modi hugged and consoled ISRO Chief K Sivan after he(Sivan) broke down. #Chandrayaan2 pic.twitter.com/R1d0C4LjAh\u2014 ANI (@ANI) September 7, 2019\n\nLaunched in July, Chandrayaan-2 had successfully completed Earth and moon orbits and was set to execute a controlled landing on the lunar south pole, a previously unexplored region.Story continues below advertisementThe incident could now set back\u00a0India\u2019s growing space ambitions, seen as a reflection of the aspirations of its young population.\u00a0AdvertisementIn the tense moments leading to the descent, a live broadcast from the space agency\u2019s control room showed rows of scientists with headphones sitting in front of computers. About 10 minutes after the lander began its descent, the commentary went quiet as officials talked among themselves with concern.\u00a0K. Sivan, head of the space agency, announced that communication with the lander had been lost.\u00a0Of the 38 soft-landing attempts made on the moon, only about half have succeeded.\u00a0In April, Israel attempted to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface, only to fail in the final moments. India had hoped its Chandrayaan-2 mission would make it the fourth nation to land on the moon after the United States, Russia and China.Story continues below advertisementPallava Bagla, science editor of news channel NDTV, said the mission would not be considered a failure. Pointing to Chandrayaan-2\u2019s orbiter, which has a mission life of a year, he said, \u201cFifty\u00a0percent of the mission is already successful and functional.\u201dAdvertisementThe orbiter carries eight scientific experiments for mapping the lunar surface and studying the outer atmosphere of the moon.\u00a0Experts had warned that landing Vikram, named after the country\u2019s first space agency chief, would be challenging.\u201cProper soft landing is the most crucial part of the exercise,\u201d said Patrick Das Gupta, a professor in the physics and astrophysics department at Delhi University. \u201cFrom an altitude of 21 miles to zero height is the most scary time.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSivan had called the landing maneuver \u201c15 minutes of terror\u201d in a television news interview.The mission has been a source of immense national pride. Social media erupted in support of the space agency and its scientists despite the setback.\u201cBe courageous,\u201d Modi told the scientists in the control room, in a moment that was broadcast across Indian public television and live-streamed online. \u201cThis is not a small achievement. The country is proud of you.\u201d\u00a0The success of the moon mission news could have helped take some heat off the Modi government, which is grappling with an increasingly gloomy economic scenario marred by\u00a0poor GDP figures and\u00a0high unemployment rates.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndia\u2019s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008,\u00a0was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on the lunar surface. The current mission would have looked for the presence of water.India\u2019s mission comes as other nations and companies are eyeing the lunar surface. This year, China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a first, and has plans to land another craft in the coming months.NASA is desperately trying to return to the moon \u2014 and had hoped to do so this year. Last year, the space agency chose nine companies to be eligible to bid on contracts to fly science experts to the lunar surface. At the time, NASA officials said they were pressing the companies to have a real sense of urgency.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters this year. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementMeanwhile, the Trump White House has directed the U.S. space agency to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, an aggressive timeline many think will be difficult to achieve.One of the successes of India\u2019s space program has been its cost-effectiveness. Chandrayaan-2 cost $141\u00a0million, a small fraction of what the United States spent on its historic Apollo moon mission.India also has begun preparations\u00a0to send a manned mission to space by 2022.\u00a0Christian Davenport in Washington contributed to this report.India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsNew Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launchWe have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.Today\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The space agency lost contact with the lander moments before the scheduled soft-landing on the lunar south pole. India\u2019s first attempt to land on the moon\u00a0appears to have failed",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "Indian amateur helps NASA reveal fate of failed moon mission (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "232",
        "date": "2019-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/indian-amateur-helps-nasa-reveal-fate-of-failed-moon-mission/2019/12/03/4953b6fa-1592-11ea-bf81-ebe89f477d1e_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 A software engineer in the south Indian city of Chennai who pored over satellite images in his spare time helped NASA locate the debris of India\u2019s ill-fated mission to the moon.Shanmuga Subramanian looked at images of the moon\u2019s surface on two laptops for six to seven hours a day until he found what he thought might be the debris of the moon lander, he told Indian television channel NDTV on Tuesday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe sent NASA an email in October with his findings. On Monday, NASA confirmed the discovery and credited Subramanian for his help. Subramanian provided a \u201cpositive identification of debris,\u201d it said.The #Chandrayaan2 Vikram lander has been found by our @NASAMoon mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. See the first mosaic of the impact site https://t.co/GA3JspCNuh pic.twitter.com/jaW5a63sAf\u2014 NASA (@NASA) December 2, 2019\n\nOn his blog, Subramanian describes himself as a coder, photographer and nerd. In his spare time, he runs a Facebook page that provides live updates on rainfall in Chennai. \u201cI did feel a lot of happiness that I was able to find it,\u201d he told NDTV of his discovery, saying he never misses a launch by India\u2019s space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndia\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 mission launched in July. It was supposed to land near the south pole of the moon Sept.\u00a07. A successful landing on the moon is a huge technical feat: This year, an Israeli spacecraft crashed while attempting it.The voyage of Chandrayaan-2 transfixed India and put it on the brink of becoming only the fourth country in the world to land a rover on the moon.But the effort ended in heartbreak when Indian space engineers lost contact with the craft during the final minutes of its descent to the surface. Hours later, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugged the head of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) as the official broke down in tears. The government later said the craft had \u201chard-landed\u201d on the moon.Story continues below advertisementISRO announced that it located the lander the day after the crash but provided no further details or images. The location of the debris remained a mystery to the rest of the world until Monday, when NASA released images showing the main crash site as well as scattered wreckage.AdvertisementSubramanian shared an email message he received early Tuesday from a NASA scientist congratulating him on his discovery. He urged India not to lose heart and to continue investing in its space ambitions.\u201cFailure is a steppingstone to success,\u201d Subramanian told NDTV.For NASA contractors, lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit homeWe have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.Today\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The software engineer spent hours poring over photos every day until he located debris from India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 mission on the moon\u2019s surface. Indian amateur helps NASA reveal fate of failed moon mission",
        "author": "Joanna Slater"
    },
    {
        "title": "Indian amateur helps NASA reveal fate of failed moon mission (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "233",
        "date": "2019-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/indian-amateur-helps-nasa-reveal-fate-of-failed-moon-mission/2019/12/03/4953b6fa-1592-11ea-bf81-ebe89f477d1e_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 A software engineer in the south Indian city of Chennai who pored over satellite images in his spare time helped NASA locate the debris of India\u2019s ill-fated mission to the moon.Shanmuga Subramanian looked at images of the moon\u2019s surface on two laptops for six to seven hours a day until he found what he thought might be the debris of the moon lander, he told Indian television channel NDTV on Tuesday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe sent NASA an email in October with his findings. On Monday, NASA confirmed the discovery and credited Subramanian for his help. Subramanian provided a \u201cpositive identification of debris,\u201d it said.The #Chandrayaan2 Vikram lander has been found by our @NASAMoon mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. See the first mosaic of the impact site https://t.co/GA3JspCNuh pic.twitter.com/jaW5a63sAf\u2014 NASA (@NASA) December 2, 2019\n\nOn his blog, Subramanian describes himself as a coder, photographer and nerd. In his spare time, he runs a Facebook page that provides live updates on rainfall in Chennai. \u201cI did feel a lot of happiness that I was able to find it,\u201d he told NDTV of his discovery, saying he never misses a launch by India\u2019s space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndia\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 mission launched in July. It was supposed to land near the south pole of the moon Sept.\u00a07. A successful landing on the moon is a huge technical feat: This year, an Israeli spacecraft crashed while attempting it.The voyage of Chandrayaan-2 transfixed India and put it on the brink of becoming only the fourth country in the world to land a rover on the moon.But the effort ended in heartbreak when Indian space engineers lost contact with the craft during the final minutes of its descent to the surface. Hours later, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugged the head of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) as the official broke down in tears. The government later said the craft had \u201chard-landed\u201d on the moon.Story continues below advertisementISRO announced that it located the lander the day after the crash but provided no further details or images. The location of the debris remained a mystery to the rest of the world until Monday, when NASA released images showing the main crash site as well as scattered wreckage.AdvertisementSubramanian shared an email message he received early Tuesday from a NASA scientist congratulating him on his discovery. He urged India not to lose heart and to continue investing in its space ambitions.\u201cFailure is a steppingstone to success,\u201d Subramanian told NDTV.For NASA contractors, lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit homeWe have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.Today\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The software engineer spent hours poring over photos every day until he located debris from India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 mission on the moon\u2019s surface. Indian amateur helps NASA reveal fate of failed moon mission",
        "author": "Joanna Slater"
    },
    {
        "title": "Indian space agency locates its moon lander a day after losing contact (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "234",
        "date": "2019-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indian-space-agency-locates-its-moon-lander-a-day-after-losing-contact/2019/09/08/8dd9a3d8-d259-11e9-ab26-e6dbebac45d3_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 A day after India\u2019s bold mission to land on the moon appeared to have failed, the country\u2019s space agency announced that the missing lander had been located, raising hopes for a turnaround.K.\u00a0Sivan, head of the Indian Space Research Organization, told the news agency ANI that the mission\u2019s orbiter had clicked a\u00a0\nthermal image of the lander\n from its cameras. \u201cWe are trying to establish contact. It will be communicated soon,\u201d he said.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVikram, the lander of Chandrayaan-2, which blasted off in July, was scheduled to soft-land on the lunar south pole early Saturday. While its descent began as planned, communication with it snapped minutes before touchdown, leading to heartbreak across the nation.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementAn emotional Sivan was\u00a0hugged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In his address to the nation, Modi told the space agency that the entire country was proud of it. Support for the scientists leading India\u2019s ambitious but scrappy space exploration efforts\u00a0poured in from across the world.\u00a0\u201cYou have inspired us,\u201d NASA said in a tweet commending the Indian space agency\u2019s efforts.\u00a0In the early hours of Sept. 7, India's Chandrayaan-2 mission went awry after the country's space agency lost contact with the Vikram lander near the lunar site. (Reuters)AdvertisementThe multiple payloads abroad Chandrayaan-2 for conducting scientific experiments included a NASA payload. India had hoped to become the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to land on the moon. The mission, which the agency described as \u201chighly complex,\u201d was aiming to land in the previously unexplored south pole region. The goal was to look for water on the moon and study its topography.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The success rate of landing on the moon is about\u00a050\u00a0percent. Earlier this year, an Israeli spacecraft, Beresheet, attempting to land on the moon crashed in its final moment.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u00a0India\u2019s homegrown and low-cost space exploration program has notched previous successes. In 2014, it became the\u00a0first country to reach Mars on its first attempt, making space for itself in the elite global space club. It has announced plans to send its first manned mission to space by 2022.\u00a0Advertisement\u00a0India\u2019s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008 and was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on the lunar surface.\u00a0India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news With Chandrayaan-2, India had hoped to become the fourth country to land on the moon. Indian space agency locates its moon lander a day after losing contact",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "Indian space agency locates its moon lander a day after losing contact (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "235",
        "date": "2019-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indian-space-agency-locates-its-moon-lander-a-day-after-losing-contact/2019/09/08/8dd9a3d8-d259-11e9-ab26-e6dbebac45d3_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 A day after India\u2019s bold mission to land on the moon appeared to have failed, the country\u2019s space agency announced that the missing lander had been located, raising hopes for a turnaround.K.\u00a0Sivan, head of the Indian Space Research Organization, told the news agency ANI that the mission\u2019s orbiter had clicked a\u00a0\nthermal image of the lander\n from its cameras. \u201cWe are trying to establish contact. It will be communicated soon,\u201d he said.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVikram, the lander of Chandrayaan-2, which blasted off in July, was scheduled to soft-land on the lunar south pole early Saturday. While its descent began as planned, communication with it snapped minutes before touchdown, leading to heartbreak across the nation.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementAn emotional Sivan was\u00a0hugged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In his address to the nation, Modi told the space agency that the entire country was proud of it. Support for the scientists leading India\u2019s ambitious but scrappy space exploration efforts\u00a0poured in from across the world.\u00a0\u201cYou have inspired us,\u201d NASA said in a tweet commending the Indian space agency\u2019s efforts.\u00a0In the early hours of Sept. 7, India's Chandrayaan-2 mission went awry after the country's space agency lost contact with the Vikram lander near the lunar site. (Reuters)AdvertisementThe multiple payloads abroad Chandrayaan-2 for conducting scientific experiments included a NASA payload. India had hoped to become the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to land on the moon. The mission, which the agency described as \u201chighly complex,\u201d was aiming to land in the previously unexplored south pole region. The goal was to look for water on the moon and study its topography.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The success rate of landing on the moon is about\u00a050\u00a0percent. Earlier this year, an Israeli spacecraft, Beresheet, attempting to land on the moon crashed in its final moment.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u00a0India\u2019s homegrown and low-cost space exploration program has notched previous successes. In 2014, it became the\u00a0first country to reach Mars on its first attempt, making space for itself in the elite global space club. It has announced plans to send its first manned mission to space by 2022.\u00a0Advertisement\u00a0India\u2019s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008 and was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on the lunar surface.\u00a0India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news With Chandrayaan-2, India had hoped to become the fourth country to land on the moon. Indian space agency locates its moon lander a day after losing contact",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "Indian space agency locates its moon lander a day after losing contact (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "236",
        "date": "2019-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indian-space-agency-locates-its-moon-lander-a-day-after-losing-contact/2019/09/08/8dd9a3d8-d259-11e9-ab26-e6dbebac45d3_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 A day after India\u2019s bold mission to land on the moon appeared to have failed, the country\u2019s space agency announced that the missing lander had been located, raising hopes for a turnaround.K.\u00a0Sivan, head of the Indian Space Research Organization, told the news agency ANI that the mission\u2019s orbiter had clicked a\u00a0\nthermal image of the lander\n from its cameras. \u201cWe are trying to establish contact. It will be communicated soon,\u201d he said.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVikram, the lander of Chandrayaan-2, which blasted off in July, was scheduled to soft-land on the lunar south pole early Saturday. While its descent began as planned, communication with it snapped minutes before touchdown, leading to heartbreak across the nation.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementAn emotional Sivan was\u00a0hugged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In his address to the nation, Modi told the space agency that the entire country was proud of it. Support for the scientists leading India\u2019s ambitious but scrappy space exploration efforts\u00a0poured in from across the world.\u00a0\u201cYou have inspired us,\u201d NASA said in a tweet commending the Indian space agency\u2019s efforts.\u00a0In the early hours of Sept. 7, India's Chandrayaan-2 mission went awry after the country's space agency lost contact with the Vikram lander near the lunar site. (Reuters)AdvertisementThe multiple payloads abroad Chandrayaan-2 for conducting scientific experiments included a NASA payload. India had hoped to become the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to land on the moon. The mission, which the agency described as \u201chighly complex,\u201d was aiming to land in the previously unexplored south pole region. The goal was to look for water on the moon and study its topography.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The success rate of landing on the moon is about\u00a050\u00a0percent. Earlier this year, an Israeli spacecraft, Beresheet, attempting to land on the moon crashed in its final moment.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u00a0India\u2019s homegrown and low-cost space exploration program has notched previous successes. In 2014, it became the\u00a0first country to reach Mars on its first attempt, making space for itself in the elite global space club. It has announced plans to send its first manned mission to space by 2022.\u00a0Advertisement\u00a0India\u2019s first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, launched in 2008 and was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on the lunar surface.\u00a0India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news With Chandrayaan-2, India had hoped to become the fourth country to land on the moon. Indian space agency locates its moon lander a day after losing contact",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircut (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "237",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/08/yusaku-maezawa-space-travel-billionaire-astronaut/",
        "text": "Japanese retail mogul Yusaku Maezawa is headed for the International Space Station after his Soyuz spacecraft took off Wednesday from a launch center in Kazakhstan.A space enthusiast even as a child, Maezawa will spend 12 days in orbit with his cameraman and assistant, Yozo Hirano, and Russian astronaut Alexander Misurkin. He will use part of the time to perform tasks from a list of 100 challenges he crowdsourced on the Internet. These include getting a haircut in zero-gravity conditions, playing air table tennis, searching for signs of alien life and experimenting with some bodily fluids. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMaezawa, who Bloomberg News says has a fortune of some $3.4 billion, has given away money to his many Twitter followers and says he plans to do so from space. His assistant, who produces videos for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers, will chronicle their time away from Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI feel like an elementary school student about to go on an outing,\u201d Maezawa said at a news conference before the launch. \u201cI didn\u2019t think I would be able to go to space. I used to like the starry sky and heavenly bodies. I feel fortunate to have this opportunity and to finally fulfill my dream.\u201dThe 46-year-old billionaire, who founded a major Japanese online retailer, joins a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs who are also private space travelers. Britain\u2019s Richard Branson reached the edge of space in a vehicle designed by his company, Virgin Galactic, in July. Days later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, also went on a space trip.The Wednesday launch was operated by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. A Roscosmos subsidiary has marketed its services on social media as a way to escape from the lockdowns brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.A billionaire is taking applications for a life partner. The winner gets to go to the moon.To prepare for his space trip, Maezawa trained for months at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, near Moscow. He documented the journey on his YouTube channel, where videos show an excited Maezawa floating in machines simulating zero gravity and trying out his space suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWednesday\u2019s trip is a trial run of sorts for Maezawa, who bought all the seats aboard SpaceX\u2019s moon-bound mission three years ago. Scheduled to launch in 2023, the Big Falcon Rocket will carry Maezawa and his companions on a week-long voyage to the moon.The billionaire, who is a major art collector, will offer several Big Falcon seats to artists in an attempt to open up access to space. The \u201cDear Moon\u201d project has received about 1 million entries from people planning to make space-influenced art, Maezawa said in July. Known for his past romances with several prominent Japanese women, he is also looking for a \u201clife partner\u201d to accompany him on his moon mission.For now, Maezawa is flying to space with two other men. Writing on Twitter hours before his Wednesday launch, he said, \u201cDreams come true.\u201dRead more:Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceTrouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year Yusaku Maezawa, 46, who is flying on a Russian spacecraft, joins a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs who are also private space travelers. Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircut",
        "author": "Amy Cheng"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircut (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "238",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/08/yusaku-maezawa-space-travel-billionaire-astronaut/",
        "text": "Japanese retail mogul Yusaku Maezawa is headed for the International Space Station after his Soyuz spacecraft took off Wednesday from a launch center in Kazakhstan.A space enthusiast even as a child, Maezawa will spend 12 days in orbit with his cameraman and assistant, Yozo Hirano, and Russian astronaut Alexander Misurkin. He will use part of the time to perform tasks from a list of 100 challenges he crowdsourced on the Internet. These include getting a haircut in zero-gravity conditions, playing air table tennis, searching for signs of alien life and experimenting with some bodily fluids. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMaezawa, who Bloomberg News says has a fortune of some $3.4 billion, has given away money to his many Twitter followers and says he plans to do so from space. His assistant, who produces videos for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers, will chronicle their time away from Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI feel like an elementary school student about to go on an outing,\u201d Maezawa said at a news conference before the launch. \u201cI didn\u2019t think I would be able to go to space. I used to like the starry sky and heavenly bodies. I feel fortunate to have this opportunity and to finally fulfill my dream.\u201dThe 46-year-old billionaire, who founded a major Japanese online retailer, joins a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs who are also private space travelers. Britain\u2019s Richard Branson reached the edge of space in a vehicle designed by his company, Virgin Galactic, in July. Days later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, also went on a space trip.The Wednesday launch was operated by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. A Roscosmos subsidiary has marketed its services on social media as a way to escape from the lockdowns brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.A billionaire is taking applications for a life partner. The winner gets to go to the moon.To prepare for his space trip, Maezawa trained for months at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, near Moscow. He documented the journey on his YouTube channel, where videos show an excited Maezawa floating in machines simulating zero gravity and trying out his space suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWednesday\u2019s trip is a trial run of sorts for Maezawa, who bought all the seats aboard SpaceX\u2019s moon-bound mission three years ago. Scheduled to launch in 2023, the Big Falcon Rocket will carry Maezawa and his companions on a week-long voyage to the moon.The billionaire, who is a major art collector, will offer several Big Falcon seats to artists in an attempt to open up access to space. The \u201cDear Moon\u201d project has received about 1 million entries from people planning to make space-influenced art, Maezawa said in July. Known for his past romances with several prominent Japanese women, he is also looking for a \u201clife partner\u201d to accompany him on his moon mission.For now, Maezawa is flying to space with two other men. Writing on Twitter hours before his Wednesday launch, he said, \u201cDreams come true.\u201dRead more:Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceTrouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year Yusaku Maezawa, 46, who is flying on a Russian spacecraft, joins a small group of wealthy entrepreneurs who are also private space travelers. Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircut",
        "author": "Amy Cheng"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla, Elon Musk face backlash in China after Beijing\u2019s complaint against SpaceX (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "239",
        "date": "2021-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/28/elon-musk-tesla-china-spacex/",
        "text": "Elon Musk may be Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year, but he is not the flavor of the month in China.Beijing\u2019s criticism this month of SpaceX satellites is fueling anger against Musk, who had long been one of the most popular Western executives in China. The backlash included calls online Wednesday for sanctions against SpaceX and suggestions to boycott Musk\u2019s electric carmaker, Tesla. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe allegations that the satellites threatened the safety of China\u2019s space station come as Beijing has been putting pressure on prominent business figures, even those who were previously national darlings. The approach also reflects the new Cold War-esque space race that is shaping up between China and the United States. Both are vying to put the first human on Mars and staking out strategic positions in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has been adored in China for years, with some of the country\u2019s most prominent entrepreneurs praising him as visionary and showing off their Tesla cars. Tesla received rare official approval to operate its Shanghai factory solo, despite a usual requirement that foreign carmakers team up with a Chinese partner.Just last month, Musk became a viral hit on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, after he posted a cryptic Chinese poem to his 1.9 million followers.But the SpaceX backlash suggests challenges ahead for Musk, as business is increasingly viewed through the lens of national security in Beijing and Washington.Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted an ancient Chinese poem. It left his followers theorizing about its meaning.Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a routine news conference on Tuesday that China notified the United Nations on Dec. 3 about two \u201cclose encounters\u201d this year between SpaceX\u2019s Starlink satellites and China\u2019s space station. The space station, known as the Tiangong, took evasive maneuvers on July 1 and Oct. 21 to avoid collisions with the satellites, according to the document Beijing submitted to the U.N.\u201cThe U.S. claims to be a strong advocate for the concept of \u2018responsible behavior in outer space,\u2019 but it disregarded its treaty and posed a grave threat to the safety of astronauts,\u201d Zhao said, referring to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.Beijing\u2019s complaint was widely reported in state media, fanning public outrage against Musk and his companies. On Tuesday, China\u2019s national broadcaster CCTV posted a video online blasting SpaceX, with the hashtag \u201cThe United States is bringing its double standards into outer space.\u201d The video and other posts tagged with the hashtag have received more than 30 million views.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe U.S. government also bears responsibility,\u201d the CCTV anchor says in the clip. \u201cThey have caused severe threat to the lives and safety of other countries\u2019 astronauts.\u201dA number of Chinese social media commentators on Wednesday raised the idea of sanctions or boycotts against SpaceX and Tesla. \u201cWe cannot let Musk eat China\u2019s food while smashing China\u2019s cooking pot,\u201d one Weibo user declared. \u201cI definitely won\u2019t buy Tesla,\u201d another wrote.Tesla and SpaceX did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.Tesla will build its first factory outside the U.S. in ChinaClose encounters between man-made objects in orbit are growing as space becomes more cluttered, with SpaceX\u2019s Starlink blamed as a major contributor. One estimate by Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton in Britain, said Starlink already accounts for more than half of close encounters between spacecraft in orbit, with the proportion forecast to grow to as much as 90 percent as the company launches more satellites, according to Space.com.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space debris has also posed a nuisance to the United States and other countries. Last month, the International Space Station maneuvered to avoid a collision with debris from a satellite China destroyed 14 years ago.China has emerged in recent years as a serious challenger to the United States in space exploration. In May, China became the second nation to deploy a vehicle on the surface of the Red Planet. Beijing announced over the summer its goal of sending a crewed mission to Mars by 2033, a timeline that could put it ahead of NASA.Some Chinese commentators suggested that perhaps China could speed up its own satellite deployments to compete with Musk. In reference to SpaceX\u2019s goal to put more than 40,000 satellites into orbit, Chinese celebrity stock picker Dan Bin quipped to his 12.8 million Weibo followers on Tuesday: \u201cFirst come, first served. We can send 100,000 of them up first.\u201dPei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.Read more:Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted an ancient Chinese poem. It left his followers theorizing about its meaning.Tesla will build its first factory outside the U.S. in ChinaIn China, escalating cost of business sends some companies to the exits The entrepreneur may be Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year, but he is not the flavor of the month in China. Tesla, Elon Musk face backlash in China after Beijing\u2019s complaint against SpaceX",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla, Elon Musk face backlash in China after Beijing\u2019s complaint against SpaceX (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "240",
        "date": "2021-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/28/elon-musk-tesla-china-spacex/",
        "text": "Elon Musk may be Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year, but he is not the flavor of the month in China.Beijing\u2019s criticism this month of SpaceX satellites is fueling anger against Musk, who had long been one of the most popular Western executives in China. The backlash included calls online Wednesday for sanctions against SpaceX and suggestions to boycott Musk\u2019s electric carmaker, Tesla. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe allegations that the satellites threatened the safety of China\u2019s space station come as Beijing has been putting pressure on prominent business figures, even those who were previously national darlings. The approach also reflects the new Cold War-esque space race that is shaping up between China and the United States. Both are vying to put the first human on Mars and staking out strategic positions in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has been adored in China for years, with some of the country\u2019s most prominent entrepreneurs praising him as visionary and showing off their Tesla cars. Tesla received rare official approval to operate its Shanghai factory solo, despite a usual requirement that foreign carmakers team up with a Chinese partner.Just last month, Musk became a viral hit on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, after he posted a cryptic Chinese poem to his 1.9 million followers.But the SpaceX backlash suggests challenges ahead for Musk, as business is increasingly viewed through the lens of national security in Beijing and Washington.Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted an ancient Chinese poem. It left his followers theorizing about its meaning.Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a routine news conference on Tuesday that China notified the United Nations on Dec. 3 about two \u201cclose encounters\u201d this year between SpaceX\u2019s Starlink satellites and China\u2019s space station. The space station, known as the Tiangong, took evasive maneuvers on July 1 and Oct. 21 to avoid collisions with the satellites, according to the document Beijing submitted to the U.N.\u201cThe U.S. claims to be a strong advocate for the concept of \u2018responsible behavior in outer space,\u2019 but it disregarded its treaty and posed a grave threat to the safety of astronauts,\u201d Zhao said, referring to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.Beijing\u2019s complaint was widely reported in state media, fanning public outrage against Musk and his companies. On Tuesday, China\u2019s national broadcaster CCTV posted a video online blasting SpaceX, with the hashtag \u201cThe United States is bringing its double standards into outer space.\u201d The video and other posts tagged with the hashtag have received more than 30 million views.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe U.S. government also bears responsibility,\u201d the CCTV anchor says in the clip. \u201cThey have caused severe threat to the lives and safety of other countries\u2019 astronauts.\u201dA number of Chinese social media commentators on Wednesday raised the idea of sanctions or boycotts against SpaceX and Tesla. \u201cWe cannot let Musk eat China\u2019s food while smashing China\u2019s cooking pot,\u201d one Weibo user declared. \u201cI definitely won\u2019t buy Tesla,\u201d another wrote.Tesla and SpaceX did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.Tesla will build its first factory outside the U.S. in ChinaClose encounters between man-made objects in orbit are growing as space becomes more cluttered, with SpaceX\u2019s Starlink blamed as a major contributor. One estimate by Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton in Britain, said Starlink already accounts for more than half of close encounters between spacecraft in orbit, with the proportion forecast to grow to as much as 90 percent as the company launches more satellites, according to Space.com.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space debris has also posed a nuisance to the United States and other countries. Last month, the International Space Station maneuvered to avoid a collision with debris from a satellite China destroyed 14 years ago.China has emerged in recent years as a serious challenger to the United States in space exploration. In May, China became the second nation to deploy a vehicle on the surface of the Red Planet. Beijing announced over the summer its goal of sending a crewed mission to Mars by 2033, a timeline that could put it ahead of NASA.Some Chinese commentators suggested that perhaps China could speed up its own satellite deployments to compete with Musk. In reference to SpaceX\u2019s goal to put more than 40,000 satellites into orbit, Chinese celebrity stock picker Dan Bin quipped to his 12.8 million Weibo followers on Tuesday: \u201cFirst come, first served. We can send 100,000 of them up first.\u201dPei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.Read more:Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted an ancient Chinese poem. It left his followers theorizing about its meaning.Tesla will build its first factory outside the U.S. in ChinaIn China, escalating cost of business sends some companies to the exits The entrepreneur may be Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year, but he is not the flavor of the month in China. Tesla, Elon Musk face backlash in China after Beijing\u2019s complaint against SpaceX",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla, Elon Musk face backlash in China after Beijing\u2019s complaint against SpaceX (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "241",
        "date": "2021-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/28/elon-musk-tesla-china-spacex/",
        "text": "Elon Musk may be Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year, but he is not the flavor of the month in China.Beijing\u2019s criticism this month of SpaceX satellites is fueling anger against Musk, who had long been one of the most popular Western executives in China. The backlash included calls online Wednesday for sanctions against SpaceX and suggestions to boycott Musk\u2019s electric carmaker, Tesla. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe allegations that the satellites threatened the safety of China\u2019s space station come as Beijing has been putting pressure on prominent business figures, even those who were previously national darlings. The approach also reflects the new Cold War-esque space race that is shaping up between China and the United States. Both are vying to put the first human on Mars and staking out strategic positions in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has been adored in China for years, with some of the country\u2019s most prominent entrepreneurs praising him as visionary and showing off their Tesla cars. Tesla received rare official approval to operate its Shanghai factory solo, despite a usual requirement that foreign carmakers team up with a Chinese partner.Just last month, Musk became a viral hit on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, after he posted a cryptic Chinese poem to his 1.9 million followers.But the SpaceX backlash suggests challenges ahead for Musk, as business is increasingly viewed through the lens of national security in Beijing and Washington.Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted an ancient Chinese poem. It left his followers theorizing about its meaning.Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a routine news conference on Tuesday that China notified the United Nations on Dec. 3 about two \u201cclose encounters\u201d this year between SpaceX\u2019s Starlink satellites and China\u2019s space station. The space station, known as the Tiangong, took evasive maneuvers on July 1 and Oct. 21 to avoid collisions with the satellites, according to the document Beijing submitted to the U.N.\u201cThe U.S. claims to be a strong advocate for the concept of \u2018responsible behavior in outer space,\u2019 but it disregarded its treaty and posed a grave threat to the safety of astronauts,\u201d Zhao said, referring to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.Beijing\u2019s complaint was widely reported in state media, fanning public outrage against Musk and his companies. On Tuesday, China\u2019s national broadcaster CCTV posted a video online blasting SpaceX, with the hashtag \u201cThe United States is bringing its double standards into outer space.\u201d The video and other posts tagged with the hashtag have received more than 30 million views.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe U.S. government also bears responsibility,\u201d the CCTV anchor says in the clip. \u201cThey have caused severe threat to the lives and safety of other countries\u2019 astronauts.\u201dA number of Chinese social media commentators on Wednesday raised the idea of sanctions or boycotts against SpaceX and Tesla. \u201cWe cannot let Musk eat China\u2019s food while smashing China\u2019s cooking pot,\u201d one Weibo user declared. \u201cI definitely won\u2019t buy Tesla,\u201d another wrote.Tesla and SpaceX did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.Tesla will build its first factory outside the U.S. in ChinaClose encounters between man-made objects in orbit are growing as space becomes more cluttered, with SpaceX\u2019s Starlink blamed as a major contributor. One estimate by Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton in Britain, said Starlink already accounts for more than half of close encounters between spacecraft in orbit, with the proportion forecast to grow to as much as 90 percent as the company launches more satellites, according to Space.com.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space debris has also posed a nuisance to the United States and other countries. Last month, the International Space Station maneuvered to avoid a collision with debris from a satellite China destroyed 14 years ago.China has emerged in recent years as a serious challenger to the United States in space exploration. In May, China became the second nation to deploy a vehicle on the surface of the Red Planet. Beijing announced over the summer its goal of sending a crewed mission to Mars by 2033, a timeline that could put it ahead of NASA.Some Chinese commentators suggested that perhaps China could speed up its own satellite deployments to compete with Musk. In reference to SpaceX\u2019s goal to put more than 40,000 satellites into orbit, Chinese celebrity stock picker Dan Bin quipped to his 12.8 million Weibo followers on Tuesday: \u201cFirst come, first served. We can send 100,000 of them up first.\u201dPei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.Read more:Billionaire Elon Musk tweeted an ancient Chinese poem. It left his followers theorizing about its meaning.Tesla will build its first factory outside the U.S. in ChinaIn China, escalating cost of business sends some companies to the exits The entrepreneur may be Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year, but he is not the flavor of the month in China. Tesla, Elon Musk face backlash in China after Beijing\u2019s complaint against SpaceX",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands rover on Mars in \u2018milestone\u2019 achievement (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "242",
        "date": "2021-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/china-mars-rover/",
        "text": "China successfully landed a rover-carrying spacecraft on Mars for the first time, state-run media reported Saturday, marking another major victory for the country\u2019s ambitious space program that aims to rival NASA.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina and the United States are the only nations to have successfully landed and operated rovers on Mars, and Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed a \u201cmilestone\u201d achievement. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched from the Chinese province of Hainan in July, had been orbiting Mars since February while surveying for potential landing sites. Early Saturday, it released an entry capsule containing a lander and a rover that began to plummet through the Mars atmosphere, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.The entry capsule safely touched down at 7:18 p.m. Eastern time Friday, though it took about an hour for ground controllers to determine that the mission had been a success, state media reported. During the perilous journey through the Martian atmosphere, the craft had to operate autonomously, and signals could not be transmitted back to ground control until the robotic rover had landed and unfolded its solar panels and antenna.Although China has landed craft on the moon \u2014 including the first probe to touch down on the far side of the moon, in January 2019 \u2014 the Mars mission is a significant leap and showcases Beijing\u2019s huge investments in its space program. The United States has managed nine successful Mars landings in the course of more than four decades, and the Soviet Union landed a probe on the planet in 1971, only to immediately lose contact with it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe motherland and people will always remember your outstanding feats!\u201d Xi said in a congratulatory message to the Tianwen-1 mission team Saturday.The rover will spend the next three months studying the surface of Mars for signs of water or ice that could point to an environment that might sustain life. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover mission, which also is looking for evidence of life on Mars, landed on the Red Planet in February.\u201cTogether with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity\u2019s understanding of the Red Planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate director of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, tweeted in a congratulatory message to the Tianwen-1 team.China\u2019s aspirations for its burgeoning space program include establishing its own space station that will continue to operate after the International Space Station is dismantled, and partnering with Russia to build a lunar base.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe successful landing on Mars comes just days after the China National Space Administration faced international rebukes over a massive rocket that fell back to Earth on an uncontrolled trajectory.Read more:NASA\u2019s Mars rover, Perseverance, aims for dicey landing to search for ancient lifeDebris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean near Maldives, China reportsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race China's space program joins NASA as the only nations to have rovers on the Red Planet. China lands rover on Mars in \u2018milestone\u2019 achievement",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands rover on Mars in \u2018milestone\u2019 achievement (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "243",
        "date": "2021-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/china-mars-rover/",
        "text": "China successfully landed a rover-carrying spacecraft on Mars for the first time, state-run media reported Saturday, marking another major victory for the country\u2019s ambitious space program that aims to rival NASA.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina and the United States are the only nations to have successfully landed and operated rovers on Mars, and Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed a \u201cmilestone\u201d achievement. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched from the Chinese province of Hainan in July, had been orbiting Mars since February while surveying for potential landing sites. Early Saturday, it released an entry capsule containing a lander and a rover that began to plummet through the Mars atmosphere, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.The entry capsule safely touched down at 7:18 p.m. Eastern time Friday, though it took about an hour for ground controllers to determine that the mission had been a success, state media reported. During the perilous journey through the Martian atmosphere, the craft had to operate autonomously, and signals could not be transmitted back to ground control until the robotic rover had landed and unfolded its solar panels and antenna.Although China has landed craft on the moon \u2014 including the first probe to touch down on the far side of the moon, in January 2019 \u2014 the Mars mission is a significant leap and showcases Beijing\u2019s huge investments in its space program. The United States has managed nine successful Mars landings in the course of more than four decades, and the Soviet Union landed a probe on the planet in 1971, only to immediately lose contact with it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe motherland and people will always remember your outstanding feats!\u201d Xi said in a congratulatory message to the Tianwen-1 mission team Saturday.The rover will spend the next three months studying the surface of Mars for signs of water or ice that could point to an environment that might sustain life. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover mission, which also is looking for evidence of life on Mars, landed on the Red Planet in February.\u201cTogether with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity\u2019s understanding of the Red Planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate director of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, tweeted in a congratulatory message to the Tianwen-1 team.China\u2019s aspirations for its burgeoning space program include establishing its own space station that will continue to operate after the International Space Station is dismantled, and partnering with Russia to build a lunar base.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe successful landing on Mars comes just days after the China National Space Administration faced international rebukes over a massive rocket that fell back to Earth on an uncontrolled trajectory.Read more:NASA\u2019s Mars rover, Perseverance, aims for dicey landing to search for ancient lifeDebris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean near Maldives, China reportsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race China's space program joins NASA as the only nations to have rovers on the Red Planet. China lands rover on Mars in \u2018milestone\u2019 achievement",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands rover on Mars in \u2018milestone\u2019 achievement (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "244",
        "date": "2021-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/china-mars-rover/",
        "text": "China successfully landed a rover-carrying spacecraft on Mars for the first time, state-run media reported Saturday, marking another major victory for the country\u2019s ambitious space program that aims to rival NASA.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina and the United States are the only nations to have successfully landed and operated rovers on Mars, and Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed a \u201cmilestone\u201d achievement. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched from the Chinese province of Hainan in July, had been orbiting Mars since February while surveying for potential landing sites. Early Saturday, it released an entry capsule containing a lander and a rover that began to plummet through the Mars atmosphere, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.The entry capsule safely touched down at 7:18 p.m. Eastern time Friday, though it took about an hour for ground controllers to determine that the mission had been a success, state media reported. During the perilous journey through the Martian atmosphere, the craft had to operate autonomously, and signals could not be transmitted back to ground control until the robotic rover had landed and unfolded its solar panels and antenna.Although China has landed craft on the moon \u2014 including the first probe to touch down on the far side of the moon, in January 2019 \u2014 the Mars mission is a significant leap and showcases Beijing\u2019s huge investments in its space program. The United States has managed nine successful Mars landings in the course of more than four decades, and the Soviet Union landed a probe on the planet in 1971, only to immediately lose contact with it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe motherland and people will always remember your outstanding feats!\u201d Xi said in a congratulatory message to the Tianwen-1 mission team Saturday.The rover will spend the next three months studying the surface of Mars for signs of water or ice that could point to an environment that might sustain life. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover mission, which also is looking for evidence of life on Mars, landed on the Red Planet in February.\u201cTogether with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity\u2019s understanding of the Red Planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate director of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, tweeted in a congratulatory message to the Tianwen-1 team.China\u2019s aspirations for its burgeoning space program include establishing its own space station that will continue to operate after the International Space Station is dismantled, and partnering with Russia to build a lunar base.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe successful landing on Mars comes just days after the China National Space Administration faced international rebukes over a massive rocket that fell back to Earth on an uncontrolled trajectory.Read more:NASA\u2019s Mars rover, Perseverance, aims for dicey landing to search for ancient lifeDebris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean near Maldives, China reportsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race China's space program joins NASA as the only nations to have rovers on the Red Planet. China lands rover on Mars in \u2018milestone\u2019 achievement",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "245",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-mars-mission-lifts-off-aiming-to-join-us-in-landing-on-red-planet/2020/07/23/0e7c2630-cca2-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html",
        "text": "China on Thursday launched its first mission to attempt to land on Mars, as space exploration becomes a growing battleground in the U.S.-China rivalry.The launch squeaks ahead of a planned U.S. mission to Mars next week, with both nations aiming to put rovers on the Red Planet. If both are successful, it will be China\u2019s first rover to touch Martian soil and the first U.S. rover launch in nearly nine years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had planned to launch its new rover, Perseverance, on July 17, but the mission was delayed to July 30, according to the U.S. space agency.The Chinese launch off the southern island of Hainan was widely watched Thursday on state television. The mission is named Tianwen-1, which in Chinese means \u201cto question the heavens.\u201dAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceSpace exploration has taken on symbolic significance in the U.S.-China strategic competition, with both President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declaring fresh ambitions in the field. Late last year, Trump signed legislation creating the U.S. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars has become a focus for the new space race, due to its potential for human habitation. Previous missions have found water on the planet, a necessity for all of Earth\u2019s life-forms.\u201cScientists have long hoped to find another celestial body in the solar system and transform it into a second Earth, which would allow humankind to migrate there in great numbers. At the moment, the only possibility is Mars,\u201d Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China\u2019s lunar project, told Chinese media earlier this week.Still, a crewed mission to Mars by any country remains years in the future.The Tianwen-1 mission includes an orbiter that will take high-resolution photographs of Mars and other measurements while circling the planet, as well as a rover that will traverse the surface, collecting data on soil and rock composition, Chinese state media reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the past, we relied on information shared on foreign websites to study Mars,\u201d Chinese National Space Science Center researcher Liu Yang said, according to an official publication. \u201cOnce our own Tianwen-1 lands on the Red Planet, we would have access to firsthand exploration data at the earliest time possible for our original research.\u201dThe spacecraft is expected to take between six and seven months to reach Mars, according to state media.In 2011, China attempted to launch a Mars orbiter in a joint operation with Russia. But that mission, Yinghuo-1, failed to leave the Earth\u2019s orbit and later broke up over the Pacific Ocean.Early last year, China landed a rover on the far side of the moon, the first nation to do so.Lyric Li in Beijing contributed to this report.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceA new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonTop Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions The Tianwen-1 mission seeks to put the nation\u2019s first rover on Mars, as NASA prepares to launch a new U.S. rover next week. China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "246",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-mars-mission-lifts-off-aiming-to-join-us-in-landing-on-red-planet/2020/07/23/0e7c2630-cca2-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html",
        "text": "China on Thursday launched its first mission to attempt to land on Mars, as space exploration becomes a growing battleground in the U.S.-China rivalry.The launch squeaks ahead of a planned U.S. mission to Mars next week, with both nations aiming to put rovers on the Red Planet. If both are successful, it will be China\u2019s first rover to touch Martian soil and the first U.S. rover launch in nearly nine years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had planned to launch its new rover, Perseverance, on July 17, but the mission was delayed to July 30, according to the U.S. space agency.The Chinese launch off the southern island of Hainan was widely watched Thursday on state television. The mission is named Tianwen-1, which in Chinese means \u201cto question the heavens.\u201dAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceSpace exploration has taken on symbolic significance in the U.S.-China strategic competition, with both President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declaring fresh ambitions in the field. Late last year, Trump signed legislation creating the U.S. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars has become a focus for the new space race, due to its potential for human habitation. Previous missions have found water on the planet, a necessity for all of Earth\u2019s life-forms.\u201cScientists have long hoped to find another celestial body in the solar system and transform it into a second Earth, which would allow humankind to migrate there in great numbers. At the moment, the only possibility is Mars,\u201d Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China\u2019s lunar project, told Chinese media earlier this week.Still, a crewed mission to Mars by any country remains years in the future.The Tianwen-1 mission includes an orbiter that will take high-resolution photographs of Mars and other measurements while circling the planet, as well as a rover that will traverse the surface, collecting data on soil and rock composition, Chinese state media reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the past, we relied on information shared on foreign websites to study Mars,\u201d Chinese National Space Science Center researcher Liu Yang said, according to an official publication. \u201cOnce our own Tianwen-1 lands on the Red Planet, we would have access to firsthand exploration data at the earliest time possible for our original research.\u201dThe spacecraft is expected to take between six and seven months to reach Mars, according to state media.In 2011, China attempted to launch a Mars orbiter in a joint operation with Russia. But that mission, Yinghuo-1, failed to leave the Earth\u2019s orbit and later broke up over the Pacific Ocean.Early last year, China landed a rover on the far side of the moon, the first nation to do so.Lyric Li in Beijing contributed to this report.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceA new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonTop Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions The Tianwen-1 mission seeks to put the nation\u2019s first rover on Mars, as NASA prepares to launch a new U.S. rover next week. China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "247",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-mars-mission-lifts-off-aiming-to-join-us-in-landing-on-red-planet/2020/07/23/0e7c2630-cca2-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html",
        "text": "China on Thursday launched its first mission to attempt to land on Mars, as space exploration becomes a growing battleground in the U.S.-China rivalry.The launch squeaks ahead of a planned U.S. mission to Mars next week, with both nations aiming to put rovers on the Red Planet. If both are successful, it will be China\u2019s first rover to touch Martian soil and the first U.S. rover launch in nearly nine years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had planned to launch its new rover, Perseverance, on July 17, but the mission was delayed to July 30, according to the U.S. space agency.The Chinese launch off the southern island of Hainan was widely watched Thursday on state television. The mission is named Tianwen-1, which in Chinese means \u201cto question the heavens.\u201dAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceSpace exploration has taken on symbolic significance in the U.S.-China strategic competition, with both President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declaring fresh ambitions in the field. Late last year, Trump signed legislation creating the U.S. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars has become a focus for the new space race, due to its potential for human habitation. Previous missions have found water on the planet, a necessity for all of Earth\u2019s life-forms.\u201cScientists have long hoped to find another celestial body in the solar system and transform it into a second Earth, which would allow humankind to migrate there in great numbers. At the moment, the only possibility is Mars,\u201d Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China\u2019s lunar project, told Chinese media earlier this week.Still, a crewed mission to Mars by any country remains years in the future.The Tianwen-1 mission includes an orbiter that will take high-resolution photographs of Mars and other measurements while circling the planet, as well as a rover that will traverse the surface, collecting data on soil and rock composition, Chinese state media reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the past, we relied on information shared on foreign websites to study Mars,\u201d Chinese National Space Science Center researcher Liu Yang said, according to an official publication. \u201cOnce our own Tianwen-1 lands on the Red Planet, we would have access to firsthand exploration data at the earliest time possible for our original research.\u201dThe spacecraft is expected to take between six and seven months to reach Mars, according to state media.In 2011, China attempted to launch a Mars orbiter in a joint operation with Russia. But that mission, Yinghuo-1, failed to leave the Earth\u2019s orbit and later broke up over the Pacific Ocean.Early last year, China landed a rover on the far side of the moon, the first nation to do so.Lyric Li in Beijing contributed to this report.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceA new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonTop Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions The Tianwen-1 mission seeks to put the nation\u2019s first rover on Mars, as NASA prepares to launch a new U.S. rover next week. China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "248",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-mars-mission-lifts-off-aiming-to-join-us-in-landing-on-red-planet/2020/07/23/0e7c2630-cca2-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html",
        "text": "China on Thursday launched its first mission to attempt to land on Mars, as space exploration becomes a growing battleground in the U.S.-China rivalry.The launch squeaks ahead of a planned U.S. mission to Mars next week, with both nations aiming to put rovers on the Red Planet. If both are successful, it will be China\u2019s first rover to touch Martian soil and the first U.S. rover launch in nearly nine years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had planned to launch its new rover, Perseverance, on July 17, but the mission was delayed to July 30, according to the U.S. space agency.The Chinese launch off the southern island of Hainan was widely watched Thursday on state television. The mission is named Tianwen-1, which in Chinese means \u201cto question the heavens.\u201dAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceSpace exploration has taken on symbolic significance in the U.S.-China strategic competition, with both President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declaring fresh ambitions in the field. Late last year, Trump signed legislation creating the U.S. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars has become a focus for the new space race, due to its potential for human habitation. Previous missions have found water on the planet, a necessity for all of Earth\u2019s life-forms.\u201cScientists have long hoped to find another celestial body in the solar system and transform it into a second Earth, which would allow humankind to migrate there in great numbers. At the moment, the only possibility is Mars,\u201d Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China\u2019s lunar project, told Chinese media earlier this week.Still, a crewed mission to Mars by any country remains years in the future.The Tianwen-1 mission includes an orbiter that will take high-resolution photographs of Mars and other measurements while circling the planet, as well as a rover that will traverse the surface, collecting data on soil and rock composition, Chinese state media reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the past, we relied on information shared on foreign websites to study Mars,\u201d Chinese National Space Science Center researcher Liu Yang said, according to an official publication. \u201cOnce our own Tianwen-1 lands on the Red Planet, we would have access to firsthand exploration data at the earliest time possible for our original research.\u201dThe spacecraft is expected to take between six and seven months to reach Mars, according to state media.In 2011, China attempted to launch a Mars orbiter in a joint operation with Russia. But that mission, Yinghuo-1, failed to leave the Earth\u2019s orbit and later broke up over the Pacific Ocean.Early last year, China landed a rover on the far side of the moon, the first nation to do so.Lyric Li in Beijing contributed to this report.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceA new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonTop Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions The Tianwen-1 mission seeks to put the nation\u2019s first rover on Mars, as NASA prepares to launch a new U.S. rover next week. China\u2019s Mars mission lifts off, aiming to join U.S. in landing on Red Planet",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "249",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/17/china-space-station-astronaut-tianhe/",
        "text": "China launched the first astronauts to its space station on Thursday, taking a significant stride in what some U.S. officials have dubbed a new space race between the two countries.The morning rocket launch in northwest China sent a spacecraft carrying three astronauts into Earth\u2019s orbit, where it docked with the still-under-construction space station later in the day. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe liftoff, which Chinese officials called a \u201ccomplete success,\u201d marks the first time in five years that China has sent a crewed mission to space. It comes amid a flurry of Chinese achievements in space that have spurred the United States to speed some of its own plans.\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d Vice President Mike Pence said in 2019 while announcing that NASA would move up its return to the moon by four years to 2024 \u2014 a timetable the Biden administration has embraced.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s comments came two months after China became the first nation to land an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon, an act the vice president said \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dThe Chinese space station represents another milestone for the country, which didn\u2019t launch an astronaut into space until 2003 \u2014 more than 40 years after the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 but has since developed its space program at a torrid pace.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceChina began assembling its Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, station in April when it launched into orbit a module that will be living quarters for its astronauts. Last month, the module was joined by a cargo spacecraft containing equipment, propellant and supplies, including food.Once the three astronauts \u2014 Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo \u2014 and their Shenzhou-12 spacecraft have docked with the space station, they will spend three months testing the life-support system and other equipment, conducting experiments and preparing the living quarters for expansion before two laboratory modules are launched next year, officials said. In total, China will conduct 11 missions this year and next to complete the space station.\u201cFirst of all, we need to arrange our home in the core module, then get started on a whole range of diagnostic tests on crucial technology and experiments,\u201d mission commander Nie, 56, told reporters the day before the launch. \u201cThe task is very arduous and there are many challenges. My colleagues and I will cooperate closely, operate carefully and overcome all difficulties.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space station could soon be the only one in orbit.After hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years, the aging \u2014 and occasionally leaking \u2014 International Space Station is set to see its funding run out in 2024, though NASA has said it is confident Congress and its international partners will agree to extend the station\u2019s life.Several companies are working on privately run, commercial replacements. But if the ISS is retired without a backup, NASA would face an \u201cexistential challenge,\u201d as one top space agency official put it, with no place for its astronauts to go.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?One place American astronauts are unlikely to go is on the Tianhe.Story continues below advertisementIn 2011, Congress passed a law requiring NASA to get Congressional approval before partnering with China, as well as having the FBI certify that the cooperation would not jeopardize national security. The act essentially banned China from the ISS, but it did little to slow the country\u2019s progress in space.AdvertisementLast month, China became only the second nation after the United States to successfully land a rover on Mars. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated China on the landing, but also warned Congress that it was a wake-up call.\u201cI want you to see this photograph,\u201d he said, holding up an image from the landing during a House appropriations hearing.\u201cIt is a very aggressive competitor,\u201d he said of China. \u201cThey\u2019re going to be landing humans on the moon. That should tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get our Human Landing System program going vigorously.\u201dChina has already begun recruiting other countries to use its new space station.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAfter the completion of China\u2019s space station, in the near future, we will see both Chinese and foreign astronauts jointly participate in the flight of the Chinese space station,\u201d Ji Qiming, assistant to the director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office, told reporters.AdvertisementBefore blasting off for the space station, the three astronauts described what the mission meant for their country.\u201cI hope that hundreds of millions of Chinese will enjoy this journey to space with us, through us,\u201d Liu said on Wednesday. \u201cWe will complete every mission, and more Chinese silhouettes and footprints will be left in the vast space.\u201dAlicia Chen contributed to this report.Read more:The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic firstDebris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean near Maldives A trio of Chinese astronauts will spend three months in space testing equipment, conducting experiments and preparing the station for future expansions. China launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up",
        "author": "Michael E. Miller"
    },
    {
        "title": "China launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "250",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/17/china-space-station-astronaut-tianhe/",
        "text": "China launched the first astronauts to its space station on Thursday, taking a significant stride in what some U.S. officials have dubbed a new space race between the two countries.The morning rocket launch in northwest China sent a spacecraft carrying three astronauts into Earth\u2019s orbit, where it docked with the still-under-construction space station later in the day. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe liftoff, which Chinese officials called a \u201ccomplete success,\u201d marks the first time in five years that China has sent a crewed mission to space. It comes amid a flurry of Chinese achievements in space that have spurred the United States to speed some of its own plans.\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d Vice President Mike Pence said in 2019 while announcing that NASA would move up its return to the moon by four years to 2024 \u2014 a timetable the Biden administration has embraced.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s comments came two months after China became the first nation to land an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon, an act the vice president said \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dThe Chinese space station represents another milestone for the country, which didn\u2019t launch an astronaut into space until 2003 \u2014 more than 40 years after the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 but has since developed its space program at a torrid pace.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceChina began assembling its Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, station in April when it launched into orbit a module that will be living quarters for its astronauts. Last month, the module was joined by a cargo spacecraft containing equipment, propellant and supplies, including food.Once the three astronauts \u2014 Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo \u2014 and their Shenzhou-12 spacecraft have docked with the space station, they will spend three months testing the life-support system and other equipment, conducting experiments and preparing the living quarters for expansion before two laboratory modules are launched next year, officials said. In total, China will conduct 11 missions this year and next to complete the space station.\u201cFirst of all, we need to arrange our home in the core module, then get started on a whole range of diagnostic tests on crucial technology and experiments,\u201d mission commander Nie, 56, told reporters the day before the launch. \u201cThe task is very arduous and there are many challenges. My colleagues and I will cooperate closely, operate carefully and overcome all difficulties.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space station could soon be the only one in orbit.After hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years, the aging \u2014 and occasionally leaking \u2014 International Space Station is set to see its funding run out in 2024, though NASA has said it is confident Congress and its international partners will agree to extend the station\u2019s life.Several companies are working on privately run, commercial replacements. But if the ISS is retired without a backup, NASA would face an \u201cexistential challenge,\u201d as one top space agency official put it, with no place for its astronauts to go.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?One place American astronauts are unlikely to go is on the Tianhe.Story continues below advertisementIn 2011, Congress passed a law requiring NASA to get Congressional approval before partnering with China, as well as having the FBI certify that the cooperation would not jeopardize national security. The act essentially banned China from the ISS, but it did little to slow the country\u2019s progress in space.AdvertisementLast month, China became only the second nation after the United States to successfully land a rover on Mars. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated China on the landing, but also warned Congress that it was a wake-up call.\u201cI want you to see this photograph,\u201d he said, holding up an image from the landing during a House appropriations hearing.\u201cIt is a very aggressive competitor,\u201d he said of China. \u201cThey\u2019re going to be landing humans on the moon. That should tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get our Human Landing System program going vigorously.\u201dChina has already begun recruiting other countries to use its new space station.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAfter the completion of China\u2019s space station, in the near future, we will see both Chinese and foreign astronauts jointly participate in the flight of the Chinese space station,\u201d Ji Qiming, assistant to the director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office, told reporters.AdvertisementBefore blasting off for the space station, the three astronauts described what the mission meant for their country.\u201cI hope that hundreds of millions of Chinese will enjoy this journey to space with us, through us,\u201d Liu said on Wednesday. \u201cWe will complete every mission, and more Chinese silhouettes and footprints will be left in the vast space.\u201dAlicia Chen contributed to this report.Read more:The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic firstDebris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean near Maldives A trio of Chinese astronauts will spend three months in space testing equipment, conducting experiments and preparing the station for future expansions. China launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up",
        "author": "Michael E. Miller"
    },
    {
        "title": "China launches moon mission, seeking to be first country in decades to collect lunar rocks (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "251",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-moon-mission/2020/11/23/aa479520-2d2f-11eb-9dd6-2d0179981719_story.html",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft without a crew aboard toward a previously unexplored part of the moon Tuesday in a bid to bring back material that could help scientists better understand the satellite and planets beyond Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOnly the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully brought lunar material back to Earth, in missions launched several decades ago. Chang\u2019e-5 launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province Tuesday. The mission is named for the Chinese goddess of the moon.The Long March-5 launch rocket carrying the Chang\u2019e-5\u2019s four modules \u2014 the lander, the ascent vehicle, the service capsule and the return capsule \u2014 began its fueling process Monday, Chinese state media reported.The lander is scheduled to touch down in an area called Oceanus Procellarum and stay on the moon for one lunar daylight period \u2014 the equivalent of around two weeks on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce there, it will attempt to dig about seven feet into the ground, then transfer the collected material to the ascender. According to NASA, the ascender will then dock with the service capsule, at which point the samples will be transferred to the return capsule. That capsule will then return to Earth, where it is expected to land in Inner Mongolia early next month. The mission\u2019s goal is to collect about 4.5 pounds of material for research.Jack Singal, an associate professor of physics at the University of Richmond, said that the mission, if successful, will allow scientists to directly date the rocks and volcanic activity from the collection site. Then calibrating the age to crater density, he said, could set the stage to \u201cgive us a better handle on dating rocks on the rest of the surface of the moon and other rocky bodies,\u201d including Mercury and Mars.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceThe endeavor is the latest in China\u2019s ambitious plans to expand its research in space, another rivalrous aspect of the U.S.-China relationship.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn July, China launched its Tianwen-1 mission, marking the country\u2019s first attempt to land a rover on Mars. NASA launched a Mars mission, called Perseverance, the next week. The United Arab Emirates also launched an orbiter to Mars that month.In January 2019, China became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. On that mission, called Chang\u2019e-4, the craft landed in the Von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n crater, in the South Pole-Aitken basin. The Chinese National Space Administration said the landing \u201cmarked a new chapter in the human race\u2019s lunar and space exploration.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called that landing \u201ca first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment.\u201dStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s mission comes as NASA is pushing, under its Artemis program, to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The Trump administration had moved up NASA\u2019s timeline from 2028 to 2024, saying it needed to move with a sense of urgency.AdvertisementNASA is hoping to create a permanent presence on and around the moon by building a space station it calls Gateway that would stay in lunar orbit and be used as a way station for astronauts and cargo.It seems unlikely, however, that NASA would be able to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious schedule. And while it appears that under the incoming Biden administration, NASA would maintain the Artemis program, the schedule would more closely adhere to the original 2028 date.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, NASA is seeking to send a series of scientific missions to the lunar surface, including a rover that would hunt for water on the moon\u2019s south pole by 2023.China has dramatically accelerated its space missions in recent years, after first launching an astronaut into space in 2003, decades after American astronauts\u2019 1969 moon landing.AdvertisementThe latest mission, Singal said, is \u201can appropriate-scale mission for an emerging space power.\u201dThe proximity of the moon, he added, means that if successful, China can \u201cget some results and a triumph quickly.\u201d\n\nChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Clarification: A previous version of this article stated that a lunar day lasts the equivalent of about two weeks on Earth. That is the length of the lunar daytime, but a full lunar day lasts about four weeks. Only the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully brought lunar material back to Earth. China launches moon mission, seeking to be first country in decades to collect lunar rocks",
        "author": "Siobh\u00e1n O'Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "China launches moon mission, seeking to be first country in decades to collect lunar rocks (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "252",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-moon-mission/2020/11/23/aa479520-2d2f-11eb-9dd6-2d0179981719_story.html",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft without a crew aboard toward a previously unexplored part of the moon Tuesday in a bid to bring back material that could help scientists better understand the satellite and planets beyond Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOnly the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully brought lunar material back to Earth, in missions launched several decades ago. Chang\u2019e-5 launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province Tuesday. The mission is named for the Chinese goddess of the moon.The Long March-5 launch rocket carrying the Chang\u2019e-5\u2019s four modules \u2014 the lander, the ascent vehicle, the service capsule and the return capsule \u2014 began its fueling process Monday, Chinese state media reported.The lander is scheduled to touch down in an area called Oceanus Procellarum and stay on the moon for one lunar daylight period \u2014 the equivalent of around two weeks on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce there, it will attempt to dig about seven feet into the ground, then transfer the collected material to the ascender. According to NASA, the ascender will then dock with the service capsule, at which point the samples will be transferred to the return capsule. That capsule will then return to Earth, where it is expected to land in Inner Mongolia early next month. The mission\u2019s goal is to collect about 4.5 pounds of material for research.Jack Singal, an associate professor of physics at the University of Richmond, said that the mission, if successful, will allow scientists to directly date the rocks and volcanic activity from the collection site. Then calibrating the age to crater density, he said, could set the stage to \u201cgive us a better handle on dating rocks on the rest of the surface of the moon and other rocky bodies,\u201d including Mercury and Mars.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceThe endeavor is the latest in China\u2019s ambitious plans to expand its research in space, another rivalrous aspect of the U.S.-China relationship.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn July, China launched its Tianwen-1 mission, marking the country\u2019s first attempt to land a rover on Mars. NASA launched a Mars mission, called Perseverance, the next week. The United Arab Emirates also launched an orbiter to Mars that month.In January 2019, China became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. On that mission, called Chang\u2019e-4, the craft landed in the Von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n crater, in the South Pole-Aitken basin. The Chinese National Space Administration said the landing \u201cmarked a new chapter in the human race\u2019s lunar and space exploration.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called that landing \u201ca first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment.\u201dStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s mission comes as NASA is pushing, under its Artemis program, to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The Trump administration had moved up NASA\u2019s timeline from 2028 to 2024, saying it needed to move with a sense of urgency.AdvertisementNASA is hoping to create a permanent presence on and around the moon by building a space station it calls Gateway that would stay in lunar orbit and be used as a way station for astronauts and cargo.It seems unlikely, however, that NASA would be able to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious schedule. And while it appears that under the incoming Biden administration, NASA would maintain the Artemis program, the schedule would more closely adhere to the original 2028 date.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, NASA is seeking to send a series of scientific missions to the lunar surface, including a rover that would hunt for water on the moon\u2019s south pole by 2023.China has dramatically accelerated its space missions in recent years, after first launching an astronaut into space in 2003, decades after American astronauts\u2019 1969 moon landing.AdvertisementThe latest mission, Singal said, is \u201can appropriate-scale mission for an emerging space power.\u201dThe proximity of the moon, he added, means that if successful, China can \u201cget some results and a triumph quickly.\u201d\n\nChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Clarification: A previous version of this article stated that a lunar day lasts the equivalent of about two weeks on Earth. That is the length of the lunar daytime, but a full lunar day lasts about four weeks. Only the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully brought lunar material back to Earth. China launches moon mission, seeking to be first country in decades to collect lunar rocks",
        "author": "Siobh\u00e1n O'Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "China launches moon mission, seeking to be first country in decades to collect lunar rocks (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "253",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-moon-mission/2020/11/23/aa479520-2d2f-11eb-9dd6-2d0179981719_story.html",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft without a crew aboard toward a previously unexplored part of the moon Tuesday in a bid to bring back material that could help scientists better understand the satellite and planets beyond Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOnly the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully brought lunar material back to Earth, in missions launched several decades ago. Chang\u2019e-5 launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province Tuesday. The mission is named for the Chinese goddess of the moon.The Long March-5 launch rocket carrying the Chang\u2019e-5\u2019s four modules \u2014 the lander, the ascent vehicle, the service capsule and the return capsule \u2014 began its fueling process Monday, Chinese state media reported.The lander is scheduled to touch down in an area called Oceanus Procellarum and stay on the moon for one lunar daylight period \u2014 the equivalent of around two weeks on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce there, it will attempt to dig about seven feet into the ground, then transfer the collected material to the ascender. According to NASA, the ascender will then dock with the service capsule, at which point the samples will be transferred to the return capsule. That capsule will then return to Earth, where it is expected to land in Inner Mongolia early next month. The mission\u2019s goal is to collect about 4.5 pounds of material for research.Jack Singal, an associate professor of physics at the University of Richmond, said that the mission, if successful, will allow scientists to directly date the rocks and volcanic activity from the collection site. Then calibrating the age to crater density, he said, could set the stage to \u201cgive us a better handle on dating rocks on the rest of the surface of the moon and other rocky bodies,\u201d including Mercury and Mars.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceThe endeavor is the latest in China\u2019s ambitious plans to expand its research in space, another rivalrous aspect of the U.S.-China relationship.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn July, China launched its Tianwen-1 mission, marking the country\u2019s first attempt to land a rover on Mars. NASA launched a Mars mission, called Perseverance, the next week. The United Arab Emirates also launched an orbiter to Mars that month.In January 2019, China became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. On that mission, called Chang\u2019e-4, the craft landed in the Von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n crater, in the South Pole-Aitken basin. The Chinese National Space Administration said the landing \u201cmarked a new chapter in the human race\u2019s lunar and space exploration.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called that landing \u201ca first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment.\u201dStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s mission comes as NASA is pushing, under its Artemis program, to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The Trump administration had moved up NASA\u2019s timeline from 2028 to 2024, saying it needed to move with a sense of urgency.AdvertisementNASA is hoping to create a permanent presence on and around the moon by building a space station it calls Gateway that would stay in lunar orbit and be used as a way station for astronauts and cargo.It seems unlikely, however, that NASA would be able to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious schedule. And while it appears that under the incoming Biden administration, NASA would maintain the Artemis program, the schedule would more closely adhere to the original 2028 date.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, NASA is seeking to send a series of scientific missions to the lunar surface, including a rover that would hunt for water on the moon\u2019s south pole by 2023.China has dramatically accelerated its space missions in recent years, after first launching an astronaut into space in 2003, decades after American astronauts\u2019 1969 moon landing.AdvertisementThe latest mission, Singal said, is \u201can appropriate-scale mission for an emerging space power.\u201dThe proximity of the moon, he added, means that if successful, China can \u201cget some results and a triumph quickly.\u201d\n\nChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Clarification: A previous version of this article stated that a lunar day lasts the equivalent of about two weeks on Earth. That is the length of the lunar daytime, but a full lunar day lasts about four weeks. Only the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully brought lunar material back to Earth. China launches moon mission, seeking to be first country in decades to collect lunar rocks",
        "author": "Siobh\u00e1n O'Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "China sends three astronauts to new space station (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "254",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/15/china-space-station-launch-tiangong/",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft bound for its unfinished space station just past midnight Saturday local time. On board were three astronauts \u2014 including the first woman to visit the station \u2014 headed on the nation\u2019s longest crewed space mission yet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Shenzhou-13 spacecraft \u2014 its name translates as \u201cDivine Vessel\u201d \u2014 took off from the Gobi Desert in northern China. Zhai Zhigang, who was chosen as mission commander for the six-month trip, graduated from China\u2019s first group of astronaut trainees in the 1990s, the Reuters news agency reported. Selected from more than 1,500 potential astronaut candidates in 1998, Zhai, once a fighter pilot in the Chinese People\u2019s Liberation Army, eventually conducted China\u2019s first spacewalk.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAfter 13 years, I am going to set out for outer space again,\u201d Zhai said to reporters. \u201cI feel excited. I feel inspired. I also feel some pressure.\u201dAdvertisementWang Yaping, 41, is the first female astronaut to visit the Chinese station and the second Chinese woman to enter space.China has spent a decade working to develop technologies for a space station. Construction of the nation\u2019s first permanent space station, Tiangong, started in April. It is slated to comprise three modules. One, called Tianhe or \u201cHeavenly Harmony,\u201d is just bigger than a city bus and serves as the main living quarters. Eleven missions will be needed to fully supply and complete the station.Story continues below advertisementThe six-month trip marks another step in the nation\u2019s rapidly advancing space program.Three Chinese astronauts returned in September from a successful 90-day visit to the station, spending their time checking Tianhe\u2019s life-support system, going on spacewalks and deploying the module\u2019s robotic arm. The group also video-called Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The three-month trip marked China\u2019s first crewed mission since 2016.Advertisement\u201cWe will definitely encounter physical and psychological problems, as well as problems related to the equipment and facility,\u201d Zhai told reporters Thursday. \u201cWhether we can complete this flight mission well depends on our team, our tenacious will and the fighting spirit of our three crew members.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the crew\u2019s two years of training together gives them the \u201cpower and wisdom\u201d to resolve all difficulties.Ahead of the launch, Beijing renewed a commitment to cooperate with the international peaceful use of space.Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian described sending people to space as a \u201ccommon cause of mankind.\u201d Zhao said China would \u201ccontinue to extend the depth and breadth of international cooperation and exchanges\u201d in spaceflight and \u201cmake positive contributions to the exploration of the mysteries of the universe.\u201d The crew for China's mission includes the first woman to visit its space station. China sends three astronauts to new space station",
        "author": "Sammy Westfall"
    },
    {
        "title": "China sends three astronauts to new space station (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "255",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/15/china-space-station-launch-tiangong/",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft bound for its unfinished space station just past midnight Saturday local time. On board were three astronauts \u2014 including the first woman to visit the station \u2014 headed on the nation\u2019s longest crewed space mission yet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Shenzhou-13 spacecraft \u2014 its name translates as \u201cDivine Vessel\u201d \u2014 took off from the Gobi Desert in northern China. Zhai Zhigang, who was chosen as mission commander for the six-month trip, graduated from China\u2019s first group of astronaut trainees in the 1990s, the Reuters news agency reported. Selected from more than 1,500 potential astronaut candidates in 1998, Zhai, once a fighter pilot in the Chinese People\u2019s Liberation Army, eventually conducted China\u2019s first spacewalk.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAfter 13 years, I am going to set out for outer space again,\u201d Zhai said to reporters. \u201cI feel excited. I feel inspired. I also feel some pressure.\u201dAdvertisementWang Yaping, 41, is the first female astronaut to visit the Chinese station and the second Chinese woman to enter space.China has spent a decade working to develop technologies for a space station. Construction of the nation\u2019s first permanent space station, Tiangong, started in April. It is slated to comprise three modules. One, called Tianhe or \u201cHeavenly Harmony,\u201d is just bigger than a city bus and serves as the main living quarters. Eleven missions will be needed to fully supply and complete the station.Story continues below advertisementThe six-month trip marks another step in the nation\u2019s rapidly advancing space program.Three Chinese astronauts returned in September from a successful 90-day visit to the station, spending their time checking Tianhe\u2019s life-support system, going on spacewalks and deploying the module\u2019s robotic arm. The group also video-called Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The three-month trip marked China\u2019s first crewed mission since 2016.Advertisement\u201cWe will definitely encounter physical and psychological problems, as well as problems related to the equipment and facility,\u201d Zhai told reporters Thursday. \u201cWhether we can complete this flight mission well depends on our team, our tenacious will and the fighting spirit of our three crew members.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the crew\u2019s two years of training together gives them the \u201cpower and wisdom\u201d to resolve all difficulties.Ahead of the launch, Beijing renewed a commitment to cooperate with the international peaceful use of space.Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian described sending people to space as a \u201ccommon cause of mankind.\u201d Zhao said China would \u201ccontinue to extend the depth and breadth of international cooperation and exchanges\u201d in spaceflight and \u201cmake positive contributions to the exploration of the mysteries of the universe.\u201d The crew for China's mission includes the first woman to visit its space station. China sends three astronauts to new space station",
        "author": "Sammy Westfall"
    },
    {
        "title": "China sends three astronauts to new space station (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "256",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/15/china-space-station-launch-tiangong/",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft bound for its unfinished space station just past midnight Saturday local time. On board were three astronauts \u2014 including the first woman to visit the station \u2014 headed on the nation\u2019s longest crewed space mission yet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Shenzhou-13 spacecraft \u2014 its name translates as \u201cDivine Vessel\u201d \u2014 took off from the Gobi Desert in northern China. Zhai Zhigang, who was chosen as mission commander for the six-month trip, graduated from China\u2019s first group of astronaut trainees in the 1990s, the Reuters news agency reported. Selected from more than 1,500 potential astronaut candidates in 1998, Zhai, once a fighter pilot in the Chinese People\u2019s Liberation Army, eventually conducted China\u2019s first spacewalk.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAfter 13 years, I am going to set out for outer space again,\u201d Zhai said to reporters. \u201cI feel excited. I feel inspired. I also feel some pressure.\u201dAdvertisementWang Yaping, 41, is the first female astronaut to visit the Chinese station and the second Chinese woman to enter space.China has spent a decade working to develop technologies for a space station. Construction of the nation\u2019s first permanent space station, Tiangong, started in April. It is slated to comprise three modules. One, called Tianhe or \u201cHeavenly Harmony,\u201d is just bigger than a city bus and serves as the main living quarters. Eleven missions will be needed to fully supply and complete the station.Story continues below advertisementThe six-month trip marks another step in the nation\u2019s rapidly advancing space program.Three Chinese astronauts returned in September from a successful 90-day visit to the station, spending their time checking Tianhe\u2019s life-support system, going on spacewalks and deploying the module\u2019s robotic arm. The group also video-called Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The three-month trip marked China\u2019s first crewed mission since 2016.Advertisement\u201cWe will definitely encounter physical and psychological problems, as well as problems related to the equipment and facility,\u201d Zhai told reporters Thursday. \u201cWhether we can complete this flight mission well depends on our team, our tenacious will and the fighting spirit of our three crew members.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the crew\u2019s two years of training together gives them the \u201cpower and wisdom\u201d to resolve all difficulties.Ahead of the launch, Beijing renewed a commitment to cooperate with the international peaceful use of space.Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian described sending people to space as a \u201ccommon cause of mankind.\u201d Zhao said China would \u201ccontinue to extend the depth and breadth of international cooperation and exchanges\u201d in spaceflight and \u201cmake positive contributions to the exploration of the mysteries of the universe.\u201d The crew for China's mission includes the first woman to visit its space station. China sends three astronauts to new space station",
        "author": "Sammy Westfall"
    },
    {
        "title": "China and Russia to open moon base, expanding space cooperation (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "257",
        "date": "2021-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-russia-moon-base-space/2021/03/10/aa629748-8186-11eb-be22-32d331d87530_story.html",
        "text": "China and Russia have agreed to jointly build a research station on the moon, expanding the two countries\u2019 cooperation in space.The lunar base will be open to \u201call interested countries and international partners,\u201d according to an online statement Tuesday from the China National Space Administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Chinese announcement did not give a target date for when the station will be complete. China\u2019s space administration said the research base will be located on the moon\u2019s surface or in orbit, with capabilities for \u201clong-term autonomous operation.\u201d It will engage in research activities, including \u201clunar exploration and utilization.\u201dA memorandum of understanding was signed Tuesday by the two countries\u2019 space administrations, the announcement said.China lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration pushIn the past few years, China has pushed to the front lines of space research for the first time, while Russia has been seeking to regain its leading position from the 1950s and \u201960s. Russia was the first country to launch a satellite into orbit in 1957, and the first to send a person into space in 1961.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the space race that ensued, the United States pulled ahead, landing the first humans on the moon in 1969.China\u2019s space achievements have been much more recent. In 2019, China became the first country to land an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon, establishing the country\u2019s arrival as a space power.Then last year, China successfully ferried 2\u00a0kilograms (4.4\u00a0pounds) of lunar rock and soil back to Earth, the first moon matter to be brought back in 44 years.Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called on the country to develop into a \u201cmajor space power.\u201dA Chinese probe, the Tianwen-1, is orbiting Mars \u2014 where it is capturing striking images \u2014 and is set to land a rover on the surface of the Red Planet in May or June.\n\nChina lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration pushChina moon mission returns to Earth, vaulting nation into ranks of space powersAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space Beijing has rapidly grown its capabilities beyond the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. China and Russia to open moon base, expanding space cooperation",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China and Russia to open moon base, expanding space cooperation (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "258",
        "date": "2021-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-russia-moon-base-space/2021/03/10/aa629748-8186-11eb-be22-32d331d87530_story.html",
        "text": "China and Russia have agreed to jointly build a research station on the moon, expanding the two countries\u2019 cooperation in space.The lunar base will be open to \u201call interested countries and international partners,\u201d according to an online statement Tuesday from the China National Space Administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Chinese announcement did not give a target date for when the station will be complete. China\u2019s space administration said the research base will be located on the moon\u2019s surface or in orbit, with capabilities for \u201clong-term autonomous operation.\u201d It will engage in research activities, including \u201clunar exploration and utilization.\u201dA memorandum of understanding was signed Tuesday by the two countries\u2019 space administrations, the announcement said.China lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration pushIn the past few years, China has pushed to the front lines of space research for the first time, while Russia has been seeking to regain its leading position from the 1950s and \u201960s. Russia was the first country to launch a satellite into orbit in 1957, and the first to send a person into space in 1961.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the space race that ensued, the United States pulled ahead, landing the first humans on the moon in 1969.China\u2019s space achievements have been much more recent. In 2019, China became the first country to land an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon, establishing the country\u2019s arrival as a space power.Then last year, China successfully ferried 2\u00a0kilograms (4.4\u00a0pounds) of lunar rock and soil back to Earth, the first moon matter to be brought back in 44 years.Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called on the country to develop into a \u201cmajor space power.\u201dA Chinese probe, the Tianwen-1, is orbiting Mars \u2014 where it is capturing striking images \u2014 and is set to land a rover on the surface of the Red Planet in May or June.\n\nChina lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration pushChina moon mission returns to Earth, vaulting nation into ranks of space powersAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space Beijing has rapidly grown its capabilities beyond the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. China and Russia to open moon base, expanding space cooperation",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China and Russia to open moon base, expanding space cooperation (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "259",
        "date": "2021-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-russia-moon-base-space/2021/03/10/aa629748-8186-11eb-be22-32d331d87530_story.html",
        "text": "China and Russia have agreed to jointly build a research station on the moon, expanding the two countries\u2019 cooperation in space.The lunar base will be open to \u201call interested countries and international partners,\u201d according to an online statement Tuesday from the China National Space Administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Chinese announcement did not give a target date for when the station will be complete. China\u2019s space administration said the research base will be located on the moon\u2019s surface or in orbit, with capabilities for \u201clong-term autonomous operation.\u201d It will engage in research activities, including \u201clunar exploration and utilization.\u201dA memorandum of understanding was signed Tuesday by the two countries\u2019 space administrations, the announcement said.China lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration pushIn the past few years, China has pushed to the front lines of space research for the first time, while Russia has been seeking to regain its leading position from the 1950s and \u201960s. Russia was the first country to launch a satellite into orbit in 1957, and the first to send a person into space in 1961.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the space race that ensued, the United States pulled ahead, landing the first humans on the moon in 1969.China\u2019s space achievements have been much more recent. In 2019, China became the first country to land an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon, establishing the country\u2019s arrival as a space power.Then last year, China successfully ferried 2\u00a0kilograms (4.4\u00a0pounds) of lunar rock and soil back to Earth, the first moon matter to be brought back in 44 years.Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called on the country to develop into a \u201cmajor space power.\u201dA Chinese probe, the Tianwen-1, is orbiting Mars \u2014 where it is capturing striking images \u2014 and is set to land a rover on the surface of the Red Planet in May or June.\n\nChina lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration pushChina moon mission returns to Earth, vaulting nation into ranks of space powersAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space Beijing has rapidly grown its capabilities beyond the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. China and Russia to open moon base, expanding space cooperation",
        "author": "Eva Dou"
    },
    {
        "title": "China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020 (WP: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "260",
        "date": "2019-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-plans-another-moon-mission-this-year-eyes-mars-in-2020/2019/01/14/8160355e-1800-11e9-a804-c35766b9f234_story.html",
        "text": "BEIJING \u2014 China\u2019s space agency, buoyed by its success in landing a rover on the far side of the moon this month, is planning to launch another mission to the moon by the end of this year and a mission to Mars as early as next year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plans, announced Monday, underscore China\u2019s ambitions in space at a time when the United States is curtailing NASA\u2019s budget and increasingly handing over space exploration to commercial adventurers. The China National Space Administration, the Chinese equivalent of NASA, is working to send a probe to the Red Planet, Wu Yanhua, deputy chief of the agency, told reporters Monday.\u201cChina will carry out its first-ever exploration mission to Mars around 2020,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s robotic spacecraft Chang\u2019e-4 landed on the far side of the moon earlier this month, a first in the human history of space exploration. On Friday, it beamed back pictures of the probe\u2019s lander and the rover taking photos of each other.AdvertisementThe space agency plans to launch a Chang\u2019e-5 mission at the end of the year with the goal of collecting samples from the near side of the moon, Wu said. They would be the first samples retrieved since 1976.\u00a0Chinese President Xi Jinping has said repeatedly that he has \u201clofty ambitions\u201d to turn China into a space power.China is building its own space station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is expected to be operational in 2022. But the agency is still deciding whether to send astronauts to the moon, Wu said Monday.\u00a0China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first\n\nThe Chang\u2019e-4 mission \u2014 Chang\u2019e is a Chinese moon goddess \u2014 is continuing.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe 1.3-ton lander, which made a soft landing on the moon earlier this month, put potato seeds and silkworm eggs, housed in a chamber and fed natural light and nutrition, on the moon.It also deployed a small rover called Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, to explore the surrounding lunar terrain, which is believed to be older than that on the near side.Advertisement\u201cAll these are first-time breakthroughs for humankind,\u201d Wu said at a news conference Monday. \u201cThey are bound to make significant impacts on both China and the world.\u201dA German-developed instrument on the lander will measure radiation levels and collect data that could be useful in planning human missions to the far side of the moon.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementChina said it has shared data with NASA about the mission to the far side of the moon.\u00a0That claim could not be immediately substantiated, but it could raise eyebrows on Capitol Hill because NASA and the Chinese agency are prohibited from cooperating without congressional approval.The 2011 Wolf Amendment, motivated by security concerns, bans NASA scientists from working with Chinese citizens affiliated with a Chinese state enterprise or entity.At an astronautical conference in Germany last year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he talked to his Chinese counterpart about expanding cooperation.Advertisement\u201cWe do cooperate in a lot of ways, but that doesn\u2019t mean our interests are always aligned,\u201d he said, according to the Space News website. \u201cSome of these decisions are going to be made above the pay grade of the NASA administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt was in the U.S. interest to cooperate, he said, adding that China\u2019s space agency was doing \u201csome amazing scientific experiments.\u201d\u201cWe can share data and collaborate that way so that each country can learn more about science,\u201d he said.The escalating trade war has dimmed the prospect of cooperation between NASA and its Chinese counterpart. In response, U.S. and Chinese scientists have focused on technical dialogues and data sharing between nongovernmental institutions.\u201cExpanded international cooperation is the wish of all scientists,\u201d Wu said Monday. \u201cIt takes joining of forces among the world\u2019s big space powers to really make a difference in human space exploration.\u201d\u00a0A new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonChina increasingly challenges American dominance of scienceToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news China is pushing ahead with its ambitions to become a space power. China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020",
        "author": "Anna Fifield"
    },
    {
        "title": "China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020 (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "261",
        "date": "2019-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-plans-another-moon-mission-this-year-eyes-mars-in-2020/2019/01/14/8160355e-1800-11e9-a804-c35766b9f234_story.html",
        "text": "BEIJING \u2014 China\u2019s space agency, buoyed by its success in landing a rover on the far side of the moon this month, is planning to launch another mission to the moon by the end of this year and a mission to Mars as early as next year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plans, announced Monday, underscore China\u2019s ambitions in space at a time when the United States is curtailing NASA\u2019s budget and increasingly handing over space exploration to commercial adventurers. The China National Space Administration, the Chinese equivalent of NASA, is working to send a probe to the Red Planet, Wu Yanhua, deputy chief of the agency, told reporters Monday.\u201cChina will carry out its first-ever exploration mission to Mars around 2020,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s robotic spacecraft Chang\u2019e-4 landed on the far side of the moon earlier this month, a first in the human history of space exploration. On Friday, it beamed back pictures of the probe\u2019s lander and the rover taking photos of each other.AdvertisementThe space agency plans to launch a Chang\u2019e-5 mission at the end of the year with the goal of collecting samples from the near side of the moon, Wu said. They would be the first samples retrieved since 1976.\u00a0Chinese President Xi Jinping has said repeatedly that he has \u201clofty ambitions\u201d to turn China into a space power.China is building its own space station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is expected to be operational in 2022. But the agency is still deciding whether to send astronauts to the moon, Wu said Monday.\u00a0China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first\n\nThe Chang\u2019e-4 mission \u2014 Chang\u2019e is a Chinese moon goddess \u2014 is continuing.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe 1.3-ton lander, which made a soft landing on the moon earlier this month, put potato seeds and silkworm eggs, housed in a chamber and fed natural light and nutrition, on the moon.It also deployed a small rover called Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, to explore the surrounding lunar terrain, which is believed to be older than that on the near side.Advertisement\u201cAll these are first-time breakthroughs for humankind,\u201d Wu said at a news conference Monday. \u201cThey are bound to make significant impacts on both China and the world.\u201dA German-developed instrument on the lander will measure radiation levels and collect data that could be useful in planning human missions to the far side of the moon.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementChina said it has shared data with NASA about the mission to the far side of the moon.\u00a0That claim could not be immediately substantiated, but it could raise eyebrows on Capitol Hill because NASA and the Chinese agency are prohibited from cooperating without congressional approval.The 2011 Wolf Amendment, motivated by security concerns, bans NASA scientists from working with Chinese citizens affiliated with a Chinese state enterprise or entity.At an astronautical conference in Germany last year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he talked to his Chinese counterpart about expanding cooperation.Advertisement\u201cWe do cooperate in a lot of ways, but that doesn\u2019t mean our interests are always aligned,\u201d he said, according to the Space News website. \u201cSome of these decisions are going to be made above the pay grade of the NASA administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt was in the U.S. interest to cooperate, he said, adding that China\u2019s space agency was doing \u201csome amazing scientific experiments.\u201d\u201cWe can share data and collaborate that way so that each country can learn more about science,\u201d he said.The escalating trade war has dimmed the prospect of cooperation between NASA and its Chinese counterpart. In response, U.S. and Chinese scientists have focused on technical dialogues and data sharing between nongovernmental institutions.\u201cExpanded international cooperation is the wish of all scientists,\u201d Wu said Monday. \u201cIt takes joining of forces among the world\u2019s big space powers to really make a difference in human space exploration.\u201d\u00a0A new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonChina increasingly challenges American dominance of scienceToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news China is pushing ahead with its ambitions to become a space power. China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020",
        "author": "Anna Fifield"
    },
    {
        "title": "China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020 (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "262",
        "date": "2019-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-plans-another-moon-mission-this-year-eyes-mars-in-2020/2019/01/14/8160355e-1800-11e9-a804-c35766b9f234_story.html",
        "text": "BEIJING \u2014 China\u2019s space agency, buoyed by its success in landing a rover on the far side of the moon this month, is planning to launch another mission to the moon by the end of this year and a mission to Mars as early as next year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plans, announced Monday, underscore China\u2019s ambitions in space at a time when the United States is curtailing NASA\u2019s budget and increasingly handing over space exploration to commercial adventurers. The China National Space Administration, the Chinese equivalent of NASA, is working to send a probe to the Red Planet, Wu Yanhua, deputy chief of the agency, told reporters Monday.\u201cChina will carry out its first-ever exploration mission to Mars around 2020,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s robotic spacecraft Chang\u2019e-4 landed on the far side of the moon earlier this month, a first in the human history of space exploration. On Friday, it beamed back pictures of the probe\u2019s lander and the rover taking photos of each other.AdvertisementThe space agency plans to launch a Chang\u2019e-5 mission at the end of the year with the goal of collecting samples from the near side of the moon, Wu said. They would be the first samples retrieved since 1976.\u00a0Chinese President Xi Jinping has said repeatedly that he has \u201clofty ambitions\u201d to turn China into a space power.China is building its own space station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is expected to be operational in 2022. But the agency is still deciding whether to send astronauts to the moon, Wu said Monday.\u00a0China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first\n\nThe Chang\u2019e-4 mission \u2014 Chang\u2019e is a Chinese moon goddess \u2014 is continuing.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe 1.3-ton lander, which made a soft landing on the moon earlier this month, put potato seeds and silkworm eggs, housed in a chamber and fed natural light and nutrition, on the moon.It also deployed a small rover called Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, to explore the surrounding lunar terrain, which is believed to be older than that on the near side.Advertisement\u201cAll these are first-time breakthroughs for humankind,\u201d Wu said at a news conference Monday. \u201cThey are bound to make significant impacts on both China and the world.\u201dA German-developed instrument on the lander will measure radiation levels and collect data that could be useful in planning human missions to the far side of the moon.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementChina said it has shared data with NASA about the mission to the far side of the moon.\u00a0That claim could not be immediately substantiated, but it could raise eyebrows on Capitol Hill because NASA and the Chinese agency are prohibited from cooperating without congressional approval.The 2011 Wolf Amendment, motivated by security concerns, bans NASA scientists from working with Chinese citizens affiliated with a Chinese state enterprise or entity.At an astronautical conference in Germany last year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he talked to his Chinese counterpart about expanding cooperation.Advertisement\u201cWe do cooperate in a lot of ways, but that doesn\u2019t mean our interests are always aligned,\u201d he said, according to the Space News website. \u201cSome of these decisions are going to be made above the pay grade of the NASA administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt was in the U.S. interest to cooperate, he said, adding that China\u2019s space agency was doing \u201csome amazing scientific experiments.\u201d\u201cWe can share data and collaborate that way so that each country can learn more about science,\u201d he said.The escalating trade war has dimmed the prospect of cooperation between NASA and its Chinese counterpart. In response, U.S. and Chinese scientists have focused on technical dialogues and data sharing between nongovernmental institutions.\u201cExpanded international cooperation is the wish of all scientists,\u201d Wu said Monday. \u201cIt takes joining of forces among the world\u2019s big space powers to really make a difference in human space exploration.\u201d\u00a0A new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonChina increasingly challenges American dominance of scienceToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news China is pushing ahead with its ambitions to become a space power. China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020",
        "author": "Anna Fifield"
    },
    {
        "title": "China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020 (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "263",
        "date": "2019-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-plans-another-moon-mission-this-year-eyes-mars-in-2020/2019/01/14/8160355e-1800-11e9-a804-c35766b9f234_story.html",
        "text": "BEIJING \u2014 China\u2019s space agency, buoyed by its success in landing a rover on the far side of the moon this month, is planning to launch another mission to the moon by the end of this year and a mission to Mars as early as next year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plans, announced Monday, underscore China\u2019s ambitions in space at a time when the United States is curtailing NASA\u2019s budget and increasingly handing over space exploration to commercial adventurers. The China National Space Administration, the Chinese equivalent of NASA, is working to send a probe to the Red Planet, Wu Yanhua, deputy chief of the agency, told reporters Monday.\u201cChina will carry out its first-ever exploration mission to Mars around 2020,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s robotic spacecraft Chang\u2019e-4 landed on the far side of the moon earlier this month, a first in the human history of space exploration. On Friday, it beamed back pictures of the probe\u2019s lander and the rover taking photos of each other.AdvertisementThe space agency plans to launch a Chang\u2019e-5 mission at the end of the year with the goal of collecting samples from the near side of the moon, Wu said. They would be the first samples retrieved since 1976.\u00a0Chinese President Xi Jinping has said repeatedly that he has \u201clofty ambitions\u201d to turn China into a space power.China is building its own space station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is expected to be operational in 2022. But the agency is still deciding whether to send astronauts to the moon, Wu said Monday.\u00a0China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first\n\nThe Chang\u2019e-4 mission \u2014 Chang\u2019e is a Chinese moon goddess \u2014 is continuing.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe 1.3-ton lander, which made a soft landing on the moon earlier this month, put potato seeds and silkworm eggs, housed in a chamber and fed natural light and nutrition, on the moon.It also deployed a small rover called Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, to explore the surrounding lunar terrain, which is believed to be older than that on the near side.Advertisement\u201cAll these are first-time breakthroughs for humankind,\u201d Wu said at a news conference Monday. \u201cThey are bound to make significant impacts on both China and the world.\u201dA German-developed instrument on the lander will measure radiation levels and collect data that could be useful in planning human missions to the far side of the moon.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementChina said it has shared data with NASA about the mission to the far side of the moon.\u00a0That claim could not be immediately substantiated, but it could raise eyebrows on Capitol Hill because NASA and the Chinese agency are prohibited from cooperating without congressional approval.The 2011 Wolf Amendment, motivated by security concerns, bans NASA scientists from working with Chinese citizens affiliated with a Chinese state enterprise or entity.At an astronautical conference in Germany last year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he talked to his Chinese counterpart about expanding cooperation.Advertisement\u201cWe do cooperate in a lot of ways, but that doesn\u2019t mean our interests are always aligned,\u201d he said, according to the Space News website. \u201cSome of these decisions are going to be made above the pay grade of the NASA administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt was in the U.S. interest to cooperate, he said, adding that China\u2019s space agency was doing \u201csome amazing scientific experiments.\u201d\u201cWe can share data and collaborate that way so that each country can learn more about science,\u201d he said.The escalating trade war has dimmed the prospect of cooperation between NASA and its Chinese counterpart. In response, U.S. and Chinese scientists have focused on technical dialogues and data sharing between nongovernmental institutions.\u201cExpanded international cooperation is the wish of all scientists,\u201d Wu said Monday. \u201cIt takes joining of forces among the world\u2019s big space powers to really make a difference in human space exploration.\u201d\u00a0A new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonChina increasingly challenges American dominance of scienceToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news China is pushing ahead with its ambitions to become a space power. China plans another moon mission this year, eyes Mars in 2020",
        "author": "Anna Fifield"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Is Set to Land Its \u2018Moon Chariot\u2019 on the Lunar South Pole (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "264",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-set-to-land-rover-on-moons-south-pole-11567687831?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=14",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s a big deal,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Alexander,\n\n\n\n director of the Rice Space Institute and professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston. \u201cThere\u2019s a renewed interest in the moon by everyone, and there are very few countries that have been able to do a soft landing.\u201d\nWith this year marking the 50th anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon, India\u2019s imprint on its surface would mark the country\u2019s rising geopolitical profile and tech capabilities.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\nCountries have unveiled ambitious plans for the moon, Mars and beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\nINDIA\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\nFirst lunar lander/rover, the Chandrayaan-2\n\n\n2019\n\n\n2021\n\n\nSecond Mars probe, the Mangalayaan-2\n\n\nCHINA\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of Mars 2020 rover and lander.\n\n\nMars lander/rover \n\n\n2020\n\n\nSpace station to be built by joining three modules in orbit\n\n\n2022\n\n\n2025\n\n\nConstruction to start on a lunar base, with a manned facility planned for 2030\n\n\n2028\n\n\nMars probe\u2014the first to return samples to Earth\n\n\n2029\n\n\nJupiter probe, China\u2019s first to an outer planet\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of the James Webb telescope.\n\n\nJames Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, begins 10-year mission.\n\n\n2021\n\n\n2023\n\n\nThe Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a space station orbiting the moon, starts operation.\n\n\n2023\n\n\nManned moon landing, NASA\u2019s first since 1972\n\n\n2026\n\n\nProbe to reach Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa\n\n\n2033\n\n\nFirst manned mission to Mars\n\n\n\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndia\u2019s journey to the moon started in 2008 when it sent its first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, to orbit the moon and seek proof of water on the surface, which it found. Its successor, Chandrayaan-2\u2014the word means moon chariot\u2014took off from India\u2019s east coast in July and has since been orbiting first the earth and then the moon, using gravity to minimize the amount of fuel needed.\n\n\nIts lander is scheduled to make a controlled descent that should put it on the moon around 1:45 a.m. Saturday India time. That is 4:15 p.m. New York time on Friday. \nIf successful, the mission would be the first to land a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s south pole and would place India behind only Russia, the U.S. and China as the fourth country to send a craft to the moon.\nA small lunar rover will roll out of the lander\u2019s belly and spend 14 days moving around analyzing minerals and the topography, if all goes according to plan.\nDespite the nation\u2019s relatively modest budget\u2014the Indian Space Research Organization\u2019s annual budget is less than $2 billion, while NASA\u2019s is more than $20 billion\u2014India is trying to shine in a time when there has been a surge of interest in space.\nA new space race has started as technology has made it easier to attempt to explore and potentially make money away from earth.\nChina landed a rover on the far side of the moon this year. It plans to send one to Mars next year and is even planning a space station above Earth and a lunar base. Japan is hoping to land a probe on the moon in 2021. The U.S. wants to build a space station orbiting the moon by 2023, make a manned moon landing the same year and even land a person on Mars by 2033.\nThe private sector also has a number of initiatives and is increasingly working with government space agencies.\n\u201cRocket science is not rocket science anymore,\u201d so countries need to do more to broadcast their strength, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ram S. Jakhu,\n\n\n\n former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStudents waved Indian national flags amid rocket models as the Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n arun sankar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOne of the ways India is escalating excitement about its mission is by landing on the South Pole. Its an area that one day could become a jumping-off point for deep-space exploration. It has ice in its craters and enjoys close to constant sunlight nearby. The ice could be turned into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe, with sunlight providing power.\n\u201cYou have the stuff you need and you have the power to access it,\u201d said Dr. Alexander at Rice.\nArriving first won\u2019t give India any special claim over what it finds but will make it part of the discussions about how moon commodities are treated in the future.\nIndia\u2019s prime minister,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi,\n\n\n\n has repeatedly pointed to the country\u2019s space program to encourage national pride. In elections this spring he bragged about its ability to send a mission to orbit Mars. In the middle of an election, New Delhi revealed that the country had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile.\n\n\nThe International Space Race SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond The New Race to the Moon: Countries and companies are gearing up to return to the lunar surface The Moonshot Mind-Set Once Came From the Government. No L India\u2019s ambitious space program is speeding toward its biggest challenge yet this weekend: landing on the moon. ",
        "author": "Eric Bellman"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Is Set to Land Its \u2018Moon Chariot\u2019 on the Lunar South Pole (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "265",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-set-to-land-rover-on-moons-south-pole-11567687831?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=56",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s a big deal,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Alexander,\n\n\n\n director of the Rice Space Institute and professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston. \u201cThere\u2019s a renewed interest in the moon by everyone, and there are very few countries that have been able to do a soft landing.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nWith this year marking the 50th anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon, India\u2019s imprint on its surface would mark the country\u2019s rising geopolitical profile and tech capabilities.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\nCountries have unveiled ambitious plans for the moon, Mars and beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\nINDIA\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\nFirst lunar lander/rover, the Chandrayaan-2\n\n\n2019\n\n\n2021\n\n\nSecond Mars probe, the Mangalayaan-2\n\n\nCHINA\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of Mars 2020 rover and lander.\n\n\nMars lander/rover \n\n\n2020\n\n\nSpace station to be built by joining three modules in orbit\n\n\n2022\n\n\n2025\n\n\nConstruction to start on a lunar base, with a manned facility planned for 2030\n\n\n2028\n\n\nMars probe\u2014the first to return samples to Earth\n\n\n2029\n\n\nJupiter probe, China\u2019s first to an outer planet\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of the James Webb telescope.\n\n\nJames Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, begins 10-year mission.\n\n\n2021\n\n\n2023\n\n\nThe Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a space station orbiting the moon, starts operation.\n\n\n2023\n\n\nManned moon landing, NASA\u2019s first since 1972\n\n\n2026\n\n\nProbe to reach Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa\n\n\n2033\n\n\nFirst manned mission to Mars\n\n\n\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndia\u2019s journey to the moon started in 2008 when it sent its first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, to orbit the moon and seek proof of water on the surface, which it found. Its successor, Chandrayaan-2\u2014the word means moon chariot\u2014took off from India\u2019s east coast in July and has since been orbiting first the earth and then the moon, using gravity to minimize the amount of fuel needed.\n\n\nIts lander is scheduled to make a controlled descent that should put it on the moon around 1:45 a.m. Saturday India time. That is 4:15 p.m. New York time on Friday. \nIf successful, the mission would be the first to land a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s south pole and would place India behind only Russia, the U.S. and China as the fourth country to send a craft to the moon.\nA small lunar rover will roll out of the lander\u2019s belly and spend 14 days moving around analyzing minerals and the topography, if all goes according to plan.\nDespite the nation\u2019s relatively modest budget\u2014the Indian Space Research Organization\u2019s annual budget is less than $2 billion, while NASA\u2019s is more than $20 billion\u2014India is trying to shine in a time when there has been a surge of interest in space.\nA new space race has started as technology has made it easier to attempt to explore and potentially make money away from earth.\nChina landed a rover on the far side of the moon this year. It plans to send one to Mars next year and is even planning a space station above Earth and a lunar base. Japan is hoping to land a probe on the moon in 2021. The U.S. wants to build a space station orbiting the moon by 2023, make a manned moon landing the same year and even land a person on Mars by 2033.\nThe private sector also has a number of initiatives and is increasingly working with government space agencies.\n\u201cRocket science is not rocket science anymore,\u201d so countries need to do more to broadcast their strength, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ram S. Jakhu,\n\n\n\n former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStudents waved Indian national flags amid rocket models as the Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n arun sankar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOne of the ways India is escalating excitement about its mission is by landing on the South Pole. Its an area that one day could become a jumping-off point for deep-space exploration. It has ice in its craters and enjoys close to constant sunlight nearby. The ice could be turned into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe, with sunlight providing power.\n\u201cYou have the stuff you need and you have the power to access it,\u201d said Dr. Alexander at Rice.\nArriving first won\u2019t give India any special claim over what it finds but will make it part of the discussions about how moon commodities are treated in the future.\nIndia\u2019s prime minister,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi,\n\n\n\n has repeatedly pointed to the country\u2019s space program to encourage national pride. In elections this spring he bragged about its ability to send a mission to orbit Mars. In the middle of an election, New Delhi revealed that the country had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile.\n\n\nThe International Space Race SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond The New Race to the Moon: Countries and companies are gearing up to return to the lunar surface The Moonshot Mind-Set Once Came From the Government. No Longer What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Life off Earth The Moon Is a Huge Potential Resource. But Who Owns It? \n\n\nIndia\u2019s ability to send probes to the moon and Mars far more cheaply than NASA is a point of pride for many Indians. The affordability and Indian ingenuity behind an orbiter that reached Mars in 2014 was even portrayed in a Bollywood movie this year called \u201cMission Mangal\u201d or Mission Mars.\n\u201cIf we go to NASA with every little problem, then we will be destroyed,\u201d the proud local scientist at the center of the film says at one point.\nTo be sure, lunar landings are dangerous and difficult. It is hard to predict terrain and other conditions and impossible to adjust the landing in real time as it takes seconds for instructions to go to and from Earth. An Israeli company attempted to land a rover on the moon this year, but it crashed during landing.\nIndia hopes that success won\u2019t only raise its profile but will also generate business. It has long sold space on its rockets and helped launch more than 400 satellites over the years, most of them for other countries.\nIt also has its own emerging private space industry, which is developing new technologies, sometimes working with the ISRO.\n\u201cWe are able to do things better, faster and cheaper than the West,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vishesh Rajaram,\n\n\n\n managing partner of Speciale Incept Advisors, a company that invests in space startups and other emerging technologies in India. \u201cA successful moon mission will reiterate our track record for space, and it is just the tip of the iceberg for what is going to come out of India.\u201d\n\u2014Vibhuti Agarwal contributed to this article.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tRam S. Jakhu is former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated McGill University was in Toronto. (Sept. 6, 2019) India\u2019s ambitious space program is speeding toward its biggest challenge yet this weekend: landing on the moon. ",
        "author": "Eric Bellman"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Is Set to Land Its \u2018Moon Chariot\u2019 on the Lunar South Pole (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "266",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-set-to-land-rover-on-moons-south-pole-11567687831?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=51",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s a big deal,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Alexander,\n\n\n\n director of the Rice Space Institute and professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston. \u201cThere\u2019s a renewed interest in the moon by everyone, and there are very few countries that have been able to do a soft landing.\u201d\nWith this year marking the 50th anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon, India\u2019s imprint on its surface would mark the country\u2019s rising geopolitical profile and tech capabilities.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\nCountries have unveiled ambitious plans for the moon, Mars and beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\nINDIA\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\nFirst lunar lander/rover, the Chandrayaan-2\n\n\n2019\n\n\n2021\n\n\nSecond Mars probe, the Mangalayaan-2\n\n\nCHINA\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of Mars 2020 rover and lander.\n\n\nMars lander/rover \n\n\n2020\n\n\nSpace station to be built by joining three modules in orbit\n\n\n2022\n\n\n2025\n\n\nConstruction to start on a lunar base, with a manned facility planned for 2030\n\n\n2028\n\n\nMars probe\u2014the first to return samples to Earth\n\n\n2029\n\n\nJupiter probe, China\u2019s first to an outer planet\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of the James Webb telescope.\n\n\nJames Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, begins 10-year mission.\n\n\n2021\n\n\n2023\n\n\nThe Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a space station orbiting the moon, starts operation.\n\n\n2023\n\n\nManned moon landing, NASA\u2019s first since 1972\n\n\n2026\n\n\nProbe to reach Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa\n\n\n2033\n\n\nFirst manned mission to Mars\n\n\n\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndia\u2019s journey to the moon started in 2008 when it sent its first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, to orbit the moon and seek proof of water on the surface, which it found. Its successor, Chandrayaan-2\u2014the word means moon chariot\u2014took off from India\u2019s east coast in July and has since been orbiting first the earth and then the moon, using gravity to minimize the amount of fuel needed.\n\n\nIts lander is scheduled to make a controlled descent that should put it on the moon around 1:45 a.m. Saturday India time. That is 4:15 p.m. New York time on Friday. \nIf successful, the mission would be the first to land a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s south pole and would place India behind only Russia, the U.S. and China as the fourth country to send a craft to the moon.\nA small lunar rover will roll out of the lander\u2019s belly and spend 14 days moving around analyzing minerals and the topography, if all goes according to plan.\nDespite the nation\u2019s relatively modest budget\u2014the Indian Space Research Organization\u2019s annual budget is less than $2 billion, while NASA\u2019s is more than $20 billion\u2014India is trying to shine in a time when there has been a surge of interest in space.\nA new space race has started as technology has made it easier to attempt to explore and potentially make money away from earth.\nChina landed a rover on the far side of the moon this year. It plans to send one to Mars next year and is even planning a space station above Earth and a lunar base. Japan is hoping to land a probe on the moon in 2021. The U.S. wants to build a space station orbiting the moon by 2023, make a manned moon landing the same year and even land a person on Mars by 2033.\nThe private sector also has a number of initiatives and is increasingly working with government space agencies.\n\u201cRocket science is not rocket science anymore,\u201d so countries need to do more to broadcast their strength, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ram S. Jakhu,\n\n\n\n former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStudents waved Indian national flags amid rocket models as the Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n arun sankar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOne of the ways India is escalating excitement about its mission is by landing on the South Pole. Its an area that one day could become a jumping-off point for deep-space exploration. It has ice in its craters and enjoys close to constant sunlight nearby. The ice could be turned into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe, with sunlight providing power.\n\u201cYou have the stuff you need and you have the power to access it,\u201d said Dr. Alexander at Rice.\nArriving first won\u2019t give India any special claim over what it finds but will make it part of the discussions about how moon commodities are treated in the future.\nIndia\u2019s prime minister,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi,\n\n\n\n has repeatedly pointed to the country\u2019s space program to encourage national pride. In elections this spring he bragged about its ability to send a mission to orbit Mars. In the middle of an election, New Delhi revealed that the country had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile.\n\n\nThe International Space Race SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond The New Race to the Moon: Countries and companies are gearing up to return to the lunar surface The Moonshot Mind-Set Once Came From the Government. No L India\u2019s ambitious space program is speeding toward its biggest challenge yet this weekend: landing on the moon. ",
        "author": "Eric Bellman"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Is Set to Land Its \u2018Moon Chariot\u2019 on the Lunar South Pole (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "267",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-set-to-land-rover-on-moons-south-pole-11567687831?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=67",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s a big deal,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Alexander,\n\n\n\n director of the Rice Space Institute and professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston. \u201cThere\u2019s a renewed interest in the moon by everyone, and there are very few countries that have been able to do a soft landing.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nWith this year marking the 50th anniversary of the first manned mission to the moon, India\u2019s imprint on its surface would mark the country\u2019s rising geopolitical profile and tech capabilities.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\nCountries have unveiled ambitious plans for the moon, Mars and beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\nINDIA\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\nFirst lunar lander/rover, the Chandrayaan-2\n\n\n2019\n\n\n2021\n\n\nSecond Mars probe, the Mangalayaan-2\n\n\nCHINA\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of Mars 2020 rover and lander.\n\n\nMars lander/rover \n\n\n2020\n\n\nSpace station to be built by joining three modules in orbit\n\n\n2022\n\n\n2025\n\n\nConstruction to start on a lunar base, with a manned facility planned for 2030\n\n\n2028\n\n\nMars probe\u2014the first to return samples to Earth\n\n\n2029\n\n\nJupiter probe, China\u2019s first to an outer planet\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of the James Webb telescope.\n\n\nJames Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, begins 10-year mission.\n\n\n2021\n\n\n2023\n\n\nThe Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a space station orbiting the moon, starts operation.\n\n\n2023\n\n\nManned moon landing, NASA\u2019s first since 1972\n\n\n2026\n\n\nProbe to reach Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa\n\n\n2033\n\n\nFirst manned mission to Mars\n\n\n\n\n\nIndian rocket carrying Chandrayaan-2. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndia\u2019s journey to the moon started in 2008 when it sent its first moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, to orbit the moon and seek proof of water on the surface, which it found. Its successor, Chandrayaan-2\u2014the word means moon chariot\u2014took off from India\u2019s east coast in July and has since been orbiting first the earth and then the moon, using gravity to minimize the amount of fuel needed.\n\n\nIts lander is scheduled to make a controlled descent that should put it on the moon around 1:45 a.m. Saturday India time. That is 4:15 p.m. New York time on Friday. \nIf successful, the mission would be the first to land a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s south pole and would place India behind only Russia, the U.S. and China as the fourth country to send a craft to the moon.\nA small lunar rover will roll out of the lander\u2019s belly and spend 14 days moving around analyzing minerals and the topography, if all goes according to plan.\nDespite the nation\u2019s relatively modest budget\u2014the Indian Space Research Organization\u2019s annual budget is less than $2 billion, while NASA\u2019s is more than $20 billion\u2014India is trying to shine in a time when there has been a surge of interest in space.\nA new space race has started as technology has made it easier to attempt to explore and potentially make money away from earth.\nChina landed a rover on the far side of the moon this year. It plans to send one to Mars next year and is even planning a space station above Earth and a lunar base. Japan is hoping to land a probe on the moon in 2021. The U.S. wants to build a space station orbiting the moon by 2023, make a manned moon landing the same year and even land a person on Mars by 2033.\nThe private sector also has a number of initiatives and is increasingly working with government space agencies.\n\u201cRocket science is not rocket science anymore,\u201d so countries need to do more to broadcast their strength, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ram S. Jakhu,\n\n\n\n former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStudents waved Indian national flags amid rocket models as the Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n arun sankar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOne of the ways India is escalating excitement about its mission is by landing on the South Pole. Its an area that one day could become a jumping-off point for deep-space exploration. It has ice in its craters and enjoys close to constant sunlight nearby. The ice could be turned into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe, with sunlight providing power.\n\u201cYou have the stuff you need and you have the power to access it,\u201d said Dr. Alexander at Rice.\nArriving first won\u2019t give India any special claim over what it finds but will make it part of the discussions about how moon commodities are treated in the future.\nIndia\u2019s prime minister,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi,\n\n\n\n has repeatedly pointed to the country\u2019s space program to encourage national pride. In elections this spring he bragged about its ability to send a mission to orbit Mars. In the middle of an election, New Delhi revealed that the country had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile.\n\n\nThe International Space Race SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond The New Race to the Moon: Countries and companies are gearing up to return to the lunar surface The Moonshot Mind-Set Once Came From the Government. India\u2019s ambitious space program is speeding toward its biggest challenge yet this weekend: landing on the moon. ",
        "author": "Eric Bellman"
    },
    {
        "title": "No masks, no coughs: Robots can be just what the doctor ordered in time of social distancing (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "268",
        "date": "2020-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/covid-robots-social-distance-jobs-japan/2020/07/08/1a82ce96-afc6-11ea-98b5-279a6479a1e4_story.html",
        "text": "TOKYO \u2014 As the coronavirus pandemic rewrites the rules of human interaction, it also has inspired new thinking about how robots and other machines might step in.The stuff of the bot world \u2014 early factory-line automation up to today's artificial intelligence \u2014 has been a growing fact of life for decades. The worldwide health crisis has added urgency to the question of how to bring robotics into the public health equation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNowhere is that truer than in Japan, a country with a long fascination with robots, from android assistants to robot receptionists. Since the virus arrived, robots have offered their services as bartenders, security guards and deliverymen.Story continues below advertisementBut they don\u2019t necessarily need to supplant humans, researchers say. They can also bridge the gap between people mindful of social distance \u2014 now or when the next major contagion hits.AdvertisementWant to drop in on your elderly parents but are afraid of passing on a coronavirus infection? Maybe you\u2019re missing your grandchildren, and finding Zoom chats a little limiting?Ideas are brewing.Hugging the botThe \u201cnewme\u201d robot developed by Japanese company Avatarin is basically a tablet computer on a stand, with wheels. The user controls the avatar from a laptop or tablet, and his or her face shows on the avatar\u2019s screen.\u201cIt\u2019s really like teleporting your consciousness,\u201d said founder and CEO Akira Fukabori. \u201cYou are really present.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlready available commercially, Avatarin\u2019s robots have been used by doctors to interact with patients in a Japanese coronavirus ward, by university students in Tokyo to \u201cattend\u201d a graduation ceremony, and by fans of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team to remotely interview their favorite players after games held in empty stadiums.AdvertisementThere are even avatar robots that have just arrived in the International Space Station.But it\u2019s the way the robot is already being used by families separated by the coronavirus that really underscores the heart of the technology \u2014 starting with the family of the company\u2019s chief operating officer, Kevin Kajitani, whose parents live in Seattle.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHis parents can\u2019t always come and visit their grandson,\u201d Fukabori said. \u201cBut they always access the avatar, and can even chase their grandson. And the grandson really hugs the robot.\u201dAvatarin is part of Japan\u2019s ANA airline group, and the company has joined with the X Prize Foundation to launch a $10 million, four-year contest for companies to create more-complex robots that could further develop the avatar concept.\u201cYou need to move,\u201d Fukabori said. \u201cThis is really important, because we forget the freedom of this mobility. You can just walk around, and people will talk to you about really, really natural things. That creates human trust. That isn\u2019t as easy in WebEx or Zoom, where if you don\u2019t know each other it\u2019s really hard to keep talking.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWork is underway on prototypes that allow users to control a remote robot through virtual reality headsets and gloves that allow the wearer to pick up, hold, touch and feel an object with a distant robotic hand, with potential uses ranging from space exploration to disaster relief or caring for the elderly.But Fukabori said the cheaper, lightweight avatars offer more immediate and affordable uses. What sets this project apart from existing avatar robots, the company says, is the ability for users to access the robots easily from a laptop, by renting them out rather than having to buy them.Avatarin hopes to install the avatars in more hospitals and in eldercare centers, shops, museums, zoos and aquariums. The company also aims to have 1,000 in place for next year\u2019s Tokyo Olympics.Cleaning patrolIn Tokyo,\u00a0robotics lab ZMP has been developing three small bots to help compensate for Japan\u2019s shrinking labor force, employing the same technology as self-driving cars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA delivery robot aims to transport goods ordered online from local warehouses to customers\u2019 doors; a patrol robot, with six cameras, does the job of a security guard; a self-driving wheelchair can be programed to take users to specific destinations. The wheelchair is already available and approved for use on Tokyo streets. The others still await official permission to venture out alone in public.Now, the patrol robot has been adapted so it can also disinfect surfaces as it patrols, and is attracting interest from Tokyo\u2019s Metro stations as well as other businesses.In May, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe noted surging demand for unmanned deliveries and pledged to carry out tests to see if delivery robots were safe to use on roads and sidewalks by the end of the year.Story continues below advertisementEven the self-driving wheelchair can come into its own amid a coronavirus-filled world, the company said, potentially helping elderly people move around more independently without a helper who might be a vector for the virus.Advertisement\u201cBefore corona, most customers wanted to reduce workers,\u201d said ZMP\u2019s chief executive, Hisashi Taniguchi. \u201cBut after corona, our customers changed drastically. Now, they want to accelerate unmanned systems.\u201dBot bartenderQbit Robotics, also in Tokyo, has programmed a robotic arm and hand to interact with customers and serve them coffee, mix cocktails or even serve a simple cup of instant pasta.President and chief executive Hiroya Nakano said he aims not to replace human interaction but to supply robots that can communicate and entertain in a \u201cfriendly\u201d way.Story continues below advertisementWhile robots can sometimes seem disturbing and alien to Westerners, they tend to be seen in a more welcoming light by many Japanese people, Nakano said.\u201cUntil now, expectations have been high for what robots can do in the future, but they haven\u2019t been able to do what humans do,\u201d he said. \u201cBut now we are living with the coronavirus, the idea of no contact, or automation, has become especially important. And I feel there is an extremely high expectation for robots to meet that demand.\u201dAnd one can dance, tooThe Cruzr robot takes kids\u2019 temperatures and reminds them to follow anti-virus rules and can also provide basic academic help and teach simple dance moves. (Min Joo Kim/The Washington Post)In South Korea, a Chinese-made robot is already greeting children in Seoul\u2019s schools as they reopen.AdvertisementThe Cruzr, with eyes that beam a neon-blue light and a video screen on its chest, takes kids\u2019 temperatures and reminds them to follow anti-virus rules.Story continues below advertisement\u201cPlease wear your mask properly,\u201d the robot recently told a student at Wooam Elementary School whose mask wasn\u2019t covering his nose.Chinese robot maker UBTech launched Cruzr in 2017 as a humanoid service robot for businesses, but the pandemic has given it added value as a personal assistant free from infection risks.It is also being used by medical institutions for mass temperature screening, patient monitoring and medical record-keeping, helping overwhelmed medical workers.In June, Seoul\u2019s Seocho district government deployed Cruzr robots to the district\u2019s 51 public schools, helping reduce the burden on overworked teachers.Before the robot came to school, teachers had taken kids\u2019 temperatures as they arrived, creating long lines and raising infection risks from human contact. Now, the robot checks the temperature of multiple students as they walk by and immediately sounds an alarm if anyone has a fever.\u201cAt first, students were ill at ease with the robot greeting them at the school gate, but in a matter of weeks, students have embraced it as part of the school community,\u201d said Yoo Jung-ho, head of Wooam\u2019s science department.At the school, students waved toward the robot at the gate as they walked into the school, and nodded in agreement when it reminded them about the mask rules.AdvertisementThe robot can also provide basic academic help and entertain students by teaching them simple dance moves.\u201cOf course, robots can\u2019t replace teachers at classrooms yet, but there is significant and rising potential for \u2018contactless\u2019 teaching with the pandemic,\u201d Yoo said.Nine-year-old Lee Hye-rin says she \u201cbefriended\u201d the robot after they danced together.\u201cWhen I first saw the robot standing in place of our teachers greeting us at the entrance, I found it cold and disorienting,\u201d Lee said. \u201cBut this robot is actually the same height as I am and also displays goofy dance moves, and I realized I can befriend him and share a fun time.\u201dBut Lee feels the robot is not so friendly when it orders her to wear her mask properly.\u201cIf I fail to follow the mask rule, my teacher\u2019s warning will be followed with a smile telling me to behave better in the future, but the robot doesn\u2019t smile when it warns me about the mask,\u201d she said.\n\nKim reported from Seoul.Japanese company adopts blanked virus tests to speed \u2018exit strategy\u2019The virus that shutdown the whole worldWhat to binge and what to read during the pandemic, according to Post foreign correspondents They rove. They disinfect. They make drinks. They even bust a few dance moves. No masks, no coughs: Robots can be just what the doctor ordered in time of social distancing",
        "author": "Simon Denyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "We have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt. (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "269",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/we-have-liftoff-india-launches-moon-mission-on-second-attempt/2019/07/22/8a1cb69c-aa34-11e9-8733-48c87235f396_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 Varunavi Sreejith, 13, gaped at the screen in front of her, inching to the edge of her seat as the clock ticked down to 2:43 p.m. When Chandrayaan-2, India\u2019s second lunar mission, took off, she jumped up, clapping, a bright smile lighting up her face.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI am very proud and relieved,\u201d Varunavi said. A student at JBM Global, one of India\u2019s only high schools offering a curriculum dedicated to space exploration, she had stayed after school to watch the live-streamed launch in the auditorium.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t alone. Hundreds of thousands of Indians across the country went online to watch the nation\u2019s most ambitious space mission to date. On Facebook, the live launch had more than 650,000 viewers. Over 7,500 people registered to travel to Satish Dhawan Space Center off the country\u2019s southeastern coast to witness it in person.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter what it called a \u201ctechnical snag\u201d aborted the first launch attempt a week ago, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully sent Chandrayaan-2 on its journey to the moon Monday afternoon in a testament to the country\u2019s burgeoning capabilities in space. Its lander will attempt to descend onto the lunar surface in the first week of September to collect information on topography and look for water.The space agency has \u201cbounced back with flying colors,\u201d ISRO chief K. Sivan said after the launch. \u201cIt is the beginning of a historical journey for India.\u201d\u00a0Experts say the successful second attempt so soon after the aborted launch highlights the ISRO\u2019s confidence in its technological capabilities, which have not been hamstrung by its paltry $1.8\u00a0billion budget. In comparison, NASA received $21.5\u00a0billion\u00a0in funding this year.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in the big leagues now,\u201d said Chaitanya Giri, a fellow at the space and ocean studies program at Gateway House, a Mumbai-based think tank. He added that the rapt public attention is a sign that India\u2019s space exploration program should now grow quickly.Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a\u00a0tweet, \u201cThe launch of #Chandrayaan2 illustrates the prowess of our scientists and the determination of [1.3\u00a0billion] Indians to scale new frontiers of science.\u201dWith Chandrayaan-2, India is attempting a soft landing on the moon \u2014 a feat accomplished by only three other countries: the United States, Russia and China. It also hopes to be the first to land in the uncharted south-pole region. In its first moon outing with Chandrayaan-1, India was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on its surface.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe low-cost, homegrown technology that has powered India\u2019s space program is a source of national pride and inspiration.\u00a0New Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launchJBM Global, a top school in a Delhi suburb, has instituted astronomy and space-studies classes for all age groups. \u201cThe response from the students is tremendous,\u201d said Uma Negi, a teacher from the educational company Space India, which conducts classes at the school. \u201cShowing them the launch encourages their curiosity.\u201dEarlier in the day, Negi showed the students models of Chandrayaan-2 that they attempted to replicate. Varunavi, who had been disappointed by the aborted launch, spoke excitedly about the possible discoveries of the new mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is a large unknown area, so we [Indians] have the chance to make a mark,\u201d she said.\u00a0While ISRO spokesman Vivek Singh refused to divulge details about the problem that delayed the launch, he said that \u201cin space science, even if there is a small observation, you cannot overlook that.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementAt a modest price tag of $141\u00a0million, Chandrayaan-2 is made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. It was\u00a0sent into space by the country\u2019s most powerful launcher, Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III, the complete design and fabrication of which has been done within the country. The orbiter will observe the lunar surface and communicate with the lander, Vikram, named after the ISRO founder.Story continues below advertisementThe rover, Pragyan, which means \u201cwisdom\u201d in Sanskrit, is a six-wheeled robotic vehicle powered by solar energy.The launch comes on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission, when humans first landed on the moon. India has also announced its intention of sending a manned space mission to the moon by 2022.\u00a0\u00a0India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The Chandrayaan-2 probe will try to land on the uncharted lunar south-pole region, carrying the hopes of a nation. We have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "We have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt. (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "270",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/we-have-liftoff-india-launches-moon-mission-on-second-attempt/2019/07/22/8a1cb69c-aa34-11e9-8733-48c87235f396_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 Varunavi Sreejith, 13, gaped at the screen in front of her, inching to the edge of her seat as the clock ticked down to 2:43 p.m. When Chandrayaan-2, India\u2019s second lunar mission, took off, she jumped up, clapping, a bright smile lighting up her face.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI am very proud and relieved,\u201d Varunavi said. A student at JBM Global, one of India\u2019s only high schools offering a curriculum dedicated to space exploration, she had stayed after school to watch the live-streamed launch in the auditorium.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t alone. Hundreds of thousands of Indians across the country went online to watch the nation\u2019s most ambitious space mission to date. On Facebook, the live launch had more than 650,000 viewers. Over 7,500 people registered to travel to Satish Dhawan Space Center off the country\u2019s southeastern coast to witness it in person.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter what it called a \u201ctechnical snag\u201d aborted the first launch attempt a week ago, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully sent Chandrayaan-2 on its journey to the moon Monday afternoon in a testament to the country\u2019s burgeoning capabilities in space. Its lander will attempt to descend onto the lunar surface in the first week of September to collect information on topography and look for water.The space agency has \u201cbounced back with flying colors,\u201d ISRO chief K. Sivan said after the launch. \u201cIt is the beginning of a historical journey for India.\u201d\u00a0Experts say the successful second attempt so soon after the aborted launch highlights the ISRO\u2019s confidence in its technological capabilities, which have not been hamstrung by its paltry $1.8\u00a0billion budget. In comparison, NASA received $21.5\u00a0billion\u00a0in funding this year.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in the big leagues now,\u201d said Chaitanya Giri, a fellow at the space and ocean studies program at Gateway House, a Mumbai-based think tank. He added that the rapt public attention is a sign that India\u2019s space exploration program should now grow quickly.Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a\u00a0tweet, \u201cThe launch of #Chandrayaan2 illustrates the prowess of our scientists and the determination of [1.3\u00a0billion] Indians to scale new frontiers of science.\u201dWith Chandrayaan-2, India is attempting a soft landing on the moon \u2014 a feat accomplished by only three other countries: the United States, Russia and China. It also hopes to be the first to land in the uncharted south-pole region. In its first moon outing with Chandrayaan-1, India was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on its surface.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe low-cost, homegrown technology that has powered India\u2019s space program is a source of national pride and inspiration.\u00a0New Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launchJBM Global, a top school in a Delhi suburb, has instituted astronomy and space-studies classes for all age groups. \u201cThe response from the students is tremendous,\u201d said Uma Negi, a teacher from the educational company Space India, which conducts classes at the school. \u201cShowing them the launch encourages their curiosity.\u201dEarlier in the day, Negi showed the students models of Chandrayaan-2 that they attempted to replicate. Varunavi, who had been disappointed by the aborted launch, spoke excitedly about the possible discoveries of the new mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is a large unknown area, so we [Indians] have the chance to make a mark,\u201d she said.\u00a0While ISRO spokesman Vivek Singh refused to divulge details about the problem that delayed the launch, he said that \u201cin space science, even if there is a small observation, you cannot overlook that.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementAt a modest price tag of $141\u00a0million, Chandrayaan-2 is made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. It was\u00a0sent into space by the country\u2019s most powerful launcher, Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III, the complete design and fabrication of which has been done within the country. The orbiter will observe the lunar surface and communicate with the lander, Vikram, named after the ISRO founder.Story continues below advertisementThe rover, Pragyan, which means \u201cwisdom\u201d in Sanskrit, is a six-wheeled robotic vehicle powered by solar energy.The launch comes on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission, when humans first landed on the moon. India has also announced its intention of sending a manned space mission to the moon by 2022.\u00a0\u00a0India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The Chandrayaan-2 probe will try to land on the uncharted lunar south-pole region, carrying the hopes of a nation. We have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "We have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt. (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "271",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/we-have-liftoff-india-launches-moon-mission-on-second-attempt/2019/07/22/8a1cb69c-aa34-11e9-8733-48c87235f396_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 Varunavi Sreejith, 13, gaped at the screen in front of her, inching to the edge of her seat as the clock ticked down to 2:43 p.m. When Chandrayaan-2, India\u2019s second lunar mission, took off, she jumped up, clapping, a bright smile lighting up her face.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI am very proud and relieved,\u201d Varunavi said. A student at JBM Global, one of India\u2019s only high schools offering a curriculum dedicated to space exploration, she had stayed after school to watch the live-streamed launch in the auditorium.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t alone. Hundreds of thousands of Indians across the country went online to watch the nation\u2019s most ambitious space mission to date. On Facebook, the live launch had more than 650,000 viewers. Over 7,500 people registered to travel to Satish Dhawan Space Center off the country\u2019s southeastern coast to witness it in person.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter what it called a \u201ctechnical snag\u201d aborted the first launch attempt a week ago, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully sent Chandrayaan-2 on its journey to the moon Monday afternoon in a testament to the country\u2019s burgeoning capabilities in space. Its lander will attempt to descend onto the lunar surface in the first week of September to collect information on topography and look for water.The space agency has \u201cbounced back with flying colors,\u201d ISRO chief K. Sivan said after the launch. \u201cIt is the beginning of a historical journey for India.\u201d\u00a0Experts say the successful second attempt so soon after the aborted launch highlights the ISRO\u2019s confidence in its technological capabilities, which have not been hamstrung by its paltry $1.8\u00a0billion budget. In comparison, NASA received $21.5\u00a0billion\u00a0in funding this year.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in the big leagues now,\u201d said Chaitanya Giri, a fellow at the space and ocean studies program at Gateway House, a Mumbai-based think tank. He added that the rapt public attention is a sign that India\u2019s space exploration program should now grow quickly.Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a\u00a0tweet, \u201cThe launch of #Chandrayaan2 illustrates the prowess of our scientists and the determination of [1.3\u00a0billion] Indians to scale new frontiers of science.\u201dWith Chandrayaan-2, India is attempting a soft landing on the moon \u2014 a feat accomplished by only three other countries: the United States, Russia and China. It also hopes to be the first to land in the uncharted south-pole region. In its first moon outing with Chandrayaan-1, India was instrumental in the\u00a0discovery of water molecules on its surface.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe low-cost, homegrown technology that has powered India\u2019s space program is a source of national pride and inspiration.\u00a0New Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launchJBM Global, a top school in a Delhi suburb, has instituted astronomy and space-studies classes for all age groups. \u201cThe response from the students is tremendous,\u201d said Uma Negi, a teacher from the educational company Space India, which conducts classes at the school. \u201cShowing them the launch encourages their curiosity.\u201dEarlier in the day, Negi showed the students models of Chandrayaan-2 that they attempted to replicate. Varunavi, who had been disappointed by the aborted launch, spoke excitedly about the possible discoveries of the new mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is a large unknown area, so we [Indians] have the chance to make a mark,\u201d she said.\u00a0While ISRO spokesman Vivek Singh refused to divulge details about the problem that delayed the launch, he said that \u201cin space science, even if there is a small observation, you cannot overlook that.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementAt a modest price tag of $141\u00a0million, Chandrayaan-2 is made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. It was\u00a0sent into space by the country\u2019s most powerful launcher, Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III, the complete design and fabrication of which has been done within the country. The orbiter will observe the lunar surface and communicate with the lander, Vikram, named after the ISRO founder.Story continues below advertisementThe rover, Pragyan, which means \u201cwisdom\u201d in Sanskrit, is a six-wheeled robotic vehicle powered by solar energy.The launch comes on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission, when humans first landed on the moon. India has also announced its intention of sending a manned space mission to the moon by 2022.\u00a0\u00a0India\u2019s moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The Chandrayaan-2 probe will try to land on the uncharted lunar south-pole region, carrying the hopes of a nation. We have liftoff! India launches moon mission on second attempt.",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "South Korea Launches First Homegrown Rocket, Satellite Into Space (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "272",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korea-launches-first-homegrown-rocket-and-satellite-into-space-11634815655?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=13",
        "text": "The three-stage, liquid-fuel rocket\u2014called Korea Satellite Launch Vehicle II, or Nuri\u2014blasted off at 5 p.m. local time Thursday from the Naro Space Center in Goheung, a city on the country\u2019s south coast. The 200-ton rocket, with a 1.5 ton dummy satellite, launched into space and reached an altitude of about 435 miles. But the satellite failed to reach orbit.\n\n\n\n\nThe launch comes at a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula, just two days after the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kim Jong Un\n \n\n\n\n regime said it had test-fired a ballistic missile launched from a submarine\u2014Pyongyang\u2019s fifth weapons test in recent weeks.\n\n\nNorth Korean state media didn\u2019t immediately respond to the launch, but Pyongyang has been swift to criticize Seoul\u2019s efforts to bolster its national defenses. In a speech last week, Mr. Kim said his country had to boost its own defenses due to South Korea\u2019s \u201cexcessive military obesity and covetousness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople at Seoul Railway Station cheered as they watched a broadcast of the launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn recent weeks, North Korea has pointed to \u201cdouble standards\u201d from South Korea and the U.S., for accelerating their own weapons development while calling Pyongyang\u2019s missile tests provocations.\nPyongyang said Wednesday that it had launched a ballistic missile from a submarine, which was the latest in a series of recent weapons tests by both Koreas that some have called an arms race. But even as Pyongyang and Seoul launch competing weaponry, from water, from land and into space, the countries are more aligned than they appear.\n\u201cNorth Korea is saying strengthening their military capability will prevent war and South Korea is saying it will ensure peace,\u201d said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. \u201cThe purposes are symmetrical.\u201d\nMr. Kim, earlier this month, said his neighbors to the south weren\u2019t the enemy. South Korean President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Moon Jae-in\n\n\n\n has recently called for an end-of-war declaration and argued that a strong defense is always aimed at ensuring peace.\n\u201cWe envision a smart yet strong military based on advanced science and technology, and promote peace together with the international community,\u201d said Mr. Moon, at a South Korean defense exhibition Wednesday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 200-ton rocket reached an altitude of about 435 miles, but the satellite failed to reach orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n YONHAP NEWS AGENCY/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nA narrative of an inter-Korean arms race plays into the Kim regime\u2019s hands, giving Pyongyang an ability to accuse Seoul, Washington and the international community of holding double standards. This perception helps create an environment for North Korea to negotiate back to stability, gives it cover to upgrade nuclear missile technology and limit South Korea\u2019s military capabilities, said Lee Ho-ryung, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a state-run think tank in Seoul.\n\u201cNorth Korea has every incentive during a time when it has serious internal problems to carry out an arms race so that it does not look like the North is inferior in any military capability,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Bennett,\n\n\n\n a senior defense analyst at Rand Corp., a think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif.\nSouth Korea\u2019s arms exports from 2016 to 2020 were 210% higher than between 2011 and 2015, ranking ninth world-wide, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data. Britain, Iraq and Indonesia are some of the main buyers of South Korea\u2019s defense products. The country is one of the largest arms importers in the world, buying weapons such as the U.S.\u2019s F-35 jet fighters. South Korea had the world\u2019s 10th-largest defense budget in 2019.\nNorth Korea is one of the most secretive exporters of arms. But it spends more on its military, as a ratio of gross domestic product, than any other of the 170 countries tracked by the U.S. State Department.\nIn 2013, South Korea, on its third try, sent its 140-ton Naro rocket, carrying a 220-pound satellite, into space. The main rocket was built in Russia and Thursday\u2019s launch was the first domestically built space launch vehicle. The Nuri rocket was developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute.\nSouth Korea\u2019s ambitions are to join the elite space club. Just six countries have successfully launched satellites over 1 ton into orbit. South Korea has been seeking to acquire this technology for more than a decade, investing around $1.6 billion in building the Nuri rocket since 2010. South Korea has now secured the key technology to develop and launch space rockets carrying domestic satellites instead of relying on U.S. satellite technology for information. The space program will contribute to South Korea\u2019s goals such as establishing a 6G network and launching spy satellites.\nBut the Nuri rocket likely won\u2019t be modified for use in a military strike, as South Korea\u2019s missiles use solid fuel unlike the liquid-fueled rocket, military experts say.\nSouth Korea has been working to develop its space program for years, and the Thursday launch is an achievement that gives the country the capability to launch satellites for military purposes and collect information on neighboring countries, said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korea studies at South Korea\u2019s Dongguk University.\n\u201cIt\u2019s a meaningful advancement in national defense and space exploration joining the league of developed countries with highly advanced technology,\u201d Mr. Kim said.\n\n\nMore Developments in Asia\n\n\n\n\nNorth Korea Tested Components of New ICBM in February, March Launches, U.S. Officials Say \nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nFrom Prosecutor to President: Yoon Suk-yeol Rides Wave of Discontent in South Korea\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nChina-Taiwan Tensions: What\u2019s Behind the Divide\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nSouth Korea Elects Yoon Suk-yeol as President, Bringing Back a Tougher Line on North Korea \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nNorth Korea Restarts Work at Nuclear Testing Site, Report Says\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nWrite to Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com and Timothy W. Martin at timothy.martin@wsj.com The technology could help expand Seoul\u2019s military satellite surveillance of Kim Jong Un\u2019s regime to the north amid heightened tensions. ",
        "author": "Dasl Yoon and Timothy W. Martin"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Upstart Wants to Be the Grubhub of China (and the Yelp, and the Groupon, and the Kayak) (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "273",
        "date": "2018-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/offering-discounts-and-delivery-meituan-wants-to-become-chinas-next-internet-giant-1529578801?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=93",
        "text": "Few U.S. or Chinese firms offer the same breadth of services as Meituan does, and it hopes to carve a spot for itself among Chinese internet giants\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Baidu Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tencent Holdings Ltd.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Beijing-based company, backed by social-media giant Tencent, has an app used by more than 320 million people to buy cinema tickets, book lifestyle services or get restaurant recommendations.\n\n\n From Restaurants to Rentals\n Meituan-Dianping offers Chinese consumers an all-in-one services app. Meituan-Dianping\u2019s in-app functions Hotel booking Works like Booking.com Movie and show tickets Works like Fandango Restaurant reviews Works like Yelp Food delivery Works like Grubhub Ride hailing Works like Uber Travel booking Works like Kayak Home rentals Works like Airbnb Supermarket Works like Walmart Meituan-Dianping\u2019s in-app functions Restaurant reviews Works like Yelp 1 Movie and show tickets Works like Fandango 2 Hotel booking Works like Booking.com 3 4 2 3 1 Food delivery Works like Grubhub 4 Ride hailing Works like Uber 5 6 5 7 Home rentals Works like Airbnb 8 6 Travel booking Works like Kayak 7 Supermarket Works like Walmart 8 Meituan-Dianping\u2019s in-app functions Restaurant reviews Works like Yelp 1 Movie and show tickets Works like Fandango 2 Hotel booking Works like Booking.com 3 Food delivery Works like Grubhub 4 4 2 3 1 Ride hailing Works like Uber 5 6 5 7 Home rentals Works like Airbnb 6 8 Travel booking Works like Kayak 7 Supermarket Works like Walmart 8 Meituan-Dianping\u2019s in-app functions 4 2 3 1 6 5 7 8 Restaurant reviews Works like Yelp 1 Movie and show tickets Works like Fandango 2 Hotel booking Works like Booking.com 3 Food delivery Works like Grubhub 4 Ride hailing Works like Uber 5 Home rentals Works like Airbnb 6 Travel booking Works like Kayak 7 Supermarket Works like Walmart 8 Source: Meituan-Dianping \n\n\n\u201cWe are talking about eating, traveling and all the local services,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Shen,\n\n\n\n founding partner of Sequoia Capital China, one of Meituan\u2019s backers. \u201cThis is a $1 trillion sector. If you are a dominant player, you are definitely worth a lot.\u201d\n\n\nValued at about $30 billion, Meituan sits between home-rental site Airbnb Inc. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. on the list of world\u2019s most valuable startups, according to the most recent rankings by The Wall Street Journal. It\u2019s aiming for an initial public offering in Hong Kong in the coming months, people familiar with the matter say, with a target valuation topping $60 billion.\nFounded in 2010, Meituan faces lots of competition. Alibaba is expanding its services business through Koubei, a joint venture with its Ant Financial Services Group affiliate. Meituan is also second to Alibaba\u2019s wholly owned Ele.me unit in food delivery, according to industry researcher Analysys International, with a 42% market share to compared to 51% for Ele.me. Meituan said Analysys data did not fully account for food deliveries initiated across all of Meituan-Dianping\u2019s apps, and understated the company\u2019s market share.\nStill, in China\u2019s massive consumer market, there is a lot of business to go around. Meituan generates an estimated $5.4 billion in annual revenue, according to people familiar with the operation\u2014more than Groupon ($2.84 billion) and Yelp ($847 million) combined.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nZhang Juntao, a delivery man for Meituan-Dianping, holds an order he is about to deliver.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Giulia Marchi for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe company\u2019s up-and-comer cred was cemented six months ago when Apple Inc. chief executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Cook\n\n\n\n ate dumplings at a Shanghai restaurant with Meituan founder Wang Xing, who taught him how to order and pay with his smartphone. Mr. Cook posted a photo on his Chinese social media account, saying he was seeing some \u201cgreat innovation\u201d on the trip.\nMr. Wang, 39, graduated from Beijing\u2019s Tsinghua University with a degree in radio technology and information systems. Fluent in English, he dropped out from a Ph.D. program at the University of Delaware to become an entrepreneur\u2014first with a social media knockoff of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook,\n\n\n which he eventually sold to a local competitor, and later with a Chinese version of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter.\n\nThat business was shut down by authorities in 2009 following ethnic unrest in the Xinjiang region, which state media blamed in part on social media.\n\n\nRelated How China\u2019s Tencent Uses Deals to Crowd Out Tech Rivals (May 15) China\u2019s Biggest Tech Unicorns Stampede to Go Public (May 1) Chinese Tech Titan Alibaba Plans Stock-Market Homecoming (Marc Meituan-Dianping defies easy comparison to a like company in the U.S., instead providing a range of services similar to those of Yelp, Groupon and  Grubhub in a single app. ",
        "author": "Liza Lin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are some of the new weapons China will unveil at Tuesday\u2019s military parade (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "274",
        "date": "2019-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/09/29/here-are-some-new-weapons-china-will-unveil-tuesdays-military-parade/",
        "text": "BEIJING \u2014 The Chinese Communist Party plans Tuesday to put on the largest military parade in the history of the People\u2019s Republic of China, wheeling out new hardware designed to show the country\u2019s advances under the leadership of Xi Jinping.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe party is marking the 70th anniversary of its establishment of the state, an important milestone because the PRC has outlasted the Soviet Union, which endured for 69 years. But it comes at a time of intense pressure on the party\u2019s leadership.The party is locked in a protracted trade war with the United States which coincides with a tangible slowdown in the economy. At the same time, protesters in Hong Kong are demonstrating against creeping Chinese restrictions of their freedoms and are warning Taiwanese that it could happen to them if China were to try to offer a \u201cone country, two systems\u201d deal to that island.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis parade will highlight Chinese military power, at a time when Sino-American relations are deteriorating and international arms control treaties are being called into question,\u201d said Antoine Bondaz and St\u00e9phane Delory of the Fondation pour la Recherche Strat\u00e9gique in France.\u201cOur research indicates that unprecedented conventional and nuclear ballistic capabilities will be paraded, some for the first time, demonstrating the quantitative and qualitative modernization of China\u2019s ballistic arsenal,\u201d they wrote in a research note. \u201cHighly rapid, even hypersonic weapon systems could also be shown, illustrating that China is, in some respects, at the forefront of global innovation.\u201d1/7 \u26a0\ufe0f NEW \ud83c\udde8\ud83c\uddf3\ud83d\ude80 Military parade on October 1 in Beijing will display unprecedented conventional and nuclear ballistic capabilities. Analysis by @AntoineBondaz, St\u00e9phane Delory and Geo4i. READ: https://t.co/zZvnIkpEML pic.twitter.com/k2Vylei96a\u2014 Antoine Bondaz (@AntoineBondaz) September 24, 2019\n\nChina\u2019s most recent parade was in 2015, marking the end of the Pacific War and the victory over Japan, and was attended by foreign leaders including then South Korean president Park Geun-hye and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Foreign leaders are expected again at this parade, but Beijing has not announced who will be coming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has announced some details, however.The parade will feature 59 phalanxes, about 15,000 soldiers, 160 aircraft and 580 other pieces of weaponry and equipment, Maj. Gen. Cai Zhijun, deputy director of the military parade office said. About 300,000 civilians will participate in the parade.But Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian dismissed the idea that the People\u2019s Liberation Army, the military force that is beholden by the Communist Party, is \u201cflexing its muscles\u201d to send a message to the outside world.\u201cOver the past 70 years, the development of the China\u2019s armed forces is obvious to all. We had no intention, nor felt the need to flex our muscle through a military parade,\u201d he said at a briefing about parade preparations last week. \u201cOver the past 70 years, the world also witnessed the contributions made by the China\u2019s armed forces. The stronger we become, the more contributions we can make to world peace.\u201dImpressive image of the current parade during the rehearsals in overview. For me the most interesting item is the new supersonic reconnaissance drone (now with wings attached?) and the Sharp Sword UCAV.(Image via by78/SDF) pic.twitter.com/sJHaye7TtN\u2014 @Rupprecht_A (@RupprechtDeino) September 28, 2019\n\nAuthorities have carried out three parade rehearsals centered on Tiananmen Square in recent weeks. People have reported seeing war planes, tanks, amphibious assault vehicles, anti-ship and antiaircraft missiles, and supersonic and stealth drones.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere is some of the firepower we can expect to see at Tuesday\u2019s parade:The DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missileThe hardware of the People\u2019s Liberation Army\u2019s Rocket Force is attracting particular attention, amid signs the Dongfeng-41 next generation ICBM may make its debut at the parade. \u201cDongfeng\u201d means \u201ceast wind.\u201dThe DF-41 is a three-stage, solid-fuel missile with a range of about 7,500 miles, meaning it could strike any target in the United States.It can carry up to 10 independently targetable nuclear warheads, Xu Guangyu, a senior adviser of the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, told the Global Times, a hawkish party-affiliated newspaper.Story continues below advertisementThe Global Times quoted military experts saying the fourth-generation nuclear DF-41 missile is \u201cbasically at the same level as the seventh-generation nuclear missiles being developed by the U.S. and Russia, and [has] attained a world-leading level in terms of technologies, materials and processes.\u201dAdvertisementBecause the DF-41 missile can be armed with a relatively large number of multiple warheads, it \u201cgives China the opportunity to significantly increase the number of deployed warheads without increasing the size of its ballistic arsenal,\u201d Bondaz and Delory wrote in their note.Furthermore, the missile can carry decoys and penetration aids, boosting its offensive capabilities, and can also change course and trajectory in flight, helping evade antimissile defenses, they said.\u201cthe highlights are expected to be the PLA\u2019s strategic nuclear missiles such as the Rocket Force\u2019s land-based DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile, the DF-17 hypersonic missile and the sea-launched JL-2\u201d https://t.co/S7GCThA65G\u2014 Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) September 22, 2019\n\nPeople watching the parade rehearsals took photos of what appeared to be DF-41 missiles, covered by camouflage canvas, on trucks on the streets of central Beijing. But the parade organizers have declined to confirm if the DF-41 missile will appear on Tuesday.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEveryone please wait and see, and I believe our journalist friends will not be disappointed,\u201d Maj. Gen. Tan Min, one of the commanders of the parade, told reporters.The DF-17 hypersonic ballistic missileThe Dongfeng-17 is a short-to-medium-range missile that can launch a hypersonic glide vehicle, or HGV, which Bondaz and Delory say \u201cwould be a major first.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThe emergence of such a system would have a considerable impact, highlighting China\u2019s progress in designing hypersonic nonstrategic gliders, a segment in which Russians and Americans are lagging behind,\u201d they wrote.The missile appears to be capable of exceeding the speed of sound and penetrating U.S. missile shields, and has a maneuverable reentry vehicle, so it could shift targets in flight.Story continues below advertisementThat would make it less vulnerable to interception by other countries\u2019 defense systems, the South China Morning Post reported, quoting an individual from the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation.\u201cAnd the DF-17 will be capable of delivering both nuclear and conventional payloads,\u201d said the individual, who was not named.When China carried out the first tests at the end of 2017, the DF-17 missile successfully completed its ballistic flights and reentered the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, using the HGV during the glide phase, the Diplomat reported at the time. It landed \u201cwithin meters\u201d of its intended target during that test, the website reported, quoting American intelligence sources.The DR-8 unmanned aerial vehicle and the Sharp Sword stealth attack dronePhotos from the parade rehearsals have prompted speculation that it will include two types of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. China has been heavily investing in drone technologies and making technological advances.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementExperts have spotted images of what appears to be a DR-8 reconnaissance drone, which can reach as far into the western Pacific as the American territory of Guam, but has been in service for some time.More concerning is the Sharp Sword, an attack drone that is not just a UAV but a UCAV: an unmanned combat air vehicle. The aircraft can carry missiles or laser-guided bombs. It is expected to enter service before the end of the year.\"Australia will need to rethink the task of defending our air space.\" | @LowyInstitute's @SamRoggeveen: https://t.co/TbI9FQcqOo\u2014 The Lowy Institute (@LowyInstitute) September 27, 2019\n\n\u201cThe U.S. has been using drones armed with missiles and guided bombs for many years in the war against terrorism,\u201d wrote Sam Roggeveen, director of the international security program at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.These longer-range aircraft and missiles seem designed with the U.S. military in mind, analysts say.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe PLA Rocket Force has placed particular emphasis on developing dangerous long-range anti-ship missiles that can keep the U.S. Navy at a safe distance,\u201d the Defense Talk industry publication reported, \u201cso the Sharp Sword\u2019s ability to further extend that range only places enemy ships in all the more peril.\u201dJ-20 stealth fighter jetsThe PLA Air Force recently released video of seven J-20s flying in formation, prompting speculation they would fly over Tiananmen Square as part of the parade.Advertisement\u201cTo truly achieve peace, defending our homeland is not enough. We must not only defend but attack,\u201d said Yang Wei, the J-20's chief designer, in the video.The Chengdu J-20, China\u2019s first multirole stealth fighter, is designed for enhanced stealth and maneuverability. Learn more about J-20: https://t.co/FwGv8goXrZ pic.twitter.com/P37T3LURVW\u2014 ChinaPower (@ChinaPowerCSIS) September 7, 2019\n\nPairs or small numbers of J-20s have appeared in previous parades, but the fact the Air Force is ready to fly seven of them is significant and suggests they are ready for combat, according to analysts.\u201cA considerable number of units are probably ready to fly the J-20,\u201d Wang Ya'nan, chief editor of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, told the Global Times.\u201cIf seven J-20s are sent simultaneously into battle, they would have a significant striking capability with their air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons,\u201d Wang told the paper. They would be able to strike enemy targets deep in hostile territory, he said.Designed for enhanced stealth and maneuverability, the J-20 has the potential to provide China with a variety of previously unavailable air combat options and enhance its capability to project power, according to the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.AdvertisementThe Pentagon says China views stealth technology as a core component in the transformation of its air force from \u201ca predominantly territorial air force to one capable of conducting both offensive and defensive operations.\u201dThe H-6N, a new bomberThe H-6N, a new version of China\u2019s long-range strategic bomber, also appeared during parade rehearsals. But photos of the H-6N posted on Weibo, China\u2019s answer to Twitter, appeared to show it did not have a bomb bay, causing analysts to wonder if it had been deleted from the photos.For the first time the H-6N's underside is clearly visible ... and it seems as if indeed the bomb bay is deleted. \ud83e\udd14But there is not the reported/rumoured semi-conformal bay to hold that use ballistic anti-ship missile. pic.twitter.com/gCDjjErGav\u2014 @Rupprecht_A (@RupprechtDeino) September 22, 2019\n\nThe photos did, however, show large, visible missiles mounted on the bomber. The War Zone blog suggested these could be DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missiles, which it said would give the bomber \u201can impressive standoff capability against large enemy warships, especially aircraft carriers.\u201dOther observers noted the bomber had an aerial refueling receptacle. That will enable the aircraft, which was modeled on the Soviet Tu-16 jet bomber, to carry out in-flight refueling \u2014 significantly boosting its operating range compared to its predecessor, the H-6K, the South China Morning Post reported.And finally all three so far known H-6N from the CTC Bomber Brigade (via @MinorLogan) pic.twitter.com/3RzJkIk1J4\u2014 @Rupprecht_A (@RupprechtDeino) September 22, 2019\n\nType 15 tanksChina\u2019s lightweight Type 15 tank also looks set to make an appearance in the parade. The tanks have been commissioned by the Chinese military, according to China\u2019s latest national defense white paper, and will appear in public for the first time at Tuesday\u2019s parade.15\u5f0f\u6226\u8eca pic.twitter.com/IE1NDm6Xof\u2014 OedoSoldier (@OedoSoldier) September 23, 2019\n\nIt is armed with a fully stabilized 105mm rifled gun and an effective firing range of two miles. The tank weighs between 33 and 36 tons, making it more mobile than a standard battle tank, which usually weight about 50 tons.\u201cMobility and rapid redeployment is the key factor of this new combat vehicle. It is intended mainly for reconnaissance and infantry support operations,\u201d according to Military Today. \u201cIt can be airdropped and operate in areas, such as mountains, jungles and river regions, that are not accessible to heavier main battle tanks.\u201d From long range ballistic missiles to hypersonic drones, China's military appears to be reaching the level of its American and Russian counterparts. Here are some of the new weapons China will unveil at Tuesday\u2019s military parade",
        "author": "Anna Fifield"
    },
    {
        "title": "CEO\u2019s Promise to Stop Tweeting Sends His Company\u2019s Stock Higher (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "275",
        "date": "2019-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ceos-promise-to-stop-tweeting-sends-his-companys-stock-higher-11549536383?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=16",
        "text": "\u201cI will focus on my main business. My challenge continues. I will achieve good results whatever it takes. Please let me take some time off from Twitter,\u201d Mr. Maezawa wrote, concluding with an emoji of a man bowing deeply. \nThe tweet immediately sent shares of Mr. Maezawa\u2019s fashion e-commerce company, Zozo Inc., 7% higher. Still, the shares, which had dropped sharply in the morning, ended the day lower.\n\n\nA Zozo spokeswoman confirmed Mr. Maezawa sent the tweet and declined to comment further.\nLast week, Zozo said it expected net profit to fall in the current fiscal year, the first annual decline since Zozo shares went public in 2007. Shares have fallen more than 60% since the peak in July.\nZozo has suffered from sluggish sales of a house clothing brand started by Mr. Maezawa and defections by some fashion brands that were upset with a discount program for customers on the company\u2019s Zozotown website.\nIn addition, some investors have questioned whether Mr. Maezawa was focused on his Zozo business amid other attention-grabbing activities including his 2017 purchase of a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of a black skull for $110.5 million. In 2023, Mr. Maezawa is set to be the first paying customer to fly around the moon on the SpaceX vehicle of Mr. Musk, CEO of car maker Tesla Inc.\nMr. Maezawa defended his discount program in recent tweets, saying some department stores have provided similar discounts and quoting a clothing brand CEO who decided to stay on Zozotown.\n\n\nRelated Coverage Japanese Billionaire\u2019s E-Commerce Site Hits Turbulence (Feb. 2) \n\n\nWrite to Megumi Fujikawa at megumi.fujikawa@wsj.com \u201cI will focus on my main business,\u201d wrote Yusaku Maezawa, the CEO of fashion e-commerce company Zozo who plans to fly around the moon on Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft. ",
        "author": "Megumi Fujikawa"
    },
    {
        "title": "Take a Flying Leap, but Bring Your Paper Parachute (NYT: At Home) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "276",
        "date": "2021-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/at-home/newspaper-parachute-activity.html",
        "text": "With a little ingenuity, your sheet of newsprint can float safely to the ground. With a little ingenuity, your sheet of newsprint can float safely to the ground. From Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s pyramid design in the 15th century to the  supersonic version that helped land the Perseverance rover safely on Mars, the parachute, a device that catches air to control an object\u2019s speed, has played an essential role in land, air, water and space travel. For all of the technology and resources that go into launching a spacecraft out of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, it is the simple parachute that is key to safely landing it. A parachute\u2019s canopy creates drag or air resistance, which means that the air below is pushed up against the underside of the canopy and slows its rate of descent.",
        "author": "By Godwyn Morris and Paula Frisch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Take a Flying Leap, but Bring Your Paper Parachute (NYT: At Home) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "277",
        "date": "2021-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/at-home/newspaper-parachute-activity.html",
        "text": "With a little ingenuity, your sheet of newsprint can float safely to the ground. With a little ingenuity, your sheet of newsprint can float safely to the ground. From Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s pyramid design in the 15th century to the  supersonic version that helped land the Perseverance rover safely on Mars, the parachute, a device that catches air to control an object\u2019s speed, has played an essential role in land, air, water and space travel. For all of the technology and resources that go into launching a spacecraft out of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, it is the simple parachute that is key to safely landing it. A parachute\u2019s canopy creates drag or air resistance, which means that the air below is pushed up against the underside of the canopy and slows its rate of descent.",
        "author": "By Godwyn Morris and Paula Frisch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Your Career Help Change the World? You Have 80,000 Hours to Try. (WSJ: At Work) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "278",
        "date": "2021-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-your-career-help-change-the-world-you-have-80-000-hours-to-try-11633858202?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=14",
        "text": "They belong to a movement called Effective Altruism, which relies on science and data to determine how individuals can use their time, money and skills to do the most good. Conceived by two Oxford University philosophers in the late 2000s, the EA approach is drawing new attention as the pandemic prompts many workers to reassess the sense of purpose and meaning they derive from their work.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMuch of Effective Altruism\u2019s early focus was on encouraging people to pursue lucrative careers to have more money to give and demonstrating which causes went the furthest to improve human lives. (Contributing toward deworming pills against parasites, for instance, helps keep millions of sub-Saharan African children in school, Effective Altruists say.) The early archetype of an EA acolyte was an investment banker or tech executive who gave large sums toward such interventions.\n\nThrough a nonprofit called 80,000 Hours, the movement has since expanded into helping people design do-good careers tailored to their talents and skills. The London-based organization, launched in 2011 by EA co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Will MacAskill\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Todd,\n\n\n\n gets its name from the 80,000 hours you are likely to spend working over a 40-year career, assuming you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year.\nOf the roughly 2,000 consultations that the group has done with career seekers during the past decade, some 500 have happened in the past year, says Mr. Todd, the group\u2019s chief executive. The Effective Altruism Forum estimates that, based on EA surveys, several thousand people world-wide are actively engaged in the movement\u2019s community.\nFinding the right altruistic career can take time. Adam Gleave, 28 years old, worked at a hedge fund after graduating from Cambridge University, where he first encountered EA. His plan had been to make a lot of money to give away, and he donated part of his salary to the Long-Term Future Fund, a nonprofit focused on global ",
        "author": "Krithika Varagur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Could Net Billions by Hitting Tesla\u2019s New Milestones (WSJ: Autos Industry) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "279",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-gives-elon-musk-new-10-year-pay-for-performance-deal-1516737688?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=79",
        "text": "The plan, which is modeled on the program set for Mr. Musk in 2012, entails a 10-year grant of stock options that would vest in 12 tranches, each with shares equal to 1% of the company\u2019s total shares outstanding as of Jan. 21, 2018. A tranche would vest only if a pair of milestones are achieved, one based on market value, the other on a measure of revenue or profit. \n\n\nMore in Auto News\n\n\n\n\nTesla Set a Model for Selling EVs That Other Auto Makers Want to Follow\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nIconic Russian Car Maker, Known for Cold War Self-Reliance, Halts Production\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nFormer Nissan Executive in Ghosn Case Returns to U.S.\nMarch 7, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nFor example, the first tranche would vest if Tesla hits $100 billion in market value and either $20 billion in revenue or $1.5 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, after adjusting for stock compensation. For all 12 tranches to vest, Tesla\u2019s market value would have to reach $650 billion.\n\n\nTesla, which reported revenue of $7 billion for 2016, had a market value of about $58.8 billion as of Monday\u2019s close. Mr. Musk owns about 20% of the company, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.\nMr. Musk could net billions of dollars by hitting only a few of the milestones. Tesla said in a proxy filing the 20.26 million stock options today would have a preliminary value of about $2.62 billion. But if Tesla were to reach the audacious market value of $650 billion\u2014as much as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n is worth today\u2014the company said Mr. Musk\u2019s stock award would reap him as much as $55.8 billion fully vested.\nThat total, however, assumes the company\u2019s shares outstanding won\u2019t be diluted. Tesla has added tens of millions of shares over the past several years, so that total dollar figure is unlikely. \n\u201cThis ensures that Elon will continue to lead Tesla\u2019s management over the long-term while also providing the flexibility to bring in another CEO who would report to Elon at some point in the future,\u201d Tesla said in a statement about the plan on Tuesday. \u201cAlthough there is no current intention for this to happen, it provides the flexibility as Tesla continues to grow to potentially allow Elon to focus more of his attention on the kinds of key product and strategic matters that most impact Tesla\u2019s long-term growth and profitability.\u201d\nTesla said that if none of the tranches are achieved, Mr. Musk wouldn\u2019t receive any compensation. That would put him in circumstances similar to those of some other prominent Silicon Valley leaders who own enormously valuable stakes in their companies but receive little or no salary.\nMr. Musk is saying, \u201cI want to set an audacious goal, and then if I achieve it, then pay me audaciously,\u201d said John Challenger, a longtime expert in corporate compensation as chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. \u201cHe is in some ways capturing the spirit of Silicon Valley.\u201d\nMr. Musk\u2019s previous compensation program, granted in 2012, targeted a market value of $43.2 billion along with meeting certain milestones by 2022. It required him to remain CEO.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adam Jonas,\n\n\n\n an analyst for Morgan Stanley, said the pay package is a \u201cmarketing tool\u201d to attract talent and raise more money as the company faces greater competition in making electric and self-driving vehicles. \u201cWe view this incentive package as more important to investor confidence than to Musk financially,\u201d Mr. Jonas wrote in a note to investors.\nSince Tesla overtook\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n \u2019s market value last year, and flirted with that of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , the Silicon Valley auto maker\u2019s valuation has been a continual point of conversation. Critics question why investors are betting so much on a company that has yet to turn an annual profit and that has delivered a fraction of the sales of much larger auto makers.\nFans say they are betting on Mr. Musk\u2019s vision for personal transportation that includes electric cars that drive themselves and draw their power from Tesla\u2019s solar panels and storage batteries.\nSuch enthusiasm fueled Tesla\u2019s growth last year, even as Mr. Musk struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan in a test of his ability to transform a luxury niche player into a more mainstream auto maker.\nMr. Musk had previously committed the company to reaching a market cap of $700 billion, something he reiterated last year. \u201cI could be completely delusional, but I think I see a clear path to that outcome,\u201d he told analysts in May.\nMr. Musk, who also heads other companies including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has hinted that he might want to change his role at Tesla.\nIn May, an analyst asked Mr. Musk if he planned to step away from Tesla after bringing out the Model 3, as he had previously suggested.\n\u201cI intend to be actively involved with Tesla for the rest of my life,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cHopefully, stopping before I get too old\u2014or too crazy, I don\u2019t Tesla unleashed a bold pay package for Chief Executive Elon Musk that again ties his compensation entirely to key performance benchmarks. This time, the goals take the electric-car maker to cosmic heights, including an ultimate aim of hitting $650 billion in market value. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Could Net Billions by Hitting Tesla\u2019s New Milestones (WSJ: Autos Industry) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "280",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-gives-elon-musk-new-10-year-pay-for-performance-deal-1516737688?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=104",
        "text": "The plan, which is modeled on the program set for Mr. Musk in 2012, entails a 10-year grant of stock options that would vest in 12 tranches, each with shares equal to 1% of the company\u2019s total shares outstanding as of Jan. 21, 2018. A tranche would vest only if a pair of milestones are achieved, one based on market value, the other on a measure of revenue or profit. \n\n\nMore in Auto News\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTesla Set a Model for Selling EVs That Other Auto Makers Want to Follow\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nIconic Russian Car Maker, Known for Cold War Self-Reliance, Halts Production\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nFormer Nissan Executive in Ghosn Case Returns to U.S.\nMarch 7, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nFor example, the first tranche would vest if Tesla hits $100 billion in market value and either $20 billion in revenue or $1.5 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, after adjusting for stock compensation. For all 12 tranches to vest, Tesla\u2019s market value would have to reach $650 billion.\n\n\nTesla, which reported revenue of $7 billion for 2016, had a market value of about $58.8 billion as of Monday\u2019s close. Mr. Musk owns about 20% of the company, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.\nMr. Musk could net billions of dollars by hitting only a few of the milestones. Tesla said in a proxy filing the 20.26 million stock options today would have a preliminary value of about $2.62 billion. But if Tesla were to reach the audacious market value of $650 billion\u2014as much as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n is worth today\u2014the company said Mr. Musk\u2019s stock award would reap him as much as $55.8 billion fully vested.\nThat total, however, assumes the company\u2019s shares outstanding won\u2019t be diluted. Tesla has added tens of millions of shares over the past several years, so that total dollar figure is unlikely. \n\u201cThis ensures that Elon will continue to lead Tesla\u2019s management over the long-term while also providing the flexibility to bring in another CEO who would report to Elon at some point in the future,\u201d Tesla said in a statement about the plan on Tuesday. \u201cAlthough there is no current intention for this to happen, it provides the flexibility as Tesla continues to grow to potentially allow Elon to focus more of his attention on the kinds of key product and strategic matters that most impact Tesla\u2019s long-term growth and profitability.\u201d\nTesla said that if none of the tranches are achieved, Mr. Musk wouldn\u2019t receive any compensation. That would put him in circumstances similar to those of some other prominent Silicon Valley leaders who own enormously valuable stakes in their companies but receive little or no salary.\nMr. Musk is saying, \u201cI want to set an audacious goal, and then if I achieve it, then pay me audaciously,\u201d said John Challenger, a longtime expert in corporate compensation as chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. \u201cHe is in some ways capturing the spirit of Silicon Valley.\u201d\nMr. Musk\u2019s previous compensation program, granted in 2012, targeted a market value of $43.2 billion along with meeting certain milestones by 2022. It required him to remain CEO.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adam Jonas,\n\n\n\n an analyst for Morgan Stanley, said the pay package is a \u201cmarketing tool\u201d to attract talent and raise more money as the company faces greater competition in making electric and self-driving vehicles. \u201cWe view this incentive package as more important to investor confidence than to Musk financially,\u201d Mr. Jonas wrote in a note to investors.\nSince Tesla overtook\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n \u2019s market value last year, and flirted with that of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , the Silicon Valley auto maker\u2019s valuation has been a continual point of conversation. Critics question why investors are betting so much on a company that has yet to turn an annual profit and that has delivered a fraction of the sales of much larger auto makers.\nFans say they are betting on Mr. Musk\u2019s vision for personal transportation that includes electric cars that drive themselves and draw their power from Tesla\u2019s solar panels and storage batteries.\nSuch enthusiasm fueled Tesla\u2019s growth last year, even as Mr. Musk struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan in a test of his ability to transform a luxury niche player into a more mainstream auto maker.\nMr. Musk had previously committed the company to reaching a market cap of $700 billion, something he reiterated last year. \u201cI could be completely delusional, but I think I see a clear path to that outcome,\u201d he told analysts in May.\nMr. Musk, who also heads other companies including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has hinted that he might want to change his role at Tesla.\nIn May, an analyst asked Mr. Musk if he planned to step away from Tesla after bringing out the Model 3, as he had previously suggested.\n\u201cI intend to be actively involved with Tesla for the rest of my life,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cHopefully, stopping before I get too old\u2014or too crazy, I d Tesla unleashed a bold pay package for Chief Executive Elon Musk that again ties his compensation entirely to key performance benchmarks. This time, the goals take the electric-car maker to cosmic heights, including an ultimate aim of hitting $650 billion in market value. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Next Frontier (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "281",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-next-frontier-11605655365?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=10",
        "text": "The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that launched from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center with four astronauts on board Sunday night safely docked with the International Space Station around 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft glided toward the station, closing the gap before latching onto a port on the ISS\u2019s center module... the spacecraft and the ISS were traveling at roughly the same speed \u2014 more than 17,000 miles per hour, the speed necessary to keep objects orbiting the Earth. The astronauts \u2014 Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker with NASA, and Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut with Japan\u2019s space agency \u2014 emerged beaming from the capsule about two hours later after a series of checks were performed to ensure that the spacecraft and the ISS had an air-tight seal.... The newly arrived astronauts shared hugs and greeting with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russia\u2019s Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who are already onboard the ISS. They arrived last month on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Scott Neuman and Russell Lewis of National Public Radio add:\nThe flight marks only the second crewed flight for Crew Dragon, which became the first commercial vehicle to put humans in orbit when astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched in May. \u201cSpaceX, this is Resilience. Excellent job, right down the center,\u201d commander Hopkins radioed to mission control after the docking. \u201cSpaceX and NASA, congratulations.\u201d Resilience is the name of the capsule that carried the astronauts. Back on earth, shares in Mr. Musk\u2019s car company have been much more than resilient. On Monday S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that the soaring Tesla shares will join the S&P 500 stock index on Dec. 21. \n\n\nThe Journal\u2019s Heather Somerville reported Monday:\nThe inclusion elevates Tesla\u2019s profile among public market investors and validates what was once a niche and highly unprofitable Silicon Valley company. Tesla also has more broadly changed the car industry\u2019s mind-set around electric cars and ignited a race toward electrification, with most rivals now offering or introducing rival products. The race to electrify the auto industry has lately been profitable for Tesla. But as the Journal\u2019s Amrith Ramkumar reports, there\u2019s a difference between Tesla and the other tech giants like Apple and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft\n\n\n that make up an increasing share of the S&P 500: \nTesla makes much less money than those companies, but its addition to that group will now increase attention on its financial results and the movement of its shares. The company last month posted a fifth consecutive profit and record quarterly sales despite the coronavirus pandemic, and its surging valuation has caused enormous losses for investors who bet against the stock in recent years. To this point Tesla doubters have indeed been punished for their skepticism. But there remain questions about the composition of Tesla\u2019s earnings, not just their size. In September, the Journal\u2019s Gunjan Banerji and Michael Wursthorn explained why the company had not already been added to the S&P 500:\nAnalysts pointed to a few factors potentially holding the company back, such as its profitability metrics and sales of regulatory credits to other auto makers. Tesla made more than $1 billion from such regulatory credits over the past four quarters, its financials show. That is more than double its profits over the past four quarters. \u201cThe quality of earnings could be a key issue with the committee,\u201d Stephanie Hill, head of index-business and strategy at Mellon, wrote in commentary ahead of S&P\u2019s announcement. \u201cTesla\u2019s positive profitability has been driven by the sale of regulatory credits to other auto manufacturers who need offsets in order to reach their emissions standards.\u201d Ms. Hill said volatility in Tesla\u2019s shares alongside the sustainability of the company\u2019s returns also could play a role. Tesla reported $428 million in revenue from the sale of emissions credits in the most recent quarter, along with net income of $104 million. Investors who believe that Tesla will need to rely on favorable environmental policy and/or enthusiastic environmentally conscious consumers to meet growth expectations may be interested in a new report from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ben Lieberman\n\n\n\n of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He notes that an electric vehicle (EV) carries its own environmental consequences, including from the mining of materials to create its battery, the significant energy needed to manufacture it, and the challenge of disposing of spent batteries. Mr. Lieberman adds:\nReplacing gasoline with electricity as the energy source for personal transportation does not eliminate emissions of air pollutants and carbon dioxide so much as displace them. If coal-fired electricity were to continue to be a significant part of the generation mix, then the emissions reductions from the transition may be minor and possibly nonexistent. But even if a transformation of the vehicle fleet to E SpaceX carries astronauts to the International Space Station and Tesla will join the S&P 500. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Next Frontier (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "282",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-next-frontier-11605655365?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=31",
        "text": "The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that launched from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center with four astronauts on board Sunday night safely docked with the International Space Station around 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft glided toward the station, closing the gap before latching onto a port on the ISS\u2019s center module... the spacecraft and the ISS were traveling at roughly the same speed \u2014 more than 17,000 miles per hour, the speed necessary to keep objects orbiting the Earth. The astronauts \u2014 Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker with NASA, and Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut with Japan\u2019s space agency \u2014 emerged beaming from the capsule about two hours later after a series of checks were performed to ensure that the spacecraft and the ISS had an air-tight seal.... The newly arrived astronauts shared hugs and greeting with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russia\u2019s Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who are already onboard the ISS. They arrived last month on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Scott Neuman and Russell Lewis of National Public Radio add:\nThe flight marks only the second crewed flight for Crew Dragon, which became the first commercial vehicle to put humans in orbit when astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched in May. \u201cSpaceX, this is Resilience. Excellent job, right down the center,\u201d commander Hopkins radioed to mission control after the docking. \u201cSpaceX and NASA, congratulations.\u201d Resilience is the name of the capsule that carried the astronauts. Back on earth, shares in Mr. Musk\u2019s car company have been much more than resilient. On Monday S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that the soaring Tesla shares will join the S&P 500 stock index on Dec. 21. \n\n\nThe Journal\u2019s Heather Somerville reported Monday:\nThe inclusion elevates Tesla\u2019s profile among public market investors and validates what was once a niche and highly unprofitable Silicon Valley company. Tesla also has more broadly changed the car industry\u2019s mind-set around electric cars and ignited a race toward electrification, with most rivals now offering or introducing rival products. The race to electrify the auto industry has lately been profitable for Tesla. But as the Journal\u2019s Amrith Ramkumar reports, there\u2019s a difference between Tesla and the other tech giants like Apple and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft\n\n\n that make up an increasing share of the S&P 500: \nTesla makes much less money than those companies, but its addition to that group will now increase attention on its financial results and the movement of its shares. The company last month posted a fifth consecutive profit and record quarterly sales despite the coronavirus pandemic, and its surging valuation has caused enormous losses for investors who bet against the stock in recent years. To this point Tesla doubters have indeed been punished for their skepticism. But there remain questions about the composition of Tesla\u2019s earnings, not just their size. In September, the Journal\u2019s Gunjan Banerji and Michael Wursthorn explained why the company had not already been added to the S&P 500:\nAnalysts pointed to a few factors potentially holding the company back, such as its profitability metrics and sales of regulatory credits to other auto makers. Tesla made more than $1 billion from such regulatory credits over the past four quarters, its financials show. That is more than double its profits over the past four quarters. \u201cThe quality of earnings could be a key issue with the committee,\u201d Stephanie Hill, head of index-business and strategy at Mellon, wrote in commentary ahead of S&P\u2019s announcement. \u201cTesla\u2019s positive profitability has been driven by the sale of regulatory credits to other auto manufacturers who need offsets in order to reach their emissions standards.\u201d Ms. Hill said volatility in Tesla\u2019s shares alongside the sustainability of the company\u2019s returns also could play a role. Tesla reported $428 million in revenue from the sale of emissions credits in the most recent quarter, along with net income of $104 million. Investors who believe that Tesla will need to rely on favorable environmental policy and/or enthusiastic environmentally conscious consumers to meet growth expectations may be interested in a new report from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ben Lieberman\n\n\n\n of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He notes that an electric vehicle (EV) carries its own environmental consequences, including from the mining of materials to create its battery, the significant energy needed to manufacture it, and the challenge of disposing of spent batteries. Mr. Lieberman adds:\nReplacing gasoline with electricity as the energy source for personal transportation does not eliminate emissions of air pollutants and carbon dioxide so much as displace them. If coal-fired electricity were to continue to be a significant part of the generation mix, then the emissions reductions from the transition may be minor and possibly nonexistent. But even if a transformation of the vehicle fleet to E SpaceX carries astronauts to the International Space Station and Tesla will join the S&P 500. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Next Frontier (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "283",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-next-frontier-11605655365?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=38",
        "text": "The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that launched from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center with four astronauts on board Sunday night safely docked with the International Space Station around 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft glided toward the station, closing the gap before latching onto a port on the ISS\u2019s center module... the spacecraft and the ISS were traveling at roughly the same speed \u2014 more than 17,000 miles per hour, the speed necessary to keep objects orbiting the Earth. The astronauts \u2014 Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker with NASA, and Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut with Japan\u2019s space agency \u2014 emerged beaming from the capsule about two hours later after a series of checks were performed to ensure that the spacecraft and the ISS had an air-tight seal.... The newly arrived astronauts shared hugs and greeting with NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russia\u2019s Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who are already onboard the ISS. They arrived last month on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Scott Neuman and Russell Lewis of National Public Radio add:\nThe flight marks only the second crewed flight for Crew Dragon, which became the first commercial vehicle to put humans in orbit when astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched in May. \u201cSpaceX, this is Resilience. Excellent job, right down the center,\u201d commander Hopkins radioed to mission control after the docking. \u201cSpaceX and NASA, congratulations.\u201d Resilience is the name of the capsule that carried the astronauts. Back on earth, shares in Mr. Musk\u2019s car company have been much more than resilient. On Monday S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that the soaring Tesla shares will join the S&P 500 stock index on Dec. 21. \n\n\nThe Journal\u2019s Heather Somerville reported Monday:\nThe inclusion elevates Tesla\u2019s profile among public market investors and validates what was once a niche and highly unprofitable Silicon Valley company. Tesla also has more broadly changed the car industry\u2019s mind-set around electric cars and ignited a race toward electrification, with most rivals now offering or introducing rival products. The race to electrify the auto industry has lately been profitable for Tesla. But as the Journal\u2019s Amrith Ramkumar reports, there\u2019s a difference between Tesla and the other tech giants like Apple and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft\n\n\n that make up an increasing share of the S&P 500: \nTesla makes much less money than those companies, but its addition to that group will now increase attention on its financial results and the movement of its shares. The company last month posted a fifth consecutive profit and record quarterly sales despite the coronavirus pandemic, and its surging valuation has caused enormous losses for investors who bet against the stock in recent years. To this point Tesla doubters have indeed been punished for their skepticism. But there remain questions about the composition of Tesla\u2019s earnings, not just their size. In September, the Journal\u2019s Gunjan Banerji and Michael Wursthorn explained why the company had not already been added to the S&P 500:\nAnalysts pointed to a few factors potentially holding the company back, such as its profitability metrics and sales of regulatory credits to other auto makers. Tesla made more than $1 billion from such regulatory credits over the past four quarters, its financials show. That is more than double its profits over the past four quarters. \u201cThe quality of earnings could be a key issue with the committee,\u201d Stephanie Hill, head of index-business and strategy at Mellon, wrote in commentary ahead of S&P\u2019s announcement. \u201cTesla\u2019s positive profitability has been driven by the sale of regulatory credits to other auto manufacturers who need offsets in order to reach their emissions standards.\u201d Ms. Hill said volatility in Tesla\u2019s shares alongside the sustainability of the company\u2019s returns also could play a role. Tesla reported $428 million in revenue from the sale of emissions credits in the most recent quarter, along with net income of $104 million. Investors who believe that Tesla will need to rely on favorable environmental policy and/or enthusiastic environmentally conscious consumers to meet growth expectations may be interested in a new report from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ben Lieberman\n\n\n\n of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He notes that an electric vehicle (EV) carries its own environmental consequences, including from the mining of materials to create its battery, the significant energy needed to manufacture it, and the challenge of disposing of spent batteries. Mr. Lieberman adds:\nReplacing gasoline with electricity as the energy source for personal transportation does not eliminate emissions of air pollutants and carbon dioxide so much as displace them. If coal-fired electricity were to continue to be a significant part of the generation mix, then the emissions reductions from the transition may be minor and possibly nonexistent. But even if a transformation of the vehicle fleet to E SpaceX carries astronauts to the International Space Station and Tesla will join the S&P 500. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The \u2018Mistake\u2019 Facebook Keeps Making (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "284",
        "date": "2018-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mistake-facebook-keeps-making-1541181468?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=18",
        "text": "Joel Ebert of the Nashville Tennessean reported on Thursday:\nA national organization backing U.S. Senate nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marsha Blackburn\u2019s\n\n\n\n campaign claimed Thursday that Facebook was censoring an ad supporting the Tennessee Republican. Susan B. Anthony List, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit aimed at ending abortion in the United States, said on Twitter that Facebook had banned a new 30-second ad. The ad raises questions about Blackburn\u2019s opponent, Democrat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Bredesen,\n\n\n\n and his views on abortion. A spokesperson for Facebook told the USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee that the ad was accidentally taken down and has since been restored. \u201cThis ad does not violate Facebook\u2019s policies and should never have been disapproved,\u201d the spokesperson said. \u201cWe\u2019re sorry for this mistake \u2014 the ad has been restored and is now running on Facebook.\u201d It\u2019s of course wonderful to hear that the company is trying to be the neutral communications platform it claims to be. But how hard is it trying? Just hours after the report in the Tennessean included Facebook\u2019s earnest-sounding apology, Susan B. Anthony List said on Twitter that another of its ads was being blocked by Facebook\u2014 this one related to another close Senate contest in Montana.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLast night Fox News reported another apology from Facebook. Whether this latest message of regret was generated by a human or an algorithm remains unclear. Perhaps someone was leaning into a keyboard to explain why the social network had blocked an organization named for a legendary advocate for women\u2019s rights, including the right to life.\n\n\nFor those wondering about Facebook\u2019s sincerity or technical competence, Susan B. Anthony List has been around since 1992 and some versions of the blocked ads have been on television for years. \nAt least for the moment it appears they can appear on Facebook as well. \u201cAt this point all of the ads are back up and running,\u201d reports Mallory Quigley of SBA List via email. She adds that four different ads created by her organization \u201chave been suspended and then approved multiple times in the last month or so.\u201d\nIf Rep. Blackburn and her pro-life supporters feel they are not getting a fair shake from social media companies, they seem to have good reason. But Facebook has at least claimed an exceptional commitment to free speech. News consumers may recall this dispatch from 2017:\nFacebook COO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sheryl Sandberg\n\n\n\n told Axios that Facebook would run the Marsha Blackburn ad announcing her Senate campaign, which claimed Planned Parenthood sold \u201cbaby body parts\u201d and was taken down by Twitter \u2014 even though Sandberg said she personally disagreed with the views expressed in the ad. \u201cWhen you cut off speech for one person, you cut off speech for other people,\u201d she said. Maybe some employees at social media companies are tempted to simply cut off speech from a certain type of person\u2014the kind that doesn\u2019t agree with them.\n\u201cTech workers were stunned by Trump\u2019s victory. Now they\u2019re helping Democratic campaigns,\u201d announced a Washington Post headline on Tuesday. To be clear, the article by the Post\u2019s Cat Zakrzewski is about tech folks volunteering their time to provide leftist organizations with perfectly legitimate assistance, such as cybersecurity training to thwart malicious hackers. \nVoters on the right half of the political spectrum have lately been given ample reason to wonder whether employees of giant Internet companies are also supporting their favorite causes at work.\n***\nIn Other News\nAnnals of American Economic Revival\n\t\t\n\t\u201cEconomists \u2018wowed\u2019 by October jobs report as wage growth picks up,\u201d Marketwatch, November 2\n***\nBottom Stories of the Day \nLongest Books Ever Written, Abridged\n\t\t\n\t\u201cThe 20 worst things about living in Portland,\u201d The Oregonian, November 1\nTry Rocket Fuel\n\t\t\n\t\u201cAnother NASA spacecraft runs out of steam, 2nd this week,\u201d Associated Press, November 1\n***\nFollow James Freeman on Twitter.\nSubscribe to the Best of the Web email with one click.\nTo suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.\n(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Jackie Harty, Alan Kuska and Norman Blanton.)\n***\nMr. Freeman is the co-author of \u201cBorrowed Time,\u201d now available from HarperBusiness. A pro-life group says the supposedly neutral Internet platform blocked its ads again. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos to Lift Off (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "285",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-to-lift-off-11623105667?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=7",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos plans to travel to space next month as part of the first crew carried by Blue Origin, the Amazon.com Inc. founder\u2019s space company. Mr. Bezos said in an Instagram post Monday that he will be one of the inaugural passengers on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, during its first crewed flight scheduled for launch from West Texas on July 20. Mr. Bezos, 57 years old, said that his brother, Mark Bezos, will also be on board... Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard has made 15 uncrewed test flights, which the company said demonstrates the mission\u2019s safety. Most commercial aircraft don\u2019t carry passengers before undergoing an intensive series of hundreds of piloted flights. \u201cI want to go on this flight because it\u2019s a thing I\u2019ve wanted to do all my life,\u201d Mr. Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram. \u201cIt\u2019s an adventure. It\u2019s a big deal for me.\u201d It will also be a big deal for the winner of a June 12 charity auction, who will be allowed to come along for the ride. The Bezos brothers and their charitable guest can take comfort in the fact that while the craft may have been subjected to relatively few test missions, its performance has been almost perfect. Darrell Etherington at TechCrunch writes that \u201csave for the first flight where the reusable booster was lost, [New Shepard] has had a complete success for each of those 15 missions, including landing of the booster (except that first time) and recovery of the capsule (for all of the launches).\u201d\nIt seems likely that the charity auction winner will enjoy the company. Avery Hartmans at Business Insider notes:\nJeff has described his brother as the \u201cfunniest guy in my life\u201d and said that when they\u2019re together \u2014 often drinking bourbon \u2014 \u201cI just laugh continuously.\u201d Taking the maiden voyage for humans on a vehicle headed 62 miles above sea level, perhaps the brothers will be thinking this is one of those times for the bourbon, and let\u2019s hope for the laughter as well. Back on Earth, more than a few observers will likely be toasting the creativity and guts of one of America\u2019s great entrepreneurs.\n\n\nWelcome Back\n\n We noticed you're already a member.\n Please sign in to continue reading WSJ or your next reading experience may be blocked.\n \n\n SIGN IN\n \n\n\n\nThe moment may also remind a few of those observers of the irony that Mr. Bezos, a sort of living testament to American liberty and American exceptionalism, owns a Beltway newspaper enamored of central planning. Viewed from outer space or here on earth, the Washington Post may look small but its owner\u2019s achievements are not. \n***\nSpeaking of Skyrocketing\nRyan Grabinski of Strategas Research notes the soaring profits of American corporations:\nWith 99% of the S&P 500 having reported, it\u2019s fair to say that 1Q\u201921 was a blowout season for earnings. 87.5% of companies beat their earnings estimates for the quarter, a record high going back to the mid-1990s and well above the long-term historical average of 65%. ***\nSpeaking of the Beltway Swamp\nThis seems to be a day to celebrate accomplishments, and believe it or not one has even occurred in Washington. Amazingly, the good news arrives in a press release from one of Washington\u2019s most politicized and dangerous bureaucracies: \nThe Department of Justice today announced that it has seized 63.7 bitcoins currently valued at approximately $2.3 million. These funds allegedly represent the proceeds of a May 8, ransom payment to individuals in a group known as DarkSide, which had targeted Colonial Pipeline, resulting in critical infrastructure being taken out of operation. The seizure warrant was authorized earlier today by the Honorable Laurel Beeler, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California... On or about May 7, Colonial Pipeline was the victim of a highly publicized ransomware attack resulting in the company taking portions of its infrastructure out of operation. Colonial Pipeline reported to the FBI that its computer network was accessed by an organization named DarkSide and that it had received and paid a ransom demand for approximately 75 bitcoins. ***\nOK, Let\u2019s Not Get Carried Away Praising Bureaucracies\nRemember when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) used to pretend that the federal student-loan program was a windfall for taxpayers? Her fellow Democrats at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue are beginning to acknowledge reality. The Journal\u2019s Josh Mitchell reports from Washington:\nThe Biden administration has raised an estimate of losses on the federal government\u2019s student loan portfolio by $53 billion, reflecting lower repayment rates and pandemic-relief efforts... A year ago, the federal budget projected that taxpayers would ultimately lose $15 billion on all outstanding student debt, which currently comes to $1.6 trillion. The administration\u2019s proposed $6 trillion budget now projects long-term losses will reach $68 billion. Those estimates are still far smaller than losses projected in an internal analysis led by officials appointed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The entrepreneur leads from the front on commercial space flight. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos to Lift Off (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "286",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-to-lift-off-11623105667?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=29",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos plans to travel to space next month as part of the first crew carried by Blue Origin, the Amazon.com Inc. founder\u2019s space company. Mr. Bezos said in an Instagram post Monday that he will be one of the inaugural passengers on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, during its first crewed flight scheduled for launch from West Texas on July 20. Mr. Bezos, 57 years old, said that his brother, Mark Bezos, will also be on board... Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard has made 15 uncrewed test flights, which the company said demonstrates the mission\u2019s safety. Most commercial aircraft don\u2019t carry passengers before undergoing an intensive series of hundreds of piloted flights. \u201cI want to go on this flight because it\u2019s a thing I\u2019ve wanted to do all my life,\u201d Mr. Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram. \u201cIt\u2019s an adventure. It\u2019s a big deal for me.\u201d It will also be a big deal for the winner of a June 12 charity auction, who will be allowed to come along for the ride. The Bezos brothers and their charitable guest can take comfort in the fact that while the craft may have been subjected to relatively few test missions, its performance has been almost perfect. Darrell Etherington at TechCrunch writes that \u201csave for the first flight where the reusable booster was lost, [New Shepard] has had a complete success for each of those 15 missions, including landing of the booster (except that first time) and recovery of the capsule (for all of the launches).\u201d\nIt seems likely that the charity auction winner will enjoy the company. Avery Hartmans at Business Insider notes:\nJeff has described his brother as the \u201cfunniest guy in my life\u201d and said that when they\u2019re together \u2014 often drinking bourbon \u2014 \u201cI just laugh continuously.\u201d Taking the maiden voyage for humans on a vehicle headed 62 miles above sea level, perhaps the brothers will be thinking this is one of those times for the bourbon, and let\u2019s hope for the laughter as well. Back on Earth, more than a few observers will likely be toasting the creativity and guts of one of America\u2019s great entrepreneurs.\n\n\nThe moment may also remind a few of those observers of the irony that Mr. Bezos, a sort of living testament to American liberty and American exceptionalism, owns a Beltway newspaper enamored of central planning. Viewed from outer space or here on earth, the Washington Post may look small but its owner\u2019s achievements are not. \n***\nSpeaking of Skyrocketing\nRyan Grabinski of Strategas Research notes the soaring profits of American corporations:\nWith 99% of the S&P 500 having reported, it\u2019s fair to say that 1Q\u201921 was a blowout season for earnings. 87.5% of companies beat their earnings estimates for the quarter, a record high going back to the mid-1990s and well above the long-term historical average of 65%. ***\nSpeaking of the Beltway Swamp\nThis seems to be a day to celebrate accomplishments, and believe it or not one has even occurred in Washington. Amazingly, the good news arrives in a press release from one of Washington\u2019s most politicized and dangerous bureaucracies: \nThe Department of Justice today announced that it has seized 63.7 bitcoins currently valued at approximately $2.3 million. These funds allegedly represent the proceeds of a May 8, ransom payment to individuals in a group known as DarkSide, which had targeted Colonial Pipeline, resulting in critical infrastructure being taken out of operation. The seizure warrant was authorized earlier today by the Honorable Laurel Beeler, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California... On or about May 7, Colonial Pipeline was the victim of a highly publicized ransomware attack resulting in the company taking portions of its infrastructure out of operation. Colonial Pipeline reported to the FBI that its computer network was accessed by an organization named DarkSide and that it had received and paid a ransom demand for approximately 75 bitcoins. ***\nOK, Let\u2019s Not Get Carried Away Praising Bureaucracies\nRemember when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) used to pretend that the federal student-loan program was a windfall for taxpayers? Her fellow Democrats at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue are beginning to acknowledge reality. The Journal\u2019s Josh Mitchell reports from Washington:\nThe Biden administration has raised an estimate of losses on the federal government\u2019s student loan portfolio by $53 billion, reflecting lower repayment rates and pandemic-relief efforts... A year ago, the federal budget projected that taxpayers would ultimately lose $15 billion on all outstanding student debt, which currently comes to $1.6 trillion. The administration\u2019s proposed $6 trillion budget now projects long-term losses will reach $68 billion. Those estimates are still far smaller than losses projected in an internal analysis led by officials appointed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Betsy DeVos,\n\n\n\n who was education secretary under President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump,\n \n\n\n\n which showed that taxpayers ultimately would b The entrepreneur leads from the front on commercial space flight. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Not Great Enough (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "287",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-great-enough-1489176832?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=25",
        "text": "\u201cWe care about revenue,\u201d said Mr. Cohn, whose job is to care about economic growth. A\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs\n\n\n alum, Mr. Cohn is a conventional Wall Streeter who could just as easily have served in a Clinton Administration as in a Trump White House. By all accounts he is bright, knowledgeable and effective in accumulating and exercising power. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBut the President doesn\u2019t need another purveyor of conventional economic analysis--he needs a champion for growth and expanded opportunity. Yes, government deficits and debt have to be reduced\u2014a task that becomes immensely easier once you have a robust economy pulling people off government assistance and into the labor force. First things first, the economy has to get bigger. \nMr. Cohn also showed up on the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Fox Business Network\n\n\n on Friday where, fortunately for workers, host Stuart Varney pressed him to commit to robust annual economic growth of 4% by 2018. \u201cWe\u2019re doing our best,\u201d said Mr. Cohn. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThey have a long way to go. Markets have risen sharply since Election Day, largely on expectations of big tax cuts. And since an armistice in the war on business was declared on January 20, there have been some encouraging signs that the U.S. economy is getting ready to break out from the sluggish new normal of the Obama era.\n\n\nToday\u2019s government jobs report, coming on the heels of this week\u2019s surprisingly good reading from ADP and Moody\u2019s Analytics, brought more good news. In February the economy added 235,000 jobs and more Americans joined the labor force. Hiring was broad-based. The new jobs were not just for low-paid burger flippers--important as such jobs are for unskilled workers, and as much as we enjoy the product of their labor.\nToday\u2019s jobs report might seem perfect in the context of recent years. But Mr. Trump wants Reagan-style growth, not Obama- or Bush-style job creation. Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics writes in a note to clients today that while this morning\u2019s report was better than expected, it\u2019s actually a \u201cmiddle of the pack jobs report.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Cohn said today that Mr. Trump ran on tax reform. Actually he ran on tax cuts. And among the other oddities of the unconventional Trump campaign was a candidate who refreshingly didn\u2019t care whether his plan fit within the unfriendly confines of congressional budget rules and their 10-year scoring windows. These rules were written by liberal Democrats to encourage spending and discourage tax cuts. If Republicans don\u2019t want to rewrite them, they should slash spending to offset big tax cuts or else accept that the cuts will need to be renewed every decade. \nMr. Cohn is a smart guy but he will add zero value in Washington if he joins the rest of that community in caring first and foremost about government revenue. Workers need him to care about economic growth. \nBottom Stories of the Day\nDrain the Swamp, or Something\n\t\t\n\t\u201cLawmaker shocked by \u2018insane\u2019 boozing at Rhode Island capitol,\u201d Associated Press, March 7\nSarah Connor? No,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dianne Feinstein\n\n\n\n \n\t\t\n\t\u201cArnold Schwarzenegger eyes Senate run,\u201d New York Post, March 10\nBut If the Race Doesn\u2019t Work Out \n\t\t\n\t\u201cThe robot chef coming to a kitchen near you,\u201d Telegraph, March 6\nYou Didn\u2019t Knit That\n \u201cHere\u2019s where all those pink hats at the women\u2019s march originated,\u201d Los Angeles Times, January 21\n\n \u201c\u2018Day Without a Woman\u2019 supporters got $246M from Soros, Fox News, March 8\n\n \nBreaking News from 1985\n\t\t\n\t\u201cChris Mullin, John Thompson III, Patrick Ewing Jr. involved in heated exchange,\u201d ESPN, March 9\nMake That 11\n \u201c10 Times The Color Pink Was Too Much,\u201d Odyssey, January 9\n\n \n \u201cCanadian town sorry for pink tap water,\u201d BBC, March 7\n\n \nIt\u2019s Always in the Last Place You Look\n\t\t\n\t\u201cNASA finds lunar spacecraft that vanished 8 years ago,\u201d CNN, March 10\nLook Out Below!\n\t\t\n\t\u201cEU Lawmaker Says News Publishers\u2019 Rights Proposal Should Be Dropped,\u201d Wall Street Journal, March 8\nFollow James Freeman on Twitter.\nSubscribe to the Best of the Web email with one click.\nTo suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.\n(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Irene Deblasio, David Gill, Matthew Hicks III, William Jensen, Alan Kuska, Mike Lavender, Tony Lima, Mary Michael, Liz Rowan, Macrena Sailor.) The February jobs report was encouraging until a Trump adviser started talking about it. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Miss Me Yet? (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "288",
        "date": "2018-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/miss-me-yet-1520956099?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=20",
        "text": "\u201cHello Pittsburgh. Hello Pittsburgh.\u201d \u201cSo we are doing a great, great job.\u201d \u201cLook at all those red hats, Rick. Look at all those hats. That\u2019s a lot of hats.\u201d \u201cAnd you did a great job on television today. I watched you, Rick, that was a great interview.\u201d \u201cI love the policeman. I love the fireman.\u201d A few of the 64 items really were outrageous, as when Mr. Trump unfairly denigrated a television host and a member of Congress. Mr. Trump often entertains the crowds at his events by insulting powerful people in media and politics. At Hillary Clinton\u2019s events, the former secretary of State tends to insult people who can\u2019t afford to attend. \nMrs. Clinton was asked over the weekend how Mr. Trump was able to win a majority of white women in 2016 despite his crude remarks about women captured on tape. Fox News reports:\n\n\n\u201cWe do not do well with white men and we don\u2019t do well with married, white women,\u201d Clinton said at a conference in Mumbai, India. \u201cAnd part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.\u201d ...Interviewed on stage by India Today editor-in-chief Aroon Purie, Clinton accused Trump of running a \u201cbackwards\u201d campaign that appealed to racists and misogynists. \u201cI won the places that represent two-thirds of America\u2019s gross domestic product,\u201d Clinton said. \u201cSo I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, \u2018Make America Great Again,\u2019 was looking backwards.\u201d She claimed Trump\u2019s message to voters was: \u201cYou know, you didn\u2019t like black people getting rights, you don\u2019t like women, you know, getting jobs. You don\u2019t want, you know, to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are.\u201d Mrs. Clinton wasn\u2019t done insulting people who chose not to vote for her. India Today reports: \nFormer US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tore into US President Donald Trump\u2019s election campaign strategy today saying that he won the first TV reality election in the US. She said that on the basis of what he said in the election campaign in 2016, America did not deserve to have Donald Trump as the US President. She said that while she ran an election campaign that was done on conventional lines, talking serious issues, the other side behaved as if they were participating in a TV reality show. Clinton said that while she ran the presidential campaign like a mother who was telling the kids to eat spinach because it was good for health while the other guy was asking them to go eat fast food and have ice-cream. \u201cMaybe I should have given them more entertainment,\u201d added Mrs. Clinton. Continuing her offshore assault on the intelligence and judgment of the American voter, the former secretary of State then warned the Indian audience that such a \u201creality TV\u201d campaign could be coming \u201cto a democracy near you\u201d and opined that \u201cit\u2019s going to require a lot more sophisticated analysis\u201d to allow voters to make the correct decision. \nCertainly Mr. Trump is a showman. As he said in Pennsylvania on Saturday, \u201cIf I came like a stiff, you guys wouldn\u2019t be here tonight.\u201d\nBut this column believes that Mrs. Clinton is selling herself short. Few contestants in the history of reality television have ever sparked such intense reactions from the American public. The next time she runs for President, Mrs. Clinton simply needs to focus on inspiring potential supporters rather than condemning them.\n***\nBottom Stories of the Day\nAnnals of Chicago Elections\n\t\t\n\t\u201cFirst jail-wide, in-person voting held at Cook County Jail,\u201d WLS, March 10\nWhy Do Bad Things Always Happen to Him?\n\t\t\n\t\u201cObama\u2019s legacy: He sparked hope -- and got blindsided,\u201d CNN, March 11\nConsolation Prize\n\t\t\n\t\u201cEx-Times editor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jill Abramson\n\n\n\n carries an Obama doll in her purse,\u201d New York Post, March 9\nEverything Seemingly Is Spinning out of Control\n\t\t\n\t\u201cAn 8-ton Chinese space lab will crash into Europe or the U.S. Don\u2019t panic yet,\u201d Big Think, March 6\nWe Blame Global Warming\n\t\t\n\t\u201cMore manatees died from cold stress this winter,\u201d Florida Today, March 9\nLife Imitates \u2018Happy Days\u2019\n\t\t\n\t\u201cThe Hottest Social Scene in Town Isn\u2019t the Singles\u2019 Bar. It\u2019s the Supermarket,\u201d The Wall Street Journal, March 10\nCold Bling\n\t\t\n\t\u201cWhat scientists found trapped in a diamond: a type of ice not known on Earth,\u201d Orlando Sentinel, March 9\nAnswers to Questions Nobody Is Asking\n\t\t\n\t\u201cWhy you might want to try a yogurt facial,\u201d New York Post, March 7\nTMI\n\t\t\n\t\u201cNASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft strips Jupiter down to its underwear,\u201d Reuters, March 7\n***\nFollow James Freeman on Twitter.\nSubscribe to the Best of the Web email with one click.\nTo suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.\n(Carol Muller and Lisa Rossi help compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Macrena Sailor, Tony Lima, Irene DeBlasio, Miguel Rakiewicz, Bill Jensen, Rod Pennington, Bryan Cohen, Michele Schiesser, Felix Bronstein, David Lerner and Blair Greber-Raines.) From the west coast of India, Hillary Clinton reflects on Middle America. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "WikiLeaks, Secrecy and the Death of a Patriot (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "289",
        "date": "2018-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wikileaks-secrecy-and-the-death-of-a-patriot-1521571135?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=78",
        "text": "With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian\u2019s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son... The technology website ZDNet reported on Friday:\nThe coroner for Sedgwick County, where Lamo lived, confirmed his death, but provided no further details. Circumstances surrounding Lamo\u2019s death are not immediately known. A neighbor who found his body said he had been dead for some time. The Colombian-American hacker, who resided in Wichita, Kansas, first rose to notoriety in the early-2000s by hacking into systems at The New York Times,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft,\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Yahoo,\n\n\n which he was subsequently convicted for. \n\n\n\nYesterday, Mario Lamo posted again on Facebook: \u201cMy sincere gratitude for your condolences to all of you. His death is still unexplained, but I\u2019m still discovering an Adri\u00e1n that became in death larger than life.\u201d \n\n\nBefore pleading guilty to a crime in 2004, Adri\u00e1n Lamo had engaged in hacking that had often been illegal but does not seem to have been malicious, and may even have been intended in part to expose flaws in computer security. A 2010 Wired magazine story on his struggles with mental health following his conviction provides some background:\nLamo made his mark in the early 2000s with a string of brazen but mostly harmless hacks against large companies, conducted out in the open and with a striking naivet\u00e9 as to the inevitable consequences for himself. In 2001, when he was 20, Lamo snuck into an unprotected content-management tool at Yahoo\u2019s news site to tinker with a Reuters story, adding a made-up quote by then-Attorney General\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Ashcroft.\n\n\n\n Lamo\u2019s other targets included WorldCom, Excite@Home and Microsoft; he alerted the press to each intrusion, and sometimes worked with the hacked company to close the security holes he\u2019d exploited. Unemployed at the time, and prone to wander the country by Greyhound, he was given the appellation \u201cthe Homeless Hacker\u201d by the media. His hacking career ended around 2002, after Lamo penetrated the internal network of The New York Times and added himself to the paper\u2019s database of op-ed contributors, putting himself in the virtual company of William F. Buckley Jr. and Jimmy Carter. The Times didn\u2019t think it was funny, and the FBI and federal prosecutors in New York charged Lamo under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. U.S. Attorney James Comey got his conviction. Lamo\u2019s notoriety from the case was likely among the reasons Manning contacted him six years later. But Lamo did not believe in the exposure of government secrets for its own sake, and the amount of data Manning was sending to WikiLeaks persuaded Lamo that the Army soldier could not possibly be vetting the information before release to prevent tragic consequences. Lamo told the U.K. newspaper The Guardian in 2013 about Manning and his actions:\n...however I personally felt about his issues, his motives, and his state of mind didn\u2019t matter, and could not factor into what I did. The choices at hand were very blunt ones \u2013 to interdict him, or to pretend I\u2019d never had my conscience as shocked as it was when I learned of the sheer volume of sensitive documents he had extracted to WikiLeaks. There was no option to interdict just the documents and put him merely in touch with counseling. There was no way to be both kind to Bradley and mindful of the potential for harm to people I had never known and would never know which the situation posed. The reader might think there was some more moderate choice that I overlooked but I looked closely, and no such choice existed. There\u2019s a science fiction story from 1954 or so by Tom Godwin, called The Cold Equations. It\u2019s about, in summary, a space shuttle, a stowaway, a pilot, and a far-off research station. Specifically, about a young girl who\u2019s stowed away not realizing that her slight excess weight would doom the flight of badly-needed medical supplies unless she was ejected. At its heart, it\u2019s a story about how much we might feel for someone and how little human feeling means against the weight of numbers. There were hundreds of thousands of documents \u2013 let\u2019s drop the number to 250,000 to be conservative \u2013 and doing nothing meant gambling that each and every one would do no harm if no warning was given. In the story, the stowaway is ejected from an airlock not because no one felt for her, but because everyone felt for her, wanted to help her, but all those feelings didn\u2019t matter a damn against the reality of the situation. Adri\u00e1n Lamo didn\u2019t consider how classified information might be useful to him, but how it might harm others. May he rest in peace.\n***\nBottom Stories of the Day will return on Wednesday.\n***\n***\nFollow James Freeman on Twitter.\nSubscribe to the Best of the Web email with one click.\nTo suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.\n(Carol Muller and Lisa Rossi help compile Best of the Web.) Adri\u00e1n Lamo took no pleasure in breaking the Manning case. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems. (WP: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "290",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/andy-weirs-project-hail-mary-is-a-bestseller-it-also-has-some-problems/2021/05/22/7ccd3578-b8bc-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html",
        "text": "Note: This article contains spoilers about the novel \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201dNo surprise: \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d Andy Weir\u2019s latest science fiction space adventure, is a bestseller. Like \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cArtemis,\u201d the book has a propulsive story line and is filled with the cool science and witty banter you expect from Weir, a software engineer who turned his love of aerospace and the hard sciences into a cottage industry. In his latest outing, Weir uses a common SF trope \u2014 a protagonist who must discover who he is and what\u2019s going on, and oh, also save humanity. It\u2019s a fun idea, and Weir knows how to ratchet up the excitement, but the novel seems written to be a movie (and in fact is being made into one, starring Ryan Gosling). Perhaps just wait for that? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA friend of mine, who teaches scriptwriting, talks about \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d \u2014 elements that don\u2019t bother you until after a movie is over and you go to the refrigerator and say, \u201cHey\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. wait a minute.\u201d Refrigerator logic is even worse in a novel \u2014 you have a lot more time to sit with the book in real time and scratch your head about the plot points and characterizations that don\u2019t quite make sense, even in speculative fiction.There\u2019s lots of \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d in \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201d Let\u2019s start with the opening. The main character, Ryland Grace, wakes up in a white room with no idea of why he is there or even what his name is. Even if the amnesia is a bit of a cliche, it\u2019s still fun to watch Grace figure everything out, and he\u2019s clever, too. But his cleverness is also the weakness of this novel, because there are so many parts of the narrative that seem to exist only to show off that quality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLet me start with a simple example. Grace is on a space mission in which they put people into a coma, knowing their brains might be mush when they wake up. That\u2019s an interesting premise and carries an inherent tension. But there\u2019s an essential element missing: When the astronauts are sent out, there are no checklists. If you know anything about NASA, or flying, or the military, or hospitals, then you know that checklists are essential and baked into the culture. Checklists are there to ensure that every aspect of a complicated aerospace feat can go off safely. Without them, something is likely to go wrong, and guess what happens in \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d? It may seem like a small thing, but the lack of checklists is what sets everything in motion.The 5 worst scenes from Andy Weir\u2019s new book, \u2018Artemis\u2019Weir has built his career on accuracy, so this is a strange oversight. This isn\u2019t about insider knowledge like \u201cwalking in a 260 lb. Orlan suit in 1.4 g is implausible at best.\u201d People can do extreme things in a moment of crisis. Characters can be exceptional. But leaving out checklists is building an entire space mission to be stupid so that you can have your main character be clever. The only checklist that appears in the novel is in a flashback to a test on Earth.Grace has to be clever about things that he absolutely should not need to be clever about. Here\u2019s another example: The ship is designed to supply gravity through constant thrust or through centrifugal force. Without one of those two things, you get zero-g. There\u2019s a countdown timer to when that engine cutoff will occur, which gives him close to six days of warning before it happens. Somehow, this very clever character is fretting about zero-g and yet also doesn\u2019t fasten his seat belt. He panics. He vomits. All of the gear he\u2019d pulled out and catalogued is now floating haphazardly around the ship. \u201cDummy,\u201d I say to myself. I really should have seen that coming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYes. Yes, you should have. This feels like a manufactured crisis to show the character cleverly solving something that doesn\u2019t need to be solved. (At another point, Grace does this long experiment to figure out how heavy something is and then realizes that he didn\u2019t need to because it was labeled.) Elsewhere, he needs to work the \u201cSpin Drive\u201d for the first time, and we get to watch Grace figure out what the Spin Drive is and how to work it. Again, there\u2019s an appalling lack of checklists. The computer AI appears to have less capability than the average smartphone. Grace has to figure out what the thing is and how it works, which he cleverly does. Disguising exposition through action is a standard SF technique, but these scenes have little emotional weight and slow down the pace of the story. Deeper into the book, where no checklists could possibly have prepped him for what happens, the novel picks up pace and the challenges get significantly more interesting.And yet weird plot holes abound, like: Grace wasn\u2019t originally supposed to go on the mission, so why do they have his name on the mission patch? Why is he comfortable spacewalking? (Every astronaut I\u2019ve spoken to says that the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is absolutely not like being in space. It\u2019s just the best thing we have.) How can the aliens have robots if they never developed computers? Since the mission has a hull robot, why isn\u2019t it deployed instead of having Grace do a spacewalk in 1.4 gs? Why do the living quarters have so much empty space?Another problem involves a bit of a spoiler, but I can\u2019t think of a way to discuss it without this reveal \u2014 and I think it needs to be discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGrace encounters an alien species that\u2019s also spacefaring and sapient. Upon meeting the beings he observes: \u201cNo one ever talks about the really hard part of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I\u2019m going to go with \u2018he\u2019 for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being \u2018it.\u2019\u2009\u201dLet\u2019s unpack that a moment. The only two pronouns that occur to Grace are \u201che\u201d and \u201cit.\u201d He is a molecular biologist turned middle school science teacher in the 21st century. He should know better. He couldn\u2019t think \u201cshe\u201d or \u201cthey?\u201d (In fact, the species are hermaphrodites and don\u2019t gender themselves.)Then there\u2019s this passage with the only major female character, Eva Stratt, a Dutch scientist who oversees the program behind the spacecraft Hail Mary that Grace will board with two other scientists to determine if a star might have the answers to saving life on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy guidelines were that all candidates must be heterosexual men,\u201d Stratt says.\u201cWhy not all heterosexual women?\u201d Graceasks.Stratt: \u201cThe vast majority of scientists and trained astronaut candidates are men. It\u2019s the world we live in. Don\u2019t like it? Encourage your female students to get into STEM. I\u2019m not here to enact social equality. I\u2019m here to do whatever\u2019s necessary to save humanity.\u201dAfrican speculative fiction is finally getting its due. Let\u2019s talk about books to seek out.There is no reason for this to be in the book. The author chose to put those words in the mouth of the only major female character. I\u2019ll grant that Grace says that it seems sexist, but having the head of a multinational task force raise the argument gives it the veneer of validity. These authorial choices are so frustrating because they aren\u2019t necessary and just reinforce this idea of space exploration being for men \u2014 and straight men at that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are plenty of things to love about this book. Grace\u2019s enthusiasm for science is infectious. Watching him get excited about an idea and chase it down is a delight. Rocky, when you meet him, is a beautifully constructed alien.But the book could have been so much better. Its central tension \u2014 will Grace figure things out? \u2014 should have been based on a real problem, instead of a series of incidents that could have been solved with checklists and simple common sense. That said, you\u2019ll probably enjoy it anyway, at least until you reach the refrigerator.\n\nMary Robinette Kowal, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the author of the Lady Astronaut series, which includes \u201cThe Calculating Stars,\u201d the 2019 Nebula, Hugo and Locus award winner for best novel, and the historical fantasy novels the Glamourist Histories series and \u201cGhost Talkers.\u201dProject Hail MaryBy Andy WeirBallantine. 496 pp. $28. For one thing, the plot features many unbelievable moments, even for speculative fiction. Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems.",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "291",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/andy-weirs-project-hail-mary-is-a-bestseller-it-also-has-some-problems/2021/05/22/7ccd3578-b8bc-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html",
        "text": "Note: This article contains spoilers about the novel \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201dNo surprise: \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d Andy Weir\u2019s latest science fiction space adventure, is a bestseller. Like \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cArtemis,\u201d the book has a propulsive story line and is filled with the cool science and witty banter you expect from Weir, a software engineer who turned his love of aerospace and the hard sciences into a cottage industry. In his latest outing, Weir uses a common SF trope \u2014 a protagonist who must discover who he is and what\u2019s going on, and oh, also save humanity. It\u2019s a fun idea, and Weir knows how to ratchet up the excitement, but the novel seems written to be a movie (and in fact is being made into one, starring Ryan Gosling). Perhaps just wait for that? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA friend of mine, who teaches scriptwriting, talks about \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d \u2014 elements that don\u2019t bother you until after a movie is over and you go to the refrigerator and say, \u201cHey\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. wait a minute.\u201d Refrigerator logic is even worse in a novel \u2014 you have a lot more time to sit with the book in real time and scratch your head about the plot points and characterizations that don\u2019t quite make sense, even in speculative fiction.There\u2019s lots of \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d in \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201d Let\u2019s start with the opening. The main character, Ryland Grace, wakes up in a white room with no idea of why he is there or even what his name is. Even if the amnesia is a bit of a cliche, it\u2019s still fun to watch Grace figure everything out, and he\u2019s clever, too. But his cleverness is also the weakness of this novel, because there are so many parts of the narrative that seem to exist only to show off that quality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLet me start with a simple example. Grace is on a space mission in which they put people into a coma, knowing their brains might be mush when they wake up. That\u2019s an interesting premise and carries an inherent tension. But there\u2019s an essential element missing: When the astronauts are sent out, there are no checklists. If you know anything about NASA, or flying, or the military, or hospitals, then you know that checklists are essential and baked into the culture. Checklists are there to ensure that every aspect of a complicated aerospace feat can go off safely. Without them, something is likely to go wrong, and guess what happens in \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d? It may seem like a small thing, but the lack of checklists is what sets everything in motion.The 5 worst scenes from Andy Weir\u2019s new book, \u2018Artemis\u2019Weir has built his career on accuracy, so this is a strange oversight. This isn\u2019t about insider knowledge like \u201cwalking in a 260 lb. Orlan suit in 1.4 g is implausible at best.\u201d People can do extreme things in a moment of crisis. Characters can be exceptional. But leaving out checklists is building an entire space mission to be stupid so that you can have your main character be clever. The only checklist that appears in the novel is in a flashback to a test on Earth.Grace has to be clever about things that he absolutely should not need to be clever about. Here\u2019s another example: The ship is designed to supply gravity through constant thrust or through centrifugal force. Without one of those two things, you get zero-g. There\u2019s a countdown timer to when that engine cutoff will occur, which gives him close to six days of warning before it happens. Somehow, this very clever character is fretting about zero-g and yet also doesn\u2019t fasten his seat belt. He panics. He vomits. All of the gear he\u2019d pulled out and catalogued is now floating haphazardly around the ship. \u201cDummy,\u201d I say to myself. I really should have seen that coming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYes. Yes, you should have. This feels like a manufactured crisis to show the character cleverly solving something that doesn\u2019t need to be solved. (At another point, Grace does this long experiment to figure out how heavy something is and then realizes that he didn\u2019t need to because it was labeled.) Elsewhere, he needs to work the \u201cSpin Drive\u201d for the first time, and we get to watch Grace figure out what the Spin Drive is and how to work it. Again, there\u2019s an appalling lack of checklists. The computer AI appears to have less capability than the average smartphone. Grace has to figure out what the thing is and how it works, which he cleverly does. Disguising exposition through action is a standard SF technique, but these scenes have little emotional weight and slow down the pace of the story. Deeper into the book, where no checklists could possibly have prepped him for what happens, the novel picks up pace and the challenges get significantly more interesting.And yet weird plot holes abound, like: Grace wasn\u2019t originally supposed to go on the mission, so why do they have his name on the mission patch? Why is he comfortable spacewalking? (Every astronaut I\u2019ve spoken to says that the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is absolutely not like being in space. It\u2019s just the best thing we have.) How can the aliens have robots if they never developed computers? Since the mission has a hull robot, why isn\u2019t it deployed instead of having Grace do a spacewalk in 1.4 gs? Why do the living quarters have so much empty space?Another problem involves a bit of a spoiler, but I can\u2019t think of a way to discuss it without this reveal \u2014 and I think it needs to be discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGrace encounters an alien species that\u2019s also spacefaring and sapient. Upon meeting the beings he observes: \u201cNo one ever talks about the really hard part of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I\u2019m going to go with \u2018he\u2019 for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being \u2018it.\u2019\u2009\u201dLet\u2019s unpack that a moment. The only two pronouns that occur to Grace are \u201che\u201d and \u201cit.\u201d He is a molecular biologist turned middle school science teacher in the 21st century. He should know better. He couldn\u2019t think \u201cshe\u201d or \u201cthey?\u201d (In fact, the species are hermaphrodites and don\u2019t gender themselves.)Then there\u2019s this passage with the only major female character, Eva Stratt, a Dutch scientist who oversees the program behind the spacecraft Hail Mary that Grace will board with two other scientists to determine if a star might have the answers to saving life on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy guidelines were that all candidates must be heterosexual men,\u201d Stratt says.\u201cWhy not all heterosexual women?\u201d Graceasks.Stratt: \u201cThe vast majority of scientists and trained astronaut candidates are men. It\u2019s the world we live in. Don\u2019t like it? Encourage your female students to get into STEM. I\u2019m not here to enact social equality. I\u2019m here to do whatever\u2019s necessary to save humanity.\u201dAfrican speculative fiction is finally getting its due. Let\u2019s talk about books to seek out.There is no reason for this to be in the book. The author chose to put those words in the mouth of the only major female character. I\u2019ll grant that Grace says that it seems sexist, but having the head of a multinational task force raise the argument gives it the veneer of validity. These authorial choices are so frustrating because they aren\u2019t necessary and just reinforce this idea of space exploration being for men \u2014 and straight men at that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are plenty of things to love about this book. Grace\u2019s enthusiasm for science is infectious. Watching him get excited about an idea and chase it down is a delight. Rocky, when you meet him, is a beautifully constructed alien.But the book could have been so much better. Its central tension \u2014 will Grace figure things out? \u2014 should have been based on a real problem, instead of a series of incidents that could have been solved with checklists and simple common sense. That said, you\u2019ll probably enjoy it anyway, at least until you reach the refrigerator.\n\nMary Robinette Kowal, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the author of the Lady Astronaut series, which includes \u201cThe Calculating Stars,\u201d the 2019 Nebula, Hugo and Locus award winner for best novel, and the historical fantasy novels the Glamourist Histories series and \u201cGhost Talkers.\u201dProject Hail MaryBy Andy WeirBallantine. 496 pp. $28. For one thing, the plot features many unbelievable moments, even for speculative fiction. Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems.",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "292",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/andy-weirs-project-hail-mary-is-a-bestseller-it-also-has-some-problems/2021/05/22/7ccd3578-b8bc-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html",
        "text": "Note: This article contains spoilers about the novel \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201dNo surprise: \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d Andy Weir\u2019s latest science fiction space adventure, is a bestseller. Like \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cArtemis,\u201d the book has a propulsive story line and is filled with the cool science and witty banter you expect from Weir, a software engineer who turned his love of aerospace and the hard sciences into a cottage industry. In his latest outing, Weir uses a common SF trope \u2014 a protagonist who must discover who he is and what\u2019s going on, and oh, also save humanity. It\u2019s a fun idea, and Weir knows how to ratchet up the excitement, but the novel seems written to be a movie (and in fact is being made into one, starring Ryan Gosling). Perhaps just wait for that? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA friend of mine, who teaches scriptwriting, talks about \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d \u2014 elements that don\u2019t bother you until after a movie is over and you go to the refrigerator and say, \u201cHey\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. wait a minute.\u201d Refrigerator logic is even worse in a novel \u2014 you have a lot more time to sit with the book in real time and scratch your head about the plot points and characterizations that don\u2019t quite make sense, even in speculative fiction.There\u2019s lots of \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d in \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201d Let\u2019s start with the opening. The main character, Ryland Grace, wakes up in a white room with no idea of why he is there or even what his name is. Even if the amnesia is a bit of a cliche, it\u2019s still fun to watch Grace figure everything out, and he\u2019s clever, too. But his cleverness is also the weakness of this novel, because there are so many parts of the narrative that seem to exist only to show off that quality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLet me start with a simple example. Grace is on a space mission in which they put people into a coma, knowing their brains might be mush when they wake up. That\u2019s an interesting premise and carries an inherent tension. But there\u2019s an essential element missing: When the astronauts are sent out, there are no checklists. If you know anything about NASA, or flying, or the military, or hospitals, then you know that checklists are essential and baked into the culture. Checklists are there to ensure that every aspect of a complicated aerospace feat can go off safely. Without them, something is likely to go wrong, and guess what happens in \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d? It may seem like a small thing, but the lack of checklists is what sets everything in motion.The 5 worst scenes from Andy Weir\u2019s new book, \u2018Artemis\u2019Weir has built his career on accuracy, so this is a strange oversight. This isn\u2019t about insider knowledge like \u201cwalking in a 260 lb. Orlan suit in 1.4 g is implausible at best.\u201d People can do extreme things in a moment of crisis. Characters can be exceptional. But leaving out checklists is building an entire space mission to be stupid so that you can have your main character be clever. The only checklist that appears in the novel is in a flashback to a test on Earth.Grace has to be clever about things that he absolutely should not need to be clever about. Here\u2019s another example: The ship is designed to supply gravity through constant thrust or through centrifugal force. Without one of those two things, you get zero-g. There\u2019s a countdown timer to when that engine cutoff will occur, which gives him close to six days of warning before it happens. Somehow, this very clever character is fretting about zero-g and yet also doesn\u2019t fasten his seat belt. He panics. He vomits. All of the gear he\u2019d pulled out and catalogued is now floating haphazardly around the ship. \u201cDummy,\u201d I say to myself. I really should have seen that coming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYes. Yes, you should have. This feels like a manufactured crisis to show the character cleverly solving something that doesn\u2019t need to be solved. (At another point, Grace does this long experiment to figure out how heavy something is and then realizes that he didn\u2019t need to because it was labeled.) Elsewhere, he needs to work the \u201cSpin Drive\u201d for the first time, and we get to watch Grace figure out what the Spin Drive is and how to work it. Again, there\u2019s an appalling lack of checklists. The computer AI appears to have less capability than the average smartphone. Grace has to figure out what the thing is and how it works, which he cleverly does. Disguising exposition through action is a standard SF technique, but these scenes have little emotional weight and slow down the pace of the story. Deeper into the book, where no checklists could possibly have prepped him for what happens, the novel picks up pace and the challenges get significantly more interesting.And yet weird plot holes abound, like: Grace wasn\u2019t originally supposed to go on the mission, so why do they have his name on the mission patch? Why is he comfortable spacewalking? (Every astronaut I\u2019ve spoken to says that the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is absolutely not like being in space. It\u2019s just the best thing we have.) How can the aliens have robots if they never developed computers? Since the mission has a hull robot, why isn\u2019t it deployed instead of having Grace do a spacewalk in 1.4 gs? Why do the living quarters have so much empty space?Another problem involves a bit of a spoiler, but I can\u2019t think of a way to discuss it without this reveal \u2014 and I think it needs to be discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGrace encounters an alien species that\u2019s also spacefaring and sapient. Upon meeting the beings he observes: \u201cNo one ever talks about the really hard part of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I\u2019m going to go with \u2018he\u2019 for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being \u2018it.\u2019\u2009\u201dLet\u2019s unpack that a moment. The only two pronouns that occur to Grace are \u201che\u201d and \u201cit.\u201d He is a molecular biologist turned middle school science teacher in the 21st century. He should know better. He couldn\u2019t think \u201cshe\u201d or \u201cthey?\u201d (In fact, the species are hermaphrodites and don\u2019t gender themselves.)Then there\u2019s this passage with the only major female character, Eva Stratt, a Dutch scientist who oversees the program behind the spacecraft Hail Mary that Grace will board with two other scientists to determine if a star might have the answers to saving life on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy guidelines were that all candidates must be heterosexual men,\u201d Stratt says.\u201cWhy not all heterosexual women?\u201d Graceasks.Stratt: \u201cThe vast majority of scientists and trained astronaut candidates are men. It\u2019s the world we live in. Don\u2019t like it? Encourage your female students to get into STEM. I\u2019m not here to enact social equality. I\u2019m here to do whatever\u2019s necessary to save humanity.\u201dAfrican speculative fiction is finally getting its due. Let\u2019s talk about books to seek out.There is no reason for this to be in the book. The author chose to put those words in the mouth of the only major female character. I\u2019ll grant that Grace says that it seems sexist, but having the head of a multinational task force raise the argument gives it the veneer of validity. These authorial choices are so frustrating because they aren\u2019t necessary and just reinforce this idea of space exploration being for men \u2014 and straight men at that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are plenty of things to love about this book. Grace\u2019s enthusiasm for science is infectious. Watching him get excited about an idea and chase it down is a delight. Rocky, when you meet him, is a beautifully constructed alien.But the book could have been so much better. Its central tension \u2014 will Grace figure things out? \u2014 should have been based on a real problem, instead of a series of incidents that could have been solved with checklists and simple common sense. That said, you\u2019ll probably enjoy it anyway, at least until you reach the refrigerator.\n\nMary Robinette Kowal, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the author of the Lady Astronaut series, which includes \u201cThe Calculating Stars,\u201d the 2019 Nebula, Hugo and Locus award winner for best novel, and the historical fantasy novels the Glamourist Histories series and \u201cGhost Talkers.\u201dProject Hail MaryBy Andy WeirBallantine. 496 pp. $28. For one thing, the plot features many unbelievable moments, even for speculative fiction. Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems.",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "293",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/andy-weirs-project-hail-mary-is-a-bestseller-it-also-has-some-problems/2021/05/22/7ccd3578-b8bc-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html",
        "text": "Note: This article contains spoilers about the novel \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201dNo surprise: \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d Andy Weir\u2019s latest science fiction space adventure, is a bestseller. Like \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cArtemis,\u201d the book has a propulsive story line and is filled with the cool science and witty banter you expect from Weir, a software engineer who turned his love of aerospace and the hard sciences into a cottage industry. In his latest outing, Weir uses a common SF trope \u2014 a protagonist who must discover who he is and what\u2019s going on, and oh, also save humanity. It\u2019s a fun idea, and Weir knows how to ratchet up the excitement, but the novel seems written to be a movie (and in fact is being made into one, starring Ryan Gosling). Perhaps just wait for that? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA friend of mine, who teaches scriptwriting, talks about \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d \u2014 elements that don\u2019t bother you until after a movie is over and you go to the refrigerator and say, \u201cHey\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. wait a minute.\u201d Refrigerator logic is even worse in a novel \u2014 you have a lot more time to sit with the book in real time and scratch your head about the plot points and characterizations that don\u2019t quite make sense, even in speculative fiction.There\u2019s lots of \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d in \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201d Let\u2019s start with the opening. The main character, Ryland Grace, wakes up in a white room with no idea of why he is there or even what his name is. Even if the amnesia is a bit of a cliche, it\u2019s still fun to watch Grace figure everything out, and he\u2019s clever, too. But his cleverness is also the weakness of this novel, because there are so many parts of the narrative that seem to exist only to show off that quality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLet me start with a simple example. Grace is on a space mission in which they put people into a coma, knowing their brains might be mush when they wake up. That\u2019s an interesting premise and carries an inherent tension. But there\u2019s an essential element missing: When the astronauts are sent out, there are no checklists. If you know anything about NASA, or flying, or the military, or hospitals, then you know that checklists are essential and baked into the culture. Checklists are there to ensure that every aspect of a complicated aerospace feat can go off safely. Without them, something is likely to go wrong, and guess what happens in \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d? It may seem like a small thing, but the lack of checklists is what sets everything in motion.The 5 worst scenes from Andy Weir\u2019s new book, \u2018Artemis\u2019Weir has built his career on accuracy, so this is a strange oversight. This isn\u2019t about insider knowledge like \u201cwalking in a 260 lb. Orlan suit in 1.4 g is implausible at best.\u201d People can do extreme things in a moment of crisis. Characters can be exceptional. But leaving out checklists is building an entire space mission to be stupid so that you can have your main character be clever. The only checklist that appears in the novel is in a flashback to a test on Earth.Grace has to be clever about things that he absolutely should not need to be clever about. Here\u2019s another example: The ship is designed to supply gravity through constant thrust or through centrifugal force. Without one of those two things, you get zero-g. There\u2019s a countdown timer to when that engine cutoff will occur, which gives him close to six days of warning before it happens. Somehow, this very clever character is fretting about zero-g and yet also doesn\u2019t fasten his seat belt. He panics. He vomits. All of the gear he\u2019d pulled out and catalogued is now floating haphazardly around the ship. \u201cDummy,\u201d I say to myself. I really should have seen that coming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYes. Yes, you should have. This feels like a manufactured crisis to show the character cleverly solving something that doesn\u2019t need to be solved. (At another point, Grace does this long experiment to figure out how heavy something is and then realizes that he didn\u2019t need to because it was labeled.) Elsewhere, he needs to work the \u201cSpin Drive\u201d for the first time, and we get to watch Grace figure out what the Spin Drive is and how to work it. Again, there\u2019s an appalling lack of checklists. The computer AI appears to have less capability than the average smartphone. Grace has to figure out what the thing is and how it works, which he cleverly does. Disguising exposition through action is a standard SF technique, but these scenes have little emotional weight and slow down the pace of the story. Deeper into the book, where no checklists could possibly have prepped him for what happens, the novel picks up pace and the challenges get significantly more interesting.And yet weird plot holes abound, like: Grace wasn\u2019t originally supposed to go on the mission, so why do they have his name on the mission patch? Why is he comfortable spacewalking? (Every astronaut I\u2019ve spoken to says that the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is absolutely not like being in space. It\u2019s just the best thing we have.) How can the aliens have robots if they never developed computers? Since the mission has a hull robot, why isn\u2019t it deployed instead of having Grace do a spacewalk in 1.4 gs? Why do the living quarters have so much empty space?Another problem involves a bit of a spoiler, but I can\u2019t think of a way to discuss it without this reveal \u2014 and I think it needs to be discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGrace encounters an alien species that\u2019s also spacefaring and sapient. Upon meeting the beings he observes: \u201cNo one ever talks about the really hard part of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I\u2019m going to go with \u2018he\u2019 for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being \u2018it.\u2019\u2009\u201dLet\u2019s unpack that a moment. The only two pronouns that occur to Grace are \u201che\u201d and \u201cit.\u201d He is a molecular biologist turned middle school science teacher in the 21st century. He should know better. He couldn\u2019t think \u201cshe\u201d or \u201cthey?\u201d (In fact, the species are hermaphrodites and don\u2019t gender themselves.)Then there\u2019s this passage with the only major female character, Eva Stratt, a Dutch scientist who oversees the program behind the spacecraft Hail Mary that Grace will board with two other scientists to determine if a star might have the answers to saving life on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy guidelines were that all candidates must be heterosexual men,\u201d Stratt says.\u201cWhy not all heterosexual women?\u201d Graceasks.Stratt: \u201cThe vast majority of scientists and trained astronaut candidates are men. It\u2019s the world we live in. Don\u2019t like it? Encourage your female students to get into STEM. I\u2019m not here to enact social equality. I\u2019m here to do whatever\u2019s necessary to save humanity.\u201dAfrican speculative fiction is finally getting its due. Let\u2019s talk about books to seek out.There is no reason for this to be in the book. The author chose to put those words in the mouth of the only major female character. I\u2019ll grant that Grace says that it seems sexist, but having the head of a multinational task force raise the argument gives it the veneer of validity. These authorial choices are so frustrating because they aren\u2019t necessary and just reinforce this idea of space exploration being for men \u2014 and straight men at that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are plenty of things to love about this book. Grace\u2019s enthusiasm for science is infectious. Watching him get excited about an idea and chase it down is a delight. Rocky, when you meet him, is a beautifully constructed alien.But the book could have been so much better. Its central tension \u2014 will Grace figure things out? \u2014 should have been based on a real problem, instead of a series of incidents that could have been solved with checklists and simple common sense. That said, you\u2019ll probably enjoy it anyway, at least until you reach the refrigerator.\n\nMary Robinette Kowal, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the author of the Lady Astronaut series, which includes \u201cThe Calculating Stars,\u201d the 2019 Nebula, Hugo and Locus award winner for best novel, and the historical fantasy novels the Glamourist Histories series and \u201cGhost Talkers.\u201dProject Hail MaryBy Andy WeirBallantine. 496 pp. $28. For one thing, the plot features many unbelievable moments, even for speculative fiction. Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems.",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "294",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/andy-weirs-project-hail-mary-is-a-bestseller-it-also-has-some-problems/2021/05/22/7ccd3578-b8bc-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html",
        "text": "Note: This article contains spoilers about the novel \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201dNo surprise: \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d Andy Weir\u2019s latest science fiction space adventure, is a bestseller. Like \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cArtemis,\u201d the book has a propulsive story line and is filled with the cool science and witty banter you expect from Weir, a software engineer who turned his love of aerospace and the hard sciences into a cottage industry. In his latest outing, Weir uses a common SF trope \u2014 a protagonist who must discover who he is and what\u2019s going on, and oh, also save humanity. It\u2019s a fun idea, and Weir knows how to ratchet up the excitement, but the novel seems written to be a movie (and in fact is being made into one, starring Ryan Gosling). Perhaps just wait for that? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA friend of mine, who teaches scriptwriting, talks about \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d \u2014 elements that don\u2019t bother you until after a movie is over and you go to the refrigerator and say, \u201cHey\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. wait a minute.\u201d Refrigerator logic is even worse in a novel \u2014 you have a lot more time to sit with the book in real time and scratch your head about the plot points and characterizations that don\u2019t quite make sense, even in speculative fiction.There\u2019s lots of \u201crefrigerator logic\u201d in \u201cProject Hail Mary.\u201d Let\u2019s start with the opening. The main character, Ryland Grace, wakes up in a white room with no idea of why he is there or even what his name is. Even if the amnesia is a bit of a cliche, it\u2019s still fun to watch Grace figure everything out, and he\u2019s clever, too. But his cleverness is also the weakness of this novel, because there are so many parts of the narrative that seem to exist only to show off that quality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLet me start with a simple example. Grace is on a space mission in which they put people into a coma, knowing their brains might be mush when they wake up. That\u2019s an interesting premise and carries an inherent tension. But there\u2019s an essential element missing: When the astronauts are sent out, there are no checklists. If you know anything about NASA, or flying, or the military, or hospitals, then you know that checklists are essential and baked into the culture. Checklists are there to ensure that every aspect of a complicated aerospace feat can go off safely. Without them, something is likely to go wrong, and guess what happens in \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d? It may seem like a small thing, but the lack of checklists is what sets everything in motion.The 5 worst scenes from Andy Weir\u2019s new book, \u2018Artemis\u2019Weir has built his career on accuracy, so this is a strange oversight. This isn\u2019t about insider knowledge like \u201cwalking in a 260 lb. Orlan suit in 1.4 g is implausible at best.\u201d People can do extreme things in a moment of crisis. Characters can be exceptional. But leaving out checklists is building an entire space mission to be stupid so that you can have your main character be clever. The only checklist that appears in the novel is in a flashback to a test on Earth.Grace has to be clever about things that he absolutely should not need to be clever about. Here\u2019s another example: The ship is designed to supply gravity through constant thrust or through centrifugal force. Without one of those two things, you get zero-g. There\u2019s a countdown timer to when that engine cutoff will occur, which gives him close to six days of warning before it happens. Somehow, this very clever character is fretting about zero-g and yet also doesn\u2019t fasten his seat belt. He panics. He vomits. All of the gear he\u2019d pulled out and catalogued is now floating haphazardly around the ship. \u201cDummy,\u201d I say to myself. I really should have seen that coming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYes. Yes, you should have. This feels like a manufactured crisis to show the character cleverly solving something that doesn\u2019t need to be solved. (At another point, Grace does this long experiment to figure out how heavy something is and then realizes that he didn\u2019t need to because it was labeled.) Elsewhere, he needs to work the \u201cSpin Drive\u201d for the first time, and we get to watch Grace figure out what the Spin Drive is and how to work it. Again, there\u2019s an appalling lack of checklists. The computer AI appears to have less capability than the average smartphone. Grace has to figure out what the thing is and how it works, which he cleverly does. Disguising exposition through action is a standard SF technique, but these scenes have little emotional weight and slow down the pace of the story. Deeper into the book, where no checklists could possibly have prepped him for what happens, the novel picks up pace and the challenges get significantly more interesting.And yet weird plot holes abound, like: Grace wasn\u2019t originally supposed to go on the mission, so why do they have his name on the mission patch? Why is he comfortable spacewalking? (Every astronaut I\u2019ve spoken to says that the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is absolutely not like being in space. It\u2019s just the best thing we have.) How can the aliens have robots if they never developed computers? Since the mission has a hull robot, why isn\u2019t it deployed instead of having Grace do a spacewalk in 1.4 gs? Why do the living quarters have so much empty space?Another problem involves a bit of a spoiler, but I can\u2019t think of a way to discuss it without this reveal \u2014 and I think it needs to be discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGrace encounters an alien species that\u2019s also spacefaring and sapient. Upon meeting the beings he observes: \u201cNo one ever talks about the really hard part of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I\u2019m going to go with \u2018he\u2019 for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being \u2018it.\u2019\u2009\u201dLet\u2019s unpack that a moment. The only two pronouns that occur to Grace are \u201che\u201d and \u201cit.\u201d He is a molecular biologist turned middle school science teacher in the 21st century. He should know better. He couldn\u2019t think \u201cshe\u201d or \u201cthey?\u201d (In fact, the species are hermaphrodites and don\u2019t gender themselves.)Then there\u2019s this passage with the only major female character, Eva Stratt, a Dutch scientist who oversees the program behind the spacecraft Hail Mary that Grace will board with two other scientists to determine if a star might have the answers to saving life on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy guidelines were that all candidates must be heterosexual men,\u201d Stratt says.\u201cWhy not all heterosexual women?\u201d Graceasks.Stratt: \u201cThe vast majority of scientists and trained astronaut candidates are men. It\u2019s the world we live in. Don\u2019t like it? Encourage your female students to get into STEM. I\u2019m not here to enact social equality. I\u2019m here to do whatever\u2019s necessary to save humanity.\u201dAfrican speculative fiction is finally getting its due. Let\u2019s talk about books to seek out.There is no reason for this to be in the book. The author chose to put those words in the mouth of the only major female character. I\u2019ll grant that Grace says that it seems sexist, but having the head of a multinational task force raise the argument gives it the veneer of validity. These authorial choices are so frustrating because they aren\u2019t necessary and just reinforce this idea of space exploration being for men \u2014 and straight men at that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are plenty of things to love about this book. Grace\u2019s enthusiasm for science is infectious. Watching him get excited about an idea and chase it down is a delight. Rocky, when you meet him, is a beautifully constructed alien.But the book could have been so much better. Its central tension \u2014 will Grace figure things out? \u2014 should have been based on a real problem, instead of a series of incidents that could have been solved with checklists and simple common sense. That said, you\u2019ll probably enjoy it anyway, at least until you reach the refrigerator.\n\nMary Robinette Kowal, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the author of the Lady Astronaut series, which includes \u201cThe Calculating Stars,\u201d the 2019 Nebula, Hugo and Locus award winner for best novel, and the historical fantasy novels the Glamourist Histories series and \u201cGhost Talkers.\u201dProject Hail MaryBy Andy WeirBallantine. 496 pp. $28. For one thing, the plot features many unbelievable moments, even for speculative fiction. Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 is a bestseller. It also has some problems.",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Monsters vs. Aliens (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "295",
        "date": "2020-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/books/review/sia-martinez-and-the-moonlit-beginning-of-everything-raquel-vasquez-gilliland.html",
        "text": "In \u201cSia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything,\u201d a Mexican-American girl lights candles in the desert for her deported mother. Then a spacecraft arrives. In \u201cSia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything,\u201d a Mexican-American girl lights candles in the desert for her deported mother. Then a spacecraft arrives. Sia Martinez is trying so hard to believe in miracles.",
        "author": "By Abby Sher"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Paradoxes and the Glory of Apollo 8\u2019s Journey Around the Moon (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "296",
        "date": "2018-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/books/review/robert-kurson-rocket-men.html",
        "text": "Fifty years after the spacecraft became the first to leave Earth\u2019s orbit, Robert Kurson tells the story of the remarkable odyssey in \u201cRocket Men.\u201d Fifty years after the spacecraft became the first to leave Earth\u2019s orbit, Robert Kurson tells the story of the remarkable odyssey in \u201cRocket Men.\u201d ROCKET MEN The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man\u2019s First Journey to the Moon By Robert Kurson Illustrated. 372 pp. Random House. $28.",
        "author": "By M. G. Lord"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Paradoxes and the Glory of Apollo 8\u2019s Journey Around the Moon (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "297",
        "date": "2018-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/books/review/robert-kurson-rocket-men.html",
        "text": "Fifty years after the spacecraft became the first to leave Earth\u2019s orbit, Robert Kurson tells the story of the remarkable odyssey in \u201cRocket Men.\u201d Fifty years after the spacecraft became the first to leave Earth\u2019s orbit, Robert Kurson tells the story of the remarkable odyssey in \u201cRocket Men.\u201d ROCKET MEN The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man\u2019s First Journey to the Moon By Robert Kurson Illustrated. 372 pp. Random House. $28.",
        "author": "By M. G. Lord"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The best science fiction and fantasy to read this fall (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "298",
        "date": "2018-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-best-science-fiction-and-fantasy-to-read-this-fall/2018/10/25/a8ceec56-b154-11e8-aed9-001309990777_story.html",
        "text": "Vengeful In \u201cVengeful\u201d (Tor), V.E. Schwab is at the top of her game, with twisty action, oddball family pairings and unexpected antiheroes you can\u2019t help but root for. The book resumes where Schwab\u2019s 2013 novel \u201cVicious\u201d left off: Eli and Victor seek revenge on each other after an experiment to induce supernatural abilities goes awry, resulting in Victor\u2019s imprisonment and Eli\u2019s descent into darkness. Their final battle left Eli imprisoned, and Victor is resurrected. But Victor begins to experience some deadly side effects; seeking a cure, he spends five years with his makeshift family. Eli ends up in a Hannibal Lecter/Clarice-type situation, helping a detective hunt down ExtraOrdinaries like himself. There\u2019s also a new character named Marcella who is hellbent on getting revenge on the mafioso husband who betrayed her. As engaging as these story lines are, as they unfold they sometimes feel a bit inevitable and oddly hollow. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Spaceship Next DoorIn \u201cThe Spaceship Next Door\u201d(John Joseph Adams/Mariner Books), Gene Doucette uses a mashup of science fiction and horror tropes to explore what happens in a small town after a seemingly cataclysmic event. Three years before the book opens, a spaceship landed in the town of Sorrow Falls. The United States fell into chaos, with suicide rates up and proclamations of doom \u2014 but then nothing happened. When the ship does start to give off some alarming signals, government analyst Edgar Somerville goes undercover as a reporter to explore. His investigation is a dud until he teams up with Annie Collins, a wise-beyond-her-years teenager who is more involved with the mysterious spaceship than it seems. The book is a slow burn that builds to a somewhat goofy ending. Still, it\u2019s a fun and heartwarming send-up of classic science fiction.Phoenix UnboundAll of the promise of Grace Draven\u2019s fantasy, \u201cPhoenix Unbound\u201d (Ace), is wrapped up in its premise. The story is set in a typical old-time fantasy milieu, where an evil empire requires each village to sacrifice a woman who is burned on a pyre in the Rite of Spring every year. Gilene makes herself a martyr: She has control of fire, and allows herself to be raped and burned once a year to protect her village. One year, however, the prime gladiator and slave Azarian sees through her plan and blackmails her to help him escape and reclaim his rightful place as head of his clan. There is a lot to be explored with the idea of ritual sacrifice of young women for the pleasure of the masses. But instead Draven plunges headlong into your typical romantic fantasy, with a compelling enemy-to-lover arc. This is comforting escapism at its best.bookworld@washpost.comEverdeen Mason reviews science fiction and fantasy every month for The Washington Post.V.E. Schwab has had enough of the \u201cclassic female\u201d role in fantasySabaa Tahir, author of \u2018A Torch in the Night,\u2019 drew from her day job and upbringing V.E. Schwab\u2019s \u2018Vengeful\u2019 is among the season\u2019s best science fiction and fantasy titles. The best science fiction and fantasy to read this fall",
        "author": "Everdeen Mason"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The weirdly specific mixtape Vol. 2: Close encounters of the tentacled kind (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "299",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-weirdly-specific-mixtape-vol-2-close-encounters-of-the-tentacled-kind/2019/02/13/0f36a9ec-2faa-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html",
        "text": "There is an abundance of cephalopod \u2014 think squid or octopus \u2014 in horror, science fiction and fantasy, reminding us again and again the terrifying, thrilling (and usually phallic) nature of tentacles. Scarier, such creatures often have an intelligence that exceeds our own capabilities. We can trace these nightmares back beyond one of the most famous \u2014 the oft-parodied Cthulhu, by H.P Lovecraft \u2014 perhaps to the shockingly erotic 19th-century woodblock painting \u201cDream of the Fisherman\u2019s Wife,\u201d which I won\u2019t describe here, as this is a family newspaper. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFortunately, a diverse group of authors are using the tentacle trope in new and interesting ways. Here\u2019s a look at a few worth reading.(Note: I Googled the history of tentacles in pop culture in the office, so this may be my last column. Never say I\u2019m not committed.)New release: \u201cThe City in the Middle of the Night,\u201d by Charlie Jane AndersAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHumans have settled on a harsh planet and created two opposing cities on the sunny side of the globe. In a caste-based city, Sophie is a timid college student in love with her roommate and best friend, the socialite Bianca. But when she gets involved in Bianca\u2019s faux-revolutionary club, it is Sophie who gets caught and exiled to the harsh, nightside terrain outside the city. This would be a death sentence if it weren\u2019t for the sentient alien Sophie befriends. Her relationship with this giant buglike creature with roving tentacles leads her on the path of true revolution. Anders has written a unique book, one that uses tropes found in old-school science fiction to comment on modern side effects of class structures: the hallmarks of a creature feature to explore colonization and the meaning of personhood; a typical rough-and-tumble bounty hunter crew to speak to cultural memory.A classic: \u201cDawn,\u201d by Octavia ButlerButler\u2019s exploration of colonialism and biodeterminism is a must-read for social sci-fi enthusiasts. \u201cDawn,\u201d the first of her Lilith\u2019s Brood series, is set hundreds of years after a nuclear war made Earth uninhabitable. A black woman named Lilith awakens on a spaceship and finds that she\u2019s been captured by the Oankali, humanoid creatures with tentacle feelers that have a variety of sensory abilities. At first, she is disgusted and terrified, but she soon begins to bond with them as she learns what happened to humanity, and what the Oankali want from her.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementButler\u2019s descriptions of the legitimately terrifying creatures require a reader to reach their imaginative limits. Just as Lilith \u2014 and the reader \u2014 struggles to process their alienness, she also starts to identify with them. The aliens\u2019 musings over human biology and its contribution to society are illuminating: The most valuable thing about humanity, they argue, is a literal cancer on the species. Although the book was published in 1987, the theme of how power imbalances affect relationships is still fresh and relevant.Critics loved it: \u201cCirce,\u201d by Madeline MillerMadeline Miller\u2019s hit take on Homer\u2019s \u201cOdyssey\u201d is a departure from much of what we know from the source material. But the event that begins Circe\u2019s path to sorcery \u2014 and exile \u2014 stays the same. When Circe falls in love with a fisherman, she turns him into a god so they can be together. But when his attentions wander to a beautiful sea nymph, Circe brews a poison to turn the object of his affection into the destructive, tentacled monster Scylla. Once exiled to the island of Aeaea, Circe is haunted by stories of Scylla\u2019s exploits until, eventually, she must face the monster she created \u2014 and the death she has wrought.I remain somewhat skeptical of most retold fairy tales and legends, but Miller gives Circe a compassionate eye and wry humor that transforms the whole tale. Circe\u2019s emotional growth is as epic as any Greek ballad and reveals the natural strength of women \u2014 goddesses or mortals.Everdeen Mason\u2009is The Washington Post\u2019s audience editor and science-fiction and fantasy columnist. A diverse group of authors are using the science-fiction trope in new and interesting ways. The weirdly specific mixtape Vol. 2: Close encounters of the tentacled kind",
        "author": "Everdeen Mason"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Clowns are creepy. Let's talk about horror, science-fiction and fantasy books that make the most of circus settings. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "300",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/clowns-are-creepy-lets-talk-about-horror-science-fiction-and-fantasy-books-make-the-most-of-circus-settings/2021/05/25/4b51bf88-a82b-11eb-8c1a-56f0cb4ff3b5_story.html",
        "text": "The circus, with its built-in otherworldliness, is an ideal setting for fantasy, horror and science-fiction novels. Authors have been capitalizing on it for years. Stephen King terrified a whole generation with Pennywise the clown in 1986\u2019s \u201cIt,\u201d then tackled a carnival setting 27 years later in \u201cJoyland.\u201d In 2011, Erin Morgenstern charmed readers and scored a big hit with \u201cThe Night Circus.\u201d So what other great fiction hides under the big top? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSilvia: There are plenty of short stories that take places in circuses and carnivals. \u201cSpurs\u201d by Tod Robbins served as the inspiration for Tod Browning\u2019s \u201cFreaks\u201d (1932). Although Robert Bloch is best known for penning \u201cPsycho\u201d (1959), he was a prolific short story writer, too. \u201cThe Double Whammy,\u201d first published in the collection \u201cCold Chills,\u201d stars a carnival employee who is terrified of the \u201cgeek\u201d \u2014 the performer who kills chickens for a sideshow. Robert Aickman\u2019s young protagonist becomes fascinated by a woman who is pierced by blades in a magician\u2019s show in \u201cThe Swords,\u201d from the collection \u201cCold Hand in Mine.\u201d E. Catherine Tobler, a criminally underrated fantasy writer, has a whole collection of circus stories titled \u201cThe Grand Tour,\u201d spanning the gamut from disturbing to bittersweet. There\u2019s also \u201cCircus: Fantasy Under the Big Top\u201d (2012), an anthology by Ekaterina Sedia with stories by Jeff VanderMeer, Genevieve Valentine, Holly Black and Tobler, among others.Let\u2019s talk about fantasy and science-fiction books that have fallen off the radarI had not heard of \u201cCircus World\u201d (1981), by Barry B. Longyear until we were putting together this column and was delighted to discover it. It\u2019s not really a novel but a series of interconnected stories with one of the most bizarre premises I\u2019ve bumped into: a planet populated by people who descend from a spaceship carrying circus performers. Yes, a circus civilization. It has not been reprinted recently, which is a shame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLavie: I\u2019m so glad you liked \u201cCircus World.\u201d It\u2019s truly a lost classic, and needs republishing. Like some of the best science fiction novels, it was initially published as short magazine stories. I may be biased \u2014 my fascination with clowns led to my own \u201cThe Escapement\u201d coming out this year. If you\u2019re ever in London, you might just find yourself \u2014 as I did one day \u2014 stumbling onto the gravesite of Joseph Grimaldi, the father of clowns, who is buried somewhat incongruously behind a children\u2019s playground not far from King\u2019s Cross. A memorial service in his honor takes place annually in the nearby clown church of Holy Trinity in Hackney, attended by clowns from around the world. The church also holds the Clown Egg Register and, yes, that is a real thing.But on to fiction! Genevieve Valentine is always an interesting writer, and her 2011 novel \u201cMechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti\u201d is a wondrous mosaic of the strange denizens of the circus, including aerialists with hollow metal bones and a pair of mechanical wings up for grabs, the battle for which provides some of the plot. Traveling across a war-torn, apocalyptic landscape, the circus troupe is beset by troubles. Somewhat steampunk, somewhat New Weird. And this year, I was very taken with \u201cBacchanal\u201d by debut author Veronica G. Henry. Set in the Depression-era South and featuring a mysterious traveling carnival, it\u2019s a novel of Black history and magic that makes for a terrific read.Silvia: Angela Carter\u2019s prose is always magical, and \u201cNights at the Circus\u201d (1984) is a playful, delicious book about a winged aerialist and the reporter trying to publish her life story. Sentences sing, the characters are varied and unique, the situations outlandish and fun. There\u2019s something Tim Burtonesque about this book in the best of ways.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinally, one of my childhood favorites was Ray Bradbury and \u201cSomething Wicked This Way Comes\u201d (1962), and it remains beloved. Two teenagers explore a mysterious carnival that has recently arrived in town. There\u2019s something mournful about this tale, but Bradbury\u2019s explosive imagination tempers the darkness. Bradbury also utilizes a carnival performer as the unifying mechanism in his science-fiction collection \u201cThe Illustrated Man\u201d (1951), with the performer\u2019s tattoos coming to life and telling each story.In \u2018Later,\u2019 Stephen King reminds us that he\u2019s the master of the kids-with-strange-powers genreLavie: The mysterious carnival has been with us since at least Charles G. Finney\u2019s 1935 classic \u201cThe Circus of Dr. Lao,\u201d and shows no sign of pulling a vanishing act anytime soon. One recent great take is Robert Jackson Bennett\u2019s \u201cThe Troupe,\u201d a 2012 cosmic thriller set in early 20th century America. In \u201cThe Troupe,\u201d young George runs away to join the Silenus troupe of vaudeville performers to find the man he thinks is his father. Slowly, George learns the group\u2019s secret: They must recreate the world on song, while evading the attentions of murderous \u201cwolves\u201d who want to destroy creation. Then there\u2019s Australian Will Elliott\u2019s \u201cThe Pilo Family Circus\u201d (2006), a horror-tinged novel where a young man, Jamie, is plunged into the life of a supernatural circus when he hits a clown with his car. When Jamie joins the circus he becomes a clown himself \u2014 but the clown he becomes wants Jamie dead. It\u2019s another (darkly) fun book.\n\nSilvia Moreno-Garcia\u2009is the author of \u201cMexican Gothic,\u201d \u201cGods of Jade and Shadow\u201d and the upcoming \u201cVelvet Was the Night.\u201d Lavie Tidhar is the author of several novels, including \u201cThe Violent Century,\u201d \u201cA Man Lies Dreaming,\u201d \u201cCentral Station\u201d and, most recently, \u201cBy Force Alone.\u201d There\u2019s much wicked fun to be found in books like \u2018The Grand Tour,\u2019 \u2018Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top\u2019 and more. Clowns are creepy. Let's talk about horror, science-fiction and fantasy books that make the most of circus settings.",
        "author": "Silvia Moreno-Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Kubrick wanted 90 tons of sand dyed gray for \u20182001\u2019 \u2014 and that was just the start (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "301",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/kubrick-wanted-90-tons-of-sand-dyed-gray-for-2001--and-that-was-just-the-start/2018/03/28/03d88c3c-2e02-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html",
        "text": "Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d had its world premiere April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Northwest Washington. People in the audience were \u201cstreaming out\u201d before the film was over. The next day, in New York City, 241exited early. Obviously, some viewers didn\u2019t know what hit \u2019em, or that they were witnessing a significant moment in filmmaking. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFifty years later, few would dispute that \u201c2001\u201d is a masterpiece. But how, exactly, is a masterpiece created, especially one that relies on collaboration? Michael Benson\u2019s new book, \u201cSpace Odyssey,\u201d is a detailed and often thrilling account of one intense, unforgettable collaboration. It\u2019s a tremendous explication of a tremendous film.Benson, the author of five books about astronomy, approaches his topic from both human and scientific angles. He begins with the friendship between director Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, which began in 1964 when jazz musician Artie Shaw recommended Clarke\u2019s novel \u201cChildhood\u2019s End\u201d to Kubrick. From there, Benson builds his narrative one collaborator at a time. We learn about Hollywood deal-making, NASA\u2019s scientific input, top-notch film photographers and animators, and who did and did not have a nervous breakdown during the four years it took Kubrick to complete his masterpiece. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite their friendship and Clarke\u2019s intelligent suggestions throughout the project, once Kubrick had gathered his team of technical specialists and began the production process, the novelist\u2019s input diminished. With only 40 minutes of dialogue in a 2 1/2-\nhour film \u2014 there was never a fixed script \u2014 the images would supplant the words. Benson\u2019s skill as a science journalist is evident when he describes how Kubrick and his staff made the film\u2019s visuals truly visionary. Although the technical descriptions of certain procedures might tax readers who aren\u2019t engineers, the cumulative effect of such information is breathtaking. All the work was done by hand, a reminder that \u201c2001\u201d was created back in the pre-digital era. For the moonscape scene, Kubrick insisted that 90 tons of sand be dyed gray. Some of the sets were \u201cso brightly lit that the actors wore sunglasses between takes.\u201dAlthough the finished film may be futuristic, the making of that future was a day-by-day, hands-on, trial-and-error, sweat-off-the-forehead human collaboration. My favorite detail involves how the Star Gate scene was created. Famous for its psychedelic special effects, the scene originated in 1965 in an abandoned brassiere factory on New York\u2019s Upper West Side. By pouring ink into tanks filled with paint thinner and then photographing the ink\u2019s flow using high camera speeds, Kubrick captured \u201cgalactic tendrils streaming into cosmic space.\u201d Although more sophisticated photographic enhancements to the Star Gate sequence were added in 1967, the paint thinner shots made the final cut. Facts such as these don\u2019t diminish the wonder of the completed film, but have the opposite effect. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBenson tries to be fair to everyone involved in this project, but Kubrick was the sun around whom they all orbited. It\u2019s Kubrick\u2019s breath we hear when HAL, the spaceship\u2019s malicious computer, is deprogrammed by astronaut Dave Bowman, played by Keir Dullea. What Benson calls the film\u2019s \u201crespiratory soundscape\u201d creates \u201ca subjective sense of shared humanity.\u201d Kubrick literally breathes life into his film. Some have regarded Kubrick as cold and distant, but Benson\u2019s book convinces otherwise. Although solidly self-protective, Kubrick appears surprisingly democratic and optimistic, often giving assignments to nontechnical people because he\u2019s curious about what they\u2019ll come up with. For instance, he put a mime, Dan Richter, in charge of the ape men in the film\u2019s \u201cDawn of Man\u201d segment. Devising the ape costumes took more than two years, and lighting one scene required 1.5 million watts. \u201cYou start to die,\u201d Richter recalls, referring to the working conditions inside the ape-men suits, yet he stayed on and was responsible for unforgettable footage.After reading a bit of Benson\u2019s book, I took a TV break: \u201c2001\u201d was on! While watching my 40-inch HD Samsung television, I was speechless. But that\u2019s the point, isn\u2019t it? Who knew that visionary thinking, attention to silence, a committed workforce, millions of light bulbs and an abandoned brassiere factory could create a masterpiece? Stanley Kubrick knew, and thanks to Michael Benson, we now know, too.Sibbie O\u2019Sullivan, a former teacher in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, has recently completed a memoir on how the Beatles have influenced her life.By Michael Benson Simon & Schuster. 497 pp. $30 Michael Benson\u2019s \u201cSpace Odyssey,\u201d on the making of a masterpiece, is out of this world. Kubrick wanted 90 tons of sand dyed gray for \u20182001\u2019 \u2014 and that was just the start",
        "author": "Sibbie O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Kubrick wanted 90 tons of sand dyed gray for \u20182001\u2019 \u2014 and that was just the start (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "302",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/kubrick-wanted-90-tons-of-sand-dyed-gray-for-2001--and-that-was-just-the-start/2018/03/28/03d88c3c-2e02-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html",
        "text": "Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d had its world premiere April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Northwest Washington. People in the audience were \u201cstreaming out\u201d before the film was over. The next day, in New York City, 241exited early. Obviously, some viewers didn\u2019t know what hit \u2019em, or that they were witnessing a significant moment in filmmaking. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFifty years later, few would dispute that \u201c2001\u201d is a masterpiece. But how, exactly, is a masterpiece created, especially one that relies on collaboration? Michael Benson\u2019s new book, \u201cSpace Odyssey,\u201d is a detailed and often thrilling account of one intense, unforgettable collaboration. It\u2019s a tremendous explication of a tremendous film.Benson, the author of five books about astronomy, approaches his topic from both human and scientific angles. He begins with the friendship between director Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, which began in 1964 when jazz musician Artie Shaw recommended Clarke\u2019s novel \u201cChildhood\u2019s End\u201d to Kubrick. From there, Benson builds his narrative one collaborator at a time. We learn about Hollywood deal-making, NASA\u2019s scientific input, top-notch film photographers and animators, and who did and did not have a nervous breakdown during the four years it took Kubrick to complete his masterpiece. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite their friendship and Clarke\u2019s intelligent suggestions throughout the project, once Kubrick had gathered his team of technical specialists and began the production process, the novelist\u2019s input diminished. With only 40 minutes of dialogue in a 2 1/2-\nhour film \u2014 there was never a fixed script \u2014 the images would supplant the words. Benson\u2019s skill as a science journalist is evident when he describes how Kubrick and his staff made the film\u2019s visuals truly visionary. Although the technical descriptions of certain procedures might tax readers who aren\u2019t engineers, the cumulative effect of such information is breathtaking. All the work was done by hand, a reminder that \u201c2001\u201d was created back in the pre-digital era. For the moonscape scene, Kubrick insisted that 90 tons of sand be dyed gray. Some of the sets were \u201cso brightly lit that the actors wore sunglasses between takes.\u201dAlthough the finished film may be futuristic, the making of that future was a day-by-day, hands-on, trial-and-error, sweat-off-the-forehead human collaboration. My favorite detail involves how the Star Gate scene was created. Famous for its psychedelic special effects, the scene originated in 1965 in an abandoned brassiere factory on New York\u2019s Upper West Side. By pouring ink into tanks filled with paint thinner and then photographing the ink\u2019s flow using high camera speeds, Kubrick captured \u201cgalactic tendrils streaming into cosmic space.\u201d Although more sophisticated photographic enhancements to the Star Gate sequence were added in 1967, the paint thinner shots made the final cut. Facts such as these don\u2019t diminish the wonder of the completed film, but have the opposite effect. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBenson tries to be fair to everyone involved in this project, but Kubrick was the sun around whom they all orbited. It\u2019s Kubrick\u2019s breath we hear when HAL, the spaceship\u2019s malicious computer, is deprogrammed by astronaut Dave Bowman, played by Keir Dullea. What Benson calls the film\u2019s \u201crespiratory soundscape\u201d creates \u201ca subjective sense of shared humanity.\u201d Kubrick literally breathes life into his film. Some have regarded Kubrick as cold and distant, but Benson\u2019s book convinces otherwise. Although solidly self-protective, Kubrick appears surprisingly democratic and optimistic, often giving assignments to nontechnical people because he\u2019s curious about what they\u2019ll come up with. For instance, he put a mime, Dan Richter, in charge of the ape men in the film\u2019s \u201cDawn of Man\u201d segment. Devising the ape costumes took more than two years, and lighting one scene required 1.5 million watts. \u201cYou start to die,\u201d Richter recalls, referring to the working conditions inside the ape-men suits, yet he stayed on and was responsible for unforgettable footage.After reading a bit of Benson\u2019s book, I took a TV break: \u201c2001\u201d was on! While watching my 40-inch HD Samsung television, I was speechless. But that\u2019s the point, isn\u2019t it? Who knew that visionary thinking, attention to silence, a committed workforce, millions of light bulbs and an abandoned brassiere factory could create a masterpiece? Stanley Kubrick knew, and thanks to Michael Benson, we now know, too.Sibbie O\u2019Sullivan, a former teacher in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, has recently completed a memoir on how the Beatles have influenced her life.By Michael Benson Simon & Schuster. 497 pp. $30 Michael Benson\u2019s \u201cSpace Odyssey,\u201d on the making of a masterpiece, is out of this world. Kubrick wanted 90 tons of sand dyed gray for \u20182001\u2019 \u2014 and that was just the start",
        "author": "Sibbie O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Kubrick wanted 90 tons of sand dyed gray for \u20182001\u2019 \u2014 and that was just the start (WP: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "303",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/kubrick-wanted-90-tons-of-sand-dyed-gray-for-2001--and-that-was-just-the-start/2018/03/28/03d88c3c-2e02-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html",
        "text": "Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d had its world premiere April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Northwest Washington. People in the audience were \u201cstreaming out\u201d before the film was over. The next day, in New York City, 241exited early. Obviously, some viewers didn\u2019t know what hit \u2019em, or that they were witnessing a significant moment in filmmaking. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFifty years later, few would dispute that \u201c2001\u201d is a masterpiece. But how, exactly, is a masterpiece created, especially one that relies on collaboration? Michael Benson\u2019s new book, \u201cSpace Odyssey,\u201d is a detailed and often thrilling account of one intense, unforgettable collaboration. It\u2019s a tremendous explication of a tremendous film.Benson, the author of five books about astronomy, approaches his topic from both human and scientific angles. He begins with the friendship between director Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, which began in 1964 when jazz musician Artie Shaw recommended Clarke\u2019s novel \u201cChildhood\u2019s End\u201d to Kubrick. From there, Benson builds his narrative one collaborator at a time. We learn about Hollywood deal-making, NASA\u2019s scientific input, top-notch film photographers and animators, and who did and did not have a nervous breakdown during the four years it took Kubrick to complete his masterpiece. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite their friendship and Clarke\u2019s intelligent suggestions throughout the project, once Kubrick had gathered his team of technical specialists and began the production process, the novelist\u2019s input diminished. With only 40 minutes of dialogue in a 2 1/2-\nhour film \u2014 there was never a fixed script \u2014 the images would supplant the words. Benson\u2019s skill as a science journalist is evident when he describes how Kubrick and his staff made the film\u2019s visuals truly visionary. Although the technical descriptions of certain procedures might tax readers who aren\u2019t engineers, the cumulative effect of such information is breathtaking. All the work was done by hand, a reminder that \u201c2001\u201d was created back in the pre-digital era. For the moonscape scene, Kubrick insisted that 90 tons of sand be dyed gray. Some of the sets were \u201cso brightly lit that the actors wore sunglasses between takes.\u201dAlthough the finished film may be futuristic, the making of that future was a day-by-day, hands-on, trial-and-error, sweat-off-the-forehead human collaboration. My favorite detail involves how the Star Gate scene was created. Famous for its psychedelic special effects, the scene originated in 1965 in an abandoned brassiere factory on New York\u2019s Upper West Side. By pouring ink into tanks filled with paint thinner and then photographing the ink\u2019s flow using high camera speeds, Kubrick captured \u201cgalactic tendrils streaming into cosmic space.\u201d Although more sophisticated photographic enhancements to the Star Gate sequence were added in 1967, the paint thinner shots made the final cut. Facts such as these don\u2019t diminish the wonder of the completed film, but have the opposite effect. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBenson tries to be fair to everyone involved in this project, but Kubrick was the sun around whom they all orbited. It\u2019s Kubrick\u2019s breath we hear when HAL, the spaceship\u2019s malicious computer, is deprogrammed by astronaut Dave Bowman, played by Keir Dullea. What Benson calls the film\u2019s \u201crespiratory soundscape\u201d creates \u201ca subjective sense of shared humanity.\u201d Kubrick literally breathes life into his film. Some have regarded Kubrick as cold and distant, but Benson\u2019s book convinces otherwise. Although solidly self-protective, Kubrick appears surprisingly democratic and optimistic, often giving assignments to nontechnical people because he\u2019s curious about what they\u2019ll come up with. For instance, he put a mime, Dan Richter, in charge of the ape men in the film\u2019s \u201cDawn of Man\u201d segment. Devising the ape costumes took more than two years, and lighting one scene required 1.5 million watts. \u201cYou start to die,\u201d Richter recalls, referring to the working conditions inside the ape-men suits, yet he stayed on and was responsible for unforgettable footage.After reading a bit of Benson\u2019s book, I took a TV break: \u201c2001\u201d was on! While watching my 40-inch HD Samsung television, I was speechless. But that\u2019s the point, isn\u2019t it? Who knew that visionary thinking, attention to silence, a committed workforce, millions of light bulbs and an abandoned brassiere factory could create a masterpiece? Stanley Kubrick knew, and thanks to Michael Benson, we now know, too.Sibbie O\u2019Sullivan, a former teacher in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, has recently completed a memoir on how the Beatles have influenced her life.By Michael Benson Simon & Schuster. 497 pp. $30 Michael Benson\u2019s \u201cSpace Odyssey,\u201d on the making of a masterpiece, is out of this world. Kubrick wanted 90 tons of sand dyed gray for \u20182001\u2019 \u2014 and that was just the start",
        "author": "Sibbie O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "10 books to read in September (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "304",
        "date": "2021-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/september-books-2021/2021/08/31/1c7e370a-09a5-11ec-9781-07796ffb56fe_story.html",
        "text": "Since it\u2019s not quite Labor Day, it feels unfair to distract you with big autumn books \u2014 but here they come, and they\u2019re worth adding to your to-be-read pile. From a comic romp set in the early 1960s to a somber look at our country\u2019s politics, these titles speak volumes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\u2018Poet Warrior: A Memoir,\u2019 by Joy Harjo (Sept. 7)\nA member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Harjo is the first Native Poet Laureate of the United States. Her second memoir (after \u201cCrazy Brave\u201d) blends personal journey with cultural meaning, weaving in stories from her ancestors that shaped her growth as an artist and teacher. The result is as strong and lyric as her poetry.\u2018Everyone wants a place where they feel safe,\u2019 says Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. poet laureate\u2018On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint,\u2019 by Maggie Nelson (Sept. 7)Story continues below advertisementThe author of \u201cThe Argonauts\u201d explores the idea of freedom as it relates to the worlds of art, sex, drugs and climate. If that sounds heady, it is, yet Nelson\u2019s care and rigor in fully exploring a concept we all think we know make her essays mind-altering.Advertisement\u2018Beautiful World, Where Are You,\u2019 by Sally Rooney (Sept. 7)Those who have read and loved \u201cNormal People\u201d and \u201cConversations With Friends\u201d can rest easy. Sally Rooney\u2019s third novel is very good, covering new territory with characters in their 30s negotiating longer-term relationships, while maintaining the author\u2019s signature sang-froid.At 28, Sally Rooney has been called the voice of her generation. Believe the hype.\u2018Assembly,\u2019 by Natasha Brown (Sept. 14)You may think Brown\u2019s debut novel, at roughly 100 pages, is a quick, easy read. Think again. It\u2019s a carefully constructed indictment of the British world where its young, Black female narrator lives. She\u2019s getting ready for a garden party while pondering a big life-or-death decision; but the bigger decision has to do with how to define her own story.Story continues below advertisement\n\u2018Harlem Shuffle,\u2019 by Colson Whitehead (Sept. 14) \nRay and Elizabeth Carney, expecting their second child, have just enough money to keep them content in their tiny apartment. But Ray, a furniture salesman, has criminals in his family tree and thieves asking him to act as their fence. Ultimately, a failed heist threatens Ray\u2019s domestic peace in this funny and sweet ode to 1960s Harlem by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.Oprah\u2019s book club pick: \u2018The Underground Railroad,\u2019 by Colson Whitehead\n\u2018The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985,\u2019 by James Baldwin (Sept. 21)\nSpeaking of Harlem, its native son James Baldwin\u2019s nonfiction could knock anyone\u2019s socks off and does in this reissue that includes some of his best essays. Baldwin\u2019s writing about race, class and sexuality remains relevant, which would no doubt sadden and enrage this late genius of American letters.James Baldwin spoke eloquently to his era. Does he speak to ours?\n\u2018The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People, Lost and Found,\u2019 by Rick Bragg (Sept. 21) \nIn \u201cAll Over but the Shoutin\u2019\u201d and other memoirs, Bragg has treated readers to a cast of human characters in Calhoun County, Ala. When cancer treatment landed him back there, in his mother\u2019s basement, Bragg found his first canine character, a bedraggled Australian shepherd with few good qualities and plenty of bad ones. Their love story is one for the ages; bring your Kleenex.\n\u2018Bewilderment,\u2019 by Richard Powers (Sept. 21)\nFollowing 2018\u2019s transcendent Pulitzer-winning \u201cThe Overstory,\u201d \u201cBewilderment\u201d is a quieter novel that is nonetheless achingly current and wise. Theo, a widowed astrobiologist, must decide whether to enroll his challenged 9-year-old, Robin, in an experimental neurofeedback program.\u2018The Overstory\u2019 is the most exciting novel about trees you\u2019ll ever read\n\u2018Peril,\u2019 by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (Sept. 21)\nWoodward, a Pulitzer-winning associate editor at The Washington Post, and Robert Costa, one of the newspaper\u2019s national political reporters, have collaborated on a book born from over 200 interviews (and 6,000 pages of transcripts) with people involved in the rocky transition from Donald Trump\u2019s presidency to Joe Biden\u2019s.Woodward\u2019s \u2018Rage\u2019 is a damning account of Trump\u2019s cowering sycophants and enablers\n\u2018Cloud Cuckoo Land,\u2019 by Anthony Doerr (Sept. 28)\nDoerr\u2019s first book since \u201cAll the Light We Cannot See\u201d involves multiple timelines and a huge cast of characters in settings that include a medieval stronghold and a spaceship. If you\u2019re looking for another story about World War II, go elsewhere. If you\u2019re looking for a superb novel, look no further.\n\nBethanne Patrick\u2009is the editor, most recently, of \u201cThe Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians and Other Remarkable People.\u201d Sally Rooney, Colson Whitehead and Richard Powers all have new novels. 10 books to read in September",
        "author": "Bethanne Patrick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Lawrence Ferlinghetti is about to turn 100, and he hasn\u2019t mellowed. At all. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "305",
        "date": "2019-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/lawrence-ferlinghetti-is-about-to-turn-100-and-he-hasnt-mellowed-at-all/2019/03/14/bdafafc0-45c4-11e9-aaf8-4512a6fe3439_story.html",
        "text": "More than 60 years ago, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote,I am anxiously waitingWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightfor the secret of eternal life to be discovered. By most counts, he seems to have discovered it.Ferlinghetti \u2014 the poet, the scholar, the champion of Allen Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl,\u201d the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, the tireless critic of political ills \u2014 turns 100 on March 24. He has not mellowed. At all.In 2017, Ferlinghetti told The Washington Post, \u201cI never wanted to write an autobiography because I don\u2019t like looking back.\u201d Evidently, he overcame that reluctance, but, of course, the autobiography he\u2019s releasing this month is entirely on his own terms. \u201cLittle Boy\u201d isn\u2019t really a memoir. The publisher calls it \u201ca novel,\u201d but it really isn\u2019t that either. As his literary ancestor Walt Whitman would say, it\u2019s a \u201cbarbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA few months ago, Ferlinghetti claimed, \u201cThe little boy is an imaginary me,\u201d but the broad outlines of his real life appear here, particularly in the early pages, which are the only ones that tell something like a coherent story. We learn of his tumultuous childhood: His father died before he was born; an aunt whisked him to France and then back to the United States; the aunt\u2019s wealthy employer, descended from the founders of Sarah Lawrence College, adopted him.He may have lived like \u201cLittle Lord Fauntleroy,\u201d but \u201cit was a very lonely life for Little Boy,\u201d Ferlinghetti writes, \u201cwith the nearest neighbor out of sight and no children of any age to play with.\u201d In a mansion some 20 miles outside New York City, his new guardians spoke to one another in courtly tones and dressed in Victorian garb. They sent him to a private school, and, more important, they possessed a fine library, which he was encouraged to use.As the pace of \u201cLittle Boy\u201d accelerates chaotically, whole years fly by in a phrase or two \u2014 from high school to college with a major in journalism, and then the Navy, where he participated in the Normandy landing and saw Nagasaki just a few weeks after it was destroyed. Discharged, he earned an MA in literature at Columbia University, a PhD at the University of Paris and \u201cemerged as a reasonably miseducated product of high culture and not all so irrelevant as rebels might imagine.\u201d And then, around Page 15, the wheels bust off this narrative, and we\u2019re airborne: \u201cGrown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-hoard pent up within him.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat follows for the next 150 pages is a volcanic explosion of personal memories, political rants, social commentary, environmental jeremiads and cultural analysis all tangled together in one breathless sentence that would make James Joyce proud.Do I recommend it?Yes I said yes I will Yes.You may think you\u2019re in good shape, but before long, you\u2019ll be panting after this irrepressible geezer. \u201cLittle Boy\u201d is full-on stream-of-consciousness: \u201cA Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.\u201d As he swoops back and forth through the impressions and highlights of his long life, Ferlinghetti spits on conventional grammar and mocks the very idea of linear coherence. A Beat sensibility? Sure, but there\u2019s also a dose of Robin Williams\u2019s manic comedy here: the hairpin turns, the interior voices bantering with each other, the constant spinning of an idea till it ricochets off to another. He\u2019s the silliest, angriest, kindest, smartest man you\u2019ve ever heard \u2014 a whirling dervish of scholarly asides, literary allusions, corny puns and twisted aphorisms drawn from \u201can echo chamber of everything ever said or sung in the history of man.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe inevitable annotated edition of \u201cLittle Boy\u201d will have to be four times longer just to explain all the references. Any page might offer a bastardized phrase from Genesis, Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold, while criticizing Christianity, condemning American capitalism and warning of the climate apocalypse.No one alive carries the history, the writers, the personal experience of 20th-century literature in his mind as Ferlinghetti does. \u201cI was all the mad wandering tattered poets rolled into one sleeping under the bridges of the world,\u201d he writes, \u201cI met all the other great writers and poets and great articulators of consciousness.\u201d Allen Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs and so many others flit in and out of these pages so casually that when he mentions Don Quixote, it took me a moment to realize that he didn\u2019t know the knight personally\n. Indeed, scholars and fans of the writers who passed through Ferlinghetti\u2019s San Francisco bookstore and publishing house may hope for a compendium of colorful anecdotes, but \u201cLittle Boy\u201d has no ambitions in that direction.\u201cWhat is the plot of this novel,\u201d he asks in one of many self-referential passages, \u201cif not the remembrance of things still not past for the past is but a cautious counselor of what has yet to come what has yet to transpire or expire so farewell final albatross as time ticks on and all of us like insects in an anthill seen from space all nebulous figures dancing in a tropic night through the night-mazes singing a lyric escape again then and why not Are we to live in despair all the time thinking only of our certain deaths so why not live the highs and ignore the lows. . . .\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYes, this can feel like trying to set the table while falling down the stairs, but there\u2019s something hypnotic about Ferlinghetti\u2019s relentless commentary, a style that amuses him, too: \u201cEvery sentence the last sentence I\u2019ll ever write but then there\u2019s always another thought to be spoken or written and we can\u2019t go on but I do.\u201d If you\u2019re willing to let go, he\u2019ll win you over. \u201cPerhaps there is no meaning there is only existing just as a poem or a painting does not mean but Is and there are only episodes that don\u2019t add up to any meaning but exert in themselves the pith of living.\u201dIt\u2019s that \u201cpith of living\u201d that \u201cLittle Boy\u201d offers up so frequently and unexpectedly. Grab hold of any section, break it apart like a pomegranate, and you\u2019ll find delicious bits randomly spread about.Stick with this book long enough, and you\u2019ll start to hear the central concerns of Ferlinghetti\u2019s life. They revolve around the disastrous conspiracy of our fecundity and our selfishness, what he calls \u201cme-me-me.\u201d \u201cOh for a little erectile dysfunction before the earth bursts its latitudinals with overpopulation,\u201d he cries, \u201cthe spaceship earth overloaded and no end to the eternal rutting and breeding a primeval instinct that will not be denied and no politician dare touch it and don\u2019t tell me I can\u2019t have a baby.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat concern for the fate of the Earth clearly haunts this thoughtful man as he contemplates \u201cthe ravenous maw of eternity.\u201d He may be, as he calls himself, a \u201cdissident romantic or romantic dissident,\u201d but he feels in his own approaching mortality the larger calamity barreling down on us all as we fritter away these final chances for salvation. \u201cThe cries of birds now are not cries of ecstasy but cries of despair.\u201dRon Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.By Lawrence FerlinghettiDoubleday. 192 pp. $24 \u201cLittle Boy\u201d is a stream-of-consciousness explosion of personal memories and political rants. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is about to turn 100, and he hasn\u2019t mellowed. At all.",
        "author": "Ron Charles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Anthony Doerr\u2019s \u2018Cloud Cuckoo Land\u2019 is a convoluted love letter to books (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "306",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/anthony-doerr-cloud-cuckoo-land-review/2021/09/27/7cf7adea-1f9f-11ec-8200-5e3fd4c49f5e_story.html",
        "text": "Librarians and bookworms throughout time are the heroes of Anthony Doerr\u2019s exceedingly busy new novel, \u201cCloud Cuckoo Land.\u201d Think of it as a triptych love letter to the millions of readers who made his previous novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cAll the Light We Cannot See,\u201d a phenomenal bestseller. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOnce again, Doerr presents young people caught in the fires of war, but his stage this time around is far vaster than the plight of two children during World War II. \u201cCloud Cuckoo Land\u201d struts across millennia. Wear comfortable shoes and remember to stay hydrated.This is a big novel of people thinking big thoughts. The earliest action takes place in the mid-15th century when Omeir, an ostracized boy with a cleft palate, is conscripted into the Ottoman army and becomes a reluctant witness to one of history\u2019s most consequential battles. The new sultan is marching on Constantinople with a set of mighty cannons that may allow him to breach the city\u2019s ancient walls. (Spoiler alert: He does.) After cleaning army latrines, Omeir \u201cwonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.\u201d15 books to read this fallMeanwhile, as preparation for that military assault grinds on, an orphan named Anna works at an embroidery house inside Constantinople. Like the young oxherd outside the city walls, she considers profound questions, too, like \u201cHow do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?\u201d Desperate to raise money to heal her sickly sister, Anna starts plucking ancient manuscripts from an abandoned priory at the edge of the city and selling them to well-heeled Italian book collectors. They work for a pre-Google nobleman who dreams of erecting \u201ca library to contain every text ever written, a library to last until the end of time, and his books will be free to anyone.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Anna keeps one literary treasure for herself: a comic allegory called \u201cCloud Cuckoo Land,\u201d written more than a thousand years earlier by the Greek writer Antonius Diogenes. Highly fragmented pages of this ancient (fictional) codex are interlaced throughout Doerr\u2019s novel. They describe the ordeals of a shepherd who turns into various animals. Some nights, Anna thinks that reading these tales aloud is the only thing keeping her sister alive. This seems unlikely to me.Review: \u2018All the Light We Cannot See,\u2019 by Anthony DoerrSome 500 years later, Zeno, an American soldier from Idaho, is captured during the Korean War. He has only the most anxious understanding of his own sexuality, but in a North Korean prison camp, he befriends a handsome British soldier who used to teach classics in England. \u201cOf all the mad things we humans do, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages,\u201d Zeno\u2019s friend says. \u201cBut in the attempt, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was the best kind of fool\u2019s errand.\u201dUnder his friend\u2019s tutelage, Zeno begins to understand the saving grace of those ancient adventures about Ulysses and Achilles. \u201cBecause if it\u2019s told well enough,\u201d he says, \u201cfor as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.\u201dLong after he returns home and retires, Zeno volunteers to direct a group of fifth-graders in a play to be performed in an Idaho public library. The children\u2019s script is drawn from a translation of the now-famous Diogenes manuscript known as \u201cCloud Cuckoo Land.\u201dSign up for the Book World newsletterAnd far off in our apocalyptic future when planet Earth is ruined, we follow 14-year-old Konstance, who\u2019s on an intergalactic spaceship called Argos, zipping along at 5 million miles an hour toward Beta Oph2. The ship is controlled by Sybil, a supercomputer nanny that contains \u201cthe collective wisdom of our species.\u201d In deference to that great repository, on Konstance\u2019s birthday, everyone sings the Library Day song. To stay engaged for the rest of her space-bound life, she has a multidirectional treadmill, which sounds even more dangerous than a Peloton, and hundreds of scraps of an ancient story called \u201cCloud Cuckoo Land.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmid all the dramatic battles being fought in this novel \u2014 past, present and future \u2014 one remains constant: the struggle against literary disintegration. Long before \u201cDon Quixote,\u201d an Italian collector is already lamenting, \u201cDay after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.\u201dAny one of these stories \u2014 except the sci-fi tale, which has a moldy \u201cTwilight Zone\u201d funk \u2014 might have made a compelling novel. But Doerr has not only packed them together, he\u2019s put them in a blender and then laid out the bits in a great scramble, as though his own book were a textual puzzle as complicated as the ancient Diogenes codex.\u201cWhat really matters,\u201d one of the many insightful children proclaims, \u201cis that the story gets passed on.\u201d Yes, libraries are awesome, and we all love books. But the artificial convolutedness of \u201cCloud Cuckoo Land\u201d is not enough to confer any additional depth on Doerr\u2019s simple, belabored theme, a theme that thumps through the novel insisting that every character kneel in reverent submission.More books reviews and recommendationsWhat\u2019s worse, julienning these disparate plots saps them of their natural drama, and no amount of grandiose narration can pump that tension back in. The fall of Constantinople inches forward so deliberately you\u2019ll think you\u2019re dragging the sultan\u2019s great cannon along the ground by yourself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat problem becomes even more acute in the contemporary sections. While Zeno and the children are practicing their theatrical adaptation of \u201cCloud Cuckoo Land,\u201d an eco-terrorist slips into the library carrying a homemade bomb equipped with a cellphone trigger. It\u2019s a terrifying setup, but the scenes are laboriously sliced almost into individual breaths. Had I known the cellphone number, I would have dialed it myself.\n\nRon Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.Cloud Cuckoo LandBy Anthony DoerrScribner. 626 pp. $30 Doerr\u2019s first novel since winning a Pulitzer Prize for \u201cAll the Light We Cannot See\u201d is full of people thinking big thoughts. Anthony Doerr\u2019s \u2018Cloud Cuckoo Land\u2019 is a convoluted love letter to books",
        "author": "Ron Charles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Desert-island books: Science fiction tales set in isolation that feel just right now (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "307",
        "date": "2020-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/desert-island-books-science-fiction-tales-set-in-isolation-that-feel-just-right-now/2020/05/01/7aa7a1bc-79ab-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html",
        "text": "Islands have cast a spell on writers\u2019 imaginations since the earliest days. In Homer\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d they hold magic and monsters, from the deadly cyclops to the sirens who nearly lure the sailors to their deaths. Desert islands inspired Daniel Defoe\u2019s classic tale of Robinson Crusoe. And if R.M. Ballantyne\u2019s \u201cThe Coral Island\u201d imagined stranded children living idyllically in 1857, along came William Golding a century later with the terrifying \u201cLord of the Flies\u201d to show the children\u2019s descent into cruelty and war. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor generations of science fiction writers, space became the new ocean, and planets the lonely islands lost in the great dark. Robert A. Heinlein\u2019s 1950 novel \u201cFarmer in the Sky\u201d became Andy Weir\u2019s 2011 novel \u201cThe Martian\u201d \u2014 both dealing with competent men doing competent things in alien worlds. Others focus on the horror and mystery of islands, such as the world described in Cordwainer Smith\u2019s classic \u201cA Planet Named Shayol,\u201d in which convicts are exposed to a virus that makes them grow extra organs, which are then harvested.As we\u2019re all being placed into lockdown around the world, life really does feel like being stranded on a desert island. So what books would you take with you to a desert island? And what can they tell us about the way we have to live now?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLavie: I actually did live on a nearly desert island once and what I ended up taking with me were a Hemingway omnibus and two tattered issues of Asimov\u2019s Science Fiction Magazine \u2014 the only things I could find! So the answer is never as glamorous as you\u2019d like to think. One classic fantasy series about islands, though, is obviously Urusla K. Le Guin\u2019s Earthsea novels, beginning with \u201cA Wizard of Earthsea,\u201d which is marvelous and does a good job of capturing the isolated nature of island living (and turning into a hawk). And Christopher Priest\u2019s \u201cThe Islanders\u201d is easily one of his best novels, a sort of guidebook to his imagined Dream Archipelago.\u2018The Princess Bride\u2019 and other fantastical novels to help you escape realitySilvia: One of the most affecting stories I\u2019ve read set on a deserted planet is \u201cWe Who Are About To .\u2009.\u2009. \u201d by Joanna Russ. It turns the survivalist Lost in Space ideas right on their head. While the stranded men are eager to colonize the planet, the protagonist is not buying into the whole interstellar Adam and Eve. It\u2019s grim and powerful. J.G. Ballard wrote a couple of novels that strike a not-so-dissimilar chord: \u201cConcrete Island\u201d and \u201cHigh Rise.\u201d In \u201cHigh Rise,\u201d a high-tech building becomes an island of steel and glass. Something, we don\u2019t know what, begins to drive its inhabitants into conflict and eventually murder. In \u201cBattle Royale,\u201d by Koushun Takami, a group of teens who must fight to the death do so on an island. Are there any science fiction \u201cisland\u201d books that are a bit more cheerful?Lavie: \u201cThe Island of Dr. Moreau\u201d? Just kidding. Though one noteworthy follow-up to the H.G. Wells classic is the Athena Club series by Theodora Goss, beginning with \u201cThe Strange Case of the Alchemist\u2019s Daughter,\u201d which imagines Moreau\u2019s daughter teaming up with Mary Jekyll and Justine Frankenstein. Great fun, if not exactly island-related. In space, of course, we get islands of a different sort: noteworthy is Aliette de Bodard\u2019s \u201cOn a Red Station, Drifting,\u201d which is set on an isolated space station in a time of war as it is flooding with refugees. The culture is Vietnamese, the literary influence is the Chinese classic \u201cA Dream of Red Mansions,\u201d and the whole thing is very ambitious.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSilvia: I suppose the beginning of \u201cThe Stars My Destination,\u201d by Alfred Bester might also count as a deserted island, since the protagonist is marooned on a spaceship and then goes on to Count of Monte Cristo his revenge. It still packs an amazing punch. To veer off into a completely different note, \u201cThe Invention of Morel\u201d by Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares tells the story of a fugitive who escapes to a deserted island only to discover it\u2019s not so deserted after all as he begins to glimpse strangers walking around, including a young woman who entrances him. But who are these people? And why are there two moons in the sky? Octavio Paz said it was the perfect novel, but it\u2019s not that well-known among English-language readers. As for the scariest deserted island story I\u2019ve ever read, the honor goes to \u201cThe Voice in the Night\u201d by William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson was clear about islands: Stay home and far away from them.\n\nSilvia Moreno-Garcia\u2009is the author of the novels \u201cGods of Jade and Shadow,\u201d \u201cSignal to Noise\u201d and, most recently, \u201cUntamed Shore.\u201d Lavie Tidhar is the author of several novels, including \u201cThe Violent Century,\u201d \u201cA Man Lies Dreaming,\u201d \u201cCentral Station\u201d and \u201cUnholy Land.\u201d Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s Earthsea novels, Christopher Priest\u2019s \u201cThe Islanders\u201d and more. Desert-island books: Science fiction tales set in isolation that feel just right now",
        "author": "Silvia Moreno-Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Desert-island books: Science fiction tales set in isolation that feel just right now (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "308",
        "date": "2020-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/desert-island-books-science-fiction-tales-set-in-isolation-that-feel-just-right-now/2020/05/01/7aa7a1bc-79ab-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html",
        "text": "Islands have cast a spell on writers\u2019 imaginations since the earliest days. In Homer\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d they hold magic and monsters, from the deadly cyclops to the sirens who nearly lure the sailors to their deaths. Desert islands inspired Daniel Defoe\u2019s classic tale of Robinson Crusoe. And if R.M. Ballantyne\u2019s \u201cThe Coral Island\u201d imagined stranded children living idyllically in 1857, along came William Golding a century later with the terrifying \u201cLord of the Flies\u201d to show the children\u2019s descent into cruelty and war. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor generations of science fiction writers, space became the new ocean, and planets the lonely islands lost in the great dark. Robert A. Heinlein\u2019s 1950 novel \u201cFarmer in the Sky\u201d became Andy Weir\u2019s 2011 novel \u201cThe Martian\u201d \u2014 both dealing with competent men doing competent things in alien worlds. Others focus on the horror and mystery of islands, such as the world described in Cordwainer Smith\u2019s classic \u201cA Planet Named Shayol,\u201d in which convicts are exposed to a virus that makes them grow extra organs, which are then harvested.As we\u2019re all being placed into lockdown around the world, life really does feel like being stranded on a desert island. So what books would you take with you to a desert island? And what can they tell us about the way we have to live now?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLavie: I actually did live on a nearly desert island once and what I ended up taking with me were a Hemingway omnibus and two tattered issues of Asimov\u2019s Science Fiction Magazine \u2014 the only things I could find! So the answer is never as glamorous as you\u2019d like to think. One classic fantasy series about islands, though, is obviously Urusla K. Le Guin\u2019s Earthsea novels, beginning with \u201cA Wizard of Earthsea,\u201d which is marvelous and does a good job of capturing the isolated nature of island living (and turning into a hawk). And Christopher Priest\u2019s \u201cThe Islanders\u201d is easily one of his best novels, a sort of guidebook to his imagined Dream Archipelago.\u2018The Princess Bride\u2019 and other fantastical novels to help you escape realitySilvia: One of the most affecting stories I\u2019ve read set on a deserted planet is \u201cWe Who Are About To .\u2009.\u2009. \u201d by Joanna Russ. It turns the survivalist Lost in Space ideas right on their head. While the stranded men are eager to colonize the planet, the protagonist is not buying into the whole interstellar Adam and Eve. It\u2019s grim and powerful. J.G. Ballard wrote a couple of novels that strike a not-so-dissimilar chord: \u201cConcrete Island\u201d and \u201cHigh Rise.\u201d In \u201cHigh Rise,\u201d a high-tech building becomes an island of steel and glass. Something, we don\u2019t know what, begins to drive its inhabitants into conflict and eventually murder. In \u201cBattle Royale,\u201d by Koushun Takami, a group of teens who must fight to the death do so on an island. Are there any science fiction \u201cisland\u201d books that are a bit more cheerful?Lavie: \u201cThe Island of Dr. Moreau\u201d? Just kidding. Though one noteworthy follow-up to the H.G. Wells classic is the Athena Club series by Theodora Goss, beginning with \u201cThe Strange Case of the Alchemist\u2019s Daughter,\u201d which imagines Moreau\u2019s daughter teaming up with Mary Jekyll and Justine Frankenstein. Great fun, if not exactly island-related. In space, of course, we get islands of a different sort: noteworthy is Aliette de Bodard\u2019s \u201cOn a Red Station, Drifting,\u201d which is set on an isolated space station in a time of war as it is flooding with refugees. The culture is Vietnamese, the literary influence is the Chinese classic \u201cA Dream of Red Mansions,\u201d and the whole thing is very ambitious.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSilvia: I suppose the beginning of \u201cThe Stars My Destination,\u201d by Alfred Bester might also count as a deserted island, since the protagonist is marooned on a spaceship and then goes on to Count of Monte Cristo his revenge. It still packs an amazing punch. To veer off into a completely different note, \u201cThe Invention of Morel\u201d by Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares tells the story of a fugitive who escapes to a deserted island only to discover it\u2019s not so deserted after all as he begins to glimpse strangers walking around, including a young woman who entrances him. But who are these people? And why are there two moons in the sky? Octavio Paz said it was the perfect novel, but it\u2019s not that well-known among English-language readers. As for the scariest deserted island story I\u2019ve ever read, the honor goes to \u201cThe Voice in the Night\u201d by William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson was clear about islands: Stay home and far away from them.\n\nSilvia Moreno-Garcia\u2009is the author of the novels \u201cGods of Jade and Shadow,\u201d \u201cSignal to Noise\u201d and, most recently, \u201cUntamed Shore.\u201d Lavie Tidhar is the author of several novels, including \u201cThe Violent Century,\u201d \u201cA Man Lies Dreaming,\u201d \u201cCentral Station\u201d and \u201cUnholy Land.\u201d Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s Earthsea novels, Christopher Priest\u2019s \u201cThe Islanders\u201d and more. Desert-island books: Science fiction tales set in isolation that feel just right now",
        "author": "Silvia Moreno-Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Stanislaw Lem has finally gotten the translations his genius deserves (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "309",
        "date": "2020-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/stanislaw-lem-has-finally-gotten-the-translations-his-genius-deserves/2020/03/03/3227b18c-5982-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html",
        "text": "Fourteen years after his death, the universe is still struggling to catch up with the vast creative force that was Stanis\u0142aw Lem. And for my money, it won\u2019t be surpassing him anytime soon.Granted, the universe is big, extending billions of light-years in every direction, and so forth. But Lem could traverse those distances in a single paragraph. And keep his readers laughing all the way to the next universe and back again. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTake the narrator of \u201cMemoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy\u201d \u2014 just reissued with newly translated material, alongside a number of other Lem works. Ijon doesn\u2019t need warp drive or clever Geordi-like \u201cStar Trek\u201d techies to transport him across space and time. With the snap of a few typewriter keys, the omnipotent Lem can dispatch him to the Nereid Nebula to meet the Phools, a race of hominiformicans who suffered economic collapse after the wealthy few bankrupted the working class, the Drudgelings. To correct the resulting chaos, the Phools submitted to a robot ruler who resolved all differences by transforming everyone into identical silver discs. (Problem solved!)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat same Ijon Tichy journeys back in time to initiate the original Big Bang (and get it right this time).In Lem\u2019s hands, the infinite reaches don\u2019t seem infinite at all. Rather they resemble an endlessly repeatable vista of the same ol\u2019 same ol\u2019, filled with rubbernecking space tourists, billboard advertisements for \u201cLunar gin\u201d and \u201cSatellite champagne,\u201d and orbiting swarms of discarded \u201ctin cans, eggshells, and old newspapers.\u201dAs one might expect from any halfway decent universe, it\u2019s not all hilarity, and the more serious side is best represented by \u201cThe Invincible\u201d \u2014 now available in the United States for the first time in a proper Polish-to-English translation. This darkly philosophical investigation into the fate of a vanished spaceship develops with moody logic as human characters journey to a distant planet and find out what it means to be not human. They stumble on a hive-organized, mechanical species with formidable destructive abilities.Lem\u2019s fiction is filled with haunting, prescient landscapes. In these reissued and newly issued translations \u2014 some by the pitch-perfect Lem-o-phile, Michael Kandel \u2014 each sentence is as hard, gleaming and unpredictable as the next marvelous invention or plot twist. It\u2019s hard to keep up with Lem\u2019s hyper-drive of an imagination but always fun to try.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn \u201cReturn From the Stars,\u201d an astronaut lands \u2014 after more than a century away \u2014 on an Earth that doesn\u2019t seem like home anymore, and every conversation draws him into a confusing situation with creatures that look like him but don\u2019t think like him at all. As the astronaut, Hal Bregg, concludes late in this reverse-Bildungsroman (the more the protagonist learns, the less he understands): \u201cThe crux of the matter was that man wanted to conquer the universe without having attended to his own problems on Earth.\u201d Yes, Hal. Tell us about it.Lem has not always been well published in the United States. Even his best-known novel, \u201cSolaris,\u201d was long available only in an imperfect Polish-to-French-to-English translation (though Bill Johnston\u2019s excellent Polish-to-English translation is currently available as an e-book). Partly, this was a result of American publishers showing little interest in translating fiction. But it doesn\u2019t help that Lem is a difficult act to categorize. While he is often marketed as a science fiction writer (his funniest, most misanthropic stories are darkly reminiscent of the great Robert Sheckley or the equally great C.M. Kornbluth), he is bound to disappoint many traditional science-fiction readers. Lem\u2019s closest literary equivalent is probably Italo Calvino.\u201cThe great humorists,\u201d Lem once wrote, \u201cwere people who had been driven to despair and anger by the conduct of mankind. In this respect, I am one of those people.\u201dEnjoying the genius of Lem requires readerly dexterity and a willingness to go wherever the author takes you. Another new-to-the-U.S. book, \u201cHighcastle: A Remembrance,\u201d a memoir of growing up in Lvov (now Lviv and part of Ukraine), explores many of the same ideas that Lem\u2019s space travelers explore on distant planets. It is as if Lem\u2019s most personal memories are perfectly continuous with the wild universes he imagines. In \u201cHighcastle,\u201d Lem tries to preserve on paper all the things he loved that were destroyed by the 1941 Nazi invasion: the candy shops, his father\u2019s surgical devices and the family gramophone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is so much easier for me to talk about the objects of my early childhood than about the people. But then, only the objects \u2014 if you can say this \u2014 were honest with me, were completely open, hiding nothing.\u201d Watching barbarians destroy his life as he was growing up probably inspired Lem to write his first, most realistic novel, \u201cHospital of the Transfiguration.\u201d This book recounts the adventures of a young doctor who witnesses the staff of a mental hospital abuse patients according to their twisted scientific rationales, even as government officials abuse the staff. (The book was censored, and Lem, possibly wisely, began transmuting his political critiques into interstellar fables.)Lem\u2019s love for remembered things resembles that found in the work of another writer exiled from his childhood home, Vladimir Nabokov. But unlike Nabokov, Lem doesn\u2019t exert excessive control over his characters, nor is he as cruel to them. Instead he grants them a wide universe to run around in. And these first six volumes only begin to make Lem properly available in English. The best books are yet to come \u2014 such as my personal favorite, the brilliant \u201cArabian Nights\u201d-like collection of robot fairy tales, \u201cThe Cyberiad,\u201d and Lem\u2019s unusual philosophical mystery, \u201cThe Investigation.\u201d But taken together, these marvelous, absorbing and often hilarious books make our weary universe seem pale and undistinguished by comparison.Scott Bradfield\u2009is the author, most recently, of \u201cDazzle Resplendent: Adventures of a Misanthropic Dog.\u201d\nRead more books coverage:\n\nTen books to read in March\n\n\u2018The Professor and the Parson\u2019 tries to make sense of a narcissistic con man who fooled nearly everyone\n\nIn \u2018Disfigured,\u2019 a writer explores the damaging ways fairy tales shape our view of the world \u2014 and ourselves\n \u201cThe Invincible\u201d is just one of the books worth reading that\u2019s available in the U.S. for the first time in a proper Polish-to-English translation. Stanislaw Lem has finally gotten the translations his genius deserves",
        "author": "Scott Bradfield"
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "310",
        "date": "2021-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/05/26/cf803fdc-bd89-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n1\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\n\n2\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save the earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n3\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n4\nWHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS (Doubleday, $28). By Stacey Abrams. A law clerk uncovers a conspiracy while researching clues about a controversial case.\n\n\n\n5\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n\n6\nSOOLEY (Doubleday, $28.95). By John Grisham. A Sudanese basketball player on a scholarship arrives in the United States just as his home country descends into civil war.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE FOUR WINDS (St. Martin\u2019s, $28.99). By Kristin Hannah. A desperate woman moves with her two children to California during the Great Depression.\n\n\n\n\n8\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon and Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\n\n9\nTHE PLOT (Celadon, $28). By Jean Hanff Korelitz. A professor gains literary acclaim after writing a novel using a former student\u2019s unpublished idea.\n\n\n\n10\nWHEREABOUTS (Knopf, $24). By Jhumpa Lahiri. A lonely woman watches people while she wanders around Italy and becomes preoccupied with death.\n\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n1\nTHE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (Dutton, $28). By John Green. Essays from the best-selling author use a five-star scale to rate aspects of modern life.\n\n\n\n2\nTHE PREMONITION (W.W. Norton, $30). By Michael Lewis. The best-selling author recounts the story of health experts who fought to raise the alarm over the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n3\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n\n4\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n\n5\nFINDING THE MOTHER TREE (Knopf, $28.95). By Suzanne Simard. An ecologist illuminates the connections between trees and people.\n\n\n\n\n6\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing during World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\n\n8\nZERO FAIL (Random House, $30). By Carol Leonnig. A study of how the Secret Service has evolved over decades and the problems it faces today.\n\n\n9\nNOISE (Little, Brown Spark, $32). By Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein. An exploration of how outside factors affect our judgments, along with tips for reducing biased thinking.\n\n\n\n10\nCASTE (Random House, $32). By Isabel Wilkerson. America\u2019s racial divisions are examined and reframed as a caste system.\n\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended May 23. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "311",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/06/09/86f02bc6-c87c-11eb-afd0-9726f7ec0ba6_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n1\nMALIBU RISING (Ballantine, $28). By Taylor Jenkins Reid. An end-of-summer party is the backdrop for the story of four famous siblings trying to reckon with their upbringing.\n\n\n\n2\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n\n3\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save Earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n\n4\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\n\n\n5\nWHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS (Doubleday, $28). By Stacey Abrams. A law clerk uncovers a conspiracy while researching clues about a controversial case.\n\n\n\n6\nTHE OTHER BLACK GIRL (Atria Books, $27). By Zakiya Dalila Harris. As the only Black person working at a prominent publishing house, an editorial assistant welcomes the arrival of another Black employee \u2014 until things take a sinister turn. \n\n\n\n7\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n8\nGOLDEN GIRL (Little, Brown, $29). By Elin Hilderbrand. A woman who has died is given the ability to observe her family from beyond the grave.\n\n\n\n9\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon and Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\n\n\n10\nTHE PLOT (Celadon, $28). By Jean Hanff Korelitz. A professor gains literary acclaim after writing a novel using a former student\u2019s unpublished idea.\n\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n\n1\nTHE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (Dutton, $28). By John Green. Essays from the best-selling author use a five-star scale to rate aspects of modern life.\n\n\n\n2\nHOW THE WORD IS PASSED (Little, Brown, $29) By Clint Smith. American historical landmarks are examined through the lens of slavery\u2019s legacy. \n\n\n\n3\nTHE PREMONITION (W.W. Norton, $30). By Michael Lewis. The best-selling author recounts the story of health experts who fought to raise the alarm over the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n4\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n\n5\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n6\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n\n7\nFINDING THE MOTHER TREE (Knopf, $28.95). By Suzanne Simard. An ecologist illuminates the connections between trees and people.\n\n\n\n\n8\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing during World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\n\n9\nSOMEBODY\u2019S DAUGHTER (Flatiron Books, $27.99). By Ashley C. Ford. The author\u2019s complicated childhood leads her to explore the factors affecting her own understanding of the world.\n\n\n10\nAFTER THE FALL (Random House, $28). By Ben Rhodes. Interviews with citizens and leaders around the world offer insights into how the United States can live up to its own democratic ideals.\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended June 6. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "312",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/07/20/17a1f9ee-e982-11eb-ba5d-55d3b5ffcaf1_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n\n1\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n2\nTHE CELLIST (Harper, $28.99). By Daniel Silva. When a Russian defector is murdered, a spy must stop the resulting disinformation campaign before it undermines Western democracy.\n\n\n\n3\nMALIBU RISING (Ballantine, $28). By Taylor Jenkins Reid. An end-of-summer party is the backdrop for the story of four famous siblings trying to reckon with their upbringing.\n\n\n\n\n4\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save the Earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n5\nTHE PAPER PALACE (Riverhead, $27). By Miranda Cowley Heller. A dalliance with an old flame causes a woman to question her life\u2019s choices.\n\n\n\n6\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\n\n8\nTHE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP (Berkley, $26). By Grady Hendrix. A support group for girls who have survived massacres reels after one of its members goes missing.\n\n\n\n9\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon and Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\n\n\n10\nTHE PERSONAL LIBRARIAN (Berkley, $27). By Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. J.P. Morgan\u2019s personal librarian hides her true racial identity as her stature rises in New York\u2019s social scene.\n\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n1\nTHIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTS (Penguin Press, $28). By Michael Pollan. The \u201cOmnivore\u2019s Dilemma\u201d author explores the cultural and scientific impacts of plant-based drugs opium, caffeine and mescaline.\n\n\n\n2\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n\n3\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n4\nAMERICAN MARXISM (Threshold, $28). By Mark R. Levin. The Fox News host explores how Marxist ideology has infiltrated American culture.\n\n\n\n5\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n6\nFINDING THE MOTHER TREE (Knopf, $28.95). By Suzanne Simard. An ecologist illuminates the connections between trees and people.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (Dutton, $28). By John Green. Essays from the best-selling author use a five-star scale to rate aspects of modern life.\n\n\n\n8\nLANDSLIDE (Holt, $29.99). By Michael Wolff. A narrative report of the chaotic events that took place near the end of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency.\n\n\n\n9\nUNTAMED (Dial, $28). By Glennon Doyle. A memoir as well as a wake-up call to people who want to learn to listen to themselves.\n\n\n\n\n10\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing in World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended July 18. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "313",
        "date": "2021-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/08/17/6c10b5cc-ff7d-11eb-85f2-b871803f65e4_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n\n1\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n2\nBILLY SUMMERS (Scribner, $30). By Stephen King. An Iraq war veteran-turned-principled hit man, who only selects targets that deserve killing, takes one last job.\n\n\n\n3\nMALIBU RISING (Ballantine, $28). By Taylor Jenkins Reid. An end-of-summer party is the backdrop for the story of four famous siblings trying to reckon with their upbringing.\n\n\n\n\n4\nTHE PAPER PALACE (Riverhead, $27). By Miranda Cowley Heller. A dalliance with an old flame causes a woman to question her life choices.\n\n\n\n\n5\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon & Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\n\n\n6\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save the Earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE (Tor, $26.99). By V.E. Schwab. A young woman\u2019s bargain for immortality renders her cursed to be forgotten by anyone she meets.\n\n\n\n\n8\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n9\nONCE THERE WERE WOLVES (Flatiron, $27.99). By Charlotte McConaghy. A biologist reintroduces gray wolves into the wild, and when they are blamed for a farmer\u2019s death she must find the killer to protect the wild creatures.\n\n\n\n10\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n\n1\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n\n2\nTHIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTS (Penguin Press, $28). By Michael Pollan. The \u201cOmnivore\u2019s Dilemma\u201d author explores the cultural and scientific impacts of the plant-based drugs opium, caffeine and mescaline.\n\n\n\n\n3\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n\n4\nI ALONE CAN FIX IT (Penguin Press, $30). By Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The authors of \u201cA Very Stable Genius\u201d chronicle the chaos during the final year of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency.\n\n\n\n\n5\nAMERICAN MARXISM (Threshold, $28). By Mark R. Levin. The Fox News host explores how Marxist ideology has infiltrated American culture.\n\n\n\n\n6\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (Dutton, $28). By John Green. Essays from the best-selling author use a five-star scale to rate aspects of modern life.\n\n\n\n\n8\nUNTAMED (Dial, $28). By Glennon Doyle. A memoir as well as a wake-up call for people who want to learn to listen to themselves.\n\n\n\n9\nTHE PREMONITION (W.W. Norton, $30). By Michael Lewis. The best-selling author recounts the story of health experts who fought to raise the alarm over the pandemic.\n\n\n\n10\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing in World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended Aug. 15. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "314",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/06/22/6e58c35c-d37b-11eb-a53a-3b5450fdca7a_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n\n1\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n\n2\nMALIBU RISING (Ballantine, $28). By Taylor Jenkins Reid. An end-of-summer party is the backdrop for the story of four famous siblings trying to reckon with their upbringing.\n\n\n\n\n3\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\n\n\n4\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save the earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n5\nTHE MAIDENS (Celadon Books, $27.99). By Alex Michaelides. A Classics professor is suspected after women from a secret society are murdered.\n\n\n\n6\nWHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS (Doubleday, $28). By Stacey Abrams. A law clerk uncovers a conspiracy while researching clues about a controversial case.\n\n\n\n\n7\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n8\nTHE PRESIDENT\u2019S DAUGHTER (Little, Brown and Knopf, $30). By Bill Clinton and James Patterson. The teenage daughter of a former United States president is kidnapped.\n\n\n\n9\nTHE OTHER BLACK GIRL (Atria Books, $27). By Zakiya Dalila Harris. As the only Black person working at a prominent publishing house, an editorial assistant welcomes the arrival of another Black employee \u2014 until things take a sinister turn. \n\n\n\n\n10\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon and Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n\n1\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n2\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing in World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\n\n\n3\nTHE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (Dutton, $28). By John Green. Essays from the best-selling author use a five-star scale to rate aspects of modern life.\n\n\n\n\n4\nTHE PREMONITION (W.W. Norton, $30). By Michael Lewis. The best-selling author recounts the story of health experts who fought to raise the alarm over the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n5\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n6\nIN THE HEIGHTS: FINDING HOME (Random House, $40). By Lin-Manuel Miranda, et al. The creators of \u201cIn the Heights\u201d describe how it went from stage to screen.\n\n\n\n7\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n\n8\nFINDING THE MOTHER TREE (Knopf, $28.95). By Suzanne Simard. An ecologist illuminates the connections between trees and people.\n\n\n\n9\nON JUNETEENTH (Liveright, $15.95). By Annette Gordon-Reed. The celebration of Black American independence is put into greater context as part of the history of the United States.\n\n\n\n10\nHOW THE WORD IS PASSED (Little, Brown, $29). By Clint Smith. American historical landmarks are examined through the lens of slavery\u2019s legacy. \n\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended June 20. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "315",
        "date": "2021-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/07/07/fc736e28-de82-11eb-9f54-7eee10b5fcd2_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n\n1\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n\n2\nMALIBU RISING (Ballantine, $28). By Taylor Jenkins Reid. An end-of-summer party is the backdrop for the story of four famous siblings trying to reckon with their upbringing.\n\n\n\n\n3\nTHE MAIDENS (Celadon Books, $27.99). By Alex Michaelides. A classics professor is suspected after women from a secret society are murdered.\n\n\n\n\n4\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save the Earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n\n5\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon and Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\n\n\n6\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\n\n\n7\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n8\nTHE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE (Tor, $26.99). By V.E. Schwab. A young woman\u2019s bargain for immortality renders her cursed to be forgotten by anyone she meets.\n\n\n\n9\nTHE OTHER BLACK GIRL (Atria Books, $27). By Zakiya Dalila Harris. As the only Black person working at a prominent publishing house, an editorial assistant welcomes the arrival of another Black employee \u2014 until things take a sinister turn. \n\n\n\n10\nTHE PERSONAL LIBRARIAN (Berkley, $27). By Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray. J. P. Morgan\u2019s personal librarian hides her true racial identity as her stature rises in New York\u2019s social scene.\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n\n1\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n\n2\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n3\nTHE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (Dutton, $28). By John Green. Essays from the best-selling author use a five-star scale to rate aspects of modern life.\n\n\n\n\n4\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing in World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\n\n\n5\nFINDING THE MOTHER TREE (Knopf, $28.95). By Suzanne Simard. An ecologist illuminates the connections between trees and people.\n\n\n\n\n6\nHOW THE WORD IS PASSED (Little, Brown, $29). By Clint Smith. American historical landmarks are examined through the lens of slavery\u2019s legacy. \n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE PREMONITION (W.W. Norton, $30). By Michael Lewis. The best-selling author recounts the story of health experts who fought to raise the alarm over the covid-19 pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n8\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n9\nCASTE (Random House, $32). By Isabel Wilkerson. America\u2019s racial divisions are examined and reframed as a caste system.\n\n\n10\nUNTAMED (The Dial Press, $28). By Glennon Doyle. A memoir as well as a wake-up call to people who want to learn to listen to themselves.\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended July 4. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "316",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/08/03/d49e7d78-f487-11eb-a49b-d96f2dac0942_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n\n1\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n\n2\nMALIBU RISING (Ballantine, $28). By Taylor Jenkins Reid. An end-of-summer party is the backdrop for the story of four famous siblings trying to reckon with their upbringing.\n\n\n\n\n3\nTHE PAPER PALACE (Riverhead, $27). By Miranda Cowley Heller. A dalliance with an old flame causes a woman to question her life choices.\n\n\n\n\n4\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n\n5\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon & Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\n\n\n6\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save the Earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE CELLIST (Harper, $28.99). By Daniel Silva. When a Russian defector is murdered, a spy must stop the resulting disinformation campaign before it undermines Western democracy.\n\n\n\n\n8\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\n\n9\nTHE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE (Tor, $26.99). By V.E. Schwab. A young woman\u2019s bargain for immortality renders her cursed to be forgotten by anyone she meets.\n\n\n10\nTHE VANISHING HALF (Riverhead, $27). By Brit Bennett. Identical twin sisters grow into women with different racial identities, leaving their daughters to grapple with issues of identity and authenticity.\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n1\nI ALONE CAN FIX IT (Penguin Press, $30). By Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. The authors of \u201cA Very Stable Genius\u201d chronicle the chaos during the final year of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency.\n\n\n\n2\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n\n3\nTHIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTS (Penguin Press, $28). By Michael Pollan. The \u201cOmnivore\u2019s Dilemma\u201d author explores the cultural and scientific impacts of the plant-based drugs opium, caffeine and mescaline.\n\n\n\n\n4\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie-rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n\n5\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n6\nAMERICAN MARXISM (Threshold, $28). By Mark R. Levin. The Fox News host explores how Marxist ideology has infiltrated American culture.\n\n\n\n\n7\nTHE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED (Dutton, $28). By John Green. Essays from the best-selling author use a five-star scale to rate aspects of modern life.\n\n\n\n\n8\nUNTAMED (Dial, $28). By Glennon Doyle. A memoir as well as a wake-up call for people who want to learn to listen to themselves.\n\n\n\n\n9\nFINDING THE MOTHER TREE (Knopf, $28.95). By Suzanne Simard. An ecologist illuminates the connections between trees and people.\n\n\n\n\n10\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing in World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended Aug. 1. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington Post hardcover bestsellers (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "317",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/washington-post-hardcover-bestsellers/2021/05/11/9fa12c08-b28b-11eb-9059-d8176b9e3798_story.html",
        "text": "Fiction\n\n\n1\nTHE HILL WE CLIMB (Viking, $15.99). By Amanda Gorman. A keepsake edition of President Biden\u2019s inaugural poem by the first U.S. youth poet laureate.\n\n\n\n2\nPROJECT HAIL MARY (Ballantine, $28.99). By Andy Weir. The lone survivor on a spaceship must figure out how to save the earth from destruction.\n\n\n\n3\nTHE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (Viking, $26). By Matt Haig. A regretful woman finds herself in a magical library, where she gets to play out her life had she made different choices.\n\n\n\n\n4\nKLARA AND THE SUN (Knopf, $28). By Kazuo Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an \u201cartificial friend,\u201d is selected as a companion for a sickly child.\n\n\n\n5\nGREAT CIRCLE (Knopf, $28.95). By Maggie Shipstead. An aviator goes missing over Antarctica and a century later an actress stars in a movie about the disappearance. \n\n\n\n6\nTHE FOUR WINDS (St. Martin\u2019s, $28.99). By Kristin Hannah. A desperate woman moves with her two children to California during the Great Depression.\n\n\n\n7\nWHEREABOUTS (Knopf, $24). By Jhumpa Lahiri. A lonely woman watches people while she wanders around Italy and becomes preoccupied with death.\n\n\n8\nSOOLEY (Doubleday, $28.95). By John Grisham. A Sudanese basketball player on a scholarship arrives in the United States just as his home country descends into civil war.\n\n\n9\nTHE LAST THING HE TOLD ME (Simon and Schuster, $27). By Laura Dave. Looking for answers about her husband\u2019s disappearance, a wife and her recalcitrant stepdaughter discover shocking secrets. \n\n\n\n10\nTHE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE (Tor, $26.99). By V.E. Schwab. A young woman\u2019s bargain for immortality renders her cursed to be forgotten by anyone she meets.\n\n\nNonfictionWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\n\n1\nTHE PREMONITION (W.W. Norton, $30). By Michael Lewis. The best-selling author recounts the story of health experts who fought to raise the alarm over the pandemic.\n\n\n2\nFINDING THE MOTHER TREE (Knopf, $28.95.) By Suzanne Simard. An ecologist illuminates the connections between trees and people.\n\n\n\n3\nCRYING IN H MART (Knopf, $26.95). By Michelle Zauner. A Korean American indie rock star chronicles her relationship with her late mother and their shared culture. \n\n\n\n\n4\nTHE BOY, THE MOLE, THE FOX AND THE HORSE (Harper One, $22.99). By Charlie Mackesy. The British illustrator brings fables about unlikely friendships to life.\n\n\n\n5\nPERSIST (Metropolitan, $27.99). By Elizabeth Warren. The senator shares how she developed her own perspectives on political transformations. \n\n\n6\nTHE BOMBER MAFIA (Little, Brown, $27). By Malcolm Gladwell. How a strategy to reduce bloodshed with precision bombing during World War II was thwarted by military leaders.\n\n\n\n7\nCASTE (Random House, $32). By Isabel Wilkerson. America\u2019s racial divisions are examined and reframed as a caste system.\n\n\n\n\n8\nWORLD TRAVEL (Ecco, $35). By Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever. Notes from the late television host and chef about his favorite travel spots are accompanied by essays from his friends and family.\n\n\n\n\n9\nUNTAMED (Dial, $28). By Glennon Doyle. A memoir and a wake-up call for people who want to learn to listen to themselves.\n\n\n\n10\nWHAT HAPPENED TO YOU? (Flatiron, $28.99.) By Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry. Scientific and emotional insights into how trauma shapes our later experiences.\n\nRankings reflect sales for the week ended May 9. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and indiebound.org. Copyright 2021 American Booksellers Association. (The bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) A snapshot of popular books. Washington Post hardcover bestsellers",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "10 books to read in May (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "318",
        "date": "2021-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/2021-books-may/2021/04/27/e200412e-a75a-11eb-8c1a-56f0cb4ff3b5_story.html",
        "text": "As we all emerge from isolation, it\u2019s time to start planning summer reading lists. Whether you\u2019re keeping it simple this year in a backyard hammock or heading to see beloved friends and family, you need some ideas for books to keep you entertained and informed. Our suggestions for May releases include historical and literary fiction, a political manifesto and an essay collection from a beloved author. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe Woman With the Blue Star: A Novel,\u201d by Pam Jenoff (May 4)Jenoff (\u201cThe Lost Girls of Paris\u201d) spent two years in Krakow working for the State Department, and she uses her knowledge of Poland to great effect in this story set during World War II. A young Jewish woman, Sadie Gault, is hiding out in the city sewer when she meets an unlikely ally, Ella Stepanek. What unfolds is a page-turner based on true stories.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe Premonition: A Pandemic Story,\u201d by Michael Lewis (May 4)Lewis, who\u2019s known for enlivening complex and otherwise dry subjects (\u201cThe Big Short,\u201d \u201cMoneyball\u201d), turns his attention to our nation\u2019s covid-19 crisis with a \u201cnonfiction thriller\u201d about various people who tried to ring the alarm about the virus\u2019s catastrophic potential, even when the Trump administration tried to shut them down.\u201cOn Juneteenth,\u201d by Annette Gordon-Reed (May 4)Pulitzer-winning historian Gordon-Reed blends nonfiction and memoir in her new book exploring Juneteenth, the commemoration of June 19, 1865, the day Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in Texas. The author grapples with the question of whether a holiday declared by a White man in her home state fits today\u2019s anti-racist struggle.Story continues below advertisement\u201cGreat Circle: A Novel,\u201d by Maggie Shipstead (May 4)AdvertisementShipstead\u2019s sweeping new female-centered epic intertwines the story of Marian, an aviator who wants to circumnavigate the globe, with that of actor Hadley Baxter, cast a century later to play Marian in a film. What can Marian\u2019s life tell Hadley about her own? The fascinating answer to that question is just one reason \u201cGreat Circle\u201d should be on everyone\u2019s TBR pile this season.\u201cOff Our Chests: A Candid Tour Through the World of Cancer,\u201d by John Marshall and Liza Marshall (May 4)Marshall of Georgetown University Hospital is a world-class oncologist who thought he knew everything about cancer. But when his wife, Liza, was diagnosed with breast cancer, both Marshalls discovered they needed more than that expertise. In alternating chapters, the couple details what worked and what didn\u2019t, what helped and what hurt on Liza\u2019s path to becoming a survivor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPersist,\u201d by Elizabeth Warren (May 4)Warren may not have become president, but, as her title suggests, that doesn\u2019t mean she\u2019s finished. In her new book, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts explains how her many facets \u2014 as a mother, teacher, planner, fighter, learner and American woman \u2014 influence her continued vision and advocacy.\u201cProject Hail Mary: A Novel,\u201d by Andy Weir (May 4)If you loved \u201cThe Martian,\u201d you\u2019ll go crazy for Weir\u2019s latest. Astronaut Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship \u2014 but he doesn\u2019t know why he\u2019s there. He doesn\u2019t even know his own name; all he knows is that he\u2019s been asleep for a long, long time. Slowly, as he pieces together his story, he remembers that his mission is crucial to humanity, and he doesn\u2019t have much time to complete it.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet,\u201d by John Green (May 18)AdvertisementMany will recognize Green\u2019s name from his books for young adults, such as \u201cThe Fault in Our Stars\u201d and \u201cLooking for Alaska.\u201d But Green also writes for a grown-up audience, as he does with this collection of shorter work based on his podcast of the same name. Green \u201creviews\u201d everything from the sunsets we experience to the movies we watch as contemporary humans with uncertain futures.\u201cThe Living Sea of Waking Dreams,\u201d by Richard Flanagan (May 25)If you read \u201cThe Narrow Road to the Deep North\u201d you\u2019ll understand that Flanagan is one of our greatest living novelists, able to tackle material so wrenching that you can\u2019t stop reading even as you wish you could. His latest is set in a bleak near future filled with fires and extinctions, where a dying woman begins to vanish. First her finger, then her knee \u2014 and it happens to others, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHeaven: A Novel,\u201d by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd (May 25)Kawakami\u2019s first novel translated into English was \u201cBreasts and Eggs,\u201d in 2020, a powerful exploration of contemporary Japanese womanhood. \u201cHeaven\u201d takes on the issue of bullying, and why a victim might choose not to fight back. Two teenagers bond over their torment, and their passive response reveals many kinds of societal injustice.bookworld@washpost.comBethanne Patrick\u2009is the editor, most recently, of \u201cThe Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians and Other Remarkable People.\u201dRead more: Pam Jenoff, Michael Lewis and Mieko Kawakami have new books out next month. 10 books to read in May",
        "author": "Bethanne Patrick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Dune\u2019 is a classic space opera. Let\u2019s talk about other great works in this genre. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "319",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/dune-is-a-classic-space-opera-lets-talk-about-other-great-works-in-this-genre/2021/12/17/ff6821fe-5912-11ec-929e-95502bf8cdd5_story.html",
        "text": "Ah, the space opera! That \u201chacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn,\u201d as science fiction author Wilson Tucker memorably put it when he coined the term in 1941. Science fiction writers (and readers) seem to never get enough of big spaceships, big galactic empires or giant worms. Frank Herbert\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d may seem like the most epic of these epics, but before him writers such as E.E. \u201cDoc\u201d Smith and Edmond \u201cThe World Wrecker\u201d Hamilton were dreaming up sweeping space adventures. Let\u2019s talk about some of our favorites in this action-packed genre. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSilvia: Because of the success of Denis Villeneuve\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d adaptation, many people have been asking me for books that resemble the movie. Although the obvious recommendation is to plow through the many volumes of the Dune series itself, newbies are sometimes fearful of being thrown into the deep end of the pool (the six Dune books penned by Frank Herbert span some 900,000 words). Therefore, I\u2019m not going big, but small, and recommending \u201cBinti\u201d (2015), a novella by Nnedi Okorafor. Like \u201cDune,\u201d \u201cBinti\u201d has a young protagonist traveling from one distant corner of the galaxy to another, while undergoing a great personal transformation. It\u2019s a coming-of-age tale rooted in African culture, which is continued in two other novellas.\u2018Dune\u2019 has long divided the science fiction world. The new film won\u2019t change that.For people looking for full-blown novels, there is Arkady Martine\u2019s \u201cA Memory Called Empire\u201d (2019). A new ambassador arrives at the city of Teixcalaan, intent on investigating the sudden death of their predecessor. It\u2019s heavy on intrigue, politics and court machinations and utilizes the tried-and-true science fiction trope of transplanted memories. An older title that falls into the brick-of-a-book category is \u201cHyperion\u201d (1989) by Dan Simmons. It borrows the structure of \u201cThe Canterbury Tales\u201d and blasts it into space in one massive undertaking.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLavie: I recently came back from France, where I was really taken with the vibrancy of French space opera. There\u2019s Pierre Bordage, whose \u201cWarriors of Silence\u201d trilogy dates back to the 1990s, and Jean-Claude Dunyach, whose \u201cDead Stars\u201d (1991) is an important early title. Both are still popular. Joining them are a host of new writers, such as Floriane Soulas, whose \u201cThe Forgotten of the Amas\u201d (2021) is a grandly ambitious novel set around a Jupiter that is presented in the true scale of a full space opera. I was also taken with Carina Rozenfeld\u2019s \u201cTerres\u201d (2021), which is not a neat fit but fascinating for its exploration of an entire multiverse. English-language publishers, take note!The big blockbuster of translated science fiction has to be Liu Cixin\u2019s \u201cThe Three-Body Problem\u201d (2008). The trilogy is hugely ambitious and cosmic in scope. And while I\u2019m talking about space opera in translation, brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky in Russia created one of the great settings of 20th century science fiction with their Noon universe, in a series of novels now gaining new appreciation and new translated editions. \u201cHard to Be a God\u201d (1964) and \u201cThe Inhabited Island\u201d (1969) were rereleased by Chicago Review Press a few years ago. I adore \u201cNoon: 22nd Century\u201d (1961), a mosaic novel which is first in the sequence, charting the expansion into space of a Soviet utopia. This is one sadly long out of print, though.I have a strong suspicion that the Noon universe partly inspired Iain M. Banks\u2019s \u201cCulture\u201d series. These sprawling novels of galactic milieus, giant orbitals and even larger A.I. ships and their various machinations offer one of the most compelling and sustained visions of a far-flung future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSilvia: It\u2019s worth noting the Strugatsky translations by Chicago Review Press seem to be the most accurate ones, as the previous editions were censored back in the day. I\u2019ll end this column with the ever-popular X meets Y: In this case, \u201cDune\u201d meets Hans Christian Andersen in \u201cThe Snow Queen\u201d (1981) by Joan Vinge. It contains the prerequisite galactic empire replete with political machinations. There\u2019s also a hero\u2019s journey, an ageless monarch, a low-tech society versus a high-tech one, and of course a lot of talk of Winter with a capital W. So, what galactic empire floats your boat, dear readers?\n\nSilvia Moreno-Garcia\u2019s books include \u201cMexican Gothic,\u201d \u201cVelvet Was the Night\u201d and \u201cThe Return of the Sorceress.\u201d Lavie Tidhar\u2019s most recent novels are \u201cThe Escapement\u201d and \u201cThe Hood.\u201dScience Fiction: Space Operas like Dune \u2018Binti\u2019 and \u2018The Snow Queen\u201d are among our favorites. How about you? \u2018Dune\u2019 is a classic space opera. Let\u2019s talk about other great works in this genre.",
        "author": "Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lavie Tidhar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Dune\u2019 is a classic space opera. Let\u2019s talk about other great works in this genre. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "320",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/dune-is-a-classic-space-opera-lets-talk-about-other-great-works-in-this-genre/2021/12/17/ff6821fe-5912-11ec-929e-95502bf8cdd5_story.html",
        "text": "Ah, the space opera! That \u201chacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn,\u201d as science fiction author Wilson Tucker memorably put it when he coined the term in 1941. Science fiction writers (and readers) seem to never get enough of big spaceships, big galactic empires or giant worms. Frank Herbert\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d may seem like the most epic of these epics, but before him writers such as E.E. \u201cDoc\u201d Smith and Edmond \u201cThe World Wrecker\u201d Hamilton were dreaming up sweeping space adventures. Let\u2019s talk about some of our favorites in this action-packed genre. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSilvia: Because of the success of Denis Villeneuve\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d adaptation, many people have been asking me for books that resemble the movie. Although the obvious recommendation is to plow through the many volumes of the Dune series itself, newbies are sometimes fearful of being thrown into the deep end of the pool (the six Dune books penned by Frank Herbert span some 900,000 words). Therefore, I\u2019m not going big, but small, and recommending \u201cBinti\u201d (2015), a novella by Nnedi Okorafor. Like \u201cDune,\u201d \u201cBinti\u201d has a young protagonist traveling from one distant corner of the galaxy to another, while undergoing a great personal transformation. It\u2019s a coming-of-age tale rooted in African culture, which is continued in two other novellas.\u2018Dune\u2019 has long divided the science fiction world. The new film won\u2019t change that.For people looking for full-blown novels, there is Arkady Martine\u2019s \u201cA Memory Called Empire\u201d (2019). A new ambassador arrives at the city of Teixcalaan, intent on investigating the sudden death of their predecessor. It\u2019s heavy on intrigue, politics and court machinations and utilizes the tried-and-true science fiction trope of transplanted memories. An older title that falls into the brick-of-a-book category is \u201cHyperion\u201d (1989) by Dan Simmons. It borrows the structure of \u201cThe Canterbury Tales\u201d and blasts it into space in one massive undertaking.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLavie: I recently came back from France, where I was really taken with the vibrancy of French space opera. There\u2019s Pierre Bordage, whose \u201cWarriors of Silence\u201d trilogy dates back to the 1990s, and Jean-Claude Dunyach, whose \u201cDead Stars\u201d (1991) is an important early title. Both are still popular. Joining them are a host of new writers, such as Floriane Soulas, whose \u201cThe Forgotten of the Amas\u201d (2021) is a grandly ambitious novel set around a Jupiter that is presented in the true scale of a full space opera. I was also taken with Carina Rozenfeld\u2019s \u201cTerres\u201d (2021), which is not a neat fit but fascinating for its exploration of an entire multiverse. English-language publishers, take note!The big blockbuster of translated science fiction has to be Liu Cixin\u2019s \u201cThe Three-Body Problem\u201d (2008). The trilogy is hugely ambitious and cosmic in scope. And while I\u2019m talking about space opera in translation, brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky in Russia created one of the great settings of 20th century science fiction with their Noon universe, in a series of novels now gaining new appreciation and new translated editions. \u201cHard to Be a God\u201d (1964) and \u201cThe Inhabited Island\u201d (1969) were rereleased by Chicago Review Press a few years ago. I adore \u201cNoon: 22nd Century\u201d (1961), a mosaic novel which is first in the sequence, charting the expansion into space of a Soviet utopia. This is one sadly long out of print, though.I have a strong suspicion that the Noon universe partly inspired Iain M. Banks\u2019s \u201cCulture\u201d series. These sprawling novels of galactic milieus, giant orbitals and even larger A.I. ships and their various machinations offer one of the most compelling and sustained visions of a far-flung future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSilvia: It\u2019s worth noting the Strugatsky translations by Chicago Review Press seem to be the most accurate ones, as the previous editions were censored back in the day. I\u2019ll end this column with the ever-popular X meets Y: In this case, \u201cDune\u201d meets Hans Christian Andersen in \u201cThe Snow Queen\u201d (1981) by Joan Vinge. It contains the prerequisite galactic empire replete with political machinations. There\u2019s also a hero\u2019s journey, an ageless monarch, a low-tech society versus a high-tech one, and of course a lot of talk of Winter with a capital W. So, what galactic empire floats your boat, dear readers?\n\nSilvia Moreno-Garcia\u2019s books include \u201cMexican Gothic,\u201d \u201cVelvet Was the Night\u201d and \u201cThe Return of the Sorceress.\u201d Lavie Tidhar\u2019s most recent novels are \u201cThe Escapement\u201d and \u201cThe Hood.\u201dScience Fiction: Space Operas like Dune \u2018Binti\u2019 and \u2018The Snow Queen\u201d are among our favorites. How about you? \u2018Dune\u2019 is a classic space opera. Let\u2019s talk about other great works in this genre.",
        "author": "Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lavie Tidhar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Dune\u2019 is a classic space opera. Let\u2019s talk about other great works in this genre. (WP: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "321",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/dune-is-a-classic-space-opera-lets-talk-about-other-great-works-in-this-genre/2021/12/17/ff6821fe-5912-11ec-929e-95502bf8cdd5_story.html",
        "text": "Ah, the space opera! That \u201chacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn,\u201d as science fiction author Wilson Tucker memorably put it when he coined the term in 1941. Science fiction writers (and readers) seem to never get enough of big spaceships, big galactic empires or giant worms. Frank Herbert\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d may seem like the most epic of these epics, but before him writers such as E.E. \u201cDoc\u201d Smith and Edmond \u201cThe World Wrecker\u201d Hamilton were dreaming up sweeping space adventures. Let\u2019s talk about some of our favorites in this action-packed genre. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSilvia: Because of the success of Denis Villeneuve\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d adaptation, many people have been asking me for books that resemble the movie. Although the obvious recommendation is to plow through the many volumes of the Dune series itself, newbies are sometimes fearful of being thrown into the deep end of the pool (the six Dune books penned by Frank Herbert span some 900,000 words). Therefore, I\u2019m not going big, but small, and recommending \u201cBinti\u201d (2015), a novella by Nnedi Okorafor. Like \u201cDune,\u201d \u201cBinti\u201d has a young protagonist traveling from one distant corner of the galaxy to another, while undergoing a great personal transformation. It\u2019s a coming-of-age tale rooted in African culture, which is continued in two other novellas.\u2018Dune\u2019 has long divided the science fiction world. The new film won\u2019t change that.For people looking for full-blown novels, there is Arkady Martine\u2019s \u201cA Memory Called Empire\u201d (2019). A new ambassador arrives at the city of Teixcalaan, intent on investigating the sudden death of their predecessor. It\u2019s heavy on intrigue, politics and court machinations and utilizes the tried-and-true science fiction trope of transplanted memories. An older title that falls into the brick-of-a-book category is \u201cHyperion\u201d (1989) by Dan Simmons. It borrows the structure of \u201cThe Canterbury Tales\u201d and blasts it into space in one massive undertaking.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLavie: I recently came back from France, where I was really taken with the vibrancy of French space opera. There\u2019s Pierre Bordage, whose \u201cWarriors of Silence\u201d trilogy dates back to the 1990s, and Jean-Claude Dunyach, whose \u201cDead Stars\u201d (1991) is an important early title. Both are still popular. Joining them are a host of new writers, such as Floriane Soulas, whose \u201cThe Forgotten of the Amas\u201d (2021) is a grandly ambitious novel set around a Jupiter that is presented in the true scale of a full space opera. I was also taken with Carina Rozenfeld\u2019s \u201cTerres\u201d (2021), which is not a neat fit but fascinating for its exploration of an entire multiverse. English-language publishers, take note!The big blockbuster of translated science fiction has to be Liu Cixin\u2019s \u201cThe Three-Body Problem\u201d (2008). The trilogy is hugely ambitious and cosmic in scope. And while I\u2019m talking about space opera in translation, brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky in Russia created one of the great settings of 20th century science fiction with their Noon universe, in a series of novels now gaining new appreciation and new translated editions. \u201cHard to Be a God\u201d (1964) and \u201cThe Inhabited Island\u201d (1969) were rereleased by Chicago Review Press a few years ago. I adore \u201cNoon: 22nd Century\u201d (1961), a mosaic novel which is first in the sequence, charting the expansion into space of a Soviet utopia. This is one sadly long out of print, though.I have a strong suspicion that the Noon universe partly inspired Iain M. Banks\u2019s \u201cCulture\u201d series. These sprawling novels of galactic milieus, giant orbitals and even larger A.I. ships and their various machinations offer one of the most compelling and sustained visions of a far-flung future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSilvia: It\u2019s worth noting the Strugatsky translations by Chicago Review Press seem to be the most accurate ones, as the previous editions were censored back in the day. I\u2019ll end this column with the ever-popular X meets Y: In this case, \u201cDune\u201d meets Hans Christian Andersen in \u201cThe Snow Queen\u201d (1981) by Joan Vinge. It contains the prerequisite galactic empire replete with political machinations. There\u2019s also a hero\u2019s journey, an ageless monarch, a low-tech society versus a high-tech one, and of course a lot of talk of Winter with a capital W. So, what galactic empire floats your boat, dear readers?\n\nSilvia Moreno-Garcia\u2019s books include \u201cMexican Gothic,\u201d \u201cVelvet Was the Night\u201d and \u201cThe Return of the Sorceress.\u201d Lavie Tidhar\u2019s most recent novels are \u201cThe Escapement\u201d and \u201cThe Hood.\u201dScience Fiction: Space Operas like Dune \u2018Binti\u2019 and \u2018The Snow Queen\u201d are among our favorites. How about you? \u2018Dune\u2019 is a classic space opera. Let\u2019s talk about other great works in this genre.",
        "author": "Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lavie Tidhar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Let\u2019s talk about science fiction and fantasy books that would make for great TV (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "322",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/lets-talk-about-science-fiction-and-fantasy-books-that-would-make-for-great-tv/2021/08/13/92941c8a-da83-11eb-9bbb-37c30dcf9363_story.html",
        "text": "Ah, the golden age of television. Complex plots, multiple characters, prestige TV that looks and feels like .\u2009.\u2009. books! Many great shows are based on science fiction and fantasy novels, from old classics like \u201cThe Tripods\u201d and \u201cBuck Rogers\u201d to today\u2019s \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale\u201d and N.K. Jemisin\u2019s upcoming \u201cInheritance\u201d trilogy adaptation. Join us as we look at some titles that we think would also make for great TV. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLavie: No science fiction writer was ever as weird, as brilliant and as unjustly neglected, perhaps, as Cordwainer Smith. It was the pen name of Paul Linebarger, a godson of Sun Yat-sen, an expert on psychological warfare and a self-described \u201cvisitor to small wars\u201d \u2014 come to think of it, his life would make a good show! When Smith turned to science fiction, he created the most vivid, strange and fascinating far-future world \u2014 a world where the planet Norstrilia grows the immortality drug stroon from giant, diseased sheep. Where the underpeople \u2014 animals given human shape and intelligence and living as servants \u2014 are fomenting revolution against the Lords of the Instrumentality. It\u2019s a world where cats pilot spaceships, ancient computers tell fortunes and a dog called D\u2019joan can become the messiah. There was nothing like it in the 1960s. There is nothing like it now. You can pick up the collected stories in volumes such as \u201cThe Best of Cordwainer Smith\u201d (1975) or \u201cThe Instrumentality of Mankind\u201d (1979), or read \u201cNorstrilia\u201d (1975), Smith\u2019s single novel in that world. With 10,000 years of history, distinct planets, worlds and cultures, and characters that are grotesque, cruel, kind, loving and whimsical, you have everything you\u2019ll need to make a winning show. Forget \u201cDune\u201d and bring on \u201cThe Dead Lady of Clown Town.\u201dLet\u2019s talk about science fiction and fantasy novels about ecology and climate changeMoving to the present, French author Aliette de Bodard\u2019s \u201cXuya\u201d universe has a similar heft to it. Thoroughly 21st century in outlook, and inspired by de Bodard\u2019s Vietnamese heritage, the books conjure an immersive vision of a far future with AI, planets, habitats and people who often worry more about their families than about saving the galaxy. Start with Hugo and Nebula awards finalist \u201cOn a Red Station, Drifting\u201d (2012) and work your way through the series to \u201cSeven of Infinities\u201d (2020). You won\u2019t be disappointed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd one more book on my wish list: Bangladeshi author Saad Z. Hossain\u2019s \u201cEscape From Baghdad!\u201d (2015) might be the best treatment of the American invasion of Iraq \u2014 and certainly the weirdest. Two men attempt to escape Baghdad, only to find themselves in the midst of a centuries-old magical conspiracy. It is thrilling, laugh-out-loud in parts and thoroughly cinematic, a \u201cCatch-22\u201d for our time, with heroes that remain thoroughly human through the horrors of war.Silvia: Considering the huge success of \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d I haven\u2019t figured out why someone hasn\u2019t attempted an adaptation of Anne McCaffrey\u2019s sprawling Dragonriders of Pern series, which began in 1968 with \u201cDragonflight.\u201d C.J. Cherryh\u2019s Chanur series also begs the TV treatment. It begins with \u201cThe Pride of Chanur\u201d (1981). A hapless human is saved by a species of catlike space-faring aliens and lands right in the middle of a galaxy-wide conflict full of twists, turns and betrayals. It has the delicious, complex politics that will make a viewer salivate, plus it comes chock full of cool-looking aliens (step aside, \u201cAvatar\u201d).P. Dj\u00e8l\u00ed Clark is another author whose work evokes great sets and vistas. \u201cA Dead Djinn in Cairo\u201d (2016) and \u201cThe Haunting of Tram Car 015\u201d (2019) have an urban fantasy vibe but are located in an alternate Egypt in the early 20th century. Clark\u2019s stories come loaded with an investigative angle that harks back to old-style gumshoes \u2014 another cool twist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinally, Clark Ashton Smith is probably one of the lesser-known Weird writers of the classic era. While H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard have been adapted for the big screen or for TV shows such as \u201cNight Gallery\u201d and \u201cConan the Adventurer,\u201d Smith hasn\u2019t received the same attention. His wonderful collection of fantasy stories, \u201cHyperborea\u201d (1971), about a mythical continent full of magic and adventure, written with a hint of wryness, would make the perfect background for a large-scale series. For anyone who is curious, my favorite story is \u201cThe Tale of Satampra Zeiros,\u201d about a thief who gets more than he bargained for during a heist.More book reviews and recommendationsLavie: So many Smiths! But let me add one more: Michael Marshall Smith. While his early Weird fiction books got big Hollywood deals, they didn\u2019t get made. \u201cOnly Forward\u201d (1994) starts as science fiction and takes a 90-degree turn into weird fantasy/horror, and \u201cSpares\u201d (1996) is the Weird noir take on clones harvested for their organs that is frankly better than \u201cNever Let Me Go\u201d \u2014 and I say this as a huge Kazuo Ishiguro fan.What about you, reader? What did we miss, and what book would you like to see coming to the screen next?\n\nSilvia Moreno-Garcia\u2018s latest novel, \u201cVelvet Was the Night,\u201d publishes this month. She is also the author of \u201cMexican Gothic,\u201d \u201cGods of Jade and Shadow\u201d and \u201cSignal to Noise.\u201d Lavie Tidhar is the author of several novels, including \u201cThe Violent Century,\u201d \u201cA Man Lies Dreaming,\u201d \u201cCentral Station\u201d and, most recently, \u201cBy Force Alone.\u201dScience Fiction and Fantasy N.K. Jemisin\u2019s Inheritance trilogy got us thinking about other titles perfect for the small screen. Let\u2019s talk about science fiction and fantasy books that would make for great TV",
        "author": "Silvia Moreno-Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The Eisner Awards are Friday, and these seven contenders deserve your attention (WP: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "323",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-eisner-awards-are-friday-and-these-seven-contenders-deserve-your-attention/2019/07/17/5f3c9a86-a88c-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html",
        "text": "When some of the biggest names in sequential art gather Friday for the Eisner Awards, the so-called \u201cOscars of comics\u201d held during San Diego Comic-Con, the ceremony will unofficially kick off the industry\u2019s season of plaques and plaudits.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile authors ranging from Tom King (the ex-CIA agent turned superhero-writing star) to Nick Drnaso (who recently scored a trailblazing Man Booker Prize nomination) have garnered headlines and secured front-runner status, there are other creators whose eligible recent titles shouldn\u2019t be overlooked. The 10 best graphic novels of 2018Here are seven books that deserve a share of the spotlight:\u201cAll the Answers: A Graphic Memoir,\u201d by Michael Kupperman (Gallery 13)Story continues below advertisementIf the attention paid to recent \u201cJeopardy!\u201d record-setter James Holzhauer seemed excessive, imagine that same treatment lasting years \u2014 for a contestant who is 7 years old. That\u2019s the fascinating true story of 1950s \u201cQuiz Kids\u201d star Joel Kupperman, the father of Eisner-winning cartoonist Michael Kupperman, whose sense of rich detail and retro-aesthetic art make this book a thoroughly winning read.Advertisement\u201cCome Again,\u201d by Nate Powell (Top Shelf)Powell, the artist for the National Book Award-winning \u201cMarch\u201d series, continues to be a master of evocative chiaroscuro that deepens the texture of his storytelling. His style befits this bewitching tale of 1970s-era secrets nestled in the Ozarks.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWoman World,\u201d by Aminder Dhaliwal (Drawn and Quarterly)More than a decade after the epic androcide comic \u201cY: The Last Man\u201d ended, Dhaliwal plays with the concept of men meeting their expiration date in this collection of slyly thoughtful strips that form a mosaic of humorous and insightful world-building in which women shape their post-dude civilization.\u201cThe Goat Getters,\u201d by Eddie Campbell (IDW)Campbell, the eclectic \u201cFrom Hell\u201d artist, achieves a feat of archival archaeology, digging up the roots of daily newspaper comic strips and tracing them back to the sports cartooning world of early 20th-century San Francisco. Such legendary creators as Rube Goldberg, George Herriman (\u201cKrazy Kat\u201d) and Bud Fisher (\u201cMutt and Jeff\u201d) leap from news clippings and vintage illustrations as upstart cartoonists who \u201creinvented comics\u201d while also covering gritty stories of sociopolitics, race and crimes of passion for Bay Area papers.\u201cBrazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World,\u201d by P\u00e9n\u00e9lope Bagieu (First Second)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBagieu, the French graphic novelist (\u201cCalifornia Dreamin\u2019 \u201d), here creates a YA-friendly pastiche of 29 bio-comics, ranging from female performers turned politically minded stars, such as Hedy Lamarr and Josephine Baker, to such warrior spirits as 19th-century Apache shaman Lozen and the 17th-century African queen Nzinga. The stories share Bagieu\u2019s warm lines and inviting palettes \u2014 yet the power of purpose that ripples through these lives is always the boldest stroke.\u201cPuerto Rico Strong: A Comics Anthology Supporting Puerto Rico Disaster, by Marco Lopez, Desiree Rodriguez, Hazel Newlevant, Derek Ruiz and Neil Schwartz (Lion Forge)This charitable anthology, released in the wake of Hurricane Maria\u2019s destruction, is a deep dive into Puerto Rican culture with tales ranging from \u201cTaino warriors taking a stand against colonization and Puerto Rico\u2019s ugly history of forced sterilization to Puerto Rican pride and even space exploration,\u201d The Washington Post\u2019s David Betancourt wrote last year. The artistry and authentic knowledge make this a standout.A new comic book anthology raises money for Puerto Rico, telling stories of history and fantasy\u201cDrawn to Purpose: American Women Illustrators and Cartoonists,\u201d by Martha Kennedy with Carla D. Hayden (University Press of Mississippi)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTreasures from the Library of Congress\u2019s Prints and Photographs Division get put on display in this scholarly work, which traces the journey of American women who overcame obstacles to create art that pushed against the expectations of their era. From West-venturing 1890s artist Mary Hallock Foote to Alison Bechdel (\u201cFun Home\u201d) and the New Yorker\u2019s Roz Chast today, this is an illuminating tome and an overdue showcase. Tom King and Nick Drnaso have made headlines, but these gifted cartoonists have created standout work, too. The Eisner Awards are Friday, and these seven contenders deserve your attention",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "11 popular authors discuss the books that are helping them cope (WP: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "324",
        "date": "2020-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/11-popular-authors-discuss-the-books-that-are-helping-them-cope/2020/05/05/b91694e4-8ecd-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html",
        "text": "One day at a time, one book at a time. Like many of us, authors are self-soothing during indefinite stay-at-home orders by reading \u2014 perhaps turning to comforting old favorites or getting lost in escapism. We asked 11\u00a0popular authors what they\u2019re reading to cope with these tough times and why.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightStephen Chbosky, author of \u201cImaginary Friend\u201d and \u201cThe Perks of Being a Wallflower\u201d For a reason only my therapist could explain, the genre I am finding greatest comfort in during this horrific time is, in fact, horror. I am moving back through my cherished Stephen King collection, starting with \u201cThe Stand.\u201d After that, I plan on a steady diet of Joe Hill, Max Brooks, Emily St. John Mandel, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan.\u2018If It Bleeds\u2019 reaffirms Stephen King\u2019s mastery of short fictionKate DiCamillo, whose books include \u201cBecause of Winn-Dixie\u201d and \u201cBeverly, Right Here\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019ve been doing a lot of rereading. In the last few weeks, I\u2019ve pulled these books off the shelf in my house: Marilynne Robinson\u2019s \u201cGilead,\u201d Mary Oliver\u2019s \u201cUpstream,\u201d Ann Patchett\u2019s \u201cThe Magician\u2019s Assistant,\u201d the collected fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Isak Dinesen\u2019s \u201cSeven Gothic Tales,\u201d Mary Norton\u2019s \u201cThe Borrowers\u201d and Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s \u201cLove in the Time of Cholera.\u201dAs I list these out, I can see that I\u2019ve kind of instinctively turned toward books of timelessness, magic, hope and love. These books have comforted me. They have cast a steady, calming light on my days. I\u2019m grateful for them.Bernardine Evaristo, author, most recently, of \u201cGirl, Woman, Other\u201dStory continues below advertisementI\u2019ve been rereading Derek Walcott\u2019s poetry collection \u201cMidsummer\u201d during lockdown. I find myself drowning in the beauty of his language and reassured by his deep awareness of the passing of time that the world as we\u2019ve known it will return to normal.AdvertisementKristin Hannah, whose books include \u201cThe Great Alone\u201d and \u201cThe Nightingale\u201dReading has been my salvation these past few weeks and helped me through the quiet of shelter-in-place. \u201cThe Glass Hotel\u201d by Emily St. John Mandel was a lovely, beautifully written and constructed novel that I couldn\u2019t put down, full of memorable, unusual characters. I especially loved the remote Vancouver Island setting \u2014 it\u2019s a place I know well. Mandel\u2019s agility with time in this story was a marvel.Story continues below advertisementI always recommend Tim Egan\u2019s remarkable, intelligent books, and \u201cThe Good Rain\u201d is one of my all-time favorites. I am a Pacific Northwest girl, and this book speaks to my soul in prose that is both luminous and accessible. In this difficult time, it is a reminder of both the beauty of this region and the fragility.Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s \u2018Station Eleven\u2019 was a huge hit. Now she\u2019s back with a different apocalypse.Erik Larson, author, most recently, of \u201cThe Splendid and the Vile\u201dAdvertisementI\u2019m big on distraction and simply wallowing in language. I just finished reading \u201cThings in Jars\u201d by Jess Kidd, which I adored \u2014 it dragged me back to 1863 London and environs, and kept me rooted there, entwined in vines of lush prose. Right now, perhaps ill-advisedly, I\u2019m rereading William Golding\u2019s \u201cLord of the Flies,\u201d feeling quite glad to be sequestered in my self-distancing abode and not on some remote island with a bunch of primal schoolkids. Next up: Kate Atkinson\u2019s \u201cBehind the Scenes at the Museum,\u201d which I just found on a bookshelf here, fortuitously unread \u2014 such a gift in these pandemic times.Story continues below advertisementAmanda Lovelace, whose books include \u201cThe Princess Saves Herself in This One\u201dI\u2019ve recently dived back into Sarah J. Maas\u2019s \u201cA Court of Thorns and Roses\u201d series. I find that this rich and beautiful fairy tale is the perfect escape for a time like this.AdvertisementJojo Moyes, whose books include \u201cThe Giver of Stars\u201d and \u201cMe Before You\u201dI\u2019m halfway through Glennon Doyle\u2019s \u201cUntamed,\u201d which I will give my daughter afterwards. I find myself (unusually) reading nonfiction at the moment, and this has made me think hard about how women police themselves and their behavior. In the same vein, I am reading Pema Chodron\u2019s \u201cWhen Things Fall Apart,\u201d which is helping me through lockdown. And for fiction, the latest Lee Child, \u201cBlue Moon,\u201d because everyone needs to kick some [butt] sometimes, even if it\u2019s just imaginary.Story continues below advertisementJenny Offill, author, most recently, of \u201cWeather\u201dI just reread Natalia Ginzburg\u2019s \u201cThe Little Virtues,\u201d a collection of essays that quietly circles around the darkness of World War II and the death of her husband in prison. It is a strangely comforting book for these times. I\u2019m also enjoying the weirdly technical but fascinating book \u201cBold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Explorations,\u201d which is all about how best to handle life in close quarters.AdvertisementKiley Reid, author of \u201cSuch a Fun Age\u201dWith seasons such as this, where it seems impossible to take in any more surprises, I adore rereading favorites, particularly when the work is so deserving. Paul Harding\u2019s \u201cTinkers\u201d is very fitting. The sentences make you wonder, \u201cHow long did it take to write this?\u201d and the world, much like ours now, often makes the reader question exactly how much time has gone by. I\u2019m also ready to reread Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019s \u201cBetween the World and Me.\u201d I\u2019d love to see what passages knock me out five years later, and if they are the same that completely took me in 2015.Story continues below advertisementR. Eric Thomas, author of \u201cHere for It\u201dSomething old: There\u2019s little I find more life-affirming and motivating than the writings of Audre Lorde, so I\u2019ve picked up a tattered, highlighted copy of \u201cSister Outsider\u201d from college and I\u2019m diving back in. Something new: L. C. Rosen\u2019s extraordinary new YA novel \u201cCamp\u201d (out May 26) is so boundlessly joyful and creative it leapt straight from the page into my heart. Something borrowed: I\u2019m taking advantage of my Enoch Pratt Free Library card to catch up with the inventive Kate Atkinson via the e-book of \u201cTranscription.\u201d Something blue: There\u2019s never a bad time to read Casey McQuiston\u2019s \u201cRed, White & Royal Blue,\u201d a book that only gets more perfect every time you read it.AdvertisementOcean Vuong, author, most recently, of \u201cOn Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous\u201dStory continues below advertisementI\u2019m rereading C.D. Wright\u2019s \u201cCooling Time,\u201d a book that defies and eludes definition. I return to it often to steady me during wavering times \u2014 but also, quite frankly, during \u201cnormal\u201d times, too. Originally written in the wake of 9/11, the book is subtitled as a \u201cpoetry vigil,\u201d but it\u2019s also a heady, erudite and carefully passionate call to arms that, in Wright\u2019s now-classic hearty and no-nonsense ethos, quickly becomes a call to ethics, to art. I will never tire of this light-beam of a book.WpRequest for Reader SubmissionTell us what you're readingSubmit a book that has resonated with you recently, and why. We may publish your submission in follow-up stories or on social media. Read our full submission guidelines here.Tell the PostRead our full submission guidelines here\n\nAngela Haupt\u2009is a freelance writer and full-time health editor in the District. Stephen Chbosky is dipping into horror; others are drawn to more upbeat fare. 11 popular authors discuss the books that are helping them cope",
        "author": "Angela Haupt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Was the Space Program Worth the Cost? (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "325",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/books/review/jeff-shesol-mercury-rising.html",
        "text": "Jeff Shesol\u2019s \u201cMercury Rising\u201d explores the careers of John Kennedy and John Glenn as a way to cut through the rhetoric of space exploration. Jeff Shesol\u2019s \u201cMercury Rising\u201d explores the careers of John Kennedy and John Glenn as a way to cut through the rhetoric of space exploration. MERCURY RISING",
        "author": "By Mark Atwood Lawrence"
    },
    {
        "title": "Was the Space Program Worth the Cost? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "326",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/books/review/jeff-shesol-mercury-rising.html",
        "text": "Jeff Shesol\u2019s \u201cMercury Rising\u201d explores the careers of John Kennedy and John Glenn as a way to cut through the rhetoric of space exploration. Jeff Shesol\u2019s \u201cMercury Rising\u201d explores the careers of John Kennedy and John Glenn as a way to cut through the rhetoric of space exploration. MERCURY RISING",
        "author": "By Mark Atwood Lawrence"
    },
    {
        "title": "Was the Space Program Worth the Cost? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "327",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/books/review/jeff-shesol-mercury-rising.html",
        "text": "Jeff Shesol\u2019s \u201cMercury Rising\u201d explores the careers of John Kennedy and John Glenn as a way to cut through the rhetoric of space exploration. Jeff Shesol\u2019s \u201cMercury Rising\u201d explores the careers of John Kennedy and John Glenn as a way to cut through the rhetoric of space exploration. MERCURY RISING",
        "author": "By Mark Atwood Lawrence"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson Explores the Symbiosis Between War and Astrophysics (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "328",
        "date": "2018-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/books/review/neil-degrasse-tyson-accessory-to-war-avis-lang.html",
        "text": "In \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d the astrophysicist offers a history of space exploration and the ways it has been aided and abetted by warfare and its needs. In \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d the astrophysicist offers a history of space exploration and the ways it has been aided and abetted by warfare and its needs. ACCESSORY TO WAR The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military By Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang Read by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Courtney B. Vance18 hours, 38 minutes. Random House Audio.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Carson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson Explores the Symbiosis Between War and Astrophysics (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "329",
        "date": "2018-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/books/review/neil-degrasse-tyson-accessory-to-war-avis-lang.html",
        "text": "In \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d the astrophysicist offers a history of space exploration and the ways it has been aided and abetted by warfare and its needs. In \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d the astrophysicist offers a history of space exploration and the ways it has been aided and abetted by warfare and its needs. ACCESSORY TO WAR The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military By Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang Read by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Courtney B. Vance18 hours, 38 minutes. Random House Audio.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Carson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson Explores the Symbiosis Between War and Astrophysics (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "330",
        "date": "2018-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/books/review/neil-degrasse-tyson-accessory-to-war-avis-lang.html",
        "text": "In \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d the astrophysicist offers a history of space exploration and the ways it has been aided and abetted by warfare and its needs. In \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d the astrophysicist offers a history of space exploration and the ways it has been aided and abetted by warfare and its needs. ACCESSORY TO WAR The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military By Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang Read by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Courtney B. Vance18 hours, 38 minutes. Random House Audio.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Carson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The novel that inspired \u2018Blade Runner\u2019 didn\u2019t predict our current reality, but these writers did (WP: Books) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "331",
        "date": "2019-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-novel-that-inspired-blade-runner-didnt-predict-our-current-reality-but-these-writers-did/2019/12/17/21345760-2055-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cBlade Runner,\u201d the movie based on Philip K. Dick\u2019s 1968 novel \u201cDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,\u201d takes place in a futuristic November 2019. In reality, replicants and floating cars have failed to materialize. Compare that to Margaret Atwood\u2019s \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale,\u201d which, when it was published in 1985, was deemed \u201cpowerless to scare,\u201d according to one New York Times critic. At the time, the idea of global pandemonium seemed dubious, even in fiction. Live Aid had united billions, NASA was eyeing Mars and, on-screen, John Hughes freed teenagers from their trappings. The gloom of the Cold War seemed to be lifting. And yet, almost 35 years later, here we are in a dystopian patriarchy. Clairvoyance is a hit-and-miss aftereffect of writing stories. Arthur C. Clarke would be heartbroken to know that the closest we\u2019ve come to space tourism is Elon Musk, but Mary Shelley might rejoice in the news that, 136 years after \u201cFrankenstein,\u201d doctors would perform the first successful kidney transplant.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s not often a writer can throw a dart into the future and hit treble 20. Here are six who did. (Caution: spoilers.)\nThe Victorian mystery that predicted trolling\n\u201cThe Invisible Man,\u201d by H.G. WellsAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWeapons experts could argue that Wells\u2019s \u201cWar of the Worlds\u201d was his most prescient book, imagining hordes of Martians armed with chemical weapons and invasive plant life. But that book\u2019s predecessor, 1897\u2019s \u201cThe Invisible Man,\u201d truly glimpsed the future. Albino optics student Griffin has perfected a drug that renders him transparent, and he uses it to commit incognito attacks on those around him: burglary, arson, kidnapping. Uncomfortably human, Griffin is a raging voice doomed to feel ignored. His spirit lives on in every expletive posted under local news stories on social media.\nAn Alexa precursor's battle cry\n\u201cMurmur,\u201d by Tim EarnshawEarnshaw\u2019s underrated L.A. trilogy is some of the most enjoyable science fiction ever published. In each installment, the protagonist overhears the theme tune from \u201cBewitched\u201d and then succumbs to a bizarre phenomenon. The hero of 1999\u2019s \u201cMurmur\u201d is Pacific Coast creative Ken Leverton, who begins to hear objects talking to each other: ATMs, forks and data cables all babble away, while his old suitcase recounts a holiday he\u2019d forgotten. Then the products turn nasty, reveling in their disdain for humans, or \u201cdumb muds\u201d as they call us. Is this what we should expect when Alexa gets sick of repeatedly playing \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d?\nThe aliens with a head start on climate change\n\u201cThe Kraken Wakes,\u201d by John WyndhamAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMaster of the cozy catastrophe, Wyndham unknowingly stepped into the 21st century when he penned \u201cThe Kraken Wakes\u201d in 1953. Aliens abandon their home planet and relocate to the Mariana Trench, where they begin harvesting cruise ships. When man retaliates with nukes, the invaders begin to blowtorch the polar ice caps. Our heroes, Mike and Phyllis Watson, watch in disbelief as sea levels slowly rise, forcing their retreat to Cornwall (now an island), and causing the British government to flee to Harrogate.\nSuper-fast forays into dial-up\n\u201cSnow Crash,\u201d by Neal StephensonWhen Stephenson unleashed \u201cSnow Crash\u201d in 1992, the term \u201csurfing the Internet\u201d had only just been coined. Certainly, the idea of MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) seemed niche. But that\u2019s what Fortnite is today, and that\u2019s what this book\u2019s Metaverse is, with its billions of users so dependent on computers that they\u2019ve started to succumb to the machines\u2019 viruses. Although not as prophetic as E.M. Forster\u2019s \u201cThe Machine Stops\u201d \u2014 which, in 1909, may have planted the seed for FaceTime with a mother chatting with a projected image of her faraway son \u2014 \u201cSnow Crash\u201d scores extra points for its uncanny vision of private armies and refugees herded onto city-sized rafts.\nCarving up the U.K. 11 years before Brexit\n\u201cDivided Kingdom,\u201d by Rupert ThomsonAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2005, Britain is \u201ca troubled place, obsessed with acquisition and celebrity.\u201d So the government decides to preemptively \u201cquarter\u201d the country based on temperament in this nightmare tale. Long before Brexit made the country\u2019s constitutional voting map look like Mr. Burns from \u201cThe Simpsons,\u201d \u201cDivided Kingdom\u201d split Britain into four colors, each matching one of the vital humors, including green for melancholic, yellow for choleric and blue for phlegmatic. Our hero, Thomas Parry, has been designated sanguine/red blood, but one night finds his chance to jump the border. If this vision of Britain wasn\u2019t isolationist enough, Thomson\u2019s first book, \u201cDreams of Leaving,\u201d depicts an English village that no one is allowed to leave.\nMaking America great, Part 1\n\u201cIt Can\u2019t Happen Here,\u201d by Sinclair LewisAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis newspaper has already detailed how Trumpism was cloned from Lewis\u2019s dystopian satire. But frankly, the similarities between Berzelius \u201cBuzz\u201d Windrip, the populist president, and today\u2019s Republican administration are so strong that they\u2019re worth underlining. A leader who brands himself champion of the \u201cForgotten Men\u201d? Check. Swipes at \u201chighbrow intellectualism\u201d? Deposed allies? Broken electoral promises? It seems it was all there in 1935, right down to the Canadian visa frenzy. \u201cNineteen Eighty-Four\u201d might be the most lasting political book ever written, but \u201cIt Can\u2019t Happen Here\u201d predicted 2016 and beyond with such aplomb that it should be filed under astrology.George Bass\u2009is a feature writer who has contributed to the Guardian, the New York Times, New Statesman and New Scientist. Clairvoyance is a hit-and-miss aftereffect of writing stories. The novel that inspired \u2018Blade Runner\u2019 didn\u2019t predict our current reality, but these writers did",
        "author": "George Bass"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018The Burning Blue\u2019 is a compact, suspenseful chronicle of the Challenger disaster (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "332",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/burning-blue-challenger-disaster-book-review/2021/06/18/91fc1fe0-cf9b-11eb-a7f1-52b8870bef7c_story.html",
        "text": "In the months leading up to Jan.\u00a028, 1986, the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded and everyone aboard was killed, there were ominous portents.As journalist Kevin Cook recounts in his solid, gripping new book, \u201cThe Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA\u2019s Challenger Disaster,\u201d the bad signs piled up: A teenage gunman had entered the New Hampshire high school where McAuliffe taught social studies and was killed by police after taking hostages. When McAuliffe and other astronaut hopefuls took a trip to an amusement park, a young employee, trying to impress them, got tangled in the machinery of a ride and died. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe shuttle\u2019s launch was delayed multiple times because of issues with a bolt in the locking mechanism of the hatch, with a computer error message, with high winds. By the time the Challenger finally launched, it was in weather much colder than any shuttle had faced. It was so cold that crews knocked icicles off the launch tower with broomsticks, Cook writes, and the launchpad toilet froze.\u2018We\u2019ve lost \u2019em, God bless \u2019em\u2019: What it was like to witness the Challenger disasterAccording to Cook, a veteran reporter who assembled \u201cThe Burning Blue\u201d from new interviews and existing sources, McAuliffe\u2019s parents had a bad feeling as they watched from the VIP bleachers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d take her off that thing if I could get out there,\u201d McAuliffe\u2019s father told her mother.\u201cEven if you could,\u201d she said, \u201cshe wouldn\u2019t come.\u201dMcAuliffe, 37, had won a nationwide contest to become the first teacher in space. Married to her high school sweetheart, with two young children, she was, as one magazine dubbed her, \u201cAmerica\u2019s most ordinary celebrity.\u201d She was a fierce advocate for teachers, a feminist and an outspoken Democrat, much to the unhappiness of President Ronald Reagan\u2019s administration, which asked her to tone it down.She wasn\u2019t a scientist, but \u201cNASA had science up the wazoo,\u201d writes Cook, and wanted someone who could publicly revive enthusiasm for the shuttle program, widely regarded as expensive and boring \u2014 nothing bad had ever happened to a shuttle. They hoped the plucky, dauntless McAuliffe would serve as a nostalgic link to the early days of the space program, when celebrity astronauts such as Neil Armstrong and John Glenn were viewed as beloved pioneers. \u201cThey wanted a teacher who\u2019d be good on the Johnny Carson show,\u201d one of McAuliffe\u2019s fellow contestants told Cook. \u201cSomeone who could help make the public love space again.\u201dSign up for the Book Club newsletterMcAuliffe became one of the most famous women in the United States almost instantly, to the initial resentment of some in the Challenger\u2019s publicity-averse crew. She was a \u201cwalking, talking publicity stunt,\u201d they thought, whose coveted shuttle seat could have gone to an actual astronaut. McAuliffe\u2019s ostensible role on the shuttle was to teach science lessons from space. She would have little else to do.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy launch day, the crew, led by venerated commander Dick Scobee, was tightly bonded. McAuliffe had grown especially close to Judy Resnik, a brilliant and glamorous pilot who had been the second American woman in space. The Challenger crew was unusually diverse: Physicist Ron McNair was the second Black man in space; mission specialist Ellison Onizuka was the first Asian American.Compact and suspenseful even as it breaks little new ground, the bulk of \u201cThe Burning Blue\u201d is devoted to McAuliffe and her grueling months of flight training, which included escape drills even though no escape was possible. Shuttles that flew before 1982 had ejector seats, Cook writes, mainly because NASA thought their presence might reassure the astronauts, but the Challenger did not. It also had no parachutes.Cook offers a detailed, heart-rending and frequently terrifying accounting of what it must have felt like to be part of the Challenger crew that day: the traditional launch day cake they promised to eat when they got back, the hours of delay spent strapped uncomfortably in their seats, knees above their heads, the roiling violence of liftoff.Thirty years ago, a TV critic watched the Challenger explosion. This is what he saw.The Challenger broke up 73 seconds into its flight after the rubber O-rings that helped seal its rocket booster joints malfunctioned in the cold. This led to a hot gas leak, which led to an explosive fireball. Communications and power to the crew cabin were severed, though the cabin itself remained largely intact.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the first minutes after the explosion, when the world realized that Christa and the others were lost, they were still alive,\u201d Cook writes. The crew survived at least 30 seconds, and perhaps more than two minutes, after the initial explosion was witnessed live on television by millions of terrified schoolchildren.It\u2019s unclear whether the crew understood what was happening. We know that pilot Michael J. Smith said \u201cUh-oh\u201d right before all communication was lost, possibly because he saw fire out his window, Cook writes. We know they followed their training; some of their personal air packs were activated, and emergency switches thrown. We know they didn\u2019t burn to death. They may have died of depressurization, or still been alive when their cabin crashed into the waters off the Florida coast. By the time their bodies were recovered in early March, NASA pathologists were unable to determine how they died. Or if they knew, they weren\u2019t saying.\u201cThe Burning Blue\u201d is careful in its examination of the political and emotional fallout from the crash. Like most events here, it\u2019s presented with little editorializing. The crash triggered a national outpouring of grief rivaled only by 9/11 and an epidemic of finger-pointing. A presidential commission under orders from Reagan not to embarrass NASA wound up roasting it instead.20 books to read this summerIt was alleged that the agency, humiliated by delays and squeezed by the White House, ignored safety concerns in its haste to launch. According to Cook, an engineer at contractor Morton Thiokol was so worried about the O-rings, he had sent a warning memo in 1985. \u201cIts last line read: This is a red flag.\u201d Employees meeting the night before the launch argued unsuccessfully for the mission to be scrubbed but were pressured into changing their minds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, one of the commission\u2019s more skeptical members, added his own appendix to their report, asking for greater transparency from NASA and a more realistic assessment of space travel\u2019s risks. \u201cIn the end, he wrote, \u2018For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.\u2019\u2009\u201d\n\nAllison Stewart\u2009writes about pop culture, music and politics for The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. She is working on a book about the history of the space program.The Burning BlueThe Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA\u2019s Challenger DisasterBy Kevin CookHenry Holt. 283 pp. $27.99. Author Kevin Cook focuses on teacher Christa McAuliffe and her grueling months of flight training. \u2018The Burning Blue\u2019 is a compact, suspenseful chronicle of the Challenger disaster",
        "author": "Allison Stewart"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018The Burning Blue\u2019 is a compact, suspenseful chronicle of the Challenger disaster (WP: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "333",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/burning-blue-challenger-disaster-book-review/2021/06/18/91fc1fe0-cf9b-11eb-a7f1-52b8870bef7c_story.html",
        "text": "In the months leading up to Jan.\u00a028, 1986, the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded and everyone aboard was killed, there were ominous portents.As journalist Kevin Cook recounts in his solid, gripping new book, \u201cThe Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA\u2019s Challenger Disaster,\u201d the bad signs piled up: A teenage gunman had entered the New Hampshire high school where McAuliffe taught social studies and was killed by police after taking hostages. When McAuliffe and other astronaut hopefuls took a trip to an amusement park, a young employee, trying to impress them, got tangled in the machinery of a ride and died. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe shuttle\u2019s launch was delayed multiple times because of issues with a bolt in the locking mechanism of the hatch, with a computer error message, with high winds. By the time the Challenger finally launched, it was in weather much colder than any shuttle had faced. It was so cold that crews knocked icicles off the launch tower with broomsticks, Cook writes, and the launchpad toilet froze.\u2018We\u2019ve lost \u2019em, God bless \u2019em\u2019: What it was like to witness the Challenger disasterAccording to Cook, a veteran reporter who assembled \u201cThe Burning Blue\u201d from new interviews and existing sources, McAuliffe\u2019s parents had a bad feeling as they watched from the VIP bleachers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d take her off that thing if I could get out there,\u201d McAuliffe\u2019s father told her mother.\u201cEven if you could,\u201d she said, \u201cshe wouldn\u2019t come.\u201dMcAuliffe, 37, had won a nationwide contest to become the first teacher in space. Married to her high school sweetheart, with two young children, she was, as one magazine dubbed her, \u201cAmerica\u2019s most ordinary celebrity.\u201d She was a fierce advocate for teachers, a feminist and an outspoken Democrat, much to the unhappiness of President Ronald Reagan\u2019s administration, which asked her to tone it down.She wasn\u2019t a scientist, but \u201cNASA had science up the wazoo,\u201d writes Cook, and wanted someone who could publicly revive enthusiasm for the shuttle program, widely regarded as expensive and boring \u2014 nothing bad had ever happened to a shuttle. They hoped the plucky, dauntless McAuliffe would serve as a nostalgic link to the early days of the space program, when celebrity astronauts such as Neil Armstrong and John Glenn were viewed as beloved pioneers. \u201cThey wanted a teacher who\u2019d be good on the Johnny Carson show,\u201d one of McAuliffe\u2019s fellow contestants told Cook. \u201cSomeone who could help make the public love space again.\u201dSign up for the Book Club newsletterMcAuliffe became one of the most famous women in the United States almost instantly, to the initial resentment of some in the Challenger\u2019s publicity-averse crew. She was a \u201cwalking, talking publicity stunt,\u201d they thought, whose coveted shuttle seat could have gone to an actual astronaut. McAuliffe\u2019s ostensible role on the shuttle was to teach science lessons from space. She would have little else to do.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy launch day, the crew, led by venerated commander Dick Scobee, was tightly bonded. McAuliffe had grown especially close to Judy Resnik, a brilliant and glamorous pilot who had been the second American woman in space. The Challenger crew was unusually diverse: Physicist Ron McNair was the second Black man in space; mission specialist Ellison Onizuka was the first Asian American.Compact and suspenseful even as it breaks little new ground, the bulk of \u201cThe Burning Blue\u201d is devoted to McAuliffe and her grueling months of flight training, which included escape drills even though no escape was possible. Shuttles that flew before 1982 had ejector seats, Cook writes, mainly because NASA thought their presence might reassure the astronauts, but the Challenger did not. It also had no parachutes.Cook offers a detailed, heart-rending and frequently terrifying accounting of what it must have felt like to be part of the Challenger crew that day: the traditional launch day cake they promised to eat when they got back, the hours of delay spent strapped uncomfortably in their seats, knees above their heads, the roiling violence of liftoff.Thirty years ago, a TV critic watched the Challenger explosion. This is what he saw.The Challenger broke up 73 seconds into its flight after the rubber O-rings that helped seal its rocket booster joints malfunctioned in the cold. This led to a hot gas leak, which led to an explosive fireball. Communications and power to the crew cabin were severed, though the cabin itself remained largely intact.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the first minutes after the explosion, when the world realized that Christa and the others were lost, they were still alive,\u201d Cook writes. The crew survived at least 30 seconds, and perhaps more than two minutes, after the initial explosion was witnessed live on television by millions of terrified schoolchildren.It\u2019s unclear whether the crew understood what was happening. We know that pilot Michael J. Smith said \u201cUh-oh\u201d right before all communication was lost, possibly because he saw fire out his window, Cook writes. We know they followed their training; some of their personal air packs were activated, and emergency switches thrown. We know they didn\u2019t burn to death. They may have died of depressurization, or still been alive when their cabin crashed into the waters off the Florida coast. By the time their bodies were recovered in early March, NASA pathologists were unable to determine how they died. Or if they knew, they weren\u2019t saying.\u201cThe Burning Blue\u201d is careful in its examination of the political and emotional fallout from the crash. Like most events here, it\u2019s presented with little editorializing. The crash triggered a national outpouring of grief rivaled only by 9/11 and an epidemic of finger-pointing. A presidential commission under orders from Reagan not to embarrass NASA wound up roasting it instead.20 books to read this summerIt was alleged that the agency, humiliated by delays and squeezed by the White House, ignored safety concerns in its haste to launch. According to Cook, an engineer at contractor Morton Thiokol was so worried about the O-rings, he had sent a warning memo in 1985. \u201cIts last line read: This is a red flag.\u201d Employees meeting the night before the launch argued unsuccessfully for the mission to be scrubbed but were pressured into changing their minds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, one of the commission\u2019s more skeptical members, added his own appendix to their report, asking for greater transparency from NASA and a more realistic assessment of space travel\u2019s risks. \u201cIn the end, he wrote, \u2018For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.\u2019\u2009\u201d\n\nAllison Stewart\u2009writes about pop culture, music and politics for The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. She is working on a book about the history of the space program.The Burning BlueThe Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA\u2019s Challenger DisasterBy Kevin CookHenry Holt. 283 pp. $27.99. Author Kevin Cook focuses on teacher Christa McAuliffe and her grueling months of flight training. \u2018The Burning Blue\u2019 is a compact, suspenseful chronicle of the Challenger disaster",
        "author": "Allison Stewart"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Best science fiction and fantasy books out this month (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "334",
        "date": "2018-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/best-science-fiction-and-fantasy-books-out-this-month/2018/04/04/45d1b9d6-3688-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html",
        "text": "Blackfish City \n(Ecco), by Sam J. Miller is set on an island city in the Arctic built after society has collapsed because of environmental disasters and war. Refugees flood the city, and a mysterious disease runs rampant through the population. One day a woman rides in on an orca, with a polar bear at her side, setting off a chain of events that ensnares a street fighter, a political lackey, an agender teen courier and a forlorn rich boy into a battle to take over the city. \n\nMiller has written an urgent tale imploring us to look at the ties between technology, race, gender and class privilege. Still, the novel is surprisingly heartwarming. Ultimately, \u201cBlackfish\u201d is a book about power structures and the way that privilege is built on the backs of the disenfranchised \u2014 wrapped in an action-packed science fiction thriller. Julia Whicker\u2019s Wonderblood\n (St. Martin\u2019s) plunges readers into a marvelous and brutal world of pseudo-magic, religion and astronomy. Set in a post-apocalyptic United States 500 years in the future, the novel follows Aurora, a 14-year-old girl abandoned by her mother, a \u201cwalking doctor\u201d who performs illegal surgeries, at a carnival run by Aurora\u2019s brother. At these carnivals, people worship the remains of space shuttles and descendants of astronauts and believe that regular executions will replenish the land. When a rival carnival, led by a man who claims to be the True King, attacks and conquers an encampment where Aurora\u2019s brother lives, Aurora is heralded as a queen who will lead the True King to his destiny. Aurora must decide what she believes and if she will help the man on his quest. The political machinations of the carnivals are thrilling, and the narration lush and wild. Some readers may find the ending unsatisfying, but the getting to it is entirely worth it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFire Dance (Tor) is a new fantasy by Ilana C. Myer set in the same world as her 2015 novel \u201cLast Song Before Night.\u201d Magic has returned to the poets of Vassilian and with it, new dangers. Lin Amaristoth, now Court Poet, must travel to an ally nation to help stop a war and discover who is behind evil magic plaguing the land. In Lin\u2019s absence, one of the academy headmasters dies, and a new one takes up residence and begins spiriting away powerful students to mysterious ends. It is unclear whether \u201cFire Dance\u201d is meant to be a sequel or a stand-alone novel, but new readers will be happy to learn that it\u2019s possible to read this on its own, even if the learning curve is a bit steep. While the plot is somewhat confusing, the writing is gorgeous. Fans of fantasy intrigue will like this one.Everdeen Mason\u2009reviews science fiction and fantasy every month for The Washington Post.Read more:\nAfter a \u2018painful\u2019 public shaming, this book was rewritten\nBest science fiction and fantasy of March\nThree novels that aim for the heart of America\u2019s love affair with guns\n New releases include \u2018Blackfish City,\u2019 by Sam J. Miller and Julia Whicker\u2019s \u2018Wonderblood.\u2019 Best science fiction and fantasy books out this month",
        "author": "Everdeen Mason"
    },
    {
        "title": "Holding Fast to High-Flying Dreams (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "335",
        "date": "2019-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/books/review/my-life-as-an-ice-cream-sandwich-ibi-zoboi.html",
        "text": "In \u201cMy Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich,\u201d Ibi Zoboi\u2019s memorable hybrid novel, a rising seventh grader needs her space \u2014 specifically, outer space. In \u201cMy Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich,\u201d Ibi Zoboi\u2019s memorable hybrid novel, a rising seventh grader needs her space \u2014 specifically, outer space. \u201cY\u2019all step away from her. She\u2019s fresh from Alabama,\u201d Ebony-Grace\u2019s father warns the neighborhood kids after her arrival in New York City\u2019s Harlem. \u201cShe\u2019s gonna need her space.\u201d",
        "author": "By J. D. Biersdorfer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Holding Fast to High-Flying Dreams (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "336",
        "date": "2019-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/books/review/my-life-as-an-ice-cream-sandwich-ibi-zoboi.html",
        "text": "In \u201cMy Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich,\u201d Ibi Zoboi\u2019s memorable hybrid novel, a rising seventh grader needs her space \u2014 specifically, outer space. In \u201cMy Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich,\u201d Ibi Zoboi\u2019s memorable hybrid novel, a rising seventh grader needs her space \u2014 specifically, outer space. \u201cY\u2019all step away from her. She\u2019s fresh from Alabama,\u201d Ebony-Grace\u2019s father warns the neighborhood kids after her arrival in New York City\u2019s Harlem. \u201cShe\u2019s gonna need her space.\u201d",
        "author": "By J. D. Biersdorfer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did an Alien Life-Form Do a Drive-By of Our Solar System in 2017? (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "337",
        "date": "2021-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/books/review/extraterrestrial-avi-loeb.html",
        "text": "\u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d by the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, makes the case for intelligent life in outer space \u2014 and for evidence that it may have visited us not long ago. \u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d by the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, makes the case for intelligent life in outer space \u2014 and for evidence that it may have visited us not long ago. EXTRATERRESTRIALThe First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond EarthBy Avi Loeb",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did an Alien Life-Form Do a Drive-By of Our Solar System in 2017? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "338",
        "date": "2021-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/books/review/extraterrestrial-avi-loeb.html",
        "text": "\u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d by the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, makes the case for intelligent life in outer space \u2014 and for evidence that it may have visited us not long ago. \u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d by the Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, makes the case for intelligent life in outer space \u2014 and for evidence that it may have visited us not long ago. EXTRATERRESTRIALThe First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond EarthBy Avi Loeb",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dystopia Infuses \u2018All Our Wrong Todays\u2019 (WSJ: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "339",
        "date": "2017-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dystopia-infuses-all-our-wrong-todays-1485965388?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=100",
        "text": "The 42-year-old Toronto writer said it was never his plan to use literary fiction to raise his profile in Hollywood. \u201cIt was a personal thing. I had a story I wanted to tell and I wanted to challenge myself,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of funny to look back on this decision, the very opposite of a career decision.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nIn ",
        "author": "Ellen Gamerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The best romance novels of 2019 (WP: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "340",
        "date": "2019-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-best-romance-novels-of-2019/2019/11/21/ad09040a-04a5-11ea-ac12-3325d49eacaa_story.html",
        "text": "\"The Flatshare\" By Beth O\u2019Leary (Flatiron)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis sneaky-sweet story is about two unique, struggling people who share a flat \u2014 he works a hospice night shift and sleeps during the day, while she has an editorial day job and stays there at night. They weren\u2019t supposed to interact at all. But their connection builds as they leave notes for one another before eventually meeting in person, and a wonderful, adorable, mutually healing romance is born. \"Crier's War\"By Nina Varela (HarperTeen)A young adult novel that explores artificial intelligence, class conflict and queer romance, \u201cCrier\u2019s War\u201d also sports an exquisite synopsis: \u201can impossible love between two girls \u2014 one human, one Made \u2014 whose romance could be the beginning of a revolution.\u201d Hello! It\u2019s perfect for the fantasy and sci-fi romance readers who love spy plots and incendiary character chemistry, yearn for queer love stories, and adore books that ask tough questions about what it means to be human.\"The Bride Test\"By Helen Hoang (Berkley)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBuy this book, and Hoang\u2019s first novel, \u201cThe Kiss Quotient,\u201d and you can thank me and your bookseller later. Why? It\u2019s a Cinderella story that\u2019s sweet and achingly funny, featuring a hero with autism and a heroine who journeys to the United States from Vietnam after his mother attempts to matchmake a marriage. \u201cThe Bride Test\u201d weaves together themes of class, diaspora, immigration and sexuality inside a familiar, fantastic and utterly charming romance.A romance novelist struggled with Asperger\u2019s. Now she writes about love on the spectrum.\"The Right Swipe\"By Alisha Rai (Avon)A tech CEO reconnects with the former NFL player who ghosted her when he becomes the face of the dating app company she wants to buy. Perhaps they can be more than colleagues and former lovers, if they can hurdle the haunting effects of their past experiences, which include a vindictive ex and the intricacies of traumatic brain injury. An ideal gift for the reader who loves comedy and emotional complexity, and who knows all too well the unique challenges of dating in the modern era.\"Polaris Rising\"By Jessie Mihalik (Harper Voyager)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis book is for any reader who has wished for more romance between captured runaway princesses and notorious criminals, in stories set amid political schemes, found family, forced proximity and family drama \u2014 IN SPACE. Those last two words are the key to many a science fiction romance reader\u2019s heart, and this book will make them giddy. The sequel, \u201cAurora Blazing,\u201d is also available \u2014 and also recommended.\"Can't Escape Love\"By Alyssa Cole (Avon Impulse)Cole has published several terrific romances this year, including this sexy, delightful novella. A brilliant anime-obsessed insomniac tracks down the live-streamer whose voice was the only thing soothing enough to help her sleep. He\u2019s creating an escape room based on a romance anime he knows nothing about \u2014 but she knows plenty. They\u2019re both business-savvy neuro-divergent nerds whose negotiations are a highlight of this treat of a story.Sarah Wendell\u2009is the author of three books and co-founder of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, one of the most popular and longest-running online communities devoted to romance fiction. There was no shortage of happily ever afters this year; some even took place in outer space. The best romance novels of 2019",
        "author": "Sarah Wendell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Prepare Yourself for Little Green Men (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "341",
        "date": "2021-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/books/ufo-books.html",
        "text": "If you can\u2019t wait to read the U.S. government\u2019s report about U.F.O.s, try one of these seven books. If you can\u2019t wait to read the U.S. government\u2019s report about U.F.O.s, try one of these seven books. In 2017, a telescope in Hawaii noticed a strange object careering through the solar system. Was it just a weirdly behaving comet? Loeb, a prominent astrophysicist at Harvard, came to a bolder conclusion: The object, christened \u201cOumuamua\u201d (Hawaiian for \u201cscout\u201d), could well be the product of an alien civilization \u2014 the first proof of intelligent life outside our planet. \u201cIf we dare to wager that Oumuamua was a piece of advanced extraterrestrial technology, we stand only to gain,\u201d he writes in this book arguing his case, which doubles as a poignant memoir of his childhood on an Israeli farm and his passion for space science.",
        "author": "By Gal Beckerman and Emily Eakin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Preparing to Launch: Three Adolescents Count Down to Adulthood (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "342",
        "date": "2020-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/27/books/review/erin-entrada-kelly-we-dream-of-space.html",
        "text": "Erin Entrada Kelly\u2019s \u201cWe Dream of Space\u201d follows three siblings, adrift in a dysfunctional family, as they await the shuttle Challenger\u2019s liftoff. Erin Entrada Kelly\u2019s \u201cWe Dream of Space\u201d follows three siblings, adrift in a dysfunctional family, as they await the shuttle Challenger\u2019s liftoff. It\u2019s January 1986. What do you do if you\u2019re a 12-year-old girl who feels invisible and longs to be a space shuttle commander? In Erin Entrada Kelly\u2019s WE DREAM OF SPACE (Greenwillow, 400 pp., $16.99; ages 8 to 12), Bernadatte Nelson Thomas (known as Bird) daydreams she\u2019s reaching out to Judith Resnik, an astronaut prepping for the launch of the Challenger. An imaginary Resnik talks back, telling Bird, \u201cYou\u2019re not disappearing,\u201d and describes being in space as \u201cfloating in a world that belongs only to you, but also belongs to everyone else.\u201d",
        "author": "By Catherine Bush"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Books Transport You to a Galaxy Far, Far Away (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "343",
        "date": "2020-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/books/review/smallest-lights-in-universe-sara-seager.html",
        "text": "The planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson and the astrophysicist Sara Seager write about the allure of studying space. The planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson and the astrophysicist Sara Seager write about the allure of studying space. THE SIRENS OF MARS Searching for Life on Another WorldBy Sarah Stewart Johnson",
        "author": "By Anthony Doerr"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Conversation With Neil deGrasse Tyson (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "344",
        "date": "2017-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/books/review/in-conversation-with-neil-degrasse-tyson.html",
        "text": "The noted astrophysicist discusses his new book, \u201cAstrophysics for People in a Hurry,\u201d and what it\u2019s like to die in a black hole. The noted astrophysicist discusses his new book, \u201cAstrophysics for People in a Hurry,\u201d and what it\u2019s like to die in a black hole. The famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has dedicated his slim new book, \u201cAstrophysics for People in a Hurry,\u201d to those who are \u201ctoo busy to read fat books, yet nonetheless seek a conduit to the cosmos.\u201d In it he explores the mysteries science has unraveled about the universe, as well as the many that it (so far) has not.",
        "author": "By Amy Harmon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Must Science Conflict With Spirituality? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "345",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/books/review/alan-lightman-searching-for-stars-on-an-island-in-maine.html",
        "text": "The astrophysicist and novelist Alan Lightman doesn\u2019t think so. And his new book, \u201cSearching for Stars on an Island in Maine,\u201d explains why. The astrophysicist and novelist Alan Lightman doesn\u2019t think so. And his new book, \u201cSearching for Stars on an Island in Maine,\u201d explains why. SEARCHING FOR STARS ON AN ISLAND IN MAINE By Alan Lightman 226 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.95.",
        "author": "By Michael Shermer"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Chirps and Ripples in the Universe That Prove Einstein Was Right (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "346",
        "date": "2017-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/books/review/einstein-relativity-theory-gravitational-waves.html",
        "text": "Three books on a major recent development in astronomy confirming relativity theory. Three books on a major recent development in astronomy confirming relativity theory. In 1921, Albert Einstein delivered a series of lectures at Princeton that marked his final attempt at a comprehensive synopsis of the special and general theories of relativity. He had introduced those theories in 1905 and 1915, respectively, and by 1921 they included refinements resulting from his and his colleagues\u2019 sustained attention to his original work. In THE FORMATIVE YEARS OF RELATIVITY: The History and Meaning of Einstein\u2019s Princeton Lectures (Princeton University, $35), the physicist Hanoch Gutfreund and the historian J\u00fcrgen Renn declare those talks to be \u201cthe paradigmatic text\u201d of this pivotal period in relativity\u2019s development.",
        "author": "By James Ryerson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ruth Freitag, Librarian to the Stars, Dies at 96 (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "347",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/books/ruth-freitag-dead.html",
        "text": "An expert on astronomy, she spent nearly a half-century at the Library of Congress and helped Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan with research. An expert on astronomy, she spent nearly a half-century at the Library of Congress and helped Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan with research. Isaac Asimov was enthralled with her and wrote her a limerick. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan wrote in their introduction to \u201cComet\u201d (1985) that \u201cone of the most pleasant experiences in writing this book\u201d was meeting her. Numerous other science writers acknowledged their debts to her in forewords to their books.",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Three New Books on the Predigital Technologies That Shaped Our World (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "348",
        "date": "2021-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/books/review/the-invention-of-medicine-robin-lane-fox-the-light-ages-seb-falk-the-age-of-wood-roland-ennos.html",
        "text": "A history of early medicine, a medieval astronomer\u2019s adventures and an exploration of wood\u2019s importance in human history all look back to eras long before the internet. A history of early medicine, a medieval astronomer\u2019s adventures and an exploration of wood\u2019s importance in human history all look back to eras long before the internet. THE INVENTION OF MEDICINEFrom Homer to HippocratesBy Robin Lane Fox",
        "author": "By Michael Strevens"
    },
    {
        "title": "Three New Books on the Predigital Technologies That Shaped Our World (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "349",
        "date": "2021-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/books/review/the-invention-of-medicine-robin-lane-fox-the-light-ages-seb-falk-the-age-of-wood-roland-ennos.html",
        "text": "A history of early medicine, a medieval astronomer\u2019s adventures and an exploration of wood\u2019s importance in human history all look back to eras long before the internet. A history of early medicine, a medieval astronomer\u2019s adventures and an exploration of wood\u2019s importance in human history all look back to eras long before the internet. THE INVENTION OF MEDICINEFrom Homer to HippocratesBy Robin Lane Fox",
        "author": "By Michael Strevens"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Memoir of a Year on the International Space Station (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "350",
        "date": "2017-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/books/review/endurance-scott-kelly.html",
        "text": "The NASA astronaut and naval pilot Scott Kelly put his \u201cEndurance\u201d to the test, both on Earth and beyond. The NASA astronaut and naval pilot Scott Kelly put his \u201cEndurance\u201d to the test, both on Earth and beyond. ENDURANCE A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery By Scott Kelly with Margaret Lazarus Dean 387 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.95.",
        "author": "By Jaroslav Kalfar"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Czech Astronaut\u2019s Earthly Troubles Come Along for the Ride (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "351",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/spaceman-of-bohemia-jaroslav-kalfar.html",
        "text": "Jaroslav Kalfar\u2019s zany debut novel, \u201cSpaceman of Bohemia,\u201d features a Czech astronaut with a lot of baggage back on Earth. Hari Kunzru reviews. Jaroslav Kalfar\u2019s zany debut novel, \u201cSpaceman of Bohemia,\u201d features a Czech astronaut with a lot of baggage back on Earth. Hari Kunzru reviews. SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIABy Jaroslav Kalfar 276 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $26.",
        "author": "By Hari Kunzru"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Czech Astronaut\u2019s Earthly Troubles Come Along for the Ride (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "352",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/books/review/spaceman-of-bohemia-jaroslav-kalfar.html",
        "text": "Jaroslav Kalfar\u2019s zany debut novel, \u201cSpaceman of Bohemia,\u201d features a Czech astronaut with a lot of baggage back on Earth. Hari Kunzru reviews. Jaroslav Kalfar\u2019s zany debut novel, \u201cSpaceman of Bohemia,\u201d features a Czech astronaut with a lot of baggage back on Earth. Hari Kunzru reviews. SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIABy Jaroslav Kalfar 276 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $26.",
        "author": "By Hari Kunzru"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018Right Stuff\u2019 for Our Moment of Space Travel (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "353",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/books/review/test-gods-nicholas-schmidle.html",
        "text": "In \u201cTest Gods,\u201d Nicholas Schmidle tells the story of Virgin Galactic\u2019s space program, with a focus on the astronauts who are charting new frontiers. In \u201cTest Gods,\u201d Nicholas Schmidle tells the story of Virgin Galactic\u2019s space program, with a focus on the astronauts who are charting new frontiers. TEST GODSVirgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern AstronautBy Nicholas Schmidle",
        "author": "By Elliot Ackerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018Right Stuff\u2019 for Our Moment of Space Travel (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "354",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/books/review/test-gods-nicholas-schmidle.html",
        "text": "In \u201cTest Gods,\u201d Nicholas Schmidle tells the story of Virgin Galactic\u2019s space program, with a focus on the astronauts who are charting new frontiers. In \u201cTest Gods,\u201d Nicholas Schmidle tells the story of Virgin Galactic\u2019s space program, with a focus on the astronauts who are charting new frontiers. TEST GODSVirgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern AstronautBy Nicholas Schmidle",
        "author": "By Elliot Ackerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "He Stayed Grounded by Writing a Thriller Set in Outer Space (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "355",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/books/chris-hadfield-astronaut-apollo-murders.html",
        "text": "Chris Hadfield went viral as an astronaut singing David Bowie in orbit. Now he has written a Cold War thriller packed with cosmic action. Chris Hadfield went viral as an astronaut singing David Bowie in orbit. Now he has written a Cold War thriller packed with cosmic action. In his long and varied career, the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has flown fighter jets, walked in space and orbited the earth for months while commanding the International Space Station. But until earlier this year, he never had to face the stomach-churning professional challenge of turning in a novel and learning that your editors think it is 35,000 words too long.",
        "author": "By Sarah Lyall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet an Intergalactic Spider in \u2018Spaceman of Bohemia\u2019 (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "356",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/books/review-spaceman-of-bohemia-jaroslav-kalfar.html",
        "text": "Space oddities abound in Jaroslav Kalfar\u2019s debut novel, as a Czech astronaut is sent to a mysterious cloud of dust swept in from a neighboring galaxy. Space oddities abound in Jaroslav Kalfar\u2019s debut novel, as a Czech astronaut is sent to a mysterious cloud of dust swept in from a neighboring galaxy. SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIABy Jaroslav Kalfar276 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $26.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Senior"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | In Jeff VanderMeer\u2019s \u2018Dead Astronauts,\u2019 time travelers try to rescue a ruined world (WP: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "357",
        "date": "2019-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/in-jeff-vandermeers-dead-astronauts-time-travelers-try-to-rescue-a-ruined-world/2019/12/04/a4541d88-16a5-11ea-9110-3b34ce1d92b1_story.html",
        "text": "The worlds of Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy, are fantastical mutations of our own where the effects of climate change appear in full Technicolor: Strange species \u2014 a bat-faced scientist, a humanoid made of moss \u2014 roam contaminated landscapes full of new ecosystems that are hostile to life as we know it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis latest book, \u201cDead Astronauts,\u201d is an expansion of 2017\u2019s \u201cBorne\u201d and could read as a bizarre origin story, a sci-fi fable told generations after the Anthropocene. Layered and complex, the novel follows Grayson, Moss and Chen, the three space travelers of the title, as they try to save the world from the Company, a powerful, reckless organization that polluted Earth beyond recognition. The trio\u2019s quest has sent them to numerous realities where each time they have failed to steer clear of peril. By now, they half-know what to expect and have learned to follow a series of scripted behaviors. But when the newest sequence of events repeatedly goes off script, they realize this time is different.Uncertainty persistently dogs these characters, but it also looms over the reader in a novel that tells a complex story using complicated, stylized writing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVanderMeer\u2019s style here, marked by an archaic syntax and clipped sentences, is cumbersome for a reader trying to gain a foothold in this strange, new world. Take, for example, the moment we meet Grayson and her wormholing companions: \u201cA glimmer, a glint, at the City\u2019s dusty edge, where the land between sky and land cut the eye. An everlasting gleam that yet evaporated upon the arrival of the three and left behind a smell like chrome and chemicals.\u201d Though lush with sensory details, the odd cadence brings to mind a speaker in a royal court, reading from a scroll of dry parchment.The best science fiction and fantasy of 2019While the ornamental style complements elements of lore peppered throughout the novel, such as the archetypal beings of the trickster fox and the lone traveler, it hampers narrative momentum. That could be forgiven if the world of \u201cDead Astronauts\u201d were less convoluted, but we are, after all, hopscotching between multiple realities, timelines and character perspectives.Some clarity arrives midway through the novel when the ever-rotating point of view shifts to Sarah, a homeless woman who can remember a time before the Company, before everything \u2014 water, air, even light \u2014 was poisoned. Here the narrative is more coherent and the style is more subdued, as if language were also vulnerable to contamination. Aided by Sarah\u2019s memories, we can begin to reconstruct how the world devolved into noxious sludge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are two notable landmarks in this swath of a wasted world, the \u201cderelict\u201d City and the nefarious Company, and they are constantly at odds with each other. Inside the Company\u2019s egg-shaped headquarters is a laboratory with a \u201cwall of globes\u201d that once served as a holding pen for Charlie X\u2019s experiments in biotech and looked like \u201clarge bubbles floating to the surface of the sea.\u201d The creatures he designed were sent on dangerous, exploratory missions through space-time to gather data for the Company and often wound up dead or gravely injured.\u201cCharlie X at twenty-seven might have lived a lifetime already,\u201d Moss thinks. \u201cHeading up a lab, experimenting with form and function, blurring the lines of art and product. Feeling so very powerful as an orchestrator and organizer and manipulator of life.\u201dBut Charlie X\u2019s shortsightedness \u2014 his belief that \u201canimals were objects to be manipulated as products or resources\u201d \u2014 backfired. Eventually, the creatures he created rebelled and laid waste to the Company and nearly all of mankind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough Charlie X could be held responsible for dooming the Earth, he also created our hero\u2019s companions, Moss and Chen, and nearly every other character we encounter. Moss and Chen both appear human for the benefit of Grayson, but, in their natural forms, Moss is a \u201ccarpet of moss\u201d and Chen unravels into \u201cribbons and rips of salamanders.\u201d Moss, perhaps out of loyalty, believes Charlie X \u201cunwittingly orchestrated their resistance\u201d before he went completely mad.The rebels are led by the Blue Fox, a messianic figure who speaks to us as a \u201cpelt nailed to a wall.\u201d The fox, like the astronauts, once burrowed through space and time \u201con a mission that could only end in disaster,\u201d though at the behest of the Company, rather than against ",
        "author": "Connor Goodwin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ben Bova, Science Fiction Editor and Author, Is Dead at 88 (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "358",
        "date": "2020-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/books/ben-bova-dies.html",
        "text": "As editor of the magazines Analog and Omni, he was a champion of a new generation of authors, including George R.R. Martin. As editor of the magazines Analog and Omni, he was a champion of a new generation of authors, including George R.R. Martin. Ben Bova was a hard-science guy \u2014 and a passionate space program booster \u2014 and his visions of the future encompassed a dizzying array of technological advances (and resulting horrors or delights), including cloning, sex in space, climate change, the nuclear arms race, Martian colonies and the search for extraterrestrials. In newspaper articles, short stories and more than 100 books, he explored these and other knotty human problems.",
        "author": "By Penelope Green"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Vinyl Frontier\u2019 Review: Greetings From Planet Earth (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "359",
        "date": "2019-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vinyl-frontier-review-greetings-from-planet-earth-11566571092?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=14",
        "text": "The task of devising that message fell to planetary scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan,\n\n\n\n with the proviso that it weigh not much more than a kilo, and (since his anatomically correct golden plaque for the Pioneer 10 spacecraft had riled the Bible Belt, if not the Kuiper) contain not one milligram of smut. His team comprised his wife, the artist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Linda Salzman Sagan\n\n\n\n ;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Drake,\n\n\n\n an astrophysicist and would-be alien-whisperer;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Timothy Ferris\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ann Druyan,\n\n\n\n an affianced pair of young writers; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Lomberg,\n\n\n\n a young artist. The mission they settled on\u2014with just six weeks left on the clock\u2014was to create a record engraved with sounds of Earth, greetings from Earth, music of Earth and (by some magic of encoding) pictures of Earth. Stamped in copper and clad in gold, the record would, with luck, remain intact for a billion years. Though the weight limit precluded a phonograph, there would be a cartridge. And the gilded aluminum album cover, inscribed with runes worthy of a cosmic Ikea, would explain how to use it.\n\n\nThe Vinyl FrontierBy Jonathan Scott Bloomsbury Sigma, 288 pages, $28\n\n\nFor the rest of the story, I refer you to two sources: \u201cMurmurs of Earth,\u201d published shortly after the 1977 launch, and a new book by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Scott,\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Vinyl Frontier.\u201d \u201cMurmurs\u201d\u2014edited by Sagan, replete with elegant essays by the team members, and graced with handsome illustrations\u2014is the locus classicus. But if you want the dirt, go with Mr. Scott. Admittedly, reading him feels a bit like getting caught in a meteor shower of anecdotes and gags, with cosmic debris rattling off your helmet like rimshots. At times the plot wobbles and characters fail to coalesce. Matters of classical music are sometimes mangled; as Mr. Scott proudly confesses, had he chosen the music for the golden record, aliens would think humankind had only three chords. \nMostly, though, he has done his homework. He has the nerd\u2019s determination to track down details, to badger surviving protagonists with questions no one else has asked. Above all, he has a golden ear for irony. Far from second-guessing or lamenting the record\u2019s imperfections, he revels in its pops, clicks, glitches and quirks\u2014from the expunging of private parts at a public agency\u2019s behest to the fact that the man speaking so eloquently on behalf of all humanity on Side 1, Track 1, U.N. Secretary-General\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kurt Waldheim,\n\n\n\n was later revealed to have been an active Nazi.\n\nMr. Scott begins his book, rather charmingly, with the story of his first mixtape. It was, of course, meant to impress a girl. But its main function was to impress upon his malleable adolescent self a sense of who he was. If this was true of a cassette pressed into a human hand, how much more so of a record frisbeed into deep space on the gigaparsec-long shot that it might be (a) found, (b) played and (c) made sense of? \nSome of the record\u2019s creators conceded as much, both in words and in the way they went about selecting, from the planet\u2019s horn of plenty\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Berry,\n\n\n\n Javanese gamelan, Pygmy vocal polyphony\u2014the 27 tracks they found most moving, most inspiring, most self-and-species-defining. (Given the constraints, they did a fine job, as earthlings can now hear on Ozma Records\u2019 sumptuous, Grammy-winning 2017 box set.) The team\u2019s perspective was that of Earth looking back at its itself from a great distance: a \u201cpale blue dot\u201d shimmering, Narcissus-like, in the inky pond of space.\nOne participant, though\u2014Jon Lomberg\u2014felt the record should focus not on feeling, which aliens might not share, but on structure. As he later told Mr. Scott, \u201cI\u2019m sceptical that cosmic loneliness is as easy to convey as prime numbers.\u201d Given his druthers, Mr. Lomberg would have led off with a brief, wordless music lesson laying out the building blocks of the structures to come. As it is, alien audiences have him to thank, in part, for three glistening crystals of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bach.\n\n\n\n \nExtraterrestrials may never\u2014even if they find the record\u2014\u201chear\u201d it, in our sense of the word. If their home planet\u2019s atmosphere doesn\u2019t favor the transmission of sound, they may well lack anything like ears. But any life form smart enough to find the record should be smart enough to see (or \u201csee\u201d) that it contains patterns. And if that life form studies those patterns long and hard enough, it may just find some meaning in them\u2014in a sense deeper than the merely semantic. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe Voyager launch marked the apotheosis of the phonograph record, which had begun its earthly career a round century before. By eclipsing the human musician, records helped us see The Voyager spacecraft carried a gold-plated LP\u2014a mixtape for aliens \ufb01lled with Bach, Chuck Berry, Javanese gamelan music and more. ",
        "author": "Evan Eisenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Vinyl Frontier\u2019 Review: Greetings From Planet Earth (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "360",
        "date": "2019-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vinyl-frontier-review-greetings-from-planet-earth-11566571092?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=52",
        "text": "The task of devising that message fell to planetary scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan,\n\n\n\n with the proviso that it weigh not much more than a kilo, and (since his anatomically correct golden plaque for the Pioneer 10 spacecraft had riled the Bible Belt, if not the Kuiper) contain not one milligram of smut. His team comprised his wife, the artist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Linda Salzman Sagan\n\n\n\n ;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Drake,\n\n\n\n an astrophysicist and would-be alien-whisperer;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Timothy Ferris\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ann Druyan,\n\n\n\n an affianced pair of young writers; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Lomberg,\n\n\n\n a young artist. The mission they settled on\u2014with just six weeks left on the clock\u2014was to create a record engraved with sounds of Earth, greetings from Earth, music of Earth and (by some magic of encoding) pictures of Earth. Stamped in copper and clad in gold, the record would, with luck, remain intact for a billion years. Though the weight limit precluded a phonograph, there would be a cartridge. And the gilded aluminum album cover, inscribed with runes worthy of a cosmic Ikea, would explain how to use it.\n\n\nThe Vinyl FrontierBy Jonathan Scott Bloomsbury Sigma, 288 pages, $28\n\n\nFor the rest of the story, I refer you to two sources: \u201cMurmurs of Earth,\u201d published shortly after the 1977 launch, and a new book by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Scott,\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Vinyl Frontier.\u201d \u201cMurmurs\u201d\u2014edited by Sagan, replete with elegant essays by the team members, and graced with handsome illustrations\u2014is the locus classicus. But if you want the dirt, go with Mr. Scott. Admittedly, reading him feels a bit like getting caught in a meteor shower of anecdotes and gags, with cosmic debris rattling off your helmet like rimshots. At times the plot wobbles and characters fail to coalesce. Matters of classical music are sometimes mangled; as Mr. Scott proudly confesses, had he chosen the music for the golden record, aliens would think humankind had only three chords. \nMostly, though, he has done his homework. He has the nerd\u2019s determination to track down details, to badger surviving protagonists with questions no one else has asked. Above all, he has a golden ear for irony. Far from second-guessing or lamenting the record\u2019s imperfections, he revels in its pops, clicks, glitches and quirks\u2014from the expunging of private parts at a public agency\u2019s behest to the fact that the man speaking so eloquently on behalf of all humanity on Side 1, Track 1, U.N. Secretary-General\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kurt Waldheim,\n\n\n\n was later revealed to have been an active Nazi.\n\nMr. Scott begins his book, rather charmingly, with the story of his first mixtape. It was, of course, meant to impress a girl. But its main function was to impress upon his malleable adolescent self a sense of who he was. If this was true of a cassette pressed into a human hand, how much more so of a record frisbeed into deep space on the gigaparsec-long shot that it might be (a) found, (b) played and (c) made sense of? \nSome of the record\u2019s creators conceded as much, both in words and in the way they went about selecting, from the planet\u2019s horn of plenty\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Berry,\n\n\n\n Javanese gamelan, Pygmy vocal polyphony\u2014the 27 tracks they found most moving, most inspiring, most self-and-species-defining. (Given the constraints, they did a fine job, as earthlings can now hear on Ozma Records\u2019 sumptuous, Grammy-winning 2017 box set.) The team\u2019s perspective was that of Earth looking back at its itself from a great distance: a \u201cpale blue dot\u201d shimmering, Narcissus-like, in the inky pond of space.\nOne participant, though\u2014Jon Lomberg\u2014felt the record should focus not on feeling, which aliens might not share, but on structure. As he later told Mr. Scott, \u201cI\u2019m sceptical that cosmic loneliness is as easy to convey as prime numbers.\u201d Given his druthers, Mr. Lomberg would have led off with a brief, wordless music lesson laying out the building blocks of the structures to come. As it is, alien audiences have him to thank, in part, for three glistening crystals of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bach.\n\n\n\n \nExtraterrestrials may never\u2014even if they find the record\u2014\u201chear\u201d it, in our sense of the word. If their home planet\u2019s atmosphere doesn\u2019t favor the transmission of sound, they may well lack anything like ears. But any life form smart enough to find the record should be smart enough to see (or \u201csee\u201d) that it contains patterns. And if that life form studies those patterns long and hard enough, it may just find some meaning in them\u2014in a sense deeper than the merely semantic. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe Voyager launch marked the apotheosis of the phonograph record, which had begun its earthly career a round century before. By eclipsing the human musician, records helped us see The Voyager spacecraft carried a gold-plated LP\u2014a mixtape for aliens \ufb01lled with Bach, Chuck Berry, Javanese gamelan music and more. ",
        "author": "Evan Eisenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "361",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1969-moon-landing-the-great-leap-upward-11563549218?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=58",
        "text": "That\u2019s not surprising. Fewer than a third of Americans living today are old enough to have watched the flickering black-and-white images of Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin on their bulky cathode-tube TVs. A 50-year span covers a lot of American history. It was roughly half a century from the end of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s presidency to the inauguration of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abraham Lincoln\n\n\n\n or from the start of the Civil War to the first shots of World War I.\n\n\nRELATED\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n Book Review: When the Moon Was a Mystery \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the immediate afterglow, the triumph of Apollo 11 mesmerized Americans and millions around the world. The explorers\u2019 club of Magellan, Columbus, Amundsen and the rest now welcomed Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Michael Collins, who orbited in the command capsule while they were on the surface. The moon landing ranks with the splitting of the atom, heart transplants, the discovery of DNA and the plotting of the genome as transcendent human achievements in science and technology. Yet today few remember much more than Armstrong proclaiming, \u201cThe Eagle has landed,\u201d and the slightly elided \u201cOne step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d\nRather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence in the dark days of the Cold War, now itself as much a relic as the Apollo command capsule in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. After that first landing, the space program suffered a run of near-disasters and tragedies\u2014most poignantly the losses of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, which cost the lives of 14 crewmen and -women. These days, what\u2019s left of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has to thumb rides on Russian rockets to get its remaining astronauts to the International Space Station and back, and the exploration of our solar system is done by robotic probes.\n\nFor all that, the voyage to the moon is an epic worth retelling with narrative skill, illuminating detail and analytic exactitude. For the golden anniversary of the great leap upward, writers have filled a small shelf with new books that, each in its own way, reanimate the saga and re-examine the issues\u2014scientific, ideological, political, fiscal\u2014raised by the most expensive and complex scientific experiment mankind has ever undertaken. The Apollo program, like the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs, was essentially an all-male, all-white enterprise\u2014the kind of exploit that some cherish today as an exemplary Make America Great Again moment.\nWas it? For one thing, a central player in the drama was a Nazi. On the morning of May 2, 1945, as Allied forces pressed deeper into Germany after Hitler\u2019s suicide, a young German tied a white handkerchief to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedaled down a mountain road near the German-Austrian border until he encountered a platoon of American troops. Pvt. Fred Schneikert pointed his M1 at the youth, who told him his brother and some colleagues wanted to surrender to the Americans. His older brother was Wernher von Braun, an SS officer, and Wernher\u2019s comrades were the scientists and technicians who had helped him develop the V-2 \u201cVengeance\u201d rocket program that rained death on England, Belgium and France in the final days of the war. What\u2019s more, they had secreted tons of plans, blueprints and V-2 parts in nearby caves. Just before the Red Army flooded the zone, von Braun and his team, together with their stash were taken into American custody, their Nazi pasts magically erased, and soon put to work in Alabama on the Saturn rockets that a quarter-century later blasted Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Collins to the moon.\nEarly on in \u201cShoot for the Moon\u201d (Little, Brown, 453 pages, $30), James Donovan astutely tells the story of von Braun\u2019s surrender\u2014the fortuitous and slightly inconvenient first chapter in the American space epic. Mr. Donovan\u2019s story is heavily focused on the missions. The Mercury and Gemini flights led to the Apollo series that were the first manned vehicles to orbit the moon. The Apollo missions also produced the iconic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo of our exquisite blue marble seen from space, the triumphant Apollo 11 landing, and the \u201cHouston-we-have-a-problem\u201d voyage enshrined in the Tom Hanks movie \u201cApollo 13.\u201d\nMr. Donovan\u2019s account is chronological. He concentrates on the astronauts themselves and the flight directors and controllers back on Earth who faced nearly as much heart-clenching pressure as the fliers. The first classes of astronauts were hotshot test pilots and Korean War combat pilots. They were all under 35, shorter than 6 feet\u2014the better to fit into the cramped space capsules\u2014white, Christian, married. They all had IQs of at least 130, college degrees, and, in many cases, advanced degrees in aeronautics or engineering. To be accepted into the program, they had to undergo five days of medical and physical tests\u2014including a proctological probe with what they called the \u201csteel eel\u201d\u2014and an additional week of psychological and stress testing.\nWithout being prurient, Mr. Donovan slips behind the shiny curtain of astronaut perfection to portray the men as they really were. During training and in between missions, many loved a drink, fast cars\u2014especially Corvettes leased for a dollar a year by a patriotic Chevy dealer\u2014and space groupies. Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury Seven original astronauts, counseled his comrades to follow the \u201cold test-pilot\u2019s creed\u201d on freebies: \u201cAnything you can eat, drink or screw within twenty-four hours is perfectly acceptable.\u201d Most of the astronauts went by the thick book of mission procedure, but there were a few free spirits. During Scott Carpenter\u2019s three-orbit Mercury flight in May 1962, he was so entranced by the view that the ground controllers thought he was delirious. \u201cThat son-of-a-bitch is never going to fly for me again,\u201d shouted the flight director, Christopher Columbus Kraft\u2014and he never did.\n\n\n Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin at Cape Canaveral on July 16, 1969, as they prepare to leave for the moon on the Apollo 11. Photos: Angelo Cozzi/Mondadori via Getty Images; NASA/Newsmakers\n\n\nVirgil \u201cGus\u201d Grissom was the space program\u2019s bad-luck martyr. A highly respected pilot, he flew the unheralded second Mercury mission after Alan Shepard became a national hero in May 1961 with a 15-minute suborbital flight. When Grissom splashed down in the Atlantic, the hatch on his capsule blew open prematurely. The sea gushed in, and Grissom nearly drowned before rescue; the capsule sank to the ocean floor. Even so, Grissom got the command of a later Gemini flight, then was chosen to lead the first Apollo mission. On Jan. 27, 1967, Grissom and his crewmates, Ed White and Roger Chafee, were in their command module filled with pure oxygen for a pre-launch test when a spark ignited a fire that incinerated them within seconds. The disaster set back the moon program for months.\nMr. Donovan saves the best for last\u2014a meticulous, almost minute-by-minute re-creation of Apollo 11\u2019s round trip to the moon, especially the landing and the 21/4 hours that Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin spent on the surface. In the months before liftoff, the astronauts had trained for every conceivable situation or malfunction they might encounter, spending 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week, in simulators. The controllers compiled cheat sheets to respond instantly to any signal of trouble. They had to be prepared. There were more than 5.5 million parts in the Saturn V rocket and the three-element spacecraft, and the mission plan had taken six years to prepare.\nAfter all that, Apollo 11\u2019s flight went off nearly flawlessly. On the way to the moon, Mr. Collins put his spacecraft in \u201cbarbecue mode\u201d\u2014rotating slowly on its long axis to equalize the temperature between 280 degrees on the sunny side of the ship and -280 on the dark side. Exquisitely calibrated bursts of engine power\u2014the burns\u2014set the ship in moon orbit, then sent the lunar lander to the surface while Mr. Collins circled above. Armstrong had to search longer than planned for a landing site free of giant boulders and had perhaps 18 seconds of fuel left when the Eagle finally alighted.\nOn the way down, a \u201cprogram alarm\u201d repeatedly sounded and lit up on the lunar module\u2019s computer display. But the controllers recognized it as harmless and didn\u2019t have to issue the dreaded order to abort the landing. The next critical moment came after Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin were returning from their lunar excursion and fired up the Eagle\u2019s ascent rocket to dock with Columbia in orbit for the trip home. The ascent rocket had no backup. Had it failed, they would have been marooned on the moon and died in 24 hours when their oxygen ran out. But the rocket worked, and soon the crew was reunited for the three-day ride back. They splashed down in mid-Pacific just 13 miles from their prime recovery ship.\nCharles Fishman\u2019s \u201cOne Giant Leap\u201d (Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, $29.99) has a broader canvas. Mr. Fishman is a veteran space reporter with a vibrant touch\u2014nearly every sentence has a fact, an insight, a colorful quote or part of a piquant anecdote. What\u2019s more, he has pondered the meaning of the moon landing and arrived at a surprising and persuasive answer. He reintroduces all the major players\u2014the at-once cynical and idealistic politicians, adept bureaucrats, nerdy scientists and \u201cRight Stuff\u201d astronauts.\nMr. Fishman agrees with John F. Kennedy\u2019s court historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that the moon landing was the significant event of the 20th century. \u201cIn the chronicle of humanity,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe first missions by people from Earth to another planetary body are unlikely ever to be lost to history, to memory, or to storytelling.\u201d And what made it so astonishing is how hard it was. When JFK ordered the moon quest in 1961, he writes, \u201che was committing the nation to do something we couldn\u2019t do. We didn\u2019t have the tools, the equipment\u2014we didn\u2019t have the rockets or the launchpads, the spacesuits or the computers or the zero-gravity food\u2014to go to the Moon. . . . We didn\u2019t even know what we would need. . . . We didn\u2019t know what course to fly to get there from here. . . . We didn\u2019t know what we would find when we got there.\u201d\nIn eight years, all those questions were answered and problems overcome\u2014by more than 400,000 people working directly or as suppliers for the program. At one point, space exploration was consuming 4.5% to 5.5% of the federal budget, with an eventual cost for the Apollo program of $160 billion in today\u2019s money. It seemed like an enormous amount, but the latest annual budget for the Pentagon alone is more than five times as much. \nMr. Fishman is a connoisseur of fascinating detail, as well. The moon is an airless wasteland, but it turns out that moon dust, as Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin discovered in their lunar lander, has a distinct odor\u2014like wet ashes or the residue of an exploded firecracker. The astronauts\u2019 spacesuits were made by Playtex, the brassiere manufacturers. They were hand-stitched by seamstresses, and their parachutes were sewn and hand-folded. A team of \u201clittle old ladies,\u201d as they were affectionately called, at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon\n\n\n in Waltham, Mass., literally wove the wiring of the Apollo\u2019s first guidance and navigation computers. And the computers that got Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Collins to the moon and back, the author calculates, had two-millionths of 1% of the computing power of that smartphone you carry around today in your pocket or purse.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIndeed, Mr. Fishman concludes, the real legacy of Apollo isn\u2019t so much in the heavens but here on Earth. \u201cThe race to the Moon,\u201d he writes, \u201cdidn\u2019t usher in the Space Age; it ushered in the Digital Age.\u201d Flying at 24,000 miles an hour, the astronauts needed real-time computing. That ultimately required integrated circuits\u2014computer chips. At NASA\u2019s goading, semiconductor companies learned to mass-produce near-flawless chips for pennies apiece. NASA introduced \u201ctechnology\u201d into popular culture, and it now so permeates our daily lives that the miracle of personal and industrial computing is taken for granted.\nThe geopolitics of the space race can\u2019t really compete with the drama of the manned flights themselves, but without the politics there would have been no flights. It\u2019s fair to say that had JFK not been elected president in 1960 and assassinated in 1963, Americans might still be reaching for the moon. The popular historian Douglas Brinkley\u2019s \u201cAmerican Moonshot\u201d (Harper, 548 pages, $35) is all about Kennedy\u2019s realpolitik crusade to beat the Soviets to the moon not so much to pursue cosmic discovery but to assert free-enterprise superiority over communist Russia on Earth. Within a week\u2019s time in April 1961, the young new president had been confronted by the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro\u2019s Cuba and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u2019s pioneering Earth-orbiting flight, one of many Soviet firsts, and felt he had to respond.\nKennedy wasn\u2019t all that captivated by space and never would be. But he turned the race with the Russians to the moon into a stirring metaphor for American \u201cvigah\u201d in the Cold War. His speech to a joint session of Congress in May 1961 set an end-of-the-decade deadline for an American moon landing, and the next year he stepped up the eloquence in his now-celebrated \u201cWe choose to go to the moon\u201d stemwinder at Rice University. \u201cHis brazen moonshot call,\u201d writes Mr. Brinkley with undiluted admiration, \u201cwas among the most courageous statements and greatest gambles ever made by an American President.\u201d\nStill, Lyndon Johnson had to leverage the shock and anguish of Kennedy\u2019s murder to revitalize support for the space program, which was hemorrhaging enthusiasm. JFK\u2019s gamble was redeemed, but it was his old political adversary, new President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n who got to make the congratulatory phone call patched into Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin\u2019s helmets as they stood on the moon. For an instant, the nation was distracted from a siege of assassinations, ghetto riots and anti-Vietnam War eruptions that make today\u2019s grim political polarization look like the Era of Good Feelings.\nThe last word, appropriately, should go to the man who watched over Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin from the Columbia command capsule, Michael Collins. His galvanizing \u201cCarrying the Fire\u201d (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 478 pages, $17), first published 45 years ago, has been reissued for the second time in a special 50th-anniversary edition. The newer books have their virtues, but Mr. Collins\u2019s literate and lively memoir remains the best written and only reported account of Apollo 11\u2019s triumph. It rescues the great moon adventure from the time warp into which it has all but disappeared.\n\u2014Mr. Kosner, the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the New York Daily News, was a young Newsweek staffer in 1969. Rather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Chasing New Horizons\u2019 and \u2018Discovering Pluto\u2019 Reviews: Big Lessons From a Tiny World (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "362",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chasing-new-horizons-and-discovering-pluto-reviews-big-lessons-from-a-tiny-world-1526073840?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=19",
        "text": "One particular photo fired up the public\u2019s imagination during the spacecraft\u2019s flyby in July 2015. The image captured a bright white region on Pluto\u2019s surface in the shape of a heart, \u201ccreating an emotional attachment for this small, previously indistinct planet at the edge of our planetary system,\u201d write\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Grinspoon\n\n\n\n in their riveting account \u201cChasing New Horizons.\u201d Many are still unaware of the 2,500 people that it took to snap that picture\u2014as well as the many years of waiting.\nMr. Stern, the project leader for New Horizons, got it all started in 1989. Long dismayed that the planet had been bumped off the itinerary of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, he organized a special session at a scientific conference that brought all the key Plutophiles together and, even though still a graduate student, wangled a meeting with NASA\u2019s director of solar-system exploration to seek funding for a mission study. The one planet left unexplored had become \u201ca symbol, an open challenge, and a dare,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\n\nChasing New HorizonsBy Alan Stern & David Grinspoon Picador, 295 pages, $28 Discovering PlutoBy Dale P. Cruikshank & William Sheehan Arizona, 475 pages, $45\n\n\nTo Mr. Stern\u2019s surprise, the NASA director agreed to the study. But that was only the beginning of a wild ride of many stops and starts over the next decade. One proposal wanted to make the spacecraft bigger than first imagined; a competing plan, highly controversial, suggested a lightweight probe that would get to Pluto in half the time. Neither panned out: Other NASA projects were sucking up all the available money, and planetary scientists were getting diverted by other celestial baubles, such as Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, with its promise of an underground ocean. In Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon\u2019s telling, NASA comes across as an agency that shifts its priorities with the political winds. Even after NASA did renew its interest in Pluto, all proposals were abruptly canceled in 2000 as cost estimates rose through the roof. \n\n\nThe \u201cPluto Underground,\u201d as the planet\u2019s scientific champions came to be known, campaigned for a resurrection. Both NASA and Congress were bombarded by thousands of letters. A high-school student in Pennsylvania even set up a Save-the-Pluto-mission website that garnered national media attention. They all had good reason to push: There was an irreversible deadline; the available launch window extended only to 2006. After that, Pluto\u2019s axial tilt would cause more and more of its surface to be in shadow, making a worthwhile flyby unfeasible for decades to come. \nIn answer to the public outcry, NASA requested proposals for a new, more streamlined mission that had to be built for under a billion dollars. At this point, \u201cChasing New Horizons\u201d turns into a fascinating David versus Goliath story, with Caltech\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u2014the more experienced planetary probe maker with political weight\u2014pitted against a relative newcomer, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Mr. Stern went with the riskier choice, and won. \u201cI knew that I had to go with the team that really wanted it and would back it forever,\u201d he said. \nEven though we know the final outcome, the story continues to be a nail-biter as the New Horizons mission is canceled twice more. The two authors, with their insider\u2019s perspective, capture the arduous process with great narrative verve. \nWe can\u2019t even rest once the spacecraft is launched in 2006, only just making the deadline. Though New Horizons mainly hibernated during its 91/2 -year voyage, the Johns Hopkins team back on Earth needed to make sure that it arrived \u201cno more than nine minutes off target . . . equivalent to a cross-country airline flight from Los Angeles to New York landing within four milliseconds of its planned time,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. The observations to be made during the flyby, some 500 in all, had to be choreographed within the computer software as precisely as a Bolshoi ballet. \nIt was soon after the launch that Pluto lost its status as a full planet, as enough evidence had been gathered to conclude that it was better described as one of the larger members of the Kuiper belt, a collection of \u201cplanetismals\u201d left over from our solar system\u2019s formation. But that hardly diminished the need to examine Pluto. As New Horizons journeyed through deep space, astronomers found out that its three known moons were accompanied by two more.\nAnd then there was the mission\u2019s final hiccup: A mere three days out from Pluto, the scientists lost all communication with the spacecraft due to a computer overload. Flyby commands had to be completely reloaded, which they accomplished by working round-the-clock, with only hours to spare before the seven onboard instruments went to work. \nOn July 14, 2015, New Horizons came with Recent flybys revealed a charming and unexpected feature\u2014a bright white region shaped like a heart. ",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Chasing New Horizons\u2019 and \u2018Discovering Pluto\u2019 Reviews: Big Lessons From a Tiny World (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "363",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chasing-new-horizons-and-discovering-pluto-reviews-big-lessons-from-a-tiny-world-1526073840?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=75",
        "text": "One particular photo fired up the public\u2019s imagination during the spacecraft\u2019s flyby in July 2015. The image captured a bright white region on Pluto\u2019s surface in the shape of a heart, \u201ccreating an emotional attachment for this small, previously indistinct planet at the edge of our planetary system,\u201d write\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Grinspoon\n\n\n\n in their riveting account \u201cChasing New Horizons.\u201d Many are still unaware of the 2,500 people that it took to snap that picture\u2014as well as the many years of waiting.\nMr. Stern, the project leader for New Horizons, got it all started in 1989. Long dismayed that the planet had been bumped off the itinerary of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, he organized a special session at a scientific conference that brought all the key Plutophiles together and, even though still a graduate student, wangled a meeting with NASA\u2019s director of solar-system exploration to seek funding for a mission study. The one planet left unexplored had become \u201ca symbol, an open challenge, and a dare,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\n\nChasing New Horizons\n\n\n\nBy Alan Stern & David Grinspoon Picador, 295 pages, $28 Discovering PlutoBy Dale P. Cruikshank & William Sheehan Arizona, 475 pages, $45\n\n\nTo Mr. Stern\u2019s surprise, the NASA director agreed to the study. But that was only the beginning of a wild ride of many stops and starts over the next decade. One proposal wanted to make the spacecraft bigger than first imagined; a competing plan, highly controversial, suggested a lightweight probe that would get to Pluto in half the time. Neither panned out: Other NASA projects were sucking up all the available money, and planetary scientists were getting diverted by other celestial baubles, such as Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, with its promise of an underground ocean. In Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon\u2019s telling, NASA comes across as an agency that shifts its priorities with the political winds. Even after NASA did renew its interest in Pluto, all proposals were abruptly canceled in 2000 as cost estimates rose through the roof. \n\n\nThe \u201cPluto Underground,\u201d as the planet\u2019s scientific champions came to be known, campaigned for a resurrection. Both NASA and Congress were bombarded by thousands of letters. A high-school student in Pennsylvania even set up a Save-the-Pluto-mission website that garnered national media attention. They all had good reason to push: There was an irreversible deadline; the available launch window extended only to 2006. After that, Pluto\u2019s axial tilt would cause more and more of its surface to be in shadow, making a worthwhile flyby unfeasible for decades to come. \nIn answer to the public outcry, NASA requested proposals for a new, more streamlined mission that had to be built for under a billion dollars. At this point, \u201cChasing New Horizons\u201d turns into a fascinating David versus Goliath story, with Caltech\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u2014the more experienced planetary probe maker with political weight\u2014pitted against a relative newcomer, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Mr. Stern went with the riskier choice, and won. \u201cI knew that I had to go with the team that really wanted it and would back it forever,\u201d he said. \nEven though we know the final outcome, the story continues to be a nail-biter as the New Horizons mission is canceled twice more. The two authors, with their insider\u2019s perspective, capture the arduous process with great narrative verve. \nWe can\u2019t even rest once the spacecraft is launched in 2006, only just making the deadline. Though New Horizons mainly hibernated during its 91/2 -year voyage, the Johns Hopkins team back on Earth needed to make sure that it arrived \u201cno more than nine minutes off target . . . equivalent to a cross-country airline flight from Los Angeles to New York landing within four milliseconds of its planned time,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. The observations to be made during the flyby, some 500 in all, had to be choreographed within the computer software as precisely as a Bolshoi ballet. \nIt was soon after the launch that Pluto lost its status as a full planet, as enough evidence had been gathered to conclude that it was better described as one of the larger members of the Kuiper belt, a collection of \u201cplanetismals\u201d left over from our solar system\u2019s formation. But that hardly diminished the need to examine Pluto. As New Horizons journeyed through deep space, astronomers found out that its three known moons were accompanied by two more.\nAnd then there was the mission\u2019s final hiccup: A mere three days out from Pluto, the scientists lost all communication with the spacecraft due to a computer overload. Flyby commands had to be completely reloaded, which they accomplished by working round-the-clock, with only hours to spare before the seven onboard instruments went to work. \nOn July 14, 2015, New Horizons came within 8,000 miles of Pluto\u2019s surface. Its cameras saw ice mountains as high as the Rockies, as well as myriad ridges and channels set amid smooth bright regions. \u201cIt rivals or beats many of the larger planets in geological complexity,\u201d said Mr. Stern. \u201cBefore the flyby, I could not in my wildest dreams have pictured structures like these or imagined how strong Pluto\u2019s geological personality would turn out to be.\u201d \nWhile \u201cChasing New Horizons\u201d is largely focused on the origin and development of the mission itself, \u201cDiscovering Pluto,\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dale P. Cruikshank\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Sheehan,\n\n\n\n offers the backstory of the explorations of our solar system\u2019s most remote regions. I came to think of the books as a flight of wines: \u201cChasing New Horizons\u201d is the starter, nimble and refreshing, with \u201cDiscovering Pluto\u201d offering deeper tones, scientific details that can be savored more slowly. Its first half, largely written by Mr. Sheehan, a historian of astronomy, is an excellent and engaging overview of the discovery of the solar system\u2019s far members Uranus and Neptune, which led to the legendary hunt for Planet X, the next suspected planet, by the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. This search ultimately resulted in Pluto\u2019s discovery in 1930 by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clyde Tombaugh\n\n\n\n (whose ashes are aboard New Horizons).\nMr. Cruikshank, a planetary scientist, takes over to review the renaissance in planetary studies over the succeeding decades, especially with the technological advances made after World War II. Geologists, chemists, atmospheric scientists and astronomers joined forces to explore a planet\u2019s varied properties. The history of the solar system is revealed through the examination of such planetary ices as water, methane and carbon dioxide. Mr. Cruikshank himself codiscovered frozen methane on Pluto; the substance\u2019s reflectivity made possible the first good estimate of Pluto\u2019s size and mass, largely unknown until 1976. \nThe stories contained within these books have not ended. New Horizons continues to glide through the farthest reaches of the solar system and on New Year\u2019s Day 2019 will fly by another Kuiper-belt object known simply as 2014 MU69, located one billion miles beyond Pluto. \u201cAt that moment, it will unseat Pluto from its briefly held distinction as the most distant targeted object ever visited by a spacecraft,\u201d write Messrs. Cruikshank and Sheehan. The New Horizons probe\u2019s \u201cepic journey will inspire the efforts of future generations of our species to continue the unfinished work of uncovering the further secrets of the Solar System and the Universe.\u201d \n\u2014Ms. Bartusiak is a professor of the practice in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. Her books include \u201cBlack Hole\u201d and \u201cEinstein\u2019s Unfinished Symphony.\u201d Recent flybys revealed a charming and unexpected feature\u2014a bright white region shaped like a heart. ",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Chasing New Horizons\u2019 and \u2018Discovering Pluto\u2019 Reviews: Big Lessons From a Tiny World (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "364",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chasing-new-horizons-and-discovering-pluto-reviews-big-lessons-from-a-tiny-world-1526073840?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=68",
        "text": "One particular photo fired up the public\u2019s imagination during the spacecraft\u2019s flyby in July 2015. The image captured a bright white region on Pluto\u2019s surface in the shape of a heart, \u201ccreating an emotional attachment for this small, previously indistinct planet at the edge of our planetary system,\u201d write\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Grinspoon\n\n\n\n in their riveting account \u201cChasing New Horizons.\u201d Many are still unaware of the 2,500 people that it took to snap that picture\u2014as well as the many years of waiting.\nMr. Stern, the project leader for New Horizons, got it all started in 1989. Long dismayed that the planet had been bumped off the itinerary of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, he organized a special session at a scientific conference that brought all the key Plutophiles together and, even though still a graduate student, wangled a meeting with NASA\u2019s director of solar-system exploration to seek funding for a mission study. The one planet left unexplored had become \u201ca symbol, an open challenge, and a dare,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\n\nChasing New HorizonsBy Alan Stern & David Grinspoon Picador, 295 pages, $28 Discovering PlutoBy Dale P. Cruikshank & William Sheehan Arizona, 475 pages, $45\n\n\nTo Mr. Stern\u2019s surprise, the NASA director agreed to the study. But that was only the beginning of a wild ride of many stops and starts over the next decade. One proposal wanted to make the spacecraft bigger than first imagined; a competing plan, highly controversial, suggested a lightweight probe that would get to Pluto in half the time. Neither panned out: Other NASA projects were sucking up all the available money, and planetary scientists were getting diverted by other celestial baubles, such as Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, with its promise of an underground ocean. In Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon\u2019s telling, NASA comes across as an agency that shifts its priorities with the political winds. Even after NASA did renew its interest in Pluto, all proposals were abruptly canceled in 2000 as cost estimates rose through the roof. \n\n\nThe \u201cPluto Underground,\u201d as the planet\u2019s scientific champions came to be known, campaigned for a resurrection. Both NASA and Congress were bombarded by thousands of letters. A high-school student in Pennsylvania even set up a Save-the-Pluto-mission website that garnered national media attention. They all had good reason to push: There was an irreversible deadline; the available launch window extended only to 2006. After that, Pluto\u2019s axial tilt would cause more and more of its surface to be in shadow, making a worthwhile flyby unfeasible for decades to come. \nIn answer to the public outcry, NASA requested proposals for a new, more streamlined mission that had to be built for under a billion dollars. At this point, \u201cChasing New Horizons\u201d turns into a fascinating David versus Goliath story, with Caltech\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u2014the more experienced planetary probe maker with political weight\u2014pitted against a relative newcomer, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Mr. Stern went with the riskier choice, and won. \u201cI knew that I had to go with the team that really wanted it and would back it forever,\u201d he said. \nEven though we know the final outcome, the story continues to be a nail-biter as the New Horizons mission is canceled twice more. The two authors, with their insider\u2019s perspective, capture the arduous process with great narrative verve. \nWe can\u2019t even rest once the spacecraft is launched in 2006, only just making the deadline. Though New Horizons mainly hibernated during its 91/2 -year voyage, the Johns Hopkins team back on Earth needed to make sure that it arrived \u201cno more than nine minutes off target . . . equivalent to a cross-country airline flight from Los Angeles to New York landing within four milliseconds of its planned time,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. The observations to be made during the flyby, some 500 in all, had to be choreographed within the computer software as precisely as a Bolshoi ballet. \nIt was soon after the launch that Pluto lost its status as a full planet, as enough evidence had been gathered to conclude that it was better described as one of the larger members of the Kuiper belt, a collection of \u201cplanetismals\u201d left over from our solar system\u2019s formation. But that hardly diminished the need to examine Pluto. As New Horizons journeyed through deep space, astronomers found out that its three known moons were accompanied by two more.\nAnd then there was the mission\u2019s final hiccup: A mere three days out from Pluto, the scientists lost all communication with the spacecraft due to a computer overload. Flyby commands had to be completely reloaded, which they accomplished by working round-the-clock, with only hours to spare before the seven onboard instruments went to work. \nOn July 14, 2015, New Horizons came with Recent flybys revealed a charming and unexpected feature\u2014a bright white region shaped like a heart. ",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Chasing New Horizons\u2019 and \u2018Discovering Pluto\u2019 Reviews: Big Lessons From a Tiny World (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "365",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chasing-new-horizons-and-discovering-pluto-reviews-big-lessons-from-a-tiny-world-1526073840?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=95",
        "text": "One particular photo fired up the public\u2019s imagination during the spacecraft\u2019s flyby in July 2015. The image captured a bright white region on Pluto\u2019s surface in the shape of a heart, \u201ccreating an emotional attachment for this small, previously indistinct planet at the edge of our planetary system,\u201d write\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Grinspoon\n\n\n\n in their riveting account \u201cChasing New Horizons.\u201d Many are still unaware of the 2,500 people that it took to snap that picture\u2014as well as the many years of waiting.\nMr. Stern, the project leader for New Horizons, got it all started in 1989. Long dismayed that the planet had been bumped off the itinerary of the Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, he organized a special session at a scientific conference that brought all the key Plutophiles together and, even though still a graduate student, wangled a meeting with NASA\u2019s director of solar-system exploration to seek funding for a mission study. The one planet left unexplored had become \u201ca symbol, an open challenge, and a dare,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\n\nChasing New Horizons\n\n\n\nBy Alan Stern & David Grinspoon Picador, 295 pages, $28 Discovering PlutoBy Dale P. Cruikshank & William Sheehan Arizona, 475 pages, $45\n\n\nTo Mr. Stern\u2019s surprise, the NASA director agreed to the study. But that was only the beginning of a wild ride of many stops and starts over the next decade. One proposal wanted to make the spacecraft bigger than first imagined; a competing plan, highly controversial, suggested a lightweight probe that would get to Pluto in half the time. Neither panned out: Other NASA projects were sucking up all the available money, and planetary scientists were getting diverted by other celestial baubles, such as Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, with its promise of an underground ocean. In Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon\u2019s telling, NASA comes across as an agency that shifts its priorities with the political winds. Even after NASA did renew its interest in Pluto, all proposals were abruptly canceled in 2000 as cost estimates rose through the roof. \n\n\nThe \u201cPluto Underground,\u201d as the planet\u2019s scientific champions came to be known, campaigned for a resurrection. Both NASA and Congress were bombarded by thousands of letters. A high-school student in Pennsylvania even set up a Save-the-Pluto-mission website that garnered national media attention. They all had good reason to push: There was an irreversible deadline; the available launch window extended only to 2006. After that, Pluto\u2019s axial tilt would cause more and more of its surface to be in shadow, making a worthwhile flyby unfeasible for decades to come. \nIn answer to the public outcry, NASA requested proposals for a new, more streamlined mission that had to be built for under a billion dollars. At this point, \u201cChasing New Horizons\u201d turns into a fascinating David versus Goliath story, with Caltech\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u2014the more experienced planetary probe maker with political weight\u2014pitted against a relative newcomer, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Mr. Stern went with the riskier choice, and won. \u201cI knew that I had to go with the team that really wanted it and would back it forever,\u201d he said. \nEven though we know the final outcome, the story continues to be a nail-biter as the New Horizons mission is canceled twice more. The two authors, with their insider\u2019s perspective, capture the arduous process with great narrative verve. \nWe can\u2019t even rest once the spacecraft is launched in 2006, only just making the deadline. Though New Horizons mainly hibernated during its 91/2 -year voyage, the Johns Hopkins team back on Earth needed to make sure that it arrived \u201cno more than nine minutes off target . . . equivalent to a cross-country airline flight from Los Angeles to New York landing within four milliseconds of its planned time,\u201d write Messrs. Stern and Grinspoon. The observations to be made during the flyby, some 500 in all, had to be choreographed within the computer software as precisely as a Bolshoi ballet. \nIt was soon after the launch that Pluto lost its status as a full planet, as enough evidence had been gathered to conclude that it was better described as one of the larger members of the Kuiper belt, a collection of \u201cplanetismals\u201d left over from our solar system\u2019s formation. But that hardly diminished the need to examine Pluto. As New Horizons journeyed through deep space, astronomers found out that its three known moons were accompanied by two more.\nAnd then there was the mission\u2019s final hiccup: A mere three days out from Pluto, the scientists lost all communication with the spacecraft due to a computer overload. Flyby commands had to be completely reloaded, which they accomplished by working round-the-clock, with only hours to spare before the seven onboard instruments went to work. \nOn July 14, 2015, New Horizons came Recent flybys revealed a charming and unexpected feature\u2014a bright white region shaped like a heart. ",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Operation Moonglow\u2019 Review: The Rockets\u2019 Red Scare (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "366",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/operation-moonglow-review-the-rockets-red-scare-11605827980?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=10",
        "text": "More than six decades later, the saga of Sputnik 1 seems as quaint as those flickery old movies of the Wright brothers\u2019 first flight over the dunes at Kitty Hawk, N.C. But at the time, the first Soviet space triumph nearly convulsed American politics as an ebullient\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikita Khrushchev\n\n\n\n proclaimed the superiority of Soviet technology. The U.S. responded, of course. Hardly a dozen years later, Apollo astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and barely two decades after that the Soviet Union imploded.\nNow, in \u201cOperation Moonglow,\u201d Teasel Muir-Harmony retells the story from a narrow, new perspective\u2014how the U.S. used space exploration as a propaganda weapon in the Cold War competition for international prestige and influence. The result is a conscientiously researched account that may be a long haul for general readers. After all, it\u2019s no revelation that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Kennedy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henry Kissinger,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Foster Dulles\n\n\n\n and his brother Allen (head of the CIA) practiced diplomatic lunacy with great flair.\nThe author tracks the early space race like a sports event or a checkers game: First Sputnik 1, then Sputnik 2 (which carried the doomed mutt Laika in her overheating capsule). America\u2019s first Vanguard rocket exploded on the pad. \u201cOh, What a Flopnik!\u201d headlined a British paper. Finally, the U.S. got the Explorer 1 satellite off the ground in early 1958 and fired Ham the chimp down range in January 1961. But in April, Soviet cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first human to orbit the Earth\u2014a world-wide sensation. After the bad press of the Bay of Pigs that spring, and goaded by Johnson and his scientific advisers, Kennedy committed to the multi-billion-dollar Project Apollo to beat theRussians to the moon by 1970.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nOperation MoonglowBy Teasel Muir-Harmony\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBasic, 367 pages, $32\n\n\nThat was years away. In May 1961, America managed to swap\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard\n\n\n\n in for Ham for a 15-minute suborbital flight, and then, in February 1962,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n became a national hero when his Friendship 7 spacecraft circled the Earth three times and splashed down safely in the Atlantic.\n\n\nBeginning with Shepard\u2019s flight, Ms. Muir-Harmony writes, the U.S. embarked on an exhaustive mission to win the world\u2019s hearts and minds by promoting\u2014scolds would say exploiting\u2014the astronauts and their spacecraft as symbols not only of America\u2019s technological superiority but also its commitment to sharing its democratic values with \u201call mankind.\u201d Much of this amounted to what the historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel J. Boorstin\n\n\n\n defined at the time in other contexts as \u201cpseudo-events\u201d\u2014press conferences and other staged episodes designed to generate publicity and goodwill.\nAfter each successful Mercury and Gemini space exploit, the all-American astronauts, often accompanied by their perfect wives, went on tour, especially to uncommitted \u201cThird World\u201d countries. Huge crowds turned out in Europe, too. The Voice of America broadcast the missions live around the world; telecasts, movies, exhibits, brochures and lectures filled out the campaign. Most of this was organized by the lavishly funded U.S. Information Agency, headed by the chain-smoking news wizard\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edward R. Murrow.\n\n\n\n The Russians, too, sent their space heroes on the publicity-campaign trail, but in contrast to the Americans, kept their spacecraft mostly under wraps and revealed no technical secrets.\nTo tell her story, Ms. Muir-Harmony, a curator at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum, has mined the information agency\u2019s archives so thoroughly that she buries the reader in repetitious detail. Her book is stuffed with crowd estimates at exhibits, poll results from obscure outposts like Madagascar, and chirpy dispatches from far-flung U.S.I.A. staffers. Still, she has to observe, \u201cit is worth noting that the extent to which the idea of US progress was etched upon the world\u2019s consciousness is impossible to measure.\u201d\nThe Cold War space race eventually energized American politicians.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower\n\n\n\n thought space exploration had no military value. Sen. John Kennedy initially dismissed it as a waste of money. But Lyndon Johnson, first as Senate majority leader, then as Kennedy\u2019s vice president and successor, pushed the Apollo program over the goal line. In the end it cost nearly $300 billion in today\u2019s money\u201418 times more than building the Panama Canal, five times more than the Manhattan Project that created the atom bomb, more than Eisenhower\u2019s epic interstate highway system.\nRichard Nixon was the chief promoter and beneficiary of the post-moon-landing PR blitz k After each successful space exploit, the all-American astronauts went on tour, especially to uncommitted \u2018Third World\u2019 countries. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Operation Moonglow\u2019 Review: The Rockets\u2019 Red Scare (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "367",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/operation-moonglow-review-the-rockets-red-scare-11605827980?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=38",
        "text": "More than six decades later, the saga of Sputnik 1 seems as quaint as those flickery old movies of the Wright brothers\u2019 first flight over the dunes at Kitty Hawk, N.C. But at the time, the first Soviet space triumph nearly convulsed American politics as an ebullient\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikita Khrushchev\n\n\n\n proclaimed the superiority of Soviet technology. The U.S. responded, of course. Hardly a dozen years later, Apollo astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and barely two decades after that the Soviet Union imploded.\nNow, in \u201cOperation Moonglow,\u201d Teasel Muir-Harmony retells the story from a narrow, new perspective\u2014how the U.S. used space exploration as a propaganda weapon in the Cold War competition for international prestige and influence. The result is a conscientiously researched account that may be a long haul for general readers. After all, it\u2019s no revelation that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Kennedy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henry Kissinger,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Foster Dulles\n\n\n\n and his brother Allen (head of the CIA) practiced diplomatic lunacy with great flair.\nThe author tracks the early space race like a sports event or a checkers game: First Sputnik 1, then Sputnik 2 (which carried the doomed mutt Laika in her overheating capsule). America\u2019s first Vanguard rocket exploded on the pad. \u201cOh, What a Flopnik!\u201d headlined a British paper. Finally, the U.S. got the Explorer 1 satellite off the ground in early 1958 and fired Ham the chimp down range in January 1961. But in April, Soviet cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first human to orbit the Earth\u2014a world-wide sensation. After the bad press of the Bay of Pigs that spring, and goaded by Johnson and his scientific advisers, Kennedy committed to the multi-billion-dollar Project Apollo to beat theRussians to the moon by 1970.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nOperation MoonglowBy Teasel Muir-Harmony\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBasic, 367 pages, $32\n\n\nThat was years away. In May 1961, America managed to swap\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard\n\n\n\n in for Ham for a 15-minute suborbital flight, and then, in February 1962,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n became a national hero when his Friendship 7 spacecraft circled the Earth three times and splashed down safely in the Atlantic.\n\n\nBeginning with Shepard\u2019s flight, Ms. Muir-Harmony writes, the U.S. embarked on an exhaustive mission to win the world\u2019s hearts and minds by promoting\u2014scolds would say exploiting\u2014the astronauts and their spacecraft as symbols not only of America\u2019s technological superiority but also its commitment to sharing its democratic values with \u201call mankind.\u201d Much of this amounted to what the historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel J. Boorstin\n\n\n\n defined at the time in other contexts as \u201cpseudo-events\u201d\u2014press conferences and other staged episodes designed to generate publicity and goodwill.\nAfter each successful Mercury and Gemini space exploit, the all-American astronauts, often accompanied by their perfect wives, went on tour, especially to uncommitted \u201cThird World\u201d countries. Huge crowds turned out in Europe, too. The Voice of America broadcast the missions live around the world; telecasts, movies, exhibits, brochures and lectures filled out the campaign. Most of this was organized by the lavishly funded U.S. Information Agency, headed by the chain-smoking news wizard\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edward R. Murrow.\n\n\n\n The Russians, too, sent their space heroes on the publicity-campaign trail, but in contrast to the Americans, kept their spacecraft mostly under wraps and revealed no technical secrets.\nTo tell her story, Ms. Muir-Harmony, a curator at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum, has mined the information agency\u2019s archives so thoroughly that she buries the reader in repetitious detail. Her book is stuffed with crowd estimates at exhibits, poll results from obscure outposts like Madagascar, and chirpy dispatches from far-flung U.S.I.A. staffers. Still, she has to observe, \u201cit is worth noting that the extent to which the idea of US progress was etched upon the world\u2019s consciousness is impossible to measure.\u201d\nThe Cold War space race eventually energized American politicians.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower\n\n\n\n thought space exploration had no military value. Sen. John Kennedy initially dismissed it as a waste of money. But Lyndon Johnson, first as Senate majority leader, then as Kennedy\u2019s vice president and successor, pushed the Apollo program over the goal line. In the end it cost nearly $300 billion in today\u2019s money\u201418 times more than building the Panama Canal, five times more than the Manhattan Project that created the atom bomb, more than Eisenhower\u2019s epic interstate highway system.\nRichard Nixon was the chief promoter and beneficiary of the post-moon-landing PR blitz k After each successful space exploit, the all-American astronauts went on tour, especially to uncommitted \u2018Third World\u2019 countries. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Operation Moonglow\u2019 Review: The Rockets\u2019 Red Scare (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "368",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/operation-moonglow-review-the-rockets-red-scare-11605827980?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=43",
        "text": "More than six decades later, the saga of Sputnik 1 seems as quaint as those flickery old movies of the Wright brothers\u2019 first flight over the dunes at Kitty Hawk, N.C. But at the time, the first Soviet space triumph nearly convulsed American politics as an ebullient\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikita Khrushchev\n\n\n\n proclaimed the superiority of Soviet technology. The U.S. responded, of course. Hardly a dozen years later, Apollo astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, and barely two decades after that the Soviet Union imploded.\nNow, in \u201cOperation Moonglow,\u201d Teasel Muir-Harmony retells the story from a narrow, new perspective\u2014how the U.S. used space exploration as a propaganda weapon in the Cold War competition for international prestige and influence. The result is a conscientiously researched account that may be a long haul for general readers. After all, it\u2019s no revelation that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Kennedy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henry Kissinger,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Foster Dulles\n\n\n\n and his brother Allen (head of the CIA) practiced diplomatic lunacy with great flair.\n\n\n\n\nThe author tracks the early space race like a sports event or a checkers game: First Sputnik 1, then Sputnik 2 (which carried the doomed mutt Laika in her overheating capsule). America\u2019s first Vanguard rocket exploded on the pad. \u201cOh, What a Flopnik!\u201d headlined a British paper. Finally, the U.S. got the Explorer 1 satellite off the ground in early 1958 and fired Ham the chimp down range in January 1961. But in April, Soviet cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first human to orbit the Earth\u2014a world-wide sensation. After the bad press of the Bay of Pigs that spring, and goaded by Johnson and his scientific advisers, Kennedy committed to the multi-billion-dollar Project Apollo to beat theRussians to the moon by 1970.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nOperation MoonglowBy Teasel Muir-Harmony\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBasic, 367 pages, $32\n\n\nThat was years away. In May 1961, America managed to swap\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard\n\n\n\n in for Ham for a 15-minute suborbital flight, and then, in February 1962,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n became a national hero when his Friendship 7 spacecraft circled the Earth three times and splashed down safely in the Atlantic.\n\n\nBeginning with Shepard\u2019s flight, Ms. Muir-Harmony writes, the U.S. embarked on an exhaustive mission to win the world\u2019s hearts and minds by promoting\u2014scolds would say exploiting\u2014the astronauts and their spacecraft as symbols not only of America\u2019s technological superiority but also its commitment to sharing its democratic values with \u201call mankind.\u201d Much of this amounted to what the historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel J. Boorstin\n\n\n\n defined at the time in other contexts as \u201cpseudo-events\u201d\u2014press conferences and other staged episodes designed to generate publicity and goodwill.\nAfter each successful Mercury and Gemini space exploit, the all-American astronauts, often accompanied by their perfect wives, went on tour, especially to uncommitted \u201cThird World\u201d countries. Huge crowds turned out in Europe, too. The Voice of America broadcast the missions live around the world; telecasts, movies, exhibits, brochures and lectures filled out the campaign. Most of this was organized by the lavishly funded U.S. Information Agency, headed by the chain-smoking news wizard\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edward R. Murrow.\n\n\n\n The Russians, too, sent their space heroes on the publicity-campaign trail, but in contrast to the Americans, kept their spacecraft mostly under wraps and revealed no technical secrets.\nTo tell her story, Ms. Muir-Harmony, a curator at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum, has mined the information agency\u2019s archives so thoroughly that she buries the reader in repetitious detail. Her book is stuffed with crowd estimates at exhibits, poll results from obscure outposts like Madagascar, and chirpy dispatches from far-flung U.S.I.A. staffers. Still, she has to observe, \u201cit is worth noting that the extent to which the idea of US progress was etched upon the world\u2019s consciousness is impossible to measure.\u201d\nThe Cold War space race eventually energized American politicians.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower\n\n\n\n thought space exploration had no military value. Sen. John Kennedy initially dismissed it as a waste of money. But Lyndon Johnson, first as Senate majority leader, then as Kennedy\u2019s vice president and successor, pushed the Apollo program over the goal line. In the end it cost nearly $300 billion in today\u2019s money\u201418 times more than building the Panama Canal, five times more than the Manhattan Project that created the atom bomb, more than Eisenhower\u2019s epic interstate highway system.\nRichard Nixon was the chief promoter and beneficiary of the post-moon-landing PR bli After each successful space exploit, the all-American astronauts went on tour, especially to uncommitted \u2018Third World\u2019 countries. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: \u2018Into the Light\u2019 Review (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "369",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-into-the-light-review-11614351987?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=27",
        "text": "In David Weber\u2019s \u201cOut of the Dark\u201d (2010), there were two things that the invading Shongairi hadn\u2019t bargained for. One was the speed of human technological development. The Shongairi were expecting steam power and muskets, not fighter jets and tanks. Still, their weapons could deal with those. What they didn\u2019t know was that there was another intelligent species on Earth besides humans: vampires. Once those bloodsuckers joined the fight, the invaders were doomed.\nBut the Shongairi were only a subordinate race, acting on the orders of the thousand-world Galactic Hegemony, which is still bent on neutralizing humanity. Mr. Weber\u2019s sequel, \u201cInto the Light\u201d (Tor, 511 pages, $28.99), written with Chris Kennedy, features a familiar survivalist scenario as small communities try to stay alive after the Shongairi\u2019s destruction of Earth\u2019s cities and infrastructure. In their quest to rebuild, the survivors re-engineer captured equipment, allowing them to use contra-gravity, low-energy nuclear reactors and construction robots.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRestoration is one thing, revenge another. Looking to take the fight to the Hegemony, a group of humans and vampires ventures out into the stars to look for allies. They travel in a spacecraft equipped with railguns and\u2014a tribute to sci-fi\u2019s past\u2014\u201cHeinlein suits,\u201d which make individual infantry soldiers an army on their own.\n\n\nMessrs. Weber and Kennedy are the modern masters of military sci-fi, so much so that if we are ever invaded from space, we can hope that they\u2019ll be commissioned to plan the fightback. They\u2019re heavy on tech and inventive with the fantasy, and they obviously intend to continue the story. To quote the last lines of Robert Heinlein\u2019s own 1951 invasion story \u201cThe Puppet Masters\u201d: \u201cThe free men are coming to kill you!\u201d Sci-fi has moved on a lot since then, even if the underlying pattern stays the same.\nQuantum computing, we\u2019re told, will be the next big techno-shock, and the country that gets the lead on it will become the world-hegemon. But what if nefarious actors master the technology first? They\u2019ll be able to take over networks, overload grids, hold countries to ransom and access all secrets. At the start of John Marrs\u2019s \u201cThe Minders\u201d (Berkley, 402 pages, $17), it\u2019s happened already. A group calling itself the \u201cCollective,\u201d acting in a spirit of \u201cethical hacktivism,\u201d has sabotaged the U.K.\u2019s driverless car network, causing thousands of deaths, and the government knows that\u2019s just the start.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHow to shield the nation\u2019s vital data? Take everything offline and send the data chips around the country in a fleet of driverless trucks? That\u2019s failed already. So the plan is to code all the nation\u2019s data in DNA and implant it in human brains. That will make the U.K. completely unhackable\u2014or so the experts tell the prime minister.\nThe trouble is that the only people whose brains are suited for this are those with a rare form of synaesthesia, so you have a very restricted pool of candidates. Worse, the five individuals who fit the requirements best are all people who, in any normal testing program, would flunk the first interview.\nEach of these \u201cminders\u201d will have access to the data they\u2019re storing. Charlie, for one, is a conspiracy theorist from way back, and now he knows the real facts about various conspiracies. Sin\u00e9ad, who is trying to escape from a controlling husband, discovers the truth about a trauma in her past and why there was a cover-up. One of the five minders cheated on the qualifying test, so there\u2019s a rogue among them, perhaps even a traitor.\nMr. Marrs, by splitting the narration between five characters, creates a string of mysteries, revelations and cliffhangers. If \u201cThe Minders\u201d has a unifying theme, it\u2019s that thinking you can rely on super-tech is dangerous. One feels sorry for the prime minister. Maybe he should have told his advisers that it was time to go back to pencil and paper.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nP. Dj\u00e8l\u00ed Clark\u2019s \u201cRing Shout\u201d (Tor, 185 pages, $19.99) is set in Macon, Ga., in 1922, and the Ku Klux Klan is marching. But underneath the robes and the hoods are things that aren\u2019t human: six eyes, flesh that opens scores of little mouths, retractile claws. For sustenance, the creatures can\u2019t resist dog meat, which is what the book\u2019s heroines Maryse, Sadie and Chef bait their monster-traps with.\nAre these beings aliens? Are they the result of an infection that mutates on hatred? Maybe they\u2019re the product of some home-grown conspiracy, signaled by the re-release of the 1915 film \u201cThe Birth of a Nation,\u201d which powered the whole \u201cLost Cause\u201d vision of the Old South.\nIt\u2019s worse than all that, as Maryse slowly works out. She gets a great deal of assistance from the hidden forms of resistance developed in the centuries of slavery, including the Shouts, triumphal religious rituals in which participants move in a circle. Maryse also wields a sword imbued with ancestral power. Trouble is, the devils have their own ways of subversion.\nThe novel flirts with allegories of hatred and corruption, just as it stirs echoes of much simpler sci-fi plotting. It\u2019s invigorated by quotations from forgotten voices of the past, often in Gullah, recorded by scholars. One thing is sure: \u201cRing Shout\u201d isn\u2019t really about 1922 in Georgia. It\u2019s looking forward to the here and now. Plus \u2018The Minders\u2019 and \u2018Ring Shout.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: Andy Weir\u2019s \u2018Project Hail Mary\u2019 Review (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "370",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-andy-weirs-project-hail-mary-review-11621607795?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=8",
        "text": "At least Mark knew who and where he was. Mr. Weir\u2019s latest novel, \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d (Ballantine, 476 pages, $28.99), stars Ryland Grace, a junior high-school science teacher who, upon waking up from a long sleep, knows only that he\u2019s in some kind of medical ward, next to two mummified corpses and a computer which won\u2019t obey him until he\u2019s remembered his name.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRyland slowly pieces together his identity and whereabouts. He measures the rate at which test tubes fall to the ground, and deduces that he\u2019s in a spacecraft. Studying the solar disc he can see through the window, he realizes that it\u2019s not the sun but Tau Ceti, a different star altogether. Mental exercise reveals that he\u2019s the sole survivor on a rescue mission to save Earth from extinction.\nSome kind of life-form\u2014an \u201cAstrophage\u201d\u2014was found to be stealing energy from the sun, and Ryland\u2019s theories about alien life made him, the science teacher, the best authority anyone had. Mr. Weir explores the question of how an Astrophage might function in great detail. As a star-eater an Astrophage is disastrous, but its capacity to store prodigious amounts of energy makes it a savior as well. Other nearby stars besides the sun have been dimming, too, but not Tau Ceti. So Ryland\u2019s been sent to find out what protects it.\n\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s a solution to the Astrophage problem,\u201d Ryland confidently tells himself once he fully remembers his mission. But Earth is not the only planet to send a visitor to Tau Ceti, and one alien researcher is there already. Now Ryland is trying to communicate with a creature made of oxidized minerals whose blood is liquid mercury. How in the world can two such beings connect at all?\nThrough science, because\u2014a venerable sci-fi principle\u2014scientific knowledge is universal, not culturally relative as the humanities professors love to say. Soon Ryland and his new friend \u201cRocky\u201d have numbers, they have \u201cyes\u201d and \u201cno,\u201d and then it\u2019s point and gesture to get nouns and verbs. After which the real action starts: finding out why Tau Ceti is immune to Astrophages, so Ryland and Rocky can save their respective planets.\nIt\u2019s one problem after another, and just like \u201cThe Martian,\u201d there\u2019s no cheating allowed. But Mr. Weir\u2019s confidence in science never falters. For every problem, there\u2019s a solution, and even the Astrophages, handled properly, are a blessing not a threat. That\u2019s the basic faith of sci-fi. The novel ends with a great punchline, just to make the point.\n\n\nWhat to Read This Week\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n The columnist Washington feared; the age of artificial intelligence; an all-black musical that transfixed Broadway; interstellar adventure from the author of \u2018The Martian\u2019 and more.\n\n\nH.G. Wells\u2019s \u201cThe Island of Dr. Moreau,\u201d published in 1896, features a mad scientist who tries to turn beasts into humans by \u201cvivisection,\u201d a process which maybe seemed possible at the time. Why? Just to see if it works, as it does, up to the point where Moreau\u2019s creations turn on him. \nIn our modern, commercial world, what would you do with a group of gene-engineered human-animal hybrids? Daryl Gregory\u2019s \u201cThe Album of Dr. Moreau\u201d (Tor, 166 pages, $14.99) provides the obvious answer: You\u2019d make them into a boy band, as \u201cDr. M\u201d has done with the WyldBoyZ. Just like the Spice Girls, they have to have distinct stage personalities. The cute one is Bobby, who has ocelot genes. The sexy one is Devin, part bonobo. The scary one is Matt the giant bat and the shy one is Tim the pangolin. Then there\u2019s Tusk the elephant\u2014he adds stage presence, lots of it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis works fine, until someone murders Dr. M in the band\u2019s Las Vegas hotel while they\u2019re on tour, at which point Mr. Gregory\u2019s story turns into a locked-room mystery. Who could have done it? Both Bobby and Tim have the claws to do the job, and as for Matt, he can fly away from any crime scene.\nLooking at motive, Dr. M isn\u2019t the creatures\u2019 creator, just their manager. So already there are issues of copyright, royalties and ownership, and not just ownership of the songs. Can hybrids be citizens? Are they mere animal imports? When Dr. M said, \u201cI own all of you,\u201d he didn\u2019t just mean the music.\nAll very difficult for Las Vegas police detective Lucia Delgado, especially as her daughter is a huge fan of the group. In any case, the background mystery is where these hybrids come from. Before Dr. M took them over, they were found on a lifeboat in the ocean (which winks at the end of Wells\u2019s story). Are they the product of a secret government experiment? Some of the clues are in their lyrics, and some are in their inner natures.\n\u201cThe Album of Dr. Moreau\u201d is a great riff not just on Wells but also Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s \u201cMurders in the Rue Morgue\u201d (1841). One day this kind of theme may turn serious, but, fortunately, we aren\u2019t there just yet. Plus Daryl Gregory\u2019s \u2018The Album of Dr. Moreau.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018When the Earth Had Two Moons\u2019 Review: A Smashing Solar System (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "371",
        "date": "2020-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-earth-had-two-moons-review-a-smashing-solar-system-11578067444?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=14",
        "text": "A thousand years after that eventful day, the glowing ring of superheated rocks in orbit above had coagulated, and the Earth finally had the moon. Or maybe, according to a scientific hypothesis pioneered in part by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Asphaug,\n\n\n\n a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, it had two moons. Mr. Asphaug explains that notion in \u201cWhen the Earth Had Two Moons,\u201d but, as he shows, to understand even one moon, one has to understand how the whole solar system came to be assembled. The story swings from the birth of the universe, through the history of astronomy, to the modern understanding of the piece-by-piece building of the planets. There are delightful sidetracks into feasting monks, desert meditations and how a technobillionaire could (and should) launch an exploration of Saturn\u2019s hydrocarbon-rich moon Titan.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA photographic mosaic of the crater-pocked far side of the moon, taken 2009-11 by NASA\u2019s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\n\nWhen the Earth Had Two MoonsBy Erik Asphaug\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCustom House, 356 pages, $28.99\n\n\nEarly on, Mr. Asphaug poses a simple question that, even to a person like me who has been thinking and studying planets for 30 years, should give pause. Why are all of the planets so different? Mercury is tiny with a huge iron core. Venus and Earth are similar in size, but Venus is a dead, dry planet with an atmosphere dense enough to crush spacecraft. Mars is small and lopsided. Jupiter is massive, Saturn has rings, Uranus is oddly tilted on its side and Neptune is missing the types of moons that all of the other giants have. Why? The interstellar cloud of gas and ice and dust that eventually formed the sun and planets probably varied smoothly from one region to the next, so why would the planets that came out of it vary so wildly?\nMr. Asphaug has a plausible solution: catastrophic collisions. Planets are assembled bit by bit, with the largest pieces coagulating together last. The collision that led to the moon\u2014definitely catastrophic\u2014was the last major part of the coagulation of the Earth. If the Mars-sized body that hit the Earth had hit it slightly differently\u2014more head on or at a higher speed, for example\u2014we probably wouldn\u2019t have the moon. With the tilt of the Earth no longer stabilized by the moon, we could have the types of extreme climate variations that we see on Mars, where glaciers periodically cover the equator. Without the moon there would be no tides, which\u2014maybe?\u2014were crucial in the evolution of life. If that singular day 4.5 billion years ago had never happened, the Earth would be a very different planet. \n\n\nThe other planets have their own one-off stories. Mercury probably had a near-catastrophic impact that tore away most of its rocky exterior; Mars was nearly destroyed by an impact that left it with a massive northern basin that could have once been filled with a temperate ocean; Saturn\u2019s rings and small moons could be the remnants of multiple colliding moons; Uranus was perhaps bashed by something huge that knocked it on its side; and Neptune\u2019s moon Triton was captured from the outer solar system and disrupted or ate all of Neptune\u2019s original moons as it came in. Even the nonplanets get in on the act. The distinctive \u201cheart\u201d on the face of Pluto is a giant basin formed by a massive impact that then slowly filled with glaciers made out of frozen nitrogen gas. \nMr. Asphaug\u2019s account sometimes requires a bit of background knowledge, but his writing is peppered with playful images (one possible collision was like \u201cmashing your fist into a cherry pie\u201d). He is at his most charming when he is not just telling how scientists currently think about the chaotic formation of the solar system but relaying his own part in the story, as with the idea of that second moon. He perfectly captures the way that so many scientific insights occur: while sitting listening to something else and having your mind wander. Mr. Asphaug tells the story of daydreaming a second moon into existence during a talk on the peculiarly thick crust on the far side of the moon. Daydreaming turns to speculative computer simulation, which excitedly turns into detailed simulation, which satisfyingly turns into substantial hypothesis: Perhaps a small second moon was created at the same time as our moon, and that small moon eventually gently collided with the main one, making, essentially a mound on the far side. \nIs the story true? Possibly. Like any good hypothesis, it provides an explanation for something that was previously unexplainable. Just as important, it makes predictions that can be tested. Future lunar geologists and seismologists could eventually find traces of the little moon that once was.\nMr. Asphaug\u2019s thesis that random catastrophic impacts explain the astounding diversity of our planetary system is humbling to a planetary astronomer like me. We are always trying to understand why the planets and other bodi Billions of years ago, an object the size of Mars smashed into the Earth. The resulting debris jetted into orbit, leaving us with one moon\u2014and maybe two. ",
        "author": "Mike Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018When the Earth Had Two Moons\u2019 Review: A Smashing Solar System (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "372",
        "date": "2020-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-earth-had-two-moons-review-a-smashing-solar-system-11578067444?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=61",
        "text": "A thousand years after that eventful day, the glowing ring of superheated rocks in orbit above had coagulated, and the Earth finally had the moon. Or maybe, according to a scientific hypothesis pioneered in part by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Asphaug,\n\n\n\n a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, it had two moons. Mr. Asphaug explains that notion in \u201cWhen the Earth Had Two Moons,\u201d but, as he shows, to understand even one moon, one has to understand how the whole solar system came to be assembled. The story swings from the birth of the universe, through the history of astronomy, to the modern understanding of the piece-by-piece building of the planets. There are delightful sidetracks into feasting monks, desert meditations and how a technobillionaire could (and should) launch an exploration of Saturn\u2019s hydrocarbon-rich moon Titan.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA photographic mosaic of the crater-pocked far side of the moon, taken 2009-11 by NASA\u2019s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\n\nWhen the Earth Had Two MoonsBy Erik Asphaug\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCustom House, 356 pages, $28.99\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEarly on, Mr. Asphaug poses a simple question that, even to a person like me who has been thinking and studying planets for 30 years, should give pause. Why are all of the planets so different? Mercury is tiny with a huge iron core. Venus and Earth are similar in size, but Venus is a dead, dry planet with an atmosphere dense enough to crush spacecraft. Mars is small and lopsided. Jupiter is massive, Saturn has rings, Uranus is oddly tilted on its side and Neptune is missing the types of moons that all of the other giants have. Why? The interstellar cloud of gas and ice and dust that eventually formed the sun and planets probably varied smoothly from one region to the next, so why would the planets that came out of it vary so wildly?\nMr. Asphaug has a plausible solution: catastrophic collisions. Planets are assembled bit by bit, with the largest pieces coagulating together last. The collision that led to the moon\u2014definitely catastrophic\u2014was the last major part of the coagulation of the Earth. If the Mars-sized body that hit the Earth had hit it slightly differently\u2014more head on or at a higher speed, for example\u2014we probably wouldn\u2019t have the moon. With the tilt of the Earth no longer stabilized by the moon, we could have the types of extreme climate variations that we see on Mars, where glaciers periodically cover the equator. Without the moon there would be no tides, which\u2014maybe?\u2014were crucial in the evolution of life. If that singular day 4.5 billion years ago had never happened, the Earth would be a very different planet. \n\n\nThe other planets have their own one-off stories. Mercury probably had a near-catastrophic impact that tore away most of its rocky exterior; Mars was nearly destroyed by an impact that left it with a massive northern basin that could have once been filled with a temperate ocean; Saturn\u2019s rings and small moons could be the remnants of multiple colliding moons; Uranus was perhaps bashed by something huge that knocked it on its side; and Neptune\u2019s moon Triton was captured from the outer solar system and disrupted or ate all of Neptune\u2019s original moons as it came in. Even the nonplanets get in on the act. The distinctive \u201cheart\u201d on the face of Pluto is a giant basin formed by a massive impact that then slowly filled with glaciers made out of frozen nitrogen gas. \nMr. Asphaug\u2019s account sometimes requires a bit of background knowledge, but his writing is peppered with playful images (one possible collision was like \u201cmashing your fist into a cherry pie\u201d). He is at his most charming when he is not just telling how scientists currently think about the chaotic formation of the solar system but relaying his own part in the story, as with the idea of that second moon. He perfectly captures the way that so many scientific insights occur: while sitting listening to something else and having your mind wander. Mr. Asphaug tells the story of daydreaming a second moon into existence during a talk on the peculiarly thick crust on the far side of the moon. Daydreaming turns to speculative computer simulation, which excitedly turns into detailed simulation, which satisfyingly turns into substantial hypothesis: Perhaps a small second moon was created at the same time as our moon, and that small moon eventually gently collided with the main one, making, essentially a mound on the far side. \nIs the story true? Possibly. Like any good hypothesis, it provides an explanation for something that was previously unexplainable. Just as important, it makes predictions that can be tested. Future lunar geologists and seismologists could eventually find traces of the little moon that once was.\nMr. Asphaug\u2019s thesis that random catastrophic impacts explain the astounding diversity of our planetary system is humbling to a planetary astronomer like me. We are always trying to understand why the planets and other Billions of years ago, an object the size of Mars smashed into the Earth. The resulting debris jetted into orbit, leaving us with one moon\u2014and maybe two. ",
        "author": "Mike Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Best: James Geary on Works of Inspired Wit (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "373",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/five-best-james-geary-on-works-of-inspired-wit-1542377096?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=17",
        "text": "1. Ijon Tichy, intrepid cosmonaut, is cruising in the constellation of Orion when a meteor pierces his ship\u2019s navigation mechanism. Tichy realizes he can fix it\u2014but not without help. Alas, Tichy is alone. He decides to sleep on the problem but is rudely awakened by a strangely familiar man. The stranger is, in fact, a future version of himself, for his ship has entered a \u201ctime loop\u201d caused by gravitational vortices. What ensues is a series of plot twists in which Tichy tries to persuade a succession of past and future selves to help him right the spacecraft\u2014a rash of hilarious slapstick brawls among various incarnations, a bravura consideration of the philosophical implications of time travel on personal identity, a witty send-up of Soviet central planning (it takes two people to fix the navigation mechanism, but only one spacesuit is provided). At one point, the many Tichys form a committee to decide what to do next, but because the time loop randomly adds and removes selves they never achieve a quorum.\nAphorisms By\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach\n\n\n\n (translated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Scrase\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wolfgang Mieder,\n\n\n\n 1994)\n2. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach published her first collection of aphorisms in 1880, when she was 50 years old. The wife of a minor aristocrat, she held unusually liberal views for her time and addressed everything from gender (\u201cAn intelligent woman has millions of born enemies . . . all the stupid men\u201d) to politics (\u201cNo nation sinks to greater depths than when its government is obliged to listen silently to moral sermons preached by obvious scoundrels\u201d). Her writing reveals a dry humor (\u201cNothing alienates two people who have nothing in common more than living together\u201d) and a wry realism about the vagaries of human relationships (\u201cBetter be struck rather than stroked by the hand we\u2019d just as soon not shake\u201d). \u201cAn aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought,\u201d she wrote. But an aphorism is also the first link. For those who relish the wit of the one-liner, Von Ebner-Eschenbach\u2019s aphorisms are a great place to start.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeorges Perec in 1969.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bridgeman Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nUnfamiliar Fishes By\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sarah Vowell\n\n\n\n (2011)\n\n3. A book on the Americanization of Hawaii by 19th-century New England missionaries not high on your reading list? It should be, because this unlikely subject becomes, in Sarah Vowell\u2019s history, a timely tale of the ambitions that made the U.S. a world power. The book covers the period roughly from 1820, when the first evangelical New Englanders arrived, to 1887, when a grandson of two of those missionaries forced a constitution on the archipelago that made the king, in Ms. Vowell\u2019s description, \u201cthe puppet of a white oligarchy.\u201d Ms. Vowell\u2019s narrative is laced with lacerating wit. \u201cA mission\u201d is, in her view, \u201ca bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong.\u201d Describing Paul\u2019s New Testament vision of a \u201cman of Macedonia\u201d imploring the future saint for help, she writes, \u201cFor Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses\u2014an all-purpose ingredient we\u2019ll stir into everything.\u201d\nA Void By\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Georges Perec\n\n\n\n (translated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gilbert Adair,\n\n\n\n 1995)\n4. This is a book in which a singularly common and important thing is missing, a thing without which it might look impractical to impart a story at all\u2014the letter \u201ce.\u201d This Gallic prodigy hands down 300 folios in which that symbol occurs on not a solitary occasion. As to plot: Anton Vowl is AWOL, a fact that draws his pals into an outlandish whodunit. For additional fun, this witty wordsmith riffs on a handful of \u201chighly familiar madrigals,\u201d among which is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Milton\u2019s\n\n\n\n rumination on his lack of sight (\u201cOn His Glaucoma\u201d) and our Bard\u2019s famous \u201cLiving, or not living\u201d soliloquy from that play about a young guy who spots his dad\u2019s ghost and winds up out of his mind. Savor this linguistic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Houdini\n\n\n\n accomplishing a dazzling, magical flight from chains of formal constraint of his own making.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Burley\u2019s\n\n\n\n Jive Edited by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Aiello\n\n\n\n (2009)\nTo Dig, or not to Dig, Jack, that\u2019s the Question; \nWhether \u2019tis the proper play to eat Onions\nAnd wipe the eyes, while laying down one\u2019s deepest Jive;\nOr to snap open one\u2019s fine switch, turn out the joint, \nMaking cats take low, by much head cutting.\n5. These are the opening lines of Hamlet\u2019s \u201cTo be or not to be\u201d soliloquy as rendered in jive by Chicago journalist Dan Burley. Burley often wrote his column, \u201cBack Door Stuff,\u201d in jive, an idiom invented by African-American jazz mus From the author, most recently, of \u2018Wit\u2019s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It.\u2019 ",
        "author": "James Geary"
    },
    {
        "title": "Book Review: When the Moon Was a Mystery (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "374",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-when-the-moon-was-a-mystery-11563548943?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=58",
        "text": "\u201cThe Book of the Moon: A Guide to Our Closest Neighbor\u201d (Abrams Image, 228 pages, $24.99), by space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, originates in the author\u2019s lifelong fascination with all things selenological. The small-format book is attractive, both inside and out, and its conversational inflection makes it suitable for pre-college readers. The narrative opens with the physical and orbital essentials of Earth\u2019s companion body, before moving on to its influence on earthly culture, manifest in megalithic artifacts, ancient calendars and literary works across the ages. Peripheral topics, such as werewolves, moonquakes and lunacy, are set off in boxes throughout the book.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe lunar surface as viewed during the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRELATED\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Emil Petrinic/NASA\n \n\n\n The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe moon\u2019s tidal influence on Earth is introduced via the ebb and flow of waters at the Falls of Lora on Scotland\u2019s western coast, where kayakers ply the cyclical currents. Ms. Aderin-Pocock adds that such moon-driven sloshing of the seas might have had profound consequences for our planet: Billions of years ago, when the moon was closer to Earth and the tides larger, vast littoral swaths were alternately inundated and exposed to the sun, possibly leading to a buildup of key compounds necessary for life. The Apollo program is covered briefly as the precursor to the next phase of cosmic exploration, in which, the author presumes, governmental entities will play a reduced role: \u201cI think that it is commerce that will take us the next step in our journey into space.\u201d Today\u2019s headlines would seem to concur.\nThe full moon\u2019s creamy brilliance is a consequence of our own physiology, as our eye compares it to the adjacent dark night sky; in truth, as any Apollo astronaut would affirm, the lunar surface is a muted canvas of gray-on-gray. Hence, my double-take when I saw the multi-hued cover of David Warmflash\u2019s \u201cMoon: An Illustrated History\u201d (Sterling, 211 pages, $24.95), which depicts a lunar disk that has been color-enhanced to reveal mineralogical differences across its surface. Mr. Warmflash, who trained as an astrobiologist, presents a chronological sequence of moon-themed illustrations\u2014paintings, photos, maps, even an astronomical stamp from Djibouti\u2014each with a facing page of explanatory text. These snippets of history range from the moon\u2019s creation in Earth\u2019s cataclysmic collision with an errant planetoid some 4.5 billion years ago to the future construction of lunar bases. In between are micro-essays on topics such as lunar geology, the moon\u2019s role in calendar-keeping, the emergence of scientific ideas about the moon\u2019s physical nature and space exploration.\n\n\nEspecially evocative is the portrait of famed aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, dwarfed by the gaping exhaust nozzles of the Saturn V rocket he helped pioneer. This symbolic harnessing of nature\u2019s power evokes Depression-era photographs of Hoover Dam, if not the vast machinery of the Krell in the movie \u201cForbidden Planet.\u201d Lest we inflate von Braun\u2019s role, Mr. Warmflash reminds us that it took the collective effort of some 400,000 people to get astronauts to the moon and back over the course of the entire Apollo program.\n\u201cThe Moon: A History for the Future\u201d (Economist/PublicAffairs, 333 pages, $28) is veteran science writer Oliver Morton\u2019s elegant tribute to the intimate relationship between humanity and Earth\u2019s natural satellite. The narrative is nonlinear, as Mr. Morton freely pursues relevant associations with the topic at hand. His prose is well-honed, if occasionally breathless, and adds a lyrical dimension to chapters on lunar properties and phenomena: \u201cTides . . . pull strongly and insistently enough for the supremely sensitive instruments of the seismologists to feel the Earth creaking gently at their touch.\u201d The Apollo 8 spacecraft crossing the moon\u2019s orbital path is \u201ca mouse scurrying over railway tracks in front of an express.\u201d Surprising stories found within include the CIA\u2019s 1965 assessment of Soviet missile-tracking radar by monitoring its faint echoes from the moon. \nAlthough his explanation of the tides is condensed to the point of opaqueness, Mr. Morton elaborates on historical beliefs about the physical nature of the lunar surface and whether the moon might be inhabited. The latter speculation was resolved in the negative as notions of lunar seas and a lunar atmosphere evaporated in the face of critical evidence in the 1800s. What remained was an airless, primeval world, devoid of life yet tantalizing to Victorian-era imagineers, such as the British amateur astronomer James Nasmyth. Frustrated by the muddled telescopic pictures of his day, he photographed his own exquisitely sculpted clay models of lunar features, illuminating them obliquely to dramatic effect.\nMr. Morton cites the reaction of Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, peering out the window at what would become the epochal image of Earth rising over the lunar horizon: \u201cOh my God! . . . Wow, that is pretty,\u201d then after a beat, \u201cHand me that roll of color [film], quick.\u201d On this anniversary of humanity\u2019s first steps on the moon, what better tribute to our venturing spirit than a family photograph. \n\u2014Mr. Hirshfeld, a professor of physics at UMass Dartmouth, is the author of \u201cStarlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe.\u201d The moon\u2019s own history, how it affects life on earth and how humans have envisioned it, from prehistory to the present day. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "Book Review: When the Moon Was a Mystery (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "375",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-when-the-moon-was-a-mystery-11563548943?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=69",
        "text": "\u201cThe Book of the Moon: A Guide to Our Closest Neighbor\u201d (Abrams Image, 228 pages, $24.99), by space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, originates in the author\u2019s lifelong fascination with all things selenological. The small-format book is attractive, both inside and out, and its conversational inflection makes it suitable for pre-college readers. The narrative opens with the physical and orbital essentials of Earth\u2019s companion body, before moving on to its influence on earthly culture, manifest in megalithic artifacts, ancient calendars and literary works across the ages. Peripheral topics, such as werewolves, moonquakes and lunacy, are set off in boxes throughout the book.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe lunar surface as viewed during the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRELATED\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Emil Petrinic/NASA\n \n\n\n The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe moon\u2019s tidal influence on Earth is introduced via the ebb and flow of waters at the Falls of Lora on Scotland\u2019s western coast, where kayakers ply the cyclical currents. Ms. Aderin-Pocock adds that such moon-driven sloshing of the seas might have had profound consequences for our planet: Billions of years ago, when the moon was closer to Earth and the tides larger, vast littoral swaths were alternately inundated and exposed to the sun, possibly leading to a buildup of key compounds necessary for life. The Apollo program is covered briefly as the precursor to the next phase of cosmic exploration, in which, the author presumes, governmental entities will play a reduced role: \u201cI think that it is commerce that will take us the next step in our journey into space.\u201d Today\u2019s headlines would seem to concur.\nThe full moon\u2019s creamy brilliance is a consequence of our own physiology, as our eye compares it to the adjacent dark night sky; in truth, as any Apollo astronaut would affirm, the lunar surface is a muted canvas of gray-on-gray. Hence, my double-take when I saw the multi-hued cover of David Warmflash\u2019s \u201cMoon: An Illustrated History\u201d (Sterling, 211 pages, $24.95), which depicts a lunar disk that has been color-enhanced to reveal mineralogical differences across its surface. Mr. Warmflash, who trained as an astrobiologist, presents a chronological sequence of moon-themed illustrations\u2014paintings, photos, maps, even an astronomical stamp from Djibouti\u2014each with a facing page of explanatory text. These snippets of history range from the moon\u2019s creation in Earth\u2019s cataclysmic collision with an errant planetoid some 4.5 billion years ago to the future construction of lunar bases. In between are micro-essays on topics such as lunar geology, the moon\u2019s role in calendar-keeping, the emergence of scientific ideas about the moon\u2019s physical nature and space exploration.\n\n\nEspecially evocative is the portrait of famed aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, dwarfed by the gaping exhaust nozzles of the Saturn V rocket he helped pioneer. This symbolic harnessing of nature\u2019s power evokes Depression-era photographs of Hoover Dam, if not the vast machinery of the Krell in the movie \u201cForbidden Planet.\u201d Lest we inflate von Braun\u2019s role, Mr. Warmflash reminds us that it took the collective effort of some 400,000 people to get astronauts to the moon and back over the course of the entire Apollo program.\n\u201cThe Moon: A History for the Future\u201d (Economist/PublicAffairs, 333 pages, $28) is veteran science writer Oliver Morton\u2019s elegant tribute to the intimate relationship between humanity and Earth\u2019s natural satellite. The narrative is nonlinear, as Mr. Morton freely pursues relevant associations with the topic at hand. His prose is well-honed, if occasionally breathless, and adds a lyrical dimension to chapters on lunar properties and phenomena: \u201cTides . . . pull strongly and insistently enough for the supremely sensitive instruments of the seismologists to feel the Earth creaking gently at their touch.\u201d The Apollo 8 spacecraft crossing the moon\u2019s orbital path is \u201ca mouse scurrying over railway tracks in front of an express.\u201d Surprising stories found within include the CIA\u2019s 1965 assessment of Soviet missile-tracking radar by monitoring its faint echoes from the moon. \nAlthough his explanation of the tides is condensed to the point of opaqueness, Mr. Morton elaborates on historical beliefs about the physical nature of the lunar surface and whether the moon might be inhabited. The latter speculation was resolved in the negative as notions of lunar seas and a lunar atmosphere evaporated in the face of critical evidence in the 1800s. What remained was an airless, primeval world, devoid of life yet tantalizing to Victorian-era imagineers, such as the British amateur astronomer James Nasmyth. Frustrated by the muddled telescopic pictures of his day, he photographed his own exquisitely sculpted clay models of lunar features, illuminating them obliquely to dramatic effect.\nM The moon\u2019s own history, how it affects life on earth and how humans have envisioned it, from prehistory to the present day. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Brief Answers to the Big Questions\u2019 and \u2018On the Future\u2019 Review: Serious Doubt on Serious Earth (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "376",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/brief-answers-to-the-big-questions-and-on-the-future-review-serious-doubt-on-serious-earth-1539909146?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=69",
        "text": "Personalities aside, Hawking and Mr. Rees had much in common. Born in 1942, both became professors at the University of Cambridge, where Newton once taught. Both contributed to our modern understanding of the big bang, black holes, galaxies and other cosmic matters. Both were committed to telling the public about science\u2019s astonishing revelations.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA radio telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge, England.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n\nOne afternoon everyone piled into a bus and drove to a local church to hear a concert. As the scientists proceeded down the center aisle of the packed church, led by Hawking in his wheelchair, parishioners stood and applauded. These churchgoers seemed to be acknowledging that science was displacing religion as the source of answers to the deepest mysteries, like why we exist.\n\n\n\n\nThat scene came to mind as I read two new books, \u201cBrief Answers to the Big Questions,\u201d by Hawking and \u201cOn the Future: Prospects for Humanity\u201d by Mr. Rees. The authors\u2019 styles differ\u2014Hawking cocky, Mr. Rees sober\u2014but the substance of their books overlaps. They offer brisk, lucid peeks into the future of science and of humanity. They evince a profound faith in science\u2019s power to demystify nature and bend it to our ends. \n\n\nBrief Answers to the Big QuestionsBy Stephen Hawking\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBantam, 230 pages, $25 On the FutureBy Martin Rees\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPrinceton, 256 pages, $18.95 \n\n\nYet reading these books was a bittersweet experience, and not only because Hawking died last March, at 76. (His book was completed by colleagues and family members.) The works resemble relics from a long-gone golden age: The high priests of science no longer enjoy the prestige they did just a few decades ago. \n\nHawking in this book is less brash than he once was. In 1980 he proclaimed that, by the end of the 20th century, physicists would discover an \u201cultimate theory\u201d that would solve the riddle of existence. It would tell us what reality is made of, where it came from and why it takes the form that it does. In \u201cBrief Answers\u201d Hawking concedes that \u201cwe are not there yet,\u201d and he pushes back his prediction for a \u201ctheory of everything\u201d to the end of this century. But he continues to promote the same ideas that he has for decades. String theory remains his favorite \u201ctheory of everything.\u201d Also called M-theory, it conjectures that reality is made of infinitesimal strings, loops or membranes wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 dimensions.\nNoting that, according to quantum mechanics, empty space seethes with particles popping into and out of existence, Hawking suggests that the entire universe began as one of these virtual particles. The universe is \u201cthe ultimate free lunch,\u201d he says. Our universe may also be just one of many. M-theory, quantum mechanics and inflation\u2014a theory of cosmic creation\u2014all suggest our cosmos is just a minuscule bubble in an infinite ocean, or \u201cmultiverse.\u201d\nTo explain why we live in this universe rather than one with radically different laws, Hawking invokes the \u201canthropic principle\u201d: If our universe were not as we observe it to be, we would not be here to observe it. Our scientific picture of the cosmos, Hawking proposes, is already so complete that it eliminates the need for God. \u201cNo one created the universe,\u201d he declares, \u201cand no one directs our fate.\u201d \nScience can save us, too, Hawking states. It gives us the means to establish colonies on Mars and elsewhere in case the Earth becomes unlivable\u2014whether because of nuclear war, runaway warming, pandemics or an asteroid collision. \u201cIf humanity is to continue for another million years,\u201d he states, \u201cour future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before.\u201d \nMr. Rees\u2019s worldview differs in a few respects from Hawking\u2019s. He describes himself as a \u201cpractising but unbelieving Christian.\u201d He respects believers, with whom he shares \u201ca sense of wonder and mystery.\u201d As for space-colonization, Mr. Rees asserts that it is \u201ca dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth\u2019s problems.\u201d He dwells more than Hawking on threats posed by climate change, nuclear weapons, bioterrorism, asteroid collisions and even economic inequality. He urges redistribution of the \u201cenormous wealth\u201d generated by the \u201cdigital revolution.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nParkes Observatory\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nYet the Cambridge colleagues agree on major issues. That machines will inevitably become super-intelligent, capable of learning without human guidance and pursuing their own goals. That we can nonetheless harness these machines for our own ends, or even merge with them. That we need more science and technology to help us overcome challenges to our peace and prosperity. That science will eventually explain the origin of this universe and even confirm the existence of other universes.\n\u201cIt\u2019s highly speculative,\u201d Mr. Rees says of multiverse theory. \u201cBut it\u2019s exciting science. And it may be true.\u201d Mr. Rees also shares Hawking\u2019s vision of \u201cpost-human\u201d cyborgs fanning out through the universe to colonize other star systems. Our bionic descendants might be smart enough to invent warp-drive spaceships and time machines, Mr. Rees suggests. They might even solve what many scientists and philosophers consider the greatest mystery of all, the mind-body problem. This puzzle asks, as Mr. Rees puts it, \u201chow atoms can assemble into \u2018grey matter\u2019 that can become aware of itself and ponder its origins.\u201d \nHawking and Mr. Rees recognize science\u2019s declining status. They call for better science education to lure more young people into science and to counter public ignorance about vaccines, genetically modified foods, climate change, nuclear power, and evolution. \u201cThe low esteem in which science and scientists are held is having serious consequences,\u201d Hawking complains. \nBoth authors fail to mention that science\u2019s wounds are at least partially self-inflicted. In 2005 statistician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Ioannidis\n\n\n\n presented evidence that \u201cmost published research findings are wrong.\u201d That is, the findings cannot be replicated by follow-up research. Many other scholars have now confirmed the work of Mr. Ioannidis. The so-called replication crisis is especially severe in fields with high financial stakes, such as oncology and psychopharmacology.\nBut physics, which should serve as the bedrock of science, is in some respects the most troubled field of all. Over the last few decades, physics in the grand mode practiced by Hawking and Mr. Rees has become increasingly disconnected from empirical evidence. Proponents of string and multiverse models tout their mathematical elegance, but strings are too small and multiverses too distant to be detected by any conceivable experiment. \nIn her new book \u201cLost in Math,\u201d German physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sabine Hossenfelder\n\n\n\n offers a far more candid and compelling assessment of modern physics than her English elders. She fears that physicists working on strings and multiverses are not really practicing physics. \u201cI\u2019m not sure anymore that what we do here, in the foundations of physics, is science,\u201d she confesses.\nAs I finished \u201cBrief Answers to the Big Questions\u201d and \u201cOn the Future,\u201d a few questions of my own came to mind. Will science regain its luster? Will it earn back the public\u2019s trust, or will its authority be permanently diminished? And what outcome should we prefer? I\u2019m glad I witnessed science\u2019s high priests at the height of their glory. But perhaps we are better off doubting all authorities, including scientific ones.\n\u2014Mr. Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. He published his new book, \u201cMind-Body Problems\u201d for free online at mindbodyproblems.com. Decades ago Stephen Hawking predicted that, by the end of the 20th century, physicists would have solved the riddle of existence. We\u2019re still waiting\u2014with no sign that today\u2019s physicists are on the right track. ",
        "author": "John Horgan"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Plagued by Fire\u2019 Review: The Spirit in the Form (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "377",
        "date": "2019-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/plagued-by-fire-review-the-spirit-in-the-form-11570806240?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=65",
        "text": "Of the nearly 500 structures that Wright designed and erected in his lifetime\u2014so many masterpieces he gave us, from the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to the epic Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pa.\u2014dozens no longer stand. Was it a sign that this Icarus of architects flew too high? Had he brought this upon himself\u2014evoking a vengeful God\u2019s wrath for pushing too many boundaries?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrank Lloyd Wright outside Taliesin, his studio and school in Wisconsin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Marvin Koner/CORBIS/Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\nPlagued by FireBy Paul Hendrickson\n\t\t\n\t\t\tKnopf, 600 pages, $35\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSuch mythopoetic questions fuel\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Hendrickson\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cPlagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright.\u201d A former Washington Post reporter, Mr. Hendrickson has written biographical studies of complex, tortured figures before, from Ernest Hemingway to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert McNamara,\n\n\n\n and in his hands Wright\u2019s life emerges with new clarity as a Shakespearean-scale drama\u2014beginning as Hamlet, ending as Lear. We see the octogenarian architect, dandied to the nines, at the wedding of his last child, Iovanna, stomping out a fire that caught her dress when she brushed a brazier. \u201cAll my life I have been plagued by fire,\u201d Wright cries, thrashing the embers with his cane. \nSo much arrogance in that eruption\u2014he was not on fire, his daughter was, on her wedding day no less\u2014but you can forgive his fury by this point. Three times did his Wisconsin home and workshop, Taliesin, burn, the first time horrifically so. On Aug. 15, 1914, a cook and domestic helper named\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julian Carlton\n\n\n\n grabbed a hatchet and bludgeoned seven people to death and then set the structure alight. Among the dead were Wright\u2019s girlfriend,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mamah Borthwick,\n\n\n\n and her two children.\n\nMr. Hendrickson opens with this gruesome event, well-recorded in the press at the time because Wright was so famous. The architect\u2019s break with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kitty Wright,\n\n\n\n his first wife, the mother of six of his eventual seven children, had roiled the Chicago newspapers a few years before. A preacher\u2019s son, a small-town man at heart, Wright had staked everything on leaving Kitty for Borthwick, with whom he eloped to Europe in 1909, ditching his work and his family. \u201cI want to live true as I would build true,\u201d Wright wrote to a friend to explain himself. \nWright would go on to \u201cbuild true,\u201d so faithful to his vision that he created a new kind of democratic American architecture. His buildings featured acres of warm wood and windows through which light could pour in\u2014and a Japanese simplicity that created secular cathedrals of family living in a nation where the middle class was just being invented. Flat, low to the ground but with roof tops that swept out into space, Wright\u2019s buildings often seemed to hover like about-to-land spaceships, defying gravity and yet part of the landscape in which they were situated\u2014like Fallingwater, which cascades down the rocks and streams over which it unfolds. Over time, he shifted to even more fanciful designs, with the circular Guggenheim as a late masterpiece. In his last interview, he said that \u201cif there were no spiritual quality in architecture, it would just be plain lumber.\u201d\nWright has been written about and studied by all the best architecture critics, from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ada Louise Huxtable\n\n\n\n to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lewis Mumford\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vincent Scully.\n\n\n\n In various ways, they regard him as a visionary, a maverick in the American grain. What hasn\u2019t been so thoroughly explored is the enigma of Julian Carlton. Among much else, \u201cPlagued by Fire\u201d tries to find out who he was exactly and why he committed such a terrible deed on that August day in 1914\u2014and what effect the incident had on Wright\u2019s life.\nTo build that kind of investigation into a telling of Wright\u2019s maniacally productive life, Mr. Hendrickson has designed a vast, sweeping book, one that, along the way, corrects some of the canards told by Wright himself. He routinely shaved two years off his age, and Huxtable argues that it was vanity that led him to say he was a few credits shy of graduation when he left the University of Wisconsin. (Mr. Hendrickson reminds us that he had taken only a few courses.) In Wright\u2019s 1932 autobiography, he claimed to have walked right into a Chicago firm and found work with no help at all. (Mr. Hendrickson suggests that Wright staged his arrival with the help of his Uncle Jenk, who had connections to the firm.) And the biggest one of all: that his father had abandoned his family when Wright was a teenager. Wright never stated this outright, but he strongly implied it, and Mr. Hendrickson reveals the truth to be far more complicated. Wright, like Hamlet, adored his father but was more loved by his difficult, overbearing mother, who had driven his father away\u2014a de A preacher\u2019s son, a small-town man at heart, Frank Lloyd Wright created secular cathedrals that seem to hover like recently landed spaceships, defying gravity. ",
        "author": "John Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018An Inventory of Losses\u2019 Review: Only a Memory (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "378",
        "date": "2021-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-inventory-of-losses-review-only-a-memory-11611935596?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=9",
        "text": "If you were unaware of these facts, you could, of course, summon them from cyberspace directly to the palm of your hand\u2014for all answers, it seems, now orbit our Earth. And yet, \u201cwe know nothing. Not much, at any rate,\u201d the German writer Judith Schalansky reminds us in \u201cAn Inventory of Losses,\u201d a wonder-filled book of 12 essays, each of which illuminates the elusive past\u2019s residue in our bewildering present. \u201cWriting cannot bring anything back,\u201d Ms. Schalansky also acknowledges, \u201cbut it can enable everything to be experienced . . . [and] the difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.\u201d\n\n\n Grab a Copy An Inventory of Losses By Judith Schalansky New DIrections 224 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book Amazon Barnes & Noble Books a Million Bookshop \n\n\nThe disparate subjects here, at first glance, seem randomly chosen. For in addition to (or embedded within) the curiosities mentioned above, Ms. Schalansky contemplates ancient Greek poetry; a submerged Pacific atoll; a ruined Italian villa; an erased East German palace; a destroyed silent film; several eccentric scientists and her own childhood in a vividly evoked coastal village. All are connected, however, because all are gone or mostly gone. Any remaining fragment therefore becomes, as Ms. Schalansky puts it, \u201cthe infinite promise of Romanticism . . . the blank space that breeds conjecture.\u201d She is referring at that moment to the mysteries surrounding the Greek poet Sappho, but the same exhilarating sense of not knowing\u2014of possible discovery, in other words\u2014pervades all of this writer\u2019s erudite imaginings as she wanders from an astrophysicist\u2019s first detection of dark matter to an imagined glimpse of the earliest humans. \n\u201cHere is the land of the beginning,\u201d Ms. Schalansky writes of the Euphrates delta, \u201cthe alluvial land of civilization, to which our remote ancestor with his heavy skull and freed-up hands was once drawn, in the process driving his wide-jawed cousin . . . ever further north, where he hid himself away in caves\u2014armed with stone tools and bones gnawed bare\u2014to die the unlamented death of his species.\u201d This is the author at her most magisterial; her stately prose in this case mirroring a river\u2019s unhurried course. (The translation from the German by Jackie Smith, here as throughout, is a triumph of subtle accuracy.) But Ms. Schalansky is also a wry, laconic and occasionally self-mocking explorer who gives the disarming impression of being astonished at times by her own conclusions. \u201cThey are animals. Animals like us. Doomed like us,\u201d she writes of two Caspian tigers she imagines fated to die in a Roman amphitheater. (Her richly imagined gladiatorial scene is terrifying.) The inevitable prospect of the Sun\u2019s destruction of the Earth conjures for her \u201cthe most appalling thing imaginable: . . . the end of time.\u201d A silent morning in the mountains prompts the fleeting thought \u201cthat mankind had perished,\u201d a possibility that, Ms. Schalansky adds, \u201cdid not frighten me; on the contrary, it was comforting.\u201d\n\n\nAll of which sounds a little portentous, as though the thunderous chords of Strauss\u2019s \u201cAlso sprach Zarathustra\u201d had been struck to herald cosmic revelation. And indeed, \u201cAn Inventory of Losses\u201d is a more somber work than \u201cAtlas of Remote Islands\u201d (2009), the jewel-like volume that earned Ms. Schalansky international acclaim both as author and book designer. A miniature delight in which each description filled little more than a page, the atlas transported the reader with dreamlike ease across oceans and centuries. \u201cI have invented nothing,\u201d Ms. Schalansky wrote in the introduction, \u201cBut I have discovered everything; I have found these stories and made them mine, just as the explorer makes the land he discovers his.\u201d \nThe same blend of poetic insight and intellectual precision creates a similar, if more diffused, effect of wonder here. \u201cAn Inventory of Losses\u201d covers broader terrain, a test of the author\u2019s agility. Yet with only a few missteps, she alights on distant lives, eras, even planets, as nimbly as she did on those forsaken islands. Comparisons with the writings of W.G. Sebald are inescapable. But Ms. Schalansky, in her quirkiness, has just as much in common with the glorious eccentrics of the 18th and 19th centuries she encounters such as Gottfried Adolf Kinau (1814-88), who spent most of his life drawing detailed maps of the moon. Inspired by such genial fanatics, by faded charts, musty documents, a bird\u2019s flight or a spaceship\u2019s voyage, Ms. Schalansky invites us to see\u2014through a telescope one moment, a microscope the next, and above all through the unmatched lens of the imagination\u2014what a moment or a fragment might reveal. \nIn a German forest, \u201ca gust of wind rustles the treetops, the sky brightens, and for a moment the pale disc of the sun glows through the wall of cloud.\u201d In the Pacific Ocean, \u201cthe gray shadow of a giant wave\u201d tower From an extinct predator to the lost work of a poet, finding beauty in the remnants of the vanished. ",
        "author": "Anna Mundow"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018An Inventory of Losses\u2019 Review: Only a Memory (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "379",
        "date": "2021-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-inventory-of-losses-review-only-a-memory-11611935596?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=28",
        "text": "If you were unaware of these facts, you could, of course, summon them from cyberspace directly to the palm of your hand\u2014for all answers, it seems, now orbit our Earth. And yet, \u201cwe know nothing. Not much, at any rate,\u201d the German writer Judith Schalansky reminds us in \u201cAn Inventory of Losses,\u201d a wonder-filled book of 12 essays, each of which illuminates the elusive past\u2019s residue in our bewildering present. \u201cWriting cannot bring anything back,\u201d Ms. Schalansky also acknowledges, \u201cbut it can enable everything to be experienced . . . [and] the difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.\u201d\n\n\n Grab a Copy An Inventory of Losses By Judith Schalansky New DIrections 224 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book Amazon Barnes & Noble Books a Million Bookshop \n\n\nThe disparate subjects here, at first glance, seem randomly chosen. For in addition to (or embedded within) the curiosities mentioned above, Ms. Schalansky contemplates ancient Greek poetry; a submerged Pacific atoll; a ruined Italian villa; an erased East German palace; a destroyed silent film; several eccentric scientists and her own childhood in a vividly evoked coastal village. All are connected, however, because all are gone or mostly gone. Any remaining fragment therefore becomes, as Ms. Schalansky puts it, \u201cthe infinite promise of Romanticism . . . the blank space that breeds conjecture.\u201d She is referring at that moment to the mysteries surrounding the Greek poet Sappho, but the same exhilarating sense of not knowing\u2014of possible discovery, in other words\u2014pervades all of this writer\u2019s erudite imaginings as she wanders from an astrophysicist\u2019s first detection of dark matter to an imagined glimpse of the earliest humans. \n\u201cHere is the land of the beginning,\u201d Ms. Schalansky writes of the Euphrates delta, \u201cthe alluvial land of civilization, to which our remote ancestor with his heavy skull and freed-up hands was once drawn, in the process driving his wide-jawed cousin . . . ever further north, where he hid himself away in caves\u2014armed with stone tools and bones gnawed bare\u2014to die the unlamented death of his species.\u201d This is the author at her most magisterial; her stately prose in this case mirroring a river\u2019s unhurried course. (The translation from the German by Jackie Smith, here as throughout, is a triumph of subtle accuracy.) But Ms. Schalansky is also a wry, laconic and occasionally self-mocking explorer who gives the disarming impression of being astonished at times by her own conclusions. \u201cThey are animals. Animals like us. Doomed like us,\u201d she writes of two Caspian tigers she imagines fated to die in a Roman amphitheater. (Her richly imagined gladiatorial scene is terrifying.) The inevitable prospect of the Sun\u2019s destruction of the Earth conjures for her \u201cthe most appalling thing imaginable: . . . the end of time.\u201d A silent morning in the mountains prompts the fleeting thought \u201cthat mankind had perished,\u201d a possibility that, Ms. Schalansky adds, \u201cdid not frighten me; on the contrary, it was comforting.\u201d\n\n\nAll of which sounds a little portentous, as though the thunderous chords of Strauss\u2019s \u201cAlso sprach Zarathustra\u201d had been struck to herald cosmic revelation. And indeed, \u201cAn Inventory of Losses\u201d is a more somber work than \u201cAtlas of Remote Islands\u201d (2009), the jewel-like volume that earned Ms. Schalansky international acclaim both as author and book designer. A miniature delight in which each description filled little more than a page, the atlas transported the reader with dreamlike ease across oceans and centuries. \u201cI have invented nothing,\u201d Ms. Schalansky wrote in the introduction, \u201cBut I have discovered everything; I have found these stories and made them mine, just as the explorer makes the land he discovers his.\u201d \nThe same blend of poetic insight and intellectual precision creates a similar, if more diffused, effect of wonder here. \u201cAn Inventory of Losses\u201d covers broader terrain, a test of the author\u2019s agility. Yet with only a few missteps, she alights on distant lives, eras, even planets, as nimbly as she did on those forsaken islands. Comparisons with the writings of W.G. Sebald are inescapable. But Ms. Schalansky, in her quirkiness, has just as much in common with the glorious eccentrics of the 18th and 19th centuries she encounters such as Gottfried Adolf Kinau (1814-88), who spent most of his life drawing detailed maps of the moon. Inspired by such genial fanatics, by faded charts, musty documents, a bird\u2019s flight or a spaceship\u2019s voyage, Ms. Schalansky invites us to see\u2014through a telescope one moment, a microscope the next, and above all through the unmatched lens of the imagination\u2014what a moment or a fragment might reveal. \nIn a German forest, \u201ca gust of wind rustles the treetops, the sky brightens, and for a moment the pale disc of the sun glows through the wall of cloud.\u201d In the Pacific Ocean, \u201cthe gray shadow of a giant wave\u201d tower From an extinct predator to the lost work of a poet, finding beauty in the remnants of the vanished. ",
        "author": "Anna Mundow"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018An Inventory of Losses\u2019 Review: Only a Memory (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "380",
        "date": "2021-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-inventory-of-losses-review-only-a-memory-11611935596?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=38",
        "text": "If you were unaware of these facts, you could, of course, summon them from cyberspace directly to the palm of your hand\u2014for all answers, it seems, now orbit our Earth. And yet, \u201cwe know nothing. Not much, at any rate,\u201d the German writer Judith Schalansky reminds us in \u201cAn Inventory of Losses,\u201d a wonder-filled book of 12 essays, each of which illuminates the elusive past\u2019s residue in our bewildering present. \u201cWriting cannot bring anything back,\u201d Ms. Schalansky also acknowledges, \u201cbut it can enable everything to be experienced . . . [and] the difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.\u201d\n\n\n Grab a Copy \n\n\n\nAn Inventory of Losses By Judith Schalansky New DIrections 224 pages We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site. Buy Book Amazon Barnes & Noble Books a Million Bookshop \n\n\nThe disparate subjects here, at first glance, seem randomly chosen. For in addition to (or embedded within) the curiosities mentioned above, Ms. Schalansky contemplates ancient Greek poetry; a submerged Pacific atoll; a ruined Italian villa; an erased East German palace; a destroyed silent film; several eccentric scientists and her own childhood in a vividly evoked coastal village. All are connected, however, because all are gone or mostly gone. Any remaining fragment therefore becomes, as Ms. Schalansky puts it, \u201cthe infinite promise of Romanticism . . . the blank space that breeds conjecture.\u201d She is referring at that moment to the mysteries surrounding the Greek poet Sappho, but the same exhilarating sense of not knowing\u2014of possible discovery, in other words\u2014pervades all of this writer\u2019s erudite imaginings as she wanders from an astrophysicist\u2019s first detection of dark matter to an imagined glimpse of the earliest humans. \n\u201cHere is the land of the beginning,\u201d Ms. Schalansky writes of the Euphrates delta, \u201cthe alluvial land of civilization, to which our remote ancestor with his heavy skull and freed-up hands was once drawn, in the process driving his wide-jawed cousin . . . ever further north, where he hid himself away in caves\u2014armed with stone tools and bones gnawed bare\u2014to die the unlamented death of his species.\u201d This is the author at her most magisterial; her stately prose in this case mirroring a river\u2019s unhurried course. (The translation from the German by Jackie Smith, here as throughout, is a triumph of subtle accuracy.) But Ms. Schalansky is also a wry, laconic and occasionally self-mocking explorer who gives the disarming impression of being astonished at times by her own conclusions. \u201cThey are animals. Animals like us. Doomed like us,\u201d she writes of two Caspian tigers she imagines fated to die in a Roman amphitheater. (Her richly imagined gladiatorial scene is terrifying.) The inevitable prospect of the Sun\u2019s destruction of the Earth conjures for her \u201cthe most appalling thing imaginable: . . . the end of time.\u201d A silent morning in the mountains prompts the fleeting thought \u201cthat mankind had perished,\u201d a possibility that, Ms. Schalansky adds, \u201cdid not frighten me; on the contrary, it was comforting.\u201d\n\n\nAll of which sounds a little portentous, as though the thunderous chords of Strauss\u2019s \u201cAlso sprach Zarathustra\u201d had been struck to herald cosmic revelation. And indeed, \u201cAn Inventory of Losses\u201d is a more somber work than \u201cAtlas of Remote Islands\u201d (2009), the jewel-like volume that earned Ms. Schalansky international acclaim both as author and book designer. A miniature delight in which each description filled little more than a page, the atlas transported the reader with dreamlike ease across oceans and centuries. \u201cI have invented nothing,\u201d Ms. Schalansky wrote in the introduction, \u201cBut I have discovered everything; I have found these stories and made them mine, just as the explorer makes the land he discovers his.\u201d \nThe same blend of poetic insight and intellectual precision creates a similar, if more diffused, effect of wonder here. \u201cAn Inventory of Losses\u201d covers broader terrain, a test of the author\u2019s agility. Yet with only a few missteps, she alights on distant lives, eras, even planets, as nimbly as she did on those forsaken islands. Comparisons with the writings of W.G. Sebald are inescapable. But Ms. Schalansky, in her quirkiness, has just as much in common with the glorious eccentrics of the 18th and 19th centuries she encounters such as Gottfried Adolf Kinau (1814-88), who spent most of his life drawing detailed maps of the moon. Inspired by such genial fanatics, by faded charts, musty documents, a bird\u2019s flight or a spaceship\u2019s voyage, Ms. Schalansky invites us to see\u2014through a telescope one moment, a microscope the next, and above all through the unmatched lens of the imagination\u2014what a moment or a fragment might reveal. \nIn a German forest, \u201ca gust of wind rustles the treetops, the sky brightens, and for a moment the pale disc of the sun glows through the wall of cloud.\u201d In the Pacific Ocean, \u201cthe gray shadow of a giant wave\u201d t From an extinct predator to the lost work of a poet, finding beauty in the remnants of the vanished. ",
        "author": "Anna Mundow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Children\u2019s Books: A Superlative Year (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "381",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-a-superlative-year-1514571284?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=81",
        "text": "For the year\u2019s most disappointing illustrations, we need look no farther than\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Laurent de Brunhoff\u2019s\n\n\n\n valedictory picture book, \u201cBabar\u2019s Guide to Paris\u201d (Abrams), a volume with illustrations so devoid of interest, so blank and lifeless, that they seem more like templates than finished drawings. Mr. de Brunhoff, who is in his 90s, has valiantly carried on the work of his father in continuing the adventures of the little elephant Babar that began in 1931, but he seems to have forgotten what used to make the books compelling. The stories were always a bit stilted, but they were saved by illustrations rich in thoughtful detail and full of dynamic modes of transport. The Babar books once teemed with cars, boats, planes, camels, elevators, elephants and hot-air balloons. At one point in this bland and inadvertently gloomy offering, Babar and Celeste dine in a featureless brasserie off empty plates and sip from unfilled glasses. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn a countervailing disappointment, sumptuous artwork and an evocative idea amount to nothing in the unsatisfying picture-book pages of \u201cThe Antlered Ship\u201d (Beach Lane). Dashka Slater\u2019s prose raises questions that neither she nor the Fan Brothers\u2019 illustrations try to answer. Why does a splendid square-rigger have enormous antlers? How does its crew bring it to harbor and head out again in search of adventure when they manifestly do not know how to sail? And what kind of fox-sailor wonders if islands like being alone or if waves look more like horses or swans? The book looks beautiful but feels phony, a gauzy concept rather than a story that would interest actual children. \nThe same goes for the year\u2019s most grimly existentialist picture book, \u201cWhy Am I Me?\u201d (Scholastic), with artwork by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sean Qualls\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Selina Alko.\n\n\n\n Children are asked to question the fact of their own lives in a way that is cut free of all of humankind\u2019s traditional understandings or tetherings. \u201cIf someone else were me,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paige Britt\n\n\n\n asks, for the young reader, \u201cWho would they be? Someone lighter, older, darker, bolder?\u201d In this strange book, children are not meant to see themselves as individuals\u2014beloved sprigs on a family tree, say, let alone persons made in the image and likeness of God\u2014but as interchangeable, characterless accidents of melanin. The signature image shows two young faces overlapping like a Venn diagram. The blending of the two is presumably meant to exalt, but it looks more like personal erasure.\n\n\nThe year\u2019s two most egregiously opportunistic, adult-pandering books must surely be \u201cThe Little Book of Little Activists\u201d (Viking), created by Leila Sales, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Joyner\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Pink Hat\u201d (Schwartz & Wade), both of which style the gush of left-wing protest over the results of last year\u2019s presidential election as something galvanizing for children who are more than a decade away from rising to the franchise.\nThe first book is full of photographs of winsome tots holding signs: \u201cWomen are Important,\u201d reads one slogan, in childish writing. \u201cWe will not be silent,\u201d reads another in the cool, confident strokes of an adult\u2019s pen; this placard is held high by a 2-year-old. Most of the children here seem like virtual ventriloquist\u2019s dummies. In one picture, a baby sits strapped in her stroller holding a printed sign: \u201cI marched before I walked.\u201d No, she didn\u2019t; she was a prop. In the second book, Mr. Joyner invents a quirky origin story for last winter\u2019s voguish pink pussy hats, which ends with a street scene of activists waving more signs: \u201cHear Our Voice\u201d and \u201cThe Future is Feminist.\u201d His drawing style is lively and fun, but the material is so unimaginative. This stuff isn\u2019t really for children. These are vanity projects for adults.\nThere\u2019s always a measure of child-pandering, and this year it reached its nadir\u2014or, I should say, its bottom\u2014with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Fletcher\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dougie Poynter\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Dinosaur That Pooped a Planet!\u201d (Aladdin), a picture book that culminates in a scene of outer space filled with a mustard-colored \u201cpoop trail\u201d full of excreted spaceships, moon rocks, Martians and satellites and a new Saturn-like \u201cpoopy planet\u201d beside the moon. \u201cAnd just when you thought all the pooping was done\u201d\u2014and it\u2019s true, by the end you are longing for it to be over\u2014\u201ca Mars cat plopped out of the dinosaur\u2019s bum.\u201d Ick.\nBut enough griping. Let\u2019s turn now to the year\u2019s two most refreshing narrators, David Alan Miller and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Burcaw.\n\n\n\n David is an eighth-grader with an amazing talent for competitive eating and the fictional hero of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pete Hautman\u2019s\n\n\n\n heartfelt middle-grade novel \u201cSlider\u201d (Candlewick). An overlooked middle child who is driven to desperate measures by a looming debt, David learns to chew and swallow with superb speed and steadiness. It\u2019s a we Meghan Cox Gurdon picks the most unsatisfying, most irritating and most egregiously opportunistic titles from 2017. ",
        "author": "Meghan Cox Gurdon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Children\u2019s Books: A Superlative Year (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "382",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-a-superlative-year-1514571284?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=75",
        "text": "For the year\u2019s most disappointing illustrations, we need look no farther than\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Laurent de Brunhoff\u2019s\n\n\n\n valedictory picture book, \u201cBabar\u2019s Guide to Paris\u201d (Abrams), a volume with illustrations so devoid of interest, so blank and lifeless, that they seem more like templates than finished drawings. Mr. de Brunhoff, who is in his 90s, has valiantly carried on the work of his father in continuing the adventures of the little elephant Babar that began in 1931, but he seems to have forgotten what used to make the books compelling. The stories were always a bit stilted, but they were saved by illustrations rich in thoughtful detail and full of dynamic modes of transport. The Babar books once teemed with cars, boats, planes, camels, elevators, elephants and hot-air balloons. At one point in this bland and inadvertently gloomy offering, Babar and Celeste dine in a featureless brasserie off empty plates and sip from unfilled glasses. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn a countervailing disappointment, sumptuous artwork and an evocative idea amount to nothing in the unsatisfying picture-book pages of \u201cThe Antlered Ship\u201d (Beach Lane). Dashka Slater\u2019s prose raises questions that neither she nor the Fan Brothers\u2019 illustrations try to answer. Why does a splendid square-rigger have enormous antlers? How does its crew bring it to harbor and head out again in search of adventure when they manifestly do not know how to sail? And what kind of fox-sailor wonders if islands like being alone or if waves look more like horses or swans? The book looks beautiful but feels phony, a gauzy concept rather than a story that would interest actual children. \nThe same goes for the year\u2019s most grimly existentialist picture book, \u201cWhy Am I Me?\u201d (Scholastic), with artwork by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sean Qualls\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Selina Alko.\n\n\n\n Children are asked to question the fact of their own lives in a way that is cut free of all of humankind\u2019s traditional understandings or tetherings. \u201cIf someone else were me,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paige Britt\n\n\n\n asks, for the young reader, \u201cWho would they be? Someone lighter, older, darker, bolder?\u201d In this strange book, children are not meant to see themselves as individuals\u2014beloved sprigs on a family tree, say, let alone persons made in the image and likeness of God\u2014but as interchangeable, characterless accidents of melanin. The signature image shows two young faces overlapping like a Venn diagram. The blending of the two is presumably meant to exalt, but it looks more like personal erasure.\n\n\nThe year\u2019s two most egregiously opportunistic, adult-pandering books must surely be \u201cThe Little Book of Little Activists\u201d (Viking), created by Leila Sales, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Joyner\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Pink Hat\u201d (Schwartz & Wade), both of which style the gush of left-wing protest over the results of last year\u2019s presidential election as something galvanizing for children who are more than a decade away from rising to the franchise.\nThe first book is full of photographs of winsome tots holding signs: \u201cWomen are Important,\u201d reads one slogan, in childish writing. \u201cWe will not be silent,\u201d reads another in the cool, confident strokes of an adult\u2019s pen; this placard is held high by a 2-year-old. Most of the children here seem like virtual ventriloquist\u2019s dummies. In one picture, a baby sits strapped in her stroller holding a printed sign: \u201cI marched before I walked.\u201d No, she didn\u2019t; she was a prop. In the second book, Mr. Joyner invents a quirky origin story for last winter\u2019s voguish pink pussy hats, which ends with a street scene of activists waving more signs: \u201cHear Our Voice\u201d and \u201cThe Future is Feminist.\u201d His drawing style is lively and fun, but the material is so unimaginative. This stuff isn\u2019t really for children. These are vanity projects for adults.\nThere\u2019s always a measure of child-pandering, and this year it reached its nadir\u2014or, I should say, its bottom\u2014with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Fletcher\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dougie Poynter\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Dinosaur That Pooped a Planet!\u201d (Aladdin), a picture book that culminates in a scene of outer space filled with a mustard-colored \u201cpoop trail\u201d full of excreted spaceships, moon rocks, Martians and satellites and a new Saturn-like \u201cpoopy planet\u201d beside the moon. \u201cAnd just when you thought all the pooping was done\u201d\u2014and it\u2019s true, by the end you are longing for it to be over\u2014\u201ca Mars cat plopped out of the dinosaur\u2019s bum.\u201d Ick.\nBut enough griping. Let\u2019s turn now to the year\u2019s two most refreshing narrators, David Alan Miller and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Burcaw.\n\n\n\n David is an eighth-grader with an amazing talent for competitive eating and the fictional hero of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pete Hautman\u2019s\n\n\n\n heartfelt middle-grade novel \u201cSlider\u201d (Candlewick). An overlooked middle child who is driven to desperate measures by a looming debt, David learns to chew and swallow with superb speed and steadiness. It\u2019s a we Meghan Cox Gurdon picks the most unsatisfying, most irritating and most egregiously opportunistic titles from 2017. ",
        "author": "Meghan Cox Gurdon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: Reviving the Old Sci-Fi Dream (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "383",
        "date": "2020-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-reviving-the-old-sci-fi-dream-11596202531?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=40",
        "text": "Combining both approaches are books that serve as sequels to or continuations of previously published works. \u201cFreedom\u201d (e-book, $6.99), by Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q. Fox, is the latest installment in the Man-Kzin Wars sequence, which goes back to a Larry Niven story of 1966. The kzinti are interstellar imperialists, tiger-sized carnivores, and man-eaters. Their mistake was thinking humans were easy prey. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFreedom\u201d is set, for once, on Earth, where a shot-down kzin is trying to get from the Appalachians to Canada, where he can live in the wild. As he crosses America, he meets people: the little girl who calls him \u201cTigey,\u201d the old hobo who offers him poteen. He doesn\u2019t harm noncombatants, and he even helps out the old lady who feeds him. Pretty soon, there are a growing number of people who reckon kzinti are much more trustworthy than \u201cthe gummint.\u201d The kzin on the run is looking for freedom, but the people he runs into on his long hike are looking for it, too. Mr. Colebatch and Ms. Fox aren\u2019t just writing adventure fiction.\n\n\nOne of the great space-opera writers was James H. Schmitz, whose novel \u201cThe Witches of Karres\u201d (developed from a story of 1949) ought to be in everyone\u2019s top five. Its hero is Captain Pausert, the commander of a tramp spaceship, who rescues three female child-slaves from their owners, not realizing that they are Karres witches on a kind of gap-year tour. Once Pausert gets them home, it turns out that he, too, has witchy powers waiting to be developed, and he needs them to defeat the threat of the Worm World.\nSchmitz excelled in side-trips and vignettes. Nothing in sci-fi is more atmospheric than the scene where Pausert is being pursued on a desert planet by a ganglord riding a war-robot\u2014and then realizes that they have both roused the planet\u2019s hostile elementals, who are gathering to cut them off.\nEric Flint and Dave Freer have produced three continuations of Schmitz\u2019s novel: \u201cThe Wizard of Karres\u201d (written with Mercedes Lackey), \u201cThe Sorceress of Karres\u201d and now \u201cThe Shaman of Karres\u201d (292 pages, $25). In the first two books, Pausert and the younger witches confront the nanite plague, the Megair Cannibals, and an intelligent plant determined to take over the galaxy. They also make side trips to a spacegoing circus and (via time-travel) to Pausert\u2019s own deprived childhood\u2014which explains both why he became a tramp skipper, and why he bonded so quickly with one of the witches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe heroine of \u201cShaman\u201d is the youngest witch, the Leewit (she insists on the definite article). Her talents are bad language, supersonic whistles and healing; the threat being faced is an alien creature that can make slaves happy in their slavery. The charm of the series continues to be the Schmitzian blend of unflagging invention and mild humor. Baen\u2019s team have caught the tone perfectly, developed the characters, and kept feeding in new ones\u2014such as the hexaperson Daal of Uldune, a ruthless tyrant trying to go straight. Anyone looking to reclaim the lost fun of sci-fi need look no further. It\u2019s almost like being young again.\nOnce upon a time, sci-fi was also called \u201cspace fiction,\u201d which is what most of it was. But the visions of Arthur C. Clarke and the \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d faded as space exploration was turned over to robots and fly-bys. Could things have been different?\nIn her 2018 novel \u201cThe Calculating Stars\u201d Mary Robinette Kowal offered an \u201calternate universe\u201d scenario. Back in the 1950s, a giant meteorite splashed into Chesapeake Bay, and the resultant tsunami drowned Washington, produced global warming, and convinced people that humanity had put all its eggs in one planetary basket. Before humanity got wiped out like the dinosaurs, it needed to develop off-world colonies to ensure species survival.\nIn \u201cThe Calculating Stars\u201d and its almost immediate sequel, \u201cThe Fated Sky,\u201d we followed Elma, who overcomes prejudice against \u201castronettes,\u201d and heads off to the Moon and then to Mars. Now, in \u201cThe Relentless Moon\u201d (Tor, 542 pages, $17.99), Ms. Kowal turns to a new heroine, Nicole, an astronaut dismissed by her superiors as \u201cold hat.\u201d But Nicole has her own power base, for she is the wife of the state governor in Kansas City, now the seat of the American government. The couple also have their own power struggle to win, for while many see space as vital for species survival, others demand that money spent on space should be spent on rebuilding the shattered Earth economy.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNicole makes her way to the Moon colony, where the problem is sabotage being carried out by the undercover operatives of the \u201cEarth First\u201d movement. No one can beat Ms. Kowal on the finely imagined details of how to disrupt Earth\u2019s toehold in the unforgiving conditions of the Moon, and how to guard against it. But Nicole is fighting a war on two fronts all the time, as bad news pours in from Earth: Canada needs to buy wheat from Algeria; the U.S. economy is being propped up by loans from Brazil. And it gets worse, for Earth and for Nicole.\n\u201cRelentless\u201d is the right word for Ms. Kowal\u2019s book. It reminds us that space is about finance and politics, not just technology. But the technology is vital just the same. Her award-winning sequence has revived the old sci-fi dream. The premise is a \u201cmight have been\u201d scenario, but the series is also a blueprint for \u201cwhat could be yet.\u201d Arthur C. Clarke would have loved it. Science fiction was once called \u2018space fiction,\u2019 which is mostly what it was. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: Reviving the Old Sci-Fi Dream (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "384",
        "date": "2020-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-reviving-the-old-sci-fi-dream-11596202531?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=50",
        "text": "Combining both approaches are books that serve as sequels to or continuations of previously published works. \u201cFreedom\u201d (e-book, $6.99), by Hal Colebatch and Jessica Q. Fox, is the latest installment in the Man-Kzin Wars sequence, which goes back to a Larry Niven story of 1966. The kzinti are interstellar imperialists, tiger-sized carnivores, and man-eaters. Their mistake was thinking humans were easy prey. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFreedom\u201d is set, for once, on Earth, where a shot-down kzin is trying to get from the Appalachians to Canada, where he can live in the wild. As he crosses America, he meets people: the little girl who calls him \u201cTigey,\u201d the old hobo who offers him poteen. He doesn\u2019t harm noncombatants, and he even helps out the old lady who feeds him. Pretty soon, there are a growing number of people who reckon kzinti are much more trustworthy than \u201cthe gummint.\u201d The kzin on the run is looking for freedom, but the people he runs into on his long hike are looking for it, too. Mr. Colebatch and Ms. Fox aren\u2019t just writing adventure fiction.\n\n\nOne of the great space-opera writers was James H. Schmitz, whose novel \u201cThe Witches of Karres\u201d (developed from a story of 1949) ought to be in everyone\u2019s top five. Its hero is Captain Pausert, the commander of a tramp spaceship, who rescues three female child-slaves from their owners, not realizing that they are Karres witches on a kind of gap-year tour. Once Pausert gets them home, it turns out that he, too, has witchy powers waiting to be developed, and he needs them to defeat the threat of the Worm World.\nSchmitz excelled in side-trips and vignettes. Nothing in sci-fi is more atmospheric than the scene where Pausert is being pursued on a desert planet by a ganglord riding a war-robot\u2014and then realizes that they have both roused the planet\u2019s hostile elementals, who are gathering to cut them off.\nEric Flint and Dave Freer have produced three continuations of Schmitz\u2019s novel: \u201cThe Wizard of Karres\u201d (written with Mercedes Lackey), \u201cThe Sorceress of Karres\u201d and now \u201cThe Shaman of Karres\u201d (292 pages, $25). In the first two books, Pausert and the younger witches confront the nanite plague, the Megair Cannibals, and an intelligent plant determined to take over the galaxy. They also make side trips to a spacegoing circus and (via time-travel) to Pausert\u2019s own deprived childhood\u2014which explains both why he became a tramp skipper, and why he bonded so quickly with one of the witches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe heroine of \u201cShaman\u201d is the youngest witch, the Leewit (she insists on the definite article). Her talents are bad language, supersonic whistles and healing; the threat being faced is an alien creature that can make slaves happy in their slavery. The charm of the series continues to be the Schmitzian blend of unflagging invention and mild humor. Baen\u2019s team have caught the tone perfectly, developed the characters, and kept feeding in new ones\u2014such as the hexaperson Daal of Uldune, a ruthless tyrant trying to go straight. Anyone looking to reclaim the lost fun of sci-fi need look no further. It\u2019s almost like being young again.\nOnce upon a time, sci-fi was also called \u201cspace fiction,\u201d which is what most of it was. But the visions of Arthur C. Clarke and the \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d faded as space exploration was turned over to robots and fly-bys. Could things have been different?\nIn her 2018 novel \u201cThe Calculating Stars\u201d Mary Robinette Kowal offered an \u201calternate universe\u201d scenario. Back in the 1950s, a giant meteorite splashed into Chesapeake Bay, and the resultant tsunami drowned Washington, produced global warming, and convinced people that humanity had put all its eggs in one planetary basket. Before humanity got wiped out like the dinosaurs, it needed to develop off-world colonies to ensure species survival.\nIn \u201cThe Calculating Stars\u201d and its almost immediate sequel, \u201cThe Fated Sky,\u201d we followed Elma, who overcomes prejudice against \u201castronettes,\u201d and heads off to the Moon and then to Mars. Now, in \u201cThe Relentless Moon\u201d (Tor, 542 pages, $17.99), Ms. Kowal turns to a new heroine, Nicole, an astronaut dismissed by her superiors as \u201cold hat.\u201d But Nicole has her own power base, for she is the wife of the state governor in Kansas City, now the seat of the American government. The couple also have their own power struggle to win, for while many see space as vital for species survival, others demand that money spent on space should be spent on rebuilding the shattered Earth economy.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNicole makes her way to the Moon colony, where the problem is sabotage being carried out by the undercover operatives of the \u201cEarth First\u201d movement. No one can beat Ms. Kowal on the finely imagined details of how to disrupt Earth\u2019s toehold in the unforgiving conditions of the Moon, and how to guard against it. But Nicole is fighting a war on two fronts all the time, as bad news pours in from Earth: Canada needs to buy wheat from Algeria; the U.S. economy is being propped up by loans from Brazil. And it gets worse, Science fiction was once called \u2018space fiction,\u2019 which is mostly what it was. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Children\u2019s Books: Galactic Adventures (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "385",
        "date": "2018-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-galactic-adventures-1530232780?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=19",
        "text": "Born on the ship, Romy has no experience of other people than what she remembers of her parents and what she can see of life on Earth from movies and TV shows stored in the ship\u2019s computer. A tech genius, Romy is also surprisingly normal: She writes fan fiction starring characters from her favorite TV series and corresponds at great intervals (because of her distance from Earth) with her therapist. When Romy learns that another ship is coming, one with superior technology that will allow it to overhaul her before she reaches the planet, she\u2019s thrilled and relieved: She won\u2019t have to settle Earth II on her own. Better still, the commander of the approaching vessel, \u201cJ,\u201d is young, charming, communicative\u2014and lonely too. As news comes of catastrophic war on Earth and NASA severs contact with Romy, she finds herself drawn yet more deeply into a relationship of trust and love (and momentary lust) with a compelling stranger who seems to have an uncanny feel for her deeper thoughts and desires.\n Warning sirens may not yet be going off in Romy\u2019s spaceship, but they will be blaring in the minds of readers age 13 and older, and rightly so. As a psychological drama, \u201cThe Loneliest Girl in the Universe\u201d is a good read with several shocking twists. It\u2019s even sharper as an extended metaphor for certain risky realities of modern adolescence. Teens who feel isolated are often tempted to seek solace in online relationships; they are wise to remember that a stranger who seems warm and genuine may have dark motives and ominous intent.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lucas Film Press\n \n\n\n\nA dreaded interstellar warrior gets a hilarious comeuppance in \u201cAre You Scared, Darth Vader?\u201d (Lucasfilm Press, 42 pages, $17.99), a meta picture book by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adam Rex\n\n\n\n that starts being funny even before the first page. (The dedication reads: \u201cFor Henry . . . I am your father. \u2013A.R.\u201d)\n\n\nOn a series of tenebrous paintings, ragged yellow lettering enlists the young reader in a taunting dialogue with the famous Star Wars villain, asking repeatedly: \u201cAre you scared, Darth Vader?\u201d In his mask and shroud, Darth Vader stands impassive and unimpressed as first a \u201cwolfman\u201d and then a \u201cvampire\u201d and a \u201cwitch\u201d jump out at him. As the provocations increase, Darth Vader becomes \u201cmost displeased\u201d but insists: \u201cI am not scared. I will never be scared. Who could possibly scare Lord Vader?\u201d As it happens, there is such a person, as readers ages 4-8 will be delighted to realize.\n\n\nSign up!Introducing the new WSJ Books Newsletter! Sign up here to be the first to find out what\u2019s new and what\u2019s good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend.\n\n\nIs it better to stand out or fit in? Two stories explore this vexed question. In the pages of the first, \u201cTwig\u201d (Simon & Schuster, 32 pages, $17.99), readers ages 4-8 meet a girl named Heidi who feels invisible at her new school. And it\u2019s true, she is, because Heidi is a stick insect, \u201ctall and long like the twig of a tree,\u201d with camouflage that makes her blend in with the background to such a degree that the other students at Bug School\u2014the honeybees, fire ants and praying mantises, among others\u2014overlook her. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cTwig\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Aura Parker/Simon and Schuster\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aura Parker\u2019s\n\n\n\n quirky, delicate pictures (see nearby) of the school and its pupils are full of seek-and-find interest, especially her jolly scenes of a crowded playground. Eventually Heidi\u2019s teacher gets the class to devise a colorful solution for the new girl that gives her visibility whenever she wants it.\nIn a second picture book, a maladapted chameleon is stuck in a predicament that brings to mind\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Raymond Chandler\u2019s\n\n\n\n brilliant line about a fellow looking \u201cabout as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.\u201d For the protagonist of \u201cNeon Leon\u201d (Nosy Crow, 22 pages, $14.99), the problem is color. In Britta Teckentrup\u2019s bold illustrations, Leon stands out in electric orange against the gentler greens, grays and blues of the world. \u201cOh dear,\u201d writes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jane Clarke\n\n\n\n in this chatty tale for 2- to 5-year-olds, \u201cLeon\u2019s so bright, he\u2019s keeping all the other chameleons awake! What a lot of grumpy chameleons!\u201d Will Leon find his place in the world? (Well, yes, but where?)\nThick obsidian lines run through vivid, jostling colors in the aboriginal Australian artwork to be found in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bronwyn Bancroft\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cShapes of Australia\u201d (Little Hare, 24 pages, $17.99). Each richly ornamented page in this picture book for the smallest children evokes objects such as boulders, creeks and honeycombs. \u201cGrasslands create a quilt of nature\u2019s comfort,\u201d we read as serpentine lines of green traverse bright square blocks of meadow. Teardrop shapes crammed with acrylic dots and circles are \u201ctermite nests settle[d] comfortably by a doomed tree.\u201d Tucked into the A gripping romantic thriller about a girl sent to found a new colony in a remote, habitable planet; a hilarious meta picture book starring a certain Sith lord from a galaxy far, far away; and more. ",
        "author": "Meghan Cox Gurdon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Under Stalin (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "386",
        "date": "2017-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-under-stalin-1487635509?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=99",
        "text": "The Soviet Union may have pioneered in space with Sputnik and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin,\n\n\n\n but today Russia has less than 1% of the world commercial market in space telecommunications, the most successful commercial product so far stemming from space exploration. Russians may have won Nobel Prizes for developing the laser, but Russia today is insignificant in the production of lasers for the world market. Russians may have developed the first digital computer in continental Europe, but who today buys a Russian computer? By missing out on the multi-billion-dollar markets for lasers, computers and space-based telecommunications, Russia has suffered a grievous economic loss. \nAccompanying this technical and economic failure was a human tragedy. Russian achievements in science and technology occurred in an environment of political terror. The father of the Russian hydrogen bomb,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrei Sakharov,\n\n\n\n wrote in his memoirs that the research facility in which he worked was built by political prisoners, and each morning he looked out the window of his office to see them marching under armed guard to their construction sites. The \u201cchief designer\u201d of the Soviet space program,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergei Korolev,\n\n\n\n was long a prisoner who worked in a special prison laboratory, or sharashka. The dean of Soviet airplane designers, A.N. Tupolev, also labored for years as a prisoner in a special laboratory. Three of the Soviet Union\u2019s Nobel Prize-winning physicists were arrested for alleged political disloyalty. Probably half of the engineers in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s were eventually arrested. In 1928 alone 648 members of the staff of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were purged.\n\n\n\n\nWhen one looks at these statistics and at the genuine achievements of Soviet science, one is forced to ask basic questions about the relation of freedom to scientific progress. During the Soviet period, with all the atrocities, 10 Soviet scientists won Nobel Prizes. How could that be? \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n wsj\n \n\n\n\n\n\nStalin and the ScientistsBy Simon Ings\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAtlantic Monthly, 508 pages, $28\n\n\nDuring the past 30 years, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a group of scholars\u201420 or so\u2014primarily in the United States, Canada, Britain and Russia, have been trying to tell the story of Soviet science and answer some of these questions. They have worked in newly opened archives and have interviewed hundreds of people. Most of the resulting scholarship has been published in academic presses and journals with small readerships. In \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stalin\n\n\n\n and the Scientists,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Simon Ings\n\n\n\n has made an effort to read all of this material and summarize it. A science writer rather than an academic, he has not worked in the archives himself or done primary research on his own, but he has read prodigiously. And he is a gifted writer. \n\n\n\u201cStalin and the Scientists\u201d is a good single source for anyone approaching Soviet science for the first time. It suffers from a number of flaws, however. Mr. Ings writes about what interests him most, such as biology, psychology and physiology. He gives no attention to mathematics and very little to theoretical physics, the fields in which the Soviet Union was the strongest. To him, physics means atomic weapons, but the Nobel Prizes that Soviet physicists won were in theoretical areas to which Mr. Ings gives little space.\nMr. Ings admirable effort to reach nonspecialized readers sometimes leads him to make exaggerated statements. He claims that we have \u201cgood agricultural and climate data for Russia going back over a thousand years\u201d when in fact the data is incomplete and unreliable. Each of the following statements is incorrect or exaggerated: \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexei Gastev\n\n\n\n was a \u2018leading architect of the Soviet industrialisation programme\u2019 \u201d; \u201cThe Bolsheviks never meant to nationalise industry on a mass scale\u201d; the chemist V.N. Ipatiev owned the \u201choliday home in which\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicholas II\n\n\n\n and his family were murdered\u201d; \u201cmost intellectuals had welcomed the revolutions of 1917\u201d;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergei Vavilov\n\n\n\n would become the \u201cpermanent secretary\u201d of the Academy of Sciences under Stalin;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikolai Bernstein\n\n\n\n \u201cinvented cybernetics\u201d; collectivization of the Soviet type was an \u201cAmerican\u201d invention;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Niels Bohr\u2019s\n\n\n\n work on physics showed that \u201cnothing useful can be said about the actual state of the universe\u201d; the arrest of the great Soviet biologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikolai Vavilov\n\n\n\n \u201chad nothing to do with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trofim Lysenko,\n\n\n\n \u201d the powerful and wrong-headed agronomist; Stalin was \u201cthe last in a long line of European philosopher kings\u201d; \u201canti-semitism was not a strong force in Soviet life\u201d;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikolai Fedorov\n\n\n\n \u201crivalled\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Karl Marx\n\n\n\n as an intellectual driver of the 1917 revolution\u201d; \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trotsky\n\n\n\n was a notorious blow-hard\u201d; \u201cBy the time of its unexpected collapse, the Soviet Union had become what its founders had always dreamt it might become: a scientific state.\u201d\nThe claim that the Soviet Union was a scientific state brings Mr. Ings close, in his conclusion, to condemning science itself. He sees science and technology as causing a coming global ecological collapse, and he thinks that in some ways the demise of the Soviet Union was a preview of what we will all soon face. In one of his final sentences he says: \u201cWe are all little Stalinists now, convinced of the efficacy of science to bail us out of any and every crisis.\u201d \u201cStalin and the Scientists\u201d deserves attention, but a very critical form of attention. It is based on an impressive amount of study, and most readers will learn a great deal. It is, however, incomplete and overdrawn.\nMr. Graham is professor of the history of science emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tand Harvard University. Soviet scientists developed the laser, pioneered semiconductors and launched the first satellite. Their advances were undone by political terror. Loren Graham reviews \u201cStalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953\u201d by Simon Ings. ",
        "author": "Loren Graham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Under Stalin (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "387",
        "date": "2017-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-under-stalin-1487635509?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=130",
        "text": "The Soviet Union may have pioneered in space with Sputnik and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin,\n\n\n\n but today Russia has less than 1% of the world commercial market in space telecommunications, the most successful commercial product so far stemming from space exploration. Russians may have won Nobel Prizes for developing the laser, but Russia today is insignificant in the production of lasers for the world market. Russians may have developed the first digital computer in continental Europe, but who today buys a Russian computer? By missing out on the multi-billion-dollar markets for lasers, computers and space-based telecommunications, Russia has suffered a grievous economic loss. \nAccompanying this technical and economic failure was a human tragedy. Russian achievements in science and technology occurred in an environment of political terror. The father of the Russian hydrogen bomb,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrei Sakharov,\n\n\n\n wrote in his memoirs that the research facility in which he worked was built by political prisoners, and each morning he looked out the window of his office to see them marching under armed guard to their construction sites. The \u201cchief designer\u201d of the Soviet space program,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergei Korolev,\n\n\n\n was long a prisoner who worked in a special prison laboratory, or sharashka. The dean of Soviet airplane designers, A.N. Tupolev, also labored for years as a prisoner in a special laboratory. Three of the Soviet Union\u2019s Nobel Prize-winning physicists were arrested for alleged political disloyalty. Probably half of the engineers in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s were eventually arrested. In 1928 alone 648 members of the staff of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were purged.\n\n\n\n\nWhen one looks at these statistics and at the genuine achievements of Soviet science, one is forced to ask basic questions about the relation of freedom to scientific progress. During the Soviet period, with all the atrocities, 10 Soviet scientists won Nobel Prizes. How could that be? \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n wsj\n \n\n\n\n\n\nStalin and the ScientistsBy Simon Ings\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAtlantic Monthly, 508 pages, $28\n\n\nDuring the past 30 years, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a group of scholars\u201420 or so\u2014primarily in the United States, Canada, Britain and Russia, have been trying to tell the story of Soviet science and answer some of these questions. They have worked in newly opened archives and have interviewed hundreds of people. Most of the resulting scholarship has been published in academic presses and journals with small readerships. In \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stalin\n\n\n\n and the Scientists,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Simon Ings\n\n\n\n has made an effort to read all of this material and summarize it. A science writer rather than an academic, he has not worked in the archives himself or done primary research on his own, but he has read prodigiously. And he is a gifted writer. \n\n\n\u201cStalin and the Scientists\u201d is a good single source for anyone approaching Soviet science for the first time. It suffers from a number of flaws, however. Mr. Ings writes about what interests him most, such as biology, psychology and physiology. He gives no attention to mathematics and very little to theoretical physics, the fields in which the Soviet Union was the strongest. To him, physics means atomic weapons, but the Nobel Prizes that Soviet physicists won were in theoretical areas to which Mr. Ings gives little space.\nMr. Ings admirable effort to reach nonspecialized readers sometimes leads him to make exaggerated statements. He claims that we have \u201cgood agricultural and climate data for Russia going back over a thousand years\u201d when in fact the data is incomplete and unreliable. Each of the following statements is incorrect or exaggerated: \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexei Gastev\n\n\n\n was a \u2018leading architect of the Soviet industrialisation programme\u2019 \u201d; \u201cThe Bolsheviks never meant to nationalise industry on a mass scale\u201d; the chemist V.N. Ipatiev owned the \u201choliday home in which\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicholas II\n\n\n\n and his family were murdered\u201d; \u201cmost intellectuals had welcomed the revolutions of 1917\u201d;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergei Vavilov\n\n\n\n would become the \u201cpermanent secretary\u201d of the Academy of Sciences under Stalin;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikolai Bernstein\n\n\n\n \u201cinvented cybernetics\u201d; collectivization of the Soviet type was an \u201cAmerican\u201d invention;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Niels Bohr\u2019s\n\n\n\n work on physics showed that \u201cnothing useful can be said about the actual state of the universe\u201d; the arrest of the great Soviet biologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikolai Vavilov\n\n\n\n \u201chad nothing to do with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trofim Lysenko,\n\n\n\n \u201d the powerful and wrong-headed agronomist; Stalin was \u201cthe last in a long line of European philosopher kings\u201d; \u201canti-semitism was not a strong force in Soviet life\u201d;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nik Soviet scientists developed the laser, pioneered semiconductors and launched the first satellite. Their advances were undone by political terror. Loren Graham reviews \u201cStalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953\u201d by Simon Ings. ",
        "author": "Loren Graham"
    },
    {
        "title": "How American Workers Got Lazy (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "388",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-american-workers-got-lazy-1488240716?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=129",
        "text": "That\u2019s the fear of Tyler Cowen, who argues in \u201cThe Complacent Class\u201d that America is increasingly defined by an aversion to risk as well as to anything that is unfamiliar or different. He sees a broad swath of the American population losing \u201cthe capacity to imagine or embrace a world where things do change rapidly for most if not all people.\u201d This mind-set, he says, has \u201csapped us of the pioneer spirit that made America the world\u2019s most productive and innovative economy.\u201d \nMany data points underscore the diminished dynamism of the U.S. economy. Mr. Cowen notes that the entrepreneurship rate has plunged, with start-ups accounting for only 7%-8% of all U.S. companies today, down from 12%-13% in the 1980s. The percentage of workers who switch jobs each year\u2014suggesting the enticement of better prospects more than the forced shifts triggered by layoffs\u2014has declined by nearly 50% in the past 15 years. And innovation is slowing, reflected in everything from falling productivity (for the past eight years, about half the postwar average) to a 25% decline, since 1999, in U.S. patents that are also filed in Europe and Japan (signaling the rigor of such patents). What\u2019s more, the innovation that\u2019s happening tends to be more incremental (think Airbnb) than fully transformational (e.g., automated, single-passenger airplanes). \n\n\n\n\nTo make his case, Mr. Cowen draws a contrast between the changes that Americans experienced in the first half of the 20th century and the changes of the past 50 years. The earlier period saw dramatic improvements in health and education as well as a proliferation of automobiles, airplanes and telephones. By comparison, the changes since 1965 have been modest. \u201cA lot of our technological world seems to have stood pretty much still,\u201d he writes, \u201calbeit with a variety of quality improvements along the way.\u201d He even notes that, while popular narcotics in the past were mind-altering (LSD) or activity-inciting (cocaine), today\u2019s drugs of choice, such as heroin and opioids, \u201cinduce a dreamlike stupor and passivity.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n wsj\n \n\n\n\n\n\nThe Complacent ClassBy Tyler Cowen\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSt. Martin\u2019s, 241 pages, $28.99\n\n\nOne contributor to such lethargy and complacency, says Mr. Cowen, is the \u201cmatching\u201d that makes it easier than ever before for people to find precisely what they want (or what an algorithm thinks they want) in everything, from music to a mate. There is now a dating app, created by Oscar Mayer, specifically targeted at bacon lovers. While acknowledging the benefits of matching, such as \u201chigher peaks of cooperative achievement and excellence,\u201d Mr. Cowen focuses on the downsides: \u201ca fundamental shift of societal energy away from building a new and freer world and toward rearranging the pieces in the world we already have.\u201d \n\n\nMatching is also fostering de facto segregation by education levels, class and race, Mr. Cowen argues, particularly in upscale college town like Austin, Texas; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Bloomington, Ind.; and Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. He fears that such sorting will reinforce itself, depressing intermingling and stifling income mobility. \u201cSegregation\u2019s losers,\u201d he writes, \u201care often the poorest and most vulnerable individuals in America\u201d who frequently live amid \u201cpeers who in many cases encourage destructive rather than successful behavior patterns.\u201d\nMr. Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University and creator of the Marginal Revolution blog, is well-known for his free-market outlook. But \u201cThe Complacent Class\u201d is refreshingly nonideological, filled with observations\u2014e.g., the fact that a rising share of the federal budget is on autopilot\u2014that will resonate with conservatives, liberals and libertarians. Written before the conclusion of the presidential campaign, the book only briefly touches on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump,\n\n\n\n noting that his campaign proposals amounted to \u201clittle more than a recipe for de facto stasis.\u201d Mr. Trump and his supporters would surely disagree. \nGiven Mr. Cowen\u2019s own innovative thinking, it\u2019s disappointing that he does not focus more on potential remedies to the torpor he describes. Instead, he puts forward a cursory set of ideas (he labels them \u201cdeliberately speculative\u201d) for reviving American dynamism over the next two decades. These include the transformational possibilities of artificial intelligence and space exploration as well as more mundane matters, like access to cheaper energy and the reduced use of antidepressants.\nIn the meantime, he sees trouble on the horizon, predicting that the United States is going to see a wave of online crime that will cause the internet to become walled off, reinforcing group isolation. In a closing section on global affairs, he asserts that the world is likely to become a more dangerous place. \u201cThe higher the benefits of peace,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe more gun-shy and war-shy the prosperous and peaceful countries will become. And thus the greater the in Employees switch jobs at half the rate they did 15 years ago. Entrepreneurship has also plunged: Only 7%-8% of U.S. companies are start-ups. ",
        "author": "Matthew Rees"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: The New Off-World Economy (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "389",
        "date": "2019-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-the-new-off-world-economy-11558125151?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=60",
        "text": "That looks prescient now, with swaggering space barons like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n using their own billions to go into orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Suarez\u2019s\n\n\n\n hugely impressive \u201cDelta-v\u201d (Dutton, 448 pages, $28) fuses the real world with sci-fi, giving the space genre a new boost and new hope. \nThe problems, of course, remain formidable, especially the financial ones. If it costs $2,000-plus to boost a kilogram into low earth orbit, what\u2019s the price of putting a many-thousand-ton hotel/space base up there? On the other hand, once humanity has a foothold outside Earth\u2019s gravity well, the cost of moving materials there from deep space\u2014mined from asteroids, say\u2014becomes almost trifling. An asteroid like Ryugu (reached by the Hayabusa2 probe while Mr. Suarez was finishing his book) contains iron, nickel, cobalt and nitrogen estimated at some $80 billion.\n\n\n\n\nBig costs, big profits, big future. But not reachable the big-government way. The philosophy of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nathan Joyce,\n\n\n\n Mr. Suarez\u2019s financier-hero, is to send humans up to solve problems on the spot that pre-programmed AIs couldn\u2019t. The risks they run provide the narrative excitement: technical failures and rival billionaire-projects in space, creditor takeovers and angry governments back on earth.\n\n\nEven more exciting, though, is the sense of what could and can be done. Gaseous carbonyl extraction to process metal from planetary dust. Chemical vapor deposition to mold machine parts. Both are needed, in the end, to make a lifeboat after the mined materials have been launched back\u2014because, unlike NASA, billionaire-funded projects send you up there but leave it to you to get home.\nAt least you can pick where you land. There\u2019s a final comic scene as surviving crew members touch down and are greeted by frowning officials with a list of offenses and fines payable. \u201cWill this cover our fine?\u201d asks an astronaut holding a space diamond (its nature and origin already explained as carefully as all other details). \u201cWelcome to Kazakhstan!\u201d is the answer. It\u2019s not what they\u2019d say at Cape Canaveral, that\u2019s for sure.\nMr. Suarez concludes with a dozen-item reading list, to make the point that he\u2019s not just free-wheeling and the issues aren\u2019t all technological. Space exploration is not just romance; it\u2019s not even just to keep the human species from having all its eggs in one basket. It\u2019s also there, he suggests, to save our economies from the day the debt-bubble bursts. This is the High Frontier for financiers and politicians as well as for fans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chen Qiufan\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cWaste Tide\u201d (Tor, 347 pages, $26.99), translated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Liu,\n\n\n\n centers on a different kind of mineral extraction. Silicon Isle is a vast waste-reclamation center on the shore of the South China Sea. It\u2019s also a vision of Hell. There, \u201cwaste girls\u201d sit all day picking endlessly through buckets of trash, sorting the plastic according to type. If there\u2019s any doubt, the test is to set fire to the scrap and sniff\u2014not a procedure that ensures long life.\nThe real money, moreover, comes from reclaiming rare-earth metals, vital for military technology and for consumer goods. China controls 95% of world production, but fortunately about 80% of the rare earths in consumer e-waste can be recycled\u2014at vast cost in pollution, naturally, so it makes economic sense to send it somewhere where the operatives don\u2019t have to be provided with health insurance.\nThe waste is hellish in more than one sense. Much of it, in Mr. Chen\u2019s horrifying vision, will come in the near future from prosthetic implants, artificial cochleas, breast implants and the other self-enhancements of the developed world. The microbatteries in discarded prosthetics live on, the limbs twitch, dead but microchipped guard dogs wag their tails, the boundary between life and death isn\u2019t clear any more.\nThe discarded prosthetics contain body fluids too. And viruses, which aren\u2019t dead at all. Just to add to the sense of horror, Silicon Isle has not abandoned its old ways while dealing with new materials. The clans of Luo, Lin and Chen jockey for power. The waste people consult witches and pursue their old and horrible habit of \u201cpalirromancy,\u201d predicting the future by observing the struggles of tied and drowning animals, so similar to the twitching guard dogs of the e-world.\nWe follow Mimi, a virus-infected waste girl who becomes, in the end, a kind of cybergoddess; and, much more ironically, Scott Brandle, a Mr. Nice Guy working for ever-so-eco-friendly TerraGreen Recycling. But those who export the waste are just as involved as those who process it. That\u2019s what globalization means. Mr. Chen quotes an old proverb: \u201cGod comes with leaden feet, but strikes with iron hands.\u201d Space exploration isn\u2019t just romance; it\u2019s not even just to keep the human species from having all its eggs in one basket. It\u2019s also there, Daniel Suarez suggest, to save our economies from the day the debt-bubble bursts. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: The New Off-World Economy (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "390",
        "date": "2019-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-the-new-off-world-economy-11558125151?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=73",
        "text": "That looks prescient now, with swaggering space barons like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n using their own billions to go into orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Suarez\u2019s\n\n\n\n hugely impressive \u201cDelta-v\u201d (Dutton, 448 pages, $28) fuses the real world with sci-fi, giving the space genre a new boost and new hope. \nThe problems, of course, remain formidable, especially the financial ones. If it costs $2,000-plus to boost a kilogram into low earth orbit, what\u2019s the price of putting a many-thousand-ton hotel/space base up there? On the other hand, once humanity has a foothold outside Earth\u2019s gravity well, the cost of moving materials there from deep space\u2014mined from asteroids, say\u2014becomes almost trifling. An asteroid like Ryugu (reached by the Hayabusa2 probe while Mr. Suarez was finishing his book) contains iron, nickel, cobalt and nitrogen estimated at some $80 billion.\n\n\n\n\nBig costs, big profits, big future. But not reachable the big-government way. The philosophy of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nathan Joyce,\n\n\n\n Mr. Suarez\u2019s financier-hero, is to send humans up to solve problems on the spot that pre-programmed AIs couldn\u2019t. The risks they run provide the narrative excitement: technical failures and rival billionaire-projects in space, creditor takeovers and angry governments back on earth.\n\n\nEven more exciting, though, is the sense of what could and can be done. Gaseous carbonyl extraction to process metal from planetary dust. Chemical vapor deposition to mold machine parts. Both are needed, in the end, to make a lifeboat after the mined materials have been launched back\u2014because, unlike NASA, billionaire-funded projects send you up there but leave it to you to get home.\nAt least you can pick where you land. There\u2019s a final comic scene as surviving crew members touch down and are greeted by frowning officials with a list of offenses and fines payable. \u201cWill this cover our fine?\u201d asks an astronaut holding a space diamond (its nature and origin already explained as carefully as all other details). \u201cWelcome to Kazakhstan!\u201d is the answer. It\u2019s not what they\u2019d say at Cape Canaveral, that\u2019s for sure.\nMr. Suarez concludes with a dozen-item reading list, to make the point that he\u2019s not just free-wheeling and the issues aren\u2019t all technological. Space exploration is not just romance; it\u2019s not even just to keep the human species from having all its eggs in one basket. It\u2019s also there, he suggests, to save our economies from the day the debt-bubble bursts. This is the High Frontier for financiers and politicians as well as for fans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chen Qiufan\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cWaste Tide\u201d (Tor, 347 pages, $26.99), translated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Liu,\n\n\n\n centers on a different kind of mineral extraction. Silicon Isle is a vast waste-reclamation center on the shore of the South China Sea. It\u2019s also a vision of Hell. There, \u201cwaste girls\u201d sit all day picking endlessly through buckets of trash, sorting the plastic according to type. If there\u2019s any doubt, the test is to set fire to the scrap and sniff\u2014not a procedure that ensures long life.\nThe real money, moreover, comes from reclaiming rare-earth metals, vital for military technology and for consumer goods. China controls 95% of world production, but fortunately about 80% of the rare earths in consumer e-waste can be recycled\u2014at vast cost in pollution, naturally, so it makes economic sense to send it somewhere where the operatives don\u2019t have to be provided with health insurance.\nThe waste is hellish in more than one sense. Much of it, in Mr. Chen\u2019s horrifying vision, will come in the near future from prosthetic implants, artificial cochleas, breast implants and the other self-enhancements of the developed world. The microbatteries in discarded prosthetics live on, the limbs twitch, dead but microchipped guard dogs wag their tails, the boundary between life and death isn\u2019t clear any more.\nThe discarded prosthetics contain body fluids too. And viruses, which aren\u2019t dead at all. Just to add to the sense of horror, Silicon Isle has not abandoned its old ways while dealing with new materials. The clans of Luo, Lin and Chen jockey for power. The waste people consult witches and pursue their old and horrible habit of \u201cpalirromancy,\u201d predicting the future by observing the struggles of tied and drowning animals, so similar to the twitching guard dogs of the e-world.\nWe follow Mimi, a virus-infected waste girl who becomes, in the end, a kind of cybergoddess; and, much more ironically, Scott Brandle, a Mr. Nice Guy working for ever-so-eco-friendly TerraGreen Recycling. But those who export the waste are just as involved as those who process it. That\u2019s what globalization means. Mr. Chen quotes an old proverb: \u201cGod comes with leaden feet, but strikes with iron hands.\u201d Space exploration isn\u2019t just romance; it\u2019s not even just to keep the human species from having all its eggs in one basket. It\u2019s also there, Daniel Suarez suggest, to save our economies from the day the debt-bubble bursts. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Great and Marvelous \u2018Wonders\u2019 (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "391",
        "date": "2017-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-great-and-marvelous-wonders-1510954863?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=83",
        "text": "If so, the sense of wonder must be ancient, a primal experience that predates Homo sapiens. But as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Caspar Henderson\n\n\n\n shows in \u201cA New Map of Wonders,\u201d the experience of wonder is more than just simple, stupefying awe. Both\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Plato\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aristotle\n\n\n\n called wonder the beginning of philosophy, but to Mr. Henderson wonder is something worthy of contemplation in and of itself. Why do certain things fill us with wonder and other things don\u2019t? Neurologically, how does wonder work in the brain? Could there even be a dark side to this blissful experience?\n\n\nA New Map of WondersBy Caspar Henderson\n\t\t\n\t\t\tChicago, 371 pages, $29\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEchoing the Seven Wonders of the World, Mr. Henderson divides his book into seven chapters, each of which explores a broad scientific topic: light; the origin of life; the heart; the brain; a human life span; planet Earth; and future technologies. The book builds from small, simple phenomena to more complex ones. But in truth, the structure is just the scaffolding, the girders underlying a magnificent Baroque edifice. Mr. Henderson, a British journalist, rarely hews very long to the subject at hand before digressing into something else: religion, art, mythology, a dozen other marvels. He\u2019s basically composed a literary Kunstkammer, one of those old-fashioned \u201ccabinets of wonder\u201d where learned scholars would cram fossils next to chalices next to seashells next to stuffed frogs or birds of paradise\u2014whatever captured their fancy. \u201cThe aim [of the book] is simply to witness some wonders as far as I can,\u201d he writes, \u201cand to get a better sense of the size of those wonders and where they are: to recognize them.\u201d\nIn his chapter on light, for example, Mr. Henderson skips around from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n watching twilight from space, to the historical difficulties of measuring the speed of light, to the physiology of human vision, to different cultures\u2019 views of rainbows, to the spectacle of the Northern Lights, which \u201cscroll over the curve of the horizon like the puddles of cool flame from brandy burning on a giant Christmas pudding.\u201d\n\n\nAlthough funny at times (\u201cwonder and humour are not mutually exclusive,\u201d he says), the book has a learned tone overall, with quotations and further explanations sprinkled in the margins. And for a book about the natural world, Mr. Henderson spends little time describing actual experiences in nature. (In that sense, the book lacks the immediacy of, say, Annie Dillard\u2019s essays or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David George Haskell\u2019s\n\n\n\n 2012 \u201cThe Forest Unseen.\u201d) But he makes up for that with page after page of gems unearthed from the quarries of history. One of my favorites is a provocative suggestion in the 1960s by the legal scholar\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Fisher\n\n\n\n that, as Mr. Henderson summarizes, \u201cinstead of having [nuclear] launch codes in an attach\u00e9 case carried by a young officer constantly at the President\u2019s side, the codes be surgically implanted in a capsule beneath the officer\u2019s heart. Then, if the President decided that the murder of tens of millions of people was necessary, he would himself have to access the codes by using a butcher\u2019s knife to gouge out the young man\u2019s heart.\u201d\nIt sounds barbaric, but Mr. Henderson notes that this setup, by making the president confront the enormity of ordering a nuclear strike, would make one far less likely, a true last resort. In this way, he suggests, the idea was really an attempt \u201cto retain a sense of decency in dark times.\u201d And it\u2019s revealing that the proposal involved hiding the capsule not behind the officer\u2019s kidneys or spleen but his heart, what Mr. Henderson calls \u201cthe centre of some of the things that matter most in our being.\u201d Passages like this show \u201cA New Map\u201d at its best: surprising, memorable and moving.\nThere\u2019s always a danger in a book like this: that examining the world scientifically might \u201cundo\u201d our sense of wonder and render the objects of inquiry lifeless\u2014that explaining things will explain them away. This isn\u2019t a new concern. (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Keats\n\n\n\n complained of scientists \u201cunweaving the rainbow,\u201d and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wordsworth\n\n\n\n once remarked that \u201cWe murder to dissect.\u201d) But the worry looms ever larger in our technical age. \u201cA New Map of Wonders\u201d does get bogged down in details occasionally, but for Mr. Henderson a scientific understanding heightens the sense of awe. In one evocative passage he points out that the behavior of superfluid helium (a supercooled form that can flow uphill, among other tricks) and the behavior of a flock of starlings (in which thousands of birds will veer and gyre and flow through the sky as one mass, like a gigantic airborne amoeba) can be described by the same mathematics. A poet would call this link a metaphor, since it aids our understanding of both.\nAnd really, the idea that science might neuter our sense of wonder seems overblown. Human beings both think and feel, and if our sense of wonder for the natural world is\u2014as the chimps at Gombe suggest\u2014hard-wired into our psyches, then the understanding we acquire through science won\u2019t destroy that response. The essential physics of rainbows was worked out in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Isaac Newton\u2019s\n\n\n\n day. But (Keats notwithstanding) has anyone since ever walked outside and seen a rainbow and felt disappointed? Despite the knowledge that it\u2019s just the refraction of sunbeams through water droplets, instinct and awe still win out.\nBut even simple rainbows, as Mr. Henderson notes, become more complicated when refracted through human consciousness. Some cultures in Indonesia and the Amazon regard rainbows not as joyful but as threatening, as portents of doom. It\u2019s a startling thought, but it\u2019s one of just several places in the book where the author swerves, damping the joy with unexpected melancholy. This penchant becomes especially obvious in the book\u2019s final chapter, which focuses on how three technologies\u2014new ways to generate energy, space exploration, and advanced computing/robotics\u2014might remake humanity. As one example, Mr. Henderson discusses what it would take for humans to visit Mars and, eventually, colonize other planets. You might expect that a man who was rhapsodizing about exoplanets a few pages earlier would be pretty gung-ho about sending astronauts on the greatest adventure in human history, but no. He actually sounds dismissive, even frightened: \u201cThese visions strike me as outlandish, verging on stark raving bonkers.\u201d It\u2019s a good reminder that there\u2019s a dark edge to wonder sometimes. Romantic poets called it the sublime\u2014a blend of awe and terror. We\u2019re sometimes fascinated by things that horrify us.\nAt different points in the book, Mr. Henderson gamely tries to define \u201cwonder.\u201d He comes closest, I think, in calling it \u201cthe apprehension of something bigger and better of which we are momentarily a part.\u201d That sense of fleetingness is important, too\u2014permanent wonder would anesthetize us. In the epilogue, Mr. Henderson notes that medieval pilgrims sometimes held mirrors up to holy relics in distant lands, then proudly showed the mirrors off when they returned home, convinced that the looking glass had somehow \u201cretained some of the relic\u2019s power,\u201d even if the image was transient. Mr. Henderson then compares his book to such a mirror, offering a hope that his brief reflections on awe-inspiring phenomena might imprint the reader in turn. He absolutely succeeds: As with the chimps in Gombe, staring at the waning sunset on the horizon, the glow of \u201cA New Map of Wonders\u201d will linger long after you put the book down.\n\u2014Mr. Kean is the author,\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tmost recently, of \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Caesar\u2019s\n\n\n\n \n\t\t\n\tLast Breath: Decoding the\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tSecrets of the Air Around Us.\u201d Science doesn\u2019t really destroy mystery. The physics of prisms was worked out in Isaac Newton\u2019s day. But has anyone ever seen a rainbow and felt disappointed? ",
        "author": "Sam Kean"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Give: Books on Science (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "392",
        "date": "2017-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-to-give-books-on-science-1510784333?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=24",
        "text": "What with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n determination to colonize Mars and a new wave of outward-looking science fiction (\u201cInterstellar,\u201d \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d), space has become glamorous again in a way it hasn\u2019t been since the Columbia disaster. Former Navy captain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly\n\n\n\n has spent more consecutive days in space than any other American\u2014a whole year on the International Space Station. His \u201cEndurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery\u201d (Knopf, 387 pages, $29.95) is a memoir of the right stuff that will hypnotize any space geek, with its streak of astronautical romance and its laconic descriptions of technical details. \u201cMy first task is to remove insulation from a main bus switching unit,\u201d he narrates, \u201cso the unit can later be removed by the main robotic arm.\u201d Sounds like dull grunt work, but he\u2019s doing it on a spacewalk.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Douglas Jones\n \n\n\n\n\n\nNeed a book for the art lover, sports fan or history buff in your life this holiday season? Check out these gift guides from The Wall Street Journal\u2019s books team.More gift ideas for readers in this weekend\u2019s Wall Street Journal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace itself may one day be colonized by an artificial \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that has escaped our control and is hell-bent on seeding the universe with copies of itself. That, at least, is one possible future described in \u201cLife 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence\u201d (Knopf, 384 pages, $28), by the physicist Max Tegmark. This terrifically lucid book contains explanations of everything from electronic logic circuits to game theory, cosmology and software that plays Go: it is probably the best popular overview to date of arguments about AI. If we seek to create an electronic superintelligence, Mr. Tegmark points out, the deep problem we need to solve first is that of \u201cvalue loading.\u201d How do we ensure the machine\u2019s values are aligned with ours, and so prevent a \u201cbreakout\u201d whereby it takes over the world? Even an AI primarily designed to protect humans, he observes, would almost certainly first take steps to prevent itself from being turned off. And from that moment we\u2019ll no longer be in control. As HAL in \u201c2001\u201d memorably puts it: \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Dave, I\u2019m afraid I can\u2019t do that.\u201d \nPhysics and biology have long been the glamour sciences, so spare a thought for their less-celebrated sibling, chemistry, without which the modern world would also be impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Gray\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cReactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe\u201d (Black Dog & Leventhal, 216 pages, $29.99) is a sumptuous coffee-table odyssey from the characters of individual atoms to our astonishing ability to \u201csee\u201d molecules orbiting distant stars. The pictures complement the text ideally, whether of sugar and oxygen reacting in \u201ca lovely fireball\u201d or\u2014in the enjoyably named \u201cThe Boring Chapter\u201d\u2014an artist\u2019s impression of what paint is doing while you watch it dry. The perfect adjunct to a chemistry set for any curious youngster, as long as you\u2019re not worried about explosions. \n\n\nChemistry also runs the batteries in our smartphones and enables us to spend all day contributing to the profits of the giant tech corporations. But what exactly is Big Tech up to?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Galloway\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google\u201d (Portfolio, 310 pages, $28) bracingly dismisses the corporate legends and origin myths put out by the companies themselves and offers his own analysis of their strategies, which is at once admiring and sardonic. (The corporations \u201ccheat\u201d and \u201csteal,\u201d he says, mainly because we let them.) The author, as a serial entrepreneur and business professor, brings his own insights into play in a pleasantly disarming way. At one of the companies he worked at, he reports, \u201cI had turned $600 million, of other people\u2019s money, into $350 million.\u201d Easily done.\nAnd what of the brave new world that the Four and their successors will build for us? In \u201cSoonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That\u2019ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything\u201d (Penguin Press, 358 pages, $30), Kelly and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zach Weinersmith\n\n\n\n offer an entertaining look at future tech wizardry, from space tourism and asteroid mining to nuclear fusion power, matter replication, synthetic biology and direct brain-computer interfaces, which no doubt would be an even more efficient way to serve us ads. The text is very well-researched, with a casual, friendly style (\u201cTinkering with the language of life. What could go wrong?\u201d), and color cartoons add a wry counterpoint to the narrative of a future that, as always, might be utopia or disaster.\nFor an omni-curious reader, the year\u2019s most mind-bending supermassive black hole of a book is physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Geoffrey West\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cScale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Steven Poole recommends the best books to give to the science lover in your life. ",
        "author": "Steven Poole"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Give: Books on Science (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "393",
        "date": "2017-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-to-give-books-on-science-1510784333?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=84",
        "text": "What with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n determination to colonize Mars and a new wave of outward-looking science fiction (\u201cInterstellar,\u201d \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d), space has become glamorous again in a way it hasn\u2019t been since the Columbia disaster. Former Navy captain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly\n\n\n\n has spent more consecutive days in space than any other American\u2014a whole year on the International Space Station. His \u201cEndurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery\u201d (Knopf, 387 pages, $29.95) is a memoir of the right stuff that will hypnotize any space geek, with its streak of astronautical romance and its laconic descriptions of technical details. \u201cMy first task is to remove insulation from a main bus switching unit,\u201d he narrates, \u201cso the unit can later be removed by the main robotic arm.\u201d Sounds like dull grunt work, but he\u2019s doing it on a spacewalk.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Douglas Jones\n \n\n\n\n\n\nNeed a book for the art lover, sports fan or history buff in your life this holiday season? Check out these gift guides from The Wall Street Journal\u2019s books team.More gift ideas for readers in this weekend\u2019s Wall Street Journal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace itself may one day be colonized by an artificial \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that has escaped our control and is hell-bent on seeding the universe with copies of itself. That, at least, is one possible future described in \u201cLife 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence\u201d (Knopf, 384 pages, $28), by the physicist Max Tegmark. This terrifically lucid book contains explanations of everything from electronic logic circuits to game theory, cosmology and software that plays Go: it is probably the best popular overview to date of arguments about AI. If we seek to create an electronic superintelligence, Mr. Tegmark points out, the deep problem we need to solve first is that of \u201cvalue loading.\u201d How do we ensure the machine\u2019s values are aligned with ours, and so prevent a \u201cbreakout\u201d whereby it takes over the world? Even an AI primarily designed to protect humans, he observes, would almost certainly first take steps to prevent itself from being turned off. And from that moment we\u2019ll no longer be in control. As HAL in \u201c2001\u201d memorably puts it: \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Dave, I\u2019m afraid I can\u2019t do that.\u201d \nPhysics and biology have long been the glamour sciences, so spare a thought for their less-celebrated sibling, chemistry, without which the modern world would also be impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Gray\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cReactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe\u201d (Black Dog & Leventhal, 216 pages, $29.99) is a sumptuous coffee-table odyssey from the characters of individual atoms to our astonishing ability to \u201csee\u201d molecules orbiting distant stars. The pictures complement the text ideally, whether of sugar and oxygen reacting in \u201ca lovely fireball\u201d or\u2014in the enjoyably named \u201cThe Boring Chapter\u201d\u2014an artist\u2019s impression of what paint is doing while you watch it dry. The perfect adjunct to a chemistry set for any curious youngster, as long as you\u2019re not worried about explosions. \n\n\nChemistry also runs the batteries in our smartphones and enables us to spend all day contributing to the profits of the giant tech corporations. But what exactly is Big Tech up to?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Galloway\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google\u201d (Portfolio, 310 pages, $28) bracingly dismisses the corporate legends and origin myths put out by the companies themselves and offers his own analysis of their strategies, which is at once admiring and sardonic. (The corporations \u201ccheat\u201d and \u201csteal,\u201d he says, mainly because we let them.) The author, as a serial entrepreneur and business professor, brings his own insights into play in a pleasantly disarming way. At one of the companies he worked at, he reports, \u201cI had turned $600 million, of other people\u2019s money, into $350 million.\u201d Easily done.\nAnd what of the brave new world that the Four and their successors will build for us? In \u201cSoonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That\u2019ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything\u201d (Penguin Press, 358 pages, $30), Kelly and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zach Weinersmith\n\n\n\n offer an entertaining look at future tech wizardry, from space tourism and asteroid mining to nuclear fusion power, matter replication, synthetic biology and direct brain-computer interfaces, which no doubt would be an even more efficient way to serve us ads. The text is very well-researched, with a casual, friendly style (\u201cTinkering with the language of life. What could go wrong?\u201d), and color cartoons add a wry counterpoint to the narrative of a future that, as always, might be utopia or disaster.\nFor an omni-curious reader, the year\u2019s most mind-bending supermassive black hole of a book is physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Geoffrey West\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cScale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies\u201d (Penguin Press, 479 pages, $30). The book begins with the observation that things do not scale linearly: If you double an animal\u2019s size, for example, its weight cubes, but the strength of its limbs only squares. Thus, poor Godzilla would collapse under his own weight, unless he were \u201calmost all leg.\u201d From here the author takes you on a quite spectacular journey through the science of shipbuilding, the metabolism of trees, the right dose of LSD to give an elephant and the ideal dimensions of a city. From simple algebra to lessons for the future of human civilization, this is science writing as wonder and as inspiration. \n\u2014Mr. Poole is the author of \u201cRethink: The Surprising\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tHistory of New Ideas.\u201d Steven Poole recommends the best books to give to the science lover in your life. ",
        "author": "Steven Poole"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Give: Books on Science (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "394",
        "date": "2017-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-to-give-books-on-science-1510784333?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=108",
        "text": "What with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n determination to colonize Mars and a new wave of outward-looking science fiction (\u201cInterstellar,\u201d \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d), space has become glamorous again in a way it hasn\u2019t been since the Columbia disaster. Former Navy captain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly\n\n\n\n has spent more consecutive days in space than any other American\u2014a whole year on the International Space Station. His \u201cEndurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery\u201d (Knopf, 387 pages, $29.95) is a memoir of the right stuff that will hypnotize any space geek, with its streak of astronautical romance and its laconic descriptions of technical details. \u201cMy first task is to remove insulation from a main bus switching unit,\u201d he narrates, \u201cso the unit can later be removed by the main robotic arm.\u201d Sounds like dull grunt work, but he\u2019s doing it on a spacewalk.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Douglas Jones\n \n\n\n\n\n\nNeed a book for the art lover, sports fan or history buff in your life this holiday season? Check out these gift guides from The Wall Street Journal\u2019s books team.More gift ideas for readers in this weekend\u2019s Wall Street Journal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace itself may one day be colonized by an artificial \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that has escaped our control and is hell-bent on seeding the universe with copies of itself. That, at least, is one possible future described in \u201cLife 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence\u201d (Knopf, 384 pages, $28), by the physicist Max Tegmark. This terrifically lucid book contains explanations of everything from electronic logic circuits to game theory, cosmology and software that plays Go: it is probably the best popular overview to date of arguments about AI. If we seek to create an electronic superintelligence, Mr. Tegmark points out, the deep problem we need to solve first is that of \u201cvalue loading.\u201d How do we ensure the machine\u2019s values are aligned with ours, and so prevent a \u201cbreakout\u201d whereby it takes over the world? Even an AI primarily designed to protect humans, he observes, would almost certainly first take steps to prevent itself from being turned off. And from that moment we\u2019ll no longer be in control. As HAL in \u201c2001\u201d memorably puts it: \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Dave, I\u2019m afraid I can\u2019t do that.\u201d \nPhysics and biology have long been the glamour sciences, so spare a thought for their less-celebrated sibling, chemistry, without which the modern world would also be impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Gray\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cReactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe\u201d (Black Dog & Leventhal, 216 pages, $29.99) is a sumptuous coffee-table odyssey from the characters of individual atoms to our astonishing ability to \u201csee\u201d molecules orbiting distant stars. The pictures complement the text ideally, whether of sugar and oxygen reacting in \u201ca lovely fireball\u201d or\u2014in the enjoyably named \u201cThe Boring Chapter\u201d\u2014an artist\u2019s impression of what paint is doing while you watch it dry. The perfect adjunct to a chemistry set for any curious youngster, as long as you\u2019re not worried about explosions. \n\n\nChemistry also runs the batteries in our smartphones and enables us to spend all day contributing to the profits of the giant tech corporations. But what exactly is Big Tech up to?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Galloway\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google\u201d (Portfolio, 310 pages, $28) bracingly dismisses the corporate legends and origin myths put out by the companies themselves and offers his own analysis of their strategies, which is at once admiring and sardonic. (The corporations \u201ccheat\u201d and \u201csteal,\u201d he says, mainly because we let them.) The author, as a serial entrepreneur and business professor, brings his own insights into play in a pleasantly disarming way. At one of the companies he worked at, he reports, \u201cI had turned $600 million, of other people\u2019s money, into $350 million.\u201d Easily done.\nAnd what of the brave new world that the Four and their successors will build for us? In \u201cSoonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That\u2019ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything\u201d (Penguin Press, 358 pages, $30), Kelly and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zach Weinersmith\n\n\n\n offer an entertaining look at future tech wizardry, from space tourism and asteroid mining to nuclear fusion power, matter replication, synthetic biology and direct brain-computer interfaces, which no doubt would be an even more efficient way to serve us ads. The text is very well-researched, with a casual, friendly style (\u201cTinkering with the language of life. What could go wrong?\u201d), and color cartoons add a wry counterpoint to the narrative of a future that, as always, might be utopia or disaster.\nFor an omni-curious reader, the year\u2019s most mind-bending supermassive black hole of a book is physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Geoffrey West\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cScale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Steven Poole recommends the best books to give to the science lover in your life. ",
        "author": "Steven Poole"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stargazers See a Business Plan (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "395",
        "date": "2018-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/stargazers-see-a-business-plan-1523817375?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=77",
        "text": "Two books now present the business stories of these companies:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Fernholz\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race\u201d and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christian Davenport\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.\u201d The books cover a similar chronology and are of similar length, but their approaches are subtly different.\n\n\n\n\nIn \u201cRocket Billionaires,\u201d Mr. Fernholz, a reporter at the website Quartz, provides the better organized narrative, centered on the private sector\u2019s quest to build reusable rocket technology. Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX gets more attention here because it is the company that, so far, has achieved the most. Initially, it ferried cargo up to the International Space Station; its success in those missions enabled it to win a contract from NASA as one of the two U.S. companies that will soon fly U.S. astronauts there. NASA has been paying Russians to do the ferrying since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.\n\n\nThe SpaceX story is enlivened by a secondary storyline: David competing for government contracts against a Goliath, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of defense behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The ULA rockets cost $400 million per launch; SpaceX\u2019s, $100 million. When asked to explain the difference, SpaceX\u2019s president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n quipped: \u201cI don\u2019t know how to build a $400 million rocket.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRocket BillionairesBy Tim Fernholz\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 281 pages, $28 The Space BaronsBy Christian Davenport\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPublicAffairs, 308 pages, $28\n\n\nIn \u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d Mr. Davenport, a reporter with the Washington Post, devotes more attention to Mr. Bezos, tracing his interest in space from the age of 5 and serving up treacle about Mr. Bezos\u2019s summers on his grandparents\u2019 ranch, \u201can ideal place for a starry-eyed kid who dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut to indulge his science fiction fantasies.\u201d The author is rather starry-eyed himself, excitedly relating the biographies of Mr. Branson and Mr. Allen, too, and their long-standing interests in aviation and space.\nDifferent beginnings in the two books are telling. With Mr. Fernholz, we are present at the launch countdown in June 2015, as a SpaceX Falcon 9 is readied. Up it went, its exhaust wake becoming a \u201cnine-petaled flower of wispy clouds.\u201d Then, two minutes later, it exploded. The thousands of people \u201cwatching the company\u2019s live video stream online were left staring at the pure, baby-blue Florida sky,\u201d he writes. \nMr. Davenport\u2019s first chapter also involves a dramatic aviation mishap: a near-fatal crash in Texas of a helicopter in which Mr. Bezos was a passenger. The Falcon 9 explosion in the other book nicely sets up a central theme, of the difficulty of attaining reliability at low cost. The helicopter crash, on the other hand, is a narrative dead end, merely adumbrating the portrait that Mr. Davenport will draw of Mr. Bezos as unflappable.\nBoth books show how SpaceX and Blue Origin have been impressively creative in reducing design and production costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. SpaceX builds its rockets horizontally, for example, so that it can use ordinary warehouse space instead of building expensive \u201chigh bay\u201d space. SpaceX and Blue Origin are similar in their approach to reusability as well, constructing rockets, not planes, that rely on retropropulsion for landing. By flipping the descending rocket so that the nose points upward, and by switching on the rocket engine in the final stage, a cushion of hot gas provides a gentle landing.\nPractical reusability also entails reducing the need for extensive refurbishing after each flight, something that SpaceX seems to have achieved. The space shuttle did not. After each flight, it required 1.2 million procedures and many months before it was ready to fly again.\nTo its credit, SpaceX has allowed the public to watch its launches and landings, some of which have ended badly. When a SpaceX rocket exploded as it was about to land on a drone ship, the company shared videos of the fireball. Mr. Musk tweeted: \u201cFull RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event.\u201d By contrast, Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has operated in a secretive fashion. When it reaches a milestone, it calls up reporters to show them the video. If it fails\u2014Mr. Davenport describes \u201ca thundering explosion\u201d in 2011 in the vicinity of Blue Origin\u2019s facility in West Texas\u2014the company remains silent. \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s design relies on \u201cair launch,\u201d its rocket firing only after the aircraft is taken aloft by another plane. Both books cover Virgin Galactic\u2019s story through 2014, when a test flight ended catastrophically, killing a pilot. After that, it grounded its aircraft\u2014until this month, as it happens, when it announced the completion of its first post-crash flight. \nVirgin Galactic and Blue Origin have trained their sights on space tourism, preparing to offer wealthy passengers the chance to experience microgravity. \u201cEntertainment turns out to be the driver of technologies,\u201d Mr. Bezos says, noting the barnstormers in the early days of aviation who would land in farmers\u2019 fields and sell tickets for short rides. SpaceX need not tarry with such trifles. It seems tantalizingly close to being the first startup to supply reliable, reusable rocket technology to take U.S. astronauts up to their orbiting workplace. Most gratifying, it will mean an end to NASA\u2019s generous payouts to hitch rides with the Russians. \nMr. Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University, is the author, most recently, of \u201cA Practical Education.\u201d The space startups launched by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have reduced costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. Randall Stross reviews \u201cRocket Billionaires\u201d by Tim Fernholz and \u201cThe Space Barons\u201d by Christian Davenport. ",
        "author": "Randall Stross"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Onward, Upward and \u2018The Future of Humanity\u2019 (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "396",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-onward-upward-and-the-future-of-humanity-1519343797?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=79",
        "text": "The basic motivation for getting off Earth, Mr. Kaku points out, is that the planet won\u2019t sustain us forever. If we don\u2019t make it uninhabitable through nuclear war or runaway global warming, we will still be at the mercy of massive asteroid strikes, or the next ice age, or the inevitable death of the sun, which will incinerate the Earth. If humanity is to endure, we need a backup. \u201cEither we must leave the Earth or we will perish,\u201d Mr. Kaku writes. \u201cThere is no other way.\u201d\nThe early parts of \u201cThe Future of Humanity\u201d involve getting out further into the solar system. (Mr. Musk has already announced his determination to found a colony on Mars.) With admirable clarity and ease, Mr. Kaku rehearses the history of rocketry and the formation of the planets, and explains how we might colonize not only Mars but some of the rocky moons of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. The grunt work of making another such world habitable could, he explains, be performed by self-replicating robots, able to build innumerable copies of themselves from whatever stuff lies to hand. Crops could be bioengineered to thrive in different atmospheres. And water could be released from Mars\u2019s polar ice caps, Mr. Musk has suggested, simply by nuking them. \n\n\n\n\nReaders may be surprised how much of the know-how for such projects already exists. It\u2019s clear how we might mine asteroids for the rare-earth metals that are crucial to the electronics industry, and it is pleasing to learn that people have already figured out what to build a moon base with: \u201cExperiments have shown that lunar soil, when heated by microwaves, can be melted and fused to make rock-hard ceramic bricks, which could be the basic building blocks for the entire moon base.\u201d It sounds a bit like lunar Lego.\n\n\nOnce humans have safely spread out within the solar system, it will surely be tempting to try to go interstellar. For that we\u2019re going to need a bigger boat. Mr. Kaku explains various plausible options for a starship\u2019s engines, the most exciting of which is very like the warp drive in \u201cStar Trek.\u201d Thus equipped, humans might indeed radiate out into a vast cosmic diaspora. But eventually, in many billions of years, we\u2019ll face the same problem we did on Earth: the destruction of our habitat, only this time the habitat will be everything. The entire universe, current thinking suggests, is doomed to end up in total disorder and darkness, making the continuation of life impossible. Mr. Kaku dreams that we might even try to escape this fate by sneaking through a wormhole into a fresh, new universe. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nThe Future of HumanityBy Michio Kaku\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDoubleday, 339 pages, $29.95\n\n\nThe book has an infectious, can-do enthusiasm and is occasionally even a little silly. (One interlude warns us that low-gravity sports will be very different from the familiar Olympics.) But since the author covers so much ground\u2014appropriately enough for a book about traveling the universe\u2014no subject can be treated in great depth. A short chapter on artificial intelligence and the possible rise of \u201csuperintelligent\u201d machines, for example, can\u2019t compete with the definitive book-length investigations of the topic,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nick Bostrom\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSuperintelligence\u201d and Max Tegmark\u2019s \u201cLife 3.0.\u201d \nWhat, meanwhile, does a highly speculative work of popular science such as this one do that a well-researched work of science fiction doesn\u2019t? Mr. Kaku understands SF\u2019s attractions\u2014he introduces chapter topics by mentioning movies (such as \u201cInterstellar\u201d) or novels (such as Isaac Asimov\u2019s \u201cFoundation\u201d series). But a lot of modern science fiction is richer than Mr. Kaku\u2019s treatments of his subjects in technical detail as well as in emotional heft. \nThe kind of planetary emergency that motivates humans to get off Earth as quickly as possible is superbly dramatized in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neal Stephenson\u2019s\n\n\n\n novel \u201cSeveneves.\u201d The challenges of terraforming other planets, to make them Earthlike and habitable, are explored deeply in Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s Mars novel sequence. And when Mr. Kaku wonders whether alien races would be benign, and whether we should even be broadcasting our existence to them, one wants to point to the epic treatment of such questions in the best-selling \u201cThree-Body Problem\u201d trilogy by the Chinese master\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cixin Liu.\n\n\n\n \nAt one point, Mr. Kaku suggests that future humans might encode their \u201cconnectome\u201d (essentially, their consciousness) into laser beams, to indulge in space tourism at the speed of light. He acknowledges the engineering problems involved in such a project\u2014which include building way-stations along the path to re-amplify the laser signal\u2014but he doesn\u2019t mention the severe conceptual problems. If a copy of my consciousness is uploaded into a traveling laser beam, but I remain on Earth, how do I enjoy this experience myself? Or if my own consciousness is transferred to the laser beam, what happens to my body? Is it destroyed? Isn\u2019t that a little bit like killing me? Such questions have long been asked both in science fiction and in philosophy, and they show that the future of humanity is always about more than physics alone.\nMr. Poole is the author of \u201cRethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas.\u201d Sooner or later, a physicist warns, Earth will be unable to sustain human life. If the species is to survive, we\u2019ll need to find another home. Steven Poole reviews \u2018The Future of Humanity\u2019 by Michio Kaku. ",
        "author": "Steven Poole"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Onward, Upward and \u2018The Future of Humanity\u2019 (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "397",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-onward-upward-and-the-future-of-humanity-1519343797?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=101",
        "text": "The basic motivation for getting off Earth, Mr. Kaku points out, is that the planet won\u2019t sustain us forever. If we don\u2019t make it uninhabitable through nuclear war or runaway global warming, we will still be at the mercy of massive asteroid strikes, or the next ice age, or the inevitable death of the sun, which will incinerate the Earth. If humanity is to endure, we need a backup. \u201cEither we must leave the Earth or we will perish,\u201d Mr. Kaku writes. \u201cThere is no other way.\u201d\nThe early parts of \u201cThe Future of Humanity\u201d involve getting out further into the solar system. (Mr. Musk has already announced his determination to found a colony on Mars.) With admirable clarity and ease, Mr. Kaku rehearses the history of rocketry and the formation of the planets, and explains how we might colonize not only Mars but some of the rocky moons of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. The grunt work of making another such world habitable could, he explains, be performed by self-replicating robots, able to build innumerable copies of themselves from whatever stuff lies to hand. Crops could be bioengineered to thrive in different atmospheres. And water could be released from Mars\u2019s polar ice caps, Mr. Musk has suggested, simply by nuking them. \n\n\n\n\nReaders may be surprised how much of the know-how for such projects already exists. It\u2019s clear how we might mine asteroids for the rare-earth metals that are crucial to the electronics industry, and it is pleasing to learn that people have already figured out what to build a moon base with: \u201cExperiments have shown that lunar soil, when heated by microwaves, can be melted and fused to make rock-hard ceramic bricks, which could be the basic building blocks for the entire moon base.\u201d It sounds a bit like lunar Lego.\n\n\nOnce humans have safely spread out within the solar system, it will surely be tempting to try to go interstellar. For that we\u2019re going to need a bigger boat. Mr. Kaku explains various plausible options for a starship\u2019s engines, the most exciting of which is very like the warp drive in \u201cStar Trek.\u201d Thus equipped, humans might indeed radiate out into a vast cosmic diaspora. But eventually, in many billions of years, we\u2019ll face the same problem we did on Earth: the destruction of our habitat, only this time the habitat will be everything. The entire universe, current thinking suggests, is doomed to end up in total disorder and darkness, making the continuation of life impossible. Mr. Kaku dreams that we might even try to escape this fate by sneaking through a wormhole into a fresh, new universe. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nThe Future of HumanityBy Michio Kaku\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDoubleday, 339 pages, $29.95\n\n\nThe book has an infectious, can-do enthusiasm and is occasionally even a little silly. (One interlude warns us that low-gravity sports will be very different from the familiar Olympics.) But since the author covers so much ground\u2014appropriately enough for a book about traveling the universe\u2014no subject can be treated in great depth. A short chapter on artificial intelligence and the possible rise of \u201csuperintelligent\u201d machines, for example, can\u2019t compete with the definitive book-length investigations of the topic,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nick Bostrom\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSuperintelligence\u201d and Max Tegmark\u2019s \u201cLife 3.0.\u201d \nWhat, meanwhile, does a highly speculative work of popular science such as this one do that a well-researched work of science fiction doesn\u2019t? Mr. Kaku understands SF\u2019s attractions\u2014he introduces chapter topics by mentioning movies (such as \u201cInterstellar\u201d) or novels (such as Isaac Asimov\u2019s \u201cFoundation\u201d series). But a lot of modern science fiction is richer than Mr. Kaku\u2019s treatments of his subjects in technical detail as well as in emotional heft. \nThe kind of planetary emergency that motivates humans to get off Earth as quickly as possible is superbly dramatized in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neal Stephenson\u2019s\n\n\n\n novel \u201cSeveneves.\u201d The challenges of terraforming other planets, to make them Earthlike and habitable, are explored deeply in Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s Mars novel sequence. And when Mr. Kaku wonders whether alien races would be benign, and whether we should even be broadcasting our existence to them, one wants to point to the epic treatment of such questions in the best-selling \u201cThree-Body Problem\u201d trilogy by the Chinese master\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cixin Liu.\n\n\n\n \nAt one point, Mr. Kaku suggests that future humans might encode their \u201cconnectome\u201d (essentially, their consciousness) into laser beams, to indulge in space tourism at the speed of light. He acknowledges the engineering problems involved in such a project\u2014which include building way-stations along the path to re-amplify the laser signal\u2014but he doesn\u2019t mention the severe conceptual problems. If a copy of my consciousness is uploaded into a traveling laser beam, but I remain on Earth, how do I enjoy this experience myself? Or if my own consciousness is transferred to the la Sooner or later, a physicist warns, Earth will be unable to sustain human life. If the species is to survive, we\u2019ll need to find another home. Steven Poole reviews \u2018The Future of Humanity\u2019 by Michio Kaku. ",
        "author": "Steven Poole"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stargazers See a Business Plan (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "398",
        "date": "2018-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/stargazers-see-a-business-plan-1523817375?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=23",
        "text": "Two books now present the business stories of these companies:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Fernholz\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race\u201d and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christian Davenport\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.\u201d The books cover a similar chronology and are of similar length, but their approaches are subtly different.\n\n\n\n\nIn \u201cRocket Billionaires,\u201d Mr. Fernholz, a reporter at the website Quartz, provides the better organized narrative, centered on the private sector\u2019s quest to build reusable rocket technology. Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX gets more attention here because it is the company that, so far, has achieved the most. Initially, it ferried cargo up to the International Space Station; its success in those missions enabled it to win a contract from NASA as one of the two U.S. companies that will soon fly U.S. astronauts there. NASA has been paying Russians to do the ferrying since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.\n\n\nThe SpaceX story is enlivened by a secondary storyline: David competing for government contracts against a Goliath, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of defense behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The ULA rockets cost $400 million per launch; SpaceX\u2019s, $100 million. When asked to explain the difference, SpaceX\u2019s president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n quipped: \u201cI don\u2019t know how to build a $400 million rocket.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRocket BillionairesBy Tim Fernholz\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 281 pages, $28 The Space BaronsBy Christian Davenport\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPublicAffairs, 308 pages, $28\n\n\nIn \u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d Mr. Davenport, a reporter with the Washington Post, devotes more attention to Mr. Bezos, tracing his interest in space from the age of 5 and serving up treacle about Mr. Bezos\u2019s summers on his grandparents\u2019 ranch, \u201can ideal place for a starry-eyed kid who dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut to indulge his science fiction fantasies.\u201d The author is rather starry-eyed himself, excitedly relating the biographies of Mr. Branson and Mr. Allen, too, and their long-standing interests in aviation and space.\nDifferent beginnings in the two books are telling. With Mr. Fernholz, we are present at the launch countdown in June 2015, as a SpaceX Falcon 9 is readied. Up it went, its exhaust wake becoming a \u201cnine-petaled flower of wispy clouds.\u201d Then, two minutes later, it exploded. The thousands of people \u201cwatching the company\u2019s live video stream online were left staring at the pure, baby-blue Florida sky,\u201d he writes. \nMr. Davenport\u2019s first chapter also involves a dramatic aviation mishap: a near-fatal crash in Texas of a helicopter in which Mr. Bezos was a passenger. The Falcon 9 explosion in the other book nicely sets up a central theme, of the difficulty of attaining reliability at low cost. The helicopter crash, on the other hand, is a narrative dead end, merely adumbrating the portrait that Mr. Davenport will draw of Mr. Bezos as unflappable.\nBoth books show how SpaceX and Blue Origin have been impressively creative in reducing design and production costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. SpaceX builds its rockets horizontally, for example, so that it can use ordinary warehouse space instead of building expensive \u201chigh bay\u201d space. SpaceX and Blue Origin are similar in their approach to reusability as well, constructing rockets, not planes, that rely on retropropulsion for landing. By flipping the descending rocket so that the nose points upward, and by switching on the rocket engine in the final stage, a cushion of hot gas provides a gentle landing.\nPractical reusability also entails reducing the need for extensive refurbishing after each flight, something that SpaceX seems to have achieved. The space shuttle did not. After each flight, it required 1.2 million procedures and many months before it was ready to fly again.\nTo its credit, SpaceX has allowed the public to watch its launches and landings, some of which have ended badly. When a SpaceX rocket exploded as it was about to land on a drone ship, the company shared videos of the fireball. Mr. Musk tweeted: \u201cFull RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event.\u201d By contrast, Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has operated in a secretive fashion. When it reaches a milestone, it calls up reporters to show them the video. If it fails\u2014Mr. Davenport describes \u201ca thundering explosion\u201d in 2011 in the vicinity of Blue Origin\u2019s facility in West Texas\u2014the company remains silent. \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s design relies on \u201cair launch,\u201d its rocket firing only after the aircraft is taken aloft by another plane. Both books cover Virgin Galactic\u2019s story through 2014, when a test flight ended catastrophically, killing a pilot. After that, it grounded its aircraft\u2014until this month, as it happens, when it announced the completion of its first post-crash flight. \nVirgin Galactic an The space startups launched by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have reduced costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. Randall Stross reviews \u201cRocket Billionaires\u201d by Tim Fernholz and \u201cThe Space Barons\u201d by Christian Davenport. ",
        "author": "Randall Stross"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stargazers See a Business Plan (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "399",
        "date": "2018-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/stargazers-see-a-business-plan-1523817375?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=70",
        "text": "Two books now present the business stories of these companies:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Fernholz\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race\u201d and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christian Davenport\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.\u201d The books cover a similar chronology and are of similar length, but their approaches are subtly different.\nIn \u201cRocket Billionaires,\u201d Mr. Fernholz, a reporter at the website Quartz, provides the better organized narrative, centered on the private sector\u2019s quest to build reusable rocket technology. Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX gets more attention here because it is the company that, so far, has achieved the most. Initially, it ferried cargo up to the International Space Station; its success in those missions enabled it to win a contract from NASA as one of the two U.S. companies that will soon fly U.S. astronauts there. NASA has been paying Russians to do the ferrying since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.\n\n\nThe SpaceX story is enlivened by a secondary storyline: David competing for government contracts against a Goliath, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of defense behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The ULA rockets cost $400 million per launch; SpaceX\u2019s, $100 million. When asked to explain the difference, SpaceX\u2019s president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n quipped: \u201cI don\u2019t know how to build a $400 million rocket.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRocket BillionairesBy Tim Fernholz\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 281 pages, $28 The Space BaronsBy Christian Davenport\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPublicAffairs, 308 pages, $28\n\n\nIn \u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d Mr. Davenport, a reporter with the Washington Post, devotes more attention to Mr. Bezos, tracing his interest in space from the age of 5 and serving up treacle about Mr. Bezos\u2019s summers on his grandparents\u2019 ranch, \u201can ideal place for a starry-eyed kid who dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut to indulge his science fiction fantasies.\u201d The author is rather starry-eyed himself, excitedly relating the biographies of Mr. Branson and Mr. Allen, too, and their long-standing interests in aviation and space.\nDifferent beginnings in the two books are telling. With Mr. Fernholz, we are present at the launch countdown in June 2015, as a SpaceX Falcon 9 is readied. Up it went, its exhaust wake becoming a \u201cnine-petaled flower of wispy clouds.\u201d Then, two minutes later, it exploded. The thousands of people \u201cwatching the company\u2019s live video stream online were left staring at the pure, baby-blue Florida sky,\u201d he writes. \nMr. Davenport\u2019s first chapter also involves a dramatic aviation mishap: a near-fatal crash in Texas of a helicopter in which Mr. Bezos was a passenger. The Falcon 9 explosion in the other book nicely sets up a central theme, of the difficulty of attaining reliability at low cost. The helicopter crash, on the other hand, is a narrative dead end, merely adumbrating the portrait that Mr. Davenport will draw of Mr. Bezos as unflappable.\nBoth books show how SpaceX and Blue Origin have been impressively creative in reducing design and production costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. SpaceX builds its rockets horizontally, for example, so that it can use ordinary warehouse space instead of building expensive \u201chigh bay\u201d space. SpaceX and Blue Origin are similar in their approach to reusability as well, constructing rockets, not planes, that rely on retropropulsion for landing. By flipping the descending rocket so that the nose points upward, and by switching on the rocket engine in the final stage, a cushion of hot gas provides a gentle landing.\nPractical reusability also entails reducing the need for extensive refurbishing after each flight, something that SpaceX seems to have achieved. The space shuttle did not. After each flight, it required 1.2 million procedures and many months before it was ready to fly again.\nTo its credit, SpaceX has allowed the public to watch its launches and landings, some of which have ended badly. When a SpaceX rocket exploded as it was about to land on a drone ship, the company shared videos of the fireball. Mr. Musk tweeted: \u201cFull RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event.\u201d By contrast, Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has operated in a secretive fashion. When it reaches a milestone, it calls up reporters to show them the video. If it fails\u2014Mr. Davenport describes \u201ca thundering explosion\u201d in 2011 in the vicinity of Blue Origin\u2019s facility in West Texas\u2014the company remains silent. \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s design relies on \u201cair launch,\u201d its rocket firing only after the aircraft is taken aloft by another plane. Both books cover Virgin Galactic\u2019s story through 2014, when a test flight ended catastrophically, killing a pilot. After that, it grounded its aircraft\u2014until this month, as it happens, when it announced the completion of its first post-crash flight. \nVirgin Galactic and Bl The space startups launched by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have reduced costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. Randall Stross reviews \u201cRocket Billionaires\u201d by Tim Fernholz and \u201cThe Space Barons\u201d by Christian Davenport. ",
        "author": "Randall Stross"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stargazers See a Business Plan (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "400",
        "date": "2018-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/stargazers-see-a-business-plan-1523817375?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=69",
        "text": "Two books now present the business stories of these companies:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Fernholz\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race\u201d and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christian Davenport\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.\u201d The books cover a similar chronology and are of similar length, but their approaches are subtly different.\nIn \u201cRocket Billionaires,\u201d Mr. Fernholz, a reporter at the website Quartz, provides the better organized narrative, centered on the private sector\u2019s quest to build reusable rocket technology. Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX gets more attention here because it is the company that, so far, has achieved the most. Initially, it ferried cargo up to the International Space Station; its success in those missions enabled it to win a contract from NASA as one of the two U.S. companies that will soon fly U.S. astronauts there. NASA has been paying Russians to do the ferrying since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.\n\n\nThe SpaceX story is enlivened by a secondary storyline: David competing for government contracts against a Goliath, United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of defense behemoths Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The ULA rockets cost $400 million per launch; SpaceX\u2019s, $100 million. When asked to explain the difference, SpaceX\u2019s president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n quipped: \u201cI don\u2019t know how to build a $400 million rocket.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRocket BillionairesBy Tim Fernholz\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 281 pages, $28 The Space BaronsBy Christian Davenport\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPublicAffairs, 308 pages, $28\n\n\nIn \u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d Mr. Davenport, a reporter with the Washington Post, devotes more attention to Mr. Bezos, tracing his interest in space from the age of 5 and serving up treacle about Mr. Bezos\u2019s summers on his grandparents\u2019 ranch, \u201can ideal place for a starry-eyed kid who dreamed of one day becoming an astronaut to indulge his science fiction fantasies.\u201d The author is rather starry-eyed himself, excitedly relating the biographies of Mr. Branson and Mr. Allen, too, and their long-standing interests in aviation and space.\nDifferent beginnings in the two books are telling. With Mr. Fernholz, we are present at the launch countdown in June 2015, as a SpaceX Falcon 9 is readied. Up it went, its exhaust wake becoming a \u201cnine-petaled flower of wispy clouds.\u201d Then, two minutes later, it exploded. The thousands of people \u201cwatching the company\u2019s live video stream online were left staring at the pure, baby-blue Florida sky,\u201d he writes. \nMr. Davenport\u2019s first chapter also involves a dramatic aviation mishap: a near-fatal crash in Texas of a helicopter in which Mr. Bezos was a passenger. The Falcon 9 explosion in the other book nicely sets up a central theme, of the difficulty of attaining reliability at low cost. The helicopter crash, on the other hand, is a narrative dead end, merely adumbrating the portrait that Mr. Davenport will draw of Mr. Bezos as unflappable.\nBoth books show how SpaceX and Blue Origin have been impressively creative in reducing design and production costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. SpaceX builds its rockets horizontally, for example, so that it can use ordinary warehouse space instead of building expensive \u201chigh bay\u201d space. SpaceX and Blue Origin are similar in their approach to reusability as well, constructing rockets, not planes, that rely on retropropulsion for landing. By flipping the descending rocket so that the nose points upward, and by switching on the rocket engine in the final stage, a cushion of hot gas provides a gentle landing.\nPractical reusability also entails reducing the need for extensive refurbishing after each flight, something that SpaceX seems to have achieved. The space shuttle did not. After each flight, it required 1.2 million procedures and many months before it was ready to fly again.\nTo its credit, SpaceX has allowed the public to watch its launches and landings, some of which have ended badly. When a SpaceX rocket exploded as it was about to land on a drone ship, the company shared videos of the fireball. Mr. Musk tweeted: \u201cFull RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) event.\u201d By contrast, Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has operated in a secretive fashion. When it reaches a milestone, it calls up reporters to show them the video. If it fails\u2014Mr. Davenport describes \u201ca thundering explosion\u201d in 2011 in the vicinity of Blue Origin\u2019s facility in West Texas\u2014the company remains silent. \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s design relies on \u201cair launch,\u201d its rocket firing only after the aircraft is taken aloft by another plane. Both books cover Virgin Galactic\u2019s story through 2014, when a test flight ended catastrophically, killing a pilot. After that, it grounded its aircraft\u2014until this month, as it happens, when it announced the completion of its first post-crash flight. \nVirgin Galactic and Bl The space startups launched by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have reduced costs far below what NASA and defense contractors are accustomed to. Randall Stross reviews \u201cRocket Billionaires\u201d by Tim Fernholz and \u201cThe Space Barons\u201d by Christian Davenport. ",
        "author": "Randall Stross"
    },
    {
        "title": "Children\u2019s Books: Diary of a Cold War Kid (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "401",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-diary-of-a-cold-war-kid-11564151479?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=52",
        "text": "The world-saving part of the story came after Jeff\u2019s operation, when the philanthropic Starlight Foundation offered to grant him a wish. His heart\u2019s desire was a bust, alas; there was no seat on the space shuttle for the rocketry-infatuated teen. What then? Thinking hard about something meaningful that might also end the \u201cwintry detachment\u201d of his remote and disdainful father, Jeff Henigson had an inspiration: \u201cMy wish is to travel to the Soviet Union and meet with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mikhail Gorbachev\n\n\n\n so that we can discuss bringing an end to nuclear weapons and the Cold War.\u201d\nIncredibly, something close to this did happen. In passages at turns humorous and poignant, the author relates his adventures behind the Iron Curtain as part of a youth exchange, and painful scenes on his return. In the U.S.S.R., the young Jeff almost kisses a girl in the Hermitage, gets surveilled by the KGB, and spends the night in a dacha with a nuclear scientist and his wife. Though the teenager is thwarted in his most sincere yearnings, readers ages 12-17 will be uplifted by this humane and entertaining chronicle.\nIt\u2019s harder to care about the individuals we meet in \u201cDreamland\u201d (Bloomsbury, 216 pages, $18.99), a grueling chronicle of America\u2019s opiate and heroin addictions, though through no fault of theirs. There are just so many of them, men and woman caught up in a double scourge. This adaptation for teen readers of Sam Quinones\u2019s 2015 nonfiction account of the same name traces the spread first of addictive prescription painkillers and then of the black-tar heroin that flooded in to feed the newly created mass craving.\n\n\nStarting and ending his narrative in working-class Portsmouth, Ohio\u2014once home to a large, popular pool called Dreamland, a place now paved over\u2014Mr. Quinones lays out tragic overlapping networks of supply and demand. He introduces readers ages 12-17 to unscrupulous doctors, pharmaceutical-company salespeople, Mexican drug couriers, American narcotics officers, and innumerable addicts and their grief-stricken families.\nIn 2007, Mr. Quinones notes, there came \u201ca stunning moment in the history of U.S. public health,\u201d when for the first time drug overdoses surpassed vehicle accidents as the principal cause of death by injury in Ohio. There is paradox in the macro-causes: Pharma-created opiates relieve suffering yet also inflict it; the same Medicaid designed to spare low-income people onerous medical costs also facilitated the spread of painkillers. The details are equally fascinating. The black-tar heroin for sale in small-town America comes from one western Mexican state, Nayarit. Its distributors have mostly been unarmed young men who slip into the U.S. for a few months at a time, changing cars often and staying out of the orbit of big-city criminal syndicates. The drug itself these drivers hold as single doses encased in balloons that are easily swallowed if they\u2019re stopped by police. \u201cWith their mouths full of twenty-five or thirty tiny balloons of heroin at a time,\u201d the author remarks, \u201cthey look like chipmunks.\u201d\nThis fast-moving and relatively austere account will acquaint teen readers with important elements of the opioid epidemic, though this discussion is only a gateway, if you will, to a deeper story of distress. Yet it ends on a note of quiet hope. Having hit bottom, Portsmouth, Ohio, is turning itself around. \u201cOnce a junkie\u2019s haven,\u201d Mr. Quinones writes, it is now a place with a culture of recovery, \u201ca refuge for those seeking a new life.\u201d A memoir of a teen\u2019s quixotic peace mission to the U.S.S.R. ",
        "author": "Meghan Cox Gurdon"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "402",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1969-moon-landing-the-great-leap-upward-11563549218?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=14",
        "text": "That\u2019s not surprising. Fewer than a third of Americans living today are old enough to have watched the flickering black-and-white images of Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin on their bulky cathode-tube TVs. A 50-year span covers a lot of American history. It was roughly half a century from the end of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s presidency to the inauguration of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abraham Lincoln\n\n\n\n or from the start of the Civil War to the first shots of World War I.\n\n\nRELATED\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n Book Review: When the Moon Was a Mystery \n\n\nIn the immediate afterglow, the triumph of Apollo 11 mesmerized Americans and millions around the world. The explorers\u2019 club of Magellan, Columbus, Amundsen and the rest now welcomed Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Michael Collins, who orbited in the command capsule while they were on the surface. The moon landing ranks with the splitting of the atom, heart transplants, the discovery of DNA and the plotting of the genome as transcendent human achievements in science and technology. Yet today few remember much more than Armstrong proclaiming, \u201cThe Eagle has landed,\u201d and the slightly elided \u201cOne step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d\nRather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence in the dark days of the Cold War, now itself as much a relic as the Apollo command capsule in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. After that first landing, the space program suffered a run of near-disasters and tragedies\u2014most poignantly the losses of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, which cost the lives of 14 crewmen and -women. These days, what\u2019s left of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has to thumb rides on Russian rockets to get its remaining astronauts to the International Space Station and back, and the exploration of our solar system is done by robotic probes.\n\nFor all that, the voyage to the moon is an epic worth retelling with narrative skill, illuminating detail and analytic exactitude. For the golden anniversary of the great leap upward, writers have filled a small shelf with new books that, each in its own way, reanimate the saga and re-examine the issues\u2014scientific, ideological, political, fiscal\u2014raised by the most expensive and complex scientific experiment mankind has ever undertaken. The Apollo program, like the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs, was essentially an all-male, all-white enterprise\u2014the kind of exploit that some cherish today as an exemplary Make America Great Again moment.\nWas it? For one thing, a central player in the drama was a Nazi. On the morning of May 2, 1945, as Allied forces pressed deeper into Germany after Hitler\u2019s suicide, a young German tied a white handkerchief to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedaled down a mountain road near the German-Austrian border until he encountered a platoon of American troops. Pvt. Fred Schneikert pointed his M1 at the youth, who told him his brother and some colleagues wanted to surrender to the Americans. His older brother was Wernher von Braun, an SS officer, and Wernher\u2019s comrades were the scientists and technicians who had helped him develop the V-2 \u201cVengeance\u201d rocket program that rained death on England, Belgium and France in the final days of the war. What\u2019s more, they had secreted tons of plans, blueprints and V-2 parts in nearby caves. Just before the Red Army flooded the zone, von Braun and his team, together with their stash were taken into American custody, their Nazi pasts magically erased, and soon put to work in Alabama on the Saturn rockets that a quarter-century later blasted Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Collins to the moon.\nEarly on in \u201cShoot for the Moon\u201d (Little, Brown, 453 pages, $30), James Donovan astutely tells the story of von Braun\u2019s surrender\u2014the fortuitous and slightly inconvenient first chapter in the American space epic. Mr. Donovan\u2019s story is heavily focused on the missions. The Mercury and Gemini flights led to the Apollo series that were the first manned vehicles to orbit the moon. The Apollo missions also produced the iconic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo of our exquisite blue marble seen from space, the triumphant Apollo 11 landing, and the \u201cHouston-we-have-a-problem\u201d voyage enshrined in the Tom Hanks movie \u201cApollo 13.\u201d\nMr. Donovan\u2019s account is chronological. He concentrates on the astronauts themselves and the flight directors and controllers back on Earth who faced nearly as much heart-clenching pressure as the fliers. The first classes of astronauts were hotshot test pilots and Korean War combat pilots. They were all under 35, shorter than 6 feet\u2014the better to fit into the cramped space capsules\u2014white, Christian, married. They all had IQs of at least 130, college degrees, and, in many cases, advanced degrees in aeronautics or engineering. To be accepted into Rather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "403",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1969-moon-landing-the-great-leap-upward-11563549218?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=53",
        "text": "That\u2019s not surprising. Fewer than a third of Americans living today are old enough to have watched the flickering black-and-white images of Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin on their bulky cathode-tube TVs. A 50-year span covers a lot of American history. It was roughly half a century from the end of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s presidency to the inauguration of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abraham Lincoln\n\n\n\n or from the start of the Civil War to the first shots of World War I.\n\n\nRELATED\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n Book Review: When the Moon Was a Mystery \n\n\nIn the immediate afterglow, the triumph of Apollo 11 mesmerized Americans and millions around the world. The explorers\u2019 club of Magellan, Columbus, Amundsen and the rest now welcomed Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Michael Collins, who orbited in the command capsule while they were on the surface. The moon landing ranks with the splitting of the atom, heart transplants, the discovery of DNA and the plotting of the genome as transcendent human achievements in science and technology. Yet today few remember much more than Armstrong proclaiming, \u201cThe Eagle has landed,\u201d and the slightly elided \u201cOne step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d\nRather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence in the dark days of the Cold War, now itself as much a relic as the Apollo command capsule in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. After that first landing, the space program suffered a run of near-disasters and tragedies\u2014most poignantly the losses of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, which cost the lives of 14 crewmen and -women. These days, what\u2019s left of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has to thumb rides on Russian rockets to get its remaining astronauts to the International Space Station and back, and the exploration of our solar system is done by robotic probes.\n\nFor all that, the voyage to the moon is an epic worth retelling with narrative skill, illuminating detail and analytic exactitude. For the golden anniversary of the great leap upward, writers have filled a small shelf with new books that, each in its own way, reanimate the saga and re-examine the issues\u2014scientific, ideological, political, fiscal\u2014raised by the most expensive and complex scientific experiment mankind has ever undertaken. The Apollo program, like the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs, was essentially an all-male, all-white enterprise\u2014the kind of exploit that some cherish today as an exemplary Make America Great Again moment.\nWas it? For one thing, a central player in the drama was a Nazi. On the morning of May 2, 1945, as Allied forces pressed deeper into Germany after Hitler\u2019s suicide, a young German tied a white handkerchief to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedaled down a mountain road near the German-Austrian border until he encountered a platoon of American troops. Pvt. Fred Schneikert pointed his M1 at the youth, who told him his brother and some colleagues wanted to surrender to the Americans. His older brother was Wernher von Braun, an SS officer, and Wernher\u2019s comrades were the scientists and technicians who had helped him develop the V-2 \u201cVengeance\u201d rocket program that rained death on England, Belgium and France in the final days of the war. What\u2019s more, they had secreted tons of plans, blueprints and V-2 parts in nearby caves. Just before the Red Army flooded the zone, von Braun and his team, together with their stash were taken into American custody, their Nazi pasts magically erased, and soon put to work in Alabama on the Saturn rockets that a quarter-century later blasted Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Collins to the moon.\nEarly on in \u201cShoot for the Moon\u201d (Little, Brown, 453 pages, $30), James Donovan astutely tells the story of von Braun\u2019s surrender\u2014the fortuitous and slightly inconvenient first chapter in the American space epic. Mr. Donovan\u2019s story is heavily focused on the missions. The Mercury and Gemini flights led to the Apollo series that were the first manned vehicles to orbit the moon. The Apollo missions also produced the iconic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo of our exquisite blue marble seen from space, the triumphant Apollo 11 landing, and the \u201cHouston-we-have-a-problem\u201d voyage enshrined in the Tom Hanks movie \u201cApollo 13.\u201d\nMr. Donovan\u2019s account is chronological. He concentrates on the astronauts themselves and the flight directors and controllers back on Earth who faced nearly as much heart-clenching pressure as the fliers. The first classes of astronauts were hotshot test pilots and Korean War combat pilots. They were all under 35, shorter than 6 feet\u2014the better to fit into the cramped space capsules\u2014white, Christian, married. They all had IQs of at least 130, college degrees, and, in many cases, advanced degrees in aeronautics or engineering. To be accepted into Rather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "404",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1969-moon-landing-the-great-leap-upward-11563549218?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=53",
        "text": "That\u2019s not surprising. Fewer than a third of Americans living today are old enough to have watched the flickering black-and-white images of Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin on their bulky cathode-tube TVs. A 50-year span covers a lot of American history. It was roughly half a century from the end of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s presidency to the inauguration of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abraham Lincoln\n\n\n\n or from the start of the Civil War to the first shots of World War I.\n\n\nRELATED\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n Book Review: When the Moon Was a Mystery \n\n\nIn the immediate afterglow, the triumph of Apollo 11 mesmerized Americans and millions around the world. The explorers\u2019 club of Magellan, Columbus, Amundsen and the rest now welcomed Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Michael Collins, who orbited in the command capsule while they were on the surface. The moon landing ranks with the splitting of the atom, heart transplants, the discovery of DNA and the plotting of the genome as transcendent human achievements in science and technology. Yet today few remember much more than Armstrong proclaiming, \u201cThe Eagle has landed,\u201d and the slightly elided \u201cOne step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d\nRather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence in the dark days of the Cold War, now itself as much a relic as the Apollo command capsule in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. After that first landing, the space program suffered a run of near-disasters and tragedies\u2014most poignantly the losses of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, which cost the lives of 14 crewmen and -women. These days, what\u2019s left of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has to thumb rides on Russian rockets to get its remaining astronauts to the International Space Station and back, and the exploration of our solar system is done by robotic probes.\n\nFor all that, the voyage to the moon is an epic worth retelling with narrative skill, illuminating detail and analytic exactitude. For the golden anniversary of the great leap upward, writers have filled a small shelf with new books that, each in its own way, reanimate the saga and re-examine the issues\u2014scientific, ideological, political, fiscal\u2014raised by the most expensive and complex scientific experiment mankind has ever undertaken. The Apollo program, like the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs, was essentially an all-male, all-white enterprise\u2014the kind of exploit that some cherish today as an exemplary Make America Great Again moment.\nWas it? For one thing, a central player in the drama was a Nazi. On the morning of May 2, 1945, as Allied forces pressed deeper into Germany after Hitler\u2019s suicide, a young German tied a white handkerchief to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedaled down a mountain road near the German-Austrian border until he encountered a platoon of American troops. Pvt. Fred Schneikert pointed his M1 at the youth, who told him his brother and some colleagues wanted to surrender to the Americans. His older brother was Wernher von Braun, an SS officer, and Wernher\u2019s comrades were the scientists and technicians who had helped him develop the V-2 \u201cVengeance\u201d rocket program that rained death on England, Belgium and France in the final days of the war. What\u2019s more, they had secreted tons of plans, blueprints and V-2 parts in nearby caves. Just before the Red Army flooded the zone, von Braun and his team, together with their stash were taken into American custody, their Nazi pasts magically erased, and soon put to work in Alabama on the Saturn rockets that a quarter-century later blasted Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Collins to the moon.\nEarly on in \u201cShoot for the Moon\u201d (Little, Brown, 453 pages, $30), James Donovan astutely tells the story of von Braun\u2019s surrender\u2014the fortuitous and slightly inconvenient first chapter in the American space epic. Mr. Donovan\u2019s story is heavily focused on the missions. The Mercury and Gemini flights led to the Apollo series that were the first manned vehicles to orbit the moon. The Apollo missions also produced the iconic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo of our exquisite blue marble seen from space, the triumphant Apollo 11 landing, and the \u201cHouston-we-have-a-problem\u201d voyage enshrined in the Tom Hanks movie \u201cApollo 13.\u201d\nMr. Donovan\u2019s account is chronological. He concentrates on the astronauts themselves and the flight directors and controllers back on Earth who faced nearly as much heart-clenching pressure as the fliers. The first classes of astronauts were hotshot test pilots and Korean War combat pilots. They were all under 35, shorter than 6 feet\u2014the better to fit into the cramped space capsules\u2014white, Christian, married. They all had IQs of at least 130, college degrees, and, in many cases, advanced degrees in aeronautics or engineering. To be accepted into Rather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 1969 Moon Landing: The Great Leap Upward (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "405",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1969-moon-landing-the-great-leap-upward-11563549218?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=69",
        "text": "That\u2019s not surprising. Fewer than a third of Americans living today are old enough to have watched the flickering black-and-white images of Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin on their bulky cathode-tube TVs. A 50-year span covers a lot of American history. It was roughly half a century from the end of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s presidency to the inauguration of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abraham Lincoln\n\n\n\n or from the start of the Civil War to the first shots of World War I.\n\n\nRELATED\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n Book Review: When the Moon Was a Mystery \n\n\nIn the immediate afterglow, the triumph of Apollo 11 mesmerized Americans and millions around the world. The explorers\u2019 club of Magellan, Columbus, Amundsen and the rest now welcomed Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Michael Collins, who orbited in the command capsule while they were on the surface. The moon landing ranks with the splitting of the atom, heart transplants, the discovery of DNA and the plotting of the genome as transcendent human achievements in science and technology. Yet today few remember much more than Armstrong proclaiming, \u201cThe Eagle has landed,\u201d and the slightly elided \u201cOne step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d\nRather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence in the dark days of the Cold War, now itself as much a relic as the Apollo command capsule in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. After that first landing, the space program suffered a run of near-disasters and tragedies\u2014most poignantly the losses of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, which cost the lives of 14 crewmen and -women. These days, what\u2019s left of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has to thumb rides on Russian rockets to get its remaining astronauts to the International Space Station and back, and the exploration of our solar system is done by robotic probes.\n\nFor all that, the voyage to the moon is an epic worth retelling with narrative skill, illuminating detail and analytic exactitude. For the golden anniversary of the great leap upward, writers have filled a small shelf with new books that, each in its own way, reanimate the saga and re-examine the issues\u2014scientific, ideological, political, fiscal\u2014raised by the most expensive and complex scientific experiment mankind has ever undertaken. The Apollo program, like the earlier Mercury and Gemini programs, was essentially an all-male, all-white enterprise\u2014the kind of exploit that some cherish today as an exemplary Make America Great Again moment.\nWas it? For one thing, a central player in the drama was a Nazi. On the morning of May 2, 1945, as Allied forces pressed deeper into Germany after Hitler\u2019s suicide, a young German tied a white handkerchief to the handlebars of his bicycle and pedaled down a mountain road near the German-Austrian border until he encountered a platoon of American troops. Pvt. Fred Schneikert pointed his M1 at the youth, who told him his brother and some colleagues wanted to surrender to the Americans. His older brother was Wernher von Braun, an SS officer, and Wernher\u2019s comrades were the scientists and technicians who had helped him develop the V-2 \u201cVengeance\u201d rocket program that rained death on England, Belgium and France in the final days of the war. What\u2019s more, they had secreted tons of plans, blueprints and V-2 parts in nearby caves. Just before the Red Army flooded the zone, von Braun and his team, together with their stash were taken into American custody, their Nazi pasts magically erased, and soon put to work in Alabama on the Saturn rockets that a quarter-century later blasted Armstrong, Mr. Aldrin and Mr. Collins to the moon.\nEarly on in \u201cShoot for the Moon\u201d (Little, Brown, 453 pages, $30), James Donovan astutely tells the story of von Braun\u2019s surrender\u2014the fortuitous and slightly inconvenient first chapter in the American space epic. Mr. Donovan\u2019s story is heavily focused on the missions. The Mercury and Gemini flights led to the Apollo series that were the first manned vehicles to orbit the moon. The Apollo missions also produced the iconic \u201cEarthrise\u201d photo of our exquisite blue marble seen from space, the triumphant Apollo 11 landing, and the \u201cHouston-we-have-a-problem\u201d voyage enshrined in the Tom Hanks movie \u201cApollo 13.\u201d\nMr. Donovan\u2019s account is chronological. He concentrates on the astronauts themselves and the flight directors and controllers back on Earth who faced nearly as much heart-clenching pressure as the fliers. The first classes of astronauts were hotshot test pilots and Korean War combat pilots. They were all under 35, shorter than 6 feet\u2014the better to fit into the cramped space capsules\u2014white, Christian, married. They all had IQs of at least 130, college degrees, and, in many cases, advanced degrees in aeronautics or engineering. To be accepted into Rather than the start of a heroic era of manned exploration of the cosmos, the moonshot turned out to be a brief, shining moment of American courage and competence. ",
        "author": "Edward Kosner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Children\u2019s Books: \u2018A\u2019 Is for a (New) Alphabet (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "406",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-a-is-for-a-new-alphabet-11600439699?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=37",
        "text": "Well, yes, as it happens, there is. Joshua David Stein makes something witty out of nothing, so to speak, with \u201cThe Invisible Alphabet\u201d (Rise x Penguin Workshop, 40 pages, $17.99), a journey through our 26 letters by way of things not seen. \u201cA is for Air / B is for Bare / C is for Clear,\u201d the book begins, as readers ages 4-7 see in quick succession a window with curtains blowing, a boy entering his bath, and the bath toys he\u2019s brought with him under the water\u2019s surface. Illustrator Ron Barrett (of \u201cCloudy With a Chance of Meatballs\u201d fame) gives these pages a spacious look by situating pen-and-ink drawings on fields of white and adding shots of neon orange. Midway through, though, all ornament drops away because, as you might imagine, \u201cN is for Nothing.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVibrant colors prevail in Julie Paschkis\u2019s lively folk art for \u201cEek!\u201d (Peachtree, 32 pages, $16.99), a picture book by Julie Larios that matches each letter to a sound or an exclamation. Mostly wordless, this abecedary begins with a mouse plucking a flower and sneezing (\u201cachoo!\u201d) and ends with the mouse presenting the flower to a friend and tucking up to sleep (\u201czzz\u201d). In between, the gaily dressed little creature meets a bee, a cat and various other animals, each encounter yielding its own sound. (Caveat lector, though: The \u201charrumph\u201d of a dog owner is followed by an \u201cick\u201d as the mouse reacts to a dog\u2019s dropping.) Children ages 2-5 who like a bit of noise with their books will enjoy these bright and buoyant pages.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChris Harris plays with similarities in the shapes of capital letters to reinforce the broader idea of shared qualities in \u201cThe Alphabet\u2019s Alphabet\u201d (Little, Brown, 48 pages, $17.99), a giddy ABC excursion illustrated by Dan Santat with characteristic luminous humor. \u201cAn A is an H that just won\u2019t stand up right,\u201d we read, as the second letter wilts into the shape of the first while trekking across sweltering desert sands. Meanwhile, \u201cB is a D with its belt on too tight,\u201d as the letter in question emerges from a fitting room, cross-eyed with constriction. A droll lower-case onlooker remarks: \u201cR U serious?\u201d Chatty verses at beginning and end drive home the point that dissimilar things (and people) can have a lot in common. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNow here\u2019s a point of commonality: All nature is written in the language of DNA, as Nicola Davies relates in \u201cGrow\u201d (Candlewick, 40 pages, $17.99), a picture-book introduction to the science of what we might call life\u2019s algorithm. As with her books about microbes (\u201cTiny Creatures\u201d) and biological diversity (\u201cMany\u201d), Ms. Davies\u2019s discussion is set amid gloriously busy illustrations by Emily Sutton (see above). In a series of framed pictures painted in watercolor, readers will trace the development of a human being from \u201ca tiny blob\u201d on an ultrasound through her infancy and youth and beyond, until she is expecting a baby of her own. \u201cFrom the time you were the size of a dot,\u201d Ms. Davies explains, \u201cyour body has been following a set of instructions. These instructions aren\u2019t written in words but in [DNA] code.\u201d This inviting book should leave children ages 6-10 both awed and informed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSophie Blackall invites children in that same age range to appreciate their surroundings in \u201cIf You Come to Earth\u201d (Chronicle, 80 pages, $18.99), a picture book framed as a child\u2019s letter to a visitor from outer space. In sweep and sentiment, this quirky and beautiful volume brings to mind \u201cHere We Are\u201d (2017) by Oliver Jeffers, which similarly gave pleasure by recounting concepts that children already know. \u201cSome things are part of nature. Some things are made by people,\u201d Ms. Blackall explains in truisms that become interesting when set beside her enchanting and delicate artwork. A few pages on, pale shapes and words (\u201cgravity,\u201d \u201csound waves\u201d) seem to be floating across a gray background. \u201cSome things,\u201d we read, \u201care invisible.\u201d Warm and optimistic, \u201cIf You Come to Earth\u201d is so rich in image that some readings may consist entirely of poring over the pictures. Is there anything fresh to be done with A-B-C? Y-E-S! ",
        "author": "Meghan Cox Gurdon"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Books of 2020: Children\u2019s Books (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "407",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-books-of-2020-childrens-books-11607642255?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=41",
        "text": "The chattering, churning, whirling waters of Jordan Scott\u2019s autobiographical picture book \u201cI Talk Like a River\u201d (Holiday House, 40 pages, $18.99) exist both inside and outside its young narrator, a boy who suffers from a debilitating stutter. \u201cAt school, I hide in the back of the class. I hope I don\u2019t have to talk,\u201d he tells us. \u201cWhen my teacher asks me a question, all my classmates turn and look.\u201d In sublime and poignant paintings, Sydney Smith shows the child\u2019s struggle, his misery and shame\u2014and then the glorious, sun-dappled afternoon when his father uses an example from nature to transform the boy\u2019s understanding of himself: \u201cI talk like a river.\u201d\nWith enigmatic black-and-white illustrations, \u201cThe Wanderer\u201d (Levine Querido, 96 pages, $21.99) takes readers on a gorgeous, wordless odyssey from one side of the world to another. Peter Van den Ende\u2019s intricate drawings follow a little paper boat as it travels through oceans and seas teeming with wonders: undulating monsters, playful mermen, and aquatic creatures that resemble elephants, cheetahs and medieval jesters. Wandering, the vessel moves beneath starry skies, passing ice floes and oil rigs until, at last, it enters the waters of a moonlit canal, where a mysterious passenger disembarks. Given the absence of text, the book may seem accessible to readers of any age, but its sophistication makes it best suited to those over the age of 8. \n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRivers unfurl like pretty ribbons across distant landscapes in \u201cIf You Come to Earth\u201d (Chronicle, 80 pages, $18.99), a beautiful and quirky picture book by Sophie Blackall that\u2019s styled as a child\u2019s letter to a visitor from outer space. \u201cThere are more than seven billion people on Earth,\u201d the narrator explains. \u201cYou can\u2019t see our thoughts, but sometimes we show our feelings on our faces.\u201d The illustrations for these musings have all the humor and delicacy that make Ms. Blackall\u2019s work so distinctive (see left): wry lines and marzipan hues in tableaux that abound in seek-and-find interest. With an innocent as narrator\u2014\u201cSome things are part of nature. Some things are made by people\u201d\u2014this open-hearted book exalts the commonplace, making ordinary things seem remarkable. \n\n\nRivers aren\u2019t a big feature of the year\u2019s best illustrated chapter books, but water, ice and snow do figure in \u201cThe Silver Arrow\u201d (Little, Brown, 259 pages, $16.99), a sparkling fantasy adventure story by Lev Grossman, with pictures by Tracy Nishamura Bishop. When an 11-year-old girl receives the gift of a steam locomotive, she and her little brother soon find themselves thundering into the magical unknown. Become conductors, they acquire train carriages\u2014some filled with books, some with candy\u2014and punch the tickets of chatty animal passengers. Jaunty and wise, \u201cThe Silver Arrow\u201d makes for a particularly fine read-aloud. \nWhen J.K. Rowling began posting chapters of an original fairytale online this summer, she invited children confined by the pandemic to submit illustrations for it. Thirty-four pictures by young artists (see right) are featured in the handsome bound edition of \u201cThe Ickabog\u201d (Scholastic, 305 pages, $26.99), a rollicking morality tale by one of our era\u2019s most assured storytellers. In the land of Cornucopia, two wicked courtiers accrue power and riches by exaggerating the menace of a legendary monster known as the Ickabog. With the populace terrorized, suppressed and taxed to the point of poverty, two young friends embark on a quest to find and reveal the truth about the monster and set the kingdom to rights.\n\n\n \n\n\n\nIn a real-life story of terror and poverty\u2014but also of resourcefulness and art\u2014the writer and illustrator Uri Shulevitz remembers his wartime childhood in \u201cChance\u201d (FSG, 329 pages, $19.99). To escape the Nazi onslaught of 1939, Mr. Shulevitz\u2019s parents fled with him from Poland to the Soviet Union. He was 4. Without papers and under suspicion, the family was sent to a labor camp near the Arctic Circle; later they were able to move to the bleak environs of Soviet Turkestan before making their way westward. This marvelous book is enriched by the author\u2019s drawings, photos and juvenilia and informed by a spirit of humane straightforwardness that feels\u2014given the subject, given the epoch\u2014like a tonic. \nIn an enthralling and original memoir for teen readers, Daniel Nayeri tells of a dislocated boyhood in \u201cEverything Sad Is Untrue\u201d (Levine Querido, 356 pages, $17.99). His narrative shifts back and forth in time; he jolts from the sacred to the profane and from the earnest to the comical; he weaves together awkward middle-school moments in modern-day Oklahoma and episodes from ancient Persian lore and his own family history. A chronicle of Mr. Nayeri\u2019s experience as a refugee\u2014he fled Iran at night with his mother and sister\u2014it\u2019s also a meditation on the untrustworthy nature of memory and an ode to the valor of his mother. \nFrances Hardinge explores the dark temptations of power in \u201cDeeplight\u201d (Amulet, 419 pages, $19.99), a young A tour through the year\u2019s highlights features marvels for readers of nearly any age. ",
        "author": "Meghan Cox Gurdon"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Little Moog Musik: Two Books on Wendy Carlos (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "408",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-little-moog-musik-two-books-on-wendy-carlos-11600466877?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=37",
        "text": "On paper, to present the Baroque works of Johann Sebastian Bach on what was then a brand-new electronic instrument, the Moog synthesizer, might have sounded like a gimmick. But the results were so colorful, so smart, so fanciful and immediately engaging that the recording was greeted fervently not only by the \u201chippie\u201d audience to which it was marketed but also by leading figures in the classical-music world, notably the pianist Glenn Gould, who called it the \u201crecord of the decade.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWendy Carlos at work in her New York City recording studio, 1979.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Leonard M. DeLessio/Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\nWendy CarlosBy Amanda Sewell\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOxford, 248 pages, $34.95 Switched-On Bach\n\n\n\nBy Roshanak Kheshti\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBloomsbury, 110 pages, $14.95 \n\n\nThe album\u2019s central creator was a shy, brilliant woman, born in 1939 and raised in Rhode Island as \u201cWalter Carlos,\u201d who had been confused from childhood about \u201cwhy her parents insisted on treating her like a boy when it was so clear to her that she was a girl,\u201d as Amanda Sewell puts it in her fine new book \u201cWendy Carlos: A Biography.\u201d With therapy and medication, Ms. Carlos had already begun to transition by the time the record was released. (Gender-confirmation surgery would follow in 1972.) Now the sudden celebrity terrified her to the point where she turned down an appearance on one of Leonard Bernstein\u2019s nationally telecast \u201cYoung People\u2019s Concerts\u201d and fulfilled only one live appearance as \u201cWalter,\u201d for which she donned a wig and fake sideburns, wore a dark suit, and spoke in as deep a voice as she could muster.\nIt is a painful image on which to dwell, but they were terrified times: Ms. Carlos knew that exposure could not only damage her career but also blast apart entirely the privacy she had cultivated for herself. Still, it would soon be apparent that her work had paid off. Electronic music, long dismissed as an obscure, brainy pursuit that came out sounding cold as outer space, was suddenly enormously popular\u2014and so it has remained. Synthesizers joined electric guitars as standard instruments in rock and jazz bands; within a year or two, colleges and even high schools were offering courses in electronic music. \n\n\nToday, in an era when a $300 keyboard purchased at your local superstore can call up the sounds of everything from piano and organ tones to a full symphony orchestra (complete with Stradivari violins, if you want them), the sheer labor it took Ms. Carlos to create \u201cSwitched-On Bach\u201d is all but impossible to imagine. Ms. Sewell is particularly good on those days. \u201cThe Moog synthesizer could only produce one note at a time,\u201d she observes. \u201cThe musician had to record each note separately, sequence them into lines, and then stack the lines on top of each other to create harmony and counterpoint.\u201d \u201cWendy Carlos: A Biography\u201d is a happy rarity among academic arts books\u2014a grounded, thoughtful, appreciative study that maintains focus on its subject and her milieu, all the while paying the reader the courtesy of elegant prose. \nThe same cannot be said for Roshanak Kheshti\u2019s bizarre little volume on \u201cSwitched-On Bach\u201d in the often excellent 331/3 series. This is yet another of those CV-enhancing autobiographical fantasias that hammer misty reverie into dull, metallic complication, complete with quotations from such light spirits as Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said. The publisher\u2019s blurb promises that \u201cthrough a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology,\u201d Ms. Kheshti, a professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego, will engage \u201cin a reading of Carlos\u2019s music within [a] gendered context.\u201d \nIf only some solid musical education could have been added to the bolus! Ms. Kheshti speaks of \u201cJohann Sebastian Bach\u2019s notorious obsessive attention to sonority, acoustics, and novel orchestration.\u201d In fact, Bach probably cared less about such matters than any other major composer: He was quite content to transpose a concerto for one instrument into a concerto for another, and his music can effectively be realized by a jazz band, sung a capella or played by any combination of instruments. (As Gould put it: \u201cAll the evidence suggests that Bach didn\u2019t give a hoot about specific sonority or even volume, but he did care, to an almost fanatic degree, about the integrity of his structures.\u201d\nNever mind. Ms. Kheshti continues that Bach \u201cpushed the boundaries of genre too, intra-acting [sic] with his instruments, the cathedral spaces in which his compositions would be performed, and the performers of his liturgical pop.\u201d She then moves on to an exploration of Ms. Carlos as \u201ccyborg.\u201d\nThe book is virtually unreadable. Within 10 years it will be incomprehensible.\n\u2014Mr. Page was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997. The synthesizer pioneer reached back to Bach and forward to music\u2019s electronic future. ",
        "author": "Tim Page"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Little Moog Musik: Two Books on Wendy Carlos (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "409",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-little-moog-musik-two-books-on-wendy-carlos-11600466877?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=47",
        "text": "On paper, to present the Baroque works of Johann Sebastian Bach on what was then a brand-new electronic instrument, the Moog synthesizer, might have sounded like a gimmick. But the results were so colorful, so smart, so fanciful and immediately engaging that the recording was greeted fervently not only by the \u201chippie\u201d audience to which it was marketed but also by leading figures in the classical-music world, notably the pianist Glenn Gould, who called it the \u201crecord of the decade.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWendy Carlos at work in her New York City recording studio, 1979.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Leonard M. DeLessio/Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\nWendy CarlosBy Amanda Sewell\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOxford, 248 pages, $34.95 Switched-On Bach\n\n\n\nBy Roshanak Kheshti\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBloomsbury, 110 pages, $14.95 \n\n\nThe album\u2019s central creator was a shy, brilliant woman, born in 1939 and raised in Rhode Island as \u201cWalter Carlos,\u201d who had been confused from childhood about \u201cwhy her parents insisted on treating her like a boy when it was so clear to her that she was a girl,\u201d as Amanda Sewell puts it in her fine new book \u201cWendy Carlos: A Biography.\u201d With therapy and medication, Ms. Carlos had already begun to transition by the time the record was released. (Gender-confirmation surgery would follow in 1972.) Now the sudden celebrity terrified her to the point where she turned down an appearance on one of Leonard Bernstein\u2019s nationally telecast \u201cYoung People\u2019s Concerts\u201d and fulfilled only one live appearance as \u201cWalter,\u201d for which she donned a wig and fake sideburns, wore a dark suit, and spoke in as deep a voice as she could muster.\nIt is a painful image on which to dwell, but they were terrified times: Ms. Carlos knew that exposure could not only damage her career but also blast apart entirely the privacy she had cultivated for herself. Still, it would soon be apparent that her work had paid off. Electronic music, long dismissed as an obscure, brainy pursuit that came out sounding cold as outer space, was suddenly enormously popular\u2014and so it has remained. Synthesizers joined electric guitars as standard instruments in rock and jazz bands; within a year or two, colleges and even high schools were offering courses in electronic music. \n\n\nToday, in an era when a $300 keyboard purchased at your local superstore can call up the sounds of everything from piano and organ tones to a full symphony orchestra (complete with Stradivari violins, if you want them), the sheer labor it took Ms. Carlos to create \u201cSwitched-On Bach\u201d is all but impossible to imagine. Ms. Sewell is particularly good on those days. \u201cThe Moog synthesizer could only produce one note at a time,\u201d she observes. \u201cThe musician had to record each note separately, sequence them into lines, and then stack the lines on top of each other to create harmony and counterpoint.\u201d \u201cWendy Carlos: A Biography\u201d is a happy rarity among academic arts books\u2014a grounded, thoughtful, appreciative study that maintains focus on its subject and her milieu, all the while paying the reader the courtesy of elegant prose. \nThe same cannot be said for Roshanak Kheshti\u2019s bizarre little volume on \u201cSwitched-On Bach\u201d in the often excellent 331/3 series. This is yet another of those CV-enhancing autobiographical fantasias that hammer misty reverie into dull, metallic complication, complete with quotations from such light spirits as Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said. The publisher\u2019s blurb promises that \u201cthrough a postcolonial lens of feminist science and technology,\u201d Ms. Kheshti, a professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego, will engage \u201cin a reading of Carlos\u2019s music within [a] gendered context.\u201d \nIf only some solid musical education could have been added to the bolus! Ms. Kheshti speaks of \u201cJohann Sebastian Bach\u2019s notorious obsessive attention to sonority, acoustics, and novel orchestration.\u201d In fact, Bach probably cared less about such matters than any other major composer: He was quite content to transpose a concerto for one instrument into a concerto for another, and his music can effectively be realized by a jazz band, sung a capella or played by any combination of instruments. (As Gould put it: \u201cAll the evidence suggests that Bach didn\u2019t give a hoot about specific sonority or even volume, but he did care, to an almost fanatic degree, about the integrity of his structures.\u201d\nNever mind. Ms. Kheshti continues that Bach \u201cpushed the boundaries of genre too, intra-acting [sic] with his instruments, the cathedral spaces in which his compositions would be performed, and the performers of his liturgical pop.\u201d She then moves on to an exploration of Ms. Carlos as \u201ccyborg.\u201d\nThe book is virtually unreadable. Within 10 years it will be incomprehensible.\n\u2014Mr. Page was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997. The synthesizer pioneer reached back to Bach and forward to music\u2019s electronic future. ",
        "author": "Tim Page"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: A New Astronomy Through \u2018The Telescope in the Ice\u2019 (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "410",
        "date": "2017-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-a-new-astronomy-through-the-telescope-in-the-ice-1513374045?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=82",
        "text": "Neutrinos are the most nonreactive of subatomic particles, breezing their way through seemingly impenetrable barriers. Nobel Prize-winning physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leon Lederman\n\n\n\n described neutrinos as \u201cbarely a fact,\u201d while others have labeled them ghost particles. Billions of these peewee interlopers, most originating in Earth\u2019s atmosphere or the sun\u2019s core, pass through our bodies every second, yet the odds of an interior collision are remote. A neutrino can easily transect a million Earths, all lined up in a row. And therein lies the challenge of any research venture based on neutrino counts. Only rarely does a neutrino strike an obstructing crumb of matter, and even then the observable consequence is a brief glimmer of blue light (known as Cherenkov radiation). At the outset, neutrino detection seemed to be a scientific snipe hunt. But technology has overcome the neutrino\u2019s aversive nature and opened up a new window onto the universe. \n\n\nThe Telescope in the IceBy Mark Bowen \n\n\n\nSt. Martin\u2019s, 424 pages, $27.99\n\n\nAstronomers have long surveyed the celestial landscape by capturing and analyzing forms of radiant energy, such as visible light, radio waves and X-rays. But photons are only one mediator of extraterrestrial information. Today a host of sci-fi-worthy gizmos monitor the incessant deluge of cosmic particles as well as the intermittent quiver of gravity waves washing over our planet. These photon-alternatives, key components of so-called multi-messenger astronomy, have given us entry to once-inaccessible regions of the universe, from the depths of the sun to the fringes of black holes. \nInitially, neutrinos offered astronomers the opportunity to \u201cpeer through\u201d the sun\u2019s opaque gases into its fiery innards. Unlike photons, which take up to a million years to make their way out of the sun, neutrinos birthed in the sun\u2019s core arrive at Earth some 8\u00bd minutes later. The first neutrino \u201ctelescope,\u201d a 100,000-gallon vat of perchloroethylene (dry-cleaning fluid), dates to the late 1960s and sat a mile underground in the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, S.D., where it would be shielded from cosmic-ray particles. But the measly number of neutrinos it detected was far short of that predicted by the accepted theory of solar energy production. This discrepancy became known as the \u201cNeutrino Problem.\u201d Subsequent study revealed that neutrinos come in a variety of subspecies, only one of which had been tallied at Homestake. With that, solar-energy theory was vindicated, and neutrino astronomy took off.\n\n\n\u201cThe Telescope in the Ice: Inventing a New Astronomy at the South Pole,\u201d by physicist-writer Mark Bowen, is the story of the global collaboration that created and operates Antarctica\u2019s IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The unconventional instrument, completed on time and on budget in December 2010, comprises some 5,000 ultrasensitive light detectors drilled a mile down into the polar ice. This frigid matrix is nature\u2019s clearest substance, surpassing even diamond in its ability to transmit light. In the Stygian gloom, such clarity allows the detectors to pick up the exceedingly faint blue flickers that signal the rare interactions of neutrinos with the ice.\nThe crucial features of IceCube are its size\u2014a cubic kilometer\u2014and the three-dimensional arrangement of its photosensors, which together allow IceCube to determine the direction, if not the specific source, from which a gust of neutrinos originates. Perhaps the strangest operational aspect of IceCube is that it is designed to detect neutrinos emanating from Earth\u2019s northern sky, after the particles have traversed the entire body of our planet. Earth filters out unwanted particles and passes IceCube\u2019s quarry: ultra-high-energy neutrinos originating outside the solar system, from exploding stars, hyperactive galaxies or other cosmic powerhouses. \nAlthough chockablock with technical details, \u201cThe Telescope in the Ice\u201d is richly intimate, drawing on Mr. Bowen\u2019s long involvement with the IceCube project and its participants. (He learned about the proposed project in 1997 atop a snow-capped peak in Bolivia, while reporting on a team of ice-core-drilling paleoclimatologists.) Human emotions are palpable in the author\u2019s you-are-there framing. The drilling of ice holes, for example, becomes a nail-biting contest between brute force and finesse, the team (and the reader) ever alert to the mechanical shudder that precedes calamity. All this in a windswept, snowbound wasteland. Is there any keener expression of scientists\u2019 dedication to the pursuit of knowledge? \nMr. Bowen acknowledges the business and public-relations side of today\u2019s Big Science: News releases, interviews and advocacy are obligatory adjuncts to the research. He also digs deeply into the social dimensions of collaborative science, especially the sort conducted in forbidding environments like Antarctica or outer space. IceCube requires a lavish team of researchers, student assistants, engineers and computer experts, along with helicopter pilots, galley cooks, ice drillers and septic-tank pumpers, all of whom must operate as a unified organism. At the Pole, the dual imperatives of science and survival flatten the social hierarchy. Even the project\u2019s nominal major-domo, the principal investigator, is totally dependent on the ancillary employees. To the PI, failure is the albatross that hangs around one\u2019s professional neck. The PI in this case is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Halzen,\n\n\n\n of the University of Wisconsin, an \u201coracular\u201d presence, Mr. Bowen tells us, whose formidable intellect gushes forth in scientific forums: \u201cIdeas splashed across his mind so fast that his mouth couldn\u2019t keep up.\u201d\nThe story\u2019s ending, although a happy one from the scientific perspective\u2014the sought-after neutrinos are found\u2014has a poignancy as the project\u2019s old guard retire or attend the funerals of their colleagues. Success at a decades-long endeavor must serve as their consolation, knowing that the icebound eye they helped create still watches over the heavens. \n\u2014Mr. Hirshfeld, a professor of physics at UMass Dartmouth, is the author of \u201cStarlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe.\u201d Antarctica\u2019s IceCube Neutrino Observatory was built not to view the stars but to detect extraterrestrial subatomic particles. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018American Science Fiction\u2019 Review: We Are Stardust, We Are Golden (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "411",
        "date": "2019-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-science-fiction-review-we-are-stardust-we-are-golden-11574441679?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=52",
        "text": "In 2012, Library of America reprinted nine classic works of science fiction from the 1950s in a two-volume set, skillfully edited by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gary K. Wolfe,\n\n\n\n whose own book, \u201cEvaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature,\u201d is a passionate and highly persuasive defense of the art of sci-fi and fantasy. Mr. Wolfe now returns to edit the latest box-set installment in the American Science Fiction line: \u201cEight Classic Novels of the 1960s.\u201d Again he has been given the unenviable task of choosing just a handful of representative novels to elevate from the pulp pages of Analog or Amazing Stories magazine to the Bible-thin, acid-free paper of Library of America\u2014a gatekeeper in a genre that takes pride in its freedom from gatekeepers. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSamuel R. Delany.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jack Mitchell/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\nAmerican Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960sEdited by Gary K. Wolfe\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLibrary of America, 1,500 pages, $75\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Wolfe explains that his selections have been partly governed by limitations. He has not picked authors who appeared in the previous anthology (ruling out\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert A. Heinlein\n\n\n\n and Alfred Bester), authors who have stand-alone LOA volumes (so no\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philip K. Dick\n\n\n\n or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ursula K. Le Guin\n\n\n\n ) and authors whose books are just too damn long (special apologies to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Herbert\n\n\n\n ). If the restrictions cost the collection some masterpieces, they help to make it unpredictable, giving newcomers to the genre much to discover and aficionados plenty to argue about. \nWhat Mr. Wolfe seems keen to stress is science fiction\u2019s versatility. The books may all be built from the \u201cthree P\u2019s\u201d\u2014psychology, politics and physics, as a would-be novelist explains in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samuel R. Delany\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cNova\u201d\u2014but they can assume wildly different shapes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joanna Russ\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cPicnic on Paradise\u201d is a straightforward adventure yarn starring a sexy heroine leading stranded vacationers to safety on a besieged planet. The breathless tale could hardly be more different from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clifford D. Simak\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cWay Station,\u201d a pensive, pastoral drama set in backwoods Wisconsin, where intergalactic travelers have set up a kind of highway rest stop tended by an undying Civil War veteran. The scenes in this touching book largely consist of inter-species conversations about peace and toleration over pots of coffee.\n\n\nThe appearance of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Keyes\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cFlowers for Algernon\u201d is a surprise because the book is familiar to most from high-school reading lists. One forgets that this compassionate exploration of mental disability is science fiction at all, but it won the Nebula Award in 1967 and was hailed by sci-fi elder statesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Algis Budrys\n\n\n\n as the year\u2019s best novel. Its inclusion is a reminder of the genre\u2019s occasional crossover successes. \nJust as sensitively drawn, and far more subtle, is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack Vance\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cEmphyrio,\u201d which chronicles an upstart\u2019s rebellion against an overbearing feudal state. But even more memorable than the drama of revolt is the young man\u2019s intimately described coming of age as a carpenter\u2019s apprentice on a planet dedicated to artisans but always closely monitored by ruling overlords. Middle Ages Europe provides the inspiration for Poul Anderson\u2019s \u201cThe High Crusade,\u201d as well. The conceit of this thoroughly entertaining historical pastiche is that an alien invasion in England in 1345 leads a glory-hungry baron to prosecute his holy crusade in outer space, where he achieves such famous victories as the Battle of Ganturath. (This romp is often deliriously funny. When the nobleman recalls that a captive alien has learned Latin, his scandalized teacher responds, \u201cI would not say that, sire. His declensions are atrocious, and what he does to irregular verbs may not be described in gentle company.\u201d)\nVariety necessarily entails low points, and the one novel I could not finish was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n R.A. Lafferty\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cPast Master.\u201d The story centers on a time-traveling Sir Thomas More and is written in a histrionic cod-Shakespearean English (\u201cSo he took one more great breath, having been loosened for the veriest instant\u201d) that grates on my ears like squeaking styrofoam.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoger Zelazny.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Buddy Mays/Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRead More: Holiday Books Gift Guide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Andrew Bannecker\n\n\n\nTo me, the two writers who stand out as being talented enough to warrant discrete Library of America volumes are\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Zelazny\n\n\n\n and Samuel R. Delany. Zelazny\u2019s \u201c. . . And Call Me Conrad\u201d (originally published under the title \u201cThis Immortal\u201d) is a kind of Indiana Jones story featuring a flinty and sardonic arts commissioner on a postnuclear Earth who has to stop the planet from being sold to the highest extraterrestrial bidder. (\u201cArmageddon has come,\u201d a character tells him, \u201cnot with a bang, but a checkbook.\u201d) The fast-paced story is wry and aphoristic and wonderfully steeped in ancient mythology. \nThen there\u2019s Delany\u2019s \u201cNova,\u201d essentially a nautical adventure relocated to outer space. The story follows Lorq Von Ray\u2019s obsessive quest to capture valuable material from an exploded star in the Pleiades, but it\u2019s propelled most of all by Delany\u2019s fugal genius with language: \u201cI have struck down one-third the cosmos to raise up another and let one more go staggering; and I feel no sin on me,\u201d Lorq thinks. \u201cThen it must be that I am free and evil. Well, then, I am free . . . I can feel fire churn by me. Like you, dead Dan, I will grasp at dawn and evening, but I will win the noon.\u201d\nLorq is, of course, an homage to Captain Ahab, and reading \u201cNova\u201d one realizes just how much Delany possesses of Melville\u2019s polymathic mind, his coy, subversive humor and his dazzling lexical gifts. It\u2019s fitting of our democratic literary tradition that in this offbeat, exuberant anthology we should find the truest 20th-century heir to the author of \u201cMoby-Dick.\u201d \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\u2014Mr. Sacks reviews fiction for the Journal. A boxed set brings together eight classic novels from the 1960s, by masters such Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ. ",
        "author": "Sam Sacks"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018American Science Fiction\u2019 Review: We Are Stardust, We Are Golden (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "412",
        "date": "2019-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-science-fiction-review-we-are-stardust-we-are-golden-11574441679?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=63",
        "text": "In 2012, Library of America reprinted nine classic works of science fiction from the 1950s in a two-volume set, skillfully edited by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gary K. Wolfe,\n\n\n\n whose own book, \u201cEvaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature,\u201d is a passionate and highly persuasive defense of the art of sci-fi and fantasy. Mr. Wolfe now returns to edit the latest box-set installment in the American Science Fiction line: \u201cEight Classic Novels of the 1960s.\u201d Again he has been given the unenviable task of choosing just a handful of representative novels to elevate from the pulp pages of Analog or Amazing Stories magazine to the Bible-thin, acid-free paper of Library of America\u2014a gatekeeper in a genre that takes pride in its freedom from gatekeepers. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSamuel R. Delany.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jack Mitchell/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\nAmerican Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960sEdited by Gary K. Wolfe\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLibrary of America, 1,500 pages, $75\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Wolfe explains that his selections have been partly governed by limitations. He has not picked authors who appeared in the previous anthology (ruling out\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert A. Heinlein\n\n\n\n and Alfred Bester), authors who have stand-alone LOA volumes (so no\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philip K. Dick\n\n\n\n or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ursula K. Le Guin\n\n\n\n ) and authors whose books are just too damn long (special apologies to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Herbert\n\n\n\n ). If the restrictions cost the collection some masterpieces, they help to make it unpredictable, giving newcomers to the genre much to discover and aficionados plenty to argue about. \nWhat Mr. Wolfe seems keen to stress is science fiction\u2019s versatility. The books may all be built from the \u201cthree P\u2019s\u201d\u2014psychology, politics and physics, as a would-be novelist explains in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samuel R. Delany\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cNova\u201d\u2014but they can assume wildly different shapes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joanna Russ\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cPicnic on Paradise\u201d is a straightforward adventure yarn starring a sexy heroine leading stranded vacationers to safety on a besieged planet. The breathless tale could hardly be more different from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clifford D. Simak\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cWay Station,\u201d a pensive, pastoral drama set in backwoods Wisconsin, where intergalactic travelers have set up a kind of highway rest stop tended by an undying Civil War veteran. The scenes in this touching book largely consist of inter-species conversations about peace and toleration over pots of coffee.\n\n\nThe appearance of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Keyes\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cFlowers for Algernon\u201d is a surprise because the book is familiar to most from high-school reading lists. One forgets that this compassionate exploration of mental disability is science fiction at all, but it won the Nebula Award in 1967 and was hailed by sci-fi elder statesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Algis Budrys\n\n\n\n as the year\u2019s best novel. Its inclusion is a reminder of the genre\u2019s occasional crossover successes. \nJust as sensitively drawn, and far more subtle, is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack Vance\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cEmphyrio,\u201d which chronicles an upstart\u2019s rebellion against an overbearing feudal state. But even more memorable than the drama of revolt is the young man\u2019s intimately described coming of age as a carpenter\u2019s apprentice on a planet dedicated to artisans but always closely monitored by ruling overlords. Middle Ages Europe provides the inspiration for Poul Anderson\u2019s \u201cThe High Crusade,\u201d as well. The conceit of this thoroughly entertaining historical pastiche is that an alien invasion in England in 1345 leads a glory-hungry baron to prosecute his holy crusade in outer space, where he achieves such famous victories as the Battle of Ganturath. (This romp is often deliriously funny. When the nobleman recalls that a captive alien has learned Latin, his scandalized teacher responds, \u201cI would not say that, sire. His declensions are atrocious, and what he does to irregular verbs may not be described in gentle company.\u201d)\nVariety necessarily entails low points, and the one novel I could not finish was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n R.A. Lafferty\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cPast Master.\u201d The story centers on a time-traveling Sir Thomas More and is written in a histrionic cod-Shakespearean English (\u201cSo he took one more great breath, having been loosened for the veriest instant\u201d) that grates on my ears like squeaking styrofoam.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoger Zelazny.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Buddy Mays/Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\nRead More: Holiday Books Gift Guide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Andrew Bannecker\n\n\n\nTo me, the two writers who stand out as being talented enough to warrant discrete Library of America volumes are\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Zelazny\n\n\n\n and Samuel R. Delany. Zelazny\u2019s \u201c. . . And Call Me Conrad\u201d (originally published under the title \u201cThis Immortal\u201d) is a kind of Indiana Jones story featuring a flinty and sardonic arts commissioner A boxed set brings together eight classic novels from the 1960s, by masters such Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ. ",
        "author": "Sam Sacks"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Nose Dive\u2019 Review: Olfactory Bliss (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "413",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nose-dive-review-olfactory-bliss-11603408842?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=34",
        "text": "Harold McGee\n\n\n\n does not suffer from this limitation. Every page of \u201cNose Dive: A Field Guide to the World\u2019s Smells\u201d is crammed with the olfactory equivalent of onomatopoeia. He describes the book as \u201ca ten-year sniffing expedition,\u201d and he\u2019s determined to explore every last cranny of what he calls the \u201cosmocosm\u201d\u2014the totality of scents in the world around us.\nFans of Mr. McGee\u2019s seminal \u201cOn Food and Cooking\u201d (1984) might be surprised to see a different author here, someone who embraces the revolting. He buys a bag of bird guano and buries his nose in the ammonia and fishy amines that waft out. No less intrepidly, he describes compost, engine oil, \u201ca fetid street drain,\u201d even his own seared tongue as he has a swollen taste bud cauterized\u2014\u201cgrilled McGee,\u201d he calls it.\n\n\n\n\nThe smell tour starts in outer space. If you could sniff an interstellar dust cloud, Mr. McGee writes, you\u2019d catch whiffs of smelling salts, camp-stove fuel, vinegar, eggs and fruit. Asteroids, meanwhile, are more redolent of sweat, almonds, fish and honey. He also delves into the raw smells of the Earth itself, in passages that are more discursive and reveal a more literary style than he usually employed in \u201cOn Food\u201d: \u201cSolid sulfur first melts into a yellow liquid, then turns red, the color of fire and blood. . . . It helped inspire visions of underworlds and afterworlds where the unrighteous dead are punished in lakes of fire and brimstone.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nNose DiveBy Harold McGee\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPenguin Press, 654 pages, $35\n\n\nFrom space and earth, he moves on to the smells of the human body\u2014or more accurately, of the 4-pound mass of microbes residing in the human body that reconfigure our largely odorless biochemicals into scented ones. And again, there\u2019s no quarter given for the squeamish. He covers bad breath, semen, feces and the aptly named putrescine and cadaverine, which produce the bouquet of decomposing corpses. You\u2019ll never look at a charcuterie plate the same way after his breakdown of how the discarded skin proteins, foot bacteria and sweat inside your socks essentially recapitulate the transformation of milk and brine into prized aromatic cheeses.\n\n\nStill, fans of Mr. McGee\u2019s culinary writing won\u2019t be disappointed\u2014there are several hundred pages devoted to scrumptious foods, both raw and cooked. He articulates the secrets of truffles and peaty whisky. He seems especially obsessed with the echoes and slant rhymes of food\u2014why pineapples can smell like Parmesan, oysters like cucumbers, sherry like soy sauce, even \u201cthe prized \u2018kerosene\u2019 note of well-aged Rieslings.\u201d\nIt\u2019s important to note that Mr. McGee isn\u2019t blustering here, the way some wine snobs speak cryptically\u2014and unverifiably\u2014of certain \u201covertones\u201d in their favorite vintages. Like an analytical chemist, he catalogs the exact molecules that each food or substance emits, and how they combine like musical notes to produce a scent chord. He offers some general rules for correlating molecular structure with aromatic sensation\u2014that sulfur is generally pungent, and large molecules are more pleasant than small ones. It\u2019s fascinating stuff. I especially enjoyed his discussion explaining how many compounds we think of as floral and fruity actually evolved first in animals, and were only later appropriated by plants, often to lure animals toward them to disperse seeds. \u201cFor the all-smelling cosmic Chef,\u201d he concludes, \u201ccucumbers would be evocative of oysters, and watermelons of fish, not the other way around!\u201d\nAs much as \u201cNose Dive\u201d is a book of today\u2019s smells, it\u2019s also a book of lost smells. In short, we live in a much different smellscape than our ancestors did. \u201cFor hundreds of thousands of years,\u201d Mr. McGee notes, \u201cmost humans would have smelled smoke every day from birth to death.\u201d In the Western world today, that\u2019s a rarity. Smells like wool, leather, animal soap and petrichor\u2014the bloom of rocks after rain\u2014rarely impinge, either. Even for smells like pine, he notes, \u201cmost people today are more likely to encounter these molecules first and most often in bathrooms and hospitals and malls, not in the wild and garden where humankind first found and cultivated them.\u201d We also go to ridiculous lengths\u2014coughing up billions of dollars a year collectively\u2014to blot out perfectly natural body odors.\nDespite the occasional nostalgia, Mr. McGee is too much of an aesthete to wallow in the doldrums for long, and his enthusiasm is contagious. (After his description of what a typing-warmed computer keyboard smells like, I couldn\u2019t help but sheepishly sniff mine.) \u201cNose Dive\u201d is not a book you need to read straight through, as Mr. McGee notes: \u201cFeel free to wander and jump and backtrack and pause, as your own nose and mind and experiences lead you.\u201d This does result in some repetition, including passages duplicated verbatim, but his admonition to \u201cset aside the air fresheners and deodorants, unleash our natural animal interest, and sniff around ourselves\u201d is good advice. Sometimes you just have to stop and smell the lychee and green-tea overtones that, with Mr. McGee\u2019s guidance, you might soon recognize in a rose.\nMr. Kean is the author, most recently, of \u201cThe Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb.\u201d The dean of food-science writers brings his matchless descriptive powers to the \u2018osmocosm\u2019\u2014the totality of scents in the world around us. ",
        "author": "Sam Kean"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Nose Dive\u2019 Review: Olfactory Bliss (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "414",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nose-dive-review-olfactory-bliss-11603408842?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=45",
        "text": "Harold McGee\n\n\n\n does not suffer from this limitation. Every page of \u201cNose Dive: A Field Guide to the World\u2019s Smells\u201d is crammed with the olfactory equivalent of onomatopoeia. He describes the book as \u201ca ten-year sniffing expedition,\u201d and he\u2019s determined to explore every last cranny of what he calls the \u201cosmocosm\u201d\u2014the totality of scents in the world around us.\nFans of Mr. McGee\u2019s seminal \u201cOn Food and Cooking\u201d (1984) might be surprised to see a different author here, someone who embraces the revolting. He buys a bag of bird guano and buries his nose in the ammonia and fishy amines that waft out. No less intrepidly, he describes compost, engine oil, \u201ca fetid street drain,\u201d even his own seared tongue as he has a swollen taste bud cauterized\u2014\u201cgrilled McGee,\u201d he calls it.\n\n\n\n\nThe smell tour starts in outer space. If you could sniff an interstellar dust cloud, Mr. McGee writes, you\u2019d catch whiffs of smelling salts, camp-stove fuel, vinegar, eggs and fruit. Asteroids, meanwhile, are more redolent of sweat, almonds, fish and honey. He also delves into the raw smells of the Earth itself, in passages that are more discursive and reveal a more literary style than he usually employed in \u201cOn Food\u201d: \u201cSolid sulfur first melts into a yellow liquid, then turns red, the color of fire and blood. . . . It helped inspire visions of underworlds and afterworlds where the unrighteous dead are punished in lakes of fire and brimstone.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nNose DiveBy Harold McGee\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPenguin Press, 654 pages, $35\n\n\nFrom space and earth, he moves on to the smells of the human body\u2014or more accurately, of the 4-pound mass of microbes residing in the human body that reconfigure our largely odorless biochemicals into scented ones. And again, there\u2019s no quarter given for the squeamish. He covers bad breath, semen, feces and the aptly named putrescine and cadaverine, which produce the bouquet of decomposing corpses. You\u2019ll never look at a charcuterie plate the same way after his breakdown of how the discarded skin proteins, foot bacteria and sweat inside your socks essentially recapitulate the transformation of milk and brine into prized aromatic cheeses.\n\n\nStill, fans of Mr. McGee\u2019s culinary writing won\u2019t be disappointed\u2014there are several hundred pages devoted to scrumptious foods, both raw and cooked. He articulates the secrets of truffles and peaty whisky. He seems especially obsessed with the echoes and slant rhymes of food\u2014why pineapples can smell like Parmesan, oysters like cucumbers, sherry like soy sauce, even \u201cthe prized \u2018kerosene\u2019 note of well-aged Rieslings.\u201d\nIt\u2019s important to note that Mr. McGee isn\u2019t blustering here, the way some wine snobs speak cryptically\u2014and unverifiably\u2014of certain \u201covertones\u201d in their favorite vintages. Like an analytical chemist, he catalogs the exact molecules that each food or substance emits, and how they combine like musical notes to produce a scent chord. He offers some general rules for correlating molecular structure with aromatic sensation\u2014that sulfur is generally pungent, and large molecules are more pleasant than small ones. It\u2019s fascinating stuff. I especially enjoyed his discussion explaining how many compounds we think of as floral and fruity actually evolved first in animals, and were only later appropriated by plants, often to lure animals toward them to disperse seeds. \u201cFor the all-smelling cosmic Chef,\u201d he concludes, \u201ccucumbers would be evocative of oysters, and watermelons of fish, not the other way around!\u201d\nAs much as \u201cNose Dive\u201d is a book of today\u2019s smells, it\u2019s also a book of lost smells. In short, we live in a much different smellscape than our ancestors did. \u201cFor hundreds of thousands of years,\u201d Mr. McGee notes, \u201cmost humans would have smelled smoke every day from birth to death.\u201d In the Western world today, that\u2019s a rarity. Smells like wool, leather, animal soap and petrichor\u2014the bloom of rocks after rain\u2014rarely impinge, either. Even for smells like pine, he notes, \u201cmost people today are more likely to encounter these molecules first and most often in bathrooms and hospitals and malls, not in the wild and garden where humankind first found and cultivated them.\u201d We also go to ridiculous lengths\u2014coughing up billions of dollars a year collectively\u2014to blot out perfectly natural body odors.\nDespite the occasional nostalgia, Mr. McGee is too much of an aesthete to wallow in the doldrums for long, and his enthusiasm is contagious. (After his description of what a typing-warmed computer keyboard smells like, I couldn\u2019t help but sheepishly sniff mine.) \u201cNose Dive\u201d is not a book you need to read straight through, as Mr. McGee notes: \u201cFeel free to wander and jump and backtrack and pause, as your own nose and mind and experiences lead you.\u201d This does result in some repetition, including passages duplicated verbatim, but his admonition to \u201cset aside the air fresheners and deodorants, unleash our natural animal interest, and sniff aroun The dean of food-science writers brings his matchless descriptive powers to the \u2018osmocosm\u2019\u2014the totality of scents in the world around us. ",
        "author": "Sam Kean"
    },
    {
        "title": "Best Books for Kids: Our Reviewer\u2019s Picks for Summer Reading (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "415",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/best-books-for-kids-our-reviewers-picks-for-summer-reading-11624453787?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=21",
        "text": "For Little Eyes, Hands and Minds\n\n\n \n\n\n\nJun Ichihara and Kazuo Hiraki, \u201cMoimoi\u2014Look at Me!\u201d (The Experiment, 24 pages, $7.95)\n\u201cResearchers in Japan believe they\u2019ve found a way to understand infant preferences, and the result is a board book full of delicious colors and paisley-like shapes.\u201d (Ages 0 to 2) Read the review\nLou Peacock and Nicola Slater, \u201cCharlie Chooses\u201d (Nosy Crow, 32 pages, $16.99)\n\n\nWritten by Lou Peacock and illustrated with \u201cretro exuberance\u201d by Nicola Slater, this tale of a little boy who always worries he\u2019ll make the wrong choice puts \u201ca humorous cast on what can be, for the possessor, a frustrating personality trait . . . Even as children experience Charlie\u2019s indecision, they\u2019ll be practicing the art of noticing their own preferences.\u201d (Ages 2 to 6) Read the review\nPascal Estellon, \u201cOrange Is an Apricot, Green Is a Tree Frog\u201d (Princeton Architectural Press, 34 pages $18.95)\nIn this eye-catching primer \u201cnotable for the elegance of its layout and the pleasing specificity of its depictions,\u201d text is at a minimum. \u201cMr. Estellon presents five colors (along with black and white) as they are expressed in nature. Yellow is corn on the cob and a zucchini blossom and a delicate frond of wheat; it is a daffodil, a dandelion and a dahlia.\u201d (Ages 3 to 6) Read the review\n\n\n\n\nPicture Book Picks\n\n\n \n\n\n\nNicol\u00f2 Carozzi, \u201cBrave as a Mouse\u201d (Random House Studio, 40 pages, $17.99)\nThe \u201celegant and atmospheric artwork\u201d of this picture book \u201clifts a cheering tale of friendship and ingenuity to the level of the sublime,\u201d as a mouse hatches a \u201ca wild, bold, brave plan\u201d plan to save a goldfish from some feline threats. (Ages 3 to 7) Read the review\nJon Klassen, \u201cThe Rock From the Sky\u201d (Candlewick, 96 pages, $18.99)\n\u201cMr. Klassen\u2019s deadpan humor\u2014in picture books such as \u2018I Want My Hat Back\u2019 and \u2018We Found a Hat\u2019\u2014has an existential bleakness that elementary-school-age kids for some reason find incredibly funny.\u201d In his latest, which \u201ccontains five brief and connected stories involving three animal friends . . . and two characters from outer space,\u201d readers will find that, in this tale of anticipation, misdirection and comic surprise, \u201cMr. Klassen has outdone himself.\u201d (Ages 3 to 8) Read the review\nGideon Sterer, \u201cThe Midnight Fair\u201d(Candlewick, 32 pages, $16.99) \n\u201cIn Mariachiara Di Giorgio\u2019s beautiful and atmospheric paintings, wild creatures watch a grassy fairground from a safe distance as carnies set up tents, rides and food stands. That night, the animals wait until the human visitors have streamed away.\u201d With its \u201cglowing colors, secretive animals and air of mischief . . . \u2018The Midnight Fair\u2019 offers true enchantment.\u201d (Ages 3 to 8) Read the review\nBrian Floca, \u201cKeeping the City Going\u201d (Atheneum, 32 pages, $17.99)\n\u201cBrian Floca pays elegant tribute to the men and women who went out to work during the Covid-19 lockdown while the rest of the country hunkered indoors . . . In these careful ink-and-watercolor pictures he shows 4- to 8-year-olds the modes of transport that proved so useful: delivery bikes, taxis and buses; ambulances, big rigs and bakery vans; pallet jacks, steel dollies and hand trucks.\u201d (Ages 4 to 8) Read the review\n\n\n\n\nStarter Stories for Early Readers\n\n\n \n\n\n\nSergio Ruzzier, \u201cFox & Chick: The Sleepover\u201d (Chronicle, 46 pages, $14.99)\n\u201cIn watercolor panel illustrations and speech-bubble dialogue,\u201d the relationship between a pair of animal friends \u201cplays out with gently instructive humor. Chick is the live wire: the needy and oblivious one, the drama queen. Fox plays the straight man, whose tolerant and affectionate nature makes him a foil to his demanding friend.\u201d (Ages 5 to 8) Read the review\nAnnie Barrows and Sophie Blackall, \u201clvy and Bean Get to Work!\u201d (Chronicle, 128 pages, $14.99)\n\u201cThe adventures that began with \u2018Ivy and Bean\u2019 arrive at a rumbustious conclusion. . . . In their final caper, Ivy and Bean find unexpected wealth after attending a Career Fair at their school.\u201d The discovery of a singularly rewarding future life as \u201ctreasure hunters\u201d inspires new plans for the duo in the 12th book in this beloved series. (Ages 6 to 9) Read the review\nAtinuke and Onyinye Iwu, \u201cToo Small Tola\u201d (Candlewick, 89 pages, $15.99)\n\u201cThe writer Atinuke sets a witty and observant collection of linked stories in modern Africa . . . cheerily illustrated by Onyinye Iwu. \u2018Tola lives in a run-down block of apartments in the megacity of Lagos, in the country of Nigeria,\u2019 we read at the start of each chapter before plunging into the escapades of a resourceful girl who constantly gets chaffed about her small stature. . . . \u2018Too Small Tola\u2019 has a diminutive heroine, but it\u2019s a big charmer and treats its newly capable readers with a respect that will make them feel knowledgeable and sophisticated.\u201d (Ages 6 to 9) Read the review\n\n\n\n\nFood for Curious Minds\n\n\n \n\n\n\nMichael Hearst and Hans Jenssen, \u201cUnconventional Vehicles\u201d(Chronicle, 104 pages, $19.99)\n\u201cWould you rather travel in a carriage pulled by ostriches or in a hot-ai A guide to books ideal for long car rides, the camp duffel bag or rainy days. ",
        "author": "WSJ Books Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Earth-Shattering\u2019 Review: Cosmic Calamities (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "416",
        "date": "2019-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/earth-shattering-review-cosmic-calamities-11550619888?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=78",
        "text": "As Mr. Berman explains, a cataclysm is \u201ctypically an event of surprise and upheaval\u201d that \u201cusually descends on its victims rapidly, although a relatively slow-spreading global epidemic would also qualify.\u201d Human bloodbaths, according to him, require 30 million deaths to earn his cataclysm imprimatur\u2014though he isn\u2019t inflexible about this.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nEarth-ShatteringBy Bob Berman\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLittle, Brown, 307 pages, $28\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cEarth-Shattering\u201d begins 13.8 billion years ago at the ultimate cataclysm, the Big Bang, \u201cthe most spectacular of all violent events.\u201d Unlike explosions\u2014discharges of kinetic energy\u2014the Big Bang \u201cinvolved the frenzied expansion of space, of emptiness itself.\u201d That expansion is still happening\u2014or, as the author says, \u201cstill banging.\u201d\nMr. Berman deftly explains the current scientific consensus about the Big Bang\u2019s cause, history and structure. And he is forthright about what still puzzles most scientists about it, such as \u201cwhy an entire universe as small as a mustard seed abruptly materialized out of nothingness.\u201d The author also introduces us to one of the book\u2019s motifs: that mind-boggling calamities can end up bestowing great benefits. \u201cThe catastrophic destruction of stars, planets, and galactic neighborhoods,\u201d Mr. Berman writes, \u201clike most other cataclysms, creates more good than harm.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Berman demonstrates this point with many of the subjects he explores. He tells us of a Mars-size planet called Theia that crashed into ours just before the first living organisms appeared. Theia was completely destroyed; Earth almost was, its crust and mantle wiped out. Fragments of Theia and Earth were hurled into space, eventually merging to become our moon, which \u201cstabilizes Earth\u2019s axial tilt,\u201d enabling seasons and shielding our planet from being mercilessly fried by the sun. This means that the Theia cataclysm ultimately played an important role in permitting life to thrive on Earth. \u201cA very happy ending,\u201d Mr. Berman concludes.\nAnother example occurred 66 million years ago when our planet was \u201cclobbered by a giant meteor\u201d at least 9 miles wide. The impact, we are told, wiped out \u201c75 percent of the world\u2019s plants and animals\u201d\u2014including all the dinosaurs\u2014and \u201cunleashed the same energy as ten billion Hiroshima bombs.\u201d Yet this devastation would permit the appearance of \u201ca new biological niche that was promptly filled by small warm-blooded creatures\u201d that eventually evolved into Homo sapiens.\nMr. Berman is an astronomer, the former \u201cNight Watchman\u201d columnist for Discover magazine and currently a columnist for Astronomy magazine. He is also the author or co-author of several books on astronomy. I greatly admire his ability to lucidly explain astrophysics to the nonscientist. (His use of the inscrutable, excruciating \u201cgrok\u201d\u2014twice\u2014is, however, a bit much.)\nThe brio that he brings to cosmic havoc makes much of \u201cEarth-Shattering\u201d a delicious guilty pleasure. But for earthly cataclysms unrelated to outer space, not so much. He scrutinizes many of them\u2014the bubonic plague, the Spanish flu, World War II, nuclear attacks, nuclear-power-plant accidents\u2014dutifully but without the same \u00e9lan. This is understandable. Earthly cataclysms, particularly the episodes of human-initiated mass slaughter, aren\u2019t beguilingly breathtaking, and Mr. Berman knows it. Inevitably, his accounts of egregious Earth-centric afflictions, while never pedantic, are just a little stolid.\nA fierce gloom-inducing jolt comes at the end of the book when the author discusses our solar system\u2019s ultimate cataclysm, the decline of our sun and planet. It is an apocalypse without religious trappings, one that\u00a0is \u201cboth absolutely certain and absolutely total.\u201d It\u00a0will arrive because our dependable sun has been \u201cgrowing 10 percent more luminous every billion years\u201d: Global temperatures will stabilize \u201cat around 710 degrees\u201d a billion years from now, resulting in the elimination of the Earth\u2019s water and engendering \u201cthe obliteration of every form of life on the planet.\u201d Another five billion years after that, our sun, having undergone numerous metamorphoses under the weight of its own gravity and by the discharge of unimaginable quantities of energy, will be reduced to the size of Earth, its nuclear reactions snuffed out. Its greater density, however, will cause Earth to continue in its orbit: The two bodies will \u201cperform their eternal minuet with each other. . . . Their dual blackness [camouflaging] them against the inkiness of space, so any future alien astronomers would be hard-pressed to detect them at all.\u201d And with that, \u201cno further cataclysm can ever befall this inky pair of globes because neither has a future.\u201d\nOne hopes that earthlings in that future era can somehow escape their demise. Alas, Mr. Berman isn\u2019t sanguine.\nMr. Schneider reviews books for newspapers and magazines. Great cataclysms can bestow great bene\ufb01ts. A Mars-size planet once collided with Earth, creating the necessary conditions for life here. ",
        "author": "Howard Schneider"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: Bamboo Bathed in Earthlight (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "417",
        "date": "2018-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-bamboo-bathed-in-earthlight-1543587557?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=68",
        "text": "It was also a countermove to a U.S. effort\u2014the G8 of major economies having become a G2\u2014though that initiative came not from the state, but from the \u201cFour Space Cadets,\u201d billionaires putting private money where public funds fear to go. The insidious proposition that Mr. Robinson puts forward is that by 2047 both China and the U.S. will have become at bottom similar societies, despite all the superficial differences.\nThe Chinese moon base has groves of bamboo, gibbons doing low-gravity acrobatics, and a private classical Chinese habitat in a lava tunnel, and it has just imported a feng shui expert to advise on further development. Superstition, thinks Fred Fredericks, an American quantum engineer headed to the moon to do some work for the Chinese. Or is it perhaps some kind of \u201cancient folkloric intuition of quantum phenomena\u201d? Chinese devotion to antiquity does not prevent mastery of modernity.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books \n\n\n\n Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMore seriously, back on Earth the problem for the Party in China is the hukou system. No one has a right to live except where they\u2019re registered, which for almost everyone is where they were born. The result is 500 million illegal migrants from the countryside into the cities, with no civil rights. \n\nNothing like that in America? In fact, midcentury America has generated a \u201cnetizen precariat.\u201d That\u2019s the class of people who own wristpads, but never know if their labor will be required from one day to the next. The \u201cgig economy,\u201d as we call it right now.\nIn the background of \u201cRed Moon,\u201d then, are serious outbreaks of civil disobedience in both the main economies of Earth. A critical figure on the moon is Chan Qi, the privileged daughter of the minister of finance, but also leader of the fight for migrants\u2019 rights. With her is Fred the quantum expert, like her on the run, because as soon as he shakes hands with Chang Yazu, the lunar governor, Chang drops dead from poison. Chang, Fred and soon Chan Qi as well are victims of Party power politics.\nSci-fi fans will love the detail and the optimism about humanity\u2019s future in space. Not so comforting are the penetrating comments about politics on Earth. But in grown-up sci fi, of which Mr. Robinson is the pre-eminent producer, it\u2019s all about mozhe shitou guo he\u2014\u201ccrossing the river by feeling the stones,\u201d the author\u2019s enigmatic quote from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Deng Xiaoping. We\u2019ve long known that space exploration depends on terrestrial politics. But what political event could put space back on the top of the agenda? In \u2018Red Moon,\u2019 it\u2019s China\u2019s decision to establish a base on the moon. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: Bamboo Bathed in Earthlight (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "418",
        "date": "2018-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-bamboo-bathed-in-earthlight-1543587557?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=83",
        "text": "It was also a countermove to a U.S. effort\u2014the G8 of major economies having become a G2\u2014though that initiative came not from the state, but from the \u201cFour Space Cadets,\u201d billionaires putting private money where public funds fear to go. The insidious proposition that Mr. Robinson puts forward is that by 2047 both China and the U.S. will have become at bottom similar societies, despite all the superficial differences.\nThe Chinese moon base has groves of bamboo, gibbons doing low-gravity acrobatics, and a private classical Chinese habitat in a lava tunnel, and it has just imported a feng shui expert to advise on further development. Superstition, thinks Fred Fredericks, an American quantum engineer headed to the moon to do some work for the Chinese. Or is it perhaps some kind of \u201cancient folkloric intuition of quantum phenomena\u201d? Chinese devotion to antiquity does not prevent mastery of modernity.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books \n\n\n\n Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMore seriously, back on Earth the problem for the Party in China is the hukou system. No one has a right to live except where they\u2019re registered, which for almost everyone is where they were born. The result is 500 million illegal migrants from the countryside into the cities, with no civil rights. \n\nNothing like that in America? In fact, midcentury America has generated a \u201cnetizen precariat.\u201d That\u2019s the class of people who own wristpads, but never know if their labor will be required from one day to the next. The \u201cgig economy,\u201d as we call it right now.\nIn the background of \u201cRed Moon,\u201d then, are serious outbreaks of civil disobedience in both the main economies of Earth. A critical figure on the moon is Chan Qi, the privileged daughter of the minister of finance, but also leader of the fight for migrants\u2019 rights. With her is Fred the quantum expert, like her on the run, because as soon as he shakes hands with Chang Yazu, the lunar governor, Chang drops dead from poison. Chang, Fred and soon Chan Qi as well are victims of Party power politics.\nSci-fi fans will love the detail and the optimism about humanity\u2019s future in space. Not so comforting are the penetrating comments about politics on Earth. But in grown-up sci fi, of which Mr. Robinson is the pre-eminent producer, it\u2019s all about mozhe shitou guo he\u2014\u201ccrossing the river by feeling the stones,\u201d the author\u2019s enigmatic quote from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Deng Xiaoping. We\u2019ve long known that space exploration depends on terrestrial politics. But what political event could put space back on the top of the agenda? In \u2018Red Moon,\u2019 it\u2019s China\u2019s decision to establish a base on the moon. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine\u2019 Review: A Longing for Truth and Meaning (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "419",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/searching-for-stars-on-an-island-in-maine-review-a-longing-for-truth-and-meaning-1523044450?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=98",
        "text": "At a higher level, we humans experience the natural world through sensory blinders, our faculties adapted to survival, not scientific detection. Yet the technology of recent decades has endowed us with the means to envision pseudo-images and mathematical constructs of phenomena beyond naked perception: atomic nuclei, stellar infernos, contours of space-time. Nor are we constrained by the metronomic passage of time; we can jump into the long-ago cauldron of the Big Bang or witness the future incineration of our planet by the red-giant sun. While \u201cseeing\u201d the unseeable, free of physical or temporal limits, has revealed much about the workings of the universe, it leaves plenty of room, even among scientists, to ponder some of the core mysteries of human existence: Why are we here? What, if anything, is the meaning of existence? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Whence consciousness?\nIn a delightful collection of essays titled \u201cSearching for Stars on an Island in Maine,\u201d MIT astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Lightman,\n\n\n\n the author of the best-selling novel \u201cEinstein\u2019s Dreams\u201d (1992), examines his own conflicted views on life, death and the nature of reality and tries to reconcile the primacy of his inner, evidence-driven scientist with his longing for spiritual transcendence. We follow Mr. Lightman on his perambulations about tiny Pole Island, a meditative oasis a million miles from the hurly-burly of daily life. \u201cIf one listens,\u201d he tells us, \u201cthere\u2019s always music on this island. The waves rolling into the shore make cascades of sound, sometimes regular rhythms and sometimes duples and triples and offbeat syncopations\u2014all set against the arpeggios and glissandos of the birds.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nEach twig, ant hill or rounded stone\u2014as well as the starry backdrop of the book\u2019s title\u2014serves as muse for Mr. Lightman\u2019s speculations about the physical and metaphysical realms. The elegant and evocative prose draws in the reader, and I felt as if I were strolling alongside the author while he thought aloud. Indeed, it was a challenge to keep pace, as I repeatedly wandered off into reveries triggered by the narrative. \n\n\nSearching for Stars on an Island in MaineBy Alan Lightman Pantheon, 226 pages, $24.95\n\n\nHere is a book in which even a colonoscopy becomes grist for the philosophical mill: \u201cI am just material stuff,\u201d Mr. Lightman informs us as a videocam spelunks through his innards, but he hedges: \u201cI know this intellectually, yet I recoil from the idea.\u201d The coverage of scientific versus speculative subjects varies from essay to essay. The chapter titled \u201cHummingbird\u201d details the creatures\u2019 wondrous aerodynamic and metabolic features\u2014period. \u201cStars\u201d opens with Galileo\u2019s assertion, inspired by his observations of sunspots, that stars are material bodies, proceeds to the principle of conservation of energy, and closes with the observation that our bodies\u2019 atoms are the detritus of stellar explosions. By contrast, \u201cAnts\u201d is a philosophical meditation on temporality versus permanence, while \u201cLaws\u201d lays out the essential difference between the provisionality of science and the permanence of core religious beliefs. \n\n\nViewing the world through the scientist\u2019s lens, Mr. Lightman reminds us that the universe is made of tangible bits of matter and energy, all governed by a set of fundamental physical laws. Whatever aspects of nature have escaped detection or explanation, he adds, will be revealed (eventually) through experiment and observation. In keeping with his \u201cCentral Doctrine of Science,\u201d he eschews unprovable hypotheses, most significantly the existence of God and the afterlife. Yet the expansive feelings aroused by his island wanderings continually sow dissonant seeds in the scientific furrows he has cultivated for decades. Mr. Lightman\u2019s cognitive turmoil is summed up in a reflection on the death of his parents, in which he reluctantly accepts the \u201cimpossible truth\u201d that they no longer exist. \u201cI wish I believed,\u201d he adds poignantly. \nMr. Lightman explores the dimly lit landscape of human consciousness, motivated in part by his own family\u2019s experience with dementia. \u201cSelf,\u201d he writes, \u201cis the name we give to the mental sensation of certain electrical and chemical flows in our neurons.\u201d Might cessation of these neurochemical currents\u2014essentially, the erasure of self\u2014someday provide a biochemical marker of the onset of death, so defined? Mr. Lightman admits that, at present, we are better at gauging the gradual diminishment of self than at pinpointing the moment it is extinguished. Contemplating his own end, he takes solace in knowing that some of the atoms he has shed might linger on Pole Island for a thousand years.\nThus, according to Mr. Lightman, a precipice looms for each of us: an eventual plunge into nonexistence. A depressing prospect, for sure, yet the inevitable judgment of those for whom religious or spiritual alternatives carry no resonance. We can await that reckoning gripped with fear, bemoaning An astrophysicist tries to reconcile his work as a scientist with his thirst for spiritual transcendence. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine\u2019 Review: A Longing for Truth and Meaning (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "420",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/searching-for-stars-on-an-island-in-maine-review-a-longing-for-truth-and-meaning-1523044450?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=77",
        "text": "At a higher level, we humans experience the natural world through sensory blinders, our faculties adapted to survival, not scientific detection. Yet the technology of recent decades has endowed us with the means to envision pseudo-images and mathematical constructs of phenomena beyond naked perception: atomic nuclei, stellar infernos, contours of space-time. Nor are we constrained by the metronomic passage of time; we can jump into the long-ago cauldron of the Big Bang or witness the future incineration of our planet by the red-giant sun. While \u201cseeing\u201d the unseeable, free of physical or temporal limits, has revealed much about the workings of the universe, it leaves plenty of room, even among scientists, to ponder some of the core mysteries of human existence: Why are we here? What, if anything, is the meaning of existence? Is there a God? Is there life after death? Whence consciousness?\nIn a delightful collection of essays titled \u201cSearching for Stars on an Island in Maine,\u201d MIT astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Lightman,\n\n\n\n the author of the best-selling novel \u201cEinstein\u2019s Dreams\u201d (1992), examines his own conflicted views on life, death and the nature of reality and tries to reconcile the primacy of his inner, evidence-driven scientist with his longing for spiritual transcendence. We follow Mr. Lightman on his perambulations about tiny Pole Island, a meditative oasis a million miles from the hurly-burly of daily life. \u201cIf one listens,\u201d he tells us, \u201cthere\u2019s always music on this island. The waves rolling into the shore make cascades of sound, sometimes regular rhythms and sometimes duples and triples and offbeat syncopations\u2014all set against the arpeggios and glissandos of the birds.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nEach twig, ant hill or rounded stone\u2014as well as the starry backdrop of the book\u2019s title\u2014serves as muse for Mr. Lightman\u2019s speculations about the physical and metaphysical realms. The elegant and evocative prose draws in the reader, and I felt as if I were strolling alongside the author while he thought aloud. Indeed, it was a challenge to keep pace, as I repeatedly wandered off into reveries triggered by the narrative. \n\n\nSearching for Stars on an Island in MaineBy Alan Lightman Pantheon, 226 pages, $24.95\n\n\nHere is a book in which even a colonoscopy becomes grist for the philosophical mill: \u201cI am just material stuff,\u201d Mr. Lightman informs us as a videocam spelunks through his innards, but he hedges: \u201cI know this intellectually, yet I recoil from the idea.\u201d The coverage of scientific versus speculative subjects varies from essay to essay. The chapter titled \u201cHummingbird\u201d details the creatures\u2019 wondrous aerodynamic and metabolic features\u2014period. \u201cStars\u201d opens with Galileo\u2019s assertion, inspired by his observations of sunspots, that stars are material bodies, proceeds to the principle of conservation of energy, and closes with the observation that our bodies\u2019 atoms are the detritus of stellar explosions. By contrast, \u201cAnts\u201d is a philosophical meditation on temporality versus permanence, while \u201cLaws\u201d lays out the essential difference between the provisionality of science and the permanence of core religious beliefs. \n\n\nViewing the world through the scientist\u2019s lens, Mr. Lightman reminds us that the universe is made of tangible bits of matter and energy, all governed by a set of fundamental physical laws. Whatever aspects of nature have escaped detection or explanation, he adds, will be revealed (eventually) through experiment and observation. In keeping with his \u201cCentral Doctrine of Science,\u201d he eschews unprovable hypotheses, most significantly the existence of God and the afterlife. Yet the expansive feelings aroused by his island wanderings continually sow dissonant seeds in the scientific furrows he has cultivated for decades. Mr. Lightman\u2019s cognitive turmoil is summed up in a reflection on the death of his parents, in which he reluctantly accepts the \u201cimpossible truth\u201d that they no longer exist. \u201cI wish I believed,\u201d he adds poignantly. \nMr. Lightman explores the dimly lit landscape of human consciousness, motivated in part by his own family\u2019s experience with dementia. \u201cSelf,\u201d he writes, \u201cis the name we give to the mental sensation of certain electrical and chemical flows in our neurons.\u201d Might cessation of these neurochemical currents\u2014essentially, the erasure of self\u2014someday provide a biochemical marker of the onset of death, so defined? Mr. Lightman admits that, at present, we are better at gauging the gradual diminishment of self than at pinpointing the moment it is extinguished. Contemplating his own end, he takes solace in knowing that some of the atoms he has shed might linger on Pole Island for a thousand years.\nThus, according to Mr. Lightman, a precipice looms for each of us: an eventual plunge into nonexistence. A depressing prospect, for sure, yet the inevitable judgment of those for whom religious or spiritual alternatives carry no resonance. We can await that reckoning gripped with fear, bemoaning the unfairness of it all\u2014or we can embrace whatever time we have left and gaze with gratitude at the splendid starscape above. For us, the wisest course of action\u2014indeed the only course of action\u2014was sung memorably by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peggy Lee\n\n\n\n back in 1969: \u201cIf that\u2019s all there is my friends, then let\u2019s keep dancing.\u201d \n\u2014Mr. Hirshfeld, a professor of physics at UMass Dartmouth, is the author of \u201cStarlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe.\u201d An astrophysicist tries to reconcile his work as a scientist with his thirst for spiritual transcendence. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018First Light\u2019 Review: A Stellar Start (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "421",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-light-review-a-stellar-start-11614957347?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=36",
        "text": "But, oh, how far we have come. When looking outward, Hubble was also looking back in cosmic time. Yet he reached only a fraction of the distance back to the big bang. Today astronomers can observe the cosmos when it was a mere baby\u2014only about 400,000 years old\u2014via the cosmic microwave background, the remnant echo of our universe\u2019s explosive beginning. And advanced telescopes, both on the ground and in space, are now viewing the birth of galaxies out to a distance of some 13 billion light years. \n\n\nFirst LightBy Emma Chapman\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBloomsbury, 304 pages, $28\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDoes that mean astronomy\u2019s job is nearly done when it comes to tracing our universe\u2019s evolution? Hardly. \u201cDespite the exponential increase in technology and progress, there is a period in our Universe that, until recently, we had no observations of at all,\u201d writes Emma Chapman, a Royal Society Fellow at Imperial College in London. \u201cFrom 380,000 years after the big bang to about 1 billion years after it, the Universe has remained in the Dark Ages. . . . In human terms, the missing cosmological data is equivalent to missing everything from the moment of conception to the first day of school, perhaps apart from a single ultrasound.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\nWhat to Read This WeekendThe science of dreams. Plus exploring Texas with Rick Bass & more.\n\n\nThis crucial period is when the brilliant big bang plasma cooled and dimmed, giving way to a stark blackness as protons and electrons joined to form the first hydrogen atoms. In time these atoms coalesced into clouds that launched the portion of this era called the Cosmic Dawn, when mammoth stars several hundred times the mass of our Sun fiercely ignited for the first time, reached surface temperatures of 100,000 Kelvin (compared to our Sun\u2019s far cooler 5,800K) and then quickly died. \u201cAnd yet in such short lifetimes, those stars are the ones most responsible for changing the Universe,\u201d notes Ms. Chapman. \u201cAs they roared to life, they illuminated the Universe, irradiating it and seeding it with metals that could then form stars, planets and us.\u201d \n\n\n\u201cFirst Light,\u201d a thoroughly engaging tale that allows us to see science in the making, chronicles current attempts to reveal this hidden era\u2014what we know and what we don\u2019t know. Ms. Chapman herself is in the thick of this endeavor and serves as a wonderful guide, whose voice is reminiscent of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan\u2019s\n\n\n\n , although with an extra and very welcome dollop of impish humor. I know of no other astronomy book that includes references to Doctor Who, Tutankhamen and cyanobacteria in its metaphors and analogies. From page to page, you get caught up in her excitement, as when she finds an unexpected exclamation point in a journal article: \u201cIt\u2019s simply not done,\u201d she exclaims. \u201cI love seeing this enthusiasm and humanity in scientific papers.\u201d\nTo get us started, the author opens with some lessons on the nature of light, the various types of stars and the nuclear reactions within them. But the first stars created in the Cosmic Dawn were very different from the ones that now surround us. When born they contained no \u201cmetals\u201d\u2014astronomical shorthand for all the elements beyond simple hydrogen and helium. These first-generation stars had yet to be enriched with the oxygen, carbon and nitrogen that are fused within stars and then spewed into space via stellar explosions. \nAstronomers have long sought these pristine first stars, and by the 1980s it was thought to be a scandal that extensive searches came up empty. To Ms. Chapman, they are \u201cthe rare Beanie Baby missing from our shelves, or the mint-condition Penny Black gap in our stamp collection. To find them, we need fresh ideas, resources and stamina.\u201d\nOne clever idea is to search for the earliest radio \u201csong\u201d of hydrogen, a 21-centimeter wavelength emitted by the neutral atoms, and then look for an abrupt change in the tune as the hydrogen gets excited by the radiation from the first stars. In 2018 a set of antennas in western Australia seemed to have captured this unique signal, which had been stretched out to a wavelength of 4\u00bd meters as it traveled through the expanding universe, giving us \u201cthe most basic morsel of information: a date of birth,\u201d writes Ms. Chapman. The first stars appeared to have arisen a mere 180 million years after the big bang. \nOr maybe not. Certain properties of the signal didn\u2019t match what astronomers had been expecting, suggesting that something else was involved, perhaps dark matter or some other unknown background accompanying the hydrogen, which muddied the interpretation. She shows us how scientific progress usually works: \u201cMore often, instead of \u2018Eureka! I\u2019ve got it,\u2019 it is \u2018That looks weird! Hang on, what is that?\u2019\u201d\nAnother approach is to carry out a bit of stellar archaeology: look around our local celestial neighborhood and seek out the smallest first-generation stars still burning away. Stars today have a typical metal content of 2%; the first stars have none. So far, astron The dazzling formation of the first stars remains one of astronomy\u2019s greatest mysteries. ",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018First Light\u2019 Review: A Stellar Start (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "422",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-light-review-a-stellar-start-11614957347?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=27",
        "text": "But, oh, how far we have come. When looking outward, Hubble was also looking back in cosmic time. Yet he reached only a fraction of the distance back to the big bang. Today astronomers can observe the cosmos when it was a mere baby\u2014only about 400,000 years old\u2014via the cosmic microwave background, the remnant echo of our universe\u2019s explosive beginning. And advanced telescopes, both on the ground and in space, are now viewing the birth of galaxies out to a distance of some 13 billion light years. \n\n\nFirst LightBy Emma Chapman\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBloomsbury, 304 pages, $28\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDoes that mean astronomy\u2019s job is nearly done when it comes to tracing our universe\u2019s evolution? Hardly. \u201cDespite the exponential increase in technology and progress, there is a period in our Universe that, until recently, we had no observations of at all,\u201d writes Emma Chapman, a Royal Society Fellow at Imperial College in London. \u201cFrom 380,000 years after the big bang to about 1 billion years after it, the Universe has remained in the Dark Ages. . . . In human terms, the missing cosmological data is equivalent to missing everything from the moment of conception to the first day of school, perhaps apart from a single ultrasound.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\nWhat to Read This WeekendThe science of dreams. Plus exploring Texas with Rick Bass & more.\n\n\nThis crucial period is when the brilliant big bang plasma cooled and dimmed, giving way to a stark blackness as protons and electrons joined to form the first hydrogen atoms. In time these atoms coalesced into clouds that launched the portion of this era called the Cosmic Dawn, when mammoth stars several hundred times the mass of our Sun fiercely ignited for the first time, reached surface temperatures of 100,000 Kelvin (compared to our Sun\u2019s far cooler 5,800K) and then quickly died. \u201cAnd yet in such short lifetimes, those stars are the ones most responsible for changing the Universe,\u201d notes Ms. Chapman. \u201cAs they roared to life, they illuminated the Universe, irradiating it and seeding it with metals that could then form stars, planets and us.\u201d \n\n\n\u201cFirst Light,\u201d a thoroughly engaging tale that allows us to see science in the making, chronicles current attempts to reveal this hidden era\u2014what we know and what we don\u2019t know. Ms. Chapman herself is in the thick of this endeavor and serves as a wonderful guide, whose voice is reminiscent of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan\u2019s\n\n\n\n , although with an extra and very welcome dollop of impish humor. I know of no other astronomy book that includes references to Doctor Who, Tutankhamen and cyanobacteria in its metaphors and analogies. From page to page, you get caught up in her excitement, as when she finds an unexpected exclamation point in a journal article: \u201cIt\u2019s simply not done,\u201d she exclaims. \u201cI love seeing this enthusiasm and humanity in scientific papers.\u201d\nTo get us started, the author opens with some lessons on the nature of light, the various types of stars and the nuclear reactions within them. But the first stars created in the Cosmic Dawn were very different from the ones that now surround us. When born they contained no \u201cmetals\u201d\u2014astronomical shorthand for all the elements beyond simple hydrogen and helium. These first-generation stars had yet to be enriched with the oxygen, carbon and nitrogen that are fused within stars and then spewed into space via stellar explosions. \nAstronomers have long sought these pristine first stars, and by the 1980s it was thought to be a scandal that extensive searches came up empty. To Ms. Chapman, they are \u201cthe rare Beanie Baby missing from our shelves, or the mint-condition Penny Black gap in our stamp collection. To find them, we need fresh ideas, resources and stamina.\u201d\nOne clever idea is to search for the earliest radio \u201csong\u201d of hydrogen, a 21-centimeter wavelength emitted by the neutral atoms, and then look for an abrupt change in the tune as the hydrogen gets excited by the radiation from the first stars. In 2018 a set of antennas in western Australia seemed to have captured this unique signal, which had been stretched out to a wavelength of 4\u00bd meters as it traveled through the expanding universe, giving us \u201cthe most basic morsel of information: a date of birth,\u201d writes Ms. Chapman. The first stars appeared to have arisen a mere 180 million years after the big bang. \nOr maybe not. Certain properties of the signal didn\u2019t match what astronomers had been expecting, suggesting that something else was involved, perhaps dark matter or some other unknown background accompanying the hydrogen, which muddied the interpretation. She shows us how scientific progress usually works: \u201cMore often, instead of \u2018Eureka! I\u2019ve got it,\u2019 it is \u2018That looks weird! Hang on, what is that?\u2019\u201d\nAnother approach is to carry out a bit of stellar archaeology: look around our local celestial neighborhood and seek out the smallest first-generation stars still burning away. Stars today have a typical metal content of 2%; the first stars have none. So far, astronomers have found only a handful that are ultra metal-poor. One star was 1/1,000,000th more iron-poor than the Sun. Close, but no cigar. \u201cIt\u2019s the equivalent of faking an Egyptian mummy almost perfectly, but leaving the body with a smartwatch on,\u201d writes Ms. Chapman. It was not an original star, but rather a close descendant that had gotten its pinch of iron from a previous generation. \nMs. Chapman\u2019s grand finale involves the \u201cEpoch of Reionization\u201d right after the Cosmic Dawn. And, yes, she agrees with you that it\u2019s a \u201cterrible, terrible name. It took me several months,\u201d she confesses, \u201cto spell it confidently, let alone pronounce it.\u201d Simply put, it\u2019s the era when the first stars\u2019 intense radiation re-energized the neutral hydrogen suffused through space, in other words \u201cionizing\u201d it back into separate protons and electrons. She describes these bubbles of ionized hydrogen, spreading outward over hundreds of millions of years, as \u201cthe footprints of the first stars.\u201d Her work involves continuing to look for that moment when neutral hydrogen\u2019s radio song suddenly goes silent, as the ionized hydrogen can no longer speak in the same way. This is a thankless job, as she must first subtract out all the other noises of the universe. \u201cIt\u2019s like listening to a phone conversation while walking past a pneumatic drill,\u201d she notes, which is why they have yet to be sure they\u2019ve found it with full confidence. Why go to all this trouble? Because it will reveal the celestial objects\u2014such as quasars, X-ray binaries, and dwarf galaxies\u2014that existed during this period of cosmic history and show how they behaved, an amazing astronomical observation from so far away. \nThere are moments in \u201cFirst Light\u201d when the text might be more at home in an astrophysical journal, but even in those sections the book offers the reader insights on the intricate data and analysis required to reveal the universe\u2019s mysteries. I eagerly await a second edition when the Cosmic Dawn is at last viewed in its full glory\u2014perhaps using a future telescope array mounted on the far side of the Moon. \n\u2014Ms. Bartusiak is Professor of the Practice emeritus in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and the author of seven books on the frontiers of astrophysics and its history, including \u201cThe Day We Found the Universe\u201d and \u201cBlack Hole.\u201d The dazzling formation of the first stars remains one of astronomy\u2019s greatest mysteries. ",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: Jeffrey Kluger\u2019s \u2018Holdout\u2019 Review. (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "423",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-jeffrey-kluger-holdout-review-11633108729?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=15",
        "text": "Walli, we learn, wants to be both an eye in the sky and a whistleblower, and what she\u2019s keeping her eye on is the \u201cConsolidation\u201d: the burning of the Amazon rainforest together with the forced resettlement of its indigenous population. Walli has an aid-worker niece down there and she means to let the world know about it.\nThis is politically infuriating. Only the United States has the power to stop the Consolidation, but the president has no desire to start a war with Brazil and its allies. He can threaten Walli with all kinds of consequences, but he can\u2019t actually get at her. Only the Russians have the rocket power to reach the Space Station, and why would they help out an American leader?\n\n\n\nWhat to Read This FallOur picks for fiction, history, children's\u2014and more.Nonfiction BooksChildren's BooksCloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony DoerrFall Books CollectionFiction Books\n\n\n\nMeantime, Walli\u2019s catch phrase (\u201cI would prefer not to\u201d) has become a hashtag, and there\u2019s a populist groundswell frightening the House and the Senate. And, of course, all the time the fires are burning in the forest, Walli\u2019s niece is on the run, and the little Guarani boy she\u2019s adopted\u2014well, his chances don\u2019t look good.\n\n\nMultiple intersecting problems, then, including survival in a deserted space station that\u2019s short of maintenance, prone to accidents and vulnerable to countermeasures. Mr. Kluger knows all about the tech, having written books about Apollo 8, Apollo 13 and the whole space program, but it\u2019s his constant switching from Earth to orbit, from Houston to Moscow, from rainforest to Washington, D.C., that keeps the pot boiling. \nThis is near-future sci-fi in the age of social media. It all seemed so much simpler, back in the 1960s . . . An astronaut follows her conscience in a near-future orbital thriller. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "With a spacecraft in trouble and the White House watching, SpaceX had to deliver (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "424",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-a-spacecraft-in-trouble-and-the-white-house-watching-spacex-had-to-deliver/2018/03/15/553d89cc-2701-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html",
        "text": "Within minutes of liftoff, it was clear the Dragon spacecraft was in trouble.Inside mission control on the morning of March 1, 2013, the SpaceX team was desperately trying to figure out what went wrong and soon pinpointed the problem: A few valves were stuck. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLori Garver, NASA\u2019s deputy administrator, was beside herself. The Obama administration had placed a bold bet on Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, awarding it hundreds of millions of dollars on contracts to fly crew \u2014 not just cargo \u2014 to the International Space Station, despite the critics who said it was foolish to trust a private outfit with such a complicated endeavor. This was a fundamental shift for NASA, a move that some in the agency\u2019s highest reaches were wary of, and a risky bet by the White House. Under President Barack Obama, NASA continued plans to retire the space shuttle and hired contractors \u2014 SpaceX and Boeing \u2014 to fly astronauts to the International Space Station as if they were providing a taxi service to space. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on missions in deep space and recapture some of the glory that had faded in the decades since the Apollo era put 12 men on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Obama acknowledged the risks of the proposal. \u201cNow, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way,\u201d he said. But the U.S. space program needed a kick-start, he said: \u201cWe will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies \u2014 from young start-ups to established leaders \u2014 compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.\u201dMusk had become the face of this new policy, the brash Silicon Valley tech billionaire who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of colonizing Mars. At first, the company had struggled, and it nearly went out of business after three failed attempts to reach orbit. But after a successful launch in 2008, SpaceX won a $1.6 billion NASA cargo contract, prompting Musk to change his log-in password to \u201cILoveNASA.\u201dNow, he had to show that his Hawthorne, Calif., upstart could deliver. And with Dragon struggling in 2013, he was starting to sweat. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA lot on the lineMusk wasn\u2019t the only one with a lot to lose. If the spacecraft didn\u2019t dock with the station, if the mission somehow failed, Garver feared the critics would again blast Obama\u2019s decision. Many were already upset with the White House for canceling the President George W. Bush-era Constellation program \u2014 a plan to return to the moon using big rockets and spacecraft built by the traditional industrial base led by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, a plan that SpaceX was fighting to disrupt. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a powerful member of the Appropriations Committee, said at the time that Obama\u2019s plan \u201cbegins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight\u201d and that Obama was turning NASA into the agency of \u201cpipe dreams and fairy tales.\u201dStory continues below advertisementObama\u2019s shift also drew criticism from Michael Griffin, a former NASA administrator.Advertisement\u201cOne day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet,\u201d he said of space flight. \u201cIt\u2019s like 1920. Lindbergh hasn\u2019t flown the Atlantic, and they\u2019re trying to sell 747s to Pan Am.\u201dTo assuage concerns, the White House decided Obama would visit the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The message was clear: Although the president canceled one of their major programs, the contractors were still a vital part of the U.S. space program. His presence there would be an endorsement and a signal to Congress. But there was a problem: The Alliance was about to launch a highly classified spaceplane known as the X-37B that would ultimately stay in orbit for months at a time. But doing what? The Pentagon wouldn\u2019t say. The program was secret, which was why the president couldn\u2019t just swing by for a photo op. The National Security Council wouldn\u2019t hear of it. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo the White House scrambled. Instead, the president would visit SpaceX, a development that the company welcomed. A presidential visit would represent a public relations triumph over its arch",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With a spacecraft in trouble and the White House watching, SpaceX had to deliver (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "425",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-a-spacecraft-in-trouble-and-the-white-house-watching-spacex-had-to-deliver/2018/03/15/553d89cc-2701-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html",
        "text": "Within minutes of liftoff, it was clear the Dragon spacecraft was in trouble.Inside mission control on the morning of March 1, 2013, the SpaceX team was desperately trying to figure out what went wrong and soon pinpointed the problem: A few valves were stuck. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLori Garver, NASA\u2019s deputy administrator, was beside herself. The Obama administration had placed a bold bet on Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, awarding it hundreds of millions of dollars on contracts to fly crew \u2014 not just cargo \u2014 to the International Space Station, despite the critics who said it was foolish to trust a private outfit with such a complicated endeavor. This was a fundamental shift for NASA, a move that some in the agency\u2019s highest reaches were wary of, and a risky bet by the White House. Under President Barack Obama, NASA continued plans to retire the space shuttle and hired contractors \u2014 SpaceX and Boeing \u2014 to fly astronauts to the International Space Station as if they were providing a taxi service to space. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on missions in deep space and recapture some of the glory that had faded in the decades since the Apollo era put 12 men on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Obama acknowledged the risks of the proposal. \u201cNow, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way,\u201d he said. But the U.S. space program needed a kick-start, he said: \u201cWe will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies \u2014 from young start-ups to established leaders \u2014 compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.\u201dMusk had become the face of this new policy, the brash Silicon Valley tech billionaire who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of colonizing Mars. At first, the company had struggled, and it nearly went out of business after three failed attempts to reach orbit. But after a successful launch in 2008, SpaceX won a $1.6 billion NASA cargo contract, prompting Musk to change his log-in password to \u201cILoveNASA.\u201dNow, he had to show that his Hawthorne, Calif., upstart could deliver. And with Dragon struggling in 2013, he was starting to sweat. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA lot on the lineMusk wasn\u2019t the only one with a lot to lose. If the spacecraft didn\u2019t dock with the station, if the mission somehow failed, Garver feared the critics would again blast Obama\u2019s decision. Many were already upset with the White House for canceling the President George W. Bush-era Constellation program \u2014 a plan to return to the moon using big rockets and spacecraft built by the traditional industrial base led by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, a plan that SpaceX was fighting to disrupt. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a powerful member of the Appropriations Committee, said at the time that Obama\u2019s plan \u201cbegins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight\u201d and that Obama was turning NASA into the agency of \u201cpipe dreams and fairy tales.\u201dStory continues below advertisementObama\u2019s shift also drew criticism from Michael Griffin, a former NASA administrator.Advertisement\u201cOne day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet,\u201d he said of space flight. \u201cIt\u2019s like 1920. Lindbergh hasn\u2019t flown the Atlantic, and they\u2019re trying to sell 747s to Pan Am.\u201dTo assuage concerns, the White House decided Obama would visit the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The message was clear: Although the president canceled one of their major programs, the contractors were still a vital part of the U.S. space program. His presence there would be an endorsement and a signal to Congress. But there was a problem: The Alliance was about to launch a highly classified spaceplane known as the X-37B that would ultimately stay in orbit for months at a time. But doing what? The Pentagon wouldn\u2019t say. The program was secret, which was why the president couldn\u2019t just swing by for a photo op. The National Security Council wouldn\u2019t hear of it. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo the White House scrambled. Instead, the president would visit SpaceX, a development that the company welcomed. A presidential visit would represent a public relations triumph over its arch",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With a spacecraft in trouble and the White House watching, SpaceX had to deliver (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "426",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-a-spacecraft-in-trouble-and-the-white-house-watching-spacex-had-to-deliver/2018/03/15/553d89cc-2701-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html",
        "text": "Within minutes of liftoff, it was clear the Dragon spacecraft was in trouble.Inside mission control on the morning of March 1, 2013, the SpaceX team was desperately trying to figure out what went wrong and soon pinpointed the problem: A few valves were stuck. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLori Garver, NASA\u2019s deputy administrator, was beside herself. The Obama administration had placed a bold bet on Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, awarding it hundreds of millions of dollars on contracts to fly crew \u2014 not just cargo \u2014 to the International Space Station, despite the critics who said it was foolish to trust a private outfit with such a complicated endeavor. This was a fundamental shift for NASA, a move that some in the agency\u2019s highest reaches were wary of, and a risky bet by the White House. Under President Barack Obama, NASA continued plans to retire the space shuttle and hired contractors \u2014 SpaceX and Boeing \u2014 to fly astronauts to the International Space Station as if they were providing a taxi service to space. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on missions in deep space and recapture some of the glory that had faded in the decades since the Apollo era put 12 men on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a 2010 speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Obama acknowledged the risks of the proposal. \u201cNow, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way,\u201d he said. But the U.S. space program needed a kick-start, he said: \u201cWe will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies \u2014 from young start-ups to established leaders \u2014 compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.\u201dMusk had become the face of this new policy, the brash Silicon Valley tech billionaire who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of colonizing Mars. At first, the company had struggled, and it nearly went out of business after three failed attempts to reach orbit. But after a successful launch in 2008, SpaceX won a $1.6 billion NASA cargo contract, prompting Musk to change his log-in password to \u201cILoveNASA.\u201dNow, he had to show that his Hawthorne, Calif., upstart could deliver. And with Dragon struggling in 2013, he was starting to sweat. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA lot on the lineMusk wasn\u2019t the only one with a lot to lose. If the spacecraft didn\u2019t dock with the station, if the mission somehow failed, Garver feared the critics would again blast Obama\u2019s decision. Many were already upset with the White House for canceling the President George W. Bush-era Constellation program \u2014 a plan to return to the moon using big rockets and spacecraft built by the traditional industrial base led by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, a plan that SpaceX was fighting to disrupt. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), a powerful member of the Appropriations Committee, said at the time that Obama\u2019s plan \u201cbegins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight\u201d and that Obama was turning NASA into the agency of \u201cpipe dreams and fairy tales.\u201dStory continues below advertisementObama\u2019s shift also drew criticism from Michael Griffin, a former NASA administrator.Advertisement\u201cOne day it will be like commercial airline travel, just not yet,\u201d he said of space flight. \u201cIt\u2019s like 1920. Lindbergh hasn\u2019t flown the Atlantic, and they\u2019re trying to sell 747s to Pan Am.\u201dTo assuage concerns, the White House decided Obama would visit the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The message was clear: Although the president canceled one of their major programs, the contractors were still a vital part of the U.S. space program. His presence there would be an endorsement and a signal to Congress. But there was a problem: The Alliance was about to launch a highly classified spaceplane known as the X-37B that would ultimately stay in orbit for months at a time. But doing what? The Pentagon wouldn\u2019t say. The program was secret, which was why the president couldn\u2019t just swing by for a photo op. The National Security Council wouldn\u2019t hear of it. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo the White House scrambled. Instead, the president would visit SpaceX, a development that the company welcomed. A presidential visit would represent a public relations triumph over its arch",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at risk. (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "427",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/elon-musks-space-x-is-using-a-powerful-rocket-technology-nasa-advisers-say-it-could-put-lives-at-risk/2018/05/05/f810b182-3cec-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story.html",
        "text": "When Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea \u2014 keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff \u2014 while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as \u201cload-and-go,\u201d could set off an explosion. The proposal has raised alarms for members of Congress and NASA safety advisers as the agency and SpaceX prepare to launch humans into orbit as early as this year. One watchdog group labeled load-and-go a \u201cpotential safety risk.\u201d A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was \u201ccontrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementConcerns at NASA over the astronauts\u2019 safety hit a high point when, in September 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. No one was hurt, but the payload, a multimillion-dollar satellite, was lost. The question on many people\u2019s minds at NASA instantly became: What if astronauts were on board?The fueling issue is emerging as a point of tension between the safety-obsessed space agency and the maverick company run by Musk, a tech entrepreneur who is well known for his flair for the dramatic and for pushing boundaries of rocket science.In this culture clash, SpaceX is the daring, Silicon Valley-style outfit led by a man who literally sells flamethrowers on the Internet and wholeheartedly embraces risk. Musk is reigniting interest in space with acrobatic rocket-booster landings and eye-popping stunts, such as launching a Tesla convertible toward Mars.\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis sensibilities have collided with a bureaucratic system at NASA that has been accused of being overly conservative in the wake of two shuttle disasters that killed 14 astronauts.\nThe concerns from some at NASA are shared by others. John Mulholland, who oversees Boeing\u2019s contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and once worked on the space shuttle, said load-and-go fueling was rejected by NASA in the past because \u201cwe never could get comfortable with the safety risks that you would take with that approach. When you\u2019re loading densified propellants, it is not an inherently stable situation.\u201dSpaceX supporters say tradition and old ways of thinking can be the enemy of innovation and thwart efforts to open the frontier of space.Story continues below advertisementGreg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California, said the load-and-go procedures were a heated issue when he served on Trump\u2019s NASA transition team.Advertisement\u201cNASA is supposed to be a risk-taking organization,\u201d he said. \u201cBut every time we would mention accepting risk in human spaceflight, the NASA people would say, \u2018But, oh, you have to remember the scar tissue\u2019\u2014 and they were talking about the two shuttle disasters. They seemed to have become victims of the past and unwilling to try anything new, because of that scar tissue.\u201dIn a recent speech, Robert Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, lamented in candid terms how the agency, with society as a whole, has become too risk-averse. He charged the agency with recapturing some of the youthful swagger that sent men to the moon during the Apollo era.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI worry, to be perfectly honest, if we would have ever launched Apollo in our environment here today,\u201d he said during a speech at the Space Symposium last month, \u201cif Buzz [Aldrin] and Neil [Armstrong] would have ever been able to go to the moon in the risk environment we have today.\u201dAdvertisementNASA is requiring SpaceX and Boeing to meet a requirement that involves some complicated calculations: The chance of death can be no greater than 1 in every 270 flights.One way to ensure that, as Lightfoot said during his speech, is to never fly: \u201cThe safest place to be is on the ground.\u201dShuttles shelvedStill, the scar tissue runs deep.NASA lost 14 astronauts in two space-shuttle disasters, the result of deep systematic problems of a once young and swashbuckling agency that many said had grown sclerotic.Story continues below advertisementIn the investigation into the 2003 disaster, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board blasted NASA for failing to learn \u201cthe bitter lessons\u201d from the Challenger explosion in 1986. Columbia was lost as much by a \u201cbroken safety culture\u201d as much as the chunk of foam that broke off and damaged the shuttle\u2019s heat shield. That second disaster helped lead to the retirement of the shuttle in 2011, leaving NASA in the position of being unable to fly astronauts from U.S. soil.AdvertisementInstead, NASA pays Russia to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station, an arrangement that costs the agency millions. In 2006, Russia charged $21.3\u00a0million a seat. That jumped to $81.9\u00a0million by 2015.To end the dependence on Russia, NASA has turned to the private sector, outsourcing the responsibility of flying astronauts to the space station to two companies \u2014 SpaceX and Boeing \u2014 that have been awarded $6.8\u00a0billion in contracts combined. Other private companies eventually could compete for other government launch contracts \u2014 including Blue Origin, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos \u2014 but none are expected to send people to the space station anytime soon.Story continues below advertisementThe pivot to private companies is enabling NASA to focus on deep space. But SpaceX and Boeing have both faced challenges and delays. Now, as the drought in human spaceflight extends into its seventh year, NASA is facing the prospect of even more delays \u2014 and questions about whether the contractors it plans to rely on will have a better track record than the agency that put men on the moon.Advertisement\u201cIt really is a very, very difficult problem to do human spaceflight,\u201d said Phil McAlister, the director of NASA\u2019s commercial spaceflight development division. \u201cYou\u2019ve got thousands of pounds of really highly energetic propellants on board. You\u2019ve got mini controlled explosions going off. You\u2019ve got to survive the rigors of space, which is not very friendly for the human body. And then you\u2019ve got to reenter the atmosphere, and the spacecraft gets heated up to thousands of degrees.\u201dSpaceX pulled off 18 successful launches last year, a record, and is aiming for more this year. But it has also lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, and amid all its triumphs, it has never attempted flying humans.The first failure happened in 2015, when a rocket blew up a couple of minutes after liftoff as it was flying cargo and supplies to the space station. No one was on board, and no one was injured. Then, just over a year later, another rocket exploded, this time on the launchpad while being fueled ahead of an engine test.At the time, Musk declared that if crews had been aboard they would have been safely ferried away by the rocket\u2019s abort system. Still, that mishap is forcing the company to redesign bottles of pressurized helium that sit inside the rocket\u2019s fuel tanks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow SpaceX is getting ready to fly astronauts on an upgraded version of the same rocket. And its decision to add propellant to the rocket with astronauts on board is attracting scrutiny.To get more power out of its rocket, SpaceX brings its propellants \u2014 liquid oxygen and refined kerosene \u2014 to unusually low temperatures. That causes them to become dense, meaning SpaceX can pack more fuel into its rockets.To SpaceX, the approach is another example of how it is breaking the mold. The densified propellant \u201cprovides greater propellant margin for increased reliability,\u201d the company said in a statement. In other words, should something go wrong on the mission, the rocket would have more propellant to adjust to emergencies. SpaceX\u2019s dramatic booster landings also require additional propellant. Story continues below advertisementBut to others it is an unnecessary risk. At a Capitol Hill hearing earlier this year, members of Congress pressed Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, about the safety of the load-and-go procedure.AdvertisementKoenigsmann said that the fueling takes only about a half-hour, a \u201crelatively quick procedure, and we believe that this exposure time is the shortest and therefore the safest approach.\u201dAnd the company points out that if anything goes wrong during fueling, the rocket\u2019s launch abort system would allow the astronauts to escape safely. It also conducts a \u201cstatic fire,\u201d a quick test firing of the engines in the days leading up to the launch to make sure the rocket is operating properly.And since its rockets and its Dragon spacecraft are reusable, the company gets to inspect them after each flight, giving it an in-depth understanding of how the vehicles perform.\u201cAs with all hazard analyses across the entire system and operations, controls against those hazards have been identified, and will be implemented and carefully verified prior to certification,\u201d the company said in a statement.But in a 2015 letter to NASA, Thomas Stafford, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and then chairman of the agency\u2019s space-station advisory committee, wrote that \u201cthere is a unanimous, and strong, feeling by the committee that scheduling the crew to be on board the Dragon spacecraft prior to loading oxidizer into the rocket is contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years, both in this country and internationally.\u201dAt the hearing this year, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said the agency had not decided whether it would allow SpaceX to load crews before loading the fuel, but he did not rule it out.He vowed that the agency would \u201cmake sure that we\u2019re really, really safe to go fly, and the system is ready for crew before we put them on board.\u201dIn an interview, Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, said the agency is in deep discussions with SpaceX about the safest way to go. The agency has a long history with SpaceX, first hiring it to fly cargo to the station and now looking for it to send humans into space.\u201cIt\u2019s a matter of having a good risk discussion so that we understand that,\u201d he said. \u201cI would just say that instead of working it in the press, we work in the engineering review boards.\u201d'You have to humanize it'For all its push-the-envelope swagger, SpaceX says it is serious about flying people safely and is going to great lengths to study every aspect of the vehicle, down to individual valves, so that it will meet and surpass the 1-in-270 chance-of-death metric, said Benji Reed, the director of SpaceX\u2019s commercial crew program.When Reed was down at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a recent trip, he came across a room on a special tour where the astronauts\u2019 families from the shuttle program used to wait ahead of the rocket launch.They were stunned to see that a whiteboard with drawings made by the children of the crew lost in the 2003 Columbia disaster was still there, preserved.\u201cThat really drives it home,\u201d Reed said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t just the people that we\u2019re flying \u2014 these are all of their families. So we take this extremely seriously, and we understand that our job is to fly people safely and bring them back safely. To do that you have to humanize it. You have to see them as your friends and as your colleagues.\u201dBut even with some of the best engineering minds at NASA, calculating risk is an imperfect science. There are too many unknowns in systems that are inherently dangerous and complex.\u201cEven identifying all of the risks is impossible,\u201d Gerstenmaier said during a speech last year. \u201cAlso, risk cannot be boiled down to a single statistic.\u201dBefore the very first shuttle flight, NASA estimated that the chance of death was between 1 in 500 and 1 in 5,000. Later, after the agency had compiled data from shuttle flights, it went back and came up with a very different number.The chance of death was actually 1 in 12. A point of tension has arisen between the safety-obsessed agency and the maverick company run by the billionaire Tesla founder. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at risk.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at risk. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "428",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/elon-musks-space-x-is-using-a-powerful-rocket-technology-nasa-advisers-say-it-could-put-lives-at-risk/2018/05/05/f810b182-3cec-11e8-a7d1-e4efec6389f0_story.html",
        "text": "When Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea \u2014 keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff \u2014 while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as \u201cload-and-go,\u201d could set off an explosion. The proposal has raised alarms for members of Congress and NASA safety advisers as the agency and SpaceX prepare to launch humans into orbit as early as this year. One watchdog group labeled load-and-go a \u201cpotential safety risk.\u201d A NASA advisory group warned in a letter that the method was \u201ccontrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementConcerns at NASA over the astronauts\u2019 safety hit a high point when, in September 2016, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. No one was hurt, but the payload, a multimillion-dollar satellite, was lost. The question on many people\u2019s minds at NASA instantly became: What if astronauts were on board?The fueling issue is emerging as a point of tension between the safety-obsessed space agency and the maverick company run by Musk, a tech entrepreneur who is well known for his flair for the dramatic and for pushing boundaries of rocket science.In this culture clash, SpaceX is the daring, Silicon Valley-style outfit led by a man who literally sells flamethrowers on the Internet and wholeheartedly embraces risk. Musk is reigniting interest in space with acrobatic rocket-booster landings and eye-popping stunts, such as launching a Tesla convertible toward Mars.\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis sensibilities have collided with a bureaucratic system at NASA that has been accused of being overly conservative in the wake of two shuttle disasters that killed 14 astronauts.\nThe concerns from some at NASA are shared by others. John Mulholland, who oversees Boeing\u2019s contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and once worked on the space shuttle, said load-and-go fueling was rejected by NASA in the past because \u201cwe never could get comfortable with the safety risks that you would take with that approach. When you\u2019re loading densified propellants, it is not an inherently stable situation.\u201dSpaceX supporters say tradition and old ways of thinking can be the enemy of innovation and thwart efforts to open the frontier of space.Story continues below advertisementGreg Autry, a business professor at the University of Southern California, said the load-and-go procedures were a heated issue when he served on Trump\u2019s NASA transition team.Advertisement\u201cNASA is supposed to be a risk-taking organization,\u201d he said. \u201cBut every time we would mention accepting risk in human spaceflight, the NASA people would say, \u2018But, oh, you have to remember the scar tissue\u2019\u2014 and they were talking about the two shuttle disasters. They seemed to have become victims of the past and unwilling to try anything new, because of that scar tissue.\u201dIn a recent speech, Robert Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, lamented in candid terms how the agency, with society as a whole, has become too risk-averse. He charged the agency with recapturing some of the youthful swagger that sent men to the moon during the Apollo era.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI worry, to be perfectly honest, if we would have ever launched Apollo in our environment here today,\u201d he said during a speech at the Space Symposium last month, \u201cif Buzz [Aldrin] and Neil [Armstrong] would have ever been able to go to the moon in the risk environment we have today.\u201dAdvertisementNASA is requiring SpaceX and Boeing to meet a requirement that involves some complicated calculations: The chance of death can be no greater than 1 in every 270 flights.One way to ensure that, as Lightfoot said during his speech, is to never fly: \u201cThe safest place to be is on the ground.\u201dShuttles shelvedStill, the scar tissue runs deep.NASA lost 14 astronauts in two space-shuttle disasters, the result of deep systematic problems of a once young and swashbuckling agency that many said had grown sclerotic.Story continues below advertisementIn the investigation into the 2003 disaster, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board blasted NASA for failing to learn \u201cthe bitter lessons\u201d from the Challenger explosion in 1986. Columbia was lost as much by a \u201cbroken safety culture\u201d as much as the chunk of foam that broke off and damaged the shuttle\u2019s heat shield. That second disaster helped lead to the retirement of the shuttle in 2011, leaving NASA in the position of being unable to fly astronauts from U.S. soil.AdvertisementInstead, NASA pays Russia to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station, an arrangement that costs the agency millions. In 2006, Russia charged $21.3\u00a0million a seat. That jumped to $81.9\u00a0million by 2015.To end the dependence on Russia, NASA has turned to the private sector, outsourcing the responsibility of flying astronauts to the space station to two companies \u2014 SpaceX and Boeing \u2014 that have been awarded $6.8\u00a0billion in contracts combined. Other private companies eventually could compete for other government launch contracts \u2014 including Blue Origin, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos \u2014 but none are expected to send people to the space station anytime soon.Story continues below advertisementThe pivot to private companies is enabling NASA to focus on deep space. But SpaceX and Boeing have both faced challenges and delays. Now, as the drought in human spaceflight extends into its seventh year, NASA is facing the prospect of even more delays \u2014 and questions about whether the contractors it plans to rely on will have a better track record than the agency that put men on the moon.Advertisement\u201cIt really is a very, very difficult problem to do human spaceflight,\u201d said Phil McAlister, the director of NASA\u2019s commercial spaceflight development division. \u201cYou\u2019ve got thousands of pounds of really highly energetic propellants on board. You\u2019ve got mini controlled explosions going off. You\u2019ve got to survive the rigors of space, which is not very friendly for the human body. And then you\u2019ve got to reenter the atmosphere, and the spacecraft gets heated up to thousands of degrees.\u201dSpaceX pulled off 18 successful launches last year, a record, and is aiming for more this year. But it has also lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, and amid all its triumphs, it has never attempted flying humans.The first failure happened in 2015, when a rocket blew up a couple of minutes after liftoff as it was flying cargo and supplies to the space station. No one was on board, and no one was injured. Then, just over a year later, another rocket exploded, this time on the launchpad while being fueled ahead of an engine test.At the time, Musk declared that if crews had been aboard they would have been safely ferried away by the rocket\u2019s abort system. Still, that mishap is forcing the company to redesign bottles of pressurized helium that sit inside the rocket\u2019s fuel tanks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow SpaceX is getting ready to fly astronauts on an upgraded version of the same rocket. And its decision to add propellant to the rocket with astronauts on board is attracting scrutiny.To get more power out of its rocket, SpaceX brings its propellants \u2014 liquid oxygen and refined kerosene \u2014 to unusually low temperatures. That causes them to become dense, meaning SpaceX can pack more fuel into its rockets.To SpaceX, the approach is another example of how it is breaking the mold. The densified propellant \u201cprovides greater propellant margin for increased reliability,\u201d the company said in a statement. In other words, should something go wrong on the mission, the rocket would have more propellant to adjust to emergencies. SpaceX\u2019s dramatic booster landings also require additional propellant. Story continues below advertisementBut to others it is an unnecessary risk. At a Capitol Hill hearing earlier this year, members of Congress pressed Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, about the safety of the load-and-go procedure.AdvertisementKoenigsmann said that the fueling takes only about a half-hour, a \u201crelatively quick procedure, and we believe that this exposure time is the shortest and therefore the safest approach.\u201dAnd the company points out that if anything goes wrong during fueling, the rocket\u2019s launch abort system would allow the astronauts to escape safely. It also conducts a \u201cstatic fire,\u201d a quick test firing of the engines in the days leading up to the launch to make sure the rocket is operating properly.And since its rockets and its Dragon spacecraft are reusable, the company gets to inspect them after each flight, giving it an in-depth understanding of how the vehicles perform.\u201cAs with all hazard analyses across the entire system and operations, controls against those hazards have been identified, and will be implemented and carefully verified prior to certification,\u201d the company said in a statement.But in a 2015 letter to NASA, Thomas Stafford, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and then chairman of the agency\u2019s space-station advisory committee, wrote that \u201cthere is a unanimous, and strong, feeling by the committee that scheduling the crew to be on board the Dragon spacecraft prior to loading oxidizer into the rocket is contrary to booster safety criteria that has been in place for over 50 years, both in this country and internationally.\u201dAt the hearing this year, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said the agency had not decided whether it would allow SpaceX to load crews before loading the fuel, but he did not rule it out.He vowed that the agency would \u201cmake sure that we\u2019re really, really safe to go fly, and the system is ready for crew before we put them on board.\u201dIn an interview, Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator, said the agency is in deep discussions with SpaceX about the safest way to go. The agency has a long history with SpaceX, first hiring it to fly cargo to the station and now looking for it to send humans into space.\u201cIt\u2019s a matter of having a good risk discussion so that we understand that,\u201d he said. \u201cI would just say that instead of working it in the press, we work in the engineering review boards.\u201d'You have to humanize it'For all its push-the-envelope swagger, SpaceX says it is serious about flying people safely and is going to great lengths to study every aspect of the vehicle, down to individual valves, so that it will meet and surpass the 1-in-270 chance-of-death metric, said Benji Reed, the director of SpaceX\u2019s commercial crew program.When Reed was down at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on a recent trip, he came across a room on a special tour where the astronauts\u2019 families from the shuttle program used to wait ahead of the rocket launch.They were stunned to see that a whiteboard with drawings made by the children of the crew lost in the 2003 Columbia disaster was still there, preserved.\u201cThat really drives it home,\u201d Reed said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t just the people that we\u2019re flying \u2014 these are all of their families. So we take this extremely seriously, and we understand that our job is to fly people safely and bring them back safely. To do that you have to humanize it. You have to see them as your friends and as your colleagues.\u201dBut even with some of the best engineering minds at NASA, calculating risk is an imperfect science. There are too many unknowns in systems that are inherently dangerous and complex.\u201cEven identifying all of the risks is impossible,\u201d Gerstenmaier said during a speech last year. \u201cAlso, risk cannot be boiled down to a single statistic.\u201dBefore the very first shuttle flight, NASA estimated that the chance of death was between 1 in 500 and 1 in 5,000. Later, after the agency had compiled data from shuttle flights, it went back and came up with a very different number.The chance of death was actually 1 in 12. A point of tension has arisen between the safety-obsessed agency and the maverick company run by the billionaire Tesla founder. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at risk.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Martin partners with ESPN\u2019s Drone Racing League on self-piloting drone competition (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "429",
        "date": "2018-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/06/lockheed-martin-partners-with-espns-drone-racing-league-self-piloting-drone-competition/",
        "text": "When an IBM computer beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at a game of chess in 1996, it was hailed as an unexpected, perhaps foreboding, victory of machine over man. Two decades later such victories are commonplace, with artificial intelligence now capable of tasks as varied as picking stocks and driving cars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCould aerial navigation be next?To find out, Bethesda-based defense contractor Lockheed Martin is partnering with the Drone Racing League, a racing competition for drone enthusiasts that airs on ESPN, to offer a total of $2 million in prizes for an artificial intelligence algorithm that can navigate better than a human-piloted drone.The two companies said they will recruit engineers from universities and elsewhere to develop software that can steer through a three-dimensional obstacle course faster than a human-piloted drone for a competition they are calling the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge. The contest will start accepting entrants in November, with the goal of racing an autonomous drone head-to-head with one of DRL's best pilots in a televised event next year.Boeing wins $805 million contract to build Navy\u2019s MQ-25 Stingray droneDRL chief executive Nicholas Horbaczewski said the goal is to develop a \u201ccrucible of competition\u201d for the software behind self-piloting drones. \u201cThis is really a challenge to encourage a new generation of researchers in autonomy .\u2009.\u2009. to give them a framework in which to compete and push the boundaries of what\u2019s possible,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Drone Racing League was founded in 2015 to formalize a patchwork of racing groups that were already using drones in fields and parking lots around the world. Its first two seasons notched tens of millions of viewers, according to one report, and its third season begins Thursday night on ESPN2.The vehicles that DRL pilots use are far advanced from the cheap quadcopters found on Amazon. They zip around faster than 80 mph, navigating complex obstacle courses that look like something out of the science fiction movie \u201cTron.\"Here are the companies that could profit from Trump\u2019s Space ForceThe pilots themselves are a devoted group of drone enthusiasts who are trying to transform the sport from an amateurish game into something resembling a professional sport, competing to navigate their drones through DRL's intricate obstacle courses. They steer the drones remotely using virtual reality goggles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor Lockheed, the marketing stunt comes as the Pentagon is looking for ways to use robotics and artificial intelligence in military operations. Defense contractors view military artificial intelligence technology as a promising emerging market, and they are competing fiercely for early opportunities.Last week, Lockheed lost out to rival Boeing for an initial foot in the door to build the Navy\u2019s MQ-25 Stingray, an autonomous refueling aircraft that is expected to become a $7 billion program. And in early May the Pentagon crossed a key milestone in a program to launch and recover small drones from larger planes, turning to an Alabama-based company Dynetics to coordinate the complex engineering challenge.Google to drop Pentagon AI contract after employee objections to the \u2018business of war\u2019Not all of the Defense Department's artificial intelligence initiatives directly involve weaponry. The Army is using artificial intelligence algorithms to spot failing tank parts before the vehicles break down in combat, for example, partnering with a Chicago-based start-up called Uptake.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLockheed is the primary contractor for NASA's InSight spacecraft, which in early May began an unmanned mission to explore Mars. It has employed autonomous navigation systems to F-16 fighter planes, built autonomous driving kits for use in Army vehicles and has invested in self-piloting submarines.Manned fighter jets like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are still the company's biggest source of business. The U.S. military's drone programs have been dominated by San Diego-based General Atomics, which makes the MQ-9 Reaper.Facebook turns to artificial intelligence to fight hate and misinformation in MyanmarLockheed's foray into drone racing can be seen as part of a broader rebranding effort being undertaken by the Washington defense establishment, as legacy defense firms present themselves as something other than lumbering, bureaucratic creatures of government. Lockheed has been pumping resources into such efforts, recently lending $100 million to its own technology venture investment fund.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"We are really at our heart a high-technology company,\u201d said Robie Samanta Roy, vice president of tech strategy at Lockheed Martin.That shift is driven by the changing face of innovation in the 21st century. Advances in artificial intelligence are increasingly coming from Silicon Valley tech firms such as Google, as opposed to government research labs.That cultural difference has occasionally been a source of friction. In early June, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post that the company would refrain from developing any artificial intelligence that is used in weaponry, after being pressured by employees over the company's military drone work.Story continues below advertisementAs they embark on their new partnership, the Drone Racing League and Lockheed Martin say they are focused purely on sport. But Lockheed executives say they view the competition as a key recruitment opportunity for national security-oriented efforts.\"We really are looking for the best and brightest scientists and engineers to help us,\u201d Roy said. Drawing a contrast between Lockheed's work and that of the commercial technology world, he added: \u201cWe are not selling ads. . . . we are saving lives.\" The Bethesda-based defense giant is partnering with the Drone Racing League on a competition to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can beat human-piloted drones. Lockheed Martin partners with ESPN\u2019s Drone Racing League on self-piloting drone competition",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronauts  (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "430",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/02/spacex-successfully-launches-spacecraft-designed-astronauts/",
        "text": "Update: The Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Sunday morning.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The United States space program took a significant step toward returning human spaceflight to American soil after a SpaceX rocket successfully blasted off from a historic launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCarrying a mannequin and 400 pounds of supplies, the company\u2019s Dragon spacecraft was hurled into orbit on its way to the International Space Station in a crucial flight for NASA and for SpaceX, the California company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk.The spacecraft is the first commercially built vehicle designed for humans to fly to the space station. If all goes well, a flight with humans could happen as soon as this year.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters before the launch.Companies in the Cosmos: Billionaires and entrepreneurs are defining a new space raceSince the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly people to space and has been forced to rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the space station, the orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.AdvertisementIn a risky experiment, NASA decided years ago to outsource to the private sector its transportation to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit. In 2014, as part of the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the agency awarded contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft capable of flying up to four astronauts to the station at a time.Story continues below advertisementWhile NASA has continued to fly probes and robots into deep space, and has even landed on Mars, the inability to fly humans has remained an embarrassment for an agency that beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race to the moon.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 2:49 a.m. Saturday from pad 39A, the same launchpad that hoisted Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and many of the space shuttle missions as well.Speaking to reporters after the launch, Musk said he was \u201cemotionally exhausted\u201d after the flight, which he said was \u201csuper stressful. But it worked \u2014 so far.\u201dAdvertisementHe said the flight was the culmination of 17 years of \u201can incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice.\"Story continues below advertisementSpaceX has used the site to ferry cargo and supplies to the space station. But despite all its successes, the company has yet to fly astronauts. SpaceX and Boeing originally planned to make their first flights with people within a few years of receiving the contracts but both programs faced technical challenges and funding issues from Congress.NASA said it is on the verge of recapturing some of the national pride that has been a hallmark of its human spaceflight program since the beginning of the Space Age.Boeing is scheduled to follow SpaceX\u2019s flight with an uncrewed test launch of its Starliner spacecraft as early as next month. SpaceX plans to fly its first mission with astronauts by July. Boeing\u2019s first flight with people is scheduled for August.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine said he was \u201c100 percent confident\u201d those flights would happen this year. But he stressed it was more important to move deliberately so \u201cwe get it right.\u201d Many officials have warned that, since the program is still in the test phase, the schedules are likely to slip, perhaps even significantly.NASA astronaut Douglas G. Hurley, slated to be on the first SpaceX test flight with humans, said the prospect of the mission \u201cis pretty exciting.\u201dNASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday's test flight is a crucial stepSaturday\u2019s flight \u201cis the next critical step in putting people on Dragon,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t begin to explain to you how exciting it is for a test pilot to be on a first flight of a vehicle. And we\u2019ll be ready when SpaceX and NASA are ready for us to fly it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter the Dragon spacecraft separated from the rocket, Musk said he checked in with Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, the other NASA astronaut scheduled to fly on the first SpaceX crewed test flight. \u201cI went over and asked what they thought, and how they felt about flying on it,\u201d Musk said. The response was positive.AdvertisementWhile the Dragon spacecraft launched successfully Saturday, the mission still has several significant hurdles to clear. Dragon has to safely dock with the station, which is expected to happen Sunday morning. The spacecraft will rely on its computers to autonomously fly the spacecraft gently alongside the station and then attach itself to one of the docking ports.Photos from the launch of a SpaceX rocket with the Dragon spacecraft, its first designed for humansShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageMarch 2, 2019 | A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the company\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, lifts off an uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Mike Blake/Reuters)\u201cWe\u2019re only partway through the mission,\u201d Musk said. \u201cBut the system thus far has passed an exhaustive set of reviews.\u201dStory continues below advertisementInitially, Russia, one of the partner countries on the station, raised concerns about the redundancy in SpaceX\u2019s system should there be an emergency. But those concerns have been alleviated, NASA officials said this week.Still, there are three astronauts on board the station \u2014 NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko \u2014 so the pressure is on to make sure the spacecraft does not pose a threat to the station as it approaches.AdvertisementThe docking represents a \u201cvery critical mission,\u201d Kirk Shireman, the manager of NASA\u2019s space station program, told reporters last week. \u201cThis vehicle coming up to the ISS for the first time has to work. It has to work. This team up here, and the people who worked around the country to make this successful, are very much aware of that.\u201dIf it is able to dock successfully, the spacecraft would remain attached to the station for five days. Then it would disembark and fly back to Earth, where it would fall through the atmosphere, a big test for the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield and parachute system.If all goes according to plan, it would splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on March 8. SpaceX successfully launched a rocket from the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday. The test flight is a crucial step before the company can fly NASA astronauts to the space station. SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronauts ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronauts  (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "431",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/02/spacex-successfully-launches-spacecraft-designed-astronauts/",
        "text": "Update: The Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Sunday morning.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The United States space program took a significant step toward returning human spaceflight to American soil after a SpaceX rocket successfully blasted off from a historic launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCarrying a mannequin and 400 pounds of supplies, the company\u2019s Dragon spacecraft was hurled into orbit on its way to the International Space Station in a crucial flight for NASA and for SpaceX, the California company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk.The spacecraft is the first commercially built vehicle designed for humans to fly to the space station. If all goes well, a flight with humans could happen as soon as this year.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters before the launch.Companies in the Cosmos: Billionaires and entrepreneurs are defining a new space raceSince the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly people to space and has been forced to rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the space station, the orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.AdvertisementIn a risky experiment, NASA decided years ago to outsource to the private sector its transportation to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit. In 2014, as part of the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the agency awarded contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft capable of flying up to four astronauts to the station at a time.Story continues below advertisementWhile NASA has continued to fly probes and robots into deep space, and has even landed on Mars, the inability to fly humans has remained an embarrassment for an agency that beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race to the moon.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 2:49 a.m. Saturday from pad 39A, the same launchpad that hoisted Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and many of the space shuttle missions as well.Speaking to reporters after the launch, Musk said he was \u201cemotionally exhausted\u201d after the flight, which he said was \u201csuper stressful. But it worked \u2014 so far.\u201dAdvertisementHe said the flight was the culmination of 17 years of \u201can incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice.\"Story continues below advertisementSpaceX has used the site to ferry cargo and supplies to the space station. But despite all its successes, the company has yet to fly astronauts. SpaceX and Boeing originally planned to make their first flights with people within a few years of receiving the contracts but both programs faced technical challenges and funding issues from Congress.NASA said it is on the verge of recapturing some of the national pride that has been a hallmark of its human spaceflight program since the beginning of the Space Age.Boeing is scheduled to follow SpaceX\u2019s flight with an uncrewed test launch of its Starliner spacecraft as early as next month. SpaceX plans to fly its first mission with astronauts by July. Boeing\u2019s first flight with people is scheduled for August.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine said he was \u201c100 percent confident\u201d those flights would happen this year. But he stressed it was more important to move deliberately so \u201cwe get it right.\u201d Many officials have warned that, since the program is still in the test phase, the schedules are likely to slip, perhaps even significantly.NASA astronaut Douglas G. Hurley, slated to be on the first SpaceX test flight with humans, said the prospect of the mission \u201cis pretty exciting.\u201dNASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday's test flight is a crucial stepSaturday\u2019s flight \u201cis the next critical step in putting people on Dragon,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t begin to explain to you how exciting it is for a test pilot to be on a first flight of a vehicle. And we\u2019ll be ready when SpaceX and NASA are ready for us to fly it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter the Dragon spacecraft separated from the rocket, Musk said he checked in with Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, the other NASA astronaut scheduled to fly on the first SpaceX crewed test flight. \u201cI went over and asked what they thought, and how they felt about flying on it,\u201d Musk said. The response was positive.AdvertisementWhile the Dragon spacecraft launched successfully Saturday, the mission still has several significant hurdles to clear. Dragon has to safely dock with the station, which is expected to happen Sunday morning. The spacecraft will rely on its computers to autonomously fly the spacecraft gently alongside the station and then attach itself to one of the docking ports.Photos from the launch of a SpaceX rocket with the Dragon spacecraft, its first designed for humansShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageMarch 2, 2019 | A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the company\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, lifts off an uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Mike Blake/Reuters)\u201cWe\u2019re only partway through the mission,\u201d Musk said. \u201cBut the system thus far has passed an exhaustive set of reviews.\u201dStory continues below advertisementInitially, Russia, one of the partner countries on the station, raised concerns about the redundancy in SpaceX\u2019s system should there be an emergency. But those concerns have been alleviated, NASA officials said this week.Still, there are three astronauts on board the station \u2014 NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko \u2014 so the pressure is on to make sure the spacecraft does not pose a threat to the station as it approaches.AdvertisementThe docking represents a \u201cvery critical mission,\u201d Kirk Shireman, the manager of NASA\u2019s space station program, told reporters last week. \u201cThis vehicle coming up to the ISS for the first time has to work. It has to work. This team up here, and the people who worked around the country to make this successful, are very much aware of that.\u201dIf it is able to dock successfully, the spacecraft would remain attached to the station for five days. Then it would disembark and fly back to Earth, where it would fall through the atmosphere, a big test for the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield and parachute system.If all goes according to plan, it would splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on March 8. SpaceX successfully launched a rocket from the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday. The test flight is a crucial step before the company can fly NASA astronauts to the space station. SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronauts ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronauts  (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "432",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/02/spacex-successfully-launches-spacecraft-designed-astronauts/",
        "text": "Update: The Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station on Sunday morning.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The United States space program took a significant step toward returning human spaceflight to American soil after a SpaceX rocket successfully blasted off from a historic launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCarrying a mannequin and 400 pounds of supplies, the company\u2019s Dragon spacecraft was hurled into orbit on its way to the International Space Station in a crucial flight for NASA and for SpaceX, the California company founded in 2002 by Elon Musk.The spacecraft is the first commercially built vehicle designed for humans to fly to the space station. If all goes well, a flight with humans could happen as soon as this year.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters before the launch.Companies in the Cosmos: Billionaires and entrepreneurs are defining a new space raceSince the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly people to space and has been forced to rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the space station, the orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.AdvertisementIn a risky experiment, NASA decided years ago to outsource to the private sector its transportation to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit. In 2014, as part of the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the agency awarded contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft capable of flying up to four astronauts to the station at a time.Story continues below advertisementWhile NASA has continued to fly probes and robots into deep space, and has even landed on Mars, the inability to fly humans has remained an embarrassment for an agency that beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race to the moon.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 2:49 a.m. Saturday from pad 39A, the same launchpad that hoisted Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and many of the space shuttle missions as well.Speaking to reporters after the launch, Musk said he was \u201cemotionally exhausted\u201d after the flight, which he said was \u201csuper stressful. But it worked \u2014 so far.\u201dAdvertisementHe said the flight was the culmination of 17 years of \u201can incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice.\"Story continues below advertisementSpaceX has used the site to ferry cargo and supplies to the space station. But despite all its successes, the company has yet to fly astronauts. SpaceX and Boeing originally planned to make their first flights with people within a few years of receiving the contracts but both programs faced technical challenges and funding issues from Congress.NASA said it is on the verge of recapturing some of the national pride that has been a hallmark of its human spaceflight program since the beginning of the Space Age.Boeing is scheduled to follow SpaceX\u2019s flight with an uncrewed test launch of its Starliner spacecraft as early as next month. SpaceX plans to fly its first mission with astronauts by July. Boeing\u2019s first flight with people is scheduled for August.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine said he was \u201c100 percent confident\u201d those flights would happen this year. But he stressed it was more important to move deliberately so \u201cwe get it right.\u201d Many officials have warned that, since the program is still in the test phase, the schedules are likely to slip, perhaps even significantly.NASA astronaut Douglas G. Hurley, slated to be on the first SpaceX test flight with humans, said the prospect of the mission \u201cis pretty exciting.\u201dNASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday's test flight is a crucial stepSaturday\u2019s flight \u201cis the next critical step in putting people on Dragon,\u201d he said. \u201cI can\u2019t begin to explain to you how exciting it is for a test pilot to be on a first flight of a vehicle. And we\u2019ll be ready when SpaceX and NASA are ready for us to fly it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter the Dragon spacecraft separated from the rocket, Musk said he checked in with Hurley and Robert L. Behnken, the other NASA astronaut scheduled to fly on the first SpaceX crewed test flight. \u201cI went over and asked what they thought, and how they felt about flying on it,\u201d Musk said. The response was positive.AdvertisementWhile the Dragon spacecraft launched successfully Saturday, the mission still has several significant hurdles to clear. Dragon has to safely dock with the station, which is expected to happen Sunday morning. The spacecraft will rely on its computers to autonomously fly the spacecraft gently alongside the station and then attach itself to one of the docking ports.Photos from the launch of a SpaceX rocket with the Dragon spacecraft, its first designed for humansShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageMarch 2, 2019 | A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the company\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, lifts off an uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Mike Blake/Reuters)\u201cWe\u2019re only partway through the mission,\u201d Musk said. \u201cBut the system thus far has passed an exhaustive set of reviews.\u201dStory continues below advertisementInitially, Russia, one of the partner countries on the station, raised concerns about the redundancy in SpaceX\u2019s system should there be an emergency. But those concerns have been alleviated, NASA officials said this week.Still, there are three astronauts on board the station \u2014 NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko \u2014 so the pressure is on to make sure the spacecraft does not pose a threat to the station as it approaches.AdvertisementThe docking represents a \u201cvery critical mission,\u201d Kirk Shireman, the manager of NASA\u2019s space station program, told reporters last week. \u201cThis vehicle coming up to the ISS for the first time has to work. It has to work. This team up here, and the people who worked around the country to make this successful, are very much aware of that.\u201dIf it is able to dock successfully, the spacecraft would remain attached to the station for five days. Then it would disembark and fly back to Earth, where it would fall through the atmosphere, a big test for the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield and parachute system.If all goes according to plan, it would splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on March 8. SpaceX successfully launched a rocket from the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday. The test flight is a crucial step before the company can fly NASA astronauts to the space station. SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronauts ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaire Elon Musk named Time\u2019s Person of the Year for 2021 (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "433",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/13/time-magazine-elon-musk/",
        "text": "Time magazine has named Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, as its 2021 Person of the Year, calling him \u201cthe man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.\u201dEdward Felsenthal, Time\u2019s editor in chief, wrote in a profile of Musk on Monday that the magazine\u2019s Person of the Year \u2014 a nearly century-old tradition \u2014 highlights people of influence, and that \u201cfew individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIn 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world\u2019s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society,\u201d Felsenthal added.Elon Musk sells roughly $5 billion in Tesla stock in series of whirlwind transactionsIn 2021, Musk, who has gone back and forth with Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest person in the world, made history \u2014 at least his spaceflight company did. In September, SpaceX launched Inspiration4, the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s company was also selected by NASA to help develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon.According to Time magazine:This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen\u2019s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars. His start-up rocket company, SpaceX, has leapfrogged Boeing and others to own America\u2019s spacefaring future. His car company, Tesla, controls two-thirds of the multibillion-dollar electric-vehicle market it pioneered and is valued at a cool $1 trillion. That has made Musk, with a net worth of more than $250 billion, the richest private citizen in history, at least on paper. He\u2019s a player in robots and solar, cryptocurrency and climate, brain-computer implants to stave off the menace of artificial intelligence and underground tunnels to move people and freight at super speeds. He dominates Wall Street: \u201cThe way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk,\u201d Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote in February, after Musk\u2019s \u201cGamestonk!!\u201d tweet vaulted the meme-stock craze into the stratosphere.The multibillionaire has also elicited scorn over the years \u2014 even more so over the course of the pandemic as he spread misinformation about the coronavirus and downplayed the risks.NBC\u2019s announcement earlier this year that he would host \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d drew intense backlash, including from SNL cast members. Shortly after the news, Musk tweeted, \u201cLet\u2019s find out just how live Saturday Night Live really is,\u201d adding a purple devil emoji.Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger\u2019s syndrome during SNL monologueWhen Musk appeared on the show in May, he revealed possibly for the first time that he is on the autism spectrum.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger\u2019s to host SNL,\u201d he said on the show. \u201cOr at least the first to admit it. So I won\u2019t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don\u2019t worry, I\u2019m pretty good at running \u2018human\u2019 in emulation mode.\u201dAdvertisement(Former SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd has been vocal about his own Asperger\u2019s diagnosis.)Time\u2019s Person of the Year designation is not necessarily an award; it is an acknowledgment of a person or group of people who have influenced society. President Biden and Vice President Harris received the nod in 2020, and teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg received it in 2019.READ MORESome SNL cast members aren\u2019t happy about Elon Musk. He\u2019s part of a long tradition of disliked hosts.Memes, merchandise and Mars cocktails: Russia\u2019s mania for Elon Musk has no boundsBillionaire Elon Musk tweeted an ancient Chinese poem. It left his followers theorizing about its meaning. \u201cIn 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world\u2019s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society,\u201d Edward Felsenthal, Time\u2019s editor in chief, wrote. Billionaire Elon Musk named Time\u2019s Person of the Year for 2021",
        "author": "Lindsey Bever"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House wants to return to moon but offers few details how that will happen (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "434",
        "date": "2018-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/white-house-wants-to-return-to-moon-but-offers-few-details-how-that-will-happen/2018/02/12/3c6f46c4-1018-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html",
        "text": "The White House is proposing a $19.9\u00a0billion budget for NASA, a nearly $400\u00a0million increase over the current budget, as part of a strategy to further fuel entrepreneurial endeavors and take the first steps to return to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut its 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, did not outline a concrete plan or timeline to travel to the lunar surface, which the Trump administration has said is one of its top priorities for NASA. The spending plan also proposed ending funding for the International Space Station after 2024, and privatizing the orbiting laboratory to free up funds for deep space exploration. In a statement to The Washington Post, Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the reconstituted National Space Council, said the administration plans to work with industry and international partners to find away to transition the station into private hands. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWith seven years with which to plan a transition to a different operational model, the United States will again demonstrate our role as the indispensable spacefaring nation,\u201d Pace said. \u201cThe transition of low Earth orbit from an environment dominated by the government to one that flourishes with commercial, international, and government partnerships is not only possible, but necessary for continued U.S. leadership.\u201dAn official with the European Space Agency, a partner on the space station, said he hadn\u2019t yet seen the proposal so couldn\u2019t comment. Some officials said it could be tricky for the United States to get out of the station\u2019s international treaties. Another roadblock is going to be Congress, where key members have already said they would not allow support for the station to be terminated before its useful life is over. \u201cThe administration\u2019s budget for NASA is a nonstarter,\u201d Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said in a statement. \u201cTurning off the lights and walking away from our sole outpost in space at a time when we\u2019re pushing the frontiers of exploration makes no sense.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House isn\u2019t planning on abandoning the station outright, and is looking to keep a robust presence in low Earth orbit in partnership with industry and other countries, according to an administration official not authorized to speak publicly about the plan. The budget calls for $150 million for a program to help industry create space habitats that could be used in place of the space station, according to the budget request released Monday.The official said the administration is trying to avoid the problem that plagued the space shuttle retirement. When the shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA had no way of flying its astronauts to the space station, and has had to rely on Russia for rides to space. SpaceX and Boeing are now under contract from NASA to build spacecraft capable of flying humans, but those first flights won\u2019t come until later this year or next, leaving the U.S. government without the ability to fly people for at least seven years.\u201cThe notion that we would walk away from LEO [or low Earth orbit] and the space station is not accurate,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe know the space station is going to eventually end. Rather than putting ourselves in the situation with shuttle, where we had no way to get to LEO, we want to start planning for that transition now.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States\u2019 international partners on the station \u201care one of the most important pieces of the station and how it functions,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe believe that opening up options and different models also means opening up opportunities for additional partners and additional ways to expand our international involvement in low Earth orbit. Imagine a scenario where a company says we have a business plan, we\u2019d like to partner with the Japanese government and the Europeans to do these types of experiments.\u201d The official said that under commercial control, NASA would become another customer, so \u201cinstead of owning the building, we would rent a couple of floors.\u201d In its budget document, the White House said it plans to partner with industry \u201cto land robotic missions on the surface of the moon in the next few years, paving the way for a return of U.S. astronauts \u2014 this time not just to visit, but to lay the foundation for further journeys of exploration and the expansion of the U.S. economy into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe budget proposal \u201creally reflects the administration\u2019s confidence that America will lead the way back to the moon and take that next giant leap,\u201d NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a speech Monday at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama.Nelson, the U.S. senator, expressed concern about plans beyond the moon.\u201cIf we\u2019re ever going to get to Mars with humans on board and return them safely, then we need a larger funding increase for NASA,\u201d he said.The proposed budget also calls for the termination of the $100 million Office of Education at NASA \u201credirecting those funds to NASA\u2019s core mission of exploration.\u201d And while it supports the development of the $8.8 billion James Webb telescope, the budget calls for the termination of the WFIRST space telescope, which NASA planned to help scientists better understand dark matter and dark energy.The budget would provide $54.2 million for public-private partnerships to help develop manufacturing technologies in space, such as 3-D printing. Under budget proposal, NASA also would look to privatize space station after 2024. White House wants to return to moon but offers few details how that will happen",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House wants to return to moon but offers few details how that will happen (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "435",
        "date": "2018-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/white-house-wants-to-return-to-moon-but-offers-few-details-how-that-will-happen/2018/02/12/3c6f46c4-1018-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html",
        "text": "The White House is proposing a $19.9\u00a0billion budget for NASA, a nearly $400\u00a0million increase over the current budget, as part of a strategy to further fuel entrepreneurial endeavors and take the first steps to return to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut its 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, did not outline a concrete plan or timeline to travel to the lunar surface, which the Trump administration has said is one of its top priorities for NASA. The spending plan also proposed ending funding for the International Space Station after 2024, and privatizing the orbiting laboratory to free up funds for deep space exploration. In a statement to The Washington Post, Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the reconstituted National Space Council, said the administration plans to work with industry and international partners to find away to transition the station into private hands. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWith seven years with which to plan a transition to a different operational model, the United States will again demonstrate our role as the indispensable spacefaring nation,\u201d Pace said. \u201cThe transition of low Earth orbit from an environment dominated by the government to one that flourishes with commercial, international, and government partnerships is not only possible, but necessary for continued U.S. leadership.\u201dAn official with the European Space Agency, a partner on the space station, said he hadn\u2019t yet seen the proposal so couldn\u2019t comment. Some officials said it could be tricky for the United States to get out of the station\u2019s international treaties. Another roadblock is going to be Congress, where key members have already said they would not allow support for the station to be terminated before its useful life is over. \u201cThe administration\u2019s budget for NASA is a nonstarter,\u201d Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said in a statement. \u201cTurning off the lights and walking away from our sole outpost in space at a time when we\u2019re pushing the frontiers of exploration makes no sense.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House isn\u2019t planning on abandoning the station outright, and is looking to keep a robust presence in low Earth orbit in partnership with industry and other countries, according to an administration official not authorized to speak publicly about the plan. The budget calls for $150 million for a program to help industry create space habitats that could be used in place of the space station, according to the budget request released Monday.The official said the administration is trying to avoid the problem that plagued the space shuttle retirement. When the shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA had no way of flying its astronauts to the space station, and has had to rely on Russia for rides to space. SpaceX and Boeing are now under contract from NASA to build spacecraft capable of flying humans, but those first flights won\u2019t come until later this year or next, leaving the U.S. government without the ability to fly people for at least seven years.\u201cThe notion that we would walk away from LEO [or low Earth orbit] and the space station is not accurate,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe know the space station is going to eventually end. Rather than putting ourselves in the situation with shuttle, where we had no way to get to LEO, we want to start planning for that transition now.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States\u2019 international partners on the station \u201care one of the most important pieces of the station and how it functions,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe believe that opening up options and different models also means opening up opportunities for additional partners and additional ways to expand our international involvement in low Earth orbit. Imagine a scenario where a company says we have a business plan, we\u2019d like to partner with the Japanese government and the Europeans to do these types of experiments.\u201d The official said that under commercial control, NASA would become another customer, so \u201cinstead of owning the building, we would rent a couple of floors.\u201d In its budget document, the White House said it plans to partner with industry \u201cto land robotic missions on the surface of the moon in the next few years, paving the way for a return of U.S. astronauts \u2014 this time not just to visit, but to lay the foundation for further journeys of exploration and the expansion of the U.S. economy into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe budget proposal \u201creally reflects the administration\u2019s confidence that America will lead the way back to the moon and take that next giant leap,\u201d NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a speech Monday at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama.Nelson, the U.S. senator, expressed concern about plans beyond the moon.\u201cIf we\u2019re ever going to get to Mars with humans on board and return them safely, then we need a larger funding increase for NASA,\u201d he said.The proposed budget also calls for the termination of the $100 million Office of Education at NASA \u201credirecting those funds to NASA\u2019s core mission of exploration.\u201d And while it supports the development of the $8.8 billion James Webb telescope, the budget calls for the termination of the WFIRST space telescope, which NASA planned to help scientists better understand dark matter and dark energy.The budget would provide $54.2 million for public-private partnerships to help develop manufacturing technologies in space, such as 3-D printing. Under budget proposal, NASA also would look to privatize space station after 2024. White House wants to return to moon but offers few details how that will happen",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House wants to return to moon but offers few details how that will happen (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "436",
        "date": "2018-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/white-house-wants-to-return-to-moon-but-offers-few-details-how-that-will-happen/2018/02/12/3c6f46c4-1018-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html",
        "text": "The White House is proposing a $19.9\u00a0billion budget for NASA, a nearly $400\u00a0million increase over the current budget, as part of a strategy to further fuel entrepreneurial endeavors and take the first steps to return to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut its 2019 budget proposal, released Monday, did not outline a concrete plan or timeline to travel to the lunar surface, which the Trump administration has said is one of its top priorities for NASA. The spending plan also proposed ending funding for the International Space Station after 2024, and privatizing the orbiting laboratory to free up funds for deep space exploration. In a statement to The Washington Post, Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the reconstituted National Space Council, said the administration plans to work with industry and international partners to find away to transition the station into private hands. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWith seven years with which to plan a transition to a different operational model, the United States will again demonstrate our role as the indispensable spacefaring nation,\u201d Pace said. \u201cThe transition of low Earth orbit from an environment dominated by the government to one that flourishes with commercial, international, and government partnerships is not only possible, but necessary for continued U.S. leadership.\u201dAn official with the European Space Agency, a partner on the space station, said he hadn\u2019t yet seen the proposal so couldn\u2019t comment. Some officials said it could be tricky for the United States to get out of the station\u2019s international treaties. Another roadblock is going to be Congress, where key members have already said they would not allow support for the station to be terminated before its useful life is over. \u201cThe administration\u2019s budget for NASA is a nonstarter,\u201d Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said in a statement. \u201cTurning off the lights and walking away from our sole outpost in space at a time when we\u2019re pushing the frontiers of exploration makes no sense.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House isn\u2019t planning on abandoning the station outright, and is looking to keep a robust presence in low Earth orbit in partnership with industry and other countries, according to an administration official not authorized to speak publicly about the plan. The budget calls for $150 million for a program to help industry create space habitats that could be used in place of the space station, according to the budget request released Monday.The official said the administration is trying to avoid the problem that plagued the space shuttle retirement. When the shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA had no way of flying its astronauts to the space station, and has had to rely on Russia for rides to space. SpaceX and Boeing are now under contract from NASA to build spacecraft capable of flying humans, but those first flights won\u2019t come until later this year or next, leaving the U.S. government without the ability to fly people for at least seven years.\u201cThe notion that we would walk away from LEO [or low Earth orbit] and the space station is not accurate,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe know the space station is going to eventually end. Rather than putting ourselves in the situation with shuttle, where we had no way to get to LEO, we want to start planning for that transition now.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States\u2019 international partners on the station \u201care one of the most important pieces of the station and how it functions,\u201d the official said. \u201cWe believe that opening up options and different models also means opening up opportunities for additional partners and additional ways to expand our international involvement in low Earth orbit. Imagine a scenario where a company says we have a business plan, we\u2019d like to partner with the Japanese government and the Europeans to do these types of experiments.\u201d The official said that under commercial control, NASA would become another customer, so \u201cinstead of owning the building, we would rent a couple of floors.\u201d In its budget document, the White House said it plans to partner with industry \u201cto land robotic missions on the surface of the moon in the next few years, paving the way for a return of U.S. astronauts \u2014 this time not just to visit, but to lay the foundation for further journeys of exploration and the expansion of the U.S. economy into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe budget proposal \u201creally reflects the administration\u2019s confidence that America will lead the way back to the moon and take that next giant leap,\u201d NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a speech Monday at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama.Nelson, the U.S. senator, expressed concern about plans beyond the moon.\u201cIf we\u2019re ever going to get to Mars with humans on board and return them safely, then we need a larger funding increase for NASA,\u201d he said.The proposed budget also calls for the termination of the $100 million Office of Education at NASA \u201credirecting those funds to NASA\u2019s core mission of exploration.\u201d And while it supports the development of the $8.8 billion James Webb telescope, the budget calls for the termination of the WFIRST space telescope, which NASA planned to help scientists better understand dark matter and dark energy.The budget would provide $54.2 million for public-private partnerships to help develop manufacturing technologies in space, such as 3-D printing. Under budget proposal, NASA also would look to privatize space station after 2024. White House wants to return to moon but offers few details how that will happen",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket start-up Astra to go public in race for commercial space (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "437",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/02/astra-public-spac-holicity/",
        "text": "The rocket start-up Astra plans to go public, the company announced Tuesday, raising $500 million to bolster its position in the burgeoning market for space transportation.In a deal valued at $2.1 billion, Astra would become the first publicly traded company dedicated to delivering satellites into Earth\u2019s orbit. The Alameda, Calif.-based rocket-maker intends to go public through a merger with a blank-check company, or what\u2019s known as a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which acts as a financial vehicle to bypass the traditional IPO process. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019re seeing hundreds of companies that want to get from anywhere on Earth to anywhere in space on their schedule \u2014 not wait years to get a lot of things to one place,\u201d said Astra founder and chef executive Chris Kemp in an interview with CNBC\u2019s \u201cSquawk Box\u201d this week. \u201cSo we\u2019re really focused on building a much smaller rocket, produced in much higher volume, launched from a much larger number of locations.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKemp, a former chief technology officer for IT at NASA, said the deal was the best way to raise significant funding and gain access to public markets.Astra offers launch services of payloads ranging from 50 to 150 kilograms, or as much as 330 pounds, and expects to begin deliveries into space by the end of the year. The company says it has booked more than $150 million in revenue from more than 50 planned launches. NASA and the Defense Department are among the company\u2019s 10 existing customers, Astra said.In a second test launch from Kodiak, Alaska, in December, an Astra rocket failed to reach Earth\u2019s orbit after the upper-stage engine depleted its fuel seconds too early, preventing the vehicle from reaching orbit velocity. But the company considered the just-shy test flight a success. Astra aims to differentiate itself in the burgeoning market for space commerce by offering smaller, more frequent launches into low Earth orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIncluding government budgets and corporate revenue, the global space industry amounts to more than $350 billion. While launch services make up only a few percentage points of that figure, the entire market depends on them. Orbital launches blast off about 100 to 120 times per year, worldwide.Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at Bryce Space and Technology, an analytics and engineering firm, said it\u2019s notable that despite not yet having sent a spacecraft to orbit, Astra has a sizable backlog of launches.\u201cThe takeaway is that in addition to elevating its public profile, the funding will accelerate construction of a manufacturing facility and associated automated hardware, bringing the company\u2019s operational timetable closer,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThis is especially important since Astra claims it will launch a few hundred times a year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCraig McCaw, the telecommunications investor partnering with Astra through his SPAC Holicity, said in a news release Tuesday that \u201cAstra\u2019s space platform will further improve our communications, help us protect our planet, and unleash entrepreneurs to launch a new generation of services to enhance our lives.\u201dShares of Holicity surged by 57 percent Tuesday.The announcement follows the successful launch and docking of the SpaceX Crew Dragon with the International Space Station in November, a pioneering mission that officially marked the first time a privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA made the trip with astronauts aboard.NASA\u2019s collaboration with SpaceX also represents the next evolution in human spaceflight, as the government works with private companies to design and build spacecraft and rockets. SpaceX, too, seemed to solidify its standing within the space industry, graduating from the status of an upstart rocket company founded by Elon Musk to a significant NASA partner, heightening popular and business interest in commercial space travel.Astra said it expects the deal to close in the second quarter, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. Listed on the Nasdaq, the company will trade under the ticker symbol ASTR. The $2.1 billion deal would make Astra the first publicly traded company dedicated to delivering satellites into Earth\u2019s orbit. Rocket start-up Astra to go public in race for commercial space",
        "author": "Hamza Shaban"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket start-up Astra to go public in race for commercial space (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "438",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/02/astra-public-spac-holicity/",
        "text": "The rocket start-up Astra plans to go public, the company announced Tuesday, raising $500 million to bolster its position in the burgeoning market for space transportation.In a deal valued at $2.1 billion, Astra would become the first publicly traded company dedicated to delivering satellites into Earth\u2019s orbit. The Alameda, Calif.-based rocket-maker intends to go public through a merger with a blank-check company, or what\u2019s known as a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which acts as a financial vehicle to bypass the traditional IPO process. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019re seeing hundreds of companies that want to get from anywhere on Earth to anywhere in space on their schedule \u2014 not wait years to get a lot of things to one place,\u201d said Astra founder and chef executive Chris Kemp in an interview with CNBC\u2019s \u201cSquawk Box\u201d this week. \u201cSo we\u2019re really focused on building a much smaller rocket, produced in much higher volume, launched from a much larger number of locations.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKemp, a former chief technology officer for IT at NASA, said the deal was the best way to raise significant funding and gain access to public markets.Astra offers launch services of payloads ranging from 50 to 150 kilograms, or as much as 330 pounds, and expects to begin deliveries into space by the end of the year. The company says it has booked more than $150 million in revenue from more than 50 planned launches. NASA and the Defense Department are among the company\u2019s 10 existing customers, Astra said.In a second test launch from Kodiak, Alaska, in December, an Astra rocket failed to reach Earth\u2019s orbit after the upper-stage engine depleted its fuel seconds too early, preventing the vehicle from reaching orbit velocity. But the company considered the just-shy test flight a success. Astra aims to differentiate itself in the burgeoning market for space commerce by offering smaller, more frequent launches into low Earth orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIncluding government budgets and corporate revenue, the global space industry amounts to more than $350 billion. While launch services make up only a few percentage points of that figure, the entire market depends on them. Orbital launches blast off about 100 to 120 times per year, worldwide.Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at Bryce Space and Technology, an analytics and engineering firm, said it\u2019s notable that despite not yet having sent a spacecraft to orbit, Astra has a sizable backlog of launches.\u201cThe takeaway is that in addition to elevating its public profile, the funding will accelerate construction of a manufacturing facility and associated automated hardware, bringing the company\u2019s operational timetable closer,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThis is especially important since Astra claims it will launch a few hundred times a year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCraig McCaw, the telecommunications investor partnering with Astra through his SPAC Holicity, said in a news release Tuesday that \u201cAstra\u2019s space platform will further improve our communications, help us protect our planet, and unleash entrepreneurs to launch a new generation of services to enhance our lives.\u201dShares of Holicity surged by 57 percent Tuesday.The announcement follows the successful launch and docking of the SpaceX Crew Dragon with the International Space Station in November, a pioneering mission that officially marked the first time a privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA made the trip with astronauts aboard.NASA\u2019s collaboration with SpaceX also represents the next evolution in human spaceflight, as the government works with private companies to design and build spacecraft and rockets. SpaceX, too, seemed to solidify its standing within the space industry, graduating from the status of an upstart rocket company founded by Elon Musk to a significant NASA partner, heightening popular and business interest in commercial space travel.Astra said it expects the deal to close in the second quarter, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. Listed on the Nasdaq, the company will trade under the ticker symbol ASTR. The $2.1 billion deal would make Astra the first publicly traded company dedicated to delivering satellites into Earth\u2019s orbit. Rocket start-up Astra to go public in race for commercial space",
        "author": "Hamza Shaban"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket start-up Astra to go public in race for commercial space (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "439",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/02/astra-public-spac-holicity/",
        "text": "The rocket start-up Astra plans to go public, the company announced Tuesday, raising $500 million to bolster its position in the burgeoning market for space transportation.In a deal valued at $2.1 billion, Astra would become the first publicly traded company dedicated to delivering satellites into Earth\u2019s orbit. The Alameda, Calif.-based rocket-maker intends to go public through a merger with a blank-check company, or what\u2019s known as a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which acts as a financial vehicle to bypass the traditional IPO process. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019re seeing hundreds of companies that want to get from anywhere on Earth to anywhere in space on their schedule \u2014 not wait years to get a lot of things to one place,\u201d said Astra founder and chef executive Chris Kemp in an interview with CNBC\u2019s \u201cSquawk Box\u201d this week. \u201cSo we\u2019re really focused on building a much smaller rocket, produced in much higher volume, launched from a much larger number of locations.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKemp, a former chief technology officer for IT at NASA, said the deal was the best way to raise significant funding and gain access to public markets.Astra offers launch services of payloads ranging from 50 to 150 kilograms, or as much as 330 pounds, and expects to begin deliveries into space by the end of the year. The company says it has booked more than $150 million in revenue from more than 50 planned launches. NASA and the Defense Department are among the company\u2019s 10 existing customers, Astra said.In a second test launch from Kodiak, Alaska, in December, an Astra rocket failed to reach Earth\u2019s orbit after the upper-stage engine depleted its fuel seconds too early, preventing the vehicle from reaching orbit velocity. But the company considered the just-shy test flight a success. Astra aims to differentiate itself in the burgeoning market for space commerce by offering smaller, more frequent launches into low Earth orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIncluding government budgets and corporate revenue, the global space industry amounts to more than $350 billion. While launch services make up only a few percentage points of that figure, the entire market depends on them. Orbital launches blast off about 100 to 120 times per year, worldwide.Phil Smith, a space industry analyst at Bryce Space and Technology, an analytics and engineering firm, said it\u2019s notable that despite not yet having sent a spacecraft to orbit, Astra has a sizable backlog of launches.\u201cThe takeaway is that in addition to elevating its public profile, the funding will accelerate construction of a manufacturing facility and associated automated hardware, bringing the company\u2019s operational timetable closer,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThis is especially important since Astra claims it will launch a few hundred times a year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCraig McCaw, the telecommunications investor partnering with Astra through his SPAC Holicity, said in a news release Tuesday that \u201cAstra\u2019s space platform will further improve our communications, help us protect our planet, and unleash entrepreneurs to launch a new generation of services to enhance our lives.\u201dShares of Holicity surged by 57 percent Tuesday.The announcement follows the successful launch and docking of the SpaceX Crew Dragon with the International Space Station in November, a pioneering mission that officially marked the first time a privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA made the trip with astronauts aboard.NASA\u2019s collaboration with SpaceX also represents the next evolution in human spaceflight, as the government works with private companies to design and build spacecraft and rockets. SpaceX, too, seemed to solidify its standing within the space industry, graduating from the status of an upstart rocket company founded by Elon Musk to a significant NASA partner, heightening popular and business interest in commercial space travel.Astra said it expects the deal to close in the second quarter, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. Listed on the Nasdaq, the company will trade under the ticker symbol ASTR. The $2.1 billion deal would make Astra the first publicly traded company dedicated to delivering satellites into Earth\u2019s orbit. Rocket start-up Astra to go public in race for commercial space",
        "author": "Hamza Shaban"
    },
    {
        "title": "The change agents bringing tradition-bound NASA into the future (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "440",
        "date": "2018-08-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-change-agents-bringing-tradition-bound-nasa-into-the-future/2018/08/24/626e6f02-a646-11e8-a656-943eefab5daf_story.html",
        "text": "The rap on NASA is that it\u2019s risk-averse, stuck in the old ways of doing things, stymied by a big 60-year-old bureaucracy that was chastened by two fatal space shuttle disasters.That was the mind-set that seemed to greet SpaceX\u2019s controversial fueling plan. Instead of filling the rocket with propellant before the astronauts board, the company proposed doing it after. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLoading a combustible mix of propellants underneath NASA\u2019s finest set off alarms inside some parts of the agency and among safety experts, who warned that it was contrary to decades of spaceflight procedure. One watchdog group called it a \u201cpotential safety risk\u201d \u2014 a spark during fueling could set off an explosion, many in NASA feared. That\u2019s what happened when a SpaceX rocket blew up while being fueled in 2016.Story continues below advertisementBut then NASA recently announced that it would allow SpaceX\u2019s fueling procedure, informally known as \u201cload and go,\u201d under the condition that the company demonstrate it five times before receiving formal certification. The decision was a significant one for NASA and signals an ongoing cultural shift as the agency partners with a growing commercial space industry that thrives on pushing boundaries.NASA trained, Boeing employed: Chris Ferguson hopes to make history as a company astronautNASA\u2019s evolution has been years in the making, officials said, as it grows more comfortable giving industry more autonomy and freedom, which many hope will spark the kind of innovation necessary to make spaceflight more routine.AdvertisementOver the years, it has developed deep partnerships with several companies, awarding them billions of dollars in contracts to carry out crucial services. Under the George W. Bush administration, NASA decided to hire contractors \u2014 SpaceX and Orbital ATK \u2014 to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station.Story continues below advertisementThen, under President Barack Obama, it awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to fly crews there, with the first flights expected next year. In doing so, the agency allowed the companies to build, design and operate their spacecraft. And while NASA laid out a list of requirements that the companies must meet, it did not dictate how they should meet them.Being able to rely on private companies to provide a delivery service to the space station \u201cwas one of the major shifting factors,\u201d said Eric Stallmer, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. \u201cThat played a huge role.\u201dAdvertisementTrading knowledgeNASA does lend its expertise and oversight, but at the same time, the companies are teaching the agency a thing or two about how to apply business practices to open the frontiers of space. None more so than Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which from the beginning of its partnership with NASA ran into resistance, a clash of Silicon Valley-style ethos with government bureaucracy, youthful impatience with aged bureaucracy.Story continues below advertisementNow President Trump and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine have gone out of their way to praise the efforts of private space companies and make it clear that the agency intends to rely on them.\u201cRich guys, they love rocket ships,\u201d Trump said at a Cabinet meeting this year. \u201cThat\u2019s good. That\u2019s better than us paying for them.\u201dPence details plan for creation of Space Force in what would be the sixth branch of the militaryIn a statement to The Washington Post, Bridenstine said that industry has had a transformative effect on the agency: \u201cOur commercial partners are challenging us to be more agile, think differently, buy smarter and develop more efficiently.\u201dAdvertisementSpaceX isn\u2019t the only company seeing the benefit of NASA\u2019s shift. The agency is being far more welcoming to private-sector input in the first component of its proposed lunar gateway program, a space station to float in the vicinity of the moon.Story continues below advertisementInstead of dictating the requirements and design of the part of the gateway that would provide power and propulsion, NASA reached out to industry for suggestions, said Mike Gold, vice president of regulatory at Maxar Technologies, one of the companies to study the power and propulsion module.\u201cLoad and go is just another example of an evolution that is occurring across the agency where we are seeing NASA embrace commercial practices and commercial experience in a wide variety of programs,\u201d he said.A new approach to fuelFor years, the thinking was that you fuel the rocket, make sure it\u2019s stable and then allow the astronauts on board. That would limit their exposure to a disaster. That\u2019s how the space shuttle program did it. And that\u2019s how Boeing, which also has the contract to fly astronauts for NASA, plans to fuel its rocket.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut SpaceX likes to do things differently.To get more power out of its Falcon 9 rockets, it chills its propellants, liquid oxygen and refined kerosene, to extremely low temperatures. As a result, they become denser, allowing SpaceX to pack more fuel into its rockets, giving them more performance. But because the fuel is so cold, it can warm up quickly, which is why it needs to be loaded at the last minute.The company, which has never flown humans to space before, says that safety is its top priority and notes that the Falcon 9 also comes with an escape system that would allow the Dragon spacecraft to quickly fly away from the rocket booster in the event of an emergency on the pad or during flight.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe would never have proposed it had we thought that it was a less safe way to go,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, told reporters this month. \u201cThe vehicle has more margin when we load the fuel quite close to liftoff.\u201dAdvertisementShe added that the astronauts are \u201cprotected by the launch escape system. They\u2019re protected by the heat shield between Dragon and the rocket.\u201dInside SpaceX, the rocket factory that plans to put private citizens in spaceSince its rocket exploded while being fueled in 2016, the company has notched 33 successful launches in a row using this fueling technique and has completed dozens more engine test fires.In a statement, Kathy Lueders, the manager of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, said the agency decided to go along with SpaceX\u2019s plan after conducting \u201can extensive review of the SpaceX ground operations, launch vehicle design, escape systems and operational history. Safety for our personnel was the driver for this analysis, and the team\u2019s assessment was that this plan presents the least risk.\u201dStory continues below advertisementStill, before signing off on the procedure, she said, SpaceX would have to demonstrate it five times, and then \u201cNASA will assess any remaining risk before determining that the system is certified to fly with crew.\u201dAdvertisementIf all goes to plan, the astronauts would board the SpaceX craft about two hours before liftoff. Then the ground crews would leave the launch site, the escape system would be activated, and fueling would begin about 38 minutes before launch.\u201cNASA has learned a number of things from SpaceX,\u201d said George Nield, a member of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. \u201cThere\u2019s not just one way to do these things. And with new technology and thinking out of the box, there are other ways that can be beneficial to not just the companies but to the government itself. .\u2009.\u2009. And load and go is an example that NASA has slowly warmed up to.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSpeaking to reporters last spring, Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, said that the rocket was designed to be the most robust in the world and dismissed concerns over the fueling.Advertisement\u201cI really do not think this presents a safety issue for astronauts,\u201d he said, calling it an \u201coverblown issue.\u201dStill, he said that launching rockets is a dangerous business that always carries some level of risk.\u201cThere could be a thousand things that could go right with this rocket and one that goes wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reason it is so hard to make an orbital rocket is that your passing grade is 100\u00a0percent.\u201dWhy the Pentagon fears the U.S. is losing the hypersonic arms race with Russia and ChinaElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at risk. Private space enterprises like SpaceX are helping launch a cultural shift at the big 60-year-old bureaucracy The change agents bringing tradition-bound NASA into the future",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As it moves aggressively to restore confidence, Boeing flies into an uncertain future (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "441",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/07/it-moves-aggressively-restore-confidence-boeing-flies-into-an-uncertain-future/",
        "text": "The production line of the 737 Max is back up and running after six months of dormancy. The Federal Aviation Administration recently has completed a series of test flights and is now studying the data to assess the safety of the plane, once derided by a congressman as a \u201cflying coffin\u201d after a pair of crashes that killed 346 people. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe moves represent significant steps forward for the beleaguered company as it tries to regain its footing and restore its reputation after the twin catastrophes of the 737 Max scandal and the coronavirus pandemic, which has crippled airline traffic and left dozens of planes parked on tarmacs for months.The company has said it is confident it will weather what has been one of the most tumultuous periods in its more than 100-year history. Boeing chief executive David Calhoun told investors in late April that the company would be able to resume deliveries of the 737 Max, which has been grounded for more than a year, this quarter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOur industry and our company will get through this,\u201d Calhoun told employees in a companywide email that announced Boeing would lay off 10 percent of its workforce. \u201cAir travel has always been resilient over the long term, and our portfolio of products, services and technology is well-positioned for the recovery that will come.\u201dBut the future of the Max and the company\u2019s fate remain far from certain, and reopening the production line may represent misplaced optimism after a series of staggering setbacks across a range of programs.It\u2019s not clear when the FAA might declare the planes safe enough to fly, or when the airline industry might bounce back, as portions of the country are seeing case spikes that could discourage travel for the foreseeable future.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson said recently that the agency is \u201cnot on any timeline\u201d to certify the Max fleet. Airline travel will come back, \u201cbut it will be slow and gradual and filled with a number of fits and starts,\u201d said Ken Herbert, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Boeing\u2019s challenges are not limited to its commercial aviation division. For years, Boeing\u2019s Defense, Space and Security division has struggled with the KC-46 tanker refueling airplane it is building for the Pentagon, with $4.6 billion in cost overruns. The Space Launch System rocket the division is building for NASA is years behind schedule and billions over budget, and has yet to fly.And its Starliner spacecraft suffered a major malfunction shortly after it reached space late last year and is now grounded while the company investigates.The problems with all four programs encapsulate Boeing\u2019s recent struggles and go to the heart of its core business: flying.Story continues below advertisementBut they also provide a glimpse into how the company is fighting back, struggling to redeem itself and get its vehicles back in the air.AdvertisementUnder the leadership of Calhoun, who replaced the ousted Dennis Muilenburg as CEO just six months ago, the company has moved aggressively. It has closed plants, laid off 12,000 workers and taken on $25 billion in debt to keep it afloat.Now, company officials say, those measures are beginning to pay off.Boeing minimized to FAA the importance of flight control system implicated in 737 Max crashes, new report saysA significant step came late last month, when the FAA performed a series of test flights of the 737 Max to assess the software upgrades Boeing has implemented in the wake of the fatal crashes.\u201cWhile completion of the flights is an important milestone, a number of key tasks remain, including evaluating the data gathered during these flights,\u201d the FAA said in a statement. \u201cThe agency is following a deliberate process and will take the time it needs to thoroughly review Boeing\u2019s work. We will lift the grounding order only after FAA safety experts are satisfied that the aircraft meets certification standards.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd given the severity and complicated nature of the problems, the process may take quite some time, said Michael Goldfarb, a former FAA chief of staff.\u201cThe remedy for the problem that brought both planes down has become a problem in and of itself,\u201d he said. \u201cWithout starting from ground up on this aircraft to look at every component, the Max should not fly again.\u201dBut Boeing officials have said they are optimistic that the planes will be back in service by the end of the year and that the airline industry will return to pre-coronavirus levels within a few years.\u201cAs people begin to relive their lives, we expect that they will also get back to traveling,\u201d Calhoun told the \u201cToday\u201d show in May. \u201cAnd as long as we can demonstrate the safety of our industry, the safety of our airplane experience, we believe we will return to a growth rate similar to the past, but it might takes us three, five years to get there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo help assuage wary passengers, Boeing has launched a \u201cTravel Confidently\u201d campaign to highlight the safety features of its aircraft, including the high-efficiency air filters in the cabin that trap more than 99.9 percent of particulates. The air in the plane is exchanged every two to three minutes, the company said. And the air flows from the ceiling to the floor, reducing the risk of infection.Boeing workers return to their factories to find hand-washing stations and a new sense of worryBoeing officials have said the reopening of the 737 Max assembly lines has been done cautiously and deliberately in anticipation of a return to service. The company has not reported a spike in coronavirus cases since workers returned, and union officials say they are generally supportive of how the company has adapted.\u201cA lot of the precautions being put into place are helping,\u201d said Jon Holden, the head of Local 751 of the International Association of Machinists, which represents thousands of workers at the company\u2019s Puget Sound facilities. \u201cIt\u2019s the masks, it\u2019s the hand sanitizer, it\u2019s the cleaning and it\u2019s the fact that everyone is taking this seriously.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said the reopening is \u201cnot without its challenges. There\u2019s certainly times where they\u2019re running short of [protective] supplies. So we continue to follow up on those types of things.\u201d And there have been times when union officials have had to call for work to stop because of unsafe conditions, such as people working too closely together or work areas that have not been cleaned between shifts.But on the whole, he said, workers were glad to be back at work.\u201cI\u2019m glad they are starting up the line,\u201d Holden said. \u201cWe have a lot of concerns over the job loss caused by covid.\u201d The workforce has already been hit hard by layoffs and any more would be \u201cthe kind of action that can devastate a community and a workforce.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company is optimistic that the market for the new fuel-efficient planes will be robust. But it has seen a wave of postponements and cancellations, including one on June 29, when Norwegian Air Shuttle said it was canceling an order of 92 of the 737 Max jets.In damning report, watchdog paints troubling picture of relationship between NASA and BoeingWhile the FAA examines how the 737 Max software operates, Boeing\u2019s Space Launch System rocket is also getting a thorough review from NASA. The rocket, which NASA hopes will take astronauts to the moon by 2024, has begun a series of eight tests known as the \u201cGreen Run\u201d that would give the space agency the confidence to finally fly it. The rocket is years behind schedule, and way over budget, a symbol, critics have said, of Boeing\u2019s poor performance and NASA\u2019s struggles to manage big programs.AdvertisementBut late last year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine celebrated the completion of the assembly of the rocket\u2019s core stage. And recently, NASA said it took another significant step forward when it successfully powered up the rocket\u2019s flight computers and avionics, completing \u201ca thorough systems checkout\u201d of the \u201cmost powerful rocket we\u2019ve ever built.\u201d The space agency is hoping to fly it for the first time next year.Story continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s \u201cteam has been hitting milestone after milestone even with COVID interrupting their work,\u201d Leanne Caret, the president and CEO of the company\u2019s Defense, Space and Security division, said in a statement to The Washington Post. \u201cThe rocket is in the test stand, the team is moving steadily toward this year\u2019s hot-fire test and, at this time next year, I believe we\u2019ll be within striking distance of launching the most powerful rocket ever built.\u201dBoeing is also scrambling to prove it can fly astronauts safely to low Earth orbit. In December, a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft without any astronauts onboard ran into trouble as soon as it reached orbit. A software problem reminiscent of the issues with the 737 Max made the spacecraft think it was at a different point in the mission. As engineers moved to fix that problem, they uncovered another that could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module when they separated in flight. They were able to quickly send up a software fix to that problem so that the two modules separated cleanly.AdvertisementThe problems prevented the spacecraft from docking with the International Space Station, and Boeing had to bring the spacecraft home after just two days.NASA finds \u2018fundamental\u2019 software problems in Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraftSince then, NASA and Boeing launched an investigation, and Boeing said it has better integrated its hardware and software teams, and has taken a hard look at its culture and processes. It\u2019s also reviewed all 1 million lines of code in the spacecraft \u201cresulting in increased robustness of flight software,\u201d the company said in a statement to The Post.It said it is \u201cmaking excellent progress in readying two Starliner spacecraft\u201d \u2014 one that would repeat the test flight without astronauts onboard expected later this year, and then one with a crew of three, which could come sometime next year.The stakes for both those launches could not be higher.\u201cThey need to nail them and prove they can stick to the schedule,\u201d Canaccord\u2019s Herbert said. \u201cThey need to get their mojo back in space. From a public relations perspective and in the eye of the customer, they\u2019ve lost a significant amount of credibility.\u201dNearly a decade after winning the Air Force contract to build a fleet of KC-46 Pegasus aerial refueling tankers, Boeing\u2019s assembly lines outside of Seattle have been busy. The company has delivered 34 of the planes so far.But the military has said it won\u2019t be able to use them for most missions until at least 2023 because of persistent technical flaws.Despite flaws, Air Force accepts Boeing\u2019s long-delayed and troubled tankerThe plane\u2019s boom, the long tube through which fuel is transferred, isn\u2019t flexible enough to safely link up with smaller jets. And the Defense Department\u2019s testing office has determined that the complicated camera system that guides the boom into place isn\u2019t accurate enough. The Air Force also has repeatedly found trash, wrenches and other debris scattered inside newly delivered jets.While Boeing works on fixing the problems, the Air Force has been forced to rely on an aging fleet of KC-10 and KC-135 tankers whose average age is close to 60 years old.In a recent interview with The Post, Boeing KC-46 program manager Jamie Burgess expressed optimism about the program\u2019s direction.\u201cThis program has been challenged in the past \u2026 that\u2019s no secret and certainly not news to anyone,\u201d Burgess said. \u201cBut the program is on a very positive path forward.\u201dIn an interview with CNBC, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said that soon after Calhoun became CEO at Boeing, they had a \u201cvery frank discussion\u201d about the troubled program.\u201cListen, I\u2019m not seeing the resources being placed against this program that need to be placed,\u201d he recalled saying. \u201cI\u2019m no longer interested in half measures when it comes to remote visual system, and quite frankly I\u2019m not seeing the talent from the company on this program that I should be seeing.\u201dSince then, he said, there has been marked improvement.\u201cI\u2019m far more confident today in the performance and the behavior of Boeing on the KC-46 than I [have] ever been in my entire time here,\u201d Goldfein said. \u201cAnd I give the new CEO a lot of credit for being a man of his word.\u201dClarification: An earlier version of this article said Boeing\u2019s KC-46 Tanker contract was awarded nearly two decades ago. The contract was awarded in 2011. While the coronavirus ravages the global airline industry, Boeing is also grappling with technical lapses and equipment problems that extend far beyond the 737 Max. As it moves aggressively to restore confidence, Boeing flies into an uncertain future",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Russian rocket carrying a crew of three, including a NASA astronaut, launches successfully, two months after a failure triggered an emergency abort (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "442",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-rocket-to-fly-with-people-for-first-time-since-october-failure/2018/12/02/5315f312-f4e4-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html",
        "text": "The first Russian rocket to fly with people since a harrowing failure two months ago blasted off Monday morning in a successful return to flight.The Soyuz rocket and spacecraft launched at 5:31\u00a0p.m. local time (6:31\u00a0a.m. Eastern time) with three people on board \u2014 NASA astronaut Anne C. McClain, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko \u2014 en route to the International Space Station from a remote launch site in Kazakhstan. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cA great launch,\u201d a NASA commentator said during a live stream of the event.Six hours later, the spacecraft reached the station and docked with it, culminating a successful mission. The crew is expected to stay on the station until June.Story continues below advertisementIn October, a Soyuz rocket malfunctioned when one of its side boosters failed to separate properly and slammed into the rocket. That triggered an automatic abort of the spacecraft, carrying the two-member crew on a wild ride nearly to the edge of space before they fell safely back to the ground.AdvertisementRoscosmos, the Russian space agency, has since said the failure was caused by a \u201cdeformed sensor\u201d damaged during the rocket\u2019s assembly. Instead of delaying the next flight with crews on board, the agency actually moved it up \u2014 a decision that NASA approved.In a recent interview, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Roscosmos has been \u201cvery transparent\u201d about the investigation into the malfunction.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey have shared with us all the data we need to be comfortable and confident that we understand the problem and that it has been resolved,\u201d he said.NASA has been forced to rely on Russia for transportation to the space station since the shuttle retired in 2011. While there are several systems capable of flying cargo and supplies to the orbiting laboratory, the Soyuz is the only vehicle able to fly people there. After the failure, officials in the United States and Russia said they had a sense of urgency to get it back up and running.AdvertisementThe malfunction did little to lessen McClain\u2019s resolve. \u201cI would have gotten on the Soyuz the next day,\u201d she recently told reporters.Story continues below advertisementShe said she was confident that Roscosmos had fixed the problem by asking \u201cthe three important questions: What happened? Why did it happen? And how do we ensure it doesn\u2019t happen again? Nobody was going to give the green light until those three questions were answered.\u201dMcClain, an Army lieutenant colonel and helicopter pilot, was chosen to be an astronaut by NASA in 2013. This was the first time she has been picked for a mission to space.When she was 3 years old, she told her mother, \u201cI want to be an astronaut,\u201d she recalled in an Army video. \u201cShe never told me that I couldn\u2019t.\u201dOn Monday, NASA also announced that the astronauts on the aborted mission in October, NASA\u2019s Tyler N. \u201cNick\u201d Hague and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, were scheduled to fly again Feb.\u00a028.NASA talking to companies about taking over the International Space StationSpace, nuclear security, polar bears: Russia and the U.S. still agree on some thingsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race The Soyuz spacecraft, carrying three astronauts, blasted off from Kazakhstan on Monday and later docked with the International Space Station. A Russian rocket carrying a crew of three, including a NASA astronaut, launches successfully, two months after a failure triggered an emergency abort",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Russian rocket carrying a crew of three, including a NASA astronaut, launches successfully, two months after a failure triggered an emergency abort (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "443",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-rocket-to-fly-with-people-for-first-time-since-october-failure/2018/12/02/5315f312-f4e4-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html",
        "text": "The first Russian rocket to fly with people since a harrowing failure two months ago blasted off Monday morning in a successful return to flight.The Soyuz rocket and spacecraft launched at 5:31\u00a0p.m. local time (6:31\u00a0a.m. Eastern time) with three people on board \u2014 NASA astronaut Anne C. McClain, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko \u2014 en route to the International Space Station from a remote launch site in Kazakhstan. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cA great launch,\u201d a NASA commentator said during a live stream of the event.Six hours later, the spacecraft reached the station and docked with it, culminating a successful mission. The crew is expected to stay on the station until June.Story continues below advertisementIn October, a Soyuz rocket malfunctioned when one of its side boosters failed to separate properly and slammed into the rocket. That triggered an automatic abort of the spacecraft, carrying the two-member crew on a wild ride nearly to the edge of space before they fell safely back to the ground.AdvertisementRoscosmos, the Russian space agency, has since said the failure was caused by a \u201cdeformed sensor\u201d damaged during the rocket\u2019s assembly. Instead of delaying the next flight with crews on board, the agency actually moved it up \u2014 a decision that NASA approved.In a recent interview, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Roscosmos has been \u201cvery transparent\u201d about the investigation into the malfunction.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey have shared with us all the data we need to be comfortable and confident that we understand the problem and that it has been resolved,\u201d he said.NASA has been forced to rely on Russia for transportation to the space station since the shuttle retired in 2011. While there are several systems capable of flying cargo and supplies to the orbiting laboratory, the Soyuz is the only vehicle able to fly people there. After the failure, officials in the United States and Russia said they had a sense of urgency to get it back up and running.AdvertisementThe malfunction did little to lessen McClain\u2019s resolve. \u201cI would have gotten on the Soyuz the next day,\u201d she recently told reporters.Story continues below advertisementShe said she was confident that Roscosmos had fixed the problem by asking \u201cthe three important questions: What happened? Why did it happen? And how do we ensure it doesn\u2019t happen again? Nobody was going to give the green light until those three questions were answered.\u201dMcClain, an Army lieutenant colonel and helicopter pilot, was chosen to be an astronaut by NASA in 2013. This was the first time she has been picked for a mission to space.When she was 3 years old, she told her mother, \u201cI want to be an astronaut,\u201d she recalled in an Army video. \u201cShe never told me that I couldn\u2019t.\u201dOn Monday, NASA also announced that the astronauts on the aborted mission in October, NASA\u2019s Tyler N. \u201cNick\u201d Hague and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, were scheduled to fly again Feb.\u00a028.NASA talking to companies about taking over the International Space StationSpace, nuclear security, polar bears: Russia and the U.S. still agree on some thingsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race The Soyuz spacecraft, carrying three astronauts, blasted off from Kazakhstan on Monday and later docked with the International Space Station. A Russian rocket carrying a crew of three, including a NASA astronaut, launches successfully, two months after a failure triggered an emergency abort",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Russian rocket carrying a crew of three, including a NASA astronaut, launches successfully, two months after a failure triggered an emergency abort (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "444",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-rocket-to-fly-with-people-for-first-time-since-october-failure/2018/12/02/5315f312-f4e4-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html",
        "text": "The first Russian rocket to fly with people since a harrowing failure two months ago blasted off Monday morning in a successful return to flight.The Soyuz rocket and spacecraft launched at 5:31\u00a0p.m. local time (6:31\u00a0a.m. Eastern time) with three people on board \u2014 NASA astronaut Anne C. McClain, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko \u2014 en route to the International Space Station from a remote launch site in Kazakhstan. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cA great launch,\u201d a NASA commentator said during a live stream of the event.Six hours later, the spacecraft reached the station and docked with it, culminating a successful mission. The crew is expected to stay on the station until June.Story continues below advertisementIn October, a Soyuz rocket malfunctioned when one of its side boosters failed to separate properly and slammed into the rocket. That triggered an automatic abort of the spacecraft, carrying the two-member crew on a wild ride nearly to the edge of space before they fell safely back to the ground.AdvertisementRoscosmos, the Russian space agency, has since said the failure was caused by a \u201cdeformed sensor\u201d damaged during the rocket\u2019s assembly. Instead of delaying the next flight with crews on board, the agency actually moved it up \u2014 a decision that NASA approved.In a recent interview, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Roscosmos has been \u201cvery transparent\u201d about the investigation into the malfunction.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey have shared with us all the data we need to be comfortable and confident that we understand the problem and that it has been resolved,\u201d he said.NASA has been forced to rely on Russia for transportation to the space station since the shuttle retired in 2011. While there are several systems capable of flying cargo and supplies to the orbiting laboratory, the Soyuz is the only vehicle able to fly people there. After the failure, officials in the United States and Russia said they had a sense of urgency to get it back up and running.AdvertisementThe malfunction did little to lessen McClain\u2019s resolve. \u201cI would have gotten on the Soyuz the next day,\u201d she recently told reporters.Story continues below advertisementShe said she was confident that Roscosmos had fixed the problem by asking \u201cthe three important questions: What happened? Why did it happen? And how do we ensure it doesn\u2019t happen again? Nobody was going to give the green light until those three questions were answered.\u201dMcClain, an Army lieutenant colonel and helicopter pilot, was chosen to be an astronaut by NASA in 2013. This was the first time she has been picked for a mission to space.When she was 3 years old, she told her mother, \u201cI want to be an astronaut,\u201d she recalled in an Army video. \u201cShe never told me that I couldn\u2019t.\u201dOn Monday, NASA also announced that the astronauts on the aborted mission in October, NASA\u2019s Tyler N. \u201cNick\u201d Hague and Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos, were scheduled to fly again Feb.\u00a028.NASA talking to companies about taking over the International Space StationSpace, nuclear security, polar bears: Russia and the U.S. still agree on some thingsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race The Soyuz spacecraft, carrying three astronauts, blasted off from Kazakhstan on Monday and later docked with the International Space Station. A Russian rocket carrying a crew of three, including a NASA astronaut, launches successfully, two months after a failure triggered an emergency abort",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The crowds are back. Now can the space industry build on the momentum? (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "445",
        "date": "2018-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-crowds-are-back-now-can-the-space-industry-build-on-its-momentum/2018/02/07/5eb0921e-0c36-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html",
        "text": "The crowds were back. Lining the beaches and the causeways, they fixed their binoculars on the same launchpad that first sent men to the moon. But this time the draw wasn\u2019t the NASA heroes of the 1960s Space Age \u2014 Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong \u2014 who paved a path to the lunar surface. Instead it was a puckish and eccentric billionaire with a big new rocket and a penchant for showmanship. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe launch of Elon Musk\u2019s Falcon Heavy from the Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday was the latest in a series of milestones that have revived interest in space, as well as the sacrosanct stretch of sand along the Florida coast that has witnessed so many epic flights through the atmosphere. The hotels were full, the press room overflowing, and the traffic near the Kennedy Space Center was bumper to bumper.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s triumph Tuesday in a SpaceX test flight that sent a sports car deep into space may have been something of a cross-promotional stunt involving Tesla, one of his other companies. But it also marked a turning point for a budding commercial space industry that has raised the stakes for itself by promising big things. Now the question is whether it can maintain its momentum and live up to the promise of returning humans to space while landing spacecraft on the surface of the moon \u2014 inherently difficult and dangerous endeavors, even for NASA.SpaceX\u2019s launch comes as the Trump administration is looking to restructure the role of NASA, ensuring that private enterprise and international partners work closely with the space agency.Later this month, Vice President Pence and the rest of the National Space Council will hold their second meeting, this time at the Kennedy Space Center, to discuss the role that companies such as SpaceX could play in the country\u2019s ambitions to return to the moon and explore the cosmos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the council, which was reconstituted under Trump, convenes, one major question it will have to grapple with is: \u201cHow can we best spend our resources as a nation to ensure the most robust space portfolio we can?\u201d said Phil Larson, an assistant dean at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a former SpaceX spokesman. Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator who pushed for a greater reliance on the commercial sector during the Obama administration, said the launch of Falcon Heavy should spark a change in the way NASA operates. \u201cThis much delayed, much maligned rocket is just what the space agency needs to escape from the governmental bureaucracy that has bound her to Low Earth Orbit for the past forty-five years,\u201d she wrote in an email. \u201cUnfortunately, the traditionalists at NASA don\u2019t share this view and have feared this moment since the day the program was announced seven years ago.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Falcon Heavy launch was a milestone not only because it became the most powerful rocket in operation, but also because it boosted its payload, the Tesla Roadster, out of Earth\u2019s orbit on a trajectory around the sun that Musk said would take it out farther than Mars to the asteroid belt. SpaceX had outfitted the vehicle with three cameras that beamed back stunning images of the ruby-red car soaring through the blackness of space, with the Earth a blue orb in the distance. As impressive as the launch was, SpaceX still faces a far greater test: flying astronauts. For all the hype and hoopla surrounding the launch of a $200,000 sports car with a space-suited mannequin named \u201cStarman\u201d at the wheel, SpaceX has never flown a rocket with a human being on board.Story continues below advertisementWhile the industry has had a number of triumphs, \u201cthat doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s going to be easy,\u201d said Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who also served as the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. \u201cTaking humans to space should never be taken for granted.\u201dAdvertisementAlong with Boeing, SpaceX is under contract from NASA to deliver astronauts to the space station. Though there have been setbacks and delays, both companies say the first flights with humans could take place this year. Virgin Galactic, the space company founded by Richard Branson, and Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin also could fly humans for the first time this year, on suborbital jaunts that could reach the edge of space. (Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementAs the space council mulls how best to involve commercial companies in its plans, its exploits so far have begun to attract attention on Florida\u2019s Space Coast, reviving an area that was hit hard when the space shuttle was retired in 2011. For about a decade, SpaceX has been a presence here, including making use of Pad 39A, scene of some of the crucial Apollo and space shuttle missions. More recently, Blue Origin is rehabilitating a historic launchpad here and has recently built a massive manufacturing facility where it plans to build its next-generation rocket, New Glenn.AdvertisementOneWeb, which plans to put up constellations of thousands of satellites to beam the Internet to remote corners of the world, is building a manufacturing site of its own nearby. Story continues below advertisementBoeing has taken over an old shuttle facility at the Kennedy Space Center and is making improvements to a Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch site in preparation for the first flights of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the shuttle. The shuttle landing strip could be used by Virgin Orbit to launch small satellites.And then there\u2019s Moon Express, the first commercial entity to receive permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly out of Earth\u2019s orbit to deep space. It plans to fly a robotic lander to the surface of the moon. In some ways, Moon Express is already moving ahead under a new model in which it partners with government agencies to achieve a first for a private company: landing a rover on the moon. \u201cThe challenges of space are immense, and the risks are huge,\u201d Bob Richards, the founder and chief executive of Moon Express, said in a statement. \u201cBut the innovations, convictions and entrepreneurial drive of the commercial space sector, in partnership with government, will achieve new economics and permanence for the expansion of Earth\u2019s social and economic sphere to the Moon and beyond.\u201d SpaceX\u2019s successful test launch of the Falcon Heavy marks turning point, some say. The crowds are back. Now can the space industry build on the momentum?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are the companies that could profit from Trump\u2019s Space Force (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "446",
        "date": "2018-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/here-are-companies-that-could-profit-trumps-space-force/",
        "text": "The cosmic rhetoric of a Space Force seeking \u201cAmerican dominance in space,\u201d as President Trump puts it, conjures images of stormtroopers, laser guns and X-wing fighters \u2013 technology straight out of science fiction.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the Pentagon is already working on technology designed to fight a war in space: rockets that could launch daily; missiles that would fly at five miles per second; satellites the size of shoe boxes; and robots that could repair them in orbit. Such efforts already amount to billions of dollars in government spending each year, much of it shrouded under classified military programs. And as the White House pledges to push for a Space Force as a sixth military branch and the first new service since the Air Force was created in 1947, a group of government contractors sees a chance to profit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementByron Callan, a prominent defense stock analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, said Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Harris Corporation may be particularly well-positioned to benefit from Trump\u2019s Space Force.The new service could line their pockets for years to come, assuming Congress embraces the idea.\u201cBecause [the Space Force] will be a smaller service with fewer resources, it may be more dependent on industry for technical advice and policy input,\u201d said Loren Thompson, a consultant with the nonprofit Lexington Institute, which receives funding from defense contractors. It \u201cwould likely be more of a creature of industry than if the Air Force were kept intact.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThroughout the history of human space travel, NASA has tended to get most of the glory. But the Defense Department has been focused on the stars since before Sputnik caused a national panic in 1957 \u2014 and led to what is now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon\u2019s research arm.AdvertisementToday, DARPA is working on a few programs that could ultimately fit under the mantle of a Space Force. Last year, it selected Boeing for its \u201cExperimental Spaceplane,\u201d or XS-1, program, which is meant to develop a spaceplane capable of flying 10 times in 10 days.Boeing\u2019s vehicle, known as the Phantom Express, would be designed to fuel up and go, taking off quickly, like a commercial airliner. That is particularly appealing to the Pentagon, which wants to be able to put satellites into orbit quickly if, for example, officials learn that an adversary is preparing to launch a missile or deploy a fleet of ships to sea.Story continues below advertisementAnd with information-age technologies penetrating further into military operations, even the Army\u2019s ground forces rely on support from beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The Global Positioning System (GPS) that numerous military systems rely on for geolocation is made possible by bus-sized satellites built primarily by Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Those satellites are hurled into space by firms like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.Inside SpaceX, the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that plans to send private citizens to spaceConcerned that adversaries could jam or interfere with those satellites, the U.S. military has worked to make them more resilient. On Tuesday afternoon, the Air Force announced that it awarded Lockheed Martin a $2.9 billion contract for just three satellites designed to be survivable against counter-space weaponry, handing the company an initial $80 million to cover development costs. AdvertisementAlongside such large and expensive systems, defense officials are planning to launch swarms of smaller satellites into orbit, which they think will be harder to destroy or disable. DARPA is developing robots that could fly from satellite to satellite in space, refueling, repairing damage or updating the satellites with new capabilities as we do with our smartphones\u2019 operating systems.Story continues below advertisementThe prospect that GPS communications could be knocked out through an attack on U.S. satellites has become so worrisome that the U.S. Navy recently added celestial navigation back into its required coursework for officers. Boeing is working on autonomous drones that can navigate without the help of GPS.\u201cThe U.S. military is dependent on space across the full spectrum of conflict, from counterterrorism operations in Yemen to a major war with a near-peer adversary like Russia or China,\u201d said Todd Harrison, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cOther countries have taken note of the advantages space provides to the U.S. military and are developing and proliferating counter-space weapons to negate our advantage in space.\u201dAdvertisementAnother top Pentagon priority is developing a hypersonic missile, one capable of traveling at five times the speed of sound, or more. In his speech at the Pentagon on his need for a Space Force, Vice President Pence said that both Russia and China are \u201cinvesting heavily\u2019 in the technology and that \u201cChina claimed to have made its first successful test of a hypersonic vehicle just last week.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn Monday the Air Force announced it is awarding a $480 million contract to Lockheed Martin to develop a hypersonic strike weapon, a project that builds on a similar contract worth almost $1 billion awarded in April. Boeing also said it was investing in a British company that is working on hypersonic propulsion systems.Why the Pentagon fears the U.S. is losing the hypersonic arms race with Russia and ChinaFor the time being, the federal space market is considered a niche business with tremendous overhead costs, available only to a handful of gigantic companies with the scale to compete.AdvertisementAn analysis by Bloomberg Government found that the Defense Department spends about $4 billion a year on space vehicles, launches, services and associated support. Most of that money is spent through contracts with three large companies: Boeing and Lockheed\u2019s United Launch Alliance; Lockheed Martin individually; and a California-based nonprofit research center called the Aerospace Corporation. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was the fourth-largest recipient of Defense Department space funding, Bloomberg Government found.Story continues below advertisementIndependent analysts were skeptical that the Space Force would give companies such as Lockheed and Boeing much of a bump in business, however, unless its creation comes with a significant increase in defense spending. The Pentagon is expected to outline its plans in greater detail next year as part of its 2020 budget request, Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told the Associated Press.The force could actually become a liability for contractors if the Pentagon\u2019s other activities are defunded to make room for more bureaucratic overhead, they said, or if a future Congress decides to cut defense spending.Advertisement\u201cFrom a business perspective I don\u2019t think [the Space Force] changes a whole lot,\u201d said Rob Levinson, senior defense analyst with Bloomberg Government. \u201cIt\u2019s a different office they have to go to, but these companies are basically going to be doing the same thing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCapital Alpha partners analyst Byron Callan described the Space force as \u201cfar from an automatic win\u201d for space companies. \u201cThey\u2019re all diversified enough that you don\u2019t know what else is going to get curtailed \u2014 that they\u2019re counting on \u2014 to pay for this,\u201d he said.And the prospect of resources being diverted from the Army, Navy and Air Force has military contractors spooked.\u201cSpace should be prioritized\u2026but at what cost?\u201d said Wes Hallman, senior vice president for policy at the National Defense Industrial Association. \u201cThe challenge with the Space Force is that you worry about creating a few more bureaucratic layers. That won\u2019t be good for the warfighter or for industry.\u201dDealmaking accelerates as federal contractors jockey for spendingPresident Trump\u2019s comments at a recent news conference suggests Lockheed and Boeing\u2019s United Launch Alliance could be in trouble if the White House gets its way: \u201cI don\u2019t like when Boeing and Lockheed get together because the pricing only goes up,\u201d Trump said, later adding \u201cwe\u2019re going to have to talk about that, your joining those two companies.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s public admonishments to those companies have seldom translated to policy, however. When he tweeted a month before his inauguration that Boeing\u2019s contract to build the Air Force One presidential plane should be canceled, it wasn\u2019t. Months later, when he criticized the price of Lockheed\u2019s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and suggested it should be replaced with a competing plane, the government ended up awarding a contract that was roughly in line with what it had already planned.Geopolitical tensions are also creating new risk for space companies. Russian lawmakers are reportedly weighing whether to cut off sales of the RD-180 rocket engine \u2014 which NASA and the Defense Department use on the Atlas V rocket \u2014 in response to U.S. sanctions. A United Launch Alliance spokesman said the company has enough inventory in the U.S. to meet its current mission needs.Space companies contacted by The Washington Post mainly said they would continue to support the government\u2019s work in space regardless of how the new service was structured. In other words, if a new Space Force were to supplant the space-based activities of another service like the Air Force, as some officials fear, the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world would simply follow the money.Advertisement\u201cLockheed Martin has played a central role in both commercial and national security space for decades, and we look forward to contributing to this critical effort through the National Space Council and other means,\u201d said Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Maureen Schumann.Boeing concurred: \u201cWe will continue to deliver for our partners in government as they stand up a Space Command and consider the path forward for implementing the Space Force,\u201d spokesman Dan Curran said in an email.Northrop Grumman offered something closer to a full-throated endorsement: \u201cWe are encouraged by the increased focus on the Space domain and its importance to our national security,\u201d spokesman Tim Paynter said in an email. \u201cGiven our deep expertise, legacy and capabilities related to Space, we look forward to supporting the nation\u2019s future needs in this critical area.\u201dNorthrop took an aggressive step into the space business last year when it bought a Virginia-based company called Orbital ATK, giving it a broad suite of space-based capabilities including bus-sized communications satellites and experimental robotic spacecraft. Florida-based government contractor Harris Corporation edged further into the industry this year through an unspecified classified contract win, chief executive Bill Brown said in a recent earnings call.Others have pointed out that more than just military might is at stake. With commercial industries like trucking and shipping increasingly reliant on GPS for navigation, securing space could have broader implications for the U.S. economy.\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the White House is focusing on America\u2019s reliance on space, and on the growing threats from Russia and China,\u201d Aerospace Industries Association president and chief executive Eric Fanning said in an email. \u201cAs Congress reacts to the Pentagon\u2019s report, we need to be careful not to create increased bureaucracy and complexity that might actually slow us down. We also need to recognize that it\u2019s not just our military, but every aspect of our economy that relies on security in space.\u201d The Pentagon is already working on technology designed to fight a war in space: rockets that could launch daily; missiles that would fly at five miles per second; satellites the size of shoe boxes; and robots that could fix them in orbit. Here are the companies that could profit from Trump\u2019s Space Force",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are the companies that could profit from Trump\u2019s Space Force (WP: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "447",
        "date": "2018-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/here-are-companies-that-could-profit-trumps-space-force/",
        "text": "The cosmic rhetoric of a Space Force seeking \u201cAmerican dominance in space,\u201d as President Trump puts it, conjures images of stormtroopers, laser guns and X-wing fighters \u2013 technology straight out of science fiction.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the Pentagon is already working on technology designed to fight a war in space: rockets that could launch daily; missiles that would fly at five miles per second; satellites the size of shoe boxes; and robots that could repair them in orbit. Such efforts already amount to billions of dollars in government spending each year, much of it shrouded under classified military programs. And as the White House pledges to push for a Space Force as a sixth military branch and the first new service since the Air Force was created in 1947, a group of government contractors sees a chance to profit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementByron Callan, a prominent defense stock analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, said Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Harris Corporation may be particularly well-positioned to benefit from Trump\u2019s Space Force.The new service could line their pockets for years to come, assuming Congress embraces the idea.\u201cBecause [the Space Force] will be a smaller service with fewer resources, it may be more dependent on industry for technical advice and policy input,\u201d said Loren Thompson, a consultant with the nonprofit Lexington Institute, which receives funding from defense contractors. It \u201cwould likely be more of a creature of industry than if the Air Force were kept intact.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThroughout the history of human space travel, NASA has tended to get most of the glory. But the Defense Department has been focused on the stars since before Sputnik caused a national panic in 1957 \u2014 and led to what is now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon\u2019s research arm.AdvertisementToday, DARPA is working on a few programs that could ultimately fit under the mantle of a Space Force. Last year, it selected Boeing for its \u201cExperimental Spaceplane,\u201d or XS-1, program, which is meant to develop a spaceplane capable of flying 10 times in 10 days.Boeing\u2019s vehicle, known as the Phantom Express, would be designed to fuel up and go, taking off quickly, like a commercial airliner. That is particularly appealing to the Pentagon, which wants to be able to put satellites into orbit quickly if, for example, officials learn that an adversary is preparing to launch a missile or deploy a fleet of ships to sea.Story continues below advertisementAnd with information-age technologies penetrating further into military operations, even the Army\u2019s ground forces rely on support from beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The Global Positioning System (GPS) that numerous military systems rely on for geolocation is made possible by bus-sized satellites built primarily by Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Those satellites are hurled into space by firms like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.Inside SpaceX, the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that plans to send private citizens to spaceConcerned that adversaries could jam or interfere with those satellites, the U.S. military has worked to make them more resilient. On Tuesday afternoon, the Air Force announced that it awarded Lockheed Martin a $2.9 billion contract for just three satellites designed to be survivable against counter-space weaponry, handing the company an initial $80 million to cover development costs. AdvertisementAlongside such large and expensive systems, defense officials are planning to launch swarms of smaller satellites into orbit, which they think will be harder to destroy or disable. DARPA is developing robots that could fly from satellite to satellite in space, refueling, repairing damage or updating the satellites with new capabilities as we do with our smartphones\u2019 operating systems.Story continues below advertisementThe prospect that GPS communications could be knocked out through an attack on U.S. satellites has become so worrisome that the U.S. Navy recently added celestial navigation back into its required coursework for officers. Boeing is working on autonomous drones that can navigate without the help of GPS.\u201cThe U.S. military is dependent on space across the full spectrum of conflict, from counterterrorism operations in Yemen to a major war with a near-peer adversary like Russia or China,\u201d said Todd Harrison, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cOther countries have taken note of the advantages space provides to the U.S. military and are developing and proliferating counter-space weapons to negate our advantage in space.\u201dAdvertisementAnother top Pentagon priority is developing a hypersonic missile, one capable of traveling at five times the speed of sound, or more. In his speech at the Pentagon on his need for a Space Force, Vice President Pence said that both Russia and China are \u201cinvesting heavily\u2019 in the technology and that \u201cChina claimed to have made its first successful test of a hypersonic vehicle just last week.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn Monday the Air Force announced it is awarding a $480 million contract to Lockheed Martin to develop a hypersonic strike weapon, a project that builds on a similar contract worth almost $1 billion awarded in April. Boeing also said it was investing in a British company that is working on hypersonic propulsion systems.Why the Pentagon fears the U.S. is losing the hypersonic arms race with Russia and ChinaFor the time being, the federal space market is considered a niche business with tremendous overhead costs, available only to a handful of gigantic companies with the scale to compete.AdvertisementAn analysis by Bloomberg Government found that the Defense Department spends about $4 billion a year on space vehicles, launches, services and associated support. Most of that money is spent through contracts with three large companies: Boeing and Lockheed\u2019s United Launch Alliance; Lockheed Martin individually; and a California-based nonprofit research center called the Aerospace Corporation. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was the fourth-largest recipient of Defense Department space funding, Bloomberg Government found.Story continues below advertisementIndependent analysts were skeptical that the Space Force would give companies such as Lockheed and Boeing much of a bump in business, however, unless its creation comes with a significant increase in defense spending. The Pentagon is expected to outline its plans in greater detail next year as part of its 2020 budget request, Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told the Associated Press.The force could actually become a liability for contractors if the Pentagon\u2019s other activities are defunded to make room for more bureaucratic overhead, they said, or if a future Congress decides to cut defense spending.Advertisement\u201cFrom a business perspective I don\u2019t think [the Space Force] changes a whole lot,\u201d said Rob Levinson, senior defense analyst with Bloomberg Government. \u201cIt\u2019s a different office they have to go to, but these companies are basically going to be doing the same thing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCapital Alpha partners analyst Byron Callan described the Space force as \u201cfar from an automatic win\u201d for space companies. \u201cThey\u2019re all diversified enough that you don\u2019t know what else is going to get curtailed \u2014 that they\u2019re counting on \u2014 to pay for this,\u201d he said.And the prospect of resources being diverted from the Army, Navy and Air Force has military contractors spooked.\u201cSpace should be prioritized\u2026but at what cost?\u201d said Wes Hallman, senior vice president for policy at the National Defense Industrial Association. \u201cThe challenge with the Space Force is that you worry about creating a few more bureaucratic layers. That won\u2019t be good for the warfighter or for industry.\u201dDealmaking accelerates as federal contractors jockey for spendingPresident Trump\u2019s comments at a recent news conference suggests Lockheed and Boeing\u2019s United Launch Alliance could be in trouble if the White House gets its way: \u201cI don\u2019t like when Boeing and Lockheed get together because the pricing only goes up,\u201d Trump said, later adding \u201cwe\u2019re going to have to talk about that, your joining those two companies.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s public admonishments to those companies have seldom translated to policy, however. When he tweeted a month before his inauguration that Boeing\u2019s contract to build the Air Force One presidential plane should be canceled, it wasn\u2019t. Months later, when he criticized the price of Lockheed\u2019s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and suggested it should be replaced with a competing plane, the government ended up awarding a contract that was roughly in line with what it had already planned.Geopolitical tensions are also creating new risk for space companies. Russian lawmakers are reportedly weighing whether to cut off sales of the RD-180 rocket engine \u2014 which NASA and the Defense Department use on the Atlas V rocket \u2014 in response to U.S. sanctions. A United Launch Alliance spokesman said the company has enough inventory in the U.S. to meet its current mission needs.Space companies contacted by The Washington Post mainly said they would continue to support the government\u2019s work in space regardless of how the new service was structured. In other words, if a new Space Force were to supplant the space-based activities of another service like the Air Force, as some officials fear, the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world would simply follow the money.Advertisement\u201cLockheed Martin has played a central role in both commercial and national security space for decades, and we look forward to contributing to this critical effort through the National Space Council and other means,\u201d said Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Maureen Schumann.Boeing concurred: \u201cWe will continue to deliver for our partners in government as they stand up a Space Command and consider the path forward for implementing the Space Force,\u201d spokesman Dan Curran said in an email.Northrop Grumman offered something closer to a full-throated endorsement: \u201cWe are encouraged by the increased focus on the Space domain and its importance to our national security,\u201d spokesman Tim Paynter said in an email. \u201cGiven our deep expertise, legacy and capabilities related to Space, we look forward to supporting the nation\u2019s future needs in this critical area.\u201dNorthrop took an aggressive step into the space business last year when it bought a Virginia-based company called Orbital ATK, giving it a broad suite of space-based capabilities including bus-sized communications satellites and experimental robotic spacecraft. Florida-based government contractor Harris Corporation edged further into the industry this year through an unspecified classified contract win, chief executive Bill Brown said in a recent earnings call.Others have pointed out that more than just military might is at stake. With commercial industries like trucking and shipping increasingly reliant on GPS for navigation, securing space could have broader implications for the U.S. economy.\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the White House is focusing on America\u2019s reliance on space, and on the growing threats from Russia and China,\u201d Aerospace Industries Association president and chief executive Eric Fanning said in an email. \u201cAs Congress reacts to the Pentagon\u2019s report, we need to be careful not to create increased bureaucracy and complexity that might actually slow us down. We also need to recognize that it\u2019s not just our military, but every aspect of our economy that relies on security in space.\u201d The Pentagon is already working on technology designed to fight a war in space: rockets that could launch daily; missiles that would fly at five miles per second; satellites the size of shoe boxes; and robots that could fix them in orbit. Here are the companies that could profit from Trump\u2019s Space Force",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are the companies that could profit from Trump\u2019s Space Force (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "448",
        "date": "2018-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/here-are-companies-that-could-profit-trumps-space-force/",
        "text": "The cosmic rhetoric of a Space Force seeking \u201cAmerican dominance in space,\u201d as President Trump puts it, conjures images of stormtroopers, laser guns and X-wing fighters \u2013 technology straight out of science fiction.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the Pentagon is already working on technology designed to fight a war in space: rockets that could launch daily; missiles that would fly at five miles per second; satellites the size of shoe boxes; and robots that could repair them in orbit. Such efforts already amount to billions of dollars in government spending each year, much of it shrouded under classified military programs. And as the White House pledges to push for a Space Force as a sixth military branch and the first new service since the Air Force was created in 1947, a group of government contractors sees a chance to profit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementByron Callan, a prominent defense stock analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, said Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Harris Corporation may be particularly well-positioned to benefit from Trump\u2019s Space Force.The new service could line their pockets for years to come, assuming Congress embraces the idea.\u201cBecause [the Space Force] will be a smaller service with fewer resources, it may be more dependent on industry for technical advice and policy input,\u201d said Loren Thompson, a consultant with the nonprofit Lexington Institute, which receives funding from defense contractors. It \u201cwould likely be more of a creature of industry than if the Air Force were kept intact.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThroughout the history of human space travel, NASA has tended to get most of the glory. But the Defense Department has been focused on the stars since before Sputnik caused a national panic in 1957 \u2014 and led to what is now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon\u2019s research arm.AdvertisementToday, DARPA is working on a few programs that could ultimately fit under the mantle of a Space Force. Last year, it selected Boeing for its \u201cExperimental Spaceplane,\u201d or XS-1, program, which is meant to develop a spaceplane capable of flying 10 times in 10 days.Boeing\u2019s vehicle, known as the Phantom Express, would be designed to fuel up and go, taking off quickly, like a commercial airliner. That is particularly appealing to the Pentagon, which wants to be able to put satellites into orbit quickly if, for example, officials learn that an adversary is preparing to launch a missile or deploy a fleet of ships to sea.Story continues below advertisementAnd with information-age technologies penetrating further into military operations, even the Army\u2019s ground forces rely on support from beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The Global Positioning System (GPS) that numerous military systems rely on for geolocation is made possible by bus-sized satellites built primarily by Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Those satellites are hurled into space by firms like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.Inside SpaceX, the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that plans to send private citizens to spaceConcerned that adversaries could jam or interfere with those satellites, the U.S. military has worked to make them more resilient. On Tuesday afternoon, the Air Force announced that it awarded Lockheed Martin a $2.9 billion contract for just three satellites designed to be survivable against counter-space weaponry, handing the company an initial $80 million to cover development costs. AdvertisementAlongside such large and expensive systems, defense officials are planning to launch swarms of smaller satellites into orbit, which they think will be harder to destroy or disable. DARPA is developing robots that could fly from satellite to satellite in space, refueling, repairing damage or updating the satellites with new capabilities as we do with our smartphones\u2019 operating systems.Story continues below advertisementThe prospect that GPS communications could be knocked out through an attack on U.S. satellites has become so worrisome that the U.S. Navy recently added celestial navigation back into its required coursework for officers. Boeing is working on autonomous drones that can navigate without the help of GPS.\u201cThe U.S. military is dependent on space across the full spectrum of conflict, from counterterrorism operations in Yemen to a major war with a near-peer adversary like Russia or China,\u201d said Todd Harrison, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cOther countries have taken note of the advantages space provides to the U.S. military and are developing and proliferating counter-space weapons to negate our advantage in space.\u201dAdvertisementAnother top Pentagon priority is developing a hypersonic missile, one capable of traveling at five times the speed of sound, or more. In his speech at the Pentagon on his need for a Space Force, Vice President Pence said that both Russia and China are \u201cinvesting heavily\u2019 in the technology and that \u201cChina claimed to have made its first successful test of a hypersonic vehicle just last week.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn Monday the Air Force announced it is awarding a $480 million contract to Lockheed Martin to develop a hypersonic strike weapon, a project that builds on a similar contract worth almost $1 billion awarded in April. Boeing also said it was investing in a British company that is working on hypersonic propulsion systems.Why the Pentagon fears the U.S. is losing the hypersonic arms race with Russia and ChinaFor the time being, the federal space market is considered a niche business with tremendous overhead costs, available only to a handful of gigantic companies with the scale to compete.AdvertisementAn analysis by Bloomberg Government found that the Defense Department spends about $4 billion a year on space vehicles, launches, services and associated support. Most of that money is spent through contracts with three large companies: Boeing and Lockheed\u2019s United Launch Alliance; Lockheed Martin individually; and a California-based nonprofit research center called the Aerospace Corporation. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was the fourth-largest recipient of Defense Department space funding, Bloomberg Government found.Story continues below advertisementIndependent analysts were skeptical that the Space Force would give companies such as Lockheed and Boeing much of a bump in business, however, unless its creation comes with a significant increase in defense spending. The Pentagon is expected to outline its plans in greater detail next year as part of its 2020 budget request, Deputy Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told the Associated Press.The force could actually become a liability for contractors if the Pentagon\u2019s other activities are defunded to make room for more bureaucratic overhead, they said, or if a future Congress decides to cut defense spending.Advertisement\u201cFrom a business perspective I don\u2019t think [the Space Force] changes a whole lot,\u201d said Rob Levinson, senior defense analyst with Bloomberg Government. \u201cIt\u2019s a different office they have to go to, but these companies are basically going to be doing the same thing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCapital Alpha partners analyst Byron Callan described the Space force as \u201cfar from an automatic win\u201d for space companies. \u201cThey\u2019re all diversified enough that you don\u2019t know what else is going to get curtailed \u2014 that they\u2019re counting on \u2014 to pay for this,\u201d he said.And the prospect of resources being diverted from the Army, Navy and Air Force has military contractors spooked.\u201cSpace should be prioritized\u2026but at what cost?\u201d said Wes Hallman, senior vice president for policy at the National Defense Industrial Association. \u201cThe challenge with the Space Force is that you worry about creating a few more bureaucratic layers. That won\u2019t be good for the warfighter or for industry.\u201dDealmaking accelerates as federal contractors jockey for spendingPresident Trump\u2019s comments at a recent news conference suggests Lockheed and Boeing\u2019s United Launch Alliance could be in trouble if the White House gets its way: \u201cI don\u2019t like when Boeing and Lockheed get together because the pricing only goes up,\u201d Trump said, later adding \u201cwe\u2019re going to have to talk about that, your joining those two companies.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s public admonishments to those companies have seldom translated to policy, however. When he tweeted a month before his inauguration that Boeing\u2019s contract to build the Air Force One presidential plane should be canceled, it wasn\u2019t. Months later, when he criticized the price of Lockheed\u2019s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and suggested it should be replaced with a competing plane, the government ended up awarding a contract that was roughly in line with what it had already planned.Geopolitical tensions are also creating new risk for space companies. Russian lawmakers are reportedly weighing whether to cut off sales of the RD-180 rocket engine \u2014 which NASA and the Defense Department use on the Atlas V rocket \u2014 in response to U.S. sanctions. A United Launch Alliance spokesman said the company has enough inventory in the U.S. to meet its current mission needs.Space companies contacted by The Washington Post mainly said they would continue to support the government\u2019s work in space regardless of how the new service was structured. In other words, if a new Space Force were to supplant the space-based activities of another service like the Air Force, as some officials fear, the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world would simply follow the money.Advertisement\u201cLockheed Martin has played a central role in both commercial and national security space for decades, and we look forward to contributing to this critical effort through the National Space Council and other means,\u201d said Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Maureen Schumann.Boeing concurred: \u201cWe will continue to deliver for our partners in government as they stand up a Space Command and consider the path forward for implementing the Space Force,\u201d spokesman Dan Curran said in an email.Northrop Grumman offered something closer to a full-throated endorsement: \u201cWe are encouraged by the increased focus on the Space domain and its importance to our national security,\u201d spokesman Tim Paynter said in an email. \u201cGiven our deep expertise, legacy and capabilities related to Space, we look forward to supporting the nation\u2019s future needs in this critical area.\u201dNorthrop took an aggressive step into the space business last year when it bought a Virginia-based company called Orbital ATK, giving it a broad suite of space-based capabilities including bus-sized communications satellites and experimental robotic spacecraft. Florida-based government contractor Harris Corporation edged further into the industry this year through an unspecified classified contract win, chief executive Bill Brown said in a recent earnings call.Others have pointed out that more than just military might is at stake. With commercial industries like trucking and shipping increasingly reliant on GPS for navigation, securing space could have broader implications for the U.S. economy.\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the White House is focusing on America\u2019s reliance on space, and on the growing threats from Russia and China,\u201d Aerospace Industries Association president and chief executive Eric Fanning said in an email. \u201cAs Congress reacts to the Pentagon\u2019s report, we need to be careful not to create increased bureaucracy and complexity that might actually slow us down. We also need to recognize that it\u2019s not just our military, but every aspect of our economy that relies on security in space.\u201d The Pentagon is already working on technology designed to fight a war in space: rockets that could launch daily; missiles that would fly at five miles per second; satellites the size of shoe boxes; and robots that could fix them in orbit. Here are the companies that could profit from Trump\u2019s Space Force",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to lay off 10 percent of its workforce (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "449",
        "date": "2019-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/12/elon-musks-spacex-lay-off-percent-its-workforce/",
        "text": "SpaceX announced Friday evening that it would lay off 10 percent of its workforce, a significant setback for the hard-charging company founded by Elon Musk.The move comes as the California-based company, which employs more than 6,000 people, is pulled in many directions. It is on the verge of launching NASA\u2019s astronauts, building a new rocket known as Starship that it hopes will be able to carry people to deep space and launching a constellation of satellites that would beam the Internet down to remote areas. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cTo continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cThis action is taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.\u201dThe move comes a few months after the Air Force awarded lucrative contracts to several of SpaceX\u2019s competitors to help them develop their rockets. SpaceX was not awarded one of the contracts. The move comes as the company is on the verge of launching NASA\u2019s astronauts, building a new rocket it hopes will be able to carry people to deep space and launching a constellation of satellites. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to lay off 10 percent of its workforce",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, transitioning to executive chair role (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "450",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/02/jeff-bezos-stepping-down-amazon-ceo-transitioning-executive-chair-role/",
        "text": "SEATTLE \u2014 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will step down as chief executive of the e-commerce giant, turning over the reins to the company\u2019s longtime cloud-computing boss Andy Jassy.Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, will transition to the role of executive chair this summer, the company said Tuesday. The looming transition marks the most radical shake-up in Amazon\u2019s corporate ranks in its nearly 30-year history. Bezos moves into a new role, with a title made for him, that keeps him at the company in a position where he will focus on innovation at Amazon and hands off the top job to a trusted deputy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIf you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive,\u201d Bezos said in an earnings release Tuesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder Bezos\u2019s stewardship, Amazon evolved from an upstart online bookseller into one of the world\u2019s most popular Internet marketplaces able to quickly deliver a vast catalogue of products and services. Bezos\u2019s creation helped set in motion a massive change in the way people around the world shop, as people began buying toothpaste to car parts to groceries on their PCs and phones. Amazon also triggered a sea change in physical retail, accelerating the shuttering of shopping malls and stores. That shift has only accelerated as the coronavirus pandemic fueled a surge in online shopping as worried customers shunned stores.To make the e-commerce business run, Amazon had to create an array of computer data centers, stacked with rows upon rows of servers, to make sure the online marketplace could handle the growing business. That developed into a new market for the company, Amazon Web Services, a giant, profit-driving cloud computing operation that now powers websites around the world.The company\u2018s meteoric growth delivered massive riches to shareholders and made Bezos \u2014 depending on the day \u2014 the richest man on the planet. For all the praise on Wall Street, however, Bezos and his brass-knuckled tactics also carried great cost. Regulators increasingly viewed Amazon as a threat to competition, and the company\u2019s own workers at times told grim tales about their mistreatment, as they sought to carry out Bezos\u2019s mission to create a consumer-first \u201ceverything store.\u201d Amazon for years faced fierce criticism for underpaying workers, only to boost its minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018. It came under fire at the beginning of the pandemic for what workers said was a lack of precautions. It\u2019s fighting an aggressive union drive at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse, where employees are pressing for better working conditions and higher pay.Andy Jassy is the likely heir apparent to Jeff BezosAmazon founder Jeff Bezos announced on Feb. 2 he will step down as company CEO in the third quarter of the year to focus on other businesses. (Reuters)Bezos, who turned 57 last month, set up the transition to Jassy last summer, when the company announced that one of his possible successors, Jeff Wilke, would soon retire. That paved the way for Jassy to take the CEO job.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo Tom Alberg, a venture capitalist and longtime Amazon director who stepped down from the board two years ago, Jassy was the obvious choice.\u201cAndy has lived his whole life in that culture, and that culture is so strong,\u201d Alberg said.Jassy\u2019s Amazon career is defined by his leading Amazon into a wholly new market, cloud computing, a business the company has come to dominate just as aggressively as it leads in the world of e-commerce. And the fact that Jassy now succeeds Bezos offers insight into Amazon: that the company still values high-risk, high-reward bets and is less defined by online shopping than some might think.Jeff Bezos, long known for guarding his privacy, faces his most public and personal crisisJassy joined the company in 1997 after graduating from Harvard Business School. At the time, Amazon had only a few hundred employees and had just gone public. The executive pioneered the company\u2019s entry into music sales, Amazon\u2019s first push outside books. In the early 2000s, Jassy shadowed Bezos as his technical assistant, something of a chief-of-staff role. And he helped launch AWS, which upended the software industry with its ability to rent space and software programming for customers to run their technical operations on Amazon\u2019s vast array of servers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s own interests have changed over the years as he personally pushed into new industries. That included launching Blue Origin about 20 years ago, a space-travel company with the stated goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d Although the company has struggled, Bezos has invested to the tune of $1 billion a year in the company and rhapsodizes about a future in which humans live in massive habitats in orbit and mine asteroids. He has said it \u201cis the most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dThe company is focused, in part, on developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the moon\u2019s surface.Bezos long was a holdout on major philanthropic efforts, despite his growing wealth. He hasn\u2019t signed the Giving Pledge, founded by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in 2010, which calls on billionaires to pledge the majority of wealth to charity. But he has increased his philanthropic efforts in recent years, donating scholarships, creating a fund for homeless families and preschools and pledging $10 billion to prevent climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said in a note to employees Tuesday that he would focus on these other gambits, including The Post, which he purchased in 2013.\u201cWhen you have a responsibility like that, it\u2019s hard to put attention on anything else,\u201d he said, referring to his role as CEO.Amazon\u2019s anti-union blitz stalks Alabama warehouse workers everywhere, even the bathroomAnd he\u2019ll continue to play an important role at Amazon. The company\u2019s finance chief, Brian Olsavsky, said Bezos will remain \u201cvery involved\u201d even after he moves into his new role.\u201cWe expect a lot of continuity with this transition,\u201d Olsavsky said in a call with journalists Tuesday afternoon. Bezos, he added, is \u201cis going to have his imprint on new product developments and also key leverage areas of innovation.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOlsavsky declined to say when Bezos first approached the board about the transition to a new role, except to say that it had been planned and was done in consultation with Amazon\u2019s directors. Five years ago, Amazon changed its management structure, naming both Jassy and Wilke division CEOs, a move that allowed Bezos to delegate many day-to-day tasks. Olsavsky said this transition was similar.Advertisement\u201cWe see the same thing happening here,\u201d Olsavsky said. \u201cJeff is going to remain with Amazon in a very important role as executive chair.\u201dWhat\u2019s more, Bezos remains Amazon\u2019s largest individual shareholder.\u201cJeff is really not going anywhere,\u201d Olsavsky said. \u201cThis is more of a restructuring of who\u2019s doing what.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOne thing Bezos may do less of: Be the public face of Amazon. Last summer, Bezos was summoned to Capitol Hill to testify virtually alongside the CEOs of Apple, Google and Facebook before a House antitrust subcommittee investigation on the clout of the tech behemoths. That spotlight will now fall on Jassy, and politicians are already preparing.\u201cI have some questions for Mr. Jassy,\u201d tweeted Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), the top Republican lawmaker on a key House antitrust panel.Amazon may have used proprietary data to compete with its merchants, Bezos tells CongressAs Amazon has grown, Bezos has increasingly become its focus, in part because the company\u2019s soaring stock value has put his personal wealth into the stratosphere. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos is the second-wealthiest person with $188 billion, which is $2 billion behind Tesla founder Elon Musk. He also has transformed his image, morphing from a nerdy, khaki-wearing tech exec to a buff, stylishly dressed socialite who attends Hollywood awards shows and New York fashion balls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019 wealth declined in April 2019 when he divorced from MacKenzie Scott, after his relationship with a former news anchor, Lauren Sanchez, became public. The record divorce settlement gave Scott 25 percent of Bezos\u2019s Amazon holdings, although Bezos retained sole voting power over the shares the two once jointly controlled, which at the time amounted to 16 percent of Amazon\u2019s total shares.Elon Musk surpasses Jeff Bezos to become world\u2019s richest personLike most large corporations, Amazon has been preparing its CEO succession plan for years. Still, Alberg, the former Amazon director who participated in that planning over the years, was surprised by the timing of Bezos\u2019s move, in part because he has always managed to juggle his different interests.\u201cI was just not expecting Jeff to step aside right now,\u201d Alberg said. \u201cHe\u2019s always been able to do a lot of things simultaneously.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon botched an attempt at bringing in an outsider as president and chief operating officer in 1999, when it hired Joe Galli from Black & Decker. Galli lasted a year, and Bezos decided to focus instead on building a strong bench of internal candidates for top jobs and ultimately to take over for him, Alberg said.\u201cHe wanted it to be somebody he knew well and the company knew well,\u201d Alberg said.Bezos\u2019s next endeavors may turn out to be as significant as the second act of his Seattle-area neighbor Bill Gates, Alberg said. The Microsoft co-founder has gone on to burnish his image as one of the world\u2019s leading philanthropists in the time after he began moving away from Microsoft in 2000, when he gave up the chief executive post he had long held. Bezos\u2019s focus on space travel and climate change could have the same lasting impact, Alberg said.\u201cI think he\u2019ll be like Gates,\u201d Alberg said. \u201cTwenty years from now, he\u2019ll be remembered for one or more of those things as well.\u201dcorrectionA previous version of this story incorrectly suggested that Jeff Bezos views his ownership of The Washington Post as a responsibility that has made it difficult for him to focus on other priorities. The story has been amended to make clear that he was referring to his role as CEO. Bezos will step down from the role after founding the company more than 20 years ago, ushering in a new era for the e-commerce giant. Current Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy will take on the mantle of CEO. Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, transitioning to executive chair role",
        "author": "Jay Greene"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, transitioning to executive chair role (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "451",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/02/jeff-bezos-stepping-down-amazon-ceo-transitioning-executive-chair-role/",
        "text": "SEATTLE \u2014 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will step down as chief executive of the e-commerce giant, turning over the reins to the company\u2019s longtime cloud-computing boss Andy Jassy.Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, will transition to the role of executive chair this summer, the company said Tuesday. The looming transition marks the most radical shake-up in Amazon\u2019s corporate ranks in its nearly 30-year history. Bezos moves into a new role, with a title made for him, that keeps him at the company in a position where he will focus on innovation at Amazon and hands off the top job to a trusted deputy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIf you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive,\u201d Bezos said in an earnings release Tuesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder Bezos\u2019s stewardship, Amazon evolved from an upstart online bookseller into one of the world\u2019s most popular Internet marketplaces able to quickly deliver a vast catalogue of products and services. Bezos\u2019s creation helped set in motion a massive change in the way people around the world shop, as people began buying toothpaste to car parts to groceries on their PCs and phones. Amazon also triggered a sea change in physical retail, accelerating the shuttering of shopping malls and stores. That shift has only accelerated as the coronavirus pandemic fueled a surge in online shopping as worried customers shunned stores.To make the e-commerce business run, Amazon had to create an array of computer data centers, stacked with rows upon rows of servers, to make sure the online marketplace could handle the growing business. That developed into a new market for the company, Amazon Web Services, a giant, profit-driving cloud computing operation that now powers websites around the world.The company\u2018s meteoric growth delivered massive riches to shareholders and made Bezos \u2014 depending on the day \u2014 the richest man on the planet. For all the praise on Wall Street, however, Bezos and his brass-knuckled tactics also carried great cost. Regulators increasingly viewed Amazon as a threat to competition, and the company\u2019s own workers at times told grim tales about their mistreatment, as they sought to carry out Bezos\u2019s mission to create a consumer-first \u201ceverything store.\u201d Amazon for years faced fierce criticism for underpaying workers, only to boost its minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018. It came under fire at the beginning of the pandemic for what workers said was a lack of precautions. It\u2019s fighting an aggressive union drive at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse, where employees are pressing for better working conditions and higher pay.Andy Jassy is the likely heir apparent to Jeff BezosAmazon founder Jeff Bezos announced on Feb. 2 he will step down as company CEO in the third quarter of the year to focus on other businesses. (Reuters)Bezos, who turned 57 last month, set up the transition to Jassy last summer, when the company announced that one of his possible successors, Jeff Wilke, would soon retire. That paved the way for Jassy to take the CEO job.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo Tom Alberg, a venture capitalist and longtime Amazon director who stepped down from the board two years ago, Jassy was the obvious choice.\u201cAndy has lived his whole life in that culture, and that culture is so strong,\u201d Alberg said.Jassy\u2019s Amazon career is defined by his leading Amazon into a wholly new market, cloud computing, a business the company has come to dominate just as aggressively as it leads in the world of e-commerce. And the fact that Jassy now succeeds Bezos offers insight into Amazon: that the company still values high-risk, high-reward bets and is less defined by online shopping than some might think.Jeff Bezos, long known for guarding his privacy, faces his most public and personal crisisJassy joined the company in 1997 after graduating from Harvard Business School. At the time, Amazon had only a few hundred employees and had just gone public. The executive pioneered the company\u2019s entry into music sales, Amazon\u2019s first push outside books. In the early 2000s, Jassy shadowed Bezos as his technical assistant, something of a chief-of-staff role. And he helped launch AWS, which upended the software industry with its ability to rent space and software programming for customers to run their technical operations on Amazon\u2019s vast array of servers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s own interests have changed over the years as he personally pushed into new industries. That included launching Blue Origin about 20 years ago, a space-travel company with the stated goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d Although the company has struggled, Bezos has invested to the tune of $1 billion a year in the company and rhapsodizes about a future in which humans live in massive habitats in orbit and mine asteroids. He has said it \u201cis the most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dThe company is focused, in part, on developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the moon\u2019s surface.Bezos long was a holdout on major philanthropic efforts, despite his growing wealth. He hasn\u2019t signed the Giving Pledge, founded by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in 2010, which calls on billionaires to pledge the majority of wealth to charity. But he has increased his philanthropic efforts in recent years, donating scholarships, creating a fund for homeless families and preschools and pledging $10 billion to prevent climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said in a note to employees Tuesday that he would focus on these other gambits, including The Post, which he purchased in 2013.\u201cWhen you have a responsibility like that, it\u2019s hard to put attention on anything else,\u201d he said, referring to his role as CEO.Amazon\u2019s anti-union blitz stalks Alabama warehouse workers everywhere, even the bathroomAnd he\u2019ll continue to play an important role at Amazon. The company\u2019s finance chief, Brian Olsavsky, said Bezos will remain \u201cvery involved\u201d even after he moves into his new role.\u201cWe expect a lot of continuity with this transition,\u201d Olsavsky said in a call with journalists Tuesday afternoon. Bezos, he added, is \u201cis going to have his imprint on new product developments and also key leverage areas of innovation.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOlsavsky declined to say when Bezos first approached the board about the transition to a new role, except to say that it had been planned and was done in consultation with Amazon\u2019s directors. Five years ago, Amazon changed its management structure, naming both Jassy and Wilke division CEOs, a move that allowed Bezos to delegate many day-to-day tasks. Olsavsky said this transition was similar.Advertisement\u201cWe see the same thing happening here,\u201d Olsavsky said. \u201cJeff is going to remain with Amazon in a very important role as executive chair.\u201dWhat\u2019s more, Bezos remains Amazon\u2019s largest individual shareholder.\u201cJeff is really not going anywhere,\u201d Olsavsky said. \u201cThis is more of a restructuring of who\u2019s doing what.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOne thing Bezos may do less of: Be the public face of Amazon. Last summer, Bezos was summoned to Capitol Hill to testify virtually alongside the CEOs of Apple, Google and Facebook before a House antitrust subcommittee investigation on the clout of the tech behemoths. That spotlight will now fall on Jassy, and politicians are already preparing.\u201cI have some questions for Mr. Jassy,\u201d tweeted Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), the top Republican lawmaker on a key House antitrust panel.Amazon may have used proprietary data to compete with its merchants, Bezos tells CongressAs Amazon has grown, Bezos has increasingly become its focus, in part because the company\u2019s soaring stock value has put his personal wealth into the stratosphere. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos is the second-wealthiest person with $188 billion, which is $2 billion behind Tesla founder Elon Musk. He also has transformed his image, morphing from a nerdy, khaki-wearing tech exec to a buff, stylishly dressed socialite who attends Hollywood awards shows and New York fashion balls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019 wealth declined in April 2019 when he divorced from MacKenzie Scott, after his relationship with a former news anchor, Lauren Sanchez, became public. The record divorce settlement gave Scott 25 percent of Bezos\u2019s Amazon holdings, although Bezos retained sole voting power over the shares the two once jointly controlled, which at the time amounted to 16 percent of Amazon\u2019s total shares.Elon Musk surpasses Jeff Bezos to become world\u2019s richest personLike most large corporations, Amazon has been preparing its CEO succession plan for years. Still, Alberg, the former Amazon director who participated in that planning over the years, was surprised by the timing of Bezos\u2019s move, in part because he has always managed to juggle his different interests.\u201cI was just not expecting Jeff to step aside right now,\u201d Alberg said. \u201cHe\u2019s always been able to do a lot of things simultaneously.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon botched an attempt at bringing in an outsider as president and chief operating officer in 1999, when it hired Joe Galli from Black & Decker. Galli lasted a year, and Bezos decided to focus instead on building a strong bench of internal candidates for top jobs and ultimately to take over for him, Alberg said.\u201cHe wanted it to be somebody he knew well and the company knew well,\u201d Alberg said.Bezos\u2019s next endeavors may turn out to be as significant as the second act of his Seattle-area neighbor Bill Gates, Alberg said. The Microsoft co-founder has gone on to burnish his image as one of the world\u2019s leading philanthropists in the time after he began moving away from Microsoft in 2000, when he gave up the chief executive post he had long held. Bezos\u2019s focus on space travel and climate change could have the same lasting impact, Alberg said.\u201cI think he\u2019ll be like Gates,\u201d Alberg said. \u201cTwenty years from now, he\u2019ll be remembered for one or more of those things as well.\u201dcorrectionA previous version of this story incorrectly suggested that Jeff Bezos views his ownership of The Washington Post as a responsibility that has made it difficult for him to focus on other priorities. The story has been amended to make clear that he was referring to his role as CEO. Bezos will step down from the role after founding the company more than 20 years ago, ushering in a new era for the e-commerce giant. Current Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy will take on the mantle of CEO. Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO, transitioning to executive chair role",
        "author": "Jay Greene"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Martin got $35.2 billion from taxpayers last year. That\u2019s more than many federal agencies. (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "452",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-trumps-budget-lockheed-looms-almost-as-large-as-the-state-department/2018/02/15/e7eb3aa8-11c1-11e8-9570-29c9830535e5_story.html",
        "text": "Of Lockheed Martin\u2019s $51 billion in sales last year, nearly 70\u00a0percent, or $35.2 billion, came from sales to the U.S. government. It\u2019s a colossal figure, hard to comprehend. So think of it this way: Lockheed\u2019s government sales are nearly what the Trump administration proposed for the State Department next year in its recently released spending plan. Or $15 billion more than all of NASA. Or about the gross domestic product of Bolivia. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith a White House proposal to spend a massive amount on defense next year in what one consultant called an \u201ceye-watering\u201d budget for the defense industry, Lockheed, the world\u2019s largest defense contractor, could get even more. Story continues below advertisementOver the past decade, Bethesda-based Lockheed, which employs 100,000 people across the globe, has averaged about $38\u00a0billion a year in federal sales, a reign during which, year after year, Lockheed has received more federal money than any other corporation.AdvertisementBoeing is in second place with annual sales of $26.5 billion in 2016, a year in which the top five defense contractors \u2014 including General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman \u2014 had total sales of nearly $110 billion to the U.S. government, according to federal procurement data. The five biggest defense contractors took in more money from the U.S. government than the next 30 companies combined.But no one can touch Lockheed, the manufacturer of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The company is so big that some have likened it to a government agency and have quipped that Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed\u2019s chief executive, is as powerful as a Cabinet secretary \u2014 or higher. When she gives her annual state of the company speeches, flanked by a pair of flags \u2014 one American, one with the company logo \u2014 she looks, well, presidential. Story continues below advertisementOver the past year, Lockheed\u2019s stock price has jumped 36 percent to close Thursday at $361. Over the past five years, it\u2019s up 300 percent. Boeing\u2019s stock has doubled over the past year, driven in large part by increased demand for commercial airplanes. AdvertisementNow, President Trump has opened the floodgates for defense spending, proposing $716\u00a0billion for the Pentagon, a 13\u00a0percent increase. And the defense industry is poised to profit, with Lockheed in the lead. \u201cDiplomacy is out; airstrikes are in,\u201d said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant with the Teal Group. \u201cIn this sort of environment, it\u2019s tough to keep a lid on costs. If demand goes up, prices don\u2019t generally come down. And, of course, it\u2019s virtually impossible to kill stuff. You don\u2019t have to make any kind of tough choices when there\u2019s such a rising tide. Warren Buffett always said, \u2018When the tide goes out, you see who is swimming naked.\u2019 Well, this is the reverse of that.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIn 2013, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis, now the secretary of defense, told Congress, \u201cIf you don\u2019t fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition.\u201d As journalist Fred Kaplan noted in Slate, the Trump administration\u2019s budget calls for a more than 25 percent increase in spending on missiles and munitions and a 26 percent cut to the State Department\u2019s funding. AdvertisementJim McAleese, a consultant and analyst, covered the \u201c\u2009\u2018Wow!\u2019 moments from the 2019 DoD budget roll-out\u201d in a recent note. Among them: Navy shipbuilding \u201chits juicy\u201d $22 billion, he wrote; Navy aircraft \u201cspiked\u201d to $19\u00a0billion; and the nuclear triad \u201cdrove the majority of development \u2018winners,\u2019\u2009\u201d he wrote, which included funding for the B-21 bomber, the Columbia-class submarine and missile defense programs.The Pentagon wants to buy more Super Hornet fighter jets, a boon for Boeing. But in the history of defense programs, there has been nothing like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Over its projected 60-year life span, it\u2019s expected to cost more than $1 trillion, making it the most expensive weapons program in the history of the Defense Department. As production has ramped up, sales of the stealthy fighter jet have continued to climb. Last year, Lockheed delivered 66 jets to U.S. and international customers, and this year, that number is expected to grow to 90. Story continues below advertisementThe company is also building the Orion spacecraft for NASA, for which the White House has budgeted $5.6 billion over the next five years. AdvertisementThere\u2019s so much money that when the Pentagon decided last year that it needed a new long-range missile, it chose not one but two companies to develop it. It awarded $900 million contracts \u2014 each more than the entire budget of the Small Business Administration \u2014 to Lockheed and Raytheon to develop the next Long-Range Standoff Missile, designed to deliver a nuclear warhead from a B-21 or B-2 bomber.But ultimately, the Pentagon plans to select only one missile in a winner-take-all contract that could be worth as much as $10\u00a0billion. The loser? It would walk away with its $900 million consolation prize, leaving the Pentagon with missile technology that may never be used. Story continues below advertisementThe top defense firms have gotten so large in recent years that in 2015, the Pentagon\u2019s chief weapons buyer issued an unusually strong statement warning against further consolidation in the industry. Frank Kendall, then the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said he feared a future in which the Pentagon \u201chas at most two or three very large suppliers for all the major weapons systems that we acquire.\u201d The top five defense contractors get more federal funding than entire U.S. agencies Lockheed Martin got $35.2 billion from taxpayers last year. That\u2019s more than many federal agencies.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA completes key test on Orion, the spacecraft Trump wants to take astronauts to the moon  (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "453",
        "date": "2019-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/02/nasa-completes-key-test-orion-spacecraft-trump-wants-take-astronauts-moon/",
        "text": "NASA on Tuesday successfully conducted a test of the emergency abort system of the spacecraft it hopes will eventually take astronauts to the moon, a key step as the agency attempts to meet an ambitious White House mandate to get astronauts to the lunar surface within five years.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter blasting off from a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7 a.m., the Orion spacecraft initiated its escape system less than a minute into flight, jettisoning the crew capsule to safety. The capsule eventually landed in the Atlantic Ocean several miles off shore. \u201cBy all first accounts, it was a perfect test,\u201d said Mark Kirasich, Orion program manager.Story continues below advertisementNo crew was aboard the spacecraft during what NASA called \u201ca highflying, fast-paced trial.\u201d But the ability to get astronauts away in case anything were to happen to the rocket below them is a key concern for NASA. Late last year, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were saved after the abort system of their Russian spacecraft kicked in two minutes after liftoff.AdvertisementThat abort \u2014 dubbed \u201ca successful failure\u201d by officials \u2014 was \u201ca good message to all of us: this is serious stuff,\u201d NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik said in a prelaunch news conference. \u201cWe have to prepare for this even though there\u2019s a low likelihood of it happening.\u201d50 astronauts, in their own wordsNASA officials hailed Tuesday\u2019s test as a key step in its quest to land humans on the moon by 2024 in a program it has dubbed Artemis.Story continues below advertisementIn March, Vice President Pence called for the agency to speed up its plans. Originally, NASA had been aiming to get astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028. But Pence directed the program to be accelerated by four years. In doing so, he took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying it \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization.\u201dOfficials at Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for the Orion program, have hailed the White House\u2019s plans, and said Tuesday\u2019s test cleared a major hurdle.Advertisement\u201cThe test flight performed perfectly,\u201d said Mike Hawes, Lockheed\u2019s Orion program manager. \u201cHopefully this will be the last time we see this launch abort system ever work. But this test brings confidence that if needed on future Orion missions, it will safely pull the crew module and astronauts away from a life threatening event during launch.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA said the test brings the agency a step closer to getting astronauts to the moon. But instead of sending astronauts directly to the lunar surface, as was done during the Apollo era, NASA plans instead to first build an outpost in orbit around the moon, known as the Gateway. The Orion spacecraft would take astronauts to the Gateway, from which they would fly to the surface of the moon by a lunar lander. Later, they\u2019d return to the Gateway aboard an ascent vehicle and fly back to Earth on the Orion.During Tuesday\u2019s three-minute test, the Orion spacecraft was listed from launchpad 46 not by the Space Launch System, the massive rocket being built to fly it, but instead by a refurbished rocket motor from a Peacekeeper missile. It hit an altitude of 31,000 feet, or about six miles high.AdvertisementAt that point it was expected to be traveling more than 800 mph, or just faster than the speed of sound, but still in the atmosphere so that there would be \u201ctremendous aerodynamic forces on the vehicle,\u201d Kirasich said. Less than a minute into flight, the abort system thrusters activated, pulling the capsule away and giving it a wild ride before it eventually slammed into the Atlantic Ocean a few minutes later.Read more: Companies in the CosmosNormally, the capsule would be guided down softly by parachutes. But NASA officials said that since the parachutes for the system have already been repeatedly tested, none were needed Tuesday. Abandoning the parachutes also helped NASA accelerate the schedule, officials said.Story continues below advertisementAs a result, the capsule was expected to be traveling about 300 mph when it slammed into the water. The impact was expected to destroy the capsule, which then would sank to the ocean floor.AdvertisementStill, NASA said it was able to collect all sorts of data from the flight. There were 890 sensors on the vehicle to measure, in real time, temperature, pressure and acoustics.Orion has only flown once, in 2014, on a four-and-a-half-hour test mission without a crew that sent a spacecraft designed for humans farther than any had gone in more than 40 years. NASA is hoping to fly it again next year, this time with the SLS rocket, on a trip without a crew on a mission around the moon. NASA plans to fly with a crew around the moon in 2022, and then reach the lunar surface two years later. A successful test of Orion's emergency abort system is a crucial step in the plan to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. NASA completes key test on Orion, the spacecraft Trump wants to take astronauts to the moon ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to launch safety review of SpaceX and Boeing after video of Elon Musk smoking pot rankled agency leaders (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "454",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/20/nasa-launch-safety-review-spacex-boeing-after-video-elon-musk-smoking-pot-rankled-agency-leaders/",
        "text": "NASA has ordered a safety review of the two companies it has hired to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, a months-long assessment that would involve hundreds of interviews designed to evaluate the culture of the workplaces, the agency said.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe review, to begin next year, would look at both Boeing and SpaceX, the companies under contract to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts, and examine \u201ceverything and anything that could impact safety\u201d as the companies prepare to fly humans for the first time, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration, said in an interview with The Washington Post. The review was prompted by the recent behavior of SpaceX\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, according to three officials with knowledge of the probe, after he took a hit of marijuana and sipped whiskey on a podcast streamed on the Internet. That rankled some at NASA\u2019s highest levels and prompted the agency to take a close look at the culture of the companies, the people said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA spokesman Bob Jacobs declined to comment on what prompted the review. But in a statement, he said it would \u201censure the companies are meeting NASA\u2019s requirements for workplace safety, including the adherence to a drug-free environment.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview that the agency wants to make sure the public has confidence in its human-spaceflight program, especially as the companies are getting closer to their first flights, scheduled for next year.Companies in the cosmos: Explore the new space race\u201cIf I see something that\u2019s inappropriate, the key concern to me is what is the culture that led to that inappropriateness and is NASA involved in that,\u201d he said. \u201cAs an agency we\u2019re not just leading ourselves, but our contractors, as well. We need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut on a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine said he has \u201ca lot of confidence in the SpaceX team.\u201d But he added that \u201cculture and leadership start at the top. Anything that would result in some questioning the culture of safety, we need to fix immediately.\u201dSpaceX said in a statement that \u201chuman spaceflight is the core mission of our company. There is nothing more important to SpaceX than this endeavor, and we take seriously the responsibility that NASA has entrusted in us to safely and reliably carry American astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\u201dThe company noted that it has worked alongside NASA for years and that it \u201cactively promotes workplace safety, and we are confident that our comprehensive drug-free workforce and workplace programs exceed all applicable contractual requirements.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBoeing said in a statement that its corporate culture \u201censures the integrity, safety and quality of our products, our people and their work environment. As NASA\u2019s trusted partner since the beginning of human spaceflight, we share the same values and are committed to continuing our legacy of trust, openness and mission success.\u201dAdvertisementThe review comes after a tumultuous time for Musk, whose behavior led to a series of scandals.Two months ago, Musk agreed to step down as chairman of Tesla and pay a $20 million fine as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had charged that he lied to investors when he tweeted that he had \u201cfunding secured\u201d to take the electric-car company private.Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018\n\nMusk caused another uproar when he called a rescue volunteer working to save the children caught in a Thai cave a \u201cpedo\u201d and \u201cchild rapist\u201d without proof. The volunteer has sued Musk for defamation.Story continues below advertisementUntil the safety review, SpaceX, however, had been largely unaffected by the controversies, moving ahead with another successful year. So far it has launched 18 times \u2014 tying its record from last year \u2014 and says it is getting close to launching NASA\u2019s astronauts.AdvertisementGerstenmaier said the review would focus not on the technical details of developing rockets and spacecraft but rather the companies\u2019 safety culture \u2014 encompassing the number of hours employees work, drug policies, leadership and management styles, whether employees\u2019 safety concerns are taken seriously, and more.\u201cIs the culture reflective of an environment that builds quality spacecraft,\u201d Gerstenmaier said. The review would be led by NASA\u2019s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, which has conducted similar probes inside NASA. Gerstenmaier said the process would be \u201cpretty invasive,\u201d involving hundreds of interviews with employees at every level of the companies and at multiple work locations.Story continues below advertisementHe added that the \u201ccompanies are responsible. If they see something, they\u2019ll take action.\u201dThe review comes as the companies are working toward flying crewed missions from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired seven years ago. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts \u2014 $4.2 billion to Boeing and $2.6 billion to SpaceX \u2014 to fly its astronauts under what is known as the Commercial Crew Program. Since then, the companies have faced setbacks and delays as they work to develop their spacecraft.AdvertisementEarlier this year, Boeing had a propellant leak during a test of its emergency abort system. A safety advisory panel also found recently that Boeing still has a number of key tests that it has not completed, included tests of its spacecraft\u2019s heat shield and parachute systems.Story continues below advertisementIt also found that SpaceX is struggling with \u201cdifficulties and problems\u201d with the spacecraft\u2019s parachute system. \u201cClearly crew cannot be risked without complete confidence in the parachute design,\u201d the panel found.Given the problems both companies are facing, the panel concluded that their schedules to fly crews \u201chave considerable risk and do not appear achievable given the number of technical issues yet to be resolved.\u201dThose technical issues are separate from the safety review. And SpaceX said it has made real progress in the development of the version of its Dragon spacecraft that is designed to fly humans. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t be more proud of all that we have already accomplished together with NASA, and we look forward to returning human spaceflight capabilities to the United States,\u201d it said in the statement.SpaceX is planning to a launch its spacecraft without crew in January and plans to fly with astronauts on board by June.Boeing has said its first flight without crew would be in March, and with astronauts by the following August. The months-long assessment will examine \u201ceverything and anything that could impact safety\u201d as the companies prepare to fly humans for the first time. NASA to launch safety review of SpaceX and Boeing after video of Elon Musk smoking pot rankled agency leaders",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to launch safety review of SpaceX and Boeing after video of Elon Musk smoking pot rankled agency leaders (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "455",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/11/20/nasa-launch-safety-review-spacex-boeing-after-video-elon-musk-smoking-pot-rankled-agency-leaders/",
        "text": "NASA has ordered a safety review of the two companies it has hired to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, a months-long assessment that would involve hundreds of interviews designed to evaluate the culture of the workplaces, the agency said.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe review, to begin next year, would look at both Boeing and SpaceX, the companies under contract to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts, and examine \u201ceverything and anything that could impact safety\u201d as the companies prepare to fly humans for the first time, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration, said in an interview with The Washington Post. The review was prompted by the recent behavior of SpaceX\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, according to three officials with knowledge of the probe, after he took a hit of marijuana and sipped whiskey on a podcast streamed on the Internet. That rankled some at NASA\u2019s highest levels and prompted the agency to take a close look at the culture of the companies, the people said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA spokesman Bob Jacobs declined to comment on what prompted the review. But in a statement, he said it would \u201censure the companies are meeting NASA\u2019s requirements for workplace safety, including the adherence to a drug-free environment.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview that the agency wants to make sure the public has confidence in its human-spaceflight program, especially as the companies are getting closer to their first flights, scheduled for next year.Companies in the cosmos: Explore the new space race\u201cIf I see something that\u2019s inappropriate, the key concern to me is what is the culture that led to that inappropriateness and is NASA involved in that,\u201d he said. \u201cAs an agency we\u2019re not just leading ourselves, but our contractors, as well. We need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut on a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine said he has \u201ca lot of confidence in the SpaceX team.\u201d But he added that \u201cculture and leadership start at the top. Anything that would result in some questioning the culture of safety, we need to fix immediately.\u201dSpaceX said in a statement that \u201chuman spaceflight is the core mission of our company. There is nothing more important to SpaceX than this endeavor, and we take seriously the responsibility that NASA has entrusted in us to safely and reliably carry American astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\u201dThe company noted that it has worked alongside NASA for years and that it \u201cactively promotes workplace safety, and we are confident that our comprehensive drug-free workforce and workplace programs exceed all applicable contractual requirements.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBoeing said in a statement that its corporate culture \u201censures the integrity, safety and quality of our products, our people and their work environment. As NASA\u2019s trusted partner since the beginning of human spaceflight, we share the same values and are committed to continuing our legacy of trust, openness and mission success.\u201dAdvertisementThe review comes after a tumultuous time for Musk, whose behavior led to a series of scandals.Two months ago, Musk agreed to step down as chairman of Tesla and pay a $20 million fine as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had charged that he lied to investors when he tweeted that he had \u201cfunding secured\u201d to take the electric-car company private.Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018\n\nMusk caused another uproar when he called a rescue volunteer working to save the children caught in a Thai cave a \u201cpedo\u201d and \u201cchild rapist\u201d without proof. The volunteer has sued Musk for defamation.Story continues below advertisementUntil the safety review, SpaceX, however, had been largely unaffected by the controversies, moving ahead with another successful year. So far it has launched 18 times \u2014 tying its record from last year \u2014 and says it is getting close to launching NASA\u2019s astronauts.AdvertisementGerstenmaier said the review would focus not on the technical details of developing rockets and spacecraft but rather the companies\u2019 safety culture \u2014 encompassing the number of hours employees work, drug policies, leadership and management styles, whether employees\u2019 safety concerns are taken seriously, and more.\u201cIs the culture reflective of an environment that builds quality spacecraft,\u201d Gerstenmaier said. The review would be led by NASA\u2019s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, which has conducted similar probes inside NASA. Gerstenmaier said the process would be \u201cpretty invasive,\u201d involving hundreds of interviews with employees at every level of the companies and at multiple work locations.Story continues below advertisementHe added that the \u201ccompanies are responsible. If they see something, they\u2019ll take action.\u201dThe review comes as the companies are working toward flying crewed missions from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired seven years ago. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts \u2014 $4.2 billion to Boeing and $2.6 billion to SpaceX \u2014 to fly its astronauts under what is known as the Commercial Crew Program. Since then, the companies have faced setbacks and delays as they work to develop their spacecraft.AdvertisementEarlier this year, Boeing had a propellant leak during a test of its emergency abort system. A safety advisory panel also found recently that Boeing still has a number of key tests that it has not completed, included tests of its spacecraft\u2019s heat shield and parachute systems.Story continues below advertisementIt also found that SpaceX is struggling with \u201cdifficulties and problems\u201d with the spacecraft\u2019s parachute system. \u201cClearly crew cannot be risked without complete confidence in the parachute design,\u201d the panel found.Given the problems both companies are facing, the panel concluded that their schedules to fly crews \u201chave considerable risk and do not appear achievable given the number of technical issues yet to be resolved.\u201dThose technical issues are separate from the safety review. And SpaceX said it has made real progress in the development of the version of its Dragon spacecraft that is designed to fly humans. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t be more proud of all that we have already accomplished together with NASA, and we look forward to returning human spaceflight capabilities to the United States,\u201d it said in the statement.SpaceX is planning to a launch its spacecraft without crew in January and plans to fly with astronauts on board by June.Boeing has said its first flight without crew would be in March, and with astronauts by the following August. The months-long assessment will examine \u201ceverything and anything that could impact safety\u201d as the companies prepare to fly humans for the first time. NASA to launch safety review of SpaceX and Boeing after video of Elon Musk smoking pot rankled agency leaders",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Defense giants bet big on small satellites (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "456",
        "date": "2018-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/16/defense-giants-bet-big-small-satellites/",
        "text": "Major U.S. defense contractors are working to reinvent their satellite businesses to include satellites no larger than a microwave oven, as they try to keep pace with a new crop of commercial technology companies leading a wave of disruption in the space industry.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTheir efforts are spearheading new investments in cube-sat technology, as the U.S. government looks for alternatives to the expensive, bus-size satellites it has relied on for decades. Last week, Boeing and Raytheon announced partnerships with start-ups focusing on small satellites, investing in Colorado-based BridgeSat and Virginia-based HawkEye360, respectively. Those announcements come as Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin expands its business with an Irvine, Calif.-based \u201cnano-satellite\u201d company called Terran Orbital.Story continues below advertisementThe companies are responding to changing priorities at U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.Trump\u2019s proposed Space Force could worsen Earth\u2019s orbital debris problem\u201cCompanies like Boeing and Lockheed have an interest in getting into the small-satellite business because it feels like that\u2019s where the industry is going,\u201d said Marco Caceres, an analyst with the aerospace consultancy Teal Group. \u201cThey have decided that rather than develop their own in-house capabilities, they want to buy into it.\u201dAdvertisementThe market for smaller satellites, which are designed to orbit close to Earth\u2019s atmosphere, is growing quickly. According to a report by the Satellite Industry Association and Bryce Space and Technology, a total of 292 of the spacecrafts were launched into space last year, compared with 55 in 2016.Story continues below advertisementThe shift is fueled by a wave of innovation that has made satellites cheaper to produce and the emergence of new commercial launch providers, such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which have made space more accessible. Recent advances in optics and communication technologies have improved the smaller spacecrafts' capabilities for remote sensing and imaging.Here are the companies that could benefit from Trump's Space ForceFor U.S. military and intelligence agencies, the move toward smaller satellites is part of a broader effort to shore up their space-based assets against attack. It\u2019s also the basis for President Trump\u2019s Space Force proposal. If approved by Congress, the Space Force would be a sixth branch of the U.S. military focused on combating security threats in space, the first new military service since the Air Force was created in 1947. If Congress embraces the idea the Space Force could be created as soon as 2020.AdvertisementThe Air Force operates a fleet of 77 satellites that the service describes as vital to detecting nuclear detonations and missile launches. Officials are hoping masses of small spacecraft will be harder for enemies to take down than a handful of large ones. Smaller satellites are also cheaper to replace.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI won\u2019t support the development any further of large, big, fat, juicy targets,\u201d Gen. John Hyten, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said at an industry conference last year. \u201cWe are going to go down a different path.\u201dThe Defense Department\u2019s advanced research and development arm, known as DARPA, is working to develop smaller satellites that use lower-cost technology under a project called \u201cBlackJack,\u201d allocating $117.5 million for the effort.Lockheed Martin partners with ESPN's Drone Racing League on self-piloting drone competitionStill, such research efforts pale in comparison to what the Pentagon is spending on older satellite systems. On Friday the Air Force announced it will pay Lockheed Martin as much as $7.2 billion for 22 satellites designed to support the Global Positioning System (GPS), which relies on one of the company\u2019s larger satellite models.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the new investments are a way to stay plugged into an increasingly vibrant commercial spaceflight industry, in which SpaceX and a SoftBank-backed company called OneWeb have pledged to launch masses of small satellites into space to bring Internet connectivity to remote areas.For defense contractors, investing in start-ups offers access to cutting-edge intellectual property.\u201cWe operate similar to a venture capital or private equity firm, but for us our focus is on the \u2018solution\u2019 side of things rather than on financial returns,\u201d said David Wajsgras, president of Raytheon\u2019s Intelligence, Information and Services business unit. \u201cWe partner with commercial companies that we see as having a better mousetrap.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWajsgras said the industry\u2019s small-satellite work has rapidly picked up steam during the past few years as customer priorities have changed. \u201cToday with the requirements that commercial and government customers have around the world, there is a need to take some of those mission capabilities and provide them at lower cost, and provide them in a different way,\u201d he said.AdvertisementKey to those efforts is Raytheon\u2019s investment in a three-year-old satellite start-up called HawkEye360, which wants to launch fleets of microwave-sized satellites into orbit, where they will orbit the Earth in clusters of three. The company is planning its first launch by the end of 2018.One of the company\u2019s core features is the ability to track radio frequencies coming off ships. HawkEye360 chief executive John Serafini says the company\u2019s early customers include U.S. agencies tracking maritime piracy, human trafficking and illegal fishing operations. \u201cWe\u2019re focusing on vessels that don\u2019t want to be found,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementSerafini says the partnership with Raytheon has given his company an open door to the hard-to-reach corners of the U.S. national security establishment, where Raytheon has spent decades building connections and technical know-how. \u201cThese customers don\u2019t usually want to buy capabilities from a three-year old start-up \u2026 they want to buy from a bigger, trusted company like Raytheon,\u201d Serafini said.AdvertisementIn mid-August Boeing announced it would buy a small-satellite manufacturer called Millennium Space Systems for a sum that wasn\u2019t disclosed, allowing it to produce satellites that weigh as little as 110 pounds. And last week it announced an investment in BridgeSat, a Colorado-based company that wants to launch fleets of small satellites that use lasers to beam information back to Earth, or to other satellites.Brian Schettler, managing director of Boeing\u2019s technology venture investment arm, said the company is planning more investments in small satellite technology. \u201cThis won\u2019t be the last investment we make in this space,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the key focus points we have pointed out for disruption.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s closest competitor, Lockheed Martin, has been pursuing more of a dual-pronged strategy, building its own smaller satellites and also reaching out to start-ups.AdvertisementOne of the company\u2019s newer satellites, called the LM400, is about the size of a washing machine. And Lockheed\u2019s venture investment arm has invested an undisclosed amount of money in an Irvine, Calif.-based company called Terran Orbital that focuses on the design, manufacturing, testing and launch of small satellites. (Lockheed\u2019s venture arm typically invests in chunks of $1 million to $5 million.)In a June 6 press briefing, Lockheed ventures executive director Chris Moran described Terran Orbital as one of the crowning successes of the company\u2019s tech investment arm, which has also invested in autonomous submarines and artificial intelligence, among other projects. What started as an exploratory investment in Terran Orbital has turned into a growing line of business with the U.S. government. Lockheed has won four government contracts in partnership with the start-up, as well as five pending contract proposals, a company spokesman said this week.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOur focus there has been to explore areas that maybe we wouldn\u2019t have done with our larger satellite buses that we manufacture ourselves,\u201d Moran said. \u201cThat\u2019s a big win for us on the venture space, to find that investment, create that partnership and see the business area really pick up the challenge and develop a whole business around that investment. I\u2019d love to see the rest of our [investments] turn into that.\u201dLockheed program manager Joel Thorson said he expects to see \u201cexponential growth\u201d in demand from the government for the small spacecraft. \u201cEvery single day we\u2019re bringing new ways, new ideas for small satellites,\u201d he said. Legacy defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are building out new business units focused on the science and technology of so-called \"cube-sats\" as the Defense Department looks to diversify its space-based assets. Defense giants bet big on small satellites",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Defense giants bet big on small satellites (WP: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "457",
        "date": "2018-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/16/defense-giants-bet-big-small-satellites/",
        "text": "Major U.S. defense contractors are working to reinvent their satellite businesses to include satellites no larger than a microwave oven, as they try to keep pace with a new crop of commercial technology companies leading a wave of disruption in the space industry.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTheir efforts are spearheading new investments in cube-sat technology, as the U.S. government looks for alternatives to the expensive, bus-size satellites it has relied on for decades. Last week, Boeing and Raytheon announced partnerships with start-ups focusing on small satellites, investing in Colorado-based BridgeSat and Virginia-based HawkEye360, respectively. Those announcements come as Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin expands its business with an Irvine, Calif.-based \u201cnano-satellite\u201d company called Terran Orbital.Story continues below advertisementThe companies are responding to changing priorities at U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.Trump\u2019s proposed Space Force could worsen Earth\u2019s orbital debris problem\u201cCompanies like Boeing and Lockheed have an interest in getting into the small-satellite business because it feels like that\u2019s where the industry is going,\u201d said Marco Caceres, an analyst with the aerospace consultancy Teal Group. \u201cThey have decided that rather than develop their own in-house capabilities, they want to buy into it.\u201dAdvertisementThe market for smaller satellites, which are designed to orbit close to Earth\u2019s atmosphere, is growing quickly. According to a report by the Satellite Industry Association and Bryce Space and Technology, a total of 292 of the spacecrafts were launched into space last year, compared with 55 in 2016.Story continues below advertisementThe shift is fueled by a wave of innovation that has made satellites cheaper to produce and the emergence of new commercial launch providers, such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which have made space more accessible. Recent advances in optics and communication technologies have improved the smaller spacecrafts' capabilities for remote sensing and imaging.Here are the companies that could benefit from Trump's Space ForceFor U.S. military and intelligence agencies, the move toward smaller satellites is part of a broader effort to shore up their space-based assets against attack. It\u2019s also the basis for President Trump\u2019s Space Force proposal. If approved by Congress, the Space Force would be a sixth branch of the U.S. military focused on combating security threats in space, the first new military service since the Air Force was created in 1947. If Congress embraces the idea the Space Force could be created as soon as 2020.AdvertisementThe Air Force operates a fleet of 77 satellites that the service describes as vital to detecting nuclear detonations and missile launches. Officials are hoping masses of small spacecraft will be harder for enemies to take down than a handful of large ones. Smaller satellites are also cheaper to replace.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI won\u2019t support the development any further of large, big, fat, juicy targets,\u201d Gen. John Hyten, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said at an industry conference last year. \u201cWe are going to go down a different path.\u201dThe Defense Department\u2019s advanced research and development arm, known as DARPA, is working to develop smaller satellites that use lower-cost technology under a project called \u201cBlackJack,\u201d allocating $117.5 million for the effort.Lockheed Martin partners with ESPN's Drone Racing League on self-piloting drone competitionStill, such research efforts pale in comparison to what the Pentagon is spending on older satellite systems. On Friday the Air Force announced it will pay Lockheed Martin as much as $7.2 billion for 22 satellites designed to support the Global Positioning System (GPS), which relies on one of the company\u2019s larger satellite models.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the new investments are a way to stay plugged into an increasingly vibrant commercial spaceflight industry, in which SpaceX and a SoftBank-backed company called OneWeb have pledged to launch masses of small satellites into space to bring Internet connectivity to remote areas.For defense contractors, investing in start-ups offers access to cutting-edge intellectual property.\u201cWe operate similar to a venture capital or private equity firm, but for us our focus is on the \u2018solution\u2019 side of things rather than on financial returns,\u201d said David Wajsgras, president of Raytheon\u2019s Intelligence, Information and Services business unit. \u201cWe partner with commercial companies that we see as having a better mousetrap.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWajsgras said the industry\u2019s small-satellite work has rapidly picked up steam during the past few years as customer priorities have changed. \u201cToday with the requirements that commercial and government customers have around the world, there is a need to take some of those mission capabilities and provide them at lower cost, and provide them in a different way,\u201d he said.AdvertisementKey to those efforts is Raytheon\u2019s investment in a three-year-old satellite start-up called HawkEye360, which wants to launch fleets of microwave-sized satellites into orbit, where they will orbit the Earth in clusters of three. The company is planning its first launch by the end of 2018.One of the company\u2019s core features is the ability to track radio frequencies coming off ships. HawkEye360 chief executive John Serafini says the company\u2019s early customers include U.S. agencies tracking maritime piracy, human trafficking and illegal fishing operations. \u201cWe\u2019re focusing on vessels that don\u2019t want to be found,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementSerafini says the partnership with Raytheon has given his company an open door to the hard-to-reach corners of the U.S. national security establishment, where Raytheon has spent decades building connections and technical know-how. \u201cThese customers don\u2019t usually want to buy capabilities from a three-year old start-up \u2026 they want to buy from a bigger, trusted company like Raytheon,\u201d Serafini said.AdvertisementIn mid-August Boeing announced it would buy a small-satellite manufacturer called Millennium Space Systems for a sum that wasn\u2019t disclosed, allowing it to produce satellites that weigh as little as 110 pounds. And last week it announced an investment in BridgeSat, a Colorado-based company that wants to launch fleets of small satellites that use lasers to beam information back to Earth, or to other satellites.Brian Schettler, managing director of Boeing\u2019s technology venture investment arm, said the company is planning more investments in small satellite technology. \u201cThis won\u2019t be the last investment we make in this space,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the key focus points we have pointed out for disruption.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s closest competitor, Lockheed Martin, has been pursuing more of a dual-pronged strategy, building its own smaller satellites and also reaching out to start-ups.AdvertisementOne of the company\u2019s newer satellites, called the LM400, is about the size of a washing machine. And Lockheed\u2019s venture investment arm has invested an undisclosed amount of money in an Irvine, Calif.-based company called Terran Orbital that focuses on the design, manufacturing, testing and launch of small satellites. (Lockheed\u2019s venture arm typically invests in chunks of $1 million to $5 million.)In a June 6 press briefing, Lockheed ventures executive director Chris Moran described Terran Orbital as one of the crowning successes of the company\u2019s tech investment arm, which has also invested in autonomous submarines and artificial intelligence, among other projects. What started as an exploratory investment in Terran Orbital has turned into a growing line of business with the U.S. government. Lockheed has won four government contracts in partnership with the start-up, as well as five pending contract proposals, a company spokesman said this week.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOur focus there has been to explore areas that maybe we wouldn\u2019t have done with our larger satellite buses that we manufacture ourselves,\u201d Moran said. \u201cThat\u2019s a big win for us on the venture space, to find that investment, create that partnership and see the business area really pick up the challenge and develop a whole business around that investment. I\u2019d love to see the rest of our [investments] turn into that.\u201dLockheed program manager Joel Thorson said he expects to see \u201cexponential growth\u201d in demand from the government for the small spacecraft. \u201cEvery single day we\u2019re bringing new ways, new ideas for small satellites,\u201d he said. Legacy defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are building out new business units focused on the science and technology of so-called \"cube-sats\" as the Defense Department looks to diversify its space-based assets. Defense giants bet big on small satellites",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Defense giants bet big on small satellites (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "458",
        "date": "2018-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/16/defense-giants-bet-big-small-satellites/",
        "text": "Major U.S. defense contractors are working to reinvent their satellite businesses to include satellites no larger than a microwave oven, as they try to keep pace with a new crop of commercial technology companies leading a wave of disruption in the space industry.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTheir efforts are spearheading new investments in cube-sat technology, as the U.S. government looks for alternatives to the expensive, bus-size satellites it has relied on for decades. Last week, Boeing and Raytheon announced partnerships with start-ups focusing on small satellites, investing in Colorado-based BridgeSat and Virginia-based HawkEye360, respectively. Those announcements come as Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin expands its business with an Irvine, Calif.-based \u201cnano-satellite\u201d company called Terran Orbital.Story continues below advertisementThe companies are responding to changing priorities at U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.Trump\u2019s proposed Space Force could worsen Earth\u2019s orbital debris problem\u201cCompanies like Boeing and Lockheed have an interest in getting into the small-satellite business because it feels like that\u2019s where the industry is going,\u201d said Marco Caceres, an analyst with the aerospace consultancy Teal Group. \u201cThey have decided that rather than develop their own in-house capabilities, they want to buy into it.\u201dAdvertisementThe market for smaller satellites, which are designed to orbit close to Earth\u2019s atmosphere, is growing quickly. According to a report by the Satellite Industry Association and Bryce Space and Technology, a total of 292 of the spacecrafts were launched into space last year, compared with 55 in 2016.Story continues below advertisementThe shift is fueled by a wave of innovation that has made satellites cheaper to produce and the emergence of new commercial launch providers, such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which have made space more accessible. Recent advances in optics and communication technologies have improved the smaller spacecrafts' capabilities for remote sensing and imaging.Here are the companies that could benefit from Trump's Space ForceFor U.S. military and intelligence agencies, the move toward smaller satellites is part of a broader effort to shore up their space-based assets against attack. It\u2019s also the basis for President Trump\u2019s Space Force proposal. If approved by Congress, the Space Force would be a sixth branch of the U.S. military focused on combating security threats in space, the first new military service since the Air Force was created in 1947. If Congress embraces the idea the Space Force could be created as soon as 2020.AdvertisementThe Air Force operates a fleet of 77 satellites that the service describes as vital to detecting nuclear detonations and missile launches. Officials are hoping masses of small spacecraft will be harder for enemies to take down than a handful of large ones. Smaller satellites are also cheaper to replace.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI won\u2019t support the development any further of large, big, fat, juicy targets,\u201d Gen. John Hyten, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said at an industry conference last year. \u201cWe are going to go down a different path.\u201dThe Defense Department\u2019s advanced research and development arm, known as DARPA, is working to develop smaller satellites that use lower-cost technology under a project called \u201cBlackJack,\u201d allocating $117.5 million for the effort.Lockheed Martin partners with ESPN's Drone Racing League on self-piloting drone competitionStill, such research efforts pale in comparison to what the Pentagon is spending on older satellite systems. On Friday the Air Force announced it will pay Lockheed Martin as much as $7.2 billion for 22 satellites designed to support the Global Positioning System (GPS), which relies on one of the company\u2019s larger satellite models.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the new investments are a way to stay plugged into an increasingly vibrant commercial spaceflight industry, in which SpaceX and a SoftBank-backed company called OneWeb have pledged to launch masses of small satellites into space to bring Internet connectivity to remote areas.For defense contractors, investing in start-ups offers access to cutting-edge intellectual property.\u201cWe operate similar to a venture capital or private equity firm, but for us our focus is on the \u2018solution\u2019 side of things rather than on financial returns,\u201d said David Wajsgras, president of Raytheon\u2019s Intelligence, Information and Services business unit. \u201cWe partner with commercial companies that we see as having a better mousetrap.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWajsgras said the industry\u2019s small-satellite work has rapidly picked up steam during the past few years as customer priorities have changed. \u201cToday with the requirements that commercial and government customers have around the world, there is a need to take some of those mission capabilities and provide them at lower cost, and provide them in a different way,\u201d he said.AdvertisementKey to those efforts is Raytheon\u2019s investment in a three-year-old satellite start-up called HawkEye360, which wants to launch fleets of microwave-sized satellites into orbit, where they will orbit the Earth in clusters of three. The company is planning its first launch by the end of 2018.One of the company\u2019s core features is the ability to track radio frequencies coming off ships. HawkEye360 chief executive John Serafini says the company\u2019s early customers include U.S. agencies tracking maritime piracy, human trafficking and illegal fishing operations. \u201cWe\u2019re focusing on vessels that don\u2019t want to be found,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementSerafini says the partnership with Raytheon has given his company an open door to the hard-to-reach corners of the U.S. national security establishment, where Raytheon has spent decades building connections and technical know-how. \u201cThese customers don\u2019t usually want to buy capabilities from a three-year old start-up \u2026 they want to buy from a bigger, trusted company like Raytheon,\u201d Serafini said.AdvertisementIn mid-August Boeing announced it would buy a small-satellite manufacturer called Millennium Space Systems for a sum that wasn\u2019t disclosed, allowing it to produce satellites that weigh as little as 110 pounds. And last week it announced an investment in BridgeSat, a Colorado-based company that wants to launch fleets of small satellites that use lasers to beam information back to Earth, or to other satellites.Brian Schettler, managing director of Boeing\u2019s technology venture investment arm, said the company is planning more investments in small satellite technology. \u201cThis won\u2019t be the last investment we make in this space,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the key focus points we have pointed out for disruption.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s closest competitor, Lockheed Martin, has been pursuing more of a dual-pronged strategy, building its own smaller satellites and also reaching out to start-ups.AdvertisementOne of the company\u2019s newer satellites, called the LM400, is about the size of a washing machine. And Lockheed\u2019s venture investment arm has invested an undisclosed amount of money in an Irvine, Calif.-based company called Terran Orbital that focuses on the design, manufacturing, testing and launch of small satellites. (Lockheed\u2019s venture arm typically invests in chunks of $1 million to $5 million.)In a June 6 press briefing, Lockheed ventures executive director Chris Moran described Terran Orbital as one of the crowning successes of the company\u2019s tech investment arm, which has also invested in autonomous submarines and artificial intelligence, among other projects. What started as an exploratory investment in Terran Orbital has turned into a growing line of business with the U.S. government. Lockheed has won four government contracts in partnership with the start-up, as well as five pending contract proposals, a company spokesman said this week.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOur focus there has been to explore areas that maybe we wouldn\u2019t have done with our larger satellite buses that we manufacture ourselves,\u201d Moran said. \u201cThat\u2019s a big win for us on the venture space, to find that investment, create that partnership and see the business area really pick up the challenge and develop a whole business around that investment. I\u2019d love to see the rest of our [investments] turn into that.\u201dLockheed program manager Joel Thorson said he expects to see \u201cexponential growth\u201d in demand from the government for the small spacecraft. \u201cEvery single day we\u2019re bringing new ways, new ideas for small satellites,\u201d he said. Legacy defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are building out new business units focused on the science and technology of so-called \"cube-sats\" as the Defense Department looks to diversify its space-based assets. Defense giants bet big on small satellites",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Martin to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4 billion (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "459",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/20/lockheed-martin-aquire-aerojet-rocketdyne-sls/",
        "text": "Lockheed Martin, the world\u2019s largest defense contractor, announced Sunday that it would acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, a rocket engine and missile manufacturer, for $4.4 billion.Unless the deal is spiked by regulators, it should further establish Lockheed Martin\u2019s dominance atop a defense contracting industry that has been trending towards consolidation for decades. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAerojet Rocketdyne is a leading supplier of rocket and missile engines that will strengthen Lockheed\u2019s position in a booming market for space systems. It is closely involved in the Pentagon\u2019s ambitious new intercontinental ballistic missile programs. And the combination should give Lockheed new advantages in hypersonic missiles, a defense-industry growth market where it appears to have an early lead over competitors. Story continues below advertisementLockheed executives said the deal would trim costs out of the defense supply chain while also helping maintain the U.S. military\u2019s edge over geopolitical rivals. Advertisement\u201cAcquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne will preserve and strengthen an essential component of the domestic defense base and reduce costs for our customers and the American taxpayer,\u201d James Taiclet, the president and CEO of Bethesda-based Lockheed, said in a statement. \u201cThis transaction enhances Lockheed Martin\u2019s support of critical U.S. and allied security missions and retains national leadership in space and hypersonic technology.\"NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried.Aerojet Rocketdyne has revenue of about $2 billion and some 5,000 employees across the country. The company manufacturers the RS-25 engines to be used on NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket, which is designed to fly astronauts to the moon, as well as propulsion systems that are already used in several of Lockheed\u2019s defense systems.Story continues below advertisementLockheed makes the Orion spacecraft that would fly atop the SLS rocket. The acquisition will give Lockheed a stake in the rocket, which is made primarily by Boeing.Advertisement\u201cJoining Lockheed Martin is a testament to the world-class organization and team we\u2019ve built and represents a natural next phase of our evolution,\u201d Eileen P. Drake, CEO and president of Aerojet Rocketdyne, said in a statement. \u201cAs part of Lockheed Martin, we will bring our advanced technologies together with their substantial expertise and resources to accelerate our shared purpose: enabling the defense of our nation and space exploration.\u201dThe deal is expected to close in the second half of 2021 and is subject to approval of Aerojet Rocketdyne shareholders.Story continues below advertisementDepending on how the Biden administration approaches consolidation in the defense sector Lockheed could face tough questions over the transaction. With $48 billion in unclassified contract receipts for fiscal year 2019, Lockheed is the largest defense contractor in the world by a wide margin. AdvertisementIn the late years of the Clinton administration the company\u2019s attempt to swallow up Northrop Grumman was rebuffed by regulators. The Trump administration has taken a hands-off approach to defense acquisitions, allowing large acquisitions by Northrop Grumman and Raytheon to pass through uninterrupted.Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said the deal could spark concerns over Lockheed\u2019s increasing share of business in the space launch sector. Story continues below advertisement\u201cGenerally the concentration of the defense industry should motivate DOD and DOJ to consider antitrust concerns more vigorously,\u201d Smithberger said. Lockheed executives say the two companies\u2019 products are complementary and not competitive. They also argued that consolidating Aerojet under Lockheed\u2019s umbrella would eliminate certain fees that are paid to the company as a subcontractor. \u201cThere is full complementarity between the Lockheed Martin portfolio and Aerojet RocketDyne, there is no overlap so to speak in the traditional antitrust bent,\" Lockheed chief executive Jim Taiclet said. Aerojet Rocketdyne manufacturers the RS-25 engines to be used on NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket, which is designed to fly astronauts to the moon. Lockheed Martin to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4 billion",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Martin to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4 billion (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "460",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/20/lockheed-martin-aquire-aerojet-rocketdyne-sls/",
        "text": "Lockheed Martin, the world\u2019s largest defense contractor, announced Sunday that it would acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, a rocket engine and missile manufacturer, for $4.4 billion.Unless the deal is spiked by regulators, it should further establish Lockheed Martin\u2019s dominance atop a defense contracting industry that has been trending towards consolidation for decades. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAerojet Rocketdyne is a leading supplier of rocket and missile engines that will strengthen Lockheed\u2019s position in a booming market for space systems. It is closely involved in the Pentagon\u2019s ambitious new intercontinental ballistic missile programs. And the combination should give Lockheed new advantages in hypersonic missiles, a defense-industry growth market where it appears to have an early lead over competitors. Story continues below advertisementLockheed executives said the deal would trim costs out of the defense supply chain while also helping maintain the U.S. military\u2019s edge over geopolitical rivals. Advertisement\u201cAcquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne will preserve and strengthen an essential component of the domestic defense base and reduce costs for our customers and the American taxpayer,\u201d James Taiclet, the president and CEO of Bethesda-based Lockheed, said in a statement. \u201cThis transaction enhances Lockheed Martin\u2019s support of critical U.S. and allied security missions and retains national leadership in space and hypersonic technology.\"NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried.Aerojet Rocketdyne has revenue of about $2 billion and some 5,000 employees across the country. The company manufacturers the RS-25 engines to be used on NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket, which is designed to fly astronauts to the moon, as well as propulsion systems that are already used in several of Lockheed\u2019s defense systems.Story continues below advertisementLockheed makes the Orion spacecraft that would fly atop the SLS rocket. The acquisition will give Lockheed a stake in the rocket, which is made primarily by Boeing.Advertisement\u201cJoining Lockheed Martin is a testament to the world-class organization and team we\u2019ve built and represents a natural next phase of our evolution,\u201d Eileen P. Drake, CEO and president of Aerojet Rocketdyne, said in a statement. \u201cAs part of Lockheed Martin, we will bring our advanced technologies together with their substantial expertise and resources to accelerate our shared purpose: enabling the defense of our nation and space exploration.\u201dThe deal is expected to close in the second half of 2021 and is subject to approval of Aerojet Rocketdyne shareholders.Story continues below advertisementDepending on how the Biden administration approaches consolidation in the defense sector Lockheed could face tough questions over the transaction. With $48 billion in unclassified contract receipts for fiscal year 2019, Lockheed is the largest defense contractor in the world by a wide margin. AdvertisementIn the late years of the Clinton administration the company\u2019s attempt to swallow up Northrop Grumman was rebuffed by regulators. The Trump administration has taken a hands-off approach to defense acquisitions, allowing large acquisitions by Northrop Grumman and Raytheon to pass through uninterrupted.Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said the deal could spark concerns over Lockheed\u2019s increasing share of business in the space launch sector. Story continues below advertisement\u201cGenerally the concentration of the defense industry should motivate DOD and DOJ to consider antitrust concerns more vigorously,\u201d Smithberger said. Lockheed executives say the two companies\u2019 products are complementary and not competitive. They also argued that consolidating Aerojet under Lockheed\u2019s umbrella would eliminate certain fees that are paid to the company as a subcontractor. \u201cThere is full complementarity between the Lockheed Martin portfolio and Aerojet RocketDyne, there is no overlap so to speak in the traditional antitrust bent,\" Lockheed chief executive Jim Taiclet said. Aerojet Rocketdyne manufacturers the RS-25 engines to be used on NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket, which is designed to fly astronauts to the moon. Lockheed Martin to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4 billion",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "461",
        "date": "2018-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/03/nasa-unveil-astronauts-who-will-relaunch-human-flights-us-soil/",
        "text": "HOUSTON \u2014 NASA on Friday announced the crews of the first flights from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011, an elite group of astronauts that the agency hopes will help open a new era of space travel.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe crews would fly on spacecraft developed not by NASA but by two corporations, SpaceX and Boeing, which are under contract to provide a taxi-like service to the International Space Station. In a ceremony at the Johnson Space Center here, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stood on a stage with a massive American flag, and introduced the crews, one-by-one, as they came on stage in distinct groups: one for SpaceX, the other Boeing.On the first human test flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, NASA selected astronauts Eric Boe and Nicole Mann to join Boeing executive Chris Ferguson, a former space shuttle commander. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley would fly on the first human test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.On the first operational mission to the International Space Station, Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada would fly for Boeing. NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins would fly Dragon\u2019s first operational mission to the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely an opportunity of a lifetime,\u201d said Mann, who was selected as an astronaut in 2013.\u201cThe first flight is something you dream about as a test pilot,\u201d said Hurley, who flew on the last shuttle mission.In an interview, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine compared the crews to the Mercury astronauts, the seven test pilots featured in \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d who flew at the dawn of the Space Age. \u201cThe Mercury 7 and the crews that we just announced \u2014 that same spirit is there,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter all these years it hasn\u2019t gone away.\u201d In 2014, Boeing and SpaceX were awarded a combined $6.8 billion in contracts from NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying crews to the station, the orbiting laboratory. Since then, they have been in a race to see which company would fly first in what\u2019s become a sort of modern-day space race. The contrast was on display Friday. On one side, Boeing showed off its spacesuit, a handsome blue uniform, next to SpaceX\u2019s sleek black-and-white suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLeading up to the ceremony at the Johnson Space Center here, Bridenstine said it was a historic moment for the agency: \u201cWe are going to launch American astronauts from American soil. That\u2019s a big deal.\u201d Meet Chris Ferguson, the citizen test pilot for the first flight of Boeing\u2019s commercial craftBoth Boeing and SpaceX have faced setbacks and delays \u2014 with the latest schedule slips being announced on Thursday. While both companies had recently said they would conduct their first test flights with astronauts on board by the end of this year, those flights are now scheduled for 2019.Taking the stage Friday before a huge American flag, Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, told the crews: \u201cWhat a sacred honor this was to be part of this program and to fly you. Thank you. We take it very seriously. We won\u2019t let you down.\u201d Story continues below advertisementSpaceX said it would fly crews by April of next year. Boeing said only that it would fly NASA\u2019s astronauts by the middle of next year. Bridenstine said he had faith in the revised timelines. \u201cWe\u2019re so close,\u201d he said. \u201cYes, I\u2019m confident.\u201d AdvertisementLast week, Boeing confirmed that it had a problem with its launch-abort system, which is designed to ferry crews to safety in the event of an emergency. In a call with reporters this week, John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s program manager, said several of the valves failed to fully close, resulting in a propellant leak.Boeing has since identified the problem, he said, and is working to fix it. \u201cThe result is that we\u2019ll have a better and safer spacecraft,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX did not give a reason for the delay of its first crewed test flight. But it had been working to resolve an issue with its second stage that caused one of its Falcon 9 rockets to explode while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test.\u201cSafely and reliably flying commercial crew missions for NASA remains the highest priority for SpaceX,\u201d Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, said in a statement.AdvertisementSince the shuttle was retired seven years ago, U.S. astronauts have had to fly on Russian rockets from a remote launch site in Kazakhstan.NASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2014 and a massive business for big companiesIn a recent report, the Government Accountability Office said further delays in NASA\u2019s \u201cCommercial Crew\u201d program could \u201cdisrupt access\u201d to the space station, which would be an enormous embarrassment for NASA after investing about $100 billion to build and operate it.Story continues below advertisementThe report warned that the companies\u2019 schedules are \u201caggressive\u201d and that they \u201chave set ambitious \u2014 rather than realistic \u2014 dates, only to frequently delay them.\u201d In an interview, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the day marked \u201ca return to where we should have been. For the last seven years, we\u2019ve been forced to essentially hitchhike, catch a ride with the Russians on Russian rockets. And that was really unfortunate. That was not good for the American space program.\u201d The new generation of pilots will fly on company spaceships. NASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "462",
        "date": "2018-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/03/nasa-unveil-astronauts-who-will-relaunch-human-flights-us-soil/",
        "text": "HOUSTON \u2014 NASA on Friday announced the crews of the first flights from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011, an elite group of astronauts that the agency hopes will help open a new era of space travel.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe crews would fly on spacecraft developed not by NASA but by two corporations, SpaceX and Boeing, which are under contract to provide a taxi-like service to the International Space Station. In a ceremony at the Johnson Space Center here, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stood on a stage with a massive American flag, and introduced the crews, one-by-one, as they came on stage in distinct groups: one for SpaceX, the other Boeing.On the first human test flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, NASA selected astronauts Eric Boe and Nicole Mann to join Boeing executive Chris Ferguson, a former space shuttle commander. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley would fly on the first human test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.On the first operational mission to the International Space Station, Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada would fly for Boeing. NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Michael Hopkins would fly Dragon\u2019s first operational mission to the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely an opportunity of a lifetime,\u201d said Mann, who was selected as an astronaut in 2013.\u201cThe first flight is something you dream about as a test pilot,\u201d said Hurley, who flew on the last shuttle mission.In an interview, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine compared the crews to the Mercury astronauts, the seven test pilots featured in \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d who flew at the dawn of the Space Age. \u201cThe Mercury 7 and the crews that we just announced \u2014 that same spirit is there,\u201d he said. \u201cAfter all these years it hasn\u2019t gone away.\u201d In 2014, Boeing and SpaceX were awarded a combined $6.8 billion in contracts from NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying crews to the station, the orbiting laboratory. Since then, they have been in a race to see which company would fly first in what\u2019s become a sort of modern-day space race. The contrast was on display Friday. On one side, Boeing showed off its spacesuit, a handsome blue uniform, next to SpaceX\u2019s sleek black-and-white suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLeading up to the ceremony at the Johnson Space Center here, Bridenstine said it was a historic moment for the agency: \u201cWe are going to launch American astronauts from American soil. That\u2019s a big deal.\u201d Meet Chris Ferguson, the citizen test pilot for the first flight of Boeing\u2019s commercial craftBoth Boeing and SpaceX have faced setbacks and delays \u2014 with the latest schedule slips being announced on Thursday. While both companies had recently said they would conduct their first test flights with astronauts on board by the end of this year, those flights are now scheduled for 2019.Taking the stage Friday before a huge American flag, Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, told the crews: \u201cWhat a sacred honor this was to be part of this program and to fly you. Thank you. We take it very seriously. We won\u2019t let you down.\u201d Story continues below advertisementSpaceX said it would fly crews by April of next year. Boeing said only that it would fly NASA\u2019s astronauts by the middle of next year. Bridenstine said he had faith in the revised timelines. \u201cWe\u2019re so close,\u201d he said. \u201cYes, I\u2019m confident.\u201d AdvertisementLast week, Boeing confirmed that it had a problem with its launch-abort system, which is designed to ferry crews to safety in the event of an emergency. In a call with reporters this week, John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s program manager, said several of the valves failed to fully close, resulting in a propellant leak.Boeing has since identified the problem, he said, and is working to fix it. \u201cThe result is that we\u2019ll have a better and safer spacecraft,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX did not give a reason for the delay of its first crewed test flight. But it had been working to resolve an issue with its second stage that caused one of its Falcon 9 rockets to explode while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test.\u201cSafely and reliably flying commercial crew missions for NASA remains the highest priority for SpaceX,\u201d Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, said in a statement.AdvertisementSince the shuttle was retired seven years ago, U.S. astronauts have had to fly on Russian rockets from a remote launch site in Kazakhstan.NASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2014 and a massive business for big companiesIn a recent report, the Government Accountability Office said further delays in NASA\u2019s \u201cCommercial Crew\u201d program could \u201cdisrupt access\u201d to the space station, which would be an enormous embarrassment for NASA after investing about $100 billion to build and operate it.Story continues below advertisementThe report warned that the companies\u2019 schedules are \u201caggressive\u201d and that they \u201chave set ambitious \u2014 rather than realistic \u2014 dates, only to frequently delay them.\u201d In an interview, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the day marked \u201ca return to where we should have been. For the last seven years, we\u2019ve been forced to essentially hitchhike, catch a ride with the Russians on Russian rockets. And that was really unfortunate. That was not good for the American space program.\u201d The new generation of pilots will fly on company spaceships. NASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside SpaceX, the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that plans to send private citizens to space (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "463",
        "date": "2018-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/inside-space-x-willy-wonka-like-rocket-factory-that-eventually-could-send-private-citizens-space/",
        "text": "HAWTHORNE, Calif. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX hosted an open house here Monday, offering a rare peek inside the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that also serves as a museum of sorts to SpaceX\u2019s 16-year history.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside the headquarters stands a towering rocket booster, the first to fly back to Earth and land instead of being ditched in the ocean. Inside, next to its mission control center, is a charred spacecraft hanging from the rafters, the first commercial capsule to reach orbit and return. But on Monday there was something else on the factory floor: the quartet of NASA astronauts SpaceX plans to fly as soon as next year, who were greeted by a thundering applause by throngs of SpaceX employees, many decked out in matching SpaceX T-shirts.Musk did not make a public appearance.Story continues below advertisementThe astronauts\u2019 presence augurs a significant point in the future of SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002 with the goal of making space accessible to large numbers of people, and eventually colonizing Mars.Advertisement\u201cHuman spaceflight was the reason that SpaceX was founded in the first place,\u201d said Benji Reed, director of SpaceX\u2019s commercial crew program. \u201cIt\u2019s our number one goal and our number one priority.\u201dBut for all of the lofty talk and ambitious goals, for all of the triumphs and setbacks, SpaceX has still yet to ever fly a single human being. Its business has been focused on flying satellites for commercial and government customers, including the Pentagon, as well as flying cargo and supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.Story continues below advertisementIn 2014, SpaceX and Boeing were awarded $6.8 billion in contracts combined to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station. Both companies have suffered a series of setbacks and delays. But under the current timeline, SpaceX said it would fly its first test mission without crews in November, and the first with crews in April of next year.AdvertisementGwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said she was confident in the timeline.\u201cWhenever we talk about dates we\u2019re always confident and then something pops up,\u201d she said. \u201cPredicting launch dates can make a liar out of the best of us. I hope I am not proven to be a liar on this one.\u201dThe key, Reed said, was developing a spacecraft to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety requirements. \u201cWe always ask ourselves would you fly on this and more would you put your family on this vehicle?\u201d he said.As part of the tour, SpaceX showed reporters a mock up of its crew capsule, the simulator the astronauts will train on, and also one of the sleek, black-and-white spacesuits they\u2019ll wear.Doug Hurley, one of the NASA astronauts assigned to fly on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, said there were a lot of improvements over the old space shuttle suits he used to wear.\u201cIt\u2019s pretty neat looking, too, which was not a requirement but we certainly appreciate it,\u201d he said. A quartet of astronauts that have been assigned to Space X visit the floor of the rocket company. Inside SpaceX, the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that plans to send private citizens to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside SpaceX, the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that plans to send private citizens to space (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "464",
        "date": "2018-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/14/inside-space-x-willy-wonka-like-rocket-factory-that-eventually-could-send-private-citizens-space/",
        "text": "HAWTHORNE, Calif. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX hosted an open house here Monday, offering a rare peek inside the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that also serves as a museum of sorts to SpaceX\u2019s 16-year history.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside the headquarters stands a towering rocket booster, the first to fly back to Earth and land instead of being ditched in the ocean. Inside, next to its mission control center, is a charred spacecraft hanging from the rafters, the first commercial capsule to reach orbit and return. But on Monday there was something else on the factory floor: the quartet of NASA astronauts SpaceX plans to fly as soon as next year, who were greeted by a thundering applause by throngs of SpaceX employees, many decked out in matching SpaceX T-shirts.Musk did not make a public appearance.Story continues below advertisementThe astronauts\u2019 presence augurs a significant point in the future of SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002 with the goal of making space accessible to large numbers of people, and eventually colonizing Mars.Advertisement\u201cHuman spaceflight was the reason that SpaceX was founded in the first place,\u201d said Benji Reed, director of SpaceX\u2019s commercial crew program. \u201cIt\u2019s our number one goal and our number one priority.\u201dBut for all of the lofty talk and ambitious goals, for all of the triumphs and setbacks, SpaceX has still yet to ever fly a single human being. Its business has been focused on flying satellites for commercial and government customers, including the Pentagon, as well as flying cargo and supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.Story continues below advertisementIn 2014, SpaceX and Boeing were awarded $6.8 billion in contracts combined to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station. Both companies have suffered a series of setbacks and delays. But under the current timeline, SpaceX said it would fly its first test mission without crews in November, and the first with crews in April of next year.AdvertisementGwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said she was confident in the timeline.\u201cWhenever we talk about dates we\u2019re always confident and then something pops up,\u201d she said. \u201cPredicting launch dates can make a liar out of the best of us. I hope I am not proven to be a liar on this one.\u201dThe key, Reed said, was developing a spacecraft to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety requirements. \u201cWe always ask ourselves would you fly on this and more would you put your family on this vehicle?\u201d he said.As part of the tour, SpaceX showed reporters a mock up of its crew capsule, the simulator the astronauts will train on, and also one of the sleek, black-and-white spacesuits they\u2019ll wear.Doug Hurley, one of the NASA astronauts assigned to fly on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, said there were a lot of improvements over the old space shuttle suits he used to wear.\u201cIt\u2019s pretty neat looking, too, which was not a requirement but we certainly appreciate it,\u201d he said. A quartet of astronauts that have been assigned to Space X visit the floor of the rocket company. Inside SpaceX, the Willy Wonka-like rocket factory that plans to send private citizens to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s banner run put at risk by renewed questions about safety of its profit-driving 737 Max 8 jet (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "465",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/11/boeing-futures-dive-after-crash-china-indonesia-ethiopia-ground-max/",
        "text": "Even after the Lion Air crash of its state-of-the-art Max 8 in October, Boeing was predicting another banner year in 2019. Orders of its 737 Max 8 aircraft were up. It had notched three major Pentagon contracts. And its stock was flying sky high.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now, after another of the aviation giant\u2019s jets crashed, this time in Ethiopia, killing all 157 people on board, it\u2019s facing renewed questions about its safety and reliability as investors knocked back its share price more than 12 percent in early trading Monday. Boeing, which last year carried the Dow Jones industrial average to record highs, dragged it down on Monday morning, as the blue-chip measure opened in the red.Story continues below advertisementChina, Indonesia and Ethiopia have grounded the 737 Max 8, which was involved in both crashes, and other carriers have signaled they may follow suit.AdvertisementIn a statement Monday, Boeing said no new safety guidance is planned as of now: \" The investigation is in its early stages, but at this point, based on the information available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance.\"The Chicago-based U.S. aerospace giant, with more than $100 billion in revenue and 153,000 employees, is one of the most heavily weighted of the Dow\u2019s 30 components. It has been one of the drivers of the 10-year-old bull market; its stock had been up more than 30 percent, year to date, as of Friday\u2019s close.Story continues below advertisementThe \"decline is weighing heavily on the Dow because the stock has much more to surrender than other Dow components,\u201d said Sam Stovall of CFRA Research.The Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index and the Nasdaq composite index showed slight gains in early trading Monday. Europe and Asia markets were also up, despite growing concerns over global growth spurred by a disappointing U.S. jobs report on Friday.Ethiopia, China, other countries ground Boeing aircraft after devastating crashThe crash comes as the aerospace giant has been having a stellar year. Its commercial business has been surging. It pulled in those three major military contracts worth more than $18 billion to build training jets, replacement helicopters and drones that can refuel fighter jets in midair. Boeing is also building the next Air Force One, a spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and a monster rocket that NASA says will again take them to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2016, it celebrated its 100-year anniversary, a legacy that marches in lockstep with the history of American aviation, from dawn of commercial air travel in the years following the Wright brothers to the bombers that helped to allies win World War II, to the F-18 Hornets and 747s in use today.But now that investigators are probing two crashes that have killed a total of 346 people, the company is facing a crisis involving its core business and a threat to the reputation it has built up after decades.One of Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg\u2019s goals for the company has been to better integrate its three major business units\u2014commercial jets, defense and space\u2014under a strategy he has called \u201cOne Boeing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIts commercial airliner business, however, has long been the driver, and international orders for Boeing\u2019s commercial jets continued to climb, even after the crash in October. With a backlog of 5,900 airplane orders, valued at $412 billion, it predicted steady growth in 2019.AdvertisementIt is not clear what caused Sunday\u2019s crash of Ethio",
        "author": "Thomas Heath"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "466",
        "date": "2019-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-2019-is-shaping-up-to-be-a-stellar-year-for-space-exploration/2019/01/11/41c370e4-1505-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk is prone to tweeting out artistic renderings of the rockets and spacecraft he intends to build, offering his followers a glimpse of the future he imagines for humanity on other planets. So when he recently posted a photo of a launchpad walkway leading out to his rocket and spacecraft, Musk felt compelled to clarify in a follow-up tweet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cSorry, to be clear, this pic is real,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNothing rendered.\u201dThough the prospect of the return of human spaceflight from U.S. soil has at times seemed like a mirage, NASA\u2019s astronauts could this year return to space from the Florida Space Coast for the first time since the space shuttle was retired more than seven years ago. If successful, it would punctuate a year that government and industry officials believe could mark a turning point in the U.S. space program, which could see all sorts of new milestones as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing is also working to develop a spacecraft it hopes would ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station by the end of 2019, meaning there would be not one but two American spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to orbit. After successfully scratching what many consider the edge of space last month, Virgin Galactic is planning to make space tourism a reality in 2019. Blue Origin also hopes to fly its first test mission to space this year. And small rocket companies hope to start launching to orbit on a more regular basis.Follow The Post\u2019s space coverage: Companies in the CosmosNASA is pushing for a return to the moon, and the White House has made space a national priority again, reconstituting the National Space Council, led by Vice President Pence.\u201cWe\u2019ve been working to get back to the Moon and go on to Mars for years, creating a diversified suborbital and low Earth orbit economy and searching for the political, technical, and monetary will to make it a reality,\u201d said Jared Stout, the former deputy executive secretary of the Space Council who is now a policy adviser at Venable, a law firm. \u201cIn 2019, we are at the precipice of realizing the dreams of decades of planning and energy poured into the space enterprise.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen it comes to space, there are always setbacks and delays. Getting off the surface of the Earth is difficult and dangerous. It requires enormous amounts of energy, and nothing ever seems to go according to schedule.Virgin Galactic had a fatal accident in 2014. And Musk recently tweeted that the uncrewed first flight of the spacecraft designed to carry humans \u201cwill be extremely intense.\u201d\u201cEarly flights are especially dangerous, as there\u2019s a lot of new hardware.\u201dThose caveats aside, here\u2019s a look at some of what\u2019s to come in 2019.Commercial crewIn 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing and Musk\u2019s SpaceX contracts to fly its astronauts to the space station, then-NASA administrator Charles Bolden said it would set \u201cthe stage for what promises to be the most ambitious and exciting chapter in the history of NASA and human space flight.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe vowed the first flights would take place by 2017, ending NASA\u2019s reliance on Russia to fly its astronauts to space.The program has suffered setbacks, including a lack of congressional funding. Now both Boeing and SpaceX are scheduled to fly test flights with humans this year, though many think there will be continued delays to the program, potentially pushing at least one of the human flights to next year.SpaceX was expected to fly a test mission without humans on board this month, but NASA recently announced that would be delayed to February.In the meantime, NASA is conducting a safety review of the companies, spurred by Musk smoking marijuana on a podcast.SpaceXAfter coming off a momentous 2018, in which it flew a record 21 times, the company hopes to continue its cadence this year. But it started 2019 on a down note, announcing late Friday that it was laying off 10 percent of its more than 6,000 employees, saying it needed to become \u201ca leaner company\u201d to achieve its many goals. The announcement came a few months after the Air Force awarded lucrative contracts to many of its competitors, but not to SpaceX, which was seen by many in the industry as a blow to the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, it maintains it is healthy, with a full manifest of commercial satellites to launch, in addition to the national security payloads it lifts for the Pentagon and the cargo it carries to the space station for NASA.It is planning two more flights of the Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful in operation today. Last year, it flew for the first time, bringing a Tesla Roadster on a trip toward Mars.After mastering the art of recovering the first stages of rockets, which had traditionally been tossed into the ocean, SpaceX is working on catching another part of its rockets: the nose cone, or fairing. In 2017, Musk said they cost about $6 million each.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAt one point, we\u2019re, like, debating, \u2018Should we try to recover it or not?\u2019\u2009\u201d he said at a news conference. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Guys, imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it\u2019s going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover that?\u2019 Yes. Yes, you would.\u201dAdvertisementThe company uses a boat with a giant net affixed to it, forming a giant catcher\u2019s mitt. During a recent test, it got pretty close.Recent fairing recovery test with Mr. Steven. So close! pic.twitter.com/DFSCfBnM0Y\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 8, 2019\n\nSpace tourismLast month, Virgin Galactic hit a long elusive goal when two pilots flew its space plane to more than 50 miles high, just barely passing what many consider the edge of space. The pilots, C.J. Sturckow, a former NASA astronaut who flew on the space shuttle four times, and Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky, a former Air Force test pilot who flew the SR-71 Blackbird, are expected to receive astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington from the Federal Aviation Administration in the near future.Story continues below advertisementRichard Branson, Virgin\u2019s founder, has said he hopes to fly sometime in 2019 and then send ticket holders thereafter from Spaceport America, the futuristic facility it plans to operate in New Mexico.AdvertisementIf all goes according to plan, as many as six passengers would reach the edge of space, unbuckle and float around the cabin for a few minutes, while taking in views of the Earth from above.Richard Branson's company got ahead in the race for commercial spaceflight once its manned spacecraft reached more than 50 miles high. (Christian Davenport, Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans a key milestone this year: its first flights past the edge of space with test pilots. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) It has said it would like to fly customers this year, as well.Those passengers would \u201cmarvel in weightless freedom and lose yourself in breathtaking views through the largest windows in spaceflight history.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company hasn\u2019t named a price or nailed down definitive dates, and it flew its New Shepard rocket only twice last year.Space Launch System/Orion\nWhile the huge rocket that NASA is building is not scheduled to fly in 2019, the Orion spacecraft is expected to reach a key milestone: the test of its emergency abort system. After years of delays and cost overruns, NASA is hoping that the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft could finally fly together by 2020.AdvertisementBut many think the first flight will slip again, and a government watchdog recently painted a poor picture of the rocket\u2019s development. In a scathing report, NASA\u2019s inspector general found that the cost of the program could balloon to as much as $9 billion.Story continues below advertisementDespite the criticism, NASA has stood by the program, saying it is key for the agency to reach the moon.Launchers and satellitesThe year 2019 could also go down as the year of the small-launch vehicle. While SpaceX and others are focused on building massive and powerful rockets, some companies have been developing much smaller launchers.They are designed to meet the needs of a revolution in satellite technology that has shrunk their size down to that of a shoe box in some cases. Small satellites don\u2019t need huge, expensive rockets, hence the boom of companies racing to build small launchers.AdvertisementRocket Lab, a company based in New Zealand and California, is leading the way. It launched three times last year, and CEO Peter Beck said in an email that \u201c2019 will be even bigger.\u201d The company is planning to launch on a monthly basis and eventually start operations from the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.Virgin Orbit, another of Branson\u2019s companies, plans its first flight to orbit this year.And Vector is also planning its first launch to orbit this year. If that\u2019s successful, it hopes to fly a handful more times. The small satellite industry is at a point where the personal computer was \u201cin 1987, where it\u2019s about to explode,\u201d said Jim Cantrell, the company\u2019s co-founder and CEO.OneWeb agrees. The company, which is backed by Virgin, Airbus, Qualcomm and others, plans to launch a constellation of satellites into low Earth orbit that would beam the Internet down to remote parts of the world. It plans to launch its first patch of satellites next month on a rocket made by Arianespace, the French rocket manufacturer.SpaceX is also getting into the small satellite business. It is raising $500 million to put up a constellation of satellites called Starlink that could beam the Internet across the globe.Last year, it won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put up as many as 12,000 satellites. But others have warned that putting so many spacecraft into orbit would face immense technical and regulatory challenges.NASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it works.He flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. Astronauts, tourists and tiny rockets are poised for liftoff. Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration (WP: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "467",
        "date": "2019-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-2019-is-shaping-up-to-be-a-stellar-year-for-space-exploration/2019/01/11/41c370e4-1505-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk is prone to tweeting out artistic renderings of the rockets and spacecraft he intends to build, offering his followers a glimpse of the future he imagines for humanity on other planets. So when he recently posted a photo of a launchpad walkway leading out to his rocket and spacecraft, Musk felt compelled to clarify in a follow-up tweet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cSorry, to be clear, this pic is real,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNothing rendered.\u201dThough the prospect of the return of human spaceflight from U.S. soil has at times seemed like a mirage, NASA\u2019s astronauts could this year return to space from the Florida Space Coast for the first time since the space shuttle was retired more than seven years ago. If successful, it would punctuate a year that government and industry officials believe could mark a turning point in the U.S. space program, which could see all sorts of new milestones as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing is also working to develop a spacecraft it hopes would ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station by the end of 2019, meaning there would be not one but two American spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to orbit. After successfully scratching what many consider the edge of space last month, Virgin Galactic is planning to make space tourism a reality in 2019. Blue Origin also hopes to fly its first test mission to space this year. And small rocket companies hope to start launching to orbit on a more regular basis.Follow The Post\u2019s space coverage: Companies in the CosmosNASA is pushing for a return to the moon, and the White House has made space a national priority again, reconstituting the National Space Council, led by Vice President Pence.\u201cWe\u2019ve been working to get back to the Moon and go on to Mars for years, creating a diversified suborbital and low Earth orbit economy and searching for the political, technical, and monetary will to make it a reality,\u201d said Jared Stout, the former deputy executive secretary of the Space Council who is now a policy adviser at Venable, a law firm. \u201cIn 2019, we are at the precipice of realizing the dreams of decades of planning and energy poured into the space enterprise.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen it comes to space, there are always setbacks and delays. Getting off the surface of the Earth is difficult and dangerous. It requires enormous amounts of energy, and nothing ever seems to go according to schedule.Virgin Galactic had a fatal accident in 2014. And Musk recently tweeted that the uncrewed first flight of the spacecraft designed to carry humans \u201cwill be extremely intense.\u201d\u201cEarly flights are especially dangerous, as there\u2019s a lot of new hardware.\u201dThose caveats aside, here\u2019s a look at some of what\u2019s to come in 2019.Commercial crewIn 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing and Musk\u2019s SpaceX contracts to fly its astronauts to the space station, then-NASA administrator Charles Bolden said it would set \u201cthe stage for what promises to be the most ambitious and exciting chapter in the history of NASA and human space flight.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe vowed the first flights would take place by 2017, ending NASA\u2019s reliance on Russia to fly its astronauts to space.The program has suffered setbacks, including a lack of congressional funding. Now both Boeing and SpaceX are scheduled to fly test flights with humans this year, though many think there will be continued delays to the program, potentially pushing at least one of the human flights to next year.SpaceX was expected to fly a test mission without humans on board this month, but NASA recently announced that would be delayed to February.In the meantime, NASA is conducting a safety review of the companies, spurred by Musk smoking marijuana on a podcast.SpaceXAfter coming off a momentous 2018, in which it flew a record 21 times, the company hopes to continue its cadence this year. But it started 2019 on a down note, announcing late Friday that it was laying off 10 percent of its more than 6,000 employees, saying it needed to become \u201ca leaner company\u201d to achieve its many goals. The announcement came a few months after the Air Force awarded lucrative contracts to many of its competitors, but not to SpaceX, which was seen by many in the industry as a blow to the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, it maintains it is healthy, with a full manifest of commercial satellites to launch, in addition to the national security payloads it lifts for the Pentagon and the cargo it carries to the space station for NASA.It is planning two more flights of the Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful in operation today. Last year, it flew for the first time, bringing a Tesla Roadster on a trip toward Mars.After mastering the art of recovering the first stages of rockets, which had traditionally been tossed into the ocean, SpaceX is working on catching another part of its rockets: the nose cone, or fairing. In 2017, Musk said they cost about $6 million each.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAt one point, we\u2019re, like, debating, \u2018Should we try to recover it or not?\u2019\u2009\u201d he said at a news conference. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Guys, imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it\u2019s going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover that?\u2019 Yes. Yes, you would.\u201dAdvertisementThe company uses a boat with a giant net affixed to it, forming a giant catcher\u2019s mitt. During a recent test, it got pretty close.Recent fairing recovery test with Mr. Steven. So close! pic.twitter.com/DFSCfBnM0Y\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 8, 2019\n\nSpace tourismLast month, Virgin Galactic hit a long elusive goal when two pilots flew its space plane to more than 50 miles high, just barely passing what many consider the edge of space. The pilots, C.J. Sturckow, a former NASA astronaut who flew on the space shuttle four times, and Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky, a former Air Force test pilot who flew the SR-71 Blackbird, are expected to receive astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington from the Federal Aviation Administration in the near future.Story continues below advertisementRichard Branson, Virgin\u2019s founder, has said he hopes to fly sometime in 2019 and then send ticket holders thereafter from Spaceport America, the futuristic facility it plans to operate in New Mexico.AdvertisementIf all goes according to plan, as many as six passengers would reach the edge of space, unbuckle and float around the cabin for a few minutes, while taking in views of the Earth from above.Richard Branson's company got ahead in the race for commercial spaceflight once its manned spacecraft reached more than 50 miles high. (Christian Davenport, Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans a key milestone this year: its first flights past the edge of space with test pilots. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) It has said it would like to fly customers this year, as well.Those passengers would \u201cmarvel in weightless freedom and lose yourself in breathtaking views through the largest windows in spaceflight history.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company hasn\u2019t named a price or nailed down definitive dates, and it flew its New Shepard rocket only twice last year.Space Launch System/Orion\nWhile the huge rocket that NASA is building is not scheduled to fly in 2019, the Orion spacecraft is expected to reach a key milestone: the test of its emergency abort system. After years of delays and cost overruns, NASA is hoping that the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft could finally fly together by 2020.AdvertisementBut many think the first flight will slip again, and a government watchdog recently painted a poor picture of the rocket\u2019s development. In a scathing report, NASA\u2019s inspector general found that the cost of the program could balloon to as much as $9 billion.Story continues below advertisementDespite the criticism, NASA has stood by the program, saying it is key for the agency to reach the moon.Launchers and satellitesThe year 2019 could also go down as the year of the small-launch vehicle. While SpaceX and others are focused on building massive and powerful rockets, some companies have been developing much smaller launchers.They are designed to meet the needs of a revolution in satellite technology that has shrunk their size down to that of a shoe box in some cases. Small satellites don\u2019t need huge, expensive rockets, hence the boom of companies racing to build small launchers.AdvertisementRocket Lab, a company based in New Zealand and California, is leading the way. It launched three times last year, and CEO Peter Beck said in an email that \u201c2019 will be even bigger.\u201d The company is planning to launch on a monthly basis and eventually start operations from the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.Virgin Orbit, another of Branson\u2019s companies, plans its first flight to orbit this year.And Vector is also planning its first launch to orbit this year. If that\u2019s successful, it hopes to fly a handful more times. The small satellite industry is at a point where the personal computer was \u201cin 1987, where it\u2019s about to explode,\u201d said Jim Cantrell, the company\u2019s co-founder and CEO.OneWeb agrees. The company, which is backed by Virgin, Airbus, Qualcomm and others, plans to launch a constellation of satellites into low Earth orbit that would beam the Internet down to remote parts of the world. It plans to launch its first patch of satellites next month on a rocket made by Arianespace, the French rocket manufacturer.SpaceX is also getting into the small satellite business. It is raising $500 million to put up a constellation of satellites called Starlink that could beam the Internet across the globe.Last year, it won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put up as many as 12,000 satellites. But others have warned that putting so many spacecraft into orbit would face immense technical and regulatory challenges.NASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it works.He flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. Astronauts, tourists and tiny rockets are poised for liftoff. Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "468",
        "date": "2019-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-2019-is-shaping-up-to-be-a-stellar-year-for-space-exploration/2019/01/11/41c370e4-1505-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk is prone to tweeting out artistic renderings of the rockets and spacecraft he intends to build, offering his followers a glimpse of the future he imagines for humanity on other planets. So when he recently posted a photo of a launchpad walkway leading out to his rocket and spacecraft, Musk felt compelled to clarify in a follow-up tweet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cSorry, to be clear, this pic is real,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNothing rendered.\u201dThough the prospect of the return of human spaceflight from U.S. soil has at times seemed like a mirage, NASA\u2019s astronauts could this year return to space from the Florida Space Coast for the first time since the space shuttle was retired more than seven years ago. If successful, it would punctuate a year that government and industry officials believe could mark a turning point in the U.S. space program, which could see all sorts of new milestones as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing is also working to develop a spacecraft it hopes would ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station by the end of 2019, meaning there would be not one but two American spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to orbit. After successfully scratching what many consider the edge of space last month, Virgin Galactic is planning to make space tourism a reality in 2019. Blue Origin also hopes to fly its first test mission to space this year. And small rocket companies hope to start launching to orbit on a more regular basis.Follow The Post\u2019s space coverage: Companies in the CosmosNASA is pushing for a return to the moon, and the White House has made space a national priority again, reconstituting the National Space Council, led by Vice President Pence.\u201cWe\u2019ve been working to get back to the Moon and go on to Mars for years, creating a diversified suborbital and low Earth orbit economy and searching for the political, technical, and monetary will to make it a reality,\u201d said Jared Stout, the former deputy executive secretary of the Space Council who is now a policy adviser at Venable, a law firm. \u201cIn 2019, we are at the precipice of realizing the dreams of decades of planning and energy poured into the space enterprise.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen it comes to space, there are always setbacks and delays. Getting off the surface of the Earth is difficult and dangerous. It requires enormous amounts of energy, and nothing ever seems to go according to schedule.Virgin Galactic had a fatal accident in 2014. And Musk recently tweeted that the uncrewed first flight of the spacecraft designed to carry humans \u201cwill be extremely intense.\u201d\u201cEarly flights are especially dangerous, as there\u2019s a lot of new hardware.\u201dThose caveats aside, here\u2019s a look at some of what\u2019s to come in 2019.Commercial crewIn 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing and Musk\u2019s SpaceX contracts to fly its astronauts to the space station, then-NASA administrator Charles Bolden said it would set \u201cthe stage for what promises to be the most ambitious and exciting chapter in the history of NASA and human space flight.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe vowed the first flights would take place by 2017, ending NASA\u2019s reliance on Russia to fly its astronauts to space.The program has suffered setbacks, including a lack of congressional funding. Now both Boeing and SpaceX are scheduled to fly test flights with humans this year, though many think there will be continued delays to the program, potentially pushing at least one of the human flights to next year.SpaceX was expected to fly a test mission without humans on board this month, but NASA recently announced that would be delayed to February.In the meantime, NASA is conducting a safety review of the companies, spurred by Musk smoking marijuana on a podcast.SpaceXAfter coming off a momentous 2018, in which it flew a record 21 times, the company hopes to continue its cadence this year. But it started 2019 on a down note, announcing late Friday that it was laying off 10 percent of its more than 6,000 employees, saying it needed to become \u201ca leaner company\u201d to achieve its many goals. The announcement came a few months after the Air Force awarded lucrative contracts to many of its competitors, but not to SpaceX, which was seen by many in the industry as a blow to the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, it maintains it is healthy, with a full manifest of commercial satellites to launch, in addition to the national security payloads it lifts for the Pentagon and the cargo it carries to the space station for NASA.It is planning two more flights of the Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful in operation today. Last year, it flew for the first time, bringing a Tesla Roadster on a trip toward Mars.After mastering the art of recovering the first stages of rockets, which had traditionally been tossed into the ocean, SpaceX is working on catching another part of its rockets: the nose cone, or fairing. In 2017, Musk said they cost about $6 million each.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAt one point, we\u2019re, like, debating, \u2018Should we try to recover it or not?\u2019\u2009\u201d he said at a news conference. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Guys, imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it\u2019s going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover that?\u2019 Yes. Yes, you would.\u201dAdvertisementThe company uses a boat with a giant net affixed to it, forming a giant catcher\u2019s mitt. During a recent test, it got pretty close.Recent fairing recovery test with Mr. Steven. So close! pic.twitter.com/DFSCfBnM0Y\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 8, 2019\n\nSpace tourismLast month, Virgin Galactic hit a long elusive goal when two pilots flew its space plane to more than 50 miles high, just barely passing what many consider the edge of space. The pilots, C.J. Sturckow, a former NASA astronaut who flew on the space shuttle four times, and Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky, a former Air Force test pilot who flew the SR-71 Blackbird, are expected to receive astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington from the Federal Aviation Administration in the near future.Story continues below advertisementRichard Branson, Virgin\u2019s founder, has said he hopes to fly sometime in 2019 and then send ticket holders thereafter from Spaceport America, the futuristic facility it plans to operate in New Mexico.AdvertisementIf all goes according to plan, as many as six passengers would reach the edge of space, unbuckle and float around the cabin for a few minutes, while taking in views of the Earth from above.Richard Branson's company got ahead in the race for commercial spaceflight once its manned spacecraft reached more than 50 miles high. (Christian Davenport, Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans a key milestone this year: its first flights past the edge of space with test pilots. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) It has said it would like to fly customers this year, as well.Those passengers would \u201cmarvel in weightless freedom and lose yourself in breathtaking views through the largest windows in spaceflight history.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company hasn\u2019t named a price or nailed down definitive dates, and it flew its New Shepard rocket only twice last year.Space Launch System/Orion\nWhile the huge rocket that NASA is building is not scheduled to fly in 2019, the Orion spacecraft is expected to reach a key milestone: the test of its emergency abort system. After years of delays and cost overruns, NASA is hoping that the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft could finally fly together by 2020.AdvertisementBut many think the first flight will slip again, and a government watchdog recently painted a poor picture of the rocket\u2019s development. In a scathing report, NASA\u2019s inspector general found that the cost of the program could balloon to as much as $9 billion.Story continues below advertisementDespite the criticism, NASA has stood by the program, saying it is key for the agency to reach the moon.Launchers and satellitesThe year 2019 could also go down as the year of the small-launch vehicle. While SpaceX and others are focused on building massive and powerful rockets, some companies have been developing much smaller launchers.They are designed to meet the needs of a revolution in satellite technology that has shrunk their size down to that of a shoe box in some cases. Small satellites don\u2019t need huge, expensive rockets, hence the boom of companies racing to build small launchers.AdvertisementRocket Lab, a company based in New Zealand and California, is leading the way. It launched three times last year, and CEO Peter Beck said in an email that \u201c2019 will be even bigger.\u201d The company is planning to launch on a monthly basis and eventually start operations from the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.Virgin Orbit, another of Branson\u2019s companies, plans its first flight to orbit this year.And Vector is also planning its first launch to orbit this year. If that\u2019s successful, it hopes to fly a handful more times. The small satellite industry is at a point where the personal computer was \u201cin 1987, where it\u2019s about to explode,\u201d said Jim Cantrell, the company\u2019s co-founder and CEO.OneWeb agrees. The company, which is backed by Virgin, Airbus, Qualcomm and others, plans to launch a constellation of satellites into low Earth orbit that would beam the Internet down to remote parts of the world. It plans to launch its first patch of satellites next month on a rocket made by Arianespace, the French rocket manufacturer.SpaceX is also getting into the small satellite business. It is raising $500 million to put up a constellation of satellites called Starlink that could beam the Internet across the globe.Last year, it won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put up as many as 12,000 satellites. But others have warned that putting so many spacecraft into orbit would face immense technical and regulatory challenges.NASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it works.He flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. Astronauts, tourists and tiny rockets are poised for liftoff. Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "469",
        "date": "2019-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-2019-is-shaping-up-to-be-a-stellar-year-for-space-exploration/2019/01/11/41c370e4-1505-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk is prone to tweeting out artistic renderings of the rockets and spacecraft he intends to build, offering his followers a glimpse of the future he imagines for humanity on other planets. So when he recently posted a photo of a launchpad walkway leading out to his rocket and spacecraft, Musk felt compelled to clarify in a follow-up tweet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cSorry, to be clear, this pic is real,\u201d he wrote. \u201cNothing rendered.\u201dThough the prospect of the return of human spaceflight from U.S. soil has at times seemed like a mirage, NASA\u2019s astronauts could this year return to space from the Florida Space Coast for the first time since the space shuttle was retired more than seven years ago. If successful, it would punctuate a year that government and industry officials believe could mark a turning point in the U.S. space program, which could see all sorts of new milestones as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing is also working to develop a spacecraft it hopes would ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station by the end of 2019, meaning there would be not one but two American spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to orbit. After successfully scratching what many consider the edge of space last month, Virgin Galactic is planning to make space tourism a reality in 2019. Blue Origin also hopes to fly its first test mission to space this year. And small rocket companies hope to start launching to orbit on a more regular basis.Follow The Post\u2019s space coverage: Companies in the CosmosNASA is pushing for a return to the moon, and the White House has made space a national priority again, reconstituting the National Space Council, led by Vice President Pence.\u201cWe\u2019ve been working to get back to the Moon and go on to Mars for years, creating a diversified suborbital and low Earth orbit economy and searching for the political, technical, and monetary will to make it a reality,\u201d said Jared Stout, the former deputy executive secretary of the Space Council who is now a policy adviser at Venable, a law firm. \u201cIn 2019, we are at the precipice of realizing the dreams of decades of planning and energy poured into the space enterprise.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen it comes to space, there are always setbacks and delays. Getting off the surface of the Earth is difficult and dangerous. It requires enormous amounts of energy, and nothing ever seems to go according to schedule.Virgin Galactic had a fatal accident in 2014. And Musk recently tweeted that the uncrewed first flight of the spacecraft designed to carry humans \u201cwill be extremely intense.\u201d\u201cEarly flights are especially dangerous, as there\u2019s a lot of new hardware.\u201dThose caveats aside, here\u2019s a look at some of what\u2019s to come in 2019.Commercial crewIn 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing and Musk\u2019s SpaceX contracts to fly its astronauts to the space station, then-NASA administrator Charles Bolden said it would set \u201cthe stage for what promises to be the most ambitious and exciting chapter in the history of NASA and human space flight.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe vowed the first flights would take place by 2017, ending NASA\u2019s reliance on Russia to fly its astronauts to space.The program has suffered setbacks, including a lack of congressional funding. Now both Boeing and SpaceX are scheduled to fly test flights with humans this year, though many think there will be continued delays to the program, potentially pushing at least one of the human flights to next year.SpaceX was expected to fly a test mission without humans on board this month, but NASA recently announced that would be delayed to February.In the meantime, NASA is conducting a safety review of the companies, spurred by Musk smoking marijuana on a podcast.SpaceXAfter coming off a momentous 2018, in which it flew a record 21 times, the company hopes to continue its cadence this year. But it started 2019 on a down note, announcing late Friday that it was laying off 10 percent of its more than 6,000 employees, saying it needed to become \u201ca leaner company\u201d to achieve its many goals. The announcement came a few months after the Air Force awarded lucrative contracts to many of its competitors, but not to SpaceX, which was seen by many in the industry as a blow to the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, it maintains it is healthy, with a full manifest of commercial satellites to launch, in addition to the national security payloads it lifts for the Pentagon and the cargo it carries to the space station for NASA.It is planning two more flights of the Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful in operation today. Last year, it flew for the first time, bringing a Tesla Roadster on a trip toward Mars.After mastering the art of recovering the first stages of rockets, which had traditionally been tossed into the ocean, SpaceX is working on catching another part of its rockets: the nose cone, or fairing. In 2017, Musk said they cost about $6 million each.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAt one point, we\u2019re, like, debating, \u2018Should we try to recover it or not?\u2019\u2009\u201d he said at a news conference. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Guys, imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it\u2019s going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover that?\u2019 Yes. Yes, you would.\u201dAdvertisementThe company uses a boat with a giant net affixed to it, forming a giant catcher\u2019s mitt. During a recent test, it got pretty close.Recent fairing recovery test with Mr. Steven. So close! pic.twitter.com/DFSCfBnM0Y\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 8, 2019\n\nSpace tourismLast month, Virgin Galactic hit a long elusive goal when two pilots flew its space plane to more than 50 miles high, just barely passing what many consider the edge of space. The pilots, C.J. Sturckow, a former NASA astronaut who flew on the space shuttle four times, and Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky, a former Air Force test pilot who flew the SR-71 Blackbird, are expected to receive astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington from the Federal Aviation Administration in the near future.Story continues below advertisementRichard Branson, Virgin\u2019s founder, has said he hopes to fly sometime in 2019 and then send ticket holders thereafter from Spaceport America, the futuristic facility it plans to operate in New Mexico.AdvertisementIf all goes according to plan, as many as six passengers would reach the edge of space, unbuckle and float around the cabin for a few minutes, while taking in views of the Earth from above.Richard Branson's company got ahead in the race for commercial spaceflight once its manned spacecraft reached more than 50 miles high. (Christian Davenport, Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post)Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans a key milestone this year: its first flights past the edge of space with test pilots. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) It has said it would like to fly customers this year, as well.Those passengers would \u201cmarvel in weightless freedom and lose yourself in breathtaking views through the largest windows in spaceflight history.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company hasn\u2019t named a price or nailed down definitive dates, and it flew its New Shepard rocket only twice last year.Space Launch System/Orion\nWhile the huge rocket that NASA is building is not scheduled to fly in 2019, the Orion spacecraft is expected to reach a key milestone: the test of its emergency abort system. After years of delays and cost overruns, NASA is hoping that the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft could finally fly together by 2020.AdvertisementBut many think the first flight will slip again, and a government watchdog recently painted a poor picture of the rocket\u2019s development. In a scathing report, NASA\u2019s inspector general found that the cost of the program could balloon to as much as $9 billion.Story continues below advertisementDespite the criticism, NASA has stood by the program, saying it is key for the agency to reach the moon.Launchers and satellitesThe year 2019 could also go down as the year of the small-launch vehicle. While SpaceX and others are focused on building massive and powerful rockets, some companies have been developing much smaller launchers.They are designed to meet the needs of a revolution in satellite technology that has shrunk their size down to that of a shoe box in some cases. Small satellites don\u2019t need huge, expensive rockets, hence the boom of companies racing to build small launchers.AdvertisementRocket Lab, a company based in New Zealand and California, is leading the way. It launched three times last year, and CEO Peter Beck said in an email that \u201c2019 will be even bigger.\u201d The company is planning to launch on a monthly basis and eventually start operations from the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.Virgin Orbit, another of Branson\u2019s companies, plans its first flight to orbit this year.And Vector is also planning its first launch to orbit this year. If that\u2019s successful, it hopes to fly a handful more times. The small satellite industry is at a point where the personal computer was \u201cin 1987, where it\u2019s about to explode,\u201d said Jim Cantrell, the company\u2019s co-founder and CEO.OneWeb agrees. The company, which is backed by Virgin, Airbus, Qualcomm and others, plans to launch a constellation of satellites into low Earth orbit that would beam the Internet down to remote parts of the world. It plans to launch its first patch of satellites next month on a rocket made by Arianespace, the French rocket manufacturer.SpaceX is also getting into the small satellite business. It is raising $500 million to put up a constellation of satellites called Starlink that could beam the Internet across the globe.Last year, it won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put up as many as 12,000 satellites. But others have warned that putting so many spacecraft into orbit would face immense technical and regulatory challenges.NASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it works.He flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. Astronauts, tourists and tiny rockets are poised for liftoff. Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space exploration",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly a Japanese billionaire and several artists on a tourist trip around the moon (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "470",
        "date": "2018-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/17/elon-musk-show-continues-spacex-plans-introduce-worlds-first-private-passenger-fly-around-moon/",
        "text": "Elon Musk attempted to write the next chapter in his quest to open up space to the masses by announcing on Monday night the first paying tourist that his company, SpaceX, seeks to fly on a trip around the moon. Speaking at SpaceX\u2019s headquarters outside of Los Angeles, he introduced Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire entrepreneur who founded the fashion label Zozo. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFinally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the moon,\u201d Maezawa said.He said he would invite six to eight artists \u2014 sculptors, painters, architects and film directors \u2014 from across the globe to fly with him on a week-long trip in 2023 that he said would lead to the production of art \u201cto inspire the dreamer in all of us.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMusk would not say what the trip would cost, but he did say that the design of the nearly-400-foot-tall Big Falcon Rocket had evolved recently, with the first flights to orbit coming in two to three years.He called Maezawa \u201cbrave\u201d and \u201can adventurer.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s dangerous, to be clear,\u201d Musk said. \u201cThis is not a walk in the park here. When you\u2019re pushing the frontier, it\u2019s not a sure thing. \u2026 There\u2019s some chance that something could go wrong. \u2026 We better get that flight right.\u201dAdvertisementOnce again, Musk\u2019s big news came in the face of nagging questions and tumult \u2014 this time generated largely by his own behavior.In the past few months, Musk has lashed out at analysts during an earnings call for Tesla, his electric car company, for asking \u201cboring, bonehead questions.\u201d He has accused, without proof, one of the cave divers who participated in the rescue of a Thai youth soccer team of being a pedophile. (On Monday, the diver sued him for defamation.) Then he vowed to take Tesla private, saying that the \u201cfunding was secured,\u201d only to reverse himself shortly afterward. And earlier this month, a video of Musk smoking marijuana and drinking whiskey on a popular podcast circulated on social media.Story continues below advertisementNow the Elon Musk show returned to the sprawling SpaceX headquarters outside Los Angeles, where the company \u2014 whether intentionally or not \u2014 provided a prime-time diversion to the troubles surrounding its celebrity chief executive by providing details about its long-anticipated moon shot.AdvertisementLast week, SpaceX posted on Twitter that it \u201chas signed the world\u2019s first private passenger to fly around the moon aboard our [Big Falcon Rocket] \u2014 an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling into space.\u201d And late Sunday, Musk further fueled the anticipation by tweeting out artist renderings of the massive launch vehicle that SpaceX is developing to fly into deep space, with a simple message: \u201c#OccupyMars.\u201dpic.twitter.com/dUpiavvM1Z\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2018\n\n#OccupyMars\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2018\n\nBut for now, the company has yet to fly a human into space. The BFR, as the rocket SpaceX would fly to the moon is known, is in development, possibly years from flying. SpaceX, which is under contract with NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station, recently announced it had to delay that first flight to April.Story continues below advertisementIts plan to fly tourists around the moon has also been delayed. If all had gone according to schedule, SpaceX would now be gearing up for its first lunar flight, fulfilling its pledge early last year to launch a pair of tourists \u201cfaster and farther into the solar system than any before them.\u201dAdvertisementSetbacks and delays, however, don\u2019t deter Musk or his relentless company, which has grown to 7,000 employees. SpaceX has pulled off feats no one thought possible, from the first successful launch to orbit a decade ago to earlier this year, when the maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket put a Tesla Roadster on a trip toward Mars.While Tesla has been plagued by production problems, SpaceX, which is also led by president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, has been far more stable, churning out 34 straight successful rocket launches over the last 20 months. It has disrupted the launch market, winning not just billions in NASA contracts but also contracts from the Pentagon. It also has a massive backlog of commercial launch contracts.Story continues below advertisementThe rocket factory continues to hum along, so much so that during a recent media event to introduce the NASA astronauts assigned to fly on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, there was a constant din of the factory that went on uninterrupted.Advertisement\u201cAll of that noise in the background, that is the sound of amazing things happening,\u201d NASA astronaut Victor Glover said.Musk\u2019s vision of an interplanetary future may be somewhere in between dreams and delusion, but at the very least he has helped inspire a new generation of enthusiasts, the way the Apollo era did in the 1960s.For his part, he has admitted that much of what he hopes to achieve in space is aspirational. The goal, he said during an announcement on how to colonize Mars two years ago, was to \u201cmake Mars seem possible. To make it seem like it\u2019s something we can do in our lifetimes. That you can go.\u201dRead more:Explore The Post\u2019s series \u201cCompanies in the Cosmos\u201d SpaceX is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at risk. NASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil The announcement comes amid questions about Musk's recent erratic behavior, and at a time when the company is poised to fly astronauts for the first time. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly a Japanese billionaire and several artists on a tourist trip around the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly a Japanese billionaire and several artists on a tourist trip around the moon (WP: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "471",
        "date": "2018-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/17/elon-musk-show-continues-spacex-plans-introduce-worlds-first-private-passenger-fly-around-moon/",
        "text": "Elon Musk attempted to write the next chapter in his quest to open up space to the masses by announcing on Monday night the first paying tourist that his company, SpaceX, seeks to fly on a trip around the moon. Speaking at SpaceX\u2019s headquarters outside of Los Angeles, he introduced Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire entrepreneur who founded the fashion label Zozo. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFinally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the moon,\u201d Maezawa said.He said he would invite six to eight artists \u2014 sculptors, painters, architects and film directors \u2014 from across the globe to fly with him on a week-long trip in 2023 that he said would lead to the production of art \u201cto inspire the dreamer in all of us.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMusk would not say what the trip would cost, but he did say that the design of the nearly-400-foot-tall Big Falcon Rocket had evolved recently, with the first flights to orbit coming in two to three years.He called Maezawa \u201cbrave\u201d and \u201can adventurer.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s dangerous, to be clear,\u201d Musk said. \u201cThis is not a walk in the park here. When you\u2019re pushing the frontier, it\u2019s not a sure thing. \u2026 There\u2019s some chance that something could go wrong. \u2026 We better get that flight right.\u201dAdvertisementOnce again, Musk\u2019s big news came in the face of nagging questions and tumult \u2014 this time generated largely by his own behavior.In the past few months, Musk has lashed out at analysts during an earnings call for Tesla, his electric car company, for asking \u201cboring, bonehead questions.\u201d He has accused, without proof, one of the cave divers who participated in the rescue of a Thai youth soccer team of being a pedophile. (On Monday, the diver sued him for defamation.) Then he vowed to take Tesla private, saying that the \u201cfunding was secured,\u201d only to reverse himself shortly afterward. And earlier this month, a video of Musk smoking marijuana and drinking whiskey on a popular podcast circulated on social media.Story continues below advertisementNow the Elon Musk show returned to the sprawling SpaceX headquarters outside Los Angeles, where the company \u2014 whether intentionally or not \u2014 provided a prime-time diversion to the troubles surrounding its celebrity chief executive by providing details about its long-anticipated moon shot.AdvertisementLast week, SpaceX posted on Twitter that it \u201chas signed the world\u2019s first private passenger to fly around the moon aboard our [Big Falcon Rocket] \u2014 an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling into space.\u201d And late Sunday, Musk further fueled the anticipation by tweeting out artist renderings of the massive launch vehicle that SpaceX is developing to fly into deep space, with a simple message: \u201c#OccupyMars.\u201dpic.twitter.com/dUpiavvM1Z\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2018\n\n#OccupyMars\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2018\n\nBut for now, the company has yet to fly a human into space. The BFR, as the rocket SpaceX would fly to the moon is known, is in development, possibly years from flying. SpaceX, which is under contract with NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station, recently announced it had to delay that first flight to April.Story continues below advertisementIts plan to fly tourists around the moon has also been delayed. If all had gone according to schedule, SpaceX would now be gearing up for its first lunar flight, fulfilling its pledge early last year to launch a pair of tourists \u201cfaster and farther into the solar system than any before them.\u201dAdvertisementSetbacks and delays, however, don\u2019t deter Musk or his relentless company, which has grown to 7,000 employees. SpaceX has pulled off feats no one thought possible, from the first successful launch to orbit a decade ago to earlier this year, when the maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket put a Tesla Roadster on a trip toward Mars.While Tesla has been plagued by production problems, SpaceX, which is also led by president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell, has been far more stable, churning out 34 straight successful rocket launches over the last 20 months. It has disrupted the launch market, winning not just billions in NASA contracts but also contracts from the Pentagon. It also has a massive backlog of commercial launch contracts.Story continues below advertisementThe rocket factory continues to hum along, so much so that during a recent media event to introduce the NASA astronauts assigned to fly on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, there was a constant din of the factory that went on uninterrupted.Advertisement\u201cAll of that noise in the background, that is the sound of amazing things happening,\u201d NASA astronaut Victor Glover said.Musk\u2019s vision of an interplanetary future may be somewhere in between dreams and delusion, but at the very least he has helped inspire a new generation of enthusiasts, the way the Apollo era did in the 1960s.For his part, he has admitted that much of what he hopes to achieve in space is aspirational. The goal, he said during an announcement on how to colonize Mars two years ago, was to \u201cmake Mars seem possible. To make it seem like it\u2019s something we can do in our lifetimes. That you can go.\u201dRead more:Explore The Post\u2019s series \u201cCompanies in the Cosmos\u201d SpaceX is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at risk. NASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil The announcement comes amid questions about Musk's recent erratic behavior, and at a time when the company is poised to fly astronauts for the first time. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly a Japanese billionaire and several artists on a tourist trip around the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing had a best-selling 737 and a growing global market. Now after two crashes, its reputation is at risk. (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "472",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/11/boeing-had-best-selling-growing-global-market-now-after-two-crashes-its-reputation-is-risk/",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s 737 Max jet found a sweet spot for the company\u2019s growing base of customers around the world: It\u2019s a best-selling workhorse with low costs, minimal upkeep and an ability to cram in more passengers. The airplane would prove perfect for midrange flights that could maximize profits for carriers.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs it boosted production, Boeing boasted that pilots did not even need flight simulator training to fly the new Max 8 jets. That helped the Chicago-based aerospace giant sell thousands of them, deepening relationships with China and fast-growing markets such as Indonesia and Ethiopia. Ultimately it powered a stock market rise that added billions to the company\u2019s value. \u201cWe aspire to be an enduring global industrial champion,\u201d CEO Dennis Muilenburg told shareholders in a 2017 address commemorating the company\u2019s 100th anniversary, \u201ca top performer in every aspect of our business, delivering superior value to our customers, employees, shareholders, communities and partners.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the crash of a 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia on Sunday \u2014 the second in less than five months \u2014 threatens to undermine Boeing\u2019s reputation around the world for safety and reliability. Already, China \u2014 the company\u2019s most important foreign market \u2014 has grounded the 737 Max 8. Analysts said Boeing would need to get to the bottom of what caused the crash and soon, or face a backlash from potential customers and investors.With Ethiopian crash, a second new Boeing 737 Max 8 goes downWithin hours of China\u2019s decision, smaller airlines followed suit. And regulators in Ethiopia and Indonesia called for closer inspections of the plane.On Tuesday, Britain joined the list of countries that have barred 737 Max planes from their airspace. The British Civil Aviation Authority announced that \u201cas a precautionary measure,\u201d no \u201ccommercial passenger flights from any operator\u201d will be allowed to arrive, depart or overfly British airspace until further notice. It noted that five 737 Max aircraft currently operate in the United Kingdom and a sixth had been scheduled to enter service later this week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is not clear why Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 fell from the skies six minutes after takeoff Sunday on its way to Nairobi. The investigation has just begun. But the crash, which killed all 157 people on board, puts the spotlight on Boeing, which already faced scrutiny for the October crash of a 737 Max 8 in Indonesia and concerns that a software update to the 737 could make it hard for pilots to override a malfunctioning autopilot system when it steers the plane into a nose-dive.In a statement Monday, Boeing said no new safety guidance is planned as of now: \u201cThe investigation is in its early stages, but at this point, based on the information available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance.\u201dThe Federal Aviation Administration endorsed the Max 8 on Monday, issuing an \u201cairworthiness notification\u201d but saying that it would \u201ccontinuously assess\u201d the plane\u2019s safety performance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing said in a statement late Monday evening that it would implement a software update to the 737 Max 8 in the coming weeks designed to \u201cmake an already safe aircraft even safer,\u201d with changes to \u201cflight control law, pilot displays, operation manuals and crew training.\u201d The statement came after the FAA said it would mandate \u201cdesign changes\u201d no later than April.While investigators descended on the crash site trying to determine what happened, China, Indonesia, Brazil, Singapore and Ethiopia grounded the planes. Australia \u2014 a major long-distance travel destination \u2014 barred them from its airspace, and Britain announced a similar ban on Tuesday. Investors battered Boeing\u2019s stock, which fell more than 12 percent in early trading Monday before rebounding and finishing the day down 5.4 percent, a sign of investor confidence in the stalwart company.But analysts at Jefferies investment bank estimated that the worst-case scenario \u2014 a software problem causing a full grounding and halt to deliveries of the 737 Max 8 \u2014 could cost Boeing about $5.1 billion, or 5 percent of the company\u2019s annual revenue, within two months. The 737 program is expected to generate about $32 billion for Boeing in 2019, Jefferies estimated, making it one of the company\u2019s single-largest sources of business.'In deep grief': Aid workers, U.N. staff, tourists among victims in Ethiopian plane crash\u201cThis is clearly a fluid situation and one that may have serious repercussions for Boeing over the short and long terms,\u201d Value Line, an investment research firm, wrote in a note for its clients. \u201cFor now, we are leaving our financial estimates unchanged, but there is clearly a large cloud of uncertainty here.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor Boeing, the largest U.S. manufacturing exporter, there is no foreign market more crucial than China. The 737 is a key part in Boeing\u2019s plans there and beyond. In 2018, Boeing increased 737 production to 52 planes a month. And nearly half of the 580 units it delivered last year were from the Max family version of the plane.Of the 43,000 new aircraft it plans to sell in the next 20 years, Boeing expects that Chinese airlines will buy nearly 20 percent. To cement what executives hope will be a fruitful relationship for years to come, Boeing recently built a plant where it finishes its planes there.And in a recent speech Muilenburg reportedly stressed how key China is to its bottom line, saying that while the company \u201cis doing well there,\u201d it remains \u201cimportant that we have a productive relationship.\u201dIn an earnings call earlier this year, he said the company views \u201cChina as a long-term growth market for us.\u201d And he said that the country \u201cneeds the airplanes for growth to fuel their economy and to meet their passenger growth and cargo growth needs.\u201dThe decision to ground the planes was an extraordinary one, especially in China, where it created headaches for travelers, disrupted the economy and caused at least a temporary rupture in relations with the American aerospace behemoth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cChina is going to be ticked by having to ground those airplanes,\u201d said Mike Boyd, president of Mike Boyd International, an aviation consulting firm. \u201cThat will hurt the Chinese economy. China isn\u2019t exactly rushing off to Wall Street to buy Boeing stock, but they are going to have to do business with Boeing.\u201dBoeing has nearly 3,000 orders for the Max 8 version of the plane, according to Boyd\u2019s analysis, with China expected to be a significant purchaser. But now \u201cthey could lose some of that business,\u201d Boyd said. \u201cEverybody has a lot on the line. Boeing needs China. China needs Boeing, too.\u201dAnd it comes in a tumultuous global trade environment, as the Trump administration and Chinese officials go round and round on a long-term trade agreement.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAll of this comes at a delicate time for Boeing because of everything else that\u2019s going on,\u201d said Kevin Michaels, an aerospace analyst with AeroDynamic Advisory, a Michigan-based consultancy. \u201cThere were no new orders of 737 last year [in China], and it\u2019s possible that was because of trade issues.\u201dAdvertisementIn October, an Indonesian Lion Air flight plunged into the Java Sea shortly after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 passengers and crew members. Investigators blamed a faulty sensor and automatic feature for pointing its nose down while pilots struggled to lift the plane up.Pilots say they were \u2018in the dark\u2019 about Boeing\u2019s 737 safety updateCriticism against Boeing stirred when the company disclosed after the Lion Air disaster that a new autopilot program known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, could disable a feature that pilots would use to take control of a plane.Story continues below advertisementThe updated software was meant to make the plane safer, by accounting for minor design changes to its engines. But pilots said a Boeing decision not to include the new system in pilot training left them \u201cin the dark\u201d about how to respond in an emergency.AdvertisementPilots of the Lion Air 737 battled the computerized control system in an effort to arrest the plane\u2019s dive, but each time the system reasserted itself, and the plane hit the water at 450 miles an hour, according to Indonesia\u2019s initial investigation report. The company faces lawsuits from at least two dozen family members whose loved ones died in the crash.While Boeing issued a bulletin in November after the crash, the controversy revived an ongoing debate about what degree of automation is safest for airplanes \u2014 and how much control human pilots should maintain.Though the Ethiopia investigation is still in the early stages, the similarities between the two crashes have prompted carriers around the world to take added precautions.In December, Muilenburg told CNBC that the \u201cairplane is safe. We\u2019re very confident in that.\u201d He touted the aircraft, which he said was designed so that additional training would be kept to a minimum on it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhat we wanted to accomplish was seamless training and introduction for our customers,\u201d he said. \u201cWe purposefully designed the airplane to behave in the same way\u201d as previous models.The crash comes as Boeing\u2019s commercial business has been surging, even after the October crash. And with a backlog of 5,900 airplane orders, or about seven years of production, that is valued at $412 billion, Boeing predicted continued growth in 2019. One of Muilenburg\u2019s goals for the company has been to better integrate its major business units \u2014 commercial jets, defense, space and services \u2014 under a strategy he has called \u201cOne Boeing.\u201dBoeing\u2019s defense business has had a good run recently as well. It recently won three major military contracts, totaling more than $18 billion combined to build training jets, replacement helicopters and drones that can refuel fighter jets in midair.It is also building the next Air Force One, a spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and a monster rocket that NASA says will one day take them to the moon.In 2016, Boeing celebrated its 100th anniversary, a legacy that marches in lockstep with the history of American aviation, from the dawn of commercial air travel in the years following the Wright Brothers to the bombers that helped to allies win World War II, to the F-18 Hornets and 747s in use today. The Chicago-based aerospace giant has more than $100 billion in revenue and 153,000 employees worldwide.But now that investigators are probing two crashes that have killed a total of 346 people, the company is facing a crisis involving its core business and a threat to the reputation it has built up after decades.In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was \u201cclosely monitoring developments\u201d and that it planned to join the National Transportation Safety Board, which was working with Ethiopian authorities investigating the crash. But it did not ground the planes, which are flown by American and Southwest airlines.The 737 Max 8 has been an important profit driver for Boeing since it was introduced in 2017. It is crucial to Boeing\u2019s broader international ambitions as it competes with Airbus, its European rival in the commercial airline business.Boeing has delivered 354 of the jets globally and has 2,912 on order, according to market estimates maintained by Boyd Group International. The jet that crashed Sunday was one of five 737 Max 8 planes operated by Ethiopian Airlines, which has 25 more on order.In the United States, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines have 59 between their two fleets, with 304 on order. American Airlines said it was monitoring the investigation but remained confident in the safety of its aircraft. Southwest said it has been in touch with Boeing and plans to follow the investigation. It had not made any changes to its operations or inspection protocol as of Sunday, the airline said. Customers took to Twitter to press for information, including one who said: \u201cIt was the first time i have ever been nervous flying with you in 25 years and hundreds of flights.\u201dThomas Heath contributed to this report. Sales of the Max 8 have fueled Boeing's global expansion and added billions to its revenue. Boeing had a best-selling 737 and a growing global market. Now after two crashes, its reputation is at risk.",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing to invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "473",
        "date": "2019-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/boeing-invest-million-richard-bransons-virgin-galactic/",
        "text": "Boeing will invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic to help it develop technologies that would allow for high-speed transportation to ferry passengers across the globe faster than the speed of sound, and possibly through space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe investment is a relatively modest amount for the aviation behemoth. But it represents what the companies called a \u201cfirst step\u201d in an unusual corporate partnership that they hope will dramatically cut travel time. Virgin Galactic, the self-proclaimed \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline,\u201d is working to ferry paying passengers to the edge of space and back by next year. The company has already reached space twice, once in late 2018 and then again earlier this year. But Branson\u2019s goal has long been to develop a powerful jet capable of crisscrossing the globe at very high speeds, and even leaving the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe companies said one of their main goals was to see if they could develop a vehicle capable of hypersonic speed that would travel at five times the speed of sound.How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.In a statement to The Post, Branson said the deal marked \u201cthe beginning of an important collaboration for the future of air and space travel, which are the natural next steps for us. Virgin Galactic and Boeing share a vision of opening access to the world and space, to more people in safe and environmentally responsible ways.\u201dIn an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s CEO, said the goal was to leverage Boeing\u2019s aviation expertise as Virgin Galactic works on new propulsion systems and materials to build a new-generation transportation system that would be economically viable.Story continues below advertisementIt is too early to say, however, what the design would be \u2014 whether it would be a vehicle capable of getting to space and reentering, or a supersonic jet that would stay in the upper atmosphere.AdvertisementThe companies said they were well aware that travel going faster than the speed of sound has proven commercially difficult and that finding a viable market for it, even if the technical challenges are overcome, has been tried before. Boeing won a government competition to build a supersonic transport in the 1960s but abandoned the project in 1971 when Congress eliminated funding.The Concorde, a creation of a British-French consortium, whisked passengers at twice the speed of sound on intercontinental flights for 27 years. But it proved an expensive option for passengers and was taken out of service in 2003. No one has found a model that works commercially since.More Boeing problems: Another space vehicle it\u2019s building for NASA is significantly delayedThe announcement of Boeing\u2019s investment comes as the company is still reeling from two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max airplanes and has faced repeated delays in building a spacecraft for NASA that would fly astronauts to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Brian Schettler, senior managing director of Boeing HorizonX Ventures, which invests in start-ups and new technologies, said that the partnership between Virgin Galactic, which Branson founded with the goal of ferrying tourists to space, and Boeing, which has been a key player since the dawn of the Space Age, would help commercialize space.Virgin Galactic soon plans to start flying customers who are paying as much as $250,000 for tourist jaunts to space out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. It is also in talks to build spaceports in other countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and some unnamed Asian countries, Whitesides said. The long-term goal is to set up hubs around the world for its high-speed travel network.The investment comes as Virgin Galactic recently announced it was going public by merging with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm. Boeing\u2019s investment would be in return for shares in Virgin Galactic, so the deal is contingent on the closing of the merger, which is expected by the end of the year. The companies will work to develop technologies to fly people across the globe faster than the speed of sound.  Boeing to invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing to invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "474",
        "date": "2019-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/boeing-invest-million-richard-bransons-virgin-galactic/",
        "text": "Boeing will invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic to help it develop technologies that would allow for high-speed transportation to ferry passengers across the globe faster than the speed of sound, and possibly through space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe investment is a relatively modest amount for the aviation behemoth. But it represents what the companies called a \u201cfirst step\u201d in an unusual corporate partnership that they hope will dramatically cut travel time. Virgin Galactic, the self-proclaimed \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline,\u201d is working to ferry paying passengers to the edge of space and back by next year. The company has already reached space twice, once in late 2018 and then again earlier this year. But Branson\u2019s goal has long been to develop a powerful jet capable of crisscrossing the globe at very high speeds, and even leaving the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe companies said one of their main goals was to see if they could develop a vehicle capable of hypersonic speed that would travel at five times the speed of sound.How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.In a statement to The Post, Branson said the deal marked \u201cthe beginning of an important collaboration for the future of air and space travel, which are the natural next steps for us. Virgin Galactic and Boeing share a vision of opening access to the world and space, to more people in safe and environmentally responsible ways.\u201dIn an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s CEO, said the goal was to leverage Boeing\u2019s aviation expertise as Virgin Galactic works on new propulsion systems and materials to build a new-generation transportation system that would be economically viable.Story continues below advertisementIt is too early to say, however, what the design would be \u2014 whether it would be a vehicle capable of getting to space and reentering, or a supersonic jet that would stay in the upper atmosphere.AdvertisementThe companies said they were well aware that travel going faster than the speed of sound has proven commercially difficult and that finding a viable market for it, even if the technical challenges are overcome, has been tried before. Boeing won a government competition to build a supersonic transport in the 1960s but abandoned the project in 1971 when Congress eliminated funding.The Concorde, a creation of a British-French consortium, whisked passengers at twice the speed of sound on intercontinental flights for 27 years. But it proved an expensive option for passengers and was taken out of service in 2003. No one has found a model that works commercially since.More Boeing problems: Another space vehicle it\u2019s building for NASA is significantly delayedThe announcement of Boeing\u2019s investment comes as the company is still reeling from two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max airplanes and has faced repeated delays in building a spacecraft for NASA that would fly astronauts to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Brian Schettler, senior managing director of Boeing HorizonX Ventures, which invests in start-ups and new technologies, said that the partnership between Virgin Galactic, which Branson founded with the goal of ferrying tourists to space, and Boeing, which has been a key player since the dawn of the Space Age, would help commercialize space.Virgin Galactic soon plans to start flying customers who are paying as much as $250,000 for tourist jaunts to space out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. It is also in talks to build spaceports in other countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and some unnamed Asian countries, Whitesides said. The long-term goal is to set up hubs around the world for its high-speed travel network.The investment comes as Virgin Galactic recently announced it was going public by merging with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm. Boeing\u2019s investment would be in return for shares in Virgin Galactic, so the deal is contingent on the closing of the merger, which is expected by the end of the year. The companies will work to develop technologies to fly people across the globe faster than the speed of sound.  Boeing to invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing to invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic (WP: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "475",
        "date": "2019-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/boeing-invest-million-richard-bransons-virgin-galactic/",
        "text": "Boeing will invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic to help it develop technologies that would allow for high-speed transportation to ferry passengers across the globe faster than the speed of sound, and possibly through space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe investment is a relatively modest amount for the aviation behemoth. But it represents what the companies called a \u201cfirst step\u201d in an unusual corporate partnership that they hope will dramatically cut travel time. Virgin Galactic, the self-proclaimed \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline,\u201d is working to ferry paying passengers to the edge of space and back by next year. The company has already reached space twice, once in late 2018 and then again earlier this year. But Branson\u2019s goal has long been to develop a powerful jet capable of crisscrossing the globe at very high speeds, and even leaving the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe companies said one of their main goals was to see if they could develop a vehicle capable of hypersonic speed that would travel at five times the speed of sound.How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.In a statement to The Post, Branson said the deal marked \u201cthe beginning of an important collaboration for the future of air and space travel, which are the natural next steps for us. Virgin Galactic and Boeing share a vision of opening access to the world and space, to more people in safe and environmentally responsible ways.\u201dIn an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s CEO, said the goal was to leverage Boeing\u2019s aviation expertise as Virgin Galactic works on new propulsion systems and materials to build a new-generation transportation system that would be economically viable.Story continues below advertisementIt is too early to say, however, what the design would be \u2014 whether it would be a vehicle capable of getting to space and reentering, or a supersonic jet that would stay in the upper atmosphere.AdvertisementThe companies said they were well aware that travel going faster than the speed of sound has proven commercially difficult and that finding a viable market for it, even if the technical challenges are overcome, has been tried before. Boeing won a government competition to build a supersonic transport in the 1960s but abandoned the project in 1971 when Congress eliminated funding.The Concorde, a creation of a British-French consortium, whisked passengers at twice the speed of sound on intercontinental flights for 27 years. But it proved an expensive option for passengers and was taken out of service in 2003. No one has found a model that works commercially since.More Boeing problems: Another space vehicle it\u2019s building for NASA is significantly delayedThe announcement of Boeing\u2019s investment comes as the company is still reeling from two fatal crashes involving its 737 Max airplanes and has faced repeated delays in building a spacecraft for NASA that would fly astronauts to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Brian Schettler, senior managing director of Boeing HorizonX Ventures, which invests in start-ups and new technologies, said that the partnership between Virgin Galactic, which Branson founded with the goal of ferrying tourists to space, and Boeing, which has been a key player since the dawn of the Space Age, would help commercialize space.Virgin Galactic soon plans to start flying customers who are paying as much as $250,000 for tourist jaunts to space out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. It is also in talks to build spaceports in other countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and some unnamed Asian countries, Whitesides said. The long-term goal is to set up hubs around the world for its high-speed travel network.The investment comes as Virgin Galactic recently announced it was going public by merging with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm. Boeing\u2019s investment would be in return for shares in Virgin Galactic, so the deal is contingent on the closing of the merger, which is expected by the end of the year. The companies will work to develop technologies to fly people across the globe faster than the speed of sound.  Boeing to invest $20 million in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing to shut down all Puget Sound operations for two weeks after employee who had coronavirus dies (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "476",
        "date": "2020-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/23/boeing-coronavirus-puget-sound/",
        "text": "Boeing will halt all production activities in the Puget Sound region of Washington state, an early national hot spot for the coronavirus outbreak, for two weeks following the reported death of an employee.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe move affects up to 70,000 employees in the Puget Sound region who the company said would receive paid leave during the halt. Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun pledged to be in close contact with the company\u2019s customers and suppliers throughout the pause. Operations at those facilities will wind down over the next few days.\u201cThis necessary step protects our employees and the communities where they work and live,\u201d Calhoun said in a statement. \u201cWe continue to work closely with public-health officials, and we\u2019re in contact with our customers, suppliers and other stakeholders who are affected by this temporary suspension. We regret the difficulty this will cause them, as well as our employees, but it\u2019s vital to maintain health and safety for all those who support our products and services, and to assist in the national effort to combat the spread of COVID-19,\u201d the disease the novel coronavirus causes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe International Association of Machinists, a union representing Boeing employees, separately told its members that an employee in the company\u2019s Everett, Wash., factory, contracted the coronavirus and has died. The statement did not identify the employee.\u201cOur hearts and prayers go out to his family,\u201d the union wrote in a notice to its members. \u201cThis devastating fact adds to an already deteriorating situation.\u201dWorking from home reveals another fault line in America\u2019s racial and educational divideThe move comes as manufacturers across the country are trying to navigate production demands with increasingly drastic state mandates designed to slow the spread of the disease. The Big Three automakers \u2015 Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler America \u2015 moved to halt their operations last week.Story continues below advertisementThe production halt could hamstring Boeing\u2019s commercial production operations until further notice. Although Boeing is headquartered in Chicago, its factories in Washington state form the epicenter of its production activities. According to the company\u2019s website, about 70,000 employees in the state handle final assembly for commercial jetliners, including the 737 Next Generation, 747, 767, 777 and 737 Max. The company has had factories in the region for 100 years.AdvertisementThe coronavirus has presented a compounding crisis for Boeing. The company already was in dire financial straits because of the 737 Max, which the FAA grounded more than a year ago after faulty flight-control systems played a role in two deadly crashes. Now the outbreak has rippled throughout the global aviation industry and, as travel bans put airlines on hold, threatened the long-term health of U.S. aviation.House report on 737 Max crashes faults Boeing\u2019s \u2018culture of concealment\u2019 and labels FAA \u2018grossly insufficient\u2019Boeing\u2019s stock price has lost about two-thirds of its value in the past month, falling faster than the broader stock market.Story continues below advertisementThe company has engineered a series of desperate measures to contain the financial damage. It drew down the full amount of its $13.8 billion loan in mid-March soon after the stock market tumble began and halted all new hires. Calhoun and board Chairman Larry Kellner announced they would forgo their salaries until the end of this year.AdvertisementThe company is asking for at least $60 billion in federal financial stimulus money to save the U.S. aviation industry, of which Boeing would be a primary beneficiary. The decision to ask for public funds has led to controversy internally, with former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley abruptly resigning from its board.Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at the Teal Group, said that at a time when Boeing is looking for a bailout from the federal government, \u201cthe deep cleaning and shutdown is the least of their worries. It\u2019s not like anyone is clamoring for jets right now. No one is flying.\u201dTrump\u2019s coronavirus plan includes industry bailouts that Republicans once opposedAccording to Boeing\u2019s website, the company employs more than 150,000 people in the United States and 65 other countries. It finished 2019 with $76.5 billion in annual revenue, a 24 percent drop from the previous year. The company\u2019s commercial aircraft division accounted for $32 billion of that. Revenue in the company\u2019s defense division remained flat, at $26 billion.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s defense business could prove to be somewhat of a refuge from turmoil facing its commercial business. The company said Monday \u201cthe majority of our production and other facilities throughout the company remain open.\u201d That includes manufacturing sites across the country where it produces aircraft and weapons for the Pentagon.On Friday, Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, issued a memo saying the defense industry met the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s definition as a \u201ccritical infrastructure sector,\u201d and as a result, companies are \u201cexpected to maintain their normal work schedules.\u201dHow has coronavirus impacted your life? Share your experience with The Post.NASA has taken a different approach.Story continues below advertisementIts facilities in Mississippi and Louisiana, where Boeing has been working on NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket, are temporarily closed due to direction from the space agency.In a memo last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said access to the Stennis and Michoud assembly facilities \u201cwill be limited to personnel required to maintain the safety and security of the center\u201d and that the agency \u201cwill temporarily suspend production and testing of the Space Launch System and Orion [spacecraft] hardware.\u201d The temporary measure from Boeing comes as factories across the country are halting operations to help contain the pandemic. Boeing to shut down all Puget Sound operations for two weeks after employee who had coronavirus dies",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Losses from Max grounding continue as Boeing reports another dismal quarter (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "477",
        "date": "2020-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/29/losses-max-grounding-continue-boeing-reports-another-dismal-quarter/",
        "text": "Boeing reported its first annual loss in more than two decades Wednesday, as the 737 Max \u2015 a once-promising line of commercial jets whose flawed control systems played a role in two deadly crashes \u2015 remains at the center of a historic safety crisis.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing closed out the fourth quarter with $17.9 billion in revenue, the company announced Wednesday, a 37 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2018. The company\u2019s 2019 net losses of $636 million mark its first annual loss since 1997. The losses stem from the continued worldwide grounding of Boeing\u2019s Max jets and a production halt this year in the wake of two fatal crashes.Once a cash-generating machine that was the envy of its competitors and a darling of Wall Street, Boeing has been forced to borrow billions of dollars to cover the cost of building airplanes it can\u2019t deliver to customers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company reported Wednesday that it owes creditors $27.3 billion, not including a separate $12 billion it is currently negotiating, executives said Wednesday.Boeing has been forced to compensate airlines for the cost of flight cancellations, taking a $5.6 billion charge in July. And a bruising congressional inquiry has pointed to deeper problems with the company\u2019s management culture, leading to the ouster of two high-ranking executives.Boeing has been 'our own worst enemy' on missed deadlines, new CEO saysWednesday was also the first earnings release for new CEO David Calhoun, a long-time Boeing board member. In a call with skeptical stock analysts Wednesday morning, Calhoun sought to cast himself as a reformer unafraid of confronting difficult truths.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMy job is to get on with it, and make the changes that I always thought were necessary,\u201d Calhoun said in a call with reporters. AdvertisementHe pushed back on the implication that he is too much of an insider to turn the page on the company\u2019s recent mistakes.\u201cWhen a board reaches a decision to change out the CEO, there is a recognition that things need to change,\u201d he said, \"And they recognize the arguments presented from the outside world as legit. That\u2019s where we are.\u201d\u2018Safety was just a given\u2019: Inside Boeing\u2019s boardroom amid the 737 Max crisisThe company has incurred another $2.6 billion in costs related to the indefinite grounding, and it expects the grounding to cost it an estimated $4 billion throughout 2020, something that should put a drag on future results.Story continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s stock price has lost about 13 percent of its value over the past year at a time when the market has surged. Despite the bad quarterly results, Boeing stock opened 2 percent higher Wednesday compared to the previous day\u2019s close, and it rose 2.6 percent by early afternoon. AdvertisementBank of America analyst Ron Epstein, who covers the aerospace and defense markets, estimates the Max crisis has cost the company $18.3 billion. Assuming the aircraft is cleared to fly again by May, Epstein said, those costs should exceed $20 billion. The 737 Max \u201cis maybe a $30 billion exercise between developing the plane and cleaning it up,\" Epstein said. There are also problems in the company\u2019s Arlington-based defense, space and security division, which also stumbled in the last quarter after several years of stable growth. Boeing took a $410 million charge in case NASA requires it to repeat a test mission of the spacecraft it is developing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Story continues below advertisementIn December, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a software problem and failed to reach the correct orbit during a test flight with no astronauts on board. NASA is investigating what caused the spacecraft\u2019s on board clock to be 11 hours off and whether to require the company to perform another test mission. Plane crash victims\u2019 families \u2018sickened\u2019 by fired Boeing CEO\u2019s $62 million payoutThe 737 Max has been out of commission for more than 10 months as regulators remain unconvinced it is safe to fly. It was grounded in mid-March when the Federal Aviation Administration recognized similarities in a pair of deadly plane crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, both of them involving new 737 Max jets, that killed 346 people.AdvertisementBoeing later admitted that a new flight-control program, interacting with bad data from the planes\u2019 external sensors, had in both cases pushed the jets into an uncontrollable nosedive.Story continues below advertisementThe FAA has made the jets\u2019 return to the sky contingent on a set of software and display changes designed to prevent the same problems from occurring again. But the timeline for approval has continually shifted over the past year as regulators discovered more problems with the plane. The company now estimates that it will be able to return the Max to flight in \u201cmid-2020,\u201d although it emphasized that the timeline is up to regulators.Throughout most of 2019, Boeing continued churning out new planes under the assumption regulations would soon clear them to fly. However, in December, the company announced it would indefinitely halt production of the embattled jets.AdvertisementThat production halt has rippled throughout the company\u2019s supply chain, resulting in about 2,800 layoffs at Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita. About half of Spirit\u2019s revenue comes from supplying parts to the Max.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to scrutiny over the Max jets, the company has faced wider criticism about its culture.The crisis has raised questions about whether Boeing\u2019s top management understands the company\u2019s own production lines, analysts said. The Chicago-based corporate office has come under criticism for being too focused on Wall Street, at the expense of the company\u2019s Seattle-based production lines.\u201cChicago has been a distant asset manager that\u2019s there to extract cash. That needs to change,\u201d said Richard Aboulafia, a longtime aerospace analyst with Teal Group.Aboulafia attributed Boeing\u2019s broader problems to a \u201ccombination of bad communication and very aggressive wage and conditions pressure in the midst of unprecedented prosperity,\u201d calling it a \u201cmixture for a toxic soup.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInternal messages between Boeing employees were recently disclosed to congressional investigators. The messages, made public last month as part of a long-running investigation into how the Max was designed and certified, could further damage the company\u2019s relationship with regulators and the flying public.Internal Boeing documents show employees discussing efforts to manipulate regulators scrutinizing the 737 MaxOne Boeing employee said in 2018, \u201cI still haven\u2019t been forgiven by god for the covering up I did last year.\u201d Another said, \u201cThis is what these regulators get when they try and get in the way.\u201d And in 2017, long before either of the crashes, a Boeing employee wrote, \u201cThis airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.\u201dIn a call with reporters Wednesday, Calhoun called those messages \u201chorribly embarrassing and not typical of what Boeing employees do,\u201d calling it a \u201cmicroculture\u201d within the company that nonetheless needs to be changed. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCalhoun, who signed off on many of his predecessor\u2019s decisions as a Boeing board member, attributed his company\u2019s problems to a lack of discipline. The 737 Max\u2019s flight control systems \u201cfailed to deal with a boundary decision in an environment we should have known something about. ... The regulators made the same mistake,\u201d he said. The mistakes that grounded the Max \u201creally were relegated to a relatively small group of folks, but it wasn\u2019t detected,\u201d he said. \u201cThe system apparently didn\u2019t listen or watch for things like that and it didn\u2019t react appropriately.\u201dHe agreed to take responsibility in his new role as CEO. \u201cI have to do everything in my power to make sure going forward that it does [catch mistakes], and it starts with me.\"Douglas MacMillan and Christian Davenport contributed to this report. The losses stem from the continued worldwide grounding of Boeing\u2019s Max jets and a production halt this year in the wake of two fatal crashes. Losses from Max grounding continue as Boeing reports another dismal quarter",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s firing of its CEO seen as move to \u2018restore confidence\u2019 in wake of 737 Max crisis  (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "478",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/23/boeing-chief-executive-dennis-muilenburg-resigns-board-seeks-restore-confidence-wake-max-crisis/",
        "text": "Boeing fired its chief executive officer Monday in a move intended to bring to a close the most tumultuous period in its 103-year history, marked by a bungled response to two fatal airplane crashes blamed on a flawed software program and poor oversight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAviation industry analysts said the sudden dismissal of Dennis Muilenburg, who had worked for Boeing for more than three decades, was a desperate attempt by the company to win back the trust of regulators and the public after crashes of its 737 Max aircraft led to the deaths of 346 people and accusations that Boeing had misled regulators and its customers. Whether it would be enough was not immediately clear.Story continues below advertisement\u201cTheir credibility has been shredded,\u201d said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee that oversees aviation and a sharp critic of Muilenburg\u2019s leadership. \u201cThey have to rebuild it. This firing can be a turning point to restoring and redeeming the company, but there has to be a management house cleaning that reflects a change in the culture of secrecy.\u201dAdvertisementOthers noted that Muilenburg would be replaced as CEO and president by Boeing\u2019s chairman, David L. Calhoun, who has served on Boeing\u2019s board for a decade and has no engineering background.In the short term, Calhoun would make a great leader because of his ability \u201cto reassure the outside world and stabilize the situation,\u201d said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst for the Teal Group. But he is an unlikely agent of dramatic change. \u201cIn an ideal world he\u2019d have aerospace engineering, program management and commercial marketplace experience,\u201d Aboulafia said. \"This is not exactly a recipe for change.\u201dKey events leading up to Boeing\u2019s firing of MuilenbergIn a statement Monday, Boeing said \"The Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders. Under the Company\u2019s new leadership, Boeing will operate with a renewed commitment to full transparency, including effective and proactive communication with the FAA, other global regulators and its customers.\u201dPossible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space stationBut restoring confidence among the public, Boeing\u2019s suppliers, airlines and members of Congress won\u2019t be easy. And it comes as the company must deal with the fallout of halting production of the flawed 737 Max airplane, ongoing scrutiny by the Federal Aviation Administration, and lawsuits brought by the families of victims who died in the crashes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the months since the crashes \u2014 one in October 2018 in Indonesia and the other in March in Ethiopia \u2014 revelation after revelation about the software\u2019s development and approval led relatives of the crashes\u2019 victims as well as members of Congress to angrily accuse Boeing of putting profits ahead of safety. Boeing, whose sales of commercial aviation aircraft have long been its cash cow, saw it\u2019s bottom line take an $8 billion hit. On Dec. 16, it announced that it would temporarily suspend manufacture of the 737 Max beginning in January.Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said that Muilenburg\u2019s departure was \u201clong overdue.\u201d\u201cUnder his watch, a long-admired company made a number of devastating decisions that suggest profit took priority over safety,\u201d said DeFazio, who has been leading an investigation into the crashes and the development of the Max aircraft. \u201cI hope the decision to remove Muilenburg means that Boeing is also ready to mark a new chapter in its commitment to safety and accountability.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn October, on the anniversary of the first crash, Democrats confronted Muilenburg with documents they had gathered as part of their own investigation into the crashes, raising new questions about what Boeing knew about the risks posed by the design of an automated feature that was intended to mimic the handling of an earlier version of the plane but, in fact, repeatedly forced the nose of the plane down in a way pilots struggled to override under certain circumstances.Boeing had not revealed the details of the software\u2019s operation to airlines in an effort to portray the Max version of the plane as not requiring additional pilot training.Lawmakers took aim at Muilenburg directly, assailing him over his $30 million pay package and calling on him to resign. He did little to gain the confidence of the victims\u2019 families, who were sitting just feet from him, repeating a line about his boyhood on an Iowa farm so many times that it eventually prompted groans from those watching in the room.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAboulafia described the past year as a \u201ccascading series of mistakes.\u201d \u201cIt doesn\u2019t get much worse,\" he said, \"and it was made worse by very poor communication with the outside world: regulators, customers, Congress, suppliers, the general public. It was almost like a master class in bad communication.\u201dMuilenburg\u2019s departure was effective immediately. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission a layoff could earn him as much as $39 million depending on the conditions of his removal. The company\u2019s chief financial officer, Greg Smith, will serve as interim chief executive during the transition period.Boeing\u2019s stock jumped nearly 3 percent Monday, to close above $337 a share. Before Monday, Boeing\u2019s share price had dropped 22 percent since the March crash, erasing about $52 billion of its market value.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Friday, Boeing\u2019s problems were compounded when, after a flawless launch to space, a Boeing spacecraft designed to fly NASA astronauts did not achieve the correct orbit when the capsule\u2019s engines failed to fire as expected. The latest misstep forced the cancellation of the spacecraft\u2019s planned mission to the International Space Station.Muilenburg was present for the launch of the Starliner capsule, but made no public statement.Financial pain from Boeing 737 Max expected to deepen after production cutIn a note to Boeing employees Monday morning, Smith thanked Muilenburg for his nearly 35 years at Boeing and wrote that he \u201cgave his all to the company under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.\u201d\u201cThis has obviously been a difficult time for our company, and our people have pulled together in extraordinary ways,\u201d Smith wrote. \u201cOver the next few weeks as we transition to new leadership, I am committed to ensuring above all that we meet the needs of our stakeholders \u2014 especially our regulators, customers and employees \u2014 with transparency and humility.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe FAA issued a statement Monday saying Boeing informed the agency of Muilenburg\u2019s departure and reiterated that it is following no set schedule for when the Max will be cleared to fly again.\u201cThe FAA continues to follow a thorough process for returning the Boeing 737 MAX to passenger service,\u201d the agency\u2019s statement said. \u201cWe continue to work with other international aviation safety regulators to review the proposed changes to the aircraft. Our first priority is safety, and we have set no timeframe for when the work will be completed.\u201d\u201cWe expect that Boeing will support that process by focusing on the quality and timeliness of data submittals for FAA review, as well as being transparent in its relationship with the FAA as safety regulator.\u201dFollowing two deadly crashes, Boeing announced on Dec. 16 that it will end production of the 737 Max in January 2020. (Reuters)In a statement, Michael Stumo, whose 24-year-old daughter Samya Rose Stumo was killed in one of the 737 Max crashes, said that Muilenburg\u2019s resignation \u201cis a good first step toward restoring Boeing to a company that focuses on safety and innovation. Now that it\u2019s known what he and top Boeing officials knew, yet ignored, prior to the crashes, it has become clear how the company eroded in quality over the years.\u201dRobert A. Clifford, an attorney representing the families suing the company, said Boeing\u2019s board \u201cdoes not deserve a \u2018pat on the back\u2019 for this decision. In fact, their leadership decisions empowered Muilenburg and the company to create a culture where profits were put ahead of the safety of the global traveling public.\u201d Boeing is still trying to regain its footing after the crashes of two passenger jets that killed 346 people and prompted a global grounding of the 737 Max aircraft. Boeing\u2019s firing of its CEO seen as move to \u2018restore confidence\u2019 in wake of 737 Max crisis ",
        "author": "Rachel Siegel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s firing of its CEO seen as move to \u2018restore confidence\u2019 in wake of 737 Max crisis  (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "479",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/23/boeing-chief-executive-dennis-muilenburg-resigns-board-seeks-restore-confidence-wake-max-crisis/",
        "text": "Boeing fired its chief executive officer Monday in a move intended to bring to a close the most tumultuous period in its 103-year history, marked by a bungled response to two fatal airplane crashes blamed on a flawed software program and poor oversight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAviation industry analysts said the sudden dismissal of Dennis Muilenburg, who had worked for Boeing for more than three decades, was a desperate attempt by the company to win back the trust of regulators and the public after crashes of its 737 Max aircraft led to the deaths of 346 people and accusations that Boeing had misled regulators and its customers. Whether it would be enough was not immediately clear.Story continues below advertisement\u201cTheir credibility has been shredded,\u201d said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee that oversees aviation and a sharp critic of Muilenburg\u2019s leadership. \u201cThey have to rebuild it. This firing can be a turning point to restoring and redeeming the company, but there has to be a management house cleaning that reflects a change in the culture of secrecy.\u201dAdvertisementOthers noted that Muilenburg would be replaced as CEO and president by Boeing\u2019s chairman, David L. Calhoun, who has served on Boeing\u2019s board for a decade and has no engineering background.In the short term, Calhoun would make a great leader because of his ability \u201cto reassure the outside world and stabilize the situation,\u201d said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst for the Teal Group. But he is an unlikely agent of dramatic change. \u201cIn an ideal world he\u2019d have aerospace engineering, program management and commercial marketplace experience,\u201d Aboulafia said. \"This is not exactly a recipe for change.\u201dKey events leading up to Boeing\u2019s firing of MuilenbergIn a statement Monday, Boeing said \"The Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders. Under the Company\u2019s new leadership, Boeing will operate with a renewed commitment to full transparency, including effective and proactive communication with the FAA, other global regulators and its customers.\u201dPossible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space stationBut restoring confidence among the public, Boeing\u2019s suppliers, airlines and members of Congress won\u2019t be easy. And it comes as the company must deal with the fallout of halting production of the flawed 737 Max airplane, ongoing scrutiny by the Federal Aviation Administration, and lawsuits brought by the families of victims who died in the crashes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the months since the crashes \u2014 one in October 2018 in Indonesia and the other in March in Ethiopia \u2014 revelation after revelation about the software\u2019s development and approval led relatives of the crashes\u2019 victims as well as members of Congress to angrily accuse Boeing of putting profits ahead of safety. Boeing, whose sales of commercial aviation aircraft have long been its cash cow, saw it\u2019s bottom line take an $8 billion hit. On Dec. 16, it announced that it would temporarily suspend manufacture of the 737 Max beginning in January.Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said that Muilenburg\u2019s departure was \u201clong overdue.\u201d\u201cUnder his watch, a long-admired company made a number of devastating decisions that suggest profit took priority over safety,\u201d said DeFazio, who has been leading an investigation into the crashes and the development of the Max aircraft. \u201cI hope the decision to remove Muilenburg means that Boeing is also ready to mark a new chapter in its commitment to safety and accountability.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn October, on the anniversary of the first crash, Democrats confronted Muilenburg with documents they had gathered as part of their own investigation into the crashes, raising new questions about what Boeing knew about the risks posed by the design of an automated feature that was intended to mimic the handling of an earlier version of the plane but, in fact, repeatedly forced the nose of the plane down in a way pilots struggled to override under certain circumstances.Boeing had not revealed the details of the software\u2019s operation to airlines in an effort to portray the Max version of the plane as not requiring additional pilot training.Lawmakers took aim at Muilenburg directly, assailing him over his $30 million pay package and calling on him to resign. He did little to gain the confidence of the victims\u2019 families, who were sitting just feet from him, repeating a line about his boyhood on an Iowa farm so many times that it eventually prompted groans from those watching in the room.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAboulafia described the past year as a \u201ccascading series of mistakes.\u201d \u201cIt doesn\u2019t get much worse,\" he said, \"and it was made worse by very poor communication with the outside world: regulators, customers, Congress, suppliers, the general public. It was almost like a master class in bad communication.\u201dMuilenburg\u2019s departure was effective immediately. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission a layoff could earn him as much as $39 million depending on the conditions of his removal. The company\u2019s chief financial officer, Greg Smith, will serve as interim chief executive during the transition period.Boeing\u2019s stock jumped nearly 3 percent Monday, to close above $337 a share. Before Monday, Boeing\u2019s share price had dropped 22 percent since the March crash, erasing about $52 billion of its market value.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Friday, Boeing\u2019s problems were compounded when, after a flawless launch to space, a Boeing spacecraft designed to fly NASA astronauts did not achieve the correct orbit when the capsule\u2019s engines failed to fire as expected. The latest misstep forced the cancellation of the spacecraft\u2019s planned mission to the International Space Station.Muilenburg was present for the launch of the Starliner capsule, but made no public statement.Financial pain from Boeing 737 Max expected to deepen after production cutIn a note to Boeing employees Monday morning, Smith thanked Muilenburg for his nearly 35 years at Boeing and wrote that he \u201cgave his all to the company under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.\u201d\u201cThis has obviously been a difficult time for our company, and our people have pulled together in extraordinary ways,\u201d Smith wrote. \u201cOver the next few weeks as we transition to new leadership, I am committed to ensuring above all that we meet the needs of our stakeholders \u2014 especially our regulators, customers and employees \u2014 with transparency and humility.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe FAA issued a statement Monday saying Boeing informed the agency of Muilenburg\u2019s departure and reiterated that it is following no set schedule for when the Max will be cleared to fly again.\u201cThe FAA continues to follow a thorough process for returning the Boeing 737 MAX to passenger service,\u201d the agency\u2019s statement said. \u201cWe continue to work with other international aviation safety regulators to review the proposed changes to the aircraft. Our first priority is safety, and we have set no timeframe for when the work will be completed.\u201d\u201cWe expect that Boeing will support that process by focusing on the quality and timeliness of data submittals for FAA review, as well as being transparent in its relationship with the FAA as safety regulator.\u201dFollowing two deadly crashes, Boeing announced on Dec. 16 that it will end production of the 737 Max in January 2020. (Reuters)In a statement, Michael Stumo, whose 24-year-old daughter Samya Rose Stumo was killed in one of the 737 Max crashes, said that Muilenburg\u2019s resignation \u201cis a good first step toward restoring Boeing to a company that focuses on safety and innovation. Now that it\u2019s known what he and top Boeing officials knew, yet ignored, prior to the crashes, it has become clear how the company eroded in quality over the years.\u201dRobert A. Clifford, an attorney representing the families suing the company, said Boeing\u2019s board \u201cdoes not deserve a \u2018pat on the back\u2019 for this decision. In fact, their leadership decisions empowered Muilenburg and the company to create a culture where profits were put ahead of the safety of the global traveling public.\u201d Boeing is still trying to regain its footing after the crashes of two passenger jets that killed 346 people and prompted a global grounding of the 737 Max aircraft. Boeing\u2019s firing of its CEO seen as move to \u2018restore confidence\u2019 in wake of 737 Max crisis ",
        "author": "Rachel Siegel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s firing of its CEO seen as move to \u2018restore confidence\u2019 in wake of 737 Max crisis  (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "480",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/23/boeing-chief-executive-dennis-muilenburg-resigns-board-seeks-restore-confidence-wake-max-crisis/",
        "text": "Boeing fired its chief executive officer Monday in a move intended to bring to a close the most tumultuous period in its 103-year history, marked by a bungled response to two fatal airplane crashes blamed on a flawed software program and poor oversight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAviation industry analysts said the sudden dismissal of Dennis Muilenburg, who had worked for Boeing for more than three decades, was a desperate attempt by the company to win back the trust of regulators and the public after crashes of its 737 Max aircraft led to the deaths of 346 people and accusations that Boeing had misled regulators and its customers. Whether it would be enough was not immediately clear.Story continues below advertisement\u201cTheir credibility has been shredded,\u201d said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee that oversees aviation and a sharp critic of Muilenburg\u2019s leadership. \u201cThey have to rebuild it. This firing can be a turning point to restoring and redeeming the company, but there has to be a management house cleaning that reflects a change in the culture of secrecy.\u201dAdvertisementOthers noted that Muilenburg would be replaced as CEO and president by Boeing\u2019s chairman, David L. Calhoun, who has served on Boeing\u2019s board for a decade and has no engineering background.In the short term, Calhoun would make a great leader because of his ability \u201cto reassure the outside world and stabilize the situation,\u201d said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst for the Teal Group. But he is an unlikely agent of dramatic change. \u201cIn an ideal world he\u2019d have aerospace engineering, program management and commercial marketplace experience,\u201d Aboulafia said. \"This is not exactly a recipe for change.\u201dKey events leading up to Boeing\u2019s firing of MuilenbergIn a statement Monday, Boeing said \"The Board of Directors decided that a change in leadership was necessary to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders. Under the Company\u2019s new leadership, Boeing will operate with a renewed commitment to full transparency, including effective and proactive communication with the FAA, other global regulators and its customers.\u201dPossible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space stationBut restoring confidence among the public, Boeing\u2019s suppliers, airlines and members of Congress won\u2019t be easy. And it comes as the company must deal with the fallout of halting production of the flawed 737 Max airplane, ongoing scrutiny by the Federal Aviation Administration, and lawsuits brought by the families of victims who died in the crashes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the months since the crashes \u2014 one in October 2018 in Indonesia and the other in March in Ethiopia \u2014 revelation after revelation about the software\u2019s development and approval led relatives of the crashes\u2019 victims as well as members of Congress to angrily accuse Boeing of putting profits ahead of safety. Boeing, whose sales of commercial aviation aircraft have long been its cash cow, saw it\u2019s bottom line take an $8 billion hit. On Dec. 16, it announced that it would temporarily suspend manufacture of the 737 Max beginning in January.Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said that Muilenburg\u2019s departure was \u201clong overdue.\u201d\u201cUnder his watch, a long-admired company made a number of devastating decisions that suggest profit took priority over safety,\u201d said DeFazio, who has been leading an investigation into the crashes and the development of the Max aircraft. \u201cI hope the decision to remove Muilenburg means that Boeing is also ready to mark a new chapter in its commitment to safety and accountability.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn October, on the anniversary of the first crash, Democrats confronted Muilenburg with documents they had gathered as part of their own investigation into the crashes, raising new questions about what Boeing knew about the risks posed by the design of an automated feature that was intended to mimic the handling of an earlier version of the plane but, in fact, repeatedly forced the nose of the plane down in a way pilots struggled to override under certain circumstances.Boeing had not revealed the details of the software\u2019s operation to airlines in an effort to portray the Max version of the plane as not requiring additional pilot training.Lawmakers took aim at Muilenburg directly, assailing him over his $30 million pay package and calling on him to resign. He did little to gain the confidence of the victims\u2019 families, who were sitting just feet from him, repeating a line about his boyhood on an Iowa farm so many times that it eventually prompted groans from those watching in the room.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAboulafia described the past year as a \u201ccascading series of mistakes.\u201d \u201cIt doesn\u2019t get much worse,\" he said, \"and it was made worse by very poor communication with the outside world: regulators, customers, Congress, suppliers, the general public. It was almost like a master class in bad communication.\u201dMuilenburg\u2019s departure was effective immediately. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission a layoff could earn him as much as $39 million depending on the conditions of his removal. The company\u2019s chief financial officer, Greg Smith, will serve as interim chief executive during the transition period.Boeing\u2019s stock jumped nearly 3 percent Monday, to close above $337 a share. Before Monday, Boeing\u2019s share price had dropped 22 percent since the March crash, erasing about $52 billion of its market value.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Friday, Boeing\u2019s problems were compounded when, after a flawless launch to space, a Boeing spacecraft designed to fly NASA astronauts did not achieve the correct orbit when the capsule\u2019s engines failed to fire as expected. The latest misstep forced the cancellation of the spacecraft\u2019s planned mission to the International Space Station.Muilenburg was present for the launch of the Starliner capsule, but made no public statement.Financial pain from Boeing 737 Max expected to deepen after production cutIn a note to Boeing employees Monday morning, Smith thanked Muilenburg for his nearly 35 years at Boeing and wrote that he \u201cgave his all to the company under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.\u201d\u201cThis has obviously been a difficult time for our company, and our people have pulled together in extraordinary ways,\u201d Smith wrote. \u201cOver the next few weeks as we transition to new leadership, I am committed to ensuring above all that we meet the needs of our stakeholders \u2014 especially our regulators, customers and employees \u2014 with transparency and humility.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe FAA issued a statement Monday saying Boeing informed the agency of Muilenburg\u2019s departure and reiterated that it is following no set schedule for when the Max will be cleared to fly again.\u201cThe FAA continues to follow a thorough process for returning the Boeing 737 MAX to passenger service,\u201d the agency\u2019s statement said. \u201cWe continue to work with other international aviation safety regulators to review the proposed changes to the aircraft. Our first priority is safety, and we have set no timeframe for when the work will be completed.\u201d\u201cWe expect that Boeing will support that process by focusing on the quality and timeliness of data submittals for FAA review, as well as being transparent in its relationship with the FAA as safety regulator.\u201dFollowing two deadly crashes, Boeing announced on Dec. 16 that it will end production of the 737 Max in January 2020. (Reuters)In a statement, Michael Stumo, whose 24-year-old daughter Samya Rose Stumo was killed in one of the 737 Max crashes, said that Muilenburg\u2019s resignation \u201cis a good first step toward restoring Boeing to a company that focuses on safety and innovation. Now that it\u2019s known what he and top Boeing officials knew, yet ignored, prior to the crashes, it has become clear how the company eroded in quality over the years.\u201dRobert A. Clifford, an attorney representing the families suing the company, said Boeing\u2019s board \u201cdoes not deserve a \u2018pat on the back\u2019 for this decision. In fact, their leadership decisions empowered Muilenburg and the company to create a culture where profits were put ahead of the safety of the global traveling public.\u201d Boeing is still trying to regain its footing after the crashes of two passenger jets that killed 346 people and prompted a global grounding of the 737 Max aircraft. Boeing\u2019s firing of its CEO seen as move to \u2018restore confidence\u2019 in wake of 737 Max crisis ",
        "author": "Rachel Siegel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.  (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "481",
        "date": "2021-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/30/blue-origin-sexist-work-culture/",
        "text": "A longtime senior executive at Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin was terminated in 2019 after an outside law firm was brought in by the company to investigate employees\u2019 allegations of his inappropriate behavior in the workplace, according to company officials and multiple people familiar with the matter.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat revelation comes as the Bezos space venture faces new allegations that it fosters a dangerous work environment, where sexist conduct is perpetrated or ignored by senior leadership. In an essay released Thursday, Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications, wrote that the spaceflight company\u2019s \u201cculture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201d The essay was posted to the whistleblowing site Lioness, which publishes stories of workplace misconduct and places them with media outlets. Abrams\u2019s post cited 20 anonymous current and former employees.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAbrams writes that she represents a group of 21 former and current staffers, employed throughout the company, who participated in drafting the post on the condition of anonymity. In an interview with The Washington Post, one of the former staffers who participated in the blog post confirmed the allegations. The Post spoke with two other former employees, who were not part of the group that wrote the blog post, who said that Blue Origin\u2019s leadership has created a toxic work environment and that they were grateful the blog was made public. They, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.\u201cI personally experienced quite a bit of trauma at Blue Origin,\u201d Abrams said in an interview with The Post. \u201cI was not the first and I was not the last.\u201dThe Post was not immediately able to confirm all the identities of the 20 unnamed employees or corroborate the allegations in the letter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Blue Origin said that the company \u201chas no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct.\u201dJeff Bezos, Blue Origin\u2019s founder, owns The Washington Post.Three people with knowledge of the incident said Blue Origin hired the Perkins Coie law firm to investigate Walt McCleery, vice president of recruiting, and found that his behavior was inappropriate. Company officials, who declined to be named, confirmed in an interview on Thursday that it had hired the law firm and terminated McCleery, who had been at the company since 2004.Story continues below advertisementOne person who was not a signatory to the blog post said in an interview that she once was in a meeting with McCleery and executives from an outside company when McCleery turned to the executives and said: \u201cI apologize for [her] being emotional. It must be her time of the month.\u201dAdvertisementThe comment \u201cwas tough for me,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was embarrassing and awkward.\u201d She said she had to quit her job there \u201cbecause I couldn\u2019t take it anymore.\u201dIn a short interview, McCleery said he was unaware of the blog post or the allegations, which he denied. \u201cNot true as far as I\u2019m concerned,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t have any other comments.\u201d When asked how he came to leave Blue Origin, he said, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how it came to an end. That\u2019s private. That\u2019s my information.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe blog post doesn\u2019t list any names, but describes several employees who allegedly treated female co-workers poorly. Abrams and the others wrote that one former executive \u201cfrequently treated women in a condescending and demeaning manner, calling them \u2018baby girl,\u2019 \u2018baby doll\u2019 or 'sweetheart\u2019 and inquiring about their dating lives.\u201dAdvertisementThe behavior was so well known, the post said, \u201cthat some women at the company took to warning new female hires to stay away from him, all while he was in charge of recruiting employees. It appeared to many of us that he was protected by his close personal relationship with Bezos \u2014 it took him physically groping a female subordinate for him to finally be let go.\u201d Representatives from Blue Origin declined to comment on the matter.Another former employee, who participated in writing the blog post, told The Post that working at Blue Origin was \u201ca dispiriting and chaotic experience. That behavior was modeled and not held accountable. Even junior members started to mirror that. It\u2019s such a mess.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe allegations come at a pivotal moment for Blue Origin, as the company attempts to compete in the increasingly crowded race to privatize space travel. Its ambitions have grown since it was founded by Bezos in 2000, as a consortium of scientists and engineers dedicated to disrupting the spaceflight industry. Blue Origin has proceeded slowly toward this goal. The company marked its first human spaceflight this summer, more than 20 years after its founding, a milestone that lagged behind Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic.AdvertisementThe group behind the blog post said that several senior leaders at Blue Origin had acted inappropriately with women and that this behavior was known throughout the company.\u201cWe had this growing community\u201d of people who left Blue Origin, Abrams said. \u201cWe joked we\u2019d create \u2018I survived Blue Origin patches.\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an interview with CBS aired on Thursday morning, Abrams said she was fired from Blue Origin in 2019, after clashing with superiors about the culture at the company. As she was being terminated, she said her manager said she was being fired because Blue Origin chief executive Bob Smith could no longer trust her.In a statement Thursday to The Post, Blue Origin said, \u201cMs. Abrams was dismissed for cause two years ago after repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cI never received any warnings, verbal or written, from management regarding issues involving federal export control regulations,\u201d Abrams wrote in a statement to The Post.Story continues below advertisementAfter she was ousted from the company, Abrams said she met with several current and former staffers, often at her home, and together they made plans to air their grievances against the company, culminating in the essay. The group members come from all the major departments at the company, Abrams said, and more than half were in or have technical roles.The document also alleges that the high-pressure contest to advance spaceflight technology and edge out competing outfits has undermined safety concerns at the company. \u201cAt Blue Origin, a common question during high-level meetings was, \u2018When will Elon or Branson fly?\u2019 \" the group wrote.Advertisement\u201cCompeting with other billionaires \u2014 and \u2018making progress for Jeff\u2019 \u2014 seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule,\u201d the group wrote. Blue Origin declined to comment on this matter.Story continues below advertisementMany of the current and former employees said they would not fly in a vehicle made by Blue Origin. \u201cAnd no wonder \u2014 we have all seen how often teams are stretched beyond reasonable limits,\u201d they said.Bezos was one of four crew members on the company\u2019s first human flight in July.Blue Origin isn\u2019t the first Bezos-founded company to be accused of fostering a toxic culture. After more than 550 Amazon employees signed on to a petition describing an \u201cunderlying culture of systemic discrimination, harassment, bullying and bias against women and underrepresented groups,\u201d the company opened an investigation into the culture of its cloud-computing unit. On Tuesday, Amazon settled a long-running dispute with two former tech workers it fired after they criticized the company for its climate policies and warehouse safety record.AdvertisementThe allegations come as Blue Origin presses a legal challenge against the federal government to receive a slice of NASA\u2019s lucrative lunar lander contract, in an attempt to force the agency to fund a second spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.The lawsuit, filed last month, came after Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision to award a $2.9 billion contract to develop the Human Landing System solely to Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Alice Crites contributed to this report. Blue Origin fosters a sexist, toxic work culture, letter led by former employees alleges Blue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture. ",
        "author": "Hamza Shaban"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Space Flight Postponed After Mishap at Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "482",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-space-flight-postponed-after-mishap-at-space-station-11627589940?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=6",
        "text": "Your browser does not support the audio tag.What\u2019s NewsBoeing's Space Launch Delayed as Company Looks to FutureA.M. Edition for July 30. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg on the postponed launch of the Starliner space capsule and its importance for Boeing's future. Actress Scarlett Johansson sues Disney for offering the latest Marvel movie 'Black Widow' on its streaming service at the same time as the theatrical release. U.S. cryptocurrency traders look offshore despite a ban. And, some companies consider a four-day work week. Marc Stewart hosts.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\n\u201cWe want to ensure that the space station is in a stable configuration, and ready for Starliner to arrive,\u201d said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, which is overseeing the Starliner effort. The Boeing capsule could be launched on Aug. 3, he said.\nBoeing said the company is ready for the Starliner launch \u201cwhen the time is right.\u201d \n\nOfficials decided to put off launching the Boeing vehicle after a flight-control team noticed at 12:45 p.m. ET on Thursday that the Russian spacecraft, called the Nauka, had inadvertently fired its thrusters while it was docked to the space station, causing the space station to veer out of its expected orientation in space. \nThe Nauka vessel, which was uncrewed, had connected with the space station Thursday morning. The 43-foot-long, 23-ton module is meant to serve in part as a new science facility and docking port, according to a NASA website. \nRoscosmos, Russia\u2019s space agency, didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nFor roughly an hour on Thursday, staffers supporting the Nauka\u2019s docking at the space station worked to return the facility to a normal orientation in space, NASA executives said at a briefing after the Starliner flight was postponed.\nCommunications between the facility and NASA failed at one point for four minutes and again for seven minutes, according to Joel Montalbano, the agency\u2019s manager for the space station program. He said teams were able to reorient it by firing countervailing thrusters, he said.\nCrew members on the station didn\u2019t face any immediate danger during the operation, Mr. Montalbano said.\n.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule was slated for launch Friday afternoon. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Space Flight Postponed After Mishap at Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "483",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-space-flight-postponed-after-mishap-at-space-station-11627589940?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=16",
        "text": "Your browser does not support the audio tag.What\u2019s NewsBoeing's Space Launch Delayed as Company Looks to FutureA.M. Edition for July 30. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg on the postponed launch of the Starliner space capsule and its importance for Boeing's future. Actress Scarlett Johansson sues Disney for offering the latest Marvel movie 'Black Widow' on its streaming service at the same time as the theatrical release. U.S. cryptocurrency traders look offshore despite a ban. And, some companies consider a four-day work week. Marc Stewart hosts.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\n\u201cWe want to ensure that the space station is in a stable configuration, and ready for Starliner to arrive,\u201d said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, which is overseeing the Starliner effort. The Boeing capsule could be launched on Aug. 3, he said.\nBoeing said the company is ready for the Starliner launch \u201cwhen the time is right.\u201d \n\nOfficials decided to put off launching the Boeing vehicle after a flight-control team noticed at 12:45 p.m. ET on Thursday that the Russian spacecraft, called the Nauka, had inadvertently fired its thrusters while it was docked to the space station, causing the space station to veer out of its expected orientation in space. \nThe Nauka vessel, which was uncrewed, had connected with the space station Thursday morning. The 43-foot-long, 23-ton module is meant to serve in part as a new science facility and docking port, according to a NASA website. \nRoscosmos, Russia\u2019s space agency, didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nFor roughly an hour on Thursday, staffers supporting the Nauka\u2019s docking at the space station worked to return the facility to a normal orientation in space, NASA executives said at a briefing after the Starliner flight was postponed.\nCommunications between the facility and NASA failed at one point for four minutes and again for seven minutes, according to Joel Montalbano, the agency\u2019s manager for the space station program. He said teams were able to reorient it by firing countervailing thrusters, he said.\nCrew members on the station didn\u2019t face any immediate danger during the operation, Mr. Montalbano said.\n.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule was slated for launch Friday afternoon. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Satellite Internet Project Is Too Risky, Rivals Say (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "484",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-satellite-internet-project-is-too-risky-rivals-say-11618827368?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=8",
        "text": "Your browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingRivals Raise Concerns About SpaceX's Starlink ProjectElon Musk's internet satellite venture, Starlink, is authorized to send 12,000 satellites into orbit to expand internet access, and it is seeking permission for another 30,000. But rivals are raising concerns about the company's approach. Correspondent Bojan Pancevski joins host Amanda Lewellyn to explain.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nNow, rival companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Viasat Inc.,\n\n VSAT -0.86%\n\n\n OneWeb Global Ltd., Hughes Network Systems and Boeing Co. are challenging Starlink\u2019s space race in front of regulators in the U.S. and Europe. Some complain that Mr. Musk\u2019s satellites are blocking their own devices\u2019 signals and have physically endangered their fleets.\nMr. Musk\u2019s endeavor is still in beta testing but it has already disrupted the industry, and even spurred the European Union to develop a rival space-based internet project to be unveiled by the end of the year.\n\n\nThe critics\u2019 main argument is that Mr. Musk\u2019s launch-first, upgrade-later principle, which made his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n TSLA -5.12%\n\n\n electric car company a pioneer, gives priority to speed over quality, filling Earth\u2019s already crowded orbit with satellites that may need fixing after they launch.\n\u201cSpaceX has a gung-ho approach to space,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris McLaughlin,\n\n\n\n government affairs chief for rival OneWeb. \u201cEvery one of our satellites is like a Ford Focus\u2014it does the same thing, it gets tested, it works\u2014while Starlink satellites are like Teslas: They launch them and then they have to upgrade and fix them, or even replace them altogether,\u201d Mr. McLaughlin said.\nSpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn image of a galaxy group from a telescope in Arizona. The diagonal lines are trails of reflected light from 25 Starlink satellites.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Victoria Girgis/Lowell Observatory\n \n\n\n\nAround 5% of the first batch of Starlink satellites failed, SpaceX said in 2019. They were left to gradually fall back to earth and vaporize in the process. In November 2020, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calculated that the Starlink failure rate was nearly 3%. Mr. McDowell said Starlink has vastly improved the design of their satellites since then, and that the failure rate is currently below 1%, and on track to improve further.\nEven with the constant improvement, Mr. McDowell said, Starlink will operate so many satellites that even a low failure rate would mean a relatively high threat to orbital safety because of the potential for collisions. \u201cThey clearly have been making continuous improvements\u2026but it\u2019s a challenging thing they are doing and it\u2019s not clear that they will be able to manage the final constellation,\u201d he said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDoes Elon Musk\u2019s satellite venture pose a threat to space safety? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nStarlink operates more than 1,300 spacecraft in Earth\u2019s lower orbit and is adding some 120 more every month. Its fleet is now on track to top the total number of satellites that have been launched since the 1950s\u2014around 9,000.\nOrbital space is finite, and the current lack of universal regulation means companies can place satellites on a first-come, first-served basis. And Mr. Musk is on track to stake a claim for most of the free orbital real estate, largely because, unlike competitors, he owns his own rockets.\nIn the coming days, the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. is set to approve a request by SpaceX to modify its license and allow a greater number of satellites to orbit at a lower altitude of around 550 kilometers (a kilometer is 0.625 mile). If approved, competitor satellites would have to navigate around SpaceX\u2019s fleet to place their own spacecraft.\nOther companies operating in space have asked the FCC to impose conditions on SpaceX, including lowering its fleet\u2019s failure rate to 1 in 1,000, and improving collision-avoidance capabilities while ensuring they don\u2019t block the transmissions of other craft orbiting above them.\n\u201cYou should have fewer satellites and make them more capable,\u201d Mark Dankberg, Viasat founder and executive chairman, said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX's new Starlink satellite internet service is being touted as a rural internet game changer. WSJ spent time with a few beta testers in a very remote area of Washington state to see if it's truly the solution to the global broadband gap. Photo Illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nOn Twitter, Mr. Musk commented on Mr. Dankberg\u2019s earlier warnings that his company posed a hazard to orbital traffic by tweeting: \u201cStarlink \u2018poses a hazard\u2019 to Viasat\u2019s profits, more like it.\u201d\nA spokesman for Boeing, which is also challenging Starlink at the FCC, said i Elon Musk\u2019s internet satellite venture has spawned an unlikely alliance of competitors, regulators and experts who say the billionaire is building a near-monopoly that is threatening space safety and the environment. ",
        "author": "Bojan Pancevski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Satellite Internet Project Is Too Risky, Rivals Say (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "485",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-satellite-internet-project-is-too-risky-rivals-say-11618827368?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=21",
        "text": "Your browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingRivals Raise Concerns About SpaceX's Starlink ProjectElon Musk's internet satellite venture, Starlink, is authorized to send 12,000 satellites into orbit to expand internet access, and it is seeking permission for another 30,000. But rivals are raising concerns about the company's approach. Correspondent Bojan Pancevski joins host Amanda Lewellyn to explain.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nNow, rival companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Viasat Inc.,\n\n VSAT -0.86%\n\n\n OneWeb Global Ltd., Hughes Network Systems and Boeing Co. are challenging Starlink\u2019s space race in front of regulators in the U.S. and Europe. Some complain that Mr. Musk\u2019s satellites are blocking their own devices\u2019 signals and have physically endangered their fleets.\nMr. Musk\u2019s endeavor is still in beta testing but it has already disrupted the industry, and even spurred the European Union to develop a rival space-based internet project to be unveiled by the end of the year.\n\n\nThe critics\u2019 main argument is that Mr. Musk\u2019s launch-first, upgrade-later principle, which made his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n TSLA -5.12%\n\n\n electric car company a pioneer, gives priority to speed over quality, filling Earth\u2019s already crowded orbit with satellites that may need fixing after they launch.\n\u201cSpaceX has a gung-ho approach to space,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris McLaughlin,\n\n\n\n government affairs chief for rival OneWeb. \u201cEvery one of our satellites is like a Ford Focus\u2014it does the same thing, it gets tested, it works\u2014while Starlink satellites are like Teslas: They launch them and then they have to upgrade and fix them, or even replace them altogether,\u201d Mr. McLaughlin said.\nSpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn image of a galaxy group from a telescope in Arizona. The diagonal lines are trails of reflected light from 25 Starlink satellites.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Victoria Girgis/Lowell Observatory\n \n\n\n\nAround 5% of the first batch of Starlink satellites failed, SpaceX said in 2019. They were left to gradually fall back to earth and vaporize in the process. In November 2020, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calculated that the Starlink failure rate was nearly 3%. Mr. McDowell said Starlink has vastly improved the design of their satellites since then, and that the failure rate is currently below 1%, and on track to improve further.\nEven with the constant improvement, Mr. McDowell said, Starlink will operate so many satellites that even a low failure rate would mean a relatively high threat to orbital safety because of the potential for collisions. \u201cThey clearly have been making continuous improvements\u2026but it\u2019s a challenging thing they are doing and it\u2019s not clear that they will be able to manage the final constellation,\u201d he said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDoes Elon Musk\u2019s satellite venture pose a threat to space safety? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nStarlink operates more than 1,300 spacecraft in Earth\u2019s lower orbit and is adding some 120 more every month. Its fleet is now on track to top the total number of satellites that have been launched since the 1950s\u2014around 9,000.\nOrbital space is finite, and the current lack of universal regulation means companies can place satellites on a first-come, first-served basis. And Mr. Musk is on track to stake a claim for most of the free orbital real estate, largely because, unlike competitors, he owns his own rockets.\nIn the coming days, the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. is set to approve a request by SpaceX to modify its license and allow a greater number of satellites to orbit at a lower altitude of around 550 kilometers (a kilometer is 0.625 mile). If approved, competitor satellites would have to navigate around SpaceX\u2019s fleet to place their own spacecraft.\nOther companies operating in space have asked the FCC to impose conditions on SpaceX, including lowering its fleet\u2019s failure rate to 1 in 1,000, and improving collision-avoidance capabilities while ensuring they don\u2019t block the transmissions of other craft orbiting above them.\n\u201cYou should have fewer satellites and make them more capable,\u201d Mark Dankberg, Viasat founder and executive chairman, said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX's new Starlink satellite internet service is being touted as a rural internet game changer. WSJ spent time with a few beta testers in a very remote area of Washington state to see if it's truly the solution to the global broadband gap. Photo Illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nOn Twitter, Mr. Musk commented on Mr. Dankberg\u2019s earlier warnings that his company posed a hazard to orbital traffic by tweeting: \u201cStarlink \u2018poses a hazard\u2019 to Viasat\u2019s profits, more like it.\u201d\nA spokesman for Boeing, which is also challenging Starlink at the FCC, said i Elon Musk\u2019s internet satellite venture has spawned an unlikely alliance of competitors, regulators and experts who say the billionaire is building a near-monopoly that is threatening space safety and the environment. ",
        "author": "Bojan Pancevski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Satellite Internet Project Is Too Risky, Rivals Say (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "486",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-satellite-internet-project-is-too-risky-rivals-say-11618827368?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=32",
        "text": "Your browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingRivals Raise Concerns About SpaceX's Starlink ProjectElon Musk's internet satellite venture, Starlink, is authorized to send 12,000 satellites into orbit to expand internet access, and it is seeking permission for another 30,000. But rivals are raising concerns about the company's approach. Correspondent Bojan Pancevski joins host Amanda Lewellyn to explain.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nNow, rival companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Viasat Inc.,\n\n VSAT 0.81%\n\n\n OneWeb Global Ltd., Hughes Network Systems and Boeing Co. are challenging Starlink\u2019s space race in front of regulators in the U.S. and Europe. Some complain that Mr. Musk\u2019s satellites are blocking their own devices\u2019 signals and have physically endangered their fleets.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s endeavor is still in beta testing but it has already disrupted the industry, and even spurred the European Union to develop a rival space-based internet project to be unveiled by the end of the year.\n\n\nThe critics\u2019 main argument is that Mr. Musk\u2019s launch-first, upgrade-later principle, which made his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n TSLA -2.41%\n\n\n electric car company a pioneer, gives priority to speed over quality, filling Earth\u2019s already crowded orbit with satellites that may need fixing after they launch.\n\u201cSpaceX has a gung-ho approach to space,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris McLaughlin,\n\n\n\n government affairs chief for rival OneWeb. \u201cEvery one of our satellites is like a Ford Focus\u2014it does the same thing, it gets tested, it works\u2014while Starlink satellites are like Teslas: They launch them and then they have to upgrade and fix them, or even replace them altogether,\u201d Mr. McLaughlin said.\nSpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn image of a galaxy group from a telescope in Arizona. The diagonal lines are trails of reflected light from 25 Starlink satellites.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Victoria Girgis/Lowell Observatory\n \n\n\n\nAround 5% of the first batch of Starlink satellites failed, SpaceX said in 2019. They were left to gradually fall back to earth and vaporize in the process. In November 2020, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calculated that the Starlink failure rate was nearly 3%. Mr. McDowell said Starlink has vastly improved the design of their satellites since then, and that the failure rate is currently below 1%, and on track to improve further.\nEven with the constant improvement, Mr. McDowell said, Starlink will operate so many satellites that even a low failure rate would mean a relatively high threat to orbital safety because of the potential for collisions. \u201cThey clearly have been making continuous improvements\u2026but it\u2019s a challenging thing they are doing and it\u2019s not clear that they will be able to manage the final constellation,\u201d he said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDoes Elon Musk\u2019s satellite venture pose a threat to space safety? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nStarlink operates more than 1,300 spacecraft in Earth\u2019s lower orbit and is adding some 120 more every month. Its fleet is now on track to top the total number of satellites that have been launched since the 1950s\u2014around 9,000.\nOrbital space is finite, and the current lack of universal regulation means companies can place satellites on a first-come, first-served basis. And Mr. Musk is on track to stake a claim for most of the free orbital real estate, largely because, unlike competitors, he owns his own rockets.\nIn the coming days, the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. is set to approve a request by SpaceX to modify its license and allow a greater number of satellites to orbit at a lower altitude of around 550 kilometers (a kilometer is 0.625 mile). If approved, competitor satellites would have to navigate around SpaceX\u2019s fleet to place their own spacecraft.\nOther companies operating in space have asked the FCC to impose conditions on SpaceX, including lowering its fleet\u2019s failure rate to 1 in 1,000, and improving collision-avoidance capabilities while ensuring they don\u2019t block the transmissions of other craft orbiting above them.\n\u201cYou should have fewer satellites and make them more capable,\u201d Mark Dankberg, Viasat founder and executive chairman, said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX's new Starlink satellite internet service is being touted as a rural internet game changer. WSJ spent time with a few beta testers in a very remote area of Washington state to see if it's truly the solution to the global broadband gap. Photo Illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nOn Twitter, Mr. Musk commented on Mr. Dankberg\u2019s earlier warnings that his company posed a hazard to orbital traffic by tweeting: \u201cStarlink \u2018poses a hazard\u2019 to Viasat\u2019s profits, more like it.\u201d\nA spokesman for Boeing, which is also challenging Starlink at the FCC, sai Elon Musk\u2019s internet satellite venture has spawned an unlikely alliance of competitors, regulators and experts who say the billionaire is building a near-monopoly that is threatening space safety and the environment. ",
        "author": "Bojan Pancevski"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Launch (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "487",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-space-flight-blue-origin-watch-when-11626642755?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=6",
        "text": "Why all the fuss about Jeff Bezos going to space? Mr. Bezos is putting himself to the test on his rocket\u2019s inaugural crewed flight. He has said he hopes this will be the first of thousands that can make space travel safe and routine, and cheap enough to allow millions to follow. Eventually.\nRichard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n also plans to take tourists to space after flying its founder there earlier this month. Blue Origin aims eventually to use its space exploration to try to tap the energy and material resources of the solar system.\n\n\nHow can I watch the Blue Origin launch?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew Shepard preparing to lift off from Van Horn, Texas, in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n blue origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe flight is scheduled for 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday and will be livestreamed by Blue Origin starting at 7.30 a.m., and later by wsj.com. Weather or technical glitches could delay the launch from Van Horn, Texas. The current forecast shows clear but gusty conditions.\nBlue Origin has discouraged visitors from approaching the launch site on Tuesday, with part of nearby Highway 54 being closed. In an early morning tweet Tuesday, the company said the New Shepard ship had reached the launch pad, which is located some distance from a barn where Blue Origin employees and guests on site for the flight are waiting for the event to begin.\nHow will Blue Origin take him to the edge of space and back again? The New Shepard can carry six people, with the rocket sending the capsule up more than 62 miles. The reusable rocket and capsule being used on Tuesday are making their third flight\u2014Blue Origin has tested the system with 15 autonomous flights without passengers. The capsule separates and affords a few minutes of weightlessness before it descends and lands in the nearby Texas desert. The rocket lands vertically back at the launch site.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nHow does it compare with Virgin Galactic? Blue Origin uses a conventional rocket and space capsule that launches and lands vertically, so it is quicker than Virgin Galactic\u2019s vehicle to reach the edge of space, and the entire flight is 11 minutes. Virgin Galactic employs an aircraft to lift its six-seat space plane aloft, before releasing it, firing a rocket to take it higher. The space plane then glides back unpowered to the ground, with the whole trip taking about 90 minutes.\nAlexa, where does space start? The lack of a definition in international law has purists and space companies sparring. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard is designed to pass the Karman Line at 62 miles above Earth, an arbitrary line above which winged aircraft can no longer fly. Virgin Galactic flies above 50 miles, another arbitrary line, though one at which some scientists say objects can still orbit the planet.\nWho is going to space with Jeff Bezos?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMark Bezos will accompany his brother, Jeff, on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Amy Harris/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos will be joined by his brother Mark; flying legend and longtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk; and a standby passenger. The winner who paid almost $30 million at a charity auction for a seat on the first flight was a no-show, so Blue Origin moved up Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen from a later flight to become its first paying customer. The second-placed offer from an unidentified bidder in May\u2019s auction was $27 million.\nMs. Funk, 82, and Mr. Daemen, 18, are both pilots and would, respectively, be the oldest and youngest people to reach space. The passengers all have to complete a 14-hour training session set to wrap up on Monday, including emergency features of the spacecraft, which includes an ejection system to power the capsule to safety in the event of an anomaly.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLongtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk, right, is also set to be a passenger on the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWhat can the passengers do up there? The capsule separates at 250,000 feet and continues up to the edge of space. Blue Origin emphasizes the capsule\u2019s big windows, which at 3.5 feet by 2.3 feet are six times bigger than those on a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 787 Dreamliner.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos in Space: What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be Like\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nBlue Origin said the newly minted astronauts would experience three or four minutes of weightlessness during which they can unbuckle from their seats, with time for a couple of somersaults.\nWhen can I go to space and how much are tickets? Blue Origin plans two more customer flights this year, with the next scheduled as early as September, but has The Amazon founder plans to make his first visit to space with a flight scheduled to launch at 9 a.m EDT on July 20. Here\u2019s what to know about the flight and how to watch the launch. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Launch (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "488",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-space-flight-blue-origin-watch-when-11626642755?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=17",
        "text": "Why all the fuss about Jeff Bezos going to space? Mr. Bezos is putting himself to the test on his rocket\u2019s inaugural crewed flight. He has said he hopes this will be the first of thousands that can make space travel safe and routine, and cheap enough to allow millions to follow. Eventually.\nRichard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n also plans to take tourists to space after flying its founder there earlier this month. Blue Origin aims eventually to use its space exploration to try to tap the energy and material resources of the solar system.\n\n\nHow can I watch the Blue Origin launch?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew Shepard preparing to lift off from Van Horn, Texas, in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n blue origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe flight is scheduled for 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday and will be livestreamed by Blue Origin starting at 7.30 a.m., and later by wsj.com. Weather or technical glitches could delay the launch from Van Horn, Texas. The current forecast shows clear but gusty conditions.\nBlue Origin has discouraged visitors from approaching the launch site on Tuesday, with part of nearby Highway 54 being closed. In an early morning tweet Tuesday, the company said the New Shepard ship had reached the launch pad, which is located some distance from a barn where Blue Origin employees and guests on site for the flight are waiting for the event to begin.\nHow will Blue Origin take him to the edge of space and back again? The New Shepard can carry six people, with the rocket sending the capsule up more than 62 miles. The reusable rocket and capsule being used on Tuesday are making their third flight\u2014Blue Origin has tested the system with 15 autonomous flights without passengers. The capsule separates and affords a few minutes of weightlessness before it descends and lands in the nearby Texas desert. The rocket lands vertically back at the launch site.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nHow does it compare with Virgin Galactic? Blue Origin uses a conventional rocket and space capsule that launches and lands vertically, so it is quicker than Virgin Galactic\u2019s vehicle to reach the edge of space, and the entire flight is 11 minutes. Virgin Galactic employs an aircraft to lift its six-seat space plane aloft, before releasing it, firing a rocket to take it higher. The space plane then glides back unpowered to the ground, with the whole trip taking about 90 minutes.\nAlexa, where does space start? The lack of a definition in international law has purists and space companies sparring. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard is designed to pass the Karman Line at 62 miles above Earth, an arbitrary line above which winged aircraft can no longer fly. Virgin Galactic flies above 50 miles, another arbitrary line, though one at which some scientists say objects can still orbit the planet.\nWho is going to space with Jeff Bezos?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMark Bezos will accompany his brother, Jeff, on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Amy Harris/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos will be joined by his brother Mark; flying legend and longtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk; and a standby passenger. The winner who paid almost $30 million at a charity auction for a seat on the first flight was a no-show, so Blue Origin moved up Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen from a later flight to become its first paying customer. The second-placed offer from an unidentified bidder in May\u2019s auction was $27 million.\nMs. Funk, 82, and Mr. Daemen, 18, are both pilots and would, respectively, be the oldest and youngest people to reach space. The passengers all have to complete a 14-hour training session set to wrap up on Monday, including emergency features of the spacecraft, which includes an ejection system to power the capsule to safety in the event of an anomaly.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLongtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk, right, is also set to be a passenger on the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWhat can the passengers do up there? The capsule separates at 250,000 feet and continues up to the edge of space. Blue Origin emphasizes the capsule\u2019s big windows, which at 3.5 feet by 2.3 feet are six times bigger than those on a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 787 Dreamliner.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos in Space: What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be Like\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nBlue Origin said the newly minted astronauts would experience three or four minutes of weightlessness during which they can unbuckle from their seats, with time for a couple of somersaults.\nWhen can I go to space and how much are tickets? Blue Origin plans two more customer flights this year, with the next scheduled as early as September, but has The Amazon founder plans to make his first visit to space with a flight scheduled to launch at 9 a.m EDT on July 20. Here\u2019s what to know about the flight and how to watch the launch. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Launch (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "489",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-space-flight-blue-origin-watch-when-11626642755?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=26",
        "text": "Why all the fuss about Jeff Bezos going to space? Mr. Bezos is putting himself to the test on his rocket\u2019s inaugural crewed flight. He has said he hopes this will be the first of thousands that can make space travel safe and routine, and cheap enough to allow millions to follow. Eventually.\nRichard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n also plans to take tourists to space after flying its founder there earlier this month. Blue Origin aims eventually to use its space exploration to try to tap the energy and material resources of the solar system.\n\n\nHow can I watch the Blue Origin launch?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew Shepard preparing to lift off from Van Horn, Texas, in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n blue origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe flight is scheduled for 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday and will be livestreamed by Blue Origin starting at 7.30 a.m., and later by wsj.com. Weather or technical glitches could delay the launch from Van Horn, Texas. The current forecast shows clear but gusty conditions.\nBlue Origin has discouraged visitors from approaching the launch site on Tuesday, with part of nearby Highway 54 being closed. In an early morning tweet Tuesday, the company said the New Shepard ship had reached the launch pad, which is located some distance from a barn where Blue Origin employees and guests on site for the flight are waiting for the event to begin.\nHow will Blue Origin take him to the edge of space and back again? The New Shepard can carry six people, with the rocket sending the capsule up more than 62 miles. The reusable rocket and capsule being used on Tuesday are making their third flight\u2014Blue Origin has tested the system with 15 autonomous flights without passengers. The capsule separates and affords a few minutes of weightlessness before it descends and lands in the nearby Texas desert. The rocket lands vertically back at the launch site.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nHow does it compare with Virgin Galactic? Blue Origin uses a conventional rocket and space capsule that launches and lands vertically, so it is quicker than Virgin Galactic\u2019s vehicle to reach the edge of space, and the entire flight is 11 minutes. Virgin Galactic employs an aircraft to lift its six-seat space plane aloft, before releasing it, firing a rocket to take it higher. The space plane then glides back unpowered to the ground, with the whole trip taking about 90 minutes.\nAlexa, where does space start? The lack of a definition in international law has purists and space companies sparring. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard is designed to pass the Karman Line at 62 miles above Earth, an arbitrary line above which winged aircraft can no longer fly. Virgin Galactic flies above 50 miles, another arbitrary line, though one at which some scientists say objects can still orbit the planet.\nWho is going to space with Jeff Bezos?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMark Bezos will accompany his brother, Jeff, on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Amy Harris/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos will be joined by his brother Mark; flying legend and longtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk; and a standby passenger. The winner who paid almost $30 million at a charity auction for a seat on the first flight was a no-show, so Blue Origin moved up Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen from a later flight to become its first paying customer. The second-placed offer from an unidentified bidder in May\u2019s auction was $27 million.\nMs. Funk, 82, and Mr. Daemen, 18, are both pilots and would, respectively, be the oldest and youngest people to reach space. The passengers all have to complete a 14-hour training session set to wrap up on Monday, including emergency features of the spacecraft, which includes an ejection system to power the capsule to safety in the event of an anomaly.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLongtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk, right, is also set to be a passenger on the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWhat can the passengers do up there? The capsule separates at 250,000 feet and continues up to the edge of space. Blue Origin emphasizes the capsule\u2019s big windows, which at 3.5 feet by 2.3 feet are six times bigger than those on a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 787 Dreamliner.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos in Space: What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be Like\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nBlue Origin said the newly minted astronauts would experience three or four minutes of weightlessness during which they can unbuckle from their seats, with time for a couple of somersaults.\nWhen can I go to space and how much are tickets? Blue Origin plans two more customer flights this year, with the next scheduled as early as September, but has The Amazon founder plans to make his first visit to space with a flight scheduled to launch at 9 a.m EDT on July 20. Here\u2019s what to know about the flight and how to watch the launch. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Launch (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "490",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-space-flight-blue-origin-watch-when-11626642755?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=26",
        "text": "Why all the fuss about Jeff Bezos going to space? Mr. Bezos is putting himself to the test on his rocket\u2019s inaugural crewed flight. He has said he hopes this will be the first of thousands that can make space travel safe and routine, and cheap enough to allow millions to follow. Eventually.\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.20%\n\n\n also plans to take tourists to space after flying its founder there earlier this month. Blue Origin aims eventually to use its space exploration to try to tap the energy and material resources of the solar system.\n\n\nHow can I watch the Blue Origin launch?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew Shepard preparing to lift off from Van Horn, Texas, in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n blue origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe flight is scheduled for 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday and will be livestreamed by Blue Origin starting at 7.30 a.m., and later by wsj.com. Weather or technical glitches could delay the launch from Van Horn, Texas. The current forecast shows clear but gusty conditions.\nBlue Origin has discouraged visitors from approaching the launch site on Tuesday, with part of nearby Highway 54 being closed. In an early morning tweet Tuesday, the company said the New Shepard ship had reached the launch pad, which is located some distance from a barn where Blue Origin employees and guests on site for the flight are waiting for the event to begin.\nHow will Blue Origin take him to the edge of space and back again? The New Shepard can carry six people, with the rocket sending the capsule up more than 62 miles. The reusable rocket and capsule being used on Tuesday are making their third flight\u2014Blue Origin has tested the system with 15 autonomous flights without passengers. The capsule separates and affords a few minutes of weightlessness before it descends and lands in the nearby Texas desert. The rocket lands vertically back at the launch site.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nHow does it compare with Virgin Galactic? Blue Origin uses a conventional rocket and space capsule that launches and lands vertically, so it is quicker than Virgin Galactic\u2019s vehicle to reach the edge of space, and the entire flight is 11 minutes. Virgin Galactic employs an aircraft to lift its six-seat space plane aloft, before releasing it, firing a rocket to take it higher. The space plane then glides back unpowered to the ground, with the whole trip taking about 90 minutes.\nAlexa, where does space start? The lack of a definition in international law has purists and space companies sparring. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard is designed to pass the Karman Line at 62 miles above Earth, an arbitrary line above which winged aircraft can no longer fly. Virgin Galactic flies above 50 miles, another arbitrary line, though one at which some scientists say objects can still orbit the planet.\nWho is going to space with Jeff Bezos?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMark Bezos will accompany his brother, Jeff, on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Amy Harris/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos will be joined by his brother Mark; flying legend and longtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk; and a standby passenger. The winner who paid almost $30 million at a charity auction for a seat on the first flight was a no-show, so Blue Origin moved up Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen from a later flight to become its first paying customer. The second-placed offer from an unidentified bidder in May\u2019s auction was $27 million.\nMs. Funk, 82, and Mr. Daemen, 18, are both pilots and would, respectively, be the oldest and youngest people to reach space. The passengers all have to complete a 14-hour training session set to wrap up on Monday, including emergency features of the spacecraft, which includes an ejection system to power the capsule to safety in the event of an anomaly.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLongtime aerospace regulator Wally Funk, right, is also set to be a passenger on the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWhat can the passengers do up there? The capsule separates at 250,000 feet and continues up to the edge of space. Blue Origin emphasizes the capsule\u2019s big windows, which at 3.5 feet by 2.3 feet are six times bigger than those on a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 787 Dreamliner.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos in Space: What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be Like\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nBlue Origin said the newly minted astronauts would experience three or four minutes of weightlessness during which they can unbuckle from their seats, with time for a couple of somersaults.\nWhen can I go to space and how much are tickets? Blue Origin plans two more customer flights this year, with the next scheduled as early as September, but The Amazon founder plans to make his first visit to space with a flight scheduled to launch at 9 a.m EDT on July 20. Here\u2019s what to know about the flight and how to watch the launch. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Lifts Off\u00a0for Long-Delayed Test Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "491",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-lifts-offfor-long-delayed-test-flightwithout-people-inside-11551514359?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=16",
        "text": "When the spacecraft separated and started flying on its own, a roar erupted from employees at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The first stage landed back vertically on a floating platform. \u201cA great day for both SpaceX and NASA,\u201d said one of the video commentators.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent much of this decade preparing to resume launching crews on domestically built rockets from American soil\u2014creating high expectations for the demonstration flight. Since NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, Russian rockets and capsules have been the only means for U.S. astronauts to reach the orbiting international laboratory.\n\n\nStressing the landmark nature of the accomplishment, NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n tweeted that the launch was a \u201cnew chapter in American excellence\u201d and a \u201cmajor milestone in our nation\u2019s history.\u201d\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is tentatively scheduled to launch its first crew in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which has a separate NASA contract to build and operate commercially developed capsules, is slated to fly people by August.\nBut those timelines could slip significantly based on engineering hurdles, according to agency and industry officials. Both companies confront a spate of unresolved safety issues that could push crewed missions far into the second half of the year, or potentially later. As a backstop NASA leaders previously dismissed as unnecessary, the agency has taken preliminary steps to pay for two seats on Russian vehicles for next year.\n\u201cThere is a lot of detail we have to work through\u201d before the anticipated crewed test flight,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s vice president of flight reliability, told reporters during Thursday\u2019s briefing at the launch site.\nThe eventual timeline for transporting astronauts on American vehicles depends on the results of test flights, as well as how quickly NASA and SpaceX teams are able to resolve open safety questions that stretch back before Saturday\u2019s launch.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s still a lot of work that we need to do,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Forrester,\n\n\n\n chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut office,\u00a0said Thursday during the briefing.\nBoth companies have a history of schedule slips, while NASA officials and outside safety advisers for months have signaled it may be difficult for the agency to quickly process the crush of reports to certify capsules are safe for humans.\nMr. Bridenstine has repeatedly expressed confidence that astronauts will fly on U.S. hardware by December. But reflecting the fluid timelines, recently he has hedged about which company is likely to reach that goal first. A posting on NASA\u2019s website Monday simply said human missions \u201care set to take place later this year.\u201d\nThe buildup to the mission was reminiscent of the heyday of human space flight from the Florida facility. There was a series of prelaunch briefings featuring astronauts and scores of reporters from around the world. Hours before liftoff, throngs of space fans and tourists gathered to be in position to catch a glimpse of the brilliant rocket plume amid the deep rumble and reverberations from the nine rocket engines putting out 1.7 million pounds of thrust.\nRegarding SpaceX\u2019s capsule, company officials and NASA experts have said they need to fix certain thrusters that can fail in extended cold conditions, along with life-support systems that need additional capacity to protect crews.\nSpaceX officials have said they are working closely with NASA to resolve issues and won\u2019t fly until agency and company officials are convinced it is safe.\nFurther risk analyses also are pending for a novel practice devised by SpaceX\u2014dubbed \u201cload and go\u201d\u2014which requires astronauts to strap into their seats while the rocket is being fueled on the launchpad. After years of controversy about the procedure, NASA\u2019s Mr. Forrester said his office ultimately concluded \u201cthis was an acceptable risk that we were willing to take.\u201d\nBoeing, which last year appeared to be in the lead for the first human flight, lost several months redesigning and retesting part of its emergency escape system. Like SpaceX, the company also faces a crucial test of its emergency crew-abort system during the summer.\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission is successful, it will justify NASA\u2019s big bet to turn over to industry routine crew transportation into orbit. SpaceX already ferries cargo to and from the space station in a different version of its Dragon spacecraft.\nBut from the beginning, those models were produced with a window to signify SpaceX\u2019s longer-term ambition of flying people, Mr. Koenigsmann said Thursday.\nSpaceX\u2019s family of Falcon 9 boosters suffered catastrophic explosions in 2015 and 2016 that rocked the company and cast a temporary cloud over the budding commercial-space industry. But since then, the company has completed dozens of missions\u00a0and has been approved by the Pent Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a Crew Dragon capsule on its maiden voyage into orbit without people on board, but technical challenges could delay for months the first trip carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Lifts Off\u00a0for Long-Delayed Test Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "492",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-lifts-offfor-long-delayed-test-flightwithout-people-inside-11551514359?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=61",
        "text": "When the spacecraft separated and started flying on its own, a roar erupted from employees at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The first stage landed back vertically on a floating platform. \u201cA great day for both SpaceX and NASA,\u201d said one of the video commentators.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent much of this decade preparing to resume launching crews on domestically built rockets from American soil\u2014creating high expectations for the demonstration flight. Since NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, Russian rockets and capsules have been the only means for U.S. astronauts to reach the orbiting international laboratory.\n\n\nStressing the landmark nature of the accomplishment, NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n tweeted that the launch was a \u201cnew chapter in American excellence\u201d and a \u201cmajor milestone in our nation\u2019s history.\u201d\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is tentatively scheduled to launch its first crew in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which has a separate NASA contract to build and operate commercially developed capsules, is slated to fly people by August.\nBut those timelines could slip significantly based on engineering hurdles, according to agency and industry officials. Both companies confront a spate of unresolved safety issues that could push crewed missions far into the second half of the year, or potentially later. As a backstop NASA leaders previously dismissed as unnecessary, the agency has taken preliminary steps to pay for two seats on Russian vehicles for next year.\n\u201cThere is a lot of detail we have to work through\u201d before the anticipated crewed test flight,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s vice president of flight reliability, told reporters during Thursday\u2019s briefing at the launch site.\nThe eventual timeline for transporting astronauts on American vehicles depends on the results of test flights, as well as how quickly NASA and SpaceX teams are able to resolve open safety questions that stretch back before Saturday\u2019s launch.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s still a lot of work that we need to do,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Forrester,\n\n\n\n chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut office,\u00a0said Thursday during the briefing.\nBoth companies have a history of schedule slips, while NASA officials and outside safety advisers for months have signaled it may be difficult for the agency to quickly process the crush of reports to certify capsules are safe for humans.\nMr. Bridenstine has repeatedly expressed confidence that astronauts will fly on U.S. hardware by December. But reflecting the fluid timelines, recently he has hedged about which company is likely to reach that goal first. A posting on NASA\u2019s website Monday simply said human missions \u201care set to take place later this year.\u201d\nThe buildup to the mission was reminiscent of the heyday of human space flight from the Florida facility. There was a series of prelaunch briefings featuring astronauts and scores of reporters from around the world. Hours before liftoff, throngs of space fans and tourists gathered to be in position to catch a glimpse of the brilliant rocket plume amid the deep rumble and reverberations from the nine rocket engines putting out 1.7 million pounds of thrust.\nRegarding SpaceX\u2019s capsule, company officials and NASA experts have said they need to fix certain thrusters that can fail in extended cold conditions, along with life-support systems that need additional capacity to protect crews.\nSpaceX officials have said they are working closely with NASA to resolve issues and won\u2019t fly until agency and company officials are convinced it is safe.\nFurther risk analyses also are pending for a novel practice devised by SpaceX\u2014dubbed \u201cload and go\u201d\u2014which requires astronauts to strap into their seats while the rocket is being fueled on the launchpad. After years of controversy about the procedure, NASA\u2019s Mr. Forrester said his office ultimately concluded \u201cthis was an acceptable risk that we were willing to take.\u201d\nBoeing, which last year appeared to be in the lead for the first human flight, lost several months redesigning and retesting part of its emergency escape system. Like SpaceX, the company also faces a crucial test of its emergency crew-abort system during the summer.\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission is successful, it will justify NASA\u2019s big bet to turn over to industry routine crew transportation into orbit. SpaceX already ferries cargo to and from the space station in a different version of its Dragon spacecraft.\nBut from the beginning, those models were produced with a window to signify SpaceX\u2019s longer-term ambition of flying people, Mr. Koenigsmann said Thursday.\nSpaceX\u2019s family of Falcon 9 boosters suffered catastrophic explosions in 2015 and 2016 that rocked the company and cast a temporary cloud over the budding commercial-space industry. But since then, the company has completed dozens of missions\u00a0and has been approved by the Pent Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a Crew Dragon capsule on its maiden voyage into orbit without people on board, but technical challenges could delay for months the first trip carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Lifts Off\u00a0for Long-Delayed Test Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "493",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-lifts-offfor-long-delayed-test-flightwithout-people-inside-11551514359?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=58",
        "text": "When the spacecraft separated and started flying on its own, a roar erupted from employees at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The first stage landed back vertically on a floating platform. \u201cA great day for both SpaceX and NASA,\u201d said one of the video commentators.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent much of this decade preparing to resume launching crews on domestically built rockets from American soil\u2014creating high expectations for the demonstration flight. Since NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, Russian rockets and capsules have been the only means for U.S. astronauts to reach the orbiting international laboratory.\n\n\nStressing the landmark nature of the accomplishment, NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n tweeted that the launch was a \u201cnew chapter in American excellence\u201d and a \u201cmajor milestone in our nation\u2019s history.\u201d\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is tentatively scheduled to launch its first crew in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which has a separate NASA contract to build and operate commercially developed capsules, is slated to fly people by August.\nBut those timelines could slip significantly based on engineering hurdles, according to agency and industry officials. Both companies confront a spate of unresolved safety issues that could push crewed missions far into the second half of the year, or potentially later. As a backstop NASA leaders previously dismissed as unnecessary, the agency has taken preliminary steps to pay for two seats on Russian vehicles for next year.\n\u201cThere is a lot of detail we have to work through\u201d before the anticipated crewed test flight,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s vice president of flight reliability, told reporters during Thursday\u2019s briefing at the launch site.\nThe eventual timeline for transporting astronauts on American vehicles depends on the results of test flights, as well as how quickly NASA and SpaceX teams are able to resolve open safety questions that stretch back before Saturday\u2019s launch.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s still a lot of work that we need to do,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Forrester,\n\n\n\n chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut office,\u00a0said Thursday during the briefing.\nBoth companies have a history of schedule slips, while NASA officials and outside safety advisers for months have signaled it may be difficult for the agency to quickly process the crush of reports to certify capsules are safe for humans.\nMr. Bridenstine has repeatedly expressed confidence that astronauts will fly on U.S. hardware by December. But reflecting the fluid timelines, recently he has hedged about which company is likely to reach that goal first. A posting on NASA\u2019s website Monday simply said human missions \u201care set to take place later this year.\u201d\nThe buildup to the mission was reminiscent of the heyday of human space flight from the Florida facility. There was a series of prelaunch briefings featuring astronauts and scores of reporters from around the world. Hours before liftoff, throngs of space fans and tourists gathered to be in position to catch a glimpse of the brilliant rocket plume amid the deep rumble and reverberations from the nine rocket engines putting out 1.7 million pounds of thrust.\nRegarding SpaceX\u2019s capsule, company officials and NASA experts have said they need to fix certain thrusters that can fail in extended cold conditions, along with life-support systems that need additional capacity to protect crews.\nSpaceX officials have said they are working closely with NASA to resolve issues and won\u2019t fly until agency and company officials are convinced it is safe.\nFurther risk analyses also are pending for a novel practice devised by SpaceX\u2014dubbed \u201cload and go\u201d\u2014which requires astronauts to strap into their seats while the rocket is being fueled on the launchpad. After years of controversy about the procedure, NASA\u2019s Mr. Forrester said his office ultimately concluded \u201cthis was an acceptable risk that we were willing to take.\u201d\nBoeing, which last year appeared to be in the lead for the first human flight, lost several months redesigning and retesting part of its emergency escape system. Like SpaceX, the company also faces a crucial test of its emergency crew-abort system during the summer.\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission is successful, it will justify NASA\u2019s big bet to turn over to industry routine crew transportation into orbit. SpaceX already ferries cargo to and from the space station in a different version of its Dragon spacecraft.\nBut from the beginning, those models were produced with a window to signify SpaceX\u2019s longer-term ambition of flying people, Mr. Koenigsmann said Thursday.\nSpaceX\u2019s family of Falcon 9 boosters suffered catastrophic explosions in 2015 and 2016 that rocked the company and cast a temporary cloud over the budding commercial-space industry. But since then, the company has completed dozens of missions\u00a0and has been approved by the Pent Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a Crew Dragon capsule on its maiden voyage into orbit without people on board, but technical challenges could delay for months the first trip carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Lifts Off\u00a0for Long-Delayed Test Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "494",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-lifts-offfor-long-delayed-test-flightwithout-people-inside-11551514359?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=77",
        "text": "When the spacecraft separated and started flying on its own, a roar erupted from employees at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The first stage landed back vertically on a floating platform. \u201cA great day for both SpaceX and NASA,\u201d said one of the video commentators.\n\n\n\n\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent much of this decade preparing to resume launching crews on domestically built rockets from American soil\u2014creating high expectations for the demonstration flight. Since NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, Russian rockets and capsules have been the only means for U.S. astronauts to reach the orbiting international laboratory.\n\n\nStressing the landmark nature of the accomplishment, NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n tweeted that the launch was a \u201cnew chapter in American excellence\u201d and a \u201cmajor milestone in our nation\u2019s history.\u201d\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is tentatively scheduled to launch its first crew in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which has a separate NASA contract to build and operate commercially developed capsules, is slated to fly people by August.\nBut those timelines could slip significantly based on engineering hurdles, according to agency and industry officials. Both companies confront a spate of unresolved safety issues that could push crewed missions far into the second half of the year, or potentially later. As a backstop NASA leaders previously dismissed as unnecessary, the agency has taken preliminary steps to pay for two seats on Russian vehicles for next year.\n\u201cThere is a lot of detail we have to work through\u201d before the anticipated crewed test flight,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s vice president of flight reliability, told reporters during Thursday\u2019s briefing at the launch site.\nThe eventual timeline for transporting astronauts on American vehicles depends on the results of test flights, as well as how quickly NASA and SpaceX teams are able to resolve open safety questions that stretch back before Saturday\u2019s launch.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s still a lot of work that we need to do,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Forrester,\n\n\n\n chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut office,\u00a0said Thursday during the briefing.\nBoth companies have a history of schedule slips, while NASA officials and outside safety advisers for months have signaled it may be difficult for the agency to quickly process the crush of reports to certify capsules are safe for humans.\nMr. Bridenstine has repeatedly expressed confidence that astronauts will fly on U.S. hardware by December. But reflecting the fluid timelines, recently he has hedged about which company is likely to reach that goal first. A posting on NASA\u2019s website Monday simply said human missions \u201care set to take place later this year.\u201d\nThe buildup to the mission was reminiscent of the heyday of human space flight from the Florida facility. There was a series of prelaunch briefings featuring astronauts and scores of reporters from around the world. Hours before liftoff, throngs of space fans and tourists gathered to be in position to catch a glimpse of the brilliant rocket plume amid the deep rumble and reverberations from the nine rocket engines putting out 1.7 million pounds of thrust.\nRegarding SpaceX\u2019s capsule, company officials and NASA experts have said they need to fix certain thrusters that can fail in extended cold conditions, along with life-support systems that need additional capacity to protect crews.\nSpaceX officials have said they are working closely with NASA to resolve issues and won\u2019t fly until agency and company officials are convinced it is safe.\nFurther risk analyses also are pending for a novel practice devised by SpaceX\u2014dubbed \u201cload and go\u201d\u2014which requires astronauts to strap into their seats while the rocket is being fueled on the launchpad. After years of controversy about the procedure, NASA\u2019s Mr. Forrester said his office ultimately concluded \u201cthis was an acceptable risk that we were willing to take.\u201d\nBoeing, which last year appeared to be in the lead for the first human flight, lost several months redesigning and retesting part of its emergency escape system. Like SpaceX, the company also faces a crucial test of its emergency crew-abort system during the summer.\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission is successful, it will justify NASA\u2019s big bet to turn over to industry routine crew transportation into orbit. SpaceX already ferries cargo to and from the space station in a different version of its Dragon spacecraft.\nBut from the beginning, those models were produced with a window to signify SpaceX\u2019s longer-term ambition of flying people, Mr. Koenigsmann said Thursday.\nSpaceX\u2019s family of Falcon 9 boosters suffered catastrophic explosions in 2015 and 2016 that rocked the company and cast a temporary cloud over the budding commercial-space industry. But since then, the company has completed dozens of missions\u00a0and has been approved by the Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a Crew Dragon capsule on its maiden voyage into orbit without people on board, but technical challenges could delay for months the first trip carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "495",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-inspiration4-launch-jared-isaacman-11631598049?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=4",
        "text": "What\u2019s all the fuss about four civilians going into orbit on a SpaceX rocket?\n\n\nRelated Links SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 SpaceX, , Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit \n\n\nThis is the first time an all-civilian crew has been sent into orbit on a private mission. Almost 600 people have flown higher than the 50-mile limit used by the U.S. to define where space begins\u2014including 54 private citizens, though they were always part of professional or military crews.\n\n\nReaching space is still expensive\u2014very expensive\u2014but the pace of launches is increasing, bringing down the cost in increments and increasing understanding about the effects of orbital travel.\u00a0\nHiring a SpaceX rocket and capsule for private travel is another marker of how the technology has matured to allow relatively safe and more frequent space trips beyond those dictated by government and military requirements.\nI\u2019ve watched three billionaires blast off this year. Is this the future of space tourism? Mr. Isaacman is paying an undisclosed sum for a full space experience for himself and three others, not a 10-minute suborbital jaunt. It comes with the attendant costs and risks of an orbital mission, especially re-entry.\u00a0\nSeats on another SpaceX launch with private citizens scheduled for next year have sold for around $55 million each, in line with that paid by previous privately funded journeys into space. The Inspiration4 crew that he is commanding has undergone months of training, including in centrifuges and fighter planes to mimic the physical stresses of launch and re-entry and prepare them to operate the spacecraft if needed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit Wednesday, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission plans to place the crew in orbit for about three days and then return them to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\nOrbital launch capacity for crewed flights remains limited beyond the requirements of government-driven missions. This is the fourth crewed mission by SpaceX in 15 months, a pace unmatched by its Russian and Chinese peers, but a reminder that private citizens in orbit will remain a relative rarity for years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stood ready in June at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for a resupply mission to the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWho is Jared Isaacman, and how did he select the crew? The 38-year-old entrepreneur is the founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\n\n , which has a market value of $6.5 billion. He is a trained pilot and aviation and space enthusiast. The Inspiration4 mission aims to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital through a fundraising drive linked to the mission. The charity said he has already committed $100 million to the goal.\nThe crew roster includes two selected via a sweepstakes run during this year\u2019s Super Bowl and one picked as an ambassador by St. Jude. Mr. Isaacman will be joined by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n 29, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, Dr.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n 51, a geosciences professor and science communicator, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n 42, a Lockheed Martin Corp. engineer.\nHow did the Inspiration4 crew reach space?\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you be interested in taking part in a space flight? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nSpaceX will launch one of its Dragon capsules atop a reusable Falcon 9 rocket, the same combination that successfully flew crews to the International Space Station three times on missions backed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe capsule, which can hold up to seven people, is orbiting at a height of 360 miles above Earth, well beyond the space station. It is traveling at more than 17,000 miles an hour as it orbits the planet 15 times a day.\nHow long are they in space, and what will they do up there? A decision on the timing and location of the splashdown will be made during the mission. The spacecraft is provisioned to sustain the crew for a week, in case re-entry is delayed.\nThe Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are fully autonomous, so the Inspiration4 crew won\u2019t have to direct it or position the space craft for re-entry after its planned three-day mission.\nThe four-person crew is expected to conduct a series of health-based experiments focused on the effects of space travel, as well as provide comparative data on their physical well-being before, during and after the mission. The medical data will be provided to the broader scientific community. Data from government-funded missions tend to be restricted.\nThere is also a big window. The docking door of the capsule has been co Jared Isaacman is the latest billionaire to head to space. This will be the first time an all-civilian crew is sent into orbit. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "496",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-inspiration4-launch-jared-isaacman-11631598049?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=22",
        "text": "What\u2019s all the fuss about four civilians going into orbit on a SpaceX rocket?\n\n\nRelated Links SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 SpaceX, , Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit \n\n\nThis is the first time an all-civilian crew has been sent into orbit on a private mission. Almost 600 people have flown higher than the 50-mile limit used by the U.S. to define where space begins\u2014including 54 private citizens, though they were always part of professional or military crews.\n\n\nReaching space is still expensive\u2014very expensive\u2014but the pace of launches is increasing, bringing down the cost in increments and increasing understanding about the effects of orbital travel.\u00a0\nHiring a SpaceX rocket and capsule for private travel is another marker of how the technology has matured to allow relatively safe and more frequent space trips beyond those dictated by government and military requirements.\nI\u2019ve watched three billionaires blast off this year. Is this the future of space tourism? Mr. Isaacman is paying an undisclosed sum for a full space experience for himself and three others, not a 10-minute suborbital jaunt. It comes with the attendant costs and risks of an orbital mission, especially re-entry.\u00a0\nSeats on another SpaceX launch with private citizens scheduled for next year have sold for around $55 million each, in line with that paid by previous privately funded journeys into space. The Inspiration4 crew that he is commanding has undergone months of training, including in centrifuges and fighter planes to mimic the physical stresses of launch and re-entry and prepare them to operate the spacecraft if needed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit Wednesday, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission plans to place the crew in orbit for about three days and then return them to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\nOrbital launch capacity for crewed flights remains limited beyond the requirements of government-driven missions. This is the fourth crewed mission by SpaceX in 15 months, a pace unmatched by its Russian and Chinese peers, but a reminder that private citizens in orbit will remain a relative rarity for years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stood ready in June at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for a resupply mission to the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWho is Jared Isaacman, and how did he select the crew? The 38-year-old entrepreneur is the founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\n\n , which has a market value of $6.5 billion. He is a trained pilot and aviation and space enthusiast. The Inspiration4 mission aims to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital through a fundraising drive linked to the mission. The charity said he has already committed $100 million to the goal.\nThe crew roster includes two selected via a sweepstakes run during this year\u2019s Super Bowl and one picked as an ambassador by St. Jude. Mr. Isaacman will be joined by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n 29, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, Dr.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n 51, a geosciences professor and science communicator, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n 42, a Lockheed Martin Corp. engineer.\nHow did the Inspiration4 crew reach space?\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you be interested in taking part in a space flight? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nSpaceX will launch one of its Dragon capsules atop a reusable Falcon 9 rocket, the same combination that successfully flew crews to the International Space Station three times on missions backed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe capsule, which can hold up to seven people, is orbiting at a height of 360 miles above Earth, well beyond the space station. It is traveling at more than 17,000 miles an hour as it orbits the planet 15 times a day.\nHow long are they in space, and what will they do up there? A decision on the timing and location of the splashdown will be made during the mission. The spacecraft is provisioned to sustain the crew for a week, in case re-entry is delayed.\nThe Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are fully autonomous, so the Inspiration4 crew won\u2019t have to direct it or position the space craft for re-entry after its planned three-day mission.\nThe four-person crew is expected to conduct a series of health-based experiments focused on the effects of space travel, as well as provide comparative data on their physical well-being before, during and after the mission. The medical data will be provided to the broader scientific community. Data from government-funded missions tend to be restricted.\nThere is also a big window. The docking door of the capsule has been co Jared Isaacman is the latest billionaire to head to space. This will be the first time an all-civilian crew is sent into orbit. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "497",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-inspiration4-launch-jared-isaacman-11631598049?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=4",
        "text": "What\u2019s all the fuss about four civilians going into orbit on a SpaceX rocket?\n\n\nRelated Links SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 SpaceX, , Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis is the first time an all-civilian crew has been sent into orbit on a private mission. Almost 600 people have flown higher than the 50-mile limit used by the U.S. to define where space begins\u2014including 54 private citizens, though they were always part of professional or military crews.\n\n\nReaching space is still expensive\u2014very expensive\u2014but the pace of launches is increasing, bringing down the cost in increments and increasing understanding about the effects of orbital travel.\u00a0\nHiring a SpaceX rocket and capsule for private travel is another marker of how the technology has matured to allow relatively safe and more frequent space trips beyond those dictated by government and military requirements.\nI\u2019ve watched three billionaires blast off this year. Is this the future of space tourism? Mr. Isaacman is paying an undisclosed sum for a full space experience for himself and three others, not a 10-minute suborbital jaunt. It comes with the attendant costs and risks of an orbital mission, especially re-entry.\u00a0\nSeats on another SpaceX launch with private citizens scheduled for next year have sold for around $55 million each, in line with that paid by previous privately funded journeys into space. The Inspiration4 crew that he is commanding has undergone months of training, including in centrifuges and fighter planes to mimic the physical stresses of launch and re-entry and prepare them to operate the spacecraft if needed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit Wednesday, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission plans to place the crew in orbit for about three days and then return them to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\nOrbital launch capacity for crewed flights remains limited beyond the requirements of government-driven missions. This is the fourth crewed mission by SpaceX in 15 months, a pace unmatched by its Russian and Chinese peers, but a reminder that private citizens in orbit will remain a relative rarity for years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stood ready in June at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for a resupply mission to the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWho is Jared Isaacman, and how did he select the crew? The 38-year-old entrepreneur is the founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\n\n , which has a market value of $6.5 billion. He is a trained pilot and aviation and space enthusiast. The Inspiration4 mission aims to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital through a fundraising drive linked to the mission. The charity said he has already committed $100 million to the goal.\nThe crew roster includes two selected via a sweepstakes run during this year\u2019s Super Bowl and one picked as an ambassador by St. Jude. Mr. Isaacman will be joined by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n 29, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, Dr.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n 51, a geosciences professor and science communicator, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n 42, a Lockheed Martin Corp. engineer.\nHow did the Inspiration4 crew reach space?\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you be interested in taking part in a space flight? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nSpaceX will launch one of its Dragon capsules atop a reusable Falcon 9 rocket, the same combination that successfully flew crews to the International Space Station three times on missions backed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe capsule, which can hold up to seven people, is orbiting at a height of 360 miles above Earth, well beyond the space station. It is traveling at more than 17,000 miles an hour as it orbits the planet 15 times a day.\nHow long are they in space, and what will they do up there? A decision on the timing and location of the splashdown will be made during the mission. The spacecraft is provisioned to sustain the crew for a week, in case re-entry is delayed.\nThe Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are fully autonomous, so the Inspiration4 crew won\u2019t have to direct it or position the space craft for re-entry after its planned three-day mission.\nThe four-person crew is expected to conduct a series of health-based experiments focused on the effects of space travel, as well as provide comparative data on their physical well-being before, during and after the mission. The medical data will be provided to the broader scientific community. Data from government-funded missions tend to be restricted.\nThere is also a big window. The docking door of the capsule has bee Jared Isaacman is the latest billionaire to head to space. This will be the first time an all-civilian crew is sent into orbit. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "498",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-inspiration4-launch-jared-isaacman-11631598049?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=15",
        "text": "What\u2019s all the fuss about four civilians going into orbit on a SpaceX rocket?\n\n\nRelated Links SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 SpaceX, , Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis is the first time an all-civilian crew has been sent into orbit on a private mission. Almost 600 people have flown higher than the 50-mile limit used by the U.S. to define where space begins\u2014including 54 private citizens, though they were always part of professional or military crews.\n\n\nReaching space is still expensive\u2014very expensive\u2014but the pace of launches is increasing, bringing down the cost in increments and increasing understanding about the effects of orbital travel.\u00a0\nHiring a SpaceX rocket and capsule for private travel is another marker of how the technology has matured to allow relatively safe and more frequent space trips beyond those dictated by government and military requirements.\nI\u2019ve watched three billionaires blast off this year. Is this the future of space tourism? Mr. Isaacman is paying an undisclosed sum for a full space experience for himself and three others, not a 10-minute suborbital jaunt. It comes with the attendant costs and risks of an orbital mission, especially re-entry.\u00a0\nSeats on another SpaceX launch with private citizens scheduled for next year have sold for around $55 million each, in line with that paid by previous privately funded journeys into space. The Inspiration4 crew that he is commanding has undergone months of training, including in centrifuges and fighter planes to mimic the physical stresses of launch and re-entry and prepare them to operate the spacecraft if needed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit Wednesday, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission plans to place the crew in orbit for about three days and then return them to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\nOrbital launch capacity for crewed flights remains limited beyond the requirements of government-driven missions. This is the fourth crewed mission by SpaceX in 15 months, a pace unmatched by its Russian and Chinese peers, but a reminder that private citizens in orbit will remain a relative rarity for years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stood ready in June at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for a resupply mission to the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWho is Jared Isaacman, and how did he select the crew? The 38-year-old entrepreneur is the founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\n\n , which has a market value of $6.5 billion. He is a trained pilot and aviation and space enthusiast. The Inspiration4 mission aims to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital through a fundraising drive linked to the mission. The charity said he has already committed $100 million to the goal.\nThe crew roster includes two selected via a sweepstakes run during this year\u2019s Super Bowl and one picked as an ambassador by St. Jude. Mr. Isaacman will be joined by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n 29, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, Dr.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n 51, a geosciences professor and science communicator, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n 42, a Lockheed Martin Corp. engineer.\nHow did the Inspiration4 crew reach space?\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you be interested in taking part in a space flight? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nSpaceX will launch one of its Dragon capsules atop a reusable Falcon 9 rocket, the same combination that successfully flew crews to the International Space Station three times on missions backed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe capsule, which can hold up to seven people, is orbiting at a height of 360 miles above Earth, well beyond the space station. It is traveling at more than 17,000 miles an hour as it orbits the planet 15 times a day.\nHow long are they in space, and what will they do up there? A decision on the timing and location of the splashdown will be made during the mission. The spacecraft is provisioned to sustain the crew for a week, in case re-entry is delayed.\nThe Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket are fully autonomous, so the Inspiration4 crew won\u2019t have to direct it or position the space craft for re-entry after its planned three-day mission.\nThe four-person crew is expected to conduct a series of health-based experiments focused on the effects of space travel, as well as provide comparative data on their physical well-being before, during and after the mission. The medical data will be provided to the broader scientific community. Data from government-funded missions tend to be restricted.\nThere is also a big window. The docking door of the capsule has been converted to include a glass dome affording 360-degree views, in addition to the spacecraft\u2019s side windows.\u00a0\nHow does this compare to recent space flights with Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson? Inspiration4 is in space, no questions asked. Mr. Bezos and Mr. Branson squabbled over the definition of space after rising to the edge on specially developed rockets and aircraft, respectively, but neither tried to make it into orbit.\nMr. Bezos\u2019s privately held Blue Origin LLC and Mr. Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n are, for now, targeting the suborbital market for well-heeled space travelers. That is some 50 miles to 65 miles above Earth with rides that provide only a few minutes of weightlessness.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at Doug.Cameron@wsj.com Jared Isaacman is the latest billionaire to head to space. This will be the first time an all-civilian crew is sent into orbit. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fast-Food Chains, Upscale Restaurants Want to Bring You Lunch (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "499",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fast-food-chains-upscale-restaurants-want-to-bring-you-lunch-1496329239?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=24",
        "text": "Wendy\u2019s Co.\n\n WEN 0.90%\n\n\n recently signed up with DoorDash Inc. to offer delivery in parts of Ohio and Texas, with plans to expand nationally within the year. \u201cWe fundamentally believe food at home is our number one competitor,\u201d Wendy\u2019s Chief Concept and Marketing Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kurt Kane\n\n\n\n said in a recent interview.\nRival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n McDonald\u2019s Corp.\n\n MCD 2.19%\n\n\n is now offering delivery in more than 2,000 U.S. restaurants using Uber Technologies Inc. \u201cRestaurant delivery is a $100 billion dollar market, and it\u2019s exploding,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lucy Brady,\n\n\n\n McDonald\u2019s senior vice president of corporate strategy and business development, told investors in March.\n\n\nBut enticing customers to order in at lunch, which has been a tough spot for burger chains in particular, remains difficult. McDonald\u2019s Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Easterbrook\n\n\n\n told investors on Wednesday that 60% of the chain\u2019s delivery orders come in the evening and late at night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn order headed out for delivery from Rizzo's Pizza in New York.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nGetting burger delivery right\u2014keeping the patty warm and juicy, while preventing toppings from getting the bun soggy\u2014is notoriously tricky. \nDoorDash said its drivers keep packaged food warm by wrapping it in \u201cspace blankets\u201d\u2014thin plastic metallic sheets originally developed by NASA to provide thermal control for spacecraft\u2014before placing them in insulated bags to ensure it arrives hot. \nTo keep McDonald\u2019s food as fresh as possible, Uber waits to notify the local restaurant of the order it receives on its UberEats app until the driver is three minutes away, an Uber spokeswoman said. Because french fries don\u2019t stay hot and fresh for long, they are the last item the restaurant makes and places in the bag for delivery orders. Since McDonald\u2019s is so ubiquitous\u201475% of the U.S. population lives within 3 miles of a McDonald\u2019s\u2014Uber drivers don\u2019t have to place the food in any special containers.\nEven upscale restaurants are joining the delivery bandwagon. Some are so confident they are even eschewing tables and chairs.\nOyster Bah in Chicago recently opened Seaside\u2019s, a delivery and carry-out-only restaurant that operates out of Oyster Bah\u2019s kitchen so that it can expand sales without any additional rental cost. It only serves food that is designed to travel well, such as fried chicken, ribs and grilled lobster, as opposed to Oyster Bah\u2019s chilled fish and shrimp and raw oysters.\n\n\nAt Your ServiceHere is how some of the biggest restaurant players are getting food to your door. McDonald\u2019sWhere:In more than 2,000 U.S. restaurants.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWith whom: Uber \n\t\t\n\t\t\tFact: 75% of people in the burger giant\u2019s top five markets, including the U.S., live within three miles of a McDonald\u2019s. PaneraWhere: Available in 24% of Panera\u2019s roughly 2,000 cafes.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWith whom:Panera employs its own drivers and recently announced plans to add 10,000 more this year, on top of the roughly 4,000 it has now.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFact: The bakery chain is rolling out a feature to its mobile order app that will allow customers to track the location of their delivery driver. Dunkin\u2019 BrandsWhere: Doughnuts and coffee and are being delivered in Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Boston and New York City.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWith whom: DoorDash.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFact: Dunkin\u2019s Baskin Robbins chain is now testing delivery in the U.S. The ice-cream chain already delivers in Saudi Arabia. Yum Brands\u2019 Taco BellWhere: Available at 900 Taco Bells in more than 50 markets.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWith whom: DoorDash.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFact: Taco Bell has said that delivery is the No. 1 service request it gets from customers. Chipotle Mexican GrillWhere: In most major cities and college campuses in the U.S.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWith whom: Postmates, OrderUp, Tapingo and Favor.\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFact: The burrito maker has created a second food assembly line in its restaurants to accommodate delivery and to-go orders. \n\n\nIn New York, Ando, from Momofuku founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Chang,\n\n\n\n was created to be a delivery-only restaurant.\nDelivery only accounts for 3% of restaurant purchases nationwide, but it is growing fast. Non-pizza delivery purchases have risen by 30% in the past four years, according to market-research firm NPD Group Inc.\n\nGrubHub Inc.,\n\n\n one of many apps that have helped improve the online-ordering and payment process, said it has more than 10,000 delivery drivers, from just a few hundred less than two years ago. Its number of active diners, which it defines as those who have placed at least one order in the past 12 months, grew 26% to 8.75 million in the first quarter from a year earlier.\nThe exponential growth of delivery comes with a new set of challenges. Some restaurants are struggling to figure out how to properly staff their kitchens to handle both in-store demand and delivery orde With online-ordering apps proliferating and many customers cutting down on eating out for lunch, restaurants are experimenting with delivery while trying not to compromise customers\u2019 eating experience. ",
        "author": "Julie Jargon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Startup Aims to Connect Satellites Directly With Cellphones (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "500",
        "date": "2019-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startup-aims-to-connect-satellites-directly-with-cellphones-11550979518?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=16",
        "text": "Various companies already market or plan to offer broadband-via-satellite services to precisely such areas. But those ventures typically require users to rely on antennas, ground stations or other types of additional terrestrial equipment that add costs and often increase complexity.\nAt a conference in Barcelona on Sunday, Charles Miller, a former Trump administration space adviser and chief executive of Virginia-based UbiquitiLink Inc., is scheduled to unveil preliminary test results connecting signals from a roughly 16\u2013pound prototype \u201corbital cell tower\u201d to a cellular device in New Zealand and later in the Falkland Islands. \n\n\nTests conducted in other parts of the globe failed because of hardware malfunctions in space or signal interference from existing users, Mr. Miller said in an interview Saturday. But in his Sunday presentation, Mr. Miller is expected to reveal that in some cases, his miniature space transmitter managed to successfully link up with an unmodified cellphone\u2014identical to those consumers currently use.\n\u201cWe succeeded in demonstrating the fundamental, core technology,\u201d Mr. Miller said in the interview, adding that previous proof-of-concept efforts by others all required \u201csome software or hardware change to the (cellular) device in order to connect.\u201d\nThe latest technology uses existing cellular frequencies and internal phone software to essentially fool the devices into processing signals as though they were coming from a ground-based tower, instead of more than 250 miles above the earth. The experiments were supported by assistance from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and test agreements with various telecommunication companies. \nIf future tests bear out the preliminary and partial results, UbiquitiLink seeks to start deploying satellites weighing some 50 pounds each by 2020 or 2021. Initial applications could include tracking vehicles, providing access to emergency services or offering individual phone users limited internet connectivity\u2014possibly just a few minutes daily when part of a limited satellite constellation passes overhead.\nThe prototype hardware, attached to a NASA unmanned cargo capsule returning from the international space station, was tested earlier this month. The next round of tests may occur during the summer, Mr. Miller said. \nAt this point Mr. Miller\u2019s fledgling venture has no signed agreements with customers or firm production plans for spacecraft. UbiquitiLink still needs to raise some $30 million to begin offering commercial services, according to its chief executive. And under the best-case scenario, it is years away from being able to offer routine broadband connections across a number of regions.\nStill, the venture has signed testing and cooperation agreements with more than a dozen telecommunication companies around the globe. Many of those participants are looking to supplement existing cell-tower coverage. Mr. Miller said his company also has attracted attention\u00a0and discussed collaborating with some Silicon Valley companies.\n\u201cWe are really excited and want to push these innovative solutions along,\u201d said Easwaren Siva, general manager of technology strategy for Vodafone Hutchison Australia, one of the test partners. \u201cThis would be transformational for rural and remote Australia,\u201d he said, where traditional terrestrial solutions are too costly.\nAdrian DiMeo, a senior technology official at Telef\u00f3nica Argentina, said his company has cellular coverage for roughly 96% of the country\u2019s population, but the rest live in remote areas where installing traditional ground infrastructure isn\u2019t viable. Even if UbiquitiLink or another space-based venture \u201cprovides only partial or limited coverage,\u201d he said, \u201cthere are still lots of good opportunities for applications\u201d to supplement existing services.\nThe technical concept has support from some prominent space industry officials. \u201c\n\u201cIt\u2019s a very interesting idea,\u201d said Mark Dankberg, chairman and CEO of satellite-operator Viasat Inc., which is pursuing a different strategy based on larger, high-altitude satellites to provide broadband connections to rural populations. \nOn Wednesday, Viasat and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n announced they are joining forces to accelerate deployment of thousands of Wi-Fi \u201chot spots\u201d in parts of Mexico with limited or no cellular services. Financial terms weren\u2019t disclosed.\nBut unlike Mr. Miller\u2019s vision, Viasat plans to set up community connections at stores, cafes or other businesses, where residents can use a prepaid card to get on the internet for a limited period.\nUbiquitiLink also has received help from regulators, mostly through authorizations to test on certain terrestrial frequencies, according to Mansoor Hanif, chief technology officer for the U.K.\u2019s telecom regulator. He said the company\u2019s partial success is likely to fuel support for the concept. \u201cI would say there is a lot of interest in this,\u201d Mr. Hanif said in an interview, with mobile operators in A tiny space startup is striving to demonstrate the feasibility of transmitting data\u2014and eventually perhaps voice messages\u2014directly from small satellites in orbit to regular cellphones on the ground. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Challenging Road Ahead for Rivian\u2019s Billionaire CEO (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "501",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenging-road-ahead-for-rivians-billionaire-ceo-11639198848?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=2",
        "text": "Unlike rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n TSLA -5.12%\n\n\n Mr. Scaringe doesn\u2019t have a significant head start on the competition; Rivian\u2019s first trucks will have to compete with electric vehicles from Tesla and other established auto makers. He also is expected to face production challenges as he tries to turn out three new models while building and operating new sales hubs instead of relying on traditional car dealers. Rivian plans to deliver roughly 1,000 vehicles by the end of 2021; more than 55,000 potential customers have placed orders that the company expects to fulfill over the next two years. \n\u201cOperational and financial risks abound,\u201d Deutsche Bank analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Emmanuel Rosner\n\n\n\n said in a note published this week. \u201cRamping up production of three new models concurrently has not been done before.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Scaringe declined to comment for this article, citing the so-called quiet period companies typically observe after an IPO. In an interview conducted before the offering, he said Rivian wants to expand its factory output, find a site for a second assembly plant and develop future vehicles to fill out its lineup. The electrification of the auto industry, he said, is a planet-wide imperative requiring more than 1 billion new vehicles. \n\u201cIt\u2019s just staggering,\u201d Mr. Scaringe said. \u201cWhat the IPO represents for us is an opportunity to accelerate how quickly we can go after some of that growth.\u201d \nRivian and other electric-vehicle makers will get some help from the government, too. The Biden administration has set a goal that plug-in and hydrogen-powered cars account for half of all new vehicle sales by 2030, and has pushed to expand existing tax credits aiming to lower cost disparities between electric and gas-powered cars. The expectation of government support for EVs has helped to fuel investor enthusiasm as well, analysts said.\n\u2018Crazy like that\u2019 The road to Rivian began on a section of Florida\u2019s \u201cspace coast,\u201d where Mr. Scaringe grew up. The area is home to NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center as well as the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. His father founded a mechanical engineering company there called Mainstream Engineering Corp., making and designing equipment for the U.S. government such as a refrigeration compressor and advanced heat pumps for spacecraft. \nAs an adolescent, Mr. Scaringe cultivated his love of automobiles. He restored Porsches with a neighbor and stashed spare parts around his bedroom. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of cars and their specifications, in much the same way others might memorize baseball statistics, said Tony Ferrer, a longtime friend who first met Mr. Scaringe in high school. When his friends saw an interesting or unfamiliar car in a parking lot, Mr. Scaringe would sometimes get down underneath it to get a better look at the undercarriage, he said. \nHe was also a competitive athlete who played varsity high school basketball and rose in height well above 6 feet. Classmates from high school and graduate school said he was tenacious during both pickup games and official contests, specializing in defense and rebounding. \nLike his father, Mr. Scaringe gravitated to entrepreneurship. His friends noticed this following a summer when he was absent on the Florida beaches where most of his friends hung out, Mr. Ferrer said. When school resumed, Mr. Scaringe told friends he was working three jobs, seven days a week. At 17, he used those earnings to put a down payment on a house, which he later rented out for income during high school and college, said people close to him. \n\u201cRJ is crazy like that,\u201d Mr. Ferrer said.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1Rivian trails many rivals in sales, but is already more valuable than GM or Ford.Global vehicle sales, 2020*Sources: LMC Automotive; the companies*2021 production targets for Rivian and Lucid approximately 1,000 and 575 respectivelyCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1ToyotaVolkswagenGeneral MotorsFordTeslaRivianLucid0 million246810\n\n\n\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1Friday's market capSource: FactSetCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1TeslaToyotaVolkswagenRivian AutomotiveGeneral MotorsFord MotorLucid Group$0 trillion$0.2$0.4$0.6$0.8$1\n\n\n\nHis interest in autos didn\u2019t wane as he got older. After studying mechanical engineering and economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he researched more efficient engines at the Sloan Automotive Laboratory, a facility named after famed GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan. He finished his Ph.D. at MIT in 2009, just as a financial crisis sent the auto industry into a tailspin and pushed Chrysler LLC and GM into bankruptcy.\nThat same year he returned to Florida to start his own company, aiming to build fuel-efficient hybrid sports cars and coupes. The initial name, Mainstream Motors, had the same first word as his father\u2019s firm, and his first offices were also inside an unused section of RJ Scaringe turned a childhood obsession with cars into one of the year\u2019s hottest IPOs. Now he must fend off stiff competition while churning out three new electric-vehicle models at the same time. ",
        "author": "Ben Foldy"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Challenging Road Ahead for Rivian\u2019s Billionaire CEO (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "502",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenging-road-ahead-for-rivians-billionaire-ceo-11639198848?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=11",
        "text": "Unlike rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n TSLA -2.41%\n\n\n Mr. Scaringe doesn\u2019t have a significant head start on the competition; Rivian\u2019s first trucks will have to compete with electric vehicles from Tesla and other established auto makers. He also is expected to face production challenges as he tries to turn out three new models while building and operating new sales hubs instead of relying on traditional car dealers. Rivian plans to deliver roughly 1,000 vehicles by the end of 2021; more than 55,000 potential customers have placed orders that the company expects to fulfill over the next two years. \n\n\n\n\n\u201cOperational and financial risks abound,\u201d Deutsche Bank analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Emmanuel Rosner\n\n\n\n said in a note published this week. \u201cRamping up production of three new models concurrently has not been done before.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Scaringe declined to comment for this article, citing the so-called quiet period companies typically observe after an IPO. In an interview conducted before the offering, he said Rivian wants to expand its factory output, find a site for a second assembly plant and develop future vehicles to fill out its lineup. The electrification of the auto industry, he said, is a planet-wide imperative requiring more than 1 billion new vehicles. \n\u201cIt\u2019s just staggering,\u201d Mr. Scaringe said. \u201cWhat the IPO represents for us is an opportunity to accelerate how quickly we can go after some of that growth.\u201d \nRivian and other electric-vehicle makers will get some help from the government, too. The Biden administration has set a goal that plug-in and hydrogen-powered cars account for half of all new vehicle sales by 2030, and has pushed to expand existing tax credits aiming to lower cost disparities between electric and gas-powered cars. The expectation of government support for EVs has helped to fuel investor enthusiasm as well, analysts said.\n\u2018Crazy like that\u2019 The road to Rivian began on a section of Florida\u2019s \u201cspace coast,\u201d where Mr. Scaringe grew up. The area is home to NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center as well as the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. His father founded a mechanical engineering company there called Mainstream Engineering Corp., making and designing equipment for the U.S. government such as a refrigeration compressor and advanced heat pumps for spacecraft. \nAs an adolescent, Mr. Scaringe cultivated his love of automobiles. He restored Porsches with a neighbor and stashed spare parts around his bedroom. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of cars and their specifications, in much the same way others might memorize baseball statistics, said Tony Ferrer, a longtime friend who first met Mr. Scaringe in high school. When his friends saw an interesting or unfamiliar car in a parking lot, Mr. Scaringe would sometimes get down underneath it to get a better look at the undercarriage, he said. \nHe was also a competitive athlete who played varsity high school basketball and rose in height well above 6 feet. Classmates from high school and graduate school said he was tenacious during both pickup games and official contests, specializing in defense and rebounding. \nLike his father, Mr. Scaringe gravitated to entrepreneurship. His friends noticed this following a summer when he was absent on the Florida beaches where most of his friends hung out, Mr. Ferrer said. When school resumed, Mr. Scaringe told friends he was working three jobs, seven days a week. At 17, he used those earnings to put a down payment on a house, which he later rented out for income during high school and college, said people close to him. \n\u201cRJ is crazy like that,\u201d Mr. Ferrer said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHis interest in autos didn\u2019t wane as he got older. After studying mechanical engineering and economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he researched more efficient engines at the Sloan Automotive Laboratory, a facility named after famed GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan. He finished his Ph.D. at MIT in 2009, just as a financial crisis sent the auto industry into a tailspin and pushed Chrysler LLC and GM into bankruptcy.\nThat same year he returned to Florida to start his own company, aiming to build fuel-efficient hybrid sports cars and coupes. The initial name, Mainstream Motors, had the same first word as his father\u2019s firm, and his first offices were also inside an unused section of his father\u2019s corporate headquarters. For funding, he took out a mortgage on the house he bought in high school, and later sold it.\nThe name soon changed to Avera Motors. In 2010, the company faced a lawsuit from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Hyundai Motor Co.\n\n\n alleging the Avera name was too similar to its Azera sedan. The company changed its name to Rivian, inspired by the Indian River near Mr. Scaringe\u2019s childhood home. He took the first half of River and the last half of Indian and combined the two.\nMr. Scaringe found help outside his ho RJ Scaringe turned a childhood obsession with cars into one of the year\u2019s hottest IPOs. Now he must fend off stiff competition while churning out three new electric-vehicle models at the same time. ",
        "author": "Ben Foldy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Completes Successful Space Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "503",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-crew-set-for-space-debut-11626775480?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=6",
        "text": "The vessel\u2019s crew capsule floated down under its three parachutes to a spot in the desert, a few minutes after the reusable booster returned\u2014following two sonic booms and blackening the pad as it landed. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft after launch on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt felt so serene and peaceful, and the floating\u2026it\u2019s a very pleasurable experience,\u201d Mr. Bezos, 57 years old, said of weightlessness at a press conference after his flight.\n\n\n\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is the first step of something big,\u201d he said, comparing the current stage of private space flight with the barnstorming phase that helped foster commercial aviation. \u201cBig things start small,\u201d he said, adding he did something similar with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n AMZN -0.88%\n\n\n about three decades ago. \nTuesday\u2019s space flight was Blue Origin\u2019s first with passengers on board, a group that included the world\u2019s wealthiest person\u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 net worth amounts to more than $200 billion, according to Bloomberg\u2014as well the oldest-ever space traveler and the youngest, 82-year-old aviator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wally Funk\n\n\n\n and 18-year-old student\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oliver Daemen,\n\n\n\n respectively.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Bezos,\n\n\n\n 50, the co-founder of private-equity firm HighPost Capital and Jeff Bezos\u2019 brother, also was on the trip. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin said it had opened ticket sales for future flights, and Mr. Bezos said it is approaching $100 million in sales, with two more crewed missions planned this year. It hasn\u2019t given details on pricing.\nThe company had hoped to start tourist flights on the New Shepard years earlier, according to Mr. Bezos\u2019 past comments about the craft. But by ferrying the four passengers to an altitude of more than 62 miles and getting them back to Earth on the RSS First Step capsule, Blue Origin demonstrated some of the engineering and rocketry prowess it has been developing. \nSpace flights are risky, and the vehicles that companies have designed to ferry humans to space have been tested a fraction of the number of times that are typical for commercial planes. The fully autonomous New Shepard rocket system has now completed 16 trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and began acquiring land in Texas to build the private facility used for Tuesday\u2019s launch. The company hired staffers to develop rockets, engines and spacecraft and now employs more than 3,500 people at facilities in Florida, California and other locations.\nAt the facility in Texas, New Shepard took off with a sustained roar, a flame visible as it powered into space. A couple of minutes later, the vessel reduced to a speck in the sky and then disappeared. One Blue Origin employee stood with her hands on her knees, overcome briefly by emotion. Others applauded and hugged each other. \nThe flight was timed to coincide with the date in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. In speeches, Mr. Bezos has cited that event as a key moment during his life and stated his conviction that humanity must establish outposts in the solar system where people could live. \nMr. Bezos has said he has invested around $1 billion annually in Blue Origin in recent years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe view from the rocket after liftoff on Tuesday morning.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos said on Tuesday that he would split his time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund focused on climate change and sustainability. \u201cAnd there\u2019s going to be a third thing and maybe a fourth thing, but I don\u2019t know what those are yet,\u201d he said. \nBlue Origin is looking to gain traction in a space market that has attracted fresh investor attention, with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into startups and listed companies. Space flight has long been dominated by government agencies. However, more companies are working to position themselves for a sector that some analysts believe may grow rapidly in the coming decades in tandem with technological advances.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n has estimated that space-related revenue could triple to more than $1 trillion by 2040.\nOn July 11,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n traveled with five others about 54 miles up in a company spacecraft, a flight meant to help spur tourism in space. Later this year, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX,\u00a0plans to take four commercial passengers into orbit on one of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX also The Amazon founder and three passengers reached the edge of space and safely returned after a flight of just over 10 minutes that the billionaire businessman hopes will kick-start an expansive new era for human space travel. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Completes Successful Space Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "504",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-crew-set-for-space-debut-11626775480?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=5",
        "text": "The vessel\u2019s crew capsule floated down under its three parachutes to a spot in the desert, a few minutes after the reusable booster returned\u2014following two sonic booms and blackening the pad as it landed. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft after launch on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt felt so serene and peaceful, and the floating\u2026it\u2019s a very pleasurable experience,\u201d Mr. Bezos, 57 years old, said of weightlessness at a press conference after his flight.\n\n\n\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is the first step of something big,\u201d he said, comparing the current stage of private space flight with the barnstorming phase that helped foster commercial aviation. \u201cBig things start small,\u201d he said, adding he did something similar with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n AMZN 0.71%\n\n\n about three decades ago. \nTuesday\u2019s space flight was Blue Origin\u2019s first with passengers on board, a group that included the world\u2019s wealthiest person\u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 net worth amounts to more than $200 billion, according to Bloomberg\u2014as well the oldest-ever space traveler and the youngest, 82-year-old aviator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wally Funk\n\n\n\n and 18-year-old student\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oliver Daemen,\n\n\n\n respectively.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Bezos,\n\n\n\n 50, the co-founder of private-equity firm HighPost Capital and Jeff Bezos\u2019 brother, also was on the trip. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin said it had opened ticket sales for future flights, and Mr. Bezos said it is approaching $100 million in sales, with two more crewed missions planned this year. It hasn\u2019t given details on pricing.\nThe company had hoped to start tourist flights on the New Shepard years earlier, according to Mr. Bezos\u2019 past comments about the craft. But by ferrying the four passengers to an altitude of more than 62 miles and getting them back to Earth on the RSS First Step capsule, Blue Origin demonstrated some of the engineering and rocketry prowess it has been developing. \nSpace flights are risky, and the vehicles that companies have designed to ferry humans to space have been tested a fraction of the number of times that are typical for commercial planes. The fully autonomous New Shepard rocket system has now completed 16 trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and began acquiring land in Texas to build the private facility used for Tuesday\u2019s launch. The company hired staffers to develop rockets, engines and spacecraft and now employs more than 3,500 people at facilities in Florida, California and other locations.\nAt the facility in Texas, New Shepard took off with a sustained roar, a flame visible as it powered into space. A couple of minutes later, the vessel reduced to a speck in the sky and then disappeared. One Blue Origin employee stood with her hands on her knees, overcome briefly by emotion. Others applauded and hugged each other. \nThe flight was timed to coincide with the date in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. In speeches, Mr. Bezos has cited that event as a key moment during his life and stated his conviction that humanity must establish outposts in the solar system where people could live. \nMr. Bezos has said he has invested around $1 billion annually in Blue Origin in recent years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe view from the rocket after liftoff on Tuesday morning.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos said on Tuesday that he would split his time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund focused on climate change and sustainability. \u201cAnd there\u2019s going to be a third thing and maybe a fourth thing, but I don\u2019t know what those are yet,\u201d he said. \nBlue Origin is looking to gain traction in a space market that has attracted fresh investor attention, with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into startups and listed companies. Space flight has long been dominated by government agencies. However, more companies are working to position themselves for a sector that some analysts believe may grow rapidly in the coming decades in tandem with technological advances.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n has estimated that space-related revenue could triple to more than $1 trillion by 2040.\nOn July 11,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n traveled with five others about 54 miles up in a company spacecraft, a flight meant to help spur tourism in space. Later this year, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX,\u00a0plans to take four commercial passengers into orbit on one of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX a The Amazon founder and three passengers reached the edge of space and safely returned after a flight of just over 10 minutes that the billionaire businessman hopes will kick-start an expansive new era for human space travel. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Completes Successful Space Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "505",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-crew-set-for-space-debut-11626775480?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=26",
        "text": "The vessel\u2019s crew capsule floated down under its three parachutes to a spot in the desert, a few minutes after the reusable booster returned\u2014following two sonic booms and blackening the pad as it landed. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft after launch on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt felt so serene and peaceful, and the floating\u2026it\u2019s a very pleasurable experience,\u201d Mr. Bezos, 57 years old, said of weightlessness at a press conference after his flight.\n\n\n\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is the first step of something big,\u201d he said, comparing the current stage of private space flight with the barnstorming phase that helped foster commercial aviation. \u201cBig things start small,\u201d he said, adding he did something similar with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n AMZN -0.88%\n\n\n about three decades ago. \nTuesday\u2019s space flight was Blue Origin\u2019s first with passengers on board, a group that included the world\u2019s wealthiest person\u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 net worth amounts to more than $200 billion, according to Bloomberg\u2014as well the oldest-ever space traveler and the youngest, 82-year-old aviator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wally Funk\n\n\n\n and 18-year-old student\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oliver Daemen,\n\n\n\n respectively.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Bezos,\n\n\n\n 50, the co-founder of private-equity firm HighPost Capital and Jeff Bezos\u2019 brother, also was on the trip. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin said it had opened ticket sales for future flights, and Mr. Bezos said it is approaching $100 million in sales, with two more crewed missions planned this year. It hasn\u2019t given details on pricing.\nThe company had hoped to start tourist flights on the New Shepard years earlier, according to Mr. Bezos\u2019 past comments about the craft. But by ferrying the four passengers to an altitude of more than 62 miles and getting them back to Earth on the RSS First Step capsule, Blue Origin demonstrated some of the engineering and rocketry prowess it has been developing. \nSpace flights are risky, and the vehicles that companies have designed to ferry humans to space have been tested a fraction of the number of times that are typical for commercial planes. The fully autonomous New Shepard rocket system has now completed 16 trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and began acquiring land in Texas to build the private facility used for Tuesday\u2019s launch. The company hired staffers to develop rockets, engines and spacecraft and now employs more than 3,500 people at facilities in Florida, California and other locations.\nAt the facility in Texas, New Shepard took off with a sustained roar, a flame visible as it powered into space. A couple of minutes later, the vessel reduced to a speck in the sky and then disappeared. One Blue Origin employee stood with her hands on her knees, overcome briefly by emotion. Others applauded and hugged each other. \nThe flight was timed to coincide with the date in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. In speeches, Mr. Bezos has cited that event as a key moment during his life and stated his conviction that humanity must establish outposts in the solar system where people could live. \nMr. Bezos has said he has invested around $1 billion annually in Blue Origin in recent years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe view from the rocket after liftoff on Tuesday morning.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos said on Tuesday that he would split his time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund focused on climate change and sustainability. \u201cAnd there\u2019s going to be a third thing and maybe a fourth thing, but I don\u2019t know what those are yet,\u201d he said. \nBlue Origin is looking to gain traction in a space market that has attracted fresh investor attention, with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into startups and listed companies. Space flight has long been dominated by government agencies. However, more companies are working to position themselves for a sector that some analysts believe may grow rapidly in the coming decades in tandem with technological advances.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n has estimated that space-related revenue could triple to more than $1 trillion by 2040.\nOn July 11,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n traveled with five others about 54 miles up in a company spacecraft, a flight meant to help spur tourism in space. Later this year, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX,\u00a0plans to take four commercial passengers into orbit on one of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX also The Amazon founder and three passengers reached the edge of space and safely returned after a flight of just over 10 minutes that the billionaire businessman hopes will kick-start an expansive new era for human space travel. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Completes Successful Space Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "506",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-crew-set-for-space-debut-11626775480?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=26",
        "text": "The vessel\u2019s crew capsule floated down under its three parachutes to a spot in the desert, a few minutes after the reusable booster returned\u2014following two sonic booms and blackening the pad as it landed. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft after launch on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt felt so serene and peaceful, and the floating\u2026it\u2019s a very pleasurable experience,\u201d Mr. Bezos, 57 years old, said of weightlessness at a press conference after his flight.\n\n\n\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing is the first step of something big,\u201d he said, comparing the current stage of private space flight with the barnstorming phase that helped foster commercial aviation. \u201cBig things start small,\u201d he said, adding he did something similar with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n AMZN 5.41%\n\n\n about three decades ago. \nTuesday\u2019s space flight was Blue Origin\u2019s first with passengers on board, a group that included the world\u2019s wealthiest person\u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 net worth amounts to more than $200 billion, according to Bloomberg\u2014as well the oldest-ever space traveler and the youngest, 82-year-old aviator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wally Funk\n\n\n\n and 18-year-old student\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oliver Daemen,\n\n\n\n respectively.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Bezos,\n\n\n\n 50, the co-founder of private-equity firm HighPost Capital and Jeff Bezos\u2019 brother, also was on the trip. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin said it had opened ticket sales for future flights, and Mr. Bezos said it is approaching $100 million in sales, with two more crewed missions planned this year. It hasn\u2019t given details on pricing.\nThe company had hoped to start tourist flights on the New Shepard years earlier, according to Mr. Bezos\u2019 past comments about the craft. But by ferrying the four passengers to an altitude of more than 62 miles and getting them back to Earth on the RSS First Step capsule, Blue Origin demonstrated some of the engineering and rocketry prowess it has been developing. \nSpace flights are risky, and the vehicles that companies have designed to ferry humans to space have been tested a fraction of the number of times that are typical for commercial planes. The fully autonomous New Shepard rocket system has now completed 16 trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and began acquiring land in Texas to build the private facility used for Tuesday\u2019s launch. The company hired staffers to develop rockets, engines and spacecraft and now employs more than 3,500 people at facilities in Florida, California and other locations.\nAt the facility in Texas, New Shepard took off with a sustained roar, a flame visible as it powered into space. A couple of minutes later, the vessel reduced to a speck in the sky and then disappeared. One Blue Origin employee stood with her hands on her knees, overcome briefly by emotion. Others applauded and hugged each other. \nThe flight was timed to coincide with the date in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon. In speeches, Mr. Bezos has cited that event as a key moment during his life and stated his conviction that humanity must establish outposts in the solar system where people could live. \nMr. Bezos has said he has invested around $1 billion annually in Blue Origin in recent years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe view from the rocket after liftoff on Tuesday morning.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos said on Tuesday that he would split his time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund focused on climate change and sustainability. \u201cAnd there\u2019s going to be a third thing and maybe a fourth thing, but I don\u2019t know what those are yet,\u201d he said. \nBlue Origin is looking to gain traction in a space market that has attracted fresh investor attention, with hundreds of millions of dollars poured into startups and listed companies. Space flight has long been dominated by government agencies. However, more companies are working to position themselves for a sector that some analysts believe may grow rapidly in the coming decades in tandem with technological advances.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n has estimated that space-related revenue could triple to more than $1 trillion by 2040.\nOn July 11,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n traveled with five others about 54 miles up in a company spacecraft, a flight meant to help spur tourism in space. Later this year, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX,\u00a0plans to take four commercial passengers into orbit on one of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX a The Amazon founder and three passengers reached the edge of space and safely returned after a flight of just over 10 minutes that the billionaire businessman hopes will kick-start an expansive new era for human space travel. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Winning Ticket to Join Jeff Bezos in Space Costs Nearly $30 Million in Blue Origin Auction (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "507",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/winning-ticket-to-join-jeff-bezos-in-space-costs-nearly-30-million-in-blue-origin-auction-11623519316?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=7",
        "text": "The successful bidder will be among the passengers on the New Shepard vehicle\u2019s first crewed launch planned for July 20 and spend a few minutes in space with Mr. Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and an unnamed fourth would-be astronaut.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBidding opened Saturday at $4.9 million and rose quickly to $10 million before four participants competed to ultimately raise the price to $28 million. A 6% buyers\u2019 commission is added to the winning bid, taking the final cost to $29.7 million. Blue Origin said 7,600 bidders from 159 countries registered for the event.\n\nProceeds go to the Blue Origin Club for the Future charity, which focuses on encouraging young people to take an interest in space, math and science.\nThe mission next month ushers in a new chapter for the long-delayed space tourism industry, where Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n have competed to take the first paying passenger on a reusable vehicle.\nThe winning bid was more than 10 times the highest auction bid price before Mr. Bezos announced Monday that he would be part of the 10-minute flight to the edge of space and back in a capsule that can hold six passengers.\nMr. Bezos is stepping down as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s\n\n AMZN -0.88%\n\n\n chief executive July 5 after leading the company for more than two decades. He has invested heavily in Blue Origin, contributing as much as roughly $1 billion a year.\nThe New Shepard is autonomous, with no pilot, and the winning bidder will have just six weeks to prepare for the mission. Passengers must sign a form waiving their right to sue Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in the event of an accident. The company said minimal training is required, and they don\u2019t have to pass a medical, only complete physical requirements including being able to run to the top of the company\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven flights of stairs\u2014in 90 seconds and fit into a spacesuit.\nBlue Origin has conducted 15 successful uncrewed launches with the rocket over the past six years from its West Texas base. The capsule is designed to parachute back to land nearby after a flight that will include a few minutes of weightlessness.\nPassengers will be allowed to unbuckle and move around the cabin during the weightless period, Blue Origin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe interior of the Blue Origin crew capsule in an undated photo from the space company.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n handout/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have said they are following rigorous testing and safety standards as they prepare to open ticket sales. Analysts expect flights to cost as much as $500,000 for a brief up and down that includes several minutes of weightlessness. \nBlue Origin\u2019s flights take about 10 minutes. Virgin Galactic\u2019s take more than two hours because the spacecraft is launched from an airplane that must first climb to a high altitude. Mr. Branson has said he hopes to be part of a test flight later this year.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe successful bidder will be part of a crew that includes Jeff Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the brother\u2019s name was Matt. (Corrected on June 12)\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The winner of the charity auction will join the Amazon CEO on the space company\u2019s first passenger flight next month. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Winning Ticket to Join Jeff Bezos in Space Costs Nearly $30 Million in Blue Origin Auction (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "508",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/winning-ticket-to-join-jeff-bezos-in-space-costs-nearly-30-million-in-blue-origin-auction-11623519316?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=8",
        "text": "The successful bidder will be among the passengers on the New Shepard vehicle\u2019s first crewed launch planned for July 20 and spend a few minutes in space with Mr. Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and an unnamed fourth would-be astronaut.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert \n\n\n\n Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBidding opened Saturday at $4.9 million and rose quickly to $10 million before four participants competed to ultimately raise the price to $28 million. A 6% buyers\u2019 commission is added to the winning bid, taking the final cost to $29.7 million. Blue Origin said 7,600 bidders from 159 countries registered for the event.\n\nProceeds go to the Blue Origin Club for the Future charity, which focuses on encouraging young people to take an interest in space, math and science.\nThe mission next month ushers in a new chapter for the long-delayed space tourism industry, where Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -1.52%\n\n\n have competed to take the first paying passenger on a reusable vehicle.\nThe winning bid was more than 10 times the highest auction bid price before Mr. Bezos announced Monday that he would be part of the 10-minute flight to the edge of space and back in a capsule that can hold six passengers.\nMr. Bezos is stepping down as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s\n\n AMZN 0.87%\n\n\n chief executive July 5 after leading the company for more than two decades. He has invested heavily in Blue Origin, contributing as much as roughly $1 billion a year.\nThe New Shepard is autonomous, with no pilot, and the winning bidder will have just six weeks to prepare for the mission. Passengers must sign a form waiving their right to sue Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in the event of an accident. The company said minimal training is required, and they don\u2019t have to pass a medical, only complete physical requirements including being able to run to the top of the company\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven flights of stairs\u2014in 90 seconds and fit into a spacesuit.\nBlue Origin has conducted 15 successful uncrewed launches with the rocket over the past six years from its West Texas base. The capsule is designed to parachute back to land nearby after a flight that will include a few minutes of weightlessness.\nPassengers will be allowed to unbuckle and move around the cabin during the weightless period, Blue Origin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe interior of the Blue Origin crew capsule in an undated photo from the space company.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n handout/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have said they are following rigorous testing and safety standards as they prepare to open ticket sales. Analysts expect flights to cost as much as $500,000 for a brief up and down that includes several minutes of weightlessness. \nBlue Origin\u2019s flights take about 10 minutes. Virgin Galactic\u2019s take more than two hours because the spacecraft is launched from an airplane that must first climb to a high altitude. Mr. Branson has said he hopes to be part of a test flight later this year.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe successful bidder will be part of a crew that includes Jeff Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the brother\u2019s name was Matt. (Corrected on June 12)\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The winner of the charity auction will join the Amazon CEO on the space company\u2019s first passenger flight next month. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Winning Ticket to Join Jeff Bezos in Space Costs Nearly $30 Million in Blue Origin Auction (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "509",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/winning-ticket-to-join-jeff-bezos-in-space-costs-nearly-30-million-in-blue-origin-auction-11623519316?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=20",
        "text": "The successful bidder will be among the passengers on the New Shepard vehicle\u2019s first crewed launch planned for July 20 and spend a few minutes in space with Mr. Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and an unnamed fourth would-be astronaut.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert \n\n\n\n Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBidding opened Saturday at $4.9 million and rose quickly to $10 million before four participants competed to ultimately raise the price to $28 million. A 6% buyers\u2019 commission is added to the winning bid, taking the final cost to $29.7 million. Blue Origin said 7,600 bidders from 159 countries registered for the event.\n\nProceeds go to the Blue Origin Club for the Future charity, which focuses on encouraging young people to take an interest in space, math and science.\nThe mission next month ushers in a new chapter for the long-delayed space tourism industry, where Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.20%\n\n\n have competed to take the first paying passenger on a reusable vehicle.\nThe winning bid was more than 10 times the highest auction bid price before Mr. Bezos announced Monday that he would be part of the 10-minute flight to the edge of space and back in a capsule that can hold six passengers.\nMr. Bezos is stepping down as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s\n\n AMZN 5.41%\n\n\n chief executive July 5 after leading the company for more than two decades. He has invested heavily in Blue Origin, contributing as much as roughly $1 billion a year.\nThe New Shepard is autonomous, with no pilot, and the winning bidder will have just six weeks to prepare for the mission. Passengers must sign a form waiving their right to sue Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in the event of an accident. The company said minimal training is required, and they don\u2019t have to pass a medical, only complete physical requirements including being able to run to the top of the company\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven flights of stairs\u2014in 90 seconds and fit into a spacesuit.\nBlue Origin has conducted 15 successful uncrewed launches with the rocket over the past six years from its West Texas base. The capsule is designed to parachute back to land nearby after a flight that will include a few minutes of weightlessness.\nPassengers will be allowed to unbuckle and move around the cabin during the weightless period, Blue Origin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe interior of the Blue Origin crew capsule in an undated photo from the space company.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n handout/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have said they are following rigorous testing and safety standards as they prepare to open ticket sales. Analysts expect flights to cost as much as $500,000 for a brief up and down that includes several minutes of weightlessness. \nBlue Origin\u2019s flights take about 10 minutes. Virgin Galactic\u2019s take more than two hours because the spacecraft is launched from an airplane that must first climb to a high altitude. Mr. Branson has said he hopes to be part of a test flight later this year.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe successful bidder will be part of a crew that includes Jeff Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the brother\u2019s name was Matt. (Corrected on June 12)\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The winner of the charity auction will join the Amazon CEO on the space company\u2019s first passenger flight next month. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Winning Ticket to Join Jeff Bezos in Space Costs Nearly $30 Million in Blue Origin Auction (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "510",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/winning-ticket-to-join-jeff-bezos-in-space-costs-nearly-30-million-in-blue-origin-auction-11623519316?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=28",
        "text": "The successful bidder will be among the passengers on the New Shepard vehicle\u2019s first crewed launch planned for July 20 and spend a few minutes in space with Mr. Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and an unnamed fourth would-be astronaut.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBidding opened Saturday at $4.9 million and rose quickly to $10 million before four participants competed to ultimately raise the price to $28 million. A 6% buyers\u2019 commission is added to the winning bid, taking the final cost to $29.7 million. Blue Origin said 7,600 bidders from 159 countries registered for the event.\n\nProceeds go to the Blue Origin Club for the Future charity, which focuses on encouraging young people to take an interest in space, math and science.\nThe mission next month ushers in a new chapter for the long-delayed space tourism industry, where Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n have competed to take the first paying passenger on a reusable vehicle.\nThe winning bid was more than 10 times the highest auction bid price before Mr. Bezos announced Monday that he would be part of the 10-minute flight to the edge of space and back in a capsule that can hold six passengers.\nMr. Bezos is stepping down as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s\n\n AMZN -0.88%\n\n\n chief executive July 5 after leading the company for more than two decades. He has invested heavily in Blue Origin, contributing as much as roughly $1 billion a year.\nThe New Shepard is autonomous, with no pilot, and the winning bidder will have just six weeks to prepare for the mission. Passengers must sign a form waiving their right to sue Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in the event of an accident. The company said minimal training is required, and they don\u2019t have to pass a medical, only complete physical requirements including being able to run to the top of the company\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven flights of stairs\u2014in 90 seconds and fit into a spacesuit.\nBlue Origin has conducted 15 successful uncrewed launches with the rocket over the past six years from its West Texas base. The capsule is designed to parachute back to land nearby after a flight that will include a few minutes of weightlessness.\nPassengers will be allowed to unbuckle and move around the cabin during the weightless period, Blue Origin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe interior of the Blue Origin crew capsule in an undated photo from the space company.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n handout/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have said they are following rigorous testing and safety standards as they prepare to open ticket sales. Analysts expect flights to cost as much as $500,000 for a brief up and down that includes several minutes of weightlessness. \nBlue Origin\u2019s flights take about 10 minutes. Virgin Galactic\u2019s take more than two hours because the spacecraft is launched from an airplane that must first climb to a high altitude. Mr. Branson has said he hopes to be part of a test flight later this year.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe successful bidder will be part of a crew that includes Jeff Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the brother\u2019s name was Matt. (Corrected on June 12)\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The winner of the charity auction will join the Amazon CEO on the space company\u2019s first passenger flight next month. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman Revises Satellite Procedures (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "511",
        "date": "2018-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/northrop-grumman-revises-satellite-procedures-after-telescope-delay-1522434090?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=20",
        "text": "The revisions are expected to affect practices at Northrop Grumman, a major supplier of commercial and defense space systems, significantly beyond its work for NASA, according to some industry and government officials.\nExtra personnel costs are anticipated to add\u00a0at least\u00a0$200 million to the Webb program\u2019s overall development costs, which could put it over the $8 billion cap approved by Congress, one of the knowledgeable people said.\n\n\nCongress has pledged to re-evaluate the project if its budget exceeded that total. In addition, some lawmakers\u00a0have already been critical of Northrop Grumman\u2019s performance.\nNeither Northrop Grumman nor National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials have publicly indicated the likely financial impact of the procedural fixes and additional hardware testing.\nOn Thursday, a Northrop Grumman spokesman declined to comment, reiterating an earlier statement that the company \u201cremains steadfast in its commitment to NASA and ensuring successful integration, launch and deployment.\u201d\nA NASA spokesman pointed to statements by agency officials during a press briefing\u00a0Tuesday. When NASA announced the schedule adjustment\u2014the third major delay\u00a0in seven years\u2014senior agency officials were uncharacteristically critical of what they called \u201cavoidable errors\u201d by\u00a0Northrop. Moreover, the announcement was unusual because details of the final timetable changes and agency positions weren\u2019t communicated to senior Northrop Grumman executives in advance, according to the knowledgeable people.\nDuring the briefing,\u00a0acting NASA chief Robert Lightfoot said \u201ccorrective actions taken by the project\u201d are intended to \u201cgive us better insight into our management of future large space systems.\u201d\nSince then, more specifics have emerged about the root causes of certain production lapses. Northrop Grumman workers\u00a0installed 16 valves on the\u00a0satellite\u2019s thrusters without relying on detailed instructions and in the process used the wrong cleaning compound, damaging the parts,\u00a0said one of the knowledgeable people.\nResulting leaks required a subcontractor to refurbish the valves, followed by another time-consuming process to replace and retest them. It took about three months to complete the process, this person said.\nWhen workers deployed a sun shield designed to protect the spacecraft\u2019s intricate gold, hexagonal-shaped mirrors in space, the operation took twice as long as expected and revealed shortcomings despite earlier successful tests with a one-third-scale replica.\nCables that pull the shield into shape\u00a0\u201cdevelop too much slack during the deployment, creating a snagging hazard,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for unmanned missions, told reporters\u00a0Tuesday.\nSeveral tears also appeared in the shield, according to one of the knowledgeable people, because of unexpected stresses stemming from workers\u2019 incorrectly attaching hooks and cables to the wrong holes.\nEven before such blunders, NASA leaders had demanded a high-level management shake-up at Northrop Grumman in response to schedule slips for the project, this person added. Privately, company managers countered that years of delays were common for other large, complex government satellite projects.\nNorthrop Grumman argued some\u00a0of its delays reflected joint NASA-contractor decisions made years earlier\u00a0to hold off developing and testing certain elements of the space observatory to give the agency extra dollars and time to complete work on its portion, one of the people familiar with the process said.\nFallout from problems with the space telescope, the largest space science program in U.S. history, could adversely affect other U.S. and international astrophysics and astronomy projects. The timing as well as the focus of some of those follow-on efforts depend partly on anticipated results from sensors on the Webb telescope.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Northrop Grumman has implemented major changes in satellite production as a result of its high-profile mistakes building NASA\u2019s troubled James Webb Space Telescope. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman Revises Satellite Procedures (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "512",
        "date": "2018-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/northrop-grumman-revises-satellite-procedures-after-telescope-delay-1522434090?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=69",
        "text": "The revisions are expected to affect practices at Northrop Grumman, a major supplier of commercial and defense space systems, significantly beyond its work for NASA, according to some industry and government officials.\nExtra personnel costs are anticipated to add\u00a0at least\u00a0$200 million to the Webb program\u2019s overall development costs, which could put it over the $8 billion cap approved by Congress, one of the knowledgeable people said.\n\n\nCongress has pledged to re-evaluate the project if its budget exceeded that total. In addition, some lawmakers\u00a0have already been critical of Northrop Grumman\u2019s performance.\nNeither Northrop Grumman nor National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials have publicly indicated the likely financial impact of the procedural fixes and additional hardware testing.\nOn Thursday, a Northrop Grumman spokesman declined to comment, reiterating an earlier statement that the company \u201cremains steadfast in its commitment to NASA and ensuring successful integration, launch and deployment.\u201d\nA NASA spokesman pointed to statements by agency officials during a press briefing\u00a0Tuesday. When NASA announced the schedule adjustment\u2014the third major delay\u00a0in seven years\u2014senior agency officials were uncharacteristically critical of what they called \u201cavoidable errors\u201d by\u00a0Northrop. Moreover, the announcement was unusual because details of the final timetable changes and agency positions weren\u2019t communicated to senior Northrop Grumman executives in advance, according to the knowledgeable people.\nDuring the briefing,\u00a0acting NASA chief Robert Lightfoot said \u201ccorrective actions taken by the project\u201d are intended to \u201cgive us better insight into our management of future large space systems.\u201d\nSince then, more specifics have emerged about the root causes of certain production lapses. Northrop Grumman workers\u00a0installed 16 valves on the\u00a0satellite\u2019s thrusters without relying on detailed instructions and in the process used the wrong cleaning compound, damaging the parts,\u00a0said one of the knowledgeable people.\nResulting leaks required a subcontractor to refurbish the valves, followed by another time-consuming process to replace and retest them. It took about three months to complete the process, this person said.\nWhen workers deployed a sun shield designed to protect the spacecraft\u2019s intricate gold, hexagonal-shaped mirrors in space, the operation took twice as long as expected and revealed shortcomings despite earlier successful tests with a one-third-scale replica.\nCables that pull the shield into shape\u00a0\u201cdevelop too much slack during the deployment, creating a snagging hazard,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for unmanned missions, told reporters\u00a0Tuesday.\nSeveral tears also appeared in the shield, according to one of the knowledgeable people, because of unexpected stresses stemming from workers\u2019 incorrectly attaching hooks and cables to the wrong holes.\nEven before such blunders, NASA leaders had demanded a high-level management shake-up at Northrop Grumman in response to schedule slips for the project, this person added. Privately, company managers countered that years of delays were common for other large, complex government satellite projects.\nNorthrop Grumman argued some\u00a0of its delays reflected joint NASA-contractor decisions made years earlier\u00a0to hold off developing and testing certain elements of the space observatory to give the agency extra dollars and time to complete work on its portion, one of the people familiar with the process said.\nFallout from problems with the space telescope, the largest space science program in U.S. history, could adversely affect other U.S. and international astrophysics and astronomy projects. The timing as well as the focus of some of those follow-on efforts depend partly on anticipated results from sensors on the Webb telescope.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Northrop Grumman has implemented major changes in satellite production as a result of its high-profile mistakes building NASA\u2019s troubled James Webb Space Telescope. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Plans Virgin Galactic Space Trip Before Jeff Bezos (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "513",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-plans-virgin-galactic-space-trip-before-jeff-bezos-11625181813?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=7",
        "text": "The planned launches ferrying both men and their fellow crewmates highlight the competition between Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin to the edge of space. Passengers on suborbital flights may pay significant amounts to experience weightlessness and see Earth from vantage points few have witnessed. \n\n\nIn a statement, Blue Origin Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith\n\n\n\n said the company wishes Mr. Branson a great, safe flight. He said Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t fly above the Karman Line, which is the imaginary boundary about 62 miles above sea level considered the beginning of space. \u201cIt\u2019s a very different experience,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore Business Stories\n\n\n\n\nThe Rise and Fall of the Management Visionary Behind Zappos\nMarch 12, 2022 \n\n\nDisney CEO Tried to Avoid Politics, Now Finds Himself in Middle of Partisan Spat\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nDocuSign Stock Plunged on Soft Outlook\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nAT&T Sketches Out Life After Hollywood \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nPressure Mounts for Western Companies Leaving Russia \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic said the company flies above 50 miles, which she said meets a National Aeronautics and Space Administration definition of space.\nVirgin Galactic executives have said in the past that trips could cost less than $500,000, but the company hasn\u2019t disclosed prices for commercial service it hopes to launch next year. \nShares of Virgin Galactic jumped 27% to $54.99 in after-hours trading Thursday. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe mission will be Virgin Galactic\u2019s first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists, including Richard Branson, in the cabin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Drew/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe mission will be Virgin Galactic\u2019s fourth crewed spaceflight and the company\u2019s first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists, including Mr. Branson, in the cabin.\n\u201cI\u2019m honored to help validate the journey our future astronauts will undertake and ensure we deliver the unique customer experience people expect from Virgin,\u201d Mr. Branson said in a statement.\nMr. Branson\u2019s task will be to use his background in creating consumer experiences to absorb the trip\u2019s feel from the perspective of a private astronaut, Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in an interview. \n\u201cThis is the flight that\u2019s ready for him,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said, adding that the company picked the proposed July 11 launch date because the company is technically ready. Last week, Virgin Galactic said the Federal Aviation Administration granted it a full commercial space-launch license, opening the door to outside passengers to join flights. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018This is the flight that\u2019s ready for him\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Virgin Galactic Chief Executive Michael Colglazier of Richard Branson\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public in 2019, uses a spacecraft that rockets into the lower part of space after being dropped from a highflying airplane that takes off from a facility in New Mexico. During flights, passengers will be able to float for a few minutes in space if they want, a spokeswoman said, before the craft glides back to earth. In all, the trips take about 90 minutes. \nOther passengers expected for the company\u2019s flight this month include Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor, and Sirisha Bandla, a vice president focused on government affairs and research. \nMr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has a different approach, using a reusable rocket to propel a capsule briefly above the Karman Line. The capsule then returns to the ground with a parachute. The trip lasts about 10 minutes.\nBlue Origin said earlier Thursday that its planned launch later this month will include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wally Funk,\n\n\n\n an 82-year-old pilot, as a guest. She had trained for space flight in the 1960s as part of a private program that tested female pilots for astronaut fitness, according to the company. \nMr. Bezos\u2019s brother Mark is also expected on the flight, as is an unnamed person who bid almost $30 million in a charity auction for a seat. \nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Launch is scheduled for July 11, nine days before that carrying Amazon\u2019s outgoing chief executive. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Plans Virgin Galactic Space Trip Before Jeff Bezos (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "514",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-plans-virgin-galactic-space-trip-before-jeff-bezos-11625181813?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=7",
        "text": "The planned launches ferrying both men and their fellow crewmates highlight the competition between Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin to the edge of space. Passengers on suborbital flights may pay significant amounts to experience weightlessness and see Earth from vantage points few have witnessed. \n\n\nIn a statement, Blue Origin Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith\n\n\n\n said the company wishes Mr. Branson a great, safe flight. He said Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t fly above the Karman Line, which is the imaginary boundary about 62 miles above sea level considered the beginning of space. \u201cIt\u2019s a very different experience,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore Business Stories\n\n\n\n\nStoli Wants to Clarify It Isn\u2019t Russian Vodka\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nApollo\u2019s Approach for Publisher Pearson Is Rejected\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nAT&T Sketches Out Life After Hollywood \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nPressure Mounts for Western Companies Leaving Russia \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nDocuSign Stock Plunges on Soft Outlook\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic said the company flies above 50 miles, which she said meets a National Aeronautics and Space Administration definition of space.\nVirgin Galactic executives have said in the past that trips could cost less than $500,000, but the company hasn\u2019t disclosed prices for commercial service it hopes to launch next year. \nShares of Virgin Galactic jumped 27% to $54.99 in after-hours trading Thursday. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe mission will be Virgin Galactic\u2019s first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists, including Richard Branson, in the cabin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Drew/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe mission will be Virgin Galactic\u2019s fourth crewed spaceflight and the company\u2019s first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists, including Mr. Branson, in the cabin.\n\u201cI\u2019m honored to help validate the journey our future astronauts will undertake and ensure we deliver the unique customer experience people expect from Virgin,\u201d Mr. Branson said in a statement.\nMr. Branson\u2019s task will be to use his background in creating consumer experiences to absorb the trip\u2019s feel from the perspective of a private astronaut, Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in an interview. \n\u201cThis is the flight that\u2019s ready for him,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said, adding that the company picked the proposed July 11 launch date because the company is technically ready. Last week, Virgin Galactic said the Federal Aviation Administration granted it a full commercial space-launch license, opening the door to outside passengers to join flights. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018This is the flight that\u2019s ready for him\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Virgin Galactic Chief Executive Michael Colglazier of Richard Branson\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public in 2019, uses a spacecraft that rockets into the lower part of space after being dropped from a highflying airplane that takes off from a facility in New Mexico. During flights, passengers will be able to float for a few minutes in space if they want, a spokeswoman said, before the craft glides back to earth. In all, the trips take about 90 minutes. \nOther passengers expected for the company\u2019s flight this month include Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor, and Sirisha Bandla, a vice president focused on government affairs and research. \nMr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has a different approach, using a reusable rocket to propel a capsule briefly above the Karman Line. The capsule then returns to the ground with a parachute. The trip lasts about 10 minutes.\nBlue Origin said earlier Thursday that its planned launch later this month will include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wally Funk,\n\n\n\n an 82-year-old pilot, as a guest. She had trained for space flight in the 1960s as part of a private program that tested female pilots for astronaut fitness, according to the company. \nMr. Bezos\u2019s brother Mark is also expected on the flight, as is an unnamed person who bid almost $30 million in a charity auction for a seat. \nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Launch is scheduled for July 11, nine days before that carrying Amazon\u2019s outgoing chief executive. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Plans Virgin Galactic Space Trip Before Jeff Bezos (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "515",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-plans-virgin-galactic-space-trip-before-jeff-bezos-11625181813?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=28",
        "text": "The planned launches ferrying both men and their fellow crewmates highlight the competition between Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin to the edge of space. Passengers on suborbital flights may pay significant amounts to experience weightlessness and see Earth from vantage points few have witnessed. \n\n\nIn a statement, Blue Origin Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith\n\n\n\n said the company wishes Mr. Branson a great, safe flight. He said Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t fly above the Karman Line, which is the imaginary boundary about 62 miles above sea level considered the beginning of space. \u201cIt\u2019s a very different experience,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore Business Stories\n\n\n\n\nDocuSign Stock Plunged on Soft Outlook\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nAT&T Sketches Out Life After Hollywood \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nDisney to Pause Political Donations in Florida \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nPressure Mounts for Western Companies Leaving Russia \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nCVS Ousts Executives After Inquiry, Vows to Overhaul How It Handles Sexual-Harassment Complaints \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic said the company flies above 50 miles, which she said meets a National Aeronautics and Space Administration definition of space.\nVirgin Galactic executives have said in the past that trips could cost less than $500,000, but the company hasn\u2019t disclosed prices for commercial service it hopes to launch next year. \nShares of Virgin Galactic jumped 27% to $54.99 in after-hours trading Thursday. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe mission will be Virgin Galactic\u2019s first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists, including Richard Branson, in the cabin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Drew/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe mission will be Virgin Galactic\u2019s fourth crewed spaceflight and the company\u2019s first to carry a full crew of two pilots and four mission specialists, including Mr. Branson, in the cabin.\n\u201cI\u2019m honored to help validate the journey our future astronauts will undertake and ensure we deliver the unique customer experience people expect from Virgin,\u201d Mr. Branson said in a statement.\nMr. Branson\u2019s task will be to use his background in creating consumer experiences to absorb the trip\u2019s feel from the perspective of a private astronaut, Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in an interview. \n\u201cThis is the flight that\u2019s ready for him,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said, adding that the company picked the proposed July 11 launch date because the company is technically ready. Last week, Virgin Galactic said the Federal Aviation Administration granted it a full commercial space-launch license, opening the door to outside passengers to join flights. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018This is the flight that\u2019s ready for him\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Virgin Galactic Chief Executive Michael Colglazier of Richard Branson\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public in 2019, uses a spacecraft that rockets into the lower part of space after being dropped from a highflying airplane that takes off from a facility in New Mexico. During flights, passengers will be able to float for a few minutes in space if they want, a spokeswoman said, before the craft glides back to earth. In all, the trips take about 90 minutes. \nOther passengers expected for the company\u2019s flight this month include Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor, and Sirisha Bandla, a vice president focused on government affairs and research. \nMr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has a different approach, using a reusable rocket to propel a capsule briefly above the Karman Line. The capsule then returns to the ground with a parachute. The trip lasts about 10 minutes.\nBlue Origin said earlier Thursday that its planned launch later this month will include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wally Funk,\n\n\n\n an 82-year-old pilot, as a guest. She had trained for space flight in the 1960s as part of a private program that tested female pilots for astronaut fitness, according to the company. \nMr. Bezos\u2019s brother Mark is also expected on the flight, as is an unnamed person who bid almost $30 million in a charity auction for a seat. \nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Launch is scheduled for July 11, nine days before that carrying Amazon\u2019s outgoing chief executive. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "516",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-starliner-set-to-launch-giving-company-a-do-over-in-space-11627300800?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=6",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration needs another way to transport astronauts and cargo to the space station, officials said. Currently, NASA relies on Russian rockets and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which beat Boeing in the race to get astronauts into space on a commercially owned and operated capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner spacecraft shortly after it landed in White Sands, N.M., in December 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Vollmer,\n\n\n\n the Boeing executive who took over the Starliner program after the earlier launch.\n\nBoeing\u2019s planned do-over test flight will carry cargo but no astronauts. NASA officials and Mr. Vollmer said Boeing and the space agency have subjected the Starliner\u2019s redo to rigorous reviews aimed at ensuring the spacecraft\u2019s software works properly with its hardware. They said their new preparations included so-called end-to-end testing, a fully simulated mission and a Boeing contractor\u2019s review of the company\u2019s work.\nBoeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n has recently touted the company\u2019s space business, which a half-century ago helped put Americans on the moon, amid publicity for competitors.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Boeing executive John Vollmer \n\n\n\n\u201cI hate that the other guy gets talked about more than we do,\u201d Mr. Calhoun said in June. \u201cBoeing will be a player there.\u201d\nThe company is slated to report second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. It previously booked a $410 million charge for the Starliner redo.\nThe December 2019 Starliner test punctuated a terrible year for Boeing. A second fatal crash of its 737 MAX months earlier led to a world-wide grounding and production halt of the popular commercial aircraft. That fall, federal lawmakers criticized then-CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n during contentious congressional testimony. Boeing\u2019s missteps soured its relationships with airline customers and its most important aviation regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.\nBoeing had hoped the planned Starliner launch in 2019 would prove a decisive win. Executives had planned a watch party with space-themed gift bags for board members and other VIPs.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSCan Boeing find redemption in the space race with the Starliner? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nInstead, a relatively basic programming error stranded the Starliner in the wrong orbit. It never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield needed to protect the capsule\u2014and would-be astronauts on board\u2014during re-entry into the earth\u2019s atmosphere. The failure further called into question Boeing\u2019s ability to pull off big projects. Three days later, Boeing announced its board had ousted Mr. Muilenburg.\nNASA and Boeing completed a final review last week for the next Starliner launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n the manager for NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, said the agency had a team embedded with Boeing engineers to look at all the changes made to the flight software.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nMr. Vollmer said Boeing shifted how it worked on software for the craft, adding what he called \u201cpeer reviews\u201d for engineers testing and analyzing the software. Unlike the first launch, Boeing\u2019s team has conducted an extensive review of different software-related scenarios that could come up during a flight, from beginning to end, he said.\nNASA officials have said they would conduct a study of Boeing\u2019s culture given the separate engineering problems in its commercial-airplane arm exposed by the 737 MAX crashes in late 2018 and early 2019. The accidents took 346 lives. The agency has completed its evaluation of Boeing, but it doesn\u2019t plan to release the results of the study, a NASA spokesman said. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up News Alert Major world and business news, including political events, takeovers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNASA wants to have two U.S. companies in place to fly crew to the International Space Station, according to the agency\u2019s spokesman. SpaceX was certified for those flights in November 2019, ending NASA\u2019s sole reliance on Russian spacecraft.\nMr. Calhoun has spent much of his tenure focused on revamping how Boeing handles engineering, safety and quality. Since he began as CEO in January 2020, the compa NASA needs another way to get to the space station. Friday\u2019s test comes after a failed 2019 attempt. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "517",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-starliner-set-to-launch-giving-company-a-do-over-in-space-11627300800?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=19",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration needs another way to transport astronauts and cargo to the space station, officials said. Currently, NASA relies on Russian rockets and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which beat Boeing in the race to get astronauts into space on a commercially owned and operated capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner spacecraft shortly after it landed in White Sands, N.M., in December 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Vollmer,\n\n\n\n the Boeing executive who took over the Starliner program after the earlier launch.\n\nBoeing\u2019s planned do-over test flight will carry cargo but no astronauts. NASA officials and Mr. Vollmer said Boeing and the space agency have subjected the Starliner\u2019s redo to rigorous reviews aimed at ensuring the spacecraft\u2019s software works properly with its hardware. They said their new preparations included so-called end-to-end testing, a fully simulated mission and a Boeing contractor\u2019s review of the company\u2019s work.\nBoeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n has recently touted the company\u2019s space business, which a half-century ago helped put Americans on the moon, amid publicity for competitors.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Boeing executive John Vollmer \n\n\n\n\u201cI hate that the other guy gets talked about more than we do,\u201d Mr. Calhoun said in June. \u201cBoeing will be a player there.\u201d\nThe company is slated to report second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. It previously booked a $410 million charge for the Starliner redo.\nThe December 2019 Starliner test punctuated a terrible year for Boeing. A second fatal crash of its 737 MAX months earlier led to a world-wide grounding and production halt of the popular commercial aircraft. That fall, federal lawmakers criticized then-CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n during contentious congressional testimony. Boeing\u2019s missteps soured its relationships with airline customers and its most important aviation regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.\nBoeing had hoped the planned Starliner launch in 2019 would prove a decisive win. Executives had planned a watch party with space-themed gift bags for board members and other VIPs.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSCan Boeing find redemption in the space race with the Starliner? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nInstead, a relatively basic programming error stranded the Starliner in the wrong orbit. It never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield needed to protect the capsule\u2014and would-be astronauts on board\u2014during re-entry into the earth\u2019s atmosphere. The failure further called into question Boeing\u2019s ability to pull off big projects. Three days later, Boeing announced its board had ousted Mr. Muilenburg.\nNASA and Boeing completed a final review last week for the next Starliner launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n the manager for NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, said the agency had a team embedded with Boeing engineers to look at all the changes made to the flight software.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nMr. Vollmer said Boeing shifted how it worked on software for the craft, adding what he called \u201cpeer reviews\u201d for engineers testing and analyzing the software. Unlike the first launch, Boeing\u2019s team has conducted an extensive review of different software-related scenarios that could come up during a flight, from beginning to end, he said.\nNASA officials have said they would conduct a study of Boeing\u2019s culture given the separate engineering problems in its commercial-airplane arm exposed by the 737 MAX crashes in late 2018 and early 2019. The accidents took 346 lives. The agency has completed its evaluation of Boeing, but it doesn\u2019t plan to release the results of the study, a NASA spokesman said. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up News Alert Major world and business news, including political events, takeovers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNASA wants to have two U.S. companies in place to fly crew to the International Space Station, according to the agency\u2019s spokesman. SpaceX was certified for those flights in November 2019, ending NASA\u2019s sole reliance on Russian spacecraft.\nMr. Calhoun has spent much of his tenure focused on revamping how Boeing handles engineering, safety and quality. Since he began as CEO in January 2020, the compa NASA needs another way to get to the space station. Friday\u2019s test comes after a failed 2019 attempt. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "518",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-starliner-set-to-launch-giving-company-a-do-over-in-space-11627300800?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=26",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration needs another way to transport astronauts and cargo to the space station, officials said. Currently, NASA relies on Russian rockets and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which beat Boeing in the race to get astronauts into space on a commercially owned and operated capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner spacecraft shortly after it landed in White Sands, N.M., in December 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Vollmer,\n\n\n\n the Boeing executive who took over the Starliner program after the earlier launch.\n\nBoeing\u2019s planned do-over test flight will carry cargo but no astronauts. NASA officials and Mr. Vollmer said Boeing and the space agency have subjected the Starliner\u2019s redo to rigorous reviews aimed at ensuring the spacecraft\u2019s software works properly with its hardware. They said their new preparations included so-called end-to-end testing, a fully simulated mission and a Boeing contractor\u2019s review of the company\u2019s work.\nBoeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n has recently touted the company\u2019s space business, which a half-century ago helped put Americans on the moon, amid publicity for competitors.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Boeing executive John Vollmer \n\n\n\n\u201cI hate that the other guy gets talked about more than we do,\u201d Mr. Calhoun said in June. \u201cBoeing will be a player there.\u201d\nThe company is slated to report second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. It previously booked a $410 million charge for the Starliner redo.\nThe December 2019 Starliner test punctuated a terrible year for Boeing. A second fatal crash of its 737 MAX months earlier led to a world-wide grounding and production halt of the popular commercial aircraft. That fall, federal lawmakers criticized then-CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n during contentious congressional testimony. Boeing\u2019s missteps soured its relationships with airline customers and its most important aviation regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.\nBoeing had hoped the planned Starliner launch in 2019 would prove a decisive win. Executives had planned a watch party with space-themed gift bags for board members and other VIPs.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSCan Boeing find redemption in the space race with the Starliner? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nInstead, a relatively basic programming error stranded the Starliner in the wrong orbit. It never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield needed to protect the capsule\u2014and would-be astronauts on board\u2014during re-entry into the earth\u2019s atmosphere. The failure further called into question Boeing\u2019s ability to pull off big projects. Three days later, Boeing announced its board had ousted Mr. Muilenburg.\nNASA and Boeing completed a final review last week for the next Starliner launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n the manager for NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, said the agency had a team embedded with Boeing engineers to look at all the changes made to the flight software.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nMr. Vollmer said Boeing shifted how it worked on software for the craft, adding what he called \u201cpeer reviews\u201d for engineers testing and analyzing the software. Unlike the first launch, Boeing\u2019s team has conducted an extensive review of different software-related scenarios that could come up during a flight, from beginning to end, he said.\nNASA officials have said they would conduct a study of Boeing\u2019s culture given the separate engineering problems in its commercial-airplane arm exposed by the 737 MAX crashes in late 2018 and early 2019. The accidents took 346 lives. The agency has completed its evaluation of Boeing, but it doesn\u2019t plan to release the results of the study, a NASA spokesman said. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up News Alert Major world and business news, including political events, takeovers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNASA wants to have two U.S. companies in place to fly crew to the International Space Station, according to the agency\u2019s spokesman. SpaceX was certified for those flights in November 2019, ending NASA\u2019s sole reliance on Russian spacecraft.\nMr. Calhoun has spent much of his tenure focused on revamping how Boeing handles engineering, safety and quality. Since he began as CEO in January 2020, the compa NASA needs another way to get to the space station. Friday\u2019s test comes after a failed 2019 attempt. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "519",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-starliner-set-to-launch-giving-company-a-do-over-in-space-11627300800?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=25",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration needs another way to transport astronauts and cargo to the space station, officials said. Currently, NASA relies on Russian rockets and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which beat Boeing in the race to get astronauts into space on a commercially owned and operated capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner spacecraft shortly after it landed in White Sands, N.M., in December 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Vollmer,\n\n\n\n the Boeing executive who took over the Starliner program after the earlier launch.\n\nBoeing\u2019s planned do-over test flight will carry cargo but no astronauts. NASA officials and Mr. Vollmer said Boeing and the space agency have subjected the Starliner\u2019s redo to rigorous reviews aimed at ensuring the spacecraft\u2019s software works properly with its hardware. They said their new preparations included so-called end-to-end testing, a fully simulated mission and a Boeing contractor\u2019s review of the company\u2019s work.\nBoeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n has recently touted the company\u2019s space business, which a half-century ago helped put Americans on the moon, amid publicity for competitors.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s of paramount importance that we have a successful flight.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Boeing executive John Vollmer \n\n\n\n\u201cI hate that the other guy gets talked about more than we do,\u201d Mr. Calhoun said in June. \u201cBoeing will be a player there.\u201d\nThe company is slated to report second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. It previously booked a $410 million charge for the Starliner redo.\nThe December 2019 Starliner test punctuated a terrible year for Boeing. A second fatal crash of its 737 MAX months earlier led to a world-wide grounding and production halt of the popular commercial aircraft. That fall, federal lawmakers criticized then-CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n during contentious congressional testimony. Boeing\u2019s missteps soured its relationships with airline customers and its most important aviation regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration.\nBoeing had hoped the planned Starliner launch in 2019 would prove a decisive win. Executives had planned a watch party with space-themed gift bags for board members and other VIPs.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSCan Boeing find redemption in the space race with the Starliner? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nInstead, a relatively basic programming error stranded the Starliner in the wrong orbit. It never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield needed to protect the capsule\u2014and would-be astronauts on board\u2014during re-entry into the earth\u2019s atmosphere. The failure further called into question Boeing\u2019s ability to pull off big projects. Three days later, Boeing announced its board had ousted Mr. Muilenburg.\nNASA and Boeing completed a final review last week for the next Starliner launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n the manager for NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, said the agency had a team embedded with Boeing engineers to look at all the changes made to the flight software.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nMr. Vollmer said Boeing shifted how it worked on software for the craft, adding what he called \u201cpeer reviews\u201d for engineers testing and analyzing the software. Unlike the first launch, Boeing\u2019s team has conducted an extensive review of different software-related scenarios that could come up during a flight, from beginning to end, he said.\nNASA officials have said they would conduct a study of Boeing\u2019s culture given the separate engineering problems in its commercial-airplane arm exposed by the 737 MAX crashes in late 2018 and early 2019. The accidents took 346 lives. The agency has completed its evaluation of Boeing, but it doesn\u2019t plan to release the results of the study, a NASA spokesman said. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up News Alert Major world and business news, including political events, takeovers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNASA wants to have two U.S. companies in place to fly crew to the International Space Station, according to the agency\u2019s spokesman. SpaceX was certified for those flights in November 2019, ending NASA\u2019s sole reliance on Russian spacecraft.\nMr. Calhoun has spent much of his tenure focused on revamping how Boeing handles engineering, safety and quality. Since he began as CEO in January 2020, the c NASA needs another way to get to the space station. Friday\u2019s test comes after a failed 2019 attempt. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon Launches Space Push to Drive Cloud-Computing Growth (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "520",
        "date": "2020-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-launches-space-push-to-drive-cloud-computing-growth-11593489660?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=12",
        "text": "The move by Amazon Web Services, the online retail giant\u2019s cloud-computing arm, comes during a multiyear surge in U.S. military and civilian agency spending on space projects, with NASA, the Pentagon and their largest contractors\u2014including Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2014benefiting from hefty appropriated or proposed budget increases. Lockheed Martin already is an Amazon customer.\nCapitol Hill is pouring billions of dollars into new boosters and the next generation of superfast missiles, driven, in part, by White House and intelligence community warnings about Chinese and Russian advances in space. Commercial companies are building or planning to deploy swarms of small satellites encircling the globe,\u00a0though the Covid-19 pandemic has dimmed the immediate outlook for many private space projects.\nAmazon is anticipating a huge increase in space-related cloud-computing contracts globally with a market size estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Teresa Carlson,\n\n\n\n AWS\u2019s vice president in charge of public sector business. \u201cThere\u2019s a need for a more modernized approach to this industry,\u201d Ms. Carlson said.\n\n\nAWS will formally announce it is establishing a dedicated segment, called Aerospace and Satellite Solutions, at an online summit focused on business with the public sector on Tuesday. The group will be run by retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier, who, until recently, was in charge of planning to set up the Space Force, the newly created branch of the military.\nThe initiative comes as AWS faced increased pressure from cloud-computing rivals for public sector business. Last year, AWS lost out to Microsoft Corp. in a high-profile competition to provide the Pentagon cloud-computing services. The program, known as JEDI, could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. Amazon has challenged the outcome.\nThe Central Intelligence Agency, which for years has used Amazon for cloud services, has said that deal is winding down and the organization is seeking a new, larger contract with multiple providers to broaden its use of the technology.\n\n\nMore How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide Amazon Has Long Ruled the Cloud. Now It Must Fend Off Rivals. \n\n\nThe competition between AWS, the market leader in cloud computing, and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up in recent years. Other vendors, such as Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google, International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp., also have been trying to win a larger share of the lucrative cloud-computing business.\nAmazon\u2019s initiative could give it an early-mover advantage, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Holger Mueller,\n\n\n\n principal analyst at consultant Constellation Research Inc.\u00a0There are no entrenched players AWS has to compete with for this cloud business, he said, adding that \u201cspace has not been a traditional vertical, like manufacturing, for the cloud.\u201d\nAmazon, whose Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n also runs space-company Blue Origin LLC, announced two-years ago its initial effort to secure space-related computing contracts. The company, in 2018, announced a cloud service, called AWS Ground Station, through which it said customers can control satellites and manage the data they collect. Amazon said Capella Space, a small San Francisco-based imaging startup, was an adopter of its new space-focused cloud services.\nCloud service providers have seen mixed fortunes during the pandemic. Many companies have increased their cloud use helping boost the top line for vendors such as Amazon and Microsoft.\u00a0 But many small businesses have struggled with paying bills and been slow to sign contracts as they grapple with the economic fallout from the recession.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Big tech firms are investing in data centers as they compete for the $214 billion cloud computing market. WSJ explains what cloud computing is, why big tech is betting big on future contracts.\n \n\n\nDespite the promise of tens of billions of extra dollars for the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to spend on future spacecraft, the commercial space-sector has felt the pinch from the Covid-19 pandemic, with venture-capital funding, at least temporarily, having become scarce. Efforts to expand in-orbit manufacturing of drugs, electronics and other products are moving slowly. Many fledgling space companies and trade associations project prolonged revenue drops, according to industry officials, and are prodding Pentagon brass to provide various forms of financial assistance to shore up the industry.\nSmall launch startups have been hit particularly hard, with some already closing their doors and analysts predicting that up to 90% of those remaining will disappear in coming years.\u00a0 Other parts of the industry also are hurting. A number of proposed low-Earth orbit satellite constellations folded or sought bankruptcy protection. Established operators of larger commercial Amazon is boosting efforts to lure military and commercial space organizations as major users of its cloud-computing services, hoping to benefit from rising government spending and burgeoning private investment. ",
        "author": "Aaron Tilley and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Races Bezos to Space as Covid Hits Business on Earth (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "521",
        "date": "2021-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-races-jeff-bezos-to-space-as-covid-19-hits-business-back-on-earth-11625753740?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=7",
        "text": "The launch, assuming no weather or technical issues, is scheduled nine days before Mr. Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. founder, is slated to be part of the first crew carried by his own space-tourism company, Blue Origin LLC. The rival launches highlight the competition that could unfold in the coming years between billionaires to carry fee-paying passengers to the edge of space. SpaceX, the rocket company led by Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n plans this year to carry paying passengers higher still.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson, 70 years old, has for years brought global attention to his businesses on the back of publicity-grabbing stunts, establishing a risk-taking, flamboyant persona that is a key part of the brand. Mr. Branson\u2019s participation in the launch is a marketing opportunity but also important for assuring future paying customers that the flight is safe, said Will Whitehorn, a former senior Virgin executive who has discussed the flight with Mr. Branson.\n\n\n\u201cNobody will feel confident in his commercial space flights if he is unwilling to do it himself,\u201d said Mr. Whitehorn, who is also the president of UKspace, a trade association for British space companies. Virgin Galactic says its tickets have sold for $250,000 each, and the company has collected $80 million in sales and deposits.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 to go to space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nVirgin Group declined to make Mr. Branson available for this story. A spokesman said Mr. Branson\u2019s trip was always planned as part of Virgin Galactic\u2019s test-flight program, and that the timing close to Mr. Bezos\u2019 flight was a coincidence. Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration granted approval of Virgin\u2019s full commercial space-launch license, opening the door for outside passengers to join flights. \nMr. Branson is no stranger to taking personal risks. In 1998, he attempted to be the first to fly a hot-air balloon around the world but crash landed near Hawaii. A 1985 attempt at the fastest Atlantic crossing ended with his vessel capsizing, though he would later break that record.\nOther stunts were more directly aimed at advertising businesses. He drove a tank into Times Square to bring attention to his attempt to start a cola company, and has been photographed in a bridal gown, drag and wearing only a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts to advertise other ventures.\nThese days, Mr. Branson spends more of his time on his private island in the British Virgin Islands than in front of cameras and corporate boards, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman said that while Mr. Branson takes an active interest in Virgin Group, day-to-day management is now led by an executive team, allowing its founder to spend more time on philanthropic causes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nMany of Mr. Branson\u2019s businesses have been hit hard by the drop-off in demand for travel that walloped the industry early last year, and has only come back in fits and starts in much of the world. Mr. Branson has said the pandemic represents the biggest challenge to his businesses in his five decades of working.\nThe entrepreneur\u2019s flagship airline, Virgin Atlantic Airways, had to raise $1.5 billion to stave off bankruptcy, while another carrier, Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd., was rescued by private-equity firm Bain Capital. Virgin Voyages, a cruise line that Mr. Branson partly owns, had just taken delivery of its first vessel when the pandemic brought that industry to a halt.\nVirgin Active, the gym operator Mr. Branson\u2019s group owns 20% of, lost over a quarter of its members last year and posted a \u00a313.1 million loss, equivalent to about $18 million, according to recent accounts from its parent company.\nVirgin Group has also warned that the pandemic would likely affect the lucrative business of leasing out the Virgin brand to other companies. Those royalties totaled \u00a372 million in 2019, according to its most recent accounts. Overall, Mr. Branson and Virgin Group have committed more than $390 million to support the business through the crisis.\nAs vaccination rates rise in many Western countries, and economies recover, Mr. Branson\u2019s businesses are preparing to make their own comebacks.\nNext week, Virgin Atlantic will restart regular operations at London Heathrow Airport after a pause of over a year. The carrier has restructured its operations, boosted its cargo network and opened new connections to try to weather the collapse in passengers.\nVirgin Voyages, the cruise British billionaire Richard Branson hopes to beat Jeff Bezos into space this Sunday with the sort of high-profile act that made him famous and helped him build his Virgin Group into a global brand. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Races Bezos to Space as Covid Hits Business on Earth (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "522",
        "date": "2021-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-races-jeff-bezos-to-space-as-covid-19-hits-business-back-on-earth-11625753740?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=18",
        "text": "The launch, assuming no weather or technical issues, is scheduled nine days before Mr. Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. founder, is slated to be part of the first crew carried by his own space-tourism company, Blue Origin LLC. The rival launches highlight the competition that could unfold in the coming years between billionaires to carry fee-paying passengers to the edge of space. SpaceX, the rocket company led by Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n plans this year to carry paying passengers higher still.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nMr. Branson, 70 years old, has for years brought global attention to his businesses on the back of publicity-grabbing stunts, establishing a risk-taking, flamboyant persona that is a key part of the brand. Mr. Branson\u2019s participation in the launch is a marketing opportunity but also important for assuring future paying customers that the flight is safe, said Will Whitehorn, a former senior Virgin executive who has discussed the flight with Mr. Branson.\n\n\n\u201cNobody will feel confident in his commercial space flights if he is unwilling to do it himself,\u201d said Mr. Whitehorn, who is also the president of UKspace, a trade association for British space companies. Virgin Galactic says its tickets have sold for $250,000 each, and the company has collected $80 million in sales and deposits.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 to go to space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nVirgin Group declined to make Mr. Branson available for this story. A spokesman said Mr. Branson\u2019s trip was always planned as part of Virgin Galactic\u2019s test-flight program, and that the timing close to Mr. Bezos\u2019 flight was a coincidence. Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration granted approval of Virgin\u2019s full commercial space-launch license, opening the door for outside passengers to join flights. \nMr. Branson is no stranger to taking personal risks. In 1998, he attempted to be the first to fly a hot-air balloon around the world but crash landed near Hawaii. A 1985 attempt at the fastest Atlantic crossing ended with his vessel capsizing, though he would later break that record.\nOther stunts were more directly aimed at advertising businesses. He drove a tank into Times Square to bring attention to his attempt to start a cola company, and has been photographed in a bridal gown, drag and wearing only a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts to advertise other ventures.\nThese days, Mr. Branson spends more of his time on his private island in the British Virgin Islands than in front of cameras and corporate boards, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman said that while Mr. Branson takes an active interest in Virgin Group, day-to-day management is now led by an executive team, allowing its founder to spend more time on philanthropic causes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nMany of Mr. Branson\u2019s businesses have been hit hard by the drop-off in demand for travel that walloped the industry early last year, and has only come back in fits and starts in much of the world. Mr. Branson has said the pandemic represents the biggest challenge to his businesses in his five decades of working.\nThe entrepreneur\u2019s flagship airline, Virgin Atlantic Airways, had to raise $1.5 billion to stave off bankruptcy, while another carrier, Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd., was rescued by private-equity firm Bain Capital. Virgin Voyages, a cruise line that Mr. Branson partly owns, had just taken delivery of its first vessel when the pandemic brought that industry to a halt.\nVirgin Active, the gym operator Mr. Branson\u2019s group owns 20% of, lost over a quarter of its members last year and posted a \u00a313.1 million loss, equivalent to about $18 million, according to recent accounts from its parent company.\nVirgin Group has also warned that the pandemic would likely affect the lucrative business of leasing out the Virgin brand to other companies. Those royalties totaled \u00a372 million in 2019, according to its most recent accounts. Overall, Mr. Branson and Virgin Group have committed more than $390 million to support the business through the crisis.\nAs vaccination rates rise in many Western countries, and economies recover, Mr. Branson\u2019s businesses are preparing to make their own comebacks.\nNext week, Virgin Atlantic will restart regular operations at London Heathrow Airport after a pause of over a year. The carrier has restructured its operations, boosted its cargo network and opened new connections to try to weather the collapse in passengers.\nVirgin Voyages, the cruise oper British billionaire Richard Branson hopes to beat Jeff Bezos into space this Sunday with the sort of high-profile act that made him famous and helped him build his Virgin Group into a global brand. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Races Bezos to Space as Covid Hits Business on Earth (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "523",
        "date": "2021-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-races-jeff-bezos-to-space-as-covid-19-hits-business-back-on-earth-11625753740?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=27",
        "text": "The launch, assuming no weather or technical issues, is scheduled nine days before Mr. Bezos, the Amazon.com Inc. founder, is slated to be part of the first crew carried by his own space-tourism company, Blue Origin LLC. The rival launches highlight the competition that could unfold in the coming years between billionaires to carry fee-paying passengers to the edge of space. SpaceX, the rocket company led by Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n plans this year to carry paying passengers higher still.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nMr. Branson, 70 years old, has for years brought global attention to his businesses on the back of publicity-grabbing stunts, establishing a risk-taking, flamboyant persona that is a key part of the brand. Mr. Branson\u2019s participation in the launch is a marketing opportunity but also important for assuring future paying customers that the flight is safe, said Will Whitehorn, a former senior Virgin executive who has discussed the flight with Mr. Branson.\n\n\n\u201cNobody will feel confident in his commercial space flights if he is unwilling to do it himself,\u201d said Mr. Whitehorn, who is also the president of UKspace, a trade association for British space companies. Virgin Galactic says its tickets have sold for $250,000 each, and the company has collected $80 million in sales and deposits.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 to go to space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nVirgin Group declined to make Mr. Branson available for this story. A spokesman said Mr. Branson\u2019s trip was always planned as part of Virgin Galactic\u2019s test-flight program, and that the timing close to Mr. Bezos\u2019 flight was a coincidence. Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration granted approval of Virgin\u2019s full commercial space-launch license, opening the door for outside passengers to join flights. \nMr. Branson is no stranger to taking personal risks. In 1998, he attempted to be the first to fly a hot-air balloon around the world but crash landed near Hawaii. A 1985 attempt at the fastest Atlantic crossing ended with his vessel capsizing, though he would later break that record.\nOther stunts were more directly aimed at advertising businesses. He drove a tank into Times Square to bring attention to his attempt to start a cola company, and has been photographed in a bridal gown, drag and wearing only a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts to advertise other ventures.\nThese days, Mr. Branson spends more of his time on his private island in the British Virgin Islands than in front of cameras and corporate boards, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman said that while Mr. Branson takes an active interest in Virgin Group, day-to-day management is now led by an executive team, allowing its founder to spend more time on philanthropic causes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nMany of Mr. Branson\u2019s businesses have been hit hard by the drop-off in demand for travel that walloped the industry early last year, and has only come back in fits and starts in much of the world. Mr. Branson has said the pandemic represents the biggest challenge to his businesses in his five decades of working.\nThe entrepreneur\u2019s flagship airline, Virgin Atlantic Airways, had to raise $1.5 billion to stave off bankruptcy, while another carrier, Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd., was rescued by private-equity firm Bain Capital. Virgin Voyages, a cruise line that Mr. Branson partly owns, had just taken delivery of its first vessel when the pandemic brought that industry to a halt.\nVirgin Active, the gym operator Mr. Branson\u2019s group owns 20% of, lost over a quarter of its members last year and posted a \u00a313.1 million loss, equivalent to about $18 million, according to recent accounts from its parent company.\nVirgin Group has also warned that the pandemic would likely affect the lucrative business of leasing out the Virgin brand to other companies. Those royalties totaled \u00a372 million in 2019, according to its most recent accounts. Overall, Mr. Branson and Virgin Group have committed more than $390 million to support the business through the crisis.\nAs vaccination rates rise in many Western countries, and economies recover, Mr. Branson\u2019s businesses are preparing to make their own comebacks.\nNext week, Virgin Atlantic will restart regular operations at London Heathrow Airport after a pause of over a year. The carrier has restructured its operations, boosted its cargo network and opened new connections to try to weather the collapse in passengers.\nVirgin Voyages, the cruise oper British billionaire Richard Branson hopes to beat Jeff Bezos into space this Sunday with the sort of high-profile act that made him famous and helped him build his Virgin Group into a global brand. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "524",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-tries-again-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=12",
        "text": "The launch was the second attempt after bad weather foiled the mission scheduled Wednesday barely 17 minutes before liftoff. Even if the rest of the mission goes as smoothly as Saturday\u2019s events, such public-private partnerships face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with current uncertainties about making a profit from ventures outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX\u2019s Successful Launch Follows Years of Setbacks \n\n\nStrapped into a reusable, gumdrop-shaped capsule called Crew Dragon, veteran astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Behnken\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Hurley\n\n\n\n embarked on a scheduled 19-hour voyage to the international space station circling the globe 250 miles up, with President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n observing the fiery scene in person. The Space Exploration and Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. local time, successfully reaching initial orbit 12 minutes later. The crew is slated to remain at the international laboratory for at least two months, before returning with the capsule\u2019s parachute landing in the Atlantic.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of Saturday's launch. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches into the atmosphere, carrying the Crew Dragon capsule on the first leg of its journey. Saul Martinez/Getty Images Spectators catch a glimpse of the launch from a Florida beach. Officials had warned the public for weeks to watch the festivities from home to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Joe Rimkus Jr./Reuters A rocket component separates from the Crew Dragon as it makes its way into initial orbit. The capsule is set to journey 19 hours before catching up with the international space station. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images \n\n\nAfter the launch, NASA chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said, \u201cI was praying for Bob and Doug. I was praying for their families.\u201d Referring to the nearly four-year delay in Crew Dragon\u2019s maiden trip with astronauts, Mr. Bridenstine said with a smile, \u201cWe might be a little late, but we got it done.\u201d In a speech celebrating the mission, Mr. Trump described Saturday\u2019s achievement as a partial antidote to the Covid-19 contagion and nationwide protests against police brutality toward black Americans. The latest launch, the president said, promotes \u201cthe sense of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.\u201d He also talked about lost years and little action on space issues under the previous Democratic administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and NASA blasted two astronauts into orbit, marking the first human launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and a new partnership between industry and government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "525",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-tries-again-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=40",
        "text": "The launch was the second attempt after bad weather foiled the mission scheduled Wednesday barely 17 minutes before liftoff. Even if the rest of the mission goes as smoothly as Saturday\u2019s events, such public-private partnerships face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with current uncertainties about making a profit from ventures outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX\u2019s Successful Launch Follows Years of Setbacks \n\n\nStrapped into a reusable, gumdrop-shaped capsule called Crew Dragon, veteran astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Behnken\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Hurley\n\n\n\n embarked on a scheduled 19-hour voyage to the international space station circling the globe 250 miles up, with President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n observing the fiery scene in person. The Space Exploration and Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. local time, successfully reaching initial orbit 12 minutes later. The crew is slated to remain at the international laboratory for at least two months, before returning with the capsule\u2019s parachute landing in the Atlantic.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of Saturday's launch. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches into the atmosphere, carrying the Crew Dragon capsule on the first leg of its journey. Saul Martinez/Getty Images Spectators catch a glimpse of the launch from a Florida beach. Officials had warned the public for weeks to watch the festivities from home to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Joe Rimkus Jr./Reuters A rocket component separates from the Crew Dragon as it makes its way into initial orbit. The capsule is set to journey 19 hours before catching up with the international space station. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images \n\n\nAfter the launch, NASA chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said, \u201cI was praying for Bob and Doug. I was praying for their families.\u201d Referring to the nearly four-year delay in Crew Dragon\u2019s maiden trip with astronauts, Mr. Bridenstine said with a smile, \u201cWe might be a little late, but we got it done.\u201d In a speech celebrating the mission, Mr. Trump described Saturday\u2019s achievement as a partial antidote to the Covid-19 contagion and nationwide protests against police brutality toward black Americans. The latest launch, the president said, promotes \u201cthe sense of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.\u201d He also talked about lost years and little action on space issues under the previous Democratic administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and NASA blasted two astronauts into orbit, marking the first human launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and a new partnership between industry and government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "526",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-tries-again-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=15",
        "text": "The launch was the second attempt after bad weather foiled the mission scheduled Wednesday barely 17 minutes before liftoff. Even if the rest of the mission goes as smoothly as Saturday\u2019s events, such public-private partnerships face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with current uncertainties about making a profit from ventures outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX\u2019s Successful Launch Follows Years of Setbacks \n\n\nStrapped into a reusable, gumdrop-shaped capsule called Crew Dragon, veteran astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Behnken\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Hurley\n\n\n\n embarked on a scheduled 19-hour voyage to the international space station circling the globe 250 miles up, with President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n observing the fiery scene in person. The Space Exploration and Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. local time, successfully reaching initial orbit 12 minutes later. The crew is slated to remain at the international laboratory for at least two months, before returning with the capsule\u2019s parachute landing in the Atlantic.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of Saturday's launch. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches into the atmosphere, carrying the Crew Dragon capsule on the first leg of its journey. Saul Martinez/Getty Images Spectators catch a glimpse of the launch from a Florida beach. Officials had warned the public for weeks to watch the festivities from home to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Joe Rimkus Jr./Reuters A rocket component separates from the Crew Dragon as it makes its way into initial orbit. The capsule is set to journey 19 hours before catching up with the international space station. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images \n\n\nAfter the launch, NASA chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said, \u201cI was praying for Bob and Doug. I was praying for their families.\u201d Referring to the nearly four-year delay in Crew Dragon\u2019s maiden trip with astronauts, Mr. Bridenstine said with a smile, \u201cWe might be a little late, but we got it done.\u201d In a speech celebrating the mission, Mr. Trump described Saturday\u2019s achievement as a partial antidote to the Covid-19 contagion and nationwide protests against police brutality toward black Americans. The latest launch, the president said, promotes \u201cthe sense of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.\u201d He also talked about lost years and little action on space issues under the previous Democratic administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and NASA blasted two astronauts into orbit, marking the first human launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and a new partnership between industry and government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "527",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-tries-again-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=38",
        "text": "The launch was the second attempt after bad weather foiled the mission scheduled Wednesday barely 17 minutes before liftoff. Even if the rest of the mission goes as smoothly as Saturday\u2019s events, such public-private partnerships face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with current uncertainties about making a profit from ventures outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX\u2019s Successful Launch Follows Years of Setbacks \n\n\nStrapped into a reusable, gumdrop-shaped capsule called Crew Dragon, veteran astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Behnken\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Hurley\n\n\n\n embarked on a scheduled 19-hour voyage to the international space station circling the globe 250 miles up, with President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n observing the fiery scene in person. The Space Exploration and Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. local time, successfully reaching initial orbit 12 minutes later. The crew is slated to remain at the international laboratory for at least two months, before returning with the capsule\u2019s parachute landing in the Atlantic.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of Saturday's launch. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches into the atmosphere, carrying the Crew Dragon capsule on the first leg of its journey. Saul Martinez/Getty Images Spectators catch a glimpse of the launch from a Florida beach. Officials had warned the public for weeks to watch the festivities from home to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Joe Rimkus Jr./Reuters A rocket component separates from the Crew Dragon as it makes its way into initial orbit. The capsule is set to journey 19 hours before catching up with the international space station. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images \n\n\nAfter the launch, NASA chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said, \u201cI was praying for Bob and Doug. I was praying for their families.\u201d Referring to the nearly four-year delay in Crew Dragon\u2019s maiden trip with astronauts, Mr. Bridenstine said with a smile, \u201cWe might be a little late, but we got it done.\u201d In a speech celebrating the mission, Mr. Trump described Saturday\u2019s achievement as a partial antidote to the Covid-19 contagion and nationwide protests against police brutality toward black Americans. The latest launch, the president said, promotes \u201cthe sense of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.\u201d He also talked about lost years and little action on space issues under the previous Democratic administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and NASA blasted two astronauts into orbit, marking the first human launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and a new partnership between industry and government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "528",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-tries-again-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=44",
        "text": "The launch was the second attempt after bad weather foiled the mission scheduled Wednesday barely 17 minutes before liftoff. Even if the rest of the mission goes as smoothly as Saturday\u2019s events, such public-private partnerships face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with current uncertainties about making a profit from ventures outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX\u2019s Successful Launch Follows Years of Setbacks \n\n\nStrapped into a reusable, gumdrop-shaped capsule called Crew Dragon, veteran astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Behnken\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Hurley\n\n\n\n embarked on a scheduled 19-hour voyage to the international space station circling the globe 250 miles up, with President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n observing the fiery scene in person. The Space Exploration and Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. local time, successfully reaching initial orbit 12 minutes later. The crew is slated to remain at the international laboratory for at least two months, before returning with the capsule\u2019s parachute landing in the Atlantic.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of Saturday's launch. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches into the atmosphere, carrying the Crew Dragon capsule on the first leg of its journey. Saul Martinez/Getty Images Spectators catch a glimpse of the launch from a Florida beach. Officials had warned the public for weeks to watch the festivities from home to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Joe Rimkus Jr./Reuters A rocket component separates from the Crew Dragon as it makes its way into initial orbit. The capsule is set to journey 19 hours before catching up with the international space station. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images \n\n\nAfter the launch, NASA chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said, \u201cI was praying for Bob and Doug. I was praying for their families.\u201d Referring to the nearly four-year delay in Crew Dragon\u2019s maiden trip with astronauts, Mr. Bridenstine said with a smile, \u201cWe might be a little late, but we got it done.\u201d In a speech celebrating the mission, Mr. Trump described Saturday\u2019s achievement as a partial antidote to the Covid-19 contagion and nationwide protests against police brutality toward black Americans. The latest launch, the president said, promotes \u201cthe sense of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.\u201d He also talked about lost years and little action on space issues under the previous Democratic administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and NASA blasted two astronauts into orbit, marking the first human launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and a new partnership between industry and government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "529",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-tries-again-to-launch-nasa-astronauts-into-orbit-11590831001?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=53",
        "text": "The launch was the second attempt after bad weather foiled the mission scheduled Wednesday barely 17 minutes before liftoff. Even if the rest of the mission goes as smoothly as Saturday\u2019s events, such public-private partnerships face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with current uncertainties about making a profit from ventures outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX\u2019s Successful Launch Follows Years of Setbacks \n\n\nStrapped into a reusable, gumdrop-shaped capsule called Crew Dragon, veteran astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Behnken\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Hurley\n\n\n\n embarked on a scheduled 19-hour voyage to the international space station circling the globe 250 miles up, with President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n observing the fiery scene in person. The Space Exploration and Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. local time, successfully reaching initial orbit 12 minutes later. The crew is slated to remain at the international laboratory for at least two months, before returning with the capsule\u2019s parachute landing in the Atlantic.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of Saturday's launch. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches into the atmosphere, carrying the Crew Dragon capsule on the first leg of its journey. Saul Martinez/Getty Images Spectators catch a glimpse of the launch from a Florida beach. Officials had warned the public for weeks to watch the festivities from home to avoid spreading the coronavirus. Joe Rimkus Jr./Reuters A rocket component separates from the Crew Dragon as it makes its way into initial orbit. The capsule is set to journey 19 hours before catching up with the international space station. NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images \n\n\nAfter the launch, NASA chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said, \u201cI was praying for Bob and Doug. I was praying for their families.\u201d Referring to the nearly four-year delay in Crew Dragon\u2019s maiden trip with astronauts, Mr. Bridenstine said with a smile, \u201cWe might be a little late, but we got it done.\u201d In a speech celebrating the mission, Mr. Trump described Saturday\u2019s achievement as a partial antidote to the Covid-19 contagion and nationwide protests against police brutality toward black Americans. The latest launch, the president said, promotes \u201cthe sense of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.\u201d He also talked about lost years and little action on space issues under the previous Democratic administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and NASA blasted two astronauts into orbit, marking the first human launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and a new partnership between industry and government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Satellite Launch Marks U.S. Military Embrace of Reusable Rockets (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "530",
        "date": "2020-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-satellite-launch-marks-u-s-military-embrace-of-reusable-rockets-11593556483?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=12",
        "text": "The launch of the Global Positioning System satellite, into partly cloudy skies at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday afternoon, marks the Pentagon\u2019s formal embrace of Mr. Musk\u2019s concept of recovering and reusing the booster\u2019s lower stage and primary engines to make rocket launches more efficient and cost-effective. The same part of the rocket has been recovered in dozens of previous Falcon 9 launches, but none of those were for the military. Some lower stages have flown several times.\nPentagon space leaders had for years expressed outright skepticism\u2014and then persistent ambivalence\u2014about vertically landing and reusing portions of rockets that flew outside the atmosphere. Many of their doubts focused on reduced fuel reserves for the primary mission if fuel had to be set aside to slow down the returning booster before its landing on a specially outfitted recovery vessel.\nBut after extensive discussions between Mr. Musk\u2019s team and military launch officials, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. agreed to slightly reduce the cost of the latest launch in return for Pentagon authorization to try to return the most expensive and biggest part of the booster.\n\n\nTuesday\u2019s liftoff and ascent played out without a hitch, as the lower stage separated about 2 1/2 minutes into the flight, while the upper stage and its payload continued toward a designated orbit around the earth. Roughly six minutes later, the returning booster gently touched down on retractable legs in the middle of a converted barge called \u201cJust Read the Instructions.\u201d\nThe Space Force issued a press release Monday touting the benefits of \u201cunique cost saving opportunities like recovering a booster.\u201d\nMr. Musk and his senior managers have said refurbishing and reusing parts of the Falcon 9 also provides essential data about the performance and durability of the rocket\u2014information that can\u2019t be gathered any other way. Senior Pentagon officials, though, at this point haven\u2019t followed the lead of commercial and civilian government counterparts in giving the green light to put high-priority payloads on top of previously flown boosters.\nThe Global Positioning System satellite launched Tuesday, designed to last longer and transmit more powerful signals than earlier versions, will join 31 other operational spacecraft that make up the GPS constellation. The latest-generation satellite, manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corp., also provides the military with more accurate and harder-to-jam signals.\nRecently, the military signed a contract with SpaceX enabling government engineers to more closely monitor rocket-refurbishment efforts. But it isn\u2019t clear when Pentagon brass will agree to launch satellites atop previously flown boosters. \nIn the coming weeks, the Pentagon is expected to select two providers for the next phase of national security launches. Two of the bidders, SpaceX and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n feature reusable boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully blasted a U.S. Space Force satellite into orbit and then recovered the main portion of the Falcon 9 rocket, in the first military mission incorporating the reusable feature. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Satellite Launch Marks U.S. Military Embrace of Reusable Rockets (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "531",
        "date": "2020-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-satellite-launch-marks-u-s-military-embrace-of-reusable-rockets-11593556483?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=43",
        "text": "The launch of the Global Positioning System satellite, into partly cloudy skies at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday afternoon, marks the Pentagon\u2019s formal embrace of Mr. Musk\u2019s concept of recovering and reusing the booster\u2019s lower stage and primary engines to make rocket launches more efficient and cost-effective. The same part of the rocket has been recovered in dozens of previous Falcon 9 launches, but none of those were for the military. Some lower stages have flown several times.\nPentagon space leaders had for years expressed outright skepticism\u2014and then persistent ambivalence\u2014about vertically landing and reusing portions of rockets that flew outside the atmosphere. Many of their doubts focused on reduced fuel reserves for the primary mission if fuel had to be set aside to slow down the returning booster before its landing on a specially outfitted recovery vessel.\nBut after extensive discussions between Mr. Musk\u2019s team and military launch officials, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. agreed to slightly reduce the cost of the latest launch in return for Pentagon authorization to try to return the most expensive and biggest part of the booster.\n\n\nTuesday\u2019s liftoff and ascent played out without a hitch, as the lower stage separated about 2 1/2 minutes into the flight, while the upper stage and its payload continued toward a designated orbit around the earth. Roughly six minutes later, the returning booster gently touched down on retractable legs in the middle of a converted barge called \u201cJust Read the Instructions.\u201d\nThe Space Force issued a press release Monday touting the benefits of \u201cunique cost saving opportunities like recovering a booster.\u201d\nMr. Musk and his senior managers have said refurbishing and reusing parts of the Falcon 9 also provides essential data about the performance and durability of the rocket\u2014information that can\u2019t be gathered any other way. Senior Pentagon officials, though, at this point haven\u2019t followed the lead of commercial and civilian government counterparts in giving the green light to put high-priority payloads on top of previously flown boosters.\nThe Global Positioning System satellite launched Tuesday, designed to last longer and transmit more powerful signals than earlier versions, will join 31 other operational spacecraft that make up the GPS constellation. The latest-generation satellite, manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corp., also provides the military with more accurate and harder-to-jam signals.\nRecently, the military signed a contract with SpaceX enabling government engineers to more closely monitor rocket-refurbishment efforts. But it isn\u2019t clear when Pentagon brass will agree to launch satellites atop previously flown boosters. \nIn the coming weeks, the Pentagon is expected to select two providers for the next phase of national security launches. Two of the bidders, SpaceX and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n feature reusable boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully blasted a U.S. Space Force satellite into orbit and then recovered the main portion of the Falcon 9 rocket, in the first military mission incorporating the reusable feature. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Satellite Launch Marks U.S. Military Embrace of Reusable Rockets (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "532",
        "date": "2020-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-satellite-launch-marks-u-s-military-embrace-of-reusable-rockets-11593556483?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=51",
        "text": "The launch of the Global Positioning System satellite, into partly cloudy skies at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday afternoon, marks the Pentagon\u2019s formal embrace of Mr. Musk\u2019s concept of recovering and reusing the booster\u2019s lower stage and primary engines to make rocket launches more efficient and cost-effective. The same part of the rocket has been recovered in dozens of previous Falcon 9 launches, but none of those were for the military. Some lower stages have flown several times.\nPentagon space leaders had for years expressed outright skepticism\u2014and then persistent ambivalence\u2014about vertically landing and reusing portions of rockets that flew outside the atmosphere. Many of their doubts focused on reduced fuel reserves for the primary mission if fuel had to be set aside to slow down the returning booster before its landing on a specially outfitted recovery vessel.\n\n\n\n\nBut after extensive discussions between Mr. Musk\u2019s team and military launch officials, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. agreed to slightly reduce the cost of the latest launch in return for Pentagon authorization to try to return the most expensive and biggest part of the booster.\n\n\nTuesday\u2019s liftoff and ascent played out without a hitch, as the lower stage separated about 2 1/2 minutes into the flight, while the upper stage and its payload continued toward a designated orbit around the earth. Roughly six minutes later, the returning booster gently touched down on retractable legs in the middle of a converted barge called \u201cJust Read the Instructions.\u201d\nThe Space Force issued a press release Monday touting the benefits of \u201cunique cost saving opportunities like recovering a booster.\u201d\nMr. Musk and his senior managers have said refurbishing and reusing parts of the Falcon 9 also provides essential data about the performance and durability of the rocket\u2014information that can\u2019t be gathered any other way. Senior Pentagon officials, though, at this point haven\u2019t followed the lead of commercial and civilian government counterparts in giving the green light to put high-priority payloads on top of previously flown boosters.\nThe Global Positioning System satellite launched Tuesday, designed to last longer and transmit more powerful signals than earlier versions, will join 31 other operational spacecraft that make up the GPS constellation. The latest-generation satellite, manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corp., also provides the military with more accurate and harder-to-jam signals.\nRecently, the military signed a contract with SpaceX enabling government engineers to more closely monitor rocket-refurbishment efforts. But it isn\u2019t clear when Pentagon brass will agree to launch satellites atop previously flown boosters. \nIn the coming weeks, the Pentagon is expected to select two providers for the next phase of national security launches. Two of the bidders, SpaceX and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n feature reusable boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully blasted a U.S. Space Force satellite into orbit and then recovered the main portion of the Falcon 9 rocket, in the first military mission incorporating the reusable feature. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Rocket Launch Owing to Weather (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "533",
        "date": "2017-01-08",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delays-rocket-launch-owing-to-weather-1483898227?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=27",
        "text": "The launch is intended to resume Falcon 9 flights following a nearly five-month hiatus, stemming from a September explosion during routine ground testing that wrecked a booster, damaged a launchpad and destroyed a $200 million commercial telecommunications satellite.\nNext weekend\u2019s flight is believed to be carrying the heaviest combined payload lofted into space by Southern California-based SpaceX, as the company is called. Closely held SpaceX is aiming to use the opportunity to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers about the reliability of its rocket fleet.\n\n\nFor Iridium, based in McLean, Va., a successful launch would begin the process of phasing out an aging satellite fleet with more-capable, next-generation spacecraft able to offer additional services. Iridium is operating without necessary in-orbit backups to cope with technical problems potentially experienced by its remaining satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX flight is set for Saturday. Shown, an earlier Falcon 9 launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration at the end of last week granted SpaceX permission to launch after accepting its report about the 2016 accident. The company-led probe, with the participation of government experts, determined that problematic fueling procedures touched off the explosion. Federal laws and regulations give SpaceX the authority to conduct such probes.\nInvestigators determined the most likely cause was an unexpected interaction between supercooled fuel inside the rocket\u2019s upper stage, and part of the composite outside wrapping of a helium tank immersed in that chilled propellant. SpaceX has said it would change fueling practices and eventually, plans a redesign, but hasn\u2019t specified what design changes are anticipated.\nIridium, which initially was delayed by manufacturing glitches with its satellites, had been counting on a launch last fall to refresh its orbiting spacecraft. \nOnce the investigation into the September explosion was finished, Iridium announced a likely November date for liftoff that moved to mid-December. Then the date slipped to Jan. 8 to allow additional testing.\nBut with heavy rain and wind gusts of more than 50 miles an hour in the vicinity of the launchpad this weekend, SpaceX opted to shift its sights to next Saturday. Industry officials said both the rocket and the satellites have been tested and are ready for countdown.\nIridium has contracted with SpaceX to launch about six dozen of its next-generation satellites over roughly the next year. But delays in revitalizing spacecraft have hurt Iridium\u2019s stock price and prompted the company to renegotiate payment terms with lenders and its satellite supplier.\nSpaceX, which is recovering from two rocket explosions over a span of roughly 15 months, will face daunting technical, scheduling and political challenges even if it carries out a flawless launch next weekend.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is assessing potential dangers of using supercooled fuel on SpaceX\u2019s anticipated missions to transport astronauts to the international space station before the end of the decade. A NASA advisory panel previously objected to such practices, which require crews to be inside the capsule on top of the rocket during fueling.\nNASA has given preliminary approval to SpaceX\u2019s plans, but the panel\u2019s strong warnings, reiterated in the wake of the September pad explosion, prompted renewed debate about the issue. According to former astronauts and ex-NASA managers, SpaceX\u2019s current design contradicts engineering principles put in place after the infamous explosion in April 1970 that crippled the Apollo 13 spacecraft bound for the moon.\nInvestigators determined that a spark from an exposed wire inside an oxygen tank caused the explosion that ripped through Apollo 13, forcing the crew to take emergency actions and resort to extraordinary steps to return safely to Earth. After that, NASA engineers made extensive efforts to remove potential ignition sources from inside all oxygen tanks.\nThe composite wrapping of helium vessels used in the Falcon 9 contains carbon, which can ignite due to friction or if breaking fibers come into contact with liquid oxygen. The company previously identified what it called \u201cseveral credible causes\u201d for the fractured vessel that led to the fireball, but didn\u2019t identify the precise root cause that prompted the explosion.\nRegarding fueling procedures on the ground, previous U.S. and foreign rockets were designed to be filled with propellants before crews came on board.\nIn addition, earlier rockets had high-pressure helium tanks installed on the outside walls of boosters, rather than located inside fuel tanks and surrounded by volatile liquid oxygen as in the Falcon 9 family of rockets. The helium is used to fill up the space inside fuel tanks as propellants are burned during ascent.\nSpaceX has said its design was tested and verified using ri Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies has delayed a planned return to flight for another week owing to bad weather and predictions of continuing storms around a central California launch complex. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Rocket Launch Owing to Weather (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "534",
        "date": "2017-01-08",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delays-rocket-launch-owing-to-weather-1483898227?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=104",
        "text": "The launch is intended to resume Falcon 9 flights following a nearly five-month hiatus, stemming from a September explosion during routine ground testing that wrecked a booster, damaged a launchpad and destroyed a $200 million commercial telecommunications satellite.\nNext weekend\u2019s flight is believed to be carrying the heaviest combined payload lofted into space by Southern California-based SpaceX, as the company is called. Closely held SpaceX is aiming to use the opportunity to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers about the reliability of its rocket fleet.\n\n\nFor Iridium, based in McLean, Va., a successful launch would begin the process of phasing out an aging satellite fleet with more-capable, next-generation spacecraft able to offer additional services. Iridium is operating without necessary in-orbit backups to cope with technical problems potentially experienced by its remaining satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX flight is set for Saturday. Shown, an earlier Falcon 9 launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration at the end of last week granted SpaceX permission to launch after accepting its report about the 2016 accident. The company-led probe, with the participation of government experts, determined that problematic fueling procedures touched off the explosion. Federal laws and regulations give SpaceX the authority to conduct such probes.\nInvestigators determined the most likely cause was an unexpected interaction between supercooled fuel inside the rocket\u2019s upper stage, and part of the composite outside wrapping of a helium tank immersed in that chilled propellant. SpaceX has said it would change fueling practices and eventually, plans a redesign, but hasn\u2019t specified what design changes are anticipated.\nIridium, which initially was delayed by manufacturing glitches with its satellites, had been counting on a launch last fall to refresh its orbiting spacecraft. \nOnce the investigation into the September explosion was finished, Iridium announced a likely November date for liftoff that moved to mid-December. Then the date slipped to Jan. 8 to allow additional testing.\nBut with heavy rain and wind gusts of more than 50 miles an hour in the vicinity of the launchpad this weekend, SpaceX opted to shift its sights to next Saturday. Industry officials said both the rocket and the satellites have been tested and are ready for countdown.\nIridium has contracted with SpaceX to launch about six dozen of its next-generation satellites over roughly the next year. But delays in revitalizing spacecraft have hurt Iridium\u2019s stock price and prompted the company to renegotiate payment terms with lenders and its satellite supplier.\nSpaceX, which is recovering from two rocket explosions over a span of roughly 15 months, will face daunting technical, scheduling and political challenges even if it carries out a flawless launch next weekend.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is assessing potential dangers of using supercooled fuel on SpaceX\u2019s anticipated missions to transport astronauts to the international space station before the end of the decade. A NASA advisory panel previously objected to such practices, which require crews to be inside the capsule on top of the rocket during fueling.\nNASA has given preliminary approval to SpaceX\u2019s plans, but the panel\u2019s strong warnings, reiterated in the wake of the September pad explosion, prompted renewed debate about the issue. According to former astronauts and ex-NASA managers, SpaceX\u2019s current design contradicts engineering principles put in place after the infamous explosion in April 1970 that crippled the Apollo 13 spacecraft bound for the moon.\nInvestigators determined that a spark from an exposed wire inside an oxygen tank caused the explosion that ripped through Apollo 13, forcing the crew to take emergency actions and resort to extraordinary steps to return safely to Earth. After that, NASA engineers made extensive efforts to remove potential ignition sources from inside all oxygen tanks.\nThe composite wrapping of helium vessels used in the Falcon 9 contains carbon, which can ignite due to friction or if breaking fibers come into contact with liquid oxygen. The company previously identified what it called \u201cseveral credible causes\u201d for the fractured vessel that led to the fireball, but didn\u2019t identify the precise root cause that prompted the explosion.\nRegarding fueling procedures on the ground, previous U.S. and foreign rockets were designed to be filled with propellants before crews came on board.\nIn addition, earlier rockets had high-pressure helium tanks installed on the outside walls of boosters, rather than located inside fuel tanks and surrounded by volatile liquid oxygen as in the Falcon 9 family of rockets. The helium is used to fill up the space inside fuel tanks as propellants are burned during ascent.\nSpaceX has said its design was tested and verified using ri Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies has delayed a planned return to flight for another week owing to bad weather and predictions of continuing storms around a central California launch complex. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Rocket Launch Owing to Weather (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "535",
        "date": "2017-01-08",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delays-rocket-launch-owing-to-weather-1483898227?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=90",
        "text": "The launch is intended to resume Falcon 9 flights following a nearly five-month hiatus, stemming from a September explosion during routine ground testing that wrecked a booster, damaged a launchpad and destroyed a $200 million commercial telecommunications satellite.\nNext weekend\u2019s flight is believed to be carrying the heaviest combined payload lofted into space by Southern California-based SpaceX, as the company is called. Closely held SpaceX is aiming to use the opportunity to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers about the reliability of its rocket fleet.\n\n\nFor Iridium, based in McLean, Va., a successful launch would begin the process of phasing out an aging satellite fleet with more-capable, next-generation spacecraft able to offer additional services. Iridium is operating without necessary in-orbit backups to cope with technical problems potentially experienced by its remaining satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX flight is set for Saturday. Shown, an earlier Falcon 9 launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration at the end of last week granted SpaceX permission to launch after accepting its report about the 2016 accident. The company-led probe, with the participation of government experts, determined that problematic fueling procedures touched off the explosion. Federal laws and regulations give SpaceX the authority to conduct such probes.\nInvestigators determined the most likely cause was an unexpected interaction between supercooled fuel inside the rocket\u2019s upper stage, and part of the composite outside wrapping of a helium tank immersed in that chilled propellant. SpaceX has said it would change fueling practices and eventually, plans a redesign, but hasn\u2019t specified what design changes are anticipated.\nIridium, which initially was delayed by manufacturing glitches with its satellites, had been counting on a launch last fall to refresh its orbiting spacecraft. \nOnce the investigation into the September explosion was finished, Iridium announced a likely November date for liftoff that moved to mid-December. Then the date slipped to Jan. 8 to allow additional testing.\nBut with heavy rain and wind gusts of more than 50 miles an hour in the vicinity of the launchpad this weekend, SpaceX opted to shift its sights to next Saturday. Industry officials said both the rocket and the satellites have been tested and are ready for countdown.\nIridium has contracted with SpaceX to launch about six dozen of its next-generation satellites over roughly the next year. But delays in revitalizing spacecraft have hurt Iridium\u2019s stock price and prompted the company to renegotiate payment terms with lenders and its satellite supplier.\nSpaceX, which is recovering from two rocket explosions over a span of roughly 15 months, will face daunting technical, scheduling and political challenges even if it carries out a flawless launch next weekend.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is assessing potential dangers of using supercooled fuel on SpaceX\u2019s anticipated missions to transport astronauts to the international space station before the end of the decade. A NASA advisory panel previously objected to such practices, which require crews to be inside the capsule on top of the rocket during fueling.\nNASA has given preliminary approval to SpaceX\u2019s plans, but the panel\u2019s strong warnings, reiterated in the wake of the September pad explosion, prompted renewed debate about the issue. According to former astronauts and ex-NASA managers, SpaceX\u2019s current design contradicts engineering principles put in place after the infamous explosion in April 1970 that crippled the Apollo 13 spacecraft bound for the moon.\nInvestigators determined that a spark from an exposed wire inside an oxygen tank caused the explosion that ripped through Apollo 13, forcing the crew to take emergency actions and resort to extraordinary steps to return safely to Earth. After that, NASA engineers made extensive efforts to remove potential ignition sources from inside all oxygen tanks.\nThe composite wrapping of helium vessels used in the Falcon 9 contains carbon, which can ignite due to friction or if breaking fibers come into contact with liquid oxygen. The company previously identified what it called \u201cseveral credible causes\u201d for the fractured vessel that led to the fireball, but didn\u2019t identify the precise root cause that prompted the explosion.\nRegarding fueling procedures on the ground, previous U.S. and foreign rockets were designed to be filled with propellants before crews came on board.\nIn addition, earlier rockets had high-pressure helium tanks installed on the outside walls of boosters, rather than located inside fuel tanks and surrounded by volatile liquid oxygen as in the Falcon 9 family of rockets. The helium is used to fill up the space inside fuel tanks as propellants are burned during ascent.\nSpaceX has said its design was tested and verified using ri Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies has delayed a planned return to flight for another week owing to bad weather and predictions of continuing storms around a central California launch complex. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Rocket Launch Owing to Weather (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "536",
        "date": "2017-01-08",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delays-rocket-launch-owing-to-weather-1483898227?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=134",
        "text": "The launch is intended to resume Falcon 9 flights following a nearly five-month hiatus, stemming from a September explosion during routine ground testing that wrecked a booster, damaged a launchpad and destroyed a $200 million commercial telecommunications satellite.\n\n\n\n\nNext weekend\u2019s flight is believed to be carrying the heaviest combined payload lofted into space by Southern California-based SpaceX, as the company is called. Closely held SpaceX is aiming to use the opportunity to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers about the reliability of its rocket fleet.\n\n\nFor Iridium, based in McLean, Va., a successful launch would begin the process of phasing out an aging satellite fleet with more-capable, next-generation spacecraft able to offer additional services. Iridium is operating without necessary in-orbit backups to cope with technical problems potentially experienced by its remaining satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX flight is set for Saturday. Shown, an earlier Falcon 9 launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration at the end of last week granted SpaceX permission to launch after accepting its report about the 2016 accident. The company-led probe, with the participation of government experts, determined that problematic fueling procedures touched off the explosion. Federal laws and regulations give SpaceX the authority to conduct such probes.\nInvestigators determined the most likely cause was an unexpected interaction between supercooled fuel inside the rocket\u2019s upper stage, and part of the composite outside wrapping of a helium tank immersed in that chilled propellant. SpaceX has said it would change fueling practices and eventually, plans a redesign, but hasn\u2019t specified what design changes are anticipated.\nIridium, which initially was delayed by manufacturing glitches with its satellites, had been counting on a launch last fall to refresh its orbiting spacecraft. \nOnce the investigation into the September explosion was finished, Iridium announced a likely November date for liftoff that moved to mid-December. Then the date slipped to Jan. 8 to allow additional testing.\nBut with heavy rain and wind gusts of more than 50 miles an hour in the vicinity of the launchpad this weekend, SpaceX opted to shift its sights to next Saturday. Industry officials said both the rocket and the satellites have been tested and are ready for countdown.\nIridium has contracted with SpaceX to launch about six dozen of its next-generation satellites over roughly the next year. But delays in revitalizing spacecraft have hurt Iridium\u2019s stock price and prompted the company to renegotiate payment terms with lenders and its satellite supplier.\nSpaceX, which is recovering from two rocket explosions over a span of roughly 15 months, will face daunting technical, scheduling and political challenges even if it carries out a flawless launch next weekend.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is assessing potential dangers of using supercooled fuel on SpaceX\u2019s anticipated missions to transport astronauts to the international space station before the end of the decade. A NASA advisory panel previously objected to such practices, which require crews to be inside the capsule on top of the rocket during fueling.\nNASA has given preliminary approval to SpaceX\u2019s plans, but the panel\u2019s strong warnings, reiterated in the wake of the September pad explosion, prompted renewed debate about the issue. According to former astronauts and ex-NASA managers, SpaceX\u2019s current design contradicts engineering principles put in place after the infamous explosion in April 1970 that crippled the Apollo 13 spacecraft bound for the moon.\nInvestigators determined that a spark from an exposed wire inside an oxygen tank caused the explosion that ripped through Apollo 13, forcing the crew to take emergency actions and resort to extraordinary steps to return safely to Earth. After that, NASA engineers made extensive efforts to remove potential ignition sources from inside all oxygen tanks.\nThe composite wrapping of helium vessels used in the Falcon 9 contains carbon, which can ignite due to friction or if breaking fibers come into contact with liquid oxygen. The company previously identified what it called \u201cseveral credible causes\u201d for the fractured vessel that led to the fireball, but didn\u2019t identify the precise root cause that prompted the explosion.\nRegarding fueling procedures on the ground, previous U.S. and foreign rockets were designed to be filled with propellants before crews came on board.\nIn addition, earlier rockets had high-pressure helium tanks installed on the outside walls of boosters, rather than located inside fuel tanks and surrounded by volatile liquid oxygen as in the Falcon 9 family of rockets. The helium is used to fill up the space inside fuel tanks as propellants are burned during ascent.\nSpaceX has said its design was tested and verified usin Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies has delayed a planned return to flight for another week owing to bad weather and predictions of continuing storms around a central California launch complex. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "537",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-empty-except-for-a-mannequin-docks-with-space-station-11551611404?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=16",
        "text": "The high-profile mission was considered historic even before the gumdrop-shaped vehicle linked up with the station about 250 miles above the Earth. In large part, it aims to test navigational equipment, automated flight-control features and laser-assisted positioning hardware.\nThe voyage marks the first time since 2011, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet, that a spacecraft designed and built in the U.S. to carry people has been blasted into orbit. Additional testing will be done before the Crew Dragon\u2019s scheduled splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, as NASA works toward its goal of privatizing human transportation to low-Earth orbit and eventually the moon\u2019s surface.\n\n\nAfter a flawless liftoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the capsule\u2014with a mannequin inside it equipped with sensors to record environmental changes and forces\u2014executed a faster-than-usual route to the rendezvous point. The reason for the extra speed was to prevent certain thruster parts from freezing and potentially breaking off, NASA and SpaceX officials told reporters.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, speaks as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, center, and Doug Hurley, right, listen during a news conference after the launch, March 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nUnder careful monitoring from NASA experts on the ground and crew members on the station itself, the capsule conducted a stately, computer-choreographed approach to catch up with and swing in front of the docking port on the station. Approaching sometimes at a velocity of barely a few inches a second, it took more than half an hour for the spacecraft to make its way to a distance of roughly 450 feet from some 3,000 feet away from the orbiting laboratory. After retreating briefly to test thrusters and other systems, SpaceX controllers gave the command for the final approach from 60 feet away.\nNarrators on NASA\u2019s live video feed of the maneuvers said the docking played out without any snafus, with the capsule\u2019s 16 thrusters operating as designed and the entire process taking less time than originally anticipated.\nHours after the docking, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n posted a message on Twitter saying \u201ca new generation of space flight starts now\u201d and \u201ccongratulations to all for this historic achievement getting us closer to flying American astronauts on American rockets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s cargo capsules also use automated approaches, but during the final phase they are grabbed by a mechanical arm operated by a crew member on the station. Crew Dragons are designed to softly contact a ring attached to the docking port and then they are pulled in and firmly grappled by a dozen hooks on the station.\nWith its nose cone opened, the video showed dramatic images of the largely white capsule visible in bright sunlight inching toward a protruding portion of the station, with both orbiting in tandem at more than 17,000 miles an hour. The docking was completed in darkness.\nEven before Sunday\u2019s heavenly hookup at 5:51 a.m. ET, NASA officials and leaders of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, enthused over trying out the latest in-orbit technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis shot, taken from the SpaceX webcast transmission on March 2, shows the dummy onboard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n spacex/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\nElon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who set up closely held SpaceX about 17 years ago near a Southern California strip mall with barely a dozen employees, told reporters after the craft reached space that he was \u201cemotionally exhausted\u201d from the stress of the launch.\nAnother major technology challenge facing the mission relates to demonstrating proper functioning of parachutes. SpaceX has encountered parachute problems in some previous Crew Dragon tests simulating returns from space.\nLeading up to Sunday\u2019s activities, Mr. Bridenstine stressed the longer term implications of commercial crew transport. Streamlined screens that astronauts will use to basically monitor missions, he told reporters before launch, mean the capsule\u2019s interior \u201clooks as much as possible as the inside of a cockpit of a commercial airliner.\u201d The upshot, Mr. Bridenstine said, is that Crew Dragons ultimately can be used for a broad range of commercial missions unrelated to NASA.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n is developing its own crew vehicle under a separate NASA contract, and current program timetables also project it could start transporting astronauts as soon as this year.\nAgency policies are driving toward a basic goal, the NASA chief said at the same Saturday press event. Over the next decade, he said, the agency seeks \u201cto be one customer of many customers in a robust marketplace\u201d focused on an array of low-Earth orbit endeavors.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Crew Capsule Lifts Off for Long-Delayed Test Flight\u2014Without People Inside (March 2 A new-generation SpaceX capsule autonomously docked with the international space station on Sunday, in a successful test of computers and maneuvering systems deemed essential to carry U.S. astronauts on future missions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "538",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-empty-except-for-a-mannequin-docks-with-space-station-11551611404?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=61",
        "text": "The high-profile mission was considered historic even before the gumdrop-shaped vehicle linked up with the station about 250 miles above the Earth. In large part, it aims to test navigational equipment, automated flight-control features and laser-assisted positioning hardware.\nThe voyage marks the first time since 2011, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet, that a spacecraft designed and built in the U.S. to carry people has been blasted into orbit. Additional testing will be done before the Crew Dragon\u2019s scheduled splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, as NASA works toward its goal of privatizing human transportation to low-Earth orbit and eventually the moon\u2019s surface.\n\n\nAfter a flawless liftoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the capsule\u2014with a mannequin inside it equipped with sensors to record environmental changes and forces\u2014executed a faster-than-usual route to the rendezvous point. The reason for the extra speed was to prevent certain thruster parts from freezing and potentially breaking off, NASA and SpaceX officials told reporters.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, speaks as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, center, and Doug Hurley, right, listen during a news conference after the launch, March 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nUnder careful monitoring from NASA experts on the ground and crew members on the station itself, the capsule conducted a stately, computer-choreographed approach to catch up with and swing in front of the docking port on the station. Approaching sometimes at a velocity of barely a few inches a second, it took more than half an hour for the spacecraft to make its way to a distance of roughly 450 feet from some 3,000 feet away from the orbiting laboratory. After retreating briefly to test thrusters and other systems, SpaceX controllers gave the command for the final approach from 60 feet away.\nNarrators on NASA\u2019s live video feed of the maneuvers said the docking played out without any snafus, with the capsule\u2019s 16 thrusters operating as designed and the entire process taking less time than originally anticipated.\nHours after the docking, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n posted a message on Twitter saying \u201ca new generation of space flight starts now\u201d and \u201ccongratulations to all for this historic achievement getting us closer to flying American astronauts on American rockets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s cargo capsules also use automated approaches, but during the final phase they are grabbed by a mechanical arm operated by a crew member on the station. Crew Dragons are designed to softly contact a ring attached to the docking port and then they are pulled in and firmly grappled by a dozen hooks on the station.\nWith its nose cone opened, the video showed dramatic images of the largely white capsule visible in bright sunlight inching toward a protruding portion of the station, with both orbiting in tandem at more than 17,000 miles an hour. The docking was completed in darkness.\nEven before Sunday\u2019s heavenly hookup at 5:51 a.m. ET, NASA officials and leaders of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, enthused over trying out the latest in-orbit technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis shot, taken from the SpaceX webcast transmission on March 2, shows the dummy onboard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n spacex/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\nElon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who set up closely held SpaceX about 17 years ago near a Southern California strip mall with barely a dozen employees, told reporters after the craft reached space that he was \u201cemotionally exhausted\u201d from the stress of the launch.\nAnother major technology challenge facing the mission relates to demonstrating proper functioning of parachutes. SpaceX has encountered parachute problems in some previous Crew Dragon tests simulating returns from space.\nLeading up to Sunday\u2019s activities, Mr. Bridenstine stressed the longer term implications of commercial crew transport. Streamlined screens that astronauts will use to basically monitor missions, he told reporters before launch, mean the capsule\u2019s interior \u201clooks as much as possible as the inside of a cockpit of a commercial airliner.\u201d The upshot, Mr. Bridenstine said, is that Crew Dragons ultimately can be used for a broad range of commercial missions unrelated to NASA.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n is developing its own crew vehicle under a separate NASA contract, and current program timetables also project it could start transporting astronauts as soon as this year.\nAgency policies are driving toward a basic goal, the NASA chief said at the same Saturday press event. Over the next decade, he said, the agency seeks \u201cto be one customer of many customers in a robust marketplace\u201d focused on an array of low-Earth orbit endeavors.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Crew Capsule Lifts Off for Long-Delayed Test Flight\u2014Without People Inside (March 2 A new-generation SpaceX capsule autonomously docked with the international space station on Sunday, in a successful test of computers and maneuvering systems deemed essential to carry U.S. astronauts on future missions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "539",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-empty-except-for-a-mannequin-docks-with-space-station-11551611404?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=58",
        "text": "The high-profile mission was considered historic even before the gumdrop-shaped vehicle linked up with the station about 250 miles above the Earth. In large part, it aims to test navigational equipment, automated flight-control features and laser-assisted positioning hardware.\nThe voyage marks the first time since 2011, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet, that a spacecraft designed and built in the U.S. to carry people has been blasted into orbit. Additional testing will be done before the Crew Dragon\u2019s scheduled splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, as NASA works toward its goal of privatizing human transportation to low-Earth orbit and eventually the moon\u2019s surface.\n\n\nAfter a flawless liftoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the capsule\u2014with a mannequin inside it equipped with sensors to record environmental changes and forces\u2014executed a faster-than-usual route to the rendezvous point. The reason for the extra speed was to prevent certain thruster parts from freezing and potentially breaking off, NASA and SpaceX officials told reporters.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, speaks as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, center, and Doug Hurley, right, listen during a news conference after the launch, March 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nUnder careful monitoring from NASA experts on the ground and crew members on the station itself, the capsule conducted a stately, computer-choreographed approach to catch up with and swing in front of the docking port on the station. Approaching sometimes at a velocity of barely a few inches a second, it took more than half an hour for the spacecraft to make its way to a distance of roughly 450 feet from some 3,000 feet away from the orbiting laboratory. After retreating briefly to test thrusters and other systems, SpaceX controllers gave the command for the final approach from 60 feet away.\nNarrators on NASA\u2019s live video feed of the maneuvers said the docking played out without any snafus, with the capsule\u2019s 16 thrusters operating as designed and the entire process taking less time than originally anticipated.\nHours after the docking, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n posted a message on Twitter saying \u201ca new generation of space flight starts now\u201d and \u201ccongratulations to all for this historic achievement getting us closer to flying American astronauts on American rockets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s cargo capsules also use automated approaches, but during the final phase they are grabbed by a mechanical arm operated by a crew member on the station. Crew Dragons are designed to softly contact a ring attached to the docking port and then they are pulled in and firmly grappled by a dozen hooks on the station.\nWith its nose cone opened, the video showed dramatic images of the largely white capsule visible in bright sunlight inching toward a protruding portion of the station, with both orbiting in tandem at more than 17,000 miles an hour. The docking was completed in darkness.\nEven before Sunday\u2019s heavenly hookup at 5:51 a.m. ET, NASA officials and leaders of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, enthused over trying out the latest in-orbit technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis shot, taken from the SpaceX webcast transmission on March 2, shows the dummy onboard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n spacex/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\nElon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who set up closely held SpaceX about 17 years ago near a Southern California strip mall with barely a dozen employees, told reporters after the craft reached space that he was \u201cemotionally exhausted\u201d from the stress of the launch.\nAnother major technology challenge facing the mission relates to demonstrating proper functioning of parachutes. SpaceX has encountered parachute problems in some previous Crew Dragon tests simulating returns from space.\nLeading up to Sunday\u2019s activities, Mr. Bridenstine stressed the longer term implications of commercial crew transport. Streamlined screens that astronauts will use to basically monitor missions, he told reporters before launch, mean the capsule\u2019s interior \u201clooks as much as possible as the inside of a cockpit of a commercial airliner.\u201d The upshot, Mr. Bridenstine said, is that Crew Dragons ultimately can be used for a broad range of commercial missions unrelated to NASA.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n is developing its own crew vehicle under a separate NASA contract, and current program timetables also project it could start transporting astronauts as soon as this year.\nAgency policies are driving toward a basic goal, the NASA chief said at the same Saturday press event. Over the next decade, he said, the agency seeks \u201cto be one customer of many customers in a robust marketplace\u201d focused on an array of low-Earth orbit endeavors.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Crew Capsule Lifts Off for Long-Delayed Test Flight\u2014Without People Inside (March 2 A new-generation SpaceX capsule autonomously docked with the international space station on Sunday, in a successful test of computers and maneuvering systems deemed essential to carry U.S. astronauts on future missions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "540",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-crew-capsule-empty-except-for-a-mannequin-docks-with-space-station-11551611404?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=77",
        "text": "The high-profile mission was considered historic even before the gumdrop-shaped vehicle linked up with the station about 250 miles above the Earth. In large part, it aims to test navigational equipment, automated flight-control features and laser-assisted positioning hardware.\n\n\n\n\nThe voyage marks the first time since 2011, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet, that a spacecraft designed and built in the U.S. to carry people has been blasted into orbit. Additional testing will be done before the Crew Dragon\u2019s scheduled splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, as NASA works toward its goal of privatizing human transportation to low-Earth orbit and eventually the moon\u2019s surface.\n\n\nAfter a flawless liftoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the capsule\u2014with a mannequin inside it equipped with sensors to record environmental changes and forces\u2014executed a faster-than-usual route to the rendezvous point. The reason for the extra speed was to prevent certain thruster parts from freezing and potentially breaking off, NASA and SpaceX officials told reporters.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, speaks as NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, center, and Doug Hurley, right, listen during a news conference after the launch, March 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nUnder careful monitoring from NASA experts on the ground and crew members on the station itself, the capsule conducted a stately, computer-choreographed approach to catch up with and swing in front of the docking port on the station. Approaching sometimes at a velocity of barely a few inches a second, it took more than half an hour for the spacecraft to make its way to a distance of roughly 450 feet from some 3,000 feet away from the orbiting laboratory. After retreating briefly to test thrusters and other systems, SpaceX controllers gave the command for the final approach from 60 feet away.\nNarrators on NASA\u2019s live video feed of the maneuvers said the docking played out without any snafus, with the capsule\u2019s 16 thrusters operating as designed and the entire process taking less time than originally anticipated.\nHours after the docking, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n posted a message on Twitter saying \u201ca new generation of space flight starts now\u201d and \u201ccongratulations to all for this historic achievement getting us closer to flying American astronauts on American rockets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s cargo capsules also use automated approaches, but during the final phase they are grabbed by a mechanical arm operated by a crew member on the station. Crew Dragons are designed to softly contact a ring attached to the docking port and then they are pulled in and firmly grappled by a dozen hooks on the station.\nWith its nose cone opened, the video showed dramatic images of the largely white capsule visible in bright sunlight inching toward a protruding portion of the station, with both orbiting in tandem at more than 17,000 miles an hour. The docking was completed in darkness.\nEven before Sunday\u2019s heavenly hookup at 5:51 a.m. ET, NASA officials and leaders of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, enthused over trying out the latest in-orbit technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis shot, taken from the SpaceX webcast transmission on March 2, shows the dummy onboard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n spacex/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\nElon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who set up closely held SpaceX about 17 years ago near a Southern California strip mall with barely a dozen employees, told reporters after the craft reached space that he was \u201cemotionally exhausted\u201d from the stress of the launch.\nAnother major technology challenge facing the mission relates to demonstrating proper functioning of parachutes. SpaceX has encountered parachute problems in some previous Crew Dragon tests simulating returns from space.\nLeading up to Sunday\u2019s activities, Mr. Bridenstine stressed the longer term implications of commercial crew transport. Streamlined screens that astronauts will use to basically monitor missions, he told reporters before launch, mean the capsule\u2019s interior \u201clooks as much as possible as the inside of a cockpit of a commercial airliner.\u201d The upshot, Mr. Bridenstine said, is that Crew Dragons ultimately can be used for a broad range of commercial missions unrelated to NASA.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n is developing its own crew vehicle under a separate NASA contract, and current program timetables also project it could start transporting astronauts as soon as this year.\nAgency policies are driving toward a basic goal, the NASA chief said at the same Saturday press event. Over the next decade, he said, the agency seeks \u201cto be one customer of many customers in a robust marketplace\u201d focused on an array of low-Earth orbit endeavors.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Crew Capsule Lifts Off for Long-Delayed Test Flight\u2014Without People Inside (Mar A new-generation SpaceX capsule autonomously docked with the international space station on Sunday, in a successful test of computers and maneuvering systems deemed essential to carry U.S. astronauts on future missions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Crisis Spreads Beyond MAX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "541",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-crisis-spreads-beyond-max-11576875942?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=14",
        "text": "The high-profile failure of the Starliner on Friday to reach the correct orbit under its own power\u2014scuttling the capsule\u2019s planned docking with the international space station\u2014was a fresh blow to Boeing as well as to U.S. efforts to return astronauts to space using a domestic vehicle. No one was aboard the spacecraft. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStarliner's misguided trajectory\n\n\n\nActual\n\n\nPlanned\n\n\nOrbit to reach International Space Station\n\n\nMissed planned orbit\nControllers determined insufficient fuel left to dock.\n\n\nFailure window\nOrbital insertion burn missed because of internal clock glitch. \n\n\nSuccessful launch\nRoughly 15 minutes from liftoff to capsule separation.\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n\nSource: preliminary information from NASA and BoeingEllie Zhu/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFollowing a flawless predawn launch of the Starliner from Florida by a Russian-powered Atlas V rocket, officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Boeing told reporters at a hastily convened press conference that a software or automation problem with the capsule stranded it in the wrong orbit without adequate fuel to rendezvous with the space station.\n\n\nThe mistake, stemming from a basic error in setting an internal clock on the spacecraft, raised new questions about Boeing\u2019s technical and management prowess. The problems with the 737 MAX have been linked to flawed design work.\nMr. Muilenburg has faced calls from some lawmakers and victims\u2019 families to step down over his handling of work to fix flight-control flaws and get the MAX flying again after two fatal crashes that took 346 lives.\nA company spokesman said Friday that Boeing\u2019s chairman,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dave Calhoun,\n\n\n\n stands behind his comments in early November on CNBC that the board of directors has confidence in Mr. Muilenburg. \nBut the Starliner\u2019s problems suggest the woes of Boeing\u2019s commercial-jet business could undermine broader strategic goals. The Chicago company\u2019s defense, space and services units are crucial to bolstering a balance sheet weakened by the MAX grounding and suspension of deliveries, which prompted S&P Global Ratings and Moody\u2019s Investors Service to downgrade Boeing\u2019s credit rating this week.\nMr. Muilenburg, who was in Florida on launch day, ran the company\u2019s defense and space business until 2013. He has been vocal about the company\u2019s ambitious plans for the sector, telling associates over the years that civil space initiatives had long-term strategic and public relations significance beyond anticipated financial returns. \nThe focus on returning the MAX to service has consumed management\u2019s time as well as the company\u2019s capital, making it tougher to sell new planes and disrupting Boeing\u2019s broader jetliner strategy, which includes plans for a new midsize aircraft.\nThe latest setbacks, coupled with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Airlines Holdings Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n announcement Friday that it removed the MAX from its schedules until June 4, highlighted the daunting crisis facing Boeing leaders\nNo large shareholders have joined in the public calls for Mr. Muilenburg to step down. Though Boeing shares have traded in a narrow range for much of the time since the MAX\u2019s grounding in March, the stock dropped 10% this month as the aircraft\u2019s expected return to service was pushed back, portending less cash flow from customers. The recent halt to MAX production is expected to raise costs and put more stress on Boeing\u2019s 150,000-strong workforce and the global aerospace supply chain.\nBoeing this past week said it planned to suspend MAX production in January after amassing around 400 undelivered jets, now stored around the country. The move follows criticism from regulators that Boeing was overly optimistic in its expectations for the MAX to be recertified for commercial flight.\nPresident Donald Trump called Mr. Muilenburg last weekend to discuss the production halt, according to people briefed on the conversation. The president asked about the duration of the shutdown, one of these people said.\nBoeing hasn\u2019t said how long the suspension might last and said it doesn\u2019t anticipate layoffs or furloughs. Around 12,000 staff assemble the plane at a plant near Seattle. \nBoeing originally planned to have delivered about 1,000 of the planes to airlines and lessors by June next year, which would represent some 5% of the global airliner fleet. Carriers have been forced to cancel thousands of flights and hang on to older planes since the MAX\u2019s grounding following a second fatal crash in five months.\nBoeing has set aside an initial $6.1 billion for customer compensation. It has also booked $3.6 billion in charges to cover the slowdown in MAX production. Analysts think both numbers could double when Boeing announces its fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 29.\nRival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE has snagged orders with its A321neo, which is larger and flies further than the MAX. United this month ordered 50 of the A321neo, the first Airbus order by the carrier since 20 Boeing\u2019s woes mounted as a long-awaited launch of its space capsule failed to reach the planned orbit and it emerged that the aerospace giant had ordered its biggest supplier to halt work on the 737 MAX. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Crisis Spreads Beyond MAX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "542",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-crisis-spreads-beyond-max-11576875942?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=49",
        "text": "The high-profile failure of the Starliner on Friday to reach the correct orbit under its own power\u2014scuttling the capsule\u2019s planned docking with the international space station\u2014was a fresh blow to Boeing as well as to U.S. efforts to return astronauts to space using a domestic vehicle. No one was aboard the spacecraft. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStarliner's misguided trajectory\n\n\n\nActual\n\n\nPlanned\n\n\nOrbit to reach International Space Station\n\n\nMissed planned orbit\nControllers determined insufficient fuel left to dock.\n\n\nFailure window\nOrbital insertion burn missed because of internal clock glitch. \n\n\nSuccessful launch\nRoughly 15 minutes from liftoff to capsule separation.\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n\nSource: preliminary information from NASA and BoeingEllie Zhu/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFollowing a flawless predawn launch of the Starliner from Florida by a Russian-powered Atlas V rocket, officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Boeing told reporters at a hastily convened press conference that a software or automation problem with the capsule stranded it in the wrong orbit without adequate fuel to rendezvous with the space station.\n\n\nThe mistake, stemming from a basic error in setting an internal clock on the spacecraft, raised new questions about Boeing\u2019s technical and management prowess. The problems with the 737 MAX have been linked to flawed design work.\nMr. Muilenburg has faced calls from some lawmakers and victims\u2019 families to step down over his handling of work to fix flight-control flaws and get the MAX flying again after two fatal crashes that took 346 lives.\nA company spokesman said Friday that Boeing\u2019s chairman,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dave Calhoun,\n\n\n\n stands behind his comments in early November on CNBC that the board of directors has confidence in Mr. Muilenburg. \nBut the Starliner\u2019s problems suggest the woes of Boeing\u2019s commercial-jet business could undermine broader strategic goals. The Chicago company\u2019s defense, space and services units are crucial to bolstering a balance sheet weakened by the MAX grounding and suspension of deliveries, which prompted S&P Global Ratings and Moody\u2019s Investors Service to downgrade Boeing\u2019s credit rating this week.\nMr. Muilenburg, who was in Florida on launch day, ran the company\u2019s defense and space business until 2013. He has been vocal about the company\u2019s ambitious plans for the sector, telling associates over the years that civil space initiatives had long-term strategic and public relations significance beyond anticipated financial returns. \nThe focus on returning the MAX to service has consumed management\u2019s time as well as the company\u2019s capital, making it tougher to sell new planes and disrupting Boeing\u2019s broader jetliner strategy, which includes plans for a new midsize aircraft.\nThe latest setbacks, coupled with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Airlines Holdings Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n announcement Friday that it removed the MAX from its schedules until June 4, highlighted the daunting crisis facing Boeing leaders\nNo large shareholders have joined in the public calls for Mr. Muilenburg to step down. Though Boeing shares have traded in a narrow range for much of the time since the MAX\u2019s grounding in March, the stock dropped 10% this month as the aircraft\u2019s expected return to service was pushed back, portending less cash flow from customers. The recent halt to MAX production is expected to raise costs and put more stress on Boeing\u2019s 150,000-strong workforce and the global aerospace supply chain.\nBoeing this past week said it planned to suspend MAX production in January after amassing around 400 undelivered jets, now stored around the country. The move follows criticism from regulators that Boeing was overly optimistic in its expectations for the MAX to be recertified for commercial flight.\nPresident Donald Trump called Mr. Muilenburg last weekend to discuss the production halt, according to people briefed on the conversation. The president asked about the duration of the shutdown, one of these people said.\nBoeing hasn\u2019t said how long the suspension might last and said it doesn\u2019t anticipate layoffs or furloughs. Around 12,000 staff assemble the plane at a plant near Seattle. \nBoeing originally planned to have delivered about 1,000 of the planes to airlines and lessors by June next year, which would represent some 5% of the global airliner fleet. Carriers have been forced to cancel thousands of flights and hang on to older planes since the MAX\u2019s grounding following a second fatal crash in five months.\nBoeing has set aside an initial $6.1 billion for customer compensation. It has also booked $3.6 billion in charges to cover the slowdown in MAX production. Analysts think both numbers could double when Boeing announces its fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 29.\nRival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE has snagged orders with its A321neo, which is larger and flies further than the MAX. United this month ordered 50 of the A321neo, the first Airbus order by the carrier since 20 Boeing\u2019s woes mounted as a long-awaited launch of its space capsule failed to reach the planned orbit and it emerged that the aerospace giant had ordered its biggest supplier to halt work on the 737 MAX. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Crisis Spreads Beyond MAX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "543",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-crisis-spreads-beyond-max-11576875942?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=48",
        "text": "The high-profile failure of the Starliner on Friday to reach the correct orbit under its own power\u2014scuttling the capsule\u2019s planned docking with the international space station\u2014was a fresh blow to Boeing as well as to U.S. efforts to return astronauts to space using a domestic vehicle. No one was aboard the spacecraft. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStarliner's misguided trajectory\n\n\n\nActual\n\n\nPlanned\n\n\nOrbit to reach International Space Station\n\n\nMissed planned orbit\nControllers determined insufficient fuel left to dock.\n\n\nFailure window\nOrbital insertion burn missed because of internal clock glitch. \n\n\nSuccessful launch\nRoughly 15 minutes from liftoff to capsule separation.\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n\nSource: preliminary information from NASA and BoeingEllie Zhu/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFollowing a flawless predawn launch of the Starliner from Florida by a Russian-powered Atlas V rocket, officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Boeing told reporters at a hastily convened press conference that a software or automation problem with the capsule stranded it in the wrong orbit without adequate fuel to rendezvous with the space station.\n\n\nThe mistake, stemming from a basic error in setting an internal clock on the spacecraft, raised new questions about Boeing\u2019s technical and management prowess. The problems with the 737 MAX have been linked to flawed design work.\nMr. Muilenburg has faced calls from some lawmakers and victims\u2019 families to step down over his handling of work to fix flight-control flaws and get the MAX flying again after two fatal crashes that took 346 lives.\nA company spokesman said Friday that Boeing\u2019s chairman,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dave Calhoun,\n\n\n\n stands behind his comments in early November on CNBC that the board of directors has confidence in Mr. Muilenburg. \nBut the Starliner\u2019s problems suggest the woes of Boeing\u2019s commercial-jet business could undermine broader strategic goals. The Chicago company\u2019s defense, space and services units are crucial to bolstering a balance sheet weakened by the MAX grounding and suspension of deliveries, which prompted S&P Global Ratings and Moody\u2019s Investors Service to downgrade Boeing\u2019s credit rating this week.\nMr. Muilenburg, who was in Florida on launch day, ran the company\u2019s defense and space business until 2013. He has been vocal about the company\u2019s ambitious plans for the sector, telling associates over the years that civil space initiatives had long-term strategic and public relations significance beyond anticipated financial returns. \nThe focus on returning the MAX to service has consumed management\u2019s time as well as the company\u2019s capital, making it tougher to sell new planes and disrupting Boeing\u2019s broader jetliner strategy, which includes plans for a new midsize aircraft.\nThe latest setbacks, coupled with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Airlines Holdings Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n announcement Friday that it removed the MAX from its schedules until June 4, highlighted the daunting crisis facing Boeing leaders\nNo large shareholders have joined in the public calls for Mr. Muilenburg to step down. Though Boeing shares have traded in a narrow range for much of the time since the MAX\u2019s grounding in March, the stock dropped 10% this month as the aircraft\u2019s expected return to service was pushed back, portending less cash flow from customers. The recent halt to MAX production is expected to raise costs and put more stress on Boeing\u2019s 150,000-strong workforce and the global aerospace supply chain.\nBoeing this past week said it planned to suspend MAX production in January after amassing around 400 undelivered jets, now stored around the country. The move follows criticism from regulators that Boeing was overly optimistic in its expectations for the MAX to be recertified for commercial flight.\nPresident Donald Trump called Mr. Muilenburg last weekend to discuss the production halt, according to people briefed on the conversation. The president asked about the duration of the shutdown, one of these people said.\nBoeing hasn\u2019t said how long the suspension might last and said it doesn\u2019t anticipate layoffs or furloughs. Around 12,000 staff assemble the plane at a plant near Seattle. \nBoeing originally planned to have delivered about 1,000 of the planes to airlines and lessors by June next year, which would represent some 5% of the global airliner fleet. Carriers have been forced to cancel thousands of flights and hang on to older planes since the MAX\u2019s grounding following a second fatal crash in five months.\nBoeing has set aside an initial $6.1 billion for customer compensation. It has also booked $3.6 billion in charges to cover the slowdown in MAX production. Analysts think both numbers could double when Boeing announces its fourth-quarter earnings on Jan. 29.\nRival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE has snagged orders with its A321neo, which is larger and flies further than the MAX. United this month ordered 50 of the A321neo, the first Airbus order by the carrier since 20 Boeing\u2019s woes mounted as a long-awaited launch of its space capsule failed to reach the planned orbit and it emerged that the aerospace giant had ordered its biggest supplier to halt work on the 737 MAX. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Examines Virgin Galactic\u2019s Flight Path (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "544",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-examines-richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-path-11630550542?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=5",
        "text": "The FAA would be concerned about a spacecraft not following an expected path during re-entry if that shift could potentially affect public safety, according to a person familiar with the agency\u2019s processes. The FAA licenses commercial space operations, including launches and re-entries of spacecraft, restricting airspace for those flights.\nAs it returned to Earth, the Unity space vehicle flew below the altitude of the airspace protected for the flight for one minute and 41 seconds because of winds before re-entering the restricted airspace, a spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic said. It didn\u2019t fly outside of geographic confines that had been established for the flight, meaning it never flew above population centers, she added.\n\n\n\u201cAlthough the flight\u2019s ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, it was a controlled and intentional flight path that allowed Unity 22 to successfully reach space and land safely,\u201d she said.\nThe New Yorker earlier reported on the FAA\u2019s investigation.\nVirgin Galactic has staked much of its future on space tourism, betting that some consumers will pay to have the company fly them more than 50 miles up, where they can take in views and move through zero gravity for a few minutes before returning to Earth. Last month, the company said it would charge consumers at least $450,000 per seat on future flights, more than what it had sought for tickets in the past. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson\u2019s trip to the edge of space opens the door to space tourism. But the company\u2019s long-term vision may be too down to Earth for space-loving investors, says WSJ writer Jon Sindreu. Photo: Virgin Galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\nVirgin said Thursday it expects to launch four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force, into space later this month or in early October on its Unity spacecraft operated by two pilots.\nThe company uses a twin-fuselage space plane to carry a spacecraft to an altitude of about 45,000 feet, where a spacecraft drops from it and is propelled by a rocket into space. Company pilots fly both the plane and the spacecraft, which returns to Earth by gliding down.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Aviation regulators are investigating how the spacecraft returned to the ground after taking billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Examines Virgin Galactic\u2019s Flight Path (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "545",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-examines-richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-path-11630550542?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=4",
        "text": "The FAA would be concerned about a spacecraft not following an expected path during re-entry if that shift could potentially affect public safety, according to a person familiar with the agency\u2019s processes. The FAA licenses commercial space operations, including launches and re-entries of spacecraft, restricting airspace for those flights.\n\n\n\n\nAs it returned to Earth, the Unity space vehicle flew below the altitude of the airspace protected for the flight for one minute and 41 seconds because of winds before re-entering the restricted airspace, a spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic said. It didn\u2019t fly outside of geographic confines that had been established for the flight, meaning it never flew above population centers, she added.\n\n\n\u201cAlthough the flight\u2019s ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, it was a controlled and intentional flight path that allowed Unity 22 to successfully reach space and land safely,\u201d she said.\nThe New Yorker earlier reported on the FAA\u2019s investigation.\nVirgin Galactic has staked much of its future on space tourism, betting that some consumers will pay to have the company fly them more than 50 miles up, where they can take in views and move through zero gravity for a few minutes before returning to Earth. Last month, the company said it would charge consumers at least $450,000 per seat on future flights, more than what it had sought for tickets in the past. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson\u2019s trip to the edge of space opens the door to space tourism. But the company\u2019s long-term vision may be too down to Earth for space-loving investors, says WSJ writer Jon Sindreu. Photo: Virgin Galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\nVirgin said Thursday it expects to launch four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force, into space later this month or in early October on its Unity spacecraft operated by two pilots.\nThe company uses a twin-fuselage space plane to carry a spacecraft to an altitude of about 45,000 feet, where a spacecraft drops from it and is propelled by a rocket into space. Company pilots fly both the plane and the spacecraft, which returns to Earth by gliding down.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Aviation regulators are investigating how the spacecraft returned to the ground after taking billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Examines Virgin Galactic\u2019s Flight Path (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "546",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-examines-richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-path-11630550542?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=24",
        "text": "The FAA would be concerned about a spacecraft not following an expected path during re-entry if that shift could potentially affect public safety, according to a person familiar with the agency\u2019s processes. The FAA licenses commercial space operations, including launches and re-entries of spacecraft, restricting airspace for those flights.\nAs it returned to Earth, the Unity space vehicle flew below the altitude of the airspace protected for the flight for one minute and 41 seconds because of winds before re-entering the restricted airspace, a spokeswoman for Virgin Galactic said. It didn\u2019t fly outside of geographic confines that had been established for the flight, meaning it never flew above population centers, she added.\n\n\n\u201cAlthough the flight\u2019s ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, it was a controlled and intentional flight path that allowed Unity 22 to successfully reach space and land safely,\u201d she said.\nThe New Yorker earlier reported on the FAA\u2019s investigation.\nVirgin Galactic has staked much of its future on space tourism, betting that some consumers will pay to have the company fly them more than 50 miles up, where they can take in views and move through zero gravity for a few minutes before returning to Earth. Last month, the company said it would charge consumers at least $450,000 per seat on future flights, more than what it had sought for tickets in the past. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson\u2019s trip to the edge of space opens the door to space tourism. But the company\u2019s long-term vision may be too down to Earth for space-loving investors, says WSJ writer Jon Sindreu. Photo: Virgin Galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\nVirgin said Thursday it expects to launch four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force, into space later this month or in early October on its Unity spacecraft operated by two pilots.\nThe company uses a twin-fuselage space plane to carry a spacecraft to an altitude of about 45,000 feet, where a spacecraft drops from it and is propelled by a rocket into space. Company pilots fly both the plane and the spacecraft, which returns to Earth by gliding down.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Aviation regulators are investigating how the spacecraft returned to the ground after taking billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers Cargo to Space Station After Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "547",
        "date": "2017-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delivers-cargo-to-international-space-station-after-delay-1487858952?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=99",
        "text": "The Dragon\u2014loaded with 5,500 pounds of supplies\u2014rocketed away Sunday from NASA\u2019s historic moon pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now leased by SpaceX, the pad had been idle since the close of the shuttle program almost six years ago.\n\n\nRead More\n\n\n\n Seven Earth-Size Worlds Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts \n\n\nThe station\u2019s six-person crew will accept another shipment Friday, this one from the Russians.\n\n\nGiven the Dragon\u2019s delayed arrival\u2014liftoff also occurred a day late\u2014the astronauts were under orders to open the capsule as soon as possible to retrieve sensitive science experiments.\n\u201cSorry about the delays,\u201d Mission Control radioed. \u201cNow the real work starts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying a load of supplies for the International Space Station. After liftoff, the booster rocket was brought back to Cape Canaveral where it successfully landed vertically. Photo: AP.\n \n\n\n\u201cCongratulations Dragon on a successful journey from Earth and now welcome on board,\u201d said French astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet,\n\n\n\n who used the station\u2019s big robot arm to grab the capsule.\nAt the top of the crew\u2019s unloading list: 40 mice that are part of a wound-healing experiment. Before the flight, researchers made small wounds in the animals\u2019 femurs then applied a new type of bandaging. Scientists want to see how quickly the wounds heal in weightlessness.\nOther newly arrived research: highly infectious MRSA bacteria, triple-contained so it doesn\u2019t get loose up there; stem cells; and instruments for studying lightning and the Earth\u2019s ozone layer.\nBesides France\u2019s Pesquet, the space station is home to two Americans and three Russians.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 Associated Press SpaceX made good on a 250-mile-high delivery at the international space station on Thursday, after fixing a navigation problem that held up the shipment for a day. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers Cargo to Space Station After Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "548",
        "date": "2017-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delivers-cargo-to-international-space-station-after-delay-1487858952?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=129",
        "text": "The Dragon\u2014loaded with 5,500 pounds of supplies\u2014rocketed away Sunday from NASA\u2019s historic moon pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now leased by SpaceX, the pad had been idle since the close of the shuttle program almost six years ago.\n\n\nRead More\n\n\n\n Seven Earth-Size Worlds Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts \n\n\nThe station\u2019s six-person crew will accept another shipment Friday, this one from the Russians.\n\n\nGiven the Dragon\u2019s delayed arrival\u2014liftoff also occurred a day late\u2014the astronauts were under orders to open the capsule as soon as possible to retrieve sensitive science experiments.\n\u201cSorry about the delays,\u201d Mission Control radioed. \u201cNow the real work starts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying a load of supplies for the International Space Station. After liftoff, the booster rocket was brought back to Cape Canaveral where it successfully landed vertically. Photo: AP.\n \n\n\n\u201cCongratulations Dragon on a successful journey from Earth and now welcome on board,\u201d said French astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet,\n\n\n\n who used the station\u2019s big robot arm to grab the capsule.\nAt the top of the crew\u2019s unloading list: 40 mice that are part of a wound-healing experiment. Before the flight, researchers made small wounds in the animals\u2019 femurs then applied a new type of bandaging. Scientists want to see how quickly the wounds heal in weightlessness.\nOther newly arrived research: highly infectious MRSA bacteria, triple-contained so it doesn\u2019t get loose up there; stem cells; and instruments for studying lightning and the Earth\u2019s ozone layer.\nBesides France\u2019s Pesquet, the space station is home to two Americans and three Russians.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 Associated Press SpaceX made good on a 250-mile-high delivery at the international space station on Thursday, after fixing a navigation problem that held up the shipment for a day. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers Cargo to Space Station After Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "549",
        "date": "2017-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delivers-cargo-to-international-space-station-after-delay-1487858952?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=26",
        "text": "The Dragon\u2014loaded with 5,500 pounds of supplies\u2014rocketed away Sunday from NASA\u2019s historic moon pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now leased by SpaceX, the pad had been idle since the close of the shuttle program almost six years ago.\n\n\nRead More Seven Earth-Size Worlds Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts \n\n\nThe station\u2019s six-person crew will accept another shipment Friday, this one from the Russians.\n\n\nGiven the Dragon\u2019s delayed arrival\u2014liftoff also occurred a day late\u2014the astronauts were under orders to open the capsule as soon as possible to retrieve sensitive science experiments.\n\u201cSorry about the delays,\u201d Mission Control radioed. \u201cNow the real work starts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying a load of supplies for the International Space Station. After liftoff, the booster rocket was brought back to Cape Canaveral where it successfully landed vertically. Photo: AP.\n \n\n\n\u201cCongratulations Dragon on a successful journey from Earth and now welcome on board,\u201d said French astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet,\n\n\n\n who used the station\u2019s big robot arm to grab the capsule.\nAt the top of the crew\u2019s unloading list: 40 mice that are part of a wound-healing experiment. Before the flight, researchers made small wounds in the animals\u2019 femurs then applied a new type of bandaging. Scientists want to see how quickly the wounds heal in weightlessness.\nOther newly arrived research: highly infectious MRSA bacteria, triple-contained so it doesn\u2019t get loose up there; stem cells; and instruments for studying lightning and the Earth\u2019s ozone layer.\nBesides France\u2019s Pesquet, the space station is home to two Americans and three Russians.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 Associated Press SpaceX made good on a 250-mile-high delivery at the international space station on Thursday, after fixing a navigation problem that held up the shipment for a day. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers Cargo to Space Station After Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "550",
        "date": "2017-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delivers-cargo-to-international-space-station-after-delay-1487858952?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=92",
        "text": "The Dragon\u2014loaded with 5,500 pounds of supplies\u2014rocketed away Sunday from NASA\u2019s historic moon pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now leased by SpaceX, the pad had been idle since the close of the shuttle program almost six years ago.\n\n\nRead More Seven Earth-Size Worlds Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts \n\n\nThe station\u2019s six-person crew will accept another shipment Friday, this one from the Russians.\n\n\nGiven the Dragon\u2019s delayed arrival\u2014liftoff also occurred a day late\u2014the astronauts were under orders to open the capsule as soon as possible to retrieve sensitive science experiments.\n\u201cSorry about the delays,\u201d Mission Control radioed. \u201cNow the real work starts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying a load of supplies for the International Space Station. After liftoff, the booster rocket was brought back to Cape Canaveral where it successfully landed vertically. Photo: AP.\n \n\n\n\u201cCongratulations Dragon on a successful journey from Earth and now welcome on board,\u201d said French astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet,\n\n\n\n who used the station\u2019s big robot arm to grab the capsule.\nAt the top of the crew\u2019s unloading list: 40 mice that are part of a wound-healing experiment. Before the flight, researchers made small wounds in the animals\u2019 femurs then applied a new type of bandaging. Scientists want to see how quickly the wounds heal in weightlessness.\nOther newly arrived research: highly infectious MRSA bacteria, triple-contained so it doesn\u2019t get loose up there; stem cells; and instruments for studying lightning and the Earth\u2019s ozone layer.\nBesides France\u2019s Pesquet, the space station is home to two Americans and three Russians.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 Associated Press SpaceX made good on a 250-mile-high delivery at the international space station on Thursday, after fixing a navigation problem that held up the shipment for a day. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers Cargo to Space Station After Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "551",
        "date": "2017-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-delivers-cargo-to-international-space-station-after-delay-1487858952?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=87",
        "text": "The Dragon\u2014loaded with 5,500 pounds of supplies\u2014rocketed away Sunday from NASA\u2019s historic moon pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now leased by SpaceX, the pad had been idle since the close of the shuttle program almost six years ago.\n\n\nRead More Seven Earth-Size Worlds Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts \n\n\nThe station\u2019s six-person crew will accept another shipment Friday, this one from the Russians.\n\n\nGiven the Dragon\u2019s delayed arrival\u2014liftoff also occurred a day late\u2014the astronauts were under orders to open the capsule as soon as possible to retrieve sensitive science experiments.\n\u201cSorry about the delays,\u201d Mission Control radioed. \u201cNow the real work starts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying a load of supplies for the International Space Station. After liftoff, the booster rocket was brought back to Cape Canaveral where it successfully landed vertically. Photo: AP.\n \n\n\n\u201cCongratulations Dragon on a successful journey from Earth and now welcome on board,\u201d said French astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet,\n\n\n\n who used the station\u2019s big robot arm to grab the capsule.\nAt the top of the crew\u2019s unloading list: 40 mice that are part of a wound-healing experiment. Before the flight, researchers made small wounds in the animals\u2019 femurs then applied a new type of bandaging. Scientists want to see how quickly the wounds heal in weightlessness.\nOther newly arrived research: highly infectious MRSA bacteria, triple-contained so it doesn\u2019t get loose up there; stem cells; and instruments for studying lightning and the Earth\u2019s ozone layer.\nBesides France\u2019s Pesquet, the space station is home to two Americans and three Russians.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 Associated Press SpaceX made good on a 250-mile-high delivery at the international space station on Thursday, after fixing a navigation problem that held up the shipment for a day. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Satellite Contract Underscores Focus on Pentagon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "552",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/analysis-spacex-satellite-contract-underscores-focus-on-pentagon-11602017932?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=11",
        "text": "The contract announced Monday\u2014essentially the early test phase of a potentially larger program\u2014highlights rapid gains by SpaceX, as the closely held Southern California company is called, to gain credibility working in this emerging arena of advanced, low-orbiting sensor networks.\nThe choice also reflects broader Pentagon initiatives to reduce the time and cost of developing certain spacecraft or weapons by piggybacking on commercial projects and components.\n\nFounded and run by Mr. Musk, who also serves as chief designer, the company seeks to become a long-term provider of both rockets and now small satellites for some of the U.S. military\u2019s highest-priority missions.\nSpaceX, which is developing a private, space-based broadband system called Starlink, will use the basic design of those commercial satellites as a platform for carrying next-generation military sensors manufactured by a subcontractor. Though Starlink hasn\u2019t yet started serving any customers, the contract indicates Pentagon officials are satisfied SpaceX has the design and manufacturing expertise to deliver several missile-tracking satellites by 2022. The sensor supplier wasn\u2019t identified.\nTypically, development and testing of substantially larger conventional satellites has taken many times longer. A SpaceX spokesman wasn\u2019t immediately available for comment.\nSpaceX\u2019s win comes barely two months after the U.S. military tapped SpaceX as one of its trusted launch providers for traditional national-security satellites that orbit at higher altitudes than the Starlink constellation. Taken together, analysts say the new business opportunities could mean potentially tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX in coming decades.\nAnalysts at Jefferies Group LLC predict the Pentagon eventually will buy hundreds of these types of small satellites, potentially swapping out some older versions with enhanced models as quickly as every two years.\nThe biggest customer for SpaceX remains the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Mr. Musk, who started his company more than a decade ago with the goal of relying entirely on private funding, subsequently spent years establishing an influential lobbying operation in Washington, cultivating Pentagon brass and senior intelligence officials, and seeking to hire former military officers. At this juncture, industry officials consider SpaceX a formidable force on Capitol Hill.\nIndustry officials see SpaceX increasingly looking to use government dollars to help support and cushion the company\u2019s changing funding needs as it simultaneously pushes ahead with new hardware for human exploration of space.\n\nL3Harris Technologies Inc.\n\n\n won a separate $194 million contract from the same Pentagon office to build and demonstrate missile-tracking satellites.\nIn a high-profile contract win in August, the Pentagon tapped SpaceX to provide nearly half of its major satellite launches for most of the decade. A joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n won the rest of the launches.\nLater this year, Mr. Musk\u2019s team is slated to start ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station on regularly scheduled flights of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has taken another big step to boost its standing as a U.S. military supplier by winning a contract for part of a proposed Pentagon missile-warning system. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Satellite Contract Underscores Focus on Pentagon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "553",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/analysis-spacex-satellite-contract-underscores-focus-on-pentagon-11602017932?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=40",
        "text": "The contract announced Monday\u2014essentially the early test phase of a potentially larger program\u2014highlights rapid gains by SpaceX, as the closely held Southern California company is called, to gain credibility working in this emerging arena of advanced, low-orbiting sensor networks.\nThe choice also reflects broader Pentagon initiatives to reduce the time and cost of developing certain spacecraft or weapons by piggybacking on commercial projects and components.\n\nFounded and run by Mr. Musk, who also serves as chief designer, the company seeks to become a long-term provider of both rockets and now small satellites for some of the U.S. military\u2019s highest-priority missions.\nSpaceX, which is developing a private, space-based broadband system called Starlink, will use the basic design of those commercial satellites as a platform for carrying next-generation military sensors manufactured by a subcontractor. Though Starlink hasn\u2019t yet started serving any customers, the contract indicates Pentagon officials are satisfied SpaceX has the design and manufacturing expertise to deliver several missile-tracking satellites by 2022. The sensor supplier wasn\u2019t identified.\nTypically, development and testing of substantially larger conventional satellites has taken many times longer. A SpaceX spokesman wasn\u2019t immediately available for comment.\nSpaceX\u2019s win comes barely two months after the U.S. military tapped SpaceX as one of its trusted launch providers for traditional national-security satellites that orbit at higher altitudes than the Starlink constellation. Taken together, analysts say the new business opportunities could mean potentially tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX in coming decades.\nAnalysts at Jefferies Group LLC predict the Pentagon eventually will buy hundreds of these types of small satellites, potentially swapping out some older versions with enhanced models as quickly as every two years.\nThe biggest customer for SpaceX remains the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Mr. Musk, who started his company more than a decade ago with the goal of relying entirely on private funding, subsequently spent years establishing an influential lobbying operation in Washington, cultivating Pentagon brass and senior intelligence officials, and seeking to hire former military officers. At this juncture, industry officials consider SpaceX a formidable force on Capitol Hill.\nIndustry officials see SpaceX increasingly looking to use government dollars to help support and cushion the company\u2019s changing funding needs as it simultaneously pushes ahead with new hardware for human exploration of space.\n\nL3Harris Technologies Inc.\n\n\n won a separate $194 million contract from the same Pentagon office to build and demonstrate missile-tracking satellites.\nIn a high-profile contract win in August, the Pentagon tapped SpaceX to provide nearly half of its major satellite launches for most of the decade. A joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n won the rest of the launches.\nLater this year, Mr. Musk\u2019s team is slated to start ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station on regularly scheduled flights of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has taken another big step to boost its standing as a U.S. military supplier by winning a contract for part of a proposed Pentagon missile-warning system. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Satellite Contract Underscores Focus on Pentagon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "554",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/analysis-spacex-satellite-contract-underscores-focus-on-pentagon-11602017932?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=46",
        "text": "The contract announced Monday\u2014essentially the early test phase of a potentially larger program\u2014highlights rapid gains by SpaceX, as the closely held Southern California company is called, to gain credibility working in this emerging arena of advanced, low-orbiting sensor networks.\n\n\n\n\nThe choice also reflects broader Pentagon initiatives to reduce the time and cost of developing certain spacecraft or weapons by piggybacking on commercial projects and components.\n\nFounded and run by Mr. Musk, who also serves as chief designer, the company seeks to become a long-term provider of both rockets and now small satellites for some of the U.S. military\u2019s highest-priority missions.\nSpaceX, which is developing a private, space-based broadband system called Starlink, will use the basic design of those commercial satellites as a platform for carrying next-generation military sensors manufactured by a subcontractor. Though Starlink hasn\u2019t yet started serving any customers, the contract indicates Pentagon officials are satisfied SpaceX has the design and manufacturing expertise to deliver several missile-tracking satellites by 2022. The sensor supplier wasn\u2019t identified.\nTypically, development and testing of substantially larger conventional satellites has taken many times longer. A SpaceX spokesman wasn\u2019t immediately available for comment.\nSpaceX\u2019s win comes barely two months after the U.S. military tapped SpaceX as one of its trusted launch providers for traditional national-security satellites that orbit at higher altitudes than the Starlink constellation. Taken together, analysts say the new business opportunities could mean potentially tens of billions of dollars for SpaceX in coming decades.\nAnalysts at Jefferies Group LLC predict the Pentagon eventually will buy hundreds of these types of small satellites, potentially swapping out some older versions with enhanced models as quickly as every two years.\nThe biggest customer for SpaceX remains the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Mr. Musk, who started his company more than a decade ago with the goal of relying entirely on private funding, subsequently spent years establishing an influential lobbying operation in Washington, cultivating Pentagon brass and senior intelligence officials, and seeking to hire former military officers. At this juncture, industry officials consider SpaceX a formidable force on Capitol Hill.\nIndustry officials see SpaceX increasingly looking to use government dollars to help support and cushion the company\u2019s changing funding needs as it simultaneously pushes ahead with new hardware for human exploration of space.\n\nL3Harris Technologies Inc.\n\n\n won a separate $194 million contract from the same Pentagon office to build and demonstrate missile-tracking satellites.\nIn a high-profile contract win in August, the Pentagon tapped SpaceX to provide nearly half of its major satellite launches for most of the decade. A joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n won the rest of the launches.\nLater this year, Mr. Musk\u2019s team is slated to start ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station on regularly scheduled flights of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has taken another big step to boost its standing as a U.S. military supplier by winning a contract for part of a proposed Pentagon missile-warning system. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "555",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-kick-starts-space-tourism-11625832000?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=7",
        "text": "The company has said the high-profile flight is the latest test of its technology and the first since the Federal Aviation Administration granted it permission last month to fly paying passengers into space. Virgin Galactic has said it expects to start operating such trips next year. For now, Sunday\u2019s flight serves as another potential validation point for a space-tourism industry that will need to attract wealthy passengers as it ramps up.\n\n\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises. Billionaires like Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and others are betting the demand is there to bring an entirely new business and experience into existence.\n\u201cThis whole business is to give people a sense of the awe and splendor of space,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a recent interview.\nVirgin Galactic hasn\u2019t said what it plans to charge for tickets when it resumes sales. The company, which had paused marketing in 2014, took as much as $250,000 in deposits for each future flight, according to its latest annual report. Some analysts believe the company may price tickets at up to $400,000 each. Executives in May said the company would reopen sales around the time Mr. Branson took a flight.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingAs Branson, Bezos Prepare to Lift Off, What's Next for Space Tourism?This weekend, Richard Branson hopes to head to space on a flight with his company Virgin Galactic. Just over a week later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to board one of his Blue Origin spacecraft. So what do the billionaires' trips mean for the burgeoning space-tourism sector, and when will the rest of us get a chance? Reporter Micah Maidenburg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. Christopher Zinsli is our supervising producer. Kateri Jochum is the executive producer of WSJ Podcasts.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\n\u201cI have no doubt there is interest in it, I have no doubt that there\u2019s customers that want to do it,\u201d said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard to say how many for how long. It\u2019s just not obvious how big it is.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has characterized interest in its offering as robust and reported it had roughly 600 reservations for future space trips backed by more than $80 million in deposits. In discussing demand, the company last year listed roughly two million people with a net worth of more than $10 million in 2019. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\n\u201cWe believe there\u2019s going to be really great demand. I think you look at the excitement all around the human spaceflight concept, and you see it in multiple players in the market,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said on an investor call in May.\nExecutives have said Virgin Galactic could generate $1 billion in revenue annually from each spaceport it operates. The company reported a loss of $273 million for 2020.\nMr. Branson\u2019s flight is scheduled to launch from the company\u2019s first such facility, located near Las Cruces, N.M. Once in space, those on board can float weightlessly for a few minutes and peer out of a dozen circular cabin windows to see views of Earth and space that few have ever seen. There are also five windows for the pilots.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity spacecraft with its carrier aircraft. Sunday\u2019s flight will be the 22nd for VSS Unity\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic isn\u2019t alone in trying to build a business based on space flight. Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin is planning a July 20 trip to space that will include him, his brother and two other people. The company is also eyeing opportunities with government and national-security customers and last year was chosen with partners to develop a lander meant to bring astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has brought astronauts to the International Space Station and back and is working on a moon lander for NASA. However, SpaceX also is planning the first all-civilian mission to space later this year, commanded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\nBy 2030, space tourism may generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for that year, according to an estimate last year by UBS analyst Myles Walton. That figure includes sales tied to the The entrepreneur\u2019s planned journey to the edge of space could bolster interest in trips, but widespread travel there is probably still years off. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "556",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-kick-starts-space-tourism-11625832000?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=20",
        "text": "The company has said the high-profile flight is the latest test of its technology and the first since the Federal Aviation Administration granted it permission last month to fly paying passengers into space. Virgin Galactic has said it expects to start operating such trips next year. For now, Sunday\u2019s flight serves as another potential validation point for a space-tourism industry that will need to attract wealthy passengers as it ramps up.\n\n\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises. Billionaires like Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and others are betting the demand is there to bring an entirely new business and experience into existence.\n\u201cThis whole business is to give people a sense of the awe and splendor of space,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a recent interview.\nVirgin Galactic hasn\u2019t said what it plans to charge for tickets when it resumes sales. The company, which had paused marketing in 2014, took as much as $250,000 in deposits for each future flight, according to its latest annual report. Some analysts believe the company may price tickets at up to $400,000 each. Executives in May said the company would reopen sales around the time Mr. Branson took a flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI have no doubt there is interest in it, I have no doubt that there\u2019s customers that want to do it,\u201d said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard to say how many for how long. It\u2019s just not obvious how big it is.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has characterized interest in its offering as robust and reported it had roughly 600 reservations for future space trips backed by more than $80 million in deposits. In discussing demand, the company last year listed roughly two million people with a net worth of more than $10 million in 2019. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\n\u201cWe believe there\u2019s going to be really great demand. I think you look at the excitement all around the human spaceflight concept, and you see it in multiple players in the market,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said on an investor call in May.\nExecutives have said Virgin Galactic could generate $1 billion in revenue annually from each spaceport it operates. The company reported a loss of $273 million for 2020.\nMr. Branson\u2019s flight is scheduled to launch from the company\u2019s first such facility, located near Las Cruces, N.M. Once in space, those on board can float weightlessly for a few minutes and peer out of a dozen circular cabin windows to see views of Earth and space that few have ever seen. There are also five windows for the pilots.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity spacecraft with its carrier aircraft. Sunday\u2019s flight will be the 22nd for VSS Unity\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic isn\u2019t alone in trying to build a business based on space flight. Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin is planning a July 20 trip to space that will include him, his brother and two other people. The company is also eyeing opportunities with government and national-security customers and last year was chosen with partners to develop a lander meant to bring astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has brought astronauts to the International Space Station and back and is working on a moon lander for NASA. However, SpaceX also is planning the first all-civilian mission to space later this year, commanded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\nBy 2030, space tourism may generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for that year, according to an estimate last year by UBS analyst Myles Walton. That figure includes sales tied to the kind of suborbital space flights\u2014reaching the boundaries of where officials say space begins\u2014that Virgin Galactic and competitor Blue Origin have been working on as well as other types of voyages, like flights around a planet and trips to the moon.\nTraveling to space carries risks. The vessels that Virgin Galactic and other space companies are using to ferry humans to space have been tested a fraction of the number of times as commercial planes. In 2014, a Virgin Galactic pilot died testing a company space plane. Safety regulators later said the pilot prematurely unlocked a tail section after the craft fired its rocket engine and as it was approaching the sound barrier, resulting in the craft being torn apart. Another pilot survived.\nJoann The entrepreneur\u2019s planned journey to the edge of space could bolster interest in trips, but widespread travel there is probably still years off. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "557",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-kick-starts-space-tourism-11625832000?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=7",
        "text": "The company has said the high-profile flight is the latest test of its technology and the first since the Federal Aviation Administration granted it permission last month to fly paying passengers into space. Virgin Galactic has said it expects to start operating such trips next year. For now, Sunday\u2019s flight serves as another potential validation point for a space-tourism industry that will need to attract wealthy passengers as it ramps up.\n\n\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises. Billionaires like Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and others are betting the demand is there to bring an entirely new business and experience into existence.\n\u201cThis whole business is to give people a sense of the awe and splendor of space,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a recent interview.\nVirgin Galactic hasn\u2019t said what it plans to charge for tickets when it resumes sales. The company, which had paused marketing in 2014, took as much as $250,000 in deposits for each future flight, according to its latest annual report. Some analysts believe the company may price tickets at up to $400,000 each. Executives in May said the company would reopen sales around the time Mr. Branson took a flight.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingAs Branson, Bezos Prepare to Lift Off, What's Next for Space Tourism?This weekend, Richard Branson hopes to head to space on a flight with his company Virgin Galactic. Just over a week later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to board one of his Blue Origin spacecraft. So what do the billionaires' trips mean for the burgeoning space-tourism sector, and when will the rest of us get a chance? Reporter Micah Maidenburg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. Christopher Zinsli is our supervising producer. Kateri Jochum is the executive producer of WSJ Podcasts.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\n\u201cI have no doubt there is interest in it, I have no doubt that there\u2019s customers that want to do it,\u201d said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard to say how many for how long. It\u2019s just not obvious how big it is.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has characterized interest in its offering as robust and reported it had roughly 600 reservations for future space trips backed by more than $80 million in deposits. In discussing demand, the company last year listed roughly two million people with a net worth of more than $10 million in 2019. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\n\u201cWe believe there\u2019s going to be really great demand. I think you look at the excitement all around the human spaceflight concept, and you see it in multiple players in the market,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said on an investor call in May.\nExecutives have said Virgin Galactic could generate $1 billion in revenue annually from each spaceport it operates. The company reported a loss of $273 million for 2020.\nMr. Branson\u2019s flight is scheduled to launch from the company\u2019s first such facility, located near Las Cruces, N.M. Once in space, those on board can float weightlessly for a few minutes and peer out of a dozen circular cabin windows to see views of Earth and space that few have ever seen. There are also five windows for the pilots.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity spacecraft with its carrier aircraft. Sunday\u2019s flight will be the 22nd for VSS Unity\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic isn\u2019t alone in trying to build a business based on space flight. Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin is planning a July 20 trip to space that will include him, his brother and two other people. The company is also eyeing opportunities with government and national-security customers and last year was chosen with partners to develop a lander meant to bring astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has brought astronauts to the International Space Station and back and is working on a moon lander for NASA. However, SpaceX also is planning the first all-civilian mission to space later this year, commanded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\nBy 2030, space tourism may generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for that year, according to an estimate last year by UBS analyst Myles Walton. That figure includes sales tied to the The entrepreneur\u2019s planned journey to the edge of space could bolster interest in trips, but widespread travel there is probably still years off. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "558",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-kick-starts-space-tourism-11625832000?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=27",
        "text": "The company has said the high-profile flight is the latest test of its technology and the first since the Federal Aviation Administration granted it permission last month to fly paying passengers into space. Virgin Galactic has said it expects to start operating such trips next year. For now, Sunday\u2019s flight serves as another potential validation point for a space-tourism industry that will need to attract wealthy passengers as it ramps up.\n\n\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises. Billionaires like Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and others are betting the demand is there to bring an entirely new business and experience into existence.\n\u201cThis whole business is to give people a sense of the awe and splendor of space,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a recent interview.\nVirgin Galactic hasn\u2019t said what it plans to charge for tickets when it resumes sales. The company, which had paused marketing in 2014, took as much as $250,000 in deposits for each future flight, according to its latest annual report. Some analysts believe the company may price tickets at up to $400,000 each. Executives in May said the company would reopen sales around the time Mr. Branson took a flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI have no doubt there is interest in it, I have no doubt that there\u2019s customers that want to do it,\u201d said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard to say how many for how long. It\u2019s just not obvious how big it is.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has characterized interest in its offering as robust and reported it had roughly 600 reservations for future space trips backed by more than $80 million in deposits. In discussing demand, the company last year listed roughly two million people with a net worth of more than $10 million in 2019. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\n\u201cWe believe there\u2019s going to be really great demand. I think you look at the excitement all around the human spaceflight concept, and you see it in multiple players in the market,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said on an investor call in May.\nExecutives have said Virgin Galactic could generate $1 billion in revenue annually from each spaceport it operates. The company reported a loss of $273 million for 2020.\nMr. Branson\u2019s flight is scheduled to launch from the company\u2019s first such facility, located near Las Cruces, N.M. Once in space, those on board can float weightlessly for a few minutes and peer out of a dozen circular cabin windows to see views of Earth and space that few have ever seen. There are also five windows for the pilots.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity spacecraft with its carrier aircraft. Sunday\u2019s flight will be the 22nd for VSS Unity\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic isn\u2019t alone in trying to build a business based on space flight. Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin is planning a July 20 trip to space that will include him, his brother and two other people. The company is also eyeing opportunities with government and national-security customers and last year was chosen with partners to develop a lander meant to bring astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has brought astronauts to the International Space Station and back and is working on a moon lander for NASA. However, SpaceX also is planning the first all-civilian mission to space later this year, commanded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\nBy 2030, space tourism may generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for that year, according to an estimate last year by UBS analyst Myles Walton. That figure includes sales tied to the kind of suborbital space flights\u2014reaching the boundaries of where officials say space begins\u2014that Virgin Galactic and competitor Blue Origin have been working on as well as other types of voyages, like flights around a planet and trips to the moon.\nTraveling to space carries risks. The vessels that Virgin Galactic and other space companies are using to ferry humans to space have been tested a fraction of the number of times as commercial planes. In 2014, a Virgin Galactic pilot died testing a company space plane. Safety regulators later said the pilot prematurely unlocked a tail section after the craft fired its rocket engine and as it was approaching the sound barrier, resulting in the craft being torn apart. Another pilot survived.\nJoann The entrepreneur\u2019s planned journey to the edge of space could bolster interest in trips, but widespread travel there is probably still years off. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "559",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-flight-kick-starts-space-tourism-11625832000?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=27",
        "text": "The company has said the high-profile flight is the latest test of its technology and the first since the Federal Aviation Administration granted it permission last month to fly paying passengers into space. Virgin Galactic has said it expects to start operating such trips next year. For now, Sunday\u2019s flight serves as another potential validation point for a space-tourism industry that will need to attract wealthy passengers as it ramps up.\n\n\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises. Billionaires like Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and others are betting the demand is there to bring an entirely new business and experience into existence.\n\u201cThis whole business is to give people a sense of the awe and splendor of space,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a recent interview.\nVirgin Galactic hasn\u2019t said what it plans to charge for tickets when it resumes sales. The company, which had paused marketing in 2014, took as much as $250,000 in deposits for each future flight, according to its latest annual report. Some analysts believe the company may price tickets at up to $400,000 each. Executives in May said the company would reopen sales around the time Mr. Branson took a flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI have no doubt there is interest in it, I have no doubt that there\u2019s customers that want to do it,\u201d said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America. \u201cIt\u2019s just hard to say how many for how long. It\u2019s just not obvious how big it is.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has characterized interest in its offering as robust and reported it had roughly 600 reservations for future space trips backed by more than $80 million in deposits. In discussing demand, the company last year listed roughly two million people with a net worth of more than $10 million in 2019. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\n\u201cWe believe there\u2019s going to be really great demand. I think you look at the excitement all around the human spaceflight concept, and you see it in multiple players in the market,\u201d Mr. Colglazier said on an investor call in May.\nExecutives have said Virgin Galactic could generate $1 billion in revenue annually from each spaceport it operates. The company reported a loss of $273 million for 2020.\nMr. Branson\u2019s flight is scheduled to launch from the company\u2019s first such facility, located near Las Cruces, N.M. Once in space, those on board can float weightlessly for a few minutes and peer out of a dozen circular cabin windows to see views of Earth and space that few have ever seen. There are also five windows for the pilots.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity spacecraft with its carrier aircraft. Sunday\u2019s flight will be the 22nd for VSS Unity\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic isn\u2019t alone in trying to build a business based on space flight. Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin is planning a July 20 trip to space that will include him, his brother and two other people. The company is also eyeing opportunities with government and national-security customers and last year was chosen with partners to develop a lander meant to bring astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has brought astronauts to the International Space Station and back and is working on a moon lander for NASA. However, SpaceX also is planning the first all-civilian mission to space later this year, commanded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\nBy 2030, space tourism may generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for that year, according to an estimate last year by UBS analyst Myles Walton. That figure includes sales tied to the kind of suborbital space flights\u2014reaching the boundaries of where officials say space begins\u2014that Virgin Galactic and competitor Blue Origin have been working on as well as other types of voyages, like flights around a planet and trips to the moon.\nTraveling to space carries risks. The vessels that Virgin Galactic and other space companies are using to ferry humans to space have been tested a fraction of the number of times as commercial planes. In 2014, a Virgin Galactic pilot died testing a company space plane. Safety regulators later said the pilot prematurely unlocked a tail section after the craft fired its rocket engine and as it was approaching the sound barrier, resulting in the craft being torn apart. Another pilot survived.\nJoann The entrepreneur\u2019s planned journey to the edge of space could bolster interest in trips, but widespread travel there is probably still years off. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Suffers Engine Testing Problem on the Ground (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "560",
        "date": "2019-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-suffers-engine-testing-problem-on-the-ground-11555881197?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=60",
        "text": "The company and NASA, which hopes to send the vehicle on its first mission into orbit with U.S. astronauts later this year, called it an \u201canomaly,\u201d without elaborating. A SpaceX spokeswoman on Sunday wasn\u2019t available for comment.\nIt is too early to tell what went wrong during the test, or even whether most of the damage was suffered by the testing facility or the capsule itself. Some early, unconfirmed reports suggested significant capsule damage, while eyewitness reports recounted a dark plume of smoke wafting high above the test site.\n\n\nIf the root cause related to malfunctions of engine nozzles, internal plumbing or the basic fuel system, according to industry officials and space experts, the upshot may be design changes accompanied by months of investigation and testing. That could push the initial crewed launch past the end of the year.\nIf the problem stemmed from a relatively simple part malfunction or failure, these experts said, it could be easier to generally maintain earlier schedules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was noncommittal in his immediate response. In a statement posted on Twitter, he wrote: \u201cThis is why we test. We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward.\u201d\nRegardless of precisely what happened, the problem occurred at a particularly important juncture for SpaceX, because it was preparing for a critical abort test of the Dragon\u2019s emergency escape engines in coming weeks. That uncrewed test has to meet NASA\u2019s criteria for safety and reliability before astronauts will be allowed to climb into the latest version of the Dragon.\nThe weekend\u2019s events now appear to put in jeopardy a summer launch date with astronauts on board.\nAlso for NASA, which has earmarked a total of nearly $7 billion to promote development and deployment of separate fleets of so-called commercial crew taxis by SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , the timing threatens plans to routinely start flying such U.S. capsules to the international space station by 2020.\nLast month, SpaceX notched a milestone by successfully launching, docking and returning safely to earth its first crew capsule, but without astronauts inside.\nOver the weekend, Space News, an industry publication, said it received a statement from SpaceX that said \u201cthe initial tests completed successfully, but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand.\u201d\nThe testing trouble also comes amid mounting White House calls to accelerate human exploration of the moon and Mars using commercially developed and operated rockets and spacecraft. Dragon flights ferrying astronauts to and from orbit are an integral part of those broader plans.\nFor the past few years,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president and chief operating officer of Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, has publicly said her highest priority is commencing safe and timely transport of U.S. astronauts to the space station.\nPreviously, NASA leaders tentatively signed off on a novel operating practice allowing SpaceX to fuel its Falcon 9 rockets for blastoff while astronauts are strapped into a Dragon capsule on top. The safety of the procedure initially was questioned by astronauts, as well as experts inside and outside NASA. The latest engine testing failure could revive some of those qualms.\nSeparately, over the years SpaceX has lost two Falcon 9 rockets due to explosions linked to questionable fuel-system designs and fuel-tank hazards. But those accidents\u2014one on the ground and the other during ascent\u2014involved engines installed on rockets rather than capsules.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A SpaceX capsule presumed damaged during weekend engine tests on the ground in Florida created an extensive plume of smoke visible for miles, prompting some industry officials to say the problem could delay the company\u2019s first crewed space flight by months. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Suffers Engine Testing Problem on the Ground (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "561",
        "date": "2019-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-suffers-engine-testing-problem-on-the-ground-11555881197?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=56",
        "text": "The company and NASA, which hopes to send the vehicle on its first mission into orbit with U.S. astronauts later this year, called it an \u201canomaly,\u201d without elaborating. A SpaceX spokeswoman on Sunday wasn\u2019t available for comment.\nIt is too early to tell what went wrong during the test, or even whether most of the damage was suffered by the testing facility or the capsule itself. Some early, unconfirmed reports suggested significant capsule damage, while eyewitness reports recounted a dark plume of smoke wafting high above the test site.\n\n\nIf the root cause related to malfunctions of engine nozzles, internal plumbing or the basic fuel system, according to industry officials and space experts, the upshot may be design changes accompanied by months of investigation and testing. That could push the initial crewed launch past the end of the year.\nIf the problem stemmed from a relatively simple part malfunction or failure, these experts said, it could be easier to generally maintain earlier schedules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was noncommittal in his immediate response. In a statement posted on Twitter, he wrote: \u201cThis is why we test. We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward.\u201d\nRegardless of precisely what happened, the problem occurred at a particularly important juncture for SpaceX, because it was preparing for a critical abort test of the Dragon\u2019s emergency escape engines in coming weeks. That uncrewed test has to meet NASA\u2019s criteria for safety and reliability before astronauts will be allowed to climb into the latest version of the Dragon.\nThe weekend\u2019s events now appear to put in jeopardy a summer launch date with astronauts on board.\nAlso for NASA, which has earmarked a total of nearly $7 billion to promote development and deployment of separate fleets of so-called commercial crew taxis by SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , the timing threatens plans to routinely start flying such U.S. capsules to the international space station by 2020.\nLast month, SpaceX notched a milestone by successfully launching, docking and returning safely to earth its first crew capsule, but without astronauts inside.\nOver the weekend, Space News, an industry publication, said it received a statement from SpaceX that said \u201cthe initial tests completed successfully, but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand.\u201d\nThe testing trouble also comes amid mounting White House calls to accelerate human exploration of the moon and Mars using commercially developed and operated rockets and spacecraft. Dragon flights ferrying astronauts to and from orbit are an integral part of those broader plans.\nFor the past few years,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president and chief operating officer of Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, has publicly said her highest priority is commencing safe and timely transport of U.S. astronauts to the space station.\nPreviously, NASA leaders tentatively signed off on a novel operating practice allowing SpaceX to fuel its Falcon 9 rockets for blastoff while astronauts are strapped into a Dragon capsule on top. The safety of the procedure initially was questioned by astronauts, as well as experts inside and outside NASA. The latest engine testing failure could revive some of those qualms.\nSeparately, over the years SpaceX has lost two Falcon 9 rockets due to explosions linked to questionable fuel-system designs and fuel-tank hazards. But those accidents\u2014one on the ground and the other during ascent\u2014involved engines installed on rockets rather than capsules.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A SpaceX capsule presumed damaged during weekend engine tests on the ground in Florida created an extensive plume of smoke visible for miles, prompting some industry officials to say the problem could delay the company\u2019s first crewed space flight by months. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Suffers Engine Testing Problem on the Ground (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "562",
        "date": "2019-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-suffers-engine-testing-problem-on-the-ground-11555881197?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=74",
        "text": "The company and NASA, which hopes to send the vehicle on its first mission into orbit with U.S. astronauts later this year, called it an \u201canomaly,\u201d without elaborating. A SpaceX spokeswoman on Sunday wasn\u2019t available for comment.\n\n\n\n\nIt is too early to tell what went wrong during the test, or even whether most of the damage was suffered by the testing facility or the capsule itself. Some early, unconfirmed reports suggested significant capsule damage, while eyewitness reports recounted a dark plume of smoke wafting high above the test site.\n\n\nIf the root cause related to malfunctions of engine nozzles, internal plumbing or the basic fuel system, according to industry officials and space experts, the upshot may be design changes accompanied by months of investigation and testing. That could push the initial crewed launch past the end of the year.\nIf the problem stemmed from a relatively simple part malfunction or failure, these experts said, it could be easier to generally maintain earlier schedules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was noncommittal in his immediate response. In a statement posted on Twitter, he wrote: \u201cThis is why we test. We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward.\u201d\nRegardless of precisely what happened, the problem occurred at a particularly important juncture for SpaceX, because it was preparing for a critical abort test of the Dragon\u2019s emergency escape engines in coming weeks. That uncrewed test has to meet NASA\u2019s criteria for safety and reliability before astronauts will be allowed to climb into the latest version of the Dragon.\nThe weekend\u2019s events now appear to put in jeopardy a summer launch date with astronauts on board.\nAlso for NASA, which has earmarked a total of nearly $7 billion to promote development and deployment of separate fleets of so-called commercial crew taxis by SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , the timing threatens plans to routinely start flying such U.S. capsules to the international space station by 2020.\nLast month, SpaceX notched a milestone by successfully launching, docking and returning safely to earth its first crew capsule, but without astronauts inside.\nOver the weekend, Space News, an industry publication, said it received a statement from SpaceX that said \u201cthe initial tests completed successfully, but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand.\u201d\nThe testing trouble also comes amid mounting White House calls to accelerate human exploration of the moon and Mars using commercially developed and operated rockets and spacecraft. Dragon flights ferrying astronauts to and from orbit are an integral part of those broader plans.\nFor the past few years,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president and chief operating officer of Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, has publicly said her highest priority is commencing safe and timely transport of U.S. astronauts to the space station.\nPreviously, NASA leaders tentatively signed off on a novel operating practice allowing SpaceX to fuel its Falcon 9 rockets for blastoff while astronauts are strapped into a Dragon capsule on top. The safety of the procedure initially was questioned by astronauts, as well as experts inside and outside NASA. The latest engine testing failure could revive some of those qualms.\nSeparately, over the years SpaceX has lost two Falcon 9 rockets due to explosions linked to questionable fuel-system designs and fuel-tank hazards. But those accidents\u2014one on the ground and the other during ascent\u2014involved engines installed on rockets rather than capsules.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A SpaceX capsule presumed damaged during weekend engine tests on the ground in Florida created an extensive plume of smoke visible for miles, prompting some industry officials to say the problem could delay the company\u2019s first crewed space flight by months. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Previously Used Cargo Capsule for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "563",
        "date": "2017-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-previously-used-cargo-capsule-for-first-time-1496525270?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=24",
        "text": "The capsule initially flew and came back from the orbiting laboratory in 2014.\nThe latest feat by Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. followed by two months the closely held company\u2019s historic accomplishment of launching, returning and vertically landing the major portion of a used booster to cap off two separate trips to space.\n\n\nSlightly more than five years ago, SpaceX became the first corporate entity to link up a spacecraft with the orbiting space station.\nUltimately, Mr. Musk and many other space experts consider reusable rockets and spacecraft key to slashing the cost of access to space and stepping up launch tempos.\nOver the years, a major challenge confronting SpaceX was ensuring that water didn\u2019t leak into returning Dragons as parachutes guided them to gentle splashdowns. A still unanswered question is how many times a capsule\u2019s heat shield\u2014attached to the bottom of the pear-shaped vehicle and designed to withstand fiery returns through the atmosphere\u2014can be reflown safely.\nThe recycled Dragon featured a new heat shield and replacement parachutes.\nThree minutes after liftoff, the main engines stopped firing as planned, the first stage separated and then the engine powering the second stage ignited. Less than eight minutes after blastoff, the Falcon 9\u2019s first stage touched down vertically at its landing site near the launchpad. The capsule is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Monday.\nThe launch had been scrubbed Thursday due to weather. Scientific cargo on board includes mice that are part of an effort to study loss of bone density in space, along with hundreds of fruit flies for biological experiments and seeds intended to grow in microgravity. Another experiment aims to test a new, flexible type of solar array that is supposed to unfurl like a mat.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff also moves SpaceX closer to shifting management and worker resources to producing just a single variant of the Dragon capsule\u2014intended to routinely start carrying humans into orbit before the end of the decade.\nThe same generation of spacecraft will be used in the future to also ferry cargo into orbit. Building, testing and reflying identical versions of the spacecraft is expected to reduce factory time and expenses for SpaceX, though it isn\u2019t clear at what point federal space officials will sign off on recycling Dragons that carry astronauts. In the long run, company officials have said, they foresee potentially dozens of such repeat missions.\nCompany engineers continue to modify Falcon 9 rockets to increase their load capabilities and make them easier to reuse. Dragon capsules also have been optimized for reuse. Company officials hope to reduce refurbishment time, including cutting down on structural inspections, as they become more proficient at flying used spacecraft.\nThe blastoff marked SpaceX\u2019s 11th successful cargo launch, and it is likely to give the company and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration a boost as both sides ramp up efforts to certify Dragons for human spaceflights. NASA\u2019s now-retired space shuttle fleet also was designed to launch repeatedly, though refurbishing the shuttles between missions proved substantially more complex, expensive and time-consuming than envisioned.\nIn addition to focusing on flying refurbished rockets and Dragon cargo capsules, SpaceX\u2019s technical experts are engaged in detailed discussions with their NASA counterparts about whether the agency will need to grant certain waivers from safety standards to authorize transporting astronauts to the orbiting space station. One of the biggest hurdles, according to agency and industry experts, relates to the hazards of flying through portions of space cluttered with tiny meteors and leftover debris from previous missions by countries and commercial entities.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for the first time launched a refurbished cargo capsule that had been used on a previous mission, a major stride toward eventually reusing spacecraft carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Previously Used Cargo Capsule for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "564",
        "date": "2017-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-previously-used-cargo-capsule-for-first-time-1496525270?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=94",
        "text": "The capsule initially flew and came back from the orbiting laboratory in 2014.\nThe latest feat by Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. followed by two months the closely held company\u2019s historic accomplishment of launching, returning and vertically landing the major portion of a used booster to cap off two separate trips to space.\n\n\nSlightly more than five years ago, SpaceX became the first corporate entity to link up a spacecraft with the orbiting space station.\nUltimately, Mr. Musk and many other space experts consider reusable rockets and spacecraft key to slashing the cost of access to space and stepping up launch tempos.\nOver the years, a major challenge confronting SpaceX was ensuring that water didn\u2019t leak into returning Dragons as parachutes guided them to gentle splashdowns. A still unanswered question is how many times a capsule\u2019s heat shield\u2014attached to the bottom of the pear-shaped vehicle and designed to withstand fiery returns through the atmosphere\u2014can be reflown safely.\nThe recycled Dragon featured a new heat shield and replacement parachutes.\nThree minutes after liftoff, the main engines stopped firing as planned, the first stage separated and then the engine powering the second stage ignited. Less than eight minutes after blastoff, the Falcon 9\u2019s first stage touched down vertically at its landing site near the launchpad. The capsule is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Monday.\nThe launch had been scrubbed Thursday due to weather. Scientific cargo on board includes mice that are part of an effort to study loss of bone density in space, along with hundreds of fruit flies for biological experiments and seeds intended to grow in microgravity. Another experiment aims to test a new, flexible type of solar array that is supposed to unfurl like a mat.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff also moves SpaceX closer to shifting management and worker resources to producing just a single variant of the Dragon capsule\u2014intended to routinely start carrying humans into orbit before the end of the decade.\nThe same generation of spacecraft will be used in the future to also ferry cargo into orbit. Building, testing and reflying identical versions of the spacecraft is expected to reduce factory time and expenses for SpaceX, though it isn\u2019t clear at what point federal space officials will sign off on recycling Dragons that carry astronauts. In the long run, company officials have said, they foresee potentially dozens of such repeat missions.\nCompany engineers continue to modify Falcon 9 rockets to increase their load capabilities and make them easier to reuse. Dragon capsules also have been optimized for reuse. Company officials hope to reduce refurbishment time, including cutting down on structural inspections, as they become more proficient at flying used spacecraft.\nThe blastoff marked SpaceX\u2019s 11th successful cargo launch, and it is likely to give the company and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration a boost as both sides ramp up efforts to certify Dragons for human spaceflights. NASA\u2019s now-retired space shuttle fleet also was designed to launch repeatedly, though refurbishing the shuttles between missions proved substantially more complex, expensive and time-consuming than envisioned.\nIn addition to focusing on flying refurbished rockets and Dragon cargo capsules, SpaceX\u2019s technical experts are engaged in detailed discussions with their NASA counterparts about whether the agency will need to grant certain waivers from safety standards to authorize transporting astronauts to the orbiting space station. One of the biggest hurdles, according to agency and industry experts, relates to the hazards of flying through portions of space cluttered with tiny meteors and leftover debris from previous missions by countries and commercial entities.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for the first time launched a refurbished cargo capsule that had been used on a previous mission, a major stride toward eventually reusing spacecraft carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Previously Used Cargo Capsule for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "565",
        "date": "2017-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-previously-used-cargo-capsule-for-first-time-1496525270?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=82",
        "text": "The capsule initially flew and came back from the orbiting laboratory in 2014.\nThe latest feat by Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. followed by two months the closely held company\u2019s historic accomplishment of launching, returning and vertically landing the major portion of a used booster to cap off two separate trips to space.\n\n\nSlightly more than five years ago, SpaceX became the first corporate entity to link up a spacecraft with the orbiting space station.\nUltimately, Mr. Musk and many other space experts consider reusable rockets and spacecraft key to slashing the cost of access to space and stepping up launch tempos.\nOver the years, a major challenge confronting SpaceX was ensuring that water didn\u2019t leak into returning Dragons as parachutes guided them to gentle splashdowns. A still unanswered question is how many times a capsule\u2019s heat shield\u2014attached to the bottom of the pear-shaped vehicle and designed to withstand fiery returns through the atmosphere\u2014can be reflown safely.\nThe recycled Dragon featured a new heat shield and replacement parachutes.\nThree minutes after liftoff, the main engines stopped firing as planned, the first stage separated and then the engine powering the second stage ignited. Less than eight minutes after blastoff, the Falcon 9\u2019s first stage touched down vertically at its landing site near the launchpad. The capsule is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Monday.\nThe launch had been scrubbed Thursday due to weather. Scientific cargo on board includes mice that are part of an effort to study loss of bone density in space, along with hundreds of fruit flies for biological experiments and seeds intended to grow in microgravity. Another experiment aims to test a new, flexible type of solar array that is supposed to unfurl like a mat.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff also moves SpaceX closer to shifting management and worker resources to producing just a single variant of the Dragon capsule\u2014intended to routinely start carrying humans into orbit before the end of the decade.\nThe same generation of spacecraft will be used in the future to also ferry cargo into orbit. Building, testing and reflying identical versions of the spacecraft is expected to reduce factory time and expenses for SpaceX, though it isn\u2019t clear at what point federal space officials will sign off on recycling Dragons that carry astronauts. In the long run, company officials have said, they foresee potentially dozens of such repeat missions.\nCompany engineers continue to modify Falcon 9 rockets to increase their load capabilities and make them easier to reuse. Dragon capsules also have been optimized for reuse. Company officials hope to reduce refurbishment time, including cutting down on structural inspections, as they become more proficient at flying used spacecraft.\nThe blastoff marked SpaceX\u2019s 11th successful cargo launch, and it is likely to give the company and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration a boost as both sides ramp up efforts to certify Dragons for human spaceflights. NASA\u2019s now-retired space shuttle fleet also was designed to launch repeatedly, though refurbishing the shuttles between missions proved substantially more complex, expensive and time-consuming than envisioned.\nIn addition to focusing on flying refurbished rockets and Dragon cargo capsules, SpaceX\u2019s technical experts are engaged in detailed discussions with their NASA counterparts about whether the agency will need to grant certain waivers from safety standards to authorize transporting astronauts to the orbiting space station. One of the biggest hurdles, according to agency and industry experts, relates to the hazards of flying through portions of space cluttered with tiny meteors and leftover debris from previous missions by countries and commercial entities.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for the first time launched a refurbished cargo capsule that had been used on a previous mission, a major stride toward eventually reusing spacecraft carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Previously Used Cargo Capsule for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "566",
        "date": "2017-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-previously-used-cargo-capsule-for-first-time-1496525270?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=121",
        "text": "The capsule initially flew and came back from the orbiting laboratory in 2014.\n\n\n\n\nThe latest feat by Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. followed by two months the closely held company\u2019s historic accomplishment of launching, returning and vertically landing the major portion of a used booster to cap off two separate trips to space.\n\n\nSlightly more than five years ago, SpaceX became the first corporate entity to link up a spacecraft with the orbiting space station.\nUltimately, Mr. Musk and many other space experts consider reusable rockets and spacecraft key to slashing the cost of access to space and stepping up launch tempos.\nOver the years, a major challenge confronting SpaceX was ensuring that water didn\u2019t leak into returning Dragons as parachutes guided them to gentle splashdowns. A still unanswered question is how many times a capsule\u2019s heat shield\u2014attached to the bottom of the pear-shaped vehicle and designed to withstand fiery returns through the atmosphere\u2014can be reflown safely.\nThe recycled Dragon featured a new heat shield and replacement parachutes.\nThree minutes after liftoff, the main engines stopped firing as planned, the first stage separated and then the engine powering the second stage ignited. Less than eight minutes after blastoff, the Falcon 9\u2019s first stage touched down vertically at its landing site near the launchpad. The capsule is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Monday.\nThe launch had been scrubbed Thursday due to weather. Scientific cargo on board includes mice that are part of an effort to study loss of bone density in space, along with hundreds of fruit flies for biological experiments and seeds intended to grow in microgravity. Another experiment aims to test a new, flexible type of solar array that is supposed to unfurl like a mat.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff also moves SpaceX closer to shifting management and worker resources to producing just a single variant of the Dragon capsule\u2014intended to routinely start carrying humans into orbit before the end of the decade.\nThe same generation of spacecraft will be used in the future to also ferry cargo into orbit. Building, testing and reflying identical versions of the spacecraft is expected to reduce factory time and expenses for SpaceX, though it isn\u2019t clear at what point federal space officials will sign off on recycling Dragons that carry astronauts. In the long run, company officials have said, they foresee potentially dozens of such repeat missions.\nCompany engineers continue to modify Falcon 9 rockets to increase their load capabilities and make them easier to reuse. Dragon capsules also have been optimized for reuse. Company officials hope to reduce refurbishment time, including cutting down on structural inspections, as they become more proficient at flying used spacecraft.\nThe blastoff marked SpaceX\u2019s 11th successful cargo launch, and it is likely to give the company and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration a boost as both sides ramp up efforts to certify Dragons for human spaceflights. NASA\u2019s now-retired space shuttle fleet also was designed to launch repeatedly, though refurbishing the shuttles between missions proved substantially more complex, expensive and time-consuming than envisioned.\nIn addition to focusing on flying refurbished rockets and Dragon cargo capsules, SpaceX\u2019s technical experts are engaged in detailed discussions with their NASA counterparts about whether the agency will need to grant certain waivers from safety standards to authorize transporting astronauts to the orbiting space station. One of the biggest hurdles, according to agency and industry experts, relates to the hazards of flying through portions of space cluttered with tiny meteors and leftover debris from previous missions by countries and commercial entities.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for the first time launched a refurbished cargo capsule that had been used on a previous mission, a major stride toward eventually reusing spacecraft carrying astronauts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos in Space: What the Blue Origin Flight Will Be Like (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "567",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-in-space-what-the-10-minute-blue-origin-flight-will-be-like-11626372013?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=27",
        "text": "The auction winner who bid $28 million for the opportunity to be on the first crewed mission by Blue Origin was unable to make the trip due to scheduling conflicts, according to the company, and Mr. Daemen was selected instead. The auction winner, whose identity is undisclosed, will fly on a future flight. For those who don\u2019t have that kind of money to spend on a roughly 10-minute flight to space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness, here\u2019s what you could expect to see if you had won the auction.\n\n\n Add your face here and experience the flight for yourself!Choose a photo... ResetYour image will not be stored.In a secluded desert area of western Texas, just outside of Van Horn, a town of about 1,800 people, you will arrive at Blue Origin\u2019s astronaut village four days before the flight. After two days of astronaut training where you will meet the pilots, learn about weightlessness and spend time in a mock capsule, you will be ready for the space flight. Blue Origin said the rocket is fully autonomous and traveling in its spacecraft requires minimal training.You will be catching a ride with Mr. Bezos and his brother, Mark Bezos. \u201cEver since I was five years old, I\u2019ve dreamed of traveling to space,\u201d Mr. Bezos said in an Instagram post. \u201cOn July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend.\u201dLiftoff! As the New Shepard rocket accelerates to Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound (more than 2,000 miles an hour), you will experience G-forces up to three times Earth\u2019s gravitational force. Also on board will be 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk. In the 1960s, Ms. Funk was one of the first 13 American women to train for space flight, but the program was canceled, and she never made it to space. She later became the first female Federal Aviation Administration inspector and first female National Transportation Safety Board air-safety investigator. At 18 and 82, respectively, Mr. Daemen and Ms. Funk, will become the youngest and oldest astronauts to travel to space.At 2 minutes and 45 seconds: The booster will separate from the capsule at about 228,000 feet. New Shepard has made 15 successful uncrewed test flights over the past six years from its West Texas base, which the company said demonstrates the mission\u2019s safety.At 3 minutes: As you approach space, you will begin to experience zero gravity. You can float around freely. Blue Origin says New Shepard\u2019s capsule offers the largest windows in space\u2014about one third of the capsule is window. Unbuckle and enjoy.At 4 minutes: You will reach the top of the flight. Enjoy the $28 million view\u2014it won\u2019t last long. You will be just above the Karman Line, an imaginary boundary about 62 miles above sea level considered by many to be the beginning of space. And you will be a few miles higher than Richard Branson recently flew aboard his Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. spacecraft, which maxed out below the Karman Line.At 6 minutes: Time to head home. Please return to your seat and be sure to buckle up as gravity will be returning with a vengeance\u2014up to 5 1/2 G\u2019s during this descent, around the forces you would feel on the most extreme roller coasters.At 7 minutes and 30 seconds: The New Shepard\u2019s booster rocket will land itself back on Earth about 2 miles away from takeoff, to be used again in a future mission.At 9 minutes: After re-entering the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, New Shepard\u2019s parachutes will deploy and float down at about 16 miles an hour. The capsule\u2019s safety features include backup systems, special seats designed to flex and absorb impact, the ability to land with only two of its three parachutes deployed and a rocket to adjust the thrust and slow the capsule down to about one mile an hour.At around 10 to 12 minutes: Land in the West Texas desert and share a high five with Jeff Bezos. You did it! You are now one of the first 600 people to visit space.\n\n\nOf course, if you still want to watch the actual launch, it will be broadcast live online beginning at 7:30 a.m. EDT on July\u00a020 at BlueOrigin.com. Liftoff is scheduled for 9 a.m. EDT, which is subject to change.\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\n\u2014Photos: Blue Origin (capsule, rocket, parachutes, takeoff and landing site); NASA (views of Earth from space); Illustrations by: Tammy Lian/WSJ Curious what Jeff Bezos and others on the New Shepard rocket will see? Picture yourself on the flight too\u2014literally. ",
        "author": "Elliot Bentley, Tammy Lian and Taylor Umlauf"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Makes Blue Origin Eligible to Launch Future Missions Without Crews (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "568",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-makes-blue-origin-eligible-to-launch-future-missions-without-crews-11608177087?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=30",
        "text": "The agency said no specific contracts had been awarded to Blue Origin, but the announcement for the first time makes the closely held company eligible for such NASA business. Under the arrangement, the company Mr. Bezos founded nearly two decades ago will be allowed to use New Glenn, roughly six stories taller than rival rockets, to compete for awards. Various NASA centers will be able to design spacecraft to take advantage of New Glenn\u2019s power and other features, including its capability to transport larger payload volumes than other rockets.\nIn a statement, Blue Origin said: \u201cWe are proud to be in NASA\u2019s launch services catalog and look forward to providing reliable launches\u201d for NASA for years to come.\n\n\nOther heavy-lift rockets already cleared to compete for NASA\u2019s scientific launches include those operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUntil the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n mike blake/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nNew Glenn, which is receiving development funding from the Pentagon, also is in the running for national-security launches. And Blue Origin previously signed up a number of commercial-satellite operators as customers.\nUntil the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin by avoiding publicity, personally investing roughly $1 billion in the company in some years while declining to discuss test launches of its smaller New Shepard booster before its first blastoff in 2015.\nIn addition to transporting satellites, Blue Origin has been testing hardware to take space tourists on suborbital thrill rides.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally Published March 22, 2019)\n \n\n\nBut as the company grew and the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture agreed to buy Blue Origin engines to help power its next-generation booster targeting Pentagon contracts, Mr. Bezos and his team opened up about their plans.\nIn a 2019 interview, Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith\n\n\n\n said the company\u2019s strategy relied heavily on winning lucrative military and other government business for its mega-rocket. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d he said.\nSince then, Blue Origin has successfully bid to become one of three teams devising lunar landers intended to transport NASA astronauts.\nBlue Origin has constructed a sprawling assembly facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of New Glenn boosters. Representing what people in the industry have estimated amounts to a $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn is designed to lift up to 45 tons into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Jeff Bezos and his company\u2019s New Glenn rocket, which hasn\u2019t yet flown, received the nod to potentially carry scientific payloads later this decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Makes Blue Origin Eligible to Launch Future Missions Without Crews (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "569",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-makes-blue-origin-eligible-to-launch-future-missions-without-crews-11608177087?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=36",
        "text": "The agency said no specific contracts had been awarded to Blue Origin, but the announcement for the first time makes the closely held company eligible for such NASA business. Under the arrangement, the company Mr. Bezos founded nearly two decades ago will be allowed to use New Glenn, roughly six stories taller than rival rockets, to compete for awards. Various NASA centers will be able to design spacecraft to take advantage of New Glenn\u2019s power and other features, including its capability to transport larger payload volumes than other rockets.\nIn a statement, Blue Origin said: \u201cWe are proud to be in NASA\u2019s launch services catalog and look forward to providing reliable launches\u201d for NASA for years to come.\n\n\nOther heavy-lift rockets already cleared to compete for NASA\u2019s scientific launches include those operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUntil the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n mike blake/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nNew Glenn, which is receiving development funding from the Pentagon, also is in the running for national-security launches. And Blue Origin previously signed up a number of commercial-satellite operators as customers.\nUntil the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin by avoiding publicity, personally investing roughly $1 billion in the company in some years while declining to discuss test launches of its smaller New Shepard booster before its first blastoff in 2015.\nIn addition to transporting satellites, Blue Origin has been testing hardware to take space tourists on suborbital thrill rides.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally Published March 22, 2019)\n \n\n\nBut as the company grew and the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture agreed to buy Blue Origin engines to help power its next-generation booster targeting Pentagon contracts, Mr. Bezos and his team opened up about their plans.\nIn a 2019 interview, Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith\n\n\n\n said the company\u2019s strategy relied heavily on winning lucrative military and other government business for its mega-rocket. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d he said.\nSince then, Blue Origin has successfully bid to become one of three teams devising lunar landers intended to transport NASA astronauts.\nBlue Origin has constructed a sprawling assembly facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of New Glenn boosters. Representing what people in the industry have estimated amounts to a $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn is designed to lift up to 45 tons into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Jeff Bezos and his company\u2019s New Glenn rocket, which hasn\u2019t yet flown, received the nod to potentially carry scientific payloads later this decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Makes Blue Origin Eligible to Launch Future Missions Without Crews (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "570",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-makes-blue-origin-eligible-to-launch-future-missions-without-crews-11608177087?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=40",
        "text": "The agency said no specific contracts had been awarded to Blue Origin, but the announcement for the first time makes the closely held company eligible for such NASA business. Under the arrangement, the company Mr. Bezos founded nearly two decades ago will be allowed to use New Glenn, roughly six stories taller than rival rockets, to compete for awards. Various NASA centers will be able to design spacecraft to take advantage of New Glenn\u2019s power and other features, including its capability to transport larger payload volumes than other rockets.\nIn a statement, Blue Origin said: \u201cWe are proud to be in NASA\u2019s launch services catalog and look forward to providing reliable launches\u201d for NASA for years to come.\n\n\nOther heavy-lift rockets already cleared to compete for NASA\u2019s scientific launches include those operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUntil the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n mike blake/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nNew Glenn, which is receiving development funding from the Pentagon, also is in the running for national-security launches. And Blue Origin previously signed up a number of commercial-satellite operators as customers.\nUntil the past few years, Mr. Bezos maintained a shroud of secrecy around Blue Origin by avoiding publicity, personally investing roughly $1 billion in the company in some years while declining to discuss test launches of its smaller New Shepard booster before its first blastoff in 2015.\nIn addition to transporting satellites, Blue Origin has been testing hardware to take space tourists on suborbital thrill rides.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally Published March 22, 2019)\n \n\n\nBut as the company grew and the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture agreed to buy Blue Origin engines to help power its next-generation booster targeting Pentagon contracts, Mr. Bezos and his team opened up about their plans.\nIn a 2019 interview, Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith\n\n\n\n said the company\u2019s strategy relied heavily on winning lucrative military and other government business for its mega-rocket. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d he said.\nSince then, Blue Origin has successfully bid to become one of three teams devising lunar landers intended to transport NASA astronauts.\nBlue Origin has constructed a sprawling assembly facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of New Glenn boosters. Representing what people in the industry have estimated amounts to a $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn is designed to lift up to 45 tons into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Jeff Bezos and his company\u2019s New Glenn rocket, which hasn\u2019t yet flown, received the nod to potentially carry scientific payloads later this decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket\u2019s Price Tag May Be Coming Back to Earth (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "571",
        "date": "2017-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-reaching-the-launch-pad-rockets-price-may-be-returning-to-earth-1491742800?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=25",
        "text": "The agency likely faces flat or declining budgets for at least the next few years, even as funding needs for these and other big-ticket development programs persist and perhaps even climb.\nThe result is that Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for Orion, and Boeing, which heads up the team developing a powerful rocket called the Space Launch System, are seeking to fend off rivals and shore up congressional and public support by emphasizing projections of aggressive cost reductions in future years.\n\n\nOrion\u2019s immediate challenges include potential extra costs if NASA and the White House opt to put astronauts on the first test flight. The initial schedule called for a 2018 mission without a crew, followed by one in 2021 carrying astronauts. But to show more dramatic progress, NASA and Lockheed appear to be leaning toward accelerating certain work to allow two astronauts to be on board for the first demonstration flight that is targeted for 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA recovery team members examine a model of Orion craft in Arizona last month. NASA likely faces flat or declining budgets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/LA Daily News/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nOver roughly the same time frame,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n are proposing privately funded cargo and crewed missions beyond Earth\u2019s orbit, some targeting the moon and even Mars.\nThose commercially funded trips are slated to cost just a fraction of the roughly $1.6 billion NASA is committed to pay for the first or second Orion demonstration flight. Orion\u2019s champions aim to show that subsequent flights of their deep-space vehicle would be considerably less expensive.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n president of Boeing\u2019s network and space systems, told reporters that managers for the SLS rocket \u201care trying to get good economics into the production system\u201d by relying on increased automation, which translates into fewer workers on the factory floor.\nReflecting large upfront engineering and development costs, NASA has estimated that early SLS flights are likely to cost roughly $1 billion apiece. But Boeing has an internal target of eventually reducing recurrent launch costs to about half that, according to company and industry officials familiar with the details.\nCosts for big aerospace programs typically drop following the development phase, though savings in this case will be harder than usual to achieve because the production volume will be so low\u2014NASA anticipates a single Orion launch annually. Signaling cost concerns, the agency last fall made a preliminary request for the industry to propose less-expensive alternatives, potentially using different hardware.\n\n\nRelated Advocates of Big NASA Rocket Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (Feb. 5) Pentagon Reaches New Deal With Lockheed Martin to Lower Cost of F-35 Jets (Feb. 3) \n\n\nSLS is slated to be the most powerful rocket ever built, designed to weigh more than 5.5 million pounds and stand taller than the Statue of Liberty. In the ultimate version, it is intended to carry more than 130 tons into orbit with thrust equivalent to the power of roughly 30 Boeing 747 jumbo jets. \u201cNo other system currently in development can do that,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter McGrath,\n\n\n\n another senior Boeing official.\nSpaceX and Blue Origin have said they plan to build even more powerful rockets than SLS. But those concepts are nowhere near production or testing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Hawes,\n\n\n\n a veteran former NASA official who now runs the Orion program for Lockheed Martin, said in an interview that his target is reducing the capsule\u2019s eventual per-flight cost to less than $300 million from today\u2019s roughly $600 million figure. \u201cPart of getting the costs down,\u201d he said, is locking in the design of environmental-control systems and other components as early as possible \u201cto prepare for the ultimate production role.\u201d\nEventually, Orion is supposed to enable four astronauts to start exploring the solar system. But just to get to the first crewed flight, engineers need to overcome major technical hurdles related to software and the operation of emergency crew-abort systems.\nOne of the biggest questions affecting recurrent costs is whether NASA will allow the capsules to be reused after fiery returns to Earth that by design, will erode Orion\u2019s heat shield, Mr. Hawes said. Lockheed Martin envisions reusing crew seats, avionics and other portions the spacecraft, he said. \nBut to determine whether the structure itself can be flown again, he said the first capsules would be outfitted with special sensors to gauge stresses and loads during flights and landings.\nIn addition, the team is considering \u201ca lot more 3-D printing and advanced manufacturing\u201d to cut costs, Mr. Hawes said. Already, engineers were able to With SpaceX and Blue Origin trips slated to cost a fraction of the $1.6 billion NASA is committed to pay for Orion\u2019s first test flight, the project\u2019s champions aim to show that subsequent flights of the vehicle would be less expensive. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket\u2019s Price Tag May Be Coming Back to Earth (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "572",
        "date": "2017-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-reaching-the-launch-pad-rockets-price-may-be-returning-to-earth-1491742800?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=125",
        "text": "The agency likely faces flat or declining budgets for at least the next few years, even as funding needs for these and other big-ticket development programs persist and perhaps even climb.\n\n\n\n\nThe result is that Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for Orion, and Boeing, which heads up the team developing a powerful rocket called the Space Launch System, are seeking to fend off rivals and shore up congressional and public support by emphasizing projections of aggressive cost reductions in future years.\n\n\nOrion\u2019s immediate challenges include potential extra costs if NASA and the White House opt to put astronauts on the first test flight. The initial schedule called for a 2018 mission without a crew, followed by one in 2021 carrying astronauts. But to show more dramatic progress, NASA and Lockheed appear to be leaning toward accelerating certain work to allow two astronauts to be on board for the first demonstration flight that is targeted for 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA recovery team members examine a model of Orion craft in Arizona last month. NASA likely faces flat or declining budgets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/LA Daily News/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nOver roughly the same time frame,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n are proposing privately funded cargo and crewed missions beyond Earth\u2019s orbit, some targeting the moon and even Mars.\nThose commercially funded trips are slated to cost just a fraction of the roughly $1.6 billion NASA is committed to pay for the first or second Orion demonstration flight. Orion\u2019s champions aim to show that subsequent flights of their deep-space vehicle would be considerably less expensive.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n president of Boeing\u2019s network and space systems, told reporters that managers for the SLS rocket \u201care trying to get good economics into the production system\u201d by relying on increased automation, which translates into fewer workers on the factory floor.\nReflecting large upfront engineering and development costs, NASA has estimated that early SLS flights are likely to cost roughly $1 billion apiece. But Boeing has an internal target of eventually reducing recurrent launch costs to about half that, according to company and industry officials familiar with the details.\nCosts for big aerospace programs typically drop following the development phase, though savings in this case will be harder than usual to achieve because the production volume will be so low\u2014NASA anticipates a single Orion launch annually. Signaling cost concerns, the agency last fall made a preliminary request for the industry to propose less-expensive alternatives, potentially using different hardware.\n\n\nRelated Advocates of Big NASA Rocket Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (Feb. 5) Pentagon Reaches New Deal With Lockheed Martin to Lower Cost of F-35 Jets (Feb. 3) \n\n\nSLS is slated to be the most powerful rocket ever built, designed to weigh more than 5.5 million pounds and stand taller than the Statue of Liberty. In the ultimate version, it is intended to carry more than 130 tons into orbit with thrust equivalent to the power of roughly 30 Boeing 747 jumbo jets. \u201cNo other system currently in development can do that,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter McGrath,\n\n\n\n another senior Boeing official.\nSpaceX and Blue Origin have said they plan to build even more powerful rockets than SLS. But those concepts are nowhere near production or testing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Hawes,\n\n\n\n a veteran former NASA official who now runs the Orion program for Lockheed Martin, said in an interview that his target is reducing the capsule\u2019s eventual per-flight cost to less than $300 million from today\u2019s roughly $600 million figure. \u201cPart of getting the costs down,\u201d he said, is locking in the design of environmental-control systems and other components as early as possible \u201cto prepare for the ultimate production role.\u201d\nEventually, Orion is supposed to enable four astronauts to start exploring the solar system. But just to get to the first crewed flight, engineers need to overcome major technical hurdles related to software and the operation of emergency crew-abort systems.\nOne of the biggest questions affecting recurrent costs is whether NASA will allow the capsules to be reused after fiery returns to Earth that by design, will erode Orion\u2019s heat shield, Mr. Hawes said. Lockheed Martin envisions reusing crew seats, avionics and other portions the spacecraft, he said. \nBut to determine whether the structure itself can be flown again, he said the first capsules would be outfitted with special sensors to gauge stresses and loads during flights and landings.\nIn addition, the team is considering \u201ca lot more 3-D printing and advanced manufacturing\u201d to cut costs, Mr. Hawes said. Already, engineers were abl With SpaceX and Blue Origin trips slated to cost a fraction of the $1.6 billion NASA is committed to pay for Orion\u2019s first test flight, the project\u2019s champions aim to show that subsequent flights of the vehicle would be less expensive. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Ends Probe of Virgin Galactic Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "573",
        "date": "2021-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-ends-probe-of-virgin-galactic-flight-11632958891?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=4",
        "text": "The agency found the company\u2019s spacecraft deviated from airspace it was assigned during its descent back to Earth, and that Virgin Galactic failed to report that error to the FAA as required.\nVirgin Galactic said the aviation regulator accepted its proposals to change how it operates space missions. Those changes, according to the company, include designating a larger area as protected airspace to allow for a variety for possible trajectories during missions and taking steps to ensure the company communicates with FAA air-traffic control about flights as they are occurring.\n\n\n\u201cThe updates to our airspace and real-time mission notification protocols will strengthen our preparations as we move closer to the commercial launch of our spaceflight experience,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a statement.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment on Virgin Galactic\u2019s planned communications changes. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment.\nShares of the Las Cruces, N.M.-based company rose more than 10% in after-hours trading.\nVirgin Galactic previously said that during the July flight, its spacecraft shifted from its planned trajectory for one minute and 41 seconds due to winds while the craft was returning to the ground. The ship never flew above population centers, the company has said.\nDuring its investigation, the FAA prohibited Virgin Galactic from operating space flights. The agency regulates launches and re-entries of space vehicles and has been working to better track missions, activating a new system over the summer to minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nEarlier this month, Virgin Galactic said it expected to open up a window to potentially operate its next space mission in mid-October, pending the conclusion of the FAA probe. The company also said then that it chose that time frame because it was working with a vendor to analyze a potential manufacturing defect in a component of a flight control system.\nThat flight, which Virgin Galactic said would be its first commercial research mission, is set to include members of the Italian Air Force.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aviation regulator said the company didn\u2019t properly communicate during a July mission that carried founder Richard Branson to space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Ends Probe of Virgin Galactic Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "574",
        "date": "2021-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-ends-probe-of-virgin-galactic-flight-11632958891?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=12",
        "text": "The agency found the company\u2019s spacecraft deviated from airspace it was assigned during its descent back to Earth, and that Virgin Galactic failed to report that error to the FAA as required.\nVirgin Galactic said the aviation regulator accepted its proposals to change how it operates space missions. Those changes, according to the company, include designating a larger area as protected airspace to allow for a variety for possible trajectories during missions and taking steps to ensure the company communicates with FAA air-traffic control about flights as they are occurring.\n\n\n\u201cThe updates to our airspace and real-time mission notification protocols will strengthen our preparations as we move closer to the commercial launch of our spaceflight experience,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a statement.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment on Virgin Galactic\u2019s planned communications changes. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment.\nShares of the Las Cruces, N.M.-based company rose more than 10% in after-hours trading.\nVirgin Galactic previously said that during the July flight, its spacecraft shifted from its planned trajectory for one minute and 41 seconds due to winds while the craft was returning to the ground. The ship never flew above population centers, the company has said.\nDuring its investigation, the FAA prohibited Virgin Galactic from operating space flights. The agency regulates launches and re-entries of space vehicles and has been working to better track missions, activating a new system over the summer to minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nEarlier this month, Virgin Galactic said it expected to open up a window to potentially operate its next space mission in mid-October, pending the conclusion of the FAA probe. The company also said then that it chose that time frame because it was working with a vendor to analyze a potential manufacturing defect in a component of a flight control system.\nThat flight, which Virgin Galactic said would be its first commercial research mission, is set to include members of the Italian Air Force.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aviation regulator said the company didn\u2019t properly communicate during a July mission that carried founder Richard Branson to space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Ends Probe of Virgin Galactic Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "575",
        "date": "2021-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-ends-probe-of-virgin-galactic-flight-11632958891?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=21",
        "text": "The agency found the company\u2019s spacecraft deviated from airspace it was assigned during its descent back to Earth, and that Virgin Galactic failed to report that error to the FAA as required.\nVirgin Galactic said the aviation regulator accepted its proposals to change how it operates space missions. Those changes, according to the company, include designating a larger area as protected airspace to allow for a variety for possible trajectories during missions and taking steps to ensure the company communicates with FAA air-traffic control about flights as they are occurring.\n\n\n\u201cThe updates to our airspace and real-time mission notification protocols will strengthen our preparations as we move closer to the commercial launch of our spaceflight experience,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said in a statement.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment on Virgin Galactic\u2019s planned communications changes. A spokeswoman for the company declined to comment.\nShares of the Las Cruces, N.M.-based company rose more than 10% in after-hours trading.\nVirgin Galactic previously said that during the July flight, its spacecraft shifted from its planned trajectory for one minute and 41 seconds due to winds while the craft was returning to the ground. The ship never flew above population centers, the company has said.\nDuring its investigation, the FAA prohibited Virgin Galactic from operating space flights. The agency regulates launches and re-entries of space vehicles and has been working to better track missions, activating a new system over the summer to minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nEarlier this month, Virgin Galactic said it expected to open up a window to potentially operate its next space mission in mid-October, pending the conclusion of the FAA probe. The company also said then that it chose that time frame because it was working with a vendor to analyze a potential manufacturing defect in a component of a flight control system.\nThat flight, which Virgin Galactic said would be its first commercial research mission, is set to include members of the Italian Air Force.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aviation regulator said the company didn\u2019t properly communicate during a July mission that carried founder Richard Branson to space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "576",
        "date": "2017-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/leading-commercial-space-group-embraces-nasas-biggest-rocket-1486491576?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=26",
        "text": "Starting in the early years of former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration, many commercial-space companies and their advocates viewed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s\u00a0 behemoth rocket as a major rival, often complaining that the program effectively siphoned off funds from less conventional commercial efforts.\n\n\nRead More Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team NASA Said to Opt for Atlas V Rocket to Ease Short-Term Concerns Over Space Station Supplies SpaceX Has Delayed First Manned NASA Launch to 2018 from 2017 \n\n\nThat rivalry has cooled somewhat in recent years, but until now the commercial industry\u2019s trade group has pointedly avoided endorsing the Space Launch System.\n\n\nThe spaceflight federation\u2019s surprise policy move reflects escalating signals supporting public-private space initiatives coming from White House aides and President Donald Trump\u2019s early appointees to NASA. Final decisions are waiting for the nomination of a NASA administrator.\nBut already, some transition memos envision a joint public-private approach to boosting manned exploration.\u00a0Others in the transition have broached the concept of essentially setting up a flyoff between the Space Launch System and commercially oriented transportation systems to circle the Moon.\nSlated to be the most powerful booster ever built, the 212 foot SLS is intended to send a manned capsule to orbit the Moon in a few \u00a0years and ultimately to transport astronauts to Mars and deeper into the solar system. The program enjoys broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and receives about $2 billion in funding annually.\nUnder current scenarios,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Orion spacecraft is designed to sit on top and ultimately protect humans from the ravages of radiation and other hazards on journeys throughout the solar system. But Mr. Stern\u2019s surprise announcement appears to open the door to broader uses of the Space Launch System.\nBefore his speech, Mr. Stern said in an interview that his members see \u201cmany potential benefits\u201d from continued work and even accelerated development of the Space Launch System. \u201cI don\u2019t want us to get into a perceived food fight\u201d over funding and other potential trade-offs related to the project, he said. The rocket\u2019s initial unmanned flight is scheduled for next year, with a manned mission anticipated by 2021.\nBut there is growing discussion among industry officials that the manned flight could be accelerated to 2020 to better fit with the Trump team\u2019s preferred timetable. Going back to his campaign, Mr. Trump and his surrogates strongly endorsed NASA programs that also promote commercial space goals.\n\u201cWhen you take the long view,\u201d Mr. Stern said in the interview, the Space Launch System \u201cis an important resource\u201d that will promote various exploration initiatives\u00a0involving the Moon and deep-space exploration for robotic as well as manned missions.\nSpeaking later in the day, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top manned exploration official, suggested the rivalry wouldn\u2019t end quickly or completely. He said a single SLS launch is projected to cost roughly $1 billion\u2014at least several times more than commercial versions\u2014but the agency is taking steps to lower production costs. Asked if NASA plans to compete contracts among the different rocket families, Mr. Gerstenmaier said \u201cwe\u2019ll see what happens as the private sector develops their capabilities.\u201d SLS is slated to fly a year earlier and carry much more payload on each trip, he noted, adding that if commercial alternatives develop well and are able to perform some government missions \u201cthen we\u2019ll go ahead and compete.\u201d\nThe Space Launch System is generally proceeding under traditional cost-plus contracts and intense NASA scrutiny. Commercial space companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, which has billions of dollars in contracts to take cargo and eventually U.S. astronauts to the space station, favor fixed-price arrangements and substantially less federal oversight. Blue Origin LLC, a growing rocket company founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n has largely avoided federal funds.\nBefore his speech outlining the revised stance on the Space Launch System, Mr. Stern said his primary goal is \u201ctaking this off the table\u201d as a divisive issue while White House aides formulate new NASA priorities. Looking ahead, he said, \u201cthere is plenty of market share to go around\u201d to support a wide range of commercial and government launch systems.\nDuring his speech, Mr. Stern said \u201cthe government can\u2019t do everything,\u201d and that a public-private partnership \u201cgives us more capital\u201d and momentum to expand exploration efforts.\nHe also said his group\u2019s overarching goal is now to support \u201cexploration of space for all purposes,\u201d which can be promoted by a robust Space Launch System.\nSpeaking at the same conference, Commercial space interests for the first time are publicly singing the praises of NASA\u2019s biggest, most expensive rocket program, seeking to get in synch with the Trump Administration\u2019s \u00a0evolving\u00a0 focus on public-private partnerships to further space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "577",
        "date": "2017-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/leading-commercial-space-group-embraces-nasas-biggest-rocket-1486491576?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=88",
        "text": "Starting in the early years of former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration, many commercial-space companies and their advocates viewed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s\u00a0 behemoth rocket as a major rival, often complaining that the program effectively siphoned off funds from less conventional commercial efforts.\n\n\nRead More Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team NASA Said to Opt for Atlas V Rocket to Ease Short-Term Concerns Over Space Station Supplies SpaceX Has Delayed First Manned NASA Launch to 2018 from 2017 \n\n\nThat rivalry has cooled somewhat in recent years, but until now the commercial industry\u2019s trade group has pointedly avoided endorsing the Space Launch System.\n\n\nThe spaceflight federation\u2019s surprise policy move reflects escalating signals supporting public-private space initiatives coming from White House aides and President Donald Trump\u2019s early appointees to NASA. Final decisions are waiting for the nomination of a NASA administrator.\nBut already, some transition memos envision a joint public-private approach to boosting manned exploration.\u00a0Others in the transition have broached the concept of essentially setting up a flyoff between the Space Launch System and commercially oriented transportation systems to circle the Moon.\nSlated to be the most powerful booster ever built, the 212 foot SLS is intended to send a manned capsule to orbit the Moon in a few \u00a0years and ultimately to transport astronauts to Mars and deeper into the solar system. The program enjoys broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and receives about $2 billion in funding annually.\nUnder current scenarios,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Orion spacecraft is designed to sit on top and ultimately protect humans from the ravages of radiation and other hazards on journeys throughout the solar system. But Mr. Stern\u2019s surprise announcement appears to open the door to broader uses of the Space Launch System.\nBefore his speech, Mr. Stern said in an interview that his members see \u201cmany potential benefits\u201d from continued work and even accelerated development of the Space Launch System. \u201cI don\u2019t want us to get into a perceived food fight\u201d over funding and other potential trade-offs related to the project, he said. The rocket\u2019s initial unmanned flight is scheduled for next year, with a manned mission anticipated by 2021.\nBut there is growing discussion among industry officials that the manned flight could be accelerated to 2020 to better fit with the Trump team\u2019s preferred timetable. Going back to his campaign, Mr. Trump and his surrogates strongly endorsed NASA programs that also promote commercial space goals.\n\u201cWhen you take the long view,\u201d Mr. Stern said in the interview, the Space Launch System \u201cis an important resource\u201d that will promote various exploration initiatives\u00a0involving the Moon and deep-space exploration for robotic as well as manned missions.\nSpeaking later in the day, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top manned exploration official, suggested the rivalry wouldn\u2019t end quickly or completely. He said a single SLS launch is projected to cost roughly $1 billion\u2014at least several times more than commercial versions\u2014but the agency is taking steps to lower production costs. Asked if NASA plans to compete contracts among the different rocket families, Mr. Gerstenmaier said \u201cwe\u2019ll see what happens as the private sector develops their capabilities.\u201d SLS is slated to fly a year earlier and carry much more payload on each trip, he noted, adding that if commercial alternatives develop well and are able to perform some government missions \u201cthen we\u2019ll go ahead and compete.\u201d\nThe Space Launch System is generally proceeding under traditional cost-plus contracts and intense NASA scrutiny. Commercial space companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, which has billions of dollars in contracts to take cargo and eventually U.S. astronauts to the space station, favor fixed-price arrangements and substantially less federal oversight. Blue Origin LLC, a growing rocket company founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n has largely avoided federal funds.\nBefore his speech outlining the revised stance on the Space Launch System, Mr. Stern said his primary goal is \u201ctaking this off the table\u201d as a divisive issue while White House aides formulate new NASA priorities. Looking ahead, he said, \u201cthere is plenty of market share to go around\u201d to support a wide range of commercial and government launch systems.\nDuring his speech, Mr. Stern said \u201cthe government can\u2019t do everything,\u201d and that a public-private partnership \u201cgives us more capital\u201d and momentum to expand exploration efforts.\nHe also said his group\u2019s overarching goal is now to support \u201cexploration of space for all purposes,\u201d which can be promoted by a robust Space Launch System.\nSpeaking at the same conference, Commercial space interests for the first time are publicly singing the praises of NASA\u2019s biggest, most expensive rocket program, seeking to get in synch with the Trump Administration\u2019s \u00a0evolving\u00a0 focus on public-private partnerships to further space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "578",
        "date": "2017-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/leading-commercial-space-group-embraces-nasas-biggest-rocket-1486491576?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=131",
        "text": "Starting in the early years of former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration, many commercial-space companies and their advocates viewed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s\u00a0 behemoth rocket as a major rival, often complaining that the program effectively siphoned off funds from less conventional commercial efforts.\n\n\nRead More\n\n\n\n Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team NASA Said to Opt for Atlas V Rocket to Ease Short-Term Concerns Over Space Station Supplies SpaceX Has Delayed First Manned NASA Launch to 2018 from 2017 \n\n\nThat rivalry has cooled somewhat in recent years, but until now the commercial industry\u2019s trade group has pointedly avoided endorsing the Space Launch System.\n\n\nThe spaceflight federation\u2019s surprise policy move reflects escalating signals supporting public-private space initiatives coming from White House aides and President Donald Trump\u2019s early appointees to NASA. Final decisions are waiting for the nomination of a NASA administrator.\nBut already, some transition memos envision a joint public-private approach to boosting manned exploration.\u00a0Others in the transition have broached the concept of essentially setting up a flyoff between the Space Launch System and commercially oriented transportation systems to circle the Moon.\nSlated to be the most powerful booster ever built, the 212 foot SLS is intended to send a manned capsule to orbit the Moon in a few \u00a0years and ultimately to transport astronauts to Mars and deeper into the solar system. The program enjoys broad bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and receives about $2 billion in funding annually.\nUnder current scenarios,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Orion spacecraft is designed to sit on top and ultimately protect humans from the ravages of radiation and other hazards on journeys throughout the solar system. But Mr. Stern\u2019s surprise announcement appears to open the door to broader uses of the Space Launch System.\nBefore his speech, Mr. Stern said in an interview that his members see \u201cmany potential benefits\u201d from continued work and even accelerated development of the Space Launch System. \u201cI don\u2019t want us to get into a perceived food fight\u201d over funding and other potential trade-offs related to the project, he said. The rocket\u2019s initial unmanned flight is scheduled for next year, with a manned mission anticipated by 2021.\nBut there is growing discussion among industry officials that the manned flight could be accelerated to 2020 to better fit with the Trump team\u2019s preferred timetable. Going back to his campaign, Mr. Trump and his surrogates strongly endorsed NASA programs that also promote commercial space goals.\n\u201cWhen you take the long view,\u201d Mr. Stern said in the interview, the Space Launch System \u201cis an important resource\u201d that will promote various exploration initiatives\u00a0involving the Moon and deep-space exploration for robotic as well as manned missions.\nSpeaking later in the day, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top manned exploration official, suggested the rivalry wouldn\u2019t end quickly or completely. He said a single SLS launch is projected to cost roughly $1 billion\u2014at least several times more than commercial versions\u2014but the agency is taking steps to lower production costs. Asked if NASA plans to compete contracts among the different rocket families, Mr. Gerstenmaier said \u201cwe\u2019ll see what happens as the private sector develops their capabilities.\u201d SLS is slated to fly a year earlier and carry much more payload on each trip, he noted, adding that if commercial alternatives develop well and are able to perform some government missions \u201cthen we\u2019ll go ahead and compete.\u201d\nThe Space Launch System is generally proceeding under traditional cost-plus contracts and intense NASA scrutiny. Commercial space companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, which has billions of dollars in contracts to take cargo and eventually U.S. astronauts to the space station, favor fixed-price arrangements and substantially less federal oversight. Blue Origin LLC, a growing rocket company founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n has largely avoided federal funds.\nBefore his speech outlining the revised stance on the Space Launch System, Mr. Stern said his primary goal is \u201ctaking this off the table\u201d as a divisive issue while White House aides formulate new NASA priorities. Looking ahead, he said, \u201cthere is plenty of market share to go around\u201d to support a wide range of commercial and government launch systems.\nDuring his speech, Mr. Stern said \u201cthe government can\u2019t do everything,\u201d and that a public-private partnership \u201cgives us more capital\u201d and momentum to expand exploration efforts.\nHe also said his group\u2019s overarching goal is now to support \u201cexploration of space for all purposes,\u201d which can be promoted by a robust Space Launch System.\nSpeaking at the same confere Commercial space interests for the first time are publicly singing the praises of NASA\u2019s biggest, most expensive rocket program, seeking to get in synch with the Trump Administration\u2019s \u00a0evolving\u00a0 focus on public-private partnerships to further space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch Aims to Highlight Advances (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "579",
        "date": "2017-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launch-aims-to-highlight-advances-1494782467?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=83",
        "text": "SpaceX management has said it foresees averaging close to two launches a month for all of 2017, though its annual high-water mark so far has been eight launches. Looking ahead, Mr. Musk\u2019s team has sketched out an aggressive timetable featuring launches as frequently as once a week by 2019.\nSpaceX also has notched progress in other areas. Last week it test-fired the core nine engines of a Falcon Heavy, a beefed-up version of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, featuring more thrust and a total 27 engines. The initial launch of the new rocket, targeted for later this year, would mark another important milestone in expanding SpaceX\u2019s capabilities. Initially, SpaceX projected the Falcon Heavy would be flying by 2013.\n\n\nMr. Musk has said the company spent roughly $1 billion developing the heavy-lift rocket but the engineering turned out to be more difficult than anticipated\u2014or \u201ccrazy hard\u201d as he described it during a March press conference. A major challenge is ensuring the engines start firing precisely at the right instant.\n\n\nRelated NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket, Deep-Space Capsule Face Delays \n\n\nAs launch rates increase, SpaceX hopes to significantly cut prices by increasingly relying on reusable boosters. The next blastoff using \u201cflight proven\u201d main engines, as the company calls them, is scheduled for the middle of next month.\nIn addition to ambitious launch plans, industry officials said SpaceX also is stepping up design work on a previously announced satellite project that could include more than 4,000 small spacecraft and may cost more than $10 billion. One of the current concepts envisions satellites weighing more than 800 pounds, equipped with six antennas and with a projected lifespan of roughly five years, according to industry officials familiar with the project.\nThe company has declined to reveal technical details, but it has announced plans to launch the first prototype satellite as early as this year.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com If Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX racks up another successful rocket launch this week, the blastoff could go a long way toward convincing critics that the company has recovered from a pair of explosions in 2015 and 2016. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch Aims to Highlight Advances (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "580",
        "date": "2017-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launch-aims-to-highlight-advances-1494782467?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=123",
        "text": "SpaceX management has said it foresees averaging close to two launches a month for all of 2017, though its annual high-water mark so far has been eight launches. Looking ahead, Mr. Musk\u2019s team has sketched out an aggressive timetable featuring launches as frequently as once a week by 2019.\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX also has notched progress in other areas. Last week it test-fired the core nine engines of a Falcon Heavy, a beefed-up version of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, featuring more thrust and a total 27 engines. The initial launch of the new rocket, targeted for later this year, would mark another important milestone in expanding SpaceX\u2019s capabilities. Initially, SpaceX projected the Falcon Heavy would be flying by 2013.\n\n\nMr. Musk has said the company spent roughly $1 billion developing the heavy-lift rocket but the engineering turned out to be more difficult than anticipated\u2014or \u201ccrazy hard\u201d as he described it during a March press conference. A major challenge is ensuring the engines start firing precisely at the right instant.\n\n\nRelated NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket, Deep-Space Capsule Face Delays \n\n\nAs launch rates increase, SpaceX hopes to significantly cut prices by increasingly relying on reusable boosters. The next blastoff using \u201cflight proven\u201d main engines, as the company calls them, is scheduled for the middle of next month.\nIn addition to ambitious launch plans, industry officials said SpaceX also is stepping up design work on a previously announced satellite project that could include more than 4,000 small spacecraft and may cost more than $10 billion. One of the current concepts envisions satellites weighing more than 800 pounds, equipped with six antennas and with a projected lifespan of roughly five years, according to industry officials familiar with the project.\nThe company has declined to reveal technical details, but it has announced plans to launch the first prototype satellite as early as this year.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com If Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX racks up another successful rocket launch this week, the blastoff could go a long way toward convincing critics that the company has recovered from a pair of explosions in 2015 and 2016. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Defense Companies Run Space Race (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "581",
        "date": "2018-08-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/defense-companies-run-space-race-1535130547?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=18",
        "text": "Space projects could see larger shifts of money as debate over the president\u2019s space-force plan increases public awareness of the military\u2019s drive to speed up deployment of next-generation space equipment.\nThe increased budget is attracting the attention not only of big companies like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.87%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -1.20%\n\n\n but also smaller ones like information-technology specialist Booz Allen Hamilton Holdings Corp. Companies are prioritizing the development of fast, highly maneuverable missiles; technology to detect hostile missile launches; small, more-resilient communications satellites; and processing data from new sensors.\n\n\nGetting less attention in the budget is traditional space hardware, such as bigger satellites that typically have taken longer to build and deploy.\nExisting military space efforts are focused through the Air Force, which has said it wants to spend around $44 billion on unclassified space research, development and new equipment over the next five years\u2014nearly 20% more than its prior guidance in 2017. While the projections were made before the president\u2019s space-force plan, much of the money could end up shifted to the new branch if Congress approves it.\nThe totals don\u2019t include expected funding boosts to classified projects, outside usual public oversight, which have been among the fastest-growing slices of the defense budget.\nBoeing Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n told Wall Street analysts earlier this year that he was encouraged by the Trump administration\u2019s \u201csustained funding and support\u201d for military and civilian space programs. \u201cWe do see it as an important business segment for our future,\u201d he said.\nProponents argue the changes to the space budget are essential to counter evolving Chinese and Russian technology capable of blinding, jamming or possibly even destroying American surveillance and communications satellites. U.S. intelligence officials have publicly criticized Beijing for aggressively pursuing antisatellite weapons and for setting up military units specifically trained to attack foreign satellites. \nBecause of the overseas threat, top candidates for additional funding include research on swarms of space-based sensors able to detect hostile missile launches and, ultimately, potential deployment of advanced orbiting lasers designed to defend a variety of military spacecraft.\nRegardless of the project, proponents predict more focus and dollars will go to build and test prototypes. They are intended to demonstrate technical capabilities and flag future production problems more quickly than the Air Force\u2019s traditional, time-consuming hardware development and acquisition process.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Air Force Gen. John Hyten,\n\n\n\n head of Strategic Command, which oversees the nation\u2019s nuclear weapons, repeatedly has lamented the lumbering pace of replacing missile-warning and other types of satellites. \u201cI don\u2019t know how it happened, but somehow this country lost the ability to go fast,\u201d he said last December. \nCompanies that stand to profit include Lockheed Martin, which recently snared contracts totaling more than $3.3 billion to develop new fleets of missile-warning satellites and highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles, able to reach targets at speeds faster than five times the speed of sound. Boeing recently bought Millennium Space Systems, a small-satellite maker that analysts said will help it downsize from school bus-size satellites.\nSenior officials at rocket-motor specialist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.\n\n\n have said the company stands to benefit from unprecedented interest in hypersonic vehicles. Industry officials see Northrop Grumman, with its long and close ties to the intelligence community, gaining from stepped-up spending on missile-warning and cutting-edge spy satellites. At the same time, service providers such as Booz Allen are bound to grow with the steadily increasing flow of data streaming from space, according to defense analysts.\nSome industry executives are optimistic about the potential of a new space force to unlock extra resources and savings by coordinating spending and making more use of cheaper commercial technology, when appropriate.\n\u201cThat will only drive more investments in the area,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Brown,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Harris Corp., which makes sensors and communication equipment. \u201cThere are tremendous opportunities [for] growing in the classified\u201d arena.\nLawmakers are unlikely to vote on the president\u2019s space-force plan until next year, and even if it is approved, implementation is bound to take years. So far neither military nor White House officials have provided specifics on the plan, and bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill appears to be building to the projected cost and Defense and aerospace companies are accelerating plans to develop new types of missiles and satellites in an effort to capitalize on President Trump\u2019s proposed military branch devoted to space warfare. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Defense Companies Run Space Race (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "582",
        "date": "2018-08-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/defense-companies-run-space-race-1535130547?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=71",
        "text": "Space projects could see larger shifts of money as debate over the president\u2019s space-force plan increases public awareness of the military\u2019s drive to speed up deployment of next-generation space equipment.\n\n\n\n\nThe increased budget is attracting the attention not only of big companies like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -0.10%\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.18%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.97%\n\n\n but also smaller ones like information-technology specialist Booz Allen Hamilton Holdings Corp. Companies are prioritizing the development of fast, highly maneuverable missiles; technology to detect hostile missile launches; small, more-resilient communications satellites; and processing data from new sensors.\n\n\nGetting less attention in the budget is traditional space hardware, such as bigger satellites that typically have taken longer to build and deploy.\nExisting military space efforts are focused through the Air Force, which has said it wants to spend around $44 billion on unclassified space research, development and new equipment over the next five years\u2014nearly 20% more than its prior guidance in 2017. While the projections were made before the president\u2019s space-force plan, much of the money could end up shifted to the new branch if Congress approves it.\nThe totals don\u2019t include expected funding boosts to classified projects, outside usual public oversight, which have been among the fastest-growing slices of the defense budget.\nBoeing Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n told Wall Street analysts earlier this year that he was encouraged by the Trump administration\u2019s \u201csustained funding and support\u201d for military and civilian space programs. \u201cWe do see it as an important business segment for our future,\u201d he said.\nProponents argue the changes to the space budget are essential to counter evolving Chinese and Russian technology capable of blinding, jamming or possibly even destroying American surveillance and communications satellites. U.S. intelligence officials have publicly criticized Beijing for aggressively pursuing antisatellite weapons and for setting up military units specifically trained to attack foreign satellites. \nBecause of the overseas threat, top candidates for additional funding include research on swarms of space-based sensors able to detect hostile missile launches and, ultimately, potential deployment of advanced orbiting lasers designed to defend a variety of military spacecraft.\nRegardless of the project, proponents predict more focus and dollars will go to build and test prototypes. They are intended to demonstrate technical capabilities and flag future production problems more quickly than the Air Force\u2019s traditional, time-consuming hardware development and acquisition process.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Air Force Gen. John Hyten,\n\n\n\n head of Strategic Command, which oversees the nation\u2019s nuclear weapons, repeatedly has lamented the lumbering pace of replacing missile-warning and other types of satellites. \u201cI don\u2019t know how it happened, but somehow this country lost the ability to go fast,\u201d he said last December. \nCompanies that stand to profit include Lockheed Martin, which recently snared contracts totaling more than $3.3 billion to develop new fleets of missile-warning satellites and highly maneuverable hypersonic missiles, able to reach targets at speeds faster than five times the speed of sound. Boeing recently bought Millennium Space Systems, a small-satellite maker that analysts said will help it downsize from school bus-size satellites.\nSenior officials at rocket-motor specialist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.\n\n\n have said the company stands to benefit from unprecedented interest in hypersonic vehicles. Industry officials see Northrop Grumman, with its long and close ties to the intelligence community, gaining from stepped-up spending on missile-warning and cutting-edge spy satellites. At the same time, service providers such as Booz Allen are bound to grow with the steadily increasing flow of data streaming from space, according to defense analysts.\nSome industry executives are optimistic about the potential of a new space force to unlock extra resources and savings by coordinating spending and making more use of cheaper commercial technology, when appropriate.\n\u201cThat will only drive more investments in the area,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Brown,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Harris Corp., which makes sensors and communication equipment. \u201cThere are tremendous opportunities [for] growing in the classified\u201d arena.\nLawmakers are unlikely to vote on the president\u2019s space-force plan until next year, and even if it is approved, implementation is bound to take years. So far neither military nor White House officials have provided specifics on the plan, and bipartisan opposition on Capitol Hill appears to be building to the projected cost and disruption of standing up an entirely new uniformed and civilian chain of command. The success of any space force would depend partly on the extent of participation by the intelligence community.\nAnd even though a space force could lead to more business, some contractors and military leaders say they are worried the move threatens to drain dollars already earmarked for space hardware into staff, support and operational accounts.\nNo matter the outcome, the Pentagon appears focused on quickly developing its new space defenses.\n\u201cWe\u2019ve told all of our contractors\u201d the military simply won\u2019t support \u201cmore exquisite, one-off science [experiments]\u201d that block rapid deployment, Air Force Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Wilson\n\n\n\n said last year.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com Defense and aerospace companies are accelerating plans to develop new types of missiles and satellites in an effort to capitalize on President Trump\u2019s proposed military branch devoted to space warfare. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and United Launch Alliance Split Rocket Contracts (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "583",
        "date": "2018-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-and-united-launch-alliance-split-640-million-in-pentagon-rocket-contracts-1521084306?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=20",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Mr. Musk\u2019s company, won a $290 million fixed-price contract to launch three Global Positioning System Satellites into orbit on Falcon 9 rockets by the end of 2020. The closely held Southern California company previously was awarded two other GPS launches.\nUnited Launch Alliance, the joint venture that historically enjoyed a virtual monopoly boosting large U.S. military or spy satellites into space, was awarded a $351 million deal for two launches of Air Force spacecraft on workhorse Atlas V rockets. Based on Air Force numbers, those launches will cost roughly $170 million apiece, or more than $70 million above SpaceX prices.\n\n\nSpaceX is a scrappy upstart that has used low prices, reusable boosters and aggressive marketing efforts to snare business from rivals around the globe, particularly United Launch Alliance.\nThe joint venture is developing a lower-cost family of rockets to compete more effectively, but those aren\u2019t expected to begin routine flights for at least three or four years.\nUntil then, Pentagon brass and Congress effectively have agreed to support transition policies that will allocate launches to both contractors.In its announcement, the Air Force emphasized the contracts were competitively awarded but are intended to \u201cstrike a balance between meeting operational needs and lowering launch costs.\u201d\n\u201cSpaceX is pleased with the Air Force\u2019s decision to select us for all five of the GPS [launches] competed to date,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tory Bruno,\n\n\n\n president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, told reporters Tuesday that development of its next-generation rocket, called Vulcan, is on track and some of the venture\u2019s biggest subcontractors have agreed to invest in developing essential technology.\nMr. Bruno said the venture currently doesn\u2019t have any contracts to launch commercial satellites, but aims to build up that portion of its business over the next five or so years to increase launch tempo and thereby reduce prices for all customers. But that may be a steep challenge, according to many industry experts. At this point, Mr. Bruno\u2019s team is launching about half as many rockets annually as SpaceX, which forecasts continued sharp increases in the number of launches in coming years.\nIn a Thursday interview reacting to the awards, Mr. Bruno said the outcome once again demonstrated the Pentagon\u2019s trust in giving United Launch Alliance missions that are more difficult and sensitive than those won by its rival. So far, he said, Air Force officials \u201chave yet to be willing to trust them with the [type of] missions we won.\u201d\nTestifying before a House appropriations defense subcommittee Wednesday, the Air Force\u2019s top civilian and uniformed leaders reiterated the Pentagon\u2019s commitment to eventually end up with at least two viable launch providers able to compete long-term for national security payloads.\nBut without referring to SpaceX by name, Air Force Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Wilson\n\n\n\n also told the panel the global launch business has been transformed in recent years. \u201cThe cost of launch is plummeting\u201d and commercial space ventures now \u201chave multiple choices\u201d to blast spacecraft beyond the atmosphere. \u201cWe\u2019re coming to a point,\u201d she said, that low-cost launchers are \u201cenabling business plans to close in space that never were possible before.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Seeking to maintain a pair of satellite-launch providers, the Air Force split $640 million in contracts between Elon Musk\u2019s low-cost SpaceX and a Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture with higher prices but a long military legacy. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and United Launch Alliance Split Rocket Contracts (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "584",
        "date": "2018-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-and-united-launch-alliance-split-640-million-in-pentagon-rocket-contracts-1521084306?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=69",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Mr. Musk\u2019s company, won a $290 million fixed-price contract to launch three Global Positioning System Satellites into orbit on Falcon 9 rockets by the end of 2020. The closely held Southern California company previously was awarded two other GPS launches.\nUnited Launch Alliance, the joint venture that historically enjoyed a virtual monopoly boosting large U.S. military or spy satellites into space, was awarded a $351 million deal for two launches of Air Force spacecraft on workhorse Atlas V rockets. Based on Air Force numbers, those launches will cost roughly $170 million apiece, or more than $70 million above SpaceX prices.\n\n\nSpaceX is a scrappy upstart that has used low prices, reusable boosters and aggressive marketing efforts to snare business from rivals around the globe, particularly United Launch Alliance.\nThe joint venture is developing a lower-cost family of rockets to compete more effectively, but those aren\u2019t expected to begin routine flights for at least three or four years.\nUntil then, Pentagon brass and Congress effectively have agreed to support transition policies that will allocate launches to both contractors.In its announcement, the Air Force emphasized the contracts were competitively awarded but are intended to \u201cstrike a balance between meeting operational needs and lowering launch costs.\u201d\n\u201cSpaceX is pleased with the Air Force\u2019s decision to select us for all five of the GPS [launches] competed to date,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tory Bruno,\n\n\n\n president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, told reporters Tuesday that development of its next-generation rocket, called Vulcan, is on track and some of the venture\u2019s biggest subcontractors have agreed to invest in developing essential technology.\nMr. Bruno said the venture currently doesn\u2019t have any contracts to launch commercial satellites, but aims to build up that portion of its business over the next five or so years to increase launch tempo and thereby reduce prices for all customers. But that may be a steep challenge, according to many industry experts. At this point, Mr. Bruno\u2019s team is launching about half as many rockets annually as SpaceX, which forecasts continued sharp increases in the number of launches in coming years.\nIn a Thursday interview reacting to the awards, Mr. Bruno said the outcome once again demonstrated the Pentagon\u2019s trust in giving United Launch Alliance missions that are more difficult and sensitive than those won by its rival. So far, he said, Air Force officials \u201chave yet to be willing to trust them with the [type of] missions we won.\u201d\nTestifying before a House appropriations defense subcommittee Wednesday, the Air Force\u2019s top civilian and uniformed leaders reiterated the Pentagon\u2019s commitment to eventually end up with at least two viable launch providers able to compete long-term for national security payloads.\nBut without referring to SpaceX by name, Air Force Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Wilson\n\n\n\n also told the panel the global launch business has been transformed in recent years. \u201cThe cost of launch is plummeting\u201d and commercial space ventures now \u201chave multiple choices\u201d to blast spacecraft beyond the atmosphere. \u201cWe\u2019re coming to a point,\u201d she said, that low-cost launchers are \u201cenabling business plans to close in space that never were possible before.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Seeking to maintain a pair of satellite-launch providers, the Air Force split $640 million in contracts between Elon Musk\u2019s low-cost SpaceX and a Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture with higher prices but a long military legacy. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Future Depends on a Gigantic Rocket and 42,000 Internet Satellites (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "585",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-future-depends-on-a-gigantic-rocket-and-42-000-internet-satellites-11640687404?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=2",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company Mr. Musk founded almost two decades ago, faces steep challenges in engineering Starship into a reusable rocket that would sharply drive down launch costs. Mr. Musk recently said the ship takes up more of his time than any other single initiative, and warned the vehicle, along with the internet service, are creating significant challenges for the company.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cStarship is a hard, hard, hard, hard project,\u201d he said at a December event hosted by The Wall Street Journal. \u201cThis is the biggest rocket ever made.\u201d\n\nStarship, which would be blasted to orbit on a booster dubbed Super Heavy, stands 160 feet tall and has a diameter of 30 feet, creating room to send hundreds of Starlink satellites to orbit at once, more than the several dozen it is able to deploy right now on one of its Falcon 9 rockets. More than half of the launches tracked by U.S. flight-safety regulators that the company has conducted the past two years have been Starlink deployments.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This year, billionaire CEO Elon Musk reached several milestones across Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. WSJ reporters Rebecca Elliott and Micah Maidenberg break down some of his biggest moments in 2021 and what\u2019s to come in 2022. Illustration: Tom Grillo\n \n\n\nThe company plans to rapidly boost the pace of satellite launches in the years ahead. SpaceX, in a July presentation to the Federal Communications Commission, said it had so far launched around 1,800 Starlink satellites and was active in more than 20 countries. The FCC has authorized SpaceX to launch around 12,000 satellites, but the company wants to add at least around 30,000 more, according to commission filings.\nMr. Musk said at an industry conference this summer that SpaceX is likely to invest at least $5 billion and perhaps as much as $10 billion in Starlink before it fully starts generating cash, with ongoing investments after that.\nIn a November tweet, Mr. Musk said if severe global recession cut into the availability of capital and liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starship and Starlink, then bankruptcy \u201cwhile still unlikely, is not impossible.\u201d\nOver the past two years, the company began equity sales that raised at least $3.8 billion, according to filings that some private companies like SpaceX may have to disclose under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. SpaceX doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nA spokesman for the company pointed to a recent statement posted to SpaceX\u2019s website that said in part the company\u2019s year ahead would include a potential first orbital mission for Starship and expanding Starlink.\nMr. Musk unveiled Starlink in 2015, aiming to develop a network of smaller satellites in a low orbit around Earth that could provide high-speed internet access around the world. SpaceX set out aggressive targets for Starlink, projecting that year more than 40 million subscribers by 2025, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Starship would be blasted to orbit on top of a Super Heavy booster.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX said this summer that it had around 140,000 Starlink customers. Starlink lists costs for the service at $99 a month, with a $499 charge for an internet terminal\u2014or roughly half the amount it costs the company to make it, Mr. Musk said over the summer.\nOther companies, such as London-based OneWeb, are also creating networks of internet satellites, and an\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n unit plans to do so in the future. Around 3.7 billion people globally remain unconnected to the internet, according to a recent report from two agencies at the United Nations, while U.S. officials have worked for years to improve access to high-speed internet in underserved areas.\n\u201cThere\u2019s a need for connectivity in places that don\u2019t have it right now,\u201d or where connections are very limited or expensive, Mr. Musk said this summer. In addition to consumers, Mr. Musk has indicated Starlink could offer services to other businesses, recently saying in a tweet that fliers should ask airlines for Starlink.\nThe internet service creates a source of demand for Starship, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Weinzierl,\n\n\n\n a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the space economy.\nHistorically, those behind big rockets without a clear use for them have faced challenges: \u201cIf we don\u2019t know why we built them, it can be a real losing proposition,\u201d Mr. Weinzierl said, adding he thinks the company will identify other uses for the rocket.\nStarship, meanwhile, has at least one confirmed customer in place: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which in April awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a Starship to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.\nAs it works to develop Starship and Starlink, SpaceX has built out a business based on government customers such as NASA and on commercial-satellite operators.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up News Alert Major world and business news, including political events, takeovers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe value of its contracts with public-sector clients amounted to $2.2 billion for the federal government\u2019s 2021 fiscal year, up from $195 million a decade earlier, according to a contracts database. SpaceX typically charges private clients $60 million to $65 million for Falcon 9 launches, according to people familiar with the matter.\nThe company\u2019s valuation has soared as it proved its spacecraft like Falcon 9 could work as intended and as it started constructing its fleet of Starlink satellites. SpaceX was valued at $100 billion in October, more than double its valuation in the summer of 2020, according to PitchBook. The latest figure rests heavily on prospects for Starlink because the potential demand for the high-speed internet service globally is much larger than the size of the launch market, investors say.\nTim Farrar, a satellite-industry consultant, said in most places around the world, internet customers either can\u2019t afford what Starlink charges or are well-served by existing broadband providers. The U.S. is the best market globally for customers that could afford around $100 a month for service and have a relatively poor broadband offering, according to Mr. Farrar.\n\u201cTo get the capacity to serve millions of people in the U.S., they\u2019re going to need to launch tens of thousands of satellites, and the only way to do that at low enough cost is to have Starship,\u201d he said. \u201cOn the other hand, it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the market will be there.\u201d\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company? Elon Musk said a lot is riding on the Starship rocket and Starlink satellite projects for his space company, which aims to reduce launch costs and build a big internet business. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another Elon Musk Prediction: Rocket Launches Will Be as Routine as Airline Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "586",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-predicts-rocket-launches-will-be-as-routine-as-airline-flights-1525988078?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=19",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, already reuses the lower stage of its current-generation rockets, typically months after the first use.\nBut starting next year, the company plans to use the same main engines and lower stage to conduct two consecutive missions in a single day, Mr. Musk said. Going further than he has before, he predicted additional advances intended eventually to make space travel as routine and safe as boarding a jetliner.\n\n\nWhen it comes to both SpaceX and electric-car company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n which Mr. Musk also runs, the billionaire has been criticized by auto-industry analysts and aerospace rivals for boasting about technical accomplishments while laying out super-ambitious goals and specific timetables that often prove unrealistic.\nRecently he clashed with Wall Street analysts over whether Tesla has the ability to ramp up production and resolve nagging assembly-line problems.\nMr. Musk\u2019s latest comments about SpaceX risk a repeat of that dynamic if the company fails to deliver. Over the years, the company has fallen short of goals to increase launch rates or complete new spacecraft on schedule.\nBut instead of dialing back public projections, Thursday\u2019s news conference highlighted Mr. Musk\u2019s determination to continue capturing the limelight with increasingly ambitious goals.\nExtolling the latest Falcon 9 as \u201cthe most reliable rocket ever built,\u201d the SpaceX chief went on to say he is certain his engineering team also \u201cwill achieve full reusability\u201d of the upper stage, which now burns up \u201clike a meteor\u201d as it returns to the atmosphere. Falcon 9 rockets have suffered two catastrophic explosions since 2015. That has compared with no such failures involving rockets built by rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance,\n\n\n a joint venture of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , over a much longer period.\nIf the reusability strategy succeeds, Mr. Musk held out the promise of cutting the price of orbital launches to $5 million or $6 million, from $50 million or $60 million currently. \u201cThat would be quite insane,\u201d he said, though customers still would have to shoulder part of the development costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images (Originally Published February 7, 2018)\n \n\n\nBut Mr. Musk didn\u2019t explain when that could occur, or how such a drastic change in his business plan would still produce enough revenue to fund pending multibillion-dollar projects to develop a behemoth deep-space rocket and deploy thousands of small communication satellites.\nThroughout his typically brash performance, Mr. Musk reiterated the tenets of his ambitions for SpaceX. He aims to build a fleet of rocket ships able to transport humans to Mars, but flexible enough to operate at roughly the cost and frequency of traditional airlines.\nTo move toward that goal, however, SpaceX first has to prove it can safely fly astronauts on today\u2019s version of the Falcon 9. National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials are considering whether to approve putting astronauts in the capsule on top of the rocket while it is loaded with super-cooled fuel. Mr. Musk said the safety issue \u201chas been somewhat overblown,\u201d though for the first time he publicly said if necessary, \u201cwe can adjust our operational procedures\u201d to fuel the rocket first.\nBut sticking with the airline analogy, Mr. Musk predicted that in the end, operational changes won\u2019t be necessary \u201cany more than passengers on an aircraft wait until the aircraft is full of fuel before boarding; that would be pretty silly.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Staking out another bold space objective, Elon Musk said the latest configuration of his rocket is designed to fly as many as 10 times without any scheduled maintenance, and ultimately could be refurbished and blast off at least 100 times. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another Elon Musk Prediction: Rocket Launches Will Be as Routine as Airline Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "587",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-predicts-rocket-launches-will-be-as-routine-as-airline-flights-1525988078?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=74",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, already reuses the lower stage of its current-generation rockets, typically months after the first use.\nBut starting next year, the company plans to use the same main engines and lower stage to conduct two consecutive missions in a single day, Mr. Musk said. Going further than he has before, he predicted additional advances intended eventually to make space travel as routine and safe as boarding a jetliner.\n\n\nWhen it comes to both SpaceX and electric-car company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n which Mr. Musk also runs, the billionaire has been criticized by auto-industry analysts and aerospace rivals for boasting about technical accomplishments while laying out super-ambitious goals and specific timetables that often prove unrealistic.\nRecently he clashed with Wall Street analysts over whether Tesla has the ability to ramp up production and resolve nagging assembly-line problems.\nMr. Musk\u2019s latest comments about SpaceX risk a repeat of that dynamic if the company fails to deliver. Over the years, the company has fallen short of goals to increase launch rates or complete new spacecraft on schedule.\nBut instead of dialing back public projections, Thursday\u2019s news conference highlighted Mr. Musk\u2019s determination to continue capturing the limelight with increasingly ambitious goals.\nExtolling the latest Falcon 9 as \u201cthe most reliable rocket ever built,\u201d the SpaceX chief went on to say he is certain his engineering team also \u201cwill achieve full reusability\u201d of the upper stage, which now burns up \u201clike a meteor\u201d as it returns to the atmosphere. Falcon 9 rockets have suffered two catastrophic explosions since 2015. That has compared with no such failures involving rockets built by rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance,\n\n\n a joint venture of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , over a much longer period.\nIf the reusability strategy succeeds, Mr. Musk held out the promise of cutting the price of orbital launches to $5 million or $6 million, from $50 million or $60 million currently. \u201cThat would be quite insane,\u201d he said, though customers still would have to shoulder part of the development costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images (Originally Published February 7, 2018)\n \n\n\nBut Mr. Musk didn\u2019t explain when that could occur, or how such a drastic change in his business plan would still produce enough revenue to fund pending multibillion-dollar projects to develop a behemoth deep-space rocket and deploy thousands of small communication satellites.\nThroughout his typically brash performance, Mr. Musk reiterated the tenets of his ambitions for SpaceX. He aims to build a fleet of rocket ships able to transport humans to Mars, but flexible enough to operate at roughly the cost and frequency of traditional airlines.\nTo move toward that goal, however, SpaceX first has to prove it can safely fly astronauts on today\u2019s version of the Falcon 9. National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials are considering whether to approve putting astronauts in the capsule on top of the rocket while it is loaded with super-cooled fuel. Mr. Musk said the safety issue \u201chas been somewhat overblown,\u201d though for the first time he publicly said if necessary, \u201cwe can adjust our operational procedures\u201d to fuel the rocket first.\nBut sticking with the airline analogy, Mr. Musk predicted that in the end, operational changes won\u2019t be necessary \u201cany more than passengers on an aircraft wait until the aircraft is full of fuel before boarding; that would be pretty silly.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Staking out another bold space objective, Elon Musk said the latest configuration of his rocket is designed to fly as many as 10 times without any scheduled maintenance, and ultimately could be refurbished and blast off at least 100 times. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another Elon Musk Prediction: Rocket Launches Will Be as Routine as Airline Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "588",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-predicts-rocket-launches-will-be-as-routine-as-airline-flights-1525988078?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=68",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, already reuses the lower stage of its current-generation rockets, typically months after the first use.\nBut starting next year, the company plans to use the same main engines and lower stage to conduct two consecutive missions in a single day, Mr. Musk said. Going further than he has before, he predicted additional advances intended eventually to make space travel as routine and safe as boarding a jetliner.\n\n\nWhen it comes to both SpaceX and electric-car company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n which Mr. Musk also runs, the billionaire has been criticized by auto-industry analysts and aerospace rivals for boasting about technical accomplishments while laying out super-ambitious goals and specific timetables that often prove unrealistic.\nRecently he clashed with Wall Street analysts over whether Tesla has the ability to ramp up production and resolve nagging assembly-line problems.\nMr. Musk\u2019s latest comments about SpaceX risk a repeat of that dynamic if the company fails to deliver. Over the years, the company has fallen short of goals to increase launch rates or complete new spacecraft on schedule.\nBut instead of dialing back public projections, Thursday\u2019s news conference highlighted Mr. Musk\u2019s determination to continue capturing the limelight with increasingly ambitious goals.\nExtolling the latest Falcon 9 as \u201cthe most reliable rocket ever built,\u201d the SpaceX chief went on to say he is certain his engineering team also \u201cwill achieve full reusability\u201d of the upper stage, which now burns up \u201clike a meteor\u201d as it returns to the atmosphere. Falcon 9 rockets have suffered two catastrophic explosions since 2015. That has compared with no such failures involving rockets built by rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance,\n\n\n a joint venture of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , over a much longer period.\nIf the reusability strategy succeeds, Mr. Musk held out the promise of cutting the price of orbital launches to $5 million or $6 million, from $50 million or $60 million currently. \u201cThat would be quite insane,\u201d he said, though customers still would have to shoulder part of the development costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images (Originally Published February 7, 2018)\n \n\n\nBut Mr. Musk didn\u2019t explain when that could occur, or how such a drastic change in his business plan would still produce enough revenue to fund pending multibillion-dollar projects to develop a behemoth deep-space rocket and deploy thousands of small communication satellites.\nThroughout his typically brash performance, Mr. Musk reiterated the tenets of his ambitions for SpaceX. He aims to build a fleet of rocket ships able to transport humans to Mars, but flexible enough to operate at roughly the cost and frequency of traditional airlines.\nTo move toward that goal, however, SpaceX first has to prove it can safely fly astronauts on today\u2019s version of the Falcon 9. National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials are considering whether to approve putting astronauts in the capsule on top of the rocket while it is loaded with super-cooled fuel. Mr. Musk said the safety issue \u201chas been somewhat overblown,\u201d though for the first time he publicly said if necessary, \u201cwe can adjust our operational procedures\u201d to fuel the rocket first.\nBut sticking with the airline analogy, Mr. Musk predicted that in the end, operational changes won\u2019t be necessary \u201cany more than passengers on an aircraft wait until the aircraft is full of fuel before boarding; that would be pretty silly.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Staking out another bold space objective, Elon Musk said the latest configuration of his rocket is designed to fly as many as 10 times without any scheduled maintenance, and ultimately could be refurbished and blast off at least 100 times. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another Elon Musk Prediction: Rocket Launches Will Be as Routine as Airline Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "589",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-predicts-rocket-launches-will-be-as-routine-as-airline-flights-1525988078?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=68",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, already reuses the lower stage of its current-generation rockets, typically months after the first use.\nBut starting next year, the company plans to use the same main engines and lower stage to conduct two consecutive missions in a single day, Mr. Musk said. Going further than he has before, he predicted additional advances intended eventually to make space travel as routine and safe as boarding a jetliner.\n\n\nWhen it comes to both SpaceX and electric-car company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n which Mr. Musk also runs, the billionaire has been criticized by auto-industry analysts and aerospace rivals for boasting about technical accomplishments while laying out super-ambitious goals and specific timetables that often prove unrealistic.\nRecently he clashed with Wall Street analysts over whether Tesla has the ability to ramp up production and resolve nagging assembly-line problems.\nMr. Musk\u2019s latest comments about SpaceX risk a repeat of that dynamic if the company fails to deliver. Over the years, the company has fallen short of goals to increase launch rates or complete new spacecraft on schedule.\nBut instead of dialing back public projections, Thursday\u2019s news conference highlighted Mr. Musk\u2019s determination to continue capturing the limelight with increasingly ambitious goals.\nExtolling the latest Falcon 9 as \u201cthe most reliable rocket ever built,\u201d the SpaceX chief went on to say he is certain his engineering team also \u201cwill achieve full reusability\u201d of the upper stage, which now burns up \u201clike a meteor\u201d as it returns to the atmosphere. Falcon 9 rockets have suffered two catastrophic explosions since 2015. That has compared with no such failures involving rockets built by rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance,\n\n\n a joint venture of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , over a much longer period.\nIf the reusability strategy succeeds, Mr. Musk held out the promise of cutting the price of orbital launches to $5 million or $6 million, from $50 million or $60 million currently. \u201cThat would be quite insane,\u201d he said, though customers still would have to shoulder part of the development costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images (Originally Published February 7, 2018)\n \n\n\nBut Mr. Musk didn\u2019t explain when that could occur, or how such a drastic change in his business plan would still produce enough revenue to fund pending multibillion-dollar projects to develop a behemoth deep-space rocket and deploy thousands of small communication satellites.\nThroughout his typically brash performance, Mr. Musk reiterated the tenets of his ambitions for SpaceX. He aims to build a fleet of rocket ships able to transport humans to Mars, but flexible enough to operate at roughly the cost and frequency of traditional airlines.\nTo move toward that goal, however, SpaceX first has to prove it can safely fly astronauts on today\u2019s version of the Falcon 9. National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials are considering whether to approve putting astronauts in the capsule on top of the rocket while it is loaded with super-cooled fuel. Mr. Musk said the safety issue \u201chas been somewhat overblown,\u201d though for the first time he publicly said if necessary, \u201cwe can adjust our operational procedures\u201d to fuel the rocket first.\nBut sticking with the airline analogy, Mr. Musk predicted that in the end, operational changes won\u2019t be necessary \u201cany more than passengers on an aircraft wait until the aircraft is full of fuel before boarding; that would be pretty silly.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Staking out another bold space objective, Elon Musk said the latest configuration of his rocket is designed to fly as many as 10 times without any scheduled maintenance, and ultimately could be refurbished and blast off at least 100 times. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches Reused Booster for NASA, a First (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "590",
        "date": "2017-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-successfully-launches-reused-booster-for-nasa-a-first-1513353133?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=21",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp. blasted more than two tons of food, supplies and scientific gear from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, resuming operations at launch complex 40, where the pad was seriously damaged by an explosion during a routine ground test of a Falcon 9 more than a year ago. In recent weeks, some high-level Pentagon acquisition officials also have embraced the idea of launching military payloads on rockets that previously flew in space.\nAfter three launch delays in a week, the flight marked the first pairing of a previously flown capsule with what SpaceX calls a \u201cflight proven\u201d rocket. Streaking upward in a nearly cloudless sky, the nine main engines cut off as anticipated about two minutes and 20 seconds into the voyage, and the second-stage engine continued powering the capsule higher into space. Roughly nine and a half minutes into the flight, flight controllers confirmed the capsule deployed as intended and began coasting through space to join the space station.\n\n\nBut looking ahead to 2018, when SpaceX anticipates it will start flights carrying U.S. astronauts to the international orbiting laboratory, Mr. Musk\u2019s management team and leaders of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration both face formidable challenges. \nFrom blastoff risks to radiation dangers to splashdown hazards, industry and government experts have said SpaceX\u2019s plans pose difficult technical and policy decisions unlike any the nation\u2019s space program has faced in many years.\nBoeing Co., which has a separate NASA contract to start ferrying astronauts to and from orbit, confronts its steep hurdles. The Chicago-based aerospace giant\u2019s crewed vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, has struggled to overcome problems with excess weight and vibrations during launch.\nBoeing intends to fly crews on Atlas V rockets, which have a longer and better safety record than the Falcon 9 fleet. And since Boeing is the primary contractor on the space station, NASA officials are more familiar with its corporate engineering, accounting and quality-control procedures than those of SpaceX.\nBoeing has said its \u201cengineering models\u201d show the Starliner \u201cis a safe, robust vehicle\u201d that will meet all mandatory safety requirements and provide the \u201clowest-risk human spaceflight vehicle to NASA.\u201d\nHawthorne, Calif.,-based SpaceX is relying on rocket-fueling procedures, internal tank configurations and an iterative design philosophy that are markedly different from legacy NASA practices. Since its Falcon 9 started flying in earnest at the start of the decade, SpaceX has deployed several different booster variants, mostly to enhance performance, reliability and reusability.\nHistorically, NASA officials were accustomed to finalizing rocket and spacecraft designs before flight operations kicked off.\nBut changes continue for the SpaceX team. Mr. Musk\u2019s engineers are redesigning, and need to demonstrate the safety of, an internal helium tank used to ensure smooth fuel flow during ascent. Various problems within that portion of the fuel systems caused the 2016 explosion and led to a 2015 explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket and its cargo shipment shortly after launch.\nIn the first quarter of 2018, SpaceX teams also will seek to demonstrate the safety of the latest engine variant for the Falcon 9\u2019s\u00a0lower stage, intended to boost thrust by 10%. A SpaceX spokeswoman said the rocket design \u201cis the final substantial upgrade to the Falcon 9,\u201d and it is slated to be \u201cthe workhorse vehicle for SpaceX for years to come.\"\nA recent testing accident with the new engine variants isn\u2019t expected to affect NASA or any other missions on the company\u2019s manifest, the spokeswoman said. \u201cWe have time to finish qualification before bringing that engine\u201d into use, she said.\nAnother issue confronting NASA is whether to approve SpaceX plans to place astronauts in the capsule during primary Falcon 9 fueling operations on the launchpad. Many experts inside and outside NASA have raised safety concerns about such a move, versus the traditional practice of keeping the crew away from the pad until fueling is finished. NASA hasn\u2019t yet made a final determination, according to industry and government officials.\nSeparately, NASA\u2019s independent safety watchdogs have raised concerns about the ability of SpaceX\u2019s capsule to land safely in rough seas.\nIn the past, SpaceX has said the Dragon capsule \u201cwas designed to be one of the safest human space vehicles ever built,\u201d and the company is cooperating with NASA \u201cto ensure all safety requirements are met.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies successfully launched a refurbished cargo capsule atop a previously used rocket toward the international space station, a milestone following its launch of the first private spacecraft to Earth orbit and back seven years ago. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches Reused Booster for NASA, a First (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "591",
        "date": "2017-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-successfully-launches-reused-booster-for-nasa-a-first-1513353133?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=73",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp. blasted more than two tons of food, supplies and scientific gear from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, resuming operations at launch complex 40, where the pad was seriously damaged by an explosion during a routine ground test of a Falcon 9 more than a year ago. In recent weeks, some high-level Pentagon acquisition officials also have embraced the idea of launching military payloads on rockets that previously flew in space.\nAfter three launch delays in a week, the flight marked the first pairing of a previously flown capsule with what SpaceX calls a \u201cflight proven\u201d rocket. Streaking upward in a nearly cloudless sky, the nine main engines cut off as anticipated about two minutes and 20 seconds into the voyage, and the second-stage engine continued powering the capsule higher into space. Roughly nine and a half minutes into the flight, flight controllers confirmed the capsule deployed as intended and began coasting through space to join the space station.\n\n\nBut looking ahead to 2018, when SpaceX anticipates it will start flights carrying U.S. astronauts to the international orbiting laboratory, Mr. Musk\u2019s management team and leaders of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration both face formidable challenges. \nFrom blastoff risks to radiation dangers to splashdown hazards, industry and government experts have said SpaceX\u2019s plans pose difficult technical and policy decisions unlike any the nation\u2019s space program has faced in many years.\nBoeing Co., which has a separate NASA contract to start ferrying astronauts to and from orbit, confronts its steep hurdles. The Chicago-based aerospace giant\u2019s crewed vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, has struggled to overcome problems with excess weight and vibrations during launch.\nBoeing intends to fly crews on Atlas V rockets, which have a longer and better safety record than the Falcon 9 fleet. And since Boeing is the primary contractor on the space station, NASA officials are more familiar with its corporate engineering, accounting and quality-control procedures than those of SpaceX.\nBoeing has said its \u201cengineering models\u201d show the Starliner \u201cis a safe, robust vehicle\u201d that will meet all mandatory safety requirements and provide the \u201clowest-risk human spaceflight vehicle to NASA.\u201d\nHawthorne, Calif.,-based SpaceX is relying on rocket-fueling procedures, internal tank configurations and an iterative design philosophy that are markedly different from legacy NASA practices. Since its Falcon 9 started flying in earnest at the start of the decade, SpaceX has deployed several different booster variants, mostly to enhance performance, reliability and reusability.\nHistorically, NASA officials were accustomed to finalizing rocket and spacecraft designs before flight operations kicked off.\nBut changes continue for the SpaceX team. Mr. Musk\u2019s engineers are redesigning, and need to demonstrate the safety of, an internal helium tank used to ensure smooth fuel flow during ascent. Various problems within that portion of the fuel systems caused the 2016 explosion and led to a 2015 explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket and its cargo shipment shortly after launch.\nIn the first quarter of 2018, SpaceX teams also will seek to demonstrate the safety of the latest engine variant for the Falcon 9\u2019s\u00a0lower stage, intended to boost thrust by 10%. A SpaceX spokeswoman said the rocket design \u201cis the final substantial upgrade to the Falcon 9,\u201d and it is slated to be \u201cthe workhorse vehicle for SpaceX for years to come.\"\nA recent testing accident with the new engine variants isn\u2019t expected to affect NASA or any other missions on the company\u2019s manifest, the spokeswoman said. \u201cWe have time to finish qualification before bringing that engine\u201d into use, she said.\nAnother issue confronting NASA is whether to approve SpaceX plans to place astronauts in the capsule during primary Falcon 9 fueling operations on the launchpad. Many experts inside and outside NASA have raised safety concerns about such a move, versus the traditional practice of keeping the crew away from the pad until fueling is finished. NASA hasn\u2019t yet made a final determination, according to industry and government officials.\nSeparately, NASA\u2019s independent safety watchdogs have raised concerns about the ability of SpaceX\u2019s capsule to land safely in rough seas.\nIn the past, SpaceX has said the Dragon capsule \u201cwas designed to be one of the safest human space vehicles ever built,\u201d and the company is cooperating with NASA \u201cto ensure all safety requirements are met.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies successfully launched a refurbished cargo capsule atop a previously used rocket toward the international space station, a milestone following its launch of the first private spacecraft to Earth orbit and back seven years ago. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches Reused Booster for NASA, a First (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "592",
        "date": "2017-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-successfully-launches-reused-booster-for-nasa-a-first-1513353133?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=106",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp. blasted more than two tons of food, supplies and scientific gear from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, resuming operations at launch complex 40, where the pad was seriously damaged by an explosion during a routine ground test of a Falcon 9 more than a year ago. In recent weeks, some high-level Pentagon acquisition officials also have embraced the idea of launching military payloads on rockets that previously flew in space.\n\n\n\n\nAfter three launch delays in a week, the flight marked the first pairing of a previously flown capsule with what SpaceX calls a \u201cflight proven\u201d rocket. Streaking upward in a nearly cloudless sky, the nine main engines cut off as anticipated about two minutes and 20 seconds into the voyage, and the second-stage engine continued powering the capsule higher into space. Roughly nine and a half minutes into the flight, flight controllers confirmed the capsule deployed as intended and began coasting through space to join the space station.\n\n\nBut looking ahead to 2018, when SpaceX anticipates it will start flights carrying U.S. astronauts to the international orbiting laboratory, Mr. Musk\u2019s management team and leaders of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration both face formidable challenges. \nFrom blastoff risks to radiation dangers to splashdown hazards, industry and government experts have said SpaceX\u2019s plans pose difficult technical and policy decisions unlike any the nation\u2019s space program has faced in many years.\nBoeing Co., which has a separate NASA contract to start ferrying astronauts to and from orbit, confronts its steep hurdles. The Chicago-based aerospace giant\u2019s crewed vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, has struggled to overcome problems with excess weight and vibrations during launch.\nBoeing intends to fly crews on Atlas V rockets, which have a longer and better safety record than the Falcon 9 fleet. And since Boeing is the primary contractor on the space station, NASA officials are more familiar with its corporate engineering, accounting and quality-control procedures than those of SpaceX.\nBoeing has said its \u201cengineering models\u201d show the Starliner \u201cis a safe, robust vehicle\u201d that will meet all mandatory safety requirements and provide the \u201clowest-risk human spaceflight vehicle to NASA.\u201d\nHawthorne, Calif.,-based SpaceX is relying on rocket-fueling procedures, internal tank configurations and an iterative design philosophy that are markedly different from legacy NASA practices. Since its Falcon 9 started flying in earnest at the start of the decade, SpaceX has deployed several different booster variants, mostly to enhance performance, reliability and reusability.\nHistorically, NASA officials were accustomed to finalizing rocket and spacecraft designs before flight operations kicked off.\nBut changes continue for the SpaceX team. Mr. Musk\u2019s engineers are redesigning, and need to demonstrate the safety of, an internal helium tank used to ensure smooth fuel flow during ascent. Various problems within that portion of the fuel systems caused the 2016 explosion and led to a 2015 explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket and its cargo shipment shortly after launch.\nIn the first quarter of 2018, SpaceX teams also will seek to demonstrate the safety of the latest engine variant for the Falcon 9\u2019s\u00a0lower stage, intended to boost thrust by 10%. A SpaceX spokeswoman said the rocket design \u201cis the final substantial upgrade to the Falcon 9,\u201d and it is slated to be \u201cthe workhorse vehicle for SpaceX for years to come.\"\nA recent testing accident with the new engine variants isn\u2019t expected to affect NASA or any other missions on the company\u2019s manifest, the spokeswoman said. \u201cWe have time to finish qualification before bringing that engine\u201d into use, she said.\nAnother issue confronting NASA is whether to approve SpaceX plans to place astronauts in the capsule during primary Falcon 9 fueling operations on the launchpad. Many experts inside and outside NASA have raised safety concerns about such a move, versus the traditional practice of keeping the crew away from the pad until fueling is finished. NASA hasn\u2019t yet made a final determination, according to industry and government officials.\nSeparately, NASA\u2019s independent safety watchdogs have raised concerns about the ability of SpaceX\u2019s capsule to land safely in rough seas.\nIn the past, SpaceX has said the Dragon capsule \u201cwas designed to be one of the safest human space vehicles ever built,\u201d and the company is cooperating with NASA \u201cto ensure all safety requirements are met.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies successfully launched a refurbished cargo capsule atop a previously used rocket toward the international space station, a milestone following its launch of the first private spacecraft to Earth orbit and back seven years ago. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Opens Space Station to Tourists and Businesses to Promote Commercial Activities (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "593",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-opens-space-station-to-tourists-and-businesses-to-promote-commercial-activities-11559936111?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=15",
        "text": "So far, only a handful of private visitors have made their way to the space station, all using Russian spacecraft. \nThe concept of offering more such trips has been discussed for years, with various companies laying out potential arrangements, safety issues and other logistics with NASA officials and representatives of some of the other countries that are partners on the space station.\n\n\nThe trips, to be arranged by private companies, will require reimbursing NASA about $35,000 a day for each visitor, covering life support, food, medical supplies and other items. But getting there and back will take many millions of additional dollars. \nBoth\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, designed the seating capacity of their commercial capsules\u2014primarily intended to transport astronauts\u2014with the idea of potentially taking a limited number of private travelers on selected trips. Those U.S. spacecraft, though, are still undergoing testing and aren\u2019t expected to be ready for routine transportation until next year at the earliest.\nThe overall cost of the anticipated tourists flights isn\u2019t clear, since it currently costs NASA more than $40 million per astronaut to blast crews to the station using Russian hardware. In previous years, a tiny group of well-heeled adventurers have paid for Russian rockets and capsules to carry them to the space station. But Moscow hasn\u2019t offered such rides to nonastronauts recently. \nThe eventual price of a space station visit, even for only a few days, is bound to be significantly more than the roughly $250,000 that companies such as Blue Origin LLC and Virgin Galactic LLC plan to charge for brief, suborbital rides to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAs part of an overall plan to phase out government support for the space station sometime during the next decade, NASA and aerospace industry leaders are exploring a wide range of options to promote business in space. The possibilities include producing drugs and manufacturing electronic components.\nWith Friday\u2019s announcement, however, NASA trained a spotlight on an element of that plan bound to resonate with many space fans and average citizens who have dreamed of looking at earth from beyond the atmosphere.\nMr. Musk has prompted headlines over the years with proposals to fly private passengers around the moon, without offering many specifics.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships, a main building block the White House hopes to use to accelerate manned exploration and establish long-term bases on the lunar surface.\nThe challenges of ramping up private investment in research projects utilizing the space station are formidable. Since 2012, such investment totals about $200 million, a small fraction of the roughly $3 billion annual cost for NASA to operate, maintain and supply the orbiting laboratory. As a result, there are various government and industry proposals to decommission large parts of the space station in the mid-2020s, or assemble a smaller replacement that would be less expensive to operate.\nSpace Adventures Inc., the U.S. company that acted as a middleman for the first tourist trips, responded to NASA\u2019s move by announcing it now can arrange visits to the space station using either Russian or Boeing-built spacecraft.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The trips, to be arranged by private companies, come as part of a broader effort to jump-start commercial initiatives on the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Opens Space Station to Tourists and Businesses to Promote Commercial Activities (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "594",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-opens-space-station-to-tourists-and-businesses-to-promote-commercial-activities-11559936111?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=58",
        "text": "So far, only a handful of private visitors have made their way to the space station, all using Russian spacecraft. \nThe concept of offering more such trips has been discussed for years, with various companies laying out potential arrangements, safety issues and other logistics with NASA officials and representatives of some of the other countries that are partners on the space station.\n\n\nThe trips, to be arranged by private companies, will require reimbursing NASA about $35,000 a day for each visitor, covering life support, food, medical supplies and other items. But getting there and back will take many millions of additional dollars. \nBoth\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, designed the seating capacity of their commercial capsules\u2014primarily intended to transport astronauts\u2014with the idea of potentially taking a limited number of private travelers on selected trips. Those U.S. spacecraft, though, are still undergoing testing and aren\u2019t expected to be ready for routine transportation until next year at the earliest.\nThe overall cost of the anticipated tourists flights isn\u2019t clear, since it currently costs NASA more than $40 million per astronaut to blast crews to the station using Russian hardware. In previous years, a tiny group of well-heeled adventurers have paid for Russian rockets and capsules to carry them to the space station. But Moscow hasn\u2019t offered such rides to nonastronauts recently. \nThe eventual price of a space station visit, even for only a few days, is bound to be significantly more than the roughly $250,000 that companies such as Blue Origin LLC and Virgin Galactic LLC plan to charge for brief, suborbital rides to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAs part of an overall plan to phase out government support for the space station sometime during the next decade, NASA and aerospace industry leaders are exploring a wide range of options to promote business in space. The possibilities include producing drugs and manufacturing electronic components.\nWith Friday\u2019s announcement, however, NASA trained a spotlight on an element of that plan bound to resonate with many space fans and average citizens who have dreamed of looking at earth from beyond the atmosphere.\nMr. Musk has prompted headlines over the years with proposals to fly private passengers around the moon, without offering many specifics.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships, a main building block the White House hopes to use to accelerate manned exploration and establish long-term bases on the lunar surface.\nThe challenges of ramping up private investment in research projects utilizing the space station are formidable. Since 2012, such investment totals about $200 million, a small fraction of the roughly $3 billion annual cost for NASA to operate, maintain and supply the orbiting laboratory. As a result, there are various government and industry proposals to decommission large parts of the space station in the mid-2020s, or assemble a smaller replacement that would be less expensive to operate.\nSpace Adventures Inc., the U.S. company that acted as a middleman for the first tourist trips, responded to NASA\u2019s move by announcing it now can arrange visits to the space station using either Russian or Boeing-built spacecraft.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The trips, to be arranged by private companies, come as part of a broader effort to jump-start commercial initiatives on the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Opens Space Station to Tourists and Businesses to Promote Commercial Activities (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "595",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-opens-space-station-to-tourists-and-businesses-to-promote-commercial-activities-11559936111?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=20",
        "text": "So far, only a handful of private visitors have made their way to the space station, all using Russian spacecraft. \n\n\n\n\nThe concept of offering more such trips has been discussed for years, with various companies laying out potential arrangements, safety issues and other logistics with NASA officials and representatives of some of the other countries that are partners on the space station.\n\n\nThe trips, to be arranged by private companies, will require reimbursing NASA about $35,000 a day for each visitor, covering life support, food, medical supplies and other items. But getting there and back will take many millions of additional dollars. \nBoth\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, designed the seating capacity of their commercial capsules\u2014primarily intended to transport astronauts\u2014with the idea of potentially taking a limited number of private travelers on selected trips. Those U.S. spacecraft, though, are still undergoing testing and aren\u2019t expected to be ready for routine transportation until next year at the earliest.\nThe overall cost of the anticipated tourists flights isn\u2019t clear, since it currently costs NASA more than $40 million per astronaut to blast crews to the station using Russian hardware. In previous years, a tiny group of well-heeled adventurers have paid for Russian rockets and capsules to carry them to the space station. But Moscow hasn\u2019t offered such rides to nonastronauts recently. \nThe eventual price of a space station visit, even for only a few days, is bound to be significantly more than the roughly $250,000 that companies such as Blue Origin LLC and Virgin Galactic LLC plan to charge for brief, suborbital rides to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAs part of an overall plan to phase out government support for the space station sometime during the next decade, NASA and aerospace industry leaders are exploring a wide range of options to promote business in space. The possibilities include producing drugs and manufacturing electronic components.\nWith Friday\u2019s announcement, however, NASA trained a spotlight on an element of that plan bound to resonate with many space fans and average citizens who have dreamed of looking at earth from beyond the atmosphere.\nMr. Musk has prompted headlines over the years with proposals to fly private passengers around the moon, without offering many specifics.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships, a main building block the White House hopes to use to accelerate manned exploration and establish long-term bases on the lunar surface.\nThe challenges of ramping up private investment in research projects utilizing the space station are formidable. Since 2012, such investment totals about $200 million, a small fraction of the roughly $3 billion annual cost for NASA to operate, maintain and supply the orbiting laboratory. As a result, there are various government and industry proposals to decommission large parts of the space station in the mid-2020s, or assemble a smaller replacement that would be less expensive to operate.\nSpace Adventures Inc., the U.S. company that acted as a middleman for the first tourist trips, responded to NASA\u2019s move by announcing it now can arrange visits to the space station using either Russian or Boeing-built spacecraft.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The trips, to be arranged by private companies, come as part of a broader effort to jump-start commercial initiatives on the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Opens Space Station to Tourists and Businesses to Promote Commercial Activities (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "596",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-opens-space-station-to-tourists-and-businesses-to-promote-commercial-activities-11559936111?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=72",
        "text": "So far, only a handful of private visitors have made their way to the space station, all using Russian spacecraft. \n\n\n\n\nThe concept of offering more such trips has been discussed for years, with various companies laying out potential arrangements, safety issues and other logistics with NASA officials and representatives of some of the other countries that are partners on the space station.\n\n\nThe trips, to be arranged by private companies, will require reimbursing NASA about $35,000 a day for each visitor, covering life support, food, medical supplies and other items. But getting there and back will take many millions of additional dollars. \nBoth\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, designed the seating capacity of their commercial capsules\u2014primarily intended to transport astronauts\u2014with the idea of potentially taking a limited number of private travelers on selected trips. Those U.S. spacecraft, though, are still undergoing testing and aren\u2019t expected to be ready for routine transportation until next year at the earliest.\nThe overall cost of the anticipated tourists flights isn\u2019t clear, since it currently costs NASA more than $40 million per astronaut to blast crews to the station using Russian hardware. In previous years, a tiny group of well-heeled adventurers have paid for Russian rockets and capsules to carry them to the space station. But Moscow hasn\u2019t offered such rides to nonastronauts recently. \nThe eventual price of a space station visit, even for only a few days, is bound to be significantly more than the roughly $250,000 that companies such as Blue Origin LLC and Virgin Galactic LLC plan to charge for brief, suborbital rides to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAs part of an overall plan to phase out government support for the space station sometime during the next decade, NASA and aerospace industry leaders are exploring a wide range of options to promote business in space. The possibilities include producing drugs and manufacturing electronic components.\nWith Friday\u2019s announcement, however, NASA trained a spotlight on an element of that plan bound to resonate with many space fans and average citizens who have dreamed of looking at earth from beyond the atmosphere.\nMr. Musk has prompted headlines over the years with proposals to fly private passengers around the moon, without offering many specifics.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships, a main building block the White House hopes to use to accelerate manned exploration and establish long-term bases on the lunar surface.\nThe challenges of ramping up private investment in research projects utilizing the space station are formidable. Since 2012, such investment totals about $200 million, a small fraction of the roughly $3 billion annual cost for NASA to operate, maintain and supply the orbiting laboratory. As a result, there are various government and industry proposals to decommission large parts of the space station in the mid-2020s, or assemble a smaller replacement that would be less expensive to operate.\nSpace Adventures Inc., the U.S. company that acted as a middleman for the first tourist trips, responded to NASA\u2019s move by announcing it now can arrange visits to the space station using either Russian or Boeing-built spacecraft.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The trips, to be arranged by private companies, come as part of a broader effort to jump-start commercial initiatives on the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "597",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-safety-watchdogs-raise-concerns-about-spacex-boeing-spacecraft-1515753011?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=21",
        "text": "Potential problems identified in the group\u2019s annual report range from unconventional rocket-fuel systems to the bombardment of aircraft in orbit by tiny meteor fragments and other space debris.\nNASA has stipulated a statistical probability of no more than one fatal accident per 270 flights. SpaceX and Boeing are developing separate fleets of capsules but neither is likely to meet that longstanding safety standard, despite years of testing, re-engineering and high-level government concern about what are called micrometeoroids, according to the report. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Space has a junk problem. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "598",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-safety-watchdogs-raise-concerns-about-spacex-boeing-spacecraft-1515753011?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=80",
        "text": "Potential problems identified in the group\u2019s annual report range from unconventional rocket-fuel systems to the bombardment of aircraft in orbit by tiny meteor fragments and other space debris.\nNASA has stipulated a statistical probability of no more than one fatal accident per 270 flights. SpaceX and Boeing are developing separate fleets of capsules but neither is likely to meet that longstanding safety standard, despite years of testing, re-engineering and high-level government concern about what are called micrometeoroids, according to the report. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Space has a junk problem. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "599",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-safety-watchdogs-raise-concerns-about-spacex-boeing-spacecraft-1515753011?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=72",
        "text": "Potential problems identified in the group\u2019s annual report range from unconventional rocket-fuel systems to the bombardment of aircraft in orbit by tiny meteor fragments and other space debris.\nNASA has stipulated a statistical probability of no more than one fatal accident per 270 flights. SpaceX and Boeing are developing separate fleets of capsules but neither is likely to meet that longstanding safety standard, despite years of testing, re-engineering and high-level government concern about what are called micrometeoroids, according to the report. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Space has a junk problem. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "600",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-safety-watchdogs-raise-concerns-about-spacex-boeing-spacecraft-1515753011?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=81",
        "text": "Potential problems identified in the group\u2019s annual report range from unconventional rocket-fuel systems to the bombardment of aircraft in orbit by tiny meteor fragments and other space debris.\n\n\n\n\nNASA has stipulated a statistical probability of no more than one fatal accident per 270 flights. SpaceX and Boeing are developing separate fleets of capsules but neither is likely to meet that longstanding safety standard, despite years of testing, re-engineering and high-level government concern about what are called micrometeoroids, according to the report. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Space has a junk problem. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "601",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-safety-watchdogs-raise-concerns-about-spacex-boeing-spacecraft-1515753011?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=104",
        "text": "Potential problems identified in the group\u2019s annual report range from unconventional rocket-fuel systems to the bombardment of aircraft in orbit by tiny meteor fragments and other space debris.\n\n\n\n\nNASA has stipulated a statistical probability of no more than one fatal accident per 270 flights. SpaceX and Boeing are developing separate fleets of capsules but neither is likely to meet that longstanding safety standard, despite years of testing, re-engineering and high-level government concern about what are called micrometeoroids, according to the report. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Space has a junk problem. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Tourists Fly at Their Own Risk (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "602",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-and-other-space-tourists-will-enter-sparse-regulatory-territory-11623325460?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=7",
        "text": "Passengers planning a ride on the New Shepard must sign a form waiving their right to sue Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC in the event of an accident. Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n which plans to send paying passengers on its space plane as early as next year, requires a similar step.\nCongress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights. Years of delays, including an accident that killed a Virgin Galactic test pilot in 2014, have pushed back the start of flights for fare-paying passengers. The policy has been extended several times and now runs until October 2023.\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s jurisdiction is limited to protecting public safety and the environment during launches and re-entries, a spokesman for the agency said. \u201cCongress has not allowed the FAA to extend its authority to the safety of crew or space flight participants,\u201d the spokesman said.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nRegulators, lawmakers and industry executives are debating whether to introduce tougher rules, such as requiring passengers to be trained for the rigors of reaching the edge of space. The companies already offer some training for their short flights, which include periods of high G-forces and the possible disorientation that can come with weightlessness.\nBlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have said they are following rigorous testing and safety standards as they prepare to open ticket sales. Analysts expect flights to cost as much as $500,000 for a brief up-and-down that includes several minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin\u2019s flights take about 10 minutes. Virgin Galactic\u2019s take more than two hours because the spacecraft is launched from an airplane that must first climb to a high altitude.\nMr. Bezos will be joined on the planned July 20 flight by his brother, Mark Bezos, and the winner of a charity auction due to conclude Saturday.\nBlue Origin said more than 6,000 bidders from 143 countries have taken part in the auction so far. The highest bid stood at $4.8 million by Thursday evening. The company, like Virgin Galactic, hasn\u2019t commented on future ticket prices.\nBlue Origin said would-be passengers will have to be able to run to the top of the company\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven flights of stairs\u2014in 90 seconds and fit into a spacesuit. Beyond that, it won\u2019t require passengers to take a medical exam before flying, referring them to their personal doctor for any fitness concerns. A Virgin Galactic official said flight preparations include a medical consultation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos\u2019s trip would make him one of a small number of amateurs who have flown in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe companies provide training over two or three days. Virgin Galactic\u2019s preparation includes sessions with its pilots, instruction on weightlessness and time in a cabin mock-up. The company offers passengers optional flights in aircraft that simulate zero gravity, as well as time in a centrifuge that replicates some of the forces astronauts experience during flight.\nBlue Origin said traveling in its spacecraft requires minimal training. \u201cIt\u2019s familiarization of the safety features and preparations to travel to space on the fully autonomous New Shepard rocket,\u201d said a spokeswoman.\nThe cost of space launches means the rockets and capsules have been tested much less exhaustively in flight than commercial aircraft, which are sent on thousands of hours of test flights before carrying paying customers.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s testing program suffered an in-flight breakup in 2014, killing a test pilot. Accident investigators attributed the crash to design defects by Scaled Composites LLC, the company that manufactured the spacecraft, that allowed a pilot\u2019s error to lead to an accident.\nA Virgin Galactic spokeswoman said Virgin Galactic has since taken over design and manufacturing of the spacecraft.\nAside from risks related to the spacecraft, some passengers will probably experience more intense medical issues than the mild ear effects familiar from airline flights, said Dr. Jeffrey Jones, a flight surgeon who has worked with astronauts at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Many people vomit during their first encounter with weightlessness, he said, and passengers can also get injured if they aren\u2019t properly strapped in when gravity returns.\n\u201cPassengers are part of the safety system. They need to know what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d said David Allen, head of operations at Blue Sky Flight Training LLC, which has helped dozens of would-be astronauts prepare for space.\n\n\nStar ToursMore WSJ coverage on commercial space travel, selected by the editors. Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos to Be on Blue Origin\u2019s First Human Space Flight (June Regulators, lawmakers and industry executives are debating whether to introduce tougher rules for the currently self-regulated space-tourism industry. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Tourists Fly at Their Own Risk (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "603",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-and-other-space-tourists-will-enter-sparse-regulatory-territory-11623325460?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=28",
        "text": "Passengers planning a ride on the New Shepard must sign a form waiving their right to sue Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC in the event of an accident. Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n which plans to send paying passengers on its space plane as early as next year, requires a similar step.\nCongress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights. Years of delays, including an accident that killed a Virgin Galactic test pilot in 2014, have pushed back the start of flights for fare-paying passengers. The policy has been extended several times and now runs until October 2023.\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s jurisdiction is limited to protecting public safety and the environment during launches and re-entries, a spokesman for the agency said. \u201cCongress has not allowed the FAA to extend its authority to the safety of crew or space flight participants,\u201d the spokesman said.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nRegulators, lawmakers and industry executives are debating whether to introduce tougher rules, such as requiring passengers to be trained for the rigors of reaching the edge of space. The companies already offer some training for their short flights, which include periods of high G-forces and the possible disorientation that can come with weightlessness.\nBlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have said they are following rigorous testing and safety standards as they prepare to open ticket sales. Analysts expect flights to cost as much as $500,000 for a brief up-and-down that includes several minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin\u2019s flights take about 10 minutes. Virgin Galactic\u2019s take more than two hours because the spacecraft is launched from an airplane that must first climb to a high altitude.\nMr. Bezos will be joined on the planned July 20 flight by his brother, Mark Bezos, and the winner of a charity auction due to conclude Saturday.\nBlue Origin said more than 6,000 bidders from 143 countries have taken part in the auction so far. The highest bid stood at $4.8 million by Thursday evening. The company, like Virgin Galactic, hasn\u2019t commented on future ticket prices.\nBlue Origin said would-be passengers will have to be able to run to the top of the company\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven flights of stairs\u2014in 90 seconds and fit into a spacesuit. Beyond that, it won\u2019t require passengers to take a medical exam before flying, referring them to their personal doctor for any fitness concerns. A Virgin Galactic official said flight preparations include a medical consultation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos\u2019s trip would make him one of a small number of amateurs who have flown in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe companies provide training over two or three days. Virgin Galactic\u2019s preparation includes sessions with its pilots, instruction on weightlessness and time in a cabin mock-up. The company offers passengers optional flights in aircraft that simulate zero gravity, as well as time in a centrifuge that replicates some of the forces astronauts experience during flight.\nBlue Origin said traveling in its spacecraft requires minimal training. \u201cIt\u2019s familiarization of the safety features and preparations to travel to space on the fully autonomous New Shepard rocket,\u201d said a spokeswoman.\nThe cost of space launches means the rockets and capsules have been tested much less exhaustively in flight than commercial aircraft, which are sent on thousands of hours of test flights before carrying paying customers.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s testing program suffered an in-flight breakup in 2014, killing a test pilot. Accident investigators attributed the crash to design defects by Scaled Composites LLC, the company that manufactured the spacecraft, that allowed a pilot\u2019s error to lead to an accident.\nA Virgin Galactic spokeswoman said Virgin Galactic has since taken over design and manufacturing of the spacecraft.\nAside from risks related to the spacecraft, some passengers will probably experience more intense medical issues than the mild ear effects familiar from airline flights, said Dr. Jeffrey Jones, a flight surgeon who has worked with astronauts at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Many people vomit during their first encounter with weightlessness, he said, and passengers can also get injured if they aren\u2019t properly strapped in when gravity returns.\n\u201cPassengers are part of the safety system. They need to know what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d said David Allen, head of operations at Blue Sky Flight Training LLC, which has helped dozens of would-be astronauts prepare for space.\n\n\nStar ToursMore WSJ coverage on commercial space travel, selected by the editors. Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos to Be on Blue Origin\u2019s First Human Space Flight (June Regulators, lawmakers and industry executives are debating whether to introduce tougher rules for the currently self-regulated space-tourism industry. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Tourists Fly at Their Own Risk (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "604",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-and-other-space-tourists-will-enter-sparse-regulatory-territory-11623325460?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=8",
        "text": "Passengers planning a ride on the New Shepard must sign a form waiving their right to sue Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC in the event of an accident. Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -1.52%\n\n\n which plans to send paying passengers on its space plane as early as next year, requires a similar step.\n\n\n\n\nCongress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights. Years of delays, including an accident that killed a Virgin Galactic test pilot in 2014, have pushed back the start of flights for fare-paying passengers. The policy has been extended several times and now runs until October 2023.\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s jurisdiction is limited to protecting public safety and the environment during launches and re-entries, a spokesman for the agency said. \u201cCongress has not allowed the FAA to extend its authority to the safety of crew or space flight participants,\u201d the spokesman said.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nRegulators, lawmakers and industry executives are debating whether to introduce tougher rules, such as requiring passengers to be trained for the rigors of reaching the edge of space. The companies already offer some training for their short flights, which include periods of high G-forces and the possible disorientation that can come with weightlessness.\nBlue Origin and Virgin Galactic have said they are following rigorous testing and safety standards as they prepare to open ticket sales. Analysts expect flights to cost as much as $500,000 for a brief up-and-down that includes several minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin\u2019s flights take about 10 minutes. Virgin Galactic\u2019s take more than two hours because the spacecraft is launched from an airplane that must first climb to a high altitude.\nMr. Bezos will be joined on the planned July 20 flight by his brother, Mark Bezos, and the winner of a charity auction due to conclude Saturday.\nBlue Origin said more than 6,000 bidders from 143 countries have taken part in the auction so far. The highest bid stood at $4.8 million by Thursday evening. The company, like Virgin Galactic, hasn\u2019t commented on future ticket prices.\nBlue Origin said would-be passengers will have to be able to run to the top of the company\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven flights of stairs\u2014in 90 seconds and fit into a spacesuit. Beyond that, it won\u2019t require passengers to take a medical exam before flying, referring them to their personal doctor for any fitness concerns. A Virgin Galactic official said flight preparations include a medical consultation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos\u2019s trip would make him one of a small number of amateurs who have flown in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe companies provide training over two or three days. Virgin Galactic\u2019s preparation includes sessions with its pilots, instruction on weightlessness and time in a cabin mock-up. The company offers passengers optional flights in aircraft that simulate zero gravity, as well as time in a centrifuge that replicates some of the forces astronauts experience during flight.\nBlue Origin said traveling in its spacecraft requires minimal training. \u201cIt\u2019s familiarization of the safety features and preparations to travel to space on the fully autonomous New Shepard rocket,\u201d said a spokeswoman.\nThe cost of space launches means the rockets and capsules have been tested much less exhaustively in flight than commercial aircraft, which are sent on thousands of hours of test flights before carrying paying customers.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s testing program suffered an in-flight breakup in 2014, killing a test pilot. Accident investigators attributed the crash to design defects by Scaled Composites LLC, the company that manufactured the spacecraft, that allowed a pilot\u2019s error to lead to an accident.\nA Virgin Galactic spokeswoman said Virgin Galactic has since taken over design and manufacturing of the spacecraft.\nAside from risks related to the spacecraft, some passengers will probably experience more intense medical issues than the mild ear effects familiar from airline flights, said Dr. Jeffrey Jones, a flight surgeon who has worked with astronauts at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Many people vomit during their first encounter with weightlessness, he said, and passengers can also get injured if they aren\u2019t properly strapped in when gravity returns.\n\u201cPassengers are part of the safety system. They need to know what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d said David Allen, head of operations at Blue Sky Flight Training LLC, which has helped dozens of would-be astronauts prepare for space.\n\n\nStar ToursMore WSJ coverage on commercial space travel, selected by the editors. Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos to Be on Blue Origin\u2019s First Human Space Flight ( Regulators, lawmakers and industry executives are debating whether to introduce tougher rules for the currently self-regulated space-tourism industry. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Launch With Michael Strahan Caps Record Spaceflight Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "605",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-space-launch-would-cap-busy-year-for-human-spaceflight-11639165779?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=2",
        "text": "Originally, the group was scheduled to fly on Thursday, but Blue Origin moved the launch time to Saturday morning because of windy conditions. The rocket blasted off just after 10 a.m. ET, according to the company, with the trip lasting slightly more than 10 minutes from launch to touchdown. \nThe flight was the 13th human space mission this year, a record surpassing the previous high of 11 launches in 1985, according to data maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos followed the group as they prepared for the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThis year\u2019s number includes five trips managed by either the Chinese and Russian governments, such as the Russian space agency\u2019s launch earlier this week of a crew that included Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station.\n\n\nIt also includes missions handled by a trio of private companies based in the U.S. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n flew billionaire founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and five others to the edge of space. Blue Origin sent a crew including Mr. Bezos, its billionaire founder, up shortly thereafter, and launched actor William Shatner and three others in October.\nSpaceX twice blasted astronauts to the space station for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in September flew four private astronauts to orbit for the first-ever all-civilian orbital trip.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Blue Origin capsule landed by parachute in West Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThe pace of human launches in 2021 \u201cis precisely what we\u2019ve been working on\u2014what I and many others in the industry have been working on\u2014for the last 20 years,\u201d said Rob Meyerson, the former president at Blue Origin. He predicted the number of human space flights will increase in the coming years given the capabilities space-transport companies have developed.\nPrivate space travel remains out of reach for the majority of people, given current ticket prices and relatively limited capacity in terms of vehicles available and licensed spaceports.\nAxiom Space Inc., a Houston-based company developing its own space facility, is charging $50 million to $55 million for each seat to arrange private-astronaut missions on SpaceX rockets to the current space station, according to a person familiar with the matter.\nVirgin Galactic has said its suborbital tourist flights will cost at least $450,000 a seat. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t discussed prices for its launches. In July, Mr. Bezos said the company was approaching $100 million in sales for its tourist space trips.\nTom Vice, chief executive at Sierra Space, said tourism trips are expected to be a big part of the company\u2019s business in the future. The company, part of contractor Sierra Nevada Corp., recently raised $1.4 billion to use in part to continue developing the Dream Chaser Spaceplane, a reusable spacecraft designed to land like a commercial jet.\n\u201cThe challenge you have to get through is it is an early adopter model,\u201d with wealthier people serving as the first customers, he said in a recent interview. \u201cIf we can get the price down, we can literally have hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, who want to get into space.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLike its two previous tourism trips this year, Blue Origin on Saturday used its reusable New Shepard rocket to blast a crew capsule from a launchpad in West Texas past the Karman line, an internationally recognized boundary for space that starts around 62 miles above Earth. Those on board got a chance to float in zero gravity conditions for a few minutes and peer back at Earth.\n\u201cIt was beyond,\u201d Mr. Strahan said shortly after he and the other passengers emerged from the crew capsule. \nMr. Taylor, chief executive of Voyager Space and a longtime advocate for space exploration, said prior to the trip that he had dreamed of visiting space since he was a child. He said suborbital trips like the one experienced through Blue Origin will be a steppingstone to longer journeys.\n\u201cIf we\u2019re going to really get out there, which is what my passion is, you\u2019ve got to take the first steps and suborbital leads to more orbital. And more orbital leads to more lunar and more lunar leads to more deep space,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Jeff Bezos\u2019s company launched six people to the edge of space Saturday, a trip that rounded out the busiest year for human flights in more than three decades. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Launch With Michael Strahan Caps Record Spaceflight Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "606",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-space-launch-would-cap-busy-year-for-human-spaceflight-11639165779?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=7",
        "text": "Originally, the group was scheduled to fly on Thursday, but Blue Origin moved the launch time to Saturday morning because of windy conditions. The rocket blasted off just after 10 a.m. ET, according to the company, with the trip lasting slightly more than 10 minutes from launch to touchdown. \n\n\n\n\nThe flight was the 13th human space mission this year, a record surpassing the previous high of 11 launches in 1985, according to data maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos followed the group as they prepared for the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThis year\u2019s number includes five trips managed by either the Chinese and Russian governments, such as the Russian space agency\u2019s launch earlier this week of a crew that included Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station.\n\n\nIt also includes missions handled by a trio of private companies based in the U.S. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n flew billionaire founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and five others to the edge of space. Blue Origin sent a crew including Mr. Bezos, its billionaire founder, up shortly thereafter, and launched actor William Shatner and three others in October.\nSpaceX twice blasted astronauts to the space station for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in September flew four private astronauts to orbit for the first-ever all-civilian orbital trip.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Blue Origin capsule landed by parachute in West Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThe pace of human launches in 2021 \u201cis precisely what we\u2019ve been working on\u2014what I and many others in the industry have been working on\u2014for the last 20 years,\u201d said Rob Meyerson, the former president at Blue Origin. He predicted the number of human space flights will increase in the coming years given the capabilities space-transport companies have developed.\nPrivate space travel remains out of reach for the majority of people, given current ticket prices and relatively limited capacity in terms of vehicles available and licensed spaceports.\nAxiom Space Inc., a Houston-based company developing its own space facility, is charging $50 million to $55 million for each seat to arrange private-astronaut missions on SpaceX rockets to the current space station, according to a person familiar with the matter.\nVirgin Galactic has said its suborbital tourist flights will cost at least $450,000 a seat. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t discussed prices for its launches. In July, Mr. Bezos said the company was approaching $100 million in sales for its tourist space trips.\nTom Vice, chief executive at Sierra Space, said tourism trips are expected to be a big part of the company\u2019s business in the future. The company, part of contractor Sierra Nevada Corp., recently raised $1.4 billion to use in part to continue developing the Dream Chaser Spaceplane, a reusable spacecraft designed to land like a commercial jet.\n\u201cThe challenge you have to get through is it is an early adopter model,\u201d with wealthier people serving as the first customers, he said in a recent interview. \u201cIf we can get the price down, we can literally have hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, who want to get into space.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLike its two previous tourism trips this year, Blue Origin on Saturday used its reusable New Shepard rocket to blast a crew capsule from a launchpad in West Texas past the Karman line, an internationally recognized boundary for space that starts around 62 miles above Earth. Those on board got a chance to float in zero gravity conditions for a few minutes and peer back at Earth.\n\u201cIt was beyond,\u201d Mr. Strahan said shortly after he and the other passengers emerged from the crew capsule. \nMr. Taylor, chief executive of Voyager Space and a longtime advocate for space exploration, said prior to the trip that he had dreamed of visiting space since he was a child. He said suborbital trips like the one experienced through Blue Origin will be a steppingstone to longer journeys.\n\u201cIf we\u2019re going to really get out there, which is what my passion is, you\u2019ve got to take the first steps and suborbital leads to more orbital. And more orbital leads to more lunar and more lunar leads to more deep space,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Jeff Bezos\u2019s company launched six people to the edge of space Saturday, a trip that rounded out the busiest year for human flights in more than three decades. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Launch With Michael Strahan Caps Record Spaceflight Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "607",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-space-launch-would-cap-busy-year-for-human-spaceflight-11639165779?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=1",
        "text": "Originally, the group was scheduled to fly on Thursday, but Blue Origin moved the launch time to Saturday morning because of windy conditions. The rocket blasted off just after 10 a.m. ET, according to the company, with the trip lasting slightly more than 10 minutes from launch to touchdown. \n\n\n\n\nThe flight was the 13th human space mission this year, a record surpassing the previous high of 11 launches in 1985, according to data maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos followed the group as they prepared for the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThis year\u2019s number includes five trips managed by either the Chinese and Russian governments, such as the Russian space agency\u2019s launch earlier this week of a crew that included Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station.\n\n\nIt also includes missions handled by a trio of private companies based in the U.S. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n flew billionaire founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and five others to the edge of space. Blue Origin sent a crew including Mr. Bezos, its billionaire founder, up shortly thereafter, and launched actor William Shatner and three others in October.\nSpaceX twice blasted astronauts to the space station for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in September flew four private astronauts to orbit for the first-ever all-civilian orbital trip.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Blue Origin capsule landed by parachute in West Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThe pace of human launches in 2021 \u201cis precisely what we\u2019ve been working on\u2014what I and many others in the industry have been working on\u2014for the last 20 years,\u201d said Rob Meyerson, the former president at Blue Origin. He predicted the number of human space flights will increase in the coming years given the capabilities space-transport companies have developed.\nPrivate space travel remains out of reach for the majority of people, given current ticket prices and relatively limited capacity in terms of vehicles available and licensed spaceports.\nAxiom Space Inc., a Houston-based company developing its own space facility, is charging $50 million to $55 million for each seat to arrange private-astronaut missions on SpaceX rockets to the current space station, according to a person familiar with the matter.\nVirgin Galactic has said its suborbital tourist flights will cost at least $450,000 a seat. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t discussed prices for its launches. In July, Mr. Bezos said the company was approaching $100 million in sales for its tourist space trips.\nTom Vice, chief executive at Sierra Space, said tourism trips are expected to be a big part of the company\u2019s business in the future. The company, part of contractor Sierra Nevada Corp., recently raised $1.4 billion to use in part to continue developing the Dream Chaser Spaceplane, a reusable spacecraft designed to land like a commercial jet.\n\u201cThe challenge you have to get through is it is an early adopter model,\u201d with wealthier people serving as the first customers, he said in a recent interview. \u201cIf we can get the price down, we can literally have hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, who want to get into space.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLike its two previous tourism trips this year, Blue Origin on Saturday used its reusable New Shepard rocket to blast a crew capsule from a launchpad in West Texas past the Karman line, an internationally recognized boundary for space that starts around 62 miles above Earth. Those on board got a chance to float in zero gravity conditions for a few minutes and peer back at Earth.\n\u201cIt was beyond,\u201d Mr. Strahan said shortly after he and the other passengers emerged from the crew capsule. \nMr. Taylor, chief executive of Voyager Space and a longtime advocate for space exploration, said prior to the trip that he had dreamed of visiting space since he was a child. He said suborbital trips like the one experienced through Blue Origin will be a steppingstone to longer journeys.\n\u201cIf we\u2019re going to really get out there, which is what my passion is, you\u2019ve got to take the first steps and suborbital leads to more orbital. And more orbital leads to more lunar and more lunar leads to more deep space,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Jeff Bezos\u2019s company launched six people to the edge of space Saturday, a trip that rounded out the busiest year for human flights in more than three decades. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Launch With Michael Strahan Caps Record Spaceflight Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "608",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-space-launch-would-cap-busy-year-for-human-spaceflight-11639165779?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=13",
        "text": "Originally, the group was scheduled to fly on Thursday, but Blue Origin moved the launch time to Saturday morning because of windy conditions. The rocket blasted off just after 10 a.m. ET, according to the company, with the trip lasting slightly more than 10 minutes from launch to touchdown. \nThe flight was the 13th human space mission this year, a record surpassing the previous high of 11 launches in 1985, according to data maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos followed the group as they prepared for the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThis year\u2019s number includes five trips managed by either the Chinese and Russian governments, such as the Russian space agency\u2019s launch earlier this week of a crew that included Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station.\n\n\nIt also includes missions handled by a trio of private companies based in the U.S. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n flew billionaire founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and five others to the edge of space. Blue Origin sent a crew including Mr. Bezos, its billionaire founder, up shortly thereafter, and launched actor William Shatner and three others in October.\nSpaceX twice blasted astronauts to the space station for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in September flew four private astronauts to orbit for the first-ever all-civilian orbital trip.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Blue Origin capsule landed by parachute in West Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThe pace of human launches in 2021 \u201cis precisely what we\u2019ve been working on\u2014what I and many others in the industry have been working on\u2014for the last 20 years,\u201d said Rob Meyerson, the former president at Blue Origin. He predicted the number of human space flights will increase in the coming years given the capabilities space-transport companies have developed.\nPrivate space travel remains out of reach for the majority of people, given current ticket prices and relatively limited capacity in terms of vehicles available and licensed spaceports.\nAxiom Space Inc., a Houston-based company developing its own space facility, is charging $50 million to $55 million for each seat to arrange private-astronaut missions on SpaceX rockets to the current space station, according to a person familiar with the matter.\nVirgin Galactic has said its suborbital tourist flights will cost at least $450,000 a seat. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t discussed prices for its launches. In July, Mr. Bezos said the company was approaching $100 million in sales for its tourist space trips.\nTom Vice, chief executive at Sierra Space, said tourism trips are expected to be a big part of the company\u2019s business in the future. The company, part of contractor Sierra Nevada Corp., recently raised $1.4 billion to use in part to continue developing the Dream Chaser Spaceplane, a reusable spacecraft designed to land like a commercial jet.\n\u201cThe challenge you have to get through is it is an early adopter model,\u201d with wealthier people serving as the first customers, he said in a recent interview. \u201cIf we can get the price down, we can literally have hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, who want to get into space.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLike its two previous tourism trips this year, Blue Origin on Saturday used its reusable New Shepard rocket to blast a crew capsule from a launchpad in West Texas past the Karman line, an internationally recognized boundary for space that starts around 62 miles above Earth. Those on board got a chance to float in zero gravity conditions for a few minutes and peer back at Earth.\n\u201cIt was beyond,\u201d Mr. Strahan said shortly after he and the other passengers emerged from the crew capsule. \nMr. Taylor, chief executive of Voyager Space and a longtime advocate for space exploration, said prior to the trip that he had dreamed of visiting space since he was a child. He said suborbital trips like the one experienced through Blue Origin will be a steppingstone to longer journeys.\n\u201cIf we\u2019re going to really get out there, which is what my passion is, you\u2019ve got to take the first steps and suborbital leads to more orbital. And more orbital leads to more lunar and more lunar leads to more deep space,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Jeff Bezos\u2019s company launched six people to the edge of space Saturday, a trip that rounded out the busiest year for human flights in more than three decades. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Launch With Michael Strahan Caps Record Spaceflight Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "609",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-space-launch-would-cap-busy-year-for-human-spaceflight-11639165779?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=11",
        "text": "Originally, the group was scheduled to fly on Thursday, but Blue Origin moved the launch time to Saturday morning because of windy conditions. The rocket blasted off just after 10 a.m. ET, according to the company, with the trip lasting slightly more than 10 minutes from launch to touchdown. \n\n\n\n\nThe flight was the 13th human space mission this year, a record surpassing the previous high of 11 launches in 1985, according to data maintained by Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos followed the group as they prepared for the Blue Origin flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThis year\u2019s number includes five trips managed by either the Chinese and Russian governments, such as the Russian space agency\u2019s launch earlier this week of a crew that included Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station.\n\n\nIt also includes missions handled by a trio of private companies based in the U.S. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n flew billionaire founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and five others to the edge of space. Blue Origin sent a crew including Mr. Bezos, its billionaire founder, up shortly thereafter, and launched actor William Shatner and three others in October.\nSpaceX twice blasted astronauts to the space station for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and in September flew four private astronauts to orbit for the first-ever all-civilian orbital trip.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Blue Origin capsule landed by parachute in West Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThe pace of human launches in 2021 \u201cis precisely what we\u2019ve been working on\u2014what I and many others in the industry have been working on\u2014for the last 20 years,\u201d said Rob Meyerson, the former president at Blue Origin. He predicted the number of human space flights will increase in the coming years given the capabilities space-transport companies have developed.\nPrivate space travel remains out of reach for the majority of people, given current ticket prices and relatively limited capacity in terms of vehicles available and licensed spaceports.\nAxiom Space Inc., a Houston-based company developing its own space facility, is charging $50 million to $55 million for each seat to arrange private-astronaut missions on SpaceX rockets to the current space station, according to a person familiar with the matter.\nVirgin Galactic has said its suborbital tourist flights will cost at least $450,000 a seat. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t discussed prices for its launches. In July, Mr. Bezos said the company was approaching $100 million in sales for its tourist space trips.\nTom Vice, chief executive at Sierra Space, said tourism trips are expected to be a big part of the company\u2019s business in the future. The company, part of contractor Sierra Nevada Corp., recently raised $1.4 billion to use in part to continue developing the Dream Chaser Spaceplane, a reusable spacecraft designed to land like a commercial jet.\n\u201cThe challenge you have to get through is it is an early adopter model,\u201d with wealthier people serving as the first customers, he said in a recent interview. \u201cIf we can get the price down, we can literally have hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, who want to get into space.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLike its two previous tourism trips this year, Blue Origin on Saturday used its reusable New Shepard rocket to blast a crew capsule from a launchpad in West Texas past the Karman line, an internationally recognized boundary for space that starts around 62 miles above Earth. Those on board got a chance to float in zero gravity conditions for a few minutes and peer back at Earth.\n\u201cIt was beyond,\u201d Mr. Strahan said shortly after he and the other passengers emerged from the crew capsule. \nMr. Taylor, chief executive of Voyager Space and a longtime advocate for space exploration, said prior to the trip that he had dreamed of visiting space since he was a child. He said suborbital trips like the one experienced through Blue Origin will be a steppingstone to longer journeys.\n\u201cIf we\u2019re going to really get out there, which is what my passion is, you\u2019ve got to take the first steps and suborbital leads to more orbital. And more orbital leads to more lunar and more lunar leads to more deep space,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Jeff Bezos\u2019s company launched six people to the edge of space Saturday, a trip that rounded out the busiest year for human flights in more than three decades. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Gets FAA Approval to Fly Customers to Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "610",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-gets-faa-approval-to-fly-customers-to-space-11624629195?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=7",
        "text": "On Friday, Virgin said the Federal Aviation Administration granted approval of Virgin\u2019s full commercial space-launch license, opening the door for outside passengers to join flights. The approval followed a test flight on May 22.\nVirgin Galactic shares soared about 30% on Friday, to $52.37 in midafternoon trading.\n\nBlue Origin has applied for but hasn\u2019t yet received a similar approval from the FAA, an FAA spokesman said. \u201cAs for all license application reviews, the FAA will make a decision when and if all regulatory requirements are met,\u201d the agency spokesman said of Blue Origin\u2019s application.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nA Blue Origin spokesman said the company is progressing in its regulatory dealings with the FAA \u201cwith expected timing aligned to our flight on July 20.\u201d \nAs the nascent space-tourism industry comes closer to selling rides to the public, executives and regulators have begun new discussions about how such flights should be overseen. Since 2004, Congress has restricted the FAA from regulating the safety of commercial space flights, hoping to insulate the sector from compliance costs while it develops. That policy has been extended several times and now runs until 2023.\nUnder the current framework, the FAA is charged only with keeping the general public and other aircraft safe during commercial launches, as spacecraft blast off and traverse the airspace that airliners and helicopters use. Virgin Galactic qualified for the commercial launch license by demonstrating that its technology worked safely in test flights, the FAA spokesman said.\nBut the agency still has no role in certifying the safety of flights themselves in the way that it oversees airplane flights. Instead, passengers must sign waivers acknowledging the risks of such flights.\nLike Mr. Bezos at Blue Origin, Mr. Branson has pledged to participate in a coming Virgin Galactic flight. The British billionaire founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 after amassing a fortune in the music and airline industries. He also has taken on adventurous challenges such as crossing the Pacific Ocean in a balloon and racing across the English Channel in an amphibious car.\nTwo years ago, Virgin Galactic went public in a deal with a special-purpose acquisition company, a way of becoming listed on a stock exchange that has since rapidly gained popularity. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nVirgin plans to send passengers to space in a rocket-propelled vessel that is launched from a highflying airplane. After being dropped from about 50,000 feet in the skies over New Mexico, the spacecraft shoots above the Karman Line\u2014the imaginary lower boundary of space\u2014where passengers experience weightlessness for a few minutes before the spacecraft descends and lands on a runway.\nThe roughly 600 people who have signed up as future passengers with Virgin Galactic would likely pay less than $500,000 for a ride, Virgin executives have said.\nVirgin hopes eventually to offer space flights from multiple locations. The company has also cited plans to take tourists to orbiting hotels and to use its vehicles for superfast long-distance travel. The Virgin spacecraft is flown by a pair of pilots. Blue Origin\u2019s capsule is fully automated and is launched vertically from the ground in Texas.\nVirgin hasn\u2019t set a date for Mr. Branson\u2019s flight, which would follow additional testing of the spacecraft. Blue Origin plans to send Mr. Bezos to suborbital space in July with his brother, Mark Bezos, and the yet-unidentified winner of a charity auction who is paying nearly $30 million for the ride. \nBecause of the cost of space launches and the limited federal regulation, the two companies\u2019 vehicles have only received a fraction of the testing that commercial aircraft go through before they carry passengers. The companies have said they are following rigorous safety protocols as they prepare to take passengers to space.\nVirgin Galactic said its review of the May 22 test showed that the flight was a success. The test was the company\u2019s third spaceflight with a crew and first-ever spaceflight from its Spaceport America site in New Mexico.\nThe company said the FAA approval and its test-flight review \u201cgive us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer.\u201d\nWrite to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com Richard Branson\u2019s company is competing with Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, in race to carry space tourists on short suborbital flights. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Gets FAA Approval to Fly Customers to Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "611",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-gets-faa-approval-to-fly-customers-to-space-11624629195?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=7",
        "text": "On Friday, Virgin said the Federal Aviation Administration granted approval of Virgin\u2019s full commercial space-launch license, opening the door for outside passengers to join flights. The approval followed a test flight on May 22.\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic shares soared about 30% on Friday, to $52.37 in midafternoon trading.\n\nBlue Origin has applied for but hasn\u2019t yet received a similar approval from the FAA, an FAA spokesman said. \u201cAs for all license application reviews, the FAA will make a decision when and if all regulatory requirements are met,\u201d the agency spokesman said of Blue Origin\u2019s application.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nA Blue Origin spokesman said the company is progressing in its regulatory dealings with the FAA \u201cwith expected timing aligned to our flight on July 20.\u201d \nAs the nascent space-tourism industry comes closer to selling rides to the public, executives and regulators have begun new discussions about how such flights should be overseen. Since 2004, Congress has restricted the FAA from regulating the safety of commercial space flights, hoping to insulate the sector from compliance costs while it develops. That policy has been extended several times and now runs until 2023.\nUnder the current framework, the FAA is charged only with keeping the general public and other aircraft safe during commercial launches, as spacecraft blast off and traverse the airspace that airliners and helicopters use. Virgin Galactic qualified for the commercial launch license by demonstrating that its technology worked safely in test flights, the FAA spokesman said.\nBut the agency still has no role in certifying the safety of flights themselves in the way that it oversees airplane flights. Instead, passengers must sign waivers acknowledging the risks of such flights.\nLike Mr. Bezos at Blue Origin, Mr. Branson has pledged to participate in a coming Virgin Galactic flight. The British billionaire founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 after amassing a fortune in the music and airline industries. He also has taken on adventurous challenges such as crossing the Pacific Ocean in a balloon and racing across the English Channel in an amphibious car.\nTwo years ago, Virgin Galactic went public in a deal with a special-purpose acquisition company, a way of becoming listed on a stock exchange that has since rapidly gained popularity. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nVirgin plans to send passengers to space in a rocket-propelled vessel that is launched from a highflying airplane. After being dropped from about 50,000 feet in the skies over New Mexico, the spacecraft shoots above the Karman Line\u2014the imaginary lower boundary of space\u2014where passengers experience weightlessness for a few minutes before the spacecraft descends and lands on a runway.\nThe roughly 600 people who have signed up as future passengers with Virgin Galactic would likely pay less than $500,000 for a ride, Virgin executives have said.\nVirgin hopes eventually to offer space flights from multiple locations. The company has also cited plans to take tourists to orbiting hotels and to use its vehicles for superfast long-distance travel. The Virgin spacecraft is flown by a pair of pilots. Blue Origin\u2019s capsule is fully automated and is launched vertically from the ground in Texas.\nVirgin hasn\u2019t set a date for Mr. Branson\u2019s flight, which would follow additional testing of the spacecraft. Blue Origin plans to send Mr. Bezos to suborbital space in July with his brother, Mark Bezos, and the yet-unidentified winner of a charity auction who is paying nearly $30 million for the ride. \nBecause of the cost of space launches and the limited federal regulation, the two companies\u2019 vehicles have only received a fraction of the testing that commercial aircraft go through before they carry passengers. The companies have said they are following rigorous safety protocols as they prepare to take passengers to space.\nVirgin Galactic said its review of the May 22 test showed that the flight was a success. The test was the company\u2019s third spaceflight with a crew and first-ever spaceflight from its Spaceport America site in New Mexico.\nThe company said the FAA approval and its test-flight review \u201cgive us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer.\u201d\nWrite to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com Richard Branson\u2019s company is competing with Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, in race to carry space tourists on short suborbital flights. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Flight Was Postponed. What Happens Now? (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "612",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-boeing-starliner-launch-watch-11627961565?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=25",
        "text": "Officials had said they could try to fly the vehicle to the space station on Aug. 4, but later nixed that possibility, saying engineers needed time to assess what happened with the valves. \nBoeing has faced problems with the Starliner before. A botched effort in late 2019 dented the record of a company that has been at the forefront of U.S. space exploration, including the Apollo missions to the moon. The Starliner is the latest of an array of new rockets, capsules and other vehicles aimed at furthering U.S. ambitions in a new space race to the moon, Mars and beyond.\n\n\nThe Starliner would give the U.S. more options to reach low earth orbit and the space station. U.S. astronauts had to hitch rides on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get there following the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. NASA opted to outsource a replacement through its Commercial Crew Program and picked Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, to provide space taxi services.\nThe CST-100 Starliner was slated to deliver more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies, and bring back material including oxygen tanks. A mannequin named Rosie the Rocketeer was also expected to be on board.\nHow can I watch the Starliner launch? NASA plans to live stream the Starliner launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida when the flight occurs. \nNASA has said the Starliner mission is expected to run five to 10 days in all. The Starliner is expected to return to Earth at a facility in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.\nWasn\u2019t this supposed to launch on Tuesday? The flight was postponed because of an issue with some valves in a vehicle\u2019s propulsion system, the company and NASA said.\nBoeing said its engineers conducting prelaunch checks of the Starliner initially detected the issue after electrical storms on Monday near the launch site.\nOfficials had scheduled the flight to begin July 30 but postponed it from that date after a Russian space vehicle mistakenly fired its thrusters while attached to the International Space Station the day earlier, forcing the facility into a tilt.\nWhat went wrong with the 2019 mission? The first uncrewed Starliner test flight in December 2019 failed to reach the space station. A software error left the spacecraft in the wrong orbit, ground controllers had difficulty communicating with the vehicle and another computer problem affected its thrusters. The spacecraft returned safely to Earth after two days, though NASA said it could have made it to the space station if astronauts were on board.\nBoeing and NASA have completed multiple reviews and tests ahead of the latest launch. Working under a fixed-price contract with NASA, Boeing took a $410 million charge to pay for the second test mission, and will ferry the cargo to and from the space station for free.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe CST-100 Starliner is slated to deliver more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joel kowsky/nasa/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nWhen will the Starliner carry astronauts? Before the Starliner can carry astronauts to the space station, Boeing needs to complete the test flight without crew members on board. A second Starliner capsule has been meant to carry astronauts to the space station as early as November, if the testing goes as planned and NASA certifies the Starliner. The reusable spacecraft is designed to fly 10 times and can be refurbished in six months.\nHow does it compare to the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule? The Starliner can carry seven astronauts or a mix of crew and cargo. It is launched on the same Atlas V series rockets developed by the joint venture between Boeing and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n that are used for military satellites. The spacecraft is autonomous, though there are backup controls that allow it to be piloted. It is designed for land-based returns, descending under parachutes, with air bags to cushion the landing.\nThe SpaceX Crew Dragon has carried cargo to the space station since 2012 and took its first astronauts to the space station in May 2020. The fully autonomous Dragon is launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and has seven seats, though like the Starliner only four are used for NASA missions. It is designed to land under parachutes in the ocean.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nWhat else does Boeing do in space? Boeing is one of the world\u2019s largest space companies, with analysts estimating annual revenue of around $6 billion from the business last year. It has alr It is unclear when Boeing will attempt to launch its Starliner space taxi after engineers detected a problem with valves on a propulsion system on the vehicle ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Flight Was Postponed. What Happens Now? (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "613",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-boeing-starliner-launch-watch-11627961565?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=24",
        "text": "Officials had said they could try to fly the vehicle to the space station on Aug. 4, but later nixed that possibility, saying engineers needed time to assess what happened with the valves. \n\n\n\n\nBoeing has faced problems with the Starliner before. A botched effort in late 2019 dented the record of a company that has been at the forefront of U.S. space exploration, including the Apollo missions to the moon. The Starliner is the latest of an array of new rockets, capsules and other vehicles aimed at furthering U.S. ambitions in a new space race to the moon, Mars and beyond.\n\n\nThe Starliner would give the U.S. more options to reach low earth orbit and the space station. U.S. astronauts had to hitch rides on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get there following the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. NASA opted to outsource a replacement through its Commercial Crew Program and picked Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, to provide space taxi services.\nThe CST-100 Starliner was slated to deliver more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies, and bring back material including oxygen tanks. A mannequin named Rosie the Rocketeer was also expected to be on board.\nHow can I watch the Starliner launch? NASA plans to live stream the Starliner launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida when the flight occurs. \nNASA has said the Starliner mission is expected to run five to 10 days in all. The Starliner is expected to return to Earth at a facility in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.\nWasn\u2019t this supposed to launch on Tuesday? The flight was postponed because of an issue with some valves in a vehicle\u2019s propulsion system, the company and NASA said.\nBoeing said its engineers conducting prelaunch checks of the Starliner initially detected the issue after electrical storms on Monday near the launch site.\nOfficials had scheduled the flight to begin July 30 but postponed it from that date after a Russian space vehicle mistakenly fired its thrusters while attached to the International Space Station the day earlier, forcing the facility into a tilt.\nWhat went wrong with the 2019 mission? The first uncrewed Starliner test flight in December 2019 failed to reach the space station. A software error left the spacecraft in the wrong orbit, ground controllers had difficulty communicating with the vehicle and another computer problem affected its thrusters. The spacecraft returned safely to Earth after two days, though NASA said it could have made it to the space station if astronauts were on board.\nBoeing and NASA have completed multiple reviews and tests ahead of the latest launch. Working under a fixed-price contract with NASA, Boeing took a $410 million charge to pay for the second test mission, and will ferry the cargo to and from the space station for free.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe CST-100 Starliner is slated to deliver more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joel kowsky/nasa/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nWhen will the Starliner carry astronauts? Before the Starliner can carry astronauts to the space station, Boeing needs to complete the test flight without crew members on board. A second Starliner capsule has been meant to carry astronauts to the space station as early as November, if the testing goes as planned and NASA certifies the Starliner. The reusable spacecraft is designed to fly 10 times and can be refurbished in six months.\nHow does it compare to the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule? The Starliner can carry seven astronauts or a mix of crew and cargo. It is launched on the same Atlas V series rockets developed by the joint venture between Boeing and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n that are used for military satellites. The spacecraft is autonomous, though there are backup controls that allow it to be piloted. It is designed for land-based returns, descending under parachutes, with air bags to cushion the landing.\nThe SpaceX Crew Dragon has carried cargo to the space station since 2012 and took its first astronauts to the space station in May 2020. The fully autonomous Dragon is launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and has seven seats, though like the Starliner only four are used for NASA missions. It is designed to land under parachutes in the ocean.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nWhat else does Boeing do in space? Boeing is one of the world\u2019s largest space companies, with analysts estimating annual revenue of around $6 billion from the business last year. It has It is unclear when Boeing will attempt to launch its Starliner space taxi after engineers detected a problem with valves on a propulsion system on the vehicle ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Closer Than Ever: Solar Orbiter\u2019s First Views of the Sun (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "614",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/closer-than-ever-solar-orbiters-first-views-of-the-sun-11594940441?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=12",
        "text": "Nineteen countries, as well as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, contributed to the mission. The image above shows the sun as it appears in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Images at this wavelength reveal the upper atmosphere of the sun, called the corona, which has a temperature of around 1 million degrees. When the image was taken on May 30, the spacecraft was halfway between the Earth and the sun. The images below taken by sensors aboard the international orbiter capture close-ups of the sun in the extreme ultraviolet and other wavelengths.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe yellow images at top reveal the sun\u2019s outer corona in the extreme ultraviolet. The red images at right show the zone between the lower and upper layers of the solar atmosphere. The middle image in the first column shows magnetic field strengths on the solar surface. The blue, white and red image at bottom left maps the velocity of the sun. Next to this image, shows the sun in visible light.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAn imaging device called the Metis coronagraph on the orbiter, which blocks light from the solar surface, shows the fainter outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona. It depicts bright equatorial streamers and fainter polar regions, characteristic of the solar corona during minimal magnetic activity.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nAn artist\u2019s impression shows the international Solar Orbiter spacecraft approaching the sun, within the orbit of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury\n\n\n at its closest approach.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThis full disc image maps the sun\u2019s magnetic properties based on data from the orbiter\u2019s Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager. A dark region in the lower right-hand area shows a large magnetically active region.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe areas of extreme brightness on this high-resolution image taken by the orbiter\u2019s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager reveal for the first time unusual features of the solar surface that scientists are calling campfires.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nA granular pattern of hot plasma seething just under the visible surface of the sun is revealed in this image taken by the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager. Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Scientists release new images that capture detailed close-ups of the central star in our solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Closer Than Ever: Solar Orbiter\u2019s First Views of the Sun (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "615",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/closer-than-ever-solar-orbiters-first-views-of-the-sun-11594940441?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=43",
        "text": "Nineteen countries, as well as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, contributed to the mission. The image above shows the sun as it appears in the extreme ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Images at this wavelength reveal the upper atmosphere of the sun, called the corona, which has a temperature of around 1 million degrees. When the image was taken on May 30, the spacecraft was halfway between the Earth and the sun. The images below taken by sensors aboard the international orbiter capture close-ups of the sun in the extreme ultraviolet and other wavelengths.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe yellow images at top reveal the sun\u2019s outer corona in the extreme ultraviolet. The red images at right show the zone between the lower and upper layers of the solar atmosphere. The middle image in the first column shows magnetic field strengths on the solar surface. The blue, white and red image at bottom left maps the velocity of the sun. Next to this image, shows the sun in visible light.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAn imaging device called the Metis coronagraph on the orbiter, which blocks light from the solar surface, shows the fainter outer atmosphere of the sun, the corona. It depicts bright equatorial streamers and fainter polar regions, characteristic of the solar corona during minimal magnetic activity.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nAn artist\u2019s impression shows the international Solar Orbiter spacecraft approaching the sun, within the orbit of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury\n\n\n at its closest approach.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThis full disc image maps the sun\u2019s magnetic properties based on data from the orbiter\u2019s Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager. A dark region in the lower right-hand area shows a large magnetically active region.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe areas of extreme brightness on this high-resolution image taken by the orbiter\u2019s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager reveal for the first time unusual features of the solar surface that scientists are calling campfires.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nA granular pattern of hot plasma seething just under the visible surface of the sun is revealed in this image taken by the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager. Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Scientists release new images that capture detailed close-ups of the central star in our solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Delayed Deep-Space Rocket Suffers Test Failure (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "616",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-delayed-deep-space-rocket-suffers-test-failure-on-the-ground-11610863851?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=30",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said they couldn\u2019t immediately determine the cause of the premature shutdown, and therefore it was too early to determine what fixes would be necessary or even if the test needed to be repeated. They said engineers didn\u2019t know whether it was a hardware, software or sensor malfunction.\n\n\n\n\nBoeing is the prime contractor for the mammoth Space Launch System booster, which is more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted Apollo astronauts toward the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was slated for its first uncrewed launch late this year, but that schedule is now in flux. Political and budget pressures on the program, projected to cost a total of between $19 billion and $23 billion to complete, were already increasing.\n\nDeparting NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n repeatedly said in a news conference that the test shouldn\u2019t be considered a failure, because engineers and program managers gained important data. But he also said, \u201cIt\u2019s not everything we hoped it would be.\u201d\n\u201cNot everything went according to script,\u201d he said. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe setback comes at a difficult time for SLS and Boeing. Industry and government officials expect the Biden administration to shelve President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision of landing astronauts on the moon as early as 2024. For many years, influential Senate Republicans have championed SLS\u2014and annually appropriated robust funding for it\u2014despite its troubled development. But with the Senate now controlled by Democrats, those supporters stand to lose significant clout.\nEven before Saturday\u2019s failed test, former NASA officials and outside space experts said they expected that for early lunar missions SLS\u2014intended to become NASA\u2019s premier deep-space rocket\u2014might take a back seat to rockets under development by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., run by Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMonths before the test, according to industry officials, leaders of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which manufactures the SLS rocket\u2019s RS-25 engines, expressed growing concerns the entire SLS program could be curtailed or significantly delayed. These officials said the company leaders were telling bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill they worried NASA was considering such commercially developed alternatives to support the initial lunar missions. SLS has been under development for a decade, with individual launches expected to cost more than $1 billion apiece.\nOther elements of lunar missions for astronauts currently on the books also are likely to change, according to industry officials. Awards to two rival teams to build lunar landers, previously anticipated in February or March, are likely to be delayed as the Biden team reassesses those projects. So far, Congress has allocated about one-quarter of the funds NASA previously requested to support producing and testing such landers by 2024.\nIn addition, according to one person briefed on the issue, barring a last-minute change in plans, the Biden transition team shortly is expected to name Steve Jurczyk, a veteran career NASA official, as acting NASA administrator, succeeding Mr. Bridenstine who previously announced his departure. Mr. Jurczyk now serves as associate administrator, the agency\u2019s highest-ranking civil servant.\nThroughout most of his 33-year NASA career, Mr. Jurczyk has been associated most closely with robotic and scientific missions, areas new White House science advisers are likely to emphasize. Before Saturday\u2019s problematic test, Congress already moved to increase NASA\u2019s research budget for some earth-imaging and climate-change programs, a trend that industry and government officials expect will accelerate. NASA press officials couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Biden\u2019s transition team didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment.\nCongress originally called for the SLS rocket and a companion deep-space capsule, known as Orion, to take flight by the end of 2016. Later, NASA\u2019s target date for a 2018 uncrewed launch slipped to 2019, and then, partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to the end of 2021.\nA series of reports by government watchdogs have highlighted scheduling delays and safety issues, while noting that program managers burned through budget reserves and took testing shortcuts to make up time.\nBackers of the SLS program have sought to maintain public support for it. With development slow and the first flight expected to lack the fanfare and publicity associated with carrying a crew, proponents had viewed Saturday\u2019s test as a way to generate momentum.\nBoeing\u2019s space program has suffered a series of setbacks in recent years. In December 2019, software errors botched the launch of its Starliner space capsule, highlighting recent engineering lapses across the company, which also makes commercial jets and military aircraft.\nThe Starliner capsule is intended to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. The SLS rocket, on which Boeing is the prime contractor for the various stages as well as the flight control system, is a separate program. It is intended to carry astronauts to the moon and deeper into the solar system using the Orion capsule, a different spacecraft built by a team headed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.97%\n\n\nAfter the test, Mr. Bridenstine told reporters \u201cI have absolutely total confidence in the team to figure out\u201d what went wrong and \u201chow to fix it\u00a0and\u00a0then get after it again.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com The engines for a giant new rocket shut down prematurely during a key test on the ground, a potentially major setback for the space ambitions of NASA and Boeing, its prime contractor. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Space Flight: What You Need to Know (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "617",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-space-flight-what-you-need-to-know-11625929202?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=7",
        "text": "Mr. Branson\u2019s flight from a spaceport in New Mexico came nine days before fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to blast into space from Texas on his Blue Origin rocket.\nHere is what you need to know about Mr. Branson\u2019s trip.\n\n\nWhy all the fuss about Richard Branson going to space? The serial entrepreneur is the first of a trio of space-obsessed billionaires to catch a ride on his own rocket, beating Mr. Bezos and Elon Musk to the punch. Though 10 years behind the company\u2019s schedule, the flight by Mr. Branson as a \u201cmission specialist\u201d on board his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n spacecraft provides a lift to the nascent tourism business.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe VSS Unity is the spacecraft that carried Richard Branson on the flight on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public last year, is also a huge favorite among retail investors, with news flow this year generating huge swings in its stock price, which has more than doubled in 2021. Even though the business has yet to carry a paying passenger, it was valued at $11.8 billion at Friday\u2019s close, and in recent sessions it was worth more than American Airlines Group Inc., the world\u2019s biggest carrier by available seats.\nDid Mr. Branson go alone? No. Joining Mr. Branson were three senior Virgin Galactic staff. Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor, was on board alongside lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla, the company\u2019s head of government affairs. Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will pilot the spacecraft.\nHow do Virgin Galactic passengers get to space? The VSS Unity spacecraft resembles a small private jet and is slung beneath a specially designed four-engine aircraft called VMS Eve, named for Mr. Branson\u2019s mother.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nThe so-called mother ship carries the spacecraft to a height of around 45,000 feet, or 8.5 miles, before detaching it and returning to base. The spacecraft, flown by two pilots, uses its onboard rocket to fly to a height of more than 50 miles. After a few minutes at the edge of space, it glides back unpowered to land at the Spaceport.\nWhat is there to do in space? Float, stare and wonder. The VSS Unity experiences several minutes of microgravity at the peak of its roughly 90-minute journey. Passengers are allowed to unbuckle and float around the pressurized cabin, take photos and videos, and soak in the fact that fewer than 500 people have been to space. Helpfully, it has big windows and soft cabin furnishings to reduce chances of bumps and scrapes. No need for helmets and pressurized space suits.\nMr. Branson, as mission specialist, evaluated the private astronaut experience and will use his observations to enhance the journey for future customers, the company has said.\nAre there risks? U.S. regulators have cleared Virgin Galactic to carry paying passengers, but those passengers are flying higher than only about 570 people have ever traveled and faster than all but a few hundred more. This was the 22nd trip for the VSS Unity, but it was still a test flight. A 2014 accident killed a Virgin Galactic pilot and forced the company to make design changes to the spacecraft.\nIn general, though, Congress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport is located near Truth or Consequences, N.M.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joel Angel Juarez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nDoes the trip make Mr. Branson and other riders an astronaut? It does. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles, the so-called Armstrong Line, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recognizes anyone traveling above it as an astronaut.\nPurists view space as starting at the Karman Line, some 62 miles high, which is where Blue Origin is targeting for its first crewed flight later this month. Neither spacecraft will be in orbit, but those on board will experience gravitational forces around 3.5 times what they are used to and travel at more than three times the speed of sound.\nIs Mr. Branson just trying to beat Mr. Bezos? According to Mr. Branson, it is just a coincidence. Reaching space is a major technical challenge, and the two companies have crossed their respective hurdles at the same time. However, Virgin Galactic secured regulatory approval to carry paying passengers days after Mr. Bezos announced his planned launch, and Mr. Branson had been expected to be part of a later test flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura What is all the fuss about Richard Branson heading for space? How did it happen? How far did he go? Here are some answers. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Space Flight: What You Need to Know (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "618",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-space-flight-what-you-need-to-know-11625929202?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=17",
        "text": "Mr. Branson\u2019s flight from a spaceport in New Mexico came nine days before fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to blast into space from Texas on his Blue Origin rocket.\nHere is what you need to know about Mr. Branson\u2019s trip.\n\n\nWhy all the fuss about Richard Branson going to space? The serial entrepreneur is the first of a trio of space-obsessed billionaires to catch a ride on his own rocket, beating Mr. Bezos and Elon Musk to the punch. Though 10 years behind the company\u2019s schedule, the flight by Mr. Branson as a \u201cmission specialist\u201d on board his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n spacecraft provides a lift to the nascent tourism business.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe VSS Unity is the spacecraft that carried Richard Branson on the flight on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public last year, is also a huge favorite among retail investors, with news flow this year generating huge swings in its stock price, which has more than doubled in 2021. Even though the business has yet to carry a paying passenger, it was valued at $11.8 billion at Friday\u2019s close, and in recent sessions it was worth more than American Airlines Group Inc., the world\u2019s biggest carrier by available seats.\nDid Mr. Branson go alone? No. Joining Mr. Branson were three senior Virgin Galactic staff. Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor, was on board alongside lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla, the company\u2019s head of government affairs. Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will pilot the spacecraft.\nHow do Virgin Galactic passengers get to space? The VSS Unity spacecraft resembles a small private jet and is slung beneath a specially designed four-engine aircraft called VMS Eve, named for Mr. Branson\u2019s mother.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nThe so-called mother ship carries the spacecraft to a height of around 45,000 feet, or 8.5 miles, before detaching it and returning to base. The spacecraft, flown by two pilots, uses its onboard rocket to fly to a height of more than 50 miles. After a few minutes at the edge of space, it glides back unpowered to land at the Spaceport.\nWhat is there to do in space? Float, stare and wonder. The VSS Unity experiences several minutes of microgravity at the peak of its roughly 90-minute journey. Passengers are allowed to unbuckle and float around the pressurized cabin, take photos and videos, and soak in the fact that fewer than 500 people have been to space. Helpfully, it has big windows and soft cabin furnishings to reduce chances of bumps and scrapes. No need for helmets and pressurized space suits.\nMr. Branson, as mission specialist, evaluated the private astronaut experience and will use his observations to enhance the journey for future customers, the company has said.\nAre there risks? U.S. regulators have cleared Virgin Galactic to carry paying passengers, but those passengers are flying higher than only about 570 people have ever traveled and faster than all but a few hundred more. This was the 22nd trip for the VSS Unity, but it was still a test flight. A 2014 accident killed a Virgin Galactic pilot and forced the company to make design changes to the spacecraft.\nIn general, though, Congress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport is located near Truth or Consequences, N.M.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joel Angel Juarez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nDoes the trip make Mr. Branson and other riders an astronaut? It does. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles, the so-called Armstrong Line, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recognizes anyone traveling above it as an astronaut.\nPurists view space as starting at the Karman Line, some 62 miles high, which is where Blue Origin is targeting for its first crewed flight later this month. Neither spacecraft will be in orbit, but those on board will experience gravitational forces around 3.5 times what they are used to and travel at more than three times the speed of sound.\nIs Mr. Branson just trying to beat Mr. Bezos? According to Mr. Branson, it is just a coincidence. Reaching space is a major technical challenge, and the two companies have crossed their respective hurdles at the same time. However, Virgin Galactic secured regulatory approval to carry paying passengers days after Mr. Bezos announced his planned launch, and Mr. Branson had been expected to be part of a later test flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura What is all the fuss about Richard Branson heading for space? How did it happen? How far did he go? Here are some answers. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Space Flight: What You Need to Know (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "619",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-space-flight-what-you-need-to-know-11625929202?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=27",
        "text": "Mr. Branson\u2019s flight from a spaceport in New Mexico came nine days before fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to blast into space from Texas on his Blue Origin rocket.\nHere is what you need to know about Mr. Branson\u2019s trip.\n\n\nWhy all the fuss about Richard Branson going to space? The serial entrepreneur is the first of a trio of space-obsessed billionaires to catch a ride on his own rocket, beating Mr. Bezos and Elon Musk to the punch. Though 10 years behind the company\u2019s schedule, the flight by Mr. Branson as a \u201cmission specialist\u201d on board his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n spacecraft provides a lift to the nascent tourism business.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe VSS Unity is the spacecraft that carried Richard Branson on the flight on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public last year, is also a huge favorite among retail investors, with news flow this year generating huge swings in its stock price, which has more than doubled in 2021. Even though the business has yet to carry a paying passenger, it was valued at $11.8 billion at Friday\u2019s close, and in recent sessions it was worth more than American Airlines Group Inc., the world\u2019s biggest carrier by available seats.\nDid Mr. Branson go alone? No. Joining Mr. Branson were three senior Virgin Galactic staff. Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor, was on board alongside lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla, the company\u2019s head of government affairs. Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will pilot the spacecraft.\nHow do Virgin Galactic passengers get to space? The VSS Unity spacecraft resembles a small private jet and is slung beneath a specially designed four-engine aircraft called VMS Eve, named for Mr. Branson\u2019s mother.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nThe so-called mother ship carries the spacecraft to a height of around 45,000 feet, or 8.5 miles, before detaching it and returning to base. The spacecraft, flown by two pilots, uses its onboard rocket to fly to a height of more than 50 miles. After a few minutes at the edge of space, it glides back unpowered to land at the Spaceport.\nWhat is there to do in space? Float, stare and wonder. The VSS Unity experiences several minutes of microgravity at the peak of its roughly 90-minute journey. Passengers are allowed to unbuckle and float around the pressurized cabin, take photos and videos, and soak in the fact that fewer than 500 people have been to space. Helpfully, it has big windows and soft cabin furnishings to reduce chances of bumps and scrapes. No need for helmets and pressurized space suits.\nMr. Branson, as mission specialist, evaluated the private astronaut experience and will use his observations to enhance the journey for future customers, the company has said.\nAre there risks? U.S. regulators have cleared Virgin Galactic to carry paying passengers, but those passengers are flying higher than only about 570 people have ever traveled and faster than all but a few hundred more. This was the 22nd trip for the VSS Unity, but it was still a test flight. A 2014 accident killed a Virgin Galactic pilot and forced the company to make design changes to the spacecraft.\nIn general, though, Congress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport is located near Truth or Consequences, N.M.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joel Angel Juarez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nDoes the trip make Mr. Branson and other riders an astronaut? It does. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles, the so-called Armstrong Line, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recognizes anyone traveling above it as an astronaut.\nPurists view space as starting at the Karman Line, some 62 miles high, which is where Blue Origin is targeting for its first crewed flight later this month. Neither spacecraft will be in orbit, but those on board will experience gravitational forces around 3.5 times what they are used to and travel at more than three times the speed of sound.\nIs Mr. Branson just trying to beat Mr. Bezos? According to Mr. Branson, it is just a coincidence. Reaching space is a major technical challenge, and the two companies have crossed their respective hurdles at the same time. However, Virgin Galactic secured regulatory approval to carry paying passengers days after Mr. Bezos announced his planned launch, and Mr. Branson had been expected to be part of a later test flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura What is all the fuss about Richard Branson heading for space? How did it happen? How far did he go? Here are some answers. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Space Flight: What You Need to Know (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "620",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-space-flight-what-you-need-to-know-11625929202?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=27",
        "text": "Mr. Branson\u2019s flight from a spaceport in New Mexico came nine days before fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to blast into space from Texas on his Blue Origin rocket.\nHere is what you need to know about Mr. Branson\u2019s trip.\n\n\nWhy all the fuss about Richard Branson going to space? The serial entrepreneur is the first of a trio of space-obsessed billionaires to catch a ride on his own rocket, beating Mr. Bezos and Elon Musk to the punch. Though 10 years behind the company\u2019s schedule, the flight by Mr. Branson as a \u201cmission specialist\u201d on board his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.20%\n\n\n spacecraft provides a lift to the nascent tourism business.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe VSS Unity is the spacecraft that carried Richard Branson on the flight on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public last year, is also a huge favorite among retail investors, with news flow this year generating huge swings in its stock price, which has more than doubled in 2021. Even though the business has yet to carry a paying passenger, it was valued at $11.8 billion at Friday\u2019s close, and in recent sessions it was worth more than American Airlines Group Inc., the world\u2019s biggest carrier by available seats.\nDid Mr. Branson go alone? No. Joining Mr. Branson were three senior Virgin Galactic staff. Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor, was on board alongside lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla, the company\u2019s head of government affairs. Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will pilot the spacecraft.\nHow do Virgin Galactic passengers get to space? The VSS Unity spacecraft resembles a small private jet and is slung beneath a specially designed four-engine aircraft called VMS Eve, named for Mr. Branson\u2019s mother.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nThe so-called mother ship carries the spacecraft to a height of around 45,000 feet, or 8.5 miles, before detaching it and returning to base. The spacecraft, flown by two pilots, uses its onboard rocket to fly to a height of more than 50 miles. After a few minutes at the edge of space, it glides back unpowered to land at the Spaceport.\nWhat is there to do in space? Float, stare and wonder. The VSS Unity experiences several minutes of microgravity at the peak of its roughly 90-minute journey. Passengers are allowed to unbuckle and float around the pressurized cabin, take photos and videos, and soak in the fact that fewer than 500 people have been to space. Helpfully, it has big windows and soft cabin furnishings to reduce chances of bumps and scrapes. No need for helmets and pressurized space suits.\nMr. Branson, as mission specialist, evaluated the private astronaut experience and will use his observations to enhance the journey for future customers, the company has said.\nAre there risks? U.S. regulators have cleared Virgin Galactic to carry paying passengers, but those passengers are flying higher than only about 570 people have ever traveled and faster than all but a few hundred more. This was the 22nd trip for the VSS Unity, but it was still a test flight. A 2014 accident killed a Virgin Galactic pilot and forced the company to make design changes to the spacecraft.\nIn general, though, Congress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport is located near Truth or Consequences, N.M.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joel Angel Juarez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nDoes the trip make Mr. Branson and other riders an astronaut? It does. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles, the so-called Armstrong Line, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recognizes anyone traveling above it as an astronaut.\nPurists view space as starting at the Karman Line, some 62 miles high, which is where Blue Origin is targeting for its first crewed flight later this month. Neither spacecraft will be in orbit, but those on board will experience gravitational forces around 3.5 times what they are used to and travel at more than three times the speed of sound.\nIs Mr. Branson just trying to beat Mr. Bezos? According to Mr. Branson, it is just a coincidence. Reaching space is a major technical challenge, and the two companies have crossed their respective hurdles at the same time. However, Virgin Galactic secured regulatory approval to carry paying passengers days after Mr. Bezos announced his planned launch, and Mr. Branson had been expected to be part of a later test flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura What is all the fuss about Richard Branson heading for space? How did it happen? How far did he go? Here are some answers. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Space Flight: What You Need to Know (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "621",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-space-flight-what-you-need-to-know-11625929202?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=7",
        "text": "Mr. Branson\u2019s flight from a spaceport in New Mexico came nine days before fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is due to blast into space from Texas on his Blue Origin rocket.\n\n\n\n\nHere is what you need to know about Mr. Branson\u2019s trip.\n\n\nWhy all the fuss about Richard Branson going to space? The serial entrepreneur is the first of a trio of space-obsessed billionaires to catch a ride on his own rocket, beating Mr. Bezos and Elon Musk to the punch. Though 10 years behind the company\u2019s schedule, the flight by Mr. Branson as a \u201cmission specialist\u201d on board his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -1.45%\n\n\n spacecraft provides a lift to the nascent tourism business.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe VSS Unity is the spacecraft that carried Richard Branson on the flight on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, which went public last year, is also a huge favorite among retail investors, with news flow this year generating huge swings in its stock price, which has more than doubled in 2021. Even though the business has yet to carry a paying passenger, it was valued at $11.8 billion at Friday\u2019s close, and in recent sessions it was worth more than American Airlines Group Inc., the world\u2019s biggest carrier by available seats.\nDid Mr. Branson go alone? No. Joining Mr. Branson were three senior Virgin Galactic staff. Beth Moses, the chief astronaut instructor, was on board alongside lead operations engineer Colin Bennett and Sirisha Bandla, the company\u2019s head of government affairs. Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will pilot the spacecraft.\nHow do Virgin Galactic passengers get to space? The VSS Unity spacecraft resembles a small private jet and is slung beneath a specially designed four-engine aircraft called VMS Eve, named for Mr. Branson\u2019s mother.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nThe so-called mother ship carries the spacecraft to a height of around 45,000 feet, or 8.5 miles, before detaching it and returning to base. The spacecraft, flown by two pilots, uses its onboard rocket to fly to a height of more than 50 miles. After a few minutes at the edge of space, it glides back unpowered to land at the Spaceport.\nWhat is there to do in space? Float, stare and wonder. The VSS Unity experiences several minutes of microgravity at the peak of its roughly 90-minute journey. Passengers are allowed to unbuckle and float around the pressurized cabin, take photos and videos, and soak in the fact that fewer than 500 people have been to space. Helpfully, it has big windows and soft cabin furnishings to reduce chances of bumps and scrapes. No need for helmets and pressurized space suits.\nMr. Branson, as mission specialist, evaluated the private astronaut experience and will use his observations to enhance the journey for future customers, the company has said.\nAre there risks? U.S. regulators have cleared Virgin Galactic to carry paying passengers, but those passengers are flying higher than only about 570 people have ever traveled and faster than all but a few hundred more. This was the 22nd trip for the VSS Unity, but it was still a test flight. A 2014 accident killed a Virgin Galactic pilot and forced the company to make design changes to the spacecraft.\nIn general, though, Congress agreed in 2004 to let the space-tourism industry self-regulate to speed its preparations for passenger flights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport is located near Truth or Consequences, N.M.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joel Angel Juarez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nDoes the trip make Mr. Branson and other riders an astronaut? It does. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles, the so-called Armstrong Line, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recognizes anyone traveling above it as an astronaut.\nPurists view space as starting at the Karman Line, some 62 miles high, which is where Blue Origin is targeting for its first crewed flight later this month. Neither spacecraft will be in orbit, but those on board will experience gravitational forces around 3.5 times what they are used to and travel at more than three times the speed of sound.\nIs Mr. Branson just trying to beat Mr. Bezos? According to Mr. Branson, it is just a coincidence. Reaching space is a major technical challenge, and the two companies have crossed their respective hurdles at the same time. However, Virgin Galactic secured regulatory approval to carry paying passengers days after Mr. Bezos announced his planned launch, and Mr. Branson had been expected to be part of a later test flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The billionaire founders of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will both be on board as the companies send their vessels to the edge of space. But their spacecraft, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: La What is all the fuss about Richard Branson heading for space? How did it happen? How far did he go? Here are some answers. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "622",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-targets-bigger-space-goals-11626613203?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=6",
        "text": "More immediately, Mr. Bezos\u2019 company is seeking business in a space market that will triple in size to more than $1 trillion in annual sales by 2040, Morgan Stanley says, assuming rapid technological developments enable routine moon landings, asteroid mining and space tourism.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s crew capsule interior. The company has spent years developing rockets, engines and vehicles.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHis own giant leap comes when Blue Origin is scheduled to launch Mr. Bezos and three other people to the edge of space in an 11-minute flight, the first launch with passengers on the company\u2019s New Shepard rocket.\n\n\nA successful trip could provide traction in an emerging space-tourism market, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s broader challenge is winning the kind of large government contracts that provide a steady revenue stream and lend credibility to companies that secure them. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, has jumped ahead of Blue Origin in winning those deals.\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space. He has cited the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission as a foundational moment for him and referenced science-fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke and the scientist and author Carl Sagan in speeches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA New Shepard rocket launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIf we\u2019re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we\u2019d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization,\u201d Mr. Bezos said during a speech two years ago. To that end, Blue Origin can lower the cost of space launches, in part by developing reusable rockets, Mr. Bezos has said.\nThe talk from the Amazon founder has been paired with major financial commitments. Mr. Bezos has disclosed he has sold $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.\nAfter founding Blue Origin in 2000, Mr. Bezos began acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of land in West Texas for the company in the early part of that decade, telling a newspaper in the area in 2005 he wanted to build a rocket launchpad on the property.\nNow, in addition to the launch site in Texas, the company has facilities in Florida, California, Alabama and Washington, D.C., as well as headquarters outside of Seattle. It employs more than 3,500 people, including Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith,\n\n\n\n a former executive at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Honeywell International Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aerospace unit. The privately owned Blue Origin doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nMr. Bezos is \u201cdoing what he did with Amazon, which is to roll over every nickel he could get into capital equipment and innovation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n a professor at American University who has written about space and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nThis year, Blue Origin intends to conduct two additional flights with passengers on the New Shepard following Tuesday\u2019s launch, executives said Sunday at a briefing. Mr. Smith didn\u2019t specify how much the company is selling tickets for.\n\u201cWillingness to pay continues to be quite high. Our early flights are going for a very good price,\u201d he said.\nOutside of the emerging space-tourism market, SpaceX has gained a deeper footing with space-related agencies in Washington. NASA and the Pentagon have spent $2.8 billion tied to 52 prime contracts won by the company led by Mr. Musk over the past 14 federal fiscal years, according to a federal spending database. They have spent $496.5 million in 33 contracts won by Blue Origin over that period.\nBlue Origin didn\u2019t respond to questions about competition with SpaceX or its plans for working with government agencies. Mr. Smith has in the past said the company wants to gain work with such customers.\nThe two companies are sparring over a deal to build a moon lander for a trip planned for 2024. The Apollo 11 moon lander reached the moon in 1969 on July 20, the same date for Mr. Bezos\u2019 scheduled space trip on Tuesday. NASA awarded SpaceX the lander contract in April, but Blue Origin protested that decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a move that could lead to NASA rebidding the contract.\nThe accountability agency is expected to issue a decision on Blue Origin\u2019s case by Aug. 4. The Dynetics unit of Tuesday\u2019s launch is a small step as it tries to make a giant leap in winning government contracts and competing with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "623",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-targets-bigger-space-goals-11626613203?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=19",
        "text": "More immediately, Mr. Bezos\u2019 company is seeking business in a space market that will triple in size to more than $1 trillion in annual sales by 2040, Morgan Stanley says, assuming rapid technological developments enable routine moon landings, asteroid mining and space tourism.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s crew capsule interior. The company has spent years developing rockets, engines and vehicles.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHis own giant leap comes when Blue Origin is scheduled to launch Mr. Bezos and three other people to the edge of space in an 11-minute flight, the first launch with passengers on the company\u2019s New Shepard rocket.\n\n\nA successful trip could provide traction in an emerging space-tourism market, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s broader challenge is winning the kind of large government contracts that provide a steady revenue stream and lend credibility to companies that secure them. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, has jumped ahead of Blue Origin in winning those deals.\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space. He has cited the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission as a foundational moment for him and referenced science-fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke and the scientist and author Carl Sagan in speeches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA New Shepard rocket launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIf we\u2019re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we\u2019d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization,\u201d Mr. Bezos said during a speech two years ago. To that end, Blue Origin can lower the cost of space launches, in part by developing reusable rockets, Mr. Bezos has said.\nThe talk from the Amazon founder has been paired with major financial commitments. Mr. Bezos has disclosed he has sold $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.\nAfter founding Blue Origin in 2000, Mr. Bezos began acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of land in West Texas for the company in the early part of that decade, telling a newspaper in the area in 2005 he wanted to build a rocket launchpad on the property.\nNow, in addition to the launch site in Texas, the company has facilities in Florida, California, Alabama and Washington, D.C., as well as headquarters outside of Seattle. It employs more than 3,500 people, including Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith,\n\n\n\n a former executive at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Honeywell International Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aerospace unit. The privately owned Blue Origin doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nMr. Bezos is \u201cdoing what he did with Amazon, which is to roll over every nickel he could get into capital equipment and innovation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n a professor at American University who has written about space and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nThis year, Blue Origin intends to conduct two additional flights with passengers on the New Shepard following Tuesday\u2019s launch, executives said Sunday at a briefing. Mr. Smith didn\u2019t specify how much the company is selling tickets for.\n\u201cWillingness to pay continues to be quite high. Our early flights are going for a very good price,\u201d he said.\nOutside of the emerging space-tourism market, SpaceX has gained a deeper footing with space-related agencies in Washington. NASA and the Pentagon have spent $2.8 billion tied to 52 prime contracts won by the company led by Mr. Musk over the past 14 federal fiscal years, according to a federal spending database. They have spent $496.5 million in 33 contracts won by Blue Origin over that period.\nBlue Origin didn\u2019t respond to questions about competition with SpaceX or its plans for working with government agencies. Mr. Smith has in the past said the company wants to gain work with such customers.\nThe two companies are sparring over a deal to build a moon lander for a trip planned for 2024. The Apollo 11 moon lander reached the moon in 1969 on July 20, the same date for Mr. Bezos\u2019 scheduled space trip on Tuesday. NASA awarded SpaceX the lander contract in April, but Blue Origin protested that decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a move that could lead to NASA rebidding the contract.\nThe accountability agency is expected to issue a decision on Blue Origin\u2019s case by Aug. 4. The Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n\n also competed for the lander and filed a protest.\nSpaceX is now the most prolific launcher, sending up 23 rockets so far this year, according to Federal Aviation Administration data covering licensed launches. Its reusable rockets help cut the cost of reaching space, a strategy also pursued by Blue Origin, which has completed nine such launches since late 2017.\n\u201cThey need to have a track record,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marco C\u00e1ceres,\n\n\n\n a space analyst at aerospace consulting firm Teal Group, referring to Blue Origin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nThe New Shepard rocket scheduled to go up Tuesday has been designed for tourist trips into suborbital space, with a six-person gumdrop-shaped capsule and windows stretching 3.5 feet by 2.3 feet along its sides. Along with the Amazon founder, the craft\u2019s passengers are Mark Bezos, Mr. Bezos\u2019 brother; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who graduated in the 1960s from a program for female astronauts; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student, the company\u2019s first paying customer.\nThe company also has been developing the New Glenn rocket, a vehicle that will stand 321 feet tall and is designed to use seven main engines to lift large payloads to orbit. In February, Blue Origin said it had made progress on several hardware components for the rocket and that it was targeting a maiden flight for New Glenn toward the end of next year.\nBlue Origin has struck deals to push its technology into the space market. The company is developing a new rocket engine for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies. The engine, which will replace the Russian-made motors now used, is behind schedule. Last week, NASA said Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies, a Seattle company, would join with Blue Origin,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n and other firms to design concepts for nuclear-propulsion systems that could power vehicles into deep space.\nBlue Origin\u2019s \u201caspirations are to become a company like SpaceX, like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing,\n\n\n like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin,\n\n\n \u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Logsdon,\n\n\n\n the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com Tuesday\u2019s launch is a small step as it tries to make a giant leap in winning government contracts and competing with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "624",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-targets-bigger-space-goals-11626613203?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=26",
        "text": "More immediately, Mr. Bezos\u2019 company is seeking business in a space market that will triple in size to more than $1 trillion in annual sales by 2040, Morgan Stanley says, assuming rapid technological developments enable routine moon landings, asteroid mining and space tourism.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s crew capsule interior. The company has spent years developing rockets, engines and vehicles.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\nHis own giant leap comes when Blue Origin is scheduled to launch Mr. Bezos and three other people to the edge of space in an 11-minute flight, the first launch with passengers on the company\u2019s New Shepard rocket.\n\n\nA successful trip could provide traction in an emerging space-tourism market, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s broader challenge is winning the kind of large government contracts that provide a steady revenue stream and lend credibility to companies that secure them. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, has jumped ahead of Blue Origin in winning those deals.\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space. He has cited the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission as a foundational moment for him and referenced science-fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke and the scientist and author Carl Sagan in speeches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA New Shepard rocket launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIf we\u2019re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we\u2019d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization,\u201d Mr. Bezos said during a speech two years ago. To that end, Blue Origin can lower the cost of space launches, in part by developing reusable rockets, Mr. Bezos has said.\nThe talk from the Amazon founder has been paired with major financial commitments. Mr. Bezos has disclosed he has sold $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.\nAfter founding Blue Origin in 2000, Mr. Bezos began acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of land in West Texas for the company in the early part of that decade, telling a newspaper in the area in 2005 he wanted to build a rocket launchpad on the property.\nNow, in addition to the launch site in Texas, the company has facilities in Florida, California, Alabama and Washington, D.C., as well as headquarters outside of Seattle. It employs more than 3,500 people, including Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith,\n\n\n\n a former executive at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Honeywell International Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aerospace unit. The privately owned Blue Origin doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nMr. Bezos is \u201cdoing what he did with Amazon, which is to roll over every nickel he could get into capital equipment and innovation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n a professor at American University who has written about space and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nThis year, Blue Origin intends to conduct two additional flights with passengers on the New Shepard following Tuesday\u2019s launch, executives said Sunday at a briefing. Mr. Smith didn\u2019t specify how much the company is selling tickets for.\n\u201cWillingness to pay continues to be quite high. Our early flights are going for a very good price,\u201d he said.\nOutside of the emerging space-tourism market, SpaceX has gained a deeper footing with space-related agencies in Washington. NASA and the Pentagon have spent $2.8 billion tied to 52 prime contracts won by the company led by Mr. Musk over the past 14 federal fiscal years, according to a federal spending database. They have spent $496.5 million in 33 contracts won by Blue Origin over that period.\nBlue Origin didn\u2019t respond to questions about competition with SpaceX or its plans for working with government agencies. Mr. Smith has in the past said the company wants to gain work with such customers.\nThe two companies are sparring over a deal to build a moon lander for a trip planned for 2024. The Apollo 11 moon lander reached the moon in 1969 on July 20, the same date for Mr. Bezos\u2019 scheduled space trip on Tuesday. NASA awarded SpaceX the lander contract in April, but Blue Origin protested that decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a move that could lead to NASA rebidding the contract.\nThe accountability agency is expected to issue a decision on Blue Origin\u2019s case by Aug. 4. The Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n Tuesday\u2019s launch is a small step as it tries to make a giant leap in winning government contracts and competing with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "625",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-targets-bigger-space-goals-11626613203?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=26",
        "text": "More immediately, Mr. Bezos\u2019 company is seeking business in a space market that will triple in size to more than $1 trillion in annual sales by 2040, Morgan Stanley says, assuming rapid technological developments enable routine moon landings, asteroid mining and space tourism.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s crew capsule interior. The company has spent years developing rockets, engines and vehicles.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHis own giant leap comes when Blue Origin is scheduled to launch Mr. Bezos and three other people to the edge of space in an 11-minute flight, the first launch with passengers on the company\u2019s New Shepard rocket.\n\n\nA successful trip could provide traction in an emerging space-tourism market, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s broader challenge is winning the kind of large government contracts that provide a steady revenue stream and lend credibility to companies that secure them. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, has jumped ahead of Blue Origin in winning those deals.\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space. He has cited the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission as a foundational moment for him and referenced science-fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke and the scientist and author Carl Sagan in speeches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA New Shepard rocket launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIf we\u2019re out in the solar system, we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we\u2019d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization,\u201d Mr. Bezos said during a speech two years ago. To that end, Blue Origin can lower the cost of space launches, in part by developing reusable rockets, Mr. Bezos has said.\nThe talk from the Amazon founder has been paired with major financial commitments. Mr. Bezos has disclosed he has sold $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.\nAfter founding Blue Origin in 2000, Mr. Bezos began acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of land in West Texas for the company in the early part of that decade, telling a newspaper in the area in 2005 he wanted to build a rocket launchpad on the property.\nNow, in addition to the launch site in Texas, the company has facilities in Florida, California, Alabama and Washington, D.C., as well as headquarters outside of Seattle. It employs more than 3,500 people, including Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Smith,\n\n\n\n a former executive at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Honeywell International Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aerospace unit. The privately owned Blue Origin doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nMr. Bezos is \u201cdoing what he did with Amazon, which is to roll over every nickel he could get into capital equipment and innovation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n a professor at American University who has written about space and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nThis year, Blue Origin intends to conduct two additional flights with passengers on the New Shepard following Tuesday\u2019s launch, executives said Sunday at a briefing. Mr. Smith didn\u2019t specify how much the company is selling tickets for.\n\u201cWillingness to pay continues to be quite high. Our early flights are going for a very good price,\u201d he said.\nOutside of the emerging space-tourism market, SpaceX has gained a deeper footing with space-related agencies in Washington. NASA and the Pentagon have spent $2.8 billion tied to 52 prime contracts won by the company led by Mr. Musk over the past 14 federal fiscal years, according to a federal spending database. They have spent $496.5 million in 33 contracts won by Blue Origin over that period.\nBlue Origin didn\u2019t respond to questions about competition with SpaceX or its plans for working with government agencies. Mr. Smith has in the past said the company wants to gain work with such customers.\nThe two companies are sparring over a deal to build a moon lander for a trip planned for 2024. The Apollo 11 moon lander reached the moon in 1969 on July 20, the same date for Mr. Bezos\u2019 scheduled space trip on Tuesday. NASA awarded SpaceX the lander contract in April, but Blue Origin protested that decision with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a move that could lead to NASA rebidding the contract.\nThe accountability agency is expected to issue a decision on Blue Origin\u2019s case by Aug. 4. The Dynetics unit of Tuesday\u2019s launch is a small step as it tries to make a giant leap in winning government contracts and competing with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SES Bets on New Fleet of Smaller Satellites (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "626",
        "date": "2017-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ses-bets-on-new-fleet-of-smaller-flexible-boeing-satellites-1505070180?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=23",
        "text": "Like other parts of the satellite industry, SES faces depressed prices for its current offerings and also has been hurt by growing competition from legacy rivals, as well as anticipated challenges from aggressive startups with deep pockets.\nThe new spacecraft, significantly smaller and more flexible than older models, are slated to be put into orbit starting in 2021. They will be deployed primarily to serve mobile users in developing regions, but with prospects for such markets still unclear, SES seeks to maximize its maneuvering room and reduce capital expenditure risks.\n\n\nChief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Karim Sabbagh\n\n\n\n said the satellites will add capacity and replace some bandwidth now provided by big, high-flying spacecraft that need replacement. Indicating that the emphasis on smaller spacecraft built to be swiftly reconfigured in orbit is gaining momentum, he said the constellation will be \u201cradically different\u201d from traditional concepts because it is designed to be \u201cmore flexible and scaleable.\u201d\nIn an interview, Mr. Sabbagh said the principle of smaller satellites, optimized to seamlessly supplement each other as customers and markets change, is \u201cwhat we have been missing for three decades in our industry.\u201d\nThe\u00a0move comes at a time cash flow and profitability for operators is under pressure, so they generally have been reticent to make investments in large, more-expensive satellites that have traditionally dominated the telecommunications segment. Advisory firm Euroconsult says big satellites have experienced a \u201cdramatic downsizing of traditional pricing\u201d for their primary services.\nAt the same time, an abundance of available bandwidth and questions about the future direction of the market have contributed to a protracted and sharp drop in orders for big satellites, some of which can cost about $400 million to build, launch and insure.\nSuch procurement contracts have slumped 50% below historic levels, with Boeing and Space Systems Loral, a unit of Canada\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.\n\n\n , among the satellite makers that have laid off staff in recent years. Industry officials said manufacturers, SES and a big chunk of its competitors are all considering smaller, less costly models.\nBudding rivals are focusing on launching swarms of hundreds\u2014or even thousands\u2014of still-smaller satellites to pipe fast, inexpensive connectivity to remote locations.\u00a0This increasingly contested segment includes OneWeb Ltd., the startup backed by European aerospace heavyweight\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n and Japanese internet and telecommunications giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SoftBank Group Corp.\n\nEntrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and his high-profile Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly called SpaceX, are actively planning to compete. Google parent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\n\n\n also has publicly expressed interest in providing space-based web links.\nAt\u00a0the same time, long-time rival Inmarsat PLC is positioning its Global Xpress constellation of traditional, high-altitude satellites\u00a0to connect planes with high-capacity internet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intelsat SA\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.\n\n\n also are developing ever larger, more-powerful spacecraft to reduce customer access costs. Yet industry experts increasingly emphasize the benefits of faster connections and enhanced productivity\u00a0from hybrid constellations such as the one SES favors, featuring a blend of high-earth orbit and lower-positioned satellites.\nThe company\u2019s next-generation spacecraft\u00a0are designed to beam highly tailored signals to serve many more but smaller\u00a0customers, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Collar,\n\n\n\n another senior SES official.\nBoth Intelsat and Canada\u2019s closely held Telesat, another major operator with 15 satellites, have made modest moves to embrace lower-orbit satellites to target similar market segments.\nSES, which built its reputation with top-of-the-line satellites hovering 23,000 miles above a specific point on the globe, initially increased its bet on smaller spacecraft last year. It acquired the 49.5% in\u00a0O3b Networks Ltd. it didn\u2019t already own in a $710 million transaction.\nThe latest decision doubles down on the strategy of targeting O3b\u2019s network for growth. The additional satellites are being designed to be more powerful than O3b\u2019s existing models, enabling\u00a0SES to tap fast-growing mobile and transportation markets. \u201cWe can build a mobile network in a country without having to lay any fiber,\u201d according to Mr. Collar.\nO3b already operates 12 spacecraft with plans to loft eight more in the next two years. Funds for all the satellites already are incorporated in SES\u2019s long-term spending blueprint.\nSES last year announced plans to launch a big satellite to provide aviation coverage over busy trans-Atlantic routes. But Mr. Collar said the expanded constellation of smaller spacecraft would cover 80% of th Satellite-services provider SES on Monday\u00a0intends to announce a deal for a new fleet of smaller, easily reprogrammable Boeing satellites, reflecting widespread industry uncertainty about demand for global internet connectivity. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall in London and Andy Pasztor in Los Angeles"
    },
    {
        "title": "SES Bets on New Fleet of Smaller Satellites (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "627",
        "date": "2017-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ses-bets-on-new-fleet-of-smaller-flexible-boeing-satellites-1505070180?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=114",
        "text": "Like other parts of the satellite industry, SES faces depressed prices for its current offerings and also has been hurt by growing competition from legacy rivals, as well as anticipated challenges from aggressive startups with deep pockets.\n\n\n\n\nThe new spacecraft, significantly smaller and more flexible than older models, are slated to be put into orbit starting in 2021. They will be deployed primarily to serve mobile users in developing regions, but with prospects for such markets still unclear, SES seeks to maximize its maneuvering room and reduce capital expenditure risks.\n\n\nChief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Karim Sabbagh\n\n\n\n said the satellites will add capacity and replace some bandwidth now provided by big, high-flying spacecraft that need replacement. Indicating that the emphasis on smaller spacecraft built to be swiftly reconfigured in orbit is gaining momentum, he said the constellation will be \u201cradically different\u201d from traditional concepts because it is designed to be \u201cmore flexible and scaleable.\u201d\nIn an interview, Mr. Sabbagh said the principle of smaller satellites, optimized to seamlessly supplement each other as customers and markets change, is \u201cwhat we have been missing for three decades in our industry.\u201d\nThe\u00a0move comes at a time cash flow and profitability for operators is under pressure, so they generally have been reticent to make investments in large, more-expensive satellites that have traditionally dominated the telecommunications segment. Advisory firm Euroconsult says big satellites have experienced a \u201cdramatic downsizing of traditional pricing\u201d for their primary services.\nAt the same time, an abundance of available bandwidth and questions about the future direction of the market have contributed to a protracted and sharp drop in orders for big satellites, some of which can cost about $400 million to build, launch and insure.\nSuch procurement contracts have slumped 50% below historic levels, with Boeing and Space Systems Loral, a unit of Canada\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.\n\n\n , among the satellite makers that have laid off staff in recent years. Industry officials said manufacturers, SES and a big chunk of its competitors are all considering smaller, less costly models.\nBudding rivals are focusing on launching swarms of hundreds\u2014or even thousands\u2014of still-smaller satellites to pipe fast, inexpensive connectivity to remote locations.\u00a0This increasingly contested segment includes OneWeb Ltd., the startup backed by European aerospace heavyweight\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n and Japanese internet and telecommunications giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SoftBank Group Corp.\n\nEntrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and his high-profile Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly called SpaceX, are actively planning to compete. Google parent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\n\n\n also has publicly expressed interest in providing space-based web links.\nAt\u00a0the same time, long-time rival Inmarsat PLC is positioning its Global Xpress constellation of traditional, high-altitude satellites\u00a0to connect planes with high-capacity internet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intelsat SA\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.\n\n\n also are developing ever larger, more-powerful spacecraft to reduce customer access costs. Yet industry experts increasingly emphasize the benefits of faster connections and enhanced productivity\u00a0from hybrid constellations such as the one SES favors, featuring a blend of high-earth orbit and lower-positioned satellites.\nThe company\u2019s next-generation spacecraft\u00a0are designed to beam highly tailored signals to serve many more but smaller\u00a0customers, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Collar,\n\n\n\n another senior SES official.\nBoth Intelsat and Canada\u2019s closely held Telesat, another major operator with 15 satellites, have made modest moves to embrace lower-orbit satellites to target similar market segments.\nSES, which built its reputation with top-of-the-line satellites hovering 23,000 miles above a specific point on the globe, initially increased its bet on smaller spacecraft last year. It acquired the 49.5% in\u00a0O3b Networks Ltd. it didn\u2019t already own in a $710 million transaction.\nThe latest decision doubles down on the strategy of targeting O3b\u2019s network for growth. The additional satellites are being designed to be more powerful than O3b\u2019s existing models, enabling\u00a0SES to tap fast-growing mobile and transportation markets. \u201cWe can build a mobile network in a country without having to lay any fiber,\u201d according to Mr. Collar.\nO3b already operates 12 spacecraft with plans to loft eight more in the next two years. Funds for all the satellites already are incorporated in SES\u2019s long-term spending blueprint.\nSES last year announced plans to launch a big satellite to provide aviation coverage over busy trans-Atlantic routes. But Mr. Collar said the expanded constellation of smaller spacecraft would cover 80% o Satellite-services provider SES on Monday\u00a0intends to announce a deal for a new fleet of smaller, easily reprogrammable Boeing satellites, reflecting widespread industry uncertainty about demand for global internet connectivity. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall in London and Andy Pasztor in Los Angeles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Astronaut Flight on Starliner Faces Further Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "628",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-first-astronaut-flight-on-starliner-faces-further-delay-11634686480?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=4",
        "text": "Last summer, before stuck valves caused Boeing and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to postpone a planned launch, the agency and company said they believed the Starliner could carry astronauts to the International Space Station on a test mission by the end of the year.\nMr. Vollmer\u2019s comments came at a briefing on Tuesday, where Boeing and NASA officials offered details about their work trying to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched the planned launch in August. Boeing and the space agency postponed that flight because of the problem.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle Parker,\n\n\n\n chief engineer for space and launch at Boeing, said Tuesday that the most likely cause of the valves problem was a corrosive substance created when moisture and oxidizer combined.\nHumidity is the probable source of the moisture that interacted with the oxidizer, Ms. Parker said. She said the company accounts for humidity when sourcing parts from suppliers and has a purge system meant to keep the valves dry.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing and NASA are working to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched an earlier planned launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n john grant/NASA/BOEING/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBoeing has wrestled with setbacks on the Starliner before. Almost two years ago, during the first attempted test launch of the ship without crew members, a software error prevented the Starliner from reaching the correct orbit. The company previously booked a $410 million charge tied to the do-over of the launch.\nIn 2014, NASA hired Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, to develop spacecraft that could carry astronauts to the space station and return them to Earth. At the time, the agency didn\u2019t have a way to transport people to the research facility other than purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nSpaceX last year launched astronauts from the U.S. to the space station for the first time since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, and brought them back. The company has completed other crewed missions to the space station and is slated to launch four astronauts to the research facility this month and ferry others from there to the ground in November.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a program manager at NASA, said eventually the space agency would like Boeing and SpaceX to be flying once a year each, part of the agency\u2019s goal of having two space vehicles that could reach the space station.\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to the day that we get into those flights where we\u2019re handing over from a SpaceX vehicle on orbit to a Boeing vehicle and vice versa,\u201d Mr. Stich said.\nTwo of the valves that became stuck have been removed from the vehicle and will be sent to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center for analysis, officials said Tuesday.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aerospace giant said its space vehicle might not carry astronauts until the end of next year, potentially putting it a year behind a previous date to deliver people to orbit. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Astronaut Flight on Starliner Faces Further Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "629",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-first-astronaut-flight-on-starliner-faces-further-delay-11634686480?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=12",
        "text": "Last summer, before stuck valves caused Boeing and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to postpone a planned launch, the agency and company said they believed the Starliner could carry astronauts to the International Space Station on a test mission by the end of the year.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Vollmer\u2019s comments came at a briefing on Tuesday, where Boeing and NASA officials offered details about their work trying to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched the planned launch in August. Boeing and the space agency postponed that flight because of the problem.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle Parker,\n\n\n\n chief engineer for space and launch at Boeing, said Tuesday that the most likely cause of the valves problem was a corrosive substance created when moisture and oxidizer combined.\nHumidity is the probable source of the moisture that interacted with the oxidizer, Ms. Parker said. She said the company accounts for humidity when sourcing parts from suppliers and has a purge system meant to keep the valves dry.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing and NASA are working to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched an earlier planned launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n john grant/NASA/BOEING/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBoeing has wrestled with setbacks on the Starliner before. Almost two years ago, during the first attempted test launch of the ship without crew members, a software error prevented the Starliner from reaching the correct orbit. The company previously booked a $410 million charge tied to the do-over of the launch.\nIn 2014, NASA hired Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, to develop spacecraft that could carry astronauts to the space station and return them to Earth. At the time, the agency didn\u2019t have a way to transport people to the research facility other than purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nSpaceX last year launched astronauts from the U.S. to the space station for the first time since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, and brought them back. The company has completed other crewed missions to the space station and is slated to launch four astronauts to the research facility this month and ferry others from there to the ground in November.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a program manager at NASA, said eventually the space agency would like Boeing and SpaceX to be flying once a year each, part of the agency\u2019s goal of having two space vehicles that could reach the space station.\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to the day that we get into those flights where we\u2019re handing over from a SpaceX vehicle on orbit to a Boeing vehicle and vice versa,\u201d Mr. Stich said.\nTwo of the valves that became stuck have been removed from the vehicle and will be sent to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center for analysis, officials said Tuesday.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aerospace giant said its space vehicle might not carry astronauts until the end of next year, potentially putting it a year behind a previous date to deliver people to orbit. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Astronaut Flight on Starliner Faces Further Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "630",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-first-astronaut-flight-on-starliner-faces-further-delay-11634686480?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=10",
        "text": "Last summer, before stuck valves caused Boeing and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to postpone a planned launch, the agency and company said they believed the Starliner could carry astronauts to the International Space Station on a test mission by the end of the year.\nMr. Vollmer\u2019s comments came at a briefing on Tuesday, where Boeing and NASA officials offered details about their work trying to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched the planned launch in August. Boeing and the space agency postponed that flight because of the problem.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle Parker,\n\n\n\n chief engineer for space and launch at Boeing, said Tuesday that the most likely cause of the valves problem was a corrosive substance created when moisture and oxidizer combined.\nHumidity is the probable source of the moisture that interacted with the oxidizer, Ms. Parker said. She said the company accounts for humidity when sourcing parts from suppliers and has a purge system meant to keep the valves dry.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing and NASA are working to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched an earlier planned launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n john grant/NASA/BOEING/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBoeing has wrestled with setbacks on the Starliner before. Almost two years ago, during the first attempted test launch of the ship without crew members, a software error prevented the Starliner from reaching the correct orbit. The company previously booked a $410 million charge tied to the do-over of the launch.\nIn 2014, NASA hired Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, to develop spacecraft that could carry astronauts to the space station and return them to Earth. At the time, the agency didn\u2019t have a way to transport people to the research facility other than purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nSpaceX last year launched astronauts from the U.S. to the space station for the first time since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, and brought them back. The company has completed other crewed missions to the space station and is slated to launch four astronauts to the research facility this month and ferry others from there to the ground in November.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a program manager at NASA, said eventually the space agency would like Boeing and SpaceX to be flying once a year each, part of the agency\u2019s goal of having two space vehicles that could reach the space station.\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to the day that we get into those flights where we\u2019re handing over from a SpaceX vehicle on orbit to a Boeing vehicle and vice versa,\u201d Mr. Stich said.\nTwo of the valves that became stuck have been removed from the vehicle and will be sent to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center for analysis, officials said Tuesday.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aerospace giant said its space vehicle might not carry astronauts until the end of next year, potentially putting it a year behind a previous date to deliver people to orbit. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Astronaut Flight on Starliner Faces Further Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "631",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-first-astronaut-flight-on-starliner-faces-further-delay-11634686480?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=20",
        "text": "Last summer, before stuck valves caused Boeing and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to postpone a planned launch, the agency and company said they believed the Starliner could carry astronauts to the International Space Station on a test mission by the end of the year.\nMr. Vollmer\u2019s comments came at a briefing on Tuesday, where Boeing and NASA officials offered details about their work trying to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched the planned launch in August. Boeing and the space agency postponed that flight because of the problem.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle Parker,\n\n\n\n chief engineer for space and launch at Boeing, said Tuesday that the most likely cause of the valves problem was a corrosive substance created when moisture and oxidizer combined.\nHumidity is the probable source of the moisture that interacted with the oxidizer, Ms. Parker said. She said the company accounts for humidity when sourcing parts from suppliers and has a purge system meant to keep the valves dry.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing and NASA are working to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched an earlier planned launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n john grant/NASA/BOEING/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBoeing has wrestled with setbacks on the Starliner before. Almost two years ago, during the first attempted test launch of the ship without crew members, a software error prevented the Starliner from reaching the correct orbit. The company previously booked a $410 million charge tied to the do-over of the launch.\nIn 2014, NASA hired Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, to develop spacecraft that could carry astronauts to the space station and return them to Earth. At the time, the agency didn\u2019t have a way to transport people to the research facility other than purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nSpaceX last year launched astronauts from the U.S. to the space station for the first time since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, and brought them back. The company has completed other crewed missions to the space station and is slated to launch four astronauts to the research facility this month and ferry others from there to the ground in November.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a program manager at NASA, said eventually the space agency would like Boeing and SpaceX to be flying once a year each, part of the agency\u2019s goal of having two space vehicles that could reach the space station.\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to the day that we get into those flights where we\u2019re handing over from a SpaceX vehicle on orbit to a Boeing vehicle and vice versa,\u201d Mr. Stich said.\nTwo of the valves that became stuck have been removed from the vehicle and will be sent to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center for analysis, officials said Tuesday.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aerospace giant said its space vehicle might not carry astronauts until the end of next year, potentially putting it a year behind a previous date to deliver people to orbit. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Astronaut Flight on Starliner Faces Further Delay (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "632",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-first-astronaut-flight-on-starliner-faces-further-delay-11634686480?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=19",
        "text": "Last summer, before stuck valves caused Boeing and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to postpone a planned launch, the agency and company said they believed the Starliner could carry astronauts to the International Space Station on a test mission by the end of the year.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Vollmer\u2019s comments came at a briefing on Tuesday, where Boeing and NASA officials offered details about their work trying to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched the planned launch in August. Boeing and the space agency postponed that flight because of the problem.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle Parker,\n\n\n\n chief engineer for space and launch at Boeing, said Tuesday that the most likely cause of the valves problem was a corrosive substance created when moisture and oxidizer combined.\nHumidity is the probable source of the moisture that interacted with the oxidizer, Ms. Parker said. She said the company accounts for humidity when sourcing parts from suppliers and has a purge system meant to keep the valves dry.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing and NASA are working to identify why some of the valves on the Starliner propulsion system became stuck and botched an earlier planned launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n john grant/NASA/BOEING/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBoeing has wrestled with setbacks on the Starliner before. Almost two years ago, during the first attempted test launch of the ship without crew members, a software error prevented the Starliner from reaching the correct orbit. The company previously booked a $410 million charge tied to the do-over of the launch.\nIn 2014, NASA hired Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, to develop spacecraft that could carry astronauts to the space station and return them to Earth. At the time, the agency didn\u2019t have a way to transport people to the research facility other than purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nSpaceX last year launched astronauts from the U.S. to the space station for the first time since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, and brought them back. The company has completed other crewed missions to the space station and is slated to launch four astronauts to the research facility this month and ferry others from there to the ground in November.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a program manager at NASA, said eventually the space agency would like Boeing and SpaceX to be flying once a year each, part of the agency\u2019s goal of having two space vehicles that could reach the space station.\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to the day that we get into those flights where we\u2019re handing over from a SpaceX vehicle on orbit to a Boeing vehicle and vice versa,\u201d Mr. Stich said.\nTwo of the valves that became stuck have been removed from the vehicle and will be sent to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center for analysis, officials said Tuesday.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The aerospace giant said its space vehicle might not carry astronauts until the end of next year, potentially putting it a year behind a previous date to deliver people to orbit. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019 Space Company Escalates Push for Moon Vehicle Work (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "633",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-space-company-escalates-push-for-moon-vehicle-work-11629145522?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=24",
        "text": "Last April, NASA awarded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, a $2.9 billion contract to develop a vehicle that it would use to land astronauts on the moon under its Artemis program. Blue Origin and Dynetics, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n had also competed to create a moon lander for the agency but failed to win part of the contract.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. \n\n\n\n A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nOn Monday, a Blue Origin spokesman said the company filed the suit to remedy what it said were flaws in how NASA handled awarding the contract for the moon lander. The Verge earlier reported on the lawsuit.\n\nNASA officials are reviewing the case, a spokeswoman said. \nThe agency has said in the past it chose SpaceX in part because of budget constraints and that it was permitted to only choose a single provider for the vehicle. The agency has also said its decision to award SpaceX the contract was a first step, and not the final one, in its plans to hire companies to provide moon-landing services.\nMr. Bezos has sought to convince NASA to permit Blue Origin to participate in the moon-lander program. Late last month, he offered to waive up to $2 billion in fees from its bid and provide other benefits in a letter sent to agency administrator Bill Nelson.\nThe company had also lodged a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office over NASA\u2019s decision, but the GAO said the agency didn\u2019t violate any procurement laws or rules in choosing to only award SpaceX the contract.\nSpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nBlue Origin has pressed its case for the lander outside of court as well. On its website, the company posted a graphic that criticized the SpaceX lunar lander, implying that its exit hatch is too high above the moon surface.\nSuch criticism drew a response from Mr. Musk, who said in one tweet if \u201clobbying & lawyers\u201d could get you into orbit, Mr. Bezos would have reached Pluto. A Blue Origin spokesman didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s partners for its lander include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.97%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.18%\n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com A Blue Origin affiliate has sued the federal government over NASA\u2019s decision to award a sole contract for the lunar lander to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Other Big Problem: Fixing Its Space Program (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "634",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixing-its-space-program-11610773201?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=30",
        "text": "Its space ambitions will soon face a major test with another attempt to launch a capsule called the Starliner. In the first launch, just over a year ago without astronauts on board, a software error sent the Starliner into the wrong orbit, and then another threatened a catastrophic end to the mission. A successful launch, which could come as soon as March, would help restore the company\u2019s reputation for reliability and engineering prowess. The problems pose a serious challenge for Chief Executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n one year into his tenure as he charts a new course in the face of uncertainties wrought by the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCEO Dave Calhoun took over as CEO last year after a decade on Boeing\u2019s board.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter making record profit of $10.5 billion in 2018, Boeing has since lost nearly half that amount as of Sept. 30, largely due to a sharp drop in commercial aircraft deliveries and MAX-related charges. Defense and space revenue of $19.5 billion in the first nine months of last year eclipsed its commercial unit\u2019s $11.4 billion in sales. Jefferies analysts estimate Boeing brought in more than $6 billion in space revenue for all of last year. While the MAX has resumed flying passengers again after a nearly two-year grounding, quality lapses with popular 787 Dreamliners have stalled deliveries as Boeing workers fix production defects of newly finished jetliners. With travel demand still weak, Boeing is likely to remain heavily dependent in coming years on its defense and space business. Boeing declined to make any executives available for interviews. Mr. Calhoun said in a written statement that the company was \u201cproud of all the products and services our engineers have developed and delivered to our commercial and military customers over these last difficult years, and of the meaningful progress we are making in safety, transparency and quality.\u201d On the Starliner capsule and MAX alike, software and hardware systems weren\u2019t working properly together due to inadequate testing, insufficient resources or a combination of the two. Engineers working on different parts of the same program failed to coordinate with each other or to properly integrate software and hardware systems\u2014and senior managers failed to resolve the disconnects, according to government reviews and people familiar with the matter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner going into position above a rocket at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Nov. 21, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cory Huston/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s defense operation has seen similar missteps. The division has had long-running problems delivering an aerial-refueling tanker that remains years behind schedule and billions over budget. Air Force brass ultimately took charge of designing fixes last year. The stumbles coincided with what former and current executives, including Mr. Calhoun, have flagged as another problem: excessive focus on financial performance, a long-term trend Boeing is trying to reverse by empowering its engineers. Senior Pentagon and NASA officials have privately raised concerns about the range of Boeing\u2019s travails, according to several participants in those conversations. They have questioned Boeing\u2019s ability to deliver on promises about the performance and reliability of its products. An Air Force spokesman said the service is \u201ccommitted to working with Boeing to field critical capabilities for the warfighter.\u201d NASA officials have said the agency is looking forward to Boeing\u2019s coming uncrewed test and later company missions carrying astronauts. Mr. Calhoun, who took over as CEO in January 2020 after spending a decade on Boeing\u2019s board, has pledged to get the company\u2019s troubled programs back on track and to focus more on improving technical excellence and engineering decision-making. The company has revamped its internal safety-reporting procedures and the board\u2019s monitoring of overall safety issues\u2014all aimed at easing schedule and cost pressures on engineers and giving senior leaders greater oversight of emerging problems. In November, Boeing hired an engineer who previously worked at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, to be its first high-ranking executive overseeing software design across the company. On Wednesday, the company named a longtime senior engineer as its first chief aerospace safety officer. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think the future holds for Boeing? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThere are early signs Boeing\u2019s troubled Air Force tanker program, initially slated to cost $4.9 billion but later viewed as an albatross by senior Pentagon leaders, is getting on track. Under a deal with Boeing struck last year, the Pentagon wound up taking over the primary design of a revamped visual system essential for allowing aircraft to safely link up with the tankers. Boeing\u2019s previous design adjustments proved ineffective, according to the Air Force, often preventing the tanker from performing its primary function. In exchange for ceding control over the technical details, Boeing got nearly $900 million in withheld payments when it was bleeding cash. In return, it must foot the bill for major design changes, which some people familiar with the matter estimate could add up to at least $3 billion more in costs for Boeing, though a person close to the company disputed that the costs would reach that high. Air Force procurement chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Will Roper\n\n\n\n said the Pentagon is happy with the tanker\u2019s new direction, and described it as the result of an \u201cengineering-first\u201d approach under Mr. Calhoun. Mr. Roper said Boeing\u2019s shift marked a \u201ccomplete turnaround on this program.\u201d Since the height of the Cold War, Boeing\u2019s name has been synonymous with dependable jetliners, top-notch military aircraft and ambitious U.S. space endeavors\u2014starting with rockets and lunar rovers the company created for Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and continuing through its ongoing management of the International Space Station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Eugene A. Cernan, Apollo 17 mission commander, with the Lunar Roving Vehicle in 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nSome former Boeing engineers and government officials trace the start of Boeing\u2019s woes to its 1997 merger with struggling rival McDonnell Douglas, which they blame for infusing the new entity\u2019s culture with greater focus on financial management. While veteran engineers have said they never lost sight of safety, some say reorganizations and turnover hampered communication and accountability. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.), who as chairman of the House Transportation Committee investigated the MAX tragedies, blamed Boeing\u2019s failure to add initial safeguards to the jet on the company\u2019s focus on money and sticking to a development schedule. \u201cThat is what ultimately drove Boeing to this tragedy, which is the press for getting this plane out, to compete with \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus,\n\n\n and they were of course driven by Wall Street,\u201d Mr. DeFazio said in September. Boeing has said its engineers didn\u2019t rush what it has described as the MAX\u2019s methodical development and didn\u2019t take shortcuts at the expense of safety. The company has said it was trying to learn from its mistakes to prevent such crashes from happening again. Boeing reached a $2.5 billion settlement this month with the Justice Department on a criminal charge that two company pilots had deceived regulators about design slip-ups and flight-control hazards. In court documents, prosecutors said the wrongdoing financially benefited Boeing but wasn\u2019t widespread throughout the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPieces of plane wreckage lie at the site where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff in 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mulugeta Ayene/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn Boeing\u2019s defense and space businesses, an increased reliance on fixed-price government contracts has squeezed profit margins because the company typically had to pay the bill for mistakes, further heightening cost and schedule pressures. Meanwhile, Boeing\u2019s large overhead on top of its multilayered bureaucracy has made it difficult to compete with more nimble rivals such as SpaceX. The launch of the uncrewed Starliner spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center in December 2019 was supposed to be a decisive win for Boeing. The company\u2019s leaders planned for directors and other VIPs to enjoy space-themed gift bags and cheering from a grandstand during a party after the early-morning liftoff. Within minutes of the launch, NASA\u2019s controllers knew the flight was going wrong. A software error stranded the spacecraft in the wrong orbit. Hours later, ground controllers had difficulty maintaining communication with the vehicle, and later scrambled to fix another major software mistake.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Dec. 20, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joel Kowsky/Nasa/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nThe Starliner, which never made it to the International Space Station as planned, eventually returned and landed safely. NASA and Boeing experts quickly determined the capsule\u2019s thrusters had failed to start at the right time and ended up depleting their fuel supply, due to faulty software testing, according to industry and government officials. NASA\u2019s leadership, concerned Boeing had a broader cultural problem in light of the MAX crisis, ordered a sweeping outside review, resulting in dozens of recommendations. Many advocated greater attention to plugging gaps in getting software and hardware to work together properly. Two fundamental software problems emerged on the Starliner. One involved a timer on the capsule that hadn\u2019t been properly synchronized with the rocket\u2019s internal clock. Boeing didn\u2019t perform a test to verify various software systems were properly coordinated, which people familiar with the matter estimated would have caught the error, at a cost of about $1 million. A separate major mistake involved software controlling thrusters that help to angle the craft properly to avoid damaging the heat shield that protects the capsule, and any astronauts inside, during re-entry. Engineers detected and were able to correct that software glitch from the ground in time to ensure that what would be the crew\u2019s portion of the capsule safely separated from the rest of the spacecraft before re-entry. After the botched mission, Boeing\u2019s board\u2014already frustrated by the MAX crisis\u2014ousted then-CEO \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n and replaced him with Mr. Calhoun. Mr. Muilenburg had once boasted that Boeing would be first to put humans on Mars. The company booked a $410 million charge to account for the Starliner launch\u2019s redo. Current and former government and industry officials blame the spotty testing on cost-cutting and inadequate staff. Boeing was years late delivering the Starliner under a fixed-price contract that created incentives for managers to keep a lid on testing and personnel costs. In addition, the company was vying with SpaceX to get the first astronauts into orbit on a commercially owned and operated capsule. Mr. Musk\u2019s team handily won that race with launches in May and November. Another closely held competitor, run by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n founder \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n is also taking aim at Boeing\u2019s legacy of space leadership. A NASA spokesman said \u201cdeadline pressures and cost cutting were not identified\u201d by a joint NASA-Boeing review team as causes of the Starliner\u2019s problems. Patricia Sanders, chairwoman of NASA\u2019s independent safety-advisory committee, said the signs point to basic lapses in Boeing\u2019s engineering discipline. \u201cIt\u2019s possible that there was some complacency that set in,\u201d she said, adding that Boeing leaders now seem to realize they have to change course. \u201cThere is a sense that Boeing overall has woken up.\u201d Boeing, under pressure from government officials, has added software engineers to the Starliner team, industry officials said. A newly appointed program manager, John Vollmer, is known for his ability to execute on difficult programs, according to people familiar with the matter, and is prodding Starliner engineers to more thoroughly test software and address problems identified by the flurry of post-failure reviews. A Boeing spokesman said the company is poised to begin full-mission simulation testing as soon as next month after making software changes recommended by an independent review ordered by NASA. Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s head of human space exploration, has singled out the agency\u2019s overreliance on Boeing\u2019s traditional engineering expertise as the crux of the Starliner\u2019s failures. Rather than reflexively trusting Boeing\u2019s technical judgment in most matters\u2014as NASA had long done\u2014\u201cwe do need to change our assumptions as to how we are working together\u201d to ensure Boeing avoids mistakes, she told reporters in July. The upshot was tighter restrictions on Boeing\u2019s engineering decisions.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Kathy Lueders at a 2014 news conference announcing the selection of Boeing and SpaceX to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nNASA has ramped up its own staffing and oversight of Boeing, acknowledging it probably paid too much attention to keeping tabs on Mr. Musk\u2019s company, until recent years viewed by career agency officials as an outsider and upstart. In addition, government watchdogs have criticized Boeing for persistently missing deadlines and busting budgets as the prime contractor for the nation\u2019s premier deep-space rocket, the mammoth Space Launch System. Every major component of the heavy-lift booster has experienced technical challenges and performance issues, according to a March 2020 report from NASA\u2019s inspector general, resulting in at least $2 billion in recent cost increases. Additional delays could add another $8 billion. After nearly a decade of development, it still isn\u2019t slated to fly until November at the earliest. A long-awaited test intended to fire up all four main engines for the first time is scheduled for Saturday. As its engineers work to vet the Starliner\u2019s software, the Boeing spokesman said, the company will perform a full end-to-end test of the capsule\u2019s mission, from prelaunch to landing. For the next blastoff, people familiar with the matter said, Boeing isn\u2019t planning to hold a flashy party.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Boeing Starliner spacecraft lands in White Sands, N.M., on Dec. 22, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Aubrey Gemignani/NASA/AP\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com The last liftoff of the Starliner spacecraft was supposed to be a decisive win. Instead, it showed that Boeing\u2019s engineering and management issues went beyond its 737 MAX planes. Can the company redeem itself with its next launch? ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can\u2019t We Put a Man on the Moon? (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "635",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-we-can-put-a-man-on-the-moon-why-cant-we-put-a-man-on-the-moon-1514833480?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=21",
        "text": "It concludes that maintaining the agency\u2019s existing procedures for funding and acquiring spacecraft will delay manned exploration by many years, versus reliance on emerging commercial alternatives.\nThe study also projects that by continuing older projects with traditional contracting arrangements\u2014including extensive costs for federal oversight\u2014the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will exceed its anticipated budgets through the next two decades. But over that stretch, according to the document, NASA could save some $300 billion and make its plans more affordable by jettisoning a \u201cbusiness as usual approach.\u201d\n\n\nThe report calls for shifting to commercial practices championed by private space-transportation companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n which are poised to vie with NASA for sending manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nUnless NASA finds a way to break a longstanding \u201ccycle of increasing costs,\u201d the study contends, \u201chuman exploration, commercialization and colonization of space will likely remain unaffordable.\u201d\nFaced with such schedule and spending pressures, \u201cNASA must dramatically change the way it works,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n an industry consultant and fledgling space entrepreneur who led the team that wrote the report. \u201cPublic-private partnerships should become the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s plans, not an adjunct to them,\u201d according to the former academic researcher.\nNASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself. The document was peer reviewed by experts and posted on the agency\u2019s website last month. At the time, a NASA manager wrote to Mr. Sercel that while the agency considered it \u201ca worthy effort\u201d examining \u201can interesting and timely concept,\u201d it stopped short of approving the findings or endorsing the technical details.\nThe conclusions coincide with White House efforts to finalize 2019 budget proposals, including ways to eventually accelerate the timing of crewed missions to or around the moon. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads a White House space policy council, has said NASA will rely on \u201cexpertise and insights from the scientists, innovators and business leaders like never before.\u201d\nSuch statements are encouraging, Mr. Sercel said in an interview over the weekend, but the bureaucracy\u2019s tendency to stick with old-style program management means \u201cthe timetable for achieving anything significant will be measured in decades.\u201d\nThe study was sponsored by the same NASA office that developed the initial program for commercially developed and operated cargo vehicles to supply the international space station. That effort has turned into one the agency\u2019s most successful and cost-effective initiatives. The document was commissioned before the 2016 election.\nNASA\u2019s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors. Supporters argue the high-cost projects ensure the only reliable path for such exploration, since company plans for heavy-lift rockets can change and the necessary technology isn\u2019t targeting any obvious commercial market. \nMany space experts argue that in the wake of NASA\u2019s Apollo lunar landings nearly five decades ago, agency budgets and public support eroded partly because there was no huge perceived economic payback, or obvious ongoing commercial benefits.\nIn calling for a return to the moon last fall, Mr. Pence acknowledged that during the intervening years \u201csending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated.\u201d Now, President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration is pushing lunar expeditions and ultimately outposts on the moon\u2019s surface as vital steppingstones to deeper space exploration, including manned voyages to Mars around the mid-2030s. White House aides for months have been considering program changes that could enhance commercial participation.\nSpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, on its own has announced plans to send an unmanned mission whipping around the Red Planet within a few years, slated to be followed by humans blasting off toward Mars before the middle of the next decade. Mr. Musk has estimated it would cost some $10 billion to develop the required rocket by itself\u2014substantially less than NASA\u2019s estimates fo NASA\u2019s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren\u2019t affordable and likely won\u2019t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can\u2019t We Put a Man on the Moon? (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "636",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-we-can-put-a-man-on-the-moon-why-cant-we-put-a-man-on-the-moon-1514833480?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=81",
        "text": "It concludes that maintaining the agency\u2019s existing procedures for funding and acquiring spacecraft will delay manned exploration by many years, versus reliance on emerging commercial alternatives.\nThe study also projects that by continuing older projects with traditional contracting arrangements\u2014including extensive costs for federal oversight\u2014the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will exceed its anticipated budgets through the next two decades. But over that stretch, according to the document, NASA could save some $300 billion and make its plans more affordable by jettisoning a \u201cbusiness as usual approach.\u201d\n\n\nThe report calls for shifting to commercial practices championed by private space-transportation companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n which are poised to vie with NASA for sending manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nUnless NASA finds a way to break a longstanding \u201ccycle of increasing costs,\u201d the study contends, \u201chuman exploration, commercialization and colonization of space will likely remain unaffordable.\u201d\nFaced with such schedule and spending pressures, \u201cNASA must dramatically change the way it works,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n an industry consultant and fledgling space entrepreneur who led the team that wrote the report. \u201cPublic-private partnerships should become the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s plans, not an adjunct to them,\u201d according to the former academic researcher.\nNASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself. The document was peer reviewed by experts and posted on the agency\u2019s website last month. At the time, a NASA manager wrote to Mr. Sercel that while the agency considered it \u201ca worthy effort\u201d examining \u201can interesting and timely concept,\u201d it stopped short of approving the findings or endorsing the technical details.\nThe conclusions coincide with White House efforts to finalize 2019 budget proposals, including ways to eventually accelerate the timing of crewed missions to or around the moon. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads a White House space policy council, has said NASA will rely on \u201cexpertise and insights from the scientists, innovators and business leaders like never before.\u201d\nSuch statements are encouraging, Mr. Sercel said in an interview over the weekend, but the bureaucracy\u2019s tendency to stick with old-style program management means \u201cthe timetable for achieving anything significant will be measured in decades.\u201d\nThe study was sponsored by the same NASA office that developed the initial program for commercially developed and operated cargo vehicles to supply the international space station. That effort has turned into one the agency\u2019s most successful and cost-effective initiatives. The document was commissioned before the 2016 election.\nNASA\u2019s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors. Supporters argue the high-cost projects ensure the only reliable path for such exploration, since company plans for heavy-lift rockets can change and the necessary technology isn\u2019t targeting any obvious commercial market. \nMany space experts argue that in the wake of NASA\u2019s Apollo lunar landings nearly five decades ago, agency budgets and public support eroded partly because there was no huge perceived economic payback, or obvious ongoing commercial benefits.\nIn calling for a return to the moon last fall, Mr. Pence acknowledged that during the intervening years \u201csending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated.\u201d Now, President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration is pushing lunar expeditions and ultimately outposts on the moon\u2019s surface as vital steppingstones to deeper space exploration, including manned voyages to Mars around the mid-2030s. White House aides for months have been considering program changes that could enhance commercial participation.\nSpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, on its own has announced plans to send an unmanned mission whipping around the Red Planet within a few years, slated to be followed by humans blasting off toward Mars before the middle of the next decade. Mr. Musk has estimated it would cost some $10 billion to develop the required rocket by itself\u2014substantially less than NASA\u2019s estimates fo NASA\u2019s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren\u2019t affordable and likely won\u2019t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can\u2019t We Put a Man on the Moon? (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "637",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-we-can-put-a-man-on-the-moon-why-cant-we-put-a-man-on-the-moon-1514833480?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=73",
        "text": "It concludes that maintaining the agency\u2019s existing procedures for funding and acquiring spacecraft will delay manned exploration by many years, versus reliance on emerging commercial alternatives.\nThe study also projects that by continuing older projects with traditional contracting arrangements\u2014including extensive costs for federal oversight\u2014the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will exceed its anticipated budgets through the next two decades. But over that stretch, according to the document, NASA could save some $300 billion and make its plans more affordable by jettisoning a \u201cbusiness as usual approach.\u201d\n\n\nThe report calls for shifting to commercial practices championed by private space-transportation companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n which are poised to vie with NASA for sending manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nUnless NASA finds a way to break a longstanding \u201ccycle of increasing costs,\u201d the study contends, \u201chuman exploration, commercialization and colonization of space will likely remain unaffordable.\u201d\nFaced with such schedule and spending pressures, \u201cNASA must dramatically change the way it works,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n an industry consultant and fledgling space entrepreneur who led the team that wrote the report. \u201cPublic-private partnerships should become the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s plans, not an adjunct to them,\u201d according to the former academic researcher.\nNASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself. The document was peer reviewed by experts and posted on the agency\u2019s website last month. At the time, a NASA manager wrote to Mr. Sercel that while the agency considered it \u201ca worthy effort\u201d examining \u201can interesting and timely concept,\u201d it stopped short of approving the findings or endorsing the technical details.\nThe conclusions coincide with White House efforts to finalize 2019 budget proposals, including ways to eventually accelerate the timing of crewed missions to or around the moon. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads a White House space policy council, has said NASA will rely on \u201cexpertise and insights from the scientists, innovators and business leaders like never before.\u201d\nSuch statements are encouraging, Mr. Sercel said in an interview over the weekend, but the bureaucracy\u2019s tendency to stick with old-style program management means \u201cthe timetable for achieving anything significant will be measured in decades.\u201d\nThe study was sponsored by the same NASA office that developed the initial program for commercially developed and operated cargo vehicles to supply the international space station. That effort has turned into one the agency\u2019s most successful and cost-effective initiatives. The document was commissioned before the 2016 election.\nNASA\u2019s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors. Supporters argue the high-cost projects ensure the only reliable path for such exploration, since company plans for heavy-lift rockets can change and the necessary technology isn\u2019t targeting any obvious commercial market. \nMany space experts argue that in the wake of NASA\u2019s Apollo lunar landings nearly five decades ago, agency budgets and public support eroded partly because there was no huge perceived economic payback, or obvious ongoing commercial benefits.\nIn calling for a return to the moon last fall, Mr. Pence acknowledged that during the intervening years \u201csending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated.\u201d Now, President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration is pushing lunar expeditions and ultimately outposts on the moon\u2019s surface as vital steppingstones to deeper space exploration, including manned voyages to Mars around the mid-2030s. White House aides for months have been considering program changes that could enhance commercial participation.\nSpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, on its own has announced plans to send an unmanned mission whipping around the Red Planet within a few years, slated to be followed by humans blasting off toward Mars before the middle of the next decade. Mr. Musk has estimated it would cost some $10 billion to develop the required rocket by itself\u2014substantially less than NASA\u2019s estimates fo NASA\u2019s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren\u2019t affordable and likely won\u2019t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can\u2019t We Put a Man on the Moon? (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "638",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-we-can-put-a-man-on-the-moon-why-cant-we-put-a-man-on-the-moon-1514833480?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=105",
        "text": "It concludes that maintaining the agency\u2019s existing procedures for funding and acquiring spacecraft will delay manned exploration by many years, versus reliance on emerging commercial alternatives.\nThe study also projects that by continuing older projects with traditional contracting arrangements\u2014including extensive costs for federal oversight\u2014the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will exceed its anticipated budgets through the next two decades. But over that stretch, according to the document, NASA could save some $300 billion and make its plans more affordable by jettisoning a \u201cbusiness as usual approach.\u201d\n\n\nThe report calls for shifting to commercial practices championed by private space-transportation companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n which are poised to vie with NASA for sending manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nUnless NASA finds a way to break a longstanding \u201ccycle of increasing costs,\u201d the study contends, \u201chuman exploration, commercialization and colonization of space will likely remain unaffordable.\u201d\nFaced with such schedule and spending pressures, \u201cNASA must dramatically change the way it works,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n an industry consultant and fledgling space entrepreneur who led the team that wrote the report. \u201cPublic-private partnerships should become the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s plans, not an adjunct to them,\u201d according to the former academic researcher.\nNASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself. The document was peer reviewed by experts and posted on the agency\u2019s website last month. At the time, a NASA manager wrote to Mr. Sercel that while the agency considered it \u201ca worthy effort\u201d examining \u201can interesting and timely concept,\u201d it stopped short of approving the findings or endorsing the technical details.\nThe conclusions coincide with White House efforts to finalize 2019 budget proposals, including ways to eventually accelerate the timing of crewed missions to or around the moon. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads a White House space policy council, has said NASA will rely on \u201cexpertise and insights from the scientists, innovators and business leaders like never before.\u201d\nSuch statements are encouraging, Mr. Sercel said in an interview over the weekend, but the bureaucracy\u2019s tendency to stick with old-style program management means \u201cthe timetable for achieving anything significant will be measured in decades.\u201d\nThe study was sponsored by the same NASA office that developed the initial program for commercially developed and operated cargo vehicles to supply the international space station. That effort has turned into one the agency\u2019s most successful and cost-effective initiatives. The document was commissioned before the 2016 election.\nNASA\u2019s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors. Supporters argue the high-cost projects ensure the only reliable path for such exploration, since company plans for heavy-lift rockets can change and the necessary technology isn\u2019t targeting any obvious commercial market. \nMany space experts argue that in the wake of NASA\u2019s Apollo lunar landings nearly five decades ago, agency budgets and public support eroded partly because there was no huge perceived economic payback, or obvious ongoing commercial benefits.\nIn calling for a return to the moon last fall, Mr. Pence acknowledged that during the intervening years \u201csending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated.\u201d Now, President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration is pushing lunar expeditions and ultimately outposts on the moon\u2019s surface as vital steppingstones to deeper space exploration, including manned voyages to Mars around the mid-2030s. White House aides for months have been considering program changes that could enhance commercial participation.\nSpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, on its own has announced plans to send an unmanned mission whipping around the Red Planet within a few years, slated to be followed by humans blasting off toward Mars before the middle of the next decade. Mr. Musk has estimated it would cost some $10 billion to develop the required rocket by itself\u2014substantially less than NASA\u2019s estimates fo NASA\u2019s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren\u2019t affordable and likely won\u2019t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Its First Rocket From Iconic Florida Pad (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "639",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-its-first-rocket-from-iconic-florida-pad-1487516347?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=26",
        "text": "It also marked the first company-owned and -operated spacecraft ever to launch from the venerable complex, which exemplified U.S. space endeavors and heroic astronaut exploits from early phases of the Cold War.\nSunday\u2019s mission came a day after a technical problem prompted a launch abort roughly 10 seconds before blastoff.\n\n\nThe latest countdown, however, proceeded like clockwork. Just before 9:39 a.m. local time, the 230-foot rocket lifted off with some 5,500 pounds of cargo and roughly 10 minutes later, the capsule separated to begin its two-day trip to link up with the international orbiting laboratory. It was SpaceX\u2019s second launch of 2017, in what portends to be a pivotal year for the closely held Southern California company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGreeted by celebratory yells from SpaceX employees observing the launch from mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket went smoothly through its point of maximum aerodynamic stress.\nBack in Florida, the main portion of the booster landed vertically near the launch facility in the first daytime reentry and successful return to Earth of a Falcon 9 first stage.\nAfter liftoff, government space officials said the capsule\u2019s solar arrays had deployed right on schedule. That means it was in the proper orbit and powered up as expected to proceed with the rest of the mission.\nThe Kennedy Space Center facility is hallowed ground for the space world, because it was the starting point for manned Apollo missions to the Moon and saw the birth and demise of the entire space shuttle fleet. Frequent flights relying on its revived payload-integration operation and towering ground-support facility are now a central element of the drive to increase launch tempo by SpaceX, as the company is called.\nThe goal is to use the Florida pad, along with another launch complex at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and a third location on the central coast of California, to accelerate the pace of SpaceX launches. Company officials have sketched out an aggressive timetable to launch as frequently as twice a month later this year.\n\n\nRelated NASA Advisory Group Raises Concerns About SpaceX Rocket-Fueling Plans (Oct. 31) SpaceX Signs First Customer for Launch of Refurbished Rocket (Aug. 30) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Completes Historic Rocket Landing (Dec. 20, 2015) \n\n\nInternal SpaceX documents project ramping up to weekly launches by 2019, though the company so far has never launched more than eight rockets in a single year.\nRebounding from two rocket explosionsover 14 months, the company has carried out a pair of extensive investigations and completed its most recent return to flight a month ago. Starting with Sunday\u2019s cargo outing, SpaceX aims to show commercial and U.S. government customers that it can be counted on to maintain operational reliability even as it dramatically increases launch rates to work through its bulging backlog of dozens of delayed missions.\nBut last week, the company delayed by eight weeks the next launch for its biggest commercial customer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\n\n\n said the launch of the second batch of its next-generation satellites was postponed to mid-June from mid-April to adjust for previous slips in SpaceX\u2019s overall launch manifest.\nAlso in 2017, SpaceX is slated to conduct the first flight of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket, featuring 27 engines and designed to carry the biggest loads into orbit as well as execute missions deeper into space.\nIn addition to the symbolism of reopening a launch complex used decades ago during the heyday of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s manned lunar exploits and subsequently for the now-retired space shuttle fleet, the rebirth of pad 39A illustrates the economic rebound of Florida\u2019s Space Coast. The resurgence in jobs is partly driven by investments in commercial space ventures.\nSpaceX\u2019s refurbishment of the pad leased from NASA, vacant for six years, is part of the region\u2019s growing employment prospects as it transitions to a more-diverse aerospace economy.\nBut the latest success also coincides with continuing technical challenges confronting SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as they push to separately develop commercial space taxis intended to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the space station before the end of the decade. SpaceX\u2019s crewed flights are slated to launch from pad 39A starting in 2018 or 2019.\nLast week, as expected, the Government Accountability Office released a final version of a report highlighting why it projects escalating schedule pressures on both commercial-crew contractors. GAO investigators described \u201ca variety of risks that could further delay certification\u201d of rockets and manned capsules to transport crews to the station.\nFor Boeing, the report said top schedule and safety risks include having adequate data to verify that some rocket engines and re-entry parachutes would operate properly.\nFor SpaceX, the GAO said the\u00a0biggest risks st Space Exploration Technologies successfully launched a cargo capsule into orbit Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center pad from which Apollo 11 took off and which served as home base for the space shuttle. ",
        "author": "Andy\u00a0Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Its First Rocket From Iconic Florida Pad (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "640",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-its-first-rocket-from-iconic-florida-pad-1487516347?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=101",
        "text": "It also marked the first company-owned and -operated spacecraft ever to launch from the venerable complex, which exemplified U.S. space endeavors and heroic astronaut exploits from early phases of the Cold War.\nSunday\u2019s mission came a day after a technical problem prompted a launch abort roughly 10 seconds before blastoff.\n\n\nThe latest countdown, however, proceeded like clockwork. Just before 9:39 a.m. local time, the 230-foot rocket lifted off with some 5,500 pounds of cargo and roughly 10 minutes later, the capsule separated to begin its two-day trip to link up with the international orbiting laboratory. It was SpaceX\u2019s second launch of 2017, in what portends to be a pivotal year for the closely held Southern California company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGreeted by celebratory yells from SpaceX employees observing the launch from mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket went smoothly through its point of maximum aerodynamic stress.\nBack in Florida, the main portion of the booster landed vertically near the launch facility in the first daytime reentry and successful return to Earth of a Falcon 9 first stage.\nAfter liftoff, government space officials said the capsule\u2019s solar arrays had deployed right on schedule. That means it was in the proper orbit and powered up as expected to proceed with the rest of the mission.\nThe Kennedy Space Center facility is hallowed ground for the space world, because it was the starting point for manned Apollo missions to the Moon and saw the birth and demise of the entire space shuttle fleet. Frequent flights relying on its revived payload-integration operation and towering ground-support facility are now a central element of the drive to increase launch tempo by SpaceX, as the company is called.\nThe goal is to use the Florida pad, along with another launch complex at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and a third location on the central coast of California, to accelerate the pace of SpaceX launches. Company officials have sketched out an aggressive timetable to launch as frequently as twice a month later this year.\n\n\nRelated NASA Advisory Group Raises Concerns About SpaceX Rocket-Fueling Plans (Oct. 31) SpaceX Signs First Customer for Launch of Refurbished Rocket (Aug. 30) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Completes Historic Rocket Landing (Dec. 20, 2015) \n\n\nInternal SpaceX documents project ramping up to weekly launches by 2019, though the company so far has never launched more than eight rockets in a single year.\nRebounding from two rocket explosionsover 14 months, the company has carried out a pair of extensive investigations and completed its most recent return to flight a month ago. Starting with Sunday\u2019s cargo outing, SpaceX aims to show commercial and U.S. government customers that it can be counted on to maintain operational reliability even as it dramatically increases launch rates to work through its bulging backlog of dozens of delayed missions.\nBut last week, the company delayed by eight weeks the next launch for its biggest commercial customer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\n\n\n said the launch of the second batch of its next-generation satellites was postponed to mid-June from mid-April to adjust for previous slips in SpaceX\u2019s overall launch manifest.\nAlso in 2017, SpaceX is slated to conduct the first flight of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket, featuring 27 engines and designed to carry the biggest loads into orbit as well as execute missions deeper into space.\nIn addition to the symbolism of reopening a launch complex used decades ago during the heyday of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s manned lunar exploits and subsequently for the now-retired space shuttle fleet, the rebirth of pad 39A illustrates the economic rebound of Florida\u2019s Space Coast. The resurgence in jobs is partly driven by investments in commercial space ventures.\nSpaceX\u2019s refurbishment of the pad leased from NASA, vacant for six years, is part of the region\u2019s growing employment prospects as it transitions to a more-diverse aerospace economy.\nBut the latest success also coincides with continuing technical challenges confronting SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as they push to separately develop commercial space taxis intended to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the space station before the end of the decade. SpaceX\u2019s crewed flights are slated to launch from pad 39A starting in 2018 or 2019.\nLast week, as expected, the Government Accountability Office released a final version of a report highlighting why it projects escalating schedule pressures on both commercial-crew contractors. GAO investigators described \u201ca variety of risks that could further delay certification\u201d of rockets and manned capsules to transport crews to the station.\nFor Boeing, the report said top schedule and safety risks include having adequate data to verify that some rocket engines and re-entry parachutes would operate properly.\nFor SpaceX, the GAO said the\u00a0biggest risks st Space Exploration Technologies successfully launched a cargo capsule into orbit Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center pad from which Apollo 11 took off and which served as home base for the space shuttle. ",
        "author": "Andy\u00a0Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Its First Rocket From Iconic Florida Pad (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "641",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-its-first-rocket-from-iconic-florida-pad-1487516347?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=87",
        "text": "It also marked the first company-owned and -operated spacecraft ever to launch from the venerable complex, which exemplified U.S. space endeavors and heroic astronaut exploits from early phases of the Cold War.\nSunday\u2019s mission came a day after a technical problem prompted a launch abort roughly 10 seconds before blastoff.\n\n\nThe latest countdown, however, proceeded like clockwork. Just before 9:39 a.m. local time, the 230-foot rocket lifted off with some 5,500 pounds of cargo and roughly 10 minutes later, the capsule separated to begin its two-day trip to link up with the international orbiting laboratory. It was SpaceX\u2019s second launch of 2017, in what portends to be a pivotal year for the closely held Southern California company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGreeted by celebratory yells from SpaceX employees observing the launch from mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket went smoothly through its point of maximum aerodynamic stress.\nBack in Florida, the main portion of the booster landed vertically near the launch facility in the first daytime reentry and successful return to Earth of a Falcon 9 first stage.\nAfter liftoff, government space officials said the capsule\u2019s solar arrays had deployed right on schedule. That means it was in the proper orbit and powered up as expected to proceed with the rest of the mission.\nThe Kennedy Space Center facility is hallowed ground for the space world, because it was the starting point for manned Apollo missions to the Moon and saw the birth and demise of the entire space shuttle fleet. Frequent flights relying on its revived payload-integration operation and towering ground-support facility are now a central element of the drive to increase launch tempo by SpaceX, as the company is called.\nThe goal is to use the Florida pad, along with another launch complex at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and a third location on the central coast of California, to accelerate the pace of SpaceX launches. Company officials have sketched out an aggressive timetable to launch as frequently as twice a month later this year.\n\n\nRelated NASA Advisory Group Raises Concerns About SpaceX Rocket-Fueling Plans (Oct. 31) SpaceX Signs First Customer for Launch of Refurbished Rocket (Aug. 30) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Completes Historic Rocket Landing (Dec. 20, 2015) \n\n\nInternal SpaceX documents project ramping up to weekly launches by 2019, though the company so far has never launched more than eight rockets in a single year.\nRebounding from two rocket explosionsover 14 months, the company has carried out a pair of extensive investigations and completed its most recent return to flight a month ago. Starting with Sunday\u2019s cargo outing, SpaceX aims to show commercial and U.S. government customers that it can be counted on to maintain operational reliability even as it dramatically increases launch rates to work through its bulging backlog of dozens of delayed missions.\nBut last week, the company delayed by eight weeks the next launch for its biggest commercial customer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\n\n\n said the launch of the second batch of its next-generation satellites was postponed to mid-June from mid-April to adjust for previous slips in SpaceX\u2019s overall launch manifest.\nAlso in 2017, SpaceX is slated to conduct the first flight of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket, featuring 27 engines and designed to carry the biggest loads into orbit as well as execute missions deeper into space.\nIn addition to the symbolism of reopening a launch complex used decades ago during the heyday of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s manned lunar exploits and subsequently for the now-retired space shuttle fleet, the rebirth of pad 39A illustrates the economic rebound of Florida\u2019s Space Coast. The resurgence in jobs is partly driven by investments in commercial space ventures.\nSpaceX\u2019s refurbishment of the pad leased from NASA, vacant for six years, is part of the region\u2019s growing employment prospects as it transitions to a more-diverse aerospace economy.\nBut the latest success also coincides with continuing technical challenges confronting SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as they push to separately develop commercial space taxis intended to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the space station before the end of the decade. SpaceX\u2019s crewed flights are slated to launch from pad 39A starting in 2018 or 2019.\nLast week, as expected, the Government Accountability Office released a final version of a report highlighting why it projects escalating schedule pressures on both commercial-crew contractors. GAO investigators described \u201ca variety of risks that could further delay certification\u201d of rockets and manned capsules to transport crews to the station.\nFor Boeing, the report said top schedule and safety risks include having adequate data to verify that some rocket engines and re-entry parachutes would operate properly.\nFor SpaceX, the GAO said the\u00a0biggest risks st Space Exploration Technologies successfully launched a cargo capsule into orbit Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center pad from which Apollo 11 took off and which served as home base for the space shuttle. ",
        "author": "Andy\u00a0Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Its First Rocket From Iconic Florida Pad (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "642",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-its-first-rocket-from-iconic-florida-pad-1487516347?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=130",
        "text": "It also marked the first company-owned and -operated spacecraft ever to launch from the venerable complex, which exemplified U.S. space endeavors and heroic astronaut exploits from early phases of the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s mission came a day after a technical problem prompted a launch abort roughly 10 seconds before blastoff.\n\n\nThe latest countdown, however, proceeded like clockwork. Just before 9:39 a.m. local time, the 230-foot rocket lifted off with some 5,500 pounds of cargo and roughly 10 minutes later, the capsule separated to begin its two-day trip to link up with the international orbiting laboratory. It was SpaceX\u2019s second launch of 2017, in what portends to be a pivotal year for the closely held Southern California company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGreeted by celebratory yells from SpaceX employees observing the launch from mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket went smoothly through its point of maximum aerodynamic stress.\nBack in Florida, the main portion of the booster landed vertically near the launch facility in the first daytime reentry and successful return to Earth of a Falcon 9 first stage.\nAfter liftoff, government space officials said the capsule\u2019s solar arrays had deployed right on schedule. That means it was in the proper orbit and powered up as expected to proceed with the rest of the mission.\nThe Kennedy Space Center facility is hallowed ground for the space world, because it was the starting point for manned Apollo missions to the Moon and saw the birth and demise of the entire space shuttle fleet. Frequent flights relying on its revived payload-integration operation and towering ground-support facility are now a central element of the drive to increase launch tempo by SpaceX, as the company is called.\nThe goal is to use the Florida pad, along with another launch complex at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and a third location on the central coast of California, to accelerate the pace of SpaceX launches. Company officials have sketched out an aggressive timetable to launch as frequently as twice a month later this year.\n\n\nRelated NASA Advisory Group Raises Concerns About SpaceX Rocket-Fueling Plans (Oct. 31) SpaceX Signs First Customer for Launch of Refurbished Rocket (Aug. 30) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Completes Historic Rocket Landing (Dec. 20, 2015) \n\n\nInternal SpaceX documents project ramping up to weekly launches by 2019, though the company so far has never launched more than eight rockets in a single year.\nRebounding from two rocket explosionsover 14 months, the company has carried out a pair of extensive investigations and completed its most recent return to flight a month ago. Starting with Sunday\u2019s cargo outing, SpaceX aims to show commercial and U.S. government customers that it can be counted on to maintain operational reliability even as it dramatically increases launch rates to work through its bulging backlog of dozens of delayed missions.\nBut last week, the company delayed by eight weeks the next launch for its biggest commercial customer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\n\n\n said the launch of the second batch of its next-generation satellites was postponed to mid-June from mid-April to adjust for previous slips in SpaceX\u2019s overall launch manifest.\nAlso in 2017, SpaceX is slated to conduct the first flight of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket, featuring 27 engines and designed to carry the biggest loads into orbit as well as execute missions deeper into space.\nIn addition to the symbolism of reopening a launch complex used decades ago during the heyday of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s manned lunar exploits and subsequently for the now-retired space shuttle fleet, the rebirth of pad 39A illustrates the economic rebound of Florida\u2019s Space Coast. The resurgence in jobs is partly driven by investments in commercial space ventures.\nSpaceX\u2019s refurbishment of the pad leased from NASA, vacant for six years, is part of the region\u2019s growing employment prospects as it transitions to a more-diverse aerospace economy.\nBut the latest success also coincides with continuing technical challenges confronting SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as they push to separately develop commercial space taxis intended to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the space station before the end of the decade. SpaceX\u2019s crewed flights are slated to launch from pad 39A starting in 2018 or 2019.\nLast week, as expected, the Government Accountability Office released a final version of a report highlighting why it projects escalating schedule pressures on both commercial-crew contractors. GAO investigators described \u201ca variety of risks that could further delay certification\u201d of rockets and manned capsules to transport crews to the station.\nFor Boeing, the report said top schedule and safety risks include having adequate data to verify that some rocket engines and re-entry parachutes would operate properly.\nFor SpaceX, the GAO said the\u00a0biggest risk Space Exploration Technologies successfully launched a cargo capsule into orbit Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center pad from which Apollo 11 took off and which served as home base for the space shuttle. ",
        "author": "Andy\u00a0Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It Signed Up Its First Moon Tourist (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "643",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-says-it-has-signed-up-its-first-round-the-moon-tourist-1536898342?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=18",
        "text": "In the message, however, SpaceX described the latest plan as \u201can important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.\u201d The identity of the passenger and other specifics are expected to be disclosed Monday.\nThursday\u2019s two-sentence statement\u2014which caught a number of space experts off guard\u2014suggests that Mr. Musk hopes to demonstrate momentum and attract more public attention to plans for his mammoth rocket and its associated spacecraft, intended to be bigger than a superjumbo airliner. As described previously by Mr. Musk, the BFR would be larger and more powerful than any rocket in history.\n\n\nRevised proposals for both were unveiled earlier this year, at which time Mr. Musk indicated he hoped to use the combination to take private passengers, and ultimately U.S. astronauts, toward the moon and deeper into space.\nBut the latest development also highlights Mr. Musk\u2019s contrarian, sometimes unpredictable streak, as well as the frequently shifting outlines of his manned space-transportation strategy.\nIn early 2017, Mr. Musk shocked the aerospace community by announcing his intention to send two space tourists, who also weren\u2019t identified, around the moon by the end of this year. Those trailblazing flights were supposed to use a human-rated version of the company\u2019s existing Dragon spacecraft on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket\u2014a 27-engine behemoth in which SpaceX has invested close to $1 billion. At the time, veteran industry officials expressed doubts about the projected timetable.\nThe first Falcon Heavy launched successfully earlier this year. But just the day before, Mr. Musk revealed the rocket already was in danger of being relegated to a backup role regarding future human flights.\nMonths later, a SpaceX spokesman confirmed the late-2018 timetable for the lunar-tourist mission had slipped to at least mid-2019 and likely longer.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nNow, company leaders seem to have moved closer to scrapping those specific Falcon Heavy ambitions altogether, by aiming to use that rocket almost exclusively for unmanned missions such as launching commercial or military satellites. As a result Mr. Musk appears focused on accelerating BFR development as part of his broader human-exploration agenda.\nAs he has before, the billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n may end up confounding naysayers about the capabilities of his team to develop and test the BFR, even if it takes longer than originally anticipated.\nIn May, Thomas Mueller, one of Mr. Musk\u2019s original SpaceX employees and the manager who has been in charge of designing every one of the company\u2019s rockets, told a space conference in Los Angeles he was devoting essentially all of his time to developing the BFR.\nThe reduced role for Falcon Heavy also comes as global demand for launches of large commercial satellites has slipped dramatically. Nearly all Wall Street analysts and industry experts expect launch contracts will remain at depressed levels for years to come.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announced that it had signed up the first private passenger to fly around the moon. It didn\u2019t provide a timetable or other details about the plan. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It Signed Up Its First Moon Tourist (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "644",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-says-it-has-signed-up-its-first-round-the-moon-tourist-1536898342?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=69",
        "text": "In the message, however, SpaceX described the latest plan as \u201can important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.\u201d The identity of the passenger and other specifics are expected to be disclosed Monday.\nThursday\u2019s two-sentence statement\u2014which caught a number of space experts off guard\u2014suggests that Mr. Musk hopes to demonstrate momentum and attract more public attention to plans for his mammoth rocket and its associated spacecraft, intended to be bigger than a superjumbo airliner. As described previously by Mr. Musk, the BFR would be larger and more powerful than any rocket in history.\n\n\nRevised proposals for both were unveiled earlier this year, at which time Mr. Musk indicated he hoped to use the combination to take private passengers, and ultimately U.S. astronauts, toward the moon and deeper into space.\nBut the latest development also highlights Mr. Musk\u2019s contrarian, sometimes unpredictable streak, as well as the frequently shifting outlines of his manned space-transportation strategy.\nIn early 2017, Mr. Musk shocked the aerospace community by announcing his intention to send two space tourists, who also weren\u2019t identified, around the moon by the end of this year. Those trailblazing flights were supposed to use a human-rated version of the company\u2019s existing Dragon spacecraft on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket\u2014a 27-engine behemoth in which SpaceX has invested close to $1 billion. At the time, veteran industry officials expressed doubts about the projected timetable.\nThe first Falcon Heavy launched successfully earlier this year. But just the day before, Mr. Musk revealed the rocket already was in danger of being relegated to a backup role regarding future human flights.\nMonths later, a SpaceX spokesman confirmed the late-2018 timetable for the lunar-tourist mission had slipped to at least mid-2019 and likely longer.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nNow, company leaders seem to have moved closer to scrapping those specific Falcon Heavy ambitions altogether, by aiming to use that rocket almost exclusively for unmanned missions such as launching commercial or military satellites. As a result Mr. Musk appears focused on accelerating BFR development as part of his broader human-exploration agenda.\nAs he has before, the billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n may end up confounding naysayers about the capabilities of his team to develop and test the BFR, even if it takes longer than originally anticipated.\nIn May, Thomas Mueller, one of Mr. Musk\u2019s original SpaceX employees and the manager who has been in charge of designing every one of the company\u2019s rockets, told a space conference in Los Angeles he was devoting essentially all of his time to developing the BFR.\nThe reduced role for Falcon Heavy also comes as global demand for launches of large commercial satellites has slipped dramatically. Nearly all Wall Street analysts and industry experts expect launch contracts will remain at depressed levels for years to come.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announced that it had signed up the first private passenger to fly around the moon. It didn\u2019t provide a timetable or other details about the plan. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It Signed Up Its First Moon Tourist (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "645",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-says-it-has-signed-up-its-first-round-the-moon-tourist-1536898342?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=64",
        "text": "In the message, however, SpaceX described the latest plan as \u201can important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.\u201d The identity of the passenger and other specifics are expected to be disclosed Monday.\nThursday\u2019s two-sentence statement\u2014which caught a number of space experts off guard\u2014suggests that Mr. Musk hopes to demonstrate momentum and attract more public attention to plans for his mammoth rocket and its associated spacecraft, intended to be bigger than a superjumbo airliner. As described previously by Mr. Musk, the BFR would be larger and more powerful than any rocket in history.\n\n\nRevised proposals for both were unveiled earlier this year, at which time Mr. Musk indicated he hoped to use the combination to take private passengers, and ultimately U.S. astronauts, toward the moon and deeper into space.\nBut the latest development also highlights Mr. Musk\u2019s contrarian, sometimes unpredictable streak, as well as the frequently shifting outlines of his manned space-transportation strategy.\nIn early 2017, Mr. Musk shocked the aerospace community by announcing his intention to send two space tourists, who also weren\u2019t identified, around the moon by the end of this year. Those trailblazing flights were supposed to use a human-rated version of the company\u2019s existing Dragon spacecraft on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket\u2014a 27-engine behemoth in which SpaceX has invested close to $1 billion. At the time, veteran industry officials expressed doubts about the projected timetable.\nThe first Falcon Heavy launched successfully earlier this year. But just the day before, Mr. Musk revealed the rocket already was in danger of being relegated to a backup role regarding future human flights.\nMonths later, a SpaceX spokesman confirmed the late-2018 timetable for the lunar-tourist mission had slipped to at least mid-2019 and likely longer.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nNow, company leaders seem to have moved closer to scrapping those specific Falcon Heavy ambitions altogether, by aiming to use that rocket almost exclusively for unmanned missions such as launching commercial or military satellites. As a result Mr. Musk appears focused on accelerating BFR development as part of his broader human-exploration agenda.\nAs he has before, the billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n may end up confounding naysayers about the capabilities of his team to develop and test the BFR, even if it takes longer than originally anticipated.\nIn May, Thomas Mueller, one of Mr. Musk\u2019s original SpaceX employees and the manager who has been in charge of designing every one of the company\u2019s rockets, told a space conference in Los Angeles he was devoting essentially all of his time to developing the BFR.\nThe reduced role for Falcon Heavy also comes as global demand for launches of large commercial satellites has slipped dramatically. Nearly all Wall Street analysts and industry experts expect launch contracts will remain at depressed levels for years to come.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announced that it had signed up the first private passenger to fly around the moon. It didn\u2019t provide a timetable or other details about the plan. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It Signed Up Its First Moon Tourist (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "646",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-says-it-has-signed-up-its-first-round-the-moon-tourist-1536898342?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=22",
        "text": "In the message, however, SpaceX described the latest plan as \u201can important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.\u201d The identity of the passenger and other specifics are expected to be disclosed Monday.\n\n\n\n\nThursday\u2019s two-sentence statement\u2014which caught a number of space experts off guard\u2014suggests that Mr. Musk hopes to demonstrate momentum and attract more public attention to plans for his mammoth rocket and its associated spacecraft, intended to be bigger than a superjumbo airliner. As described previously by Mr. Musk, the BFR would be larger and more powerful than any rocket in history.\n\n\nRevised proposals for both were unveiled earlier this year, at which time Mr. Musk indicated he hoped to use the combination to take private passengers, and ultimately U.S. astronauts, toward the moon and deeper into space.\nBut the latest development also highlights Mr. Musk\u2019s contrarian, sometimes unpredictable streak, as well as the frequently shifting outlines of his manned space-transportation strategy.\nIn early 2017, Mr. Musk shocked the aerospace community by announcing his intention to send two space tourists, who also weren\u2019t identified, around the moon by the end of this year. Those trailblazing flights were supposed to use a human-rated version of the company\u2019s existing Dragon spacecraft on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket\u2014a 27-engine behemoth in which SpaceX has invested close to $1 billion. At the time, veteran industry officials expressed doubts about the projected timetable.\nThe first Falcon Heavy launched successfully earlier this year. But just the day before, Mr. Musk revealed the rocket already was in danger of being relegated to a backup role regarding future human flights.\nMonths later, a SpaceX spokesman confirmed the late-2018 timetable for the lunar-tourist mission had slipped to at least mid-2019 and likely longer.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nNow, company leaders seem to have moved closer to scrapping those specific Falcon Heavy ambitions altogether, by aiming to use that rocket almost exclusively for unmanned missions such as launching commercial or military satellites. As a result Mr. Musk appears focused on accelerating BFR development as part of his broader human-exploration agenda.\nAs he has before, the billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n may end up confounding naysayers about the capabilities of his team to develop and test the BFR, even if it takes longer than originally anticipated.\nIn May, Thomas Mueller, one of Mr. Musk\u2019s original SpaceX employees and the manager who has been in charge of designing every one of the company\u2019s rockets, told a space conference in Los Angeles he was devoting essentially all of his time to developing the BFR.\nThe reduced role for Falcon Heavy also comes as global demand for launches of large commercial satellites has slipped dramatically. Nearly all Wall Street analysts and industry experts expect launch contracts will remain at depressed levels for years to come.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announced that it had signed up the first private passenger to fly around the moon. It didn\u2019t provide a timetable or other details about the plan. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It Signed Up Its First Moon Tourist (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "647",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-says-it-has-signed-up-its-first-round-the-moon-tourist-1536898342?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=88",
        "text": "In the message, however, SpaceX described the latest plan as \u201can important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.\u201d The identity of the passenger and other specifics are expected to be disclosed Monday.\n\n\n\n\nThursday\u2019s two-sentence statement\u2014which caught a number of space experts off guard\u2014suggests that Mr. Musk hopes to demonstrate momentum and attract more public attention to plans for his mammoth rocket and its associated spacecraft, intended to be bigger than a superjumbo airliner. As described previously by Mr. Musk, the BFR would be larger and more powerful than any rocket in history.\n\n\nRevised proposals for both were unveiled earlier this year, at which time Mr. Musk indicated he hoped to use the combination to take private passengers, and ultimately U.S. astronauts, toward the moon and deeper into space.\nBut the latest development also highlights Mr. Musk\u2019s contrarian, sometimes unpredictable streak, as well as the frequently shifting outlines of his manned space-transportation strategy.\nIn early 2017, Mr. Musk shocked the aerospace community by announcing his intention to send two space tourists, who also weren\u2019t identified, around the moon by the end of this year. Those trailblazing flights were supposed to use a human-rated version of the company\u2019s existing Dragon spacecraft on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket\u2014a 27-engine behemoth in which SpaceX has invested close to $1 billion. At the time, veteran industry officials expressed doubts about the projected timetable.\nThe first Falcon Heavy launched successfully earlier this year. But just the day before, Mr. Musk revealed the rocket already was in danger of being relegated to a backup role regarding future human flights.\nMonths later, a SpaceX spokesman confirmed the late-2018 timetable for the lunar-tourist mission had slipped to at least mid-2019 and likely longer.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nNow, company leaders seem to have moved closer to scrapping those specific Falcon Heavy ambitions altogether, by aiming to use that rocket almost exclusively for unmanned missions such as launching commercial or military satellites. As a result Mr. Musk appears focused on accelerating BFR development as part of his broader human-exploration agenda.\nAs he has before, the billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n may end up confounding naysayers about the capabilities of his team to develop and test the BFR, even if it takes longer than originally anticipated.\nIn May, Thomas Mueller, one of Mr. Musk\u2019s original SpaceX employees and the manager who has been in charge of designing every one of the company\u2019s rockets, told a space conference in Los Angeles he was devoting essentially all of his time to developing the BFR.\nThe reduced role for Falcon Heavy also comes as global demand for launches of large commercial satellites has slipped dramatically. Nearly all Wall Street analysts and industry experts expect launch contracts will remain at depressed levels for years to come.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announced that it had signed up the first private passenger to fly around the moon. It didn\u2019t provide a timetable or other details about the plan. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Small-Satellite Launch Venture Fails First Test (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "648",
        "date": "2020-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-small-satellite-launch-venture-fails-first-test-11590446353?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=13",
        "text": "In follow-up messages on Twitter, the company said the main engine roared to life, but \u201can anomaly then occurred early\u201d in the booster\u2019s trajectory, and the mission safely terminated. \u201cOur goals today were to work through the process of conducting a launch, learn as much as we could, and achieve ignition,\u201d the company said. \u201cWe hoped we could have done more, but we accomplished those key objectives today.\u201d\nVirgin Orbit officials had tamped down expectations, reminding reporters during a prelaunch teleconference on Saturday that on average one out of two launches of a new rocket design fail. The flight on Monday had been delayed from last year for some rocket modifications.\n\n\nBut hours after the sudden failure, a company representative provided additional details suggesting the cause may be more significant than the earlier tweets suggested. In an email response, Virgin Orbit spokesman Kendall Russell said the rocket\u2019s autonomous safety system, designed to destroy an errant booster if it veers off course, didn\u2019t activate to terminate the flight because the vehicle was still in the correct flight corridor. He added that \u201cengineers are diving into the data now to determine the source\u201d of the catastrophic malfunction.\nA successful flight would have provided a jolt of good news for the global space industry; several startup rocket ventures have lately stumbled or failed partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some companies have been forced to shutter facilities, and interest in prospective launch contracts has slumped, while investments from many entrepreneurs and venture funds have dried up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX and NASA are scheduled to launch the first orbital human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle Program ended in 2011. But as SpaceX dominates the headlines, a large number of small launch startups are poised to fail. WSJ\u2019s Liz Ornitz explains. Photo: NASA/Tony Gray, Tim Terry & Kevin O\u2019Connell\n \n\n\nThe failed launch also amounted to a personal setback for Mr. Branson, the high-profile British billionaire. Despite severe strains on his world-wide business empire because of the pandemic, he has continued to support and closely follow progress of the fledgling launch venture, of which he is a partial owner.\nVirgin Orbit, which started building rockets in Long Beach, Calif., a few years ago and has about 500 employees, stands out from other fledgling launch providers partly because of its novel operating concept. The use of an airborne platform is intended to provide maximum flexibility as far as the time and location of launches. Customers are supposed to be able to set up satellite delivery to specific orbits, something that typically can\u2019t be arranged when small spacecraft piggyback rides on larger rockets boosting larger satellites.\nMr. Branson wasn\u2019t at the Mojave Air and Space Port when the four-engine jumbo jet lifted off. But on Saturday Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, joked that he hadn\u2019t heard from his boss for some 40 minutes. Mr. Branson \u201chas guided and mentored us through the years,\u201d Mr. Hart said, and was \u201calways available for a phone call.\u201d\nEven with a picture-perfect launch, prospects for the company\u2019s growth over the next few years would have seemed limited. Mr. Hart told reporters current plans call for ramping up commercial operations slowly, with two to four launches likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 marketed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nIn the wake of the failure, Mr. Musk commented on the disappointment. \u201cSorry to hear that. Orbit is hard,\u201d he said in a message on Twitter. \u201cTook us four attempts with Falcon 1,\u201d he wrote, referring to the rocket that SpaceX flew before the Falcon 9.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit aims to loft into low-Earth orbit satellites weighing several hundred pounds, versus spacecraft weighing thousands of pounds for SpaceX and European competitor Arianespace SA.\nOver the last two years, the U.S. has captured roughly 60% of the global market for launching such larger commercial satellites\u2014some rivaling the size of a pickup truck or van\u2014into higher orbits. Virgin Orbit is targeting civil, military and commercial customers at the lower end of the market and, according to Mr. Hart, already has several hundred million dollars in contracts.\nAdvances in satellite design and fabrication have resulted in steadily smaller and more capable satellites. But a number of analysts anticipate commercial customer demand will support only two or three small-satellite launch systems in coming years, and U.S. military needs are still unclear.\nOther companies pursuing small-satellite launches include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven booster; Blue Origin Federation LLC, established by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founde A company founded by entrepreneur Richard Branson to launch small satellites botched its initial demonstration flight, as a rocket released from a specially outfitted jumbo jet failed to reach low-earth orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Small-Satellite Launch Venture Fails First Test (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "649",
        "date": "2020-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-small-satellite-launch-venture-fails-first-test-11590446353?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=45",
        "text": "In follow-up messages on Twitter, the company said the main engine roared to life, but \u201can anomaly then occurred early\u201d in the booster\u2019s trajectory, and the mission safely terminated. \u201cOur goals today were to work through the process of conducting a launch, learn as much as we could, and achieve ignition,\u201d the company said. \u201cWe hoped we could have done more, but we accomplished those key objectives today.\u201d\nVirgin Orbit officials had tamped down expectations, reminding reporters during a prelaunch teleconference on Saturday that on average one out of two launches of a new rocket design fail. The flight on Monday had been delayed from last year for some rocket modifications.\n\n\nBut hours after the sudden failure, a company representative provided additional details suggesting the cause may be more significant than the earlier tweets suggested. In an email response, Virgin Orbit spokesman Kendall Russell said the rocket\u2019s autonomous safety system, designed to destroy an errant booster if it veers off course, didn\u2019t activate to terminate the flight because the vehicle was still in the correct flight corridor. He added that \u201cengineers are diving into the data now to determine the source\u201d of the catastrophic malfunction.\nA successful flight would have provided a jolt of good news for the global space industry; several startup rocket ventures have lately stumbled or failed partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some companies have been forced to shutter facilities, and interest in prospective launch contracts has slumped, while investments from many entrepreneurs and venture funds have dried up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX and NASA are scheduled to launch the first orbital human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle Program ended in 2011. But as SpaceX dominates the headlines, a large number of small launch startups are poised to fail. WSJ\u2019s Liz Ornitz explains. Photo: NASA/Tony Gray, Tim Terry & Kevin O\u2019Connell\n \n\n\nThe failed launch also amounted to a personal setback for Mr. Branson, the high-profile British billionaire. Despite severe strains on his world-wide business empire because of the pandemic, he has continued to support and closely follow progress of the fledgling launch venture, of which he is a partial owner.\nVirgin Orbit, which started building rockets in Long Beach, Calif., a few years ago and has about 500 employees, stands out from other fledgling launch providers partly because of its novel operating concept. The use of an airborne platform is intended to provide maximum flexibility as far as the time and location of launches. Customers are supposed to be able to set up satellite delivery to specific orbits, something that typically can\u2019t be arranged when small spacecraft piggyback rides on larger rockets boosting larger satellites.\nMr. Branson wasn\u2019t at the Mojave Air and Space Port when the four-engine jumbo jet lifted off. But on Saturday Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, joked that he hadn\u2019t heard from his boss for some 40 minutes. Mr. Branson \u201chas guided and mentored us through the years,\u201d Mr. Hart said, and was \u201calways available for a phone call.\u201d\nEven with a picture-perfect launch, prospects for the company\u2019s growth over the next few years would have seemed limited. Mr. Hart told reporters current plans call for ramping up commercial operations slowly, with two to four launches likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 marketed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nIn the wake of the failure, Mr. Musk commented on the disappointment. \u201cSorry to hear that. Orbit is hard,\u201d he said in a message on Twitter. \u201cTook us four attempts with Falcon 1,\u201d he wrote, referring to the rocket that SpaceX flew before the Falcon 9.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit aims to loft into low-Earth orbit satellites weighing several hundred pounds, versus spacecraft weighing thousands of pounds for SpaceX and European competitor Arianespace SA.\nOver the last two years, the U.S. has captured roughly 60% of the global market for launching such larger commercial satellites\u2014some rivaling the size of a pickup truck or van\u2014into higher orbits. Virgin Orbit is targeting civil, military and commercial customers at the lower end of the market and, according to Mr. Hart, already has several hundred million dollars in contracts.\nAdvances in satellite design and fabrication have resulted in steadily smaller and more capable satellites. But a number of analysts anticipate commercial customer demand will support only two or three small-satellite launch systems in coming years, and U.S. military needs are still unclear.\nOther companies pursuing small-satellite launches include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven booster; Blue Origin Federation LLC, established by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founde A company founded by entrepreneur Richard Branson to launch small satellites botched its initial demonstration flight, as a rocket released from a specially outfitted jumbo jet failed to reach low-earth orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Small-Satellite Launch Venture Fails First Test (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "650",
        "date": "2020-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-small-satellite-launch-venture-fails-first-test-11590446353?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=54",
        "text": "In follow-up messages on Twitter, the company said the main engine roared to life, but \u201can anomaly then occurred early\u201d in the booster\u2019s trajectory, and the mission safely terminated. \u201cOur goals today were to work through the process of conducting a launch, learn as much as we could, and achieve ignition,\u201d the company said. \u201cWe hoped we could have done more, but we accomplished those key objectives today.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit officials had tamped down expectations, reminding reporters during a prelaunch teleconference on Saturday that on average one out of two launches of a new rocket design fail. The flight on Monday had been delayed from last year for some rocket modifications.\n\n\nBut hours after the sudden failure, a company representative provided additional details suggesting the cause may be more significant than the earlier tweets suggested. In an email response, Virgin Orbit spokesman Kendall Russell said the rocket\u2019s autonomous safety system, designed to destroy an errant booster if it veers off course, didn\u2019t activate to terminate the flight because the vehicle was still in the correct flight corridor. He added that \u201cengineers are diving into the data now to determine the source\u201d of the catastrophic malfunction.\nA successful flight would have provided a jolt of good news for the global space industry; several startup rocket ventures have lately stumbled or failed partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some companies have been forced to shutter facilities, and interest in prospective launch contracts has slumped, while investments from many entrepreneurs and venture funds have dried up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX and NASA are scheduled to launch the first orbital human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle Program ended in 2011. But as SpaceX dominates the headlines, a large number of small launch startups are poised to fail. WSJ\u2019s Liz Ornitz explains. Photo: NASA/Tony Gray, Tim Terry & Kevin O\u2019Connell\n \n\n\nThe failed launch also amounted to a personal setback for Mr. Branson, the high-profile British billionaire. Despite severe strains on his world-wide business empire because of the pandemic, he has continued to support and closely follow progress of the fledgling launch venture, of which he is a partial owner.\nVirgin Orbit, which started building rockets in Long Beach, Calif., a few years ago and has about 500 employees, stands out from other fledgling launch providers partly because of its novel operating concept. The use of an airborne platform is intended to provide maximum flexibility as far as the time and location of launches. Customers are supposed to be able to set up satellite delivery to specific orbits, something that typically can\u2019t be arranged when small spacecraft piggyback rides on larger rockets boosting larger satellites.\nMr. Branson wasn\u2019t at the Mojave Air and Space Port when the four-engine jumbo jet lifted off. But on Saturday Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, joked that he hadn\u2019t heard from his boss for some 40 minutes. Mr. Branson \u201chas guided and mentored us through the years,\u201d Mr. Hart said, and was \u201calways available for a phone call.\u201d\nEven with a picture-perfect launch, prospects for the company\u2019s growth over the next few years would have seemed limited. Mr. Hart told reporters current plans call for ramping up commercial operations slowly, with two to four launches likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 marketed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nIn the wake of the failure, Mr. Musk commented on the disappointment. \u201cSorry to hear that. Orbit is hard,\u201d he said in a message on Twitter. \u201cTook us four attempts with Falcon 1,\u201d he wrote, referring to the rocket that SpaceX flew before the Falcon 9.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit aims to loft into low-Earth orbit satellites weighing several hundred pounds, versus spacecraft weighing thousands of pounds for SpaceX and European competitor Arianespace SA.\nOver the last two years, the U.S. has captured roughly 60% of the global market for launching such larger commercial satellites\u2014some rivaling the size of a pickup truck or van\u2014into higher orbits. Virgin Orbit is targeting civil, military and commercial customers at the lower end of the market and, according to Mr. Hart, already has several hundred million dollars in contracts.\nAdvances in satellite design and fabrication have resulted in steadily smaller and more capable satellites. But a number of analysts anticipate commercial customer demand will support only two or three small-satellite launch systems in coming years, and U.S. military needs are still unclear.\nOther companies pursuing small-satellite launches include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven booster; Blue Origin Federation LLC, established by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n fo A company founded by entrepreneur Richard Branson to launch small satellites botched its initial demonstration flight, as a rocket released from a specially outfitted jumbo jet failed to reach low-earth orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Offers to Waive $2 Billion for NASA Contract (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "651",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-fresh-from-space-offers-to-waive-2-billion-for-nasa-moon-contract-11627379891?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=25",
        "text": "In an open letter Monday to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s administrator, Mr. Bezos said his fee-waiving offer over roughly the next two years would remove those constraints.\n\u201cI believe this mission is important. I am honored to offer these contributions and am grateful to be in a financial position to be able to do so,\u201d Mr. Bezos said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSpaceX won the $2.9 billion Artemis contract in April, beating out bids by both Blue Origin and a unit of Virginia-based\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which provides scientific and technological services. The arrangement expanded SpaceX\u2019s relationship with NASA, which already is contracting its Falcon 9 rockets to ferry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. \n\n\nA spokesman for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\n\nshare your thoughtsShould NASA accept the fee-waiving offer from Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin space company? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBoth Blue Origin and Dynetics filed protests of the contract award to SpaceX with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which is due to rule on them by next week. NASA said it wouldn\u2019t comment on Mr. Bezos\u2019 letter because of those efforts.\nNASA determined that Blue Origin\u2019s bid price for the lander contract amounted to $5.99 billion, according to the company\u2019s protest with the GAO. The gap between Blue Origin\u2019s higher bid and SpaceX\u2019s would narrow, according to Mr. Bezos\u2019 letter to NASA, but it might not close completely. \nIn addition to the offer to waive $2 billion in payments, Blue Origin promised to fund an additional mission of the lander to low-Earth orbit, the letter said. It didn\u2019t estimate how much that effort would cost. A Blue Origin spokeswoman declined to comment.\nNASA has said its decision to award SpaceX the lander contract was a first step, and not the final one, in the agency\u2019s plans to tap outside companies to provide moon-landing services.\nMr. Nelson said previously at a congressional hearing that NASA would seek $5 billion in additional government funding to support future bids for its lunar lander system.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n who was nominated by the Trump administration to serve as NASA\u2019s finance chief but never received a Senate confirmation vote, said the agency has successfully hired multiple contractors for important space programs. He said NASA should take advantage of what Blue Origin proposed.\n\u201cNothing is more important than having a backup system,\u201d Mr. Autry said.\nMr. Bezos\u2019 appeal came a week after he traveled into space in a flight that highlighted Blue Origin\u2019s interest in the nascent space-tourism market. The company has been trying to develop a business beyond that sector, however.\nIn addition to competing for the moon lander, Blue Origin has been developing a rocket called the New Glenn that is designed to take large payloads into orbit but hasn\u2019t yet flown. The company is behind in its plans to launch the New Glenn and said in February that it was targeting a maiden flight for late next year.\nBlue Origin also struck a deal to develop a new rocket engine for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, but that effort has also experienced delays.\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron contributed to this article.\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com The Amazon founder\u2019s offer aims to help his space company, Blue Origin, secure a joint contract for the lunar-lander program that was awarded solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Offers to Waive $2 Billion for NASA Contract (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "652",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-fresh-from-space-offers-to-waive-2-billion-for-nasa-moon-contract-11627379891?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=5",
        "text": "In an open letter Monday to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s administrator, Mr. Bezos said his fee-waiving offer over roughly the next two years would remove those constraints.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI believe this mission is important. I am honored to offer these contributions and am grateful to be in a financial position to be able to do so,\u201d Mr. Bezos said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSpaceX won the $2.9 billion Artemis contract in April, beating out bids by both Blue Origin and a unit of Virginia-based\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which provides scientific and technological services. The arrangement expanded SpaceX\u2019s relationship with NASA, which already is contracting its Falcon 9 rockets to ferry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. \n\n\nA spokesman for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\n\nshare your thoughtsShould NASA accept the fee-waiving offer from Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin space company? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBoth Blue Origin and Dynetics filed protests of the contract award to SpaceX with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which is due to rule on them by next week. NASA said it wouldn\u2019t comment on Mr. Bezos\u2019 letter because of those efforts.\nNASA determined that Blue Origin\u2019s bid price for the lander contract amounted to $5.99 billion, according to the company\u2019s protest with the GAO. The gap between Blue Origin\u2019s higher bid and SpaceX\u2019s would narrow, according to Mr. Bezos\u2019 letter to NASA, but it might not close completely. \nIn addition to the offer to waive $2 billion in payments, Blue Origin promised to fund an additional mission of the lander to low-Earth orbit, the letter said. It didn\u2019t estimate how much that effort would cost. A Blue Origin spokeswoman declined to comment.\nNASA has said its decision to award SpaceX the lander contract was a first step, and not the final one, in the agency\u2019s plans to tap outside companies to provide moon-landing services.\nMr. Nelson said previously at a congressional hearing that NASA would seek $5 billion in additional government funding to support future bids for its lunar lander system.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n who was nominated by the Trump administration to serve as NASA\u2019s finance chief but never received a Senate confirmation vote, said the agency has successfully hired multiple contractors for important space programs. He said NASA should take advantage of what Blue Origin proposed.\n\u201cNothing is more important than having a backup system,\u201d Mr. Autry said.\nMr. Bezos\u2019 appeal came a week after he traveled into space in a flight that highlighted Blue Origin\u2019s interest in the nascent space-tourism market. The company has been trying to develop a business beyond that sector, however.\nIn addition to competing for the moon lander, Blue Origin has been developing a rocket called the New Glenn that is designed to take large payloads into orbit but hasn\u2019t yet flown. The company is behind in its plans to launch the New Glenn and said in February that it was targeting a maiden flight for late next year.\nBlue Origin also struck a deal to develop a new rocket engine for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, but that effort has also experienced delays.\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron contributed to this article.\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com The Amazon founder\u2019s offer aims to help his space company, Blue Origin, secure a joint contract for the lunar-lander program that was awarded solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Offers to Waive $2 Billion for NASA Contract (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "653",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-fresh-from-space-offers-to-waive-2-billion-for-nasa-moon-contract-11627379891?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=25",
        "text": "In an open letter Monday to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s administrator, Mr. Bezos said his fee-waiving offer over roughly the next two years would remove those constraints.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI believe this mission is important. I am honored to offer these contributions and am grateful to be in a financial position to be able to do so,\u201d Mr. Bezos said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSpaceX won the $2.9 billion Artemis contract in April, beating out bids by both Blue Origin and a unit of Virginia-based\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which provides scientific and technological services. The arrangement expanded SpaceX\u2019s relationship with NASA, which already is contracting its Falcon 9 rockets to ferry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. \n\n\nA spokesman for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\n\nshare your thoughtsShould NASA accept the fee-waiving offer from Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin space company? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBoth Blue Origin and Dynetics filed protests of the contract award to SpaceX with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which is due to rule on them by next week. NASA said it wouldn\u2019t comment on Mr. Bezos\u2019 letter because of those efforts.\nNASA determined that Blue Origin\u2019s bid price for the lander contract amounted to $5.99 billion, according to the company\u2019s protest with the GAO. The gap between Blue Origin\u2019s higher bid and SpaceX\u2019s would narrow, according to Mr. Bezos\u2019 letter to NASA, but it might not close completely. \nIn addition to the offer to waive $2 billion in payments, Blue Origin promised to fund an additional mission of the lander to low-Earth orbit, the letter said. It didn\u2019t estimate how much that effort would cost. A Blue Origin spokeswoman declined to comment.\nNASA has said its decision to award SpaceX the lander contract was a first step, and not the final one, in the agency\u2019s plans to tap outside companies to provide moon-landing services.\nMr. Nelson said previously at a congressional hearing that NASA would seek $5 billion in additional government funding to support future bids for its lunar lander system.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n who was nominated by the Trump administration to serve as NASA\u2019s finance chief but never received a Senate confirmation vote, said the agency has successfully hired multiple contractors for important space programs. He said NASA should take advantage of what Blue Origin proposed.\n\u201cNothing is more important than having a backup system,\u201d Mr. Autry said.\nMr. Bezos\u2019 appeal came a week after he traveled into space in a flight that highlighted Blue Origin\u2019s interest in the nascent space-tourism market. The company has been trying to develop a business beyond that sector, however.\nIn addition to competing for the moon lander, Blue Origin has been developing a rocket called the New Glenn that is designed to take large payloads into orbit but hasn\u2019t yet flown. The company is behind in its plans to launch the New Glenn and said in February that it was targeting a maiden flight for late next year.\nBlue Origin also struck a deal to develop a new rocket engine for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, but that effort has also experienced delays.\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron contributed to this article.\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com The Amazon founder\u2019s offer aims to help his space company, Blue Origin, secure a joint contract for the lunar-lander program that was awarded solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Big Aerospace Contractors Bet On Space Refueling Startup (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "654",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-aerospace-contractors-bet-on-space-refueling-startup-11631008801?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=5",
        "text": "Government agencies and private companies have launched thousands of satellites in recent years for communications networks, navigation systems and other missions. That pace and the expectation of more launches to come have helped support new bets on servicing spacecraft.\nNorthrop Grumman has developed a vehicle that docks to satellites with depleted fuel, prolonging their life by using the vehicle\u2019s own thrusters and fuel. Lockheed Martin last month said a system designed to service other satellites was ready for a demonstration launch later this year.\n\n\nOther privately held space companies are working on projects to move satellites around in space or clean up debris in orbit. Last Thursday,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Redwire Corp.\n\n\n , which is focused in part on in-orbit services and manufacturing, completed a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company. Redwire shares rose 17% Friday in their trading debut, giving it a market value of more than $772 million, according to the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNorthrop Grumman\u2019s Intelsat 901 satellite in a company photograph from February 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Northrop Grumman/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nOrbit Fab has developed a valve system that can latch the company\u2019s refueling vehicles onto other spacecraft, according to Mr. Schiel. In June, Orbit Fab launched a fueling vehicle it developed aboard a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket, to test the valve system and ensure a propellant tank holds its pressure.\n\u201cIf you truly want a bustling in-space economy, you need that energy, you need that fuel in order to move things around,\u201d Mr. Schiel said. The company is looking to launch two refueling shuttles at the end of next year or by early 2023, he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Moran,\n\n\n\n executive director at Lockheed Martin\u2019s venture arm, said the company wanted to invest in Orbit Fab based on customer feedback about keeping satellites operational after they have spent their fuel. \u201cThey\u2019re very interested in extending the lifetime of expensive assets,\u201d he said.\nNorthrop Grumman, which has previously worked with Orbit Fab, said it wants to join with emerging companies to tap into new capabilities for customers.\nCorporate investments such as the kind Northrop and Lockheed made in Orbit Fab have grown as entrepreneurs eye opportunities for economic activity in space. Last year, 61 companies placed investments in space startups, double the number in 2015, according to BryceTech, a data and engineering company.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tOrbit Fab was incorrectly called Orbit Lab on two instances in an earlier version of this article. (Corrected on Sept. 7, 2021) Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have invested in startup Orbit Fab, which plans to launch two refueling shuttles as early as next year. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Big Aerospace Contractors Bet On Space Refueling Startup (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "655",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-aerospace-contractors-bet-on-space-refueling-startup-11631008801?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=23",
        "text": "Government agencies and private companies have launched thousands of satellites in recent years for communications networks, navigation systems and other missions. That pace and the expectation of more launches to come have helped support new bets on servicing spacecraft.\nNorthrop Grumman has developed a vehicle that docks to satellites with depleted fuel, prolonging their life by using the vehicle\u2019s own thrusters and fuel. Lockheed Martin last month said a system designed to service other satellites was ready for a demonstration launch later this year.\n\n\nOther privately held space companies are working on projects to move satellites around in space or clean up debris in orbit. Last Thursday,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Redwire Corp.\n\n\n , which is focused in part on in-orbit services and manufacturing, completed a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company. Redwire shares rose 17% Friday in their trading debut, giving it a market value of more than $772 million, according to the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNorthrop Grumman\u2019s Intelsat 901 satellite in a company photograph from February 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Northrop Grumman/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nOrbit Fab has developed a valve system that can latch the company\u2019s refueling vehicles onto other spacecraft, according to Mr. Schiel. In June, Orbit Fab launched a fueling vehicle it developed aboard a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket, to test the valve system and ensure a propellant tank holds its pressure.\n\u201cIf you truly want a bustling in-space economy, you need that energy, you need that fuel in order to move things around,\u201d Mr. Schiel said. The company is looking to launch two refueling shuttles at the end of next year or by early 2023, he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Moran,\n\n\n\n executive director at Lockheed Martin\u2019s venture arm, said the company wanted to invest in Orbit Fab based on customer feedback about keeping satellites operational after they have spent their fuel. \u201cThey\u2019re very interested in extending the lifetime of expensive assets,\u201d he said.\nNorthrop Grumman, which has previously worked with Orbit Fab, said it wants to join with emerging companies to tap into new capabilities for customers.\nCorporate investments such as the kind Northrop and Lockheed made in Orbit Fab have grown as entrepreneurs eye opportunities for economic activity in space. Last year, 61 companies placed investments in space startups, double the number in 2015, according to BryceTech, a data and engineering company.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tOrbit Fab was incorrectly called Orbit Lab on two instances in an earlier version of this article. (Corrected on Sept. 7, 2021) Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have invested in startup Orbit Fab, which plans to launch two refueling shuttles as early as next year. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Big Aerospace Contractors Bet On Space Refueling Startup (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "656",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-aerospace-contractors-bet-on-space-refueling-startup-11631008801?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=23",
        "text": "Government agencies and private companies have launched thousands of satellites in recent years for communications networks, navigation systems and other missions. That pace and the expectation of more launches to come have helped support new bets on servicing spacecraft.\n\n\n\n\nNorthrop Grumman has developed a vehicle that docks to satellites with depleted fuel, prolonging their life by using the vehicle\u2019s own thrusters and fuel. Lockheed Martin last month said a system designed to service other satellites was ready for a demonstration launch later this year.\n\n\nOther privately held space companies are working on projects to move satellites around in space or clean up debris in orbit. Last Thursday,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Redwire Corp.\n\n\n , which is focused in part on in-orbit services and manufacturing, completed a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company. Redwire shares rose 17% Friday in their trading debut, giving it a market value of more than $772 million, according to the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNorthrop Grumman\u2019s Intelsat 901 satellite in a company photograph from February 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Northrop Grumman/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nOrbit Fab has developed a valve system that can latch the company\u2019s refueling vehicles onto other spacecraft, according to Mr. Schiel. In June, Orbit Fab launched a fueling vehicle it developed aboard a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket, to test the valve system and ensure a propellant tank holds its pressure.\n\u201cIf you truly want a bustling in-space economy, you need that energy, you need that fuel in order to move things around,\u201d Mr. Schiel said. The company is looking to launch two refueling shuttles at the end of next year or by early 2023, he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Moran,\n\n\n\n executive director at Lockheed Martin\u2019s venture arm, said the company wanted to invest in Orbit Fab based on customer feedback about keeping satellites operational after they have spent their fuel. \u201cThey\u2019re very interested in extending the lifetime of expensive assets,\u201d he said.\nNorthrop Grumman, which has previously worked with Orbit Fab, said it wants to join with emerging companies to tap into new capabilities for customers.\nCorporate investments such as the kind Northrop and Lockheed made in Orbit Fab have grown as entrepreneurs eye opportunities for economic activity in space. Last year, 61 companies placed investments in space startups, double the number in 2015, according to BryceTech, a data and engineering company.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tOrbit Fab was incorrectly called Orbit Lab on two instances in an earlier version of this article. (Corrected on Sept. 7, 2021) Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have invested in startup Orbit Fab, which plans to launch two refueling shuttles as early as next year. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Successful Launch Follows Years of Setbacks (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "657",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-successful-launch-saturday-follows-years-of-setbacks-11590869761?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=53",
        "text": "From early tests that revealed capsule leaks to a major failure of a key crew-abort system just months ago, closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, proved resilient enough to bounce back from such setbacks. It took a hasty redesign, for example, to make NASA officials comfortable with the safety of the Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s cluster of four parachutes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSome of SpaceX\u2019s Firsts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSept. 2008 Falcon 1 is the first privately made liquid fuel rocket\nto reach Earth orbit.\n\n\n2010\n\n\nJuly \u201909 Falcon 1 delivers a \ncommercial satellite to orbit.\n\n\nMay \u201912 Dragon spacecraft \nvisits the space station.\n\n\nApril \u201916 The first stage of Falcon 9 returns to earth and lands on a droneship.\n\n\nMarch \u201917 First reflight of an orbital class rocket.\n\n\n2015\n\n\nJune \u201917 A Dragon spacecraft returns to the international space station after being used.\n\n\nMarch \u201919 Crew Dragon spacecraft autonomously docks with the ISS.\n\n\nMay \u201920 The company becomes the first private company to send a human crew into space.\n\n\n2020\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn addition, Mr. Musk\u2019s team had to persuade NASA that its Crew Dragon capsule could safely withstand collisions with micrometeoroids. And NASA, in turn, had to convince its Russian partners on the space station that the capsule\u2019s automated linkup maneuvers include fail-safe protections against crashing into and potentially damaging the orbital laboratory.\n\n\nEach time, SpaceX managers resolved doubts and objections through persistence combined with engineering. The goal is \u201cto break it on the ground during testing to see where the limits are,\u201d Mr. Musk told reporters Friday.\nThe notoriously tough challenges of designing and demonstrating the reliability of a big new rocket\u2014which can cost between $1 billion and $2.5 billion\u2014have kept all but the most well-heeled and confident entrepreneurs away. The version of the Falcon 9 used Saturday has launched some 20 times.\nThrough the years, SpaceX has managed to change course when necessary.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n Mr. Musk\u2019s longtime lieutenant and SpaceX\u2019s president, has said that historically, the aerospace industry has worried too much about the public image of test failures. By contrast, SpaceX remains determined to benefit from them.\n\u201cThe best way to learn is to push your systems to the limit,\u201d Ms. Shotwell has said, to highlight \u201cwhere you\u2019re weak and make things better.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley made history Saturday as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX rocket successfully launched the NASA crew into orbit becoming the first private firm to do so. The endeavor marks a new era for space exploration. Photo: David J. Philip/AP\n \n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com To reach Saturday\u2019s astronaut liftoff, Elon Musk and his engineering team overcame a string of failures and swift design changes that generated years of skepticism inside NASA. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "658",
        "date": "2017-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-proposes-a-private-manned-mission-to-orbit-moon-1488238007?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=26",
        "text": "Few details were given about the prospective tourist flights, which would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development. But the company revealed that health tests and initial training for the first passengers are set to begin later this year, adding that \u201cother flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow.\u201d The current proposal doesn\u2019t entail numerous orbits of the moon or landing on its surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off in Florida on February 19. Prospective tourist flights would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nThe plan entails an autonomous, roughly weeklong voyage that would speed hundreds of thousands of miles from home, hurtle past the Moon and then return on an automated trajectory and presumably, a parachute landing. Mr. Musk told reporters astronauts could replace tourists at NASA\u2019s request. But the agency is pursuing a separate, more expensive program to build a bigger rocket and spacecraft to carry out manned flights near the Moon and eventually to Mars.\n\n\nFor SpaceX, whose full name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the step marks the latest bid to stay at the forefront of high-profile commercial space exploits while positioning itself to benefit from synergies between private and public initiatives. The Southern California company described space tourism as an important complement to its work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe announcement said most of the funding for the manned version of the Dragon capsule came from NASA, and emphasized that the agency has encouraged flying privately crewed missions to lower \u201clong-term costs to the government\u201d and gain additional flight experience and reliability. \n\n\nMore The Smart Way to Pack for Several Months in Outer Space \n\n\nBut the tone and sweep of the announcement also appeared to have the intent of accomplishing the goals of some senior White House aides who want dramatic space initiatives that could be easily understood by average voters and carried out within the president\u2019s current four-year term. Mr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet spelled out his vision for NASA, and major policy decisions are awaiting the nomination of the next NASA administrator. But Mr. Musk has been among high-tech business leaders who have met repeatedly with the president and some top aides. He also has been named to a blue-ribbon White house advisory group.\nIn addition, some transition officials for the administration previously sketched out scenarios under which privately owned and operated spacecraft would fly lunar missions within a few years, and even compete with NASA programs to reach deeper into the solar system\nMonday\u2019s announcement highlighted that, due to the trajectory mapped out for SpaceX\u2019s anticipated paying passengers, they would \u201ctravel faster and deeper into the solar system than any before them.\u201d\nIn a nod to the iconic Apollo program that sent U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon more than four decades ago, SpaceX said plans call for private flights to blast off from the same launchpad where those missions started.\nThe shift to lunar trips comes in the wake of years of blown deadlines by SpaceX in other areas, including a ballooning backlog of dozens of seriously delayed missions, various missed timetables for new technology and a launch cadence stubbornly below what the company projected. \nThe company\u2019s latest project depends on the successful debut of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy, a significantly larger follow-on to the existing Falcon 9 booster, scheduled to fly later this year. \nFeaturing 27 separate engines, the Falcon Heavy is designed to produce two-thirds of the thrust of the vaunted Saturn V rocket that blasted astronauts to the Moon. But over the years, SpaceX engineers have faced substantial technical challenges ensuring precise ignition and burn rates for all those engines, according to industry officials familiar with the details. \nDisclosure of SpaceX\u2019s ambitious tourism concept also comes as the White House and lawmakers prepare to establish revised NASA spending levels, based on likely policy shifts and changing overall federal budget priorities. GOP House and Senate leaders already have signed off on status quo bills that maintain every one of the agency\u2019s manned exploration priorities, but White House insistence on more public-private partnerships could upset those compromises.\nAt the same time, SpaceX\u2019s strategy is likely to further fuel arguments on Capitol Hill and among space experts about the intrinsic scientific value of lunar orbital mission \u2014 a debate that has been under way for many years.\nEarlier this month Mr. Musk\u2019s team acknowledged that the pressure of competing projects\u2014including focus on the Falcon Heavy and recovery from a pair of Falcon 9 explosions\u2014prompted the company to delay it Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has proposed taking tourists around the moon in as soon as two years, touting such missions as the evolution of public-private partnerships favored by the Trump administration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "659",
        "date": "2017-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-proposes-a-private-manned-mission-to-orbit-moon-1488238007?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=92",
        "text": "Few details were given about the prospective tourist flights, which would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development. But the company revealed that health tests and initial training for the first passengers are set to begin later this year, adding that \u201cother flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow.\u201d The current proposal doesn\u2019t entail numerous orbits of the moon or landing on its surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off in Florida on February 19. Prospective tourist flights would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nThe plan entails an autonomous, roughly weeklong voyage that would speed hundreds of thousands of miles from home, hurtle past the Moon and then return on an automated trajectory and presumably, a parachute landing. Mr. Musk told reporters astronauts could replace tourists at NASA\u2019s request. But the agency is pursuing a separate, more expensive program to build a bigger rocket and spacecraft to carry out manned flights near the Moon and eventually to Mars.\n\n\nFor SpaceX, whose full name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the step marks the latest bid to stay at the forefront of high-profile commercial space exploits while positioning itself to benefit from synergies between private and public initiatives. The Southern California company described space tourism as an important complement to its work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe announcement said most of the funding for the manned version of the Dragon capsule came from NASA, and emphasized that the agency has encouraged flying privately crewed missions to lower \u201clong-term costs to the government\u201d and gain additional flight experience and reliability. \n\n\nMore The Smart Way to Pack for Several Months in Outer Space \n\n\nBut the tone and sweep of the announcement also appeared to have the intent of accomplishing the goals of some senior White House aides who want dramatic space initiatives that could be easily understood by average voters and carried out within the president\u2019s current four-year term. Mr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet spelled out his vision for NASA, and major policy decisions are awaiting the nomination of the next NASA administrator. But Mr. Musk has been among high-tech business leaders who have met repeatedly with the president and some top aides. He also has been named to a blue-ribbon White house advisory group.\nIn addition, some transition officials for the administration previously sketched out scenarios under which privately owned and operated spacecraft would fly lunar missions within a few years, and even compete with NASA programs to reach deeper into the solar system\nMonday\u2019s announcement highlighted that, due to the trajectory mapped out for SpaceX\u2019s anticipated paying passengers, they would \u201ctravel faster and deeper into the solar system than any before them.\u201d\nIn a nod to the iconic Apollo program that sent U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon more than four decades ago, SpaceX said plans call for private flights to blast off from the same launchpad where those missions started.\nThe shift to lunar trips comes in the wake of years of blown deadlines by SpaceX in other areas, including a ballooning backlog of dozens of seriously delayed missions, various missed timetables for new technology and a launch cadence stubbornly below what the company projected. \nThe company\u2019s latest project depends on the successful debut of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy, a significantly larger follow-on to the existing Falcon 9 booster, scheduled to fly later this year. \nFeaturing 27 separate engines, the Falcon Heavy is designed to produce two-thirds of the thrust of the vaunted Saturn V rocket that blasted astronauts to the Moon. But over the years, SpaceX engineers have faced substantial technical challenges ensuring precise ignition and burn rates for all those engines, according to industry officials familiar with the details. \nDisclosure of SpaceX\u2019s ambitious tourism concept also comes as the White House and lawmakers prepare to establish revised NASA spending levels, based on likely policy shifts and changing overall federal budget priorities. GOP House and Senate leaders already have signed off on status quo bills that maintain every one of the agency\u2019s manned exploration priorities, but White House insistence on more public-private partnerships could upset those compromises.\nAt the same time, SpaceX\u2019s strategy is likely to further fuel arguments on Capitol Hill and among space experts about the intrinsic scientific value of lunar orbital mission \u2014 a debate that has been under way for many years.\nEarlier this month Mr. Musk\u2019s team acknowledged that the pressure of competing projects\u2014including focus on the Falcon Heavy and recovery from a pair of Falcon 9 explosions\u2014prompted the company to delay it Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has proposed taking tourists around the moon in as soon as two years, touting such missions as the evolution of public-private partnerships favored by the Trump administration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "660",
        "date": "2017-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-proposes-a-private-manned-mission-to-orbit-moon-1488238007?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=87",
        "text": "Few details were given about the prospective tourist flights, which would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development. But the company revealed that health tests and initial training for the first passengers are set to begin later this year, adding that \u201cother flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow.\u201d The current proposal doesn\u2019t entail numerous orbits of the moon or landing on its surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off in Florida on February 19. Prospective tourist flights would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nThe plan entails an autonomous, roughly weeklong voyage that would speed hundreds of thousands of miles from home, hurtle past the Moon and then return on an automated trajectory and presumably, a parachute landing. Mr. Musk told reporters astronauts could replace tourists at NASA\u2019s request. But the agency is pursuing a separate, more expensive program to build a bigger rocket and spacecraft to carry out manned flights near the Moon and eventually to Mars.\n\n\nFor SpaceX, whose full name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the step marks the latest bid to stay at the forefront of high-profile commercial space exploits while positioning itself to benefit from synergies between private and public initiatives. The Southern California company described space tourism as an important complement to its work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe announcement said most of the funding for the manned version of the Dragon capsule came from NASA, and emphasized that the agency has encouraged flying privately crewed missions to lower \u201clong-term costs to the government\u201d and gain additional flight experience and reliability. \n\n\nMore The Smart Way to Pack for Several Months in Outer Space \n\n\nBut the tone and sweep of the announcement also appeared to have the intent of accomplishing the goals of some senior White House aides who want dramatic space initiatives that could be easily understood by average voters and carried out within the president\u2019s current four-year term. Mr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet spelled out his vision for NASA, and major policy decisions are awaiting the nomination of the next NASA administrator. But Mr. Musk has been among high-tech business leaders who have met repeatedly with the president and some top aides. He also has been named to a blue-ribbon White house advisory group.\nIn addition, some transition officials for the administration previously sketched out scenarios under which privately owned and operated spacecraft would fly lunar missions within a few years, and even compete with NASA programs to reach deeper into the solar system\nMonday\u2019s announcement highlighted that, due to the trajectory mapped out for SpaceX\u2019s anticipated paying passengers, they would \u201ctravel faster and deeper into the solar system than any before them.\u201d\nIn a nod to the iconic Apollo program that sent U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon more than four decades ago, SpaceX said plans call for private flights to blast off from the same launchpad where those missions started.\nThe shift to lunar trips comes in the wake of years of blown deadlines by SpaceX in other areas, including a ballooning backlog of dozens of seriously delayed missions, various missed timetables for new technology and a launch cadence stubbornly below what the company projected. \nThe company\u2019s latest project depends on the successful debut of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy, a significantly larger follow-on to the existing Falcon 9 booster, scheduled to fly later this year. \nFeaturing 27 separate engines, the Falcon Heavy is designed to produce two-thirds of the thrust of the vaunted Saturn V rocket that blasted astronauts to the Moon. But over the years, SpaceX engineers have faced substantial technical challenges ensuring precise ignition and burn rates for all those engines, according to industry officials familiar with the details. \nDisclosure of SpaceX\u2019s ambitious tourism concept also comes as the White House and lawmakers prepare to establish revised NASA spending levels, based on likely policy shifts and changing overall federal budget priorities. GOP House and Senate leaders already have signed off on status quo bills that maintain every one of the agency\u2019s manned exploration priorities, but White House insistence on more public-private partnerships could upset those compromises.\nAt the same time, SpaceX\u2019s strategy is likely to further fuel arguments on Capitol Hill and among space experts about the intrinsic scientific value of lunar orbital mission \u2014 a debate that has been under way for many years.\nEarlier this month Mr. Musk\u2019s team acknowledged that the pressure of competing projects\u2014including focus on the Falcon Heavy and recovery from a pair of Falcon 9 explosions\u2014prompted the company to delay it Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has proposed taking tourists around the moon in as soon as two years, touting such missions as the evolution of public-private partnerships favored by the Trump administration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "661",
        "date": "2017-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-proposes-a-private-manned-mission-to-orbit-moon-1488238007?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=129",
        "text": "Few details were given about the prospective tourist flights, which would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development. But the company revealed that health tests and initial training for the first passengers are set to begin later this year, adding that \u201cother flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow.\u201d The current proposal doesn\u2019t entail numerous orbits of the moon or landing on its surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off in Florida on February 19. Prospective tourist flights would use an upgraded Dragon capsule and heavy-lift rocket already in development.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe plan entails an autonomous, roughly weeklong voyage that would speed hundreds of thousands of miles from home, hurtle past the Moon and then return on an automated trajectory and presumably, a parachute landing. Mr. Musk told reporters astronauts could replace tourists at NASA\u2019s request. But the agency is pursuing a separate, more expensive program to build a bigger rocket and spacecraft to carry out manned flights near the Moon and eventually to Mars.\n\n\nFor SpaceX, whose full name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the step marks the latest bid to stay at the forefront of high-profile commercial space exploits while positioning itself to benefit from synergies between private and public initiatives. The Southern California company described space tourism as an important complement to its work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nThe announcement said most of the funding for the manned version of the Dragon capsule came from NASA, and emphasized that the agency has encouraged flying privately crewed missions to lower \u201clong-term costs to the government\u201d and gain additional flight experience and reliability. \n\n\nMore The Smart Way to Pack for Several Months in Outer Space \n\n\nBut the tone and sweep of the announcement also appeared to have the intent of accomplishing the goals of some senior White House aides who want dramatic space initiatives that could be easily understood by average voters and carried out within the president\u2019s current four-year term. Mr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet spelled out his vision for NASA, and major policy decisions are awaiting the nomination of the next NASA administrator. But Mr. Musk has been among high-tech business leaders who have met repeatedly with the president and some top aides. He also has been named to a blue-ribbon White house advisory group.\nIn addition, some transition officials for the administration previously sketched out scenarios under which privately owned and operated spacecraft would fly lunar missions within a few years, and even compete with NASA programs to reach deeper into the solar system\nMonday\u2019s announcement highlighted that, due to the trajectory mapped out for SpaceX\u2019s anticipated paying passengers, they would \u201ctravel faster and deeper into the solar system than any before them.\u201d\nIn a nod to the iconic Apollo program that sent U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon more than four decades ago, SpaceX said plans call for private flights to blast off from the same launchpad where those missions started.\nThe shift to lunar trips comes in the wake of years of blown deadlines by SpaceX in other areas, including a ballooning backlog of dozens of seriously delayed missions, various missed timetables for new technology and a launch cadence stubbornly below what the company projected. \nThe company\u2019s latest project depends on the successful debut of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy, a significantly larger follow-on to the existing Falcon 9 booster, scheduled to fly later this year. \nFeaturing 27 separate engines, the Falcon Heavy is designed to produce two-thirds of the thrust of the vaunted Saturn V rocket that blasted astronauts to the Moon. But over the years, SpaceX engineers have faced substantial technical challenges ensuring precise ignition and burn rates for all those engines, according to industry officials familiar with the details. \nDisclosure of SpaceX\u2019s ambitious tourism concept also comes as the White House and lawmakers prepare to establish revised NASA spending levels, based on likely policy shifts and changing overall federal budget priorities. GOP House and Senate leaders already have signed off on status quo bills that maintain every one of the agency\u2019s manned exploration priorities, but White House insistence on more public-private partnerships could upset those compromises.\nAt the same time, SpaceX\u2019s strategy is likely to further fuel arguments on Capitol Hill and among space experts about the intrinsic scientific value of lunar orbital mission \u2014 a debate that has been under way for many years.\nEarlier this month Mr. Musk\u2019s team acknowledged that the pressure of competing projects\u2014including focus on the Falcon Heavy and recovery from a pair of Falcon 9 explosions\u2014prompted the company to dela Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has proposed taking tourists around the moon in as soon as two years, touting such missions as the evolution of public-private partnerships favored by the Trump administration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon, NASA Remove Barriers Impeding Joint Space Projects (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "662",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-nasa-knock-down-barriers-impeding-joint-space-projects-11612187500?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=9",
        "text": "Driving the changes are actions by Moscow and Beijing to challenge American space interests with antisatellite weapons, jamming capabilities and other potentially hostile technology. Those secretive systems, often operated by specially trained forces focused on space dominance, threaten both U.S. military and private assets in orbit, according to a series of reports from the Pentagon, the White House National Space Council and industry study groups. As a result, the Pentagon is intent on tapping civilian expertise and programs to help gain an edge in this emerging warfighting domain.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGen. John Raymond, chief of operations for the Space Force, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andrew Harnik/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe Space Force is at the center of the action. Gen. John Raymond, the fledgling military branch\u2019s chief of operations, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA aimed at shielding satellites from lasers or cyberattacks. Eventually, according to government and industry officials briefed on the matter, civil-military cooperation is expected to extend to defending planned NASA bases on the lunar surface, as well as protecting U.S. commercial operations envisioned to extract water or minerals there.\n\nLarge and small contractors are maneuvering to take advantage of opportunities to merge military and nonmilitary technologies. They include established military suppliers that already have a foot in both camps, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.87%\n\n\n , the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n LDOS -1.02%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Smaller companies such as Maxar Technologies Holdings Inc., closely held robotic-lander maker Astrobotic Technology Inc. and small-satellite producer Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\n RTX -1.61%\n\n\n , also seek to diversify in the same way.\nBuilding on initial NASA and military technology, Northrop Grumman has demonstrated the commercial utility of attaching a new propulsion system to an aging satellite with depleted fuel reserves, as a way to keep that spacecraft in orbit beyond its intended lifespan. \u201cWe\u2019re very excited about where that\u2019s going to go\u201d in terms of government acceptance of in-orbit refueling and assembly options, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Wilson,\n\n\n\n Northrop\u2019s vice president of strategic space systems.\n\u201cWe\u2019re having a lot of conversations,\u201d he said, \u201cwith the Defense Department, the national-security community and NASA.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Things are transitioning from ideas to actual programs.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Joel Sercel, a space entrepreneur\n\n\n\nThe most dramatic evidence of shifting U.S. policy is \u201cwatching the barriers crumble between civil, military and commercial space in terms of an integrated strategy for our country,\u201d Pam Melroy, an ex-astronaut and former Pentagon and industry official, told a think-tank conference in January.\n\u201cThings are transitioning from ideas to actual programs,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a space entrepreneur who earlier worked for the Pentagon and NASA.\nIndustry and government officials said they expect the trend to accelerate under President Biden, primarily because lawmakers and the military appear strongly behind such an integrated approach in a contested military arena.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched its first mission of the year with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Turkish satellite, the same day an 8% jump in Tesla\u2019s stock made the founder of both companies, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Jan 8, 2021)\n \n\n\n\u201cWe now have those potential adversaries looking to deny our use of space\u201d for military and commercial purposes, Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Thompson,\n\n\n\n the Pentagon\u2019s vice chief of space operations, said during an industry conference last year.\nWhen President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower\n\n\n\n created NASA as an independent agency in 1958, he bucked strong military and congressional pressure to make it part of the Pentagon, said historian Susan Eisenhower, who has written books on her grandfather\u2019s leadership style. Instead, he \u201cwanted a firewall between them\u201d to allow countries to share the science, she said in a talk late last year.\nFor more than six decades, the U.S. government followed that principle despite moves by Beijing and Moscow to meld military and civilian endeavors. The U.S. astronaut corps always has included many military officers, some previous NASA scientists quietly shared data with military counterparts and NASA\u2019s now-retired Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to launch Pentagon satellites. But today, veteran industry and government experts describe the cooperation as much more extensive The collaboration between civilian and military projects\u2014once rare\u2014comes as threats from Russia and China grow. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon, NASA Remove Barriers Impeding Joint Space Projects (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "663",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-nasa-knock-down-barriers-impeding-joint-space-projects-11612187500?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=29",
        "text": "Driving the changes are actions by Moscow and Beijing to challenge American space interests with antisatellite weapons, jamming capabilities and other potentially hostile technology. Those secretive systems, often operated by specially trained forces focused on space dominance, threaten both U.S. military and private assets in orbit, according to a series of reports from the Pentagon, the White House National Space Council and industry study groups. As a result, the Pentagon is intent on tapping civilian expertise and programs to help gain an edge in this emerging warfighting domain.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGen. John Raymond, chief of operations for the Space Force, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andrew Harnik/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Space Force is at the center of the action. Gen. John Raymond, the fledgling military branch\u2019s chief of operations, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA aimed at shielding satellites from lasers or cyberattacks. Eventually, according to government and industry officials briefed on the matter, civil-military cooperation is expected to extend to defending planned NASA bases on the lunar surface, as well as protecting U.S. commercial operations envisioned to extract water or minerals there.\n\nLarge and small contractors are maneuvering to take advantage of opportunities to merge military and nonmilitary technologies. They include established military suppliers that already have a foot in both camps, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.18%\n\n\n , the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n LDOS 0.13%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Smaller companies such as Maxar Technologies Holdings Inc., closely held robotic-lander maker Astrobotic Technology Inc. and small-satellite producer Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\n RTX -0.01%\n\n\n , also seek to diversify in the same way.\nBuilding on initial NASA and military technology, Northrop Grumman has demonstrated the commercial utility of attaching a new propulsion system to an aging satellite with depleted fuel reserves, as a way to keep that spacecraft in orbit beyond its intended lifespan. \u201cWe\u2019re very excited about where that\u2019s going to go\u201d in terms of government acceptance of in-orbit refueling and assembly options, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Wilson,\n\n\n\n Northrop\u2019s vice president of strategic space systems.\n\u201cWe\u2019re having a lot of conversations,\u201d he said, \u201cwith the Defense Department, the national-security community and NASA.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Things are transitioning from ideas to actual programs.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Joel Sercel, a space entrepreneur\n\n\n\nThe most dramatic evidence of shifting U.S. policy is \u201cwatching the barriers crumble between civil, military and commercial space in terms of an integrated strategy for our country,\u201d Pam Melroy, an ex-astronaut and former Pentagon and industry official, told a think-tank conference in January.\n\u201cThings are transitioning from ideas to actual programs,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a space entrepreneur who earlier worked for the Pentagon and NASA.\nIndustry and government officials said they expect the trend to accelerate under President Biden, primarily because lawmakers and the military appear strongly behind such an integrated approach in a contested military arena.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched its first mission of the year with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Turkish satellite, the same day an 8% jump in Tesla\u2019s stock made the founder of both companies, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Jan 8, 2021)\n \n\n\n\u201cWe now have those potential adversaries looking to deny our use of space\u201d for military and commercial purposes, Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Thompson,\n\n\n\n the Pentagon\u2019s vice chief of space operations, said during an industry conference last year.\nWhen President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower\n\n\n\n created NASA as an independent agency in 1958, he bucked strong military and congressional pressure to make it part of the Pentagon, said historian Susan Eisenhower, who has written books on her grandfather\u2019s leadership style. Instead, he \u201cwanted a firewall between them\u201d to allow countries to share the science, she said in a talk late last year.\nFor more than six decades, the U.S. government followed that principle despite moves by Beijing and Moscow to meld military and civilian endeavors. The U.S. astronaut corps always has included many military officers, some previous NASA scientists quietly shared data with military counterparts and NASA\u2019s now-retired Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to launch Pentagon satellites. But today, veteran industry and government experts describe the cooperation as much more extensive, covering burgeoning capabilities such as repairing and repurposing satellites in orbit, or moving them around with nuclear propulsion. Intelligence agencies are more involved than ever in leveraging civilian technology, including artificial intelligence, robotic capabilities and production know-how.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA handout shows an illustration of a Mars transit habitat and nuclear propulsion system that could one day take astronauts there.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA handout/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cYes, we do science, exploration and discovery,\u201d then-NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n told a government and industry gathering in September. He emphasized how well the Pentagon and NASA were working together. \u201cWhat I hope people take away from this discussion,\u201d Mr. Bridenstine said, referring to NASA, is that \u201cwe are an instrument of national power.\u201d\nGeorge Stafford, a co-founder of Blue Canyon, sees NASA and the Pentagon using the same common, small-satellite cores for a range of applications. Military leaders need NASA\u2019s knowledge to achieve some of their goals. For example, they \u201chave to turn to NASA in order to get the expertise they need\u201d to operate in the vicinity of the moon, Mr. Stafford said in an interview. \u201cIt has to be that kind of relationship,\u201d he added, because \u201cour adversaries are expanding their scope\u201d to try to control space around the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Cook,\n\n\n\n deputy group president of Dynetics, sees orbital transfer of supercooled fuel, 3-D imaging of the moon\u2019s surface and nuclear propulsion as core technologies spanning future military and NASA missions. Policy directives from the White House and the Space Force, he said, are aimed at leveraging the nation\u2019s best technical capabilities to establish human outposts on the moon and, ultimately, to project U.S. power deeper into space. Others see a priority in identifying benign foreign satellites from potential weapons.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up News Alert Major world and business news, including political events, takeovers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSome veteran space experts remain skeptical about how quickly tangible changes will materialize. There are a host of \u201cvery interesting and nice theoretical arguments,\u201d about such interagency teamwork, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Loverro,\n\n\n\n who has held senior management jobs at NASA and in the Pentagon. \u201cBut the world isn\u2019t there yet.\u201d\nFor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Jablonsky,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Maxar, more mundane goals such as assembling telescopes and repurposing vehicles in space open up huge possibilities for different parts of the U.S. government.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n a space historian who teaches at American University, sees the inevitable blurring of once-clear distinctions between civil and military initiatives playing out in France, Japan and other countries.\n\u201cYou\u2019re going to see more dual-use civilian and military technology\u201d by nations across the globe, he said.\nSome goals are more aspirational than immediately realistic. NASA and the Space Force ultimately foresee joint programs to shield Earth from potentially cataclysmic collisions with asteroids. The Pentagon has hired a contractor to design a mini space station to research manufacturing and training in orbit.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The collaboration between civilian and military projects\u2014once rare\u2014comes as threats from Russia and China grow. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon, NASA Remove Barriers Impeding Joint Space Projects (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "664",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-nasa-knock-down-barriers-impeding-joint-space-projects-11612187500?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=35",
        "text": "Driving the changes are actions by Moscow and Beijing to challenge American space interests with antisatellite weapons, jamming capabilities and other potentially hostile technology. Those secretive systems, often operated by specially trained forces focused on space dominance, threaten both U.S. military and private assets in orbit, according to a series of reports from the Pentagon, the White House National Space Council and industry study groups. As a result, the Pentagon is intent on tapping civilian expertise and programs to help gain an edge in this emerging warfighting domain.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGen. John Raymond, chief of operations for the Space Force, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andrew Harnik/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe Space Force is at the center of the action. Gen. John Raymond, the fledgling military branch\u2019s chief of operations, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA aimed at shielding satellites from lasers or cyberattacks. Eventually, according to government and industry officials briefed on the matter, civil-military cooperation is expected to extend to defending planned NASA bases on the lunar surface, as well as protecting U.S. commercial operations envisioned to extract water or minerals there.\n\nLarge and small contractors are maneuvering to take advantage of opportunities to merge military and nonmilitary technologies. They include established military suppliers that already have a foot in both camps, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.87%\n\n\n , the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n LDOS -1.02%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Smaller companies such as Maxar Technologies Holdings Inc., closely held robotic-lander maker Astrobotic Technology Inc. and small-satellite producer Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\n RTX -1.61%\n\n\n , also seek to diversify in the same way.\nBuilding on initial NASA and military technology, Northrop Grumman has demonstrated the commercial utility of attaching a new propulsion system to an aging satellite with depleted fuel reserves, as a way to keep that spacecraft in orbit beyond its intended lifespan. \u201cWe\u2019re very excited about where that\u2019s going to go\u201d in terms of government acceptance of in-orbit refueling and assembly options, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Wilson,\n\n\n\n Northrop\u2019s vice president of strategic space systems.\n\u201cWe\u2019re having a lot of conversations,\u201d he said, \u201cwith the Defense Department, the national-security community and NASA.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Things are transitioning from ideas to actual programs.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Joel Sercel, a space entrepreneur\n\n\n\nThe most dramatic evidence of shifting U.S. policy is \u201cwatching the barriers crumble between civil, military and commercial space in terms of an integrated strategy for our country,\u201d Pam Melroy, an ex-astronaut and former Pentagon and industry official, told a think-tank conference in January.\n\u201cThings are transitioning from ideas to actual programs,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a space entrepreneur who earlier worked for the Pentagon and NASA.\nIndustry and government officials said they expect the trend to accelerate under President Biden, primarily because lawmakers and the military appear strongly behind such an integrated approach in a contested military arena.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched its first mission of the year with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Turkish satellite, the same day an 8% jump in Tesla\u2019s stock made the founder of both companies, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Jan 8, 2021)\n \n\n\n\u201cWe now have those potential adversaries looking to deny our use of space\u201d for military and commercial purposes, Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Thompson,\n\n\n\n the Pentagon\u2019s vice chief of space operations, said during an industry conference last year.\nWhen President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower\n\n\n\n created NASA as an independent agency in 1958, he bucked strong military and congressional pressure to make it part of the Pentagon, said historian Susan Eisenhower, who has written books on her grandfather\u2019s leadership style. Instead, he \u201cwanted a firewall between them\u201d to allow countries to share the science, she said in a talk late last year.\nFor more than six decades, the U.S. government followed that principle despite moves by Beijing and Moscow to meld military and civilian endeavors. The U.S. astronaut corps always has included many military officers, some previous NASA scientists quietly shared data with military counterparts and NASA\u2019s now-retired Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to launch Pentagon satellites. But today, veteran industry and government experts describe the cooperation as much more extensive The collaboration between civilian and military projects\u2014once rare\u2014comes as threats from Russia and China grow. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon, NASA Remove Barriers Impeding Joint Space Projects (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "665",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-nasa-knock-down-barriers-impeding-joint-space-projects-11612187500?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=38",
        "text": "Driving the changes are actions by Moscow and Beijing to challenge American space interests with antisatellite weapons, jamming capabilities and other potentially hostile technology. Those secretive systems, often operated by specially trained forces focused on space dominance, threaten both U.S. military and private assets in orbit, according to a series of reports from the Pentagon, the White House National Space Council and industry study groups. As a result, the Pentagon is intent on tapping civilian expertise and programs to help gain an edge in this emerging warfighting domain.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGen. John Raymond, chief of operations for the Space Force, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andrew Harnik/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Space Force is at the center of the action. Gen. John Raymond, the fledgling military branch\u2019s chief of operations, recently unveiled a research partnership with NASA aimed at shielding satellites from lasers or cyberattacks. Eventually, according to government and industry officials briefed on the matter, civil-military cooperation is expected to extend to defending planned NASA bases on the lunar surface, as well as protecting U.S. commercial operations envisioned to extract water or minerals there.\n\nLarge and small contractors are maneuvering to take advantage of opportunities to merge military and nonmilitary technologies. They include established military suppliers that already have a foot in both camps, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.18%\n\n\n , the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n LDOS 0.13%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Smaller companies such as Maxar Technologies Holdings Inc., closely held robotic-lander maker Astrobotic Technology Inc. and small-satellite producer Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\n RTX -0.01%\n\n\n , also seek to diversify in the same way.\nBuilding on initial NASA and military technology, Northrop Grumman has demonstrated the commercial utility of attaching a new propulsion system to an aging satellite with depleted fuel reserves, as a way to keep that spacecraft in orbit beyond its intended lifespan. \u201cWe\u2019re very excited about where that\u2019s going to go\u201d in terms of government acceptance of in-orbit refueling and assembly options, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Wilson,\n\n\n\n Northrop\u2019s vice president of strategic space systems.\n\u201cWe\u2019re having a lot of conversations,\u201d he said, \u201cwith the Defense Department, the national-security community and NASA.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Things are transitioning from ideas to actual programs.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Joel Sercel, a space entrepreneur\n\n\n\nThe most dramatic evidence of shifting U.S. policy is \u201cwatching the barriers crumble between civil, military and commercial space in terms of an integrated strategy for our country,\u201d Pam Melroy, an ex-astronaut and former Pentagon and industry official, told a think-tank conference in January.\n\u201cThings are transitioning from ideas to actual programs,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a space entrepreneur who earlier worked for the Pentagon and NASA.\nIndustry and government officials said they expect the trend to accelerate under President Biden, primarily because lawmakers and the military appear strongly behind such an integrated approach in a contested military arena.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched its first mission of the year with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Turkish satellite, the same day an 8% jump in Tesla\u2019s stock made the founder of both companies, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Jan 8, 2021)\n \n\n\n\u201cWe now have those potential adversaries looking to deny our use of space\u201d for military and commercial purposes, Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Thompson,\n\n\n\n the Pentagon\u2019s vice chief of space operations, said during an industry conference last year.\nWhen President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower\n\n\n\n created NASA as an independent agency in 1958, he bucked strong military and congressional pressure to make it part of the Pentagon, said historian Susan Eisenhower, who has written books on her grandfather\u2019s leadership style. Instead, he \u201cwanted a firewall between them\u201d to allow countries to share the science, she said in a talk late last year.\nFor more than six decades, the U.S. government followed that principle despite moves by Beijing and Moscow to meld military and civilian endeavors. The U.S. astronaut corps always has included many military officers, some previous NASA scientists quietly shared data with military counterparts and NASA\u2019s now-retired Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to launch Pentagon satellites. But today, veteran industry and government experts describe the cooperation as much more extens The collaboration between civilian and military projects\u2014once rare\u2014comes as threats from Russia and China grow. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Review Botched Boeing Launch (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "666",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-review-botched-boeing-launch-11581121101?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=13",
        "text": "Douglas Loverro, an associate NASA administrator, said the agency would examine whether broader problems at Boeing contributed to the Starliner\u2019s software problems. He said NASA\u2019s oversight of the spacecraft\u2019s development had also been insufficient.\n\u201cIt looks as if there could possibly be process issues at Boeing, and so we want to understand what the culture is at Boeing that may have led to that,\u201d Mr. Loverro said in a call with reporters.\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s board ousted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n as chief executive days after the Starliner launch on Dec. 20. The mishap dealt another blow to Boeing, as its management continues to work through the ramifications of the grounding of the 737 MAX. The passenger jet has been grounded since March following the second of two fatal crashes, and Boeing suspended its production in January. \nBoeing said Friday that it had signed a new $13 billion loan agreement to bolster its liquidity. The amount was at the midrange of market expectations. Moody\u2019s said it expects the two-year credit facility to be fully drawn down this year, offsetting a projected $11 billion drain in cash. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n a Boeing senior vice president, said the Chicago-based aerospace giant would learn from the Starliner software problems and was reviewing the matter. \nIn addition to the Starliner, NASA plans to rely on Boeing for spacecraft as part of human exploration of the moon and other parts of the solar system. \nPrior to Friday\u2019s developments, NASA\u2019s top safety-advisory panel urged agency leaders to delve into reasons for the software problems and determine what corrective action may be necessary.\nOn its website, NASA also disclosed that officials are still seeking to understand the root cause of a third technical problem that occurred on the same launch. According to the agency, the flight experienced intermittent communication difficulties between the capsule and the ground, which impeded the ability of flight controllers to send commands and otherwise control the vehicle. \nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The agency wants to know whether broader problems at Boeing contributed to its failure to detect software problems that spoiled the launch of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Review Botched Boeing Launch (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "667",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-review-botched-boeing-launch-11581121101?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=59",
        "text": "Douglas Loverro, an associate NASA administrator, said the agency would examine whether broader problems at Boeing contributed to the Starliner\u2019s software problems. He said NASA\u2019s oversight of the spacecraft\u2019s development had also been insufficient.\n\u201cIt looks as if there could possibly be process issues at Boeing, and so we want to understand what the culture is at Boeing that may have led to that,\u201d Mr. Loverro said in a call with reporters.\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s board ousted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n as chief executive days after the Starliner launch on Dec. 20. The mishap dealt another blow to Boeing, as its management continues to work through the ramifications of the grounding of the 737 MAX. The passenger jet has been grounded since March following the second of two fatal crashes, and Boeing suspended its production in January. \nBoeing said Friday that it had signed a new $13 billion loan agreement to bolster its liquidity. The amount was at the midrange of market expectations. Moody\u2019s said it expects the two-year credit facility to be fully drawn down this year, offsetting a projected $11 billion drain in cash. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n a Boeing senior vice president, said the Chicago-based aerospace giant would learn from the Starliner software problems and was reviewing the matter. \nIn addition to the Starliner, NASA plans to rely on Boeing for spacecraft as part of human exploration of the moon and other parts of the solar system. \nPrior to Friday\u2019s developments, NASA\u2019s top safety-advisory panel urged agency leaders to delve into reasons for the software problems and determine what corrective action may be necessary.\nOn its website, NASA also disclosed that officials are still seeking to understand the root cause of a third technical problem that occurred on the same launch. According to the agency, the flight experienced intermittent communication difficulties between the capsule and the ground, which impeded the ability of flight controllers to send commands and otherwise control the vehicle. \nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The agency wants to know whether broader problems at Boeing contributed to its failure to detect software problems that spoiled the launch of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Craft Docks With Space Station, Ushering in New Era (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "668",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-capsule-links-up-with-space-station-11590934994?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=12",
        "text": "Crucial parts of the trip played out smoothly, from the blastoff to the manual maneuvers near the space station and the seamless docking, culminating with a televised ceremony extolling the accomplishments.\n\u201cThe whole world saw this mission, and we are so, so proud of everything you have done for our country and, in fact, to inspire the world,\u201d an exuberant Jim Bridenstine, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told the crew via a video connection from its Houston mission control center.\n\n\nReferring to the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial unrest across the U.S., Mr. Bridenstine said the latest successes notched by NASA in partnership with Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u2014will help Americans \u201clook at the future and say things are going to be brighter.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Bob Behnken enters the international space station from the SpaceX capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAt a later press conference, Mr. Bridenstine said, \u201cThis has gone as well as we could have expected it to go.\u201d\nThe mission\u2019s assortment of firsts is likely to provide momentum for proposed public-private collaborations to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and similar arrangements for exploration of Mars and other commercial ventures throughout the solar system. President Trump has set a 2024 goal for the next moon landing.\nNASA envisions a surge in companies hunting for business opportunities beyond the atmosphere. \u201cThere are other companies, right now, stepping up to the plate that want to be part of this\u201d new government-industry dynamic, Mr. Bridenstine said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Doug Hurley, right, and Bob Behnken, second from the right, join the crew at the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSuch projects still face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with uncertainties about prospects for future corporate profits. According to many experts inside and outside NASA, the agency\u2019s current plans for swiftly getting back to the lunar surface at this point are significantly underfunded.\nWhite House and Pentagon officials view the mission partly as a way to counter civil and military space advances by China and Russia.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft approaches the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa tv/epa/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s weekend exploits highlighted how far the closely held company has come since its creation as a scrappy startup with a handful of employees working out of a converted warehouse near a strip mall in a Los Angeles suburb. \nAround 1 p.m. Sunday\u2014nearly three hours after arriving at its destination\u2014Crew Dragon\u2019s hatch was opened, and the newest inhabitants of the space station crawled through a connecting tunnel to emerge into the $100 billion facility as its newest inhabitants. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSome of SpaceX\u2019s Firsts\n\n\n\nSept. 2008 Falcon 1 is the first privately made liquid fuel rocket\nto reach Earth orbit.\n\n\n2010\n\n\nJuly \u201909 Falcon 1 delivers a \ncommercial satellite to orbit.\n\n\nMay \u201912 Dragon spacecraft \nvisits the space station.\n\n\nApril \u201916 The first stage of Falcon 9 returns to earth and lands on a droneship.\n\n\nMarch \u201917 First reflight of an orbital class rocket.\n\n\n2015\n\n\nJune \u201917 A Dragon spacecraft returns to the international space station after being used.\n\n\nMarch \u201919 Crew Dragon spacecraft autonomously docks with the ISS.\n\n\nMay \u201920 The company becomes the first private company to send a human crew into space.\n\n\n2020\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cBob and Doug, we\u2019re glad to have you as part of the crew,\u201d said U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy, the space station\u2019s commander, ringing a traditional ship\u2019s bell to mark the occasion. The arrivals hugged Mr. Cassidy and two Russian crew members already in orbit.\nMr. Hurley, dressed in tan pants and a blue, short-sleeved polo shirt with the mission\u2019s logo, said, \u201cWe\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201d\nOn Saturday the crew underwent final medical checks, received weather and other briefings and then rode to the pad in a white, electric-powered sedan built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n another of Mr. Musk\u2019s companies. The launch was the first to blast human beings into space from a U.S. location in nine years, since NASA\u2019s geriatric fleet of space shuttles was retired.\nThe technically smooth countdown at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center had its share of suspense, though, as weather forecasts predicted only a 50-50 chance of acceptable conditions, with rain in the vicinity. Dark, towering clouds and rain menaced the 230-foot rocket during earlier portions of the countdown, but the weather improved dramatically about an hour before launch.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of S Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX on Sunday successfully docked a company-owned capsule carrying a pair of NASA astronauts with the International Space Station, opening a new chapter in commercial space endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Craft Docks With Space Station, Ushering in New Era (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "669",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-capsule-links-up-with-space-station-11590934994?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=38",
        "text": "Crucial parts of the trip played out smoothly, from the blastoff to the manual maneuvers near the space station and the seamless docking, culminating with a televised ceremony extolling the accomplishments.\n\u201cThe whole world saw this mission, and we are so, so proud of everything you have done for our country and, in fact, to inspire the world,\u201d an exuberant Jim Bridenstine, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told the crew via a video connection from its Houston mission control center.\n\n\nReferring to the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial unrest across the U.S., Mr. Bridenstine said the latest successes notched by NASA in partnership with Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u2014will help Americans \u201clook at the future and say things are going to be brighter.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Bob Behnken enters the international space station from the SpaceX capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAt a later press conference, Mr. Bridenstine said, \u201cThis has gone as well as we could have expected it to go.\u201d\nThe mission\u2019s assortment of firsts is likely to provide momentum for proposed public-private collaborations to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and similar arrangements for exploration of Mars and other commercial ventures throughout the solar system. President Trump has set a 2024 goal for the next moon landing.\nNASA envisions a surge in companies hunting for business opportunities beyond the atmosphere. \u201cThere are other companies, right now, stepping up to the plate that want to be part of this\u201d new government-industry dynamic, Mr. Bridenstine said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Doug Hurley, right, and Bob Behnken, second from the right, join the crew at the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSuch projects still face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with uncertainties about prospects for future corporate profits. According to many experts inside and outside NASA, the agency\u2019s current plans for swiftly getting back to the lunar surface at this point are significantly underfunded.\nWhite House and Pentagon officials view the mission partly as a way to counter civil and military space advances by China and Russia.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft approaches the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa tv/epa/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s weekend exploits highlighted how far the closely held company has come since its creation as a scrappy startup with a handful of employees working out of a converted warehouse near a strip mall in a Los Angeles suburb. \nAround 1 p.m. Sunday\u2014nearly three hours after arriving at its destination\u2014Crew Dragon\u2019s hatch was opened, and the newest inhabitants of the space station crawled through a connecting tunnel to emerge into the $100 billion facility as its newest inhabitants. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSome of SpaceX\u2019s Firsts\n\n\n\nSept. 2008 Falcon 1 is the first privately made liquid fuel rocket\nto reach Earth orbit.\n\n\n2010\n\n\nJuly \u201909 Falcon 1 delivers a \ncommercial satellite to orbit.\n\n\nMay \u201912 Dragon spacecraft \nvisits the space station.\n\n\nApril \u201916 The first stage of Falcon 9 returns to earth and lands on a droneship.\n\n\nMarch \u201917 First reflight of an orbital class rocket.\n\n\n2015\n\n\nJune \u201917 A Dragon spacecraft returns to the international space station after being used.\n\n\nMarch \u201919 Crew Dragon spacecraft autonomously docks with the ISS.\n\n\nMay \u201920 The company becomes the first private company to send a human crew into space.\n\n\n2020\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cBob and Doug, we\u2019re glad to have you as part of the crew,\u201d said U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy, the space station\u2019s commander, ringing a traditional ship\u2019s bell to mark the occasion. The arrivals hugged Mr. Cassidy and two Russian crew members already in orbit.\nMr. Hurley, dressed in tan pants and a blue, short-sleeved polo shirt with the mission\u2019s logo, said, \u201cWe\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201d\nOn Saturday the crew underwent final medical checks, received weather and other briefings and then rode to the pad in a white, electric-powered sedan built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n another of Mr. Musk\u2019s companies. The launch was the first to blast human beings into space from a U.S. location in nine years, since NASA\u2019s geriatric fleet of space shuttles was retired.\nThe technically smooth countdown at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center had its share of suspense, though, as weather forecasts predicted only a 50-50 chance of acceptable conditions, with rain in the vicinity. Dark, towering clouds and rain menaced the 230-foot rocket during earlier portions of the countdown, but the weather improved dramatically about an hour before launch.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of S Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX on Sunday successfully docked a company-owned capsule carrying a pair of NASA astronauts with the International Space Station, opening a new chapter in commercial space endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Craft Docks With Space Station, Ushering in New Era (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "670",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-capsule-links-up-with-space-station-11590934994?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=44",
        "text": "Crucial parts of the trip played out smoothly, from the blastoff to the manual maneuvers near the space station and the seamless docking, culminating with a televised ceremony extolling the accomplishments.\n\u201cThe whole world saw this mission, and we are so, so proud of everything you have done for our country and, in fact, to inspire the world,\u201d an exuberant Jim Bridenstine, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told the crew via a video connection from its Houston mission control center.\n\n\nReferring to the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial unrest across the U.S., Mr. Bridenstine said the latest successes notched by NASA in partnership with Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u2014will help Americans \u201clook at the future and say things are going to be brighter.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Bob Behnken enters the international space station from the SpaceX capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAt a later press conference, Mr. Bridenstine said, \u201cThis has gone as well as we could have expected it to go.\u201d\nThe mission\u2019s assortment of firsts is likely to provide momentum for proposed public-private collaborations to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and similar arrangements for exploration of Mars and other commercial ventures throughout the solar system. President Trump has set a 2024 goal for the next moon landing.\nNASA envisions a surge in companies hunting for business opportunities beyond the atmosphere. \u201cThere are other companies, right now, stepping up to the plate that want to be part of this\u201d new government-industry dynamic, Mr. Bridenstine said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Doug Hurley, right, and Bob Behnken, second from the right, join the crew at the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSuch projects still face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with uncertainties about prospects for future corporate profits. According to many experts inside and outside NASA, the agency\u2019s current plans for swiftly getting back to the lunar surface at this point are significantly underfunded.\nWhite House and Pentagon officials view the mission partly as a way to counter civil and military space advances by China and Russia.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft approaches the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa tv/epa/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s weekend exploits highlighted how far the closely held company has come since its creation as a scrappy startup with a handful of employees working out of a converted warehouse near a strip mall in a Los Angeles suburb. \nAround 1 p.m. Sunday\u2014nearly three hours after arriving at its destination\u2014Crew Dragon\u2019s hatch was opened, and the newest inhabitants of the space station crawled through a connecting tunnel to emerge into the $100 billion facility as its newest inhabitants. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSome of SpaceX\u2019s Firsts\n\n\n\nSept. 2008 Falcon 1 is the first privately made liquid fuel rocket\nto reach Earth orbit.\n\n\n2010\n\n\nJuly \u201909 Falcon 1 delivers a \ncommercial satellite to orbit.\n\n\nMay \u201912 Dragon spacecraft \nvisits the space station.\n\n\nApril \u201916 The first stage of Falcon 9 returns to earth and lands on a droneship.\n\n\nMarch \u201917 First reflight of an orbital class rocket.\n\n\n2015\n\n\nJune \u201917 A Dragon spacecraft returns to the international space station after being used.\n\n\nMarch \u201919 Crew Dragon spacecraft autonomously docks with the ISS.\n\n\nMay \u201920 The company becomes the first private company to send a human crew into space.\n\n\n2020\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cBob and Doug, we\u2019re glad to have you as part of the crew,\u201d said U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy, the space station\u2019s commander, ringing a traditional ship\u2019s bell to mark the occasion. The arrivals hugged Mr. Cassidy and two Russian crew members already in orbit.\nMr. Hurley, dressed in tan pants and a blue, short-sleeved polo shirt with the mission\u2019s logo, said, \u201cWe\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201d\nOn Saturday the crew underwent final medical checks, received weather and other briefings and then rode to the pad in a white, electric-powered sedan built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n another of Mr. Musk\u2019s companies. The launch was the first to blast human beings into space from a U.S. location in nine years, since NASA\u2019s geriatric fleet of space shuttles was retired.\nThe technically smooth countdown at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center had its share of suspense, though, as weather forecasts predicted only a 50-50 chance of acceptable conditions, with rain in the vicinity. Dark, towering clouds and rain menaced the 230-foot rocket during earlier portions of the countdown, but the weather improved dramatically about an hour before launch.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahead of S Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX on Sunday successfully docked a company-owned capsule carrying a pair of NASA astronauts with the International Space Station, opening a new chapter in commercial space endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Craft Docks With Space Station, Ushering in New Era (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "671",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-capsule-links-up-with-space-station-11590934994?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=53",
        "text": "Crucial parts of the trip played out smoothly, from the blastoff to the manual maneuvers near the space station and the seamless docking, culminating with a televised ceremony extolling the accomplishments.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe whole world saw this mission, and we are so, so proud of everything you have done for our country and, in fact, to inspire the world,\u201d an exuberant Jim Bridenstine, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, told the crew via a video connection from its Houston mission control center.\n\n\nReferring to the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial unrest across the U.S., Mr. Bridenstine said the latest successes notched by NASA in partnership with Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u2014will help Americans \u201clook at the future and say things are going to be brighter.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Bob Behnken enters the international space station from the SpaceX capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAt a later press conference, Mr. Bridenstine said, \u201cThis has gone as well as we could have expected it to go.\u201d\nThe mission\u2019s assortment of firsts is likely to provide momentum for proposed public-private collaborations to return U.S. astronauts to the moon and similar arrangements for exploration of Mars and other commercial ventures throughout the solar system. President Trump has set a 2024 goal for the next moon landing.\nNASA envisions a surge in companies hunting for business opportunities beyond the atmosphere. \u201cThere are other companies, right now, stepping up to the plate that want to be part of this\u201d new government-industry dynamic, Mr. Bridenstine said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Doug Hurley, right, and Bob Behnken, second from the right, join the crew at the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSuch projects still face significant funding and technical challenges, starting with uncertainties about prospects for future corporate profits. According to many experts inside and outside NASA, the agency\u2019s current plans for swiftly getting back to the lunar surface at this point are significantly underfunded.\nWhite House and Pentagon officials view the mission partly as a way to counter civil and military space advances by China and Russia.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft approaches the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa tv/epa/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s weekend exploits highlighted how far the closely held company has come since its creation as a scrappy startup with a handful of employees working out of a converted warehouse near a strip mall in a Los Angeles suburb. \nAround 1 p.m. Sunday\u2014nearly three hours after arriving at its destination\u2014Crew Dragon\u2019s hatch was opened, and the newest inhabitants of the space station crawled through a connecting tunnel to emerge into the $100 billion facility as its newest inhabitants. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSome of SpaceX\u2019s Firsts\n\n\n\nSept. 2008 Falcon 1 is the first privately made liquid fuel rocket\nto reach Earth orbit.\n\n\n2010\n\n\nJuly \u201909 Falcon 1 delivers a \ncommercial satellite to orbit.\n\n\nMay \u201912 Dragon spacecraft \nvisits the space station.\n\n\nApril \u201916 The first stage of Falcon 9 returns to earth and lands on a droneship.\n\n\nMarch \u201917 First reflight of an orbital class rocket.\n\n\n2015\n\n\nJune \u201917 A Dragon spacecraft returns to the international space station after being used.\n\n\nMarch \u201919 Crew Dragon spacecraft autonomously docks with the ISS.\n\n\nMay \u201920 The company becomes the first private company to send a human crew into space.\n\n\n2020\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cBob and Doug, we\u2019re glad to have you as part of the crew,\u201d said U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy, the space station\u2019s commander, ringing a traditional ship\u2019s bell to mark the occasion. The arrivals hugged Mr. Cassidy and two Russian crew members already in orbit.\nMr. Hurley, dressed in tan pants and a blue, short-sleeved polo shirt with the mission\u2019s logo, said, \u201cWe\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201d\nOn Saturday the crew underwent final medical checks, received weather and other briefings and then rode to the pad in a white, electric-powered sedan built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n another of Mr. Musk\u2019s companies. The launch was the first to blast human beings into space from a U.S. location in nine years, since NASA\u2019s geriatric fleet of space shuttles was retired.\nThe technically smooth countdown at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center had its share of suspense, though, as weather forecasts predicted only a 50-50 chance of acceptable conditions, with rain in the vicinity. Dark, towering clouds and rain menaced the 230-foot rocket during earlier portions of the countdown, but the weather improved dramatically about an hour before launch.\n\n\n NASA astronauts Bob Behnken (rear) and Doug Hurley are strapped in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule at Florida's Kennedy Space Center ahe Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX on Sunday successfully docked a company-owned capsule carrying a pair of NASA astronauts with the International Space Station, opening a new chapter in commercial space endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Taxi Services Struggle to Meet  NASA Safety Rules (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "672",
        "date": "2017-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-space-taxi-services-struggle-to-meet-nasa-safety-rules-1511611200?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=22",
        "text": "But these commercial efforts face formidable obstacles in meeting safety requirements set by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, posing policy and public-relations dilemmas for the agency\u2019s chiefs.\nExperts say NASA likely will require inspections in space to reduce the threat of catastrophic accidents, a last-ditch safeguard that it had hoped to avoid when approving the plan three years ago. Still, it is unclear is whether such on-orbit checks by NASA would alleviate dangers from space debris and tiny meteor fragments, say experts inside and outside the agency.\n\n\nFor months, these experts have warned that without new protections neither Boeing\u2019s nor SpaceX\u2019s vehicles appear likely to comply with safety levels. Minutes of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, composed of six independent safety watchdogs, are rife with concerns of danger.\nThe stakes are high both for NASA and the companies. After fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer. Falling short of the safety benchmark could further delay the goal of ending American reliance on Russian spacecraft to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the international space station, a 250-mile-high orbiting laboratory. NASA\u2019s ultimate sign off also is likely to prompt congressional scrutiny.\nBoeing recently said company engineering models show its CST-100 Starliner \u201cis a safe, robust vehicle\u201d that will meet all mandatory safety numbers. \u201cNASA will review that analysis\u201d next month, according to a Boeing spokeswoman, and \u201cwe will not speculate on their findings prior to the meeting.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis image supplied by the European Space Agency shows SpaceX\u2019s unmanned Dragon spacecraft passing above Dubai last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ESA via Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of Mr. Musk\u2019s space-transportation company, recently said it and NASA are \u201cworking closely to ensure all safety requirements are met\u201d for its new, manned Dragon spacecraft. It said the company was evaluating a number of options, including space inspections. Government and company experts \u201chave jointly made significant progress in defining\u201d orbital debris risks, SpaceX said.\nNASA\u2019s requirements now call for a statistical limit of no more than one possible fatal accident per 270 flights. By contrast, scheduled airlines experience roughly one accident per one million departures globally. Although even the new standard seems perilous, it is a reflection of the mission\u2019s technical difficulties. The standard is still more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns.\nThe commercial designers are seeking to alleviate other risks. They are concerned that extra shielding to better safeguard equipment and crews from collisions with debris could make spacecraft too heavy. They also are examining risks associated with vibrations during launch, explosives that deploy parachutes, vulnerabilities of heat shields and other issues. \nBut their biggest safety challenge stems from the thousands of tiny meteors or space particles now prevalent in space that can damage or penetrate the space capsules. Traveling at approximately 17,000 miles an hour, even a paint chip can spark disaster. Boeing partly addressed this by changing its design to install Kevlar backing. SpaceX is relying on other features.\nThe international space station also faces risks from such orbital debris, but its design minimizes hazards and it can maneuver to avoid collisions.\nA comprehensive review of capsule safety is slated for early next month, which is expected to provide NASA\u2019s preliminary conclusions about assessments submitted by each of the contractors. So far the agency has committed roughly $4 billion overall on the two systems, with a total of 16 flights expected through the mid 2020s. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPortions of Boeing\u2019s manned CST-100 Starliner capsule undergo tests at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kim L. Shiflett/Nasa\n \n\n\n\nA NASA spokeswoman said the agency plans to \u201cwork with the contractors [Boeing and SpaceX] through their final certification\u201d and neither company \u201chas requested a formal waiver from NASA\u201d not to comply with required safety metrics. The agency \u201cis still evaluating the use of inspection\u201d for their vehicles, she said. \nAerospace industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Cooke,\n\n\n\n a former senior NASA official, said he wasn\u2019t surprised by difficulties complying with safety standards related to orbital debris. \u201cIt\u2019s always been a difficult requirement to meet,\u201d Mr. Cooke said in an interview. \u201cNASA has to make a judgment on where the overall risk stands,\u201d a decision that is \u201calways done with a lot of data and a lot of hand-wringing,\u201d he said.\nToday, only Russian rockets and spacecraft transport astronauts into orbit. But Moscow\u2019s safety NASA is scrutinizing space safety as Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX work on new vessels that the agency would begin using as early as next year to fly astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Taxi Services Struggle to Meet  NASA Safety Rules (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "673",
        "date": "2017-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-space-taxi-services-struggle-to-meet-nasa-safety-rules-1511611200?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=83",
        "text": "But these commercial efforts face formidable obstacles in meeting safety requirements set by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, posing policy and public-relations dilemmas for the agency\u2019s chiefs.\nExperts say NASA likely will require inspections in space to reduce the threat of catastrophic accidents, a last-ditch safeguard that it had hoped to avoid when approving the plan three years ago. Still, it is unclear is whether such on-orbit checks by NASA would alleviate dangers from space debris and tiny meteor fragments, say experts inside and outside the agency.\n\n\nFor months, these experts have warned that without new protections neither Boeing\u2019s nor SpaceX\u2019s vehicles appear likely to comply with safety levels. Minutes of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, composed of six independent safety watchdogs, are rife with concerns of danger.\nThe stakes are high both for NASA and the companies. After fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer. Falling short of the safety benchmark could further delay the goal of ending American reliance on Russian spacecraft to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the international space station, a 250-mile-high orbiting laboratory. NASA\u2019s ultimate sign off also is likely to prompt congressional scrutiny.\nBoeing recently said company engineering models show its CST-100 Starliner \u201cis a safe, robust vehicle\u201d that will meet all mandatory safety numbers. \u201cNASA will review that analysis\u201d next month, according to a Boeing spokeswoman, and \u201cwe will not speculate on their findings prior to the meeting.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis image supplied by the European Space Agency shows SpaceX\u2019s unmanned Dragon spacecraft passing above Dubai last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ESA via Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of Mr. Musk\u2019s space-transportation company, recently said it and NASA are \u201cworking closely to ensure all safety requirements are met\u201d for its new, manned Dragon spacecraft. It said the company was evaluating a number of options, including space inspections. Government and company experts \u201chave jointly made significant progress in defining\u201d orbital debris risks, SpaceX said.\nNASA\u2019s requirements now call for a statistical limit of no more than one possible fatal accident per 270 flights. By contrast, scheduled airlines experience roughly one accident per one million departures globally. Although even the new standard seems perilous, it is a reflection of the mission\u2019s technical difficulties. The standard is still more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns.\nThe commercial designers are seeking to alleviate other risks. They are concerned that extra shielding to better safeguard equipment and crews from collisions with debris could make spacecraft too heavy. They also are examining risks associated with vibrations during launch, explosives that deploy parachutes, vulnerabilities of heat shields and other issues. \nBut their biggest safety challenge stems from the thousands of tiny meteors or space particles now prevalent in space that can damage or penetrate the space capsules. Traveling at approximately 17,000 miles an hour, even a paint chip can spark disaster. Boeing partly addressed this by changing its design to install Kevlar backing. SpaceX is relying on other features.\nThe international space station also faces risks from such orbital debris, but its design minimizes hazards and it can maneuver to avoid collisions.\nA comprehensive review of capsule safety is slated for early next month, which is expected to provide NASA\u2019s preliminary conclusions about assessments submitted by each of the contractors. So far the agency has committed roughly $4 billion overall on the two systems, with a total of 16 flights expected through the mid 2020s. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPortions of Boeing\u2019s manned CST-100 Starliner capsule undergo tests at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kim L. Shiflett/Nasa\n \n\n\n\nA NASA spokeswoman said the agency plans to \u201cwork with the contractors [Boeing and SpaceX] through their final certification\u201d and neither company \u201chas requested a formal waiver from NASA\u201d not to comply with required safety metrics. The agency \u201cis still evaluating the use of inspection\u201d for their vehicles, she said. \nAerospace industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Cooke,\n\n\n\n a former senior NASA official, said he wasn\u2019t surprised by difficulties complying with safety standards related to orbital debris. \u201cIt\u2019s always been a difficult requirement to meet,\u201d Mr. Cooke said in an interview. \u201cNASA has to make a judgment on where the overall risk stands,\u201d a decision that is \u201calways done with a lot of data and a lot of hand-wringing,\u201d he said.\nToday, only Russian rockets and spacecraft transport astronauts into orbit. But Moscow\u2019s safety NASA is scrutinizing space safety as Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX work on new vessels that the agency would begin using as early as next year to fly astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Taxi Services Struggle to Meet  NASA Safety Rules (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "674",
        "date": "2017-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-space-taxi-services-struggle-to-meet-nasa-safety-rules-1511611200?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=74",
        "text": "But these commercial efforts face formidable obstacles in meeting safety requirements set by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, posing policy and public-relations dilemmas for the agency\u2019s chiefs.\nExperts say NASA likely will require inspections in space to reduce the threat of catastrophic accidents, a last-ditch safeguard that it had hoped to avoid when approving the plan three years ago. Still, it is unclear is whether such on-orbit checks by NASA would alleviate dangers from space debris and tiny meteor fragments, say experts inside and outside the agency.\n\n\nFor months, these experts have warned that without new protections neither Boeing\u2019s nor SpaceX\u2019s vehicles appear likely to comply with safety levels. Minutes of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, composed of six independent safety watchdogs, are rife with concerns of danger.\nThe stakes are high both for NASA and the companies. After fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer. Falling short of the safety benchmark could further delay the goal of ending American reliance on Russian spacecraft to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the international space station, a 250-mile-high orbiting laboratory. NASA\u2019s ultimate sign off also is likely to prompt congressional scrutiny.\nBoeing recently said company engineering models show its CST-100 Starliner \u201cis a safe, robust vehicle\u201d that will meet all mandatory safety numbers. \u201cNASA will review that analysis\u201d next month, according to a Boeing spokeswoman, and \u201cwe will not speculate on their findings prior to the meeting.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis image supplied by the European Space Agency shows SpaceX\u2019s unmanned Dragon spacecraft passing above Dubai last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ESA via Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of Mr. Musk\u2019s space-transportation company, recently said it and NASA are \u201cworking closely to ensure all safety requirements are met\u201d for its new, manned Dragon spacecraft. It said the company was evaluating a number of options, including space inspections. Government and company experts \u201chave jointly made significant progress in defining\u201d orbital debris risks, SpaceX said.\nNASA\u2019s requirements now call for a statistical limit of no more than one possible fatal accident per 270 flights. By contrast, scheduled airlines experience roughly one accident per one million departures globally. Although even the new standard seems perilous, it is a reflection of the mission\u2019s technical difficulties. The standard is still more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns.\nThe commercial designers are seeking to alleviate other risks. They are concerned that extra shielding to better safeguard equipment and crews from collisions with debris could make spacecraft too heavy. They also are examining risks associated with vibrations during launch, explosives that deploy parachutes, vulnerabilities of heat shields and other issues. \nBut their biggest safety challenge stems from the thousands of tiny meteors or space particles now prevalent in space that can damage or penetrate the space capsules. Traveling at approximately 17,000 miles an hour, even a paint chip can spark disaster. Boeing partly addressed this by changing its design to install Kevlar backing. SpaceX is relying on other features.\nThe international space station also faces risks from such orbital debris, but its design minimizes hazards and it can maneuver to avoid collisions.\nA comprehensive review of capsule safety is slated for early next month, which is expected to provide NASA\u2019s preliminary conclusions about assessments submitted by each of the contractors. So far the agency has committed roughly $4 billion overall on the two systems, with a total of 16 flights expected through the mid 2020s. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPortions of Boeing\u2019s manned CST-100 Starliner capsule undergo tests at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kim L. Shiflett/Nasa\n \n\n\n\nA NASA spokeswoman said the agency plans to \u201cwork with the contractors [Boeing and SpaceX] through their final certification\u201d and neither company \u201chas requested a formal waiver from NASA\u201d not to comply with required safety metrics. The agency \u201cis still evaluating the use of inspection\u201d for their vehicles, she said. \nAerospace industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Cooke,\n\n\n\n a former senior NASA official, said he wasn\u2019t surprised by difficulties complying with safety standards related to orbital debris. \u201cIt\u2019s always been a difficult requirement to meet,\u201d Mr. Cooke said in an interview. \u201cNASA has to make a judgment on where the overall risk stands,\u201d a decision that is \u201calways done with a lot of data and a lot of hand-wringing,\u201d he said.\nToday, only Russian rockets and spacecraft transport astronauts into orbit. But Moscow\u2019s safety NASA is scrutinizing space safety as Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX work on new vessels that the agency would begin using as early as next year to fly astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Taxi Services Struggle to Meet  NASA Safety Rules (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "675",
        "date": "2017-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-space-taxi-services-struggle-to-meet-nasa-safety-rules-1511611200?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=107",
        "text": "But these commercial efforts face formidable obstacles in meeting safety requirements set by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, posing policy and public-relations dilemmas for the agency\u2019s chiefs.\n\n\n\n\nExperts say NASA likely will require inspections in space to reduce the threat of catastrophic accidents, a last-ditch safeguard that it had hoped to avoid when approving the plan three years ago. Still, it is unclear is whether such on-orbit checks by NASA would alleviate dangers from space debris and tiny meteor fragments, say experts inside and outside the agency.\n\n\nFor months, these experts have warned that without new protections neither Boeing\u2019s nor SpaceX\u2019s vehicles appear likely to comply with safety levels. Minutes of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, composed of six independent safety watchdogs, are rife with concerns of danger.\nThe stakes are high both for NASA and the companies. After fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer. Falling short of the safety benchmark could further delay the goal of ending American reliance on Russian spacecraft to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the international space station, a 250-mile-high orbiting laboratory. NASA\u2019s ultimate sign off also is likely to prompt congressional scrutiny.\nBoeing recently said company engineering models show its CST-100 Starliner \u201cis a safe, robust vehicle\u201d that will meet all mandatory safety numbers. \u201cNASA will review that analysis\u201d next month, according to a Boeing spokeswoman, and \u201cwe will not speculate on their findings prior to the meeting.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis image supplied by the European Space Agency shows SpaceX\u2019s unmanned Dragon spacecraft passing above Dubai last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ESA via Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of Mr. Musk\u2019s space-transportation company, recently said it and NASA are \u201cworking closely to ensure all safety requirements are met\u201d for its new, manned Dragon spacecraft. It said the company was evaluating a number of options, including space inspections. Government and company experts \u201chave jointly made significant progress in defining\u201d orbital debris risks, SpaceX said.\nNASA\u2019s requirements now call for a statistical limit of no more than one possible fatal accident per 270 flights. By contrast, scheduled airlines experience roughly one accident per one million departures globally. Although even the new standard seems perilous, it is a reflection of the mission\u2019s technical difficulties. The standard is still more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns.\nThe commercial designers are seeking to alleviate other risks. They are concerned that extra shielding to better safeguard equipment and crews from collisions with debris could make spacecraft too heavy. They also are examining risks associated with vibrations during launch, explosives that deploy parachutes, vulnerabilities of heat shields and other issues. \nBut their biggest safety challenge stems from the thousands of tiny meteors or space particles now prevalent in space that can damage or penetrate the space capsules. Traveling at approximately 17,000 miles an hour, even a paint chip can spark disaster. Boeing partly addressed this by changing its design to install Kevlar backing. SpaceX is relying on other features.\nThe international space station also faces risks from such orbital debris, but its design minimizes hazards and it can maneuver to avoid collisions.\nA comprehensive review of capsule safety is slated for early next month, which is expected to provide NASA\u2019s preliminary conclusions about assessments submitted by each of the contractors. So far the agency has committed roughly $4 billion overall on the two systems, with a total of 16 flights expected through the mid 2020s. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPortions of Boeing\u2019s manned CST-100 Starliner capsule undergo tests at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kim L. Shiflett/Nasa\n \n\n\n\nA NASA spokeswoman said the agency plans to \u201cwork with the contractors [Boeing and SpaceX] through their final certification\u201d and neither company \u201chas requested a formal waiver from NASA\u201d not to comply with required safety metrics. The agency \u201cis still evaluating the use of inspection\u201d for their vehicles, she said. \nAerospace industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Cooke,\n\n\n\n a former senior NASA official, said he wasn\u2019t surprised by difficulties complying with safety standards related to orbital debris. \u201cIt\u2019s always been a difficult requirement to meet,\u201d Mr. Cooke said in an interview. \u201cNASA has to make a judgment on where the overall risk stands,\u201d a decision that is \u201calways done with a lot of data and a lot of hand-wringing,\u201d he said.\nToday, only Russian rockets and spacecraft transport astronauts into orbit. But Moscow\u2019s sa NASA is scrutinizing space safety as Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX work on new vessels that the agency would begin using as early as next year to fly astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inmarsat Aims High on In-Flight Wi-Fi (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "676",
        "date": "2017-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/inmarsat-ceo-promises-top-quality-wi-fi-experience-in-flight-1498720304?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=24",
        "text": "Britain\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC is betting that a new satellite, launched overnight by the European Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, will address those concerns. Passengers \u201cwill have a high-quality Wi-Fi experience akin to a top-quality hotel or internet cafe,\u201d Inmarsat Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rupert Pearce\n\n\n\n said in an interview.\n\nBritish Airways,\n\n ICAGY -0.58%\n\n\n a unit of International Continental Airlines Group SA, has committed to becoming the launch operator of the system on its short-haul planes. Deutsche Lufthansa AG said it would experiment with the system.\n\n\nThe new satellite carries payloads for a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia-based Arabsat and for Inmarsat, whose equipment serves as the key element of it in-flight connectivity offer. Inmarsat\u2019s dedicated in-flight system, called the European Aviation Network, relies on a network of terrestrial air-to-ground communications towers, built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deutsche Telekom AG\n\n\n . The satellite link provides additional capacity and fills in the spots in Europe that the ground-towers can\u2019t cover. Using the ground towers will help cut costs, Mr. Pearce said, helping fuel passengers use of the service.\nThe European Aviation Network could serve as a blueprint for the company to target other regions. \u201cThere is an opportunity to take that knowledge to work in other markets and North America could be one of them,\u201d Mr. Pearce said.\n\nGogo Inc.,\n\n\n which provides internet in the U.S. on planes from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n American Airlines Group Inc.,\nDelta Air Lines Inc.\n\n\n and others, has disappointed main travelers because of limited capacity and low speed. Gogo last year signed a contract with global satellite operator SES SA to boost bandwidth. SES last year also agreed to build a powerful new satellite to help France\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Thales SA\n\n\n provide in-flight broadband equivalent to fiber connectivity starting in 2020.\nInmarsat has made a big bet on providing broadband to planes. A series of other spacecraft, called Global Xpress, aim to beam the internet to planes, ships and users on the ground often in remote locations. The company this month announced it would buy a fifth of those spacecraft in a sign of confidence in the market.\nBut its plans for Europe aren\u2019t without critics. Rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat,\n\n\n based in Carlsbad, Calif., said Inmarsat is violating key elements of its license, including relying too heavily on the ground portion. The company also has missed repeated milestones required by the license, said ViaSat president\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Baldridge.\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\u2019s system \u201cis inconsistent with the initial tender,\u201d he said.\nViaSat in April asked the European Court of Justice to instruct the European Commission to enforce Inmarsat\u2019s license rather than delegating that role to European Union member states.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eutelsat,\n\n\n ViaSat\u2019s European partner to provide in-flight broadband in Europe, is joining the case. The two are providing service to European airline\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Finnair\n\n\n and El Al Israel Airlines Ltd.\nMr. Pearce plays down the attack, saying rivals that are behind in deploying their own systems are using legal maneuvers to derail Inmarsat. \u201cTheir claims are completely false and without merit,\u201d he said.\nTo avoid delays to its service, Inmarsat last year moved the launch of the European Aviation Network spacecraft to Ariane 5 rocket from the Falcon 9 made by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, as the U.S. rocket company had suffered an explosion during a fueling exercise in September at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Inmarsat worried SpaceX launches would be delayed as the company returned to flight. \nThe satellite will undergo checks in the next few months before it is set to become operational in September. Inmarsat also still needs some European regulators to sign off on elements of its hybrid system. Although the space element has received all approvals, some regulators in big markets such as Germany and France still need to approve the use of the terrestrial system.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com One of the world\u2019s biggest satellite providers is betting that a new satellite, launched overnight, will allow passengers to have a high-quality Wi-Fi experience when airborne. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inmarsat Aims High on In-Flight Wi-Fi (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "677",
        "date": "2017-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/inmarsat-ceo-promises-top-quality-wi-fi-experience-in-flight-1498720304?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=84",
        "text": "Britain\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC is betting that a new satellite, launched overnight by the European Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, will address those concerns. Passengers \u201cwill have a high-quality Wi-Fi experience akin to a top-quality hotel or internet cafe,\u201d Inmarsat Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rupert Pearce\n\n\n\n said in an interview.\n\nBritish Airways,\n\n ICAGY -0.58%\n\n\n a unit of International Continental Airlines Group SA, has committed to becoming the launch operator of the system on its short-haul planes. Deutsche Lufthansa AG said it would experiment with the system.\n\n\nThe new satellite carries payloads for a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia-based Arabsat and for Inmarsat, whose equipment serves as the key element of it in-flight connectivity offer. Inmarsat\u2019s dedicated in-flight system, called the European Aviation Network, relies on a network of terrestrial air-to-ground communications towers, built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deutsche Telekom AG\n\n\n . The satellite link provides additional capacity and fills in the spots in Europe that the ground-towers can\u2019t cover. Using the ground towers will help cut costs, Mr. Pearce said, helping fuel passengers use of the service.\nThe European Aviation Network could serve as a blueprint for the company to target other regions. \u201cThere is an opportunity to take that knowledge to work in other markets and North America could be one of them,\u201d Mr. Pearce said.\n\nGogo Inc.,\n\n\n which provides internet in the U.S. on planes from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n American Airlines Group Inc.,\nDelta Air Lines Inc.\n\n\n and others, has disappointed main travelers because of limited capacity and low speed. Gogo last year signed a contract with global satellite operator SES SA to boost bandwidth. SES last year also agreed to build a powerful new satellite to help France\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Thales SA\n\n\n provide in-flight broadband equivalent to fiber connectivity starting in 2020.\nInmarsat has made a big bet on providing broadband to planes. A series of other spacecraft, called Global Xpress, aim to beam the internet to planes, ships and users on the ground often in remote locations. The company this month announced it would buy a fifth of those spacecraft in a sign of confidence in the market.\nBut its plans for Europe aren\u2019t without critics. Rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat,\n\n\n based in Carlsbad, Calif., said Inmarsat is violating key elements of its license, including relying too heavily on the ground portion. The company also has missed repeated milestones required by the license, said ViaSat president\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Baldridge.\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\u2019s system \u201cis inconsistent with the initial tender,\u201d he said.\nViaSat in April asked the European Court of Justice to instruct the European Commission to enforce Inmarsat\u2019s license rather than delegating that role to European Union member states.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eutelsat,\n\n\n ViaSat\u2019s European partner to provide in-flight broadband in Europe, is joining the case. The two are providing service to European airline\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Finnair\n\n\n and El Al Israel Airlines Ltd.\nMr. Pearce plays down the attack, saying rivals that are behind in deploying their own systems are using legal maneuvers to derail Inmarsat. \u201cTheir claims are completely false and without merit,\u201d he said.\nTo avoid delays to its service, Inmarsat last year moved the launch of the European Aviation Network spacecraft to Ariane 5 rocket from the Falcon 9 made by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, as the U.S. rocket company had suffered an explosion during a fueling exercise in September at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Inmarsat worried SpaceX launches would be delayed as the company returned to flight. \nThe satellite will undergo checks in the next few months before it is set to become operational in September. Inmarsat also still needs some European regulators to sign off on elements of its hybrid system. Although the space element has received all approvals, some regulators in big markets such as Germany and France still need to approve the use of the terrestrial system.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com One of the world\u2019s biggest satellite providers is betting that a new satellite, launched overnight, will allow passengers to have a high-quality Wi-Fi experience when airborne. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inmarsat Aims High on In-Flight Wi-Fi (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "678",
        "date": "2017-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/inmarsat-ceo-promises-top-quality-wi-fi-experience-in-flight-1498720304?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=119",
        "text": "Britain\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC is betting that a new satellite, launched overnight by the European Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, will address those concerns. Passengers \u201cwill have a high-quality Wi-Fi experience akin to a top-quality hotel or internet cafe,\u201d Inmarsat Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rupert Pearce\n\n\n\n said in an interview.\n\n\n\n\n\nBritish Airways,\n\n ICAGY 0.59%\n\n\n a unit of International Continental Airlines Group SA, has committed to becoming the launch operator of the system on its short-haul planes. Deutsche Lufthansa AG said it would experiment with the system.\n\n\nThe new satellite carries payloads for a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia-based Arabsat and for Inmarsat, whose equipment serves as the key element of it in-flight connectivity offer. Inmarsat\u2019s dedicated in-flight system, called the European Aviation Network, relies on a network of terrestrial air-to-ground communications towers, built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deutsche Telekom AG\n\n\n . The satellite link provides additional capacity and fills in the spots in Europe that the ground-towers can\u2019t cover. Using the ground towers will help cut costs, Mr. Pearce said, helping fuel passengers use of the service.\nThe European Aviation Network could serve as a blueprint for the company to target other regions. \u201cThere is an opportunity to take that knowledge to work in other markets and North America could be one of them,\u201d Mr. Pearce said.\n\nGogo Inc.,\n\n\n which provides internet in the U.S. on planes from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n American Airlines Group Inc.,\nDelta Air Lines Inc.\n\n\n and others, has disappointed main travelers because of limited capacity and low speed. Gogo last year signed a contract with global satellite operator SES SA to boost bandwidth. SES last year also agreed to build a powerful new satellite to help France\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Thales SA\n\n\n provide in-flight broadband equivalent to fiber connectivity starting in 2020.\nInmarsat has made a big bet on providing broadband to planes. A series of other spacecraft, called Global Xpress, aim to beam the internet to planes, ships and users on the ground often in remote locations. The company this month announced it would buy a fifth of those spacecraft in a sign of confidence in the market.\nBut its plans for Europe aren\u2019t without critics. Rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat,\n\n\n based in Carlsbad, Calif., said Inmarsat is violating key elements of its license, including relying too heavily on the ground portion. The company also has missed repeated milestones required by the license, said ViaSat president\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Baldridge.\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\u2019s system \u201cis inconsistent with the initial tender,\u201d he said.\nViaSat in April asked the European Court of Justice to instruct the European Commission to enforce Inmarsat\u2019s license rather than delegating that role to European Union member states.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eutelsat,\n\n\n ViaSat\u2019s European partner to provide in-flight broadband in Europe, is joining the case. The two are providing service to European airline\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Finnair\n\n\n and El Al Israel Airlines Ltd.\nMr. Pearce plays down the attack, saying rivals that are behind in deploying their own systems are using legal maneuvers to derail Inmarsat. \u201cTheir claims are completely false and without merit,\u201d he said.\nTo avoid delays to its service, Inmarsat last year moved the launch of the European Aviation Network spacecraft to Ariane 5 rocket from the Falcon 9 made by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, as the U.S. rocket company had suffered an explosion during a fueling exercise in September at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Inmarsat worried SpaceX launches would be delayed as the company returned to flight. \nThe satellite will undergo checks in the next few months before it is set to become operational in September. Inmarsat also still needs some European regulators to sign off on elements of its hybrid system. Although the space element has received all approvals, some regulators in big markets such as Germany and France still need to approve the use of the terrestrial system.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com One of the world\u2019s biggest satellite providers is betting that a new satellite, launched overnight, will allow passengers to have a high-quality Wi-Fi experience when airborne. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Plans Investment in Virgin Orbit\u2019s $3.2 Billion SPAC Listing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "679",
        "date": "2021-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-plans-investment-in-virgin-orbits-3-2-billion-spac-listing-11629713303?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=5",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s planned investment, which The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier Monday, comes through a SPAC-related fundraising round called a private investment in public equity, or PIPE. That fundraising has garnered a total of $100 million in commitments, Virgin Orbit said. \nA Boeing spokeswoman declined to say how much it was investing. She said it was a strategic move and the Chicago-based company has a longstanding relationship with the Virgin Group. Boeing already has an investment in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n Mr. Branson\u2019s space-tourism business. \u201cWe believe in the importance of the satellite launch market and the capabilities Virgin Orbit brings to the industry,\u201d she said.\n\n\nPrivate-equity fund AE Industrial Partners LP will also invest in the PIPE, Virgin said. AE Industrial Partners didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment early Monday.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s plans to seek a SPAC-related listing were first reported earlier this year by the Journal.\nBoeing\u2019s planned investment coincides with its struggles with its own space business. The launch of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which the company had hoped would allow it to eventually send manned NASA missions to the International Space Station, was delayed earlier this month because of faulty valves.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s planned listing comes as investors increasingly bet on the falling costs of accessing space for business, tourism and scientific research. Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Group owns 80% of Virgin Orbit, with Mubadala Investment Co., the United Arab Emirates sovereign-wealth fund, owning the rest.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s another milestone for empowering all of those working today to build space technology that will positively change the world,\u201d Mr. Branson said.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Branson beat fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n into space in a high-profile trip that took him on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft more than 50 miles above Earth. \nVirgin Orbit has completed two successful satellite launches this year, lifting the company into a small group of small-satellite launch providers able to offer flight-proven hardware. The Southern California-based company uses a launch method unique among its competitors. A converted jumbo jet releases a rocket, which then fires up and carries its payload of small satellites into orbit.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com Richard Branson\u2019s satellite-launching startup said Boeing will invest in the listing later this year, a move that comes as the plane maker\u2019s own space program faces hurdles. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Plans Investment in Virgin Orbit\u2019s $3.2 Billion SPAC Listing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "680",
        "date": "2021-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-plans-investment-in-virgin-orbits-3-2-billion-spac-listing-11629713303?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=4",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s planned investment, which The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier Monday, comes through a SPAC-related fundraising round called a private investment in public equity, or PIPE. That fundraising has garnered a total of $100 million in commitments, Virgin Orbit said. \n\n\n\n\nA Boeing spokeswoman declined to say how much it was investing. She said it was a strategic move and the Chicago-based company has a longstanding relationship with the Virgin Group. Boeing already has an investment in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n Mr. Branson\u2019s space-tourism business. \u201cWe believe in the importance of the satellite launch market and the capabilities Virgin Orbit brings to the industry,\u201d she said.\n\n\nPrivate-equity fund AE Industrial Partners LP will also invest in the PIPE, Virgin said. AE Industrial Partners didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment early Monday.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s plans to seek a SPAC-related listing were first reported earlier this year by the Journal.\nBoeing\u2019s planned investment coincides with its struggles with its own space business. The launch of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which the company had hoped would allow it to eventually send manned NASA missions to the International Space Station, was delayed earlier this month because of faulty valves.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s planned listing comes as investors increasingly bet on the falling costs of accessing space for business, tourism and scientific research. Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Group owns 80% of Virgin Orbit, with Mubadala Investment Co., the United Arab Emirates sovereign-wealth fund, owning the rest.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s another milestone for empowering all of those working today to build space technology that will positively change the world,\u201d Mr. Branson said.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Branson beat fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n into space in a high-profile trip that took him on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft more than 50 miles above Earth. \nVirgin Orbit has completed two successful satellite launches this year, lifting the company into a small group of small-satellite launch providers able to offer flight-proven hardware. The Southern California-based company uses a launch method unique among its competitors. A converted jumbo jet releases a rocket, which then fires up and carries its payload of small satellites into orbit.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com Richard Branson\u2019s satellite-launching startup said Boeing will invest in the listing later this year, a move that comes as the plane maker\u2019s own space program faces hurdles. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Plans Investment in Virgin Orbit\u2019s $3.2 Billion SPAC Listing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "681",
        "date": "2021-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-plans-investment-in-virgin-orbits-3-2-billion-spac-listing-11629713303?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=24",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s planned investment, which The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier Monday, comes through a SPAC-related fundraising round called a private investment in public equity, or PIPE. That fundraising has garnered a total of $100 million in commitments, Virgin Orbit said. \nA Boeing spokeswoman declined to say how much it was investing. She said it was a strategic move and the Chicago-based company has a longstanding relationship with the Virgin Group. Boeing already has an investment in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n Mr. Branson\u2019s space-tourism business. \u201cWe believe in the importance of the satellite launch market and the capabilities Virgin Orbit brings to the industry,\u201d she said.\n\n\nPrivate-equity fund AE Industrial Partners LP will also invest in the PIPE, Virgin said. AE Industrial Partners didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment early Monday.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s plans to seek a SPAC-related listing were first reported earlier this year by the Journal.\nBoeing\u2019s planned investment coincides with its struggles with its own space business. The launch of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which the company had hoped would allow it to eventually send manned NASA missions to the International Space Station, was delayed earlier this month because of faulty valves.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s planned listing comes as investors increasingly bet on the falling costs of accessing space for business, tourism and scientific research. Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Group owns 80% of Virgin Orbit, with Mubadala Investment Co., the United Arab Emirates sovereign-wealth fund, owning the rest.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s another milestone for empowering all of those working today to build space technology that will positively change the world,\u201d Mr. Branson said.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Branson beat fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n into space in a high-profile trip that took him on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft more than 50 miles above Earth. \nVirgin Orbit has completed two successful satellite launches this year, lifting the company into a small group of small-satellite launch providers able to offer flight-proven hardware. The Southern California-based company uses a launch method unique among its competitors. A converted jumbo jet releases a rocket, which then fires up and carries its payload of small satellites into orbit.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com Richard Branson\u2019s satellite-launching startup said Boeing will invest in the listing later this year, a move that comes as the plane maker\u2019s own space program faces hurdles. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "682",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-s-starliner-launch-could-face-delay-of-several-months-11628808399?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=5",
        "text": "Boeing engineers have been working to repair a problem with some of the valves in a propulsion system on the Starliner that was discovered earlier this month while the vehicle sat on a launchpad. The company first said it was investigating the valve issues last week, and on Monday disclosed that 13 valves had failed to open as expected during preflight checks. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNine of the valves are now functioning and Boeing engineers are working to address the other four, the company said Thursday. \n\n\u201cOver the past couple of days, our team has taken the necessary time to safely access and test the affected valves,\u201d said John Vollmer, a Boeing executive overseeing the Starliner.\nThe company also said it would work with NASA and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between it and Lockheed Martin Corp. that provides the rocket to take the Starliner to space, to determine a date for another launch \u201cwhen the spacecraft is ready.\u201d \nBoeing and NASA on Monday said they hadn\u2019t given up on potentially launching the Starliner in August. NASA said then the earliest possible date for another attempt would be in the middle of this month.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingBoeing's Space Program Faces New SetbackBoeing's Starliner space capsule has faced a string of problems, setting back a company that was once a leader in the space industry. Reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss the latest issues and the role Boeing hopes to play in the sector's future.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nOther missions are also planned for the space station, complicating when the Starliner may try to reach the facility without crew members again. NASA has said a Dragon spacecraft carrying cargo from Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, would launch for the station later this month. \nThe agency also plans to launch a ship to study asteroids no earlier than mid-October from the location at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where engineers are currently working on the Starliner. NASA has said previously any date for another Starliner launch would protect the asteroid mission. \nOn Friday, officials from NASA and Boeing are scheduled to discuss the Starliner at a press event. The space agency said Thursday it was discussing the mission status with Boeing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nAs teams continued to work on the valve problem, separating the Starliner from the rocket appeared increasingly necessary, according to people familiar with the matter. \nAhead of the Starliner do-over, NASA and Boeing officials in July said they had subjected the spacecraft to rigorous, increased testing to ensure a successful test. \nIn December 2019, a Boeing software error prevented the Starliner from getting into the correct orbit and it never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s protective heat shield.\nThe 2019 botched space mission came as Boeing was struggling with the fallout of two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX passenger aircraft. Company executives have since sought to revamp how the company handles engineering, safety and quality issues.\nNASA has said it wants to have two U.S.-based companies available to transport astronauts to and from the space station. Right now, the agency has one confirmed provider, SpaceX, in place for those flights. Its second option is to contract for seats on Russian rockets. \nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "683",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-s-starliner-launch-could-face-delay-of-several-months-11628808399?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=18",
        "text": "Boeing engineers have been working to repair a problem with some of the valves in a propulsion system on the Starliner that was discovered earlier this month while the vehicle sat on a launchpad. The company first said it was investigating the valve issues last week, and on Monday disclosed that 13 valves had failed to open as expected during preflight checks. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNine of the valves are now functioning and Boeing engineers are working to address the other four, the company said Thursday. \n\n\u201cOver the past couple of days, our team has taken the necessary time to safely access and test the affected valves,\u201d said John Vollmer, a Boeing executive overseeing the Starliner.\nThe company also said it would work with NASA and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between it and Lockheed Martin Corp. that provides the rocket to take the Starliner to space, to determine a date for another launch \u201cwhen the spacecraft is ready.\u201d \nBoeing and NASA on Monday said they hadn\u2019t given up on potentially launching the Starliner in August. NASA said then the earliest possible date for another attempt would be in the middle of this month.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOther missions are also planned for the space station, complicating when the Starliner may try to reach the facility without crew members again. NASA has said a Dragon spacecraft carrying cargo from Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, would launch for the station later this month. \nThe agency also plans to launch a ship to study asteroids no earlier than mid-October from the location at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where engineers are currently working on the Starliner. NASA has said previously any date for another Starliner launch would protect the asteroid mission. \nOn Friday, officials from NASA and Boeing are scheduled to discuss the Starliner at a press event. The space agency said Thursday it was discussing the mission status with Boeing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nAs teams continued to work on the valve problem, separating the Starliner from the rocket appeared increasingly necessary, according to people familiar with the matter. \nAhead of the Starliner do-over, NASA and Boeing officials in July said they had subjected the spacecraft to rigorous, increased testing to ensure a successful test. \nIn December 2019, a Boeing software error prevented the Starliner from getting into the correct orbit and it never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s protective heat shield.\nThe 2019 botched space mission came as Boeing was struggling with the fallout of two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX passenger aircraft. Company executives have since sought to revamp how the company handles engineering, safety and quality issues.\nNASA has said it wants to have two U.S.-based companies available to transport astronauts to and from the space station. Right now, the agency has one confirmed provider, SpaceX, in place for those flights. Its second option is to contract for seats on Russian rockets. \nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "684",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-s-starliner-launch-could-face-delay-of-several-months-11628808399?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=15",
        "text": "Boeing engineers have been working to repair a problem with some of the valves in a propulsion system on the Starliner that was discovered earlier this month while the vehicle sat on a launchpad. The company first said it was investigating the valve issues last week, and on Monday disclosed that 13 valves had failed to open as expected during preflight checks. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNine of the valves are now functioning and Boeing engineers are working to address the other four, the company said Thursday. \n\n\u201cOver the past couple of days, our team has taken the necessary time to safely access and test the affected valves,\u201d said John Vollmer, a Boeing executive overseeing the Starliner.\nThe company also said it would work with NASA and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between it and Lockheed Martin Corp. that provides the rocket to take the Starliner to space, to determine a date for another launch \u201cwhen the spacecraft is ready.\u201d \nBoeing and NASA on Monday said they hadn\u2019t given up on potentially launching the Starliner in August. NASA said then the earliest possible date for another attempt would be in the middle of this month.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingBoeing's Space Program Faces New SetbackBoeing's Starliner space capsule has faced a string of problems, setting back a company that was once a leader in the space industry. Reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss the latest issues and the role Boeing hopes to play in the sector's future.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nOther missions are also planned for the space station, complicating when the Starliner may try to reach the facility without crew members again. NASA has said a Dragon spacecraft carrying cargo from Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, would launch for the station later this month. \nThe agency also plans to launch a ship to study asteroids no earlier than mid-October from the location at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where engineers are currently working on the Starliner. NASA has said previously any date for another Starliner launch would protect the asteroid mission. \nOn Friday, officials from NASA and Boeing are scheduled to discuss the Starliner at a press event. The space agency said Thursday it was discussing the mission status with Boeing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nAs teams continued to work on the valve problem, separating the Starliner from the rocket appeared increasingly necessary, according to people familiar with the matter. \nAhead of the Starliner do-over, NASA and Boeing officials in July said they had subjected the spacecraft to rigorous, increased testing to ensure a successful test. \nIn December 2019, a Boeing software error prevented the Starliner from getting into the correct orbit and it never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s protective heat shield.\nThe 2019 botched space mission came as Boeing was struggling with the fallout of two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX passenger aircraft. Company executives have since sought to revamp how the company handles engineering, safety and quality issues.\nNASA has said it wants to have two U.S.-based companies available to transport astronauts to and from the space station. Right now, the agency has one confirmed provider, SpaceX, in place for those flights. Its second option is to contract for seats on Russian rockets. \nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "685",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-s-starliner-launch-could-face-delay-of-several-months-11628808399?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=25",
        "text": "Boeing engineers have been working to repair a problem with some of the valves in a propulsion system on the Starliner that was discovered earlier this month while the vehicle sat on a launchpad. The company first said it was investigating the valve issues last week, and on Monday disclosed that 13 valves had failed to open as expected during preflight checks. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNine of the valves are now functioning and Boeing engineers are working to address the other four, the company said Thursday. \n\n\u201cOver the past couple of days, our team has taken the necessary time to safely access and test the affected valves,\u201d said John Vollmer, a Boeing executive overseeing the Starliner.\nThe company also said it would work with NASA and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between it and Lockheed Martin Corp. that provides the rocket to take the Starliner to space, to determine a date for another launch \u201cwhen the spacecraft is ready.\u201d \nBoeing and NASA on Monday said they hadn\u2019t given up on potentially launching the Starliner in August. NASA said then the earliest possible date for another attempt would be in the middle of this month.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOther missions are also planned for the space station, complicating when the Starliner may try to reach the facility without crew members again. NASA has said a Dragon spacecraft carrying cargo from Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, would launch for the station later this month. \nThe agency also plans to launch a ship to study asteroids no earlier than mid-October from the location at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where engineers are currently working on the Starliner. NASA has said previously any date for another Starliner launch would protect the asteroid mission. \nOn Friday, officials from NASA and Boeing are scheduled to discuss the Starliner at a press event. The space agency said Thursday it was discussing the mission status with Boeing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nAs teams continued to work on the valve problem, separating the Starliner from the rocket appeared increasingly necessary, according to people familiar with the matter. \nAhead of the Starliner do-over, NASA and Boeing officials in July said they had subjected the spacecraft to rigorous, increased testing to ensure a successful test. \nIn December 2019, a Boeing software error prevented the Starliner from getting into the correct orbit and it never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s protective heat shield.\nThe 2019 botched space mission came as Boeing was struggling with the fallout of two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX passenger aircraft. Company executives have since sought to revamp how the company handles engineering, safety and quality issues.\nNASA has said it wants to have two U.S.-based companies available to transport astronauts to and from the space station. Right now, the agency has one confirmed provider, SpaceX, in place for those flights. Its second option is to contract for seats on Russian rockets. \nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "686",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-s-starliner-launch-could-face-delay-of-several-months-11628808399?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=24",
        "text": "Boeing engineers have been working to repair a problem with some of the valves in a propulsion system on the Starliner that was discovered earlier this month while the vehicle sat on a launchpad. The company first said it was investigating the valve issues last week, and on Monday disclosed that 13 valves had failed to open as expected during preflight checks. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNine of the valves are now functioning and Boeing engineers are working to address the other four, the company said Thursday. \n\n\u201cOver the past couple of days, our team has taken the necessary time to safely access and test the affected valves,\u201d said John Vollmer, a Boeing executive overseeing the Starliner.\nThe company also said it would work with NASA and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between it and Lockheed Martin Corp. that provides the rocket to take the Starliner to space, to determine a date for another launch \u201cwhen the spacecraft is ready.\u201d \nBoeing and NASA on Monday said they hadn\u2019t given up on potentially launching the Starliner in August. NASA said then the earliest possible date for another attempt would be in the middle of this month.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOther missions are also planned for the space station, complicating when the Starliner may try to reach the facility without crew members again. NASA has said a Dragon spacecraft carrying cargo from Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, would launch for the station later this month. \nThe agency also plans to launch a ship to study asteroids no earlier than mid-October from the location at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where engineers are currently working on the Starliner. NASA has said previously any date for another Starliner launch would protect the asteroid mission. \nOn Friday, officials from NASA and Boeing are scheduled to discuss the Starliner at a press event. The space agency said Thursday it was discussing the mission status with Boeing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nAs teams continued to work on the valve problem, separating the Starliner from the rocket appeared increasingly necessary, according to people familiar with the matter. \nAhead of the Starliner do-over, NASA and Boeing officials in July said they had subjected the spacecraft to rigorous, increased testing to ensure a successful test. \nIn December 2019, a Boeing software error prevented the Starliner from getting into the correct orbit and it never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s protective heat shield.\nThe 2019 botched space mission came as Boeing was struggling with the fallout of two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX passenger aircraft. Company executives have since sought to revamp how the company handles engineering, safety and quality issues.\nNASA has said it wants to have two U.S.-based companies available to transport astronauts to and from the space station. Right now, the agency has one confirmed provider, SpaceX, in place for those flights. Its second option is to contract for seats on Russian rockets. \nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "687",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-seeks-to-make-human-flights-routine-with-nasa-mission-11605459000?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=10",
        "text": "Blastoff of the Crew Dragon capsule, named Resilience, at 7:27 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Fla., was the start of a roughly 27-hour trip to link up with the space station. It followed NASA\u2019s formal decision last week designating SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule as safe to transport astronauts for routine crew rotation and other operational flights serving the international laboratory. Months before, two other NASA astronauts completed a smooth test flight of an earlier version of the capsule to the station. Late Monday, SpaceX said on Twitter that \u201cCrew Dragon\u201d had arrived at the space station after a successful docking. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s launch will be the first time NASA has put four astronauts into a capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 slowly left the pad on Sunday precisely on schedule as required, churning out more than 1.3 million pounds of thrust, accelerating with a deep rumble and trailing a bright orange plume that illuminated the night sky. Roughly 12 minutes later, ground controllers announced the capsule separated safely from the rocket\u2019s upper stage and its systems appeared to be operating normally.\n\n\nA little earlier, the lower portion of the rocket, including its nine main engines, returned and gently touched down vertically on a specially outfitted ocean platform. SpaceX and NASA already have agreed to reuse that lower stage\u2014something agency officials haven\u2019t previously permitted for human flights\u2014to power the company\u2019s next commercial crew launch in the spring. \nNASA\u2019s official endorsement of the Dragon\u2019s safety was the long-term goal of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, throughout six years of roller-coaster development and testing. Over that stretch, the SpaceX team had to surmount a pair of catastrophic rocket explosions, complex problems with the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a 2019 explosive failure of emergency-escape engines. They are intended to whisk astronauts to safety in the event of an aborted launch. Nobody was injured in those accidents, but they set back the program and gave ammunition to industry and congressional critics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left the launchpad on Sunday precisely on schedule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThroughout those high-profile problems and technical challenges, though, Mr. Musk and his team persevered in following a more-nimble, less bureaucratic path for engineering and design verification than NASA had embraced previously.\nSunday\u2019s launch was the vindication of that approach, as happy shouts and loud clapping echoed from SpaceX\u2019s primary ground control room in Hawthorne, Calif., while jubilant NASA and agency leaders prepared to face reporters. \nDuring a press conference, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell \n\n\n\n underscored the company\u2019s plans over the next 15 months to launch seven Dragon capsules on behalf of NASA, including three cargo versions. Sunday\u2019s mission, she said, \u201crepresents the initiation of a Dragon in orbit continuously\u201d and \u201creally the beginning of a new era in human space flight.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s human exploration push, said \u201cit\u2019s been quite a journey\u201d with SpaceX and \u201ceverybody is so fired up, they\u2019re so excited\u201d in the wake of the successful launch. \u201cBut we\u2019re not done yet, we need to keep going.\u201d she added. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those four precious crew members.\u201d\nWhen NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n welcomed the astronauts to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center a week ago, he emphasized the ever-present dangers of space travel. \u201cMake no mistake,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cEvery flight is a test.\u201d But, he added: \u201cIt\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule returned from the International Space Station in a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico. (Originally published Aug. 2, 2020) Photo by NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSince the retirement of the space-shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA has envisioned eventually relying on privately developed and operated space capsules to handle human orbital missions. Meanwhile, NASA has relied exclusively on Russian rockets and capsules as it awaited domestic options.\nSpaceX launches are projected to cost NASA about 40% less on a per astronaut basis than what the Kremlin has charged. The broader U.S. aim is to free up agency funds to explore deeper into the solar system.\nA successful test flight in May of a Dragon capsule carrying two astronauts\u00a0 played out without any major problems, clearing the way for Sunday\u2019s attempt. The latest spacecraft has upgrades to its solar arrays, fuel pumps and heat sh Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched four astronauts into orbit, marking the company\u2019s first full-fledged operational mission with humans on board and beginning regularly scheduled commercial flights to the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "688",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-seeks-to-make-human-flights-routine-with-nasa-mission-11605459000?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=31",
        "text": "Blastoff of the Crew Dragon capsule, named Resilience, at 7:27 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Fla., was the start of a roughly 27-hour trip to link up with the space station. It followed NASA\u2019s formal decision last week designating SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule as safe to transport astronauts for routine crew rotation and other operational flights serving the international laboratory. Months before, two other NASA astronauts completed a smooth test flight of an earlier version of the capsule to the station. Late Monday, SpaceX said on Twitter that \u201cCrew Dragon\u201d had arrived at the space station after a successful docking. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s launch will be the first time NASA has put four astronauts into a capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 slowly left the pad on Sunday precisely on schedule as required, churning out more than 1.3 million pounds of thrust, accelerating with a deep rumble and trailing a bright orange plume that illuminated the night sky. Roughly 12 minutes later, ground controllers announced the capsule separated safely from the rocket\u2019s upper stage and its systems appeared to be operating normally.\n\n\nA little earlier, the lower portion of the rocket, including its nine main engines, returned and gently touched down vertically on a specially outfitted ocean platform. SpaceX and NASA already have agreed to reuse that lower stage\u2014something agency officials haven\u2019t previously permitted for human flights\u2014to power the company\u2019s next commercial crew launch in the spring. \nNASA\u2019s official endorsement of the Dragon\u2019s safety was the long-term goal of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, throughout six years of roller-coaster development and testing. Over that stretch, the SpaceX team had to surmount a pair of catastrophic rocket explosions, complex problems with the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a 2019 explosive failure of emergency-escape engines. They are intended to whisk astronauts to safety in the event of an aborted launch. Nobody was injured in those accidents, but they set back the program and gave ammunition to industry and congressional critics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left the launchpad on Sunday precisely on schedule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThroughout those high-profile problems and technical challenges, though, Mr. Musk and his team persevered in following a more-nimble, less bureaucratic path for engineering and design verification than NASA had embraced previously.\nSunday\u2019s launch was the vindication of that approach, as happy shouts and loud clapping echoed from SpaceX\u2019s primary ground control room in Hawthorne, Calif., while jubilant NASA and agency leaders prepared to face reporters. \nDuring a press conference, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell \n\n\n\n underscored the company\u2019s plans over the next 15 months to launch seven Dragon capsules on behalf of NASA, including three cargo versions. Sunday\u2019s mission, she said, \u201crepresents the initiation of a Dragon in orbit continuously\u201d and \u201creally the beginning of a new era in human space flight.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s human exploration push, said \u201cit\u2019s been quite a journey\u201d with SpaceX and \u201ceverybody is so fired up, they\u2019re so excited\u201d in the wake of the successful launch. \u201cBut we\u2019re not done yet, we need to keep going.\u201d she added. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those four precious crew members.\u201d\nWhen NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n welcomed the astronauts to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center a week ago, he emphasized the ever-present dangers of space travel. \u201cMake no mistake,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cEvery flight is a test.\u201d But, he added: \u201cIt\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule returned from the International Space Station in a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico. (Originally published Aug. 2, 2020) Photo by NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSince the retirement of the space-shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA has envisioned eventually relying on privately developed and operated space capsules to handle human orbital missions. Meanwhile, NASA has relied exclusively on Russian rockets and capsules as it awaited domestic options.\nSpaceX launches are projected to cost NASA about 40% less on a per astronaut basis than what the Kremlin has charged. The broader U.S. aim is to free up agency funds to explore deeper into the solar system.\nA successful test flight in May of a Dragon capsule carrying two astronauts\u00a0 played out without any major problems, clearing the way for Sunday\u2019s attempt. The latest spacecraft has upgrades to its solar arrays, fuel pumps and heat sh Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched four astronauts into orbit, marking the company\u2019s first full-fledged operational mission with humans on board and beginning regularly scheduled commercial flights to the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "689",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-seeks-to-make-human-flights-routine-with-nasa-mission-11605459000?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=11",
        "text": "Blastoff of the Crew Dragon capsule, named Resilience, at 7:27 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Fla., was the start of a roughly 27-hour trip to link up with the space station. It followed NASA\u2019s formal decision last week designating SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule as safe to transport astronauts for routine crew rotation and other operational flights serving the international laboratory. Months before, two other NASA astronauts completed a smooth test flight of an earlier version of the capsule to the station. Late Monday, SpaceX said on Twitter that \u201cCrew Dragon\u201d had arrived at the space station after a successful docking. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s launch will be the first time NASA has put four astronauts into a capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 slowly left the pad on Sunday precisely on schedule as required, churning out more than 1.3 million pounds of thrust, accelerating with a deep rumble and trailing a bright orange plume that illuminated the night sky. Roughly 12 minutes later, ground controllers announced the capsule separated safely from the rocket\u2019s upper stage and its systems appeared to be operating normally.\n\n\nA little earlier, the lower portion of the rocket, including its nine main engines, returned and gently touched down vertically on a specially outfitted ocean platform. SpaceX and NASA already have agreed to reuse that lower stage\u2014something agency officials haven\u2019t previously permitted for human flights\u2014to power the company\u2019s next commercial crew launch in the spring. \nNASA\u2019s official endorsement of the Dragon\u2019s safety was the long-term goal of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, throughout six years of roller-coaster development and testing. Over that stretch, the SpaceX team had to surmount a pair of catastrophic rocket explosions, complex problems with the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a 2019 explosive failure of emergency-escape engines. They are intended to whisk astronauts to safety in the event of an aborted launch. Nobody was injured in those accidents, but they set back the program and gave ammunition to industry and congressional critics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left the launchpad on Sunday precisely on schedule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThroughout those high-profile problems and technical challenges, though, Mr. Musk and his team persevered in following a more-nimble, less bureaucratic path for engineering and design verification than NASA had embraced previously.\nSunday\u2019s launch was the vindication of that approach, as happy shouts and loud clapping echoed from SpaceX\u2019s primary ground control room in Hawthorne, Calif., while jubilant NASA and agency leaders prepared to face reporters. \nDuring a press conference, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell \n\n\n\n underscored the company\u2019s plans over the next 15 months to launch seven Dragon capsules on behalf of NASA, including three cargo versions. Sunday\u2019s mission, she said, \u201crepresents the initiation of a Dragon in orbit continuously\u201d and \u201creally the beginning of a new era in human space flight.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s human exploration push, said \u201cit\u2019s been quite a journey\u201d with SpaceX and \u201ceverybody is so fired up, they\u2019re so excited\u201d in the wake of the successful launch. \u201cBut we\u2019re not done yet, we need to keep going.\u201d she added. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those four precious crew members.\u201d\nWhen NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n welcomed the astronauts to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center a week ago, he emphasized the ever-present dangers of space travel. \u201cMake no mistake,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cEvery flight is a test.\u201d But, he added: \u201cIt\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule returned from the International Space Station in a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico. (Originally published Aug. 2, 2020) Photo by NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSince the retirement of the space-shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA has envisioned eventually relying on privately developed and operated space capsules to handle human orbital missions. Meanwhile, NASA has relied exclusively on Russian rockets and capsules as it awaited domestic options.\nSpaceX launches are projected to cost NASA about 40% less on a per astronaut basis than what the Kremlin has charged. The broader U.S. aim is to free up agency funds to explore deeper into the solar system.\nA successful test flight in May of a Dragon capsule carrying two astronauts\u00a0 played out without any major problems, clearing the way for Sunday\u2019s attempt. The latest spacecraft has upgrades to its solar arrays, fuel pumps and hea Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched four astronauts into orbit, marking the company\u2019s first full-fledged operational mission with humans on board and beginning regularly scheduled commercial flights to the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "690",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-seeks-to-make-human-flights-routine-with-nasa-mission-11605459000?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=38",
        "text": "Blastoff of the Crew Dragon capsule, named Resilience, at 7:27 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Fla., was the start of a roughly 27-hour trip to link up with the space station. It followed NASA\u2019s formal decision last week designating SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule as safe to transport astronauts for routine crew rotation and other operational flights serving the international laboratory. Months before, two other NASA astronauts completed a smooth test flight of an earlier version of the capsule to the station. Late Monday, SpaceX said on Twitter that \u201cCrew Dragon\u201d had arrived at the space station after a successful docking. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s launch will be the first time NASA has put four astronauts into a capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 slowly left the pad on Sunday precisely on schedule as required, churning out more than 1.3 million pounds of thrust, accelerating with a deep rumble and trailing a bright orange plume that illuminated the night sky. Roughly 12 minutes later, ground controllers announced the capsule separated safely from the rocket\u2019s upper stage and its systems appeared to be operating normally.\n\n\nA little earlier, the lower portion of the rocket, including its nine main engines, returned and gently touched down vertically on a specially outfitted ocean platform. SpaceX and NASA already have agreed to reuse that lower stage\u2014something agency officials haven\u2019t previously permitted for human flights\u2014to power the company\u2019s next commercial crew launch in the spring. \nNASA\u2019s official endorsement of the Dragon\u2019s safety was the long-term goal of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, throughout six years of roller-coaster development and testing. Over that stretch, the SpaceX team had to surmount a pair of catastrophic rocket explosions, complex problems with the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a 2019 explosive failure of emergency-escape engines. They are intended to whisk astronauts to safety in the event of an aborted launch. Nobody was injured in those accidents, but they set back the program and gave ammunition to industry and congressional critics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left the launchpad on Sunday precisely on schedule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThroughout those high-profile problems and technical challenges, though, Mr. Musk and his team persevered in following a more-nimble, less bureaucratic path for engineering and design verification than NASA had embraced previously.\nSunday\u2019s launch was the vindication of that approach, as happy shouts and loud clapping echoed from SpaceX\u2019s primary ground control room in Hawthorne, Calif., while jubilant NASA and agency leaders prepared to face reporters. \nDuring a press conference, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell \n\n\n\n underscored the company\u2019s plans over the next 15 months to launch seven Dragon capsules on behalf of NASA, including three cargo versions. Sunday\u2019s mission, she said, \u201crepresents the initiation of a Dragon in orbit continuously\u201d and \u201creally the beginning of a new era in human space flight.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s human exploration push, said \u201cit\u2019s been quite a journey\u201d with SpaceX and \u201ceverybody is so fired up, they\u2019re so excited\u201d in the wake of the successful launch. \u201cBut we\u2019re not done yet, we need to keep going.\u201d she added. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those four precious crew members.\u201d\nWhen NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n welcomed the astronauts to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center a week ago, he emphasized the ever-present dangers of space travel. \u201cMake no mistake,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cEvery flight is a test.\u201d But, he added: \u201cIt\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule returned from the International Space Station in a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico. (Originally published Aug. 2, 2020) Photo by NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSince the retirement of the space-shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA has envisioned eventually relying on privately developed and operated space capsules to handle human orbital missions. Meanwhile, NASA has relied exclusively on Russian rockets and capsules as it awaited domestic options.\nSpaceX launches are projected to cost NASA about 40% less on a per astronaut basis than what the Kremlin has charged. The broader U.S. aim is to free up agency funds to explore deeper into the solar system.\nA successful test flight in May of a Dragon capsule carrying two astronauts\u00a0 played out without any major problems, clearing the way for Sunday\u2019s attempt. The latest spacecraft has upgrades to its solar arrays, fuel pumps and heat sh Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched four astronauts into orbit, marking the company\u2019s first full-fledged operational mission with humans on board and beginning regularly scheduled commercial flights to the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "691",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-seeks-to-make-human-flights-routine-with-nasa-mission-11605459000?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=43",
        "text": "Blastoff of the Crew Dragon capsule, named Resilience, at 7:27 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Fla., was the start of a roughly 27-hour trip to link up with the space station. It followed NASA\u2019s formal decision last week designating SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule as safe to transport astronauts for routine crew rotation and other operational flights serving the international laboratory. Months before, two other NASA astronauts completed a smooth test flight of an earlier version of the capsule to the station. Late Monday, SpaceX said on Twitter that \u201cCrew Dragon\u201d had arrived at the space station after a successful docking. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s launch will be the first time NASA has put four astronauts into a capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 slowly left the pad on Sunday precisely on schedule as required, churning out more than 1.3 million pounds of thrust, accelerating with a deep rumble and trailing a bright orange plume that illuminated the night sky. Roughly 12 minutes later, ground controllers announced the capsule separated safely from the rocket\u2019s upper stage and its systems appeared to be operating normally.\n\n\nA little earlier, the lower portion of the rocket, including its nine main engines, returned and gently touched down vertically on a specially outfitted ocean platform. SpaceX and NASA already have agreed to reuse that lower stage\u2014something agency officials haven\u2019t previously permitted for human flights\u2014to power the company\u2019s next commercial crew launch in the spring. \nNASA\u2019s official endorsement of the Dragon\u2019s safety was the long-term goal of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, throughout six years of roller-coaster development and testing. Over that stretch, the SpaceX team had to surmount a pair of catastrophic rocket explosions, complex problems with the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a 2019 explosive failure of emergency-escape engines. They are intended to whisk astronauts to safety in the event of an aborted launch. Nobody was injured in those accidents, but they set back the program and gave ammunition to industry and congressional critics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left the launchpad on Sunday precisely on schedule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThroughout those high-profile problems and technical challenges, though, Mr. Musk and his team persevered in following a more-nimble, less bureaucratic path for engineering and design verification than NASA had embraced previously.\nSunday\u2019s launch was the vindication of that approach, as happy shouts and loud clapping echoed from SpaceX\u2019s primary ground control room in Hawthorne, Calif., while jubilant NASA and agency leaders prepared to face reporters. \nDuring a press conference, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell \n\n\n\n underscored the company\u2019s plans over the next 15 months to launch seven Dragon capsules on behalf of NASA, including three cargo versions. Sunday\u2019s mission, she said, \u201crepresents the initiation of a Dragon in orbit continuously\u201d and \u201creally the beginning of a new era in human space flight.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s human exploration push, said \u201cit\u2019s been quite a journey\u201d with SpaceX and \u201ceverybody is so fired up, they\u2019re so excited\u201d in the wake of the successful launch. \u201cBut we\u2019re not done yet, we need to keep going.\u201d she added. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those four precious crew members.\u201d\nWhen NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n welcomed the astronauts to the launch site at Kennedy Space Center a week ago, he emphasized the ever-present dangers of space travel. \u201cMake no mistake,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cEvery flight is a test.\u201d But, he added: \u201cIt\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule returned from the International Space Station in a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico. (Originally published Aug. 2, 2020) Photo by NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\nSince the retirement of the space-shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA has envisioned eventually relying on privately developed and operated space capsules to handle human orbital missions. Meanwhile, NASA has relied exclusively on Russian rockets and capsules as it awaited domestic options.\nSpaceX launches are projected to cost NASA about 40% less on a per astronaut basis than what the Kremlin has charged. The broader U.S. aim is to free up agency funds to explore deeper into the solar system.\nA successful test flight in May of a Dragon capsule carrying two astronauts\u00a0 played out without any major problems, clearing the way for Sunday\u2019s attempt. The latest spacecraft has upgrades to its solar arrays, fuel pumps and hea Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched four astronauts into orbit, marking the company\u2019s first full-fledged operational mission with humans on board and beginning regularly scheduled commercial flights to the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rough Landing Expected for the Glut of New Small-Rocket Makers (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "692",
        "date": "2021-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rough-landing-expected-for-the-glut-of-new-small-rocket-makers-11612710000?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=9",
        "text": "All competitors, though, confront the same market reality. Burgeoning corporate, civilian and military uses of compact satellites weighing under a ton\u2014ranging from toaster-size models to versions resembling refrigerators\u2014won\u2019t generate enough demand to support the current glut of small launchers.\n\u201cCould the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not,\u201d said Chuck Beames, chairman of small-satellite maker York Space Systems LLC and a former Pentagon space official who also chairs a trade association advocating for small spacecraft. He said a more realistic number would be four healthy small-rocket operators and several established companies flying larger commercial boosters.\n\n\nThe latter group, primarily targeting a different market segment of huge satellites headed into higher orbits, include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Europe\u2019s Arianespace SA and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos.\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin, specializes in carrying large Pentagon satellites. For all of them, transporting small satellites is a secondary goal.\nLarge satellites go more than 22,000 miles above the earth, remaining fixed above the same point on the globe. They are designed for spy and surveillance missions; civil and military communications; and broadcasting video signals. Some cost many hundreds of millions of dollars apiece.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototype crash-landed during a second test flight. About two months earlier, Elon Musk\u2019s company launched the spacecraft, which landed in an equally explosive fireball. Photo: Gene Blevins/Reuters\n \n\n\nThe new generation of small satellites zip around the earth at altitudes measured in hundreds of miles, but they often carry advanced sensors able to perform functions done by larger versions. They are proliferating for applications including Earth observation, communications, gathering climate-change data and tracking hostile missiles. Some proposed mega-constellations are slated to feature thousands of small satellites providing ubiquitous internet connections. Latest-generation compact satellites can cost between tens of thousands of dollars to many millions.\nThe small-rocket sector is attracting more attention because forecasters envision a boom in small-satellite production. Estimates peg the number of such satellites that reached orbit last year at 1,200, with more than 10,000 expected over the next decade. In comparison, about 400 small commercial satellites launched between 2015 and 2018, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan says.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Could the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Chuck Beames, chairman of York Space Systems \n\n\n\nSo far, small-rocket makers have garnered a disproportionate share of investment. Nearly half the $15.7 billion in venture capital invested in commercial space last year went to a range of launcher-related developments, estimates say, though the segment produces a sliver of total industry revenue.\nSome veteran space officials likened the current situation to a space-investment bubble in the late 1990s, when a flurry of ambitious satellite ventures prompted optimistic projections about a surge in blastoffs. In the end, nearly all those satellite plans imploded because of daunting technical and financial hurdles, leaving behind a launch sector coping with a steep falloff in anticipated business.\nBillionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig McCaw,\n\n\n\n among the prominent investors hurt by past failures, is a booster of small rockets. Two decades ago, he recalled, building a single satellite could take years. Today, Mr. McCaw and others say, satellite and launch hardware is dramatically smaller, less expensive and faster to assemble, with demand growing.\nThe old industry norms have been shelved, he said, joking that \u201csometimes dinosaurs take a long way and time to die.\u201d\nTraditionally, large rockets designed to carry multiton satellites roughly the size of school buses also can carry smaller spacecraft in so-called ride-share arrangements. But the piggyback spacecraft are dependent on the schedule and orbit location dictated by the primary customer.\nSmaller rockets aim to specifically serve lighter satellites headed for tailored orbits. Launch companies compete based on price, schedule flexibility and optimal orbit locations. Prices are a fraction of the roughly $60 million Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., charges for blasting larger satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson's Virgin Orbit, with a rocket underneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, before takeoff and test launch last month in Mojave, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nMany rocket makers and their customers anticipate few long-term succ Companies and entrepreneurs world-wide are working on more than 100 new small-rocket ventures, but industry officials anticipate a shakeout eventually may leave just a handful of survivors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rough Landing Expected for the Glut of New Small-Rocket Makers (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "693",
        "date": "2021-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rough-landing-expected-for-the-glut-of-new-small-rocket-makers-11612710000?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=28",
        "text": "All competitors, though, confront the same market reality. Burgeoning corporate, civilian and military uses of compact satellites weighing under a ton\u2014ranging from toaster-size models to versions resembling refrigerators\u2014won\u2019t generate enough demand to support the current glut of small launchers.\n\u201cCould the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not,\u201d said Chuck Beames, chairman of small-satellite maker York Space Systems LLC and a former Pentagon space official who also chairs a trade association advocating for small spacecraft. He said a more realistic number would be four healthy small-rocket operators and several established companies flying larger commercial boosters.\n\n\nThe latter group, primarily targeting a different market segment of huge satellites headed into higher orbits, include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Europe\u2019s Arianespace SA and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos.\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin, specializes in carrying large Pentagon satellites. For all of them, transporting small satellites is a secondary goal.\nLarge satellites go more than 22,000 miles above the earth, remaining fixed above the same point on the globe. They are designed for spy and surveillance missions; civil and military communications; and broadcasting video signals. Some cost many hundreds of millions of dollars apiece.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototype crash-landed during a second test flight. About two months earlier, Elon Musk\u2019s company launched the spacecraft, which landed in an equally explosive fireball. Photo: Gene Blevins/Reuters\n \n\n\nThe new generation of small satellites zip around the earth at altitudes measured in hundreds of miles, but they often carry advanced sensors able to perform functions done by larger versions. They are proliferating for applications including Earth observation, communications, gathering climate-change data and tracking hostile missiles. Some proposed mega-constellations are slated to feature thousands of small satellites providing ubiquitous internet connections. Latest-generation compact satellites can cost between tens of thousands of dollars to many millions.\nThe small-rocket sector is attracting more attention because forecasters envision a boom in small-satellite production. Estimates peg the number of such satellites that reached orbit last year at 1,200, with more than 10,000 expected over the next decade. In comparison, about 400 small commercial satellites launched between 2015 and 2018, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan says.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Could the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Chuck Beames, chairman of York Space Systems \n\n\n\nSo far, small-rocket makers have garnered a disproportionate share of investment. Nearly half the $15.7 billion in venture capital invested in commercial space last year went to a range of launcher-related developments, estimates say, though the segment produces a sliver of total industry revenue.\nSome veteran space officials likened the current situation to a space-investment bubble in the late 1990s, when a flurry of ambitious satellite ventures prompted optimistic projections about a surge in blastoffs. In the end, nearly all those satellite plans imploded because of daunting technical and financial hurdles, leaving behind a launch sector coping with a steep falloff in anticipated business.\nBillionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig McCaw,\n\n\n\n among the prominent investors hurt by past failures, is a booster of small rockets. Two decades ago, he recalled, building a single satellite could take years. Today, Mr. McCaw and others say, satellite and launch hardware is dramatically smaller, less expensive and faster to assemble, with demand growing.\nThe old industry norms have been shelved, he said, joking that \u201csometimes dinosaurs take a long way and time to die.\u201d\nTraditionally, large rockets designed to carry multiton satellites roughly the size of school buses also can carry smaller spacecraft in so-called ride-share arrangements. But the piggyback spacecraft are dependent on the schedule and orbit location dictated by the primary customer.\nSmaller rockets aim to specifically serve lighter satellites headed for tailored orbits. Launch companies compete based on price, schedule flexibility and optimal orbit locations. Prices are a fraction of the roughly $60 million Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., charges for blasting larger satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson's Virgin Orbit, with a rocket underneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, before takeoff and test launch last month in Mojave, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nMany rocket makers and their customers anticipate few long-term succ Companies and entrepreneurs world-wide are working on more than 100 new small-rocket ventures, but industry officials anticipate a shakeout eventually may leave just a handful of survivors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rough Landing Expected for the Glut of New Small-Rocket Makers (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "694",
        "date": "2021-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rough-landing-expected-for-the-glut-of-new-small-rocket-makers-11612710000?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=35",
        "text": "All competitors, though, confront the same market reality. Burgeoning corporate, civilian and military uses of compact satellites weighing under a ton\u2014ranging from toaster-size models to versions resembling refrigerators\u2014won\u2019t generate enough demand to support the current glut of small launchers.\n\u201cCould the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not,\u201d said Chuck Beames, chairman of small-satellite maker York Space Systems LLC and a former Pentagon space official who also chairs a trade association advocating for small spacecraft. He said a more realistic number would be four healthy small-rocket operators and several established companies flying larger commercial boosters.\n\n\nThe latter group, primarily targeting a different market segment of huge satellites headed into higher orbits, include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Europe\u2019s Arianespace SA and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos.\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin, specializes in carrying large Pentagon satellites. For all of them, transporting small satellites is a secondary goal.\nLarge satellites go more than 22,000 miles above the earth, remaining fixed above the same point on the globe. They are designed for spy and surveillance missions; civil and military communications; and broadcasting video signals. Some cost many hundreds of millions of dollars apiece.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototype crash-landed during a second test flight. About two months earlier, Elon Musk\u2019s company launched the spacecraft, which landed in an equally explosive fireball. Photo: Gene Blevins/Reuters\n \n\n\nThe new generation of small satellites zip around the earth at altitudes measured in hundreds of miles, but they often carry advanced sensors able to perform functions done by larger versions. They are proliferating for applications including Earth observation, communications, gathering climate-change data and tracking hostile missiles. Some proposed mega-constellations are slated to feature thousands of small satellites providing ubiquitous internet connections. Latest-generation compact satellites can cost between tens of thousands of dollars to many millions.\nThe small-rocket sector is attracting more attention because forecasters envision a boom in small-satellite production. Estimates peg the number of such satellites that reached orbit last year at 1,200, with more than 10,000 expected over the next decade. In comparison, about 400 small commercial satellites launched between 2015 and 2018, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan says.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Could the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Chuck Beames, chairman of York Space Systems \n\n\n\nSo far, small-rocket makers have garnered a disproportionate share of investment. Nearly half the $15.7 billion in venture capital invested in commercial space last year went to a range of launcher-related developments, estimates say, though the segment produces a sliver of total industry revenue.\nSome veteran space officials likened the current situation to a space-investment bubble in the late 1990s, when a flurry of ambitious satellite ventures prompted optimistic projections about a surge in blastoffs. In the end, nearly all those satellite plans imploded because of daunting technical and financial hurdles, leaving behind a launch sector coping with a steep falloff in anticipated business.\nBillionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig McCaw,\n\n\n\n among the prominent investors hurt by past failures, is a booster of small rockets. Two decades ago, he recalled, building a single satellite could take years. Today, Mr. McCaw and others say, satellite and launch hardware is dramatically smaller, less expensive and faster to assemble, with demand growing.\nThe old industry norms have been shelved, he said, joking that \u201csometimes dinosaurs take a long way and time to die.\u201d\nTraditionally, large rockets designed to carry multiton satellites roughly the size of school buses also can carry smaller spacecraft in so-called ride-share arrangements. But the piggyback spacecraft are dependent on the schedule and orbit location dictated by the primary customer.\nSmaller rockets aim to specifically serve lighter satellites headed for tailored orbits. Launch companies compete based on price, schedule flexibility and optimal orbit locations. Prices are a fraction of the roughly $60 million Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., charges for blasting larger satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson's Virgin Orbit, with a rocket underneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, before takeoff and test launch last month in Mojave, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nMany rocket makers and their customers anticipate few long-term succ Companies and entrepreneurs world-wide are working on more than 100 new small-rocket ventures, but industry officials anticipate a shakeout eventually may leave just a handful of survivors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rough Landing Expected for the Glut of New Small-Rocket Makers (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "695",
        "date": "2021-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rough-landing-expected-for-the-glut-of-new-small-rocket-makers-11612710000?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=37",
        "text": "All competitors, though, confront the same market reality. Burgeoning corporate, civilian and military uses of compact satellites weighing under a ton\u2014ranging from toaster-size models to versions resembling refrigerators\u2014won\u2019t generate enough demand to support the current glut of small launchers.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cCould the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not,\u201d said Chuck Beames, chairman of small-satellite maker York Space Systems LLC and a former Pentagon space official who also chairs a trade association advocating for small spacecraft. He said a more realistic number would be four healthy small-rocket operators and several established companies flying larger commercial boosters.\n\n\nThe latter group, primarily targeting a different market segment of huge satellites headed into higher orbits, include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Europe\u2019s Arianespace SA and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos.\n\n\n\n United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin, specializes in carrying large Pentagon satellites. For all of them, transporting small satellites is a secondary goal.\nLarge satellites go more than 22,000 miles above the earth, remaining fixed above the same point on the globe. They are designed for spy and surveillance missions; civil and military communications; and broadcasting video signals. Some cost many hundreds of millions of dollars apiece.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototype crash-landed during a second test flight. About two months earlier, Elon Musk\u2019s company launched the spacecraft, which landed in an equally explosive fireball. Photo: Gene Blevins/Reuters\n \n\n\nThe new generation of small satellites zip around the earth at altitudes measured in hundreds of miles, but they often carry advanced sensors able to perform functions done by larger versions. They are proliferating for applications including Earth observation, communications, gathering climate-change data and tracking hostile missiles. Some proposed mega-constellations are slated to feature thousands of small satellites providing ubiquitous internet connections. Latest-generation compact satellites can cost between tens of thousands of dollars to many millions.\nThe small-rocket sector is attracting more attention because forecasters envision a boom in small-satellite production. Estimates peg the number of such satellites that reached orbit last year at 1,200, with more than 10,000 expected over the next decade. In comparison, about 400 small commercial satellites launched between 2015 and 2018, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan says.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Could the industry support 100 new launch companies? Of course not.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Chuck Beames, chairman of York Space Systems \n\n\n\nSo far, small-rocket makers have garnered a disproportionate share of investment. Nearly half the $15.7 billion in venture capital invested in commercial space last year went to a range of launcher-related developments, estimates say, though the segment produces a sliver of total industry revenue.\nSome veteran space officials likened the current situation to a space-investment bubble in the late 1990s, when a flurry of ambitious satellite ventures prompted optimistic projections about a surge in blastoffs. In the end, nearly all those satellite plans imploded because of daunting technical and financial hurdles, leaving behind a launch sector coping with a steep falloff in anticipated business.\nBillionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig McCaw,\n\n\n\n among the prominent investors hurt by past failures, is a booster of small rockets. Two decades ago, he recalled, building a single satellite could take years. Today, Mr. McCaw and others say, satellite and launch hardware is dramatically smaller, less expensive and faster to assemble, with demand growing.\nThe old industry norms have been shelved, he said, joking that \u201csometimes dinosaurs take a long way and time to die.\u201d\nTraditionally, large rockets designed to carry multiton satellites roughly the size of school buses also can carry smaller spacecraft in so-called ride-share arrangements. But the piggyback spacecraft are dependent on the schedule and orbit location dictated by the primary customer.\nSmaller rockets aim to specifically serve lighter satellites headed for tailored orbits. Launch companies compete based on price, schedule flexibility and optimal orbit locations. Prices are a fraction of the roughly $60 million Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., charges for blasting larger satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson's Virgin Orbit, with a rocket underneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, before takeoff and test launch last month in Mojave, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nMany rocket makers and their customers anticipate few long-term Companies and entrepreneurs world-wide are working on more than 100 new small-rocket ventures, but industry officials anticipate a shakeout eventually may leave just a handful of survivors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Airbus Sees Broad Benefits from Satellite Joint Venture (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "696",
        "date": "2018-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbus-has-high-expectations-for-small-satellite-production-system-1531854310?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=19",
        "text": "Airbus officials previously highlighted expected financial gains stemming from assembling up to two satellites a day at the comparatively low cost of $1 million each. But Mr. Hoke\u2019s comments at the international air show here Monday were the most specific yet about the project\u2019s positive effect on internal industrial processes, as well as on the general approach of Airbus engineers.\nCommitting to assemble a new generation of lightweight satellites primarily using robots \u201cwas a game-changer for us,\u201d Mr. Hoke said. Previously the Airbus unit assembled one or two much larger satellites a month relying heavily on manual labor and extensive testing during production.\n\n\nThe satellites slated to be built for OneWeb on a Florida assembly line later this year will undergo substantially less testing as a unit, once individual components meet requirements earlier in the process.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicolas Chamussy,\n\n\n\n who runs the Airbus satellite business, said in the same interview that the impact on engineers has been significant. \u201cIt has brought the teams to the spirit of we can probably do things differently\u201d than in the past, he said.\nNow, Airbus is working on ways to transfer the knowledge and lessons learned beyond the several hundred Airbus staff working on the project.\nIn addition to staff training and awareness, Mr. Hoke said the production changes will help Airbus maintain what he described as a \u201cone, two or three year\u201d head start over competitors seeking to launch small-satellite constellations similar to those designed for OneWeb and its initial deployment of 900 spacecraft..\nThe scale of OneWeb production has tested Airbus, the officials said. The company, for instance, needs to install one onboard computer on each satellite. In the past, Airbus has produced roughly one such computer per month.\nThe upshot is that Airbus experts designed the computers, which were then contracted out to suppliers.\nMr. Hoke said prospective customers interested in small-satellite projects tend to \u201clike the design\u201d of the basic satellite platform employed for the OneWeb constellation and \u201cactive discussions\u201d are under way with other customers on potential follow-on systems. Airbus also is mulling whether to use the same platform to bid on a closely watched Pentagon research project called \u201cBlackjack,\u201d consisting of small satellites.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Airbus says working with internet-service startup OneWeb is helping it maintain a head start over competitors seeking to launch small-satellite constellations. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Latest Capsules Expected to Pose Greater Risks Than Projected (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "697",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-latest-capsules-expected-to-pose-greater-risks-transporting-astronauts-than-originally-projected-1495827859?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=24",
        "text": "After the space shuttle Columbia exploded during re-entry in 2003, killing all seven crew members, the head of NASA\u2019s astronaut office urged management to adopt a safety standard for future human spacecraft of no more than one projected fatal accident per 1,000 flights. But that quickly proved technically unachievable. So when the space shuttles were retired in 2011 after a total of 135 flights, including two catastrophes, the hope was that future spacecraft would meet a standard of one fatal accident per roughly 700 flights\u2014roughly 10 times safer than the shuttles.\nYet that benchmark also was adjusted downward over the years, as detailed rocket and capsule designs were altered and entire programs were scrapped or overhauled. \u201cThere is no way they can achieve those numbers in the real world,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Don Nelson,\n\n\n\n a retired NASA engineer who raised safety concerns before the Columbia tragedy.\n\n\nNow, NASA says Boeing and Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will be mandated to meet a standard of no more than one potential catastrophic event in 270 flights, more than twice as risky as the proposed post-shuttle benchmark. NASA said it hasn\u2019t yet calculated even general safety standard covering the entire first Orion flight intended to carry astronauts to the vicinity of the moon, anticipated to last about three weeks. Industry officials, however, said NASA has issued \u201cdesign guidance\u201d covering capsule safety on that mission, for which a trajectory already has been decided. The number is no more than one fatal accident in 240 flights.\nThe commercial capsules are expected to conduct routine flights by mid-2019, which means they probably have to be well on the way to being certified before the end of next year.\nAn agency spokeswoman said \u201cour safety requirements remain consistent\u201d across commercial and traditional acquisition programs intended to transport astronauts, adding that specific calculations are based on factors ranging from duration of the flight to proximity to tiny meteorites to likely radiation exposure. NASA said the guidance number for Orion doesn\u2019t reflect launch hazards and certain other risks associated with the projected overall mission.\nUnderlying the numbers, NASA is struggling with a host of technical issues amid wide-ranging industry discussions over the variability of agency safety assessments. Experts inside and outside the government describe existing risk calculations as often imprecise. Such statistical measures, officially called \u201closs of crew\u201d numbers, are based on various engineering assumptions and can shift markedly depending on design changes and revised mission profiles. They also can be wildly optimistic. Just before the space shuttles stopped flying, NASA determined that based on their actual flight history and documented safety incidents, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was roughly one in nine.\nAgainst this confusing backdrop,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n a career NASA official with three decades of high-level experience who is in charge of human exploration, told an industry-government conference earlier this year in Washington that lawmakers, agency officials and the public have failed to explicitly acknowledge the full extent of the risks.\nBased on physics and the nature of space flight, he said, in the end \u201cwe\u2019re going to be flying with some risk, no matter how hard we try to remove that risk.\"\nNASA and its supporters \"should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d Mr. Gerstenmaier told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s next-generation manned spacecraft, initially envisioned to be roughly 10 times safer than the retired space shuttle fleet, will fall significantly short of that goal, according to industry and former agency officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Latest Capsules Expected to Pose Greater Risks Than Projected (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "698",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-latest-capsules-expected-to-pose-greater-risks-transporting-astronauts-than-originally-projected-1495827859?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=94",
        "text": "After the space shuttle Columbia exploded during re-entry in 2003, killing all seven crew members, the head of NASA\u2019s astronaut office urged management to adopt a safety standard for future human spacecraft of no more than one projected fatal accident per 1,000 flights. But that quickly proved technically unachievable. So when the space shuttles were retired in 2011 after a total of 135 flights, including two catastrophes, the hope was that future spacecraft would meet a standard of one fatal accident per roughly 700 flights\u2014roughly 10 times safer than the shuttles.\nYet that benchmark also was adjusted downward over the years, as detailed rocket and capsule designs were altered and entire programs were scrapped or overhauled. \u201cThere is no way they can achieve those numbers in the real world,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Don Nelson,\n\n\n\n a retired NASA engineer who raised safety concerns before the Columbia tragedy.\n\n\nNow, NASA says Boeing and Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will be mandated to meet a standard of no more than one potential catastrophic event in 270 flights, more than twice as risky as the proposed post-shuttle benchmark. NASA said it hasn\u2019t yet calculated even general safety standard covering the entire first Orion flight intended to carry astronauts to the vicinity of the moon, anticipated to last about three weeks. Industry officials, however, said NASA has issued \u201cdesign guidance\u201d covering capsule safety on that mission, for which a trajectory already has been decided. The number is no more than one fatal accident in 240 flights.\nThe commercial capsules are expected to conduct routine flights by mid-2019, which means they probably have to be well on the way to being certified before the end of next year.\nAn agency spokeswoman said \u201cour safety requirements remain consistent\u201d across commercial and traditional acquisition programs intended to transport astronauts, adding that specific calculations are based on factors ranging from duration of the flight to proximity to tiny meteorites to likely radiation exposure. NASA said the guidance number for Orion doesn\u2019t reflect launch hazards and certain other risks associated with the projected overall mission.\nUnderlying the numbers, NASA is struggling with a host of technical issues amid wide-ranging industry discussions over the variability of agency safety assessments. Experts inside and outside the government describe existing risk calculations as often imprecise. Such statistical measures, officially called \u201closs of crew\u201d numbers, are based on various engineering assumptions and can shift markedly depending on design changes and revised mission profiles. They also can be wildly optimistic. Just before the space shuttles stopped flying, NASA determined that based on their actual flight history and documented safety incidents, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was roughly one in nine.\nAgainst this confusing backdrop,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n a career NASA official with three decades of high-level experience who is in charge of human exploration, told an industry-government conference earlier this year in Washington that lawmakers, agency officials and the public have failed to explicitly acknowledge the full extent of the risks.\nBased on physics and the nature of space flight, he said, in the end \u201cwe\u2019re going to be flying with some risk, no matter how hard we try to remove that risk.\"\nNASA and its supporters \"should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d Mr. Gerstenmaier told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s next-generation manned spacecraft, initially envisioned to be roughly 10 times safer than the retired space shuttle fleet, will fall significantly short of that goal, according to industry and former agency officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Latest Capsules Expected to Pose Greater Risks Than Projected (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "699",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-latest-capsules-expected-to-pose-greater-risks-transporting-astronauts-than-originally-projected-1495827859?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=82",
        "text": "After the space shuttle Columbia exploded during re-entry in 2003, killing all seven crew members, the head of NASA\u2019s astronaut office urged management to adopt a safety standard for future human spacecraft of no more than one projected fatal accident per 1,000 flights. But that quickly proved technically unachievable. So when the space shuttles were retired in 2011 after a total of 135 flights, including two catastrophes, the hope was that future spacecraft would meet a standard of one fatal accident per roughly 700 flights\u2014roughly 10 times safer than the shuttles.\nYet that benchmark also was adjusted downward over the years, as detailed rocket and capsule designs were altered and entire programs were scrapped or overhauled. \u201cThere is no way they can achieve those numbers in the real world,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Don Nelson,\n\n\n\n a retired NASA engineer who raised safety concerns before the Columbia tragedy.\n\n\nNow, NASA says Boeing and Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will be mandated to meet a standard of no more than one potential catastrophic event in 270 flights, more than twice as risky as the proposed post-shuttle benchmark. NASA said it hasn\u2019t yet calculated even general safety standard covering the entire first Orion flight intended to carry astronauts to the vicinity of the moon, anticipated to last about three weeks. Industry officials, however, said NASA has issued \u201cdesign guidance\u201d covering capsule safety on that mission, for which a trajectory already has been decided. The number is no more than one fatal accident in 240 flights.\nThe commercial capsules are expected to conduct routine flights by mid-2019, which means they probably have to be well on the way to being certified before the end of next year.\nAn agency spokeswoman said \u201cour safety requirements remain consistent\u201d across commercial and traditional acquisition programs intended to transport astronauts, adding that specific calculations are based on factors ranging from duration of the flight to proximity to tiny meteorites to likely radiation exposure. NASA said the guidance number for Orion doesn\u2019t reflect launch hazards and certain other risks associated with the projected overall mission.\nUnderlying the numbers, NASA is struggling with a host of technical issues amid wide-ranging industry discussions over the variability of agency safety assessments. Experts inside and outside the government describe existing risk calculations as often imprecise. Such statistical measures, officially called \u201closs of crew\u201d numbers, are based on various engineering assumptions and can shift markedly depending on design changes and revised mission profiles. They also can be wildly optimistic. Just before the space shuttles stopped flying, NASA determined that based on their actual flight history and documented safety incidents, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was roughly one in nine.\nAgainst this confusing backdrop,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n a career NASA official with three decades of high-level experience who is in charge of human exploration, told an industry-government conference earlier this year in Washington that lawmakers, agency officials and the public have failed to explicitly acknowledge the full extent of the risks.\nBased on physics and the nature of space flight, he said, in the end \u201cwe\u2019re going to be flying with some risk, no matter how hard we try to remove that risk.\"\nNASA and its supporters \"should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d Mr. Gerstenmaier told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s next-generation manned spacecraft, initially envisioned to be roughly 10 times safer than the retired space shuttle fleet, will fall significantly short of that goal, according to industry and former agency officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Latest Capsules Expected to Pose Greater Risks Than Projected (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "700",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-latest-capsules-expected-to-pose-greater-risks-transporting-astronauts-than-originally-projected-1495827859?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=121",
        "text": "After the space shuttle Columbia exploded during re-entry in 2003, killing all seven crew members, the head of NASA\u2019s astronaut office urged management to adopt a safety standard for future human spacecraft of no more than one projected fatal accident per 1,000 flights. But that quickly proved technically unachievable. So when the space shuttles were retired in 2011 after a total of 135 flights, including two catastrophes, the hope was that future spacecraft would meet a standard of one fatal accident per roughly 700 flights\u2014roughly 10 times safer than the shuttles.\n\n\n\n\nYet that benchmark also was adjusted downward over the years, as detailed rocket and capsule designs were altered and entire programs were scrapped or overhauled. \u201cThere is no way they can achieve those numbers in the real world,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Don Nelson,\n\n\n\n a retired NASA engineer who raised safety concerns before the Columbia tragedy.\n\n\nNow, NASA says Boeing and Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will be mandated to meet a standard of no more than one potential catastrophic event in 270 flights, more than twice as risky as the proposed post-shuttle benchmark. NASA said it hasn\u2019t yet calculated even general safety standard covering the entire first Orion flight intended to carry astronauts to the vicinity of the moon, anticipated to last about three weeks. Industry officials, however, said NASA has issued \u201cdesign guidance\u201d covering capsule safety on that mission, for which a trajectory already has been decided. The number is no more than one fatal accident in 240 flights.\nThe commercial capsules are expected to conduct routine flights by mid-2019, which means they probably have to be well on the way to being certified before the end of next year.\nAn agency spokeswoman said \u201cour safety requirements remain consistent\u201d across commercial and traditional acquisition programs intended to transport astronauts, adding that specific calculations are based on factors ranging from duration of the flight to proximity to tiny meteorites to likely radiation exposure. NASA said the guidance number for Orion doesn\u2019t reflect launch hazards and certain other risks associated with the projected overall mission.\nUnderlying the numbers, NASA is struggling with a host of technical issues amid wide-ranging industry discussions over the variability of agency safety assessments. Experts inside and outside the government describe existing risk calculations as often imprecise. Such statistical measures, officially called \u201closs of crew\u201d numbers, are based on various engineering assumptions and can shift markedly depending on design changes and revised mission profiles. They also can be wildly optimistic. Just before the space shuttles stopped flying, NASA determined that based on their actual flight history and documented safety incidents, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was roughly one in nine.\nAgainst this confusing backdrop,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n a career NASA official with three decades of high-level experience who is in charge of human exploration, told an industry-government conference earlier this year in Washington that lawmakers, agency officials and the public have failed to explicitly acknowledge the full extent of the risks.\nBased on physics and the nature of space flight, he said, in the end \u201cwe\u2019re going to be flying with some risk, no matter how hard we try to remove that risk.\"\nNASA and its supporters \"should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d Mr. Gerstenmaier told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s next-generation manned spacecraft, initially envisioned to be roughly 10 times safer than the retired space shuttle fleet, will fall significantly short of that goal, according to industry and former agency officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Tiny Water-Powered Engines, Startup Aims to Give Small Satellites a Nudge (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "701",
        "date": "2019-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-tiny-water-powered-rockets-startup-aims-to-give-small-satellites-a-nudge-11549209724?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=16",
        "text": "After the satellites, which have a weight range of a few pounds to several hundred pounds, are blasted out of the atmosphere atop various rockets, the aim is to use a two-foot by two-foot spacecraft, called Vigoride, to nudge them into optimal orbits. The vehicle\u2019s innovative engine promises a long-sought solution for a sort of last-mile problem: Small satellites often hitch rides with bigger ones, but as a result they can end up in orbits that aren\u2019t really best for their particular missions. Moving them has tended to be complicated and expensive, and often simply impossible.\nMomentus arrives as production of small satellites is exploding world-wide, with thousands of launches projected over the next decade, for tasks including earth imaging, environmental monitoring and offering internet links from space. \n\n\nSome estimates peg global investment in commercial space ventures, encompassing rockets, spacecraft and ground support, at roughly $18 billion since 2009. That total could be dwarfed over the next decade as plans mature for new satellite constellations, next-generation rockets, space tourism and private missions into deep space.\n\n\nEarlier Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites How to Make a Tiny Satellite Tiny Satellites: The Latest Innovation Hedge Funds Are Using to Get a Leg Up \n\n\nBut under existing launch arrangements, many small satellites can\u2019t maximize return on investment because they are stranded in less-than-desirable locations. That can occur even when operators purchase a dedicated launch from the growing list of small-satellite boosters.\nThe first Momentus test flight is slated for the spring, and company officials Monday are set to announce Germany\u2019s Exolaunch GmbH, previously ECM Launch Services, as their first paying customer with a contract valued at about $6 million for a series of supplemental rides to low-earth orbit and beyond through 2021.\nThe fledgling company also has signed nonbinding service agreements with numerous entities around the globe totaling some $400 million. If the demonstration mission pans out, routine operations could commence by the end of next year, Momentus says. \nTechnical snafus could disrupt the company\u2019s plans, and it still has to convince skeptics and would-be customers it can build, test and launch its spacecraft on time. The company intends to rely on Russian rockets to reach space, at least in the beginning, which raises potential diplomatic and regulatory complications.\nUnder existing launch arrangements, companies, entrepreneurs and scientific organizations either have to pay hefty fees to launch a small satellite on a dedicated small-satellite rocket, or hitch a ride as an ancillary payload on a heavy-lift booster, meaning larger satellites dictate where they are released in space.\nThe Momentus engine uses microwaves to heat water to superhot temperatures, creating a plasma and ejecting a stream of high-velocity water vapor into space, providing thrust.\nThe company\u2019s website describes the goal as the \u201cin-space equivalent of the connecting flight\u201d for airline passengers.\nVeteran industry consultant Tim Farrar said \u201cin theory, giving satellites an external boost could be useful.\u201d But like many other space ventures, he said, \u201cthe real test is converting it from a technology demonstration to a real business.\u201d\nSome small satellites can maneuver into position using their own propulsion, but that expends fuel and dramatically shortens their useful life because even after reaching their intended orbit, they still need fuel to maintain their position over time. The very smallest satellites, often called cubesats or microsats, don\u2019t have that capability. With Vigoride, Momentus says it would cost roughly $1.2 million to disperse a cluster of as many as two dozen satellites weighing some 20 pounds apiece into different orbits.\nEarlier versions of the engine technology were studied in laboratories and debated in academic circles for decades. But until now, engineering hurdles made it less desirable than traditional chemical and electric propulsion, which typically use exotic chemicals or highly pressurized tanks\nMomentus, however, says the latest design tweaks make its propulsion solutions faster and less costly than those alternatives. Since its system relies on water as a feed stock and doesn\u2019t need hazardous or toxic chemicals, Vigoride and larger versions on the drawing board \u201cbasically use the same valves and pipes for storage as in a normal kitchen,\u201d according to serial entrepreneur Mikhail Kokorich, the company\u2019s chief executive.\nIf Momentus succeeds in showing the power and dependability of its space tug after release into low-earth orbit from a Russian Soyuz rocket, probably three months from now, it would be the first commercial demonstration of microwave plasma propulsion technology in the harsh conditions of space.\nJoel Sercel, a former government scientist who is the company\u2019s chief technology officer and a longtime champion of th A tiny U.S. space startup relying on a first-of-its-kind propulsion system\u2014fueled by water and microwaves\u2014aspires to make it easier and cheaper to reach orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Tiny Water-Powered Engines, Startup Aims to Give Small Satellites a Nudge (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "702",
        "date": "2019-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-tiny-water-powered-rockets-startup-aims-to-give-small-satellites-a-nudge-11549209724?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=21",
        "text": "After the satellites, which have a weight range of a few pounds to several hundred pounds, are blasted out of the atmosphere atop various rockets, the aim is to use a two-foot by two-foot spacecraft, called Vigoride, to nudge them into optimal orbits. The vehicle\u2019s innovative engine promises a long-sought solution for a sort of last-mile problem: Small satellites often hitch rides with bigger ones, but as a result they can end up in orbits that aren\u2019t really best for their particular missions. Moving them has tended to be complicated and expensive, and often simply impossible.\n\n\n\n\nMomentus arrives as production of small satellites is exploding world-wide, with thousands of launches projected over the next decade, for tasks including earth imaging, environmental monitoring and offering internet links from space. \n\n\nSome estimates peg global investment in commercial space ventures, encompassing rockets, spacecraft and ground support, at roughly $18 billion since 2009. That total could be dwarfed over the next decade as plans mature for new satellite constellations, next-generation rockets, space tourism and private missions into deep space.\n\n\nEarlier Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites How to Make a Tiny Satellite Tiny Satellites: The Latest Innovation Hedge Funds Are Using to Get a Leg Up \n\n\nBut under existing launch arrangements, many small satellites can\u2019t maximize return on investment because they are stranded in less-than-desirable locations. That can occur even when operators purchase a dedicated launch from the growing list of small-satellite boosters.\nThe first Momentus test flight is slated for the spring, and company officials Monday are set to announce Germany\u2019s Exolaunch GmbH, previously ECM Launch Services, as their first paying customer with a contract valued at about $6 million for a series of supplemental rides to low-earth orbit and beyond through 2021.\nThe fledgling company also has signed nonbinding service agreements with numerous entities around the globe totaling some $400 million. If the demonstration mission pans out, routine operations could commence by the end of next year, Momentus says. \nTechnical snafus could disrupt the company\u2019s plans, and it still has to convince skeptics and would-be customers it can build, test and launch its spacecraft on time. The company intends to rely on Russian rockets to reach space, at least in the beginning, which raises potential diplomatic and regulatory complications.\nUnder existing launch arrangements, companies, entrepreneurs and scientific organizations either have to pay hefty fees to launch a small satellite on a dedicated small-satellite rocket, or hitch a ride as an ancillary payload on a heavy-lift booster, meaning larger satellites dictate where they are released in space.\nThe Momentus engine uses microwaves to heat water to superhot temperatures, creating a plasma and ejecting a stream of high-velocity water vapor into space, providing thrust.\nThe company\u2019s website describes the goal as the \u201cin-space equivalent of the connecting flight\u201d for airline passengers.\nVeteran industry consultant Tim Farrar said \u201cin theory, giving satellites an external boost could be useful.\u201d But like many other space ventures, he said, \u201cthe real test is converting it from a technology demonstration to a real business.\u201d\nSome small satellites can maneuver into position using their own propulsion, but that expends fuel and dramatically shortens their useful life because even after reaching their intended orbit, they still need fuel to maintain their position over time. The very smallest satellites, often called cubesats or microsats, don\u2019t have that capability. With Vigoride, Momentus says it would cost roughly $1.2 million to disperse a cluster of as many as two dozen satellites weighing some 20 pounds apiece into different orbits.\nEarlier versions of the engine technology were studied in laboratories and debated in academic circles for decades. But until now, engineering hurdles made it less desirable than traditional chemical and electric propulsion, which typically use exotic chemicals or highly pressurized tanks\nMomentus, however, says the latest design tweaks make its propulsion solutions faster and less costly than those alternatives. Since its system relies on water as a feed stock and doesn\u2019t need hazardous or toxic chemicals, Vigoride and larger versions on the drawing board \u201cbasically use the same valves and pipes for storage as in a normal kitchen,\u201d according to serial entrepreneur Mikhail Kokorich, the company\u2019s chief executive.\nIf Momentus succeeds in showing the power and dependability of its space tug after release into low-earth orbit from a Russian Soyuz rocket, probably three months from now, it would be the first commercial demonstration of microwave plasma propulsion technology in the harsh conditions of space.\nJoel Sercel, a former government scientist who is the company\u2019s chief technology officer and a longtime champion o A tiny U.S. space startup relying on a first-of-its-kind propulsion system\u2014fueled by water and microwaves\u2014aspires to make it easier and cheaper to reach orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Tiny Water-Powered Engines, Startup Aims to Give Small Satellites a Nudge (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "703",
        "date": "2019-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-tiny-water-powered-rockets-startup-aims-to-give-small-satellites-a-nudge-11549209724?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=59",
        "text": "After the satellites, which have a weight range of a few pounds to several hundred pounds, are blasted out of the atmosphere atop various rockets, the aim is to use a two-foot by two-foot spacecraft, called Vigoride, to nudge them into optimal orbits. The vehicle\u2019s innovative engine promises a long-sought solution for a sort of last-mile problem: Small satellites often hitch rides with bigger ones, but as a result they can end up in orbits that aren\u2019t really best for their particular missions. Moving them has tended to be complicated and expensive, and often simply impossible.\nMomentus arrives as production of small satellites is exploding world-wide, with thousands of launches projected over the next decade, for tasks including earth imaging, environmental monitoring and offering internet links from space. \n\n\nSome estimates peg global investment in commercial space ventures, encompassing rockets, spacecraft and ground support, at roughly $18 billion since 2009. That total could be dwarfed over the next decade as plans mature for new satellite constellations, next-generation rockets, space tourism and private missions into deep space.\n\n\nEarlier Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites How to Make a Tiny Satellite Tiny Satellites: The Latest Innovation Hedge Funds Are Using to Get a Leg Up \n\n\nBut under existing launch arrangements, many small satellites can\u2019t maximize return on investment because they are stranded in less-than-desirable locations. That can occur even when operators purchase a dedicated launch from the growing list of small-satellite boosters.\nThe first Momentus test flight is slated for the spring, and company officials Monday are set to announce Germany\u2019s Exolaunch GmbH, previously ECM Launch Services, as their first paying customer with a contract valued at about $6 million for a series of supplemental rides to low-earth orbit and beyond through 2021.\nThe fledgling company also has signed nonbinding service agreements with numerous entities around the globe totaling some $400 million. If the demonstration mission pans out, routine operations could commence by the end of next year, Momentus says. \nTechnical snafus could disrupt the company\u2019s plans, and it still has to convince skeptics and would-be customers it can build, test and launch its spacecraft on time. The company intends to rely on Russian rockets to reach space, at least in the beginning, which raises potential diplomatic and regulatory complications.\nUnder existing launch arrangements, companies, entrepreneurs and scientific organizations either have to pay hefty fees to launch a small satellite on a dedicated small-satellite rocket, or hitch a ride as an ancillary payload on a heavy-lift booster, meaning larger satellites dictate where they are released in space.\nThe Momentus engine uses microwaves to heat water to superhot temperatures, creating a plasma and ejecting a stream of high-velocity water vapor into space, providing thrust.\nThe company\u2019s website describes the goal as the \u201cin-space equivalent of the connecting flight\u201d for airline passengers.\nVeteran industry consultant Tim Farrar said \u201cin theory, giving satellites an external boost could be useful.\u201d But like many other space ventures, he said, \u201cthe real test is converting it from a technology demonstration to a real business.\u201d\nSome small satellites can maneuver into position using their own propulsion, but that expends fuel and dramatically shortens their useful life because even after reaching their intended orbit, they still need fuel to maintain their position over time. The very smallest satellites, often called cubesats or microsats, don\u2019t have that capability. With Vigoride, Momentus says it would cost roughly $1.2 million to disperse a cluster of as many as two dozen satellites weighing some 20 pounds apiece into different orbits.\nEarlier versions of the engine technology were studied in laboratories and debated in academic circles for decades. But until now, engineering hurdles made it less desirable than traditional chemical and electric propulsion, which typically use exotic chemicals or highly pressurized tanks\nMomentus, however, says the latest design tweaks make its propulsion solutions faster and less costly than those alternatives. Since its system relies on water as a feed stock and doesn\u2019t need hazardous or toxic chemicals, Vigoride and larger versions on the drawing board \u201cbasically use the same valves and pipes for storage as in a normal kitchen,\u201d according to serial entrepreneur Mikhail Kokorich, the company\u2019s chief executive.\nIf Momentus succeeds in showing the power and dependability of its space tug after release into low-earth orbit from a Russian Soyuz rocket, probably three months from now, it would be the first commercial demonstration of microwave plasma propulsion technology in the harsh conditions of space.\nJoel Sercel, a former government scientist who is the company\u2019s chief technology officer and a longtime champion of th A tiny U.S. space startup relying on a first-of-its-kind propulsion system\u2014fueled by water and microwaves\u2014aspires to make it easier and cheaper to reach orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "704",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-19th-rocket-in-a-year-a-company-record-1543862707?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=17",
        "text": "Aerospace industry officials said the Falcon 9 rocket carried the largest number of satellites ever stacked on top a U.S. booster: a cluster of more than five dozen small satellites that were launched into space from central California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base.\nSuch multiple-satellite missions are aimed at helping SpaceX compete against a bevy of much smaller, less costly rockets currently under development or starting to provide rides for this burgeoning market segment.\n\n\nThe lower part of the Falcon 9 launched Monday had flown on two previous missions, another first for the Hawthorne, Calif., company that has become synonymous with reusable rockets.\nThe launch occurred at 10:34 a.m. local time and the second stage separated successfully.\nBy slashing launch costs for individual customers and repeatedly recycling the main engines and the rest of the lower stage, Mr. Musk and his team seek to make it significantly easier for entrepreneurs, space startups, academic researchers and student groups to get spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. In this case, the stage flew for the third time in roughly seven months, reflecting SpaceX\u2019s growing expertise and confidence in reusing such hardware.\nSince global demand for launching larger satellites into higher orbits is stagnant and likely to shrink over the next two or three years, competition for the lower end of the satellite market is bound to intensify.\nBut SpaceX has other reasons for reusing hardware that already has flown in space. Over the years, SpaceX officials have maintained that enhanced rocket reusability\u2014conceived with the goal of eventually paving the way for flights several times a week or even several times a day\u2014is the best way to ensure overall mission reliability. \nThe more often launch crews execute their intricate sequence of engineering checks and commands, according to this concept, the more likely they are to get rockets off the ground safely and on schedule.\nHours after launch, SpaceX and a separate satellite-launch broker that helped with the arrangements said the payload deployed as planned. \nSuch small satellites typically hitch a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket dedicated to lifting a larger spacecraft, which means schedules often are at the mercy of the main customer.\nBut in recent years, satellite operators ranging from the Air Force to telecommunications companies to startup Earth-imaging ventures have stressed the benefits of prioritizing mini-payloads on certain launches. Dozens of different entities built the small satellites, from the Air Force to various space startups.\nThe 64 satellites come from 17 different countries and are sponsored by space agencies, companies, art museums and even a U.S. middle school.\nSpaceflight, a Seattle-based launch broker that arranged for the unusual manifest of satellites, has said such missions enable \u201call kinds of business plans to come to fruition.\u201d\nThe rocket\u2019s lower stage returned and landed vertically on a specially outfitted floating platform less than nine minutes after launch. \nReflecting SpaceX\u2019s accelerating launch tempo, the company on Tuesday is scheduled to launch a cargo resupply capsule for NASA to the international space station. That mission also will use a Falcon 9 rocket, but it is slated to lift off from Florida.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A successful rocket launch Monday by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX marked twin milestones for the company\u2019s drive to ease access for commercial satellites into orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "705",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-19th-rocket-in-a-year-a-company-record-1543862707?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=61",
        "text": "Aerospace industry officials said the Falcon 9 rocket carried the largest number of satellites ever stacked on top a U.S. booster: a cluster of more than five dozen small satellites that were launched into space from central California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base.\nSuch multiple-satellite missions are aimed at helping SpaceX compete against a bevy of much smaller, less costly rockets currently under development or starting to provide rides for this burgeoning market segment.\n\n\nThe lower part of the Falcon 9 launched Monday had flown on two previous missions, another first for the Hawthorne, Calif., company that has become synonymous with reusable rockets.\nThe launch occurred at 10:34 a.m. local time and the second stage separated successfully.\nBy slashing launch costs for individual customers and repeatedly recycling the main engines and the rest of the lower stage, Mr. Musk and his team seek to make it significantly easier for entrepreneurs, space startups, academic researchers and student groups to get spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. In this case, the stage flew for the third time in roughly seven months, reflecting SpaceX\u2019s growing expertise and confidence in reusing such hardware.\nSince global demand for launching larger satellites into higher orbits is stagnant and likely to shrink over the next two or three years, competition for the lower end of the satellite market is bound to intensify.\nBut SpaceX has other reasons for reusing hardware that already has flown in space. Over the years, SpaceX officials have maintained that enhanced rocket reusability\u2014conceived with the goal of eventually paving the way for flights several times a week or even several times a day\u2014is the best way to ensure overall mission reliability. \nThe more often launch crews execute their intricate sequence of engineering checks and commands, according to this concept, the more likely they are to get rockets off the ground safely and on schedule.\nHours after launch, SpaceX and a separate satellite-launch broker that helped with the arrangements said the payload deployed as planned. \nSuch small satellites typically hitch a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket dedicated to lifting a larger spacecraft, which means schedules often are at the mercy of the main customer.\nBut in recent years, satellite operators ranging from the Air Force to telecommunications companies to startup Earth-imaging ventures have stressed the benefits of prioritizing mini-payloads on certain launches. Dozens of different entities built the small satellites, from the Air Force to various space startups.\nThe 64 satellites come from 17 different countries and are sponsored by space agencies, companies, art museums and even a U.S. middle school.\nSpaceflight, a Seattle-based launch broker that arranged for the unusual manifest of satellites, has said such missions enable \u201call kinds of business plans to come to fruition.\u201d\nThe rocket\u2019s lower stage returned and landed vertically on a specially outfitted floating platform less than nine minutes after launch. \nReflecting SpaceX\u2019s accelerating launch tempo, the company on Tuesday is scheduled to launch a cargo resupply capsule for NASA to the international space station. That mission also will use a Falcon 9 rocket, but it is slated to lift off from Florida.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A successful rocket launch Monday by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX marked twin milestones for the company\u2019s drive to ease access for commercial satellites into orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "706",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-19th-rocket-in-a-year-a-company-record-1543862707?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=83",
        "text": "Aerospace industry officials said the Falcon 9 rocket carried the largest number of satellites ever stacked on top a U.S. booster: a cluster of more than five dozen small satellites that were launched into space from central California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base.\n\n\n\n\nSuch multiple-satellite missions are aimed at helping SpaceX compete against a bevy of much smaller, less costly rockets currently under development or starting to provide rides for this burgeoning market segment.\n\n\nThe lower part of the Falcon 9 launched Monday had flown on two previous missions, another first for the Hawthorne, Calif., company that has become synonymous with reusable rockets.\nThe launch occurred at 10:34 a.m. local time and the second stage separated successfully.\nBy slashing launch costs for individual customers and repeatedly recycling the main engines and the rest of the lower stage, Mr. Musk and his team seek to make it significantly easier for entrepreneurs, space startups, academic researchers and student groups to get spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. In this case, the stage flew for the third time in roughly seven months, reflecting SpaceX\u2019s growing expertise and confidence in reusing such hardware.\nSince global demand for launching larger satellites into higher orbits is stagnant and likely to shrink over the next two or three years, competition for the lower end of the satellite market is bound to intensify.\nBut SpaceX has other reasons for reusing hardware that already has flown in space. Over the years, SpaceX officials have maintained that enhanced rocket reusability\u2014conceived with the goal of eventually paving the way for flights several times a week or even several times a day\u2014is the best way to ensure overall mission reliability. \nThe more often launch crews execute their intricate sequence of engineering checks and commands, according to this concept, the more likely they are to get rockets off the ground safely and on schedule.\nHours after launch, SpaceX and a separate satellite-launch broker that helped with the arrangements said the payload deployed as planned. \nSuch small satellites typically hitch a ride as a secondary payload on a rocket dedicated to lifting a larger spacecraft, which means schedules often are at the mercy of the main customer.\nBut in recent years, satellite operators ranging from the Air Force to telecommunications companies to startup Earth-imaging ventures have stressed the benefits of prioritizing mini-payloads on certain launches. Dozens of different entities built the small satellites, from the Air Force to various space startups.\nThe 64 satellites come from 17 different countries and are sponsored by space agencies, companies, art museums and even a U.S. middle school.\nSpaceflight, a Seattle-based launch broker that arranged for the unusual manifest of satellites, has said such missions enable \u201call kinds of business plans to come to fruition.\u201d\nThe rocket\u2019s lower stage returned and landed vertically on a specially outfitted floating platform less than nine minutes after launch. \nReflecting SpaceX\u2019s accelerating launch tempo, the company on Tuesday is scheduled to launch a cargo resupply capsule for NASA to the international space station. That mission also will use a Falcon 9 rocket, but it is slated to lift off from Florida.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A successful rocket launch Monday by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX marked twin milestones for the company\u2019s drive to ease access for commercial satellites into orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Rebuffed in Contract Protest (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "707",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-blue-origin-rebuffed-in-its-protest-of-moon-lander-contract-11627670119?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=25",
        "text": "A spokeswoman for Blue Origin didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. Dynetics said it respects the GAO\u2019s decision and plans to compete for other lander opportunities and moon-related work.\nMr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin is pursuing a broad agenda for space, and winning part of the lander contract was important for the company\u2019s ambitions. Blue Origin\u2019s partners for its lander included\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -1.20%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.87%\n\n\n\n\nIn a letter sent Monday, Mr. Bezos made a personal appeal to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson regarding the contract, offering to waive up to $2 billion in payments over roughly the next two years and fund another mission of the lander to low-Earth orbit.\nMr. Nelson declined to comment on the letter during a briefing Thursday. He had previously said at a congressional hearing that NASA would seek more funding to support future bids for its lunar landing system. NASA said Friday that the GAO\u2019s decision would allow it to set a timeline with SpaceX for landing astronauts back on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.\nThe GAO on Friday said that NASA didn\u2019t violate any procurement laws or rules when it decided to award a single contract for the lander to Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is formally called. NASA had opted to go with a single supplier amid budget constraints.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin and Dynetics filed protests with the GAO over that decision, arguing that the agency was required to make multiple awards. Such protests could have forced NASA to rebid the contract, but the GAO concluded that the space agency was within its rights to choose only SpaceX. A spokesman for SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\u201cNASA\u2019s announcement provided that the number of awards the agency would make was subject to the amount of funding available for the program,\u201d the GAO said in a statement. \u201cIn addition, the announcement reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all.\u201d \nMr. Musk reacted to the news by tweeting \u201cGAO\u201d and then a flexed-arm emoji. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com A federal agency upheld the decision to make Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX the sole winner of a contract to develop a moon lander for NASA. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Rebuffed in Contract Protest (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "708",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-blue-origin-rebuffed-in-its-protest-of-moon-lander-contract-11627670119?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=25",
        "text": "A spokeswoman for Blue Origin didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. Dynetics said it respects the GAO\u2019s decision and plans to compete for other lander opportunities and moon-related work.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin is pursuing a broad agenda for space, and winning part of the lander contract was important for the company\u2019s ambitions. Blue Origin\u2019s partners for its lander included\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.97%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n NOC -1.18%\n\n\n\n\nIn a letter sent Monday, Mr. Bezos made a personal appeal to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson regarding the contract, offering to waive up to $2 billion in payments over roughly the next two years and fund another mission of the lander to low-Earth orbit.\nMr. Nelson declined to comment on the letter during a briefing Thursday. He had previously said at a congressional hearing that NASA would seek more funding to support future bids for its lunar landing system. NASA said Friday that the GAO\u2019s decision would allow it to set a timeline with SpaceX for landing astronauts back on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.\nThe GAO on Friday said that NASA didn\u2019t violate any procurement laws or rules when it decided to award a single contract for the lander to Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is formally called. NASA had opted to go with a single supplier amid budget constraints.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin and Dynetics filed protests with the GAO over that decision, arguing that the agency was required to make multiple awards. Such protests could have forced NASA to rebid the contract, but the GAO concluded that the space agency was within its rights to choose only SpaceX. A spokesman for SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\u201cNASA\u2019s announcement provided that the number of awards the agency would make was subject to the amount of funding available for the program,\u201d the GAO said in a statement. \u201cIn addition, the announcement reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all.\u201d \nMr. Musk reacted to the news by tweeting \u201cGAO\u201d and then a flexed-arm emoji. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com A federal agency upheld the decision to make Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX the sole winner of a contract to develop a moon lander for NASA. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Has a Ticket to Space, Too...With Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "709",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-has-a-ticket-to-space-too-with-richard-bransons-virgin-11626012705?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=7",
        "text": "A spokesman for Galactic said Mr. Musk had bought a ticket for his own space ride. It is unclear how far up the waiting list Mr. Musk is for a seat. Virgin Galactic said its tickets have sold for $250,000 each, and the company has collected $80 million in sales and deposits.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nRepresentatives for Mr. Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. A representative for Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, wasn\u2019t immediately available to comment early Sunday.\n\n\nIn a preflight interview by London\u2019s Sunday Times, Mr. Branson acknowledged the purchase: \u201cElon\u2019s a friend and maybe I\u2019ll travel on one of his ships one day,\u201d he told the newspaper. Sunday morning, Mr. Branson tweeted a photo of himself and Mr. Musk: \u201cGreat to start the morning with a friend.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 for a trip to space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe bonhomie contrasts with recent sniping by Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin. The company is slated to send Mr. Bezos to space later this month. Last week, the company called Mr. Branson\u2019s space craft a \u201chigh altitude airplane,\u201d noting passengers won\u2019t get above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n\u00a0Line, an imaginary boundary 62 miles above sea level that many authorities recognize as the start of space. Virgin Galactic said its vehicle would top 50 miles, a boundary recognized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration.\nIn a tweet Saturday, Blue Origin wished Mr. Branson \u201ca great flight.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and five crew members successfully traveled to the edge of space, experiencing weightlessness aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft. The flight is part of a push to spur a new space-tourism industry. Photo: Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company? Ahead of Branson\u2019s blastoff Sunday, Virgin Galactic said fellow billionaire has a ticket. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Has a Ticket to Space, Too...With Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "710",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-has-a-ticket-to-space-too-with-richard-bransons-virgin-11626012705?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=17",
        "text": "A spokesman for Galactic said Mr. Musk had bought a ticket for his own space ride. It is unclear how far up the waiting list Mr. Musk is for a seat. Virgin Galactic said its tickets have sold for $250,000 each, and the company has collected $80 million in sales and deposits.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nRepresentatives for Mr. Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. A representative for Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, wasn\u2019t immediately available to comment early Sunday.\n\n\nIn a preflight interview by London\u2019s Sunday Times, Mr. Branson acknowledged the purchase: \u201cElon\u2019s a friend and maybe I\u2019ll travel on one of his ships one day,\u201d he told the newspaper. Sunday morning, Mr. Branson tweeted a photo of himself and Mr. Musk: \u201cGreat to start the morning with a friend.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 for a trip to space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe bonhomie contrasts with recent sniping by Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin. The company is slated to send Mr. Bezos to space later this month. Last week, the company called Mr. Branson\u2019s space craft a \u201chigh altitude airplane,\u201d noting passengers won\u2019t get above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n\u00a0Line, an imaginary boundary 62 miles above sea level that many authorities recognize as the start of space. Virgin Galactic said its vehicle would top 50 miles, a boundary recognized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration.\nIn a tweet Saturday, Blue Origin wished Mr. Branson \u201ca great flight.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and five crew members successfully traveled to the edge of space, experiencing weightlessness aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft. The flight is part of a push to spur a new space-tourism industry. Photo: Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company? Ahead of Branson\u2019s blastoff Sunday, Virgin Galactic said fellow billionaire has a ticket. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Has a Ticket to Space, Too...With Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "711",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-has-a-ticket-to-space-too-with-richard-bransons-virgin-11626012705?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=27",
        "text": "A spokesman for Galactic said Mr. Musk had bought a ticket for his own space ride. It is unclear how far up the waiting list Mr. Musk is for a seat. Virgin Galactic said its tickets have sold for $250,000 each, and the company has collected $80 million in sales and deposits.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nRepresentatives for Mr. Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. A representative for Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, wasn\u2019t immediately available to comment early Sunday.\n\n\nIn a preflight interview by London\u2019s Sunday Times, Mr. Branson acknowledged the purchase: \u201cElon\u2019s a friend and maybe I\u2019ll travel on one of his ships one day,\u201d he told the newspaper. Sunday morning, Mr. Branson tweeted a photo of himself and Mr. Musk: \u201cGreat to start the morning with a friend.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 for a trip to space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe bonhomie contrasts with recent sniping by Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin. The company is slated to send Mr. Bezos to space later this month. Last week, the company called Mr. Branson\u2019s space craft a \u201chigh altitude airplane,\u201d noting passengers won\u2019t get above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n\u00a0Line, an imaginary boundary 62 miles above sea level that many authorities recognize as the start of space. Virgin Galactic said its vehicle would top 50 miles, a boundary recognized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration.\nIn a tweet Saturday, Blue Origin wished Mr. Branson \u201ca great flight.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and five crew members successfully traveled to the edge of space, experiencing weightlessness aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft. The flight is part of a push to spur a new space-tourism industry. Photo: Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company? Ahead of Branson\u2019s blastoff Sunday, Virgin Galactic said fellow billionaire has a ticket. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft to Return to Factory Over Stuck Valves (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "712",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-says-it-will-remove-starliner-spacecraft-from-rocket-11628873905?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=5",
        "text": "\u201cWe\u2019re going to go fix this problem,\u201d associate NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders\n\n\n\n said. \u201cThe team needs some time now to really be able to figure out what\u2019s wrong.\u201d\nBoeing said its preliminary analysis indicated that moisture in the spacecraft\u2019s propulsion system somehow resulted in corrosion on 13, or more than half, of certain valves and prevented them from opening properly, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Vollmer,\n\n\n\n a company executive who oversees the Starliner. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe valves open and close to allow\u2014or stop if needed\u2014the flow of certain chemicals used to propel the spacecraft at various stages of the mission and are key to its safety. \n\n\nMr. Vollmer said Boeing hadn\u2019t identified the moisture\u2019s source. Nine of the 13 valves are back to functioning normally, with four still closed, the company has said. \nMr. Vollmer added that Boeing would evaluate whether the problematic valves would require a redesign. He also flagged a separate problem with sensors that indicate whether the valves are open or closed. A storm also displaced covers over the spacecraft\u2019s thrusters, resulting in water intrusion, he said.\nThe valves were used on the 2019 Starliner flight that didn\u2019t reach the space station, but weren\u2019t the cause of that mission\u2019s mistakes, according to Mr. Vollmer. He also said they had been tested previously without any incident. When the vessel was on the launchpad for the most recent flight attempt last week, Boeing checked the valves as part of its testing procedures and discovered the problem, he added. \n\u201cThese are the kinds of things you want to find on the ground,\u201d said Ms. Lueders. \nThe propulsion system containing the valves is manufactured by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n AJRD 2.51%\n\n\n a longtime Boeing supplier that officials said was assisting in the troubleshooting and repairs. The company declined to comment Friday.\nEarlier in the week, Boeing and NASA had said they were weighing potentially launching the Starliner this month. NASA has other missions planned in coming months that complicate scheduling future attempts to launch the Starliner. \nBoeing has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station, without crew on board\u2014after the earlier attempt a year and a half ago. Ultimately, the capsule is supposed to ferry astronauts and cargo to the space station.\nAhead of the Starliner do-over this summer, NASA and Boeing officials in July said they had subjected the spacecraft to rigorous, increased testing to ensure a successful test. The company previously booked a $410 million charge related to the costs of the launch redo. Mr. Vollmer said Friday that it was too soon to say how much the latest delay might cost Boeing.\nAfter the Starliner is removed from the rocket, the spacecraft will be moved to a factory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he said. \nIn December 2019, a Boeing software error prevented the Starliner from getting into the correct orbit and it never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s protective heat shield.\nNASA has said it wants to have two U.S.-based companies available to transport astronauts to and from the space station. Right now, the agency has one confirmed provider, SpaceX, in place for those flights. Its second option is to contract for seats on Russian rockets.\nOn Friday, NASA officials and Mr. Vollmer said they were disappointed by the Starliner\u2019s lengthy delay but stressed that a schedule wasn\u2019t their primary concern. \n\u201cThe launch window, while important to us, was not the driver,\u201d Mr. Vollmer said. \u201cThe driver was safety.\u201d \n\n\nBoeing\u2019s StarlinerMore WSJ coverage, selected by the editors Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (Aug. 12) Boeing Space Flight Postponed After Mishap at Space Station (July 29) Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (Dec. 20, 2019) \n\n\nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The decision to remove the Starliner from the rocket that was supposed to propel it into space is expected to delay its launch by several months. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft to Return to Factory Over Stuck Valves (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "713",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-says-it-will-remove-starliner-spacecraft-from-rocket-11628873905?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=25",
        "text": "\u201cWe\u2019re going to go fix this problem,\u201d associate NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders\n\n\n\n said. \u201cThe team needs some time now to really be able to figure out what\u2019s wrong.\u201d\nBoeing said its preliminary analysis indicated that moisture in the spacecraft\u2019s propulsion system somehow resulted in corrosion on 13, or more than half, of certain valves and prevented them from opening properly, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Vollmer,\n\n\n\n a company executive who oversees the Starliner. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe valves open and close to allow\u2014or stop if needed\u2014the flow of certain chemicals used to propel the spacecraft at various stages of the mission and are key to its safety. \n\n\nMr. Vollmer said Boeing hadn\u2019t identified the moisture\u2019s source. Nine of the 13 valves are back to functioning normally, with four still closed, the company has said. \nMr. Vollmer added that Boeing would evaluate whether the problematic valves would require a redesign. He also flagged a separate problem with sensors that indicate whether the valves are open or closed. A storm also displaced covers over the spacecraft\u2019s thrusters, resulting in water intrusion, he said.\nThe valves were used on the 2019 Starliner flight that didn\u2019t reach the space station, but weren\u2019t the cause of that mission\u2019s mistakes, according to Mr. Vollmer. He also said they had been tested previously without any incident. When the vessel was on the launchpad for the most recent flight attempt last week, Boeing checked the valves as part of its testing procedures and discovered the problem, he added. \n\u201cThese are the kinds of things you want to find on the ground,\u201d said Ms. Lueders. \nThe propulsion system containing the valves is manufactured by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n AJRD 2.51%\n\n\n a longtime Boeing supplier that officials said was assisting in the troubleshooting and repairs. The company declined to comment Friday.\nEarlier in the week, Boeing and NASA had said they were weighing potentially launching the Starliner this month. NASA has other missions planned in coming months that complicate scheduling future attempts to launch the Starliner. \nBoeing has spent years developing the Starliner and was supposed to launch it late last month to dock with the International Space Station, without crew on board\u2014after the earlier attempt a year and a half ago. Ultimately, the capsule is supposed to ferry astronauts and cargo to the space station.\nAhead of the Starliner do-over this summer, NASA and Boeing officials in July said they had subjected the spacecraft to rigorous, increased testing to ensure a successful test. The company previously booked a $410 million charge related to the costs of the launch redo. Mr. Vollmer said Friday that it was too soon to say how much the latest delay might cost Boeing.\nAfter the Starliner is removed from the rocket, the spacecraft will be moved to a factory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he said. \nIn December 2019, a Boeing software error prevented the Starliner from getting into the correct orbit and it never docked with the space station. Another potentially catastrophic error was fixed during the mission to prevent damaging the spacecraft\u2019s protective heat shield.\nNASA has said it wants to have two U.S.-based companies available to transport astronauts to and from the space station. Right now, the agency has one confirmed provider, SpaceX, in place for those flights. Its second option is to contract for seats on Russian rockets.\nOn Friday, NASA officials and Mr. Vollmer said they were disappointed by the Starliner\u2019s lengthy delay but stressed that a schedule wasn\u2019t their primary concern. \n\u201cThe launch window, while important to us, was not the driver,\u201d Mr. Vollmer said. \u201cThe driver was safety.\u201d \n\n\nBoeing\u2019s StarlinerMore WSJ coverage, selected by the editors Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (Aug. 12) Boeing Space Flight Postponed After Mishap at Space Station (July 29) Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (Dec. 20, 2019) \n\n\nWrite to Andrew Tangel at Andrew.Tangel@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The decision to remove the Starliner from the rocket that was supposed to propel it into space is expected to delay its launch by several months. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Space Flight Postponed After Mishap at Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "714",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-space-flight-postponed-after-mishap-at-space-station-11627589940?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=18",
        "text": "\u201cWe want to ensure that the space station is in a stable configuration, and ready for Starliner to arrive,\u201d said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, which is overseeing the Starliner effort. The Boeing capsule could be launched on Aug. 3, he said.\n\n\n\n\nBoeing said the company is ready for the Starliner launch \u201cwhen the time is right.\u201d \n\nOfficials decided to put off launching the Boeing vehicle after a flight-control team noticed at 12:45 p.m. ET on Thursday that the Russian spacecraft, called the Nauka, had inadvertently fired its thrusters while it was docked to the space station, causing the space station to veer out of its expected orientation in space. \nThe Nauka vessel, which was uncrewed, had connected with the space station Thursday morning. The 43-foot-long, 23-ton module is meant to serve in part as a new science facility and docking port, according to a NASA website. \nRoscosmos, Russia\u2019s space agency, didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nFor roughly an hour on Thursday, staffers supporting the Nauka\u2019s docking at the space station worked to return the facility to a normal orientation in space, NASA executives said at a briefing after the Starliner flight was postponed.\nCommunications between the facility and NASA failed at one point for four minutes and again for seven minutes, according to Joel Montalbano, the agency\u2019s manager for the space station program. He said teams were able to reorient it by firing countervailing thrusters, he said.\nCrew members on the station didn\u2019t face any immediate danger during the operation, Mr. Montalbano said.\n.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule was slated for launch Friday afternoon. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Reduces Stake in Virgin Galactic (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "715",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-reduces-stake-in-virgin-galactic-11628890369?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=5",
        "text": "\u201cVirgin intends to use the net proceeds from this sale to support its portfolio of global leisure, holiday and travel businesses that continue to be affected by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to supporting the development and growth of new and existing businesses,\" a spokeswoman said in a statement.\nMr. Branson\u2019s business empire\u2014straddling airlines, cruise ships, hotels and gyms\u2014is trying to recover from the economic hit that many tourism and travel-focused businesses have suffered during the health crisis. Virgin Galactic Holdings and satellite-launch company Virgin Orbit have been bright spots.\n\n\nLast month, Mr. Branson beat fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n into space in a high-profile trip that took him on a Virgin Galactic Holdings spacecraft more than 50 miles above Earth. Mr. Bezos followed soon after aboard a spacecraft developed by his company Blue Origin LLC.\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises.\nVirgin Group also cashed out shares in Virgin Galactic in May to raise money for the wider business.\nThe spokeswoman said that Virgin Group continues to be the largest single shareholder in Virgin Galactic.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com The billionaire sold $300 million worth of shares in his space tourism company to raise money for other parts of the Virgin business empire. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Reduces Stake in Virgin Galactic (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "716",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-reduces-stake-in-virgin-galactic-11628890369?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=5",
        "text": "\u201cVirgin intends to use the net proceeds from this sale to support its portfolio of global leisure, holiday and travel businesses that continue to be affected by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to supporting the development and growth of new and existing businesses,\" a spokeswoman said in a statement.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s business empire\u2014straddling airlines, cruise ships, hotels and gyms\u2014is trying to recover from the economic hit that many tourism and travel-focused businesses have suffered during the health crisis. Virgin Galactic Holdings and satellite-launch company Virgin Orbit have been bright spots.\n\n\nLast month, Mr. Branson beat fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n into space in a high-profile trip that took him on a Virgin Galactic Holdings spacecraft more than 50 miles above Earth. Mr. Bezos followed soon after aboard a spacecraft developed by his company Blue Origin LLC.\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises.\nVirgin Group also cashed out shares in Virgin Galactic in May to raise money for the wider business.\nThe spokeswoman said that Virgin Group continues to be the largest single shareholder in Virgin Galactic.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com The billionaire sold $300 million worth of shares in his space tourism company to raise money for other parts of the Virgin business empire. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Reduces Stake in Virgin Galactic (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "717",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-reduces-stake-in-virgin-galactic-11628890369?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=15",
        "text": "\u201cVirgin intends to use the net proceeds from this sale to support its portfolio of global leisure, holiday and travel businesses that continue to be affected by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to supporting the development and growth of new and existing businesses,\" a spokeswoman said in a statement.\nMr. Branson\u2019s business empire\u2014straddling airlines, cruise ships, hotels and gyms\u2014is trying to recover from the economic hit that many tourism and travel-focused businesses have suffered during the health crisis. Virgin Galactic Holdings and satellite-launch company Virgin Orbit have been bright spots.\n\n\nLast month, Mr. Branson beat fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n into space in a high-profile trip that took him on a Virgin Galactic Holdings spacecraft more than 50 miles above Earth. Mr. Bezos followed soon after aboard a spacecraft developed by his company Blue Origin LLC.\nHuman space flight, long the province of government agencies with scientific goals and policy objectives, is drawing fresh interest from investors and companies who see new opportunities to create a space-tourism industry that has long been elusive for commercial enterprises.\nVirgin Group also cashed out shares in Virgin Galactic in May to raise money for the wider business.\nThe spokeswoman said that Virgin Group continues to be the largest single shareholder in Virgin Galactic.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com The billionaire sold $300 million worth of shares in his space tourism company to raise money for other parts of the Virgin business empire. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Looks to Build Satellites More Quickly, With Fewer Workers (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "718",
        "date": "2017-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-looks-to-build-satellites-more-quickly-with-fewer-workers-1487692416?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=26",
        "text": "\u201cOur roadmaps are really focused on simplifying the overall architecture and design of satellites so they can be assembled more quickly,\u201d Mr. Rusnock said. \u201cMaking them simpler, easier to put together\u201d also reduces production glitches, he said.\nThe effort is part of management\u2019s latest bid to become more competitive in an evolving industry. \u201cWe cannot continue to do what we\u2019ve been doing and stay competitive,\u201d he said.\n\n\nHistorically, satellites generally have relied on highly customized, by-hand assembly procedures that slowed production and boosted costs. But starting with small satellites, proponents of change are devising new methods that entail bringing together standardized, pretested modular components and sidestepping most of the painstaking testing and integration currently carried out on the factory floor.\n\n\nMore Business News\n\n\n\n\nThe Rise and Fall of the Management Visionary Behind Zappos\nMarch 12, 2022 \n\n\nDisney CEO Tried to Avoid Politics, Now Finds Himself in Middle of Partisan Spat\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nDocuSign Stock Plunged on Soft Outlook\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nAT&T Sketches Out Life After Hollywood \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nPressure Mounts for Western Companies Leaving Russia \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nNow, internal test protocols \u201cbasically tell the spacecraft to check itself,\u201d Mr. Rusnock said.\nThe outcome, according to Boeing officials, ultimately is likely to reduce the longevity of some communications satellites\u2014potentially cutting in half today\u2019s typical useful life of 15 years or more\u2014partly by eliminating certain expensive redundant systems on board.\nSome of the new manufacturing processes\u2014including 3-D printing\u2014have been implemented inside Boeing\u2019s sprawling facility in suburban Los Angeles, while others are still in the planning stages. The effort is expected to require years, as well as the buy-in of satellite customers, to yield substantial results.\nBut Mr. Rusnock stressed that Boeing is adopting the concepts for various models and is actively looking to begin\u00a0implementing them on selected commercial projects.\nChange could speed up if Boeing is successful in winning bids on various projects expected to be announced in coming months, Mr. Rusnock said, declining to identify any prospective customers.\nThe\u00a0benefits of the new process, according to Mr. Rusnock, are slated to be lower acquisition costs for operators while provide them greater opportunities to launch upgraded technology before hardware becomes outdated in orbit.\n\u201cI hear customers talking about\u201d a shorter lifespan for satellites \u201cinstead of a 15-year paradigm,\u201d he said.\nBoeing\u2019s satellite models typically take five years to design and build. Some of them can be as large as a school bus, weigh thousands of pounds and cost roughly $150 million. The number of satellites built annually can be counted on two hands.\nBy contrast, various makers of small satellites, often weighing only dozens or hundreds of pounds, have adopted some of the faster, less-expensive production techniques eyed by Mr. Rusnock. For example, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE and OneWeb Ltd., a startup planning to offer global internet connections via satellites, is setting up an automated assembly line in Florida to crank out hundreds of satellites a year\u2014each costing around $1 million.\nSenior Airbus officials have said the OneWeb project is intended to help the European aerospace powerhouse become the industry leader in high-volume spacecraft manufacturing.\nOver the years, Boeing built its reputation making complex, highly reliable satellites that tended to be on the expensive side.\nUltimately, Mr. Rusnock said, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing stopping us\u201d from realizing huge reductions in production schedules. Final assembly and painting of an entire Boeing 737 jetliner takes 11 days, he noted, \u201cand we\u2019re looking in that direction as to how we make that happen\u201d for spacecraft.\nThe efforts come after personnel cuts in the satellite unit in 2015, and coincides with Boeing\u2019s announcement in November that it was realigning defense and space businesses to cut facilities and increase efficiency and collaboration throughout the U.S., as well as globally.\nBoeing\u2019s space operation, including units besides satellite manufacturing, employs some 14,000 workers in California. Down the road, management is betting that additional satellite orders will offset anticipated personnel cuts.\nThe modular approach also is gaining traction in other corners of the satellite world. Boeing customer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.,\n\n\n on its own, is building the communications portion of a super-powerful satellite network that will use Boeing\u2019s power and propulsion hardware.\n\u201cA big part of the lead time is because of the customization\u201d required for typical satellites, according to Mark Dankberg, ViaSat\u2019s chairman and chief executive. Instead, ViaSat designs flexible and modular packages, he said in an interview last week, built around advanced digital systems focused on \u201cmak Boeing is taking steps to build satellites more quickly through new production practices that will rely more on 3-D printing and involve fewer workers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Looks to Build Satellites More Quickly, With Fewer Workers (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "719",
        "date": "2017-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-looks-to-build-satellites-more-quickly-with-fewer-workers-1487692416?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=87",
        "text": "\u201cOur roadmaps are really focused on simplifying the overall architecture and design of satellites so they can be assembled more quickly,\u201d Mr. Rusnock said. \u201cMaking them simpler, easier to put together\u201d also reduces production glitches, he said.\nThe effort is part of management\u2019s latest bid to become more competitive in an evolving industry. \u201cWe cannot continue to do what we\u2019ve been doing and stay competitive,\u201d he said.\n\n\nHistorically, satellites generally have relied on highly customized, by-hand assembly procedures that slowed production and boosted costs. But starting with small satellites, proponents of change are devising new methods that entail bringing together standardized, pretested modular components and sidestepping most of the painstaking testing and integration currently carried out on the factory floor.\n\n\nMore Business News\n\n\n\n\nDisney CEO Tried to Avoid Politics, Now Finds Himself in Middle of Partisan Spat\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nDocuSign Stock Plunged on Soft Outlook\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nAT&T Sketches Out Life After Hollywood \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nPressure Mounts for Western Companies Leaving Russia \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nCVS Ousts Executives After Inquiry, Vows to Overhaul How It Handles Sexual-Harassment Complaints \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nNow, internal test protocols \u201cbasically tell the spacecraft to check itself,\u201d Mr. Rusnock said.\nThe outcome, according to Boeing officials, ultimately is likely to reduce the longevity of some communications satellites\u2014potentially cutting in half today\u2019s typical useful life of 15 years or more\u2014partly by eliminating certain expensive redundant systems on board.\nSome of the new manufacturing processes\u2014including 3-D printing\u2014have been implemented inside Boeing\u2019s sprawling facility in suburban Los Angeles, while others are still in the planning stages. The effort is expected to require years, as well as the buy-in of satellite customers, to yield substantial results.\nBut Mr. Rusnock stressed that Boeing is adopting the concepts for various models and is actively looking to begin\u00a0implementing them on selected commercial projects.\nChange could speed up if Boeing is successful in winning bids on various projects expected to be announced in coming months, Mr. Rusnock said, declining to identify any prospective customers.\nThe\u00a0benefits of the new process, according to Mr. Rusnock, are slated to be lower acquisition costs for operators while provide them greater opportunities to launch upgraded technology before hardware becomes outdated in orbit.\n\u201cI hear customers talking about\u201d a shorter lifespan for satellites \u201cinstead of a 15-year paradigm,\u201d he said.\nBoeing\u2019s satellite models typically take five years to design and build. Some of them can be as large as a school bus, weigh thousands of pounds and cost roughly $150 million. The number of satellites built annually can be counted on two hands.\nBy contrast, various makers of small satellites, often weighing only dozens or hundreds of pounds, have adopted some of the faster, less-expensive production techniques eyed by Mr. Rusnock. For example, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE and OneWeb Ltd., a startup planning to offer global internet connections via satellites, is setting up an automated assembly line in Florida to crank out hundreds of satellites a year\u2014each costing around $1 million.\nSenior Airbus officials have said the OneWeb project is intended to help the European aerospace powerhouse become the industry leader in high-volume spacecraft manufacturing.\nOver the years, Boeing built its reputation making complex, highly reliable satellites that tended to be on the expensive side.\nUltimately, Mr. Rusnock said, \u201cthere\u2019s nothing stopping us\u201d from realizing huge reductions in production schedules. Final assembly and painting of an entire Boeing 737 jetliner takes 11 days, he noted, \u201cand we\u2019re looking in that direction as to how we make that happen\u201d for spacecraft.\nThe efforts come after personnel cuts in the satellite unit in 2015, and coincides with Boeing\u2019s announcement in November that it was realigning defense and space businesses to cut facilities and increase efficiency and collaboration throughout the U.S., as well as globally.\nBoeing\u2019s space operation, including units besides satellite manufacturing, employs some 14,000 workers in California. Down the road, management is betting that additional satellite orders will offset anticipated personnel cuts.\nThe modular approach also is gaining traction in other corners of the satellite world. Boeing customer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.,\n\n\n on its own, is building the communications portion of a super-powerful satellite network that will use Boeing\u2019s power and propulsion hardware.\n\u201cA big part of the lead time is because of the customization\u201d required for typical satellites, according to Mark Dankberg, ViaSat\u2019s chairman and chief executive. Instead, ViaSat designs flexible and modular packages, he said in an interview last week, built around ad Boeing is taking steps to build satellites more quickly through new production practices that will rely more on 3-D printing and involve fewer workers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia\u2019s Missile Test Adds \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tto Space-Junk Concerns (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "720",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-antisatellite-missile-test-adds-to-space-junk-concern-11637157601?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=3",
        "text": "\u201cIt makes doing business in orbit a little more difficult,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which has supported expansion in the space sector by hiring private companies to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Suffredini,\n\n\n\n chief executive at Axiom Space Inc., a Houston-based company managing private-astronaut trips to the current space station and developing its own facility, said that larger objects created by the missile test can be accounted for and that some small ones will decay. Not every piece can be expected to disappear or be monitored, he said.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s still debris that\u2019s in a range that\u2019s not reliably tracked, that will hang around and hang around for a long time,\u201d Mr. Suffredini said. Axiom doesn\u2019t expect to lose any clients related to concern over debris, he said.\nJunk orbiting the Earth\u2014old satellites and rocket parts as well as bits of metal created by missile tests and satellite collisions\u2014has long been monitored by government officials and space-industry executives. As of May, the Pentagon was tracking more than 27,000 pieces of debris in space, NASA has said.\nMost of those items were larger than a softball, but some were as small as 2 inches, according to the space agency.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe Russian missile test created an additional 1,500 pieces large enough to be tracked, as well as hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments, according to the U.S. State Department. After the missile strike, the seven crew members on board the International Space Station carried out emergency procedures and sheltered in two spacecraft docked to the facility as it twice passed through or near the debris, NASA has said.\nOn Tuesday, Russian officials defended the country\u2019s decision to test its missile. The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement cited by its television channel, Zvezda, that the U.S. knows that fragments resulting from the test \u201cdid not represent and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities.\u201d\nA White House official later in the day criticized the action, saying the debris will continue to stand as \u201ca direct threat to activities in outer space for years to come and puts at risk satellites all nations rely on for national security, economic prosperity and scientific discovery.\u201d\nOther countries\u2019 militaries have created space debris when testing weapons. In 2007, China shot a satellite in space, and the U.S. followed suit a year later, according to news reports. The Indian government used a missile to destroy a satellite in 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late March, residents in Oregon and Washington filmed bright lights resembling a meteor shower that turned out to be debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, according to astronomers. Photo: Roman Puzhlyakov/AP\n \n\n\nThe 2007 Chinese test created more than 3,500 pieces of debris that can be tracked, most of which are still in orbit, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan McDowell,\n\n\n\n an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The U.S. test generated 175 pieces, all of which have re-entered, and one piece of debris remains in space related to India\u2019s missile, he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Mealling,\n\n\n\n general partner at Starbridge Venture Capital, said the space technology-focused company is concerned about challenges that could arise for satellite operators if debris crowds out orbits.\nLeoLabs, a company that uses radar to track space debris, had found pieces of the satellite destroyed in the Russian test at altitudes ranging from 273 miles to 323 miles, according to a spokeswoman.\nRussia\u2019s test shows the need for new rules governing how space can be used, some industry executives said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Collar,\n\n\n\n chief executive of SES SA, a satellite company that plans to deploy satellites to lower-end orbits, said Russia\u2019s test pointed to the need to have \u201call nations behaving responsibly in space, and this is pretty irresponsible.\u201d More debris in lower-end orbits probably wouldn\u2019t change his company\u2019s efforts, he said.\nCountries need to agree that they won\u2019t carry out activities that generate debris \u201cto the extent they can harm the people living on these space stations,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Manber,\n\n\n\n president of international and space stations at Voyager Space, which has a subsidiary that is developing a station called Starlab with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\u2014Ann M. Simmons contributed to this article.\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJ Companies are navigating a growing field of debris as they spend billions of dollars to develop businesses in space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Is Going to Space Next Week (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "721",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-is-going-to-space-on-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-flight-11633358711?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=4",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d the 90-year-old actor said in a statement. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201d\nThis will be the 18th launch of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft and comes several months after the company\u2019s first crewed flight. The spacecraft is expected to launch at around 9:30 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 William Shatner\n\n\n\nIn July, Mr. Bezos and three passengers reached the edge of space in the New Shepard, a flight that was part of the company\u2019s broader mission to expand human space travel. That crew included Mr. Bezos and his brother, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen, the oldest and youngest ever space travelers.\u00a0\n\n\nWith this next flight, Mr. Shatner is expected to become the oldest person to have traveled to space, Blue Origin said.\nMr. Shatner and Ms. Powers are \u201chonored guests\u201d on the coming flight, a company spokeswoman said, while Mr. Boshuizen and Mr. de Vries paid to join.\nLast week, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was examining safety allegations made in a letter by a former employee of Mr. Bezos\u2019 company. In a letter published Thursday, the former employee claimed that Blue Origin had given priority to speed and competition with other space-industry billionaires over safety for some of its rockets, and alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company. \u00a0\nThe company last week declined to comment on specific allegations in the letter. It said it would investigate any new claims of misconduct at the company.\u00a0\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space.\u00a0\nBlue Origin\u2019s efforts have also contributed to the burgeoning space-tourism industry, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\u00a0\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg contributed to this article\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\n\n\nMore on blue origin FAA to Review Letter That Criticizes Blue Origin on Safety (Sept. 30) Blue Origin Launch: Jeff Bezos and Crew Complete Successful Space Flight (July 20) Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (July 18) \n\n\nWrite to Jennifer Calfas at jennifer.calfas@wsj.com The actor known for playing Captain Kirk in \u201cStar Trek\u201d is slated to join the spaceflight on Oct. 12. ",
        "author": "Jennifer Calfas"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Is Going to Space Next Week (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "722",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-is-going-to-space-on-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-flight-11633358711?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=21",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d the 90-year-old actor said in a statement. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201d\nThis will be the 18th launch of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft and comes several months after the company\u2019s first crewed flight. The spacecraft is expected to launch at around 9:30 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 William Shatner\n\n\n\nIn July, Mr. Bezos and three passengers reached the edge of space in the New Shepard, a flight that was part of the company\u2019s broader mission to expand human space travel. That crew included Mr. Bezos and his brother, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen, the oldest and youngest ever space travelers.\u00a0\n\n\nWith this next flight, Mr. Shatner is expected to become the oldest person to have traveled to space, Blue Origin said.\nMr. Shatner and Ms. Powers are \u201chonored guests\u201d on the coming flight, a company spokeswoman said, while Mr. Boshuizen and Mr. de Vries paid to join.\nLast week, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was examining safety allegations made in a letter by a former employee of Mr. Bezos\u2019 company. In a letter published Thursday, the former employee claimed that Blue Origin had given priority to speed and competition with other space-industry billionaires over safety for some of its rockets, and alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company. \u00a0\nThe company last week declined to comment on specific allegations in the letter. It said it would investigate any new claims of misconduct at the company.\u00a0\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space.\u00a0\nBlue Origin\u2019s efforts have also contributed to the burgeoning space-tourism industry, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\u00a0\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg contributed to this article\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\n\n\nMore on blue origin FAA to Review Letter That Criticizes Blue Origin on Safety (Sept. 30) Blue Origin Launch: Jeff Bezos and Crew Complete Successful Space Flight (July 20) Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (July 18) \n\n\nWrite to Jennifer Calfas at jennifer.calfas@wsj.com The actor known for playing Captain Kirk in \u201cStar Trek\u201d is slated to join the spaceflight on Oct. 12. ",
        "author": "Jennifer Calfas"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Is Going to Space Next Week (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "723",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-is-going-to-space-on-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-flight-11633358711?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=3",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d the 90-year-old actor said in a statement. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThis will be the 18th launch of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft and comes several months after the company\u2019s first crewed flight. The spacecraft is expected to launch at around 9:30 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 William Shatner\n\n\n\nIn July, Mr. Bezos and three passengers reached the edge of space in the New Shepard, a flight that was part of the company\u2019s broader mission to expand human space travel. That crew included Mr. Bezos and his brother, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen, the oldest and youngest ever space travelers.\u00a0\n\n\nWith this next flight, Mr. Shatner is expected to become the oldest person to have traveled to space, Blue Origin said.\nMr. Shatner and Ms. Powers are \u201chonored guests\u201d on the coming flight, a company spokeswoman said, while Mr. Boshuizen and Mr. de Vries paid to join.\nLast week, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was examining safety allegations made in a letter by a former employee of Mr. Bezos\u2019 company. In a letter published Thursday, the former employee claimed that Blue Origin had given priority to speed and competition with other space-industry billionaires over safety for some of its rockets, and alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company. \u00a0\nThe company last week declined to comment on specific allegations in the letter. It said it would investigate any new claims of misconduct at the company.\u00a0\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space.\u00a0\nBlue Origin\u2019s efforts have also contributed to the burgeoning space-tourism industry, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\u00a0\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg contributed to this article\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\n\n\nMore on blue origin FAA to Review Letter That Criticizes Blue Origin on Safety (Sept. 30) Blue Origin Launch: Jeff Bezos and Crew Complete Successful Space Flight (July 20) Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (July 18) \n\n\nWrite to Jennifer Calfas at jennifer.calfas@wsj.com The actor known for playing Captain Kirk in \u201cStar Trek\u201d is slated to join the spaceflight on Oct. 12. ",
        "author": "Jennifer Calfas"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Is Going to Space Next Week (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "724",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-is-going-to-space-on-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-flight-11633358711?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=21",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d the 90-year-old actor said in a statement. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThis will be the 18th launch of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft and comes several months after the company\u2019s first crewed flight. The spacecraft is expected to launch at around 9:30 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 William Shatner\n\n\n\nIn July, Mr. Bezos and three passengers reached the edge of space in the New Shepard, a flight that was part of the company\u2019s broader mission to expand human space travel. That crew included Mr. Bezos and his brother, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen, the oldest and youngest ever space travelers.\u00a0\n\n\nWith this next flight, Mr. Shatner is expected to become the oldest person to have traveled to space, Blue Origin said.\nMr. Shatner and Ms. Powers are \u201chonored guests\u201d on the coming flight, a company spokeswoman said, while Mr. Boshuizen and Mr. de Vries paid to join.\nLast week, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was examining safety allegations made in a letter by a former employee of Mr. Bezos\u2019 company. In a letter published Thursday, the former employee claimed that Blue Origin had given priority to speed and competition with other space-industry billionaires over safety for some of its rockets, and alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company. \u00a0\nThe company last week declined to comment on specific allegations in the letter. It said it would investigate any new claims of misconduct at the company.\u00a0\nFor years, Blue Origin has been building up operations and developing a portfolio of rockets, engines and vehicles. That push has been animated by what Mr. Bezos has described as his passion for space.\u00a0\nBlue Origin\u2019s efforts have also contributed to the burgeoning space-tourism industry, which includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\u00a0\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg contributed to this article\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\n\n\nMore on blue origin FAA to Review Letter That Criticizes Blue Origin on Safety (Sept. 30) Blue Origin Launch: Jeff Bezos and Crew Complete Successful Space Flight (July 20) Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (July 18) \n\n\nWrite to Jennifer Calfas at jennifer.calfas@wsj.com The actor known for playing Captain Kirk in \u201cStar Trek\u201d is slated to join the spaceflight on Oct. 12. ",
        "author": "Jennifer Calfas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic gets FAA approval to take customers to space (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "725",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/25/virgin-galactic-faa-approval/",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic says it has Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly customers into space, making it the first spaceline to cross that hurdle, the company announced Friday.The milestone comes at a key moment in the space race: On the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, July 20, Jeff Bezos plans to be onboard when one of his Blue Origin rockets makes its first crewed spaceflight. The FAA is expected to grant Blue Origin a commercial license soon, according to people familiar with the process. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVirgin Galactic has left the door open for its British billionaire owner, Richard Branson, to attempt to reach space before Bezos, although the company has not confirmed plans to do so.Story continues below advertisement(Amazon CEO Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, owns The Washington Post.)Everything you need to know about going to spaceMeanwhile, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX recently completed its third human spaceflight in less than a year. The company has also been awarded a NASA contract to develop a lunar lander.AdvertisementApproval from the FAA comes after Virgin Galactic completed the third successful test flight of its Unity spaceship in late May, its first spaceflight from the Spaceport America hub in New Mexico. The flight achieved a speed of Mach 3 and reached space at an altitude of 55.5 miles, the company said.\u201cToday\u2019s approval by the FAA of our full commercial launch license, in conjunction with the success of our May 22 test flight, gives us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer,\u201d Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, Michael Colglazier, said in a statement.Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?Worldwide, fewer than 600 people have ever reached the boundary of space. But in the next year or so, more than a dozen private citizens are scheduled to launch on commercial spacecraft, opening up a new destination for the wealthy and setting the foundation for an industry that analysts say could be worth $8 billion by 2030.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace tourists will fly at their own risk: Though the FAA requires launch companies to protect people and property on the ground, the passengers are governed only by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, meaning they have to sign a waiver and be made aware of the risks, much like skydivers and bungee jumpers.Virgin Galactic has said it expects to begin commercial service in 2022. It has already sold 600 tickets, with prices topping out around $250,000 for suborbital flights, where passengers would experience a few minutes of weightlessness before falling back to Earth. The company has said costs will go up when ticket sales reopen later this year, but it has yet to name a price. Analysts have said they expect it to be $500,000.A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 millionVirgin Galactic said its goal is to offer its future astronauts \u201can unmatched safe and affordable journey to space without the need for any special prior experience or significant prior training and preparation.\u201d Future Virgin Galactic astronauts will receive three days of training at Spaceport America in New Mexico before taking flight, according to the company\u2019s website. There, they will learn how to \u201cmake the most of time spent in microgravity\u201d and how to be \u201csafe and comfortable during periods of high acceleration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce the vessel is free from Earth\u2019s atmosphere, Virgin Galactic pilots will maneuver the spaceship to give passengers \u201cthe best possible views of Earth and the blackness of space,\u201d the company said on its website.The May test flight marked Virgin Galactic\u2019s first trip to space in more than two years. In that time, the company moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico. It also went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and appointed its new chief executive, Michael Colglazier, a former Disney executive who is working to expand the company\u2019s operations worldwide as well as build a fleet of spacecraft.Branson founded Virgin Galactic \u2014 which he calls \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d \u2014 in 2004 after he acquired the rights to the company\u2019s first spacecraft technology from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong the earlier entrants to the commercial space race, Virgin Galactic had some serious setbacks after a spaceship came apart during a test flight over the Mojave Desert, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury in 2014. The company has raised well over $1 billion since its inception, though much of it directly from Branson.Virgin Galactic shares soared Friday, as investors reacted to the FAA approval and closed at $55.91, a 38.56 percent jump. The spaceflight company, owned by billionaire Richard Branson, says it is the first to get the regulatory green light to carry commercial passengers. Virgin Galactic gets FAA approval to take customers to space",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic gets FAA approval to take customers to space (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "726",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/25/virgin-galactic-faa-approval/",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic says it has Federal Aviation Administration approval to fly customers into space, making it the first spaceline to cross that hurdle, the company announced Friday.The milestone comes at a key moment in the space race: On the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, July 20, Jeff Bezos plans to be onboard when one of his Blue Origin rockets makes its first crewed spaceflight. The FAA is expected to grant Blue Origin a commercial license soon, according to people familiar with the process. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVirgin Galactic has left the door open for its British billionaire owner, Richard Branson, to attempt to reach space before Bezos, although the company has not confirmed plans to do so.Story continues below advertisement(Amazon CEO Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, owns The Washington Post.)Everything you need to know about going to spaceMeanwhile, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX recently completed its third human spaceflight in less than a year. The company has also been awarded a NASA contract to develop a lunar lander.AdvertisementApproval from the FAA comes after Virgin Galactic completed the third successful test flight of its Unity spaceship in late May, its first spaceflight from the Spaceport America hub in New Mexico. The flight achieved a speed of Mach 3 and reached space at an altitude of 55.5 miles, the company said.\u201cToday\u2019s approval by the FAA of our full commercial launch license, in conjunction with the success of our May 22 test flight, gives us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer,\u201d Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, Michael Colglazier, said in a statement.Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?Worldwide, fewer than 600 people have ever reached the boundary of space. But in the next year or so, more than a dozen private citizens are scheduled to launch on commercial spacecraft, opening up a new destination for the wealthy and setting the foundation for an industry that analysts say could be worth $8 billion by 2030.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace tourists will fly at their own risk: Though the FAA requires launch companies to protect people and property on the ground, the passengers are governed only by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, meaning they have to sign a waiver and be made aware of the risks, much like skydivers and bungee jumpers.Virgin Galactic has said it expects to begin commercial service in 2022. It has already sold 600 tickets, with prices topping out around $250,000 for suborbital flights, where passengers would experience a few minutes of weightlessness before falling back to Earth. The company has said costs will go up when ticket sales reopen later this year, but it has yet to name a price. Analysts have said they expect it to be $500,000.A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 millionVirgin Galactic said its goal is to offer its future astronauts \u201can unmatched safe and affordable journey to space without the need for any special prior experience or significant prior training and preparation.\u201d Future Virgin Galactic astronauts will receive three days of training at Spaceport America in New Mexico before taking flight, according to the company\u2019s website. There, they will learn how to \u201cmake the most of time spent in microgravity\u201d and how to be \u201csafe and comfortable during periods of high acceleration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce the vessel is free from Earth\u2019s atmosphere, Virgin Galactic pilots will maneuver the spaceship to give passengers \u201cthe best possible views of Earth and the blackness of space,\u201d the company said on its website.The May test flight marked Virgin Galactic\u2019s first trip to space in more than two years. In that time, the company moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico. It also went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and appointed its new chief executive, Michael Colglazier, a former Disney executive who is working to expand the company\u2019s operations worldwide as well as build a fleet of spacecraft.Branson founded Virgin Galactic \u2014 which he calls \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d \u2014 in 2004 after he acquired the rights to the company\u2019s first spacecraft technology from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong the earlier entrants to the commercial space race, Virgin Galactic had some serious setbacks after a spaceship came apart during a test flight over the Mojave Desert, killing co-pilot Michael Alsbury in 2014. The company has raised well over $1 billion since its inception, though much of it directly from Branson.Virgin Galactic shares soared Friday, as investors reacted to the FAA approval and closed at $55.91, a 38.56 percent jump. The spaceflight company, owned by billionaire Richard Branson, says it is the first to get the regulatory green light to carry commercial passengers. Virgin Galactic gets FAA approval to take customers to space",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flight (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "727",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/22/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-completes-second-flight-bid-reach-space/",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic flew its space plane past the edge of space Friday morning on its quest to eventually fly paying passengers there, a milestone that company founder Richard Branson said could come as early as this year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight came two months after Virgin Galactic hit an altitude of 51.4 miles, reaching space for the first time, a historic milestone for which its pilots were awarded astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration. The astronauts described the flight as an early step towards making space available to those who aren\u2019t professional astronauts.\u201cFor the three of us today this was the fulfillment of lifelong ambitions, but paradoxically is also just the beginning of an adventure which we can\u2019t wait to share with thousands of others,\u201d chief pilot Dave Mackay said in a statement after the flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic tweeted \u201cSpaceShipTwo, welcome back to space\u201d at 8:55 a.m. Pacific time, and the company later reported its craft reached an apogee of 55.87 miles, or 295,007 feet.The launch came as the company looked to further test the outer limits of the space plane before it starts flying the hundreds of tourists who have signed up to pay as much as $250,000 a ticket.Virgin Galactic has yet to hit what\u2019s known as the Karman line, the 62-mile, or 100-kilometer boundary that many consider to be the edge of space. In comments this week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose Blue Origin space venture also intends to fly tourists on suborbital trips to space, took a swipe at his competitor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Virgin Galactic's quest for space\u201cOne of the issues that Virgin Galactic will have to address, eventually, is that they are not flying above the Karman line,\u201d Bezos said at an event in New York, according to SpaceNews.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin, which has not announced how much it would charge its passengers, would fly above 62 miles, he said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dVirgin Galactic officials have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the FAA and other federal government agencies have defined space as beginning at 50 miles, and in a statement late last year, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the company \u201chas always respected this recognition and will follow the same.\u201dWhere does space begin?SpaceShipTwo, as the rocket plane is known, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at about 8 a.m. Pacific time, tethered to the belly of a mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo. The vehicles flew to an altitude of about 40,000 feet before the spacecraft was dropped and the pilot hit the ignition, kick-starting the motor and sending the spacecraft soaring through the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the controls were Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief pilot, Dave Mackay, a former Royal Air Force pilot, and Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and U-2 and F-16 pilot.The company announced after takeoff that a third crew member was aboard the spacecraft: Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor and an \u201cexpert micro-gravity researcher.\u201d The company said in a tweet that Moses \u201cwill provide human validation for the data we collect, including aspects of the customer cabin and spaceflight environment from the perspective of people in the back.\u201dWe have a 3rd crew member in the cabin of SpaceShipTwo today, Chief Astronaut Instructor, Beth Moses. She will provide human validation for the data we collect. Including aspects of the customer cabin and spaceflight environment from the perspective of people in the back. pic.twitter.com/WiUxhuf2zv\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) February 22, 2019\n\nAlthough it was not the company\u2019s first mission to space, it was a day of firsts for the budding commercial spaceflight industry: Moses was the first person to floated weightlessly in space without restraints aboard a commercial spaceship; the first time a non-pilot went to space on a commercial spaceship; and it was the first commercial spacecraft to carry three people to outer space.The flight, delayed after high winds on Wednesday, was another key step in the development of the spacecraft company, officials said.\u201cAlthough we passed a major milestone in December, we still have a way to go in testing the many factors that can affect a flight,\u201d Virgin said in a statement before the mission. \u201cSo, for this flight, we will be expanding the envelope to gather new and vital data essential to future tests and operations, including vehicle center of gravity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight was also to test certain aspects of the crew cabin, where the passengers would have a few minutes to float around weightlessly, enjoying views of space and the Earth from above.\u201cHaving Beth fly in the cabin today, starting to ensure that our customer journey is as flawless as the spaceship itself, brings a huge sense of anticipation and excitement to all of us here who are looking forward to experiencing space for ourselves,\u201d Branson said in a press advisory sent out soon after the flight. \"The next few months promise to be the most thrilling yet.\u201dCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race For the second time in three months, Virgin Galactic has launched a spacecraft into space. But varying definitions of \"space\" sparked comments by Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, who said in a speech that his company's astronauts won't have \"asterisks\" next to their names because they'll exceed NASA's definition of space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flight (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "728",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/22/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-completes-second-flight-bid-reach-space/",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic flew its space plane past the edge of space Friday morning on its quest to eventually fly paying passengers there, a milestone that company founder Richard Branson said could come as early as this year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight came two months after Virgin Galactic hit an altitude of 51.4 miles, reaching space for the first time, a historic milestone for which its pilots were awarded astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration. The astronauts described the flight as an early step towards making space available to those who aren\u2019t professional astronauts.\u201cFor the three of us today this was the fulfillment of lifelong ambitions, but paradoxically is also just the beginning of an adventure which we can\u2019t wait to share with thousands of others,\u201d chief pilot Dave Mackay said in a statement after the flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic tweeted \u201cSpaceShipTwo, welcome back to space\u201d at 8:55 a.m. Pacific time, and the company later reported its craft reached an apogee of 55.87 miles, or 295,007 feet.The launch came as the company looked to further test the outer limits of the space plane before it starts flying the hundreds of tourists who have signed up to pay as much as $250,000 a ticket.Virgin Galactic has yet to hit what\u2019s known as the Karman line, the 62-mile, or 100-kilometer boundary that many consider to be the edge of space. In comments this week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose Blue Origin space venture also intends to fly tourists on suborbital trips to space, took a swipe at his competitor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Virgin Galactic's quest for space\u201cOne of the issues that Virgin Galactic will have to address, eventually, is that they are not flying above the Karman line,\u201d Bezos said at an event in New York, according to SpaceNews.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin, which has not announced how much it would charge its passengers, would fly above 62 miles, he said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dVirgin Galactic officials have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the FAA and other federal government agencies have defined space as beginning at 50 miles, and in a statement late last year, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the company \u201chas always respected this recognition and will follow the same.\u201dWhere does space begin?SpaceShipTwo, as the rocket plane is known, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at about 8 a.m. Pacific time, tethered to the belly of a mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo. The vehicles flew to an altitude of about 40,000 feet before the spacecraft was dropped and the pilot hit the ignition, kick-starting the motor and sending the spacecraft soaring through the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the controls were Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief pilot, Dave Mackay, a former Royal Air Force pilot, and Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and U-2 and F-16 pilot.The company announced after takeoff that a third crew member was aboard the spacecraft: Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor and an \u201cexpert micro-gravity researcher.\u201d The company said in a tweet that Moses \u201cwill provide human validation for the data we collect, including aspects of the customer cabin and spaceflight environment from the perspective of people in the back.\u201dWe have a 3rd crew member in the cabin of SpaceShipTwo today, Chief Astronaut Instructor, Beth Moses. She will provide human validation for the data we collect. Including aspects of the customer cabin and spaceflight environment from the perspective of people in the back. pic.twitter.com/WiUxhuf2zv\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) February 22, 2019\n\nAlthough it was not the company\u2019s first mission to space, it was a day of firsts for the budding commercial spaceflight industry: Moses was the first person to floated weightlessly in space without restraints aboard a commercial spaceship; the first time a non-pilot went to space on a commercial spaceship; and it was the first commercial spacecraft to carry three people to outer space.The flight, delayed after high winds on Wednesday, was another key step in the development of the spacecraft company, officials said.\u201cAlthough we passed a major milestone in December, we still have a way to go in testing the many factors that can affect a flight,\u201d Virgin said in a statement before the mission. \u201cSo, for this flight, we will be expanding the envelope to gather new and vital data essential to future tests and operations, including vehicle center of gravity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight was also to test certain aspects of the crew cabin, where the passengers would have a few minutes to float around weightlessly, enjoying views of space and the Earth from above.\u201cHaving Beth fly in the cabin today, starting to ensure that our customer journey is as flawless as the spaceship itself, brings a huge sense of anticipation and excitement to all of us here who are looking forward to experiencing space for ourselves,\u201d Branson said in a press advisory sent out soon after the flight. \"The next few months promise to be the most thrilling yet.\u201dCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race For the second time in three months, Virgin Galactic has launched a spacecraft into space. But varying definitions of \"space\" sparked comments by Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, who said in a speech that his company's astronauts won't have \"asterisks\" next to their names because they'll exceed NASA's definition of space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flight (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "729",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/22/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-completes-second-flight-bid-reach-space/",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic flew its space plane past the edge of space Friday morning on its quest to eventually fly paying passengers there, a milestone that company founder Richard Branson said could come as early as this year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight came two months after Virgin Galactic hit an altitude of 51.4 miles, reaching space for the first time, a historic milestone for which its pilots were awarded astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration. The astronauts described the flight as an early step towards making space available to those who aren\u2019t professional astronauts.\u201cFor the three of us today this was the fulfillment of lifelong ambitions, but paradoxically is also just the beginning of an adventure which we can\u2019t wait to share with thousands of others,\u201d chief pilot Dave Mackay said in a statement after the flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic tweeted \u201cSpaceShipTwo, welcome back to space\u201d at 8:55 a.m. Pacific time, and the company later reported its craft reached an apogee of 55.87 miles, or 295,007 feet.The launch came as the company looked to further test the outer limits of the space plane before it starts flying the hundreds of tourists who have signed up to pay as much as $250,000 a ticket.Virgin Galactic has yet to hit what\u2019s known as the Karman line, the 62-mile, or 100-kilometer boundary that many consider to be the edge of space. In comments this week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose Blue Origin space venture also intends to fly tourists on suborbital trips to space, took a swipe at his competitor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Virgin Galactic's quest for space\u201cOne of the issues that Virgin Galactic will have to address, eventually, is that they are not flying above the Karman line,\u201d Bezos said at an event in New York, according to SpaceNews.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin, which has not announced how much it would charge its passengers, would fly above 62 miles, he said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dVirgin Galactic officials have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the FAA and other federal government agencies have defined space as beginning at 50 miles, and in a statement late last year, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the company \u201chas always respected this recognition and will follow the same.\u201dWhere does space begin?SpaceShipTwo, as the rocket plane is known, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at about 8 a.m. Pacific time, tethered to the belly of a mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo. The vehicles flew to an altitude of about 40,000 feet before the spacecraft was dropped and the pilot hit the ignition, kick-starting the motor and sending the spacecraft soaring through the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the controls were Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief pilot, Dave Mackay, a former Royal Air Force pilot, and Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and U-2 and F-16 pilot.The company announced after takeoff that a third crew member was aboard the spacecraft: Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor and an \u201cexpert micro-gravity researcher.\u201d The company said in a tweet that Moses \u201cwill provide human validation for the data we collect, including aspects of the customer cabin and spaceflight environment from the perspective of people in the back.\u201dWe have a 3rd crew member in the cabin of SpaceShipTwo today, Chief Astronaut Instructor, Beth Moses. She will provide human validation for the data we collect. Including aspects of the customer cabin and spaceflight environment from the perspective of people in the back. pic.twitter.com/WiUxhuf2zv\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) February 22, 2019\n\nAlthough it was not the company\u2019s first mission to space, it was a day of firsts for the budding commercial spaceflight industry: Moses was the first person to floated weightlessly in space without restraints aboard a commercial spaceship; the first time a non-pilot went to space on a commercial spaceship; and it was the first commercial spacecraft to carry three people to outer space.The flight, delayed after high winds on Wednesday, was another key step in the development of the spacecraft company, officials said.\u201cAlthough we passed a major milestone in December, we still have a way to go in testing the many factors that can affect a flight,\u201d Virgin said in a statement before the mission. \u201cSo, for this flight, we will be expanding the envelope to gather new and vital data essential to future tests and operations, including vehicle center of gravity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight was also to test certain aspects of the crew cabin, where the passengers would have a few minutes to float around weightlessly, enjoying views of space and the Earth from above.\u201cHaving Beth fly in the cabin today, starting to ensure that our customer journey is as flawless as the spaceship itself, brings a huge sense of anticipation and excitement to all of us here who are looking forward to experiencing space for ourselves,\u201d Branson said in a press advisory sent out soon after the flight. \"The next few months promise to be the most thrilling yet.\u201dCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race For the second time in three months, Virgin Galactic has launched a spacecraft into space. But varying definitions of \"space\" sparked comments by Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, who said in a speech that his company's astronauts won't have \"asterisks\" next to their names because they'll exceed NASA's definition of space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "730",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/virgin-galactic-plans-to-reach-space-with-a-test-flight-thursday/2018/12/12/f53067b4-fe4d-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html",
        "text": "MOJAVE, Calif. \u2014 Virgin Galactic launched a spacecraft more than 50 miles high Thursday, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s definition of space and capturing a long-elusive goal for the company founded by Richard Branson that one day wants to fly tourists through the atmosphere.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch of a spacecraft from U.S. soil with humans on board to reach the edge of space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. And it effectively opens a new era in human spaceflight, one where companies are working to end governments\u2019 long held monopoly on space, aiming to push farther faster. Though it just scratched the lowest edge of where many believe space begins, the launch had huge implications for a growing industry aiming to fly civilians on a regular basis. The flight was bold and risky, and following a fatal crash from four years ago, reminiscent in its daring of a bygone era of human spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRichard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)It comes at a time when NASA is still forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to orbit and faces criticism that its aversion to risk has replaced the youthful audacity that helped it put men on the moon.With the flight \u2014 taking place on a chilly morning shortly after sunrise \u2014 Virgin can claim an edge in the race for human spaceflight, as a number of companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Boeing, work to develop spacecraft capable of flying people.With two seasoned pilots in the cockpit \u2014 Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow \u2014 the vehicle known as SpaceShipTwo was ferried to an altitude of about 43,000 feet by a mother ship. Like a bomb, the spacecraft was released into a free fall before the pilot ignited the engine, propelling the spaceplane faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo test flight reaches spaceShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageVirgin Galactic's carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, with space tourism rocket plane SpaceShipTwo attached, takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. (Handout)Soon, the vehicle pointed almost straight up, as it streaked through the same skies over the California desert where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947. The spacecraft reached a height of 51.4 miles, hitting a top speed of Mach 2.9, before descending and returning the company\u2019s space port in Mojave.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn the ground, a gaggle of press, space enthusiasts, including Branson and his guests watched the flight, tilting their heads skyward. Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket, hugged his son as the spacecraft raced upward and a commentator called out the altitude.\u201cIt\u2019s been 14 long years to get here. We\u2019ve had tears, real tears, and moments of joy. So the tears today were tears of joy,\u201d he told reporters afterward. \u201cIt was maybe tears of relief as well. When you are in the test flight program of a space company you can never be completely 100 percent sure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStucky, the pilot in command for the mission, said it went as smoothly as it could have \u2014 and well enough for him to perform a victory barrel roll as the spacecraft returned to Earth.\u201cThat was rather incredible,\u201d he said. Seeing \u201cthe dark sky was great. Everything just worked great. ...We had tons of extra propellant. Had plenty of time to look around.\u201dVirgin Galactic has nearly 700 people who have paid as much as $250,000 for its suborbital joyrides \u2014 more than the 560 or so people who have ever been to space. Eventually the company wants to fly six passengers at a time. The FAA plans to formally honor the pilots of Thursday\u2019s flight by awarding them commercial astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington next year.Story continues below advertisementFor Branson, the launch was the culmination of years\u2019 worth of lofty dreams and tragic setbacks as he sought to build what he calls \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201d He founded Virgin Galactic after buying the rights in 2004 to the technology behind SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that made it to the edge of space three times that year, winning the $10 million Ansari X prize and becoming the first privately funded vehicle to fly humans to space.AdvertisementThursday\u2019s launch was also a major milestone for a growing commercial space industry, which for all its triumphs has yet to show it can routinely fly humans into space. But that may soon change.Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly tourists, though to a higher altitude and with a rocket that launches vertically, not a spaceplane. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIts first test flights with humans on board are scheduled for next year.SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, and Boeing are under contract with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory, as early as next year.As the plight of Virgin Galactic shows, ending government\u2019s long-held monopoly on human spaceflight has been difficult. Despite the long odds, Branson started his quest to open space to the masses with his typical bravado, vowing the company would soon be taking tourists by the hundreds on awe-inspiring jaunts to the cosmos.AdvertisementBut years passed, the program suffered delay after delay and in 2014, a fatal setback: The spacecraft came apart midflight, killing Michael Alsbury, the pilot.Story continues below advertisementAs federal investigators probed what caused the crash, Branson pondered whether to continue, ultimately vowing to press on.Companies in the Cosmos: Entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn 2016, he unveiled a new spaceplane, dubbed Unity, and the company started its test program again, slowly pushing the envelope on test flight after test flight. Thursday\u2019s flight was a key milestone that the company says will push it closer to flying tourists from Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s futuristic launch facility in New Mexico.Branson said he has invested nearly $1 billion of his own money into the venture. \u201cSpace is not cheap,\u201d he said.Now Virgin is looking forward to selling more tickets and making the company commercially viable, he said. Once the test program is finished, he said the operation will move next year to Spaceport America, the futuristic facility in New Mexico where it intends to fly its tourist flights. Branson has said he intends to be on the first commercial flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company is now building two more spaceships in anticipation of the price coming down and more people signing up to fly.Virgin\u2019s ultimate goal is to build spaceports around the globe, \u201cand we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space,\u201d George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said in a recent interview.Eventually, the company would like to turn those spaceports into \u201cfuture hubs for a network of intercontinental transportation nodes\u201d where the spaceships can transport people across the globe in a matter of hours.In the long term, the company wants to fly \u201cinto major airports because we have a winged vehicle that can integrate smoothly in traffic patterns,\u201d Whitesides said.Story continues below advertisementThat goal is still \u201cmany years out,\u201d he said. \u201cBut that\u2019s the evolution \u2014 so that at the end of it you\u2019ve built up, step-by-step, a capability to go between continents in an hour or two.\u201dRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it worksNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2014 and a massive business for big companiesHe flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. After setbacks, rocket launch opens new era in human spaceflight. Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "731",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/virgin-galactic-plans-to-reach-space-with-a-test-flight-thursday/2018/12/12/f53067b4-fe4d-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html",
        "text": "MOJAVE, Calif. \u2014 Virgin Galactic launched a spacecraft more than 50 miles high Thursday, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s definition of space and capturing a long-elusive goal for the company founded by Richard Branson that one day wants to fly tourists through the atmosphere.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch of a spacecraft from U.S. soil with humans on board to reach the edge of space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. And it effectively opens a new era in human spaceflight, one where companies are working to end governments\u2019 long held monopoly on space, aiming to push farther faster. Though it just scratched the lowest edge of where many believe space begins, the launch had huge implications for a growing industry aiming to fly civilians on a regular basis. The flight was bold and risky, and following a fatal crash from four years ago, reminiscent in its daring of a bygone era of human spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRichard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)It comes at a time when NASA is still forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to orbit and faces criticism that its aversion to risk has replaced the youthful audacity that helped it put men on the moon.With the flight \u2014 taking place on a chilly morning shortly after sunrise \u2014 Virgin can claim an edge in the race for human spaceflight, as a number of companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Boeing, work to develop spacecraft capable of flying people.With two seasoned pilots in the cockpit \u2014 Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow \u2014 the vehicle known as SpaceShipTwo was ferried to an altitude of about 43,000 feet by a mother ship. Like a bomb, the spacecraft was released into a free fall before the pilot ignited the engine, propelling the spaceplane faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo test flight reaches spaceShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageVirgin Galactic's carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, with space tourism rocket plane SpaceShipTwo attached, takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. (Handout)Soon, the vehicle pointed almost straight up, as it streaked through the same skies over the California desert where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947. The spacecraft reached a height of 51.4 miles, hitting a top speed of Mach 2.9, before descending and returning the company\u2019s space port in Mojave.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn the ground, a gaggle of press, space enthusiasts, including Branson and his guests watched the flight, tilting their heads skyward. Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket, hugged his son as the spacecraft raced upward and a commentator called out the altitude.\u201cIt\u2019s been 14 long years to get here. We\u2019ve had tears, real tears, and moments of joy. So the tears today were tears of joy,\u201d he told reporters afterward. \u201cIt was maybe tears of relief as well. When you are in the test flight program of a space company you can never be completely 100 percent sure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStucky, the pilot in command for the mission, said it went as smoothly as it could have \u2014 and well enough for him to perform a victory barrel roll as the spacecraft returned to Earth.\u201cThat was rather incredible,\u201d he said. Seeing \u201cthe dark sky was great. Everything just worked great. ...We had tons of extra propellant. Had plenty of time to look around.\u201dVirgin Galactic has nearly 700 people who have paid as much as $250,000 for its suborbital joyrides \u2014 more than the 560 or so people who have ever been to space. Eventually the company wants to fly six passengers at a time. The FAA plans to formally honor the pilots of Thursday\u2019s flight by awarding them commercial astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington next year.Story continues below advertisementFor Branson, the launch was the culmination of years\u2019 worth of lofty dreams and tragic setbacks as he sought to build what he calls \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201d He founded Virgin Galactic after buying the rights in 2004 to the technology behind SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that made it to the edge of space three times that year, winning the $10 million Ansari X prize and becoming the first privately funded vehicle to fly humans to space.AdvertisementThursday\u2019s launch was also a major milestone for a growing commercial space industry, which for all its triumphs has yet to show it can routinely fly humans into space. But that may soon change.Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly tourists, though to a higher altitude and with a rocket that launches vertically, not a spaceplane. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIts first test flights with humans on board are scheduled for next year.SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, and Boeing are under contract with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory, as early as next year.As the plight of Virgin Galactic shows, ending government\u2019s long-held monopoly on human spaceflight has been difficult. Despite the long odds, Branson started his quest to open space to the masses with his typical bravado, vowing the company would soon be taking tourists by the hundreds on awe-inspiring jaunts to the cosmos.AdvertisementBut years passed, the program suffered delay after delay and in 2014, a fatal setback: The spacecraft came apart midflight, killing Michael Alsbury, the pilot.Story continues below advertisementAs federal investigators probed what caused the crash, Branson pondered whether to continue, ultimately vowing to press on.Companies in the Cosmos: Entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn 2016, he unveiled a new spaceplane, dubbed Unity, and the company started its test program again, slowly pushing the envelope on test flight after test flight. Thursday\u2019s flight was a key milestone that the company says will push it closer to flying tourists from Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s futuristic launch facility in New Mexico.Branson said he has invested nearly $1 billion of his own money into the venture. \u201cSpace is not cheap,\u201d he said.Now Virgin is looking forward to selling more tickets and making the company commercially viable, he said. Once the test program is finished, he said the operation will move next year to Spaceport America, the futuristic facility in New Mexico where it intends to fly its tourist flights. Branson has said he intends to be on the first commercial flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company is now building two more spaceships in anticipation of the price coming down and more people signing up to fly.Virgin\u2019s ultimate goal is to build spaceports around the globe, \u201cand we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space,\u201d George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said in a recent interview.Eventually, the company would like to turn those spaceports into \u201cfuture hubs for a network of intercontinental transportation nodes\u201d where the spaceships can transport people across the globe in a matter of hours.In the long term, the company wants to fly \u201cinto major airports because we have a winged vehicle that can integrate smoothly in traffic patterns,\u201d Whitesides said.Story continues below advertisementThat goal is still \u201cmany years out,\u201d he said. \u201cBut that\u2019s the evolution \u2014 so that at the end of it you\u2019ve built up, step-by-step, a capability to go between continents in an hour or two.\u201dRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it worksNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2014 and a massive business for big companiesHe flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. After setbacks, rocket launch opens new era in human spaceflight. Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there (WP: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "732",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/virgin-galactic-plans-to-reach-space-with-a-test-flight-thursday/2018/12/12/f53067b4-fe4d-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html",
        "text": "MOJAVE, Calif. \u2014 Virgin Galactic launched a spacecraft more than 50 miles high Thursday, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s definition of space and capturing a long-elusive goal for the company founded by Richard Branson that one day wants to fly tourists through the atmosphere.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch of a spacecraft from U.S. soil with humans on board to reach the edge of space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. And it effectively opens a new era in human spaceflight, one where companies are working to end governments\u2019 long held monopoly on space, aiming to push farther faster. Though it just scratched the lowest edge of where many believe space begins, the launch had huge implications for a growing industry aiming to fly civilians on a regular basis. The flight was bold and risky, and following a fatal crash from four years ago, reminiscent in its daring of a bygone era of human spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRichard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)It comes at a time when NASA is still forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to orbit and faces criticism that its aversion to risk has replaced the youthful audacity that helped it put men on the moon.With the flight \u2014 taking place on a chilly morning shortly after sunrise \u2014 Virgin can claim an edge in the race for human spaceflight, as a number of companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Boeing, work to develop spacecraft capable of flying people.With two seasoned pilots in the cockpit \u2014 Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow \u2014 the vehicle known as SpaceShipTwo was ferried to an altitude of about 43,000 feet by a mother ship. Like a bomb, the spacecraft was released into a free fall before the pilot ignited the engine, propelling the spaceplane faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo test flight reaches spaceShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageVirgin Galactic's carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, with space tourism rocket plane SpaceShipTwo attached, takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. (Handout)Soon, the vehicle pointed almost straight up, as it streaked through the same skies over the California desert where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947. The spacecraft reached a height of 51.4 miles, hitting a top speed of Mach 2.9, before descending and returning the company\u2019s space port in Mojave.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn the ground, a gaggle of press, space enthusiasts, including Branson and his guests watched the flight, tilting their heads skyward. Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket, hugged his son as the spacecraft raced upward and a commentator called out the altitude.\u201cIt\u2019s been 14 long years to get here. We\u2019ve had tears, real tears, and moments of joy. So the tears today were tears of joy,\u201d he told reporters afterward. \u201cIt was maybe tears of relief as well. When you are in the test flight program of a space company you can never be completely 100 percent sure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStucky, the pilot in command for the mission, said it went as smoothly as it could have \u2014 and well enough for him to perform a victory barrel roll as the spacecraft returned to Earth.\u201cThat was rather incredible,\u201d he said. Seeing \u201cthe dark sky was great. Everything just worked great. ...We had tons of extra propellant. Had plenty of time to look around.\u201dVirgin Galactic has nearly 700 people who have paid as much as $250,000 for its suborbital joyrides \u2014 more than the 560 or so people who have ever been to space. Eventually the company wants to fly six passengers at a time. The FAA plans to formally honor the pilots of Thursday\u2019s flight by awarding them commercial astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington next year.Story continues below advertisementFor Branson, the launch was the culmination of years\u2019 worth of lofty dreams and tragic setbacks as he sought to build what he calls \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201d He founded Virgin Galactic after buying the rights in 2004 to the technology behind SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that made it to the edge of space three times that year, winning the $10 million Ansari X prize and becoming the first privately funded vehicle to fly humans to space.AdvertisementThursday\u2019s launch was also a major milestone for a growing commercial space industry, which for all its triumphs has yet to show it can routinely fly humans into space. But that may soon change.Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly tourists, though to a higher altitude and with a rocket that launches vertically, not a spaceplane. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIts first test flights with humans on board are scheduled for next year.SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, and Boeing are under contract with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory, as early as next year.As the plight of Virgin Galactic shows, ending government\u2019s long-held monopoly on human spaceflight has been difficult. Despite the long odds, Branson started his quest to open space to the masses with his typical bravado, vowing the company would soon be taking tourists by the hundreds on awe-inspiring jaunts to the cosmos.AdvertisementBut years passed, the program suffered delay after delay and in 2014, a fatal setback: The spacecraft came apart midflight, killing Michael Alsbury, the pilot.Story continues below advertisementAs federal investigators probed what caused the crash, Branson pondered whether to continue, ultimately vowing to press on.Companies in the Cosmos: Entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn 2016, he unveiled a new spaceplane, dubbed Unity, and the company started its test program again, slowly pushing the envelope on test flight after test flight. Thursday\u2019s flight was a key milestone that the company says will push it closer to flying tourists from Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s futuristic launch facility in New Mexico.Branson said he has invested nearly $1 billion of his own money into the venture. \u201cSpace is not cheap,\u201d he said.Now Virgin is looking forward to selling more tickets and making the company commercially viable, he said. Once the test program is finished, he said the operation will move next year to Spaceport America, the futuristic facility in New Mexico where it intends to fly its tourist flights. Branson has said he intends to be on the first commercial flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company is now building two more spaceships in anticipation of the price coming down and more people signing up to fly.Virgin\u2019s ultimate goal is to build spaceports around the globe, \u201cand we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space,\u201d George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said in a recent interview.Eventually, the company would like to turn those spaceports into \u201cfuture hubs for a network of intercontinental transportation nodes\u201d where the spaceships can transport people across the globe in a matter of hours.In the long term, the company wants to fly \u201cinto major airports because we have a winged vehicle that can integrate smoothly in traffic patterns,\u201d Whitesides said.Story continues below advertisementThat goal is still \u201cmany years out,\u201d he said. \u201cBut that\u2019s the evolution \u2014 so that at the end of it you\u2019ve built up, step-by-step, a capability to go between continents in an hour or two.\u201dRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it worksNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2014 and a massive business for big companiesHe flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. After setbacks, rocket launch opens new era in human spaceflight. Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "733",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/virgin-galactic-plans-to-reach-space-with-a-test-flight-thursday/2018/12/12/f53067b4-fe4d-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html",
        "text": "MOJAVE, Calif. \u2014 Virgin Galactic launched a spacecraft more than 50 miles high Thursday, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s definition of space and capturing a long-elusive goal for the company founded by Richard Branson that one day wants to fly tourists through the atmosphere.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch of a spacecraft from U.S. soil with humans on board to reach the edge of space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. And it effectively opens a new era in human spaceflight, one where companies are working to end governments\u2019 long held monopoly on space, aiming to push farther faster. Though it just scratched the lowest edge of where many believe space begins, the launch had huge implications for a growing industry aiming to fly civilians on a regular basis. The flight was bold and risky, and following a fatal crash from four years ago, reminiscent in its daring of a bygone era of human spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRichard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)It comes at a time when NASA is still forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to orbit and faces criticism that its aversion to risk has replaced the youthful audacity that helped it put men on the moon.With the flight \u2014 taking place on a chilly morning shortly after sunrise \u2014 Virgin can claim an edge in the race for human spaceflight, as a number of companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Boeing, work to develop spacecraft capable of flying people.With two seasoned pilots in the cockpit \u2014 Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow \u2014 the vehicle known as SpaceShipTwo was ferried to an altitude of about 43,000 feet by a mother ship. Like a bomb, the spacecraft was released into a free fall before the pilot ignited the engine, propelling the spaceplane faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo test flight reaches spaceShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageVirgin Galactic's carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, with space tourism rocket plane SpaceShipTwo attached, takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. (Handout)Soon, the vehicle pointed almost straight up, as it streaked through the same skies over the California desert where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947. The spacecraft reached a height of 51.4 miles, hitting a top speed of Mach 2.9, before descending and returning the company\u2019s space port in Mojave.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn the ground, a gaggle of press, space enthusiasts, including Branson and his guests watched the flight, tilting their heads skyward. Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket, hugged his son as the spacecraft raced upward and a commentator called out the altitude.\u201cIt\u2019s been 14 long years to get here. We\u2019ve had tears, real tears, and moments of joy. So the tears today were tears of joy,\u201d he told reporters afterward. \u201cIt was maybe tears of relief as well. When you are in the test flight program of a space company you can never be completely 100 percent sure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStucky, the pilot in command for the mission, said it went as smoothly as it could have \u2014 and well enough for him to perform a victory barrel roll as the spacecraft returned to Earth.\u201cThat was rather incredible,\u201d he said. Seeing \u201cthe dark sky was great. Everything just worked great. ...We had tons of extra propellant. Had plenty of time to look around.\u201dVirgin Galactic has nearly 700 people who have paid as much as $250,000 for its suborbital joyrides \u2014 more than the 560 or so people who have ever been to space. Eventually the company wants to fly six passengers at a time. The FAA plans to formally honor the pilots of Thursday\u2019s flight by awarding them commercial astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington next year.Story continues below advertisementFor Branson, the launch was the culmination of years\u2019 worth of lofty dreams and tragic setbacks as he sought to build what he calls \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201d He founded Virgin Galactic after buying the rights in 2004 to the technology behind SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that made it to the edge of space three times that year, winning the $10 million Ansari X prize and becoming the first privately funded vehicle to fly humans to space.AdvertisementThursday\u2019s launch was also a major milestone for a growing commercial space industry, which for all its triumphs has yet to show it can routinely fly humans into space. But that may soon change.Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly tourists, though to a higher altitude and with a rocket that launches vertically, not a spaceplane. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIts first test flights with humans on board are scheduled for next year.SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, and Boeing are under contract with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory, as early as next year.As the plight of Virgin Galactic shows, ending government\u2019s long-held monopoly on human spaceflight has been difficult. Despite the long odds, Branson started his quest to open space to the masses with his typical bravado, vowing the company would soon be taking tourists by the hundreds on awe-inspiring jaunts to the cosmos.AdvertisementBut years passed, the program suffered delay after delay and in 2014, a fatal setback: The spacecraft came apart midflight, killing Michael Alsbury, the pilot.Story continues below advertisementAs federal investigators probed what caused the crash, Branson pondered whether to continue, ultimately vowing to press on.Companies in the Cosmos: Entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn 2016, he unveiled a new spaceplane, dubbed Unity, and the company started its test program again, slowly pushing the envelope on test flight after test flight. Thursday\u2019s flight was a key milestone that the company says will push it closer to flying tourists from Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s futuristic launch facility in New Mexico.Branson said he has invested nearly $1 billion of his own money into the venture. \u201cSpace is not cheap,\u201d he said.Now Virgin is looking forward to selling more tickets and making the company commercially viable, he said. Once the test program is finished, he said the operation will move next year to Spaceport America, the futuristic facility in New Mexico where it intends to fly its tourist flights. Branson has said he intends to be on the first commercial flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company is now building two more spaceships in anticipation of the price coming down and more people signing up to fly.Virgin\u2019s ultimate goal is to build spaceports around the globe, \u201cand we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space,\u201d George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said in a recent interview.Eventually, the company would like to turn those spaceports into \u201cfuture hubs for a network of intercontinental transportation nodes\u201d where the spaceships can transport people across the globe in a matter of hours.In the long term, the company wants to fly \u201cinto major airports because we have a winged vehicle that can integrate smoothly in traffic patterns,\u201d Whitesides said.Story continues below advertisementThat goal is still \u201cmany years out,\u201d he said. \u201cBut that\u2019s the evolution \u2014 so that at the end of it you\u2019ve built up, step-by-step, a capability to go between continents in an hour or two.\u201dRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it worksNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2014 and a massive business for big companiesHe flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. After setbacks, rocket launch opens new era in human spaceflight. Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "734",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/virgin-galactic-plans-to-reach-space-with-a-test-flight-thursday/2018/12/12/f53067b4-fe4d-11e8-862a-b6a6f3ce8199_story.html",
        "text": "MOJAVE, Calif. \u2014 Virgin Galactic launched a spacecraft more than 50 miles high Thursday, reaching the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s definition of space and capturing a long-elusive goal for the company founded by Richard Branson that one day wants to fly tourists through the atmosphere.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough it did not reach orbit, the flight was the first launch of a spacecraft from U.S. soil with humans on board to reach the edge of space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. And it effectively opens a new era in human spaceflight, one where companies are working to end governments\u2019 long held monopoly on space, aiming to push farther faster. Though it just scratched the lowest edge of where many believe space begins, the launch had huge implications for a growing industry aiming to fly civilians on a regular basis. The flight was bold and risky, and following a fatal crash from four years ago, reminiscent in its daring of a bygone era of human spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRichard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)It comes at a time when NASA is still forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to orbit and faces criticism that its aversion to risk has replaced the youthful audacity that helped it put men on the moon.With the flight \u2014 taking place on a chilly morning shortly after sunrise \u2014 Virgin can claim an edge in the race for human spaceflight, as a number of companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Boeing, work to develop spacecraft capable of flying people.With two seasoned pilots in the cockpit \u2014 Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow \u2014 the vehicle known as SpaceShipTwo was ferried to an altitude of about 43,000 feet by a mother ship. Like a bomb, the spacecraft was released into a free fall before the pilot ignited the engine, propelling the spaceplane faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo test flight reaches spaceShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageVirgin Galactic's carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, with space tourism rocket plane SpaceShipTwo attached, takes off from Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif. (Handout)Soon, the vehicle pointed almost straight up, as it streaked through the same skies over the California desert where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947. The spacecraft reached a height of 51.4 miles, hitting a top speed of Mach 2.9, before descending and returning the company\u2019s space port in Mojave.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn the ground, a gaggle of press, space enthusiasts, including Branson and his guests watched the flight, tilting their heads skyward. Branson, wearing a leather bomber jacket, hugged his son as the spacecraft raced upward and a commentator called out the altitude.\u201cIt\u2019s been 14 long years to get here. We\u2019ve had tears, real tears, and moments of joy. So the tears today were tears of joy,\u201d he told reporters afterward. \u201cIt was maybe tears of relief as well. When you are in the test flight program of a space company you can never be completely 100 percent sure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStucky, the pilot in command for the mission, said it went as smoothly as it could have \u2014 and well enough for him to perform a victory barrel roll as the spacecraft returned to Earth.\u201cThat was rather incredible,\u201d he said. Seeing \u201cthe dark sky was great. Everything just worked great. ...We had tons of extra propellant. Had plenty of time to look around.\u201dVirgin Galactic has nearly 700 people who have paid as much as $250,000 for its suborbital joyrides \u2014 more than the 560 or so people who have ever been to space. Eventually the company wants to fly six passengers at a time. The FAA plans to formally honor the pilots of Thursday\u2019s flight by awarding them commercial astronaut wings at a ceremony in Washington next year.Story continues below advertisementFor Branson, the launch was the culmination of years\u2019 worth of lofty dreams and tragic setbacks as he sought to build what he calls \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201d He founded Virgin Galactic after buying the rights in 2004 to the technology behind SpaceShipOne, the spacecraft funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that made it to the edge of space three times that year, winning the $10 million Ansari X prize and becoming the first privately funded vehicle to fly humans to space.AdvertisementThursday\u2019s launch was also a major milestone for a growing commercial space industry, which for all its triumphs has yet to show it can routinely fly humans into space. But that may soon change.Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly tourists, though to a higher altitude and with a rocket that launches vertically, not a spaceplane. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIts first test flights with humans on board are scheduled for next year.SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk, and Boeing are under contract with NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory, as early as next year.As the plight of Virgin Galactic shows, ending government\u2019s long-held monopoly on human spaceflight has been difficult. Despite the long odds, Branson started his quest to open space to the masses with his typical bravado, vowing the company would soon be taking tourists by the hundreds on awe-inspiring jaunts to the cosmos.AdvertisementBut years passed, the program suffered delay after delay and in 2014, a fatal setback: The spacecraft came apart midflight, killing Michael Alsbury, the pilot.Story continues below advertisementAs federal investigators probed what caused the crash, Branson pondered whether to continue, ultimately vowing to press on.Companies in the Cosmos: Entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn 2016, he unveiled a new spaceplane, dubbed Unity, and the company started its test program again, slowly pushing the envelope on test flight after test flight. Thursday\u2019s flight was a key milestone that the company says will push it closer to flying tourists from Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s futuristic launch facility in New Mexico.Branson said he has invested nearly $1 billion of his own money into the venture. \u201cSpace is not cheap,\u201d he said.Now Virgin is looking forward to selling more tickets and making the company commercially viable, he said. Once the test program is finished, he said the operation will move next year to Spaceport America, the futuristic facility in New Mexico where it intends to fly its tourist flights. Branson has said he intends to be on the first commercial flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company is now building two more spaceships in anticipation of the price coming down and more people signing up to fly.Virgin\u2019s ultimate goal is to build spaceports around the globe, \u201cand we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space,\u201d George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said in a recent interview.Eventually, the company would like to turn those spaceports into \u201cfuture hubs for a network of intercontinental transportation nodes\u201d where the spaceships can transport people across the globe in a matter of hours.In the long term, the company wants to fly \u201cinto major airports because we have a winged vehicle that can integrate smoothly in traffic patterns,\u201d Whitesides said.Story continues below advertisementThat goal is still \u201cmany years out,\u201d he said. \u201cBut that\u2019s the evolution \u2014 so that at the end of it you\u2019ve built up, step-by-step, a capability to go between continents in an hour or two.\u201dRockets and airplanes may begin to share airspace even more. Here\u2019s how it worksNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2014 and a massive business for big companiesHe flew with NASA before. Now, he\u2019s returning as a private astronaut. After setbacks, rocket launch opens new era in human spaceflight. Virgin Galactic test flight reaches space, taking a step closer to flying tourists there",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "735",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/09/virgin-galactic-announces-plans-become-first-publicly-listed-space-company/",
        "text": "Before Virgin Galactic starts bringing human beings closer to the cosmos, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company has set its sights on another new frontier: the New York Stock Exchange.The British billionaire announced Tuesday that Virgin Galactic planned to become the first human spaceflight company to go public via a merger with a New York investment firm. Social Capital Hedosophia will take a 49 percent stake in the company, which will be valued at roughly $1.5 billion. The firm\u2019s chief executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, will invest an additional $100 million in the combined enterprise at $10 per share and become its chairman. The listing is expected before the end of the year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe move is a major shift for a company that has been funded largely by Branson\u2019s personal fortune as it struggled to get its commercial operations underway, and start generating real revenue. When he founded the company in 2004, Branson pledged that flights would happen within a few years, but the endeavor has taken much longer, and been far costlier than originally anticipated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the capital it raises by going public, Virgin Galactic said it will be able to sustain its operations until it begins commercial flights and starts generating its own revenue. Six hundred people in 60 countries have put down more than $80 million in deposits to get on Virgin Galactic\u2019s reservation list, ultimately signing up to pay as much as $250,000 a ticket; the company\u2019s customer backlog alone would double the number of people who have ever gone to space.\u201cGreat progress in our test flight program means that we are on track for our beautiful spaceship to begin commercial service,\u201d Branson said in a statement. \u201cBy embarking on this new chapter, at this advanced point in Virgin Galactic\u2019s development, we can open space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts.\u201dThe public listing would represent a major milestone for the fast-growing space sector, which could be worth $2.7 trillion by 2045, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. For years, Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has been locked in competition with fellow billionaire enterprises, such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bezos has said Blue Origin is vying to build a lunar lander for NASA, as it aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic was founded in 2004, but it suffered serious setbacks after a spaceship came apart during a test flight of the Mojave Desert in 2014, killing a co-pilot, Michael Alsbury. So far, Virgin has flown its vehicle SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space twice. The first flight, in December, was with two test pilots. The second, in February, had two pilots and a crew member. The five members of the flights were awarded commercial astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration.\u201cWe are confident that VG is light-years ahead of the competition,\u201d Palihapitiya said in a statement. \u201cIt is backed by an exciting business model and an uncompromising commitment to safety and customer satisfaction.\u201dRichard Branson's Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flightThe company has raised more than $1 billion since its inception, but much of that funding came directly from Branson. In 2017, Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund said it planned to pour $1 billion into the company, but Branson halted talks after the murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi last year.In May, the company announced that it would finally move its operations to Spaceport America, the launch site in rural New Mexico, after years of waiting and delays. The \u201cworld\u2019s first purpose-built commercial spaceport\u201d \u2014 which cost New Mexico taxpayers $220 million to build \u2014 will house Virgin Galactic\u2019s fleet of space vehicles and 100 staff by the end of the summer.Unlike a traditional rocket that launches vertically, Virgin Galactic has built a spaceplane that is tethered to the bellow of a carrier airplane, which hoists it to an altitude of about 40,000 feet. There, the spaceplane is released, fires its motor and races through the atmosphere to the edge of space, where passengers would spend about four minutes in a weightless environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCurrently, the company is building two more spacecraft. In an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the merger would allow the company to build as many as five spaceplanes and two carrier aircraft, as well as help invest in additional spaceports around the world.A larger fleet would \u201callow us to over time reduce the cost and open up the market even further,\u201d he said.Virgin has been in discussions to open spaceports in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, he said. Ultimately it wants to build a network of destinations that would allow passengers to rapidly cross the globe in one of its spacecraft.Branson has said he intends to fly this year. But Whitesides said, \u201cwe have a few more test flights.\u201d He added he was aware that \u201cobviously Richard is eager to fly.\u201d With the capital it raises by going public, the company will be able to sustain its operations until it begins commercial flights and starts generating its own revenue. Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public (WP: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "736",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/09/virgin-galactic-announces-plans-become-first-publicly-listed-space-company/",
        "text": "Before Virgin Galactic starts bringing human beings closer to the cosmos, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company has set its sights on another new frontier: the New York Stock Exchange.The British billionaire announced Tuesday that Virgin Galactic planned to become the first human spaceflight company to go public via a merger with a New York investment firm. Social Capital Hedosophia will take a 49 percent stake in the company, which will be valued at roughly $1.5 billion. The firm\u2019s chief executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, will invest an additional $100 million in the combined enterprise at $10 per share and become its chairman. The listing is expected before the end of the year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe move is a major shift for a company that has been funded largely by Branson\u2019s personal fortune as it struggled to get its commercial operations underway, and start generating real revenue. When he founded the company in 2004, Branson pledged that flights would happen within a few years, but the endeavor has taken much longer, and been far costlier than originally anticipated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the capital it raises by going public, Virgin Galactic said it will be able to sustain its operations until it begins commercial flights and starts generating its own revenue. Six hundred people in 60 countries have put down more than $80 million in deposits to get on Virgin Galactic\u2019s reservation list, ultimately signing up to pay as much as $250,000 a ticket; the company\u2019s customer backlog alone would double the number of people who have ever gone to space.\u201cGreat progress in our test flight program means that we are on track for our beautiful spaceship to begin commercial service,\u201d Branson said in a statement. \u201cBy embarking on this new chapter, at this advanced point in Virgin Galactic\u2019s development, we can open space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts.\u201dThe public listing would represent a major milestone for the fast-growing space sector, which could be worth $2.7 trillion by 2045, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. For years, Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has been locked in competition with fellow billionaire enterprises, such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bezos has said Blue Origin is vying to build a lunar lander for NASA, as it aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic was founded in 2004, but it suffered serious setbacks after a spaceship came apart during a test flight of the Mojave Desert in 2014, killing a co-pilot, Michael Alsbury. So far, Virgin has flown its vehicle SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space twice. The first flight, in December, was with two test pilots. The second, in February, had two pilots and a crew member. The five members of the flights were awarded commercial astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration.\u201cWe are confident that VG is light-years ahead of the competition,\u201d Palihapitiya said in a statement. \u201cIt is backed by an exciting business model and an uncompromising commitment to safety and customer satisfaction.\u201dRichard Branson's Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flightThe company has raised more than $1 billion since its inception, but much of that funding came directly from Branson. In 2017, Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund said it planned to pour $1 billion into the company, but Branson halted talks after the murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi last year.In May, the company announced that it would finally move its operations to Spaceport America, the launch site in rural New Mexico, after years of waiting and delays. The \u201cworld\u2019s first purpose-built commercial spaceport\u201d \u2014 which cost New Mexico taxpayers $220 million to build \u2014 will house Virgin Galactic\u2019s fleet of space vehicles and 100 staff by the end of the summer.Unlike a traditional rocket that launches vertically, Virgin Galactic has built a spaceplane that is tethered to the bellow of a carrier airplane, which hoists it to an altitude of about 40,000 feet. There, the spaceplane is released, fires its motor and races through the atmosphere to the edge of space, where passengers would spend about four minutes in a weightless environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCurrently, the company is building two more spacecraft. In an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the merger would allow the company to build as many as five spaceplanes and two carrier aircraft, as well as help invest in additional spaceports around the world.A larger fleet would \u201callow us to over time reduce the cost and open up the market even further,\u201d he said.Virgin has been in discussions to open spaceports in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, he said. Ultimately it wants to build a network of destinations that would allow passengers to rapidly cross the globe in one of its spacecraft.Branson has said he intends to fly this year. But Whitesides said, \u201cwe have a few more test flights.\u201d He added he was aware that \u201cobviously Richard is eager to fly.\u201d With the capital it raises by going public, the company will be able to sustain its operations until it begins commercial flights and starts generating its own revenue. Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "737",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/07/09/virgin-galactic-announces-plans-become-first-publicly-listed-space-company/",
        "text": "Before Virgin Galactic starts bringing human beings closer to the cosmos, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company has set its sights on another new frontier: the New York Stock Exchange.The British billionaire announced Tuesday that Virgin Galactic planned to become the first human spaceflight company to go public via a merger with a New York investment firm. Social Capital Hedosophia will take a 49 percent stake in the company, which will be valued at roughly $1.5 billion. The firm\u2019s chief executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, will invest an additional $100 million in the combined enterprise at $10 per share and become its chairman. The listing is expected before the end of the year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe move is a major shift for a company that has been funded largely by Branson\u2019s personal fortune as it struggled to get its commercial operations underway, and start generating real revenue. When he founded the company in 2004, Branson pledged that flights would happen within a few years, but the endeavor has taken much longer, and been far costlier than originally anticipated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the capital it raises by going public, Virgin Galactic said it will be able to sustain its operations until it begins commercial flights and starts generating its own revenue. Six hundred people in 60 countries have put down more than $80 million in deposits to get on Virgin Galactic\u2019s reservation list, ultimately signing up to pay as much as $250,000 a ticket; the company\u2019s customer backlog alone would double the number of people who have ever gone to space.\u201cGreat progress in our test flight program means that we are on track for our beautiful spaceship to begin commercial service,\u201d Branson said in a statement. \u201cBy embarking on this new chapter, at this advanced point in Virgin Galactic\u2019s development, we can open space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts.\u201dThe public listing would represent a major milestone for the fast-growing space sector, which could be worth $2.7 trillion by 2045, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. For years, Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has been locked in competition with fellow billionaire enterprises, such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bezos has said Blue Origin is vying to build a lunar lander for NASA, as it aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic was founded in 2004, but it suffered serious setbacks after a spaceship came apart during a test flight of the Mojave Desert in 2014, killing a co-pilot, Michael Alsbury. So far, Virgin has flown its vehicle SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space twice. The first flight, in December, was with two test pilots. The second, in February, had two pilots and a crew member. The five members of the flights were awarded commercial astronaut wings by the Federal Aviation Administration.\u201cWe are confident that VG is light-years ahead of the competition,\u201d Palihapitiya said in a statement. \u201cIt is backed by an exciting business model and an uncompromising commitment to safety and customer satisfaction.\u201dRichard Branson's Virgin Galactic reaches space again in successful flightThe company has raised more than $1 billion since its inception, but much of that funding came directly from Branson. In 2017, Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund said it planned to pour $1 billion into the company, but Branson halted talks after the murder of Saudi journalist and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi last year.In May, the company announced that it would finally move its operations to Spaceport America, the launch site in rural New Mexico, after years of waiting and delays. The \u201cworld\u2019s first purpose-built commercial spaceport\u201d \u2014 which cost New Mexico taxpayers $220 million to build \u2014 will house Virgin Galactic\u2019s fleet of space vehicles and 100 staff by the end of the summer.Unlike a traditional rocket that launches vertically, Virgin Galactic has built a spaceplane that is tethered to the bellow of a carrier airplane, which hoists it to an altitude of about 40,000 feet. There, the spaceplane is released, fires its motor and races through the atmosphere to the edge of space, where passengers would spend about four minutes in a weightless environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCurrently, the company is building two more spacecraft. In an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the merger would allow the company to build as many as five spaceplanes and two carrier aircraft, as well as help invest in additional spaceports around the world.A larger fleet would \u201callow us to over time reduce the cost and open up the market even further,\u201d he said.Virgin has been in discussions to open spaceports in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, he said. Ultimately it wants to build a network of destinations that would allow passengers to rapidly cross the globe in one of its spacecraft.Branson has said he intends to fly this year. But Whitesides said, \u201cwe have a few more test flights.\u201d He added he was aware that \u201cobviously Richard is eager to fly.\u201d With the capital it raises by going public, the company will be able to sustain its operations until it begins commercial flights and starts generating its own revenue. Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic says it is on the cusp of flying humans to space. But where does space begin? (WP: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "738",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/11/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-says-it-is-cusp-flying-humans-space-where-does-space-begin/",
        "text": "As soon as Thursday, Virgin Galactic plans to fire the rocket motor of its spacecraft and fly to an altitude of more than 50 miles. If it accomplishes that goal, it would proclaim it has reached the edge of space, and that its pilots are the first astronauts to launch from United States soil since the last space shuttle mission in 2011. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the test flight would also crystallize a long-simmering debate over where space begins. The Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration have awarded astronaut wings for pilots who have made it to 50 miles or above. But to many, the edge of space begins not at 50 miles, but at 62 miles, or 100 km, at the so-called Karman line, named for Theodore von Karman, one of the founders of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.As Virgin Galactic \u2014 the company founded by billionaire Richard Branson with a goal of taking tourists on suborbital trips high into the sky \u2014 prepares to eventually fly its first customers, the question remains: Where does space begin?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s an interesting question,\u201d said Bill Barry, NASA\u2019s chief historian. \u201cThere isn\u2019t any agreed upon international definition.\u201dThe Karman line is used by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the World Air Sports Federation, a record-keeping organization that promotes aeronautical activities around the world. And it was the measuring stick in the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition in 2004 \u2014 the first spacecraft to pass that altitude twice in two weeks won. As a result, it widely became accepted as the boundary of space.Companies in the Cosmos: How entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceBlue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly its customers 62 miles or more. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, hit an altitude of 116 miles during his 15-minute suborbital flight in 1961.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe recent flight by astronaut NASA Nick Hague shows how tricky the issue is. In October, his flight to the International Space Station was aborted due to a rocket failure. Initially, NASA said in a statement to The Post that he is still considered to have made it to space because \u201che scraped the edge of [62 miles], which is the theoretical boundary of space.\u201dBut then it backtracked, saying that Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin actually reached an altitude just short of the Karman line at approximately 93 km, or about 58 miles. It added that it considers him to be \u201ca flown astronaut because he launched and landed in a spacecraft; he was fully trained and prepared for the launch and mission to the International Space Station.\u201dThere is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law. Unlike a body of water, the atmosphere doesn\u2019t end at any precise point. Instead, the air gets progressively thinner the higher the altitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany countries prefer that ambiguity, allowing them to fly spacecraft, such as intelligence satellites, over a foreign country without crossing into another nation\u2019s airspace.\u201cIf you\u2019re flying an aircraft, national sovereignty matters,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation. \u201cBut if you\u2019re a satellite, they can over fly pretty much anywhere they want without getting permission.\u201dWeeden is in the camp that believe the lower threshold should suffice. \u201cFrom a technical perspective, [50 miles] is a good working definition,\u201d he said.It\u2019s the definition used by the Air Force, which in the 1960s awarded astronaut wings to the pilots in the X-15 program who flew the jet 50 miles or higher.Story continues below advertisementThe FAA\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Transportation also uses 50 miles in awarding what it calls \u201cCommercial Astronaut Wings.\u201d That definition put it in line with the military, and the FAA has said it would also help it promote the commercial space industry, part of the agency\u2019s mandate.AdvertisementIn 2004, the agency awarded astronaut wings the pilots in the Ansari X Prize. And it also plans to honor Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots should they reach 50 miles or more, according to Gregory Martin, the FAA\u2019s assistant administrator for communications.Recently, there has been pushback against the 62-mile boundary. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has argued for the 50-mile definition based on a mathematical analysis of objects flying through the upper layers of the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementHe keeps a list of astronauts and said if Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots crest 50 miles, they\u2019d earn the honor of astronaut.\u201cMy plan is to count those people as astronauts and to include them on my list,\u201d he said.And the FAI has also said it would revisit its decision to use the 100 km definition, citing \u201cmany scientific and technical discussions around this demarcation line for the \u2018edge of space\u2019 and variance around this as a boundary condition for recognition of \u2018astronaut\u2019 status,'\u201d it said in a recent statement. As a result, it called for an international workshop \u201cto fully explore this issue with input and participation from the astrodynamics and astronautical community.\u201dVirgin would welcome that. If 50 miles was good enough for the Air Force, it is good enough for the company, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive said. \u201cVirgin Galactic has always respected this recognition and will follow the same,\u201d he said.Ultimately, the company\u2019s goal is to ferry many more people to 50 miles, or higher. It has more than 600 people who have signed up for the trips on SpaceShipTwo, its spaceplane, which now cost $250,000.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs of today, only about 550 people have ever been to space,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is a crazy low number in my opinion. I mean, 550 people fit on one airplane, if it\u2019s a big plane.\u201dThe long-term goal is to make it routine. \u201cYou can easily imagine a future in which there are four or five spaceports around the planet, and we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space.\u201dDig deeper: Space + U.S. CitiesWant to explore how the modern space industry has affected cities and businesses? Check out our curated list of stories below.Understanding how the modern space race affects citiesIn the 1960s, this Florida coast line was a boomtown thriving on the race to the moon. Now, private investment in space travel might bring that back.Story continues below advertisementContext matters: Where does outer space actually begin?Virgin Atlantic plans on taking customers 50 miles into space, but there\u2019s actually some debate over where the edge of space begins.What commercial space travel means for airlinesThe number of commercial rocket companies that plan to to fly on a weekly basis could be a threat to airlines who manage a congested airspace. A single launch can affect hundreds of flights. As Virgin Galactic \u2014 the company founded by billionaire Richard Branson with a goal of taking tourists on suborbital trips high into the sky \u2014  prepares to eventually fly its first customers, the question remains: Where does space begin? Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic says it is on the cusp of flying humans to space. But where does space begin?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic says it is on the cusp of flying humans to space. But where does space begin? (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "739",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/11/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-says-it-is-cusp-flying-humans-space-where-does-space-begin/",
        "text": "As soon as Thursday, Virgin Galactic plans to fire the rocket motor of its spacecraft and fly to an altitude of more than 50 miles. If it accomplishes that goal, it would proclaim it has reached the edge of space, and that its pilots are the first astronauts to launch from United States soil since the last space shuttle mission in 2011. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the test flight would also crystallize a long-simmering debate over where space begins. The Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration have awarded astronaut wings for pilots who have made it to 50 miles or above. But to many, the edge of space begins not at 50 miles, but at 62 miles, or 100 km, at the so-called Karman line, named for Theodore von Karman, one of the founders of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.As Virgin Galactic \u2014 the company founded by billionaire Richard Branson with a goal of taking tourists on suborbital trips high into the sky \u2014 prepares to eventually fly its first customers, the question remains: Where does space begin?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s an interesting question,\u201d said Bill Barry, NASA\u2019s chief historian. \u201cThere isn\u2019t any agreed upon international definition.\u201dThe Karman line is used by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the World Air Sports Federation, a record-keeping organization that promotes aeronautical activities around the world. And it was the measuring stick in the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition in 2004 \u2014 the first spacecraft to pass that altitude twice in two weeks won. As a result, it widely became accepted as the boundary of space.Companies in the Cosmos: How entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceBlue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly its customers 62 miles or more. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, hit an altitude of 116 miles during his 15-minute suborbital flight in 1961.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe recent flight by astronaut NASA Nick Hague shows how tricky the issue is. In October, his flight to the International Space Station was aborted due to a rocket failure. Initially, NASA said in a statement to The Post that he is still considered to have made it to space because \u201che scraped the edge of [62 miles], which is the theoretical boundary of space.\u201dBut then it backtracked, saying that Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin actually reached an altitude just short of the Karman line at approximately 93 km, or about 58 miles. It added that it considers him to be \u201ca flown astronaut because he launched and landed in a spacecraft; he was fully trained and prepared for the launch and mission to the International Space Station.\u201dThere is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law. Unlike a body of water, the atmosphere doesn\u2019t end at any precise point. Instead, the air gets progressively thinner the higher the altitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany countries prefer that ambiguity, allowing them to fly spacecraft, such as intelligence satellites, over a foreign country without crossing into another nation\u2019s airspace.\u201cIf you\u2019re flying an aircraft, national sovereignty matters,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation. \u201cBut if you\u2019re a satellite, they can over fly pretty much anywhere they want without getting permission.\u201dWeeden is in the camp that believe the lower threshold should suffice. \u201cFrom a technical perspective, [50 miles] is a good working definition,\u201d he said.It\u2019s the definition used by the Air Force, which in the 1960s awarded astronaut wings to the pilots in the X-15 program who flew the jet 50 miles or higher.Story continues below advertisementThe FAA\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Transportation also uses 50 miles in awarding what it calls \u201cCommercial Astronaut Wings.\u201d That definition put it in line with the military, and the FAA has said it would also help it promote the commercial space industry, part of the agency\u2019s mandate.AdvertisementIn 2004, the agency awarded astronaut wings the pilots in the Ansari X Prize. And it also plans to honor Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots should they reach 50 miles or more, according to Gregory Martin, the FAA\u2019s assistant administrator for communications.Recently, there has been pushback against the 62-mile boundary. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has argued for the 50-mile definition based on a mathematical analysis of objects flying through the upper layers of the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementHe keeps a list of astronauts and said if Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots crest 50 miles, they\u2019d earn the honor of astronaut.\u201cMy plan is to count those people as astronauts and to include them on my list,\u201d he said.And the FAI has also said it would revisit its decision to use the 100 km definition, citing \u201cmany scientific and technical discussions around this demarcation line for the \u2018edge of space\u2019 and variance around this as a boundary condition for recognition of \u2018astronaut\u2019 status,'\u201d it said in a recent statement. As a result, it called for an international workshop \u201cto fully explore this issue with input and participation from the astrodynamics and astronautical community.\u201dVirgin would welcome that. If 50 miles was good enough for the Air Force, it is good enough for the company, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive said. \u201cVirgin Galactic has always respected this recognition and will follow the same,\u201d he said.Ultimately, the company\u2019s goal is to ferry many more people to 50 miles, or higher. It has more than 600 people who have signed up for the trips on SpaceShipTwo, its spaceplane, which now cost $250,000.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs of today, only about 550 people have ever been to space,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is a crazy low number in my opinion. I mean, 550 people fit on one airplane, if it\u2019s a big plane.\u201dThe long-term goal is to make it routine. \u201cYou can easily imagine a future in which there are four or five spaceports around the planet, and we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space.\u201dDig deeper: Space + U.S. CitiesWant to explore how the modern space industry has affected cities and businesses? Check out our curated list of stories below.Understanding how the modern space race affects citiesIn the 1960s, this Florida coast line was a boomtown thriving on the race to the moon. Now, private investment in space travel might bring that back.Story continues below advertisementContext matters: Where does outer space actually begin?Virgin Atlantic plans on taking customers 50 miles into space, but there\u2019s actually some debate over where the edge of space begins.What commercial space travel means for airlinesThe number of commercial rocket companies that plan to to fly on a weekly basis could be a threat to airlines who manage a congested airspace. A single launch can affect hundreds of flights. As Virgin Galactic \u2014 the company founded by billionaire Richard Branson with a goal of taking tourists on suborbital trips high into the sky \u2014  prepares to eventually fly its first customers, the question remains: Where does space begin? Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic says it is on the cusp of flying humans to space. But where does space begin?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic says it is on the cusp of flying humans to space. But where does space begin? (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "740",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/11/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-says-it-is-cusp-flying-humans-space-where-does-space-begin/",
        "text": "As soon as Thursday, Virgin Galactic plans to fire the rocket motor of its spacecraft and fly to an altitude of more than 50 miles. If it accomplishes that goal, it would proclaim it has reached the edge of space, and that its pilots are the first astronauts to launch from United States soil since the last space shuttle mission in 2011. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the test flight would also crystallize a long-simmering debate over where space begins. The Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration have awarded astronaut wings for pilots who have made it to 50 miles or above. But to many, the edge of space begins not at 50 miles, but at 62 miles, or 100 km, at the so-called Karman line, named for Theodore von Karman, one of the founders of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.As Virgin Galactic \u2014 the company founded by billionaire Richard Branson with a goal of taking tourists on suborbital trips high into the sky \u2014 prepares to eventually fly its first customers, the question remains: Where does space begin?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s an interesting question,\u201d said Bill Barry, NASA\u2019s chief historian. \u201cThere isn\u2019t any agreed upon international definition.\u201dThe Karman line is used by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the World Air Sports Federation, a record-keeping organization that promotes aeronautical activities around the world. And it was the measuring stick in the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition in 2004 \u2014 the first spacecraft to pass that altitude twice in two weeks won. As a result, it widely became accepted as the boundary of space.Companies in the Cosmos: How entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceBlue Origin, the space company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly its customers 62 miles or more. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, hit an altitude of 116 miles during his 15-minute suborbital flight in 1961.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe recent flight by astronaut NASA Nick Hague shows how tricky the issue is. In October, his flight to the International Space Station was aborted due to a rocket failure. Initially, NASA said in a statement to The Post that he is still considered to have made it to space because \u201che scraped the edge of [62 miles], which is the theoretical boundary of space.\u201dBut then it backtracked, saying that Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin actually reached an altitude just short of the Karman line at approximately 93 km, or about 58 miles. It added that it considers him to be \u201ca flown astronaut because he launched and landed in a spacecraft; he was fully trained and prepared for the launch and mission to the International Space Station.\u201dThere is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law. Unlike a body of water, the atmosphere doesn\u2019t end at any precise point. Instead, the air gets progressively thinner the higher the altitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany countries prefer that ambiguity, allowing them to fly spacecraft, such as intelligence satellites, over a foreign country without crossing into another nation\u2019s airspace.\u201cIf you\u2019re flying an aircraft, national sovereignty matters,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation. \u201cBut if you\u2019re a satellite, they can over fly pretty much anywhere they want without getting permission.\u201dWeeden is in the camp that believe the lower threshold should suffice. \u201cFrom a technical perspective, [50 miles] is a good working definition,\u201d he said.It\u2019s the definition used by the Air Force, which in the 1960s awarded astronaut wings to the pilots in the X-15 program who flew the jet 50 miles or higher.Story continues below advertisementThe FAA\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Transportation also uses 50 miles in awarding what it calls \u201cCommercial Astronaut Wings.\u201d That definition put it in line with the military, and the FAA has said it would also help it promote the commercial space industry, part of the agency\u2019s mandate.AdvertisementIn 2004, the agency awarded astronaut wings the pilots in the Ansari X Prize. And it also plans to honor Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots should they reach 50 miles or more, according to Gregory Martin, the FAA\u2019s assistant administrator for communications.Recently, there has been pushback against the 62-mile boundary. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has argued for the 50-mile definition based on a mathematical analysis of objects flying through the upper layers of the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementHe keeps a list of astronauts and said if Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots crest 50 miles, they\u2019d earn the honor of astronaut.\u201cMy plan is to count those people as astronauts and to include them on my list,\u201d he said.And the FAI has also said it would revisit its decision to use the 100 km definition, citing \u201cmany scientific and technical discussions around this demarcation line for the \u2018edge of space\u2019 and variance around this as a boundary condition for recognition of \u2018astronaut\u2019 status,'\u201d it said in a recent statement. As a result, it called for an international workshop \u201cto fully explore this issue with input and participation from the astrodynamics and astronautical community.\u201dVirgin would welcome that. If 50 miles was good enough for the Air Force, it is good enough for the company, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive said. \u201cVirgin Galactic has always respected this recognition and will follow the same,\u201d he said.Ultimately, the company\u2019s goal is to ferry many more people to 50 miles, or higher. It has more than 600 people who have signed up for the trips on SpaceShipTwo, its spaceplane, which now cost $250,000.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs of today, only about 550 people have ever been to space,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is a crazy low number in my opinion. I mean, 550 people fit on one airplane, if it\u2019s a big plane.\u201dThe long-term goal is to make it routine. \u201cYou can easily imagine a future in which there are four or five spaceports around the planet, and we\u2019re operating multiple times a week at each one of those and enabling tens of thousands of people to experience space.\u201dDig deeper: Space + U.S. CitiesWant to explore how the modern space industry has affected cities and businesses? Check out our curated list of stories below.Understanding how the modern space race affects citiesIn the 1960s, this Florida coast line was a boomtown thriving on the race to the moon. Now, private investment in space travel might bring that back.Story continues below advertisementContext matters: Where does outer space actually begin?Virgin Atlantic plans on taking customers 50 miles into space, but there\u2019s actually some debate over where the edge of space begins.What commercial space travel means for airlinesThe number of commercial rocket companies that plan to to fly on a weekly basis could be a threat to airlines who manage a congested airspace. A single launch can affect hundreds of flights. As Virgin Galactic \u2014 the company founded by billionaire Richard Branson with a goal of taking tourists on suborbital trips high into the sky \u2014  prepares to eventually fly its first customers, the question remains: Where does space begin? Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic says it is on the cusp of flying humans to space. But where does space begin?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Opens Door to Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "741",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-set-for-travel-to-space-in-sunday-flight-11626002209?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=7",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic, the company Mr. Branson founded, plans to initiate commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights. The test flight was aimed at evaluating systems and the passenger experience, as well as providing additional validation of its safety. Vehicles developed by private space companies have been tested a fraction of the number of times compared with the planes used by airlines.\nThe British entrepreneur and five crew members crossed one threshold of space, climbing 53.5 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nAt the peak of the spaceship VSS Unity\u2019s 15-minute trip after separating from the launch aircraft, crew members unbuckled from their seats and experienced weightlessness, peering at Earth and into space from a dozen windows in the cabin.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re here to make space more accessible to all,\u201d Mr. Branson said Sunday after landing. His only worry was \u201csome tiny little something\u201d that would prevent the trip from happening, he added later.\nThe flight is part of a broader push from companies and investors to develop viable businesses based on human space flight, long dominated by government space agencies with scientific and policy missions. \nUnity\u2019s trip meant that, for a few minutes, there were a record 16 people in space, including its crew and those on board the International Space Station and China\u2019s Tiangong capsule. Overall, hundreds of people have successfully visited suborbital space since the 1960s, including some private tourists, such as investor Dennis Tito\u2019s visit via a Russian rocket to the station in 2001. But Mr. Branson\u2019s round-trip visit illustrates the efforts that private companies are now undertaking to develop businesses that can ultimately carry hundreds of people a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEntrepreneur RIchard Branson floated inside Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane on Sunday after reaching the edge of space before safely returning to Earth. The company plans to initiate commercial passenger service next year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\nAmazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin LLC, which plans to take him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket on July 20. Blue Origin said it is flying above the Karman Line, a boundary some 62 miles above Earth considered to be the start of space by many. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles.\nMr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, who was in New Mexico for the Virgin Galactic launch, both extended their congratulations to Mr. Branson on social media.\nA plane, called the VMS Eve, took off at 10:40 a.m. ET, carrying Unity. Roughly 45 minutes later, a red flare was visible in the sky when the spacecraft was released from the plane and fired its rocket, sending Unity surging up. Shortly after, the spacecraft had reached space. By 11:36 a.m. ET, the plane and the spacecraft could be seen in the sky making their descent to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nAt the facility, Virgin Galactic staged a live streamed event, which included late-night TV host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid. Around 500 guests were in attendance, including New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Spaceport America facility, which was constructed using funds from New Mexico and local tax dollars, should help foster the state\u2019s economy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gov. Lujan Grisham\n\n\n\n said. \u201cWe\u2019re on the map,\u201d she said. The nearby town of Truth or Consequences put itself on the map in 1950 after residents voted to change its name from Hot Springs to successfully win the right to host an episode of the eponymous game show, according to the Sierra County website.\nSpace tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate last year from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS.\n\nVirgin Galactic has said it plans to initiate paying-passenger space flights in 2022. The company has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed what it will charge for tickets when it starts selling them again, but prices are likely to be out of reach for most people for some time. Mr. Musk is one of the ticket holders, a Virgin Galactic spokesman said. In the past, the company has sold tickets for as much as $250,000 each, according t The billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s hourlong trip was aimed at highlighting the safety and potential of sending paying passengers to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Opens Door to Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "742",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-set-for-travel-to-space-in-sunday-flight-11626002209?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=20",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic, the company Mr. Branson founded, plans to initiate commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights. The test flight was aimed at evaluating systems and the passenger experience, as well as providing additional validation of its safety. Vehicles developed by private space companies have been tested a fraction of the number of times compared with the planes used by airlines.\nThe British entrepreneur and five crew members crossed one threshold of space, climbing 53.5 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nAt the peak of the spaceship VSS Unity\u2019s 15-minute trip after separating from the launch aircraft, crew members unbuckled from their seats and experienced weightlessness, peering at Earth and into space from a dozen windows in the cabin.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re here to make space more accessible to all,\u201d Mr. Branson said Sunday after landing. His only worry was \u201csome tiny little something\u201d that would prevent the trip from happening, he added later.\nThe flight is part of a broader push from companies and investors to develop viable businesses based on human space flight, long dominated by government space agencies with scientific and policy missions. \nUnity\u2019s trip meant that, for a few minutes, there were a record 16 people in space, including its crew and those on board the International Space Station and China\u2019s Tiangong capsule. Overall, hundreds of people have successfully visited suborbital space since the 1960s, including some private tourists, such as investor Dennis Tito\u2019s visit via a Russian rocket to the station in 2001. But Mr. Branson\u2019s round-trip visit illustrates the efforts that private companies are now undertaking to develop businesses that can ultimately carry hundreds of people a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEntrepreneur RIchard Branson floated inside Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane on Sunday after reaching the edge of space before safely returning to Earth. The company plans to initiate commercial passenger service next year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\nAmazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin LLC, which plans to take him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket on July 20. Blue Origin said it is flying above the Karman Line, a boundary some 62 miles above Earth considered to be the start of space by many. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles.\nMr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, who was in New Mexico for the Virgin Galactic launch, both extended their congratulations to Mr. Branson on social media.\nA plane, called the VMS Eve, took off at 10:40 a.m. ET, carrying Unity. Roughly 45 minutes later, a red flare was visible in the sky when the spacecraft was released from the plane and fired its rocket, sending Unity surging up. Shortly after, the spacecraft had reached space. By 11:36 a.m. ET, the plane and the spacecraft could be seen in the sky making their descent to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nAt the facility, Virgin Galactic staged a live streamed event, which included late-night TV host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid. Around 500 guests were in attendance, including New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Spaceport America facility, which was constructed using funds from New Mexico and local tax dollars, should help foster the state\u2019s economy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gov. Lujan Grisham\n\n\n\n said. \u201cWe\u2019re on the map,\u201d she said. The nearby town of Truth or Consequences put itself on the map in 1950 after residents voted to change its name from Hot Springs to successfully win the right to host an episode of the eponymous game show, according to the Sierra County website.\nSpace tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate last year from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS.\n\nVirgin Galactic has said it plans to initiate paying-passenger space flights in 2022. The company has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed what it will charge for tickets when it starts selling them again, but prices are likely to be out of reach for most people for some time. Mr. Musk is one of the ticket holders, a Virgin Galactic spokesman said. In the past, the company has sold tickets for as much as $250,000 each, according t The billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s hourlong trip was aimed at highlighting the safety and potential of sending paying passengers to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Opens Door to Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "743",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-set-for-travel-to-space-in-sunday-flight-11626002209?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=7",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic, the company Mr. Branson founded, plans to initiate commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights. The test flight was aimed at evaluating systems and the passenger experience, as well as providing additional validation of its safety. Vehicles developed by private space companies have been tested a fraction of the number of times compared with the planes used by airlines.\n\n\n\n\nThe British entrepreneur and five crew members crossed one threshold of space, climbing 53.5 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nAt the peak of the spaceship VSS Unity\u2019s 15-minute trip after separating from the launch aircraft, crew members unbuckled from their seats and experienced weightlessness, peering at Earth and into space from a dozen windows in the cabin.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re here to make space more accessible to all,\u201d Mr. Branson said Sunday after landing. His only worry was \u201csome tiny little something\u201d that would prevent the trip from happening, he added later.\nThe flight is part of a broader push from companies and investors to develop viable businesses based on human space flight, long dominated by government space agencies with scientific and policy missions. \nUnity\u2019s trip meant that, for a few minutes, there were a record 16 people in space, including its crew and those on board the International Space Station and China\u2019s Tiangong capsule. Overall, hundreds of people have successfully visited suborbital space since the 1960s, including some private tourists, such as investor Dennis Tito\u2019s visit via a Russian rocket to the station in 2001. But Mr. Branson\u2019s round-trip visit illustrates the efforts that private companies are now undertaking to develop businesses that can ultimately carry hundreds of people a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEntrepreneur RIchard Branson floated inside Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane on Sunday after reaching the edge of space before safely returning to Earth. The company plans to initiate commercial passenger service next year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\nAmazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin LLC, which plans to take him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket on July 20. Blue Origin said it is flying above the Karman Line, a boundary some 62 miles above Earth considered to be the start of space by many. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles.\nMr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, who was in New Mexico for the Virgin Galactic launch, both extended their congratulations to Mr. Branson on social media.\nA plane, called the VMS Eve, took off at 10:40 a.m. ET, carrying Unity. Roughly 45 minutes later, a red flare was visible in the sky when the spacecraft was released from the plane and fired its rocket, sending Unity surging up. Shortly after, the spacecraft had reached space. By 11:36 a.m. ET, the plane and the spacecraft could be seen in the sky making their descent to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nAt the facility, Virgin Galactic staged a live streamed event, which included late-night TV host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid. Around 500 guests were in attendance, including New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Spaceport America facility, which was constructed using funds from New Mexico and local tax dollars, should help foster the state\u2019s economy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gov. Lujan Grisham\n\n\n\n said. \u201cWe\u2019re on the map,\u201d she said. The nearby town of Truth or Consequences put itself on the map in 1950 after residents voted to change its name from Hot Springs to successfully win the right to host an episode of the eponymous game show, according to the Sierra County website.\nSpace tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate last year from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS.\n\nVirgin Galactic has said it plans to initiate paying-passenger space flights in 2022. The company has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed what it will charge for tickets when it starts selling them again, but prices are likely to be out of reach for most people for some time. Mr. Musk is one of the ticket holders, a Virgin Galactic spokesman said. In the past, the company has sold tickets for as much as $250,000 each, accordi The billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s hourlong trip was aimed at highlighting the safety and potential of sending paying passengers to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Opens Door to Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "744",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-set-for-travel-to-space-in-sunday-flight-11626002209?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=17",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic, the company Mr. Branson founded, plans to initiate commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights. The test flight was aimed at evaluating systems and the passenger experience, as well as providing additional validation of its safety. Vehicles developed by private space companies have been tested a fraction of the number of times compared with the planes used by airlines.\nThe British entrepreneur and five crew members crossed one threshold of space, climbing 53.5 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nAt the peak of the spaceship VSS Unity\u2019s 15-minute trip after separating from the launch aircraft, crew members unbuckled from their seats and experienced weightlessness, peering at Earth and into space from a dozen windows in the cabin.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re here to make space more accessible to all,\u201d Mr. Branson said Sunday after landing. His only worry was \u201csome tiny little something\u201d that would prevent the trip from happening, he added later.\nThe flight is part of a broader push from companies and investors to develop viable businesses based on human space flight, long dominated by government space agencies with scientific and policy missions. \nUnity\u2019s trip meant that, for a few minutes, there were a record 16 people in space, including its crew and those on board the International Space Station and China\u2019s Tiangong capsule. Overall, hundreds of people have successfully visited suborbital space since the 1960s, including some private tourists, such as investor Dennis Tito\u2019s visit via a Russian rocket to the station in 2001. But Mr. Branson\u2019s round-trip visit illustrates the efforts that private companies are now undertaking to develop businesses that can ultimately carry hundreds of people a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEntrepreneur RIchard Branson floated inside Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane on Sunday after reaching the edge of space before safely returning to Earth. The company plans to initiate commercial passenger service next year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\nAmazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin LLC, which plans to take him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket on July 20. Blue Origin said it is flying above the Karman Line, a boundary some 62 miles above Earth considered to be the start of space by many. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles.\nMr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, who was in New Mexico for the Virgin Galactic launch, both extended their congratulations to Mr. Branson on social media.\nA plane, called the VMS Eve, took off at 10:40 a.m. ET, carrying Unity. Roughly 45 minutes later, a red flare was visible in the sky when the spacecraft was released from the plane and fired its rocket, sending Unity surging up. Shortly after, the spacecraft had reached space. By 11:36 a.m. ET, the plane and the spacecraft could be seen in the sky making their descent to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nAt the facility, Virgin Galactic staged a live streamed event, which included late-night TV host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid. Around 500 guests were in attendance, including New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Spaceport America facility, which was constructed using funds from New Mexico and local tax dollars, should help foster the state\u2019s economy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gov. Lujan Grisham\n\n\n\n said. \u201cWe\u2019re on the map,\u201d she said. The nearby town of Truth or Consequences put itself on the map in 1950 after residents voted to change its name from Hot Springs to successfully win the right to host an episode of the eponymous game show, according to the Sierra County website.\nSpace tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate last year from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS.\n\nVirgin Galactic has said it plans to initiate paying-passenger space flights in 2022. The company has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed what it will charge for tickets when it starts selling them again, but prices are likely to be out of reach for most people for some time. Mr. Musk is one of the ticket holders, a Virgin Galactic spokesman said. In the past, the company has sold tickets for as much as $250,000 each, according t The billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s hourlong trip was aimed at highlighting the safety and potential of sending paying passengers to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Opens Door to Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "745",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-set-for-travel-to-space-in-sunday-flight-11626002209?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=27",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic, the company Mr. Branson founded, plans to initiate commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights. The test flight was aimed at evaluating systems and the passenger experience, as well as providing additional validation of its safety. Vehicles developed by private space companies have been tested a fraction of the number of times compared with the planes used by airlines.\nThe British entrepreneur and five crew members crossed one threshold of space, climbing 53.5 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nAt the peak of the spaceship VSS Unity\u2019s 15-minute trip after separating from the launch aircraft, crew members unbuckled from their seats and experienced weightlessness, peering at Earth and into space from a dozen windows in the cabin.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re here to make space more accessible to all,\u201d Mr. Branson said Sunday after landing. His only worry was \u201csome tiny little something\u201d that would prevent the trip from happening, he added later.\nThe flight is part of a broader push from companies and investors to develop viable businesses based on human space flight, long dominated by government space agencies with scientific and policy missions. \nUnity\u2019s trip meant that, for a few minutes, there were a record 16 people in space, including its crew and those on board the International Space Station and China\u2019s Tiangong capsule. Overall, hundreds of people have successfully visited suborbital space since the 1960s, including some private tourists, such as investor Dennis Tito\u2019s visit via a Russian rocket to the station in 2001. But Mr. Branson\u2019s round-trip visit illustrates the efforts that private companies are now undertaking to develop businesses that can ultimately carry hundreds of people a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEntrepreneur RIchard Branson floated inside Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane on Sunday after reaching the edge of space before safely returning to Earth. The company plans to initiate commercial passenger service next year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\nAmazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin LLC, which plans to take him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket on July 20. Blue Origin said it is flying above the Karman Line, a boundary some 62 miles above Earth considered to be the start of space by many. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles.\nMr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, who was in New Mexico for the Virgin Galactic launch, both extended their congratulations to Mr. Branson on social media.\nA plane, called the VMS Eve, took off at 10:40 a.m. ET, carrying Unity. Roughly 45 minutes later, a red flare was visible in the sky when the spacecraft was released from the plane and fired its rocket, sending Unity surging up. Shortly after, the spacecraft had reached space. By 11:36 a.m. ET, the plane and the spacecraft could be seen in the sky making their descent to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nAt the facility, Virgin Galactic staged a live streamed event, which included late-night TV host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid. Around 500 guests were in attendance, including New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Spaceport America facility, which was constructed using funds from New Mexico and local tax dollars, should help foster the state\u2019s economy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gov. Lujan Grisham\n\n\n\n said. \u201cWe\u2019re on the map,\u201d she said. The nearby town of Truth or Consequences put itself on the map in 1950 after residents voted to change its name from Hot Springs to successfully win the right to host an episode of the eponymous game show, according to the Sierra County website.\nSpace tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate last year from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS.\n\nVirgin Galactic has said it plans to initiate paying-passenger space flights in 2022. The company has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed what it will charge for tickets when it starts selling them again, but prices are likely to be out of reach for most people for some time. Mr. Musk is one of the ticket holders, a Virgin Galactic spokesman said. In the past, the company has sold tickets for as much as $250,000 each, according t The billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s hourlong trip was aimed at highlighting the safety and potential of sending paying passengers to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Opens Door to Space Tourism (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "746",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-set-for-travel-to-space-in-sunday-flight-11626002209?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=27",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic, the company Mr. Branson founded, plans to initiate commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights. The test flight was aimed at evaluating systems and the passenger experience, as well as providing additional validation of its safety. Vehicles developed by private space companies have been tested a fraction of the number of times compared with the planes used by airlines.\n\n\n\n\nThe British entrepreneur and five crew members crossed one threshold of space, climbing 53.5 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nAt the peak of the spaceship VSS Unity\u2019s 15-minute trip after separating from the launch aircraft, crew members unbuckled from their seats and experienced weightlessness, peering at Earth and into space from a dozen windows in the cabin.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re here to make space more accessible to all,\u201d Mr. Branson said Sunday after landing. His only worry was \u201csome tiny little something\u201d that would prevent the trip from happening, he added later.\nThe flight is part of a broader push from companies and investors to develop viable businesses based on human space flight, long dominated by government space agencies with scientific and policy missions. \nUnity\u2019s trip meant that, for a few minutes, there were a record 16 people in space, including its crew and those on board the International Space Station and China\u2019s Tiangong capsule. Overall, hundreds of people have successfully visited suborbital space since the 1960s, including some private tourists, such as investor Dennis Tito\u2019s visit via a Russian rocket to the station in 2001. But Mr. Branson\u2019s round-trip visit illustrates the efforts that private companies are now undertaking to develop businesses that can ultimately carry hundreds of people a year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEntrepreneur RIchard Branson floated inside Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane on Sunday after reaching the edge of space before safely returning to Earth. The company plans to initiate commercial passenger service next year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\nAmazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin LLC, which plans to take him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket on July 20. Blue Origin said it is flying above the Karman Line, a boundary some 62 miles above Earth considered to be the start of space by many. The Federal Aviation Administration defines space as starting at 50 miles.\nMr. Bezos and Mr. Musk, who was in New Mexico for the Virgin Galactic launch, both extended their congratulations to Mr. Branson on social media.\nA plane, called the VMS Eve, took off at 10:40 a.m. ET, carrying Unity. Roughly 45 minutes later, a red flare was visible in the sky when the spacecraft was released from the plane and fired its rocket, sending Unity surging up. Shortly after, the spacecraft had reached space. By 11:36 a.m. ET, the plane and the spacecraft could be seen in the sky making their descent to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nAt the facility, Virgin Galactic staged a live streamed event, which included late-night TV host Stephen Colbert and singer Khalid. Around 500 guests were in attendance, including New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Spaceport America facility, which was constructed using funds from New Mexico and local tax dollars, should help foster the state\u2019s economy,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gov. Lujan Grisham\n\n\n\n said. \u201cWe\u2019re on the map,\u201d she said. The nearby town of Truth or Consequences put itself on the map in 1950 after residents voted to change its name from Hot Springs to successfully win the right to host an episode of the eponymous game show, according to the Sierra County website.\nSpace tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate last year from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS.\n\nVirgin Galactic has said it plans to initiate paying-passenger space flights in 2022. The company has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed what it will charge for tickets when it starts selling them again, but prices are likely to be out of reach for most people for some time. Mr. Musk is one of the ticket holders, a Virgin Galactic spokesman said. In the past, the company has sold tickets for as much as $250,000 each, accordi The billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s hourlong trip was aimed at highlighting the safety and potential of sending paying passengers to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really Begins (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "747",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-richard-branson-and-where-space-really-begins-11626451830?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=6",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration considers space starting 50 miles above Earth, and those that fly above that level as astronauts. Mr. Branson and the rest of his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n crew received their astronaut wing badges on Sunday after passing that boundary but staying below the Karman Line.\nExperts say there is little different in the passenger experience at the high points of the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flights, but their contrasting paths have led to a renewed examination of where space begins\u2014an answer that differs based on whether you are approaching the question from a scientific, commercial or legal viewpoint.\n\n\n\u201cScientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space,\u201d said Katherine de Kleer, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Scientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Katherine de Kleer, professor at California Institute of Technology \n\n\n\nMs. de Kleer said there isn\u2019t a consensus about where space starts among planetary scientists. She defines the boundary to space for Earth and other planets to be the base of the exosphere, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration defines as the outermost layer of the atmosphere. However, she said, applying that definition to Earth, where the base of the exosphere is around 435 miles high, would mean the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station are still in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Hubble and the space station orbit at roughly 340 miles and 250 miles above Earth, respectively.\nThe Karman Line is the internationally recognized boundary to space set by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration A\u00e9ronautique Internationale, an international aeronautics record-keeping body. Theodore von Karman, an engineer and mathematician, in the 1950s calculated the altitude at which lift from the air can no longer keep winged craft aloft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nA practical way to consider where space begins is by considering the type of vehicle needed to fly, said Alyssa Goodman, a professor of applied astronomy at Harvard University. Airplanes can fly in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere because the air pressure provides lift to the aircraft\u2019s wings. However, to get to space, a spacecraft needs propulsion to get past the Karman Line.\nBlue Origin has boasted in tweets that its New Shepard spacecraft \u201cwas designed to fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.\u201d Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has said that going above the line makes for a different experience.\nGregory Chamitoff, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University and a former NASA astronaut, said people won\u2019t be able to tell the difference between being 50 miles and 62 miles above Earth. On both trips, passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness.\nAs for whether Virgin passengers should get an asterisk for not passing the Karman Line, Mr. Chamitoff said, \u201cThat\u2019s kind of silly.\u201d\nMr. Branson said his Virgin Galactic experience Sunday \u201cwas beyond my wildest dreams\u201d and that he took notes to enhance the trip for the company\u2019s future passengers. \u201cThe only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it,\u201d he said after landing on Sunday.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is set to be the youngest person to fly to space. He will fly with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's New Shepard vessel on July 20, replacing the auction winner who canceled after paying roughly $30 million for a seat. Photo: Daemen Family, Blue Origin\n \n\n\nThe view of Earth isn\u2019t much different at those levels, Ms. Goodman said. Neither set of passengers will be high enough to see the Earth as a sphere, but they will still see a black sky and the Earth\u2019s curvature, she said.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like Star Trek,\u201d Ms. Goodman said.\nThe biggest difference will be in the passengers\u2019 experiences during takeoff and landing, Mr. Chamitoff said. Virgin Galactic\u2019s passengers are in a spacecraft that is carried about 8.5 miles above Earth by a mother ship before being dropped and rocketing into space. After a few minutes at the edge of space, the spacecraft glides back to Earth unpowered. Other than when the spacecraft rockets into space, the experience is likely similar to being in an airplane, Mr. Chamitoff said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow do you think private-enterprise missions will affect the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOn the other hand, Blue Origin\u2019s passengers are in a capsule on top of a rocket and wil The trips by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are highlighting the fact that there are different definitions of where space starts. ",
        "author": "Krystal Hur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really Begins (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "748",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-richard-branson-and-where-space-really-begins-11626451830?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=17",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration considers space starting 50 miles above Earth, and those that fly above that level as astronauts. Mr. Branson and the rest of his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n crew received their astronaut wing badges on Sunday after passing that boundary but staying below the Karman Line.\nExperts say there is little different in the passenger experience at the high points of the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flights, but their contrasting paths have led to a renewed examination of where space begins\u2014an answer that differs based on whether you are approaching the question from a scientific, commercial or legal viewpoint.\n\n\n\u201cScientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space,\u201d said Katherine de Kleer, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Scientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Katherine de Kleer, professor at California Institute of Technology \n\n\n\nMs. de Kleer said there isn\u2019t a consensus about where space starts among planetary scientists. She defines the boundary to space for Earth and other planets to be the base of the exosphere, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration defines as the outermost layer of the atmosphere. However, she said, applying that definition to Earth, where the base of the exosphere is around 435 miles high, would mean the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station are still in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Hubble and the space station orbit at roughly 340 miles and 250 miles above Earth, respectively.\nThe Karman Line is the internationally recognized boundary to space set by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration A\u00e9ronautique Internationale, an international aeronautics record-keeping body. Theodore von Karman, an engineer and mathematician, in the 1950s calculated the altitude at which lift from the air can no longer keep winged craft aloft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nA practical way to consider where space begins is by considering the type of vehicle needed to fly, said Alyssa Goodman, a professor of applied astronomy at Harvard University. Airplanes can fly in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere because the air pressure provides lift to the aircraft\u2019s wings. However, to get to space, a spacecraft needs propulsion to get past the Karman Line.\nBlue Origin has boasted in tweets that its New Shepard spacecraft \u201cwas designed to fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.\u201d Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has said that going above the line makes for a different experience.\nGregory Chamitoff, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University and a former NASA astronaut, said people won\u2019t be able to tell the difference between being 50 miles and 62 miles above Earth. On both trips, passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness.\nAs for whether Virgin passengers should get an asterisk for not passing the Karman Line, Mr. Chamitoff said, \u201cThat\u2019s kind of silly.\u201d\nMr. Branson said his Virgin Galactic experience Sunday \u201cwas beyond my wildest dreams\u201d and that he took notes to enhance the trip for the company\u2019s future passengers. \u201cThe only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it,\u201d he said after landing on Sunday.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is set to be the youngest person to fly to space. He will fly with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's New Shepard vessel on July 20, replacing the auction winner who canceled after paying roughly $30 million for a seat. Photo: Daemen Family, Blue Origin\n \n\n\nThe view of Earth isn\u2019t much different at those levels, Ms. Goodman said. Neither set of passengers will be high enough to see the Earth as a sphere, but they will still see a black sky and the Earth\u2019s curvature, she said.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like Star Trek,\u201d Ms. Goodman said.\nThe biggest difference will be in the passengers\u2019 experiences during takeoff and landing, Mr. Chamitoff said. Virgin Galactic\u2019s passengers are in a spacecraft that is carried about 8.5 miles above Earth by a mother ship before being dropped and rocketing into space. After a few minutes at the edge of space, the spacecraft glides back to Earth unpowered. Other than when the spacecraft rockets into space, the experience is likely similar to being in an airplane, Mr. Chamitoff said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow do you think private-enterprise missions will affect the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOn the other hand, Blue Origin\u2019s passengers are in a capsule on top of a rocket and wil The trips by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are highlighting the fact that there are different definitions of where space starts. ",
        "author": "Krystal Hur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really Begins (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "749",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-richard-branson-and-where-space-really-begins-11626451830?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=27",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration considers space starting 50 miles above Earth, and those that fly above that level as astronauts. Mr. Branson and the rest of his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n crew received their astronaut wing badges on Sunday after passing that boundary but staying below the Karman Line.\nExperts say there is little different in the passenger experience at the high points of the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flights, but their contrasting paths have led to a renewed examination of where space begins\u2014an answer that differs based on whether you are approaching the question from a scientific, commercial or legal viewpoint.\n\n\n\u201cScientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space,\u201d said Katherine de Kleer, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Scientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Katherine de Kleer, professor at California Institute of Technology \n\n\n\nMs. de Kleer said there isn\u2019t a consensus about where space starts among planetary scientists. She defines the boundary to space for Earth and other planets to be the base of the exosphere, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration defines as the outermost layer of the atmosphere. However, she said, applying that definition to Earth, where the base of the exosphere is around 435 miles high, would mean the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station are still in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Hubble and the space station orbit at roughly 340 miles and 250 miles above Earth, respectively.\nThe Karman Line is the internationally recognized boundary to space set by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration A\u00e9ronautique Internationale, an international aeronautics record-keeping body. Theodore von Karman, an engineer and mathematician, in the 1950s calculated the altitude at which lift from the air can no longer keep winged craft aloft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nA practical way to consider where space begins is by considering the type of vehicle needed to fly, said Alyssa Goodman, a professor of applied astronomy at Harvard University. Airplanes can fly in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere because the air pressure provides lift to the aircraft\u2019s wings. However, to get to space, a spacecraft needs propulsion to get past the Karman Line.\nBlue Origin has boasted in tweets that its New Shepard spacecraft \u201cwas designed to fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.\u201d Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has said that going above the line makes for a different experience.\nGregory Chamitoff, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University and a former NASA astronaut, said people won\u2019t be able to tell the difference between being 50 miles and 62 miles above Earth. On both trips, passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness.\nAs for whether Virgin passengers should get an asterisk for not passing the Karman Line, Mr. Chamitoff said, \u201cThat\u2019s kind of silly.\u201d\nMr. Branson said his Virgin Galactic experience Sunday \u201cwas beyond my wildest dreams\u201d and that he took notes to enhance the trip for the company\u2019s future passengers. \u201cThe only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it,\u201d he said after landing on Sunday.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is set to be the youngest person to fly to space. He will fly with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's New Shepard vessel on July 20, replacing the auction winner who canceled after paying roughly $30 million for a seat. Photo: Daemen Family, Blue Origin\n \n\n\nThe view of Earth isn\u2019t much different at those levels, Ms. Goodman said. Neither set of passengers will be high enough to see the Earth as a sphere, but they will still see a black sky and the Earth\u2019s curvature, she said.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like Star Trek,\u201d Ms. Goodman said.\nThe biggest difference will be in the passengers\u2019 experiences during takeoff and landing, Mr. Chamitoff said. Virgin Galactic\u2019s passengers are in a spacecraft that is carried about 8.5 miles above Earth by a mother ship before being dropped and rocketing into space. After a few minutes at the edge of space, the spacecraft glides back to Earth unpowered. Other than when the spacecraft rockets into space, the experience is likely similar to being in an airplane, Mr. Chamitoff said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow do you think private-enterprise missions will affect the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOn the other hand, Blue Origin\u2019s passengers are in a capsule on top of a rocket and wil The trips by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are highlighting the fact that there are different definitions of where space starts. ",
        "author": "Krystal Hur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really Begins (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "750",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-richard-branson-and-where-space-really-begins-11626451830?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=19",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration considers space starting 50 miles above Earth, and those that fly above that level as astronauts. Mr. Branson and the rest of his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.20%\n\n\n crew received their astronaut wing badges on Sunday after passing that boundary but staying below the Karman Line.\n\n\n\n\nExperts say there is little different in the passenger experience at the high points of the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flights, but their contrasting paths have led to a renewed examination of where space begins\u2014an answer that differs based on whether you are approaching the question from a scientific, commercial or legal viewpoint.\n\n\n\u201cScientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space,\u201d said Katherine de Kleer, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Scientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Katherine de Kleer, professor at California Institute of Technology \n\n\n\nMs. de Kleer said there isn\u2019t a consensus about where space starts among planetary scientists. She defines the boundary to space for Earth and other planets to be the base of the exosphere, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration defines as the outermost layer of the atmosphere. However, she said, applying that definition to Earth, where the base of the exosphere is around 435 miles high, would mean the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station are still in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Hubble and the space station orbit at roughly 340 miles and 250 miles above Earth, respectively.\nThe Karman Line is the internationally recognized boundary to space set by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration A\u00e9ronautique Internationale, an international aeronautics record-keeping body. Theodore von Karman, an engineer and mathematician, in the 1950s calculated the altitude at which lift from the air can no longer keep winged craft aloft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nA practical way to consider where space begins is by considering the type of vehicle needed to fly, said Alyssa Goodman, a professor of applied astronomy at Harvard University. Airplanes can fly in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere because the air pressure provides lift to the aircraft\u2019s wings. However, to get to space, a spacecraft needs propulsion to get past the Karman Line.\nBlue Origin has boasted in tweets that its New Shepard spacecraft \u201cwas designed to fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.\u201d Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has said that going above the line makes for a different experience.\nGregory Chamitoff, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University and a former NASA astronaut, said people won\u2019t be able to tell the difference between being 50 miles and 62 miles above Earth. On both trips, passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness.\nAs for whether Virgin passengers should get an asterisk for not passing the Karman Line, Mr. Chamitoff said, \u201cThat\u2019s kind of silly.\u201d\nMr. Branson said his Virgin Galactic experience Sunday \u201cwas beyond my wildest dreams\u201d and that he took notes to enhance the trip for the company\u2019s future passengers. \u201cThe only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it,\u201d he said after landing on Sunday.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is set to be the youngest person to fly to space. He will fly with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's New Shepard vessel on July 20, replacing the auction winner who canceled after paying roughly $30 million for a seat. Photo: Daemen Family, Blue Origin\n \n\n\nThe view of Earth isn\u2019t much different at those levels, Ms. Goodman said. Neither set of passengers will be high enough to see the Earth as a sphere, but they will still see a black sky and the Earth\u2019s curvature, she said.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like Star Trek,\u201d Ms. Goodman said.\nThe biggest difference will be in the passengers\u2019 experiences during takeoff and landing, Mr. Chamitoff said. Virgin Galactic\u2019s passengers are in a spacecraft that is carried about 8.5 miles above Earth by a mother ship before being dropped and rocketing into space. After a few minutes at the edge of space, the spacecraft glides back to Earth unpowered. Other than when the spacecraft rockets into space, the experience is likely similar to being in an airplane, Mr. Chamitoff said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow do you think private-enterprise missions will affect the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOn the other hand, Blue Origin\u2019s passengers are in a capsule on top of a rocket and will experience more acceleration at takeoff, Mr. Chamitoff said. Passengers then return to Earth in the capsule under parachutes, which could lead to a bumpier landing, he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nDefining space also has legal and political implications. Countries concerned about national sovereignty want space to be higher so they can claim more airspace, said Michael Kezirian, a professor of astronautics practice at the University of Southern California and fellow of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety.\nThe IAASS has advocated for considering three zones rather than just aerospace and outer space, with the middle zone, which it calls Near Space, being subject to a different set of rules than air or space travel. The organization considers Near Space to be from around 11 miles to around 99 miles above sea level. Near Space includes suborbital flight.\nThe Outer Space Treaty of 1967 states that all countries are free to explore outer space with no nation able to stake a claim. There are no rules governing how high a spacecraft can go. Getting consensus treaties approved to define where space is has been difficult because of the uncertainty of the future of space travel, Mr. Kezirian said.\n\u201cYou just don\u2019t know what in 20 years the use of space will be and what the law should be,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company? The trips by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are highlighting the fact that there are different definitions of where space starts. ",
        "author": "Krystal Hur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really Begins (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "751",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-richard-branson-and-where-space-really-begins-11626451830?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=26",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration considers space starting 50 miles above Earth, and those that fly above that level as astronauts. Mr. Branson and the rest of his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -3.20%\n\n\n crew received their astronaut wing badges on Sunday after passing that boundary but staying below the Karman Line.\n\n\n\n\nExperts say there is little different in the passenger experience at the high points of the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flights, but their contrasting paths have led to a renewed examination of where space begins\u2014an answer that differs based on whether you are approaching the question from a scientific, commercial or legal viewpoint.\n\n\n\u201cScientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space,\u201d said Katherine de Kleer, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Scientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Katherine de Kleer, professor at California Institute of Technology \n\n\n\nMs. de Kleer said there isn\u2019t a consensus about where space starts among planetary scientists. She defines the boundary to space for Earth and other planets to be the base of the exosphere, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration defines as the outermost layer of the atmosphere. However, she said, applying that definition to Earth, where the base of the exosphere is around 435 miles high, would mean the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station are still in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Hubble and the space station orbit at roughly 340 miles and 250 miles above Earth, respectively.\nThe Karman Line is the internationally recognized boundary to space set by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration A\u00e9ronautique Internationale, an international aeronautics record-keeping body. Theodore von Karman, an engineer and mathematician, in the 1950s calculated the altitude at which lift from the air can no longer keep winged craft aloft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nA practical way to consider where space begins is by considering the type of vehicle needed to fly, said Alyssa Goodman, a professor of applied astronomy at Harvard University. Airplanes can fly in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere because the air pressure provides lift to the aircraft\u2019s wings. However, to get to space, a spacecraft needs propulsion to get past the Karman Line.\nBlue Origin has boasted in tweets that its New Shepard spacecraft \u201cwas designed to fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.\u201d Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has said that going above the line makes for a different experience.\nGregory Chamitoff, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University and a former NASA astronaut, said people won\u2019t be able to tell the difference between being 50 miles and 62 miles above Earth. On both trips, passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness.\nAs for whether Virgin passengers should get an asterisk for not passing the Karman Line, Mr. Chamitoff said, \u201cThat\u2019s kind of silly.\u201d\nMr. Branson said his Virgin Galactic experience Sunday \u201cwas beyond my wildest dreams\u201d and that he took notes to enhance the trip for the company\u2019s future passengers. \u201cThe only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it,\u201d he said after landing on Sunday.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is set to be the youngest person to fly to space. He will fly with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's New Shepard vessel on July 20, replacing the auction winner who canceled after paying roughly $30 million for a seat. Photo: Daemen Family, Blue Origin\n \n\n\nThe view of Earth isn\u2019t much different at those levels, Ms. Goodman said. Neither set of passengers will be high enough to see the Earth as a sphere, but they will still see a black sky and the Earth\u2019s curvature, she said.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like Star Trek,\u201d Ms. Goodman said.\nThe biggest difference will be in the passengers\u2019 experiences during takeoff and landing, Mr. Chamitoff said. Virgin Galactic\u2019s passengers are in a spacecraft that is carried about 8.5 miles above Earth by a mother ship before being dropped and rocketing into space. After a few minutes at the edge of space, the spacecraft glides back to Earth unpowered. Other than when the spacecraft rockets into space, the experience is likely similar to being in an airplane, Mr. Chamitoff said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow do you think private-enterprise missions will affect the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOn the other hand, Blue Origin\u2019s passengers are in a capsule on top of a rocket and The trips by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are highlighting the fact that there are different definitions of where space starts. ",
        "author": "Krystal Hur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really Begins (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "752",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-richard-branson-and-where-space-really-begins-11626451830?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=6",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration considers space starting 50 miles above Earth, and those that fly above that level as astronauts. Mr. Branson and the rest of his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n SPCE -1.65%\n\n\n crew received their astronaut wing badges on Sunday after passing that boundary but staying below the Karman Line.\n\n\n\n\nExperts say there is little different in the passenger experience at the high points of the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic flights, but their contrasting paths have led to a renewed examination of where space begins\u2014an answer that differs based on whether you are approaching the question from a scientific, commercial or legal viewpoint.\n\n\n\u201cScientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space,\u201d said Katherine de Kleer, a professor of astronomy and planetary science at the California Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Scientists recognize that there are a lot of different ways to define the boundaries of space.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Katherine de Kleer, professor at California Institute of Technology \n\n\n\nMs. de Kleer said there isn\u2019t a consensus about where space starts among planetary scientists. She defines the boundary to space for Earth and other planets to be the base of the exosphere, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration defines as the outermost layer of the atmosphere. However, she said, applying that definition to Earth, where the base of the exosphere is around 435 miles high, would mean the Hubble Space Telescope and International Space Station are still in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Hubble and the space station orbit at roughly 340 miles and 250 miles above Earth, respectively.\nThe Karman Line is the internationally recognized boundary to space set by the F\u00e9d\u00e9ration A\u00e9ronautique Internationale, an international aeronautics record-keeping body. Theodore von Karman, an engineer and mathematician, in the 1950s calculated the altitude at which lift from the air can no longer keep winged craft aloft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nA practical way to consider where space begins is by considering the type of vehicle needed to fly, said Alyssa Goodman, a professor of applied astronomy at Harvard University. Airplanes can fly in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere because the air pressure provides lift to the aircraft\u2019s wings. However, to get to space, a spacecraft needs propulsion to get past the Karman Line.\nBlue Origin has boasted in tweets that its New Shepard spacecraft \u201cwas designed to fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name.\u201d Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has said that going above the line makes for a different experience.\nGregory Chamitoff, a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University and a former NASA astronaut, said people won\u2019t be able to tell the difference between being 50 miles and 62 miles above Earth. On both trips, passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness.\nAs for whether Virgin passengers should get an asterisk for not passing the Karman Line, Mr. Chamitoff said, \u201cThat\u2019s kind of silly.\u201d\nMr. Branson said his Virgin Galactic experience Sunday \u201cwas beyond my wildest dreams\u201d and that he took notes to enhance the trip for the company\u2019s future passengers. \u201cThe only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it,\u201d he said after landing on Sunday.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is set to be the youngest person to fly to space. He will fly with Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin's New Shepard vessel on July 20, replacing the auction winner who canceled after paying roughly $30 million for a seat. Photo: Daemen Family, Blue Origin\n \n\n\nThe view of Earth isn\u2019t much different at those levels, Ms. Goodman said. Neither set of passengers will be high enough to see the Earth as a sphere, but they will still see a black sky and the Earth\u2019s curvature, she said.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like Star Trek,\u201d Ms. Goodman said.\nThe biggest difference will be in the passengers\u2019 experiences during takeoff and landing, Mr. Chamitoff said. Virgin Galactic\u2019s passengers are in a spacecraft that is carried about 8.5 miles above Earth by a mother ship before being dropped and rocketing into space. After a few minutes at the edge of space, the spacecraft glides back to Earth unpowered. Other than when the spacecraft rockets into space, the experience is likely similar to being in an airplane, Mr. Chamitoff said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow do you think private-enterprise missions will affect the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOn the other hand, Blue Origin\u2019s passengers are in a capsule on top of a rocket and The trips by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are highlighting the fact that there are different definitions of where space starts. ",
        "author": "Krystal Hur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Plans to Resume Space-Tourism Sales (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "753",
        "date": "2020-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-plans-to-resume-space-tourism-sales-11582678956?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=13",
        "text": "The company had targeted a first commercial flight by June carrying Mr. Branson, who turns 70 this year, but said on an investor call Tuesday it was focused on working through testing and approval for its space launch system. Virgin Galactic still aims to launch flights this year.\nShares fell around 6% in after-hours trade after Virgin Galactic reported a loss of $72.8 million for the fourth quarter, including $48 million in costs tied to its public offering. The loss widened the company\u2019s full-year deficit to $210.9 million loss from $138.1 million a year earlier.\n\n\nMore than 600 potential customers have already paid a collective $80 million in deposits for the flight. They will be passengers aboard a six-passenger plane that will be carried aloft by a larger jet before being released and using its own rocket to reach the edge of space. Passengers on the 90-minute flights would experience three to four minutes of weightlessness.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic still aims to launch flights this year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Matt Hartman/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe company has one working spaceship and plans an initial fleet of five that could perform 25 flights a month. The short trips are initially aimed at high-net worth individuals, but the company says interest will expand as economies of scale bring down ticket prices. Virgin Galactic said interest had grown since October\u2019s initial public offering, with the number of people registering online as potential passengers doubling since then to almost 8,000.\nTicket sales halted following the crash of a test plane in 2014, killing a pilot, and the company didn\u2019t identify when they would restart. However, Virgin Galactic plans a soft launch by opening online registration for a refundable $1,000 fee to join the line of those who have already paid deposits.\n\u201cWe do plan on going back to the market with a higher price point,\u201d said Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n whose contract includes a flight for himself and his wife, according to regulatory filings.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here\u2019s how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nThough Virgin Galactic ended the year with $480 million in cash, some analysts have questioned whether it should use its soaring stock price as leverage to raise more funds for future phases beyond space tourism. Those would include a proposed hypersonic jet that could in theory travel from London and New York in an hour.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n last year invested $20 million in the company, in part to support the hypersonics effort and work on urban mobility initiatives, two areas championed by former CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg.\n\n\n\n \nMr. Whitesides, who served as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s chief of staff, said on the investor call that there were no plans to raise more funds beyond the potential exercise of some share warrants.\nHe said the company was focused on the commercial launch and had completed 20 of the 29 approvals required to validate the commercial license it received from the Federal Aviation Administration in 2016.\nVirgin Galactic is competing with Blue Origin LLC, a rival space-tourism startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n to be the first to carry paying passengers outside the atmosphere in a U.S.-built spacecraft.\nMr. Whitesides said Virgin Galactic\u2019s use of a reusable plane made it \u201corders of magnitude cheaper\u201d than the space capsules developed by Blue Origin.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com Virgin Galactic Holdings still plans to make its first commercial space-tourism flight this year and took a step toward resuming ticket sales for jaunts expected to cost upward of $250,000. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Plans to Resume Space-Tourism Sales (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "754",
        "date": "2020-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-plans-to-resume-space-tourism-sales-11582678956?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=18",
        "text": "The company had targeted a first commercial flight by June carrying Mr. Branson, who turns 70 this year, but said on an investor call Tuesday it was focused on working through testing and approval for its space launch system. Virgin Galactic still aims to launch flights this year.\n\n\n\n\nShares fell around 6% in after-hours trade after Virgin Galactic reported a loss of $72.8 million for the fourth quarter, including $48 million in costs tied to its public offering. The loss widened the company\u2019s full-year deficit to $210.9 million loss from $138.1 million a year earlier.\n\n\nMore than 600 potential customers have already paid a collective $80 million in deposits for the flight. They will be passengers aboard a six-passenger plane that will be carried aloft by a larger jet before being released and using its own rocket to reach the edge of space. Passengers on the 90-minute flights would experience three to four minutes of weightlessness.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic still aims to launch flights this year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Matt Hartman/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe company has one working spaceship and plans an initial fleet of five that could perform 25 flights a month. The short trips are initially aimed at high-net worth individuals, but the company says interest will expand as economies of scale bring down ticket prices. Virgin Galactic said interest had grown since October\u2019s initial public offering, with the number of people registering online as potential passengers doubling since then to almost 8,000.\nTicket sales halted following the crash of a test plane in 2014, killing a pilot, and the company didn\u2019t identify when they would restart. However, Virgin Galactic plans a soft launch by opening online registration for a refundable $1,000 fee to join the line of those who have already paid deposits.\n\u201cWe do plan on going back to the market with a higher price point,\u201d said Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n whose contract includes a flight for himself and his wife, according to regulatory filings.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here\u2019s how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nThough Virgin Galactic ended the year with $480 million in cash, some analysts have questioned whether it should use its soaring stock price as leverage to raise more funds for future phases beyond space tourism. Those would include a proposed hypersonic jet that could in theory travel from London and New York in an hour.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n last year invested $20 million in the company, in part to support the hypersonics effort and work on urban mobility initiatives, two areas championed by former CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg.\n\n\n\n \nMr. Whitesides, who served as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s chief of staff, said on the investor call that there were no plans to raise more funds beyond the potential exercise of some share warrants.\nHe said the company was focused on the commercial launch and had completed 20 of the 29 approvals required to validate the commercial license it received from the Federal Aviation Administration in 2016.\nVirgin Galactic is competing with Blue Origin LLC, a rival space-tourism startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n to be the first to carry paying passengers outside the atmosphere in a U.S.-built spacecraft.\nMr. Whitesides said Virgin Galactic\u2019s use of a reusable plane made it \u201corders of magnitude cheaper\u201d than the space capsules developed by Blue Origin.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com Virgin Galactic Holdings still plans to make its first commercial space-tourism flight this year and took a step toward resuming ticket sales for jaunts expected to cost upward of $250,000. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Blue Origin Space Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "755",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-says-teen-to-replace-auction-winner-on-space-flight-11626364233?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=6",
        "text": "Taking the fourth seat in the passenger capsule on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard vehicle will be Oliver Daemen, according to the company. Mr. Daemen, 18, graduated from high school last year and plans to study physics and innovation management at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands starting in September, Blue Origin said. \nMr. Daemen\u2019s father is Joes Daemen, the founder of Somerset Capital Partners BV, an investment firm based in the Netherlands, a spokeswoman for the family said. The elder Mr. Daemen purchased the ticket for his son, given Oliver\u2019s interest in space and aviation, she added, declining to comment on its price.\n\n\nSomerset\u2019s activities include deals in real estate and private equity, according to the company\u2019s website.\nThe upcoming flight is a dream come true, the younger Mr. Daemen said in a translated press release from the family.\nBlue Origin moved up Oliver Daemen as a passenger when the seat became available, a spokeswoman for the company said. She declined to specify how much the ticket cost. \n\u201cOliver represents a new generation of people who will help us build a road to space,\u201d Blue Origin Chief Executive Bob Smith said in a statement.\nLast month, the company said close to 7,600 people from 159 countries had registered to bid for a seat on the launch, with the winner paying close to $30 million to fly to one boundary of space with Mr. Bezos and his brother Mark.\nBlue Origin said Thursday the person who won the auction had chosen to fly on a future trip to space on the New Shepard.\nWally Funk, a longtime pilot who trained to be an astronaut under a space program for women in the 1960s, is also joining the launch. Earlier this week, the Federal Aviation Administration signed off on Blue Origin\u2019s plans to proceed with the launch from the company\u2019s facility near Van Horn, Texas. \nEach person slated to be on the launch meets the company\u2019s requirements for doing so, Blue Origin\u2019s spokeswoman said. \nThe launch of the New Shepard vessel will be Blue Origin\u2019s first to space with humans on board. The company said Monday it is targeting a launch of the vehicle, which includes a rocket and crew capsule with room for six people, on July 20 at 9 a.m. ET. Blue Origin\u2019s flight is expected to last about 11 minutes, with the capsule carrying the four passengers reaching a peak altitude of about 66 miles.\n\n\n\n\n\n VIDEO\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nLast Sunday, a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n spacecraft with six people on board, including billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, reached a boundary of space and safely returned to Earth. The Virgin Galactic flight was meant to help spur a nascent space-tourism industry, with Mr. Branson providing feedback on the customer experience on the company\u2019s spacecraft. \nThree other Virgin Galactic executives joined the company\u2019s trip to space, in addition to Mr. Branson and two pilots who guided the spaceship. \nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019 space company, said that the person who paid roughly $30 million for a seat aboard the July 20 trip to space won\u2019t be going, and an 18-year-old would join the launch instead. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Blue Origin Space Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "756",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-says-teen-to-replace-auction-winner-on-space-flight-11626364233?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=6",
        "text": "Taking the fourth seat in the passenger capsule on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard vehicle will be Oliver Daemen, according to the company. Mr. Daemen, 18, graduated from high school last year and plans to study physics and innovation management at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands starting in September, Blue Origin said. \n\n\n\n\nMr. Daemen\u2019s father is Joes Daemen, the founder of Somerset Capital Partners BV, an investment firm based in the Netherlands, a spokeswoman for the family said. The elder Mr. Daemen purchased the ticket for his son, given Oliver\u2019s interest in space and aviation, she added, declining to comment on its price.\n\n\nSomerset\u2019s activities include deals in real estate and private equity, according to the company\u2019s website.\nThe upcoming flight is a dream come true, the younger Mr. Daemen said in a translated press release from the family.\nBlue Origin moved up Oliver Daemen as a passenger when the seat became available, a spokeswoman for the company said. She declined to specify how much the ticket cost. \n\u201cOliver represents a new generation of people who will help us build a road to space,\u201d Blue Origin Chief Executive Bob Smith said in a statement.\nLast month, the company said close to 7,600 people from 159 countries had registered to bid for a seat on the launch, with the winner paying close to $30 million to fly to one boundary of space with Mr. Bezos and his brother Mark.\nBlue Origin said Thursday the person who won the auction had chosen to fly on a future trip to space on the New Shepard.\nWally Funk, a longtime pilot who trained to be an astronaut under a space program for women in the 1960s, is also joining the launch. Earlier this week, the Federal Aviation Administration signed off on Blue Origin\u2019s plans to proceed with the launch from the company\u2019s facility near Van Horn, Texas. \nEach person slated to be on the launch meets the company\u2019s requirements for doing so, Blue Origin\u2019s spokeswoman said. \nThe launch of the New Shepard vessel will be Blue Origin\u2019s first to space with humans on board. The company said Monday it is targeting a launch of the vehicle, which includes a rocket and crew capsule with room for six people, on July 20 at 9 a.m. ET. Blue Origin\u2019s flight is expected to last about 11 minutes, with the capsule carrying the four passengers reaching a peak altitude of about 66 miles.\n\n\n\n\n\n VIDEO\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nLast Sunday, a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n spacecraft with six people on board, including billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, reached a boundary of space and safely returned to Earth. The Virgin Galactic flight was meant to help spur a nascent space-tourism industry, with Mr. Branson providing feedback on the customer experience on the company\u2019s spacecraft. \nThree other Virgin Galactic executives joined the company\u2019s trip to space, in addition to Mr. Branson and two pilots who guided the spaceship. \nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019 space company, said that the person who paid roughly $30 million for a seat aboard the July 20 trip to space won\u2019t be going, and an 18-year-old would join the launch instead. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Boeing\u2019s Starliner Won\u2019t Attempt Launch Again This Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "757",
        "date": "2021-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-says-boeings-starliner-wont-attempt-launch-again-this-year-11633555273?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=4",
        "text": "Steve Stich, a program manager at NASA, said during a briefing Wednesday that there won\u2019t be another opportunity this year to complete the Starliner demonstration flight, citing other missions to the space station and coming launches. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe earliest the Starliner is likely to try to launch again is the April through June stretch in 2022, according to people familiar with the space vehicle. A spokesman for NASA declined to comment on the timing, and Mr. Stich said at the briefing it was too soon to specify a date for the Starliner test flight as Boeing and the agency work to determine why the valves became stuck. \n\nNASA said it had reassigned two agency astronauts, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, who had been tapped to fly on the Starliner during the vehicle\u2019s test mission with crew on board and on a separate flight. Both will now travel to the space station on a future mission using a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket and its Dragon crew capsule. \nThe agency said in a statement that it shifted Ms. Mann and Mr. Cassada to the future SpaceX launch \u201cto allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner,\u201d while permitting the astronauts to gain spaceflight experience.\nA spokesman for Boeing said that the company supported NASA\u2019s move to shift the assignments for the astronauts and that Boeing remained committed to safety. \u201cWe understand the agency\u2019s need to make adjustments to get members of the current astronaut class flying experience on an operational vehicle while the development of the Starliner spacecraft continues,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s Starliner spaceship has been hampered by a string of errors and delays. In this video, WSJ\u2019s Micah Maidenberg explains why Boeing has struggled to launch the Starliner on schedule and what\u2019s next for the aerospace giant\u2019s space program.Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky\n \n\n\nThe planned launch of the Starliner in August was meant as a makeup of a botched flight of the vehicle in late 2019. During that mission, the Starliner ended up in the wrong orbit due to a programming error. It also faced a potentially catastrophic error involving its heat shield that was fixed during the flight. \nNASA has contracted with Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to the space station. Last year, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, the first human space flight from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s StarlinerMore WSJ coverage of the company\u2019s troubled attempts at space flight, selected by the editors Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft to Return to Factory Over Stuck Valves (Aug. 13) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (Aug. 12) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Flight Was Postponed. What Happens Now? (Aug. 3) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (July 26) Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (Dec. 20, 2019) \n\n\n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The U.S. space agency has reassigned two astronauts from Boeing missions to a future SpaceX flight. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Boeing\u2019s Starliner Won\u2019t Attempt Launch Again This Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "758",
        "date": "2021-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-says-boeings-starliner-wont-attempt-launch-again-this-year-11633555273?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=14",
        "text": "Steve Stich, a program manager at NASA, said during a briefing Wednesday that there won\u2019t be another opportunity this year to complete the Starliner demonstration flight, citing other missions to the space station and coming launches. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert \n\n\n\n Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe earliest the Starliner is likely to try to launch again is the April through June stretch in 2022, according to people familiar with the space vehicle. A spokesman for NASA declined to comment on the timing, and Mr. Stich said at the briefing it was too soon to specify a date for the Starliner test flight as Boeing and the agency work to determine why the valves became stuck. \n\nNASA said it had reassigned two agency astronauts, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, who had been tapped to fly on the Starliner during the vehicle\u2019s test mission with crew on board and on a separate flight. Both will now travel to the space station on a future mission using a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket and its Dragon crew capsule. \nThe agency said in a statement that it shifted Ms. Mann and Mr. Cassada to the future SpaceX launch \u201cto allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner,\u201d while permitting the astronauts to gain spaceflight experience.\nA spokesman for Boeing said that the company supported NASA\u2019s move to shift the assignments for the astronauts and that Boeing remained committed to safety. \u201cWe understand the agency\u2019s need to make adjustments to get members of the current astronaut class flying experience on an operational vehicle while the development of the Starliner spacecraft continues,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s Starliner spaceship has been hampered by a string of errors and delays. In this video, WSJ\u2019s Micah Maidenberg explains why Boeing has struggled to launch the Starliner on schedule and what\u2019s next for the aerospace giant\u2019s space program.Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky\n \n\n\nThe planned launch of the Starliner in August was meant as a makeup of a botched flight of the vehicle in late 2019. During that mission, the Starliner ended up in the wrong orbit due to a programming error. It also faced a potentially catastrophic error involving its heat shield that was fixed during the flight. \nNASA has contracted with Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to the space station. Last year, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, the first human space flight from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s StarlinerMore WSJ coverage of the company\u2019s troubled attempts at space flight, selected by the editors Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft to Return to Factory Over Stuck Valves (Aug. 13) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (Aug. 12) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Flight Was Postponed. What Happens Now? (Aug. 3) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (July 26) Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (Dec. 20, 2019) \n\n\n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The U.S. space agency has reassigned two astronauts from Boeing missions to a future SpaceX flight. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Boeing\u2019s Starliner Won\u2019t Attempt Launch Again This Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "759",
        "date": "2021-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-says-boeings-starliner-wont-attempt-launch-again-this-year-11633555273?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=11",
        "text": "Steve Stich, a program manager at NASA, said during a briefing Wednesday that there won\u2019t be another opportunity this year to complete the Starliner demonstration flight, citing other missions to the space station and coming launches. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe earliest the Starliner is likely to try to launch again is the April through June stretch in 2022, according to people familiar with the space vehicle. A spokesman for NASA declined to comment on the timing, and Mr. Stich said at the briefing it was too soon to specify a date for the Starliner test flight as Boeing and the agency work to determine why the valves became stuck. \n\nNASA said it had reassigned two agency astronauts, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, who had been tapped to fly on the Starliner during the vehicle\u2019s test mission with crew on board and on a separate flight. Both will now travel to the space station on a future mission using a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket and its Dragon crew capsule. \nThe agency said in a statement that it shifted Ms. Mann and Mr. Cassada to the future SpaceX launch \u201cto allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner,\u201d while permitting the astronauts to gain spaceflight experience.\nA spokesman for Boeing said that the company supported NASA\u2019s move to shift the assignments for the astronauts and that Boeing remained committed to safety. \u201cWe understand the agency\u2019s need to make adjustments to get members of the current astronaut class flying experience on an operational vehicle while the development of the Starliner spacecraft continues,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s Starliner spaceship has been hampered by a string of errors and delays. In this video, WSJ\u2019s Micah Maidenberg explains why Boeing has struggled to launch the Starliner on schedule and what\u2019s next for the aerospace giant\u2019s space program.Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky\n \n\n\nThe planned launch of the Starliner in August was meant as a makeup of a botched flight of the vehicle in late 2019. During that mission, the Starliner ended up in the wrong orbit due to a programming error. It also faced a potentially catastrophic error involving its heat shield that was fixed during the flight. \nNASA has contracted with Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to the space station. Last year, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, the first human space flight from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s StarlinerMore WSJ coverage of the company\u2019s troubled attempts at space flight, selected by the editors Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft to Return to Factory Over Stuck Valves (Aug. 13) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (Aug. 12) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Flight Was Postponed. What Happens Now? (Aug. 3) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (July 26) Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (Dec. 20, 2019) \n\n\n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The U.S. space agency has reassigned two astronauts from Boeing missions to a future SpaceX flight. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Boeing\u2019s Starliner Won\u2019t Attempt Launch Again This Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "760",
        "date": "2021-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-says-boeings-starliner-wont-attempt-launch-again-this-year-11633555273?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=21",
        "text": "Steve Stich, a program manager at NASA, said during a briefing Wednesday that there won\u2019t be another opportunity this year to complete the Starliner demonstration flight, citing other missions to the space station and coming launches. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe earliest the Starliner is likely to try to launch again is the April through June stretch in 2022, according to people familiar with the space vehicle. A spokesman for NASA declined to comment on the timing, and Mr. Stich said at the briefing it was too soon to specify a date for the Starliner test flight as Boeing and the agency work to determine why the valves became stuck. \n\nNASA said it had reassigned two agency astronauts, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, who had been tapped to fly on the Starliner during the vehicle\u2019s test mission with crew on board and on a separate flight. Both will now travel to the space station on a future mission using a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket and its Dragon crew capsule. \nThe agency said in a statement that it shifted Ms. Mann and Mr. Cassada to the future SpaceX launch \u201cto allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner,\u201d while permitting the astronauts to gain spaceflight experience.\nA spokesman for Boeing said that the company supported NASA\u2019s move to shift the assignments for the astronauts and that Boeing remained committed to safety. \u201cWe understand the agency\u2019s need to make adjustments to get members of the current astronaut class flying experience on an operational vehicle while the development of the Starliner spacecraft continues,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s Starliner spaceship has been hampered by a string of errors and delays. In this video, WSJ\u2019s Micah Maidenberg explains why Boeing has struggled to launch the Starliner on schedule and what\u2019s next for the aerospace giant\u2019s space program.Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky\n \n\n\nThe planned launch of the Starliner in August was meant as a makeup of a botched flight of the vehicle in late 2019. During that mission, the Starliner ended up in the wrong orbit due to a programming error. It also faced a potentially catastrophic error involving its heat shield that was fixed during the flight. \nNASA has contracted with Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to the space station. Last year, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, the first human space flight from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s StarlinerMore WSJ coverage of the company\u2019s troubled attempts at space flight, selected by the editors Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft to Return to Factory Over Stuck Valves (Aug. 13) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (Aug. 12) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Flight Was Postponed. What Happens Now? (Aug. 3) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (July 26) Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (Dec. 20, 2019) \n\n\n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The U.S. space agency has reassigned two astronauts from Boeing missions to a future SpaceX flight. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Boeing\u2019s Starliner Won\u2019t Attempt Launch Again This Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "761",
        "date": "2021-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-says-boeings-starliner-wont-attempt-launch-again-this-year-11633555273?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=21",
        "text": "Steve Stich, a program manager at NASA, said during a briefing Wednesday that there won\u2019t be another opportunity this year to complete the Starliner demonstration flight, citing other missions to the space station and coming launches. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert \n\n\n\n Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe earliest the Starliner is likely to try to launch again is the April through June stretch in 2022, according to people familiar with the space vehicle. A spokesman for NASA declined to comment on the timing, and Mr. Stich said at the briefing it was too soon to specify a date for the Starliner test flight as Boeing and the agency work to determine why the valves became stuck. \n\nNASA said it had reassigned two agency astronauts, Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, who had been tapped to fly on the Starliner during the vehicle\u2019s test mission with crew on board and on a separate flight. Both will now travel to the space station on a future mission using a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket and its Dragon crew capsule. \nThe agency said in a statement that it shifted Ms. Mann and Mr. Cassada to the future SpaceX launch \u201cto allow Boeing time to complete the development of Starliner,\u201d while permitting the astronauts to gain spaceflight experience.\nA spokesman for Boeing said that the company supported NASA\u2019s move to shift the assignments for the astronauts and that Boeing remained committed to safety. \u201cWe understand the agency\u2019s need to make adjustments to get members of the current astronaut class flying experience on an operational vehicle while the development of the Starliner spacecraft continues,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s Starliner spaceship has been hampered by a string of errors and delays. In this video, WSJ\u2019s Micah Maidenberg explains why Boeing has struggled to launch the Starliner on schedule and what\u2019s next for the aerospace giant\u2019s space program.Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky\n \n\n\nThe planned launch of the Starliner in August was meant as a makeup of a botched flight of the vehicle in late 2019. During that mission, the Starliner ended up in the wrong orbit due to a programming error. It also faced a potentially catastrophic error involving its heat shield that was fixed during the flight. \nNASA has contracted with Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to the space station. Last year, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, the first human space flight from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s StarlinerMore WSJ coverage of the company\u2019s troubled attempts at space flight, selected by the editors Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft to Return to Factory Over Stuck Valves (Aug. 13) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Could Face Delay of Several Months (Aug. 12) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Flight Was Postponed. What Happens Now? (Aug. 3) Boeing\u2019s Starliner Set to Launch, Giving Company a Do-Over in Space (July 26) Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (Dec. 20, 2019) \n\n\n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The U.S. space agency has reassigned two astronauts from Boeing missions to a future SpaceX flight. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Tourist Is a Japanese Billionaire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "762",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-announces-first-lunar-tourist-for-2023-mission-1537237536?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=18",
        "text": "Mr. Maezawa, an art collector, said he would invite six to eight artists to participate in the lunar voyage as a way of inspiring their work.\n\u201cFor me, this project is very meaningful,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said, adding that he hoped traveling to the moon would increase world peace. \u201cThis is my lifelong dream,\u201d he said.\n\n\nThis isn\u2019t Mr. Maezawa\u2019s first time in the limelight: The e-commerce mogul stunned the art world last year when he paid $110.5 million for a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jean-Michel Basquiat\n\n\n\n painting of a black skull, a record for a U.S. artist at auction.\nMr. Maezawa, a 42-year-old former rock drummer, amassed a $3 billion fortune selling imported records and then trendy clothes through his online fashion conglomerate, now part of a company called Zozotown.\nMr. Musk said Mr. Maezawa, whom he described as \u201cthe bravest person\u201d and \u201cthe best adventurer,\u201d is \u201cpaying a lot of money\u201d and \u201cfor the ability for the average citizen to travel to other planets.\u201d \nMr. Musk said he expected short test hops of the spacecraft next year and perhaps some booster tests shortly after that. \u201cIf things go well,\u201d he added, SpaceX \u201ccould be doing the first orbital flights in two or three years.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Yusaku Maezawa \n\n\n\n\u201cI did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said. \u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said after purchasing the Basquiat painting he wondered \u201cwhat if Basquiat had gone to space and seen the moon up close?\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said he hasn\u2019t decided which artists\u2014who could range from painters, musicians and fashion designers to photographers or film directors\u2014to invite. \u201cIf you should hear from me you should say \u2018yes, please\u2019\u2014don\u2019t say \u2018no,\u2019\u201d he said. \nMr. Musk\u2019s enthusiasm for a lunar-tourist mission has been evident for two years, though Monday\u2019s announcement is the fourth iteration of those plans. Since the initial concept was revealed in February 2017, SpaceX has delayed the anticipated launch two times and twice changed rocket designs.\nMr. Musk said the mission would take about four to five days.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s founder and chief executive has consistently said his company\u2019s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars, so the proposed mission around the moon originally caught some boosters and industry officials by surprise. But then it became widely viewed as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of the company\u2019s 27-engine Falcon Heavy booster, which flew for the first time earlier this year. But now, with SpaceX substituting an even bigger, more powerful rocket under development\u2014dubbed the BFR\u2014the anticipated mission has been pushed back several years.\nLast September, Mr. Musk said he expected to send a BFR carrying people to Mars in 2022, though he called that deadline \u201caspirational.\u201d Since then, SpaceX President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell\n\n\n\n has said the company hopes to flight test the rocket\u2019s spaceship on independent short hops by the end of 2019.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed costs for the mammoth rocket or its associated spaceship. But at Monday\u2019s event Mr. Musk said it would likely end up around $5 billion. Before announcing the passenger at Monday\u2019s event, Mr. Musk acknowledged he doesn\u2019t have a specific funding concept. \u201cWe need to seek every possible means\u201d of funding, the SpaceX chief told the crowd, without elaborating on new sources outside the company\u2019s current or proposed business lines.\n\n\nRelated Coverage One Small Step for Flashy Japanese Billionaire, One Giant Leap for SpaceX \n\n\nMr. Musk said the deposit already paid by Mr. Maezawa \u201cwill have a material impact\u201d on covering some of the development costs and the proposed rocket could launch from a floating platform. \nIn SpaceX\u2019s customary flashy style, Mr. Musk spoke on a 2-foot-high white podium, facing a bank of video cameras, photographers and a crowd of reporters and employees. A few yards behind him was the working end of a massive Falcon 9 rocket, laid out horizontally with the nozzles of its nine engines facing the media. Hanging on part of the rocket factory wall and towering over the crowd was a full scale, black-and-white diagram of the rear view of the spaceship.\nBefore the press conference started, press relations officials said Mr. Musk\u2014facing heightened public and government scrutiny in others areas\u2014wouldn\u2019t respond to questions on other topics.\nDuring the nearly 90-minute press conference, Mr. Musk veered from off-the-cuff sound bites about complex rocket trajectories to comments about his personal excitement. \u201cI\u2019m super fired-up,\u201d he said in conclusion. \u201cThis is going to be great.\u201d\nDespite the public focus on the moon mission, Mr. Musk also has sent mixed messages about how important he thinks human or rob SpaceX\u2019s first paying passenger will be Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who is to blast off from earth in 2023, circle the moon and return, said CEO Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Anne Steele"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Tourist Is a Japanese Billionaire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "763",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-announces-first-lunar-tourist-for-2023-mission-1537237536?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=69",
        "text": "Mr. Maezawa, an art collector, said he would invite six to eight artists to participate in the lunar voyage as a way of inspiring their work.\n\u201cFor me, this project is very meaningful,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said, adding that he hoped traveling to the moon would increase world peace. \u201cThis is my lifelong dream,\u201d he said.\n\n\nThis isn\u2019t Mr. Maezawa\u2019s first time in the limelight: The e-commerce mogul stunned the art world last year when he paid $110.5 million for a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jean-Michel Basquiat\n\n\n\n painting of a black skull, a record for a U.S. artist at auction.\nMr. Maezawa, a 42-year-old former rock drummer, amassed a $3 billion fortune selling imported records and then trendy clothes through his online fashion conglomerate, now part of a company called Zozotown.\nMr. Musk said Mr. Maezawa, whom he described as \u201cthe bravest person\u201d and \u201cthe best adventurer,\u201d is \u201cpaying a lot of money\u201d and \u201cfor the ability for the average citizen to travel to other planets.\u201d \nMr. Musk said he expected short test hops of the spacecraft next year and perhaps some booster tests shortly after that. \u201cIf things go well,\u201d he added, SpaceX \u201ccould be doing the first orbital flights in two or three years.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Yusaku Maezawa \n\n\n\n\u201cI did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said. \u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said after purchasing the Basquiat painting he wondered \u201cwhat if Basquiat had gone to space and seen the moon up close?\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said he hasn\u2019t decided which artists\u2014who could range from painters, musicians and fashion designers to photographers or film directors\u2014to invite. \u201cIf you should hear from me you should say \u2018yes, please\u2019\u2014don\u2019t say \u2018no,\u2019\u201d he said. \nMr. Musk\u2019s enthusiasm for a lunar-tourist mission has been evident for two years, though Monday\u2019s announcement is the fourth iteration of those plans. Since the initial concept was revealed in February 2017, SpaceX has delayed the anticipated launch two times and twice changed rocket designs.\nMr. Musk said the mission would take about four to five days.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s founder and chief executive has consistently said his company\u2019s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars, so the proposed mission around the moon originally caught some boosters and industry officials by surprise. But then it became widely viewed as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of the company\u2019s 27-engine Falcon Heavy booster, which flew for the first time earlier this year. But now, with SpaceX substituting an even bigger, more powerful rocket under development\u2014dubbed the BFR\u2014the anticipated mission has been pushed back several years.\nLast September, Mr. Musk said he expected to send a BFR carrying people to Mars in 2022, though he called that deadline \u201caspirational.\u201d Since then, SpaceX President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell\n\n\n\n has said the company hopes to flight test the rocket\u2019s spaceship on independent short hops by the end of 2019.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed costs for the mammoth rocket or its associated spaceship. But at Monday\u2019s event Mr. Musk said it would likely end up around $5 billion. Before announcing the passenger at Monday\u2019s event, Mr. Musk acknowledged he doesn\u2019t have a specific funding concept. \u201cWe need to seek every possible means\u201d of funding, the SpaceX chief told the crowd, without elaborating on new sources outside the company\u2019s current or proposed business lines.\n\n\nRelated Coverage One Small Step for Flashy Japanese Billionaire, One Giant Leap for SpaceX \n\n\nMr. Musk said the deposit already paid by Mr. Maezawa \u201cwill have a material impact\u201d on covering some of the development costs and the proposed rocket could launch from a floating platform. \nIn SpaceX\u2019s customary flashy style, Mr. Musk spoke on a 2-foot-high white podium, facing a bank of video cameras, photographers and a crowd of reporters and employees. A few yards behind him was the working end of a massive Falcon 9 rocket, laid out horizontally with the nozzles of its nine engines facing the media. Hanging on part of the rocket factory wall and towering over the crowd was a full scale, black-and-white diagram of the rear view of the spaceship.\nBefore the press conference started, press relations officials said Mr. Musk\u2014facing heightened public and government scrutiny in others areas\u2014wouldn\u2019t respond to questions on other topics.\nDuring the nearly 90-minute press conference, Mr. Musk veered from off-the-cuff sound bites about complex rocket trajectories to comments about his personal excitement. \u201cI\u2019m super fired-up,\u201d he said in conclusion. \u201cThis is going to be great.\u201d\nDespite the public focus on the moon mission, Mr. Musk also has sent mixed messages about how important he thinks human or rob SpaceX\u2019s first paying passenger will be Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who is to blast off from earth in 2023, circle the moon and return, said CEO Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Anne Steele"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Tourist Is a Japanese Billionaire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "764",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-announces-first-lunar-tourist-for-2023-mission-1537237536?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=64",
        "text": "Mr. Maezawa, an art collector, said he would invite six to eight artists to participate in the lunar voyage as a way of inspiring their work.\n\u201cFor me, this project is very meaningful,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said, adding that he hoped traveling to the moon would increase world peace. \u201cThis is my lifelong dream,\u201d he said.\n\n\nThis isn\u2019t Mr. Maezawa\u2019s first time in the limelight: The e-commerce mogul stunned the art world last year when he paid $110.5 million for a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jean-Michel Basquiat\n\n\n\n painting of a black skull, a record for a U.S. artist at auction.\nMr. Maezawa, a 42-year-old former rock drummer, amassed a $3 billion fortune selling imported records and then trendy clothes through his online fashion conglomerate, now part of a company called Zozotown.\nMr. Musk said Mr. Maezawa, whom he described as \u201cthe bravest person\u201d and \u201cthe best adventurer,\u201d is \u201cpaying a lot of money\u201d and \u201cfor the ability for the average citizen to travel to other planets.\u201d \nMr. Musk said he expected short test hops of the spacecraft next year and perhaps some booster tests shortly after that. \u201cIf things go well,\u201d he added, SpaceX \u201ccould be doing the first orbital flights in two or three years.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Yusaku Maezawa \n\n\n\n\u201cI did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said. \u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said after purchasing the Basquiat painting he wondered \u201cwhat if Basquiat had gone to space and seen the moon up close?\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said he hasn\u2019t decided which artists\u2014who could range from painters, musicians and fashion designers to photographers or film directors\u2014to invite. \u201cIf you should hear from me you should say \u2018yes, please\u2019\u2014don\u2019t say \u2018no,\u2019\u201d he said. \nMr. Musk\u2019s enthusiasm for a lunar-tourist mission has been evident for two years, though Monday\u2019s announcement is the fourth iteration of those plans. Since the initial concept was revealed in February 2017, SpaceX has delayed the anticipated launch two times and twice changed rocket designs.\nMr. Musk said the mission would take about four to five days.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s founder and chief executive has consistently said his company\u2019s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars, so the proposed mission around the moon originally caught some boosters and industry officials by surprise. But then it became widely viewed as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of the company\u2019s 27-engine Falcon Heavy booster, which flew for the first time earlier this year. But now, with SpaceX substituting an even bigger, more powerful rocket under development\u2014dubbed the BFR\u2014the anticipated mission has been pushed back several years.\nLast September, Mr. Musk said he expected to send a BFR carrying people to Mars in 2022, though he called that deadline \u201caspirational.\u201d Since then, SpaceX President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell\n\n\n\n has said the company hopes to flight test the rocket\u2019s spaceship on independent short hops by the end of 2019.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed costs for the mammoth rocket or its associated spaceship. But at Monday\u2019s event Mr. Musk said it would likely end up around $5 billion. Before announcing the passenger at Monday\u2019s event, Mr. Musk acknowledged he doesn\u2019t have a specific funding concept. \u201cWe need to seek every possible means\u201d of funding, the SpaceX chief told the crowd, without elaborating on new sources outside the company\u2019s current or proposed business lines.\n\n\nRelated Coverage One Small Step for Flashy Japanese Billionaire, One Giant Leap for SpaceX \n\n\nMr. Musk said the deposit already paid by Mr. Maezawa \u201cwill have a material impact\u201d on covering some of the development costs and the proposed rocket could launch from a floating platform. \nIn SpaceX\u2019s customary flashy style, Mr. Musk spoke on a 2-foot-high white podium, facing a bank of video cameras, photographers and a crowd of reporters and employees. A few yards behind him was the working end of a massive Falcon 9 rocket, laid out horizontally with the nozzles of its nine engines facing the media. Hanging on part of the rocket factory wall and towering over the crowd was a full scale, black-and-white diagram of the rear view of the spaceship.\nBefore the press conference started, press relations officials said Mr. Musk\u2014facing heightened public and government scrutiny in others areas\u2014wouldn\u2019t respond to questions on other topics.\nDuring the nearly 90-minute press conference, Mr. Musk veered from off-the-cuff sound bites about complex rocket trajectories to comments about his personal excitement. \u201cI\u2019m super fired-up,\u201d he said in conclusion. \u201cThis is going to be great.\u201d\nDespite the public focus on the moon mission, Mr. Musk also has sent mixed messages about how important he thinks human or rob SpaceX\u2019s first paying passenger will be Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who is to blast off from earth in 2023, circle the moon and return, said CEO Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Anne Steele"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Tourist Is a Japanese Billionaire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "765",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-announces-first-lunar-tourist-for-2023-mission-1537237536?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=22",
        "text": "Mr. Maezawa, an art collector, said he would invite six to eight artists to participate in the lunar voyage as a way of inspiring their work.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFor me, this project is very meaningful,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said, adding that he hoped traveling to the moon would increase world peace. \u201cThis is my lifelong dream,\u201d he said.\n\n\nThis isn\u2019t Mr. Maezawa\u2019s first time in the limelight: The e-commerce mogul stunned the art world last year when he paid $110.5 million for a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jean-Michel Basquiat\n\n\n\n painting of a black skull, a record for a U.S. artist at auction.\nMr. Maezawa, a 42-year-old former rock drummer, amassed a $3 billion fortune selling imported records and then trendy clothes through his online fashion conglomerate, now part of a company called Zozotown.\nMr. Musk said Mr. Maezawa, whom he described as \u201cthe bravest person\u201d and \u201cthe best adventurer,\u201d is \u201cpaying a lot of money\u201d and \u201cfor the ability for the average citizen to travel to other planets.\u201d \nMr. Musk said he expected short test hops of the spacecraft next year and perhaps some booster tests shortly after that. \u201cIf things go well,\u201d he added, SpaceX \u201ccould be doing the first orbital flights in two or three years.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Yusaku Maezawa \n\n\n\n\u201cI did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said. \u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said after purchasing the Basquiat painting he wondered \u201cwhat if Basquiat had gone to space and seen the moon up close?\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said he hasn\u2019t decided which artists\u2014who could range from painters, musicians and fashion designers to photographers or film directors\u2014to invite. \u201cIf you should hear from me you should say \u2018yes, please\u2019\u2014don\u2019t say \u2018no,\u2019\u201d he said. \nMr. Musk\u2019s enthusiasm for a lunar-tourist mission has been evident for two years, though Monday\u2019s announcement is the fourth iteration of those plans. Since the initial concept was revealed in February 2017, SpaceX has delayed the anticipated launch two times and twice changed rocket designs.\nMr. Musk said the mission would take about four to five days.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s founder and chief executive has consistently said his company\u2019s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars, so the proposed mission around the moon originally caught some boosters and industry officials by surprise. But then it became widely viewed as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of the company\u2019s 27-engine Falcon Heavy booster, which flew for the first time earlier this year. But now, with SpaceX substituting an even bigger, more powerful rocket under development\u2014dubbed the BFR\u2014the anticipated mission has been pushed back several years.\nLast September, Mr. Musk said he expected to send a BFR carrying people to Mars in 2022, though he called that deadline \u201caspirational.\u201d Since then, SpaceX President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell\n\n\n\n has said the company hopes to flight test the rocket\u2019s spaceship on independent short hops by the end of 2019.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed costs for the mammoth rocket or its associated spaceship. But at Monday\u2019s event Mr. Musk said it would likely end up around $5 billion. Before announcing the passenger at Monday\u2019s event, Mr. Musk acknowledged he doesn\u2019t have a specific funding concept. \u201cWe need to seek every possible means\u201d of funding, the SpaceX chief told the crowd, without elaborating on new sources outside the company\u2019s current or proposed business lines.\n\n\nRelated Coverage One Small Step for Flashy Japanese Billionaire, One Giant Leap for SpaceX \n\n\nMr. Musk said the deposit already paid by Mr. Maezawa \u201cwill have a material impact\u201d on covering some of the development costs and the proposed rocket could launch from a floating platform. \nIn SpaceX\u2019s customary flashy style, Mr. Musk spoke on a 2-foot-high white podium, facing a bank of video cameras, photographers and a crowd of reporters and employees. A few yards behind him was the working end of a massive Falcon 9 rocket, laid out horizontally with the nozzles of its nine engines facing the media. Hanging on part of the rocket factory wall and towering over the crowd was a full scale, black-and-white diagram of the rear view of the spaceship.\nBefore the press conference started, press relations officials said Mr. Musk\u2014facing heightened public and government scrutiny in others areas\u2014wouldn\u2019t respond to questions on other topics.\nDuring the nearly 90-minute press conference, Mr. Musk veered from off-the-cuff sound bites about complex rocket trajectories to comments about his personal excitement. \u201cI\u2019m super fired-up,\u201d he said in conclusion. \u201cThis is going to be great.\u201d\nDespite the public focus on the moon mission, Mr. Musk also has sent mixed messages about how important he thinks human or r SpaceX\u2019s first paying passenger will be Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who is to blast off from earth in 2023, circle the moon and return, said CEO Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Anne Steele"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Tourist Is a Japanese Billionaire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "766",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-announces-first-lunar-tourist-for-2023-mission-1537237536?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=87",
        "text": "Mr. Maezawa, an art collector, said he would invite six to eight artists to participate in the lunar voyage as a way of inspiring their work.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFor me, this project is very meaningful,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said, adding that he hoped traveling to the moon would increase world peace. \u201cThis is my lifelong dream,\u201d he said.\n\n\nThis isn\u2019t Mr. Maezawa\u2019s first time in the limelight: The e-commerce mogul stunned the art world last year when he paid $110.5 million for a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jean-Michel Basquiat\n\n\n\n painting of a black skull, a record for a U.S. artist at auction.\nMr. Maezawa, a 42-year-old former rock drummer, amassed a $3 billion fortune selling imported records and then trendy clothes through his online fashion conglomerate, now part of a company called Zozotown.\nMr. Musk said Mr. Maezawa, whom he described as \u201cthe bravest person\u201d and \u201cthe best adventurer,\u201d is \u201cpaying a lot of money\u201d and \u201cfor the ability for the average citizen to travel to other planets.\u201d \nMr. Musk said he expected short test hops of the spacecraft next year and perhaps some booster tests shortly after that. \u201cIf things go well,\u201d he added, SpaceX \u201ccould be doing the first orbital flights in two or three years.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Yusaku Maezawa \n\n\n\n\u201cI did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself,\u201d Mr. Maezawa said. \u201cI want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon with artists.\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said after purchasing the Basquiat painting he wondered \u201cwhat if Basquiat had gone to space and seen the moon up close?\u201d\nMr. Maezawa said he hasn\u2019t decided which artists\u2014who could range from painters, musicians and fashion designers to photographers or film directors\u2014to invite. \u201cIf you should hear from me you should say \u2018yes, please\u2019\u2014don\u2019t say \u2018no,\u2019\u201d he said. \nMr. Musk\u2019s enthusiasm for a lunar-tourist mission has been evident for two years, though Monday\u2019s announcement is the fourth iteration of those plans. Since the initial concept was revealed in February 2017, SpaceX has delayed the anticipated launch two times and twice changed rocket designs.\nMr. Musk said the mission would take about four to five days.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s founder and chief executive has consistently said his company\u2019s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars, so the proposed mission around the moon originally caught some boosters and industry officials by surprise. But then it became widely viewed as a way to demonstrate the capabilities of the company\u2019s 27-engine Falcon Heavy booster, which flew for the first time earlier this year. But now, with SpaceX substituting an even bigger, more powerful rocket under development\u2014dubbed the BFR\u2014the anticipated mission has been pushed back several years.\nLast September, Mr. Musk said he expected to send a BFR carrying people to Mars in 2022, though he called that deadline \u201caspirational.\u201d Since then, SpaceX President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell\n\n\n\n has said the company hopes to flight test the rocket\u2019s spaceship on independent short hops by the end of 2019.\nThe company hasn\u2019t disclosed costs for the mammoth rocket or its associated spaceship. But at Monday\u2019s event Mr. Musk said it would likely end up around $5 billion. Before announcing the passenger at Monday\u2019s event, Mr. Musk acknowledged he doesn\u2019t have a specific funding concept. \u201cWe need to seek every possible means\u201d of funding, the SpaceX chief told the crowd, without elaborating on new sources outside the company\u2019s current or proposed business lines.\n\n\nRelated Coverage One Small Step for Flashy Japanese Billionaire, One Giant Leap for SpaceX \n\n\nMr. Musk said the deposit already paid by Mr. Maezawa \u201cwill have a material impact\u201d on covering some of the development costs and the proposed rocket could launch from a floating platform. \nIn SpaceX\u2019s customary flashy style, Mr. Musk spoke on a 2-foot-high white podium, facing a bank of video cameras, photographers and a crowd of reporters and employees. A few yards behind him was the working end of a massive Falcon 9 rocket, laid out horizontally with the nozzles of its nine engines facing the media. Hanging on part of the rocket factory wall and towering over the crowd was a full scale, black-and-white diagram of the rear view of the spaceship.\nBefore the press conference started, press relations officials said Mr. Musk\u2014facing heightened public and government scrutiny in others areas\u2014wouldn\u2019t respond to questions on other topics.\nDuring the nearly 90-minute press conference, Mr. Musk veered from off-the-cuff sound bites about complex rocket trajectories to comments about his personal excitement. \u201cI\u2019m super fired-up,\u201d he said in conclusion. \u201cThis is going to be great.\u201d\nDespite the public focus on the moon mission, Mr. Musk also has sent mixed messages about how important he thinks human or SpaceX\u2019s first paying passenger will be Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who is to blast off from earth in 2023, circle the moon and return, said CEO Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Anne Steele"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Returns Private Astronauts to Earth After Three Days in Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "767",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-returns-private-astronauts-to-earth-after-three-days-in-orbit-11632006524?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=4",
        "text": "Mr. Isaacman was heard saying shortly after touchdown that it was a \u201check of a ride\u201d and that things were \u201cjust getting started.\u201d\nBoats moved toward the capsule following the landing, according to SpaceX\u2019s live stream of the return. Roughly 30 minutes after landing, teams had hoisted the spacecraft out of the water and onto a recovery vessel. Crew members began leaving the vehicle through a side hatch and onto a platform around 50 minutes after splashdown, with Ms. Arceneaux emerging first.\n\n\nMedical personnel were expected to check on the crew, who would then be flown back to land, according to the live stream.\nIn a tweet Saturday evening, Mr. Musk congratulated the mission. \nThe Inspiration4 mission broke new ground for a private human space flight, marking the first occasion that a crew of people who weren\u2019t government astronauts traveled to orbit on a company\u2019s spaceship. Previous tourists who traveled that deep into space purchased seats on Russian government rockets. \nThe mission marked other firsts as well. Ms. Arceneaux, who is 29, was the youngest American and woman to travel to space, according to a spokesman. Dr. Proctor, designated as the pilot for the trip, was the first Black woman to serve in that role.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Inspired Inspiration4\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Florida Today/Associated Press\n\n\nSpaceX took the crew to the deepest orbit that Americans have been to since 2009, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last repaired the Hubble Space Telescope.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, described the flight as a smooth one during a briefing Saturday night after the landing. The company saw issues with a waste-management system and took a temperature sensor on an engine offline because it was providing bad data, he said. That sensor had backup ones in place, and the crew never faced any risks, he said.\nThe issue with the waste-management system had to do with a fan and workarounds for the problem were found, Inspiration4 mission director Todd Ericson said.\nOrbital space missions can pose risks. The crew orbited Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule. While re-entering the atmosphere, the vehicle\u2019s heat shield was expected to face temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.\nDuring the flight, Mr. Isaacman and Dr. Proctor were tasked with ensuring the automated system that flew the Crew Dragon capsule was working properly and were prepared for any contingencies, Mr. Ericson said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crew of Inspiration4 in the Dragon capsule during their first day in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s company launched the crew toward orbit Wednesday evening. The mission used a space vehicle SpaceX has also tapped to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station: a Crew Dragon capsule stacked on top of one of its Falcon 9 rockets.\nDuring their trip to orbit with SpaceX, crew members held video calls with children at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of its charitable funds; conducted scientific experiments and floated around while taking in views of Earth. On Friday, they appeared on video at the New York Stock Exchange at the close of trading. Meals on board included pasta Bolognese, lamb and cold pizza.\n\u201cSorry it was cold! Dragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a tweet about the latter item. \nPrivate space trips are one part of a commercial space industry that also includes rocket-launch startups and venture-backed companies focused on refueling satellites, as well as larger aerospace companies with decades of experience building space vehicles for government clients.\nSpaceX isn\u2019t alone in seeing opportunity in tourist visits to space. This summer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed high-profile trips to the edge of space with their founders on board.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on future missions on its Starliner capsule, which has yet to carry people to space, could be bought by tourists.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat\u2019s next for commercial space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nExecutives have said SpaceX has a backlog of commercial trips booked and that it wants to conduct at least six such missions a year. Mr. Reed, the company\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said Saturday that interest in trips had been growing. \nIt might take years before more people are able to access space, in part because of the costs of such trips and relatively limited capacity. Virgin Galactic said in August it would charge consumers at least $450,000 a seat for its flights, while Blue Origin sold for about $30 million a seat on its rocket that to The four-person crew lands off the coast of Florida, completing a mission that included scientific research and cold pizza. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Returns Private Astronauts to Earth After Three Days in Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "768",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-returns-private-astronauts-to-earth-after-three-days-in-orbit-11632006524?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=13",
        "text": "Mr. Isaacman was heard saying shortly after touchdown that it was a \u201check of a ride\u201d and that things were \u201cjust getting started.\u201d\nBoats moved toward the capsule following the landing, according to SpaceX\u2019s live stream of the return. Roughly 30 minutes after landing, teams had hoisted the spacecraft out of the water and onto a recovery vessel. Crew members began leaving the vehicle through a side hatch and onto a platform around 50 minutes after splashdown, with Ms. Arceneaux emerging first.\n\n\nMedical personnel were expected to check on the crew, who would then be flown back to land, according to the live stream.\nIn a tweet Saturday evening, Mr. Musk congratulated the mission. \nThe Inspiration4 mission broke new ground for a private human space flight, marking the first occasion that a crew of people who weren\u2019t government astronauts traveled to orbit on a company\u2019s spaceship. Previous tourists who traveled that deep into space purchased seats on Russian government rockets. \nThe mission marked other firsts as well. Ms. Arceneaux, who is 29, was the youngest American and woman to travel to space, according to a spokesman. Dr. Proctor, designated as the pilot for the trip, was the first Black woman to serve in that role.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Inspired Inspiration4\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Florida Today/Associated Press\n\n\nSpaceX took the crew to the deepest orbit that Americans have been to since 2009, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last repaired the Hubble Space Telescope.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, described the flight as a smooth one during a briefing Saturday night after the landing. The company saw issues with a waste-management system and took a temperature sensor on an engine offline because it was providing bad data, he said. That sensor had backup ones in place, and the crew never faced any risks, he said.\nThe issue with the waste-management system had to do with a fan and workarounds for the problem were found, Inspiration4 mission director Todd Ericson said.\nOrbital space missions can pose risks. The crew orbited Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule. While re-entering the atmosphere, the vehicle\u2019s heat shield was expected to face temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.\nDuring the flight, Mr. Isaacman and Dr. Proctor were tasked with ensuring the automated system that flew the Crew Dragon capsule was working properly and were prepared for any contingencies, Mr. Ericson said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crew of Inspiration4 in the Dragon capsule during their first day in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s company launched the crew toward orbit Wednesday evening. The mission used a space vehicle SpaceX has also tapped to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station: a Crew Dragon capsule stacked on top of one of its Falcon 9 rockets.\nDuring their trip to orbit with SpaceX, crew members held video calls with children at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of its charitable funds; conducted scientific experiments and floated around while taking in views of Earth. On Friday, they appeared on video at the New York Stock Exchange at the close of trading. Meals on board included pasta Bolognese, lamb and cold pizza.\n\u201cSorry it was cold! Dragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a tweet about the latter item. \nPrivate space trips are one part of a commercial space industry that also includes rocket-launch startups and venture-backed companies focused on refueling satellites, as well as larger aerospace companies with decades of experience building space vehicles for government clients.\nSpaceX isn\u2019t alone in seeing opportunity in tourist visits to space. This summer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed high-profile trips to the edge of space with their founders on board.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on future missions on its Starliner capsule, which has yet to carry people to space, could be bought by tourists.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat\u2019s next for commercial space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nExecutives have said SpaceX has a backlog of commercial trips booked and that it wants to conduct at least six such missions a year. Mr. Reed, the company\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said Saturday that interest in trips had been growing. \nIt might take years before more people are able to access space, in part because of the costs of such trips and relatively limited capacity. Virgin Galactic said in August it would charge consumers at least $450,000 a seat for its flights, while Blue Origin sold for about $30 million a seat on its rocket that to The four-person crew lands off the coast of Florida, completing a mission that included scientific research and cold pizza. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Returns Private Astronauts to Earth After Three Days in Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "769",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-returns-private-astronauts-to-earth-after-three-days-in-orbit-11632006524?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=22",
        "text": "Mr. Isaacman was heard saying shortly after touchdown that it was a \u201check of a ride\u201d and that things were \u201cjust getting started.\u201d\nBoats moved toward the capsule following the landing, according to SpaceX\u2019s live stream of the return. Roughly 30 minutes after landing, teams had hoisted the spacecraft out of the water and onto a recovery vessel. Crew members began leaving the vehicle through a side hatch and onto a platform around 50 minutes after splashdown, with Ms. Arceneaux emerging first.\n\n\nMedical personnel were expected to check on the crew, who would then be flown back to land, according to the live stream.\nIn a tweet Saturday evening, Mr. Musk congratulated the mission. \nThe Inspiration4 mission broke new ground for a private human space flight, marking the first occasion that a crew of people who weren\u2019t government astronauts traveled to orbit on a company\u2019s spaceship. Previous tourists who traveled that deep into space purchased seats on Russian government rockets. \nThe mission marked other firsts as well. Ms. Arceneaux, who is 29, was the youngest American and woman to travel to space, according to a spokesman. Dr. Proctor, designated as the pilot for the trip, was the first Black woman to serve in that role.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Inspired Inspiration4\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Florida Today/Associated Press\n\n\nSpaceX took the crew to the deepest orbit that Americans have been to since 2009, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last repaired the Hubble Space Telescope.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, described the flight as a smooth one during a briefing Saturday night after the landing. The company saw issues with a waste-management system and took a temperature sensor on an engine offline because it was providing bad data, he said. That sensor had backup ones in place, and the crew never faced any risks, he said.\nThe issue with the waste-management system had to do with a fan and workarounds for the problem were found, Inspiration4 mission director Todd Ericson said.\nOrbital space missions can pose risks. The crew orbited Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule. While re-entering the atmosphere, the vehicle\u2019s heat shield was expected to face temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.\nDuring the flight, Mr. Isaacman and Dr. Proctor were tasked with ensuring the automated system that flew the Crew Dragon capsule was working properly and were prepared for any contingencies, Mr. Ericson said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crew of Inspiration4 in the Dragon capsule during their first day in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s company launched the crew toward orbit Wednesday evening. The mission used a space vehicle SpaceX has also tapped to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station: a Crew Dragon capsule stacked on top of one of its Falcon 9 rockets.\nDuring their trip to orbit with SpaceX, crew members held video calls with children at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of its charitable funds; conducted scientific experiments and floated around while taking in views of Earth. On Friday, they appeared on video at the New York Stock Exchange at the close of trading. Meals on board included pasta Bolognese, lamb and cold pizza.\n\u201cSorry it was cold! Dragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a tweet about the latter item. \nPrivate space trips are one part of a commercial space industry that also includes rocket-launch startups and venture-backed companies focused on refueling satellites, as well as larger aerospace companies with decades of experience building space vehicles for government clients.\nSpaceX isn\u2019t alone in seeing opportunity in tourist visits to space. This summer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed high-profile trips to the edge of space with their founders on board.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on future missions on its Starliner capsule, which has yet to carry people to space, could be bought by tourists.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat\u2019s next for commercial space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nExecutives have said SpaceX has a backlog of commercial trips booked and that it wants to conduct at least six such missions a year. Mr. Reed, the company\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said Saturday that interest in trips had been growing. \nIt might take years before more people are able to access space, in part because of the costs of such trips and relatively limited capacity. Virgin Galactic said in August it would charge consumers at least $450,000 a seat for its flights, while Blue Origin sold for about $30 million a seat on its rocket that to The four-person crew lands off the coast of Florida, completing a mission that included scientific research and cold pizza. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Returns Private Astronauts to Earth After Three Days in Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "770",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-returns-private-astronauts-to-earth-after-three-days-in-orbit-11632006524?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=4",
        "text": "Mr. Isaacman was heard saying shortly after touchdown that it was a \u201check of a ride\u201d and that things were \u201cjust getting started.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBoats moved toward the capsule following the landing, according to SpaceX\u2019s live stream of the return. Roughly 30 minutes after landing, teams had hoisted the spacecraft out of the water and onto a recovery vessel. Crew members began leaving the vehicle through a side hatch and onto a platform around 50 minutes after splashdown, with Ms. Arceneaux emerging first.\n\n\nMedical personnel were expected to check on the crew, who would then be flown back to land, according to the live stream.\nIn a tweet Saturday evening, Mr. Musk congratulated the mission. \nThe Inspiration4 mission broke new ground for a private human space flight, marking the first occasion that a crew of people who weren\u2019t government astronauts traveled to orbit on a company\u2019s spaceship. Previous tourists who traveled that deep into space purchased seats on Russian government rockets. \nThe mission marked other firsts as well. Ms. Arceneaux, who is 29, was the youngest American and woman to travel to space, according to a spokesman. Dr. Proctor, designated as the pilot for the trip, was the first Black woman to serve in that role.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Inspired Inspiration4\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Florida Today/Associated Press\n\n\nSpaceX took the crew to the deepest orbit that Americans have been to since 2009, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last repaired the Hubble Space Telescope.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, described the flight as a smooth one during a briefing Saturday night after the landing. The company saw issues with a waste-management system and took a temperature sensor on an engine offline because it was providing bad data, he said. That sensor had backup ones in place, and the crew never faced any risks, he said.\nThe issue with the waste-management system had to do with a fan and workarounds for the problem were found, Inspiration4 mission director Todd Ericson said.\nOrbital space missions can pose risks. The crew orbited Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule. While re-entering the atmosphere, the vehicle\u2019s heat shield was expected to face temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.\nDuring the flight, Mr. Isaacman and Dr. Proctor were tasked with ensuring the automated system that flew the Crew Dragon capsule was working properly and were prepared for any contingencies, Mr. Ericson said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crew of Inspiration4 in the Dragon capsule during their first day in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s company launched the crew toward orbit Wednesday evening. The mission used a space vehicle SpaceX has also tapped to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station: a Crew Dragon capsule stacked on top of one of its Falcon 9 rockets.\nDuring their trip to orbit with SpaceX, crew members held video calls with children at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of its charitable funds; conducted scientific experiments and floated around while taking in views of Earth. On Friday, they appeared on video at the New York Stock Exchange at the close of trading. Meals on board included pasta Bolognese, lamb and cold pizza.\n\u201cSorry it was cold! Dragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a tweet about the latter item. \nPrivate space trips are one part of a commercial space industry that also includes rocket-launch startups and venture-backed companies focused on refueling satellites, as well as larger aerospace companies with decades of experience building space vehicles for government clients.\nSpaceX isn\u2019t alone in seeing opportunity in tourist visits to space. This summer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed high-profile trips to the edge of space with their founders on board.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on future missions on its Starliner capsule, which has yet to carry people to space, could be bought by tourists.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat\u2019s next for commercial space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nExecutives have said SpaceX has a backlog of commercial trips booked and that it wants to conduct at least six such missions a year. Mr. Reed, the company\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said Saturday that interest in trips had been growing. \nIt might take years before more people are able to access space, in part because of the costs of such trips and relatively limited capacity. Virgin Galactic said in August it would charge consumers at least $450,000 a seat for its flights, while Blue Origin sold for about $30 million a seat on its rocket tha The four-person crew lands off the coast of Florida, completing a mission that included scientific research and cold pizza. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Returns Private Astronauts to Earth After Three Days in Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "771",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-returns-private-astronauts-to-earth-after-three-days-in-orbit-11632006524?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=22",
        "text": "Mr. Isaacman was heard saying shortly after touchdown that it was a \u201check of a ride\u201d and that things were \u201cjust getting started.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBoats moved toward the capsule following the landing, according to SpaceX\u2019s live stream of the return. Roughly 30 minutes after landing, teams had hoisted the spacecraft out of the water and onto a recovery vessel. Crew members began leaving the vehicle through a side hatch and onto a platform around 50 minutes after splashdown, with Ms. Arceneaux emerging first.\n\n\nMedical personnel were expected to check on the crew, who would then be flown back to land, according to the live stream.\nIn a tweet Saturday evening, Mr. Musk congratulated the mission. \nThe Inspiration4 mission broke new ground for a private human space flight, marking the first occasion that a crew of people who weren\u2019t government astronauts traveled to orbit on a company\u2019s spaceship. Previous tourists who traveled that deep into space purchased seats on Russian government rockets. \nThe mission marked other firsts as well. Ms. Arceneaux, who is 29, was the youngest American and woman to travel to space, according to a spokesman. Dr. Proctor, designated as the pilot for the trip, was the first Black woman to serve in that role.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Inspired Inspiration4\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Florida Today/Associated Press\n\n\nSpaceX took the crew to the deepest orbit that Americans have been to since 2009, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last repaired the Hubble Space Telescope.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, described the flight as a smooth one during a briefing Saturday night after the landing. The company saw issues with a waste-management system and took a temperature sensor on an engine offline because it was providing bad data, he said. That sensor had backup ones in place, and the crew never faced any risks, he said.\nThe issue with the waste-management system had to do with a fan and workarounds for the problem were found, Inspiration4 mission director Todd Ericson said.\nOrbital space missions can pose risks. The crew orbited Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule. While re-entering the atmosphere, the vehicle\u2019s heat shield was expected to face temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.\nDuring the flight, Mr. Isaacman and Dr. Proctor were tasked with ensuring the automated system that flew the Crew Dragon capsule was working properly and were prepared for any contingencies, Mr. Ericson said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crew of Inspiration4 in the Dragon capsule during their first day in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s company launched the crew toward orbit Wednesday evening. The mission used a space vehicle SpaceX has also tapped to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station: a Crew Dragon capsule stacked on top of one of its Falcon 9 rockets.\nDuring their trip to orbit with SpaceX, crew members held video calls with children at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of its charitable funds; conducted scientific experiments and floated around while taking in views of Earth. On Friday, they appeared on video at the New York Stock Exchange at the close of trading. Meals on board included pasta Bolognese, lamb and cold pizza.\n\u201cSorry it was cold! Dragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a tweet about the latter item. \nPrivate space trips are one part of a commercial space industry that also includes rocket-launch startups and venture-backed companies focused on refueling satellites, as well as larger aerospace companies with decades of experience building space vehicles for government clients.\nSpaceX isn\u2019t alone in seeing opportunity in tourist visits to space. This summer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed high-profile trips to the edge of space with their founders on board.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on future missions on its Starliner capsule, which has yet to carry people to space, could be bought by tourists.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat\u2019s next for commercial space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nExecutives have said SpaceX has a backlog of commercial trips booked and that it wants to conduct at least six such missions a year. Mr. Reed, the company\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said Saturday that interest in trips had been growing. \nIt might take years before more people are able to access space, in part because of the costs of such trips and relatively limited capacity. Virgin Galactic said in August it would charge consumers at least $450,000 a seat for its flights, while Blue Origin sold for about $30 million a seat on its rocket tha The four-person crew lands off the coast of Florida, completing a mission that included scientific research and cold pizza. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Rockets Out of Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "772",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-space-tourism-company-rockets-out-of-atmosphere-for-first-time-11544720558?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=17",
        "text": "After the flight, the closely held company said SpaceShip Two had climbed above 271,000 feet, or about 51.4 miles, reaching a maximum speed of 2.9 times the speed of sound.\nThe U.S. Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration consider 50 miles up to be the edge of space, though some scientists, space buffs and international record-keeping authorities say space starts even higher.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic years ago led the way in sparking interest in blasting tourists and small satellites into space using cheap rockets and various other unconventional launch systems. Experts consider it the fastest-growing segment in commercial space. But a December 2014 accident caused Virgin Galactic to assume a significantly lower profile.\nNow, the company has bounced back from the crash that killed a co-pilot and prompted federal criticism of design principles and what investigators determined was inadequate consideration of potential human error in pilot training. \nThursday\u2019s flight could put Virgin Galactic in a strong position to compete with Blue Origin, a rival space-tourism startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n The ventures are vying to be first to carry paying passengers outside the atmosphere in a U.S.-built spacecraft. Both companies have indicated commercial operations are likely to start sometime next year, but schedules are fluid and the outcome of future test flights could alter those plans. Mr. Branson\u2019s ambitions also include launching small satellites using a rocket released from a modified Boeing Co. 747.\nOver the years, Mr. Branson has sought more than $1.4 billion in funding from Middle Eastern investors for his space-plane venture, but much of that support is now uncertain due to Virgin Galactic\u2019s decision to sever financial ties with Saudi Arabia.\nMr. Branson and his team originally rolled out an early version of the rocket-powered craft nine years ago and initially hoped to begin regular flights several years later.\nDuring the intervening years, Virgin Galactic brought manufacturing and testing of its winged spacecraft in-house while revamping safety and quality-control safeguards. The 2014 flight was touted as a record-setting event before the accident. Since then, Mr. Branson has refused to predict test flight schedules.\nVirgin Galactic on Wednesday posted a message on Twitter seemingly aimed at tamping down expectations, suggesting the rocket motor perhaps wouldn\u2019t be ignited for the full duration needed to travel out of the atmosphere.\nBut after the flight, the company posted a flurry of tweets on the altitude and speed of SpaceShip Two.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s milestone also amounts to vindication for the billionaire entrepreneur known for his marketing savvy and personal commitment to space exploration. In the past, Mr. Branson has said he and some family members expect to be on the first one of his space planes carrying passengers.\nMr. Branson released a statement saying \u201cit was an indescribable feeling: joy, relief, exhilaration and anticipation for what is yet to come.\u201d \nWhile flying in clear skies Thursday in California with SpaceShip Two tucked under its wings, the four-engine carrier plane dubbed White Knight Two released the mostly white spacecraft at around 8 a.m. local time. The rocket motor fired as expected for 60 seconds, blasting the test vehicle into a suborbital trajectory. It deployed a movable tail to slow down during the descent and glided back toward its base, landing like a conventional aircraft about 45 minutes after takeoff. \nThursday was the fourth time the spacecraft, also called VSS Unity, has flown under its own power, with the rocket motor firing longer than in previous flights. The company said Wednesday that the test was intended to obtain data on supersonic-handling qualities and thermal dynamics. That ground controllers gave the green light for full-duration thrust indicates the vehicle didn\u2019t exhibit any unexpected problems or handling difficulties.\nThe flight marked the first time since the retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet in 2011 that a U.S.-built vehicle carried people into space. American astronauts travel to and from the international space station aboard Russian-built rockets and capsules.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. next year plan to start transporting astronauts into orbit on separate, domestically produced rockets and capsules. Both companies have longer-term plans for carrying tourists into space.\nFollowing Thursday\u2019s landing, a jubilant Mr. Branson shed tears of joy as he hugged bystanders, reflected on 14 years of effort and ruminated about the future. No other private spacecraft specifically designed to carry paying passengers has ever flown to the boundary to space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s chief executive and a former senior NASA official, said Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism venture, reached the edge of space in a test flight, four years after a fatal accident set back the project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Rockets Out of Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "773",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-space-tourism-company-rockets-out-of-atmosphere-for-first-time-11544720558?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=65",
        "text": "After the flight, the closely held company said SpaceShip Two had climbed above 271,000 feet, or about 51.4 miles, reaching a maximum speed of 2.9 times the speed of sound.\nThe U.S. Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration consider 50 miles up to be the edge of space, though some scientists, space buffs and international record-keeping authorities say space starts even higher.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic years ago led the way in sparking interest in blasting tourists and small satellites into space using cheap rockets and various other unconventional launch systems. Experts consider it the fastest-growing segment in commercial space. But a December 2014 accident caused Virgin Galactic to assume a significantly lower profile.\nNow, the company has bounced back from the crash that killed a co-pilot and prompted federal criticism of design principles and what investigators determined was inadequate consideration of potential human error in pilot training. \nThursday\u2019s flight could put Virgin Galactic in a strong position to compete with Blue Origin, a rival space-tourism startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n The ventures are vying to be first to carry paying passengers outside the atmosphere in a U.S.-built spacecraft. Both companies have indicated commercial operations are likely to start sometime next year, but schedules are fluid and the outcome of future test flights could alter those plans. Mr. Branson\u2019s ambitions also include launching small satellites using a rocket released from a modified Boeing Co. 747.\nOver the years, Mr. Branson has sought more than $1.4 billion in funding from Middle Eastern investors for his space-plane venture, but much of that support is now uncertain due to Virgin Galactic\u2019s decision to sever financial ties with Saudi Arabia.\nMr. Branson and his team originally rolled out an early version of the rocket-powered craft nine years ago and initially hoped to begin regular flights several years later.\nDuring the intervening years, Virgin Galactic brought manufacturing and testing of its winged spacecraft in-house while revamping safety and quality-control safeguards. The 2014 flight was touted as a record-setting event before the accident. Since then, Mr. Branson has refused to predict test flight schedules.\nVirgin Galactic on Wednesday posted a message on Twitter seemingly aimed at tamping down expectations, suggesting the rocket motor perhaps wouldn\u2019t be ignited for the full duration needed to travel out of the atmosphere.\nBut after the flight, the company posted a flurry of tweets on the altitude and speed of SpaceShip Two.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s milestone also amounts to vindication for the billionaire entrepreneur known for his marketing savvy and personal commitment to space exploration. In the past, Mr. Branson has said he and some family members expect to be on the first one of his space planes carrying passengers.\nMr. Branson released a statement saying \u201cit was an indescribable feeling: joy, relief, exhilaration and anticipation for what is yet to come.\u201d \nWhile flying in clear skies Thursday in California with SpaceShip Two tucked under its wings, the four-engine carrier plane dubbed White Knight Two released the mostly white spacecraft at around 8 a.m. local time. The rocket motor fired as expected for 60 seconds, blasting the test vehicle into a suborbital trajectory. It deployed a movable tail to slow down during the descent and glided back toward its base, landing like a conventional aircraft about 45 minutes after takeoff. \nThursday was the fourth time the spacecraft, also called VSS Unity, has flown under its own power, with the rocket motor firing longer than in previous flights. The company said Wednesday that the test was intended to obtain data on supersonic-handling qualities and thermal dynamics. That ground controllers gave the green light for full-duration thrust indicates the vehicle didn\u2019t exhibit any unexpected problems or handling difficulties.\nThe flight marked the first time since the retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet in 2011 that a U.S.-built vehicle carried people into space. American astronauts travel to and from the international space station aboard Russian-built rockets and capsules.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. next year plan to start transporting astronauts into orbit on separate, domestically produced rockets and capsules. Both companies have longer-term plans for carrying tourists into space.\nFollowing Thursday\u2019s landing, a jubilant Mr. Branson shed tears of joy as he hugged bystanders, reflected on 14 years of effort and ruminated about the future. No other private spacecraft specifically designed to carry paying passengers has ever flown to the boundary to space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s chief executive and a former senior NASA official, said Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism venture, reached the edge of space in a test flight, four years after a fatal accident set back the project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Rockets Out of Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "774",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-space-tourism-company-rockets-out-of-atmosphere-for-first-time-11544720558?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=61",
        "text": "After the flight, the closely held company said SpaceShip Two had climbed above 271,000 feet, or about 51.4 miles, reaching a maximum speed of 2.9 times the speed of sound.\nThe U.S. Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration consider 50 miles up to be the edge of space, though some scientists, space buffs and international record-keeping authorities say space starts even higher.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic years ago led the way in sparking interest in blasting tourists and small satellites into space using cheap rockets and various other unconventional launch systems. Experts consider it the fastest-growing segment in commercial space. But a December 2014 accident caused Virgin Galactic to assume a significantly lower profile.\nNow, the company has bounced back from the crash that killed a co-pilot and prompted federal criticism of design principles and what investigators determined was inadequate consideration of potential human error in pilot training. \nThursday\u2019s flight could put Virgin Galactic in a strong position to compete with Blue Origin, a rival space-tourism startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n The ventures are vying to be first to carry paying passengers outside the atmosphere in a U.S.-built spacecraft. Both companies have indicated commercial operations are likely to start sometime next year, but schedules are fluid and the outcome of future test flights could alter those plans. Mr. Branson\u2019s ambitions also include launching small satellites using a rocket released from a modified Boeing Co. 747.\nOver the years, Mr. Branson has sought more than $1.4 billion in funding from Middle Eastern investors for his space-plane venture, but much of that support is now uncertain due to Virgin Galactic\u2019s decision to sever financial ties with Saudi Arabia.\nMr. Branson and his team originally rolled out an early version of the rocket-powered craft nine years ago and initially hoped to begin regular flights several years later.\nDuring the intervening years, Virgin Galactic brought manufacturing and testing of its winged spacecraft in-house while revamping safety and quality-control safeguards. The 2014 flight was touted as a record-setting event before the accident. Since then, Mr. Branson has refused to predict test flight schedules.\nVirgin Galactic on Wednesday posted a message on Twitter seemingly aimed at tamping down expectations, suggesting the rocket motor perhaps wouldn\u2019t be ignited for the full duration needed to travel out of the atmosphere.\nBut after the flight, the company posted a flurry of tweets on the altitude and speed of SpaceShip Two.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s milestone also amounts to vindication for the billionaire entrepreneur known for his marketing savvy and personal commitment to space exploration. In the past, Mr. Branson has said he and some family members expect to be on the first one of his space planes carrying passengers.\nMr. Branson released a statement saying \u201cit was an indescribable feeling: joy, relief, exhilaration and anticipation for what is yet to come.\u201d \nWhile flying in clear skies Thursday in California with SpaceShip Two tucked under its wings, the four-engine carrier plane dubbed White Knight Two released the mostly white spacecraft at around 8 a.m. local time. The rocket motor fired as expected for 60 seconds, blasting the test vehicle into a suborbital trajectory. It deployed a movable tail to slow down during the descent and glided back toward its base, landing like a conventional aircraft about 45 minutes after takeoff. \nThursday was the fourth time the spacecraft, also called VSS Unity, has flown under its own power, with the rocket motor firing longer than in previous flights. The company said Wednesday that the test was intended to obtain data on supersonic-handling qualities and thermal dynamics. That ground controllers gave the green light for full-duration thrust indicates the vehicle didn\u2019t exhibit any unexpected problems or handling difficulties.\nThe flight marked the first time since the retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet in 2011 that a U.S.-built vehicle carried people into space. American astronauts travel to and from the international space station aboard Russian-built rockets and capsules.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. next year plan to start transporting astronauts into orbit on separate, domestically produced rockets and capsules. Both companies have longer-term plans for carrying tourists into space.\nFollowing Thursday\u2019s landing, a jubilant Mr. Branson shed tears of joy as he hugged bystanders, reflected on 14 years of effort and ruminated about the future. No other private spacecraft specifically designed to carry paying passengers has ever flown to the boundary to space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s chief executive and a former senior NASA official, said Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism venture, reached the edge of space in a test flight, four years after a fatal accident set back the project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Rockets Out of Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "775",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-space-tourism-company-rockets-out-of-atmosphere-for-first-time-11544720558?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=21",
        "text": "After the flight, the closely held company said SpaceShip Two had climbed above 271,000 feet, or about 51.4 miles, reaching a maximum speed of 2.9 times the speed of sound.\n\n\n\n\nThe U.S. Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration consider 50 miles up to be the edge of space, though some scientists, space buffs and international record-keeping authorities say space starts even higher.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic years ago led the way in sparking interest in blasting tourists and small satellites into space using cheap rockets and various other unconventional launch systems. Experts consider it the fastest-growing segment in commercial space. But a December 2014 accident caused Virgin Galactic to assume a significantly lower profile.\nNow, the company has bounced back from the crash that killed a co-pilot and prompted federal criticism of design principles and what investigators determined was inadequate consideration of potential human error in pilot training. \nThursday\u2019s flight could put Virgin Galactic in a strong position to compete with Blue Origin, a rival space-tourism startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n The ventures are vying to be first to carry paying passengers outside the atmosphere in a U.S.-built spacecraft. Both companies have indicated commercial operations are likely to start sometime next year, but schedules are fluid and the outcome of future test flights could alter those plans. Mr. Branson\u2019s ambitions also include launching small satellites using a rocket released from a modified Boeing Co. 747.\nOver the years, Mr. Branson has sought more than $1.4 billion in funding from Middle Eastern investors for his space-plane venture, but much of that support is now uncertain due to Virgin Galactic\u2019s decision to sever financial ties with Saudi Arabia.\nMr. Branson and his team originally rolled out an early version of the rocket-powered craft nine years ago and initially hoped to begin regular flights several years later.\nDuring the intervening years, Virgin Galactic brought manufacturing and testing of its winged spacecraft in-house while revamping safety and quality-control safeguards. The 2014 flight was touted as a record-setting event before the accident. Since then, Mr. Branson has refused to predict test flight schedules.\nVirgin Galactic on Wednesday posted a message on Twitter seemingly aimed at tamping down expectations, suggesting the rocket motor perhaps wouldn\u2019t be ignited for the full duration needed to travel out of the atmosphere.\nBut after the flight, the company posted a flurry of tweets on the altitude and speed of SpaceShip Two.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s milestone also amounts to vindication for the billionaire entrepreneur known for his marketing savvy and personal commitment to space exploration. In the past, Mr. Branson has said he and some family members expect to be on the first one of his space planes carrying passengers.\nMr. Branson released a statement saying \u201cit was an indescribable feeling: joy, relief, exhilaration and anticipation for what is yet to come.\u201d \nWhile flying in clear skies Thursday in California with SpaceShip Two tucked under its wings, the four-engine carrier plane dubbed White Knight Two released the mostly white spacecraft at around 8 a.m. local time. The rocket motor fired as expected for 60 seconds, blasting the test vehicle into a suborbital trajectory. It deployed a movable tail to slow down during the descent and glided back toward its base, landing like a conventional aircraft about 45 minutes after takeoff. \nThursday was the fourth time the spacecraft, also called VSS Unity, has flown under its own power, with the rocket motor firing longer than in previous flights. The company said Wednesday that the test was intended to obtain data on supersonic-handling qualities and thermal dynamics. That ground controllers gave the green light for full-duration thrust indicates the vehicle didn\u2019t exhibit any unexpected problems or handling difficulties.\nThe flight marked the first time since the retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet in 2011 that a U.S.-built vehicle carried people into space. American astronauts travel to and from the international space station aboard Russian-built rockets and capsules.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. next year plan to start transporting astronauts into orbit on separate, domestically produced rockets and capsules. Both companies have longer-term plans for carrying tourists into space.\nFollowing Thursday\u2019s landing, a jubilant Mr. Branson shed tears of joy as he hugged bystanders, reflected on 14 years of effort and ruminated about the future. No other private spacecraft specifically designed to carry paying passengers has ever flown to the boundary to space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s chief executive and a former senior NASA official, s Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism venture, reached the edge of space in a test flight, four years after a fatal accident set back the project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Rockets Out of Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "776",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-space-tourism-company-rockets-out-of-atmosphere-for-first-time-11544720558?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=82",
        "text": "After the flight, the closely held company said SpaceShip Two had climbed above 271,000 feet, or about 51.4 miles, reaching a maximum speed of 2.9 times the speed of sound.\n\n\n\n\nThe U.S. Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration consider 50 miles up to be the edge of space, though some scientists, space buffs and international record-keeping authorities say space starts even higher.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic years ago led the way in sparking interest in blasting tourists and small satellites into space using cheap rockets and various other unconventional launch systems. Experts consider it the fastest-growing segment in commercial space. But a December 2014 accident caused Virgin Galactic to assume a significantly lower profile.\nNow, the company has bounced back from the crash that killed a co-pilot and prompted federal criticism of design principles and what investigators determined was inadequate consideration of potential human error in pilot training. \nThursday\u2019s flight could put Virgin Galactic in a strong position to compete with Blue Origin, a rival space-tourism startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n The ventures are vying to be first to carry paying passengers outside the atmosphere in a U.S.-built spacecraft. Both companies have indicated commercial operations are likely to start sometime next year, but schedules are fluid and the outcome of future test flights could alter those plans. Mr. Branson\u2019s ambitions also include launching small satellites using a rocket released from a modified Boeing Co. 747.\nOver the years, Mr. Branson has sought more than $1.4 billion in funding from Middle Eastern investors for his space-plane venture, but much of that support is now uncertain due to Virgin Galactic\u2019s decision to sever financial ties with Saudi Arabia.\nMr. Branson and his team originally rolled out an early version of the rocket-powered craft nine years ago and initially hoped to begin regular flights several years later.\nDuring the intervening years, Virgin Galactic brought manufacturing and testing of its winged spacecraft in-house while revamping safety and quality-control safeguards. The 2014 flight was touted as a record-setting event before the accident. Since then, Mr. Branson has refused to predict test flight schedules.\nVirgin Galactic on Wednesday posted a message on Twitter seemingly aimed at tamping down expectations, suggesting the rocket motor perhaps wouldn\u2019t be ignited for the full duration needed to travel out of the atmosphere.\nBut after the flight, the company posted a flurry of tweets on the altitude and speed of SpaceShip Two.\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s milestone also amounts to vindication for the billionaire entrepreneur known for his marketing savvy and personal commitment to space exploration. In the past, Mr. Branson has said he and some family members expect to be on the first one of his space planes carrying passengers.\nMr. Branson released a statement saying \u201cit was an indescribable feeling: joy, relief, exhilaration and anticipation for what is yet to come.\u201d \nWhile flying in clear skies Thursday in California with SpaceShip Two tucked under its wings, the four-engine carrier plane dubbed White Knight Two released the mostly white spacecraft at around 8 a.m. local time. The rocket motor fired as expected for 60 seconds, blasting the test vehicle into a suborbital trajectory. It deployed a movable tail to slow down during the descent and glided back toward its base, landing like a conventional aircraft about 45 minutes after takeoff. \nThursday was the fourth time the spacecraft, also called VSS Unity, has flown under its own power, with the rocket motor firing longer than in previous flights. The company said Wednesday that the test was intended to obtain data on supersonic-handling qualities and thermal dynamics. That ground controllers gave the green light for full-duration thrust indicates the vehicle didn\u2019t exhibit any unexpected problems or handling difficulties.\nThe flight marked the first time since the retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet in 2011 that a U.S.-built vehicle carried people into space. American astronauts travel to and from the international space station aboard Russian-built rockets and capsules.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. next year plan to start transporting astronauts into orbit on separate, domestically produced rockets and capsules. Both companies have longer-term plans for carrying tourists into space.\nFollowing Thursday\u2019s landing, a jubilant Mr. Branson shed tears of joy as he hugged bystanders, reflected on 14 years of effort and ruminated about the future. No other private spacecraft specifically designed to carry paying passengers has ever flown to the boundary to space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s chief executive and a former senior NASA official, s Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism venture, reached the edge of space in a test flight, four years after a fatal accident set back the project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paul Allen spent years building the world\u2019s biggest airplane. He\u2019ll never see it fly. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "777",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/18/paul-allen-spent-years-building-worlds-biggest-airplane-hell-never-see-it-fly/",
        "text": "The world\u2019s largest airplane took a stroll the other day. Under the cloudless skies of the Mojave Desert, it rolled out of its hangar and powered down the runway. Slowly at first, then faster, 60 mph, then 70, then 80. But it stopped just short of liftoff, like a sprinter pulling up just before taking the long jump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe leap to flight will come soon. The plane needs a few more test runs down the tarmac. Then it will fly.Too bad Paul Allen will never get to see it. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, who had quietly been building the monster of an aircraft for several years, died this past week without ever seeing his twin-fuselage creation take to the skies.Story continues below advertisementWhich is a shame. Because Stratolaunch was designed not just to make aviation history, but help Allen, and the many others who grew up wanting to make space more accessible to regular people, realize his childhood space dreams.AdvertisementWhen Stratolaunch flies it would be the largest plane, as measured by wingspan, ever to take to the skies, bigger even than Howard Hughes\u2019s famed Spruce Goose, which flew once, in 1947.Often better known for his other pursuits, chief among them bringing personal computing software into people\u2019s homes, Allen was also an aerospace enthusiast. Stratolaunch was to be his crowning achievement, a massive plane of almost incomprehensible size, capable of carrying as many as three rockets tethered to its belly, which, once aloft, would drop like skydivers, one by one, before launching to orbit from the air.Story continues below advertisementIt had been criticized by some as a vanity project, and Allen as another billionaire with lofty, quixotic ambitions in space.But as he laid out his plans to me in an interview last year for my book \u2014 \u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d which traces the cosmic dreams of Allen, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeffrey P. Bezos \u2014 he said he was thinking of ways to harness the power of a revolution in satellite technology for good.AdvertisementBefore we sat down in his Seattle office, which offered a stunning view of the Space Needle and Elliott Bay, his staffers had warned me he might be a touch awkward. He\u2019s a genius, they said, but he could be skittish in interviews and as a result didn\u2019t do many.Story continues below advertisementBut as he talked about the future he envisioned in space, he was at ease and excited at the possibilities \u2014 especially with the advancements in satellite technology.Just like how computers have drastically reduced in size while increasing in performance, satellites have gone from the size of school buses to shoe boxes. Being able to put up constellations of them could transform all sorts of industries, he said, and even beam the Internet to all corners of the planet.\u201cThe capabilities of these small satellites is something that\u2019s really interesting and fascinating,\u201d he said, \u201cboth for communications, where a lot of people are putting up constellations of satellites, and for monitoring the challenged health of our planet.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe\u2019d become particularly interested in how space could be used to keep an eye on \u201cthings like illegal fishing in the ocean, which is an increasing problem.\u201dThe Pentagon was also taking an interest in ways to launch small satellites quickly and affordably. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson visited Stratolaunch last year. So did Vice President Pence, who heads the National Space Council.When I met with Allen, we chatted about his childhood passion for space, his first foray into human spaceflight and then most recent plans to build this massive plane, which was so big even he seemed awestruck by its size. That took me by surprise. This, after all, was a man used to doing big things.Story continues below advertisementOn the whiteboard in his office, there were all sorts of projects listed. On the shelf by the window was the Super Bowl trophy his Seattle Seahawks had won. Next to it was a model of his yacht, named Octopus, which cost a reported $200 million to build and came equipped with not one but two helicopter landing pads on its deck and a recording studio once used by Mick Jagger.AdvertisementBut in its ambition and complexity, Stratolaunch dwarfed even that.\u201cThis is big,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt. Is. Giant.\u201dWith six 747 engines and 28 wheels and miles of wiring coursing through its body, the plane is like multiple planes rolled into one \u2014 a supersize, Frankenstein-like creation that could only exist in the wild imagination of an eccentric, reclusive billionaire.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to using it to launch satellites, he had another plan, his company revealed to me that day last year: a space shuttle, known as Black Ice, that one day could carry people to orbit.But that was for someday in the future.For now, they were focused on getting Stratolaunch off the ground.The stuff of childhood dreamsAllen grew up knowing all the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts as if they were his favorite baseball players, he wrote in his memoir, \u201cIdea Man.\u201d And like many kids of his generation, he grew up wanting to become an astronaut. But then in the sixth grade he couldn\u2019t see the blackboard at school, he told me in his office, and he knew that meant \u201cmy dreams of being an astronaut were over.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis father was the associate director of the University of Washington Library, a second home of sorts for Allen. \u201cMy Dad was just letting me loose in the stacks,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI loved it.\u201dHe devoured not just science fiction, but books about Wernher von Braun, the German-born architect of NASA\u2019s might Saturn V rocket, which sent men to the moon. Once, Allen tried to build a homemade rocket of his own using the arm of an aluminum chair packed with powdered zinc and sulfur and firing it from a coffee pot. It didn\u2019t work.He did, however, make it down to the Kennedy Space Center in 1981 to witness the maiden flight of the space shuttle.\u201cThe sound was unbelievable,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe air was vibrating, and you could feel the compression waves going into your chest. You could feel the heat from the engines on your face.\u201dIn 2004, Allen made history when SpaceShipOne, the space plane he funded, won the $10 million AnsariX Prize challenge by becoming the first nongovernmental vehicle to fly a person to space. In three flights that year, test pilots rode the spaceplane past the 100 km threshold that is generally considered the edge of space. But each flight was risky and harrowing, and Allen found himself petrified that someone would get hurt or killed. The risk was just too great.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith computer software \u201cyou worst outcome is an error message,\u201d he wrote in his memoir. \u201cNow I knew the person whose life hung in the balance, and I found that hard to handle.\u201dBut others saw the flights as a precursor to the dawn of a new Space Age, one where corporations would compete and open space to the masses. Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, was smitten with the idea and acquired from Allen the rights to the technology behind SpaceShipOne.As they watched the final X Prize flight together, Branson turned to Allen and said, \u201cPaul, isn\u2019t this better than the best sex you\u2019ve ever had?\u201dAllen demurred.\u201cIf I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn\u2019t enjoy it very much,\u201d he wrote in his memoir.\u2018This is a dream\u2019Allen went off to pursue other projects, but in 2011 he announced he was getting back in the space game by building Stratolaunch.Advertisement\u201cYou have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cAnd this is a dream I\u2019m very excited about.\u201dThe announcement came at an interesting time \u2014 NASA had just retired the space shuttle, leaving it without a way to get astronauts to space. And there was great hope that a new commercial space industry, led by Musk\u2019s SpaceX and others, would help open the frontier.Allen said Stratolaunch would be part of that movement, and keep \u201cAmerica at the forefront of space exploration.\u201dBy the time I sat down with him six years later, the giant plane still hadn\u2019t flown.\u201cIt\u2019s taken longer than expected, as almost all rocket projects do,\u201d he said.But he was looking forward to seeing it take off. He couldn\u2019t wait for the day he\u2019d be back out on the flight line in Mojave, watching the plane pick up speed down the runway, moving faster and faster toward a future he had seen in his dreams since childhood.Read more:Companies in the CosmosWhy Paul Allen is building the world\u2019s largest airplaneReady to book your satellite launch online? In an interview last year, Allen talked about the future he envisioned in space, he was at ease and excited at the possibilities \u2014 especially with the advancements in satellite technology. Paul Allen spent years building the world\u2019s biggest airplane. He\u2019ll never see it fly.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paul Allen spent years building the world\u2019s biggest airplane. He\u2019ll never see it fly. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "778",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/18/paul-allen-spent-years-building-worlds-biggest-airplane-hell-never-see-it-fly/",
        "text": "The world\u2019s largest airplane took a stroll the other day. Under the cloudless skies of the Mojave Desert, it rolled out of its hangar and powered down the runway. Slowly at first, then faster, 60 mph, then 70, then 80. But it stopped just short of liftoff, like a sprinter pulling up just before taking the long jump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe leap to flight will come soon. The plane needs a few more test runs down the tarmac. Then it will fly.Too bad Paul Allen will never get to see it. The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, who had quietly been building the monster of an aircraft for several years, died this past week without ever seeing his twin-fuselage creation take to the skies.Story continues below advertisementWhich is a shame. Because Stratolaunch was designed not just to make aviation history, but help Allen, and the many others who grew up wanting to make space more accessible to regular people, realize his childhood space dreams.AdvertisementWhen Stratolaunch flies it would be the largest plane, as measured by wingspan, ever to take to the skies, bigger even than Howard Hughes\u2019s famed Spruce Goose, which flew once, in 1947.Often better known for his other pursuits, chief among them bringing personal computing software into people\u2019s homes, Allen was also an aerospace enthusiast. Stratolaunch was to be his crowning achievement, a massive plane of almost incomprehensible size, capable of carrying as many as three rockets tethered to its belly, which, once aloft, would drop like skydivers, one by one, before launching to orbit from the air.Story continues below advertisementIt had been criticized by some as a vanity project, and Allen as another billionaire with lofty, quixotic ambitions in space.But as he laid out his plans to me in an interview last year for my book \u2014 \u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d which traces the cosmic dreams of Allen, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeffrey P. Bezos \u2014 he said he was thinking of ways to harness the power of a revolution in satellite technology for good.AdvertisementBefore we sat down in his Seattle office, which offered a stunning view of the Space Needle and Elliott Bay, his staffers had warned me he might be a touch awkward. He\u2019s a genius, they said, but he could be skittish in interviews and as a result didn\u2019t do many.Story continues below advertisementBut as he talked about the future he envisioned in space, he was at ease and excited at the possibilities \u2014 especially with the advancements in satellite technology.Just like how computers have drastically reduced in size while increasing in performance, satellites have gone from the size of school buses to shoe boxes. Being able to put up constellations of them could transform all sorts of industries, he said, and even beam the Internet to all corners of the planet.\u201cThe capabilities of these small satellites is something that\u2019s really interesting and fascinating,\u201d he said, \u201cboth for communications, where a lot of people are putting up constellations of satellites, and for monitoring the challenged health of our planet.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe\u2019d become particularly interested in how space could be used to keep an eye on \u201cthings like illegal fishing in the ocean, which is an increasing problem.\u201dThe Pentagon was also taking an interest in ways to launch small satellites quickly and affordably. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson visited Stratolaunch last year. So did Vice President Pence, who heads the National Space Council.When I met with Allen, we chatted about his childhood passion for space, his first foray into human spaceflight and then most recent plans to build this massive plane, which was so big even he seemed awestruck by its size. That took me by surprise. This, after all, was a man used to doing big things.Story continues below advertisementOn the whiteboard in his office, there were all sorts of projects listed. On the shelf by the window was the Super Bowl trophy his Seattle Seahawks had won. Next to it was a model of his yacht, named Octopus, which cost a reported $200 million to build and came equipped with not one but two helicopter landing pads on its deck and a recording studio once used by Mick Jagger.AdvertisementBut in its ambition and complexity, Stratolaunch dwarfed even that.\u201cThis is big,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt. Is. Giant.\u201dWith six 747 engines and 28 wheels and miles of wiring coursing through its body, the plane is like multiple planes rolled into one \u2014 a supersize, Frankenstein-like creation that could only exist in the wild imagination of an eccentric, reclusive billionaire.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to using it to launch satellites, he had another plan, his company revealed to me that day last year: a space shuttle, known as Black Ice, that one day could carry people to orbit.But that was for someday in the future.For now, they were focused on getting Stratolaunch off the ground.The stuff of childhood dreamsAllen grew up knowing all the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts as if they were his favorite baseball players, he wrote in his memoir, \u201cIdea Man.\u201d And like many kids of his generation, he grew up wanting to become an astronaut. But then in the sixth grade he couldn\u2019t see the blackboard at school, he told me in his office, and he knew that meant \u201cmy dreams of being an astronaut were over.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis father was the associate director of the University of Washington Library, a second home of sorts for Allen. \u201cMy Dad was just letting me loose in the stacks,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI loved it.\u201dHe devoured not just science fiction, but books about Wernher von Braun, the German-born architect of NASA\u2019s might Saturn V rocket, which sent men to the moon. Once, Allen tried to build a homemade rocket of his own using the arm of an aluminum chair packed with powdered zinc and sulfur and firing it from a coffee pot. It didn\u2019t work.He did, however, make it down to the Kennedy Space Center in 1981 to witness the maiden flight of the space shuttle.\u201cThe sound was unbelievable,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe air was vibrating, and you could feel the compression waves going into your chest. You could feel the heat from the engines on your face.\u201dIn 2004, Allen made history when SpaceShipOne, the space plane he funded, won the $10 million AnsariX Prize challenge by becoming the first nongovernmental vehicle to fly a person to space. In three flights that year, test pilots rode the spaceplane past the 100 km threshold that is generally considered the edge of space. But each flight was risky and harrowing, and Allen found himself petrified that someone would get hurt or killed. The risk was just too great.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith computer software \u201cyou worst outcome is an error message,\u201d he wrote in his memoir. \u201cNow I knew the person whose life hung in the balance, and I found that hard to handle.\u201dBut others saw the flights as a precursor to the dawn of a new Space Age, one where corporations would compete and open space to the masses. Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, was smitten with the idea and acquired from Allen the rights to the technology behind SpaceShipOne.As they watched the final X Prize flight together, Branson turned to Allen and said, \u201cPaul, isn\u2019t this better than the best sex you\u2019ve ever had?\u201dAllen demurred.\u201cIf I was this anxious during any kind of interpersonal activity, I couldn\u2019t enjoy it very much,\u201d he wrote in his memoir.\u2018This is a dream\u2019Allen went off to pursue other projects, but in 2011 he announced he was getting back in the space game by building Stratolaunch.Advertisement\u201cYou have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cAnd this is a dream I\u2019m very excited about.\u201dThe announcement came at an interesting time \u2014 NASA had just retired the space shuttle, leaving it without a way to get astronauts to space. And there was great hope that a new commercial space industry, led by Musk\u2019s SpaceX and others, would help open the frontier.Allen said Stratolaunch would be part of that movement, and keep \u201cAmerica at the forefront of space exploration.\u201dBy the time I sat down with him six years later, the giant plane still hadn\u2019t flown.\u201cIt\u2019s taken longer than expected, as almost all rocket projects do,\u201d he said.But he was looking forward to seeing it take off. He couldn\u2019t wait for the day he\u2019d be back out on the flight line in Mojave, watching the plane pick up speed down the runway, moving faster and faster toward a future he had seen in his dreams since childhood.Read more:Companies in the CosmosWhy Paul Allen is building the world\u2019s largest airplaneReady to book your satellite launch online? In an interview last year, Allen talked about the future he envisioned in space, he was at ease and excited at the possibilities \u2014 especially with the advancements in satellite technology. Paul Allen spent years building the world\u2019s biggest airplane. He\u2019ll never see it fly.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It\u2019s later than you think\u2019: A grieving father\u2019s warning to other working parents goes viral (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "779",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/05/its-later-than-you-think-grieving-fathers-warning-other-working-parents-goes-viral/",
        "text": "In a wrenching essay, a tech executive in Portland, Ore., shared how the death of his 8-year-old son forced him to rethink how he has oriented his life around work, and he urged other parents to do the same.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a LinkedIn post that has gone viral, J.R. Storment detailed how his days had been dominated by work since he co-founded the Portland cloud management start-up Cloudability in 2011, the same month he had twin boys. And he wrote about the regret he felt about things he wished he had done differently with his son Wiley, who died unexpectedly in his sleep last month of complications from epilepsy. Storment said that he is struggling to redefine his relationship to work \u2014 and urged other parents not to make the same mistakes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of the things you are likely spending your time on you\u2019ll regret once you no longer have the time,\u201d Storment wrote.AdvertisementParents frequently schedule one-on-one meetings with co-workers, but do they schedule them with their kids? \u201cIf there\u2019s any lesson to take away from this, it\u2019s to remind others (and myself) not to miss out on the things that matter,\u201d he said in his essay.Millennials want a work-life balance. Their bosses just don\u2019t get why.The post struck a chord with working parents trying to juggle children and jobs in an age when technology dictates that work begins the moment you pick up your phone in the morning and stops only when you force yourself to put it down.\u201cThrough the story about this tragic event comes an incredibly important reminder about priorities ",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s not just Amazon: Apple quietly explores Northern Virginia for 20,000 workers (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "780",
        "date": "2018-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/its-not-just-amazon-apple-quietly-explores-northern-virginia-for-20000-jobs/2018/05/16/1c66b3b0-5566-11e8-abd8-265bd07a9859_story.html",
        "text": "Apple has quietly explored the idea of opening a campus for 20,000 employees in Northern Virginia, further advancing the possibility that the Washington area could evolve into an East Coast outpost for Silicon Valley.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightApple\u2019s consideration of the region comes eight months after Amazon.com selected three local jurisdictions there as part of its high-profile search for a North American headquarters outside of Seattle. Economic development officials under Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) proposed several sites for the project after Apple representatives said the company was seeking 4\u00a0million square feet of office space to accom",
        "author": "Jonathan O'Connell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apple announces major expansion in Austin, other U.S. cities (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "781",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/13/apple-announces-major-expansion-austin-other-us-cities/",
        "text": "Apple announced Thursday that it would be expanding its offices across the United States, with a $1 billion new campus in Austin and new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City, Calif. The tech giant also said it expects to add hundreds of jobs in Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colo., in the next three years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\"Talent, creativity and tomorrow\u2019s breakthrough ideas aren\u2019t limited by region or Zip code, and, with this new expansion, we\u2019re redoubling our commitment to cultivating the high-tech sector and workforce nationwide,\u201d Apple\u2019s chief executive, Tim Cook, said in a statement. He did not specify the types of jobs that were being created.With its expansion, the company has said it is on track to create 20,000 new jobs in the United States by 2023. While many celebrate the news of more jobs with one of the world\u2019s most powerful companies, some worry that an influx of highly paid workers might exacerbate income inequality, while increasing housing prices and cost of living.Amazon HQ2 decision: Amazon splits prize between Crystal City and New YorkApple\u2019s announcement comes as other major tech companies are also adding to their work forces. Google has plans to expand in San Jose, and last month Amazon announced that it would split its new headquarters between Long Island City, N.Y., and Crystal City in Arlington, Va., after a year-long search that drew bids from 238 cities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Amazon decision sparked an outcry for its theatrics in making cities bend over backward to sell themselves to Amazon and for eventually rejecting cities seemingly more in need of the transformation the online retailer had promised to bring. Public officials in New York have been especially critical upon learning that incentives from New York City and the state to entice Amazon amounted to roughly $3 billion, and the planning stages for the Queens headquarters have been marked by protesters.(Amazon\u2019s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, also owns The Washington Post.)Apple said in January that it planned to spend $30 billion on new facilities and hire 20,000 employees in the United States over the next five years, and company officials said much of that growth would come at a new location outside California and Texas, home to its two largest hubs. At one point, Apple was considering the District and Northern Virginia for a possible 20,000-person office, The Washington Post reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the ramp-up to Apple\u2019s expansion, Cook said in a March MSNBC interview that the company was explicitly trying to avoid the \u201cbeauty contest kind of thing\u201d that Amazon had spawned.\u201cFrom our point of view, we didn\u2019t want to create this contest, because I think what comes out of that is you wind up putting people through a ton of work to select one,\u201d Cook said. \u201cSo that is a case where you have a winner and a lot of losers. I don\u2019t like that.\u201dApple did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday\u2019s announcement.Valued at $920 billion, Apple is the most profitable company in the world. It completed its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., nicknamed \u201cthe spaceship\u201d for its circular design, last spring. The company employs 90,000 people in the United States, with workers in every state.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe new North Austin campus, which will be less than a mile from its current campus, will span more than 130 acres, according to a statement, including 50 acres of preserved open space, and will be wholly powered by renewable energy. The facility will be able to accommodate up to 15,000 workers, making Apple the largest private employer in Austin.\u201cApple is among the world\u2019s most innovative companies and an avid creator of jobs in Texas and across the country,\u201d Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said in a statement. \u201cTheir decision to expand operations in our state is a testament to the high-quality workforce and unmatched economic environment that Texas offers.\"In addition to new sites that can accommodate more than 1,000 employees in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City, Apple also said it plans to invest $10 billion in U.S. data centers over the next five years, including $4.5 billion this year and next. Apple announced a $1 billion new campus in the Texas capital, and new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City. Apple announces major expansion in Austin, other U.S. cities",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Took Richard Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next. (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "782",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-took-richard-branson-to-space-paying-customers-are-next-11626088448?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=6",
        "text": "Your browser does not support the audio tag.What\u2019s NewsWhat Virgin Galactic's Flight Could Mean for the Aerospace IndustryP.M. Edition for July 12. British billionaire Richard Branson and five other crew members successfully flew to the edge of space on Sunday. But what's the practical impact of the trip for aerospace and the nascent space tourism sector? Aerospace reporter Doug Cameron joins host Annmarie Fertoli to discuss.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic shares, which have attracted a big retail following, fell 17% on Monday after the company said it could sell up to $500 million in stock. \n\n\n\n\nAt the crux of Galactic\u2019s business model will be whether demand for space travel is sustainable. Analysts have been trying to figure that out, looking at various comparatives, from the use of private jets to the number of people who have climbed Mount Everest.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity, above New Mexico on Sunday, is part of a new generation\u2019s space race.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like a Venn diagram\u201d of thrill-seekers and high-wealth individuals, said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America.\n\n\nThe 90-minute flight was a critical marketing moment after years of slow progress and setbacks. A devastating 2014 failed launch resulted in the death of a Virgin crew member.\n\u201cI think and hope we showed the world today it\u2019s going to be possible to see this planet from space, and what that could be like,\u201d Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said after Sunday\u2019s launch. \u201cThe scale which [we] were able to share that with the world through this live stream was really important.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s role was to assess the experience for a private customer, from training, to how the company helps passengers build confidence before takeoff, to the actual launch into space, Mr. Colglazier said. For new astronauts, that process is being streamlined to between five and seven days, he said.\nMr. Branson said he has inserted himself into the customer experience of many of his entrepreneurial ventures, including airlines, cruise lines and trains. \u201cI\u2019ve written down 30 or 40 little things that will make the next experience for the next person who goes to space with us that much better,\u201d he said at a press conference Sunday after the flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe flight by Richard Branson and the crew on Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane was broadcast live.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIn the next few months, two more flights are set to take off, one more manned by Virgin crew and a second carrying members of the Italian Air Force. Starting next year, the company\u2019s commercial space flights will begin in earnest from 2022 as it aims to increase to some 400 flights a year.\nTo get to that number of flights, Mr. Colglazier estimates the company will likely need \u201chigh-single-digit to low-double-digit number of spaceships.\u201d From there, Virgin Galactic is preparing to build additional spaceport facilities, potentially in other countries.\nAbout two million people can afford to go to space, according to equity analysts at Vertical Research Partners, with that high-net-wealth population growing at around 6% each year. It estimates that Virgin needs to transport around 1,700, or about 0.08% of those individuals, to space each year for its model to work.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 for a chance to experience space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWhat aspiring astronauts are willing to pay isn\u2019t yet clear. Blue Origin received more than 20 bids in excess of $4.8 million to grab the first seat on its first passenger mission next week, which analysts say indicate a high level of untapped demand. Space tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n last year. Virgin says it is aiming to generate $1 billion for every spaceport it constructs.\nAs of March, Virgin Galactic had about 600 bookings, priced at an average of $250,000, with $80 million in deposits from would-be astronauts. UBS estimates that the price point for tickets will likely rise to between $300,000 to $400,000 per ticket, with prices potentially becoming more accessible as operations scale and costs reduced.\nTicket sales were paused after the 2014 catastrophe. Mr. Colglazier said the plan is to release a next tranche of tickets toward the end of summer or early fall. \n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin La After Sunday\u2019s successful launch, Virgin Galactic\u2019s bet on space tourism is moving from prototype development to building a sustainable business. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Makes NYSE Debut (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "783",
        "date": "2019-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-makes-nyse-debut-11572281019?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=19",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s listing was made possible after Social Capital Hedosophia, a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, reached a deal in July to acquire a stake in Mr. Branson\u2019s firm. The proceeds from the $820 million deal are expected to help fund the space-tourism business until its spaceships can commercially operate and potentially turn a profit.\n\n\n\n\nMonday\u2019s debut also marked the first time shares of a human-spaceflight venture have been traded on a public market. Virgin Galactic, listed under the ticker SPCE, is racing to send tourists into space ahead of rivals such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\n\n\n\u201cHaving closed a number of public companies, this is the most satisfying,\u201d Mr. Branson said in an interview. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of skeptics over the last 15 years.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here\u2019s how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally published April 11, 2019)\n \n\n\nVirgin Galactic expects to scale its commercial operations in mid-2020, and, in a tweet Monday, the company said the public listing puts it \u201con a clear path\u201d to launching the service.\nSPACs have been growing in popularity due to the booming market for initial public offerings and strong interest from private-equity firms and others. They typically have two years to use capital they raise to buy a company and take it public. Social Capital Hedosophia, led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chamath Palihapitiya,\n\n\n\n chief executive of venture-capital firm Social Capital LP, began trading on the NYSE in September 2017.\nVirgin Galactic said Friday it raised more than $450 million from the transaction, giving it a $2.3 billion market capitalization. Existing Virgin Galactic shareholders own nearly 59% of the newly publicly traded firm.\nMr. Branson has been pursuing the notion of blasting tourists and small satellites into space for more than a decade. Virgin Galactic, founded in 2004, previously had raised more than $1 billion, mostly from Mr. Branson.\nThe company\u2019s plans have been delayed multiple times, most notably following a December 2014 crash that left one person dead, a pilot. \nSome 600 people have already paid a total of roughly $80 million to secure seats on Virgin Galactic\u2019s space vehicles. Though sales of new tickets are now on hold, another 3,700 people have registered for the opportunity to purchase seats.\nBefore agreeing to terms with Social Capital, Virgin Galactic walked away from a $1 billion investment offer from Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident writer, at a Saudi consulate.\n\u201cWe\u2019ve more than replaced what we\u2019ve turned down,\u201d Mr. Branson said.\nIn the transaction that took Virgin Galactic public,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n agreed to invest $20 million in the company\u2019s stock and Social Capital\u2019s Mr. Palihapitiya also bought $100 million of stock.\nVirgin Galactic reported a net loss of $138.1 million on $2.8 million in revenue in 2018, according to securities filings. Through six months this year, it recorded losses of $86.7 million on $2.4 million in revenue.\nIf able to begin commercial operations next June, Virgin Galactic has said it could be profitable on an Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, basis by the end of 2021.\nMr. Branson started building his global empire in the early 1970s with Virgin Records, which he sold in 1992. His portfolio has expanded to include everything from airlines to wine.\n\n\nMore Heard on the Street: Quest Could Get Bumpier \n\n\nWrite to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com Virgin Galactic made its trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange, giving public investors their first chance to buy a piece of the space-tourism company founded by Richard Branson. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Makes NYSE Debut (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "784",
        "date": "2019-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-makes-nyse-debut-11572281019?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=64",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s listing was made possible after Social Capital Hedosophia, a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, reached a deal in July to acquire a stake in Mr. Branson\u2019s firm. The proceeds from the $820 million deal are expected to help fund the space-tourism business until its spaceships can commercially operate and potentially turn a profit.\n\n\n\n\nMonday\u2019s debut also marked the first time shares of a human-spaceflight venture have been traded on a public market. Virgin Galactic, listed under the ticker SPCE, is racing to send tourists into space ahead of rivals such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\n\n\n\u201cHaving closed a number of public companies, this is the most satisfying,\u201d Mr. Branson said in an interview. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of skeptics over the last 15 years.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here\u2019s how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally published April 11, 2019)\n \n\n\nVirgin Galactic expects to scale its commercial operations in mid-2020, and, in a tweet Monday, the company said the public listing puts it \u201con a clear path\u201d to launching the service.\nSPACs have been growing in popularity due to the booming market for initial public offerings and strong interest from private-equity firms and others. They typically have two years to use capital they raise to buy a company and take it public. Social Capital Hedosophia, led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chamath Palihapitiya,\n\n\n\n chief executive of venture-capital firm Social Capital LP, began trading on the NYSE in September 2017.\nVirgin Galactic said Friday it raised more than $450 million from the transaction, giving it a $2.3 billion market capitalization. Existing Virgin Galactic shareholders own nearly 59% of the newly publicly traded firm.\nMr. Branson has been pursuing the notion of blasting tourists and small satellites into space for more than a decade. Virgin Galactic, founded in 2004, previously had raised more than $1 billion, mostly from Mr. Branson.\nThe company\u2019s plans have been delayed multiple times, most notably following a December 2014 crash that left one person dead, a pilot. \nSome 600 people have already paid a total of roughly $80 million to secure seats on Virgin Galactic\u2019s space vehicles. Though sales of new tickets are now on hold, another 3,700 people have registered for the opportunity to purchase seats.\nBefore agreeing to terms with Social Capital, Virgin Galactic walked away from a $1 billion investment offer from Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident writer, at a Saudi consulate.\n\u201cWe\u2019ve more than replaced what we\u2019ve turned down,\u201d Mr. Branson said.\nIn the transaction that took Virgin Galactic public,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n agreed to invest $20 million in the company\u2019s stock and Social Capital\u2019s Mr. Palihapitiya also bought $100 million of stock.\nVirgin Galactic reported a net loss of $138.1 million on $2.8 million in revenue in 2018, according to securities filings. Through six months this year, it recorded losses of $86.7 million on $2.4 million in revenue.\nIf able to begin commercial operations next June, Virgin Galactic has said it could be profitable on an Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, basis by the end of 2021.\nMr. Branson started building his global empire in the early 1970s with Virgin Records, which he sold in 1992. His portfolio has expanded to include everything from airlines to wine.\n\n\nMore Heard on the Street: Quest Could Get Bumpier \n\n\nWrite to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com Virgin Galactic made its trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange, giving public investors their first chance to buy a piece of the space-tourism company founded by Richard Branson. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Took Richard Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next. (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "785",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-took-richard-branson-to-space-paying-customers-are-next-11626088448?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=20",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic shares, which have attracted a big retail following, fell 17% on Monday after the company said it could sell up to $500 million in stock. \nAt the crux of Galactic\u2019s business model will be whether demand for space travel is sustainable. Analysts have been trying to figure that out, looking at various comparatives, from the use of private jets to the number of people who have climbed Mount Everest.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity, above New Mexico on Sunday, is part of a new generation\u2019s space race.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like a Venn diagram\u201d of thrill-seekers and high-wealth individuals, said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America.\n\n\nThe 90-minute flight was a critical marketing moment after years of slow progress and setbacks. A devastating 2014 failed launch resulted in the death of a Virgin crew member.\n\u201cI think and hope we showed the world today it\u2019s going to be possible to see this planet from space, and what that could be like,\u201d Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said after Sunday\u2019s launch. \u201cThe scale which [we] were able to share that with the world through this live stream was really important.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s role was to assess the experience for a private customer, from training, to how the company helps passengers build confidence before takeoff, to the actual launch into space, Mr. Colglazier said. For new astronauts, that process is being streamlined to between five and seven days, he said.\nMr. Branson said he has inserted himself into the customer experience of many of his entrepreneurial ventures, including airlines, cruise lines and trains. \u201cI\u2019ve written down 30 or 40 little things that will make the next experience for the next person who goes to space with us that much better,\u201d he said at a press conference Sunday after the flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe flight by Richard Branson and the crew on Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane was broadcast live.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIn the next few months, two more flights are set to take off, one more manned by Virgin crew and a second carrying members of the Italian Air Force. Starting next year, the company\u2019s commercial space flights will begin in earnest from 2022 as it aims to increase to some 400 flights a year.\nTo get to that number of flights, Mr. Colglazier estimates the company will likely need \u201chigh-single-digit to low-double-digit number of spaceships.\u201d From there, Virgin Galactic is preparing to build additional spaceport facilities, potentially in other countries.\nAbout two million people can afford to go to space, according to equity analysts at Vertical Research Partners, with that high-net-wealth population growing at around 6% each year. It estimates that Virgin needs to transport around 1,700, or about 0.08% of those individuals, to space each year for its model to work.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 for a chance to experience space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWhat aspiring astronauts are willing to pay isn\u2019t yet clear. Blue Origin received more than 20 bids in excess of $4.8 million to grab the first seat on its first passenger mission next week, which analysts say indicate a high level of untapped demand. Space tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n last year. Virgin says it is aiming to generate $1 billion for every spaceport it constructs.\nAs of March, Virgin Galactic had about 600 bookings, priced at an average of $250,000, with $80 million in deposits from would-be astronauts. UBS estimates that the price point for tickets will likely rise to between $300,000 to $400,000 per ticket, with prices potentially becoming more accessible as operations scale and costs reduced.\nTicket sales were paused after the 2014 catastrophe. Mr. Colglazier said the plan is to release a next tranche of tickets toward the end of summer or early fall. \n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@ws After Sunday\u2019s successful launch, Virgin Galactic\u2019s bet on space tourism is moving from prototype development to building a sustainable business. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Took Richard Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next. (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "786",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-took-richard-branson-to-space-paying-customers-are-next-11626088448?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=27",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic shares, which have attracted a big retail following, fell 17% on Monday after the company said it could sell up to $500 million in stock. \nAt the crux of Galactic\u2019s business model will be whether demand for space travel is sustainable. Analysts have been trying to figure that out, looking at various comparatives, from the use of private jets to the number of people who have climbed Mount Everest.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s VSS Unity, above New Mexico on Sunday, is part of a new generation\u2019s space race.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like a Venn diagram\u201d of thrill-seekers and high-wealth individuals, said Ron Epstein, an aerospace industry analyst at Bank of America.\n\n\nThe 90-minute flight was a critical marketing moment after years of slow progress and setbacks. A devastating 2014 failed launch resulted in the death of a Virgin crew member.\n\u201cI think and hope we showed the world today it\u2019s going to be possible to see this planet from space, and what that could be like,\u201d Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said after Sunday\u2019s launch. \u201cThe scale which [we] were able to share that with the world through this live stream was really important.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PHOTOS: Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Are Going to Space. Here\u2019s How Their Trips Will Differ.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s role was to assess the experience for a private customer, from training, to how the company helps passengers build confidence before takeoff, to the actual launch into space, Mr. Colglazier said. For new astronauts, that process is being streamlined to between five and seven days, he said.\nMr. Branson said he has inserted himself into the customer experience of many of his entrepreneurial ventures, including airlines, cruise lines and trains. \u201cI\u2019ve written down 30 or 40 little things that will make the next experience for the next person who goes to space with us that much better,\u201d he said at a press conference Sunday after the flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe flight by Richard Branson and the crew on Virgin Galactic's passenger rocket plane was broadcast live.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n virgin galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIn the next few months, two more flights are set to take off, one more manned by Virgin crew and a second carrying members of the Italian Air Force. Starting next year, the company\u2019s commercial space flights will begin in earnest from 2022 as it aims to increase to some 400 flights a year.\nTo get to that number of flights, Mr. Colglazier estimates the company will likely need \u201chigh-single-digit to low-double-digit number of spaceships.\u201d From there, Virgin Galactic is preparing to build additional spaceport facilities, potentially in other countries.\nAbout two million people can afford to go to space, according to equity analysts at Vertical Research Partners, with that high-net-wealth population growing at around 6% each year. It estimates that Virgin needs to transport around 1,700, or about 0.08% of those individuals, to space each year for its model to work.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you pay $250,000 for a chance to experience space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWhat aspiring astronauts are willing to pay isn\u2019t yet clear. Blue Origin received more than 20 bids in excess of $4.8 million to grab the first seat on its first passenger mission next week, which analysts say indicate a high level of untapped demand. Space tourism could generate close to $4 billion in annual revenue by 2030, according to an estimate from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n last year. Virgin says it is aiming to generate $1 billion for every spaceport it constructs.\nAs of March, Virgin Galactic had about 600 bookings, priced at an average of $250,000, with $80 million in deposits from would-be astronauts. UBS estimates that the price point for tickets will likely rise to between $300,000 to $400,000 per ticket, with prices potentially becoming more accessible as operations scale and costs reduced.\nTicket sales were paused after the 2014 catastrophe. Mr. Colglazier said the plan is to release a next tranche of tickets toward the end of summer or early fall. \n\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@w After Sunday\u2019s successful launch, Virgin Galactic\u2019s bet on space tourism is moving from prototype development to building a sustainable business. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s Stock Has Worst Day in More Than a Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "787",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-could-sell-up-to-500-million-in-stock-after-branson-went-to-space-11626108175?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=20",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic said Monday that it has struck a distribution agency agreement with Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Morgan Stanley & Co. and Goldman Sachs & Co. to sell as much as $500 million in stock from time to time. Proceeds from any sale would go toward the development of its spaceship fleet and other purposes.\nShares of Virgin Galactic fell 17% to $40.69, its worst single-day percentage loss since March 2020. The company\u2019s market value slipped below $10 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s market value is around $10 billion. The company\u2019s rocket plane took founder Richard Branson to the edge of space on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brian Jordan/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe stock was up as much as 3% earlier in Monday\u2019s session before news of the sale was disclosed. Despite the decline Monday, the company\u2019s share price is still more than double it was a year ago.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic said it also could sell its stock to one or more of the agents at a price agreed upon at the time of the sale.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.What\u2019s NewsWhat Virgin Galactic's Flight Could Mean for the Aerospace IndustryP.M. Edition for July 12. British billionaire Richard Branson and five other crew members successfully flew to the edge of space on Sunday. But what's the practical impact of the trip for aerospace and the nascent space tourism sector? Aerospace reporter Doug Cameron joins host Annmarie Fertoli to discuss.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s trip on the VSS Unity space plane brings the company closer to taking passengers to and from space. Virgin Galactic plans to start commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights.\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n also has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin, which plans to fly him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket July 20.\nVirgin Galactic has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\n\n\nMore Virgin Galactic CoverageFurther WSJ coverage of the Richard Branson-founded company, selected by the editors. Virgin Galactic Took Richard Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next Richard Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What he Learned Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Really a Space Company? What's Next For Space Tourism (Podcast and Transcript, July 9) \n\n\nWrite to Dave Sebastian at dave.sebastian@wsj.com Virgin Galactic\u2019s shares fell 17% after the space-tourism company said it could sell as much as $500 million in stock. The announcement came a day after the company\u2019s founder, Richard Branson, and five other crew members flew to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Dave Sebastian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s Stock Has Worst Day in More Than a Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "788",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-could-sell-up-to-500-million-in-stock-after-branson-went-to-space-11626108175?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=6",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic said Monday that it has struck a distribution agency agreement with Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Morgan Stanley & Co. and Goldman Sachs & Co. to sell as much as $500 million in stock from time to time. Proceeds from any sale would go toward the development of its spaceship fleet and other purposes.\n\n\n\n\nShares of Virgin Galactic fell 17% to $40.69, its worst single-day percentage loss since March 2020. The company\u2019s market value slipped below $10 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s market value is around $10 billion. The company\u2019s rocket plane took founder Richard Branson to the edge of space on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brian Jordan/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe stock was up as much as 3% earlier in Monday\u2019s session before news of the sale was disclosed. Despite the decline Monday, the company\u2019s share price is still more than double it was a year ago.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic said it also could sell its stock to one or more of the agents at a price agreed upon at the time of the sale.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.What\u2019s NewsWhat Virgin Galactic's Flight Could Mean for the Aerospace IndustryP.M. Edition for July 12. British billionaire Richard Branson and five other crew members successfully flew to the edge of space on Sunday. But what's the practical impact of the trip for aerospace and the nascent space tourism sector? Aerospace reporter Doug Cameron joins host Annmarie Fertoli to discuss.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s trip on the VSS Unity space plane brings the company closer to taking passengers to and from space. Virgin Galactic plans to start commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights.\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n also has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin, which plans to fly him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket July 20.\nVirgin Galactic has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\n\n\nMore Virgin Galactic CoverageFurther WSJ coverage of the Richard Branson-founded company, selected by the editors. Virgin Galactic Took Richard Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next Richard Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What he Learned Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Really a Space Company? What's Next For Space Tourism (Podcast and Transcript, July 9) \n\n\nWrite to Dave Sebastian at dave.sebastian@wsj.com Virgin Galactic\u2019s shares fell 17% after the space-tourism company said it could sell as much as $500 million in stock. The announcement came a day after the company\u2019s founder, Richard Branson, and five other crew members flew to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Dave Sebastian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s Stock Has Worst Day in More Than a Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "789",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-could-sell-up-to-500-million-in-stock-after-branson-went-to-space-11626108175?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=27",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic said Monday that it has struck a distribution agency agreement with Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, Morgan Stanley & Co. and Goldman Sachs & Co. to sell as much as $500 million in stock from time to time. Proceeds from any sale would go toward the development of its spaceship fleet and other purposes.\n\n\n\n\nShares of Virgin Galactic fell 17% to $40.69, its worst single-day percentage loss since March 2020. The company\u2019s market value slipped below $10 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s market value is around $10 billion. The company\u2019s rocket plane took founder Richard Branson to the edge of space on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brian Jordan/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe stock was up as much as 3% earlier in Monday\u2019s session before news of the sale was disclosed. Despite the decline Monday, the company\u2019s share price is still more than double it was a year ago.\n\n\nVirgin Galactic said it also could sell its stock to one or more of the agents at a price agreed upon at the time of the sale.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s trip on the VSS Unity space plane brings the company closer to taking passengers to and from space. Virgin Galactic plans to start commercial service next year, charging passengers hundreds of thousands of dollars each for such flights.\nOther companies are expected to join Virgin Galactic in transporting passengers to and from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to fly the chief executive of a payments company and three others into orbit this year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n also has been investing in his space company, Blue Origin, which plans to fly him and three others to suborbital space on a company rocket July 20.\nVirgin Galactic has reported 600 reservations for future flights backed by $80 million in deposits. It reported a loss of $273 million for last year and, compared with Blue Origin and SpaceX, has a business model that is more deeply tied to the emergence of a space-tourism sector.\n\n\nMore Virgin Galactic CoverageFurther WSJ coverage of the Richard Branson-founded company, selected by the editors. Virgin Galactic Took Richard Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next Richard Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What he Learned Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Really a Space Company? What's Next For Space Tourism (Podcast and Transcript, July 9) \n\n\nWrite to Dave Sebastian at dave.sebastian@wsj.com Virgin Galactic\u2019s shares fell 17% after the space-tourism company said it could sell as much as $500 million in stock. The announcement came a day after the company\u2019s founder, Richard Branson, and five other crew members flew to the edge of space. ",
        "author": "Dave Sebastian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned. (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "790",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-went-to-space-heres-what-he-learned-11626099007?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=6",
        "text": "The Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nHere are a few observations from the 70-year-old, serial entrepreneur, both from space and after he came back to earth.\nWhat the moment means for young entrepreneurs \n\n\n\nI was once a kid with a dream looking up to the stars, and now I\u2019m an adult in a spaceship looking back to our beautiful earth. To the next generation of dreamers: If we can do this, just imagine what you can do. And I look forward to you all following your dreams and doing wonderful things.\nWhy did he need to go himself? I\u2019ve had a notebook with me. I\u2019ve written down 30 or 40 little things that will make the next experience for the next person who goes to space with us that much better. And the only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it.\n\n\nHow did he find the trip? 99.9% was beyond my wildest dreams. It is impossible to describe, well, I should try, what it\u2019s like going from 0 to 3 Mach in 7 or 8 seconds, and then as you go into space it\u2019s just, the views are breathtaking.\nAbout last-minute preparations: The only thing I was worried about was some tiny little something that would get in the way, that would stop us going into space because of something tiny. Now, after 17 years, the team is so meticulous, X-raying every single bit of the craft and so on, so no concerns on that count.\nWhat\u2019s next? Whether I will do another adventure, I\u2019m not sure if it would be fair to put my family through another one. I think I\u2019ve got the record for being pulled out of the sea five times by helicopters. So I\u2019ll definitely give it a rest for the time being.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nWrite to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The serial entrepreneur traveled more than 50 miles above sea level on Sunday. Here are a few observations from the 70 year old, both from space and after he came back to earth. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned. (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "791",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-went-to-space-heres-what-he-learned-11626099007?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=17",
        "text": "The Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nHere are a few observations from the 70-year-old, serial entrepreneur, both from space and after he came back to earth.\nWhat the moment means for young entrepreneurs I was once a kid with a dream looking up to the stars, and now I\u2019m an adult in a spaceship looking back to our beautiful earth. To the next generation of dreamers: If we can do this, just imagine what you can do. And I look forward to you all following your dreams and doing wonderful things.\nWhy did he need to go himself? I\u2019ve had a notebook with me. I\u2019ve written down 30 or 40 little things that will make the next experience for the next person who goes to space with us that much better. And the only way you sometimes can find these little things is to get in a spaceship and go to space and experience it.\n\n\nHow did he find the trip? 99.9% was beyond my wildest dreams. It is impossible to describe, well, I should try, what it\u2019s like going from 0 to 3 Mach in 7 or 8 seconds, and then as you go into space it\u2019s just, the views are breathtaking.\nAbout last-minute preparations: The only thing I was worried about was some tiny little something that would get in the way, that would stop us going into space because of something tiny. Now, after 17 years, the team is so meticulous, X-raying every single bit of the craft and so on, so no concerns on that count.\nWhat\u2019s next? Whether I will do another adventure, I\u2019m not sure if it would be fair to put my family through another one. I think I\u2019ve got the record for being pulled out of the sea five times by helicopters. So I\u2019ll definitely give it a rest for the time being.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nWrite to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The serial entrepreneur traveled more than 50 miles above sea level on Sunday. Here are a few observations from the 70 year old, both from space and after he came back to earth. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Astronauts Float Through Orbit With Video Calls, Cold Pizza, Earth Views (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "792",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-astronauts-float-through-orbit-with-video-calls-cold-pizza-earth-views-11631920830?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=4",
        "text": "The mission represents the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Traveled to Space: Here\u2019s How Their Trips Differed \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re giving all of our time right now to science, research and some ukulele playing, and trying to raise some good awareness for an important cause for us back on Earth,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the entrepreneur who paid for the mission, said during a SpaceX live stream Friday afternoon.\n\n\nThe comments were the crew\u2019s first public remarks since they lifted off Wednesday evening in the Crew Dragon vehicle stacked atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.\nAt one point during the live stream their second day in orbit, Mr. Isaacman, chief executive of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n appeared to be perpendicular to a camera, floating.\nChris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee, played a ukulele for a moment, while Sian Proctor showed off a drawing she made. Crew member Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, appeared upside down when the live stream began.\n\u201cHayley is a champ at spinning,\u201d Dr. Proctor said.\nThose on board said they had been enjoying looking at Earth from a domed-cupola window, which SpaceX added to the vehicle in the place of a docking system that wasn\u2019t needed because the vehicle isn\u2019t linking to the International Space Station during the trip. The views, Ms. Arceneaux said, \u201care out of this world.\u201d\nThe crew members discussed some other tidbits about private space travel. Mr. Sembroski confirmed there was coffee available. One of their first meals on board, according to SpaceX: cold pizza.\nThe song \u201cYou\u2019re the Inspiration\u201d by the band Chicago woke the crew up Friday, according to a tweet earlier from the team behind the mission.\nMr. Isaacman said the crew had been using a portable ultrasound device for various experiments. They also have taken blood samples and conducted cognitive tests. SpaceX, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medicine have been collecting environmental and medical data from the crew for research purposes.\nCrew members spoke with patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of charitable funds being raised by the flight, according to a video the institution posted online.\nThey also reached Tom Cruise. \u201cYou can be our wingman anytime,\u201d the mission\u2019s official\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account said about the chat with the actor. At the close of the trading Friday, the crew appeared on a screen at the New York Stock Exchange.\nDuring their first day in orbit, the crew traveled around Earth nearly six times, conducting some scientific experiments and eating before heading to bed. Mr. Isaacman also placed two sports bets.\nThe flight has been drawing attention from National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel, including Administrator Bill Nelson, who congratulated the crew and said on Twitter that NASA looks forward to a future when it is \u201cone of many customers in the commercial space market.\u201d\nInvestors have also been following the mission, the latest in a string of flights that have sent private civilians to space, stoking expectations about a space-tourism market. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed trips with crew members on board to the edge of space.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com SpaceX says it plans to land crew in the waters off Florida just after 7 p.m. on Saturday. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Astronauts Float Through Orbit With Video Calls, Cold Pizza, Earth Views (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "793",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-astronauts-float-through-orbit-with-video-calls-cold-pizza-earth-views-11631920830?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=15",
        "text": "The mission represents the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Traveled to Space: Here\u2019s How Their Trips Differed \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re giving all of our time right now to science, research and some ukulele playing, and trying to raise some good awareness for an important cause for us back on Earth,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the entrepreneur who paid for the mission, said during a SpaceX live stream Friday afternoon.\n\n\nThe comments were the crew\u2019s first public remarks since they lifted off Wednesday evening in the Crew Dragon vehicle stacked atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.\nAt one point during the live stream their second day in orbit, Mr. Isaacman, chief executive of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n appeared to be perpendicular to a camera, floating.\nChris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee, played a ukulele for a moment, while Sian Proctor showed off a drawing she made. Crew member Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, appeared upside down when the live stream began.\n\u201cHayley is a champ at spinning,\u201d Dr. Proctor said.\nThose on board said they had been enjoying looking at Earth from a domed-cupola window, which SpaceX added to the vehicle in the place of a docking system that wasn\u2019t needed because the vehicle isn\u2019t linking to the International Space Station during the trip. The views, Ms. Arceneaux said, \u201care out of this world.\u201d\nThe crew members discussed some other tidbits about private space travel. Mr. Sembroski confirmed there was coffee available. One of their first meals on board, according to SpaceX: cold pizza.\nThe song \u201cYou\u2019re the Inspiration\u201d by the band Chicago woke the crew up Friday, according to a tweet earlier from the team behind the mission.\nMr. Isaacman said the crew had been using a portable ultrasound device for various experiments. They also have taken blood samples and conducted cognitive tests. SpaceX, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medicine have been collecting environmental and medical data from the crew for research purposes.\nCrew members spoke with patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of charitable funds being raised by the flight, according to a video the institution posted online.\nThey also reached Tom Cruise. \u201cYou can be our wingman anytime,\u201d the mission\u2019s official\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account said about the chat with the actor. At the close of the trading Friday, the crew appeared on a screen at the New York Stock Exchange.\nDuring their first day in orbit, the crew traveled around Earth nearly six times, conducting some scientific experiments and eating before heading to bed. Mr. Isaacman also placed two sports bets.\nThe flight has been drawing attention from National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel, including Administrator Bill Nelson, who congratulated the crew and said on Twitter that NASA looks forward to a future when it is \u201cone of many customers in the commercial space market.\u201d\nInvestors have also been following the mission, the latest in a string of flights that have sent private civilians to space, stoking expectations about a space-tourism market. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed trips with crew members on board to the edge of space.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com SpaceX says it plans to land crew in the waters off Florida just after 7 p.m. on Saturday. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Astronauts Float Through Orbit With Video Calls, Cold Pizza, Earth Views (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "794",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-astronauts-float-through-orbit-with-video-calls-cold-pizza-earth-views-11631920830?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=4",
        "text": "The mission represents the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship.\n\n\n SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Traveled to Space: Here\u2019s How Their Trips Differed \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re giving all of our time right now to science, research and some ukulele playing, and trying to raise some good awareness for an important cause for us back on Earth,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the entrepreneur who paid for the mission, said during a SpaceX live stream Friday afternoon.\n\n\nThe comments were the crew\u2019s first public remarks since they lifted off Wednesday evening in the Crew Dragon vehicle stacked atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.\nAt one point during the live stream their second day in orbit, Mr. Isaacman, chief executive of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n appeared to be perpendicular to a camera, floating.\nChris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee, played a ukulele for a moment, while Sian Proctor showed off a drawing she made. Crew member Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, appeared upside down when the live stream began.\n\u201cHayley is a champ at spinning,\u201d Dr. Proctor said.\nThose on board said they had been enjoying looking at Earth from a domed-cupola window, which SpaceX added to the vehicle in the place of a docking system that wasn\u2019t needed because the vehicle isn\u2019t linking to the International Space Station during the trip. The views, Ms. Arceneaux said, \u201care out of this world.\u201d\nThe crew members discussed some other tidbits about private space travel. Mr. Sembroski confirmed there was coffee available. One of their first meals on board, according to SpaceX: cold pizza.\nThe song \u201cYou\u2019re the Inspiration\u201d by the band Chicago woke the crew up Friday, according to a tweet earlier from the team behind the mission.\nMr. Isaacman said the crew had been using a portable ultrasound device for various experiments. They also have taken blood samples and conducted cognitive tests. SpaceX, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medicine have been collecting environmental and medical data from the crew for research purposes.\nCrew members spoke with patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of charitable funds being raised by the flight, according to a video the institution posted online.\nThey also reached Tom Cruise. \u201cYou can be our wingman anytime,\u201d the mission\u2019s official\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account said about the chat with the actor. At the close of the trading Friday, the crew appeared on a screen at the New York Stock Exchange.\nDuring their first day in orbit, the crew traveled around Earth nearly six times, conducting some scientific experiments and eating before heading to bed. Mr. Isaacman also placed two sports bets.\nThe flight has been drawing attention from National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel, including Administrator Bill Nelson, who congratulated the crew and said on Twitter that NASA looks forward to a future when it is \u201cone of many customers in the commercial space market.\u201d\nInvestors have also been following the mission, the latest in a string of flights that have sent private civilians to space, stoking expectations about a space-tourism market. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed trips with crew members on board to the edge of space.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com SpaceX says it plans to land crew in the waters off Florida just after 7 p.m. on Saturday. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Astronauts Float Through Orbit With Video Calls, Cold Pizza, Earth Views (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "795",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-astronauts-float-through-orbit-with-video-calls-cold-pizza-earth-views-11631920830?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=13",
        "text": "The mission represents the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship.\n\n\n SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Traveled to Space: Here\u2019s How Their Trips Differed \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re giving all of our time right now to science, research and some ukulele playing, and trying to raise some good awareness for an important cause for us back on Earth,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the entrepreneur who paid for the mission, said during a SpaceX live stream Friday afternoon.\n\n\nThe comments were the crew\u2019s first public remarks since they lifted off Wednesday evening in the Crew Dragon vehicle stacked atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.\nAt one point during the live stream their second day in orbit, Mr. Isaacman, chief executive of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n appeared to be perpendicular to a camera, floating.\nChris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee, played a ukulele for a moment, while Sian Proctor showed off a drawing she made. Crew member Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, appeared upside down when the live stream began.\n\u201cHayley is a champ at spinning,\u201d Dr. Proctor said.\nThose on board said they had been enjoying looking at Earth from a domed-cupola window, which SpaceX added to the vehicle in the place of a docking system that wasn\u2019t needed because the vehicle isn\u2019t linking to the International Space Station during the trip. The views, Ms. Arceneaux said, \u201care out of this world.\u201d\nThe crew members discussed some other tidbits about private space travel. Mr. Sembroski confirmed there was coffee available. One of their first meals on board, according to SpaceX: cold pizza.\nThe song \u201cYou\u2019re the Inspiration\u201d by the band Chicago woke the crew up Friday, according to a tweet earlier from the team behind the mission.\nMr. Isaacman said the crew had been using a portable ultrasound device for various experiments. They also have taken blood samples and conducted cognitive tests. SpaceX, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medicine have been collecting environmental and medical data from the crew for research purposes.\nCrew members spoke with patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of charitable funds being raised by the flight, according to a video the institution posted online.\nThey also reached Tom Cruise. \u201cYou can be our wingman anytime,\u201d the mission\u2019s official\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account said about the chat with the actor. At the close of the trading Friday, the crew appeared on a screen at the New York Stock Exchange.\nDuring their first day in orbit, the crew traveled around Earth nearly six times, conducting some scientific experiments and eating before heading to bed. Mr. Isaacman also placed two sports bets.\nThe flight has been drawing attention from National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel, including Administrator Bill Nelson, who congratulated the crew and said on Twitter that NASA looks forward to a future when it is \u201cone of many customers in the commercial space market.\u201d\nInvestors have also been following the mission, the latest in a string of flights that have sent private civilians to space, stoking expectations about a space-tourism market. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed trips with crew members on board to the edge of space.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com SpaceX says it plans to land crew in the waters off Florida just after 7 p.m. on Saturday. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Astronauts Float Through Orbit With Video Calls, Cold Pizza, Earth Views (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "796",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-astronauts-float-through-orbit-with-video-calls-cold-pizza-earth-views-11631920830?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=22",
        "text": "The mission represents the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship.\n\n\n SpaceX and the Civilian Travel Era: How Elon Musk Created Inspiration4 Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos Traveled to Space: Here\u2019s How Their Trips Differed \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re giving all of our time right now to science, research and some ukulele playing, and trying to raise some good awareness for an important cause for us back on Earth,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the entrepreneur who paid for the mission, said during a SpaceX live stream Friday afternoon.\n\n\nThe comments were the crew\u2019s first public remarks since they lifted off Wednesday evening in the Crew Dragon vehicle stacked atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.\nAt one point during the live stream their second day in orbit, Mr. Isaacman, chief executive of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n appeared to be perpendicular to a camera, floating.\nChris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee, played a ukulele for a moment, while Sian Proctor showed off a drawing she made. Crew member Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, appeared upside down when the live stream began.\n\u201cHayley is a champ at spinning,\u201d Dr. Proctor said.\nThose on board said they had been enjoying looking at Earth from a domed-cupola window, which SpaceX added to the vehicle in the place of a docking system that wasn\u2019t needed because the vehicle isn\u2019t linking to the International Space Station during the trip. The views, Ms. Arceneaux said, \u201care out of this world.\u201d\nThe crew members discussed some other tidbits about private space travel. Mr. Sembroski confirmed there was coffee available. One of their first meals on board, according to SpaceX: cold pizza.\nThe song \u201cYou\u2019re the Inspiration\u201d by the band Chicago woke the crew up Friday, according to a tweet earlier from the team behind the mission.\nMr. Isaacman said the crew had been using a portable ultrasound device for various experiments. They also have taken blood samples and conducted cognitive tests. SpaceX, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medicine have been collecting environmental and medical data from the crew for research purposes.\nCrew members spoke with patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, the recipient of charitable funds being raised by the flight, according to a video the institution posted online.\nThey also reached Tom Cruise. \u201cYou can be our wingman anytime,\u201d the mission\u2019s official\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account said about the chat with the actor. At the close of the trading Friday, the crew appeared on a screen at the New York Stock Exchange.\nDuring their first day in orbit, the crew traveled around Earth nearly six times, conducting some scientific experiments and eating before heading to bed. Mr. Isaacman also placed two sports bets.\nThe flight has been drawing attention from National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel, including Administrator Bill Nelson, who congratulated the crew and said on Twitter that NASA looks forward to a future when it is \u201cone of many customers in the commercial space market.\u201d\nInvestors have also been following the mission, the latest in a string of flights that have sent private civilians to space, stoking expectations about a space-tourism market. In July,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC completed trips with crew members on board to the edge of space.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com SpaceX says it plans to land crew in the waters off Florida just after 7 p.m. on Saturday. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Pushes Back Commercial Space Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "797",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-pushes-back-commercial-space-flights-11634255879?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=10",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nShares of Virgin Galactic fell more than 14% in after-hours trading.\nThe company had been analyzing a potential defect in a component from a supplier, according to a previous statement. A spokeswoman said Thursday the company resolved the issue. However, inspections tied to the part took time, requiring it to push back commercial service by a month, she said. The potentially defective part wasn\u2019t on its plane or spaceship, the company said.\n\nVirgin Galactic said it would now focus on enhancing its space plane and the ship that the plane carries to an altitude of about 45,000 feet, where it is dropped to rocket to the edge of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nMr. Branson completed a trip of that nature in July, garnering attention for the company\u2019s plans to foster a wider space-tourism market. On Wednesday, a rival for space tourists,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin, flew four people to the edge of space, including the actor William Shatner in a high-profile launch.\nPreviously, Virgin Galactic had expected to fly two members of the Italian Air Force, a researcher and a company employee to the edge of space as part of its testing program before it began the work to enhance the vehicles. Virgin Galactic has been planning to improve its plane and spaceship to reduce the turnaround time between flights.\nOn Thursday, the company said it would start on that work before carrying out the mission with the members from the Italian Air Force. The company said a test recently flagged a possible issue tied to the strength of certain materials it uses, requiring further physical inspections.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingWilliam Shatner Goes to Space With Blue OriginThe actor who played Captain Kirk on 'Star Trek' has gone to space in real life. William Shatner joined three other passengers on Blue Origin's second crewed space flight on Wednesday. Reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss what this could signal about the future of space tourism, and whether high-profile passengers could move the industry forward.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nEnhancing its vehicles before the flight with the Italian military personnel underscores the company\u2019s focus on safety, Mr. Colglazier said in a statement.\nThe company didn\u2019t say when that mission could fly, but did say it would go up before any private-astronaut flights. The company had targeted late September and the middle of this month as dates to potentially conduct the flight with members of the Italian military.\nLast month, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared Virgin Galactic to operate space flights again after completing an investigation into how the company\u2019s spaceship returned to ground during the flight with Mr. Branson on board.\nThat flight deviated from its expected path, according to the regulator, which said Virgin failed to report the error as required. The company said it made changes to how it operates space missions and communicates with FAA air-traffic control.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company said it believes it will launch private-astronaut flights in the fourth quarter of 2022. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Pushes Back Commercial Space Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "798",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-pushes-back-commercial-space-flights-11634255879?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=20",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nShares of Virgin Galactic fell more than 14% in after-hours trading.\nThe company had been analyzing a potential defect in a component from a supplier, according to a previous statement. A spokeswoman said Thursday the company resolved the issue. However, inspections tied to the part took time, requiring it to push back commercial service by a month, she said. The potentially defective part wasn\u2019t on its plane or spaceship, the company said.\n\nVirgin Galactic said it would now focus on enhancing its space plane and the ship that the plane carries to an altitude of about 45,000 feet, where it is dropped to rocket to the edge of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nMr. Branson completed a trip of that nature in July, garnering attention for the company\u2019s plans to foster a wider space-tourism market. On Wednesday, a rival for space tourists,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin, flew four people to the edge of space, including the actor William Shatner in a high-profile launch.\nPreviously, Virgin Galactic had expected to fly two members of the Italian Air Force, a researcher and a company employee to the edge of space as part of its testing program before it began the work to enhance the vehicles. Virgin Galactic has been planning to improve its plane and spaceship to reduce the turnaround time between flights.\nOn Thursday, the company said it would start on that work before carrying out the mission with the members from the Italian Air Force. The company said a test recently flagged a possible issue tied to the strength of certain materials it uses, requiring further physical inspections.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEnhancing its vehicles before the flight with the Italian military personnel underscores the company\u2019s focus on safety, Mr. Colglazier said in a statement.\nThe company didn\u2019t say when that mission could fly, but did say it would go up before any private-astronaut flights. The company had targeted late September and the middle of this month as dates to potentially conduct the flight with members of the Italian military.\nLast month, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared Virgin Galactic to operate space flights again after completing an investigation into how the company\u2019s spaceship returned to ground during the flight with Mr. Branson on board.\nThat flight deviated from its expected path, according to the regulator, which said Virgin failed to report the error as required. The company said it made changes to how it operates space missions and communicates with FAA air-traffic control.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company said it believes it will launch private-astronaut flights in the fourth quarter of 2022. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Pushes Back Commercial Space Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "799",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-pushes-back-commercial-space-flights-11634255879?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=3",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShares of Virgin Galactic fell more than 14% in after-hours trading.\nThe company had been analyzing a potential defect in a component from a supplier, according to a previous statement. A spokeswoman said Thursday the company resolved the issue. However, inspections tied to the part took time, requiring it to push back commercial service by a month, she said. The potentially defective part wasn\u2019t on its plane or spaceship, the company said.\n\nVirgin Galactic said it would now focus on enhancing its space plane and the ship that the plane carries to an altitude of about 45,000 feet, where it is dropped to rocket to the edge of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nMr. Branson completed a trip of that nature in July, garnering attention for the company\u2019s plans to foster a wider space-tourism market. On Wednesday, a rival for space tourists,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin, flew four people to the edge of space, including the actor William Shatner in a high-profile launch.\nPreviously, Virgin Galactic had expected to fly two members of the Italian Air Force, a researcher and a company employee to the edge of space as part of its testing program before it began the work to enhance the vehicles. Virgin Galactic has been planning to improve its plane and spaceship to reduce the turnaround time between flights.\nOn Thursday, the company said it would start on that work before carrying out the mission with the members from the Italian Air Force. The company said a test recently flagged a possible issue tied to the strength of certain materials it uses, requiring further physical inspections.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingWilliam Shatner Goes to Space With Blue OriginThe actor who played Captain Kirk on 'Star Trek' has gone to space in real life. William Shatner joined three other passengers on Blue Origin's second crewed space flight on Wednesday. Reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss what this could signal about the future of space tourism, and whether high-profile passengers could move the industry forward.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nEnhancing its vehicles before the flight with the Italian military personnel underscores the company\u2019s focus on safety, Mr. Colglazier said in a statement.\nThe company didn\u2019t say when that mission could fly, but did say it would go up before any private-astronaut flights. The company had targeted late September and the middle of this month as dates to potentially conduct the flight with members of the Italian military.\nLast month, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared Virgin Galactic to operate space flights again after completing an investigation into how the company\u2019s spaceship returned to ground during the flight with Mr. Branson on board.\nThat flight deviated from its expected path, according to the regulator, which said Virgin failed to report the error as required. The company said it made changes to how it operates space missions and communicates with FAA air-traffic control.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company said it believes it will launch private-astronaut flights in the fourth quarter of 2022. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Explodes During Test-Flight Landing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "800",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-starship-prototype-explodes-upon-landing-after-test-flight-11607565444?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=10",
        "text": "But within minutes, after a video feed showed a fireball at the instant of touchdown, Mr. Musk posted a follow-up tweet explaining that low fuel pressure \u201cduring the landing burn contributed to the high touchdown velocity and the massive explosion.\u201d\nStill, the company\u2019s founder and chief technical officer added there was good news because the team \u201cgot all the data\u201d it needed during the mission. \u201cIt appears everything is in order for future tests,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore on Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk Moves to Texas, Takes Jab at Silicon Valley (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Advises CEOs to Stop Wasting Time on PowerPoint, Meetings (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Isn\u2019t Sweet on Candy Makers (Dec. 8) Tesla Plans Stock Sale, Closing Year of Soaring Gains (Dec. 8) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit in NASA Mission (Nov. 17) \n\n\nWeeks before launch, Mr. Musk had sought to tamp down expectations by predicting a 1-in-3 chance of success for the test of the reusable craft, which uses a complex midair maneuver that flips it from nose-down to a final nose-up descent. That abrupt movement\u2014which industry officials say hasn\u2019t been successfully executed before by any other big booster\u2014is one of the most challenging aspects of Starship\u2019s flight profile. Preparing for the flight, Mr. Musk promised the company would show real-time footage of the test, \u201cwarts and all\u201d\u2014something he had eschewed for some earlier Starship tests.\n\n\nOn average, one out of the first three launches of new rockets have ended in failure over the past few decades \nOn Wednesday, a trio of engines boosted the vehicle to its planned altitude, before navigation and flight-control systems, as expected, reoriented it for a vertical landing attempt near the company\u2019s manufacturing and testing facility in southern Texas. The day before, the flight was scrubbed just before liftoff because of an automated engine warning. \nEarlier versions of the gleaming stainless-steel spaceship\u2014intended to transport people to the moon and eventually Mars\u2014previously performed much simpler short hops, reaching an altitude of barely 500 feet. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, also suffered a string of engine problems, structural failures and other technical setbacks before Wednesday\u2019s liftoff.\nDespite the botched touchdown, the suborbital mission highlighted the capabilities of the latest-version Starship, a hulking combination of capsule and rocket, which is 30 feet in diameter and features rakish fins near the nose and longer flaps at the base. Previous versions were tested without a nose cone.\nStarship has gone through dramatic design changes over the years, even as Mr. Musk continues to predict significantly faster progress for his program compared with U.S. government plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the 2030s.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. But industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes already have been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nIn the wake of the mishap, SpaceX\u2019s chief reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test. \u201cMars, here we come,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a succinct, separate tweet.\nThe privately held Southern California company hasn\u2019t publicly spelled out a financing plan or detailed technical milestones. Before humans can be carried inside, life-support systems need to be developed and vetted.\nFor Mr. Musk, managing the Starship project and development of SpaceX\u2019s production, test and launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, have become consuming tasks. On Tuesday, during The Wall Street Journal\u2019s annual CEO Council event, Mr. Musk said he had personally relocated to Texas partly to oversee progress on Starship. He cited work on the space project and a new factory to build Tesla vehicles in the Austin area as \u201cthe two biggest things that I\u2019ve got going on right now.\u201d Mr. Musk also runs electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the wake of the Starship mishap, SpaceX Chief Elon Musk reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test: \u2018Mars, here we come,\u2019 he tweeted.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n olivier douliery/SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThat rocket, slated to have roughly 30 engines, is called Super Heavy; it hasn\u2019t yet flown. The Starship-Super Heavy combination, potentially able to lift some 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, could become a building block of NASA\u2019s Elon Musk\u2019s space-transportation company blasted its Starship spacecraft nearly 8 miles high and maneuvered it back seemingly to a pinpoint landing, but then suffered a spectacular explosion as the vehicle failed to slow down before smashing into the ground. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Explodes During Test-Flight Landing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "801",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-starship-prototype-explodes-upon-landing-after-test-flight-11607565444?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=30",
        "text": "But within minutes, after a video feed showed a fireball at the instant of touchdown, Mr. Musk posted a follow-up tweet explaining that low fuel pressure \u201cduring the landing burn contributed to the high touchdown velocity and the massive explosion.\u201d\nStill, the company\u2019s founder and chief technical officer added there was good news because the team \u201cgot all the data\u201d it needed during the mission. \u201cIt appears everything is in order for future tests,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore on Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk Moves to Texas, Takes Jab at Silicon Valley (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Advises CEOs to Stop Wasting Time on PowerPoint, Meetings (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Isn\u2019t Sweet on Candy Makers (Dec. 8) Tesla Plans Stock Sale, Closing Year of Soaring Gains (Dec. 8) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit in NASA Mission (Nov. 17) \n\n\nWeeks before launch, Mr. Musk had sought to tamp down expectations by predicting a 1-in-3 chance of success for the test of the reusable craft, which uses a complex midair maneuver that flips it from nose-down to a final nose-up descent. That abrupt movement\u2014which industry officials say hasn\u2019t been successfully executed before by any other big booster\u2014is one of the most challenging aspects of Starship\u2019s flight profile. Preparing for the flight, Mr. Musk promised the company would show real-time footage of the test, \u201cwarts and all\u201d\u2014something he had eschewed for some earlier Starship tests.\n\n\nOn average, one out of the first three launches of new rockets have ended in failure over the past few decades \nOn Wednesday, a trio of engines boosted the vehicle to its planned altitude, before navigation and flight-control systems, as expected, reoriented it for a vertical landing attempt near the company\u2019s manufacturing and testing facility in southern Texas. The day before, the flight was scrubbed just before liftoff because of an automated engine warning. \nEarlier versions of the gleaming stainless-steel spaceship\u2014intended to transport people to the moon and eventually Mars\u2014previously performed much simpler short hops, reaching an altitude of barely 500 feet. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, also suffered a string of engine problems, structural failures and other technical setbacks before Wednesday\u2019s liftoff.\nDespite the botched touchdown, the suborbital mission highlighted the capabilities of the latest-version Starship, a hulking combination of capsule and rocket, which is 30 feet in diameter and features rakish fins near the nose and longer flaps at the base. Previous versions were tested without a nose cone.\nStarship has gone through dramatic design changes over the years, even as Mr. Musk continues to predict significantly faster progress for his program compared with U.S. government plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the 2030s.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. But industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes already have been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nIn the wake of the mishap, SpaceX\u2019s chief reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test. \u201cMars, here we come,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a succinct, separate tweet.\nThe privately held Southern California company hasn\u2019t publicly spelled out a financing plan or detailed technical milestones. Before humans can be carried inside, life-support systems need to be developed and vetted.\nFor Mr. Musk, managing the Starship project and development of SpaceX\u2019s production, test and launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, have become consuming tasks. On Tuesday, during The Wall Street Journal\u2019s annual CEO Council event, Mr. Musk said he had personally relocated to Texas partly to oversee progress on Starship. He cited work on the space project and a new factory to build Tesla vehicles in the Austin area as \u201cthe two biggest things that I\u2019ve got going on right now.\u201d Mr. Musk also runs electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the wake of the Starship mishap, SpaceX Chief Elon Musk reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test: \u2018Mars, here we come,\u2019 he tweeted.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n olivier douliery/SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThat rocket, slated to have roughly 30 engines, is called Super Heavy; it hasn\u2019t yet flown. The Starship-Super Heavy combination, potentially able to lift some 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, could become a building block of NASA\u2019s Elon Musk\u2019s space-transportation company blasted its Starship spacecraft nearly 8 miles high and maneuvered it back seemingly to a pinpoint landing, but then suffered a spectacular explosion as the vehicle failed to slow down before smashing into the ground. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Explodes During Test-Flight Landing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "802",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-starship-prototype-explodes-upon-landing-after-test-flight-11607565444?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=37",
        "text": "But within minutes, after a video feed showed a fireball at the instant of touchdown, Mr. Musk posted a follow-up tweet explaining that low fuel pressure \u201cduring the landing burn contributed to the high touchdown velocity and the massive explosion.\u201d\nStill, the company\u2019s founder and chief technical officer added there was good news because the team \u201cgot all the data\u201d it needed during the mission. \u201cIt appears everything is in order for future tests,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore on Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk Moves to Texas, Takes Jab at Silicon Valley (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Advises CEOs to Stop Wasting Time on PowerPoint, Meetings (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Isn\u2019t Sweet on Candy Makers (Dec. 8) Tesla Plans Stock Sale, Closing Year of Soaring Gains (Dec. 8) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit in NASA Mission (Nov. 17) \n\n\nWeeks before launch, Mr. Musk had sought to tamp down expectations by predicting a 1-in-3 chance of success for the test of the reusable craft, which uses a complex midair maneuver that flips it from nose-down to a final nose-up descent. That abrupt movement\u2014which industry officials say hasn\u2019t been successfully executed before by any other big booster\u2014is one of the most challenging aspects of Starship\u2019s flight profile. Preparing for the flight, Mr. Musk promised the company would show real-time footage of the test, \u201cwarts and all\u201d\u2014something he had eschewed for some earlier Starship tests.\n\n\nOn average, one out of the first three launches of new rockets have ended in failure over the past few decades \nOn Wednesday, a trio of engines boosted the vehicle to its planned altitude, before navigation and flight-control systems, as expected, reoriented it for a vertical landing attempt near the company\u2019s manufacturing and testing facility in southern Texas. The day before, the flight was scrubbed just before liftoff because of an automated engine warning. \nEarlier versions of the gleaming stainless-steel spaceship\u2014intended to transport people to the moon and eventually Mars\u2014previously performed much simpler short hops, reaching an altitude of barely 500 feet. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, also suffered a string of engine problems, structural failures and other technical setbacks before Wednesday\u2019s liftoff.\nDespite the botched touchdown, the suborbital mission highlighted the capabilities of the latest-version Starship, a hulking combination of capsule and rocket, which is 30 feet in diameter and features rakish fins near the nose and longer flaps at the base. Previous versions were tested without a nose cone.\nStarship has gone through dramatic design changes over the years, even as Mr. Musk continues to predict significantly faster progress for his program compared with U.S. government plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the 2030s.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. But industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes already have been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nIn the wake of the mishap, SpaceX\u2019s chief reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test. \u201cMars, here we come,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a succinct, separate tweet.\nThe privately held Southern California company hasn\u2019t publicly spelled out a financing plan or detailed technical milestones. Before humans can be carried inside, life-support systems need to be developed and vetted.\nFor Mr. Musk, managing the Starship project and development of SpaceX\u2019s production, test and launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, have become consuming tasks. On Tuesday, during The Wall Street Journal\u2019s annual CEO Council event, Mr. Musk said he had personally relocated to Texas partly to oversee progress on Starship. He cited work on the space project and a new factory to build Tesla vehicles in the Austin area as \u201cthe two biggest things that I\u2019ve got going on right now.\u201d Mr. Musk also runs electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the wake of the Starship mishap, SpaceX Chief Elon Musk reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test: \u2018Mars, here we come,\u2019 he tweeted.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n olivier douliery/SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThat rocket, slated to have roughly 30 engines, is called Super Heavy; it hasn\u2019t yet flown. The Starship-Super Heavy combination, potentially able to lift some 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, could become a building block of NASA\u2019s Elon Musk\u2019s space-transportation company blasted its Starship spacecraft nearly 8 miles high and maneuvered it back seemingly to a pinpoint landing, but then suffered a spectacular explosion as the vehicle failed to slow down before smashing into the ground. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Explodes During Test-Flight Landing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "803",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-starship-prototype-explodes-upon-landing-after-test-flight-11607565444?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=41",
        "text": "But within minutes, after a video feed showed a fireball at the instant of touchdown, Mr. Musk posted a follow-up tweet explaining that low fuel pressure \u201cduring the landing burn contributed to the high touchdown velocity and the massive explosion.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nStill, the company\u2019s founder and chief technical officer added there was good news because the team \u201cgot all the data\u201d it needed during the mission. \u201cIt appears everything is in order for future tests,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore on Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk Moves to Texas, Takes Jab at Silicon Valley (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Advises CEOs to Stop Wasting Time on PowerPoint, Meetings (Dec. 8) Elon Musk Isn\u2019t Sweet on Candy Makers (Dec. 8) Tesla Plans Stock Sale, Closing Year of Soaring Gains (Dec. 8) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts Into Orbit in NASA Mission (Nov. 17) \n\n\nWeeks before launch, Mr. Musk had sought to tamp down expectations by predicting a 1-in-3 chance of success for the test of the reusable craft, which uses a complex midair maneuver that flips it from nose-down to a final nose-up descent. That abrupt movement\u2014which industry officials say hasn\u2019t been successfully executed before by any other big booster\u2014is one of the most challenging aspects of Starship\u2019s flight profile. Preparing for the flight, Mr. Musk promised the company would show real-time footage of the test, \u201cwarts and all\u201d\u2014something he had eschewed for some earlier Starship tests.\n\n\nOn average, one out of the first three launches of new rockets have ended in failure over the past few decades \nOn Wednesday, a trio of engines boosted the vehicle to its planned altitude, before navigation and flight-control systems, as expected, reoriented it for a vertical landing attempt near the company\u2019s manufacturing and testing facility in southern Texas. The day before, the flight was scrubbed just before liftoff because of an automated engine warning. \nEarlier versions of the gleaming stainless-steel spaceship\u2014intended to transport people to the moon and eventually Mars\u2014previously performed much simpler short hops, reaching an altitude of barely 500 feet. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, also suffered a string of engine problems, structural failures and other technical setbacks before Wednesday\u2019s liftoff.\nDespite the botched touchdown, the suborbital mission highlighted the capabilities of the latest-version Starship, a hulking combination of capsule and rocket, which is 30 feet in diameter and features rakish fins near the nose and longer flaps at the base. Previous versions were tested without a nose cone.\nStarship has gone through dramatic design changes over the years, even as Mr. Musk continues to predict significantly faster progress for his program compared with U.S. government plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the 2030s.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. But industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes already have been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nIn the wake of the mishap, SpaceX\u2019s chief reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test. \u201cMars, here we come,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a succinct, separate tweet.\nThe privately held Southern California company hasn\u2019t publicly spelled out a financing plan or detailed technical milestones. Before humans can be carried inside, life-support systems need to be developed and vetted.\nFor Mr. Musk, managing the Starship project and development of SpaceX\u2019s production, test and launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, have become consuming tasks. On Tuesday, during The Wall Street Journal\u2019s annual CEO Council event, Mr. Musk said he had personally relocated to Texas partly to oversee progress on Starship. He cited work on the space project and a new factory to build Tesla vehicles in the Austin area as \u201cthe two biggest things that I\u2019ve got going on right now.\u201d Mr. Musk also runs electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the wake of the Starship mishap, SpaceX Chief Elon Musk reiterated his upbeat assessment of the overall test: \u2018Mars, here we come,\u2019 he tweeted.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n olivier douliery/SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThat rocket, slated to have roughly 30 engines, is called Super Heavy; it hasn\u2019t yet flown. The Starship-Super Heavy combination, potentially able to lift some 150 tons into low-Earth orbit, could become a building block of NA Elon Musk\u2019s space-transportation company blasted its Starship spacecraft nearly 8 miles high and maneuvered it back seemingly to a pinpoint landing, but then suffered a spectacular explosion as the vehicle failed to slow down before smashing into the ground. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic to Go Public (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "804",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bransons-space-unit-to-go-public-11562644860?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=19",
        "text": "As part of the deal with Social Capital Hedosophia, a publicly traded shell, Virgin Galactic later this year would become the first publicly listed human-spaceflight company.\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic expects that this deal will give it enough capital to fund the business until its spaceships can commercially operate and turn a profit. It is in a race with companies including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which are also working on ways to send tourists into space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic rocket plane, the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane, with SpaceShipTwo passenger craft takes off in Mojave, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gene blevins/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Branson said in an interview that most of the proceeds from this deal will be used \u201cto make sure we can enable as many people in the world as possible to become astronauts.\u201d \n\n\nThe listing plans were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal and announced by the companies on Tuesday morning.\nVirgin Galactic years ago led the way in sparking interest in blasting tourists and small satellites into space using cheap rockets and various other unconventional launch systems. Experts consider it the fastest-growing segment in commercial space. But a December 2014 fatal accident set back the company\u2019s plans.\nStill, it has gotten some 600 people to plunk down roughly $80 million in total to secure seats on vehicles it hopes will put the first customers into space in the next few years.\nVirgin Galactic has already raised more than $1 billion since it was founded in 2004, mostly from Mr. Branson.\nSaudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund announced plans to invest $1 billion in the company in 2017, but Mr. Branson suspended those talks a year later after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident writer, at a Saudi consulate.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChamath Palihapitiya, founder and chief executive officer of Social Capital LP.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Kauzlarich/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nAfter Mr. Branson stepped away from the deal,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chamath Palihapitiya,\n\n\n\n chief executive of venture-capital firm Social Capital LP and a former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n executive, contacted him about a potential investment through the SPAC he launched in 2017. The parties have spent most of this year working through the details and Virgin Galactic\u2019s executives recently met with investors to gauge their interest.\nThe $800 million includes about $100 million that Mr. Palihapitiya is putting into the deal. He will serve as chairman of the company.\n\u201cThere\u2019s nothing as exciting as this next-generation space race,\u201d said Mr. Palihapitiya. \u201cIt\u2019s attracting the most talented and respected entrepreneurs of our generation.\u201d\nSPACs typically have two years to use capital they raise to buy a company and take it public. Social Capital Hedosophia has been trading on the New York Stock Exchange since September 2017 and is nearing the end of the time allotted to purchase a company.\nSPACs are being formed at a record pace amid a booming IPO market and robust interest from private-equity firms and others.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Maureen Farrell at maureen.farrell@wsj.com Virgin Galactic has plans to become the first publicly listed human spaceflight company. It expects that the deal to go public will give it enough capital to fund the business until its spaceships can commercially operate and send tourists into space. ",
        "author": "Maureen Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic to Go Public (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "805",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bransons-space-unit-to-go-public-11562644860?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=70",
        "text": "As part of the deal with Social Capital Hedosophia, a publicly traded shell, Virgin Galactic later this year would become the first publicly listed human-spaceflight company.\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic expects that this deal will give it enough capital to fund the business until its spaceships can commercially operate and turn a profit. It is in a race with companies including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which are also working on ways to send tourists into space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic rocket plane, the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane, with SpaceShipTwo passenger craft takes off in Mojave, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gene blevins/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Branson said in an interview that most of the proceeds from this deal will be used \u201cto make sure we can enable as many people in the world as possible to become astronauts.\u201d \n\n\nThe listing plans were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal and announced by the companies on Tuesday morning.\nVirgin Galactic years ago led the way in sparking interest in blasting tourists and small satellites into space using cheap rockets and various other unconventional launch systems. Experts consider it the fastest-growing segment in commercial space. But a December 2014 fatal accident set back the company\u2019s plans.\nStill, it has gotten some 600 people to plunk down roughly $80 million in total to secure seats on vehicles it hopes will put the first customers into space in the next few years.\nVirgin Galactic has already raised more than $1 billion since it was founded in 2004, mostly from Mr. Branson.\nSaudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund announced plans to invest $1 billion in the company in 2017, but Mr. Branson suspended those talks a year later after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident writer, at a Saudi consulate.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChamath Palihapitiya, founder and chief executive officer of Social Capital LP.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Kauzlarich/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nAfter Mr. Branson stepped away from the deal,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chamath Palihapitiya,\n\n\n\n chief executive of venture-capital firm Social Capital LP and a former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n executive, contacted him about a potential investment through the SPAC he launched in 2017. The parties have spent most of this year working through the details and Virgin Galactic\u2019s executives recently met with investors to gauge their interest.\nThe $800 million includes about $100 million that Mr. Palihapitiya is putting into the deal. He will serve as chairman of the company.\n\u201cThere\u2019s nothing as exciting as this next-generation space race,\u201d said Mr. Palihapitiya. \u201cIt\u2019s attracting the most talented and respected entrepreneurs of our generation.\u201d\nSPACs typically have two years to use capital they raise to buy a company and take it public. Social Capital Hedosophia has been trading on the New York Stock Exchange since September 2017 and is nearing the end of the time allotted to purchase a company.\nSPACs are being formed at a record pace amid a booming IPO market and robust interest from private-equity firms and others.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Maureen Farrell at maureen.farrell@wsj.com Virgin Galactic has plans to become the first publicly listed human spaceflight company. It expects that the deal to go public will give it enough capital to fund the business until its spaceships can commercially operate and send tourists into space. ",
        "author": "Maureen Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Returns Four Astronauts to Earth, Ending 200-Day Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "806",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-returns-four-astronauts-to-earth-ending-200-day-flight-11636433471?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=18",
        "text": "\u201cOn behalf of SpaceX, welcome home to Planet Earth,\u201d SpaceX Mission Control radioed from Southern California. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view of the SpaceX capsule, off the side of the International Space Station, on Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nTheir homecoming\u2014coming just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station\u2014paved the way for Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s launch of their four replacements as early as Wednesday night. \n\nThe newcomers were scheduled to launch first, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration switched the order because of bad weather and an astronaut\u2019s undisclosed medical condition. The welcoming duties will now fall to the lone American and two Russians left behind at the space station.\nBefore Monday afternoon\u2019s undocking, German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who is waiting to launch at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, tweeted it was a shame the two crews wouldn\u2019t overlap at the space station but \u201cwe trust you\u2019ll leave everything nice and tidy.\u201d His will be SpaceX\u2019s fourth crew flight for NASA in 1 1/2 years.\nNASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan\u2019s Akihiko Hoshide and France\u2019s Thomas Pesquet should have been back Monday morning, but high wind in the recovery zone delayed their return. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crew of the SpaceX capsule, after splashing down into the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, Fla., late Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cOne more night with this magical view. Who could complain? I\u2019ll miss our spaceship!\u201d Mr. Pesquet tweeted Sunday alongside a brief video showing the space station illuminated against the blackness of space and the twinkling city lights on the nighttime side of Earth.\nBefore leaving the neighborhood, the four took a spin around the space station, taking pictures. This was a first for SpaceX; NASA\u2019s shuttles used to do it all the time before their retirement a decade ago. The last Russian capsule fly-around was three years ago.\nAn issue arose shortly after their April liftoff; Mission Control warned a piece of space junk was threatening to collide with their capsule. It turned out to be a false alarm. Then in July, thrusters on a newly arrived Russian lab inadvertently fired and sent the station into a spin. The four astronauts took shelter in their docked SpaceX capsule, ready to make a hasty departure if necessary.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAmong the upbeat milestones: four spacewalks to enhance the station\u2019s solar power, a movie-making visit by a Russian film crew and the first-ever space harvest of chile peppers.\nThe next crew will also spend six months up there, welcoming back-to-back groups of tourists. A Japanese tycoon and his personal assistant will get a lift from the Russian Space Agency in December, followed by three businessmen arriving via SpaceX in February. SpaceX\u2019s first privately chartered flight, in September, bypassed the space station.\nCopyright 2021 The Associated Press. Their homecoming\u2014coming just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station\u2014paved the way for SpaceX\u2019s launch of their four replacements as early as Wednesday night. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Returns Four Astronauts to Earth, Ending 200-Day Flight (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "807",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-returns-four-astronauts-to-earth-ending-200-day-flight-11636433471?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=17",
        "text": "\u201cOn behalf of SpaceX, welcome home to Planet Earth,\u201d SpaceX Mission Control radioed from Southern California. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view of the SpaceX capsule, off the side of the International Space Station, on Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTheir homecoming\u2014coming just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station\u2014paved the way for Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s launch of their four replacements as early as Wednesday night. \n\nThe newcomers were scheduled to launch first, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration switched the order because of bad weather and an astronaut\u2019s undisclosed medical condition. The welcoming duties will now fall to the lone American and two Russians left behind at the space station.\nBefore Monday afternoon\u2019s undocking, German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who is waiting to launch at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, tweeted it was a shame the two crews wouldn\u2019t overlap at the space station but \u201cwe trust you\u2019ll leave everything nice and tidy.\u201d His will be SpaceX\u2019s fourth crew flight for NASA in 1 1/2 years.\nNASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan\u2019s Akihiko Hoshide and France\u2019s Thomas Pesquet should have been back Monday morning, but high wind in the recovery zone delayed their return. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crew of the SpaceX capsule, after splashing down into the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, Fla., late Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cOne more night with this magical view. Who could complain? I\u2019ll miss our spaceship!\u201d Mr. Pesquet tweeted Sunday alongside a brief video showing the space station illuminated against the blackness of space and the twinkling city lights on the nighttime side of Earth.\nBefore leaving the neighborhood, the four took a spin around the space station, taking pictures. This was a first for SpaceX; NASA\u2019s shuttles used to do it all the time before their retirement a decade ago. The last Russian capsule fly-around was three years ago.\nAn issue arose shortly after their April liftoff; Mission Control warned a piece of space junk was threatening to collide with their capsule. It turned out to be a false alarm. Then in July, thrusters on a newly arrived Russian lab inadvertently fired and sent the station into a spin. The four astronauts took shelter in their docked SpaceX capsule, ready to make a hasty departure if necessary.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAmong the upbeat milestones: four spacewalks to enhance the station\u2019s solar power, a movie-making visit by a Russian film crew and the first-ever space harvest of chile peppers.\nThe next crew will also spend six months up there, welcoming back-to-back groups of tourists. A Japanese tycoon and his personal assistant will get a lift from the Russian Space Agency in December, followed by three businessmen arriving via SpaceX in February. SpaceX\u2019s first privately chartered flight, in September, bypassed the space station.\nCopyright 2021 The Associated Press. Their homecoming\u2014coming just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station\u2014paved the way for SpaceX\u2019s launch of their four replacements as early as Wednesday night. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Why Toronto Film Festival breakouts like \u2018A Star Is Born\u2019 make the popular Oscar moot (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "808",
        "date": "2018-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/15/why-toronto-film-festival-breakouts-like-star-is-born-make-popular-oscar-moot/",
        "text": "TORONTO \u2014 The sounds of ap",
        "author": "Steven Zeitchik"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Neil Armstrong movie appears to be flopping because of Marco Rubio. The truth is more complicated. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "809",
        "date": "2018-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/22/neil-armstrong-movie-appears-be-flopping-because-marco-rubio-truth-is-more-complicated/",
        "text": "Movies about space exploration have tended to be pretty strong box-office performers lately, whether they\u2019re films based on events that did happen, films based on events that didn\u2019t happen or films based on events that will one day happen if only we could get Matt Damon enough potatoes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo it\u2019s been a surprise to see \u201cFirst Man,\u201d the Neil Armstrong drama starring Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy and directed by \u201cLa La Land\u201d filmmaker Damien Chazelle, do as poorly as it has. The film took in just $16 million last week in its first weekend of release, despite showing on nearly 4,000 screens. (In contrast, \u201cThe First Purge\u201d took in more. Also in contrast, \u201cPeter Rabbit\u201d took in more.) It didn\u2019t do much better on its second weekend \u2014 barely $8 million in receipts and bested by four other releases.Absent a major awards run, the film seems poised to become a disappointment for its studio, Universal, not to mention its star and its previously red-hot director.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut exactly why \u201cFirst Man\u201d has underperformed has become a matter of debate in movie-business circles over the past week. Were its prospects sunk by Republican leaders complaining, before the film had even been released, that it didn\u2019t sufficiently glorify American achievement? Or is the truth, like Armstrong\u2019s story itself, a little more complicated, involving not just politics but subtle business reasons as well?First, some background. \u201cFirst Man,\u201d about one of the great unifying American achievements of the 20th century and the internal conflict of the man who risked his life to achieve it, was humming along, seemingly set for a nice theatrical run after its premieres at the upscale Venice and Toronto film festivals in the late summer. That\u2019s when several outlets, including Business Insider, pointed out the absence of an iconic moment in the moon-landing saga, with Armstrong not shown planting the American flag on the lunar surface.Gosling himself, a Canadian, poured some unintentional gasoline on the flame when he told reporters that \u201cI don\u2019t think he saw himself as an American hero,\u201d referring to Armstrong. (Whether he was putting the emphasis on \u201cAmerican\u201d or \u201chero\u201d remains an open question.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis in turn set off political leaders, particularly Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). \u201cThis is total lunacy. And a disservice at a time when our people need reminders of what we can achieve when we work together,\u201d the politician tweeted in response both to the flag-planting absence and Gosling\u2019s comments. \u201cThe American people paid for that mission, on rockets built by Americans, with American technology & carrying American astronauts. It wasn\u2019t a UN mission.\u201dThe Rubio criticism was echoed by a number of public figures, including fellow Armstrong moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, who tweeted photos many saw as a pointed response to the omission.Chazelle defended the shot choices in a statement right after the Rubio tweet. \u201cTo address the question of whether this was a political statement, the answer is no,\u201d he said. \u201cI wanted the primary focus in that scene to be on Neil\u2019s solitary moments on the moon.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScreenwriter Josh Singer added in an interview with Variety that \u201cby focusing on that loss and sacrifice and failure, it humanizes this person who we think of as an idol and helps us really understand that this wasn\u2019t easy, this wasn\u2019t superheroes that did it.\u201d (Chazelle, via a representative, declined to comment for this piece.) And Armstrong\u2019s sons waved aside the notion that Chazelle meant to take an anti-patriotic poke.Many conservatives nonetheless joined the chorus. By the time it was over, the film had become as divisive as the lunar-landing itself was unifying. Even President Trump got in on the action.Scoring points in the culture wars certainly makes the movie more political than you\u2019d expect for a space-race drama from a half century ago. Whether it has an impact on the box office is another matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome Hollywood pundits certainly thought so. In a post on the trade site Deadline, Michael Cieply asked, \u201cWhat Do Words Cost? For \u2018First Man,\u2019 Perhaps, Quite A Lot,\u201d and broke down the box-office underperformance by the word count in Gosling\u2019s interview. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg advanced the theory even more directly.\u201cFIRST MAN got Swiftboated,\u201d he posted on Twitter, referring to the politically motivated set of attacks during the 2004 presidential election about John Kerry\u2019s Vietnam War record. \u201cI genuinely believe its box-office performance was undercut by the BS about the planting of the American flag.\u201dHe makes a potent case, given the decibel level of the controversy and the fact that \u201cFirst Man\u201d contains subject matter that might be expected to play strongly in red states.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut this political question, attention-grabbing as it is, ignores more nuts-and-bolts movie issues that were just as likely to have a significant impact, relating as much to how and when the film was released as to what a politician was tweeting about it.Chazelle\u2019s previous movies (they also include \u201cWhiplash\u201d) all were platformed \u2014 that is, released on a handful of screens before being broadened to thousands of them. The idea is for the movie to build buzz slowly, assuredly, before being subject to the opening-weekend buzz saw of the 2,500-plus screen release, in which a shaky opening weekend dooms a picture.\u201cFirst Man\u201d did not go that route \u2014 a substantive fact, given that the film, with its vibe of art-house restraint, was not even roundly loved by the people who saw it. The film garnered a B+ in the opening-weekend polling system known as CinemaScore. That\u2019s solid, but hardly great. And the film ran up against stronger-than-expected competition in fellow wide releases \u201cVenom\u201d and \u201cA Star is Born.\u201d A platform release would have avoided them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe film also didn\u2019t do well in Houston and Los Angeles, according to a person familiar with the figures who was not authorized to talk about them. That would seem like a potential revolt by the Aldrin crowd \u2014 after all, both metro areas are key to the U.S. exploration of space (the former via NASA and the latter with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory).But that would be a red herring. The more likely reason the film unperformed in those cities is because both teams from them were in the Major League Baseball playoffs last weekend. A movie about the 1969 lunar landing is marketed to, and a strong appeal for, older males, a demographic that is also highly drawn to playoff baseball.It is hard to know how all these factors interacted with one another. Stripping away these layers, one is left mainly with the controversy and its antagonists. This was, said critics on the left, an example of how badly pop culture has been politicized. Of course critics on the right said the same thing about the movie.One inference they both might have pointed out, and even agreed on: In times so divided, making a movie about unity could be the most politicizing act of all. Was \"First Man,\" Ryan Gosling and Damien Chazelle's collaboration about Neil Armstrong, submarined at the box office by a conservative backlash? Or was its release simply marked by missteps? The Neil Armstrong movie appears to be flopping because of Marco Rubio. The truth is more complicated.",
        "author": "Steven Zeitchik"
    },
    {
        "title": "Justin Sun\u2019s $28 million bid won a Blue Origin auction. Now he\u2019ll pick 5 people to join him in space. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "810",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/22/justin-sun-blue-origin/",
        "text": "Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun revealed himself Wednesday as the mysterious auction winner who secured a seat on Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight last summer with a $28 million bid \u2014 only to skip it. Now he has a travel window and plans to handpick five people to join him.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe founder of Tron, a blockchain platform, will join an elite group of deep-pocketed space travelers with next year\u2019s launch. In a series of Twitter posts, Sun said it was an opportunity to realize a childhood dream and share the joy with five \u201cspace warriors\u201d through his new \u201cSea of Stars\u201d campaign. Sun said his future crew mates will hold \u201cspecial status\u201d in such fields as cryptocurrency, technology and art, and include a \u201csocially influential celebrity.\u201d Their identities will be announced sequentially in the run-up to the flight, his tweet said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun\u2019s $28 million bid covers the cost of his seat; he\u2019ll pay separate, undisclosed fares for the others, a Blue Origin spokesperson said. The auction proceeds benefit the company\u2019s foundation, which works to advance science, technology, engineering and mathematics education and \u201cthe future of life in space.\u201dSun\u2019s big reveal marks the latest turn in a prolific year for civilian spaceflight. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts into orbit, and it won the NASA contract to put them on the moon. In July, Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson became the first of the \u201cspace barons\u201d to fly to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos followed less than two weeks later aboard a Blue Origin rocket.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to spaceSun initially won the auction to accompany Bezos on that July 20 spaceflight but withdrew due to \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201d He had outbid thousands people representing more than 150 countries, according to the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his place went Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. The teen accompanied Bezos and his brother, Mark Bezos, and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator and member of the Mercury 13 \u2014 a group of women who had been privately trained for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race. (Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Three months later, 90-year-old William Shatner broke Funk\u2019s record to become the oldest person to go to space. The actor is best known for portraying Capt. James T. Kirk in the Star Trek TV and movie franchise.In mid-December, Blue Origin sent a crew of six to space that included Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Also aboard was Michael Strahan, a co-host on \u201cGood Morning America\u201d and former NFL star.(1/12)6 months ago, I was lucky enough to win the auction of Blue Origin\u2019s first launch! Today, I announce that I\u2019m launching the \"Sea of Stars\" campaign, which will select 5 warriors to explore space with me in 2022! @blueorigin @clubforfuture! Details: https://t.co/uoCCwofsjk pic.twitter.com/gZmPDQ3l5D\u2014 H.E. Justin Sun \ud83c\udd63\ud83c\udf1e\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde9 (@justinsuntron) December 22, 2021\n\nIn his Twitter thread, Sun left enigmatic descriptions of the types of people who will accompany him to space: a prominent cryptocurrency figure who is \u201ccrazy about cruising in Metaverse\u201d; a member of the blockchain community; a tech entrepreneur; an artist to create space-themed art; and a celebrity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun said his \u201cSea of Stars\u201d campaign is meant to encourage regular people to get involved in space exploration. The title pays homage to a Chinese saying that describes Earth as \u201cwhere the chapter of human life starts for our future generations, not where it ends,\u201d according to a Blue Origin news release.\u201cSpace exploration is the joint mission of all humankind, and the Sea of Stars is the future of our generation,\u201d Sun wrote. \u201cWith the rapid development of commercial aerospace, entering space may become a dream that everyone can realize in their lifetime.\u201dHis flight is \u201cexpected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022,\u201d according to a website created for the campaign. Blue Origin said it\u2019s one of six civilian trips planned next year.Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircutSun created Peiwo, a voice streaming app with millions of users. He later founded Tron, a blockchain platform that boasts tens of millions of users, and owns BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing service. In 2019, he made headlines with a $4.57 million donation to a homeless charity that won him a steak dinner with famed investor Warren Buffett.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun\u2019s career took an unusual turn when he became the World Trade Organization ambassador for Grenada.It\u2019s unclear how Sun came to be associated with the Caribbean nation. In an open letter published by the Tron Foundation, Sun said he planned to \u201cfight for the interests of developing countries, and promote the development of the blockchain industry and digital economy\u201d before the WTO.\u201cThe due recognition of the blockchain industry by sovereign states will be the final milestone towards achieving a [truly] decentralized financial infrastructure,\u201d Sun wrote.He plans to bring Grenada\u2019s flag on his spaceflight, according to a statement from the company. The crypto magnate, who revealed himself to be the mystery bidder, calls space exploration \u201cthe joint mission of all humankind.\u201d Justin Sun\u2019s $28 million bid won a Blue Origin auction. Now he\u2019ll pick 5 people to join him in space.",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Justin Sun\u2019s $28 million bid won a Blue Origin auction. Now he\u2019ll pick 5 people to join him in space. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "811",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/22/justin-sun-blue-origin/",
        "text": "Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun revealed himself Wednesday as the mysterious auction winner who secured a seat on Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight last summer with a $28 million bid \u2014 only to skip it. Now he has a travel window and plans to handpick five people to join him.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe founder of Tron, a blockchain platform, will join an elite group of deep-pocketed space travelers with next year\u2019s launch. In a series of Twitter posts, Sun said it was an opportunity to realize a childhood dream and share the joy with five \u201cspace warriors\u201d through his new \u201cSea of Stars\u201d campaign. Sun said his future crew mates will hold \u201cspecial status\u201d in such fields as cryptocurrency, technology and art, and include a \u201csocially influential celebrity.\u201d Their identities will be announced sequentially in the run-up to the flight, his tweet said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun\u2019s $28 million bid covers the cost of his seat; he\u2019ll pay separate, undisclosed fares for the others, a Blue Origin spokesperson said. The auction proceeds benefit the company\u2019s foundation, which works to advance science, technology, engineering and mathematics education and \u201cthe future of life in space.\u201dSun\u2019s big reveal marks the latest turn in a prolific year for civilian spaceflight. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts into orbit, and it won the NASA contract to put them on the moon. In July, Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson became the first of the \u201cspace barons\u201d to fly to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos followed less than two weeks later aboard a Blue Origin rocket.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to spaceSun initially won the auction to accompany Bezos on that July 20 spaceflight but withdrew due to \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201d He had outbid thousands people representing more than 150 countries, according to the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his place went Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. The teen accompanied Bezos and his brother, Mark Bezos, and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator and member of the Mercury 13 \u2014 a group of women who had been privately trained for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race. (Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Three months later, 90-year-old William Shatner broke Funk\u2019s record to become the oldest person to go to space. The actor is best known for portraying Capt. James T. Kirk in the Star Trek TV and movie franchise.In mid-December, Blue Origin sent a crew of six to space that included Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Also aboard was Michael Strahan, a co-host on \u201cGood Morning America\u201d and former NFL star.(1/12)6 months ago, I was lucky enough to win the auction of Blue Origin\u2019s first launch! Today, I announce that I\u2019m launching the \"Sea of Stars\" campaign, which will select 5 warriors to explore space with me in 2022! @blueorigin @clubforfuture! Details: https://t.co/uoCCwofsjk pic.twitter.com/gZmPDQ3l5D\u2014 H.E. Justin Sun \ud83c\udd63\ud83c\udf1e\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde9 (@justinsuntron) December 22, 2021\n\nIn his Twitter thread, Sun left enigmatic descriptions of the types of people who will accompany him to space: a prominent cryptocurrency figure who is \u201ccrazy about cruising in Metaverse\u201d; a member of the blockchain community; a tech entrepreneur; an artist to create space-themed art; and a celebrity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun said his \u201cSea of Stars\u201d campaign is meant to encourage regular people to get involved in space exploration. The title pays homage to a Chinese saying that describes Earth as \u201cwhere the chapter of human life starts for our future generations, not where it ends,\u201d according to a Blue Origin news release.\u201cSpace exploration is the joint mission of all humankind, and the Sea of Stars is the future of our generation,\u201d Sun wrote. \u201cWith the rapid development of commercial aerospace, entering space may become a dream that everyone can realize in their lifetime.\u201dHis flight is \u201cexpected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022,\u201d according to a website created for the campaign. Blue Origin said it\u2019s one of six civilian trips planned next year.Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircutSun created Peiwo, a voice streaming app with millions of users. He later founded Tron, a blockchain platform that boasts tens of millions of users, and owns BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing service. In 2019, he made headlines with a $4.57 million donation to a homeless charity that won him a steak dinner with famed investor Warren Buffett.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun\u2019s career took an unusual turn when he became the World Trade Organization ambassador for Grenada.It\u2019s unclear how Sun came to be associated with the Caribbean nation. In an open letter published by the Tron Foundation, Sun said he planned to \u201cfight for the interests of developing countries, and promote the development of the blockchain industry and digital economy\u201d before the WTO.\u201cThe due recognition of the blockchain industry by sovereign states will be the final milestone towards achieving a [truly] decentralized financial infrastructure,\u201d Sun wrote.He plans to bring Grenada\u2019s flag on his spaceflight, according to a statement from the company. The crypto magnate, who revealed himself to be the mystery bidder, calls space exploration \u201cthe joint mission of all humankind.\u201d Justin Sun\u2019s $28 million bid won a Blue Origin auction. Now he\u2019ll pick 5 people to join him in space.",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Justin Sun\u2019s $28 million bid won a Blue Origin auction. Now he\u2019ll pick 5 people to join him in space. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "812",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/22/justin-sun-blue-origin/",
        "text": "Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun revealed himself Wednesday as the mysterious auction winner who secured a seat on Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight last summer with a $28 million bid \u2014 only to skip it. Now he has a travel window and plans to handpick five people to join him.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe founder of Tron, a blockchain platform, will join an elite group of deep-pocketed space travelers with next year\u2019s launch. In a series of Twitter posts, Sun said it was an opportunity to realize a childhood dream and share the joy with five \u201cspace warriors\u201d through his new \u201cSea of Stars\u201d campaign. Sun said his future crew mates will hold \u201cspecial status\u201d in such fields as cryptocurrency, technology and art, and include a \u201csocially influential celebrity.\u201d Their identities will be announced sequentially in the run-up to the flight, his tweet said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun\u2019s $28 million bid covers the cost of his seat; he\u2019ll pay separate, undisclosed fares for the others, a Blue Origin spokesperson said. The auction proceeds benefit the company\u2019s foundation, which works to advance science, technology, engineering and mathematics education and \u201cthe future of life in space.\u201dSun\u2019s big reveal marks the latest turn in a prolific year for civilian spaceflight. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts into orbit, and it won the NASA contract to put them on the moon. In July, Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson became the first of the \u201cspace barons\u201d to fly to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos followed less than two weeks later aboard a Blue Origin rocket.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to spaceSun initially won the auction to accompany Bezos on that July 20 spaceflight but withdrew due to \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201d He had outbid thousands people representing more than 150 countries, according to the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his place went Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. The teen accompanied Bezos and his brother, Mark Bezos, and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator and member of the Mercury 13 \u2014 a group of women who had been privately trained for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race. (Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Three months later, 90-year-old William Shatner broke Funk\u2019s record to become the oldest person to go to space. The actor is best known for portraying Capt. James T. Kirk in the Star Trek TV and movie franchise.In mid-December, Blue Origin sent a crew of six to space that included Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Also aboard was Michael Strahan, a co-host on \u201cGood Morning America\u201d and former NFL star.(1/12)6 months ago, I was lucky enough to win the auction of Blue Origin\u2019s first launch! Today, I announce that I\u2019m launching the \"Sea of Stars\" campaign, which will select 5 warriors to explore space with me in 2022! @blueorigin @clubforfuture! Details: https://t.co/uoCCwofsjk pic.twitter.com/gZmPDQ3l5D\u2014 H.E. Justin Sun \ud83c\udd63\ud83c\udf1e\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde9 (@justinsuntron) December 22, 2021\n\nIn his Twitter thread, Sun left enigmatic descriptions of the types of people who will accompany him to space: a prominent cryptocurrency figure who is \u201ccrazy about cruising in Metaverse\u201d; a member of the blockchain community; a tech entrepreneur; an artist to create space-themed art; and a celebrity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun said his \u201cSea of Stars\u201d campaign is meant to encourage regular people to get involved in space exploration. The title pays homage to a Chinese saying that describes Earth as \u201cwhere the chapter of human life starts for our future generations, not where it ends,\u201d according to a Blue Origin news release.\u201cSpace exploration is the joint mission of all humankind, and the Sea of Stars is the future of our generation,\u201d Sun wrote. \u201cWith the rapid development of commercial aerospace, entering space may become a dream that everyone can realize in their lifetime.\u201dHis flight is \u201cexpected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022,\u201d according to a website created for the campaign. Blue Origin said it\u2019s one of six civilian trips planned next year.Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircutSun created Peiwo, a voice streaming app with millions of users. He later founded Tron, a blockchain platform that boasts tens of millions of users, and owns BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing service. In 2019, he made headlines with a $4.57 million donation to a homeless charity that won him a steak dinner with famed investor Warren Buffett.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSun\u2019s career took an unusual turn when he became the World Trade Organization ambassador for Grenada.It\u2019s unclear how Sun came to be associated with the Caribbean nation. In an open letter published by the Tron Foundation, Sun said he planned to \u201cfight for the interests of developing countries, and promote the development of the blockchain industry and digital economy\u201d before the WTO.\u201cThe due recognition of the blockchain industry by sovereign states will be the final milestone towards achieving a [truly] decentralized financial infrastructure,\u201d Sun wrote.He plans to bring Grenada\u2019s flag on his spaceflight, according to a statement from the company. The crypto magnate, who revealed himself to be the mystery bidder, calls space exploration \u201cthe joint mission of all humankind.\u201d Justin Sun\u2019s $28 million bid won a Blue Origin auction. Now he\u2019ll pick 5 people to join him in space.",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit Reaches Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "813",
        "date": "2021-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-reaches-space-with-unconventional-rocket-launch-system-11610946369?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=29",
        "text": "With the proliferation of small-satellite manufacturers across the U.S. and other regions, specialized launch providers are rushing to fill the demand to blast their products into space. They include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven rocket; Texas-based Firefly Aerospace; and Relativity Space, which plans to launch 3-D manufactured rockets. But only a few of the startups can claim the distinction of blasting out of the atmosphere, a goal Mr. Branson and his team have pursued for years, even as more-conventional rocket designs grabbed most of the public attention.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s novel airborne platform, a specially outfitted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jet named Cosmic Girl, climbed to an altitude of roughly 6 miles above the Pacific Ocean and released a slender, 70-foot rocket slung under its left wing. The booster\u2019s main liquid-fueled engine roared to life, transporting the cluster of cubesats, or miniature satellites, built by universities and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, into low-Earth orbit.\n\n\nMr. Branson said the company\u2019s LauncherOne rocket would encourage \u201ca whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit.\u201d Virgin Orbit CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart\n\n\n\n said the company managed to demonstrate every element of its launch system. The next mission is slated to begin commercial operations, with customers including the U.K.\u2019s Air Force and low-cost communications provider Swarm Technologies Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson said the company\u2019s rocket would encourage a new generation of innovators.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIt is a fraught time for the host of launch companies world-wide seeking to cash in on the exponential growth of small satellites designed for tasks including earth observation, industrial uses and climate studies. Dozens of other companies targeting the same expanding market have suffered funding problems or delays getting launchers airborne in the past year, partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to U.S. government and industry officials.\nCommercial customers and the U.S. military are looking more to benefit from the lower costs and increased flexibility of small rockets able to put satellites weighing from a few pounds to a few hundred pounds into tailored orbits. Placing such satellites as secondary payloads on larger boosters\u2014essentially piggybacking them on larger satellites\u2014often means customers can\u2019t depend on optimum schedules or orbital locations. The result can fray business plans and reduce the useful life of satellites\n\n\nKeywords The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet (Jan. 9) \n\n\nDespite the small-satellite trend, some industry players see some rockets carrying many at a time and, therefore, potentially producing a glut of launch providers. \u201cI don\u2019t see that demand is going to increase dramatically over the next few years,\u201d said George Stafford, a co-founder of small-satellite maker Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\nRegardless of industry expansion, it will take time for Virgin Orbit\u2019s approach to shake up the launch business. The sister company of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\n\n SPCE -3.96%\n\n\n a space-tourism venture also founded by Mr. Branson, has said it expects to increase launches slowly, with only a few likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for significantly larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The startup reached space with an unconventional rocket-launch system, deploying tiny satellites into orbit in demonstration flight. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit Reaches Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "814",
        "date": "2021-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-reaches-space-with-unconventional-rocket-launch-system-11610946369?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=10",
        "text": "With the proliferation of small-satellite manufacturers across the U.S. and other regions, specialized launch providers are rushing to fill the demand to blast their products into space. They include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven rocket; Texas-based Firefly Aerospace; and Relativity Space, which plans to launch 3-D manufactured rockets. But only a few of the startups can claim the distinction of blasting out of the atmosphere, a goal Mr. Branson and his team have pursued for years, even as more-conventional rocket designs grabbed most of the public attention.\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s novel airborne platform, a specially outfitted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jet named Cosmic Girl, climbed to an altitude of roughly 6 miles above the Pacific Ocean and released a slender, 70-foot rocket slung under its left wing. The booster\u2019s main liquid-fueled engine roared to life, transporting the cluster of cubesats, or miniature satellites, built by universities and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, into low-Earth orbit.\n\n\nMr. Branson said the company\u2019s LauncherOne rocket would encourage \u201ca whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit.\u201d Virgin Orbit CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart\n\n\n\n said the company managed to demonstrate every element of its launch system. The next mission is slated to begin commercial operations, with customers including the U.K.\u2019s Air Force and low-cost communications provider Swarm Technologies Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson said the company\u2019s rocket would encourage a new generation of innovators.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIt is a fraught time for the host of launch companies world-wide seeking to cash in on the exponential growth of small satellites designed for tasks including earth observation, industrial uses and climate studies. Dozens of other companies targeting the same expanding market have suffered funding problems or delays getting launchers airborne in the past year, partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to U.S. government and industry officials.\nCommercial customers and the U.S. military are looking more to benefit from the lower costs and increased flexibility of small rockets able to put satellites weighing from a few pounds to a few hundred pounds into tailored orbits. Placing such satellites as secondary payloads on larger boosters\u2014essentially piggybacking them on larger satellites\u2014often means customers can\u2019t depend on optimum schedules or orbital locations. The result can fray business plans and reduce the useful life of satellites\n\n\nKeywords The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet (Jan. 9) \n\n\nDespite the small-satellite trend, some industry players see some rockets carrying many at a time and, therefore, potentially producing a glut of launch providers. \u201cI don\u2019t see that demand is going to increase dramatically over the next few years,\u201d said George Stafford, a co-founder of small-satellite maker Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\nRegardless of industry expansion, it will take time for Virgin Orbit\u2019s approach to shake up the launch business. The sister company of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\n\n SPCE -1.97%\n\n\n a space-tourism venture also founded by Mr. Branson, has said it expects to increase launches slowly, with only a few likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for significantly larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The startup reached space with an unconventional rocket-launch system, deploying tiny satellites into orbit in demonstration flight. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit Reaches Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "815",
        "date": "2021-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-reaches-space-with-unconventional-rocket-launch-system-11610946369?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=26",
        "text": "With the proliferation of small-satellite manufacturers across the U.S. and other regions, specialized launch providers are rushing to fill the demand to blast their products into space. They include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven rocket; Texas-based Firefly Aerospace; and Relativity Space, which plans to launch 3-D manufactured rockets. But only a few of the startups can claim the distinction of blasting out of the atmosphere, a goal Mr. Branson and his team have pursued for years, even as more-conventional rocket designs grabbed most of the public attention.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s novel airborne platform, a specially outfitted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jet named Cosmic Girl, climbed to an altitude of roughly 6 miles above the Pacific Ocean and released a slender, 70-foot rocket slung under its left wing. The booster\u2019s main liquid-fueled engine roared to life, transporting the cluster of cubesats, or miniature satellites, built by universities and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, into low-Earth orbit.\n\n\nMr. Branson said the company\u2019s LauncherOne rocket would encourage \u201ca whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit.\u201d Virgin Orbit CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart\n\n\n\n said the company managed to demonstrate every element of its launch system. The next mission is slated to begin commercial operations, with customers including the U.K.\u2019s Air Force and low-cost communications provider Swarm Technologies Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson said the company\u2019s rocket would encourage a new generation of innovators.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIt is a fraught time for the host of launch companies world-wide seeking to cash in on the exponential growth of small satellites designed for tasks including earth observation, industrial uses and climate studies. Dozens of other companies targeting the same expanding market have suffered funding problems or delays getting launchers airborne in the past year, partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to U.S. government and industry officials.\nCommercial customers and the U.S. military are looking more to benefit from the lower costs and increased flexibility of small rockets able to put satellites weighing from a few pounds to a few hundred pounds into tailored orbits. Placing such satellites as secondary payloads on larger boosters\u2014essentially piggybacking them on larger satellites\u2014often means customers can\u2019t depend on optimum schedules or orbital locations. The result can fray business plans and reduce the useful life of satellites\n\n\nKeywords The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet (Jan. 9) \n\n\nDespite the small-satellite trend, some industry players see some rockets carrying many at a time and, therefore, potentially producing a glut of launch providers. \u201cI don\u2019t see that demand is going to increase dramatically over the next few years,\u201d said George Stafford, a co-founder of small-satellite maker Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\nRegardless of industry expansion, it will take time for Virgin Orbit\u2019s approach to shake up the launch business. The sister company of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n a space-tourism venture also founded by Mr. Branson, has said it expects to increase launches slowly, with only a few likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for significantly larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The startup reached space with an unconventional rocket-launch system, deploying tiny satellites into orbit in demonstration flight. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit Reaches Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "816",
        "date": "2021-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-reaches-space-with-unconventional-rocket-launch-system-11610946369?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=35",
        "text": "With the proliferation of small-satellite manufacturers across the U.S. and other regions, specialized launch providers are rushing to fill the demand to blast their products into space. They include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven rocket; Texas-based Firefly Aerospace; and Relativity Space, which plans to launch 3-D manufactured rockets. But only a few of the startups can claim the distinction of blasting out of the atmosphere, a goal Mr. Branson and his team have pursued for years, even as more-conventional rocket designs grabbed most of the public attention.\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s novel airborne platform, a specially outfitted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jet named Cosmic Girl, climbed to an altitude of roughly 6 miles above the Pacific Ocean and released a slender, 70-foot rocket slung under its left wing. The booster\u2019s main liquid-fueled engine roared to life, transporting the cluster of cubesats, or miniature satellites, built by universities and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, into low-Earth orbit.\n\n\nMr. Branson said the company\u2019s LauncherOne rocket would encourage \u201ca whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit.\u201d Virgin Orbit CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart\n\n\n\n said the company managed to demonstrate every element of its launch system. The next mission is slated to begin commercial operations, with customers including the U.K.\u2019s Air Force and low-cost communications provider Swarm Technologies Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson said the company\u2019s rocket would encourage a new generation of innovators.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIt is a fraught time for the host of launch companies world-wide seeking to cash in on the exponential growth of small satellites designed for tasks including earth observation, industrial uses and climate studies. Dozens of other companies targeting the same expanding market have suffered funding problems or delays getting launchers airborne in the past year, partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to U.S. government and industry officials.\nCommercial customers and the U.S. military are looking more to benefit from the lower costs and increased flexibility of small rockets able to put satellites weighing from a few pounds to a few hundred pounds into tailored orbits. Placing such satellites as secondary payloads on larger boosters\u2014essentially piggybacking them on larger satellites\u2014often means customers can\u2019t depend on optimum schedules or orbital locations. The result can fray business plans and reduce the useful life of satellites\n\n\nKeywords The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet (Jan. 9) \n\n\nDespite the small-satellite trend, some industry players see some rockets carrying many at a time and, therefore, potentially producing a glut of launch providers. \u201cI don\u2019t see that demand is going to increase dramatically over the next few years,\u201d said George Stafford, a co-founder of small-satellite maker Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\nRegardless of industry expansion, it will take time for Virgin Orbit\u2019s approach to shake up the launch business. The sister company of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n a space-tourism venture also founded by Mr. Branson, has said it expects to increase launches slowly, with only a few likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for significantly larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The startup reached space with an unconventional rocket-launch system, deploying tiny satellites into orbit in demonstration flight. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit Reaches Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "817",
        "date": "2021-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-reaches-space-with-unconventional-rocket-launch-system-11610946369?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=39",
        "text": "With the proliferation of small-satellite manufacturers across the U.S. and other regions, specialized launch providers are rushing to fill the demand to blast their products into space. They include Rocket Lab, a U.S.-New Zealand company that has a flight-proven rocket; Texas-based Firefly Aerospace; and Relativity Space, which plans to launch 3-D manufactured rockets. But only a few of the startups can claim the distinction of blasting out of the atmosphere, a goal Mr. Branson and his team have pursued for years, even as more-conventional rocket designs grabbed most of the public attention.\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s novel airborne platform, a specially outfitted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jet named Cosmic Girl, climbed to an altitude of roughly 6 miles above the Pacific Ocean and released a slender, 70-foot rocket slung under its left wing. The booster\u2019s main liquid-fueled engine roared to life, transporting the cluster of cubesats, or miniature satellites, built by universities and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, into low-Earth orbit.\n\n\nMr. Branson said the company\u2019s LauncherOne rocket would encourage \u201ca whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit.\u201d Virgin Orbit CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart\n\n\n\n said the company managed to demonstrate every element of its launch system. The next mission is slated to begin commercial operations, with customers including the U.K.\u2019s Air Force and low-cost communications provider Swarm Technologies Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson said the company\u2019s rocket would encourage a new generation of innovators.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIt is a fraught time for the host of launch companies world-wide seeking to cash in on the exponential growth of small satellites designed for tasks including earth observation, industrial uses and climate studies. Dozens of other companies targeting the same expanding market have suffered funding problems or delays getting launchers airborne in the past year, partly as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to U.S. government and industry officials.\nCommercial customers and the U.S. military are looking more to benefit from the lower costs and increased flexibility of small rockets able to put satellites weighing from a few pounds to a few hundred pounds into tailored orbits. Placing such satellites as secondary payloads on larger boosters\u2014essentially piggybacking them on larger satellites\u2014often means customers can\u2019t depend on optimum schedules or orbital locations. The result can fray business plans and reduce the useful life of satellites\n\n\nKeywords The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet (Jan. 9) \n\n\nDespite the small-satellite trend, some industry players see some rockets carrying many at a time and, therefore, potentially producing a glut of launch providers. \u201cI don\u2019t see that demand is going to increase dramatically over the next few years,\u201d said George Stafford, a co-founder of small-satellite maker Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Technologies Corp.\n\nRegardless of industry expansion, it will take time for Virgin Orbit\u2019s approach to shake up the launch business. The sister company of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\n\n SPCE -3.20%\n\n\n a space-tourism venture also founded by Mr. Branson, has said it expects to increase launches slowly, with only a few likely for all of 2021. Virgin Orbit initially marketed a price of $12 million for a launch, versus roughly five times that much for significantly larger rockets, such as the Falcon 9 operated by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The startup reached space with an unconventional rocket-launch system, deploying tiny satellites into orbit in demonstration flight. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Sees Private Spacecraft Potentially Reaching Moon First (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "818",
        "date": "2019-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-sees-private-spacecraft-potentially-reaching-moon-before-u-s-astronauts-11560962649?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=15",
        "text": "With agency officials and White House aides pushing to put NASA astronauts on the moon by 2024\u2014four years earlier than the previous schedule\u2014Mr. Bridenstine predicted some commercial missions could fly there before 2024 to gain a competitive advantage in bidding for subsequent NASA transportation contracts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n leah millis/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine didn\u2019t identify specific companies or elaborate on industry\u2019s potential timeline, but his comments underscore how significantly the Trump administration\u2019s stepped-up focus on private-public space partnerships may shake up the aerospace sector. \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a resurgence of interest in the moon\u201d across the board from various companies and other nations \u201clike we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d the NASA chief said.\nHe reiterated that the U.S. government envisions paying to use landers as a commercial service, instead of NASA designing, building and operating the vehicles. As a result, when the agency ultimately signs a contract to carry astronauts \u201cit may or may not be the first time\u201d that vehicle has landed on the moon, Mr. Bridenstine said.\nPrivate industry will be expected to come up with a big chunk of the required investment, he added, because \u201cwe want to be one customer of many customers\u201d using landers shuttling between the moon and a proposed orbiting facility, called a gateway, that NASA plans to deploy by the middle of the next decade. The agency expects to spend as much as $30 billion over the next five years to speed up astronaut missions to the moon.\nEntrepreneurs such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Blue Origin LLC, have signaled their general willingness to make upfront investments in lunar exploration with the aim of snaring NASA business that traditionally has gone to established aerospace companies.\nBut Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s financing concept may not generate much support among larger and older NASA contractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , for instance, which is building a deep-space capsule called Orion under a traditional NASA contract, has serious reservations about following Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s lead.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Ambrose,\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\u2019s executive vice president for space, told reporters during a roundtable discussion at the show Wednesday that, as far as a private company financing a moon landing, \u201csomeone could do it\u201d but \u201cthat\u2019s not the course we\u2019re on right now\u201d with NASA\u2019s lunar ambitions. \u201c To reach the moon faster, he said, \u201dCongress has to resource it.\u201d Once the risk is understood, according to Mr. Ambrose, commercial investors can piggyback and expand uses of the lander and related technology. \nThe level of private investment is particularly important because NASA may not get the increased funding it is seeking for 2020 and later years to pay for faster exploration of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite U.S. government efforts to accelerate human space exploration, private spacecraft could beat American astronauts to the surface of the moon, according to the head of NASA. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Sees Private Spacecraft Potentially Reaching Moon First (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "819",
        "date": "2019-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-sees-private-spacecraft-potentially-reaching-moon-before-u-s-astronauts-11560962649?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=58",
        "text": "With agency officials and White House aides pushing to put NASA astronauts on the moon by 2024\u2014four years earlier than the previous schedule\u2014Mr. Bridenstine predicted some commercial missions could fly there before 2024 to gain a competitive advantage in bidding for subsequent NASA transportation contracts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n leah millis/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine didn\u2019t identify specific companies or elaborate on industry\u2019s potential timeline, but his comments underscore how significantly the Trump administration\u2019s stepped-up focus on private-public space partnerships may shake up the aerospace sector. \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a resurgence of interest in the moon\u201d across the board from various companies and other nations \u201clike we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d the NASA chief said.\nHe reiterated that the U.S. government envisions paying to use landers as a commercial service, instead of NASA designing, building and operating the vehicles. As a result, when the agency ultimately signs a contract to carry astronauts \u201cit may or may not be the first time\u201d that vehicle has landed on the moon, Mr. Bridenstine said.\nPrivate industry will be expected to come up with a big chunk of the required investment, he added, because \u201cwe want to be one customer of many customers\u201d using landers shuttling between the moon and a proposed orbiting facility, called a gateway, that NASA plans to deploy by the middle of the next decade. The agency expects to spend as much as $30 billion over the next five years to speed up astronaut missions to the moon.\nEntrepreneurs such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Blue Origin LLC, have signaled their general willingness to make upfront investments in lunar exploration with the aim of snaring NASA business that traditionally has gone to established aerospace companies.\nBut Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s financing concept may not generate much support among larger and older NASA contractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , for instance, which is building a deep-space capsule called Orion under a traditional NASA contract, has serious reservations about following Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s lead.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Ambrose,\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\u2019s executive vice president for space, told reporters during a roundtable discussion at the show Wednesday that, as far as a private company financing a moon landing, \u201csomeone could do it\u201d but \u201cthat\u2019s not the course we\u2019re on right now\u201d with NASA\u2019s lunar ambitions. \u201c To reach the moon faster, he said, \u201dCongress has to resource it.\u201d Once the risk is understood, according to Mr. Ambrose, commercial investors can piggyback and expand uses of the lander and related technology. \nThe level of private investment is particularly important because NASA may not get the increased funding it is seeking for 2020 and later years to pay for faster exploration of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite U.S. government efforts to accelerate human space exploration, private spacecraft could beat American astronauts to the surface of the moon, according to the head of NASA. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Sees Private Spacecraft Potentially Reaching Moon First (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "820",
        "date": "2019-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-sees-private-spacecraft-potentially-reaching-moon-before-u-s-astronauts-11560962649?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=55",
        "text": "With agency officials and White House aides pushing to put NASA astronauts on the moon by 2024\u2014four years earlier than the previous schedule\u2014Mr. Bridenstine predicted some commercial missions could fly there before 2024 to gain a competitive advantage in bidding for subsequent NASA transportation contracts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n leah millis/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine didn\u2019t identify specific companies or elaborate on industry\u2019s potential timeline, but his comments underscore how significantly the Trump administration\u2019s stepped-up focus on private-public space partnerships may shake up the aerospace sector. \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a resurgence of interest in the moon\u201d across the board from various companies and other nations \u201clike we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d the NASA chief said.\nHe reiterated that the U.S. government envisions paying to use landers as a commercial service, instead of NASA designing, building and operating the vehicles. As a result, when the agency ultimately signs a contract to carry astronauts \u201cit may or may not be the first time\u201d that vehicle has landed on the moon, Mr. Bridenstine said.\nPrivate industry will be expected to come up with a big chunk of the required investment, he added, because \u201cwe want to be one customer of many customers\u201d using landers shuttling between the moon and a proposed orbiting facility, called a gateway, that NASA plans to deploy by the middle of the next decade. The agency expects to spend as much as $30 billion over the next five years to speed up astronaut missions to the moon.\nEntrepreneurs such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Blue Origin LLC, have signaled their general willingness to make upfront investments in lunar exploration with the aim of snaring NASA business that traditionally has gone to established aerospace companies.\nBut Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s financing concept may not generate much support among larger and older NASA contractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , for instance, which is building a deep-space capsule called Orion under a traditional NASA contract, has serious reservations about following Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s lead.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Ambrose,\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\u2019s executive vice president for space, told reporters during a roundtable discussion at the show Wednesday that, as far as a private company financing a moon landing, \u201csomeone could do it\u201d but \u201cthat\u2019s not the course we\u2019re on right now\u201d with NASA\u2019s lunar ambitions. \u201c To reach the moon faster, he said, \u201dCongress has to resource it.\u201d Once the risk is understood, according to Mr. Ambrose, commercial investors can piggyback and expand uses of the lander and related technology. \nThe level of private investment is particularly important because NASA may not get the increased funding it is seeking for 2020 and later years to pay for faster exploration of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite U.S. government efforts to accelerate human space exploration, private spacecraft could beat American astronauts to the surface of the moon, according to the head of NASA. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Sees Private Spacecraft Potentially Reaching Moon First (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "821",
        "date": "2019-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-sees-private-spacecraft-potentially-reaching-moon-before-u-s-astronauts-11560962649?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=71",
        "text": "With agency officials and White House aides pushing to put NASA astronauts on the moon by 2024\u2014four years earlier than the previous schedule\u2014Mr. Bridenstine predicted some commercial missions could fly there before 2024 to gain a competitive advantage in bidding for subsequent NASA transportation contracts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n leah millis/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine didn\u2019t identify specific companies or elaborate on industry\u2019s potential timeline, but his comments underscore how significantly the Trump administration\u2019s stepped-up focus on private-public space partnerships may shake up the aerospace sector. \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a resurgence of interest in the moon\u201d across the board from various companies and other nations \u201clike we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d the NASA chief said.\nHe reiterated that the U.S. government envisions paying to use landers as a commercial service, instead of NASA designing, building and operating the vehicles. As a result, when the agency ultimately signs a contract to carry astronauts \u201cit may or may not be the first time\u201d that vehicle has landed on the moon, Mr. Bridenstine said.\nPrivate industry will be expected to come up with a big chunk of the required investment, he added, because \u201cwe want to be one customer of many customers\u201d using landers shuttling between the moon and a proposed orbiting facility, called a gateway, that NASA plans to deploy by the middle of the next decade. The agency expects to spend as much as $30 billion over the next five years to speed up astronaut missions to the moon.\nEntrepreneurs such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs Blue Origin LLC, have signaled their general willingness to make upfront investments in lunar exploration with the aim of snaring NASA business that traditionally has gone to established aerospace companies.\nBut Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s financing concept may not generate much support among larger and older NASA contractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , for instance, which is building a deep-space capsule called Orion under a traditional NASA contract, has serious reservations about following Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s lead.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Ambrose,\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\u2019s executive vice president for space, told reporters during a roundtable discussion at the show Wednesday that, as far as a private company financing a moon landing, \u201csomeone could do it\u201d but \u201cthat\u2019s not the course we\u2019re on right now\u201d with NASA\u2019s lunar ambitions. \u201c To reach the moon faster, he said, \u201dCongress has to resource it.\u201d Once the risk is understood, according to Mr. Ambrose, commercial investors can piggyback and expand uses of the lander and related technology. \nThe level of private investment is particularly important because NASA may not get the increased funding it is seeking for 2020 and later years to pay for faster exploration of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite U.S. government efforts to accelerate human space exploration, private spacecraft could beat American astronauts to the surface of the moon, according to the head of NASA. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit Seeks $1 Billion Valuation in Fundraising (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "822",
        "date": "2020-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-seeks-1-billion-valuation-in-fundraising-11602403201?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=12",
        "text": "Virgin Orbit said in August it had hired LionTree Advisors LLC and Perella Weinberg Partners LP to look at potential financial transactions. Those banks are now charged with helping it raise between $150 million to $200 million by as early as the end of the year for capital expenditure and to fund satellite launches, according to the people familiar with the plans.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson is among a group of entrepreneurs, including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\u00a0 Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who have helped kick-start an era of commercially led space exploration.\n\n\nWhile the satellite industry has historically been dominated by large vehicles launching large satellites, Virgin Orbit and several other rivals world-wide want to send smaller satellites into lower orbits, targeting civil, military and commercial customers at the lower end of the market. \nAnalysts say Virgin Orbit\u2019s proposed launches\u2014from moving aircraft rather than from the ground\u2014are cheaper and more flexible but have confronted technical issues and still face hurdles. The company, which has yet to put a payload into orbit, initially expected to be launching roughly a dozen times a year by now.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here\u2019s how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally published March 22, 2019)\n \n\n\n\u201cIn a crowded market, Virgin Orbit is a front-runner,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cBut like everyone else, it is facing some challenges.\u201d\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s business is partly dependent on a bevy of smaller space startups\u2014producing everything from miniature satellites to compact but powerful Earth-observation sensors\u2014to provide new commercial opportunities and a steady flow of scientific payloads from governments and universities.\nBut even before the pandemic, many space startups struggled to maintain momentum and find funding. Since Covid-19 struck, projected demand for launches has slumped and some investment has dried up.\nMore recently, industry officials and consultants have pointed to a gradual resurgence of interest in the sector, prompted by the U.S. military\u2019s support for smaller, less-expensive satellites and more-nimble launch systems.\nVirgin Orbit has also had its own problems. In May, the company\u2019s initial demonstration flight failed after a rocket released from a specially outfitted jumbo jet failed to reach low-Earth orbit.\nVirgin Orbit officials said at the time that on average one out of two launches of a new rocket design fail.\nIndustry consultants and analysts have estimated that so far, Mr. Branson\u2019s company has spent at least $400 million developing its air-launching system. \nFor Mr. Branson, the Virgin Orbit fundraising is the third time he has turned to investors amid the pandemic, which has crushed the tourism and travel markets that form the mainstay of his Virgin Group.\nIn July, Virgin Atlantic Airways secured a financial package worth about $1.5 billion that will allow it to stave off bankruptcy. That included a sale of around 10% in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -1.69%\n\n\n which left him as a minority owner in the space tourism firm.\nEarlier this month, Virgin Group floated a special-purpose acquisition company in New York, raising a more-than-expected $480 million to make investments in the consumer industry.\nOver the last decade, Mr. Branson has mainly taken a back seat on management of his companies but remains focused on his two U.S.-based space ventures, Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit, according to people familiar with him.\nVirgin Orbit started building rockets in Long Beach, Calif., a few years ago and has about 500 employees.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com, Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The fundraising for the satellite-launch company comes as the British billionaire\u2019s sprawling travel-to-finance empire and the wider commercial space industry have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald, Ben Dummett and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit Seeks $1 Billion Valuation in Fundraising (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "823",
        "date": "2020-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-seeks-1-billion-valuation-in-fundraising-11602403201?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=46",
        "text": "Virgin Orbit said in August it had hired LionTree Advisors LLC and Perella Weinberg Partners LP to look at potential financial transactions. Those banks are now charged with helping it raise between $150 million to $200 million by as early as the end of the year for capital expenditure and to fund satellite launches, according to the people familiar with the plans.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson is among a group of entrepreneurs, including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\u00a0 Amazon.com Inc. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who have helped kick-start an era of commercially led space exploration.\n\n\nWhile the satellite industry has historically been dominated by large vehicles launching large satellites, Virgin Orbit and several other rivals world-wide want to send smaller satellites into lower orbits, targeting civil, military and commercial customers at the lower end of the market. \nAnalysts say Virgin Orbit\u2019s proposed launches\u2014from moving aircraft rather than from the ground\u2014are cheaper and more flexible but have confronted technical issues and still face hurdles. The company, which has yet to put a payload into orbit, initially expected to be launching roughly a dozen times a year by now.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here\u2019s how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally published March 22, 2019)\n \n\n\n\u201cIn a crowded market, Virgin Orbit is a front-runner,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cBut like everyone else, it is facing some challenges.\u201d\nVirgin Orbit\u2019s business is partly dependent on a bevy of smaller space startups\u2014producing everything from miniature satellites to compact but powerful Earth-observation sensors\u2014to provide new commercial opportunities and a steady flow of scientific payloads from governments and universities.\nBut even before the pandemic, many space startups struggled to maintain momentum and find funding. Since Covid-19 struck, projected demand for launches has slumped and some investment has dried up.\nMore recently, industry officials and consultants have pointed to a gradual resurgence of interest in the sector, prompted by the U.S. military\u2019s support for smaller, less-expensive satellites and more-nimble launch systems.\nVirgin Orbit has also had its own problems. In May, the company\u2019s initial demonstration flight failed after a rocket released from a specially outfitted jumbo jet failed to reach low-Earth orbit.\nVirgin Orbit officials said at the time that on average one out of two launches of a new rocket design fail.\nIndustry consultants and analysts have estimated that so far, Mr. Branson\u2019s company has spent at least $400 million developing its air-launching system. \nFor Mr. Branson, the Virgin Orbit fundraising is the third time he has turned to investors amid the pandemic, which has crushed the tourism and travel markets that form the mainstay of his Virgin Group.\nIn July, Virgin Atlantic Airways secured a financial package worth about $1.5 billion that will allow it to stave off bankruptcy. That included a sale of around 10% in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -2.18%\n\n\n which left him as a minority owner in the space tourism firm.\nEarlier this month, Virgin Group floated a special-purpose acquisition company in New York, raising a more-than-expected $480 million to make investments in the consumer industry.\nOver the last decade, Mr. Branson has mainly taken a back seat on management of his companies but remains focused on his two U.S.-based space ventures, Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit, according to people familiar with him.\nVirgin Orbit started building rockets in Long Beach, Calif., a few years ago and has about 500 employees.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com, Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The fundraising for the satellite-launch company comes as the British billionaire\u2019s sprawling travel-to-finance empire and the wider commercial space industry have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald, Ben Dummett and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Post-CEO Life Looks Like if You\u2019re Jeff Bezos (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "824",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-post-ceo-life-looks-like-if-youre-jeff-bezos-11625218231?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=7",
        "text": "The trip will be the most public showcase of Mr. Bezos\u2019 pursuits outside of Amazon as he hands off day-to-day management of the e-commerce titan to his successor, Amazon Web Services Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andy Jassy.\n\n\n\n Mr. Bezos, the world\u2019s richest person, has been gradually moving to an expansive post-CEO life that aside from space exploration includes a climate-focused philanthropy and an embrace of celebrity, complete with public appearances with actors and moguls, multimillion-dollar homes, globe-trotting on private jets and a soon-to-be-completed superyacht.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingAmazon Post-Bezos: What Comes Next?Next week Jeff Bezos is set to step down as CEO of Amazon, the company he founded and built into a sprawling e-commerce juggernaut. So what does Amazon look like post-Bezos? WSJ's Amazon reporter, Dana Mattioli, joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss the company's history and future. Production help this week came from Amanda Lewellyn. Christopher Zinsli is our supervising producer. Kateri Jochum is the executive producer of WSJ Podcasts.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nThe 57-year-old Amazon founder has prepared closely for his departure and is handing the company\u2019s top post to one of his most trusted advisers in Mr. Jassy, even as he has signaled to investors that he intends to remain involved. Mr. Bezos has said in his role as chairman, he will focus on new initiatives and innovations, including on projects to make Amazon\u2019s warehouses safer for workers. \n\nMr. Bezos in the past has said executive transitions should be \u201cboring\u201d because preparations for a smooth change would have long been in place, according to Colin Bryar, who served as an early technical adviser to Mr. Bezos. \n\u201cYou don\u2019t want an organization to incur a knowledge gap,\u201d Mr. Bryar said of Mr. Bezos\u2019 thought process on transitions. \nAmazon declined to make Mr. Bezos available for an interview. \nThese days, one of the best ways to know what Mr. Bezos is up to, or his whereabouts, is his Instagram account. One of his latest posts shows him embracing movie star Dwayne \u201cThe Rock\u201d Johnson while teasing a partnership between Amazon Studios and Mr. Johnson\u2019s Seven Bucks Productions company. Several recent posts have been about a newer interest\u2014fighting climate change. Mr. Bezos last year announced the creation of the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund, one of the world\u2019s largest climate-focused initiatives. Mr. Bezos is worth roughly $200 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. \nSo far, the Earth Fund program has been untraditional and operated largely outside the public eye.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTwo weeks after Mr. Bezos gives up his CEO seat, he plans to launch into space in a capsule built by his rocket company, Blue Origin, in what is to be the program\u2019s first human space flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Red Huber/TNS/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\nIn November, when it announced its first $791 million in grants, it had not yet established an office, hired an executive director or set up a website. Nonprofits working on climate issues said they were in the dark about what Mr. Bezos wanted to fund, or what his overall strategy was. In March, Mr. Bezos announced that the fund had hired\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Steer,\n\n\n\n head of the economic and environment nonprofit World Resources Institute, as president and chief executive. In an interview, Mr. Steer said the fund\u2019s first grants showcased its interests in research, data, policy and advocacy. \nGrantees say Mr. Bezos\u2019 grantmaking initially has been marked by speed, low levels of paperwork and his direct involvement. Gloria Walton, president and chief executive of the Oakland, Calif. based Solutions Project, which supports climate advocates and landed a grant of $43 million, said Mr. Bezos outlined his inexperience in a call and said he wanted to learn and listen. She said she pressed him to give more grants to community-based groups led by women and people of color, and he was responsive. \n\u201cThis is the way he does it. There is not a lot of infrastructure. There is not a lot of upfront strategy development, and he is hands-on,\u201d said Angela Anderson, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which received a $15 million grant. The group said it would use the grant to support updates for the U.S. electrical grid and to help speed up the electrification of commercial trucking.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Blue Origin plans to launch its first passenger spaceflight on July 20 with billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos and three others on board. The flight, which will have at least one paying passenger, is being hailed as the next step in a new era of space tourism. Photo illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nOther recipients included the World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fu For the first time in 27 years, he won\u2019t be running Amazon day to day. He plans a flight to space and a fight against climate change. ",
        "author": "Sebastian Herrera and Russell Gold"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Post-CEO Life Looks Like if You\u2019re Jeff Bezos (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "825",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-post-ceo-life-looks-like-if-youre-jeff-bezos-11625218231?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=27",
        "text": "The trip will be the most public showcase of Mr. Bezos\u2019 pursuits outside of Amazon as he hands off day-to-day management of the e-commerce titan to his successor, Amazon Web Services Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andy Jassy.\n\n\n\n Mr. Bezos, the world\u2019s richest person, has been gradually moving to an expansive post-CEO life that aside from space exploration includes a climate-focused philanthropy and an embrace of celebrity, complete with public appearances with actors and moguls, multimillion-dollar homes, globe-trotting on private jets and a soon-to-be-completed superyacht.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 57-year-old Amazon founder has prepared closely for his departure and is handing the company\u2019s top post to one of his most trusted advisers in Mr. Jassy, even as he has signaled to investors that he intends to remain involved. Mr. Bezos has said in his role as chairman, he will focus on new initiatives and innovations, including on projects to make Amazon\u2019s warehouses safer for workers. \n\nMr. Bezos in the past has said executive transitions should be \u201cboring\u201d because preparations for a smooth change would have long been in place, according to Colin Bryar, who served as an early technical adviser to Mr. Bezos. \n\u201cYou don\u2019t want an organization to incur a knowledge gap,\u201d Mr. Bryar said of Mr. Bezos\u2019 thought process on transitions. \nAmazon declined to make Mr. Bezos available for an interview. \nThese days, one of the best ways to know what Mr. Bezos is up to, or his whereabouts, is his Instagram account. One of his latest posts shows him embracing movie star Dwayne \u201cThe Rock\u201d Johnson while teasing a partnership between Amazon Studios and Mr. Johnson\u2019s Seven Bucks Productions company. Several recent posts have been about a newer interest\u2014fighting climate change. Mr. Bezos last year announced the creation of the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund, one of the world\u2019s largest climate-focused initiatives. Mr. Bezos is worth roughly $200 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. \nSo far, the Earth Fund program has been untraditional and operated largely outside the public eye.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTwo weeks after Mr. Bezos gives up his CEO seat, he plans to launch into space in a capsule built by his rocket company, Blue Origin, in what is to be the program\u2019s first human space flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Red Huber/TNS/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\nIn November, when it announced its first $791 million in grants, it had not yet established an office, hired an executive director or set up a website. Nonprofits working on climate issues said they were in the dark about what Mr. Bezos wanted to fund, or what his overall strategy was. In March, Mr. Bezos announced that the fund had hired\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Steer,\n\n\n\n head of the economic and environment nonprofit World Resources Institute, as president and chief executive. In an interview, Mr. Steer said the fund\u2019s first grants showcased its interests in research, data, policy and advocacy. \nGrantees say Mr. Bezos\u2019 grantmaking initially has been marked by speed, low levels of paperwork and his direct involvement. Gloria Walton, president and chief executive of the Oakland, Calif. based Solutions Project, which supports climate advocates and landed a grant of $43 million, said Mr. Bezos outlined his inexperience in a call and said he wanted to learn and listen. She said she pressed him to give more grants to community-based groups led by women and people of color, and he was responsive. \n\u201cThis is the way he does it. There is not a lot of infrastructure. There is not a lot of upfront strategy development, and he is hands-on,\u201d said Angela Anderson, director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which received a $15 million grant. The group said it would use the grant to support updates for the U.S. electrical grid and to help speed up the electrification of commercial trucking.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Blue Origin plans to launch its first passenger spaceflight on July 20 with billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos and three others on board. The flight, which will have at least one paying passenger, is being hailed as the next step in a new era of space tourism. Photo illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nOther recipients included the World Resources Institute and World Wildlife Fund, which each received a $100 million grant, as well as San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation, which received a $50 million grant. \n\u201cHe\u2019s conveyed the fact that acting on climate change can actually drive more economic efficiency. It can drive new technologies. It can lower risk,\u201d Mr. Steer said, adding that while the fund is still in its early stages, it will largely be based in Washington, D.C. and plans to build a \u201cworld-class team\u201d at the direction of Mr. Bezos.\nMr. Bezos in recent years has spent more time on high-level decisions at Amazon as he\u2019s also transformed into a much more public figure.\nHe became a tabloid sensation as he began to d For the first time in 27 years, he won\u2019t be running Amazon day to day. He plans a flight to space and a fight against climate change. ",
        "author": "Sebastian Herrera and Russell Gold"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "826",
        "date": "2018-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-falcon-heavy-rocket-represents-a-major-bet-for-spacex-1517752801?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=71",
        "text": "The primary reason for the weakened demand is that both national security and corporate satellites continue to get smaller and lighter. So now, even if it performs as advertised, the Falcon Heavy might be\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n biggest contrarian bet since he founded SpaceX over 15 years ago.\nSince Mr. Musk announced the Falcon Heavy in 2011, his closely held company has become a dominant force, relying on a Falcon 9 rocket that is substantially more powerful than initial versions and able to fly more frequently than vehicles used by rivals.\n\n\nThe website for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, lists four future Falcon Heavy launches carrying customer payloads, versus more than two dozen for its smaller predecessor, the workhorse Falcon 9. Less than two years ago, internal company documents projected a total of as many as 17 Falcon Heavy launches from 2017 to the end of 2019.\nWhen it comes to prospective manned missions, the outlook also seems uncertain. Mr. Musk faces escalating competition\u2014with formidable rivals ranging from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to fellow billionaire and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2014for a prominent role in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s proposed return of astronauts to the moon. Potential Falcon Heavy participation is murkier in longer-term NASA efforts to send humans farther into the solar system, largely because Mr. Musk already has unveiled plans for a substantially larger rocket, dubbed the Big Falcon Rocket, targeting eventual voyages to Mars.\n\n\n Booster Club SpaceX's new Falcon Heavy is more powerful than any rocket currently in use, but still not as large as the Saturn V that launched astronauts to the moon. Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 10 m\u2020 3.7 m 12 m 1.7 m Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 1.7 m 12 m 3.7 m 10 m\u2020 Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 12 m 1.7 m 3.7 m 10 m\u2020 4 2 3 1 1.7 m 3.7 m 12 m 10 m\u2020 1) Falcon 1 Payload First launched 0.5 tons* September 2008 2) Falcon 9 Payload First launched 25 tons* June 2010 3) Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* 4) Saturn V First launched Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Note: Apollo configuration of Saturn V shown *Estimated, at low-earth orbit \u2020Without fins Sources: SpaceX; NASA \n\n\nSeparately, NASA is pursuing its own multibillion-dollar Mars rocket. It is unknown how, or even if, Mr. Musk\u2019s privately financed vehicles might mesh with those plans.\nGiven the high personal and corporate stakes riding on Tuesday\u2019s test flight, Mr. Musk hopes to demonstrate convincingly to naysayers as well as future customers that his team achieved something never done before: Using private funding, it developed and successfully launched a rocket featuring 5 million pounds of thrust, the most power since the Apollo era\u2019s Saturn V.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nIf all goes well, the 230-foot behemoth is scheduled to lift off from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday afternoon local time, carrying a red Tesla roadster as a mock payload. Renowned for his public-relations flair, Mr. Musk, who also runs car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Motors Inc.,\n\n\n has quipped on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n that the car will remain \u201cin deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn\u2019t blow up on ascent.\u201d\nThe first three minutes will be the most stressful for the rocket\u2014and for SpaceX officials. By then, two side boosters are supposed to separate and push away from the rocket Widely acknowledged as an engineering marvel, the new booster faces uncertain commercial demand. The rocket is set to make its maiden voyage on Tuesday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "827",
        "date": "2018-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-falcon-heavy-rocket-represents-a-major-bet-for-spacex-1517752801?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=103",
        "text": "The primary reason for the weakened demand is that both national security and corporate satellites continue to get smaller and lighter. So now, even if it performs as advertised, the Falcon Heavy might be\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n biggest contrarian bet since he founded SpaceX over 15 years ago.\n\n\n\n\nSince Mr. Musk announced the Falcon Heavy in 2011, his closely held company has become a dominant force, relying on a Falcon 9 rocket that is substantially more powerful than initial versions and able to fly more frequently than vehicles used by rivals.\n\n\nThe website for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, lists four future Falcon Heavy launches carrying customer payloads, versus more than two dozen for its smaller predecessor, the workhorse Falcon 9. Less than two years ago, internal company documents projected a total of as many as 17 Falcon Heavy launches from 2017 to the end of 2019.\nWhen it comes to prospective manned missions, the outlook also seems uncertain. Mr. Musk faces escalating competition\u2014with formidable rivals ranging from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to fellow billionaire and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2014for a prominent role in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s proposed return of astronauts to the moon. Potential Falcon Heavy participation is murkier in longer-term NASA efforts to send humans farther into the solar system, largely because Mr. Musk already has unveiled plans for a substantially larger rocket, dubbed the Big Falcon Rocket, targeting eventual voyages to Mars.\n\n\n Booster Club SpaceX's new Falcon Heavy is more powerful than any rocket currently in use, but still not as large as the Saturn V that launched astronauts to the moon. Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 10 m\u2020 3.7 m 12 m 1.7 m Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 1.7 m 12 m 3.7 m 10 m\u2020 Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 12 m 1.7 m 3.7 m 10 m\u2020 4 2 3 1 1.7 m 3.7 m 12 m 10 m\u2020 1) Falcon 1 Payload First launched 0.5 tons* September 2008 2) Falcon 9 Payload First launched 25 tons* June 2010 3) Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* 4) Saturn V First launched Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Note: Apollo configuration of Saturn V shown *Estimated, at low-earth orbit \u2020Without fins Sources: SpaceX; NASA \n\n\nSeparately, NASA is pursuing its own multibillion-dollar Mars rocket. It is unknown how, or even if, Mr. Musk\u2019s privately financed vehicles might mesh with those plans.\nGiven the high personal and corporate stakes riding on Tuesday\u2019s test flight, Mr. Musk hopes to demonstrate convincingly to naysayers as well as future customers that his team achieved something never done before: Using private funding, it developed and successfully launched a rocket featuring 5 million pounds of thrust, the most power since the Apollo era\u2019s Saturn V.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nIf all goes well, the 230-foot behemoth is scheduled to lift off from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday afternoon local time, carrying a red Tesla roadster as a mock payload. Renowned for his public-relations flair, Mr. Musk, who also runs car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Motors Inc.,\n\n\n has quipped on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n that the car will remain \u201cin deep space for a billion years or so if it doesn\u2019t blow up on ascent.\u201d\nThe first three minutes will be the most stressful for the rocket\u2014and for SpaceX officials. By then, two side boosters are supposed to separate and push away from the ro Widely acknowledged as an engineering marvel, the new booster faces uncertain commercial demand. The rocket is set to make its maiden voyage on Tuesday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Starship Lands on Fifth Attempt (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "828",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-starship-lands-on-fifth-attempt-11620256754?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=21",
        "text": "The mission continues a frenetic period of launches by closely held SpaceX for government, military and commercial customers in recent weeks, including the successful transit of astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\nThe experimental Starship design underpins the recent $2.9 billion NASA contract win by SpaceX to provide a lunar lander for astronauts later in the decade. The two losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n filed official protests over the award which they said was driven in part by lack of funding to hire more than one contractor.\n\n\nPrevious SpaceX efforts since the first Starship flight last December ended with the loss of the vehicle, highlighting the complexity of the mission, which includes flipping the vehicle upright from a nose-down position before touchdown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since 1968, a SpaceX capsule carrying a crew of four \u2014 three from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration \u2014 touched down in the Gulf of Mexico early Sunday. Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, said it is evolving the Starship design rapidly and needed to perform multiple test flights before it would be ready for an orbital or lunar mission. The latest launch vehicle featured a new engine design and upgraded avionics.\nThe Starship has yet to be fired into orbit or carry any crew, and would need larger engines\u2014currently under development\u2014to reach orbit and be fueled in space for longer missions, such as to the moon.\nSpaceX last week secured clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration for its next three missions, including the latest.\nThe firm has to secure approval for design changes and adhere to the FAA\u2019s assessment of risks, as well as have government inspectors at the launch site. Starship launches require road closures and the evacuation of residents in the immediate area around Boca Chica Village, which hosts the SpaceX facility.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. Industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes have already been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\nThe company is focused on government and commercial launches but also plans to enter the nascent space-tourism market using the Crew Dragon capsule that has carried NASA astronauts.\nIt faces competition from Blue Origin, which on Wednesday said it aimed to make the first crewed launch of its New Shepard vehicle on July 20. It is auctioning a seat on the six-person flight, but didn\u2019t disclose planned pricing for its suborbital jaunts. \nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tAn earlier version of this article incorrectly featured an image of the SpaceX rocket ship lifting off rather than landing. (Corrected on May 5.) An uncrewed 16-story rocket ship was launched from the company\u2019s facility in southern Texas and landed back on its pad after a six-minute flight. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Starship Lands on Fifth Attempt (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "829",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-starship-lands-on-fifth-attempt-11620256754?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=30",
        "text": "The mission continues a frenetic period of launches by closely held SpaceX for government, military and commercial customers in recent weeks, including the successful transit of astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\nThe experimental Starship design underpins the recent $2.9 billion NASA contract win by SpaceX to provide a lunar lander for astronauts later in the decade. The two losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n filed official protests over the award which they said was driven in part by lack of funding to hire more than one contractor.\n\n\nPrevious SpaceX efforts since the first Starship flight last December ended with the loss of the vehicle, highlighting the complexity of the mission, which includes flipping the vehicle upright from a nose-down position before touchdown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since 1968, a SpaceX capsule carrying a crew of four \u2014 three from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration \u2014 touched down in the Gulf of Mexico early Sunday. Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, said it is evolving the Starship design rapidly and needed to perform multiple test flights before it would be ready for an orbital or lunar mission. The latest launch vehicle featured a new engine design and upgraded avionics.\nThe Starship has yet to be fired into orbit or carry any crew, and would need larger engines\u2014currently under development\u2014to reach orbit and be fueled in space for longer missions, such as to the moon.\nSpaceX last week secured clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration for its next three missions, including the latest.\nThe firm has to secure approval for design changes and adhere to the FAA\u2019s assessment of risks, as well as have government inspectors at the launch site. Starship launches require road closures and the evacuation of residents in the immediate area around Boca Chica Village, which hosts the SpaceX facility.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. Industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes have already been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\nThe company is focused on government and commercial launches but also plans to enter the nascent space-tourism market using the Crew Dragon capsule that has carried NASA astronauts.\nIt faces competition from Blue Origin, which on Wednesday said it aimed to make the first crewed launch of its New Shepard vehicle on July 20. It is auctioning a seat on the six-person flight, but didn\u2019t disclose planned pricing for its suborbital jaunts. \nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tAn earlier version of this article incorrectly featured an image of the SpaceX rocket ship lifting off rather than landing. (Corrected on May 5.) An uncrewed 16-story rocket ship was launched from the company\u2019s facility in southern Texas and landed back on its pad after a six-minute flight. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Starship Lands on Fifth Attempt (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "830",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-starship-lands-on-fifth-attempt-11620256754?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=31",
        "text": "The mission continues a frenetic period of launches by closely held SpaceX for government, military and commercial customers in recent weeks, including the successful transit of astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\nThe experimental Starship design underpins the recent $2.9 billion NASA contract win by SpaceX to provide a lunar lander for astronauts later in the decade. The two losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n filed official protests over the award which they said was driven in part by lack of funding to hire more than one contractor.\n\n\nPrevious SpaceX efforts since the first Starship flight last December ended with the loss of the vehicle, highlighting the complexity of the mission, which includes flipping the vehicle upright from a nose-down position before touchdown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since 1968, a SpaceX capsule carrying a crew of four \u2014 three from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration \u2014 touched down in the Gulf of Mexico early Sunday. Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, said it is evolving the Starship design rapidly and needed to perform multiple test flights before it would be ready for an orbital or lunar mission. The latest launch vehicle featured a new engine design and upgraded avionics.\nThe Starship has yet to be fired into orbit or carry any crew, and would need larger engines\u2014currently under development\u2014to reach orbit and be fueled in space for longer missions, such as to the moon.\nSpaceX last week secured clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration for its next three missions, including the latest.\nThe firm has to secure approval for design changes and adhere to the FAA\u2019s assessment of risks, as well as have government inspectors at the launch site. Starship launches require road closures and the evacuation of residents in the immediate area around Boca Chica Village, which hosts the SpaceX facility.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. Industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes have already been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\nThe company is focused on government and commercial launches but also plans to enter the nascent space-tourism market using the Crew Dragon capsule that has carried NASA astronauts.\nIt faces competition from Blue Origin, which on Wednesday said it aimed to make the first crewed launch of its New Shepard vehicle on July 20. It is auctioning a seat on the six-person flight, but didn\u2019t disclose planned pricing for its suborbital jaunts. \nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tAn earlier version of this article incorrectly featured an image of the SpaceX rocket ship lifting off rather than landing. (Corrected on May 5.) An uncrewed 16-story rocket ship was launched from the company\u2019s facility in southern Texas and landed back on its pad after a six-minute flight. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Starship Lands on Fifth Attempt (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "831",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-starship-lands-on-fifth-attempt-11620256754?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=8",
        "text": "The mission continues a frenetic period of launches by closely held SpaceX for government, military and commercial customers in recent weeks, including the successful transit of astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\n\n\n\n\nThe experimental Starship design underpins the recent $2.9 billion NASA contract win by SpaceX to provide a lunar lander for astronauts later in the decade. The two losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n filed official protests over the award which they said was driven in part by lack of funding to hire more than one contractor.\n\n\nPrevious SpaceX efforts since the first Starship flight last December ended with the loss of the vehicle, highlighting the complexity of the mission, which includes flipping the vehicle upright from a nose-down position before touchdown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since 1968, a SpaceX capsule carrying a crew of four \u2014 three from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration \u2014 touched down in the Gulf of Mexico early Sunday. Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the company\u2019s formal name, said it is evolving the Starship design rapidly and needed to perform multiple test flights before it would be ready for an orbital or lunar mission. The latest launch vehicle featured a new engine design and upgraded avionics.\nThe Starship has yet to be fired into orbit or carry any crew, and would need larger engines\u2014currently under development\u2014to reach orbit and be fueled in space for longer missions, such as to the moon.\nSpaceX last week secured clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration for its next three missions, including the latest.\nThe firm has to secure approval for design changes and adhere to the FAA\u2019s assessment of risks, as well as have government inspectors at the launch site. Starship launches require road closures and the evacuation of residents in the immediate area around Boca Chica Village, which hosts the SpaceX facility.\nAt various times Mr. Musk has said SpaceX foresees sending a Starship, with or without people on board, around Mars within a handful of years. Industry and government space officials consider that overly optimistic. A number of other prototypes have already been built or are in fabrication, and Mr. Musk has talked about ultimately sending as many as 100 people on a single Starship voyage.\nSpaceX\u2019s accomplishments have vaulted the company to the top tier of commercial and government launch providers, prompting intense industry interest in Starship\u2019s development. To reach the moon or penetrate deeper into the solar system, Starship is designed to sit on top of another, giant rocket that SpaceX also is developing.\nThe company is focused on government and commercial launches but also plans to enter the nascent space-tourism market using the Crew Dragon capsule that has carried NASA astronauts.\nIt faces competition from Blue Origin, which on Wednesday said it aimed to make the first crewed launch of its New Shepard vehicle on July 20. It is auctioning a seat on the six-person flight, but didn\u2019t disclose planned pricing for its suborbital jaunts. \nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tAn earlier version of this article incorrectly featured an image of the SpaceX rocket ship lifting off rather than landing. (Corrected on May 5.) An uncrewed 16-story rocket ship was launched from the company\u2019s facility in southern Texas and landed back on its pad after a six-minute flight. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Space Startup to Supply Engines for Boeing-Lockheed Rocket Venture (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "832",
        "date": "2018-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezoss-space-startup-to-supply-engines-for-boeing-lockheed-rocket-venture-1538035079?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=69",
        "text": "The long-term, potentially multibillion-dollar agreement could provide a boost to Blue Origin\u2019s eventual goal of becoming a major military launch provider itself. The company plans to use the same engines to power its own heavy-lift launcher, called New Glenn, which is under development. The announcement didn\u2019t provide details about prices or other specifics.\nMany industry experts expect that the development deadline is likely to be extended, with regular operations of the Vulcan booster potentially starting before the middle of the next decade. Even if everything goes smoothly, testing and final certification of the New Glenn booster is also expected to take roughly that long.\n\nThe Blue Origin engines have strategic importance for the Pentagon because they are intended to end the use of Russian-built RD-180 engines, which now provide primary propulsion on United Launch\u2019s workhorse Atlas V rockets.\n\n\nRelated Boeing Wins Contest to Build Air Force Trainer Jets (Sept. 27) Japanese Startups Chase Otherworldly Opportunities (Sept. 26) One Small Step for Yusaku Maezawa, One Giant Leap for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (Sept. 18) \n\n\nVulcan\u2019s design envisions maximum liftoff thrust at 3.8 million pounds, and ULA estimates the project will generate more than 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Blue Origin is planning to set up a production facility for its engines\nDescribing ULA as \u201cthe premier launch service provider\u201d for the Pentagon, Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said \u201cwe\u2019re thrilled to be part of their team and that mission.\u201d \nCompetition in the satellite-launch business is heating up. The Air Force is considering how to divvy up hundreds of millions of federal dollars to develop a fleet of lower-cost, more versatile rockets. Blue Origin, United Launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Innovation Systems unit, formerly known as Orbital ATK, are all in the running. The Air Force is preparing to shortly announce the first-stage winners. \nThe push by Mr. Bezos into the rocket business comes amid a transformation of the space industry\u2014spanning both military and commercial markets\u2014driven by like-minded entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Elon Musk, whose SpaceX venture is already launching satellites for the Pentagon. The three billionaires also are eyeing nascent space tourism markets and ultimately even super-fast passenger transport around the globe.\nSpaceX has challenged established industry players, and Mr. Musk has sparred publicly with Boeing CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n about which company will be first to power a manned flight to Mars.\nBlue Origin is financing and developing the BE-4 engine almost entirely with its own funds. Mr. Bezos, founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said he invests roughly $1 billion of his personal fortune into Blue Origin annually.\nNegotiations between United Launch and Blue Origin dragged on for months, with both sides bargaining hard over price, delivery schedules and production reliability. Other hurdles, according to two people familiar with the details, included United Launch\u2019s concerns about relying on a prospective rival for its most important engine supply. It couldn\u2019t be learned what provisions were hammered out.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBlue Origin beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc., which had sought to sell its AR1 engine as the primary propulsion system for the Vulcan. A spokesman for Aerojet, which previously was picked to provide smaller, upper-stage engines for the ULA rocket, said \u201cwe are committed\u201d to the AR1 engine and \u201cwill have a test-ready engine in 2019.\u201d The spokesman also said that regardless of the decision, Aerojet\u2019s \u201cliquid engine business is thriving,\u201d and the AR1 remains an option for possible smaller launch vehicles on the drawing board.\nThe selection highlights some of the tough choices stemming from President Trump\u2019s national defense strategy. Unveiled earlier this year, the strategy favors attracting more high-technology companies\u2014with little or no military background\u2014as Pentagon contractors.\nWhile Blue Origin fits that bill, analysts said it leaves Aerojet\u2014one of two legacy suppliers of domestic rocket and missile engines\u2014in a seemingly difficult position with fewer opportunities. Northrop Grumman Corp. recently completed its $9.2 billion purchase of the other big rocket-engine maker, Orbital ATK, a deal that analysts said made Aerojet a potential takeover target for companies such as Boeing.\nBoeing and Northrop Grumman are competing for a contract worth as much as $120 billion to replace the current arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles, with Northrop\u2019s new unit and Aerojet set to provide one or both companies with engines. The Pentagon i Blue Origin, the space-transportation company run by Jeff Bezos, has won a contract to provide engines for a potential rival\u2019s next-generation rocket, further roiling a tumultuous industry and vaulting Mr. Bezos into the lucrative market for Pentagon satellite launches. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Space Startup to Supply Engines for Boeing-Lockheed Rocket Venture (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "833",
        "date": "2018-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezoss-space-startup-to-supply-engines-for-boeing-lockheed-rocket-venture-1538035079?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=22",
        "text": "The long-term, potentially multibillion-dollar agreement could provide a boost to Blue Origin\u2019s eventual goal of becoming a major military launch provider itself. The company plans to use the same engines to power its own heavy-lift launcher, called New Glenn, which is under development. The announcement didn\u2019t provide details about prices or other specifics.\n\n\n\n\nMany industry experts expect that the development deadline is likely to be extended, with regular operations of the Vulcan booster potentially starting before the middle of the next decade. Even if everything goes smoothly, testing and final certification of the New Glenn booster is also expected to take roughly that long.\n\nThe Blue Origin engines have strategic importance for the Pentagon because they are intended to end the use of Russian-built RD-180 engines, which now provide primary propulsion on United Launch\u2019s workhorse Atlas V rockets.\n\n\nRelated Boeing Wins Contest to Build Air Force Trainer Jets (Sept. 27) Japanese Startups Chase Otherworldly Opportunities (Sept. 26) One Small Step for Yusaku Maezawa, One Giant Leap for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (Sept. 18) \n\n\nVulcan\u2019s design envisions maximum liftoff thrust at 3.8 million pounds, and ULA estimates the project will generate more than 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Blue Origin is planning to set up a production facility for its engines\nDescribing ULA as \u201cthe premier launch service provider\u201d for the Pentagon, Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said \u201cwe\u2019re thrilled to be part of their team and that mission.\u201d \nCompetition in the satellite-launch business is heating up. The Air Force is considering how to divvy up hundreds of millions of federal dollars to develop a fleet of lower-cost, more versatile rockets. Blue Origin, United Launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Innovation Systems unit, formerly known as Orbital ATK, are all in the running. The Air Force is preparing to shortly announce the first-stage winners. \nThe push by Mr. Bezos into the rocket business comes amid a transformation of the space industry\u2014spanning both military and commercial markets\u2014driven by like-minded entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Elon Musk, whose SpaceX venture is already launching satellites for the Pentagon. The three billionaires also are eyeing nascent space tourism markets and ultimately even super-fast passenger transport around the globe.\nSpaceX has challenged established industry players, and Mr. Musk has sparred publicly with Boeing CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n about which company will be first to power a manned flight to Mars.\nBlue Origin is financing and developing the BE-4 engine almost entirely with its own funds. Mr. Bezos, founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said he invests roughly $1 billion of his personal fortune into Blue Origin annually.\nNegotiations between United Launch and Blue Origin dragged on for months, with both sides bargaining hard over price, delivery schedules and production reliability. Other hurdles, according to two people familiar with the details, included United Launch\u2019s concerns about relying on a prospective rival for its most important engine supply. It couldn\u2019t be learned what provisions were hammered out.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBlue Origin beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc., which had sought to sell its AR1 engine as the primary propulsion system for the Vulcan. A spokesman for Aerojet, which previously was picked to provide smaller, upper-stage engines for the ULA rocket, said \u201cwe are committed\u201d to the AR1 engine and \u201cwill have a test-ready engine in 2019.\u201d The spokesman also said that regardless of the decision, Aerojet\u2019s \u201cliquid engine business is thriving,\u201d and the AR1 remains an option for possible smaller launch vehicles on the drawing board.\nThe selection highlights some of the tough choices stemming from President Trump\u2019s national defense strategy. Unveiled earlier this year, the strategy favors attracting more high-technology companies\u2014with little or no military background\u2014as Pentagon contractors.\nWhile Blue Origin fits that bill, analysts said it leaves Aerojet\u2014one of two legacy suppliers of domestic rocket and missile engines\u2014in a seemingly difficult position with fewer opportunities. Northrop Grumman Corp. recently completed its $9.2 billion purchase of the other big rocket-engine maker, Orbital ATK, a deal that analysts said made Aerojet a potential takeover target for companies such as Boeing.\nBoeing and Northrop Grumman are competing for a contract worth as much as $120 billion to replace the current arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles, with Northrop\u2019s new unit and Aerojet set to provide one or both companies with engines. The Pentag Blue Origin, the space-transportation company run by Jeff Bezos, has won a contract to provide engines for a potential rival\u2019s next-generation rocket, further roiling a tumultuous industry and vaulting Mr. Bezos into the lucrative market for Pentagon satellite launches. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Space Startup to Supply Engines for Boeing-Lockheed Rocket Venture (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "834",
        "date": "2018-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezoss-space-startup-to-supply-engines-for-boeing-lockheed-rocket-venture-1538035079?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=63",
        "text": "The long-term, potentially multibillion-dollar agreement could provide a boost to Blue Origin\u2019s eventual goal of becoming a major military launch provider itself. The company plans to use the same engines to power its own heavy-lift launcher, called New Glenn, which is under development. The announcement didn\u2019t provide details about prices or other specifics.\nMany industry experts expect that the development deadline is likely to be extended, with regular operations of the Vulcan booster potentially starting before the middle of the next decade. Even if everything goes smoothly, testing and final certification of the New Glenn booster is also expected to take roughly that long.\n\nThe Blue Origin engines have strategic importance for the Pentagon because they are intended to end the use of Russian-built RD-180 engines, which now provide primary propulsion on United Launch\u2019s workhorse Atlas V rockets.\n\n\nRelated Boeing Wins Contest to Build Air Force Trainer Jets (Sept. 27) Japanese Startups Chase Otherworldly Opportunities (Sept. 26) One Small Step for Yusaku Maezawa, One Giant Leap for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (Sept. 18) \n\n\nVulcan\u2019s design envisions maximum liftoff thrust at 3.8 million pounds, and ULA estimates the project will generate more than 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Blue Origin is planning to set up a production facility for its engines\nDescribing ULA as \u201cthe premier launch service provider\u201d for the Pentagon, Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said \u201cwe\u2019re thrilled to be part of their team and that mission.\u201d \nCompetition in the satellite-launch business is heating up. The Air Force is considering how to divvy up hundreds of millions of federal dollars to develop a fleet of lower-cost, more versatile rockets. Blue Origin, United Launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Innovation Systems unit, formerly known as Orbital ATK, are all in the running. The Air Force is preparing to shortly announce the first-stage winners. \nThe push by Mr. Bezos into the rocket business comes amid a transformation of the space industry\u2014spanning both military and commercial markets\u2014driven by like-minded entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Elon Musk, whose SpaceX venture is already launching satellites for the Pentagon. The three billionaires also are eyeing nascent space tourism markets and ultimately even super-fast passenger transport around the globe.\nSpaceX has challenged established industry players, and Mr. Musk has sparred publicly with Boeing CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n about which company will be first to power a manned flight to Mars.\nBlue Origin is financing and developing the BE-4 engine almost entirely with its own funds. Mr. Bezos, founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said he invests roughly $1 billion of his personal fortune into Blue Origin annually.\nNegotiations between United Launch and Blue Origin dragged on for months, with both sides bargaining hard over price, delivery schedules and production reliability. Other hurdles, according to two people familiar with the details, included United Launch\u2019s concerns about relying on a prospective rival for its most important engine supply. It couldn\u2019t be learned what provisions were hammered out.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBlue Origin beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc., which had sought to sell its AR1 engine as the primary propulsion system for the Vulcan. A spokesman for Aerojet, which previously was picked to provide smaller, upper-stage engines for the ULA rocket, said \u201cwe are committed\u201d to the AR1 engine and \u201cwill have a test-ready engine in 2019.\u201d The spokesman also said that regardless of the decision, Aerojet\u2019s \u201cliquid engine business is thriving,\u201d and the AR1 remains an option for possible smaller launch vehicles on the drawing board.\nThe selection highlights some of the tough choices stemming from President Trump\u2019s national defense strategy. Unveiled earlier this year, the strategy favors attracting more high-technology companies\u2014with little or no military background\u2014as Pentagon contractors.\nWhile Blue Origin fits that bill, analysts said it leaves Aerojet\u2014one of two legacy suppliers of domestic rocket and missile engines\u2014in a seemingly difficult position with fewer opportunities. Northrop Grumman Corp. recently completed its $9.2 billion purchase of the other big rocket-engine maker, Orbital ATK, a deal that analysts said made Aerojet a potential takeover target for companies such as Boeing.\nBoeing and Northrop Grumman are competing for a contract worth as much as $120 billion to replace the current arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles, with Northrop\u2019s new unit and Aerojet set to provide one or both companies with engines. The Pentagon i Blue Origin, the space-transportation company run by Jeff Bezos, has won a contract to provide engines for a potential rival\u2019s next-generation rocket, further roiling a tumultuous industry and vaulting Mr. Bezos into the lucrative market for Pentagon satellite launches. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Space Startup to Supply Engines for Boeing-Lockheed Rocket Venture (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "835",
        "date": "2018-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezoss-space-startup-to-supply-engines-for-boeing-lockheed-rocket-venture-1538035079?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=87",
        "text": "The long-term, potentially multibillion-dollar agreement could provide a boost to Blue Origin\u2019s eventual goal of becoming a major military launch provider itself. The company plans to use the same engines to power its own heavy-lift launcher, called New Glenn, which is under development. The announcement didn\u2019t provide details about prices or other specifics.\n\n\n\n\nMany industry experts expect that the development deadline is likely to be extended, with regular operations of the Vulcan booster potentially starting before the middle of the next decade. Even if everything goes smoothly, testing and final certification of the New Glenn booster is also expected to take roughly that long.\n\nThe Blue Origin engines have strategic importance for the Pentagon because they are intended to end the use of Russian-built RD-180 engines, which now provide primary propulsion on United Launch\u2019s workhorse Atlas V rockets.\n\n\nRelated Boeing Wins Contest to Build Air Force Trainer Jets (Sept. 27) Japanese Startups Chase Otherworldly Opportunities (Sept. 26) One Small Step for Yusaku Maezawa, One Giant Leap for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (Sept. 18) \n\n\nVulcan\u2019s design envisions maximum liftoff thrust at 3.8 million pounds, and ULA estimates the project will generate more than 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. Blue Origin is planning to set up a production facility for its engines\nDescribing ULA as \u201cthe premier launch service provider\u201d for the Pentagon, Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said \u201cwe\u2019re thrilled to be part of their team and that mission.\u201d \nCompetition in the satellite-launch business is heating up. The Air Force is considering how to divvy up hundreds of millions of federal dollars to develop a fleet of lower-cost, more versatile rockets. Blue Origin, United Launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Innovation Systems unit, formerly known as Orbital ATK, are all in the running. The Air Force is preparing to shortly announce the first-stage winners. \nThe push by Mr. Bezos into the rocket business comes amid a transformation of the space industry\u2014spanning both military and commercial markets\u2014driven by like-minded entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Elon Musk, whose SpaceX venture is already launching satellites for the Pentagon. The three billionaires also are eyeing nascent space tourism markets and ultimately even super-fast passenger transport around the globe.\nSpaceX has challenged established industry players, and Mr. Musk has sparred publicly with Boeing CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg\n\n\n\n about which company will be first to power a manned flight to Mars.\nBlue Origin is financing and developing the BE-4 engine almost entirely with its own funds. Mr. Bezos, founder and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said he invests roughly $1 billion of his personal fortune into Blue Origin annually.\nNegotiations between United Launch and Blue Origin dragged on for months, with both sides bargaining hard over price, delivery schedules and production reliability. Other hurdles, according to two people familiar with the details, included United Launch\u2019s concerns about relying on a prospective rival for its most important engine supply. It couldn\u2019t be learned what provisions were hammered out.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBlue Origin beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc., which had sought to sell its AR1 engine as the primary propulsion system for the Vulcan. A spokesman for Aerojet, which previously was picked to provide smaller, upper-stage engines for the ULA rocket, said \u201cwe are committed\u201d to the AR1 engine and \u201cwill have a test-ready engine in 2019.\u201d The spokesman also said that regardless of the decision, Aerojet\u2019s \u201cliquid engine business is thriving,\u201d and the AR1 remains an option for possible smaller launch vehicles on the drawing board.\nThe selection highlights some of the tough choices stemming from President Trump\u2019s national defense strategy. Unveiled earlier this year, the strategy favors attracting more high-technology companies\u2014with little or no military background\u2014as Pentagon contractors.\nWhile Blue Origin fits that bill, analysts said it leaves Aerojet\u2014one of two legacy suppliers of domestic rocket and missile engines\u2014in a seemingly difficult position with fewer opportunities. Northrop Grumman Corp. recently completed its $9.2 billion purchase of the other big rocket-engine maker, Orbital ATK, a deal that analysts said made Aerojet a potential takeover target for companies such as Boeing.\nBoeing and Northrop Grumman are competing for a contract worth as much as $120 billion to replace the current arsenal of land-based nuclear missiles, with Northrop\u2019s new unit and Aerojet set to provide one or both companies with engines. The Pentag Blue Origin, the space-transportation company run by Jeff Bezos, has won a contract to provide engines for a potential rival\u2019s next-generation rocket, further roiling a tumultuous industry and vaulting Mr. Bezos into the lucrative market for Pentagon satellite launches. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Picks SpaceX to Build New Lunar Lander (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "836",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-picks-spacex-to-build-new-lunar-lander-11618604869?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=31",
        "text": "The lander deal adds to the products SpaceX is developing, with recent funding rounds raising its valuation close to $100 billion as it pursues a mix of new rockets, space taxis and an array of hundreds of satellites for military and commercial customers.\nSpaceX already flies astronauts on behalf of NASA to and from the International Space Station and is developing a large new rocket called the Super Heavy to launch the Starship vehicle on which its lunar lander is based. The Starship has made a series of test flights from Texas, some of which have ended in failure after exploding on landing.\n\n\nNASA plans to use a new rocket made by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n for a moon mission known as Artemis 1 as early as November. It would fly around the moon before returning the Orion crew capsule produced by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n to Earth.\nCurrent plans call for a second crewed test in 2023 that would be followed the next year by the first astronaut landing since 1972, using the SpaceX moon taxi to transfer to and from Orion. The final schedule for the Artemis program depends on contractors developing and testing the equipment and securing funding for the program.\n\u201cIf they\u2019re hitting their milestones, we may have a shot at 2024,\u201d NASA Acting Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Jurczyk\n\n\n\n said at a news conference.\nBoeing\u2019s Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule are both owned by NASA, but the lunar lander is the largest part of Artemis to rely on a public-private partnership and is owned and run by SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nMr. Jurczyk said in response to a question that there were no plans to drop the Boeing rocket in favor of the SpaceX Super Heavy for the crewed moon missions.\nBoeing\u2019s own Starliner space taxi has yet to reach the space station after an uncrewed test flight fell short in 2019, with a second attempt expected later this year.\nClosely held SpaceX beat out competition to build the initial lander from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n\n Mr. Jurczyk said the single winner worked with NASA\u2019s budget plans, and officials said that later flights would be opened to competition.\n\n\n\n\n\n From Our Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The decision is the latest in a string of lunar-related wins for the Elon Musk-controlled company. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Picks SpaceX to Build New Lunar Lander (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "837",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-picks-spacex-to-build-new-lunar-lander-11618604869?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=32",
        "text": "The lander deal adds to the products SpaceX is developing, with recent funding rounds raising its valuation close to $100 billion as it pursues a mix of new rockets, space taxis and an array of hundreds of satellites for military and commercial customers.\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX already flies astronauts on behalf of NASA to and from the International Space Station and is developing a large new rocket called the Super Heavy to launch the Starship vehicle on which its lunar lander is based. The Starship has made a series of test flights from Texas, some of which have ended in failure after exploding on landing.\n\n\nNASA plans to use a new rocket made by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -0.10%\n\n\n for a moon mission known as Artemis 1 as early as November. It would fly around the moon before returning the Orion crew capsule produced by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n to Earth.\nCurrent plans call for a second crewed test in 2023 that would be followed the next year by the first astronaut landing since 1972, using the SpaceX moon taxi to transfer to and from Orion. The final schedule for the Artemis program depends on contractors developing and testing the equipment and securing funding for the program.\n\u201cIf they\u2019re hitting their milestones, we may have a shot at 2024,\u201d NASA Acting Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Jurczyk\n\n\n\n said at a news conference.\nBoeing\u2019s Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule are both owned by NASA, but the lunar lander is the largest part of Artemis to rely on a public-private partnership and is owned and run by SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nMr. Jurczyk said in response to a question that there were no plans to drop the Boeing rocket in favor of the SpaceX Super Heavy for the crewed moon missions.\nBoeing\u2019s own Starliner space taxi has yet to reach the space station after an uncrewed test flight fell short in 2019, with a second attempt expected later this year.\nClosely held SpaceX beat out competition to build the initial lander from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n\n Mr. Jurczyk said the single winner worked with NASA\u2019s budget plans, and officials said that later flights would be opened to competition.\n\n\n\n\n\n From Our Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The decision is the latest in a string of lunar-related wins for the Elon Musk-controlled company. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Investigating Former Official\u2019s Contacts With Boeing on Lunar Contracts (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "838",
        "date": "2020-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-investigating-former-officials-contacts-with-boeing-on-lunar-contracts-11591538265?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=38",
        "text": "The inspector general\u2019s staff, these people said, is looking into an allegation that Mr. Loverro improperly provided guidance that could have offered the Chicago aerospace giant unusual insight into aspects of the competition.\nBoeing ultimately was eliminated in the competition\u00a0for technical and cost reasons unrelated to the communications with Mr. Loverro, according to these people. The outcome was viewed as a blow for Boeing, long formidable in U.S. space exploration efforts.\n\n\nIn a related strand of the inquiry, according to these people, investigators are looking into Mr. Loverro\u2019s various contacts with Boeing and a second bidder outside normal contracting channels.\u00a0Investigators are still trying to determine what\u00a0information was passed on and whether motivations were ill-intended, these people said.\n\n\nReturning to the Moon Senior NASA Official Resigns Amid Probe Into Suspect Contracting Actions (May 20) NASA Picks Three Contractors, Including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to Lead Lunar Lander Teams (April 30) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (Feb. 7) \n\n\nAfter NASA\u2019s chief asked for his resignation on May 18, Mr. Loverro sent a farewell message to staff the next day. He wrote that \u201crisk-taking is part of the job description\u201d of someone in his role. Without elaborating, the message said, \u201cI took such a risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission.\u201d\n\u201cIt is clear that I made a mistake in that choice,\u201d he added.\nThe investigation centers around the contracts awarded for one of NASA\u2019s most ambitious initiatives: sending humans\u00a0to the moon for the first time in nearly half a century. Boeing unsuccessfully competed earlier this year against space-exploration rivals including SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\u2019s\n\n\n\n Blue Origin Federation LLC for the contracts to build the landers\u00a0needed to\u00a0ship astronauts to the moon. The contracts eventually are expected to total billions of dollars.\nSome of Mr. Loverro\u2019s contacts with Boeing amid the competition breached established internal NASA guidelines and typical procedures, according to the people familiar with the details. They said the actions may have reflected a possible overreach by a newcomer to NASA\u2019s leadership ranks seeking to rev up the competition. The investigation, though, also appears to be looking into whether Boeing, as a result, could have received an unfair advantage or otherwise benefited, the people said.\nMr. Loverro, a former senior Pentagon space official who played an important role in establishing the goals and broad design of NASA\u2019s human-lander program after coming to the agency in December, didn\u2019t make the final contracting decisions, the people said. The communications under scrutiny, they said, occurred while Boeing was still in the running for a contract.\nThe specific focus of the investigation, under way for months, hasn\u2019t been reported before. The Wall Street Journal in May reported the inspector general\u2019s office was delving into unspecified contracting improprieties associated with Mr. Loverro\u2019s exit, but at the time didn\u2019t say the inspector general was focused on Boeing. The investigation is separate from a routine audit previously announced by that office.\nAt the end of April, NASA chose three corporate teams to develop landers intended to take astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024, relying on a blend of startup and established contractors to lead the way with much different technical solutions. Totaling $967 million, the contracts are intended to be a down payment for billions of additional tax dollars NASA plans to spend on lander prototypes and testing.\nTwo of the contracts went to companies led by prominent space entrepreneurs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, whose formal name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., received a contract for $135 million. A corporate team headed by Blue Origin, founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder Mr. Bezos, received $579 million.\nThe third award, amounting to $253 million, went to a team led by Dynetics, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n a longtime NASA contractor. Taken together, the awards represent the most concrete step by NASA to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.\nAs part of the overall inquiry, according to one of the people familiar with the details, investigators have been asking about whether Boeing may have possessed any outside\u00a0documents that gave it an unfair edge.\nMr. Loverro\u2019s resignation surprised and concerned people at NASA and in parts of the aerospace industry, according to multiple workers and officials, as it played out days before SpaceX\u2019s history-making mission to launch astronauts into orbit.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s inspector general is investigating an allegation\u00a0that a high-ranking official improperly guided Boeing Co. regarding an agency competition for lunar-lander contracts, according to people familiar with the details. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Investigating Former Official\u2019s Contacts With Boeing on Lunar Contracts (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "839",
        "date": "2020-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-investigating-former-officials-contacts-with-boeing-on-lunar-contracts-11591538265?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=44",
        "text": "The inspector general\u2019s staff, these people said, is looking into an allegation that Mr. Loverro improperly provided guidance that could have offered the Chicago aerospace giant unusual insight into aspects of the competition.\nBoeing ultimately was eliminated in the competition\u00a0for technical and cost reasons unrelated to the communications with Mr. Loverro, according to these people. The outcome was viewed as a blow for Boeing, long formidable in U.S. space exploration efforts.\n\n\nIn a related strand of the inquiry, according to these people, investigators are looking into Mr. Loverro\u2019s various contacts with Boeing and a second bidder outside normal contracting channels.\u00a0Investigators are still trying to determine what\u00a0information was passed on and whether motivations were ill-intended, these people said.\n\n\nReturning to the Moon Senior NASA Official Resigns Amid Probe Into Suspect Contracting Actions (May 20) NASA Picks Three Contractors, Including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to Lead Lunar Lander Teams (April 30) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (Feb. 7) \n\n\nAfter NASA\u2019s chief asked for his resignation on May 18, Mr. Loverro sent a farewell message to staff the next day. He wrote that \u201crisk-taking is part of the job description\u201d of someone in his role. Without elaborating, the message said, \u201cI took such a risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission.\u201d\n\u201cIt is clear that I made a mistake in that choice,\u201d he added.\nThe investigation centers around the contracts awarded for one of NASA\u2019s most ambitious initiatives: sending humans\u00a0to the moon for the first time in nearly half a century. Boeing unsuccessfully competed earlier this year against space-exploration rivals including SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\u2019s\n\n\n\n Blue Origin Federation LLC for the contracts to build the landers\u00a0needed to\u00a0ship astronauts to the moon. The contracts eventually are expected to total billions of dollars.\nSome of Mr. Loverro\u2019s contacts with Boeing amid the competition breached established internal NASA guidelines and typical procedures, according to the people familiar with the details. They said the actions may have reflected a possible overreach by a newcomer to NASA\u2019s leadership ranks seeking to rev up the competition. The investigation, though, also appears to be looking into whether Boeing, as a result, could have received an unfair advantage or otherwise benefited, the people said.\nMr. Loverro, a former senior Pentagon space official who played an important role in establishing the goals and broad design of NASA\u2019s human-lander program after coming to the agency in December, didn\u2019t make the final contracting decisions, the people said. The communications under scrutiny, they said, occurred while Boeing was still in the running for a contract.\nThe specific focus of the investigation, under way for months, hasn\u2019t been reported before. The Wall Street Journal in May reported the inspector general\u2019s office was delving into unspecified contracting improprieties associated with Mr. Loverro\u2019s exit, but at the time didn\u2019t say the inspector general was focused on Boeing. The investigation is separate from a routine audit previously announced by that office.\nAt the end of April, NASA chose three corporate teams to develop landers intended to take astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024, relying on a blend of startup and established contractors to lead the way with much different technical solutions. Totaling $967 million, the contracts are intended to be a down payment for billions of additional tax dollars NASA plans to spend on lander prototypes and testing.\nTwo of the contracts went to companies led by prominent space entrepreneurs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, whose formal name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., received a contract for $135 million. A corporate team headed by Blue Origin, founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder Mr. Bezos, received $579 million.\nThe third award, amounting to $253 million, went to a team led by Dynetics, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n a longtime NASA contractor. Taken together, the awards represent the most concrete step by NASA to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.\nAs part of the overall inquiry, according to one of the people familiar with the details, investigators have been asking about whether Boeing may have possessed any outside\u00a0documents that gave it an unfair edge.\nMr. Loverro\u2019s resignation surprised and concerned people at NASA and in parts of the aerospace industry, according to multiple workers and officials, as it played out days before SpaceX\u2019s history-making mission to launch astronauts into orbit.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s inspector general is investigating an allegation\u00a0that a high-ranking official improperly guided Boeing Co. regarding an agency competition for lunar-lander contracts, according to people familiar with the details. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Investigating Former Official\u2019s Contacts With Boeing on Lunar Contracts (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "840",
        "date": "2020-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-investigating-former-officials-contacts-with-boeing-on-lunar-contracts-11591538265?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=53",
        "text": "The inspector general\u2019s staff, these people said, is looking into an allegation that Mr. Loverro improperly provided guidance that could have offered the Chicago aerospace giant unusual insight into aspects of the competition.\n\n\n\n\nBoeing ultimately was eliminated in the competition\u00a0for technical and cost reasons unrelated to the communications with Mr. Loverro, according to these people. The outcome was viewed as a blow for Boeing, long formidable in U.S. space exploration efforts.\n\n\nIn a related strand of the inquiry, according to these people, investigators are looking into Mr. Loverro\u2019s various contacts with Boeing and a second bidder outside normal contracting channels.\u00a0Investigators are still trying to determine what\u00a0information was passed on and whether motivations were ill-intended, these people said.\n\n\nReturning to the Moon Senior NASA Official Resigns Amid Probe Into Suspect Contracting Actions (May 20) NASA Picks Three Contractors, Including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to Lead Lunar Lander Teams (April 30) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (Feb. 7) \n\n\nAfter NASA\u2019s chief asked for his resignation on May 18, Mr. Loverro sent a farewell message to staff the next day. He wrote that \u201crisk-taking is part of the job description\u201d of someone in his role. Without elaborating, the message said, \u201cI took such a risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission.\u201d\n\u201cIt is clear that I made a mistake in that choice,\u201d he added.\nThe investigation centers around the contracts awarded for one of NASA\u2019s most ambitious initiatives: sending humans\u00a0to the moon for the first time in nearly half a century. Boeing unsuccessfully competed earlier this year against space-exploration rivals including SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\u2019s\n\n\n\n Blue Origin Federation LLC for the contracts to build the landers\u00a0needed to\u00a0ship astronauts to the moon. The contracts eventually are expected to total billions of dollars.\nSome of Mr. Loverro\u2019s contacts with Boeing amid the competition breached established internal NASA guidelines and typical procedures, according to the people familiar with the details. They said the actions may have reflected a possible overreach by a newcomer to NASA\u2019s leadership ranks seeking to rev up the competition. The investigation, though, also appears to be looking into whether Boeing, as a result, could have received an unfair advantage or otherwise benefited, the people said.\nMr. Loverro, a former senior Pentagon space official who played an important role in establishing the goals and broad design of NASA\u2019s human-lander program after coming to the agency in December, didn\u2019t make the final contracting decisions, the people said. The communications under scrutiny, they said, occurred while Boeing was still in the running for a contract.\nThe specific focus of the investigation, under way for months, hasn\u2019t been reported before. The Wall Street Journal in May reported the inspector general\u2019s office was delving into unspecified contracting improprieties associated with Mr. Loverro\u2019s exit, but at the time didn\u2019t say the inspector general was focused on Boeing. The investigation is separate from a routine audit previously announced by that office.\nAt the end of April, NASA chose three corporate teams to develop landers intended to take astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024, relying on a blend of startup and established contractors to lead the way with much different technical solutions. Totaling $967 million, the contracts are intended to be a down payment for billions of additional tax dollars NASA plans to spend on lander prototypes and testing.\nTwo of the contracts went to companies led by prominent space entrepreneurs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, whose formal name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., received a contract for $135 million. A corporate team headed by Blue Origin, founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder Mr. Bezos, received $579 million.\nThe third award, amounting to $253 million, went to a team led by Dynetics, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n a longtime NASA contractor. Taken together, the awards represent the most concrete step by NASA to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.\nAs part of the overall inquiry, according to one of the people familiar with the details, investigators have been asking about whether Boeing may have possessed any outside\u00a0documents that gave it an unfair edge.\nMr. Loverro\u2019s resignation surprised and concerned people at NASA and in parts of the aerospace industry, according to multiple workers and officials, as it played out days before SpaceX\u2019s history-making mission to launch astronauts into orbit.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s inspector general is investigating an allegation\u00a0that a high-ranking official improperly guided Boeing Co. regarding an agency competition for lunar-lander contracts, according to people familiar with the details. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Comes Out Against Federal Electric-Vehicle Spending (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "841",
        "date": "2021-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-comes-out-against-federal-electric-vehicle-spending-11638892791?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=14",
        "text": "The House has passed a roughly $2 trillion social-spending and climate bill championed by President Biden that would give consumers a tax credit of as much as $12,500 if they buy an electric vehicle assembled by union workers using American-built batteries. Vehicles made in nonunion factories, such as Tesla\u2019s, would qualify for a smaller credit.\nThe Senate has yet to vote on the measure. \n\n\u201cHonestly, I would just can this whole bill,\u201d Mr. Musk said during a virtual appearance at the WSJ\u2019s CEO Council Summit, speaking from a factory Tesla is building in the Austin, Texas, area.\nHe also said that federal funding for electric-vehicle charging is unnecessary. The infrastructure package that Mr. Biden signed into law in November includes $7.5 billion to expand the nation\u2019s network of electric-vehicle charging stations.\n\u201cDo we need support for gas stations? We don\u2019t,\u201d he said. \u201cDelete it.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who is often critical of U.S. authorities, including President Biden, has struck a more conciliatory tone when it comes to the Chinese government.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\u201cThere are a lot of people in the government in China who kind of grew up\u2026with China being a small economy and maybe who feel like China was pushed around a lot. They haven\u2019t fully appreciated the fact that China really is going to be the big kid on the block,\u201d he said.\nMr. Musk added that Tesla has a good relationship with China, home to the company\u2019s largest vehicle factory by output.\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks about what\u2019s next for Tesla and SpaceX, the role of government in business and provides an update on the Starship launch. Photo: Ralph Alswang for the Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t mean to endorse everything China does any more than I would, say, endorse everything the United States does, or any country,\u201d he said.\nIn the interview, Mr. Musk touched on other issues, saying that CEO is a made-up title, and that he splits his time roughly equally between running Tesla and his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX.\n\u201cI triage the tasks and try to do the things that are most useful,\u201d he said.\nMr. Musk said SpaceX\u2019s work developing its Starship rocket absorbs more of his mental focus than any other single initiative. Starship, designed to be a reusable orbital rocket, is such a tough challenge it makes him wonder whether he can pull off the project, he said.\nBuilding the rocket could reduce the cost of getting to orbit by a factor of 100 or more, he said, adding that creating such a space vehicle could be the difference between whether humanity does or doesn\u2019t become a multiplanetary species.\nRead the full transcript of the interview online.\n\u2014Micah Maidenberg contributed this article. Elon Musk took aim at a signature Biden administration legislative proposal and said China is adjusting to its growing position as a dominant world power in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Two Aborted Attempts, SpaceX Launches Large Satellite Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "842",
        "date": "2017-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-two-aborted-attempts-spacex-launches-large-satellite-into-orbit-1499299404?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=80",
        "text": "The flight of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying a 7.5-ton satellite into a high-earth orbit for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intelsat SA\n\n\n was the third successful mission in less than two weeks for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the closely held Southern California company is formally called. It is also believed to be the heaviest payload Mr. Musk\u2019s team has ever put into space.\nRoughly three minutes into the flight, the rocket\u2019s lower stage separated and the upper stage\u2019s engine ignited as planned. Some five minutes later, the upper engine shut down as the satellite continued on its way.\n\n\nRebounding from launch delays stemming from two Falcon 9 explosions spanning 2015 and 2016, SpaceX is seeking to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers that it is safely ramping up its launch tempo. The company has targeted for later this year the initial flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket, a Falcon 9 derivative featuring 27 main engines and roughly twice the lifting capacity of SpaceX\u2019s current fleet of boosters.\nWednesday\u2019s mission was the 10th successful launch of a Falcon 9 this year, already beating SpaceX\u2019s previous record of eight launches in 2016.\nWith some $10 billion in launch business on its books, including contracts from the Pentagon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, SpaceX has set the pace for the budding commercial space industry. But in addition to its swift growth and lofty ambitions\u2014including a manned flyby of the moon as early as next year\u2014the company is renowned for a scrappy attitude and nimble engineering culture that is determined to make decisions more quickly than legacy competitors or government agencies.\nNASA probably would have taken more than a day to analyze the flood of available data surrounding Monday\u2019s countdown, which was stopped roughly 10 seconds before liftoff, according to some industry officials. But barely hours after the launch was scrubbed, Mr. Musk posted a message on Twitter saying that company experts intended to be \u201cdoing a full review of rocket and pad systems\u201d on the July 4 holiday. By Wednesday morning, SpaceX sent an email alerting the media that the launch was reset for that evening, without elaborating on the cause of the earlier problem.\nSome six minutes before liftoff, the narrator of the launch webcast said engineers had determined that Monday\u2019s scrub was caused by a computer-generated warning about the rocket\u2019s avionics, or flight-control systems. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Insprucker,\n\n\n\n the narrator, also said that engineers had \u201cconfirmed the rocket was good\u201d and no hardware changes were required. Instead, a software tweak solved the problem. \nThe fast turnaround was reminiscent of instances over the years when SpaceX demonstrated its troubleshooting capabilities. In December 2010, when two cracks were discovered at the end of the second-stage engine nozzle on a Falcon 9, Mr. Musk and his designers were able to implement a makeshift but workable solution to trim off the suspect section of the nozzle in just one day.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket is carrying a 7.5-ton satellite into a high-earth orbit for Intelsat.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Craig Bailey/Florida Today/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nLess than two years later, when SpaceX made history by becoming the first company to send a capsule to rendezvous with the international space station, SpaceX engineers improvised a tweak to part of the distance-measuring radar system used by the unmanned, bell-shaped Dragon to safely approach the station.\nBefore the end of the decade, company officials hope to routinely launch at least one SpaceX rocket every week.\nFrom the start, SpaceX was committed to breaking rocketry conventions by developing a series of enhanced versions of its rockets, while flying older models in the interim. With NASA\u2019s blessing, the company also set out to reduce costs and speed up production, partly by cutting back on traditional quality-control checks and inspections of parts from subcontractors. \nThe failure of a substandard structural part inside the upper stage of a Falcon 9 caused a 2015 explosion during a flight, leading the company to step up inspections. The blast, followed by a second accident during prelaunch ground tests in 2016, prompted concern among senior NASA officials about SpaceX\u2019s management practices and production safeguards.\nSince then, the company has focused on whittling down its backlog of launches and demonstrating the benefits of reusing as many of the components of its rockets as feasible.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tSpaceX plans a manned flyby of the moon as early as next year. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was a flyby of Mars. (July 5, 2017)\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com SpaceX blasted a large commercial communications satellite into orbit without a hitch, a successful attempt that followed a pair of last-second launch aborts over two days. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Two Aborted Attempts, SpaceX Launches Large Satellite Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "843",
        "date": "2017-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-two-aborted-attempts-spacex-launches-large-satellite-into-orbit-1499299404?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=119",
        "text": "The flight of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying a 7.5-ton satellite into a high-earth orbit for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intelsat SA\n\n\n was the third successful mission in less than two weeks for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the closely held Southern California company is formally called. It is also believed to be the heaviest payload Mr. Musk\u2019s team has ever put into space.\n\n\n\n\nRoughly three minutes into the flight, the rocket\u2019s lower stage separated and the upper stage\u2019s engine ignited as planned. Some five minutes later, the upper engine shut down as the satellite continued on its way.\n\n\nRebounding from launch delays stemming from two Falcon 9 explosions spanning 2015 and 2016, SpaceX is seeking to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers that it is safely ramping up its launch tempo. The company has targeted for later this year the initial flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket, a Falcon 9 derivative featuring 27 main engines and roughly twice the lifting capacity of SpaceX\u2019s current fleet of boosters.\nWednesday\u2019s mission was the 10th successful launch of a Falcon 9 this year, already beating SpaceX\u2019s previous record of eight launches in 2016.\nWith some $10 billion in launch business on its books, including contracts from the Pentagon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, SpaceX has set the pace for the budding commercial space industry. But in addition to its swift growth and lofty ambitions\u2014including a manned flyby of the moon as early as next year\u2014the company is renowned for a scrappy attitude and nimble engineering culture that is determined to make decisions more quickly than legacy competitors or government agencies.\nNASA probably would have taken more than a day to analyze the flood of available data surrounding Monday\u2019s countdown, which was stopped roughly 10 seconds before liftoff, according to some industry officials. But barely hours after the launch was scrubbed, Mr. Musk posted a message on Twitter saying that company experts intended to be \u201cdoing a full review of rocket and pad systems\u201d on the July 4 holiday. By Wednesday morning, SpaceX sent an email alerting the media that the launch was reset for that evening, without elaborating on the cause of the earlier problem.\nSome six minutes before liftoff, the narrator of the launch webcast said engineers had determined that Monday\u2019s scrub was caused by a computer-generated warning about the rocket\u2019s avionics, or flight-control systems. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Insprucker,\n\n\n\n the narrator, also said that engineers had \u201cconfirmed the rocket was good\u201d and no hardware changes were required. Instead, a software tweak solved the problem. \nThe fast turnaround was reminiscent of instances over the years when SpaceX demonstrated its troubleshooting capabilities. In December 2010, when two cracks were discovered at the end of the second-stage engine nozzle on a Falcon 9, Mr. Musk and his designers were able to implement a makeshift but workable solution to trim off the suspect section of the nozzle in just one day.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket is carrying a 7.5-ton satellite into a high-earth orbit for Intelsat.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Craig Bailey/Florida Today/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nLess than two years later, when SpaceX made history by becoming the first company to send a capsule to rendezvous with the international space station, SpaceX engineers improvised a tweak to part of the distance-measuring radar system used by the unmanned, bell-shaped Dragon to safely approach the station.\nBefore the end of the decade, company officials hope to routinely launch at least one SpaceX rocket every week.\nFrom the start, SpaceX was committed to breaking rocketry conventions by developing a series of enhanced versions of its rockets, while flying older models in the interim. With NASA\u2019s blessing, the company also set out to reduce costs and speed up production, partly by cutting back on traditional quality-control checks and inspections of parts from subcontractors. \nThe failure of a substandard structural part inside the upper stage of a Falcon 9 caused a 2015 explosion during a flight, leading the company to step up inspections. The blast, followed by a second accident during prelaunch ground tests in 2016, prompted concern among senior NASA officials about SpaceX\u2019s management practices and production safeguards.\nSince then, the company has focused on whittling down its backlog of launches and demonstrating the benefits of reusing as many of the components of its rockets as feasible.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tSpaceX plans a manned flyby of the moon as early as next year. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was a flyby of Mars. (July 5, 2017)\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com SpaceX blasted a large commercial communications satellite into orbit without a hitch, a successful attempt that followed a pair of last-second launch aborts over two days. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Riles Its Rivals for Broadband Subsidies (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "844",
        "date": "2021-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-riles-its-rivals-for-broadband-subsidies-11612108801?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=38",
        "text": "The federal government is now planning a final round of vetting before it bets big that Mr. Musk\u2019s technology can help close persistent gaps in U.S. high-speed internet service. Most of the $9.2 billion in subsidies awarded by the Federal Communications Commission was earmarked for more established technologies, which included companies laying fiber-optic cable.\n\n\n\n\nThe FCC is requiring SpaceX and others in line for subsidies to demonstrate their financial and technical wherewithal to build out a network, and Friday was the deadline for submitting those plans.\n\n\nRivals of SpaceX for subsidy dollars are calling on the FCC and its new leadership under the Biden administration to give those plans a closer look, and they are drumming up support for their cause on Capitol Hill.\nMore than 150 members of Congress wrote the FCC on Jan. 19 urging it \u201cto thoroughly vet the winning bidders to ensure that they are capable\u201d and to \u201cconsider opportunities for public input on the applications.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk spoke at a conference on satellite technology in Washington, D.C., early last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Susan Walsh/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe letter, which didn\u2019t mention SpaceX or other companies by name, was subsequently promoted online by two trade groups that have competed for the federal subsidies: the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the Rural Broadband Association.\n\u201cWe are in effect funding an experiment here,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Matheson,\n\n\n\n chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association,\u00a0which represents electricity providers also in line for subsidies to build out fiber-optic broadband networks. \u201cWe don\u2019t know if it works or doesn\u2019t work,\u201d he said in an interview, referring to the SpaceX system.\nRepresentatives for SpaceX, whose official name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nSupporters of the SpaceX plan say delivering broadband via satellite has the potential to reach isolated homes and businesses at a significantly lower cost.\nMeanwhile, federal subsidies could help boost plans by Mr. Musk\u2019s company to deliver high-speed internet by satellite across the globe, a venture considered key to its financial success.\nAn FCC representative declined to say when the agency expected to make a decision on the SpaceX plan, pointing to the agency\u2019s published procedures. They don\u2019t give a timeline for approving applications and state that the applications with detailed plans are generally not public until approved.\nSpaceX isn\u2019t the only company whose system uses satellites\u2014nor is it the only winning bidder to generate controversy. Mr. Matheson pointed to large amounts of funding secured by internet providers that use so-called fixed-wireless technology, apparently beating out fiber-based providers even though fiber technology is generally considered speedier.\nSpaceX plans to use the money to provide broadband to more than 640,000 locations across 35 states that don\u2019t yet have high-speed access, according to the FCC. Many of these are homes and businesses in rural areas where the cost of building a high-speed network has so far exceeded the potential revenue broadband companies could expect to reap.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n As many schools around the country start the year virtually, residents in rural communities like those in West Virginia are asking why they don\u2019t have reliable Internet service. The recent bankruptcy of Frontier Communications provides insight into how U.S. broadband policies have fallen short for many Americans. Photo Illustration: Carlos Waters/ Video: Jake Nicol/",
        "author": "Ryan Tracy"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, Contractors Weigh Plans for Exploration Gateway (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "845",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-contractors-weigh-plans-for-exploration-gateway-1491316304?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=99",
        "text": "The company\u2019s concept, smaller and simpler than a previous proposal, includes a crew module serving as a jumping-off point for a reusable vehicle able to reach Mars. It also features solar-electric powered propulsion based on technology developed for commercial satellites; and envisions some manufacturing activities in space to maintain the habitat. \n\n\nRead More House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (March 7) Jeff Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (March 5) NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (March 1) SpaceX Delivers Cargo to International Space Station After Delay (Feb. 23) Advocates of Big NASA Rocket Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (Feb. 5) Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Role of Private Enterprise (Feb. 5) \n\n\nThe announcement, which largely mirrors the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s latest strategy, highlights\u00a0that Boeing, NASA and industry leaders are all seeking to recalibrate expectations to reflect new agency budget constraints and the principle of public-private partnerships championed by President\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s administration.\n\n\nThe goal is to \u201cfit within a funding curve and try to get something up there that\u2019s operational\u201d by roughly 2025, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter McGrath,\n\n\n\n a senior Boeing exploration executive.\nThe Trump administration has signaled that NASA\u2019s total budget is likely to stay flat or decline somewhat, with significant cuts in earth-observation and climate change programs.\nUnder a previous NASA study contract, Boeing,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and other companies are devising alternate plans for what are called deep-space gateways. Experts say that a number of contractors are likely to participate in the final program to deploy a functioning gateway. \nThe ultimate goal of the full-fledged program is putting the technology in place to safely send astronauts on the dangerous journey to Mars.\nThe orbiting international laboratory, which was assembled over many years at a cost of some $100 billion, is slated to continue operations until at least 2024. \nThere is no international consensus to go beyond that, though NASA and Boeing, among others, are pushing to keep it open until 2028. Meanwhile, Russia and Europe are considering an end to their partnership in the space station to save money and partly because they want to concentrate on exploring the moon.\nBut with NASA expected to firm up its post-space station strategy by 2019, there also are considerations of recruiting foreign countries and commercial partners for a follow-on program envisioned to cost $1 billion or more annually.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s manned exploration efforts, emphasized the importance of international cooperation on a replacement platform. Striving to take humans to Mars entails \u201ca scale that\u2019s more than a single country\u201d can handle, he said during one panel.\nNASA currently spends roughly $3 billion a year supplying, manning and otherwise operating the space station. Once development of commercial space taxis to ferry astronauts to the station ends within two years, Boeing sees some of that funding stream shifting toward work on an exploration gateway. Yet many budget and policy uncertainties remain.\nAsked about funding,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Raymond Cunningham,\n\n\n\n a high-ranking official at NASA\u2019s Huntsville space flight center overseeing the gateway program, said \u201cwe haven\u2019t made a decision about how we will move forward\u201d on a budget.\nAt the same time, Boeing executives emphasized the need for commercial partners. Mr. McGrath told reporters the company\u2019s proposal \u201clooks at ways commercial [entities] can possibly complement\u201d NASA\u2019s limited resources.\nUnder Boeing\u2019s proposal, crews would initially stay at the gateway less than a month. By 2028 or so, Boeing and NASA anticipate a year-long manned mission to test out environmental controls and radiation shielding on the exploration vehicle. When it is deployed, the gateway is supposed to be the starting and ending point for manned missions to orbit Mars and by the late 2030s, to land on the red planet itself.\nA bipartisan NASA authorization bill that sailed through Congress last month calls for NASA to quickly build and test ground-based versions of a crew habitat that would be part of any exploration outpost near the moon.\nUnder Boeing\u2019s proposal, the company wants to use NASA\u2019s proposed heavy-lift rocket, called the Space Launch System, to transport elements of the gateway during missions that already are on the agency\u2019s launch calendar for other purposes. \nIn this way, Boeing, which is the prime contractor on the big rocket slated to have its first flight next year, hopes to reduce the gateway\u2019s overall price tag but still maintain momentum for deep-space exploration.\nThe outpost could provide a platform for important laboratory research and continued With European and Russian space agencies looking to bow out of the international space station, the U.S. is stepping up plans for a smaller-scale replacement\u00a0intended to be a base for planetary exploration after the mid 2020s. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, Contractors Weigh Plans for Exploration Gateway (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "846",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-contractors-weigh-plans-for-exploration-gateway-1491316304?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=85",
        "text": "The company\u2019s concept, smaller and simpler than a previous proposal, includes a crew module serving as a jumping-off point for a reusable vehicle able to reach Mars. It also features solar-electric powered propulsion based on technology developed for commercial satellites; and envisions some manufacturing activities in space to maintain the habitat. \n\n\nRead More House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (March 7) Jeff Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (March 5) NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (March 1) SpaceX Delivers Cargo to International Space Station After Delay (Feb. 23) Advocates of Big NASA Rocket Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (Feb. 5) Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Role of Private Enterprise (Feb. 5) \n\n\nThe announcement, which largely mirrors the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s latest strategy, highlights\u00a0that Boeing, NASA and industry leaders are all seeking to recalibrate expectations to reflect new agency budget constraints and the principle of public-private partnerships championed by President\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s administration.\n\n\nThe goal is to \u201cfit within a funding curve and try to get something up there that\u2019s operational\u201d by roughly 2025, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter McGrath,\n\n\n\n a senior Boeing exploration executive.\nThe Trump administration has signaled that NASA\u2019s total budget is likely to stay flat or decline somewhat, with significant cuts in earth-observation and climate change programs.\nUnder a previous NASA study contract, Boeing,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and other companies are devising alternate plans for what are called deep-space gateways. Experts say that a number of contractors are likely to participate in the final program to deploy a functioning gateway. \nThe ultimate goal of the full-fledged program is putting the technology in place to safely send astronauts on the dangerous journey to Mars.\nThe orbiting international laboratory, which was assembled over many years at a cost of some $100 billion, is slated to continue operations until at least 2024. \nThere is no international consensus to go beyond that, though NASA and Boeing, among others, are pushing to keep it open until 2028. Meanwhile, Russia and Europe are considering an end to their partnership in the space station to save money and partly because they want to concentrate on exploring the moon.\nBut with NASA expected to firm up its post-space station strategy by 2019, there also are considerations of recruiting foreign countries and commercial partners for a follow-on program envisioned to cost $1 billion or more annually.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s manned exploration efforts, emphasized the importance of international cooperation on a replacement platform. Striving to take humans to Mars entails \u201ca scale that\u2019s more than a single country\u201d can handle, he said during one panel.\nNASA currently spends roughly $3 billion a year supplying, manning and otherwise operating the space station. Once development of commercial space taxis to ferry astronauts to the station ends within two years, Boeing sees some of that funding stream shifting toward work on an exploration gateway. Yet many budget and policy uncertainties remain.\nAsked about funding,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Raymond Cunningham,\n\n\n\n a high-ranking official at NASA\u2019s Huntsville space flight center overseeing the gateway program, said \u201cwe haven\u2019t made a decision about how we will move forward\u201d on a budget.\nAt the same time, Boeing executives emphasized the need for commercial partners. Mr. McGrath told reporters the company\u2019s proposal \u201clooks at ways commercial [entities] can possibly complement\u201d NASA\u2019s limited resources.\nUnder Boeing\u2019s proposal, crews would initially stay at the gateway less than a month. By 2028 or so, Boeing and NASA anticipate a year-long manned mission to test out environmental controls and radiation shielding on the exploration vehicle. When it is deployed, the gateway is supposed to be the starting and ending point for manned missions to orbit Mars and by the late 2030s, to land on the red planet itself.\nA bipartisan NASA authorization bill that sailed through Congress last month calls for NASA to quickly build and test ground-based versions of a crew habitat that would be part of any exploration outpost near the moon.\nUnder Boeing\u2019s proposal, the company wants to use NASA\u2019s proposed heavy-lift rocket, called the Space Launch System, to transport elements of the gateway during missions that already are on the agency\u2019s launch calendar for other purposes. \nIn this way, Boeing, which is the prime contractor on the big rocket slated to have its first flight next year, hopes to reduce the gateway\u2019s overall price tag but still maintain momentum for deep-space exploration.\nThe outpost could provide a platform for important laboratory research and continued With European and Russian space agencies looking to bow out of the international space station, the U.S. is stepping up plans for a smaller-scale replacement\u00a0intended to be a base for planetary exploration after the mid 2020s. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, Contractors Weigh Plans for Exploration Gateway (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "847",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-contractors-weigh-plans-for-exploration-gateway-1491316304?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=126",
        "text": "The company\u2019s concept, smaller and simpler than a previous proposal, includes a crew module serving as a jumping-off point for a reusable vehicle able to reach Mars. It also features solar-electric powered propulsion based on technology developed for commercial satellites; and envisions some manufacturing activities in space to maintain the habitat. \n\n\nRead More\n\n\n\n House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (March 7) Jeff Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (March 5) NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (March 1) SpaceX Delivers Cargo to International Space Station After Delay (Feb. 23) Advocates of Big NASA Rocket Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (Feb. 5) Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Role of Private Enterprise (Feb. 5) \n\n\nThe announcement, which largely mirrors the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s latest strategy, highlights\u00a0that Boeing, NASA and industry leaders are all seeking to recalibrate expectations to reflect new agency budget constraints and the principle of public-private partnerships championed by President\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s administration.\n\n\nThe goal is to \u201cfit within a funding curve and try to get something up there that\u2019s operational\u201d by roughly 2025, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter McGrath,\n\n\n\n a senior Boeing exploration executive.\nThe Trump administration has signaled that NASA\u2019s total budget is likely to stay flat or decline somewhat, with significant cuts in earth-observation and climate change programs.\nUnder a previous NASA study contract, Boeing,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and other companies are devising alternate plans for what are called deep-space gateways. Experts say that a number of contractors are likely to participate in the final program to deploy a functioning gateway. \nThe ultimate goal of the full-fledged program is putting the technology in place to safely send astronauts on the dangerous journey to Mars.\nThe orbiting international laboratory, which was assembled over many years at a cost of some $100 billion, is slated to continue operations until at least 2024. \nThere is no international consensus to go beyond that, though NASA and Boeing, among others, are pushing to keep it open until 2028. Meanwhile, Russia and Europe are considering an end to their partnership in the space station to save money and partly because they want to concentrate on exploring the moon.\nBut with NASA expected to firm up its post-space station strategy by 2019, there also are considerations of recruiting foreign countries and commercial partners for a follow-on program envisioned to cost $1 billion or more annually.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who heads NASA\u2019s manned exploration efforts, emphasized the importance of international cooperation on a replacement platform. Striving to take humans to Mars entails \u201ca scale that\u2019s more than a single country\u201d can handle, he said during one panel.\nNASA currently spends roughly $3 billion a year supplying, manning and otherwise operating the space station. Once development of commercial space taxis to ferry astronauts to the station ends within two years, Boeing sees some of that funding stream shifting toward work on an exploration gateway. Yet many budget and policy uncertainties remain.\nAsked about funding,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Raymond Cunningham,\n\n\n\n a high-ranking official at NASA\u2019s Huntsville space flight center overseeing the gateway program, said \u201cwe haven\u2019t made a decision about how we will move forward\u201d on a budget.\nAt the same time, Boeing executives emphasized the need for commercial partners. Mr. McGrath told reporters the company\u2019s proposal \u201clooks at ways commercial [entities] can possibly complement\u201d NASA\u2019s limited resources.\nUnder Boeing\u2019s proposal, crews would initially stay at the gateway less than a month. By 2028 or so, Boeing and NASA anticipate a year-long manned mission to test out environmental controls and radiation shielding on the exploration vehicle. When it is deployed, the gateway is supposed to be the starting and ending point for manned missions to orbit Mars and by the late 2030s, to land on the red planet itself.\nA bipartisan NASA authorization bill that sailed through Congress last month calls for NASA to quickly build and test ground-based versions of a crew habitat that would be part of any exploration outpost near the moon.\nUnder Boeing\u2019s proposal, the company wants to use NASA\u2019s proposed heavy-lift rocket, called the Space Launch System, to transport elements of the gateway during missions that already are on the agency\u2019s launch calendar for other purposes. \nIn this way, Boeing, which is the prime contractor on the big rocket slated to have its first flight next year, hopes to reduce the gateway\u2019s overall price tag but still maintain momentum for deep-space exploration.\nThe outpost could provide a platform for important laboratory research and contin With European and Russian space agencies looking to bow out of the international space station, the U.S. is stepping up plans for a smaller-scale replacement\u00a0intended to be a base for planetary exploration after the mid 2020s. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Says Virgin Galactic Can\u2019t Fly Spaceship During Investigation (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "848",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-says-virgin-galactic-cant-fly-spaceship-during-investigation-11630615848?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=5",
        "text": "The company said it has been working closely with the FAA to support a thorough review of the flight and resolve the matter in a timely way. The company on Wednesday attributed the deviation in its flight path on July 11 to wind, and said pilots who commanded the ship responded appropriately to changing conditions as they brought the Unity back to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic also said then that the Unity never went outside of the geographic confines that had been established for the mission, and that those on board were never in any danger.\nAn FAA spokesman said Thursday the Unity ship can\u2019t be operated until the agency approves a final report on the July 11 matter, or determines the issues related to the Unity\u2019s shift out of its planned trajectory that day didn\u2019t affect public safety.\n\n\nThe FAA spokesman declined to comment on how long the agency\u2019s investigation would last. So-called mishap probes generally can be finished in a matter of weeks, he said, but more complex ones may take several months.\nThe agency\u2019s examination of the July 11 flight may delay Virgin Galactic\u2019s next expected space flight. The company said earlier Thursday it planned to fly four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force and a researcher, to space in late September or early next month.\nVirgin Galactic described that planned mission as its first focused on commercial research, with crew members studying how the transition from gravity to microgravity affects the human body, and conducting other tests. The company has said it would charge the equivalent of $600,000 per seat for research and astronaut training missions, and at least $450,000 per seat for space tourism flights.\nThe FAA\u2019s role in space includes regulating launches and re-entries of space vehicles. During missions, the agency restricts airspace, seeking to avoid potential accidents. The FAA said in July it had activated a new system to track in real time launch and re-entry vehicles, saying the tool would help minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nThe agency\u2019s approach to space at times has drawn criticism. A flight planned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for late June was delayed one day after an aircraft entered into restricted airspace, according to a tweet at the time by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of the company also called SpaceX. He called that restricted area \u201cunreasonably gigantic.\u201d\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The regulator\u2019s examination of its July 11 flight could delay company\u2019s next planned space launch. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Says Virgin Galactic Can\u2019t Fly Spaceship During Investigation (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "849",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-says-virgin-galactic-cant-fly-spaceship-during-investigation-11630615848?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=4",
        "text": "The company said it has been working closely with the FAA to support a thorough review of the flight and resolve the matter in a timely way. The company on Wednesday attributed the deviation in its flight path on July 11 to wind, and said pilots who commanded the ship responded appropriately to changing conditions as they brought the Unity back to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic also said then that the Unity never went outside of the geographic confines that had been established for the mission, and that those on board were never in any danger.\n\n\n\n\nAn FAA spokesman said Thursday the Unity ship can\u2019t be operated until the agency approves a final report on the July 11 matter, or determines the issues related to the Unity\u2019s shift out of its planned trajectory that day didn\u2019t affect public safety.\n\n\nThe FAA spokesman declined to comment on how long the agency\u2019s investigation would last. So-called mishap probes generally can be finished in a matter of weeks, he said, but more complex ones may take several months.\nThe agency\u2019s examination of the July 11 flight may delay Virgin Galactic\u2019s next expected space flight. The company said earlier Thursday it planned to fly four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force and a researcher, to space in late September or early next month.\nVirgin Galactic described that planned mission as its first focused on commercial research, with crew members studying how the transition from gravity to microgravity affects the human body, and conducting other tests. The company has said it would charge the equivalent of $600,000 per seat for research and astronaut training missions, and at least $450,000 per seat for space tourism flights.\nThe FAA\u2019s role in space includes regulating launches and re-entries of space vehicles. During missions, the agency restricts airspace, seeking to avoid potential accidents. The FAA said in July it had activated a new system to track in real time launch and re-entry vehicles, saying the tool would help minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nThe agency\u2019s approach to space at times has drawn criticism. A flight planned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for late June was delayed one day after an aircraft entered into restricted airspace, according to a tweet at the time by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of the company also called SpaceX. He called that restricted area \u201cunreasonably gigantic.\u201d\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The regulator\u2019s examination of its July 11 flight could delay company\u2019s next planned space launch. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Says Virgin Galactic Can\u2019t Fly Spaceship During Investigation (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "850",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-says-virgin-galactic-cant-fly-spaceship-during-investigation-11630615848?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=14",
        "text": "The company said it has been working closely with the FAA to support a thorough review of the flight and resolve the matter in a timely way. The company on Wednesday attributed the deviation in its flight path on July 11 to wind, and said pilots who commanded the ship responded appropriately to changing conditions as they brought the Unity back to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic also said then that the Unity never went outside of the geographic confines that had been established for the mission, and that those on board were never in any danger.\nAn FAA spokesman said Thursday the Unity ship can\u2019t be operated until the agency approves a final report on the July 11 matter, or determines the issues related to the Unity\u2019s shift out of its planned trajectory that day didn\u2019t affect public safety.\n\n\nThe FAA spokesman declined to comment on how long the agency\u2019s investigation would last. So-called mishap probes generally can be finished in a matter of weeks, he said, but more complex ones may take several months.\nThe agency\u2019s examination of the July 11 flight may delay Virgin Galactic\u2019s next expected space flight. The company said earlier Thursday it planned to fly four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force and a researcher, to space in late September or early next month.\nVirgin Galactic described that planned mission as its first focused on commercial research, with crew members studying how the transition from gravity to microgravity affects the human body, and conducting other tests. The company has said it would charge the equivalent of $600,000 per seat for research and astronaut training missions, and at least $450,000 per seat for space tourism flights.\nThe FAA\u2019s role in space includes regulating launches and re-entries of space vehicles. During missions, the agency restricts airspace, seeking to avoid potential accidents. The FAA said in July it had activated a new system to track in real time launch and re-entry vehicles, saying the tool would help minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nThe agency\u2019s approach to space at times has drawn criticism. A flight planned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for late June was delayed one day after an aircraft entered into restricted airspace, according to a tweet at the time by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of the company also called SpaceX. He called that restricted area \u201cunreasonably gigantic.\u201d\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The regulator\u2019s examination of its July 11 flight could delay company\u2019s next planned space launch. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Says Virgin Galactic Can\u2019t Fly Spaceship During Investigation (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "851",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-says-virgin-galactic-cant-fly-spaceship-during-investigation-11630615848?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=24",
        "text": "The company said it has been working closely with the FAA to support a thorough review of the flight and resolve the matter in a timely way. The company on Wednesday attributed the deviation in its flight path on July 11 to wind, and said pilots who commanded the ship responded appropriately to changing conditions as they brought the Unity back to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic also said then that the Unity never went outside of the geographic confines that had been established for the mission, and that those on board were never in any danger.\nAn FAA spokesman said Thursday the Unity ship can\u2019t be operated until the agency approves a final report on the July 11 matter, or determines the issues related to the Unity\u2019s shift out of its planned trajectory that day didn\u2019t affect public safety.\n\n\nThe FAA spokesman declined to comment on how long the agency\u2019s investigation would last. So-called mishap probes generally can be finished in a matter of weeks, he said, but more complex ones may take several months.\nThe agency\u2019s examination of the July 11 flight may delay Virgin Galactic\u2019s next expected space flight. The company said earlier Thursday it planned to fly four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force and a researcher, to space in late September or early next month.\nVirgin Galactic described that planned mission as its first focused on commercial research, with crew members studying how the transition from gravity to microgravity affects the human body, and conducting other tests. The company has said it would charge the equivalent of $600,000 per seat for research and astronaut training missions, and at least $450,000 per seat for space tourism flights.\nThe FAA\u2019s role in space includes regulating launches and re-entries of space vehicles. During missions, the agency restricts airspace, seeking to avoid potential accidents. The FAA said in July it had activated a new system to track in real time launch and re-entry vehicles, saying the tool would help minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nThe agency\u2019s approach to space at times has drawn criticism. A flight planned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for late June was delayed one day after an aircraft entered into restricted airspace, according to a tweet at the time by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of the company also called SpaceX. He called that restricted area \u201cunreasonably gigantic.\u201d\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The regulator\u2019s examination of its July 11 flight could delay company\u2019s next planned space launch. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA Says Virgin Galactic Can\u2019t Fly Spaceship During Investigation (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "852",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/faa-says-virgin-galactic-cant-fly-spaceship-during-investigation-11630615848?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=23",
        "text": "The company said it has been working closely with the FAA to support a thorough review of the flight and resolve the matter in a timely way. The company on Wednesday attributed the deviation in its flight path on July 11 to wind, and said pilots who commanded the ship responded appropriately to changing conditions as they brought the Unity back to the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico. Virgin Galactic also said then that the Unity never went outside of the geographic confines that had been established for the mission, and that those on board were never in any danger.\n\n\n\n\nAn FAA spokesman said Thursday the Unity ship can\u2019t be operated until the agency approves a final report on the July 11 matter, or determines the issues related to the Unity\u2019s shift out of its planned trajectory that day didn\u2019t affect public safety.\n\n\nThe FAA spokesman declined to comment on how long the agency\u2019s investigation would last. So-called mishap probes generally can be finished in a matter of weeks, he said, but more complex ones may take several months.\nThe agency\u2019s examination of the July 11 flight may delay Virgin Galactic\u2019s next expected space flight. The company said earlier Thursday it planned to fly four people, including two members of the Italian Air Force and a researcher, to space in late September or early next month.\nVirgin Galactic described that planned mission as its first focused on commercial research, with crew members studying how the transition from gravity to microgravity affects the human body, and conducting other tests. The company has said it would charge the equivalent of $600,000 per seat for research and astronaut training missions, and at least $450,000 per seat for space tourism flights.\nThe FAA\u2019s role in space includes regulating launches and re-entries of space vehicles. During missions, the agency restricts airspace, seeking to avoid potential accidents. The FAA said in July it had activated a new system to track in real time launch and re-entry vehicles, saying the tool would help minimize the impact of airspace closures due to space trips.\nThe agency\u2019s approach to space at times has drawn criticism. A flight planned by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for late June was delayed one day after an aircraft entered into restricted airspace, according to a tweet at the time by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of the company also called SpaceX. He called that restricted area \u201cunreasonably gigantic.\u201d\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The regulator\u2019s examination of its July 11 flight could delay company\u2019s next planned space launch. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk on \u2018SNL\u2019 Says He Has Asperger\u2019s, Jokes About Dogecoin (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "853",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-quips-about-his-aspergers-to-kick-off-snl-host-gig-11620534790?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=20",
        "text": "The chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX\u2014and who is known for sometimes taking swipes at rivals on Twitter\u2014issued a faux apology as part of the host\u2019s customary opening monologue. \u201cTo anyone I\u2019ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I\u2019m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cDid you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?\u201d\nThe early cracks stopped short of some of Mr. Musk\u2019s edgier comments. In the past, he has taken swipes at the Securities and Exchange Commission and billionaire\nJeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who has a history of comments that move markets, had a similar effect on \u201cSNL,\u201d when he appeared in its satirical news segment, Weekend Update, as \u201cLloyd Ostertag, financial expert,\u201d who called himself \u201cThe Dogefather.\u201d \n\n\nAfter he expounded on the merits of the cryptocurrency using jargon, cast members\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Che\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Jost\n\n\n\n repeatedly asked him to explain, \u201cWhat is dogecoin?\u201d Pressed by Mr. Che, Mr. Musk eventually said, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s a hustle.\u201d\nThe price of dogecoin, created in 2013 as a joke, surged as high as 74 cents early Saturday in advance of Mr. Musk\u2019s \u201cSNL\u201d appearance, spurring hope among investors that it would cross $1 for the first time. The price wobbled between 49 cents and 69 cents for most of the broadcast, according to CoinDesk. \n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingElon Musk Makes His 'SNL' DebutTesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hosted \"Saturday Night Live\" this past weekend. Tesla reporter Rebecca Elliott joins host Amanda Lewellyn to discuss what happened and why the sketch show made the unusual choice to bring him on in the first place.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nWhen the show ended, dogecoin was trading around 52 cents, putting its market value at about $72 billion\u2014greater than the valuations of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kraft Heinz Co.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Robinhood, the online trading app popular with individual investors, said on Twitter during the program that it was experiencing issues with cryptocurrency trading. Robinhood later tweeted that the issues were resolved. \nThe stir created around the show since Mr. Musk was named as host last month suggests that \u201cSNL\u201d may see a surge in TV ratings. The show has drawn an average 9.2 million total viewers in its 46th season, according to Nielsen data. NBC said Sunday that Mr. Musk\u2019s episode tied for its third-highest rated telecast of the season, behind Dave Chappelle in November and the season premiere hosted by Chris Rock in October.\nNBC sought to capitalize on Mr. Musk\u2019s global notoriety, live-streaming the show for the first time internationally in more than 100 countries.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nIn the run up to the show, which comes with a battery of sketch writers, Mr. Musk turned to Twitter to crowdsource ideas for his appearance from among his roughly 53 million followers. There the live-comedy novice took some online ribbing from \u201cSNL\u201d cast member\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Redd\n\n\n\n for referring to a sketch as a \u201cskit.\u201d\nMaye Musk made an appearance in keeping with a show tradition of bringing on cast members\u2019 mothers on the eve of Mother\u2019s Day. She said that she hoped her gift wouldn\u2019t be the dogecoin her son has often tweeted about. Mr. Musk said it was. \nHis appearance on \u201cSNL\u201d is Mr. Musk\u2019s latest excursion into pop culture. His casting credits include a number of film and TV cameos, such as \u201cIron Man 2\u201d and episodes of \u201cThe Big Bang Theory,\u201d \u201cSouth Park\u201d and \u201cThe Simpsons.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat was your reaction to Elon Musk\u2019s SNL performance? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nMr. Musk is one of a small cadre of business people to host \u201cSNL,\u201d which typically taps people from the entertainment world for the coveted role. The late George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, hosted in 1990, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ralph Nader,\n\n\n\n the high-profile consumer crusader, hosted in 1977. Publishing magnate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Forbes\n\n\n\n did the honors in 1996, shortly after giving up his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n hosted in 2004, when he was early in his tenure on the NBC reality series \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d and again in 2015, when he was vying to be the Republican candidate for the White House.\nUnlike some hosts who play a more passive role in the comedy, Mr. Musk appeared in the majority of live sketches and prereco The cryptocurrency, which surged ahead of the broadcast, was trading lower after the Tesla and SpaceX leader said it was \u201ca hustle\u201d during a sketch in which he portrayed a financial expert. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott and John Jurgensen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk on \u2018SNL\u2019 Says He Has Asperger\u2019s, Jokes About Dogecoin (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "854",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-quips-about-his-aspergers-to-kick-off-snl-host-gig-11620534790?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=30",
        "text": "The chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX\u2014and who is known for sometimes taking swipes at rivals on Twitter\u2014issued a faux apology as part of the host\u2019s customary opening monologue. \u201cTo anyone I\u2019ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I\u2019m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cDid you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?\u201d\nThe early cracks stopped short of some of Mr. Musk\u2019s edgier comments. In the past, he has taken swipes at the Securities and Exchange Commission and billionaire\nJeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who has a history of comments that move markets, had a similar effect on \u201cSNL,\u201d when he appeared in its satirical news segment, Weekend Update, as \u201cLloyd Ostertag, financial expert,\u201d who called himself \u201cThe Dogefather.\u201d \n\n\nAfter he expounded on the merits of the cryptocurrency using jargon, cast members\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Che\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Jost\n\n\n\n repeatedly asked him to explain, \u201cWhat is dogecoin?\u201d Pressed by Mr. Che, Mr. Musk eventually said, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s a hustle.\u201d\nThe price of dogecoin, created in 2013 as a joke, surged as high as 74 cents early Saturday in advance of Mr. Musk\u2019s \u201cSNL\u201d appearance, spurring hope among investors that it would cross $1 for the first time. The price wobbled between 49 cents and 69 cents for most of the broadcast, according to CoinDesk. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen the show ended, dogecoin was trading around 52 cents, putting its market value at about $72 billion\u2014greater than the valuations of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kraft Heinz Co.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Robinhood, the online trading app popular with individual investors, said on Twitter during the program that it was experiencing issues with cryptocurrency trading. Robinhood later tweeted that the issues were resolved. \nThe stir created around the show since Mr. Musk was named as host last month suggests that \u201cSNL\u201d may see a surge in TV ratings. The show has drawn an average 9.2 million total viewers in its 46th season, according to Nielsen data. NBC said Sunday that Mr. Musk\u2019s episode tied for its third-highest rated telecast of the season, behind Dave Chappelle in November and the season premiere hosted by Chris Rock in October.\nNBC sought to capitalize on Mr. Musk\u2019s global notoriety, live-streaming the show for the first time internationally in more than 100 countries.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nIn the run up to the show, which comes with a battery of sketch writers, Mr. Musk turned to Twitter to crowdsource ideas for his appearance from among his roughly 53 million followers. There the live-comedy novice took some online ribbing from \u201cSNL\u201d cast member\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Redd\n\n\n\n for referring to a sketch as a \u201cskit.\u201d\nMaye Musk made an appearance in keeping with a show tradition of bringing on cast members\u2019 mothers on the eve of Mother\u2019s Day. She said that she hoped her gift wouldn\u2019t be the dogecoin her son has often tweeted about. Mr. Musk said it was. \nHis appearance on \u201cSNL\u201d is Mr. Musk\u2019s latest excursion into pop culture. His casting credits include a number of film and TV cameos, such as \u201cIron Man 2\u201d and episodes of \u201cThe Big Bang Theory,\u201d \u201cSouth Park\u201d and \u201cThe Simpsons.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat was your reaction to Elon Musk\u2019s SNL performance? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nMr. Musk is one of a small cadre of business people to host \u201cSNL,\u201d which typically taps people from the entertainment world for the coveted role. The late George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, hosted in 1990, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ralph Nader,\n\n\n\n the high-profile consumer crusader, hosted in 1977. Publishing magnate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Forbes\n\n\n\n did the honors in 1996, shortly after giving up his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n hosted in 2004, when he was early in his tenure on the NBC reality series \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d and again in 2015, when he was vying to be the Republican candidate for the White House.\nUnlike some hosts who play a more passive role in the comedy, Mr. Musk appeared in the majority of live sketches and prerecorded bits. In one segment, Mr. Musk, who longs to colonize Mars, issued commands to a Mars mission that relied on a slacker character played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pete Davidson.\n\n\n\n Mr. Musk also showed up in the sketch, \u201cGen Z Hospital,\u201d playing a bearded doctor and managing to deliver youth slang with a straight face. He also dressed up as the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nintendo\n\n\n character Wario for a parody of anti-Italian bias in the Sup The cryptocurrency, which surged ahead of the broadcast, was trading lower after the Tesla and SpaceX leader said it was \u201ca hustle\u201d during a sketch in which he portrayed a financial expert. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott and John Jurgensen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk on \u2018SNL\u2019 Says He Has Asperger\u2019s, Jokes About Dogecoin (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "855",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-quips-about-his-aspergers-to-kick-off-snl-host-gig-11620534790?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=30",
        "text": "The chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX\u2014and who is known for sometimes taking swipes at rivals on Twitter\u2014issued a faux apology as part of the host\u2019s customary opening monologue. \u201cTo anyone I\u2019ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars, and I\u2019m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cDid you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe early cracks stopped short of some of Mr. Musk\u2019s edgier comments. In the past, he has taken swipes at the Securities and Exchange Commission and billionaire\nJeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who has a history of comments that move markets, had a similar effect on \u201cSNL,\u201d when he appeared in its satirical news segment, Weekend Update, as \u201cLloyd Ostertag, financial expert,\u201d who called himself \u201cThe Dogefather.\u201d \n\n\nAfter he expounded on the merits of the cryptocurrency using jargon, cast members\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Che\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Jost\n\n\n\n repeatedly asked him to explain, \u201cWhat is dogecoin?\u201d Pressed by Mr. Che, Mr. Musk eventually said, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s a hustle.\u201d\nThe price of dogecoin, created in 2013 as a joke, surged as high as 74 cents early Saturday in advance of Mr. Musk\u2019s \u201cSNL\u201d appearance, spurring hope among investors that it would cross $1 for the first time. The price wobbled between 49 cents and 69 cents for most of the broadcast, according to CoinDesk. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen the show ended, dogecoin was trading around 52 cents, putting its market value at about $72 billion\u2014greater than the valuations of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kraft Heinz Co.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Robinhood, the online trading app popular with individual investors, said on Twitter during the program that it was experiencing issues with cryptocurrency trading. Robinhood later tweeted that the issues were resolved. \nThe stir created around the show since Mr. Musk was named as host last month suggests that \u201cSNL\u201d may see a surge in TV ratings. The show has drawn an average 9.2 million total viewers in its 46th season, according to Nielsen data. NBC said Sunday that Mr. Musk\u2019s episode tied for its third-highest rated telecast of the season, behind Dave Chappelle in November and the season premiere hosted by Chris Rock in October.\nNBC sought to capitalize on Mr. Musk\u2019s global notoriety, live-streaming the show for the first time internationally in more than 100 countries.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nIn the run up to the show, which comes with a battery of sketch writers, Mr. Musk turned to Twitter to crowdsource ideas for his appearance from among his roughly 53 million followers. There the live-comedy novice took some online ribbing from \u201cSNL\u201d cast member\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Redd\n\n\n\n for referring to a sketch as a \u201cskit.\u201d\nMaye Musk made an appearance in keeping with a show tradition of bringing on cast members\u2019 mothers on the eve of Mother\u2019s Day. She said that she hoped her gift wouldn\u2019t be the dogecoin her son has often tweeted about. Mr. Musk said it was. \nHis appearance on \u201cSNL\u201d is Mr. Musk\u2019s latest excursion into pop culture. His casting credits include a number of film and TV cameos, such as \u201cIron Man 2\u201d and episodes of \u201cThe Big Bang Theory,\u201d \u201cSouth Park\u201d and \u201cThe Simpsons.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat was your reaction to Elon Musk\u2019s SNL performance? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nMr. Musk is one of a small cadre of business people to host \u201cSNL,\u201d which typically taps people from the entertainment world for the coveted role. The late George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, hosted in 1990, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ralph Nader,\n\n\n\n the high-profile consumer crusader, hosted in 1977. Publishing magnate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Forbes\n\n\n\n did the honors in 1996, shortly after giving up his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n hosted in 2004, when he was early in his tenure on the NBC reality series \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d and again in 2015, when he was vying to be the Republican candidate for the White House.\nUnlike some hosts who play a more passive role in the comedy, Mr. Musk appeared in the majority of live sketches and prerecorded bits. In one segment, Mr. Musk, who longs to colonize Mars, issued commands to a Mars mission that relied on a slacker character played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pete Davidson.\n\n\n\n Mr. Musk also showed up in the sketch, \u201cGen Z Hospital,\u201d playing a bearded doctor and managing to deliver youth slang with a straight face. He also dressed up as the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nintendo\n\n\n character Wario for a parody of anti-Italian bias in the The cryptocurrency, which surged ahead of the broadcast, was trading lower after the Tesla and SpaceX leader said it was \u201ca hustle\u201d during a sketch in which he portrayed a financial expert. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott and John Jurgensen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Twitter CEO Rethinks Africa Trip as Coronavirus Spreads (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "856",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-rethinks-africa-trip-as-coronavirus-spreads-11583437987?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=59",
        "text": "The CEO first disclosed his Africa plans last year via Twitter, surprising some company insiders. He said Thursday he didn\u2019t make his plans to work there remotely sufficiently clear at the time. \u201cI do believe fully in this concept of figuring out how to work in a distributed model. So my intention is not to go over and just hang out or take a sabbatical, but actually everything I\u2019m doing in San Francisco, doing on another continent,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Dorsey defended his plans to spend time in Africa. \u201cThe tech innovation is incredible,\u201d he said, and represented a growth opportunity for Twitter. \n\n\nElliott has taken a roughly $1 billion stake in Twitter and nominated four directors to the social-media company\u2019s board. It is also seeking a full-time CEO. Mr. Dorsey runs payments firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Square Inc.\n\n\n as well as Twitter. \nMr. Dorsey co-founded Twitter and was its first chief executive, before he was pushed out in 2008 with the company struggling from technical glitches. He returned to the company in 2011, first as executive chairman before being reappointed as CEO in 2015 when he relinquished the chairmanship. He retained the Square CEO job.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Scientists racing to find a vaccine for the Wuhan coronavirus are hoping a cutting-edge approach called \u201crapid response platforms\u201d will quickly yield a breakthrough. WSJ\u2019s Jason Bellini explains what these are and how they work. Photo: Tolga Akmen / AFP\n \n\n\n\u201cI have enough flexibility in my schedule to focus on the most important things and I have a good sense of what is critical on both companies,\u201d Mr. Dorsey said at the investor event. \nMr. Dorsey has received public backing for retaining his CEO role at Twitter from some within and outside the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who also runs rocket firm Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and is a heavy user of Twitter, tweeted \u201cJust want to say that I support @Jack as Twitter CEO,\u201d using Mr. Dorsey\u2019s name on Twitter. A \u201c#WeBackJack\u201d campaign supporting Mr. Dorsey launched on Twitter, joined by several employees of the social-media company.\nOpening the door to Elliott\u2019s campaign is the fact that Twitter doesn\u2019t have the super-voting-share structure that insulates some other Silicon Valley companies from outside pressure. The fund\u2019s interest in Twitter comes after several years during which the social-media company has struggled to generate the kind of user growth that rivals, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.,\n\n\n have generated. Twitter also has drawn criticism for the nature of the discourse on its platform frequently criticized as hostile. \nAmid those issues, the company\u2019s share price, and user base, has lagged behind rivals. Twitter has 152 million daily average users, according to its latest quarterly figures, compared with Facebook\u2019s user base that tops 1.6 billion.\nTwitter shares are down 3.4% since Mr. Dorsey took over as interim CEO in July 2015 before regaining the post on a permanent basis later that year. Facebook\u2019s stock has more than doubled over that time. \nMr. Dorsey aimed to deflect some of the criticism, saying he had focused the company when he returned and had driven technical improvements. Many of the initiatives have materialized in the last year, he said.\nAmong the initiatives he has pushed is greater use of machine-learning systems to help provide more relevant content to users. The new tools also are being used to identify for removal content that violates Twitter policies, he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve removed a lot of the burden of reporting abuse and harassment.\u201d\nTwitter last year also surprised investors when it said that technical glitches hampered its ability to sell ads in the third quarter, causing the stock to tumble. Fixing the software problem would still weigh on earnings this year, it said. \nThe company has been rebuilding its advertising services, Mr. Dorsey said, and expected to complete the effort this year, \u201cwhich is a huge milestone for us and long overdue.\u201d \nDespite some investor concern that the spreading coronavirus could dent advertising revenue broadly, Mr. Dorsey said it was too early to detect any impact for Twitter. He said that the outbreak was driving more people to seek out Twitter to determine what is happening. \nTwitter is among several companies to have adjusted its operations to deal with concerns about the virus. \nMr. Dorsey withdrew from a planned appearance at the annual South by Southwest gathering in Austin, Texas, scheduled for this month. The company also said it was asking employees to work from home to stem the spread of the virus. Twitter also has taken steps to try to curb misinformation on its platform about the epidemic.\nWrite to Betsy Morris at betsy.morris@wsj.com Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is reconsidering plans to spend part of this year in Africa, a trip that has drawn criticism and helped fuel a push by activist hedge fund Elliott to possibly replace him. ",
        "author": "Betsy Morris"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Advances Long-Term Military Launch Provider Goal (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "857",
        "date": "2020-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-advances-goal-of-becoming-trusted-long-term-military-launch-provider-11597010973?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=41",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Mr. Musk\u2019s company, is slated to conduct 40% of the missions, achieving a long-cherished goal of breaking into the ranks of the Pentagon\u2019s most trusted corporate partners. The Boeing-Lockheed joint venture is slated to carry out the rest of the launches. Initial awards for each company exceeded $300 million, though industry estimates of the eventual combined contract value range from more than $4 billion to about $6 billion.\nBlue Origin Federation LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n made a big push to snare some of the launches, stressing the strength of its technology and financial commitment to improve it further. The fourth bidder was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n\nIndustry officials said the announcement appears to give SpaceX a long-term advantage over Blue Origin to become the dominant new entrant in the lucrative market for launching big U.S. national-security payloads over coming decades. Both companies consider government launches strategically important for their future prospects, and the military plans to reopen competition for later missions.\n\n\nSuccess for SpaceX SpaceX Capsule and NASA Crew Make Historic Splashdown (Aug. 2) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Capsule Links Up With Space Station (May 31) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) SpaceX Satellite Launch Marks U.S. Military Embrace of Reusable Rockets (June 30) \n\n\nWith Pentagon spending on space programs, particularly classified projects, projected to continue climbing for years, competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin is likely to ramp up, even as ULA seeks to stay in the lead.\nFriday\u2019s announcement, however, amounts to a potentially important SpaceX coup in an already simmering rivalry. Messrs. Musk and Bezos have traded satirical barbs on social media in the past, sometimes playing down or poking fun at each other\u2019s space accomplishments. But publicly and privately, industry officials said, both men have emphasized their determination\u2014regardless of the extent of government financial support\u2014to develop larger and more powerful rockets capable of accelerating human exploration and ultimately establishing settlements deep in the solar system.\nBut at this point SpaceX, which Pentagon brass considered an upstart outsider as recently as six years ago, has positioned itself to become a mainstay for blasting the heaviest and most expensive American military and spy satellites into space. \u201cThis is a huge win, highlighting how far they have come in both the commercial and military launch markets,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Torres,\n\n\n\n a veteran industry official and author of books on space history. \u201cThey have clearly earned their stripes.\u201d\nULA\u2019s ability to secure the majority of launches \u201cis more important for the overall industry,\u201d Mr. Torres added, because its heavy reliance on existing hardware will end up bolstering other major Pentagon suppliers. \nThe closely watched decision wasn\u2019t a surprise to some industry insiders, because the Pentagon previously signaled it intended to place a premium on the record of the bidders. SpaceX\u2019s family of Falcon boosters has successfully launched earlier Air Force missions. ULA has a long history of military contracts for its highly reliable Delta IV and Atlas V boosters, and it is currently developing a new rocket called Vulcan-Centaur.\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Glenn rocket lacks that pedigree, though the company is supplying the same engines for use on ULA\u2019s next-generation Vulcan design. ULA\u2019s current rockets use Russian-built engines, long a source of concern among lawmakers and military officials, and the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture faces strict congressional deadlines for switching to alternate rockets using domestic engines. Northrop Grumman also offered a brand-new booster.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Dragon Capsule\u2019 returned from the International Space Station in a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo by NASA/AFP\n \n\n\nAmid the heightened competition, SpaceX and Blue Origin over the years filed separate lawsuits challenging different aspects of Pentagon contracting policies, and have lobbied Capitol Hill to snare federal development dollars. Led by billionaire entrepreneurs willing to invest heavily to turn their space ambitions into reality, the two companies also are facing off against each other to supply hardware for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return U.S. astronauts to the moon. NASA is expected to make a decision later this year.\nTaken together, Pentagon and NASA choices are expected to be the most consequential moves establishing the direction of U.S. rocket companies since the late 1990s.\nRecently, Mr. Musk\u2019s business endeavors have soared. SpaceX succeeded in launching and docking with the International Space Station th Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has vaulted into an elite tier of military suppliers, winning a multibillion-dollar contract that makes it one of the Pentagon\u2019s two primary satellite-launch providers through most of the decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Advances Long-Term Military Launch Provider Goal (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "858",
        "date": "2020-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-advances-goal-of-becoming-trusted-long-term-military-launch-provider-11597010973?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=49",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of Mr. Musk\u2019s company, is slated to conduct 40% of the missions, achieving a long-cherished goal of breaking into the ranks of the Pentagon\u2019s most trusted corporate partners. The Boeing-Lockheed joint venture is slated to carry out the rest of the launches. Initial awards for each company exceeded $300 million, though industry estimates of the eventual combined contract value range from more than $4 billion to about $6 billion.\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin Federation LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n made a big push to snare some of the launches, stressing the strength of its technology and financial commitment to improve it further. The fourth bidder was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n\nIndustry officials said the announcement appears to give SpaceX a long-term advantage over Blue Origin to become the dominant new entrant in the lucrative market for launching big U.S. national-security payloads over coming decades. Both companies consider government launches strategically important for their future prospects, and the military plans to reopen competition for later missions.\n\n\nSuccess for SpaceX SpaceX Capsule and NASA Crew Make Historic Splashdown (Aug. 2) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Capsule Links Up With Space Station (May 31) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) SpaceX Satellite Launch Marks U.S. Military Embrace of Reusable Rockets (June 30) \n\n\nWith Pentagon spending on space programs, particularly classified projects, projected to continue climbing for years, competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin is likely to ramp up, even as ULA seeks to stay in the lead.\nFriday\u2019s announcement, however, amounts to a potentially important SpaceX coup in an already simmering rivalry. Messrs. Musk and Bezos have traded satirical barbs on social media in the past, sometimes playing down or poking fun at each other\u2019s space accomplishments. But publicly and privately, industry officials said, both men have emphasized their determination\u2014regardless of the extent of government financial support\u2014to develop larger and more powerful rockets capable of accelerating human exploration and ultimately establishing settlements deep in the solar system.\nBut at this point SpaceX, which Pentagon brass considered an upstart outsider as recently as six years ago, has positioned itself to become a mainstay for blasting the heaviest and most expensive American military and spy satellites into space. \u201cThis is a huge win, highlighting how far they have come in both the commercial and military launch markets,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Torres,\n\n\n\n a veteran industry official and author of books on space history. \u201cThey have clearly earned their stripes.\u201d\nULA\u2019s ability to secure the majority of launches \u201cis more important for the overall industry,\u201d Mr. Torres added, because its heavy reliance on existing hardware will end up bolstering other major Pentagon suppliers. \nThe closely watched decision wasn\u2019t a surprise to some industry insiders, because the Pentagon previously signaled it intended to place a premium on the record of the bidders. SpaceX\u2019s family of Falcon boosters has successfully launched earlier Air Force missions. ULA has a long history of military contracts for its highly reliable Delta IV and Atlas V boosters, and it is currently developing a new rocket called Vulcan-Centaur.\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Glenn rocket lacks that pedigree, though the company is supplying the same engines for use on ULA\u2019s next-generation Vulcan design. ULA\u2019s current rockets use Russian-built engines, long a source of concern among lawmakers and military officials, and the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture faces strict congressional deadlines for switching to alternate rockets using domestic engines. Northrop Grumman also offered a brand-new booster.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Dragon Capsule\u2019 returned from the International Space Station in a splashdown landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo by NASA/AFP\n \n\n\nAmid the heightened competition, SpaceX and Blue Origin over the years filed separate lawsuits challenging different aspects of Pentagon contracting policies, and have lobbied Capitol Hill to snare federal development dollars. Led by billionaire entrepreneurs willing to invest heavily to turn their space ambitions into reality, the two companies also are facing off against each other to supply hardware for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return U.S. astronauts to the moon. NASA is expected to make a decision later this year.\nTaken together, Pentagon and NASA choices are expected to be the most consequential moves establishing the direction of U.S. rocket companies since the late 1990s.\nRecently, Mr. Musk\u2019s business endeavors have soared. SpaceX succeeded in launching and docking with the International Space Statio Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has vaulted into an elite tier of military suppliers, winning a multibillion-dollar contract that makes it one of the Pentagon\u2019s two primary satellite-launch providers through most of the decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Future Depends on a Gigantic Rocket and 42,000 Internet Satellites (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "859",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-future-depends-on-a-gigantic-rocket-and-42-000-internet-satellites-11640687404?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=1",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company Mr. Musk founded almost two decades ago, faces steep challenges in engineering Starship into a reusable rocket that would sharply drive down launch costs. Mr. Musk recently said the ship takes up more of his time than any other single initiative, and warned the vehicle, along with the internet service, are creating significant challenges for the company.\n\u201cStarship is a hard, hard, hard, hard project,\u201d he said at a December event hosted by The Wall Street Journal. \u201cThis is the biggest rocket ever made.\u201d\n\nStarship, which would be blasted to orbit on a booster dubbed Super Heavy, stands 160 feet tall and has a diameter of 30 feet, creating room to send hundreds of Starlink satellites to orbit at once, more than the several dozen it is able to deploy right now on one of its Falcon 9 rockets. More than half of the launches tracked by U.S. flight-safety regulators that the company has conducted the past two years have been Starlink deployments.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This year, billionaire CEO Elon Musk reached several milestones across Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. WSJ reporters Rebecca Elliott and Micah Maidenberg break down some of his biggest moments in 2021 and what\u2019s to come in 2022. Illustration: Tom Grillo\n \n\n\nThe company plans to rapidly boost the pace of satellite launches in the years ahead. SpaceX, in a July presentation to the Federal Communications Commission, said it had so far launched around 1,800 Starlink satellites and was active in more than 20 countries. The FCC has authorized SpaceX to launch around 12,000 satellites, but the company wants to add at least around 30,000 more, according to commission filings.\nMr. Musk said at an industry conference this summer that SpaceX is likely to invest at least $5 billion and perhaps as much as $10 billion in Starlink before it fully starts generating cash, with ongoing investments after that.\nIn a November tweet, Mr. Musk said if severe global recession cut into the availability of capital and liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starship and Starlink, then bankruptcy \u201cwhile still unlikely, is not impossible.\u201d\nOver the past two years, the company began equity sales that raised at least $3.8 billion, according to filings that some private companies like SpaceX may have to disclose under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. SpaceX doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nA spokesman for the company pointed to a recent statement posted to SpaceX\u2019s website that said in part the company\u2019s year ahead would include a potential first orbital mission for Starship and expanding Starlink.\nMr. Musk unveiled Starlink in 2015, aiming to develop a network of smaller satellites in a low orbit around Earth that could provide high-speed internet access around the world. SpaceX set out aggressive targets for Starlink, projecting that year more than 40 million subscribers by 2025, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Starship would be blasted to orbit on top of a Super Heavy booster.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX said this summer that it had around 140,000 Starlink customers. Starlink lists costs for the service at $99 a month, with a $499 charge for an internet terminal\u2014or roughly half the amount it costs the company to make it, Mr. Musk said over the summer.\nOther companies, such as London-based OneWeb, are also creating networks of internet satellites, and an\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n unit plans to do so in the future. Around 3.7 billion people globally remain unconnected to the internet, according to a recent report from two agencies at the United Nations, while U.S. officials have worked for years to improve access to high-speed internet in underserved areas.\n\u201cThere\u2019s a need for connectivity in places that don\u2019t have it right now,\u201d or where connections are very limited or expensive, Mr. Musk said this summer. In addition to consumers, Mr. Musk has indicated Starlink could offer services to other businesses, recently saying in a tweet that fliers should ask airlines for Starlink.\nThe internet service creates a source of demand for Starship, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Weinzierl,\n\n\n\n a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the space economy.\nHistorically, those behind big rockets without a clear use for them have faced challenges: \u201cIf we don\u2019t know why we built them, it can be a real losing proposition,\u201d Mr. Weinzierl said, adding he thinks the company will identify other uses for the rocket.\nStarship, meanwhile, has at least one confirmed customer in place: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which in April awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a Starship to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.\nAs it works to develop Starship and Starlink, SpaceX has built out a business based on government customers such as NA Elon Musk said a lot is riding on the Starship rocket and Starlink satellite projects for his space company, which aims to reduce launch costs and build a big internet business. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Future Depends on a Gigantic Rocket and 42,000 Internet Satellites (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "860",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-future-depends-on-a-gigantic-rocket-and-42-000-internet-satellites-11640687404?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=1",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company Mr. Musk founded almost two decades ago, faces steep challenges in engineering Starship into a reusable rocket that would sharply drive down launch costs. Mr. Musk recently said the ship takes up more of his time than any other single initiative, and warned the vehicle, along with the internet service, are creating significant challenges for the company.\n\u201cStarship is a hard, hard, hard, hard project,\u201d he said at a December event hosted by The Wall Street Journal. \u201cThis is the biggest rocket ever made.\u201d\n\nStarship, which would be blasted to orbit on a booster dubbed Super Heavy, stands 160 feet tall and has a diameter of 30 feet, creating room to send hundreds of Starlink satellites to orbit at once, more than the several dozen it is able to deploy right now on one of its Falcon 9 rockets. More than half of the launches tracked by U.S. flight-safety regulators that the company has conducted the past two years have been Starlink deployments.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This year, billionaire CEO Elon Musk reached several milestones across Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. WSJ reporters Rebecca Elliott and Micah Maidenberg break down some of his biggest moments in 2021 and what\u2019s to come in 2022. Illustration: Tom Grillo\n \n\n\nThe company plans to rapidly boost the pace of satellite launches in the years ahead. SpaceX, in a July presentation to the Federal Communications Commission, said it had so far launched around 1,800 Starlink satellites and was active in more than 20 countries. The FCC has authorized SpaceX to launch around 12,000 satellites, but the company wants to add at least around 30,000 more, according to commission filings.\nMr. Musk said at an industry conference this summer that SpaceX is likely to invest at least $5 billion and perhaps as much as $10 billion in Starlink before it fully starts generating cash, with ongoing investments after that.\nIn a November tweet, Mr. Musk said if severe global recession cut into the availability of capital and liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starship and Starlink, then bankruptcy \u201cwhile still unlikely, is not impossible.\u201d\nOver the past two years, the company began equity sales that raised at least $3.8 billion, according to filings that some private companies like SpaceX may have to disclose under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. SpaceX doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nA spokesman for the company pointed to a recent statement posted to SpaceX\u2019s website that said in part the company\u2019s year ahead would include a potential first orbital mission for Starship and expanding Starlink.\nMr. Musk unveiled Starlink in 2015, aiming to develop a network of smaller satellites in a low orbit around Earth that could provide high-speed internet access around the world. SpaceX set out aggressive targets for Starlink, projecting that year more than 40 million subscribers by 2025, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Starship would be blasted to orbit on top of a Super Heavy booster.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX said this summer that it had around 140,000 Starlink customers. Starlink lists costs for the service at $99 a month, with a $499 charge for an internet terminal\u2014or roughly half the amount it costs the company to make it, Mr. Musk said over the summer.\nOther companies, such as London-based OneWeb, are also creating networks of internet satellites, and an\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n unit plans to do so in the future. Around 3.7 billion people globally remain unconnected to the internet, according to a recent report from two agencies at the United Nations, while U.S. officials have worked for years to improve access to high-speed internet in underserved areas.\n\u201cThere\u2019s a need for connectivity in places that don\u2019t have it right now,\u201d or where connections are very limited or expensive, Mr. Musk said this summer. In addition to consumers, Mr. Musk has indicated Starlink could offer services to other businesses, recently saying in a tweet that fliers should ask airlines for Starlink.\nThe internet service creates a source of demand for Starship, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Weinzierl,\n\n\n\n a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the space economy.\nHistorically, those behind big rockets without a clear use for them have faced challenges: \u201cIf we don\u2019t know why we built them, it can be a real losing proposition,\u201d Mr. Weinzierl said, adding he thinks the company will identify other uses for the rocket.\nStarship, meanwhile, has at least one confirmed customer in place: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which in April awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a Starship to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.\nAs it works to develop Starship and Starlink, SpaceX has built out a business based on government customers such as NA Elon Musk said a lot is riding on the Starship rocket and Starlink satellite projects for his space company, which aims to reduce launch costs and build a big internet business. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Future Depends on a Gigantic Rocket and 42,000 Internet Satellites (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "861",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-future-depends-on-a-gigantic-rocket-and-42-000-internet-satellites-11640687404?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=2",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company Mr. Musk founded almost two decades ago, faces steep challenges in engineering Starship into a reusable rocket that would sharply drive down launch costs. Mr. Musk recently said the ship takes up more of his time than any other single initiative, and warned the vehicle, along with the internet service, are creating significant challenges for the company.\n\u201cStarship is a hard, hard, hard, hard project,\u201d he said at a December event hosted by The Wall Street Journal. \u201cThis is the biggest rocket ever made.\u201d\n\nStarship, which would be blasted to orbit on a booster dubbed Super Heavy, stands 160 feet tall and has a diameter of 30 feet, creating room to send hundreds of Starlink satellites to orbit at once, more than the several dozen it is able to deploy right now on one of its Falcon 9 rockets. More than half of the launches tracked by U.S. flight-safety regulators that the company has conducted the past two years have been Starlink deployments.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This year, billionaire CEO Elon Musk reached several milestones across Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink. WSJ reporters Rebecca Elliott and Micah Maidenberg break down some of his biggest moments in 2021 and what\u2019s to come in 2022. Illustration: Tom Grillo\n \n\n\nThe company plans to rapidly boost the pace of satellite launches in the years ahead. SpaceX, in a July presentation to the Federal Communications Commission, said it had so far launched around 1,800 Starlink satellites and was active in more than 20 countries. The FCC has authorized SpaceX to launch around 12,000 satellites, but the company wants to add at least around 30,000 more, according to commission filings.\nMr. Musk said at an industry conference this summer that SpaceX is likely to invest at least $5 billion and perhaps as much as $10 billion in Starlink before it fully starts generating cash, with ongoing investments after that.\nIn a November tweet, Mr. Musk said if severe global recession cut into the availability of capital and liquidity while SpaceX was losing billions on Starship and Starlink, then bankruptcy \u201cwhile still unlikely, is not impossible.\u201d\nOver the past two years, the company began equity sales that raised at least $3.8 billion, according to filings that some private companies like SpaceX may have to disclose under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. SpaceX doesn\u2019t release financial statements.\nA spokesman for the company pointed to a recent statement posted to SpaceX\u2019s website that said in part the company\u2019s year ahead would include a potential first orbital mission for Starship and expanding Starlink.\nMr. Musk unveiled Starlink in 2015, aiming to develop a network of smaller satellites in a low orbit around Earth that could provide high-speed internet access around the world. SpaceX set out aggressive targets for Starlink, projecting that year more than 40 million subscribers by 2025, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Starship would be blasted to orbit on top of a Super Heavy booster.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX said this summer that it had around 140,000 Starlink customers. Starlink lists costs for the service at $99 a month, with a $499 charge for an internet terminal\u2014or roughly half the amount it costs the company to make it, Mr. Musk said over the summer.\nOther companies, such as London-based OneWeb, are also creating networks of internet satellites, and an\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n unit plans to do so in the future. Around 3.7 billion people globally remain unconnected to the internet, according to a recent report from two agencies at the United Nations, while U.S. officials have worked for years to improve access to high-speed internet in underserved areas.\n\u201cThere\u2019s a need for connectivity in places that don\u2019t have it right now,\u201d or where connections are very limited or expensive, Mr. Musk said this summer. In addition to consumers, Mr. Musk has indicated Starlink could offer services to other businesses, recently saying in a tweet that fliers should ask airlines for Starlink.\nThe internet service creates a source of demand for Starship, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Weinzierl,\n\n\n\n a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the space economy.\nHistorically, those behind big rockets without a clear use for them have faced challenges: \u201cIf we don\u2019t know why we built them, it can be a real losing proposition,\u201d Mr. Weinzierl said, adding he thinks the company will identify other uses for the rocket.\nStarship, meanwhile, has at least one confirmed customer in place: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which in April awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a Starship to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.\nAs it works to develop Starship and Starlink, SpaceX has built out a business based on government customers such as NA Elon Musk said a lot is riding on the Starship rocket and Starlink satellite projects for his space company, which aims to reduce launch costs and build a big internet business. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Seeks Next Milestone With Launch This Week (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "862",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-launch-this-week-11631531152?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=23",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company led by Mr. Musk and President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n has outflanked rivals by pushing to rapidly develop its space hardware and prove that it works, people familiar with the company say.\nMr. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, investing his own funds with a goal of eventually taking people to Mars. Along the way, the company won contracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, gaining agency support during the company\u2019s early years.\n\nNow, nearly two decades after its founding, SpaceX has helped to reinvigorate the country\u2019s space ambitions by orchestrating high-profile launches. Last year, the company blasted two NASA astronauts into orbit, where they docked at the International Space Station. It was the first launch with humans from the U.S. in almost a decade.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n nasa/ben smegelsky/Reuters\n\n\n\u201cOne of the big ways SpaceX shook things up was by bringing a venture capital frame of reference to launch and innovating with a much higher risk tolerance than you would see from large, publicly traded companies,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carissa Christensen,\n\n\n\n chief executive of BryceTech, a data and engineering firm focused in part on space. \u201cI think SpaceX got people\u2019s attention by blending visionary narrative with engineering innovation.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSpaceX has faced its share of challenges as it built its operations, including explosions, in 2015 and the following year, of Falcon 9 rockets. For a two-year stretch beginning in the middle of 2007, the company repeatedly faced cash squeezes, Mr. Musk has said.\nThis week, SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 and its Crew Dragon capsule\u2014the same hardware NASA has tapped for astronaut missions\u2014to take four people to orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\n\n chief executive who will lead the Inspiration4 flight, said his team is confident in SpaceX\u2019s technology and the training it has put him and fellow crew members through. That regimen has included using simulators to mimic the flight and preparing for everything from a normal mission to emergencies, he said.\nThe businessman paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum for the mission, which includes a charitable component and research tasks for crew members.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some in the small border town believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development, jobs and education. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nMr. Isaacman said Mr. Musk, other than for the announcement of the mission, hasn\u2019t talked about the Inspiration4 flight during their conversations.\n\u201cThis mission is a stepping stone. You have to clear this obstacle in order to do many more, you know, that are bigger and grander, and get us to the moon, Mars and beyond,\u201d he said.\nSpaceX executives weren\u2019t available for comment.\nThe company, valued at more than $74 billion last April according to Pitchbook, stands out in an expanding space sector that has drawn billions of dollars in fresh investment in recent years. Based in Hawthorne, Calif., SpaceX is developing a satellite-based broadband internet service and building a moon lander for NASA, in addition to orchestrating launches.\nSpaceX\u2019s ability to develop rockets that can be used multiple times has lowered the cost of flying to space, analysts and space executives have said.\nReusable space vehicles weren\u2019t new when SpaceX and competitors began pursuing them. NASA\u2019s fleet of shuttles that could be flown multiple times were launched 135 times until the last flight ended in 2011, according to the agency.\n\u201cThe revolutionary development from SpaceX wasn\u2019t necessarily the technology, it was really operational. They demonstrated how you can reuse a rocket without incurring the tremendous cost of taking the whole thing apart\u201d after a mission, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Aldrin,\n\n\n\n director of the Aldrin Space Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology.\nSo far this year, the company has conducted 24 of the 41 licensed launches in the U.S., according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Last year, it orchestrated 25 out of the 39 launches. More are on tap, including missions for NASA and four contracted by Axiom Space Inc., a company behind a range of commercial-space projects.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA screenshot of a NASA TV livestream shows astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken as they prepared to return to earth in a SpaceX capsule last year.\n\n\n\nCompetitors are working on their own efforts to launch humans, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is aiming to cement its position as a leading space enterprise with a mission this week that seeks to deliver four civilians to orbit for several days and then return them to Earth. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Seeks Next Milestone With Launch This Week (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "863",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-launch-this-week-11631531152?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=22",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company led by Mr. Musk and President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n has outflanked rivals by pushing to rapidly develop its space hardware and prove that it works, people familiar with the company say.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, investing his own funds with a goal of eventually taking people to Mars. Along the way, the company won contracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, gaining agency support during the company\u2019s early years.\n\nNow, nearly two decades after its founding, SpaceX has helped to reinvigorate the country\u2019s space ambitions by orchestrating high-profile launches. Last year, the company blasted two NASA astronauts into orbit, where they docked at the International Space Station. It was the first launch with humans from the U.S. in almost a decade.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n nasa/ben smegelsky/Reuters\n\n\n\u201cOne of the big ways SpaceX shook things up was by bringing a venture capital frame of reference to launch and innovating with a much higher risk tolerance than you would see from large, publicly traded companies,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carissa Christensen,\n\n\n\n chief executive of BryceTech, a data and engineering firm focused in part on space. \u201cI think SpaceX got people\u2019s attention by blending visionary narrative with engineering innovation.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSpaceX has faced its share of challenges as it built its operations, including explosions, in 2015 and the following year, of Falcon 9 rockets. For a two-year stretch beginning in the middle of 2007, the company repeatedly faced cash squeezes, Mr. Musk has said.\nThis week, SpaceX will use its Falcon 9 and its Crew Dragon capsule\u2014the same hardware NASA has tapped for astronaut missions\u2014to take four people to orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.\n\n\n chief executive who will lead the Inspiration4 flight, said his team is confident in SpaceX\u2019s technology and the training it has put him and fellow crew members through. That regimen has included using simulators to mimic the flight and preparing for everything from a normal mission to emergencies, he said.\nThe businessman paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum for the mission, which includes a charitable component and research tasks for crew members.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some in the small border town believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development, jobs and education. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nMr. Isaacman said Mr. Musk, other than for the announcement of the mission, hasn\u2019t talked about the Inspiration4 flight during their conversations.\n\u201cThis mission is a stepping stone. You have to clear this obstacle in order to do many more, you know, that are bigger and grander, and get us to the moon, Mars and beyond,\u201d he said.\nSpaceX executives weren\u2019t available for comment.\nThe company, valued at more than $74 billion last April according to Pitchbook, stands out in an expanding space sector that has drawn billions of dollars in fresh investment in recent years. Based in Hawthorne, Calif., SpaceX is developing a satellite-based broadband internet service and building a moon lander for NASA, in addition to orchestrating launches.\nSpaceX\u2019s ability to develop rockets that can be used multiple times has lowered the cost of flying to space, analysts and space executives have said.\nReusable space vehicles weren\u2019t new when SpaceX and competitors began pursuing them. NASA\u2019s fleet of shuttles that could be flown multiple times were launched 135 times until the last flight ended in 2011, according to the agency.\n\u201cThe revolutionary development from SpaceX wasn\u2019t necessarily the technology, it was really operational. They demonstrated how you can reuse a rocket without incurring the tremendous cost of taking the whole thing apart\u201d after a mission, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Aldrin,\n\n\n\n director of the Aldrin Space Institute at the Florida Institute of Technology.\nSo far this year, the company has conducted 24 of the 41 licensed launches in the U.S., according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Last year, it orchestrated 25 out of the 39 launches. More are on tap, including missions for NASA and four contracted by Axiom Space Inc., a company behind a range of commercial-space projects.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA screenshot of a NASA TV livestream shows astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken as they prepared to return to earth in a SpaceX capsule last year.\n\n\n\nCompetitors are working on their own efforts to launch hum Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is aiming to cement its position as a leading space enterprise with a mission this week that seeks to deliver four civilians to orbit for several days and then return them to Earth. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, Once a Washington Outsider, Courts Military Business (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "864",
        "date": "2020-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-once-a-washington-outsider-courts-military-business-11604517046?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=10",
        "text": "Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held company, also has worked with the Air Force and the Army to demonstrate communication links. And weeks ago, it signed a Pentagon agreement to study the feasibility of using SpaceX\u2019s proposed deep-space Starship transport, a giant capsule with built-in rocket engines, eventually to whisk cargo around the globe. Company engineers envision moving 80 tons between continents in minutes.\nFrom the beginning, Mr. Musk has said his ultimate goal was colonizing Mars to provide humans a safe escape from Earth if necessary. But in the process, SpaceX amassed an order book of civilian launch contracts estimated to total about $5 billion. It also has won contracts to supply the military with rocket launches and satellite prototypes eventually worth an estimated $6 billion and roughly $9 billion more in past and future National Aeronautics and Space Administration awards, primarily to ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. \n\nThose totals are still dwarfed by the leading military suppliers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n reported some $26 billion in revenue last year from its defense and space segments, while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , the country\u2019s largest defense contractor, reported about $21 billion from its space and missile operations. Both companies also serve as prime contractors for major NASA programs amounting to tens of billions of additional dollars over the years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk has said a goal of his was colonizing Mars to provide humans a safe escape from Earth if necessary.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMany of SpaceX\u2019s contracts rely on nascent technology, depend on future Pentagon decisions and offer limited initial revenue. But as Congress and the Pentagon increasingly pump money into an array of space programs\u2014with classified projects growing the fastest\u2014industry officials said in the next decade or so, SpaceX will be positioned for a multibillion-dollar boost. \nTotal defense appropriations could decline if Democrats take the White House and push new spending priorities. But the emphasis on enhanced space capabilities would likely remain in a new administration because it is part of long-term military funding plans and strategies already backed by Congress.\nSpace X\u2019s pivot toward national-security programs is intended to piggyback on rockets and satellites the company already is building for U.S. civilian and commercial customers. NASA remains its top customer. But the company\u2019s evolving strategy, according to analysts and industry officials, is to adapt some of its current systems to new missions such as tracking space debris, helping defend against superfast missiles and providing secure communication links for U.S. warfighters world-wide.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s leaders \u201cwere persistent, did their homework and did everything they needed to do\u201d to gain the military\u2019s trust, according to veteran industry consultant Roger Rusch. \u201cThat persistence has paid off.\u201d Mr. Rusch isn\u2019t working for SpaceX or its competitors.\nA SpaceX spokesman didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nMarketing to generals, though, is very different from negotiating commercial contracts, in which SpaceX often has significant leverage because it charges so much less than rivals. Consultant Keith Volkert, who represents major satellite operators contracting with SpaceX, said Mr. Musk\u2019s team relishes telling his corporate clients they are, quite literally, just along for the ride. \n\u201cWe\u2019re not actually selling you a rocket,\u201d he recalls company representatives often saying. \u201cWe\u2019re selling you a bus, and you don\u2019t get to kick the tires.\u201d \nIn less than two dozen years, SpaceX has expanded from a handful of employees working in a converted warehouse near a strip mall to roughly 8,000 employees and facilities from Texas to Florida to Washington state. Inside the nation\u2019s capital, it has garnered a reputation as one of the most combative and successful lobbying outfits.\nBy offering lower prices than traditional industry leaders, SpaceX became the country\u2019s top commercial and civilian launch provider. But that approach won\u2019t work with demanding military customers who give priority to reliability and strict oversight rather than cost, Mr. Volkert said.\nMr. Musk has lured private investors with plans to deploy thousands of small satellites as part of his Starlink venture, a commercial broadband project that industry and military officials say could eventually serve as a backbone for various global military applications including surveillance. Since getting humans to Mars requires developing and testing novel technology likely to cost at least $30 billion by Mr. Musk\u2019s public estimates, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was dismissed by Pentagon brass during its early years. But now, the billionaire entrepreneur and his company are enjoying more success than ever in snaring Pentagon business. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, Once a Washington Outsider, Courts Military Business (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "865",
        "date": "2020-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-once-a-washington-outsider-courts-military-business-11604517046?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=32",
        "text": "Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held company, also has worked with the Air Force and the Army to demonstrate communication links. And weeks ago, it signed a Pentagon agreement to study the feasibility of using SpaceX\u2019s proposed deep-space Starship transport, a giant capsule with built-in rocket engines, eventually to whisk cargo around the globe. Company engineers envision moving 80 tons between continents in minutes.\nFrom the beginning, Mr. Musk has said his ultimate goal was colonizing Mars to provide humans a safe escape from Earth if necessary. But in the process, SpaceX amassed an order book of civilian launch contracts estimated to total about $5 billion. It also has won contracts to supply the military with rocket launches and satellite prototypes eventually worth an estimated $6 billion and roughly $9 billion more in past and future National Aeronautics and Space Administration awards, primarily to ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. \n\nThose totals are still dwarfed by the leading military suppliers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n reported some $26 billion in revenue last year from its defense and space segments, while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , the country\u2019s largest defense contractor, reported about $21 billion from its space and missile operations. Both companies also serve as prime contractors for major NASA programs amounting to tens of billions of additional dollars over the years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk has said a goal of his was colonizing Mars to provide humans a safe escape from Earth if necessary.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMany of SpaceX\u2019s contracts rely on nascent technology, depend on future Pentagon decisions and offer limited initial revenue. But as Congress and the Pentagon increasingly pump money into an array of space programs\u2014with classified projects growing the fastest\u2014industry officials said in the next decade or so, SpaceX will be positioned for a multibillion-dollar boost. \nTotal defense appropriations could decline if Democrats take the White House and push new spending priorities. But the emphasis on enhanced space capabilities would likely remain in a new administration because it is part of long-term military funding plans and strategies already backed by Congress.\nSpace X\u2019s pivot toward national-security programs is intended to piggyback on rockets and satellites the company already is building for U.S. civilian and commercial customers. NASA remains its top customer. But the company\u2019s evolving strategy, according to analysts and industry officials, is to adapt some of its current systems to new missions such as tracking space debris, helping defend against superfast missiles and providing secure communication links for U.S. warfighters world-wide.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s leaders \u201cwere persistent, did their homework and did everything they needed to do\u201d to gain the military\u2019s trust, according to veteran industry consultant Roger Rusch. \u201cThat persistence has paid off.\u201d Mr. Rusch isn\u2019t working for SpaceX or its competitors.\nA SpaceX spokesman didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nMarketing to generals, though, is very different from negotiating commercial contracts, in which SpaceX often has significant leverage because it charges so much less than rivals. Consultant Keith Volkert, who represents major satellite operators contracting with SpaceX, said Mr. Musk\u2019s team relishes telling his corporate clients they are, quite literally, just along for the ride. \n\u201cWe\u2019re not actually selling you a rocket,\u201d he recalls company representatives often saying. \u201cWe\u2019re selling you a bus, and you don\u2019t get to kick the tires.\u201d \nIn less than two dozen years, SpaceX has expanded from a handful of employees working in a converted warehouse near a strip mall to roughly 8,000 employees and facilities from Texas to Florida to Washington state. Inside the nation\u2019s capital, it has garnered a reputation as one of the most combative and successful lobbying outfits.\nBy offering lower prices than traditional industry leaders, SpaceX became the country\u2019s top commercial and civilian launch provider. But that approach won\u2019t work with demanding military customers who give priority to reliability and strict oversight rather than cost, Mr. Volkert said.\nMr. Musk has lured private investors with plans to deploy thousands of small satellites as part of his Starlink venture, a commercial broadband project that industry and military officials say could eventually serve as a backbone for various global military applications including surveillance. Since getting humans to Mars requires developing and testing novel technology likely to cost at least $30 billion by Mr. Musk\u2019s public estimates, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was dismissed by Pentagon brass during its early years. But now, the billionaire entrepreneur and his company are enjoying more success than ever in snaring Pentagon business. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, Once a Washington Outsider, Courts Military Business (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "866",
        "date": "2020-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-once-a-washington-outsider-courts-military-business-11604517046?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=44",
        "text": "Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held company, also has worked with the Air Force and the Army to demonstrate communication links. And weeks ago, it signed a Pentagon agreement to study the feasibility of using SpaceX\u2019s proposed deep-space Starship transport, a giant capsule with built-in rocket engines, eventually to whisk cargo around the globe. Company engineers envision moving 80 tons between continents in minutes.\nFrom the beginning, Mr. Musk has said his ultimate goal was colonizing Mars to provide humans a safe escape from Earth if necessary. But in the process, SpaceX amassed an order book of civilian launch contracts estimated to total about $5 billion. It also has won contracts to supply the military with rocket launches and satellite prototypes eventually worth an estimated $6 billion and roughly $9 billion more in past and future National Aeronautics and Space Administration awards, primarily to ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. \n\nThose totals are still dwarfed by the leading military suppliers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n reported some $26 billion in revenue last year from its defense and space segments, while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , the country\u2019s largest defense contractor, reported about $21 billion from its space and missile operations. Both companies also serve as prime contractors for major NASA programs amounting to tens of billions of additional dollars over the years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk has said a goal of his was colonizing Mars to provide humans a safe escape from Earth if necessary.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMany of SpaceX\u2019s contracts rely on nascent technology, depend on future Pentagon decisions and offer limited initial revenue. But as Congress and the Pentagon increasingly pump money into an array of space programs\u2014with classified projects growing the fastest\u2014industry officials said in the next decade or so, SpaceX will be positioned for a multibillion-dollar boost. \nTotal defense appropriations could decline if Democrats take the White House and push new spending priorities. But the emphasis on enhanced space capabilities would likely remain in a new administration because it is part of long-term military funding plans and strategies already backed by Congress.\nSpace X\u2019s pivot toward national-security programs is intended to piggyback on rockets and satellites the company already is building for U.S. civilian and commercial customers. NASA remains its top customer. But the company\u2019s evolving strategy, according to analysts and industry officials, is to adapt some of its current systems to new missions such as tracking space debris, helping defend against superfast missiles and providing secure communication links for U.S. warfighters world-wide.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s leaders \u201cwere persistent, did their homework and did everything they needed to do\u201d to gain the military\u2019s trust, according to veteran industry consultant Roger Rusch. \u201cThat persistence has paid off.\u201d Mr. Rusch isn\u2019t working for SpaceX or its competitors.\nA SpaceX spokesman didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nMarketing to generals, though, is very different from negotiating commercial contracts, in which SpaceX often has significant leverage because it charges so much less than rivals. Consultant Keith Volkert, who represents major satellite operators contracting with SpaceX, said Mr. Musk\u2019s team relishes telling his corporate clients they are, quite literally, just along for the ride. \n\u201cWe\u2019re not actually selling you a rocket,\u201d he recalls company representatives often saying. \u201cWe\u2019re selling you a bus, and you don\u2019t get to kick the tires.\u201d \nIn less than two dozen years, SpaceX has expanded from a handful of employees working in a converted warehouse near a strip mall to roughly 8,000 employees and facilities from Texas to Florida to Washington state. Inside the nation\u2019s capital, it has garnered a reputation as one of the most combative and successful lobbying outfits.\nBy offering lower prices than traditional industry leaders, SpaceX became the country\u2019s top commercial and civilian launch provider. But that approach won\u2019t work with demanding military customers who give priority to reliability and strict oversight rather than cost, Mr. Volkert said.\nMr. Musk has lured private investors with plans to deploy thousands of small satellites as part of his Starlink venture, a commercial broadband project that industry and military officials say could eventually serve as a backbone for various global military applications including surveillance. Since getting humans to Mars requires developing and testing novel technology likely to cost at least $30 billion by Mr. Musk\u2019s public estimates, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was dismissed by Pentagon brass during its early years. But now, the billionaire entrepreneur and his company are enjoying more success than ever in snaring Pentagon business. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "867",
        "date": "2017-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-plans-for-mega-rocket-and-deep-space-capsule-face-concerns-delays-1494798080?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=95",
        "text": "Sending astronauts to the moon and beyond is projected to pose particularly significant safety risks during re-entry and landing.\nBudget and production woes have further delayed NASA\u2019s human exploration program for deep space, with federal watchdogs raising fresh concerns about safety.\nInitial blastoff of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Orion capsule and its biggest rocket, called the Space Launch System, has been pushed to 2019 from 2018, the agency said Friday.\nAnd despite several years of intense development and projections of roughly $15 billion invested in the overall project by then, the flight isn\u2019t slated to have any astronauts on board as some NASA and White House officials had hoped.\n\n\nOnce the first crewed version of Orion blasts off to circle the moon probably in 2022, industry experts and government documents suggest the mission will be more hazardous\u2014particularly during re-entry\u2014than early designers and proponents of the system originally envisioned.\nAstronauts inside Orion, for example, are expected to confront significantly greater risks during their return to earth than they are anticipated to face while riding commercially-developed capsules back from the international space station, according to agency officials and documents.\nBased on numbers provided by NASA program managers and the agency\u2019s inspector general, the chance of a fatal accident during re-entry and landing of an Orion capsule\u2014being built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n \u2014statistically is nearly twice what it is projected to be for astronauts traveling in a Dragon capsule slated to be flown back from the space station by entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nSpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is commonly called, plans to begin routinely ferrying crews to and from the station within two years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n is separately developing its own commercial space taxi for the same purpose.\nFor all those impending crew flights, a NASA spokeswoman said the mandatory safety benchmark for re-entry and landing is no more than one catastrophic accident per 1,000 returns to Earth. A report released in April by the inspector general, which highlighted schedule and safety issues facing NASA\u2019s deep-space initiative, said the agency had established a statistical limit of 1 fatal accident for every 650 Orion descents and landings.\nThe 1-in-1,000 safety statistic for human space flights was first proposed by NASA\u2019s astronaut office in 2004 in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.\nSuch statistical measures, officially called \u201closs of crew\u201d numbers, aren\u2019t precise because they are based on various engineering assumptions and can shift markedly depending on design changes and revised mission profiles. NASA said it hasn\u2019t yet developed a specific number, or even range of risk calculations, covering Orion\u2019s entire initial crewed flight.\nFor commercial crew trips, NASA has established the overall safety bar encompassing all phases of flight at no greater than one fatal accident per 270 missions, according to the spokeswoman.\nLate Sunday, Lockheed Martin said, \u201cThe overall mission risk will be inherently different for deep space missions.\u201d The written response also said, \u201cWe have designed Orion to be as safe as possible knowing it will see a wide variety of environments and destinations. Orion exceeds all of NASA\u2019s safety requirements.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for Boeing, which leads the team developing SLS, declined to discuss specific risk numbers, saying \u201cour analyses show we currently exceed NASA\u2019s requirements.\u201d\nNonetheless, the variation in safety benchmarks underscores the challenges facing NASA as it seeks to use Orion and SLS to help establish what it describes as a \u201cdeep space gateway\u201d to promote commercial and foreign government partnerships. The goal is to explore the solar system and eventually send astronauts to Mars after 2030.\nThe agency spokeswoman said \u201cour safety requirements remain consistent\u201d across commercial and traditional space systems intended to transport astronauts. But she said Orion\u2019s loss of crew limits will vary depending on mission requirements and factors such as flight duration, trajectory and passing through higher radiation environments.\nFaster return speeds from deep space, compared with less-demanding re-entry trajectories from the international space station in low-earth orbit, also raise the inherent risks for Orion missions.\nFriday\u2019s announcement follows separate reports by NASA\u2019s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office highlighting schedule delays and safety issues affecting Orion and the mega-rocket designed to carry it.\nBoth of those reports stressed that program managers have eaten through recommended budget reserves and are taking some testing shortcuts to try to make up time. NASA\u2019s response to the inspector general\u2019s recommendations included a pledge to complete a more Sending astronauts to the moon and beyond is projected to pose particularly significant safety risks during re-entry and landing. Budget and production woes have further delayed NASA\u2019s human exploration program for deep space, with federal watchdogs raising fresh concerns about safety. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "868",
        "date": "2017-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-plans-for-mega-rocket-and-deep-space-capsule-face-concerns-delays-1494798080?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=83",
        "text": "Sending astronauts to the moon and beyond is projected to pose particularly significant safety risks during re-entry and landing.\nBudget and production woes have further delayed NASA\u2019s human exploration program for deep space, with federal watchdogs raising fresh concerns about safety.\nInitial blastoff of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Orion capsule and its biggest rocket, called the Space Launch System, has been pushed to 2019 from 2018, the agency said Friday.\nAnd despite several years of intense development and projections of roughly $15 billion invested in the overall project by then, the flight isn\u2019t slated to have any astronauts on board as some NASA and White House officials had hoped.\n\n\nOnce the first crewed version of Orion blasts off to circle the moon probably in 2022, industry experts and government documents suggest the mission will be more hazardous\u2014particularly during re-entry\u2014than early designers and proponents of the system originally envisioned.\nAstronauts inside Orion, for example, are expected to confront significantly greater risks during their return to earth than they are anticipated to face while riding commercially-developed capsules back from the international space station, according to agency officials and documents.\nBased on numbers provided by NASA program managers and the agency\u2019s inspector general, the chance of a fatal accident during re-entry and landing of an Orion capsule\u2014being built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n \u2014statistically is nearly twice what it is projected to be for astronauts traveling in a Dragon capsule slated to be flown back from the space station by entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nSpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is commonly called, plans to begin routinely ferrying crews to and from the station within two years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n is separately developing its own commercial space taxi for the same purpose.\nFor all those impending crew flights, a NASA spokeswoman said the mandatory safety benchmark for re-entry and landing is no more than one catastrophic accident per 1,000 returns to Earth. A report released in April by the inspector general, which highlighted schedule and safety issues facing NASA\u2019s deep-space initiative, said the agency had established a statistical limit of 1 fatal accident for every 650 Orion descents and landings.\nThe 1-in-1,000 safety statistic for human space flights was first proposed by NASA\u2019s astronaut office in 2004 in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.\nSuch statistical measures, officially called \u201closs of crew\u201d numbers, aren\u2019t precise because they are based on various engineering assumptions and can shift markedly depending on design changes and revised mission profiles. NASA said it hasn\u2019t yet developed a specific number, or even range of risk calculations, covering Orion\u2019s entire initial crewed flight.\nFor commercial crew trips, NASA has established the overall safety bar encompassing all phases of flight at no greater than one fatal accident per 270 missions, according to the spokeswoman.\nLate Sunday, Lockheed Martin said, \u201cThe overall mission risk will be inherently different for deep space missions.\u201d The written response also said, \u201cWe have designed Orion to be as safe as possible knowing it will see a wide variety of environments and destinations. Orion exceeds all of NASA\u2019s safety requirements.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for Boeing, which leads the team developing SLS, declined to discuss specific risk numbers, saying \u201cour analyses show we currently exceed NASA\u2019s requirements.\u201d\nNonetheless, the variation in safety benchmarks underscores the challenges facing NASA as it seeks to use Orion and SLS to help establish what it describes as a \u201cdeep space gateway\u201d to promote commercial and foreign government partnerships. The goal is to explore the solar system and eventually send astronauts to Mars after 2030.\nThe agency spokeswoman said \u201cour safety requirements remain consistent\u201d across commercial and traditional space systems intended to transport astronauts. But she said Orion\u2019s loss of crew limits will vary depending on mission requirements and factors such as flight duration, trajectory and passing through higher radiation environments.\nFaster return speeds from deep space, compared with less-demanding re-entry trajectories from the international space station in low-earth orbit, also raise the inherent risks for Orion missions.\nFriday\u2019s announcement follows separate reports by NASA\u2019s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office highlighting schedule delays and safety issues affecting Orion and the mega-rocket designed to carry it.\nBoth of those reports stressed that program managers have eaten through recommended budget reserves and are taking some testing shortcuts to try to make up time. NASA\u2019s response to the inspector general\u2019s recommendations included a pledge to complete a more Sending astronauts to the moon and beyond is projected to pose particularly significant safety risks during re-entry and landing. Budget and production woes have further delayed NASA\u2019s human exploration program for deep space, with federal watchdogs raising fresh concerns about safety. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "869",
        "date": "2017-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-expected-to-unveil-further-plans-for-private-space-exploration-1488743790?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=100",
        "text": "Plans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one version roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals with powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos, left, founder of Blue Origin, speaks during a space symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., in April 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.\n\n\nThe initial test flight of SpaceX\u2019s long-delayed Falcon Heavy, which would become the world\u2019s most potent operational rocket, is scheduled for later this year. NASA\u2019s much larger booster, called SLS, is slated for its maiden flight in 2018.\nSo far, Mr. Bezos has been less specific about timetables to demonstrate the reliability of his emerging heavy-lift rocket variant, called New Glenn, after the late astronaut and U.S. senator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn.\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s founder has been even less specific about a next-generation rocket on the drawing board, dubbed New Armstrong, in memory of the late astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n who was the first man to set foot on the Moon. That booster is intended for travel deep into the solar system.\n\n\nRead more Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) \n\n\nBoth self-described \u201cspace geeks\u201d with ambitious visions of helping humans establish large-scale settlements beyond Earth in their lifetimes, Messrs. Bezos and Musk have jousted good-naturedly on social media in the past about competing to land the first spent booster vertically back on Earth. Mr. Bezos did it first after a suborbital mission, but Mr. Musk accomplished the feat by landing the main portion of a Falcon 9 rocket that delivered a payload into orbit.\nFor the first time, Blue Origin in the next few days is expected to make public specific customers, according to industry officials. A series of announcements and postings on Twitter is slated to follow a separate flurry of news reports last week about Blue Origin\u2019s bid for NASA\u2019s support to ship experiments, cargo and other hardware to the moon with the aim of setting up a permanent settlement there.\nThe proposal, which hasn\u2019t been acted on by the agency, was first reported by the Washington Post, which is controlled by Mr. Bezos.\nLast-minute shifts could change Blue Origin\u2019s plans for the coming days, and Mr. Bezos is renowned for teasing the media with broad concepts, often without providing subsequent details. He is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning in the prominent leadoff slot at an international satellite conference in Washington.\nThe appearance also comes in the wake of Mr. Musk prompting headlines last week with a proposal to fly two fare-paying passengers on an automated trip around the moon by 2018.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships to accelerate manned exploration favored by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding.\nLast September, Mr. Bezos rocked the international aerospace community by disclosing that his New Glenn rocket would feature a cluster of seven main engines and stand more than 310 feet tall. If it flies by the end of the decade as intended, the largest version of the proposed booster could vie for commercial and military satellite launches with SpaceX, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOver the years, Mr. Bezos has stressed the importance of creating reusable technology able to slash transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today\u2019s rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d\nUnlike Mr. Musk, who relishes making a steady stream of splashy announcements setting increasingly aggressive goals, Mr. Bezos remained virtually silent to outsiders until after Blue Origin pulled off its coup of successfully landing a New Shepard booster back at its West Texas launchpad in late 2015.\nThe unmanned vehicle flew a suborbital test to 333,000 feet, reached nearly four times the speed of sound, and then both the capsule and its liquid-fueled rocket separately landed sa Blue Origin, the burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com chairman Jeff Bezos, this week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "870",
        "date": "2017-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-expected-to-unveil-further-plans-for-private-space-exploration-1488743790?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=28",
        "text": "Plans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one version roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals with powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos, left, founder of Blue Origin, speaks during a space symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., in April 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.\n\n\nThe initial test flight of SpaceX\u2019s long-delayed Falcon Heavy, which would become the world\u2019s most potent operational rocket, is scheduled for later this year. NASA\u2019s much larger booster, called SLS, is slated for its maiden flight in 2018.\nSo far, Mr. Bezos has been less specific about timetables to demonstrate the reliability of his emerging heavy-lift rocket variant, called New Glenn, after the late astronaut and U.S. senator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn.\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s founder has been even less specific about a next-generation rocket on the drawing board, dubbed New Armstrong, in memory of the late astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n who was the first man to set foot on the Moon. That booster is intended for travel deep into the solar system.\n\n\nRead more Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) \n\n\nBoth self-described \u201cspace geeks\u201d with ambitious visions of helping humans establish large-scale settlements beyond Earth in their lifetimes, Messrs. Bezos and Musk have jousted good-naturedly on social media in the past about competing to land the first spent booster vertically back on Earth. Mr. Bezos did it first after a suborbital mission, but Mr. Musk accomplished the feat by landing the main portion of a Falcon 9 rocket that delivered a payload into orbit.\nFor the first time, Blue Origin in the next few days is expected to make public specific customers, according to industry officials. A series of announcements and postings on Twitter is slated to follow a separate flurry of news reports last week about Blue Origin\u2019s bid for NASA\u2019s support to ship experiments, cargo and other hardware to the moon with the aim of setting up a permanent settlement there.\nThe proposal, which hasn\u2019t been acted on by the agency, was first reported by the Washington Post, which is controlled by Mr. Bezos.\nLast-minute shifts could change Blue Origin\u2019s plans for the coming days, and Mr. Bezos is renowned for teasing the media with broad concepts, often without providing subsequent details. He is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning in the prominent leadoff slot at an international satellite conference in Washington.\nThe appearance also comes in the wake of Mr. Musk prompting headlines last week with a proposal to fly two fare-paying passengers on an automated trip around the moon by 2018.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships to accelerate manned exploration favored by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding.\nLast September, Mr. Bezos rocked the international aerospace community by disclosing that his New Glenn rocket would feature a cluster of seven main engines and stand more than 310 feet tall. If it flies by the end of the decade as intended, the largest version of the proposed booster could vie for commercial and military satellite launches with SpaceX, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOver the years, Mr. Bezos has stressed the importance of creating reusable technology able to slash transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today\u2019s rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d\nUnlike Mr. Musk, who relishes making a steady stream of splashy announcements setting increasingly aggressive goals, Mr. Bezos remained virtually silent to outsiders until after Blue Origin pulled off its coup of successfully landing a New Shepard booster back at its West Texas launchpad in late 2015.\nThe unmanned vehicle flew a suborbital test to 333,000 feet, reached nearly four times the speed of sound, and then both the capsule and its liquid-fueled rocket separately lande Blue Origin, the burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com chairman Jeff Bezos, this week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "871",
        "date": "2017-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-expected-to-unveil-further-plans-for-private-space-exploration-1488743790?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=91",
        "text": "Plans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one version roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals with powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos, left, founder of Blue Origin, speaks during a space symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., in April 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.\n\n\nThe initial test flight of SpaceX\u2019s long-delayed Falcon Heavy, which would become the world\u2019s most potent operational rocket, is scheduled for later this year. NASA\u2019s much larger booster, called SLS, is slated for its maiden flight in 2018.\nSo far, Mr. Bezos has been less specific about timetables to demonstrate the reliability of his emerging heavy-lift rocket variant, called New Glenn, after the late astronaut and U.S. senator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn.\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s founder has been even less specific about a next-generation rocket on the drawing board, dubbed New Armstrong, in memory of the late astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n who was the first man to set foot on the Moon. That booster is intended for travel deep into the solar system.\n\n\nRead more Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) \n\n\nBoth self-described \u201cspace geeks\u201d with ambitious visions of helping humans establish large-scale settlements beyond Earth in their lifetimes, Messrs. Bezos and Musk have jousted good-naturedly on social media in the past about competing to land the first spent booster vertically back on Earth. Mr. Bezos did it first after a suborbital mission, but Mr. Musk accomplished the feat by landing the main portion of a Falcon 9 rocket that delivered a payload into orbit.\nFor the first time, Blue Origin in the next few days is expected to make public specific customers, according to industry officials. A series of announcements and postings on Twitter is slated to follow a separate flurry of news reports last week about Blue Origin\u2019s bid for NASA\u2019s support to ship experiments, cargo and other hardware to the moon with the aim of setting up a permanent settlement there.\nThe proposal, which hasn\u2019t been acted on by the agency, was first reported by the Washington Post, which is controlled by Mr. Bezos.\nLast-minute shifts could change Blue Origin\u2019s plans for the coming days, and Mr. Bezos is renowned for teasing the media with broad concepts, often without providing subsequent details. He is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning in the prominent leadoff slot at an international satellite conference in Washington.\nThe appearance also comes in the wake of Mr. Musk prompting headlines last week with a proposal to fly two fare-paying passengers on an automated trip around the moon by 2018.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships to accelerate manned exploration favored by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding.\nLast September, Mr. Bezos rocked the international aerospace community by disclosing that his New Glenn rocket would feature a cluster of seven main engines and stand more than 310 feet tall. If it flies by the end of the decade as intended, the largest version of the proposed booster could vie for commercial and military satellite launches with SpaceX, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOver the years, Mr. Bezos has stressed the importance of creating reusable technology able to slash transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today\u2019s rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d\nUnlike Mr. Musk, who relishes making a steady stream of splashy announcements setting increasingly aggressive goals, Mr. Bezos remained virtually silent to outsiders until after Blue Origin pulled off its coup of successfully landing a New Shepard booster back at its West Texas launchpad in late 2015.\nThe unmanned vehicle flew a suborbital test to 333,000 feet, reached nearly four times the speed of sound, and then both the capsule and its liquid-fueled rocket separately landed sa Blue Origin, the burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com chairman Jeff Bezos, this week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "872",
        "date": "2017-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-expected-to-unveil-further-plans-for-private-space-exploration-1488743790?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=87",
        "text": "Plans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one version roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals with powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos, left, founder of Blue Origin, speaks during a space symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., in April 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.\n\n\nThe initial test flight of SpaceX\u2019s long-delayed Falcon Heavy, which would become the world\u2019s most potent operational rocket, is scheduled for later this year. NASA\u2019s much larger booster, called SLS, is slated for its maiden flight in 2018.\nSo far, Mr. Bezos has been less specific about timetables to demonstrate the reliability of his emerging heavy-lift rocket variant, called New Glenn, after the late astronaut and U.S. senator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn.\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s founder has been even less specific about a next-generation rocket on the drawing board, dubbed New Armstrong, in memory of the late astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n who was the first man to set foot on the Moon. That booster is intended for travel deep into the solar system.\n\n\nRead more Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) \n\n\nBoth self-described \u201cspace geeks\u201d with ambitious visions of helping humans establish large-scale settlements beyond Earth in their lifetimes, Messrs. Bezos and Musk have jousted good-naturedly on social media in the past about competing to land the first spent booster vertically back on Earth. Mr. Bezos did it first after a suborbital mission, but Mr. Musk accomplished the feat by landing the main portion of a Falcon 9 rocket that delivered a payload into orbit.\nFor the first time, Blue Origin in the next few days is expected to make public specific customers, according to industry officials. A series of announcements and postings on Twitter is slated to follow a separate flurry of news reports last week about Blue Origin\u2019s bid for NASA\u2019s support to ship experiments, cargo and other hardware to the moon with the aim of setting up a permanent settlement there.\nThe proposal, which hasn\u2019t been acted on by the agency, was first reported by the Washington Post, which is controlled by Mr. Bezos.\nLast-minute shifts could change Blue Origin\u2019s plans for the coming days, and Mr. Bezos is renowned for teasing the media with broad concepts, often without providing subsequent details. He is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning in the prominent leadoff slot at an international satellite conference in Washington.\nThe appearance also comes in the wake of Mr. Musk prompting headlines last week with a proposal to fly two fare-paying passengers on an automated trip around the moon by 2018.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships to accelerate manned exploration favored by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding.\nLast September, Mr. Bezos rocked the international aerospace community by disclosing that his New Glenn rocket would feature a cluster of seven main engines and stand more than 310 feet tall. If it flies by the end of the decade as intended, the largest version of the proposed booster could vie for commercial and military satellite launches with SpaceX, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOver the years, Mr. Bezos has stressed the importance of creating reusable technology able to slash transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today\u2019s rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d\nUnlike Mr. Musk, who relishes making a steady stream of splashy announcements setting increasingly aggressive goals, Mr. Bezos remained virtually silent to outsiders until after Blue Origin pulled off its coup of successfully landing a New Shepard booster back at its West Texas launchpad in late 2015.\nThe unmanned vehicle flew a suborbital test to 333,000 feet, reached nearly four times the speed of sound, and then both the capsule and its liquid-fueled rocket separately landed sa Blue Origin, the burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com chairman Jeff Bezos, this week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "873",
        "date": "2017-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-expected-to-unveil-further-plans-for-private-space-exploration-1488743790?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=128",
        "text": "Plans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one version roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals with powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos, left, founder of Blue Origin, speaks during a space symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., in April 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.\n\n\nThe initial test flight of SpaceX\u2019s long-delayed Falcon Heavy, which would become the world\u2019s most potent operational rocket, is scheduled for later this year. NASA\u2019s much larger booster, called SLS, is slated for its maiden flight in 2018.\nSo far, Mr. Bezos has been less specific about timetables to demonstrate the reliability of his emerging heavy-lift rocket variant, called New Glenn, after the late astronaut and U.S. senator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn.\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s founder has been even less specific about a next-generation rocket on the drawing board, dubbed New Armstrong, in memory of the late astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n who was the first man to set foot on the Moon. That booster is intended for travel deep into the solar system.\n\n\nRead more Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) \n\n\nBoth self-described \u201cspace geeks\u201d with ambitious visions of helping humans establish large-scale settlements beyond Earth in their lifetimes, Messrs. Bezos and Musk have jousted good-naturedly on social media in the past about competing to land the first spent booster vertically back on Earth. Mr. Bezos did it first after a suborbital mission, but Mr. Musk accomplished the feat by landing the main portion of a Falcon 9 rocket that delivered a payload into orbit.\nFor the first time, Blue Origin in the next few days is expected to make public specific customers, according to industry officials. A series of announcements and postings on Twitter is slated to follow a separate flurry of news reports last week about Blue Origin\u2019s bid for NASA\u2019s support to ship experiments, cargo and other hardware to the moon with the aim of setting up a permanent settlement there.\nThe proposal, which hasn\u2019t been acted on by the agency, was first reported by the Washington Post, which is controlled by Mr. Bezos.\nLast-minute shifts could change Blue Origin\u2019s plans for the coming days, and Mr. Bezos is renowned for teasing the media with broad concepts, often without providing subsequent details. He is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning in the prominent leadoff slot at an international satellite conference in Washington.\nThe appearance also comes in the wake of Mr. Musk prompting headlines last week with a proposal to fly two fare-paying passengers on an automated trip around the moon by 2018.\nTraditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships to accelerate manned exploration favored by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding.\nLast September, Mr. Bezos rocked the international aerospace community by disclosing that his New Glenn rocket would feature a cluster of seven main engines and stand more than 310 feet tall. If it flies by the end of the decade as intended, the largest version of the proposed booster could vie for commercial and military satellite launches with SpaceX, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOver the years, Mr. Bezos has stressed the importance of creating reusable technology able to slash transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today\u2019s rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d\nUnlike Mr. Musk, who relishes making a steady stream of splashy announcements setting increasingly aggressive goals, Mr. Bezos remained virtually silent to outsiders until after Blue Origin pulled off its coup of successfully landing a New Shepard booster back at its West Texas launchpad in late 2015.\nThe unmanned vehicle flew a suborbital test to 333,000 feet, reached nearly four times the speed of sound, and then both the capsule and its liquid-fueled rocket separately lande Blue Origin, the burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com chairman Jeff Bezos, this week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule and NASA Crew Make Historic Splashdown (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "874",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-and-nasa-crew-make-historic-splashdown-11596397269?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=11",
        "text": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make SplashdownAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken return to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station\u00a0\u00a0NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images1 of 6\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 6Hide CaptionNASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, overcame years of technical problems, nagging delays, a launchpad explosion during a test and hordes of skeptics inside and outside government to reach the historic goal. SpaceX previously pioneered reusable boosters, which increasingly have been accepted by commercial and U.S. government customers, including the Pentagon.\nWith plans to start regular crewed trips to the orbiting international laboratory within months, SpaceX has vaulted ahead of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s most prominent example of joint government-industry endeavors beyond the atmosphere. NASA plans to use the same principles to send astronauts to the surface of the moon later in the decade, and ultimately to Mars.\n\n\nBoeing, which also has an agency contract to transport astronauts into orbit, seeks to conduct a test flight of its capsule without crew later this year, following a botched attempt in December.\n\u201cWelcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control radioed the crew as the capsule bobbed in calm seas. \n\n\nMore on the Mission Capsule Links Up With Space Station (May 31) SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Launch from Florida Canceled Over Bad Weather (May 27) SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (May 23) \n\n\nWhen the smiling astronauts exited some two hours later in front of video cameras, with the assistance of ground staff, Mr. Hurley had a pithy comment for average citizens: \u201cYou should take a moment to just cherish this day, especially given all the things that have happened this year.\u201d \nWaiting to be picked up by the company\u2019s recovery vessel, the crew radioed they were in good condition.\nSince the retirement of NASA\u2019s winged Space Shuttle fleet in 2011\u2014which landed on runways after space missions\u2014the U.S. has relied on Russian rockets and capsules to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit. NASA moved away from water landings in the mid-1970s, following a series of Apollo missions to the lunar surface.\nIn a message posted on Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence said, \u201dOn behalf of a grateful Nation, thank you!\u201d\nIn the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, NASA and White House officials have sought to use the mission to highlight U.S. persistence and scientific know-how. It also is the first step in what space experts see as a longer-term foundation for space tourism and a way to build momentum for proposed public-private partnerships to explore deeper into the solar system.\nBut President Trump\u2019s administration faces stiff budget problems and major opposition on Capitol Hill regarding its plans for space travel.\nRegardless of how political winds and legislative squabbles affect NASA\u2019s existing plans, Mr. Musk and his management team earlier racked up a series of other technical coups, ranging from being the first to fuel rockets with astronauts on board to vertically landing parts of used boosters on floating platforms and reusing those sections multiple times. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule and NASA Crew Make Historic Splashdown (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "875",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-and-nasa-crew-make-historic-splashdown-11596397269?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=37",
        "text": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make SplashdownAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken return to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station\u00a0\u00a0NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images1 of 6\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 6Hide CaptionNASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, overcame years of technical problems, nagging delays, a launchpad explosion during a test and hordes of skeptics inside and outside government to reach the historic goal. SpaceX previously pioneered reusable boosters, which increasingly have been accepted by commercial and U.S. government customers, including the Pentagon.\nWith plans to start regular crewed trips to the orbiting international laboratory within months, SpaceX has vaulted ahead of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s most prominent example of joint government-industry endeavors beyond the atmosphere. NASA plans to use the same principles to send astronauts to the surface of the moon later in the decade, and ultimately to Mars.\n\n\nBoeing, which also has an agency contract to transport astronauts into orbit, seeks to conduct a test flight of its capsule without crew later this year, following a botched attempt in December.\n\u201cWelcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control radioed the crew as the capsule bobbed in calm seas. \n\n\nMore on the Mission Capsule Links Up With Space Station (May 31) SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Launch from Florida Canceled Over Bad Weather (May 27) SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (May 23) \n\n\nWhen the smiling astronauts exited some two hours later in front of video cameras, with the assistance of ground staff, Mr. Hurley had a pithy comment for average citizens: \u201cYou should take a moment to just cherish this day, especially given all the things that have happened this year.\u201d \nWaiting to be picked up by the company\u2019s recovery vessel, the crew radioed they were in good condition.\nSince the retirement of NASA\u2019s winged Space Shuttle fleet in 2011\u2014which landed on runways after space missions\u2014the U.S. has relied on Russian rockets and capsules to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit. NASA moved away from water landings in the mid-1970s, following a series of Apollo missions to the lunar surface.\nIn a message posted on Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence said, \u201dOn behalf of a grateful Nation, thank you!\u201d\nIn the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, NASA and White House officials have sought to use the mission to highlight U.S. persistence and scientific know-how. It also is the first step in what space experts see as a longer-term foundation for space tourism and a way to build momentum for proposed public-private partnerships to explore deeper into the solar system.\nBut President Trump\u2019s administration faces stiff budget problems and major opposition on Capitol Hill regarding its plans for space travel.\nRegardless of how political winds and legislative squabbles affect NASA\u2019s existing plans, Mr. Musk and his management team earlier racked up a series of other technical coups, ranging from being the first to fuel rockets with astronauts on board to vertically landing parts of used boosters on floating platforms and reusing those sections multiple times. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule and NASA Crew Make Historic Splashdown (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "876",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-and-nasa-crew-make-historic-splashdown-11596397269?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=14",
        "text": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make SplashdownAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken return to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station\u00a0\u00a0NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images1 of 6\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 6Hide CaptionNASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, overcame years of technical problems, nagging delays, a launchpad explosion during a test and hordes of skeptics inside and outside government to reach the historic goal. SpaceX previously pioneered reusable boosters, which increasingly have been accepted by commercial and U.S. government customers, including the Pentagon.\n\n\n\n\nWith plans to start regular crewed trips to the orbiting international laboratory within months, SpaceX has vaulted ahead of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s most prominent example of joint government-industry endeavors beyond the atmosphere. NASA plans to use the same principles to send astronauts to the surface of the moon later in the decade, and ultimately to Mars.\n\n\nBoeing, which also has an agency contract to transport astronauts into orbit, seeks to conduct a test flight of its capsule without crew later this year, following a botched attempt in December.\n\u201cWelcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control radioed the crew as the capsule bobbed in calm seas. \n\n\nMore on the Mission Capsule Links Up With Space Station (May 31) SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Launch from Florida Canceled Over Bad Weather (May 27) SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (May 23) \n\n\nWhen the smiling astronauts exited some two hours later in front of video cameras, with the assistance of ground staff, Mr. Hurley had a pithy comment for average citizens: \u201cYou should take a moment to just cherish this day, especially given all the things that have happened this year.\u201d \nWaiting to be picked up by the company\u2019s recovery vessel, the crew radioed they were in good condition.\nSince the retirement of NASA\u2019s winged Space Shuttle fleet in 2011\u2014which landed on runways after space missions\u2014the U.S. has relied on Russian rockets and capsules to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit. NASA moved away from water landings in the mid-1970s, following a series of Apollo missions to the lunar surface.\nIn a message posted on Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence said, \u201dOn behalf of a grateful Nation, thank you!\u201d\nIn the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, NASA and White House officials have sought to use the mission to highlight U.S. persistence and scientific know-how. It also is the first step in what space experts see as a longer-term foundation for space tourism and a way to build momentum for proposed public-private partnerships to explore deeper into the solar system.\nBut President Trump\u2019s administration faces stiff budget problems and major opposition on Capitol Hill regarding its plans for space travel.\nRegardless of how political winds and legislative squabbles affect NASA\u2019s existing plans, Mr. Musk and his management team earlier racked up a series of other technical coups, ranging from being the first to fuel rockets with astronauts on board to vertically landing parts of used boosters on floating platforms and reusing those sections multiple times. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule and NASA Crew Make Historic Splashdown (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "877",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-and-nasa-crew-make-historic-splashdown-11596397269?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=42",
        "text": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make SplashdownAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken return to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station\u00a0\u00a0NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images1 of 6\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 6Hide CaptionNASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, overcame years of technical problems, nagging delays, a launchpad explosion during a test and hordes of skeptics inside and outside government to reach the historic goal. SpaceX previously pioneered reusable boosters, which increasingly have been accepted by commercial and U.S. government customers, including the Pentagon.\nWith plans to start regular crewed trips to the orbiting international laboratory within months, SpaceX has vaulted ahead of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s most prominent example of joint government-industry endeavors beyond the atmosphere. NASA plans to use the same principles to send astronauts to the surface of the moon later in the decade, and ultimately to Mars.\n\n\nBoeing, which also has an agency contract to transport astronauts into orbit, seeks to conduct a test flight of its capsule without crew later this year, following a botched attempt in December.\n\u201cWelcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control radioed the crew as the capsule bobbed in calm seas. \n\n\nMore on the Mission Capsule Links Up With Space Station (May 31) SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Launch from Florida Canceled Over Bad Weather (May 27) SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (May 23) \n\n\nWhen the smiling astronauts exited some two hours later in front of video cameras, with the assistance of ground staff, Mr. Hurley had a pithy comment for average citizens: \u201cYou should take a moment to just cherish this day, especially given all the things that have happened this year.\u201d \nWaiting to be picked up by the company\u2019s recovery vessel, the crew radioed they were in good condition.\nSince the retirement of NASA\u2019s winged Space Shuttle fleet in 2011\u2014which landed on runways after space missions\u2014the U.S. has relied on Russian rockets and capsules to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit. NASA moved away from water landings in the mid-1970s, following a series of Apollo missions to the lunar surface.\nIn a message posted on Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence said, \u201dOn behalf of a grateful Nation, thank you!\u201d\nIn the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, NASA and White House officials have sought to use the mission to highlight U.S. persistence and scientific know-how. It also is the first step in what space experts see as a longer-term foundation for space tourism and a way to build momentum for proposed public-private partnerships to explore deeper into the solar system.\nBut President Trump\u2019s administration faces stiff budget problems and major opposition on Capitol Hill regarding its plans for space travel.\nRegardless of how political winds and legislative squabbles affect NASA\u2019s existing plans, Mr. Musk and his management team earlier racked up a series of other technical coups, ranging from being the first to fuel rockets with astronauts on board to vertically landing parts of used boosters on floating platforms and reusing those sections multiple times. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule and NASA Crew Make Historic Splashdown (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "878",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-and-nasa-crew-make-historic-splashdown-11596397269?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=49",
        "text": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make SplashdownAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken return to Earth less than a day after departing the International Space Station\u00a0\u00a0NASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images1 of 6\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 6Hide CaptionNASA astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule onboard a recovery ship shortly after having splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.Bill Ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, overcame years of technical problems, nagging delays, a launchpad explosion during a test and hordes of skeptics inside and outside government to reach the historic goal. SpaceX previously pioneered reusable boosters, which increasingly have been accepted by commercial and U.S. government customers, including the Pentagon.\n\n\n\n\nWith plans to start regular crewed trips to the orbiting international laboratory within months, SpaceX has vaulted ahead of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s most prominent example of joint government-industry endeavors beyond the atmosphere. NASA plans to use the same principles to send astronauts to the surface of the moon later in the decade, and ultimately to Mars.\n\n\nBoeing, which also has an agency contract to transport astronauts into orbit, seeks to conduct a test flight of its capsule without crew later this year, following a botched attempt in December.\n\u201cWelcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control radioed the crew as the capsule bobbed in calm seas. \n\n\nMore on the Mission Capsule Links Up With Space Station (May 31) SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts Into Orbit (May 30) Launch from Florida Canceled Over Bad Weather (May 27) SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (May 23) \n\n\nWhen the smiling astronauts exited some two hours later in front of video cameras, with the assistance of ground staff, Mr. Hurley had a pithy comment for average citizens: \u201cYou should take a moment to just cherish this day, especially given all the things that have happened this year.\u201d \nWaiting to be picked up by the company\u2019s recovery vessel, the crew radioed they were in good condition.\nSince the retirement of NASA\u2019s winged Space Shuttle fleet in 2011\u2014which landed on runways after space missions\u2014the U.S. has relied on Russian rockets and capsules to ferry U.S. astronauts into orbit. NASA moved away from water landings in the mid-1970s, following a series of Apollo missions to the lunar surface.\nIn a message posted on Twitter, Vice President Mike Pence said, \u201dOn behalf of a grateful Nation, thank you!\u201d\nIn the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, NASA and White House officials have sought to use the mission to highlight U.S. persistence and scientific know-how. It also is the first step in what space experts see as a longer-term foundation for space tourism and a way to build momentum for proposed public-private partnerships to explore deeper into the solar system.\nBut President Trump\u2019s administration faces stiff budget problems and major opposition on Capitol Hill regarding its plans for space travel.\nRegardless of how political winds and legislative squabbles affect NASA\u2019s existing plans, Mr. Musk and his management team earlier racked up a series of other technical coups, ranging from being the first to fuel rockets with astronauts on board to vertically landing parts of used boosters on floating platforms and reusing those sections multiple times. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a retro-style splashdown, their capsule parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico to close out an unprecedented test flight by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Startup\u2019s Rocket Reaches Space, but Falls Short of Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "879",
        "date": "2017-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/startups-rocket-reaches-space-but-falls-short-of-orbit-1495750466?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=82",
        "text": "Peter Beck,\n\n\n\n the founder and chief executive of the closely held U.S.-New Zealand company, said in an interview that the rocket performed \u201cextremely well\u201d until the upper-stage engine shut off prematurely after attaining an altitude of at least 120 miles. Anything above 62 miles is generally considered outside the atmosphere.\nThe company aims to carry what are anticipated to be swarms of small commercial and scientific satellites in the next few years.\n\n\n\u201cWe went through all the critical events and gathered all the data we needed to gather,\u201d Mr. Beck said, adding that the company will analyze the data to determine what went wrong in the last portion of the flight.\nHistorically, newly designed rockets on average experience one failure during the first three flights. Other statistics indicate that from 1990 to 2010, roughly two-thirds of maiden rocket launches were unsuccessful. Entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, suffered three consecutive launch failures nearly a decade ago that almost sank the company shortly after its inception.\nWith many space entrepreneurs and investors closely watching Rocket Lab\u2019s initial performance, Mr. Beck said he was pleased with the result and added that it left the company \u201cin an extremely strong position to pursue\u201d commercial operations after a pair of additional test flights.\nRocket Lab, based in Huntington Beach, Calif., exemplifies the fledgling industry known as \u201cNew Space\u201d: a more nimble, Silicon Valley-like approach to designing, producing and testing rockets and small satellites that relies heavily on automated manufacturing and frequent modifications to hardware.\nThe company has built a rocket largely from carbon-composite materials and featuring engine parts produced by 3-D printing in the U.S. Fuel tanks and other structures are manufactured in New Zealand. With this novel approach, the company pulled off the first flight of an orbital-class rocket from a privately run launch complex.\nBlue Origin LLC, the space startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n and Virgin Galactic LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n also have conducted test flights from private ranges but those vehicles are designed for suborbital missions. Virgin Galactic, however, is a rival for launching small satellites.\nMr. Beck\u2019s company was able to design, build and launch its rocket in roughly four years and with a relatively small staff that now numbers about 160 employees. It aims to launch satellites weighing hundreds of pounds for several million dollars, versus existing larger rockets that charge 10 or 20 times more and are designed to carry satellites weighing thousands of pounds apiece.\nThe flight comes amid escalating interest from venture capitalists, legacy aerospace companies and even the Pentagon in finding new ways to launch smaller satellites. By 2019, Mr. Beck said he hopes Electron rockets will be blasting off once a week from the remote New Zealand launch facility\nOn Wednesday, the U.S. military took a step closer to charting its own path to faster, inexpensive vehicles to reach orbit. The Pentagon\u2019s premier research agency picked\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to develop an experimental spaceplane, designated XS-1, intended to quickly launch small or large satellites at a cost of $5 million per mission. The unmanned vehicle would take off vertically, release a mini-rocket powerful enough to boost a satellite into orbit and then land as a conventional airplane\u2014ready to be refueled and operate again within hours.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com RocketLab, a startup widely seen as a trailblazer for frequent, ultralow-cost access to space, failed to reach orbit on its first flight. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Startup\u2019s Rocket Reaches Space, but Falls Short of Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "880",
        "date": "2017-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/startups-rocket-reaches-space-but-falls-short-of-orbit-1495750466?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=122",
        "text": "Peter Beck,\n\n\n\n the founder and chief executive of the closely held U.S.-New Zealand company, said in an interview that the rocket performed \u201cextremely well\u201d until the upper-stage engine shut off prematurely after attaining an altitude of at least 120 miles. Anything above 62 miles is generally considered outside the atmosphere.\n\n\n\n\nThe company aims to carry what are anticipated to be swarms of small commercial and scientific satellites in the next few years.\n\n\n\u201cWe went through all the critical events and gathered all the data we needed to gather,\u201d Mr. Beck said, adding that the company will analyze the data to determine what went wrong in the last portion of the flight.\nHistorically, newly designed rockets on average experience one failure during the first three flights. Other statistics indicate that from 1990 to 2010, roughly two-thirds of maiden rocket launches were unsuccessful. Entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, suffered three consecutive launch failures nearly a decade ago that almost sank the company shortly after its inception.\nWith many space entrepreneurs and investors closely watching Rocket Lab\u2019s initial performance, Mr. Beck said he was pleased with the result and added that it left the company \u201cin an extremely strong position to pursue\u201d commercial operations after a pair of additional test flights.\nRocket Lab, based in Huntington Beach, Calif., exemplifies the fledgling industry known as \u201cNew Space\u201d: a more nimble, Silicon Valley-like approach to designing, producing and testing rockets and small satellites that relies heavily on automated manufacturing and frequent modifications to hardware.\nThe company has built a rocket largely from carbon-composite materials and featuring engine parts produced by 3-D printing in the U.S. Fuel tanks and other structures are manufactured in New Zealand. With this novel approach, the company pulled off the first flight of an orbital-class rocket from a privately run launch complex.\nBlue Origin LLC, the space startup run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n and Virgin Galactic LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n also have conducted test flights from private ranges but those vehicles are designed for suborbital missions. Virgin Galactic, however, is a rival for launching small satellites.\nMr. Beck\u2019s company was able to design, build and launch its rocket in roughly four years and with a relatively small staff that now numbers about 160 employees. It aims to launch satellites weighing hundreds of pounds for several million dollars, versus existing larger rockets that charge 10 or 20 times more and are designed to carry satellites weighing thousands of pounds apiece.\nThe flight comes amid escalating interest from venture capitalists, legacy aerospace companies and even the Pentagon in finding new ways to launch smaller satellites. By 2019, Mr. Beck said he hopes Electron rockets will be blasting off once a week from the remote New Zealand launch facility\nOn Wednesday, the U.S. military took a step closer to charting its own path to faster, inexpensive vehicles to reach orbit. The Pentagon\u2019s premier research agency picked\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to develop an experimental spaceplane, designated XS-1, intended to quickly launch small or large satellites at a cost of $5 million per mission. The unmanned vehicle would take off vertically, release a mini-rocket powerful enough to boost a satellite into orbit and then land as a conventional airplane\u2014ready to be refueled and operate again within hours.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com RocketLab, a startup widely seen as a trailblazer for frequent, ultralow-cost access to space, failed to reach orbit on its first flight. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Envisions Using Cargo Rockets (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "881",
        "date": "2021-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-envisions-using-cargo-rockets-11622835080?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=21",
        "text": "Pentagon officials said recent technological advances are removing obstacles to space delivery, such as the risk of rockets heading back to earth being mistaken for nuclear missiles. Reusable rockets are bringing down the cost of space launches, and the reliability required for military use is also improving.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX on Thursday notched its 101st successful mission in a row.\n\u201cIt looks like technology may have caught up with a good idea,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Spanjers,\n\n\n\n program manager for the new Air Force Rocket Cargo initiative.\n\n\nSpaceX and other private firms have outlined plans to provide cargo services via their rockets, launching loads into space that would be landed or parachuted to their final destination.\nThe uncrewed Starship successfully launched and landed last month by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, is the only craft currently designed to carry as much as 100 tons.\nPentagon officials said they would like to have multiple providers to carry supplies including military vehicles from commercial spaceports. If designs were refined to carry passengers, troops could also be involved, they said.\nThe Defense Department earmarked $48 million in its latest budget request to develop ways of sending cargo on commercial rockets and is talking to a number of launch providers, Dr. Spanjers said. The funding would be used to explore how to adapt cargo for space travel and identify how it could be delivered to austere environments.\nHe said the Pentagon is wary of distorting commercial efforts to create a space-delivery market by making it reliant on military funding, but wants to be an early adopter of the technology being developed commercially. \nOne of the biggest challenges had been to prevent an adversary such as Russia or China mistaking an incoming rocket hauling supplies from one equipped with nuclear warheads.\n\u201cWe know how to handle that deconfliction,\u201d said Dr. Spanjers.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The military has revived plans to use commercial rockets such as those being developed by SpaceX to deliver supplies to military hot spots. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Envisions Using Cargo Rockets (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "882",
        "date": "2021-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-envisions-using-cargo-rockets-11622835080?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=29",
        "text": "Pentagon officials said recent technological advances are removing obstacles to space delivery, such as the risk of rockets heading back to earth being mistaken for nuclear missiles. Reusable rockets are bringing down the cost of space launches, and the reliability required for military use is also improving.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX on Thursday notched its 101st successful mission in a row.\n\u201cIt looks like technology may have caught up with a good idea,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Spanjers,\n\n\n\n program manager for the new Air Force Rocket Cargo initiative.\n\n\nSpaceX and other private firms have outlined plans to provide cargo services via their rockets, launching loads into space that would be landed or parachuted to their final destination.\nThe uncrewed Starship successfully launched and landed last month by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, is the only craft currently designed to carry as much as 100 tons.\nPentagon officials said they would like to have multiple providers to carry supplies including military vehicles from commercial spaceports. If designs were refined to carry passengers, troops could also be involved, they said.\nThe Defense Department earmarked $48 million in its latest budget request to develop ways of sending cargo on commercial rockets and is talking to a number of launch providers, Dr. Spanjers said. The funding would be used to explore how to adapt cargo for space travel and identify how it could be delivered to austere environments.\nHe said the Pentagon is wary of distorting commercial efforts to create a space-delivery market by making it reliant on military funding, but wants to be an early adopter of the technology being developed commercially. \nOne of the biggest challenges had been to prevent an adversary such as Russia or China mistaking an incoming rocket hauling supplies from one equipped with nuclear warheads.\n\u201cWe know how to handle that deconfliction,\u201d said Dr. Spanjers.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The military has revived plans to use commercial rockets such as those being developed by SpaceX to deliver supplies to military hot spots. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Envisions Using Cargo Rockets (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "883",
        "date": "2021-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-envisions-using-cargo-rockets-11622835080?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=29",
        "text": "Pentagon officials said recent technological advances are removing obstacles to space delivery, such as the risk of rockets heading back to earth being mistaken for nuclear missiles. Reusable rockets are bringing down the cost of space launches, and the reliability required for military use is also improving.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX on Thursday notched its 101st successful mission in a row.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt looks like technology may have caught up with a good idea,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Spanjers,\n\n\n\n program manager for the new Air Force Rocket Cargo initiative.\n\n\nSpaceX and other private firms have outlined plans to provide cargo services via their rockets, launching loads into space that would be landed or parachuted to their final destination.\nThe uncrewed Starship successfully launched and landed last month by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, is the only craft currently designed to carry as much as 100 tons.\nPentagon officials said they would like to have multiple providers to carry supplies including military vehicles from commercial spaceports. If designs were refined to carry passengers, troops could also be involved, they said.\nThe Defense Department earmarked $48 million in its latest budget request to develop ways of sending cargo on commercial rockets and is talking to a number of launch providers, Dr. Spanjers said. The funding would be used to explore how to adapt cargo for space travel and identify how it could be delivered to austere environments.\nHe said the Pentagon is wary of distorting commercial efforts to create a space-delivery market by making it reliant on military funding, but wants to be an early adopter of the technology being developed commercially. \nOne of the biggest challenges had been to prevent an adversary such as Russia or China mistaking an incoming rocket hauling supplies from one equipped with nuclear warheads.\n\u201cWe know how to handle that deconfliction,\u201d said Dr. Spanjers.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The military has revived plans to use commercial rockets such as those being developed by SpaceX to deliver supplies to military hot spots. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "884",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-delays-plans-for-first-space-tourists-to-circle-moon-1528046708?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=19",
        "text": "Over the weekend, company spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Gleeson\n\n\n\n confirmed the private moon launch has been postponed, without indicating when it might occur. \u201cSpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals around the moon and there is growing interest from many customers,\u201d Mr. Gleeson said in an email.\nThe delay comes amid SpaceX\u2019s own projections of a nearly 40% drop in launches next year from as many as 28 anticipated for 2018. The decline primarily reflects a global slump in manufacturing orders and launch contracts for large commercial satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP (Originally Published February 6, 2018)\n \n\n\nSpaceX also is confronting industry doubts about market demand for its Falcon Heavy rocket, the company\u2019s newest and biggest launcher, which had its maiden blastoff in February. \u201cPeople don\u2019t think it\u2019s serious enough yet to figure out how to use it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Mueller,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s chief propulsion technology officer, said in May, speaking to attendees on the sidelines of a space conference in Los Angeles. Mr. Mueller declined to elaborate or respond to questions.\n\n\nIndustry officials and SpaceX competitors have said the latest variant of the company\u2019s smaller Falcon 9 rocket\u2014upgraded to provide more thrust than earlier versions\u2014is capable of putting most of the current generation of large and small satellites into required orbits. Those improvements have \u201celiminated much of the commercial need for the Falcon Heavy,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur.\nRegardless of when tourist voyages start, Mr. Musk and his team already have revolutionized the launch industry by accomplishing two goals that historically were considered impossible: SpaceX has slashed rocket prices with the Falcon 9 and pioneered fully reusable main stages, including engines. The company seeks to refly those parts 10 times with minimal refurbishment. \nBefore 1 a.m. local time Monday, a Falcon 9 rocket launched a large communications satellite for Luxembourg-based SES SA, optimized to serve mobile and residential customers along with airlines and maritime users throughout the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The uneventful liftoff from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, followed by routine separation of the upper stage from the previously flown rocket\u2019s lower stage, marked the fifth time Mr. Musk\u2019s company has been contracted to carry an SES satellite to high-earth orbit. The successful mission occurred on the eighth anniversary of Falcon 9\u2019s first launch, also from the same facility.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s vision of quickly using the Falcon Heavy for moon missions has been upended. In February 2017, Mr. Musk announced with some fanfare that before the end of 2018, SpaceX intended to send two paying customers around the moon and back to earth using an automated Dragon capsule launched by the company\u2019s most powerful rocket. The passengers were never identified, but the company said they already had paid \u201ca significant deposit\u201d and preparations were under way for health tests and training for the estimated weeklong trip.\nAt the time, SpaceX expected to complete unmanned flight tests of the Dragon capsule and then repeatedly transport astronauts to and from the international space station, before using it to carry paying passengers deeper into the cosmos. \nBut that schedule has now slipped, with the company telling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration it is targeting the first astronaut test flight no earlier than December 2018. Congressional investigators have said that could drag well into 2019, with approval for routine operational flights coming many months later.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Musk also suggested at least some proposed Falcon Heavy missions intended to transport people probably would take a back seat to development of an even bigger launcher designed for deeper space exploration.\nMr. Gleeson, the company spokesman, indicated private missions around the moon and elsewhere, presenting an opportunity for humans \u201cto travel faster and farther into the solar system than any before them,\u201d amount to \u201can important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal\u201d of establishing large-scale settlements on Mars. Mr. Musk has talked about first establishing a base on the lunar surface.\nSome industry experts and analysts see huge risks for SpaceX from potentially suffering a major malfunction, or even fatal accident, involving tourists, before its Dragon capsule is certified to fly NASA astronauts into orbit.\n\u201cSpaceX faces much higher stakes\u201d than carrying paying passengers as soon as it envisioned, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur who served on President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n SpaceX likely won\u2019t launch a pair of space tourists to loop around the moon this year, the latest sign challenges are disrupting Elon Musk\u2019s plans for human space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "885",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-delays-plans-for-first-space-tourists-to-circle-moon-1528046708?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=73",
        "text": "Over the weekend, company spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Gleeson\n\n\n\n confirmed the private moon launch has been postponed, without indicating when it might occur. \u201cSpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals around the moon and there is growing interest from many customers,\u201d Mr. Gleeson said in an email.\nThe delay comes amid SpaceX\u2019s own projections of a nearly 40% drop in launches next year from as many as 28 anticipated for 2018. The decline primarily reflects a global slump in manufacturing orders and launch contracts for large commercial satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP (Originally Published February 6, 2018)\n \n\n\nSpaceX also is confronting industry doubts about market demand for its Falcon Heavy rocket, the company\u2019s newest and biggest launcher, which had its maiden blastoff in February. \u201cPeople don\u2019t think it\u2019s serious enough yet to figure out how to use it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Mueller,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s chief propulsion technology officer, said in May, speaking to attendees on the sidelines of a space conference in Los Angeles. Mr. Mueller declined to elaborate or respond to questions.\n\n\nIndustry officials and SpaceX competitors have said the latest variant of the company\u2019s smaller Falcon 9 rocket\u2014upgraded to provide more thrust than earlier versions\u2014is capable of putting most of the current generation of large and small satellites into required orbits. Those improvements have \u201celiminated much of the commercial need for the Falcon Heavy,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur.\nRegardless of when tourist voyages start, Mr. Musk and his team already have revolutionized the launch industry by accomplishing two goals that historically were considered impossible: SpaceX has slashed rocket prices with the Falcon 9 and pioneered fully reusable main stages, including engines. The company seeks to refly those parts 10 times with minimal refurbishment. \nBefore 1 a.m. local time Monday, a Falcon 9 rocket launched a large communications satellite for Luxembourg-based SES SA, optimized to serve mobile and residential customers along with airlines and maritime users throughout the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The uneventful liftoff from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, followed by routine separation of the upper stage from the previously flown rocket\u2019s lower stage, marked the fifth time Mr. Musk\u2019s company has been contracted to carry an SES satellite to high-earth orbit. The successful mission occurred on the eighth anniversary of Falcon 9\u2019s first launch, also from the same facility.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s vision of quickly using the Falcon Heavy for moon missions has been upended. In February 2017, Mr. Musk announced with some fanfare that before the end of 2018, SpaceX intended to send two paying customers around the moon and back to earth using an automated Dragon capsule launched by the company\u2019s most powerful rocket. The passengers were never identified, but the company said they already had paid \u201ca significant deposit\u201d and preparations were under way for health tests and training for the estimated weeklong trip.\nAt the time, SpaceX expected to complete unmanned flight tests of the Dragon capsule and then repeatedly transport astronauts to and from the international space station, before using it to carry paying passengers deeper into the cosmos. \nBut that schedule has now slipped, with the company telling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration it is targeting the first astronaut test flight no earlier than December 2018. Congressional investigators have said that could drag well into 2019, with approval for routine operational flights coming many months later.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Musk also suggested at least some proposed Falcon Heavy missions intended to transport people probably would take a back seat to development of an even bigger launcher designed for deeper space exploration.\nMr. Gleeson, the company spokesman, indicated private missions around the moon and elsewhere, presenting an opportunity for humans \u201cto travel faster and farther into the solar system than any before them,\u201d amount to \u201can important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal\u201d of establishing large-scale settlements on Mars. Mr. Musk has talked about first establishing a base on the lunar surface.\nSome industry experts and analysts see huge risks for SpaceX from potentially suffering a major malfunction, or even fatal accident, involving tourists, before its Dragon capsule is certified to fly NASA astronauts into orbit.\n\u201cSpaceX faces much higher stakes\u201d than carrying paying passengers as soon as it envisioned, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur who served on President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n SpaceX likely won\u2019t launch a pair of space tourists to loop around the moon this year, the latest sign challenges are disrupting Elon Musk\u2019s plans for human space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "886",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-delays-plans-for-first-space-tourists-to-circle-moon-1528046708?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=67",
        "text": "Over the weekend, company spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Gleeson\n\n\n\n confirmed the private moon launch has been postponed, without indicating when it might occur. \u201cSpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals around the moon and there is growing interest from many customers,\u201d Mr. Gleeson said in an email.\nThe delay comes amid SpaceX\u2019s own projections of a nearly 40% drop in launches next year from as many as 28 anticipated for 2018. The decline primarily reflects a global slump in manufacturing orders and launch contracts for large commercial satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP (Originally Published February 6, 2018)\n \n\n\nSpaceX also is confronting industry doubts about market demand for its Falcon Heavy rocket, the company\u2019s newest and biggest launcher, which had its maiden blastoff in February. \u201cPeople don\u2019t think it\u2019s serious enough yet to figure out how to use it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Mueller,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s chief propulsion technology officer, said in May, speaking to attendees on the sidelines of a space conference in Los Angeles. Mr. Mueller declined to elaborate or respond to questions.\n\n\nIndustry officials and SpaceX competitors have said the latest variant of the company\u2019s smaller Falcon 9 rocket\u2014upgraded to provide more thrust than earlier versions\u2014is capable of putting most of the current generation of large and small satellites into required orbits. Those improvements have \u201celiminated much of the commercial need for the Falcon Heavy,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur.\nRegardless of when tourist voyages start, Mr. Musk and his team already have revolutionized the launch industry by accomplishing two goals that historically were considered impossible: SpaceX has slashed rocket prices with the Falcon 9 and pioneered fully reusable main stages, including engines. The company seeks to refly those parts 10 times with minimal refurbishment. \nBefore 1 a.m. local time Monday, a Falcon 9 rocket launched a large communications satellite for Luxembourg-based SES SA, optimized to serve mobile and residential customers along with airlines and maritime users throughout the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The uneventful liftoff from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, followed by routine separation of the upper stage from the previously flown rocket\u2019s lower stage, marked the fifth time Mr. Musk\u2019s company has been contracted to carry an SES satellite to high-earth orbit. The successful mission occurred on the eighth anniversary of Falcon 9\u2019s first launch, also from the same facility.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s vision of quickly using the Falcon Heavy for moon missions has been upended. In February 2017, Mr. Musk announced with some fanfare that before the end of 2018, SpaceX intended to send two paying customers around the moon and back to earth using an automated Dragon capsule launched by the company\u2019s most powerful rocket. The passengers were never identified, but the company said they already had paid \u201ca significant deposit\u201d and preparations were under way for health tests and training for the estimated weeklong trip.\nAt the time, SpaceX expected to complete unmanned flight tests of the Dragon capsule and then repeatedly transport astronauts to and from the international space station, before using it to carry paying passengers deeper into the cosmos. \nBut that schedule has now slipped, with the company telling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration it is targeting the first astronaut test flight no earlier than December 2018. Congressional investigators have said that could drag well into 2019, with approval for routine operational flights coming many months later.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Musk also suggested at least some proposed Falcon Heavy missions intended to transport people probably would take a back seat to development of an even bigger launcher designed for deeper space exploration.\nMr. Gleeson, the company spokesman, indicated private missions around the moon and elsewhere, presenting an opportunity for humans \u201cto travel faster and farther into the solar system than any before them,\u201d amount to \u201can important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal\u201d of establishing large-scale settlements on Mars. Mr. Musk has talked about first establishing a base on the lunar surface.\nSome industry experts and analysts see huge risks for SpaceX from potentially suffering a major malfunction, or even fatal accident, involving tourists, before its Dragon capsule is certified to fly NASA astronauts into orbit.\n\u201cSpaceX faces much higher stakes\u201d than carrying paying passengers as soon as it envisioned, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur who served on President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n SpaceX likely won\u2019t launch a pair of space tourists to loop around the moon this year, the latest sign challenges are disrupting Elon Musk\u2019s plans for human space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "887",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-delays-plans-for-first-space-tourists-to-circle-moon-1528046708?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=67",
        "text": "Over the weekend, company spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Gleeson\n\n\n\n confirmed the private moon launch has been postponed, without indicating when it might occur. \u201cSpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals around the moon and there is growing interest from many customers,\u201d Mr. Gleeson said in an email.\nThe delay comes amid SpaceX\u2019s own projections of a nearly 40% drop in launches next year from as many as 28 anticipated for 2018. The decline primarily reflects a global slump in manufacturing orders and launch contracts for large commercial satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP (Originally Published February 6, 2018)\n \n\n\nSpaceX also is confronting industry doubts about market demand for its Falcon Heavy rocket, the company\u2019s newest and biggest launcher, which had its maiden blastoff in February. \u201cPeople don\u2019t think it\u2019s serious enough yet to figure out how to use it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Mueller,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s chief propulsion technology officer, said in May, speaking to attendees on the sidelines of a space conference in Los Angeles. Mr. Mueller declined to elaborate or respond to questions.\n\n\nIndustry officials and SpaceX competitors have said the latest variant of the company\u2019s smaller Falcon 9 rocket\u2014upgraded to provide more thrust than earlier versions\u2014is capable of putting most of the current generation of large and small satellites into required orbits. Those improvements have \u201celiminated much of the commercial need for the Falcon Heavy,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur.\nRegardless of when tourist voyages start, Mr. Musk and his team already have revolutionized the launch industry by accomplishing two goals that historically were considered impossible: SpaceX has slashed rocket prices with the Falcon 9 and pioneered fully reusable main stages, including engines. The company seeks to refly those parts 10 times with minimal refurbishment. \nBefore 1 a.m. local time Monday, a Falcon 9 rocket launched a large communications satellite for Luxembourg-based SES SA, optimized to serve mobile and residential customers along with airlines and maritime users throughout the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The uneventful liftoff from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, followed by routine separation of the upper stage from the previously flown rocket\u2019s lower stage, marked the fifth time Mr. Musk\u2019s company has been contracted to carry an SES satellite to high-earth orbit. The successful mission occurred on the eighth anniversary of Falcon 9\u2019s first launch, also from the same facility.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s vision of quickly using the Falcon Heavy for moon missions has been upended. In February 2017, Mr. Musk announced with some fanfare that before the end of 2018, SpaceX intended to send two paying customers around the moon and back to earth using an automated Dragon capsule launched by the company\u2019s most powerful rocket. The passengers were never identified, but the company said they already had paid \u201ca significant deposit\u201d and preparations were under way for health tests and training for the estimated weeklong trip.\nAt the time, SpaceX expected to complete unmanned flight tests of the Dragon capsule and then repeatedly transport astronauts to and from the international space station, before using it to carry paying passengers deeper into the cosmos. \nBut that schedule has now slipped, with the company telling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration it is targeting the first astronaut test flight no earlier than December 2018. Congressional investigators have said that could drag well into 2019, with approval for routine operational flights coming many months later.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Musk also suggested at least some proposed Falcon Heavy missions intended to transport people probably would take a back seat to development of an even bigger launcher designed for deeper space exploration.\nMr. Gleeson, the company spokesman, indicated private missions around the moon and elsewhere, presenting an opportunity for humans \u201cto travel faster and farther into the solar system than any before them,\u201d amount to \u201can important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal\u201d of establishing large-scale settlements on Mars. Mr. Musk has talked about first establishing a base on the lunar surface.\nSome industry experts and analysts see huge risks for SpaceX from potentially suffering a major malfunction, or even fatal accident, involving tourists, before its Dragon capsule is certified to fly NASA astronauts into orbit.\n\u201cSpaceX faces much higher stakes\u201d than carrying paying passengers as soon as it envisioned, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur who served on President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n SpaceX likely won\u2019t launch a pair of space tourists to loop around the moon this year, the latest sign challenges are disrupting Elon Musk\u2019s plans for human space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "888",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-delays-plans-for-first-space-tourists-to-circle-moon-1528046708?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=94",
        "text": "Over the weekend, company spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Gleeson\n\n\n\n confirmed the private moon launch has been postponed, without indicating when it might occur. \u201cSpaceX is still planning to fly private individuals around the moon and there is growing interest from many customers,\u201d Mr. Gleeson said in an email.\n\n\n\n\nThe delay comes amid SpaceX\u2019s own projections of a nearly 40% drop in launches next year from as many as 28 anticipated for 2018. The decline primarily reflects a global slump in manufacturing orders and launch contracts for large commercial satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP (Originally Published February 6, 2018)\n \n\n\nSpaceX also is confronting industry doubts about market demand for its Falcon Heavy rocket, the company\u2019s newest and biggest launcher, which had its maiden blastoff in February. \u201cPeople don\u2019t think it\u2019s serious enough yet to figure out how to use it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Mueller,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s chief propulsion technology officer, said in May, speaking to attendees on the sidelines of a space conference in Los Angeles. Mr. Mueller declined to elaborate or respond to questions.\n\n\nIndustry officials and SpaceX competitors have said the latest variant of the company\u2019s smaller Falcon 9 rocket\u2014upgraded to provide more thrust than earlier versions\u2014is capable of putting most of the current generation of large and small satellites into required orbits. Those improvements have \u201celiminated much of the commercial need for the Falcon Heavy,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur.\nRegardless of when tourist voyages start, Mr. Musk and his team already have revolutionized the launch industry by accomplishing two goals that historically were considered impossible: SpaceX has slashed rocket prices with the Falcon 9 and pioneered fully reusable main stages, including engines. The company seeks to refly those parts 10 times with minimal refurbishment. \nBefore 1 a.m. local time Monday, a Falcon 9 rocket launched a large communications satellite for Luxembourg-based SES SA, optimized to serve mobile and residential customers along with airlines and maritime users throughout the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The uneventful liftoff from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, followed by routine separation of the upper stage from the previously flown rocket\u2019s lower stage, marked the fifth time Mr. Musk\u2019s company has been contracted to carry an SES satellite to high-earth orbit. The successful mission occurred on the eighth anniversary of Falcon 9\u2019s first launch, also from the same facility.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s vision of quickly using the Falcon Heavy for moon missions has been upended. In February 2017, Mr. Musk announced with some fanfare that before the end of 2018, SpaceX intended to send two paying customers around the moon and back to earth using an automated Dragon capsule launched by the company\u2019s most powerful rocket. The passengers were never identified, but the company said they already had paid \u201ca significant deposit\u201d and preparations were under way for health tests and training for the estimated weeklong trip.\nAt the time, SpaceX expected to complete unmanned flight tests of the Dragon capsule and then repeatedly transport astronauts to and from the international space station, before using it to carry paying passengers deeper into the cosmos. \nBut that schedule has now slipped, with the company telling the National Aeronautics and Space Administration it is targeting the first astronaut test flight no earlier than December 2018. Congressional investigators have said that could drag well into 2019, with approval for routine operational flights coming many months later.\nEarlier this year, Mr. Musk also suggested at least some proposed Falcon Heavy missions intended to transport people probably would take a back seat to development of an even bigger launcher designed for deeper space exploration.\nMr. Gleeson, the company spokesman, indicated private missions around the moon and elsewhere, presenting an opportunity for humans \u201cto travel faster and farther into the solar system than any before them,\u201d amount to \u201can important milestone as we work toward our ultimate goal\u201d of establishing large-scale settlements on Mars. Mr. Musk has talked about first establishing a base on the lunar surface.\nSome industry experts and analysts see huge risks for SpaceX from potentially suffering a major malfunction, or even fatal accident, involving tourists, before its Dragon capsule is certified to fly NASA astronauts into orbit.\n\u201cSpaceX faces much higher stakes\u201d than carrying paying passengers as soon as it envisioned, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a consultant and space entrepreneur who served on President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trum SpaceX likely won\u2019t launch a pair of space tourists to loop around the moon this year, the latest sign challenges are disrupting Elon Musk\u2019s plans for human space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Faces Delays in Shift Away From Russian Rocket Engines (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "889",
        "date": "2017-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-faces-delays-in-shift-away-from-russian-rocket-engines-1504526402?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=78",
        "text": "Other people familiar with the details said United Launch\u2014a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n \u2014may have to extend the timeline as far out as 2028.\nThe delay raises the question of whether the U.S. military will have to use more of the Russian engines amid tensions between the two nations. It also has important implications for the cost and timing of Pentagon space programs, the health of the military-industrial base and the growth of the commercial space sector.\n\n\nGen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Goldfein,\n\n\n\n the Air Force chief of staff, told lawmakers earlier this year that replacing RD-180s \u201cas soon as possible\u201d has to be balanced with two other pressing, sometimes conflicting priorities: maintaining access to space and promoting competition among launch providers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA model of a Russian RD-180 rocket engine in Moscow in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nUnited Launch, entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and commercial startup Blue Origin LLC\u2014founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2014are racing to develop their own versions of a new generation of cheaper, more-capable rockets using only U.S.-made engines. The outcome of that competition partly depends on how quickly United Launch is able to pivot away from the more expensive Atlas V and the RD-180 engines that power its lower stage.\nThe Russian engines blast most Air Force communications and navigation satellites into orbit. Launches of Falcon 9 rockets built by SpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, start at less than $83 million for the military, more than 40% below traditional United Launch prices.\nThe Boeing-Lockheed venture expects to have a new engine fully tested by 2019 and a replacement rocket, called Vulcan, certified to carry Pentagon payloads by 2022 or 2023. But a spokeswoman for United Launch said some Atlas V missions are slated to continue beyond that point, at least through \u201cthe mid-2020s,\u201d until Vulcan demonstrates its dependability.\nThat is much later than what many lawmakers and industry officials envisioned three years ago, when Congress began wrestling with the problem of phasing out Russian hardware. The move was prompted by the Kremlin\u2019s annexation of Crimea and fomenting of civil war in eastern Ukraine. \nOriginally, Air Force generals and Pentagon brass said the switch to all-domestic boosters could be completed as soon as 2020. United Launch said it intended to cut development time to \u201chalf the normal span\u201d of nearly a decade. Since then, costs and engineering hurdles have steadily stretched that timetable, even as military leaders continue to warn Congress about the hazards of prematurely cutting off Atlas V missions. At all times, the Pentagon wants a minimum of two separate rocket families for guaranteed access to space.\n\n\nRelated Deal Tried to Block \u2018Rogue Marketing\u2019 of Space Advances \n\n\nAs recently as June, Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), a United Launch supporter, grilled Air Force generals about why a domestic alternative wouldn\u2019t be possible in two or three years. \nDeveloping and test flying such a powerful new engine historically has cost about $1 billion, with a price tag of roughly three times that much for an entirely new rocket and enhanced ground-support systems. Excluding engine-development costs, launch spending is expected to eat up nearly half of the Air Force\u2019s total 2018 procurement budget of roughly $3.4 billion for unclassified space programs.\nFor United Launch, it isn\u2019t clear what portion of development costs the Pentagon ultimately will cover, or whether Boeing and Lockheed will keep the effort on track. United Launch has said it is determined to cut costs and has made good engineering progress.\nSpaceX is four years late flying a much bigger derivative of its current Falcon 9 rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, powered by 27 engines that create huge technical hurdles. The maiden launch is now scheduled for late 2017. Mr. Musk said earlier this year that due to structural issues raised by the number of engines, it \u201cended up being way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought.\u201d\nPart of a Blue Origin rocket exploded on the ground earlier this year, delaying development of a new, methane-fueled engine the company plans to use itself and hopes to sell to United Launch. Blue Origin officials say they have duplicate hardware to alleviate testing delays.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX prepared to launch a Falcon 9 rocket on April 29 in Cape Canaveral.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe spokeswoman for the joint venture said it has 22 contracts for Atlas V launches, not all of which are military, and has \u201cmore than 30 engines\u201d either on hand or in the pipeline from Russia, including a fi Technical and funding challenges will force the Pentagon to rely on Russian-manufactured rocket engines at least through the middle of the next decade, several years longer than originally anticipated. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Faces Delays in Shift Away From Russian Rocket Engines (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "890",
        "date": "2017-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-faces-delays-in-shift-away-from-russian-rocket-engines-1504526402?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=114",
        "text": "Other people familiar with the details said United Launch\u2014a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n \u2014may have to extend the timeline as far out as 2028.\n\n\n\n\nThe delay raises the question of whether the U.S. military will have to use more of the Russian engines amid tensions between the two nations. It also has important implications for the cost and timing of Pentagon space programs, the health of the military-industrial base and the growth of the commercial space sector.\n\n\nGen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Goldfein,\n\n\n\n the Air Force chief of staff, told lawmakers earlier this year that replacing RD-180s \u201cas soon as possible\u201d has to be balanced with two other pressing, sometimes conflicting priorities: maintaining access to space and promoting competition among launch providers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA model of a Russian RD-180 rocket engine in Moscow in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nUnited Launch, entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and commercial startup Blue Origin LLC\u2014founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2014are racing to develop their own versions of a new generation of cheaper, more-capable rockets using only U.S.-made engines. The outcome of that competition partly depends on how quickly United Launch is able to pivot away from the more expensive Atlas V and the RD-180 engines that power its lower stage.\nThe Russian engines blast most Air Force communications and navigation satellites into orbit. Launches of Falcon 9 rockets built by SpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, start at less than $83 million for the military, more than 40% below traditional United Launch prices.\nThe Boeing-Lockheed venture expects to have a new engine fully tested by 2019 and a replacement rocket, called Vulcan, certified to carry Pentagon payloads by 2022 or 2023. But a spokeswoman for United Launch said some Atlas V missions are slated to continue beyond that point, at least through \u201cthe mid-2020s,\u201d until Vulcan demonstrates its dependability.\nThat is much later than what many lawmakers and industry officials envisioned three years ago, when Congress began wrestling with the problem of phasing out Russian hardware. The move was prompted by the Kremlin\u2019s annexation of Crimea and fomenting of civil war in eastern Ukraine. \nOriginally, Air Force generals and Pentagon brass said the switch to all-domestic boosters could be completed as soon as 2020. United Launch said it intended to cut development time to \u201chalf the normal span\u201d of nearly a decade. Since then, costs and engineering hurdles have steadily stretched that timetable, even as military leaders continue to warn Congress about the hazards of prematurely cutting off Atlas V missions. At all times, the Pentagon wants a minimum of two separate rocket families for guaranteed access to space.\n\n\nRelated Deal Tried to Block \u2018Rogue Marketing\u2019 of Space Advances \n\n\nAs recently as June, Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), a United Launch supporter, grilled Air Force generals about why a domestic alternative wouldn\u2019t be possible in two or three years. \nDeveloping and test flying such a powerful new engine historically has cost about $1 billion, with a price tag of roughly three times that much for an entirely new rocket and enhanced ground-support systems. Excluding engine-development costs, launch spending is expected to eat up nearly half of the Air Force\u2019s total 2018 procurement budget of roughly $3.4 billion for unclassified space programs.\nFor United Launch, it isn\u2019t clear what portion of development costs the Pentagon ultimately will cover, or whether Boeing and Lockheed will keep the effort on track. United Launch has said it is determined to cut costs and has made good engineering progress.\nSpaceX is four years late flying a much bigger derivative of its current Falcon 9 rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, powered by 27 engines that create huge technical hurdles. The maiden launch is now scheduled for late 2017. Mr. Musk said earlier this year that due to structural issues raised by the number of engines, it \u201cended up being way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought.\u201d\nPart of a Blue Origin rocket exploded on the ground earlier this year, delaying development of a new, methane-fueled engine the company plans to use itself and hopes to sell to United Launch. Blue Origin officials say they have duplicate hardware to alleviate testing delays.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX prepared to launch a Falcon 9 rocket on April 29 in Cape Canaveral.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe spokeswoman for the joint venture said it has 22 contracts for Atlas V launches, not all of which are military, and has \u201cmore than 30 engines\u201d either on hand or in the pipeline from Russia, including Technical and funding challenges will force the Pentagon to rely on Russian-manufactured rocket engines at least through the middle of the next decade, several years longer than originally anticipated. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Private Enterprise (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "891",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-space-policy-options-emphasize-role-of-private-enterprise-1486317411?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=102",
        "text": "No final decisions have been made, and steps to alter existing programs or launch new ones await nomination of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief. White House advisers assigned to oversee NASA also have orders to delay big decisions until a governmentwide space council is formally set up under Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n according to people familiar with the details.\nBut in the interim, the agency and its programs are embroiled in political maneuvering\u2014and some personnel intrigue. Proponents of commercial space efforts have sought to recast the initial NASA transition team\u2019s proposed \u201cagency action plan\u201d by stressing, among other items, a rapid and affordable return to the moon, possibly led by private enterprise.\n\n\nThe common thread among many of the policy options, transition and industry officials said, is a focus on projects able to attract widespread voter support that realistically can be completed during Mr. Trump\u2019s current four-year presidential term. \nFrom potentially staking out mineral rights on the moon to fostering the concept of privately owned and operated space stations circling the globe, the vision sketched out in memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal illustrates growing pressure on NASA to change its traditional way of operating.\nDespite an annual budget of roughly $19 billion and some 17,000 employees, outside experts say the agency isn\u2019t likely to have the needed funding to carry out all of its mandates during the next decade.\nBut for now, Republican congressional leaders are vowing to maintain every big-ticket item.\nAt the same time, legacy contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n are seeking to safeguard multibillion-dollar rocket and manned capsule programs slated to explore deep space in coming decades.\nThe result, according to industry and transition officials, is a behind-the-scenes tussle pitting such established priorities against alternative, commercially driven projects championed by companies including entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. \nMr. Musk is a member of Mr. Trump\u2019s economic advisory council.\nFor each of the past four years, NASA has spent more than $2 billion overall developing its most powerful rocket, called Space Launch System, and a companion manned capsule, named Orion. They are often described as \u201cOld Space,\u201d representing cost-plus contracts combined with intense agency supervision and direction.\nFor years, NASA leaders and lawmakers have been arguing over the optimum use for those expensive programs, which have now climbed to about $3.3 billion a year, and are designed to ultimately transport humans to Mars around 2035. \nPrograms such as SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules, however, typically are referred to as \u201cNew Space,\u201d featuring less-costly, fixed-price contracts and reduced federal oversight. They have clear-cut missions to ferry cargo and, before the end of this decade, U.S. astronauts to the international space station.\nGrowing tension between the two approaches is highlighted by a Jan. 23 email from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a member of NASA\u2019s original transition team, to former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich,\n\n\n\n a confidant of Mr. Trump who also served on a higher-level transition team.\nIn the email, Mr. Miller advocates that NASA \u201chold an internal competition between Old Space and New Space\u201d to determine the best and least expensive way to return to the moon. \u201cIf this initiative can be approved quickly by the White House, and appropriately funded,\u201d he said in the email, there could be \u201cprivate American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the moon by 2020.\u201d\nAccording to the email, Mr. Miller, a former NASA official, says he \u201crewrote the 80+ page\u201d original transition report to emphasize commercial space partnerships with the agreement of White House aide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Noble.\n\n\n\n \nThe same email lists other potential strategies that were prepared for the White House: transitioning to privately owned and operated space stations, and refocusing NASA on economic development of space and creation of \u201cprivate sector jobs, over exploration and other more esoteric activities.\u201d\nMr. Miller, a space-industry consultant and strong advocate of moon missions, has long been a vocal foe of the Space Launch System (SLS). His critics contend the latest strategies are intended to damage or even kill the rocket program headed by Boeing.\nIn an interview Mr. Miller said he believes his proposals were forwarded to other White House aides, and didn\u2019t target, seek to downgrade or negatively affect SLS. The recommendations about the program were \u201cneutral,\u201d he added, and didn\u2019t affect it \u201cone way or the other.\u201d \nMr. Miller said he was asked by Mr. Noble \u201cto help with fixing a draft document,\u201d and \u201cI The Trump administration\u2019s evolving space policy is expected to foster private investment, while likely favoring relatively short-term goals such as sending astronauts back to orbit the moon by 2020, according to industry and transition officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Private Enterprise (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "892",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-space-policy-options-emphasize-role-of-private-enterprise-1486317411?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=93",
        "text": "No final decisions have been made, and steps to alter existing programs or launch new ones await nomination of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief. White House advisers assigned to oversee NASA also have orders to delay big decisions until a governmentwide space council is formally set up under Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n according to people familiar with the details.\nBut in the interim, the agency and its programs are embroiled in political maneuvering\u2014and some personnel intrigue. Proponents of commercial space efforts have sought to recast the initial NASA transition team\u2019s proposed \u201cagency action plan\u201d by stressing, among other items, a rapid and affordable return to the moon, possibly led by private enterprise.\n\n\nThe common thread among many of the policy options, transition and industry officials said, is a focus on projects able to attract widespread voter support that realistically can be completed during Mr. Trump\u2019s current four-year presidential term. \nFrom potentially staking out mineral rights on the moon to fostering the concept of privately owned and operated space stations circling the globe, the vision sketched out in memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal illustrates growing pressure on NASA to change its traditional way of operating.\nDespite an annual budget of roughly $19 billion and some 17,000 employees, outside experts say the agency isn\u2019t likely to have the needed funding to carry out all of its mandates during the next decade.\nBut for now, Republican congressional leaders are vowing to maintain every big-ticket item.\nAt the same time, legacy contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n are seeking to safeguard multibillion-dollar rocket and manned capsule programs slated to explore deep space in coming decades.\nThe result, according to industry and transition officials, is a behind-the-scenes tussle pitting such established priorities against alternative, commercially driven projects championed by companies including entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. \nMr. Musk is a member of Mr. Trump\u2019s economic advisory council.\nFor each of the past four years, NASA has spent more than $2 billion overall developing its most powerful rocket, called Space Launch System, and a companion manned capsule, named Orion. They are often described as \u201cOld Space,\u201d representing cost-plus contracts combined with intense agency supervision and direction.\nFor years, NASA leaders and lawmakers have been arguing over the optimum use for those expensive programs, which have now climbed to about $3.3 billion a year, and are designed to ultimately transport humans to Mars around 2035. \nPrograms such as SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules, however, typically are referred to as \u201cNew Space,\u201d featuring less-costly, fixed-price contracts and reduced federal oversight. They have clear-cut missions to ferry cargo and, before the end of this decade, U.S. astronauts to the international space station.\nGrowing tension between the two approaches is highlighted by a Jan. 23 email from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a member of NASA\u2019s original transition team, to former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich,\n\n\n\n a confidant of Mr. Trump who also served on a higher-level transition team.\nIn the email, Mr. Miller advocates that NASA \u201chold an internal competition between Old Space and New Space\u201d to determine the best and least expensive way to return to the moon. \u201cIf this initiative can be approved quickly by the White House, and appropriately funded,\u201d he said in the email, there could be \u201cprivate American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the moon by 2020.\u201d\nAccording to the email, Mr. Miller, a former NASA official, says he \u201crewrote the 80+ page\u201d original transition report to emphasize commercial space partnerships with the agreement of White House aide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Noble.\n\n\n\n \nThe same email lists other potential strategies that were prepared for the White House: transitioning to privately owned and operated space stations, and refocusing NASA on economic development of space and creation of \u201cprivate sector jobs, over exploration and other more esoteric activities.\u201d\nMr. Miller, a space-industry consultant and strong advocate of moon missions, has long been a vocal foe of the Space Launch System (SLS). His critics contend the latest strategies are intended to damage or even kill the rocket program headed by Boeing.\nIn an interview Mr. Miller said he believes his proposals were forwarded to other White House aides, and didn\u2019t target, seek to downgrade or negatively affect SLS. The recommendations about the program were \u201cneutral,\u201d he added, and didn\u2019t affect it \u201cone way or the other.\u201d \nMr. Miller said he was asked by Mr. Noble \u201cto help with fixing a draft document,\u201d and \u201cI The Trump administration\u2019s evolving space policy is expected to foster private investment, while likely favoring relatively short-term goals such as sending astronauts back to orbit the moon by 2020, according to industry and transition officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Private Enterprise (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "893",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-space-policy-options-emphasize-role-of-private-enterprise-1486317411?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=100",
        "text": "No final decisions have been made, and steps to alter existing programs or launch new ones await nomination of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief. White House advisers assigned to oversee NASA also have orders to delay big decisions until a governmentwide space council is formally set up under Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n according to people familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\nBut in the interim, the agency and its programs are embroiled in political maneuvering\u2014and some personnel intrigue. Proponents of commercial space efforts have sought to recast the initial NASA transition team\u2019s proposed \u201cagency action plan\u201d by stressing, among other items, a rapid and affordable return to the moon, possibly led by private enterprise.\n\n\nThe common thread among many of the policy options, transition and industry officials said, is a focus on projects able to attract widespread voter support that realistically can be completed during Mr. Trump\u2019s current four-year presidential term. \nFrom potentially staking out mineral rights on the moon to fostering the concept of privately owned and operated space stations circling the globe, the vision sketched out in memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal illustrates growing pressure on NASA to change its traditional way of operating.\nDespite an annual budget of roughly $19 billion and some 17,000 employees, outside experts say the agency isn\u2019t likely to have the needed funding to carry out all of its mandates during the next decade.\nBut for now, Republican congressional leaders are vowing to maintain every big-ticket item.\nAt the same time, legacy contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n are seeking to safeguard multibillion-dollar rocket and manned capsule programs slated to explore deep space in coming decades.\nThe result, according to industry and transition officials, is a behind-the-scenes tussle pitting such established priorities against alternative, commercially driven projects championed by companies including entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. \nMr. Musk is a member of Mr. Trump\u2019s economic advisory council.\nFor each of the past four years, NASA has spent more than $2 billion overall developing its most powerful rocket, called Space Launch System, and a companion manned capsule, named Orion. They are often described as \u201cOld Space,\u201d representing cost-plus contracts combined with intense agency supervision and direction.\nFor years, NASA leaders and lawmakers have been arguing over the optimum use for those expensive programs, which have now climbed to about $3.3 billion a year, and are designed to ultimately transport humans to Mars around 2035. \nPrograms such as SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules, however, typically are referred to as \u201cNew Space,\u201d featuring less-costly, fixed-price contracts and reduced federal oversight. They have clear-cut missions to ferry cargo and, before the end of this decade, U.S. astronauts to the international space station.\nGrowing tension between the two approaches is highlighted by a Jan. 23 email from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a member of NASA\u2019s original transition team, to former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich,\n\n\n\n a confidant of Mr. Trump who also served on a higher-level transition team.\nIn the email, Mr. Miller advocates that NASA \u201chold an internal competition between Old Space and New Space\u201d to determine the best and least expensive way to return to the moon. \u201cIf this initiative can be approved quickly by the White House, and appropriately funded,\u201d he said in the email, there could be \u201cprivate American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the moon by 2020.\u201d\nAccording to the email, Mr. Miller, a former NASA official, says he \u201crewrote the 80+ page\u201d original transition report to emphasize commercial space partnerships with the agreement of White House aide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Noble.\n\n\n\n \nThe same email lists other potential strategies that were prepared for the White House: transitioning to privately owned and operated space stations, and refocusing NASA on economic development of space and creation of \u201cprivate sector jobs, over exploration and other more esoteric activities.\u201d\nMr. Miller, a space-industry consultant and strong advocate of moon missions, has long been a vocal foe of the Space Launch System (SLS). His critics contend the latest strategies are intended to damage or even kill the rocket program headed by Boeing.\nIn an interview Mr. Miller said he believes his proposals were forwarded to other White House aides, and didn\u2019t target, seek to downgrade or negatively affect SLS. The recommendations about the program were \u201cneutral,\u201d he added, and didn\u2019t affect it \u201cone way or the other.\u201d \nMr. Miller said he was asked by Mr. Noble \u201cto help with fixing a draft document,\u201d and \u201cI didn\u2019t consider it out of bounds.\u201d\nIn an email, Mr. Gingrich, a supporter of moon exploration, said \u201cwe have the chance to break into a very exciting period of competitive space.\u201d He added: \u201cI am not opposed to any specific program,\u201d but object to \u201cany effort to cut off competition.\u201d\nThe same email went to former Rep. Robert Walker, who helped draft early space-policy positions for Mr. Trump\u2019s campaign but wasn\u2019t a member of the transition team. On Sunday, Mr. Walker said he received the email because he was \u201cconsulted about whether concepts being considered by the transition team were in line with the space policies that had been approved by the campaign.\u201d\nMr. Noble declined to comment.\nA Trump administration representative said \u201cno authority was given to any member\u201d of the original transition team \u201cto set NASA policy.\u201d The administration representative said that \u201cwill be the responsibility of the NASA administrator.\u201d\nThe controversy comes amid strong bipartisan support for SLS on Capitol Hill. \u201cIt is absolutely crucial that we have consistency\u201d so the transition \u201cdoesn\u2019t disrupt major programs\u201d including SLS, according to Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lamar Smith,\n\n\n\n the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science Committee. \u201cWe\u2019re absolutely sure about that.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The Trump administration\u2019s evolving space policy is expected to foster private investment, while likely favoring relatively short-term goals such as sending astronauts back to orbit the moon by 2020, according to industry and transition officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Private Enterprise (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "894",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-space-policy-options-emphasize-role-of-private-enterprise-1486317411?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=88",
        "text": "No final decisions have been made, and steps to alter existing programs or launch new ones await nomination of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief. White House advisers assigned to oversee NASA also have orders to delay big decisions until a governmentwide space council is formally set up under Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n according to people familiar with the details.\nBut in the interim, the agency and its programs are embroiled in political maneuvering\u2014and some personnel intrigue. Proponents of commercial space efforts have sought to recast the initial NASA transition team\u2019s proposed \u201cagency action plan\u201d by stressing, among other items, a rapid and affordable return to the moon, possibly led by private enterprise.\n\n\nThe common thread among many of the policy options, transition and industry officials said, is a focus on projects able to attract widespread voter support that realistically can be completed during Mr. Trump\u2019s current four-year presidential term. \nFrom potentially staking out mineral rights on the moon to fostering the concept of privately owned and operated space stations circling the globe, the vision sketched out in memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal illustrates growing pressure on NASA to change its traditional way of operating.\nDespite an annual budget of roughly $19 billion and some 17,000 employees, outside experts say the agency isn\u2019t likely to have the needed funding to carry out all of its mandates during the next decade.\nBut for now, Republican congressional leaders are vowing to maintain every big-ticket item.\nAt the same time, legacy contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n are seeking to safeguard multibillion-dollar rocket and manned capsule programs slated to explore deep space in coming decades.\nThe result, according to industry and transition officials, is a behind-the-scenes tussle pitting such established priorities against alternative, commercially driven projects championed by companies including entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. \nMr. Musk is a member of Mr. Trump\u2019s economic advisory council.\nFor each of the past four years, NASA has spent more than $2 billion overall developing its most powerful rocket, called Space Launch System, and a companion manned capsule, named Orion. They are often described as \u201cOld Space,\u201d representing cost-plus contracts combined with intense agency supervision and direction.\nFor years, NASA leaders and lawmakers have been arguing over the optimum use for those expensive programs, which have now climbed to about $3.3 billion a year, and are designed to ultimately transport humans to Mars around 2035. \nPrograms such as SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules, however, typically are referred to as \u201cNew Space,\u201d featuring less-costly, fixed-price contracts and reduced federal oversight. They have clear-cut missions to ferry cargo and, before the end of this decade, U.S. astronauts to the international space station.\nGrowing tension between the two approaches is highlighted by a Jan. 23 email from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a member of NASA\u2019s original transition team, to former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich,\n\n\n\n a confidant of Mr. Trump who also served on a higher-level transition team.\nIn the email, Mr. Miller advocates that NASA \u201chold an internal competition between Old Space and New Space\u201d to determine the best and least expensive way to return to the moon. \u201cIf this initiative can be approved quickly by the White House, and appropriately funded,\u201d he said in the email, there could be \u201cprivate American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the moon by 2020.\u201d\nAccording to the email, Mr. Miller, a former NASA official, says he \u201crewrote the 80+ page\u201d original transition report to emphasize commercial space partnerships with the agreement of White House aide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Noble.\n\n\n\n \nThe same email lists other potential strategies that were prepared for the White House: transitioning to privately owned and operated space stations, and refocusing NASA on economic development of space and creation of \u201cprivate sector jobs, over exploration and other more esoteric activities.\u201d\nMr. Miller, a space-industry consultant and strong advocate of moon missions, has long been a vocal foe of the Space Launch System (SLS). His critics contend the latest strategies are intended to damage or even kill the rocket program headed by Boeing.\nIn an interview Mr. Miller said he believes his proposals were forwarded to other White House aides, and didn\u2019t target, seek to downgrade or negatively affect SLS. The recommendations about the program were \u201cneutral,\u201d he added, and didn\u2019t affect it \u201cone way or the other.\u201d \nMr. Miller said he was asked by Mr. Noble \u201cto help with fixing a draft document,\u201d and \u201cI The Trump administration\u2019s evolving space policy is expected to foster private investment, while likely favoring relatively short-term goals such as sending astronauts back to orbit the moon by 2020, according to industry and transition officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Private Enterprise (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "895",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-space-policy-options-emphasize-role-of-private-enterprise-1486317411?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=131",
        "text": "No final decisions have been made, and steps to alter existing programs or launch new ones await nomination of a National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief. White House advisers assigned to oversee NASA also have orders to delay big decisions until a governmentwide space council is formally set up under Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n according to people familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\nBut in the interim, the agency and its programs are embroiled in political maneuvering\u2014and some personnel intrigue. Proponents of commercial space efforts have sought to recast the initial NASA transition team\u2019s proposed \u201cagency action plan\u201d by stressing, among other items, a rapid and affordable return to the moon, possibly led by private enterprise.\n\n\nThe common thread among many of the policy options, transition and industry officials said, is a focus on projects able to attract widespread voter support that realistically can be completed during Mr. Trump\u2019s current four-year presidential term. \nFrom potentially staking out mineral rights on the moon to fostering the concept of privately owned and operated space stations circling the globe, the vision sketched out in memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal illustrates growing pressure on NASA to change its traditional way of operating.\nDespite an annual budget of roughly $19 billion and some 17,000 employees, outside experts say the agency isn\u2019t likely to have the needed funding to carry out all of its mandates during the next decade.\nBut for now, Republican congressional leaders are vowing to maintain every big-ticket item.\nAt the same time, legacy contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n are seeking to safeguard multibillion-dollar rocket and manned capsule programs slated to explore deep space in coming decades.\nThe result, according to industry and transition officials, is a behind-the-scenes tussle pitting such established priorities against alternative, commercially driven projects championed by companies including entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. \nMr. Musk is a member of Mr. Trump\u2019s economic advisory council.\nFor each of the past four years, NASA has spent more than $2 billion overall developing its most powerful rocket, called Space Launch System, and a companion manned capsule, named Orion. They are often described as \u201cOld Space,\u201d representing cost-plus contracts combined with intense agency supervision and direction.\nFor years, NASA leaders and lawmakers have been arguing over the optimum use for those expensive programs, which have now climbed to about $3.3 billion a year, and are designed to ultimately transport humans to Mars around 2035. \nPrograms such as SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules, however, typically are referred to as \u201cNew Space,\u201d featuring less-costly, fixed-price contracts and reduced federal oversight. They have clear-cut missions to ferry cargo and, before the end of this decade, U.S. astronauts to the international space station.\nGrowing tension between the two approaches is highlighted by a Jan. 23 email from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a member of NASA\u2019s original transition team, to former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich,\n\n\n\n a confidant of Mr. Trump who also served on a higher-level transition team.\nIn the email, Mr. Miller advocates that NASA \u201chold an internal competition between Old Space and New Space\u201d to determine the best and least expensive way to return to the moon. \u201cIf this initiative can be approved quickly by the White House, and appropriately funded,\u201d he said in the email, there could be \u201cprivate American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the moon by 2020.\u201d\nAccording to the email, Mr. Miller, a former NASA official, says he \u201crewrote the 80+ page\u201d original transition report to emphasize commercial space partnerships with the agreement of White House aide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Noble.\n\n\n\n \nThe same email lists other potential strategies that were prepared for the White House: transitioning to privately owned and operated space stations, and refocusing NASA on economic development of space and creation of \u201cprivate sector jobs, over exploration and other more esoteric activities.\u201d\nMr. Miller, a space-industry consultant and strong advocate of moon missions, has long been a vocal foe of the Space Launch System (SLS). His critics contend the latest strategies are intended to damage or even kill the rocket program headed by Boeing.\nIn an interview Mr. Miller said he believes his proposals were forwarded to other White House aides, and didn\u2019t target, seek to downgrade or negatively affect SLS. The recommendations about the program were \u201cneutral,\u201d he added, and didn\u2019t affect it \u201cone way or the other.\u201d \nMr. Miller said he was asked by Mr. Noble \u201cto help with fixing a draft document,\u201d and The Trump administration\u2019s evolving space policy is expected to foster private investment, while likely favoring relatively short-term goals such as sending astronauts back to orbit the moon by 2020, according to industry and transition officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Delayed Deep-Space Rocket Suffers Test Failure (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "896",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-delayed-deep-space-rocket-suffers-test-failure-on-the-ground-11610863851?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=9",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said they couldn\u2019t immediately determine the cause of the premature shutdown, and therefore it was too early to determine what fixes would be necessary or even if the test needed to be repeated. They said engineers didn\u2019t know whether it was a hardware, software or sensor malfunction.\nBoeing is the prime contractor for the mammoth Space Launch System booster, which is more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted Apollo astronauts toward the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was slated for its first uncrewed launch late this year, but that schedule is now in flux. Political and budget pressures on the program, projected to cost a total of between $19 billion and $23 billion to complete, were already increasing.\n\nDeparting NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n repeatedly said in a news conference that the test shouldn\u2019t be considered a failure, because engineers and program managers gained important data. But he also said, \u201cIt\u2019s not everything we hoped it would be.\u201d\n\u201cNot everything went according to script,\u201d he said. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe setback comes at a difficult time for SLS and Boeing. Industry and government officials expect the Biden administration to shelve President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision of landing astronauts on the moon as early as 2024. For many years, influential Senate Republicans have championed SLS\u2014and annually appropriated robust funding for it\u2014despite its troubled development. But with the Senate now controlled by Democrats, those supporters stand to lose significant clout.\nEven before Saturday\u2019s failed test, former NASA officials and outside space experts said they expected that for early lunar missions SLS\u2014intended to become NASA\u2019s premier deep-space rocket\u2014might take a back seat to rockets under development by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., run by Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMonths before the test, according to industry officials, leaders of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which manufactures the SLS rocket\u2019s RS-25 engines, expressed growing concerns the entire SLS program could be curtailed or significantly delayed. These officials said the company leaders were telling bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill they worried NASA was considering such commercially developed alternatives to support the initial lunar missions. SLS has been under development for a decade, with individual launches expected to cost more than $1 billion apiece.\nOther elements of lunar missions for astronauts currently on the books also are likely to change, according to industry officials. Awards to two rival teams to build lunar landers, previously anticipated in February or March, are likely to be delayed as the Biden team reassesses those projects. So far, Congress has allocated about one-quarter of the funds NASA previously requested to support producing and testing such landers by 2024.\nIn addition, according to one person briefed on the issue, barring a last-minute change in plans, the Biden transition team shortly is expected to name Steve Jurczyk, a veteran career NASA official, as acting NASA administrator, succeeding Mr. Bridenstine who previously announced his departure. Mr. Jurczyk now serves as associate administrator, the agency\u2019s highest-ranking civil servant.\nThroughout most of his 33-year NASA career, Mr. Jurczyk has been associated most closely with robotic and scientific missions, areas new White House science advisers are likely to emphasize. Before Saturday\u2019s problematic test, Congress already moved to increase NASA\u2019s research budget for some earth-imaging and climate-change programs, a trend that industry and government officials expect will accelerate. NASA press officials couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Biden\u2019s transition team didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment.\nCongress originally called for the SLS rocket and a companion deep-space capsule, known as Orion, to take flight by the end of 2016. Later, NASA\u2019s target date for a 2018 uncrewed launch slipped to 2019, and then, partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to the end of 2021.\nA series of reports by government watchdogs have highlighted scheduling delays and safety issues, while noting that program managers burned through budget reserves and took testing shortcuts to make up time.\nBackers of the SLS program have sought to maintain public support for it. With development slow and the first flight expected to lack the fanfare and publicity associated with carrying a crew, proponents had viewed Saturday\u2019s test The engines for a giant new rocket shut down prematurely during a key test on the ground, a potentially major setback for the space ambitions of NASA and Boeing, its prime contractor. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Delayed Deep-Space Rocket Suffers Test Failure (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "897",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-delayed-deep-space-rocket-suffers-test-failure-on-the-ground-11610863851?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=35",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said they couldn\u2019t immediately determine the cause of the premature shutdown, and therefore it was too early to determine what fixes would be necessary or even if the test needed to be repeated. They said engineers didn\u2019t know whether it was a hardware, software or sensor malfunction.\nBoeing is the prime contractor for the mammoth Space Launch System booster, which is more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted Apollo astronauts toward the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was slated for its first uncrewed launch late this year, but that schedule is now in flux. Political and budget pressures on the program, projected to cost a total of between $19 billion and $23 billion to complete, were already increasing.\n\nDeparting NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n repeatedly said in a news conference that the test shouldn\u2019t be considered a failure, because engineers and program managers gained important data. But he also said, \u201cIt\u2019s not everything we hoped it would be.\u201d\n\u201cNot everything went according to script,\u201d he said. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe setback comes at a difficult time for SLS and Boeing. Industry and government officials expect the Biden administration to shelve President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision of landing astronauts on the moon as early as 2024. For many years, influential Senate Republicans have championed SLS\u2014and annually appropriated robust funding for it\u2014despite its troubled development. But with the Senate now controlled by Democrats, those supporters stand to lose significant clout.\nEven before Saturday\u2019s failed test, former NASA officials and outside space experts said they expected that for early lunar missions SLS\u2014intended to become NASA\u2019s premier deep-space rocket\u2014might take a back seat to rockets under development by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., run by Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMonths before the test, according to industry officials, leaders of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which manufactures the SLS rocket\u2019s RS-25 engines, expressed growing concerns the entire SLS program could be curtailed or significantly delayed. These officials said the company leaders were telling bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill they worried NASA was considering such commercially developed alternatives to support the initial lunar missions. SLS has been under development for a decade, with individual launches expected to cost more than $1 billion apiece.\nOther elements of lunar missions for astronauts currently on the books also are likely to change, according to industry officials. Awards to two rival teams to build lunar landers, previously anticipated in February or March, are likely to be delayed as the Biden team reassesses those projects. So far, Congress has allocated about one-quarter of the funds NASA previously requested to support producing and testing such landers by 2024.\nIn addition, according to one person briefed on the issue, barring a last-minute change in plans, the Biden transition team shortly is expected to name Steve Jurczyk, a veteran career NASA official, as acting NASA administrator, succeeding Mr. Bridenstine who previously announced his departure. Mr. Jurczyk now serves as associate administrator, the agency\u2019s highest-ranking civil servant.\nThroughout most of his 33-year NASA career, Mr. Jurczyk has been associated most closely with robotic and scientific missions, areas new White House science advisers are likely to emphasize. Before Saturday\u2019s problematic test, Congress already moved to increase NASA\u2019s research budget for some earth-imaging and climate-change programs, a trend that industry and government officials expect will accelerate. NASA press officials couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Biden\u2019s transition team didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment.\nCongress originally called for the SLS rocket and a companion deep-space capsule, known as Orion, to take flight by the end of 2016. Later, NASA\u2019s target date for a 2018 uncrewed launch slipped to 2019, and then, partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to the end of 2021.\nA series of reports by government watchdogs have highlighted scheduling delays and safety issues, while noting that program managers burned through budget reserves and took testing shortcuts to make up time.\nBackers of the SLS program have sought to maintain public support for it. With development slow and the first flight expected to lack the fanfare and publicity associated with carrying a crew, proponents had viewed Saturday\u2019s test The engines for a giant new rocket shut down prematurely during a key test on the ground, a potentially major setback for the space ambitions of NASA and Boeing, its prime contractor. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Delayed Deep-Space Rocket Suffers Test Failure (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "898",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-delayed-deep-space-rocket-suffers-test-failure-on-the-ground-11610863851?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=39",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said they couldn\u2019t immediately determine the cause of the premature shutdown, and therefore it was too early to determine what fixes would be necessary or even if the test needed to be repeated. They said engineers didn\u2019t know whether it was a hardware, software or sensor malfunction.\n\n\n\n\nBoeing is the prime contractor for the mammoth Space Launch System booster, which is more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted Apollo astronauts toward the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was slated for its first uncrewed launch late this year, but that schedule is now in flux. Political and budget pressures on the program, projected to cost a total of between $19 billion and $23 billion to complete, were already increasing.\n\nDeparting NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n repeatedly said in a news conference that the test shouldn\u2019t be considered a failure, because engineers and program managers gained important data. But he also said, \u201cIt\u2019s not everything we hoped it would be.\u201d\n\u201cNot everything went according to script,\u201d he said. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe setback comes at a difficult time for SLS and Boeing. Industry and government officials expect the Biden administration to shelve President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision of landing astronauts on the moon as early as 2024. For many years, influential Senate Republicans have championed SLS\u2014and annually appropriated robust funding for it\u2014despite its troubled development. But with the Senate now controlled by Democrats, those supporters stand to lose significant clout.\nEven before Saturday\u2019s failed test, former NASA officials and outside space experts said they expected that for early lunar missions SLS\u2014intended to become NASA\u2019s premier deep-space rocket\u2014might take a back seat to rockets under development by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., run by Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n and Blue Origin Federation LLC, run by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMonths before the test, according to industry officials, leaders of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which manufactures the SLS rocket\u2019s RS-25 engines, expressed growing concerns the entire SLS program could be curtailed or significantly delayed. These officials said the company leaders were telling bipartisan supporters on Capitol Hill they worried NASA was considering such commercially developed alternatives to support the initial lunar missions. SLS has been under development for a decade, with individual launches expected to cost more than $1 billion apiece.\nOther elements of lunar missions for astronauts currently on the books also are likely to change, according to industry officials. Awards to two rival teams to build lunar landers, previously anticipated in February or March, are likely to be delayed as the Biden team reassesses those projects. So far, Congress has allocated about one-quarter of the funds NASA previously requested to support producing and testing such landers by 2024.\nIn addition, according to one person briefed on the issue, barring a last-minute change in plans, the Biden transition team shortly is expected to name Steve Jurczyk, a veteran career NASA official, as acting NASA administrator, succeeding Mr. Bridenstine who previously announced his departure. Mr. Jurczyk now serves as associate administrator, the agency\u2019s highest-ranking civil servant.\nThroughout most of his 33-year NASA career, Mr. Jurczyk has been associated most closely with robotic and scientific missions, areas new White House science advisers are likely to emphasize. Before Saturday\u2019s problematic test, Congress already moved to increase NASA\u2019s research budget for some earth-imaging and climate-change programs, a trend that industry and government officials expect will accelerate. NASA press officials couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Biden\u2019s transition team didn\u2019t immediately return a request for comment.\nCongress originally called for the SLS rocket and a companion deep-space capsule, known as Orion, to take flight by the end of 2016. Later, NASA\u2019s target date for a 2018 uncrewed launch slipped to 2019, and then, partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to the end of 2021.\nA series of reports by government watchdogs have highlighted scheduling delays and safety issues, while noting that program managers burned through budget reserves and took testing shortcuts to make up time.\nBackers of the SLS program have sought to maintain public support for it. With development slow and the first flight expected to lack the fanfare and publicity associated with carrying a crew, proponents had viewed Saturday\u2019s The engines for a giant new rocket shut down prematurely during a key test on the ground, a potentially major setback for the space ambitions of NASA and Boeing, its prime contractor. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Launch Delayed by Valve Issue (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "899",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-starliner-launch-delayed-by-propulsion-problem-11628021155?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=25",
        "text": "NASA said some weren\u2019t in proper configuration for the launch, which was scheduled for Aug. 3. Engineering teams have ruled out a number of potential causes, including software, the agency said. \nThe high-profile flight was meant as a do-over for Boeing, after the Starliner failed to reach the space station in a late-2019 test flight because of software errors and following other delays. That botched mission dented the record of a company that has been at the forefront of U.S. space exploration, including the Apollo missions to the moon. \n\n\nLast week, officials from NASA said a preflight review of the launch had gone off smoothly. The agency had wanted to test the Starliner without a crew on board ahead of a planned launch with astronauts later this year. \nBoeing plans to power down the Starliner capsule Tuesday evening, NASA said, and the capsule and the Atlas V rocket that would have carried it into space will be moved back into a facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida from a launchpad there.\n\u201cWe\u2019re going to let the data lead our work,\u201d said John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president overseeing the Starliner program. He had said earlier Tuesday that the postponement disappointed him. Engineers at Boeing first detected the issue with the valves on Monday, according to the company. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe CST-100 Starliner was slated to deliver more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and supplies, and bring back material including oxygen tanks.\nThe launch previously had been planned for Friday, but was postponed after a Russian space vehicle mistakenly fired its thrusters while attached to the International Space Station a day earlier, forcing the facility into a tilt.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com Boeing\u2019s planned Starliner flight was postponed after engineers found a problem with some valves on a propulsion system used on the space capsule, the company and NASA said. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Launch Delayed by Valve Issue (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "900",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-starliner-launch-delayed-by-propulsion-problem-11628021155?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=24",
        "text": "NASA said some weren\u2019t in proper configuration for the launch, which was scheduled for Aug. 3. Engineering teams have ruled out a number of potential causes, including software, the agency said. \n\n\n\n\nThe high-profile flight was meant as a do-over for Boeing, after the Starliner failed to reach the space station in a late-2019 test flight because of software errors and following other delays. That botched mission dented the record of a company that has been at the forefront of U.S. space exploration, including the Apollo missions to the moon. \n\n\nLast week, officials from NASA said a preflight review of the launch had gone off smoothly. The agency had wanted to test the Starliner without a crew on board ahead of a planned launch with astronauts later this year. \nBoeing plans to power down the Starliner capsule Tuesday evening, NASA said, and the capsule and the Atlas V rocket that would have carried it into space will be moved back into a facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida from a launchpad there.\n\u201cWe\u2019re going to let the data lead our work,\u201d said John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president overseeing the Starliner program. He had said earlier Tuesday that the postponement disappointed him. Engineers at Boeing first detected the issue with the valves on Monday, according to the company. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe CST-100 Starliner was slated to deliver more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and supplies, and bring back material including oxygen tanks.\nThe launch previously had been planned for Friday, but was postponed after a Russian space vehicle mistakenly fired its thrusters while attached to the International Space Station a day earlier, forcing the facility into a tilt.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com Boeing\u2019s planned Starliner flight was postponed after engineers found a problem with some valves on a propulsion system used on the space capsule, the company and NASA said. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Air Taxis and Self-Driving Aircraft: Aviation Industry Faces Its Future (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "901",
        "date": "2018-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/air-taxis-and-self-driving-aircraft-aviation-industry-faces-its-future-1532174400?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=71",
        "text": "Much of the attention at the biennial aerospace jamboree was on still-developing forms of air transport that were widely dismissed as science fiction barely a few years ago.\nSuch next-generation projects are a contrast with the industry\u2019s recent fixation on designing and building more fuel-efficient planes, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n \u2019s 787 Dreamliner and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\u2019s\n\n\n A350 long-range jet. Fast-selling single-aisle jets, variants of the Boeing 737 and Airbus\u2019s A320 and the industry\u2019s workhorses, have been the stars of recent shows.\n\n\nThose new planes were dreamt up when the industry\u2019s future seemed focused in kerosene-burning, tube-and-wing shaped aircraft; the recent technological wizardry of such planes is in their fuel conservation, range and quiet engines. \n\n\nRelated New York-London in 3\u00bd Hours? Supersonic Travel May Be Back U.S., Boeing Complete $3.9 Billion Air Force One Deal As Farnborough Airshow Opens, Space Agencies Put Collaboration on Display Global Trade Spat Unnerves Plane Makers \n\n\nBut a look at what generated the most excitement in Farnborough indicates another future for the industry is coming into view.\nAt a Boeing briefing on the future of next-generation air transportation, Chief Technology Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Hyslop\n\n\n\n predicted urban flying vehicles would be able to transport passengers and goods relatively soon. Although it isn\u2019t clear whether they would be fully autonomous, or how regulators would manage air traffic, Mr. Hyslop boldly called it a \u201cnew era of transportation and mobility.\u201d\nSuch craft \u201care going to start flying around in the next few years\u201d without requiring airports, at least in a testing capacity, he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re talking decades.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mitch Snyder,\n\n\n\n president of Textron Inc.\u2019s Bell helicopter unit, told reporters he expected several of the company\u2019s fully-autonomous models would serve military and commercial customers within a few years. \nA contingent of space companies also exhibited at the show. Britain\u2019s space agency announced plans to create a spaceport from which to launch rockets. Even space enthusiasts were surprised \u201cby the sheer interest in space, the excitement it\u2019s created\u201d among show goers, said Patrick Wood, who runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n space operations in the U.K. \nSkeptics emphasize that some of these high-profile concepts have been touted before, only to fail. More than a decade ago, various companies promised fleets of small passenger planes to serve as air taxis buzzing between cities. That still hasn\u2019t happened.\nNow, though, the biggest, most-respected names in the industry are piling into some of these unconventional projects. Since 2003, closely held Aerion Corp. has been marketing its concept of the fastest business jet ever. This year,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin are part of the project.\nWhat\u2019s also changed is how seriously leading plane makers are taking the cutting-edge technology. Executives at Boeing and Airbus have watched entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n upend the car business and, much closer to home, the traditional rocket business with the success of his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. They hope to avoid similar disrupters affecting various other parts of their business.\nBritish aircraft engine maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Rolls-Royce Holdings\n\n\n PLC is a home-crowd favorite at Farnborough, and one seen as tradition-bound. This year, though, it is investing in hybrid-electric plane technology and showing off its own mini-electric airborne taxi helicopter concept.\nSpaceX\u2019s example resonates for startups such as Boom Technology Inc., which is developing an entirely business-class supersonic airliner. \n\u201cIf I hadn\u2019t seen [Mr. Musk\u2019s] successes, I probably wouldn\u2019t have started,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blake Scholl,\n\n\n\n the Denver, company\u2019s founder and chief executive, said. \u201cNew entrants in aerospace can do things that the incumbents can\u2019t.\u201d \n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com The Farnborough International Airshow in England this past week highlighted technology of the near future, including autonomous aircraft and urban flying vehicles that don\u2019t need an airport. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Air Taxis and Self-Driving Aircraft: Aviation Industry Faces Its Future (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "902",
        "date": "2018-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/air-taxis-and-self-driving-aircraft-aviation-industry-faces-its-future-1532174400?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=72",
        "text": "Much of the attention at the biennial aerospace jamboree was on still-developing forms of air transport that were widely dismissed as science fiction barely a few years ago.\n\n\n\n\nSuch next-generation projects are a contrast with the industry\u2019s recent fixation on designing and building more fuel-efficient planes, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -0.10%\n\n\n \u2019s 787 Dreamliner and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\u2019s\n\n\n A350 long-range jet. Fast-selling single-aisle jets, variants of the Boeing 737 and Airbus\u2019s A320 and the industry\u2019s workhorses, have been the stars of recent shows.\n\n\nThose new planes were dreamt up when the industry\u2019s future seemed focused in kerosene-burning, tube-and-wing shaped aircraft; the recent technological wizardry of such planes is in their fuel conservation, range and quiet engines. \n\n\nRelated New York-London in 3\u00bd Hours? Supersonic Travel May Be Back U.S., Boeing Complete $3.9 Billion Air Force One Deal As Farnborough Airshow Opens, Space Agencies Put Collaboration on Display Global Trade Spat Unnerves Plane Makers \n\n\nBut a look at what generated the most excitement in Farnborough indicates another future for the industry is coming into view.\nAt a Boeing briefing on the future of next-generation air transportation, Chief Technology Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Hyslop\n\n\n\n predicted urban flying vehicles would be able to transport passengers and goods relatively soon. Although it isn\u2019t clear whether they would be fully autonomous, or how regulators would manage air traffic, Mr. Hyslop boldly called it a \u201cnew era of transportation and mobility.\u201d\nSuch craft \u201care going to start flying around in the next few years\u201d without requiring airports, at least in a testing capacity, he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re talking decades.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mitch Snyder,\n\n\n\n president of Textron Inc.\u2019s Bell helicopter unit, told reporters he expected several of the company\u2019s fully-autonomous models would serve military and commercial customers within a few years. \nA contingent of space companies also exhibited at the show. Britain\u2019s space agency announced plans to create a spaceport from which to launch rockets. Even space enthusiasts were surprised \u201cby the sheer interest in space, the excitement it\u2019s created\u201d among show goers, said Patrick Wood, who runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n space operations in the U.K. \nSkeptics emphasize that some of these high-profile concepts have been touted before, only to fail. More than a decade ago, various companies promised fleets of small passenger planes to serve as air taxis buzzing between cities. That still hasn\u2019t happened.\nNow, though, the biggest, most-respected names in the industry are piling into some of these unconventional projects. Since 2003, closely held Aerion Corp. has been marketing its concept of the fastest business jet ever. This year,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin are part of the project.\nWhat\u2019s also changed is how seriously leading plane makers are taking the cutting-edge technology. Executives at Boeing and Airbus have watched entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n upend the car business and, much closer to home, the traditional rocket business with the success of his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. They hope to avoid similar disrupters affecting various other parts of their business.\nBritish aircraft engine maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Rolls-Royce Holdings\n\n\n PLC is a home-crowd favorite at Farnborough, and one seen as tradition-bound. This year, though, it is investing in hybrid-electric plane technology and showing off its own mini-electric airborne taxi helicopter concept.\nSpaceX\u2019s example resonates for startups such as Boom Technology Inc., which is developing an entirely business-class supersonic airliner. \n\u201cIf I hadn\u2019t seen [Mr. Musk\u2019s] successes, I probably wouldn\u2019t have started,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blake Scholl,\n\n\n\n the Denver, company\u2019s founder and chief executive, said. \u201cNew entrants in aerospace can do things that the incumbents can\u2019t.\u201d \n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com The Farnborough International Airshow in England this past week highlighted technology of the near future, including autonomous aircraft and urban flying vehicles that don\u2019t need an airport. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Air Taxis and Self-Driving Aircraft: Aviation Industry Faces Its Future (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "903",
        "date": "2018-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/air-taxis-and-self-driving-aircraft-aviation-industry-faces-its-future-1532174400?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=91",
        "text": "Much of the attention at the biennial aerospace jamboree was on still-developing forms of air transport that were widely dismissed as science fiction barely a few years ago.\n\n\n\n\nSuch next-generation projects are a contrast with the industry\u2019s recent fixation on designing and building more fuel-efficient planes, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -0.06%\n\n\n \u2019s 787 Dreamliner and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\u2019s\n\n\n A350 long-range jet. Fast-selling single-aisle jets, variants of the Boeing 737 and Airbus\u2019s A320 and the industry\u2019s workhorses, have been the stars of recent shows.\n\n\nThose new planes were dreamt up when the industry\u2019s future seemed focused in kerosene-burning, tube-and-wing shaped aircraft; the recent technological wizardry of such planes is in their fuel conservation, range and quiet engines. \n\n\nRelated New York-London in 3\u00bd Hours? Supersonic Travel May Be Back U.S., Boeing Complete $3.9 Billion Air Force One Deal As Farnborough Airshow Opens, Space Agencies Put Collaboration on Display Global Trade Spat Unnerves Plane Makers \n\n\nBut a look at what generated the most excitement in Farnborough indicates another future for the industry is coming into view.\nAt a Boeing briefing on the future of next-generation air transportation, Chief Technology Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Hyslop\n\n\n\n predicted urban flying vehicles would be able to transport passengers and goods relatively soon. Although it isn\u2019t clear whether they would be fully autonomous, or how regulators would manage air traffic, Mr. Hyslop boldly called it a \u201cnew era of transportation and mobility.\u201d\nSuch craft \u201care going to start flying around in the next few years\u201d without requiring airports, at least in a testing capacity, he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re talking decades.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mitch Snyder,\n\n\n\n president of Textron Inc.\u2019s Bell helicopter unit, told reporters he expected several of the company\u2019s fully-autonomous models would serve military and commercial customers within a few years. \nA contingent of space companies also exhibited at the show. Britain\u2019s space agency announced plans to create a spaceport from which to launch rockets. Even space enthusiasts were surprised \u201cby the sheer interest in space, the excitement it\u2019s created\u201d among show goers, said Patrick Wood, who runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n space operations in the U.K. \nSkeptics emphasize that some of these high-profile concepts have been touted before, only to fail. More than a decade ago, various companies promised fleets of small passenger planes to serve as air taxis buzzing between cities. That still hasn\u2019t happened.\nNow, though, the biggest, most-respected names in the industry are piling into some of these unconventional projects. Since 2003, closely held Aerion Corp. has been marketing its concept of the fastest business jet ever. This year,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin are part of the project.\nWhat\u2019s also changed is how seriously leading plane makers are taking the cutting-edge technology. Executives at Boeing and Airbus have watched entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n upend the car business and, much closer to home, the traditional rocket business with the success of his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. They hope to avoid similar disrupters affecting various other parts of their business.\nBritish aircraft engine maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Rolls-Royce Holdings\n\n\n PLC is a home-crowd favorite at Farnborough, and one seen as tradition-bound. This year, though, it is investing in hybrid-electric plane technology and showing off its own mini-electric airborne taxi helicopter concept.\nSpaceX\u2019s example resonates for startups such as Boom Technology Inc., which is developing an entirely business-class supersonic airliner. \n\u201cIf I hadn\u2019t seen [Mr. Musk\u2019s] successes, I probably wouldn\u2019t have started,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blake Scholl,\n\n\n\n the Denver, company\u2019s founder and chief executive, said. \u201cNew entrants in aerospace can do things that the incumbents can\u2019t.\u201d \n\u2014Andrew Tangel contributed to this article.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com The Farnborough International Airshow in England this past week highlighted technology of the near future, including autonomous aircraft and urban flying vehicles that don\u2019t need an airport. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Overtakes Bezos as World\u2019s Wealthiest Person (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "904",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-s-elon-musk-overtakes-amazon-s-jeff-bezos-as-world-s-wealthiest-person-11610045468?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=36",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s net worth totaled around $195 billion Thursday, up from roughly $30 billion a year ago and topping Mr. Bezos\u2019s wealth by about $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The value of Tesla\u2019s shares rose almost 8% Thursday, enough for Mr. Musk to overtake Mr. Bezos in the wealth ranking. Amazon\u2019s stock was up less than 1%. Mr. Bezos held the top spot for more than three years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s net worth rose to $188.5 billion as of 10:15 a.m. Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Britta Pedersen/DDP/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cHow strange,\u201d Mr. Musk tweeted Thursday about the milestone. \u201cWell, back to work\u2026\u201d\n\n\nEstablishing the net worth of the world\u2019s wealthiest can be tricky, in part because many of their holdings are private. Forbes, which also tracks the assets of billionaires, ranked Mr. Musk several billion dollars behind Mr. Bezos Thursday.\nBoth chief executives have been huge winners during the pandemic as the shares in their companies rose sharply even as the global economy was hit by the Covid-19 disease. Amazon\u2019s stock is up more than 60% over the past year, as people flocked to online shopping and business embraced the kind of cloud-computing services it offers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s wealth is tied largely to Tesla, whose market capitalization increased by more than 700% in the last year as investors poured money into electric-vehicle makers. The company is now the world\u2019s most valuable auto maker, and on Thursday also overtook\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n by value, making the car maker the fifth-largest U.S. company. Mr. Musk, 49, owned roughly 20% of Tesla as of year-end 2019, a securities filing showed. \nMr. Musk also is chief executive of privately held rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which joined with NASA last year to resume human space flight from American soil after years during which the U.S. relied on foreign rockets.\u00a0Bloomberg valued his stake in that venture at around $19 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe South Africa-born entrepreneur doesn\u2019t accept a salary from Tesla and instead is compensated in the form of stock awards when the company achieves certain milestones tied to items including Tesla\u2019s valuation and revenue. The stock options he became eligible for last year were worth more than $23 billion as of Wednesday, according to corporate-governance data company Equilar Inc.\nMr. Musk last year said he had moved to Texas\u2014a state that doesn\u2019t collect state income or capital-gains tax for individuals. SpaceX and Tesla have activities in Texas, though both maintain a large footprint in California.\nTesla, based in Silicon Valley, delivered nearly half a million vehicles globally last year and is expected to report its first full year of profit when it releases 2020 fourth-quarter earnings in a few weeks. The company in December also was included in the S&P 500 index.\nWrite to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com The value of Tesla\u2019s shares rose around 6% intraday Thursday, enough for Elon Musk to surpass Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Overtakes Bezos as World\u2019s Wealthiest Person (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "905",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-s-elon-musk-overtakes-amazon-s-jeff-bezos-as-world-s-wealthiest-person-11610045468?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=39",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s net worth totaled around $195 billion Thursday, up from roughly $30 billion a year ago and topping Mr. Bezos\u2019s wealth by about $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The value of Tesla\u2019s shares rose almost 8% Thursday, enough for Mr. Musk to overtake Mr. Bezos in the wealth ranking. Amazon\u2019s stock was up less than 1%. Mr. Bezos held the top spot for more than three years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s net worth rose to $188.5 billion as of 10:15 a.m. Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Britta Pedersen/DDP/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cHow strange,\u201d Mr. Musk tweeted Thursday about the milestone. \u201cWell, back to work\u2026\u201d\n\n\nEstablishing the net worth of the world\u2019s wealthiest can be tricky, in part because many of their holdings are private. Forbes, which also tracks the assets of billionaires, ranked Mr. Musk several billion dollars behind Mr. Bezos Thursday.\nBoth chief executives have been huge winners during the pandemic as the shares in their companies rose sharply even as the global economy was hit by the Covid-19 disease. Amazon\u2019s stock is up more than 60% over the past year, as people flocked to online shopping and business embraced the kind of cloud-computing services it offers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s wealth is tied largely to Tesla, whose market capitalization increased by more than 700% in the last year as investors poured money into electric-vehicle makers. The company is now the world\u2019s most valuable auto maker, and on Thursday also overtook\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n by value, making the car maker the fifth-largest U.S. company. Mr. Musk, 49, owned roughly 20% of Tesla as of year-end 2019, a securities filing showed. \nMr. Musk also is chief executive of privately held rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which joined with NASA last year to resume human space flight from American soil after years during which the U.S. relied on foreign rockets.\u00a0Bloomberg valued his stake in that venture at around $19 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe South Africa-born entrepreneur doesn\u2019t accept a salary from Tesla and instead is compensated in the form of stock awards when the company achieves certain milestones tied to items including Tesla\u2019s valuation and revenue. The stock options he became eligible for last year were worth more than $23 billion as of Wednesday, according to corporate-governance data company Equilar Inc.\nMr. Musk last year said he had moved to Texas\u2014a state that doesn\u2019t collect state income or capital-gains tax for individuals. SpaceX and Tesla have activities in Texas, though both maintain a large footprint in California.\nTesla, based in Silicon Valley, delivered nearly half a million vehicles globally last year and is expected to report its first full year of profit when it releases 2020 fourth-quarter earnings in a few weeks. The company in December also was included in the S&P 500 index.\nWrite to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com The value of Tesla\u2019s shares rose around 6% intraday Thursday, enough for Elon Musk to surpass Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Relocates to Texas (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "906",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-to-discuss-teslas-banner-year-despite-pandemic-silicon-valleys-future-11607449988?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=41",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s companies continue to maintain extensive operations in California, and other tech firms are expanding their presence there. Yet his decision to move underscores a growing discontent, particularly among wealthier tech professionals, with the cost of living in the state, a pre-pandemic real-estate crunch and clogged roads.\n\n\nRelated Musk Advises CEOs to Stop Wasting Time on Meetings Musk Criticizes Candy Makers for Lack of New Products Tesla Plans Stock Sale, Closing Year of Soaring Gains Heard on the Street: Tesla Is Watching Its Stock Price \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTaking up residence in Texas comes with personal benefits for Mr. Musk: The state doesn\u2019t collect state income or capital-gains tax for individuals. The auto executive qualified this year for billions of dollars in stock-option compensation as part of a pay-package agreement, making him the second-richest person in the world.\n\n\nDuring the spring, when Mr. Musk was sparring over coronavirus shelter-in-place orders that shut his factory near San Francisco,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n California Gov. Gavin Newsom\n\n\n\n told CNBC he was \u201cnot worried about Elon leaving any time soon\u201d and the state was committed to the car maker\u2019s success. \u201cWe may not be the cheapest place to do business but we are the best place to do business,\u201d Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said. Silicon Valley remains home to some of the hottest companies\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbnb Inc.\n\n\n and food delivery company DoorDash Inc. are poised for multibillion-dollar public listings this month and are both based in San Francisco. \nMr. Newsom\u2019s office didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment about Mr. Musk\u2019s move.\n\n\nMore From the WSJ CEO Council Trudeau Confident in Strong Recovery for 2021 Biden Adviser Sees U.S. Rejoining Iran Nuclear Deal \n\n\nThe pandemic has upended some of the most coveted aspects of working in Silicon Valley: the relative ease of networking and collaborating with like-minded tech workers, startup founders and investors bellying up to the bar to hash out deals, or the perks of free meals, laundry services, massage and fitness classes on lavish corporate campuses.\nSince Covid-19 struck, executives and employees have fled the San Francisco Bay Area for cheaper locales since remote working conditions have become the norm for many people. Last week,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Hewlett Packard Enterprise,\n\n\n whose origins trace back to the founding of Silicon Valley, said it planned to shift its headquarters to Texas. The departures have led many tech leaders and industry watchers to question whether the geographic region is losing its position as the nation\u2019s leading technology hub.\n\nPalantir Technologies Inc.,\n\n\n founded in the Bay Area in 2003, moved its headquarters to Denver this year. CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Karp,\n\n\n\n who co-founded the company, linked the departure to what he says is a view in Silicon Valley that is out of touch with American principles and societal needs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n During WSJ's CEO Council, the Tesla chief said the pandemic could reduce the region's impact and warned against \u201cmind viruses\u201d that harm dialogue on social media. Photo: Tobias Schwarz/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\nMr. Musk echoed that sentiment Tuesday, arguing the San Francisco Bay Area \u201chas too much influence on the world.\u201d That power is shifting, he said. \u201cI think we\u2019ll see some reduction in the influence of Silicon Valley.\u201d\nMr. Musk made the comments from Texas during The Wall Street Journal\u2019s CEO Council annual summit in an interview with Editor in Chief Matt Murray.\nPalantir co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joe Lonsdale,\n\n\n\n a venture capitalist, moved to Austin this year. The city has become an attractive alternative to Silicon Valley for tech industry professionals. He wrote in a Journal opinion article last month that California has turned into a place where \u201cbad policies discourage business and innovation, stifle opportunity and make life in major cities ugly and unpleasant.\u201d\nTwo other prominent conservative venture capitalists,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Keith Rabois,\n\n\n\n have cited what they see as Silicon Valley\u2019s liberal politics as reasons to relocate. Mr. Rabois said he is headed to Miami. Mr. Thiel has moved to Los Angeles.\nCalifornia\u2019s taxes underlie many of the complaints. Its personal income tax tops out at 13.3% for amounts over $1 million a year, the highest in the nation. Capital gains are taxed at a similar rate. Many who call the Bay Area home have expressed relief at the departure of tech professionals who have been blamed for driving up the cost of living and congesting the freeways.\nTesla\u2019s new car plant, its first U.S. factory outside Silicon Valley, is slated to open in Austin next year. Mr. Musk\u2019s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has operations in South Texas, leading Mr. Musk to spend a lot of time in the state. He filed paperwork in late Octo The Tesla chief\u2019s relocation makes him one of the highest-profile executives yet to leave Silicon Valley during the pandemic. He said California had become complacent with its innovators and taken them for granted. ",
        "author": "Heather Somerville"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Says He Personally Owns Bitcoin\u2014and So Does SpaceX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "907",
        "date": "2021-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-says-he-personally-owns-bitcoinand-so-does-spacex-11626908542?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=26",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s comments about bitcoin have added to price volatility, at times causing sharp swings in the cryptocurrency\u2019s value. Mr. Musk said that with his personal holding in bitcoin, he is financially affected when the price drops.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI might pump, but I don\u2019t dump,\u201d he said on a panel about bitcoin. \u201cI definitely do not believe in getting the price high and selling or anything like that.\u201d\n\n\nThe price of bitcoin briefly rose during the panel, but has since fallen, according to CoinDesk.\nMr. Musk didn\u2019t specify the size of his personal bitcoin holding or that of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name of SpaceX. Mr. Musk said he wasn\u2019t selling bitcoin, nor was SpaceX.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s comments on assets like bitcoin and dogecoin have helped send prices sky high \u2013 and crashing down \u2013 over the past year. WSJ explains Musk\u2019s influence on cryptocurrency investors, and why some experts think the \u2018Dogefather\u2019 is taking investors for a ride. Photo illustration: Liz Ornitz\n \n\n\nTesla in April said it had sold some of its bitcoin and had about $1.3 billion of its holding parked in its treasury at the end of the first quarter. \nThe billionaire chief executive said he also owns ethereum and dogecoin, other cryptocurrencies, though those holdings are worth less than his bitcoin stake.\nMr. Musk also reiterated his concerns about the energy that bitcoin mining consumes and said that Tesla likely would accept the cryptocurrency again if the process to generate the digital currency becomes less reliant on fossil fuels.\n\u201cI would want to do a little bit more diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50% and that there is a trend towards increasing that number,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com The Tesla chief executive said he and his rocket company hold he cryptocurrency, which he generally supports despite harboring concerns about its environmental impacts. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Pledges to Sell Tesla Stock if Twitter Voters Agree (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "908",
        "date": "2021-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-pledges-to-sell-tesla-stock-if-twitter-voters-agree-11636233979?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=18",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, considered the world\u2019s richest person after a surge in the value of his Tesla stock, previously blasted a proposed tax on billionaires that would have subjected some holdings of about 700 Americans to annual capital-gains taxes on increases in value.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cEventually, they run out of other people\u2019s money and then they come for you,\u201d Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter last month.\n\nThe plan would have taxed the billionaires\u2019 unrealized gains on publicly traded assets, so they would have owed tax annually on rising values whether the assets were sold or not. (Losses would have offset gains.) This change would have effectively eliminated the billionaires\u2019 ability to defer capital-gains taxes indefinitely.\nThe proposed tax drew strong opposition and was dropped soon after it was proposed in late October. Opponents feared that the tax could be broadened to apply to assets of less-wealthy taxpayers, among other things. \nMr. Musk\u2019s poll drew a response Saturday from Senate Finance Committee Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ron Wyden.\n\n\n\n \u201cWhether or not the world\u2019s wealthiest man pays any taxes at all shouldn\u2019t depend on the results of a Twitter poll,\u201d the Democrat from Oregon said in a statement in which the lawmaker voiced support for a tax on the income of billionaires.\nRegardless, if Mr. Musk is inclined to sell stock, now could be a good time to do it. The current top tax rate on long-term capital gains is 23.8%, but Congress has been considering raising it. Changes in capital-gains tax rates often take effect immediately, to prevent gamesmanship.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up News Alert Major world and business news, including political events, takeovers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMr. Musk holds more than 17% of Tesla stock, valued at over $200 billion, according to the most recent available data in FactSet. Mr. Musk, who also runs the privately held rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has a total net worth of around $338 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.\nA Tesla share sale could amount to around $21 billion based on the stock\u2019s Friday closing price of $1,222.09. The Twitter poll is scheduled to close Sunday afternoon.\nMr. Musk accepts no salary at Tesla. In a tweet Saturday he said \u201cthe only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.\u201d Shares have risen about 75% over the past three months.\nHis compensation package entitles him to stock awards. He typically doesn\u2019t sell stock, though he has sold some to cover taxes on past stock options.\nSelling shares would weaken Mr. Musk\u2019s control over Tesla. Unlike\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Meta Platforms Inc.\n\n\n (formerly Facebook Inc.) and Google parent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.,\n\n\n Tesla lacks a dual-class of stock ownership, which gives founders supervoting power over common shareholders. \nMr. Musk has some personal loan obligations pledged against his Tesla stock, according to a company regulatory filing.\nMr. Musk in September said he \u201cwould prefer to stay out of politics\u201d after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Texas Gov. Greg Abbott,\n\n\n\n a Republican, said the billionaire supported his social policies. Mr. Musk, who has since said he would move Tesla\u2019s corporate headquarters to Texas from California, has become increasingly critical of the Biden administration, after Tesla wasn\u2019t invited to a White House event aimed at accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles.\n\u2014Richard Rubin contributed to this article.\nWrite to Laura Saunders at laura.saunders@wsj.com and Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com Should Elon Musk sell 10% of his Tesla stock? The billionaire asks Twitter followers and commits to following their directive, amid debates about capital-gains taxes. ",
        "author": "Laura Saunders and Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Says He Tested Positive for Covid-19 (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "909",
        "date": "2020-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-says-he-tested-both-positive-and-negative-for-covid-19-11605251724?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=33",
        "text": "Mr. Musk said Saturday he was getting another test with results expected Sunday. \u201cAlmost no symptoms today, so hopefully better results,\u201d he tweeted.\n\n\n\n\nAfter the earlier mixed outcome of the rapid-response tests, Mr. Musk late Thursday tweeted: \u201cSomething extremely bogus is going on,\u201d later adding, \u201cIf it\u2019s happening to me, it\u2019s happening to others.\u201d\n\nHis comments about the results met with a chorus of Twitter followers who shared skepticism about the tests, alleging high false-positive rates and widespread misdiagnosis. Among those making the claims were groups and individuals who have publicly opposed the lockdowns and other restrictions mandated by governments to try to stem the spread of the virus.\nHealth officials in the U.S. are reporting higher infection rates, as well as more hospitalizations due to Covid-19 that rose to a record 68,516 Friday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.\nThe symptoms Mr. Musk initially said he had experienced were mild \u201csniffles & cough & slight fever past few days.\u201d \n\n\nMore on Elon Musk Musk\u2019s SpaceX, Once a Washington Outsider, Courts Military Business (Nov. 4) Tesla Pulls Ahead in the Coronavirus Era After Musk\u2019s Years of Struggle (Aug. 2) Behind Musk\u2019s Fight to Keep Up With Detroit (May 13) Musk, Tech\u2019s Cash-Poor Billionaire (May 8) Musk\u2019s Defiance in the Time of Coronavirus (March 20) \n\n\nIf a diagnosis is confirmed, Mr. Musk would become one of several CEOs to reveal they contracted the virus. Morgan Stanley CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Gorman,\n\n\n\n NBCUniversal CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Shell\n\n\n\n and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Antonio Neri\n\n\n\n revealed positive diagnoses earlier this year. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard Willard,\n\n\n\n former CEO of Altria Group Inc., took a temporary medical leave after a positive diagnosis in March and announced his retirement in April after a rocky two-year tenure leading the Marlboro maker. \nThrough the pandemic, management teams have worked to fortify succession plans and review backup operating plans when critical employees fall ill. \nIn March, Mr. Musk said there would likely be close to zero new Covid-19 cases in the U.S. by the end of April. The outspoken CEO also said in March: \u201cMy guess is that the panic will cause more harm than the virus, if that hasn\u2019t happened already.\u201d\nMr. Musk disclosed the test results ahead of a planned rocket launch by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., where he also is CEO. The launch from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station\u2014the launch was scheduled for Saturday, but got delayed as a result of onshore winds and for booster-recovery operations.\nNASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n on Friday said it was the agency\u2019s policy that when someone tests positive, they self-isolate, and that it was looking to SpaceX to handle any appropriate contact tracing. \u201cIf there are adjustments that need to be made, we will make them,\u201d he said.\nThe astronauts scheduled to launch on the Falcon 9 rocket have been quarantining and, Mr. Bridenstine said, he wasn\u2019t aware of any contact between them and Mr. Musk. The crew, he said, \u201cshould be in good shape.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Coronavirus Briefing and Health Weekly Get a weekly briefing about the coronavirus pandemic and a Health newsletter when the crisis abates. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAmong the questions Mr. Musk on Twitter raised about Covid-19 testing was the level of false-positive rates for PCR tests. \u201cThe guy is spreading more misinformation on Covid than almost anyone else out there,\u201d said Ashish Jha, professor of health services and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. \u201cThings are horrible and he is actively using his platform to say things that will lead to more infections and deaths. It is deeply irresponsible and he should be better than this.\u201d\nMr. Jha said one of Mr. Musk\u2019s deputies contacted him early in the pandemic and asked him to make public statements asserting that a large number of false positive tests made the pandemic appear much worse than it was. Mr. Jha declined, he said, because \u201cthe idea that there are all these false positives with PCR tests is junk.\u201d\nFalse positives and false negatives can occur with any clinical test. False negative results, or failing to pick up a present infection, are more common with antigen tests, but false positives can also occur. Public-health authorities sometimes recommend a confirmatory PCR test and say that test results should be looked at in conjunction with other pieces of information, such as symptoms and potential exposure.\nMr. Musk and Tesla didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nOn Thursday, Alameda County, near San Francisco\u2014where Tesla\u2019s lone U.S. car factory is based\u2014warned of rising coronavirus cases and potential new restrictions to combat the disease. County health officials earlier this year ordered Tesla to temporarily close the car plant. \nOn an earnings call in April, with the U.S. plant shut, Mr. Musk railed against local shelter-in-place restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the virus.\n\u201cGive people back their goddamn freedom,\u201d he said. \nWhen Tesla reopened the Fremont plant in May, it had put in place safety protocols that county officials inspected. Workers have reported instances of Covid-19 cases among workers at the facility, though neither Tesla nor local authorities have commented on the scale of infection among the vehicle maker\u2019s staff.\nThe response to the pandemic has become a polarized issue in America. Mr. Musk retweeted several comments that sought to raise questions about the accuracy of tests.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Aerial footage showed forklifts in action, people walking and cars entering Tesla's car plant in Fremont, Calif., as Elon Musk said the electric-vehicle maker would defy a county order and resume production. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News (Originally Published May 12)\n \n\n\nThe rapid test, which Mr. Musk said was from Becton, Dickinson & Co., is one of several authorized antigen tests, which search for virus proteins in patient samples and can deliver a result in about 15 minutes. The tests tend to be less precise than laboratory-based PCR tests. But they are good at identifying those that have higher viral loads and are likely most infectious, public-health experts say.\n\u201cWe are aware of the tweet and are reaching out to learn more, consistent with our quality management process,\u201d a spokeswoman for Becton Dickinson said. \u201cWe stand by the quality, utility and science of our system and assay. There are many factors that could lead to a discordant result, including a low viral load.\u201d \nBecton Dickinson in September said it was investigating reports from nursing homes that federally provided rapid coronavirus testing equipment from the company was producing false-positive results in some cases.\nIt couldn\u2019t be determined why Mr. Musk took four rapid tests or how he had access to so many when many members of the public at times have struggled to get timely testing.\nDespite the turmoil of recent months and the wider global economic slowdown, Tesla has been navigating the health crisis with little apparent impact. Vehicles deliveries in the second quarter fell compared with the year-ago period.\nThe pandemic at one point threatened to derail Mr. Musk\u2019s plan to boost Tesla deliveries by about 36% this year with the closure of the plant. Mr. Musk fought to reopen the factory, and Tesla last month said its goal of delivering more than 500,000 vehicles this year could still be attainable. The company is on track to post its first full-year profit in 2020 despite the pandemic, according to analyst estimates.\nTesla shares were down about 0.8% Friday afternoon as the broader market advanced. \n\u2014Bowdeya Tweh and Brianna Abbott contributed to this article.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Heather Somerville at Heather.Somerville@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tBoth Mr. Musk\u2019s Covid-19 tests and Alameda County\u2019s advisory occurred Thursday. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said they occurred Wednesday. (Corrected on Nov. 13) The Tesla chief executive has repeatedly played down the risk of the coronavirus since early in the pandemic. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Heather Somerville"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Says He Tested Positive for Covid-19 (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "910",
        "date": "2020-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-says-he-tested-both-positive-and-negative-for-covid-19-11605251724?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=43",
        "text": "Mr. Musk said Saturday he was getting another test with results expected Sunday. \u201cAlmost no symptoms today, so hopefully better results,\u201d he tweeted.\n\n\n\n\nAfter the earlier mixed outcome of the rapid-response tests, Mr. Musk late Thursday tweeted: \u201cSomething extremely bogus is going on,\u201d later adding, \u201cIf it\u2019s happening to me, it\u2019s happening to others.\u201d\n\nHis comments about the results met with a chorus of Twitter followers who shared skepticism about the tests, alleging high false-positive rates and widespread misdiagnosis. Among those making the claims were groups and individuals who have publicly opposed the lockdowns and other restrictions mandated by governments to try to stem the spread of the virus.\nHealth officials in the U.S. are reporting higher infection rates, as well as more hospitalizations due to Covid-19 that rose to a record 68,516 Friday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.\nThe symptoms Mr. Musk initially said he had experienced were mild \u201csniffles & cough & slight fever past few days.\u201d \n\n\nMore on Elon Musk Musk\u2019s SpaceX, Once a Washington Outsider, Courts Military Business (Nov. 4) Tesla Pulls Ahead in the Coronavirus Era After Musk\u2019s Years of Struggle (Aug. 2) Behind Musk\u2019s Fight to Keep Up With Detroit (May 13) Musk, Tech\u2019s Cash-Poor Billionaire (May 8) Musk\u2019s Defiance in the Time of Coronavirus (March 20) \n\n\nIf a diagnosis is confirmed, Mr. Musk would become one of several CEOs to reveal they contracted the virus. Morgan Stanley CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Gorman,\n\n\n\n NBCUniversal CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Shell\n\n\n\n and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Antonio Neri\n\n\n\n revealed positive diagnoses earlier this year. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard Willard,\n\n\n\n former CEO of Altria Group Inc., took a temporary medical leave after a positive diagnosis in March and announced his retirement in April after a rocky two-year tenure leading the Marlboro maker. \nThrough the pandemic, management teams have worked to fortify succession plans and review backup operating plans when critical employees fall ill. \nIn March, Mr. Musk said there would likely be close to zero new Covid-19 cases in the U.S. by the end of April. The outspoken CEO also said in March: \u201cMy guess is that the panic will cause more harm than the virus, if that hasn\u2019t happened already.\u201d\nMr. Musk disclosed the test results ahead of a planned rocket launch by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., where he also is CEO. The launch from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station\u2014the launch was scheduled for Saturday, but got delayed as a result of onshore winds and for booster-recovery operations.\nNASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n on Friday said it was the agency\u2019s policy that when someone tests positive, they self-isolate, and that it was looking to SpaceX to handle any appropriate contact tracing. \u201cIf there are adjustments that need to be made, we will make them,\u201d he said.\nThe astronauts scheduled to launch on the Falcon 9 rocket have been quarantining and, Mr. Bridenstine said, he wasn\u2019t aware of any contact between them and Mr. Musk. The crew, he said, \u201cshould be in good shape.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Coronavirus Briefing and Health Weekly Get a weekly briefing about the coronavirus pandemic and a Health newsletter when the crisis abates. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAmong the questions Mr. Musk on Twitter raised about Covid-19 testing was the level of false-positive rates for PCR tests. \u201cThe guy is spreading more misinformation on Covid than almost anyone else out there,\u201d said Ashish Jha, professor of health services and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. \u201cThings are horrible and he is actively using his platform to say things that will lead to more infections and deaths. It is deeply irresponsible and he should be better than this.\u201d\nMr. Jha said one of Mr. Musk\u2019s deputies contacted him early in the pandemic and asked him to make public statements asserting that a large number of false positive tests made the pandemic appear much worse than it was. Mr. Jha declined, he said, because \u201cthe idea that there are all these false positives with PCR tests is junk.\u201d\nFalse positives and false negatives can occur with any clinical test. False negative results, or failing to pick up a present infection, are more common with antigen tests, but false positives can also occur. Public-health authorities sometimes recommend a confirmatory PCR test and say that test results should be looked at in conjunction with other pieces of information, such as symptoms and potential exposure.\nMr. Musk and Tesla didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nOn Thursday, Alameda County, near San Francisco\u2014where Tesla\u2019s lone U.S. car factory is based\u2014warned of rising coronavirus cases and potential new restrictions to combat the disease. County health off The Tesla chief executive has repeatedly played down the risk of the coronavirus since early in the pandemic. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Heather Somerville"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Says He Will Pay More Than $11 Billion in Taxes This Year (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "911",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-he-will-pay-more-than-11-billion-in-taxes-this-year-11640001132?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=5",
        "text": "Mr. Musk is the world\u2019s wealthiest person with a net worth of $243 billion as of Sunday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The majority of that wealth is tied up in Tesla and his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u00a0\n\n\nHe sparred last week with Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elizabeth Warren\n\n\n\n (D., Mass.), who called on the billionaire to pay more in taxes. \u201cLet\u2019s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,\u201d Ms. Warren tweeted, referring to Mr. Musk who was recently named Time magazine\u2019s person of the year.\u00a0\nMr. Musk responded at the time by saying that he will pay more taxes than any American in history this year.\nMr. Musk is compensated in stock awards and doesn\u2019t accept a cash salary from Tesla. He launched a Twitter poll last month asking people whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla holdings, which voters backed. He framed the poll question in the context of a continuing debate about how some of America\u2019s wealthiest individuals should be taxed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTesla shares dropped 3.5% on Monday, closing below $900 for the first time since October. The stock is up for the year, though it has lost more than a quarter of its value since Mr. Musk launched the Twitter poll and his ensuing stock sales.\u00a0\nHe faces an August 2022 deadline to convert roughly 22.9 million vested stock options into shares or let them expire worthless, according to a regulatory filing. He would need about $143 million to exercise those options, and could owe more than $9 billion in federal income and Medicare taxes upon exercising them.\u00a0\nUnder California law, Mr. Musk also likely would face a sizable state tax burden because exercised options are treated as compensation partly earned in the state while he lived there.\u00a0\nThat California tax likely would be due even though Mr. Musk said in late 2020 that he had moved to Texas. The state of Texas doesn\u2019t impose individual income or capital-gains taxes. He has also said he is moving Tesla\u2019s headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Silicon Valley.\nMr. Musk previously ridiculed a proposed tax on billionaires\u2019 unrealized capital gains, saying on Twitter that eventually the government runs \u201cout of other people\u2019s money and then they come for you.\u201d\u00a0\nWrite to Steven Russolillo at Steven.Russolillo@wsj.com The Tesla chief executive made the disclosure in a tweet on Sunday without offering additional details. ",
        "author": "Steven Russolillo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk, \u2018SNL,\u2019 Dogecoin, and Mother\u2019s Day: The Making of a Comic Cocktail (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "912",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-elon-musk-be-funny-on-snl-more-important-will-he-move-the-market-11620478835?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=31",
        "text": "Mr. Musk has flashed his comedic side while turning Tesla Inc. into one of the largest U.S. companies by market value and building a space business that is carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. He has won a global following and, for the first time, the show will be livestreamed internationally in over 100 countries via YouTube, NBC said Saturday.\n\n\n\n\nHis eclectic, from-the-hip style has helped the SpaceX and Tesla chief cultivate a loyal following and generate buzz around his ventures. It has also landed him in some hot water, and will make for an interesting comic cocktail on live\u2014albeit mostly scripted\u2014broadcast TV. \n\n\nIn a teaser for his appearance, Mr. Musk called himself a wild card before promising to be \u201cgood-ish\u201d with his mom slated to be attending the show for Mother\u2019s Day. \nSome investors appear to be betting that Mr. Musk\u2019s performance could be market moving, as his tweets often are. \nThe cryptocurrency dogecoin, which was created as a joke, has been repeat fodder for Mr. Musk on Twitter. He hinted in a tweet last month that \u201cThe Dogefather\u201d might feature on \u201cSNL.\u201d As of Friday afternoon, the price of the cryptocurrency had roughly doubled since the tweet, according to CoinDesk.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk has, naturally, turned to Twitter in recent days to crowdsource ideas for his appearance from among his roughly 53 million followers, and thrown out ideas of his own:\n\u201cThrowing out some skit ideas for SNL. What should I do?\u201d\n\u201cBaby Shark & Shark Tank merge to form Baby Shark Tank\u201d\n\u201cIrony Man\u2014defeats villains using the power of irony\u201d\n\u201cWoke James Bond SNL May 8\u201d\nWill he be funny? Here\u2019s a sampling of Mr. Musk\u2019s past attempts at humor, and some hints of what might be to come.\nMr. Musk has a habit of deploying humor against rivals, regulators and short sellers who bet against Tesla\u2019s stock. \u201cA lot of people think, \u2018Oh, he\u2019s gone crazy on Twitter,\u2019\u201d Mr. Musk said in a recent interview on the social-media app Clubhouse. \u201cI\u2019m like no, I started crazy on Twitter.\u201d \nLast summer, for example, Mr. Musk took a seemingly lewd swipe at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has sanctioned him over some of his tweets, triggering a warning from a Tesla investor, and a Musk response. \nAnd after rival space company Blue Origin LLC, owned by billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n challenged NASA\u2019s decision to award a high-profile contract to Space Exploration Technologies Corp., SpaceX\u2019s formal name, Mr. Musk responded in a tweet: \u201cCan\u2019t get it up (to orbit) lol.\u201d\nMr. Musk\u2019s humor isn\u2019t always biting. He reportedly met his girlfriend, Grimes, because of a joke about artificial intelligence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 49-year-old\u2019s comedy, occasionally, appears to come straight from a pre-teen\u2019s repertoire. At least some Tesla vehicles are capable of farting on command, among other unusual features. \n\u201cPlease put \u201cinvented car fart\u201d on my gravestone. This is my only request,\u201d he has tweeted. \nAmong his pop-culture credits, Mr. Musk has logged cameos on the sitcom \u201cThe Big Bang Theory\u201d and the movie \u201cIron Man 2.\u201d \nSome of his acts can backfire. Three years ago, for example, Tesla made an April Fool\u2019s joke about the company going bankrupt; the stock promptly fell. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShares in Tesla also retreated after Mr. Musk appeared to smoke marijuana during a late-night interview with comedian Joe Rogan. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you enjoy Elon Musk\u2019s brand of humor? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nPaul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth\u2019s Tuck School of Business who coaches executives, said that appearing on \u201cSNL\u201d is fraught with danger, but perhaps less so for Mr. Musk, who has already divided the crowd.\n\u201cPeople who like him will love him more for doing this, and people who don\u2019t will just find new ways to dislike him,\u201d Mr. Argenti said.\nWrite to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com The Tesla chief has been cracking wise for years, often at the expense of rivals, short sellers and regulators. Sometimes, his jokes have backfired. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s War on Regulators (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "913",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-regulators-crash-11619624227?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=23",
        "text": "Most chief executives try to avoid regulators\u2014or at least stay in their good graces. Many accused of overstepping have paid fines or agreed to make improvements. Mr. Musk, revered by some investors for his iconoclastic approach, has taken a different tack on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the world, not letting regulations hinder his goals to revolutionize transportation with Tesla Inc.\u2019s electric cars or colonize Mars using SpaceX rockets. Federal agencies say he\u2019s breaking the rules and endangering people. Mr. Musk says they\u2019re holding back progress. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that Tesla and a key regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, are failing to implement the NTSB\u2019s recommendations to prevent misuse of the company\u2019s advanced driver-assistance system. Both agencies are investigating a recent fatal crash involving a Tesla in Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration criticized SpaceX for launching a rocket in December without a proper FAA license. Mr. Musk ridiculed the FAA space division in a tweet as \u201cfundamentally broken.\u201dCrude remarks Mr. Musk stands out even when measured against other Silicon Valley titans, who have long bridled at regulators. Rather than engaging in a give-and-take with government authorities, Mr. Musk\u2019s default response includes making public, sometimes crude, remarks via Twitter disparaging them. After the Securities and Exchange Commission asked for information on whether Tesla was monitoring Mr. Musk\u2019s public messages\u2014as required under an amendment to a 2018 consent decree\u2014the billionaire last summer tweeted an apparent reference to a sex act: \u201cSEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon\u2019s.\u201d When asked to comment on the specifics of this article, Mr. Musk replied with a \u201cpoop\u201d emoji. Asked to elaborate, Mr. Musk declined to provide any input on his interactions with federal agencies or his view toward regulation. In a tweet Tuesday, Mr. Musk said he agrees with regulators \u201c99.9% of the time.\u201d He added that when they disagree, it \u201cis almost always due to new technologies that past regulations didn\u2019t anticipate.\u201d Tesla and SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. NHTSA said it is \u201cclosely evaluating potential next steps to ensure that drivers have access to the most effective measures to ensure their safety, including the understanding that they are fully responsible for the operation of the vehicle.\u201d An FAA spokesman said SpaceX has taken \u201ccorrective actions\u201d that enhance public safety since the December launch. An SEC spokesman declined to comment. Rather than encouraging Mr. Musk to conform, some shareholders revel in his behavior. Mr. Musk\u2019s fans \u201csee him as a freedom fighter and they cheer him on,\u201d says Nathan Weiss, an independent research analyst who has long followed Tesla. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has already designed rockets that are successfully in service taking cargo and people to space. Just last week, a SpaceX rocket brought four astronauts to the space station, for the first time employing a pre-used capsule and rocket. Earlier this month,NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to build a lunar lander for moon missions. SpaceX has run into conflict with regulators as it tests its new large rocket, the Starship, a reusable transportation system that can carry crew and cargo to Mars, according to the company\u2019s website.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX performs a test of its Starship SN8 rocket in Boca Chica, Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nTensions built as a Dec. 9 launch date approached. Reflecting the reality that early test flights often go awry, Mr. Musk tweeted on Dec. 7 that the launch had just a one-in-three chance of complete success. For the FAA, the acid test was whether a possible explosion would pose a threat to surrounding communities. Atmospheric conditions such as temperature, wind direction and clouds can affect the distance shock waves travel in an explosion, space aviation experts say. The FAA calculated that the launch might exceed its threshold for risk of injuries to the public. SpaceX presented the FAA with its own risk analysis. The FAA rejected SpaceX\u2019s analysis and declined to waive the agency\u2019s own safety criteria, according to an FAA spokesman.Fireball SpaceX launched the rocket anyway. The vehicle, dubbed SN8, soared miles into the air before returning to the launchpad nearly seven minutes later, exploding into a fireball on impact. No one was hurt and there were no reports of property damage. After the FAA delayed a January test launch, Mr. Musk accused the agency of holding back progress and argued that its regulations were outdated. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities,\u201d he tweeted on Jan. 28. \u201cUnder those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201d\n\n\nShare your thoughtsDo you think excessive regulation is holding back innovation The Tesla and SpaceX chief has become one of the world\u2019s most successful entrepreneurs by reinventing industries from electric cars to rockets. Along the way, he\u2019s also rewritten the rules of engagement with U.S. regulators. ",
        "author": "Susan Pulliam, Rebecca Elliott and Ben Foldy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s War on Regulators (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "914",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-regulators-crash-11619624227?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=31",
        "text": "Most chief executives try to avoid regulators\u2014or at least stay in their good graces. Many accused of overstepping have paid fines or agreed to make improvements. Mr. Musk, revered by some investors for his iconoclastic approach, has taken a different tack on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the world, not letting regulations hinder his goals to revolutionize transportation with Tesla Inc.\u2019s electric cars or colonize Mars using SpaceX rockets. Federal agencies say he\u2019s breaking the rules and endangering people. Mr. Musk says they\u2019re holding back progress. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that Tesla and a key regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, are failing to implement the NTSB\u2019s recommendations to prevent misuse of the company\u2019s advanced driver-assistance system. Both agencies are investigating a recent fatal crash involving a Tesla in Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration criticized SpaceX for launching a rocket in December without a proper FAA license. Mr. Musk ridiculed the FAA space division in a tweet as \u201cfundamentally broken.\u201dCrude remarks Mr. Musk stands out even when measured against other Silicon Valley titans, who have long bridled at regulators. Rather than engaging in a give-and-take with government authorities, Mr. Musk\u2019s default response includes making public, sometimes crude, remarks via Twitter disparaging them. After the Securities and Exchange Commission asked for information on whether Tesla was monitoring Mr. Musk\u2019s public messages\u2014as required under an amendment to a 2018 consent decree\u2014the billionaire last summer tweeted an apparent reference to a sex act: \u201cSEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon\u2019s.\u201d When asked to comment on the specifics of this article, Mr. Musk replied with a \u201cpoop\u201d emoji. Asked to elaborate, Mr. Musk declined to provide any input on his interactions with federal agencies or his view toward regulation. In a tweet Tuesday, Mr. Musk said he agrees with regulators \u201c99.9% of the time.\u201d He added that when they disagree, it \u201cis almost always due to new technologies that past regulations didn\u2019t anticipate.\u201d Tesla and SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. NHTSA said it is \u201cclosely evaluating potential next steps to ensure that drivers have access to the most effective measures to ensure their safety, including the understanding that they are fully responsible for the operation of the vehicle.\u201d An FAA spokesman said SpaceX has taken \u201ccorrective actions\u201d that enhance public safety since the December launch. An SEC spokesman declined to comment. Rather than encouraging Mr. Musk to conform, some shareholders revel in his behavior. Mr. Musk\u2019s fans \u201csee him as a freedom fighter and they cheer him on,\u201d says Nathan Weiss, an independent research analyst who has long followed Tesla. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has already designed rockets that are successfully in service taking cargo and people to space. Just last week, a SpaceX rocket brought four astronauts to the space station, for the first time employing a pre-used capsule and rocket. Earlier this month,NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to build a lunar lander for moon missions. SpaceX has run into conflict with regulators as it tests its new large rocket, the Starship, a reusable transportation system that can carry crew and cargo to Mars, according to the company\u2019s website.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX performs a test of its Starship SN8 rocket in Boca Chica, Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nTensions built as a Dec. 9 launch date approached. Reflecting the reality that early test flights often go awry, Mr. Musk tweeted on Dec. 7 that the launch had just a one-in-three chance of complete success. For the FAA, the acid test was whether a possible explosion would pose a threat to surrounding communities. Atmospheric conditions such as temperature, wind direction and clouds can affect the distance shock waves travel in an explosion, space aviation experts say. The FAA calculated that the launch might exceed its threshold for risk of injuries to the public. SpaceX presented the FAA with its own risk analysis. The FAA rejected SpaceX\u2019s analysis and declined to waive the agency\u2019s own safety criteria, according to an FAA spokesman.Fireball SpaceX launched the rocket anyway. The vehicle, dubbed SN8, soared miles into the air before returning to the launchpad nearly seven minutes later, exploding into a fireball on impact. No one was hurt and there were no reports of property damage. After the FAA delayed a January test launch, Mr. Musk accused the agency of holding back progress and argued that its regulations were outdated. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities,\u201d he tweeted on Jan. 28. \u201cUnder those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201d\n\n\nShare your thoughtsDo you think excessive regulation is holding back innovation The Tesla and SpaceX chief has become one of the world\u2019s most successful entrepreneurs by reinventing industries from electric cars to rockets. Along the way, he\u2019s also rewritten the rules of engagement with U.S. regulators. ",
        "author": "Susan Pulliam, Rebecca Elliott and Ben Foldy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s War on Regulators (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "915",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-regulators-crash-11619624227?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=31",
        "text": "Most chief executives try to avoid regulators\u2014or at least stay in their good graces. Many accused of overstepping have paid fines or agreed to make improvements. Mr. Musk, revered by some investors for his iconoclastic approach, has taken a different tack on his way to becoming one of the richest men in the world, not letting regulations hinder his goals to revolutionize transportation with Tesla Inc.\u2019s electric cars or colonize Mars using SpaceX rockets. Federal agencies say he\u2019s breaking the rules and endangering people. Mr. Musk says they\u2019re holding back progress. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that Tesla and a key regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, are failing to implement the NTSB\u2019s recommendations to prevent misuse of the company\u2019s advanced driver-assistance system. Both agencies are investigating a recent fatal crash involving a Tesla in Texas. The Federal Aviation Administration criticized SpaceX for launching a rocket in December without a proper FAA license. Mr. Musk ridiculed the FAA space division in a tweet as \u201cfundamentally broken.\u201dCrude remarks Mr. Musk stands out even when measured against other Silicon Valley titans, who have long bridled at regulators. Rather than engaging in a give-and-take with government authorities, Mr. Musk\u2019s default response includes making public, sometimes crude, remarks via Twitter disparaging them. After the Securities and Exchange Commission asked for information on whether Tesla was monitoring Mr. Musk\u2019s public messages\u2014as required under an amendment to a 2018 consent decree\u2014the billionaire last summer tweeted an apparent reference to a sex act: \u201cSEC, three letter acronym, middle word is Elon\u2019s.\u201d When asked to comment on the specifics of this article, Mr. Musk replied with a \u201cpoop\u201d emoji. Asked to elaborate, Mr. Musk declined to provide any input on his interactions with federal agencies or his view toward regulation. In a tweet Tuesday, Mr. Musk said he agrees with regulators \u201c99.9% of the time.\u201d He added that when they disagree, it \u201cis almost always due to new technologies that past regulations didn\u2019t anticipate.\u201d Tesla and SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. NHTSA said it is \u201cclosely evaluating potential next steps to ensure that drivers have access to the most effective measures to ensure their safety, including the understanding that they are fully responsible for the operation of the vehicle.\u201d An FAA spokesman said SpaceX has taken \u201ccorrective actions\u201d that enhance public safety since the December launch. An SEC spokesman declined to comment. Rather than encouraging Mr. Musk to conform, some shareholders revel in his behavior. Mr. Musk\u2019s fans \u201csee him as a freedom fighter and they cheer him on,\u201d says Nathan Weiss, an independent research analyst who has long followed Tesla. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has already designed rockets that are successfully in service taking cargo and people to space. Just last week, a SpaceX rocket brought four astronauts to the space station, for the first time employing a pre-used capsule and rocket. Earlier this month,NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.89 billion contract to build a lunar lander for moon missions. SpaceX has run into conflict with regulators as it tests its new large rocket, the Starship, a reusable transportation system that can carry crew and cargo to Mars, according to the company\u2019s website.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX performs a test of its Starship SN8 rocket in Boca Chica, Texas.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nTensions built as a Dec. 9 launch date approached. Reflecting the reality that early test flights often go awry, Mr. Musk tweeted on Dec. 7 that the launch had just a one-in-three chance of complete success. For the FAA, the acid test was whether a possible explosion would pose a threat to surrounding communities. Atmospheric conditions such as temperature, wind direction and clouds can affect the distance shock waves travel in an explosion, space aviation experts say. The FAA calculated that the launch might exceed its threshold for risk of injuries to the public. SpaceX presented the FAA with its own risk analysis. The FAA rejected SpaceX\u2019s analysis and declined to waive the agency\u2019s own safety criteria, according to an FAA spokesman.Fireball SpaceX launched the rocket anyway. The vehicle, dubbed SN8, soared miles into the air before returning to the launchpad nearly seven minutes later, exploding into a fireball on impact. No one was hurt and there were no reports of property damage. After the FAA delayed a January test launch, Mr. Musk accused the agency of holding back progress and argued that its regulations were outdated. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities,\u201d he tweeted on Jan. 28. \u201cUnder those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201d\n\n\nShare your thoughtsDo you think excessive regulation is holding back innovation The Tesla and SpaceX chief has become one of the world\u2019s most successful entrepreneurs by reinventing industries from electric cars to rockets. Along the way, he\u2019s also rewritten the rules of engagement with U.S. regulators. ",
        "author": "Susan Pulliam, Rebecca Elliott and Ben Foldy"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Returns to Earth in Rare Nighttime Splashdown (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "916",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-returns-four-astronauts-safely-to-earth-in-nighttime-splashdown-11619941622?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=31",
        "text": "Late last year, a SpaceX rocket powered the capsule carrying National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency into orbit. The capsule then docked with the ISS.\nSunday\u2019s return to Earth was the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since Apollo 8, which was the first mission to orbit the moon, in 1968.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronauts, from left, Shannon Walker, Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, shortly after returning to Earth.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe splashdown was the latest in a series of milestones for SpaceX and NASA, as the two fall into what they have described as an operational \u201ccadence.\u201d The partners now have regularly scheduled human shuttles to and from space using the company\u2019s commercially built rockets and capsules.\n\nLast month, a SpaceX rocket sent another manned capsule into orbit, where it docked with the ISS. Its crew of four is currently on the space station at the start of their mission there. \nIn November, SpaceX said it planned to launch seven capsules for NASA, including three cargo variants, over the following 15 months. The next human mission is set to take place in the fall, sending another team of astronauts for a separate six-month stint on the space station.\nWrite to Chip Cummins at chip.cummins@wsj.com A SpaceX capsule with four astronauts returning from the International Space Station splashed down early Sunday safely in the Gulf of Mexico, the first such nighttime return to Earth for NASA since 1968. ",
        "author": "Chip Cummins"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Returns to Earth in Rare Nighttime Splashdown (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "917",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-capsule-returns-four-astronauts-safely-to-earth-in-nighttime-splashdown-11619941622?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=31",
        "text": "Late last year, a SpaceX rocket powered the capsule carrying National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency into orbit. The capsule then docked with the ISS.\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s return to Earth was the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since Apollo 8, which was the first mission to orbit the moon, in 1968.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronauts, from left, Shannon Walker, Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, shortly after returning to Earth.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe splashdown was the latest in a series of milestones for SpaceX and NASA, as the two fall into what they have described as an operational \u201ccadence.\u201d The partners now have regularly scheduled human shuttles to and from space using the company\u2019s commercially built rockets and capsules.\n\nLast month, a SpaceX rocket sent another manned capsule into orbit, where it docked with the ISS. Its crew of four is currently on the space station at the start of their mission there. \nIn November, SpaceX said it planned to launch seven capsules for NASA, including three cargo variants, over the following 15 months. The next human mission is set to take place in the fall, sending another team of astronauts for a separate six-month stint on the space station.\nWrite to Chip Cummins at chip.cummins@wsj.com A SpaceX capsule with four astronauts returning from the International Space Station splashed down early Sunday safely in the Gulf of Mexico, the first such nighttime return to Earth for NASA since 1968. ",
        "author": "Chip Cummins"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Empires Jeff Bezos Built (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "918",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-empires-jeff-bezos-built-11625400002?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=26",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos Founded Amazon More Than 26 Years Ago. Here\u2019s What He Achieved.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Paul Souders/Getty Images\n\n\nStarting Monday, when Mr. Bezos leaves the CEO role to become executive chairman, the Amazon founder will enter a life that includes space exploration, philanthropy and splashy spending on real estate and new toys. As he hands over day-to-day management of the company to Amazon Web Services CEO \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andy Jassy,\n\n\n\n here\u2019s a look at the personal and professional empires he created: Long business tentacles Amazon dominates online retail, where it accounts for about 41% of all online sales, according to research firm eMarketer. But the company also helped pioneer cloud computing services and is a force in the advertising industry, where it now competes with ad titans \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Google and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn recent years, Amazon has forged its way deeper into the daily lives of Americans through its streaming services and smart devices, categories where it has maintained a grip even as competition has heated up. Its Alexa assistant and Fire TV streaming devices regularly rank among Amazon\u2019s bestselling items on its site, thanks in part to regular discounts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEndless hiring Few, if any, companies have ever come close to matching the hiring efforts Amazon undertook during the past year. The company added more than 500,000 employees world-wide in 2020 and could in coming years overtake \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart Inc.\n\n\n as the nation\u2019s largest employer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNumber of people employed at the warehouse\n\n\n8,862 (largest)\n\n\nWarehouses with an unknown \nnumber of employees\n\n\n2,500\n\n\n500\n\n\nStates with no Amazon warehouse facilities\n\n\nWash.\n\n\nN.H.\n\n\nMaine\n\n\nVt.\n\n\nMont.\n\n\nN.D.\n\n\nMinn.\n\n\nOre.\n\n\nN.Y.\n\n\nMich.\n\n\nMass.\n\n\nIdaho\n\n\nWis.\n\n\nS.D.\n\n\nCalif.\n\n\nWyo.\n\n\nIowa\n\n\nPa.\n\n\nOhio\n\n\nNeb.\n\n\nInd.\n\n\nNev.\n\n\nIll.\n\n\nUtah\n\n\nW.Va.\n\n\nColo.\n\n\nVa.\n\n\nKan.\n\n\nKy.\n\n\nMo.\n\n\nAriz.\n\n\nTenn.\n\n\nN.C.\n\n\nArk.\n\n\nS.C.\n\n\nOkla.\n\n\nN.M.\n\n\nMiss.\n\n\nGa.\n\n\nAla.\n\n\nTexas\n\n\nAlaska\n\n\nLa.\n\n\nFla.\n\n\nHawaii\n\n\n\n\n\nNumber of people employed at the warehouse\n\n\nWarehouses with \nan unknown number \nof employees\n\n\n8,862 (largest)\n\n\n2,500\n\n\n500\n\n\nStates with no Amazon \nwarehouse facilities\n\n\n\n\n\nNumber of people employed at the warehouse\n\n\n8,862 (largest)\n\n\n2,500\n\n\n500\n\n\nWarehouses with an unknown \nnumber of employees\n\n\nStates with no Amazon \nwarehouse facilities\n\n\n\nNote: Includes only facilities that are currently open; employees include seasonal staff\nSource: MWPVL \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo meet the demand it has seen, Amazon has opened warehouses at a steady pace throughout the country, part of its effort to deliver packages to customers in one day or less.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn Amazon worker gets boxes ready to ship in North Carolina.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeremy M. Lange for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon has had several rounds of hiring sprees. In the spring of 2020, it hired 175,000 workers to meet a surge in demand caused by the pandemic, later saying 125,000 of those workers could stay full-time with the company. In September, it added another 100,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada. And this May, it announced an addition of another 75,000 workers. The company has also boosted its corporate head count. In January, it announced the addition of about 3,000 employees to its corporate ranks in the Boston area, one of a number of expansions of technology jobs in major American cities for the company. And in June, it added 800 roles to its Amazon Web Services team in Redmond, Wash. Amazon said roughly 130,000 of its 950,000 U.S. employees work in its corporate offices. Hollywood success\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon entered the filmmaking industry in 2010 through its launch of Amazon Studios. Now a recognized producer and distributor of movies and television series, the Studios division has experienced Oscar-winning success as it has rolled out exclusive titles and featured headline actors such as Michael B. Jordan. Amazon has invested more in the division in recent years. Some of Amazon\u2019s most-recognized titles include \u201cThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,\u201d a series about a housewife in the 1950s becoming a comedian. The show has run for three seasons and become one of Amazon\u2019s most recognized titles. It has won numerous awards\u2014Golden Globes, Emmys and Screen Actors Guild, among others. This year, its 2020 movie \u201cSound of Metal\u201d about a drummer who begins to lose his hearing notched two Oscar wins at the Academy Awards. The recognition added to previous Oscar-winning titles, including 2016\u2019s \u201cManchester by the Sea.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has run for three seasons and become one of Amazon\u2019s most recognized titles.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Amazon Studios\n \n\n\n\nBezos empire Mr. Bezos plans to launch into space on July 20 in a capsule built by his rocket company, Blue Origin, in what will be the program\u2019s first human s As the Amazon founder launches into space, here\u2019s a look at the personal and professional empires he created. ",
        "author": "Sebastian Herrera and Angela Calderon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Other Big Problem: Fixing Its Space Program (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "919",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixing-its-space-program-11610773201?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=9",
        "text": "Its space ambitions will soon face a major test with another attempt to launch a capsule called the Starliner. In the first launch, just over a year ago without astronauts on board, a software error sent the Starliner into the wrong orbit, and then another threatened a catastrophic end to the mission. A successful launch, which could come as soon as March, would help restore the company\u2019s reputation for reliability and engineering prowess. The problems pose a serious challenge for Chief Executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n one year into his tenure as he charts a new course in the face of uncertainties wrought by the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCEO Dave Calhoun took over as CEO last year after a decade on Boeing\u2019s board.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0Ready for LiftoffWith commercial jetliner sales down, Boeinghas grown more reliant on its space anddefense arm.Boeing\u2019s annual revenue, by divisionSources: the company (2017\u201319); FactSet (2020)Note: 2020 figures are projections. Boeing Capital\u2019srevenue not shown.Created with Highcharts 8.1.0.billionCommercial AirplanesDefense, Space & SecurityGlobal Services2017'18'19'20020406080100$120\n\n\n\nAfter making record profit of $10.5 billion in 2018, Boeing has since lost nearly half that amount as of Sept. 30, largely due to a sharp drop in commercial aircraft deliveries and MAX-related charges. Defense and space revenue of $19.5 billion in the first nine months of last year eclipsed its commercial unit\u2019s $11.4 billion in sales. Jefferies analysts estimate Boeing brought in more than $6 billion in space revenue for all of last year. While the MAX has resumed flying passengers again after a nearly two-year grounding, quality lapses with popular 787 Dreamliners have stalled deliveries as Boeing workers fix production defects of newly finished jetliners. With travel demand still weak, Boeing is likely to remain heavily dependent in coming years on its defense and space business. Boeing declined to make any executives available for interviews. Mr. Calhoun said in a written statement that the company was \u201cproud of all the products and services our engineers have developed and delivered to our commercial and military customers over these last difficult years, and of the meaningful progress we are making in safety, transparency and quality.\u201d On the Starliner capsule and MAX alike, software and hardware systems weren\u2019t working properly together due to inadequate testing, insufficient resources or a combination of the two. Engineers working on different parts of the same program failed to coordinate with each other or to properly integrate software and hardware systems\u2014and senior managers failed to resolve the disconnects, according to government reviews and people familiar with the matter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner going into position above a rocket at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Nov. 21, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cory Huston/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s defense operation has seen similar missteps. The division has had long-running problems delivering an aerial-refueling tanker that remains years behind schedule and billions over budget. Air Force brass ultimately took charge of designing fixes last year. The stumbles coincided with what former and current executives, including Mr. Calhoun, have flagged as another problem: excessive focus on financial performance, a long-term trend Boeing is trying to reverse by empowering its engineers. Senior Pentagon and NASA officials have privately raised concerns about the range of Boeing\u2019s travails, according to several participants in those conversations. They have questioned Boeing\u2019s ability to deliver on promises about the performance and reliability of its products. An Air Force spokesman said the service is \u201ccommitted to working with Boeing to field critical capabilities for the warfighter.\u201d NASA officials have said the agency is looking forward to Boeing\u2019s coming uncrewed test and later company missions carrying astronauts. Mr. Calhoun, who took over as CEO in January 2020 after spending a decade on Boeing\u2019s board, has pledged to get the company\u2019s troubled programs back on track and to focus more on improving technical excellence and engineering decision-making. The company has revamped its internal safety-reporting procedures and the board\u2019s monitoring of overall safety issues\u2014all aimed at easing schedule and cost pressures on engineers and giving senior leaders greater oversight of emerging problems. In November, Boeing hired an engineer who previously worked at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, to be its first high-ranking executive overseeing software design across the company. On Wednesday, the company named a longtime senior engineer as its first chief aerospace safety officer. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you thin The last liftoff of the Starliner spacecraft was supposed to be a decisive win. Instead, it showed that Boeing\u2019s engineering and management issues went beyond its 737 MAX planes. Can the company redeem itself with its next launch? ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Other Big Problem: Fixing Its Space Program (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "920",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixing-its-space-program-11610773201?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=29",
        "text": "Its space ambitions will soon face a major test with another attempt to launch a capsule called the Starliner. In the first launch, just over a year ago without astronauts on board, a software error sent the Starliner into the wrong orbit, and then another threatened a catastrophic end to the mission. A successful launch, which could come as soon as March, would help restore the company\u2019s reputation for reliability and engineering prowess. The problems pose a serious challenge for Chief Executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n one year into his tenure as he charts a new course in the face of uncertainties wrought by the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCEO Dave Calhoun took over as CEO last year after a decade on Boeing\u2019s board.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter making record profit of $10.5 billion in 2018, Boeing has since lost nearly half that amount as of Sept. 30, largely due to a sharp drop in commercial aircraft deliveries and MAX-related charges. Defense and space revenue of $19.5 billion in the first nine months of last year eclipsed its commercial unit\u2019s $11.4 billion in sales. Jefferies analysts estimate Boeing brought in more than $6 billion in space revenue for all of last year. While the MAX has resumed flying passengers again after a nearly two-year grounding, quality lapses with popular 787 Dreamliners have stalled deliveries as Boeing workers fix production defects of newly finished jetliners. With travel demand still weak, Boeing is likely to remain heavily dependent in coming years on its defense and space business. Boeing declined to make any executives available for interviews. Mr. Calhoun said in a written statement that the company was \u201cproud of all the products and services our engineers have developed and delivered to our commercial and military customers over these last difficult years, and of the meaningful progress we are making in safety, transparency and quality.\u201d On the Starliner capsule and MAX alike, software and hardware systems weren\u2019t working properly together due to inadequate testing, insufficient resources or a combination of the two. Engineers working on different parts of the same program failed to coordinate with each other or to properly integrate software and hardware systems\u2014and senior managers failed to resolve the disconnects, according to government reviews and people familiar with the matter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner going into position above a rocket at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Nov. 21, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cory Huston/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s defense operation has seen similar missteps. The division has had long-running problems delivering an aerial-refueling tanker that remains years behind schedule and billions over budget. Air Force brass ultimately took charge of designing fixes last year. The stumbles coincided with what former and current executives, including Mr. Calhoun, have flagged as another problem: excessive focus on financial performance, a long-term trend Boeing is trying to reverse by empowering its engineers. Senior Pentagon and NASA officials have privately raised concerns about the range of Boeing\u2019s travails, according to several participants in those conversations. They have questioned Boeing\u2019s ability to deliver on promises about the performance and reliability of its products. An Air Force spokesman said the service is \u201ccommitted to working with Boeing to field critical capabilities for the warfighter.\u201d NASA officials have said the agency is looking forward to Boeing\u2019s coming uncrewed test and later company missions carrying astronauts. Mr. Calhoun, who took over as CEO in January 2020 after spending a decade on Boeing\u2019s board, has pledged to get the company\u2019s troubled programs back on track and to focus more on improving technical excellence and engineering decision-making. The company has revamped its internal safety-reporting procedures and the board\u2019s monitoring of overall safety issues\u2014all aimed at easing schedule and cost pressures on engineers and giving senior leaders greater oversight of emerging problems. In November, Boeing hired an engineer who previously worked at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, to be its first high-ranking executive overseeing software design across the company. On Wednesday, the company named a longtime senior engineer as its first chief aerospace safety officer. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think the future holds for Boeing? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThere are early signs Boeing\u2019s troubled Air Force tanker program, initially slated to cost $4.9 billion but later viewed as an albatross by senior Pentagon leaders, is getting on track. Under a deal with Boeing struck last year, the Pentagon wound up taking over the primary design of a revamped visual system essential for allowing aircraft to safely link The last liftoff of the Starliner spacecraft was supposed to be a decisive win. Instead, it showed that Boeing\u2019s engineering and management issues went beyond its 737 MAX planes. Can the company redeem itself with its next launch? ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Other Big Problem: Fixing Its Space Program (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "921",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixing-its-space-program-11610773201?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=35",
        "text": "Its space ambitions will soon face a major test with another attempt to launch a capsule called the Starliner. In the first launch, just over a year ago without astronauts on board, a software error sent the Starliner into the wrong orbit, and then another threatened a catastrophic end to the mission. A successful launch, which could come as soon as March, would help restore the company\u2019s reputation for reliability and engineering prowess. The problems pose a serious challenge for Chief Executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n one year into his tenure as he charts a new course in the face of uncertainties wrought by the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCEO Dave Calhoun took over as CEO last year after a decade on Boeing\u2019s board.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter making record profit of $10.5 billion in 2018, Boeing has since lost nearly half that amount as of Sept. 30, largely due to a sharp drop in commercial aircraft deliveries and MAX-related charges. Defense and space revenue of $19.5 billion in the first nine months of last year eclipsed its commercial unit\u2019s $11.4 billion in sales. Jefferies analysts estimate Boeing brought in more than $6 billion in space revenue for all of last year. While the MAX has resumed flying passengers again after a nearly two-year grounding, quality lapses with popular 787 Dreamliners have stalled deliveries as Boeing workers fix production defects of newly finished jetliners. With travel demand still weak, Boeing is likely to remain heavily dependent in coming years on its defense and space business. Boeing declined to make any executives available for interviews. Mr. Calhoun said in a written statement that the company was \u201cproud of all the products and services our engineers have developed and delivered to our commercial and military customers over these last difficult years, and of the meaningful progress we are making in safety, transparency and quality.\u201d On the Starliner capsule and MAX alike, software and hardware systems weren\u2019t working properly together due to inadequate testing, insufficient resources or a combination of the two. Engineers working on different parts of the same program failed to coordinate with each other or to properly integrate software and hardware systems\u2014and senior managers failed to resolve the disconnects, according to government reviews and people familiar with the matter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner going into position above a rocket at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Nov. 21, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cory Huston/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s defense operation has seen similar missteps. The division has had long-running problems delivering an aerial-refueling tanker that remains years behind schedule and billions over budget. Air Force brass ultimately took charge of designing fixes last year. The stumbles coincided with what former and current executives, including Mr. Calhoun, have flagged as another problem: excessive focus on financial performance, a long-term trend Boeing is trying to reverse by empowering its engineers. Senior Pentagon and NASA officials have privately raised concerns about the range of Boeing\u2019s travails, according to several participants in those conversations. They have questioned Boeing\u2019s ability to deliver on promises about the performance and reliability of its products. An Air Force spokesman said the service is \u201ccommitted to working with Boeing to field critical capabilities for the warfighter.\u201d NASA officials have said the agency is looking forward to Boeing\u2019s coming uncrewed test and later company missions carrying astronauts. Mr. Calhoun, who took over as CEO in January 2020 after spending a decade on Boeing\u2019s board, has pledged to get the company\u2019s troubled programs back on track and to focus more on improving technical excellence and engineering decision-making. The company has revamped its internal safety-reporting procedures and the board\u2019s monitoring of overall safety issues\u2014all aimed at easing schedule and cost pressures on engineers and giving senior leaders greater oversight of emerging problems. In November, Boeing hired an engineer who previously worked at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, to be its first high-ranking executive overseeing software design across the company. On Wednesday, the company named a longtime senior engineer as its first chief aerospace safety officer. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think the future holds for Boeing? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThere are early signs Boeing\u2019s troubled Air Force tanker program, initially slated to cost $4.9 billion but later viewed as an albatross by senior Pentagon leaders, is getting on track. Under a deal with Boeing struck last year, the Pentagon wound up taking over the primary design of a revamped visual system essential for allowing aircraft to safely link The last liftoff of the Starliner spacecraft was supposed to be a decisive win. Instead, it showed that Boeing\u2019s engineering and management issues went beyond its 737 MAX planes. Can the company redeem itself with its next launch? ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Other Big Problem: Fixing Its Space Program (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "922",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeings-other-big-problem-fixing-its-space-program-11610773201?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=39",
        "text": "Its space ambitions will soon face a major test with another attempt to launch a capsule called the Starliner. In the first launch, just over a year ago without astronauts on board, a software error sent the Starliner into the wrong orbit, and then another threatened a catastrophic end to the mission. A successful launch, which could come as soon as March, would help restore the company\u2019s reputation for reliability and engineering prowess. The problems pose a serious challenge for Chief Executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Calhoun\n\n\n\n one year into his tenure as he charts a new course in the face of uncertainties wrought by the pandemic.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCEO Dave Calhoun took over as CEO last year after a decade on Boeing\u2019s board.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter making record profit of $10.5 billion in 2018, Boeing has since lost nearly half that amount as of Sept. 30, largely due to a sharp drop in commercial aircraft deliveries and MAX-related charges. Defense and space revenue of $19.5 billion in the first nine months of last year eclipsed its commercial unit\u2019s $11.4 billion in sales. Jefferies analysts estimate Boeing brought in more than $6 billion in space revenue for all of last year. While the MAX has resumed flying passengers again after a nearly two-year grounding, quality lapses with popular 787 Dreamliners have stalled deliveries as Boeing workers fix production defects of newly finished jetliners. With travel demand still weak, Boeing is likely to remain heavily dependent in coming years on its defense and space business. Boeing declined to make any executives available for interviews. Mr. Calhoun said in a written statement that the company was \u201cproud of all the products and services our engineers have developed and delivered to our commercial and military customers over these last difficult years, and of the meaningful progress we are making in safety, transparency and quality.\u201d On the Starliner capsule and MAX alike, software and hardware systems weren\u2019t working properly together due to inadequate testing, insufficient resources or a combination of the two. Engineers working on different parts of the same program failed to coordinate with each other or to properly integrate software and hardware systems\u2014and senior managers failed to resolve the disconnects, according to government reviews and people familiar with the matter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Starliner going into position above a rocket at Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Nov. 21, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cory Huston/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s defense operation has seen similar missteps. The division has had long-running problems delivering an aerial-refueling tanker that remains years behind schedule and billions over budget. Air Force brass ultimately took charge of designing fixes last year. The stumbles coincided with what former and current executives, including Mr. Calhoun, have flagged as another problem: excessive focus on financial performance, a long-term trend Boeing is trying to reverse by empowering its engineers. Senior Pentagon and NASA officials have privately raised concerns about the range of Boeing\u2019s travails, according to several participants in those conversations. They have questioned Boeing\u2019s ability to deliver on promises about the performance and reliability of its products. An Air Force spokesman said the service is \u201ccommitted to working with Boeing to field critical capabilities for the warfighter.\u201d NASA officials have said the agency is looking forward to Boeing\u2019s coming uncrewed test and later company missions carrying astronauts. Mr. Calhoun, who took over as CEO in January 2020 after spending a decade on Boeing\u2019s board, has pledged to get the company\u2019s troubled programs back on track and to focus more on improving technical excellence and engineering decision-making. The company has revamped its internal safety-reporting procedures and the board\u2019s monitoring of overall safety issues\u2014all aimed at easing schedule and cost pressures on engineers and giving senior leaders greater oversight of emerging problems. In November, Boeing hired an engineer who previously worked at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, to be its first high-ranking executive overseeing software design across the company. On Wednesday, the company named a longtime senior engineer as its first chief aerospace safety officer. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think the future holds for Boeing? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThere are early signs Boeing\u2019s troubled Air Force tanker program, initially slated to cost $4.9 billion but later viewed as an albatross by senior Pentagon leaders, is getting on track. Under a deal with Boeing struck last year, the Pentagon wound up taking over the primary design of a revamped visual system essential for allowing aircraft to safely link The last liftoff of the Starliner spacecraft was supposed to be a decisive win. Instead, it showed that Boeing\u2019s engineering and management issues went beyond its 737 MAX planes. Can the company redeem itself with its next launch? ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Andrew Tangel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Officials Put Collaboration on Display at Airshow (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "923",
        "date": "2018-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-farnborough-airshow-opens-space-agencies-put-collaboration-on-display-1531724400?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=22",
        "text": "In the first such example at this year\u2019s event, the U.K.\u2019s space agency on Monday announced that Lockheed Martin Corp. won a $31 million contract to develop the country\u2019s first spaceport, to be located on the north coast of Scotland. For two years, British authorities have weighed plans for such a site to blast satellites into orbit and offer a potential base for zero-gravity tourist flights.\n\n\n\n\nThe agency also wants Lockheed Martin to develop technology able to simultaneously deploy up to six small satellites, and is seeking another company to separately build a small rocket relying on fuel with reduced carbon emissions. \n\n\nThe U.K. agency said the goal is to establish Europe\u2019s \u201cfirst one-stop shop for building, launching and operating satellites\u201d using rockets as well as innovative spaceplanes that take off like conventional aircraft. U.K. authorities hope to expand their market by negotiating legal and technical safeguards with Washington allowing various U.S. launch vehicles to blast off from British soil.\nOn Tuesday, heads of the European Space Agency and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration are expected to spell out cooperative efforts to send astronauts back to the moon, with the eventual goal of landing humans on Mars.\n\n\nRelated Boeing,Airbus Land $43 Billion Worth of Airliner Orders Trade Spat Unnerves Plane Makers \n\n\nLeading up to the show, ESA took preliminary steps to develop complementary technology that could be used as part of a joint mission as soon as 2026 to grab samples from Mars and return them to earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n received study contracts geared to achieve that long-term scientific goal.\nOver the years, Moscow and Washington managed to work closely together on space-related matters despite clashes over strategic issues. Now, industry and geopolitical experts are betting space can be similarly insulated from the broader discord roiling U.S.-European relations.\n\u201cAs a practical matter so far,\u201d space endeavors \u201cgenerally have remained unrelated to what\u2019s taking place with NATO and trade negotiations,\u201d according to James McAleese, a Northern Virginia-based consultant. And that discord, he added, \u201cisn\u2019t likely to have much future impact on\u201d the segment.\nCollaboration between U.S. and European governments and companies have been gaining steam this year. Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic LLC, entrepreneur Richard Branson\u2019s U.S. space-tourism startup, announced plans to build a new spaceport in Italy.\nAnd last month, Scott Pace, the White House\u2019s top space adviser, highlighted the importance of joining with other countries in both robotic and manned exploration. The U.S. wants \u201cto have the largest club we can\u201d to jointly explore the solar system, he told a federal space advisory committee.\nLast week, the Aerospace Industries Association released a report indicating that U.S. aerospace and defense companies generated some $143 billion in 2017 exports and a positive trade balance of roughly $86 billion.\u00a0That includes airlines and other nonspace products.\nA panel discussion at the show is slated to provide Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, his first high-profile opportunity to explain a cooperative vision to a global audience and meet with a range of international space leaders. Since taking office three months ago, Mr. Bridenstine has stressed that to succeed with deep-space exploration, NASA needs to team up with commercial operators and other governments.\nEuropean space experts agree. During an international conference in Colorado in April, David Parker, ESA\u2019s director of human and robotic exploration, said his agency\u2019s institutional \u201cDNA has national cooperation built in.\u201d\nA potential hurdle for collaboration, however, is an escalating public dispute between U.K. and European Union officials over Britain\u2019s continued involvement in the partly-finished, multibillion-dollar Galileo satellite navigation constellation. A majority of EU member states want to block British firms from competing for the next round of business, while London is demanding a delay of contracts pending resolution of Brexit negotiations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com From promoting space tourism to proposing new launch sites to setting up assembly lines to churn out small satellites, corporate and government space officials are pursuing intercontinental collaboration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Officials Put Collaboration on Display at Airshow (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "924",
        "date": "2018-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-farnborough-airshow-opens-space-agencies-put-collaboration-on-display-1531724400?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=65",
        "text": "In the first such example at this year\u2019s event, the U.K.\u2019s space agency on Monday announced that Lockheed Martin Corp. won a $31 million contract to develop the country\u2019s first spaceport, to be located on the north coast of Scotland. For two years, British authorities have weighed plans for such a site to blast satellites into orbit and offer a potential base for zero-gravity tourist flights.\nThe agency also wants Lockheed Martin to develop technology able to simultaneously deploy up to six small satellites, and is seeking another company to separately build a small rocket relying on fuel with reduced carbon emissions. \n\n\nThe U.K. agency said the goal is to establish Europe\u2019s \u201cfirst one-stop shop for building, launching and operating satellites\u201d using rockets as well as innovative spaceplanes that take off like conventional aircraft. U.K. authorities hope to expand their market by negotiating legal and technical safeguards with Washington allowing various U.S. launch vehicles to blast off from British soil.\nOn Tuesday, heads of the European Space Agency and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration are expected to spell out cooperative efforts to send astronauts back to the moon, with the eventual goal of landing humans on Mars.\n\n\nRelated Boeing,Airbus Land $43 Billion Worth of Airliner Orders Trade Spat Unnerves Plane Makers \n\n\nLeading up to the show, ESA took preliminary steps to develop complementary technology that could be used as part of a joint mission as soon as 2026 to grab samples from Mars and return them to earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n received study contracts geared to achieve that long-term scientific goal.\nOver the years, Moscow and Washington managed to work closely together on space-related matters despite clashes over strategic issues. Now, industry and geopolitical experts are betting space can be similarly insulated from the broader discord roiling U.S.-European relations.\n\u201cAs a practical matter so far,\u201d space endeavors \u201cgenerally have remained unrelated to what\u2019s taking place with NATO and trade negotiations,\u201d according to James McAleese, a Northern Virginia-based consultant. And that discord, he added, \u201cisn\u2019t likely to have much future impact on\u201d the segment.\nCollaboration between U.S. and European governments and companies have been gaining steam this year. Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic LLC, entrepreneur Richard Branson\u2019s U.S. space-tourism startup, announced plans to build a new spaceport in Italy.\nAnd last month, Scott Pace, the White House\u2019s top space adviser, highlighted the importance of joining with other countries in both robotic and manned exploration. The U.S. wants \u201cto have the largest club we can\u201d to jointly explore the solar system, he told a federal space advisory committee.\nLast week, the Aerospace Industries Association released a report indicating that U.S. aerospace and defense companies generated some $143 billion in 2017 exports and a positive trade balance of roughly $86 billion.\u00a0That includes airlines and other nonspace products.\nA panel discussion at the show is slated to provide Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, his first high-profile opportunity to explain a cooperative vision to a global audience and meet with a range of international space leaders. Since taking office three months ago, Mr. Bridenstine has stressed that to succeed with deep-space exploration, NASA needs to team up with commercial operators and other governments.\nEuropean space experts agree. During an international conference in Colorado in April, David Parker, ESA\u2019s director of human and robotic exploration, said his agency\u2019s institutional \u201cDNA has national cooperation built in.\u201d\nA potential hurdle for collaboration, however, is an escalating public dispute between U.K. and European Union officials over Britain\u2019s continued involvement in the partly-finished, multibillion-dollar Galileo satellite navigation constellation. A majority of EU member states want to block British firms from competing for the next round of business, while London is demanding a delay of contracts pending resolution of Brexit negotiations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com From promoting space tourism to proposing new launch sites to setting up assembly lines to churn out small satellites, corporate and government space officials are pursuing intercontinental collaboration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Officials Put Collaboration on Display at Airshow (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "925",
        "date": "2018-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-farnborough-airshow-opens-space-agencies-put-collaboration-on-display-1531724400?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=91",
        "text": "In the first such example at this year\u2019s event, the U.K.\u2019s space agency on Monday announced that Lockheed Martin Corp. won a $31 million contract to develop the country\u2019s first spaceport, to be located on the north coast of Scotland. For two years, British authorities have weighed plans for such a site to blast satellites into orbit and offer a potential base for zero-gravity tourist flights.\n\n\n\n\nThe agency also wants Lockheed Martin to develop technology able to simultaneously deploy up to six small satellites, and is seeking another company to separately build a small rocket relying on fuel with reduced carbon emissions. \n\n\nThe U.K. agency said the goal is to establish Europe\u2019s \u201cfirst one-stop shop for building, launching and operating satellites\u201d using rockets as well as innovative spaceplanes that take off like conventional aircraft. U.K. authorities hope to expand their market by negotiating legal and technical safeguards with Washington allowing various U.S. launch vehicles to blast off from British soil.\nOn Tuesday, heads of the European Space Agency and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration are expected to spell out cooperative efforts to send astronauts back to the moon, with the eventual goal of landing humans on Mars.\n\n\nRelated Boeing,Airbus Land $43 Billion Worth of Airliner Orders Trade Spat Unnerves Plane Makers \n\n\nLeading up to the show, ESA took preliminary steps to develop complementary technology that could be used as part of a joint mission as soon as 2026 to grab samples from Mars and return them to earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n received study contracts geared to achieve that long-term scientific goal.\nOver the years, Moscow and Washington managed to work closely together on space-related matters despite clashes over strategic issues. Now, industry and geopolitical experts are betting space can be similarly insulated from the broader discord roiling U.S.-European relations.\n\u201cAs a practical matter so far,\u201d space endeavors \u201cgenerally have remained unrelated to what\u2019s taking place with NATO and trade negotiations,\u201d according to James McAleese, a Northern Virginia-based consultant. And that discord, he added, \u201cisn\u2019t likely to have much future impact on\u201d the segment.\nCollaboration between U.S. and European governments and companies have been gaining steam this year. Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic LLC, entrepreneur Richard Branson\u2019s U.S. space-tourism startup, announced plans to build a new spaceport in Italy.\nAnd last month, Scott Pace, the White House\u2019s top space adviser, highlighted the importance of joining with other countries in both robotic and manned exploration. The U.S. wants \u201cto have the largest club we can\u201d to jointly explore the solar system, he told a federal space advisory committee.\nLast week, the Aerospace Industries Association released a report indicating that U.S. aerospace and defense companies generated some $143 billion in 2017 exports and a positive trade balance of roughly $86 billion.\u00a0That includes airlines and other nonspace products.\nA panel discussion at the show is slated to provide Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, his first high-profile opportunity to explain a cooperative vision to a global audience and meet with a range of international space leaders. Since taking office three months ago, Mr. Bridenstine has stressed that to succeed with deep-space exploration, NASA needs to team up with commercial operators and other governments.\nEuropean space experts agree. During an international conference in Colorado in April, David Parker, ESA\u2019s director of human and robotic exploration, said his agency\u2019s institutional \u201cDNA has national cooperation built in.\u201d\nA potential hurdle for collaboration, however, is an escalating public dispute between U.K. and European Union officials over Britain\u2019s continued involvement in the partly-finished, multibillion-dollar Galileo satellite navigation constellation. A majority of EU member states want to block British firms from competing for the next round of business, while London is demanding a delay of contracts pending resolution of Brexit negotiations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com From promoting space tourism to proposing new launch sites to setting up assembly lines to churn out small satellites, corporate and government space officials are pursuing intercontinental collaboration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "926",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-jared-isaacman-face-test-during-private-flight-to-orbit-11631698201?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=4",
        "text": "If the mission \u201cdoesn\u2019t go right, people are going to say that we shouldn\u2019t have done this,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\nThe husband and father of two said he has been fascinated by space since he was a child. He said for a long time he assumed that piloting high-performance jets\u2014Mr. Isaacman is an aviator certified to fly dozens of different kinds of aircraft\u2014would be the closest he would get to space.\n\nJoining Mr. Isaacman on board a space capsule that may launch as soon as Wednesday evening are Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and science communicator whose father worked at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility; Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, which will receive charitable funds raised by the mission; and Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nMr. Isaacman recently spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the flight. Here are edited excerpts from the interview:\nWSJ: What did you find the most surprising about the training process?\nMr. Isaacman: The intensity of it in general. When you learn to fly a fighter jet, you get a\u2026manual, and it\u2019s maybe 100 pages and you study it up; and you know everything about how it works, and you know what its limitations are and how to handle emergencies, and then you can get tested on it.\nI don\u2019t know why I thought that would be the same, and it was not. Our first two weeks at SpaceX, we\u2019ve got about 3,000 pages of academic material dropped on us, and it was just kind of death by PowerPoint, over and over, until you absorb it all.\nHow have you thought about the risks of this flight?\nIt doesn\u2019t take weeks of training or months to realize the risks. You know it inherently from the start that rockets are controlled explosions, [going] up to 17,500 miles an hour into an unforgiving environment. You gain confidence that those risks are minimal and mitigated based on the organization you\u2019re working with.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left: Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux arrive for the launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spacex/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWhy did you choose SpaceX for this mission?\nSpaceX returned human spaceflight to the United States, and no one is close to doing that other than them.\nHow did the flight come together?\nI was on a call in October of 2020\u2026with SpaceX, and it had nothing to do with space exploration. But I did close the call by making a comment that hey, you know, whenever you guys are ready to really open this thing up, keep me in mind, because I\u2019m super interested. And they were like, \u2018Oh, really? Because we might be a little bit closer you think.\u2019 And it was like a week later that Inspiration4 was born.\nWhat are the biggest hurdles to a mission like this?\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nI think availability of capital is number one. We\u2019re fortunate now [because] this is a low-interest-rate environment where investments can be made in space exploration because you\u2019re going to need those investments to drive down costs. SpaceX\u2019s goal to make life multiplanetary and get us to Mars and be able to stay there makes the Manhattan Project look small in comparison\u2026We need to be able to continue to make investments in this and the things here on Earth in order to justify those investments. And that\u2019s not easy. It\u2019s not easy for even one of the richest people in the world like Elon, but I know he\u2019s committed.\nWhat are you hearing from people in your network about this mission? Are they interested in going to space?\nI certainly get a lot of people who ask me about what it\u2019s like at SpaceX, and have you learned from it, and are there things you\u2019re taking away that you apply to your own business. The answer to all those is yes\u2026But no, surprisingly, none of my friends or anyone who said like, \u2018Hey, should I go up into space?\u2019 I think they\u2019re all in wait-and-see mode\u2014let\u2019s see how this one goes. Which is fine. That\u2019s what our mission is about too, opening it up.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\n\n\nThe Civilian Mission to OrbitMore WSJ coverage of the Inspiration4 launch, selected by the editors The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Launch This Week The founder of payments-processing company Shift4 Payments will lead the first orbital mission made up entirely of civilians. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "927",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-jared-isaacman-face-test-during-private-flight-to-orbit-11631698201?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=23",
        "text": "If the mission \u201cdoesn\u2019t go right, people are going to say that we shouldn\u2019t have done this,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\nThe husband and father of two said he has been fascinated by space since he was a child. He said for a long time he assumed that piloting high-performance jets\u2014Mr. Isaacman is an aviator certified to fly dozens of different kinds of aircraft\u2014would be the closest he would get to space.\n\nJoining Mr. Isaacman on board a space capsule that may launch as soon as Wednesday evening are Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and science communicator whose father worked at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility; Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, which will receive charitable funds raised by the mission; and Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nMr. Isaacman recently spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the flight. Here are edited excerpts from the interview:\nWSJ: What did you find the most surprising about the training process?\nMr. Isaacman: The intensity of it in general. When you learn to fly a fighter jet, you get a\u2026manual, and it\u2019s maybe 100 pages and you study it up; and you know everything about how it works, and you know what its limitations are and how to handle emergencies, and then you can get tested on it.\nI don\u2019t know why I thought that would be the same, and it was not. Our first two weeks at SpaceX, we\u2019ve got about 3,000 pages of academic material dropped on us, and it was just kind of death by PowerPoint, over and over, until you absorb it all.\nHow have you thought about the risks of this flight?\nIt doesn\u2019t take weeks of training or months to realize the risks. You know it inherently from the start that rockets are controlled explosions, [going] up to 17,500 miles an hour into an unforgiving environment. You gain confidence that those risks are minimal and mitigated based on the organization you\u2019re working with.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left: Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux arrive for the launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spacex/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWhy did you choose SpaceX for this mission?\nSpaceX returned human spaceflight to the United States, and no one is close to doing that other than them.\nHow did the flight come together?\nI was on a call in October of 2020\u2026with SpaceX, and it had nothing to do with space exploration. But I did close the call by making a comment that hey, you know, whenever you guys are ready to really open this thing up, keep me in mind, because I\u2019m super interested. And they were like, \u2018Oh, really? Because we might be a little bit closer you think.\u2019 And it was like a week later that Inspiration4 was born.\nWhat are the biggest hurdles to a mission like this?\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nI think availability of capital is number one. We\u2019re fortunate now [because] this is a low-interest-rate environment where investments can be made in space exploration because you\u2019re going to need those investments to drive down costs. SpaceX\u2019s goal to make life multiplanetary and get us to Mars and be able to stay there makes the Manhattan Project look small in comparison\u2026We need to be able to continue to make investments in this and the things here on Earth in order to justify those investments. And that\u2019s not easy. It\u2019s not easy for even one of the richest people in the world like Elon, but I know he\u2019s committed.\nWhat are you hearing from people in your network about this mission? Are they interested in going to space?\nI certainly get a lot of people who ask me about what it\u2019s like at SpaceX, and have you learned from it, and are there things you\u2019re taking away that you apply to your own business. The answer to all those is yes\u2026But no, surprisingly, none of my friends or anyone who said like, \u2018Hey, should I go up into space?\u2019 I think they\u2019re all in wait-and-see mode\u2014let\u2019s see how this one goes. Which is fine. That\u2019s what our mission is about too, opening it up.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\n\n\nThe Civilian Mission to OrbitMore WSJ coverage of the Inspiration4 launch, selected by the editors The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Launch This Week The founder of payments-processing company Shift4 Payments will lead the first orbital mission made up entirely of civilians. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "928",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-jared-isaacman-face-test-during-private-flight-to-orbit-11631698201?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=16",
        "text": "If the mission \u201cdoesn\u2019t go right, people are going to say that we shouldn\u2019t have done this,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe husband and father of two said he has been fascinated by space since he was a child. He said for a long time he assumed that piloting high-performance jets\u2014Mr. Isaacman is an aviator certified to fly dozens of different kinds of aircraft\u2014would be the closest he would get to space.\n\nJoining Mr. Isaacman on board a space capsule that may launch as soon as Wednesday evening are Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and science communicator whose father worked at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility; Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, which will receive charitable funds raised by the mission; and Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nMr. Isaacman recently spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the flight. Here are edited excerpts from the interview:\nWSJ: What did you find the most surprising about the training process?\nMr. Isaacman: The intensity of it in general. When you learn to fly a fighter jet, you get a\u2026manual, and it\u2019s maybe 100 pages and you study it up; and you know everything about how it works, and you know what its limitations are and how to handle emergencies, and then you can get tested on it.\nI don\u2019t know why I thought that would be the same, and it was not. Our first two weeks at SpaceX, we\u2019ve got about 3,000 pages of academic material dropped on us, and it was just kind of death by PowerPoint, over and over, until you absorb it all.\nHow have you thought about the risks of this flight?\nIt doesn\u2019t take weeks of training or months to realize the risks. You know it inherently from the start that rockets are controlled explosions, [going] up to 17,500 miles an hour into an unforgiving environment. You gain confidence that those risks are minimal and mitigated based on the organization you\u2019re working with.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left: Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux arrive for the launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spacex/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWhy did you choose SpaceX for this mission?\nSpaceX returned human spaceflight to the United States, and no one is close to doing that other than them.\nHow did the flight come together?\nI was on a call in October of 2020\u2026with SpaceX, and it had nothing to do with space exploration. But I did close the call by making a comment that hey, you know, whenever you guys are ready to really open this thing up, keep me in mind, because I\u2019m super interested. And they were like, \u2018Oh, really? Because we might be a little bit closer you think.\u2019 And it was like a week later that Inspiration4 was born.\nWhat are the biggest hurdles to a mission like this?\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nI think availability of capital is number one. We\u2019re fortunate now [because] this is a low-interest-rate environment where investments can be made in space exploration because you\u2019re going to need those investments to drive down costs. SpaceX\u2019s goal to make life multiplanetary and get us to Mars and be able to stay there makes the Manhattan Project look small in comparison\u2026We need to be able to continue to make investments in this and the things here on Earth in order to justify those investments. And that\u2019s not easy. It\u2019s not easy for even one of the richest people in the world like Elon, but I know he\u2019s committed.\nWhat are you hearing from people in your network about this mission? Are they interested in going to space?\nI certainly get a lot of people who ask me about what it\u2019s like at SpaceX, and have you learned from it, and are there things you\u2019re taking away that you apply to your own business. The answer to all those is yes\u2026But no, surprisingly, none of my friends or anyone who said like, \u2018Hey, should I go up into space?\u2019 I think they\u2019re all in wait-and-see mode\u2014let\u2019s see how this one goes. Which is fine. That\u2019s what our mission is about too, opening it up.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\n\n\nThe Civilian Mission to OrbitMore WSJ coverage of the Inspiration4 launch, selected by the editors The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Launch This Week The founder of payments-processing company Shift4 Payments will lead the first orbital mission made up entirely of civilians. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "929",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-jared-isaacman-face-test-during-private-flight-to-orbit-11631698201?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=22",
        "text": "If the mission \u201cdoesn\u2019t go right, people are going to say that we shouldn\u2019t have done this,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe husband and father of two said he has been fascinated by space since he was a child. He said for a long time he assumed that piloting high-performance jets\u2014Mr. Isaacman is an aviator certified to fly dozens of different kinds of aircraft\u2014would be the closest he would get to space.\n\nJoining Mr. Isaacman on board a space capsule that may launch as soon as Wednesday evening are Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and science communicator whose father worked at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration facility; Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, which will receive charitable funds raised by the mission; and Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nMr. Isaacman recently spoke with The Wall Street Journal about the flight. Here are edited excerpts from the interview:\nWSJ: What did you find the most surprising about the training process?\nMr. Isaacman: The intensity of it in general. When you learn to fly a fighter jet, you get a\u2026manual, and it\u2019s maybe 100 pages and you study it up; and you know everything about how it works, and you know what its limitations are and how to handle emergencies, and then you can get tested on it.\nI don\u2019t know why I thought that would be the same, and it was not. Our first two weeks at SpaceX, we\u2019ve got about 3,000 pages of academic material dropped on us, and it was just kind of death by PowerPoint, over and over, until you absorb it all.\nHow have you thought about the risks of this flight?\nIt doesn\u2019t take weeks of training or months to realize the risks. You know it inherently from the start that rockets are controlled explosions, [going] up to 17,500 miles an hour into an unforgiving environment. You gain confidence that those risks are minimal and mitigated based on the organization you\u2019re working with.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left: Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux arrive for the launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spacex/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWhy did you choose SpaceX for this mission?\nSpaceX returned human spaceflight to the United States, and no one is close to doing that other than them.\nHow did the flight come together?\nI was on a call in October of 2020\u2026with SpaceX, and it had nothing to do with space exploration. But I did close the call by making a comment that hey, you know, whenever you guys are ready to really open this thing up, keep me in mind, because I\u2019m super interested. And they were like, \u2018Oh, really? Because we might be a little bit closer you think.\u2019 And it was like a week later that Inspiration4 was born.\nWhat are the biggest hurdles to a mission like this?\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nI think availability of capital is number one. We\u2019re fortunate now [because] this is a low-interest-rate environment where investments can be made in space exploration because you\u2019re going to need those investments to drive down costs. SpaceX\u2019s goal to make life multiplanetary and get us to Mars and be able to stay there makes the Manhattan Project look small in comparison\u2026We need to be able to continue to make investments in this and the things here on Earth in order to justify those investments. And that\u2019s not easy. It\u2019s not easy for even one of the richest people in the world like Elon, but I know he\u2019s committed.\nWhat are you hearing from people in your network about this mission? Are they interested in going to space?\nI certainly get a lot of people who ask me about what it\u2019s like at SpaceX, and have you learned from it, and are there things you\u2019re taking away that you apply to your own business. The answer to all those is yes\u2026But no, surprisingly, none of my friends or anyone who said like, \u2018Hey, should I go up into space?\u2019 I think they\u2019re all in wait-and-see mode\u2014let\u2019s see how this one goes. Which is fine. That\u2019s what our mission is about too, opening it up.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\n\n\nThe Civilian Mission to OrbitMore WSJ coverage of the Inspiration4 launch, selected by the editors The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Launch This Week The founder of payments-processing company Shift4 Payments will lead the first orbital mission made up entirely of civilians. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Sees \u2018Golden Age\u2019 for Entrepreneurs in Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "930",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-sees-golden-age-for-entrepreneurs-in-space-1491436671?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=27",
        "text": "He said he was \u201chopeful\u201d that Blue Origin will begin offering trips for paying customers next year, adding that \u201cI\u2019m super optimistic\u201d there will be a large market for such 11-minute thrill rides in a fully automated capsule offering views of the earth from the edge of space. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t yet set a price or begun marketing efforts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBut in his remarks, the often secretive\u00a0Amazon\u00a0chairman also laid out a much broader, longer-term vision of how Blue Origin\u2019s accomplishments so far and its plans for the future are poised to usher in a \u201cgolden age of space exploration.\u201d\n\n\nSpurred by dramatic drops in the cost of access to space\u2014which he predicted ultimately could be one-hundredth of current prices\u2014he said \u201cyou will be living in a completely new world\u201d that will \u201chelp open the gateway to this new generation of people\u201d eager to start businesses involving space.\nWearing dark glasses, casually dressed and sometimes cracking jokes, an upbeat Mr. Bezos reiterated his argument that lowering launch costs promises a revolution in entrepreneurship and could provide a major boost for an array of startup companies world-wide. He said reaching the goal of affordable space access depends on three variables: talented people, money and patience. \u201cAnd we have all three,\u201d he snapped.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos addresses the media about the New Shepard rocket booster and Crew Capsule mockup at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n isaiah downing/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nAs one of the world\u2019s most successful and widely known entrepreneurs\u2014and a self-described \u201cspace geek\u201d who became fascinated by human exploration of the heavens as a youngster after watching Apollo moon landings -- Mr. Bezos has pumped big chunks of his fortune into Blue Origin.\u00a0Until Wednesday, however, he kept the amount confidential.\nBut in response to questions about the company\u2019s finances, he said: \u201cI sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.\u201d\nIn another disclosure about ongoing development of a future reusable, heavy-lift rocket called New Glenn\u2014named for late astronaut John Glenn\u2014Mr. Bezos estimated that project alone could cost as much as $2.5 billion.\nWith few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has avoided federal funds and sought to finance his space dreams out of his own pocket.\nVeteran space industry officials said the visual trappings of Wednesday\u2019s event, with the entrepreneur standing on a stage against the backdrop of snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, partly reflected the simmering rivalry between Mr. Bezos and entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n Both billionaires are stubborn, technically savvy and have a history of resorting to subtle one-upsmanship to comment on each other\u2019s successes.\nIn the past, Mr. Musk has used comparably flashy settings, replete with strobe lights and images of him prowling around a stage almost like a rock star, to introduce new SpaceX hardware. \nLast month, Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. made history by successfully launching and then vertically landing the main part of a Falcon 9 booster for a second time\u2014after sending a huge commercial satellite into orbit. Blue Origin accomplished a similar feat earlier and did it multiple times, though New Shepard is smaller, typically flies to a lower altitude and hasn\u2019t launched any satellites.\nSpaceX\u2019s feat prompted a gusher of publicity around the globe, driven by Mr. Musk\u2019s predictions that his company eventually could launch the same booster as many as 100 times, with minimal refurbishment in between flights.\nAsked about Mr. Musk\u2019s efforts, Mr. Bezos said \u201cwe\u2019re very like-minded in a lot of ways\u201d but the \u201cengineering approach is a little bit different.\u201d But the Amazon chief repeated his notion that repurposing launchers will make economic sense only if they can be returned to service quickly, like airliners, with simple inspections and routine procedures calling for refueling and minimal maintenance.\nMuch like his refusal to be pinned down on the cost of future tickets or precisely when Blue Origin envisions launching commercial service, Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t elaborate on how frequently tourist flights will blast off or how long he expects it will take until the same rocket launches several times a day.\nMr. Bezos began the press conference by climbing into the blue and white capsule named after the late astronaut Alan Shepard who was the first American in space, staring back at reporters through its super-sized windows and declaring: \u201cCan you imagine how Alan Shepard might have felt.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos, aboard the capsule named after the late astronaut Alan Shepard, says he sells about Looking to start space-tourism flights in 2018 that he predicts will open the floodgates for a new breed of entrepreneurs, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said in some years he has personally invested up to $1 billion to further those goals. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Sees \u2018Golden Age\u2019 for Entrepreneurs in Space (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "931",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-sees-golden-age-for-entrepreneurs-in-space-1491436671?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=125",
        "text": "He said he was \u201chopeful\u201d that Blue Origin will begin offering trips for paying customers next year, adding that \u201cI\u2019m super optimistic\u201d there will be a large market for such 11-minute thrill rides in a fully automated capsule offering views of the earth from the edge of space. Blue Origin hasn\u2019t yet set a price or begun marketing efforts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBut in his remarks, the often secretive\u00a0Amazon\u00a0chairman also laid out a much broader, longer-term vision of how Blue Origin\u2019s accomplishments so far and its plans for the future are poised to usher in a \u201cgolden age of space exploration.\u201d\n\n\nSpurred by dramatic drops in the cost of access to space\u2014which he predicted ultimately could be one-hundredth of current prices\u2014he said \u201cyou will be living in a completely new world\u201d that will \u201chelp open the gateway to this new generation of people\u201d eager to start businesses involving space.\nWearing dark glasses, casually dressed and sometimes cracking jokes, an upbeat Mr. Bezos reiterated his argument that lowering launch costs promises a revolution in entrepreneurship and could provide a major boost for an array of startup companies world-wide. He said reaching the goal of affordable space access depends on three variables: talented people, money and patience. \u201cAnd we have all three,\u201d he snapped.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos addresses the media about the New Shepard rocket booster and Crew Capsule mockup at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n isaiah downing/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nAs one of the world\u2019s most successful and widely known entrepreneurs\u2014and a self-described \u201cspace geek\u201d who became fascinated by human exploration of the heavens as a youngster after watching Apollo moon landings -- Mr. Bezos has pumped big chunks of his fortune into Blue Origin.\u00a0Until Wednesday, however, he kept the amount confidential.\nBut in response to questions about the company\u2019s finances, he said: \u201cI sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.\u201d\nIn another disclosure about ongoing development of a future reusable, heavy-lift rocket called New Glenn\u2014named for late astronaut John Glenn\u2014Mr. Bezos estimated that project alone could cost as much as $2.5 billion.\nWith few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has avoided federal funds and sought to finance his space dreams out of his own pocket.\nVeteran space industry officials said the visual trappings of Wednesday\u2019s event, with the entrepreneur standing on a stage against the backdrop of snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, partly reflected the simmering rivalry between Mr. Bezos and entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n Both billionaires are stubborn, technically savvy and have a history of resorting to subtle one-upsmanship to comment on each other\u2019s successes.\nIn the past, Mr. Musk has used comparably flashy settings, replete with strobe lights and images of him prowling around a stage almost like a rock star, to introduce new SpaceX hardware. \nLast month, Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. made history by successfully launching and then vertically landing the main part of a Falcon 9 booster for a second time\u2014after sending a huge commercial satellite into orbit. Blue Origin accomplished a similar feat earlier and did it multiple times, though New Shepard is smaller, typically flies to a lower altitude and hasn\u2019t launched any satellites.\nSpaceX\u2019s feat prompted a gusher of publicity around the globe, driven by Mr. Musk\u2019s predictions that his company eventually could launch the same booster as many as 100 times, with minimal refurbishment in between flights.\nAsked about Mr. Musk\u2019s efforts, Mr. Bezos said \u201cwe\u2019re very like-minded in a lot of ways\u201d but the \u201cengineering approach is a little bit different.\u201d But the Amazon chief repeated his notion that repurposing launchers will make economic sense only if they can be returned to service quickly, like airliners, with simple inspections and routine procedures calling for refueling and minimal maintenance.\nMuch like his refusal to be pinned down on the cost of future tickets or precisely when Blue Origin envisions launching commercial service, Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t elaborate on how frequently tourist flights will blast off or how long he expects it will take until the same rocket launches several times a day.\nMr. Bezos began the press conference by climbing into the blue and white capsule named after the late astronaut Alan Shepard who was the first American in space, staring back at reporters through its super-sized windows and declaring: \u201cCan you imagine how Alan Shepard might have felt.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Bezos, aboard the capsule named after the late astronaut Alan Shepard, says he sells about Looking to start space-tourism flights in 2018 that he predicts will open the floodgates for a new breed of entrepreneurs, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos said in some years he has personally invested up to $1 billion to further those goals. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Sides With \u2018Fortnite\u2019-Maker Epic in Battle Over Apple App Store Fees (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "932",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-sides-with-fortnite-maker-epic-in-battle-over-apple-app-store-fees-11627674037?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=25",
        "text": "Epic sued Apple last year, calling the company\u2019s control over software developers monopolistic. In a federal trial that concluded in May, Epic CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Sweeney\n\n\n\n accused Apple of unfairly profiting from the work of videogame makers. \n\n\n\n\nApple has defended how it operates the app store and said Epic\u2019s lawsuit was a basic disagreement over money. It takes as much as 30% of user spending that happens on most apps within its store. The company has said it spends money to ensure that the store provides a safe, secure way for users to download apps.\n\n\nU.S. District Judge\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers\n\n\n\n is expected to make a ruling on the dispute in the coming months. She scrutinized Apple\u2019s fees in the case and suggested the company doesn\u2019t have enough competition and set the 30% commission arbitrarily. She also said she was concerned that Epic didn\u2019t seem interested in paying Apple for access to customers. \nMr. Musk routinely takes aim at rivals and critics on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter,\n\n\n including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nOn Friday for example, he appeared to applaud the U.S. Government Accountability Office for rejecting appeals filed by Mr. Bezos\u2019 space company, Blue Origin LLC, and another company over a contract to develop a lunar lander. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Mr. Musk\u2019s rocket company, won the $2.9 billion contract. \n\u201cGAO,\u201d Mr. Musk said on Twitter, appending a \u201cmuscle\u201d emoji.\nHe also called last year for Amazon to be broken up after the online retail giant rejected a book about the Covid-19 pandemic.\nApple has been a relatively infrequent topic of Mr. Musk\u2019s Twitter musings. The billionaire has said he once reached out to Apple Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Cook\n\n\n\n about possibly acquiring Tesla and that Mr. Cook didn\u2019t take the meeting, a recollection he reprised on Twitter Friday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple\u2019s hardware, software and services work so harmoniously that it is often called a \u201cwalled garden.\u201d The idea is central to recent antitrust scrutiny and the Epic vs. Apple case. WSJ\u2019s Joanna Stern went to a real walled garden to explain it all. Photo illustration: Adele Morgan/The Wall Street Journal Tesla chief executive calls Apple fees \u2018a de facto global tax on the Internet.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Companies Secretly Boost Their Glassdoor Ratings (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "933",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-manipulate-glassdoor-by-inflating-rankings-and-pressuring-employees-11548171977?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=80",
        "text": "Concerned that negative reviews could hurt recruiting, Guaranteed Rate CEO \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Victor Ciardelli\n\n\n\n instructed his team to enlist employees likely to post positive reviews, said a person familiar with his instructions. In September and October these employees flooded Glassdoor with hundreds of five-star ratings. The company rating now sits at 4.1. Glassdoor has become an important arbiter of employee sentiment in today\u2019s highly competitive job market. A Wall Street Journal investigation shows it can be manipulated by employers trying to sway opinion in their favor.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn analysis of millions of anonymous reviews posted on Glassdoor\u2019s site identified more than 400 companies with unusually large single-month increases in reviews. Some companies, including \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and software giant \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SAP SE,\n\n\n have had multiple spikes. During the vast majority of these surges, the ratings were disproportionately positive compared with the surrounding months, the Journal\u2019s analysis shows. Glassdoor\u2019s problem echoes the challenges faced by other online rating platforms, which are trying to ensure their rankings are real. Amazon.com Inc., local-business site \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Yelp Inc.\n\n\n and hotel-and-restaurant site \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n TripAdvisor Inc.\n\n\n have all had to fend off attempts to game reviews and ratings. Glassdoor\u2019s company ratings are a powerful weapon in job recruiting, giving companies an incentive to inflate them. Sought-after workers\u2014the site gets about 60 million users per month, according to web-research firm SimilarWeb\u2014read reviews to help determine where they want to work. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSAP\u2019s stand at a job fair in Berlin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\u201cGlassdoor is the most dominant company reviews website by far,\u201d said Andy Challenger, vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. He said low ratings can discourage applicants, \u201cparticularly at a time like right now, with unemployment at historically low levels when companies are fighting to retain and attract good people.\u201d In the Journal\u2019s analysis, five-star ratings collectively made up 45% of reviews in the months where the number of reviews jumped, compared with 25% in the six months before and after. While it isn\u2019t possible to determine from the data alone what caused each spike, a statistical test shows the likelihood that so many would skew positive by chance is highly improbable. Well-known names with large spikes included messaging-app developer Slack Technologies Inc., professional-networking site LinkedIn, health insurer Anthem Inc., household-products maker \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Clorox Co.\n\n\n and Jack Daniel\u2019s maker \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Brown-Forman Corp.\n Spokespeople for Slack, LinkedIn and Anthem said their companies have encouraged employees to give feedback. A Brown-Forman spokeswoman said it doesn\u2019t have a formal strategy to solicit reviews. Clorox didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. In some cases, companies have encouraged loyal employees to post reviews as part of a publicity campaign. SpaceX and SAP, for example, galvanized employees to leave reviews to make Glassdoor\u2019s annual ranking of the \u201cBest Places to Work.\u201d Other companies, including Guaranteed Rate, have pressured employees to write positive reviews in order to raise poor ratings, according to interviews with current and former employees. Guaranteed Rate\u2019s Mr. Ciardelli said in a written statement that his management team felt Glassdoor ratings didn\u2019t accurately reflect the company\u2019s work environment and so it asked employees to post reviews.\n\n\n Star Search The Journal's analysis revealed unusually large single-month increases in five-star reviews on Glassdoor. Total reviews SpaceX monthly reviews 250 Share of reviews that have 5 stars 100 40 0% 60 80 20 10 Oct. 2018 Glassdoor annual rankings deadline. SpaceX places 48th. Oct. 2016 Reviews balloon around deadline for Glassdoor best-workplaces award. Of 248 total reviews, 73% are 5-star. Fall 2015 More than a dozen reviewers complain about work-life balance. \u201918 \u201916 \u201917 2015 August 2017 Interns provide 92% of five-star reviews. Around this time, SpaceX recruiter offers free mugs for Glassdoor reviews. July 2016 Interns provide 84% of five-star reviews amid an internal effort to increase company rating. SpaceX monthly reviews Total reviews 250 Share of reviews that have 5 stars 100 80 40 60 20 0% 10 Oct. 2018 Glassdoor annual rankings deadline. SpaceX places 48th. Oct. 2016 Reviews balloon around deadline for Glassdoor best-workplaces award. Of 248 total reviews, 73% are 5-star. Fall 2015 More than a dozen reviewers complain about work-life balance. \u201917 \u201918 \u201916 2015 July 2016 Interns provide 8 Employers flood the ranking site with 5-star postings requested from enthusiastic staffers, leading to unusual spikes, a WSJ investigation found. This is a conundrum facing many influential raters, including Amazon.com, Yelp and TripAdvisor, who have had to fend off attempts to game reviews. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andrea Fuller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sole U.S. Producer of a Vital Rocket Propellant Meets Competition (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "934",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sole-u-s-producer-of-a-vital-rocket-propellant-meets-competition-1514578249?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=105",
        "text": "By the late 1990s, federal officials gave the green light for that facility to become the only U.S. source of the compound, an essential oxidizer for solid rocket motors.\n\n\nRelated\n\n\n\n Orbital ATK Is Under White House Pressure for Foreign Purchase of Propellant \n\n\nVolume dropped sharply after the end of the Cold War and declined further during Pentagon budget tightening under President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama.\n\n\n\n Despite various ownership changes, however, the company continued to enjoy hefty margins as a sole-source producer.\n\n\nThe latest dispute follows a roughly fivefold increase in prices over a decade, according to the plant\u2019s largest customer. But it also reflects a fundamental business miscalculation by the investment vehicle for the prominent Huntsman clan, which acquired control of the company in 2015.\nUnder the leadership of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Huntsman Sr.\n\n\n\n , the family assembled a global chemical-making empire and members became civic and philanthropic leaders in Utah. \nJon Jr., a former Utah governor and GOP presidential candidate, currently serves as U.S. ambassador to Russia.\nWhen the family gained control of American Pacific from a private-equity group, it paid a premium including money set aside for environmental cleanup. The Huntsmans, according to people familiar with their thinking, felt confident they could continue charging premium prices for a product deemed essential by every branch of the U.S. armed services.\nBut things went sour quickly. The new owners didn\u2019t take into account the increasingly competitive landscape, particularly for rocket propulsion, prompted by the rise of commercial space companies, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nThe Huntsman team also realized too late the extent of the bad blood between their company and its biggest customer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Orbital ATK Inc.,\n\n\n which demanded deep price cuts in exchange for signing multiyear agreements.\nAn impasse over pricing has provided an opening for less-expensive foreign supplies. But Paul Huntsman, American Pacific\u2019s chairman and another son of Jon Sr., highlights the legacy of reliance on U.S. supplies. \u201cDomestically produced fuel,\u201d he said, \u201chas successfully supported our national security and space supremacy for the last 70 years.\u201d\nA Pentagon spokesman said the military prefers to \u201cmaintain a U.S. industrial capability\u201d for ammonium perchlorate but \u201ccontinues to explore many mitigation options in an effort to find the most cost-effective\u201d solution.\nAs the debate heats up, American Pacific supporters are campaigning for help from Pentagon brass and advisers in the West Wing of the White House to guarantee future prices and volumes. A French joint venture seeking to expand its foothold in the U.S. oxidizer market is advocating a compromise, according to industry officials involved in the discussions. The proposed solution envisions reserving some sole-source domestic contracts, but opening up other military and civilian business to international competition.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tAn explosion at an American Pacific Corp. predecessor\u2019s plant in 1988 near Henderson, Nev., killed two people and injured more than 300. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Henderson was in Utah. Also, the Huntsman team\u2019s biggest customer was Orbital ATK Inc. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the company\u2019s name as Orbitak ATK Inc. (Dec. 29, 2017)\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com An American Pacific Corp. plant has been ensnared in three decades of pricing and policy disputes. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Like Musk, Tesla\u2019s New Director Is Known as Maverick (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "935",
        "date": "2018-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/like-musk-teslas-new-director-is-known-as-maverick-11546021291?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=81",
        "text": "Both men are proud of their accomplishments as entrepreneurs. Mr. Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 and has built it into a business-software giant with a market value topping $160 billion. Mr. Musk has made Tesla a leader in electric vehicles whose market value exceeds General Motors Co.\u2019s even though it has never turned an annual profit\u2014all while running other businesses, including rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. He previously was a co-founder of PayPal as well.\nMr. Ellison spoke of his admiration for Mr. Musk, whom he called a very close friend, at an Oracle analyst conference in October where, unprompted, he lashed out at critics of the billionaire entrepreneur.\n\n\n\u201cThis guy is landing rockets,\u201d Mr. Ellison said. \u201cHe\u2019s landing rockets on robot drone rafts in the ocean, and you\u2019re saying he doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s doing. Well, who else is landing a rocket? Do you ever land a rocket on a robot drone?\u201d\nA person close to Tesla said Mr. Ellison and Mr. Musk have met about five times over the years, in group settings, and have otherwise spoken or emailed infrequently.\nMr. Ellison previously has shown an inclination for loyalty to executives he respects, hiring Mark Hurd to be Oracle\u2019s co-president soon after Mr. Hurd resigned under pressure as chief executive of Oracle rival Hewlett Packard.\nCurrently ranked as the fifth-richest American with a net worth of $58 billion, according to Forbes, Mr. Ellison also has been a flamboyantly big spender whose real-estate acquisitions include most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai. He once filed a lawsuit against neighbors in a posh section of San Francisco for allowing their trees to grow too tall, blocking views from his property. He and Mr. Musk share a fondness for ultraexpensive automobiles, both having owned McLaren super cars.\nMessrs. Musk and Ellison also both have received big pay packages from their companies, in which they are large shareholders. Mr. Ellison was the most richly paid U.S. executive in the decade that ended in 2010, according to a Journal analysis.\nTesla shareholders earlier this year approved a pay package for Mr. Musk that could be worth $2.6 billion if the company meets certain targets.\nMr. Ellison also is a Tesla customer, the company disclosed in an SEC filing Friday. A company in which he is a significant shareholder paid Tesla $1.9 million for a \u201cmicrogrid energy system for a greenhouse farming project\u201d on Lanai.\nWrite to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison shares with the Tesla chief a number of traits, including a quickness to spar with critics and rivals whom he sees as standing in the way of building his business. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Capsule Returns; NASA Weighs Need for More Testing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "936",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-space-capsule-is-back-but-its-return-to-space-up-in-the-air-11577034940?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=48",
        "text": "Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. were hired by the NASA to develop the first U.S.-made vehicles for carrying American astronauts and supplies into space since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011.\nFrom the early phases of the program, NASA said crews wouldn\u2019t fly on the new capsules until each company performed one successful, uncrewed rendezvous with the orbiting international laboratory.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow important is continued space exploration by the United States? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBut in the wake of Friday\u2019s botched mission, agency officials have said such demonstration flights aren\u2019t mandatory under the 2014 contracts, setting the stage for a major policy decision. NASA and White House officials are eager to certify the domestic capsules as safe to start carrying astronauts as quickly as possible because by 2021 the U.S. faces the prospect of running out of seats on Russian-operated capsules.\n\n\nBoth programs are behind schedule, though SpaceX earlier this year successfully launched its Dragon capsule and docked it with the space station, before making a successful landing.\nBoeing\u2019s Starliner capsule was successfully launched on Friday, but a problem with its internal clock\u2014it was set 11 hours off\u2014forced the cancellation of its docking and the curtailment of the mission.\nThe capsule landed successfully and on target at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, passing one of the flight\u2019s\u00a0important tests. \n\u201cMake no mistake, this did not go according to plan in every way we would have hoped,\u201d NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said at a news conference. \u201c[But] a whole lot more things did go right.\u201d\nMr. Bridenstine said it would be \u201cweeks, months\u201d before NASA was prepared to put astronauts on the Starliner, after reviewing data from the first flight.\n\u201cWe own it. It\u2019s not cool,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch, who apologized to astronauts on the space station.\nHe said it would take at least three months to review the data from the flight before a decision could be made on whether a second, uncrewed mission was required before launching a Starliner\u2014which is designed to be used up to 10 times\u2014with astronauts on board.\nThe Starliner carried cargo for the space station\u2014including holiday gifts for its crew\u2014as well as a test dummy to monitor its life-support systems, all of which officials said worked as expected.\n\u201cThe real tragedy is the Christmas presents,\u201d said Mr. Bridenstine.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Boeing\u2019s plan to ferry astronauts into orbit faces a three-month delay if it\u2019s required to make a second test flight of its Starliner space capsule, which landed successfully Sunday morning after a curtailed first launch. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Capsule Returns; NASA Weighs Need for More Testing (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "937",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-space-capsule-is-back-but-its-return-to-space-up-in-the-air-11577034940?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=61",
        "text": "Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. were hired by the NASA to develop the first U.S.-made vehicles for carrying American astronauts and supplies into space since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011.\n\n\n\n\nFrom the early phases of the program, NASA said crews wouldn\u2019t fly on the new capsules until each company performed one successful, uncrewed rendezvous with the orbiting international laboratory.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow important is continued space exploration by the United States? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBut in the wake of Friday\u2019s botched mission, agency officials have said such demonstration flights aren\u2019t mandatory under the 2014 contracts, setting the stage for a major policy decision. NASA and White House officials are eager to certify the domestic capsules as safe to start carrying astronauts as quickly as possible because by 2021 the U.S. faces the prospect of running out of seats on Russian-operated capsules.\n\n\nBoth programs are behind schedule, though SpaceX earlier this year successfully launched its Dragon capsule and docked it with the space station, before making a successful landing.\nBoeing\u2019s Starliner capsule was successfully launched on Friday, but a problem with its internal clock\u2014it was set 11 hours off\u2014forced the cancellation of its docking and the curtailment of the mission.\nThe capsule landed successfully and on target at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, passing one of the flight\u2019s\u00a0important tests. \n\u201cMake no mistake, this did not go according to plan in every way we would have hoped,\u201d NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said at a news conference. \u201c[But] a whole lot more things did go right.\u201d\nMr. Bridenstine said it would be \u201cweeks, months\u201d before NASA was prepared to put astronauts on the Starliner, after reviewing data from the first flight.\n\u201cWe own it. It\u2019s not cool,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch, who apologized to astronauts on the space station.\nHe said it would take at least three months to review the data from the flight before a decision could be made on whether a second, uncrewed mission was required before launching a Starliner\u2014which is designed to be used up to 10 times\u2014with astronauts on board.\nThe Starliner carried cargo for the space station\u2014including holiday gifts for its crew\u2014as well as a test dummy to monitor its life-support systems, all of which officials said worked as expected.\n\u201cThe real tragedy is the Christmas presents,\u201d said Mr. Bridenstine.\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Boeing\u2019s plan to ferry astronauts into orbit faces a three-month delay if it\u2019s required to make a second test flight of its Starliner space capsule, which landed successfully Sunday morning after a curtailed first launch. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cable, Internet Companies Stand to Gain From Infrastructure Bill (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "938",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cable-internet-companies-stand-to-gain-from-broadband-funding-in-infrastructure-bill-11627983180?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=24",
        "text": "AT&T plans to self-fund its fiber-optic network expansion to cover millions of new locations in the coming years. Its chief executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Stankey,\n\n\n\n has said government support in other areas would be \u201cicing on the cake.\u201d Charter Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Rutledge\n\n\n\n has said the cable company can expand its network efficiently with help from government subsidies.\n\n\n\n\nThe bill would also extend an emergency fund set up earlier this year to cover broadband service for low-income Americans. Those users could eventually become full-paying customers. \n\n\nThe latest version of the bill hammered out Sunday came as a relief to some in the telecom industry who opposed measures being considered in previous iterations, including mandated higher internet speed requirements and incentives for companies looking to compete with existing cable and telephone operators.\nThere are still some provisions that broadband providers will likely chafe at, including\u00a0proposed rules that force them to plainly disclose the service levels and prices they offer, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blair Levin,\n\n\n\n a market analyst at New Street Research.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAT&T plans to self-fund its fiber-optic network expansion to cover millions of new locations, but says it could do more with government support.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n TIMOTHY A. CLARY/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAnother provision withholds funding from carriers that suffer long network outages.\n\u201cThere\u2019s a bunch of stuff in the legislation that industry doesn\u2019t like,\u201d said Mr. Levin, who was executive director of former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n National Broadband Plan. \u201cBut from an investor perspective, those things aren\u2019t really going to shake revenues and margins.\u201d\nReporting and reliability requirements aren\u2019t likely to dent the bottom lines of broadband companies that already deal with armies of regulators, he added.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Federal Communications Commission, which oversees cable and telephone companies, still lacks a permanent chairperson, leaving open the question of how strictly officials will enforce the rules in the future.\nBroadband providers dodged another bullet when the Senate bill adopted a threshold of 100 megabits per second for broadband downloads with 20 Mbps uploads for new grants. Consumer advocates had pushed the government to require higher speeds as a precondition for funding, but many cable networks aren\u2019t designed to fit faster uploads.\nThe new broadband standard means companies that offer service over coaxial cables as well as fiber-optic lines can benefit from federal funding. The standard also allows newer companies like Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, to compete for grants for their internet-beaming satellite constellations.\nConsumer advocates have meanwhile complained that the legislation avoided mandating more aggressive measures to expand internet access. The grants stop short of supporting government-owned networks that could compete with cable companies, for instance.\n\u201cI don\u2019t see anything in here that will change the structure of the market to create real competition,\u201d said Christopher Mitchell, director of the community broadband networks program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.\nMr. Mitchell welcomed the bill\u2019s provision to distribute grants through state offices, however, instead of through the Federal Communications Commission or another U.S. agency. The FCC has said that past grant programs left many Americans behind because of flawed maps.\n\u201cThe states know a little bit better, and frankly the localities know really well where the gaps are,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCompanies like SpaceX would be able to compete for grants for its internet-beaming satellite constellations.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe rules for broadband service were among the most contested elements of the bill over the past few days, according to lobbyists following the talks.\nMarket observers say the coronavirus pandemic has reframed the debate about broadband funding by showing how many Americans need internet access to work and study. Republicans and Democrats were both poised to spend tens of billions of dollars to expand internet access as early as this spring. \nThey quibbled instead over the size and scope of the programs.\n\u201cWithin a few weeks of the Covid shutdown, everyone realized we really do need networks everywhere,\u201d Mr. Levin said.\nTwo recent economic studies show that expanding high-quality internet access could have significant economic benefits, particularly for low-income households.\nThe first study, published by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, found that universal high-speed internet service would raise labor productivity by 1.1%. Using results of a survey they designed and administered beginning in May 2020, the authors estimate that a The $1 trillion infrastructure bill moving through the Senate includes $65 billion to improve internet access for poor and isolated communities. ",
        "author": "Drew FitzGerald and David Harrison"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Executes Back-to-Back Launches in Roughly 48 Hours (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "939",
        "date": "2017-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-seeks-to-execute-back-to-back-launches-in-roughly-48-hours-1498400829?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=92",
        "text": "After using previously flown main engines to blast a Bulgarian telecommunications satellite into orbit Friday from a Florida launchpad, the closely held company on Sunday afternoon used a California Air Force base to send a batch of 10 smaller satellites into space for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.,\n\n IRDM -1.97%\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s largest commercial customer.\nSunday\u2019s blastoff marked the shortest time between launches in SpaceX\u2019s history. As the ninth launch of 2017, it also was a record for annual launches by the company, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp. SpaceX had eight successful launches in 2016, before an explosion during routine ground testing temporarily halted Falcon 9 launches.\n\n\nSpaceX has rebounded strongly since that accident, alleviating many of the reliability concerns expressed privately by government and industry officials. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket carrying a communications satellite that will provide television broadcast and data communications services over southeast Europe lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut perhaps more than any previous benchmark, this weekend\u2019s activities provided the strongest sign yet that SpaceX is on track to overcome years of nagging schedule slips by continuing to ramp up its launch tempo. Amid cheers from company officials at SpaceX\u2019s mission control center in suburban Los Angeles, Sunday\u2019s blastoff paved the way for gradual deployment of the Iridium satellites over a 15-minute stretch that resembled an automated but graceful ballet in space.\nSeven minutes after blastoff, the floating platform in the Pacific Ocean started receiving signals from the used booster streaking back toward the landing area. Video cameras captured the soft touchdown.\nWith an aggressive summer and fall launch schedule, SpaceX officials are looking to rack up a total of roughly two dozen launches by the end of the year. Previous internal projections showed as many as 27 launches for all of 2017, nearly doubling to a total of 52 in 2019.\nBut the financial results of flying used boosters remain uncertain. Mr. Musk and some of his top lieutenants initially projected huge price cuts. Then SpaceX officials talked about price reductions of slightly more than one-tenth of the $62 million official Falcon 9 launch price tag. Internal financial documents prepared more than a year ago projected that the combination of reduced prices and refurbishment costs would trim the company\u2019s net income by roughly 20% between 2016 and 2020.\nMore recently, discussions about how SpaceX adjusts its launch schedule priorities\u2014and how customers move up or down that list\u2014has reverberated among rivals and industry officials tracking the company\u2019s prices and activities. Some of these officials have said that willingness or desire to fly satellites on refurbished boosters sometimes can help certain customers speed up dates for blastoff. But other factors in determining launch schedules include contract-price details, which in some cases provide an incentive for SpaceX itself to accelerate launch dates, according to one person familiar with the details. That is because certain launch agreements require the company to provide a discount if launches end up delayed past a specified date, regardless of the type of booster.\nJuggling launch dates, which happens to a lesser extent with every rocket operator, is further complicated for SpaceX because it has to match customer technical needs with a range of rocket variants the company flies to orbit. And some commercial customers already have been frustrated by having to wait an extra year or two, sometimes even longer, for a ride to space.\nA SpaceX spokesman on Sunday said, \u201cWe determine when we launch our customers based on the dates included in their respective contracts and the availability of launch vehicles suited to their specific mission requirements.\u201d Spokesman John Taylor also said \u201cit\u2019s important to note that government customers will take priority in the manifest as required by contracts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch,\n\n\n\n Iridium\u2019s CEO, has made no secret of his willingness to accept refurbished boosters if that would speed up deployment of his 70-plus satellite constellation, which is currently expected to be completed by mid-2018. Mr. Desch also told reporters on a recent conference call that further price cuts could help persuade him to switch to reused hardware, according to trade publication Space News.\nThe company has said it is working through some 70 missions on its launch backlog with a value in excess of $10 billion. Eventually, SpaceX hopes to transition used boosters for another launch in roughly a day.\nSunday\u2019s mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the central California coast, comes at a particularly hectic time for SpaceX. After years of delays, the comp Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX on Sunday successfully executed the second of two unmanned missions within a roughly 48-hour period in a high-water mark for the company\u2019s operational prowess. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Executes Back-to-Back Launches in Roughly 48 Hours (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "940",
        "date": "2017-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-seeks-to-execute-back-to-back-launches-in-roughly-48-hours-1498400829?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=81",
        "text": "After using previously flown main engines to blast a Bulgarian telecommunications satellite into orbit Friday from a Florida launchpad, the closely held company on Sunday afternoon used a California Air Force base to send a batch of 10 smaller satellites into space for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.,\n\n IRDM -1.97%\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s largest commercial customer.\nSunday\u2019s blastoff marked the shortest time between launches in SpaceX\u2019s history. As the ninth launch of 2017, it also was a record for annual launches by the company, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp. SpaceX had eight successful launches in 2016, before an explosion during routine ground testing temporarily halted Falcon 9 launches.\n\n\nSpaceX has rebounded strongly since that accident, alleviating many of the reliability concerns expressed privately by government and industry officials. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket carrying a communications satellite that will provide television broadcast and data communications services over southeast Europe lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut perhaps more than any previous benchmark, this weekend\u2019s activities provided the strongest sign yet that SpaceX is on track to overcome years of nagging schedule slips by continuing to ramp up its launch tempo. Amid cheers from company officials at SpaceX\u2019s mission control center in suburban Los Angeles, Sunday\u2019s blastoff paved the way for gradual deployment of the Iridium satellites over a 15-minute stretch that resembled an automated but graceful ballet in space.\nSeven minutes after blastoff, the floating platform in the Pacific Ocean started receiving signals from the used booster streaking back toward the landing area. Video cameras captured the soft touchdown.\nWith an aggressive summer and fall launch schedule, SpaceX officials are looking to rack up a total of roughly two dozen launches by the end of the year. Previous internal projections showed as many as 27 launches for all of 2017, nearly doubling to a total of 52 in 2019.\nBut the financial results of flying used boosters remain uncertain. Mr. Musk and some of his top lieutenants initially projected huge price cuts. Then SpaceX officials talked about price reductions of slightly more than one-tenth of the $62 million official Falcon 9 launch price tag. Internal financial documents prepared more than a year ago projected that the combination of reduced prices and refurbishment costs would trim the company\u2019s net income by roughly 20% between 2016 and 2020.\nMore recently, discussions about how SpaceX adjusts its launch schedule priorities\u2014and how customers move up or down that list\u2014has reverberated among rivals and industry officials tracking the company\u2019s prices and activities. Some of these officials have said that willingness or desire to fly satellites on refurbished boosters sometimes can help certain customers speed up dates for blastoff. But other factors in determining launch schedules include contract-price details, which in some cases provide an incentive for SpaceX itself to accelerate launch dates, according to one person familiar with the details. That is because certain launch agreements require the company to provide a discount if launches end up delayed past a specified date, regardless of the type of booster.\nJuggling launch dates, which happens to a lesser extent with every rocket operator, is further complicated for SpaceX because it has to match customer technical needs with a range of rocket variants the company flies to orbit. And some commercial customers already have been frustrated by having to wait an extra year or two, sometimes even longer, for a ride to space.\nA SpaceX spokesman on Sunday said, \u201cWe determine when we launch our customers based on the dates included in their respective contracts and the availability of launch vehicles suited to their specific mission requirements.\u201d Spokesman John Taylor also said \u201cit\u2019s important to note that government customers will take priority in the manifest as required by contracts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch,\n\n\n\n Iridium\u2019s CEO, has made no secret of his willingness to accept refurbished boosters if that would speed up deployment of his 70-plus satellite constellation, which is currently expected to be completed by mid-2018. Mr. Desch also told reporters on a recent conference call that further price cuts could help persuade him to switch to reused hardware, according to trade publication Space News.\nThe company has said it is working through some 70 missions on its launch backlog with a value in excess of $10 billion. Eventually, SpaceX hopes to transition used boosters for another launch in roughly a day.\nSunday\u2019s mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the central California coast, comes at a particularly hectic time for SpaceX. After years of delays, the comp Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX on Sunday successfully executed the second of two unmanned missions within a roughly 48-hour period in a high-water mark for the company\u2019s operational prowess. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Executes Back-to-Back Launches in Roughly 48 Hours (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "941",
        "date": "2017-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-seeks-to-execute-back-to-back-launches-in-roughly-48-hours-1498400829?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=119",
        "text": "After using previously flown main engines to blast a Bulgarian telecommunications satellite into orbit Friday from a Florida launchpad, the closely held company on Sunday afternoon used a California Air Force base to send a batch of 10 smaller satellites into space for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.,\n\n IRDM -0.92%\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s largest commercial customer.\n\n\n\n\nSunday\u2019s blastoff marked the shortest time between launches in SpaceX\u2019s history. As the ninth launch of 2017, it also was a record for annual launches by the company, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp. SpaceX had eight successful launches in 2016, before an explosion during routine ground testing temporarily halted Falcon 9 launches.\n\n\nSpaceX has rebounded strongly since that accident, alleviating many of the reliability concerns expressed privately by government and industry officials. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket carrying a communications satellite that will provide television broadcast and data communications services over southeast Europe lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut perhaps more than any previous benchmark, this weekend\u2019s activities provided the strongest sign yet that SpaceX is on track to overcome years of nagging schedule slips by continuing to ramp up its launch tempo. Amid cheers from company officials at SpaceX\u2019s mission control center in suburban Los Angeles, Sunday\u2019s blastoff paved the way for gradual deployment of the Iridium satellites over a 15-minute stretch that resembled an automated but graceful ballet in space.\nSeven minutes after blastoff, the floating platform in the Pacific Ocean started receiving signals from the used booster streaking back toward the landing area. Video cameras captured the soft touchdown.\nWith an aggressive summer and fall launch schedule, SpaceX officials are looking to rack up a total of roughly two dozen launches by the end of the year. Previous internal projections showed as many as 27 launches for all of 2017, nearly doubling to a total of 52 in 2019.\nBut the financial results of flying used boosters remain uncertain. Mr. Musk and some of his top lieutenants initially projected huge price cuts. Then SpaceX officials talked about price reductions of slightly more than one-tenth of the $62 million official Falcon 9 launch price tag. Internal financial documents prepared more than a year ago projected that the combination of reduced prices and refurbishment costs would trim the company\u2019s net income by roughly 20% between 2016 and 2020.\nMore recently, discussions about how SpaceX adjusts its launch schedule priorities\u2014and how customers move up or down that list\u2014has reverberated among rivals and industry officials tracking the company\u2019s prices and activities. Some of these officials have said that willingness or desire to fly satellites on refurbished boosters sometimes can help certain customers speed up dates for blastoff. But other factors in determining launch schedules include contract-price details, which in some cases provide an incentive for SpaceX itself to accelerate launch dates, according to one person familiar with the details. That is because certain launch agreements require the company to provide a discount if launches end up delayed past a specified date, regardless of the type of booster.\nJuggling launch dates, which happens to a lesser extent with every rocket operator, is further complicated for SpaceX because it has to match customer technical needs with a range of rocket variants the company flies to orbit. And some commercial customers already have been frustrated by having to wait an extra year or two, sometimes even longer, for a ride to space.\nA SpaceX spokesman on Sunday said, \u201cWe determine when we launch our customers based on the dates included in their respective contracts and the availability of launch vehicles suited to their specific mission requirements.\u201d Spokesman John Taylor also said \u201cit\u2019s important to note that government customers will take priority in the manifest as required by contracts.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch,\n\n\n\n Iridium\u2019s CEO, has made no secret of his willingness to accept refurbished boosters if that would speed up deployment of his 70-plus satellite constellation, which is currently expected to be completed by mid-2018. Mr. Desch also told reporters on a recent conference call that further price cuts could help persuade him to switch to reused hardware, according to trade publication Space News.\nThe company has said it is working through some 70 missions on its launch backlog with a value in excess of $10 billion. Eventually, SpaceX hopes to transition used boosters for another launch in roughly a day.\nSunday\u2019s mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the central California coast, comes at a particularly hectic time for SpaceX. After years of delays, the Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX on Sunday successfully executed the second of two unmanned missions within a roughly 48-hour period in a high-water mark for the company\u2019s operational prowess. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches First All-Civilian Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "942",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-first-all-civilian-flight-to-orbit-11631750630?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=15",
        "text": "About 12 minutes after launch, the capsule carrying members of the Inspiration4 mission\u2014a billionaire businessman, a geoscientist, a physician assistant and an aerospace engineer\u2014separated from a booster. Then, the capsule began traveling to an orbit about 360 miles above Earth.\n\n\n\n\nThat orbit would be higher than those followed by the International Space Station and by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope, according to SpaceX. Americans haven't been that far into space since 2009, when NASA astronauts last worked on repairing the Hubble.\n\nThe capsule is slated to return to Earth after about three days, splashing down off the coast of Florida.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew Dragon capsule, launching with four civilians onboard from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n sam wolfe/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe space flight Wednesday marks new terrain for a commercial space industry that has attracted entrepreneurs and investors who are betting on an expanding set of business opportunities beyond Earth.\nFor the first time, an all-civilian crew is traveling to orbit on a mission arranged entirely by private parties.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the billionaire founder of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n purchased the trip for an undisclosed sum from SpaceX and is commanding the mission. Previous travelers to orbit had to secure seats on Russian government-controlled rockets to venture that deep into space.\n\u201cFew have come before, and many are about to follow. The door\u2019s open now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said during a SpaceX live stream of the launch.\nThree people joined Mr. Isaacman on the flight, which has a charitable component. They are\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n a geoscientist and science communicator;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nOrbital space missions carry risks. The crew will travel around the Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s crew capsule. The company\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket uses nine engines fueled with kerosene and liquid oxygen during the first stage of flights. Upon re-entry, the capsule\u2019s heat shield is expected to endure temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Upon landing in the ocean with parachutes, the capsule is expected to be traveling about 24 feet a second.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis screenshot taken from the SpaceX live webcast shows a plush dog floating in the capsule of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAny jitters are the good kind,\u201d Ms. Arceneaux said Tuesday during a briefing about the flight.\nTo prepare for today\u2019s flight, members of the crew trained for months. That regimen included hiking up Mt. Rainier together, flying in jet fighters to mimic the stress of spaceflight and spending 30 hours together in the crew capsule.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight at SpaceX, said Tuesday that the company had established a plan for the mission that included accounting for fuel, food and water\u2014and space debris. Mr. Musk told crew members that the company\u2019s leaders are focused on carrying out the mission, Mr. Isaacman said.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, was founded by Mr. Musk in 2002 with a goal of taking people to Mars. The company has invested in developing rockets that it could reuse in a relatively quick manner to push down the cost of launching crew or cargo into space.\nIn 2015 and the year after, separate Falcon 9 rockets exploded. But SpaceX says it has launched Falcon 9 boosters more than 120 times.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\nLast year, the company ferried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, the first human launch from U.S. soil in almost a decade.\nSpaceX has built other rockets, established a satellite-internet service called Starlink and is building a moon lander for NASA in addition to handling launches for the agency, military clients and commercial customers. In April, SpaceX was valued at more than $74 billion.\nOther companies are also pursuing private space trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\nflew people about 54 miles above Earth over the summer, while Blue Origin LLC launched passengers more than 62 miles up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on its Starliner space capsule could be used for tourist flights.\nSpaceX\u2019s Mr. Reed said Tuesday that the company wants to make going to space easier, including to other planets. \u201cThe long-term vision is that spacefl The Inspiration4 mission, led by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, would take Americans the farthest into space since 2009. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches First All-Civilian Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "943",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-first-all-civilian-flight-to-orbit-11631750630?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=16",
        "text": "About 12 minutes after launch, the capsule carrying members of the Inspiration4 mission\u2014a billionaire businessman, a geoscientist, a physician assistant and an aerospace engineer\u2014separated from a booster. Then, the capsule began traveling to an orbit about 360 miles above Earth.\n\n\n\n\nThat orbit would be higher than those followed by the International Space Station and by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope, according to SpaceX. Americans haven't been that far into space since 2009, when NASA astronauts last worked on repairing the Hubble.\n\nThe capsule is slated to return to Earth after about three days, splashing down off the coast of Florida.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew Dragon capsule, launching with four civilians onboard from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n sam wolfe/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe space flight Wednesday marks new terrain for a commercial space industry that has attracted entrepreneurs and investors who are betting on an expanding set of business opportunities beyond Earth.\nFor the first time, an all-civilian crew is traveling to orbit on a mission arranged entirely by private parties.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the billionaire founder of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n purchased the trip for an undisclosed sum from SpaceX and is commanding the mission. Previous travelers to orbit had to secure seats on Russian government-controlled rockets to venture that deep into space.\n\u201cFew have come before, and many are about to follow. The door\u2019s open now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said during a SpaceX live stream of the launch.\nThree people joined Mr. Isaacman on the flight, which has a charitable component. They are\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n a geoscientist and science communicator;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nOrbital space missions carry risks. The crew will travel around the Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s crew capsule. The company\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket uses nine engines fueled with kerosene and liquid oxygen during the first stage of flights. Upon re-entry, the capsule\u2019s heat shield is expected to endure temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Upon landing in the ocean with parachutes, the capsule is expected to be traveling about 24 feet a second.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis screenshot taken from the SpaceX live webcast shows a plush dog floating in the capsule of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAny jitters are the good kind,\u201d Ms. Arceneaux said Tuesday during a briefing about the flight.\nTo prepare for today\u2019s flight, members of the crew trained for months. That regimen included hiking up Mt. Rainier together, flying in jet fighters to mimic the stress of spaceflight and spending 30 hours together in the crew capsule.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight at SpaceX, said Tuesday that the company had established a plan for the mission that included accounting for fuel, food and water\u2014and space debris. Mr. Musk told crew members that the company\u2019s leaders are focused on carrying out the mission, Mr. Isaacman said.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, was founded by Mr. Musk in 2002 with a goal of taking people to Mars. The company has invested in developing rockets that it could reuse in a relatively quick manner to push down the cost of launching crew or cargo into space.\nIn 2015 and the year after, separate Falcon 9 rockets exploded. But SpaceX says it has launched Falcon 9 boosters more than 120 times.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\nLast year, the company ferried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, the first human launch from U.S. soil in almost a decade.\nSpaceX has built other rockets, established a satellite-internet service called Starlink and is building a moon lander for NASA in addition to handling launches for the agency, military clients and commercial customers. In April, SpaceX was valued at more than $74 billion.\nOther companies are also pursuing private space trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\nflew people about 54 miles above Earth over the summer, while Blue Origin LLC launched passengers more than 62 miles up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on its Starliner space capsule could be used for tourist flights.\nSpaceX\u2019s Mr. Reed said Tuesday that the company wants to make going to space easier, including to other planets. \u201cThe long-term vision is that spaceflight becomes airline-like. You buy a ticket, and you go,\u201d he said.\nThe company has a backlog of commercial-astronaut missions, he said, and wants to be able to launch such flights up to six times a year at a minimum. Some of the company\u2019s future private missions, including four contracted by Axiom Space Inc., have already been announced.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up In Today's Paper A complete list, with links, of every article from the day's Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil McAlister,\n\n\n\n director of NASA\u2019s commercial spaceflight division, said Inspiration4 marked the culmination of a yearslong effort at the agency to help bolster companies that could provide transport services for NASA as well as for private astronauts.\n\u201cWith private companies bringing their own capital and their own capabilities, NASA can just leverage that\u2014we don\u2019t have to build everything ourselves. And then we can focus on the deep space exploration missions,\u201d he said.\n\n\nThe Civilian Mission to OrbitMore WSJ coverage of the Inspiration4 launch, selected by the editors SpaceX, Jared Isaacman Face Test During Private Flight to Orbit The SpaceX Inspiration4 Launch: What to Know About the Orbital Mission Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Launch This Week \n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The Inspiration4 mission, led by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, would take Americans the farthest into space since 2009. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches First All-Civilian Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "944",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-first-all-civilian-flight-to-orbit-11631750630?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=22",
        "text": "About 12 minutes after launch, the capsule carrying members of the Inspiration4 mission\u2014a billionaire businessman, a geoscientist, a physician assistant and an aerospace engineer\u2014separated from a booster. Then, the capsule began traveling to an orbit about 360 miles above Earth.\nThat orbit would be higher than those followed by the International Space Station and by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope, according to SpaceX. Americans haven't been that far into space since 2009, when NASA astronauts last worked on repairing the Hubble.\n\nThe capsule is slated to return to Earth after about three days, splashing down off the coast of Florida.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew Dragon capsule, launching with four civilians onboard from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n sam wolfe/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe space flight Wednesday marks new terrain for a commercial space industry that has attracted entrepreneurs and investors who are betting on an expanding set of business opportunities beyond Earth.\nFor the first time, an all-civilian crew is traveling to orbit on a mission arranged entirely by private parties.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the billionaire founder of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n purchased the trip for an undisclosed sum from SpaceX and is commanding the mission. Previous travelers to orbit had to secure seats on Russian government-controlled rockets to venture that deep into space.\n\u201cFew have come before, and many are about to follow. The door\u2019s open now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said during a SpaceX live stream of the launch.\nThree people joined Mr. Isaacman on the flight, which has a charitable component. They are\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n a geoscientist and science communicator;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nOrbital space missions carry risks. The crew will travel around the Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s crew capsule. The company\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket uses nine engines fueled with kerosene and liquid oxygen during the first stage of flights. Upon re-entry, the capsule\u2019s heat shield is expected to endure temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Upon landing in the ocean with parachutes, the capsule is expected to be traveling about 24 feet a second.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis screenshot taken from the SpaceX live webcast shows a plush dog floating in the capsule of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAny jitters are the good kind,\u201d Ms. Arceneaux said Tuesday during a briefing about the flight.\nTo prepare for today\u2019s flight, members of the crew trained for months. That regimen included hiking up Mt. Rainier together, flying in jet fighters to mimic the stress of spaceflight and spending 30 hours together in the crew capsule.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight at SpaceX, said Tuesday that the company had established a plan for the mission that included accounting for fuel, food and water\u2014and space debris. Mr. Musk told crew members that the company\u2019s leaders are focused on carrying out the mission, Mr. Isaacman said.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, was founded by Mr. Musk in 2002 with a goal of taking people to Mars. The company has invested in developing rockets that it could reuse in a relatively quick manner to push down the cost of launching crew or cargo into space.\nIn 2015 and the year after, separate Falcon 9 rockets exploded. But SpaceX says it has launched Falcon 9 boosters more than 120 times.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\nLast year, the company ferried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, the first human launch from U.S. soil in almost a decade.\nSpaceX has built other rockets, established a satellite-internet service called Starlink and is building a moon lander for NASA in addition to handling launches for the agency, military clients and commercial customers. In April, SpaceX was valued at more than $74 billion.\nOther companies are also pursuing private space trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\nflew people about 54 miles above Earth over the summer, while Blue Origin LLC launched passengers more than 62 miles up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on its Starliner space capsule could be used for tourist flights.\nSpaceX\u2019s Mr. Reed said Tuesday that the company wants to make going to space easier, including to other planets. \u201cThe long-term vision is that spaceflight The Inspiration4 mission, led by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, would take Americans the farthest into space since 2009. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches First All-Civilian Flight to Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "945",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-first-all-civilian-flight-to-orbit-11631750630?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=22",
        "text": "About 12 minutes after launch, the capsule carrying members of the Inspiration4 mission\u2014a billionaire businessman, a geoscientist, a physician assistant and an aerospace engineer\u2014separated from a booster. Then, the capsule began traveling to an orbit about 360 miles above Earth.\n\n\n\n\nThat orbit would be higher than those followed by the International Space Station and by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope, according to SpaceX. Americans haven't been that far into space since 2009, when NASA astronauts last worked on repairing the Hubble.\n\nThe capsule is slated to return to Earth after about three days, splashing down off the coast of Florida.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew Dragon capsule, launching with four civilians onboard from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n sam wolfe/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe space flight Wednesday marks new terrain for a commercial space industry that has attracted entrepreneurs and investors who are betting on an expanding set of business opportunities beyond Earth.\nFor the first time, an all-civilian crew is traveling to orbit on a mission arranged entirely by private parties.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman,\n\n\n\n the billionaire founder of payments-processing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shift4 Payments Inc.,\n\n\n purchased the trip for an undisclosed sum from SpaceX and is commanding the mission. Previous travelers to orbit had to secure seats on Russian government-controlled rockets to venture that deep into space.\n\u201cFew have come before, and many are about to follow. The door\u2019s open now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible,\u201d Mr. Isaacman said during a SpaceX live stream of the launch.\nThree people joined Mr. Isaacman on the flight, which has a charitable component. They are\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Sian Proctor,\n\n\n\n a geoscientist and science communicator;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hayley Arceneaux,\n\n\n\n a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Sembroski,\n\n\n\n an Air Force veteran and aerospace-industry employee.\nOrbital space missions carry risks. The crew will travel around the Earth at around 17,000 miles an hour in SpaceX\u2019s crew capsule. The company\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket uses nine engines fueled with kerosene and liquid oxygen during the first stage of flights. Upon re-entry, the capsule\u2019s heat shield is expected to endure temperatures of around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Upon landing in the ocean with parachutes, the capsule is expected to be traveling about 24 feet a second.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis screenshot taken from the SpaceX live webcast shows a plush dog floating in the capsule of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAny jitters are the good kind,\u201d Ms. Arceneaux said Tuesday during a briefing about the flight.\nTo prepare for today\u2019s flight, members of the crew trained for months. That regimen included hiking up Mt. Rainier together, flying in jet fighters to mimic the stress of spaceflight and spending 30 hours together in the crew capsule.\nBenji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight at SpaceX, said Tuesday that the company had established a plan for the mission that included accounting for fuel, food and water\u2014and space debris. Mr. Musk told crew members that the company\u2019s leaders are focused on carrying out the mission, Mr. Isaacman said.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, was founded by Mr. Musk in 2002 with a goal of taking people to Mars. The company has invested in developing rockets that it could reuse in a relatively quick manner to push down the cost of launching crew or cargo into space.\nIn 2015 and the year after, separate Falcon 9 rockets exploded. But SpaceX says it has launched Falcon 9 boosters more than 120 times.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX: A Timeline of Its History\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ben smegelsky/nasa/Reuters\n\n\nLast year, the company ferried two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, the first human launch from U.S. soil in almost a decade.\nSpaceX has built other rockets, established a satellite-internet service called Starlink and is building a moon lander for NASA in addition to handling launches for the agency, military clients and commercial customers. In April, SpaceX was valued at more than $74 billion.\nOther companies are also pursuing private space trips.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\nflew people about 54 miles above Earth over the summer, while Blue Origin LLC launched passengers more than 62 miles up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n has said seats on its Starliner space capsule could be used for tourist flights.\nSpaceX\u2019s Mr. Reed said Tuesday that the company wants to make going to space easier, including to other planets. \u201cThe long-term vision is that spacefl The Inspiration4 mission, led by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, would take Americans the farthest into space since 2009. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space-Based Flight Tracking Comes Closer With Launch of Satellites (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "946",
        "date": "2017-01-15",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/space-based-flight-tracking-comes-closer-with-launch-of-satellites-1484303455?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=133",
        "text": "A new satellite-based joint-venture called Aireon LLC would give controllers full visibility by next year, if all goes according to plan, providing real-time flight information from planes over both water and land.\n\n\n\n\nThe first 10 satellites were blasted into orbit Saturday morning from a central California Air Force base by entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and were determined to be functioning normally. Eight of them are expected to begin commercial operations in about three months, after various checks are completed. SpaceX, as the company is called, has signed contracts to launch 70 such satellites into orbit.\n\n\nUntil recently, many supporters of the fledgling traffic control system seemed optimistic that U.S. authorities would embrace the changes relatively quickly. But over the weekend, the head of the satellite-services company backing the venture indicated that wasn\u2019t likely.\nSkepticism among some U.S airlines and federal budget constraints are contributing to that reluctance, according to industry officials. But along with other countries and foreign air-traffic-control providers, federal experts are slated to start verifying the accuracy of the data transmitted by the system shortly.\nAireon dates back to 2011, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications,\n\n\n Inc., a McLean, Va., telecommunications-satellite operator, formed a consortium with foreign air-navigation agencies to find a way to track global air traffic from space. The idea was to piggyback the air-traffic control technology onto Iridium\u2019s replacement constellation of telecom satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn air traffic controller in the control tower at Los Angeles International Airport in 2016. Using conventional land-based systems, air-traffic controllers must extrapolate the location of airplanes flying over water; with a satellite-based system they would see each airplane\u2019s exact location.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bob Riha, Jr/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nProponents say Aireon\u2019s technology would give pilots greater flexibility to change routes, avoid turbulence and cut flight times. It would help airlines save fuel and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. And it would allow planes routinely to fly within 15 miles of each other over water, compared with about 80 miles of separation under current rules\u2014leading to more traffic in the air on any given route.\nThe U.S., with the busiest airspace, hasn\u2019t signed on yet with Aireon as either an investor or customer. Budget constraints and reluctance by some airlines to invest in additional equipment have prompted an advisory committee of the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of an Aireon contract compared with upgrades of existing ground-based services. Preliminary results are expected next month; though a decision isn\u2019t likely until later this year.\nThe FAA has been focused on rolling out advances of its new land-based satellite surveillance system, which cost $2.7 billion and isn\u2019t expected to be fully operable until at least 2020. \nIridium Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch,\n\n\n\n after the weekend\u2019s satellite launch, projected that the FAA\u2019s embrace of the technology will be slow and gradual, probably taking at least several years. \u201cIt won\u2019t be quite the big bang we expected\u201d initially, he said, adding that even after agency agrees to sign up, it is expected to start using the service only in limited areas. Mr. Desch said Iridium intends \u201cto support the process in the U.S.\u201d but looks forward to \u201csigning up the rest of the world.\u201d\nThe Aireon technology has gained currency in the almost three years since the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. That event helped persuade global authorities to adopt international aircraft-tracking rules and look for better ways to pinpoint the location of downed planes.\nToday, U.S. controllers in Oakland, Calif., are responsible for a swath of the Pacific Ocean from the West Coast to the Philippines. Controllers in Canada and Great Britain share responsibility for busy North Atlantic routes with counterparts in New York and on Portugal\u2019s Azores Islands. Without full visibility, these and other \u201coceanic\u201d controllers have to funnel planes onto designated aerial highways, keeping them well separated.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m very excited about how this is going to change my job,\u201d said Neil Collins, a 17-year Canadian controller in Gander, Newfoundland, who helps direct airplanes over the North Atlantic. \u201cWe will know exactly where [the planes] are.\u201d\nCurrently, if a plane deviates from its flight plan, controllers must extrapolate where it is, he said. Most aircraft emit position reports only every 15 minutes and while moving at about 500 miles an hour.\nThe technology also could obviate the need for developing countries to build or maintain conventional land-based tracking systems. \u201cThis would be very similar to the transformative impact of wir Ten Iridium Communications satellites are  ushering in a new chapter in air-traffic control\u2014which the U.S. aviation industry plans to sit out for now. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Susan Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Space Flight Tickets to Start at $450,000 a Seat (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "947",
        "date": "2021-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-space-flight-tickets-to-start-at-450-000-a-seat-11628262330?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=5",
        "text": "\u201cWe expect many consumers will want to fly with friends or family, and we will customize the experience to meet their individual preferences,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n told investors Thursday.\nShares for Virgin Galactic were up around 8% Friday morning.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLast month, Virgin Galactic flew Richard Branson and three company executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin LLC are preparing to start ferrying consumers to space following their respective high-profile flights last month with their founders on board.\n\n\nThe level of demand for such trips isn\u2019t fully clear, though some analysts have estimated the industry by 2030 could generate nearly $4 billion in sales for that year. Virgin Galactic has said it has 600 reservations for future flights, while Mr. Bezos said in July that Blue Origin was approaching $100 million in ticket sales.\nOther companies, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, are also eyeing the space-tourism market.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n has said tourists could take seats on future missions of its Starliner space capsule.\nVirgin Galactic had previously said it sold tickets for space flights at as much as $250,000 each. The $450,000 per-seat price, meanwhile, is more than what some analysts had been expecting.\nLast month, the company flew Mr. Branson and three Virgin Galactic executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nIn addition, Virgin Galactic said it plans to charge the equivalent of $600,000 a seat for research and professional-astronaut missions.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company previously sold tickets for space-tourism flights at up to $250,000 each. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Space Flight Tickets to Start at $450,000 a Seat (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "948",
        "date": "2021-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-space-flight-tickets-to-start-at-450-000-a-seat-11628262330?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=25",
        "text": "\u201cWe expect many consumers will want to fly with friends or family, and we will customize the experience to meet their individual preferences,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n told investors Thursday.\nShares for Virgin Galactic were up around 8% Friday morning.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLast month, Virgin Galactic flew Richard Branson and three company executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin LLC are preparing to start ferrying consumers to space following their respective high-profile flights last month with their founders on board.\n\n\nThe level of demand for such trips isn\u2019t fully clear, though some analysts have estimated the industry by 2030 could generate nearly $4 billion in sales for that year. Virgin Galactic has said it has 600 reservations for future flights, while Mr. Bezos said in July that Blue Origin was approaching $100 million in ticket sales.\nOther companies, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, are also eyeing the space-tourism market.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n has said tourists could take seats on future missions of its Starliner space capsule.\nVirgin Galactic had previously said it sold tickets for space flights at as much as $250,000 each. The $450,000 per-seat price, meanwhile, is more than what some analysts had been expecting.\nLast month, the company flew Mr. Branson and three Virgin Galactic executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nIn addition, Virgin Galactic said it plans to charge the equivalent of $600,000 a seat for research and professional-astronaut missions.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company previously sold tickets for space-tourism flights at up to $250,000 each. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Space Flight Tickets to Start at $450,000 a Seat (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "949",
        "date": "2021-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-space-flight-tickets-to-start-at-450-000-a-seat-11628262330?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=5",
        "text": "\u201cWe expect many consumers will want to fly with friends or family, and we will customize the experience to meet their individual preferences,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n told investors Thursday.\n\n\n\n\nShares for Virgin Galactic were up around 8% Friday morning.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLast month, Virgin Galactic flew Richard Branson and three company executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin LLC are preparing to start ferrying consumers to space following their respective high-profile flights last month with their founders on board.\n\n\nThe level of demand for such trips isn\u2019t fully clear, though some analysts have estimated the industry by 2030 could generate nearly $4 billion in sales for that year. Virgin Galactic has said it has 600 reservations for future flights, while Mr. Bezos said in July that Blue Origin was approaching $100 million in ticket sales.\nOther companies, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, are also eyeing the space-tourism market.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA 0.40%\n\n\n has said tourists could take seats on future missions of its Starliner space capsule.\nVirgin Galactic had previously said it sold tickets for space flights at as much as $250,000 each. The $450,000 per-seat price, meanwhile, is more than what some analysts had been expecting.\nLast month, the company flew Mr. Branson and three Virgin Galactic executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nIn addition, Virgin Galactic said it plans to charge the equivalent of $600,000 a seat for research and professional-astronaut missions.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company previously sold tickets for space-tourism flights at up to $250,000 each. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Space Flight Tickets to Start at $450,000 a Seat (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "950",
        "date": "2021-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-space-flight-tickets-to-start-at-450-000-a-seat-11628262330?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=24",
        "text": "\u201cWe expect many consumers will want to fly with friends or family, and we will customize the experience to meet their individual preferences,\u201d Virgin Galactic Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n told investors Thursday.\n\n\n\n\nShares for Virgin Galactic were up around 8% Friday morning.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLast month, Virgin Galactic flew Richard Branson and three company executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin LLC are preparing to start ferrying consumers to space following their respective high-profile flights last month with their founders on board.\n\n\nThe level of demand for such trips isn\u2019t fully clear, though some analysts have estimated the industry by 2030 could generate nearly $4 billion in sales for that year. Virgin Galactic has said it has 600 reservations for future flights, while Mr. Bezos said in July that Blue Origin was approaching $100 million in ticket sales.\nOther companies, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, are also eyeing the space-tourism market.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -0.10%\n\n\n has said tourists could take seats on future missions of its Starliner space capsule.\nVirgin Galactic had previously said it sold tickets for space flights at as much as $250,000 each. The $450,000 per-seat price, meanwhile, is more than what some analysts had been expecting.\nLast month, the company flew Mr. Branson and three Virgin Galactic executives more than 50 miles up, departing from the Spaceport America facility in New Mexico.\nIn addition, Virgin Galactic said it plans to charge the equivalent of $600,000 a seat for research and professional-astronaut missions.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The company previously sold tickets for space-tourism flights at up to $250,000 each. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "In China\u2019s New Space Odyssey, 80 Startups Race to Get Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "951",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-startups-push-into-space-business-1541851211?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=62",
        "text": "\u201cThree years ago, no one imagined that a private Chinese company could do this,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lan Tianyi,\n\n\n\n founder of Ultimate Blue Nebula Co., a Beijing consultancy, referring to the launch attempt. \u201cNow, the private sector in China is very strong.\u201d\nChina has ambitious plans for its national space program. Coming missions include the launch of an unmanned lunar lander in December, while a Mars lander is due to blast off in 2020. China\u2019s BeiDou satellite navigation system\u2014a rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System\u2014is due for completion that same year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeijing opened up its space industry to private players in 2014, with the government hoping to snare a piece of the booming global commercial space sector. That industry generated revenue of $348 billion last year, largely from building, launching and operating satellites, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Satellite Industry Association.\n\n\nMost of the roughly 80 Chinese space startups counted by Mr. Lan are building satellites and related software applications, while as many as 10 are developing launch vehicles, hoping one day to rival existing state and private-sector launch outfits\u2014such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known\u2014for commercial contracts.\nLandspace Technology Corp. had hoped to become the first Chinese startup to blast a rocket into orbit last month. But its Vermillion Bird rocket failed to achieve its mission of putting a satellite into orbit, opening the door for another launch developer, One Space, to achieve the milestone when it stages an orbital launch slated for late 2018. Should that attempt fail, further contenders are lining up launches in 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\nLike other entrepreneurs with no background in aerospace,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Zhang \n\n\n\n spotted a big opportunity in the government\u2019s liberalization of the space industry. Mr. Zhang, a former banker with Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Santander Group,\n\n\n co-founded Landspace in 2015 with a team of experienced engineers who had worked on the Long March rocket family that underpins China\u2019s national space program. The team had no idea how to turn its knowledge into a commercial venture, Mr. Zhang said in an interview earlier this year.\nThe U.S.\u2019s fast-growing private space industry was the team\u2019s source of inspiration. \u201cWe wanted to do something like SpaceX\u2014they were our role model,\u201d Mr. Zhang said.\nLandspace has raised about $72 million from a combination of private investors and city governments, including the eastern city of Huzhou, where Landspace has a factory.\nThe state is involved in most of China\u2019s commercial launch startups, if only as an investor. One Space, Landspace\u2019s rival, raised its $116 million in funding from private investors and state-owned funds, a spokesman for the company said. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmployees assembled a model rocket at Landspace Technology headquarters in Beijing in September. The company\u2019s Vermillion Bird rocket last month failed to achieve its mission of putting a satellite into orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nLandspace needs roughly a further $115 million in capital to reach the stage where it can start commercial operations, Mr. Zhang said. The rocket tested in October can only carry a 300-kilogram (660-pound) payload, but Landspace is developing a larger\u2014and technically far more complex\u2014vehicle that is designed to lift 4,000 kilograms and would put it within touching distance of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, which can handle 4,850 kilograms.\nWhile SpaceX says it costs $62 million to launch the Falcon 9, Mr. Zhang said clients would be able to lease Landspace\u2019s rocket\u2014which is designed to reach a lower orbit than the more powerful Falcon 9\u2014for about $15 million.\nChina isn\u2019t the only country with commercial space aspirations; Brazil, India, Japan and the United Arab Emirates are all vying for launch business, too. What\u2019s more, China\u2019s ability to tap the American market is hampered by a U.S. government policy that restricts China from launching satellites made with U.S. parts, effectively barring it from launching American and some other commercial satellites.\nBut that hasn\u2019t stopped China\u2019s state-run space agencies from winning European contracts, and the entry into the global satellite business by its private sector raises the prospect of cheaper launch costs, both for longtime customers such as telecommunications and media companies, as well as for emerging industries finding new ways to use the technology.\nMany of China\u2019s private satellite firms are developing CubeSats, miniaturized satellites that come relatively cheap, can be launched 20 at a time and can be deployed in large constellations to provide widespread coverage.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA CubeSat miniaturized satellite made by ZeroG Labs. CubeSats can be launched 20 at a time and deployed in large constellations to provide widespread coverage.\n\n\n Space is corporate China\u2019s newest frontier, as Chinese startups prepare to boldly go head-to-head with the likes of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for a slice of the space market. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "In China\u2019s New Space Odyssey, 80 Startups Race to Get Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "952",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-startups-push-into-space-business-1541851211?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=62",
        "text": "\u201cThree years ago, no one imagined that a private Chinese company could do this,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lan Tianyi,\n\n\n\n founder of Ultimate Blue Nebula Co., a Beijing consultancy, referring to the launch attempt. \u201cNow, the private sector in China is very strong.\u201d\nChina has ambitious plans for its national space program. Coming missions include the launch of an unmanned lunar lander in December, while a Mars lander is due to blast off in 2020. China\u2019s BeiDou satellite navigation system\u2014a rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System\u2014is due for completion that same year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeijing opened up its space industry to private players in 2014, with the government hoping to snare a piece of the booming global commercial space sector. That industry generated revenue of $348 billion last year, largely from building, launching and operating satellites, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Satellite Industry Association.\n\n\nMost of the roughly 80 Chinese space startups counted by Mr. Lan are building satellites and related software applications, while as many as 10 are developing launch vehicles, hoping one day to rival existing state and private-sector launch outfits\u2014such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known\u2014for commercial contracts.\nLandspace Technology Corp. had hoped to become the first Chinese startup to blast a rocket into orbit last month. But its Vermillion Bird rocket failed to achieve its mission of putting a satellite into orbit, opening the door for another launch developer, One Space, to achieve the milestone when it stages an orbital launch slated for late 2018. Should that attempt fail, further contenders are lining up launches in 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\nLike other entrepreneurs with no background in aerospace,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Zhang \n\n\n\n spotted a big opportunity in the government\u2019s liberalization of the space industry. Mr. Zhang, a former banker with Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Santander Group,\n\n\n co-founded Landspace in 2015 with a team of experienced engineers who had worked on the Long March rocket family that underpins China\u2019s national space program. The team had no idea how to turn its knowledge into a commercial venture, Mr. Zhang said in an interview earlier this year.\nThe U.S.\u2019s fast-growing private space industry was the team\u2019s source of inspiration. \u201cWe wanted to do something like SpaceX\u2014they were our role model,\u201d Mr. Zhang said.\nLandspace has raised about $72 million from a combination of private investors and city governments, including the eastern city of Huzhou, where Landspace has a factory.\nThe state is involved in most of China\u2019s commercial launch startups, if only as an investor. One Space, Landspace\u2019s rival, raised its $116 million in funding from private investors and state-owned funds, a spokesman for the company said. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmployees assembled a model rocket at Landspace Technology headquarters in Beijing in September. The company\u2019s Vermillion Bird rocket last month failed to achieve its mission of putting a satellite into orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nLandspace needs roughly a further $115 million in capital to reach the stage where it can start commercial operations, Mr. Zhang said. The rocket tested in October can only carry a 300-kilogram (660-pound) payload, but Landspace is developing a larger\u2014and technically far more complex\u2014vehicle that is designed to lift 4,000 kilograms and would put it within touching distance of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, which can handle 4,850 kilograms.\nWhile SpaceX says it costs $62 million to launch the Falcon 9, Mr. Zhang said clients would be able to lease Landspace\u2019s rocket\u2014which is designed to reach a lower orbit than the more powerful Falcon 9\u2014for about $15 million.\nChina isn\u2019t the only country with commercial space aspirations; Brazil, India, Japan and the United Arab Emirates are all vying for launch business, too. What\u2019s more, China\u2019s ability to tap the American market is hampered by a U.S. government policy that restricts China from launching satellites made with U.S. parts, effectively barring it from launching American and some other commercial satellites.\nBut that hasn\u2019t stopped China\u2019s state-run space agencies from winning European contracts, and the entry into the global satellite business by its private sector raises the prospect of cheaper launch costs, both for longtime customers such as telecommunications and media companies, as well as for emerging industries finding new ways to use the technology.\nMany of China\u2019s private satellite firms are developing CubeSats, miniaturized satellites that come relatively cheap, can be launched 20 at a time and can be deployed in large constellations to provide widespread coverage.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA CubeSat miniaturized satellite made by ZeroG Labs. CubeSats can be launched 20 at a time and deployed in large constellations to provide widespread coverage.\n\n\n Space is corporate China\u2019s newest frontier, as Chinese startups prepare to boldly go head-to-head with the likes of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for a slice of the space market. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "In China\u2019s New Space Odyssey, 80 Startups Race to Get Into Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "953",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-startups-push-into-space-business-1541851211?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=84",
        "text": "\u201cThree years ago, no one imagined that a private Chinese company could do this,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lan Tianyi,\n\n\n\n founder of Ultimate Blue Nebula Co., a Beijing consultancy, referring to the launch attempt. \u201cNow, the private sector in China is very strong.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nChina has ambitious plans for its national space program. Coming missions include the launch of an unmanned lunar lander in December, while a Mars lander is due to blast off in 2020. China\u2019s BeiDou satellite navigation system\u2014a rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System\u2014is due for completion that same year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeijing opened up its space industry to private players in 2014, with the government hoping to snare a piece of the booming global commercial space sector. That industry generated revenue of $348 billion last year, largely from building, launching and operating satellites, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Satellite Industry Association.\n\n\nMost of the roughly 80 Chinese space startups counted by Mr. Lan are building satellites and related software applications, while as many as 10 are developing launch vehicles, hoping one day to rival existing state and private-sector launch outfits\u2014such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known\u2014for commercial contracts.\nLandspace Technology Corp. had hoped to become the first Chinese startup to blast a rocket into orbit last month. But its Vermillion Bird rocket failed to achieve its mission of putting a satellite into orbit, opening the door for another launch developer, One Space, to achieve the milestone when it stages an orbital launch slated for late 2018. Should that attempt fail, further contenders are lining up launches in 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\nLike other entrepreneurs with no background in aerospace,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Zhang \n\n\n\n spotted a big opportunity in the government\u2019s liberalization of the space industry. Mr. Zhang, a former banker with Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Santander Group,\n\n\n co-founded Landspace in 2015 with a team of experienced engineers who had worked on the Long March rocket family that underpins China\u2019s national space program. The team had no idea how to turn its knowledge into a commercial venture, Mr. Zhang said in an interview earlier this year.\nThe U.S.\u2019s fast-growing private space industry was the team\u2019s source of inspiration. \u201cWe wanted to do something like SpaceX\u2014they were our role model,\u201d Mr. Zhang said.\nLandspace has raised about $72 million from a combination of private investors and city governments, including the eastern city of Huzhou, where Landspace has a factory.\nThe state is involved in most of China\u2019s commercial launch startups, if only as an investor. One Space, Landspace\u2019s rival, raised its $116 million in funding from private investors and state-owned funds, a spokesman for the company said. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmployees assembled a model rocket at Landspace Technology headquarters in Beijing in September. The company\u2019s Vermillion Bird rocket last month failed to achieve its mission of putting a satellite into orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nLandspace needs roughly a further $115 million in capital to reach the stage where it can start commercial operations, Mr. Zhang said. The rocket tested in October can only carry a 300-kilogram (660-pound) payload, but Landspace is developing a larger\u2014and technically far more complex\u2014vehicle that is designed to lift 4,000 kilograms and would put it within touching distance of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, which can handle 4,850 kilograms.\nWhile SpaceX says it costs $62 million to launch the Falcon 9, Mr. Zhang said clients would be able to lease Landspace\u2019s rocket\u2014which is designed to reach a lower orbit than the more powerful Falcon 9\u2014for about $15 million.\nChina isn\u2019t the only country with commercial space aspirations; Brazil, India, Japan and the United Arab Emirates are all vying for launch business, too. What\u2019s more, China\u2019s ability to tap the American market is hampered by a U.S. government policy that restricts China from launching satellites made with U.S. parts, effectively barring it from launching American and some other commercial satellites.\nBut that hasn\u2019t stopped China\u2019s state-run space agencies from winning European contracts, and the entry into the global satellite business by its private sector raises the prospect of cheaper launch costs, both for longtime customers such as telecommunications and media companies, as well as for emerging industries finding new ways to use the technology.\nMany of China\u2019s private satellite firms are developing CubeSats, miniaturized satellites that come relatively cheap, can be launched 20 at a time and can be deployed in large constellations to provide widespread coverage.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA CubeSat miniaturized satellite made by ZeroG Labs. CubeSats can be launched 20 at a time and deployed in large constellations to provide widespread coverage. Space is corporate China\u2019s newest frontier, as Chinese startups prepare to boldly go head-to-head with the likes of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for a slice of the space market. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Proposes Making Hypersonic Airliners (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "954",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-proposes-using-spaceship-technology-to-create-super-fast-airliners-1506693744?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=22",
        "text": "\u201cIf we\u2019re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars,\u201d he told a space conference in Australia, \u201cthen why not go to other places on earth as well.\u201d\nThe references lacked technical and financial details, and Mr. Musk never indicated he was committed to pursuing the notion. There was no mention of even a preliminary project timeline.\n\n\nBut his comments at a prominent venue\u2014coupled with a futuristic animation video depicting rocket planes taking off and landing vertically from floating launchpads\u2014marked the first time Mr. Musk has publicly talked at length about such possible uses for hypersonic vehicles adapted from space exploration.\nIntended to reach speeds around 18,000 miles an hour, the vehicles potentially could blast off, cruise outside the atmosphere and then rely on advanced maneuvers and cutting-edge heat shields to make pinpoint landings. Presumably, most of the propulsion, navigation and safety systems would be derived from versions intended to explore deep space.\nHypersonic technology\u2014which encompasses anything moving faster than five times the speed of sound\u2014increasingly is being looked at for military and civilian applications world-wide. The Pentagon, for instance, is actively pursuing prototypes for planes and weapons that could travel from the U.S. to prospective battlefields in Asia or the Middle East in less than 30 or 40 minutes. China and Russia also are aggressively developing and testing their own prototypes.\nFor travel to Mars, SpeceX\u2019s vehicle would carry roughly 100 passengers and large amounts of cargo. For airline applications, it might be possible to accommodate a larger number of passengers, though Mr. Musk didn\u2019t elaborate\n\u201cOnce you are out of the atmosphere, you will go as smooth as silk\u201d because there is no turbulence or weather, Mr. Musk said\nHe didn\u2019t discuss potential ticket costs during his address. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nAfter Friday\u2019s session, Mr. Musk indicated the cost for a potential hypersonic airliner seat \u201cshould be about the same as full fare economy\u201d in a conventional aircraft. \u201cForgot to mention that,\u201d he wrote on Instagram, the Huffington Post reported.\nFor decades, entrepreneurs, researchers and federal scientists have unsuccessfully sought to uncover the secrets of reducing temperatures during such speedy flights. Mr. Musk didn\u2019t delve into that issue or other technical hurdles that historically have blocked development of a hypersonic airliners.\nBy incorporating innovative engine designs, the benefits of 3-D printing and principles of using the same booster repeatedly, other entrepreneurs also are following the same uphill path. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Milam,\n\n\n\n a Texas real-estate developer and technology investor has pledged to invest as much as $20 million of his own funds over the next few years to design a commercial hypersonic plane.\n\u201cThere has been lots of discussion about high-speed flight since the end of Concorde, but little has been realized,\u201d Mr. Milam said.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The SpaceX chief sketched out ways to use space travel technology to whisk passengers to any destination around the globe in less than an hour. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Proposes Making Hypersonic Airliners (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "955",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-proposes-using-spaceship-technology-to-create-super-fast-airliners-1506693744?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=86",
        "text": "\u201cIf we\u2019re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars,\u201d he told a space conference in Australia, \u201cthen why not go to other places on earth as well.\u201d\nThe references lacked technical and financial details, and Mr. Musk never indicated he was committed to pursuing the notion. There was no mention of even a preliminary project timeline.\n\n\nBut his comments at a prominent venue\u2014coupled with a futuristic animation video depicting rocket planes taking off and landing vertically from floating launchpads\u2014marked the first time Mr. Musk has publicly talked at length about such possible uses for hypersonic vehicles adapted from space exploration.\nIntended to reach speeds around 18,000 miles an hour, the vehicles potentially could blast off, cruise outside the atmosphere and then rely on advanced maneuvers and cutting-edge heat shields to make pinpoint landings. Presumably, most of the propulsion, navigation and safety systems would be derived from versions intended to explore deep space.\nHypersonic technology\u2014which encompasses anything moving faster than five times the speed of sound\u2014increasingly is being looked at for military and civilian applications world-wide. The Pentagon, for instance, is actively pursuing prototypes for planes and weapons that could travel from the U.S. to prospective battlefields in Asia or the Middle East in less than 30 or 40 minutes. China and Russia also are aggressively developing and testing their own prototypes.\nFor travel to Mars, SpeceX\u2019s vehicle would carry roughly 100 passengers and large amounts of cargo. For airline applications, it might be possible to accommodate a larger number of passengers, though Mr. Musk didn\u2019t elaborate\n\u201cOnce you are out of the atmosphere, you will go as smooth as silk\u201d because there is no turbulence or weather, Mr. Musk said\nHe didn\u2019t discuss potential ticket costs during his address. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nAfter Friday\u2019s session, Mr. Musk indicated the cost for a potential hypersonic airliner seat \u201cshould be about the same as full fare economy\u201d in a conventional aircraft. \u201cForgot to mention that,\u201d he wrote on Instagram, the Huffington Post reported.\nFor decades, entrepreneurs, researchers and federal scientists have unsuccessfully sought to uncover the secrets of reducing temperatures during such speedy flights. Mr. Musk didn\u2019t delve into that issue or other technical hurdles that historically have blocked development of a hypersonic airliners.\nBy incorporating innovative engine designs, the benefits of 3-D printing and principles of using the same booster repeatedly, other entrepreneurs also are following the same uphill path. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Milam,\n\n\n\n a Texas real-estate developer and technology investor has pledged to invest as much as $20 million of his own funds over the next few years to design a commercial hypersonic plane.\n\u201cThere has been lots of discussion about high-speed flight since the end of Concorde, but little has been realized,\u201d Mr. Milam said.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The SpaceX chief sketched out ways to use space travel technology to whisk passengers to any destination around the globe in less than an hour. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Proposes Making Hypersonic Airliners (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "956",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-proposes-using-spaceship-technology-to-create-super-fast-airliners-1506693744?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=112",
        "text": "\u201cIf we\u2019re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars,\u201d he told a space conference in Australia, \u201cthen why not go to other places on earth as well.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe references lacked technical and financial details, and Mr. Musk never indicated he was committed to pursuing the notion. There was no mention of even a preliminary project timeline.\n\n\nBut his comments at a prominent venue\u2014coupled with a futuristic animation video depicting rocket planes taking off and landing vertically from floating launchpads\u2014marked the first time Mr. Musk has publicly talked at length about such possible uses for hypersonic vehicles adapted from space exploration.\nIntended to reach speeds around 18,000 miles an hour, the vehicles potentially could blast off, cruise outside the atmosphere and then rely on advanced maneuvers and cutting-edge heat shields to make pinpoint landings. Presumably, most of the propulsion, navigation and safety systems would be derived from versions intended to explore deep space.\nHypersonic technology\u2014which encompasses anything moving faster than five times the speed of sound\u2014increasingly is being looked at for military and civilian applications world-wide. The Pentagon, for instance, is actively pursuing prototypes for planes and weapons that could travel from the U.S. to prospective battlefields in Asia or the Middle East in less than 30 or 40 minutes. China and Russia also are aggressively developing and testing their own prototypes.\nFor travel to Mars, SpeceX\u2019s vehicle would carry roughly 100 passengers and large amounts of cargo. For airline applications, it might be possible to accommodate a larger number of passengers, though Mr. Musk didn\u2019t elaborate\n\u201cOnce you are out of the atmosphere, you will go as smooth as silk\u201d because there is no turbulence or weather, Mr. Musk said\nHe didn\u2019t discuss potential ticket costs during his address. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nAfter Friday\u2019s session, Mr. Musk indicated the cost for a potential hypersonic airliner seat \u201cshould be about the same as full fare economy\u201d in a conventional aircraft. \u201cForgot to mention that,\u201d he wrote on Instagram, the Huffington Post reported.\nFor decades, entrepreneurs, researchers and federal scientists have unsuccessfully sought to uncover the secrets of reducing temperatures during such speedy flights. Mr. Musk didn\u2019t delve into that issue or other technical hurdles that historically have blocked development of a hypersonic airliners.\nBy incorporating innovative engine designs, the benefits of 3-D printing and principles of using the same booster repeatedly, other entrepreneurs also are following the same uphill path. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Milam,\n\n\n\n a Texas real-estate developer and technology investor has pledged to invest as much as $20 million of his own funds over the next few years to design a commercial hypersonic plane.\n\u201cThere has been lots of discussion about high-speed flight since the end of Concorde, but little has been realized,\u201d Mr. Milam said.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The SpaceX chief sketched out ways to use space travel technology to whisk passengers to any destination around the globe in less than an hour. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Falcon Heavy: A Good Show, but Not Necessarily Great Business (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "957",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-falcon-heavy-a-good-show-but-not-necessarily-great-business-1518047939?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=78",
        "text": "\u201cI don\u2019t understand what their plan is\u201d to overcome those challenges, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Mulholland,\n\n\n\n head of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n \u2019s program to carry U.S. astronauts to the international space station, on the sidelines of the conference.\nWhen Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n kicked off development of what would become the world\u2019s most powerful operational rocket at the start of the decade, the goal was to lift as many as 70 tons into orbits relatively close to Earth.\n\n\nThe vehicle was conceived to carry megasatellites for either businesses or the government, and transport U.S. astronauts. It was also intended to serve as a bridge to even more powerful systems designed to ultimately create human outposts deeper in space.\nThe successful launch proved the validity of the engineering, but assumptions about market demand have changed considerably in the intervening years. The size as well as the type of payloads has shifted, and not to the Falcon Heavy\u2019s advantage.\nCommercial satellite operators increasingly are looking to reduce the size of their communication and earth-imaging models. So are Pentagon and national-security customers, worried about exposing multibillion-dollar satellites to potential attacks by adversaries.\n\u201cI will not support buying big satellites that make juicy targets,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. John Hyten,\n\n\n\n head of the U.S. Strategic Command, has said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy still can provide a cut-rate price to get the heaviest payloads into orbit. After Tuesday\u2019s success, Mr. Musk told reporters his company already can count on a number of private customers and hopes to be approved for the full array of spy satellite missions in coming years. SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 also has been beefed up over the years to allow it to carry some larger satellites that otherwise would have required a Falcon Heavy.\nThe new rocket can \u201cmeet the diverse needs of the civil, commercial, and national security\u201d markets in a way that will \u201cfree up resources to enable customers to reinvest savings in new space capabilities,\u201d according to Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.\nBut the number of corporate payloads world-wide in the category initially envisioned by Falcon Heavy\u2019s designers is now projected to remain at their current depressed levels for the foreseeable future, according to updated industry statistics released at the conference.\nBy contrast, the number of small, low-orbit satellites has been climbing steadily, and global launch totals in that segment are expected to jump to 397 in 2019 from an estimated 341 this year, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Smith,\n\n\n\n a launch expert with the consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.\nIn the past few years, the Pentagon has launched only one or two ultra-heavy satellites of its own.\nBoeing\u2019s Mr. Mulholland said his team decided early on that a Falcon Heavy-class rocket wouldn\u2019t produce the thrust \u201cwe really need for Mars,\u201d or to establish a permanent gateway to deep space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nMr. Smith told the conference that the global space economy expanded to some $345 billion last year, with launch services accounting for less than $6 billion.\nThe Falcon Heavy might find its niche as part of a broad government-industry partnership spanning manned and robotic missions to explore regions around the moon and beyond.\n\u201cNo single organization has the level of resources\u201d to accelerate exploration of the solar system \u201cwith the urgency, and most importantly, the safety that is needed,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Nield,\n\n\n\n head of the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s commercial space office, told the conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The launch this week of SpaceX\u2019s mammoth Falcon Heavy rocket was a feat, but many in the space industry doubt it will bring the company big commercial business. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Falcon Heavy: A Good Show, but Not Necessarily Great Business (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "958",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-falcon-heavy-a-good-show-but-not-necessarily-great-business-1518047939?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=71",
        "text": "\u201cI don\u2019t understand what their plan is\u201d to overcome those challenges, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Mulholland,\n\n\n\n head of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n \u2019s program to carry U.S. astronauts to the international space station, on the sidelines of the conference.\nWhen Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n kicked off development of what would become the world\u2019s most powerful operational rocket at the start of the decade, the goal was to lift as many as 70 tons into orbits relatively close to Earth.\n\n\nThe vehicle was conceived to carry megasatellites for either businesses or the government, and transport U.S. astronauts. It was also intended to serve as a bridge to even more powerful systems designed to ultimately create human outposts deeper in space.\nThe successful launch proved the validity of the engineering, but assumptions about market demand have changed considerably in the intervening years. The size as well as the type of payloads has shifted, and not to the Falcon Heavy\u2019s advantage.\nCommercial satellite operators increasingly are looking to reduce the size of their communication and earth-imaging models. So are Pentagon and national-security customers, worried about exposing multibillion-dollar satellites to potential attacks by adversaries.\n\u201cI will not support buying big satellites that make juicy targets,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. John Hyten,\n\n\n\n head of the U.S. Strategic Command, has said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy still can provide a cut-rate price to get the heaviest payloads into orbit. After Tuesday\u2019s success, Mr. Musk told reporters his company already can count on a number of private customers and hopes to be approved for the full array of spy satellite missions in coming years. SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 also has been beefed up over the years to allow it to carry some larger satellites that otherwise would have required a Falcon Heavy.\nThe new rocket can \u201cmeet the diverse needs of the civil, commercial, and national security\u201d markets in a way that will \u201cfree up resources to enable customers to reinvest savings in new space capabilities,\u201d according to Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.\nBut the number of corporate payloads world-wide in the category initially envisioned by Falcon Heavy\u2019s designers is now projected to remain at their current depressed levels for the foreseeable future, according to updated industry statistics released at the conference.\nBy contrast, the number of small, low-orbit satellites has been climbing steadily, and global launch totals in that segment are expected to jump to 397 in 2019 from an estimated 341 this year, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Smith,\n\n\n\n a launch expert with the consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.\nIn the past few years, the Pentagon has launched only one or two ultra-heavy satellites of its own.\nBoeing\u2019s Mr. Mulholland said his team decided early on that a Falcon Heavy-class rocket wouldn\u2019t produce the thrust \u201cwe really need for Mars,\u201d or to establish a permanent gateway to deep space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nMr. Smith told the conference that the global space economy expanded to some $345 billion last year, with launch services accounting for less than $6 billion.\nThe Falcon Heavy might find its niche as part of a broad government-industry partnership spanning manned and robotic missions to explore regions around the moon and beyond.\n\u201cNo single organization has the level of resources\u201d to accelerate exploration of the solar system \u201cwith the urgency, and most importantly, the safety that is needed,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Nield,\n\n\n\n head of the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s commercial space office, told the conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The launch this week of SpaceX\u2019s mammoth Falcon Heavy rocket was a feat, but many in the space industry doubt it will bring the company big commercial business. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Falcon Heavy: A Good Show, but Not Necessarily Great Business (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "959",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-falcon-heavy-a-good-show-but-not-necessarily-great-business-1518047939?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=102",
        "text": "\u201cI don\u2019t understand what their plan is\u201d to overcome those challenges, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Mulholland,\n\n\n\n head of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n \u2019s program to carry U.S. astronauts to the international space station, on the sidelines of the conference.\nWhen Space Exploration Technologies Corp. founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n kicked off development of what would become the world\u2019s most powerful operational rocket at the start of the decade, the goal was to lift as many as 70 tons into orbits relatively close to Earth.\n\n\nThe vehicle was conceived to carry megasatellites for either businesses or the government, and transport U.S. astronauts. It was also intended to serve as a bridge to even more powerful systems designed to ultimately create human outposts deeper in space.\nThe successful launch proved the validity of the engineering, but assumptions about market demand have changed considerably in the intervening years. The size as well as the type of payloads has shifted, and not to the Falcon Heavy\u2019s advantage.\nCommercial satellite operators increasingly are looking to reduce the size of their communication and earth-imaging models. So are Pentagon and national-security customers, worried about exposing multibillion-dollar satellites to potential attacks by adversaries.\n\u201cI will not support buying big satellites that make juicy targets,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. John Hyten,\n\n\n\n head of the U.S. Strategic Command, has said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy still can provide a cut-rate price to get the heaviest payloads into orbit. After Tuesday\u2019s success, Mr. Musk told reporters his company already can count on a number of private customers and hopes to be approved for the full array of spy satellite missions in coming years. SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 also has been beefed up over the years to allow it to carry some larger satellites that otherwise would have required a Falcon Heavy.\nThe new rocket can \u201cmeet the diverse needs of the civil, commercial, and national security\u201d markets in a way that will \u201cfree up resources to enable customers to reinvest savings in new space capabilities,\u201d according to Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.\nBut the number of corporate payloads world-wide in the category initially envisioned by Falcon Heavy\u2019s designers is now projected to remain at their current depressed levels for the foreseeable future, according to updated industry statistics released at the conference.\nBy contrast, the number of small, low-orbit satellites has been climbing steadily, and global launch totals in that segment are expected to jump to 397 in 2019 from an estimated 341 this year, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Smith,\n\n\n\n a launch expert with the consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.\nIn the past few years, the Pentagon has launched only one or two ultra-heavy satellites of its own.\nBoeing\u2019s Mr. Mulholland said his team decided early on that a Falcon Heavy-class rocket wouldn\u2019t produce the thrust \u201cwe really need for Mars,\u201d or to establish a permanent gateway to deep space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nMr. Smith told the conference that the global space economy expanded to some $345 billion last year, with launch services accounting for less than $6 billion.\nThe Falcon Heavy might find its niche as part of a broad government-industry partnership spanning manned and robotic missions to explore regions around the moon and beyond.\n\u201cNo single organization has the level of resources\u201d to accelerate exploration of the solar system \u201cwith the urgency, and most importantly, the safety that is needed,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Nield,\n\n\n\n head of the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s commercial space office, told the conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The launch this week of SpaceX\u2019s mammoth Falcon Heavy rocket was a feat, but many in the space industry doubt it will bring the company big commercial business. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Says CEOs\u2019 Focus Often Misdirected (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "960",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-advises-ceos-to-stop-wasting-time-on-powerpoint-meetings-11607470065?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=41",
        "text": "\u201cAre CEOs in corporate America focused enough on product improvement? I think the answer is no,\u201d Mr. Musk told an online audience Tuesday during The Wall Street Journal\u2019s CEO Council annual summit. \u201cSpend less time on finance, spend less time in conference rooms, less time on PowerPoint and more time just trying to make your product as amazing as possible.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nIn his remarks, Mr. Musk repeatedly took swipes at the way most companies were run. He also decried business school graduates, declaring there were \u201ctoo many M.B.A.s running companies.\u201d\n\n\nRelated Musk Moves to Texas, Takes Jab at Silicon Valley Musk Criticizes Candy Makers for Lack of New Products Tesla Plans Stock Sale, Closing Year of Soaring Gains Heard on the Street: Tesla Is Watching Its Stock Price \n\n\nThe billionaire executive has always taken an unusual approach to management, one that has gotten him into hot water at times. He has tussled with financial regulators over his social-media usage and, earlier this year, criticized California\u2019s shelter-in-place efforts to contain the coronavirus. The Securities and Exchange Commissionsued Mr. Musk in 2018, alleging he tweeted misleading information about taking Tesla private. A settlement deal with the SEC required that Tesla officials preapprove statements from him that could affect the company\u2019s stock price. Earlier this year, he tweeted that he felt Tesla\u2019s stock price was too high.\n\n\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the point of a company at all? Why even have companies?\u201d Mr. Musk asked Tuesday, suggesting many leaders had lost sight of the fundamental role of corporations. \u201cA company has no value in and of itself. It only has value to the degree that it is an effective allocator of resources to create goods and services that are of a greater value than the cost of the inputs.\u201d\nInstead of obsessing over spreadsheets, he said, executives should walk factory floors or interact with more customers. Innovation often doesn\u2019t come through one breakthrough idea but a relentless focus on continuous improvement, he said.\n\u201cIs your product as awesome as it could be? Probably not,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cWhat could you do to make it great?\u201d\nDeveloping a product-focused mind-set is a skill that can be learned, Mr. Musk said, suggesting that executives seek negative feedback and think about the products they would want to use. \u201cIt\u2019s not some mysterious thing,\u201d he said.\n\u201cBasically just be an absolute perfectionist about the product you make or the services provided,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t love it, don\u2019t expect others will, either.\u201d\nAt his own companies, including Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., also known as SpaceX, Mr. Musk said he had made mistakes in the past when he strayed from his own advice and got too far away from the companies\u2019 core tasks.\n\u201cWhen I have spent too much time in a conference room, that\u2019s generally when things have gone awry,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I go to spend time on the factory floor, or really using the cars, thinking about the rockets, that\u2019s where things have gone better.\u201d\nWhen asked if he needed to better delegate, Mr. Musk said his employees respected when he dived into the details of their work.\n\u201cThink about war: Do you want the general in some ivory tower or on the front lines? The troops are going to fight a lot harder if they see the general on the front lines,\u201d he said. \u201cNobody bleeds with the prince in the palace. Get out there on the goddamn front line and show them that you care, and that you\u2019re not just in some plush office somewhere.\u201d\nWrite to Chip Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com Tesla\u2019s chief advises company leaders to concentrate more on finding ways to make their products better and spend less time in meetings and poring over spreadsheets. ",
        "author": "Chip Cutter"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S., Israel Join Forces to Protect Astronauts From Radiation (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "961",
        "date": "2018-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-israeli-space-agencies-join-forces-to-protect-astronauts-from-radiation-1523969713?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=68",
        "text": "StemRad Ltd., a closely held Israeli company that already supplies a different type of personal radiation-protective gear to a limited numbers of soldiers, nuclear plant workers and emergency responders, developed the space version of its product in conjunction with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -1.20%\n\n\n The vests are designed to be light and supple enough for future astronauts to wear while doing normal tasks on lengthy missions deep in the solar system and eventually to Mars, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oren Milstein,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s founder and chief executive.\nIn addition to the anticipated scientific payoff, Lockheed Martin officials envision business and geopolitical benefits from engaging more closely with Israel and its fast-growing commercial space sector.\n\n\nNASA reiterated that \u201cradiation is one of the biggest hazards crew will face on deep space missions,\u201d adding that the cooperative effort with Israel aims to \u201cdevelop additional methods to protect them.\u201d\nThe vests will be fitted on a mannequin during the first flight of NASA\u2019s Orion capsule, an unmanned mission currently scheduled for 2019. Radiation sensors inside the mannequin and on a second one without the vest are supposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the material in protecting human organs from potentially lethal doses of high-energy radiation. Germany\u2019s DLR research center also is participating.\nIn an interview, Mr. Milstein said the arrangement with NASA sets up the most detailed and extensive experiment yet to measure radiation hazards for crews traveling beyond low-earth orbit. The vest also will be tested next year by astronauts on the international space station.\nFormer astronaut and retired\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Air Force Gen. Thomas Stafford,\n\n\n\n who heads an advisory panel for NASA, said typical radiation levels in low-earth orbit are roughly 100 times greater than background levels experienced by people living in tropical regions. Astronaut exposure during solar storms, however, can be substantially higher. In space, there are no clouds or rain to shield humans from such gamma rays. NASA worries about extended exposure, which can cause cancer and destroy bone marrow.\nUntil now, the agency\u2019s primary strategy has been to provide a protected space deep inside Orion where astronauts would be able to retreat if solar storms erupt. But such areas\u2014dubbed storm shelters\u2014may be too small to accommodate crews over extended periods. For major solar eruptions, which can stretch from a day to a week, U.S. and Israeli researchers seek a mobile protection system as a supplement.\n\u201cShielding the whole body is just impossible,\u201d according to Mr. Milstein, while water or other radiation barriers are too heavy. He said cramped shelters are \u201cnot \u00a0a viable solution for long-duration travel.\u201d\nSo Mr. Milstein\u2019s company has developed a vest, weighing about 50 pounds and contoured to the bodies of individual astronauts, specifically intended to protect their vital organs. The test mannequins will have female anatomies, because women are more susceptible than men to radiation hazards. And StemRad\u2019s biggest challenge, Mr. Milstein said, has been creating a dense material able to protect against radiation but still flexible enough to allow normal movement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Murrow,\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\u2019s official working on the project, said if the vests pass muster, he foresees them alleviating \u201cone of the most vexing problems of long-duration space flight.\u201d\nFor Lockheed Martin, the partnership also portends longer-term, less technical gains. Israel\u2019s space industry is undergoing a dramatic growth spurt, \u201cwhich is becoming a very interesting source of innovation,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claire Jolly,\n\n\n\n a senior analyst for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, told a conference panel on Monday.\nMr. Murrow, who has worked with StemRad since the inception of the project, sees it bringing an energetic new player \u201cinto the space-faring community.\u201d NASA and its contractors, he said, can be boosted by \u201cthe creative spirit of a young company.\u201d StemRad and Israeli space officials, for their part, continue to express interest in greater cooperation with NASA.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com U.S. and Israeli space officials have teamed up with a Tel Aviv-based technology startup to combat one of the gravest threats confronting future astronauts: excessive radiation exposure. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S., Israel Join Forces to Protect Astronauts From Radiation (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "962",
        "date": "2018-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-israeli-space-agencies-join-forces-to-protect-astronauts-from-radiation-1523969713?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=97",
        "text": "StemRad Ltd., a closely held Israeli company that already supplies a different type of personal radiation-protective gear to a limited numbers of soldiers, nuclear plant workers and emergency responders, developed the space version of its product in conjunction with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.41%\n\n\n The vests are designed to be light and supple enough for future astronauts to wear while doing normal tasks on lengthy missions deep in the solar system and eventually to Mars, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oren Milstein,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s founder and chief executive.\n\n\n\n\nIn addition to the anticipated scientific payoff, Lockheed Martin officials envision business and geopolitical benefits from engaging more closely with Israel and its fast-growing commercial space sector.\n\n\nNASA reiterated that \u201cradiation is one of the biggest hazards crew will face on deep space missions,\u201d adding that the cooperative effort with Israel aims to \u201cdevelop additional methods to protect them.\u201d\nThe vests will be fitted on a mannequin during the first flight of NASA\u2019s Orion capsule, an unmanned mission currently scheduled for 2019. Radiation sensors inside the mannequin and on a second one without the vest are supposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the material in protecting human organs from potentially lethal doses of high-energy radiation. Germany\u2019s DLR research center also is participating.\nIn an interview, Mr. Milstein said the arrangement with NASA sets up the most detailed and extensive experiment yet to measure radiation hazards for crews traveling beyond low-earth orbit. The vest also will be tested next year by astronauts on the international space station.\nFormer astronaut and retired\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Air Force Gen. Thomas Stafford,\n\n\n\n who heads an advisory panel for NASA, said typical radiation levels in low-earth orbit are roughly 100 times greater than background levels experienced by people living in tropical regions. Astronaut exposure during solar storms, however, can be substantially higher. In space, there are no clouds or rain to shield humans from such gamma rays. NASA worries about extended exposure, which can cause cancer and destroy bone marrow.\nUntil now, the agency\u2019s primary strategy has been to provide a protected space deep inside Orion where astronauts would be able to retreat if solar storms erupt. But such areas\u2014dubbed storm shelters\u2014may be too small to accommodate crews over extended periods. For major solar eruptions, which can stretch from a day to a week, U.S. and Israeli researchers seek a mobile protection system as a supplement.\n\u201cShielding the whole body is just impossible,\u201d according to Mr. Milstein, while water or other radiation barriers are too heavy. He said cramped shelters are \u201cnot \u00a0a viable solution for long-duration travel.\u201d\nSo Mr. Milstein\u2019s company has developed a vest, weighing about 50 pounds and contoured to the bodies of individual astronauts, specifically intended to protect their vital organs. The test mannequins will have female anatomies, because women are more susceptible than men to radiation hazards. And StemRad\u2019s biggest challenge, Mr. Milstein said, has been creating a dense material able to protect against radiation but still flexible enough to allow normal movement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Murrow,\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\u2019s official working on the project, said if the vests pass muster, he foresees them alleviating \u201cone of the most vexing problems of long-duration space flight.\u201d\nFor Lockheed Martin, the partnership also portends longer-term, less technical gains. Israel\u2019s space industry is undergoing a dramatic growth spurt, \u201cwhich is becoming a very interesting source of innovation,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claire Jolly,\n\n\n\n a senior analyst for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, told a conference panel on Monday.\nMr. Murrow, who has worked with StemRad since the inception of the project, sees it bringing an energetic new player \u201cinto the space-faring community.\u201d NASA and its contractors, he said, can be boosted by \u201cthe creative spirit of a young company.\u201d StemRad and Israeli space officials, for their part, continue to express interest in greater cooperation with NASA.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com U.S. and Israeli space officials have teamed up with a Tel Aviv-based technology startup to combat one of the gravest threats confronting future astronauts: excessive radiation exposure. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We\u2019ve Been Humbled\u2019: Boeing\u2019s CEO Struggles to Contain 737 MAX Crisis (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "963",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/weve-been-humbled-boeings-ceo-struggles-to-contain-737-max-crisis-11577062371?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=49",
        "text": "Show more warmth, Mr. Munoz told the 55-year-old CEO during a visit in the airline chief\u2019s office inside Chicago\u2019s Willis Tower, according to United officials. After all, Mr. Munoz told him, 346 people perished on Boeing\u2019s planes. Since the dual crashes, Boeing has fumbled its response, treating the disasters more like typical accidents, repeatedly minimizing its own technical and design mistakes and underestimating the backlash from regulators, customers and the flying public. At the center is Mr. Muilenburg who appeared to rely too heavily on data and legal advice to make decisions as he sought to find what went wrong, communicate and get Boeing\u2019s plane flying again. His choices failed to resolve\u2014and sometimes exacerbated\u2014friction with regulators and airlines, indicating that until recently he may not have fully grasped the severity of the challenges confronting him.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTurbulent Tenure\nBoeing shares surged during CEO Dennis Muilenburg's tenure, with its market value peaking above $250 billion just days before the second crash of a 737 MAX.\n\n\n\n\n\n$500\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n400\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n300\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n200\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n100\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n$500\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n400\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n300\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n200\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n100\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n$500\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n400\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n300\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n200\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n100\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing share price\n\n\n$500\n\n\n4\n\n\n400\n\n\n300\n\n\n3\n\n\n5\n\n\n200\n\n\n1\n\n\n100\n\n\n2\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n1\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n2\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n3\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n4\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n5\n\n\n\n\n\nSource: FactSet\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHe has prioritized getting the MAX back aloft while struggling with the complexities of politics and public relations, technical hurdles and restoring passenger confidence. He finally conceded mistakes after declining to acknowledge flaws in a flight-control system implicated in both accidents. With the grounding set to last at least a year, Mr. Muilenburg and his supporters now say his approach is evolving. He went from ardently defending Boeing to belatedly acknowledging mistakes, seeking input from customers, apologizing and meeting with grieving families. He has begun talking publicly about Boeing\u2019s newfound humility. \u201cWe\u2019ve been humbled by these two accidents,\u201d Mr. Muilenburg said in an interview last week. \u201cWe\u2019re making changes to our company, and I\u2019m changing as a leader as well.\u201d Mr. Muilenburg is still left with a deepening crisis. His repeated assurances of the plane\u2019s safety have failed to win regulators\u2019 approval. A string of Boeing\u2019s optimistic predictions for when regulators would certify the aircraft for flying haven\u2019t panned out and have indeed antagonized air-safety regulators world-wide.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing 737 MAX production in Renton, Wash., in March.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Ryder/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nBoeing, the largest U.S. manufacturing exporter, is suspending MAX production starting January. The production suspension, which prompted President Trump to call Mr. Muilenburg, has big implications for Boeing\u2019s vast network of suppliers and their employees\u2014and the American economy. U.S. industry officials don\u2019t expect the Federal Aviation Administration to lift its flight ban until at least February. Making matters worse, Boeing this month botched a space capsule\u2019s long-awaited test flight\u2014it went into the wrong orbit\u2014raising fresh questions about management\u2019s ability to pull off big feats. Boeing\u2019s string of missteps is fueling speculation among airline, government and other industry officials about how long Mr. Muilenburg can keep his job. Boeing\u2019s board stripped him of his dual role as chairman earlier this year. After the failed space mission, Boeing\u2019s new chairman, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dave Calhoun,\n\n\n\n on Friday stood by earlier televised comments backing Mr. Muilenburg. A Boeing spokesman said Sunday Mr. Calhoun stands by his endorsement. Mr. Muilenburg, an engineer by training, came to lead Boeing after a long stint in the aerospace Dennis Muilenburg, the aviation giant\u2019s chief, relied on data and legal advice to make decisions as he sought to get the plane flying again. His choices have failed to resolve friction with customers, regulators and the flying public. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel, Alison Sider and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We\u2019ve Been Humbled\u2019: Boeing\u2019s CEO Struggles to Contain 737 MAX Crisis (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "964",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/weve-been-humbled-boeings-ceo-struggles-to-contain-737-max-crisis-11577062371?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=48",
        "text": "Show more warmth, Mr. Munoz told the 55-year-old CEO during a visit in the airline chief\u2019s office inside Chicago\u2019s Willis Tower, according to United officials. After all, Mr. Munoz told him, 346 people perished on Boeing\u2019s planes. Since the dual crashes, Boeing has fumbled its response, treating the disasters more like typical accidents, repeatedly minimizing its own technical and design mistakes and underestimating the backlash from regulators, customers and the flying public. At the center is Mr. Muilenburg who appeared to rely too heavily on data and legal advice to make decisions as he sought to find what went wrong, communicate and get Boeing\u2019s plane flying again. His choices failed to resolve\u2014and sometimes exacerbated\u2014friction with regulators and airlines, indicating that until recently he may not have fully grasped the severity of the challenges confronting him.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTurbulent Tenure\nBoeing shares surged during CEO Dennis Muilenburg's tenure, with its market value peaking above $250 billion just days before the second crash of a 737 MAX.\n\n\n\n\n\n$500\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n400\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n300\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n200\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n100\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n$500\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n400\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n300\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n200\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n100\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n$500\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n400\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n300\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n200\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n100\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing share price\n\n\n$500\n\n\n4\n\n\n400\n\n\n300\n\n\n3\n\n\n5\n\n\n200\n\n\n1\n\n\n100\n\n\n2\n\n\n0\n\n\n2015\n\n\n\u201916\n\n\n\u201917\n\n\n\u201918\n\n\n\u201919\n\n\nJuly 1, 2015\nDennis Muilenburg becomes CEO\n\n\n1\n\n\nMay 16, 2017\nFirst 737 MAX delivered to Malaysia's Malindo Air\n\n\n2\n\n\nOct. 29, 2018\nLion Air Flight JT910 crashes\n\n\n3\n\n\nMarch 10, 2019\nEthiopian Airlines Flight ET302 crashes\n\n\n4\n\n\nDec. 16, 2019\nBoeing announces plans to suspend 737 MAX production\n\n\n5\n\n\n\n\n\nSource: FactSet\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHe has prioritized getting the MAX back aloft while struggling with the complexities of politics and public relations, technical hurdles and restoring passenger confidence. He finally conceded mistakes after declining to acknowledge flaws in a flight-control system implicated in both accidents. With the grounding set to last at least a year, Mr. Muilenburg and his supporters now say his approach is evolving. He went from ardently defending Boeing to belatedly acknowledging mistakes, seeking input from customers, apologizing and meeting with grieving families. He has begun talking publicly about Boeing\u2019s newfound humility. \u201cWe\u2019ve been humbled by these two accidents,\u201d Mr. Muilenburg said in an interview last week. \u201cWe\u2019re making changes to our company, and I\u2019m changing as a leader as well.\u201d Mr. Muilenburg is still left with a deepening crisis. His repeated assurances of the plane\u2019s safety have failed to win regulators\u2019 approval. A string of Boeing\u2019s optimistic predictions for when regulators would certify the aircraft for flying haven\u2019t panned out and have indeed antagonized air-safety regulators world-wide.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoeing 737 MAX production in Renton, Wash., in March.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Ryder/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nBoeing, the largest U.S. manufacturing exporter, is suspending MAX production starting January. The production suspension, which prompted President Trump to call Mr. Muilenburg, has big implications for Boeing\u2019s vast network of suppliers and their employees\u2014and the American economy. U.S. industry officials don\u2019t expect the Federal Aviation Administration to lift its flight ban until at least February. Making matters worse, Boeing this month botched a space capsule\u2019s long-awaited test flight\u2014it went into the wrong orbit\u2014raising fresh questions about management\u2019s ability to pull off big feats. Boeing\u2019s string of missteps is fueling speculation among airline, government and other industry officials about how long Mr. Muilenburg can keep his job. Boeing\u2019s board stripped him of his dual role as chairman earlier this year. After the failed space mission, Boeing\u2019s new chairman, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dave Calhoun,\n\n\n\n on Friday stood by earlier televised comments backing Mr. Muilenburg. A Boeing spokesman said Sunday Mr. Calhoun stands by his endorsement. Mr. Muilenburg, an engineer by training, came to lead Boeing after a long stint in the aerospace Dennis Muilenburg, the aviation giant\u2019s chief, relied on data and legal advice to make decisions as he sought to get the plane flying again. His choices have failed to resolve friction with customers, regulators and the flying public. ",
        "author": "Andrew Tangel, Alison Sider and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Defense Contractor Is Under Fire for Foreign Purchase of Propellant (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "965",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/orbital-atk-is-under-white-house-pressure-for-foreign-purchase-of-propellant-1514574693?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=73",
        "text": "In behind-the-scenes clashes, high-ranking trade, military and space advisers to President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n have voiced opposition to Orbital\u2019s purchase as part of company cost-cutting initiatives, according to industry and government officials familiar with the details. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOrbital ATK's Antares rocket sits on the 0A launch pad at the NASA Wallops Island flight facility in Wallops Island, Va., on Nov. 10.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Steve Helber/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe propellant is available at a higher price from a sole domestic source, closely held American Pacific Corp., controlled by Utah\u2019s billionaire Huntsman family, which founded\u00a0multinational chemical powerhouse Huntsman Corp. Low sales volume and high fixed costs have made the company vulnerable to less-expensive competitors.\u00a0\n\n\nThe material is a vital oxidizer that controls how quickly and with what power solid rocket motors burn. It is used in everything from missiles carried under the wings of Air Force fighters to the largest, nuclear-tipped missiles buried in silos or hidden beneath the seas aboard Navy submarines. \nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration also relies on ammonium perchlorate for its next-generation rockets, called SLS, eventually slated to take astronauts to Mars. \nThe French imports are intended to be part of a test to determine, among other things, whether NASA will permit the foreign material to be put into those rockets.\nAmerican Pacific charges roughly twice as much per pound for the compound as its overseas competitor, setting up a conflict between \u201cBuy American\u201d principles championed by the Trump administration and military and NASA program managers intent on squeezing the most out of every acquisition dollar.\n\n\nRelated Sole U.S. Producer of a Vital Rocket Propellant Meets Competition \n\n\nThe issue also heralds a broader debate over erosion of U.S. defense suppliers and the aerospace industrial base. With an administration-wide report on the general health of second- and third-tier suppliers due in the spring, one senior White House official considers American Pacific\u2019s escalating financial problems \u201can excellent example of the need to ensure domestic capabilities\u201d amid a dwindling number of homegrown subcontractors.\nAbove all, White House advisers are stepping up scrutiny due to worries about outsourcing such a vital product to a foreign venture. \u201cIt\u2019s imperative that all government agencies are acting in concert with the goal of ensuring a reliable U.S. supply,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Navarro,\n\n\n\n a top trade adviser to Mr. Trump, who is leading the charge against Orbital ATK.\nAs the leading U.S. maker of solid rocket motors, Orbital ATK currently consumes about half the domestic supplies of ammonium perchlorate. Management has told federal officials that at a time when the company is demanding price cuts from subcontractors and sharply scaling back its own production costs and personnel, it wants to avoid paying monopolistic prices to American Pacific. The solid rocket motor business has shrunk in the past two decades, with many industry officials anticipating more consolidation.\nAn Orbital ATK spokeswoman said,\u00a0\u201cWe constantly seek and evaluate ways to reduce costs in our supply chain while also mitigating program risk.\u201d Because higher prices for the oxidizer threaten to add tens of millions of dollars to each SLS launch, she said, Orbital ATK \u201cwill continue to work with our customers on the most affordable ways to help them achieve their goals.\u201d\nConfronted with White House criticism and accelerating drops in demand, American Pacific is appealing to patriotism. \u201cWe firmly believe that the Trump administration will not allow imported rocket fuel that is subsidized and subject to control by a foreign government to power our nation\u2019s missile defense, nuclear deterrent and critical space missions,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Huntsman,\n\n\n\n American Pacific\u2019s chairman.\nAmerican Pacific has repeatedly told federal officials it needs minimum, multi-year purchase guarantees to operate efficiently and lock in plans to stay afloat. Such arguments are backed by Scott Pace, a senior aide to Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n and the top staffer at the White House Space Council.\nMr. Pace expressed concerns to Orbital, American Pacific and administration officials at meetings earlier this year about looking overseas for the oxidizer, according to some of the participants. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Pace earlier this month said the council \u201chasn\u2019t made any policy recommendations to the President\u201d about the topic.\nAn American Pacific plant in remote Cedar City, Utah, turns out more than four dozen, slightly different variations of the compound needed for the full range of Pentagon applications. Supporters contend foreign supplies\u00a0wouldn\u2019t be able meet all of those specific requirements and will entail substant Orbital ATK Inc. has sparked national-security concerns among White House officials because it shifted purchasing to foreign sources of an essential chemical used for powering U.S. missiles and rockets. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Pursues Private Space Station (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "966",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-pursues-private-space-station-11635194295?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=2",
        "text": "The venture including Blue Origin isn\u2019t the only one aiming to run a facility in space. Last week, the space company Nanoracks said it was working with Voyager Space, its majority owner, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.40%\n\n\n to develop a station called Starlab. Axiom Space Inc. is also working on its own facility.\n\n\n\n\nThe push by companies to create their own facilities comes as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration prepares to wind down the International Space Station. The facility costs NASA up to $4 billion annually and will be structurally sound until 2028, though it can be used beyond that year, officials from the agency have said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn artist's impression of the Nanoracks commercial space station, Starlab.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Nanoracks/Voyager Space/Lockheed Martin/Cover Images/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nEarlier this year, NASA said it planned to award up to four contracts of at least $300 million each to support different concepts for commercially owned destinations in orbit. In a contracting document tied to that effort, NASA said it envisioned a future where the agency was one customer among many at privately held stations. A spokeswoman said the agency has received roughly a dozen proposals for station concepts.\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s space station venture has submitted a proposal for that opportunity, but plans to go forward with its facility regardless of what NASA decides, said Brent Sherwood, the company\u2019s senior vice president of advanced development programs.\nWhile the market for scientific research in orbit is understood, the levels of demand for facilities in space among other potential users isn\u2019t clear yet, Mr. Sherwood said. The group will try to find customers among media companies, manufacturers and space tourists, among others.\n\u201cIt\u2019s time to test these other markets,\u201d Mr. Sherwood said.\nNanoracks Chief Executive Jeffrey Manber said he thinks there will be six to 10 space stations focused on different market niches in the coming years. \u201cWe know there is a market,\u201d he said during a recent interview.\nStarlab, the facility Nanoracks is developing with Lockheed Martin, will combine space hardware with Nanoracks\u2019 expertise in operating a research park that can attract customers and make the facility successful, Mr. Manber said.\nThe companies behind StarLab expect that station, which will include a laboratory for scientific research and manufacturing uses, to begin initial operations by 2027.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com\n\n\nThe New Space RaceMore WSJ coverage of space ventures, selected by the editors William Shatner Goes to Space on Blue Origin\u2019s Second Human Flight (Oct. 13) Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals (July 18) Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Opens Door to Space Tourism (July 11) The space company said it would help to build a facility, part of a bet that many future orbital facilities will be privately owned and operated. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "23andMe to Go Public With Richard Branson-Backed SPAC (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "967",
        "date": "2021-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/23andme-to-go-public-with-richard-branson-backed-spac-11612450687?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=10",
        "text": "The genetics startup is the latest in a wave of companies making their public-market debuts through special-purpose acquisition companies rather than traditional initial public offerings. SPACs, also known as blank-check companies, turn the IPO process on its head by going public and raising cash without a business, and then searching for one to combine with.\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Group floated its SPAC last October, raising $480 million.\n\n\nThe deal would help fund 23andMe\u2019s transition away from the slowing consumer DNA-testing market toward the potentially more lucrative health market.\n23andMe has for years used saliva test kits to tell millions of consumers how closely related they are to Neanderthals or whether they are likely to develop diseases like diabetes or Alzheimer\u2019s. Mr. Branson, an early investor in the company, said he learned that his own great-great-grandmother was Indian after using its products.\nThe company organized buzzy \u201cspit parties\u201d with celebrities and others, to demonstrate the ease of using its tests. Many people gave the kits to relatives as holiday presents, encouraged by heartwarming ads about people finding out about their family histories and promotions that dropped the products\u2019 prices below $100.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nOver 25 million people are estimated to have been tested using various companies\u2019 DNA products. But sales have since slowed, and 23andMe and rival Ancestry announced layoffs last year. Some executives say the market had become saturated as consumers interested in genetics have already bought a kit. Others attribute the downturn to privacy concerns after revelations that the FBI used consumer databases to help identify suspects of cold crimes based on relatives\u2019 DNA.\nAmid the slowdown,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Blackstone Group Inc.\nacquired Ancestry for $4.7 billion last year, while earlier this year Australia\u2019s MyDNA said it was acquiring Houston-based Gene by Gene Ltd. and FamilyTreeDNA. Terms of the deal weren\u2019t disclosed.\n\u201cThere is absolutely that slowdown,\u201d Ms. Wojcicki said in an interview Thursday, adding that the company was shifting away from ancestry to focus on the health market. \u201cWe have always seen health as a much bigger opportunity.\u201d\nWith a database of over 10 million customers, 23andMe said it can still conduct health research even if sales continue to slow. Over 80% of customers have agreed to participate in research, and customers every day fill out over 30,000 surveys on various health and related issues, it said.\nThe company said it can leverage existing customers, such as the 1.7 million in the database with high cholesterol, nearly 1.6 million with depression and 539,000 with Type 2 diabetes, to ask research questions and identify people who might want to participate in clinical trials.\n23andMe signed a deal with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GlaxoSmithKline\n\n\n PLC in 2018 to allow the pharmaceutical giant to use the startup\u2019s database to help identify targets for drug discovery. 23andMe is also developing drug candidates on its own. All told, it says it has a pipeline of more than 30 therapeutic programs, spanning oncology, respiratory, cardiovascular and other diseases.\nLast year, 23andMe launched a subscription product offering health information to customers, which Ms. Wojcicki said had already garnered over 75,000 subscribers. The company charges $29 for the subscription but said it is still testing pricing levels and features.\nFor Mr. Branson, Thursday\u2019s deal comes as his sprawling portfolio has been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, which has devastated the travel and tourism industry long at Virgin\u2019s core.\nThe entrepreneur\u2019s two space ventures, though, have seen increased investor interest. Shares in space tourism company Virgin Galactic Holding\u2019s Inc. are up 140% this year to date, while last month Virgin Orbit, a venture to launch small satellites, deployed 10 tiny ones into orbit for the first time.\nMr. Branson said around 80% of the business was hit by the pandemic. \u201cThrough diversification the Virgin Group has got through it all, the companies have survived and we will come back stronger by the summer, once we are out of Covid,\u201d he said in an interview.\nHe said that some parts of his business might call for more cash, mentioning a global health and gym business, and that Virgin Group would recapitalize any company that needs it.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com and Amy Dockser Marcus at amy.marcus@wsj.com The DNA-testing startup is joining with a blank-check firm backed by Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Group, the latest in a wave of public-market debuts via special-purpose acquisition companies. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald and Amy Dockser Marcus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Names Disney International Parks Head as Next CEO (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "968",
        "date": "2020-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-names-disney-international-parks-head-as-next-ceo-11594849110?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=14",
        "text": "Mr. Colglazier will also take Mr. Whitesides\u2019 board seat, effective July 20, the company said.\n\n\nRelated Stories\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Makes NYSE Debut(Oct. 28, 2019) Disney Closing Hong Kong Property as Government Looks to Halt Virus (July 13, 2020) \n\n\n\u201cThe next decade for Virgin Galactic will be commercially-focused, and it is the perfect moment for us to bring a visionary commercial leader like Michael,\u201d Mr. Whitesides said in a statement, pointing to Mr. Colglazier\u2019s experience in building customer experiences for Disney and scaling businesses into multibillion-dollar organizations.\n\n\nMr. Whitesides, a former chief of staff at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, joined Virgin Galactic as its first CEO in 2010 and led the company through an initial public offering, creating the world\u2019s first publicly traded human spaceflight venture.\nDuring his tenure, Virgin Galactic grew from a company with some 30 workers to more than 900 workers. It notched key milestones: the first humans to launch into space from U.S. soil since the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the first woman to fly on a commercial space vehicle.\nAs chief space officer, Mr. Whitesides, who will also chair Virgin Galactic\u2019s space advisory board, will focus on developing the company\u2019s business opportunities, including point-to-point hypersonic travel and orbital space travel.\nMr. Whitesides has been widely credited with maneuvering the company through its biggest crisis in 2014, after a disastrous test flight destroyed Virgin Galactic\u2019s initial spaceplane, killed one of two crew members and forced it to reinvent itself in the glare of public controversy.\nFederal accident investigators faulted the company for glaring design flaws, while Virgin Galactic shifted its safety priorities and brought all manufacturing and testing in-house. At the time of the crash, company officials suggested the first revenue flight was barely months away. Virgin Galactic and other aerospace industry companies succeeded in persuading lawmakers to avoid imposing strict safety mandates and detailed regulations on the burgeoning industry.\nSince then,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Amazon.comInc.\u2019s\n\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n has created a rival space tourism company, Blue Origin Federation LLC, aiming to offer similar thrill rides to the edge of space featuring a brief period of weightlessness.\nWrite to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism venture, has tapped Michael Colglazier of Disney as its next chief executive as the company prepares for commercial services. ",
        "author": "Maria Armental"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Secures Lifeline for Virgin Atlantic (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "969",
        "date": "2020-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-secures-lifeline-for-virgin-atlantic-11594737052?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=14",
        "text": "Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Group will invest \u00a3200 million ($250 million) in the U.K.-based airline, a popular option for trans-Atlantic flights. U.S.-based Davidson Kempner Capital Management LP, meanwhile, is providing \u00a3170 million ($213 million) in secured loans. The deal is contingent on the airline making savings through deferrals of fees and advances from payments companies and aircraft lessors. The company will also push back orders of new\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n aircraft, it said.\nVirgin Group will retain its 51% controlling stake in the airline, and its U.S. partner\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Delta Air Lines Inc.\n\n DAL -0.26%\n\n\n will continue to hold the remaining 49%. Both companies are deferring fees on things like using Virgin\u2019s brand name and Delta\u2019s booking system, Virgin said.\n\n\n\n\nIn recent years, Mr. Branson had taken a back seat in a 50-year-old business he built through a constant churn of new investments in industries like airlines, banks, gyms and hotels. He assumed a big role in setting up, running and promoting many of them\u2014often through high-profile stunts. He once arrived in Manhattan\u2019s Times Square in a tank to advertise a new cola brand. More recently, though, Mr. Branson has acted more like an investor in these businesses than its manager, according to people who work with him.\n\n\nHe is now at the center of the financial difficulties the pandemic has unleashed. Many of his biggest investments are geared toward travel and leisure, industries particularly hard hit by the crisis. Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Voyages cruise line had just taken delivery of its first vessel when the pandemic brought that industry to a halt.\nVirgin Voyages has another three cruise ships for which it has signed binding contracts for delivery over the next three years, at a cost of around \u20ac2 billion ($2.17 billion), according to news releases the company issued last year. The effort is a joint venture with U.S. private-equity firm Bain Capital. Virgin Hotels, meanwhile, was set to open three new U.S. properties this year\u2014in Nashville, New York and Las Vegas\u2014and a further two the year after.\nThe Virgin Group generates around $150 million a year in revenue, according to a person familiar with its business. In the last five years, it has also made around $1.5 billion by selling assets to reinvest in businesses like Virgin Voyages and two space-linked enterprises, this person said.\nMr. Branson has been dealing with the crisis from the British Virgin Islands, where he owns the island of Necker. Early in the pandemic, he said he was considering borrowing against the island to help bolster his other businesses. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAirlines have been retrenching dramatically amid a near-standstill to air travel during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n phil noble/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIn May, Virgin Group sold over 10% of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -1.72%\n\n\n the space tourism venture that recently started trading in New York. Part of those proceeds are going into Virgin Atlantic.\nDespite the lifeline, Virgin Atlantic still faces big hurdles. Airlines across the globe have retrenched dramatically as air travel has come to a near-standstill. They have furloughed or let go hundreds of thousands of staff, deferred or canceled new aircraft orders and grounded flights, drying up revenue.\nUnlike in the rest of Europe, where the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deutsche Lufthansa AG\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Air France-KLM\n\n\n have received billions of dollars worth of loans from local governments, the U.K. opted to forgo an aviation-specific bailout strategy. That led Virgin Atlantic to undertake a monthslong search for external funding to keep its operations ticking.\n\u201cUndoubtedly, the last six months have been the toughest we have faced in our 36-year history,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shai Weiss,\n\n\n\n Virgin Atlantic\u2019s chief executive, in a statement.\nVirgin Atlantic was poised this year to turn its first profit since 2016 until the coronavirus struck, cutting flights by 98% in the second quarter and forcing the airline to lay off 3,550 workers. The airline said in its statement that it expects capacity to be reduced by 60% in the second half of 2020 from the year before and predicts precrisis levels of flying won\u2019t return until 2023.\nLast month, Bain Capital agreed to buy Virgin Atlantic\u2019s insolvent sister airline Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd., charting a future involving fewer and smaller planes and mirroring strategies adopted by other carriers, including in the U.S.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com and Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com The financial package, worth about $1.5 billion, will help the airline stave off bankruptcy and provide some breathing room for the British billionaire\u2019s broader effort to stabilize his travel and tourism empire amid the pandemic. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Secures Lifeline for Virgin Atlantic (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "970",
        "date": "2020-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-secures-lifeline-for-virgin-atlantic-11594737052?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=36",
        "text": "Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Group will invest \u00a3200 million ($250 million) in the U.K.-based airline, a popular option for trans-Atlantic flights. U.S.-based Davidson Kempner Capital Management LP, meanwhile, is providing \u00a3170 million ($213 million) in secured loans. The deal is contingent on the airline making savings through deferrals of fees and advances from payments companies and aircraft lessors. The company will also push back orders of new\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n aircraft, it said.\nVirgin Group will retain its 51% controlling stake in the airline, and its U.S. partner\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Delta Air Lines Inc.\n\n DAL -1.47%\n\n\n will continue to hold the remaining 49%. Both companies are deferring fees on things like using Virgin\u2019s brand name and Delta\u2019s booking system, Virgin said.\nIn recent years, Mr. Branson had taken a back seat in a 50-year-old business he built through a constant churn of new investments in industries like airlines, banks, gyms and hotels. He assumed a big role in setting up, running and promoting many of them\u2014often through high-profile stunts. He once arrived in Manhattan\u2019s Times Square in a tank to advertise a new cola brand. More recently, though, Mr. Branson has acted more like an investor in these businesses than its manager, according to people who work with him.\n\n\nHe is now at the center of the financial difficulties the pandemic has unleashed. Many of his biggest investments are geared toward travel and leisure, industries particularly hard hit by the crisis. Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Voyages cruise line had just taken delivery of its first vessel when the pandemic brought that industry to a halt.\nVirgin Voyages has another three cruise ships for which it has signed binding contracts for delivery over the next three years, at a cost of around \u20ac2 billion ($2.17 billion), according to news releases the company issued last year. The effort is a joint venture with U.S. private-equity firm Bain Capital. Virgin Hotels, meanwhile, was set to open three new U.S. properties this year\u2014in Nashville, New York and Las Vegas\u2014and a further two the year after.\nThe Virgin Group generates around $150 million a year in revenue, according to a person familiar with its business. In the last five years, it has also made around $1.5 billion by selling assets to reinvest in businesses like Virgin Voyages and two space-linked enterprises, this person said.\nMr. Branson has been dealing with the crisis from the British Virgin Islands, where he owns the island of Necker. Early in the pandemic, he said he was considering borrowing against the island to help bolster his other businesses. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAirlines have been retrenching dramatically amid a near-standstill to air travel during the coronavirus pandemic.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n phil noble/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIn May, Virgin Group sold over 10% of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n the space tourism venture that recently started trading in New York. Part of those proceeds are going into Virgin Atlantic.\nDespite the lifeline, Virgin Atlantic still faces big hurdles. Airlines across the globe have retrenched dramatically as air travel has come to a near-standstill. They have furloughed or let go hundreds of thousands of staff, deferred or canceled new aircraft orders and grounded flights, drying up revenue.\nUnlike in the rest of Europe, where the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deutsche Lufthansa AG\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Air France-KLM\n\n\n have received billions of dollars worth of loans from local governments, the U.K. opted to forgo an aviation-specific bailout strategy. That led Virgin Atlantic to undertake a monthslong search for external funding to keep its operations ticking.\n\u201cUndoubtedly, the last six months have been the toughest we have faced in our 36-year history,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shai Weiss,\n\n\n\n Virgin Atlantic\u2019s chief executive, in a statement.\nVirgin Atlantic was poised this year to turn its first profit since 2016 until the coronavirus struck, cutting flights by 98% in the second quarter and forcing the airline to lay off 3,550 workers. The airline said in its statement that it expects capacity to be reduced by 60% in the second half of 2020 from the year before and predicts precrisis levels of flying won\u2019t return until 2023.\nLast month, Bain Capital agreed to buy Virgin Atlantic\u2019s insolvent sister airline Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd., charting a future involving fewer and smaller planes and mirroring strategies adopted by other carriers, including in the U.S.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com and Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com The financial package, worth about $1.5 billion, will help the airline stave off bankruptcy and provide some breathing room for the British billionaire\u2019s broader effort to stabilize his travel and tourism empire amid the pandemic. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Fights to Save Travel, Tourism Empire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "971",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-fights-to-save-travel-tourism-empire-11587502370?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=44",
        "text": "Mr. Branson, 69 years old, became one of Britain\u2019s best-known billionaires by putting his Virgin brand on an array of businesses, including planes and trains, cola and bridal gowns, often taking an equity stake and licensing fees in exchange. Several of his biggest forays are focused on travel and tourism. Amid the new coronavirus pandemic, he now finds himself at the epicenter of the meltdown in those industries. \u201cThis is the moment of truth\u201d for Mr. Branson, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Bower,\n\n\n\n an author who has written a book about him.\nMr. Branson\u2019s reversal of fortune is emblematic of the pandemic\u2019s ferocious economic repercussions. His flagship venture, Virgin Atlantic, was poised this year to turn its first profit since 2016, according to a spokeswoman for the airline. Because of his unique business model\u2014based in large part on his own high-profile, personal branding\u2014he has become a poster child for what can go wrong in the pandemic era.\n\n\nLate last year, Mr. Branson listed his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n a space tourism venture, on the New York Stock Exchange. But for decades, Mr. Branson has been the public face of his Virgin-branded airlines. First among them was Virgin Atlantic, which marketed itself to high-end travelers between the U.S. and Europe with its \u201cupper class\u201d cabin. The pandemic has ravaged the airline industry in recent months. The sector is expecting $314 billion in lost revenue, far outstripping the impact from the 9/11 attacks in 2001, according to the International Air Transport Association, a trade body.\nAmid the carnage, Mr. Branson this week said he planned to borrow money against his private island in the British Virgin Islands to save jobs at his portfolio companies. He bought the island when he was 29. \u201cOver the five decades I have been in business, this is the most challenging time we have ever faced,\u201d he wrote in a letter to his employees, posted on his group\u2019s website.\nIn the letter, he pleaded for state aid from the Australian and U.K. governments to help his airlines weather a collapse in bookings and tight travel bans instituted by many countries to slow the pandemic. Addressing criticism from U.K. lawmakers that Mr. Branson himself should be the one bailing out his company, he said his own net worth is calculated \u201con the value of Virgin businesses around the world before this crisis, not sitting as cash in a bank account ready to withdraw.\u201d\n\n\nFrom the Archives Meet Richard Branson\u2019s Parents Profile of Sir Richard Branson Richard Branson\u2019s Tech Essentials \n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s net worth is estimated at around \u00a33 billion to \u00a33.5 billion ($3.7 billion to $4.3 billion), according to a Virgin spokesman. The spokesman said Mr. Branson was using his assets to raise funds, including the plan to take out a loan against his island. He has also liquidated a number of financial instruments and holdings, the spokesman said.\nOn Tuesday, Virgin Australia entered bankruptcy administration after lawmakers there refused financial aid. They cited the airline\u2019s large foreign ownership. Virgin owns 10% of the carrier, Australia\u2019s second-largest after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Qantas Airways Ltd.\n\n\n The other 90% is owned by foreign airlines like Abu Dhabi\u2019s Etihad Airways,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Singapore Airlines Ltd.\n\n\n and Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co. The carrier employs more than 10,000 staff and controls just under a third of the domestic market. Its sister carrier, U.K.-based Virgin Atlantic, is 51% owned by Virgin Group, based in the British Virgin Islands, and 49% owned by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Delta Air Lines Inc.\n\n\n It is asking for financial assistance from the U.K. government to stay afloat. Virgin Atlantic has been a thorn in the side of flag carrier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n British Airways\n\n\n since its formation in the 1980s.\nLike many airlines, the coronavirus has wiped out its ability to operate. It has grounded about 85% of its fleet. Last week, it was operating a handful of passenger flights. This week, its only flights were for moving cargo. Virgin Atlantic has been the most vocal of Britain\u2019s carriers in calling for the government to step in and bolster the industry. The U.K. has balked, saying a rescue was a last resort and should follow efforts to secure fresh cash from existing investors. A Virgin Atlantic spokeswoman said talks over funding were \u201congoing\u201d and \u201cpositive.\u201d with a decision due to be made by the government early next month. Delta said it \u201cremains supportive of our partner airlines and their efforts to gain needed financial support.\u201d\nThough not Britain\u2019s richest businessman, Mr. Branson is among those with the highest profile. He left his private school at 16 and set up a magazine called \u201cStudent,\u201d using it to sell vinyl records in what would be the start of his first big business, the Virgin Records chain of stores, and then music label. When Mr. Branson moved into airlines and tourism, the His Virgin Group is at epicenter of the meltdown in those industries. Virgin Australia has filed for bankruptcy. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Fights to Save Travel, Tourism Empire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "972",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-fights-to-save-travel-tourism-empire-11587502370?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=17",
        "text": "Mr. Branson, 69 years old, became one of Britain\u2019s best-known billionaires by putting his Virgin brand on an array of businesses, including planes and trains, cola and bridal gowns, often taking an equity stake and licensing fees in exchange. Several of his biggest forays are focused on travel and tourism. Amid the new coronavirus pandemic, he now finds himself at the epicenter of the meltdown in those industries. \u201cThis is the moment of truth\u201d for Mr. Branson, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Bower,\n\n\n\n an author who has written a book about him.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s reversal of fortune is emblematic of the pandemic\u2019s ferocious economic repercussions. His flagship venture, Virgin Atlantic, was poised this year to turn its first profit since 2016, according to a spokeswoman for the airline. Because of his unique business model\u2014based in large part on his own high-profile, personal branding\u2014he has become a poster child for what can go wrong in the pandemic era.\n\n\nLate last year, Mr. Branson listed his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n a space tourism venture, on the New York Stock Exchange. But for decades, Mr. Branson has been the public face of his Virgin-branded airlines. First among them was Virgin Atlantic, which marketed itself to high-end travelers between the U.S. and Europe with its \u201cupper class\u201d cabin. The pandemic has ravaged the airline industry in recent months. The sector is expecting $314 billion in lost revenue, far outstripping the impact from the 9/11 attacks in 2001, according to the International Air Transport Association, a trade body.\nAmid the carnage, Mr. Branson this week said he planned to borrow money against his private island in the British Virgin Islands to save jobs at his portfolio companies. He bought the island when he was 29. \u201cOver the five decades I have been in business, this is the most challenging time we have ever faced,\u201d he wrote in a letter to his employees, posted on his group\u2019s website.\nIn the letter, he pleaded for state aid from the Australian and U.K. governments to help his airlines weather a collapse in bookings and tight travel bans instituted by many countries to slow the pandemic. Addressing criticism from U.K. lawmakers that Mr. Branson himself should be the one bailing out his company, he said his own net worth is calculated \u201con the value of Virgin businesses around the world before this crisis, not sitting as cash in a bank account ready to withdraw.\u201d\n\n\nFrom the Archives Meet Richard Branson\u2019s Parents Profile of Sir Richard Branson Richard Branson\u2019s Tech Essentials \n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s net worth is estimated at around \u00a33 billion to \u00a33.5 billion ($3.7 billion to $4.3 billion), according to a Virgin spokesman. The spokesman said Mr. Branson was using his assets to raise funds, including the plan to take out a loan against his island. He has also liquidated a number of financial instruments and holdings, the spokesman said.\nOn Tuesday, Virgin Australia entered bankruptcy administration after lawmakers there refused financial aid. They cited the airline\u2019s large foreign ownership. Virgin owns 10% of the carrier, Australia\u2019s second-largest after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Qantas Airways Ltd.\n\n\n The other 90% is owned by foreign airlines like Abu Dhabi\u2019s Etihad Airways,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Singapore Airlines Ltd.\n\n\n and Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co. The carrier employs more than 10,000 staff and controls just under a third of the domestic market. Its sister carrier, U.K.-based Virgin Atlantic, is 51% owned by Virgin Group, based in the British Virgin Islands, and 49% owned by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Delta Air Lines Inc.\n\n\n It is asking for financial assistance from the U.K. government to stay afloat. Virgin Atlantic has been a thorn in the side of flag carrier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n British Airways\n\n\n since its formation in the 1980s.\nLike many airlines, the coronavirus has wiped out its ability to operate. It has grounded about 85% of its fleet. Last week, it was operating a handful of passenger flights. This week, its only flights were for moving cargo. Virgin Atlantic has been the most vocal of Britain\u2019s carriers in calling for the government to step in and bolster the industry. The U.K. has balked, saying a rescue was a last resort and should follow efforts to secure fresh cash from existing investors. A Virgin Atlantic spokeswoman said talks over funding were \u201congoing\u201d and \u201cpositive.\u201d with a decision due to be made by the government early next month. Delta said it \u201cremains supportive of our partner airlines and their efforts to gain needed financial support.\u201d\nThough not Britain\u2019s richest businessman, Mr. Branson is among those with the highest profile. He left his private school at 16 and set up a magazine called \u201cStudent,\u201d using it to sell vinyl records in what would be the start of his first big business, the Virgin Records chain of stores, and then music label. When Mr. Branson moved into airlines and tourism, His Virgin Group is at epicenter of the meltdown in those industries. Virgin Australia has filed for bankruptcy. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Fights to Save Travel, Tourism Empire (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "973",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-fights-to-save-travel-tourism-empire-11587502370?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=41",
        "text": "Mr. Branson, 69 years old, became one of Britain\u2019s best-known billionaires by putting his Virgin brand on an array of businesses, including planes and trains, cola and bridal gowns, often taking an equity stake and licensing fees in exchange. Several of his biggest forays are focused on travel and tourism. Amid the new coronavirus pandemic, he now finds himself at the epicenter of the meltdown in those industries. \u201cThis is the moment of truth\u201d for Mr. Branson, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Bower,\n\n\n\n an author who has written a book about him.\nMr. Branson\u2019s reversal of fortune is emblematic of the pandemic\u2019s ferocious economic repercussions. His flagship venture, Virgin Atlantic, was poised this year to turn its first profit since 2016, according to a spokeswoman for the airline. Because of his unique business model\u2014based in large part on his own high-profile, personal branding\u2014he has become a poster child for what can go wrong in the pandemic era.\n\n\nLate last year, Mr. Branson listed his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n a space tourism venture, on the New York Stock Exchange. But for decades, Mr. Branson has been the public face of his Virgin-branded airlines. First among them was Virgin Atlantic, which marketed itself to high-end travelers between the U.S. and Europe with its \u201cupper class\u201d cabin. The pandemic has ravaged the airline industry in recent months. The sector is expecting $314 billion in lost revenue, far outstripping the impact from the 9/11 attacks in 2001, according to the International Air Transport Association, a trade body.\nAmid the carnage, Mr. Branson this week said he planned to borrow money against his private island in the British Virgin Islands to save jobs at his portfolio companies. He bought the island when he was 29. \u201cOver the five decades I have been in business, this is the most challenging time we have ever faced,\u201d he wrote in a letter to his employees, posted on his group\u2019s website.\nIn the letter, he pleaded for state aid from the Australian and U.K. governments to help his airlines weather a collapse in bookings and tight travel bans instituted by many countries to slow the pandemic. Addressing criticism from U.K. lawmakers that Mr. Branson himself should be the one bailing out his company, he said his own net worth is calculated \u201con the value of Virgin businesses around the world before this crisis, not sitting as cash in a bank account ready to withdraw.\u201d\n\n\nFrom the Archives Meet Richard Branson\u2019s Parents Profile of Sir Richard Branson Richard Branson\u2019s Tech Essentials \n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s net worth is estimated at around \u00a33 billion to \u00a33.5 billion ($3.7 billion to $4.3 billion), according to a Virgin spokesman. The spokesman said Mr. Branson was using his assets to raise funds, including the plan to take out a loan against his island. He has also liquidated a number of financial instruments and holdings, the spokesman said.\nOn Tuesday, Virgin Australia entered bankruptcy administration after lawmakers there refused financial aid. They cited the airline\u2019s large foreign ownership. Virgin owns 10% of the carrier, Australia\u2019s second-largest after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Qantas Airways Ltd.\n\n\n The other 90% is owned by foreign airlines like Abu Dhabi\u2019s Etihad Airways,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Singapore Airlines Ltd.\n\n\n and Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co. The carrier employs more than 10,000 staff and controls just under a third of the domestic market. Its sister carrier, U.K.-based Virgin Atlantic, is 51% owned by Virgin Group, based in the British Virgin Islands, and 49% owned by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Delta Air Lines Inc.\n\n\n It is asking for financial assistance from the U.K. government to stay afloat. Virgin Atlantic has been a thorn in the side of flag carrier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n British Airways\n\n\n since its formation in the 1980s.\nLike many airlines, the coronavirus has wiped out its ability to operate. It has grounded about 85% of its fleet. Last week, it was operating a handful of passenger flights. This week, its only flights were for moving cargo. Virgin Atlantic has been the most vocal of Britain\u2019s carriers in calling for the government to step in and bolster the industry. The U.K. has balked, saying a rescue was a last resort and should follow efforts to secure fresh cash from existing investors. A Virgin Atlantic spokeswoman said talks over funding were \u201congoing\u201d and \u201cpositive.\u201d with a decision due to be made by the government early next month. Delta said it \u201cremains supportive of our partner airlines and their efforts to gain needed financial support.\u201d\nThough not Britain\u2019s richest businessman, Mr. Branson is among those with the highest profile. He left his private school at 16 and set up a magazine called \u201cStudent,\u201d using it to sell vinyl records in what would be the start of his first big business, the Virgin Records chain of stores, and then music label. When Mr. Branson moved into airlines and tourism, the His Virgin Group is at epicenter of the meltdown in those industries. Virgin Australia has filed for bankruptcy. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz and Alistair MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Rides and Skyscrapers Allow the Rich to Keep Rising (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "974",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-rides-and-skyscrapers-allow-the-rich-to-keep-rising-11626623819?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=19",
        "text": "It goes back at least to the 13th century, when Italian noble families competed to erect ever-taller towers on their palazzi. And the race continues today on Manhattan\u2019s skyscraping Billionaires\u2019 Row and among well-heeled mountain climbers who compete to tick off the world\u2019s highest peaks.\n\n\n\n\nNow, space is the final status frontier. It has the added allure of exclusivity, since there are so few ways to get there\u2014or places to visit. And even in space, altitude brings bragging rights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Chrysler Building, in distance, was briefly the world\u2019s tallest building after Walter Chrysler secretly built and added a 125-foot spire.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n angela weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMr. Branson flew 53.5 miles up, past what the U.S. government considers the edge of space. Mr. Bezos intends to ascend more than 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, crossing the so-called Karman Line, which is internationally recognized as the start of space.\n\n\n\u201cFor 96% of the world\u2019s population, space begins 100 km up,\u201d Mr. Bezos\u2019 space company, Blue Origin, said on Twitter ahead of Mr. Branson\u2019s flight. The tweet also boasted that Mr. Bezos\u2019 rocket has the \u201clargest windows in space\u201d\u2014not the \u201cairplane-sized windows\u201d on Mr. Branson\u2019s rocket-plane.\nMr. Branson, who has made a career of competition by taking on mammoth rivals including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Coca-Cola Co.\n\n\n and British Airways, sidestepped Mr. Bezos\u2019 altitude throw-down by denying they were rivals.\n\u201cIt really wasn\u2019t a race,\u201d Mr. Branson said Sunday after landing. \u201cWe wish Jeff the absolute best.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBishops pushed masons to test the limits of Gothic architecture until part of the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre in Beauvais, France, collapsed in 1284.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John van Hasselt/Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMessrs. Branson and Bezos, along with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n are promising a science-fiction vision of jaunts toward the cosmos. Sky-high ticket prices mean that for the foreseeable future most of the passengers will likely be very wealthy.\nA desire to test limits is part of what drives the wealthy and successful to space, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jordan Bimm,\n\n\n\n a space historian at the University of Chicago.\u00a0\u201cOnce you have immense power on earth, you sort of look for the next challenge,\u201d says Mr. Bimm, noting space counts as \u201cone of the ultimate challenges.\u201d\nAcademics tend to see this space race as an extension of the competitiveness that has fueled human competition\u2014and innovation\u2014for centuries.\n\u201cThere are some things that are preserved throughout time,\u201d Mr. Bimm said. \u201cFor the wealthy, it\u2019s that they will always try to sort of one-up each other and there\u2019s this battle for prestige by going higher,\u201d he said.\nThroughout history, the rich competed by fighting one another, and so also competed to build bigger castles with taller walls on higher ground. In medieval Italian cities, the rich put towers on their mansions to escape urban mobs, and then competed for height, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carol Krinsky,\n\n\n\n an art history professor at New York University.\nIn towns across northern medieval France, the competition was to build taller cathedrals. \u201cIt was because the bishops had egos,\u201d said Ms. Krinsky, noting that most were second sons of rich families, whose eldest sons inherited everything.\u00a0Bishops pushed masons to test the limits of Gothic architecture until part of the tallest cathedral, in Beauvais, collapsed in 1284, Ms. Krinsky said.\nThe race upward supercharged a century ago with skyscrapers. In 1930, Walter Chrysler wanted his Manhattan tower to top one being built by a rival on Wall Street, and so had a 125-foot spire secretly built and hoisted into place, briefly making the Chrysler Building the world\u2019s tallest.\nFlying until recently was also a domain by the rich. The first humans to lift off\u2014by hot-air balloon, in 1783\u2014did so under the patronage of France\u2019s very rich king, Louis XVI, 10 years before he was guillotined in the French Revolution.\nUntil the U.S. deregulated commercial aviation in the 1970s, jet travel was largely a preserve of the rich. Exorbitantly expensive tickets on the supersonic Concorde took passengers higher and faster than other jets.\nRich people have been escaping the atmosphere since American financier Dennis Tito became the first space tourist in 2001, paying $20 million to spend eight days in the International Space Station. In the next six months, around 10 more private citizens are due to spend as much as $55 million each for space flights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sarah Fallaw,\n\n\n\n a psychologist in Marietta, Ga., who studies building wealth, says that the need to compete is often hard-wired into the affluent. \u201cSome of the characteristics that allowed them to become successful are also characteristics that are impacting the way that they\u2019re continuing to be competitive,\u201d Ms. Fallaw said.\n\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com and Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com Today\u2019s billionaire space race is the latest chapter in a centuries-old competition among the wealthy seeking greater heights, be it Italian noble families erecting ever-taller towers on their palazzi to today\u2019s Billionaires\u2019 Row in Manhattan. ",
        "author": "Georgi Kantchev and Daniel Michaels"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s newest business partner: A Chinese firm with a history of SEC investigations (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "975",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/12/23/trump-spac-deal-sec/",
        "text": "A Chinese firm helping former president Donald Trump take his new media company public has been the target of investigations by federal securities regulators, who say the firm misrepresented shell companies with no products and few employees as ambitious, growing enterprises, documents and interviews show.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightArc Capital, an investment advisory firm based in Shanghai, has repeatedly helped create or finance companies with little or no revenue, no customers and office locations that point to P.O. boxes, according to a Washington Post review of regulatory and court filings. One claimed to be developing autonomous drone software despite having no employees; another said it operated a publicly traded in-home bakery \u201cspecializing in freshly-made cakes and cupcakes\u201d before saying it pivoted into touch-screen technologies for a \u201cdiversified blue-chip client base,\u201d regulatory filings show. The United States allows shell companies to be listed on public markets but requires operators to truthfully represent them as businesses with no active operations, securities lawyers said. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Arc of deceiving investors about the scope of its operations, the locations of the businesses and the identities of the people behind them, documents show.This year, Arc helped create Digital World Acquisition, an investment vehicle that has raised over $1.2 billion to conduct a merger with Trump Media and Technology Group. Digital World is what\u2019s known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a type of shell business that raises money from investors to acquire a private start-up with strong growth prospects. The deal, which still must be approved by shareholders and regulators, has the potential to enrich the former president and turn his nascent social media start-up into a public company overnight.The Trump name has attracted investors, pushing shares of Digital World up five times their listing price in anticipation of the merger, despite a lack of information about the actual business. Trump Media has released two slide presentations as part of its proposal, but the material offers scant detail about company\u2019s proposed management team, corporate structure, finances or other information typically used by investors to judge a business\u2019s viability.Trump, still barred from Twitter and Facebook, to launch social network in 'fight back' against big tech\u201cThere\u2019s a shell company basically merging with another shell company, because, as far as we know, the Trump media company hasn\u2019t yet been formed,\u201d said Robert B. Lamm, a lawyer who chairs the securities practice at Florida-based law firm Gunster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRepresentatives from Arc Capital, Trump Media and Digital World did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a promotional video last year, Arc managing partner Sergio Camarero cited SPACs as one of the business opportunities Arc was pursuing, along with helping Chinese state-owned companies identify infrastructure investment projects overseas.In the United States, \u201cthere is a lot of capital floating into SPACs and going toward SPACs instead of traditional IPO, so this is a place where we are very well positioned,\u201d Camarero said in the video.An unusual team of advisers is supporting the former president\u2019s effort. Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, former stars from Trump\u2019s TV show, \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d pitched the idea to Trump earlier this year, according to a person who was briefed on one of their meetings. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a fierce defender of Trump who does not have experience as a corporate executive, recently announced he will leave Congress at the end of the year to be the company\u2019s CEO.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the center of the deal is Arc Capital, a tiny Chinese outfit that is virtually unknown on Wall Street, but well known to some regulators in Washington who have spent years examining the firm and raising concerns about its unconventional business practices.In 2017, the SEC stopped three Arc-backed companies from publicly selling shares, citing \u201cmaterial misstatements and omissions\u201d in their registration documents, agency records show. The SEC suspended trading in a fourth Arc-financed business as it investigated whether Arc engaged in fraud, the documents show. No charges have been brought against Arc in these cases, and the current status of the investigations is unclear.Kevin Callahan, an SEC spokesman, declined to comment on Arc Capital or on the status of any of the agency\u2019s investigations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe SEC is now examining communications between Digital World and Trump Media, the former disclosed in a filing earlier this month. Securities regulators are seeking to determine whether the firms may have violated rules forbidding SPACs from planning a deal with an acquisition target before announcing it publicly, the New York Times has reported.Callahan declined to comment on the Trump deal beyond pointing to remarks this month by commission Chairman Gary Gensler, who said the SEC\u2019s enforcement division continues to be a \u201ccop on the beat to ensure that investors are being protected in the SPAC space.\u201d The agency recently charged an early-stage space transportation company and the SPAC business acquiring it for making \u201cmisleading claims\u201d about the company\u2019s technology.The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is also reviewing trading in Digital World securities in the days before the announcement of the Trump deal, Digital World said in the filing, noting that both Finra and the SEC have said the investigations do not necessarily indicate that the company has violated any laws.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinra did not respond to a request for comment.A successful SPAC deal could boost Trump\u2019s financial situation, which has taken some hits in recent years. Revenue dipped considerably at some of his hotels during his presidency, as travelers who disagreed with his politics avoided his properties. The pandemic later delivered a separate blow to the entire hospitality industry.Other Trump ventures have come under scrutiny in recent years, including his charitable foundation, which shut down after an investigation by the New York attorney general\u2019s office, and Trump University, an online school that closed and paid a $25 million settlement to former students.Story continues below advertisementManhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats, are investigating Trump\u2019s business and have already charged his chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and his business with tax fraud. Both pleaded not guilty to all charges. Trump has not been accused of any crimes.SEC issues stop ordersArc Capital was founded in 2015 by Mexican entrepreneur Abraham Cinta and a few of his colleagues, who decided to leave their jobs at an investment firm to strike out on their own, according to interviews with three former Arc employees and biographical information on Arc\u2019s website.AdvertisementCinta, a slight man with a boyish grin and an often disheveled appearance, saw an opportunity to help Chinese companies list their shares on U.S. stock exchanges, according to the former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information about their former employer.Story continues below advertisementCinta and Arc\u2019s managing partners did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story.Cinta often remarked that U.S. securities regulators were generally looser with rules around registering public companies than Chinese and Hong Kong regulators, so it would be easier to take unproven, early-stage businesses public, two of the former employees said. He would sometimes illustrate this point by showing colleagues SEC registration statements containing what he thought were outlandish claims, such as a man who said he founded a Texas amusement park because Jesus Christ told him to do it, one of the former employees said.AdvertisementEven that man raised $15 million, the person remembered Cinta saying.Story continues below advertisementArc\u2019s businesses had their own peculiarities. Go EZ, which filed to sell shares on the public market in 2015, described itself to investors as a Miami Beach-based tech and retail business that sold smartphones and smartphone accessories. However, Cinta, who lived in Shanghai, was the sole employee, the SEC claimed in an order, and Go EZ\u2019s first registration document did not once mention the word \u201crevenue,\u201d suggesting it had not sold anything.After the SEC said in a letter to Cinta that Go EZ appeared to be a shell company, \u201cbecause you appear to have no or nominal operations and nominal assets,\u201d Go EZ updated the registration statement to include revenue from Cellular of Miami Beach, a retail cellphone store it claimed to have acquired months earlier. SEC investigators later interviewed the man who sold the Florida store to Go EZ; he said the firm never provided any money, inventory or other assistance, so he eventually cut off ties to Go EZ and reclaimed the business for himself, the SEC said in its order.AdvertisementGo EZ was one of three Arc-related businesses the SEC stopped from selling shares in 2017. The operators of the firms \u201cmaterially misstated the nature and scope of their businesses\u201d and failed to disclose the identities and potential conflicts of all the people behind them, the SEC said in its \u201cstop order\u201d of the three companies.Story continues below advertisementArc did not fully cooperate with the SEC\u2019s investigation and key personnel, including Cinta, refused to make themselves available for testimony in the United States, the stop order said. The SEC revoked Go EZ\u2019s registration in 2019 because it said the company was delinquent in its filings.Stop orders, which prevent public listings because of misleading or deficient registration statements, are rare: In the past decade, as hundreds of businesses have gone public, only 35 companies have had their registration statements suspended in this way, according to a count of stop orders listed on the SEC\u2019s website.AdvertisementThree former employees who worked at Arc\u2019s headquarters in Shanghai described a start-up culture dominated by Cinta and the firm\u2019s four managing partners. These managers sometimes pushed employees to exaggerate in their analyses of firms, such as making unrealistic projections of future revenue, said two of the employees, who discussed internal company information on the condition they not be identified.Both employees said they became concerned they were being asked to bend the rules. \u201c",
        "author": "Douglas MacMillan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A proliferation of space junk is blocking our view of the cosmos, research shows (WP: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "976",
        "date": "2021-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/27/starlink-light-pollution/",
        "text": "The rapidly growing cloud of satellites and space junk orbiting the Earth is beginning to block our view of the universe around us, according to new research.Each individual object in orbit, from the tiniest bits of space garbage to the largest man-made satellites, reflects a commensurate amount of sunlight back toward the Earth. Multiplied by the tens of millions, the collective amounts to a 10 percent increase in illumination across the night sky. That increased sky glow is washing out our view of the cosmos, making it harder for scientists to peer into the farthest reaches of our galaxy and the universe beyond. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf the astronomers\u2019 calculations are correct, it means we\u2019ve surpassed a sky brightness threshold for unimpeded astronomical observation set decades ago by the International Astronomical Union, an association of professional astronomers who, among other things, assign names to newly discovered celestial bodies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSince there are objects orbiting the Earth in all manner of orbital inclinations, really nowhere is safe from this,\u201d said John Barentine, director of public policy at the International Dark-Sky Association and a co-author of the study, which was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a scientific journal.One major area of concern is the rise of satellite mega-constellations, like SpaceX\u2019s Starlink project, which has put more than 1,300 satellites in orbit since 2018 with plans to potentially launch tens of thousands more. Other companies, including Amazon and OneWeb, also have constellation plans of their own. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Those figures would represent a massive increase over the current number of operational satellites in orbit, which the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates to be more than 3,300. The devices are used in telecommunications, navigation, weather monitoring, space science and other areas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to satellites, the European Space Agency estimates there are tens of thousands of large pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth, a number that swells into the millions when considering smaller objects down to a diameter of 1 millimeter. According to NASA, the debris has a collective mass of about 6,000 tons.Some of the newer satellites have left glowing streaks through telescope images and prompted enough outcry among astronomers that Starlink has taken steps to reduce their luminosity. But the latest versions are still too bright by \u201ca factor of more than 2,\u201d Barentine said, noting that there is \u201cno clear commitment\u201d from the other commercial satellite operators to adopt the same brightness limit as SpaceX.But the new research digs into the possibility of astronomical disruption above and beyond individual satellites\u2019 direct effects on images. Every additional orbital object also contributes to an increase in the total luminosity of the light sky, as sunlight reflects off its surface and scatters throughout the atmosphere. The effect is similar to ground-based light pollution from lamps and other nighttime light sources, which effectively wash out the visual contrast of the night sky, making fainter astronomy targets more difficult to see.It\u2019s also plausible that we could be hampering our ability to detect hazardous asteroids on a collision course with Earth. \u201cI think the answer is \u2018we don\u2019t know,\u2019 \u201d Barentine said, \u201cbut the idea that we might miss an object on a collision course with Earth is concerning.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChristopher Kyba, a light pollution expert at the German Research Center for Geosciences who was not involved in the research, called the results \u201creally shocking\u201d but cautioned that they still need to be confirmed by experimental data.\u201cThe problem with the reflected light from objects humans put into space (if the authors are correct) is that there\u2019s almost nowhere on Earth you could go to avoid it,\u201d Kyba said. \u201cSo as more satellites are put into orbit, all of Earth\u2019s countryside and wilderness areas will get brighter.\u201dKyba says he\u2019s optimistic that in the coming decades scientists will develop ways to safely remove man-made debris from orbit, which could lessen some of these pressures.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe night sky is a gift the cosmos gives to all of humanity, inspiring awe and wonder and drawing our thoughts to some of the greatest questions humanity has ever asked in trying to understand the universe,\u201d Barentine said. But, he added, \u201cit\u2019s already under assault in many parts of the world from terrestrial light pollution, and the contribution of diffuse light from satellites and space debris potentially robs us of something that is rightly the shared heritage of all people.\u201d The increased sky glow makes it harder for scientists to peer into the farthest reaches of the galaxy, slowing down the pace of astronomical observation. A proliferation of space junk is blocking our view of the cosmos, research shows",
        "author": "Christopher Ingraham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aide Gwynne Shotwell Is a Steadying Force at SpaceX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "977",
        "date": "2018-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-right-hand-woman-is-steadying-force-at-spacex-1538233204?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=68",
        "text": "Some space experts cite Ms. Shotwell\u2019s calm and collegial manner for helping closely held SpaceX avoid the management and legal turmoil roiling Tesla, where Mr. Musk agreed to step down as chairman as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.\n\u201cShe has managed to not only survive but thrive in a tough role that other people haven\u2019t managed as well,\u201d said Lori Garver, a former senior official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who dealt frequently with Ms. Shotwell. Her personality and leadership, Ms. Garver said, \u201cprovide the secret sauce for the company, which has helped keep it successful.\u201d\n\nToday, SpaceX, as the company with 7,000 workers is called, has challenged the space-transportation business by slashing costs and reusing boosters.\nA sign of Ms. Shotwell\u2019s effectiveness was her use of her NASA connections in 2013 to help SpaceX snare an exclusive, long-term lease for launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, according to people familiar with the matter, contracting documents and agency emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Pad 39A helped launch U.S. astronauts to the moon and now is integral to SpaceX\u2019s operations.\nMs. Shotwell and Mr. Musk, through a SpaceX spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed or provide comment.\nOver the years, Mr. Musk has considered taking SpaceX public but stopped short to avoid ceding some control, according to former employees, business partners and others. At SpaceX, he can focus on technical specifics, sometimes even arcane and relatively minor details, because he has someone, in Ms. Shotwell, who can manage business strategy and operations. Antonio Abad Martin, operations chief at Spanish satellite-operator Hispasat Group, a longtime customer of SpaceX, said Ms. Shotwell told him early on that he should deal primarily with her because \u201cshe knew how to manage Elon.\u201d\nMs. Shotwell started at SpaceX as the head of business development with nothing to sell but the promise of a rocket. She joined, according to an interview with Northwestern University\u2019s alumni magazine, because she relished the challenge.\nShe became president in 2008, responsible for fast-growing operations, along with government and legal affairs. Ms. Shotwell\u2019s profile at SpaceX rose because of her success a decade ago snaring the company\u2019s first major contract with NASA to launch cargo into orbit.\n\u201cI very seldom dealt with Elon because Gwynne ran the company,\u201d said Charles Bolden, NASA administrator during the Obama administration. She was much more \u201cpersonable and more inclined to talk about family\u201d in addition to business, he said. Ms. Shotwell is the mother of two children, and her husband works at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\nCritics say Ms. Shotwell also has sharp elbows and a reputation for outflanking potential rivals. Others fault Ms. Shotwell for failing to prevent burnout among certain SpaceX workers; and former employees say she didn\u2019t keep Mr. Musk from abruptly pushing out various managers and then threatening to sue them if they spoke poorly about the company.\nSome people praise Ms. Shotwell for serving as a mediator or cushion for Mr. Musk, who is renowned for overly aggressive deadlines and sometimes unpredictable moves. Industry veterans credit Ms. Shotwell with eventually persuading her boss to refrain from riling lawmakers by attacking NASA\u2019s proposed deep-space rocket. Ms. Shotwell worked hard \u201cto keep him from being too publicly negative\u201d and creating unnecessary enemies on Capitol Hill, Ms. Garver said.\nMr. Musk has shown his trust in Ms. Shotwell, as she is the only other company official usually permitted to clear press statements or stand in for him at launch sites, according to current and former company officials.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch,\n\n\n\n chief executive of satellite-operator Iridium Communications Inc., SpaceX\u2019s largest commercial customer, said his \u201ccompany has almost never had to deal with Elon.\u201d Mr. Desch added that Ms. Shotwell never appeared to have to check with anyone before making decisions.\nLikewise, Ms. Shotwell is loyal to Mr. Musk. Associates and industry officials said they have never heard her criticize Mr. Musk or even poke good-natured fun at his prickly personality, as other SpaceX managers are inclined to do in social settings.\n\u201cI love working for Elon,\u201d Ms. Shotwell said in a CNBC interview earlier this year, calling him \u201ca great boss\u201d who is funny, fair and an inspirational leader.\nNonetheless, Ms. Shotwell has been willing to sound a cautionary note regarding some of Mr. Musk\u2019s more-ambitious predictions. For instance, she has warned that SpaceX\u2019s plans to build and operate a constellation of its own communication satellites will work only if major technical and business questions can be resolved. Mr. Musk, on the other hand, has offered more unqualified support for the plan.\nMore recently, she cast doubt on internal company projections from years ago that satellite revenue wil Space Exploration Technologies President Gwynne Shotwell serves as the company\u2019s essential buffer for its founder and chairman, Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aide Gwynne Shotwell Is a Steadying Force at SpaceX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "978",
        "date": "2018-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-right-hand-woman-is-steadying-force-at-spacex-1538233204?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=63",
        "text": "Some space experts cite Ms. Shotwell\u2019s calm and collegial manner for helping closely held SpaceX avoid the management and legal turmoil roiling Tesla, where Mr. Musk agreed to step down as chairman as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.\n\u201cShe has managed to not only survive but thrive in a tough role that other people haven\u2019t managed as well,\u201d said Lori Garver, a former senior official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who dealt frequently with Ms. Shotwell. Her personality and leadership, Ms. Garver said, \u201cprovide the secret sauce for the company, which has helped keep it successful.\u201d\n\nToday, SpaceX, as the company with 7,000 workers is called, has challenged the space-transportation business by slashing costs and reusing boosters.\nA sign of Ms. Shotwell\u2019s effectiveness was her use of her NASA connections in 2013 to help SpaceX snare an exclusive, long-term lease for launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, according to people familiar with the matter, contracting documents and agency emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Pad 39A helped launch U.S. astronauts to the moon and now is integral to SpaceX\u2019s operations.\nMs. Shotwell and Mr. Musk, through a SpaceX spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed or provide comment.\nOver the years, Mr. Musk has considered taking SpaceX public but stopped short to avoid ceding some control, according to former employees, business partners and others. At SpaceX, he can focus on technical specifics, sometimes even arcane and relatively minor details, because he has someone, in Ms. Shotwell, who can manage business strategy and operations. Antonio Abad Martin, operations chief at Spanish satellite-operator Hispasat Group, a longtime customer of SpaceX, said Ms. Shotwell told him early on that he should deal primarily with her because \u201cshe knew how to manage Elon.\u201d\nMs. Shotwell started at SpaceX as the head of business development with nothing to sell but the promise of a rocket. She joined, according to an interview with Northwestern University\u2019s alumni magazine, because she relished the challenge.\nShe became president in 2008, responsible for fast-growing operations, along with government and legal affairs. Ms. Shotwell\u2019s profile at SpaceX rose because of her success a decade ago snaring the company\u2019s first major contract with NASA to launch cargo into orbit.\n\u201cI very seldom dealt with Elon because Gwynne ran the company,\u201d said Charles Bolden, NASA administrator during the Obama administration. She was much more \u201cpersonable and more inclined to talk about family\u201d in addition to business, he said. Ms. Shotwell is the mother of two children, and her husband works at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\nCritics say Ms. Shotwell also has sharp elbows and a reputation for outflanking potential rivals. Others fault Ms. Shotwell for failing to prevent burnout among certain SpaceX workers; and former employees say she didn\u2019t keep Mr. Musk from abruptly pushing out various managers and then threatening to sue them if they spoke poorly about the company.\nSome people praise Ms. Shotwell for serving as a mediator or cushion for Mr. Musk, who is renowned for overly aggressive deadlines and sometimes unpredictable moves. Industry veterans credit Ms. Shotwell with eventually persuading her boss to refrain from riling lawmakers by attacking NASA\u2019s proposed deep-space rocket. Ms. Shotwell worked hard \u201cto keep him from being too publicly negative\u201d and creating unnecessary enemies on Capitol Hill, Ms. Garver said.\nMr. Musk has shown his trust in Ms. Shotwell, as she is the only other company official usually permitted to clear press statements or stand in for him at launch sites, according to current and former company officials.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch,\n\n\n\n chief executive of satellite-operator Iridium Communications Inc., SpaceX\u2019s largest commercial customer, said his \u201ccompany has almost never had to deal with Elon.\u201d Mr. Desch added that Ms. Shotwell never appeared to have to check with anyone before making decisions.\nLikewise, Ms. Shotwell is loyal to Mr. Musk. Associates and industry officials said they have never heard her criticize Mr. Musk or even poke good-natured fun at his prickly personality, as other SpaceX managers are inclined to do in social settings.\n\u201cI love working for Elon,\u201d Ms. Shotwell said in a CNBC interview earlier this year, calling him \u201ca great boss\u201d who is funny, fair and an inspirational leader.\nNonetheless, Ms. Shotwell has been willing to sound a cautionary note regarding some of Mr. Musk\u2019s more-ambitious predictions. For instance, she has warned that SpaceX\u2019s plans to build and operate a constellation of its own communication satellites will work only if major technical and business questions can be resolved. Mr. Musk, on the other hand, has offered more unqualified support for the plan.\nMore recently, she cast doubt on internal company projections from years ago that satellite revenue wil Space Exploration Technologies President Gwynne Shotwell serves as the company\u2019s essential buffer for its founder and chairman, Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aide Gwynne Shotwell Is a Steadying Force at SpaceX (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "979",
        "date": "2018-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-right-hand-woman-is-steadying-force-at-spacex-1538233204?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=87",
        "text": "Some space experts cite Ms. Shotwell\u2019s calm and collegial manner for helping closely held SpaceX avoid the management and legal turmoil roiling Tesla, where Mr. Musk agreed to step down as chairman as part of a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.\n\u201cShe has managed to not only survive but thrive in a tough role that other people haven\u2019t managed as well,\u201d said Lori Garver, a former senior official at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who dealt frequently with Ms. Shotwell. Her personality and leadership, Ms. Garver said, \u201cprovide the secret sauce for the company, which has helped keep it successful.\u201d\n\nToday, SpaceX, as the company with 7,000 workers is called, has challenged the space-transportation business by slashing costs and reusing boosters.\nA sign of Ms. Shotwell\u2019s effectiveness was her use of her NASA connections in 2013 to help SpaceX snare an exclusive, long-term lease for launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, according to people familiar with the matter, contracting documents and agency emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Pad 39A helped launch U.S. astronauts to the moon and now is integral to SpaceX\u2019s operations.\nMs. Shotwell and Mr. Musk, through a SpaceX spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed or provide comment.\nOver the years, Mr. Musk has considered taking SpaceX public but stopped short to avoid ceding some control, according to former employees, business partners and others. At SpaceX, he can focus on technical specifics, sometimes even arcane and relatively minor details, because he has someone, in Ms. Shotwell, who can manage business strategy and operations. Antonio Abad Martin, operations chief at Spanish satellite-operator Hispasat Group, a longtime customer of SpaceX, said Ms. Shotwell told him early on that he should deal primarily with her because \u201cshe knew how to manage Elon.\u201d\nMs. Shotwell started at SpaceX as the head of business development with nothing to sell but the promise of a rocket. She joined, according to an interview with Northwestern University\u2019s alumni magazine, because she relished the challenge.\nShe became president in 2008, responsible for fast-growing operations, along with government and legal affairs. Ms. Shotwell\u2019s profile at SpaceX rose because of her success a decade ago snaring the company\u2019s first major contract with NASA to launch cargo into orbit.\n\u201cI very seldom dealt with Elon because Gwynne ran the company,\u201d said Charles Bolden, NASA administrator during the Obama administration. She was much more \u201cpersonable and more inclined to talk about family\u201d in addition to business, he said. Ms. Shotwell is the mother of two children, and her husband works at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\nCritics say Ms. Shotwell also has sharp elbows and a reputation for outflanking potential rivals. Others fault Ms. Shotwell for failing to prevent burnout among certain SpaceX workers; and former employees say she didn\u2019t keep Mr. Musk from abruptly pushing out various managers and then threatening to sue them if they spoke poorly about the company.\nSome people praise Ms. Shotwell for serving as a mediator or cushion for Mr. Musk, who is renowned for overly aggressive deadlines and sometimes unpredictable moves. Industry veterans credit Ms. Shotwell with eventually persuading her boss to refrain from riling lawmakers by attacking NASA\u2019s proposed deep-space rocket. Ms. Shotwell worked hard \u201cto keep him from being too publicly negative\u201d and creating unnecessary enemies on Capitol Hill, Ms. Garver said.\nMr. Musk has shown his trust in Ms. Shotwell, as she is the only other company official usually permitted to clear press statements or stand in for him at launch sites, according to current and former company officials.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch,\n\n\n\n chief executive of satellite-operator Iridium Communications Inc., SpaceX\u2019s largest commercial customer, said his \u201ccompany has almost never had to deal with Elon.\u201d Mr. Desch added that Ms. Shotwell never appeared to have to check with anyone before making decisions.\nLikewise, Ms. Shotwell is loyal to Mr. Musk. Associates and industry officials said they have never heard her criticize Mr. Musk or even poke good-natured fun at his prickly personality, as other SpaceX managers are inclined to do in social settings.\n\u201cI love working for Elon,\u201d Ms. Shotwell said in a CNBC interview earlier this year, calling him \u201ca great boss\u201d who is funny, fair and an inspirational leader.\nNonetheless, Ms. Shotwell has been willing to sound a cautionary note regarding some of Mr. Musk\u2019s more-ambitious predictions. For instance, she has warned that SpaceX\u2019s plans to build and operate a constellation of its own communication satellites will work only if major technical and business questions can be resolved. Mr. Musk, on the other hand, has offered more unqualified support for the plan.\nMore recently, she cast doubt on internal company projections from years ago that satellite revenue wil Space Exploration Technologies President Gwynne Shotwell serves as the company\u2019s essential buffer for its founder and chairman, Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Spy Satellite Believed Lost After SpaceX Mission Fails (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "980",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-spy-satellite-believed-lost-after-spacex-mission-fails-1515462479?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=81",
        "text": "Once the engine powering the rocket\u2019s expendable second stage stops firing, whatever it is carrying is supposed to separate and proceed on its own trajectory. If a satellite isn\u2019t set free at the right time or is damaged upon release, it can be dragged back toward earth.\nScheduled for mid-November, Zuma\u2019s launch was delayed when SpaceX announced engineers \u201cwanted to take a closer look at data from recent\u201d tests of a fairing, or protective covering for a satellite, used for another customer. At the time, the company didn\u2019t publicly outline what prompted the additional testing. Fairings are used to shield satellites that are carried near the nose of the rocket. They remain in place during the early phases of the ascent, but are jettisoned before final insertion into orbit.\n\n\nDuring the launch, SpaceX didn\u2019t signal any problems with the fairing or associated hardware. Since then, it has declined to indicate whether such issues caused or contributed to Sunday\u2019s missteps. \nThe lack of details about what occurred means that some possible alternate sequence of events other than a failed separation may have been the culprit.\nFor rapidly growing SpaceX, which seeks to establish itself as a reliable, low-cost launch provider for the Pentagon, the failed mission came at an important juncture. The company is competing for more national-security launches against its primary rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nAs of Monday night, nearly 24 hours after the launch, uncertainty surrounded both the mission and the fate of the satellite, which some industry officials estimated carried a price tag in the billions of dollars. Notably, the Pentagon\u2019s Strategic Command, which keeps track of all commercial, scientific and national-security satellites along with space debris, hadn\u2019t updated its catalog of objects to reflect a new satellite circling the planet.\nNeither\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which built the satellite, nor SpaceX, as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n space-transportation company is called, has shed light on what happened. \nA Northrop Grumman spokesman said, \u201cWe cannot comment on classified missions.\u201d \nA SpaceX spokesman said: \u201cWe do not comment on missions of this nature, but as of right now reviews of the data indicate Falcon 9 performed nominally.\u201d That terminology typically indicates that the rocket\u2019s engines and navigation systems operated without glitches. The spokesman declined to elaborate.\nIt isn\u2019t clear what job the satellite was intended to perform, or even which U.S. agency contracted for the satellite. As usual for classified launches, the information released by SpaceX before liftoff was bereft of details about the payload. A video broadcast Sunday night narrated by a SpaceX official didn\u2019t provide any hint of problems, though the feed ended before the planned deployment of the satellite.\nMr. Musk\u2019s closely held, Southern California-based company has projected ramping up its overall launch rate to more than 25 missions in 2018, from 18 in 2017, and is scheduled to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the international space station before the end of the year.\nIf preparations remain on track, SpaceX later this month anticipates the maiden launch of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket, featuring 27 engines putting out more power than roughly 18 Boeing 747 jumbo jets.\nNorthrop Grumman not only was the prime contractor for the satellite, it was also responsible for choosing the launch provider. Despite SpaceX\u2019s growing list of accomplishments, including routinely landing, refurbishing and reusing the main stages of Falcon 9 boosters, industry and government officials have said some in the intelligence community continue to have qualms about relying on Mr. Musk\u2019s nontraditional business practices. \n\u2014Byron Tau contributed to this article. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com An expensive, highly classified U.S. spy satellite is presumed to be a total loss after it failed to reach orbit atop a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket on Sunday, according to industry and government officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Spy Satellite Believed Lost After SpaceX Mission Fails (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "981",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-spy-satellite-believed-lost-after-spacex-mission-fails-1515462479?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=105",
        "text": "Once the engine powering the rocket\u2019s expendable second stage stops firing, whatever it is carrying is supposed to separate and proceed on its own trajectory. If a satellite isn\u2019t set free at the right time or is damaged upon release, it can be dragged back toward earth.\n\n\n\n\nScheduled for mid-November, Zuma\u2019s launch was delayed when SpaceX announced engineers \u201cwanted to take a closer look at data from recent\u201d tests of a fairing, or protective covering for a satellite, used for another customer. At the time, the company didn\u2019t publicly outline what prompted the additional testing. Fairings are used to shield satellites that are carried near the nose of the rocket. They remain in place during the early phases of the ascent, but are jettisoned before final insertion into orbit.\n\n\nDuring the launch, SpaceX didn\u2019t signal any problems with the fairing or associated hardware. Since then, it has declined to indicate whether such issues caused or contributed to Sunday\u2019s missteps. \nThe lack of details about what occurred means that some possible alternate sequence of events other than a failed separation may have been the culprit.\nFor rapidly growing SpaceX, which seeks to establish itself as a reliable, low-cost launch provider for the Pentagon, the failed mission came at an important juncture. The company is competing for more national-security launches against its primary rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nAs of Monday night, nearly 24 hours after the launch, uncertainty surrounded both the mission and the fate of the satellite, which some industry officials estimated carried a price tag in the billions of dollars. Notably, the Pentagon\u2019s Strategic Command, which keeps track of all commercial, scientific and national-security satellites along with space debris, hadn\u2019t updated its catalog of objects to reflect a new satellite circling the planet.\nNeither\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which built the satellite, nor SpaceX, as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n space-transportation company is called, has shed light on what happened. \nA Northrop Grumman spokesman said, \u201cWe cannot comment on classified missions.\u201d \nA SpaceX spokesman said: \u201cWe do not comment on missions of this nature, but as of right now reviews of the data indicate Falcon 9 performed nominally.\u201d That terminology typically indicates that the rocket\u2019s engines and navigation systems operated without glitches. The spokesman declined to elaborate.\nIt isn\u2019t clear what job the satellite was intended to perform, or even which U.S. agency contracted for the satellite. As usual for classified launches, the information released by SpaceX before liftoff was bereft of details about the payload. A video broadcast Sunday night narrated by a SpaceX official didn\u2019t provide any hint of problems, though the feed ended before the planned deployment of the satellite.\nMr. Musk\u2019s closely held, Southern California-based company has projected ramping up its overall launch rate to more than 25 missions in 2018, from 18 in 2017, and is scheduled to start ferrying U.S. astronauts to the international space station before the end of the year.\nIf preparations remain on track, SpaceX later this month anticipates the maiden launch of its long-delayed Falcon Heavy rocket, featuring 27 engines putting out more power than roughly 18 Boeing 747 jumbo jets.\nNorthrop Grumman not only was the prime contractor for the satellite, it was also responsible for choosing the launch provider. Despite SpaceX\u2019s growing list of accomplishments, including routinely landing, refurbishing and reusing the main stages of Falcon 9 boosters, industry and government officials have said some in the intelligence community continue to have qualms about relying on Mr. Musk\u2019s nontraditional business practices. \n\u2014Byron Tau contributed to this article. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com An expensive, highly classified U.S. spy satellite is presumed to be a total loss after it failed to reach orbit atop a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket on Sunday, according to industry and government officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Finds Ways to Prevent Battery Fires (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "982",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-work-to-head-off-battery-blazes-in-space-finds-uses-on-earth-1500638400?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=83",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s initial goal was to prevent fiery accidents from lithium-battery malfunctions in space suits. The first modified suits are scheduled to be sent to the international space station in coming months. Future electric planes and unmanned Mars rovers could get later versions of the technology.\nThe fire-prevention designs under development by NASA and Kulr aren\u2019t meant for laptops or smartphones, but they are set to be used in consumer products such as centralized audio controls for homes and Ubtech Robotics Corp.\u2019s Lynx, a new humanoid robot. Lynx features\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Alexa digital assistant and is slated to go on sale this summer.\n\n\nUbtech, a fast-growing Chinese robot maker, is in the final stages of testing the Lynx robots, which will offer facial-recognition capabilities and personalized greetings, along with other features available on Amazon\u2019s Wi-Fi connected Echo speakers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Goti Deng,\n\n\n\n closely held Ubtech\u2019s chief strategy officer, said the \u201cdemands for battery performance are really high,\u201d but \u201cright now Kulr is a star\u201d in finding ways to reduce the risk of dangerous overheating.\nUbtech already relies on Kulr to safeguard robots sold by major U.S. retailers such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Best Buy Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Costco Wholesale Corp.\n\n\n By early 2018, Mr. Goti said, his company plans to incorporate more-capable cooling technology in its next-generation robots intended for airports and museums.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUbtech\u2019s Lynx is a humanoid robot with Amazon\u2019s Alexa digital assistant.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jae C. Hong/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nKulr Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Mo\n\n\n\n said the company is far enough along to start assessing commercial applications, ranging from medical devices to drones to electrical systems on airliners.The company, which is based in Campbell, Calif., also has signed a wide-ranging marketing deal with Jabil Circuits Inc., a manufacturer of electronic products for customers such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n International Business Machines Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n HP Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Xerox Corp.\n\n\u201cBattery technology has outpaced thermal-protection technology,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Keith Cochran,\n\n\n\n Jabil vice president of global business units, who added that Kulr\u2019s technology \u201cis very credible and the products work.\u201d He said he expects Jabil to showcase Kulr\u2019s technology in a line of home audio-control equipment within a few months.\nLithium power packs installed in robots, lights and some appliances are growing more powerful. They pose increasing challenges for fire-suppression systems, particularly if shipments burst into flames in cargo holds of airplanes. Fires hot enough to melt aluminum fuselages\u2014which were sparked or fed by large shipments of lithium batteries\u2014destroyed three large jets over the past decade. Each year dozens of emergencies and diversions prompted by smoldering or flaming laptops in airliner cabins are reported world-wide.\nAgainst this backdrop, NASA\u2019s research is attracting attention from other federal agencies. Battery experts from the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration have requested details of certain laboratory techniques, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Darcy,\n\n\n\n a top NASA battery expert. \nFor NASA, which describes Kulr\u2019s approach as \u201cvery promising,\u201d having a variety of cooling options is important to ensure safe power in different types of hardware, including portions of the aging space station and solar-arrays under development.\n\u201cI don\u2019t think there is anyone else doing the testing that we\u2019re doing,\u201d Mr. Darcy said.\nPrompted by a pair of high-profile lithium-battery fires on Boeing Co. 787 jetliners in 2013, NASA decided to see if it could reduce the hazards of such malfunctions so \u201cthey wouldn\u2019t be catastrophic events\u201d in orbit, Mr. Darcy said.\nKulr\u2019s Mr. Mo and his management team predict they will get a jump on competitors because their technology aims to make batteries only 5% heavier, compared with current technology that adds 15% to 20% in weight.\nBy encapsulating water in specially treated carbon-fiber based pockets, the company has been able to keep cell temperatures below 158 degrees Fahrenheit even when an adjoining test cell\u2019s temperature climbed to about 1,000 degrees in one 2016 test cited by NASA. Recent lab results have been even more favorable, according to company test summaries.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA research to prevent catastrophic fires on vehicles in orbit soon is expected to make personal robots, audio gear and other electronics safer on the ground. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Finds Ways to Prevent Battery Fires (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "983",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-work-to-head-off-battery-blazes-in-space-finds-uses-on-earth-1500638400?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=90",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s initial goal was to prevent fiery accidents from lithium-battery malfunctions in space suits. The first modified suits are scheduled to be sent to the international space station in coming months. Future electric planes and unmanned Mars rovers could get later versions of the technology.\n\n\n\n\nThe fire-prevention designs under development by NASA and Kulr aren\u2019t meant for laptops or smartphones, but they are set to be used in consumer products such as centralized audio controls for homes and Ubtech Robotics Corp.\u2019s Lynx, a new humanoid robot. Lynx features\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Alexa digital assistant and is slated to go on sale this summer.\n\n\nUbtech, a fast-growing Chinese robot maker, is in the final stages of testing the Lynx robots, which will offer facial-recognition capabilities and personalized greetings, along with other features available on Amazon\u2019s Wi-Fi connected Echo speakers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Goti Deng,\n\n\n\n closely held Ubtech\u2019s chief strategy officer, said the \u201cdemands for battery performance are really high,\u201d but \u201cright now Kulr is a star\u201d in finding ways to reduce the risk of dangerous overheating.\nUbtech already relies on Kulr to safeguard robots sold by major U.S. retailers such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Best Buy Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Costco Wholesale Corp.\n\n\n By early 2018, Mr. Goti said, his company plans to incorporate more-capable cooling technology in its next-generation robots intended for airports and museums.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUbtech\u2019s Lynx is a humanoid robot with Amazon\u2019s Alexa digital assistant.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jae C. Hong/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nKulr Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Mo\n\n\n\n said the company is far enough along to start assessing commercial applications, ranging from medical devices to drones to electrical systems on airliners.The company, which is based in Campbell, Calif., also has signed a wide-ranging marketing deal with Jabil Circuits Inc., a manufacturer of electronic products for customers such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n International Business Machines Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n HP Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Xerox Corp.\n\n\u201cBattery technology has outpaced thermal-protection technology,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Keith Cochran,\n\n\n\n Jabil vice president of global business units, who added that Kulr\u2019s technology \u201cis very credible and the products work.\u201d He said he expects Jabil to showcase Kulr\u2019s technology in a line of home audio-control equipment within a few months.\nLithium power packs installed in robots, lights and some appliances are growing more powerful. They pose increasing challenges for fire-suppression systems, particularly if shipments burst into flames in cargo holds of airplanes. Fires hot enough to melt aluminum fuselages\u2014which were sparked or fed by large shipments of lithium batteries\u2014destroyed three large jets over the past decade. Each year dozens of emergencies and diversions prompted by smoldering or flaming laptops in airliner cabins are reported world-wide.\nAgainst this backdrop, NASA\u2019s research is attracting attention from other federal agencies. Battery experts from the Pentagon and the Federal Aviation Administration have requested details of certain laboratory techniques, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Darcy,\n\n\n\n a top NASA battery expert. \nFor NASA, which describes Kulr\u2019s approach as \u201cvery promising,\u201d having a variety of cooling options is important to ensure safe power in different types of hardware, including portions of the aging space station and solar-arrays under development.\n\u201cI don\u2019t think there is anyone else doing the testing that we\u2019re doing,\u201d Mr. Darcy said.\nPrompted by a pair of high-profile lithium-battery fires on Boeing Co. 787 jetliners in 2013, NASA decided to see if it could reduce the hazards of such malfunctions so \u201cthey wouldn\u2019t be catastrophic events\u201d in orbit, Mr. Darcy said.\nKulr\u2019s Mr. Mo and his management team predict they will get a jump on competitors because their technology aims to make batteries only 5% heavier, compared with current technology that adds 15% to 20% in weight.\nBy encapsulating water in specially treated carbon-fiber based pockets, the company has been able to keep cell temperatures below 158 degrees Fahrenheit even when an adjoining test cell\u2019s temperature climbed to about 1,000 degrees in one 2016 test cited by NASA. Recent lab results have been even more favorable, according to company test summaries.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA research to prevent catastrophic fires on vehicles in orbit soon is expected to make personal robots, audio gear and other electronics safer on the ground. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Advisers Heighten Warnings About Manned SpaceX Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "984",
        "date": "2017-01-14",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-advisory-panel-heightens-warnings-about-manned-spacex-flights-1484444673?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=89",
        "text": "Deciding to stick with the current concept \u201cshould not be unduly influenced\u201d by factors such as schedule and budget concerns, the report said.\nThe panel also emphasized that safety trade-offs over the fueling issue can\u2019t be defined by what it called \u201cthe best we can do given the constraints\u201d considerations.\n\n\nWhen questioned about the report, a SpaceX spokesman on Saturday referred to earlier statements the company has made about its fueling procedure, which it said has received initial clearance from NASA.\nThe report is the second NASA advisory panel to raise similar red flags in the past year. A group chaired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Stafford\n\n\n\n , a former astronaut and retired Air Force lieutenant general, in 2015 first warned that SpaceX\u2019s fueling plans contradict decades of international space-launch policy.\nBoth NASA and the company, founded and run by billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n have said they are cooperating to assess safety issues. They have pledged repeatedly to launch crews only if all safety concerns are resolved.\n\u2014NASA also has promised to incorporate lessons learned from a pair of SpaceX explosions dating back to the summer of 2015.Andy Pasztor\nMr. Musk and his team want to use supercooled fuel to boost the power and increase fuel reserves of their Falcon 9 rockets. Such practices are central to SpaceX\u2019s ability to meet its goal of routinely reusing the most expensive parts of boosters on multiple launches.\nBut company officials have said they can\u2019t do that unless astronauts get on board befcore fueling, because crews wouldn\u2019t have enough time to climb into capsules after propellants are pumped into the rocket. The supercooled liquids have to be launched shortly after loading.\nIn September, an unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launchpad while it was being filled with propellants. Investigators determined the cause of the explosion stemmed from an unexpected interaction of liquid oxygen with a tank containing helium.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX has identified the likely variables that led to the launchpad explosion of its Falcon 9 rocket back in September. In the next week, the company is expected to attempt its first launch since that accident took place. Photo: U.S. Launch Report\n \n\n\nIndustry and former NASA officials said the supercooled fueling procedure wasn\u2019t part of SpaceX\u2019s initial concept for building what are called commercial space taxis, intended to ferry astronauts to and from the orbiting international space station. Missions could start in less than two years.\nDescribed as a \u201cload and go\u201d procedure in the latest report, the safety advisory panel stressed that potentially complex interactions between propellants and other systems, as seen in the 2016 accident, \u201cmay not be adequately understood, which results in a higher level of uncertainty that must be factored into the risk determination.\u201d\nThe report also indicated that the panel remains concerned that some particularly difficult technical challenges could prevent NASA from meeting its standard of no more than a 1 in 270 chance of losing a crew during any given manned flight of commercial capsules being developed by SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\nOngoing reviews of those issues have the potential to affect the budget, schedule and crew safety, according to the report.\nThe aerospace advisory panel\u2019s report, covering many other NASA safety issues, repeats qualms about SpaceX\u2019s fundamental fueling procedures raised earlier by a separate panel responsible for advising the agency about the safety of space-station operations.\nNASA effectively told members of that panel, led by Gen. Stafford, to stand down from analyzing the issue and instructed them to refrain from publicly discussing their concerns.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Fueling rockets with astronauts already strapped into capsules on top entails major explosion risks and other uncertainties that need to be assessed, the aerospace safety advisory committee said in its annual report. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Advisers Heighten Warnings About Manned SpaceX Flights (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "985",
        "date": "2017-01-14",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-advisory-panel-heightens-warnings-about-manned-spacex-flights-1484444673?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=133",
        "text": "Deciding to stick with the current concept \u201cshould not be unduly influenced\u201d by factors such as schedule and budget concerns, the report said.\n\n\n\n\nThe panel also emphasized that safety trade-offs over the fueling issue can\u2019t be defined by what it called \u201cthe best we can do given the constraints\u201d considerations.\n\n\nWhen questioned about the report, a SpaceX spokesman on Saturday referred to earlier statements the company has made about its fueling procedure, which it said has received initial clearance from NASA.\nThe report is the second NASA advisory panel to raise similar red flags in the past year. A group chaired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Stafford\n\n\n\n , a former astronaut and retired Air Force lieutenant general, in 2015 first warned that SpaceX\u2019s fueling plans contradict decades of international space-launch policy.\nBoth NASA and the company, founded and run by billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n have said they are cooperating to assess safety issues. They have pledged repeatedly to launch crews only if all safety concerns are resolved.\n\u2014NASA also has promised to incorporate lessons learned from a pair of SpaceX explosions dating back to the summer of 2015.Andy Pasztor\nMr. Musk and his team want to use supercooled fuel to boost the power and increase fuel reserves of their Falcon 9 rockets. Such practices are central to SpaceX\u2019s ability to meet its goal of routinely reusing the most expensive parts of boosters on multiple launches.\nBut company officials have said they can\u2019t do that unless astronauts get on board befcore fueling, because crews wouldn\u2019t have enough time to climb into capsules after propellants are pumped into the rocket. The supercooled liquids have to be launched shortly after loading.\nIn September, an unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launchpad while it was being filled with propellants. Investigators determined the cause of the explosion stemmed from an unexpected interaction of liquid oxygen with a tank containing helium.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX has identified the likely variables that led to the launchpad explosion of its Falcon 9 rocket back in September. In the next week, the company is expected to attempt its first launch since that accident took place. Photo: U.S. Launch Report\n \n\n\nIndustry and former NASA officials said the supercooled fueling procedure wasn\u2019t part of SpaceX\u2019s initial concept for building what are called commercial space taxis, intended to ferry astronauts to and from the orbiting international space station. Missions could start in less than two years.\nDescribed as a \u201cload and go\u201d procedure in the latest report, the safety advisory panel stressed that potentially complex interactions between propellants and other systems, as seen in the 2016 accident, \u201cmay not be adequately understood, which results in a higher level of uncertainty that must be factored into the risk determination.\u201d\nThe report also indicated that the panel remains concerned that some particularly difficult technical challenges could prevent NASA from meeting its standard of no more than a 1 in 270 chance of losing a crew during any given manned flight of commercial capsules being developed by SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\nOngoing reviews of those issues have the potential to affect the budget, schedule and crew safety, according to the report.\nThe aerospace advisory panel\u2019s report, covering many other NASA safety issues, repeats qualms about SpaceX\u2019s fundamental fueling procedures raised earlier by a separate panel responsible for advising the agency about the safety of space-station operations.\nNASA effectively told members of that panel, led by Gen. Stafford, to stand down from analyzing the issue and instructed them to refrain from publicly discussing their concerns.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Fueling rockets with astronauts already strapped into capsules on top entails major explosion risks and other uncertainties that need to be assessed, the aerospace safety advisory committee said in its annual report. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin offers to waive $2 billion in NASA payments in bid for moon landing contract (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "986",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/26/blue-origin-moon-contract/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin spaceflight company has publicly offered to cover up to $2 billion in NASA contract fees so it can remain involved in the U.S. government\u2019s effort to return astronauts to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe long-shot bid to persuade the space agency to change course comes after Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was selected in April as the primary contractor to build the moon lander and given a $2.9 billion contract for the work. Blue Origin countered Monday with a highly unusual open letter signed by Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. In it, he criticized NASA\u2019s decision to rely on a single company for the moon lander, an approach he said would \u201cput an end to meaningful competition for years to come\u201d by locking the government into SpaceX\u2019s rocket technology.Story continues below advertisementHe offered to pour billions of dollars in company funding into the effort in exchange for a seat at the table.Advertisement\u201cWithout competition, NASA\u2019s short-term and long-term lunar ambitions will be delayed, will ultimately cost more, and won\u2019t serve the national interest,\u201d Bezos wrote in the letter.Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra moneyIt\u2019s unclear whether and how NASA will respond. As of late afternoon, NASA had not commented on how it might proceed. A NASA spokeswoman said the agency was aware of Bezos\u2019s letter but declined further comment, citing pending litigation.The open offer from Bezos marks a significant departure from the normal pace of government procurement, which usually happens behind closed doors through a scripted, bureaucratic process. It is rare for the details of contract negotiations to spill into the public domain, and rarer still for interested bidders to throw out offers and counteroffers in pointed corporate blog posts.Story continues below advertisementThe $2 billion olive branch is also abnormal. Although it\u2019s common for aerospace companies to invest corporate funds in technologies they intend to sell to the government, they typically prefer the government to underwrite as much of the development expenses as possible.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019m not sure there\u2019s any precedent for this,\u201d said Alan Chvotkin, a partner with the government contracts law firm Nichols Liu who is not affiliated with either Blue Origin or SpaceX. \u201cIt\u2019s of a magnitude that we rarely see \u2026 they\u2019re essentially putting $2 billion on the line.\u201dNASA is in a unique position because both SpaceX and Blue Origin are deep-pocketed commercial spaceflight companies that are comfortable with paying to develop their own technology. And Blue Origin can argue that NASA strayed from its original vision by going with a single contract.Story continues below advertisementThe \u201chuman landing system\u201d was initially supposed to involve two manufacturers, something that would let the government benefit from redundancy across systems and also give it leverage in any future negotiations. But the agency said it did not have enough room in its budget to issue more than one contract. The $2.9 billion contract given to SpaceX fit within the agency\u2019s budget only because SpaceX agreed to modify its payment schedule, according to a NASA document obtained by The Post.AdvertisementBlue Origin already has formally challenged the award to Space X.In a solution offered \u201cfor [NASA\u2019s] consideration\u201d on Monday, Bezos said Blue Origin would effectively pay for the first two fiscal years of technology development itself by waiving up to $2 billion in fees, while \u201cgovernment appropriation actions catch up.\u201d Bezos also offered to cover the costs of an un-crewed test mission to prove its lunar lander is safe. In exchange, Blue Origin would get a contract with a fixed price and cover any cost-overruns, according to the letter.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNASA veered from its original dual-source acquisition strategy due to perceived near-term budgetary issues, and this offer removes that obstacle,\u201d Bezos wrote.Two procurement experts contacted by The Post said NASA probably could issue a contract under the terms spelled out in Bezos\u2019s letter. The Federal Acquisition Regulation, which governs most large purchases made by government agencies, does provide a framework for building procurements around \u201cunsolicited proposals.\u201d And the specific structure of the moon lander contract, carried out through a \u201cbroad agency announcement\u201d rather than a typical request for proposals, might provide the government leeway.AdvertisementBut it would be highly abnormal for a government agency to suddenly change course in response to a public pronouncement from someone interested in selling something to the government. Such an action could become fodder for future bid protests.Story continues below advertisementFranklin Turner, a government contracts attorney with the law firm McCarter & English who is not affiliated with either Blue Origin or SpaceX, said it would be highly unusual for NASA to reshape its plan after receiving a public request from a prospective bidder.\u201cIt is entirely up to the agency as to how it\u2019s going to define its own requirements,\u201d Turner said. \u201cBut I would be very surprised to see NASA turn on a dime in response to a proposal like this one.\u201d In April, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin spaceflight company lost out to Elon Musk's SpaceX in a contest to return U.S. astronauts to the moon. But Blue Origin wants back in. Blue Origin offers to waive $2 billion in NASA payments in bid for moon landing contract",
        "author": "Aaron Gregg"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Giant Leap for SpaceX (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "987",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/dealbook/spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft company is scheduled to send two astronauts into orbit today, a major milestone for the commercial space business. Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft company is scheduled to send two astronauts into orbit today, a major milestone for the commercial space business.  Our next DealBook Debrief call is Thursday at 11 a.m. Eastern, featuring the Opinion staff writer and editor Bari Weiss, who will discuss shifts in the media and culture, and take your questions. R.S.V.P. here to join. (Want this in your inbox each morning? Sign up here.)",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "One Giant Leap for SpaceX (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "988",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/dealbook/spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft company is scheduled to send two astronauts into orbit today, a major milestone for the commercial space business. Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft company is scheduled to send two astronauts into orbit today, a major milestone for the commercial space business.  Our next DealBook Debrief call is Thursday at 11 a.m. Eastern, featuring the Opinion staff writer and editor Bari Weiss, who will discuss shifts in the media and culture, and take your questions. R.S.V.P. here to join. (Want this in your inbox each morning? Sign up here.)",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Spaceflights for Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos spur a race for insurers, too. (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "989",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/business/richard-branson-jeff-bezos-spaceflight-insurance.html",
        "text": "Brokers say neither mogul appears to have bought coverage in case of an accident, but some insurers are interested in developing policies for space tourism. Brokers say neither mogul appears to have bought coverage in case of an accident, but some insurers are interested in developing policies for space tourism. Richard Branson is scheduled to fly into suborbital space on Sunday, nine days ahead of a similar journey by a fellow billionaire, Jeff Bezos. These first flights for the space moguls will also launch without liability insurance, the DealBook newsletter reports.",
        "author": "By Stephen Gandel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Her Scientific Discovery: Support (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "990",
        "date": "2017-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/business/women-minorities-science.html",
        "text": "A Yale scientist needed advocates in order to believe she could succeed in her field. A Yale scientist needed advocates in order to believe she could succeed in her field. The critically acclaimed movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d about three African-American women who were instrumental in the success of the Apollo 11 space mission, hit close to home for me. Since its release, I have frequently been asked why there aren\u2019t more people like me in my field.",
        "author": "By Anjelica L. Gonzalez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Her Scientific Discovery: Support (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "991",
        "date": "2017-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/business/women-minorities-science.html",
        "text": "A Yale scientist needed advocates in order to believe she could succeed in her field. A Yale scientist needed advocates in order to believe she could succeed in her field. The critically acclaimed movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d about three African-American women who were instrumental in the success of the Apollo 11 space mission, hit close to home for me. Since its release, I have frequently been asked why there aren\u2019t more people like me in my field.",
        "author": "By Anjelica L. Gonzalez"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Week in Business: A Milestone in Space Tourism (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "992",
        "date": "2021-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/business/the-week-in-business-space-tourism-taxes-booster-shots.html",
        "text": "Plus, a tax plan is proposed and the government will weigh in on booster shots. Plus, a tax plan is proposed and the government will weigh in on booster shots. A SpaceX rocket carrying four Americans blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday. The orbital spaceflight was the first to carry only passengers who weren\u2019t professional astronauts, a milestone for the space tourism industry. In addition to SpaceX, which Elon Musk founded, Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic plan to offer commercial spaceflights. But the latest flight differed from the short jaunts that Mr. Bezos and Mr. Branson took to space in July. The crew orbited the planet for three days.",
        "author": "By Sarah Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "S.E.C. Says a SPAC Misled Investors About Its Space Deal (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "993",
        "date": "2021-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/13/business/sec-spac-momentus-stable-road.html",
        "text": "A civil settlement involving Momentus and Stable Road Acquisition was one of the first major moves by the agency since the start of the SPAC boom. A civil settlement involving Momentus and Stable Road Acquisition was one of the first major moves by the agency since the start of the SPAC boom. A planned merger involving an upstart space transportation company may not get off the ground after securities regulators brought one of the first major enforcement actions targeting a cash-rich blank check company.",
        "author": "By Matthew Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going for Broke in Cryptoland (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "994",
        "date": "2021-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/business/hype-coins-cryptocurrency.html",
        "text": "Some hype coins mint instant millionaires. Others go bust. Why not take a chance? Some hype coins mint instant millionaires. Others go bust. Why not take a chance? They have names that make them sound delicious, like Cookie Coin. Or headed for outer space, like Pluto Coin. Or space-bound and delicious, like AstroCake, which was described this way: \u201cCreated 5 minutes ago. SAFE.\u201d",
        "author": "By David Segal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andy Weir\u2019s Best Seller \u2018The Martian\u2019 Gets a Classroom-Friendly Makeover (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "995",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/business/andy-weirs-best-seller-the-martian-gets-a-classroom-friendly-makeover.html",
        "text": "Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. There are more than 160 swear words in Andy Weir\u2019s sci-fi thriller, \u201cThe Martian,\u201d including two memorably deployed F-words in the novel\u2019s first three sentences.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Alter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andy Weir\u2019s Best Seller \u2018The Martian\u2019 Gets a Classroom-Friendly Makeover (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "996",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/business/andy-weirs-best-seller-the-martian-gets-a-classroom-friendly-makeover.html",
        "text": "Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. There are more than 160 swear words in Andy Weir\u2019s sci-fi thriller, \u201cThe Martian,\u201d including two memorably deployed F-words in the novel\u2019s first three sentences.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Alter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andy Weir\u2019s Best Seller \u2018The Martian\u2019 Gets a Classroom-Friendly Makeover (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "997",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/business/andy-weirs-best-seller-the-martian-gets-a-classroom-friendly-makeover.html",
        "text": "Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. There are more than 160 swear words in Andy Weir\u2019s sci-fi thriller, \u201cThe Martian,\u201d including two memorably deployed F-words in the novel\u2019s first three sentences.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Alter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andy Weir\u2019s Best Seller \u2018The Martian\u2019 Gets a Classroom-Friendly Makeover (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "998",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/business/andy-weirs-best-seller-the-martian-gets-a-classroom-friendly-makeover.html",
        "text": "Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. Science teachers are using a new edition of \u201cThe Martian\u201d to teach physics, astronomy and chemistry. It\u2019s the same story \u2014 minus the profanity. There are more than 160 swear words in Andy Weir\u2019s sci-fi thriller, \u201cThe Martian,\u201d including two memorably deployed F-words in the novel\u2019s first three sentences.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Alter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sewing That Ends Up in Orbit (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "999",
        "date": "2018-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/business/sewing-leidos-astronauts.html",
        "text": "In 1975, Hue Nguyen fled by boat from South Vietnam, where she had learned to sew. Now her finished work soars into space with NASA astronauts. In 1975, Hue Nguyen fled by boat from South Vietnam, where she had learned to sew. Now her finished work soars into space with NASA astronauts. Hue Nguyen, 64, is a seamstress at Leidos in Webster, Tex.",
        "author": "As told to Patricia R. Olsen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Space Tourism? Because It Operates Outside of NASA (WSJ: Business World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1000",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-tourism-nasa-bezos-musk-branson-11627070311?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=6",
        "text": "Read More Business World\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Rutan was the brains behind Virgin Galactic founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n space plane, a first in two ways. Mr. Rutan\u2019s original model in 2004 received the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s first commercial human spaceflight license. And Mr. Branson used a later model this month to beat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n to an imaginary line marking the beginnings of outer space.\nMr. Branson might be said to proceed in the freebooting tradition of the East India Company. The private sector pursues its own aims and government follows. Mr. Bezos and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n without the least disrespect, are government contractors in waiting. The things many of us dream of\u2014Mars colonization, exploring the oceans of Europa, sending robot probes to nearby star systems\u2014are public-sector work even if big pieces can be split off for private competition.\n\n\nAll hail Mr. Musk for forcing NASA and its pork-barreling congressional masters to recognize the cost-cutting benefits of private, reusable rocketry. He did so with his own money, impelling NASA for now to alter its business model in a way that may or may not stick.\nAll three billionaires\u2014call them Messrs. B, B & M\u2014deserve credit for reawakening public interest in space. The downside of the Musk-Bezos approach is also apparent. The two are locked in a dispute, currently before the Government Accountability Office, over a contract for NASA\u2019s new lunar lander.\nMy tiny asterisk in this history was a 2004 column entitled \u201cThe \u2018Final Frontier\u2019 May Be a Senate Waste Basket,\u201d helping to resurrect a bill requiring the FAA to facilitate private space ventures. A few years later, President Obama arrived as an enthusiast for NASA becoming a consumer of private services rather than doing everything in-house on a cost-plus basis. Then he met\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n a Senate overseer from Florida, who forced down his throat a NASA heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, which a decade later still hasn\u2019t flown and is laughably over budget.\nWhen Mr. Nelson became the Biden administration\u2019s NASA chief in May, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n response from former space officials and space policy experts might have stripped the atmosphere off a small planet. Mr. Nelson\u2019s other claim to fame, many recalled, was mandating himself a useless passenger on a 1986 shuttle flight. In his new job, he\u2019s already started trumpeting a Cold War space race with China, which some see as a prelude to redirecting as much of NASA\u2019s future budget back to its public-sector workforce as he can get away with.\nMr. Bezos said after his flight that suborbital tourism is a sideshow. His \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket is overbuilt for the purpose and really directed toward lifting heavier payloads into orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musks speaks in Washington, March 9, 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n brendan smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDitto Mr. Musk. His Starship spacecraft and its associated Super Heavy Rocket, the current apples of his eye, have the U.S. government as their prime target customer.\nMr. Branson\u2019s aim is altogether different. His spaceship is essentially a two-stage winged aircraft. He looks beyond space tourism for the wealthy to suborbital transportation between cities. He would take passengers to the edge of space not for the purpose of setting them down where they started but halfway around the world.\nCall this a longer bet, with routine supersonic travel preceding the space developments that many of us pine for. Mr. Musk is talking about Mars colonization within his lifetime (he wants to live to see it, after all) but Mr. Branson\u2019s implicit timeline is probably more realistic if less pleasing to those of us watching our biological clocks run down. For one thing, nowhere in sight is NASA\u2019s space-ready nuclear reactor, a likely requirement for the next big advance in space exploration.\nIn one respect, the future is already here. The punditry has converted itself into an algorithm, reflexively lamenting billionaire space jaunts in a way it never laments expenditures on beer nuts or electric-vehicle subsidies, though these monies could also be used to relieve human want.\nA biblical figure once joked to one of his disciples: Stop worrying, you\u2019ll always have poor people to parade your compassion over. But life has other purposes too. A mammalian species lasts only about two million years in the fossil record. One thing we know is that a species tied to one planet is guaranteed to fail eventually.\n*** Clarification: The Kaiser Family Foundation notes it asked survey respondents whether they \u201ctested positive\u201d for Covid, a result found on page 21 of its methodology appendix. This is not the same as \u201chad Covid\u201d (fewer than one-third of cases are confirmed by testing). KFF also points to a separate appendix in a separate repor But fans of space exploration know big government will likely always take the lead. ",
        "author": "Holman W. Jenkins, Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Space Tourism? Because It Operates Outside of NASA (WSJ: Business World) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1001",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-tourism-nasa-bezos-musk-branson-11627070311?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=19",
        "text": "Read More Business World\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Rutan was the brains behind Virgin Galactic founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n space plane, a first in two ways. Mr. Rutan\u2019s original model in 2004 received the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s first commercial human spaceflight license. And Mr. Branson used a later model this month to beat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n to an imaginary line marking the beginnings of outer space.\nMr. Branson might be said to proceed in the freebooting tradition of the East India Company. The private sector pursues its own aims and government follows. Mr. Bezos and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n without the least disrespect, are government contractors in waiting. The things many of us dream of\u2014Mars colonization, exploring the oceans of Europa, sending robot probes to nearby star systems\u2014are public-sector work even if big pieces can be split off for private competition.\n\n\nAll hail Mr. Musk for forcing NASA and its pork-barreling congressional masters to recognize the cost-cutting benefits of private, reusable rocketry. He did so with his own money, impelling NASA for now to alter its business model in a way that may or may not stick.\nAll three billionaires\u2014call them Messrs. B, B & M\u2014deserve credit for reawakening public interest in space. The downside of the Musk-Bezos approach is also apparent. The two are locked in a dispute, currently before the Government Accountability Office, over a contract for NASA\u2019s new lunar lander.\nMy tiny asterisk in this history was a 2004 column entitled \u201cThe \u2018Final Frontier\u2019 May Be a Senate Waste Basket,\u201d helping to resurrect a bill requiring the FAA to facilitate private space ventures. A few years later, President Obama arrived as an enthusiast for NASA becoming a consumer of private services rather than doing everything in-house on a cost-plus basis. Then he met\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n a Senate overseer from Florida, who forced down his throat a NASA heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, which a decade later still hasn\u2019t flown and is laughably over budget.\nWhen Mr. Nelson became the Biden administration\u2019s NASA chief in May, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n response from former space officials and space policy experts might have stripped the atmosphere off a small planet. Mr. Nelson\u2019s other claim to fame, many recalled, was mandating himself a useless passenger on a 1986 shuttle flight. In his new job, he\u2019s already started trumpeting a Cold War space race with China, which some see as a prelude to redirecting as much of NASA\u2019s future budget back to its public-sector workforce as he can get away with.\nMr. Bezos said after his flight that suborbital tourism is a sideshow. His \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket is overbuilt for the purpose and really directed toward lifting heavier payloads into orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musks speaks in Washington, March 9, 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n brendan smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDitto Mr. Musk. His Starship spacecraft and its associated Super Heavy Rocket, the current apples of his eye, have the U.S. government as their prime target customer.\nMr. Branson\u2019s aim is altogether different. His spaceship is essentially a two-stage winged aircraft. He looks beyond space tourism for the wealthy to suborbital transportation between cities. He would take passengers to the edge of space not for the purpose of setting them down where they started but halfway around the world.\nCall this a longer bet, with routine supersonic travel preceding the space developments that many of us pine for. Mr. Musk is talking about Mars colonization within his lifetime (he wants to live to see it, after all) but Mr. Branson\u2019s implicit timeline is probably more realistic if less pleasing to those of us watching our biological clocks run down. For one thing, nowhere in sight is NASA\u2019s space-ready nuclear reactor, a likely requirement for the next big advance in space exploration.\nIn one respect, the future is already here. The punditry has converted itself into an algorithm, reflexively lamenting billionaire space jaunts in a way it never laments expenditures on beer nuts or electric-vehicle subsidies, though these monies could also be used to relieve human want.\nA biblical figure once joked to one of his disciples: Stop worrying, you\u2019ll always have poor people to parade your compassion over. But life has other purposes too. A mammalian species lasts only about two million years in the fossil record. One thing we know is that a species tied to one planet is guaranteed to fail eventually.\n*** Clarification: The Kaiser Family Foundation notes it asked survey respondents whether they \u201ctested positive\u201d for Covid, a result found on page 21 of its methodology appendix. This is not the same as \u201chad Covid\u201d (fewer than one-third of cases are confirmed by testing). KFF also points to a separate appendix in a separate repor But fans of space exploration know big government will likely always take the lead. ",
        "author": "Holman W. Jenkins, Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Space Tourism? Because It Operates Outside of NASA (WSJ: Business World) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1002",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-tourism-nasa-bezos-musk-branson-11627070311?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=5",
        "text": "Read More Business World\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Rutan was the brains behind Virgin Galactic founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n space plane, a first in two ways. Mr. Rutan\u2019s original model in 2004 received the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s first commercial human spaceflight license. And Mr. Branson used a later model this month to beat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n to an imaginary line marking the beginnings of outer space.\nMr. Branson might be said to proceed in the freebooting tradition of the East India Company. The private sector pursues its own aims and government follows. Mr. Bezos and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n without the least disrespect, are government contractors in waiting. The things many of us dream of\u2014Mars colonization, exploring the oceans of Europa, sending robot probes to nearby star systems\u2014are public-sector work even if big pieces can be split off for private competition.\n\n\nAll hail Mr. Musk for forcing NASA and its pork-barreling congressional masters to recognize the cost-cutting benefits of private, reusable rocketry. He did so with his own money, impelling NASA for now to alter its business model in a way that may or may not stick.\nAll three billionaires\u2014call them Messrs. B, B & M\u2014deserve credit for reawakening public interest in space. The downside of the Musk-Bezos approach is also apparent. The two are locked in a dispute, currently before the Government Accountability Office, over a contract for NASA\u2019s new lunar lander.\nMy tiny asterisk in this history was a 2004 column entitled \u201cThe \u2018Final Frontier\u2019 May Be a Senate Waste Basket,\u201d helping to resurrect a bill requiring the FAA to facilitate private space ventures. A few years later, President Obama arrived as an enthusiast for NASA becoming a consumer of private services rather than doing everything in-house on a cost-plus basis. Then he met\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n a Senate overseer from Florida, who forced down his throat a NASA heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, which a decade later still hasn\u2019t flown and is laughably over budget.\nWhen Mr. Nelson became the Biden administration\u2019s NASA chief in May, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n response from former space officials and space policy experts might have stripped the atmosphere off a small planet. Mr. Nelson\u2019s other claim to fame, many recalled, was mandating himself a useless passenger on a 1986 shuttle flight. In his new job, he\u2019s already started trumpeting a Cold War space race with China, which some see as a prelude to redirecting as much of NASA\u2019s future budget back to its public-sector workforce as he can get away with.\nMr. Bezos said after his flight that suborbital tourism is a sideshow. His \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket is overbuilt for the purpose and really directed toward lifting heavier payloads into orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musks speaks in Washington, March 9, 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n brendan smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDitto Mr. Musk. His Starship spacecraft and its associated Super Heavy Rocket, the current apples of his eye, have the U.S. government as their prime target customer.\nMr. Branson\u2019s aim is altogether different. His spaceship is essentially a two-stage winged aircraft. He looks beyond space tourism for the wealthy to suborbital transportation between cities. He would take passengers to the edge of space not for the purpose of setting them down where they started but halfway around the world.\nCall this a longer bet, with routine supersonic travel preceding the space developments that many of us pine for. Mr. Musk is talking about Mars colonization within his lifetime (he wants to live to see it, after all) but Mr. Branson\u2019s implicit timeline is probably more realistic if less pleasing to those of us watching our biological clocks run down. For one thing, nowhere in sight is NASA\u2019s space-ready nuclear reactor, a likely requirement for the next big advance in space exploration.\nIn one respect, the future is already here. The punditry has converted itself into an algorithm, reflexively lamenting billionaire space jaunts in a way it never laments expenditures on beer nuts or electric-vehicle subsidies, though these monies could also be used to relieve human want.\nA biblical figure once joked to one of his disciples: Stop worrying, you\u2019ll always have poor people to parade your compassion over. But life has other purposes too. A mammalian species lasts only about two million years in the fossil record. One thing we know is that a species tied to one planet is guaranteed to fail eventually.\n*** Clarification: The Kaiser Family Foundation notes it asked survey respondents whether they \u201ctested positive\u201d for Covid, a result found on page 21 of its methodology appendix. This is not the same as \u201chad Covid\u201d (fewer than one-third of cases are confirmed by testing). KFF also points to a separate appendix in a separate r But fans of space exploration know big government will likely always take the lead. ",
        "author": "Holman W. Jenkins, Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Building Towards Third Commercial Launch, Virgin Orbit Completes Final Launch Rehearsal (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1003",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-towards-third-commercial-launch-virgin-orbit-completes-final-launch-rehearsal-01640265009?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=1",
        "text": "This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211223005252/en/ \n\n Virgin Orbit team completing final technical rehearsal of LauncherOne R5 for January flight (Photo: Business Wire) \n\n\n \"The successful completion of this final major test has us heading into the holiday season with excellent momentum and high confidence for our Above the Clouds launch,\" said Chief Operating Officer Tony Gingiss. \"It's been an incredible year, delivering 19 satellites to orbit and ramping up our factory for 2022 -- our team has earned a joyous and restful holiday with their families.\" \n\n With this critical test successfully completed and the bonus of adding an additional satellite to the payload stack earlier this month, Virgin Orbit is tracking towards a launch in January 2022. The launch window is set to open January 12th, 2022, and the launch itself will be livestreamed to the public. The spacecraft to be launched for this mission include satellites for the US Department of Defense's Space Test Program, Polish company SatRevolution, and Spire Global, Inc. (NYSE: SPIR). Virgin Orbit has safely loaded the spacecraft in the vehicle's payload adapter, and they are slated for delivery to the Mojave Air and Space Port in early January. \n\n ABOUT NEXTGEN ACQUISITION CORP. II \n\n NextGen Acquisition Corp. II is a blank check company whose business purpose is to effect a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. NextGen is led by George Mattson, a former Partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Gregory Summe, former Chairman and CEO of Perkin Elmer and Vice Chairman of the Carlyle Group. NextGen is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol \"NGCA.\" For more information, please visit www.nextgenacq.com. \n\n ABOUT VIRGIN ORBIT \n\n Virgin Orbit operates one of the most flexible and responsive space launch systems ever built. Founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2017, the company began commercial service in 2021, and has already delivered commercial, civil, national security, and international satellites into orbit. Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rockets are designed and manufactured in Long Beach, California, and are air-launched from a modified 747- 400 carrier aircraft that allows Virgin Orbit to operate from locations all over the world in order to best serve each customer's needs. On August 22, 2021, Virgin Orbit entered into a definitive agreement to combine with NextGen Acquisition Corp. II (NASDAQ: NGCA), a special purpose acquisition company, which would result in Virgin Orbit becoming a publicly listed company on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol VORB. To learn more, visit virginorbit.com \n\n IMPORTANT LEGAL INFORMATION \n\n Additional Information and Where to Find It \n\n This press release relates to a proposed transaction between Vieco USA, Inc. (\"Vieco USA\") and NextGen Acquisition Corp. II (\"NextGen\"). This press release is not a proxy statement or solicitation of a proxy, consent or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the potential transaction and shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such state or jurisdiction. In connection with the proposed transaction, NextGen has filed a registration statement on Form S-4 with the SEC on September 16, 2021, as amended on October 29, 2021, November 23, 2021 and December 3, 2021, which was declared effective by the SEC on December 7, 2021, which includes a document that serves as a prospectus and proxy statement of NextGen (the \"proxy statement/prospectus\"). A definitive proxy statement/prospectus was mailed to all NextGen shareholders of record as of November 19, 2021, the record date established for the extraordinary general meeting of shareholders relating to the proposed transaction on December 28, 2021. NextGen also will file other documents regarding the proposed transaction with the SEC. This communication does not contain all the information that should be considered concerning the proposed transaction and is not intended to form the basis of any investment decision or any other decision in respect of the proposed transaction. Before making any voting or investment decision, investors and security holders of NextGen are urged to read the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus included therein and all other relevant documents filed or that will be filed with the SEC in connection with the proposed transaction as they become available because they will contain important information about the proposed transaction. \n\n Investors and security holders may obtain free copies of the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus included t  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Building Towards Third Commercial Launch, Virgin Orbit Completes Final Launch Rehearsal (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1004",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/building-towards-third-commercial-launch-virgin-orbit-completes-final-launch-rehearsal-01640265009?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=3",
        "text": "This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211223005252/en/ \n\n Virgin Orbit team completing final technical rehearsal of LauncherOne R5 for January flight (Photo: Business Wire) \n\n\n \"The successful completion of this final major test has us heading into the holiday season with excellent momentum and high confidence for our Above the Clouds launch,\" said Chief Operating Officer Tony Gingiss. \"It's been an incredible year, delivering 19 satellites to orbit and ramping up our factory for 2022 -- our team has earned a joyous and restful holiday with their families.\" \n\n With this critical test successfully completed and the bonus of adding an additional satellite to the payload stack earlier this month, Virgin Orbit is tracking towards a launch in January 2022. The launch window is set to open January 12th, 2022, and the launch itself will be livestreamed to the public. The spacecraft to be launched for this mission include satellites for the US Department of Defense's Space Test Program, Polish company SatRevolution, and Spire Global, Inc. (NYSE: SPIR). Virgin Orbit has safely loaded the spacecraft in the vehicle's payload adapter, and they are slated for delivery to the Mojave Air and Space Port in early January. \n\n ABOUT NEXTGEN ACQUISITION CORP. II \n\n NextGen Acquisition Corp. II is a blank check company whose business purpose is to effect a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. NextGen is led by George Mattson, a former Partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Gregory Summe, former Chairman and CEO of Perkin Elmer and Vice Chairman of the Carlyle Group. NextGen is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol \"NGCA.\" For more information, please visit www.nextgenacq.com. \n\n ABOUT VIRGIN ORBIT \n\n Virgin Orbit operates one of the most flexible and responsive space launch systems ever built. Founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2017, the company began commercial service in 2021, and has already delivered commercial, civil, national security, and international satellites into orbit. Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rockets are designed and manufactured in Long Beach, California, and are air-launched from a modified 747- 400 carrier aircraft that allows Virgin Orbit to operate from locations all over the world in order to best serve each customer's needs. On August 22, 2021, Virgin Orbit entered into a definitive agreement to combine with NextGen Acquisition Corp. II (NASDAQ: NGCA), a special purpose acquisition company, which would result in Virgin Orbit becoming a publicly listed company on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol VORB. To learn more, visit virginorbit.com \n\n IMPORTANT LEGAL INFORMATION \n\n Additional Information and Where to Find It \n\n This press release relates to a proposed transaction between Vieco USA, Inc. (\"Vieco USA\") and NextGen Acquisition Corp. II (\"NextGen\"). This press release is not a proxy statement or solicitation of a proxy, consent or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the potential transaction and shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such state or jurisdiction. In connection with the proposed transaction, NextGen has filed a registration statement on Form S-4 with the SEC on September 16, 2021, as amended on October 29, 2021, November 23, 2021 and December 3, 2021, which was declared effective by the SEC on December 7, 2021, which includes a document that serves as a prospectus and proxy statement of NextGen (the \"proxy statement/prospectus\"). A definitive proxy statement/prospectus was mailed to all NextGen shareholders of record as of November 19, 2021, the record date established for the extraordinary general meeting of shareholders relating to the proposed transaction on December 28, 2021. NextGen also will file other documents regarding the proposed transaction with the SEC. This communication does not contain all the information that should be considered concerning the proposed transaction and is not intended to form the basis of any investment decision or any other decision in respect of the proposed transaction. Before making any voting or investment decision, investors and security holders of NextGen are urged to read the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus included therein and all other relevant documents filed or that will be filed with the SEC in connection with the proposed transaction as they become available because they will contain important information about the proposed transaction. \n\n Investors and security holders may obtain free copies of the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus included t  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Procure Space ETF (UFO) Conducts Semi-Annual Rebalance (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1005",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-procure-space-etf-ufo-conducts-semi-annual-rebalance-01640012779?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=1",
        "text": "The following companies have been added to the fund's portfolio, effective as of Dec. 20, 2021. \n -- Arqit Quantum (ARQQ): A cybersecurity company, Arqit Quantum plans to \n supply quantum encryption services via satellite to secure networked \n devices (on Earth) against sophisticated cyber threats. \n \n -- Astra Space (ASTR): Astra Space is a launch company that designs, tests, \n manufactures and operates orbital launch vehicles to support satellite \n operators offering a wide variety of space-based applications. \n \n -- BlackSky Technology (BKSY): A leading provider of real-time geospatial \n intelligence, BlackSky Technology monitors activities and facilities by \n leveraging its satellite constellation and a network of other sensors \n from around the world. \n \n -- Momentus (MNTS): Momentus seeks to become a leader for in-space \n transportation, satellite-as-a-service and in-orbit satellite servicing. \n \n -- Mynaric (MYNA): A laser-based communication company, Mynaric enables high \n data rate and long-distance transmission between moving objects for \n terrestrial, airborne and space applications. \n \n -- Redwire (RDW): Redwire owns multiple infrastructure-related entities, \n which focus on manufacturing, 3D printing, servicing and assembly in \n space, as well as space domain awareness. \n \n -- Rocket Lab (RKLB): A launch and satellite manufacturing company, Rocket \n Lab delivers launch services, spacecraft components, satellites and other \n spacecraft and on-orbit management solutions. \n \n -- Spire Global (SPIR): Spire Global is a data and analytics company that \n uses satellite technology to provide advanced maritime, aviation and \n weather tracking. \n All aforementioned companies hit the U.S. public market within the last six months via special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) or the traditional initial public offering (IPO) process. \n\n\n \"The surge in space-related companies going public signifies that investors are ready to take the space economy seriously,\" said Andrew Chanin, Co-Founder and CEO of ProcureAM. \"We're thrilled that as the space economy grows and evolves, we can continue to expand UFO's pure-play exposure to the most cutting-edge technologies across the space sector.\" \n\n UFO's underlying index, the S-Network Space Index, was created by seasoned space industry analyst Micah Walter-Range, former Director of Research and Analysis for the non-profit Space Foundation. The index is carefully maintained using a defined rules-based methodology overseen by an impartial Index Committee and requires at least 80% of components to receive a majority of their revenue from space-related activities. \n\n For more information, please visit www.ProcureETFs.com. \n\n About ProcureAM \n\n ProcureAM, LLC (ProcureAM) is an innovative exchange-traded product (ETP) issuer based in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Established by renowned industry veterans Robert Tull and Andrew Chanin, ProcureAM offers a unique platform for the creation of both proprietary and partnered ETPs. ProcureAM listens to clients and endeavors to provide investors with access to distinct investment opportunities. Whether you are looking to invest in ETPs or create one, contact ProcureAM to explore your performance potential: www.ProcureETFs.com. \n\n Media contact: \n\n Gregory FCA for ProcureAM \n\n Jill Fritz, 484-832-7034 \n\n procuream@gregoryfca.com \n\n For a complete list of holdings in UFO, visit: https://procureetfs.com/ufo/. Fund holdings and sector allocations are subject to change at any time and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. \n\n Please consider the Funds investment objectives, risks, and charges and expenses carefully before you invest. This and other important information is contained in the Fund's summary prospectus and prospectus, which can be obtained by visiting procureetfs.com. Read carefully before you invest. \n\n Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible. The Fund is also subject to the following risks: Shares of any ETF are bought and sold at market price (not NAV), may trade at a discount or premium to NAV and are not individually redeemed from the funds. Brokerage commissions will reduce returns. \n\n Aerospace and defense companies can be significantly affected by government aerospace and defense regulation and spending policies. The exploration of space by private industry and the harvesting of space assets is a business based in future and is witnessing new entrants into the market. Investments in the Fund will be riskier than traditional investments in established industry sectors. The Fund is considered to be concentrated in securities of companies that operate or utilize satellites which are subject to manufacturing delays, launch delays or failures, and operational and environmental risks that could limit their ability to utilize the satellites needed to deliver services to  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Procure Space ETF (UFO) Conducts Semi-Annual Rebalance (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1006",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-procure-space-etf-ufo-conducts-semi-annual-rebalance-01640012779?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=2",
        "text": "The following companies have been added to the fund's portfolio, effective as of Dec. 20, 2021. \n -- Arqit Quantum (ARQQ): A cybersecurity company, Arqit Quantum plans to \n supply quantum encryption services via satellite to secure networked \n devices (on Earth) against sophisticated cyber threats. \n \n -- Astra Space (ASTR): Astra Space is a launch company that designs, tests, \n manufactures and operates orbital launch vehicles to support satellite \n operators offering a wide variety of space-based applications. \n \n -- BlackSky Technology (BKSY): A leading provider of real-time geospatial \n intelligence, BlackSky Technology monitors activities and facilities by \n leveraging its satellite constellation and a network of other sensors \n from around the world. \n \n -- Momentus (MNTS): Momentus seeks to become a leader for in-space \n transportation, satellite-as-a-service and in-orbit satellite servicing. \n \n -- Mynaric (MYNA): A laser-based communication company, Mynaric enables high \n data rate and long-distance transmission between moving objects for \n terrestrial, airborne and space applications. \n \n -- Redwire (RDW): Redwire owns multiple infrastructure-related entities, \n which focus on manufacturing, 3D printing, servicing and assembly in \n space, as well as space domain awareness. \n \n -- Rocket Lab (RKLB): A launch and satellite manufacturing company, Rocket \n Lab delivers launch services, spacecraft components, satellites and other \n spacecraft and on-orbit management solutions. \n \n -- Spire Global (SPIR): Spire Global is a data and analytics company that \n uses satellite technology to provide advanced maritime, aviation and \n weather tracking. \n\n\n\n\n All aforementioned companies hit the U.S. public market within the last six months via special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) or the traditional initial public offering (IPO) process. \n\n\n \"The surge in space-related companies going public signifies that investors are ready to take the space economy seriously,\" said Andrew Chanin, Co-Founder and CEO of ProcureAM. \"We're thrilled that as the space economy grows and evolves, we can continue to expand UFO's pure-play exposure to the most cutting-edge technologies across the space sector.\" \n\n UFO's underlying index, the S-Network Space Index, was created by seasoned space industry analyst Micah Walter-Range, former Director of Research and Analysis for the non-profit Space Foundation. The index is carefully maintained using a defined rules-based methodology overseen by an impartial Index Committee and requires at least 80% of components to receive a majority of their revenue from space-related activities. \n\n For more information, please visit www.ProcureETFs.com. \n\n About ProcureAM \n\n ProcureAM, LLC (ProcureAM) is an innovative exchange-traded product (ETP) issuer based in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Established by renowned industry veterans Robert Tull and Andrew Chanin, ProcureAM offers a unique platform for the creation of both proprietary and partnered ETPs. ProcureAM listens to clients and endeavors to provide investors with access to distinct investment opportunities. Whether you are looking to invest in ETPs or create one, contact ProcureAM to explore your performance potential: www.ProcureETFs.com. \n\n Media contact: \n\n Gregory FCA for ProcureAM \n\n Jill Fritz, 484-832-7034 \n\n procuream@gregoryfca.com \n\n For a complete list of holdings in UFO, visit: https://procureetfs.com/ufo/. Fund holdings and sector allocations are subject to change at any time and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. \n\n Please consider the Funds investment objectives, risks, and charges and expenses carefully before you invest. This and other important information is contained in the Fund's summary prospectus and prospectus, which can be obtained by visiting procureetfs.com. Read carefully before you invest. \n\n Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible. The Fund is also subject to the following risks: Shares of any ETF are bought and sold at market price (not NAV), may trade at a discount or premium to NAV and are not individually redeemed from the funds. Brokerage commissions will reduce returns. \n\n Aerospace and defense companies can be significantly affected by government aerospace and defense regulation and spending policies. The exploration of space by private industry and the harvesting of space assets is a business based in future and is witnessing new entrants into the market. Investments in the Fund will be riskier than traditional investments in established industry sectors. The Fund is considered to be concentrated in securities of companies that operate or utilize satellites which are subject to manufacturing delays, launch delays or failures, and operational and environmental risks that could limit their ability to utilize the satellites needed to deliver service  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Procure Space ETF (UFO) Conducts Semi-Annual Rebalance (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1007",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-procure-space-etf-ufo-conducts-semi-annual-rebalance-01640012779?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=5",
        "text": "The following companies have been added to the fund's portfolio, effective as of Dec. 20, 2021. \n -- Arqit Quantum (ARQQ): A cybersecurity company, Arqit Quantum plans to \n supply quantum encryption services via satellite to secure networked \n devices (on Earth) against sophisticated cyber threats. \n \n -- Astra Space (ASTR): Astra Space is a launch company that designs, tests, \n manufactures and operates orbital launch vehicles to support satellite \n operators offering a wide variety of space-based applications. \n \n -- BlackSky Technology (BKSY): A leading provider of real-time geospatial \n intelligence, BlackSky Technology monitors activities and facilities by \n leveraging its satellite constellation and a network of other sensors \n from around the world. \n \n -- Momentus (MNTS): Momentus seeks to become a leader for in-space \n transportation, satellite-as-a-service and in-orbit satellite servicing. \n \n -- Mynaric (MYNA): A laser-based communication company, Mynaric enables high \n data rate and long-distance transmission between moving objects for \n terrestrial, airborne and space applications. \n \n -- Redwire (RDW): Redwire owns multiple infrastructure-related entities, \n which focus on manufacturing, 3D printing, servicing and assembly in \n space, as well as space domain awareness. \n \n -- Rocket Lab (RKLB): A launch and satellite manufacturing company, Rocket \n Lab delivers launch services, spacecraft components, satellites and other \n spacecraft and on-orbit management solutions. \n \n -- Spire Global (SPIR): Spire Global is a data and analytics company that \n uses satellite technology to provide advanced maritime, aviation and \n weather tracking. \n\n\n\n\n All aforementioned companies hit the U.S. public market within the last six months via special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) or the traditional initial public offering (IPO) process. \n\n\n \"The surge in space-related companies going public signifies that investors are ready to take the space economy seriously,\" said Andrew Chanin, Co-Founder and CEO of ProcureAM. \"We're thrilled that as the space economy grows and evolves, we can continue to expand UFO's pure-play exposure to the most cutting-edge technologies across the space sector.\" \n\n UFO's underlying index, the S-Network Space Index, was created by seasoned space industry analyst Micah Walter-Range, former Director of Research and Analysis for the non-profit Space Foundation. The index is carefully maintained using a defined rules-based methodology overseen by an impartial Index Committee and requires at least 80% of components to receive a majority of their revenue from space-related activities. \n\n For more information, please visit www.ProcureETFs.com. \n\n About ProcureAM \n\n ProcureAM, LLC (ProcureAM) is an innovative exchange-traded product (ETP) issuer based in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Established by renowned industry veterans Robert Tull and Andrew Chanin, ProcureAM offers a unique platform for the creation of both proprietary and partnered ETPs. ProcureAM listens to clients and endeavors to provide investors with access to distinct investment opportunities. Whether you are looking to invest in ETPs or create one, contact ProcureAM to explore your performance potential: www.ProcureETFs.com. \n\n Media contact: \n\n Gregory FCA for ProcureAM \n\n Jill Fritz, 484-832-7034 \n\n procuream@gregoryfca.com \n\n For a complete list of holdings in UFO, visit: https://procureetfs.com/ufo/. Fund holdings and sector allocations are subject to change at any time and should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. \n\n Please consider the Funds investment objectives, risks, and charges and expenses carefully before you invest. This and other important information is contained in the Fund's summary prospectus and prospectus, which can be obtained by visiting procureetfs.com. Read carefully before you invest. \n\n Investing involves risk. Principal loss is possible. The Fund is also subject to the following risks: Shares of any ETF are bought and sold at market price (not NAV), may trade at a discount or premium to NAV and are not individually redeemed from the funds. Brokerage commissions will reduce returns. \n\n Aerospace and defense companies can be significantly affected by government aerospace and defense regulation and spending policies. The exploration of space by private industry and the harvesting of space assets is a business based in future and is witnessing new entrants into the market. Investments in the Fund will be riskier than traditional investments in established industry sectors. The Fund is considered to be concentrated in securities of companies that operate or utilize satellites which are subject to manufacturing delays, launch delays or failures, and operational and environmental risks that could limit their ability to utilize the satellites needed to deliver services to customers. Investing in foreign securities are volatile, harder to price, and less liquid than U.S. securities. Securities of small- and mid-capitalization companies may experience much more price volatility, greater spreads between their bid and ask prices and significantly lower trading volumes than securities issued by large, more established companies. The Fund is not actively managed so it would not take defensive positions in declining markets unless such positions are reflected in the underlying index. Please refer to the summary prospectus for a more detailed explanation of the Funds' principal risks. It is not possible to invest in an index. \n\n The S-Network Space Index focuses on companies that are significantly engaged in space-related activities. Index constituents span multiple industries, including satellite-based consumer products and services, rocket and satellite manufacturing, space technology hardware, and space-based imagery and intelligence services. Approximately 80 percent of companies in the index derive the majority of revenues directly from their involvement in the space industry. \n\n UFO is distributed by Quasar Distributors LLC. \n\n SOURCE: ProcureAM \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/678644/The-Procure-Space-ETF-UFO-Conducts-Semi-Annual-Rebalance  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab to Acquire SolAero Holdings, Inc., a Global Leader in Space Solar Power Products (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1008",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-to-acquire-solaero-holdings-inc-a-global-leader-in-space-solar-power-products-01639429812?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=2",
        "text": "The acquisition aligns with Rocket Lab's growth strategy of vertical integration to deliver a comprehensive space solution that spans spacecraft manufacture, satellite subsystems, flight software, ground operations, and launch. As one of only two companies producing high-efficiency, space-grade solar cells in the United States, SolAero's space solar cells are among the highest performing in the world, and support civil space exploration, science, defense and intelligence, and commercial markets. In combining with Rocket Lab, SolAero will tap into the Company's resources and manufacturing capability to boost high-volume production, making high-performing space power technologies available at scale. \n\n \"SolAero is a highly complementary addition to Rocket Lab's vertically integrated business model and strengthens our ability to streamline space for our customers by delivering complete space mission solutions,\" said Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck. \"SolAero has established itself as a premier provider of solar technologies, enabling trailblazing missions that have expanded scientific horizons and advanced commercial space. By combining our innovative teams, industry-leading technologies, and strong resources, we can advance space exploration and enable our customers to push the boundaries of what's possible in orbit. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome the SolAero team to the Rocket Lab family.\" \n\n\n \"We are very excited to join the outstanding team at Rocket Lab and contribute to their track record of innovation and on-orbit success,\" said SolAero President and CEO, Brad Clevenger. \"As Rocket Lab builds on its capability to provide complete mission solutions, SolAero is a natural fit for Rocket Lab. We look forward to becoming an integral part of Rocket Lab's Space Systems business while continuing to offer all of our customers premier capability and value.\" \n\n Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, SolAero's solar cells, solar panels, and composite structural products have supported more than 1,000 successful space missions with 100% reliability and mission success to date. Over the past two decades, SolAero's products have played key roles in some of the industry's most ambitious space missions, including supplying power to NASA's Parker Solar Probe and Mars Insight Lander, the largest solar array ever deployed on the surface of Mars, and several Cygnus Cargo Resupply Missions to the International Space Station. SolAero also led the development and manufacturing of the solar panel on Ingenuity, the helicopter that successfully flew on Mars in April this year, marking the first ever powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth. \n\n SolAero technology has also made commercial constellations possible, providing power to OneWeb's broadband constellation. Most recently, SolAero has been selected to supply Solar Power Modules for the Power and Propulsion Element of NASA's Gateway as part of NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans, which will enable future missions to Mars. \n\n The addition of SolAero's 425-strong team brings Rocket Lab's total headcount to more than 1,100 employees across its space manufacturing complexes, test facilities, and launch sites in California, Virginia, Colorado, Maryland, Toronto, New Zealand and now Albuquerque, New Mexico. The SolAero team will continue to be led by President and CEO Brad Clevenger at SolAero's 154,696 ft(2) (14,372 m(2)) production facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico. \n\n The SolAero merger is Rocket Lab's third proposed acquisition announced this year, following the acquisition of space software company ASI Aerospace LLC in October 2021, and spacecraft separation systems company Planetary Systems Corporation, which was completed in December 2021. \n\n Rocket Lab will host a conference call for investors at 2:00 p.m. PST (5:00 p.m. EST) today to discuss the agreement. The live webcast and a replay of the webcast will be available on Rocket Lab's Investor Relations website: https://investors.rocketlabusa.com/events-and-presentations/events \n\n About Rocket Lab \n\n Founded in 2006, Rocket Lab is an end-to-end space company with an established track record of mission success. We deliver reliable launch services, spacecraft components, satellites and other spacecraft and on-orbit management solutions that make it faster, easier and more affordable to access space. Headquartered in Long Beach, California, Rocket Lab designs and manufactures the Electron small orbital launch vehicle and the Photon satellite platform and is developing the Neutron 8-ton payload class launch vehicle. Since its first orbital launch in January 2018, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has become the second most frequently launched U.S. rocket annually and has delivered 109 satellites to orbit for private and public sector organizations, enabling operations in national security, scientific research, space debris mitigation, Earth observation, clima  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab to Acquire SolAero Holdings, Inc., a Global Leader in Space Solar Power Products (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1009",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-to-acquire-solaero-holdings-inc-a-global-leader-in-space-solar-power-products-01639429812?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=7",
        "text": "The acquisition aligns with Rocket Lab's growth strategy of vertical integration to deliver a comprehensive space solution that spans spacecraft manufacture, satellite subsystems, flight software, ground operations, and launch. As one of only two companies producing high-efficiency, space-grade solar cells in the United States, SolAero's space solar cells are among the highest performing in the world, and support civil space exploration, science, defense and intelligence, and commercial markets. In combining with Rocket Lab, SolAero will tap into the Company's resources and manufacturing capability to boost high-volume production, making high-performing space power technologies available at scale. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"SolAero is a highly complementary addition to Rocket Lab's vertically integrated business model and strengthens our ability to streamline space for our customers by delivering complete space mission solutions,\" said Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck. \"SolAero has established itself as a premier provider of solar technologies, enabling trailblazing missions that have expanded scientific horizons and advanced commercial space. By combining our innovative teams, industry-leading technologies, and strong resources, we can advance space exploration and enable our customers to push the boundaries of what's possible in orbit. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome the SolAero team to the Rocket Lab family.\" \n\n\n \"We are very excited to join the outstanding team at Rocket Lab and contribute to their track record of innovation and on-orbit success,\" said SolAero President and CEO, Brad Clevenger. \"As Rocket Lab builds on its capability to provide complete mission solutions, SolAero is a natural fit for Rocket Lab. We look forward to becoming an integral part of Rocket Lab's Space Systems business while continuing to offer all of our customers premier capability and value.\" \n\n Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, SolAero's solar cells, solar panels, and composite structural products have supported more than 1,000 successful space missions with 100% reliability and mission success to date. Over the past two decades, SolAero's products have played key roles in some of the industry's most ambitious space missions, including supplying power to NASA's Parker Solar Probe and Mars Insight Lander, the largest solar array ever deployed on the surface of Mars, and several Cygnus Cargo Resupply Missions to the International Space Station. SolAero also led the development and manufacturing of the solar panel on Ingenuity, the helicopter that successfully flew on Mars in April this year, marking the first ever powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth. \n\n SolAero technology has also made commercial constellations possible, providing power to OneWeb's broadband constellation. Most recently, SolAero has been selected to supply Solar Power Modules for the Power and Propulsion Element of NASA's Gateway as part of NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans, which will enable future missions to Mars. \n\n The addition of SolAero's 425-strong team brings Rocket Lab's total headcount to more than 1,100 employees across its space manufacturing complexes, test facilities, and launch sites in California, Virginia, Colorado, Maryland, Toronto, New Zealand and now Albuquerque, New Mexico. The SolAero team will continue to be led by President and CEO Brad Clevenger at SolAero's 154,696 ft(2) (14,372 m(2)) production facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico. \n\n The SolAero merger is Rocket Lab's third proposed acquisition announced this year, following the acquisition of space software company ASI Aerospace LLC in October 2021, and spacecraft separation systems company Planetary Systems Corporation, which was completed in December 2021. \n\n Rocket Lab will host a conference call for investors at 2:00 p.m. PST (5:00 p.m. EST) today to discuss the agreement. The live webcast and a replay of the webcast will be available on Rocket Lab's Investor Relations website: https://investors.rocketlabusa.com/events-and-presentations/events \n\n About Rocket Lab \n\n Founded in 2006, Rocket Lab is an end-to-end space company with an established track record of mission success. We deliver reliable launch services, spacecraft components, satellites and other spacecraft and on-orbit management solutions that make it faster, easier and more affordable to access space. Headquartered in Long Beach, California, Rocket Lab designs and manufactures the Electron small orbital launch vehicle and the Photon satellite platform and is developing the Neutron 8-ton payload class launch vehicle. Since its first orbital launch in January 2018, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has become the second most frequently launched U.S. rocket annually and has delivered 109 satellites to orbit for private and public sector organizations, enabling operations in national security, scientific research, space debris mitigation, Earth observation, climate monitoring, and communications. Rocket Lab's Photon spacecraft platform has been selected to support NASA missions to the Moon and Mars, as well as the first private commercial mission to Venus. Rocket Lab has three launch pads at two launch sites, including two launch pads at a private orbital launch site located in New Zealand, one of which is currently operational, and a second launch site in Virginia, USA which is expected to become operational in early 2022. To learn more, visit www.rocketlabusa.com. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release may contain certain \"forward-looking statements\" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These forward-looking statements, including without limitation expectations regarding the timing, completion, and benefit of the SolAero acquisition, are based on Rocket Lab's current expectations and beliefs concerning future developments and their potential effects. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties (many of which are beyond Rocket Lab's control), or other assumptions that may cause actual results or performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, including risks related to the global COVID-19 pandemic, including risks that the SolAero acquisition may not be consummated on the timetable that we expect or at all, that its financial and operating performance may not meet our expectations, or that we may not realize the benefits of the proposed acquisition or be able to successfully integrate into our business without substantial additional costs or in a manner that negatively impacts our business or operating results; risks related to government restrictions and lock-downs in New Zealand and other countries in which we operate that could delay or suspend our operations; delays and disruptions in expansion efforts; our dependence on a limited number of customers; the harsh and unpredictable environment of space in which our products operate which could adversely affect our launch vehicle and spacecraft; increased congestion from the proliferation of low Earth orbit constellations which could materially increase the risk of potential collision with space debris or another spacecraft and limit or impair our launch flexibility and/or access to our own orbital slots; increased competition in our industry due in part to rapid technological development and decreasing costs; technological change in our industry which we may not be able to keep up with or which may render our services uncompetitive; average selling price trends; failure of our launch vehicles, satellites and components to operate as intended either due to our error in design in production or through no fault of our own; launch schedule disruptions; supply chain disruptions, product delays or failures; design and engineering flaws; launch failures; natural disasters and epidemics or pandemics; changes in governmental regulations including with respect to trade and export restrictions, or in the status of our regulatory approvals or applications; or other events that force us to cancel or reschedule launches, including customer contractual rescheduling and termination rights; risks that acquisitions may not be completed on the anticipated timeframe or at all or do not achieve the anticipated benefits and results; and the other risks detailed from time to time in Rocket Lab's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the \"SEC\"), including under the heading \"Risk Factors\" in the prospectus dated October 7, 2021 related to our Registration Statement on Form S-1 (File No. 333-259757), which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission pursuant to Rule 424(b) on October 7, 2021 and elsewhere (including that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic may also exacerbate the risks discussed therein). There can be no assurance that the future developments affecting Rocket Lab will be those that we have anticipated. Except as required by law, Rocket Lab is not undertaking any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211213005915/en/ \n \n CONTACT: + Rocket Lab Media Contact \n Morgan Bailey \n\n media@rocketlabusa.com \n \n SOURCE: Rocket Lab USA, Inc. \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab to Acquire SolAero Holdings, Inc., a Global Leader in Space Solar Power Products (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1010",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-to-acquire-solaero-holdings-inc-a-global-leader-in-space-solar-power-products-01639429812?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=12",
        "text": "The acquisition aligns with Rocket Lab's growth strategy of vertical integration to deliver a comprehensive space solution that spans spacecraft manufacture, satellite subsystems, flight software, ground operations, and launch. As one of only two companies producing high-efficiency, space-grade solar cells in the United States, SolAero's space solar cells are among the highest performing in the world, and support civil space exploration, science, defense and intelligence, and commercial markets. In combining with Rocket Lab, SolAero will tap into the Company's resources and manufacturing capability to boost high-volume production, making high-performing space power technologies available at scale. \n\n \"SolAero is a highly complementary addition to Rocket Lab's vertically integrated business model and strengthens our ability to streamline space for our customers by delivering complete space mission solutions,\" said Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck. \"SolAero has established itself as a premier provider of solar technologies, enabling trailblazing missions that have expanded scientific horizons and advanced commercial space. By combining our innovative teams, industry-leading technologies, and strong resources, we can advance space exploration and enable our customers to push the boundaries of what's possible in orbit. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome the SolAero team to the Rocket Lab family.\" \n\n\n \"We are very excited to join the outstanding team at Rocket Lab and contribute to their track record of innovation and on-orbit success,\" said SolAero President and CEO, Brad Clevenger. \"As Rocket Lab builds on its capability to provide complete mission solutions, SolAero is a natural fit for Rocket Lab. We look forward to becoming an integral part of Rocket Lab's Space Systems business while continuing to offer all of our customers premier capability and value.\" \n\n Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, SolAero's solar cells, solar panels, and composite structural products have supported more than 1,000 successful space missions with 100% reliability and mission success to date. Over the past two decades, SolAero's products have played key roles in some of the industry's most ambitious space missions, including supplying power to NASA's Parker Solar Probe and Mars Insight Lander, the largest solar array ever deployed on the surface of Mars, and several Cygnus Cargo Resupply Missions to the International Space Station. SolAero also led the development and manufacturing of the solar panel on Ingenuity, the helicopter that successfully flew on Mars in April this year, marking the first ever powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth. \n\n SolAero technology has also made commercial constellations possible, providing power to OneWeb's broadband constellation. Most recently, SolAero has been selected to supply Solar Power Modules for the Power and Propulsion Element of NASA's Gateway as part of NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans, which will enable future missions to Mars. \n\n The addition of SolAero's 425-strong team brings Rocket Lab's total headcount to more than 1,100 employees across its space manufacturing complexes, test facilities, and launch sites in California, Virginia, Colorado, Maryland, Toronto, New Zealand and now Albuquerque, New Mexico. The SolAero team will continue to be led by President and CEO Brad Clevenger at SolAero's 154,696 ft(2) (14,372 m(2)) production facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico. \n\n The SolAero merger is Rocket Lab's third proposed acquisition announced this year, following the acquisition of space software company ASI Aerospace LLC in October 2021, and spacecraft separation systems company Planetary Systems Corporation, which was completed in December 2021. \n\n Rocket Lab will host a conference call for investors at 2:00 p.m. PST (5:00 p.m. EST) today to discuss the agreement. The live webcast and a replay of the webcast will be available on Rocket Lab's Investor Relations website: https://investors.rocketlabusa.com/events-and-presentations/events \n\n About Rocket Lab \n\n Founded in 2006, Rocket Lab is an end-to-end space company with an established track record of mission success. We deliver reliable launch services, spacecraft components, satellites and other spacecraft and on-orbit management solutions that make it faster, easier and more affordable to access space. Headquartered in Long Beach, California, Rocket Lab designs and manufactures the Electron small orbital launch vehicle and the Photon satellite platform and is developing the Neutron 8-ton payload class launch vehicle. Since its first orbital launch in January 2018, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has become the second most frequently launched U.S. rocket annually and has delivered 109 satellites to orbit for private and public sector organizations, enabling operations in national security, scientific research, space debris mitigation, Earth observation, clima  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab to Acquire SolAero Holdings, Inc., a Global Leader in Space Solar Power Products (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1011",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-to-acquire-solaero-holdings-inc-a-global-leader-in-space-solar-power-products-01639429812?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=10",
        "text": "The acquisition aligns with Rocket Lab's growth strategy of vertical integration to deliver a comprehensive space solution that spans spacecraft manufacture, satellite subsystems, flight software, ground operations, and launch. As one of only two companies producing high-efficiency, space-grade solar cells in the United States, SolAero's space solar cells are among the highest performing in the world, and support civil space exploration, science, defense and intelligence, and commercial markets. In combining with Rocket Lab, SolAero will tap into the Company's resources and manufacturing capability to boost high-volume production, making high-performing space power technologies available at scale. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"SolAero is a highly complementary addition to Rocket Lab's vertically integrated business model and strengthens our ability to streamline space for our customers by delivering complete space mission solutions,\" said Rocket Lab founder and CEO, Peter Beck. \"SolAero has established itself as a premier provider of solar technologies, enabling trailblazing missions that have expanded scientific horizons and advanced commercial space. By combining our innovative teams, industry-leading technologies, and strong resources, we can advance space exploration and enable our customers to push the boundaries of what's possible in orbit. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome the SolAero team to the Rocket Lab family.\" \n\n\n \"We are very excited to join the outstanding team at Rocket Lab and contribute to their track record of innovation and on-orbit success,\" said SolAero President and CEO, Brad Clevenger. \"As Rocket Lab builds on its capability to provide complete mission solutions, SolAero is a natural fit for Rocket Lab. We look forward to becoming an integral part of Rocket Lab's Space Systems business while continuing to offer all of our customers premier capability and value.\" \n\n Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, SolAero's solar cells, solar panels, and composite structural products have supported more than 1,000 successful space missions with 100% reliability and mission success to date. Over the past two decades, SolAero's products have played key roles in some of the industry's most ambitious space missions, including supplying power to NASA's Parker Solar Probe and Mars Insight Lander, the largest solar array ever deployed on the surface of Mars, and several Cygnus Cargo Resupply Missions to the International Space Station. SolAero also led the development and manufacturing of the solar panel on Ingenuity, the helicopter that successfully flew on Mars in April this year, marking the first ever powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth. \n\n SolAero technology has also made commercial constellations possible, providing power to OneWeb's broadband constellation. Most recently, SolAero has been selected to supply Solar Power Modules for the Power and Propulsion Element of NASA's Gateway as part of NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans, which will enable future missions to Mars. \n\n The addition of SolAero's 425-strong team brings Rocket Lab's total headcount to more than 1,100 employees across its space manufacturing complexes, test facilities, and launch sites in California, Virginia, Colorado, Maryland, Toronto, New Zealand and now Albuquerque, New Mexico. The SolAero team will continue to be led by President and CEO Brad Clevenger at SolAero's 154,696 ft(2) (14,372 m(2)) production facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico. \n\n The SolAero merger is Rocket Lab's third proposed acquisition announced this year, following the acquisition of space software company ASI Aerospace LLC in October 2021, and spacecraft separation systems company Planetary Systems Corporation, which was completed in December 2021. \n\n Rocket Lab will host a conference call for investors at 2:00 p.m. PST (5:00 p.m. EST) today to discuss the agreement. The live webcast and a replay of the webcast will be available on Rocket Lab's Investor Relations website: https://investors.rocketlabusa.com/events-and-presentations/events \n\n About Rocket Lab \n\n Founded in 2006, Rocket Lab is an end-to-end space company with an established track record of mission success. We deliver reliable launch services, spacecraft components, satellites and other spacecraft and on-orbit management solutions that make it faster, easier and more affordable to access space. Headquartered in Long Beach, California, Rocket Lab designs and manufactures the Electron small orbital launch vehicle and the Photon satellite platform and is developing the Neutron 8-ton payload class launch vehicle. Since its first orbital launch in January 2018, Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has become the second most frequently launched U.S. rocket annually and has delivered 109 satellites to orbit for private and public sector organizations, enabling operations in national security, scientific research, space debris mitigation, Earth observation, c  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sidus Space and KSAT Join Forces to Enable End-to-End Mission Operations Solutions to Support LizzieSat(TM) Constellation of 100 Satellites (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1012",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sidus-space-and-ksat-join-forces-to-enable-end-to-end-mission-operations-solutions-to-support-lizziesat-tm-constellation-of-100-satellites-01640095643?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=1",
        "text": "Sidus Space delivers a complete solution for customers, including satellite design and build, integration of technologies, launch vehicle rideshares, and ground segment support leveraging an existing global network of ground stations. Unlike constellations planned or launched by companies such as OneWeb, SpaceX (Starlink) and Amazon (Project Kuiper), designed to provide broadband connectivity, the LizzieSat(TM) constellation will enable rapid delivery of high impact data for commercial and government customers. \n\n KSAT's KSATlite ground network is designed and optimized for small satellite systems, providing streamlined access, through standardized API-driven interfaces, and scalable support that grows to meet mission needs.Through close collaboration, Sidus and KSAT now provides critical launch to operations ground segment support for LizzieSat(TM) customers. KSATlite has become the dominant SmallSat Ground Network solution, currently supporting more than 35 000 passes per month, including support for all leading SmallSat operators. \n\n \"We are incredibly pleased to announce our partnership with KSAT to support the LizzieSat(TM) constellation. Thanks to our integration with KSAT, a well-established and reliable ground station services provider, high-speed data transmission will dramatically reduce the delivery time of geolocation data to our customers by a factor of three. The services of KSATlite will significantly enhance collection and intelligent analysis by returning richer, more precise data down-to-Earth in much less time,\" said Carol Craig, CEO of Sidus Space. \n\n\n \"We are very happy about this agreement with Sidus Space, a company from the booming commercial aerospace community in Florida, and we look forward to supporting their LizzieSat(TM) constellation. With their future fleet of 100 smallsats they will be able to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility that the KSATlite network provides to meet the demands in an increasingly interconnected, cloud-based, and data-driven world,\" said Marte Indregard, CCO of KSAT. \n\n About Sidus Space \n\n Sidus Space (NASDAQ:SIDU) located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, operates from a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility. Sidus Space focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection, with a mission of Bringing Space Down to Earth(TM) and a vision of enabling space flight heritage status for new technologies while delivering data and predictive analytics to domestic and global customers. Sidus Space makes it easy for any corporation, industry, or vertical to start their journey off-planet with our rapidly scalable, low-cost satellite services, space-based solutions, and testing alternatives. More than just a \"Satellite-as-a-Service\" provider, we become your trusted Mission Partner from concept to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. \n\n Sidus is ISO 9001:2015, AS9100 Rev. D certified, and ITAR registered. \n\n About KSAT \n\n KSAT, Kongsberg Satellite Services, is the market leader in providing ground communication services for spacecraft and launch vehicles to the commercial and institutional space sector. Supporting more than of 70,000 satellite ground communication links a month, their extensive network of more than 200 antennas across the globe is constantly expanding. KSAT has developed and deployed a modern software-defined ground station architecture and is positioned to support any mission in LEO, MEO, GEO and HEO, as well as Lunar missions. \n\n For investor and media inquiries, please contact: \n\n James Carbonara \n\n Hayden IR \n\n (646)-755-7412 \n\n james@haydenir.com \n\n SOURCE: Sidus Space \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/678719/Sidus-Space-and-KSAT-Join-Forces-to-Enable-End-to-End-Mission-Operations-Solutions-to-Support-LizzieSatTM-Constellation-of-100-Satellites  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sidus Space and KSAT Join Forces to Enable End-to-End Mission Operations Solutions to Support LizzieSat(TM) Constellation of 100 Satellites (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1013",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sidus-space-and-ksat-join-forces-to-enable-end-to-end-mission-operations-solutions-to-support-lizziesat-tm-constellation-of-100-satellites-01640095643?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=4",
        "text": "Sidus Space delivers a complete solution for customers, including satellite design and build, integration of technologies, launch vehicle rideshares, and ground segment support leveraging an existing global network of ground stations. Unlike constellations planned or launched by companies such as OneWeb, SpaceX (Starlink) and Amazon (Project Kuiper), designed to provide broadband connectivity, the LizzieSat(TM) constellation will enable rapid delivery of high impact data for commercial and government customers. \n\n KSAT's KSATlite ground network is designed and optimized for small satellite systems, providing streamlined access, through standardized API-driven interfaces, and scalable support that grows to meet mission needs.Through close collaboration, Sidus and KSAT now provides critical launch to operations ground segment support for LizzieSat(TM) customers. KSATlite has become the dominant SmallSat Ground Network solution, currently supporting more than 35 000 passes per month, including support for all leading SmallSat operators. \n\n \"We are incredibly pleased to announce our partnership with KSAT to support the LizzieSat(TM) constellation. Thanks to our integration with KSAT, a well-established and reliable ground station services provider, high-speed data transmission will dramatically reduce the delivery time of geolocation data to our customers by a factor of three. The services of KSATlite will significantly enhance collection and intelligent analysis by returning richer, more precise data down-to-Earth in much less time,\" said Carol Craig, CEO of Sidus Space. \n\n\n \"We are very happy about this agreement with Sidus Space, a company from the booming commercial aerospace community in Florida, and we look forward to supporting their LizzieSat(TM) constellation. With their future fleet of 100 smallsats they will be able to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility that the KSATlite network provides to meet the demands in an increasingly interconnected, cloud-based, and data-driven world,\" said Marte Indregard, CCO of KSAT. \n\n About Sidus Space \n\n Sidus Space (NASDAQ:SIDU) located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, operates from a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility. Sidus Space focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection, with a mission of Bringing Space Down to Earth(TM) and a vision of enabling space flight heritage status for new technologies while delivering data and predictive analytics to domestic and global customers. Sidus Space makes it easy for any corporation, industry, or vertical to start their journey off-planet with our rapidly scalable, low-cost satellite services, space-based solutions, and testing alternatives. More than just a \"Satellite-as-a-Service\" provider, we become your trusted Mission Partner from concept to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. \n\n Sidus is ISO 9001:2015, AS9100 Rev. D certified, and ITAR registered. \n\n About KSAT \n\n KSAT, Kongsberg Satellite Services, is the market leader in providing ground communication services for spacecraft and launch vehicles to the commercial and institutional space sector. Supporting more than of 70,000 satellite ground communication links a month, their extensive network of more than 200 antennas across the globe is constantly expanding. KSAT has developed and deployed a modern software-defined ground station architecture and is positioned to support any mission in LEO, MEO, GEO and HEO, as well as Lunar missions. \n\n For investor and media inquiries, please contact: \n\n James Carbonara \n\n Hayden IR \n\n (646)-755-7412 \n\n james@haydenir.com \n\n SOURCE: Sidus Space \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/678719/Sidus-Space-and-KSAT-Join-Forces-to-Enable-End-to-End-Mission-Operations-Solutions-to-Support-LizzieSatTM-Constellation-of-100-Satellites  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sidus Space Announces Enhancements to its Facilities Including a New State of the Art Cleanroom For Production, Testing and Integration of the LizzieSat(TM) Constellation (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1014",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sidus-space-announces-enhancements-to-its-facilities-including-a-new-state-of-the-art-cleanroom-for-production-testing-and-integration-of-the-lizziesat-tm-constellation-01640268375?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=1",
        "text": "LizzieSats (LS) are 3D manufactured Low Earth Orbit (LEO) microsatellites focused on rapid, cost-effective development and testing of upcoming innovative spacecraft technologies for multiple customers. LS is a 100kg (220-pound) satellite with space to efficiently integrate customer sensors and technologies. \n\n In addition to preparing for production on LizzieSat(TM), Sidus Space is ramping up for work on recently awarded contracts which includes a multi-million dollar agreement supporting one of America's largest private companies. Other facility enhancements include improved network connectivity with Fiber optic internet, an industrial grade epoxy shop floor, new LED light fixtures throughout the facility, additional workstations and office spaces for the growing employee team and a state-of-the-art cleanroom. Sidus anticipates that the new workspace will be completed in the next month. \n\n\n The Sidus Space ISO 100,000 cleanroom, with over 800 square feet of continuous space, was designed with high-end precision engineering. The self-contained space will allow cleanroom processing of up to 6 LizzieSats simultaneously as they progress through the integration, assembly, and test phases of development. The HEPA Fan Filter Units (FFUs) to be installed in the cleanroom, will provide up to 808 CFM (at high speed) and will remove 99.99% of particles >/= 0.3 microns in diameter. The modular system allows for expansion and reconfiguration as needed to accommodate custom applications. \n\n \"Cleanrooms safely protect satellites or spacecraft components from particles, residues, or bio-films that corrode electrical systems, hinder performance, or reduce satellite lifetime. Our top priority is to ensure each satellite and all of their related components meet the highest level of quality required to launch into space before they reach orbit so that they will perform successfully in the space environment. I am very proud of our team and their tremendous skillset as they continually support our customers,\" said Carol Craig, CEO of Sidus Space. \n\n The manufacturer of the cleanroom, Terra Universal, is the leading manufacturer of critical environment applications, with over 40 years of design and fabrication experience in cleanroom- and laboratory-based industries. \n\n About Sidus Space \n\n Sidus Space (NASDAQ:SIDU) located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, operates from a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility. Sidus Space focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection, with a mission of Bringing Space Down to Earth(TM) and a vision of enabling space flight heritage status for new technologies while delivering data and predictive analytics to domestic and global customers. Sidus Space makes it easy for any corporation, industry, or vertical to start their journey off-planet with our rapidly scalable, low-cost satellite services, space-based solutions, and testing alternatives. More than just a \"Satellite-as-a-Service\" provider, we become your trusted Mission Partner from concept to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. \n\n Sidus is ISO 9001:2015, AS9100 Rev. D certified, and ITAR registered. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n Statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects, as well as any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, may constitute 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the expected trading commencement and closing dates. The words 'anticipate,' 'believe,' 'continue,' 'could,' 'estimate,' 'expect,' 'intend,' 'may,' 'plan,' 'potential,' 'predict,' 'project,' 'should,' 'target,' 'will,' 'would' and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: the uncertainties related to market conditions and other factors discussed in the 'Risk Factors' section of the final prospectus dated December 13, 2021 filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof, and Sidus Space, Inc. specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n For investor and media inquiries, please contact: \n\n James Carbonara \n\n Hayden IR \n\n (646)-755-7412 \n\n james@haydenir.com \n\n SOURCE: Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/679235/Sidus-Space-Announces-Enhancements-to-its-Facilities-Including-a-New-State-of-the-Art-Cleanroom-For-Production-Testing-and-Integration-of-the-LizzieSatTM-Constellation  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sidus Space Announces Enhancements to its Facilities Including a New State of the Art Cleanroom For Production, Testing and Integration of the LizzieSat(TM) Constellation (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1015",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sidus-space-announces-enhancements-to-its-facilities-including-a-new-state-of-the-art-cleanroom-for-production-testing-and-integration-of-the-lizziesat-tm-constellation-01640268375?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=3",
        "text": "LizzieSats (LS) are 3D manufactured Low Earth Orbit (LEO) microsatellites focused on rapid, cost-effective development and testing of upcoming innovative spacecraft technologies for multiple customers. LS is a 100kg (220-pound) satellite with space to efficiently integrate customer sensors and technologies. \n\n In addition to preparing for production on LizzieSat(TM), Sidus Space is ramping up for work on recently awarded contracts which includes a multi-million dollar agreement supporting one of America's largest private companies. Other facility enhancements include improved network connectivity with Fiber optic internet, an industrial grade epoxy shop floor, new LED light fixtures throughout the facility, additional workstations and office spaces for the growing employee team and a state-of-the-art cleanroom. Sidus anticipates that the new workspace will be completed in the next month. \n\n\n The Sidus Space ISO 100,000 cleanroom, with over 800 square feet of continuous space, was designed with high-end precision engineering. The self-contained space will allow cleanroom processing of up to 6 LizzieSats simultaneously as they progress through the integration, assembly, and test phases of development. The HEPA Fan Filter Units (FFUs) to be installed in the cleanroom, will provide up to 808 CFM (at high speed) and will remove 99.99% of particles >/= 0.3 microns in diameter. The modular system allows for expansion and reconfiguration as needed to accommodate custom applications. \n\n \"Cleanrooms safely protect satellites or spacecraft components from particles, residues, or bio-films that corrode electrical systems, hinder performance, or reduce satellite lifetime. Our top priority is to ensure each satellite and all of their related components meet the highest level of quality required to launch into space before they reach orbit so that they will perform successfully in the space environment. I am very proud of our team and their tremendous skillset as they continually support our customers,\" said Carol Craig, CEO of Sidus Space. \n\n The manufacturer of the cleanroom, Terra Universal, is the leading manufacturer of critical environment applications, with over 40 years of design and fabrication experience in cleanroom- and laboratory-based industries. \n\n About Sidus Space \n\n Sidus Space (NASDAQ:SIDU) located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, operates from a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility. Sidus Space focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection, with a mission of Bringing Space Down to Earth(TM) and a vision of enabling space flight heritage status for new technologies while delivering data and predictive analytics to domestic and global customers. Sidus Space makes it easy for any corporation, industry, or vertical to start their journey off-planet with our rapidly scalable, low-cost satellite services, space-based solutions, and testing alternatives. More than just a \"Satellite-as-a-Service\" provider, we become your trusted Mission Partner from concept to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. \n\n Sidus is ISO 9001:2015, AS9100 Rev. D certified, and ITAR registered. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n Statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects, as well as any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, may constitute 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the expected trading commencement and closing dates. The words 'anticipate,' 'believe,' 'continue,' 'could,' 'estimate,' 'expect,' 'intend,' 'may,' 'plan,' 'potential,' 'predict,' 'project,' 'should,' 'target,' 'will,' 'would' and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: the uncertainties related to market conditions and other factors discussed in the 'Risk Factors' section of the final prospectus dated December 13, 2021 filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof, and Sidus Space, Inc. specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n For investor and media inquiries, please contact: \n\n James Carbonara \n\n Hayden IR \n\n (646)-755-7412 \n\n james@haydenir.com \n\n SOURCE: Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/679235/Sidus-Space-Announces-Enhancements-to-its-Facilities-Including-a-New-State-of-the-Art-Cleanroom-For-Production-Testing-and-Integration-of-the-LizzieSatTM-Constellation  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sidus Space Signs Contracts with NASA to Support the Astra Program and with Mission Helios for Space Services for a Combined Value of $1 Million (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1016",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sidus-space-signs-contracts-with-nasa-to-support-the-astra-program-and-with-mission-helios-for-space-services-for-a-combined-value-of-1-million-01639749982?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=1",
        "text": "For NASA's Advanced Space Technology Roadmapping Architecture (ASTRA) project, NASA's Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) team will join Sidus Space to integrate and demonstrate for the first time, Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) derived autonomous operations in a spaceflight environment. The demonstration will provide the necessary flight heritage for an autonomous system development platform to be used throughout the Artemis project and beyond. ASTRA will infuse multiple new technologies, including an autonomous imaging system on a Sidus-built LizzieSat-1 satellite which will then be deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) using the SSIKLOPS deployer. The ASTRA imaging system will capture images of targets on Earth during predefined times to test autonomous functionally of conducting imaging system operations, capturing images of specific targets, and imaging system downlink and memory performance. \n\n LizzieSat-1, currently manifested to launch late 2022, will validate the AES-developed autonomy software (NPAS) through on-orbit testing. The testing will evaluate the autonomous operation of the satellite imaging functions, assess the performance and behavior of the spacecraft power systems, and support the development, integration, testing, and operations of critical technologies for current and future Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) missions. \n\n In addition to the ASTRA technologies aboard LizzieSat-1, Sidus Space will also provide launch and integration services for the ERC-20 token community, Mission Helios. As a decentralized space community, Helios plans to pioneer a new and innovative space-based blockchain technology that will mint satellite imagery through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. \n\n\n Under the agreement, Sidus Space will provide launch and mission services to test the first-ever blockchain-based 1U (approximately 10 cm(3) ) satellite imagery system aboard the multi-mission LizzieSat platform. LizzieSat-1 will launch and deploy from the International Space Station utilizing the SSIKLOPS deployer. The Helios imagery system will deploy from the ISS to provide a new era of satellite imagery. The imagery system that will encode Earth images into NFTs that can be bought, sold, and traded ensures the data collected from the system will be stored for the foreseeable future in an open-source and non-manipulative manner that can be freely used for expanding space research and exploration. \n\n About Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n Sidus Space located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, operates from a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility. Sidus Space focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection, with a mission of Bringing Space Down to Earth(TM) and a vision of enabling space flight heritage status for new technologies while delivering data and predictive analytics to domestic and global customers. Sidus Space makes it easy for any corporation, industry, or vertical to start their journey off-planet with our rapidly scalable, low-cost satellite services, space-based solutions, and testing alternatives. More than just a 'Satellite-as-a-Service' provider, we become your trusted Mission Partner from concept to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. Sidus is ISO 9001:2015, AS9100 Rev. D certified, and ITAR registered. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n Statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects, as well as any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, may constitute 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the expected trading commencement and closing dates. The words 'anticipate,' 'believe,' 'continue,' 'could,' 'estimate,' 'expect,' 'intend,' 'may,' 'plan,' 'potential,' 'predict,' 'project,' 'should,' 'target,' 'will,' 'would' and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: the uncertainties related to market conditions and other factors discussed in the 'Risk Factors' section of the final prospectus dated December 13, 2021 filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof, and Sidus Space, Inc. specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n For investor and media inquiries, please contact: \n\n James Carbonara \n\n Hayden IR \n\n (646)-755-7412 \n\n james@haydenir.com \n\n SOURCE: Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/678210/Sidus-Spa  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sidus Space Signs Contracts with NASA to Support the Astra Program and with Mission Helios for Space Services for a Combined Value of $1 Million (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1017",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sidus-space-signs-contracts-with-nasa-to-support-the-astra-program-and-with-mission-helios-for-space-services-for-a-combined-value-of-1-million-01639749982?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=7",
        "text": "For NASA's Advanced Space Technology Roadmapping Architecture (ASTRA) project, NASA's Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) team will join Sidus Space to integrate and demonstrate for the first time, Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) derived autonomous operations in a spaceflight environment. The demonstration will provide the necessary flight heritage for an autonomous system development platform to be used throughout the Artemis project and beyond. ASTRA will infuse multiple new technologies, including an autonomous imaging system on a Sidus-built LizzieSat-1 satellite which will then be deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) using the SSIKLOPS deployer. The ASTRA imaging system will capture images of targets on Earth during predefined times to test autonomous functionally of conducting imaging system operations, capturing images of specific targets, and imaging system downlink and memory performance. \n\n LizzieSat-1, currently manifested to launch late 2022, will validate the AES-developed autonomy software (NPAS) through on-orbit testing. The testing will evaluate the autonomous operation of the satellite imaging functions, assess the performance and behavior of the spacecraft power systems, and support the development, integration, testing, and operations of critical technologies for current and future Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) missions. \n\n In addition to the ASTRA technologies aboard LizzieSat-1, Sidus Space will also provide launch and integration services for the ERC-20 token community, Mission Helios. As a decentralized space community, Helios plans to pioneer a new and innovative space-based blockchain technology that will mint satellite imagery through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. \n\n\n Under the agreement, Sidus Space will provide launch and mission services to test the first-ever blockchain-based 1U (approximately 10 cm(3) ) satellite imagery system aboard the multi-mission LizzieSat platform. LizzieSat-1 will launch and deploy from the International Space Station utilizing the SSIKLOPS deployer. The Helios imagery system will deploy from the ISS to provide a new era of satellite imagery. The imagery system that will encode Earth images into NFTs that can be bought, sold, and traded ensures the data collected from the system will be stored for the foreseeable future in an open-source and non-manipulative manner that can be freely used for expanding space research and exploration. \n\n About Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n Sidus Space located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, operates from a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility. Sidus Space focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection, with a mission of Bringing Space Down to Earth(TM) and a vision of enabling space flight heritage status for new technologies while delivering data and predictive analytics to domestic and global customers. Sidus Space makes it easy for any corporation, industry, or vertical to start their journey off-planet with our rapidly scalable, low-cost satellite services, space-based solutions, and testing alternatives. More than just a 'Satellite-as-a-Service' provider, we become your trusted Mission Partner from concept to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. Sidus is ISO 9001:2015, AS9100 Rev. D certified, and ITAR registered. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n Statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects, as well as any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, may constitute 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the expected trading commencement and closing dates. The words 'anticipate,' 'believe,' 'continue,' 'could,' 'estimate,' 'expect,' 'intend,' 'may,' 'plan,' 'potential,' 'predict,' 'project,' 'should,' 'target,' 'will,' 'would' and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: the uncertainties related to market conditions and other factors discussed in the 'Risk Factors' section of the final prospectus dated December 13, 2021 filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof, and Sidus Space, Inc. specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n For investor and media inquiries, please contact: \n\n James Carbonara \n\n Hayden IR \n\n (646)-755-7412 \n\n james@haydenir.com \n\n SOURCE: Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/678210/Sidus-Spa  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sidus Space Signs Contracts with NASA to Support the Astra Program and with Mission Helios for Space Services for a Combined Value of $1 Million (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1018",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sidus-space-signs-contracts-with-nasa-to-support-the-astra-program-and-with-mission-helios-for-space-services-for-a-combined-value-of-1-million-01639749982?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=6",
        "text": "For NASA's Advanced Space Technology Roadmapping Architecture (ASTRA) project, NASA's Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) team will join Sidus Space to integrate and demonstrate for the first time, Advanced Exploration Systems (AES) derived autonomous operations in a spaceflight environment. The demonstration will provide the necessary flight heritage for an autonomous system development platform to be used throughout the Artemis project and beyond. ASTRA will infuse multiple new technologies, including an autonomous imaging system on a Sidus-built LizzieSat-1 satellite which will then be deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) using the SSIKLOPS deployer. The ASTRA imaging system will capture images of targets on Earth during predefined times to test autonomous functionally of conducting imaging system operations, capturing images of specific targets, and imaging system downlink and memory performance. \n\n LizzieSat-1, currently manifested to launch late 2022, will validate the AES-developed autonomy software (NPAS) through on-orbit testing. The testing will evaluate the autonomous operation of the satellite imaging functions, assess the performance and behavior of the spacecraft power systems, and support the development, integration, testing, and operations of critical technologies for current and future Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) missions. \n\n\n\n\n\n In addition to the ASTRA technologies aboard LizzieSat-1, Sidus Space will also provide launch and integration services for the ERC-20 token community, Mission Helios. As a decentralized space community, Helios plans to pioneer a new and innovative space-based blockchain technology that will mint satellite imagery through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. \n\n\n Under the agreement, Sidus Space will provide launch and mission services to test the first-ever blockchain-based 1U (approximately 10 cm(3) ) satellite imagery system aboard the multi-mission LizzieSat platform. LizzieSat-1 will launch and deploy from the International Space Station utilizing the SSIKLOPS deployer. The Helios imagery system will deploy from the ISS to provide a new era of satellite imagery. The imagery system that will encode Earth images into NFTs that can be bought, sold, and traded ensures the data collected from the system will be stored for the foreseeable future in an open-source and non-manipulative manner that can be freely used for expanding space research and exploration. \n\n About Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n Sidus Space located in Cape Canaveral, Florida, operates from a 35,000-square-foot manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing facility. Sidus Space focuses on commercial satellite design, manufacture, launch, and data collection, with a mission of Bringing Space Down to Earth(TM) and a vision of enabling space flight heritage status for new technologies while delivering data and predictive analytics to domestic and global customers. Sidus Space makes it easy for any corporation, industry, or vertical to start their journey off-planet with our rapidly scalable, low-cost satellite services, space-based solutions, and testing alternatives. More than just a 'Satellite-as-a-Service' provider, we become your trusted Mission Partner from concept to Low Earth Orbit and beyond. Sidus is ISO 9001:2015, AS9100 Rev. D certified, and ITAR registered. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n Statements in this press release about future expectations, plans and prospects, as well as any other statements regarding matters that are not historical facts, may constitute 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements relating to the expected trading commencement and closing dates. The words 'anticipate,' 'believe,' 'continue,' 'could,' 'estimate,' 'expect,' 'intend,' 'may,' 'plan,' 'potential,' 'predict,' 'project,' 'should,' 'target,' 'will,' 'would' and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: the uncertainties related to market conditions and other factors discussed in the 'Risk Factors' section of the final prospectus dated December 13, 2021 filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements contained in this press release speak only as of the date hereof, and Sidus Space, Inc. specifically disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n For investor and media inquiries, please contact: \n\n James Carbonara \n\n Hayden IR \n\n (646)-755-7412 \n\n james@haydenir.com \n\n SOURCE: Sidus Space, Inc. \n\n View source version on accesswire.com: \n\n https://www.accesswire.com/678210/Sidus-Space-Signs-Contracts-with-NASA-to-Support-the-Astra-Program-and-with-Mission-Helios-for-Space-Services-for-a-Combined-Value-of-1-Million  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "L3Harris Completes Final US Missile Defense Agency Satellite Design Milestone (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1019",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/l3harris-completes-final-us-missile-defense-agency-satellite-design-milestone-01640005552?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=1",
        "text": "Completing the CDR is the final design milestone ensuring performance, cost and schedule requirements can be met before beginning to build the satellite. However, L3Harris has been building and buying components concurrently to maintain an aggressive schedule. \n\n \"L3Harris is moving quickly, in collaboration with our customer, to provide prototype HBTSS satellites that demonstrate the sensitivity and fire control quality of service necessary to support the hypersonic kill chain,\" said Ed Zoiss, president, L3Harris Space & Airborne Systems. \"Recent events with China and Russia increase the urgency to counter hypersonics and advanced maneuvering threats.\" \n\n\n HBTSS is one of several proposed systems within the Department of Defense's next-generation proliferated low-Earth orbit space architecture. The program's objective is to demonstrate the capability to detect and track traditional and emerging missile threats using infrared sensors and advanced processing capability. \n\n L3Harris has prioritized investments in end-to-end satellite solutions in spacecraft, payloads, ground software and advanced algorithms. The Missile Defense Agency awarded L3Harris a study contract in 2019 and the prototype demonstration in January 2021. In December 2020, the Space Development Agency selected L3Harris to build and launch four space vehicles to demonstrate the capability to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles. \n\n About L3Harris Technologies \n\n L3Harris Technologies is an agile global aerospace and defense technology innovator, delivering end-to-end solutions that meet customers' mission-critical needs. The company provides advanced defense and commercial technologies across space, air, land, sea and cyber domains. L3Harris has approximately $18 billion in annual revenue and 47,000 employees, with customers in more than 100 countries. L3Harris.com. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release contains forward-looking statements that reflect management's current expectations, assumptions and estimates of future performance and economic conditions. Such statements are made in reliance upon the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and future trends to differ materially from those matters expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Statements about the value or expected value of orders, contracts or programs or about system or technology capabilities are forward-looking and involve risks and uncertainties. L3Harris disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211220005271/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Kristin P. Jones \n Space and Airborne Systems \n\n Kristin.P.Jones@L3Harris.com \n\n 571-419-4718 \n\n Jim Burke \n\n Corporate \n\n Jim.Burke@L3Harris.com \n\n 321-727-9131 \n \n SOURCE: L3Harris Technologies \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "L3Harris Completes Final US Missile Defense Agency Satellite Design Milestone (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1020",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/l3harris-completes-final-us-missile-defense-agency-satellite-design-milestone-01640005552?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=6",
        "text": "Completing the CDR is the final design milestone ensuring performance, cost and schedule requirements can be met before beginning to build the satellite. However, L3Harris has been building and buying components concurrently to maintain an aggressive schedule. \n\n \"L3Harris is moving quickly, in collaboration with our customer, to provide prototype HBTSS satellites that demonstrate the sensitivity and fire control quality of service necessary to support the hypersonic kill chain,\" said Ed Zoiss, president, L3Harris Space & Airborne Systems. \"Recent events with China and Russia increase the urgency to counter hypersonics and advanced maneuvering threats.\" \n\n\n HBTSS is one of several proposed systems within the Department of Defense's next-generation proliferated low-Earth orbit space architecture. The program's objective is to demonstrate the capability to detect and track traditional and emerging missile threats using infrared sensors and advanced processing capability. \n\n L3Harris has prioritized investments in end-to-end satellite solutions in spacecraft, payloads, ground software and advanced algorithms. The Missile Defense Agency awarded L3Harris a study contract in 2019 and the prototype demonstration in January 2021. In December 2020, the Space Development Agency selected L3Harris to build and launch four space vehicles to demonstrate the capability to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles. \n\n About L3Harris Technologies \n\n L3Harris Technologies is an agile global aerospace and defense technology innovator, delivering end-to-end solutions that meet customers' mission-critical needs. The company provides advanced defense and commercial technologies across space, air, land, sea and cyber domains. L3Harris has approximately $18 billion in annual revenue and 47,000 employees, with customers in more than 100 countries. L3Harris.com. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release contains forward-looking statements that reflect management's current expectations, assumptions and estimates of future performance and economic conditions. Such statements are made in reliance upon the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results and future trends to differ materially from those matters expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Statements about the value or expected value of orders, contracts or programs or about system or technology capabilities are forward-looking and involve risks and uncertainties. L3Harris disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211220005271/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Kristin P. Jones \n Space and Airborne Systems \n\n Kristin.P.Jones@L3Harris.com \n\n 571-419-4718 \n\n Jim Burke \n\n Corporate \n\n Jim.Burke@L3Harris.com \n\n 321-727-9131 \n \n SOURCE: L3Harris Technologies \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellogic Announces Upcoming Appointment of Six New Board Members (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1021",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellogic-announces-upcoming-appointment-of-six-new-board-members-01640174711?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=3",
        "text": "CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--December 22, 2021-- \n Satellogic, a leader in sub-meter resolution satellite imagery collection, today announced the upcoming appointment of six new members to the company Board of Directors, collectively bringing decades of public company experience, technical expertise and commercial capabilities to guide the company through its public listing and beyond. The members, Jenette Ramos, Marcos Galperin, Brad Halverson, Dr. Dava Newman, Tarun Bhatnagar and Robert Bearden will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang and Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman on the board, which will be effective upon the company's upcoming public listing. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"These upcoming additions to our board have impressive backgrounds spanning astronautics, engineering, manufacturing, audit, scaling and public listing, and will help drive the company to its mission of democratizing access to geospatial data. We are grateful for their commitment to the company as we continue to build out our constellation of satellites to remap the entire surface of the Earth daily,\" said Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic CEO. \n\n\n Jenette Ramos, former Senior Vice President in charge of Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Operations at Boeing, will help steer the roll-out of Satellogic's high-throughput manufacturing facility and roll out of the satellites. During her tenure at Boeing, Jenette was named the project manager of Boeing's first environmental lab, and in 2017, Jenette was named Asian American Executive of the Year by the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers. She previously served on the board of the Nature Conservancy of Washington and the National Organization of Disability. \n\n Marcos Galperin is the founder, CEO and Chairman of MercadoLibre, and will assist in guiding Satellogic as a publicly listed company through his experience listing MercadoLibre as the first Latin American technology company on the Nasdaq. Marcos co-founded MercadoLibre in 1999 while attending Stanford University and has managed the business for over 20 years. Marcos is the Chairman of the Board at Globant and serves as a board member at Televisa, Onappsis and Endeavor. \n\n Brad Halverson is the former CFO of Caterpillar, and will chair the Audit Committee at Satellogic. He currently serves on the board of directors of Sysco Corporation, where he is the Lead Independent Director and chairs the Audit Committee. Under his leadership at Caterpillar, the company underwent a significant restructuring, emerging with a strong balance sheet and financial metrics. Prior to serving as CFO, Brad had served in various roles rising from a Staff Accountant to Vice President of the Financial Services Division. \n\n Dr. Dava Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a faculty member of Harvard-MIT Health, Sciences and Technology program. Dava will assist Satellogic with her deep experience with space exploration and building data products for machine learning purposes. Dava is the former deputy administrator at NASA, served as principal investigator on four spaceflight missions, and has authored more than 300 publications. She is also a founder of EarthDNA, a non-profit organization committed to implementing AI and machine learning for enhanced understanding of global metrics and accelerated positive change for global sustainability. \n\n Tarun Bhatnagar, former VP of Payments at Google, joins the board with 25 years of experience in the high-tech industry, and will focus on developing Satellogic's data as a service product. Tarun's career journey has focused primarily on scaling businesses and he brings a deep product expertise to the board as Satellogic navigates the unique challenge of launching a completely new product to revolutionize an industry. In his role at Google, he was responsible for the Payments P&L across the US and led the ecosystems and partnerships teams for the region. Prior to that, Tarun was the VP of Geo Enterprise Business & Cloud Manufacturing Solutions, where he helped found Google's Geo Enterprise offering. \n\n Robert Bearden is Chief Executive Officer of Cloudera Inc. and will bring decades of industry experience in open source software to the Satellogic board. Rob will assist with the software licensing business and helping unite the vision and mission of the company with the strategy and underlying plan. Rob was the co-founder of Hortonworks, a publicly traded open-source company that merged with Cloudera in 2019, and also served as President and COO of SpringSource and COO of JBoss until its acquisition by Red Hat in 2006. He also serves as Chairman of the Board at Nlyte Software. \n\n The new members will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang, partner at Cowboy Ventures, and former partner at Fenwick & West. Ted is also a board member of several other companies including Drata, Vic.ai, SVT Robotics and Contra. He, along with Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman, will complete the eight-person Board of Directors. \n\n These appointments will come as Satellogic lists as a public company through a proposed business combination with CF Acquisition Corp. V (Nasdaq: CFV) (\"CFAC V\"), a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. The transaction, which is expected to allow Satellogic to build out its constellation of satellites and maintain its position as a global leader in sub-meter imagery, is projected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021. After closing, Satellogic will trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol \"SATL.\" \n\n About Satellogic \n\n Founded in 2010 by Emiliano Kargieman and Gerardo Richarte, Satellogic is the first vertically integrated geospatial company, driving real outcomes with planetary-scale insights. Satellogic is building the first scalable, fully automated Earth Observation platform with the ability to remap the entire planet at both high-frequency and high-resolution, providing accessible and affordable solutions for customers. \n\n Satellogic's mission is to democratize access to geospatial data through its information platform to help solve the world's most pressing problems including climate change, energy supply, and food security. Using its patented Earth imaging technology, Satellogic unlocks the power of Earth Observation to deliver high-quality, planetary insights at the lowest cost in the industry. \n\n With more than a decade of experience in space, Satellogic has proven technology and a strong track record of delivering satellites to orbit and high-resolution data to customers at the right price point. \n\n To learn more, please visit: http://www.satellogic.com \n\n About CF Acquisition Corp. V \n\n CF Acquisition Corp. V is a blank check company led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Howard W. Lutnick. CF V was formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. CF V focuses on industries where its management team and founders have experience and insights and can bring significant value to business combinations. \n\n About Cantor Fitzgerald \n\n CF V is sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald, with over 12,000 employees, is a leading global financial services group at the forefront of financial and technological innovation and has been a proven and resilient leader for over 70 years. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. is a preeminent investment bank serving more than 5,000 institutional clients around the world, recognized for its strengths in fixed income and equity capital markets, investment banking, SPAC underwriting and PIPE placements, prime brokerage, commercial real estate and for its global distribution platform. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. is one of the 24 primary dealers authorized to transact business with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Cantor Fitzgerald is a leading SPAC sponsor, having completed multiple initial public offerings and announced multiple business combinations through its CF Acquisition platform. For more information, please visit: www.cantor.com. \n\n Additional Information \n\n This press release relates to a proposed transaction between Satellogic and CF V. In connection with the transaction described herein, CF V, Satellogic and/or a successor entity of the transaction has filed relevant materials with the SEC, including an effective registration statement on Form F-4, which includes a prospectus of Satellogic and a proxy statement of CF V. The definitive proxy statement was sent to all CF V stockholders. Satellogic, CF V and/or a successor entity of the transaction will also file other documents regarding the proposed transaction with the SEC. Before making any voting or investment decision, investors and security holders of Satellogic and CF V are urged to read the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus and all other relevant documents filed or that will be filed with the SEC in connection with the proposed transaction as they become available because they will contain important information about the proposed transaction. \n\n Investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus and all other relevant documents filed or that will be filed with the SEC by Satellogic, CF V or any successor entity of the transaction through the website maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov. \n\n The documents filed by CF V with the SEC also may be obtained free of charge upon written request to CF Acquisition Corp. V, 110 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022 or via email at CFV@cantor.com. The documents filed by Satellogic or any successor entity of the transaction with the SEC also may be obtained free of charge upon written request to Satellogic USA, Inc., 210 Delburg St., Davidson, NC 28036. \n\n Participants in the Solicitation \n\n Satellogic, CF V and their respective directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from CF V's stockholders in connection with the proposed transaction. A list of the names of such directors and executive officers, and information regarding their interests in the business combination and their ownership of CF V's securities are, or will be, contained in CF V's filings with the SEC, and such information and names of Satellogic's directors and executive officers are also in the registration statement on Form F-4 filed with the SEC by Satellogic. \n\n Non-Solicitation \n\n This press release is not a proxy statement or solicitation of a proxy, consent or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the potential transaction and shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities of CF V, Satellogic or any successor entity of the transaction, nor shall there be any sale of any such securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such state or jurisdiction. No offer of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the \"Securities Act\"). \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release contains \"forward-looking statements,\" including statements regarding the proposed transaction between CF V and Satellogic. Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the closing of the transaction and CF V's, Satellogic's or their respective management teams' expectations, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. The words \"anticipate\", \"believe\", \"continue\", \"could\", \"estimate\", \"expect\", \"intends\", \"may\", \"might\", \"plan\", \"possible\", \"potential\", \"predict\", \"project\", \"should\", \"would\" and similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. These forward-looking statements are based on CF V's and Satellogic's current expectations and beliefs concerning future developments and their potential effects on CF V, Satellogic or any successor entity of the transaction and include statements concerning (i) leadership changes, (ii) Satellogic's ability to scale its constellation, (iii) Satellogic's ability to meet image quality expectations and continue to offer superior unit economics, (iv) Satellogic's ability to become or remain an industry leader, (v) Satellogic's ability to address all commercial applications for satellite imagery or address a certain total addressable market, (vi) expectations regarding cash on the balance sheet following closing of the Business Combination and the PIPE offering and whether such cash will be sufficient to meet Satellogic's business objectives and (vii) the expected timing of closing the transaction. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on various assumptions, whether or not identified in this press release. These forward-looking statements are provided for illustrative purposes only and are not intended to serve as, and must not be relied on by, an investor as, a guarantee, an assurance, a prediction or a definitive statement of fact or probability. Actual events and circumstances are difficult or impossible to predict and will differ from assumptions. Many actual events and circumstances are beyond the control of CF V and Satellogic. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, including but not limited to: (i) the risk that the transaction may not be completed in a timely manner or at all, which may adversely affect the price of CF V's securities, (ii) the failure to satisfy the conditions to the consummation of the transaction, including the adoption of the merger agreement by CF V's stockholders, the satisfaction of the minimum trust account amount following any redemptions by CF V's public stockholders and the receipt of certain governmental and regulatory approvals, (iii) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the merger agreement, (iv) the inability to complete the PIPE offering, (v) the effect of the announcement or pendency of the transaction on Satellogic's business relationships, operating results and business generally, (vi) risks that the transaction disrupts current plans and operations of Satellogic, (vii) changes in the competitive and highly regulated industries in which Satellogic operates, variations in operating performance across competitors and changes in laws and regulations affecting Satellogic's business, (viii) the ability to implement business plans, forecasts and other expectations after the completion of the transaction, and identify and realize additional opportunities, (ix) the risk of downturns in the commercial launch services, satellite and spacecraft industry, (x) the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against Satellogic or CF V related to the merger agreement or the transaction, (xi) volatility in the price of CF V's or any successor entity's securities due to a variety of factors, including changes in the competitive and highly regulated industries in which Satellogic operates or plans to operate, variations in performance across competitors, changes in laws and regulations affecting Satellogic's business and changes in the combined capital structure, (xii) costs related to the transaction and the failure to realize anticipated benefits of the transaction or to realize estimated pro forma results and underlying assumptions, including with respect to estimated stockholder redemptions, (xiii) the risk that Satellogic and its current and future collaborators are unable to successfully develop and commercialize Satellogic's products or services, or experience significant delays in doing so, (xiv) the risk that Satellogic may never achieve or sustain profitability, (xv) the risk that Satellogic may need to raise additional capital to execute its business plan, which many not be available on acceptable terms or at all, (xvi) the risk that the post-combination company experiences difficulties in managing its growth and expanding operations, (xvii) the risk that third-party suppliers and manufacturers are not able to fully and timely meet their obligations, (xviii) the risk of product liability or regulatory lawsuits or proceedings relating to Satellogic's products and services, (xix) the risk that Satellogic is unable to secure or protect its intellectual property and (xx) the risk that the post-combination company's securities will not be approved for listing on The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC or another stock exchange or if approved, maintain the listing. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described in the \"Risk Factors\" section of the registration statement on Form F-4 and proxy statement/prospectus discussed above and other documents filed or to be filed by CF V, Satellogic and/or or any successor entity of the transaction from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Satellogic and CF V assume no obligation and do not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Neither Satellogic nor CF V gives any assurance that either Satellogic, CF V or the combined company will achieve its expectations. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211222005118/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Investor Relations: \n MZ Group \n\n Chris Tyson/Larry Holub \n\n (949) 491-8235 \n\n SATL@mzgroup.us \n\n Media Relations: \n\n Satellogic \n\n pr@satellogic.com \n\n FTI Consulting \n\n Rachel Chesley / Antonia Gray \n\n Satellogic@fticonsulting.com \n \n SOURCE: Satellogic \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellogic Announces Upcoming Appointment of Six New Board Members (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1022",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellogic-announces-upcoming-appointment-of-six-new-board-members-01640174711?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=4",
        "text": "CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--December 22, 2021-- \n Satellogic, a leader in sub-meter resolution satellite imagery collection, today announced the upcoming appointment of six new members to the company Board of Directors, collectively bringing decades of public company experience, technical expertise and commercial capabilities to guide the company through its public listing and beyond. The members, Jenette Ramos, Marcos Galperin, Brad Halverson, Dr. Dava Newman, Tarun Bhatnagar and Robert Bearden will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang and Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman on the board, which will be effective upon the company's upcoming public listing. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"These upcoming additions to our board have impressive backgrounds spanning astronautics, engineering, manufacturing, audit, scaling and public listing, and will help drive the company to its mission of democratizing access to geospatial data. We are grateful for their commitment to the company as we continue to build out our constellation of satellites to remap the entire surface of the Earth daily,\" said Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic CEO. \n\n\n Jenette Ramos, former Senior Vice President in charge of Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Operations at Boeing, will help steer the roll-out of Satellogic's high-throughput manufacturing facility and roll out of the satellites. During her tenure at Boeing, Jenette was named the project manager of Boeing's first environmental lab, and in 2017, Jenette was named Asian American Executive of the Year by the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers. She previously served on the board of the Nature Conservancy of Washington and the National Organization of Disability. \n\n Marcos Galperin is the founder, CEO and Chairman of MercadoLibre, and will assist in guiding Satellogic as a publicly listed company through his experience listing MercadoLibre as the first Latin American technology company on the Nasdaq. Marcos co-founded MercadoLibre in 1999 while attending Stanford University and has managed the business for over 20 years. Marcos is the Chairman of the Board at Globant and serves as a board member at Televisa, Onappsis and Endeavor. \n\n Brad Halverson is the former CFO of Caterpillar, and will chair the Audit Committee at Satellogic. He currently serves on the board of directors of Sysco Corporation, where he is the Lead Independent Director and chairs the Audit Committee. Under his leadership at Caterpillar, the company underwent a significant restructuring, emerging with a strong balance sheet and financial metrics. Prior to serving as CFO, Brad had served in various roles rising from a Staff Accountant to Vice President of the Financial Services Division. \n\n Dr. Dava Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a faculty member of Harvard-MIT Health, Sciences and Technology program. Dava will assist Satellogic with her deep experience with space exploration and building data products for machine learning purposes. Dava is the former deputy administrator at NASA, served as principal investigator on four spaceflight missions, and has authored more than 300 publications. She is also a founder of EarthDNA, a non-profit organization committed to implementing AI and machine learning for enhanced understanding of global metrics and accelerated positive change for global sustainability. \n\n Tarun Bhatnagar, former VP of Payments at Google, joins the board with 25 years of experience in the high-tech industry, and will focus on developing Satellogic's data as a service product. Tarun's career journey has focused primarily on scaling businesses and he brings a deep product expertise to the board as Satellogic navigates the unique challenge of launching a completely new product to revolutionize an industry. In his role at Google, he was responsible for the Payments P&L across the US and led the ecosystems and partnerships teams for the region. Prior to that, Tarun was the VP of Geo Enterprise Business & Cloud Manufacturing Solutions, where he helped found Google's Geo Enterprise offering. \n\n Robert Bearden is Chief Executive Officer of Cloudera Inc. and will bring decades of industry experience in open source software to the Satellogic board. Rob will assist with the software licensing business and helping unite the vision and mission of the company with the strategy and underlying plan. Rob was the co-founder of Hortonworks, a publicly traded open-source company that merged with Cloudera in 2019, and also served as President and COO of SpringSource and COO of JBoss until its acquisition by Red Hat in 2006. He also serves as Chairman of the Board at Nlyte Software. \n\n The new members will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang, partner at Cowboy Ventures, and former partner at Fenwick & West. Ted is also a board member of several other companies including Drata, Vic.ai, SVT Robotics and Contra. He, along with Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman, will complete the eight-person Board of Directors. \n\n These appointments will come as Satellogic lists as a public company through a proposed business combination with CF Acquisition Corp. V (Nasdaq: CFV) (\"CFAC V\"), a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. The transaction, which is expected to allow Satellogic to build out its constellation of satellites and maintain its position as a global leader in sub-meter imagery, is projected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021. After closing, Satellogic will trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol \"SATL.\" \n\n About Satellogic \n\n Founded in 2010 by Emiliano Kargieman and Gerardo Richarte, Satellogic is the first vertically integrated geospatial company, driving real outcomes with planetary-scale insights. Satellogic is building the first scalable, fully automated Earth Observation platform with the ability to remap the entire planet at both high-frequency and high-resolution, providing accessible and affordable solutions for customers. \n\n Satellogic's mission is to democratize access to geospatial data through its information platform to help solve the world's most pressing problems including climate change, energy supply, and food security. Using its patented Earth imaging technology, Satellogic unlocks the power of Earth Observation to deliver high-quality, planetary insights at the lowest cost in the industry. \n\n With more than a decade of experience in space, Satellogic has proven technology and a strong track record of delivering satellites to orbit and high-resolution data to customers at the right price point. \n\n To learn more, please visit: http://www.satellogic.com \n\n About CF Acquisition Corp. V \n\n CF Acquisition Corp. V is a blank check company led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Howard W. Lutnick. CF V was formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. CF V focuses on industries where its management team and founders have experience and insights and can bring significant value to business combinations. \n\n About Cantor Fitzgerald \n\n CF V is sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald, with over 12,000 employees, is a leading global financial services group at the forefront of financial and technological innovation and has been a proven and resilient leader for over 70 years. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. is a preeminent investment bank serving more than 5,000 institutional clients around the world, recognized for its strengths in fixed income and equity capital markets, investment banking, SPAC underwriting and PIPE placements, prime brokerage, commercial real estate and for its global distribution platform. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. is one of the 24 primary dealers authorized to transact business with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Cantor Fitzgerald is a leading SPAC sponsor, having completed multiple initial public offerings and announced multiple business combinations through its CF Acquisition platform. For more information, please visit: www.cantor.com. \n\n Additional Information \n\n This press release relates to a proposed transaction between Satellogic and CF V. In connection with the transaction described herein, CF V, Satellogic and/or a successor entity of the transaction has filed relevant materials with the SEC, including an effective registration statement on Form F-4, which includes a prospectus of Satellogic and a proxy statement of CF V. The definitive proxy statement was sent to all CF V stockholders. Satellogic, CF V and/or a successor entity of the transaction will also file other documents regarding the proposed transaction with the SEC. Before making any voting or investment decision, investors and security holders of Satellogic and CF V are urged to read the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus and all other relevant documents filed or that will be filed with the SEC in connection with the proposed transaction as they become available because they will contain important information about the proposed transaction. \n\n Investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the registration statement, the proxy statement/prospectus and all other relevant documents filed or that will be filed with the SEC by Satellogic, CF V or any successor entity of the transaction through the website maintained by the SEC at www.sec.gov. \n\n The documents filed by CF V with the SEC also may be obtained free of charge upon written request to CF Acquisition Corp. V, 110 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022 or via email at CFV@cantor.com. The documents filed by Satellogic or any successor entity of the transaction with the SEC also may be obtained free of charge upon written request to Satellogic USA, Inc., 210 Delburg St., Davidson, NC 28036. \n\n Participants in the Solicitation \n\n Satellogic, CF V and their respective directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from CF V's stockholders in connection with the proposed transaction. A list of the names of such directors and executive officers, and information regarding their interests in the business combination and their ownership of CF V's securities are, or will be, contained in CF V's filings with the SEC, and such information and names of Satellogic's directors and executive officers are also in the registration statement on Form F-4 filed with the SEC by Satellogic. \n\n Non-Solicitation \n\n This press release is not a proxy statement or solicitation of a proxy, consent or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the potential transaction and shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities of CF V, Satellogic or any successor entity of the transaction, nor shall there be any sale of any such securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such state or jurisdiction. No offer of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the \"Securities Act\"). \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release contains \"forward-looking statements,\" including statements regarding the proposed transaction between CF V and Satellogic. Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the closing of the transaction and CF V's, Satellogic's or their respective management teams' expectations, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. The words \"anticipate\", \"believe\", \"continue\", \"could\", \"estimate\", \"expect\", \"intends\", \"may\", \"might\", \"plan\", \"possible\", \"potential\", \"predict\", \"project\", \"should\", \"would\" and similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. These forward-looking statements are based on CF V's and Satellogic's current expectations and beliefs concerning future developments and their potential effects on CF V, Satellogic or any successor entity of the transaction and include statements concerning (i) leadership changes, (ii) Satellogic's ability to scale its constellation, (iii) Satellogic's ability to meet image quality expectations and continue to offer superior unit economics, (iv) Satellogic's ability to become or remain an industry leader, (v) Satellogic's ability to address all commercial applications for satellite imagery or address a certain total addressable market, (vi) expectations regarding cash on the balance sheet following closing of the Business Combination and the PIPE offering and whether such cash will be sufficient to meet Satellogic's business objectives and (vii) the expected timing of closing the transaction. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on various assumptions, whether or not identified in this press release. These forward-looking statements are provided for illustrative purposes only and are not intended to serve as, and must not be relied on by, an investor as, a guarantee, an assurance, a prediction or a definitive statement of fact or probability. Actual events and circumstances are difficult or impossible to predict and will differ from assumptions. Many actual events and circumstances are beyond the control of CF V and Satellogic. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, including but not limited to: (i) the risk that the transaction may not be completed in a timely manner or at all, which may adversely affect the price of CF V's securities, (ii) the failure to satisfy the conditions to the consummation of the transaction, including the adoption of the merger agreement by CF V's stockholders, the satisfaction of the minimum trust account amount following any redemptions by CF V's public stockholders and the receipt of certain governmental and regulatory approvals, (iii) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the merger agreement, (iv) the inability to complete the PIPE offering, (v) the effect of the announcement or pendency of the transaction on Satellogic's business relationships, operating results and business generally, (vi) risks that the transaction disrupts current plans and operations of Satellogic, (vii) changes in the competitive and highly regulated industries in which Satellogic operates, variations in operating performance across competitors and changes in laws and regulations affecting Satellogic's business, (viii) the ability to implement business plans, forecasts and other expectations after the completion of the transaction, and identify and realize additional opportunities, (ix) the risk of downturns in the commercial launch services, satellite and spacecraft industry, (x) the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against Satellogic or CF V related to the merger agreement or the transaction, (xi) volatility in the price of CF V's or any successor entity's securities due to a variety of factors, including changes in the competitive and highly regulated industries in which Satellogic operates or plans to operate, variations in performance across competitors, changes in laws and regulations affecting Satellogic's business and changes in the combined capital structure, (xii) costs related to the transaction and the failure to realize anticipated benefits of the transaction or to realize estimated pro forma results and underlying assumptions, including with respect to estimated stockholder redemptions, (xiii) the risk that Satellogic and its current and future collaborators are unable to successfully develop and commercialize Satellogic's products or services, or experience significant delays in doing so, (xiv) the risk that Satellogic may never achieve or sustain profitability, (xv) the risk that Satellogic may need to raise additional capital to execute its business plan, which many not be available on acceptable terms or at all, (xvi) the risk that the post-combination company experiences difficulties in managing its growth and expanding operations, (xvii) the risk that third-party suppliers and manufacturers are not able to fully and timely meet their obligations, (xviii) the risk of product liability or regulatory lawsuits or proceedings relating to Satellogic's products and services, (xix) the risk that Satellogic is unable to secure or protect its intellectual property and (xx) the risk that the post-combination company's securities will not be approved for listing on The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC or another stock exchange or if approved, maintain the listing. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described in the \"Risk Factors\" section of the registration statement on Form F-4 and proxy statement/prospectus discussed above and other documents filed or to be filed by CF V, Satellogic and/or or any successor entity of the transaction from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Satellogic and CF V assume no obligation and do not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Neither Satellogic nor CF V gives any assurance that either Satellogic, CF V or the combined company will achieve its expectations. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211222005118/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Investor Relations: \n MZ Group \n\n Chris Tyson/Larry Holub \n\n (949) 491-8235 \n\n SATL@mzgroup.us \n\n Media Relations: \n\n Satellogic \n\n pr@satellogic.com \n\n FTI Consulting \n\n Rachel Chesley / Antonia Gray \n\n Satellogic@fticonsulting.com \n \n SOURCE: Satellogic \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NextGen Acquisition Corp. II Stockholders Approve Business Combination With Virgin Orbit, the Responsive Launch and Space Solutions Company; Virgin Orbit Expected to List on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1023",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nextgen-acquisition-corp-ii-stockholders-approve-business-combination-with-virgin-orbit-the-responsive-launch-and-space-solutions-company-virgin-orbit-expected-to-list-on-the-nasdaq-stock-exchange-01640715967?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=2",
        "text": "Also today, NextGen and the Virgin Group announced that the minimum cash condition required for the merger to be completed has been satisfied, which will provide Virgin Orbit with growth capital to continue its rapid ramp-up in commercial space launch. The closing of the business combination is expected to occur before the end of December 2021, subject to the expected satisfaction or waiver of all closing conditions. Upon the closing of the business combination, the combined company will be named \"Virgin Orbit Holdings, Inc.\" and its common stock is expected to be listed on the NASDAQ under the new ticker symbol \"VORB\". \n\n \"We're on track to end December with Virgin Orbit as a publicly traded company -- a fantastic way to celebrate and cap an incredible year that started with delivering a dozen satellites for its first customer, NASA, into their target orbit in January,\" said Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Orbit. \"Thanks to Dan and his world-class team, along with the support of our partners at NextGen and other investors, Virgin Orbit is well positioned to continue revolutionizing satellite launch and building unrivalled space technology that we believe will positively change the world. With a diverse and global customer base, it is the only launch company that can go anytime, from anywhere, to any orbit. With the company preparing for a third consecutive successful launch in January, I'm thrilled to support Virgin Orbit as it becomes a publicly traded business and builds on the incredible successes that we've seen this year.\" \n\n\n\n\n\n Dan Hart, Chief Executive Officer of Virgin Orbit, commented, \"This marks another major milestone for Virgin Orbit in a year that has seen us prove our technology and place satellites successfully into orbit for commercial enterprises, the US government, and for our allies. The capital raised through this transaction combined with our new access to the public markets, will enable us to scale rocket manufacturing and extend our space solutions business and product development while we continue to expand globally through key partnerships with customers worldwide. We have a world class team that has become known for their creativity and skill for design and advanced manufacturing. We look forward to driving enduring shareholder value by delivering unrivaled mobility of launch and space access, and exciting space solutions services.\" \n\n\n \"The space economy is developing rapidly, and Virgin Orbit is extremely well-positioned to benefit as the industry grows in the years to come,\" noted George Mattson and Gregory Summe, the Co-Founders of NextGen. \"The company's differentiated technology drives huge benefits to customers in the national security, civil, and commercial markets around the world. We are excited to help Virgin Orbit progress into the next chapter of its exciting journey as a public company.\" \n\n The transaction is expected to raise approximately $228 million in gross proceeds, including $68M from trust proceeds and $160 million from a fully committed PIPE led by strategic and institutional investors including Boeing and AE Industrial Partners, in addition to existing Virgin Orbit investors Virgin Group and Mubadala Investment Company. and members of NextGen's Sponsor. \n\n The expected closing of the business combination comes at the end of a busy year for Virgin Orbit that saw the company deliver its first customer satellites to orbit, achieving a 100% mission success rate for customers including NASA, the US Department of Defense, the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and Polish company SatRevolution. Two of those customers -- the US Department of Defense and SatRevolution -- are again participating in the upcoming Above the Clouds launch, joined by Spire Global, Inc (NYSE: SPIR), which joined the manifest in December, a demonstration of the LauncherOne system's flexibility and responsiveness. Virgin Orbit recently completed its final pre-launch rehearsal for that flight, with the launch window scheduled to open on January 12, 2022. \n\n Additionally, in the past four months alone, Virgin Orbit has made announcements with the Southwest Research Institute, ANA Holdings, Astroscale, SatRevolution, Hypersat, Horizon Technologies, and Arqit Quantum (NASDAQ: ARQQ). For these customers and others with forthcoming announcements, Virgin Orbit expects to launch dozens of rockets in total, conducting missions ranging from space debris mitigation to exploration and from environmental monitoring to national security. \n\n In serving those and other customers, Virgin Orbit plans to make use of an expanding network of international spaceports. First among them is Spaceport Cornwall in the United Kingdom, where Virgin Orbit executives met with Prime Minister Boris Johnson as part of the G7 Summit in June; the first LauncherOne mission from Cornwall, expected in 2022, is expected to be the first ever launch from the British Isles. The company was also selected by the Brazilian Space Agency (Ag\u00eancia Espacial Brasileira; AEB) and Brazilian Air Force (For\u00e7a A\u00e9rea Brasileira, FAB) earlier this year to bring orbital launch capability to Brazil. Adding to the global scope of the program, ANA HOLDINGS INC., the owners of Japan's largest airline, announced in November that it has entered into a memorandum of understanding with Virgin Orbit to procure twenty flights of the LauncherOne rocket and to lead the effort to provide funds and support for those orbital missions to launch from Japan's Oita Prefecture. \n\n 2021 also saw Virgin Orbit unveil its work in Space Solutions. By selectively investing with constellation partners, the Company is compiling a cross-cutting suite of end-to-end, value-added services for Earth Observation and the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, using the \"Satellites as a Service\" model to serve markets including national security, ship management, aviation, pipeline monitoring, intelligent agriculture, and more, helping improve efficiency across some of the world's biggest industries. As part of this strategy, Virgin Orbit has recently announced investments in innovative satellite companies such as quantum encryption company Arqit (NASDAQ: ARQQ), marine intelligence company Horizons Technologies, and geospatial analytics company HyperSat. The company has also announced commercial partnerships with BigBear.ai and Redwire to develop and enhance its next generation space solutions offerings. \n\n To celebrate the expected closing of the merger, Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Orbit expect to ring the Opening Bell on the NASDAQ on Friday, January 7, only a few days before the opening of the launch window for the company's next mission, Above the Clouds, which is expected to deliver seven satellites into Low Earth Orbit. \n\n ABOUT VIRGIN ORBIT \n\n Virgin Orbit operates one of the most flexible and responsive space launch systems ever built. Founded by Sir Richard Branson in 2017, the company began commercial service in 2021, and has already delivered commercial, civil, national security, and international satellites into orbit. Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rockets are designed and manufactured in Long Beach, California, and are air-launched from a modified 747- 400 carrier aircraft that allows Virgin Orbit to operate from locations all over the world in order to best serve each customer's needs. On August 22, 2021, Virgin Orbit entered into a definitive agreement to combine with NextGen Acquisition Corp. II (NASDAQ: NGCA), a special purpose acquisition company, which would result in Virgin Orbit becoming a publicly listed company on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol VORB. To learn more, visit virginorbit.com. \n\n ABOUT NEXTGEN ACQUISITION CORP. II \n\n NextGen Acquisition Corp. II is a blank check company whose business purpose is to effect a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. NextGen is led by George Mattson, a former Partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and Gregory Summe, former Chairman and CEO of Perkin Elmer and Vice Chairman of the Carlyle Group. NextGen is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol \"NGCA.\" For more information, please visit www.nextgenacq.com. \n\n IMPORTANT LEGAL INFORMATION \n\n Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including with respect to the proposed transaction between Vieco USA and NextGen. These forward-looking statements generally are identified by the words \"believe,\" \"project,\" \"expect,\" \"anticipate,\" \"estimate,\" \"intend,\" \"strategy,\" \"future,\" \"opportunity,\" \"plan,\" \"may,\" \"should,\" \"will,\" \"would,\" \"will be,\" \"will continue,\" \"will likely result,\" and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are predictions, projections and other statements about future events that are based on current expectations and assumptions and, as a result, are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, including but not limited to: (i) the risk that the transaction may not be completed in a timely manner or at all, which may adversely affect the price of NextGen's securities, (ii) the risk that the transaction may not be completed by NextGen's business combination deadline and the potential failure to obtain an extension of the business combination deadline if sought by NextGen, (iii) the failure to satisfy the conditions to the consummation of the transaction, (iv) the lack of a third party valuation in determining whether or not to pursue the proposed transaction, (v) the inability to complete the PIPE investment in connection with the transaction, (vi) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the Merger Agreement, (vii) the effect of the announcement or pendency of the transaction on Vieco USA's business relationships, operating results, and business generally, (viii) risks that the proposed transaction disrupts current plans and operations of Vieco USA and potential difficulties in Vieco USA employee retention as a result of the transaction, (ix) the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against Vieco USA or against NextGen related to the Merger Agreement or the proposed transaction, (x) the ability to maintain the listing of NextGen's securities on a national securities exchange, (xi) the price of NextGen's securities may be volatile due to a variety of factors, including changes in the competitive and regulated industries in which NextGen plans to operate or Vieco USA operates, variations in operating performance across competitors, changes in laws and regulations affecting NextGen's or Vieco USA's business, Vieco USA's inability to implement its business plan or meet or exceed its financial projections and changes in the combined capital structure, (xii) the ability to implement business plans, forecasts, and other expectations after the completion of the proposed transaction, and identify and realize additional opportunities, (xiii) the ability of Vieco USA to implement its strategic initiatives and continue to innovate its existing products, (xiv) the ability of Vieco USA to defend its intellectual property, (xv) the ability of Vieco USA to satisfy regulatory requirements, (xvi) the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Vieco USA's and the combined company's business and (xvii) the risk of downturns in the commercial launch services, satellite and spacecraft industry. The foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. You should carefully consider the foregoing factors and the other risks and uncertainties described in the \"Risk Factors\" section of NextGen's definitive proxy statement/prospectus filed by NextGen with the SEC on December 7, 2021 and other documents filed or that may be filed by NextGen from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and Vieco USA and NextGen assume no obligation and do not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Neither Vieco USA nor NextGen gives any assurance that either Vieco USA or NextGen, or the combined company, will achieve its expectations. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211228005152/en/ \n \n CONTACT: MEDIA ENQUIRIES \n Media, Virgin Orbit: \n\n Alison Patch, Senior Director of Communications \n\n press@virginorbit.com \n\n +1-949-616-2504 \n \n SOURCE: Virgin Orbit \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Emerge Announces Estimated Annual Distributions for Emerge ARK ETFs (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1024",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/emerge-announces-estimated-annual-distributions-for-emerge-ark-etfs-01639768445?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=6",
        "text": "These estimates are for the year-end capital gains distribution only, which will be reinvested in additional units of the respective Fund at year-end. The additional units will be immediately consolidated with the previously outstanding units such that the net asset value per unit of the respective Fund following the distribution and reinvestment is the same as it would have been if the distribution had not been paid. \n\n The record date for the distributions is December 22, 2021 and the distributions are payable on December 31, 2021. Emerge expects to announce the final distribution amounts on or about December 23, 2021. Details regarding the estimated distribution amounts are as follows: \n \n Ticker Estimated Annual Capital Gains \n Fund Symbol Distribution Per Unit (CAD) \n----------------------------------- -------- ------------------------------- \n Emerge ARK Global Disruptive \n Innovation ETF (ETF Series Units) EARK $0.398 \n----------------------------------- -------- ------------------------------- \n EARK.U $0.399 \n -------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- \n Emerge ARK Genomics & Biotech ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAGB $0.500 \n----------------------------------- -------- ------------------------------- \n EAGB.U $0.503 \n -------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- \n Emerge ARK Fintech Innovation ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAFT $0.000 \n----------------------------------- -------- ------------------------------- \n EAFT.U \n -------------------------------------------- ------------------------------- \n \n \n \n Ticker Estimated Annual Capital Gains \n Fund Symbol Distribution Per Unit (CAD) \n------------------------------------ -------- ------------------------------ \n Emerge ARK AI & Big Data ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAAI $7.041 \n------------------------------------ -------- ------------------------------ \n EAAI.U $7.047 \n --------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ \n Emerge ARK Autonomous Tech & \n Robotics ETF (ETF Series Units) EAUT $1.941 \n------------------------------------ -------- ------------------------------ \n EAUT.U $1.945 \n --------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ \n Emerge ARK Space Exploration ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAXP $0.000 \n------------------------------------ -------- ------------------------------ \n EAXP.U \n --------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ \n \n\n\n\n\n The actual taxable amounts of reinvested and cash distributions for 2021, including the tax characteristics of the distributions, will be reported to brokers through CDS Clearing and Depository Services Inc. in early 2022. \n\n\n Distributions for the Funds will vary from period to period. For further information regarding the Distribution, please visit www.emergecm.ca \n\n Commissions, management fees and expenses all may be associated with exchange traded funds (ETFs). ETFs are not guaranteed; their values change frequently, and past performance may not be repeated. There are risks involved with investing in ETFs. Please read the prospectus for a complete description of risks relevant to the Funds. Investors may incur customary brokerage commissions in buying or selling ETF units. Please read the prospectus before investing in the Funds. \n\n Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information may relate to a future outlook and anticipated distributions, events or results and may include statements regarding future financial performance. In some cases, forward-looking information can be identified by terms such as \"may\", \"will\", \"should\", \"expect\", \"anticipate\", \"believe\", \"intend\" or other similar expressions concerning matters that are not historical facts. Actual results may vary from such forward-looking information. Emerge undertakes no obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statement whether as a result of new information, future events or other such factors which affect this information, except as required by law. \n\n About Emerge Canada Inc. \n\n Emerge Canada Inc. provides clients with elite investment strategies. Currently, Emerge offers the Funds, which are sub-advised by Emerge Capital Management Inc., which has retained ARK Investment Management LLC (\"ARK Invest\") to provide investment advice in respect of the Funds. \n\n ARK Invest is providing thematic research and investment recommendations for each of the Funds. Please find a brief description below. \n\n ARK Invest is a Manhattan-based thematic disruptive innovation technology specialist that is headed by Catherine Wood, CEO/CIO and Founder. Cathie Wood is gaining broad industry recognition for her ground-breaking work in thematic disruptive investing. Accompanying Catherine Wood is an analyst team with deep subject matter expertise and is focused in the technology themes ARK Invest feels are the fastest growing in the world. ARK Invest, as well as being a leader in disruptive investing, has achieved strong performance and industry recognition. For more information, please visit www.emergecm.ca. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211217005557/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Media: \n Emerge Canada Inc. \n\n Allison Langley, Marketing Manager \n\n T: 416 934 1321 \n\n E: alangley@emergecm.ca \n \n SOURCE: Emerge Canada Inc. \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Emerge Announces Final Annual Distributions for Emerge ARK ETFs (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1025",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/emerge-announces-final-annual-distributions-for-emerge-ark-etfs-01640285107?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=3",
        "text": "The record date for the distributions was December 22, 2021 and the distributions are payable on December 31, 2021. Details regarding the distribution amounts are as follows: \n \n \n Ticker Annual Capital Gains \n Fund Symbol Distribution Per Unit (CAD) \n---------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- \n \n Emerge ARK Global Disruptive \n Innovation ETF (ETF Series \n Units) EARK $0.398 \n---------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- \n EARK.U $0.399 \n ------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- \nEmerge ARK Genomics & Biotech ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAGB $0.514 \n---------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- \n EAGB.U $0.503 \n ------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- \nEmerge ARK Fintech Innovation ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAFT $0.000 \n---------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- \n EAFT.U \n ------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- \n Emerge ARK AI & Big Data ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAAI $7.041 \n---------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- \n EAAI.U $7.047 \n ------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- \n Emerge ARK Autonomous Tech & \n Robotics ETF (ETF Series Units) EAUT $1.941 \n---------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- \n EAUT.U $1.945 \n ------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- \n Emerge ARK Space Exploration ETF \n (ETF Series Units) EAXP $0.000 \n---------------------------------- -------- ---------------------------- \n EAXP.U \n ------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- \n \n\n\n\n\n The actual taxable amounts of reinvested and cash distributions for 2021, including the tax characteristics of the distributions, will be reported to brokers through CDS Clearing and Depository Services Inc. in early 2022. \n\n\n Distributions for the Funds will vary from period to period. For further information regarding the Distribution, please visit www.emergecm.ca \n\n Commissions, management fees and expenses all may be associated with exchange traded funds (ETFs). ETFs are not guaranteed; their values change frequently, and past performance may not be repeated. There are risks involved with investing in ETFs. Please read the prospectus for a complete description of risks relevant to the Funds. Investors may incur customary brokerage commissions in buying or selling ETF units. Please read the prospectus before investing in the Funds. \n\n About Emerge Canada Inc. \n\n Emerge Canada Inc. provides clients with elite investment strategies. Currently, Emerge offers the Funds, which are sub-advised by Emerge Capital Management Inc., which has retained ARK Investment Management LLC (\"ARK Invest\") to provide investment advice in respect of the Funds. \n\n ARK Invest is providing thematic research and investment recommendations for each of the Funds. Please find a brief description below. \n\n ARK Invest is a Manhattan-based thematic disruptive innovation technology specialist that is headed by Catherine Wood, CEO/CIO and Founder. Cathie Wood is gaining broad industry recognition for her ground-breaking work in thematic disruptive investing. Accompanying Catherine Wood is an analyst team with deep subject matter expertise and is focused in the technology themes ARK Invest feels are the fastest growing in the world. ARK Invest, as well as being a leader in disruptive investing, has achieved strong performance and industry recognition. For more information, please visit www.emergecm.ca. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211223005407/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Media: \n Emerge Canada Inc. \n\n Allison Langley, Marketing Manager \n\n T: 416 934 1321 \n\n E: alangley@emergecm.ca \n \n SOURCE: Emerge Canada Inc. \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Velo3D Ships First Sapphire(R) XC to an Aerospace Customer, Delivering Bigger Parts, Productivity Improvements, and Cost Reduction for Metal Additive Manufacturing (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1026",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/velo3d-ships-first-sapphire-r-xc-to-an-aerospace-customer-delivering-bigger-parts-productivity-improvements-and-cost-reduction-for-metal-additive-manufacturing-01640293808?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=1",
        "text": "Sapphire(R) XC is built to enable a seamless transition of parts that were developed and qualified on Sapphire(R) to the larger, more productive Sapphire(R) XC, reducing the cost of producing parts by up to 75%. Sapphire(R) XC also expands the use of Velo3D's production solution to parts that are up to 400% larger in volume than the largest parts possible to produce with Sapphire(R) . The customer receiving the new Sapphire(R) XC will use it to scale up production of its product that is built using the Sapphire(R) fleet of metal 3D printers they already have. \n\n \"I believe that the Sapphire XC will quickly become the gold standard in advanced metal additive manufacturing,\" said Benny Buller, Velo3D CEO and Founder. \"Because our customer is already utilizing our end-to-end production solution, they can immediately and seamlessly move parts to Sapphire XC to achieve a phenomenal production rate increase. We made a huge effort to ensure that Sapphire XC uses the exact same manufacturing process as Sapphire. The ability to move production seamlessly between different products was considered impossible when we started Velo3D, but I am proud to declare that we have unlocked this ability for our customers and partners. It is a huge accomplishment--our biggest achievement of 2021.\" \n\n\n Velo3D currently has a backlog of firm bookings for 17 additional Sapphire(R) XC systems as well as 19 additional reservations. The demand is primarily driven by the lower production costs Sapphire(R) XC can enable for customers who have adopted the original Sapphire(R) printers and its ability to produce much larger parts. These improvements are largely driven by new features and capabilities the printer delivers, including: \n -- Larger build volume: The Sapphire(R) XC is one of the largest available \n laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) printers with a build volume of 600 mm in \n diameter and 550 mm in height--400% larger volume than the original \n Sapphire(R) system. \n \n -- Additional lasers: The Sapphire(R) XC uses eight 1-kilowatt lasers to \n selectively weld powdered metal layer-by-layer. Velo3D's Sapphire(R) \n system uses two 1-kilowatt lasers. \n \n -- Faster non-contact recoater: Compared to its Sapphire(R) system, Velo3D's \n proprietary protrusion-tolerant recoater is now twice as fast on \n Sapphire(R) XC, significantly reducing non-productive overhead time. \n All of these features come together to dramatically increase throughput by up to 400%, which lowers the cost of produced parts by up to 75%. \n\n The ability for existing customers to seamlessly transition from the Sapphire(R) to the Sapphire(R) XC is a key differentiator for Velo3D. This is made possible by Velo3D's end-to-end solution that preserves design intent and delivers predictable, repeatable outcomes. \n\n The Flow(TM) pre-print preparation software analyzes part designs and prescribes a set of known recipes needed to manufacture the part. Customers simply upload the CAD file for a part they would like to print and the software's integrated simulation engine creates a file that can be used across any device to build exactly the same part. As parts are printed, the Assure(TM) quality assurance and control system monitors the build and provides detailed reporting for full traceability layer by layer. This gives customers confidence that the parts produced are identical across Sapphire(R) printers. \n\n The Sapphire(R) XC is able to print using a wide variety of materials that are often used in the production of mission-critical parts in the aviation, aerospace, defense, oil and gas, and energy industries. The list of available metals includes Inconel 718 & 625, Hastelloy(R) X, Hastelloy(R) C22, Aluminum, Scalmalloy(c) , and Titanium Ti-6Al-4V. Velo3D continually evaluates and qualifies new materials for use in its end-to-end solution. \n\n About Velo3D: \n\n Velo3D is a metal 3D printing technology company. 3D printing--also known as additive manufacturing (AM)--has a unique ability to improve the way high-value metal parts are built. However, legacy metal AM has been greatly limited in its capabilities since its invention almost 30 years ago. This has prevented the technology from being used to create the most valuable and impactful parts, restricting its use to specific niches where the limitations were acceptable. \n\n Velo3D has overcome these limitations so engineers can design and print the parts they want. The company's solution unlocks a wide breadth of design freedom and enables customers in space exploration, aviation, power generation, energy and semiconductor to innovate the future in their respective industries. Using Velo3D, these customers can now build mission-critical metal parts that were previously impossible to manufacture. The end-to-end solution includes the Flow(TM) print preparation software, the Sapphire(R) family of printers, and the Assure(TM) quality control system--all of which are powered by Velo3D'  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Velo3D Ships First Sapphire(R) XC to an Aerospace Customer, Delivering Bigger Parts, Productivity Improvements, and Cost Reduction for Metal Additive Manufacturing (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1027",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/velo3d-ships-first-sapphire-r-xc-to-an-aerospace-customer-delivering-bigger-parts-productivity-improvements-and-cost-reduction-for-metal-additive-manufacturing-01640293808?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=3",
        "text": "Sapphire(R) XC is built to enable a seamless transition of parts that were developed and qualified on Sapphire(R) to the larger, more productive Sapphire(R) XC, reducing the cost of producing parts by up to 75%. Sapphire(R) XC also expands the use of Velo3D's production solution to parts that are up to 400% larger in volume than the largest parts possible to produce with Sapphire(R) . The customer receiving the new Sapphire(R) XC will use it to scale up production of its product that is built using the Sapphire(R) fleet of metal 3D printers they already have. \n\n \"I believe that the Sapphire XC will quickly become the gold standard in advanced metal additive manufacturing,\" said Benny Buller, Velo3D CEO and Founder. \"Because our customer is already utilizing our end-to-end production solution, they can immediately and seamlessly move parts to Sapphire XC to achieve a phenomenal production rate increase. We made a huge effort to ensure that Sapphire XC uses the exact same manufacturing process as Sapphire. The ability to move production seamlessly between different products was considered impossible when we started Velo3D, but I am proud to declare that we have unlocked this ability for our customers and partners. It is a huge accomplishment--our biggest achievement of 2021.\" \n\n\n Velo3D currently has a backlog of firm bookings for 17 additional Sapphire(R) XC systems as well as 19 additional reservations. The demand is primarily driven by the lower production costs Sapphire(R) XC can enable for customers who have adopted the original Sapphire(R) printers and its ability to produce much larger parts. These improvements are largely driven by new features and capabilities the printer delivers, including: \n -- Larger build volume: The Sapphire(R) XC is one of the largest available \n laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) printers with a build volume of 600 mm in \n diameter and 550 mm in height--400% larger volume than the original \n Sapphire(R) system. \n \n -- Additional lasers: The Sapphire(R) XC uses eight 1-kilowatt lasers to \n selectively weld powdered metal layer-by-layer. Velo3D's Sapphire(R) \n system uses two 1-kilowatt lasers. \n \n -- Faster non-contact recoater: Compared to its Sapphire(R) system, Velo3D's \n proprietary protrusion-tolerant recoater is now twice as fast on \n Sapphire(R) XC, significantly reducing non-productive overhead time. \n All of these features come together to dramatically increase throughput by up to 400%, which lowers the cost of produced parts by up to 75%. \n\n The ability for existing customers to seamlessly transition from the Sapphire(R) to the Sapphire(R) XC is a key differentiator for Velo3D. This is made possible by Velo3D's end-to-end solution that preserves design intent and delivers predictable, repeatable outcomes. \n\n The Flow(TM) pre-print preparation software analyzes part designs and prescribes a set of known recipes needed to manufacture the part. Customers simply upload the CAD file for a part they would like to print and the software's integrated simulation engine creates a file that can be used across any device to build exactly the same part. As parts are printed, the Assure(TM) quality assurance and control system monitors the build and provides detailed reporting for full traceability layer by layer. This gives customers confidence that the parts produced are identical across Sapphire(R) printers. \n\n The Sapphire(R) XC is able to print using a wide variety of materials that are often used in the production of mission-critical parts in the aviation, aerospace, defense, oil and gas, and energy industries. The list of available metals includes Inconel 718 & 625, Hastelloy(R) X, Hastelloy(R) C22, Aluminum, Scalmalloy(c) , and Titanium Ti-6Al-4V. Velo3D continually evaluates and qualifies new materials for use in its end-to-end solution. \n\n About Velo3D: \n\n Velo3D is a metal 3D printing technology company. 3D printing--also known as additive manufacturing (AM)--has a unique ability to improve the way high-value metal parts are built. However, legacy metal AM has been greatly limited in its capabilities since its invention almost 30 years ago. This has prevented the technology from being used to create the most valuable and impactful parts, restricting its use to specific niches where the limitations were acceptable. \n\n Velo3D has overcome these limitations so engineers can design and print the parts they want. The company's solution unlocks a wide breadth of design freedom and enables customers in space exploration, aviation, power generation, energy and semiconductor to innovate the future in their respective industries. Using Velo3D, these customers can now build mission-critical metal parts that were previously impossible to manufacture. The end-to-end solution includes the Flow(TM) print preparation software, the Sapphire(R) family of printers, and the Assure(TM) quality control system--all of which are powered by Velo3D'  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Velo3D Ships First Sapphire(R) XC to an Aerospace Customer, Delivering Bigger Parts, Productivity Improvements, and Cost Reduction for Metal Additive Manufacturing (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1028",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/velo3d-ships-first-sapphire-r-xc-to-an-aerospace-customer-delivering-bigger-parts-productivity-improvements-and-cost-reduction-for-metal-additive-manufacturing-01640293808?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=3",
        "text": "Sapphire(R) XC is built to enable a seamless transition of parts that were developed and qualified on Sapphire(R) to the larger, more productive Sapphire(R) XC, reducing the cost of producing parts by up to 75%. Sapphire(R) XC also expands the use of Velo3D's production solution to parts that are up to 400% larger in volume than the largest parts possible to produce with Sapphire(R) . The customer receiving the new Sapphire(R) XC will use it to scale up production of its product that is built using the Sapphire(R) fleet of metal 3D printers they already have. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"I believe that the Sapphire XC will quickly become the gold standard in advanced metal additive manufacturing,\" said Benny Buller, Velo3D CEO and Founder. \"Because our customer is already utilizing our end-to-end production solution, they can immediately and seamlessly move parts to Sapphire XC to achieve a phenomenal production rate increase. We made a huge effort to ensure that Sapphire XC uses the exact same manufacturing process as Sapphire. The ability to move production seamlessly between different products was considered impossible when we started Velo3D, but I am proud to declare that we have unlocked this ability for our customers and partners. It is a huge accomplishment--our biggest achievement of 2021.\" \n\n\n Velo3D currently has a backlog of firm bookings for 17 additional Sapphire(R) XC systems as well as 19 additional reservations. The demand is primarily driven by the lower production costs Sapphire(R) XC can enable for customers who have adopted the original Sapphire(R) printers and its ability to produce much larger parts. These improvements are largely driven by new features and capabilities the printer delivers, including: \n -- Larger build volume: The Sapphire(R) XC is one of the largest available \n laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) printers with a build volume of 600 mm in \n diameter and 550 mm in height--400% larger volume than the original \n Sapphire(R) system. \n \n -- Additional lasers: The Sapphire(R) XC uses eight 1-kilowatt lasers to \n selectively weld powdered metal layer-by-layer. Velo3D's Sapphire(R) \n system uses two 1-kilowatt lasers. \n \n -- Faster non-contact recoater: Compared to its Sapphire(R) system, Velo3D's \n proprietary protrusion-tolerant recoater is now twice as fast on \n Sapphire(R) XC, significantly reducing non-productive overhead time. \n All of these features come together to dramatically increase throughput by up to 400%, which lowers the cost of produced parts by up to 75%. \n\n The ability for existing customers to seamlessly transition from the Sapphire(R) to the Sapphire(R) XC is a key differentiator for Velo3D. This is made possible by Velo3D's end-to-end solution that preserves design intent and delivers predictable, repeatable outcomes. \n\n The Flow(TM) pre-print preparation software analyzes part designs and prescribes a set of known recipes needed to manufacture the part. Customers simply upload the CAD file for a part they would like to print and the software's integrated simulation engine creates a file that can be used across any device to build exactly the same part. As parts are printed, the Assure(TM) quality assurance and control system monitors the build and provides detailed reporting for full traceability layer by layer. This gives customers confidence that the parts produced are identical across Sapphire(R) printers. \n\n The Sapphire(R) XC is able to print using a wide variety of materials that are often used in the production of mission-critical parts in the aviation, aerospace, defense, oil and gas, and energy industries. The list of available metals includes Inconel 718 & 625, Hastelloy(R) X, Hastelloy(R) C22, Aluminum, Scalmalloy(c) , and Titanium Ti-6Al-4V. Velo3D continually evaluates and qualifies new materials for use in its end-to-end solution. \n\n About Velo3D: \n\n Velo3D is a metal 3D printing technology company. 3D printing--also known as additive manufacturing (AM)--has a unique ability to improve the way high-value metal parts are built. However, legacy metal AM has been greatly limited in its capabilities since its invention almost 30 years ago. This has prevented the technology from being used to create the most valuable and impactful parts, restricting its use to specific niches where the limitations were acceptable. \n\n Velo3D has overcome these limitations so engineers can design and print the parts they want. The company's solution unlocks a wide breadth of design freedom and enables customers in space exploration, aviation, power generation, energy and semiconductor to innovate the future in their respective industries. Using Velo3D, these customers can now build mission-critical metal parts that were previously impossible to manufacture. The end-to-end solution includes the Flow(TM) print preparation software, the Sapphire(R) family of printers, and the Assure(TM) quality control system--all of which are powered by Velo3D's Intelligent Fusion(R) manufacturing process. The company delivered its first Sapphire(R) system in 2018 and has been a strategic partner to innovators such as SpaceX, Honeywell, Honda, Chromalloy, and Lam Research. Velo3D has been named to Fast Company's prestigious annual list of the World's Most Innovative Companies for 2021. For more information, please visit velo3d.com, or follow the company on LinkedIn or Twitter. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release includes \"forward-looking statements\" within the meaning of the \"safe harbor\" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1996. The Company's actual results may differ from its expectations, estimates and projections and consequently, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as \"expect\", \"estimate\", \"project\", \"budget\", \"forecast\", \"anticipate\", \"intend\", \"plan\", \"may\", \"will\", \"could\", \"should\", \"believes\", \"predicts\", \"potential\", \"continue\", and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding the production capacity, cost reduction and other expected benefits of Sapphire(R) XC, expected demand for Sapphire(R) XC and existing customers' ability to transition to Sapphire(R) XC and the Company's other expectations, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies for the future. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described in the documents filed by the Company from time to time with the SEC. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Most of these factors are outside the Company's control and are difficult to predict. The Company cautions not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, including projections, which speak only as of the date made. The Company does not undertake or accept any obligation to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211223005098/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Media Contact: \n Velo3D \n\n Dan Sorensen \n\n dan.sorensen@velo3d.com \n\n Investor Relations: \n\n Bob Okunski, VP Investor Relations \n\n investors@velo3d.com \n \n SOURCE: Velo3D, Inc. \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "BioHarvest Sciences Inc. 2021 CEO Letter to Shareholder Partners (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1029",
        "date": "2021-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bioharvest-sciences-inc-2021-ceo-letter-to-shareholder-partners-01640872853?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1",
        "text": "It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity at the end of the year to summarize for our shareholder partners the major accomplishments of what has been an inspiring and transformative first full calendar year for me as CEO of BioHarvest Sciences. I will also include my own forward-looking thoughts for how we are envisioning the year ahead, in which we expect to trigger an acceleration of revenue growth, a game-changing expansion of our product lineup, as well as regulatory work and clinical studies that will provide a clear roadmap to continued global growth. Our vision is to drive human utility value: making a fundamental and positive change to our consumer's overall health and wellness. 2022 will be a year in which we not only open new doors as we further scale and commercialize our products, but also open minds to the significant potential that our platform technology has to drive this fundamental improvement in health and wellness on a global scale. \n\n\n\n\n\n In accordance with BioHarvest's vision and its biotech journey, I am extremely proud to share below the team's 2021 achievements grouped by key areas: Science & Technology, Operations, Sales, Finance and Environmental & Social Governance. \n\n\n 2021 Achievements \n\n Science & Technology \n 1. In August 2021, we announced the historical creation of the Amalgamated \n Trichomes Coral Structure (ATCS). Why was this so important? Because the \n way to deliver full spectrum cannabis is to grow the trichomes, which are \n the mini factories of the cannabis plant where all cannabinoids, \n flavonoids and terpenes are produced. These trichomes are delicate \n components of the plant which can be vulnerable to the shear forces \n applied by the motion of the liquid media in the bioreactors. This new \n coral structure protects the trichomes during their growth in such a way \n that has enabled us to move from lab-scale creation of the trichomes \n towards larger scale bioreactors. \n 1. We announced on December 8 that we were the first company in the world to \n grow a significant amount of cannabis biomass \"without growing the plant\", \n creating biotech and Cannabis industry history. With three different \n strains under development, we have now produced over 10 kilograms of \n biomass. The news has generated significant media interest (which I will \n detail below), and it has also introduced our science to thousands of new \n investors, science fans, and cannabis enthusiasts. It has provided a firm \n launch point for 2022, and there is more to come: I have challenged our \n marketing team to have the accompanying video viewed 1 million+ times, \n and we are already at 250,000+, so please stay tuned to our upcoming \n media placements! \n 1. Through our continued research, we added a new functionality claim for \n VINIA(R), which reduces the oxidation of LDL cholesterol, enabling \n VINIA(R) to have one more important reason to appeal to the millions of \n consumers concerned about their cardiovascular health. \n Operations \n 1. I am so proud that our new 20 Ton per year production facility was \n completed on schedule, passing the ISO audits in September 2021, despite \n significant global supply challenges. We received GMP certification from \n Israel's Ministry of Health in November and we are currently working hard \n to execute the biological technology transfer, so we can commence \n production. \n 1. Our Science, Advisory and Executive teams are critical for executing our \n biotech vision. This year we were honored to add both significant brain \n power and experience to each group with the addition of Colonel Chris \n Hadfield (space and aeronautics), Dr. Dennis Goodman (cardiology), Steven \n Lehrer (biotech), and Scott McCune (consumer marketing) to our Advisory \n Board. David Tsur (pharmaceutical and biotech) has joined the Board of \n Directors. Kobi Rosenzweig (VP operations) and Jarred Turner (VP of \n E-commerce) have joined the executive team. Building a world class \n company requires world class people - I am so pleased that each of these \n industry experts has joined us on our journey. \n Sales \n 1. Israel Sales - This time last year we were energized by the spectacular \n VINIA Israel ecommerce launch in Q4 2020, which established a sales \n momentum that we have been able to successfully maintain. Throughout \n 2021, we continued to grow revenue in this market, at 10% sales growth \n quarter on quarter, for the first 3 quarters of the year, and accordingly \n have increased full year guidance on two occasions. \n 1. VINIA US Market launch - May 2021. While this highlight is only one of \n many from 2021, it represented a giant leap forward for BioHarvest \n Sciences. We created entirely new operational units to facilitate the \n workings of a successful North American e-commerce business, including \n Marketing, Fulfilment, Customer Success, and global supply. We also added \n the required thought leadership with committed staff and external \n partners to bring us their expertise and drive from Launch Day forward. \n Sales performance in the U.S. pilot program has been extremely encouraging with us crossing the US$100,000 sales orders per month mark very early in the launch, with 89% of sales being subscription packages generating monthly recurring revenue, and an average sales order value of US $80 per transaction. \n\n We have been humbled by the feedback from our consumer base - as of this week, new VINIA users have submitted 350+ verified reviews, with a 4.8/5 rating, which is best in class from a performance perspective when benchmarked versus industry norms. \n\n We look forward to scaling our US launch as soon as we bring our new 20 Ton per year manufacturing facility online and to adding significant customer count to a base that already exceeds 11,000 customers across USA and Israel. \n 1. B2B Sales - our Batory sales and distribution partnership continues to \n add significant value for the business. We have successfully expanded our \n partnership with \"Designs for Health Inc\" who in 2021 formulated VINIA(R) \n into 3 new products which are now commercially available including \"NRF2 \n Modulator\", \"Senolytic Synergy\" and \"Bergavin(TM)\". We are currently \n engaged in a number of strategic discussions with giants of industry and \n look forward to converting additional major B2B partnerships in 2022. \n Finance \n 1. Investors have reacted positively to the company's achievements \n throughout 2021. The share price increased 130% from the beginning of \n the year to reflect a recently reached market capitalization of $200 \n million. \n 1. Strong treasury - In 2021, we raised a total of $9.4 Million CAD in two \n successful private placements, plus $4.6 Million CAD in exercised \n warrants. \n 1. In 2021, we have significantly increased the investor base. As the \n company continues to perform well against its biotech vision and \n increases revenues substantially, the prospects remain high for 2022 to \n further increase that base and to add more institutional investors. \n 1. Given the 2021 achievements record and the 2022 prospects listed below, \n we believe that BioHarvest presents a very attractive investment \n opportunity. \n Environmental & Social Governance \n\n I trust that our community of investor partners understands how deeply we are committed to making BioHarvest Sciences a role model for other companies to follow as it relates to our ESG credentials and delivering continuous improvement across key identified metrics. \n 1. In July, we became the first Biotechnology company that produces \n cannabinoids to publish an ESG Sustainability report. This initial report \n was our first, and there are more to come. As the Globe and Mail reported \n on Dec 28. 2021, our BioFarming technology can reduce land requirements \n for nutrient growth by 95%. Investors are welcome to access the complete \n ESG report here. \n 1. We are a company committed to diversity in the workplace and understand \n the power of diversity to help create competitive advantage. We are very \n proud of the fact that 55% of our workforce is female and that our entire \n R & D team is female. Importantly, as a company that understands the \n power of experience, we have more than 45% of our workforce above the age \n of 50 years old. This provides us with a wealth of brain power, people \n maturity and a unique sense of drive and commitment to make the world \n better for our children and grandchildren. \n 1. Our December media coverage on cannabis R+D has generated a wave of \n commercial inquiries, which is fantastic, and we are committed to \n responding to every contact. I want to reassure investors that we will \n consider every commercial opportunity, but I do want our community to \n understand that our first priority will be to supply cannabis ingredients \n for medicinal applications in line with our commitment to be a purpose \n driven company. We do not envision replacing recreational suppliers, or \n artisan growers - we will focus on providing fingerprint consistent \n ingredients for products that require the highest levels of cleanliness \n and consistency. \n Media Coverage \n\n This year, we partnered with two very established public relations firms (Boldt and Thunder-11) to help introduce us to both Major news media and the cannabis community, and it has paid huge dividends in \"earned\" media coverage. For the portion of our community that follows early-stage companies, this major media interest will be mind blowing, as small companies will rarely make the news cycle. Our North American news coverage is spiking here at the end of 2021, which establishes a fantastic launching point for the New Year. \n -- Forbes.com: Dec 8 - Producing Cannabis Biomass Without Growing A Cannabis \n Plant - How One Company Is Doing It. \n -- The Globe and Mail: Dec. 28 - Canadian-Israeli biotech company growing \n nutrients for Earth and beyond \n -- The Houston Chronicle: Dec. 27 - Bowie Singing Astronaut developing \n protein pills for real space travel \n -- CannabisTech.com: Dec. 23 - How to Grow Cannabis Without Growing a Plant \n -- The Jerusalem Post: Dec. 29 - An astounding 2021 for Israeli tech could \n bring pivot \n Looking Forward to 2022 \n\n This coming year will see us \"land\" and \"expand\", plus drive further impact in existing programs. \n\n We expect to be selling our first cannabis-related products in 2022 upon completion of our final scale up phase and regulatory approvals. For VINIA, we are planning a step up in aggressive US marketing and will continue to push forward on the regulatory approval of VINIA in the EU and UK. As a science-based company, we always want to expand our science-based credentials, so we intend to fund additional clinical trials on VINIA, cannabis, and our olive cell product which is next in our polyphenol/antioxidant pipeline. \n\n At some point in the first half of 2022, we will likely announce the next plant-based vertical which we believe we can disrupt with our proprietary platform technology, adding one more significant validation on how we can bring the power of the plant to the people. Investors can also anticipate the 2022 launch of our first cannabis products and the significant scaling of VINIA(R). I expect these two products to generate market-moving revenues in 2022, but they are just the start. \n\n We will also join the space race as the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson work to make \"space settlements\" something of a reality by 2030. We will work closely with our new advisory board member Colonel Chris Hadfield to start the process to assess how we can use our proprietary platform to help solve two major challenges which exists for space settlements - sustainable food supply and reducing the effects of ionizing radiation on oxidation of LDL cholesterol. \n\n Our entire team is so thankful that you have been part of this stage in our growth phase, and we are very proud to partner with you on our biotech journey. We are inspired by your support and the deep sense of \"purpose\" that you share with us on the BioHarvest Sciences team. That primary purpose is to drive Human Utility Value, and to drive a transformational positive change in the Health and Wellness of hundreds of millions of people. \n\n Our team is laser focused on executing the 2022 plan, and we intend to make 2022 a year to remember. \n\n For a video reel of this year's major announcements, click here. \n\n Happy New Year and may your 2022 be filled with only good health and blessings. \n\n Warmest wishes, \n\n Ilan Sobel, Chief Executive Officer \n\n BioHarvest Sciences Inc. \n\n About BioHarvest Sciences Inc. \n\n BioHarvest Sciences Inc. (CSE: BHSC) is a fast-growing Biotech firm listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange. BioHarvest has developed a patented bio-cell growth platform technology capable of growing the active and beneficial ingredients in fruit and plants, at industrial scale, without the need to grow the plant itself. This technology is economical, ensures consistency, and avoids the negative environmental impacts associated with traditional agriculture. BioHarvest is currently focused on nutraceuticals and the medicinal cannabis markets. Visit: www.bioharvest.com. \n\n For further information, please contact: \n\n Dave Ryan, VP Investor Relations & Director \n\n Phone: 1 (604) 622-1186 \n\n Email: dave@bioharvest.com \n\n Twitter \n\n Facebook \n\n LinkedIn \n\n Youtube \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n Information set forth in this news release might include forward-looking statements that are based on management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions, and expectations, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. There is no assurance that we will achieve our objective of making our products available in multiple markets including bio-space and exposing our technology to different verticals. In particular, there is no assurance that the Company will be able to leverage its technology platform to successfully provide essential nutrition and active ingredients for space exploration. There is no assurance that the Company will be successful in expanding its technology to broader medical applications or conduct clinical trials to validate the efficacy of the Company's products for new forms of medical treatments. There is no assurance that the ability to produce a commercial sized biomass will result in the Company entering into commercial production of Cannabis. There is no assurance the Company will be able to successfully convert the exiting 2 tons/year VINIA(R) facility to a Cannabis production facility in H1, 2022. There is no assurance we will be able to commercialize our first Cannabis products in the first half of 2022, and there is no assurance the Company will be able to add new verticals or build additional plants elsewhere. Clinical trials are subject to risks of significant cost overruns and lengthy delays with no assurance they will confirm desired results. Even where desired results are obtained government approvals for treatments take considerable time and cannot be guaranteed. There is no assurance the BioFarming technology will make a significant impact on multiple verticals of life -science based businesses in general or in the bio-space industry. There is no assurance that we will achieve our objective of being a leading supplier of Cannabis. There is no assurance that the Israeli market results for Vinia(R) will translate directly into the U.S. markets which may depend on different consumer preferences and more substantial marketing expenditures and resources. There is no assurance that strong sales metrics experienced to date will result in future demand for VINIA(R). Markets for nutraceuticals are unpredictable and subject to changes in consumer tastes and trends as well as economic factors beyond our control. Delays and cost overruns may result in delays achieving our objectives obtaining market acceptance and regulatory approvals for geographic expansion is subject to risk and cannot be guaranteed. Projected sales of Cannabis will require the company to obtain production and / or export licensing which cannot be assured. \n\n There is no assurance we will trigger an acceleration of revenue growth or a game changing expansion of our product lineup. These things are subject to uncertainties including the uncertainty of continuing market acceptance of our products and market acceptance of new products which are subject to changing consumer preference and access to marketplaces. There is no assurance we will achieve additional major B2B partnerships in 2022 as this is subject to acceptance of our products by businesses and their customers. There is no assurance that we will increase our investor base or add new institutional investors as this is subject to our meeting investment criteria of investors and conditions affecting equity markets generally. Continuing outbreaks of Covid variants may cause delays or other impacts to business plans and /or impact equity markets in 2022. \n\n All forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain, and actual results may be affected by a number of material factors beyond our control. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. BHSC does not intend to update forward-looking statement disclosures other than through our regular management discussion and analysis disclosures. \n\n Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. \n\n To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/108664  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "BioHarvest Sciences Inc. 2021 CEO Letter to Shareholder Partners (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1030",
        "date": "2021-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bioharvest-sciences-inc-2021-ceo-letter-to-shareholder-partners-01640872853?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=1",
        "text": "It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity at the end of the year to summarize for our shareholder partners the major accomplishments of what has been an inspiring and transformative first full calendar year for me as CEO of BioHarvest Sciences. I will also include my own forward-looking thoughts for how we are envisioning the year ahead, in which we expect to trigger an acceleration of revenue growth, a game-changing expansion of our product lineup, as well as regulatory work and clinical studies that will provide a clear roadmap to continued global growth. Our vision is to drive human utility value: making a fundamental and positive change to our consumer's overall health and wellness. 2022 will be a year in which we not only open new doors as we further scale and commercialize our products, but also open minds to the significant potential that our platform technology has to drive this fundamental improvement in health and wellness on a global scale. \n\n\n\n\n\n In accordance with BioHarvest's vision and its biotech journey, I am extremely proud to share below the team's 2021 achievements grouped by key areas: Science & Technology, Operations, Sales, Finance and Environmental & Social Governance. \n\n\n 2021 Achievements \n\n Science & Technology \n 1. In August 2021, we announced the historical creation of the Amalgamated \n Trichomes Coral Structure (ATCS). Why was this so important? Because the \n way to deliver full spectrum cannabis is to grow the trichomes, which are \n the mini factories of the cannabis plant where all cannabinoids, \n flavonoids and terpenes are produced. These trichomes are delicate \n components of the plant which can be vulnerable to the shear forces \n applied by the motion of the liquid media in the bioreactors. This new \n coral structure protects the trichomes during their growth in such a way \n that has enabled us to move from lab-scale creation of the trichomes \n towards larger scale bioreactors. \n 1. We announced on December 8 that we were the first company in the world to \n grow a significant amount of cannabis biomass \"without growing the plant\", \n creating biotech and Cannabis industry history. With three different \n strains under development, we have now produced over 10 kilograms of \n biomass. The news has generated significant media interest (which I will \n detail below), and it has also introduced our science to thousands of new \n investors, science fans, and cannabis enthusiasts. It has provided a firm \n launch point for 2022, and there is more to come: I have challenged our \n marketing team to have the accompanying video viewed 1 million+ times, \n and we are already at 250,000+, so please stay tuned to our upcoming \n media placements! \n 1. Through our continued research, we added a new functionality claim for \n VINIA(R), which reduces the oxidation of LDL cholesterol, enabling \n VINIA(R) to have one more important reason to appeal to the millions of \n consumers concerned about their cardiovascular health. \n Operations \n 1. I am so proud that our new 20 Ton per year production facility was \n completed on schedule, passing the ISO audits in September 2021, despite \n significant global supply challenges. We received GMP certification from \n Israel's Ministry of Health in November and we are currently working hard \n to execute the biological technology transfer, so we can commence \n production. \n 1. Our Science, Advisory and Executive teams are critical for executing our \n biotech vision. This year we were honored to add both significant brain \n power and experience to each group with the addition of Colonel Chris \n Hadfield (space and aeronautics), Dr. Dennis Goodman (cardiology), Steven \n Lehrer (biotech), and Scott McCune (consumer marketing) to our Advisory \n Board. David Tsur (pharmaceutical and biotech) has joined the Board of \n Directors. Kobi Rosenzweig (VP operations) and Jarred Turner (VP of \n E-commerce) have joined the executive team. Building a world class \n company requires world class people - I am so pleased that each of these \n industry experts has joined us on our journey. \n Sales \n 1. Israel Sales - This time last year we were energized by the spectacular \n VINIA Israel ecommerce launch in Q4 2020, which established a sales \n momentum that we have been able to successfully maintain. Throughout \n 2021, we continued to grow revenue in this market, at 10% sales growth \n quarter on quarter, for the first 3 quarters of the year, and accordingly \n have increased full year guidance on two occasions. \n 1. VINIA US Market launch - May 2021. While this highlight is only one of \n many from 2021, it represented a giant leap forward for BioHarvest \n Sciences. We created entirely new operational units to facilitate the \n workings of a successful North American e-commerce business, including \n Marketing, Fulfilment, Customer Success, and global supply. We also added \n the required thought leadership with committed staff and external \n partners to bring us their expertise and drive from Launch Day forward. \n Sales performance in the U.S. pilot program has been extremely encouraging with us crossing the US$100,000 sales orders per month mark very early in the launch, with 89% of sales being subscription packages generating monthly recurring revenue, and an average sales order value of US $80 per transaction. \n\n We have been humbled by the feedback from our consumer base - as of this week, new VINIA users have submitted 350+ verified reviews, with a 4.8/5 rating, which is best in class from a performance perspective when benchmarked versus industry norms. \n\n We look forward to scaling our US launch as soon as we bring our new 20 Ton per year manufacturing facility online and to adding significant customer count to a base that already exceeds 11,000 customers across USA and Israel. \n 1. B2B Sales - our Batory sales and distribution partnership continues to \n add significant value for the business. We have successfully expanded our \n partnership with \"Designs for Health Inc\" who in 2021 formulated VINIA(R) \n into 3 new products which are now commercially available including \"NRF2 \n Modulator\", \"Senolytic Synergy\" and \"Bergavin(TM)\". We are currently \n engaged in a number of strategic discussions with giants of industry and \n look forward to converting additional major B2B partnerships in 2022. \n Finance \n 1. Investors have reacted positively to the company's achievements \n throughout 2021. The share price increased 130% from the beginning of \n the year to reflect a recently reached market capitalization of $200 \n million. \n 1. Strong treasury - In 2021, we raised a total of $9.4 Million CAD in two \n successful private placements, plus $4.6 Million CAD in exercised \n warrants. \n 1. In 2021, we have significantly increased the investor base. As the \n company continues to perform well against its biotech vision and \n increases revenues substantially, the prospects remain high for 2022 to \n further increase that base and to add more institutional investors. \n 1. Given the 2021 achievements record and the 2022 prospects listed below, \n we believe that BioHarvest presents a very attractive investment \n opportunity. \n Environmental & Social Governance \n\n I trust that our community of investor partners understands how deeply we are committed to making BioHarvest Sciences a role model for other companies to follow as it relates to our ESG credentials and delivering continuous improvement across key identified metrics. \n 1. In July, we became the first Biotechnology company that produces \n cannabinoids to publish an ESG Sustainability report. This initial report \n was our first, and there are more to come. As the Globe and Mail reported \n on Dec 28. 2021, our BioFarming technology can reduce land requirements \n for nutrient growth by 95%. Investors are welcome to access the complete \n ESG report here. \n 1. We are a company committed to diversity in the workplace and understand \n the power of diversity to help create competitive advantage. We are very \n proud of the fact that 55% of our workforce is female and that our entire \n R & D team is female. Importantly, as a company that understands the \n power of experience, we have more than 45% of our workforce above the age \n of 50 years old. This provides us with a wealth of brain power, people \n maturity and a unique sense of drive and commitment to make the world \n better for our children and grandchildren. \n 1. Our December media coverage on cannabis R+D has generated a wave of \n commercial inquiries, which is fantastic, and we are committed to \n responding to every contact. I want to reassure investors that we will \n consider every commercial opportunity, but I do want our community to \n understand that our first priority will be to supply cannabis ingredients \n for medicinal applications in line with our commitment to be a purpose \n driven company. We do not envision replacing recreational suppliers, or \n artisan growers - we will focus on providing fingerprint consistent \n ingredients for products that require the highest levels of cleanliness \n and consistency. \n Media Coverage \n\n This year, we partnered with two very established public relations firms (Boldt and Thunder-11) to help introduce us to both Major news media and the cannabis community, and it has paid huge dividends in \"earned\" media coverage. For the portion of our community that follows early-stage companies, this major media interest will be mind blowing, as small companies will rarely make the news cycle. Our North American news coverage is spiking here at the end of 2021, which establishes a fantastic launching point for the New Year. \n -- Forbes.com: Dec 8 - Producing Cannabis Biomass Without Growing A Cannabis \n Plant - How One Company Is Doing It. \n -- The Globe and Mail: Dec. 28 - Canadian-Israeli biotech company growing \n nutrients for Earth and beyond \n -- The Houston Chronicle: Dec. 27 - Bowie Singing Astronaut developing \n protein pills for real space travel \n -- CannabisTech.com: Dec. 23 - How to Grow Cannabis Without Growing a Plant \n -- The Jerusalem Post: Dec. 29 - An astounding 2021 for Israeli tech could \n bring pivot \n Looking Forward to 2022 \n\n This coming year will see us \"land\" and \"expand\", plus drive further impact in existing programs. \n\n We expect to be selling our first cannabis-related products in 2022 upon completion of our final scale up phase and regulatory approvals. For VINIA, we are planning a step up in aggressive US marketing and will continue to push forward on the regulatory approval of VINIA in the EU and UK. As a science-based company, we always want to expand our science-based credentials, so we intend to fund additional clinical trials on VINIA, cannabis, and our olive cell product which is next in our polyphenol/antioxidant pipeline. \n\n At some point in the first half of 2022, we will likely announce the next plant-based vertical which we believe we can disrupt with our proprietary platform technology, adding one more significant validation on how we can bring the power of the plant to the people. Investors can also anticipate the 2022 launch of our first cannabis products and the significant scaling of VINIA(R). I expect these two products to generate market-moving revenues in 2022, but they are just the start. \n\n We will also join the space race as the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson work to make \"space settlements\" something of a reality by 2030. We will work closely with our new advisory board member Colonel Chris Hadfield to start the process to assess how we can use our proprietary platform to help solve two major challenges which exists for space settlements - sustainable food supply and reducing the effects of ionizing radiation on oxidation of LDL cholesterol. \n\n Our entire team is so thankful that you have been part of this stage in our growth phase, and we are very proud to partner with you on our biotech journey. We are inspired by your support and the deep sense of \"purpose\" that you share with us on the BioHarvest Sciences team. That primary purpose is to drive Human Utility Value, and to drive a transformational positive change in the Health and Wellness of hundreds of millions of people. \n\n Our team is laser focused on executing the 2022 plan, and we intend to make 2022 a year to remember. \n\n For a video reel of this year's major announcements, click here. \n\n Happy New Year and may your 2022 be filled with only good health and blessings. \n\n Warmest wishes, \n\n Ilan Sobel, Chief Executive Officer \n\n BioHarvest Sciences Inc. \n\n About BioHarvest Sciences Inc. \n\n BioHarvest Sciences Inc. (CSE: BHSC) is a fast-growing Biotech firm listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange. BioHarvest has developed a patented bio-cell growth platform technology capable of growing the active and beneficial ingredients in fruit and plants, at industrial scale, without the need to grow the plant itself. This technology is economical, ensures consistency, and avoids the negative environmental impacts associated with traditional agriculture. BioHarvest is currently focused on nutraceuticals and the medicinal cannabis markets. Visit: www.bioharvest.com. \n\n For further information, please contact: \n\n Dave Ryan, VP Investor Relations & Director \n\n Phone: 1 (604) 622-1186 \n\n Email: dave@bioharvest.com \n\n Twitter \n\n Facebook \n\n LinkedIn \n\n Youtube \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n Information set forth in this news release might include forward-looking statements that are based on management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions, and expectations, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. There is no assurance that we will achieve our objective of making our products available in multiple markets including bio-space and exposing our technology to different verticals. In particular, there is no assurance that the Company will be able to leverage its technology platform to successfully provide essential nutrition and active ingredients for space exploration. There is no assurance that the Company will be successful in expanding its technology to broader medical applications or conduct clinical trials to validate the efficacy of the Company's products for new forms of medical treatments. There is no assurance that the ability to produce a commercial sized biomass will result in the Company entering into commercial production of Cannabis. There is no assurance the Company will be able to successfully convert the exiting 2 tons/year VINIA(R) facility to a Cannabis production facility in H1, 2022. There is no assurance we will be able to commercialize our first Cannabis products in the first half of 2022, and there is no assurance the Company will be able to add new verticals or build additional plants elsewhere. Clinical trials are subject to risks of significant cost overruns and lengthy delays with no assurance they will confirm desired results. Even where desired results are obtained government approvals for treatments take considerable time and cannot be guaranteed. There is no assurance the BioFarming technology will make a significant impact on multiple verticals of life -science based businesses in general or in the bio-space industry. There is no assurance that we will achieve our objective of being a leading supplier of Cannabis. There is no assurance that the Israeli market results for Vinia(R) will translate directly into the U.S. markets which may depend on different consumer preferences and more substantial marketing expenditures and resources. There is no assurance that strong sales metrics experienced to date will result in future demand for VINIA(R). Markets for nutraceuticals are unpredictable and subject to changes in consumer tastes and trends as well as economic factors beyond our control. Delays and cost overruns may result in delays achieving our objectives obtaining market acceptance and regulatory approvals for geographic expansion is subject to risk and cannot be guaranteed. Projected sales of Cannabis will require the company to obtain production and / or export licensing which cannot be assured. \n\n There is no assurance we will trigger an acceleration of revenue growth or a game changing expansion of our product lineup. These things are subject to uncertainties including the uncertainty of continuing market acceptance of our products and market acceptance of new products which are subject to changing consumer preference and access to marketplaces. There is no assurance we will achieve additional major B2B partnerships in 2022 as this is subject to acceptance of our products by businesses and their customers. There is no assurance that we will increase our investor base or add new institutional investors as this is subject to our meeting investment criteria of investors and conditions affecting equity markets generally. Continuing outbreaks of Covid variants may cause delays or other impacts to business plans and /or impact equity markets in 2022. \n\n All forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain, and actual results may be affected by a number of material factors beyond our control. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. BHSC does not intend to update forward-looking statement disclosures other than through our regular management discussion and analysis disclosures. \n\n Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. \n\n To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/108664  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellogic Announces Upcoming Appointment of Six New Board Members (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1031",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellogic-announces-upcoming-appointment-of-six-new-board-members-01640174711?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=1",
        "text": "CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--December 22, 2021-- \n Satellogic, a leader in sub-meter resolution satellite imagery collection, today announced the upcoming appointment of six new members to the company Board of Directors, collectively bringing decades of public company experience, technical expertise and commercial capabilities to guide the company through its public listing and beyond. The members, Jenette Ramos, Marcos Galperin, Brad Halverson, Dr. Dava Newman, Tarun Bhatnagar and Robert Bearden will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang and Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman on the board, which will be effective upon the company's upcoming public listing. \n\n \"These upcoming additions to our board have impressive backgrounds spanning astronautics, engineering, manufacturing, audit, scaling and public listing, and will help drive the company to its mission of democratizing access to geospatial data. We are grateful for their commitment to the company as we continue to build out our constellation of satellites to remap the entire surface of the Earth daily,\" said Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic CEO. \n\n\n Jenette Ramos, former Senior Vice President in charge of Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Operations at Boeing, will help steer the roll-out of Satellogic's high-throughput manufacturing facility and roll out of the satellites. During her tenure at Boeing, Jenette was named the project manager of Boeing's first environmental lab, and in 2017, Jenette was named Asian American Executive of the Year by the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers. She previously served on the board of the Nature Conservancy of Washington and the National Organization of Disability. \n\n Marcos Galperin is the founder, CEO and Chairman of MercadoLibre, and will assist in guiding Satellogic as a publicly listed company through his experience listing MercadoLibre as the first Latin American technology company on the Nasdaq. Marcos co-founded MercadoLibre in 1999 while attending Stanford University and has managed the business for over 20 years. Marcos is the Chairman of the Board at Globant and serves as a board member at Televisa, Onappsis and Endeavor. \n\n Brad Halverson is the former CFO of Caterpillar, and will chair the Audit Committee at Satellogic. He currently serves on the board of directors of Sysco Corporation, where he is the Lead Independent Director and chairs the Audit Committee. Under his leadership at Caterpillar, the company underwent a significant restructuring, emerging with a strong balance sheet and financial metrics. Prior to serving as CFO, Brad had served in various roles rising from a Staff Accountant to Vice President of the Financial Services Division. \n\n Dr. Dava Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a faculty member of Harvard-MIT Health, Sciences and Technology program. Dava will assist Satellogic with her deep experience with space exploration and building data products for machine learning purposes. Dava is the former deputy administrator at NASA, served as principal investigator on four spaceflight missions, and has authored more than 300 publications. She is also a founder of EarthDNA, a non-profit organization committed to implementing AI and machine learning for enhanced understanding of global metrics and accelerated positive change for global sustainability. \n\n Tarun Bhatnagar, former VP of Payments at Google, joins the board with 25 years of experience in the high-tech industry, and will focus on developing Satellogic's data as a service product. Tarun's career journey has focused primarily on scaling businesses and he brings a deep product expertise to the board as Satellogic navigates the unique challenge of launching a completely new product to revolutionize an industry. In his role at Google, he was responsible for the Payments P&L across the US and led the ecosystems and partnerships teams for the region. Prior to that, Tarun was the VP of Geo Enterprise Business & Cloud Manufacturing Solutions, where he helped found Google's Geo Enterprise offering. \n\n Robert Bearden is Chief Executive Officer of Cloudera Inc. and will bring decades of industry experience in open source software to the Satellogic board. Rob will assist with the software licensing business and helping unite the vision and mission of the company with the strategy and underlying plan. Rob was the co-founder of Hortonworks, a publicly traded open-source company that merged with Cloudera in 2019, and also served as President and COO of SpringSource and COO of JBoss until its acquisition by Red Hat in 2006. He also serves as Chairman of the Board at Nlyte Software. \n\n The new members will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang, partner at Cowboy Ventures, and former partner at Fenwick & West. Ted is also a board member of several other companies including Drata, Vic.ai, SVT Robotics and Contra. He, along with Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman, will complete  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellogic Announces Upcoming Appointment of Six New Board Members (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1032",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellogic-announces-upcoming-appointment-of-six-new-board-members-01640174711?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=4",
        "text": "CHARLOTTE, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--December 22, 2021-- \n Satellogic, a leader in sub-meter resolution satellite imagery collection, today announced the upcoming appointment of six new members to the company Board of Directors, collectively bringing decades of public company experience, technical expertise and commercial capabilities to guide the company through its public listing and beyond. The members, Jenette Ramos, Marcos Galperin, Brad Halverson, Dr. Dava Newman, Tarun Bhatnagar and Robert Bearden will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang and Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman on the board, which will be effective upon the company's upcoming public listing. \n\n \"These upcoming additions to our board have impressive backgrounds spanning astronautics, engineering, manufacturing, audit, scaling and public listing, and will help drive the company to its mission of democratizing access to geospatial data. We are grateful for their commitment to the company as we continue to build out our constellation of satellites to remap the entire surface of the Earth daily,\" said Emiliano Kargieman, Satellogic CEO. \n\n\n Jenette Ramos, former Senior Vice President in charge of Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Operations at Boeing, will help steer the roll-out of Satellogic's high-throughput manufacturing facility and roll out of the satellites. During her tenure at Boeing, Jenette was named the project manager of Boeing's first environmental lab, and in 2017, Jenette was named Asian American Executive of the Year by the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers. She previously served on the board of the Nature Conservancy of Washington and the National Organization of Disability. \n\n Marcos Galperin is the founder, CEO and Chairman of MercadoLibre, and will assist in guiding Satellogic as a publicly listed company through his experience listing MercadoLibre as the first Latin American technology company on the Nasdaq. Marcos co-founded MercadoLibre in 1999 while attending Stanford University and has managed the business for over 20 years. Marcos is the Chairman of the Board at Globant and serves as a board member at Televisa, Onappsis and Endeavor. \n\n Brad Halverson is the former CFO of Caterpillar, and will chair the Audit Committee at Satellogic. He currently serves on the board of directors of Sysco Corporation, where he is the Lead Independent Director and chairs the Audit Committee. Under his leadership at Caterpillar, the company underwent a significant restructuring, emerging with a strong balance sheet and financial metrics. Prior to serving as CFO, Brad had served in various roles rising from a Staff Accountant to Vice President of the Financial Services Division. \n\n Dr. Dava Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a faculty member of Harvard-MIT Health, Sciences and Technology program. Dava will assist Satellogic with her deep experience with space exploration and building data products for machine learning purposes. Dava is the former deputy administrator at NASA, served as principal investigator on four spaceflight missions, and has authored more than 300 publications. She is also a founder of EarthDNA, a non-profit organization committed to implementing AI and machine learning for enhanced understanding of global metrics and accelerated positive change for global sustainability. \n\n Tarun Bhatnagar, former VP of Payments at Google, joins the board with 25 years of experience in the high-tech industry, and will focus on developing Satellogic's data as a service product. Tarun's career journey has focused primarily on scaling businesses and he brings a deep product expertise to the board as Satellogic navigates the unique challenge of launching a completely new product to revolutionize an industry. In his role at Google, he was responsible for the Payments P&L across the US and led the ecosystems and partnerships teams for the region. Prior to that, Tarun was the VP of Geo Enterprise Business & Cloud Manufacturing Solutions, where he helped found Google's Geo Enterprise offering. \n\n Robert Bearden is Chief Executive Officer of Cloudera Inc. and will bring decades of industry experience in open source software to the Satellogic board. Rob will assist with the software licensing business and helping unite the vision and mission of the company with the strategy and underlying plan. Rob was the co-founder of Hortonworks, a publicly traded open-source company that merged with Cloudera in 2019, and also served as President and COO of SpringSource and COO of JBoss until its acquisition by Red Hat in 2006. He also serves as Chairman of the Board at Nlyte Software. \n\n The new members will join incoming Chairman Ted Wang, partner at Cowboy Ventures, and former partner at Fenwick & West. Ted is also a board member of several other companies including Drata, Vic.ai, SVT Robotics and Contra. He, along with Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman, will complete  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Redwire Will Launch Superalloy Manufacturing Technology and Plant Science Experiments to Space Station Aboard SpaceX's 24th Cargo Resupply Mission (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1033",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/redwire-will-launch-superalloy-manufacturing-technology-and-plant-science-experiments-to-space-station-aboard-spacex-s-24th-cargo-resupply-mission-01639575313?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=6",
        "text": "\"The Redwire capabilities launching on this mission signal an exciting opportunity to increase the throughput of in space manufacturing and life sciences R&D in space,\" said Andrew Rush, President & COO of Redwire. \"Over the past 15 months, we've launched four new manufacturing capabilities to the space station and are launching three plant biology experiments on this mission alone. Redwire's expanded capabilities are working to accelerate technology development and scientific discovery that will improve life on Earth and drive a space-for-Earth economy.\" \n\n Redwire will host an in-person \"Launch & Learn\" media luncheon at 1 p.m. EST Monday, Dec. 20 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex to discuss the company's four payloads launching on this mission. Media will have the opportunity to learn more about the Redwire technology being launched and speak with subject matter experts. Media wishing to attend the luncheon must contact Tere Riley at: Tere.Riley@redwirespace.com. \n\n\n\n\n\n The Redwire technology launching on this mission includes in-space manufacturing technology and plant biology experiments from the company's latest acquisition, Techshot, which demonstrates the breadth of Redwire's on-orbit capabilities to accelerate more scientific discovery and deliver more beneficial products to Earth. \n\n\n Turbine Superalloy Casting Module \n\n Redwire will be launching the Turbine Superalloy Casting Module (TSCM), a commercial in-space manufacturing device designed to provide proof-of-principle for polycrystalline superalloy part manufacturing in microgravity for terrestrial use. Applications for this technology include turbine engines in industries such as aerospace and power generation. TSCM was developed in partnership with NASA's ISS Research Integration Office at Johnson Space Center. \n\n MVP-PLANT-01 \n\n MVP-PLANT-01 is an investigation launching on SpaceX-24 that will use Redwire's Multi-Use Variable-Gravity Platform (MVP) to profile and monitor shoot and root development of plants in microgravity to understand the regulatory mechanisms involved in plant responses to a novel environment. MVP-PLANT-01 can contribute designing plants to withstand extreme terrestrial environments and long-duration spaceflight. The investigation will also validate Redwire MVP Phytofuge experiment modules for future plant investigations on the ISS. The Phytofuge module is one of several different experiment modules developed for use in conjunction with the MVP facility. The modules were developed by Redwire engineers to enable early-stage seedling plant growth in a variable gravity environment. \n\n Veggie PONDS-03R \n\n Also launching on SpaceX-24 is Veggie PONDS-03R, a technology demonstration that explores how plants respond to microgravity and demonstrates technology for reliable vegetable production on orbit. This flight will also validate the Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System (PONDS) hardware, which was originally developed by Tupperware Brands and validated by recently acquired Techshot. The PONDS hardware is designed for flight inside NASA's Vegetable Production System (Veggie) facility. PONDS can grow a wide variety of plants in space and requires far less monitoring and maintenance time from flight crews than other passive plant growth devices. \n\n Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics \n\n Also as part of the SpaceX-24 mission, Redwire is working with researchers from Clemson University to support the Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics (Plant Habitat-05) investigation, which will utilize the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), an automated plant growth facility managed by Redwire that is used to conduct bioscience research aboard ISS. The investigation will cultivate several cotton genotypes from cotton plant tissue cultures exposed to spaceflight. This project is sponsored by the ISS National Lab and stems from a previous Cotton Sustainability Challenge. The knowledge gained from the investigation could enable the growth of cotton plants that more efficiently use water and adapt to changing environments. \n\n To learn more about the science and technology that Redwire is launching on SpaceX's 24 cargo resupply mission, visit: www.redwirespace.com \n\n About Redwire \n\n Redwire Corporation (NYSE: RDW) is a leader in space infrastructure for the next generation space economy, with valuable IP for solar power generation and in-space 3D printing and manufacturing. With decades of flight heritage combined with the agile and innovative culture of a commercial space platform, Redwire is uniquely positioned to assist its customers in solving the complex challenges of future space missions. For more information, please visit www.redwirespace.com. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211215005560/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Media Contact: \n Tere Riley \n\n Tere.Riley@redwirespace.com \n\n 321-831-0134 \n\n OR \n\n Investors: \n\n Michael Shannon \n\n investorrelations@redwirespace.com \n\n 904-425-1431 \n \n SOURCE: Redwire Corporation \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Redwire Will Launch Superalloy Manufacturing Technology and Plant Science Experiments to Space Station Aboard SpaceX's 24th Cargo Resupply Mission (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1034",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/redwire-will-launch-superalloy-manufacturing-technology-and-plant-science-experiments-to-space-station-aboard-spacex-s-24th-cargo-resupply-mission-01639575313?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=10",
        "text": "\"The Redwire capabilities launching on this mission signal an exciting opportunity to increase the throughput of in space manufacturing and life sciences R&D in space,\" said Andrew Rush, President & COO of Redwire. \"Over the past 15 months, we've launched four new manufacturing capabilities to the space station and are launching three plant biology experiments on this mission alone. Redwire's expanded capabilities are working to accelerate technology development and scientific discovery that will improve life on Earth and drive a space-for-Earth economy.\" \n\n Redwire will host an in-person \"Launch & Learn\" media luncheon at 1 p.m. EST Monday, Dec. 20 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex to discuss the company's four payloads launching on this mission. Media will have the opportunity to learn more about the Redwire technology being launched and speak with subject matter experts. Media wishing to attend the luncheon must contact Tere Riley at: Tere.Riley@redwirespace.com. \n\n The Redwire technology launching on this mission includes in-space manufacturing technology and plant biology experiments from the company's latest acquisition, Techshot, which demonstrates the breadth of Redwire's on-orbit capabilities to accelerate more scientific discovery and deliver more beneficial products to Earth. \n\n\n Turbine Superalloy Casting Module \n\n Redwire will be launching the Turbine Superalloy Casting Module (TSCM), a commercial in-space manufacturing device designed to provide proof-of-principle for polycrystalline superalloy part manufacturing in microgravity for terrestrial use. Applications for this technology include turbine engines in industries such as aerospace and power generation. TSCM was developed in partnership with NASA's ISS Research Integration Office at Johnson Space Center. \n\n MVP-PLANT-01 \n\n MVP-PLANT-01 is an investigation launching on SpaceX-24 that will use Redwire's Multi-Use Variable-Gravity Platform (MVP) to profile and monitor shoot and root development of plants in microgravity to understand the regulatory mechanisms involved in plant responses to a novel environment. MVP-PLANT-01 can contribute designing plants to withstand extreme terrestrial environments and long-duration spaceflight. The investigation will also validate Redwire MVP Phytofuge experiment modules for future plant investigations on the ISS. The Phytofuge module is one of several different experiment modules developed for use in conjunction with the MVP facility. The modules were developed by Redwire engineers to enable early-stage seedling plant growth in a variable gravity environment. \n\n Veggie PONDS-03R \n\n Also launching on SpaceX-24 is Veggie PONDS-03R, a technology demonstration that explores how plants respond to microgravity and demonstrates technology for reliable vegetable production on orbit. This flight will also validate the Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System (PONDS) hardware, which was originally developed by Tupperware Brands and validated by recently acquired Techshot. The PONDS hardware is designed for flight inside NASA's Vegetable Production System (Veggie) facility. PONDS can grow a wide variety of plants in space and requires far less monitoring and maintenance time from flight crews than other passive plant growth devices. \n\n Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics \n\n Also as part of the SpaceX-24 mission, Redwire is working with researchers from Clemson University to support the Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics (Plant Habitat-05) investigation, which will utilize the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), an automated plant growth facility managed by Redwire that is used to conduct bioscience research aboard ISS. The investigation will cultivate several cotton genotypes from cotton plant tissue cultures exposed to spaceflight. This project is sponsored by the ISS National Lab and stems from a previous Cotton Sustainability Challenge. The knowledge gained from the investigation could enable the growth of cotton plants that more efficiently use water and adapt to changing environments. \n\n To learn more about the science and technology that Redwire is launching on SpaceX's 24 cargo resupply mission, visit: www.redwirespace.com \n\n About Redwire \n\n Redwire Corporation (NYSE: RDW) is a leader in space infrastructure for the next generation space economy, with valuable IP for solar power generation and in-space 3D printing and manufacturing. With decades of flight heritage combined with the agile and innovative culture of a commercial space platform, Redwire is uniquely positioned to assist its customers in solving the complex challenges of future space missions. For more information, please visit www.redwirespace.com. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211215005560/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Media Contact: \n Tere Riley \n\n Tere.Riley@redwirespace.com \n\n 321-831-0134 \n\n OR  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Redwire Will Launch Superalloy Manufacturing Technology and Plant Science Experiments to Space Station Aboard SpaceX's 24th Cargo Resupply Mission (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1035",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/redwire-will-launch-superalloy-manufacturing-technology-and-plant-science-experiments-to-space-station-aboard-spacex-s-24th-cargo-resupply-mission-01639575313?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=8",
        "text": "\"The Redwire capabilities launching on this mission signal an exciting opportunity to increase the throughput of in space manufacturing and life sciences R&D in space,\" said Andrew Rush, President & COO of Redwire. \"Over the past 15 months, we've launched four new manufacturing capabilities to the space station and are launching three plant biology experiments on this mission alone. Redwire's expanded capabilities are working to accelerate technology development and scientific discovery that will improve life on Earth and drive a space-for-Earth economy.\" \n\n Redwire will host an in-person \"Launch & Learn\" media luncheon at 1 p.m. EST Monday, Dec. 20 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex to discuss the company's four payloads launching on this mission. Media will have the opportunity to learn more about the Redwire technology being launched and speak with subject matter experts. Media wishing to attend the luncheon must contact Tere Riley at: Tere.Riley@redwirespace.com. \n\n\n\n\n\n The Redwire technology launching on this mission includes in-space manufacturing technology and plant biology experiments from the company's latest acquisition, Techshot, which demonstrates the breadth of Redwire's on-orbit capabilities to accelerate more scientific discovery and deliver more beneficial products to Earth. \n\n\n Turbine Superalloy Casting Module \n\n Redwire will be launching the Turbine Superalloy Casting Module (TSCM), a commercial in-space manufacturing device designed to provide proof-of-principle for polycrystalline superalloy part manufacturing in microgravity for terrestrial use. Applications for this technology include turbine engines in industries such as aerospace and power generation. TSCM was developed in partnership with NASA's ISS Research Integration Office at Johnson Space Center. \n\n MVP-PLANT-01 \n\n MVP-PLANT-01 is an investigation launching on SpaceX-24 that will use Redwire's Multi-Use Variable-Gravity Platform (MVP) to profile and monitor shoot and root development of plants in microgravity to understand the regulatory mechanisms involved in plant responses to a novel environment. MVP-PLANT-01 can contribute designing plants to withstand extreme terrestrial environments and long-duration spaceflight. The investigation will also validate Redwire MVP Phytofuge experiment modules for future plant investigations on the ISS. The Phytofuge module is one of several different experiment modules developed for use in conjunction with the MVP facility. The modules were developed by Redwire engineers to enable early-stage seedling plant growth in a variable gravity environment. \n\n Veggie PONDS-03R \n\n Also launching on SpaceX-24 is Veggie PONDS-03R, a technology demonstration that explores how plants respond to microgravity and demonstrates technology for reliable vegetable production on orbit. This flight will also validate the Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System (PONDS) hardware, which was originally developed by Tupperware Brands and validated by recently acquired Techshot. The PONDS hardware is designed for flight inside NASA's Vegetable Production System (Veggie) facility. PONDS can grow a wide variety of plants in space and requires far less monitoring and maintenance time from flight crews than other passive plant growth devices. \n\n Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics \n\n Also as part of the SpaceX-24 mission, Redwire is working with researchers from Clemson University to support the Unlocking the Cotton Genome to Precision Genetics (Plant Habitat-05) investigation, which will utilize the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), an automated plant growth facility managed by Redwire that is used to conduct bioscience research aboard ISS. The investigation will cultivate several cotton genotypes from cotton plant tissue cultures exposed to spaceflight. This project is sponsored by the ISS National Lab and stems from a previous Cotton Sustainability Challenge. The knowledge gained from the investigation could enable the growth of cotton plants that more efficiently use water and adapt to changing environments. \n\n To learn more about the science and technology that Redwire is launching on SpaceX's 24 cargo resupply mission, visit: www.redwirespace.com \n\n About Redwire \n\n Redwire Corporation (NYSE: RDW) is a leader in space infrastructure for the next generation space economy, with valuable IP for solar power generation and in-space 3D printing and manufacturing. With decades of flight heritage combined with the agile and innovative culture of a commercial space platform, Redwire is uniquely positioned to assist its customers in solving the complex challenges of future space missions. For more information, please visit www.redwirespace.com. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211215005560/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Media Contact: \n Tere Riley \n\n Tere.Riley@redwirespace.com \n\n 321-831-0134 \n\n  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Momentus Welcomes Recent Addition to Procure Holdings' Procure Space ETF (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1036",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/momentus-welcomes-recent-addition-to-procure-holdings-procure-space-etf-01640121186?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=2",
        "text": "\"We're pleased to be included in the Procure Space ETF,\" said Momentus Chief Executive Officer John Rood. \"The new space economy will be enabled by commercial companies and we're glad that investors see value in what space infrastructure and services firms can offer for the future.\" \n\n\n\n\n\n About Momentus \n\n\n Momentus is a U.S. commercial space company that plans to offer in-space infrastructure services, including in-space transportation, hosted payloads and in-orbit services. Momentus believes it can make new ways of operating in space possible with its planned in-space transfer and service vehicles that will be powered by an innovative water plasma-based propulsion system that is under development. The Company anticipates flying its first Vigoride vehicle to Low Earth Orbit on a third-party launch provider as early as June 2022, subject to receipt of appropriate government licenses and availability of slots on its launch provider's manifest, for which there is no assurance such licenses, approvals and availability will be received, if at all. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release contains certain statements which may constitute \"forward-looking statements\" for purposes of the federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Momentus or its management team's expectations, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future, projections, forecasts or other characterizations of future events or circumstances, including any underlying assumptions, and are not guarantees of future performance. The words \"may,\" \"will,\" \"anticipate,\" \"believe,\" \"expect,\" \"continue,\" \"could,\" \"estimate,\" \"future,\" \"expect, \" \"intends,\" \"may,\" \"might,\" \"plan,\" \"possible,\" \"potential,\" \"aim,\" \"strive,\" \"predict,\" \"project,\" \"should,\" \"would\" and similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. \n\n Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. Instead, they are based only on our current beliefs, expectations and assumptions regarding the future of our business, future plans and strategies, projections, anticipated events and trends, the economy and other future conditions. \n\n Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of Momentus' control. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, including but not limited to risks and uncertainties included under the \"Risk Factors\" in the Proxy Statement/Prospectus filed by the Company on July 23, 2021, as such factors may be updated from time to time in our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the \"SEC\"), accessible on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov and the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.momentus.space. These filings identify and address other important risks and uncertainties that could cause the Company's actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and, except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211220005983/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Investors \n Darryl Genovesi at investors@momentus.space \n\n Media \n\n Jessica Pieczonka at press@momentus.space \n \n SOURCE: Momentus Inc. \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Hey, Star Wars geeks. There\u2019s a plane just for you now. (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1037",
        "date": "2019-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2019/11/20/hey-star-wars-geeks-theres-plane-just-you-now/",
        "text": "United Airlines isn\u2019t flying anyone to a galaxy far, far away. But the carrier is giving Star Wars buffs a new way to indulge their Force fandom in the form of a new decked-out plane that started flying this month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThink of it as a year-long airborne commercial for the latest film in the franchise, \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,\u201d which comes out next month. The movie title is, in fact, written on the outside of the Boeing 737-800, which also bears X-wing and TIE fighter spacecraft, a blue and red lightsaber on either side of the tail and a spray of stars against a dark backdrop. So cool! I\u2019m on the only @united Star Wars plane in the world headed to NJ! \u2708\ufe0f The theme music is full blast. Feel like I\u2019m on The Millennium Falcon. #maytheforcebewithyou #speakerlife pic.twitter.com/4kpkl0lfEh\u2014 Anne Grady Group (@AnneGradyGroup) November 13, 2019\n\nEach side of the exterior represents the good (blue) and evil (red) side of the Force; even the name of the airline is written in each color. Details continue inside the cabin, where the film theme song plays as passengers board and a plaque declares, \u201cNo matter where your travel takes you today \u2014 may the Force be with you.\u201d A new Star Wars-themed safety video includes lots of droid action.The seats get no break from the dramatic set design. Headrests on one side, in red, bear the mark of the autocratic First Order. This is where Stormtroopers and Kylo Ren might sit, given a choice (which would mean they did not book the restrictive basic economy fare). On the other side of the cabin, blue headrests carry the sign of the Princess Leia-founded Resistance. That\u2019s the section for the Reys and Luke Skywalkers among us.Passengers typically do not get a chance to choose their allegiance, spokeswoman Maddie King said. That\u2019s because most already have their seats picked before they know they\u2019re on the new plane. The jet is mainly used on North American routes, as well as some flights to Central America or the Caribbean.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s mainly a surprise and a delight for it to show up at your airport or as your actual aircraft,\u201d she says.The United Airlines #StarWars plane shows up as an X-Wing on FlightAware \ud83d\ude02 pic.twitter.com/OFrb2Z7SiK\u2014 Matt Lindsley (@mjlbb21) November 14, 2019\n\nThose who are intent on getting the Skywalker experience \u2014 if Jedi mind tricks don\u2019t work for them \u2014 can try to game the system by keeping tabs on the plane in the United app or through the FlightAware tracking tool by using its tail number, N36272. Flights will be shown for that current day, as well as for the next two, which could provide a way for highly motivated travelers to book a seat at the last minute. But aircraft can be swapped out anytime, so such a gambit is risky.\u201cFlights are typically assigned three days out, so you would get an idea of where the plane is going to be flying three days out,\u201d King says. \u201cWe have seen some customers try to book the flight, and we have seen some who were successful.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven non-passengers can figure out where the aircraft is flying through the United app or FlightAware, which plane spotters appear to have been doing over the past week. On the FlightAware app, the plane stands out from everything else in the sky: It appears as an X-wing Starfighter.United\u2019s jet will be flying long after the new Star Wars movie is out of theaters. It\u2019s scheduled to be in service until the end of next year, when a new paint job will remove the Skywalker design from the air.Read more:Southwest\u2019s plan to conquer the airline industry, one joke at a timeEverything you need to know about Baby Yoda, who is probably not actually Yoda but still very cuteA brief history of airline cookie drama, from Biscoff to Stroopwafels The airline is operating a flying ad for the franchise\u2019s next movie. Fliers can only luck into the experience, although die-hard fans could attempt to pin down the jet and book. Hey, Star Wars geeks. There\u2019s a plane just for you now.",
        "author": "Hannah Sampson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1038",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2019/07/11/biggest-questions-about-space-travel-answered/",
        "text": "Space suddenly seems a little more reachable \u2014 at least, for those who have cash to burn.Virgin Galactic\u2019s announcement Tuesday that it is going public through a merger with an investment firm came with an update that the company is preparing to send its first customers into space within a year, CNBC reported. More than 600 people have placed deposits topping $80 million in total, chairman Chamath Palihapitiya told the network, and another 2,500 want to get in line. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVirgin isn\u2019t alone in the space race: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space exploration company, is promoting \u201cthe largest windows in space\u201d on its New Shepard capsule, although test flights with humans onboard have not yet taken place. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Elon Musk announced last year that his company, SpaceX, has a customer lined up who will pay to fly around the moon. Last month, NASA made a change in policy and said it would allow space tourists to visit the International Space Station as soon as next year. The agency said logistics would have to be arranged by SpaceX and Boeing, which NASA has tapped to get crews to the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo will we all be jetting around space with our cameras, orbital passports and zero-gravity fanny packs in a decade? Not so fast. Here\u2019s what potential space explorers need to know.Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture publicWhat does space tourism involve?The most widely touted versions involve rocketing passengers more than 50 miles into the atmosphere and achieving minutes of weightlessness and witnessing Earth views before returning to land. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin differ in the details of how they will get to space and the altitude they\u2019ll reach, but they are promoting relatively similar experiences and plan to carry six passengers at once.There are even more ambitious offerings: Space Adventures, which has sent seven people to space as tourists, offers multiday experiences including a \u201ccircumlunar\u201d mission, a trip to the International Space Station and a spacewalk add-on; the company has contracted with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. Bigelow Space Operations, a branch of space-technology company Bigelow Aerospace, said last month it had \u201cpaid substantial sums as deposits and reservation fees to secure up to four SpaceX launches to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor those craving weightlessness without the actual space travel, Zero Gravity Corporation gets you there 15 times, for 20 to 30 seconds each, in a trip, through aerobatic maneuvers.How much does it cost?Virgin Galactic is reportedly charging up to $250,000 for its trips. Reuters reported that Blue Origin will charge between $200,000 and $300,000.For the biggest spenders, Bigelow Space Operations has set the price of a space station trip at $52 million; most of that cost is to get there. NASA estimated that staying at the station would set travelers back about $35,000 a night.Space Adventures does not list prices on its website. (If you have to ask, you probably can\u2019t afford it.) The last tourist in space, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Lalibert\u00e9, reportedly paid $35 million for his 2009 trip to the space station arranged by the company in partnership with Russia\u2019s space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe option of least resistance is Zero Gravity Corporation, which sells a single seat on its flights (which, again, don\u2019t actually go to space) for $5,400 plus tax.Who can go?Other than prohibitions associated with cost, no companies have announced any limitations on who can travel. On its website, Virgin Galactic says its plan is to \u201copen space to everybody,\u201d from ages \u201cspanning the teens to the 90s.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon planHow soon can people go?This has been a moving target for more than a decade, and initial dates are still not firm. Virgin Galactic\u2019s chairman said Tuesday that it expected to fly its first customers within a year, but with a backlog of hundreds, the wait would still be extensive. Blue Origin has not yet opened reservations or even flown a test flight with humans. And SpaceX has said its trip around the moon could not happen before 2023.What kind of training is necessary?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstronauts who fly with space programs are subject to high fitness standards and rigorous training. Space tourists, not so much.Blue Origin says passengers will learn everything they need to know the day before launch, including \u201cmission and vehicle overviews, in-depth safety briefings, mission simulation and instruction on your in-flight activities such as operational procedures, communications and maneuvering in a weightless environment.\u201dVirgin Galactic says training and preparation would take three days: \u201cPre-flight training will ensure that each astronaut is mentally and physically prepared to savor every second of the spaceflight and fully equipped to fulfill any personal objectives. Our aerospace medical experts will be constantly on hand to offer advice and help, and to check pre-flight fitness,\u201d the company says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhere do I sign up?For the most part, companies that are moving closer to spaceflight are taking names on their websites. There are also a handful of travel agents accredited for space trips with Virgin Galactic. Bigelow Space Operations essentially tells people to stay tuned: \u201cAs you might imagine, as they say \u2018the devil is in the details,\u2019 and there are many.\u201dChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Space tourism will surely be a blast, but can it also improve life on Earth?Introducing By The Way, a new digital travel product from The Washington PostYes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. So you want to take a trip to space? Here's everything aspiring astronauts need to know. The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered",
        "author": "Hannah Sampson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1039",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2019/07/11/biggest-questions-about-space-travel-answered/",
        "text": "Space suddenly seems a little more reachable \u2014 at least, for those who have cash to burn.Virgin Galactic\u2019s announcement Tuesday that it is going public through a merger with an investment firm came with an update that the company is preparing to send its first customers into space within a year, CNBC reported. More than 600 people have placed deposits topping $80 million in total, chairman Chamath Palihapitiya told the network, and another 2,500 want to get in line. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVirgin isn\u2019t alone in the space race: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space exploration company, is promoting \u201cthe largest windows in space\u201d on its New Shepard capsule, although test flights with humans onboard have not yet taken place. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Elon Musk announced last year that his company, SpaceX, has a customer lined up who will pay to fly around the moon. Last month, NASA made a change in policy and said it would allow space tourists to visit the International Space Station as soon as next year. The agency said logistics would have to be arranged by SpaceX and Boeing, which NASA has tapped to get crews to the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo will we all be jetting around space with our cameras, orbital passports and zero-gravity fanny packs in a decade? Not so fast. Here\u2019s what potential space explorers need to know.Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture publicWhat does space tourism involve?The most widely touted versions involve rocketing passengers more than 50 miles into the atmosphere and achieving minutes of weightlessness and witnessing Earth views before returning to land. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin differ in the details of how they will get to space and the altitude they\u2019ll reach, but they are promoting relatively similar experiences and plan to carry six passengers at once.There are even more ambitious offerings: Space Adventures, which has sent seven people to space as tourists, offers multiday experiences including a \u201ccircumlunar\u201d mission, a trip to the International Space Station and a spacewalk add-on; the company has contracted with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. Bigelow Space Operations, a branch of space-technology company Bigelow Aerospace, said last month it had \u201cpaid substantial sums as deposits and reservation fees to secure up to four SpaceX launches to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor those craving weightlessness without the actual space travel, Zero Gravity Corporation gets you there 15 times, for 20 to 30 seconds each, in a trip, through aerobatic maneuvers.How much does it cost?Virgin Galactic is reportedly charging up to $250,000 for its trips. Reuters reported that Blue Origin will charge between $200,000 and $300,000.For the biggest spenders, Bigelow Space Operations has set the price of a space station trip at $52 million; most of that cost is to get there. NASA estimated that staying at the station would set travelers back about $35,000 a night.Space Adventures does not list prices on its website. (If you have to ask, you probably can\u2019t afford it.) The last tourist in space, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Lalibert\u00e9, reportedly paid $35 million for his 2009 trip to the space station arranged by the company in partnership with Russia\u2019s space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe option of least resistance is Zero Gravity Corporation, which sells a single seat on its flights (which, again, don\u2019t actually go to space) for $5,400 plus tax.Who can go?Other than prohibitions associated with cost, no companies have announced any limitations on who can travel. On its website, Virgin Galactic says its plan is to \u201copen space to everybody,\u201d from ages \u201cspanning the teens to the 90s.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon planHow soon can people go?This has been a moving target for more than a decade, and initial dates are still not firm. Virgin Galactic\u2019s chairman said Tuesday that it expected to fly its first customers within a year, but with a backlog of hundreds, the wait would still be extensive. Blue Origin has not yet opened reservations or even flown a test flight with humans. And SpaceX has said its trip around the moon could not happen before 2023.What kind of training is necessary?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstronauts who fly with space programs are subject to high fitness standards and rigorous training. Space tourists, not so much.Blue Origin says passengers will learn everything they need to know the day before launch, including \u201cmission and vehicle overviews, in-depth safety briefings, mission simulation and instruction on your in-flight activities such as operational procedures, communications and maneuvering in a weightless environment.\u201dVirgin Galactic says training and preparation would take three days: \u201cPre-flight training will ensure that each astronaut is mentally and physically prepared to savor every second of the spaceflight and fully equipped to fulfill any personal objectives. Our aerospace medical experts will be constantly on hand to offer advice and help, and to check pre-flight fitness,\u201d the company says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhere do I sign up?For the most part, companies that are moving closer to spaceflight are taking names on their websites. There are also a handful of travel agents accredited for space trips with Virgin Galactic. Bigelow Space Operations essentially tells people to stay tuned: \u201cAs you might imagine, as they say \u2018the devil is in the details,\u2019 and there are many.\u201dChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Space tourism will surely be a blast, but can it also improve life on Earth?Introducing By The Way, a new digital travel product from The Washington PostYes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. So you want to take a trip to space? Here's everything aspiring astronauts need to know. The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered",
        "author": "Hannah Sampson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1040",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2019/07/11/biggest-questions-about-space-travel-answered/",
        "text": "Space suddenly seems a little more reachable \u2014 at least, for those who have cash to burn.Virgin Galactic\u2019s announcement Tuesday that it is going public through a merger with an investment firm came with an update that the company is preparing to send its first customers into space within a year, CNBC reported. More than 600 people have placed deposits topping $80 million in total, chairman Chamath Palihapitiya told the network, and another 2,500 want to get in line. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVirgin isn\u2019t alone in the space race: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space exploration company, is promoting \u201cthe largest windows in space\u201d on its New Shepard capsule, although test flights with humans onboard have not yet taken place. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Elon Musk announced last year that his company, SpaceX, has a customer lined up who will pay to fly around the moon. Last month, NASA made a change in policy and said it would allow space tourists to visit the International Space Station as soon as next year. The agency said logistics would have to be arranged by SpaceX and Boeing, which NASA has tapped to get crews to the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo will we all be jetting around space with our cameras, orbital passports and zero-gravity fanny packs in a decade? Not so fast. Here\u2019s what potential space explorers need to know.Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture publicWhat does space tourism involve?The most widely touted versions involve rocketing passengers more than 50 miles into the atmosphere and achieving minutes of weightlessness and witnessing Earth views before returning to land. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin differ in the details of how they will get to space and the altitude they\u2019ll reach, but they are promoting relatively similar experiences and plan to carry six passengers at once.There are even more ambitious offerings: Space Adventures, which has sent seven people to space as tourists, offers multiday experiences including a \u201ccircumlunar\u201d mission, a trip to the International Space Station and a spacewalk add-on; the company has contracted with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. Bigelow Space Operations, a branch of space-technology company Bigelow Aerospace, said last month it had \u201cpaid substantial sums as deposits and reservation fees to secure up to four SpaceX launches to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor those craving weightlessness without the actual space travel, Zero Gravity Corporation gets you there 15 times, for 20 to 30 seconds each, in a trip, through aerobatic maneuvers.How much does it cost?Virgin Galactic is reportedly charging up to $250,000 for its trips. Reuters reported that Blue Origin will charge between $200,000 and $300,000.For the biggest spenders, Bigelow Space Operations has set the price of a space station trip at $52 million; most of that cost is to get there. NASA estimated that staying at the station would set travelers back about $35,000 a night.Space Adventures does not list prices on its website. (If you have to ask, you probably can\u2019t afford it.) The last tourist in space, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Lalibert\u00e9, reportedly paid $35 million for his 2009 trip to the space station arranged by the company in partnership with Russia\u2019s space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe option of least resistance is Zero Gravity Corporation, which sells a single seat on its flights (which, again, don\u2019t actually go to space) for $5,400 plus tax.Who can go?Other than prohibitions associated with cost, no companies have announced any limitations on who can travel. On its website, Virgin Galactic says its plan is to \u201copen space to everybody,\u201d from ages \u201cspanning the teens to the 90s.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon planHow soon can people go?This has been a moving target for more than a decade, and initial dates are still not firm. Virgin Galactic\u2019s chairman said Tuesday that it expected to fly its first customers within a year, but with a backlog of hundreds, the wait would still be extensive. Blue Origin has not yet opened reservations or even flown a test flight with humans. And SpaceX has said its trip around the moon could not happen before 2023.What kind of training is necessary?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstronauts who fly with space programs are subject to high fitness standards and rigorous training. Space tourists, not so much.Blue Origin says passengers will learn everything they need to know the day before launch, including \u201cmission and vehicle overviews, in-depth safety briefings, mission simulation and instruction on your in-flight activities such as operational procedures, communications and maneuvering in a weightless environment.\u201dVirgin Galactic says training and preparation would take three days: \u201cPre-flight training will ensure that each astronaut is mentally and physically prepared to savor every second of the spaceflight and fully equipped to fulfill any personal objectives. Our aerospace medical experts will be constantly on hand to offer advice and help, and to check pre-flight fitness,\u201d the company says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhere do I sign up?For the most part, companies that are moving closer to spaceflight are taking names on their websites. There are also a handful of travel agents accredited for space trips with Virgin Galactic. Bigelow Space Operations essentially tells people to stay tuned: \u201cAs you might imagine, as they say \u2018the devil is in the details,\u2019 and there are many.\u201dChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Space tourism will surely be a blast, but can it also improve life on Earth?Introducing By The Way, a new digital travel product from The Washington PostYes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. So you want to take a trip to space? Here's everything aspiring astronauts need to know. The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered",
        "author": "Hannah Sampson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1041",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2019/07/11/biggest-questions-about-space-travel-answered/",
        "text": "Space suddenly seems a little more reachable \u2014 at least, for those who have cash to burn.Virgin Galactic\u2019s announcement Tuesday that it is going public through a merger with an investment firm came with an update that the company is preparing to send its first customers into space within a year, CNBC reported. More than 600 people have placed deposits topping $80 million in total, chairman Chamath Palihapitiya told the network, and another 2,500 want to get in line. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVirgin isn\u2019t alone in the space race: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space exploration company, is promoting \u201cthe largest windows in space\u201d on its New Shepard capsule, although test flights with humans onboard have not yet taken place. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Elon Musk announced last year that his company, SpaceX, has a customer lined up who will pay to fly around the moon. Last month, NASA made a change in policy and said it would allow space tourists to visit the International Space Station as soon as next year. The agency said logistics would have to be arranged by SpaceX and Boeing, which NASA has tapped to get crews to the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo will we all be jetting around space with our cameras, orbital passports and zero-gravity fanny packs in a decade? Not so fast. Here\u2019s what potential space explorers need to know.Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture publicWhat does space tourism involve?The most widely touted versions involve rocketing passengers more than 50 miles into the atmosphere and achieving minutes of weightlessness and witnessing Earth views before returning to land. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin differ in the details of how they will get to space and the altitude they\u2019ll reach, but they are promoting relatively similar experiences and plan to carry six passengers at once.There are even more ambitious offerings: Space Adventures, which has sent seven people to space as tourists, offers multiday experiences including a \u201ccircumlunar\u201d mission, a trip to the International Space Station and a spacewalk add-on; the company has contracted with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. Bigelow Space Operations, a branch of space-technology company Bigelow Aerospace, said last month it had \u201cpaid substantial sums as deposits and reservation fees to secure up to four SpaceX launches to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor those craving weightlessness without the actual space travel, Zero Gravity Corporation gets you there 15 times, for 20 to 30 seconds each, in a trip, through aerobatic maneuvers.How much does it cost?Virgin Galactic is reportedly charging up to $250,000 for its trips. Reuters reported that Blue Origin will charge between $200,000 and $300,000.For the biggest spenders, Bigelow Space Operations has set the price of a space station trip at $52 million; most of that cost is to get there. NASA estimated that staying at the station would set travelers back about $35,000 a night.Space Adventures does not list prices on its website. (If you have to ask, you probably can\u2019t afford it.) The last tourist in space, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Lalibert\u00e9, reportedly paid $35 million for his 2009 trip to the space station arranged by the company in partnership with Russia\u2019s space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe option of least resistance is Zero Gravity Corporation, which sells a single seat on its flights (which, again, don\u2019t actually go to space) for $5,400 plus tax.Who can go?Other than prohibitions associated with cost, no companies have announced any limitations on who can travel. On its website, Virgin Galactic says its plan is to \u201copen space to everybody,\u201d from ages \u201cspanning the teens to the 90s.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon planHow soon can people go?This has been a moving target for more than a decade, and initial dates are still not firm. Virgin Galactic\u2019s chairman said Tuesday that it expected to fly its first customers within a year, but with a backlog of hundreds, the wait would still be extensive. Blue Origin has not yet opened reservations or even flown a test flight with humans. And SpaceX has said its trip around the moon could not happen before 2023.What kind of training is necessary?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstronauts who fly with space programs are subject to high fitness standards and rigorous training. Space tourists, not so much.Blue Origin says passengers will learn everything they need to know the day before launch, including \u201cmission and vehicle overviews, in-depth safety briefings, mission simulation and instruction on your in-flight activities such as operational procedures, communications and maneuvering in a weightless environment.\u201dVirgin Galactic says training and preparation would take three days: \u201cPre-flight training will ensure that each astronaut is mentally and physically prepared to savor every second of the spaceflight and fully equipped to fulfill any personal objectives. Our aerospace medical experts will be constantly on hand to offer advice and help, and to check pre-flight fitness,\u201d the company says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhere do I sign up?For the most part, companies that are moving closer to spaceflight are taking names on their websites. There are also a handful of travel agents accredited for space trips with Virgin Galactic. Bigelow Space Operations essentially tells people to stay tuned: \u201cAs you might imagine, as they say \u2018the devil is in the details,\u2019 and there are many.\u201dChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Space tourism will surely be a blast, but can it also improve life on Earth?Introducing By The Way, a new digital travel product from The Washington PostYes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. So you want to take a trip to space? Here's everything aspiring astronauts need to know. The 6 biggest questions about space travel, answered",
        "author": "Hannah Sampson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Disney World is celebrating turning 50. Will covid rain on the parade?   (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1042",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/10/01/disney-world-50th-anniversary-2021-updates/",
        "text": "Walt Disney World\u2019s 50th anniversary was supposed to be an epic blowout, a multi-month celebration that would attract millions of visitors to Florida from around the globe.On the agenda: a slate of new reasons to visit, including two big-ticket rides that were scheduled to open \u201cin time for the big 5-0,\u201d official Disney fan club D23 said back in 2017. That\u2019s when executives started hyping the anniversary event with the announcement of attractions based on the Tron and Guardians of the Galaxy movie franchises. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRight\u201cFor a milestone that big, it\u2019s never too early to start planning,\u201d the D23 announcement said.The celebration is still happening \u2014 starting on the actual anniversary, Friday, and stretching for 18 months \u2014 but the pandemic has forced the party to downsize.Masks are back at Disney World amid political tensions over coronavirus restrictions in FloridaWhile new coronavirus cases and deaths are down in Florida from the recent peak, the state was hit hard by the summer delta surge. Disney reinstated indoor mask rules for all guests in late July \u2014 an approach not shared by the state.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGoing to Florida used to be part of the draw of visiting Walt Disney World,\u201d Robert Niles, founder and editor of Theme Park Insider, said in an email. \u201cBut now that\u2019s a liability for many fans who are putting off trips because of Florida\u2019s recent status as Ground Zero for the Delta variant.\u201dThe Florida parks saw smaller crowds about a month before the anniversary \u2014 which coincided both with the delta surge and a return to school. Some visitors were able to walk onto rides that normally command hours-long waits.\u201cYou will never see wait times like this again in a non-pandemic time,\u201d said Len Testa, co-author of the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World and president of TouringPlans.com, a trip-planning site and travel agency.This is going to be a SUPER HOT take & a lot of you won\u2019t agree with me but I\u2019m not really feeling the 50th anniversary things Disney is offering at all. & please don\u2019t get me wrong it\u2019s all beautiful things coming out of it I just expected alittle more.\u2014 KingdaK(HAlloween) \ud83c\udf83 (@Kingdakha92) September 26, 2021\n\nThe pandemic\u2019s impact goes beyond lower visitor counts. Those major rides that were teased four years ago? Still not open, after construction projects were temporarily paused and revenue plummeted because of park closures. International visitors are mostly not allowed to visit until U.S. borders reopen to vaccinated travelers in early November. Some hotels at the sprawling resort complex are not yet operating at full capacity. And a hallmark event of most Disney extravaganzas \u2014 an actual parade \u2014 is not part of the lineup.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cUsually these anniversaries do come with a big new parade,\u201d said Carissa Baker, an assistant professor of theme park and attraction management at the University of Central Florida\u2019s Rosen College of Hospitality Management. Baker worked at Disneyland in California during its 50th in 2005, and has visited Disney\u2019s parks for other big birthdays.Disney is still offering plenty of new things to see, do and taste. Highlights include a ride based on the rat-as-chef movie \u201cRatatouille\u201d that officially launches Friday at Epcot, one of the resort\u2019s four theme parks. Epcot and Magic Kingdom are also both introducing new nighttime shows.\u201cI worried they wouldn\u2019t get this much stuff done, but they did,\u201d Baker said. \u201cI\u2019m pretty excited for them that they were able to do that. It\u2019s certainly not the scale they probably would have anticipated pre-pandemic.\u201dDisney World opened 50 years ago; these workers never leftThe iconic Cinderella Castle got a glow-up for the occasion, and centerpiece structures at all the parks will have special lighting features. New restaurants have been added, too. One comes with space-station views; another serves crepes. Throughout the resort, there are more than 150 new menu items, some of which pay tribute to pieces of Disney World history.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTesta said those additions are great \u2014 but not showstoppers. \u201cBut it\u2019s basically like, what are the small things we can do knowing we don\u2019t have anything big to open?\u201dNiles said he is not seeing the level of enthusiasm for this anniversary that he has for past celebrations among theme park fans.\u201cThe new attractions are nice but not the blockbusters that Disney needs to get people traveling again,\u201d he said. \u201cI am sure that a lot of Disney fans will visit the resort during the celebration, but I suspect that most of them would have gone anyway. Casual fans might wait instead to see how covid plays out before committing to visit at some point later, perhaps when the new Guardians of the Galaxy and Tron roller coasters open.\u201dStory continues below advertisementStill, the party is going on \u2014 and is likely to pick up steam moving forward. On Thursday, the company announced that the Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind ride would open sometime in 2022, though there\u2019s still no update on the Tron coaster. And Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a role-playing Star Wars hotel experience that starts at $5,300 for a family of three, takes off March 1.AdvertisementThe company plans to have all hotels open by the end of the year, aside from one that is being renovated. And chief financial officer Christine McCarthy said during an earnings call this summer that Disney expects to have its domestic parks fully staffed by the end of the year.The gates to Magic Kingdom have opened and guests are pouring in for the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney World! pic.twitter.com/smdNu7PFxg\u2014 WDW News Today (@WDWNT) October 1, 2021\n\nDespite the challenges, photos on social media early Friday morning showed people crowded at the entrance of the Magic Kingdom.Story continues below advertisementThe entry system that Disney introduced during the pandemic showed that Magic Kingdom \u2014 the resort\u2019s first park to open \u2014 had no more availability for Friday, though reservations were still available at other properties.Scott Schweiger, 47, of St. Louis, visited all four parks with his wife and three friends just before the anniversary and found things to enjoy \u2014 but also some cause for complaint. Fans have bemoaned the loss of perks including the complimentary airport shuttle service for resort guests, which is ending Jan. 1, and the replacement of the free FastPass line-skipping option with a new system that charges a fee for faster access to popular rides.Advertisement\u201cIt seems to be a way of rewarding the people who can afford to pay for it with a better park experience,\u201d Schweiger, who uses the name Buzz Bradley for his Disney trivia podcast called the Dis 10, said in an email.Epcot did not disappoint tonight!!! \u2764\ufe0f\u2764\ufe0f\u2764\ufe0f\u2764\ufe0f\u2764\ufe0f\u2764\ufe0f#epcot #Harmonious pic.twitter.com/YHPFhx8Y9f\u2014 Buzz Bradley (@DisneyOnParade) September 30, 2021\n\nHe praised the staff, Epcot\u2019s nighttime show and the new lighting that decks out the park\u2019s Spaceship Earth. But he said he was disappointed with the cost and quality of food and drinks; a dearth of charging stations; upkeep and maintenance; and what he views as the company\u2019s emphasis on rolling out features that will make money rather than give all visitors more to enjoy.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAs for the 50th, I would love to come back to fully experience it, but the dramatic increase in cost, along with the removal of many longtime perks, has really turned myself, and others like me, off,\u201d said Schweiger, who owns a business selling produce at a farmers market.Disney, hit hard by the pandemic, signals its belief that bright days are imminentMany of the people interviewed for this story visited the Florida parks this week to preview the offerings; some spoke to The Washington Post while on-site.Advertisement\u201cWe have a princess cavalcade going by,\u201d Greg Antonelle, co-owner of the travel agency MickeyTravels, said during an interview from the Magic Kingdom on Thursday. Cavalcades, or shorter appearances by characters, have taken the place of parades for now.Antonelle said his agency has had clients locked in for this week for a long time, and bookings \u2014 both for the near term and into next year \u2014 have been ticking up recently after a modest early September.\u201cThis is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,\u201d he said. \u201cSure, the celebration is 18 months long. There\u2019s only one 50th anniversary date: October 1. People wanted to be here.\u201d Though scaled back, the celebration will last 18 months with new rides, restaurants and more. Disney World is celebrating turning 50. Will covid rain on the parade?  ",
        "author": "Hannah Sampson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A vacation that\u2019s out of this world: The first space hotel is set to start construction by 2026 (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1043",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/03/03/space-hotel-orbital-assembly/",
        "text": "While the concept of space tourism may sound ludicrous, plans to launch people into space as a vacation vs. a vocation are well underway.Orbital Assembly, a large space construction company, announced this year in a virtual event on its YouTube channel that it was on track to begin construction on the world\u2019s (er, galaxy\u2019s) first space hotel by 2026, Interesting Engineering reported. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightJohn Blincow, chief executive of Orbital Assembly, told The Washington Post that the coronavirus pandemic may ultimately delay the construction start date from its original 2025 projection. However, he believes it could take just a year or two to assemble Voyager Station, the commercial space station that will house the hotel.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s going to happen fast when it starts,\u201d Blincow said. \u201cAnd we believe it\u2019s going to happen a lot, too, even before we finish the first one. We have buyers for other stations because they\u2019re very, very lucrative.\u201dAdvertisementTourists will need to undergo some training (both safety and physical) before boarding their SpaceX Starship shuttle to Voyager Station, which is designed to accommodate 280 eight guests and 112 crew members. That will include people there for space tourism alone, scientists conducting low-gravity research and service industry professionals doing what they do best \u2014 but in space. These included world-renowned chefs Blincow plans to work with who will have the chance to build out (electric and fire-free) kitchens for the space station.\u201cIt\u2019s a historic moment,\u201d Blincow said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have the top chefs making really, really good food. And when you pay $5 million to go someplace, it\u2019s not going to be burgers and fries.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBlincow isn\u2019t speaking in hyperbole. A trip to the first space hotel should cost $5 million for about 3\u00bd days orbiting the Earth. That sum may sound extreme, but it\u2019s exponentially cheaper than other up-and-coming opportunities for private citizens \u2014 for example, the first would-be spaceflight crew made up of private citizens each paid $55 million a ticket for Axiom Space\u2019s trip up to the International Space Station for eight days.AdvertisementVoyager Station\u2019s mission is to accommodate those people expressing interest to go, and provide an experience more comfortable than what the International Space has to offer.The rotating structure will have artificial gravity, so tourists won\u2019t float through the place like goo in a lava lamp or experience \u201cmoon-face\u201d \u2014 the head pressure-inducing, sinus-clogging effect caused by microgravity\u2019s impact on the body\u2019s fluid distribution. With their fluids where they\u2019re supposed to be, hotel guests will be able to sleep, eat, shower and use the restroom normally, Blincow said.Story continues below advertisementThat doesn\u2019t mean staying at the space hotel will feel completely normal. Because you\u2019re in lunar gravity, \u201cwhen you jump in the air, you jump five times higher,\u201d Blincow said.5 budgeting tips for travel \u2014 even if we can\u2019t go anywhere yetThat jumping can be done in Voyager Station\u2019s gymnasium, an area where space tourists can work out or play games. Blincow said the gymnasium will also be an entertainment venue for rock stars and talk-show hosts.Advertisement\u201cWe want to have Sting come up and play, and Beyonc\u00e9,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019ll be two shows every night. \u2026 That\u2019s part of the entertainment package.\u201dBut the actual star of the show will be the opportunity for hotel guests to leave Voyager Station and do a spacewalk. Blincow said astronauts have told him over the years that the experience is so incredible that they don\u2019t want to come back inside.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s nothing between you and the universe but the face plate,\u201d Blincow said. \u201cGoing out there and looking at the whole solar system and the Earth from the outside, it\u2019s going to be an extraordinary moment.\u201dBlincow said the chance of the everyman staying in a space hotel shouldn\u2019t seem like a reality far, far away. The hope is to eventually get the price down to be more attainable to the middle class.Advertisement\u201cWhen you and I can look forward to buying a ticket and going [to space], that\u2019s the golden age of space travel,\u201d Blincow said.Royal Caribbean is starting \u2018fully vaccinated\u2019 cruises from IsraelEven at the current earth-shattering price tag, travelers are eager for space tourism. More than 600 people have placed deposits, topping $80 million in total, for Virgin Galactic\u2019s upcoming space opportunities, and thousands more are on a waitlist.Story continues below advertisementRoman & Erica, a travel company for ultrawealthy clients, started working with Axiom Space in 2018 to find people interested in paying the gargantuan fare for space tourism. Before the pandemic, the travel company\u2019s co-founder, Roman Chiporukha, said his clients laughed off the opportunity. But once 2020 showed them how unpredictable life can be, the offer didn\u2019t seem so crazy anymore.\u201cNow the conversations I\u2019m having with people is, 'Oh, that\u2019s very interesting. How long is the training? Where do I need to train? What\u2019s the deposit like? Do I need to pay the $55 million in advance or is it in tranches?\u201d said Chiporukha, whose clients pay annual membership prices ranging from $62,500 to $180,000.\u201cThis is only going to grow and expand and become more interesting.\u201dRead more on travel during the pandemic:Tips: Advice column | Coronavirus testing | Sanitizing your hotel | Updating documentsFlying: Pandemic packing | Airport protocol | Staying healthy on planes | Fly or drive? | LayoversRoad trips: Tips | Rental cars | Best snacks | Long-haul trains | Rest stops | Cross-country driving The mega-rich are already gearing up for space travel. Now there's a space hotel in the works. A vacation that\u2019s out of this world: The first space hotel is set to start construction by 2026",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "A vacation that\u2019s out of this world: The first space hotel is set to start construction by 2026 (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1044",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/03/03/space-hotel-orbital-assembly/",
        "text": "While the concept of space tourism may sound ludicrous, plans to launch people into space as a vacation vs. a vocation are well underway.Orbital Assembly, a large space construction company, announced this year in a virtual event on its YouTube channel that it was on track to begin construction on the world\u2019s (er, galaxy\u2019s) first space hotel by 2026, Interesting Engineering reported. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightJohn Blincow, chief executive of Orbital Assembly, told The Washington Post that the coronavirus pandemic may ultimately delay the construction start date from its original 2025 projection. However, he believes it could take just a year or two to assemble Voyager Station, the commercial space station that will house the hotel.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s going to happen fast when it starts,\u201d Blincow said. \u201cAnd we believe it\u2019s going to happen a lot, too, even before we finish the first one. We have buyers for other stations because they\u2019re very, very lucrative.\u201dAdvertisementTourists will need to undergo some training (both safety and physical) before boarding their SpaceX Starship shuttle to Voyager Station, which is designed to accommodate 280 eight guests and 112 crew members. That will include people there for space tourism alone, scientists conducting low-gravity research and service industry professionals doing what they do best \u2014 but in space. These included world-renowned chefs Blincow plans to work with who will have the chance to build out (electric and fire-free) kitchens for the space station.\u201cIt\u2019s a historic moment,\u201d Blincow said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have the top chefs making really, really good food. And when you pay $5 million to go someplace, it\u2019s not going to be burgers and fries.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBlincow isn\u2019t speaking in hyperbole. A trip to the first space hotel should cost $5 million for about 3\u00bd days orbiting the Earth. That sum may sound extreme, but it\u2019s exponentially cheaper than other up-and-coming opportunities for private citizens \u2014 for example, the first would-be spaceflight crew made up of private citizens each paid $55 million a ticket for Axiom Space\u2019s trip up to the International Space Station for eight days.AdvertisementVoyager Station\u2019s mission is to accommodate those people expressing interest to go, and provide an experience more comfortable than what the International Space has to offer.The rotating structure will have artificial gravity, so tourists won\u2019t float through the place like goo in a lava lamp or experience \u201cmoon-face\u201d \u2014 the head pressure-inducing, sinus-clogging effect caused by microgravity\u2019s impact on the body\u2019s fluid distribution. With their fluids where they\u2019re supposed to be, hotel guests will be able to sleep, eat, shower and use the restroom normally, Blincow said.Story continues below advertisementThat doesn\u2019t mean staying at the space hotel will feel completely normal. Because you\u2019re in lunar gravity, \u201cwhen you jump in the air, you jump five times higher,\u201d Blincow said.5 budgeting tips for travel \u2014 even if we can\u2019t go anywhere yetThat jumping can be done in Voyager Station\u2019s gymnasium, an area where space tourists can work out or play games. Blincow said the gymnasium will also be an entertainment venue for rock stars and talk-show hosts.Advertisement\u201cWe want to have Sting come up and play, and Beyonc\u00e9,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019ll be two shows every night. \u2026 That\u2019s part of the entertainment package.\u201dBut the actual star of the show will be the opportunity for hotel guests to leave Voyager Station and do a spacewalk. Blincow said astronauts have told him over the years that the experience is so incredible that they don\u2019t want to come back inside.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s nothing between you and the universe but the face plate,\u201d Blincow said. \u201cGoing out there and looking at the whole solar system and the Earth from the outside, it\u2019s going to be an extraordinary moment.\u201dBlincow said the chance of the everyman staying in a space hotel shouldn\u2019t seem like a reality far, far away. The hope is to eventually get the price down to be more attainable to the middle class.Advertisement\u201cWhen you and I can look forward to buying a ticket and going [to space], that\u2019s the golden age of space travel,\u201d Blincow said.Royal Caribbean is starting \u2018fully vaccinated\u2019 cruises from IsraelEven at the current earth-shattering price tag, travelers are eager for space tourism. More than 600 people have placed deposits, topping $80 million in total, for Virgin Galactic\u2019s upcoming space opportunities, and thousands more are on a waitlist.Story continues below advertisementRoman & Erica, a travel company for ultrawealthy clients, started working with Axiom Space in 2018 to find people interested in paying the gargantuan fare for space tourism. Before the pandemic, the travel company\u2019s co-founder, Roman Chiporukha, said his clients laughed off the opportunity. But once 2020 showed them how unpredictable life can be, the offer didn\u2019t seem so crazy anymore.\u201cNow the conversations I\u2019m having with people is, 'Oh, that\u2019s very interesting. How long is the training? Where do I need to train? What\u2019s the deposit like? Do I need to pay the $55 million in advance or is it in tranches?\u201d said Chiporukha, whose clients pay annual membership prices ranging from $62,500 to $180,000.\u201cThis is only going to grow and expand and become more interesting.\u201dRead more on travel during the pandemic:Tips: Advice column | Coronavirus testing | Sanitizing your hotel | Updating documentsFlying: Pandemic packing | Airport protocol | Staying healthy on planes | Fly or drive? | LayoversRoad trips: Tips | Rental cars | Best snacks | Long-haul trains | Rest stops | Cross-country driving The mega-rich are already gearing up for space travel. Now there's a space hotel in the works. A vacation that\u2019s out of this world: The first space hotel is set to start construction by 2026",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians. (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1045",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/12/08/space-tourism-luxury-training/",
        "text": "Once upon a time, if someone wanted to go to space, they had to dedicate their life to the dream and beat out stiff competition. Since 1959, NASA has selected just 360 people to serve as potential astronauts. The field for the latest training program included 12,000 applicants for 10 spots. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightBut with the business of commercial space travel ramping up, you don\u2019t have to spend your life preparing your mind and body to travel beyond Earth. As an increasing number of billionaires, celebrities and contest-winners have been rocketing out of the atmosphere, analysts believe the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030.Not all companies getting into space tourism are transporting travelers on flight missions. There\u2019s also Orbite, a company building what it says will be the first commercial equivalent of a NASA training center. The \u201cAstronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Complex\u201d is targeting a 2024 opening in a yet-to-be-disclosed U.S. location. In the meantime, the company has smaller programs up and running in Florida and France.In 2019, after noticing a gap in the market for a company that would train private citizens to become commercial astronauts, Orbite co-founders Jason Andrews and Nicolas Gaume decided to step in to create a boot camp for space tourists. Orbite likens its services to pilot\u2019s license courses for hobbyists.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you did go to space camp as a kid, you can now come back what may be many decades later and have the adult version,\u201d said Andrews, who co-founded the aerospace company Spaceflight Industries.Some people are actually paying to get \u2018lost\u2019 on vacationAndrews and Gaume \u2014 a French tech entrepreneur who comes from a family of hoteliers \u2014 have tapped world-renowned industrial architect and designer Philippe Starck to design their complex. Beyond the training facilities, it will have luxury accommodations and fine dining. Down the line, the co-founders want to replicate the training center in other parts of the world.\u201cWe really see this as a global business and a way to be that gateway for people to come and experience space,\u201d Andrews said.While Orbite\u2019s mission is to train future astronauts, it will also appeal to people who would like to be space tourists but can\u2019t afford a mission. At this time, civilian space travel costs hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars (unless you win a contest).How to protect your travel plans from covid chaos\u201cA lot of our clientele may not have the financial means to go to space, but they want to experience what it\u2019s like to train to go to space,\u201d Andrews said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere aren\u2019t estimates for stays at the complex yet, but we know it won\u2019t be cheap. Until construction on the complex is completed, Orbite is offering three-day, two-night \u201cAstronaut Orientation\u201d courses that range from $15,000 to $30,000 (excluding transportation to the program).Limited to groups of 10, Astronaut Orientation promises mental, emotional and physical training for civilian space travel.\u201cYou walk away understanding what it means to go to space and also experiencing it physically,\u201d Andrews said.At their state-of-the-art space camp for adults, students can stay at a luxury hotel \u2014 either the Four Seasons Orlando or Gaume\u2019s La Co(o)rniche in La Test-de-Buch in southwest France. Itineraries differ depending on the location of the orientation, but attendees can expect to study rocket science and modern spaceflight vehicles, taste food that astronauts eat, take virtual-reality space vehicle hangar tours and mission simulations, plus feel weightlessness from different parabolic flight experiences.\u201cWe tried to bring the best of hospitality and space expertise into this promise Orbite could be the gateway to space for anybody interested to touch that amazing journey,\u201d Gaume said.Decades later, \u2018Home Alone\u2019 fans are still casing the iconic houseAndrews said the adventure travel element of the astronaut orientation is another selling point for guests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy putting yourself in intense, challenging and uncomfortable situations, \u201cyou come away not only with a life experience that will be impossible to replicate somewhere else, but you also come away learning more about yourself,\u201d Andrews said.Orbite astronaut orientations may be more accessible opportunities than joining the ranks of NASA or paying for a Space X ticket, but the cost is still out of reach to most people on the planet. Gaume and Andrews said they hope to eventually offer single-day experiences that cost hundreds of dollars at their future complex.\u201cIt\u2019s first and foremost an astronaut training facility, but we have experiences that really cater to every clientele and their economic needs,\u201d Andrews said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be a really nice destination vacation, but also a transformative experience.\u201d A startup is running space camps for adults out of hotels in France and Florida. The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians. (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1046",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/12/08/space-tourism-luxury-training/",
        "text": "Once upon a time, if someone wanted to go to space, they had to dedicate their life to the dream and beat out stiff competition. Since 1959, NASA has selected just 360 people to serve as potential astronauts. The field for the latest training program included 12,000 applicants for 10 spots. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightBut with the business of commercial space travel ramping up, you don\u2019t have to spend your life preparing your mind and body to travel beyond Earth. As an increasing number of billionaires, celebrities and contest-winners have been rocketing out of the atmosphere, analysts believe the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030.Not all companies getting into space tourism are transporting travelers on flight missions. There\u2019s also Orbite, a company building what it says will be the first commercial equivalent of a NASA training center. The \u201cAstronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Complex\u201d is targeting a 2024 opening in a yet-to-be-disclosed U.S. location. In the meantime, the company has smaller programs up and running in Florida and France.In 2019, after noticing a gap in the market for a company that would train private citizens to become commercial astronauts, Orbite co-founders Jason Andrews and Nicolas Gaume decided to step in to create a boot camp for space tourists. Orbite likens its services to pilot\u2019s license courses for hobbyists.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you did go to space camp as a kid, you can now come back what may be many decades later and have the adult version,\u201d said Andrews, who co-founded the aerospace company Spaceflight Industries.Some people are actually paying to get \u2018lost\u2019 on vacationAndrews and Gaume \u2014 a French tech entrepreneur who comes from a family of hoteliers \u2014 have tapped world-renowned industrial architect and designer Philippe Starck to design their complex. Beyond the training facilities, it will have luxury accommodations and fine dining. Down the line, the co-founders want to replicate the training center in other parts of the world.\u201cWe really see this as a global business and a way to be that gateway for people to come and experience space,\u201d Andrews said.While Orbite\u2019s mission is to train future astronauts, it will also appeal to people who would like to be space tourists but can\u2019t afford a mission. At this time, civilian space travel costs hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars (unless you win a contest).How to protect your travel plans from covid chaos\u201cA lot of our clientele may not have the financial means to go to space, but they want to experience what it\u2019s like to train to go to space,\u201d Andrews said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere aren\u2019t estimates for stays at the complex yet, but we know it won\u2019t be cheap. Until construction on the complex is completed, Orbite is offering three-day, two-night \u201cAstronaut Orientation\u201d courses that range from $15,000 to $30,000 (excluding transportation to the program).Limited to groups of 10, Astronaut Orientation promises mental, emotional and physical training for civilian space travel.\u201cYou walk away understanding what it means to go to space and also experiencing it physically,\u201d Andrews said.At their state-of-the-art space camp for adults, students can stay at a luxury hotel \u2014 either the Four Seasons Orlando or Gaume\u2019s La Co(o)rniche in La Test-de-Buch in southwest France. Itineraries differ depending on the location of the orientation, but attendees can expect to study rocket science and modern spaceflight vehicles, taste food that astronauts eat, take virtual-reality space vehicle hangar tours and mission simulations, plus feel weightlessness from different parabolic flight experiences.\u201cWe tried to bring the best of hospitality and space expertise into this promise Orbite could be the gateway to space for anybody interested to touch that amazing journey,\u201d Gaume said.Decades later, \u2018Home Alone\u2019 fans are still casing the iconic houseAndrews said the adventure travel element of the astronaut orientation is another selling point for guests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy putting yourself in intense, challenging and uncomfortable situations, \u201cyou come away not only with a life experience that will be impossible to replicate somewhere else, but you also come away learning more about yourself,\u201d Andrews said.Orbite astronaut orientations may be more accessible opportunities than joining the ranks of NASA or paying for a Space X ticket, but the cost is still out of reach to most people on the planet. Gaume and Andrews said they hope to eventually offer single-day experiences that cost hundreds of dollars at their future complex.\u201cIt\u2019s first and foremost an astronaut training facility, but we have experiences that really cater to every clientele and their economic needs,\u201d Andrews said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be a really nice destination vacation, but also a transformative experience.\u201d A startup is running space camps for adults out of hotels in France and Florida. The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians. (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1047",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/12/08/space-tourism-luxury-training/",
        "text": "Once upon a time, if someone wanted to go to space, they had to dedicate their life to the dream and beat out stiff competition. Since 1959, NASA has selected just 360 people to serve as potential astronauts. The field for the latest training program included 12,000 applicants for 10 spots. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightBut with the business of commercial space travel ramping up, you don\u2019t have to spend your life preparing your mind and body to travel beyond Earth. As an increasing number of billionaires, celebrities and contest-winners have been rocketing out of the atmosphere, analysts believe the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030.Not all companies getting into space tourism are transporting travelers on flight missions. There\u2019s also Orbite, a company building what it says will be the first commercial equivalent of a NASA training center. The \u201cAstronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Complex\u201d is targeting a 2024 opening in a yet-to-be-disclosed U.S. location. In the meantime, the company has smaller programs up and running in Florida and France.In 2019, after noticing a gap in the market for a company that would train private citizens to become commercial astronauts, Orbite co-founders Jason Andrews and Nicolas Gaume decided to step in to create a boot camp for space tourists. Orbite likens its services to pilot\u2019s license courses for hobbyists.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you did go to space camp as a kid, you can now come back what may be many decades later and have the adult version,\u201d said Andrews, who co-founded the aerospace company Spaceflight Industries.Some people are actually paying to get \u2018lost\u2019 on vacationAndrews and Gaume \u2014 a French tech entrepreneur who comes from a family of hoteliers \u2014 have tapped world-renowned industrial architect and designer Philippe Starck to design their complex. Beyond the training facilities, it will have luxury accommodations and fine dining. Down the line, the co-founders want to replicate the training center in other parts of the world.\u201cWe really see this as a global business and a way to be that gateway for people to come and experience space,\u201d Andrews said.While Orbite\u2019s mission is to train future astronauts, it will also appeal to people who would like to be space tourists but can\u2019t afford a mission. At this time, civilian space travel costs hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars (unless you win a contest).How to protect your travel plans from covid chaos\u201cA lot of our clientele may not have the financial means to go to space, but they want to experience what it\u2019s like to train to go to space,\u201d Andrews said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere aren\u2019t estimates for stays at the complex yet, but we know it won\u2019t be cheap. Until construction on the complex is completed, Orbite is offering three-day, two-night \u201cAstronaut Orientation\u201d courses that range from $15,000 to $30,000 (excluding transportation to the program).Limited to groups of 10, Astronaut Orientation promises mental, emotional and physical training for civilian space travel.\u201cYou walk away understanding what it means to go to space and also experiencing it physically,\u201d Andrews said.At their state-of-the-art space camp for adults, students can stay at a luxury hotel \u2014 either the Four Seasons Orlando or Gaume\u2019s La Co(o)rniche in La Test-de-Buch in southwest France. Itineraries differ depending on the location of the orientation, but attendees can expect to study rocket science and modern spaceflight vehicles, taste food that astronauts eat, take virtual-reality space vehicle hangar tours and mission simulations, plus feel weightlessness from different parabolic flight experiences.\u201cWe tried to bring the best of hospitality and space expertise into this promise Orbite could be the gateway to space for anybody interested to touch that amazing journey,\u201d Gaume said.Decades later, \u2018Home Alone\u2019 fans are still casing the iconic houseAndrews said the adventure travel element of the astronaut orientation is another selling point for guests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy putting yourself in intense, challenging and uncomfortable situations, \u201cyou come away not only with a life experience that will be impossible to replicate somewhere else, but you also come away learning more about yourself,\u201d Andrews said.Orbite astronaut orientations may be more accessible opportunities than joining the ranks of NASA or paying for a Space X ticket, but the cost is still out of reach to most people on the planet. Gaume and Andrews said they hope to eventually offer single-day experiences that cost hundreds of dollars at their future complex.\u201cIt\u2019s first and foremost an astronaut training facility, but we have experiences that really cater to every clientele and their economic needs,\u201d Andrews said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be a really nice destination vacation, but also a transformative experience.\u201d A startup is running space camps for adults out of hotels in France and Florida. The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians. (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1048",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/12/08/space-tourism-luxury-training/",
        "text": "Once upon a time, if someone wanted to go to space, they had to dedicate their life to the dream and beat out stiff competition. Since 1959, NASA has selected just 360 people to serve as potential astronauts. The field for the latest training program included 12,000 applicants for 10 spots. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightBut with the business of commercial space travel ramping up, you don\u2019t have to spend your life preparing your mind and body to travel beyond Earth. As an increasing number of billionaires, celebrities and contest-winners have been rocketing out of the atmosphere, analysts believe the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030.Not all companies getting into space tourism are transporting travelers on flight missions. There\u2019s also Orbite, a company building what it says will be the first commercial equivalent of a NASA training center. The \u201cAstronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Complex\u201d is targeting a 2024 opening in a yet-to-be-disclosed U.S. location. In the meantime, the company has smaller programs up and running in Florida and France.In 2019, after noticing a gap in the market for a company that would train private citizens to become commercial astronauts, Orbite co-founders Jason Andrews and Nicolas Gaume decided to step in to create a boot camp for space tourists. Orbite likens its services to pilot\u2019s license courses for hobbyists.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you did go to space camp as a kid, you can now come back what may be many decades later and have the adult version,\u201d said Andrews, who co-founded the aerospace company Spaceflight Industries.Some people are actually paying to get \u2018lost\u2019 on vacationAndrews and Gaume \u2014 a French tech entrepreneur who comes from a family of hoteliers \u2014 have tapped world-renowned industrial architect and designer Philippe Starck to design their complex. Beyond the training facilities, it will have luxury accommodations and fine dining. Down the line, the co-founders want to replicate the training center in other parts of the world.\u201cWe really see this as a global business and a way to be that gateway for people to come and experience space,\u201d Andrews said.While Orbite\u2019s mission is to train future astronauts, it will also appeal to people who would like to be space tourists but can\u2019t afford a mission. At this time, civilian space travel costs hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars (unless you win a contest).How to protect your travel plans from covid chaos\u201cA lot of our clientele may not have the financial means to go to space, but they want to experience what it\u2019s like to train to go to space,\u201d Andrews said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere aren\u2019t estimates for stays at the complex yet, but we know it won\u2019t be cheap. Until construction on the complex is completed, Orbite is offering three-day, two-night \u201cAstronaut Orientation\u201d courses that range from $15,000 to $30,000 (excluding transportation to the program).Limited to groups of 10, Astronaut Orientation promises mental, emotional and physical training for civilian space travel.\u201cYou walk away understanding what it means to go to space and also experiencing it physically,\u201d Andrews said.At their state-of-the-art space camp for adults, students can stay at a luxury hotel \u2014 either the Four Seasons Orlando or Gaume\u2019s La Co(o)rniche in La Test-de-Buch in southwest France. Itineraries differ depending on the location of the orientation, but attendees can expect to study rocket science and modern spaceflight vehicles, taste food that astronauts eat, take virtual-reality space vehicle hangar tours and mission simulations, plus feel weightlessness from different parabolic flight experiences.\u201cWe tried to bring the best of hospitality and space expertise into this promise Orbite could be the gateway to space for anybody interested to touch that amazing journey,\u201d Gaume said.Decades later, \u2018Home Alone\u2019 fans are still casing the iconic houseAndrews said the adventure travel element of the astronaut orientation is another selling point for guests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy putting yourself in intense, challenging and uncomfortable situations, \u201cyou come away not only with a life experience that will be impossible to replicate somewhere else, but you also come away learning more about yourself,\u201d Andrews said.Orbite astronaut orientations may be more accessible opportunities than joining the ranks of NASA or paying for a Space X ticket, but the cost is still out of reach to most people on the planet. Gaume and Andrews said they hope to eventually offer single-day experiences that cost hundreds of dollars at their future complex.\u201cIt\u2019s first and foremost an astronaut training facility, but we have experiences that really cater to every clientele and their economic needs,\u201d Andrews said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be a really nice destination vacation, but also a transformative experience.\u201d A startup is running space camps for adults out of hotels in France and Florida. The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "13 travel resolutions for 2022, according to pros (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1049",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/12/27/travel-trends-2022-new-years-resolutions/",
        "text": "As yet another tumultuous year for travel comes to a close and yet another coronavirus wave sets records, the team at By The Way remains hopeful for what is to come in 2022.The surges in delta and omicron variants warn us that we may get tastes of freedom when cases calm down, but some unforeseen havoc may be lurking around the corner to thwart our travel plans again. No trip is set in stone. No takeoff is guaranteed. Any optimism comes with caution. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightThose caveats can make the trips we take more memorable, more appreciated and more rewarding. So we keep planning, hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.To draw inspiration for our eventual adventures, we collected thoughts and goals from 13 of our favorite travelers. Here are their New Year\u2019s resolutions, edited for length and clarity.The best travel advice of 2021, from By The Way ConciergeCarole Hopson, United Airlines pilotIG: @carole.hopsonThere had already been a pilot shortage looming when the world ground to a halt because of the coronavirus. The Cares Act had to be enacted twice to save transportation jobs, mine included. I launched the Jet Black Foundation, a program with the goal of recruiting and training 100 African-American female professional aviators. Our mission is not only purposeful, but also simultaneously solves a real-world business challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I reflect on 2021, I am convinced that equity is not some vague notion. It is a solid business solution to the pilot shortage, and Jet Black intends to search from a virtually untapped talent pool \u2014 2022 will be fruitful, as we intend to raise $7 million to empower Black women to earn a pair of wings.U.S. passports are about to get more expensiveVictoria Leandra, journalist and podcast hostIG: @VictoriaLeandra View this post on Instagram A post shared by VICTORIA LEANDRA (@victorialeandra)\nVisiting Colombia and Costa Rica in 2021 sparked my desire to continue learning about the many different aspects of my own Latino culture. A week or 10 days of travel is not nearly enough to fully immerse yourself in a country to understand its nuances. I\u2019d like for 2022 to be the year I begin traveling for an extended time while working remotely.Story continues below advertisementThe more time I have in a destination, the more time I have to genuinely connect with locals doing extraordinary work in their respective industries, which is something I\u2019m interested in highlighting through EL ADN Podcast.AdvertisementOn a more personal note, I have this tradition where I take my mom on a mother-daughter trip each year, and I\u2019d like to start that with my father in 2022. I\u2019d love to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with him. If there\u2019s something I\u2019ve learned from the pandemic is that family time is precious.My last travel resolution for the new year is completing a full marathon abroad to officially become an international \u201ctravel runner,\u201d a concept my friend and I started using after our half-marathons in Puerto Rico and Miami.Rick Steves, travel author and hostIG: @ricksteveseurope One year ago, as I happily said goodbye to 2020, I hoped \u2014 and expected \u2014 that the pandemic would be over by 2022. Now, though, it\u2019s clear that we\u2019ll be traveling cautiously for a while. But, thanks to two recent trips to my favorite continent, I have a new optimism. Here are my takeaways for European travel in the new year:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe news at home can stoke ill-founded anxiety. I wouldn\u2019t tell Americans, \u201cSure, you can travel \u2026 no problem.\u201d But I would say, \u201cYou\u2019ll feel at least as safe in Europe as you do traveling here in the U.S.\u201dFrom Athens to the Alps and Rome to Paris, I was struck by how normal travel felt. My big fear was that my favorite little mom-and-pop joints hadn\u2019t survived. From Alessandro\u2019s osteria to Dimitri\u2019s taverna to Heidi\u2019s chalet, these are the entrepreneurial ventures that enliven our travel experiences \u2026 the kind of places I weave into my guidebooks, TV shows and tours. And thankfully, nearly all my favorites are still standing \u2014 tired and hunkered down, but strong and determined.The joys of European travel are still waiting for us: the rattan seats at the Paris corner cafe, the passeggiata (evening stroll) in Rome and the edgy street art tour in Athens. And from Norway to Portugal to Turkey, my resolution for 2022 is to happily (and safely) venture where my travel dreams take me.Rick Steves looks to the future after an 18-month hiatus from European travelAlvaro Silberstein, CEO of Wheel the WorldIG: @alvasilMy 2022 travel resolution is to continue creating opportunities for people with disabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy excursions, the people I\u2019ve met along the way and ideas I\u2019ve had while traveling have been some of the greatest sources of inspiration throughout my life. In 2016, with the help of my friends, I became the first person in a wheelchair to complete the W trek in Patagonia. This trip is what inspired me to found Wheel the World, a travel guide and booking site that prioritizes accessibility, and encourage other people with disabilities to feel empowered to travel without limitations.During the coronavirus, people with disabilities had to isolate and restrict themselves even more than most. This is why travel isn\u2019t just something we want after long quarantines; it\u2019s something we need to free our minds and feel capable of living life to its fullest.From airport WiFi to \u2018juice jacking\u2019: 7 ways to protect your data when travelingMarcella Hudson, co-founder and program director of beGirl.worldIG: @begirl.worldAs I travel throughout 2022, I plan to nurture myself daily. If quarantine has taught me anything, it has taught me the importance of self-care. It is so easy to jump up in the morning and start a busy day. When I am at home, I go for a morning walk and afterward sip coffee on the patio before starting work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I discover new spaces on my travels, I\u2019m going to continue this routine all while taking in the sights and sounds of another land. I am establishing the practice of transformative travel vs. transactional travel. Instead of just hitting bucket list goals, crossing off the next country on the map, or quickly traveling to the next hot spot, I want to slow down and focus on the culture, history, architecture, cuisine and vibe of each location.I am going to learn more about the lives of the tour guides I meet, extend graciousness and gratitude to the essential workers I encounter, and bask in the spirit of humanity and wonder.I stayed in a ski-town hostel during covid. Here\u2019s what it was like.Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon, travel writer and hostIG: @JetSetSarahMy biggest personal resolution is to finally set foot on the continent of Africa in 2022. Ancestry.com tells me that like many other people with Caribbean roots, my forebears are from West Africa, most likely Benin, Togo and/or Nigeria. Professionally, I\u2019ll continue to champion the Caribbean as a layered, nuanced and culturally rich region of so much more than just sun, sea and sand.Annie Cheng, founder of The Table Less TraveledIG: @anniechengeatsMy travel resolution for 2022 is to integrate my work travel and personal life. Traveling for work on our boutique culinary tours has always felt more personal through the relationships and connections I made with locals around the world. Originally, I took those journeys independently, often leaving home and family for up to six months a year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHowever, with more companies adapting to virtual collaboration, my partner and I have more flexibility. Next year, whether he is attending a conference in Texas or I\u2019m hosting a tour in Italy, we\u2019ll be traveling together with our little one in tow, taking turns with remote work and child care.Our goal is to add extra days, or even weeks, to each destination so we can keep \u201chome\u201d and family together.The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.Adam Richman, host of the History Channel\u2019s \u2018Modern Marvels\u2019IG: @adamrichmanBefore the pandemic began, I was living and filming a show in London, one of my favorite cities. When I had to return home, not only was the show unfinished, it also felt like I left my experience in London unfinished as well.Story continues below advertisementIn the new year, I hope to return to England. There are still places in Asia and Europe I have yet to visit that have long been on my bucket list, but with the surge of the omicron variant, I am going to proceed with caution.AdvertisementWhile Europe will have to wait, the beauty of the U.S. will not, and there is much left to explore in the coming year \u2014 wide open spaces that are covid-safe, inspiring and breathtaking.Decades later, \u2018Home Alone\u2019 fans are still casing the iconic houseKathy McCabe, host of \u2018Dream of Italy\u2019 on PBSIG: @dreamofitalyMy travel resolution is to listen more and appreciate everything I hear. Italy is the place I visit most often, and the most surprising thing I missed was the range of unique and even comforting everyday sounds.Story continues below advertisementOh how I missed the cadence and pitch of la bella lingua \u2014 the \u201cbeautiful language\u201d \u2014 being spoken around me, the strong chhhh sound of the espresso machine at the local bar, the symphony of street sounds from buzzing Vespas, the distinct sound of European ambulances and even the voice of a nonna yelling \u201cGiorgio\u201d off her terrace.I promise not to take for granted the very sounds of travel itself, from the \u201cping\u201d of the seat belt sign to the pound of the passport stamp.Ruzwana Bashir, founder and CEO of PeekIG: @ruzwanaI\u2019ve missed taking the epic bucket list trips, with my favorites including ice-trekking in Argentina, exploring the Palmyra ruins in Syria and seeing orangutans in the rainforests in Borneo. My travel resolution includes bringing those back, starting with my current trip to Thailand to ring in the new year.AdvertisementBut over covid, I\u2019ve also realized that adventures can be close to home. When far-flung places were inaccessible, I made the most of my weekends \u2014 like renting a boat for the day to sail around Los Angeles and taking a road trip to go hiking in Yosemite. Travel doesn\u2019t feel guaranteed anymore, so next year I\u2019m committed to being spontaneous and finding experiences to make the most of every moment.Everything you need to know about traveling to ThailandSebastian Modak, Lonely Planet\u2019s editor-at-largeIG: @sebmodakAbout three days into a week-long cycling trip \u2014 a largely aimless and improvised loop in northern Vermont and southern Qu\u00e9bec \u2014 I realized that I had stumbled upon something I had so often missed in my years frantically crisscrossing the world: the joy of moving slowly and deliberately.In 2020, Year of New Hobbies that it was, I quit smoking, momentarily stopped traveling internationally and got a bit obsessed with cycling. As I looked for ways to tap into adventure, serendipity and the magic of travel without navigating closed borders, 2021 was all about multiday bike touring. I pedaled out into the Hudson Valley, into the Adirondack Mountains and even into Canada.In 2022, I want to keep doing that, but I also hope to put into practice some larger lessons from that style of travel. I want to travel slower and more intentionally. I want to realize how lucky I am to be out exploring the world, even if it\u2019s in my own backyard.Catherine Powell, Airbnb\u2019s global head of hostingTwitter: @capow14For those fortunate enough to do so, working from home now means working from any home. The freedom you feel when you realize you can go a little farther if you stay a little longer is just the antidote to the isolation we have all experienced. In my case, this has meant enjoying long weekends away with my husband in California, Utah and Colorado, and longer stays with family in the U.K. and Italy.My goal for 2022 is to discover more of the United States (Georgia and Nashville are next on my list), reconnect with family overseas and \u2014 having started my job at Airbnb right as the pandemic began \u2014 spend time with team members and Hosts whom I have only met via Zoom.Andrew Zimmern, TV host and Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N.'s World Food ProgrammeIG: @chefazI am not one for New Year\u2019s resolutions. However, I do always look back at the last year to take inventory, see what worked and what didn\u2019t, what actions and behaviors brought me closer to my goals and which ones didn\u2019t. I tell anyone who will listen to imagine what kind of life they really want and then say \u201cno\u201d to anything that didn\u2019t help them get there. Sounds easy. It isn\u2019t.Travel for me has always been transformative. The more you venture away from your normal, whether that\u2019s around the world or on the other side of town, the more you learn. Away from our primary habitat we take more risks, ask more questions and try new things. Then we learn, grow and bring all that back.Well, I didn\u2019t really travel in 2021. And that was the primary source of growth for me. Travel had been the single greatest learning activity in my life \u2014 until I stopped it entirely and spent more time with my kid than I have in a long time.Turns out, I don\u2019t have to travel to take risks, ask questions, try new things and learn from that process. Turns out, the more time I spend with my favorite human, real time being really present in those moments, it achieves the same result. And I got more of the life I wanted at the same time. I guess you\u2019re never too old to learn a new trick \u2014 or to take a different kind of journey.correctionA previous version of this article misstated the last name of Sebastian Modak's girlfriend. She is Maggie Tishman, not Maggie Tish. The article has been corrected. Expect remote work, domestic travel and family time to trend on 2022 itineraries. 13 travel resolutions for 2022, according to pros",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "13 travel resolutions for 2022, according to pros (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1050",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/12/27/travel-trends-2022-new-years-resolutions/",
        "text": "As yet another tumultuous year for travel comes to a close and yet another coronavirus wave sets records, the team at By The Way remains hopeful for what is to come in 2022.The surges in delta and omicron variants warn us that we may get tastes of freedom when cases calm down, but some unforeseen havoc may be lurking around the corner to thwart our travel plans again. No trip is set in stone. No takeoff is guaranteed. Any optimism comes with caution. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightThose caveats can make the trips we take more memorable, more appreciated and more rewarding. So we keep planning, hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.To draw inspiration for our eventual adventures, we collected thoughts and goals from 13 of our favorite travelers. Here are their New Year\u2019s resolutions, edited for length and clarity.The best travel advice of 2021, from By The Way ConciergeCarole Hopson, United Airlines pilotIG: @carole.hopsonThere had already been a pilot shortage looming when the world ground to a halt because of the coronavirus. The Cares Act had to be enacted twice to save transportation jobs, mine included. I launched the Jet Black Foundation, a program with the goal of recruiting and training 100 African-American female professional aviators. Our mission is not only purposeful, but also simultaneously solves a real-world business challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I reflect on 2021, I am convinced that equity is not some vague notion. It is a solid business solution to the pilot shortage, and Jet Black intends to search from a virtually untapped talent pool \u2014 2022 will be fruitful, as we intend to raise $7 million to empower Black women to earn a pair of wings.U.S. passports are about to get more expensiveVictoria Leandra, journalist and podcast hostIG: @VictoriaLeandra View this post on Instagram A post shared by VICTORIA LEANDRA (@victorialeandra)\nVisiting Colombia and Costa Rica in 2021 sparked my desire to continue learning about the many different aspects of my own Latino culture. A week or 10 days of travel is not nearly enough to fully immerse yourself in a country to understand its nuances. I\u2019d like for 2022 to be the year I begin traveling for an extended time while working remotely.Story continues below advertisementThe more time I have in a destination, the more time I have to genuinely connect with locals doing extraordinary work in their respective industries, which is something I\u2019m interested in highlighting through EL ADN Podcast.AdvertisementOn a more personal note, I have this tradition where I take my mom on a mother-daughter trip each year, and I\u2019d like to start that with my father in 2022. I\u2019d love to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with him. If there\u2019s something I\u2019ve learned from the pandemic is that family time is precious.My last travel resolution for the new year is completing a full marathon abroad to officially become an international \u201ctravel runner,\u201d a concept my friend and I started using after our half-marathons in Puerto Rico and Miami.Rick Steves, travel author and hostIG: @ricksteveseurope One year ago, as I happily said goodbye to 2020, I hoped \u2014 and expected \u2014 that the pandemic would be over by 2022. Now, though, it\u2019s clear that we\u2019ll be traveling cautiously for a while. But, thanks to two recent trips to my favorite continent, I have a new optimism. Here are my takeaways for European travel in the new year:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe news at home can stoke ill-founded anxiety. I wouldn\u2019t tell Americans, \u201cSure, you can travel \u2026 no problem.\u201d But I would say, \u201cYou\u2019ll feel at least as safe in Europe as you do traveling here in the U.S.\u201dFrom Athens to the Alps and Rome to Paris, I was struck by how normal travel felt. My big fear was that my favorite little mom-and-pop joints hadn\u2019t survived. From Alessandro\u2019s osteria to Dimitri\u2019s taverna to Heidi\u2019s chalet, these are the entrepreneurial ventures that enliven our travel experiences \u2026 the kind of places I weave into my guidebooks, TV shows and tours. And thankfully, nearly all my favorites are still standing \u2014 tired and hunkered down, but strong and determined.The joys of European travel are still waiting for us: the rattan seats at the Paris corner cafe, the passeggiata (evening stroll) in Rome and the edgy street art tour in Athens. And from Norway to Portugal to Turkey, my resolution for 2022 is to happily (and safely) venture where my travel dreams take me.Rick Steves looks to the future after an 18-month hiatus from European travelAlvaro Silberstein, CEO of Wheel the WorldIG: @alvasilMy 2022 travel resolution is to continue creating opportunities for people with disabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy excursions, the people I\u2019ve met along the way and ideas I\u2019ve had while traveling have been some of the greatest sources of inspiration throughout my life. In 2016, with the help of my friends, I became the first person in a wheelchair to complete the W trek in Patagonia. This trip is what inspired me to found Wheel the World, a travel guide and booking site that prioritizes accessibility, and encourage other people with disabilities to feel empowered to travel without limitations.During the coronavirus, people with disabilities had to isolate and restrict themselves even more than most. This is why travel isn\u2019t just something we want after long quarantines; it\u2019s something we need to free our minds and feel capable of living life to its fullest.From airport WiFi to \u2018juice jacking\u2019: 7 ways to protect your data when travelingMarcella Hudson, co-founder and program director of beGirl.worldIG: @begirl.worldAs I travel throughout 2022, I plan to nurture myself daily. If quarantine has taught me anything, it has taught me the importance of self-care. It is so easy to jump up in the morning and start a busy day. When I am at home, I go for a morning walk and afterward sip coffee on the patio before starting work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I discover new spaces on my travels, I\u2019m going to continue this routine all while taking in the sights and sounds of another land. I am establishing the practice of transformative travel vs. transactional travel. Instead of just hitting bucket list goals, crossing off the next country on the map, or quickly traveling to the next hot spot, I want to slow down and focus on the culture, history, architecture, cuisine and vibe of each location.I am going to learn more about the lives of the tour guides I meet, extend graciousness and gratitude to the essential workers I encounter, and bask in the spirit of humanity and wonder.I stayed in a ski-town hostel during covid. Here\u2019s what it was like.Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon, travel writer and hostIG: @JetSetSarahMy biggest personal resolution is to finally set foot on the continent of Africa in 2022. Ancestry.com tells me that like many other people with Caribbean roots, my forebears are from West Africa, most likely Benin, Togo and/or Nigeria. Professionally, I\u2019ll continue to champion the Caribbean as a layered, nuanced and culturally rich region of so much more than just sun, sea and sand.Annie Cheng, founder of The Table Less TraveledIG: @anniechengeatsMy travel resolution for 2022 is to integrate my work travel and personal life. Traveling for work on our boutique culinary tours has always felt more personal through the relationships and connections I made with locals around the world. Originally, I took those journeys independently, often leaving home and family for up to six months a year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHowever, with more companies adapting to virtual collaboration, my partner and I have more flexibility. Next year, whether he is attending a conference in Texas or I\u2019m hosting a tour in Italy, we\u2019ll be traveling together with our little one in tow, taking turns with remote work and child care.Our goal is to add extra days, or even weeks, to each destination so we can keep \u201chome\u201d and family together.The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.Adam Richman, host of the History Channel\u2019s \u2018Modern Marvels\u2019IG: @adamrichmanBefore the pandemic began, I was living and filming a show in London, one of my favorite cities. When I had to return home, not only was the show unfinished, it also felt like I left my experience in London unfinished as well.Story continues below advertisementIn the new year, I hope to return to England. There are still places in Asia and Europe I have yet to visit that have long been on my bucket list, but with the surge of the omicron variant, I am going to proceed with caution.AdvertisementWhile Europe will have to wait, the beauty of the U.S. will not, and there is much left to explore in the coming year \u2014 wide open spaces that are covid-safe, inspiring and breathtaking.Decades later, \u2018Home Alone\u2019 fans are still casing the iconic houseKathy McCabe, host of \u2018Dream of Italy\u2019 on PBSIG: @dreamofitalyMy travel resolution is to listen more and appreciate everything I hear. Italy is the place I visit most often, and the most surprising thing I missed was the range of unique and even comforting everyday sounds.Story continues below advertisementOh how I missed the cadence and pitch of la bella lingua \u2014 the \u201cbeautiful language\u201d \u2014 being spoken around me, the strong chhhh sound of the espresso machine at the local bar, the symphony of street sounds from buzzing Vespas, the distinct sound of European ambulances and even the voice of a nonna yelling \u201cGiorgio\u201d off her terrace.I promise not to take for granted the very sounds of travel itself, from the \u201cping\u201d of the seat belt sign to the pound of the passport stamp.Ruzwana Bashir, founder and CEO of PeekIG: @ruzwanaI\u2019ve missed taking the epic bucket list trips, with my favorites including ice-trekking in Argentina, exploring the Palmyra ruins in Syria and seeing orangutans in the rainforests in Borneo. My travel resolution includes bringing those back, starting with my current trip to Thailand to ring in the new year.AdvertisementBut over covid, I\u2019ve also realized that adventures can be close to home. When far-flung places were inaccessible, I made the most of my weekends \u2014 like renting a boat for the day to sail around Los Angeles and taking a road trip to go hiking in Yosemite. Travel doesn\u2019t feel guaranteed anymore, so next year I\u2019m committed to being spontaneous and finding experiences to make the most of every moment.Everything you need to know about traveling to ThailandSebastian Modak, Lonely Planet\u2019s editor-at-largeIG: @sebmodakAbout three days into a week-long cycling trip \u2014 a largely aimless and improvised loop in northern Vermont and southern Qu\u00e9bec \u2014 I realized that I had stumbled upon something I had so often missed in my years frantically crisscrossing the world: the joy of moving slowly and deliberately.In 2020, Year of New Hobbies that it was, I quit smoking, momentarily stopped traveling internationally and got a bit obsessed with cycling. As I looked for ways to tap into adventure, serendipity and the magic of travel without navigating closed borders, 2021 was all about multiday bike touring. I pedaled out into the Hudson Valley, into the Adirondack Mountains and even into Canada.In 2022, I want to keep doing that, but I also hope to put into practice some larger lessons from that style of travel. I want to travel slower and more intentionally. I want to realize how lucky I am to be out exploring the world, even if it\u2019s in my own backyard.Catherine Powell, Airbnb\u2019s global head of hostingTwitter: @capow14For those fortunate enough to do so, working from home now means working from any home. The freedom you feel when you realize you can go a little farther if you stay a little longer is just the antidote to the isolation we have all experienced. In my case, this has meant enjoying long weekends away with my husband in California, Utah and Colorado, and longer stays with family in the U.K. and Italy.My goal for 2022 is to discover more of the United States (Georgia and Nashville are next on my list), reconnect with family overseas and \u2014 having started my job at Airbnb right as the pandemic began \u2014 spend time with team members and Hosts whom I have only met via Zoom.Andrew Zimmern, TV host and Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N.'s World Food ProgrammeIG: @chefazI am not one for New Year\u2019s resolutions. However, I do always look back at the last year to take inventory, see what worked and what didn\u2019t, what actions and behaviors brought me closer to my goals and which ones didn\u2019t. I tell anyone who will listen to imagine what kind of life they really want and then say \u201cno\u201d to anything that didn\u2019t help them get there. Sounds easy. It isn\u2019t.Travel for me has always been transformative. The more you venture away from your normal, whether that\u2019s around the world or on the other side of town, the more you learn. Away from our primary habitat we take more risks, ask more questions and try new things. Then we learn, grow and bring all that back.Well, I didn\u2019t really travel in 2021. And that was the primary source of growth for me. Travel had been the single greatest learning activity in my life \u2014 until I stopped it entirely and spent more time with my kid than I have in a long time.Turns out, I don\u2019t have to travel to take risks, ask questions, try new things and learn from that process. Turns out, the more time I spend with my favorite human, real time being really present in those moments, it achieves the same result. And I got more of the life I wanted at the same time. I guess you\u2019re never too old to learn a new trick \u2014 or to take a different kind of journey.correctionA previous version of this article misstated the last name of Sebastian Modak's girlfriend. She is Maggie Tishman, not Maggie Tish. The article has been corrected. Expect remote work, domestic travel and family time to trend on 2022 itineraries. 13 travel resolutions for 2022, according to pros",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "13 travel resolutions for 2022, according to pros (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1051",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/12/27/travel-trends-2022-new-years-resolutions/",
        "text": "As yet another tumultuous year for travel comes to a close and yet another coronavirus wave sets records, the team at By The Way remains hopeful for what is to come in 2022.The surges in delta and omicron variants warn us that we may get tastes of freedom when cases calm down, but some unforeseen havoc may be lurking around the corner to thwart our travel plans again. No trip is set in stone. No takeoff is guaranteed. Any optimism comes with caution. Please answer this short survey on By The Way and your upcoming travel plansArrowRightThose caveats can make the trips we take more memorable, more appreciated and more rewarding. So we keep planning, hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.To draw inspiration for our eventual adventures, we collected thoughts and goals from 13 of our favorite travelers. Here are their New Year\u2019s resolutions, edited for length and clarity.The best travel advice of 2021, from By The Way ConciergeCarole Hopson, United Airlines pilotIG: @carole.hopsonThere had already been a pilot shortage looming when the world ground to a halt because of the coronavirus. The Cares Act had to be enacted twice to save transportation jobs, mine included. I launched the Jet Black Foundation, a program with the goal of recruiting and training 100 African-American female professional aviators. Our mission is not only purposeful, but also simultaneously solves a real-world business challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I reflect on 2021, I am convinced that equity is not some vague notion. It is a solid business solution to the pilot shortage, and Jet Black intends to search from a virtually untapped talent pool \u2014 2022 will be fruitful, as we intend to raise $7 million to empower Black women to earn a pair of wings.U.S. passports are about to get more expensiveVictoria Leandra, journalist and podcast hostIG: @VictoriaLeandra View this post on Instagram A post shared by VICTORIA LEANDRA (@victorialeandra)\nVisiting Colombia and Costa Rica in 2021 sparked my desire to continue learning about the many different aspects of my own Latino culture. A week or 10 days of travel is not nearly enough to fully immerse yourself in a country to understand its nuances. I\u2019d like for 2022 to be the year I begin traveling for an extended time while working remotely.Story continues below advertisementThe more time I have in a destination, the more time I have to genuinely connect with locals doing extraordinary work in their respective industries, which is something I\u2019m interested in highlighting through EL ADN Podcast.AdvertisementOn a more personal note, I have this tradition where I take my mom on a mother-daughter trip each year, and I\u2019d like to start that with my father in 2022. I\u2019d love to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with him. If there\u2019s something I\u2019ve learned from the pandemic is that family time is precious.My last travel resolution for the new year is completing a full marathon abroad to officially become an international \u201ctravel runner,\u201d a concept my friend and I started using after our half-marathons in Puerto Rico and Miami.Rick Steves, travel author and hostIG: @ricksteveseurope One year ago, as I happily said goodbye to 2020, I hoped \u2014 and expected \u2014 that the pandemic would be over by 2022. Now, though, it\u2019s clear that we\u2019ll be traveling cautiously for a while. But, thanks to two recent trips to my favorite continent, I have a new optimism. Here are my takeaways for European travel in the new year:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe news at home can stoke ill-founded anxiety. I wouldn\u2019t tell Americans, \u201cSure, you can travel \u2026 no problem.\u201d But I would say, \u201cYou\u2019ll feel at least as safe in Europe as you do traveling here in the U.S.\u201dFrom Athens to the Alps and Rome to Paris, I was struck by how normal travel felt. My big fear was that my favorite little mom-and-pop joints hadn\u2019t survived. From Alessandro\u2019s osteria to Dimitri\u2019s taverna to Heidi\u2019s chalet, these are the entrepreneurial ventures that enliven our travel experiences \u2026 the kind of places I weave into my guidebooks, TV shows and tours. And thankfully, nearly all my favorites are still standing \u2014 tired and hunkered down, but strong and determined.The joys of European travel are still waiting for us: the rattan seats at the Paris corner cafe, the passeggiata (evening stroll) in Rome and the edgy street art tour in Athens. And from Norway to Portugal to Turkey, my resolution for 2022 is to happily (and safely) venture where my travel dreams take me.Rick Steves looks to the future after an 18-month hiatus from European travelAlvaro Silberstein, CEO of Wheel the WorldIG: @alvasilMy 2022 travel resolution is to continue creating opportunities for people with disabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy excursions, the people I\u2019ve met along the way and ideas I\u2019ve had while traveling have been some of the greatest sources of inspiration throughout my life. In 2016, with the help of my friends, I became the first person in a wheelchair to complete the W trek in Patagonia. This trip is what inspired me to found Wheel the World, a travel guide and booking site that prioritizes accessibility, and encourage other people with disabilities to feel empowered to travel without limitations.During the coronavirus, people with disabilities had to isolate and restrict themselves even more than most. This is why travel isn\u2019t just something we want after long quarantines; it\u2019s something we need to free our minds and feel capable of living life to its fullest.From airport WiFi to \u2018juice jacking\u2019: 7 ways to protect your data when travelingMarcella Hudson, co-founder and program director of beGirl.worldIG: @begirl.worldAs I travel throughout 2022, I plan to nurture myself daily. If quarantine has taught me anything, it has taught me the importance of self-care. It is so easy to jump up in the morning and start a busy day. When I am at home, I go for a morning walk and afterward sip coffee on the patio before starting work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I discover new spaces on my travels, I\u2019m going to continue this routine all while taking in the sights and sounds of another land. I am establishing the practice of transformative travel vs. transactional travel. Instead of just hitting bucket list goals, crossing off the next country on the map, or quickly traveling to the next hot spot, I want to slow down and focus on the culture, history, architecture, cuisine and vibe of each location.I am going to learn more about the lives of the tour guides I meet, extend graciousness and gratitude to the essential workers I encounter, and bask in the spirit of humanity and wonder.I stayed in a ski-town hostel during covid. Here\u2019s what it was like.Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon, travel writer and hostIG: @JetSetSarahMy biggest personal resolution is to finally set foot on the continent of Africa in 2022. Ancestry.com tells me that like many other people with Caribbean roots, my forebears are from West Africa, most likely Benin, Togo and/or Nigeria. Professionally, I\u2019ll continue to champion the Caribbean as a layered, nuanced and culturally rich region of so much more than just sun, sea and sand.Annie Cheng, founder of The Table Less TraveledIG: @anniechengeatsMy travel resolution for 2022 is to integrate my work travel and personal life. Traveling for work on our boutique culinary tours has always felt more personal through the relationships and connections I made with locals around the world. Originally, I took those journeys independently, often leaving home and family for up to six months a year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHowever, with more companies adapting to virtual collaboration, my partner and I have more flexibility. Next year, whether he is attending a conference in Texas or I\u2019m hosting a tour in Italy, we\u2019ll be traveling together with our little one in tow, taking turns with remote work and child care.Our goal is to add extra days, or even weeks, to each destination so we can keep \u201chome\u201d and family together.The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.Adam Richman, host of the History Channel\u2019s \u2018Modern Marvels\u2019IG: @adamrichmanBefore the pandemic began, I was living and filming a show in London, one of my favorite cities. When I had to return home, not only was the show unfinished, it also felt like I left my experience in London unfinished as well.Story continues below advertisementIn the new year, I hope to return to England. There are still places in Asia and Europe I have yet to visit that have long been on my bucket list, but with the surge of the omicron variant, I am going to proceed with caution.AdvertisementWhile Europe will have to wait, the beauty of the U.S. will not, and there is much left to explore in the coming year \u2014 wide open spaces that are covid-safe, inspiring and breathtaking.Decades later, \u2018Home Alone\u2019 fans are still casing the iconic houseKathy McCabe, host of \u2018Dream of Italy\u2019 on PBSIG: @dreamofitalyMy travel resolution is to listen more and appreciate everything I hear. Italy is the place I visit most often, and the most surprising thing I missed was the range of unique and even comforting everyday sounds.Story continues below advertisementOh how I missed the cadence and pitch of la bella lingua \u2014 the \u201cbeautiful language\u201d \u2014 being spoken around me, the strong chhhh sound of the espresso machine at the local bar, the symphony of street sounds from buzzing Vespas, the distinct sound of European ambulances and even the voice of a nonna yelling \u201cGiorgio\u201d off her terrace.I promise not to take for granted the very sounds of travel itself, from the \u201cping\u201d of the seat belt sign to the pound of the passport stamp.Ruzwana Bashir, founder and CEO of PeekIG: @ruzwanaI\u2019ve missed taking the epic bucket list trips, with my favorites including ice-trekking in Argentina, exploring the Palmyra ruins in Syria and seeing orangutans in the rainforests in Borneo. My travel resolution includes bringing those back, starting with my current trip to Thailand to ring in the new year.AdvertisementBut over covid, I\u2019ve also realized that adventures can be close to home. When far-flung places were inaccessible, I made the most of my weekends \u2014 like renting a boat for the day to sail around Los Angeles and taking a road trip to go hiking in Yosemite. Travel doesn\u2019t feel guaranteed anymore, so next year I\u2019m committed to being spontaneous and finding experiences to make the most of every moment.Everything you need to know about traveling to ThailandSebastian Modak, Lonely Planet\u2019s editor-at-largeIG: @sebmodakAbout three days into a week-long cycling trip \u2014 a largely aimless and improvised loop in northern Vermont and southern Qu\u00e9bec \u2014 I realized that I had stumbled upon something I had so often missed in my years frantically crisscrossing the world: the joy of moving slowly and deliberately.In 2020, Year of New Hobbies that it was, I quit smoking, momentarily stopped traveling internationally and got a bit obsessed with cycling. As I looked for ways to tap into adventure, serendipity and the magic of travel without navigating closed borders, 2021 was all about multiday bike touring. I pedaled out into the Hudson Valley, into the Adirondack Mountains and even into Canada.In 2022, I want to keep doing that, but I also hope to put into practice some larger lessons from that style of travel. I want to travel slower and more intentionally. I want to realize how lucky I am to be out exploring the world, even if it\u2019s in my own backyard.Catherine Powell, Airbnb\u2019s global head of hostingTwitter: @capow14For those fortunate enough to do so, working from home now means working from any home. The freedom you feel when you realize you can go a little farther if you stay a little longer is just the antidote to the isolation we have all experienced. In my case, this has meant enjoying long weekends away with my husband in California, Utah and Colorado, and longer stays with family in the U.K. and Italy.My goal for 2022 is to discover more of the United States (Georgia and Nashville are next on my list), reconnect with family overseas and \u2014 having started my job at Airbnb right as the pandemic began \u2014 spend time with team members and Hosts whom I have only met via Zoom.Andrew Zimmern, TV host and Goodwill Ambassador for the U.N.'s World Food ProgrammeIG: @chefazI am not one for New Year\u2019s resolutions. However, I do always look back at the last year to take inventory, see what worked and what didn\u2019t, what actions and behaviors brought me closer to my goals and which ones didn\u2019t. I tell anyone who will listen to imagine what kind of life they really want and then say \u201cno\u201d to anything that didn\u2019t help them get there. Sounds easy. It isn\u2019t.Travel for me has always been transformative. The more you venture away from your normal, whether that\u2019s around the world or on the other side of town, the more you learn. Away from our primary habitat we take more risks, ask more questions and try new things. Then we learn, grow and bring all that back.Well, I didn\u2019t really travel in 2021. And that was the primary source of growth for me. Travel had been the single greatest learning activity in my life \u2014 until I stopped it entirely and spent more time with my kid than I have in a long time.Turns out, I don\u2019t have to travel to take risks, ask questions, try new things and learn from that process. Turns out, the more time I spend with my favorite human, real time being really present in those moments, it achieves the same result. And I got more of the life I wanted at the same time. I guess you\u2019re never too old to learn a new trick \u2014 or to take a different kind of journey.correctionA previous version of this article misstated the last name of Sebastian Modak's girlfriend. She is Maggie Tishman, not Maggie Tish. The article has been corrected. Expect remote work, domestic travel and family time to trend on 2022 itineraries. 13 travel resolutions for 2022, according to pros",
        "author": "Natalie B. Compton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alaska Airlines is the first airline to ban emotional support animals (WP: By The Way - Travel) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1052",
        "date": "2020-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/12/30/alaska-airlines-emotional-support-animals/",
        "text": "Alaska Airlines is the first U.S. carrier to ban emotional support animals on its flights following a Department of Transportation ruling that airlines will only be required to transport service dogs.Beginning Jan. 11, the airline will allow only service dogs that are \u201cspecially trained\u201d and will refuse transport to emotional support animals. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe DOT rule change came early this month following the agency\u2019s decision to revise its Air Carrier Access legislation because passengers have for years been requesting airlines accept their \u201cservice\u201d pigs, rabbits and peacocks. Until now, the department had not defined what constituted a service animal, and all emotional support animals were federally required to be permitted on planes.Story continues below advertisementIn 2017, the trade group Airlines for America estimated that the number of emotional support animals traveling on commercial flights increased to 751,000, a sharp rise from the 481,000 seen the year before.Airlines will no longer be required to transport emotional support animals\u201cFollowing recent changes to U.S. Department of Transportation\u2019s (DOT) rules, Alaska Airlines will no longer accept emotional support animals on its flights,\u201d the airline said in a news release. \u201cAlaska will only transport service dogs, which are specially trained to perform tasks for the benefit of a qualified individual with a disability.\u201dAdvertisementOn its website, the airline states that size of all service dogs allowed onboard \u201cmust not exceed the footprint or personal space of the guest\u2019s seat or foot area during the entire flight.\u201d The service dog must also be leashed at all times, is expected to \u201cbehave properly,\u201d cannot occupy a seat or tray table and may not be under four months old.Story continues below advertisementThe airline called the move a necessary step. \u201cThis regulatory change is welcome news, as it will help us reduce disturbances onboard, while continuing to accommodate our guests traveling with qualified service animals,\u201d Ray Prentice, director of customer advocacy at Alaska Airlines, said in the news release.\u201cThe final rule announced today addresses concerns raised by individuals with disabilities, airlines, flight attendants, airports, other aviation transportation stakeholders and other members of the public, regarding service animals on aircraft,\u201d DOT officials said in a statement announcing the rule change on Dec. 2.AdvertisementAlaska Airlines flights will accept passengers who booked travel before Jan. 11 to bring an emotional support animal other than a dog only up until Mar. 1. The DOT originally took up the ban on service animals in January 2019.Read more: Flying with covid-19 isn\u2019t just reckless \u2014 it\u2019s potentially deadly, doctors sayDelta, United will require U.S. visitors traveling from the U.K. to show proof of a negative covid-19 testAfter 13 air crew broke quarantine, Sydney health officials will now police-monitor working flight attendants Beginning Jan. 11, the airline will allow only service dogs that are \u201cspecially trained\u201d and will refuse transport to emotional support animals. Alaska Airlines is the first airline to ban emotional support animals",
        "author": "Shannon McMahon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Maverick astrophysicist calls for unusually intense solar cycle, straying from consensus view (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1053",
        "date": "2020-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/19/solar-cycle-prediction-mcintosh/",
        "text": "When the chips are down and a big storm is brewing on Earth, odds are that forecasters are predicting close to the same thing. But when it comes to space weather and storms that flare up on the surface of the sun, that\u2019s not always the case. The sun has begun a new 11-year cycle, and scientists have very different ideas on just how much energy will be available to fuel its eruptions. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe consensus view of an international panel of 12 scientists calls for the new cycle, Solar Cycle 25, to be small to average, much like its predecessor, Solar Cycle 24.But a prominent astrophysicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Scott McIntosh, foresees the sun going gangbusters. The cycle is already off to a fast start, coinciding with the recent publication of McIntosh\u2019s paper in Solar Physics. The study, with contributions from several of his colleagues, forecasts the nascent sunspot cycle to become one of the strongest ever recorded.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe weather on the sun matters because solar outbursts can unleash radiation into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere that is dangerous for air travelers; interfere with spacecraft and satellites; and, in a worst-case scenario, inflict significant damage on Earth\u2019s power grids.The forecasts for the new solar cycle, which are so divergent, regard the number of sunspots that the sun will cook up over the coming 11 years. Sunspots are like bruises on the surface of the sun, cooler discolorations that throb and pulsate.Forecasting sunspots is important, since \u201ccoronal mass ejections\u201d that originate from them can send disruptive bursts of magnetic energy toward the Earth.Predicting sunspots in the new solar cycleIn September, NASA announced that solar cycle 24 ended in December 2019, and that solar cycle 25 had begun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe number of sunspots crowding the solar disk at one time varies significantly over the course of the solar cycle. During solar minimum \u2014 which we\u2019re emerging from right now \u2014 weeks can pass without a single sunspot. In fact, 206 days in 2020 (or 58 percent of the year) haven\u2019t featured any Earth-facing sunspots.But at the peak of a solar cycle, the average monthly sunspot number ranges from 140 to 220.Solar cycle 24\u2032s sunspot activity proved underwhelming \u2014 with the sunspot number averaging 110 at its peak.An international panel co-chaired by scientists from NOAA and NASA, which featured six U.S. solar scientists and half a dozen from abroad, is anticipating a similarly quiet cycle 25.Scientists predict a new solar cycle is about to begin and that it might be stronger than the last oneThey\u2019re calling for that peak to occur in July 2025, give or take about eight months.Story continues below advertisementBut McIntosh, who is now NCAR\u2019s deputy director and previously directed its High Altitude Observatory, estimates a sunspot number more than double what the joint panel is predicting.The panel\u2019s prediction: A quiet cycle The scientists on the Solar Cycle 25 Prediction Panel produced their outlook by reviewing and vetting a number of predictions across the solar science and astrophysics community. Among them is Doug Biesecker, the panel\u2019s co-chair and a scientist at NOAA\u2019s Space Weather Prediction Center.AdvertisementAmong the diverse panel, different ideas were discussed and debated. Disagreements often stemmed from the state of the science, Biesecker explained, and how poorly understood the underlying physics of the sun are.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe concluded it would be similar in strength to the cycle that\u2019s just died,\u201d said Gordon Petrie, a scientist at the National Solar Observatory. \u201cThis is a comparatively weak number. [Cycle 23] was about 50 percent stronger than [cycle 24], and going back to the 1950s, the cycles were much stronger [still.]\u201dThe lone wolf with a shocking forecast In stark contrast to the panel\u2019s forecast are the prophecies of McIntosh, who anticipates that the upcoming solar cycle could be the most active in half a century. He has developed a prediction technique he says foreshadows a coming period of solar volatility.Advertisement\u201cIf the relationship, [which] was developed off 24 cycles, holds, the number [of sunspots] coming out is double what the consensus prediction was from the various panel members was,\u201d McIntosh said.Story continues below advertisementHis group pinned their forecast at \u201c233 [sunspots] with error bars\u201d during the peak of Solar Cycle 25.\u201cAnd those error bars are not huge,\u201d McIntosh added. \u201cThe data just smacks you in the face.\u201dWhy the forecasts matter Predicting discolorations on the surface of a star 93 million miles away might seem like an abstract art, but it\u2019s actually a vital exercise. That\u2019s because the Earth is susceptible to \u201cspace weather,\u201d or the effects of \u201cstorms\u201d launched from the sun. The storms hurl high-energy particles toward the Earth, along with intense spurts of magnetic energy.That can have a pretty visible manifestation in the form of the aurora borealis and australis, but other impacts can be much more severe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBig [solar] cycles cause things to fall out of low Earth orbit more quickly,\u201d explained Biesecker. That can be problematic for satellites, which are integral for global economies and commerce. \u201c[Energy from solar storms can] heat up the [thermosphere, or upper atmosphere], and that heating basically results in increased density at satellite orbit altitudes.\u201dThat, in turn, slows down the satellites, sometimes to the point of knocking some out of orbit.This can be problematic too, because decades\u2019 worth of satellite launches have cluttered the extreme outer atmosphere with defunct leftovers and space junk. Without drag to scour out the extraterrestrial rubbish, the risk of an operable satellite being damaged by a collision climbs.Story continues below advertisementThe solar storms can disrupt or destroy the electronics onboard satellites if precautions aren\u2019t taken. A big storm, and \u201cyou\u2019ll literally see satellites frying,\u201d McIntosh warned. \u201cThey cut corners on shielding.\u201dAdvertisementAnd the biggest events have even knocked out electrical grids on the ground before \u2014 though episodes of that magnitude are rare. On March 12, 1989, a solar storm brought the northern lights as far south as Cuba and Florida, while knocking out power to a large swath of Quebec.The episode paled in comparison to the infamous Carrington Event, which brought the planet\u2019s biggest geomagnetic storm on record in early September 1859. Telegraph wires fried, while the northern lights could be seen across the entire Lower 48.Story continues below advertisementIn 2013, researchers in the United Kingdom published a paper estimating that a similar storm today could cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, slashing the country\u2019s GDP by up to 15 percent. Some even speculate that a solar storm of that magnitude would bring the world\u2019s economy to a screeching halt, with electrical service restoration taking months.AdvertisementSolar storms can also boost how much solar radiation passengers and crew onboard commercial flights near the poles are exposed to, at times reaching dangerous levels. Airlines sometimes reroute their flights if they have advance notice.Leveraging the sun\u2019s magnetism to make predictions By understanding the current magnetic structure and field strength of the sun, it\u2019s possible for solar physicists to make forward-looking predictions of sunspot number. The science is still in its early stages at best, with a few main techniques for estimation.\u201cIt\u2019s not a mature branch of science, I have to say,\u201d Petrie said. \u201cWe have set of \u2026 calculations that guide us.\u201dScientists have found a link between how much magnetic energy pours out of the sun at solar minimum and the number of sunspots that form later in the cycle.AdvertisementAnother method of prediction focuses on observed motion and visible signatures on the sun\u2019s surface.\u201cIt is based on what we see on the [illuminated surface], and tries to project \u2026 what we\u2019ll see on the surface based on what we\u2019ve already seen,\u201d Petrie said.A novel approach leads a wildly different prediction McIntosh has taken an entirely different approach in his strategy. And he thinks it could be revolutionary.\u201cUp until a couple years ago, I was watching the slow decline of solar activity over the last 30 years, and kind of jumped on the bandwagon that year that\u2019s going to continue,\u201d McIntosh said. \u201cBut then we did some work about 18 months ago.\u201dMcIntosh has set about trying to figure out how the sun\u2019s \u201cinternal magnetic machine\u201d works. He deduced that there are as many as four main magnetic bands that encircle the sun at any one time. Sunspots, he argues, are the result of interference and overlap between those bands.McIntosh postulates that there may not be just one cycle that accounts for sunspot activity but, in fact, several, connected to one of those four main magnetic bands. He thinks they all overlap in different ways, their peaks slightly misaligned. The frequency of sunspots we see is the product of how those subcycles interact.McIntosh enlisted the help of plasma fusion scientists to review past data and come up with the math to predict what sunspot patterns may arise in the years ahead.What does it mean when the sun is spotless and serene?Only time will tell if McIntosh\u2019s predictions for an active Solar Cycle 25 are borne out. He says \u201cthe proof is in the pudding.\u201dFor now, the panel has remained quiet about his research, but McIntosh says that \u2014 if his predictions are realized \u2014 the field will have a lot of work to do.\u201cThis work is pointing in a direction which says much of the past physics isn\u2019t quite right,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we\u2019re right, it points to a quite different way in how the sun works.\u201d If the prediction of Scott McIntosh of the National Center for Atmospheric is right, it could mean more frequent and energetic solar storms in the coming years. Maverick astrophysicist calls for unusually intense solar cycle, straying from consensus view",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Total solar eclipse dazzles skies in Antarctica. The photos are spectacular. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1054",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/12/06/antarctica-solar-eclipse-total/",
        "text": "Watching a total solar eclipse never gets old. Our bright sun, momentarily obscured by our moon, fades to a dark circle. But meanwhile, the sun\u2019s corona \u2014 the outermost part of its atmosphere which is usually hidden \u2014 emerges as a glowing circle of light around the jet black void.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor about two minutes on Saturday, a select few witnessed the astronomical dance from Antarctica. Sky watchers captured the event in photos and videos for those of us who could not travel to the end of the world. Before Saturday, the last total solar eclipse to occur in Antarctica was Nov. 23, 2003. The next one will not occur until 2039.Antarctica's total solar eclipse SaturdayOn Dec. 4, Patrick Poitevin filmed the eclipse from start to finish from an aircraft leaving from Puntas Arenas, Chile. (Patrick Poitevin)The video above, taken by Patrick Poitevin on an iPhone 6, shows the eclipse from start to finish from an aircraft leaving from Puntas Arenas, Chile. Others captured the event from research stations on the ground and in space.Total Solar Eclipse in Antarctica \u2600\ufe0f\ud83c\udf13\ud83c\udf0e\ud83d\udcf7: From the Union Glacier Joint Scientific Polar Station. By @FTruebaG / @MarcaChile and @ReneQuinan / @inach_gob\ud83d\udcf7: From an airplane. \u201cEflight 2021-Sunrise\u201d Mission by astronomy student @vanebulossa / @uchile pic.twitter.com/lRmBt62SaS\u2014 ALMA Observatory at Home\ud83d\udce1 (@almaobs) December 4, 2021\n\nWoo hoo!!! \u2600\ufe0f\ud83c\udf1e\u2708\ufe0f This is not the first time Mike Kentrianakis has chased a #TotalSolarEclipse to view it from the air - this time, the round trip to #Antarctica from NY involves 9 flights, but definitely paid off! This is so amazing!https://t.co/pFQZIET7AZ pic.twitter.com/YAQl1t0BUZ\u2014 Cady Coleman (@Astro_Cady) December 4, 2021\n\nThe Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, spacecraft captured the Moon\u2019s shadow over Antarctica about a million miles from Earth. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station, orbiting about 250 miles above Earth, also captured photos from the Cupola.07:53 on Saturday December 4th, over the Indian Ocean pic.twitter.com/JEaMOeHmjb\u2014 DSCOVR:EPIC (@dscovr_epic) December 5, 2021\n\n\"Saturday morning, the Expedition 66 crew squeezed into the Cupola to check out the total solar eclipse that occurred over Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Here the moon casts an oblong shadow on the Earth\u2019s surface. It was an incredible sight to behold.\" \u2013 Kayla Barron pic.twitter.com/FktW8qsBIU\u2014 NASA Astronauts (@NASA_Astronauts) December 4, 2021\n\nThe last total solar eclipse in the United States amazed sky watchers from Oregon to South Carolina in 2017. The next total solar eclipse in the United States will take a path from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024.Missed the solar eclipse? You won\u2019t have to wait too long for the next one. For about two minutes on Saturday, a select few witnessed the astronomical dance from Antarctica. Total solar eclipse dazzles skies in Antarctica. The photos are spectacular.",
        "author": "Kasha Patel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Total solar eclipse dazzles skies in Antarctica. The photos are spectacular. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1055",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/12/06/antarctica-solar-eclipse-total/",
        "text": "Watching a total solar eclipse never gets old. Our bright sun, momentarily obscured by our moon, fades to a dark circle. But meanwhile, the sun\u2019s corona \u2014 the outermost part of its atmosphere which is usually hidden \u2014 emerges as a glowing circle of light around the jet black void.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor about two minutes on Saturday, a select few witnessed the astronomical dance from Antarctica. Sky watchers captured the event in photos and videos for those of us who could not travel to the end of the world. Before Saturday, the last total solar eclipse to occur in Antarctica was Nov. 23, 2003. The next one will not occur until 2039.Antarctica's total solar eclipse SaturdayOn Dec. 4, Patrick Poitevin filmed the eclipse from start to finish from an aircraft leaving from Puntas Arenas, Chile. (Patrick Poitevin)The video above, taken by Patrick Poitevin on an iPhone 6, shows the eclipse from start to finish from an aircraft leaving from Puntas Arenas, Chile. Others captured the event from research stations on the ground and in space.Total Solar Eclipse in Antarctica \u2600\ufe0f\ud83c\udf13\ud83c\udf0e\ud83d\udcf7: From the Union Glacier Joint Scientific Polar Station. By @FTruebaG / @MarcaChile and @ReneQuinan / @inach_gob\ud83d\udcf7: From an airplane. \u201cEflight 2021-Sunrise\u201d Mission by astronomy student @vanebulossa / @uchile pic.twitter.com/lRmBt62SaS\u2014 ALMA Observatory at Home\ud83d\udce1 (@almaobs) December 4, 2021\n\nWoo hoo!!! \u2600\ufe0f\ud83c\udf1e\u2708\ufe0f This is not the first time Mike Kentrianakis has chased a #TotalSolarEclipse to view it from the air - this time, the round trip to #Antarctica from NY involves 9 flights, but definitely paid off! This is so amazing!https://t.co/pFQZIET7AZ pic.twitter.com/YAQl1t0BUZ\u2014 Cady Coleman (@Astro_Cady) December 4, 2021\n\nThe Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVR, spacecraft captured the Moon\u2019s shadow over Antarctica about a million miles from Earth. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station, orbiting about 250 miles above Earth, also captured photos from the Cupola.07:53 on Saturday December 4th, over the Indian Ocean pic.twitter.com/JEaMOeHmjb\u2014 DSCOVR:EPIC (@dscovr_epic) December 5, 2021\n\n\"Saturday morning, the Expedition 66 crew squeezed into the Cupola to check out the total solar eclipse that occurred over Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Here the moon casts an oblong shadow on the Earth\u2019s surface. It was an incredible sight to behold.\" \u2013 Kayla Barron pic.twitter.com/FktW8qsBIU\u2014 NASA Astronauts (@NASA_Astronauts) December 4, 2021\n\nThe last total solar eclipse in the United States amazed sky watchers from Oregon to South Carolina in 2017. The next total solar eclipse in the United States will take a path from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024.Missed the solar eclipse? You won\u2019t have to wait too long for the next one. For about two minutes on Saturday, a select few witnessed the astronomical dance from Antarctica. Total solar eclipse dazzles skies in Antarctica. The photos are spectacular.",
        "author": "Kasha Patel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter reaches opposition tonight. Here\u2019s when and how to see it. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1056",
        "date": "2018-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/05/04/jupiter-reaches-opposition-early-next-week-heres-how-to-see-it/",
        "text": "Walk away from Facebook, nix the porch light and stroll outside to enjoy the sky tonight. The king of the planets stays very bright throughout this month and reaches \u201copposition\u201d on Tuesday, which means the planet with the big red spot will be very bright in the southeast sky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOpposition occurs when Jupiter and the sun are opposite one another from our earthly perspective. Essentially, we revel in a \u201cfull\u201d Jupiter\u00a0\u2014 just like a full moon \u2014 which can be seen throughout May at -2.5 magnitude (very bright) in the constellation Libra in the southeast after sundown. Jupiter ascends the\u00a0southeast sky beginning around 8 p.m., while the sun sets in the west. As the night grows darker, the large gaseous planet becomes an exceptionally bright spot. Like working the overnight third shift, the planet now stays up all night.Throughout the night you will see Jupiter climb higher toward the south (it\u2019s due south at 1:10 a.m., according to the Naval Observatory) and then descend toward the west, where the large planet sets at 6:18 a.m. \u2014 about 17 minutes after sunrise. If you\u2019re an early riser, you can find Jupiter in the western sky before dawn.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWant an app to help see eclipses, comets and constellations? This is my favorite.From Earth, Jupiter appears as a muted bright spot in the sky, but this giant planet sports a titanic personality.NASA\u2019s Juno probe is on tour around the planet and sending back images once unimaginable.\u00a0It captured scenes of massive cyclones from the planet\u2019s south and north pole region \u2014 which look like a caffeinated version of Vincent Van Gogh\u2019s \u201cThe Starry Night.\u201dLast month, NASA released a 3-D flyover of Jupiter\u2019s north pole region taken by the spacecraft\u2019s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper instrument. The tool captured light from deep inside Jupiter, as it studied the weather 30 to 45 miles below the gassy planet\u2019s cloud tops. In March, Juno scientists published results in the journal Nature, which provided gravity measurements and explained the planet\u2019s mysterious zones and belts.Jupiter\u2019s stunning Great Red Spot, seen like never before\u201cGalileo viewed the stripes on Jupiter more than 400 years ago,\u201d said Yohai Kaspi, Juno co-investigator from the Weizmann Institute of Science\u00a0in Israel, who led research for the Nature paper.\u201cUntil now, we only had a superficial understanding of them and have been able to relate these stripes to cloud features along Jupiter\u2019s jets,\u201d\u00a0Kaspi\u00a0said. \u201cNow \u2026 we know how deep the jets extend and what their structure is beneath the visible clouds. It\u2019s like going from a 2-D picture to a 3-D version in high definition.\u201d The planet with the big red spot will be very bright in the southeast sky. Jupiter reaches opposition tonight. Here\u2019s when and how to see it.",
        "author": "Blaine Friedlander"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bundle up and watch a Wallops rocket launch Sunday morning (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1057",
        "date": "2017-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/11/09/you-can-watch-a-rocket-launch-saturday-morning-from-d-c-but-bundle-up/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.8 a.m. update Saturday: The launch was aborted due to an aircraft detected in the vicinity of the launch site. It has been re-scheduled for Sunday morning at 7:14 a.m. The weather will again be cold \u2013 near freezing in the Washington area \u2013 so spectators will want to, again, bundle up. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOriginal post from FridayA rocket will blast away from Wallops Island, Va., early tomorrow morning and will be visible over much of the Mid-Atlantic. But, should you choose to take in the spectacle, wear your winter attire, as it is set to be the coldest morning of the fall so far.Liftoff is set for 7:37 a.m., but check the launch status before heading out: These missions are sometimes delayed or scrubbed. Sometimes equipment malfunctions and, during some previous launch efforts, unidentified boats in the range of the launch site have foiled attempts. While it is expected to be very cold, weather should be very favorable for launch, with clear skies and light winds.For best viewing in the D.C. area, find a location with an unimpeded view of the southeast sky, where you should direct your eyes. The rocket\u2019s vapor trail should become visible about 90 seconds after launch. At its highest, the rocket will zip about 10 degrees above the horizon.Beyond Washington, the launch should be visible between North Carolina and Connecticut.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Antares rocket \u201cwill carry Orbital ATK\u2019s Cygnus spacecraft with more than 7,000 pounds of food, clothing and experiments on the CRS-8 mission to the International Space Station,\u201d NASA says.NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space StationThis is the second International Space Station supply mission for this particular type of spacecraft. The last one happened Oct. 17, 2016, and was also visible around Washington.In a previous effort in 2014, the rocket exploded,\u00a0and the mission failed.For launch updates on Saturday, follow NASA Wallops on Twitter and/or Facebook.If you decide to venture out to watch, be prepared for temperatures in the 20s. Put on your hats and gloves and maybe brew some piping hot coffee. Or, if you prefer, watch the launch from the comfort of your home on NASA TV, which will begin coverage at 7 a.m. Saturday's launch was scrubbed and has been rescheduled for Sunday morning at 7:14 a.m. Bundle up and watch a Wallops rocket launch Sunday morning",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bundle up and watch a Wallops rocket launch Sunday morning (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1058",
        "date": "2017-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/11/09/you-can-watch-a-rocket-launch-saturday-morning-from-d-c-but-bundle-up/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.8 a.m. update Saturday: The launch was aborted due to an aircraft detected in the vicinity of the launch site. It has been re-scheduled for Sunday morning at 7:14 a.m. The weather will again be cold \u2013 near freezing in the Washington area \u2013 so spectators will want to, again, bundle up. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOriginal post from FridayA rocket will blast away from Wallops Island, Va., early tomorrow morning and will be visible over much of the Mid-Atlantic. But, should you choose to take in the spectacle, wear your winter attire, as it is set to be the coldest morning of the fall so far.Liftoff is set for 7:37 a.m., but check the launch status before heading out: These missions are sometimes delayed or scrubbed. Sometimes equipment malfunctions and, during some previous launch efforts, unidentified boats in the range of the launch site have foiled attempts. While it is expected to be very cold, weather should be very favorable for launch, with clear skies and light winds.For best viewing in the D.C. area, find a location with an unimpeded view of the southeast sky, where you should direct your eyes. The rocket\u2019s vapor trail should become visible about 90 seconds after launch. At its highest, the rocket will zip about 10 degrees above the horizon.Beyond Washington, the launch should be visible between North Carolina and Connecticut.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Antares rocket \u201cwill carry Orbital ATK\u2019s Cygnus spacecraft with more than 7,000 pounds of food, clothing and experiments on the CRS-8 mission to the International Space Station,\u201d NASA says.NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space StationThis is the second International Space Station supply mission for this particular type of spacecraft. The last one happened Oct. 17, 2016, and was also visible around Washington.In a previous effort in 2014, the rocket exploded,\u00a0and the mission failed.For launch updates on Saturday, follow NASA Wallops on Twitter and/or Facebook.If you decide to venture out to watch, be prepared for temperatures in the 20s. Put on your hats and gloves and maybe brew some piping hot coffee. Or, if you prefer, watch the launch from the comfort of your home on NASA TV, which will begin coverage at 7 a.m. Saturday's launch was scrubbed and has been rescheduled for Sunday morning at 7:14 a.m. Bundle up and watch a Wallops rocket launch Sunday morning",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The majesty and miracle of the 1969 moon landing \u2018still boggles the mind\u2019 (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1059",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/07/20/majesty-miracle-moon-landing-still-boggles-mind/",
        "text": "This is the second in a two-part series. Read the first: \u2018It truly was a miracle\u2019: The marvelous moment Apollo 11 rode off to the moonEarly Sunday morning, July 20, 1969. All systems were 'GO\u2019 for a landing on the moon. The exquisite space ballet that had gone on since Apollo 11\u2019s launch four days earlier was scheduled to reach a crescendo later that day. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightYears of intense work were coming down to this moment.The landing was scheduled for late afternoon, but before that was possible, a precisely choreographed series of maneuvers had to come off perfectly\u2026 or else.CBS anchor Walter Cronkite and the other Apollo experts expounded on all the things that could go wrong. If a rocket burned a second too long, Apollo 11 would head into oblivion.Story continues below advertisementWe were preemptively trying to come to grips with the creepy, ghastly pall that would hang over all of us if these American heroes had to be abandoned to die on the moon. We watched the play-by-play on television with awe and pride that Americans were actually going to try, but we all knew that they were skating on a knife\u2019s edge. It was hard to breathe normally.\u2018They would get killed\u2019: The weather forecast that saved Apollo 11The Soviets injected another layer of mystery and anxiety into the second-by-second drama. Earlier that week, newspapers reported that an unmanned spacecraft called Luna 15 was heading to the moon. The speculation was that the Russians were trying beat Apollo 11 back to earth with moon rocks. But there was also the possibility they would jam communications or otherwise foul up the delicate maneuvering required for a moon landing. They wouldn\u2019t do that, would they?AdvertisementUnbeknown to us at the time\u2026 through a backchannel\u2026 at the last minute\u2026 the U.S. received assurances there would be no interference.Story continues below advertisementThat Sunday morning earth time, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin squeezed into the cramped lunar lander. By early afternoon, checkout complete, standing shoulder to shoulder, cool as cucumbers, they turned the spidery spacecraft, and tail-first headed for the surface of the moon. We heard every word.The real drama began about 4 p.m. Eastern. The Eagle\u2019s big rocket engine was scheduled to fire. That would slow their descent. At that point, they\u2019d have 12 minutes to maneuver until their fuel tank was dry. On television, over a NASA animation, which was only valid if things went perfectly, a giant digital clock labeled \u201cTime to Lunar Landing\u201d counted it down.Communications were scratchy at times. But through the static we heard Buzz Aldrin. The big tail engine had fired on time. The big clock was counting \u2013 11 minutes, 10, 9, 8. It\u2019s nerve-racking to think about, even 50 years later.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHouston was giving them readouts. Aldrin was reporting what they knew. The static was bad. We turned up the TV to hear what they were saying, but it was mostly tech talk with Mission Control that we didn\u2019t understand. Minutes were speeding by, but it was taking forever.At six and a half minutes out, we hear, \u201cProgram alarm 1202\u2026 1202\u201d. It\u2019s Aldrin. Was there stress in his voice? I think so. But they kept going. It must have been nothing.Then the Eagle wants to know about that alarm. What the heck is a 1202? Maybe it wasn\u2019t normal. Houston says they\u2019re working on it.More alarms, but Houston says, \u201cWe\u2019re GO\u201d.Less than five minutes. All good.Less than three minutes. Houston says they are GO for landing.Story continues below advertisementMore alarms! A \u201c1201\u201d this time. Then two minutes out, another \u201c1202.\u201d Little did we know, there was a scramble going on in Mission Control to analyze the alarms. The computer was overflowing, prioritizing tasks. Houston made the call. A tough call. We\u2019re GO.AdvertisementAldrin is reading out their altitude and speed. We don\u2019t know what it means, but it all sounds good. Suddenly the big clock, which had been off the screen, popped up and said 22 seconds to landing. Really?The clock got to zero. They took it off the TV. The Eagle was still flying. Houston said, \u201c60 seconds.\u201d But 60 seconds until what? The animation on TV showed them on the moon, but Aldrin said, \u201cforward, forward.\u201d Later we\u2019d know, Armstrong was looking for a place to land.Story continues below advertisementThey are close. We hear a voice under obvious stress say, \u201c30 seconds.\u201d It has to happen now.Suddenly we hear, \u201ccontact light.\u201d And 22 seconds later, for posterity, \u201cThe Eagle has landed.\u201dThe initial calculation was they had 18 seconds of fuel left in the tank when they landed. The countdown we heard was from a guy with a stopwatch in Houston timing them down to the last drop. If we\u2019d known that at the time, our hearts would have beaten twice as fast as they already were.AdvertisementA fearless test pilot, a miracle-maker at the flight controls, Commander Neil Armstrong had done it. He took manual control, found an open spot, and put her down.It was hard to know how to feel at that moment. We looked at each other unsure that we heard it right. Was it possible? They had actually done it.Story continues below advertisementThe group of us watching the coverage that day were friends whose fathers and husbands worked on the Apollo team and helped make this incredible thing happen. We were immensely proud, of course, but also, we never doubted. If these people that we knew so well said it could be done, we believed it. We believed in them.Later that evening, we watched Neil Armstrong, a 38-year-old American, step on the moon \u2013 live on television. People have criticized, \u201cOne small step for man. One giant leap for mankind\u201d as not worthy of the moment. Cronkite was less than enthused. But I got it immediately. Yes, it\u2019s not grammatically perfect, but the confusion about the message still rings hollow to me.AdvertisementThe next day, the ugly duckling named Eagle flew perfectly again, and they were on their way home.Story continues below advertisementWe found out later that Russia\u2019s Luna 15 malfunctioned, and crashed some 700 miles from where Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the moon. And years later we learned that the Russians had tried to launch their version of the Saturn V four times, but none of those rockets got far from the launchpad before blowing up.The Russians couldn\u2019t do it, but the mighty Saturn V never failed. Even after 50 years, nothing has matched it. Finally, if nothing changes, NASA will launch a worthy replacement next year.That men and women of the 1960s could pull it off, that America could make it happen, still boggles the mind. The achievement soars in the rarest of air along with the founding of America itself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was July 20, 1969. Man walked on the moon. That 50 years later, most Americans couldn\u2019t tell you the date, and some would even doubt it, was inconceivable to the people all over the world who lived it, felt it, and thought the moment was surely seared into forever.The majesty and the miracle of Apollo has only magnified over these 50 years by the increasing differential in time and tech. Today, we swim in high technology, but rockets still blow up on the launchpad. Yet, the Saturn V flew every time. No human since Apollo has gone higher than low earth orbit, yet in 1969 men went to the moon.As we look at the moon this week, remember and reflect. Fifty years ago, we were there.Bryan Norcross is a hurricane specialist at WPLG-TV in Miami and the Weather Channel. This essay first appeared on Miami\u2019s Local10.com. The achievement soars in the rarest of air along with the founding of America itself. The majesty and miracle of the 1969 moon landing \u2018still boggles the mind\u2019",
        "author": "Bryan Norcross"
    },
    {
        "title": "The biggest meteor shower of the year peaks tonight. Here\u2019s how to watch. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1060",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/12/12/the-biggest-meteor-shower-of-the-year-peaks-this-week-heres-how-to-watch/",
        "text": "The Geminid meteor shower \u2014 one of the best of the year \u2014 will peak Wednesday night. This year it promises to be even better\u00a0as the waning crescent moon suppresses its own bold personality,\u00a0offering perhaps the strongest shooting stars show for 2017.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe International Meteor Organization predicts the Geminids shower to brim with about 120 meteors an hour. Due to the usual cold weather, it\u2019s hard to spend much time outside to watch, said Beverly Thackeray, a doctoral student in astronomy at the University of Maryland. \u201cBut if the conditions are right, and you can see the night sky, it is probably the best meteor shower of the year. So, grab some hot cocoa and get some sleeping bags,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementThe Geminids are known for producing some fireballs, Thackeray said.Meteors will likely start late in the evening Wednesday and go throughout the night. All you have to do is turn off porch and house lights, go outside, get your eyes acclimated to the dark and begin looking up. The waning crescent moon will be in a last-quarter phase, and it\u2019s not going to rise until about 3:45 a.m., which means the sky will be plenty dark. If you\u2019re in an area with bright light pollution, like a major city, you may want to head out to the far suburbs to get the best view.The meteors will be emanating from the Gemini constellation. Smartphone apps such as\u00a0Sky Guide for iOS and Sky Map for Android can help identify the planets and constellations.Usually, meteors occur when Earth passes through the dusty trails of comets. When comets approach the sun, they form a tail, spewing vapor and dirt. As our planet rounds the sun on its annual 365-day journey, the Earth\u2019s atmosphere inevitably strikes debris from these leftover comet trails. The dust burns in our atmosphere, lights up and shoots across our heavens.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Geminid meteors are different. They occur thanks to a rocky asteroid called (3200) Phaethon, a carbonaceous entity about 3 miles in diameter that voyages close to the sun, heats up, and releases dust. When Earth runs into these rocks, they burn up.There is much to learn about these asteroids. Matthew Knight and Michael Kelley, astronomy researchers at the University of Maryland, will travel this week to Happy Jack, Ariz., to use the Lowell Observatory\u2019s behemoth Discovery Channel Telescope around Phaethon\u2019s close approach (it won\u2019t hit us) to Earth.Phaethon passes Earth every 1.4 years, and it will pass closer to Earth on Dec. 16 than ever since its discovery in 1983. It will pass this close again in 2093, Knight said. At this week\u2019s pass, the asteroid will be about .07 astronomical units or about 6.5 million miles away \u2014 the equivalent of about 30 trips between our pale blue planet and the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn this scientific hunt to understand Phaethon, the Maryland researchers will exploit the telescope\u2019s ability to rapidly switch between an optical imager, an optical spectrograph and an infrared spectrograph.Phaethon is a B-type asteroid that could be similar to some carbonaceous chondrites, which could contain organic molecules \u2014 the stuff of life. Some of these kind of meteorites \u2014 broken off from asteroids \u2014 may have been cosmic couriers that brought water to Earth. \u201cThat\u2019s a pretty profound thing in geology,\u201d said Sam Crossley, a doctoral student in planetary geology at Maryland and a NASA Harriet Jenkins Fellow. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the holy grails of planetary science \u2014 finding where water came from.\u201dTo root out the genesis of life, scientists are on the case. Phaethon\u2019s carbonaceous cousin, (101955) Bennu, another B-type asteroid, will get a visitor late\u00a0in the summer. NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx mission spacecraft, part of the agency\u2019s New Frontiers program, in September 2016. The craft will reach Bennu in August 2018, pluck samples from it and return to Earth with specimens in 2023.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThackeray wishes to see more Geminid meteors in the future showers. The planet Jupiter\u2019s immense gravity seems to be tugging Phaethon\u2019s dusty trail more into Earth\u2019s path. \u201cJupiter is pulling things, like it always does,\u201d she said. \u201cJupiter is the ruler of the solar system. It\u2019s the reason we have an asteroid belt to begin with. That\u2019s why a planet didn\u2019t accrete (coalesce) in the asteroid belt, because Jupiter wouldn\u2019t allow that to happen.\u201dWill Jupiter continue to pull more of the asteroid\u2019s trail into Earth\u2019s path?\u201cHopefully,\u201d said Thackeray, who participates in the National Science Foundation\u2019s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. \u201cI hope this meteor shower continues to get more spectacular over time.\u201d The Geminid shower is one of the best meteor showers on the astronomical calendar, and the moon isn't going to compete with the show this year. The biggest meteor shower of the year peaks tonight. Here\u2019s how to watch.",
        "author": "Blaine Friedlander"
    },
    {
        "title": "Planetary party: Catch multiple planets lined up with the moon as summer wanes (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1061",
        "date": "2018-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/08/22/planetary-party-catch-multiple-planets-lined-up-with-the-moon-as-summer-wanes/",
        "text": "Summer\u2019s unofficial end looms in less than two weeks. Whether you\u2019re at the beach, or tired from back-to-school sales, there is still time to enjoy a plentiful panorama of planets in the evenings from now through Labor Day. The planetary party also continues into the autumn.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the best viewing, you\u2019ll want to head out after sunset and look to the south. Gazing from west to east, the effervescent Venus stands strong, low in the western sky at dusk and into the evening now. The robust Jupiter follows Venus in the southwest, the ringed Saturn sails through the southern heavens, and our red neighbor Mars ascends the early evening eastern sky, according to Brian Murphy, professor of physics and astronomy at Butler University in Indianapolis.Story continues below advertisementA slightly modified planetary party configuration occurs in September.Advertisement\u201cThis is not a one-and-done event,\u201d said Murphy, who also directs Butler\u2019s Holcomb Observatory and Planetarium. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be slow transition \u2026 as the four planets are strung across the sky each evening.\u201dBy Wednesday and Thursday nights, an increasingly brighter moon loiters near the reddish Mars (-2.4 magnitude, bright) in the southeastern heavens. It rises now in the east about an hour before sun sets in the west. (The moon becomes full Aug. 26.)Find Jupiter, large and gaseous, sauntering between Venus and Saturn in the constellation Libra, in the southwestern evening sky this week, at a bright -2.0 magnitude.You may have already noticed that Mars is very bright this summer. A few weeks back, on July 31, the Red Planet made its closest approach to Earth since 2003. The planet will next make a strong, close approach in 2035, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn mid-September, the moon fills out another planetary dance card. The skinny, waxing crescent moon appears to float above the brilliant Venus \u2014 low on the horizon \u2014 on Sept. 12 in the west-southwestern sky, Murphy said.The moon scoots to Jupiter in the southwestern heavens Sept. 13 and then visits Saturn on Sept. 16 to 17, when our lunar neighbor reaches its first quarter. The waxing gibbous moon slides by Mars Sept. 19, according to Murphy. For the United States, the autumnal equinox is Sept. 22 and the full moon will be Sept. 24.Murphy served as a tour guide to the night sky last Friday night at the Holcomb Observatory, when about 400 people turned out. In this age of glorious photographs from spacecraft, he explained that astronomers \u201cworry that people won\u2019t be thrilled by looking through a telescope,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there\u2019s something really special about seeing the sky with your own eyes.\u201d There's even more reason than normal to look up in the nights ahead.  Planetary party: Catch multiple planets lined up with the moon as summer wanes",
        "author": "Blaine Friedlander"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thunderstorms could scrub historic SpaceX launch of two NASA astronauts on Wednesday (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1062",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/26/weather-forecast-spacex-nasa-launch/",
        "text": "Residual moisture from a tropical weather system that drenched eastern Florida over the Memorial Day weekend could delay Wednesday\u2019s highly anticipated launch of two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. If successful, the test flight would restore crewed spaceflight to the United States after nine years and mark a milestone for a private space company. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rocket launch, set for 4:33 p.m. Eastern time, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., will send astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the space station. NASA has been relying on the Falcon 9 rocket to send supplies to the space station, but this will be a major test for the Commercial Crew program, through which the space agency is contracting with SpaceX and Boeing to resume crewed spaceflight from U.S. soil after years of hitching a ride aboard Russian rockets.The next Americans in spaceThe tropical weather system unloaded over seven inches of rain in the Miami area Sunday and Monday, flooding low-lying areas.Flooding rains drench South Florida, with coastal Carolinas next in lineIn Cape Canaveral, the system produced nearly two inches of rain on Monday and Monday night, but weather radar showed much of the rain lifting off to the northeast on Tuesday morning.Rainbow over the Cape. A good sign? #spacex #nasa #demo2 pic.twitter.com/r3hMtgXTVI\u2014 Christian Davenport (@wapodavenport) May 26, 2020\n\nBy Wednesday, the tropical wave is predicted to be positioned near the Carolinas, but its counterclockwise circulation could draw moisture back over the Florida Peninsula, allowing scattered thunderstorms to flare up and move toward the vicinity of the Space Coast around the 4:33 p.m. launch time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOn launch day, residual moisture will still be present and mid-level steering flow will be westerly, meaning afternoon convection will travel eastward toward the Space Coast,\u201d the Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron wrote in a statement Tuesday morning. \u201cThe primary concerns are flight through precipitation, as well as the anvil and cumulus cloud rules associated with the afternoon convection.\u201dThe \u201crules\u201d referenced were developed for launches to avoid natural and rocket-triggered lightning strikes, which are possible in the presence of tall cumulus clouds. Numerous \u201cdo not launch\u201d rules are in place for various cloud, wind and precipitation scenarios.On Tuesday, the Weather Squadron, a unit of the Air Force\u2019s 45th Space Wing and responsible for supporting missions at Kennedy Space Center, determined there is a 40 percent chance that weather conditions will violate at least one of the rules and prevent a rocket launch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is an improvement from its assessment on Sunday that there was a 60 percent chance of violating the necessary weather conditions.Captain Jason Fontenot, a meteorologist with the Weather Squadron and spacelift weather operations flight commander, said precipitation in the launch area is his biggest concern but that \u201cinland storms could lead to a scrub if they came close enough.\u201dShould storms erupt Wednesday, forcing the launch to be scrubbed, SpaceX has scheduled backup launch windows on Saturday at 3:22 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Weather conditions are forecast to improve marginally with the probability of interference dropping to 30 percent by Saturday.Story continues below advertisementIn its forecast, the Weather Squadron wrote that although Saturday\u2019s weather will be similar to Wednesday\u2019s, the earlier liftoff time gives the launch \u201ca fighting chance\u201d before storms pop up over the peninsula and move toward the coast.AdvertisementBillowing cumulus clouds or anvil clouds associated with the tops of thunderstorms have a perilous spaceflight history. When rockets tear through them they can trigger a lightning strike, as happened during Apollo 12 when the Saturn V rocket was hit, causing damage to some nonessential components. The crew was able to complete the mission to the moon.\u201cWe have to make sure we stay away from triggered or natural lightning events that come with those different types of clouds,\u201d Fontenot said.Story continues below advertisementCumulus clouds would also subject the rocket to strong updrafts and downdrafts, which could place added stress on the rocket and the Crew Dragon spacecraft.In addition to the weather on Cape Canaveral, NASA and SpaceX are closely monitoring sea states along the East Coast in the unlikely event the capsule with the two astronauts aboard is forced to abort its launch because of an emergency and ends up in the ocean. While unlikely, high winds and waves could also force officials to scrub the launch.AdvertisementFontenot said his forecasting team has access to \u201cone of the densest suites of weather sensors anywhere in the world\u201d for monitoring conditions. They include wind sensors, lightning detection systems, a surface electric field system, and radar systems.The Weather Squadron will release one more public forecast Wednesday morning prior to launch and will then provide regular updates directly to SpaceX and NASA, some of which will likely be broadcast during the countdown process.Christian Davenport and Andrew Freedman contributed to this report. Residual moisture from a tropical wave that drenched eastern Florida could delay the highly anticipated launch. Thunderstorms could scrub historic SpaceX launch of two NASA astronauts on Wednesday",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover may unlock mysteries behind weather on Mars (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1063",
        "date": "2021-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/23/mars-weather-perseverance-rover/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover made history Thursday when it touched down on the Red Planet, the culmination of decades of research and a half-year journey through space. Perseverance was launched July 30, the latest undertaking in an effort to learn whether life was ever possible on Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpace scientists far and wide are thrilled at what Perseverance may teach us. The rover is equipped with the latest technology to revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet. Meteorologists are excited, too, because the probe could unlock secrets of the atmosphere of Mars \u2014 a planet whose average surface temperature sits near minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit. Daily temperature swings can exceed 150 degrees. Scientists have even captured imagery of dust devils, small whirling vortices, swirling across the Martian surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the first time, we hope that we will really have the ability to measure the [wind direction],\u201d said Leslie Tamppari of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. She also serves as the deputy project scientist for NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HDTamppari explained that there are twin wind sensors on Perseverance that allow scientists to deduce wind direction. The Curiosity rover, launched in 2011, was supposed to be able to do the same thing, but one of the sensors was damaged on landing.\u201cThis time we protected [the wind sensor mechanism] by folding it in on itself so that upon landing, if anything got kicked up, it would not get damaged,\u201d Tamppari said. \u201cWe hope we\u2019ll have full vector winds from landing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHaving accurate wind speed and direction data is integral to understanding how dust is lofted into Mars\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementTamppari recounted planetary dust storms that swallow the entirety of Mars, blotting out the sun for six months at a time and causing surface temperatures to plummet.\u201cWe have these global dust storms that happen every few Mars years, and we don\u2019t understand why \u2014 occasionally one of the more frequent regional dust storms [can grow and] become global,\u201d Tamppari said.One such dust storm in June 2018 spelled the demise of Opportunity, a rover launched in 2003 that had been exploring the Martian surface for more than 14 years. Incident solar radiation, used to power the rover, dropped to zero beneath the thick shroud of dust, and more than 1,000 attempts to contact the rover over the next seven months were unsuccessful.Story continues below advertisementThe addition of Perseverance also complements the Curiosity rover, since now scientists can obtain atmospheric pressure readings from two locations. That allows them to make deductions about the overall atmospheric flow and search for the triggering mechanisms behind dust events.Perseverance is powered by what are known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators, meaning it\u2019s not dependent on sunlight and should be immune to dust storms. Tamppari expects that it will be a number of years before the power source begins to degrade. If the rover does encounter a dust storm, the data it collects could prove invaluable, she said.Tamppari and her team aim to piece together a general circulation model of Mars\u2019s atmosphere, understanding how heat, moisture, dust and gases are transported over the course of a typical year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the weather station, we are measuring atmospheric pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, the dust in the atmosphere and water in atmosphere, particle sizes [and], for the first time, the net radiation,\u201d Tamppari said.She and her team are particularly interested in learning more about how water vapor is distributed in the Martian atmosphere, which is made up of 95 percent carbon dioxide. Much of the water vapor comes from solid carbon-dioxide ice caps at the poles that are vaporized during the winter, Tamppari explained.Beneath that frozen CO2 is conventional water ice. \u201cWater ice condenses first after the carbon dioxide, so with the solar energy heating the water ice cap, it puts that into the atmosphere. But we still don\u2019t understand the whole transport,\u201d Tamppari said.Without weather balloons or any direct sampling equipment, NASA scientists have had to devise creative techniques to detect water vapor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTamppari described an apparatus on the rover called SuperCam, a set of tools that uses a camera, laser and other instruments to search for chemical compounds potentially supportive of past life on Mars. According to NASA, SuperCam\u2019s instruments can \u201cidentify the chemical and mineral makeup of targets as small as a pencil point from a distance of more than 20 feet.\u201d\u201cIn the SuperCam instruments, we have a spectrometer that has the ability to detect water vapor,\u201d Tamppari said. A spectrometer fires high-energy light at an object and can determine the object\u2019s composition based on the wavelength at which it emits light, or electromagnetic radiation.That doesn\u2019t reveal how much water is present at different levels of the atmosphere but does offer insight into the total amount of water in a column of atmosphere. Tamppari hopes that data can be used in conjunction with surface observations to piece together a basic model of water vapor concentration with altitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt its core, Perseverance is one more observation station that can help provide a clearer picture of what\u2019s going on in Mars\u2019s atmosphere. Tamppari said that Perseverance will work in tandem with the Curiosity rover and, combined with data from satellites orbiting overhead, will track the motion of weather systems and attempt to understand their makeup.Meanwhile, scores of other experiments will be ongoing simultaneously as the rover explores the Jezero Crater, about 19 degrees north of the Martian equator. Their goal is largely to look for signs of past life, while also collecting data to inform possible human exploration of the Red Planet.\u201cWe [had] to land somewhere it\u2019s not too rocky,\u201d Tamppari said. \u201cIt has to be somewhere the spacecraft can slow down. And the higher elevations at higher latitudes, we can\u2019t do that. This particular crater is what we ended up with.\u201dNASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past lifeShe explained that the crater has the remains of an ancient river inlet and an outlet, with what appears to be a river delta in the distance.\u201cOn Earth, [a river delta] is a very good place to find microbes that might have been fossilized in the rock record,\u201d Tamppari said.What Perseverance finds remains to be seen. Scientists are hoping to unravel the secrets behind the general circulation of Mars's winds. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover may unlock mysteries behind weather on Mars",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover may unlock mysteries behind weather on Mars (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1064",
        "date": "2021-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/23/mars-weather-perseverance-rover/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover made history Thursday when it touched down on the Red Planet, the culmination of decades of research and a half-year journey through space. Perseverance was launched July 30, the latest undertaking in an effort to learn whether life was ever possible on Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpace scientists far and wide are thrilled at what Perseverance may teach us. The rover is equipped with the latest technology to revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet. Meteorologists are excited, too, because the probe could unlock secrets of the atmosphere of Mars \u2014 a planet whose average surface temperature sits near minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit. Daily temperature swings can exceed 150 degrees. Scientists have even captured imagery of dust devils, small whirling vortices, swirling across the Martian surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the first time, we hope that we will really have the ability to measure the [wind direction],\u201d said Leslie Tamppari of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. She also serves as the deputy project scientist for NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HDTamppari explained that there are twin wind sensors on Perseverance that allow scientists to deduce wind direction. The Curiosity rover, launched in 2011, was supposed to be able to do the same thing, but one of the sensors was damaged on landing.\u201cThis time we protected [the wind sensor mechanism] by folding it in on itself so that upon landing, if anything got kicked up, it would not get damaged,\u201d Tamppari said. \u201cWe hope we\u2019ll have full vector winds from landing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHaving accurate wind speed and direction data is integral to understanding how dust is lofted into Mars\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementTamppari recounted planetary dust storms that swallow the entirety of Mars, blotting out the sun for six months at a time and causing surface temperatures to plummet.\u201cWe have these global dust storms that happen every few Mars years, and we don\u2019t understand why \u2014 occasionally one of the more frequent regional dust storms [can grow and] become global,\u201d Tamppari said.One such dust storm in June 2018 spelled the demise of Opportunity, a rover launched in 2003 that had been exploring the Martian surface for more than 14 years. Incident solar radiation, used to power the rover, dropped to zero beneath the thick shroud of dust, and more than 1,000 attempts to contact the rover over the next seven months were unsuccessful.Story continues below advertisementThe addition of Perseverance also complements the Curiosity rover, since now scientists can obtain atmospheric pressure readings from two locations. That allows them to make deductions about the overall atmospheric flow and search for the triggering mechanisms behind dust events.Perseverance is powered by what are known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators, meaning it\u2019s not dependent on sunlight and should be immune to dust storms. Tamppari expects that it will be a number of years before the power source begins to degrade. If the rover does encounter a dust storm, the data it collects could prove invaluable, she said.Tamppari and her team aim to piece together a general circulation model of Mars\u2019s atmosphere, understanding how heat, moisture, dust and gases are transported over the course of a typical year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the weather station, we are measuring atmospheric pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, the dust in the atmosphere and water in atmosphere, particle sizes [and], for the first time, the net radiation,\u201d Tamppari said.She and her team are particularly interested in learning more about how water vapor is distributed in the Martian atmosphere, which is made up of 95 percent carbon dioxide. Much of the water vapor comes from solid carbon-dioxide ice caps at the poles that are vaporized during the winter, Tamppari explained.Beneath that frozen CO2 is conventional water ice. \u201cWater ice condenses first after the carbon dioxide, so with the solar energy heating the water ice cap, it puts that into the atmosphere. But we still don\u2019t understand the whole transport,\u201d Tamppari said.Without weather balloons or any direct sampling equipment, NASA scientists have had to devise creative techniques to detect water vapor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTamppari described an apparatus on the rover called SuperCam, a set of tools that uses a camera, laser and other instruments to search for chemical compounds potentially supportive of past life on Mars. According to NASA, SuperCam\u2019s instruments can \u201cidentify the chemical and mineral makeup of targets as small as a pencil point from a distance of more than 20 feet.\u201d\u201cIn the SuperCam instruments, we have a spectrometer that has the ability to detect water vapor,\u201d Tamppari said. A spectrometer fires high-energy light at an object and can determine the object\u2019s composition based on the wavelength at which it emits light, or electromagnetic radiation.That doesn\u2019t reveal how much water is present at different levels of the atmosphere but does offer insight into the total amount of water in a column of atmosphere. Tamppari hopes that data can be used in conjunction with surface observations to piece together a basic model of water vapor concentration with altitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt its core, Perseverance is one more observation station that can help provide a clearer picture of what\u2019s going on in Mars\u2019s atmosphere. Tamppari said that Perseverance will work in tandem with the Curiosity rover and, combined with data from satellites orbiting overhead, will track the motion of weather systems and attempt to understand their makeup.Meanwhile, scores of other experiments will be ongoing simultaneously as the rover explores the Jezero Crater, about 19 degrees north of the Martian equator. Their goal is largely to look for signs of past life, while also collecting data to inform possible human exploration of the Red Planet.\u201cWe [had] to land somewhere it\u2019s not too rocky,\u201d Tamppari said. \u201cIt has to be somewhere the spacecraft can slow down. And the higher elevations at higher latitudes, we can\u2019t do that. This particular crater is what we ended up with.\u201dNASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past lifeShe explained that the crater has the remains of an ancient river inlet and an outlet, with what appears to be a river delta in the distance.\u201cOn Earth, [a river delta] is a very good place to find microbes that might have been fossilized in the rock record,\u201d Tamppari said.What Perseverance finds remains to be seen. Scientists are hoping to unravel the secrets behind the general circulation of Mars's winds. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover may unlock mysteries behind weather on Mars",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover may unlock mysteries behind weather on Mars (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1065",
        "date": "2021-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/23/mars-weather-perseverance-rover/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover made history Thursday when it touched down on the Red Planet, the culmination of decades of research and a half-year journey through space. Perseverance was launched July 30, the latest undertaking in an effort to learn whether life was ever possible on Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpace scientists far and wide are thrilled at what Perseverance may teach us. The rover is equipped with the latest technology to revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet. Meteorologists are excited, too, because the probe could unlock secrets of the atmosphere of Mars \u2014 a planet whose average surface temperature sits near minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit. Daily temperature swings can exceed 150 degrees. Scientists have even captured imagery of dust devils, small whirling vortices, swirling across the Martian surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the first time, we hope that we will really have the ability to measure the [wind direction],\u201d said Leslie Tamppari of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. She also serves as the deputy project scientist for NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HDTamppari explained that there are twin wind sensors on Perseverance that allow scientists to deduce wind direction. The Curiosity rover, launched in 2011, was supposed to be able to do the same thing, but one of the sensors was damaged on landing.\u201cThis time we protected [the wind sensor mechanism] by folding it in on itself so that upon landing, if anything got kicked up, it would not get damaged,\u201d Tamppari said. \u201cWe hope we\u2019ll have full vector winds from landing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHaving accurate wind speed and direction data is integral to understanding how dust is lofted into Mars\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementTamppari recounted planetary dust storms that swallow the entirety of Mars, blotting out the sun for six months at a time and causing surface temperatures to plummet.\u201cWe have these global dust storms that happen every few Mars years, and we don\u2019t understand why \u2014 occasionally one of the more frequent regional dust storms [can grow and] become global,\u201d Tamppari said.One such dust storm in June 2018 spelled the demise of Opportunity, a rover launched in 2003 that had been exploring the Martian surface for more than 14 years. Incident solar radiation, used to power the rover, dropped to zero beneath the thick shroud of dust, and more than 1,000 attempts to contact the rover over the next seven months were unsuccessful.Story continues below advertisementThe addition of Perseverance also complements the Curiosity rover, since now scientists can obtain atmospheric pressure readings from two locations. That allows them to make deductions about the overall atmospheric flow and search for the triggering mechanisms behind dust events.Perseverance is powered by what are known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators, meaning it\u2019s not dependent on sunlight and should be immune to dust storms. Tamppari expects that it will be a number of years before the power source begins to degrade. If the rover does encounter a dust storm, the data it collects could prove invaluable, she said.Tamppari and her team aim to piece together a general circulation model of Mars\u2019s atmosphere, understanding how heat, moisture, dust and gases are transported over the course of a typical year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the weather station, we are measuring atmospheric pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, the dust in the atmosphere and water in atmosphere, particle sizes [and], for the first time, the net radiation,\u201d Tamppari said.She and her team are particularly interested in learning more about how water vapor is distributed in the Martian atmosphere, which is made up of 95 percent carbon dioxide. Much of the water vapor comes from solid carbon-dioxide ice caps at the poles that are vaporized during the winter, Tamppari explained.Beneath that frozen CO2 is conventional water ice. \u201cWater ice condenses first after the carbon dioxide, so with the solar energy heating the water ice cap, it puts that into the atmosphere. But we still don\u2019t understand the whole transport,\u201d Tamppari said.Without weather balloons or any direct sampling equipment, NASA scientists have had to devise creative techniques to detect water vapor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTamppari described an apparatus on the rover called SuperCam, a set of tools that uses a camera, laser and other instruments to search for chemical compounds potentially supportive of past life on Mars. According to NASA, SuperCam\u2019s instruments can \u201cidentify the chemical and mineral makeup of targets as small as a pencil point from a distance of more than 20 feet.\u201d\u201cIn the SuperCam instruments, we have a spectrometer that has the ability to detect water vapor,\u201d Tamppari said. A spectrometer fires high-energy light at an object and can determine the object\u2019s composition based on the wavelength at which it emits light, or electromagnetic radiation.That doesn\u2019t reveal how much water is present at different levels of the atmosphere but does offer insight into the total amount of water in a column of atmosphere. Tamppari hopes that data can be used in conjunction with surface observations to piece together a basic model of water vapor concentration with altitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt its core, Perseverance is one more observation station that can help provide a clearer picture of what\u2019s going on in Mars\u2019s atmosphere. Tamppari said that Perseverance will work in tandem with the Curiosity rover and, combined with data from satellites orbiting overhead, will track the motion of weather systems and attempt to understand their makeup.Meanwhile, scores of other experiments will be ongoing simultaneously as the rover explores the Jezero Crater, about 19 degrees north of the Martian equator. Their goal is largely to look for signs of past life, while also collecting data to inform possible human exploration of the Red Planet.\u201cWe [had] to land somewhere it\u2019s not too rocky,\u201d Tamppari said. \u201cIt has to be somewhere the spacecraft can slow down. And the higher elevations at higher latitudes, we can\u2019t do that. This particular crater is what we ended up with.\u201dNASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past lifeShe explained that the crater has the remains of an ancient river inlet and an outlet, with what appears to be a river delta in the distance.\u201cOn Earth, [a river delta] is a very good place to find microbes that might have been fossilized in the rock record,\u201d Tamppari said.What Perseverance finds remains to be seen. Scientists are hoping to unravel the secrets behind the general circulation of Mars's winds. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover may unlock mysteries behind weather on Mars",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars to shine extra bright tonight, poised opposite the sun (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1066",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/10/13/mars-bright-opposition/",
        "text": "Mars will be at its brightest and most visible on Tuesday night, with the Red Planet near its closest point to Earth and directly opposite the sun. The \u201copposition\u201d of Mars means it will be visible all night long, starting in the east after sunset and climbing high overhead before setting in the west around sunrise. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightYou don't need a spacecraft to see Mars! You can\u2019t miss it in the eastern sky just after sunset or toward the south by midnight local time. Today Mars is at opposition, meaning it\u2019s positioned directly opposite the Sun, which makes it especially bright. https://t.co/gAbOkp9Fs3 pic.twitter.com/N59zEyXYEh\u2014 NASA Mars (@NASAMars) October 13, 2020\n\nOpposition describes the occasion marked by the sun, Earth and Mars all lining up perfectly. Earth is in the middle, so the sun is on one side while Mars is on the other. That means Mars will be at the opposite point in the sky, above the horizon after the sun has set.It also means Mars will appear fully illuminated from the vantage point of Earth-dwellers, causing it to appear especially bright.Where to lookMars was closest to Earth a week ago on Oct. 6, in fact the closest in 15 years, but appears more brilliant Tuesday night. That\u2019s because it\u2019s in a better position to reflect more sunlight back at us. Last week, it was doing so at a slanted angle, acutely diminishing its apparent magnitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf you\u2019re looking to catch Mars at its most effulgent, all you have to do is look east an hour or two after sunset. Mars will be highest toward midnight.Fall night sky to offer wondrous celestial sights from Halloween \u2018blue moon\u2019 to dazzling meteor showersYou\u2019ll be able to tell which one is Mars based on its brightness and color. Only Venus and the Moon will be more scintillating. But Venus makes its appearance in the mornings.You\u2019ll also see a reddish tinge to Mars, resulting from the iron oxide-rich surface that gives it a rusty hue.What is opposition, and how often does it occur?Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. Earth is located about 93 million miles from the sun; Mars averages 142 million miles. It\u2019s the last of the solar system\u2019s solid, dense inner planets, which also include Mercury, Venus and Earth.Story continues below advertisementEarth rotates around the sun once every 365 days; Mars takes 687 days to do the same, so a year on Mars is longer. That also means that Earth and Mars are usually in different places in their orbits about the sun.The weather on Mars is both totally alien and somewhat Earth-like all at oncePicture two cars driving around a traffic circle, at different speeds. Even if they start out next to each other, the faster car will outrun the slower until it comes back around again. That\u2019s sort of how Earth and Mars behave.AdvertisementAs a result, opposition occurs every 26 months or so, when the more quickly orbiting Earth swings by on the \u201cinside lane\u201d as it passes by Mars.Why opposition doesn\u2019t always mean the closest point to EarthCommon sense dictates that when we pass Mars in a perfect line with the sun, Mars should be at its closest point to Earth. But that\u2019s not exactly true. Mars was closer a week ago. SpaceWeather.com reports that was its closest until 2035.Story continues below advertisementThe reason? Mars has a slightly eccentric, or elliptical, orbit. In addition, the gravity of Jupiter tugs on Mars and causes its orbit to be a bit off-kilter compared with ours. Those orbital quirks make it so Mars can sometimes be closest before opposition, and therefore before it appears brightest.Mark your calendar for these celestial events in 2020According to EarthSky.org, Mars will next reach its closest point to Earth on Dec. 1, 2022, but the next opposition will occur a week later. The sun, Earth and Mars will form a perfect line. Mars to shine extra bright tonight, poised opposite the sun",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "International Space Station to make brilliant pass over East Coast after sunset (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1067",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/09/20/international-space-station-make-brilliant-pass-over-east-coast-after-sunset/",
        "text": "Looking for cool Friday night plans? How about watching the largest spacecraft ever created zip across the sky at 4.76 miles per second?The International Space Station is slated to make a bright pass over the Eastern Seaboard on Friday night, visible from cities such as Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. In fact, anyone from Florida through Canada can enjoy the show. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo make things even better, the weather is expected to be superb. Mostly clear skies will dominate the East Coast, with crisp, refreshing dryness sledging all the way down the Appalachians.For folks in Florida or Georgia, look to the south-southwest at 7:56 p.m. The space station will arc its way higher over the sky before fading off into the northeast about six minutes later. Farther north, it will be a touch later \u2014 7:58 p.m. in D.C., 7:59 p.m. in New York, and 8 p.m. in Boston. It will be bright enough that folks in well-lit, downtown areas can enjoy the spectacle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe International Space Station will look like a swiftly moving airplane, although it won\u2019t be blinking. Any light you see does not come from the space station. (After all, it\u2019s not as if it risks hitting any errant deer in space, so the ISS doesn\u2019t have headlights.) Instead, it\u2019s reflected sunlight glinting off the station\u2019s solar panels. Because the International Space Station is so high, it can catch the sunlight even after the sun has set for some on Earth below.The International Space Station, built in 1998, has made nearly 120,000 orbits. It soars across the sky some 294 miles above Earth. That\u2019s 50 times higher than most commercial airliners fly.Contrary to popular belief, the space station is not immune to gravity. It feels a lot of gravitational pull toward earth. Being onboard the space station diminishes the force of gravity by only about 10 percent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut no need to duck and cover; the space station is not going to \u201cfall\u201d down. But it is constantly in free fall. However, its extreme forward speed allows it to \u201coutrun\u201d the distance gravity would have it fall during a given interval, balancing out and maintaining its constant altitude. However, if the ISS were to slow down, it would spiral inward toward Earth.It\u2019s just like when you were a kid. Remember going outside, tying a rope to a bucket filled with water, and careening it vertically around in circles? If you spin fast enough, the water stays in the bucket. . . . but if you stop spinning, PLOP! That\u2019s because centrifugal (outward) force balances gravitational (downward/inward) force. Of course, in the space station\u2019s case, \u201cdown\u201d is relative, simply meaning toward Earth. Because the International Space Station is so close to Earth, it must travel quite fast to escape falling; that\u2019s why we see it moving across the sky so quickly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf we want the satellite to remain \u201clocked\u201d with Earth\u2019s rotation, peering down at the same place, we have to go way farther out in space. Eventually, we\u2019ll get to a point where gravity is less, meaning the satellite can travel at a slower forward speed to remain suspended and an angular speed that matches Earth\u2019s rotation rate. What\u2019s this height? 22,236 miles! We call that the height of \u201cgeosync.\u201d The GOES weather satellites orbit at that height.Pretty cool, right? Friday night will offer a great science lesson for the kids, too. So set an alarm on your phone, and keep an eye out for something (sort of) out of this world. It's not a bird. It's not a plane. It's the Space Station whizzing across the sky at 17,000 mph. International Space Station to make brilliant pass over East Coast after sunset",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "International Space Station to make brilliant pass over East Coast after sunset (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1068",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/09/20/international-space-station-make-brilliant-pass-over-east-coast-after-sunset/",
        "text": "Looking for cool Friday night plans? How about watching the largest spacecraft ever created zip across the sky at 4.76 miles per second?The International Space Station is slated to make a bright pass over the Eastern Seaboard on Friday night, visible from cities such as Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. In fact, anyone from Florida through Canada can enjoy the show. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo make things even better, the weather is expected to be superb. Mostly clear skies will dominate the East Coast, with crisp, refreshing dryness sledging all the way down the Appalachians.For folks in Florida or Georgia, look to the south-southwest at 7:56 p.m. The space station will arc its way higher over the sky before fading off into the northeast about six minutes later. Farther north, it will be a touch later \u2014 7:58 p.m. in D.C., 7:59 p.m. in New York, and 8 p.m. in Boston. It will be bright enough that folks in well-lit, downtown areas can enjoy the spectacle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe International Space Station will look like a swiftly moving airplane, although it won\u2019t be blinking. Any light you see does not come from the space station. (After all, it\u2019s not as if it risks hitting any errant deer in space, so the ISS doesn\u2019t have headlights.) Instead, it\u2019s reflected sunlight glinting off the station\u2019s solar panels. Because the International Space Station is so high, it can catch the sunlight even after the sun has set for some on Earth below.The International Space Station, built in 1998, has made nearly 120,000 orbits. It soars across the sky some 294 miles above Earth. That\u2019s 50 times higher than most commercial airliners fly.Contrary to popular belief, the space station is not immune to gravity. It feels a lot of gravitational pull toward earth. Being onboard the space station diminishes the force of gravity by only about 10 percent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut no need to duck and cover; the space station is not going to \u201cfall\u201d down. But it is constantly in free fall. However, its extreme forward speed allows it to \u201coutrun\u201d the distance gravity would have it fall during a given interval, balancing out and maintaining its constant altitude. However, if the ISS were to slow down, it would spiral inward toward Earth.It\u2019s just like when you were a kid. Remember going outside, tying a rope to a bucket filled with water, and careening it vertically around in circles? If you spin fast enough, the water stays in the bucket. . . . but if you stop spinning, PLOP! That\u2019s because centrifugal (outward) force balances gravitational (downward/inward) force. Of course, in the space station\u2019s case, \u201cdown\u201d is relative, simply meaning toward Earth. Because the International Space Station is so close to Earth, it must travel quite fast to escape falling; that\u2019s why we see it moving across the sky so quickly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf we want the satellite to remain \u201clocked\u201d with Earth\u2019s rotation, peering down at the same place, we have to go way farther out in space. Eventually, we\u2019ll get to a point where gravity is less, meaning the satellite can travel at a slower forward speed to remain suspended and an angular speed that matches Earth\u2019s rotation rate. What\u2019s this height? 22,236 miles! We call that the height of \u201cgeosync.\u201d The GOES weather satellites orbit at that height.Pretty cool, right? Friday night will offer a great science lesson for the kids, too. So set an alarm on your phone, and keep an eye out for something (sort of) out of this world. It's not a bird. It's not a plane. It's the Space Station whizzing across the sky at 17,000 mph. International Space Station to make brilliant pass over East Coast after sunset",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the International Space Station sweep up Interstate 95 corridor in a prime-time show tonight (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1069",
        "date": "2017-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/11/29/watch-the-international-space-station-sweep-up-interstate-95-corridor-in-a-prime-time-show-tonight/",
        "text": "Look up.This evening, around 5:34 p.m., the International Space Station (ISS) will zip up the East Coast, putting on quite a spectacle from Charleston, S.C., to Portland, Maine.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightYes, the ISS passes overhead pretty regularly \u2014 but often at odd times and low angles.This is a special flyover: Sky watchers in population centers along the East Coast and everywhere in between\u00a0will be able to see it almost directly overhead (in most places) and\u00a0at a convenient time just after sunset. As a bonus, the weather is unseasonably warm. Aside from the moon, the ISS will be the brightest object in the sky.\u201cThe pass is going straight up the East Coast, from Charleston (49 degrees) all the way through Richmond, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC and Boston, all six of which have passes over 80 degrees (basically directly overhead),\u201d said NASA\u2019s Tabatha Thompson in an email. \u201cWith the clear and unseasonably warm weather this evening, this is a great opportunity to see the Station as it passes overhead. All the passes are right around 5:34 p.m., when most kids are home from school, even if a lot of adults aren\u2019t. They can always step outside of the office or stop along the commute for a great view.\u201dBelow are pass-over times and peak heights for select cities, via NASA\u2019s Spot the Station website:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCharleston, S.C. (5:34 p.m., 49 degrees)Raleigh, N.C. (5:34 p.m., 69 degrees)Richmond (5:34 p.m., 80 degrees)Washington, D.C. (5:34 p.m., 85 degrees)Baltimore, Md. (5:34 p.m., 84 degrees)Philadelphia (5:35 p.m., 86 degrees)New York (5:35 p.m., 85 degrees)Boston (5:35 p.m., 85 degrees)Portland, Maine (5:35 p.m., 74 degrees)In all of these locations, the ISS will approach from the southwest and then move off to the northeast. In most spots, the pass will last about four to five minutes, beginning in the southwest sky about two minutes before the times given above and lasting about two minutes after. The spacecraft will be moving at about 17,500 mph.\u201cThe space station looks like an airplane or a very bright star moving across the sky, except it doesn\u2019t have flashing lights or change direction,\u201d NASA explains. \u201cIt will also be moving considerably faster than a typical airplane.\u201dApps such as\u00a0Sky Guide can help you locate the ISS and all the other things in the sky. This is a special flyover: You'll be able to see it almost directly overhead, and the weather is nice and warm. Watch the International Space Station sweep up Interstate 95 corridor in a prime-time show tonight",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lightning \u2018superbolts\u2019 can be 1,000 times brighter than ordinary flashes, study finds (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1070",
        "date": "2020-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/11/14/lightning-superbolts-study/",
        "text": "Lightning can be beautiful, scary and destructive, some five times hotter than the surface of the sun and carrying a 300 million Volt shock. Now, atmospheric scientists are learning more about superbolts, a rare breed of extreme lightning bolt that can stretch for hundreds of miles and be a thousand times brighter than an ordinary lightning stroke. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEarlier this year, researchers confirmed a pair of ultra-long-distance lightning strikes in South America that spanned up to 442 miles and lasted for nearly 17 seconds. Ongoing research has turned to how much power these fierce discharges contain, as well as their relative rarity.World record lightning \u2018megaflash\u2019 in South America \u2014 440 miles long \u2014 confirmed by scientistsA new paper published in the American Geophysical Union\u2019s Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres found that roughly one third of 1 percent, or 1 in every 300 lightning strikes, could be classified as a superbolt.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA superbolt is any flash of lightning that is 100 times brighter than average.Hunting for superboltsThe study was led by Michael Peterson, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. His team examined two years\u2019 worth of data from the GOES weather satellites, which peer down on North and South America with ultrahigh resolution. The satellites have a device known as the \u201cGeostationary Lightning Mapper,\u201d which maps lightning from above.The apparatus is about the size of a person and can detect intra-cloud and cloud-to-cloud flashes, many of which are not picked up by most ground-based lightning detection networks.\u201cWe want to see what the boundaries really are,\u201d Peterson said. \u201cIt\u2019s about how big and how bright they can get.\u201dSize vs. brightness: megaflashes and superboltsPeterson explained that a bolt\u2019s size and luminosity are two sides of the same coin but present different research challenges. The conditions that give rise to expansive \u201cmegaflashes\u201d are also conducive to extremely bright and powerful superbolts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA megaflash is any lightning discharge greater than 100 kilometers (62 miles) across. Megaflashes oftentimes are or contain superbolts, since the optical power, or brightness, of a bolt is a product of its size and current.Peterson said researchers care about the brightness of lightning because the more luminous flashes, from a satellite perspective, are usually the most powerful.\u201cThere is a correlation between peak light power and peak energy,\u201d he explained.Gone in a flash: observational challengesDeducing exactly how powerful a stroke of lightning is based on its luminosity isn\u2019t easy. Lightning happens fast.\u201cYou have these events that are very instantaneous, tens to hundreds of microseconds, and then they\u2019re over,\u201d explained Peterson.Story continues below advertisementA microsecond is one millionth of a second.The Geostationary Lightning Mapper however, can only capture flashes which are longer, or 2,000 millionths of a second, meaning more fleeting peaks in luminosity are often missed.AdvertisementPeterson said that the European Space Agency is planning on launching a satellite that captures images twice as often.D.C. area lightning display astonishes onlookers: \u2018Never seen an electrical storm like this\u2019Still, Peterson said that lightning scientists have been privy to a \u201cfire hose\u201d of data since the first Geostationary Lightning Mapper was launched via satellite in 2016. Peterson and his colleagues reviewed GLM data from January of 2018 to January 2020, which featured more than 600 million lightning strikes, and found about 2 million strikes that were considered superbolts. That\u2019s about 0.32 percent of the total discharges.Story continues below advertisementNot all detected superbolts were actually that super, however. Most flashes observed by the satellite-mounted lightning mapper are \u201cseen\u201d by sensors through a thick layer of cloud, which reduces their brightness. But a few ordinary bolts at the periphery of storms may protrude into clear air in direct view of the sensor, tricking the satellite into thinking an exceptionally bright flash has occurred.AdvertisementWhere the most extreme superbolts lurkPeterson\u2019s work describes ordinary superbolts as \u201cubiquitous\u201d and notes that they can occur with just about any strong thunderstorm in North or South America. But he identified an elite tier of superbolts 1,000 times more powerful than an average lightning stroke.Story continues below advertisementThose are found in only the most electrified storms in a few parts of the word \u2014 namely the central United States and parts of South America\u2019s La Plata Basin, including Paraguay, northern Argentina and southeast Brazil.The secret to storms there is their size. Hulking \u201cmesoscale convective systems,\u201d often hundreds of miles across, can bring thunder, lightning and rain for hours.\u201cThere\u2019s a subset of lightning in these larger storms \u2026 where charge in the [anvil cloud] layer is conducive to flashes with a long horizontal extent,\u201d said Peterson.That allows for extreme discharges that are often both megaflashes and superbolts. A single event can even have dozens of channels that strike the ground, bringing large amounts of current to the surface and posing a serious danger to land-dwellers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPeterson\u2019s team has been working to learn more about those events by comparing satellite-based lightning flash data to surface strike observations collected from a network of ground-based sensors.\u201c[The satellites] will tell you there is something bright there,\u201d explained Peterson. \u201cGround networks come in and \u2026 see mostly cloud to ground.\u201dChipping away at the mysteries of lightning dynamics Others lightning researchers, like Joseph Dwyer at the University of New Hampshire, say that Peterson\u2019s work clarifies uncertainties in superbolt theory dating back decades.\u201cSo called \u2018superbolts\u2019 were first identified in the late 70s by optical instruments on the Vela satellites,\u201d explained Dwyer in an email. \u201cOne unresolved question, however, was whether these superbolts were a different kind of lightning, or if they were just normal lightning seen directly by the spacecraft.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, thanks to work like Peterson\u2019s, it\u2019s looking like superbolts may be super after all.Elusive red sprites, like glowing jellyfish in the night sky, photographed in Oklahoma\u201cThese recent studies are beginning to shed light on the topic, showing that at least some superbolts do appear to be much brighter than normal lightning,\u201d said Dwyer. \u201cThese studies are also beginning to identify what kinds of lightning are involved in superbolts and where they happen.\u201dPeterson continues to redouble his efforts at unlocking the secrets behind superbolts. His biggest question: Why is there a superbolt hot spot in the northwest Pacific Ocean between the Korea Peninsula and Japan?\u201cThe sweet spot looking for these things has not really been well-observed,\u201d said Peterson. \u201cIt would be fantastic if the Japanese Meteorological Agency was to launch a [lightning mapping] instrument.\"Storms over the ocean produce less lightning than their terrestrial counterparts. Because of that, it\u2019s easier to build up more charge in the storm and generate a stronger electric field. \u201cThis can lead to these superbolt cases,\u201d Peterson said. Fewer than 1 in 300 bolts are superbolts, but they strike with rare power. Lightning \u2018superbolts\u2019 can be 1,000 times brighter than ordinary flashes, study finds",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "A rocket launch, shooting stars and the space station? Big sky show Friday morning in Southeast, Mid-Atlantic. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1071",
        "date": "2021-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/21/rocket-lyrid-meteor-iss/",
        "text": "If you\u2019re not an early riser and you live in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, you might want to set your alarm clock Friday morning, when a rocket launch, the International Space Station and a few shooting stars from the Lyrid meteor shower may all be visible for a time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe weather looks to fully cooperate in most areas, seemingly a rarity for skywatchers. That means anyone from the Florida Peninsula to the nation\u2019s capital should have a chance to witness the celestial triple feature. The key time frame is between 5 and 6 a.m.Blast off! Five years ago, Antares rocket launch thrilled sky watchers in Mid-AtlanticThe centerpiece of the display will be the launch of SpaceX Crew-2, a Crew Dragon spacecraft transporting four astronauts to the International Space Station. The launch was originally slated for Thursday morning but was scrubbed due to the forecast of inclement weather.Liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. will instead occur at 5:49 a.m. Eastern time Friday, assuming the weather cooperates and there are no technical difficulties.Though no rain or storms are in the forecast for Florida\u2019s Space Coast on Thursday, flight engineers were worried about wind conditions and wave heights in the areas below which the rocket will travel en route to orbit. That would pose an issue if the mission had to be aborted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s unclear exactly how readily the launch will be seen, but Tony Rice, an ambassador for NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thinks there\u2019s a good shot it\u2019ll be visible for much of the East Coast.\u201cThe exhaust plume of the Falcon 9 rocket illuminated by the rising sun could be visible,\u201d he wrote in an email. \u201cDon\u2019t expect the kind of show we were treated to last month with the Starlink launch [though.]\u201dThat Starlink launch, which took place at 6:01 a.m. on March 14, carried five dozen Internet satellites into orbit using 1.7 million pounds of thrust. For comparison, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner jet has 64,000 pounds of thrust in each of its twin engines.Story continues below advertisementThe American Meteor Society received more than 120 fireball reports from viewers along the East Coast mistaking the rocket for a meteor.The launch proved picturesque along much of the East Coast, since it occurred 30 minutes earlier before sunrise, meaning the sky was darker. Rice emphasized that earlier timing would produce a better show, since the exhaust plume would be illuminated by sunlight high above the ground while the earth\u2019s surface and sky overhead are still dark.Falcon 9 rocket flyover in the early dawn light, shot from central Virginia last week. Canon Rebel t6, 10\" exposure at 16mm, f/2, iso 1600. #CanonFavPic #canonphotography pic.twitter.com/DaTKiEwmXu\u2014 Peter Forister \u26a1\ufe0f\ud83c\udf2a\u26a1\ufe0f (@forecaster25) March 22, 2021\n\nThis time around, the launch comes only an hour before sunrise in Cape Canaveral. The sun will be just 13 degrees below the horizon around the start of nautical twilight.AdvertisementFarther north, according to Rice, the show might be a bit better, since the sky will be darker. It may take a few minutes for the rocket to ascend high enough to become visible at your location; Rice recommends ballparking about one minute\u2019s delay after launch for every hundred miles you are from the launch.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, low pressure passing offshore of New England and into the Gulf of Maine will induce west-northwesterly winds along the Appalachians eastward, eroding cloud cover and bringing mostly clear skies. It\u2019ll be chilly though \u2014 40s for the Carolina coastal plain, and 30s inland across much of Virginia, the Mid-Atlantic and the North Carolina Piedmont.Temperatures in the 40s will also be common across much of Georgia, with 50s in southern regions and 60s in Florida.The International Space Station will also be visible Friday morning, about 40 minutes before the spacecraft launch. It will first appear for many in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic around 5:08 a.m. and should be about as bright as an airplane passing overhead \u2014 except it\u2019s cruising through space 254 miles overhead at about 17,000 mph.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt produces no light of its own; instead, you\u2019ll be seeing sunlight reflecting off solar panels attached to the structure. The vessel is about the width of a football field.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon rocket is at the pad in Florida and the Crew-2 astronauts are preparing for launch on Thursday. More... https://t.co/McwAXSncbi pic.twitter.com/POS83xDLiK\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 18, 2021\n\nWhere to look and exactly how high in the sky the Space Station will get depends on your specific location. You can check the specifics for your neighborhood here.Amid all that, there\u2019s even a chance you could catch a shooting star, too! The Lyrid meteor shower will be active, but the waxing gibbous moon, which will be about 70 percent illuminated, will outshine some of them. Fortunately, moonset occurs shortly before 5 a.m., allowing a better window of darker skies.Look up! Plenty of clear sky for the Lyrid meteor shower tonight and tomorrow night. Up to 20 meteors an hour from dusk til dawn. Most after midnight. Previous photo by @JosephJCullen. pic.twitter.com/Der9oPDnaI\u2014 Barra Best (@barrabest) April 21, 2021\n\nUp to a dozen shooting stars may sputter across the sky each hour. The show is instigated by tiny pebbles of debris left in the wake of Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, which passes by Earth every 451 years.Most Lyrid meteors are dull in comparison to those produced by the year\u2019s more prolific Perseid or Geminid meteor showers, but a few rogue \u201cfireballs,\u201d or shooting stars brighter than Venus, are possible. The key time frame is between 5 and 6 a.m. for the triple celestial feature. A rocket launch, shooting stars and the space station? Big sky show Friday morning in Southeast, Mid-Atlantic.",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "A rocket launch, shooting stars and the space station? Big sky show Friday morning in Southeast, Mid-Atlantic. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1072",
        "date": "2021-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/21/rocket-lyrid-meteor-iss/",
        "text": "If you\u2019re not an early riser and you live in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, you might want to set your alarm clock Friday morning, when a rocket launch, the International Space Station and a few shooting stars from the Lyrid meteor shower may all be visible for a time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe weather looks to fully cooperate in most areas, seemingly a rarity for skywatchers. That means anyone from the Florida Peninsula to the nation\u2019s capital should have a chance to witness the celestial triple feature. The key time frame is between 5 and 6 a.m.Blast off! Five years ago, Antares rocket launch thrilled sky watchers in Mid-AtlanticThe centerpiece of the display will be the launch of SpaceX Crew-2, a Crew Dragon spacecraft transporting four astronauts to the International Space Station. The launch was originally slated for Thursday morning but was scrubbed due to the forecast of inclement weather.Liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. will instead occur at 5:49 a.m. Eastern time Friday, assuming the weather cooperates and there are no technical difficulties.Though no rain or storms are in the forecast for Florida\u2019s Space Coast on Thursday, flight engineers were worried about wind conditions and wave heights in the areas below which the rocket will travel en route to orbit. That would pose an issue if the mission had to be aborted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s unclear exactly how readily the launch will be seen, but Tony Rice, an ambassador for NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thinks there\u2019s a good shot it\u2019ll be visible for much of the East Coast.\u201cThe exhaust plume of the Falcon 9 rocket illuminated by the rising sun could be visible,\u201d he wrote in an email. \u201cDon\u2019t expect the kind of show we were treated to last month with the Starlink launch [though.]\u201dThat Starlink launch, which took place at 6:01 a.m. on March 14, carried five dozen Internet satellites into orbit using 1.7 million pounds of thrust. For comparison, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner jet has 64,000 pounds of thrust in each of its twin engines.Story continues below advertisementThe American Meteor Society received more than 120 fireball reports from viewers along the East Coast mistaking the rocket for a meteor.The launch proved picturesque along much of the East Coast, since it occurred 30 minutes earlier before sunrise, meaning the sky was darker. Rice emphasized that earlier timing would produce a better show, since the exhaust plume would be illuminated by sunlight high above the ground while the earth\u2019s surface and sky overhead are still dark.Falcon 9 rocket flyover in the early dawn light, shot from central Virginia last week. Canon Rebel t6, 10\" exposure at 16mm, f/2, iso 1600. #CanonFavPic #canonphotography pic.twitter.com/DaTKiEwmXu\u2014 Peter Forister \u26a1\ufe0f\ud83c\udf2a\u26a1\ufe0f (@forecaster25) March 22, 2021\n\nThis time around, the launch comes only an hour before sunrise in Cape Canaveral. The sun will be just 13 degrees below the horizon around the start of nautical twilight.AdvertisementFarther north, according to Rice, the show might be a bit better, since the sky will be darker. It may take a few minutes for the rocket to ascend high enough to become visible at your location; Rice recommends ballparking about one minute\u2019s delay after launch for every hundred miles you are from the launch.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, low pressure passing offshore of New England and into the Gulf of Maine will induce west-northwesterly winds along the Appalachians eastward, eroding cloud cover and bringing mostly clear skies. It\u2019ll be chilly though \u2014 40s for the Carolina coastal plain, and 30s inland across much of Virginia, the Mid-Atlantic and the North Carolina Piedmont.Temperatures in the 40s will also be common across much of Georgia, with 50s in southern regions and 60s in Florida.The International Space Station will also be visible Friday morning, about 40 minutes before the spacecraft launch. It will first appear for many in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic around 5:08 a.m. and should be about as bright as an airplane passing overhead \u2014 except it\u2019s cruising through space 254 miles overhead at about 17,000 mph.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt produces no light of its own; instead, you\u2019ll be seeing sunlight reflecting off solar panels attached to the structure. The vessel is about the width of a football field.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon rocket is at the pad in Florida and the Crew-2 astronauts are preparing for launch on Thursday. More... https://t.co/McwAXSncbi pic.twitter.com/POS83xDLiK\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 18, 2021\n\nWhere to look and exactly how high in the sky the Space Station will get depends on your specific location. You can check the specifics for your neighborhood here.Amid all that, there\u2019s even a chance you could catch a shooting star, too! The Lyrid meteor shower will be active, but the waxing gibbous moon, which will be about 70 percent illuminated, will outshine some of them. Fortunately, moonset occurs shortly before 5 a.m., allowing a better window of darker skies.Look up! Plenty of clear sky for the Lyrid meteor shower tonight and tomorrow night. Up to 20 meteors an hour from dusk til dawn. Most after midnight. Previous photo by @JosephJCullen. pic.twitter.com/Der9oPDnaI\u2014 Barra Best (@barrabest) April 21, 2021\n\nUp to a dozen shooting stars may sputter across the sky each hour. The show is instigated by tiny pebbles of debris left in the wake of Comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher, which passes by Earth every 451 years.Most Lyrid meteors are dull in comparison to those produced by the year\u2019s more prolific Perseid or Geminid meteor showers, but a few rogue \u201cfireballs,\u201d or shooting stars brighter than Venus, are possible. The key time frame is between 5 and 6 a.m. for the triple celestial feature. A rocket launch, shooting stars and the space station? Big sky show Friday morning in Southeast, Mid-Atlantic.",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Media hyped a chance to see the northern lights last Saturday night. It was a bad forecast badly communicated. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1073",
        "date": "2019-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/03/29/media-hyped-chance-see-northern-lights-last-saturday-night-it-was-bad-forecast-badly-communicated/",
        "text": "For skywatchers in the United States as far south as Northern Virginia and Illinois, last Saturday night was slated to be memorable.Except\u2026 it wasn\u2019t.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor days, local and national media outlets had been heralding an anticipated display of the ethereal aurora borealis \u2013 more commonly known as the northern lights. A blast of plasma launched from sunspot region AR2736 \u2013 a bruise on the sun throbbing with pulses of magnetic energy \u2013 appeared to be targeting earth. The high-energy particles were seen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s Space Weather Prediction Center, which hoisted a watch the prior Wednesday outlining potential for a moderate geomagnetic storm on earth.Boom! Here's the Solar #Flare that unleashed a #CME towards Earth yesterday that prompted the G2 #geomag storm watch for this weekend. pic.twitter.com/smCzLen0Zw\u2014 Northern Lights Now (@NorthLightAlert) March 21, 2019\n\nThe blast, known as a coronal mass ejection, hurled a burst of protons and electrons into space in the direction of earth. When these charged particles bombard the earth\u2019s upper atmosphere, the planet\u2019s magnetic field can convert potentially harmful energy to visible light. That\u2019s the aurora. The more intense the solar blast, the farther south the northern lights dip. On rare occasions, the Lower 48 is treated to its mystical emerald dance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUSA Today advertised the \u201crare chance to see the northern lights,\u201d while Insider asserted they could shimmer as low as Chicago and New York. NBC News announced the aurora borealis had odds of reaching \u201cfar south.\"But the sky never delivered. Who knows how many people shivered beneath a bright moon staring upward until the frigid weather trumped their patience. The solar blast didn\u2019t hit Earth until Sunday evening and, even then, did not spark a geomagnetic storm that triggered northern lights.Why the busted forecast? It was a combination of scientific uncertainty and ill-based media hype.\u201cSpace weather forecasting is where terrestrial weather forecasting was back in the 1960s,\u201d wrote Tamitha Skov, an expert in space weather, in an email. She explained the challenges in observing solar storms, and why it makes predicting their impacts so difficult.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe essentially have something akin to a \u2018tornado siren\u2019 when forecasting these events,\u201d she wrote. \u201cWe see them launch off of the Sun and can estimate their initial speed for a very small window of time as they are launched. Why such a small time window? Sadly, it\u2019s the only time we really see them well enough to make measurements.\u201dThe SOHO \u2013 or Solar and Heliospheric Observatory \u2013 is a spacecraft that\u2019s been peering at the sun since 1996. It provides these initial images that assist scientists like Skov in modeling solar eruptions. The Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in 2011, also has a similar role. But that\u2019s about it in terms of useful real-time data. Other observing platforms can send higher-resolution images, but by the time they reach earth the solar storm has already hit \u2013 or missed. And confidence is low to begin with in making predictions based solely off satellite imagery.The next data we get isn\u2019t until a solar storm reaches earth-orbiting satellites like DSCOVR. These platforms can offer live monitoring of a number of parameters. But their proximity to earth limits usefulness, offering no more than an hour\u2019s warning before the solar storm hits. It\u2019s like having a buoy at the end of a dock to measure an incoming tsunami.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAfter [they launch], solar storms aren\u2019t truly visible to us forecasters again until days later, when they pass by our upstream satellite monitors very close to Earth,\u201d explained Skov. \u201cThis means the intervening 92 million miles between the Sun and the Earth are an observational \u2018dead zone\u2019 when it comes to real-time forecasting. We simply cannot see how far the solar storm has traveled, or what it\u2019s encountered along the way.\u201dSkov illustrates how difficult it is to fill in the gap. \u201cImagine trying to predict [the ETA of] someone traveling cross-country from L.A. to Washington DC,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re dealing with freeways, back roads, rush-hour traffic, collisions, bad weather\u2026 you name it. All you have to estimate their arrival time is the speed at which they backed their car out of the driveway.\u201dIt comes as no surprise that accurate predictions of space weather and auroral activity are hard to come by. But Skov, creator of the popular site SpaceWeatherWoman.com, is trying to change that. She\u2019s built a following of 50,000 followers, whom she taps for current observations from all around the globe. She stressed the importance of citizen scientists in the endeavor, whose help she has enlisted to make better short-term aurora forecasts during big events.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut forecasting hurdles weren\u2019t the only thing that led to Saturday\u2019s letdown. Media hype also brewed hope in regions that wouldn\u2019t have seen the lights even had the forecast come to full fruition.The Space Weather Prediction Center called for a G2 storm. What\u2019s that mean? An index used to measure geomagnetic activity should peak at a 6 on a 0-9+ scale. For reference, this happens an average of 360 days every 11 years. Do we see the northern lights every week and a half in the contiguous United States? Nope.But the media ran with it, likely due in part to how quiet the sun has been lately. It\u2019s just like how the first snow of a season is noteworthy. Snow isn\u2019t special, but any disruption to a quiet spell becomes news.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI think the reason the media so often overstates the likelihood of aurora is that, when they do get it right, their readers are just wildly impressed,\u201d wrote Joe Kunches, space weather expert for Capital Weather Gang. \u201cThe phenomenon is so striking, so brilliant \u2014 kind of like seeing Elvis. Unforgettable.\u201dAdvertisementTheoretically, a G2 storm \u2013 one of the level that was forecast last weekend \u2013 would spill the lights to around the U.S./Canada border. But the operative word is visible, and seldom is seeing them as easy as it may seem.\u201cYou need a dark sky with little background lighting, a dull moon, few clouds, and have to be watching a the right time,\u201d Kunches emphasized.Story continues below advertisementAnd more often than not, the flashy images you see from U.S. locations get a little help from the camera. Longtime exposures can capture faint auroral glows that would be imperceptible to the naked eye.Once and a while, though, those of us at the mid-latitudes can get lucky.\u201cI don\u2019t want people to think they will never see aurora if they live in the U.S.,\u201d wrote Skov. \u201cThat would be just as false as the hype we had over this latest storm.\u201dAdvertisementOn June 22, 2015, a geomagnetic storm climbed to a G4, with geomagnetic KP indexes ranging between 8 and 9 out of 9. Visible northern lights dipped as far south as southern New England, making for an hour of white and green shimmering curtains.One solar storm in 1859, known as the Carrington event, brought the northern lights as far south as Hawaii and Florida! In Washington, D.C., it was reportedly possible to read a newspaper at midnight, illuminated by the green waves above. If a storm of similar magnitude happened again today, the results could be disastrous, crippling earth\u2019s power grid. Why the busted forecast? It was a combination of scientific uncertainty and ill-based media hype. Media hyped a chance to see the northern lights last Saturday night. It was a bad forecast badly communicated.",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Weather to make Saturday\u2019s SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts another nail-biter (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1074",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/30/weather-forecast-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "For real-time updates on weather and the launch, follow our live updates here: SpaceX launch live updates. (This information below was valid as of 10:19 a.m. Saturday.)After weather foiled its first attempt Wednesday, NASA will take a second shot at launching two of its astronauts to the International Space Station on Saturday afternoon aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Weather could once again interfere with or thwart the effort. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, responsible for supporting missions at Kennedy Space Center, says there is a 50-50 chance weather will prevent the launch set for 3:22 p.m. Eastern. That is only a 10 percentage point improvement over the odds it gave for Wednesday\u2019s launch, which was ultimately scrubbed because of storms in the vicinity.Follow live coverage of the SpaceX and NASA launchHowever, the Weather Squadron\u2019s forecast discussion posted early Saturday offered a glimmer of hope. It noted that the weather balloon launched in the morning indicated that the atmospheric instability necessary to trigger storms was only \u201cmoderate,\u201d meaning storms \u201cmay hold off until after T-0.\u201dWe are moving forward with launch today. Weather challenges remain with a 50% chance of cancellation. #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) May 30, 2020\n\nIf Saturday\u2019s launch cannot proceed, the next launch attempt is set for 3 p.m. on Sunday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe historic launch would propel American astronauts into space from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade, marking a milestone for the private space industry while restoring confidence in the nation\u2019s ability to conduct crewed space flight aboard U.S.-made rockets.The rocket launch will send astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the Space Station. NASA has been relying on the Falcon 9 rocket, which will carry the Crew Dragon, to send supplies to the space station. But this will be a major test for the Commercial Crew Program, through which the space agency is contracting with SpaceX and Boeing to resume crewed space flight from U.S. soil after years of hitching an expensive ride aboard Russian rockets.The main trigger for showers and storms this weekend is a cold front approaching Florida from the northwest. That front probably won\u2019t clear the Space Coast until late Sunday or Monday.Forecasts from high-resolution weather models on Saturday simulated widely scattered to widespread storms in the area around launch time.The National Weather Service in Melbourne, Fla., wrote in a discussion that the main threats \u201cwill be frequent lightning, downburst winds of 40 to 50 mph, along with torrential rainfall.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe private forecast company, ClimaCell, was more optimistic. On Friday afternoon, it wrote, \u201cThe weather outlook 24 hours in advance is looking favorable for SpaceX and NASA.\u201d It said the risk of precipitation, clouds, and high winds was low, with a medium risk of lightning.If Saturday\u2019s launch is scrubbed because of weather, the outlook for Sunday remains mixed. The Weather Service in Melbourne expects \u201canother round of slow moving storms with torrential rainfall and CG [cloud to ground] lightning the primary concerns, along with brief wet microburst winds.\u201dSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket launch was scrubbed due to bad weather on May 27. Here are other reasons teams may cancel a launch. (The Washington Post)The Weather Squadron determined the chance of weather conditions interfering with Sunday\u2019s launch is 40 percent, a 10 percentage point improvement over Saturday. \u201c[T]he late season frontal boundary will provide some added cloudiness over the Spaceport early, but will likely push just south of the area by T-0,\u201d it wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its Saturday briefing, the Weather Squadron made clear that its weather concerns for both Saturday and Sunday were the same as those that stopped Wednesday\u2019s launch attempt, namely the possible presence of showers and thunderstorms in the vicinity of the launch site and tall cumulus clouds which can be a source of turbulence and lightning.Either day\u2019s launch could be aborted if any of a dozen weather rules are violated for various cloud, wind and precipitation scenarios. The majority of the rules relate to the presence of thunderstorms or thunderstorm clouds within 10 nautical miles to the launch site and flight path. These rules were designed to protect against lightning strikes to the in-flight rocket, triggered by the rocket\u2019s interaction with storm clouds or unleashed by the storm itself.During Wednesday\u2019s scrubbed launch, three weather rules were violated, including the presence of natural lightning and an attached anvil, which is the top of a towering thunderstorm that can generate an electric field and trigger lightning when in contact with a rocket\u2019s plume.Past instances of rockets launching into stormy conditions have led to close calls and disaster. During the Apollo 12 launch, the Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning twice, causing damage to some nonessential components. Nevertheless, the crew was able to complete the mission to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1987, the unmanned Atlas/Centaur-67 rocket was launched into rainy, overcast skies when lightning struck, sending it \u201ctumbling out of control,\u201d according to Reuters. Safety officers were forced to divert and destroy the rocket so its debris would not land in civilian areas.Atmospheric scientists have learned that rockets generate an electrically conductive exhaust plume that can trigger lightning when passing through a preexisting electric field \u2014 usually from clouds containing both water and ice. These are typically tall cumulus clouds or the anvils (or tops) of thunderstorm clouds.Capt. Jason Fontenot, a meteorologist with the Weather Squadron and spacelift weather operations flight commander, said his forecasting team has access to \u201cone of the densest suites of weather sensors anywhere in the world\u201d for monitoring conditions. They include wind sensors, lightning detection systems, a surface electric field system and radar.In addition to the weather at Cape Canaveral, sea states along the East Coast and across the Atlantic Ocean toward Ireland are being monitored in the unlikely event the capsule with the two astronauts aboard is forced to abort its launch because of an emergency and ends up in the ocean.Ocean conditions along the flight path, however, are not predicted to be out of the ordinary, with waves mostly in the range of three to six feet.Andrew Freedman contributed to this story. Forecasts call for a 50-50 chance of storms that could interfere with the historic launch effort. Weather to make Saturday\u2019s SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts another nail-biter",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA receives first weather reports from Perseverance rover on Mars at Jezero Crater (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1075",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/08/nasa-perseverence-jezero-weather/",
        "text": "Earlier this week, the NASA Perseverance rover reported on the weather from Mars\u2019s Jezero Crater for the first time, providing an invaluable data set that will augment scientific understanding of the Martian atmosphere and inform future decisions about the rover\u2019s mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe weather data will also help mission scientists decide when to launch Ingenuity, a drone-like helicopter, that\u2019s set to take flight as early as Sunday. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover may unlock mysteries behind weather on MarsPerseverance, which was launched from Earth on July 30, arrived on the Red Planet in mid-February and has been exploring the Martian surface and collecting various types of data.On Feb. 18, NASA successfully landed the Perseverance rover on Mars. Here is a live video of the landing. (NASA)Among them is weather data, which scientists say will better shape what we know about radiative processes and the cycle of water in Mars\u2019s atmosphere. There isn\u2019t much of it, but water trapped beneath solid carbon-dioxide ice caps at the poles can be vaporized during the summertime and enter the atmosphere. Part of the plan with Perseverance is to unlock clues about what happens after.Perseverance is in Mars\u2019s Jezero Crater, a site NASA chose for the rover\u2019s landing thanks to its wide expanses, free of obstacles, and the presence of a dried-up river delta from 3.5 billion years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Saturday and Sunday, the rover\u2019s Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer, or MEDA, reported a high temperature of minus-7.6 degrees, and a low of minus-117.4 degrees. That rivals the coldest temperature measured on Earth \u2014 minus-128.6 degrees observed at the Vostok weather station in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.At least the winds on Mars were comparatively tepid, gusting to only 22 mph. But imagine that wind chill \u2026The MEDA probes for temperature at four different levels \u2014 the surface, 2.76 feet, 4.76 feet and 98.43 feet. While barely touching the surface of the lower atmosphere, the MEDA is expected to help offer insight into Mars\u2019s radiation budget. In other words, scientists will learn how sunlight striking the surface is transformed into heat that enters and cycles through the atmosphere.Perseverance isn\u2019t the first spacecraft to return weather observations from the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which landed in 2011, suffered damage to one of its wind sensors. That meant that it could measure wind speed but not wind direction. Since Perseverance can tell from which way the winds are blowing, scientists are hoping to use its observations in tandem with those of Curiosity and satellite measurements to learn about Mars\u2019s general atmospheric circulation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArguably of greatest utility to scientists in the short term is the potential for Perseverance\u2019s observations to inform mission-critical decisions, and ultimately when the famed Ingenuity helicopter will be tested. The helicopter was previously lodged in the underbelly of Perseverance, where it was stowed for the journey to Mars; on March 21, Perseverance shed the graphite debris shield that had protected Ingenuity during travel.Ingenuity\u2019s first flight is slated for no earlier than Sunday, a touch later than the Thursday date originally projected. Even if the helicopter is in full working order, flying on the Red Planet is no easy feat.The atmosphere, mostly made up of carbon dioxide, is barely 1 percent of Earth\u2019s density. Helicopters on Earth can\u2019t take off at high elevations because the air is too thin. Imagine that factor multiplied by 50 on Mars. NASA actually tested Ingenuity in vacuum chambers at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.A little while ago I spotted this Dust Devil in the LCAM images that @NASAPersevere captured during the landing phase on Sol 0. It therefore is the first ever Dust Devil seen by the mission - before it even touched down. pic.twitter.com/CJMjgPRjhm\u2014 Simeon Schmau\u00df (@stim3on) April 6, 2021\n\nThat effect is acutely offset by Mars\u2019s weaker gravity \u2014 about a third that of Earth. Still, working to construct a helicopter able to fly on Mars required years of engineering. Even the planet\u2019s temperatures had to be taken into consideration; the extreme cold can \u201cfreeze and crack unprotected electrical components,\u201d writes NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd before it can roam, NASA plans to conduct test flights to make sure everything is in working order. Just deploying the helicopter to its launchpad will take 6 days 4 hours. During one of the final phases of deployment, Perseverance charged Ingenuity\u2019s batteries before the cords were cut; then, the rover drove off, allowing sunlight to beam onto the helicopter\u2019s solar panels to charge it.NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past lifeDuring Ingenuity\u2019s first test flight, its rotors will be spun at more than 2,500 revolutions per minute, and the helicopter will ascend through the thin atmosphere to just 10 feet. After hovering for up to 30 seconds, it will touch back down. NASA scientists will spend a few days gathering data and reviewing the flight\u2019s performance before undertaking more complex endeavors in the future.In the meantime, scientists will continue to await more detailed weather information from Perseverance and scope out an ideal airstrip for the helicopter. Ingenuity weighs only four pounds, its lightweight frame highly susceptible to even gentle winds.Assuming an initial test flight does occur Sunday, NASA plans to host a live broadcast of the results early Monday. The weather data is crucial as the first flight of Ingenuity draws near. NASA receives first weather reports from Perseverance rover on Mars at Jezero Crater",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "PM Update: A mix of sun and clouds through a cool weekend (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1076",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2018/11/16/pm-update-mix-sun-clouds-through-cool-weekend/",
        "text": "Despite an increasingly less-potent sun as we head toward the winter solstice, high temperatures ranging from the upper 40s to lower 50s in much of the area did a good job of melting off the early-season snow that fell yesterday. The few high clouds blowing by this afternoon should get out of here this evening. Our overnight is mostly clear and seasonably cool. Cooler-than-normal conditions persist through the weekend. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightListen to our daily D.C. forecasts: Apple Podcasts | Amazon Echo | More optionsThrough tonight: Skies should trend clearer after dark as a patch of high clouds moves on. We\u2019re mostly clear much of the night, although additional high cloudiness may blow by at some point. Lows fall to a range of about 30 to 35 most spots. Winds weaken a bit into the night, but they stay up around 5 to 10 mph out of the north and northwest.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementView the current weather at The Washington Post.Tomorrow (Saturday): This is not a bad day overall. Skies should be sunnier than not, with any clouds tending to be high up. Afternoon maximums should head for the mid-40s to about 50. Winds are light out of the northwest.Sunday: There\u2019s no major change from Saturday. Coming off lows in the 30s, afternoon highs again rise into the 40s to about 50. We may see more in the way of cloudiness than Saturday, but that\u2019s hard to be certain about.See Camden Walker\u2019s forecast through the beginning of next week. And if you haven\u2019t already, join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. For related traffic news, check out Gridlock.Story continues below advertisementRocket launch: If you are up early (or are one to set your alarm for such things), an Antares rocket launch should be visible in our skies. With a scheduled launch from Wallops Island at 4:01 a.m., the rocket\u2019s burners should be visible in the seconds to minutes after launch. With partly to mostly clear skies anticipated, the main impediment may be time and temperature! It\u2019ll be in the near-30 to mid-30s zone in general.The Sun is out at @NASA_Wallops as preparations continue for the scheduled launch of @northropgrumman's #Antares rocket with #Cygnus cargo spacecraft to @Space_Station at 4:01am ET on Saturday, Nov. 17. More photos: https://t.co/AhNhB52pad pic.twitter.com/F2VjOAV5kP\u2014 NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) November 16, 2018\n\nWant our 5 a.m. forecast delivered to your email inbox? Subscribe here. We've got a much-needed break in the storminess on tap. PM Update: A mix of sun and clouds through a cool weekend",
        "author": "Ian Livingston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1077",
        "date": "2017-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/06/21/attention-scott-pruitt-red-teams-and-blue-teams-are-no-way-to-conduct-climate-science/",
        "text": "CommentaryIn a recent op-ed, Steven Koonin, a professor at New York University, called for the establishment of a \u201cRed Team/Blue Team\u201d process for climate science. Environmental Protection Agency\u00a0Administrator Scott Pruitt made a similar request in an interview with Breitbart News, and demanded \u201ca true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSuch calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.The basic premise of these \u201cRed Team/Blue Team\u201d requests is that climate science is broken and needs to be fixed. The implicit message in the requests is that scientists belong to tribes, and key findings of climate science \u2014 such as the existence of a large human-caused warming signal \u2014 have not undergone adequate review by all tribes. This tribalism could be addressed, Koonin believes, by emulating Red Team/Blue Team assessment strategies in \u201cintelligence assessments, spacecraft design, and major industrial operations.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn Koonin\u2019s view, \u201ctraditional\u201d peer-review processes are flawed and lack transparency, and international scientific assessments do not accurately represent \u201cthe vibrant and developing science.\u201d He implicitly accuses the climate science community of \u201cadvisory malpractice\u201d by ignoring major sources of uncertainty. To use present-day vernacular, both Koonin and Pruitt are essentially claiming that peer-review systems are rigged, and that climate scientists are not providing sound scientific information to policymakers.We do not consider ourselves to be members of any team or tribe. Our goal is not to \u201cwin\u201d against \u201cthe other side.\u201d Our prime motivation is to understand the natural world, and to use that knowledge and understanding to inform sensible decisions on important public policy questions. Whether we succeed in doing so is what we are ultimately judged on.The peer-review system criticized by Koonin and Pruitt is imperfect, but it is the best system we have, and has served science well for several centuries.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe international assessments Koonin has questioned are made by large groups of experts, and are reviewed in an extraordinarily open and transparent way. These assessments receive detailed comments from many hundreds of scientists uninvolved in the writing of the assessment, with expertise in a wide range of fields, as well as from industry stakeholders and government representatives. All comments received are logged and made publicly available, together with responses from the assessment authors. Independent review editors determine whether the authors\u2019 responses are accurate and adequate. Developing science, far from being ignored, is confronted directly and openly in such assessments.Koonin\u2019s claim that important uncertainties are neglected is patently incorrect. Scientists have spent many decades kicking the tires of climate science, identifying and quantifying key uncertainties, and trying to reduce those uncertainties. Critical examination of models, data and theory is not a fringe activity.All scientists are inveterate tire kickers and testers of conventional wisdom. To paraphrase the Geico commercial, \u201cIf you\u2019re a scientist, that\u2019s what you do.\u201d The highest kudos go to those who overturn accepted understanding, and replace it with something that better fits available data. Even after all the tire kicking, there is strong scientific consensus that planetary-scale warming is now unambiguous, and that human activities are the dominant contribution to this warming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCritiques of this consensus have been offered up for decades. Each critique is often presented as a kind of smoking gun \u2014 one piece of evidence that falsifies all other evidence and understanding. There are many examples of such putative smoking guns. The ballistics of each gun has been carefully tested by thousands of scientists around the world. The \u201cnatural causes\u201d gun doesn\u2019t fit the overwhelming evidence of human-caused climate change. The \u201cno warming\u201d gun is inconsistent with reality.If you\u2019re a climate scientist, you\u2019ve likely spent years of your career going down such rabbit holes, evaluating \u201cnatural causes\u201d and \u201cno warming\u201d claims. You\u2019ve considered and debated these claims. You\u2019ve put them through their paces. They do not hold up to available evidence. Only the most robust findings survive peer review and form the basis of today\u2019s scientific consensus.Science has substantially improved our understanding of the physical climate system, the reality of human-caused warming, and the likely climatic outcomes if we do nothing to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Rejecting this tried and tested understanding would constitute real \u201cadvisory malpractice,\u201d and would delay effective action to address human-caused climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn short, climate science is not broken. It does not need fixing. We hear similar \u201cbroken\u201d arguments about the media, the courts and our democracy itself. We are told that only one team or person can fix the problem; that if we place our trust in that one team, that one person, everything will be fine. In the case of climate science, we choose to place our trust in peer review and in the scientific community \u2014 not in teams appointed by Koonin or Pruitt.Benjamin Santer is an atmospheric scientist and member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.Kerry Emanuel is a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Such team proposals are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions. Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science",
        "author": "Benjamin Santer"
    },
    {
        "title": "ClimaCell, an ambitious private weather firm, plans to launch its own satellites (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1078",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/24/climacell-satellite-constellation-precipitation/",
        "text": "ClimaCell, a growing private weather company based in Boston whose customers include airlines, maritime shipping firms and everyday consumers, plans to spend $150 million during the next few years to launch its own satellite radar constellation. The goal, company leaders said in an interview, is to make its own forecasts more reliable, thereby benefiting its clients, the public through its weather app and policymakers. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis aim contrasts with the business of most, if not all, space companies today that are pursuing weather applications. These firms, such as GeoOptics and Spire, have business models based on selling the data for others to use in forecasting the weather, with customers that include federal agencies. However, ClimaCell would use its own technology, which already includes proprietary weather modeling, to take advantage of the data it gathers from space.Weather is turning into big business. And that could be trouble for the public.The end result, if all goes well, would be a vertically integrated weather company whose operations range from generating its own data to sifting through that information using computer models and turning that into products aimed at improving how businesses operate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording to ClimaCell co-founder and chief executive Shimon Elkabetz, ClimaCell has several dozen scientists and engineers now dedicated to developing and eventually deploying a fleet of small space-based weather radars that could gather real-time data of every location on the globe at any time. This would be a major leap forward for radar coverage over data-sparse regions, he said, such as Africa, South America and the oceans.The satellites would carry a Ka-band radar instrument, Elkabetz said, which he compared to a research mission that NASA has carried out known as the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite.GPM consists of a dual-frequency radar that allows it to get a three-dimensional view of precipitation falling within a storm, including by seeing the distribution of different droplet sizes within the clouds, according to Dalia Kirschbaum, who heads NASA\u2019s hydrological sciences lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA launches game-changing satellite for tracking global precipitationThe downside to GPM is that it is just one satellite. \u201cWhen you have a single orbiting spacecraft, if you don\u2019t get a good [pass over] a storm, then you just miss it,\u201d she said.The space agency has also launched small satellites, such as rainCube, which was deployed from the International Space Station, to help solve the challenge of building powerful radars in small boxes, Kirschbaum said.\u201cThe instrument will offer similar capabilities\u201d to the radar aboard GPM, Elkabetz said, \u201cin terms of both resolution and sensitivity, but exceed the swath,\u201d or scan footprint, by a factor of more than two.To accomplish this, the company is planning to use its own technologies to develop a new radar and antenna. ClimaCell is seeking to lower the costs per satellite by at least half compared with the NASA satellite, which scans a location on Earth only every three days. The cost savings, Elkabetz said, \u201cwill allow us to scale this from a single-satellite mission to a constellation of dozens of satellites that enables global coverage with high revisit rates.\u201dMeet the ClimaCell weather app. Alerting you when it\u2019s about to rain.Rei Goffer, co-founder and chief strategy officer at ClimaCell, said revisit times, the interval between instances when the satellite passes over the same location on Earth, would be one hour in the company\u2019s planned satellite constellation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not going to space just because it\u2019s cool,\u201d Goffer said in an interview, but instead are trying to solve a data gap that could allow the company to make far more accurate forecasts.Private weather company ClimaCell to spin off nonprofit to tackle weather forecasting, early warnings in AfricaOutside experts, such as Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, questioned whether the new satellites would interfere with other spacecraft also operating within the Ka band of spectrum, including planned 5G satellites and other weather satellites already in low Earth orbit.Elkabetz said he expects to encounter skepticism from those who may not believe that ClimaCell has solved some of the technical challenges in developing and deploying these satellites. If he were not involved in the project already, he would not believe it, either, he said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI respect anyone who thinks it\u2019s difficult, and as we are able to reveal in the future how it works, hopefully people will be able to witness it themselves,\u201d he said in an interview.AdvertisementMarshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia\u2019s atmospheric sciences program, said he sees this project as a way to better predict weather extremes.\u201cPrecipitation is at the heart of many weather-related extremes ranging from flooding to hurricanes, yet is very difficult to measure on global scales,\u201d Shepherd said in an email.\u201cI am not surprised that scholars are exploring new ways to provide measurements with the accuracy and resolution useful for applications.\u201dStory continues below advertisementClimaCell has raised a substantial amount of money for a recent entrant into the weather forecasting business: about $112 million in venture capital funding, with the most recent round closing in July 2020.Elkabetz noted that most of the world still does not have radar coverage, including in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.Advertisement\u201cThe system\u2019s capabilities will enable new modeling and analytics with precision never before available in the developing world,\u201d he said.\u201cThe data will power applications such as monitoring the conditions favorable for locust reproduction and migrations, as well as conditions that lead to devastating infectious diseases such as malaria, which put millions of lives and livelihoods at risk,\u201d Elkabetz said in a statement.Story continues below advertisementThe satellites could significantly help hurricane forecasts, he said, since they would provide details about the structure and evolution of such storms. The National Hurricane Center has utilized data from the GPM mission and previous weather satellites for forecasting purposes.The chief engineer for the program is John Springmann, who has worked with private sector space firms including SpaceFlight industries, which launched the BlackSky constellation. The team has also been working with Kerri Cahoy, co-director of the small-satellite center at MIT.ClimaCell is aiming to launch its first radar satellite in the third quarter of 2022.Through the company\u2019s nonprofit arm known as ClimaCell.org, the satellite data could flow to areas where improved forecasts are desperately needed, mainly in the developing world, Goffer and Elkabetz said. The company's main goal is to make its own weather forecasts more reliable. ClimaCell, an ambitious private weather firm, plans to launch its own satellites",
        "author": "Andrew Freedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "ClimaCell, an ambitious private weather firm, plans to launch its own satellites (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1079",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/24/climacell-satellite-constellation-precipitation/",
        "text": "ClimaCell, a growing private weather company based in Boston whose customers include airlines, maritime shipping firms and everyday consumers, plans to spend $150 million during the next few years to launch its own satellite radar constellation. The goal, company leaders said in an interview, is to make its own forecasts more reliable, thereby benefiting its clients, the public through its weather app and policymakers. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis aim contrasts with the business of most, if not all, space companies today that are pursuing weather applications. These firms, such as GeoOptics and Spire, have business models based on selling the data for others to use in forecasting the weather, with customers that include federal agencies. However, ClimaCell would use its own technology, which already includes proprietary weather modeling, to take advantage of the data it gathers from space.Weather is turning into big business. And that could be trouble for the public.The end result, if all goes well, would be a vertically integrated weather company whose operations range from generating its own data to sifting through that information using computer models and turning that into products aimed at improving how businesses operate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording to ClimaCell co-founder and chief executive Shimon Elkabetz, ClimaCell has several dozen scientists and engineers now dedicated to developing and eventually deploying a fleet of small space-based weather radars that could gather real-time data of every location on the globe at any time. This would be a major leap forward for radar coverage over data-sparse regions, he said, such as Africa, South America and the oceans.The satellites would carry a Ka-band radar instrument, Elkabetz said, which he compared to a research mission that NASA has carried out known as the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite.GPM consists of a dual-frequency radar that allows it to get a three-dimensional view of precipitation falling within a storm, including by seeing the distribution of different droplet sizes within the clouds, according to Dalia Kirschbaum, who heads NASA\u2019s hydrological sciences lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA launches game-changing satellite for tracking global precipitationThe downside to GPM is that it is just one satellite. \u201cWhen you have a single orbiting spacecraft, if you don\u2019t get a good [pass over] a storm, then you just miss it,\u201d she said.The space agency has also launched small satellites, such as rainCube, which was deployed from the International Space Station, to help solve the challenge of building powerful radars in small boxes, Kirschbaum said.\u201cThe instrument will offer similar capabilities\u201d to the radar aboard GPM, Elkabetz said, \u201cin terms of both resolution and sensitivity, but exceed the swath,\u201d or scan footprint, by a factor of more than two.To accomplish this, the company is planning to use its own technologies to develop a new radar and antenna. ClimaCell is seeking to lower the costs per satellite by at least half compared with the NASA satellite, which scans a location on Earth only every three days. The cost savings, Elkabetz said, \u201cwill allow us to scale this from a single-satellite mission to a constellation of dozens of satellites that enables global coverage with high revisit rates.\u201dMeet the ClimaCell weather app. Alerting you when it\u2019s about to rain.Rei Goffer, co-founder and chief strategy officer at ClimaCell, said revisit times, the interval between instances when the satellite passes over the same location on Earth, would be one hour in the company\u2019s planned satellite constellation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not going to space just because it\u2019s cool,\u201d Goffer said in an interview, but instead are trying to solve a data gap that could allow the company to make far more accurate forecasts.Private weather company ClimaCell to spin off nonprofit to tackle weather forecasting, early warnings in AfricaOutside experts, such as Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation, questioned whether the new satellites would interfere with other spacecraft also operating within the Ka band of spectrum, including planned 5G satellites and other weather satellites already in low Earth orbit.Elkabetz said he expects to encounter skepticism from those who may not believe that ClimaCell has solved some of the technical challenges in developing and deploying these satellites. If he were not involved in the project already, he would not believe it, either, he said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI respect anyone who thinks it\u2019s difficult, and as we are able to reveal in the future how it works, hopefully people will be able to witness it themselves,\u201d he said in an interview.AdvertisementMarshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia\u2019s atmospheric sciences program, said he sees this project as a way to better predict weather extremes.\u201cPrecipitation is at the heart of many weather-related extremes ranging from flooding to hurricanes, yet is very difficult to measure on global scales,\u201d Shepherd said in an email.\u201cI am not surprised that scholars are exploring new ways to provide measurements with the accuracy and resolution useful for applications.\u201dStory continues below advertisementClimaCell has raised a substantial amount of money for a recent entrant into the weather forecasting business: about $112 million in venture capital funding, with the most recent round closing in July 2020.Elkabetz noted that most of the world still does not have radar coverage, including in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.Advertisement\u201cThe system\u2019s capabilities will enable new modeling and analytics with precision never before available in the developing world,\u201d he said.\u201cThe data will power applications such as monitoring the conditions favorable for locust reproduction and migrations, as well as conditions that lead to devastating infectious diseases such as malaria, which put millions of lives and livelihoods at risk,\u201d Elkabetz said in a statement.Story continues below advertisementThe satellites could significantly help hurricane forecasts, he said, since they would provide details about the structure and evolution of such storms. The National Hurricane Center has utilized data from the GPM mission and previous weather satellites for forecasting purposes.The chief engineer for the program is John Springmann, who has worked with private sector space firms including SpaceFlight industries, which launched the BlackSky constellation. The team has also been working with Kerri Cahoy, co-director of the small-satellite center at MIT.ClimaCell is aiming to launch its first radar satellite in the third quarter of 2022.Through the company\u2019s nonprofit arm known as ClimaCell.org, the satellite data could flow to areas where improved forecasts are desperately needed, mainly in the developing world, Goffer and Elkabetz said. The company's main goal is to make its own weather forecasts more reliable. ClimaCell, an ambitious private weather firm, plans to launch its own satellites",
        "author": "Andrew Freedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aurora borealis could dip into the northern U.S. this weekend (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1080",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/29/northern-lights-solar-flare/",
        "text": "Bright auroras may illuminate the dark skies over the northern United States this Halloween weekend.On Thursday, the sun launched a major \u201cX-class\u201d solar flare, sparking a high-frequency radio blackout across parts of South America. That same pulse of energy is trailed by a coronal mass ejection (CME), or a cluster of solar plasma and material surfing an interstellar shock wave. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe CME, the strongest of this solar cycle so far, could slam Earth and whip up a stunning display of the northern lights. A CME from a similar position spawned beautiful auroras on Oct. 12.Brilliant auroras light up North America from Alberta to Nebraska on Oct. 12NOAA\u2019s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., is warning of a potential strong (G3) geomagnetic storm that may rock the Earth on Saturday, with effects lingering into Sunday. Storms of that tier can produce displays of the northern lights visible at latitudes as low as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Oregon, and can also have electrical impacts.Voltage irregularities are possible on high-latitude power grids, along with intermittent issues with radio and navigation.Sky watchers in the United States and abroad are hoping for a Halloween weekend treat reminiscent of the geomagnetic storms of 2003, during which the aurora borealis shone as far south as Texas and Florida. That spattering of solar flares and geomagnetic storms caused a power outage in Sweden and forced air traffic controllers to reroute flights; NASA\u2019s Advanced Composition Explorer spacecraft was damaged.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis time, forecasters are able to adequately warn power companies and utility managers of potential threats, allowing protective action to be taken in advance.The hampered high-frequency radio activity during the flare is the only ill effect of the event so far.A major solar flareAnother look at the X1 solar flare and the resulting CME as seen by SOHO/LASCO. A partial halo CME was launched with a clear earth-directed component. Impact expected late 30 October/early 31 October. Strong G3 geomagnetic storm possible this Halloween weekend! pic.twitter.com/lFNI0FwISe\u2014 SpaceWeatherLive (@_SpaceWeather_) October 29, 2021\n\nSolar flares are like eruptions that hurtle off the surface of the sun. They\u2019re born from sunspots, or small bruiselike discolorations, that throb and pulsate with magnetic energy. When a solar flare occurs, X-rays and other high-energy particles are spewed outward in all directions. We ordinarily don\u2019t know about an incoming solar flare until right before or when a radio blackout ensues.Story continues below advertisementThursday\u2019s solar flare was an \u201cX-class\u201d flare, the most significant classification. It came from NOAA active region 2887, a large sunspot group mapped by scientists. Typically, large, expansive active regions are most likely to produce strong eruptions, as they draw magnetic fields over a broad expanse. These fields provide fuel for the event.AdvertisementThink of it like the sound of a large symphony orchestra compared with a string quartet \u2014 the more the better, for energy that is. NOAA 2887 is still hot and in a prime spot for more geomagnetic activity, with more to possibly come for the next four to five days.NASA\u2019s Solar and Heliophysics Observatory (SOHO) captured the moments that high-energy particles, including protons, bombarded the satellite. The clear image suddenly became snowy, resembling a spattering of streaks and pixelated speckles. Radio blackouts occurred shortly thereafter.Story continues below advertisementWeather satellites, like the GOES-series ones that provide most of the imagery relied upon by meteorologists, have noted an increase in the frequency of solar protons, but experts think it is not enough to cause radiation exposure concerns.The coronal mass ejectionA look at @NWSSWPC ENLIL solar wind model showing the coronal mass ejection launched by yesterday's X1 solar flare.They predict the plasma cloud to impact our planet around 16 UTC tomorrow. A strong (G3-Kp7) geomagnetic storm watch is in effect. pic.twitter.com/rFHEPV8ytg\u2014 SpaceWeatherLive (@_SpaceWeather_) October 29, 2021\n\nBehind the solar flare is a more targeted coronal mass ejection (CME), which departed the sun at a speed of 973 km/s. CMEs contain the pulse of magnetic energy that interacts with Earth\u2019s magnetic field to produce visible light. If we didn\u2019t have a magnetic field, we\u2019d have nothing to convert or deflect incoming magnetic energy into dazzling displays.AdvertisementThe Earth\u2019s magnetic field is most concentrated near the poles. That\u2019s why the aurora borealis (northern lights) and the aurora australis (southern lights) typically appear in a ring around their respective pole. When the arriving CME is more intense, the \u201cauroral oval\u201d can expand equatorward to include the lower latitudes.Story continues below advertisementThis time, a belt of the northern United States may see some green hues late Saturday night into Sunday as the energy \u201cexcites\u201d gases in our upper atmosphere, causing each molecule to emit a photon, or a packet of colorful light. There is some uncertainty in exact timing of any aurora.It takes time for forecasters to determine the likelihood of a CME being Earth-directed. Glancing blows can usually bring shows to the Arctic and Antarctic, but a mid-latitude display would require a direct strike. That looks to be the case this time.How to enjoy the showNorthern tier states, stretching from Washington to Michigan to Ohio, may enjoy some overnight color. The prospects of clearer skies will be decent in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and over Wisconsin, as well as in the Pacific Northwest, but signs point to clouds lingering over the northern Rockies and Northern Tier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFolks farther south, more than a hundred or so miles away from the Canadian border, have a better chance of seeing monochromatic arcs of light or dull white pillars that appear like flashlights shining into the sky.Clouds will pervade across much of the eastern United States, thanks to a stalled low-pressure system that will slowly wither away over the northern Appalachians. There may be a few breaks in the forecast over Maine, but it\u2019s not worth betting on.Maverick astrophysicist calls for unusually intense solar cycle, straying from consensus viewFor the best chance to see them, find a patch of land that offers an unobstructed view over the northern horizon. Make sure you can see the stars, too, and you\u2019re not fighting light pollution.Allsky coverage of ND last night revealed multiple STEVE sightings, SAR arcs, overhead coronas, pulsating aurora, and pink and blue aurora shortly before sunrise on October 12. pic.twitter.com/upXRw06c4u\u2014 North Dakota Dual Aurora Camera (@NoDDAC_cameras) October 12, 2021\n\nCameras can ordinarily \u201csee\u201d them first, since long exposures are able to resolve faint light more vibrantly. If you don\u2019t see them, don\u2019t despair. We\u2019re entering a period of increased solar activity, known as a solar maximum, and we can expect to see more auroral activity this solar cycle. Much of New England, the Upper Midwest and the Northern Tier may see the dancing northern lights Aurora borealis could dip into the northern U.S. this weekend",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Brilliant auroras light up North America from Alberta to Nebraska (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1081",
        "date": "2021-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/12/aurora-us-canada-northern-lights/",
        "text": "As many people in the Northern Hemisphere were asleep Monday night, the northern lights were awake and wild. The brilliant auroras, which appeared at lower latitudes than usual, put on a show along the northern tier of the United States, Canada and parts of Europe from late night to early morning. This event may herald the real start of the next solar activity maximum, which was expected to begin in the past year but was slow to materialize. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe events leading to the colorful display began Saturday, when a solar flare erupted. The flare was not particularly large, but it was positioned centrally on the Earth-facing side of the solar sphere. More critically, a coronal mass ejection (CME) also accompanied the flare.CMEs, although less spectacular than the flash of a flare, are the element that send Earth\u2019s magnetic field into a frenzy. They add enormous amounts of energy to the near-Earth environment and help spawn the otherworldly colors, which are excited nitrogen and oxygen molecules releasing photons of light. Strong geomagnetic storms may sometimes affect electrical power grids, GPS positioning and various types of communications.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThink of a CME\u2019s transit the way a batter sees a pitch coming from the pitcher\u2019s mound. Speed is important, clearly, but more than that, the spin on the baseball dictates where the pitch will end up and how effective it will be. Though CMEs don\u2019t spin, they do carry a magnetic field component; but the magnitude is unknown until the CME travels within 1 million miles of Earth, where spacecraft can measure it.Geomagnetic activity increased as this CME approached Earth, spurring minor to moderate storm (G1-G2) storm conditions. Some ground reports even hint at another dancing light display that sometimes accompanies auroras called STEVE (short for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), although researchers are still verifying the reports..@STEVEPhenomena about 30 minutes ago, seen from NW of Calgary, facing south@TweetAurora pic.twitter.com/0qcW3yQu2r\u2014 Chris Ratzlaff \ud83c\udde8\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\udf3e\ud83d\uddfb\ud83d\udcab (@ratzlaff) October 12, 2021\n\n\u201cCitizen scientists reported some unusual arcs on the southern edge of the auroral activity. Definitely a classic STEVE but also something looked more anomalous in structure and color,\u201d Liz MacDonald, a space scientist at NASA, wrote to us.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf you saw an aurora or STEVE, report your observations to the citizen-science project Aurorasaurus to help researchers improve aurora forecasting and learn more about STEVE.There\u2019s a chance for lingering auroral shows Tuesday night. But also, over the next few years be mindful of the sun making a splash, with more space weather storms in the offing.Until then, enjoy these beautiful aurora photographs captured by dedicated sky watchers. Reports range from Alberta to Nebraska to Maine to space.CanadaKABOOM \ud83d\udca5 Out of this world AURORA last night in Alix #alberta G2 Solar Storm conditions all night long! So glad many were able to witness this!! #NorthernLights #aurora #AuroraBorealis #abstorm #teamtanner #NaturePhotography @dartanner @TamithaSkov @NightLights_AM @JimCantore pic.twitter.com/Gi0QSc3LFq\u2014 \u1d1b\u0280\u1d07\u1d07 \u1d1b\u1d00\u0274\u0274\u1d07\u0280 (@treetanner) October 12, 2021\n\nNear Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Credit: Lindsay Stanbury pic.twitter.com/1ANufvTKLt\u2014 Space Weather Watch (@spacewxwatch) October 12, 2021\n\nU.S. MidwestAllsky coverage of ND last night revealed multiple STEVE sightings, SAR arcs, overhead coronas, pulsating aurora, and pink and blue aurora shortly before sunrise on October 12. pic.twitter.com/upXRw06c4u\u2014 North Dakota Dual Aurora Camera (@NoDDAC_cameras) October 12, 2021\n\n@TamithaSkov @weatherchannel Shortly after Earth was smacked by the CME last night, the skies really ramped up sparking a gorgeous display of the #AuroraBorealis as seen from Oran, IA. pic.twitter.com/6GDXIdLz4B\u2014 Starguy Mark (@SSA_Mark) October 12, 2021\n\nBefore the clouds and rain moved in tonight, I was able to photograph a vivid Aurora band over the Keweenaw at Eagle Harbor and Great Sand Bay, MI. I'm glad I got to see the lights tonight!! \ud83d\udc9a\ud83d\udc9c #NorthernLights #AuroraBorealis #KeweenawPeninsula #StormHour #UpperMichigan pic.twitter.com/MM1gSta5nP\u2014 isaac (@ID_Photo_Graphy) October 12, 2021\n\nU.S. West CoastThe rare time when the aurora cooperates with my work schedule! Incredible show happening right now in Fairbanks. These were a few shots taken from 8-10pm. #akwx #aurora #northernlights @TamithaSkov @Aurora_Alerts @TweetAurora pic.twitter.com/QFJD2btt8P\u2014 Luke Culver (@LukeCulverWx) October 12, 2021\n\nDid you see them? Northern lights (Aurora Borealis) were out tonight in Puget Sound! Timelapse video from Bainbridge Island tonight...#northernlights #aurora #seattle #bainbridgeisland #ferry #wsferries @wsferries #pnw #pnwphotographer #king5 #komo4 #kiro7 #q13fox pic.twitter.com/eU2suflJ43\u2014 Jim Reitz (@jimre) October 12, 2021\n\nGot this shot from Magnusson park in Seattle! pic.twitter.com/p2bmG3GSAq\u2014 Jensen Welton (@jenwelton) October 12, 2021\n\nU.S. East CoastFoliage chasing by day, #AuroraBorealis hunting by night. October in Maine putting on a show 24/7 // @visitmaine @Toyota @StormHour pic.twitter.com/ML2azhASB3\u2014 Jamie Walter (@jwalter1337) October 12, 2021\n\n47 minutes of aurora squished down to 5 seconds. Watch for the dancing at the end!11:44 PM - 12:31 AM EDT0344-0431 GMT #NHwx #aurora @TamithaSkov @ericfisher @NorthLightAlert #AuroraBorealis pic.twitter.com/njmnUNKFes\u2014 Rob Wright Images (@RobWrightImages) October 12, 2021\n\nOne of my best shots tonight of the #NorthernLights from here in Castle Hill #Maine. 46\u00b0 40' N #mewx #AuroraBorealis pic.twitter.com/5Fd99vJ2F6\u2014 James Sinko (@JamesSinko) October 12, 2021\n\nFrom aboveWOW! Just spoke with the captain on my flight (@united 225) and he shared this photo from the cockpit this evening from his much better camera. What a shot. #AuroraBorealis #NorthernLights #iawx pic.twitter.com/SnnfKFN9NS\u2014 Nathan Santo Domingo (@NSDwx) October 12, 2021\n\nI caught this aurora just as orbital sunrise was beginning. Breathtaking! pic.twitter.com/8km6i4M5Vj\u2014 Shane Kimbrough (@astro_kimbrough) October 12, 2021\n\nEast coast #Aurora for the win! For the 2nd night in a row, every overpass captured #AuroraBorealis activity overnight, as forecast by @NOAA Space Weather. The brightest and broadest North America activity was captured by #NOAA20 #VIIRS DNB at 1:45am CDT. https://t.co/N94utqlp7f pic.twitter.com/gqfLDLFY0L\u2014 UW-Madison CIMSS (@UWCIMSS) October 12, 2021\n\nKasha Patel contributed to this report. This October event may herald the real start of the next active solar period, which has been slow to materialize. Brilliant auroras light up North America from Alberta to Nebraska",
        "author": "Joe Kunches"
    },
    {
        "title": "Brilliant auroras light up North America from Alberta to Nebraska (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1082",
        "date": "2021-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/12/aurora-us-canada-northern-lights/",
        "text": "As many people in the Northern Hemisphere were asleep Monday night, the northern lights were awake and wild. The brilliant auroras, which appeared at lower latitudes than usual, put on a show along the northern tier of the United States, Canada and parts of Europe from late night to early morning. This event may herald the real start of the next solar activity maximum, which was expected to begin in the past year but was slow to materialize. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe events leading to the colorful display began Saturday, when a solar flare erupted. The flare was not particularly large, but it was positioned centrally on the Earth-facing side of the solar sphere. More critically, a coronal mass ejection (CME) also accompanied the flare.CMEs, although less spectacular than the flash of a flare, are the element that send Earth\u2019s magnetic field into a frenzy. They add enormous amounts of energy to the near-Earth environment and help spawn the otherworldly colors, which are excited nitrogen and oxygen molecules releasing photons of light. Strong geomagnetic storms may sometimes affect electrical power grids, GPS positioning and various types of communications.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThink of a CME\u2019s transit the way a batter sees a pitch coming from the pitcher\u2019s mound. Speed is important, clearly, but more than that, the spin on the baseball dictates where the pitch will end up and how effective it will be. Though CMEs don\u2019t spin, they do carry a magnetic field component; but the magnitude is unknown until the CME travels within 1 million miles of Earth, where spacecraft can measure it.Geomagnetic activity increased as this CME approached Earth, spurring minor to moderate storm (G1-G2) storm conditions. Some ground reports even hint at another dancing light display that sometimes accompanies auroras called STEVE (short for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), although researchers are still verifying the reports..@STEVEPhenomena about 30 minutes ago, seen from NW of Calgary, facing south@TweetAurora pic.twitter.com/0qcW3yQu2r\u2014 Chris Ratzlaff \ud83c\udde8\ud83c\udde6\ud83c\udf3e\ud83d\uddfb\ud83d\udcab (@ratzlaff) October 12, 2021\n\n\u201cCitizen scientists reported some unusual arcs on the southern edge of the auroral activity. Definitely a classic STEVE but also something looked more anomalous in structure and color,\u201d Liz MacDonald, a space scientist at NASA, wrote to us.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf you saw an aurora or STEVE, report your observations to the citizen-science project Aurorasaurus to help researchers improve aurora forecasting and learn more about STEVE.There\u2019s a chance for lingering auroral shows Tuesday night. But also, over the next few years be mindful of the sun making a splash, with more space weather storms in the offing.Until then, enjoy these beautiful aurora photographs captured by dedicated sky watchers. Reports range from Alberta to Nebraska to Maine to space.CanadaKABOOM \ud83d\udca5 Out of this world AURORA last night in Alix #alberta G2 Solar Storm conditions all night long! So glad many were able to witness this!! #NorthernLights #aurora #AuroraBorealis #abstorm #teamtanner #NaturePhotography @dartanner @TamithaSkov @NightLights_AM @JimCantore pic.twitter.com/Gi0QSc3LFq\u2014 \u1d1b\u0280\u1d07\u1d07 \u1d1b\u1d00\u0274\u0274\u1d07\u0280 (@treetanner) October 12, 2021\n\nNear Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Credit: Lindsay Stanbury pic.twitter.com/1ANufvTKLt\u2014 Space Weather Watch (@spacewxwatch) October 12, 2021\n\nU.S. MidwestAllsky coverage of ND last night revealed multiple STEVE sightings, SAR arcs, overhead coronas, pulsating aurora, and pink and blue aurora shortly before sunrise on October 12. pic.twitter.com/upXRw06c4u\u2014 North Dakota Dual Aurora Camera (@NoDDAC_cameras) October 12, 2021\n\n@TamithaSkov @weatherchannel Shortly after Earth was smacked by the CME last night, the skies really ramped up sparking a gorgeous display of the #AuroraBorealis as seen from Oran, IA. pic.twitter.com/6GDXIdLz4B\u2014 Starguy Mark (@SSA_Mark) October 12, 2021\n\nBefore the clouds and rain moved in tonight, I was able to photograph a vivid Aurora band over the Keweenaw at Eagle Harbor and Great Sand Bay, MI. I'm glad I got to see the lights tonight!! \ud83d\udc9a\ud83d\udc9c #NorthernLights #AuroraBorealis #KeweenawPeninsula #StormHour #UpperMichigan pic.twitter.com/MM1gSta5nP\u2014 isaac (@ID_Photo_Graphy) October 12, 2021\n\nU.S. West CoastThe rare time when the aurora cooperates with my work schedule! Incredible show happening right now in Fairbanks. These were a few shots taken from 8-10pm. #akwx #aurora #northernlights @TamithaSkov @Aurora_Alerts @TweetAurora pic.twitter.com/QFJD2btt8P\u2014 Luke Culver (@LukeCulverWx) October 12, 2021\n\nDid you see them? Northern lights (Aurora Borealis) were out tonight in Puget Sound! Timelapse video from Bainbridge Island tonight...#northernlights #aurora #seattle #bainbridgeisland #ferry #wsferries @wsferries #pnw #pnwphotographer #king5 #komo4 #kiro7 #q13fox pic.twitter.com/eU2suflJ43\u2014 Jim Reitz (@jimre) October 12, 2021\n\nGot this shot from Magnusson park in Seattle! pic.twitter.com/p2bmG3GSAq\u2014 Jensen Welton (@jenwelton) October 12, 2021\n\nU.S. East CoastFoliage chasing by day, #AuroraBorealis hunting by night. October in Maine putting on a show 24/7 // @visitmaine @Toyota @StormHour pic.twitter.com/ML2azhASB3\u2014 Jamie Walter (@jwalter1337) October 12, 2021\n\n47 minutes of aurora squished down to 5 seconds. Watch for the dancing at the end!11:44 PM - 12:31 AM EDT0344-0431 GMT #NHwx #aurora @TamithaSkov @ericfisher @NorthLightAlert #AuroraBorealis pic.twitter.com/njmnUNKFes\u2014 Rob Wright Images (@RobWrightImages) October 12, 2021\n\nOne of my best shots tonight of the #NorthernLights from here in Castle Hill #Maine. 46\u00b0 40' N #mewx #AuroraBorealis pic.twitter.com/5Fd99vJ2F6\u2014 James Sinko (@JamesSinko) October 12, 2021\n\nFrom aboveWOW! Just spoke with the captain on my flight (@united 225) and he shared this photo from the cockpit this evening from his much better camera. What a shot. #AuroraBorealis #NorthernLights #iawx pic.twitter.com/SnnfKFN9NS\u2014 Nathan Santo Domingo (@NSDwx) October 12, 2021\n\nI caught this aurora just as orbital sunrise was beginning. Breathtaking! pic.twitter.com/8km6i4M5Vj\u2014 Shane Kimbrough (@astro_kimbrough) October 12, 2021\n\nEast coast #Aurora for the win! For the 2nd night in a row, every overpass captured #AuroraBorealis activity overnight, as forecast by @NOAA Space Weather. The brightest and broadest North America activity was captured by #NOAA20 #VIIRS DNB at 1:45am CDT. https://t.co/N94utqlp7f pic.twitter.com/gqfLDLFY0L\u2014 UW-Madison CIMSS (@UWCIMSS) October 12, 2021\n\nKasha Patel contributed to this report. This October event may herald the real start of the next active solar period, which has been slow to materialize. Brilliant auroras light up North America from Alberta to Nebraska",
        "author": "Joe Kunches"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forecast calls for 50-50 chance weather will permit historic SpaceX launch on Saturday (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1083",
        "date": "2020-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/29/weather-forecast-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "After weather scrubbed the initial effort to launch two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX rocket Wednesday, conditions are expected to become marginally more favorable for two possible attempts this weekend.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe launch, which would propel American astronauts into space from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade, is first scheduled for Saturday at 3:22 p.m. If it cannot proceed, the next launch attempt would occur Sunday at 3 p.m. The potential for disruptive weather is pegged at 50 percent Saturday and 40 percent Sunday, according to the Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, responsible for supporting missions at Kennedy Space Center. This is a slight improvement over Wednesday\u2019s forecast, which assigned a 60 percent chance of unfavorable weather. The main weather concern Wednesday was nearby thunderstorms, which turned out to be the case.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the mission aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket can proceed, it will mark a milestone for the private space industry while restoring confidence in the nation\u2019s ability to conduct crewed space flight aboard American-made rockets.The rocket launch will send astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the Space Station. NASA has been relying on the Falcon 9 rocket, which will carry the Crew Dragon, to send supplies to the space station. But this will be a major test for the Commercial Crew Program, through which the space agency is contracting with SpaceX and Boeing to resume crewed space flight from U.S. soil after years of hitching an expensive ride aboard Russian rockets.The next Americans in spaceIn its briefing posted Friday morning, the Weather Squadron made clear that its weather concerns for Saturday and Sunday are the same as those which foiled Wednesday\u2019s launch attempt, namely the possible presence of showers and thunderstorms in the vicinity of the launch site, and tall cumulus clouds which can be a source of turbulence and lightning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe main trigger for showers and storms over the weekend will be a cold front approaching Florida from the northwest. That front probably won\u2019t clear the Space Coast until sometime Monday.\u201cAlthough it seems a welcome drying trend over Florida will soon be upon us, it\u2019s not clear if the timing will be soon enough for Sunday\u2019s attempt,\u201d the Weather Squadron wrote.The National Weather Service in Melbourne, Fla. forecasts a 60 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms Saturday in Cape Canaveral, and a 50 percent chance Sunday. \u201c[D]eep moisture will remain in place this weekend \u2026 with rain chances well above normal,\u201d it wrote in its forecast discussion.Story continues below advertisementDuring Wednesday\u2019s scrubbed launch, three weather rules were violated, including the presence of natural lightning and an attached anvil, which is the top of a towering thunderstorm that can generate an electric field and trigger lightning when in contact with a rocket\u2019s plume.Wow. pic.twitter.com/hY3pC8iwTp\u2014 Ryan Bale \ud83d\ude80\ud83e\uddd1\ud83c\udffc",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Comet Neowise has begun to dim, so catch it while you can (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1084",
        "date": "2020-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/07/21/comet-neowise-has-begun-dim-so-catch-it-while-you-can/",
        "text": "After impressing scientists and captivating skywatchers around the world for weeks, comet Neowise is beginning to dim. Already, astronomers have noted a reduction in its luminance in the night sky, with some reporting more difficulty finding the comet. While it still shines prominently in rural areas, city dwellers may soon be out of luck, since the comet made its closest pass to Earth on Wednesday and is now beginning its journey to the outer reaches of the solar system. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe icy snowball is just three miles wide, but being cooked by the sun caused the comet to shed some of its frigid innards, ensuring that it was followed closely by a luminous tail as well as dusty debris.Comet Neowise, two meteor showers and the ISS: Skywatching opportunities abound in next few weeksNeowise will soon draw farther both from the Earth and the sun, outrunning the sun\u2019s effects and our ability to see the results. By August, it may become tricky to spot with the naked eye even beneath the clearest and darkest of skies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the meantime, you may still have a few opportunities to catch the comet, despite its reduced splendor, before it vanishes for the next 6,000 years.On Tuesday night, for example, Neowise will appear just below and slightly to the left of the Big Dipper, a constellation of stars also known as Ursa Major. To spot it, look to the northwest about an hour after sunset.How to catch comet Neowise before it disappearsBy Wednesday, Neowise will be in a similar spot in the west-northwest, climbing a bit higher above the horizon each day.Escaping city lights is key; the more stars you can see, the better the chances are that you\u2019ll catch a glimpse of the comet. At first, it will look like nothing more than another star, but as your eyes adjust, you\u2019ll begin to see its faintly visible debris trail. That tail is like a wind vane, revealing the direction the \u201csolar wind\u201d is sweeping away material shed by the comet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf you have a telescope or binoculars, that\u2019s even better. The comet has been compared in brightness to the Milky Way.A surprise discoveryNeowise surprised the world in early July when it raced past the sun and survived unscathed. The comet was first discovered on March 27, spotted by NASA\u2019s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer; that\u2019s how the comet earned the name \u201cNEOWISE.\u201d The spacecraft is not meant to detect comets, but rather to spot near-Earth asteroids and other objects. It has detected 346 near-Earth objects since its inception.Comet Neowise is gracing the night sky and is visible with the naked eyeOther night sky viewing opportunities In the meantime, even if you don\u2019t get to enjoy comet Neowise before it fades into oblivion, there are still plenty of upcoming sights that will adorn the night sky.The Perseid meteor shower, among the most spectacular of the year, will light up the skies on the night of Aug. 11, when up to 50 shooting stars every hour will streak overhead. A 47-percent-illuminated moon may outshine some of the fainter meteors, but there will be plenty of shooting stars and even some fireballs for anyone with clear skies to enjoy. The comet won't be visible for much longer, but there's still time to enjoy it before it disappears for the next 6,000 years. Comet Neowise has begun to dim, so catch it while you can",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aurora sighted in northern U.S. as powerful geomagnetic storm continues (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1085",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/05/12/aurora-northern-lights-us-canada/",
        "text": "A surprise storm rocking Earth\u2019s magnetic field brought a rare display of the northern lights to parts of the northern United States early Wednesday, sending skywatchers staring upward at pastel hues. There\u2019s a chance that observers could be treated once again Wednesday night as the display potentially continues courtesy of energetic particles striking the planet\u2019s upper atmosphere. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe northern lights were sighted in Alaska and Minnesota, as well as across Canada and into parts of Europe and the United Kingdom. Their southern counterparts also made an appearance in New Zealand.The sun may offer key to predicting El Ni\u00f1o, groundbreaking study findsForecasters at the National Weather Service\u2019s Space Weather Prediction Center noted the geomagnetic storm reached a level 3 on a 1-to-5 scale; level 3 storming can easily send the lights dancing south into the Lower 48, but this time around, the most dramatic storming occurred during the daylight hours on Wednesday.Like clockwork, the northern lights show up! 2:52 am unedited from the camera. Isabella, MN 5-12-21 @Vincent_Ledvina @TamithaSkov @MoffettKaitlyn pic.twitter.com/6rB1dx8Olw\u2014 Levi Johnson (@levikj) May 12, 2021\n\nThe storm was originally anticipated to peak at level 1 status, which would relegate any aurora sightings to places such as Canada and Alaska. Instead, a more direct impact of energy arriving from the sun occurred. A level 3 geomagnetic storm is considered \u201cstrong\u201d by the Space Weather Prediction Center, and occurs on average of 130 days per 11-year solar cycle.Will the aurora be visible Wednesday night?It\u2019s unclear whether the Earth\u2019s upper atmosphere will continue feeling the effects of the geomagnetic storm Wednesday night, but it\u2019s possible that the lights are still visible. G3 storms can sometimes produce faint auroral displays all the way to Boston, Chicago, Seattle, the northern Plains and northern parts of the Corn Belt.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor most, any display would appear as a milky-white arc on the horizon, akin to distant city lights. A few might witness playful pillars, gently shimmering like a curtain fluttering in a gentle breeze.No edit right off camera #Dunedin #NZ Smails beach @_SpaceWeather_ @TamithaSkov @dartanner @chunder10 pic.twitter.com/4F4uIBVc4D\u2014 Paul Le Comte \ud83c\udf42 (@five15design) May 12, 2021\n\nThere\u2019s a better chance of the lights lingering in Canada and Alaska, though far northern regions will be contending with near total daylight. In Utqiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, the sun won\u2019t dip below the horizon until Aug. 2.Parts of northwest Europe, where nightfall will descend earlier than in North America, have elevated viewing prospects if and where cloud cover breaks.Many northern areas will hang on to a fair amount of cloud tonight, but if you're lucky and the clouds break, you may catch a glimpse of the #Auroraborealis\ud83d\udcf7 If you capture it on camera, we'd love to see your pics, using #loveukweather \ud83c\udfa5 pic.twitter.com/MHwDr0a7bh\u2014 Met Office (@metoffice) May 12, 2021\n\nIt\u2019s also worth remembering that many photographers use long exposures to capture the northern lights, meaning pictures will reveal brighter and more vibrant features than are visible with the naked eye. Still, it\u2019s worth glancing northward if you live in northern parts of the United States; sometimes, events such as this can bring surprises.The science of the lightsThe northern lights stem from energy streaming off the sun and into space. High-energy particles make up the \u201csolar wind.\u201d The speed, density and magnetic characteristics of those particles determine how they will interact with Earth\u2019s magnetosphere, or magnetic field.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarth\u2019s magnetosphere transforms the potentially hazardous electromagnetic energy into curtains of visible light that we see as the aurora. The more intense the disturbance, the farther away from the poles the lights will extend.Usually, the solar wind is meager enough that only the high latitudes are treated to auroral displays. But when conditions line up just right, even those at the mid-latitudes can get in on the show.Geomagnetic Storm in progress! A CME from a filament eruption has impacted Earth-space today, with likely Minor to Strong geomagnetic storms continuing this afternoon and evening. Aurora sightings are possible in the north of the UK tonight where skies are clear. pic.twitter.com/9tnilufM8I\u2014 Met Office Space (@MetOfficeSpace) May 12, 2021\n\nThe frequency and intensity of the northern lights are often tied to an 11-year cycle on the sun that describes the number of \u201csunspots\u201d that are visible. Sunspots are localized cool spots on the surface of the solar disk that bubble up and pulsate with magnetic energy. They are most frequent every 11 years at the peak of a \u201csolar cycle.\u201d The sun has been relatively quiet in the last few years as solar cycle 24 concluded and solar cycle 25 began; Wednesday\u2019s storm is the strongest geomagnetic storm to date of cycle 25.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStrong solar storms are born when sunspots produce eruptions of energy that can, on occasion, target Earth. Solar flares, which emanate from sunspots, are explosions of light that accelerate high-energy particles toward Earth in minutes and can cause radio blackouts.Appears the CME is starting to hit. Watch for northern lights soon after sunset in Minnesota if the numbers hold @Vincent_Ledvina @TamithaSkov @AuroraNotify @CBS3Duluth @MoffettKaitlyn pic.twitter.com/vvFc5kQCO2\u2014 Levi Johnson (@levikj) April 24, 2021\n\nCoronal mass ejections (CME), meanwhile, are explosions that launch solar material in a given direction. When pointed at Earth, they usually take a couple days to arrive. Scientists are concerned about the potential for particularly intense strong coronal mass ejections, which could disturb the electrical power grid and damage spacecraft electronics.\u201cThe flare is like the muzzle flash, which can be seen anywhere in the vicinity,\u201d NASA wrote. \u201cThe [coronal mass ejection] is like the cannonball, propelled forward in a single, preferential direction.\u201d#Solarstorms dont have to be fast to be intense, if they have strong southward magnetic fields. Having a #solar wind speed of about 400 km/s is enough! This is one of the first filament eruptions to hit in a while, which should remind us how intense these kind of storms can be! https://t.co/R7Q7BaMZQO\u2014 Dr. Tamitha Skov (@TamithaSkov) May 12, 2021\n\nThe coronal mass ejection that reached Earth very early Wednesday wasn\u2019t moving fast by CME standards \u2014 the solar wind speed only ticked up to about 280 miles per second when it arrived, compared with ordinary values of 186 to 217 miles per second.During the fiercest solar storms, the solar wind can reach speeds of 373 miles per second or greater. Despite its unremarkable field, Wednesday\u2019s event packed quite a punch.Wednesday morning\u2019s light show over Canada was captured by the Suomi-NPP satellite, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, which has a day-night band that can sense the luminous emissions of the aurora. Cities such as Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit are visible on the bottom of the images, while swirls of the aurora ebb and flow over Canada.Maverick astrophysicist calls for unusually intense solar cycle, straying from consensus view There\u2019s an outside chance the northern lights could appear once again Wednesday night. Aurora sighted in northern U.S. as powerful geomagnetic storm continues",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Chinese spacecraft is falling out of the sky. It\u2019s not supposed to happen like this. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1086",
        "date": "2018-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/03/28/a-chinese-spacecraft-is-falling-out-of-the-sky-its-not-supposed-to-happen-like-this/",
        "text": "A spacecraft\u00a0the size of a small house is about to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. We don\u2019t know when, exactly, and we certainly don\u2019t know where. Pieces of the spacecraft might survive the fiery reentry and make it to the ground \u2014 or maybe they won\u2019t. We\u2019ll be able to see it happen if it reenters over a populated area, probably. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs you can tell, there are a lot of unknowns for something that\u2019s going to happen in a matter of days. Forecasters have a pretty good idea of what the weather is going to be like on April 1 \u2014 the operators of this totally man-made and human-controlled spacecraft have\u00a0only a rough idea when it\u2019s going to fall out of the sky.The operators of the Chinese space lab, Tiangong-1, lost contact with it back in 2016. They didn\u2019t come right out and say\u00a0that, though. At first, China\u2019s space agency said it was being disabled. Then amateur skywatchers took notice and found that the spacecraft was actually out of control. China admitted as much later, saying they expected Tiangong-1 to make an uncontrolled reentry in late 2017. Now it looks like the spacecraft\u00a0will blast into Earth\u2019s atmosphere on March 31 or April 1.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not really supposed to go like this.\u201cWe have protocols for every launch and every spacecraft to make sure we can properly bring it down,\u201d J.D. Harrington, a spokesman for NASA, told The Washington Post. \u201cThere are times when those plans don\u2019t come to fruition, and that\u2019s something all space agencies have to deal with.\u201dT-minus one week until China\u2019s space lab crashes to Earth. Here\u2019s what it will look like.NASA isn\u2019t tracking this spacecraft. (The military is, however, at the Joint Space Operations Center at\u00a0Vandenberg Air Force Base.)But NASA knows a few things about space debris and how to prevent satellites from falling out of the sky, uncontrolled. The protocol usually consists of having enough fuel on board to make a controlled reentry,\u00a0Harrington said. If operators can steer the spacecraft, they can pinpoint exactly where and when it will enter Earth\u2019s atmosphere.In some cases, NASA will use fuel intended for reentry to keep the science mission going. That was the case with the TRMM satellite, which was decommissioned and fell back to Earth in 2015.\u00a0NASA and the broader research community decided it was worth the risk to use the extra fuel to extend the mission\u00a0\u2014 monitoring tropical rainfall, which provided invaluable contributions to things like hurricane and monsoon research.The difference\u00a0between TRMM and Tiangong-1, though, is size. TRMM was a relatively small research satellite, weighing around\u00a05,700 pounds when it reentered the atmosphere. It burned up into small debris that didn\u2019t pose much of a threat to anything on the ground. Tiangong-1 is nearly 19,000 pounds and the size of a small house.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeither NASA nor the European Space Agency know how the spacecraft is constructed or what it\u2019s made of. Large titanium or steel components could withstand the heat of reentry.The space agencies have performed controlled re-entries on spacecraft of this size before. Based on those, \u201cit can be surmised that Tiangong-1 will break up during its atmospheric reentry and that some parts will survive the process and reach the surface of Earth,\u201d the European Space Agency says.There are no laws that govern the movement of objects in space, says\u00a0Holger Krag, the head of the Space Debris Office at the European Space Agency. The only international law that applies to space objects is the Liability Convention, which was reached by the U.N. General Assembly in 1971. It says that when something falls out of space and lands on the ground, the country where that object originated is absolutely liable for any damage it causes.Dear Science: Where do spacecraft go when they die?\u201cThere\u2019s no similar thing for property in space, though,\u201d Krag told The Post. Contact is \u201cmuch more likely to occur there than an injury on the ground. This isn\u2019t covered by any international space law.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement(By the way, you can see all of the stuff in space in real time, at the website\u00a0stuffin.space.)So far, an international space crisis has been avoided because of the good relationship between all of the space nations, including the United States, Russia, Europe and China, to name a few. Plus it helps that 71 percent of Earth is covered in water.\u201cThat\u2019s 71 percent odds that it\u2019s going to go in the drink,\u201d Harrington said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been fortunate.\u201dTiangong-1 is far from the biggest thing to fall out of space uncontrolled. The 39-ton second stage of the Saturn V rocket used to launch Skylab made an uncontrolled reentry in 1975, two years after it was finished guiding Skylab into place.Skylab itself, weighing in at 74 tons, made an infamous semi-controlled reentry in 1979. The spacecraft didn\u2019t burn up as fast as NASA thought it would, so instead of landing in the ocean southeast of Cape Town, South Africa, its pieces scattered across southwest Australia.One town\u00a0even fined NASA\u00a0$400 for littering. As far as we know, that fine was never paid. There are still a lot of unknowns for something that's going to happen in a matter of days. A Chinese spacecraft is falling out of the sky. It\u2019s not supposed to happen like this.",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Weather scrubs SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1087",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/05/27/weather-forecast-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "4:30 p.m. update: Storms and lightning in the proximity of the Kennedy Space Center prevented the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The next launch attempt is set for Saturday at 3:22 p.m. Due to the forecast for possible showers and storms, weather could again pose challenges.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThree weather rules were violated, which prevented the launch, including the presence of natural lightning and an attached anvil, a towering thunderstorm top that can generate an electric field and trigger lightning when in contact with a rocket\u2019s plume. The weather showed signs of clearing after the no-go decision was made, but the launch could not wait, due to specific timing requirements necessary for reaching the International Space Station.Today's #LaunchAmerica attempt was an instantaneous launch window. Due to orbital mechanics, we need to make sure that at the time we launch, we are able to reach the @Space_Station on time and accurately. Because of this, we could not wait for clear weather today. pic.twitter.com/t5uykgL2Fp\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 27, 2020\n\nOriginal postStory continues below advertisementAmerican astronauts will launch into space from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade Wednesday. That is, if weather permits. The chance of thunderstorms that could scrub the planned launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station has increased since Tuesday, from 40 to 60 percent.AdvertisementThe predicted storms are expected to be hit or miss. If the mission aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket can proceed, it will mark a milestone for the private space industry while restoring confidence in the nation\u2019s ability to conduct crewed space flight aboard American-made rockets.NASA described Wednesday as \u201cnot only a big day for our teams \u2014 it\u2019s a big day for our country,\u201d in a tweet.Story continues below advertisementThe rocket launch, set for 4:33 p.m. Eastern time, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., will send Behnken and Hurley aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the space station. NASA has been relying on the Falcon 9 rocket, which will carry the Crew Dragon, to send supplies to the space station. But this will be a major test for the Commercial Crew Program, through which the space agency is contracting with SpaceX and Boeing to resume crewed space flight from U.S. soil after years of hitching a ride aboard Russian rockets.Follow live coverage of the SpaceX launch hereThe latest weather updates (last updated at 4:10 p.m.)A report from a NASA television host indicated that air and sea space around the launch site was clear for launch. However, one weather condition necessary for launch related to \u201clightning energy dissipation\u201d was being violated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWeather had been \u201ctrending in the right direction\u201d between 3:30 and 3:50 p.m., but just after 4 p.m. it began to trend in the wrong direction, NASA television reported.A final go-no go decision was expected at 4:13 p.m., 20 minutes before launch.Weather radar showed a line of showers and thunderstorms beginning to exit the Space Coast from the west. A special marine warning had previously been in effect (until 3:30 p.m.) for coastal waters for heavy showers and storms with wind gusts potentially topping 39 mph. A tornado warning was even in effect until 2:15 p.m. in north central Brevard County, about 20 miles north of Cape Canaveral.A few pop-up showers and storms trailing this line lingered around the Space Coast and to the west, but radar showed large gaps in precipitation coverage, which could provide an opening for the 4:33 p.m. launch. Still, the presence or proximity of tall cumulus clouds or anvils could potentially pose a problem.Wow. pic.twitter.com/hY3pC8iwTp\u2014 Ryan Bale \ud83d\ude80\ud83e\uddd1\ud83c\udffc",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stop telling us to use \u2018percent humidity.\u2019 It\u2019s terrible and here\u2019s why. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1088",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/07/12/stop-telling-us-to-use-percent-humidity-its-terrible-and-heres-why/",
        "text": "We get a lot of complaints about humidity. It is, after all, peak summer in D.C. \u2014 the nation\u2019s swamp \u2014 which it turns out is hard to drain.Sometimes the complaints are about more than just the heavy feeling of sultry moisture and sticky clothes, though. Sometimes the air is so humid that people need more to complain about. Like maybe even the way we talk about humidity in general. There are just some temperatures at which nothing is good enough, you know? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpecifically, some of our readers (and listeners) can\u2019t stand that we don\u2019t use \u201cpercent humidity.\u201d You may be familiar with this metric from things like third-grade science lessons and the generic weather app on your phone. It\u2019s really easy to understand \u2014 on a scale of 1 to 100, how humid is it?Story continues below advertisementExcept that\u2019s not at all what percent humidity is describing. Key to this is the modifier to the term that\u2019s often dropped in casual conversation: relative humidity. It\u2019s relative to the temperature.AdvertisementThe amount of moisture that air can \u201chold\u201d changes with temperature. Cold air can hold less moisture. Hot air can hold much more moisture. (This is a very simplistic explanation of a complex thermodynamic principle, but it accurately describes the outcome, which is why I use it when I\u2019m talking to people who really don\u2019t care about my thermodynamic principles.)For example, it might surprise you to know that right now \u2014 at 11:45 a.m. Wednesday \u2014 the relative humidity is just 52 percent in D.C.Story continues below advertisementNice! Right?Wrong. So wrong. Because it\u2019s relative.Here\u2019s another example. Air that\u2019s 85 degrees with 25 percent humidity contains twice as much moisture as 35-degree air with 75 percent humidity. My colleague Don Lipman uses a little story to illustrate this:I like to use the analogy of a windowless spaceship returning to Earth after a long voyage. It lands in Washington, but the crew has no idea what season it is. A garbled radio message informs the crew only that the relative humidity is 75 percent. What kind of weather should they dress for? Many might say warm, humid weather. They would not necessarily be right, however, as the outside air temperature could be 20 degrees Fahrenheit and it could be the middle of winter.Have I dogged relative humidity enough? Are you ready for me to get off my high humidity horse? Okay.This is why we use dew point instead.\u00a0The dew point is the temperature at which dew forms on things like the grass and your car windshield. If the air temperature drops to the dew point, the air is saturated, which is exactly what it sounds like \u2014 wet. The inverse is true, as well. If the dew point rises to the temperature, the air is saturated. The closer the dew point is to the temperature, the more humid it feels, especially in the summer when the air can hold a lot of moisture.Let\u2019s go back to today\u2019s conditions, which gave us a 52 percent humidity. At 11:45 a.m., the temperature was 90 degrees and the dew point was 70. That\u2019s pretty high. According to our very scientific dew point chart above, it feels \u201csticky\u201d going on \u201cmuggy.\u201dDuring a heat wave the body has to work harder to maintain a normal body temperature. Here are five facts to keep in mind when dealing with intense heat. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)In Washington, when it\u2019s both hot and humid, relative humidity levels are usually between 40 and 50 percent, and very rarely higher than 55 percent. If we said that the humidity is 40 percent when it\u2019s 100 degrees, our readers may not appreciate that it\u2019s actually quite humid outside.We\u2019re sticking with dew point. You might be familiar with relative humidity from sources such as third-grade science lessons and the generic weather app on your phone. But there's something better. Stop telling us to use \u2018percent humidity.\u2019 It\u2019s terrible and here\u2019s why.",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "A totally awesome time-lapse view of a Texas supercell storm (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1089",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/05/31/a-totally-awesome-time-lapse-view-of-texas-supercell-storm/",
        "text": "Meteorologist Jacob DeFlitch had one of the season\u2019s most spectacular storms all to himself Saturday evening. Instead of heading to Kansas with the mass of other storm chasers, DeFlitch \u2014 based in Colorado \u2014 took the road less traveled into the Texas panhandle.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd that made all the difference.DeFlitch began his storm pursuit in Boise City, Okla., where he spotted a fledgling thunderstorm, born in eastern New Mexico. It would captivate him for the next three hours. DeFlitch followed the storm, driving across the Texas-Oklahoma border into the Texas panhandle, where he watched the storm mature near the town of Stratford. Then he filmed it at its prime and created a time-lapse. The footage is breathtaking.Story continues below advertisementThe time-lapse reveals the rotating storm\u2019s structure, resembling an alien spaceship or, as storm chasers refer to it, a \u201cmother ship.\u201dAdvertisementThe warm moist air feeding into the storm, or updraft, twists around it like a corkscrew.\u201cIt was one of the best structures I\u2019ve seen all-time,\u201d DeFlitch said.The icing on the cake was the lightning, which shot down the towering storm shaft as the sun was setting: storm-chasing gold.The dog along for the ride, however, was not impressed:Should start @ChasingWithEcho. pic.twitter.com/WZQuFmh3od\u2014 Jacob DeFlitch (@WxDeFlitch) May 30, 2017\n\nThe storm, known as a supercell because of its rotating winds, did not spawn a tornado. However, according to the National Weather Service, it produced tennis- to baseball-size hail.Below, find some captures from DeFlitch\u2019s Twitter feed:That'll do, Texas. #txwx pic.twitter.com/vAkHkkKSWI\u2014 Jacob DeFlitch (@WxDeFlitch) May 28, 2017\n\nUpdate.. pic.twitter.com/p5zJpf1Pmh\u2014 Jacob DeFlitch (@WxDeFlitch) May 28, 2017\n\nAbsolutely breathtaking structure on yesterday's supercell near Stratford, TX #txwx pic.twitter.com/rEkHQ2ZhYQ\u2014 Jacob DeFlitch (@WxDeFlitch) May 28, 2017\n\nCorkscrew updraft.. Gorgeous structure as sunset sets on storm near Morse #txwx pic.twitter.com/8Zo3NWquNQ\u2014 Jacob DeFlitch (@WxDeFlitch) May 28, 2017\n\n The icing on the cake was the lightning, which shot down the towering storm shaft as the sun was setting: storm-chasing gold. A totally awesome time-lapse view of a Texas supercell storm",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Last of three rounds of showers and storms moving through Saturday night (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1090",
        "date": "2017-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/07/22/intense-storms-will-likely-cross-the-area-this-afternoon-with-more-possible-this-evening/",
        "text": "8:55 p.m. update: The last of the three rounds of showers and storms is approaching the Interstate 81 corridor in northwest Virginia and should move into D.C.\u2019s \u00a0western areas in the next hour and immediate metro in the 10 p.m. hour. It is not severe though may contain some downpours and a bit of lightning. Unless any warnings are issued with this activity (unlikely), this will be our last update of the evening. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the forecast through tomorrow, see:\u00a0PM Update: More strong storms possible tonight and again on Sunday\u2019s steamy afternoon6:50 p.m. update: As the worst of the second round of storms pushes well south and east of the region, we\u2019re eyeing a third round to the northwest pushing southeast. Our best estimate is that rolls rough the region between about 9 p.m. and midnight from west to east.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe\u2019re going to take a pause from updates until the next round approaches. We doubt it will be severe but it could bring some more downpours, lightning and gusty winds.6:40 p.m. update: The worst of the storms have moved south and east of Washington, with warnings in effect for the region near Fredericksburg (and to the south and east) and much of Calvert County continuing through 7 p.m.A tornado warning was issued south of Fredericksburg in Spotsylvania County at 6:15 p.m. but was discontinued. We have not seen any reports of a confirmed tornado.Here\u2019s a view of what the second round of storms looked like approaching Washington:Storm looked like the Independence Day spaceship moving in over D.C. @capitalweather #thunderstorms pic.twitter.com/hHmyRiPjV8\u2014 The Noah (@Noahood) July 22, 2017\n\n6:08 p.m. update: A severe thunderstorm warning has been issued for our southeast suburbs out to the Chesapeake. Main threat here is damaging winds that could bring down branches and small trees.Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Waldorf MD, Clinton MD, Fort Washington MD until 7:00 PM EDT pic.twitter.com/BnJu1mupyy\u2014 NWS Baltimore-Washington (@NWS_BaltWash) July 22, 2017\n\n5:45 p.m. update: Heavy rain has arrived in the Beltway! Time to cover the grill and head indoors. This line has some gusty wind, too.Incoming, Beltway! Heavy rain and some gusty winds. Head indoors. \u2614\ufe0f pic.twitter.com/x8q0jfUI2m\u2014 Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) July 22, 2017\n\n5:20 pm. update: Another line of thunderstorms is sweeping across the D.C. region, although these should not be as strong and windy as those we saw earlier this afternoon. It appears the strongest storms will be focused south of the metro in this round. So far no severe thunderstorm warnings have been issued, but keep an eye on the weather before heading out this evening.Another line of storms has arrived but this one not quite as strong as the last. pic.twitter.com/rEbcY9qPF6\u2014 Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) July 22, 2017\n\n@capitalweather pic.twitter.com/PLuyXwkL3I\u2014 Kristen Jeffers, MPA \u270a\ud83c\udffd\ud83c\udf08 (she/her) (@blackurbanist) July 22, 2017\n\n3:15 p.m. update: The first round of thunderstorms is tapering off and that should wrap things up for the next couple of hours. We\u2019re still watching the potential for more thunderstorms later this afternoon and evening, though. It\u2019s unclear at this point whether there will be enough energy in the atmosphere over D.C. to feed those storms.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe\u2019ve seen at least one report of tree damage in the Rockville area. This is also where some homes lost power. It looks like Rockville probably got the strongest wind gusts in the metro this afternoon.We\u2019ll continue to update this post as things continue to evolve this afternoon and evening.2:30 p.m. update: The squall line has arrived in the Beltway. Gusty winds precede the rain.\u00a0A new severe thunderstorm warning was issued for parts of Prince George\u2019s and Anne Arundel counties, including Laurel, Bowie and Annapolis. The storm will be strongest in these areas, but we\u2019re not seeing reports of damage yet. Gusty winds are the main threat, and isolated power outages are possible if branches start to come down.Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Bowie MD, Severn MD, Annapolis MD until 3:15 PM EDT pic.twitter.com/c7Gif22ODy\u2014 NWS Baltimore-Washington (@NWS_BaltWash) July 22, 2017\n\n2:10 p.m. update: A severe thunderstorm warning has been issued for our northern suburbs. The squall line is approaching fast and gusty winds could be damaging. We\u2019re already hearing of power outages in the Rockville area, although they aren\u2019t widespread at this point.Severe Thunderstorm Warning including Germantown MD, Rockville MD, Gaithersburg MD until 2:30 PM EDT pic.twitter.com/lfXGjGSw0s\u2014 NWS Baltimore-Washington (@NWS_BaltWash) July 22, 2017\n\n1:30 p.m. update: We\u2019re watching a squall line approach from the west. Storms will arrive in the D.C. metro in the 2 p.m. hour. Strong winds are possible, and torrential rain is likely. Check the weather before you head out this afternoon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementForecast in detail:An oppressive heat wave continues today, and now we\u2019re adding storms to the mix. High heat and humidity levels also mean the atmosphere is unstable, primed for thunderstorms. The first round of weekend storms becomes likely as we get deeper into the afternoon.\u00a0Some could be severe through this evening.Although it has been sunny into the midday, conditions can and will rapidly deteriorate as waves of showers and storms charge our way. While it is unlikely it will rain a majority of the time this afternoon and evening, any activity may be intense. Dangerous lightning and brief torrential rains are risks with any storms. There is also the potential for damaging winds across the region.This continues to look like it may be multiple rounds. The first should pass this afternoon, with another wave or two wanting to arrive later. More tomorrow as well.Chance of storms: 70 percentCoverage: Scattered to widespreadTiming: 2 p.m. to 12 a.m. (two or more rounds)Threats:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTorrential rain: Medium-HighLightning: MediumDamaging winds:\u00a0MediumFlash flooding: Low-MediumLarge hail: LowTornadoes: LowCurrent radarDiscussionLast night, a large complex of fast-moving thunderstorms congealed over Ohio, and this system is tracking toward the greater D.C.-Baltimore region. While radar trends indicate that this complex has weakened, there is the potential that portions of this system could regenerate east of the Appalachians later today.The system approaching the area has produced limited severe weather thus far, with mainly isolated damaging winds and some reports of severe gusts. While not necessarily a derecho, it does reflect a higher level of widespread organization with the potential to impact central Maryland, D.C. and Northern Virginia beginning around 3 p.m. (arriving earlier far west), with multiple bands of showers and storms continuing as late as midnight.The bow-shaped complex of thunderstorms is shown in the radar snapshot below. Meteorologists note that the northern \u201ccomma head\u201d of the bow echo is rotating, with an embedded vortex called an MCV (mesoscale convective vortex). While the MCV should stay north of the immediate D.C. region, it may continue to support convergence of air into the system, helping to maintain longevity.The National Weather Service\u2019s Storm Prediction Center (SPC), for now, is maintaining a \u201cslight risk\u201d outlook across our region, mainly for a 15\u00a0percent chance of damaging wind. A slight risk is the second on a scale of 1 to 5 for severe weather threats, with one being the lowest.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis augers with our thinking as discussed Friday. What may limit the severe potential is moderate levels of instability, plus somewhat weak wind shear. However, the destabilization trend will have to be closely monitored this afternoon. SPC mentions the potential for an upgrade to \u201cenhanced,\u201d or level three out of five, with a 30\u00a0percent probability of more widespread damaging wind.Today we are focused on the high resolution prediction models, such as the HRRR, a snapshot of which is shown below (simulated radar reflectivity, valid at 4 p.m.) While the storm complex tracks across Pennsylvania, multiple convective bands extend southward. The first of these could cross D.C. during the midafternoon, with later bands around 7\u00a0to 8 p.m., and perhaps as late as 10\u00a0p.m. to midnight.Additionally, with the atmosphere so humid, there is a slight concern for localized flash flooding. This becomes more likely if there are repeated assaults by convective cells, which is certainly possible.CWG will be monitoring and updating the severe threat as\u00a0the day unfolds. The drama with severe weather continues tomorrow, which may even turn out to be a more potent scenario than today. You'll want to stay weather-aware through this evening.  Last of three rounds of showers and storms moving through Saturday night",
        "author": "Jeff Halverson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | As extreme weather intensifies, a growing need for private-sector engagement in government (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1091",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/09/extreme-weather-government-commercial-partnership/",
        "text": "Late on the morning of Aug. 30, 2005, I stood with my wife and 5-year-old daughter in the driveway of our property in South Diamondhead, Miss., struggling to accept what we were seeing.In the place where our nicely furnished, three-story home stood 36 hours earlier, there was only the concrete slab of our foundation. Every structure in our neighborhood was missing, swept northwest in the 28-foot storm surge from Hurricane Katrina and deposited in a massive, miles-long mound of debris along the south side of Interstate 10. This event demonstrated the importance of quality weather information on a deep, personal level. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFast-forward to 2020, when I served as the deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: There were 22 billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events across the United States, breaking the previous annual record of 16 events that occurred in 2017 and 2011. The total cost over the past five years exceeded $600 billion, a record since NOAA began compiling such data in 1980. This increase is due to a combination of factors, including increased exposure, vulnerability and climate change.The importance of weather and climate prediction for saving lives and protecting property has never been greater, and we realized at NOAA that an \u201call hands on deck\u201d approach was needed. Therefore, we increased our participation in public-private partnerships to fill gaps in data, models and tools.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementToday, as Tropical Storm Elsa roars up the East Coast and the West roasts amid its third punishing heat wave of the summer, the need for private-sector engagement in government weather services has only become more imperative.Weather is turning into big business. What that could mean for the public.Historically, government agencies and departments have taken the lead in protecting the public from extreme weather, but over the past few years, we have seen a \u201csecond bold era\u201d in American innovation emerge. In the first, after World War II, the U.S. government led the major programs that maintained American leadership in science and technology \u2014 e.g., NASA in space exploration, the Defense Department in satellites, and the Atomic Energy Commission in nuclear power. Today, that leadership is increasingly evident in the private sector.This motivated Congress to establish NOAA\u2019s Commercial Weather Data Program in 2016, with the intent to leverage the growing spaced-based commercial weather data enterprise. As the acting NOAA administrator, I received an earful during a congressional hearing in 2018 from lawmakers who expressed frustration over our slow start. But by 2020, we awarded our first contracts for radio occultation data, as well as an artificial intelligence (AI) agreement to advance data assimilation, and a truly transformational public-private partnership to revolutionize NOAA\u2019s weather and ocean modeling capabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNOAA also recognized the power of the private sector in ocean data collection, leading us to form innovative partnerships with organizations such as Caladan Oceanic, Ocean Infinity, iXblue, Saildrone, Fugro, Viking Cruise Lines and Maersk.How high-tech robotic surfboards could change our understanding of the Gulf StreamSo we should ask ourselves, \u201cHow has this helped?\u201dFor comparison, let\u2019s go back to my experience with Katrina in 2005. The official three-day track error by the National Hurricane Center for Katrina was 174 nautical miles, at which point the forecast track shifted dramatically to the west. My home switched from being on the less-vulnerable left location relative to the storm to the most dangerous right-front quadrant. We also did not receive an indication that the storm surge would exceed 20 feet until 24 hours before landfall \u2014 after we evacuated.Story continues below advertisementI am exceedingly grateful for the warnings issued by the fine professionals at the Hurricane Center. They did the best they could with the tools they had, and they saved our lives. But because we did not have more time and forewarning of the magnitude of the impacts, we didn\u2019t take most of our belongings with us. Apart from our cars and bags packed for a weekend away, we lost everything we owned.AdvertisementWhat about now? Thankfully, we have seen some stunning successes in the Hurricane Center\u2019s tropical cyclone forecast track accuracy. Brilliant examples include Hurricane Florence in 2018, Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and Hurricane Laura in 2020. The track forecast for Tropical Storm Elsa this year has also been exceptional.Nice job, @NHC_Atlantic! \ud83d\udc4f\ud83d\udc4f\ud83d\udc4fThis post is for the weather geeks who know how much goes into forecasting a hurricane and how tough it is to predict behavior this many days out. #Elsa pic.twitter.com/HCdBx0wbbd\u2014 The Weather Channel (@weatherchannel) July 7, 2021\n\nBut we still have much room for improvement. Let\u2019s look at Hurricane Dorian again. Despite the forecast accuracy for landfall in North Carolina, the situation was much different as the storm entered the Caribbean. Fortunately for the Greater Antilles, the track error worked in their favor.The biggest challenge with Dorian was intensity prediction. Dorian resulted in the largest error since 2003, when the Hurricane Center began issuing five-day intensity forecasts. The outcome was an average bust of 100 knots on the five-day intensity forecast, with none of the models even showing it as a major hurricane.Even though Atlantic Basin hurricane track errors have decreased from 250 miles three days before landfall 20 years ago to 100 miles today, hurricane intensity forecasts have shown barely any improvement in 30 years. Rapid intensification before landfall catches communities off-guard by creating a much stronger and more dangerous storm than anticipated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNOAA\u2019s new partnerships with industry are only just beginning to take hold, and the opportunities for more impactful collaborations are expanding rapidly. A particularly innovative company is tomorrow.io (formerly ClimaCell), which intends to deploy the first constellation of 32 radar-equipped satellites in low Earth orbit by 2024.An ambitious private weather firm plans to launch its own satellitesSofar Ocean is also a rising star in the commercial data world, with plans to add 1,500 of its Spotter metocean buoys to its global network this year. It also delivers services using data, models and tools, and its Wayfinder app is particularly notable. It is used by shipping companies for dynamic route optimization using its Spotter network. The app calculates fuel and cost savings, as well as reductions in carbon emissions.Charting the correct course in a changing climate can only be achieved by reliable prediction. Improving the accuracy and reducing the uncertainty in warnings, forecasts and projections ensures effective preparation, adaptation and mitigation. Industry is delivering the data, models and tools today to navigate this future safely and successfully. It will be best for governments to get on board.Gallaudet is a retired Navy rear admiral, former deputy administrator at NOAA and assistant secretary of commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. Before NOAA, he served for 32 years in the Navy, completing his career as the Oceanographer and Navigator of the Navy and director of the Navy\u2019s Task Force Climate Change. The importance of weather and climate prediction for saving lives and protecting property has never been greater. As extreme weather intensifies, a growing need for private-sector engagement in government",
        "author": "Tim Gallaudet"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | As extreme weather intensifies, a growing need for private-sector engagement in government (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1092",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/09/extreme-weather-government-commercial-partnership/",
        "text": "Late on the morning of Aug. 30, 2005, I stood with my wife and 5-year-old daughter in the driveway of our property in South Diamondhead, Miss., struggling to accept what we were seeing.In the place where our nicely furnished, three-story home stood 36 hours earlier, there was only the concrete slab of our foundation. Every structure in our neighborhood was missing, swept northwest in the 28-foot storm surge from Hurricane Katrina and deposited in a massive, miles-long mound of debris along the south side of Interstate 10. This event demonstrated the importance of quality weather information on a deep, personal level. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFast-forward to 2020, when I served as the deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: There were 22 billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events across the United States, breaking the previous annual record of 16 events that occurred in 2017 and 2011. The total cost over the past five years exceeded $600 billion, a record since NOAA began compiling such data in 1980. This increase is due to a combination of factors, including increased exposure, vulnerability and climate change.The importance of weather and climate prediction for saving lives and protecting property has never been greater, and we realized at NOAA that an \u201call hands on deck\u201d approach was needed. Therefore, we increased our participation in public-private partnerships to fill gaps in data, models and tools.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementToday, as Tropical Storm Elsa roars up the East Coast and the West roasts amid its third punishing heat wave of the summer, the need for private-sector engagement in government weather services has only become more imperative.Weather is turning into big business. What that could mean for the public.Historically, government agencies and departments have taken the lead in protecting the public from extreme weather, but over the past few years, we have seen a \u201csecond bold era\u201d in American innovation emerge. In the first, after World War II, the U.S. government led the major programs that maintained American leadership in science and technology \u2014 e.g., NASA in space exploration, the Defense Department in satellites, and the Atomic Energy Commission in nuclear power. Today, that leadership is increasingly evident in the private sector.This motivated Congress to establish NOAA\u2019s Commercial Weather Data Program in 2016, with the intent to leverage the growing spaced-based commercial weather data enterprise. As the acting NOAA administrator, I received an earful during a congressional hearing in 2018 from lawmakers who expressed frustration over our slow start. But by 2020, we awarded our first contracts for radio occultation data, as well as an artificial intelligence (AI) agreement to advance data assimilation, and a truly transformational public-private partnership to revolutionize NOAA\u2019s weather and ocean modeling capabilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNOAA also recognized the power of the private sector in ocean data collection, leading us to form innovative partnerships with organizations such as Caladan Oceanic, Ocean Infinity, iXblue, Saildrone, Fugro, Viking Cruise Lines and Maersk.How high-tech robotic surfboards could change our understanding of the Gulf StreamSo we should ask ourselves, \u201cHow has this helped?\u201dFor comparison, let\u2019s go back to my experience with Katrina in 2005. The official three-day track error by the National Hurricane Center for Katrina was 174 nautical miles, at which point the forecast track shifted dramatically to the west. My home switched from being on the less-vulnerable left location relative to the storm to the most dangerous right-front quadrant. We also did not receive an indication that the storm surge would exceed 20 feet until 24 hours before landfall \u2014 after we evacuated.Story continues below advertisementI am exceedingly grateful for the warnings issued by the fine professionals at the Hurricane Center. They did the best they could with the tools they had, and they saved our lives. But because we did not have more time and forewarning of the magnitude of the impacts, we didn\u2019t take most of our belongings with us. Apart from our cars and bags packed for a weekend away, we lost everything we owned.AdvertisementWhat about now? Thankfully, we have seen some stunning successes in the Hurricane Center\u2019s tropical cyclone forecast track accuracy. Brilliant examples include Hurricane Florence in 2018, Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and Hurricane Laura in 2020. The track forecast for Tropical Storm Elsa this year has also been exceptional.Nice job, @NHC_Atlantic! \ud83d\udc4f\ud83d\udc4f\ud83d\udc4fThis post is for the weather geeks who know how much goes into forecasting a hurricane and how tough it is to predict behavior this many days out. #Elsa pic.twitter.com/HCdBx0wbbd\u2014 The Weather Channel (@weatherchannel) July 7, 2021\n\nBut we still have much room for improvement. Let\u2019s look at Hurricane Dorian again. Despite the forecast accuracy for landfall in North Carolina, the situation was much different as the storm entered the Caribbean. Fortunately for the Greater Antilles, the track error worked in their favor.The biggest challenge with Dorian was intensity prediction. Dorian resulted in the largest error since 2003, when the Hurricane Center began issuing five-day intensity forecasts. The outcome was an average bust of 100 knots on the five-day intensity forecast, with none of the models even showing it as a major hurricane.Even though Atlantic Basin hurricane track errors have decreased from 250 miles three days before landfall 20 years ago to 100 miles today, hurricane intensity forecasts have shown barely any improvement in 30 years. Rapid intensification before landfall catches communities off-guard by creating a much stronger and more dangerous storm than anticipated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNOAA\u2019s new partnerships with industry are only just beginning to take hold, and the opportunities for more impactful collaborations are expanding rapidly. A particularly innovative company is tomorrow.io (formerly ClimaCell), which intends to deploy the first constellation of 32 radar-equipped satellites in low Earth orbit by 2024.An ambitious private weather firm plans to launch its own satellitesSofar Ocean is also a rising star in the commercial data world, with plans to add 1,500 of its Spotter metocean buoys to its global network this year. It also delivers services using data, models and tools, and its Wayfinder app is particularly notable. It is used by shipping companies for dynamic route optimization using its Spotter network. The app calculates fuel and cost savings, as well as reductions in carbon emissions.Charting the correct course in a changing climate can only be achieved by reliable prediction. Improving the accuracy and reducing the uncertainty in warnings, forecasts and projections ensures effective preparation, adaptation and mitigation. Industry is delivering the data, models and tools today to navigate this future safely and successfully. It will be best for governments to get on board.Gallaudet is a retired Navy rear admiral, former deputy administrator at NOAA and assistant secretary of commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. Before NOAA, he served for 32 years in the Navy, completing his career as the Oceanographer and Navigator of the Navy and director of the Navy\u2019s Task Force Climate Change. The importance of weather and climate prediction for saving lives and protecting property has never been greater. As extreme weather intensifies, a growing need for private-sector engagement in government",
        "author": "Tim Gallaudet"
    },
    {
        "title": "See Japan\u2019s Ioyama volcano erupting for the first time in 250 years (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1093",
        "date": "2018-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/04/20/japan-volcano-mt-ioyama-erupts-video-shows-first-rumblings-in-250-years/",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s Ioyama volcano awoke from a 250-year slumber Thursday afternoon, spewing a plume of ash taller than the Eiffel Tower that prompted warnings for planes and nearby villages that faced a threat from ash and falling rocks.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe last time the volcano was active was in 1768, eight\u00a0years before the Declaration of Independence. Mount Io erupted around 3:40 p.m. Thursday,\u00a0according to the Associated Press. No injuries were reported, although Japanese officials warned that the eruption could continue into the weekend. Japan\u2019s meteorological agency declared the entire mountain off limits on Friday, even though explosions had subsided.Volcanic thunder is real, and this is what it sounds like\u201cThere is a possibility the volcano will become more active,\u201d Meteorological Agency official Makoto Saito told the Japan Times.Story continues below advertisementIn particular, the agency expects more ash and pyroclastic flows, a mix of hot lava blocks, ash and gases that barrel down the sides of some volcanoes.AdvertisementJapan sits in the Pacific Ocean\u2019s \u201cRing of Fire\u201d and has 110 active volcanoes, according to the AP. And Mount Io is part of the Kirishima mountain range on Kyushu, Japan\u2019s southern main island.Io is erupting about 620 miles southwest of the capital, Tokyo, near the site of another volcano that violently erupted in March.Several people were killed in January after Mount Moto-Shirane erupted without warning near a popular ski resort northwest of Tokyo.The meteorological agency detected volcanic activity on Mount Io in February and raised the warning level to 2.Read more:There\u2019s a small chance an asteroid will smack into Earth in 2135. NASA is working on a plan.This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.This ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the oceanScientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beach Japanese officials warned people nearby to be wary of ash and falling volcanic rock.  See Japan\u2019s Ioyama volcano erupting for the first time in 250 years",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Challenger space shuttle disaster set one meteorologist on a unique path (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1094",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/28/breea-lisko-meteorologist-air-force/",
        "text": "The air temperature was 4 degrees outside the windows of a second-grade classroom, filled with enraptured students in Eagan, Minn. A young Breea Lisko and her classmates gathered excitedly to watch America\u2019s first teacher head to space. It was Jan. 28, 1986, and the space shuttle Challenger was moments away from liftoff. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLisko remembers the boxy cathode-ray-tube television wheeled in on a cart; the teacher turning off the classroom lights; the choir of her classmates\u2019 countdown in joyful unison.And she remembers the chilling silence that followed moments later, when images of the Challenger engulfed in a fireball flickered across the screen. Her teacher hastily clicked off the television. Friends and teachers wept, stunned.'We've lost 'em, God bless 'em': What it was like to witness the Challenger disasterLater that summer, Lisko found herself staring at the stars above Kabekona Lake, about 3\u00bd hours north of Minneapolis, becoming lost in their grandeur above as she pondered the mysteries of space. It marked the start of a passion that soon burned as bright as the ever-present stars she gazed at year after year.A decade later, Lisko was on her way to Iowa State University to study atmospheric sciences before starting her career as a launch weather commander overseeing rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.Vandenberg\u2019s Space Launch Complex 4 is on the coast of California about 65 miles northwest of Santa Barbara. Its location was strategically chosen due to its distance away from populated areas, lest an accident occur during launch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe weather support mission is all about protecting the people, the rocket, [and] the payload,\u201d says Lisko, who is tasked with describing the critical weather leading up to each launch.And when it comes to launching payloads into orbit precision is vital.Surface winds faster than 16 mph can cause a rocket with 7.2 million pounds of thrust \u2014 even a few inches into its ascent \u2014 to drift into the launch tower, potentially destroying expensive assets that may have taken years and billions of dollars to design and build.That makes getting the weather right a necessity \u2014 but Lisko\u2019s job doesn\u2019t stop at liftoff.Once a rocket is airborne, the weather team diligently monitors and models where a hypothetical toxic plume or pieces of rocket debris would drift should an explosion occur aloft.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a forecasting job with no room for error, but Lisko takes it in stride.AdvertisementShe recalls one particular launch forecast in October 2005 that was especially challenging \u2014 it featured a meandering sea breeze, as well as a temperature inversion. An inversion marks a layer in the atmosphere where temperature increases with height. As a result, air density fluctuates dramatically over short distances, a potential obstacle for rocket operations.Above the inversion, cold air is heavy, sinking toward the Earth\u2019s surface. For rocket launches with tens of thousands of pounds of thrust, an inversion can catch some of the incredible power burning from rocket boosters. A portion of that energy is concentrated and reflected down to the surface by the invisible inversion. That produces a powerful shock wave, potent enough to blow out the windows of houses in towns close to the launchpad.Story continues below advertisementOn this day, Lisko had to bear the potential consequences of this in mind, but she was also contending with trying to forecast the sea breeze. Subtle shifts in wind speed or direction could prove disastrous for the launch. It was a tough forecast dilemma: The inversion could destroy the neighborhood; the sea breeze could destroy the rocket.Advertisement\u201cWhen we launched the final Titan IV rocket in October of 2005, it felt like an earthquake,\u201d recalled Lisko. \u201cThe roar hit us all in the gut. It was the last time the Titan IV would be launched, and a lot of pressure rode on accuracy of the wind forecast.\u201dThat meant that, even after all other cross-checks were met, final permission to launch rested with the meteorologist on duty \u2014 who was Lisko.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMinnesota lakes don\u2019t create a sea breeze like coastlines do,\u201d she laughs, remembering her upbringing. \u201cForecasters in unfamiliar environments have to trust fundamental weather forecasting rules and historic data in lieu of personal instincts.\u201dWhile Lisko herself hasn\u2019t been to space, she empathizes with the \u201coverview effect,\u201d a shift of awareness and sense of awe that astronauts experience when seeing Earth in its entirety from a distant vantage point.AdvertisementLisko has not only supported space missions in nearly two decades of service. Over the years, she has served in a variety of roles, including in Afghanistan as a meteorological officer for NATO.Story continues below advertisementShe\u2019s recently pivoted to her biggest challenge yet: using weather and space-weather information to advise the Air Force in rapid-response situations from the Pentagon.Instead of the \u201cwhen, what, and how much\u201d parts of a weather forecast, Lisko now works explaining the \u201cso what\u201d to key national security officials. She deals with water resources, natural disaster preparedness, agriculture and myriad other factors that interact with weather and climate to affect everyday life.How does she feel about that?\u201cNational security is a team sport, and weather impacts everything we want to do,\u201d Lisko says. \u201cMeteorologists have to get it right the first time, every time, to ultimately get the mission done. It\u2019s fascinating. It\u2019s a challenge. And I love it.\u201dThe author is an Air Force officer with a bachelor\u2019s degree in atmospheric sciences from the University of North Dakota. Defense meteorologist Lt. Col. Breea Lisko has supported rocket launches and mission-critical operations for the U.S. Air Force. How the Challenger space shuttle disaster set one meteorologist on a unique path",
        "author": "Jonathan D. Sawtelle"
    },
    {
        "title": "The sun may offer key to predicting El Ni\u00f1o, groundbreaking study finds (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1095",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/05/08/sun-el-nino-study/",
        "text": "When it comes to long-term hurricane forecasts, tornado predictions in the Plains or prospects for winter rain in California, you\u2019ll often hear meteorologists refer to El Ni\u00f1o or La Ni\u00f1a. They\u2019re phases in a cycle that starts in the tropics, spreading an influence across the globe and shaping weather both close to home and on different continents. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow there\u2019s emerging research to suggest that cosmic rays, or positively charged, high-energy particles from space, might be the mechanism that flips the switch between phases. Cosmic rays come from outside our solar system, but the number and intensity that reach Earth hinge on the magnetic field of the sun.A swing between El Ni\u00f1o and La Ni\u00f1a can have dramatic implications on global weather, bringing widespread shifts in precipitation and changes in temperature that can be problematic for vulnerable populations and have massive economic effects. In California, for instance, flood events during El Ni\u00f1o periods have proven 10 times more costly than those during La Ni\u00f1a events. In some parts of the world that depend heavily on agriculture and marine commerce, a flip from El Ni\u00f1o to La Ni\u00f1a can alter daily life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA paper recently published in the journal Earth and Space Science links terminator events, or the end of a cycle on the sun, with the flip of a switch between El Ni\u00f1o and La Ni\u00f1a. The solar magnetic cycle, which is mirrored by fluctuations in the number of sunspots on the solar disk, is made up of roughly 22-year periods. Each span features two maxima and minima each of sunspot frequency and coverage \u2014 one of each magnetic polarity lasting roughly 11 years.Sunspots behave like bar magnets: Imagine that the bar magnets rotate 180 degrees every 11 years.Maverick astrophysicist calls for unusually intense solar cycle, straying from consensus viewRobert Leamon, a research scientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and one of the researchers credited with the discovery, said that, if more can be learned about the relationship between solar activity and the El Ni\u00f1o-La Ni\u00f1a cycle, or ENSO, it could be a game-changer for disaster preparedness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn Australia, for example, El Ni\u00f1o events, associated with warming waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean, tend to substantially increase the risk of drought, while La Ni\u00f1as, tied to cooling waters, increase rainfall and flooding.\u201cI have some attention from the Australians,\u201d said Leamon in a recent phone call. \u201cI think of the massive wildfires and droughts that dominated headlines before covid. I hope here will come a time soon that people recognize that, based on the phase of the solar cycle, there is a likelihood of there being El Ni\u00f1o or La Ni\u00f1a.\u201dHow the relationship worksThe key to this proposed solar-weather connection lies in \u201cterminator\u201d events, which spell the end of a solar cycle. Over the course of 22 years, bands of magnetism wrapping around the sun slowly migrate toward the equator, interacting with one another to produce sunspots. Those sunspots, or cool, dark discolorations on the sun\u2019s surface, pulsate with magnetic energy, occasionally hurling it into space in solar storms that can spark displays of the northern lights.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are two bands of magnetism per hemisphere on the sun. At solar minimum, both sets of bands are of equal and opposite strength, so the sun\u2019s magnetic output flatlines. That drop changes the sun\u2019s magnetic field, resulting in a decrease in the number of cosmic rays hitting Earth\u2019s upper atmosphere.Maverick astrophysicist calls for unusually intense solar cycle, straying from consensus viewLeamon explained that the flip from El Ni\u00f1o to La Ni\u00f1a usually comes a couple of months after a cycle\u2019s terminator. Since the terminator event is associated with a drop-off in cosmic rays, Leamon thinks the triggering mechanism is electrical in nature.\u201cYes, it has to be,\u201d said Leamon, who suspects that the abrupt drop-off in conductivity of the upper atmosphere, or ease through which electrical energy flows through it, is having a chain reaction of effects that percolates down to the surface, where weather occurs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe solar effects on the upper atmosphere predispose the atmosphere to be in La Ni\u00f1a,\u201d he explained.How the sun might flip the switch to La Ni\u00f1aBut that\u2019s where things get hazy \u2014 namely because Leamon and his colleagues have yet to establish an understanding of how a change in electrical field would influence the oceans and induce a La Ni\u00f1a. He does have a few hunches, though.\u201cIt changes how the [large-scale atmospheric] waves that the likes of thunderstorms or clouds or moisture upwelling generate in the Pacific,\u201d Leamon said.While the researchers didn\u2019t link the strength of a terminator event with the strength of an El Ni\u00f1o or La Ni\u00f1a pattern, they said there was a connection between bigger terminator events and a more dramatic shift from Ni\u00f1o to Ni\u00f1a.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the things we\u2019ve keyed into is, as this correlation gets stronger, whatever the mechanism is, produces the biggest swing,\u201d said Scott McIntosh, deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a co-author on the project. \u201cWe\u2019re talking peak to peak El Ni\u00f1o into La Ni\u00f1a, \u2026 the peak of heating [in the east tropical Pacific] to trough of cooling.\u201dLingering La Ni\u00f1as may help forecasters spot costly weather patterns two years awayApplications of the findingsIf their theory holds up, it could become a big player in seasonal hurricane forecasts, because the first year after a shift toward La Ni\u00f1a often brings a busy Atlantic season. That\u2019s because water temperatures in the Atlantic remain comparatively mild, while upper-atmospheric winds are weak, allowing storms to develop without being shredded apart.Leamon endeavors that, down the road, their techniques may allow for rough El Ni\u00f1o/La Ni\u00f1a forecasts up to a decade in advance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s certainly better than a \u2026 seasonal outlook,\u201d he said.Those long-range forecasts wouldn\u2019t just be of importance to scientists \u2014 they\u2019d be of enormous use to urban planners, government leaders and even everyday citizens. Envision an emergency manager planning for hurricane season, an overseer of water resources in California deciding how much water to budget for a community over each of the next several years or a farmer in the Midwest considering whether to splurge and invest in drought-resistant crops.Having advanced insight into the phase of El Ni\u00f1o or La Ni\u00f1a will be especially crucial in the years ahead, when accompanying changes in weather will piggyback upon a growing disruptive influence from human-induced climate change.Reaction from climate and space scientistsDespite the strong correlation and the efforts ahead, the study has been met with mixed reviews from the climate science community. That\u2019s usually the case in science with any new, novel ways of looking at an issue. In this case, the multidisciplinary element \u2014 combining space weather with Earth\u2019s climate \u2014 blends two different communities together.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMathew Barlow, a professor of climate science at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, described the findings as a \u201cpotentially interesting empirical relationship,\u201d but said the proof is in the pudding when it comes to using those findings.What does it mean when the sun is spotless and serene?\u201cWe have yet to see whether the relationship, even if truly robust, can measurably improve current forecasts,\u201d he wrote in an email. \u201cMy own personal interest level would tick up noticeably based on \u2026 the identification of a plausible physical mechanism underlying the relationship.\u201dOthers point to the short time scale over which observations were used to draw conclusions. Among them is Mark Cane, a climate scientist at Columbia University and an El Ni\u00f1o expert.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIntuition should warn you that roughly 60 years of data is not enough to tell you anything conclusive about a 22-year cycle,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementAmong space scientists, the research is beginning to catch on. Tamitha Skov, a space weather physicist who goes by \u201cSpace Weather Woman\u201d on social media, described the work as \u201ca [wake-up] call to terrestrial meteorologists and solar/space weather scientists.\u201d\u201cI wouldn\u2019t go so far as to call the results of this work a \u2018conclusion\u2019 per se \u2014 rather something akin to a steppingstone in a new direction,\u201d wrote Skov in an email. \u201cBut to take the next step, these improved observations of the sun and those of the neutral atmosphere are only a part of the puzzle that needs to be pieced together.\u201dFor now, it remains to be seen if the relationship will hold during the next solar cycle \u2014 but Leamon and McIntosh plan to continue forging ahead in hopes of next figuring out why the link between solar activity and El Ni\u00f1o and La Ni\u00f1a exists.\u201cIt has sort of been an uphill struggle,\u201d Leamon said. \u201cBut one man\u2019s noise is another man\u2019s data.\u201d Scientists identify possible connection between the solar cycle and whether El Ni\u00f1o or La Ni\u00f1a is present. The sun may offer key to predicting El Ni\u00f1o, groundbreaking study finds",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "60 inches of rain fell from Hurricane Harvey in Texas, shattering U.S. storm record (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1096",
        "date": "2017-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/29/harvey-marks-the-most-extreme-rain-event-in-u-s-history/",
        "text": "Update, Sept. 22 and 29New data from the National Weather Service shows that a weather station near Nederland, Tex. about 10 miles north of Port Arthur received 60.58 inches of rain from Hurricane Harvey. Another weather station, about five miles to the southeast of Nederland near Groves, Tex. registered 60.54 inches during the storm. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAll rainfalls totals from this storm are still preliminary and require review. But, if verified, these observations would mark the two greatest single-storm rainfall totals on record in the U.S., including Hawaii.Related stories: Harvey is a 1,000-year flood event unprecedented in scale | We still don\u2019t know how to talk about floodsStory continues below advertisement(This story, first updated on Sept. 22, was revised on Sept. 29 to amend the totals for Nederland and Groves, Tex. based on new\u00a0numbers provided by the National Weather Service.)Original post from Aug. 29The rain from Harvey is in a class of its own. The storm has unloaded over 50 inches of rain east of Houston, the greatest amount\u00a0ever recorded in the Lower 48 states from a single storm. And it\u2019s still raining.AdvertisementJohn Nielsen-Gammon, Texas state climatologist, said a rain gauge near Mont Belvieu at Cedar Bayou, about 40 miles east of Houston, had registered 51.9 inches of rain through late\u00a0Tuesday afternoon.\u00a0This total exceeds the previous record of 48 inches set during tropical cyclone Amelia in Medina, Texas in 1978.Link: Rainfall totals from HarveyAll rainfalls totals from this storm are still preliminary and require review. But, if verified, this amount breaks not only the Texas state rainfall record but also the record for the remaining\u00a0Lower 48 states.What the flooding and rescues of Hurricane Harvey look like, in videosHawaii\u00a0has logged isolated reports of greater amounts at high elevations from tropical systems, but the footprint from Harvey in Southeast Texas is much larger. It has produced at least three feet of rain over most of the Houston region, affecting more than 5 million people.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe 3-to-4 day rainfall totals of greater than 40 inches (possible 50 inches in locations surrounding Santa Fe and Dickinson) are simply mind-blowing that has lead to the largest flood in Houston-Galveston history,\u201d the\u00a0National Weather Service office serving Houston wrote.From the perspective of the amount of volume unloaded in the United States from a single storm, Harvey has\u00a0no rival.Capital Weather Gang's Jason Samenow shares what's next for the battered Texas coast and tracks Harvey's path toward Southwestern Louisiana. (Claritza Jimenez, Jason Samenow/The Washington Post)Nielsen-Gammon found\u00a0Harvey\u2019s total rainfall concentrated over\u00a0a 20,000-square-mile area represents nearly 19 times the daily discharge of the Mississippi River, by far the most of any tropical system ever recorded.Texas flood disaster: Harvey has unloaded 9 trillion gallons of waterThe Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison determined that many areas of Southeast Texas have received rain that is expected to come around only once every 1,000 years (or having a 0.1 percent probability of occurrence), assuming a stationary climate.4 day rain total with nearly entire metro area exceeding the 1% annual chance rainfall event (100 yr) and some areas near the 0.1% (1000 yr) pic.twitter.com/12D9sHxNZD\u2014 UW-Madison SSEC (@UWSSEC) August 28, 2017\n\nThis is truly an epic storm.Houston residents evacuate their homes amid Harvey flooding after a reservoir spilled over for the first time in history. (Dalton Bennett, Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)More on Hurricane HarveyHarvey\u2019s forecast was good \u2014 but it shows where progress can be madeGRAPHIC: Harvey\u2019s impactGRAPHIC: A close-up look at the flooding in HoustonTrump is heading to Texas while a full-on rescue is still underwayDams are overflowing for the first time in their historySnakes, gators and fire ants are alive and well in Harvey\u2019s flood waters New Weather Service data show two locations near Port Arthur, Tex. registered over 60 inches of rain. 60 inches of rain fell from Hurricane Harvey in Texas, shattering U.S. storm record",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "NOAA taps David Legates, professor who questions the seriousness and severity of global warming, for top role (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1097",
        "date": "2020-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/13/noaa-hires-david-legates-climate/",
        "text": "The Trump administration has tapped David Legates, an academic who has long questioned the scientific consensus that human activity is causing global warming, to help run the agency that produces much of the climate research funded by the U.S. government.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLegates, a University of Delaware professor who was forced out of his role as that state\u2019s climatologist because of his controversial views, has taken a senior leadership role at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The agency, which oversees weather forecasting, climate research and fisheries, has until now continued its climate research and communications activities unfettered by political influence. For that, NOAA stands in stark contrast to the Environmental Protection Agency and science agencies at the Interior Department, where the Trump administration has dismissed and sidelined climate scientists or altered their work before publication.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe move to install Legates as the new deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for environmental observation and prediction, a position that would report directly to acting NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs, is raising concerns in the science community that this could be a White House-orchestrated move to influence the agency\u2019s scientific reports.The appointment, first reported by NPR, was confirmed in an email obtained by The Washington Post from his academic department at the University of Delaware, where he teaches in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences. An email from the director of the department was sent to the department Friday, letting students know he won\u2019t be teaching for the rest of the fall semester.\u201cCongratulat[e] him on this appt if you talk with him,\u201d wrote associate professor and interim department chair Tracy DeLiberty. \u201cDavid hopes to be back at UD in the spring.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeither NOAA nor the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency, would confirm Legates\u2019s appointment to a position that does not require Senate confirmation.However, Legates now has a NOAA email address and appears in the agency\u2019s personnel directory.The new hire came as a surprise to a NOAA official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the appointment.\u201cI knew nothing about this and here it comes as a midnight hire over the weekend,\u201d the official said. \u201cNOAA was being run reasonably well and the need for any new talent coming into this organization at this point is really not needed.\u201dLegates has long criticized mainstream climate scientistsLegates was formerly Delaware\u2019s state climatologist, a position from which he he stepped down in 2011. He had come under pressure from then-Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D), because of his fossil fuel industry-funded research casting doubt on the science showing that burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels is the main factor behind heating the planet and would lead to dangerous effects such as sea level rise and extreme weather events.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLegates is affiliated with the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank funded in part by the fossil fuel industry that supports research arguing that human-caused climate change is not a serious threat.At the organization\u2019s 10th International Conference on Climate Change in 2015, he was presented with the Courage in Defense of Science Award. In his acceptance speech, he said he saw it as recognizing him for surviving having been \u201cbeaten over the head by a bunch of thugs,\u201d referring to mainstream climate scientists and politicians who have criticized his work.Legates\u2019s views on climate change line up squarely with those of President Trump, who has denied the existence of human-caused global warming, and blamed the ongoing climate change-fueled wildfire disaster in the West on forest mismanagement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLegates also has questioned scientists\u2019 approach to the coronavirus pandemic, having co-written a commentary published on Heartland\u2019s website on April 13 that compared the modeling of the virus\u2019s spread to climate modeling, blasting both as inaccurate because of the assumptions the modelers made.\u201cWe can\u2019t afford a cure that\u2019s worse than the disease \u2014 or a prolonged and deadly national economic shutdown that could have been shortened by updated and corrected models,\u201d Legates wrote, along with Paul Driessen, another Heartland-affiliated scholar.\u201cNow just imagine: What if we could have that same honest, science-based approach to climate models?\u201d they wrote.Story continues below advertisement\u201cShouldn\u2019t we demand that these models be verified against real-world evidence? Natural forces have caused climate changes and extreme weather events throughout history. What proof is there that what we see today is due to fossil fuel emissions, and not to those same natural forces? We certainly don\u2019t want energy \u2018solutions\u2019 that don\u2019t work and are far worse than the supposed manmade climate and weather \u2018virus.\u2019 \u201dThe simplest of climate models run decades ago accurately projected global warming\u201cAnd we have the climate data. We\u2019ve got years of data,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThe data show the models don\u2019t match reality,\u201d they wrote, despite numerous peer-reviewed studies showing otherwise.Advertisement\u201cThey know disaster scenarios sell,\u201d Legates and Driessen wrote of climate scientists, many of whom are funded by NOAA grants. \u201cDisaster forecasts keep them employed, swimming in research money \u2014 and empowered to tell legislators and regulators that humanity must take immediate, draconian action to eliminate all fossil fuel use \u2014 the economic, human and environmental consequences be damned.\"Story continues below advertisementNOAA is a major hub for federal climate research, along with NASA, the Energy Department and the National Science Foundation, among others. Its scientists contribute to reports by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC). The IPCC has warned of severe consequences for humanity if greenhouse gases are not reduced significantly in the next one to two decades.Legates, however, was a lead author of a Heartland-funded, non-peer-reviewed rebuttal to the IPCC, called, \u201cClimate Change Reconsidered\" which Heartland published most recently in 2018. That report extolled the virtues of fossil fuels, stating: \u201cThe analysis conducted here for the first time finds nearly all the impacts of fossil fuel use on human well-being are net positive (benefits minus costs), near zero (no net benefit or cost), or are simply unknown.\u201dAdvertisementLegates\u2019s arrival at NOAA comes a year after the agency\u2019s scientific independence took a hit when the agency criticized its own forecasters\u2019 accurate forecast for Hurricane Dorian to satisfy White House concerns that its communications were making the president look bad for having claimed, erroneously, that the storm would threaten Alabama.Story continues below advertisementA recent Commerce Department Inspector General report faulted Commerce Department and NOAA leadership for their roles in that matter.Investigation rebukes Commerce Department for siding with Trump over forecasters during Hurricane DorianWatchdogs such as Gretchen Goldman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a research and advocacy group, said they fear that Legates\u2019s appointment signals a new level of interference in the agency\u2019s scientific work.\u201cThis is a disappointing move. It is a slap in the face to NOAA scientists who work daily to conduct and communicate climate science to the public and decision makers,\u201d Goldman said in an email. \u201cUntil now, NOAA has largely evaded the kind of anti-science political appointees that have devastated the EPA and Interior. With Dr. Legates we risk seeing the same kind of politicization of science and corruption of ethics. At the same time, NOAA has a strong culture of scientific integrity; Dr Legates must be ready to uphold it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe NOAA official said the agency has a tradition of scientific independence. They said the career science staff at NOAA is culturally and procedurally resistant to politically-based directives. \u201cOur practice has been to rebut or resist any policy-based intrusions into our scientific work,\u201d the official said.NOAA has a scientific integrity policy that is meant to prevent politically-based interests from altering agency research conclusions and communications in press releases and other materials.Jane Lubchenco, a marine scientist at Oregon State University who served as President Barack Obama\u2019s NOAA administrator during his first term, said Legates is far outside the scientific mainstream and could harm the agency\u2019s work.\u201cThe juxtaposition of the apocalyptic wildfires and the announcement of David Legates\u2019 appointment is mind-boggling,\u201d she said in an email.Advertisement\"Just at the time when we need continued truth from the nation\u2019s lead climate agency, a climate denier is hired. This is a travesty. Even during this administration, NOAA has continued to provide accurate climate information, data, and products to help citizens, decision and policy makers know what is happening and evaluate options for action,\u201d Lubchenco said.\u201cLegates would be in a position to squelch the free flow of accurate scientific information to the public, to distort or manipulate scientific findings, curtail monitoring and research, and create an overall chilling atmosphere for the high-quality science and scientists that the nation needs. It seems clear that NOAA\u2019s truth and information were a threat to this administration. If this appointment goes ahead, the nation and the world will lose.\u201dOn Monday, the American Geophysical Union, which is the world\u2019s largest scientific society representing Earth and space sciences, publicly urged that Legates\u2019 appointment be rescinded. \u201cWith climate change producing raging wildfires in the western United States and devastating hurricanes in the Atlantic, our nation \u2013 and the world \u2013 cannot afford to have our federal government undermining the important work of climate scientists,\u201d wrote Randy Fiser, the group\u2019s executive director and CEO. NOAA is appointing Legates to a top position, raising concerns about his influence on the agency's climate science work. NOAA taps David Legates, professor who questions the seriousness and severity of global warming, for top role",
        "author": "Andrew Freedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The concept of a thousand-year rainstorm is legitimate but limited. Here\u2019s what you should understand about it. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1098",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/05/29/the-concept-of-a-thousand-year-rainstorm-is-legitimate-but-limited-heres-what-you-should-understand-about-it/",
        "text": "For the second time in two years, Ellicott City drowned in a\u00a0 \u201cthousand-year\u201d rainstorm Sunday. The concept of a thousand-year rain event, while intended to place the rarity of an extreme event into perspective, is controversial.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe headline of Capital Weather Gang\u2019s\u00a0detailed explanation\u00a0of Sunday\u2019s flood, \u201cThe second 1,000-year rainstorm in two years engulfed Ellicott City,\u201d by Jeff Halverson, drew swift criticism. Article\u2019s headline is a clear cut case of statistical illiteracy, complained Tee Queue, a Facebook reader.But hydrologists, geologists and meteorologists have applied the concept for decades. That said, it is often misunderstood.\u00a0\u201cFrom a practical standpoint, the concept can be misleading without a proper understanding of how such a number is derived,\u201d said Halverson, who is also a professor of meteorology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA 1,000-year rain event, as its name\u00a0implies, is exceptionally rare.\u00a0It signifies just a 0.1 percent chance of such an event happening in any given year.\u00a0\u201cOr, a better way to think about it is that 99.9 percent of the time, such an event will never happen,\u201d explained Shane Hubbard, a meteorological researcher at University of Wisconsin\u2019s Space Science and Engineering Center.But people often fail to appreciate that when scientists declare that a storm is a 1,000-year, 500-year or 100-year event, it does not mean this extreme rainfall will necessarily happen that infrequently. These return intervals just express probabilities, which lead some to underestimate the risks they signify.\u201cThe fact is, the math behind these numbers also tell us a 500-year event at a given place has about a 10 percent chance of happening over a 50-year period,\u201d wrote Brian Bledsoe, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Georgia in a commentary for the Capital Weather Gang.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added: \u201c[M]ost people are still surprised, if not astonished, to learn that the 100-year flood at a given location has more than a 1 in 4 chance of occurring within the term of a 30-year mortgage. For most of us, this 26 percent chance our home will be flooded before we have a chance to pay it off is troubling if not unacceptable.\u201dThese metrics are also limited based on the assumptions on which they\u2019re calculated.For one, rainfall and flood data generally go back only 100 years or so, so\u00a0scientists must extrapolate\u00a0available\u00a0data back in time to determine what 500-year and 1,000-year events actually represent.Furthermore, the climate is changing, and precipitation events have become more intense in recent decades, so what constitutes different return frequencies (100-year, 500-year, 1,000-year and so forth) is probably changing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClimate change studies have found that what\u2019s considered a 500-year rainstorm today may become much more frequent in coming decades.Hurricane Harvey was a 1,000-year rainstorm unprecedented in scaleAn additional complication is that a 1,000-year rainstorm is not the same thing as a 1,000-year flood, and the two are sometimes used interchangeably. Whereas the rarity of a rain event can be objectively analyzed based on how much water falls from the sky, the frequency of flood events can be a moving target\u00a0because of land-use decisions\u00a0that make a particular location more or less vulnerable.Although rainfall of six inches in three hours has a probability of occurrence of less than or equal to one in 1,000 in Ellicott City according to the National Weather Service, the town has flooded 15 times since 1768 indicating the flood return interval is much higher.Story continues below advertisementHalverson even wonders whether\u00a0six inches of rain in three hours in Ellicott City is truly as rare as the Weather Service\u2019s statistics suggest. \u201cThere were two of these 1,000-year events in two years,\u201d Halverson said. \u201cThat is not distorting the truth. But does the statistic anymore hold water?\u201dAdvertisementDespite their shortcomings, the University of Wisconsin\u2019s Hubbard,\u00a0who analyzes geographic information to help decision-makers plan for floods, stands by the use of these return interval metrics. \u201cFor a community, they help put these events into perspective and understand the impact,\u201d he said.He added that they have \u201ctremendous\u201d value for flood planning and designing infrastructure to be able to withstand events up to a certain intensity. \u201cDecision-makers\u00a0have to be able to pick a number and say this is the number we need to be prepared for,\u201d he said. While intended to place the rarity of an extreme event into perspective, the concept is controversial. The concept of a thousand-year rainstorm is legitimate but limited. Here\u2019s what you should understand about it.",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "A stunning solar eclipse visits the moon Wednesday during the lunar eclipse on Earth (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1099",
        "date": "2018-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/01/30/a-stunning-solar-eclipse-visits-the-moon-wednesday-during-the-lunar-eclipse-on-earth/",
        "text": "Early Wednesday morning, Americans west of the Mississippi River can watch the moon turn blood red, when it plunges through Earth\u2019s shadow in a lunar eclipse.But if you could somehow hitch a ride to the moon, you would witness a magical celestial show seen only by astronauts:\u00a0a spectacular total solar eclipse\u00a0more than an hour long. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA solar eclipse of such duration is more than 20 times longer than the amazing total solar eclipses witnessed by millions of Americans in August. It lasted two\u00a0minutes and\u00a041\u00a0seconds at the most. (The longest a solar eclipse can ever last on Earth is seven minutes and 29 seconds.)Best images of the total solar eclipseA solar eclipse seen from the moon would not only last much longer than the Earth version, but it would also take on a unique appearance as Earth blocks the sun. (During a solar eclipse seen from Earth, the moon blocks the sun.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWatching a solar eclipse from the moon, the disk of the Earth would appear\u00a0over three times larger than the sun. (During an earthen solar eclipse, the moon and sun are roughly the same size. That\u2019s why they produce such an exquisite site during their heavenly flirtations up above.)On the moon, as the solar eclipse progressed, the bright side of the moon would gradually darken as the earth interrupts the flow of sunlight. Shadows would become sharper, and the color of the light would change. The ordinarily bland sunlight would transition to a bronze tinge that would wash over everything.Then, as Earth wedges into more and more of the sun, the light streaming down to the moon would shrink into a bead \u2014 the same \u201cBailey\u2019s Bead\u201d phenomenon that we saw during the Great American Eclipse. But that\u2019s when things become markedly different.Next, a red ring would form around Earth, which would otherwise appear as an inky-black sphere across the dark vastness of space. It would be much brighter on one side of the outlined earth. This \u201cring of fire\u201d would develop as the last rays of sunlight streamed through the earth\u2019s atmosphere tangentially to the surface, filtering out all but the red wavelengths. It\u2019s the same reason sunsets look red from the ground.This razor-thin crimson ring would be an \u201cincredible sight,\u201d said Karen Runyon, a science teacher in Massachusetts. Runyon is passionate about everything science and shares this love of learning in the classroom. Of all that the field encompasses, space science is her favorite.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhen I stare in wonder at the simplicity of a lunar eclipse,\u201d she said, \u201cI often think about the view from the moon. Imagine seeing every sunrise and sunset on Earth all at once against a starry backdrop, the moon bathed in a dusky glow. It would be simply astonishing!\u201dThe elusive solar corona, too, would emerge. But because Earth would cover more of the space surrounding the sun, lunar residents wouldn\u2019t be able to see the chromosphere \u2014 the fiery region of high-energy flares ejecting from the sun\u2019s surface. Likewise, \u201ccoronal loops\u201d of plasma that snake around magnetic field lines close to the solar surface would be out of view, the inner corona obscured as well.But Earth wouldn\u2019t hide everything. Depending on the shape of the corona, long silky prominences would shimmer well beyond the void cut out by Earth. These icy-white tendrils would stretch out for millions of miles, like hair radiating from Earth. While some of the coronal structure fades into the twilight sky during solar eclipses on Earth, it would blaze against a pitch-black background in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMoreover, the dark side of Earth facing the moon wouldn\u2019t be completely dark. From the moon, you\u00a0would be able to see the nighttime lights of distant cities a quarter million miles away. Likewise, the corona\u2019s color would change \u2014 whitest toward the edges, then blue, and finally a peachy orange toward the center. And this wouldn\u2019t be a fleeting event as on Earth; it would last more than an hour!In addition to this, Earth would seem to \u201cglow\u201d red from light scattered through and around the atmosphere. This is known as \u201cearthshine.\u201d It\u2019s the reason we can sometimes see the dark side of the moon from Earth, even though the moon produces no natural light of its own.What does a lunar eclipse look like from the moon? It's a solar eclipse... and then some! pic.twitter.com/SnnAhIU5TY\u2014 Matthew Cappucci (@MatthewCappucci) January 29, 2018\n\nAllyson Bieryla is an astrophysicist at Harvard University; she witnessed her first solar eclipse in the summer, and in her words, it was \u201cmind-blowing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was such a breathtaking sight that I now want to become an eclipse chaser,\u201d she said. \u201cI can only imagine that seeing a solar eclipse from the moon must be an incredibly humbling experience.\u201dMany who witnessed the solar eclipse from Earth in August reported feeling significantly more grounded after. It\u2019s a transformative and deeply spiritual experience for many as they stare up and marvel at the grandeur of the universe.\u201cCosmic events such as an eclipse are so surreal that they force us to stop and remember that we are all part of something much bigger,\u201d Bieryla said. \u201cStanding on the moon this Wednesday watching as our distant home passes in front of the sun is not something that I imagine would leave a person underwhelmed.\u201dFor anyone who successfully makes it to the moon Wednesday morning, please send pictures. Hitch a ride to the moon, and you'll witness a magical celestial show seen only by astronauts. A stunning solar eclipse visits the moon Wednesday during the lunar eclipse on Earth",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Harvey is a 1,000-year flood event unprecedented in scale (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1100",
        "date": "2017-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/08/31/harvey-is-a-1000-year-flood-event-unprecedented-in-scale/",
        "text": "As Harvey\u2019s rains unfolded, the intensity and scope of the disaster were so enormous that weather forecasters, first responders, the victims, everyone really, couldn\u2019t believe their eyes. Now the data are bearing out what everyone suspected: This flood event is on an entirely different scale than what we\u2019ve seen before in the United States. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA new analysis from the University of Wisconsin\u2019s Space Science and Engineering Center has determined that Harvey is a 1-in-1,000-year flood event\u00a0that has overwhelmed an enormous section of\u00a0 Southeast Texas equivalent in size to New Jersey.There is nothing in the historical record that rivals this, according to Shane Hubbard, the Wisconsin researcher who made and mapped this calculation. \u201cIn looking at many of these events [in the United States], I\u2019ve never seen anything of this magnitude or size,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is something that hasn\u2019t happened in our modern era of observations.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHubbard made additional calculations that accentuate\u00a0the massive scale of\u00a0the disaster:At least 20 inches of rain fell over an area (nearly 29,000 square miles) larger than 10 states, including West Virginia and Maryland (by a factor of more than two).At least 30 inches of rain fell over an area (more than 11,000 square miles) equivalent to Maryland\u2019s size.A 1,000-year flood event, as its name\u00a0implies, is exceptionally rare.\u00a0It signifies just a 0.1 percent chance of such an event happening in any given year.\u00a0\u201cOr, a better way to think about it is that 99.9 percent of the time, such an event will never happen,\u201d Hubbard said.Apart from Harvey, there\u2019s simply no record of a 1,000-year event occupying\u00a0so much real estate.Hurricane Harvey is the most extreme rain event in Texas history. But the city of Houston has some unique geographic and design challenges that have contributed to the flooding disaster. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)While no one questions the exceptional nature of Harvey\u2019s rainfall, the concept of a 1,000-year flood event has been criticized by some academics and flood planners. For one, rainfall and flood data generally go back only 100 years or so, so statistical tricks must be applied to determine what 500-year and 1,000-year events actually represent. Furthermore, the climate is changing and precipitation events have become more intense in recent decades, so what constitutes different return frequencies (100-year, 500-year, 1,000-year and so forth) is probably changing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClimate change studies have found\u00a0that what\u2019s considered a 500-year flood today may become much more frequent in coming decades.But Hubbard,\u00a0who analyzes geographic information to help decision-makers plan for floods, stands by the use of these return interval metrics despite their shortcomings. \u201cFor a community, they help put these events into perspective and understand the impact of a flood,\u201d he said.He added that they have \u201ctremendous\u201d value for flood planning and designing infrastructure to be able to withstand events up to a certain intensity. \u201cDecision-makers\u00a0have to be able to pick a number and say this is the number we need to be prepared for,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we debate and belabor the accuracy of these estimates, the community will not have a value to plan for.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHubbard agrees that the climate is changing and precipitation is becoming more intense in some areas, but he said it would be complicated to adapt the flood return frequencies. \u201cThe challenge is trying to separate when you have these 500-year events happening all the time, what part is a changing climate, what part is changes in urbanization and agriculture and what part is the lack of understanding of what\u2019s happened in the past,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn any event, Harvey puts an exclamation mark on the\u00a0pattern of disastrous rain events in recent years and may be a harbinger of more such events in the coming decades.\u201cExpect #HarveyFlood record will be broken in 5, 15, 25 years from now \u2014 sooner rather than later,\u201d tweeted David Titley, professor of meteorology at Penn State.Read moreHarvey has unloaded 24.5 trillion gallons of water on Texas and LouisianaHarvey marks the most extreme rain event in U.S. historyHouston is experiencing its third \u2018500-year\u2019 flood in 3 years. How is that possible? An area of Texas the size of New Jersey experienced a 1,000-year flood. Harvey is a 1,000-year flood event unprecedented in scale",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | After 9/11, weather forecasting played a pivotal role in Afghanistan military operations (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1101",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/09/10/weather-operations-afghanistan-post-911/",
        "text": "The author is an active duty Air Force officer, who served four tours in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2011. He holds a bachelor\u2019s degree in atmospheric sciences from the University of North Dakota.Not long after southerly winds moved smoke from the destroyed World Trade Center Towers, three young highly specialized Air Force meteorologists were directed to plan a mission to collect atmospheric data in support of the first U.S. raid into Afghanistan. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn October 2001, the trio began their reconnaissance from a secret vantage point in the remote mountains of South Asia. They collected the data and dispatched a transmission via secure text to the task force commander.Story continues below advertisementIn response, the commanding general launched the first operation of the war, and leveraged the first of what would become tens of thousands of weather forecasts in support of operations to topple the Taliban, rout al-Qaeda, kill Osama bin Laden, cultivate an Afghan national security force, establish and protect an infant democracy and repel the Islamic State. In recent weeks, forecasts also supported the withdrawal from Afghanistan, including of all forces and diplomats, and ultimately the last U.S. soldier.AdvertisementWhen weather insights were properly integrated from the onset, missions could be executed with tremendous precision. But not every mission could wait for the perfect conditions. Countless missions were launched based on real-time intelligence with only very brief windows of opportunity.The commanders relied on weather forecasters to provide the best-available information on the skies and the seas, taking into account all air and ground components, originations, routes and return times. The goal? To provide the greatest possible advantage over the enemy.Story continues below advertisementEach day provided its own set of forecast challenges. Early on, the absence of real-time weather observations and credible computer models made prediction difficult.Enterprising young officers dispatched remote weather sensors from low-flying helicopters, transmitting their observations via satellite communication. But sustaining the stream of observations was hard. There could never be enough sensors to get a perfect picture of weather changes from valley to valley.AdvertisementForecast uncertainty in Afghanistan was primarily tied to its complicated terrain. The Hindu Kush mountain range fans out from the northeast of the country, ridges and valleys running in multiple directions. The fault lines running east-west created a ridgeline that often locks in stratus clouds and fog sweeping down from Central Asia. South of the ridgeline, the city of Herat would be sunny and hot. North of the ridge, the city of Bala Murghab would be gray and chilly with little visibility for aircraft takeoffs and landings.Story continues below advertisementMountains would capture cloud moisture from passing storm systems; mornings would look crystal clear, and by noon the sun-warmed peaks would be socked in with clouds obscuring helicopter transit routes. The ascending elevation and narrowing channels on the highway from Kandahar to Qalat would create tens of meandering dust devils and sand-sky brownouts in the summer but induce whiteout blizzards come winter. Ghazni and Wardak provinces could be covered in feet of snow overnight.The storms they weathered: Memorial Day reflections on service and sacrificeIn addition to their forecasting responsibilities, it was common for staff meteorologists to fulfill additional roles, including guard duty, assisting medical teams caring for the wounded or providing humanitarian support to the Afghan families near the base. Most deployed meteorologists experienced inbound rockets and mortar fire.AdvertisementOne forward-deployed weather observer reported a temperature of 136 degrees during a firefight while on patrol, the result of both hot weather and heat from rifle barrels amid the fighting. Such observations were critical to casualty and medical evacuation operations. As weather differed from one valley to the next, such \u201cground truth\u201d assisted planning for flight routes and travel times.Story continues below advertisementA soldier once recalled awaiting medevac and watched a helicopter \u201cfind the one gap between the storms our weather guy said would be there.\u201dOne heroic Air Force weather officer was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for gallantry during a \u201cgreen on blue\u201d active shooter incident. Two specialized weather observers received Purple Hearts for wounds sustained repelling attacks from insurgents. One weather observer was awarded a Bronze Star with Valor for leading a light infantry unit to safety following an intense firefight.How the Challenger space shuttle disaster set one meteorologist on a unique pathThe diversity of weather forecasters and observers who served in Afghanistan and supported operations was vibrant. And many are likely to ponder which forecasts they got right, and which ones they missed, reflecting on predictions that aided mission accomplishment and how they felt when weather put their comrades in harm\u2019s way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany may remember just how much the fighting seasons were dependent on the weather; the dust hanging in the sky for weeks over Kandahar; the full moon illuminating the Panjshir Valley, and oppressive humidity embracing Asadabad, Jalalabad and Torkham Valley.Some may smile remembering the millions of moths and bugs attracted to runway lights and how they would vanish once the winds rose above 18 knots. One meteorologist recalls a sudden cloudburst that coincided with the celebrations of Eid al-Fitr, allowing people to use a rising Pech River to deliver ample fresh firewood to joy-filled families in the adjoining valleys.Many still serving may quietly wonder if they\u2019ll ever have to forecast the weather in Afghanistan again.The views expressed are the author\u2019s own and not necessarily those of the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense. Tens of thousands of forecasts helped guide military operations, from routing al-Qaeda to eliminating Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, weather forecasting played a pivotal role in Afghanistan military operations",
        "author": "Jonathan D. Sawtelle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump taps AccuWeather CEO to head NOAA, breaking with precedent of nominating scientists (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1102",
        "date": "2017-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/10/12/trump-taps-barry-myers-accuweather-ceo-to-head-noaa-choice-seen-as-controversial/",
        "text": "(This story has been updated.)Barry Myers, the chief executive of the private weather forecasting company AccuWeather, is President Trump\u2019s pick to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe appointment of Myers, a businessman and lawyer, breaks from the recent precedent\u00a0of scientists\u00a0leading the\u00a0agency tasked with a large, complex and technically demanding portfolio. Every past NOAA administrator but one, attorney Richard Frank who served from 1977-1981, held science degrees. The agency oversees the National Weather Service, conducts and funds weather and climate research, and operates a constellation of weather satellites as well as a climate data center. It\u00a0also has critical responsibilities in monitoring and protecting the nation\u2019s coasts, oceans and fisheries.Story continues below advertisementMyers\u2019s supporters say he brings valuable\u00a0experience from the private sector that will help NOAA advance its capabilities.Advertisement\u201c[I]n an Administration that places high value on business acumen, Barry brings a strong track record in growing one of the most successful companies in the weather industry,\u201d said Ray Ban, co-chair of the Weather Coalition, an advocacy group for strengthening America\u2019s weather industry across sectors.Vice Adm. Conrad Lautenbacher, NOAA administrator under George W. Bush, said Myers is an \u201cideal fit\u201d for the position. \u201cBarry brings with him an outstanding record as a leader and manager as well as many years of experience in all aspects of meteorology,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementBut others are concerned about his potential conflicts of interest and lack of science background.As NOAA administrator, Myers would be in charge of the Weather Service whose data are heavily\u00a0used by his family business, based in State College, Pa.AdvertisementAccuWeather has, in the past, supported measures to limit the extent to which the Weather Service can release information to the public, so that private companies could generate their own value-added products using this same information. In 2005, for example, Myers and his brother Joel gave money to then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who introduced legislation aimed at curtailing government competition with private weather services.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBarry Myers defines \u2018conflict of interest,'\u201d said Ciaran Clayton, who was communications director at NOAA in the Obama administration. \u201cHe actively lobbied to privatize the National Weather Service, which works day in and day out to protect the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans, to benefit his own company\u2019s bottom line.\u201dMyers\u2019s appointment is strongly opposed by the labor union for the National Weather Service, the NWS Employees Organization, for this same reason. \u201cAs NOAA administrator, he would be in a position to fundamentally alter the nature of weather services that NOAA provides the nation, to the benefit of his family-owned business,\u201d said Richard Hirn, a spokesperson for the union.AdvertisementSen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) called Myers a \u201cquestionable choice\u201d to lead NOAA. \u201cMr. Myers will have to work very hard to persuade me that he will run NOAA for the public good,\u201d Schatz said. \u201c[H]e will also need to explain why his service as NOAA Administrator will not violate conflict of interest rules and regulations.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) expressed a similar sentiment. \u201cWe can\u2019t afford to have someone in this position that might be tempted to feather their own nest by privatizing the National Weather Service,\u201d he said.In January, when he was first rumored to be a candidate for administrator, Myers\u00a0expressed strong support for\u00a0the Weather Service and its mission. He has a long history of working with the Weather Service, having advised five directors, according to his biography, and won an award from the American Meteorological Society\u00a0for \u201cfostering strong cooperation between private sector and government weather services\u201d in 2014.AdvertisementHis supporters believe he will be able to apply his business savvy to help NOAA\u00a0better leverage assets in the commercial sector.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMyers will bring that Big Data acumen to NOAA and likely accelerate a process that has slowly been underway: more private-sector collaboration with satellite data, weather models and other information services,\u201d said Ryan Maue, a weather model product developer for Weather.us, in an interview with the\u00a0Associated Press.Richard Spinrad, NOAA\u2019s chief scientist in the Obama administration, expressed some reservations about Myers\u2019s lack of science background but said\u00a0his business background \u201ccould serve him well\u201d since NOAA is housed in the Department of Commerce. Spinrad\u00a0said Myers can position himself to succeed if he is able\u00a0\u201cto bolster his leadership team with scientifically competent, and technically experienced experts.\u201dAdvertisementWhile very familiar with challenges facing the weather industry, Myers lack of experience managing ocean issues has emerged as a particular concern. \u201cIf confirmed, it will be [Myers\u2019] duty to champion all facets of NOAA from the deep sea to outer space. Myers has had nearly forty years in the private weather industry but the stakes at NOAA are different,\u201d said Janis Searles Jones, CEO of the Ocean Conservancy.Story continues below advertisementPerhaps allaying such concerns, some scientific leadership is already in place to help Myers navigate challenging oceanic and atmospheric issues. In recent weeks, Trump announced selections for two deputies to support the NOAA administrator: former Navy oceanographer Rear. Adm. Timothy Gallaudet and Neil Jacobs, chief atmospheric scientist at Panasonic Avionics Corporation.Gallaudet\u2019s confirmation sailed through the Senate and reactions to his appointment have been glowing, including from officials of the previous administration.Advertisement\u201c[Gallaudet] has a proven track record of outstanding service, and is a terrific nominee,\u201d said Jane Lubchenco, who headed NOAA during President Barack Obama\u2019s first term, in an email.Story continues below advertisementNews releases from the Consortium for Ocean Leadership and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of academic institutions, focused on scientific research, also lauded Gallaudet\u2019s expertise and record of service.\u201cMr. Myers\u2019 knowledge of the weather and climate enterprise will be complemented by Admiral Gallaudet\u2019s extensive scientific and operational expertise in oceanography and meteorology,\u201d said Rear. Adm. (Ret.) Jonathan White, president of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership.Jacobs, the second deputy, is best known for developing a weather forecast model at Panasonic that has, at times, outperformed the National Weather Service\u2019s main model.The best forecasts for Hurricane Irma came from a computer model few people know aboutJacobs could help Myers in improving NOAA\u2019s\u00a0weather forecast modeling, integrating private sector knowledge and methods.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFrom my years of working with Barry, I know he appreciates the importance of re-establishing U.S. preeminence in weather prediction,\u201d said Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Busalacchi has supported Myers ever since he emerged as the front-runner for the NOAA job in May.Even with the prospect of Myers advancing NOAA\u2019s technology, some are still uncomfortable with a businessman running an agency whose mission is public service-focused.\u201cThe tendency to place corporate leaders in charge of public agencies is ill-advised because the measure of success do not translate well from private organizations to public institutions,\u201d said Susan Jasko, an expert in\u00a0communication theory\u00a0specializing in weather at California University of Pennsylvania.Andrew Rosenberg of the Union of Concerned Scientists and former NOAA scientist wrote in a blog post: \u201cSome say that bringing a business approach to government is essential. I am not one of them.\u201dAdvertisementLubchenco put the task in front of Myers this way: \u201cThe new NOAA administrator must be a strong champion for and steward of all of NOAA \u2014 its integrated mission of science, services, and stewardship. This means nurturing its research, climate, weather, ships and planes, satellites, ocean and coasts, fisheries, sanctuaries, trust resources, and other units. If some of these units wither, the ability of the others to function well is compromised. Strong science underpins both the service and the stewardship functions.\u201dOne of the big unknowns about Myers is his position on climate change. He has made no known public statements on the politically charged issue.AccuWeather\u2019s stated position on climate change, while not inconsistent with existing scientific assessments, is vague. \u201cGlobal climate change is a matter of intense concern and public importance,\u201d it begins. \u201cThere can be little doubt that human beings influence the world\u2019s climate. At the same time, our knowledge of the extent, progress, mechanisms and results of global climate change is still incomplete.\u201dMarshall Shepherd, a past president of the American Meteorological Society, said he is willing to give Myers \u201cthe benefit of the doubt\u201d if he is \u201ca stronger leader on climate change and an advocate for the National Weather Service.\u201dThe jury is out. Some are concerned about his potential conflicts of interest and lack of science background. Trump taps AccuWeather CEO to head NOAA, breaking with precedent of nominating scientists",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 10 most incredible photos from a record-breaking year (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1103",
        "date": "2017-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/12/27/the-10-most-incredible-photos-from-an-astounding-year-in-weather/",
        "text": "2017 was an incredible, devastating year in weather \u2014 and now, the second-warmest year on record across the globed, according to NASA. From multiple major hurricanes to an unparalleled wildfire season, the final toll will be thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBetween these catastrophes, though, were a few glimmers of light in the form of a stunning wildflower super bloom and a solar eclipse for the ages. Here are the 10 most incredible weather photos of 2017.Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto RicoNo storm in 2017 was as devastating as Hurricane Maria was to Puerto Rico. More than three months later, more than half the island\u2019s 3.3 million population is still without power, on which the government blames Puerto Rico\u2019s rough terrain.Story continues below advertisementAlthough the official death toll\u00a0has remained relatively low, a recent investigation by the New York Times found that the number of hurricane-related deaths probably\u00a0exceeds 1,000. The governor of Puerto Rico ordered a recount of the death toll in mid-December.AdvertisementHurricane Maria storiesTrapped in the mountains, Puerto Ricans don\u2019t see helpFEMA says most of Puerto Rico has potable water. That can\u2019t be true.Puerto Rico Governor orders death toll recountTotal solar eclipseAs veteran meteorologist Bob Ryan said, watching a total solar eclipse is \u201cwitnessing the indescribable.\u201d And, at least according to a CNN poll before the event, half of the U.S. population watched it, which would make it the most-viewed eclipse in history. The path was what made this eclipse so special \u2014 across the entire Lower 48 from Oregon to South Carolina.Solar eclipse coverageIs the total solar eclipse worth all the hype?Story continues below advertisementBest images of the total solar eclipseWhat the eclipse looked like across the countryOroville Dam disaster\nWater pours over the damaged Oroville spillway on Feb. 15. (Dale Kolke/California Department of Water Resources)\nAfter an exceptionally wet winter in Northern California, the Lake Oroville dam\u2019s spillway crumbled during powerful storms in February. The spillway regulates the water flow out of the dam, and its damage placed hundreds of thousands at risk downstream. About 188,000 people were evacuated\u00a0as a result of\u00a0the mishap, but ultimately no homes or people were harmed.\nIn 2005, when the dam was up for relicensing, environmental groups warned that the spillway was not strong enough to control such a large flow.\u00a0The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a new license despite the petitions.\nThe state is now racing to repair the dam in time for the winter rain and spring runoff.\n\nRelated:\nThe government was warned the Oroville dam spillway wasn\u2019t safe. It didn\u2019t listen.\nThe Oroville dam spillway failed miserably, so the government is blowing it up\nThree hurricanes in the AtlanticIt was a record-book hurricane season in 2017. Not only was it one of the most active, but also it was the most expensive season in U.S. history. Although final costs may not be known for years, estimates suggest the tab will run beyond $200 billion.2017 hurricane season coverageHarvey. Irma. Maria. Why was this hurricane season so bad?AdvertisementThe hurricane season from hell is finally overThe National Hurricane Center issued its best forecasts this yearCalifornia super bloomA wildflower super bloom took over the hillsides in California in the spring after nearly 10 inches of\u00a0much-needed winter rain. For four\u00a0years, the state had struggled with a serious drought that drained reservoirs and prompted water bans. But\u00a0last\u00a0year\u2019s El Ni\u00f1o-like\u00a0conditions brought the rain and the wildflowers took a giant gulp.More on the superbloom:These flowers have been dormant for years, now they blanket California\u2019s hillsidesStory continues below advertisementCalifornia\u2019s wildflower super bloom is so intense you can see it from spaceCrazy snow in\u00a0the Sierra NevadaThere was more rain and snowfall in California during the 2016-2017 water year than any other season on record. The California-Nevada River Forecast Center uses an eight-station index in the northern\u00a0Sierras to quantify the region\u2019s precipitation. As of Feb. 12,\u00a0those eight station had received 226 percent of normal.AdvertisementWhen surveyors went out to measure how much had accumulated through the winter, they found 751 inches of snow just north of Lake Tahoe \u2014 more than 62 feet.Squaw Valley Ski Resort\u00a0got more than 47 feet of snow last winter, including a 45-year record of 282 inches in January. It was enough that the ski area stayed open through July 4, which is just the fourth time it\u00a0has been able to do that.Sierra snow stories:500 inches and counting: Snow clobbered ski resorts in 2017Story continues below advertisementIt snowed 5.7 trillion gallons of water in January aloneNorthern California breaks record for wettest winterHarvey floodingHurricane Harvey, which slammed into Texas in late August,\u00a0was more destructive in its flooding than any of its other components. About 33 trillion gallons of water fell from the storm, most of which landed in a swath from Houston to Southwest Louisiana. Most estimates place Harvey ahead of Hurricane Katrina in\u00a0damages\u00a0\u2014 about $180 billion.Stories from Hurricane HarveyThe wettest storm in U.S. historyAdvertisementHarvey unloaded 33 trillion gallons of water over Southeast Texas and Southwest LouisianaCalifornia wildfiresIt was a deadly, destructive year for wildfires in California. Thousands of families were evacuated from their homes, and many of those had nothing to come back to but ash and rubble. Dozens died in a blaze that took off overnight in the wine country north of San Francisco.Story continues below advertisementIn December, dry Santa Ana winds stoked what would become the largest fire in California history \u2014 the Thomas Fire in Southern California. It burned nearly 300,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and spurred more than 8,000 firefighters into action at its peak. The cause of the Thomas Fire remains under investigation.More on California\u2019s terrible fire yearAt least 40 dead in Northern California wildfiresAdvertisementAfter devastating wildfires, California wine country is \u2018as beautiful as ever\u2019 \u2014 and hurting for visitorsApocalyptic images snow the devastation caused by deadly wine-country firesIrma pulls the ocean away from the shoreHurricane Irma\u2019s winds were strong enough to temporarily change the shape of the shorelines in the Bahamas and Florida. Twitter user @Kaydi_K\u00a0shared a\u00a0video during the storm\u00a0that quickly went viral. The wind on Long Island in the Bahamas was blowing from southeast to northwest. So, on the\u00a0northwest side of the island, water was getting\u00a0pulled away from the shoreline.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI am in disbelief right now\u2026\u201d she wrote. \u201cThis is Long Island, Bahamas and the ocean water is missing!!!\u201dOf course, the water returned to the Bahamas, but then the phenomenon occurred again in Tampa Bay a couple of days later as Irma approached the west coast of Florida.RelatedHurricane Irma is so strong it\u2019s\u00a0pulling the water away from shorelinesAdvertisementTampa Bay appears dry as Hurricane Irma pulls water out to sea58 inches in 48 hoursTwo days of lake-effect snow buried Erie, Pa., the state\u2019s fourth largest city, under about five feet of snow on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The storm buried local and state snowfall records, including the biggest two-day snowfall in all of Pennsylvania. smashing both local and state snowfall records while hampering holiday travel around the Great Lakes.Story continues below advertisementIt didn\u2019t stop there, though. Snow continued to fall\u00a0into the third and fourth days, pushing the month to the snowiest December on record in the city.Erie officials declared a state of emergency pleaded that people stay off the roads, including interstates 90 and 79. Emergency vehicles had a hard time getting through the snow, so they were supplied with Humvee ambulances by the National Guard.Crazy lake effect snow storiesHow this Pennsylvania city got more than 4 feet of snow in just 30 hoursWatch these adorable dogs romp in nose-high snowEditor\u2019s note: This compilation was originally published in late December. It\u2019s particularly relevant again, now that NOAA and NASA have said 2017 ranks in the top 3 warmest years on record. Time and again, research has shown that extreme weather events will increase in frequency \u2014 and perhaps magnitude \u2014 as Earth warms due to fossil fuel emissions. Last year was the second-warmest on record, globally, according to NASA. But between the catastrophes came a few glimmers of light in the form of a stunning wildflower super bloom and a solar eclipse for the ages. The 10 most incredible photos from a record-breaking year",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space geeks: Astronomy Night on the National Mall is tomorrow \u2014 and it\u2019s free (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1104",
        "date": "2017-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/05/30/space-geeks-astronomy-night-on-the-national-mall-is-this-friday-and-its-free/",
        "text": "On Friday evening, you\u2019ll have the opportunity to see a few of our neighboring planets as well as the moon and the sun\u00a0on through the lens of 20 expensive telescopes that you and I cannot afford. Fortunately, the D.C. area astronomers are willing to share, as they do every year at the annual Astronomy Night on the Mall. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe event is free Friday from 6 to 11 p.m. All you have to do is show up on the northeast grounds of the Washington Monument. You\u2019ll see a lot of telescopes with lines of people trailing behind them. Each \u2018scope is usually trained on a specific\u00a0space object \u2014 another planet, the moon, maybe a nearby comet.The event will offer\u00a0space geeks \u201chands-on activities, demonstrations, hand-outs, posters, banners, and videos; a planetarium show with a portable blow-up dome, speakers from scientific and educational organization, and a chance to mingle with astronomers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe event is organized and hosted by Hofstra University\u00a0along with volunteers from all of the big science organizations \u2014 the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the International Dark Sky Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club and the American Geophysical Union. Scientists from these groups will be on hand to\u00a0offer demonstrations and discussion.This is the\u00a0eighth annual Mall event that organizer Don Lubowich, astronomy outreach coordinator at Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y., has assembled.Rain location: School Without Walls High School, 2130 G St. NW. Professional and amateur astronomers will be there to share their telescopes. Space geeks: Astronomy Night on the National Mall is tomorrow \u2014 and it\u2019s free",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space nerds, mark your calendar \u2014 Astronomy night on the Mall is Saturday (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1105",
        "date": "2018-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/06/20/space-nerds-mark-your-calendar-astronomy-night-on-the-national-mall-is-saturday/",
        "text": "If you like parties, planets and performances, mark Saturday on your calendar. It\u2019s the annual Astronomy Festival on the National Mall in Washington, when telescopes spring up to help view nearby planets, and astronomers \u2014 professional and amateur \u2014 come out in droves to hang out, answer questions and help us appreciate the magic of space. And this year, several Smithsonian museums will be open until midnight. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe astronomical start to summer occurs at the summer solstice at 6:07 a.m. June 21, according to the Naval Observatory, and you can enjoy the planets with your naked eye on these warm nights:After the sun sets, find a very bright Venus at -4 magnitude\u00a0in the west-northwestern sky. The planet loiters in the constellation Gemini, near the \u201ctwin stars\u201d Pollux and Castor until about 11 p.m., according to the observatory.The waxing gibbous moon dances with the large, gaseous Jupiter on the evening of June 23 in the southeast. Jupiter is a bright -2.4 magnitude.Saturn is days away from reaching opposition, which means that this ringed planet is opposite to the sun, from our earthly perspective. Saturn becomes \u201cfull\u201d on June 27, according to the observatory. This bright, zero magnitude planet rises now in the\u00a0eastern sky about 8:30 p.m.Mars rises minutes after 11 p.m. in the eastern heavens in the constellation Capricornus now. Find the reddish planet at -1.8 magnitude, with strong views of it before dawn.Saturday\u2019s Astronomy Festival on the National Mall starts summer with several kinds of telescopes \u2014 including those with filters for people to safely see the sun \u2014 or telescopes where you can see the moon and planets or simply listen to the universe. Organized by astronomer Donald Lubowich, coordinator of astronomy outreach at Hofstra University, Long Island, about 100 astronomy educators and enthusiasts from more than 30 science organizations near Washington will provide heavenly guided tours.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Astronomy Festival on the National Mall\u00a0will be held from 6 to 11 p.m. at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, the northwest corner of the grounds of the Washington Monument. If it rains, head to the School Without Walls High School, 2130 G St. NW, on the George Washington University campus.Aside from being the day of the festival, Saturday is not just any mow-the-lawn Saturday. It\u2019s Solstice Saturday, when all of the Smithsonian\u2019s museums will celebrate the sun\u2019s presence with myriad all-day events. Many of the Smithsonian\u2019s museums will remain open until midnight on June 23.In this coordinated effort to soak up the sun, this is the Smithsonian\u2019s first Solstice Saturday, according to Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas. The activities include talks, exhibits and tasting sun-drenched flavors.Yoko Ono\u2019s \u201cWish Tree for Washington\u201d opens at the Hirshhorn Museum\u00a0and\u00a0Sculpture Garden, and the Hirshhorn\u2019s Dolcezza Coffee & Gelato cafe features \u201cOrange Sunshine,\u201d a new gelato made from oolong tea and tangerine.The day will be filled with activities at the National Air and Space Museum and \u2014 after dark \u2014 you can gaze toward the heavens at the Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory, adjacent to the building.At the National Museum of the American Indian,\u00a0enjoy Inti Raymi, the Inca festival of the sun, which features Andean music and dance. Create a llama pendant (3 to 7 p.m.) or watercolor luminary (7 to 9 p.m.) and then at 9 p.m., groove with your glow stick at the evening dance party on the Welcome Plaza.Near the Smithsonian Castle, the Enid A. Haupt Garden will feature music Saturday, starting at 5:30 p.m.Music will flow at the National Museum of African Art\u2019s Fountain Garden.Listen to violinist Simon Shaheen and the Qantara ensemble \u2014 performing a blend of jazz, Latin and Arabian musical traditions \u2014 at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. With telescopes set up across the lawn on June 23, you'll be able to see Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Several Smithsonian museums will be open until midnight. Space nerds, mark your calendar \u2014 Astronomy night on the Mall is Saturday",
        "author": "Blaine Friedlander"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The networks all but ignored climate change last year. That\u2019s bad news for science. (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1106",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/03/30/the-networks-all-but-ignored-climate-change-last-year-thats-bad-news-for-science/",
        "text": "It\u2019s not that there isn\u2019t enough climate change news to cover. 2015 was the hottest year on record at that point, the Paris agreement was signed by dozens of nations, and California was in its worst drought in perhaps millennia. But if you get your news from the networks, there\u2019s a good chance you didn\u2019t know any of this was going on. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightStories about climate change on network news \u2014 ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox (the network, not Fox News) \u2014 dropped 66 percent, according to research by Media Matters.If you break it down into actual time spent, network news is devoting a shockingly small number of minutes per year on climate change. It\u2019s shocking because, as a recent Gallup poll shows, a majority of Americans are crossing the divide between\u00a0those concerned about climate change and those who think it\u2019s baloney.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2015, network news \u2014 Sunday shows and evening news \u2014 spent 146 minutes on the topic of climate change. In 2016, it was 50 minutes.By its own description, Media Matters is a \u201c501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.\u201d It\u2019s a\u00a0media fact-checking organization. Most fact-checkers focus on politicians. Media Matters analyzes statements and coverage of the media itself.It does this because what the media choose to cover is important. In fact, in 1927, the Federal Radio Commission (later the FCC) was created by Congress in part to ensure that radio stations (which transitioned into TV stations) were broadcasting in the public\u2019s interest, whether that be news or entertainment. At one point, there was a rule that said networks had to devote equal time to all political candidates to prevent bias.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the airwaves were \u201cderegulated\u201d in 1996 by the Telecommunications Act, Congress saw value in limiting bias on the airwaves. Now, it\u2019s up to the viewers to decide \u2014 but\u00a0they can\u2019t do that if they\u2019re not getting the information in the first place.This report is important right now, when Congress and the White House actively seek to limit the role of science in policymaking.On Wednesday, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology held a hearing to (ostensibly) debate the scientific method. It\u00a0devolved into finger-pointing, name-calling and one Republican congressman yelling at Democrats and a leading climate researcher. In one down-to-Earth moment, Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) asked the panel of scientists\u00a0what Congress could do to advance science, \u201cinstead of holding this unproductive hearing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater that afternoon, Congress voted to limit which scientific studies the Environmental Protection Agency can use to create regulations. If signed, the law would be entirely subjective \u2014\u00a0the EPA will be able to use only \u201cthe best available science.\u201dBest according to whom?In an example of how this \u201cbest science\u201d thing would work, EPA Administrator\u00a0Scott Pruitt defied his own scientists and said no thanks on\u00a0a rule that would protect children from developmental disorders.The EPA\u2019s own scientists say the chemical chlorpyrifos, which can cause memory decline in young children, is showing up in our food and water at unsafe levels. \u201cThe chemical was banned in 2000 for use in most household settings\u00a0but today is still used at about 40,000 farms on about 50 different types of crops, ranging from almonds to apples,\u201d the New York Times reported Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPruitt\u2019s response: We need to be \u201ccertain\u201d that the chemical is causing defects before we limit it in our food.If you have ever taken a fifth-grade science class, you know that there\u2019s no such thing as scientific certainty. You will never hear a scientist say she is \u201c100 percent certain\u201d about anything, because that\u2019s not the way science works. The U.S. judicial system understands this:There is no common definition across science or within disciplines as to what threshold establishes certainty. Therefore, whether couched as \u201cscientific certainty\u201d or \u201c[discipline] certainty,\u201d the term is idiosyncratic to the witness.In the case of chlorpyrifos, the expert \u201cwitness\u201d is the scientist.I\u2019m not surprised\u00a0that the networks don\u2019t want to talk about climate change \u2014 it\u2019s a hot-button political issue because politicians made it that way. As it turns out, politicians are inherently the only people who can politicize a subject.Story continues below advertisementHere\u2019s the truth, though: Despite the lack of coverage in 2016, half the country thinks climate change is caused by human activity and believe it\u2019s a problem. Less than a quarter of our population think climate change is either not happening or is no big deal.The media have a responsibility to report the facts. If scientists agree an extreme weather event was made worse by climate change, viewers need to know that, not just because it is true, but because people do think it\u2019s a problem. I don\u2019t know whom network news and Congress are serving by turning a blind eye to climate change, but according to these poll results, it\u2019s not the voters. Media coverage is critical right now as Congress and the White House actively seek to limit the role of science in policymaking. The networks all but ignored climate change last year. That\u2019s bad news for science.",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | On International Women\u2019s Day, these atmospheric scientists inspire us (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1107",
        "date": "2021-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/03/08/women-atmospheric-science/",
        "text": "On March 8, International Women\u2019s Day, people around the world celebrate and recognize women for their achievements and reflect on the courage and determination of women who advance gender equality.This day of recognition was born when Clara Zetkin, the leader of the Women\u2019s Office of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, proposed the idea at the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen in 1910. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWe have clearly come a long way since then, with women making huge strides in the global workforce.What better way to celebrate such achievement than with a roundup of some inspirational women working in climate and atmospheric sciences?Story continues below advertisementStanding on their shoulders \u2026Joanne Simpson (1923-2010)In the field of atmospheric science, no list of great scientists (of any gender) is complete without Joanne Simpson. In 1949, she became the first woman to earn a PhD in meteorology from the University of Chicago. Her research helped advance the field of tropical meteorology.From 2010: Legend of meteorology drifts offBut the path wasn\u2019t easy for a woman at that time. A faculty adviser told Simpson no woman would ever get a PhD in meteorology, and even if she did, no one would hire her. It was her interest in clouds that got her through. Carl-Gustaf Rossby, then-chair of the university\u2019s Meteorology Department, thought that clouds were not very interesting, so it was a good subject \u201cfor a little girl to study.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSimpson\u2019s research, conducted with Herbert Riehl, eventually proved that clouds are not just a result of weather, but phenomena that drive the weather and are an integral component of the atmosphere\u2019s circulation.Eunice Foote (1819-1888)If you ever wondered who discovered the greenhouse effect, you may have come across the name Joseph Fourier, who first described the process in the 1820s. But a woman helped make a critical discovery in how the greenhouse effect works.In 1856, Eunice Foote began conducting research on how gases such as water vapor and carbon dioxide affected the temperature of air exposed to sunlight. She actually figured out adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would cause the planet to warm three years before physicist John Tyndall, frequently credited for this discovery. Foote\u2019s research serves as the one of the building blocks of modern climate science.June Bacon-Bercey (1928-2019)It was 1954 when June Bacon-Bercey became UCLA\u2019s first Black woman to earn a degree in meteorology, having resisted advice to major in home economics. Like many of us, she was passionate about weather. She became chief meteorologist for a Buffalo news network.Obituary for June Bacon-Bercey, pathbreaking TV meteorologistDespite being the first woman to earn the American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval, she still had to fight the \u201cweather girl\u201d cliche. She is credited as one of the founders of the AMS Board on Women and Minorities and led many efforts to increase participation of women and minorities in science. Since her death in 2019, the AMS renamed its Award for Broadcast Meteorology the June Bacon-Bercey Award for Broadcast Meteorology.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBacon-Bercey, Foote and Simpson, among others, have not only paved the way for all women in science, but have advanced our understanding of weather and climate.Now, there are many women working to expand the field and make it more accessible. Here a few of them.Leaders of today \u2026Suzanne Van CootenSuzanne Van Cooten serves as the hydrologist-in-charge for the National Weather Service\u2019s Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center. Her extensive r\u00e9sum\u00e9 includes chief scientist of the Weather Service\u2019s National Data Buoy Center and deputy chief of the Warning Research Development Division at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. She is also a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and has published research in the Bulletin of the AMS on the underrepresentation of Indigenous scientists in science.Story continues below advertisementFadji Zaouna MainaAdvertisementIn 2020, Fadji Zaouna Maina made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Scientists list and was also named one of the 100 most influential Africans of 2020 by New African Magazine. Originally from Niger, she is now an earth scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, studying the impact of climate extremes and wildfires on water resources. She\u2019s an inspiration to all academic researchers for what she has been able to accomplish in such a short time, and her achievements have been particularly noted in her home country: Last fall, Niger\u2019s president congratulated her on being the first Nigerien scientist to work at NASA.Mika ToscaMika Tosca is a climate scientist and assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has published research on using observations to prove that smoke from fires inhibits convection and now researches how art can help improve science. Not only is her work in climate science interesting and unique, she is also a role model for young girls in the LGBT community. In 2019, she published an article in Eos on art and science, and she frequently gives talks on how her experiences as a transgender scientist at a nontraditional university are helping her bridge the divides among scientists, artists and the public.Women in STEM: Some statisticsWith all of these women paving the way, the world must now be filled with women advancing weather, water and climate science, right? Well, sort of.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile there are many women actively working to expand our knowledge of Earth and its atmosphere, a significant gender gap remains in science, technology, engineering and math fields as a whole. Men still greatly outnumber women in STEM, and the gap is not closing as fast as one would like.Women make up half of the total U.S. college-educated workforce but only 28 percent of the science and engineering workforce.Fewer than 30 percent of the world\u2019s researchers are women.In 2017, women accounted for 29 percent of physical scientists.Although women have made gains \u2014 from 8 percent of STEM workers in 1970 to 27 percent in 2019 \u2014 men still dominate the field. Men make up 52 percent of all U.S. workers but 73 percent of all STEM workers, according to data from the Census Bureau. And yes, there is still a significant gender wage gap, with women consistently earning less than men \u2014 82 cents, on average, for every dollar a man earns. The gap is larger for women of color.Women and minorities in weather and climate fields confront harassment, lack of inclusionUnfortunately, covid-19 has sent the numbers in the opposite direction. According to the Fawcett Society, the United Kingdom\u2019s leading membership charity campaigning for gender equality and women\u2019s rights, the gender gap has widened during the pandemic. The Society says women have been more likely than men to lose their jobs or be furloughed, and while both men and women have done more child care since March, the gap between the amount of time mothers and fathers spent grew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow for some irony.According to U.N. Women Australia, research shows that female-led countries are handling covid-19 more effectively than those led by men. Countries led by women reacted more quickly and decisively in the face of potential fatalities and, as a result, saw fewer overall cases and deaths. And, focusing on STEM, it has been argued, gender diversity is actually crucial to science.Despite the statistics, we continue to be inspired by the women advancing the fields of weather and climate every day. Women deserve a seat at the scientific table, and we will continue to press forward and close those gender gaps. Until then, we celebrate those women who came before us to shatter the glass ceiling, as well as the men who supported those efforts.Story continues below advertisementTo that, we say Happy International Women\u2019s Day. Want to show your support? Wear purple and #DressForSTEM on March 14-15 to support women in STEM!Becky Bolinger is the assistant state climatologist for Colorado and a research scientist at Colorado State University.Kerrin Jeromin is an American Meteorological Society-certified broadcast meteorologist with more than 12 years of forecasting experience and has covered everything from winter storms to hurricanes to natural disasters and major climate events. We celebrate leading women in meteorology and climate science for their enormous contributions and influence. On International Women\u2019s Day, these atmospheric scientists inspire us",
        "author": "Becky Bolinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Skydiving: An adrenaline-filled, immersive rush through the atmosphere (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1108",
        "date": "2021-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/08/skydiving-meteorology-airplane-science/",
        "text": "Some people are afraid to fly in airplanes. Other people jump out of them. The U.S. Parachute Association estimates some 350,000 people take life\u2019s biggest leap of faith every single year, and, as one might expect, that jump is at the mercy of the weather.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSkydiving is exactly what it sounds like \u2014 using an airplane to ascend to 12,000, 15,000 or even 18,000 feet before diving into thin air. After a free fall that could last up to two minutes, parachutes are used to slow the descent. Minutes later, a controlled glide to earth ensues. Hiking the Grand Canyon is a thrill but perilous for the unpreparedI took the plunge in June in Titusville, Fla., tumbling toward the ground in view of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. It was a mixture of adrenaline and serenity, my nerves quickly replaced by a peaceful bliss. It\u2019s the perfect sport for a meteorologist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLong before any visitors arrive or aircraft are fueled, skydive companies across the Sunshine State and beyond actively pore over plentiful weather data, taking current conditions and future forecasts into consideration as they plan the day ahead. Low-level clouds that obscure the ground are a no-go for skydiving. So are cloud ceilings below the height at which the jump is set to take place.Most jumps originate between 12,000 and 18,000 feet. Below that level, you\u2019ll have only a brief window of free fall. Higher than 18,000 feet, you\u2019d need supplemental oxygen. Eighteen thousand feet corresponds roughly to the halfway height of the lower atmosphere at the mid-latitudes, meaning the air is 50 percent thinner. At that height, aircraft would also need to pressurize their cabins, meaning opening a door midflight would be impossible.My friend Allen and I opted to jump from 15,000 feet. We were told to expect about 70 seconds of free fall. Originally, we had planned to jump from 12,000 feet but were told the 12,000-foot jumpers were flown last \u2014 and I was concerned that mid-level clouds emanating from Tropical Storm Claudette in the Gulf of Mexico would preclude our jump. (Plus, we were admittedly nervous \u2014 the sooner we jumped, the better.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTemperatures were already in the 80s upon our arrival at 8 a.m., the sunshine intense and the humidity sultry. Winds were light, gently stirring the wind sock on the adjacent air strip. Other jumpers nearby stared at the ground silently, equally apprehensive about what was ahead.By 10 a.m., we had signed all the paperwork and were handed harnesses that wrapped around our legs, torso and shoulders. Then it was time to wait. We were load 3, meaning the skydiving company\u2019s twin turboprop aircraft had to make two 30-minute flights to \u201cdrop off\u201d the 18,000-foot jumpers first.New analysis shows Oklahoma may have overtaken Florida as nation\u2019s lightning capitalThe sky overhead was a deep royal blue, but a crisp edge to the mid-level cloud deck was approaching to the west. I knew the clock was ticking.Story continues below advertisementIn Florida, the lightning capital of the United States, the weather is extra capricious \u2014 afternoons can feature a swing from sunny skies to fierce afternoon thunderstorms with torrential downpours and earth-shattering lightning displays. They form along the afternoon sea breezes, which result when drier air over the land is heated faster and rises, drawing in slightly cooler air from over the waters to replace it. The sea breeze fronts ordinarily kick in around or just after lunch.Once the sea breeze starts up, widespread convection \u2014 or the vertical transfer of heat in the atmosphere \u2014 begins. Even where clouds aren\u2019t present, pockets of rising air can induce considerable turbulence. Most skydiving facilities wrap up operations before 1 or 2 p.m., especially near the coast. And in June or July, a late-day thundershower is a good bet by suppertime.The sea breeze also factors into the wind forecast; jumpers exit the aircraft upwind of their landing target. Changing winds with height, or wind shear, make landing difficult.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen it was our turn, I said a silent prayer, smirked at Allen and hopped aboard the aircraft first. Seven first-time skydivers and their instructors managed to jam-pack the Cessna, squatting on foam benches stretching the length of the roughly 16-foot cabin. Seconds later, we were taxiing and climbing \u2014 no preflight safety talk or chatter about oxygen masks. We took off eastward into the wind, climbing quickly. I glanced at Allen and shouted \u201cI wonder when they offer the in-flight movie.\u201dHe didn\u2019t laugh.I straddled the bench in front of my instructor, who began affixing carabiners to my back. The straps around my shoulders went tight. I glanced out the window as the verdant landscape below faded into a washed-out blue, the adjacent coastline shimmering in the morning sun. The plane traced a loop back westward toward the airfield. It was time. One instructor lifted the ribbed plexiglass door.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo jumpers and their instructors went ahead of me. Then it was my turn. I squatted on the side of the plane for three or four seconds, arms crossed, before the instructor on my back launched us into thin air. I couldn\u2019t resist smiling.We accelerated quickly, but it wasn\u2019t perceptible \u2014 there was no whoosh like on a roller coaster or a jet taking off. Within seconds, we were plummeting at terminal velocity \u2014 120 mph. I felt like a human dropsonde \u2014 a device tossed out of airplanes to log weather conditions on the way down. I took note of the temperature; it felt like 52 or 53 degrees outside.Without air, we\u2019d continue accelerating at 22 mph every second until pancaking into the ground. Thankfully, Earth has an atmosphere. Terminal velocity occurs when the force imparted by air resistance, proportional to speed, exactly equals the tug of gravity, preventing further acceleration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe wind was fierce even though the air wasn\u2019t moving \u2014 we were moving through it. Imagine the sensation you get sticking your head out the window while driving on the highway, and then multiply that by five. My face was smooshed as if I were braving a Category 3 hurricane.WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE pic.twitter.com/f6T7EdqHE5\u2014 Matthew Cappucci (@MatthewCappucci) June 18, 2021\n\nBreathing was an odd experience. The air was moving so quickly into my nostrils that it felt like gushing water. Sure, maybe the air was only half as thick, but I was getting plenty of it. At that altitude, the crisp air was dry. My lips quickly became chapped.The free fall was simultaneously loud and yet deafeningly silent. There were no airplane sounds, birds or insects to hear, and nobody was talking. Instead, I heard a high-pitched whirring or hum that grew continuously louder.Story continues below advertisementI figured it was vortex shedding, or the result of little tiny invisible whirls rolling off my face and ears. That\u2019s what makes the wind whistle in power lines. The pitch got higher as we traveled faster.AdvertisementEqually impressive was the change in temperature. In dry conditions, I knew the air should warm about 27 degrees for every mile I fell as a result of ordinary atmospheric processes. Since every mile I fell only took 15 to 30 seconds, it felt like I was being thrown through three seasons in a minute or two.My meteorological daydreaming was interrupted by a sharp upward tug as my instructor deployed the parachute around 4,500 feet. The airport was in view below. I spotted a few other jumpers at the same stage.Story continues below advertisementInitially, the parachute ride was a bit choppy; we were passing through a weak interface known as the planetary boundary layer, which separates more turbulent flow near the surface from smoother flow aloft. The ride smoothed out as we descended further, my instructor steering us toward the airport. Sometimes, it\u2019s possible to surf \u201cthermals,\u201d or invisible columns of upward-moving warm air, and remain suspended or even climb.AdvertisementIn a quick three or four minutes, I was back on the ground, but my mind was still on cloud nine. I spend most of my waking hours thinking about the atmosphere, but diving through it was something different altogether.A successful skydive requires a hefty load of planning, a good forecast and someone who knows what they\u2019re doing. And if you\u2019re a meteorologist, it also provides a glimpse of the atmosphere from a view like no other. Skydiving is like an outdoor classroom for meteorology Skydiving: An adrenaline-filled, immersive rush through the atmosphere",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Ledger: European Exit costs General Motors at least $4 Billion (WSJ: Cfo Blog) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1109",
        "date": "2017-03-06",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2017/03/06/the-morning-ledger-european-exit-costs-general-motors-at-least-4-billion/?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=100",
        "text": "GM will be liable for much of Opel\u2019s pension obligations, estimated at as much as $10 billion by analysts, which had been a major sticking point during negotiations. GM said it would take an accounting charge of $4 billion to $4.5 billion in connection with the transaction. Still, the U.S. auto maker said the deal would free up about $2 billion in cash, which it plans to use for share buybacks.\nThe sale of Adam Opel AG likely eliminates a source of low-cost funding for the Detroit auto giant\u2019s car-lending business, potentially pressuring profit in lending operations the company has been trying to rebuild since bankruptcy. GM has collected nearly $2 billion from retail customer deposits since late 2015 for use in global lending. The catch: those funds were deposited in the so-called Opel Bank, an online bank that operates only for residents of Germany.\n\nCFO JOURNAL TODAY\nSnap Inc. shares may be excluded from S&P 500 and other indexes.\u00a0Investors will soon face a less exuberant side to the social-networking darling, Richard Teitelbaum writes. The company\u2019s stock is likely to be excluded from several indexes because its class-A shares carry no voting rights.\nTHE WEEK AHEAD\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, attends a hearing in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 6, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nECB meeting, China inflation, U.S. jobs.On Tuesday, the Commerce Department\u2019s monthly trade report on trade and goods in January is out. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development presents its twice yearly interim economic assessment in Paris. European Central Bank policy makers on Wednesday will gather in Frankfurt to kick off a two-day rate-setting meeting. With the economic outlook for the eurozone brightening and inflation above target, pressure is building in the bloc\u2019s strongest members for an end to the ECB\u2019s easy-money policies. At his news conference on Thursday, ECB President Mario Draghi is expected to brush off any talk of an early exit from the bank\u2019s bond-purchase program, though he might rule out further interest-rate cuts.\nBeijing on Thursday (Wednesday evening in the U.S.) will report consumer inflation data for February, and economists expect the figure will show an increase of 1.4% from a year earlier, compared with January\u2019s 2.5% acceleration. Also Thursday, Japan\u2019s Labor Ministry will release January wage data, seen by economists as a key indicator of how well Prime Minister Shinzo Abe\u2019s economic programs are working. On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department releases its February jobs report, the last major chunk of economic data ahead of the Federal Reserve\u2019s March 14-15 policy meeting.\nGeneva Motor Show overshadowed by trade questions. When auto executives make their annual pilgrimage to the Palexpo fairgrounds for the Geneva Motor Show this week, they may find it tough to stay focused on the luxury sports cars, sport-utility vehicles and new gizmos on display.\nU.K. to keep purse strings tight. U.K. treasury chief Philip Hammond signaled that he will keep a tight rein on Britain\u2019s public finances when he presents his latest tax-and-spending plans to U.K. lawmakers on Wednesday, despite better-than-expected economic growth that economists say should swell government tax revenue.\nMerkel to testify on Volkswagen emissions scandal. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a staunch defender of the country\u2019s car industry, testifies this week before a parliamentary investigation into Volkswagen AG\u2019s diesel cheating that is looking into any relationship between her lobbying and the scandal.\nBezos to unveil further plans for private space exploration. The burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com Inc. Chairman Jeff Bezos this week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives, the latest step toward its long-term goal of building rockets powerful enough to penetrate deep into the solar system, according to industry officials.\nCORPORATE NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Chief Executive of Deutsche Bank, John Cryan.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDeutsche likely to underwhelm again after rights issue. Deutsche Bank AG wants another \u20ac8 billion from long-suffering investors. The big concern will be that they are throwing more good money after bad since they put in the same amount in 2014.\nAberdeen Asset Management, Standard Life to join forces. Aberdeen Asset Management PLC and Standard Life PLC on Monday said they have agreed to the terms of an all-share merger, creating one of the U.K.\u2019s largest asset managers with a combined market value of more than \u00a311 billion ($13.5 billion). The merger could see the elimination of up to 1,000 jobs, the Times reports.\nChina\u2019s telecom operators to eliminate roaming fees. China\u2019s three state-run telecom operators said Monday they will eliminate mobile roaming fees in October as part of a government plan, which could hurt their re General Motors has agreed to sell its European car brands Opel and Vauxhall to France\u2019s Peugeot. Deutsche Bank is seeking to raise $8.5 billion through a share sale and Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life said they have agreed to the terms of an all-share merger. ",
        "author": "Rheaa Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Ledger: European Exit costs General Motors at least $4 Billion (WSJ: Cfo Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1110",
        "date": "2017-03-06",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2017/03/06/the-morning-ledger-european-exit-costs-general-motors-at-least-4-billion/?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=128",
        "text": "GM will be liable for much of Opel\u2019s pension obligations, estimated at as much as $10 billion by analysts, which had been a major sticking point during negotiations. GM said it would take an accounting charge of $4 billion to $4.5 billion in connection with the transaction. Still, the U.S. auto maker said the deal would free up about $2 billion in cash, which it plans to use for share buybacks.\n\n\n\n\nThe sale of Adam Opel AG likely eliminates a source of low-cost funding for the Detroit auto giant\u2019s car-lending business, potentially pressuring profit in lending operations the company has been trying to rebuild since bankruptcy. GM has collected nearly $2 billion from retail customer deposits since late 2015 for use in global lending. The catch: those funds were deposited in the so-called Opel Bank, an online bank that operates only for residents of Germany.\n\nCFO JOURNAL TODAY\nSnap Inc. shares may be excluded from S&P 500 and other indexes.\u00a0Investors will soon face a less exuberant side to the social-networking darling, Richard Teitelbaum writes. The company\u2019s stock is likely to be excluded from several indexes because its class-A shares carry no voting rights.\nTHE WEEK AHEAD\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, attends a hearing in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 6, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nECB meeting, China inflation, U.S. jobs.On Tuesday, the Commerce Department\u2019s monthly trade report on trade and goods in January is out. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development presents its twice yearly interim economic assessment in Paris. European Central Bank policy makers on Wednesday will gather in Frankfurt to kick off a two-day rate-setting meeting. With the economic outlook for the eurozone brightening and inflation above target, pressure is building in the bloc\u2019s strongest members for an end to the ECB\u2019s easy-money policies. At his news conference on Thursday, ECB President Mario Draghi is expected to brush off any talk of an early exit from the bank\u2019s bond-purchase program, though he might rule out further interest-rate cuts.\nBeijing on Thursday (Wednesday evening in the U.S.) will report consumer inflation data for February, and economists expect the figure will show an increase of 1.4% from a year earlier, compared with January\u2019s 2.5% acceleration. Also Thursday, Japan\u2019s Labor Ministry will release January wage data, seen by economists as a key indicator of how well Prime Minister Shinzo Abe\u2019s economic programs are working. On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department releases its February jobs report, the last major chunk of economic data ahead of the Federal Reserve\u2019s March 14-15 policy meeting.\nGeneva Motor Show overshadowed by trade questions. When auto executives make their annual pilgrimage to the Palexpo fairgrounds for the Geneva Motor Show this week, they may find it tough to stay focused on the luxury sports cars, sport-utility vehicles and new gizmos on display.\nU.K. to keep purse strings tight. U.K. treasury chief Philip Hammond signaled that he will keep a tight rein on Britain\u2019s public finances when he presents his latest tax-and-spending plans to U.K. lawmakers on Wednesday, despite better-than-expected economic growth that economists say should swell government tax revenue.\nMerkel to testify on Volkswagen emissions scandal. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a staunch defender of the country\u2019s car industry, testifies this week before a parliamentary investigation into Volkswagen AG\u2019s diesel cheating that is looking into any relationship between her lobbying and the scandal.\nBezos to unveil further plans for private space exploration. The burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com Inc. Chairman Jeff Bezos this week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives, the latest step toward its long-term goal of building rockets powerful enough to penetrate deep into the solar system, according to industry officials.\nCORPORATE NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Chief Executive of Deutsche Bank, John Cryan.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDeutsche likely to underwhelm again after rights issue. Deutsche Bank AG wants another \u20ac8 billion from long-suffering investors. The big concern will be that they are throwing more good money after bad since they put in the same amount in 2014.\nAberdeen Asset Management, Standard Life to join forces. Aberdeen Asset Management PLC and Standard Life PLC on Monday said they have agreed to the terms of an all-share merger, creating one of the U.K.\u2019s largest asset managers with a combined market value of more than \u00a311 billion ($13.5 billion). The merger could see the elimination of up to 1,000 jobs, the Times reports.\nChina\u2019s telecom operators to eliminate roaming fees. China\u2019s three state-run telecom operators said Monday they will eliminate mobile roaming fees in October as part of a government plan, which could hurt thei General Motors has agreed to sell its European car brands Opel and Vauxhall to France\u2019s Peugeot. Deutsche Bank is seeking to raise $8.5 billion through a share sale and Aberdeen Asset Management and Standard Life said they have agreed to the terms of an all-share merger. ",
        "author": "Rheaa Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former Virgin Galactic CFO Joins Satellite Observation Startup (WSJ: CFO Journal) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1111",
        "date": "2021-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-virgin-galactic-cfo-joins-satellite-observation-startup-11618430287?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=24",
        "text": "Jon Campagna is the new CFO at Capella Space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Capella Space\n \n\n\n\nCapella Space, which was founded in 2016, provides on-demand satellite images of forest fires, oil spills or other special events on the planet to its customers. Capella uses what\u2019s known as a synthetic aperture radar, which captures images at night and through cloud cover, smoke or fog, according to the company. Most of its clients are government agencies, such as the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office, though it also has commercial customers.\nMr. Campagna is joining Capella as it looks to expand its commercial operations, executives said. The company, after several years of development, launched its first operational satellite in August, said Chief Executive Payam Banazadeh. Capella currently has three satellites in orbit and has four more planned for 2021.\n\nThe company began to sell its imagery to clients in January, Mr. Banazadeh said. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit like a flip of a switch for us, I would say, in the last four or five months,\u201d he said, referring to the shift from testing its technology to selling it.\nCapella, which is venture-backed, declined to share information about its financial performance. It has raised approximately $77 million from investors as of April 2020, according to data provider PitchBook Data Inc. Capella said it has raised $96 million to date but declined to provide details.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up WSJ | CFO Journal The Morning Ledger provides daily news and insights on corporate finance from the CFO Journal team. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nCapella typically partners with companies such as SpaceX,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n space-transportation company, to launch its satellites, the company said. SpaceX, whose official name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nMr. Campagna said one of his top priorities in the new role will be to expand the company\u2019s accounting team and strengthen its budgeting, forecasting and revenue-collections capabilities. Asked whether he is preparing Capella for a potential public listing, Mr. Campagna said the company is exploring options to raise additional capital in the public and private markets.\n\u201cThe key focus is around building out a team that can support whatever path we choose,\u201d Mr. Campagna said. Capella currently has 109 employees, three of whom work in finance.\n\n\nRelated Coverage\n\n\n\n\nCongress Passes Legislation on Libor Fix as Part of Spending Package\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nCFOs Seek Higher Returns on Cash, but Banks May Be Slow to Raise Rates\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nShyft, Maker of Delivery Vans, Introduces an Electric One \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs Capella\u2019s first CFO, Mr. Campagna will be tasked with ensuring the company has a strong finance division in place as it starts to generate more revenue, said Matt O\u2019Connell, operating partner at venture firm DCVC, an early investor in Capella. Mr. O\u2019Connell declined to say how much his company has invested in Capella.\nMr. O\u2019Connell, who also serves on Capella\u2019s board, described investors\u2019 enthusiasm for the industry by noting that space-related technology underpins many of the products that consumers use daily, including navigation systems in their cars or on their smartphones.\n\u201cSpace is just part of our lives these days,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Kristin Broughton at Kristin.Broughton@wsj.com Jon Campagna, who previously served as CFO at space-travel company Virgin Galactic for about three years, has been named the first finance chief at San Francisco-based Capella Space. ",
        "author": "Kristin Broughton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former Virgin Galactic CFO Joins Satellite Observation Startup (WSJ: CFO Journal) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1112",
        "date": "2021-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-virgin-galactic-cfo-joins-satellite-observation-startup-11618430287?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=32",
        "text": "Jon Campagna is the new CFO at Capella Space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Capella Space\n \n\n\n\nCapella Space, which was founded in 2016, provides on-demand satellite images of forest fires, oil spills or other special events on the planet to its customers. Capella uses what\u2019s known as a synthetic aperture radar, which captures images at night and through cloud cover, smoke or fog, according to the company. Most of its clients are government agencies, such as the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office, though it also has commercial customers.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Campagna is joining Capella as it looks to expand its commercial operations, executives said. The company, after several years of development, launched its first operational satellite in August, said Chief Executive Payam Banazadeh. Capella currently has three satellites in orbit and has four more planned for 2021.\n\nThe company began to sell its imagery to clients in January, Mr. Banazadeh said. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit like a flip of a switch for us, I would say, in the last four or five months,\u201d he said, referring to the shift from testing its technology to selling it.\nCapella, which is venture-backed, declined to share information about its financial performance. It has raised approximately $77 million from investors as of April 2020, according to data provider PitchBook Data Inc. Capella said it has raised $96 million to date but declined to provide details.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up WSJ | CFO Journal The Morning Ledger provides daily news and insights on corporate finance from the CFO Journal team. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nCapella typically partners with companies such as SpaceX,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n space-transportation company, to launch its satellites, the company said. SpaceX, whose official name is Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nMr. Campagna said one of his top priorities in the new role will be to expand the company\u2019s accounting team and strengthen its budgeting, forecasting and revenue-collections capabilities. Asked whether he is preparing Capella for a potential public listing, Mr. Campagna said the company is exploring options to raise additional capital in the public and private markets.\n\u201cThe key focus is around building out a team that can support whatever path we choose,\u201d Mr. Campagna said. Capella currently has 109 employees, three of whom work in finance.\n\n\nRelated Coverage\n\n\n\n\nCFOs Seek Higher Returns on Cash, but Banks May Be Slow to Raise Rates\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nShyft, Maker of Delivery Vans, Introduces an Electric One \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nMacy\u2019s Shifts Focus to Investments, Buybacks After Paying Down Covid Debt \nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs Capella\u2019s first CFO, Mr. Campagna will be tasked with ensuring the company has a strong finance division in place as it starts to generate more revenue, said Matt O\u2019Connell, operating partner at venture firm DCVC, an early investor in Capella. Mr. O\u2019Connell declined to say how much his company has invested in Capella.\nMr. O\u2019Connell, who also serves on Capella\u2019s board, described investors\u2019 enthusiasm for the industry by noting that space-related technology underpins many of the products that consumers use daily, including navigation systems in their cars or on their smartphones.\n\u201cSpace is just part of our lives these days,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Kristin Broughton at Kristin.Broughton@wsj.com Jon Campagna, who previously served as CFO at space-travel company Virgin Galactic for about three years, has been named the first finance chief at San Francisco-based Capella Space. ",
        "author": "Kristin Broughton"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Space Station Is Coming Together Bit by Bit (WSJ: China) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1113",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-space-station-tiangong-is-coming-together-bit-by-bit-11631871002?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=4",
        "text": "When completed, Tiangong will weigh about 150,000 pounds and be roughly one-sixth the size of the International Space Station, a 900,000-pound craft that over the past two decades has hosted over 200 astronauts from more than a dozen countries. Tiangong will have a large robotic arm for construction and maintenance, and there are plans for a powerful space telescope, which will remain in proximity to the station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Chinese space station, when complete, will have about 4,000 cubic feet of living space and weigh about 150,000 pounds.\n\nIt will be roughly one-sixth the size of the 900,000-pound International Space Station.\n\nOver the past two decades, the ISS has hosted more than 200 astronauts from more than a dozen countries. Tiangong\u2019s first visitors were three Chinese astronauts, and the Chinese space agency has said astronauts from other countries will visit in coming years.\n\nIt is expected to be operational for more than 10 years. While the expected lifespan of the ISS was 15 years, it has now been in space for nearly 23 years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTiangong is seen as a centerpiece of China\u2019s increasingly ambitious space program, which in recent years has notched a number of remarkable achievements\u2014including the successful landing of a rover on Mars in May. Construction of Tiangong comes a decade after national security concerns led the U.S. to bar the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from working with China and China-based companies, effectively shutting off Chinese astronauts from the ISS. Although it is being built solely by China, a number of other nations have signed on to fly experiments aboard Tiangong. China hasn\u2019t revealed how much the station will cost to build or to operate. Tiangong\u2019s core module\u2014Tianhe, or \u201cHarmony of the Heavens\u201d in Chinese\u2014is now orbiting at an altitude of about 250 miles. In 2022, two more modules are to be launched to the budding outpost: Wentian (\u201cQuest for the Heavens\u201d) and Mengtian (\u201cDreaming of the Heavens\u201d), both of which will house scientific experiments.\n\n\n First Module Launched China launched Tianhe on April 29, 2021. The bus-sized module contains the station\u2019s life support systems and will serve as its living quarters. It\u2019s equipped with sleeping berths and a galley with a microwave as well as a treadmill and stationary bike. Videos of the interior show that it\u2019s adorned with Chinese flags. Key Supplies Delivered China launched Tianzhou-2, an uncrewed spacecraft loaded with supplies and propellant for the station, on May 29, 2021. The craft docked with Tianhe later the same day. It held 4.69 tons of cargo, including food for the crew for three months. First Crew Arrives On June 17, three Chinese astronauts -- or taikonauts, as they are known in China -- launched to Tianhe aboard a Shenzhou capsule. Additional Modules Arrive Next year, China is expected to launch Wentian and Mentian, the station\u2019s two remaining modules \n\n\nThe ISS has a large robotic arm, and so will Tiangong. China says the arm will be used for cargo handling, station maintenance and to help control docking of spacecraft\u2014though the U.S. Space Command warned Congress earlier this year that the technology could also be deployed as a tool for attacking satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s answer to the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled for launch in 2024. The Chinese Space Station Telescope\u2014also known as Xuntian, or \u201cSurvey the Heavens\u201d in Chinese\u2014will survey and photograph the universe using its 2-meter-diameter lens and a 2.5-billion-pixel camera. The telescope will orbit near Tiangong so that it can be maintained and refueled.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDiameter lens\n\n\n2 meter (6.6 ft)\n\n\nThe telescope will be able to periodically dock with the outpost in the future\n\n\n\n\n\nThe telescope will be able to periodically dock with the outpost in the future\n\n\nDiameter lens\n\n\n2 meter (6.6 ft)\n\n\n\n\n\nThe telescope will be able to periodically dock with the outpost in the future\n\n\nDiameter lens\n\n\n2 meter (6.6 ft)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWrite to Alberto Cervantes at Alberto.Cervantes@wsj.com and Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com Barred from the International Space Station, China has embarked on an ambitious, multiyear plan to build its own Earth-orbiting habitat. ",
        "author": "Alberto Cervantes, Natasha Khan and Danny Dougherty"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Experimental Spaceplane (WSJ: China) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1114",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-launches-experimental-spaceplane-11599217896?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=11",
        "text": "Unlike with recent high-profile missions, China\u2019s National Space Administration didn\u2019t announce the launch ahead of time. The mission will test the craft\u2019s technology and \u201cprovide technical support for the peaceful use of space,\u201d Xinhua said, without disclosing further details about its capabilities or the planned duration of its time in orbit.\nBoth China and the U.S. have secretive programs to develop unmanned, reusable spaceplanes. Last year, the U.S. Air Force\u2019s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, which resembles a miniature version of the retired Space Shuttle, completed a 780-day mission in orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai (originally Published July 17, 2020)\n \n\n\nA separate U.S. Experimental Spaceplane development program being run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was abandoned earlier this year.\n\n\nChina has been working on its own spaceplane since at least 2007, when images of a craft known as the Shenlong slung beneath the wing of a Chinese bomber first circulated widely in Chinese media. A state-run television station in northern China\u2019s Shaanxi province reported in 2011 that the Shenlong had conducted a suborbital flight, though little else is known about the top-secret program.\nXinhua didn\u2019t disclose whether the vehicle launched Friday was a version of the Shenlong or a completely new spacecraft.\nLast year the state-run China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics released images it said showed wind-tunnel tests of a prototype spaceplane with the capability to launch horizontally from a larger aircraft before using a powerful propulsion system to blast itself into orbit.\nChina launched its first mission to Mars in July, the latest in a string of missions that have underscored its growing challenge to the U.S.\u2019s long-held status as the world\u2019s leading space power. The country aims to have an operational space station by 2022 and a manned lunar base by 2045.\nLast year, the U.S. established a military Space Command to counter perceived threats in space, chiefly from China and Russia.\nWrite to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com China is claiming success in the secretive launch of an experimental spaceplane. The rocket-mounted reusable spacecraft was lofted into orbit from the Gobi Desert. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Experimental Spaceplane (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1115",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-launches-experimental-spaceplane-11599217896?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=41",
        "text": "Unlike with recent high-profile missions, China\u2019s National Space Administration didn\u2019t announce the launch ahead of time. The mission will test the craft\u2019s technology and \u201cprovide technical support for the peaceful use of space,\u201d Xinhua said, without disclosing further details about its capabilities or the planned duration of its time in orbit.\nBoth China and the U.S. have secretive programs to develop unmanned, reusable spaceplanes. Last year, the U.S. Air Force\u2019s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, which resembles a miniature version of the retired Space Shuttle, completed a 780-day mission in orbit.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai (originally Published July 17, 2020)\n \n\n\nA separate U.S. Experimental Spaceplane development program being run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was abandoned earlier this year.\n\n\nChina has been working on its own spaceplane since at least 2007, when images of a craft known as the Shenlong slung beneath the wing of a Chinese bomber first circulated widely in Chinese media. A state-run television station in northern China\u2019s Shaanxi province reported in 2011 that the Shenlong had conducted a suborbital flight, though little else is known about the top-secret program.\nXinhua didn\u2019t disclose whether the vehicle launched Friday was a version of the Shenlong or a completely new spacecraft.\nLast year the state-run China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics released images it said showed wind-tunnel tests of a prototype spaceplane with the capability to launch horizontally from a larger aircraft before using a powerful propulsion system to blast itself into orbit.\nChina launched its first mission to Mars in July, the latest in a string of missions that have underscored its growing challenge to the U.S.\u2019s long-held status as the world\u2019s leading space power. The country aims to have an operational space station by 2022 and a manned lunar base by 2045.\nLast year, the U.S. established a military Space Command to counter perceived threats in space, chiefly from China and Russia.\nWrite to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com China is claiming success in the secretive launch of an experimental spaceplane. The rocket-mounted reusable spacecraft was lofted into orbit from the Gobi Desert. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands a Probe on Moon as It Pursues Space Ambitions (WSJ: China) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1116",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-a-probe-on-the-moon-as-it-pursues-space-ambitions-11606842163?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=10",
        "text": "Only the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have managed to return lunar samples, and not in almost 45 years. The plan is to retrieve around 4.4 pounds of rock samples and materials from just below the lunar surface. The moon is central to China\u2019s fast-advancing scientific and strategic space ambitions.\nThe lander is expected to operate and depart from the moon within one lunar daytime, giving it about two weeks of Earth days. After collecting samples, it is scheduled to blast off the moon and connect with a lunar orbiter before returning to Earth midmonth.\n\n\nChina launched its first manned space flight in 2003 and in space has explored quantum communications, erected a large radio telescope and built a system of satellites to support a GPS-like navigation system.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rocket carrying China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 lunar probe launched on Nov. 24. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES\n\n\n\nChina deliberately crashed a spacecraft into the moon in 2009 after mapping it from orbit and has now returned there with three successful unmanned landings, including one in early 2019, when it put a probe on the dark side of the moon, in a first for humanity. China hasn\u2019t tried to put a person on the moon.\nA Chinese Mars lander is due at the red planet around February.\nChina hopes to establish a manned base on the moon during the current decade, from which it could further explore deep space. The moon\u2019s supply of helium-3, a potential energy source, has been of particular interest to Beijing. The potential for water on the moon is important as a possible rocket fuel if it is found and can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen.\nAny permanent Chinese presence on the moon promises to rewrite the global order in space, and scientists say Beijing is eager to build capacity there in terms of rules of exploration and access to resources.\nPartly with an eye on China\u2019s efforts,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n President Trump\n\n\n\n last year announced creation of the Space Command to coordinate activity and a Space Force military branch under the Air Force.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTechnical personnel worked at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center on Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cai Yang/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com Beijing\u2019s plan is to retrieve around 4.4 pounds of rock samples and materials from just below the lunar surface. ",
        "author": "James T. Areddy and Liyan Qi"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands a Probe on Moon as It Pursues Space Ambitions (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1117",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-a-probe-on-the-moon-as-it-pursues-space-ambitions-11606842163?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=42",
        "text": "Only the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have managed to return lunar samples, and not in almost 45 years. The plan is to retrieve around 4.4 pounds of rock samples and materials from just below the lunar surface. The moon is central to China\u2019s fast-advancing scientific and strategic space ambitions.\n\n\n\n\nThe lander is expected to operate and depart from the moon within one lunar daytime, giving it about two weeks of Earth days. After collecting samples, it is scheduled to blast off the moon and connect with a lunar orbiter before returning to Earth midmonth.\n\n\nChina launched its first manned space flight in 2003 and in space has explored quantum communications, erected a large radio telescope and built a system of satellites to support a GPS-like navigation system.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rocket carrying China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 lunar probe launched on Nov. 24. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES\n\n\n\nChina deliberately crashed a spacecraft into the moon in 2009 after mapping it from orbit and has now returned there with three successful unmanned landings, including one in early 2019, when it put a probe on the dark side of the moon, in a first for humanity. China hasn\u2019t tried to put a person on the moon.\nA Chinese Mars lander is due at the red planet around February.\nChina hopes to establish a manned base on the moon during the current decade, from which it could further explore deep space. The moon\u2019s supply of helium-3, a potential energy source, has been of particular interest to Beijing. The potential for water on the moon is important as a possible rocket fuel if it is found and can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen.\nAny permanent Chinese presence on the moon promises to rewrite the global order in space, and scientists say Beijing is eager to build capacity there in terms of rules of exploration and access to resources.\nPartly with an eye on China\u2019s efforts,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n President Trump\n\n\n\n last year announced creation of the Space Command to coordinate activity and a Space Force military branch under the Air Force.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTechnical personnel worked at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center on Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cai Yang/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com Beijing\u2019s plan is to retrieve around 4.4 pounds of rock samples and materials from just below the lunar surface. ",
        "author": "James T. Areddy and Liyan Qi"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (WSJ: China) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1118",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-probe-on-dark-side-of-the-moon-11546493599?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=17",
        "text": "More than just a technological achievement, the mission\u2019s success is a publicity coup for President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping,\n\n\n\n who has personally endorsed China\u2019s space efforts, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dean Cheng,\n\n\n\n an expert on China\u2019s space capabilities at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. \u201cThis is huge\u2014a major first,\u201d said Mr. Cheng. \u201cFor Xi Jinping and his great Chinese revival, this is a wonderful example.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\nThe landing makes China the first country to deploy a probe on the far side of the moon. To help achieve the feat, a communications-relay satellite called Magpie Bridge was positioned 50,000 miles beyond the moon last June to bounce transmissions between the Chang\u2019e-4 and terrestrial ground stations. \n\n\nThe Chang\u2019e-4 began its descent early on Thursday and then hovered 100 meters (328 feet) above the moon\u2019s surface to enable its sensors to pick out the smoothest spot for landing before completing its approach, state media said. The craft was launched from southwest China last month, and took 4\u00bd days to reach the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China gained on the U.S. in the new space race by making the first-ever landing on the far side of the moon. What's driving China\u2019s ambitions and should the U.S. be nervous? The WSJ explains. Photo: CHINA NATIONAL SPACE ADMINISTRAT/SHUTTERSTOCK\n \n\n\nThe first two Chang\u2019e missions studied the moon from orbit, while 2013\u2019s Chang\u2019e-3 was China\u2019s first probe to reach the lunar surface. A follow-up mission, the Chang\u2019e-5, will attempt to gather lunar samples and return them to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The New Space Race\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n David Chan/The Wall Street Journal\n\n\nThe mission\u2019s success heats up the competition between China and the U.S. to become the first in half a century to land astronauts on the moon\u2014and more broadly to claim leadership in space.\nChina aims to start building a lunar base by 2025 and to man the facility by 2030; in the long term it hopes to mine the moon for energy resources. The U.S. plans to return to the moon around 2023.\nBoth countries face daunting technical hurdles. China\u2019s new super-heavy lift rocket, the Long March 5, failed during its maiden flight in 2017 and has yet to fly again, setting back the country\u2019s mission schedule. NASA is still developing both the spacecraft and the rocket it will need to return American astronauts to the lunar surface.\nAs China methodically ticks off its objectives, the pressure is mounting for the U.S. to retain its crown as the world\u2019s space pioneer, according to Mr. Cheng. \u201cThere are many who worry that the Chinese will put a man on the moon before we\u2019re able to do it again,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA photo from the China National Space Administration shows an artist\u2019s impression of the rover for the Chang'e-4 lunar probe.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n china national space administrat/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com China successfully landed a probe on the far side of the moon, marking a milestone for the country\u2019s ambitious space program and heating up competition with the U.S. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1119",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-probe-on-dark-side-of-the-moon-11546493599?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=60",
        "text": "More than just a technological achievement, the mission\u2019s success is a publicity coup for President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping,\n\n\n\n who has personally endorsed China\u2019s space efforts, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dean Cheng,\n\n\n\n an expert on China\u2019s space capabilities at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. \u201cThis is huge\u2014a major first,\u201d said Mr. Cheng. \u201cFor Xi Jinping and his great Chinese revival, this is a wonderful example.\u201d \n\n\nThe landing makes China the first country to deploy a probe on the far side of the moon. To help achieve the feat, a communications-relay satellite called Magpie Bridge was positioned 50,000 miles beyond the moon last June to bounce transmissions between the Chang\u2019e-4 and terrestrial ground stations. \n\n\nThe Chang\u2019e-4 began its descent early on Thursday and then hovered 100 meters (328 feet) above the moon\u2019s surface to enable its sensors to pick out the smoothest spot for landing before completing its approach, state media said. The craft was launched from southwest China last month, and took 4\u00bd days to reach the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China gained on the U.S. in the new space race by making the first-ever landing on the far side of the moon. What's driving China\u2019s ambitions and should the U.S. be nervous? The WSJ explains. Photo: CHINA NATIONAL SPACE ADMINISTRAT/SHUTTERSTOCK\n \n\n\nThe first two Chang\u2019e missions studied the moon from orbit, while 2013\u2019s Chang\u2019e-3 was China\u2019s first probe to reach the lunar surface. A follow-up mission, the Chang\u2019e-5, will attempt to gather lunar samples and return them to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The New Space Race\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n David Chan/The Wall Street Journal\n\n\nThe mission\u2019s success heats up the competition between China and the U.S. to become the first in half a century to land astronauts on the moon\u2014and more broadly to claim leadership in space.\nChina aims to start building a lunar base by 2025 and to man the facility by 2030; in the long term it hopes to mine the moon for energy resources. The U.S. plans to return to the moon around 2023.\nBoth countries face daunting technical hurdles. China\u2019s new super-heavy lift rocket, the Long March 5, failed during its maiden flight in 2017 and has yet to fly again, setting back the country\u2019s mission schedule. NASA is still developing both the spacecraft and the rocket it will need to return American astronauts to the lunar surface.\nAs China methodically ticks off its objectives, the pressure is mounting for the U.S. to retain its crown as the world\u2019s space pioneer, according to Mr. Cheng. \u201cThere are many who worry that the Chinese will put a man on the moon before we\u2019re able to do it again,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA photo from the China National Space Administration shows an artist\u2019s impression of the rover for the Chang'e-4 lunar probe.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n china national space administrat/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com China successfully landed a probe on the far side of the moon, marking a milestone for the country\u2019s ambitious space program and heating up competition with the U.S. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Lunar Probe Returns With Moon Fragments (WSJ: China) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1120",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-moon-mission-ends-as-lunar-probe-returns-to-earth-with-fragments-11608147926?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=10",
        "text": "China Central Television coverage showed the craft intact and nestled in the snowy ground and being approached by helicopters. It took some time after it touched down for ground crews to locate the roughly 3-foot-wide capsule in the dark and state media cited challenges in getting vehicles across the flat expanse to retrieve it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRecovery crew members check on capsule of the Chang\u2019e 5 probe after it landed in Siziwang district, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in this photo released by Xinhua News Agency.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ren Junchuan/Xinhua/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s complicated Chang\u2019e 5 mission began on Nov. 24. The space vehicle included orbiter, lander and ascender with maneuvers that included reuniting spacecraft 200 miles from the lunar surface for a transfer of captured moon material before firing off for a return to Earth.\n\n\nThe Chang\u2019e 5 probe, China\u2019s third exploration on the moon\u2019s surface, had spent 19 hours on the surface and used robotic equipment to drill about 2 feet deep to recover around 4.4 pounds of rock and material. \u201cThese samples will be studied to uncover clues to the moon\u2019s multi-billion-year history,\u201d according to a report by CCTV, the state broadcaster.\nThe China National Space Administration\u2019s updates throughout the mission have cited success with Chang\u2019e 5\u2019s tricky maneuvers and pride in \u201cretrieving China\u2019s first samples from an extraterrestrial body.\u201d\nReports by Xinhua News Agency said that while on the moon the probe withstood temperatures exceeding 212 degrees Fahrenheit and deployed technology such as regolith-penetrating radar. \u201cDiverse samples at different sites have been gathered,\u201d Xinhua said, adding that the material was vacuum-sealed for safe return to Earth.\nA statement from Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n published in state media called the mission a complete success and a step forward for the country\u2019s aerospace program.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China sent the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft to collect and bring back to Earth samples from the moon. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why the success of this mission could be a milestone for the country's young but ambitious space program. Photo: Jin Liwang/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\nChina becomes the third nation after the U.S. and the former Soviet Union to manage the return of lunar samples. The Chang\u2019e 5 mission planted China\u2019s flag on the moon\u2019s surface before departing.\nThe U.S., the only nation to put a man on the moon, last did so in 1972. The Soviet Union\u2019s successful mission in 1976 to return around 6 ounces of moon material to Earth was its third attempt to do so, according to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. China first reached the moon in 2009 and by 2013 had put a rover on its surface.\nExploration of the moon, along with probes of Earth\u2019s mountaintops, seabed and polar extremes, marks China\u2019s effort to build up its scientific capabilities and boost national pride. As if to underscore China\u2019s continuing space ambitions, the country on Wednesday positioned a Long March-8 carrier rocket on a launch site in southern Hainan Island ahead of a test flight later this month aimed at developing reusable space equipment. Within a decade, China hopes to establish a base on the moon for people and further explore deep space.\nChinese scientists have expressed interest in the moon\u2019s supply of helium-3, a potential energy source, as well as its potential for water as a life source and rocket fuel.\nWrite to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com China\u2019s space program executed the final stage of an ambitious mission to capture moon fragments and return them to Earth, state media reported, as its space vehicle touched down in a northern China landscape covered in snow. ",
        "author": "James T. Areddy"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Lunar Probe Returns With Moon Fragments (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1121",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-moon-mission-ends-as-lunar-probe-returns-to-earth-with-fragments-11608147926?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=36",
        "text": "China Central Television coverage showed the craft intact and nestled in the snowy ground and being approached by helicopters. It took some time after it touched down for ground crews to locate the roughly 3-foot-wide capsule in the dark and state media cited challenges in getting vehicles across the flat expanse to retrieve it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRecovery crew members check on capsule of the Chang\u2019e 5 probe after it landed in Siziwang district, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in this photo released by Xinhua News Agency.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ren Junchuan/Xinhua/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s complicated Chang\u2019e 5 mission began on Nov. 24. The space vehicle included orbiter, lander and ascender with maneuvers that included reuniting spacecraft 200 miles from the lunar surface for a transfer of captured moon material before firing off for a return to Earth.\n\n\nThe Chang\u2019e 5 probe, China\u2019s third exploration on the moon\u2019s surface, had spent 19 hours on the surface and used robotic equipment to drill about 2 feet deep to recover around 4.4 pounds of rock and material. \u201cThese samples will be studied to uncover clues to the moon\u2019s multi-billion-year history,\u201d according to a report by CCTV, the state broadcaster.\nThe China National Space Administration\u2019s updates throughout the mission have cited success with Chang\u2019e 5\u2019s tricky maneuvers and pride in \u201cretrieving China\u2019s first samples from an extraterrestrial body.\u201d\nReports by Xinhua News Agency said that while on the moon the probe withstood temperatures exceeding 212 degrees Fahrenheit and deployed technology such as regolith-penetrating radar. \u201cDiverse samples at different sites have been gathered,\u201d Xinhua said, adding that the material was vacuum-sealed for safe return to Earth.\nA statement from Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n published in state media called the mission a complete success and a step forward for the country\u2019s aerospace program.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China sent the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft to collect and bring back to Earth samples from the moon. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why the success of this mission could be a milestone for the country's young but ambitious space program. Photo: Jin Liwang/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\nChina becomes the third nation after the U.S. and the former Soviet Union to manage the return of lunar samples. The Chang\u2019e 5 mission planted China\u2019s flag on the moon\u2019s surface before departing.\nThe U.S., the only nation to put a man on the moon, last did so in 1972. The Soviet Union\u2019s successful mission in 1976 to return around 6 ounces of moon material to Earth was its third attempt to do so, according to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. China first reached the moon in 2009 and by 2013 had put a rover on its surface.\nExploration of the moon, along with probes of Earth\u2019s mountaintops, seabed and polar extremes, marks China\u2019s effort to build up its scientific capabilities and boost national pride. As if to underscore China\u2019s continuing space ambitions, the country on Wednesday positioned a Long March-8 carrier rocket on a launch site in southern Hainan Island ahead of a test flight later this month aimed at developing reusable space equipment. Within a decade, China hopes to establish a base on the moon for people and further explore deep space.\nChinese scientists have expressed interest in the moon\u2019s supply of helium-3, a potential energy source, as well as its potential for water as a life source and rocket fuel.\nWrite to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com China\u2019s space program executed the final stage of an ambitious mission to capture moon fragments and return them to Earth, state media reported, as its space vehicle touched down in a northern China landscape covered in snow. ",
        "author": "James T. Areddy"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Lunar Probe Returns With Moon Fragments (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1122",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-moon-mission-ends-as-lunar-probe-returns-to-earth-with-fragments-11608147926?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=40",
        "text": "China Central Television coverage showed the craft intact and nestled in the snowy ground and being approached by helicopters. It took some time after it touched down for ground crews to locate the roughly 3-foot-wide capsule in the dark and state media cited challenges in getting vehicles across the flat expanse to retrieve it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRecovery crew members check on capsule of the Chang\u2019e 5 probe after it landed in Siziwang district, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in this photo released by Xinhua News Agency.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ren Junchuan/Xinhua/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s complicated Chang\u2019e 5 mission began on Nov. 24. The space vehicle included orbiter, lander and ascender with maneuvers that included reuniting spacecraft 200 miles from the lunar surface for a transfer of captured moon material before firing off for a return to Earth.\n\n\nThe Chang\u2019e 5 probe, China\u2019s third exploration on the moon\u2019s surface, had spent 19 hours on the surface and used robotic equipment to drill about 2 feet deep to recover around 4.4 pounds of rock and material. \u201cThese samples will be studied to uncover clues to the moon\u2019s multi-billion-year history,\u201d according to a report by CCTV, the state broadcaster.\nThe China National Space Administration\u2019s updates throughout the mission have cited success with Chang\u2019e 5\u2019s tricky maneuvers and pride in \u201cretrieving China\u2019s first samples from an extraterrestrial body.\u201d\nReports by Xinhua News Agency said that while on the moon the probe withstood temperatures exceeding 212 degrees Fahrenheit and deployed technology such as regolith-penetrating radar. \u201cDiverse samples at different sites have been gathered,\u201d Xinhua said, adding that the material was vacuum-sealed for safe return to Earth.\nA statement from Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n published in state media called the mission a complete success and a step forward for the country\u2019s aerospace program.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China sent the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft to collect and bring back to Earth samples from the moon. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why the success of this mission could be a milestone for the country's young but ambitious space program. Photo: Jin Liwang/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\nChina becomes the third nation after the U.S. and the former Soviet Union to manage the return of lunar samples. The Chang\u2019e 5 mission planted China\u2019s flag on the moon\u2019s surface before departing.\nThe U.S., the only nation to put a man on the moon, last did so in 1972. The Soviet Union\u2019s successful mission in 1976 to return around 6 ounces of moon material to Earth was its third attempt to do so, according to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. China first reached the moon in 2009 and by 2013 had put a rover on its surface.\nExploration of the moon, along with probes of Earth\u2019s mountaintops, seabed and polar extremes, marks China\u2019s effort to build up its scientific capabilities and boost national pride. As if to underscore China\u2019s continuing space ambitions, the country on Wednesday positioned a Long March-8 carrier rocket on a launch site in southern Hainan Island ahead of a test flight later this month aimed at developing reusable space equipment. Within a decade, China hopes to establish a base on the moon for people and further explore deep space.\nChinese scientists have expressed interest in the moon\u2019s supply of helium-3, a potential energy source, as well as its potential for water as a life source and rocket fuel.\nWrite to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com China\u2019s space program executed the final stage of an ambitious mission to capture moon fragments and return them to Earth, state media reported, as its space vehicle touched down in a northern China landscape covered in snow. ",
        "author": "James T. Areddy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Astronauts Sent Into Orbit to Staff Space Station (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1123",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-astronauts-lift-off-in-mission-to-staff-space-station-11623894483?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=28",
        "text": "The spaceship docked hours later with the already orbiting Tianhe module and the astronauts will spend three months there, including two planned spacewalks.\nBefore the launch, the astronauts were escorted by a motorcade down an avenue lined with Chinese national flags to the launchpad in the Gobi Desert on a clear-sky morning.\n\n\nTheir mission comes as China undertakes increasingly bold endeavors in space and days before the country celebrates the July centenary of the founding of its ruling Chinese Communist Party. China\u2019s astronauts are being feted as heroes by state media as symbols of China\u2019s rapidly advancing space program, which is promoted as a source of national pride.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA departure ceremony for the astronauts before boarding the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft on Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n greg baker/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nWhile space exploration in the West has been bolstered by private entrepreneurs such as Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n China\u2019s state-led space program resembles earlier efforts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which regularly included military personnel on active duty.\nChina has closely directed goals for its space program and its astronauts\u2014dubbed taikonauts\u2014and the efforts attract the kind of celebrity and nationalistic fervor that America\u2019s earliest adventurers into outer space inspired. Many space fans regularly travel to launch sites, such as the island province of Hainan.\nThe astronauts, wearing Chinese flags and Communist Party pins on their lapels indicating their membership in China\u2019s ruling party, greeted reporters Wednesday at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.\n\u201cLooking back, 13 years seems long but it passed with a blink of an eye,\u201d said Mr. Liu, who in 2008 handed a fellow astronaut a Chinese flag to wave during a historic walk in space. \u201cWhen I\u2019m standing on the mechanical arms, when I\u2019m facing the vast universe, when I see those stars flying past the planet Earth I hope that all the Chinese people can fly with me from the bottom of their hearts.\u201d\nChina has made leaps and bounds in space exploration in recent years, last month becoming only the second nation to successfully land and operate a rover on Mars.\nThe Tiangong Space Station\u2014which means \u201cHeavenly Palace\u201d in Chinese\u2014is being constructed over the coming months. It is seen as a rival to the International Space Station, which has hosted more than 200 astronauts from more than a dozen countries over the past two decades. Since 2011, China has been excluded by U.S. law from working with NASA, and its astronauts are barred from the ISS.\nTiangong, which is much smaller than the ISS, will host foreign astronauts once it is completed, according to Hao Chun, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office.\nThe mission is China\u2019s first crewed flight into space in five years. The three men will stay for three months\u2014longer than any previous Chinese astronauts. They will be tasked with performing two spacewalks during their stay in orbit, as well as conducting tests in preparation for the other missions that are expected to travel to the station before its planned completion at the end of 2022.\n\u201cTo fly into space on behalf of my motherland, I feel a deep sense of mission and honor,\u201d Nie Haisheng, the 56-year-old commander of the mission said on the eve of the launch, in televised remarks.\nIt is the third space mission for Mr. Nie, who has headed the Taikonaut Brigade of the PLA. \u201cThe development of China\u2019s space mission is a process of translating our dreams into reality, and over the years we have written a glorious chapter for China\u2019s space mission,\u201d he said. \u201cEach step of progress embodies the expectations of the country, the party as well as the people.\u201d\n\n\nChina in SpaceMore coverage of the country\u2019s space program, selected by WSJ editors China Lands on Mars in Crowning Moment for Space Program (May 16) China Advances Space Station Ambition With Module Launch (April 29) China Lands a Probe on the Moon as It Pursues Space Ambitions (Dec. 1, 2020) China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (Jan. 3, 2019) \n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com China launched the three astronauts into space and celebrated them as heroes of the country\u2019s rapidly advancing program, which is being promoted as a source of national pride. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Astronauts Sent Into Orbit to Staff Space Station (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1124",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-astronauts-lift-off-in-mission-to-staff-space-station-11623894483?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=28",
        "text": "The spaceship docked hours later with the already orbiting Tianhe module and the astronauts will spend three months there, including two planned spacewalks.\n\n\n\n\nBefore the launch, the astronauts were escorted by a motorcade down an avenue lined with Chinese national flags to the launchpad in the Gobi Desert on a clear-sky morning.\n\n\nTheir mission comes as China undertakes increasingly bold endeavors in space and days before the country celebrates the July centenary of the founding of its ruling Chinese Communist Party. China\u2019s astronauts are being feted as heroes by state media as symbols of China\u2019s rapidly advancing space program, which is promoted as a source of national pride.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA departure ceremony for the astronauts before boarding the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft on Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n greg baker/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nWhile space exploration in the West has been bolstered by private entrepreneurs such as Tesla Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n China\u2019s state-led space program resembles earlier efforts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which regularly included military personnel on active duty.\nChina has closely directed goals for its space program and its astronauts\u2014dubbed taikonauts\u2014and the efforts attract the kind of celebrity and nationalistic fervor that America\u2019s earliest adventurers into outer space inspired. Many space fans regularly travel to launch sites, such as the island province of Hainan.\nThe astronauts, wearing Chinese flags and Communist Party pins on their lapels indicating their membership in China\u2019s ruling party, greeted reporters Wednesday at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.\n\u201cLooking back, 13 years seems long but it passed with a blink of an eye,\u201d said Mr. Liu, who in 2008 handed a fellow astronaut a Chinese flag to wave during a historic walk in space. \u201cWhen I\u2019m standing on the mechanical arms, when I\u2019m facing the vast universe, when I see those stars flying past the planet Earth I hope that all the Chinese people can fly with me from the bottom of their hearts.\u201d\nChina has made leaps and bounds in space exploration in recent years, last month becoming only the second nation to successfully land and operate a rover on Mars.\nThe Tiangong Space Station\u2014which means \u201cHeavenly Palace\u201d in Chinese\u2014is being constructed over the coming months. It is seen as a rival to the International Space Station, which has hosted more than 200 astronauts from more than a dozen countries over the past two decades. Since 2011, China has been excluded by U.S. law from working with NASA, and its astronauts are barred from the ISS.\nTiangong, which is much smaller than the ISS, will host foreign astronauts once it is completed, according to Hao Chun, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office.\nThe mission is China\u2019s first crewed flight into space in five years. The three men will stay for three months\u2014longer than any previous Chinese astronauts. They will be tasked with performing two spacewalks during their stay in orbit, as well as conducting tests in preparation for the other missions that are expected to travel to the station before its planned completion at the end of 2022.\n\u201cTo fly into space on behalf of my motherland, I feel a deep sense of mission and honor,\u201d Nie Haisheng, the 56-year-old commander of the mission said on the eve of the launch, in televised remarks.\nIt is the third space mission for Mr. Nie, who has headed the Taikonaut Brigade of the PLA. \u201cThe development of China\u2019s space mission is a process of translating our dreams into reality, and over the years we have written a glorious chapter for China\u2019s space mission,\u201d he said. \u201cEach step of progress embodies the expectations of the country, the party as well as the people.\u201d\n\n\nChina in SpaceMore coverage of the country\u2019s space program, selected by WSJ editors China Lands on Mars in Crowning Moment for Space Program (May 16) China Advances Space Station Ambition With Module Launch (April 29) China Lands a Probe on the Moon as It Pursues Space Ambitions (Dec. 1, 2020) China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (Jan. 3, 2019) \n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com China launched the three astronauts into space and celebrated them as heroes of the country\u2019s rapidly advancing program, which is being promoted as a source of national pride. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Astronauts Complete Country\u2019s Longest Stay in Space (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1125",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-astronauts-complete-countrys-longest-stay-in-space-landing-in-gobi-desert-11631870252?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=15",
        "text": "Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo spent three months on the module that will form the core of its Tiangong space station. In space the team worked on the construction of the space station and made two spacewalks. It also held a video call with Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n and broadcast a science lesson to schools across China to mark the beginning of a new semester in September.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA re-entry capsule carrying three Chinese astronauts landed in the Gobi Desert.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n cctv/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Tiangong space station is seen as China\u2019s answer to the International Space Station, which has been host to astronauts from more than a dozen countries and is approved to operate until the end of 2024. For the past decade, China has been excluded by U.S. law from working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and its astronauts are barred from the International Space Station.\n\n\nThe re-entry capsule, slowed by a red and white parachute, landed Friday at the Dongfeng site in the Gobi Desert in northern China\u2019s Inner Mongolia region, where rescue teams raced to greet it.\nAfter some safety checks, as Chinese flags flew next to the capsule, the astronauts rested on white chairs and readjusted to Earth\u2019s conditions while being tended to by support staff.\nMore missions are planned for the space station\u2019s construction in the coming months. A cargo spaceship is expected to be sent into orbit in coming weeks, while the Shenzhou-13, which will take another three taikonauts to the station, is expected to launch in October and remain in orbit for six months. The Tiangong, which translates to \u201cHeavenly Palace,\u201d is expected to be completed by the end of next year.\n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Two Chinese astronauts completed their first spacewalk outside China\u2019s new Tiangong space station Sunday, the first of two scheduled during their three-month mission. Screenshot: CCTV\n \n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com The trio of taikonauts spent three months helping build China\u2019s rival to the International Space Station before landing in the Gobi Desert. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Astronauts Complete Country\u2019s Longest Stay in Space (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1126",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-astronauts-complete-countrys-longest-stay-in-space-landing-in-gobi-desert-11631870252?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=22",
        "text": "Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo spent three months on the module that will form the core of its Tiangong space station. In space the team worked on the construction of the space station and made two spacewalks. It also held a video call with Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n and broadcast a science lesson to schools across China to mark the beginning of a new semester in September.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA re-entry capsule carrying three Chinese astronauts landed in the Gobi Desert.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n cctv/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe Tiangong space station is seen as China\u2019s answer to the International Space Station, which has been host to astronauts from more than a dozen countries and is approved to operate until the end of 2024. For the past decade, China has been excluded by U.S. law from working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and its astronauts are barred from the International Space Station.\n\n\nThe re-entry capsule, slowed by a red and white parachute, landed Friday at the Dongfeng site in the Gobi Desert in northern China\u2019s Inner Mongolia region, where rescue teams raced to greet it.\nAfter some safety checks, as Chinese flags flew next to the capsule, the astronauts rested on white chairs and readjusted to Earth\u2019s conditions while being tended to by support staff.\nMore missions are planned for the space station\u2019s construction in the coming months. A cargo spaceship is expected to be sent into orbit in coming weeks, while the Shenzhou-13, which will take another three taikonauts to the station, is expected to launch in October and remain in orbit for six months. The Tiangong, which translates to \u201cHeavenly Palace,\u201d is expected to be completed by the end of next year.\n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Two Chinese astronauts completed their first spacewalk outside China\u2019s new Tiangong space station Sunday, the first of two scheduled during their three-month mission. Screenshot: CCTV\n \n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com The trio of taikonauts spent three months helping build China\u2019s rival to the International Space Station before landing in the Gobi Desert. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lodges Complaint After Alleged Near Collision With Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Satellites (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1127",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lodges-complaint-after-alleged-near-miss-with-elon-musks-spacex-satellites-11640704035?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=2",
        "text": "In a July presentation to the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX said it had so far launched around 1,800 Starlink satellites and was active in more than 20 countries.\nIt plans to rapidly boost the pace of satellite launches in the years ahead.\u00a0In commission filings, Space X has said it\u00a0wants to add at least around 30,000 more satellites.\n\n\nThe developments come as a space race accelerates between the U.S. and China and as traffic in low Earth orbit becomes increasingly cluttered. China has been barred by U.S. law\u00a0from working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for a decade, and has since pursued its own increasingly bold space program. It began construction of a space station earlier this year, aiming for completion by the end of 2022.\n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n While the future of the nearly 23-year-old International Space Station remains uncertain after 2024, China says its newly equipped Tiangong station will be up and running by next year. WSJ unpacks the design and technology of both space stations. Photo: CCTV; NASA\n \n\n\nMr. Zhao cited the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which stipulates that all countries should respect and protect the safety of astronauts. He said the Chinese government notified the U.N. Secretary-General of the near misses on Dec. 3.\n\u201cThe United States keeps proclaiming the so-called concept of responsibility in outer space, but it ignores international treaty obligations and poses a serious threat to the safety of astronauts,\u201d Mr. Zhao said. \u201cThis is typical double standards.\u201d\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company Mr. Musk founded almost two decades ago, didn\u2019t immediately reply to a request for comment.\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com Beijing said the incidents occurred in July and October, and forced astronauts to take emergency action to avoid collision. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lodges Complaint After Alleged Near Collision With Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Satellites (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1128",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lodges-complaint-after-alleged-near-miss-with-elon-musks-spacex-satellites-11640704035?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=2",
        "text": "In a July presentation to the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX said it had so far launched around 1,800 Starlink satellites and was active in more than 20 countries.\n\n\n\n\nIt plans to rapidly boost the pace of satellite launches in the years ahead.\u00a0In commission filings, Space X has said it\u00a0wants to add at least around 30,000 more satellites.\n\n\nThe developments come as a space race accelerates between the U.S. and China and as traffic in low Earth orbit becomes increasingly cluttered. China has been barred by U.S. law\u00a0from working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for a decade, and has since pursued its own increasingly bold space program. It began construction of a space station earlier this year, aiming for completion by the end of 2022.\n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n While the future of the nearly 23-year-old International Space Station remains uncertain after 2024, China says its newly equipped Tiangong station will be up and running by next year. WSJ unpacks the design and technology of both space stations. Photo: CCTV; NASA\n \n\n\nMr. Zhao cited the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which stipulates that all countries should respect and protect the safety of astronauts. He said the Chinese government notified the U.N. Secretary-General of the near misses on Dec. 3.\n\u201cThe United States keeps proclaiming the so-called concept of responsibility in outer space, but it ignores international treaty obligations and poses a serious threat to the safety of astronauts,\u201d Mr. Zhao said. \u201cThis is typical double standards.\u201d\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for the company Mr. Musk founded almost two decades ago, didn\u2019t immediately reply to a request for comment.\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com Beijing said the incidents occurred in July and October, and forced astronauts to take emergency action to avoid collision. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Will Attempt to Land Rover on Mars in Coming Days (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1129",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-will-attempt-to-land-rover-on-mars-in-coming-days-11620999668?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=30",
        "text": "China plans for the 240-kilogram (529-pound) Zhurong rover\u2014named after the god of fire in ancient Chinese mythology\u2014to explore the planet for about 90 Martian days. Known as sols, days on Mars are about 39 minutes longer than days on Earth.\nIf it succeeds, it will mark a significant milestone in China\u2019s increasingly bold space program, which has made strides this year. The nation sent a core component of its new space station into orbit last month, and plans a series of other launches in coming months to target a 2022 operational date.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn exhibition in Beijing on Friday depicted Chinese rovers on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ng Han Guan/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nLanding on Mars carries considerable difficulties, and several nations have tried and failed. The only space agency that has successfully landed and operated on Mars is the U.S.\u2019s National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The U.S. has successfully operated five rovers on Mars, including Perseverance, which landed in February.\n\n\n The Soviet Union\u2019s Mars 3 lander touched down on the planet in 1971 but failed shortly after.\nMars\u2019s thin atmosphere makes descent trickier, while minutes-long communication lags means the lander, which carries the rover, is essentially on an automated track once the attempt begins. \nTianwen-1\u2019s Mars entry, descent and landing will take around nine minutes, during which the Chinese explorer\u2019s speed will be reduced from 4.9 kilometers per second (10,961 miles per hour) to zero, state-run Global Times reported, citing the probe\u2019s contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.\nThe craft will use parachutes, retrorockets and its blunt shape to reduce its speed and touch down on the planet, the CNSA has said.\nThe CNSA said Friday that the mission had already obtained a large amount of scientific data since entering Mars\u2019s orbit in February.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis image released by the China National Space Administration in March shows the surface of Mars taken by the country\u2019s Tianwen-1 probe as it orbited the planet.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com National space agency plans for the rover to explore the planet for about three months, marking a significant milestone in China\u2019s ambitious space program if it proves successful. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Will Attempt to Land Rover on Mars in Coming Days (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1130",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-will-attempt-to-land-rover-on-mars-in-coming-days-11620999668?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=22",
        "text": "China plans for the 240-kilogram (529-pound) Zhurong rover\u2014named after the god of fire in ancient Chinese mythology\u2014to explore the planet for about 90 Martian days. Known as sols, days on Mars are about 39 minutes longer than days on Earth.\n\n\n\n\nIf it succeeds, it will mark a significant milestone in China\u2019s increasingly bold space program, which has made strides this year. The nation sent a core component of its new space station into orbit last month, and plans a series of other launches in coming months to target a 2022 operational date.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn exhibition in Beijing on Friday depicted Chinese rovers on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ng Han Guan/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nLanding on Mars carries considerable difficulties, and several nations have tried and failed. The only space agency that has successfully landed and operated on Mars is the U.S.\u2019s National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The U.S. has successfully operated five rovers on Mars, including Perseverance, which landed in February.\n\n\n The Soviet Union\u2019s Mars 3 lander touched down on the planet in 1971 but failed shortly after.\nMars\u2019s thin atmosphere makes descent trickier, while minutes-long communication lags means the lander, which carries the rover, is essentially on an automated track once the attempt begins. \nTianwen-1\u2019s Mars entry, descent and landing will take around nine minutes, during which the Chinese explorer\u2019s speed will be reduced from 4.9 kilometers per second (10,961 miles per hour) to zero, state-run Global Times reported, citing the probe\u2019s contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.\nThe craft will use parachutes, retrorockets and its blunt shape to reduce its speed and touch down on the planet, the CNSA has said.\nThe CNSA said Friday that the mission had already obtained a large amount of scientific data since entering Mars\u2019s orbit in February.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis image released by the China National Space Administration in March shows the surface of Mars taken by the country\u2019s Tianwen-1 probe as it orbited the planet.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com National space agency plans for the rover to explore the planet for about three months, marking a significant milestone in China\u2019s ambitious space program if it proves successful. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Will Attempt to Land Rover on Mars in Coming Days (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1131",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-will-attempt-to-land-rover-on-mars-in-coming-days-11620999668?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=30",
        "text": "China plans for the 240-kilogram (529-pound) Zhurong rover\u2014named after the god of fire in ancient Chinese mythology\u2014to explore the planet for about 90 Martian days. Known as sols, days on Mars are about 39 minutes longer than days on Earth.\n\n\n\n\nIf it succeeds, it will mark a significant milestone in China\u2019s increasingly bold space program, which has made strides this year. The nation sent a core component of its new space station into orbit last month, and plans a series of other launches in coming months to target a 2022 operational date.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn exhibition in Beijing on Friday depicted Chinese rovers on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ng Han Guan/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nLanding on Mars carries considerable difficulties, and several nations have tried and failed. The only space agency that has successfully landed and operated on Mars is the U.S.\u2019s National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The U.S. has successfully operated five rovers on Mars, including Perseverance, which landed in February.\n\n\n The Soviet Union\u2019s Mars 3 lander touched down on the planet in 1971 but failed shortly after.\nMars\u2019s thin atmosphere makes descent trickier, while minutes-long communication lags means the lander, which carries the rover, is essentially on an automated track once the attempt begins. \nTianwen-1\u2019s Mars entry, descent and landing will take around nine minutes, during which the Chinese explorer\u2019s speed will be reduced from 4.9 kilometers per second (10,961 miles per hour) to zero, state-run Global Times reported, citing the probe\u2019s contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.\nThe craft will use parachutes, retrorockets and its blunt shape to reduce its speed and touch down on the planet, the CNSA has said.\nThe CNSA said Friday that the mission had already obtained a large amount of scientific data since entering Mars\u2019s orbit in February.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis image released by the China National Space Administration in March shows the surface of Mars taken by the country\u2019s Tianwen-1 probe as it orbited the planet.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com National space agency plans for the rover to explore the planet for about three months, marking a significant milestone in China\u2019s ambitious space program if it proves successful. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Confidence Rises in Its Military, U.S. Says (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1132",
        "date": "2019-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-confidence-rises-in-its-military-u-s-says-11547597775?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=59",
        "text": "Washington and Beijing are engaged in a trade fight, and tensions over Taiwan persist, although the official said there is no indication that China is looking to take military action anywhere soon.\n\u201cBut they are present in a lot of places and we will have to interact with them, engage with them, deal with them, monitor them more broadly than we\u2019ve ever had to before when they were very regionally focused and near their own shores.\u201d\n\n\nThe report, called \u201cChina Military Power: Modernizing a Force to Fight and Win,\u201d touches on potential threats, China\u2019s military leadership, and national military command and control, among other issues. The Pentagon separately publishes an annual report mandated by Congress on Chinese military capabilities.\nThe Defense Intelligence Agency report found that in addition to traditional military advances, China is increasingly shifting attention to emerging security domains, particularly cyber and outer space.\nThe report assessed that the People\u2019s Liberation Army remained far short of being able to deploy conventional military forces globally, but that Beijing could reach adversaries anywhere with its space, cyberspace and nuclear capabilities.\nThe report said that China had identified controlling information\u2014or so-called \u201cinformation dominance\u201d\u2014as a prerequisite for victory in a modern war. The report also warned of China\u2019s improving antisatellite capabilities that could interfere with reconnaissance and communications systems in what would amount to an attack designed to \u201cblind and deafen the enemy.\u201d\nDespite the advances, it isn\u2019t clear to U.S. analysts when the country would be in a position to pursue both its regional and global military ambitions or to contemplate possible military action toward Taiwan.\n\u201cI think we still see that there are aspects to their training and their command structure that they still need to work on,\u201d the official said.\nThe official said it is unclear whether any possible regional incursion would include amphibious ships, helicopters or airborne troops.\n\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of work that they\u2019re still doing to try to work on those capabilities and we don\u2019t have a real strong grasp on when they will think that they are confident in that capability,\u201d the official said.\nIn Beijing on Tuesday, the American Chief of Naval Operations\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adm. John Richardson\n\n\n\n met with military counterparts.\nThe Pentagon has long been concerned about China\u2019s global ambitions, most particularly in the east African nation of Djibouti, where it has established a port and military base near a large contingent of U.S. forces and drone operations in nearby Camp Lemonnier.\nWrite to Gordon Lubold at Gordon.Lubold@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com China\u2019s military ambitions have given its leaders growing confidence about their capabilities, according to a new U.S. assessment that warns that Beijing may believe it can wage a regional conflict while maintaining its expanded global presence. ",
        "author": "Gordon Lubold and Dustin Volz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Martin Deploys Augmented Reality for Spacecraft Manufacturing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1133",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockheed-martin-deploys-augmented-reality-for-spacecraft-manufacturing-1533155486?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=18",
        "text": "Yvonne Hodge, vice president and chief information officer for Lockheed Martin's space division\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lockheed Martin\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThis is a really exciting capability that can really accelerate us and make us more competitive,\u201d she said.\nThe defense contractor is among many companies exploring augmented reality particularly in manufacturing. Analysts predict enterprise use will increase sharply in the coming years. About 14.4 million U.S. workers will use \u201csmart glasses,\u201d such as Google Glass and Microsoft Corp.\u2019s HoloLens, in 2025, up from 400,000 this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. Large companies will spend $3.6 billion on smart glasses in 2025, up from $6 million in 2016, according to Forrester.\n\nLockheed\u2019s space division began experimenting and studying how to use augmented reality in production beginning five years ago.\nOver the past year, with enough expertise on the software side and advances in AR headsets, Lockheed has begun experimenting with augmented reality in the manufacturing of the Orion space vehicle, which is being built for NASA with the intention of traveling to Mars.\nBefore, for example, technicians used paper instructions or 3-D models on a computer in certain manufacturing processes of Orion. Now, instead of having to look through binders of data or content on the computer across the room, they can wear an AR device such as HoloLens, which overlays instructions for drilling or applying torque to specific parts of the spacecraft, said Shelley Peterson, augmented reality systems engineer at Lockheed Martin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOver the past year Lockheed has begun experimenting with AR in the manufacturing of the Orion space vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lockheed Martin\n \n\n\n\nThe time it takes for a technician to \u201cramp up,\u201d or to understand the drilling processes, has been reduced from eight hours to about 45 minutes using augmented reality headsets, she said. It recently took about 2 weeks to conduct a manufacturing process which involved drilling and inserting panels into the Orion spacecraft, Ms. Peterson said. That process had taken about six weeks in the past, she said.\nAugmented reality has also in some cases helped technicians to eliminate defects because following instructions has become significantly easier, Ms. Hodge said. The IT team is currently trying to track how the defect rate has improved as a result of the technology.\n\u201cWhen you look at return on investment, you\u2019re really talking about reducing cycle time and defect rate \u2026 and that\u2019s pretty exciting,\u201d Ms. Hodge said.\nLockheed Martin declined to disclose specifics on how many employees are using augmented reality, but Ms. Hodge said it\u2019s a growing emerging technology that\u2019s being put to use within the division.\nSoftware programs offered by vendors such as Scope AR don\u2019t require much coding, which makes it easier and quicker for Lockheed Martin IT workers to design 3-D representations of objects and instructions that are overlaid onto a real-world environment, Ms. Hodge said.\nThere are still technological challenges to contend with before augmented reality is deployed more widely throughout the company, she said. For example, the software that supports the headsets sometimes encounter difficulties rendering 3-D images of complex machinery with many parts and details in high resolution, because of the strain on compute processing, Ms. Hodge said.\nThe division also is experimenting with the idea of using 3-D representations of jets and weapons systems to speed up the time it takes to design defense system-related projects for military members. Lockheed\u2019s innovation center in Denver, Colo. is planning on offering customers the opportunity to visualize how certain products such as weapons systems or F-35 jets might look in a particular environment, Ms. Hodge said.\nThat would speed up the time it takes to design projects because Lockheed Martin gets faster, on-the-spot feedback and collaboration from the customer as opposed to collaborating on design requirements via white papers or emails, she said.\n\u201cThey get immersed in providing us more knowledge about what their experiences are and what their requirements are,\u201d she said. Lockheed Martin\u2019s space division is using augmented reality headsets and software to speed up the time it takes for engineers to learn about and conduct manufacturing processes on spacecraft ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Martin Deploys Augmented Reality for Spacecraft Manufacturing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1134",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockheed-martin-deploys-augmented-reality-for-spacecraft-manufacturing-1533155486?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=90",
        "text": "Yvonne Hodge, vice president and chief information officer for Lockheed Martin's space division\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lockheed Martin\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThis is a really exciting capability that can really accelerate us and make us more competitive,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\nThe defense contractor is among many companies exploring augmented reality particularly in manufacturing. Analysts predict enterprise use will increase sharply in the coming years. About 14.4 million U.S. workers will use \u201csmart glasses,\u201d such as Google Glass and Microsoft Corp.\u2019s HoloLens, in 2025, up from 400,000 this year, according to Forrester Research Inc. Large companies will spend $3.6 billion on smart glasses in 2025, up from $6 million in 2016, according to Forrester.\n\nLockheed\u2019s space division began experimenting and studying how to use augmented reality in production beginning five years ago.\nOver the past year, with enough expertise on the software side and advances in AR headsets, Lockheed has begun experimenting with augmented reality in the manufacturing of the Orion space vehicle, which is being built for NASA with the intention of traveling to Mars.\nBefore, for example, technicians used paper instructions or 3-D models on a computer in certain manufacturing processes of Orion. Now, instead of having to look through binders of data or content on the computer across the room, they can wear an AR device such as HoloLens, which overlays instructions for drilling or applying torque to specific parts of the spacecraft, said Shelley Peterson, augmented reality systems engineer at Lockheed Martin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOver the past year Lockheed has begun experimenting with AR in the manufacturing of the Orion space vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lockheed Martin\n \n\n\n\nThe time it takes for a technician to \u201cramp up,\u201d or to understand the drilling processes, has been reduced from eight hours to about 45 minutes using augmented reality headsets, she said. It recently took about 2 weeks to conduct a manufacturing process which involved drilling and inserting panels into the Orion spacecraft, Ms. Peterson said. That process had taken about six weeks in the past, she said.\nAugmented reality has also in some cases helped technicians to eliminate defects because following instructions has become significantly easier, Ms. Hodge said. The IT team is currently trying to track how the defect rate has improved as a result of the technology.\n\u201cWhen you look at return on investment, you\u2019re really talking about reducing cycle time and defect rate \u2026 and that\u2019s pretty exciting,\u201d Ms. Hodge said.\nLockheed Martin declined to disclose specifics on how many employees are using augmented reality, but Ms. Hodge said it\u2019s a growing emerging technology that\u2019s being put to use within the division.\nSoftware programs offered by vendors such as Scope AR don\u2019t require much coding, which makes it easier and quicker for Lockheed Martin IT workers to design 3-D representations of objects and instructions that are overlaid onto a real-world environment, Ms. Hodge said.\nThere are still technological challenges to contend with before augmented reality is deployed more widely throughout the company, she said. For example, the software that supports the headsets sometimes encounter difficulties rendering 3-D images of complex machinery with many parts and details in high resolution, because of the strain on compute processing, Ms. Hodge said.\nThe division also is experimenting with the idea of using 3-D representations of jets and weapons systems to speed up the time it takes to design defense system-related projects for military members. Lockheed\u2019s innovation center in Denver, Colo. is planning on offering customers the opportunity to visualize how certain products such as weapons systems or F-35 jets might look in a particular environment, Ms. Hodge said.\nThat would speed up the time it takes to design projects because Lockheed Martin gets faster, on-the-spot feedback and collaboration from the customer as opposed to collaborating on design requirements via white papers or emails, she said.\n\u201cThey get immersed in providing us more knowledge about what their experiences are and what their requirements are,\u201d she said. Lockheed Martin\u2019s space division is using augmented reality headsets and software to speed up the time it takes for engineers to learn about and conduct manufacturing processes on spacecraft ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Facebook Pursues \u2018Adversarial\u2019 Approach to AI (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1135",
        "date": "2017-04-07",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/04/07/the-morning-download-facebook-pursues-adversarial-approach-to-ai/?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=96",
        "text": "Unlike supervised learning, where a machine is trained to identify objects based on a set of human-labeled training data, adversarial networks is based on the idea that an AI system can be embedded with two neural networks: one that makes predictions and another that trains itself to tell the first one whether the prediction was good or bad, Ms. Castellanos reports. (For more, see our CIO Journal Explainer: What Is AI?) The idea is for machines to make logical inferences without requiring as much human-labeled training data. \u201cThe holy grail of AI is to get a machine to acquire common sense \u2026 and to acquire it, they must learn how the world works,\u201d said Dr. LeCun.\nDeveloping neural networks that require less data is a pursuit shared across Silicon Valley and beyond, but even that collective effort pales in comparison to the capabilities of the brain. \u201cThe number of connections in our brain is 100,000,000,000,000,\u201d Dr. LeCun tells Ms. Castellanos. \u201dWe don\u2019t have machines that are that powerful. When will we have machines that are that powerful? It\u2019s not very far in the future. It\u2019s maybe 30 years.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBlackRock gets chattier. The world\u2019s largest money manager, BlackRock Inc., has begun using a messaging platform from Symphony Communication Services LLC to communicate with other firms, reports CIO Journal\u2019s Steven Norton. The firm started using \u201ccross pod\u201d communication in February after it integrated Symphony further into its compliance processes, said Jody Kochansky, head of the asset manager\u2019s Aladdin product group. Symphony became the primary internal chat platform for the asset manager\u2019s roughly 14,000 employees in June following significant beta testing. BlackRock is piloting the cross pod functionality with \u201cmultiple\u201d counterparties, custodian and accounting agents, the company said. The firm declined to say how many people at BlackRock have used the new functionality so far.\n\nSECURITY AND PRIVACY\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n JOSH EDELSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES\n \n\n\n\nTwitter v. Homeland Security. Twitter Inc. has filed a lawsuit alleging that President Trump's administration compelled the company to reveal the identity of an account that was critical of the president, according to Recode. The lawsuit shows that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security demanded that the company reveal who was behind the account @ALT_USCIS, which had been critical of U.S. immigration policies. Twitter says the request was an unlawful use of the government's investigative powers, according to Recode.\nQuotable. Twitter says the government\u2019s request \u201cwould have a grave chilling effect on the speech of that account in particular and on the many other \u2018alternative agency\u2019 accounts that have been created to voice dissent to government policies,\" according to Recode.\nThe other side. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is the defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment on pending litigation, according to Reuters. The American Civil Liberties Union is representing the anonymous Twitter user, according to Reuters.\nAs if college parents didn\u2019t have enough stress. Internal Revenue Service data on up to 100,000 taxpayers was compromised in a breach of a college financial-aid tool. An online tool that helps families fill out the government\u2019s Free Application for Federal Student Aid form was taken offline in March after identity thieves used it to gather information to file fake tax returns, report WSJ\u2019s Richard Rubin and Douglas Belkin. About 8,000 fraudulent refunds were issued, costing about $30 million, according to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The IRS knew in September there was a potential risk in the online tool and began talking to the Education Department about it in October, he said. \u201cTo shut it down without a clear indication of criminals actually using it seemed to us that it was going to unnecessarily disadvantage millions of people who used it,\u201d he told reporters after a hearing Thursday.\nU.S. trade group hit by China-linked hackers. A website belonging to the National Foreign Trade Council was hacked by a group linked to the Chinese government. Fortune reports that hackers left\u00a0a malicious link to spyware on web pages used by NFTC members, which includes Ford Motor Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The breach was first detected five weeks ago.\nNET NEUTRALITY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFCC Chairman Ajit Pai, shown on March 8, aims to preserve the basic principles of net neutrality but shift enforcement to the Federal Trade Commission.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS\n \n\n\n\nNet neutrality fight rears up again. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai laid out preliminary plans to roll back the agency\u2019s net neutrality rules in a meeting this week with trade associations, according to several people familiar with the matter. \u201cThe conversation shows that the FCC chairman is inching closer to making his plans public, possibly as soon as this month,\u201d reports the WSJ\u2019s John D. McKinnon. The FCC didn\u2019t immediately respond to requests for comment.\nWhat it means. The plans appear to be aimed at preserving the basic principles of net neutrality but shifting enforcement to the Federal Trade Commission, while undoing what Republican critics regard as the regulatory overreach of the FCC\u2019s rules.\nWhat happened before. The FCC created the rules during the Obama administration, requiring internet service providers to treat all internet traffic the same. The regulations have been criticized by telecommunications companies, as well as Mr. Pai and other Republicans, who say the rules are heavy-handed and could discourage investment in broadband.\nWhat happens now. It remains unclear when the FCC could move forward with the planned rollback, which is sure to spark an outcry from consumer groups and some congressional Democrats. They\u2014along with some internet firms\u2014view strong net neutrality rules as crucial to maintaining competition on the internet. They are skeptical of any effort to roll back the rules. Mr. Pai\u2019s plans could begin to be adopted as soon as the FCC\u2019s monthly meeting in May, although the June meeting remains possibility, according to one person familiar with the matter.\nCLOUD\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn aerial image of Microsoft's data center in eastern Washington.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Microsoft\n \n\n\n\nTech\u2019s data-center arms race: $31.5 billion, and counting. Technology companies are spending lavishly on data centers to ensure we can shop, work, and veg out on video online. Company filings show that combined, Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google, and Microsoft Corp. doled out $31.54 billion in capital spending and leases in 2016, reports the Journal\u2019s Jay Greene. Not every dollar of that is spent on data centers that deliver infrastructure as a service but each company describes the cloud as a major investment area. \u201cInvestors are willing to tolerate the hefty tab, as they often do for energy exploration, or by telecommunications companies unfolding vast networks of fiber. That\u2019s because the potential payoff is big: a piece of the roughly $500 billion businesses spent last year on computing, storage, networking, database technology and more, according to research firm Gartner Inc.,\u201d he writes. The massive investment creates a barrier for new entrants who can\u2019t match the money.\nCan Oracle catch up?Oracle Corp. last summer unveiled cloud-infrastructure services it said will challenge Amazon yet Oracle\u2019s capital spending, which includes data-center development, in the four quarters through February was $1.7 billion. Oracle senior vice president of product marketing Steve Daheb said measuring its prowess in dollars is \u201chardly conclusive.\u201d\nMore coming. Amazon announced plans this week to build a massive collection of data centers in Stockholm, though it didn\u2019t disclose the price tag. Amazon also named Paris Ningxia, China, as future homes for its computing muscle. Microsoft plans to add locations in France, Texas, and Arizona. Google plans centers in California, Canada, and the Netherlands.\nThe cloud, now with AI. Cloud vendors Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon Web Services are recognizing a competitive edge in their AI offerings. \"There's a new generation of applications that require a lot more intense data science and machine learning. There is a race for who is going to provide the tools for that,\"\u00a0Diego Oppenheimer, CEO of Algorithmia Inc., tells Bloomberg. IDC thinks that AI may ultimately decide which vendor wins the cloud infrastructure market.\u00a0\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmployees work on the warehouse floor at an Amazon.com Inc. fulfillment center in Peterborough, U.K., on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Simon Dawson/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nThe Amazon effect.Bloomberg reports on the \"arms race\" among logistics firms and robot makers resulting from Amazon.com Inc.'s 2012 acquisition of robotics firm\u00a0Kiva Systems. One player is startup RightHand Robotics Inc., maker of a\u00a0robotic picking platform. MIT Technology Review has the story.\nVolkswagen invests $180 million in a Chinese AI startup.Mobvoi Inc., an AI firm founded by ex-Googlers, has received a $180 million investment from Volkswagen AG. Bloomberg reports that Mobvoi will develop products voice-recognition and natural language processing technology for the auto maker.\nFacebook's new AI-powered personal assistant.Facebook Inc. has launched an AI-powered digital personal assistant for iOS and Android users across the U.S., according to ZDNet. Facebook officials had previously said the AI service, which is integrated with the company's Messenger app, could help purchase items, get gifts delivered and book travel arrangements with the help of human supervision. But the automated version of M that launched Thursday offers limited functionality. ZDNet says M appears when it recognizes intent in a Messenger conversation and offers six actions for users: sending stickers, paying or requesting money, sharing your location, making plans, starting a poll and getting a ride.\nLyft raises $500 million. Ride-hailing company Lyft Inc. is completing a new $500 million funding round that sharply increases its valuation, giving it a boost as larger rival Uber Technologies Inc. reels from a series of scandals, the Journal reports. Lyft\u2019s new round puts its valuation at about $7.5 billion.\nIntel CEO recognizes pay raise. Security costs and a stock bump sent Intel Corp. CEO Brian Krzanich\u2019s compensation package up 30% to $19.1 million last year,\u00a0Bloomberg reports. Citing a TechCrunch story, Bloomberg says that the company decided to increase security service costs to $2.13 million after Mr. Krzanich said executives were facing backlash for the company's decision to spend $300 million on hiring for gender and ethnic diversity.\nThe secret life of emoji. The little characters adorning everything from your kid\u2019s texts to your company\u2019s marketing strategy can be a misunderstood lot. University of Toronto anthropologist Marcel Danesi is one of several scientists studying the meaning of emoji and their use in human interaction. Emoji can lighten an awkward situation, such as when Venmo users ask each other for payments. Flying dollar bills are among the most popular symbol used, says Venmo, which is owned by PayPal Holdings Inc. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch estimates that more than 300 million devices world-wide offer emoji technology. Most used, she said, is the \u201ctears of joy\u201d emoji. The WSJ's Ellie Kincaid and Daniela Hernandez have the story.\nFacebook to educate users on fake news.\u00a0Users will see prompts at the top of their news feeds to view tips on how to spot fakery. Among the tips: check for misspellings and strange web addresses. The company worked with nonprofit journalistic group First Draft to draw up the tips, Bloomberg reports.\nTwitter's largest shareholder to sell 30% of stock. Twitter co-founder and board member Evan Williams disclosed Thursday that he plans to sell up to 30% of his shares in the social-media company over the next year, the Journal's Deepa Seetharaman reports.\u00a0Mr. Williams, Twitter\u2019s largest individual shareholder with a 6% stake, cited personal reasons for the selling plan, which kicked off Monday.\nComcast launches a new mobile service. Comcast Corp. has launched Xfinity Mobile, a wireless service offering unlimited data plans between $45 and $65 per line, TechCrunch reports. The service will include access to Comcast's 16 million internet hotspots, and the service also includes access to Comcast's TV streaming service. The service is limited to the company's 25 million internet customers or new customers to start.\nWHAT YOUR CEO IS READING\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPluto illuminated from behind by the sun as the New Horizons spacecraft travels away from it at a distance of about 120,000 miles. On Friday, April 7, 2017, the spacecraft will reach a halfway between Pluto and its next much, much smaller stop, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nEvery week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, General interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.\nHow one 'moonshot' agency works with AI. Read a profile on any given company\u2019s cadre of artificial intelligence experts and there's bound to be a line or two describing how achingly cool they are--about how this or that member wrote the definitive paper on the Riemann hypothesis while bartending a Reyjavik death metal club... and he was only 12 at the time. Never do these profiles draw the line from all that coolness to their present job of, say, training machines to micro-target discount shoe shoppers who are most likely to own cats. The people at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab don't have to worry. On site AI staffers\u00a0are encouraged to riff on ideas that go beyond what counts as normal work at a\u00a0space agency where \u201cmoonshots\u201d are literally the business. \u00a0\"Let\u2019s just go completely nuts and say a comet is coming in from the Kuiper Belt,\u201d JPL AI head Steve Chien tells Quartz's Dave Gershgorn. \"If you harpoon it with a very elastic tether, and then you hitch a ride on it, then you have an in-situ thing sitting on an object going in a crazy elliptical orbit, god knows when it\u2019ll come back. How do you control that? It\u2019s gotta be AI.\u201d\nCEOs: Here be backstabbers. Research appears to have validated the gut-based conclusions of many leaders, from Rome\u2019s Julius Caesar to today\u2019s corporate executives. Using survey data on CEO-top manager relationships at large and midsize U.S. public companies and on\u00a0journalists with whom the survey subjects reported having communicated, researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at San Antonio concluded that today\u2019s flatterer has a decent chance of becoming tomorrow\u2019s backstabber. \"Not only did ingratiation increase the likelihood that managers would feel resentment toward the CEO, but it also increased the likelihood that they would make statements that reflected negatively on the CEO when communicating with journalists,\u201d they write in Harvard Business Review. \"These negative statements included both direct criticism and subtle forms, such as noting that the 'board is picking up the slack' or that the CEO 'recognizes their lack of experience.'\"\nThe disruption of disruption. What exactly do we mean by digital disruption these days? Disruption founder John Straw sees \u201cfive principles,\u201d ranging from the Kodak moment, brought on by the \u201crapid wholesale destruction of its consumables business,\u201d to disruptive business models as practiced by Uber Technologies Inc.\u00a0\"Value and profit become entrenched in the data sets held by the industry leaders, moving revenue away from where it\u2019s traditionally been made,\u201d Mr. Straw concludes. \"Such a profound shift can and does create social change as AI has and will continue to create unemployment in previously \u2018safe\u2019 sectors.\"\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nThe U.S. military fired a series of missiles at a Syrian\u00a0air base in response to calls for a display of force after the Assad regime was believed to have used banned chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.\u00a0(WSJ)\nThe Senate voted 52-48 along party lines to end filibusters for Supreme Court nominees after failing to end the debate on the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch. (WSJ)\nFord said it would start building electric cars in China to tap into a state-sponsored boom in green-energy vehicles. (WSJ)\nThe market isn\u2019t yet repeating the 2000 equity bubble or the 2007 debt bubble, but it has some of the worst features of both. (WSJ)\nThe Morning Download is edited by CIO Journal's Tom Loftus\u00a0and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Sara Castellanos and Kim S. Nash\u00a0contributed to today's newsletter. \u00a0Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking\u00a0http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload. The human brain, against all contemporary evidence, remains the machine to beat when it comes to intelligence. Yann LeCun, director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook Inc., this week spoke of his team\u2019s work in closing that gap. One effort involves so-called adversarial networks, which could open a path towards unsupervised learning ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: IT Charity Begins at Home (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1136",
        "date": "2018-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-it-charity-begins-at-home-1533213081?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=18",
        "text": "Trickle down IT.\u00a0\"Without optimizing how IT itself operates within a company, efforts to improve other business-side systems and processes with cloud computing, artificial intelligence, automation and other capabilities risk hitting a bottleneck that leaves the entire business lagging behind competitors, the IT consulting firm said.\u201d\nRespect yourself.\u00a0Scott Holland, Hackett\u2019s global IT executive advisory practice leader, tells Mr. Loten that companies with optimized tech departments tend to see IT 'as a valued business partner,' rather than a cost center to supply and service technology for other divisions across the company.\nLATEST FROM CIO JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOver the past year Lockheed has begun experimenting with AR in the manufacturing of the Orion space vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n LOCKHEED MARTIN\n \n\n\n\nLockheed Martin deploys augmented reality for spacecraft manufacturing.\u00a0Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s space division is using augmented reality headsets and software to speed up the time it takes for engineers to learn about and conduct manufacturing processeson spacecraft, Yvonne Hodge, the division\u2019s vice president and chief information officer,\u00a0tells CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos.\u00a0Over the past year, Lockheed has begun experimenting with augmented reality in the manufacturing of the Orion space vehicle, which is being built for NASA with the intention of traveling to Mars.\n\nTECH AND THE CITY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApple employees prepare for an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n MICHAEL SHORT/BLOOMBERG NEWS\n \n\n\n\nApple talks, Cupertino goverment walks.\u00a0Cupertino in California, home of\u00a0Apple Inc., backed down from a proposal for a per-employee tax on big companies.\u00a0The WSJ's Nour Malas reports\u00a0that the proposal faced opposition from local businesses and a direct appeal from Apple to consider alternatives. Neighbor Mountain View,\u00a0Alphabet Inc.'s hometown,\u00a0voted unanimously last month to put the same type of tax on the ballot\nLocal resistance builds to Google\u2019s \u2018smart city\u2019 in Toronto.\u00a0Suddenly the idea of a 'smart city' outfitted with smart traffic lights, smart thermostats, smart garbage-disposal units doesn't sound like a smart idea. The Alphabet project on the city's waterfront is suffering from delays and the loss of key personnel,\u00a0the Journal's Vipal Monga and\u00a0Jacquie McNish report. Meanwhile\u00a0privacy watchdogs are sniffing around.\nCYBERSECURITY\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n LEAH MILLIS/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nGOP senators reject election security bill.\u00a0Vice President Pence on Tuesday said the adminstration will\u00a0step\u00a0up efforts\u00a0to deter cyberattacks against U.S. democracy. No one told the Senate, apparently. Republican senators rejected an amendment by\u00a0Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) to provide an extra $250 million to states for election cybersecurity.\u00a0The Hill reportsthat Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee was the only GOP senator to support the bill.\nReddit hacked.\u00a0The social media website reported that a\u00a0hacker accessed user data\u00a0including \"some current email addresses\" and a 2007 database backup containing email addresses and encrypted passwords.\nMembers of renowned hacking gang arrested.\u00a0The Ukraine-based Carbanak gang chalked up success over the years in stealing troves of payment card numbers and other data from\u00a0 businesses including Whole Foods, Trump Hotels and Hudson\u2019s Bay Co.\u2019s Saks Fifth Avenue. Now three members are in custody,\u00a0Reuters reports.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople wait in line at the Google booth at the Big Data expo in Guiyang, Guizhou province, China, in May. The tech giant is said to be testing a search engine that adheres to the country\u2019s controls.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ALEKSANDAR PLAVEVSKI/EPA-EFE/REX/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK\n \n\n\n\nGoogle considering censored search engine for return to China.Google is testing a mobile version of its search engine that would adhere to China\u2019s strict controls over content, a person familiar with the matter\u00a0tells the WSJ's Douglas MacMillan. If true, the effort marks a dramatic aboutface for the company, which\u00a0abandoned its Chinese search operations in 2010 to protest the state\u2019s censorship.\nFake Facebook accounts tried to friend U.S. protest groups.\u00a0Organizers behind the newly revealed batch of fake\u00a0Facebook Inc.\u00a0accounts often sought to work alongside legitimate groups organizing rallies and protests in the U.S.\u00a0According to the Journal's Deepa Seetharaman and Robert McMillan, the effort marked a new strategy in efforts to sow discord through social media ahead of the midterm elections.\u00a0Facebook said it had removed 32 fake pages and accounts from its main platform and its Instagram photo-sharing app. It said the now-deleted pages \u201ccreated about 30 events\u201d starting in May 2017.\nFacebook\u2019s new message to WhatsApp: Make money.\u00a0WhatsApp on Wednesday detailed plans to sell advertisements and charge big companies that use its serv If you consider your primary duty as an IT executive to spearhead digital transformation across the company,  you might be doing it wrong. ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: AI Takes National Stage With White House Meeting (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1137",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-ai-takes-national-stage-with-white-house-meeting-1526043106?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=19",
        "text": "The gathering followed a template for meetings of this type: Support was offered, \u2018atta-boys\u2019 were distributed. Still, the meeting acknowledged that AI, increasingly, has become tied to something larger. \u201cOther countries are very organized,\u201d Naveen Rao, Intel Corp.\u2019s vice president and general manager of artificial intelligence,\u00a0tells the Journal\u2019s John D. McKinnon. \u201cSome of them can use government to remove barriers to technology adoption in a way we can\u2019t because we operate differently. If we don\u2019t find a way to do that here, we risk losing our edge.\u201d\nCIO JOURNAL EXCLUSIVE\n\nFord promotes Jeff Lemmer to CIO.\u00a0Ford Motor Co.\u00a0named 31-year veteran Jeff Lemmer chief information officer Thursday as the automaker continues to cut costs and works to keep pace with rivals. Mr. Lemmer\u00a0tells CIO Journal's Steven Norton\u00a0that he will oversee the continued restructuring of the global IT organization over the next 12 to 15 months, with a focus on agile processes and product-focused teams. The effort is part of Ford CEO Jim Hackett\u2019s broader mandate to cut costs and improve \u201coperational fitness\u201d across the firm.\nTECH EARNINGS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n PHOTO: THOMAS WHITE/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nMore users pony up for Dropbox.\u00a0The data-storage provider said it added about half a million paying customers in the first quarter,\u00a0the Journal\u2019s Jay Greene reports. That helped the company increase revenue by 28% in its first financial report as a public company. Dropbox said it had more than 500 million registered users of both its free and paid services.\nSymantec says annual report may be delayed.\u00a0Symantec Corp. said its financial results and forecast may change based on the outcome of an internal investigation that was initiated after concerns were raised by a former employee,\u00a0reports Reuters.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor the first time, the full cache has been made public of more than 3,000 ads that Facebook, the company logo of which is seen here in a photo illustration, said were purchased by a pro-Kremlin group.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JAAP ARRIENS/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nThousands of Russia-Linked Facebook ads released.\u00a0Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday made public for the first time the full cache of more than 3,000 ads that\u00a0Facebook Inc.\u00a0said were purchased by a pro-Kremlin group, the Internet Research Agency.\u00a0The Wall Street Journal reports\u00a0that documents show how Russian propagandists grew increasingly sophisticated in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, targeting specific regions and people with certain job titles.\nNet neutrality rules to end June 11.\u00a0After repealing Obama-era \u201cnet neutrality\u201d rules in December, the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that new rules allowing internet providers to block or slow websites as long as they disclose the practice would go into effect next month,\u00a0according to Reuters. The U.S. Senate is expected to vote as early as next week on whether to reject the repeal.\nPlease don\u2019t Skype me.\u00a0Since buying Skype from private equity investors,\u00a0Microsoft Corp.\u00a0has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market,\u00a0Bloomberg writes. That pivot has come at a price as the complexity of corporate software alienates the simplicity-driven consumer. Many Skypers say it\u2019s less intuitive and harder to use, which could be a boon for similar tools offered by the likes of\u00a0Apple Inc.\u00a0and\u00a0Alphabet Inc.'s Google.\n19th century retail giant goes e-commerce. Sears Holdings Corp.\u00a0will provide tire installation and balancing services for people who buy any brand of tire on\u00a0Amazon.com Inc., the WSJ\u2019s Aisha Al-Muslim and Suzanne Kapner report. The company also plans to make its Sears Auto Center locations a pick-up point for Amazon tire orders.\nStage set for battle over data privacy in Europe.\u00a0A battle is looming in Europe over what information Facebook, Google and other companies can demand from you. It boils down to what they really need to know\u2014a debate that could end up in courts for years.\u00a0The Journal's Sam Schechner has more.\nMusk: Rocket launches will be as routine as airline flights.\u00a0Staking out another bold space objective, Elon Musk said the latest configuration of his rocket is designed to fly as many as 10 times without any scheduled maintenance, and ultimately could be refurbished and blast off at least 100 times.\u00a0The Journal's Andy Pasztor reports\u00a0that\u00a0Mr. Musk\u2019s latest comments risk a repeat of that dynamic if the company fails to deliver. Over the years, the company has fallen short of goals to increase launch rates or complete new spacecraft on schedule.\nWHAT YOUR CEO IS READING\nEvery week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.\nWhen the killer AI comes.\u00a0The world-conquering artificial intelligence many fear likely will come from your friendly You can be forgiven if the term \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d instills a tiny feeling of existential dread\u2014a realization that the same tech promising revolution in health care also may contain the seed for less healthy outcomes for humanity in general ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: AI Takes National Stage With White House Meeting (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1138",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-ai-takes-national-stage-with-white-house-meeting-1526043106?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=75",
        "text": "The gathering followed a template for meetings of this type: Support was offered, \u2018atta-boys\u2019 were distributed. Still, the meeting acknowledged that AI, increasingly, has become tied to something larger. \u201cOther countries are very organized,\u201d Naveen Rao, Intel Corp.\u2019s vice president and general manager of artificial intelligence,\u00a0tells the Journal\u2019s John D. McKinnon. \u201cSome of them can use government to remove barriers to technology adoption in a way we can\u2019t because we operate differently. If we don\u2019t find a way to do that here, we risk losing our edge.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nCIO JOURNAL EXCLUSIVE\n\nFord promotes Jeff Lemmer to CIO.\u00a0Ford Motor Co.\u00a0named 31-year veteran Jeff Lemmer chief information officer Thursday as the automaker continues to cut costs and works to keep pace with rivals. Mr. Lemmer\u00a0tells CIO Journal's Steven Norton\u00a0that he will oversee the continued restructuring of the global IT organization over the next 12 to 15 months, with a focus on agile processes and product-focused teams. The effort is part of Ford CEO Jim Hackett\u2019s broader mandate to cut costs and improve \u201coperational fitness\u201d across the firm.\nTECH EARNINGS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n PHOTO: THOMAS WHITE/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nMore users pony up for Dropbox.\u00a0The data-storage provider said it added about half a million paying customers in the first quarter,\u00a0the Journal\u2019s Jay Greene reports. That helped the company increase revenue by 28% in its first financial report as a public company. Dropbox said it had more than 500 million registered users of both its free and paid services.\nSymantec says annual report may be delayed.\u00a0Symantec Corp. said its financial results and forecast may change based on the outcome of an internal investigation that was initiated after concerns were raised by a former employee,\u00a0reports Reuters.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor the first time, the full cache has been made public of more than 3,000 ads that Facebook, the company logo of which is seen here in a photo illustration, said were purchased by a pro-Kremlin group.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JAAP ARRIENS/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nThousands of Russia-Linked Facebook ads released.\u00a0Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday made public for the first time the full cache of more than 3,000 ads that\u00a0Facebook Inc.\u00a0said were purchased by a pro-Kremlin group, the Internet Research Agency.\u00a0The Wall Street Journal reports\u00a0that documents show how Russian propagandists grew increasingly sophisticated in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, targeting specific regions and people with certain job titles.\nNet neutrality rules to end June 11.\u00a0After repealing Obama-era \u201cnet neutrality\u201d rules in December, the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that new rules allowing internet providers to block or slow websites as long as they disclose the practice would go into effect next month,\u00a0according to Reuters. The U.S. Senate is expected to vote as early as next week on whether to reject the repeal.\nPlease don\u2019t Skype me.\u00a0Since buying Skype from private equity investors,\u00a0Microsoft Corp.\u00a0has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market,\u00a0Bloomberg writes. That pivot has come at a price as the complexity of corporate software alienates the simplicity-driven consumer. Many Skypers say it\u2019s less intuitive and harder to use, which could be a boon for similar tools offered by the likes of\u00a0Apple Inc.\u00a0and\u00a0Alphabet Inc.'s Google.\n19th century retail giant goes e-commerce. Sears Holdings Corp.\u00a0will provide tire installation and balancing services for people who buy any brand of tire on\u00a0Amazon.com Inc., the WSJ\u2019s Aisha Al-Muslim and Suzanne Kapner report. The company also plans to make its Sears Auto Center locations a pick-up point for Amazon tire orders.\nStage set for battle over data privacy in Europe.\u00a0A battle is looming in Europe over what information Facebook, Google and other companies can demand from you. It boils down to what they really need to know\u2014a debate that could end up in courts for years.\u00a0The Journal's Sam Schechner has more.\nMusk: Rocket launches will be as routine as airline flights.\u00a0Staking out another bold space objective, Elon Musk said the latest configuration of his rocket is designed to fly as many as 10 times without any scheduled maintenance, and ultimately could be refurbished and blast off at least 100 times.\u00a0The Journal's Andy Pasztor reports\u00a0that\u00a0Mr. Musk\u2019s latest comments risk a repeat of that dynamic if the company fails to deliver. Over the years, the company has fallen short of goals to increase launch rates or complete new spacecraft on schedule.\nWHAT YOUR CEO IS READING\nEvery week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.\nWhen the killer AI comes.\u00a0The world-conquering artificial intelligence many fear likely will come from your friendly-neighborhood corporation,\u00a0says the New Yorker\u2019s Tad Friend, who surveys literature, white papers and scary quotes from Stephen Hawking and philosopher Nick Bostrom for clues into humanity\u2019s fate. Corporations pay developers handsomely and they \u201clack the constitutional framework\u201d for keeping matters of this importance in check. Because building the first artificial general intelligence matters more than building the first \"safe\" one, \"the race seems designed to go to whichever company assembles the most ruthless task force.\"\nKansans not in Kansas anymore.\u00a0Mechanization has depopulated rural Kansas, leaving towns empty and smaller farmers relying on commodity markets, where they have no control over price. Native Kansan Corie Brown\u00a0takes the backroads for New Food Economy,\u00a0chalking up\u00a0 the little victories\u2014 a coffee roaster in Saint Francis (population 1,300), a well-stocked grocery store in Downs (population 844), a rebirth in organic farming\u2014in a story that likely won't end well. Gaze through the grain dust haze and what's happening in Kansas hints at dramatic demographic shifts worldwide as automation supplants humans. \"Such people will not care about the place or the land,\" says Laszlo Kulcsar, head of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at Pennsylvania State University. \"They will be people with no other options.\u201d\nAI: Alchemy or engineering?\u00a0A Google AI researcher says peers have little understanding of the field.\u00a0Science Magazine\u2019s Matthew Hutson\u00a0reports that the accusation, made by Ali Rahimi, has attracted support from some of the biggest names in the industry. \"People gravitate around cargo-cult practices,\" relying on 'folklore and magic spells,' says Fran\u00e7ois Chollet, a computer scientist at Google. For the defense, Yann LeCun, Facebook's chief AI scientist, says focusing too much time on understanding AI blunts innovation. \u201cEngineering is messy,\u201d he says.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nSome countries\u00a0are accepting quotas on their exports\u00a0to the U.S. as they strike deals with the Trump administration to avoid tariffs. (WSJ)\nThe consumer-price index rose 0.2% in April,\u00a0while average hourly pay for private-sector workers was flat\u00a0and average weekly earnings fell 0.1%, taking inflation into account. (WSJ)\nNo rest for Hollywood.\u00a0A behemoth box-office contender will open nearly every week. Han Solo and Deadpool duke it out with \u2018Jurassic World\u2019 dinosaurs and Dwayne Johnson. (WSJ)\nCritics of short-termism have it wrong: The evidence doesn\u2019t support the idea that the economy is suffering because shareholders\u2019 focus on quarterly reports leads to myopic management. (WSJ)\nThe Morning Download is edited by Tom Loftus and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. You can be forgiven if the term \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d instills a tiny feeling of existential dread\u2014a realization that the same tech promising revolution in health care also may contain the seed for less healthy outcomes for humanity in general ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: IT Drives Faster Innovation Cycle for Boeing Satellite Business (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1139",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/02/22/the-morning-download-more-tech-fewer-workers-lower-costs-of-satellite-manufacturing/?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=26",
        "text": "The company\u2019s proposed changes, spelled out in an interview by\u00a0Paul Rusnock,\u00a0who leads Boeing\u2019s satellite business, already have taken hold in the small-satellite world and shaken up that segment of the industry, the Journal reports. \u201cOur roadmaps are really focused on simplifying the overall architecture and design of satellites so they can be assembled more quickly,\u201d Mr. Rusnock said. \u201cMaking them simpler, easier to put together\u201d also reduces production glitches, he said.\nNow, internal test protocols \u201cbasically tell the spacecraft to check itself,\u201d Mr. Rusnock said. That is critical as rivals disrupt the industry. A joint venture between\u00a0Airbus\u00a0SE and OneWeb Ltd., a startup planning to offer global internet connections via satellites,\u00a0is setting up an automated assembly line in Florida to crank out hundreds of satellites a year\u2014each costing around $1 million, the Journal reports. These changes could lead to a new model for production of commercial and military aircraft, too. Similar changes are occurring throughout the manufacturing sector, as IT and automation enable new production models that are focused on faster innovation and lower costs, albeit often with fewer workers.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe logo of messaging app Snapchat is seen at a booth at TechFair LA, a technology job fair, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., January 26, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Reuters/Lucy Nicholson\n \n\n\n\nSnapchat parent kicks off pre-IPO roadshow.Decelerating user growth and threats from Facebook Inc.\u2019s Instagram shouldn\u2019t stopSnap Inc.from attaining a valuation of as much as $22 billion, the company says. Snap\u2019s chief executive, finance chief and chief strategy officer answered questions from portfolio managers and analysts at a lunch Tuesday ahead of the company\u2019s initial public offering planned for early March, according to people who attended the event,\u00a0write WSJ\u2019s Corrie Driebusch and Maureen Farrell.\u00a0The deal will be closely watched for signs of whether a largely stagnant IPO market will rebound this year.\n\nUPS tests drone delivery. United Parcel Service Inc. in a test Monday\u00a0deployed a drone from the roof of one of its trucks to deliver a package. Reuters reports that \"the drone\u00a0flew autonomously toward its destination, dropped \u00a0a package and then returned to the vehicle as the driver continued on a delivery route.\" The company provided no\u00a0timeline for mass adoption.\u00a0\nKnow your lemurs. Researchers have used a facial recognition system on lemurs, identifying individuals with 98% accuracy, Quartz reports. The system, built by George Washington University and Michigan State University, was adapted from open-source software OpenBR used to recognize humans.\nWal-Mart\u2019s in-store order pick-ups boost sales. Quarterly earnings from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., reported Tuesday, show that online shoppers who agreed to pick up goods in person helped increase sales at physical stores, the Journal reports. The big-box retailer and Home Depot Inc. bucked a shopping slump that hit Macy\u2019s Inc. and others fighting e-commerce trends.\n\u2018Thoughtfulness\u2019 matters when elected officials use social media. New York City\u2019s chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan wants to see more government tweeting and online socializing with constituents for \u201cresponsible communication,\u201d he tells CIO Journal\u2019s Sara Castellanos. \u201cAccurate, up-to-date, plain-language information\u201d is critical, he says. The city responds to 50 types of service requests on Twitter and is exploring how to use more photography and video online.\nKroger takes tech to the aisles. Grocery chain Kroger Co. is running a project called \u201cdigital shelf edge\u201d to test sensors and software that interact with shoppers as they pass with Kroger apps activated on their smartphone. CIO Chris Hjelm wants to blend physical shopping with technology to create a customer experience as seamless as e-commerce, he tells CIO Journal. \u00a0Internet of Things, data analytics and video will all play a role in supermarkets as Kroger competes with Amazon.com Inc. and other online grocery players.\nHey Google: Set up a Kubernetes cluster.Fortune reports that IT is using the Amazon Echo and Google Assistant for more than just the weather. One storage provider posted a video on how to \"use Alexa to provision storage.\" Some call the emerging concept \"VoiceOps\" and while the video demonstrations hardly register on YouTube, the practice could soon trend in IT.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nActivist investor Carl Icahn takes stake in Bristol-Myers Squibb\u00a0Co. on the same day as a board shake-up. (WSJ)\nThe Federal Reserve is due to release minutes from its latest meeting, potentially providing clues about the timing of interest-rate increases this year. (WSJ)\nUnited Parcel Service Inc. is due to start Saturday ground deliveries this week to keep up with shift to online shopping. (WSJ)\nPresident Trump tightens deportation rules, calling for 5,000 more Border Patrol agents and 10,000 immigrat More technology and fewer people mean lower costs in Boeing Co.'s satellite manufacturing program. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Lyft, Shifting into Autonomous Mode, Hires a CISO (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1140",
        "date": "2017-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-lyft-shifting-into-autonomous-mode-hires-a-ciso-1501848800?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=23",
        "text": "Lyft last month said it is forming its own autonomous-car development division that will be staffed by hundreds of engineers and technicians at new offices in Silicon Valley, a shift beyond partnerships. This week, General Motors Co., which last year invested $500 million in Lyft, hired two cybersecurity experts who are known for remotely hacking into a Jeep, a sign of emerging risks on the road to a connected future.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn aerial shot of destroyed and damaged homes after a tornado tore through the eastern neighborhood in New Orleans in February.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nUber knowingly leased unsafe cars to drivers. The ride-hailing giant last year bought 1,000 Honda SUVs in Singapore that were subject to a recall. Last year one caught on fire, nearly injuring a driver. The episode, which wasn\u2019t previously public knowledge, adds to the list of crises that unfolded at Uber Technologies Inc. on the watch of former Chief Executive Travis Kalanick. The WSJ's Douglas MacMillan and Newley Purnell have the story on how the company's breakneck growth across more than 70 countries has forced regional teams to operate without the systems and professional bureaucracy that multinational companies typically employ.\n\nResearcher credited with stopping WannaCry arrested. The FBI this week arrested British national\u00a0Marcus Hutchins over his alleged involvement in creating malware targeting personal banking information, the Guardian reports. Mr. Hutchins, a security researcher, achieved cyber fame in May after registering a website found in the code behind a worldwide ransomeware outbreak. The site ended up acting as a kill switch for the malware, the Guardian reports.\nFrom driverless cars to flying ones.\u00a0Google co-founder Larry Page\u2019s flying-car startup enlisted star Google engineer Anthony Levandowski to work on the project months before Mr. Levandowski left the tech giant last year, allegedly with trade secrets, for rival Uber Technologies Inc., the Journal's Jack Nicas reports.\u00a0Google parent\u00a0Alphabet\u00a0Inc.\u00a0is suing Uber for allegedly conspiring with Mr. Levandowski. The Journal reported in May on how Mr. Levandowski, during his time at Google,\u00a0led\u00a0outside firms related to his work on self-driving cars and other projects. He eventually sold one to his employer for about $20 million.\nBaccarat: Not just for Bond films.\u00a0People linked to\u00a02016's\u00a0$81 million Bank of Bangladesh hack, the largest cyberheist in history, used marathon baccarat sessions in Manila to launder tens of millions of dollars, Bloomberg reports. The FBI is investigating possible links to North Korea.\nTwo China tech giants wrestle over data. Huawei Technologies Co. is collecting user-activity information on its smartphone in an effort to improve its AI capability, the WSJ reports. Problem is that the information captured includes text messages sent using WeChat. App maker Tencent Holdings Ltd. contends that Huawei is effectively taking Tencent\u2019s data and violating the privacy of WeChat users. It has asked the Chinese government to intervene.\nDrones, apps, AI speed up insurance claims. About four in 10 car insurers no longer use employees to physically inspect damage in some cases, the WSJ's Nicole Friedman reports. At \u00a0insurance startup Lemonade, customers file claims by chatting with a bot, uploading relevant photos and recording videos of themselves describing the loss. The company\u2019s algorithms run 18 antifraud tests.\nFCC addresses digital divide in rural America. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday took steps to boost incentives for carriers to expand broadband service, voting to overhaul one of its existing programs for extending wireless broadband, and moving forward with redesigning another existing subsidy program, the Connect America fund, which will distribute about $2 billion over a decade, the Journal's John D. McKinnon reports.\u00a0The FCC estimates that in urban areas, 97% of Americans have access to high-speed fixed service. But in rural areas it is 65%, and 60% on tribal lands.\nSymantec sells web-certification business. Cybersecurity firm Symantec Corp. said Wednesday it has agreed to sell its website-security business to DigiCert Inc., a Utah-based web-certification firm, the WSJ's Ezequiel Minaya reports. Symantec Chief Executive Greg Clark said in prepared remarks that selling DigiCert \u201callows us to sharpen our enterprise focus\u201d on its cloud-security business.\nAuto tech race forces Toyota to go\u00a0local for IT talent.\u00a0With Silicon Valley tech expertise at a premium, Toyota Motor Co.\u00a0is leading\u00a0an aggressive talent search closer to home, targeting talent along Tokyo's\u00a0Nambu railway line, traditional home of Japan's tech companies. Bloomberg reports that the move \"is unusual in a country where lifetime employment is still the norm at many big companies.\"\nWHAT YOUR CEO IS READING\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rendering of one of the two identical Voyager spacecraft.\n\n\n Lyft has hired its first chief information security officer, who will have to address the growing risks associated with increasingly connected and autonomous vehicles, two areas central to the future of the ride-hailing company. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Lyft, Shifting into Autonomous Mode, Hires a CISO (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1141",
        "date": "2017-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-lyft-shifting-into-autonomous-mode-hires-a-ciso-1501848800?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=79",
        "text": "Lyft last month said it is forming its own autonomous-car development division that will be staffed by hundreds of engineers and technicians at new offices in Silicon Valley, a shift beyond partnerships. This week, General Motors Co., which last year invested $500 million in Lyft, hired two cybersecurity experts who are known for remotely hacking into a Jeep, a sign of emerging risks on the road to a connected future.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn aerial shot of destroyed and damaged homes after a tornado tore through the eastern neighborhood in New Orleans in February.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n GERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nUber knowingly leased unsafe cars to drivers. The ride-hailing giant last year bought 1,000 Honda SUVs in Singapore that were subject to a recall. Last year one caught on fire, nearly injuring a driver. The episode, which wasn\u2019t previously public knowledge, adds to the list of crises that unfolded at Uber Technologies Inc. on the watch of former Chief Executive Travis Kalanick. The WSJ's Douglas MacMillan and Newley Purnell have the story on how the company's breakneck growth across more than 70 countries has forced regional teams to operate without the systems and professional bureaucracy that multinational companies typically employ.\n\nResearcher credited with stopping WannaCry arrested. The FBI this week arrested British national\u00a0Marcus Hutchins over his alleged involvement in creating malware targeting personal banking information, the Guardian reports. Mr. Hutchins, a security researcher, achieved cyber fame in May after registering a website found in the code behind a worldwide ransomeware outbreak. The site ended up acting as a kill switch for the malware, the Guardian reports.\nFrom driverless cars to flying ones.\u00a0Google co-founder Larry Page\u2019s flying-car startup enlisted star Google engineer Anthony Levandowski to work on the project months before Mr. Levandowski left the tech giant last year, allegedly with trade secrets, for rival Uber Technologies Inc., the Journal's Jack Nicas reports.\u00a0Google parent\u00a0Alphabet\u00a0Inc.\u00a0is suing Uber for allegedly conspiring with Mr. Levandowski. The Journal reported in May on how Mr. Levandowski, during his time at Google,\u00a0led\u00a0outside firms related to his work on self-driving cars and other projects. He eventually sold one to his employer for about $20 million.\nBaccarat: Not just for Bond films.\u00a0People linked to\u00a02016's\u00a0$81 million Bank of Bangladesh hack, the largest cyberheist in history, used marathon baccarat sessions in Manila to launder tens of millions of dollars, Bloomberg reports. The FBI is investigating possible links to North Korea.\nTwo China tech giants wrestle over data. Huawei Technologies Co. is collecting user-activity information on its smartphone in an effort to improve its AI capability, the WSJ reports. Problem is that the information captured includes text messages sent using WeChat. App maker Tencent Holdings Ltd. contends that Huawei is effectively taking Tencent\u2019s data and violating the privacy of WeChat users. It has asked the Chinese government to intervene.\nDrones, apps, AI speed up insurance claims. About four in 10 car insurers no longer use employees to physically inspect damage in some cases, the WSJ's Nicole Friedman reports. At \u00a0insurance startup Lemonade, customers file claims by chatting with a bot, uploading relevant photos and recording videos of themselves describing the loss. The company\u2019s algorithms run 18 antifraud tests.\nFCC addresses digital divide in rural America. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday took steps to boost incentives for carriers to expand broadband service, voting to overhaul one of its existing programs for extending wireless broadband, and moving forward with redesigning another existing subsidy program, the Connect America fund, which will distribute about $2 billion over a decade, the Journal's John D. McKinnon reports.\u00a0The FCC estimates that in urban areas, 97% of Americans have access to high-speed fixed service. But in rural areas it is 65%, and 60% on tribal lands.\nSymantec sells web-certification business. Cybersecurity firm Symantec Corp. said Wednesday it has agreed to sell its website-security business to DigiCert Inc., a Utah-based web-certification firm, the WSJ's Ezequiel Minaya reports. Symantec Chief Executive Greg Clark said in prepared remarks that selling DigiCert \u201callows us to sharpen our enterprise focus\u201d on its cloud-security business.\nAuto tech race forces Toyota to go\u00a0local for IT talent.\u00a0With Silicon Valley tech expertise at a premium, Toyota Motor Co.\u00a0is leading\u00a0an aggressive talent search closer to home, targeting talent along Tokyo's\u00a0Nambu railway line, traditional home of Japan's tech companies. Bloomberg reports that the move \"is unusual in a country where lifetime employment is still the norm at many big companies.\"\nWHAT YOUR CEO IS READING\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rendering of one of the two identical Voyager spacecraft.\n\n\n Lyft has hired its first chief information security officer, who will have to address the growing risks associated with increasingly connected and autonomous vehicles, two areas central to the future of the ride-hailing company. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Your CEO Is Reading: Legacy Tech in Spaaaace; Not-So-Digital Natives (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1142",
        "date": "2017-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-your-ceo-is-reading-legacy-tech-in-spaaaace-not-so-digital-natives-1501862912?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=23",
        "text": "Legacy tech goes interstellar.\u00a0Forty years and billions of miles later, the fate of the Voyager spacecraft plying interstellar space rest in the hands of a small team of engineers, \u201cmost of whom have been with the mission since the Reagan administration,\u201d\u00a0Kim Tingley writes for the New York Times Magazine. The right stuff separating these employees from their peers, many\u00a0now retired, is their \"fluency with archaic languages,\u201d used to operate and coax data from the spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers, which have only four kilobytes of storage and \u201chave 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone.\u201d Said one engineer on his tenure. \"I would not leave Voyager to go to the new Mars missions. I will not leave Voyager until it ceases to exist. Or until I cease to exist.\u2019\u2019\nYeti with a smartphone.\u00a0\u00a0Digital natives process information no differently than the dinosaurs who can recall Windows 95 and educational institutions that built programs around the belief that young people today\u00a0were born with an innate ability to multitask run the risk of doing their\u00a0students a disservice, according to a recent study. \"The digital native is a myth it claims, a yeti with a smartphone,\"\u00a0notes a Nature editorial\u00a0on the study, adding that \"many members of the digital-savvy generation use technology in the same way as many of their elders: to passively soak up information.\u201d Companies\u00a0targeting digital natives\u00a0make note.\nRelated: The smartphone effect.\u00a0The Atlantic's Jean M. Twenge says\u00a0the combined effects of smartphones and social media are\u00a0making kids today less independent and more unhappy. \"The more time teens spend\u00a0looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.\"\n\nJeff Bezos is here to help.\u00a0The Onion, an online satire magazine,\u00a0imagines the Amazon.com Inc. CEO as an advice columnist for startups. \"Well, there\u2019s no magic involved, but the keys to success are quite simple: Value your customers, hire well, find a market that isn\u2019t being served, and realize that someday I will utterly crush you.\u201d Legacy tech goes interstellar; Yeti with a smartphone; social media's depressing side effect; Jeff Bezos is here to help. ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Your CEO Is Reading: Legacy Tech in Spaaaace; Not-So-Digital Natives (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1143",
        "date": "2017-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-your-ceo-is-reading-legacy-tech-in-spaaaace-not-so-digital-natives-1501862912?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=79",
        "text": "Legacy tech goes interstellar.\u00a0Forty years and billions of miles later, the fate of the Voyager spacecraft plying interstellar space rest in the hands of a small team of engineers, \u201cmost of whom have been with the mission since the Reagan administration,\u201d\u00a0Kim Tingley writes for the New York Times Magazine. The right stuff separating these employees from their peers, many\u00a0now retired, is their \"fluency with archaic languages,\u201d used to operate and coax data from the spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers, which have only four kilobytes of storage and \u201chave 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone.\u201d Said one engineer on his tenure. \"I would not leave Voyager to go to the new Mars missions. I will not leave Voyager until it ceases to exist. Or until I cease to exist.\u2019\u2019\nYeti with a smartphone.\u00a0\u00a0Digital natives process information no differently than the dinosaurs who can recall Windows 95 and educational institutions that built programs around the belief that young people today\u00a0were born with an innate ability to multitask run the risk of doing their\u00a0students a disservice, according to a recent study. \"The digital native is a myth it claims, a yeti with a smartphone,\"\u00a0notes a Nature editorial\u00a0on the study, adding that \"many members of the digital-savvy generation use technology in the same way as many of their elders: to passively soak up information.\u201d Companies\u00a0targeting digital natives\u00a0make note.\nRelated: The smartphone effect.\u00a0The Atlantic's Jean M. Twenge says\u00a0the combined effects of smartphones and social media are\u00a0making kids today less independent and more unhappy. \"The more time teens spend\u00a0looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.\"\n\nJeff Bezos is here to help.\u00a0The Onion, an online satire magazine,\u00a0imagines the Amazon.com Inc. CEO as an advice columnist for startups. \"Well, there\u2019s no magic involved, but the keys to success are quite simple: Value your customers, hire well, find a market that isn\u2019t being served, and realize that someday I will utterly crush you.\u201d Legacy tech goes interstellar; Yeti with a smartphone; social media's depressing side effect; Jeff Bezos is here to help. ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: IBM Earnings Reflect Rising Demand for AI, Cloud (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1144",
        "date": "2019-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-ibm-earnings-reflect-rising-demand-for-ai-cloud-01548250120?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=80",
        "text": "Where\u2019s the growth?\u00a0It\u2019s in the company\u2019s four so-called strategic imperatives. Those businesses\u2014cloud computing and data analytics, among others\u2014grew 5% in the quarter to $11.5 billion, the Journal reports. The cloud business grew 12 percent to $19.2 billion in 2018,\u00a0according to Reuters. Last fall, IBM announced it would buy\u00a0Red Hat Inc.\u00a0to boost its efforts in the cloud. It recently struck new cloud deals\u00a0with\u00a0Vodafone Group PLC\u2019s business services division\u00a0and French bank\u00a0BNP Paribas.\n\n\n\n\nCognitive leap.\u00a0\u201cThe company\u2019s cognitive software business, which houses artificial intelligence platform Watson, analytics and cybersecurity services, reported sales of $5.46 billion, compared with analysts\u2019 expectation of $5.25 billion,\u201d Reuters reports.\n\nHEARD AT DAVOS\nMarriott CEO: Not in the crosshairs.\u00a0Arne Sorenson\u00a0told CNBC\u00a0that the hotel company is \"not in a business that is super sensitive from a national security perspective. And I don't think we're going to be in anybody's crosshairs.\" Marriott in November revealed that its Starwood properties reservation database had been hit in a massive cyberattack.\u00a0The WSJ reported earlier this month\u00a0that U.S. officials familiar with the probe and independent cybersecurity researchers view China as the leading suspect.\nSaleforce.com CEO: Trainwreck in Frisco.\u00a0Marc Benioff says that San Francisco is a \"trainwreck\" of inequality and Silicon Valley is partly to blame.\u00a0\"We have to look at San Francisco and say here's the best technology example in the world and yet the worst homelessness,\"\u00a0he tells CNBC.\nFUTURE OF WORK\nCompanies manipulate online employer ranking site. Glassdoor,an important arbiter of employee sentiment, can be manipulated by employers trying to sway opinion in their favor,\u00a0a Wall Street Journal investigation shows.\nCurious spikes.\u00a0The WSJ identified more than 400 companies with unusually large single-month increases in reviews. Some companies, including Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u00a0and software giant\u00a0SAP SE, have had multiple spikes.\nDepartment of Labor: Oracle underpaid women and minorities.\u00a0A Labor Department analysis has found that the software company over several years underpaid women and minorities for a total of $400 million in lost wages,\u00a0the Guardian reports. The Labor Department released its findings on Tuesday as part of an ongoing discrimination lawsuit against\u00a0Oracle Corp.\u00a0The Guardian reports that an Oracle spokesperson declined to comment on Tuesday. In 2017,\u00a0an Oracle spokesperson told the Guardian that the allegations were \u201cwithout merit\u201d and that pay decisions were \u201cnon-discriminatory.\"\nThe Labor Department on Oracle's practices.\u00a0\"Oracle suppressed starting salaries for its female and non-White employees, assigned them to lower level positions and depressed their wages over the years they worked at Oracle.\"\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\nBud uses machine learning to detect the sound of broken beer making.\u00a0An Anheuser-Busch\u00a0InBev SA\u00a0plant in Fort Collins, Colo. is the first among the company\u2019s 350 beverage-making facilities to test whether wireless sensors that can detect ultrasonic sounds\u2014beyond the grasp of the human ear\u2014can be analyzed to predict when machines need maintenance.\u00a0The WSJ has more.\nHow it works.\u00a0Sensors placed cross three packaging lines motors pick up sounds which are transmitted in real time and then compared to a normal, functioning engine\u2019s sounds, which serve as a baseline and allow the program to identify anomalies.\nArtificial ears replace human ears. \"Sound-based predictive maintenance is becoming more important for companies, as there has been a wave of retirements among workers who were tasked with listening to machines to identify potential breakdowns, said Heiko Claussen, who leads AI innovation for the Factory Automation Business Unit of\u00a0Siemens AG.\"\nOnline bets exposed.\u00a0ZDNet reports\u00a0on a leak on a server used by an online gambling group that exposed the real names, street addresses, account balances and email addresses of bettors and betting information on some 108 million records.\nDrone halts Newark airport arrivals.\u00a0The Federal Aviation Administration halted all airplane arrivals into Newark Liberty International Airport Tuesday evening after a drone was spotted near another New Jersey airport. Planes were unable to land at Newark for about 30 minutes during one of the airport\u2019s busiest hours, an FAA spokesman\u00a0tells the WSJ.\nTech companies tie business to climate change.\u00a0Many of the largest U.S. companies participated in a study by U.K.-based Carbon Disclosure Project on some of the opportunities and risks posed by climate change.\u00a0Bloomberg reviewed\u00a0some of the submissions.\nFrom Intel: Increased operational costs. \"Many of Intel\u2019s operations are located in semi-arid regions and water-stressed areas, such as Israel, China and the southwestern United States.\"\nApple sees opportunities.\u00a0\u201cAs people begin to experience severe weather events with greater frequency, we expect an increasing need for confidence International Business Machine Corp.\u2019s\u00a0 fourth-quarter financial results reflect the continuing rise of artificial intelligence and cloud computing as central to corporate technology investment. ",
        "author": "Steve Rosenbush"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Twitter\u2019s China Shakeup Occurs Amid Rougher Global Cross Currents (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1145",
        "date": "2017-01-03",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/03/the-morning-download-twitters-china-shakeup-occurs-amid-rougher-global-cross-currents/?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=102",
        "text": "Still, there are growing tensions in the relationship between China and the U.S., particularly in the area of technology. The Obama administration said China's ability to make investments in the U.S. semiconductor industry, which is key to national security, may be curbed. And of course the incoming Trump administration has promised a more aggressive stance on trade with China. Regardless of Twitter's particular business needs in this leadership change, it occurs at a critical time of transition in the economic relationship between the two countries, especially when it comes to IT.\n\n\n\n\nSPECIAL COVERAGE: CIO JOURNAL LOOKS AHEAD TO 2017\n\nThe year ahead: Artificial intelligence drives CIO agendas. CIOs are putting a generation of cheaper and more powerful artificial intelligence to use in a range of corporate applications, automating work that people have performed and making it possible to do things that weren\u2019t possible before.\nThe year ahead: Digital transformation tops CIO agenda for 2017. As CIOs build the infrastructure for this connected, measured, analyzed real-time world, there is more emphasis on cloud and data analytics, and improved customer-facing technology. \u201cWe\u2019ll further scale and mature our use of data analytics across the enterprise,\u201d Intel Corp. CIO Paula Tolliver tells CIO Journal.\nFuture Tech: CIOs envision transporters, conference-room cars, mind readers. From hypersonic travel to devices that can read your mind and the rise of robotic exoskeletons, CIOs tell us which futuristic technologies they hope (or expect) will come to fruition by 2029.\nSPECIAL COVERAGE: CIO JOURNAL \u00a0LOOKS BACK AT 2016\nCIO top stories of 2016: Cloud, emerging technology in era of digital business. AI, Blockchain, STEM education and the cloud were among the biggest stories of the year for CIOs, as CIOs prepared corporate infrastructure for a new era of digital business.\nQuiz: Test your 2016 tech news IQ. Were you paying attention? Take the quiz.\nGadget goodness: CIOs reveal tech they love, and long for.Because CIOs aren\u2019t only about enterprise software and hyperconverged infrastructure.\nCIOs name their favorite books of 2016. We asked technology executives to share the best non-business book they read this year.\nTech vendors turn to gifts, gags and gimmicks to reach CIOs.CIOs say IT salespeople go to amazing lengths to get attention, plying them with everything from alcohol, ice cream and poetry (!) to lavish trips and a flight on a stunt plane.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTransit planners say it's only a matter of time and money until self-driving cars travel on \"smart-roads\" that communicate directly with vehicles to help them move as quickly and safely as possible.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n VDOT\n \n\n\n\nStates wire up roads as cars get smarter. Some states are setting up \u201csmart roads\u201d lined with fiber optics, cameras and connected signaling devices in an effort to unlock benefits from self-driving cars, curb accidents and save fuel.\u00a0\u201cThis transition is happening a lot quicker than we anticipated,\u201d Ronique Day,\u00a0a government transportation analyst in Virginia, tells the WSJ's Paul Page. But so far no common standard has been established for how a new generation of smartcars will receive information from smart roads\u2014or how they will handle alerts once they get them.\nSalesforce banks on rapid revenue growth.Salesforce.com Inc. has set itself a goal of doubling its annual revenue. But the business-software company faces a big obstacle in making the leap from $10 billion, which it expects to hit in its next fiscal year, to $20 billion: intensifying competition from companies such as\u00a0Microsoft\u00a0Corp., SAP SE\u00a0and\u00a0Oracle\u00a0Corp. Some analysts tell the Journal's Rachael King that they are skeptical that the company can maintain its rapid growth rate even as the overall market expands at a steady clip. Investors may start to demand that Salesforce, which has posted losses for the past five years, start turning a profit if revenue growth slows, analysts say.\nChinese access to U.S. semiconductor industry may be curbed. The Obama administration is finalizing a study that will include recommendations aimed at bolstering protection of an industry deemed critical to national security, according to people familiar with the study, the WSJ's Ian Talley reports. Among its recommendations could be a tougher stance by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, a secretive multi-agency panel that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. assets for national security threats.\nThink like a futurist to be prepared for the totally unexpected. The art and science of futuring is fast becoming a necessary skill, where we read signals, see trends and ruthlessly test our own assumptions, writes Christopher Mims.\nSpaceX launches set to resume in January. Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. said it plans to resume rocket launches on Jan. 8, using revised operational practices developed in response to a fiery accident that occurred during routine ground preparations last fall, the WSJ's Andy Pasztor reports.The tentative blastoff date for the Falcon 9 from California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base is subject to results of testing later this week, industry officials said, and still could change. But if everything checks out, Iridium Communications Inc., which has been eagerly waiting to get the first 10 of its next-generation communications satellites into orbit since the September 2016 fireball, can anticipate a launch next Sunday morning.\nCES 2017 kicks off this week. The annual Consumer Electronics Show will be held this week in Las Vegas, and The Verge reports this year's gadget extravaganza will feature a plethora of high-tech television screens, advanced drones and virtual reality headsets. Wireless headphones will reign supreme because of their market penetration last year. \"A positive reception for wireless models already on sale and Apple Inc.'s decision to pull the cord on the traditional headphone jack in its latest iPhone generation have combined to drive demand for more,\" The Verge reports.\nPearl Automation values transparency. Pearl Automation, founded by three former senior managers at Apple Inc., has attempted to replicate their former company's dedication to quality and design while, unlike Apple, also maintaining a commitment to transparency. The New York Times' Vindu Goel reports that the young car accessory company holds weekly meetings with its staff, where managers brief them on coming products, company finances, technical problems and presentations made to the board. \"It's very liberating to know what's going on. Everyone is contributing here, so everyone has a need to know,\" Pearl employee Brian Latimer told the Times.\nBitcoin's value hits $1,000. The digital currency Bitcoin has amassed a value of more than $1,000 so far this year, more than doubling its value over 2016, according to The Guardian. Analysts have said the increase is attributed to the increased demand in China on the back of a 7% decline in the value of the yuan, The Guardian reports. The currency is appealing for those worried about a shortage of cash, especially in places such as India.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nIt is corporate earnings, not Donald Trump\u2019s election, that is most likely to help sustain U.S. stocks\u2019 march in 2017. (WSJ)\nEuropean stocks opened higher and futures pointed to a small gain for U.S. markets. In currencies, the dollar strengthened while the euro fell. (WSJ)\nIndonesia\u2019s government has cut its business partnerships with J.P. Morgan Chase, faulting a recent equities downgrade by the U.S. bank, (WSJ)\nU.S. companies are preparing to invest again after years on the sidelines, and rising interest rates are unlikely to impede them. (WSJ)\nSara Castellanos and Tom Loftus\u00a0contributed to this article.\u00a0The Morning Download comes from the editors of CIO Journal and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning.\u00a0Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking\u00a0http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload. The departure of Twitter's top executive in China after only eight months on the job occurs amid growing tensions in a global relationship that is pivotal to U.S. business interests, especially when it comes to matters of information technology. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Facebook Under Fire (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1146",
        "date": "2018-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-facebook-under-fire-01545226589?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=60",
        "text": "Steve Satterfield, Facebook\u2019s director of privacy and public policy, told the Times that none of the partnerships violated users\u2019 privacy or an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. Regardless, such revelations reflect growing demands around the world for much greater public transparency and clarity into how social platforms, and today\u2019s internet, actually work.\nFor years, many people took it for granted when social platforms suggested potential friends and connections, or allowed their credentials to be conveniently used for access to other platforms and devices, or recommended a product or service, displaying uncanny insight into our deepest desires as consumers.\nAll of those capabilities are built on data. Until now, the mechanisms for collecting such data were opaque to the public, and offered on a take-it-or-leave it basis with limited meaningful opportunity to opt-in or out. There were few limits on how companies could use the data that they traded. All of that is now being renegotiated around the world, with the interests of the user coming to the fore. Any company that entertains the thought of using the personal data of its customers or employees must understand this emerging social contract.\n\nLATEST FROM CIO JOURNAL\nLift-and-shift cloud strategies can be costly.\u00a0More than 80% of on-premise enterprise workloads are overprovisioned, meaning they have more compute power, memory and storage than they will ever need to operate, Bain & Co. reports. Take those workloads and move them to the cloud and companies can actually increase the costs of running them by up to 15%. \"They\u2019re merely transferring their existing inefficiencies to a new location,\u201d says the report.\u00a0CIO Journal's Angus Loten has more.\nMUSK, ETC.\nSpace X raising money for internet service.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s rocket company,\u00a0Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, in a bid to help get\u00a0 Starlink, its nascent satellite internet service, off the ground,\u00a0the Journal's Rolfe Winkler, Andy Pasztor and Rob Copeland report.\nElon Musk invents the tunnel.\u00a0\u201cYou can think of these as wormholes,\u201d he said Monday as his company,\u00a0The Boring Co.,\u00a0unveiled a proof-of-concept tunnel under Hawthorne, Calif. \u201cYou drop down the wormhole, pop out the other side, and then you drive normally.\u201d\u00a0Quartz goes underground.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\nBlythe Masters resigns from blockchain startup.\u00a0Blythe Masters, a former banker who was one of the most high-profile executives to jump to the blockchain industry, is stepping down as chief executive of\u00a0Digital Asset Holdings LLC,\u00a0the WSJ's\u00a0Steven Russolillo reports. She was one of the most prominent female executives in a male-dominated industry.\nA banker past.\u00a0At\u00a0JPMorgan Chase & Co.\u00a0she was a pioneer behind credit-default swaps, a controversial derivative that some say contributed to the financial crisis a decade ago.\nIt was quite a trip.\u00a0After a manic surge in 2017, cryptocurrencies have lost more than 80% of their market value from their high in January\nApple stumbles in India.\u00a0The number of\u00a0Apple Inc.\u00a0iPhones shipped in India has fallen 40% so far this year compared with 2017, and Apple\u2019s market share there has dropped to about 1% from about 2%, research firm Canalys estimates. The Cupertino, Calif., company posted revenues of $1.8 billion in India this fiscal year, less than half of what executives had once hoped to capture.\nSkip India?\u00a0Are you kidding?\u00a0With 1.3 billion consumers, the country is the world\u2019s biggest untapped tech market. Just 24% of Indians own smartphones,\u00a0the WSJ's Newley Purnell and Tripp Mickle report.\nAnd in China.\u00a0After a Chinese court ordered Apple to stop selling iPhones while it studies its suspected infringement of two software patents held by\u00a0Qualcomm Inc.\u00a0the company\u00a0shipped out a software update\u00a0it says\u00a0addresses the patents in question.\nFrance ready to tax away.\u00a0While a European Union-wide plan to institute digital tax faces some resistance among members, the French government has decided to go its own way withplans to introduce a tax aimed at American tech companies on January 1,\u00a0the New York Times reports.\nTech unicorns going public at near-record pace.\u00a0The number of companies valued at $1 billion or more at the time of their initial public offerings is expected to rise next year,\u00a0the Journal's Corrie Driebusch reports. Among the firms considering 2019 IPOs:\u00a0Uber Technologies Inc.,\u00a0Lyft Inc.\u00a0and\u00a0Slack Technologies Inc.\u00a0\nKroger starts self-driving grocery delivery.\u00a0Trundling down the streets of\u00a0Scottsdale, Ariz: A cute self-driving vehicle by startup\u00a0Nuro\u00a0and loaded with groceries from the local\u00a0Kroger Co.'s Fry\u2019s Food Stores.\u00a0Reuters has more.\nUber ok'd to self-drive in Pennsylvania.\u00a0The state suspending an Uber Technologies Inc. self-driving program earlier this year following a deadly accident in Arizona,\u00a0Reuters reports.\nEurope to make multi-billion\u00a0investment in microelectronics.\u00a0The WSJ's Valentina Pop reports\u00a0that the move to allocate Until now, the mechanisms for collecting personal data by digital platforms were opaque to the public, and offered on a take-it-or-leave it basis with limited meaningful opportunity to opt-in or out. All of that is now being renegotiated around the world, with the interests of the user coming to the fore. ",
        "author": "Steve Rosenbush"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Facebook Under Fire (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1147",
        "date": "2018-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-facebook-under-fire-01545226589?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=82",
        "text": "Steve Satterfield, Facebook\u2019s director of privacy and public policy, told the Times that none of the partnerships violated users\u2019 privacy or an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. Regardless, such revelations reflect growing demands around the world for much greater public transparency and clarity into how social platforms, and today\u2019s internet, actually work.\nFor years, many people took it for granted when social platforms suggested potential friends and connections, or allowed their credentials to be conveniently used for access to other platforms and devices, or recommended a product or service, displaying uncanny insight into our deepest desires as consumers.\n\n\n\n\nAll of those capabilities are built on data. Until now, the mechanisms for collecting such data were opaque to the public, and offered on a take-it-or-leave it basis with limited meaningful opportunity to opt-in or out. There were few limits on how companies could use the data that they traded. All of that is now being renegotiated around the world, with the interests of the user coming to the fore. Any company that entertains the thought of using the personal data of its customers or employees must understand this emerging social contract.\n\nLATEST FROM CIO JOURNAL\nLift-and-shift cloud strategies can be costly.\u00a0More than 80% of on-premise enterprise workloads are overprovisioned, meaning they have more compute power, memory and storage than they will ever need to operate, Bain & Co. reports. Take those workloads and move them to the cloud and companies can actually increase the costs of running them by up to 15%. \"They\u2019re merely transferring their existing inefficiencies to a new location,\u201d says the report.\u00a0CIO Journal's Angus Loten has more.\nMUSK, ETC.\nSpace X raising money for internet service.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s rocket company,\u00a0Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, in a bid to help get\u00a0 Starlink, its nascent satellite internet service, off the ground,\u00a0the Journal's Rolfe Winkler, Andy Pasztor and Rob Copeland report.\nElon Musk invents the tunnel.\u00a0\u201cYou can think of these as wormholes,\u201d he said Monday as his company,\u00a0The Boring Co.,\u00a0unveiled a proof-of-concept tunnel under Hawthorne, Calif. \u201cYou drop down the wormhole, pop out the other side, and then you drive normally.\u201d\u00a0Quartz goes underground.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\nBlythe Masters resigns from blockchain startup.\u00a0Blythe Masters, a former banker who was one of the most high-profile executives to jump to the blockchain industry, is stepping down as chief executive of\u00a0Digital Asset Holdings LLC,\u00a0the WSJ's\u00a0Steven Russolillo reports. She was one of the most prominent female executives in a male-dominated industry.\nA banker past.\u00a0At\u00a0JPMorgan Chase & Co.\u00a0she was a pioneer behind credit-default swaps, a controversial derivative that some say contributed to the financial crisis a decade ago.\nIt was quite a trip.\u00a0After a manic surge in 2017, cryptocurrencies have lost more than 80% of their market value from their high in January\nApple stumbles in India.\u00a0The number of\u00a0Apple Inc.\u00a0iPhones shipped in India has fallen 40% so far this year compared with 2017, and Apple\u2019s market share there has dropped to about 1% from about 2%, research firm Canalys estimates. The Cupertino, Calif., company posted revenues of $1.8 billion in India this fiscal year, less than half of what executives had once hoped to capture.\nSkip India?\u00a0Are you kidding?\u00a0With 1.3 billion consumers, the country is the world\u2019s biggest untapped tech market. Just 24% of Indians own smartphones,\u00a0the WSJ's Newley Purnell and Tripp Mickle report.\nAnd in China.\u00a0After a Chinese court ordered Apple to stop selling iPhones while it studies its suspected infringement of two software patents held by\u00a0Qualcomm Inc.\u00a0the company\u00a0shipped out a software update\u00a0it says\u00a0addresses the patents in question.\nFrance ready to tax away.\u00a0While a European Union-wide plan to institute digital tax faces some resistance among members, the French government has decided to go its own way withplans to introduce a tax aimed at American tech companies on January 1,\u00a0the New York Times reports.\nTech unicorns going public at near-record pace.\u00a0The number of companies valued at $1 billion or more at the time of their initial public offerings is expected to rise next year,\u00a0the Journal's Corrie Driebusch reports. Among the firms considering 2019 IPOs:\u00a0Uber Technologies Inc.,\u00a0Lyft Inc.\u00a0and\u00a0Slack Technologies Inc.\u00a0\nKroger starts self-driving grocery delivery.\u00a0Trundling down the streets of\u00a0Scottsdale, Ariz: A cute self-driving vehicle by startup\u00a0Nuro\u00a0and loaded with groceries from the local\u00a0Kroger Co.'s Fry\u2019s Food Stores.\u00a0Reuters has more.\nUber ok'd to self-drive in Pennsylvania.\u00a0The state suspending an Uber Technologies Inc. self-driving program earlier this year following a deadly accident in Arizona,\u00a0Reuters reports.\nEurope to make multi-billion\u00a0investment in microelectronics.\u00a0The WSJ's Valentina Pop reports\u00a0that the move to alloc Until now, the mechanisms for collecting personal data by digital platforms were opaque to the public, and offered on a take-it-or-leave it basis with limited meaningful opportunity to opt-in or out. All of that is now being renegotiated around the world, with the interests of the user coming to the fore. ",
        "author": "Steve Rosenbush"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Google Researcher Seeks Breakthrough in Quantum Computing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1148",
        "date": "2017-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-google-researcher-seeks-breakthrough-in-quantum-computing-1500297978?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=90",
        "text": "Physicist John Martinis joined \nAlphabet\n\n\n Inc.\u2019s Google to solve two of the most pressing challenges in advancing this science. \u201cThe real excitement is, if you can do it efficiently, you can start solving problems that you couldn\u2019t even dream of solving on a classical computer,\u201d Dr. Martinis told CIO Journal\u2019s Sara Castellanos prior to his comments Friday at the International Conference on Quantum Technologies in Moscow. Technology executives in sectors ranging from biotechnology to automotive and materials manufacturing have announced partnerships this year with technology vendors\u00a0on quantum computing experiments, and China and other countries\u00a0have made technological leaps in quantum computing.\nDr. Martinis said his 20-person Santa Barbara-based research team is trying to solve two big problems, including the fact that qubits can\u2019t yet maintain their quantum mechanical state for more than a fraction of a second. Another major challenge is that current quantum computing systems won\u2019t continue operating in the event of a disruption. He hopes to achieve, this year, supremacy over traditional computers. \u201cQuantum supremacy is kind of step one in the plans that we have,\u201d he told Ms. Castellanos. \u201cIn the next two, three or four years, we plan to go way beyond that.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Jon Simon/IBM/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIBM unveils new mainframes.\u00a0In addition to increased speed, International Business Machines Corp. says the new systems, branded\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n Z and priced starting at $500,000, offer extra horsepower for encrypting data at all times throughout the system and automating compliance with international data regulations.\u00a0IBM is expected on Tuesday to release its second-quarter results, the WSJ's Ted Greenwald reports.\n\nFun fact. IBM has continued to update its mainframes over nearly seven decades and now holds more than 90% of the market.\nTech firms push for net neutrality rules. \u00a0A group representing tech companies including Alphabet and \nFacebook\n\n\n Inc . urged the FCC on Monday to abandon plans to reverse\u00a0 rules barring ISPs from blocking or slowing consumer access to web content, Reuters reports.\nReport says economic damage of cyberattack could match natural disaster. Reuters reports that a major, global cyber attack could trigger an average of $53 billion in losses, on par with a natural disaster such as Superstorm Sandy, citing a report written by Lloyd's of London and risk-modeling firm Cyence.\nCloud configuration error exposes Dow Jones subscribers.\u00a0About 2.2 million subscribers\u2019 records were affected, a Dow Jones spokesman said. Some of the records included customer names, usernames, email and physical addresses, and the last 4 digits of credit-card numbers, although some records were missing parts of that information, the Journal's Robert McMillan reports.\u00a0The data also included information relating to Dow Jones\u2019s Risk & Compliance service, which helps companies follow international regulations, the spokesman said\nMessaging app to boost efforts to remove terror-linked content. The co-founder of encrypted messaging app Telegram said Sunday that it will put together a team of moderators who are familiar with Indonesia\u2019s language and culture to remove terrorist-linked content after Indonesia\u2019s government limited access to the service and threatened a complete ban. The Journal's James Hookway reports that security officials there have said that suspected militants detained by police have told them that they received instructions through the app,\nMusk lays-out worst case scenario for AI threat. Artificial intelligence will threaten all human jobs and could even spark a war, \nTesla\n\n\n Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\n\n\n\n told the National Governors Association, as he called for the creation of a regulatory body to guide development of the powerful technology. Mr. Musk has been vocal about his concerns about AI and helped create OpenAI, a nonprofit research group that aims for the safe development of the technology, the WSJ's Tim Higgins reports.\nWhat he said.\u00a0\u201cIt is the biggest risk that we face as a civilization.\"\nBitcoin takes a slide. The price of the digital currency bitcoin fell over the weekend, dropping below $2,000 and farther away from its June highs, part of a broad selloff in dozens of cryptocurrencies, says the Journal's Paul Vigna.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nThe nearly two-decade global dominance by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n of the so-called single-aisle airliner market is threatened by three new competitors from China, Russia and Canada. (WSJ)\nA Republican push to pass a sweeping health-care law experienced another setback\u00a0as Senate leaders said they would delay a vote set for this week.\u00a0 (WSJ)\nEuropean stocks opened slightly higher despite a steep drop in Chinese markets, as a climb in commodity prices and a record finish on Wall Street proved supportive. (WSJ)\nSome of the toughest places to build new housing in the U.S. are older urban, low-rise neighborhoods like Venice, Calif. Brimming with tech startups, Venice hasn\u2019t gained a single housing unit in 15 years.\u00a0(WSJ)\nThe Morning Download is edited by Tom Loftus and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking\u00a0http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload. Good morning. It is said in business, perhaps too often, that you need to focus on where the puck is going, not on where the puck is at any given moment. What if the puck is headed in two directions at once? Could you model for that outcome? If so, you grasp the fundamental weirdness at the heart of quantum computing, in which bits, or qubits, aren\u2019t simply ones or zeroes, but exist in both states at once.  Physicist John Martinis joined Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google to solve two of the most pressing challenges in advancing this science. \u201cThe real excitement is, if you can do it efficiently, you can start solving problems that you couldn\u2019t even dream of solving on a classical computer,\u201d he says. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Google Researcher Seeks Breakthrough in Quantum Computing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1149",
        "date": "2017-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-google-researcher-seeks-breakthrough-in-quantum-computing-1500297978?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=118",
        "text": "Physicist John Martinis joined \nAlphabet\n\n\n Inc.\u2019s Google to solve two of the most pressing challenges in advancing this science. \u201cThe real excitement is, if you can do it efficiently, you can start solving problems that you couldn\u2019t even dream of solving on a classical computer,\u201d Dr. Martinis told CIO Journal\u2019s Sara Castellanos prior to his comments Friday at the International Conference on Quantum Technologies in Moscow. Technology executives in sectors ranging from biotechnology to automotive and materials manufacturing have announced partnerships this year with technology vendors\u00a0on quantum computing experiments, and China and other countries\u00a0have made technological leaps in quantum computing.\nDr. Martinis said his 20-person Santa Barbara-based research team is trying to solve two big problems, including the fact that qubits can\u2019t yet maintain their quantum mechanical state for more than a fraction of a second. Another major challenge is that current quantum computing systems won\u2019t continue operating in the event of a disruption. He hopes to achieve, this year, supremacy over traditional computers. \u201cQuantum supremacy is kind of step one in the plans that we have,\u201d he told Ms. Castellanos. \u201cIn the next two, three or four years, we plan to go way beyond that.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Jon Simon/IBM/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIBM unveils new mainframes.\u00a0In addition to increased speed, International Business Machines Corp. says the new systems, branded\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n Z and priced starting at $500,000, offer extra horsepower for encrypting data at all times throughout the system and automating compliance with international data regulations.\u00a0IBM is expected on Tuesday to release its second-quarter results, the WSJ's Ted Greenwald reports.\n\nFun fact. IBM has continued to update its mainframes over nearly seven decades and now holds more than 90% of the market.\nTech firms push for net neutrality rules. \u00a0A group representing tech companies including Alphabet and \nFacebook\n\n\n Inc . urged the FCC on Monday to abandon plans to reverse\u00a0 rules barring ISPs from blocking or slowing consumer access to web content, Reuters reports.\nReport says economic damage of cyberattack could match natural disaster. Reuters reports that a major, global cyber attack could trigger an average of $53 billion in losses, on par with a natural disaster such as Superstorm Sandy, citing a report written by Lloyd's of London and risk-modeling firm Cyence.\nCloud configuration error exposes Dow Jones subscribers.\u00a0About 2.2 million subscribers\u2019 records were affected, a Dow Jones spokesman said. Some of the records included customer names, usernames, email and physical addresses, and the last 4 digits of credit-card numbers, although some records were missing parts of that information, the Journal's Robert McMillan reports.\u00a0The data also included information relating to Dow Jones\u2019s Risk & Compliance service, which helps companies follow international regulations, the spokesman said\nMessaging app to boost efforts to remove terror-linked content. The co-founder of encrypted messaging app Telegram said Sunday that it will put together a team of moderators who are familiar with Indonesia\u2019s language and culture to remove terrorist-linked content after Indonesia\u2019s government limited access to the service and threatened a complete ban. The Journal's James Hookway reports that security officials there have said that suspected militants detained by police have told them that they received instructions through the app,\nMusk lays-out worst case scenario for AI threat. Artificial intelligence will threaten all human jobs and could even spark a war, \nTesla\n\n\n Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\n\n\n\n told the National Governors Association, as he called for the creation of a regulatory body to guide development of the powerful technology. Mr. Musk has been vocal about his concerns about AI and helped create OpenAI, a nonprofit research group that aims for the safe development of the technology, the WSJ's Tim Higgins reports.\nWhat he said.\u00a0\u201cIt is the biggest risk that we face as a civilization.\"\nBitcoin takes a slide. The price of the digital currency bitcoin fell over the weekend, dropping below $2,000 and farther away from its June highs, part of a broad selloff in dozens of cryptocurrencies, says the Journal's Paul Vigna.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nThe nearly two-decade global dominance by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n of the so-called single-aisle airliner market is threatened by three new competitors from China, Russia and Canada. (WSJ)\nA Republican push to pass a sweeping health-care law experienced another setback\u00a0as Senate leaders said they would delay a vote set for this week.\u00a0 (WSJ)\nEuropean stocks opened slightly higher despite a steep drop in Chinese mark Good morning. It is said in business, perhaps too often, that you need to focus on where the puck is going, not on where the puck is at any given moment. What if the puck is headed in two directions at once? Could you model for that outcome? If so, you grasp the fundamental weirdness at the heart of quantum computing, in which bits, or qubits, aren\u2019t simply ones or zeroes, but exist in both states at once.  Physicist John Martinis joined Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google to solve two of the most pressing challenges in advancing this science. \u201cThe real excitement is, if you can do it efficiently, you can start solving problems that you couldn\u2019t even dream of solving on a classical computer,\u201d he says. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Insurers Rely on Technology to Speed Payment of Harvey Claims (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1150",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-insurers-rely-on-technology-to-speed-payment-of-harvey-claims-1504614067?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=114",
        "text": "Major insurers, including San Antonio-based USAA, are flying drones to capture images and video of flooded areas difficult to reach by car or on foot. Farmers adjusters are using portable devices, including smartphones, to access geocoded mapping software to help overlay policies on aerial imagery of the affected areas, Ron Guerrier, chief information officer, said in an email. \"This situation is a big one, I can say that,\u201d said Ronnie Ringland, an infrastructure analyst who has been part of State Farm\u2019s systems catastrophe services team for 20 years.\nState Farm has received 53,000 claims related to Harvey, with 27,000 on last Tuesday alone. On a typical day, the company gets about 30,000 claims total across the U.S., a spokesman said. Residential flood loss from Harvey is estimated at up to $37 billion, according to CoreLogic Inc., a property data consultancy. Hurricane Katrina\u2019s property and casualty insurance losses amounted to $41 billion, according to Risk Management Solutions Inc.\nAs automation anxiety grows, remember we\u2019ve been here before. The rise of smart machines continue to provoke fears about life in the technological future. CIO Journal columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger reminds us that many of those anxieties are nothing new.\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Google booth at the 2016 China International Electronic Commerce Expo in Yiwu, China.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n STR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES\n \n\n\n\nGoogle seeks AI talent in China.\u00a0Alphabet Inc.'s Google\u00a0has recently posted at least four AI-related jobs on its career site in Beijing, say the WSJ's Alyssa Abkowitz and Liza Lin. Two of the jobs are related to machine learning in Google\u2019s cloud-computing operation, even though Google Cloud does not operate in the country. The company pulled back from China in 2010 over censorship concerns and after a cyberattack that Google linked to local hackers.\u00a0Even so, Google has continued to maintain some operations in China and some analysts have said they believe the company is looking to expand its presence.\nSupermarket giant seeks help from tech. Kroger Co., facing headwinds from deep-discounting chains, online grocers and Amazon.com Inc.'s rapid advance in the grocery business, is adding online ordering options and meal kits in some stores, and investing in technology to better market to consumers, says the Journal's Heather Haddon.\u00a0By the end of the year Kroger plans to allow consumers to order their groceries online for pickup in 1,000 of its stores. The grocer is also testing delivery through the third-party Shipt Inc. service and Uber drivers in some markets.\nAlexa and Siri Escalate virtual assistant battle. Apple Inc. has shifted oversight of its Siri system to Craig Federighi, its top software engineer, after five years\u00a0under the leadership of another senior vice president, Eddy Cue. The Journal's Laura Stevens and Tripp Mickle report that the move comes amid concerns that Siri, which popularized voice assistants when Apple introduced it in 2011,\u00a0has lost ground to rivals\u00a0including Alphabet's Google Assistant and Amazon.com's Alexa. Amazon is adding hundreds of engineers to the Alexa program and giving it hiring preference over other divisions, according to people familiar with the company\u2019s thinking.\nSchneider Electric takes stake in engineering software firm. French industrial group Schneider Electric SE has agreed to take control of British engineering software provider Aveva Group PLC in an effort to bolster its industrial software business and compete against rivals such as Siemens AG, the Journal's Ben Dummett and Nick Kostov report.\u00a0\u00a0Aveva provides engineering software to owners, operators and engineering contractors that operate in the power, oil-and-gas, marine and paper and pulp sectors, among others.\nU.S. reliant on Russian rockets for some time to come. Technical and funding challenges will force the Pentagon to rely on Russian-manufactured rocket engines at least through the middle of the next decade, several years longer than originally anticipated, the Journal's Andy Pasztor reports. Meanwhile United Launch\u2014a joint venture between\u00a0Lockheed Martin\u00a0Corp.\u00a0and\u00a0Boeing\u00a0Co.--entrepreneur Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and commercial startup Blue Origin LLC\u2014founded and run by\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\u00a0Chief Executive Jeff Bezos \u2014are racing to develop their own versions of a new generation of cheaper, more-capable rockets using only U.S.-made engines.\nUnited Technologies initiates history's biggest aerospace deal. Industrial conglomerate United Technologies Corp. reached a deal to pay $23 billion for\u00a0Rockwell Collins Inc., which specializes in cockpit displays and communications systems for passenger jets and the military. The Journal says the deal promises to reshape the market for aerospace parts. And it could be a harbinger of a breakup of United Technologies in the years following integration, according to people familiar with the company The epic rain and wind in east Texas has ended and water in flooded neighborhoods is subsiding, but the volume of insurance claims tied to Harvey is creating a logistical challenge of its own. Insurance companies are employing a range of technological tools to get through the work and process claims as quickly as possible for people in need. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Revelations of Russian Political Ads on Facebook, Twitter Spark Frankenstein Moment (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1151",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-revelations-of-russian-political-ads-on-facebook-twitter-spark-frankenstein-moment-1506688571?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=112",
        "text": "In this drama, Facebook\u00a0CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the Good Doctor, who doesn\u2019t appear to quite understand the power of his own remarkable creation. \u201cI don\u2019t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That\u2019s not what I stand for,\u201d he said in a statement last week. Nonetheless, Facebook has identified 5,200 Russian-backed ads. Highlights from the Journal\u2019s story: In July,\u00a0Facebook said it had no evidence that Russian entities bought ads targeted at Americans on the platform during the election season ... Twitter\u00a0said it found 201 accounts on its service linked to Russian actors that Facebook recently identified as having run ads meant to sow political and social division. In addition, Twitter said the Russian-backed news site RT, which a U.S. intelligence report said aimed to meddle in the election, bought $274,100 of ads on Twitter last year. That's compared with the $152,000 that Facebook said Russian actors spent on its site. Twitter\u2019s comments left unclear the extent of the problem, including how many accounts attempted to spread misinformation or violated Twitter\u2019s rules, and how users interacted with those tweets.\nAs the Journal notes, \u201cTwitter\u2019s announcement is likely to further heighten tensions between technology companies and regulators for how their platforms are used to spread misinformation and affect the democratic process, in ways that the companies struggle to grasp.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nAcknowledging fears, Microsoft\u2019s Nadella remains optimistic about AI.Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella, speaking at an event Wednesday, said he\u2019s aware that other high profile technology executives have warned about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence. \u201cTo me, AI can in fact bring more human empowerment, bring more inclusion so that people can fully participate in our community and society,\u201d he said.\n\nBridgestone Americas eyes growth with CIO. Stefano Mezzabotta, a former Procter & Gamble technology leader, will be responsible for steering strategy and operations at the tire maker\u2019s IT units across North and South America, the company said.\nSECURITY AND PRIVACY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhole Foods said card-payment information of customers who drank and dined in its taprooms and full-service restaurants has been hacked.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n CHRIS O'MEARA/ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nWhole Foods discloses breach. The grocery-store chain,\u00a0now part\u00a0of\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.,\u00a0said card-payment information of customers who drank and dined in its taprooms and full-service restaurants has been hacked, says the WSJ's Imani Moise. Whole Foods\u00a0said its restaurants and taprooms use a separate checkout system and information of its grocery shoppers weren\u2019t affected.\nMoscow adds facial recognition tech to citywide surveillance system.\u00a0Moscow's network of 170,000 surveillance cameras will\u00a0soon boast facial recognition technology developed by Russian startup N-Tech.Lab Ltd., Bloomberg reports.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCustomers shop for a bunk bed at IKEA. The company said it would use TaskRabbit to make it easier for customers to hire people to assemble its furniture.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG NEWS\n \n\n\n\nDigital transformation\u00a0impacts tiny wrench makers.IKEA will acquire Silicon Valley startup TaskRabbit\u2014the online marketplace that connects people with freelancers willing to do odd jobs\u2014in a move that combines the trailblazer of the flat pack with one of the gig economy\u2019s best-known exemplars. IKEA said it would use TaskRabbit to make it easier for its existing customers to assemble its furniture.\u00a0\u201cAs urbanisation and digital transformation continue to challenge retail concepts we need to develop the business faster and in a more flexible way,\u201d IKEA CEO Jesper Brodin tells Saabhira Choaudri.\nGlobal booking issue grounds airlines. Amadeus IT Group SA is blaming a \"network issue\" for delaying the departures of a number of flights Thursday morning. More than 130 airlines use the system, which helps manage reservations and other capabilities, Bloomberg says.\nIBM employs more people in India than anywhere else. And the work there spans the gamut, says the New York Times, \"from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to performing cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars.\" All told about one-third of the company's work force, 130,000 people, work in India.\nMusk lays out Mars plans. Elon Musk sketched out his aggressive vision of private space exploration by his company SpaceX\u2014complete with technical details of capsules larger than superjumbo airliners and the basis of a business plan to pay for it\u2014at an international astronautics conference in Australia on Friday. The Journal's Andy Pasztor has the story.\nMars.\u00a0Mr. Musk projected first trips to the red planet by\u00a02022 or 2024.\nAnd a new rocket to get there. SpaceX\u2019s next-generation rocket is expected to featur Reports of Russian manipulation of Facebook and Twitter during the 2016 presidential campaign have sparked a  Frankenstein moment, a realization that somehow, the experiment worked, creating something that is both more powerful and less governable that we imagined. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: SpaceX\u2019s Broadband Plan Takes Off (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1152",
        "date": "2018-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-spacexs-broadband-plan-takes-off-1518701476?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=72",
        "text": "FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Wednesday recommended approving Mr. Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s plan to provide internet service through huge arrays of earth-orbiting satellites, the Journal reports, calling it \"a move that could expand broadband availability across the U.S. and beyond.\" Highlights from the story by John D. McKinnon and Andy Pasztor:\nQuestions linger, as they are wont to do. \"The move gives a boost to the firm, known as SpaceX, and its founder, entrepreneur Elon Musk ... But questions still linger over the broadband project, and SpaceX officials have provided few details in public comments. SpaceX has said it plans to launch its first prototype satellite as early as this year aboard one of the company\u2019s own rockets.\"\nThere is no bottleneck in outer space. The proposed approval would be the first given to an American-based company to provide broadband services using a new generation of low-earth-orbit satellites, according to the Journal. \"Over the past year, the FCC has approved similar requests by OneWeb, Space Norway and Telesat of Canada to provide broadband in the U.S. using satellite technology. Those approvals have been the first of their kind. The FCC continues to process other similar requests,\" the Journal said.\n\nSECURITY AND PRIVACY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA computer hacked by a computer worm known as \u2018Petya\u2019 in June 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n SOROKIN DONAT/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nU.K. says Russia behind Petya cyberattack that crippled global firms. Wednesday\u2019s allegations by London represented the first time a major Western government has pinned blame on Moscow for the June incident, the Journal's Stu Woo reports. The Petya cyberattack crippled computer networks at multinational firms including FedEx Corp., container-ship giant A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S and pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co.\u00a0The U.K. didn\u2019t provide specific evidence for its conclusion that Russia was to blame.\nDon't trust Huawei, intel chiefs say. The directors of six separate U.S. intelligence agencies warned Americans not to use products from China's Huawei Technologies Co.,\u00a0a global leader in telecommunications. CNBC reports that the comments came during Tuesday's Senate\u00a0Intelligence Committee meeting.\u00a0Huawei\u00a0was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former engineer for China\u2019s communist People\u2019s Liberation Army.\nTECH EARNINGS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES\n \n\n\n\nCisco to bring $67 billion to U.S. after new tax law. Cisco Systems Inc. plans to spend much of the newly repatriated cash on share buybacks and dividends, the Journal's Austen Hufford and Jay Greene report. Tax law critics have said increases in share repurchases and dividends show money saved from the law is going to shareholders instead of being invested in new U.S. jobs, infrastructure, research and development, and related areas. Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. all said in their earnings calls in recent weeks that the ability to more easily access overseas cash hasn\u2019t changed their spending plans.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEuropean Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Jan. 18, 2018.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThanks to GDPR, DPOs are so hot right now. As the world prepares for the May rollout of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which gives citizens more control over their online data, the data protection officer is trending, How hot? Reuters has the numbers.\nTime to update your c.v. \"More than 28,000 will be needed in Europe and U.S. and as many as 75,000 around the globe as a result of GDPR, the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) estimates. \"\nThe Ubers and Microsofts of the world take notice. \"The need for DPOs is expected to be particularly high in any data-rich industries, such as tech, digital marketing, finance, healthcare and retail.\"\nBut why?\u00a0\"GDPR requires that DPOs assist their companies on data audits for compliance with privacy laws, train employees on data privacy and serve as the point of contact for European regulators. Other provisions of the law require that companies make personal information available to customers on request, or delete it entirely in some cases, and report any data breaches within 72 hours.\"\nGoogle Chrome to block some ads (not Google's). Starting on Thursday, Google\u2019s Chrome browser will block certain types of online advertisements, including spammy pop-ups. The Journal's Douglas MacMillan reports that some in the ad industry find Google's move self-serving as it generates most of its revenue from text search ads and rectangular display ad--formats not included in the black list.\nET researchers\u00a0compete\u00a0with cryptocurrency miners for GPUs. Gamers aren't the only ones hurting from the cryptocurrency miners' craze for GPUs.\u00a0 Researchers associated with the\u00a0Search for Extraterrestrial Intelli All too often, the limitations of networking remain the bottleneck in a technology ecosystem that is rapidly evolving. Neural networking, artificial intelligence and the cloud are progressing fast. Yet without a strong network, the full benefits of emerging technology are hard to realize. It sounds like a problem for Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: SpaceX\u2019s Broadband Plan Takes Off (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1153",
        "date": "2018-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-spacexs-broadband-plan-takes-off-1518701476?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=101",
        "text": "FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Wednesday recommended approving Mr. Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s plan to provide internet service through huge arrays of earth-orbiting satellites, the Journal reports, calling it \"a move that could expand broadband availability across the U.S. and beyond.\" Highlights from the story by John D. McKinnon and Andy Pasztor:\nQuestions linger, as they are wont to do. \"The move gives a boost to the firm, known as SpaceX, and its founder, entrepreneur Elon Musk ... But questions still linger over the broadband project, and SpaceX officials have provided few details in public comments. SpaceX has said it plans to launch its first prototype satellite as early as this year aboard one of the company\u2019s own rockets.\"\n\n\n\n\nThere is no bottleneck in outer space. The proposed approval would be the first given to an American-based company to provide broadband services using a new generation of low-earth-orbit satellites, according to the Journal. \"Over the past year, the FCC has approved similar requests by OneWeb, Space Norway and Telesat of Canada to provide broadband in the U.S. using satellite technology. Those approvals have been the first of their kind. The FCC continues to process other similar requests,\" the Journal said.\n\nSECURITY AND PRIVACY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA computer hacked by a computer worm known as \u2018Petya\u2019 in June 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n SOROKIN DONAT/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nU.K. says Russia behind Petya cyberattack that crippled global firms. Wednesday\u2019s allegations by London represented the first time a major Western government has pinned blame on Moscow for the June incident, the Journal's Stu Woo reports. The Petya cyberattack crippled computer networks at multinational firms including FedEx Corp., container-ship giant A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S and pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co.\u00a0The U.K. didn\u2019t provide specific evidence for its conclusion that Russia was to blame.\nDon't trust Huawei, intel chiefs say. The directors of six separate U.S. intelligence agencies warned Americans not to use products from China's Huawei Technologies Co.,\u00a0a global leader in telecommunications. CNBC reports that the comments came during Tuesday's Senate\u00a0Intelligence Committee meeting.\u00a0Huawei\u00a0was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former engineer for China\u2019s communist People\u2019s Liberation Army.\nTECH EARNINGS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES\n \n\n\n\nCisco to bring $67 billion to U.S. after new tax law. Cisco Systems Inc. plans to spend much of the newly repatriated cash on share buybacks and dividends, the Journal's Austen Hufford and Jay Greene report. Tax law critics have said increases in share repurchases and dividends show money saved from the law is going to shareholders instead of being invested in new U.S. jobs, infrastructure, research and development, and related areas. Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. all said in their earnings calls in recent weeks that the ability to more easily access overseas cash hasn\u2019t changed their spending plans.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEuropean Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, Jan. 18, 2018.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThanks to GDPR, DPOs are so hot right now. As the world prepares for the May rollout of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which gives citizens more control over their online data, the data protection officer is trending, How hot? Reuters has the numbers.\nTime to update your c.v. \"More than 28,000 will be needed in Europe and U.S. and as many as 75,000 around the globe as a result of GDPR, the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) estimates. \"\nThe Ubers and Microsofts of the world take notice. \"The need for DPOs is expected to be particularly high in any data-rich industries, such as tech, digital marketing, finance, healthcare and retail.\"\nBut why?\u00a0\"GDPR requires that DPOs assist their companies on data audits for compliance with privacy laws, train employees on data privacy and serve as the point of contact for European regulators. Other provisions of the law require that companies make personal information available to customers on request, or delete it entirely in some cases, and report any data breaches within 72 hours.\"\nGoogle Chrome to block some ads (not Google's). Starting on Thursday, Google\u2019s Chrome browser will block certain types of online advertisements, including spammy pop-ups. The Journal's Douglas MacMillan reports that some in the ad industry find Google's move self-serving as it generates most of its revenue from text search ads and rectangular display ad--formats not included in the black list.\nET researchers\u00a0compete\u00a0with cryptocurrency miners for GPUs. Gamers aren't the only ones hurting from the cryptocurrency miners' craze for GPUs.\u00a0 Researchers associated with the\u00a0Search for Extraterrestrial Int All too often, the limitations of networking remain the bottleneck in a technology ecosystem that is rapidly evolving. Neural networking, artificial intelligence and the cloud are progressing fast. Yet without a strong network, the full benefits of emerging technology are hard to realize. It sounds like a problem for Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Businesses Confront Post-Smartphone Mobility (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1154",
        "date": "2019-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-businesses-confront-post-smartphone-mobility-01547470488?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=80",
        "text": "Does that mean that people are smarter again? True, there's been a growing awareness that smartphones can be addictive, spur anxiety and cause distraction. But the bigger idea is that every thing else is getting smarter. \"Functions are now flying out of phones and onto other products with their own embedded smart connections,\" they write.\nA new challenge for business. \"What\u2019s shifted,\" they write, \"is the smartphone\u2019s monolithic status as the device that software companies and businesses needed to reach mobile users\u2014and for consumers to access their services.\u201d Businesses, having just mastered mobility, are facing a new tech landscape, where the focus is less about shoving tech into any one device and more about surrounding users with it. More on that below.\n\n\n\n\nLATEST FROM CIO JOURNAL\n\nBeyond machine learning: Capturing cause-and-effect relationships.\u00a0Companies using machine learning to identify that needle-in-the-haystack bit of business insight could learn from the scientists who succeeded in locating the smallest needle of them all, the Higgs boson particle.\u00a0CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger explains.\nAFTER THE SMARTPHONE\nThe race for the next big thing.\u00a0Venture-capital investors are spraying money into fields like virtual reality, driverless cars and even implants in the brain.\u00a0The WSJ's Eliot Brown looks\u00a0at\u00a0some of the startups attracting investment, from augmented reality company\u00a0Magic Leap, to\u00a0Paradromics, which aims to build a cortex-connected device that could control prosthetics or send vision signals to a blind person.\nIn fast-aging Japan, elder care is a high-tech pursuit.\u00a0In a country with one of the world\u2019s fastest-growing elderly populations and a tight labor market, the demand for senior care is driving innovation and spawning startups,\u00a0the WSJ's\u00a0Suryatapa Bhattacharya reports.\nA young market for aging customers.\u00a0Of the 92 Japanese startups seeking to be valued at $1 billion or more, 25 are focused on health care with much of the backing coming not from VC, but large companies looking for growth businesses.\nInnovation for the aged.\u00a0Meet cardiologist and videogame fan Masahiko Hara who developed a system for stroke rehabilitation that takes a cue from augmented-reality games such as Pok\u00e9mon Go.\nTech to the rescue of the small farmer.\u00a0Startups and future-forward small farmers are exploring how technology, including computer vision and robotic milking machines, could reduce tedious, routine work while cutting down on the use of fossil fuel, fertilizer and feed.\u00a0The New York Times reports\u00a0on small farm tech.\nImagine no iPhone (I wonder if you can).\u00a0Writes the Journal's John Stoll. \"If history is any indication ...\u00a0 America\u2019s favorite handheld device will someday take up residence with the digital camera, the calculator, the pager, Sony\u2019s Walkman and the Palm Pilot in a museum.\"\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\nAlphabet unit tests new system to identify airborne drones.\u00a0The Journal's Andy Pasztor explains\u00a0that the concept\u00a0is aimed at tracking different types of drones using disparate software applications linked by a common web-based system. By sharing such data, the companies say the location of drones and identity of operators can be captured easily.\nAirports look to drone tech.\u00a0The capability to identify and track unmanned aircraft has sparked concern recently in the wake of drone sightings that disrupted airline traffic at\u00a0two major hubs\u00a0in the United Kingdom: London\u2019s Heathrow and Gatwick airports.\nPoland urges NATO allies to coordinate against China cybersecurity challenges.\u00a0Polish Interior Minister Joachim Brudzinski on Saturday echoed U.S. exhortations of allies to exclude\u00a0Huawei Technologies Co., and other Chinese hardware makers from their telecommunications systems.\u00a0The WSJ's Daniel Michaels\u00a0reports that Poland\u2019s Internal Security Agency on Friday detained a Chinese national employed by Huawei and a Polish citizen previously employed by the Polish intelligence service on allegations of espionage. The Chinese national,\u00a0Wang Weijing, was fired by Huawei\u00a0on Saturday. Huawei also said Mr. Wang \u201chas brought Huawei into disrepute.\u201d\u00a0the Journal's\u00a0Dan Strumpf reports.\nSpaceX to cut 10% of Workforce.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u00a0plans to reduce its workforce by 10%, or roughly 600 employees,\u00a0the WSJ's Andy Pasztor reports. The cuts come even as the company seeks to ramp up ambitious projects to develop a super-powerful rocket and deploy thousands of advanced satellites.\nPutting the 'chain' in blockchain.\u00a0China's cyber regulatory agency is requiring that blockchain owners require participants to submit their real names and telephone or national ID numbers,\u00a0Reuters reports.\nAlphabet sued over executive exit.\u00a0A lawsuit says board members breached their fiduciary duties in approving a $90 million exit package for Andy Rubin, then under investigation for sexual harrassement,\u00a0the New York Times reports.\nNailed it.\u00a0PriNail from\u00a0Japan's Koizumi Seiki Corp.\u00a0is a $500 toaster-sized de Businesses, having just mastered mobility, are facing a new tech landscape, where the focus is less about shoving tech into any one device and more about surrounding users with it. ",
        "author": "Tom Loftus"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: CIOs Say AI Is Changing More Elements of Business (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1155",
        "date": "2017-03-06",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/03/06/the-morning-download-cios-say-ai-is-changing-more-elements-of-business/?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=98",
        "text": "Chemical giant Olin Corp. makes use of AI in its massive supply chain, according to CIO Christy Barker. \"It drives down costs and speeds up processing,\" she said. Rackspace makes use of AI to improve security in ways that people can't on their own, CTO John Engates said. While much of AI's development as a general form of human-like intelligence remains in the speculative future, its role as a practical tool in the present is very real, and growing in influence.\n\n\n\n\nMachine learning and knowledge discovery. Machine learning is now so hot that those working in the field must be extra careful to avoid another round of hype and unfulfilled promises, Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger explains. They must set realistic expectations for what machine learning can accomplish, and explain its strengths and limitations, including when it\u2019s use is called for and when other AI tools might be more appropriate.\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmployees work on the automated assembly line at the Siemens electronics factory in Amberg, Germany. Siemens is among the companies working on digital platforms for industry.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n MARTIN LEISSL/BLOOMBERG\n \n\n\n\nGE and Siemens vie to reinvent manufacturing. Germany's Siemens AG and its larger U.S. rival General Electric Co. are duking it out to create the definitive \"Internet of Things\" cloud platform for industry, the Journal's Christopher Alessi writes. \"The question is who will create and dominate a realm of technology that promises both to become the backbone of industrial automation and provide mountains of data about everything from parts inventories to how products are wearing long after their purchase.\"\nIT will play a huge role in the development of both firms' industrial platforms. Helmuth Ludwig, Siemens global head of IT, recently told CIO Journal he is helping the company roll out its MindSphere platform across its factories. Similarly, GE CIO Jim Fowler has said he hopes to drive $700 million worth of gross productivity gains by the end of the year, a goal he plans to accomplish by developing new ways to use its Predix industrial platform.\nBlockchain, everywhere. This week, shipping giant Maersk is expected to announce it's using International Business Machines Corp.'s blockchain technology to track items it carries on its cargo ships, the New York Times reports. It is yet another example of how the tech behind the virtual currency bitcoin is being applied to real-world problems like tracking pork chops and shipping containers across global supply chains. (For an introduction to the technology, see our CIO Explainer.)\nBut that's not all. Rival Microsoft Corp. said last week it's working with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and other corporate giants on a blockchain system that competes against IBM's, the Times reports. And CIO Journal's Kim S. Nash has chronicledWal-Mart Stores Inc.'s work with IBM's blockchain to track pork and produce.\nThe big question: how will these blockchain visions take shape? \u201cWe believe with 100 percent certainty that it\u2019s going to matter,\u201d Mark Russinovich, the head of Microsoft\u2019s blockchain efforts, tells the NYT. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of where\u2019s its going to matter and how it\u2019s going to matter.\u201d\nWhite House tech vacancies may affect cybersecurity. President Trump has yet to replace the federal CIO and CISO, a gap that worries technology and security experts, writes The Christian Science Monitor. Lack of leadership makes it more difficult to update IT infrastructure, which puts federal systems at greater risk for being breached, they say. Until early this year, Tony Scott was CIO and retired Brigadier General Gregory Touhill, who was CISO, left early this year. Margie Graves is acting CIO.\nU.S. suspends fast-track H-1B visas. Starting April 3, the U.S. will suspend for up to six months so-called premium processing of H-1B work visa petitions, writes Computerworld. The government said it hopes to clear a backlog of petitions built up over the past few years.\nHow Uber deceives authorities. To fool regulators in markets where its ran up against the law, Uber Technologies Inc. created software to identify and mislead officials, the New York Times reports. The software, called Greyball, tapped into \"GPS rings\" the company set around government offices. Geographical data combined with the tracking of low-cost --i.e. government-issued phones -- credit cards tied to city agencies and actually \"eyeballing\" people who frequently opened and closed the app, helped Uber identify\u00a0regulators targeting its drivers.\nUtilities\u00a0go virtual. Utilities are building virtual powerplants that knit together solar panels, lithium batteries and software in an effort to manage solar\u00a0power and feed it into the power grid as needed, the Journal's Cassandra Sweet reports.\nAn antidote to the gutter.\u00a0To combat trolling, a\u00a0site published by the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK just rolled out a system that gives readers a brief multiple-choice quiz about the contents of an article\u2014proving they really read it\u2014before allowing them to comment, WSJ Columnist Christopher Mims writes.\nJeff Bezos expected to unveil plans for private space exploration. Blue Origin, the burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com Inc. chairman Jeff Bezos, this week is expected to disclose new customers and share further details about\u00a0its family of reusable rockets, the Journal's Andy Pasztor reports.\u00a0Plans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one version roughly half as powerful as the Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals with powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nChatbot gives free legal aid to asylum seekers. The DoNotReply chatbot on Facebook Inc.'s Messenger can help immigrants file asylum applications in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, reports The Guardian.\u00a0The bot was created by a Stanford University student to help users adjudicate parking fines.\nCyber quote of the day.\u00a0\u201cPot meet kettle,\u201d said John Zody,\u00a0chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party, upon news of Vice President Mike Pence's use of private email while governor. Mr. Pence had\u00a0harshly criticized Democrat\u00a0Hillary Clinton\u2019s email practices during the 2016 presidential campaign.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nOil prices fell Monday with market participants blaming lower growth forecasts in China and signs that U.S. oil producers are continuing to ramp up activity. (WSJ)\nCharity officials increasingly get million-dollar paydays, according to newly searchable IRS data. (WSJ)\nPresident Trump is expected to sign a new order on travel bans Monday, scaling back his previous policy. (WSJ)\nWe're all sometimes internet trolls, says researchers who found that our mood and previous exposure can make us twice as likely to troll online. (WSJ)\nKim S. Nash and Steven Norton contributed to this article.\u00a0The Morning Download comes from the editors of CIO Journal and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning.\u00a0Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking\u00a0http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload. Artificial intelligence is a growing part of the every-day IT infrastructure of the corporate world for a variety of situations, including supply chain, policing, and security, CIOs at the annual WSJ CIO Network conference said last week. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: AI Push Drives Talent Moves From Microsoft and Baidu (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1156",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/17/the-morning-download-ai-push-drives-talent-moves-from-microsoft-and-baidu/?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=103",
        "text": "As Microsoft moved to incorporate Maluuba\u2019s\u00a050 employees\u00a0into its 5,000-strong AI division, created last September,\u00a0Baidu Inc.\u00a0announced\u00a0Tuesday\u00a0that\u00a0Qi Lu, a former Microsoft executive and architect of CEO Satya Nadella\u2019s AI and bots strategy, would help lead its own AI efforts,\u00a0Bloomberg reports.\nAutonomous driving technology and sassy AI chatbots certainly guide some of today\u2019s AI talent chase, which also includes\u00a0Salesforce.com Inc.\u2019s acquisition of\u00a0MetaMind\u00a0in April and\u00a0Apple Inc.\u2019s August acquisition of\u00a0Turi Inc.,\u00a0but so does weaving artificial intelligence into the most mundane of activities, including corporate search.\u00a0In a blog post\u00a0announcing the Maluuba acquisition,\u00a0Harry Shum, head of Microsoft\u2019s AI research, described how the technology, by sifting through emails and other documents, could help people identify an employee with specific knowledge. \u201cThe agent would be able to answer your question in a company security-compliant manner by having a deeper understanding of the contents of your organization\u2019s documents and emails, instead of simply retrieving a document by keyword matching,\u201d he writes.\u00a0IT executives, bedeviled for decades by corporate search, may welcome this application of AI talent.\nWal-Mart names GE Power\u2019s Clay Johnson CIO.Wal-Mart Stores Inc. named GE Power Chief Information Officer Clay Johnson enterprise chief information officer and executive vice president for global business services, part of a larger reorganization of its corporate IT and e-commerce groups. Wal-Mart\u2019s new Global Business Services division combines cybersecurity, back-office solutions and global shared services groups under a single umbrella, led by Mr. Johnson. He succeeds CIO Karenann Terrell, who is leaving in February after five years in the position. Jeremy King, who oversaw a multi-year project to overhaul e-commerce systems from packaged and proprietary software to open-source systems, takes over the technology organizations for both stores and online business.\n\nPentagon CIO to retire. Terry Halvorsen, who as the Pentagon\u2019s chief information officer sought to ramp up the agency\u2019s data-center consolidation efforts and shift more workloads to the cloud, is retiring at the end of February, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed Friday. Current principal deputy CIO, John Zangardi, is expected to step in as acting CIO, the spokesman said.\nConcerns on AI\u2019s economic impact are in a class by themselves. The internet generated a fair degree of hype, especially in the dot-com era of the late 1990s, but the overriding feelings were ones of hope and excitement. Not so with AI, says Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Along with admiration for its considerable accomplishments, there are serious fears that AI advances will lead to massive job losses, economic dislocations and social unrest.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMeg Whitman said technological innovations would solve climate-change, medical and agricultural issues, but would also eliminate jobs regardless of the age and class of workers.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS\n \n\n\n\nHP CEO says robotics, AI kill jobs. Corporations and academia must collaborate to address the problem of automation eliminating jobs, Meg Whitman, chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Monday, the WSJ reports. Technology can solve deep problems, including climate change, but the transition from old to new jobs will also cause shifts in the type and geographical location of employment, she said.\nLenovo thought it knew how to fix tarnished brands. Success with a deal for International Business Machines Corp. personal computers led China\u2019s Lenovo Group Ltd. to underestimate the difficulty of reviving smartphone company Motorola Mobility, which it acquired in 2014 for $2.91 billion. Two years later Lenovo has axed at least 2,000 U.S. jobs. It has fallen to as low as No. 8 globally in the smartphone world, from No. 3. \u201cWe underestimated the differences of the culture and the business model,\u201d CEO Yang Yuanqing confesses to the Journal's Kathy Chu and Juro Osawa.\nSpaceX makes a comeback. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket Saturday, rebounding from a catastrophic accident in September, the WSJ's Andy Pasztor and Rolfe Winkler report. The rocket, launching from central California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base, carried 10 Iridium Communications Inc. satellites\u00a0 SpaceX once again landed the lower part of the rocket back on a floating platform\u2014this time in the Pacific Ocean. That return landing is part of a goal to save money by reusing major components in multiple launches.\nFacebook looks to ward off strict regulation in Germany.Facebook Inc. sent senior leaders to Germany, which is a tough critic of the social network, to discuss doing more to address false news reports and hate speech, Reuters reports. Germany is expected to pass leg Artificial intelligence is the new front in the technology talent war as Microsoft, Baidu, Salesforce.com, Apple and others compete for executives and the startups they run. ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: AI Push Drives Talent Moves From Microsoft and Baidu (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1157",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/17/the-morning-download-ai-push-drives-talent-moves-from-microsoft-and-baidu/?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=133",
        "text": "As Microsoft moved to incorporate Maluuba\u2019s\u00a050 employees\u00a0into its 5,000-strong AI division, created last September,\u00a0Baidu Inc.\u00a0announced\u00a0Tuesday\u00a0that\u00a0Qi Lu, a former Microsoft executive and architect of CEO Satya Nadella\u2019s AI and bots strategy, would help lead its own AI efforts,\u00a0Bloomberg reports.\nAutonomous driving technology and sassy AI chatbots certainly guide some of today\u2019s AI talent chase, which also includes\u00a0Salesforce.com Inc.\u2019s acquisition of\u00a0MetaMind\u00a0in April and\u00a0Apple Inc.\u2019s August acquisition of\u00a0Turi Inc.,\u00a0but so does weaving artificial intelligence into the most mundane of activities, including corporate search.\u00a0In a blog post\u00a0announcing the Maluuba acquisition,\u00a0Harry Shum, head of Microsoft\u2019s AI research, described how the technology, by sifting through emails and other documents, could help people identify an employee with specific knowledge. \u201cThe agent would be able to answer your question in a company security-compliant manner by having a deeper understanding of the contents of your organization\u2019s documents and emails, instead of simply retrieving a document by keyword matching,\u201d he writes.\u00a0IT executives, bedeviled for decades by corporate search, may welcome this application of AI talent.\n\n\n\n\nWal-Mart names GE Power\u2019s Clay Johnson CIO.Wal-Mart Stores Inc. named GE Power Chief Information Officer Clay Johnson enterprise chief information officer and executive vice president for global business services, part of a larger reorganization of its corporate IT and e-commerce groups. Wal-Mart\u2019s new Global Business Services division combines cybersecurity, back-office solutions and global shared services groups under a single umbrella, led by Mr. Johnson. He succeeds CIO Karenann Terrell, who is leaving in February after five years in the position. Jeremy King, who oversaw a multi-year project to overhaul e-commerce systems from packaged and proprietary software to open-source systems, takes over the technology organizations for both stores and online business.\n\nPentagon CIO to retire. Terry Halvorsen, who as the Pentagon\u2019s chief information officer sought to ramp up the agency\u2019s data-center consolidation efforts and shift more workloads to the cloud, is retiring at the end of February, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed Friday. Current principal deputy CIO, John Zangardi, is expected to step in as acting CIO, the spokesman said.\nConcerns on AI\u2019s economic impact are in a class by themselves. The internet generated a fair degree of hype, especially in the dot-com era of the late 1990s, but the overriding feelings were ones of hope and excitement. Not so with AI, says Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Along with admiration for its considerable accomplishments, there are serious fears that AI advances will lead to massive job losses, economic dislocations and social unrest.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMeg Whitman said technological innovations would solve climate-change, medical and agricultural issues, but would also eliminate jobs regardless of the age and class of workers.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS\n \n\n\n\nHP CEO says robotics, AI kill jobs. Corporations and academia must collaborate to address the problem of automation eliminating jobs, Meg Whitman, chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Monday, the WSJ reports. Technology can solve deep problems, including climate change, but the transition from old to new jobs will also cause shifts in the type and geographical location of employment, she said.\nLenovo thought it knew how to fix tarnished brands. Success with a deal for International Business Machines Corp. personal computers led China\u2019s Lenovo Group Ltd. to underestimate the difficulty of reviving smartphone company Motorola Mobility, which it acquired in 2014 for $2.91 billion. Two years later Lenovo has axed at least 2,000 U.S. jobs. It has fallen to as low as No. 8 globally in the smartphone world, from No. 3. \u201cWe underestimated the differences of the culture and the business model,\u201d CEO Yang Yuanqing confesses to the Journal's Kathy Chu and Juro Osawa.\nSpaceX makes a comeback. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket Saturday, rebounding from a catastrophic accident in September, the WSJ's Andy Pasztor and Rolfe Winkler report. The rocket, launching from central California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base, carried 10 Iridium Communications Inc. satellites\u00a0 SpaceX once again landed the lower part of the rocket back on a floating platform\u2014this time in the Pacific Ocean. That return landing is part of a goal to save money by reusing major components in multiple launches.\nFacebook looks to ward off strict regulation in Germany.Facebook Inc. sent senior leaders to Germany, which is a tough critic of the social network, to discuss doing more to address false news reports and hate speech, Reuters reports. Germany is expected to pass Artificial intelligence is the new front in the technology talent war as Microsoft, Baidu, Salesforce.com, Apple and others compete for executives and the startups they run. ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Waymo Self-Driving Platform Recalls Google\u2019s Android Model in Mobile (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1158",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/09/the-morning-download-waymo-self-driving-platform-recalls-googles-android-model-in-mobile/?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=102",
        "text": "\u201cWhat we\u2019re bringing to market is a self-driving technology platform,\u201d John Krafcik, head of Waymo and former head of Hyundai Motor Co. in the U.S., said in a speech in Detroit at the North American International Auto Show. This \u201cwill allow us to deliver products and services that make getting around safe and easy for everyone. Some of these we may do on our own; some we may work on with partners.\u201d The sensor package will include Waymo's own laser sensors, known as lidar, as well as cameras and radar. The software in development now for years is capable of full autonomy, Mr. Krafcik said.\nThe question now is to what extent Alphabet and a handful of other tech giants such as Uber Technologies Inc. will be able to dominate the auto market, where car makers are ever mindful of how the failure to master the game of dueling software platforms hurt mobile phone makers. Car companies are, in essence, device makers in the next great emerging mobile market, based on autonomous, connected and digital vehicles. Given the amount of time, effort and cash that car companies have invested in developing their autonomous car efforts, on display in Detroit this week and at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, it appears a much more competitive battle looms this time around.\n\n\n\n\nMacy's girds for digital era. The retailer plans to close 63 stores this spring and cut 10,000 jobs amid a similar restructuring of its operations. The move is expected to save the retail giant roughly $550 million a year, about half of which it now plans to funnel into its digital business and other growth strategies, a company spokeswoman tells CIO Journal.\u00a0Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, said companies like Macy\u2019s that embrace digital technology eventually reach a breaking point and are forced to reorganize.\u201cWe will see a lot more organizational upheaval, staff anxiety and ghost town storefronts in the next five years,\u201d said Mr. Schadler, referring to the broader retail industry.\n\nSecuring the foundations of our digital economy. Having led the development and deployment of the internet, the U.S. now has the opportunity to lead in securing the cyberspace foundations of our growing digital economy, writes Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. A recent presidential commission called for the private sector and government to work together in building a roadmap for improving the security and robustness of digital networks.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApple has achieved dominance through design and execution. Shown, MacBook Pro laptops after their launch in October.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n GETTY IMAGES\n \n\n\n\nWhy Apple's critics are right this time. Apple Inc. appears to be having an execution problem with its cloud software, its MacBooks and, most notably, artificial intelligence. The company's early efforts with Siri has been surpassed by Amazon.com Inc. and Google's own AI-based software. \"AI isn\u2019t just a curiosity for the company; it is the technology most likely to disrupt Apple as thoroughly as Apple disrupted the smartphone industry,\"\u00a0says Journal Columnist Christopher Mims. In related new Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone ten years ago today, the BBC writes.\nApple lowers CEO pay after missed targets. Under CEO Tim Cook, Apple has more than quadrupled research and development spending; it spent more than $10 billion on R&D last year. But it has failed to release a runaway hit, the WSJ's Tripp Mickle reports. The company said in a regulatory filing Friday that annual sales of $215.6 billion were 3.7% below target. Mr. Cook\u2019s total 2016 compensation dropped to $8.75 million for the year, down 15% from $10.3 million in the year earlier. Apple\u2019s five-most senior executives also saw their total compensation fall for fiscal 2016, according to Friday\u2019s filing.\nWhite House warns against Chinese investment in U.S. semiconductor industry. A\u00a0report prepared by the President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology advises that\u00a0the U.S. \u00a0bolster protection of the American semiconductor industry as a national-security imperative against a Chinese plan to dominate the sector.\u00a0The brief, which cites a $160 billion plan by Beijing to establish China as a global leader in the semiconductor industry, comes as the U.S. semiconductor industry\u00a0faces a wave of consolidations,\u00a0the WSJ's Ian Talley reports. The Chinese government and its industries see that as an opportunity.\nRegulators eye data companies in wake of Microsoft, LinkedIn deal. Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times of actions by regulators aimed at recognizing the ever-growing power of so-called \"digital\" platform companies such as Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google and Facebook Inc., who are leveraging troves of user information collected through their online shopping and AI efforts for other services. The fear is that as big internet companies gather more data, network effects may prevent users and businesses from moving away from the dominant digital platforms.\nUber to share some ride data. Uber Technologies Inc. will start releasing its anonymized data from dozens of global cities showing average travel times from one point to another, information gleaned from millions of trips. The company, which has tussled with regulators from Seattle to Paris to keep its ridership data private, said the data can be a resource for urban planners to analyze traffic patterns and make more informed decisions about civic infrastructure. As the WSJ's Greg Bensinger notes, anything the company can do to speed traffic flow allows it to collect more passengers, who might otherwise use yellow cabs or public transportation.\nWeather delays SpaceX launch. Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies has delayed a planned return to flight after five months for another week owing to bad weather and predictions of continuing storms around a central California launch complex, the Journal's Andy Pasztor reports.\u00a0The latest schedule calls for blastoff of a Falcon 9 rocket, carrying 10 satellites for\u00a0Iridium Communications\u00a0Inc.,\u00a0from Vandenberg Air Force Base next Saturday morning.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nUtilities are closing U.S. nuclear-power plants as they face competition from cheaper sources of electricity and political pressure from critics. (WSJ)\nFiat Chrysler\u2019s move to invest $1 billion in U.S. plants comes as auto makers are facing heat from the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to manufacture more vehicles in the U.S. (WSJ)\nBanking and energy stocks led the decline, despite positive economic data from Germany, and sterling slumped to its lowest level since October against the dollar. (WSJ)\nFrench police have arrested 17 people in connection with the armed robbery of U.S. reality-TV star Kim Kardashian in Paris three months ago. (WSJ)\nTom Loftus\u00a0contributed to this article.\u00a0The Morning Download comes from the editors of CIO Journal and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning.\u00a0Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking\u00a0http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload. The question now is to what extent Alphabet and a handful of other tech giants will be able to dominate the auto market, where car makers are ever mindful of how the failure to master the game of dueling software platforms hurt mobile phone makers. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Silicon Valley Business Culture Goes Viral (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1159",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/04/the-morning-download-silicon-valley-business-culture-goes-viral/?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=94",
        "text": "\u201cCompanies that transition from a more traditional business model to one built around technology and IT must adopt a management practice that can support this evolution,\u201d Dave Webb, global chief information officer of Equifax Inc. says.\u00a0Other large corporations from insurer Liberty Mutual to consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co., are making similar changes. At Equifax,\u00a0senior\u00a0leadership roles in the product and business units are being filled by former divisional chief information officers. They are broadening the use of so-called agile management techniques, known for shorter and more frequent development cycles that make use of customer data. Equifax says such changes are helping it move beyond its core credit-reporting service.\nTraditional hierarchies are being challenged in the process.\u00a0A few years into her stint running P&G\u2019s operations in Asia, Deb Henretta riled her leadership team by insisting that a young, data analyst attend monthly strategy meetings.\u00a0\u201cHe created algorithms that helped us look at early trends that were starting to indicate a business problem,\u201d she says, citing reports that synthesized sell-through, customer information, market share and other data flowing into the company through recently deployed digital tools.\u00a0 Says Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. \"Once digital reaches a certain percentage of your business, you have to reorganize.\"\nTECH EARNINGS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nTesla's 2016 sales drive comes up a bit short.Tesla Motors Inc.\u2019s fourth-quarter sales rose 27% to 22,000 vehicles, compared with 17,478 a year earlier, the Journal's Tim Higgins reports. Alas it was not enough for the company to reach its goal of 80,000 vehicles for the year. Instead the final tally was 76,230 cars and sport-utility vehicles. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk was aiming for a strong finish to 2016 to help keep investor confidence ahead of the introduction this year of the new Model 3, a $35,000 sedan intended to broaden Tesla\u2019s business beyond luxury cars and SUVs.\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n BEN SKLAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nAutomation's impact on the routine job. The share of Americans working in\u00a0a relatively narrow set of repeated tasks, such as welding-machine operators or bank tellers,\u00a0has fallen from 40.5% in 1979 to 31.2% in 2014, according to new research. Many workers who would typically have held such jobs are taking on\u00a0lower-paying low-skill manual work or simply dropping out of the labor force, says the WSJ's Lauren Weber, citing findings\u00a0from the paper, \u201cDisappearing Routine Jobs.\u201d\nQualcomm to invest in SoftBank\u2019s new technology fund. The $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, announced in October, made more news last month when CEO Masayoshi Son met with President-elect\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0in New York and pledged to\u00a0invest $50 billion in the U.S.\u00a0and create thousands of jobs, the Journal's Liz Hoffman and Ted Greenwald report.\nIntel buys 15% stake in German auto makers\u2019 digital-map venture. Intel Corp. and Here International B.V., acquired in 2015 from Nokia by\u00a0BMW AG, Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG\u2019s\u00a0Audi\u00a0unit, aim to jointly develop technology needed to support the real-time updates of traffic and road conditions that are used to enable and ensure the safety of fully automated vehicles, says the Journal's William Boston. The companies also said they plan to explore other business opportunities to develop services that use location data generated by the vehicles and their passengers.\nUber's India challenge. Uber Technologies Inc. has about 400,000 drivers on its platform in India, and wants to add one million in the next two years, the WSJ's Newley Purnell writes. While mobilizing an army of drivers is crucial, it is particularly tough in a country where less than 5% of households own cars and few potential drivers understand English or how to use an app.\nSpaceX launches will resume. Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will resume rocket launches on Jan. 8 after a months-long hiatus, WSJ's Andy Pasztor reports. The tentative blastoff date for the Falcon 9 from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base is subject to results of testing later this week. SpaceX will be using revised operational practices developed in response to a fiery accident that occurred during routine ground preparations in September 2016.\nTax advantages for Airbnb users in U.K. A new investigation reveals that Airbnb\u00a0Inc.\u00a0can offer travelers tax advantages in the U.K., according to the Guardian and the Financial Times. About one third of the savings the company offers on accommodations in London comes from having a lower tax bill, according to The Guardian. Traditional hotels have to pay expensive business rates on their property and they charge travelers taxes on the entire cost of the stay.\nUber and Lyft could slash nee Large corporations are adopting those social aspects of the tech world, and not just within their IT departments. In many cases, these changes are moving all the way up to the level of CEO ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Silicon Valley Business Culture Goes Viral (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1160",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/04/the-morning-download-silicon-valley-business-culture-goes-viral/?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=134",
        "text": "\u201cCompanies that transition from a more traditional business model to one built around technology and IT must adopt a management practice that can support this evolution,\u201d Dave Webb, global chief information officer of Equifax Inc. says.\u00a0Other large corporations from insurer Liberty Mutual to consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble Co., are making similar changes. At Equifax,\u00a0senior\u00a0leadership roles in the product and business units are being filled by former divisional chief information officers. They are broadening the use of so-called agile management techniques, known for shorter and more frequent development cycles that make use of customer data. Equifax says such changes are helping it move beyond its core credit-reporting service.\nTraditional hierarchies are being challenged in the process.\u00a0A few years into her stint running P&G\u2019s operations in Asia, Deb Henretta riled her leadership team by insisting that a young, data analyst attend monthly strategy meetings.\u00a0\u201cHe created algorithms that helped us look at early trends that were starting to indicate a business problem,\u201d she says, citing reports that synthesized sell-through, customer information, market share and other data flowing into the company through recently deployed digital tools.\u00a0 Says Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. \"Once digital reaches a certain percentage of your business, you have to reorganize.\"\n\n\n\n\nTECH EARNINGS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nTesla's 2016 sales drive comes up a bit short.Tesla Motors Inc.\u2019s fourth-quarter sales rose 27% to 22,000 vehicles, compared with 17,478 a year earlier, the Journal's Tim Higgins reports. Alas it was not enough for the company to reach its goal of 80,000 vehicles for the year. Instead the final tally was 76,230 cars and sport-utility vehicles. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk was aiming for a strong finish to 2016 to help keep investor confidence ahead of the introduction this year of the new Model 3, a $35,000 sedan intended to broaden Tesla\u2019s business beyond luxury cars and SUVs.\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n BEN SKLAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nAutomation's impact on the routine job. The share of Americans working in\u00a0a relatively narrow set of repeated tasks, such as welding-machine operators or bank tellers,\u00a0has fallen from 40.5% in 1979 to 31.2% in 2014, according to new research. Many workers who would typically have held such jobs are taking on\u00a0lower-paying low-skill manual work or simply dropping out of the labor force, says the WSJ's Lauren Weber, citing findings\u00a0from the paper, \u201cDisappearing Routine Jobs.\u201d\nQualcomm to invest in SoftBank\u2019s new technology fund. The $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, announced in October, made more news last month when CEO Masayoshi Son met with President-elect\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0in New York and pledged to\u00a0invest $50 billion in the U.S.\u00a0and create thousands of jobs, the Journal's Liz Hoffman and Ted Greenwald report.\nIntel buys 15% stake in German auto makers\u2019 digital-map venture. Intel Corp. and Here International B.V., acquired in 2015 from Nokia by\u00a0BMW AG, Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG\u2019s\u00a0Audi\u00a0unit, aim to jointly develop technology needed to support the real-time updates of traffic and road conditions that are used to enable and ensure the safety of fully automated vehicles, says the Journal's William Boston. The companies also said they plan to explore other business opportunities to develop services that use location data generated by the vehicles and their passengers.\nUber's India challenge. Uber Technologies Inc. has about 400,000 drivers on its platform in India, and wants to add one million in the next two years, the WSJ's Newley Purnell writes. While mobilizing an army of drivers is crucial, it is particularly tough in a country where less than 5% of households own cars and few potential drivers understand English or how to use an app.\nSpaceX launches will resume. Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will resume rocket launches on Jan. 8 after a months-long hiatus, WSJ's Andy Pasztor reports. The tentative blastoff date for the Falcon 9 from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base is subject to results of testing later this week. SpaceX will be using revised operational practices developed in response to a fiery accident that occurred during routine ground preparations in September 2016.\nTax advantages for Airbnb users in U.K. A new investigation reveals that Airbnb\u00a0Inc.\u00a0can offer travelers tax advantages in the U.K., according to the Guardian and the Financial Times. About one third of the savings the company offers on accommodations in London comes from having a lower tax bill, according to The Guardian. Traditional hotels have to pay expensive business rates on their property and they charge travelers taxes on the entire cost of the stay.\nUber and Lyft could slash Large corporations are adopting those social aspects of the tech world, and not just within their IT departments. In many cases, these changes are moving all the way up to the level of CEO ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Infosys, Feeling Pressure on Global Outsourcers, Plans to Hire 10,000 in U.S. (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1161",
        "date": "2017-05-02",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/05/02/the-morning-download-infosys-feeling-pressure-on-global-outsourcers-plans-to-hire-hire-10000-in-u-s/?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=83",
        "text": "\"The move comes at a time when Infosys and some of its Indian peers such as Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Ltd. have become political targets in the United States for allegedly displacing U.S. workers' jobs by flying in foreigners on temporary visas,\" Reuters reports. The temporary visas, under the H-1B program, have been been targeted by President Donald Trump, sparking a fierce response from U.S. tech firms that say they have trouble competing for scarce tech talent and that the temporary workers are crucial to their ability to innovate and compete. President Trump signed an order calling for changes in the program in April, the WSJ reported.\nOther governments such as Australia also have been targeting India-based outsourcing firms that are users of temporary visas, according to Reuters. That pressure seems to have an effect on companies such as Infosys, which is applying for fewer visas and is making more of an effort to hire locally. \"Hiring locally is a compulsion and its not just because of what's happening in the U.S.,\" Harit Shah, research analyst at Reliance Securities, told Reuters. \"The model itself is not sustainable.\"\nUPS CIO Juan Perez adds engineering to his portfolio. United Parcel Service Inc. CIO Juan Perez has added engineering to his responsibilities as the company looks to reorganize itself in an effort to speed up innovation and automate its logistics network. Mr. Perez, now the company\u2019s chief information and engineering officer as of April 24, will oversee a group of 15,000 information technology and engineering employees.\u201cWe intend, through this change, to organize our groups in a way that we can advance our technology strategy at a much faster pace,\u201d Mr. Perez tells CIO Journal. His new responsibilities come as the company looks for a return on the billions of dollars it has invested in modernizing the technology of its network.\n\nINFRASTRUCTURE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe platform at Delancey Street/Essex for the F train\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ALLISON PASEK/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nNew York subway operates on ancient signaling system. That New York City\u2019s famous subway system runs on signaling systems predating World War II should not surprise the millions who rely on the system each day. But what the New York Times digs up on the MTA\u2019s effort to replace antiquated block signaling technology with a computerized system is enough to shock the most jaded straphanger: \u201cIn 1997, officials said that every line would be computerized by this year. By 2005, they had pushed the deadline to 2045, and now even that target seems unrealistic.\u201d\nMANAGEMENT\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoxes stand during construction at the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, April 3, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Michael Short/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nTomorrow's workplace today, courtesy of new tech HQs. The future of work is already playing out in the new tech HQs currently in the works by Silicon Valley giants such as Apple Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc., the Economist writes.\nMoving away from the fixed workstation. At Salesforce.com\u2019s new tower in San Francisco, the top two floors will be reserved \u201cas an airy lounge for employees, where they can work communally and gaze out at the views over a latt\u00e9.\u201d\nFocus on transparency. Secretive Uber Technologies Inc. is planning for \u201can entirely see-through head office. It is expected to have some interior areas, as well as a park, that will be open to the public.\u201d\nFocus on transparency [scary-AI edition].Nvidia Corp.\u2019s AI will monitor employee arrival and departures, \u201cwith the ostensible aim of adjusting the building\u2019s heating and cooling systems.\u201d\nPlease, no. LinkedIn\u2019s new building in San Francisco \u201cincludes a \u2018silent disco\u2019, where people can dance to music with headphones on.\u201d\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket carrying a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office lifts off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., May 1, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX delivers spy satellite. A Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket Monday took off from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center with a classified payload for the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office, the Journal\u2019s Andy Pasztor reports. The mission marks the fourth successful launch since the Falcon 9 returned to service in January, following a four-month lapse prompted by an explosion on the launchpad last September.\nSentencing software under review. The United States Supreme Court has expressed interest in a Wisconsin case where an individual\u2019s sentencing was determined by a private company\u2019s proprietary software, the New York Times reports. The defendant, who was sentenced to six years in 2016, said the use of the algorithm violated his right to due process. Software maker Northpointe tells the NYT that its algorithms are proprietary and \u201cwe don\u2019t relea Infosys Ltd. said it plans to hire 10,000 workers in the U.S. and open four U.S.-based technology centers, an apparent response to the pressure that India-based IT outsourcing firms face from President Donald Trump\u2019s administration and other governments. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Infosys, Feeling Pressure on Global Outsourcers, Plans to Hire 10,000 in U.S. (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1162",
        "date": "2017-05-02",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/05/02/the-morning-download-infosys-feeling-pressure-on-global-outsourcers-plans-to-hire-hire-10000-in-u-s/?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=123",
        "text": "\"The move comes at a time when Infosys and some of its Indian peers such as Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Ltd. have become political targets in the United States for allegedly displacing U.S. workers' jobs by flying in foreigners on temporary visas,\" Reuters reports. The temporary visas, under the H-1B program, have been been targeted by President Donald Trump, sparking a fierce response from U.S. tech firms that say they have trouble competing for scarce tech talent and that the temporary workers are crucial to their ability to innovate and compete. President Trump signed an order calling for changes in the program in April, the WSJ reported.\nOther governments such as Australia also have been targeting India-based outsourcing firms that are users of temporary visas, according to Reuters. That pressure seems to have an effect on companies such as Infosys, which is applying for fewer visas and is making more of an effort to hire locally. \"Hiring locally is a compulsion and its not just because of what's happening in the U.S.,\" Harit Shah, research analyst at Reliance Securities, told Reuters. \"The model itself is not sustainable.\"\n\n\n\n\nUPS CIO Juan Perez adds engineering to his portfolio. United Parcel Service Inc. CIO Juan Perez has added engineering to his responsibilities as the company looks to reorganize itself in an effort to speed up innovation and automate its logistics network. Mr. Perez, now the company\u2019s chief information and engineering officer as of April 24, will oversee a group of 15,000 information technology and engineering employees.\u201cWe intend, through this change, to organize our groups in a way that we can advance our technology strategy at a much faster pace,\u201d Mr. Perez tells CIO Journal. His new responsibilities come as the company looks for a return on the billions of dollars it has invested in modernizing the technology of its network.\n\nINFRASTRUCTURE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe platform at Delancey Street/Essex for the F train\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ALLISON PASEK/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nNew York subway operates on ancient signaling system. That New York City\u2019s famous subway system runs on signaling systems predating World War II should not surprise the millions who rely on the system each day. But what the New York Times digs up on the MTA\u2019s effort to replace antiquated block signaling technology with a computerized system is enough to shock the most jaded straphanger: \u201cIn 1997, officials said that every line would be computerized by this year. By 2005, they had pushed the deadline to 2045, and now even that target seems unrealistic.\u201d\nMANAGEMENT\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoxes stand during construction at the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, April 3, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Michael Short/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nTomorrow's workplace today, courtesy of new tech HQs. The future of work is already playing out in the new tech HQs currently in the works by Silicon Valley giants such as Apple Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc., the Economist writes.\nMoving away from the fixed workstation. At Salesforce.com\u2019s new tower in San Francisco, the top two floors will be reserved \u201cas an airy lounge for employees, where they can work communally and gaze out at the views over a latt\u00e9.\u201d\nFocus on transparency. Secretive Uber Technologies Inc. is planning for \u201can entirely see-through head office. It is expected to have some interior areas, as well as a park, that will be open to the public.\u201d\nFocus on transparency [scary-AI edition].Nvidia Corp.\u2019s AI will monitor employee arrival and departures, \u201cwith the ostensible aim of adjusting the building\u2019s heating and cooling systems.\u201d\nPlease, no. LinkedIn\u2019s new building in San Francisco \u201cincludes a \u2018silent disco\u2019, where people can dance to music with headphones on.\u201d\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket carrying a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office lifts off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., May 1, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX delivers spy satellite. A Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket Monday took off from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center with a classified payload for the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office, the Journal\u2019s Andy Pasztor reports. The mission marks the fourth successful launch since the Falcon 9 returned to service in January, following a four-month lapse prompted by an explosion on the launchpad last September.\nSentencing software under review. The United States Supreme Court has expressed interest in a Wisconsin case where an individual\u2019s sentencing was determined by a private company\u2019s proprietary software, the New York Times reports. The defendant, who was sentenced to six years in 2016, said the use of the algorithm violated his right to due process. Software maker Northpointe tells the NYT that its algorithms are proprietary and \u201cwe don\u2019t r Infosys Ltd. said it plans to hire 10,000 workers in the U.S. and open four U.S.-based technology centers, an apparent response to the pressure that India-based IT outsourcing firms face from President Donald Trump\u2019s administration and other governments. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Your CEO Is Reading: Team Building; Moon Corp.; Constructive Cursing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1163",
        "date": "2018-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-your-ceo-is-reading-team-building-moon-corp-constructive-cursing-1538163044?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=63",
        "text": "Building effective teams.\u00a0The topic of effective team-building has launched more than a billion articles and conference keynotes. Still it's worth noting how John L. Hennessy, Alphabet chairman, former president of Stanford University and \"Godfather of Silicon Valley,\" describes the process in his new book,\u00a0Leading Matters:\u00a0Lessons from My Journey. A team he helped create in the 1980s led to the implementation of the RISC processor. His ground rules: Keep teams small, but representative of a variety of view points, skills and personalities; Establish a shared goal; Don't criticize ideas, \"think them through\"; Make tough questions mandatory; Treat team members with respect. Follow those rules and one day you could win computing's highest honor, the ACM A.M. Turing Award. It worked for Mr. Hennessy.\nMoon as marketplace.\u00a0Today there are more planned missions to the moon than any time since the 1960s and 1970s, but this time private companies are fueling the space race. Among the firms vying for lunar real estate are SpaceIL, an Israeli organization, Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin LLC and Japan's Ispace. \"Instead of leaving flagpoles in the regolith, they want customers, in the government and commercial sectors, who will pay them to deliver their hardware to the moon, or mine its crust for minerals.\"says the Atlantic's Marina Koren. \"They want to help convert the ice on the moon into usable resources, such as fuel for a deep-space mission. And they want the work to produce revenue, just as rocket launches have for SpaceX,\"\nTwo key takeaways from having Steve Jobs compare your work to dog crap.\u00a0\"The first is that brand-new work is frequently no good. Excellent results only come at the end of a long chain of effort,\"\u00a0Ken Kocienda, a former Apple engineer and designer,\u00a0writes in a WSJ essay. \"The second point sometimes gets lost in the conventional view of Steve Jobs as a bully or a jerk: Criticism can be effective even if it\u2019s not constructive.\" Building effective teams; Moon as marketplace; That time Steve Jobs compared his work to dog crap ",
        "author": "Tom LoftusNews Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Apple Looks to Maintain Software Quality Amid Growing Complexity (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1164",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-apple-looks-to-maintain-software-quality-amid-growing-complexity-1528115529?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=94",
        "text": "Among the flaws.\u00a0One flaw caused iPhone users typing \u201ci\u201d to get a character described as \u201cA [?]\u201d instead, \u201cand another that caused messages to display out of chronological order.\u201d\nSound familiar?\u00a0Apple, like almost every company, is pushing out updates at a faster pace, and that creates another dimension of risk. \u201cApple has compounded those challenges since 2012 by releasing both iOS and Mac software updates annually. Previously, the company updated Mac software about every other year,\u201d the WSJ says. \u201cEach new release adds features and layers of code that can trigger a mistake in the underlying existing code.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nTHE LATEST FROM CIO JOURNAL\n\nU.S. tech exports up 3.1% in 2017.\u00a0U.S. firms exported $322 billion worth of technology products and services last year, amid rising demand by enterprises worldwide for digital tools and capabilities,\u00a0CompTIA reports. However, a U.S. trade deficit in tech continues.\nFrom horseless carriages to driverless cars. Just like cars were first viewed as a fix for the problems caused by horses, people are now looking to autonomous vehicles to help address problems brought about by cars, especially accidents, pollution, and congestion,\u00a0CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes.\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\nTax law spurs tech update at IRS. The Internal Revenue Service plans to spend $291 million updating 140 computer systems to help it implement the new tax overhaul, according to an agency document\u00a0seen by the Journal. The IT costs and other back-office operations will consume more than 90% of the money Congress is giving the IRS for implementation.\nMicrosoft to acquire GitHub.\u00a0Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire code repository company\u00a0GitHub Inc., people familiar with the matter\u00a0tell Bloomberg. A deal could be announced as soon as Monday. It would help Microsoft, which increasingly relies on open source software, to add programming tools and grow closer to a firm that plays a big role in how Microsoft writes its code.\nGoogle drops Pentagon contract.\u00a0Alphabet Inc.'s Google won't renew a contract with the Pentagon that had become the focus of internal debate around the use of the tech giant's technology for military purposes,\u00a0the Journal's Douglas MacMillan reports. The program, code-named \"Project Maven,\" helped the Pentagon identify and track potential drone targets through artificial intelligence.\nFacebook's device maker partnerships questioned.\u00a0Privacy experts are questioning partnerships the social network formed\u00a0 with over 60 device makers, granting them access to user data as well as their friends' data without explicit consent.\u00a0The New York Times reports\u00a0that some partners have access to Facebook users' political leanings, religion and relationship status.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s like having door locks installed, only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends,\" Ashkan Soltani, a former Federal Trade Commission chief technology, tells the NYT.\nNo moon-circling space tourists this year. SpaceX has indicated it won\u2019t launch a pair of space tourists to loop around the moon this year as previously announced,\u00a0the Journal reports. It's the latest sign that technical and production challenges are disrupting Elon Musk\u2019s plans for human exploration of the solar system. A new timetable hasn't been released.\nCarmakers hike spare parts prices. Automakers such as Jaguar and Land Rover have increased revenues by more than $1 billion in the past decade by using sophisticated pricing software,\u00a0Reuters reports, citing sales presentations by Accenture and other documents filed in a court case. The software identifies which spare parts in a manufacturer's range customers would be OK paying more for, how much to raise prices by and which prices shouldn't be raised.\nChinese regulators investigate memory-chip makers.\u00a0\u00a0The three companies\u2014Micron Technology Inc.,\u00a0Samsung Electronics Co.\u00a0and\u00a0SK Hynix Inc.\u2014said they are cooperating with the investigation, but didn\u2019t say what it is about,\u00a0the Journal's Yoko Kubota reports. A Bernstein analyst said it may concern the rising cost of DRAM chips that Chinese smartphone makers are facing as demand continues to outpace supply.\nJapan sets 2020 target for self-driving car service.\u00a0The plan is to have a service up and running on Tokyo's roads in time for the 2020 Olympics,\u00a0Reuters reports.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nThe Trump administration\u00a0showed no sign of backing down\u00a0from restrictive tariffs in the face of pushback from allies and China. (WSJ)\nAngela Merkel\u00a0outlined proposals\u00a0for overhauling and strengthening the architecture of the European Union, including combining nations\u2019 defense capabilities and building a common investment fund. (WSJ)\n\u201cSolo: A Star Wars Story,\u201d which cost more than $250 million to produce, will likely finish its domestic run below $200 million\u2014a once\u00a0unfathomable performance\u00a0for the \u201cStar Wars\u201d spinoff. (WSJ)\nStocks in Europe and Asia climbed to start the week after an upbeat jobs report\u00a0helped spur gains\u00a0Friday on No one, not even Apple, can escape the challenges that come with the scale and complexity of modern networks. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Open Source Pioneer Mark Shuttleworth Says Smart \u201cEdge\u2019 Devices Spawn Business Models (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1165",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/01/04/open-source-pioneer-mark-shuttleworth-says-smart-edge-devices-spawn-business-models/?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=104",
        "text": "\u201dData at the edge is very interesting to many kinds of companies,\u201d he said.\nCIO Journal spoke about this intertwined future of business and technology with Mr. Shuttleworth, a native of South African who holds dual citizenship in the U.K., where he lives on the Isle of Man. He began his business career by founding Thawte Consulting, which was sold to security firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VeriSign .\n\n\n In addition to working on Ubuntu and Canonical, he also has established HBD Venture Capital and a number of foundations. He also distinguished himself as an early space tourist and the first African in space.\nCanonical is focused on helping companies bridge the cloud and private data centers that increasingly work with and reflect the influence of cloud-based tools and infrastructure, according to Mr. Shuttleworth. \u201cWe invest a lot of capital in support of dynamism, moving workloads internally or in the cloud, in ways that enable businesses to work in a very elastic fashion,\u201d he says.\n\nHere are edited highlights of the conversation:\nHow is business changing in response to cloud computing?\nThese changes broadly fall into two themes. There is the hybrid cloud, in which workloads reside on-premise and on at least two public clouds. Where you operate a workload is an economic decision. \u00a0If I know that I am going to burn 1,000 servers for five years, or three years, that might be better funded by capex, in the data center. Bursty applications, or those focused on specific geographies, might be better funded by opex, in the cloud. This is an unforced choice.\nThen, there is the theme of the edge. All sorts of institutions are interested in that. Some companies are proactive, like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Corp\n\n\n ., are challenging divisions to find new streams of data and revenue associated with the edge device, such as a wind turbine. And sometimes, companies are defensive. They are worried about competing against the next Airbnb or Uber. In each case, they are looking at how do you add value, based on a lot of machine data.\nA company can only see a little bit of the value of its data. But what about the vibration in that machine? Is that normal? That is a service that a company can offer you, because it can see data across all machines. There are new kinds of businesses based on logistics and finance. How do you run a fleet? Today, we are able to put all sorts of sensors on a fleet, which enables us to run new kinds of business. Data at the edge is very interesting to many kinds of companies. Networks of ATM machines have been behind the curve, historically. Maybe financial institutions will rethink that, and new business models achieve if they have more sophisticated edge devices.\nDo you see the self-driving vehicle as an edge device that will change transportation?\nVery much so. As the autonomous vehicle comes out of the lab, into production, you think about having to precisely place software updates onto the vehicle in the field. You can\u2019t say I am going to wait for the vehicle to come into the service center. You have to be able to update in the field. If you don\u2019t, you have static software. Software that can\u2019t be changed ultimately becomes a liability. If you are willing to address the liability, you can make changes and also create opportunities. I can change what is possible.\nI have sensors on a fleet. Real-time data is coming back to the cloud, machine learning is taking place, and now real-time decision-making is being pushed back to the individual trucks. The truck is only seeing its data. The model that is based on the entire fleet\u2019s data is distributed to the entire fleet. The fleet is getting smarter every day. Those kinds of ideas are very interesting and we see them occupying a lot of cycles among teams that are forward looking.\nFollow @steve_rosenbush Smarter edge devices, from connected and self-driving vehicles to wind turbines and cash machines, are sending data to the cloud, where it is aggregated, analyzed and sent back to the field in the form of insight. That is paving the way for new business models, according to Mark Shuttleworth, who pioneered the Ubuntu operating system that helps make much of the cloud run \u201dData at the edge is very interesting to many kinds of companies,\u201d he says. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Qubit by Qubit, IBM Scientists Contend With Quirks of Quantum Physics (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1166",
        "date": "2018-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/qubit-by-qubit-ibm-scientists-contend-with-quirks-of-quantum-physics-1516385800?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=80",
        "text": "While traditional computers use binary digits, or bits, which can either be 0s or 1s, quantum computers, which harness the properties of quantum physics, use quantum bits, or qubits, which can represent and store information in both 0s and 1s simultaneously.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFor years and years, really good scientists worked on trying to make a single qubit work well, and just to be able to do that seemed like something that would be science fiction,\u201d Dr. Wisnieff said in an interview.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIBM's 20-qubit chip sits inside this cryostat, which is an apparatus that cools the chip to temperatures colder than outer space to elicit quantum mechanical effects.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nLast December, IBM announced a commercial partnership program, IBM Q Network, in which companies can access its 20-qubit quantum computing system over the cloud. IBM says the 20-qubit chip is capable of exploring possible solutions for narrow optimization problems.\n\nIt\u2019s currently working out the kinks with its recently-built next-generation 50-qubit chip, which companies in the IBM Q Network will have access to within the next year.\nA 50-qubit chip will be used to explore solutions to larger problems, starting first with those related to chemistry and error mitigation, Dr. Wisnieff said.\nWithin three years, IBM\u2019s goal is for a quantum computer to solve important, computationally-intensive problems that could add business value, such as those related to risk analysis and trading strategies for financial services firms.\nAdding one qubit doubles the power of a quantum chip, whereas adding one bit negligibly increases a classical chip\u2019s computing power, as WSJ has previously reported. The challenges with adding qubits, though, are formidable.\nQubits are delicate and easily disrupted by changes in temperature, noise, frequency and motion. This is referred to by physicists as decoherence.\nFor example, a calculation could be completely destroyed if someone were to tap on the outside of the cryostat, the apparatus that cools the chip to temperatures colder than outer space to elicit quantum mechanical effects, Dr. Wisnieff said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA partial view inside the cryostat, where the qubit chip is surrounded by metals.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nQubits can only maintain their quantum mechanical state for about 100 microseconds today before decoherence starts to occur, IBM researchers have said. That\u2019s typically due to a loss of energy that disturbs the wave function within a qubit, where information is contained.\n\u201cThe thing that confounds us is small amounts of energy will leak out of the qubit and therefore change the wave functions, and the quantum information is lost,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re looking at is building circuits that are exquisitely good at holding energy.\u201d\nResearchers are also contending with somewhat of a translation problem. Today, the solution to a computation made by a quantum computing system still needs to be read by a conventional computer, which relies on classical bits that store information in either ones or zeroes.\n\u201cIt\u2019s as if a person has a deep, rich thought and at the end of the day, it can only answer yes or no questions,\u201d Dr. Wisnieff said.\nIBM is working to build a general-purpose scalable quantum computing machine alongside other technology giants including Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google.\nThe qubit race is heating up. Google, for example, is working on building a 49-qubit chip for its planned general-purpose quantum computer. Researchers there are also working on similar challenges related to error mitigation. The near-term goal for Google researchers is to demonstrate so-called quantum supremacy, the tipping point where a quantum computer accomplishes something beyond the grasp of a conventional computer.\nD-Wave Systems Inc., another major player in the quantum computing industry, recently released a 2,048-qubit chip. However, the company\u2019s quantum computing systems operate using a different architecture and scientists have warned that it shouldn\u2019t be compared with the general-purpose quantum computers that IBM and Google are working to build. Researchers at International Business Machine Corp.\u2019s Thomas J. Watson Research Center say they\u2019re working out the bugs in their next-generation quantum computing chip, which could help derive competitive value for companies. But first, they\u2019ll have to contend with the laws of physics, ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Qubit by Qubit, IBM Scientists Contend With Quirks of Quantum Physics (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1167",
        "date": "2018-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/qubit-by-qubit-ibm-scientists-contend-with-quirks-of-quantum-physics-1516385800?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=104",
        "text": "While traditional computers use binary digits, or bits, which can either be 0s or 1s, quantum computers, which harness the properties of quantum physics, use quantum bits, or qubits, which can represent and store information in both 0s and 1s simultaneously.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFor years and years, really good scientists worked on trying to make a single qubit work well, and just to be able to do that seemed like something that would be science fiction,\u201d Dr. Wisnieff said in an interview.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIBM's 20-qubit chip sits inside this cryostat, which is an apparatus that cools the chip to temperatures colder than outer space to elicit quantum mechanical effects.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nLast December, IBM announced a commercial partnership program, IBM Q Network, in which companies can access its 20-qubit quantum computing system over the cloud. IBM says the 20-qubit chip is capable of exploring possible solutions for narrow optimization problems.\n\nIt\u2019s currently working out the kinks with its recently-built next-generation 50-qubit chip, which companies in the IBM Q Network will have access to within the next year.\nA 50-qubit chip will be used to explore solutions to larger problems, starting first with those related to chemistry and error mitigation, Dr. Wisnieff said.\nWithin three years, IBM\u2019s goal is for a quantum computer to solve important, computationally-intensive problems that could add business value, such as those related to risk analysis and trading strategies for financial services firms.\nAdding one qubit doubles the power of a quantum chip, whereas adding one bit negligibly increases a classical chip\u2019s computing power, as WSJ has previously reported. The challenges with adding qubits, though, are formidable.\nQubits are delicate and easily disrupted by changes in temperature, noise, frequency and motion. This is referred to by physicists as decoherence.\nFor example, a calculation could be completely destroyed if someone were to tap on the outside of the cryostat, the apparatus that cools the chip to temperatures colder than outer space to elicit quantum mechanical effects, Dr. Wisnieff said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA partial view inside the cryostat, where the qubit chip is surrounded by metals.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nQubits can only maintain their quantum mechanical state for about 100 microseconds today before decoherence starts to occur, IBM researchers have said. That\u2019s typically due to a loss of energy that disturbs the wave function within a qubit, where information is contained.\n\u201cThe thing that confounds us is small amounts of energy will leak out of the qubit and therefore change the wave functions, and the quantum information is lost,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re looking at is building circuits that are exquisitely good at holding energy.\u201d\nResearchers are also contending with somewhat of a translation problem. Today, the solution to a computation made by a quantum computing system still needs to be read by a conventional computer, which relies on classical bits that store information in either ones or zeroes.\n\u201cIt\u2019s as if a person has a deep, rich thought and at the end of the day, it can only answer yes or no questions,\u201d Dr. Wisnieff said.\nIBM is working to build a general-purpose scalable quantum computing machine alongside other technology giants including Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google.\nThe qubit race is heating up. Google, for example, is working on building a 49-qubit chip for its planned general-purpose quantum computer. Researchers there are also working on similar challenges related to error mitigation. The near-term goal for Google researchers is to demonstrate so-called quantum supremacy, the tipping point where a quantum computer accomplishes something beyond the grasp of a conventional computer.\nD-Wave Systems Inc., another major player in the quantum computing industry, recently released a 2,048-qubit chip. However, the company\u2019s quantum computing systems operate using a different architecture and scientists have warned that it shouldn\u2019t be compared with the general-purpose quantum computers that IBM and Google are working to build. Researchers at International Business Machine Corp.\u2019s Thomas J. Watson Research Center say they\u2019re working out the bugs in their next-generation quantum computing chip, which could help derive competitive value for companies. But first, they\u2019ll have to contend with the laws of physics, ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: China, Unencumbered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene Editing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1168",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-china-unencumbered-by-rules-races-ahead-in-gene-editing-1516627704?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=80",
        "text": "The real-world drama surrounding gene-editing, with broad implications for life sciences and beyond, is far more interesting than fiction. \u201cIn a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool,\u201d the Journal's Preetika Rana, Amy Dockser Marcus and Wenxin Fan report. \u201cU.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven\u2019t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn\u2019t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.\u201d\nThere are fewer restrictions in China, which helps the country advance in gene-editing and in the use of artificial intelligence. \u201cDr. Wu\u2019s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system\u2019s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease,\u201d the Journal reports. \u201cChina shouldn\u2019t have been the first one to do it,\u201d says Dr. Wu, 53, an oncologist and president of Hangzhou Cancer Hospital. \u201cBut there are fewer restrictions.\u201d Read more here.\nThis MORNING DOWNLOAD EXTRA is brought to you by the letter Q...\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nWalk into a quantum computing lab at International Business Machine Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and you'll see an impressive apparatus, called a cryostat, which cools a quantum chip to temperatures colder than outer space.Next to this formidable vessel, folded neatly near a server rack, is something seemingly out of place in this high-tech environment: a costume of the 1980s arcade and video game character Q*Bert.IBM's quantum researchers named the quantum chip nestled inside the cryostat after this tangerine-colored orb with a funnel-shaped nose. Why? In the world of quantum science, answers to some questions are simply elusive.\n\n\"Before we release things out it's very useful for us to have code names for the machines and for the processors themselves,\" said Dario Gil, vice president for artificial intelligence and IBM Q for IBM Research.\nDr. Gil wasn't familiar with the game himself, but said the researchers were on the hunt for a quirky 'Q' name for the 20-quantum bit chip.\n\"There's a lot of playfulness going on with the 'Qs'. Q*bert was a good example of that,\" he said.At press time, the name of IBM's 50-qubit chip was still a secret. -- Sara Castellanos\nQubit by qubit, IBM scientists contend with quirks of quantum physics. Researchers at IBM\u2019s Thomas J. Watson Research Center say they\u2019re working out the bugs in their next-generation quantum computing chip, which could help derive competitive value for companies. But first, they\u2019ll have to contend with the laws of physics.\u00a0\u201cFor years and years, really good scientists worked on trying to make a single qubit work well, and just to be able to do that seemed like something that would be science fiction,\u201d Robert Wisnieff, chief technology officer of quantum computing at IBM Research, tells CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos.\nCloud computing evolves into the supply chain of digital services. Cloud computing is such an important and interesting subject because it lies at the intersection of three major 21st century trends: the evolution of the IT industry; the rise of digital supply chains; and the growing importance of services in the digital economy. CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger has the story.\nEUROPE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nFacebook to open Europe training centers. Facebook\u00a0plans to open three centers in Europe as part of an effort to train 1 million people over the next two years\u00a0in digital skills, Reuters reports. The move comes as the company remains a prime target for the continent's regulators concerning its tax practices, its handling of citizen data and the level of compliance with new hate speech laws.\nEMERGING TECHNOLOGY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Rocket Lab Electron rocket sat on a pad Dec. 12, 2017, on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. On Sunday, the space-transportation startup successfully placed satellites into orbit for the first time.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nStartup puts satellites in orbit for first time.Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad, the Journal's Andy Pasztor reports.\u00a0The 10-year-old company seeks to usher in an era of weekly\u2014or ultimately even more frequent\u2014launches of imaging, weather and other types of low-earth-orbit satellites weighing dozens of pounds to h Gene-editing now is part of popular consciousness, the latest emerging technology to capture our imagination and scare the daylights out of us. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: China, Unencumbered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene Editing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1169",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-china-unencumbered-by-rules-races-ahead-in-gene-editing-1516627704?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=74",
        "text": "The real-world drama surrounding gene-editing, with broad implications for life sciences and beyond, is far more interesting than fiction. \u201cIn a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool,\u201d the Journal's Preetika Rana, Amy Dockser Marcus and Wenxin Fan report. \u201cU.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven\u2019t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn\u2019t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.\u201d\nThere are fewer restrictions in China, which helps the country advance in gene-editing and in the use of artificial intelligence. \u201cDr. Wu\u2019s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system\u2019s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease,\u201d the Journal reports. \u201cChina shouldn\u2019t have been the first one to do it,\u201d says Dr. Wu, 53, an oncologist and president of Hangzhou Cancer Hospital. \u201cBut there are fewer restrictions.\u201d Read more here.\nThis MORNING DOWNLOAD EXTRA is brought to you by the letter Q...\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nWalk into a quantum computing lab at International Business Machine Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and you'll see an impressive apparatus, called a cryostat, which cools a quantum chip to temperatures colder than outer space.Next to this formidable vessel, folded neatly near a server rack, is something seemingly out of place in this high-tech environment: a costume of the 1980s arcade and video game character Q*Bert.IBM's quantum researchers named the quantum chip nestled inside the cryostat after this tangerine-colored orb with a funnel-shaped nose. Why? In the world of quantum science, answers to some questions are simply elusive.\n\n\"Before we release things out it's very useful for us to have code names for the machines and for the processors themselves,\" said Dario Gil, vice president for artificial intelligence and IBM Q for IBM Research.\nDr. Gil wasn't familiar with the game himself, but said the researchers were on the hunt for a quirky 'Q' name for the 20-quantum bit chip.\n\"There's a lot of playfulness going on with the 'Qs'. Q*bert was a good example of that,\" he said.At press time, the name of IBM's 50-qubit chip was still a secret. -- Sara Castellanos\nQubit by qubit, IBM scientists contend with quirks of quantum physics. Researchers at IBM\u2019s Thomas J. Watson Research Center say they\u2019re working out the bugs in their next-generation quantum computing chip, which could help derive competitive value for companies. But first, they\u2019ll have to contend with the laws of physics.\u00a0\u201cFor years and years, really good scientists worked on trying to make a single qubit work well, and just to be able to do that seemed like something that would be science fiction,\u201d Robert Wisnieff, chief technology officer of quantum computing at IBM Research, tells CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos.\nCloud computing evolves into the supply chain of digital services. Cloud computing is such an important and interesting subject because it lies at the intersection of three major 21st century trends: the evolution of the IT industry; the rise of digital supply chains; and the growing importance of services in the digital economy. CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger has the story.\nEUROPE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nFacebook to open Europe training centers. Facebook\u00a0plans to open three centers in Europe as part of an effort to train 1 million people over the next two years\u00a0in digital skills, Reuters reports. The move comes as the company remains a prime target for the continent's regulators concerning its tax practices, its handling of citizen data and the level of compliance with new hate speech laws.\nEMERGING TECHNOLOGY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Rocket Lab Electron rocket sat on a pad Dec. 12, 2017, on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. On Sunday, the space-transportation startup successfully placed satellites into orbit for the first time.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nStartup puts satellites in orbit for first time.Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad, the Journal's Andy Pasztor reports.\u00a0The 10-year-old company seeks to usher in an era of weekly\u2014or ultimately even more frequent\u2014launches of imaging, weather and other types of low-earth-orbit satellites weighing dozens of pounds to h Gene-editing now is part of popular consciousness, the latest emerging technology to capture our imagination and scare the daylights out of us. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: China, Unencumbered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene Editing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1170",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-china-unencumbered-by-rules-races-ahead-in-gene-editing-1516627704?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=80",
        "text": "The real-world drama surrounding gene-editing, with broad implications for life sciences and beyond, is far more interesting than fiction. \u201cIn a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool,\u201d the Journal's Preetika Rana, Amy Dockser Marcus and Wenxin Fan report. \u201cU.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven\u2019t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn\u2019t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.\u201d\nThere are fewer restrictions in China, which helps the country advance in gene-editing and in the use of artificial intelligence. \u201cDr. Wu\u2019s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system\u2019s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease,\u201d the Journal reports. \u201cChina shouldn\u2019t have been the first one to do it,\u201d says Dr. Wu, 53, an oncologist and president of Hangzhou Cancer Hospital. \u201cBut there are fewer restrictions.\u201d Read more here.\n\n\n\n\nThis MORNING DOWNLOAD EXTRA is brought to you by the letter Q...\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nWalk into a quantum computing lab at International Business Machine Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and you'll see an impressive apparatus, called a cryostat, which cools a quantum chip to temperatures colder than outer space.Next to this formidable vessel, folded neatly near a server rack, is something seemingly out of place in this high-tech environment: a costume of the 1980s arcade and video game character Q*Bert.IBM's quantum researchers named the quantum chip nestled inside the cryostat after this tangerine-colored orb with a funnel-shaped nose. Why? In the world of quantum science, answers to some questions are simply elusive.\n\n\"Before we release things out it's very useful for us to have code names for the machines and for the processors themselves,\" said Dario Gil, vice president for artificial intelligence and IBM Q for IBM Research.\nDr. Gil wasn't familiar with the game himself, but said the researchers were on the hunt for a quirky 'Q' name for the 20-quantum bit chip.\n\"There's a lot of playfulness going on with the 'Qs'. Q*bert was a good example of that,\" he said.At press time, the name of IBM's 50-qubit chip was still a secret. -- Sara Castellanos\nQubit by qubit, IBM scientists contend with quirks of quantum physics. Researchers at IBM\u2019s Thomas J. Watson Research Center say they\u2019re working out the bugs in their next-generation quantum computing chip, which could help derive competitive value for companies. But first, they\u2019ll have to contend with the laws of physics.\u00a0\u201cFor years and years, really good scientists worked on trying to make a single qubit work well, and just to be able to do that seemed like something that would be science fiction,\u201d Robert Wisnieff, chief technology officer of quantum computing at IBM Research, tells CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos.\nCloud computing evolves into the supply chain of digital services. Cloud computing is such an important and interesting subject because it lies at the intersection of three major 21st century trends: the evolution of the IT industry; the rise of digital supply chains; and the growing importance of services in the digital economy. CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger has the story.\nEUROPE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nFacebook to open Europe training centers. Facebook\u00a0plans to open three centers in Europe as part of an effort to train 1 million people over the next two years\u00a0in digital skills, Reuters reports. The move comes as the company remains a prime target for the continent's regulators concerning its tax practices, its handling of citizen data and the level of compliance with new hate speech laws.\nEMERGING TECHNOLOGY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Rocket Lab Electron rocket sat on a pad Dec. 12, 2017, on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. On Sunday, the space-transportation startup successfully placed satellites into orbit for the first time.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nStartup puts satellites in orbit for first time.Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad, the Journal's Andy Pasztor reports.\u00a0The 10-year-old company seeks to usher in an era of weekly\u2014or ultimately even more frequent\u2014launches of imaging, weather and other types of low-earth-orbit satellites weighing dozens of pounds to hundreds of pounds each. The projected price tag is about $5 million a launch.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPedestrians walked past an Amazon Go store in Seattle in April 2017. The cashierless convenience store, which had been open only to employees for testing purposes, is scheduled to open to the public on Monday after a yearlong delay.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nAmazon\u2019s cashierless \u2018Go\u2019 convenience store set to open. The new Amazon Go store, located in the base of Amazon.com Inc.\u2019s main headquarters in Seattle, uses computer vision and machine-learning algorithms to track shoppers and charge them for what they select, thereby eliminating checkout counters. The WSJ's Laura Stevens has the story.\nHow it works. A customer entering the store scans his or her phone and then becomes represented internally as a 3-D object to the system. Cameras also are pointed at the shelves to determine interactions with goods.\nAbout those jobs.Reports the The New York Times: \"There were a little over\u00a03.5 million cashiers in the United States\u00a0in 2016 \u2014 and some of their jobs may be in jeopardy if the technology behind Amazon Go eventually spreads.\nAdvertising\u2019s \u2018Mad Men\u2019 bristle at the digital revolution. Publicis Groupe, one of the world\u2019s largest ad agencies, is trying to force old-school \u201ccreatives\u201d to work more closely with new technology hires to hang on to big clients, the WSJ's Nick Kostov and David Gauthier-Villars report. One tool: an algorithm dubbed \u201cMarcel\u201d that selects teams from across the company\u2019s sprawling operations.\nTarget, analyze, repeat. For a\u00a0recent online campaign for Bridgestone Corp.\u2019s Firestone tire brand, the agency combed the feeds of social-network users and determined what kind of cars they drove in order to serve up customized videos. The agency then used Google\u2019s geo-localization tool to determine whether people who had seen their videos visited a Firestone dealer in the next 30 days.\nSays a modern-day Don Draper.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re now all about targeting and retargeting,\u201d said one creative director who is skeptical of the digital overhaul. \u201cWho\u2019s thinking about what people are going to be dreaming about?\u201d\nFacebook punts to users. The social network plans to start ranking news sources in its feed based on user evaluations of credibility, the Journal's Deepa Seetharaman reports. The most \u201cbroadly trusted\u201d publications\u2014those trusted and recognized by a large cross-section of Facebook users\u2014would get a boost in the news feed, while those that users rate low on trust would be penalized. In a statement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said\u00a0the change is necessary to address the role of social media in amplifying sensationalism, misinformation and polarization.\nWhy users' judgement may not be a good idea.\u00a0 \u201cYou may end up with reality television,\u201d said Nicco Mele, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.\nNYSE owner to bring discipline to crypto prices. In a move that could draw financial heavyweights into bitcoin, Intercontinental Exchange Inc., or ICE, said Thursday that it was joining with startup Blockstream to launch a data feed that would pull information from more than 15 cryptocurrency exchanges around the world and deliver it to financial firms. The WSJ's Alexander Osipovich reports that crypto traders currently rely on various websites that don\u2019t necessarily identify their creators or announce when they make changes.\nU.S.\u00a0sanctions bite into Microsoft's Russia sales. Two distributors of Microsoft Corp. products are making it harder for 200 Russian companies to buy products after new U.S. sanctions cut the duration of loans offered to Russian firms, Reuters reports. One of the distributors is telling would-be buyers that they will need to pay\u00a0within tight deadlines, or pay upfront. Reuters says that\u00a0Microsoft did not respond to questions about whether it was behind the new restrictions.\nTwitter to users: You got served. Twitter Inc. is starting to email those users--all 677,775 of them--who followed or interacted with accounts linked to a Russia propaganda campaign during the 2016 election. Ars Technica reports that Twitter continues to identify propaganda-spewing accounts masking as Americans, including 3,814 accounts linked to Russian troll farm Internet Research Agency.\nSouth Korea\u2019s cryptocurrency crackdown isn\u2019t stopping this exchange\u2019s launch. Beijing-based OKCoin, which previously ran one of the biggest bitcoin exchanges in China before the government there banned cryptocurrency exchanges on the mainland, now plans to branch out to South Korea, another Asian hot spot for crypto trading (and fresh crack downs by the government). The WSJ reports that the company's OKCoin Korea website has accepted preorder registrations for more than 150,000 people since Friday. The exchange intends to make some 60 digital coins available for trading.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nThe effects of a government shutdown that began Saturday will kick in more forcefully with the start of the workweek as agencies implement contingency plans to scale back operations and send workers home. (WSJ)\nGlobal stock markets were muted as a U.S. federal government shutdown was poised to stretch into a third day. (WSJ)\nCoca-Cola hopes four new flavors of Diet Coke and skinnier, redesigned cans hitting U.S. shelves this week will lure back lapsed soda drinkers. (WSJ)\nTwo large Xerox investors, billionaires Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, have formed an alliance and plan to encourage the printer and copier giant to explore a potential sale. (WSJ)\nThe Morning Download is edited by\u00a0Tom Loftus and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking\u00a0http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload. Gene-editing now is part of popular consciousness, the latest emerging technology to capture our imagination and scare the daylights out of us. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: China, Unencumbered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene Editing (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1171",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-china-unencumbered-by-rules-races-ahead-in-gene-editing-1516627704?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=104",
        "text": "The real-world drama surrounding gene-editing, with broad implications for life sciences and beyond, is far more interesting than fiction. \u201cIn a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool,\u201d the Journal's Preetika Rana, Amy Dockser Marcus and Wenxin Fan report. \u201cU.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven\u2019t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn\u2019t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.\u201d\nThere are fewer restrictions in China, which helps the country advance in gene-editing and in the use of artificial intelligence. \u201cDr. Wu\u2019s team at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital has been drawing blood from esophageal-cancer patients, shipping it by high-speed rail to a lab that modifies disease-fighting cells using Crispr-Cas9 by deleting a gene that interferes with the immune system\u2019s ability to fight cancer. His team then infuses the cells back into the patients, hoping the reprogrammed DNA will destroy the disease,\u201d the Journal reports. \u201cChina shouldn\u2019t have been the first one to do it,\u201d says Dr. Wu, 53, an oncologist and president of Hangzhou Cancer Hospital. \u201cBut there are fewer restrictions.\u201d Read more here.\n\n\n\n\nThis MORNING DOWNLOAD EXTRA is brought to you by the letter Q...\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Sara Castellanos / WSJ\n \n\n\n\nWalk into a quantum computing lab at International Business Machine Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and you'll see an impressive apparatus, called a cryostat, which cools a quantum chip to temperatures colder than outer space.Next to this formidable vessel, folded neatly near a server rack, is something seemingly out of place in this high-tech environment: a costume of the 1980s arcade and video game character Q*Bert.IBM's quantum researchers named the quantum chip nestled inside the cryostat after this tangerine-colored orb with a funnel-shaped nose. Why? In the world of quantum science, answers to some questions are simply elusive.\n\n\"Before we release things out it's very useful for us to have code names for the machines and for the processors themselves,\" said Dario Gil, vice president for artificial intelligence and IBM Q for IBM Research.\nDr. Gil wasn't familiar with the game himself, but said the researchers were on the hunt for a quirky 'Q' name for the 20-quantum bit chip.\n\"There's a lot of playfulness going on with the 'Qs'. Q*bert was a good example of that,\" he said.At press time, the name of IBM's 50-qubit chip was still a secret. -- Sara Castellanos\nQubit by qubit, IBM scientists contend with quirks of quantum physics. Researchers at IBM\u2019s Thomas J. Watson Research Center say they\u2019re working out the bugs in their next-generation quantum computing chip, which could help derive competitive value for companies. But first, they\u2019ll have to contend with the laws of physics.\u00a0\u201cFor years and years, really good scientists worked on trying to make a single qubit work well, and just to be able to do that seemed like something that would be science fiction,\u201d Robert Wisnieff, chief technology officer of quantum computing at IBM Research, tells CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos.\nCloud computing evolves into the supply chain of digital services. Cloud computing is such an important and interesting subject because it lies at the intersection of three major 21st century trends: the evolution of the IT industry; the rise of digital supply chains; and the growing importance of services in the digital economy. CIO Journal Columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger has the story.\nEUROPE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nFacebook to open Europe training centers. Facebook\u00a0plans to open three centers in Europe as part of an effort to train 1 million people over the next two years\u00a0in digital skills, Reuters reports. The move comes as the company remains a prime target for the continent's regulators concerning its tax practices, its handling of citizen data and the level of compliance with new hate speech laws.\nEMERGING TECHNOLOGY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Rocket Lab Electron rocket sat on a pad Dec. 12, 2017, on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. On Sunday, the space-transportation startup successfully placed satellites into orbit for the first time.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nStartup puts satellites in orbit for first time.Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad, the Journal's Andy Pasztor reports.\u00a0The 10-year-old company seeks to usher in an era of weekly\u2014or ultimately even more frequent\u2014launches of imaging, weather and other types of low-earth-orbit satellites weighing dozens of pounds Gene-editing now is part of popular consciousness, the latest emerging technology to capture our imagination and scare the daylights out of us. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Display Technologies Set to Transform Workspaces (WSJ: CIO Journal) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1172",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-display-technologies-set-to-transform-workspaces-11552341336?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=16",
        "text": "So-called ambient experiences, where virtual and physical worlds are blended in real time across multiple devices and displays, will become the norm. \u201cThere are going to be more and more displays for all these aspects of your life, giving you this kind of seamless experience,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tuong Nguyen,\n\n\n\n a senior principal analyst for technology research firm Gartner Inc. who specializes in emerging technologies and trends.\nNew workspaces will emerge with multiple displays and larger, panoramic screens partly because data is becoming a central focus in all industries, multitasking is necessary and younger workers are demanding better quality products at work, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bert Park,\n\n\n\n senior vice president and general manager of software and peripherals at Dell Inc., a division of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dell Technologies Inc.\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up WSJ | CIO Journal The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nComputer displays will continue to be \u201canchor-points\u201d for workforce productivity because the demand for visualizing data, including charts and graphs, will continue to grow, Mr. Park said. \u201cA lot of people will be multitasking, which means you need more display real estate space,\u201d he said.\n\nIt could be common for workers in sectors beyond finance to have larger or separate screens for email, video chat and charts, for example, as opposed to switching back and forth between multiple tabs. Separate screens could save time, increase worker productivity and possibly prevent workers from misremembering facts, he said.\nTransparent displays, such as augmented reality headsets that overlay computer-generated images on a user\u2019s view of the real world, also could become more prevalent in the workforce in a three-to-five-year time frame, Mr. Park said.\nCompanies already have begun experimenting with augmented reality headsets and tablets, primarily to guide workers through manufacturing and maintenance processes. Demand for augmented reality displays could also filter into research and development and product design, Mr. Park said. \u201cYou could start to build the next version of the product, and make improvements in AR in an interactive way,\u201d he said.\nLockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s space division is using augmented reality headsets to speed up the time it takes for engineers to learn about and conduct manufacturing processes on spacecraft, for example.\nWorld-wide spending on augmented reality and virtual reality is expected to reach nearly $20.4 billion this year, according to market intelligence firm International Data Corp. That\u2019s up from an estimated $12.1 billion in 2018.\nYounger workers including those in the millennial generation will embrace these new technologies and help drive their popularity in the workplace, Mr. Park said. But older workers also will be inclined to use new displays and headsets for solving certain problems, he said.\nVirtual reality, where users wear headsets in which they can see and interact with lifelike digitized representations, is catching on in the workforce, albeit at a slower pace, Mr. Park said.\n\nUnited Parcel Service Inc.,\n\n\n for example, is using virtual reality to simulate the experience of driving its iconic brown delivery trucks before new drivers hit the road. Genentech Inc., a division of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Roche Holding AG\n\n\n , is using virtual reality as a training tool for eye surgeons in a clinical trial that executives expect will be the beginning of widespread use of the technology.\nVirtual reality headsets will have to overcome some challenges in the next few years, Mr. Park said. Since the headset sits so close to users\u2019 eyes, the resolution needs to be sharper to deliver \u201clifelike capability.\u201d Real-time information is critical in business, so chip technology needs to evolve to fix latency issues that cause delays in information, he said. The future of virtual and augmented reality depends largely on the success of fifth-generation wireless technology, in which latency could be reduced significantly.\n\u201cThe technology we have today is in its adolescence,\u201d Gartner\u2019s Mr. Nguyen said, referring to augmented and virtual reality displays. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of grown up, but it\u2019s working through a lot of its awkward phases.\u201d\nWrite to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com In the years ahead, it will be more common for workspaces to host multiple monitors of all kinds, including computer and tablet screens and displays that facilitate augmented and virtual reality experiences. ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic CIO Sees Key Role as Company Prepares for Commercial Operations (WSJ: CIO Journal) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1173",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-cio-sees-key-role-as-company-prepares-for-commercial-operations-11618849274?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=8",
        "text": "One of his priorities is creating an \u201cintegrated systems architecture,\u201d or a framework for how the different systems used to design and build spaceships connect and share data seamlessly. This includes, for instance, creating pipelines between systems that store design and flight data to systems that can use that data to create predictive models that forecast vehicle maintenance needs.\nHe also said he\u2019s in the process of introducing tools for managing data and the digital representations\u2014known as \u201cdigital twins\u201d\u2014of the aircraft and spacecraft that Virgin Galactic manufactures.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a journey, though, that requires not just tools, but driving \u2018digital\u2019 process change,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up WSJ | CIO Journal The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, founded in 2004, has pitched the promise of taking passengers to the edge of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, more than 50 miles high, for the views and a few minutes of weightlessness. So far six hundred passengers have signed up for the roughly 90-minute journey, paying up to $250,000 a ticket. Sales of new tickets are now on hold, a company spokeswoman said.\nThe company\u2019s plans have been delayed multiple times, most notably following a 2014 crash of a test vehicle that left one pilot dead.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic CIO Alistair Burns\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\nThe publicly traded company is one of several businesses in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Group. A company spokeswoman said Virgin Galactic anticipates sending Mr. Branson on a test flight as early as this summer and sending paying customers into space in 2022.\nThe company\u2019s primary competitor is Blue Origin Federation LLC, the space transportation company founded by Amazon.com Inc. chief executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s business model appears likely to have \u201chighly attractive economics once it is up and running,\u201d Douglas Harned, an AllianceBernstein equity analyst, said in a research note last week. But he said the risks of the business appear to far exceed those of commercial airline travel or theme parks. \u201cA catastrophic failure by any provider could have a crushing effect on demand for all.\u201d\nInaugural CIOs, such as Mr. Burns, often benefit from a blank slate as they don\u2019t have to revamp the culture or operating model set by their predecessors, said Matt Guarini, senior research director at research and consulting firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Forrester Research Inc.\n\nHe added that the most successful CIOs are ones that keep the customers top of mind, and that is going to be especially important with the market Virgin Galactic is targeting. \u201cThese people who are traveling are going to have great expectations because they\u2019re spending a lot of money,\u201d Mr. Guarini said. \u201cAnd so part of that experience is going to come from the technology that supports them.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has seen its share of turnover in the C-suite over the past year. CEO Michael Colglazier, previously the head of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walt Disney Co.\n\n\n \u2019s international parks and resorts, joined last July. In February it tapped\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Ahrens,\n\n\n\n of semiconductor company Mellanox Technologies Ltd., as its finance chief after former CFO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Campagna\n\n\n\n left to join satellite observation startup Capella Space Corp.\nBefore joining Virgin Galactic, Mr. Burns spent nearly five years as CIO at OSI Systems Inc., which develops security screening technologies and other electronic systems. His career in IT, which exceeds 25 years, also includes holding technology leadership positions at manufacturing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Meggitt\n\n\n PLC and media company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Thomson Reuters.\n\nA licensed pilot since 1994, Mr. Burns said he\u2019ll seize the first opportunity that\u2019s available for him to take a flight to space.\n\u201cIt would be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.\u201d\nWrite to Jared Council at jared.council@wsj.com As Virgin Galactic moves from flight tests to commercial operations, CIO Alistair Burns wants to ensure the space tourism company has the IT infrastructure in place to support that transition. ",
        "author": "Jared Council"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic CIO Sees Key Role as Company Prepares for Commercial Operations (WSJ: CIO Journal) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1174",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-cio-sees-key-role-as-company-prepares-for-commercial-operations-11618849274?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=24",
        "text": "One of his priorities is creating an \u201cintegrated systems architecture,\u201d or a framework for how the different systems used to design and build spaceships connect and share data seamlessly. This includes, for instance, creating pipelines between systems that store design and flight data to systems that can use that data to create predictive models that forecast vehicle maintenance needs.\nHe also said he\u2019s in the process of introducing tools for managing data and the digital representations\u2014known as \u201cdigital twins\u201d\u2014of the aircraft and spacecraft that Virgin Galactic manufactures.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a journey, though, that requires not just tools, but driving \u2018digital\u2019 process change,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up WSJ | CIO Journal The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, founded in 2004, has pitched the promise of taking passengers to the edge of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, more than 50 miles high, for the views and a few minutes of weightlessness. So far six hundred passengers have signed up for the roughly 90-minute journey, paying up to $250,000 a ticket. Sales of new tickets are now on hold, a company spokeswoman said.\nThe company\u2019s plans have been delayed multiple times, most notably following a 2014 crash of a test vehicle that left one pilot dead.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic CIO Alistair Burns\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\nThe publicly traded company is one of several businesses in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Group. A company spokeswoman said Virgin Galactic anticipates sending Mr. Branson on a test flight as early as this summer and sending paying customers into space in 2022.\nThe company\u2019s primary competitor is Blue Origin Federation LLC, the space transportation company founded by Amazon.com Inc. chief executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s business model appears likely to have \u201chighly attractive economics once it is up and running,\u201d Douglas Harned, an AllianceBernstein equity analyst, said in a research note last week. But he said the risks of the business appear to far exceed those of commercial airline travel or theme parks. \u201cA catastrophic failure by any provider could have a crushing effect on demand for all.\u201d\nInaugural CIOs, such as Mr. Burns, often benefit from a blank slate as they don\u2019t have to revamp the culture or operating model set by their predecessors, said Matt Guarini, senior research director at research and consulting firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Forrester Research Inc.\n\nHe added that the most successful CIOs are ones that keep the customers top of mind, and that is going to be especially important with the market Virgin Galactic is targeting. \u201cThese people who are traveling are going to have great expectations because they\u2019re spending a lot of money,\u201d Mr. Guarini said. \u201cAnd so part of that experience is going to come from the technology that supports them.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has seen its share of turnover in the C-suite over the past year. CEO Michael Colglazier, previously the head of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walt Disney Co.\n\n\n \u2019s international parks and resorts, joined last July. In February it tapped\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Ahrens,\n\n\n\n of semiconductor company Mellanox Technologies Ltd., as its finance chief after former CFO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Campagna\n\n\n\n left to join satellite observation startup Capella Space Corp.\nBefore joining Virgin Galactic, Mr. Burns spent nearly five years as CIO at OSI Systems Inc., which develops security screening technologies and other electronic systems. His career in IT, which exceeds 25 years, also includes holding technology leadership positions at manufacturing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Meggitt\n\n\n PLC and media company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Thomson Reuters.\n\nA licensed pilot since 1994, Mr. Burns said he\u2019ll seize the first opportunity that\u2019s available for him to take a flight to space.\n\u201cIt would be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.\u201d\nWrite to Jared Council at jared.council@wsj.com As Virgin Galactic moves from flight tests to commercial operations, CIO Alistair Burns wants to ensure the space tourism company has the IT infrastructure in place to support that transition. ",
        "author": "Jared Council"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic CIO Sees Key Role as Company Prepares for Commercial Operations (WSJ: CIO Journal) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1175",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-cio-sees-key-role-as-company-prepares-for-commercial-operations-11618849274?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=9",
        "text": "One of his priorities is creating an \u201cintegrated systems architecture,\u201d or a framework for how the different systems used to design and build spaceships connect and share data seamlessly. This includes, for instance, creating pipelines between systems that store design and flight data to systems that can use that data to create predictive models that forecast vehicle maintenance needs.\n\n\n\n\nHe also said he\u2019s in the process of introducing tools for managing data and the digital representations\u2014known as \u201cdigital twins\u201d\u2014of the aircraft and spacecraft that Virgin Galactic manufactures.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a journey, though, that requires not just tools, but driving \u2018digital\u2019 process change,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up WSJ | CIO Journal The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nVirgin Galactic, founded in 2004, has pitched the promise of taking passengers to the edge of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, more than 50 miles high, for the views and a few minutes of weightlessness. So far six hundred passengers have signed up for the roughly 90-minute journey, paying up to $250,000 a ticket. Sales of new tickets are now on hold, a company spokeswoman said.\nThe company\u2019s plans have been delayed multiple times, most notably following a 2014 crash of a test vehicle that left one pilot dead.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic CIO Alistair Burns\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\nThe publicly traded company is one of several businesses in Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Group. A company spokeswoman said Virgin Galactic anticipates sending Mr. Branson on a test flight as early as this summer and sending paying customers into space in 2022.\nThe company\u2019s primary competitor is Blue Origin Federation LLC, the space transportation company founded by Amazon.com Inc. chief executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s business model appears likely to have \u201chighly attractive economics once it is up and running,\u201d Douglas Harned, an AllianceBernstein equity analyst, said in a research note last week. But he said the risks of the business appear to far exceed those of commercial airline travel or theme parks. \u201cA catastrophic failure by any provider could have a crushing effect on demand for all.\u201d\nInaugural CIOs, such as Mr. Burns, often benefit from a blank slate as they don\u2019t have to revamp the culture or operating model set by their predecessors, said Matt Guarini, senior research director at research and consulting firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Forrester Research Inc.\n\nHe added that the most successful CIOs are ones that keep the customers top of mind, and that is going to be especially important with the market Virgin Galactic is targeting. \u201cThese people who are traveling are going to have great expectations because they\u2019re spending a lot of money,\u201d Mr. Guarini said. \u201cAnd so part of that experience is going to come from the technology that supports them.\u201d\nVirgin Galactic has seen its share of turnover in the C-suite over the past year. CEO Michael Colglazier, previously the head of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walt Disney Co.\n\n\n \u2019s international parks and resorts, joined last July. In February it tapped\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Ahrens,\n\n\n\n of semiconductor company Mellanox Technologies Ltd., as its finance chief after former CFO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Campagna\n\n\n\n left to join satellite observation startup Capella Space Corp.\nBefore joining Virgin Galactic, Mr. Burns spent nearly five years as CIO at OSI Systems Inc., which develops security screening technologies and other electronic systems. His career in IT, which exceeds 25 years, also includes holding technology leadership positions at manufacturing company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Meggitt\n\n\n PLC and media company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Thomson Reuters.\n\nA licensed pilot since 1994, Mr. Burns said he\u2019ll seize the first opportunity that\u2019s available for him to take a flight to space.\n\u201cIt would be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.\u201d\nWrite to Jared Council at jared.council@wsj.com As Virgin Galactic moves from flight tests to commercial operations, CIO Alistair Burns wants to ensure the space tourism company has the IT infrastructure in place to support that transition. ",
        "author": "Jared Council"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Fear Climate Data Gap as Trump Aims at Satellites (NYT: Climate) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1176",
        "date": "2017-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/climate/trump-nasa-satellites-global-warming-data.html",
        "text": "Even if Congress votes to keep NASA environmental missions, the nation\u2019s climate monitoring faces challenges, researchers say. Even if Congress votes to keep NASA environmental missions, the nation\u2019s climate monitoring faces challenges, researchers say. Among the sweeping cuts in the Trump administration\u2019s 53-page budget blueprint released last month, one paragraph stood out to climate researchers. It proposed eliminating four of NASA\u2019s climate science missions, including instruments to study clouds, small airborne particles, the flow of carbon dioxide and other elements of the atmosphere and oceans.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Fear Climate Data Gap as Trump Aims at Satellites (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1177",
        "date": "2017-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/climate/trump-nasa-satellites-global-warming-data.html",
        "text": "Even if Congress votes to keep NASA environmental missions, the nation\u2019s climate monitoring faces challenges, researchers say. Even if Congress votes to keep NASA environmental missions, the nation\u2019s climate monitoring faces challenges, researchers say. Among the sweeping cuts in the Trump administration\u2019s 53-page budget blueprint released last month, one paragraph stood out to climate researchers. It proposed eliminating four of NASA\u2019s climate science missions, including instruments to study clouds, small airborne particles, the flow of carbon dioxide and other elements of the atmosphere and oceans.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Fear Climate Data Gap as Trump Aims at Satellites (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1178",
        "date": "2017-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/climate/trump-nasa-satellites-global-warming-data.html",
        "text": "Even if Congress votes to keep NASA environmental missions, the nation\u2019s climate monitoring faces challenges, researchers say. Even if Congress votes to keep NASA environmental missions, the nation\u2019s climate monitoring faces challenges, researchers say. Among the sweeping cuts in the Trump administration\u2019s 53-page budget blueprint released last month, one paragraph stood out to climate researchers. It proposed eliminating four of NASA\u2019s climate science missions, including instruments to study clouds, small airborne particles, the flow of carbon dioxide and other elements of the atmosphere and oceans.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Climate Warms, Plants Will Absorb Less CO\u2082, Study Finds (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1179",
        "date": "2019-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/climate/plants-co2-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Plants and soil absorb carbon dioxide, which helps mitigate climate change. But global warming will degrade that ability, scientists say. Plants and soil absorb carbon dioxide, which helps mitigate climate change. But global warming will degrade that ability, scientists say. The last time the atmosphere contained as much carbon dioxide as it does now, birdlike dinosaurs roamed what was then a verdant landscape. The earth\u2019s lushness was at least partly caused by the abundance of CO\u2082, which plants use for photosynthesis. That has led to the idea that more CO\u2082 in the atmosphere could create a literally greener planet.",
        "author": "By Kendra Pierre-Louis"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the Ice Melts, NASA Will Be Watching (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1180",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/climate/nasa-ice-satellite-launch.html",
        "text": "The new ICESat-2, set to launch on Saturday, can measure changes in the planet\u2019s ice that are less than the width of a pencil. The new ICESat-2, set to launch on Saturday, can measure changes in the planet\u2019s ice that are less than the width of a pencil. If all goes well for NASA on Saturday, climate scientists will get a new eye in the sky that will be able to watch the Earth\u2019s ice melt practically drip by drip.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Biden Administration Strategy: Send In the Scientists (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1181",
        "date": "2021-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/climate/gavin-schmidt-climate-change-nasa.html",
        "text": "Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate scientist, will fill a newly created job of climate adviser to NASA, in a prominent example of Biden\u2019s pledge to focus on climate policy. Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate scientist, will fill a newly created job of climate adviser to NASA, in a prominent example of Biden\u2019s pledge to focus on climate policy. More than a decade ago, a woman at a bar near the Columbia University campus turned to Gavin Schmidt and asked if he knew the main component of air. \u201cYes, nitrogen,\u201d he replied. His answer lost her a bet about whether the average stranger at the bar would know anything about atmospheric chemistry. Two years later, they were married.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Else Does the U.S. Have an Infrastructure Problem? Antarctica (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1182",
        "date": "2017-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/climate/where-else-does-the-us-have-an-infrastructure-problem-antarctica.html",
        "text": "The United States has had the most ambitious research program in Antarctica for 50 years. But our reporters journeyed there and found the infrastructure is aging and deteriorating, and the new price tags are high. The United States has had the most ambitious research program in Antarctica for 50 years. But our reporters journeyed there and found the infrastructure is aging and deteriorating, and the new price tags are high. McMURDO STATION, Antarctica \u2014 The American research station on the edge of this frozen continent may look like a mining camp in the wilderness, but it is actually one of the glories of American science.",
        "author": "By Justin Gillis and Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Else Does the U.S. Have an Infrastructure Problem? Antarctica (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1183",
        "date": "2017-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/climate/where-else-does-the-us-have-an-infrastructure-problem-antarctica.html",
        "text": "The United States has had the most ambitious research program in Antarctica for 50 years. But our reporters journeyed there and found the infrastructure is aging and deteriorating, and the new price tags are high. The United States has had the most ambitious research program in Antarctica for 50 years. But our reporters journeyed there and found the infrastructure is aging and deteriorating, and the new price tags are high. McMURDO STATION, Antarctica \u2014 The American research station on the edge of this frozen continent may look like a mining camp in the wilderness, but it is actually one of the glories of American science.",
        "author": "By Justin Gillis and Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | \u2018America is fiddling around\u2019: Jerry Brown says Trump is fueling California\u2019s climate push (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1184",
        "date": "2017-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/08/02/how-trump-is-fueling-jerry-browns-climate-change-push-in-california/",
        "text": "When President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, it stunned the world. But it also had a less predictable effect: turning California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) into Trump\u2019s antithesis and furthering his own climate-crusading agenda.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightOr so Brown claims.\u00a0\u201cIf anything, the Trump imperative going in the opposite direction is a stimulus,\u201d Brown said in a recent interview with The Washington Post\u2019s David Bruns. \u201cIt\u2019s a goad, it\u2019s a pressure. \u2026 In a way, \u00a0it\u2019s a rising of or raising of awareness that\u2019s actually making my agenda stronger and more resonant with the people of California.\u201d Known as \u201cGovernor Moonbeam,\u201d in part because of his passion for space exploration during his first two terms as governor in the 1970s, Brown has been an environmentalist and science aficionado for decades.\u00a0He\u00a0ran unsuccessfully for resident in 1980 with the slogan, \u201cProtect the Earth, serve the people, explore the universe.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring Brown\u2019s more recent two terms, California has been a powerhouse in promoting the spread of electric cars and renewable energy, and the state recently\u00a0extended\u00a0its ambitious cap-and-trade program.Brown has also been\u00a0involved in promoting the\u00a0Under2 Coalition, an alliance of cities and states around the world committed\u00a0to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions to help keep the climate\u2019s warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).Shortly after Trump\u2019s election, amid fears about cuts to scientific research, Brown\u2019s comment that \u201cif Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite\u201d reverberated in climate and scientific circles.Story continues below advertisementFollowing Trump\u2019s Paris climate deal withdrawal, Brown\u00a0took a five day trip to China\u00a0to promote clean energy and climate action, meeting President Xi Jinping, and also launched (with several other state and city leaders) the\u00a0U.S. Climate Alliance, which is a way of staying committed to the Paris deal through the actions of U.S. state and local actors. Next up: A global summit in California next year to focus on climate change.AdvertisementIn his interview with The Post, Brown argued there was more interest now in climate change because of Trump\u2019s actions.\u201cThe fact that Trump is the null hypothesis, he\u2019s saying there is no climate change, it\u2019s a hoax,\u201d said Brown. \u201cSo that sets up an antinomy, a contradiction. And because of that what California is doing is more salient. People are paying attention. People are more concerned because now they see, oh what Trump is saying \u2013 that\u2019s not right.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd he insisted that climate change was a serious danger.\u201cThere are scientists who predicted that humanity will have a very hard time being around after the 21st century because not just of climate change but nuclear and other kinds of technologies that could get out of hand,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we lack the morality, the wisdom and the collective self-restraint to manage what is becoming the aggregation of the most unimaginable power that any species has ever possessed.\u201dAdvertisementHe depicted the decarbonization of the world economy as one of the greatest economic and technological challenges of our time.\u201cWe\u2019re going to radically transform the very basis of who and what we are,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s big. That\u2019s what you say we\u2019re facing a wall of inertia and to overcome that step by step takes clarity takes science takes technology and takes enlightened leadership and the ability and willingness of people to follow and to do what they have to do.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWith Trump\u2019s Paris climate pact withdrawal, China and other countries are now poised to lead that transformation, rather than the United States, Brown said.\u201cAmerica is fiddling around now,\u201d said Brown.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s goofing off in many respects and the people in Washington are taking almost a perverse pleasure in roasting Trump through these inquiries. But at the end of the day America has to have a president. And America has to have a focus and that same level of determination that the Chinese are exhibiting.\u201d \"The Trump imperative going in the opposite direction is a stimulus,\" California's governor tells The Post. \u2018America is fiddling around\u2019: Jerry Brown says Trump is fueling California\u2019s climate push",
        "author": "Chris Mooney"
    },
    {
        "title": "A huge Antarctic glacier just lost another chunk of ice \u2014 and we know because of NASA (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1185",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/22/a-huge-antarctic-glacier-just-lost-another-chunk-of-ice-and-we-know-because-of-nasa/",
        "text": "One of Antarctica\u2019s most rapidly melting glaciers has shed yet another large block of ice in an event that NASA scientists say is \u201cfurther evidence of the ice shelf\u2019s fragility.\u201d The agency drew attention to the incident in a tweet Wednesday morning. \u00a010 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightPine Island Glacier, located on the edge of the increasingly unstable ice sheet of\u00a0West Antarctica, is a top concern for climate scientists and one of the region\u2019s biggest potential contributors to global sea level rise. It\u2019s\u00a0pouring about 50 billion tons of ice into the ocean each year, and scientists think this rate could continue to increase in the future. Altogether, the glacier has the potential to raise global sea levels by an estimated two feet. \u00a0 Scientists\u2019 concern stems largely from the glacier\u2019s interaction with the ocean, which laps against the exposed front of the floating\u00a0ice shelf and also travels deep beneath it. Warming ocean waters can cause glaciers to melt from the bottom up, making them less stable and more likely to break.\u00a0In fact, Pine Island Glacier has experienced several significant calving events \u2014 that\u2019s when an iceberg breaks off from the ice shelf \u2014 in recent years. In 2015, the glacier lost a massive iceberg with an area of more than 200 square miles. \u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe most recent event, which was captured via satellite imagery at the end of January, is small in comparison \u2014 NASA scientists estimate that the area of ice lost only spans a square mile or so. But the event speaks to the fact that the glacier is still melting and breaking. \u00a0\u201cI think this event is the calving equivalent of an \u2018aftershock\u2019 following the much bigger event,\u201d said Ian Howat, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, in a recent statement. \u201cApparently, there are weaknesses in the ice shelf \u2014 just inland of the rift that caused the 2015 calving \u2014 that are resulting in these smaller breaks.\u201d Indeed, scientists have previously observed multiple small rifts in the ice that they think could lead to more calving events in the future. \u00a0The incident comes as the\u00a0future of the agency\u2019s climate research grows increasingly uncertain. Last November, just after President Trump was elected, one of his campaign advisers shocked the climate science community by suggesting that the new administration should curtail NASA climate research activities. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd now, the issue has cropped up again in a hearing conducted last Thursday by the House Committee on Science, Space and\u00a0Technology. At the hearing, committee chair Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) reportedly stated that he\u2019d like to see a \u201crebalancing\u201d at NASA, and later told E&E News that he\u2019d like the agency to focus more on space exploration, while other agencies can focus on earth sciences and climate change.\u00a0(On the space front, NASA researchers were part of a broader team that\u00a0just discovered a striking group of seven exoplanets orbiting close to a nearby sun, all of which are in an Earthlike temperature range.)Although\u00a0it\u2019s true that other federal agencies are also instrumental players when it comes to U.S. climate science, NASA\u2019s satellite observations give the agency a unique and probably irreplaceable role when it comes to climate research. NASA data have been used in everything from constructing global temperature records to monitoring ice melt at the poles and recording events\u00a0such as the recent calving at Pine Island. Experts have noted that cutting the agency\u2019s earth sciences research could be devastating not only for U.S. scientists, but for climate researchers around\u00a0the world. \u00a0It\u2019s also notable that the agency has continued to post about climate science when other agencies \u2014 most notably the Environmental Protection Agency \u2014 appear to have reduced\u00a0their communications under the new administration. Shortly after the inauguration, Trump administration officials enacted a temporary media blackout for certain federal agencies, including the EPA and the Interior and Agriculture departments. And although\u00a0most agencies resumed communications as usual shortly thereafter, the EPA remained almost completely silent on social media until the official appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator last week. \u00a0For now, it seems like business as usual for NASA\u00a0as the agency continues to keep the public informed about Pine Island and other climate news. The federal science agency continues to share plenty of information about climate change. A huge Antarctic glacier just lost another chunk of ice \u2014 and we know because of NASA",
        "author": "Chelsea Harvey"
    },
    {
        "title": "A huge Antarctic glacier just lost another chunk of ice \u2014 and we know because of NASA (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1186",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/22/a-huge-antarctic-glacier-just-lost-another-chunk-of-ice-and-we-know-because-of-nasa/",
        "text": "One of Antarctica\u2019s most rapidly melting glaciers has shed yet another large block of ice in an event that NASA scientists say is \u201cfurther evidence of the ice shelf\u2019s fragility.\u201d The agency drew attention to the incident in a tweet Wednesday morning. \u00a010 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightPine Island Glacier, located on the edge of the increasingly unstable ice sheet of\u00a0West Antarctica, is a top concern for climate scientists and one of the region\u2019s biggest potential contributors to global sea level rise. It\u2019s\u00a0pouring about 50 billion tons of ice into the ocean each year, and scientists think this rate could continue to increase in the future. Altogether, the glacier has the potential to raise global sea levels by an estimated two feet. \u00a0 Scientists\u2019 concern stems largely from the glacier\u2019s interaction with the ocean, which laps against the exposed front of the floating\u00a0ice shelf and also travels deep beneath it. Warming ocean waters can cause glaciers to melt from the bottom up, making them less stable and more likely to break.\u00a0In fact, Pine Island Glacier has experienced several significant calving events \u2014 that\u2019s when an iceberg breaks off from the ice shelf \u2014 in recent years. In 2015, the glacier lost a massive iceberg with an area of more than 200 square miles. \u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe most recent event, which was captured via satellite imagery at the end of January, is small in comparison \u2014 NASA scientists estimate that the area of ice lost only spans a square mile or so. But the event speaks to the fact that the glacier is still melting and breaking. \u00a0\u201cI think this event is the calving equivalent of an \u2018aftershock\u2019 following the much bigger event,\u201d said Ian Howat, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, in a recent statement. \u201cApparently, there are weaknesses in the ice shelf \u2014 just inland of the rift that caused the 2015 calving \u2014 that are resulting in these smaller breaks.\u201d Indeed, scientists have previously observed multiple small rifts in the ice that they think could lead to more calving events in the future. \u00a0The incident comes as the\u00a0future of the agency\u2019s climate research grows increasingly uncertain. Last November, just after President Trump was elected, one of his campaign advisers shocked the climate science community by suggesting that the new administration should curtail NASA climate research activities. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd now, the issue has cropped up again in a hearing conducted last Thursday by the House Committee on Science, Space and\u00a0Technology. At the hearing, committee chair Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) reportedly stated that he\u2019d like to see a \u201crebalancing\u201d at NASA, and later told E&E News that he\u2019d like the agency to focus more on space exploration, while other agencies can focus on earth sciences and climate change.\u00a0(On the space front, NASA researchers were part of a broader team that\u00a0just discovered a striking group of seven exoplanets orbiting close to a nearby sun, all of which are in an Earthlike temperature range.)Although\u00a0it\u2019s true that other federal agencies are also instrumental players when it comes to U.S. climate science, NASA\u2019s satellite observations give the agency a unique and probably irreplaceable role when it comes to climate research. NASA data have been used in everything from constructing global temperature records to monitoring ice melt at the poles and recording events\u00a0such as the recent calving at Pine Island. Experts have noted that cutting the agency\u2019s earth sciences research could be devastating not only for U.S. scientists, but for climate researchers around\u00a0the world. \u00a0It\u2019s also notable that the agency has continued to post about climate science when other agencies \u2014 most notably the Environmental Protection Agency \u2014 appear to have reduced\u00a0their communications under the new administration. Shortly after the inauguration, Trump administration officials enacted a temporary media blackout for certain federal agencies, including the EPA and the Interior and Agriculture departments. And although\u00a0most agencies resumed communications as usual shortly thereafter, the EPA remained almost completely silent on social media until the official appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator last week. \u00a0For now, it seems like business as usual for NASA\u00a0as the agency continues to keep the public informed about Pine Island and other climate news. The federal science agency continues to share plenty of information about climate change. A huge Antarctic glacier just lost another chunk of ice \u2014 and we know because of NASA",
        "author": "Chelsea Harvey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Greta Thunberg says \u2018COP26 is a failure,\u2019 as she leads Glasgow protests (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1187",
        "date": "2021-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/05/cop26-climate-protests-live-updates/",
        "text": "GLASGOW, Scotland \u2014 Young activists were the focus of the United Nations climate summit on Friday, both within the halls of the conference center and in protests on the streets of Glasgow.Here\u2019s what to knowSwedish teen activist Greta Thunberg led a Fridays for Future student demonstration of 25,000 people. \u201cIt is not a secret that COP26 is a failure,\u201d she said. \u201cIt should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.\u201dCOP26 President Alok Sharma has urged climate negotiators to speed up their work so draft proposals tackling climate change are ready for the ministers arriving next week.Youth activists are also being featured as part of the official conference program, with Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai among Friday\u2019s speakers.Climate protests proceed peacefully. Police report no arrests.Return to menuBy Kasha Patel2:42 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhile thousands of activists marched in the streets of Glasgow on Friday, police intervention appeared minimal.A taxi driver said he had never seen so many police officers, and they were \u201call standing around not doing anything.\u201dPolice Scotland had not reported any arrests related to the protests as of 5:15 p.m. At least one rowdier protester was escorted from the crowd while youth activists gave speeches.Nothing to see here, just life sized Pikachu's being escorted by police to protest at the Cop26 climate conference pic.twitter.com/PBOGywCoR5\u2014 Dexerto (@Dexerto) November 5, 2021\n\nIf anything, Greater Glasgow Police seemed more concerned about potential accidents from fireworks that would be set off in the evening for Bonfire Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Night.The security presence was much heavier earlier in the week, during the World Leaders Summit. Police blocked off a street and contained crowds for more than three hours, according to those on the ground.A larger protest, attracting a diverse range of groups under the banner of \u201cclimate justice,\u201d is planned for Saturday.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementIceberg from Greenland arrives at climate summitReturn to menuBy William Booth1:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkActivists have brought a small iceberg from Greenland to the global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, with backing from the Hollywood actor Rainn Wilson, best-known as the scheming lackey Dwight Schrute in \u201cThe Office\u201d sitcom.The little berg is quietly melting outside the sprawl of the Scottish Events Campus, where COP26 is taking place.The scientists and campaigners with the group Arctic Basecamp ferried the 9,000-pound block of ice to COP26 first by ship, from Narsaq, Greenland, to England, and then onward to Scotland via truck. The energy expense was offset by the purchase of carbon credits.Though climate change is very serious, there were puns.\u201cWhat is happening in the Arctic is only the tip of the iceberg of the climate emergency,\u201d said Gail Whiteman, professor of sustainability at the University of Exeter Business School.Whiteman told the Press Association: \u201cBy literally bringing the Arctic to COP26, we\u2019re sending a strong message to the world\u2019s leaders that what happens in the Arctic doesn\u2019t stay there.\u201dShe added, \u201cThis iceberg may not be inside the negotiation rooms in the Blue Zone, but it\u2019s here and too big to be ignored.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateGreta Thunberg has no kind words for COP26Return to menuBy Kasha Patel and Karla Adam12:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkGreta Thunberg did not have kind words to say about COP26, calling it \u201cfailure,\u201d \u201cexclusionary\u201d and \u201ca global north green wash festival.\u201d\u201cIt is a not a secret that COP26 is a failure,\u201d said Thunberg, who headlined an afternoon of speeches from youth activists outside the United Nations climate summit. \u201cIt should be obvious that this crisis cannot be solved with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.\u201dThunberg accused leaders of doing worse than nothing. \u201cThey are actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks to benefit themselves and to continue profiting from this destructive system,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is an active choice by the leaders to continue to let the exploitation of people and nature, and the destruction of future and present living conditions, to take place.\u201dThunberg said, at our current emissions rates, the best chance to stay below 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) degrees of warming relative to industrial levels will be gone by the end of this decade.\u201cWe need immediate, drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen,\u201d Thunberg said. \u201cAs we don\u2019t have the technological solutions that alone will do anything even close to that, that means we will have to fundamentally change our society.\u201d View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) Maia Piermattei, 20, a university student, was among thousands packed into George Square listening to Thunberg. She said she was struck by how young Thunberg looked. \u201cShe\u2019s not just young, she\u2019s physically small, she really looks like a child,\" Piermattei said. \"And yet what she says is so powerful. She has leadership.\u201d Piermattei contrasted this to the leaders gathered at the COP26 summit, where she has been waitressing. \u201cI don\u2019t feel as represented by them as I do by Greta. She feels like one of us.\u201dThunberg will be at another, potentially larger, rally tomorrow.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement\u2018On the frontlines of the crisis, but not on the front pages of the newspapers\u2019Return to menuBy Marisa Bellack12:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkVanessa Nakate, a 24-year-old activist from Kampala, Uganda, was among the many speakers addressing the inequities of climate change and climate politics.\u201cWe are in a disaster that is happening every day,\u201d she said, noting that \u201cfloods are ravaging\u201d different parts of her country and the African continent.Africa, she said, is responsible for only 3 percent of historical global emissions, and yet it is suffering some of the \u201cmost brutal impacts.\u201dWhile these countries are \u201con the front lines of the climate crisis, they are not on the front pages of the world\u2019s newspapers,\u201d said Nakate, who herself was on the cover of Time magazine last month. \u201cHow will we have climate justice if people from the most affected areas are not being listened to?\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAl Gore says satellites will serve as \u2018neighborhood watch\u2019 to monitor compliance with emissions pledgesReturn to menuBy William Booth12:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkHe\u2019s back. One of the world\u2019s first politicians to seriously confront the threat of a warming world, Al Gore, told the global summit in Glasgow that all the big promises made at COP26 by nations, investors and industries need to be kept.And Gore has a way to do it \u2014 \u201cnot to be the climate cop, but to be the neighborhood watch. Except the neighborhood is the globe, and we are all in this together.\u201d\u201cThose who have made pledges should understand very clearly that their actions will matter a great deal and that any mismatch between their pledges and their subsequent actions will be noted very carefully,\u201d he said.\u201cWe are entering an era of radical transparency,\u201d the former vice president added, with satellites keeping watch, as well as ground, sea and air-based sensors, Internet data streams and crowdsourced information gathering, enhanced by artificial intelligence computing.To that end, the two-time presidential candidate and Oscar winner for his 2006 documentary, \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth,\u201d helped found an academic and technology consortium called Climate TRACE, for \u201cTracking Real-time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions.\u201dGore said the Climate TRACE system, employing satellites launched by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will soon be able to offer \u201ca complete picture of the entire Earth\u2019s surface every day, and soon we will have a complete picture of every square centimeter of the Earth\u2019s surface every six hours.\u201dSo stealthy methane emitters and carbon dioxide cheaters beware.Al Gore will be watching.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement\u2018The climate crisis affects us all\u2019 but not \u2018in the same way\u2019Return to menuBy Kasha Patel11:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkAfter marching through the streets of Glasgow, more than a dozen youth activists are giving speeches discussing the impacts of climate change in their own countries and calling for more action by world leaders. The speeches will be headlined by Greta Thunberg, who led the march.\u201cThe climate crisis affects us all, but the crucial point to understand is that it does not affect us all in the same way,\u201d said Nina Sostinky of Argentina.Sostinky talked about the environmental impacts in her country, especially the exploitation of natural resources by other nations. She noted that the benefits of extractive megaprojects often go to outside countries, while poverty persists within the local population.\u201cIt\u2019s time for those who see our land as an open door to exploit our natural resources to begin with thinking what the meaning of concept development really is,\u201d she said. \u201cNo, it\u2019s not fair what we\u2019re going through as humanity. However, here we are striking in Glasgow, as leaders decide what is better or worse for our future.\u201dEchoing Thunberg\u2019s words, she summarized, \u201cWe are sick of the \u2018blah, blah, blah.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSenate Democrats arrive in Glasgow as House preps pivotal votesReturn to menuBy Maxine Joselow11:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkSens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) arrived Friday at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow while House Democrats in Washington prepared to hold two momentous votes to advance President Biden\u2019s roughly $3 trillion economic agenda.Heinrich told The Washington Post that even though the infrastructure bill and social spending plan have not yet cleared Congress, the United States still has credibility on climate at the U.N. conference.\u201cWe\u2019ve been meeting all afternoon with other countries in bilateral conversations, and they understand this stuff is not easy, but that we\u2019re genuinely back in the game,\u201d Heinrich said.Whitehouse added that other nations recognize \u201cthis is our opening bid, and we\u2019re not going away.\u201dThe Democrats landed in Glasgow after the United States on Thursday reportedly declined to join an international deal to phase out coal for fear of angering Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a centrist who has ties to the coal industry. Manchin has also objected to several climate provisions in the $1.75 trillion social spending legislation.Whitehouse said of Manchin: \u201cWe\u2019re still working with him, and we\u2019re very much hoping that we can get to a better place, as this negotiation closes out.\u201dSchatz said he was \u201cencouraged\u201d by Manchin\u2019s comments about the legislation on \u201cMorning Joe\u201d on Thursday.More Democrats are expected to touch down in Glasgow this weekend, as part of a delegation organized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). For the first time, House Republicans have arranged their own trip to the U.N. climate conference.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementMore than a dozen countries have filed updated climate pledges during COP26, but world remains on troubling trajectoryReturn to menuBy Brady Dennis11:32 a.m.Link copiedLinkUnited Nations officials on Friday said 14 countries had submitted new or updated climate plans since the beginning of the Glasgow talks \u2014 a development that organizers welcomed but that does little to fundamentally alter the world\u2019s trajectory.In an update to previous analyses of the plans, known as \u201cnationally determined contributions,\u201d or NDCs, officials said countries including Chad, Ghana, Uzbekistan, Iraq and Pakistan had logged updated or additional national blueprints through Tuesday.The United Nation\u2019s analysis showed that while the additions and alterations could result in slightly lower emissions than previously expected, total global emissions are still on pace to rise by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. And the plans appear to do little to alter U.N. projections that the world is on pace to warm roughly 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared with preindustrial times.That path remains far in excess of the Paris climate accord\u2019s goal of limiting warming to \u201cwell below\u201d 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels, and, if possible, no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).Current NDCs do not fully reflect all the various promises leaders have made in the opening days of COP26. And nations will continue to face pressure to commit to more-ambitious climate targets during the summit and in the months and years that follow.\u201cThis is doable if we follow through,\u201d U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry told reporters Friday. \u201cAnd the follow-through coming out of here is essential.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementChildren make their first foray into protesting in Glasgow during climate summitReturn to menuBy Karla Adam11:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkMany young Glaswegians took to the streets Friday, making their debut as climate change protesters after securing permission from parents to skip their school lessons. They carried homemade signs like \u201cNo more blah blah blah\u201d and \u201cThe oceans are rising and so are we.\u201dHannah Lowdon, 10, came to \u201cmy first COP, my first protest\u201d holding her homemade sign that said: \u201cClimate is changing. Why aren\u2019t we?\u201dShe described activist Greta Thunberg as \u201cmy idol\u201d and said she was really hoping to see the Swedish teen because she had shown the world that \u201ckids can do a lot\u201d and \u201cadults don\u2019t have to do everything.\u201dHer mom, Susannah Lowdon, said that her daughter, who attends school next to the park where the protest started, \u201cloves her animals and her rainforests and nature generally\u201d and that this was the first time either of them had taken to the streets.Sinead Isiah, 10, was also there to protest. She said she was demonstrating because \u201cthe environment is very important\u201d and was absolutely worth skipping school Friday, when she had a scheduled spelling test. \u201cI\u2019ll probably have to do it next week,\u201d she said with a sigh.She and her friend Aoidhe Featherstone, 10, were leading a chant in the middle of the march that snaked through central Glasgow. \u201cI think we can save the planet but we have to act now,\u201d said Aoidhe. Her mom, Mo Hume, 49, said that she\u2019d taken her daughter on protests before but that this time the dynamics had shifted.\u201cThis one is driven by her; we are accompanying her. There are lessons here for adults on how we take on this issue,\u201d she said.Vulnerable nations send SOS as climate targets slip out of reachReturn to menuBy Sarah Kaplan10:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkUnderneath the chorus of new climate commitments and calls for collaboration that have echoed through the first week of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, a hum of anxiety can be heard.Attendees at the summit know the cruel math of climate change by heart. They\u2019re aware that if temperatures rise just a few fractions of a degree further, the planet could see species vanish, sea levels surge and natural disasters intensify to unheard-of extremes.So they knew what it meant when a new Global Carbon Budget was released early Thursday showing that global greenhouse gas emissions have almost completely rebounded after their pandemic slump. The world has just 11 years of burning carbon at the current rate if humanity hopes to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.Read the full storyArrowRightScenes from the Glasgow youth protests outside COP26Return to menuBy Karla Adam10:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkThousands of young people thronged the streets of Glasgow outside the U.N. Climate Summit calling for real change to stem the tide of global warming. Climate activists, including the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, joined the Fridays for the Future rally that featured a march through the city and then speeches.Organizers estimated the number of participants to be 25,000.Even while U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry claimed that the latest climate summit would herald real change, many young people have assessed the event as little more than greenwashing to cover up wealthy countries\u2019 resistance to change.Many in the march were young schoolchildren, skipping their lessons on a crisp autumnal day to make some noise. Some held aloft signs that said, \u201cNo more blah blah blah\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s our planet too.\u201dKerry says Glasgow climate summit \u2018far from business as usual\u2019 Return to menuBy William Booth9:33 a.m.Link copiedLinkU.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry told reporters in Glasgow that the U.N. summit is the most ambitious he has seen in his long years \u2014 with more real money on the table and more serious ambition than ever before.\u201cI believe what is happening here is far from business as usual,\u201d he said, as thousands of youthful protesters took to the streets of Glasgow demanding more real action and less \u201cblah, blah, blah.\u201dIn remarks at the news conference on Friday, Kerry said he felt \u201ca greater sense of urgency\u201d and \u201ca greater sense of focus\u201d than he\u2019s ever seen at a climate summit in its first week.Kerry said there is \u201creal money\u201d being put on the table that could pivot investment away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy systems.Kerry said today the majority of the world\u2019s wealthiest countries in G-20 \u201chave real plans that they have laid out\u201d that could keep the hope alive of limiting future warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius \u201cif every aspect of those plans are pursued.\u201dKerry said: \u201cThat\u2019s a game changer. Way beyond what many people thought was possible.\u201dThe envoy said he understood the world\u2019s frustration. \u201cI\u2019m frustrated, too,\u201d he said.\u201cThe words don\u2019t mean enough unless they are implemented, and all of us have seen years of frustration for promises that are made not to stand up,\u201d Kerry said.Kerry said that the Glasgow summit will not conclude with \u201cjob done,\u201d but with the message \u201cjob not done.\u201d\u201cThis is a 10-year race,\u201d the envoy said, warning the world has still not produced the kind of ambitious plans that would limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.Fridays for Future protest march gets underwayReturn to menuBy Kasha Patel8:59 a.m.Link copiedLinkOn Nov. 5, kids in Glasgow, Scotland joined Greta Thunberg and protested climate change at the Fridays For Future march during COP26. (Zoeann Murphy, Casey Silvestri/The Washington Post)Greta Thunberg is leading thousands of activists in Glasgow, marching from Kelingrove Park to George Square. Chants and signs underline the growing sense of urgency about action on climate change. Below are a few scenes from the protests.Young activists are marching through Glasgow in a demand for world leaders to tackle climate change. pic.twitter.com/iI8CVIaifg\u2014 STV News (@STVNews) November 5, 2021\n\nEnvironmentalists walk around George Square in Glasgow with a tree for a ritual. 5.11.21#COP26Glasgow #glasgowprotest pic.twitter.com/ereiZeDeoN\u2014 Jamie Lawson (@JamieLawson1001) November 5, 2021\n\nEating Animals Kills Our Planet. #COP26 pic.twitter.com/pupsDw29I5\u2014 FARM Animal Rights (@FARMUSA) November 5, 2021\n\nGreta Thunberg amid a crowd of thousands marching toward george square pic.twitter.com/uftW2PTm3y\u2014 Megan Specia (@meganspecia) November 5, 2021\n\nScottish signmakers on their game as Climate Strike march sets off across Glasgow pic.twitter.com/sSk9wJ928H\u2014 Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) November 5, 2021\n\nP7 children taking part in a peaceful protest to Save our planet and stop climate change. @COP26 @NicolaSturgeon @scotgov @BBCScotlandNews pic.twitter.com/ezYuqfNq5z\u2014 MrsMcMillan_DHT_CCPS (@MrsMcMillanDHT) November 5, 2021\n\n\"Buddha Nature\" in George Square in Glasgow. 5.11.21 #GlasgowCop26 #glasgowprotest pic.twitter.com/L6JC7h9eye\u2014 Jamie Lawson (@JamieLawson1001) November 5, 2021\n\nWhat climate activists from six countries want to see at COP26Return to menuBy Joy Yi8:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkSix activists from developing countries share how climate change has impacted their countries and how they would define success at the U.N. climate summit. (Joy Yi/The Washington Post)Thousands of people marched in Glasgow, Scotland, to push for climate action and protest the disparate impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities and countries. On Nov. 5, Fridays for Future Glasgow, a chapter of the youth-led climate organization inspired by Greta Thunberg, will lead a school strike for climate justice during the U.N. summit.We spoke with six activists from the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Kenya, Bangladesh and Argentina, five of whom belong to a Fridays for Future chapter, about how climate change is impacting their countries and how they would define success at COP26.Read the full storyArrowRightBulletKey updateBulletKey updateBulletKey updateBulletKey update MORE ON CLIMATE CHANGEThe race to defuse Congo\u2019s carbon bombNews\u2022December 16, 2021More than 40 percent of Americans live in counties hit by climate disasters in 2021News\u2022January 5, 2022Climate change fuels a water rights conflict built on over a century of broken promisesNews\u2022November 22, 2021 Youth activists will be the focus both inside and outside the COP26 venue. Greta Thunberg says \u2018COP26 is a failure,\u2019 as she leads Glasgow protests",
        "author": "Karla Adam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate change upped the odds of Hurricane Harvey\u2019s extreme rains, study finds (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1188",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/13/climate-change-upped-the-odds-of-harveys-extreme-rains-study-finds/",
        "text": "The\u00a0extreme rains\u00a0that inundated the Houston area during Hurricane Harvey were made more likely by climate change, a new study suggests, adding that such extreme flooding events will only become more frequent\u00a0as the globe continues to warm.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRight\u201cI guess what I was hoping to achieve was a little bit of a public service,\u201d said MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, who published the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. \u201cThere are folks down in Texas who are having to rebuild infrastructure, and I think they need to have some idea of what kind of event they\u2019re building for.\u201d In the wake of Harvey, many researchers pointed out that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor and that, as a result, a warmer planet should see more extreme rains. But Emanuel\u2019s study goes beyond this general statement to support the idea that the specific risk of such an extreme rain event is already rising because of how humans have changed the planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVia climate modeling, Emanuel generated 3,700 computerized storms for each of three separate models that situated the storms in the\u00a0climates of the years from\u00a01980 to 2016. All of the storms were in the vicinity of Houston or other Texas areas.\u00a0He examined how often, in his models, there would be about 20 inches of rain in one of these events.Harvey produced\u00a0closer to\u00a033 inches over Houston. But in the tests\u00a0under the 1980 to 2016 conditions, getting 20 inches of rain was rare in the extreme.\u201cBy the standards of the average climate during 1981-2000, Harvey\u2019s rainfall in Houston was \u2018biblical\u2019 in the sense that it likely occurred around once since the Old Testament was written,\u201d wrote Emanuel, adding that in the much larger area of Texas,\u00a0such rains did occur once every 100 years.Story continues below advertisementThen\u00a0Emanuel performed a similar analysis, this time in the projected climates of the years 2080 to 2100, assuming the climate changes in some of the more severe ways scientists suggest it could.AdvertisementThe odds, accordingly, shifted toward a much greater likelihood of such events by 2100. Harvey\u2019s rains in Houston became a once-in-100-years event (rather than a once-in-2,000-years event), and for Texas as a whole, the odds increased from once in 100 years to once every 5\u00bd.This also meant, Emanuel calculated, that Harvey was probably more likely in 2017 than in the era from 1981 to 2000. In 2017, Harvey would be a once-in-325-years event. For Texas as a whole, in 2017 it would be a once-in-16-years event.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was a very unusual event,\u201d Emanuel said. \u201cLess unlikely than it might have been 30 years ago, but even now very unusual.\u201dEmanuel conceded that precisely why the simulations changed the odds with greater global warming wasn\u2019t clear \u2014 whether it had something to do with more water vapor or other storm characteristics. \u201cThis is left to future work,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementSeveral researchers praised the study, including\u00a0Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate expert at Stanford University who has focused on the science of attributing extreme events to climate change.\u201cHarvey was a complex event with lots of contributing ingredients. This study breaks new ground by isolating the role that global warming played in upping the odds that a storm like Harvey produces very heavy rainfall,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe 20-fold future increase in the probability of Harvey-level rainfall points toward a markedly increasing vulnerability of Gulf Coast communities \u2014 one that they are not well prepared to adjust to,\u201d added\u00a0Greg Holland, a hurricane scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.Shane Hubbard,\u00a0a researcher at the Space Science and Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison who has also studied the odds of Harvey\u2019s rains, did question some aspects of the presentation.AdvertisementHe suggested that Harvey was such an extreme event \u2014 producing as much rainfall as three prior Texas flood disasters combined \u2014 that Emanuel\u2019s approach of looking at rainfall at a single point \u201cdoes not accurately represent what happened during Harvey.\u201dStory continues below advertisementStill, looking toward the future, Hubbard found the research helpful.\u201cThis work suggests that with landfalling hurricanes, the amounts of precipitation will dramatically increase, meaning the risk to populations along streams and rivers will also dramatically increase. Hurricanes are not a single hazard, but multiple hazards,\u201d he added.The new study will probably be followed by many others on the link between the devastating 2017 hurricane season and climate change.\u201cI think humans have changed the odds quite a bit,\u201d Emanuel said. It could be the first of many studies of climate change and the extreme 2017 hurricane season. Climate change upped the odds of Hurricane Harvey\u2019s extreme rains, study finds",
        "author": "Chris Mooney"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists triple their estimates of the number of people threatened by rising seas (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1189",
        "date": "2019-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/10/29/scientists-triple-their-estimates-number-people-threatened-by-rising-seas/",
        "text": "Rising seas will be much worse and more expensive to deal with than previously thought, new research finds, not because of faster changes in sea levels but because of an increase in estimates of the number of people living on low ground.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightThe upshot of the study is that 110 million people worldwide live below the high-tide level; that includes many partly protected by sea walls or other infrastructure, as in New Orleans. Even under a scenario of very modest climate change, that number will rise to 150 million in 2050 and 190 million by 2100. If climate change and sea level rise follow a worse path, as many as 340 million people living below the high-tide level could be in peril, to say nothing of how many could be affected by floods and extreme events.Story continues below advertisementSuch figures are three times \u2014 or more \u2014 higher than earlier estimates.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve had a huge blind spot as to the degree of danger, and that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been striving to improve,\u201d said Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central, who wrote the new study in Nature Communications with colleague Scott Kulp.The reason for the big change is that prior research has relied on data about coastal elevations that comes from radar measurements from the 2000 space shuttle Endeavor mission. But that data set has problems. The instrument detected the height not only of the coastal land surface but anything else that was on it, such as houses and trees. This introduced errors in land-elevation estimates averaging about 6\u00bd feet globally, the new study says.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFor all of the resources we have rightly invested in improving our sea level projections, we didn\u2019t know the height of the ground beneath our feet,\u201d Strauss said.AdvertisementSome wealthy countries, such as the United States, have used laser-based coastal measurements to gain more accuracy, but most have not been able to do so.The new study uses the more accurate U.S. measurements as a guide, training an algorithm to apply similar adjustments to the global data set from the space shuttle. This is where the much higher numbers for exposed populations come from, with the biggest changes in exposure coming for countries in Asia.\u201cIn terms of global estimates, I think the analysis convincingly shows that the situation is probably even worse than previous studies suggested,\u201d said St\u00e9phane Hallegatte, an economist at the World Bank who studies climate change and disaster exposure. \u201cWe are talking about hundreds of millions of people who will be directly exposed.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe changes are certainly very large. The study estimates that 110 million people live below the current high-tide level vs. an estimated 28 million for the older data set. About 250 million people would fall below the level of the worst yearly flood, the study says, up from the previous estimate of 65 million.AdvertisementProjections illustrate how exposed people will be as seas continue to rise.The study considers a scenario that would lead to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, of global warming by 2100, the temperature rise that world leaders have set as an absolute limit. The study projects that 150 million people would live below the high tide line by 2050 and 200 million by 2100. Those exposed to an annual flood in that year would be 360 million.Story continues below advertisementThe world is on course to warm considerably more than 2 degrees Celsius, however, so there are more dire scenarios.If key instabilities kick in in Antarctica, 480 million people would be exposed to an annual flood in 2100.The findings are worst for Asia, notably in China, Bangladesh and India. In the worst-case scenario, 87 million, 50 million and 38 million people in those countries, respectively, would fall below the high-tide level in 2100.AdvertisementThe situation is, if anything, more ominous than these figures suggest, according to the World Bank\u2019s Hallegatte. That\u2019s because in addition to high-tide and annual worst-case flood events, there are major floods from hurricanes and other storms and disasters to consider, even if they do not occur every year. The impact of these severe events will be worsened and affect larger populations as seas continue to rise.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMost dikes and protection systems have been built for the sea level of 50 years ago or more, and will be increasingly ill-designed to protect people against floods, leading to rapidly increasing coastal flood losses in the absence of large upgrades,\u201d Hallegatte said. \u201cUpgrading those systems will be expensive but is unavoidable if one wants to avoid unacceptable economic losses in large cities.\u201dSeveral other researchers said the new estimates are a step forward, although some criticized the work.Advertisement\u201cThis study is an important step toward a more accurate estimation of population at risk from global sea level rise,\u201d said Pinki Mondal, a University of Delaware researcher who uses satellite and other remote-sensing tools to study climate change risks and effects. \u201cWith advancements in technology, computing resources and machine learning, it is becoming increasingly possible to have highly accurate estimates of say, elevation, as shown in this study.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAthanasios Vafeidis, a sea level expert at the University of Kiel in Germany, agreed that the research presents \u201cnew, improved information on coastal elevation.\u201d\u201cHowever,\u201d he said, \u201cimportant factors such as socioeconomic development and adaptation are not considered in these estimates. Physical processes are represented in a rather simplistic manner.\u201dAdvertisementVafeidis noted that it\u2019s not clear how well the algorithm, which is trained on the U.S. coastline, performs in other countries. He also said that the way populations grow and adapt to rising seas is more complex than the study was able to account for and that the effects of floods, too, depend on much more nuanced factors than the sheer elevation of the land.Story continues below advertisementClimate Central\u2019s Strauss acknowledges that the study does not give any \u201cexplicit consideration\u201d to current adaptation measures, such as sea walls, in assessing present-day exposure; it is merely measuring the elevation of the land itself and the number of people living on it.That, he argues, may be good news \u2014 an indication that humans are already capable of adapting to threats from the sea.\u201cWe infer that there must be coastal defenses protecting those 100 million-plus people below today\u2019s high tide line,\u201d Strauss said. \u201cBecause only a handful of them can be living in houseboats or homes on stilts.\u201dStill, whatever their current defenses, people already living below high-tide lines are likely to be increasingly tested in coming years.\u201cThis new study suggests that a lot of the assessments published on climate change risks are underestimated and would need to be revised,\u201d Hallegatte said. 150 million will live below the permanent high tide line by the year 2050, new research finds. Scientists triple their estimates of the number of people threatened by rising seas",
        "author": "Chris Mooney"
    },
    {
        "title": "Despite pandemic, carbon dioxide level in atmosphere hits record high (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1190",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/06/07/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-hits-record-levels/",
        "text": "Economies worldwide nearly ground to a halt over the 15 months of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to a startling drop in global greenhouse gas emissions.But the idle airplanes, boarded-up stores and quiet highways barely made a dent in the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday had reached the highest levels since accurate measurements began 63 years ago. 10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightThe new figures serve as a sober reminder that even as President Biden and other world leaders make unprecedented promises about curtailing greenhouse gas emissions, turning the tide of climate change will take even more massive efforts over a much longer period of time.Story continues below advertisementThe report of a climb in atmospheric carbon dioxide was also published on the eve of a meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized countries, where climate change is expected to be at center stage. The G-7 meeting is intended to prod major emitting countries toward more ambitious actions ahead of a major international climate conference in Glasgow in November.Advertisement\u201cFossil fuel burning is really at the heart of this. If we don\u2019t tackle fossil fuel burning, the problem is not going to go away,\u201d Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at Scripps, said in an interview, adding that the world ultimately will have to make emissions cuts that are \u201cmuch larger and sustained\u201d than anything that happened during the pandemic.Scientists from Scripps and the NOAA said on Monday that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide peaked in May, reaching a monthly average of nearly 419 parts per million.Story continues below advertisementThat represents an increase from the May 2020 mean of 417 parts per million, and it marks the highest level since measurements began 63 years ago at the NOAA observatory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Twice in 2021, daily levels recorded at the observatory have exceeded 420 parts per million, researchers said.AdvertisementPsychological research shows that climate change can alter an individual's mental health both directly and indirectly, impacting how we respond to this crisis. (John Farrell/The Washington Post)Carbon dioxide spikes to critical record, halfway to doubling preindustrial levels\u201cWhile 2020 saw a historic drop in emissions, the fact that at certain points more than half the world\u2019s population was under lockdown, and emissions ONLY fell 6 percent, should be a sobering reminder of how staggeringly hard it will be to get to net zero and how much more work we have to do,\u201d Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University\u2019s global energy center, said in an email.\u201cShutting down economic activity is not a viable or desirable way to reduce emissions, and as economies open back up, it\u2019s not surprising emissions are rising because we still have not put in place the changes needed for the overall system of how we produce and consume energy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe increasing CO2 concentration alone was not particularly surprising to scientists, who have watched the figure rise steadily over time. What was telling was the fact that the drop in emissions during the pandemic did little to slow down the increase.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s significant in that it shows we are still fully on the wrong track,\u201d Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA\u2019s Global Monitoring Laboratory, said in an interview. \u201cThe rate of increase has been the highest in the past decade, and we\u2019re still on it.\u201dTans noted that humans continue to add about 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution to the atmosphere each year, and that avoiding catastrophic changes to the climate will require reducing that number to zero as quickly as possible.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe emissions of CO2 continue to be incredibly high,\u201d said Corinne Le Qu\u00e9r\u00e9, research professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia in Britain. \u201cThe concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will stop rising when the emissions approach zero.\u201dDoing that translates into daunting targets. In November 2019, a United Nations Environment Program report warned that unless global greenhouse gas emissions fell by 7.6 percent each year between 2020 and 2030, the world would miss the opportunity to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), above preindustrial levels \u2014 a key goal of the Paris agreement.AdvertisementLast year, a report by the same group said that to meet that goal, countries would need to increase their current emissions-cutting pledges fivefold \u2014 an aspiration that would require rapid and profound changes in how societies travel, produce electricity and eat.Story continues below advertisementCarbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas, traps heat from the planet\u2019s surface that would otherwise escape into space. Much of the carbon dioxide breaks down after about 100 years, but the current global rate of emissions is enough to offset that rate and further increase the atmospheric concentration of the gas, causing the planet to warm steadily.The highest monthly mean levels of carbon dioxide typically occur each May, just before plants in the Northern Hemisphere start to remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere during the growing season. In the northern fall, winter and early spring, plants and soil give off CO2, causing levels to rise.AdvertisementEven as international borders closed and global economic activity took a massive hit throughout much of 2020, researchers have found that human-caused emissions rebounded fairly quickly after decreasing sharply early in the pandemic.Story continues below advertisementIn 2020, primary energy demand decreased nearly 4 percent, and global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions fell by 5.8 percent, according to the International Energy Agency \u2014 the largest annual percentage decline since World War II.In absolute terms, the decline in emissions of almost 2 billion tons of CO2 is \u201cwithout precedent in human history,\u201d the IEA said. \u201cBroadly speaking, this is the equivalent of removing all of the European Union\u2019s emissions from the global total.\u201d The agency said that demand for fossil fuels was hardest hit in 2020 \u2014 especially oil, which plunged 8.6 percent, and coal, which dropped by 4 percent.Carbon emissions on track to surge as world rebounds from pandemicBut in the broader sense, the pandemic could prove to be little more than a blip in the world\u2019s efforts to combat climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEnergy-related carbon dioxide emissions during 2020 dropped to about the same level of global emissions that prevailed in 2012 \u2014 not nearly low enough to change the world\u2019s current trajectory. That reality offers the latest evidence of the stubbornness of human-related emissions and the difficulty the world faces in making the kind of far-reaching, long-lasting cuts necessary to slow Earth\u2019s warming and avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.Already, the IEA has said it expects global carbon emissions to surge this year as parts of the world rebound from the coronavirus pandemic. The group projected in April that emissions are on track to reach the second-largest annual rise on record.Global energy demand is already set to surpass 2019 levels, alongside continued growth in alternative energies, the Paris-based organization found.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to surge, leaders around the world face mounting pressure to commit to more aggressive, more urgent plans to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. Some countries have begun to outline more ambitious targets ahead of a key U.N. climate conference in the fall. Among them is the United States, which under President Biden has vowed to cut its overall emissions in half by the end of the decade.Biden plans to cut emissions at least in half by 2030Still, analyses by the United Nations and other organizations have found that a grim gap remains between the world\u2019s current path and the significant shifts needed keep Earth\u2019s warming to \u201cwell below\u201d 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels \u2014 a central goal of the Paris agreement. In short, the existing promises aren\u2019t enough, and most countries have not lived up to the promises they have made.Keeling said he is optimistic that major changes lie ahead as renewable energy and other technologies take root and multiply. But they won\u2019t happen overnight. \u201cI do expect we will see significant changes in the years ahead. The political will has shifted,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat we need to do is see a sustained move toward moving away from fossil fuels.\u201dTans also holds out hope that the world will be able to put itself on a better path. The science of how to do that exists, he said, but what remains unclear is whether societies can muster the kind of action that has yet to materialize.\u201cThe goals so far are themselves insufficient, even after having been beefed up,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re running out of time. The longer we wait, the harder it gets.\u201d \u2018If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, the highest priority must be to reduce CO2 pollution to zero at the earliest possible date,\u2019 one top scientist says  Despite pandemic, carbon dioxide level in atmosphere hits record high",
        "author": "Brady Dennis"
    },
    {
        "title": "A runaway greenhouse effect turned Venus into \u2018hell.\u2019 Could the same thing happen here? (WP: Climate Solutions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1191",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/03/20/runaway-greenhouse-effect-turned-venus-into-hell-could-same-thing-happen-here/",
        "text": "Is there a temperature rise number that will result in a runaway greenhouse effect sending the Earth towards the fate of Venus?-- Richard, New Boston NH10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightOnce upon a time, around small yellow sun, there existed a world with a rocky surface and a molten core. It harbored water and may even have been hospitable to life. Then the planet got hot -- really hot. Its atmosphere filled with heat-trapping gases. Water evaporated into its atmosphere and then was lost to space. Whatever mechanisms the planet may have had for balancing its climate were broken. Nothing, not even a robot, could survive there.This is not a scenario from a science fiction novel about climate change (or the director\u2019s cut of Wall-E). It\u2019s what scientists say really happened to a world in our own solar system: Venus.Story continues below advertisementHuman-driven climate change will never get quite as bad as that, said Giada Arney, a planetary scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center. But the story of Venus\u2019s transformation from potentially Earth-like planet to the \u201cclosest thing to hell in our solar system,\u201d she said, holds important lessons for people navigating a warming world.AdvertisementFor the past 4.6 billion years, Earth has kept its climate in balance via a process known as the carbon cycle. Over time, most carbon in the atmosphere is taken up by the ocean, then locked into rocks in the form of calcium carbonate, or limestone. The movement of tectonic plates pulls those rocks into Earth\u2019s interior, where carbon can be stored for millennia before it is belched back into the atmosphere by volcanoes.The carbon cycle is Earth\u2019s thermostat, keeping temperatures from swinging too far toward either extreme. When volcanoes are particularly active, carbon builds up in the atmosphere, trapping heat the way a greenhouse roof does (that\u2019s where we get the term \u201cgreenhouse effect\"). But rising temperatures can lead to more rain, which wears away rocks, which releases material for making calcium carbonate, which locks up carbon in the form of seashells, limestone and other rock and cools things down again.Story continues below advertisementScientists suspect that Venus once had its own thermostat. Spacecraft sent to probe the planet\u2019s atmosphere have found molecular remnants of water -- evidence that, at one point, the planet was able to keep its temperature under control. When the planet got too hot, water would evaporate and form clouds in the atmosphere that reflected sunlight back into space. If the planet had plate tectonics, as some researchers have speculated, that system would have helped modulate the carbon.AdvertisementBut the sun, like all yellow dwarf stars, grows brighter as it ages. This gradual brightening is much too slow to account for the climate change Earth has experienced in the last century, but it has made radiation from the sun about 40 percent more intense than it was 4 billion years ago.At some point -- perhaps as recently as half a billion years ago -- Venus could no longer handle the heat. Its clouds got too thick and started to trap more radiation than they reflected. Conditions became so warm that all the planet\u2019s water turned to vapor, which was then broken up by the sun\u2019s radiation.Story continues below advertisementLosing its water might also have disrupted Venus\u2019s tectonics (if it had any), because water is thought to be an important \u201clubricant\u201d for shifting tectonic plates. Without this recycling mechanism, carbon in the atmosphere accumulated to suffocating extremes.Advertisement\u201cAt that point it\u2019s game over,\u201d said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist North Carolina State University. \u201cThat planet has no means of ridding itself of the heat energy from the star.\u201dNow Venus is the poster child for the \u201crunaway greenhouse effect,\" a testament to the way a planet can change when the cycles that balance its climate are broken. The temperature at its surface is more than 850 degrees Fahrenheit -- as hot as a self-cleaning oven. The crushing pressure of an atmosphere thick with sulfuric acid clouds is as intense as what you\u2019d experience half a mile beneath the ocean on Earth. If that wasn\u2019t enough to kill you, breathing air composed of 96 percent carbon dioxide would do the trick.Story continues below advertisementThe same gradual brightening of the Sun that turned Venus into a furnace will one day do the same to Earth, Arney said -- but not for another couple billion years.AdvertisementClimate change is a much more immediate concern. Much the way a warming sun broke Venus\u2019s temperature control system, humans have disrupted Earth\u2019s natural cycle by burning fossil fuels, scientists agree. The buried carbon of ancient organisms that would otherwise have stayed locked up beneath Earth\u2019s surface is now being released release at least 60 times as fast as it would under as natural processes. The planet is heating up at a rate of about 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade --faster than any known change over the past 4.6 billion years.We\u2019re unlikely to see our planet become Venus anytime soon, Byrne said, even if we burned every gallon of oil and ounce of coal currently in the ground. Earth\u2019s average temperature would have to rise by dozens of degrees Fahrenheit to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, and the worst climate change scenarios don\u2019t project warming greater than 8.1 degrees by the end of the century.\u201cBut I think it\u2019s certainly worth us being humble,\u201d Byrne said. \u201cPlanetary systems are kept in a very fine balance ... and it\u2019s important for humans to realize it doesn\u2019t take very much to tip the balance and really fundamentally change things.\u201d[What questions do you have about climate change? Ask The Post.] The story of Venus\u2019s transformation from potentially Earth-like planet to the \u201cclosest thing to hell in our solar system\" holds important lessons for Earthlings navigating a warming world. A runaway greenhouse effect turned Venus into \u2018hell.\u2019 Could the same thing happen here?",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Digital Ad Opportunities and Capital Spur Investor Interest in Ad Tech (WSJ: CMO Today) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1192",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/digital-ad-opportunities-and-capital-spur-investor-interest-in-ad-tech-11625220000?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=19",
        "text": "Ad tech facilitates automated digital ad buying and targeting, while marketing tech generally supports longer-term efforts such as customer relationship management.\n\n\n\n\nInvestors in the past decade or so shunned ad tech as the sector\u2019s companies struggled to compete with ad giants like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Google and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n and to evolve their businesses to rely less on manual labor and more on self-service models. The industry was marred with bankruptcies, with chapter 11 filings from companies such as Videology in 2018 and Sizmek Inc. in 2019, and confronted by challenges related to changing privacy expectations and rules.\n\nBut the industry has regained its mojo, fueled by a rise in digital ad spending and cheap borrowing. New entrants are gunning for a share of the digital ad market, too, including media companies and retailers with growing online divisions.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up WSJ | CMO Today CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\u201cThis sector has been out of favor for so long and largely has been ignored,\u201d said Terry Kawaja, chief executive and founder of investment bank Luma Partners, which focuses on ad and marketing technology. But a recent surge of public and private investment in the category indicates there has been a change in tune, he said.\nFour years ago, there were just a few public ad tech companies, and only one of them had a valuation of over $1 billion, Mr. Kawaja said. Now, there are a dozen such companies trading at over $1 billion, and likely more to come, according to Mr. Kawaja. Luma is launching indexes to track the public companies in ad and marketing tech, he said.\nAd- and marketing-tech companies including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Pubmatic Inc.,\nViant Technology Inc.,\nAppLovin Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DoubleVerify Holdings Inc.\n\n\n have already completed public offerings in recent months. More recently, ad-tech firm Innovid Inc. announced plans to go public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company. And Outbrain competitor Taboola began trading earlier this week following a SPAC deal. \nAn evolving sector Deals in ad tech and martech are growing in number following a lull during the pandemic, meanwhile, and were up 174% in the second quarter from the same period last year, according to a report released by Luma on Thursday.\nMedia companies betting on streaming TV services to connect advertisers with cord-cutters have helped boost deal making. Last year, NBCUniversal parent company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Comcast Corp.\n\n\n acquired Beeswax and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Roku Inc.\n\n\n this March agreed to purchase Nielsen\u2019s advanced video ad unit. \nRetailers are also entering the fray as they grow their digital commerce operations and compete with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\nWalmart Inc.\n\n\n this year agreed to buy automated ad creation technology from Thunder Industries, for example, while Amazon itself in 2019 bought Sizmek\u2019s ad-targeting and automated ad creation technology.\n\u201cThere\u2019s more room to grow the pie overall, and digital advertising is going to become the default as every media channel becomes digital,\u201d said Prohaska Consulting Chief Executive Officer and Principal Matt Prohaska, who focuses on the advertising and marketing tech industry.\nU.S. digital advertising spending is expected to increase 25% this year to over $191 billion, according to a forecast from research firm eMarketer.\nInvestors have money to spend, Mr. Prohaska added. This year, multiple clients who never invested in ad or marketing technology have expressed interest in the category, he said.\nInvestors are looking at examples such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Trade Desk Inc.,\n\n\n said Mr. Prohaska. The company, which focuses on automated ad buying, has achieved a market cap of over $35 billion since going public in 2016.\nThe category is also getting a lift from the broader technology industry, said Brent Thill, tech sector leader for software and internet research at Jefferies. \u201cThe overall tech market is white hot and valuations have gone into outer space,\u201d Mr. Thill said. \u201cThat\u2019s helping the ad tech space.\u201d\nTo be sure, many ad tech companies face an uphill battle as they evolve their offerings to help advertisers and publishers navigate new privacy rules, as well as future ad-targeting changes from Google. \nAnd as ad tech companies experience multiples once reserved for the best software companies, investors should remain skeptical, said Mr. Thill.\n\u201cIt feels almost too good to sustain,\u201d he said.\n\n\nMore From CMO Today\n\n\n\n\nLocked-Out Account Users Wrestle With Two-Factor Authentication \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nTinder Adds Background Checks to Its Dating App\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nAd Giant WPP Ceasing Operations in Russia \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nWrite to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com Deal activity and public offerings in the advertising and marketing technology industry are rising as the sector gets a boost from a flush of available capital and companies looking for a share of a growing digital ad business. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Bruell"
    },
    {
        "title": "As HBCU football deals with realignment, the Celebration Bowl still holds its appeal (WP: College Football) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1193",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/12/17/celebration-bowl-jackson-state-south-carolina-state/",
        "text": "The Celebration Bowl reconvenes Saturday in Atlanta after one pandemic cancellation, two years of waiting and three jarring conference reconfigurations. It looks different and maybe even misshapen, as does all college football from time to realigned time. Does it retain its churning meaning?Please answer some questions in this short survey about professional soccer and the 2022 Men's FIFA World Cup.ArrowRightTwo key pieces of evidence shout the following: Yes. The Celebration Bowl, the historically Black college and university national-title-claim game, has a six-year contract with ESPN, and it has just gone and sold out Mercedes-Benz Stadium, that funky spaceship on the Atlanta skyline, a first for this seven-year-old, six-edition-old event. Might it last a hundred years, as wise souls projected back in 2019 when life was sort of normal?Story continues below advertisement\u201cMan, I sure hope so,\u201d retired coach Rod Broadway, who won it twice with North Carolina A&T, said by phone from North Carolina, \u201cbecause it\u2019s such a beautiful event.\u201d He predicted it long could benefit from one aspect: \u201cAnd I think the goal and the direction that it\u2019s taken, it\u2019s not just a bowl game; it\u2019s a social event.\u201dIn signing day shocker, top recruit Travis Hunter goes with Deion Sanders and Jackson StateTwo years since a cloudy day outdoors and a goose-bump day indoors in December 2019, when North Carolina A&T beat Alcorn State, 64-44, before the world went on hiatus, the annual match of HBCU conference champions will pit two first-timers with big fan bases: Southwestern Athletic Conference champion Jackson State (11-1) against Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference champion South Carolina State (6-5). Yet it will pit an altered SWAC and a really altered MEAC.AdvertisementIn 2017, year No. 3 of the Celebration Bowl, the MEAC sent a champ from an 11-team conference (North Carolina A&T), while the SWAC sent a champ from a 10-team conference (Grambling). Since then, five teams have left the MEAC, two of those for the SWAC, and the balance of football teams has tilted to an imbalance of 12-6, SWAC. Two teams \u2014 Hampton and Celebration Bowl dynasty North Carolina A&T (which won the bowl four times) \u2014 ventured to the Big South, or what some call \u201cthe mainstream.\u201d Two teams, Florida A&M and Bethune-Cookman, left the MEAC for the SWAC.Story continues below advertisementIt sounds a lot like .\u2009.\u2009. college football, an eccentric business in which every team must adapt, and so the 2021 Celebration Bowl run-up sounds just as excited as .\u2009.\u2009. 2019.\u201cI\u2019ve been trying to get to this thing for about 10 years now,\u201d 20-season South Carolina State mainstay coach Oliver \u201cBuddy\u201d Pough joked at the bowl intro news conference. \u201cAnd I can tell you that I fought for a good many years to keep this thing from happening. And then by the time I figured out that this was something that we ought to really buy into, you know, I think I\u2019ve been punished for not being able to be on board at the beginning!\u201dAdvertisementHe called it \u201csomething that\u2019s going to be bigger and better as we continue to build\u201d and said his fresh thinking gained much prodding from one of the coaches who helped \u201cpunish\u201d him, Broadway, who would come to dinner at Pough\u2019s house, families all around, and: \u201cThey got everybody in my house all juiced-up about how great an atmosphere and all the different kinds of things.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe understand this is a very, very important event,\u201d said Jackson State assistant coach Gary Harrell, a former wide receiver, assistant coach and head coach at Howard. He called the game \u201ca voice, a voice that speaks volumes.\u201dHBCU-Power Five partnerships seek to accomplish \u2018more than just scheduling games\u2019Adding to a football importance widely agreed upon and certainly visible in the faces of the winners on that field in 2019, this meaningful bowl in a country full of nutty bowls has its relationship with Atlanta. It has its intensive involvement from a mighty force: HBCU Greek life. It has its bands, in this case South Carolina State\u2019s \u201cMarching 101\u201d and Jackson State\u2019s \u201cSonic Boom of the South.\u201d It has the rare component of fans of teams who are not playing, as noted Broadway: \u201cI saw Grambling [fans] there. I saw South Carolina State. Fans from all over the league. North Carolina Central. All of them were there.\u201dAnd now it has Jackson State Coach Deion Sanders, among those rare souls who can attract eyeballs just by standing over there on a sideline, especially after Wednesday, when Jackson State jostled the whole college landscape by landing prized recruit Travis Hunter, a suburban Atlantan no less.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn listing his probable reasons for the sellout, 20-year Atlantan Jamie Walker of Black College Sports Network spoke of the \u201cnew blood in the game,\u201d the \u201ctwo rabid fan bases\u201d \u2014 and then of the Atlantan nostalgia Sanders represents. For some around the country, his loud Super Bowl stints with Dallas and San Francisco might have occluded that he started off in Atlanta, unless they caught the documentary about how he started off with two sports, including the Atlanta Braves.\u201cIt\u2019s an entertainment city, a city for entertainers,\u201d Walker said during a phone interview. \u201cEven though if you look at the team Deion was on here [1989-93], they didn\u2019t have back-to-back winning seasons, but they did have a flair, a flamboyance, significant in what the city was becoming at that time.\u201dHe reached back into those days of yore, which preceded Walker\u2019s arrival in 2002 as a North Carolinian and an A&T graduate, and brought up some of the names \u2014 Evander Holyfield, MC Hammer \u2014 that helped usher Atlanta toward its profound redefinition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom that mix, he reminded, blares Sanders.Walker thinks the MEAC, which has just changed commissioners from Celebration Bowl pioneer Dennis Thomas to Sonja Stills, former chief operating officer, might just be \u201cgood right now, you know, standing pat.\u201d He did feel the old heart/mind tussle when his alma mater, A&T, left for the Big South. The mind knew it could be a sensible business decision. The heart knew the Celebration Bowl wouldn\u2019t be an option anymore. Both heart and mind knew that old pull between dreams for HBCUs: the Celebration Bowl, or maybe the FCS playoffs, where Big South champion Kennesaw State landed this year, as did somebody else: Florida A&M, as an at-large team after it landed one game \u2014 and one point within that game \u2014 shy of Jackson State in the SWAC East.The ultimate college football bowl game betting guide, Part I\u201cRegardless of the way conferences are structured,\u201d Walker concluded, \u201cI think the [Celebration Bowl] will go on.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor one thing, its first five attendances \u2014 35,528, 31,096, 25,873, 31,672 and 32,958 \u2014 all of them roughly normal by the standards of bowl games that rely heavily on TV packages, are about to go outdone.Said Pough, contagiously excited: \u201cI think there\u2019s room for all the different schools of thought. You\u2019ve got some schools that want to go more mainstream and some of us who enjoy staying in our traditional HBCU leagues that way.\u201d He thought the bowl would stay strong and said, \u201cI don\u2019t have an exact play for what will be best, for, say, for instance, the MEAC, because our numbers are down as far as football-playing schools are concerned, but I can tell you that we seem to like doing what we\u2019re doing and I think we\u2019ll continue to go that way.\u201dFor one thing, they\u2019re about to have quite some weekend, during which Pough, such a Braves fan he claims you can gauge whether they won by his mood, is about to meet, for the first time, Sanders. Jackson State, coached by Deion Sanders, will take on South Carolina State in Atlanta in the HBCU national-title claim game. As HBCU football deals with realignment, the Celebration Bowl still holds its appeal",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "San Diego State probably deserves more credit for playing all of its games away from home (WP: College Football) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1194",
        "date": "2021-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/11/25/san-diego-state-football-carson-home-stadium/",
        "text": "On a deliriously loopy long weekend with an Egg Bowl (in Mississippi), an Iron Bowl (in Alabama), \u201cThe Game\u201d (in Michigan), a thing they used to call a \u201cCivil War\u201d (in Oregon), an Old Oaken Bucket (in Indiana), a Palmetto Bowl (in South Carolina), an Apple Cup (in Washington), a Governor\u2019s Cup (in Kentucky), a Duel in the Desert (in Arizona) and Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate (in Georgia), among still others, save an eye for another oddball. Please answer some questions in this short survey about professional soccer and the 2022 Men's FIFA World Cup.ArrowRightOn Friday morning adjacent to Los Angeles, they\u2019ll answer an age-old question: If you stage a momentous football game at 9 a.m. on Black Friday at least 115 miles from either campus, will anybody come?Actually, wait: Nobody has ever really asked that question.Story continues below advertisementWhen No. 21 San Diego State (10-1, 6-1) plays Boise State (7-4, 5-2) to help deal with the jumbled Mountain West standings, it could bring a shred of attention to a Group of Five school that hasn\u2019t gotten enough attention this season. While fairness enthusiasts have concentrated on the case of Cincinnati in determining whether college football\u2019s financial underlings will get any respect, that noise may have drowned out San Diego State.Cincinnati makes history by joining Ohio State in the CFP\u2019s top fourOfficialdom says the Aztecs are 5-1 at home and 5-0 on the road.AdvertisementThey\u2019re really 10-1 on the road.While their new stadium gets built for 2022 on the ground of bygone Chargers and three Super Bowls where Doug Williams threw and Terrell Davis romped and Tampa Bay kept returning interceptions, the Aztecs have bused about 115 miles, again and five more agains, to their \u201chome\u201d games in Carson, Calif., at Dignity Health Sports Park, where the Chargers used to play after they played in San Diego but before they played in the spaceship they and the Rams share nowadays. The Aztecs stay one night in a hotel, as home teams have done forever but just not 115 miles away from home. They did likewise for the abbreviated season of 2020.Story continues below advertisementIf anyone has ever driven or bused up Interstate 5 from San Diego through Orange County to Los Angeles, they might have learned a wise adage: Take the train.\u201cThere at the very beginning of last season, it was kind of a haul,\u201d San Diego State linebacker Caden McDonald said this week. \u201cYou could kind of feel it, like, going up there, like, going out of our own way to go play the games. Now, we like it; it\u2019s like a part of our routine. It\u2019s nothing. That\u2019s our home stadium up there, and our fans travel up there and support us. And we have the best fans, too.\u201dThe best fans would make such a trip, yes, but \u201cbest\u201d does imply rarity. So as the Aztecs and Broncos get set to go at rational coffee hour, and some San Diegans think they should be playing at the University of San Diego (capacity 6,000), a careful observer might wait for the middle of the second half, for the reveal of a telltale stat: attendance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDignity Health Park seats 27,000. San Diego State drew an announced 10,116 to its home opener Sept. 4 against New Mexico State. It drew 11,090 for its win over now-No. 19 Utah, then 7,619 for Towson, 8,387 for New Mexico, 11,034 for Fresno State and 11,821 for Nevada.What will it draw at 9 a.m.?And how does one play important football at 9 a.m.?As two-term San Diego State Coach Brady Hoke \u2014 2009-10, 2019-present \u2014 outlined it, the team will eat at 5:30 a.m. McDonald spoke of the usual chicken and spaghetti at that hour, and no one retched, at least not audibly. The whole thing prompted rational questions from Kirk Kenney of the San Diego Union-Tribune: \u201cIs that a lighter meal than it might be on a normal time? How much do you want them to have inside their systems before they take the field?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEnough where they\u2019re comfortable that they can play their best,\u201d Hoke said. \u201cYou know, it will be a normal pregame meal. And you know, there\u2019s a lot of guys [who] don\u2019t eat that [anytime]. You know, there\u2019s a lot of guys who can\u2019t eat before they play. I was one of those guys. Obviously, I got over it \u2026\u201dMeep, meep. Here come the UTSA Roadrunners, college football\u2019s other unbeaten team.As Hoke also explained: \u201cWhen we winter-condition, we start at 6 a.m. When we do our conditioning in the summer, our guys start at 6 a.m. They lifted this morning, at 5:30.\u201dAnd as McDonald said: \u201cUsually, because we play at, like, 8:30 [p.m.], so we wake up and do our stuff all day and just sit in the hotel all day long and just wait, wait, wait, watch football, all day. So this\u2019ll be wake up, and now we\u2019re the team that gets to be watched all day long, and then we\u2019ll be done by 12 or 1 o\u2019clock, and then we\u2019ll have the rest of the day.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey\u2019ve got it figured out, and they\u2019ve even got the road trip built into a football credo, that of overcoming \u201cadversity,\u201d yet it\u2019s unlikely they\u2019re getting enough credit for playing 11 road games out of 11. The College Football Playoff selection committee actually docked San Diego State two places Tuesday night for getting caught in a taut tussle last Friday at UNLV, leaving it three places behind Utah (8-3), which lost to San Diego State in three overtimes in Carson, in September, both teams on the road.It\u2019s possible the Aztecs ought to place more highly, just for their trouble, just as it\u2019s possible the fans who do reach their \u201chome\u201d games ought to place more highly as well \u2014 in the national consciousness. It would be a fun endeavor for some puckish sort on Friday morning to sit there and count them as carefully as possible, taking care not to omit anyone who might have gotten up to go to the restroom. The No. 21 Aztecs have played this season's home games 115 miles from home in Carson, Calif. San Diego State probably deserves more credit for playing all of its games away from home",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alabama thrashes Georgia\u2019s vaunted defense to win SEC championship (WP: College Football) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1195",
        "date": "2021-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/12/04/alabama-georgia-sec-championship-game/",
        "text": "ATLANTA \u2014 The Godzilla unit of the whole national college football season, Georgia\u2019s defense, underwent an attack so outrageous Saturday that all the understanding accrued across three months seemed to go kaput in hours. Somehow, an Alabama offense had gone from stagecoach to spaceship in seven days, and somehow, from the second quarter forward, the defense of the year and maybe even of the ages began to look misshapen, distorted and maybe even winded. The No. 1 Bulldogs would finish the SEC championship game with one of the odder phrases possible: upset by Alabama. The 41-24 pasting in front of 78,030 goggle-eyed witnesses would become the seventh straight Georgia loss to Alabama dotting the last 14 seasons among neighbors who seldom meet. It would plunk Georgia Coach Kirby Smart to 0-4 against his former boss, Alabama Coach Nick Saban, after multitudes woke up figuring Saturday the last day of that schneid. It might make the Georgia fans, who filed into Mercedes-Benz Stadium with something north of hope, wonder: If not now, when?Well, maybe in a few weeks, if they can stomach the thought.While No. 3 Alabama (12-1) certainly qualified for its seventh College Football Playoff in the eight seasons of the four-team concept, and its brilliant Californian quarterback, Bryce Young, almost certainly qualified for Alabama\u2019s third Heisman Trophy in that span, college football intellectuals figure there\u2019ll be a space also for Georgia (12-1), even after its defense spent a day looking like somebody else\u2019s defense.It had given up a puny 229.7 yards per game across 12 games.Here, it gave up a no-way 536.It had given up a microscopic 83 points.Here, it gave up 41 percent of that, discounting a late interception return for a touchdown.\u201cIt didn\u2019t do any damage\u201d to the Georgia psyche, Smart said thereafter. \u201cWhat it did was reinvigorate our energy. It re-centers you.\u201d He said he told his players, an entrenched and unanimous No. 1, \u201cI love \u2019em and I appreciate \u2019em, and you know, the outside noise begins now.\u201dAlabama knew such noise already, in the form of mass harrumphs at its imperfections which had been more imperfect than usual, mostly from its lavishly privileged fans. So before he thanked the media in general, Saban got the chance at a one-liner, which he nailed: \u201cYou guys gave us a lot of really positive rat poison (meaning derision). The rat poison that you usually give us (flattery) is usually fatal. But the rat poison you gave us this week was yummy.\u201dThe whole jarring onslaught of it, done with a so-so rushing game, helped Alabama zoom from 10-0 behind to 31-17 ahead, and it came just seven days after the Crimson Tide had looked near-stagnant down the road at Auburn through almost the entirety of regulation time, which ended 10-10. \u201cI think sometimes when you start a game,\u201d Saban said, \u201cthe speed of the game gets you a little bit,\u201d what with practices unable to simulate the Georgia defense, but then \u201conce you sort of get used to the speed of the game, you start operating a little bit better.\u201dYoung went 26 for 44 for 421 yards and three touchdowns with zero interceptions, amassing 461 total yards, an event record. Wideouts, long an Alabama specialty, zigzagged madly. Jameson Williams, so fast he can seem to produce contrails, caught seven passes for 184 yards, and John Metchie III caught six for 97 before sustaining a knee injury. Eight Alabama residents caught passes. The offensive line, doubted since its muddled venture to Auburn, allowed zero sacks and an inconsequential four tackles for loss to a frightening front seven, such that Young extolled that line and said, \u201cI think they just kept hearing it [criticism] and hearing it.\u201dBy the way, the day had begun as a Georgia moment in a Georgia season. A contagious bravado filled the air as Georgians filed into the stadium. The two reds, so close to each other in the Pantone scheme, made the indoors into another lower-case red sea.All seemed predictably Georgian up to a point, and that point came four seconds into the second quarter. When 6-foot-7 tight end Darnell Washington reached up to pluck a five-yard touchdown pass from Stetson Bennett for a 10-0 lead, the Bulldogs had just gone 97 yards in eight plays, their long path downright utopian.Bennett had thrown six passes, completed six passes, completed them to six people \u2014 to three wide receivers, two tight ends and a running back. He had completed them to Ladd McConkey, Jermaine Burton, Zamir White, John Fitzpatrick, George Pickens and Washington \u2014 two guys from Georgia and one each from California, North Carolina, Alabama and, just for show, Las Vegas (the touchdown).It looked precisely as drives should look, and it looked precisely as Georgia\u2019s season had looked: airtight.By then, one might have wondered: Can Alabama be blanked?Answer: Hell, no.On third and three, Young backed up from his own 33, looked a bit left and then back a bit right toward Williams, who ran alone between the hash marks at the 47. \u201cWe had a couple of busts,\u201d Smart said. Williams caught it, headed left, reached the left sideline and kept gathering speed when that seemed improbable.Perspective: Brian Kelly\u2019s in love again. And this time it\u2019s for real.The 67-yard touchdown that made the score 10-7 didn\u2019t change everything by itself, but a good lawyer could make a case that it did. Suddenly, a Georgia defense that came about as close to impermeable developed the bad kind of holiness: 24 points and 319 yards in the second quarter.Young, masterful, guided Alabama 80 yards on six plays for a 14-10 lead, 79 yards in 12 plays for a 17-10 lead, 75 yards in nine plays for a 24-17 lead and, after halftime, 75 yards in five plays for a 31-17 lead. He threw pinpoint passes such as the 13-yard touchdown to Metchie that made it 14-10. He found receivers suddenly so alone it looked like they\u2019d just stepped in off the sideline. He scrambled some, with moves worth the outrageous ticket prices. He even scrambled briefly once out of a thicket before pitching smartly to Brian Robinson Jr. for a 13-yard gain.By the time that electrifying transfer from Ohio State, Williams, ran behind two Georgia defenders up the right side just after halftime to collect a 55-yard touchdown bomb, a feast for the eyes and that 31-17 lead, the game had become very much about Young rather than about the Georgia defense. It looked like Alabama offensive coordinator Bill O\u2019Brien, the former Houston Texans coach, had emerged from his laboratory, his eyes Auburn-bleary, but a solution in hand.It went all the way to Young chewing clock with grinding plays in the fourth quarter, then saying, \u201cI\u2019m super-excited,\u201d as people often do when bound for New York.\u2014 Chuck CulpepperThis story has been updated. Find highlights by Glynn A. Hill below.Read more college football:Hassan Haskins\u2019s high school coach needed someone to listen. Michigan finally did.College football coaches once were institutions. Now they\u2019re expensive rentals.By landing Lincoln Riley, USC reshapes the landscape and changes the gameGeorgia falls to Alabama, suffers first loss of the seasonReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill7:56 p.m.Link copiedLinkBryce Young connected with Jameson Williams on two long scoring tosses as No. 3 Alabama shredded Georgia\u2019s top-ranked defense to upset the No. 1 Bulldogs in the Southeastern Conference championship game, 41-24.A defensive unit that looked impenetrable through most of this season surrendered the lead in the second quarter and never got it back, as the Crimson Tide mounted a 17-point lead against a team that hadn\u2019t surrendered more than 17 points this season.Young bolstered his Heisman Trophy bid, throwing for 421 yards and three touchdowns and adding 40 yards and a score on the ground. Williams caught seven passes for 184 yards and two touchdowns, and Alabama racked up 536 yards of offense against Georgia\u2019s vaunted defense.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAlabama takes three-possession lead lateReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkWill Reichard padded Alabama\u2019s lead with a 41-yard field goal, finishing a 12-play, 62-yard drive that took 5:09 off the clock. (Alabama 41, Georgia 24 with 1:27 left in the fourth quarter)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCincinnati tops Houston as Alabama looks to secure its place in the playoffReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill7:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkCincinnati strengthened its case for a place in the College Football Playoff on Saturday, beating Houston, 35-20, in the American Athletic Conference championship game to remain undefeated.The result comes as Alabama drives on the Georgia defense, bleeding the clock below two minutes with a 38-24 lead.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementGeorgia trims deficit, trails 38-24Return to menuBy Glynn A. Hill7:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkBrock Bowers shed three defenders on the way to an 18-yard touchdown pass from Stetson Bennett. (Alabama 38, Georgia 24 with 9:42 left in the fourth quarter)Brock Bowers just went bulldozer mode for a TD pic.twitter.com/Fn95IhtzIq\u2014 CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 5, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAlabama cements its grip with pick sixReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill7:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkJordan Battle intercepted Stetson Bennett and returned it 40 yards for a score, extending Alabama\u2019s lead late in the game. (Alabama 38, Georgia 17 with 11:59 left in the fourth quarter)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementGeorgia\u2019s failed fourth-down attempt caps third quarterReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill6:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkGeorgia\u2019s offense drove deep into Alabama territory on each of its past two drives but failed to come away with points on both.A DeMarcco Hellams interception ended the first drive at the Alabama 19. Trailing by 14, Georgia attempted to convert a fourth and nine from the same spot on its next possession but failed as the quarter expired. (Alabama 31, Georgia 17 with 13:22 left in the fourth quarter)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTop-ranked Georgia defense struggling to slow the TideReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill6:39 p.m.Link copiedLinkGeorgia trailed for 20 minutes all season before the start of Saturday\u2019s SEC championship, largely thanks to a dominant defense that held teams to an absurd 6.9 points and 229.7 yards per game.The Bulldogs found themselves behind for most of the second quarter, and their struggles against Alabama quarterback Bryce Young and receiver Jameson Williams have continued into the third quarter.Alabama\u2019s 24 first-half points are more than any team scored against Georgia in a game this season. The Crimson Tide\u2019s 365 first-half yards also dwarfed the Bulldogs\u2019 season average.After defensive back DeMarcco Hellams, a former DeMatha Catholic High standout, intercepted Stetson Bennett halfway through the third quarter, the Crimson Tide has a chance to add to its offensive total, which is already nearing 450 yards. (Alabama 31, Georgia 17 with 5:47 left in the third quarter)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBryce Young connects with Jameson Williams for another deep scoreReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill6:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkYoung continued to carve up the Georgia secondary with his third touchdown pass of the game, a 55-yard pass to Jameson Williams to give Alabama a 31-17 lead. Young has 350 yards early in the third quarter against the top defense in the country.\"Jameson down there somewhere.\" - Bryce Young, probably pic.twitter.com/hdCRpnzus3\u2014 CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 4, 2021\n\nWilliams has six catches for 176 yards and two scores, the second of which came after fellow receiver John Metchie III was ruled out with a leg injury. (Alabama 31, Georgia 17 with 13:10 left in the third quarter)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSaturday upset muddles College Football Playoff picture Return to menuBy Glynn A. Hill5:58 p.m.Link copiedLinkBaylor safety Jairon McVea burst toward Oklahoma State running back Dezmon Jackson on a fourth down play with 24 seconds remaining in the Big 12 championship game, giving desperate pursuit as Jackson bounced his run to the outside and raced the safety to the pylon.BAYLOR STOPS OKLAHOMA STATE ON 4TH DOWN \ud83d\ude31 pic.twitter.com/9JlKW4ZLrv\u2014 SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) December 4, 2021\n\nMcVea closed, Jackson dove and the latter came up short as the No. 5 Cowboys turned the ball over on downs, surrendering the conference title and relinquishing a potential place in the College Football Playoff after a 21-16 defeat.Elsewhere, No. 4 Cincinnati leads No. 21 Houston, 14-13, at halftime of the American Athletic Conference championship, with a spot in the top four on the line for the Bearcats. No. 2 Michigan will face No. 13 Iowa in the Big Ten title game Saturday night.Alabama recaptures lead before halftimeReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill5:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkBryce Young added to his touchdown total, tallying a rushing score after he plunged into the end zone with 26 seconds left in the half. Alabama leads Georgia, 24-17, at the break.BRYCE YOUNG WILL DO IT HIMSELF@AlabamaFTBL back in front pic.twitter.com/m4XO2M76KG\u2014 CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 4, 2021\n\n(Alabama 24, Georgia 17 at the half)Georgia draws even and ties game at 17Return to menuBy Glynn A. Hill5:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkGeorgia wide receiver Ladd McConkey secured a screen pass, darted inside, broke a tackle and raced into the end zone, where he promptly took a bow. He leveled the score at 17-17 with about two minutes remaining in the first half.Alabama\u2019s Bryce Young and Georgia\u2019s Stetson Bennett have each thrown two touchdown passes.MCCONKEY, TAKE A BOW@GeorgiaFootball ties it up at 17 pic.twitter.com/tqn2adeR4u\u2014 CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 4, 2021\n\n(Alabama 17, Georgia 17 with 2:06 left in the second quarter)Field goal extends Alabama\u2019s lead to sevenReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill5:27 p.m.Link copiedLinkWill Reichard snuck his 33-yard attempt inside the post to add three to the Crimson Tide\u2019s 17-10 second-quarter lead. It capped a 12-play, 79-yard drive. (Alabama 17, Georgia 10 with 3:28 left in the second quarter)Alabama takes a 14-10 lead over GeorgiaReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill5:13 p.m.Link copiedLinkAlabama\u2019s offensive line gave Bryce Young ample time to deliver a 13-yard touchdown strike to John Metchie III, giving Alabama its first lead of the game.BAMA TAKES THE LEAD@AlabamaFTBL finds John Metchie in the end zone pic.twitter.com/radNehuVBt\u2014 CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 4, 2021\n\n(Alabama 14, Georgia 10 with 9:46 left in the second quarter)Alabama strikes back as Jameson Williams goes 67 yards for sixReturn to menuBy Glynn A. Hill5:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkAlabama receiver Jameson Williams found acres of space in Georgia\u2019s secondary before catching a timely pass from Bryce Young, hitting another gear as he torched the Bulldogs\u2019 defense for a 67-yard touchdown.JAMESON WILLIAMS IS GONE@AlabamaFTBL strikes back. pic.twitter.com/JHFIBMwuwF\u2014 CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 4, 2021\n\nThat\u2019s his 14th touchdown for the Crimson Tide this season. (Georgia 10, Alabama 7 with 14:12 left in the second quarter) No. 3 Alabama earned a 41-24 win over No. 1 Georgia, handing the Bulldogs their first loss of the season and solidifying the Crimson Tide\u2019s place in the College Football Playoff. Alabama thrashes Georgia\u2019s vaunted defense to win SEC championship",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | College football is crazy, and we\u2019re crazy for college football (WP: College Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1196",
        "date": "2018-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/college-football-is-crazy-and-were-crazy-for-college-football/2018/08/31/6181a8d8-ad63-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html",
        "text": "ATLANTA \u2014 The first two creatures of autumn were spotted Friday morning at a breakfast table near 15th and L streets NW in Washington. Somebody somewhere had stamped their clothes with an orange rendition of a longhorn steer, and their matching orange steer clothing appliqu\u00e9s told of the September reality that Longhorns will go streaming into Maryland on Saturday. These two homo sapiens behaved as do most in 2018: They read their phones. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe next creature came down the aisle at Reagan National Airport hours later, and he wore a T-shirt telling of an animal unknown to biologists yet known to roam Alabama plains (or Plains). \u201cWAR EAGLE,\u201d it read in orange, so that if you were barely knowledgeable enough, you could know without asking him that he probably hopped this jet for the marquee Auburn-Washington matchup Saturday in Atlanta. His \u201cWAR EAGLE\u201d shirt might have seemed eccentric among human fashions and behaviors yet differed from the even more eccentric \u201cWAR DAMN EAGLE.\u201dA few boarders behind him came another creature of the season, wearing a purple cap with a white husky on it, so that if you were barely knowledgeable enough you could know without asking that he probably will spend Saturday afternoon in the spaceship Mercedes-Benz Stadium at the Auburn-Washington game, where he probably will join his tribe in impersonations of dog barks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoaming college football remains arguably the best way to roam and understand the United States, that aberrant screwball of a land. Through college football, you can see so many of America\u2019s customs, variations, excesses and dietary atrocities.Jerry Brewer: As season dawns, Maryland braces for days of reckoningIf the United States can be said to be troubled at a certain moment in history, then it can fit that college football is troubled simultaneously, and that has blared true lately. The season begins with Ohio State Coach Urban Meyer sitting at home perhaps with a clicker and a frown, absent from the Buckeyes\u2019 game against Oregon State because of a three-game suspension, and it begins with a thought that all should remember, early and often, about 19-year-old Maryland offensive lineman Jordan McNair, who died in June.As awful August gasps away its last minutes, the games flood in to make it disappear even if it won\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t. Starting Saturday, the country will be deluged with all the usual oddities that rank this among the oddest endeavors in the 200,000 years of humanity.Sally Jenkins: Meyer still has his job, but Ohio State documents show what he deservesOn Saturday, there will be a stadium in Clemson, S.C., where the fans storm the field after every single game because Americans are constantly reminded that life is short and you should maximize field stormings. On Sept. 8, UCLA will send its newly hired offensive lab technician to Oklahoma so that two offenses can aim to show again how the culture \u2014 and the playbook \u2014 flourished with artfulness in the 21st\u00a0century, largely because of UCLA\u2019s new lab geek.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Sept. 29, more than 100,000 fans will wear white in State College, Pa., and while that\u2019s a plenty strange anthropological twist, Penn State and Ohio State will play as reminders that this weird business of having students play American football before six-figure audiences comes with steep complications.More innocuously, we lucky sorts who have frequented the city of Miami will know it\u2019s always possible to spot garish jewelry there, and the Miami Hurricanes will persist in their fresh tradition of garish jewelry that signifies turnovers forced. Encouraging innovation will continue to sprout; near the stadium at Wisconsin, a fraternity house boasts an astonishing two-floor beer bong, an improvement over bygone days when boring beer bongs ran closer to the ground.Arizona long has been more open-minded than some places, so it will reflect that with a coach (Herman Edwards) returning to the college game (Arizona State) somehow for the first time since he coached defensive backs at San Jose State in 1989. Seattle, home of those Washington Huskies, will reflect for us the age-old churn of greed and contempt \u2014 as when people with boat spots in the Lake Washington tailgate system occasionally covet the superior boat spots of others.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen you\u2019re coveting others\u2019 tailgate boat spots in a gorgeous setting, you\u2019re by definition unhappy.In the 50 states that feel like 50\u00a0nations, we\u2019re about to witness months of Louisianians seething over Alabamian excellence, Mississippians seething over Alabamian excellence, Georgians and Tennesseans and Floridians seething over Alabamian excellence, and then, near the end in late November, the War Damn Eagles seething over Alabamian excellence. Sometime in there, Alabama Coach Nick Saban might name a quarterback, or he might not, all of which will remind us that traditions linger here.Meanwhile, Michigan fans may or may not end up reminding us how Americans love to debate the worthiness of a coach who is better than any other coach available, while Ohio State fans will start off without their coach because he went heart-over-head for years before jettisoning the assistant who coached wide \nreceivers, even when, for the last big chunk of that tenure, the Buckeyes-minded have deemed the wide receiving department a weak link that wound up hindering the running game and all else.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt shows, as college football does better than just about anything, that nothing really makes all that much sense.Read more:Matt Canada has been everywhere in college football, but Maryland is uncharted territory\u2018Dark side of college sports\u2019: Maryland students return to a conflicted campus amid football scandalsWeek 1 TV schedule: Washington-Auburn, Michigan-Notre Dame are nice first coursesPlayers and coaches with the most to gain and lose in Week 1 The sport\u2019s awful August gives way to the games of September, which flood in to make it disappear even if it won\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t. College football is crazy, and we\u2019re crazy for college football",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Alabama-Georgia national title game feels like it should be played in a backyard (WP: College Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1197",
        "date": "2018-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/the-alabama-georgia-national-title-game-feels-like-it-should-be-played-in-a-backyard/2018/01/07/5fc5af1c-f3d2-11e7-a9e3-ab18ce41436a_story.html",
        "text": "ATLANTA \u2014 Follow, if you will: Team A will play Team B on Monday night.The head coach of Team B spent nine recent seasons coaching defense at Team A. The defensive coordinator of Team A spent two recent seasons coordinating defense at Team B. The defensive coordinator of Team B spent one recent season as associate head coach and defensive backs coach of Team A. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe outside linebackers coach of Team B spent three fairly recent seasons as the director of player development for Team A, such that the defensive coordinator of Team A has just hired the outside linebackers coach of Team B to become his defensive coordinator at Team C, which is Tennessee, which is very much not in this game.Story continues below advertisementThe wide receivers coach at Team B worked for the head coach at Team A, with the Miami Dolphins, from 2005 to 2006, while the inside linebackers coach at Team B worked for eight recent seasons as the undergraduate analyst, graduate assistant and director of player development at Team A.AdvertisementAnd as the head coach of Team A sat at a dais downtown with the head coach of Team B on Sunday morning, the head coach of Team A referred to his own wife and to the Team B head coach's children when he said, \"Terry was there when his babies were born.\" That followed Saturday, when the head coach of Team B said that when it comes to the struggles and nuances of being married to a college football head coach, the wife of the head coach of Team A has \"definitely mentored\" his wife.As Georgia football rose to national championship game, state has grown as recruiting hotbedClearly, this particular College Football Playoff national championship game, between Alabama (a Team A if ever there was one) and Georgia (Team B), should not happen in a state-of-art spaceship of a stadium such as Mercedes-Benz. Story continues below advertisementIt should happen in some back yard.Take it back only to Oct. 3, 2015, in nearby Athens, Ga. Georgia (then 4-0) ranked No. 8 and felt excited. Alabama (then 3-1) ranked No. 13 and felt miffed, having just lost two weeks prior at home to Ole Miss, thus violating all known patterns of the known universe. Alabama plied its trademark forbiddance of drama and won, 38-10, with current Georgia Coach Kirby Smart as its defensive coordinator, and with current Georgia defensive coordinator Mel Tucker as its associate head coach and defensive backs coach. On the other side, Georgia had future Alabama defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt as its defensive coordinator and former Alabama director of player development Kevin Sherrer as its outside linebackers coach.AdvertisementObviously, all this weird familiarity throws some puzzles, strategy-wise. Story continues below advertisementSmart: \"Sometimes, you talk yourself out of things that you should do because you know what the other team does, and I think you've got to be careful of that.\"Pruitt: \"You know, it's interesting, because sometimes you might could overthink it, 'cause you say, 'Okay, if we do this, Kirby's going to know we're going to do this, so they're going to try to do it this way.' And I'm sure he's probably sitting there doing the same thing, so it'll probably be hit-and-miss in the game.\"Tack on that both belong to, of course, the same conference, the Southeastern, which meant that when Alabama played Tennessee and Mississippi State this season, Georgia already had played those two, deepening Alabama's study of a Georgia it already understood utterly. Ahead of kickoff, this sounds destined to be some spare occasion, with buzzards flying overhead, bruises forming left and right and somebody winning 2-0, in overtime. \u2018The most frustrated fan base in college football\u2019 embraces a new sensation: BeliefIt's also, all of it, a one-game tribute to Saban, for whom half the Georgia staff has worked. By defying human nature, outwitting the dreaded complacency, going 124-14 the past 10 seasons with four national championships (hiking his own total to five) and staging a dynasty in which a 10-3 season in 2010 turns up as the dud of the bunch \u2014 10-3! \u2014 Saban has caused some predictable byproducts. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe utmost of those might come in two guys who can compare Decembers \u2014 really rare, rarefied Decembers.For the past month, Pruitt has coordinated the defense at Alabama toward the College Football Playoff while also preparing for the job he'll begin in full Tuesday: head coach at woebegone Tennessee. Two years ago, Smart coordinated the defense at Alabama toward the College Football Playoff while also preparing for the job he began in full thereafter: head coach at dissatisfied Georgia. Because of the towering refusal-to-lose of Saban, Smart can say of Pruitt, \"He was in a worse situation, because I didn't have to deal with a signing day,\" a reference to that early signing period that dropped into coaches' schedules Dec. 20. Story continues below advertisementBecause of the seemingly endless excellence commanded by Saban, Pruitt can say, \"You know, there's only 24 hours in a day. To me, it's a little bit of a feeling of guilt. You know, what you almost feel like is, 'Sitting here working on this game. Should I be doing something for the place that I'm about to go?' Or, the fact that I'm trying to recruit for Tennessee, or set up, or hire somebody. 'Should I be spending this 45 minutes getting ready to figure out a way to stop [Georgia running backs] Sony [Michel] and Nick [Chubb]?' So there's really not a good answer to that. I've tried to manage it the best I could.\"AdvertisementTired?\"I'm not tired at all,\" the 43-year-old said. \"I probably won't get tired until maybe February.\"Story continues below advertisementIn this odd construct, when Alabama coaches would go to recruit, it would enable Pruitt to go to recruit for Tennessee. In turn, having hired Georgia's Sherrer to be his defensive coordinator, he can josh, \"I told him he needs to be working on Tennessee this whole week.\"Nick Saban and Bill Belichick: A pair of legends rise from film room of \u201994 BrownsIn the colloquial way of using \"setting\" for the word \"sitting,\" Pruitt said, \"We want to be 'setting' here as soon as possible.\"He meant Tennessee, while coaching Alabama, and anticipating collaborating with a former Alabama coach at Georgia.Man, that Saban. In explaining this elongated Alabama run, Smart said of Saban, \"He never asked anybody in the organization to work any harder than he did. He held every person on the staff \u2014 and I'm not talking about just the coaching staff, I'm talking about the entire organization \u2014 to be at their best. And I think that's sometimes a lost art in some organizations.\" Pruitt told of Saban's hands-on style at practice, especially with cornerbacks, which Pruitt called Saban's \"passion,\" saying, \"If you told him he couldn't be the corners coach, he'd probably just quit.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPause.\"So they'll probably let him be the corners coach for a while.\"In turn, Saban attributed his 11-0 record against his former assistants to unequal playing fields, to Alabama's established presence against programs more fledgling. Now he will oppose one that wasn't fledgling to begin with and has zoomed in a two-season whoosh from anything resembling fledgling. \"Kirby,\" he said, \"did as good a job as anybody ever did for us.\"So here they are, the whole family, in the big yard. More from The Post:\nIs the College Football Playoff championship getting a little too familiar?\nGeorgia beats Alabama, a meaningless college basketball result with a little bit of football meaning\nBefore the Bulldogs played the Rose Bowl, mascot Uga X made a star turn\n These two coaching staffs know each other really, really well. The Alabama-Georgia national title game feels like it should be played in a backyard",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018The Mandalorian\u2019s\u2019 second season has begun \u2014 and secrecy is still what helps make it tick (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1198",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/10/30/mandalorian-disney-plus-season-two/",
        "text": "We already know how far Disney and the producers of \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d are willing to go to keep a secret: They left money on the table. A disturbance in the Force if there ever was one. Not a single Baby Yoda, ahem, excuse me \u2026 not a single \u201cThe Child\u201d toy was put into production, despite the undeniable cuteness and marketability of such a creation, until the newborn Star Wars legend (as newborn as a 50-year-old can be) made his finger-pointing debut in the final seconds of \u201cThe Mandalorian\u2019s\u201d first chapter during the launch of Disney Plus almost a year ago. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd now the most meme-able/gif-able baby in the galaxy (remember when he drank some tea? awww) and his Beskar-armored bounty-hunter protector are back.The first episode of \u201cThe Mandalorian\u2019s\u201d second season (Chapter 9 for those keeping count) is now streaming on Disney Plus, a relief to Star Wars fandom and the reporters tasked with covering such a momentous occasion in this far, far away galaxy. Screeners were not made available to the media until the Season 2 premiere dropped on Disney Plus at 3 a.m. Eastern on Friday. And that will be the case all season.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhy? Because the secret ingredient in the sauce of \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d is secrecy, remember? So if a super-powerful, wanted-across-the-galaxy, half-century-old alien baby was the big surprise at the end of last year\u2019s premiere, what was the big surprise at the end of this one to justify so much stealth?We\u2019ll get to that in a second.Season 2 of \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d starts off giving you what you want. Dat baby. After your eyes are treated to the flickering coolness of Disney Plus\u2019s Star Wars intro of flashing helmets (Vader, BB8, C3PO, Kylo Ren, R2D2 and more, until you get to the shiny helmet of the Mandalorian), we see the child and Mando coming out of the shadows digging up dirt on where they can find other Mandalorians that can possibly help the Child get home to his people.Inquisitiveness by intimidation leads the two to Tatooine, a planet whose sole existence, it seems, is for hiding things (the chosen one, a retired Obi-Wan Kenobi, the chosen one\u2019s child).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe dusty and dry planet helps augment \u201cThe Mandalorian\u2019s\u201d space-western vibes. They pair the bartender for information upon entry into a saloon. The locals give the new guy a look as he comes into town with the tiny green kid. But Mando isn\u2019t the only helmeted gunslinger in town with a rocket on his back, which leads to a good old-fashioned Wild West stare-down, and an unmasking that sparks more questions than answers.Pedro Pascal returns as the lone bounty hunter traveling through the galaxy evading the authority of the New Republic. (Walt Disney Studios)\u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d assumes you\u2019re caught up on all the casting news that made waves in the Star Wars fandom. In the season\u2019s first episode, we come upon important puzzle pieces not seen in quite a while, while others still lurk in the darkness waiting to make their live-action Star Wars debut. But when you think you\u2019ve had your \u201caha\u201d moment and found one of those characters, you realize you\u2019re wrong, and you begin hanging on the every word of a person you barely know and are not sure you can trust until your eyes tell you you\u2019ve found the expected icon you were looking for.Rosario Dawson will play fan-favorite Ahsoka Tano in \u2018The Mandalorian.\u2019 Is this the series\u2019s next Baby Yoda moment?There\u2019s a new spaceship smell to this season \u2014 new monsters, and more vibrant and adorable goo-goo gaga-ness from the child. (Is he growing? Will he soon speak?) But it also drips with the familiarity of what made last season work so well. \u201cThe Mandalorian,\u201d fueled by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni\u2019s encyclopedic knowledge of this universe and Ludwig G\u00f6ransson\u2019s next-generation musical score, is Star Wars storytelling at its best. This show\u2019s top feat continues to be telling a Star Wars tale that doesn\u2019t need Jedi or Sith to be top-notch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThink back to last season. The only lightsaber seen was the Darksaber Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) wielded in the final moments of Season 1 during his continual hunt for the child. Other than that? Nothing? A Star Wars story so good it doesn\u2019t need lightsabers? That\u2019s a card only Favreau and Filoni have up their sleeves. Episode 1 of Season 2 is more of the same. But the thought of Moff Gideon having to light his saber up because another one could be lunging toward him? That\u2019s giving a show that doesn\u2019t need any help more ammunition to obliterate expectations.But what about all the secrecy? Why no screeners? What could be waiting in the final seconds of the Season 2 premiere? Does the moment deliver?Is there even a moment?Yes. And it doesn\u2019t disappoint. This is the way.Read more:Baby Yoda toys are finally arriving. Sure, they missed the holidays \u2014 but at least that prevented spoilers.How \u2018The Clone Wars\u2019 turned Ahsoka Tano into a legendary Star Wars character Mando and Baby Yoda are back on Disney Plus. \u2018The Mandalorian\u2019s\u2019 second season has begun \u2014 and secrecy is still what helps make it tick",
        "author": "David Betancourt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018The Gunk\u2019: Cleaning doesn\u2019t have to be a chore (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1199",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/comics/2021/12/17/the-gunk-review/",
        "text": "The GunkDeveloped by: Image & Form GamesWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Thunderful PublishingAvailable on: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/SMy favorite exchange in \u201cThe Gunk\u201d happens early in the first chapter shortly after Rani and Becks, two financially-strapped, planet-hopping scavengers, come across an uncharted world. As Becks pilots their spaceship, Rani rappels down a rope and sets out to get the lay of the land. In a cavern, Rani comes across a mound made up of a bubbly, gelatinous substance \u2014 the eponymous gunk of the title. Using a hand tool which doubles as her prosthetic limb, Rani scans the material to reveal that it\u2019s \u201can organic compound.\u201d Following Becks\u2019s suggestion, she uses her hand tool (which she affectionately calls \u201cpumpkin\u201d) to hoover up the substance. This reveals a small pool of bright green liquid, which another scan reveals to be a promising energy source. Hoping to secure a larger deposit of the liquid, Rani looks for more traces of it and asks Becks what she would do if they should strike it rich. After saying she\u2019d first pay off her debts Becks says: \u201cI don\u2019t dream big until I know it\u2019s within my reach\u201d to which Rani wittily replies: \u201cA dream, Becks, is something that\u2019s out of our reach. Otherwise, it\u2019s called an option.\u201d That snippet of conversation nicely captures the personality of the game\u2019s central characters. Becks is prudent, Rani intrepid. It also sets the stage for the tension that threatens to sour their relationship. As Rani explores the planet and uses her hand tool to remove the gunk she is dazzled to see the environment transform from a dull grayish landscape to one bursting with exotic flora. Eventually, Rani discovers the ruins and relics of a lost civilization and an alien suspended in a tank hooked up to machinery, the purpose of which is a mystery. And while Becks counsels caution, Rani grows more headstrong and dismissive of her partner\u2019s input.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe Gunk\u201d is an eco-fable about characters determined to remake the world and the consequences that result from their hubris. Featuring light action sequences (there are gunk monsters) and straightforward puzzle sequences, the game focuses on the pleasures of exploration and tidying up above all else. Stepping into the role of Rani, players spend most of their time cleaning up gunk and searching for \u201cmycelium coils\u201d and \u201cmulligan melons.\u201dMycelium coils are round-mushroom heads attached to narrow stems rooted in the ground. Rani can detach them using her tool and then shoot them into the pools of green liquid. This causes mushroom platforms to sprout up so that she can traverse otherwise impossible-to-access areas. Mulligan melons bear a resemblance to the tops of the mycelium coils, but once detached from their surroundings they explode after a short period of time. Rani can use these to clear away out-of-reach clusters of gunk. Most of the puzzles revolve around the use of these two substances. Save for one moment late in the game where I missed cleaning up a tiny amount of gunk that prevented me from uncovering a resource, I was able to complete the story without much effort.\u201cThe Gunk\u201d is a casual adventure game that\u2019s easy on the eyes and benefits from the voice acting of Fiona Nova (Rani) and Abigail Turner (Becks). They endow their respective characters with no shortage of vitality.Sure, on the face of it, a game centered around cleaning up gunk might not sound like an interesting diversion. But it works thanks to the focused nature of the campaign (this is not a game that feels padded out with superfluous content) and because there is something intrinsically satisfying to radically altering the appearance of a landscape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor all the neat freaks out there, this one\u2019s for you.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Moncage\u2019: Playing with a Rubik\u2019s Cube of memories\u2018Tandem: A Tale of Shadows\u2019 is an exquisitely structured puzzle-platformer\u2018Guardians of the Galaxy\u2019: A game with big personality\u2018Metroid Dread\u2019: A revitalization of the old action-exploration formula \"The Gunk\" is a game centered around cleaning up, well, gunk. It might not sound like an interesting diversion but it works because there is something satisfying to radically altering the appearance of a landscape. \u2018The Gunk\u2019: Cleaning doesn\u2019t have to be a chore",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Artful Escape\u2019: A musical comedy that\u2019s all about the comedy (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1200",
        "date": "2021-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/07/artful-escape-game-review/",
        "text": "The Artful EscapeDeveloped by: Beethoven & DinosaurWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Annapurna InteractiveAvailable on: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/SIn the mid-1980s one of my favorite clothing items was a pink Iron Maiden sweatshirt that had a skinless alien on it, in some noirish setting. (Alas, I never liked the group, I simply liked the look of their merchandise.) As a child of the era, it was easy to enjoy the overlap between fantasy imagery and music. I never thought it strange that Michael Jackson turned into a werewolf in \u201cThriller,\u201d or that Ozzy Osbourne dressed up as different, bizarre characters on his album covers. I was reminded of the cheesy flights of fantasy that characterized some of the music of the 1980s while playing \u201cThe Artful Escape,\u201d a game that pays humorous tribute to that era\u2019s indulgence of flexible personas, stage-strutting guitar gods and kitschy imagery. When we first meet Francis Vendetti (voiced by Michael Johnston), the teenager around whom events in the game turn, he is seated on a bench dutifully strumming a few folk licks on his guitar. It brings him no pleasure. He is the nephew of a local folk legend, and he wears heavily the mantle of expectations that have been placed on him. Francis styles himself a serious folk musician, but when he lets himself go, as he does when he walks to a nearby cliff overlooking his small Colorado hometown, he reveals himself to be a flashy guitar noodler. The discrepancy between how he fancies himself and his talent\u2019s natural bent is called out to him by Violetta (Caroline Kinley), a mysterious young woman who appears from out of nowhere, seated on the bench. After chatting with her Francis starts having epiphanies while walking through the town to his house. Before he heads upstairs to his room for the night, he tells his mother that he intends to fashion an elaborate persona for himself.Later that night the lights in the town go dark and a spaceship descends stealthy from the sky. An alien named Zomm (terrifically voiced by Jason Schwartzman) greets Francis outside his home and tells him he is needed as a support act by the captain. Zomm gives Francis a guitar, and by pressing X players can send Francis blazing through notes on the instrument, causing the area behind him to light up. At the town fountain Francis meets the man for whom he is supposed to open. Lightman (Carl Weathers) arrives by drifting down on a beam of light, jamming on a six-string axe. The musical legend leads Francis to a building that only sometimes appears on the map or in reality, and inside his Cosmic Emporium Francis steps through a door that leads to the tripped-out zone of the Cosmic Extraordinary. In no time he is jamming with aliens and sliding past landscapes that flower in lights, activity and colors as he plays.\u201cThe Artful Escape\u201d is a breezy game. It has light platforming sections and simple, Simon-says moments where players must follow a series of on-screen button prompts so Francis can rock out during the shows he has to stage to win over alien audiences. I laughed several times watching Francis being put through the paces of galactic stardom in the form of a talk show, a publicity stunt and dealings with agents and an imposing tastemaker. The voice cast makes the most of the game\u2019s Adult Swim sensibility. Carl Weathers, in particular, shines as Lightman when he says things such as, \u201cWe\u2019re going on a ride across the dilated pupils of the cosmos. Man! You\u2019re going to see flotsam that will change you forever.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnfortunately, as a musical experience, I found \u201cThe Artful Escape\u201d completely lacking. Even for ironic kicks, I can only happily listen to so much guitar doodling. Thankfully, the rest of the game makes it easy to tune out the soundtrack.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Sable\u2019: An art game for people who like adventure games, and vice versa\u2018Deathloop\u2019: It\u2019s campy and the mechanics are good, but nothing more than that\u2018Psychonauts 2\u2019: A comedic masterpiece\u2018Golf Club: Wasteland\u2019: The Mario golf game we always wanted As a musical experience \u201cThe Artful Escape\u201d is lacking. Thankfully, the rest of the game makes it easy to tune out the soundtrack. \u2018The Artful Escape\u2019: A musical comedy that\u2019s all about the comedy",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Returnal\u2019: It really stressed me out, man (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1201",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/04/30/returnal-it-really-stressed-me-out-man/",
        "text": "ReturnalDeveloped by: HousemarqueWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Sony Interactive EntertainmentAvailable on: PlayStation 5\u201cIt looks stressful,\u201d a friend of mine said while watching me play \u201cReturnal,\u201d the new PlayStation 5 exclusive about an astronaut snared in a vicious time loop on a far-flung planet. Yes. Very. Stressful. And, for me, borderline painful. \u201cReturnal\u201d fetishizes challenge in a way that markedly recalls the Souls games. But as someone who went out and got a PlayStation 3 just to play \u201cDemon's Souls\u201d (2009), and, moreover, loved Housemarque\u2019s last two games, \u201cReturnal\u201d makes me rue the influence that Souls games have exerted on the industry. In my view, \u201cReturnal\u2019s\u201d severe difficulty level does a disservice to its entertainment value. I\u2019m struggling with \u2018Returnal,\u2019 and I play \u2018Dark Souls\u2019 to relax\u201cReturnal\u201d is focused around Selene, an astronaut who crashes on a planet called Atropos and discovers her own corpse. (Later, in what I imagine is meant to be a homage to the film \u201cSolaris,\u201d she discovers a replica of her house on the alien world.) Over six large areas \u2014 biomes \u2014 players learn about her, and the planet that seems to doom those who visit, to cycles of violence. Procedurally generated environments bring about changes to the environment with each new play cycle. Alas, getting to the first boss was enough to convince me that I didn\u2019t want anything more to do with \u201cReturnal\u201d in its current state. This is lamentable because I appreciate certain aspects of its design like its superb audio design, responsive controls and the haptic feedback that makes moving through the game an unusually tactile experience. But I deplore others, specifically the game\u2019s risk-reward systems, which are unbalanced. If the difficulty level is rejiggered in later updates, I might give it another go.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cReturnal\u201d plays like a cross between a typical third-person shooter and a bullet-hell spaceship game insofar as enemies are given to wide area attacks. Although waves of projectiles can be jumped over or strategically dodged using Selene\u2019s dash ability, physical attacks must simply be avoided. The game nudges players to take on enemies up close because fallen foes drop obolites (small golden globes) which quickly vanish unless one acquires an item that prolongs their appearance across a play cycle. Obolites serve as one of \u201cReturnal\u2019s\u201d two in-game currencies. They can be used at special stations \u2014 fabricators \u2014 to create items that boost health or other stats. Upon death, players lose their obolites and any nonpermanent stats-boosting items as well as any found weapons.Ether, the game\u2019s other in-game currency, which is far more rare and can be acquired through exploration, carries over between play cycles. Spend enough hours gathering ether and Selene can spend the hard-earned resource at a reconstructor, a device which will preserve all of Selene\u2019s perishable equipment, as well as the state of the world, for one play cycle when she loses her life. It can also be used to \u201ccleanse malignancy.\u201d As Selene travels about the world she\u2019ll often come across chests that contain valuable items that also carry the risk of imposing detrimental effects if she opens them without first dispelling their malignancy. Malignant status effects can take on different forms such as the inability to pick up new weapons. These effects can be reversed by finding a specific number of items such as obolites.Parasites are another risk-reward system in the game. Selene can attach a few of the small clingy critters to herself, boosting some effects while draining others. It says something about how punitive their detrimental effects are that I rarely felt like using them. In truth, I was turned off by the number of the game\u2019s poisoned treats \u2014 my masochism doesn\u2019t run that way. These days I value games that respect my time and don\u2019t necessitate ascetic dedication.In theory, as players progress through the game and unlock say, a boss chamber, they can make a beeline back to it after dying, skipping through areas that are not subject to lockdown in which all enemies must be vanquished to proceed. In practice, I found this an untenable strategy. Early on, one can only gain access to more powerful weapons by increasing Selene\u2019s weapons proficiency through killing enemies or finding items that raise her proficiency stat, so I found myself grinding through areas over and over again both to raise enough currency for stat boosting items and to acquire better weapons.The Souls games famously made death a consequential affair by stripping players of their \u201csouls,\u201d the in-game currency, and giving them one chance to reclaim them by making it back to the spot where they died without getting killed. Crucially, the Souls games allowed players to acquire better equipment that would carry over between runs so future attempts yielded better odds. By sticking closer to a roguelike template that wipes out most of one\u2019s resources upon death, \u201cReturnal\u201d courts frustration in a way I found off-putting. Spending thirty-plus minutes on an area then dying and having little to show for it is not my idea of a good time. (I\u2019d rather play something like \u201cSpelunky 2\u201d or \u201cDead Cells\u201d \u2014 hard games with roguelike elements that introduce new environments at a much faster pace.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI am certain that \u201cReturnal\u201d will have its partisans. Highly skilled and dedicated players will, no doubt, thrill to its challenges. But there are so many other enjoyable games based around shooting aliens that, for me, struggling against \u201cReturnal\u2019s\u201d enemies for hours on end feels like a questionable use of time.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Lost Words: Beyond the Page\u2019 combines video game and storybook magic for young audiences\u2018Devotion\u2019: A full-fledged psychological horror experience\u2018Genesis Noir\u2019: A stunning game about love, murder, joy and the Big Bang\u2018It Takes Two\u2019 tests your ability to save a marriage and fly a fidget spinner \u201cReturnal\u201d makes us reconsider the influence that Souls games have exerted on the industry. Its severe difficulty level does a disservice to its entertainment value. \u2018Returnal\u2019: It really stressed me out, man",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Returnal\u2019: It really stressed me out, man (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1202",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/04/30/returnal-it-really-stressed-me-out-man/",
        "text": "ReturnalDeveloped by: HousemarqueWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Sony Interactive EntertainmentAvailable on: PlayStation 5\u201cIt looks stressful,\u201d a friend of mine said while watching me play \u201cReturnal,\u201d the new PlayStation 5 exclusive about an astronaut snared in a vicious time loop on a far-flung planet. Yes. Very. Stressful. And, for me, borderline painful. \u201cReturnal\u201d fetishizes challenge in a way that markedly recalls the Souls games. But as someone who went out and got a PlayStation 3 just to play \u201cDemon's Souls\u201d (2009), and, moreover, loved Housemarque\u2019s last two games, \u201cReturnal\u201d makes me rue the influence that Souls games have exerted on the industry. In my view, \u201cReturnal\u2019s\u201d severe difficulty level does a disservice to its entertainment value. I\u2019m struggling with \u2018Returnal,\u2019 and I play \u2018Dark Souls\u2019 to relax\u201cReturnal\u201d is focused around Selene, an astronaut who crashes on a planet called Atropos and discovers her own corpse. (Later, in what I imagine is meant to be a homage to the film \u201cSolaris,\u201d she discovers a replica of her house on the alien world.) Over six large areas \u2014 biomes \u2014 players learn about her, and the planet that seems to doom those who visit, to cycles of violence. Procedurally generated environments bring about changes to the environment with each new play cycle. Alas, getting to the first boss was enough to convince me that I didn\u2019t want anything more to do with \u201cReturnal\u201d in its current state. This is lamentable because I appreciate certain aspects of its design like its superb audio design, responsive controls and the haptic feedback that makes moving through the game an unusually tactile experience. But I deplore others, specifically the game\u2019s risk-reward systems, which are unbalanced. If the difficulty level is rejiggered in later updates, I might give it another go.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cReturnal\u201d plays like a cross between a typical third-person shooter and a bullet-hell spaceship game insofar as enemies are given to wide area attacks. Although waves of projectiles can be jumped over or strategically dodged using Selene\u2019s dash ability, physical attacks must simply be avoided. The game nudges players to take on enemies up close because fallen foes drop obolites (small golden globes) which quickly vanish unless one acquires an item that prolongs their appearance across a play cycle. Obolites serve as one of \u201cReturnal\u2019s\u201d two in-game currencies. They can be used at special stations \u2014 fabricators \u2014 to create items that boost health or other stats. Upon death, players lose their obolites and any nonpermanent stats-boosting items as well as any found weapons.Ether, the game\u2019s other in-game currency, which is far more rare and can be acquired through exploration, carries over between play cycles. Spend enough hours gathering ether and Selene can spend the hard-earned resource at a reconstructor, a device which will preserve all of Selene\u2019s perishable equipment, as well as the state of the world, for one play cycle when she loses her life. It can also be used to \u201ccleanse malignancy.\u201d As Selene travels about the world she\u2019ll often come across chests that contain valuable items that also carry the risk of imposing detrimental effects if she opens them without first dispelling their malignancy. Malignant status effects can take on different forms such as the inability to pick up new weapons. These effects can be reversed by finding a specific number of items such as obolites.Parasites are another risk-reward system in the game. Selene can attach a few of the small clingy critters to herself, boosting some effects while draining others. It says something about how punitive their detrimental effects are that I rarely felt like using them. In truth, I was turned off by the number of the game\u2019s poisoned treats \u2014 my masochism doesn\u2019t run that way. These days I value games that respect my time and don\u2019t necessitate ascetic dedication.In theory, as players progress through the game and unlock say, a boss chamber, they can make a beeline back to it after dying, skipping through areas that are not subject to lockdown in which all enemies must be vanquished to proceed. In practice, I found this an untenable strategy. Early on, one can only gain access to more powerful weapons by increasing Selene\u2019s weapons proficiency through killing enemies or finding items that raise her proficiency stat, so I found myself grinding through areas over and over again both to raise enough currency for stat boosting items and to acquire better weapons.The Souls games famously made death a consequential affair by stripping players of their \u201csouls,\u201d the in-game currency, and giving them one chance to reclaim them by making it back to the spot where they died without getting killed. Crucially, the Souls games allowed players to acquire better equipment that would carry over between runs so future attempts yielded better odds. By sticking closer to a roguelike template that wipes out most of one\u2019s resources upon death, \u201cReturnal\u201d courts frustration in a way I found off-putting. Spending thirty-plus minutes on an area then dying and having little to show for it is not my idea of a good time. (I\u2019d rather play something like \u201cSpelunky 2\u201d or \u201cDead Cells\u201d \u2014 hard games with roguelike elements that introduce new environments at a much faster pace.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI am certain that \u201cReturnal\u201d will have its partisans. Highly skilled and dedicated players will, no doubt, thrill to its challenges. But there are so many other enjoyable games based around shooting aliens that, for me, struggling against \u201cReturnal\u2019s\u201d enemies for hours on end feels like a questionable use of time.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Lost Words: Beyond the Page\u2019 combines video game and storybook magic for young audiences\u2018Devotion\u2019: A full-fledged psychological horror experience\u2018Genesis Noir\u2019: A stunning game about love, murder, joy and the Big Bang\u2018It Takes Two\u2019 tests your ability to save a marriage and fly a fidget spinner \u201cReturnal\u201d makes us reconsider the influence that Souls games have exerted on the industry. Its severe difficulty level does a disservice to its entertainment value. \u2018Returnal\u2019: It really stressed me out, man",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | It might take a while to warm up to, but once you do \u2018Outer Wilds\u2019 is quite an adventure (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1203",
        "date": "2019-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/06/13/it-might-take-while-warm-up-once-you-do-outer-wilds-is-quite-an-adventure/",
        "text": "Outer Wilds Developed by: Mobius DigitalWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished By: Annapurna InteractiveAvailable on: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One,It took me a while to warm up to \u201cOuter Wilds,\u201d the new space exploration game that tasks players with investigating time loops, supernovas, black holes, planetary surface integrity, and other cosmic curiosities. At first I found the game bewildering, even off-putting. In hindsight, though, my initial reaction strikes me as a testament to how well the game succeeds on its own terms. Given that \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d is all about discovering the sort of phenomena that once astonished and befuddled an advanced alien civilization, it seems right that I should have been unsettled by it at first. \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d begins with your character opening his eyes and gazing at the stars. Training your vision forward reveals one of your fellow four-eyed Hearthians seated before a campfire. If you so choose, the first action you can perform in the game is to roast a marshmallow and eat it. Before you can access your ship, which rests on an elevated platform nearby, you must acquire launch codes from your Outer Wilds Ventures supervisor. Making your way to the observatory, you\u2019ll notice wooden houses with right-triangle frames, and a scattering of Timber Hearth\u2019s inhabitants who are happy to chitchat for a spell.On the ground floor of the observatory there is a small museum that contains artifacts from a long-vanished civilization called the Nomai. These fur-clad, three-eyed beings left traces of themselves throughout the solar system, but no one knows where the Nomai originated or what led to the collapse of their civilization. Recent advances in technology, however, have led to the manufacture of a tool that can translate the Nomai\u2019s spiral script. And in a head-scratching display of confidence, this precious tool has been entrusted to you for use on your maiden voyage.There is a tweeness to the game\u2019s aesthetics that put me in mind of Wes Anderson\u2019s movies \u2014 Timber Hearth looks like a summer camp, and the Hearthians\u2019 ramshackle spaceships resemble children's toys. But such cuteness belies the fact that \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d asks a fair amount from the player in terms of conceptual thinking. You are given remarkably little direction as to how you should proceed in the game apart from the advice to go forth and explore. As such, for the first several hours I found myself irritated that I was at a loss as to how to proceed in the most efficient manner. Questions like, \u201cin what order should I visit the planets,\u201d and \u201cam I remotely on the right track with what I\u2019m doing\u201d nagged at me because, of course, as a critic I felt the pressure to not futz around. While I found it mildly interesting that I could, say, land my ship on a comet, there is no way I would have guessed that I could access the comet\u2019s core by waiting for it to fly close enough to the sun without consulting the Internet.Eventually things began to coalesce as I found and translated more samples of Nomai writing. I don\u2019t want to share too much of what I\u2019ve found since fumbling in the dark is an essential component to how the game operates. I will say that after spending more than twenty hours with it, its mysteries revolve around something that is older than the universe itself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I\u2019ve chipped away at \u201cOuter Wilds,\u201d my appreciation of it has grown exponentially. I admire how it plays with scientific concepts like quantum matter that can appear and disappear when you look at it, then look away, then look back. Also, I liked how different places in the game are only accessible when a planet \u2014 which is small and easy to navigate around \u2014 is in a certain phase of its orbital rotation. I\u2019m not used to entertaining such thoughts in a video game, which makes doing so a pleasure.Approached with patience, \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d offers quite the adventure.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Draugen\u2019 is a picturesque game about delusional thinkingLike many VR games right now, \u2018Blood & Truth\u2019 coasts on its noveltyA powerful combination of art direction, action and voice acting makes \u2018A Plague Tale: Innocence\u2019 a game worth your time\u2018Rage 2\u2019 is a game that\u2019s confidently bland Finding the game bewildering at first is a testament to how well the game succeeds on its own terms. It might take a while to warm up to, but once you do \u2018Outer Wilds\u2019 is quite an adventure",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | It might take a while to warm up to, but once you do \u2018Outer Wilds\u2019 is quite an adventure (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1204",
        "date": "2019-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/06/13/it-might-take-while-warm-up-once-you-do-outer-wilds-is-quite-an-adventure/",
        "text": "Outer Wilds Developed by: Mobius DigitalWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished By: Annapurna InteractiveAvailable on: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One,It took me a while to warm up to \u201cOuter Wilds,\u201d the new space exploration game that tasks players with investigating time loops, supernovas, black holes, planetary surface integrity, and other cosmic curiosities. At first I found the game bewildering, even off-putting. In hindsight, though, my initial reaction strikes me as a testament to how well the game succeeds on its own terms. Given that \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d is all about discovering the sort of phenomena that once astonished and befuddled an advanced alien civilization, it seems right that I should have been unsettled by it at first. \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d begins with your character opening his eyes and gazing at the stars. Training your vision forward reveals one of your fellow four-eyed Hearthians seated before a campfire. If you so choose, the first action you can perform in the game is to roast a marshmallow and eat it. Before you can access your ship, which rests on an elevated platform nearby, you must acquire launch codes from your Outer Wilds Ventures supervisor. Making your way to the observatory, you\u2019ll notice wooden houses with right-triangle frames, and a scattering of Timber Hearth\u2019s inhabitants who are happy to chitchat for a spell.On the ground floor of the observatory there is a small museum that contains artifacts from a long-vanished civilization called the Nomai. These fur-clad, three-eyed beings left traces of themselves throughout the solar system, but no one knows where the Nomai originated or what led to the collapse of their civilization. Recent advances in technology, however, have led to the manufacture of a tool that can translate the Nomai\u2019s spiral script. And in a head-scratching display of confidence, this precious tool has been entrusted to you for use on your maiden voyage.There is a tweeness to the game\u2019s aesthetics that put me in mind of Wes Anderson\u2019s movies \u2014 Timber Hearth looks like a summer camp, and the Hearthians\u2019 ramshackle spaceships resemble children's toys. But such cuteness belies the fact that \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d asks a fair amount from the player in terms of conceptual thinking. You are given remarkably little direction as to how you should proceed in the game apart from the advice to go forth and explore. As such, for the first several hours I found myself irritated that I was at a loss as to how to proceed in the most efficient manner. Questions like, \u201cin what order should I visit the planets,\u201d and \u201cam I remotely on the right track with what I\u2019m doing\u201d nagged at me because, of course, as a critic I felt the pressure to not futz around. While I found it mildly interesting that I could, say, land my ship on a comet, there is no way I would have guessed that I could access the comet\u2019s core by waiting for it to fly close enough to the sun without consulting the Internet.Eventually things began to coalesce as I found and translated more samples of Nomai writing. I don\u2019t want to share too much of what I\u2019ve found since fumbling in the dark is an essential component to how the game operates. I will say that after spending more than twenty hours with it, its mysteries revolve around something that is older than the universe itself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I\u2019ve chipped away at \u201cOuter Wilds,\u201d my appreciation of it has grown exponentially. I admire how it plays with scientific concepts like quantum matter that can appear and disappear when you look at it, then look away, then look back. Also, I liked how different places in the game are only accessible when a planet \u2014 which is small and easy to navigate around \u2014 is in a certain phase of its orbital rotation. I\u2019m not used to entertaining such thoughts in a video game, which makes doing so a pleasure.Approached with patience, \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d offers quite the adventure.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Draugen\u2019 is a picturesque game about delusional thinkingLike many VR games right now, \u2018Blood & Truth\u2019 coasts on its noveltyA powerful combination of art direction, action and voice acting makes \u2018A Plague Tale: Innocence\u2019 a game worth your time\u2018Rage 2\u2019 is a game that\u2019s confidently bland Finding the game bewildering at first is a testament to how well the game succeeds on its own terms. It might take a while to warm up to, but once you do \u2018Outer Wilds\u2019 is quite an adventure",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Nex Machina\u2019: Frenetic, hypnotic and seriously addictive (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1205",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/06/30/nex-machina-frenetic-hypnotic-and-seriously-addictive/",
        "text": "Nex MachinaDeveloped by: HousemarquePublished by: HousemarqueAvailable on: PC, PlayStation 4I received my PlayStation 4 as a Christmas gift in 2013. For at least a year, until \u201cBloodborne\u201d came out, my go-to game was \u201cResogun\u201d a side-scrolling, spaceship shooter that was available for free to PlayStation Plus subscribers. Developed by Housemarque, Finland\u2019s oldest video game studio, \u201cResogun\u201d was a love letter to my favorite game as a little kid, \u201cDefender\u201d (another Christmas gift) for the Atari 2600. Visually, it was one of the most impressive first-wave PS4 titles in large part because of its use of voxels \u2014 cube shaped graphical units. Explosions resulted in the scattering of innumerable volume-rich particles that upped the ante for video game pyrotechnics. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn 2014, \u201cResogun\u201d was nominated for an Action Game of the Year award at the DICE Summit is Las Vegas. According to Mikael Haveri, Housemarque\u2019s Head of Self-Publishing, in the wee hours of the morning after the award ceremony members of his team spotted Eugene Jarvis, the lead designer behind \u201cDefender.\u201d Summoning up their courage, they told him the influence he\u2019d exerted on the development of their craft (earlier that evening, Jarvis had received the Pioneer Award). In the days following the event, Jarvis, who had played and admired \u201cResogun,\u201d agreed to collaborate with Housemarque on a new project that the studio internally referred to as \u201cThe Jarvis Project.\u201d From that was born \u201cNex Machina,\u201d a twitch shooter that stands as a pinnacle of a certain kind of arcade-inspired game design.Apart from \u201cDefender\u201d (1981), the other games which Jarvis is primarily known for are overhead shooters \u201cRobotron 2084\u201d (1984) and \u201cSmash TV\u201d (1990). Both games, in their arcade versions, use a twin-stick setup, a form that dates back to \u201cGun Fight\u201d (1975) but which Jarvis popularized with \u201cRobotron.\u201d With mesmerizing virtuosity, \u201cNex Machina\u201d iterates on Jarvis\u2019s famous twin-stick shooters.In \u201cNex Machina\u201d you play as a robot-killing soldier who must mow down waves of enemies before proceeding to the next section. The action is frenetic and supremely hypnotic. Much of the pleasure comes from being forced to quickly process tremendous amounts of visual information while remaining ever-so-slightly on the other side of being overwhelmed. \u201cWe like our explosions so we\u2019re always balancing a visual aesthetic of chaos with actual readability to the player,\u201d Haveri said. \u201cThat\u2019s the dance that we like to take on.\u201d \u201cNex Machina\u201d uses Housemarque\u2019s in-house graphics engine to create voxel-made environments that are among the most beautiful that I\u2019ve ever seen in an arcade-style game.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen I asked Haveri to elaborate on Housemarque\u2019s aesthetic commitment to voxel technology he said, \u201cThe voxels create a familiar but still very video-gamey world. It takes you to a different place. It\u2019s like a storybook in that sense\u2026 like Lego building blocks, you can see a lot of depth.\u201dAs with \u201cResogun,\u201d \u201cNex Machina\u201d brilliantly incorporates one of Jarvis\u2019s most inspired design choices from \u201cDefender\u201d \u2014 multiple goals. Although you can blast your way through a level with utter abandon, you can also try to rescue oblivious humans (wandering around the playfield with their eyes trained on digital devices) from being harvested by the robots who have evolved and turned against their former masters. As it happens, there is an achievement for going through a stage on the experienced difficulty level or above without saving anyone \u2013 Nihilist. However, the game offers incentives for choosing otherwise by way of score multipliers. Of course rescuing humans often means throwing yourself even more in harm\u2019s way so you are forced to regularly weigh the opportunity cost for undertaking humanitarian maneuvers.By design, \u201cNex Machina\u201d is a hard game, a fact made plain by its difficulty levels. Rookie or the default difficulty level offers unlimited continues and five stages. Experienced, the next difficulty level up, alots 99 continues. I played the game on experienced and yet, despite the seemingly generous number of continues, I was absolutely obliterated by the time I hit the fourth stage. That\u2019s okay, because \u201cNex Machina\u201d is a game that I plan to keep in rotation for the indefinite future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is some serious video game crack.Note: I played \u201cNex Machina\u201d on an i5-4690K computer with a second-generation Nvidia Titan X graphics card. At 3840\u00d72160 resolution, the game ran with an average frame rate close to 52 frames-per-second.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer who has been playing video games since the days of the Atari 2600. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Barnes & Noble Review, Al Jazeera America, the Guardian and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter\u00a0@Chris_Byrd.Recent\u00a0game reviews:\u2018Lydia\u2019: This child\u2019s tale deals skillfully with adult issues\u2018Arms\u2019 for Nintendo Switch: A safe way to throw a punchA disabled protagonist creates interesting opportunities but \u2018Perception\u2019 falls short\u2018Rime\u2019 is an eye-catching, \u2018Zelda\u2019-like puzzle-adventure \u201cNex Machina\u201d is a game worth keeping in your rotation for the indefinite future. \u2018Nex Machina\u2019: Frenetic, hypnotic and seriously addictive",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stan Lee created superheroes who fight hate. Here\u2019s what he has to say after Charlottesville. (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1206",
        "date": "2017-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/08/16/stan-lee-created-superheroes-that-fight-hate-heres-what-he-has-to-say-after-charlottesville/",
        "text": "MORE THAN a half-century ago, Stan Lee began to help create Marvel characters who responded through allegory to the protests and violence and racial hate he saw playing out on America\u2019s streets.\u201cI always felt the X-Men, in a subtle way, often touched upon the subject of racism and inequality, and I believe that subject has come up in other titles, too,\u201d Lee told Comic Riffs last fall, referring to his \u201960s-born superheroes who feel like outsiders, \u201cbut we would never pound hard on the subject, which must be handled with care and intelligence.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNot one to pound hard with fresh words in the wake of last weekend\u2019s violence in Charlottesville, the 94-year-old Lee instead responded by tweeting out the anti-bigotry message of a vintage \u201cStan\u2019s Soapbox\u201d comic-book missive \u2014 which the legendary creator called \u201cas true today as it was in 1968,\u201d when he penned it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLet\u2019s lay it right on the line,\u201d Lee wrote in the year that the Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. \u201cRacism and bigotry are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed supervillains, they can\u2019t be halted with a punch in the snoot or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them, is to expose them \u2014 to reveal from the insidious evil they really are.\u201dLee, who had served in the Army during World War II, went on to call the bigot \u201can unreasoning hater \u2014 one who hates blindly, fanatically, indiscriminately.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race \u2014 to despise an entire nation \u2014 to vilify an entire religion,\u201d Lee\u2019s \u201cSoapbox\u201d said. \u201cSooner or later, we must learn to judge each other on our own merits. Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill our hearts with tolerance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor then, and only then, will we be truly worthy of the concept that man was created in the image of God \u2014 a God who calls us all \u2014 His children.\u201dStan Lee has a new plan to unite police and Black Lives MatterAs of Wednesday, Lee\u2019s tweet had been \u201cliked\u201d nearly 50,000 times.Lee told Comic Riffs last year that he is \u201ca believer in the innate goodness of man,\u201d adding that \u201cAmerica is made of different races and different religions, but we\u2019re all co-travelers on the spaceship Earth and must respect and help each other along the way.\u201dRead more:RIP: Without Joan Lee, 95, we might not have even Stan Lee\u2019s Marvel universeCartoonist Gene Luen Yang\u2019s rousing diversity speech at the National Book Festival The Marvel mastermind has long spoken out against prejudice. Stan Lee created superheroes who fight hate. Here\u2019s what he has to say after Charlottesville.",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Kingdom Hearts 3\u2019 has a baffling backstory but is a treat for fans of Disney and Pixar (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1207",
        "date": "2019-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/01/31/kingdom-hearts-has-baffling-backstory-is-treat-fans-disney-pixar/",
        "text": "Kingdom Hearts 3Developed by: Square EnixWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Square EnixAvailable on: PlayStation 4, Xbox OneWhenever a popular, story-infused video game is released and has a few numbers in its title, the question, \u201cDo you need to play the previous ones in the series?\u201d usually pops up. The vast majority of the time I say \u201cno.\u201d No, you don\u2019t need to play the earlier Elder Scrolls, Red Dead Redemption, Assassin\u2019s Creed, The Witcher or Persona games to forge a deep connection with the latest incarnation. But if you ask me this question about \u201cKingdom Hearts 3,\u201d well \u2026 To the uninitiated, the first thing to know is that \u201cKingdom Hearts 3\u201d is the tenth entry in a series which mashes up characters from the Final Fantasy and Disney universes. The series has accumulated enough knotty story lines since its debut in 2002 to make studying a summary of the events a bit of a chore for anyone with only a slight interest in the ramifications of the Keyblade Wars.Suffice it to say, \u201cKingdom Hearts 3\u201d stars Sora, an unflappable, good-natured kid who befriends Donald, Goofy and a certain royal mouse named King Mickey. All are capable keyblade wielders (keyblades being the material incarnation of warriors\u2019 hearts). Together, they and a bunch of allies fight against those who want to forge a powerful keyblade that can access Kingdom Hearts, the haven of all the hearts in the world. Catching up on the backstory requires keeping track of characters \u2014 some with similar names \u2014 who have a habit of dividing themselves into different incarnations, losing control of their wills, getting stuck in different worlds or forgetting important events. Listening to the characters discuss this stuff left me with the impression that they weren\u2019t so much chatting with each other as summarizing and advancing plot points.If this sounds too close to an invitation to wade into the waters of delirious fan fiction, you have my sympathies. But, however eye-glazing \u201cKingdom Hearts 3\u2019s\u201d overarching narrative may be, it\u2019s worth stressing how easy it is to get swept up in the broad strokes of its gameplay and the more isolated story beats in the game. Running into the Little Chef from \u201cRatatouille,\u201d dancing with the Rapunzel of \u201cTangled,\u201d visiting a toy store with the characters from\u201d Toy Story\u201d or helping out Queen Elsa of \u201cFrozen,\u201d will elicit fuzzy feelings in anyone who is disposed to the charms of Disney and Pixar.As a game, \u201cKingdom Hearts 3\u201d takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. There are plenty of minigames in it that are diverting but not much more. Though I enjoyed spending a little time with the gang from Winnie the Pooh, helping Rabbit harvest vegetables by playing a basic-color match game wasn\u2019t terribly exciting, neither was traveling between worlds in a little spaceship, the mechanics of which didn\u2019t seem far removed from one of the old \u201cStar Fox\u201d games.In any case, the game\u2019s core combat mechanics are a delight. Sora & Co.\u2019s battles against the minions of darkness are spectacular. The combat is fluid and full of rainbow-colored swirls, starry shapes, and other visual doodads. Sora can summon a variety of repurposed theme park rides like a merry-go-round, spinning teacups or a white-water rapids ride to help clobber enemies. He can also avail himself of more exotic means such as taking to the air in a rocket with Woody and Buzz from \u201cToy Story\u201d or hopping on the back of Simba from the \u201cLion King.\u201d The gorgeous eruptions of lights over the battlefields could give \u201cDestiny 2\u201d a run for its money.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cKingdom Hearts 3\u201d is a game I would recommend to parents looking for something to play with their kids or to adults with a soft spot for Disney. Though it\u2019s weighed down by its lore, which only children are likely to become invested in, its razzle dazzle gameplay and steady parade of cameo appearances will appeal to those with a taste for the ludicrous.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Resident Evil 2\u2019 is the perfect example of how a game\u2019s design can overshadow the need for a story\u2018Bury me, my Love\u2019 creates an intimate and tangible experience out of recent history\u2018Katamari Damacy Reroll\u2019 will charm its players with strangenessDeveloper Lucas Pope continues to play with the idea of game-player as worker in \u2018Return of the Obra Dinn\u2019 The series has accumulated enough knotty storylines to make studying a summary of the events a bit of a chore but the game\u2019s core combat mechanics are a delight. \u2018Kingdom Hearts 3\u2019 has a baffling backstory but is a treat for fans of Disney and Pixar",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Golf Club: Wasteland\u2019: The Mario golf game we always wanted (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1208",
        "date": "2021-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/09/03/golf-club-wasteland-game-review/",
        "text": "Golf Club: WastelandDeveloped by: Demagog StudioWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Untold TalesAvailable on: Nintendo: Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox OneA spaceship arrives near the outskirts of Alphaville. Out of it steps Charlie, a man in a hazmat suit. The air is toxic so he leaves his helmet on. Approaching a nearby ball he carefully angles his golf club and takes a swing. After the ball comes to rest, Charlie activates his jet pack to go after it. The flat terrain surrounding the first hole gives little hint of the challenges to come as the naturalized Martian methodically edges his way from a wooded area to an urban environment that is in the process of being reclaimed by nature. \u201cGolf Club: Wasteland\u201d is an arcade-style game that projects a future where the well-heeled flee to Mars before the onset of an ecological catastrophe on Earth, then return from the Red Planet to Earth to hit the links among the ruins. In venerable fashion, the game is easy to pick up though difficult to master. Control of Charlie\u2019s golf swing is tied to the left control stick. This can be used to select the angle of the shot as well as the amount of force that Charlie uses to hit the ball, which is accomplished with the tap of a button. On a first playthrough, players can choose between a story and challenge mode. The former allows players to take as many shots as they like to complete a given hole while the latter requires them to not go over par.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe game\u2019s elegantly simple mechanics are complemented by its cultural savviness. Film buffs, for instance, will recognize that the city to which Charlie is heading bears the name of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s classic sci-fi film \u201cAlphaville.\u201d There are also references throughout the campaign to the work of other creative giants in film and literature such as Samuel Beckett and Aldous Huxley. (At one point, Charlie finds himself trying to finish a hole in an erstwhile nightclub named Soma, the name of the multipurpose drug featured in Huxley\u2019s most famous novel \u201cBrave New World.\u201d)As players make their way through a 35-hole course that will see them knocking balls across balconies, up escalators, through factories and into pipes, they\u2019ll be treated to the sounds of Radio Nostalgia, easily the best in-game station I\u2019ve heard this side of \u201cGrand Theft Auto V.\u201d Radio Nostalgia features some wonderful original tracks such as a song about two astronauts who argue about art \u2014 Andrei Tarkovsky vs. Stanley Kubrick, Herman Melville vs. Dostoyevsky \u2014 as well as an ode to stockpiling supplies. Interspersed among the musical offerings are stories from people who call in to the show to share their nostalgic reflections about life on earth. One of my favorites include a caller who recounts a chemically-laced evening she had at a dance party. The evening culminated with her tripping out and remembering the lines of from a poem by Heinrich Heine which she recites in its original German. Another caller laments the olfactory-impoverished state of life on Mars in comparison to the rich variety of smells that suffused her native Havana. After asserting that it was those smells that played a decisive role in the formation of her character \u2014 a Proustian sentiment if there ever was one. She goes on to sing a hauntingly beautiful song in Spanish whose words (like those of the Heine poem) I wish had been translated.\u201cGolf Club: Wasteland\u201d is one of the best games I\u2019ve played this year. I loved everything about this game from its refined art style to its soundtrack. It\u2019s peculiar alchemy of meditative sport and pointed sentimentality is a sight to behold.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChristopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Twelve Minutes\u2019: Grueling repetition with an interesting payoff\u2018Road 96\u2019: The concept delivers, but the details are sorely lacking\u2018Death\u2019s Door\u2019: A clever and fun Zelda homage\u2018Mythic Ocean\u2019: Playing nice with the gods \u201cGolf Club: Wasteland\u201d is one of the best games of the year. \u2018Golf Club: Wasteland\u2019: The Mario golf game we always wanted",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Genesis Noir\u2019: A stunning game about love, murder, joy and the Big Bang (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1209",
        "date": "2021-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/04/12/genesis-noir-game-review/",
        "text": "Genesis NoirDeveloped by: Feral Cat DenWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Fellow TravelerAvailable on: Mac, Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox OneIf a crime writer, a cosmologist and a mythologist collaborated on a video game, the result might be \u201cGenesis Noir,\u201d the most conceptually audacious game to hit digital storefronts in many moons. Unlike most games that bend over backward to deliver easily digestible narratives, \u201cGenesis Noir\u201d leans into abstraction and associative logic with unabashed zeal. A narrative log on a spaceship that appears near the end of the campaign neatly sums up its lofty conviction, \u201cJust because something is a game, doesn\u2019t mean that your thoughts, your feelings, your expectations are trivial, or irrelevant, or meaningless. For it is in these that lies a game\u2019s true beauty.\u201d Here is one of those rare titles that would not be out of place in a gallery. \u201cGenesis Noir\u201d unfolds through a series of title cards interspersed between playable sections. The cards set out the principles of the Big Bang Theory \u2014 an explosion of energy gave birth to our universe. Like a refrain, they also circle back to the subject of myth as it relates to the human propensity to come to terms with the mysteries and verities that underwrite existence through archetypal stories. Here, these stories take the form of events that span the range of creation from the flowering of life in a bed of water to the world-devouring darkness precipitated by a black hole.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlayers assume the role of No Man, a tall thin man who sports the standard garb of a noir hero: a trench coat and a hat. Late in the game he is referred to by different names: the Eternal Demon, Beat Brother, Ancestral Spirit, and Time Traveler, which reinforce the notion that he is more of a symbol than a conventional character; thus, his actions should be read metaphorically. At the start of the game, we find him selling watches out of his coat pockets to various pedestrians on the street like a peddler of illicit goods. Returning to his home in a clock tower he finds a number written on a napkin belonging to a love interest. After dialing the number on a rotary phone he hears distressed sounds coming from the other end before the line abruptly clicks off. Racing, falling and crawling on stairs and streets that take on impossible angles he arrives at a building where he wrenches on the door handle until the door shatters like a pane of glass. Bursting into a room, he sees another man point a gun at a woman and pull the trigger. In \u201cGenesis Noir\u2019s\u201d cosmology, this event is the cause of the Big Bang.The would-be victim is Miss Mass, a singer who leads a band called the Divine Jazz Section. Her assailant is her bandmate and erstwhile lover Golden Boy, a saxophone player who is made jealous by her dalliance with No Man. Viewed through the lens of the Big Bang, the symbolic relationship of these three is clear. Miss Mass held the universe of the band together until her head was turned by No Man. In a fit of jealousy, Golden Boy shoots Miss Mass and triggers an explosion of energy that echoes throughout time and space \u2014 elements that are associated with No Man, who takes it upon himself to literally peer into the explosion to see if there is a way that he might be able to reverse it.For the first two-thirds of the game, players return repeatedly to the crime scene where the propulsive force of the gunshot from Golden Boy\u2019s handgun hangs in the air like a frozen, elongated balloon. Moving a cursor inside the narrowly demarcated blast radius one comes across dots or particles that can be clicked on. Some of these yield dead ends while others lead to stages that take No Man to different points in the evolution of Earth \u2014 from an ancient Greek amphitheater to a feudal Japanese countryside to jazz-age Harlem to the laboratory of a supercollider and finally to a place of shape-shifting spirits. These places are punctuated with puzzles that see No Man doing such things as trading riffs with a musician, planting seeds in a garden and bearing witness to the killing of a mythological animal whose face becomes that of a constellation.\u201cGenesis Noir\u2019s\u201d hopscotch approach to gameplay keeps things fresh and unexpected. On an audiovisual level its beautiful jazz score and ultrarefined minimalist line art are entrancing. Alas, I did come across a few bugs on the Xbox version that required a couple of restarts when a puzzle broke and the screen froze. I also had to duck out to the pause menu a few times to make the on-screen cursor work. Regardless, I hope a few glitches, which will likely be resolved in an update, don\u2019t dampen anyone\u2019s curiosity. As someone who plays too many conventional games I relished spending time with something so unusual. Overall, there is a richness to the game\u2019s aesthetic form which unfortunately leaves me with the unsettling feeling that I haven\u2019t done it proper justice.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChristopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018It Takes Two\u2019 tests your ability to save a marriage and fly a fidget spinner\u2018Mundaun\u2019 offers the rare chance to smoke a pipe while talking to the severed head of a goat\u2018Mutropolis\u2019: A game definitely worth watching on YouTube\u2018Persona 5 Strikers\u2019: A great sequel if you\u2019ve already studied up If a crime writer, a cosmologist and a mythologist collaborated on a video game, the result might be \u201cGenesis Noir,\u201d the most conceptually audacious game to hit digital storefronts in many moons. \u2018Genesis Noir\u2019: A stunning game about love, murder, joy and the Big Bang",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The ultimate ranking of the best \u2018Star Trek\u2019 captains (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1210",
        "date": "2017-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/09/22/the-ultimate-ranking-of-the-best-star-trek-captains/",
        "text": "After a 12-year television drought, \u201cStar Trek\u201d fans welcome a new series, \u201cDiscovery,\u201d which premieres on CBS Sunday night. So as a new crew goes boldly, we examine the canon to rank \u201cStar Trek\u2019s\u201d best captains.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe franchise launched with the original series, \u201cStar Trek\u201d (1966-1969), with the iconic Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) at the helm after the series pilot. That was followed by: an animated version of the original (1973-1974); \u201cThe Next Generation\u201d (1987-1994); \u201cDeep Space 9\u201d (1993-1999); \u201cVoyager\u201d (1995-2001); and a prequel, \u201cEnterprise\u201d (2001-2005). The franchise has spawned 13 movies \u2014 including the three most recent, which reboot the story. Surveying them all, we rank not on talent of actors or quality of shows, but rather on their fitness as captains. They are judged here on the greatness of their achievements, the impact of their mistakes, the resources they had and the obstacles they faced \u2014 the commander in full.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement7. Jonathan Archer, \u201cEnterprise\u201d: A century before James T. Kirk, Archer faced a task that had no playbook: commanding the first deep-space Federation vessel. He stopped an alien superweapon meant to destroy Earth. But heroics aside, Archer wilted from command presence on the Enterprise, spending more time sulking and grousing than leading and inspiring. Archer\u2019s folksy Southern chief engineer with the \u201cRight Stuff\u201d swagger would have made a superior captain. His\u00a0best character trait?\u00a0Bringing his beagle on board.6. Christopher Pike, \u201cStar Trek\u201d (original series): Pike is the Enterprise captain in the series pilot and shows up in the reboot films as Star Fleet brass. In the pilot, Pike was captured by aliens who imprisoned species to study them, using their big brains to manipulate the reality of their prisoners. Pike withstood mental torture, intuited he was experiencing an illusion and turned the tables on his captors. Jeffrey Hunter, who played Pike, refused to commit to the TV series. William Shatner was then cast as the Enterprise captain, and the rest is Trek history.5. James T. Kirk, \u201cStar Trek\u201d (original series film reboot): All of the good traits of the original Kirk \u2014 an intense loyalty to crew and warp-speed decision-making \u2014 are balanced against a juvenile disregard for the Prime Directive, which forbids interference in alien civilizations. He turned an entire developing species into spaceship-worshiping cultists by raising the USS Enterprise out of the ocean right in front of them. The small sample size (only three movies) harms this Kirk\u2019s ranking; we need to see how he handles a Gorn.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement4. Jean-Luc Picard, \u201cThe Next Generation\u201d: Surprised to see him this low? Picard is intelligent, courageous and commanding, but has a fatal flaw: an arrogant belief in human ability. Consider: In his third encounter with \u201cQ,\u201d an apparently omnipotent and clearly unpredictable being, Picard, who is not omnipotent, makes the catastrophic misjudgment of insulting him, telling Q humans don\u2019t need his help. Q petulantly slings the Enterprise across the galaxy and into first contact with a species they could not handle \u2014 the Borg, an advanced, pitiless drone collective that would become the Federation\u2019s greatest enemy. Make it d\u2019oh!3. Kathryn Janeway, \u201cVoyager\u201d: Janeway, Star Trek\u2019s only major female captain, was forced into an impossible situation:\u00a0An alien transported her ship and crew 75 years away from Earth while they were chasing an anti-Federation rebel group. Then she had to integrate the two crews \u2026 and then persuade them not to mutiny and toss her out of an airlock when she destroyed their shortcut home. (Those high-minded Star Fleet values \u2026) On the long voyage back to Earth, Janeway had to scavenge her way across the quadrant for resources to literally keep the ship\u2019s lights on and battle hostile aliens at every turn. She also had to overcome the most laconic bridge crew in Federation history.2. Benjamin Sisko, \u201cDeep Space Nine\u201d: Unlike Star Fleet captains who went to space in Federation ships with crews duty-bound to follow orders, Sisko took command of a booby-trapped alien space station with an alien first officer who hated him. There was also a range of alien civilians with their own agendas, from a grifting Ferengi bartender to a scheming Cardassian tailor, all of whom made running the station tougher than herding targs. Bonus: The local religion thought Sisko was a holy man, so there was that diplomatic land mine to deal with, and he was a widower raising a son. Sisko\u2019s integrity and ingenuity turned the haters into loyalists and welded his crew to him. Sisko was the Eisenhower of captains \u2014 the Federation\u2019s greatest massed-forces military commander \u2014 and led the battles that protected the quadrant from alien takeover.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement1. James T. Kirk, \u201cStar Trek\u201d: The predictable but correct choice. Kirk commanded with brains, heart and brio. He is the Federation\u2019s greatest one-on-one tactical commander in battle and could even destroy malevolent talking computers by arguing them into logical suicide-spirals. He began his career battling Klingons and lost his son to Klingons, yet ended up sealing the Federation peace with the Klingons. He had two substantial flaws: He treated the Prime Directive like dental floss and\u00a0looked at many alien species as child-races in need of education, enlightenment or a good spanking. But his sometimes-cavalier attitude never imperiled the entire Federation like some captains (cough cough \u2014 Picard \u2014 cough cough). Also, Kirk was smart enough to lean on the Federation\u2019s finest first officer. With Spock, the superego to Kirk\u2019s id, they were a nearly flawless pair.Bonus: The greatest alien captain: Unnamed Romulan commander in the original series episode, \u201cBalance of Terror,\u201d who wages a white-knuckles cat-and-mouse game with Kirk worthy of any great submarine film duel. The noble and morally tortured Romulan captain was played by the late Mark Lenard, who went on to play Spock\u2019s father in later Treks, which is cool, because Vulcans and Romulans are cousins.Read more:How Star Trek embraced diversity 50 years ago \u2014 and continues to do so todayAs \u2018Star Trek\u2019 turns 50, what would creator Gene Roddenberry think of modern life? From James T. Kirk to Jean-Luc Picard, check out where your favorite may have landed. The ultimate ranking of the best \u2018Star Trek\u2019 captains",
        "author": "Frank Ahrens"
    },
    {
        "title": "A new comic book anthology raises money for Puerto Rico, telling stories of history and fantasy (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1211",
        "date": "2018-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/03/15/a-new-comic-book-anthology-raises-money-for-puerto-rico-telling-stories-of-history-and-fantasy/",
        "text": "St. Louis-based comic book publisher Lion Forge is joining the relief efforts to assist those still in need in Puerto Rico after the destruction of Hurricane Maria.All profits from Lion Forge\u2019s just-released \u201cPuerto Rico Strong\u201d anthology, written and illustrated by some of the top Puerto Rican and Latino talent in the comic book industry, will go to the United Way of Puerto Rico. Lion Forge\u2019s pledge will assist with\u00a0nonprofit child-care facilities, community schools and health-care centers. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLion Forge will match the first $25,000 made from \u201cPuerto Rico Strong,\u201d with Diamond Comic Distributors also donating 5 percent of retail sales to United Way of Puerto Rico.Story continues below advertisement\u201cPuerto Rico Strong\u201d is a deep dive into Puerto Rican culture.\u00a0Stories range from Taino warriors taking a stand against colonization and\u00a0Puerto Rico\u2019s ugly history of forced sterilization to Puerto Rican pride and even space exploration.AdvertisementPuerto Rico Strong \u201ccan be personal stories, it can be stories about Puerto Rico\u2019s history,\u201d Marco Lopez, an editor and writer on the anthology, told The Washington Post\u2019s Comic Riffs. \u201cIt can be social political stories or stories based on Puerto Rico\u2019s culture or just fantastic made up sci-fi fantasy stories.\u201dWriter Vita Ayala (\u201cBatman Beyond,\u201d \u201cSupergirl\u201d) and Deadpool co-creator Fabian Nicieza are some of the familiar comic book industry names attached. The goal from Lion Forge was to create something lasting that would have an impact beyond just making a donation.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe figured the best way we could help is use what we\u2019re good at, which is making comic books,\u201d said Derek Ruiz, an editor/writer on \u201cPuerto Rico Strong.\u201dNeil Schwartz, another editor on the anthology, was inspired by the industry veterans\u2019 response to \u201cPuerto Rico Strong\u2019s\u201d call to action.\u201cWhen we blew the horn, so many people wanted to answer the call from different walks of life, no matter what their forte was, whether it was comics or Web comics,\u201d Schwartz said. \u201cWhat we put together is amazing and that diversity is really what speaks to why this project works so well and why it\u2019s important to all of us, because we all felt that passion for Puerto Rico.\u201dLopez, Schwartz and Ruiz all agree that integral to the success of \u201cPuerto Rico Strong\u2019s\u201d unifying collaborative efforts was the work of Lion Forge editorial assistant Desiree Rodriguez, who, like Lopez and Ruiz, is Puerto Rican, and felt a special connection to the project. She served as an editor on \u201cPuerto Rico Strong.\u201d\u2018A different kind of superhero\u2019: Why \u2018Black Panther\u2019 will mean so much to so manyRodriguez already had a database of the top Latino talent in comics and was responsible for bringing many of \u201cPuerto Rico Strong\u2019s\u201d collaborators on board. As a lifelong fan of comic book culture, she is excited to see \u201cPuerto Rico Strong\u201d in comic book shops, but she says just as important is its\u00a0arrival in libraries and schools to serve as an education tool.\u201cThere\u2019s so little history taught about Puerto Rico. One of the things I noticed when the hurricane news was at its peak, was that a lot of people didn\u2019t know about the Jones Act. They didn\u2019t know about the economic struggles that [Puerto Rico] has continuously gone through and the history behind that,\u201d Rodriguez said. \u201cOne of the goals was to teach people. \u2026 That way, people could read this \u2026 and can learn about the island through actual Puerto Ricans, because history is so often told through the privileged point of view.\u201dRead more:As Puerto Rican superhero makes debut, her writer brings \u2018the power of our people\u2019 to comicsMiles Morales\u2019s most heroic stand as Spider-Man? The moment he embraces his biracial identity Profits from \u201cPuerto Rico Strong\u201d will assist in the aftermath from Hurricane Maria. A new comic book anthology raises money for Puerto Rico, telling stories of history and fantasy",
        "author": "David Betancourt"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Peanuts\u2019 and NASA are collaborating again \u2014 five decades after Snoopy\u2019s moon mission (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1212",
        "date": "2018-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/07/10/peanuts-and-nasa-are-collaborating-again-five-decades-after-snoopys-moon-landing-connection/",
        "text": "EVEN BEFORE\u00a0man had landed on the moon, Snoopy had landed his name on NASA equipment. Now, \u201cPeanuts\u201d and the space agency will launch a new phase of partnership.Peanuts Worldwide and NASA will announce on Tuesday that they have entered into a multiyear Space Act Agreement, executives at Peanuts tell The Washington Post\u2019s Comic Riffs. The partnership is engineered \u201cto inspire a passion for space exploration and STEM\u201d education among students, according to Peanuts Worldwide. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJean Schulz, widow of \u201cPeanuts\u201d creator Charles M. \u201cSparky\u201d Schulz, said that the initiative continues the cartoonist\u2019s enthusiasm for NASA, noting: \u201cIt was all very personal for Sparky.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA first approached Schulz in the mid-1960s about putting Snoopy \u2014 famously an aviator in \u201cPeanuts\u201d fantasy sequences \u2014 on its spaceflight safety materials. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the agency\u2019s Silver Snoopy Award \u2014 an honor that recognizes achievements by NASA employees and contractors \u2014 and in 1969,\u00a0the Apollo 10 lunar mission named modules for hard-luck Charlie Brown and his beagle, Snoopy.AdvertisementCraig Schulz, the cartoonist\u2019s youngest son and \u201cThe Peanuts Movie\u201d producer, noted that his father called the Apollo 10 naming \u201cthe proudest moment in his career.\u201dAdded Jean Schulz: \u201cSparky saw that if these men were willing to risk their lives for a mission such as this, he certainly could bless the use of his characters.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe new era of collaboration aims to create\u00a0entertainment content \u2014 including publishing, merchandising and interactive projects \u2014 that can help popularize science and tech education.\u201cWith its new mission for \u2018Peanuts,\u2019 NASA now has the chance to branch off, or rather \u2018STEM-off,\u2019 its 50 years of success using Snoopy as a symbol for human spaceflight safety, while at the same time being able to engage a new generation with a set of highly relatable and widely recognizable characters,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, the editor of collectSPACE and past online program director for the National Space Society.\u201cThe \u2018Peanuts\u2019 gang are as diverse in their personality and approach as are the many opportunities that await those who embrace science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects,\u201d continued Pearlman, an expert on the cultural intersection of space and pop culture, from collectibles to educational guides.For the new campaign, Astronaut Snoopy will be the face of STEM-based school curriculums with a focus on America\u2019s latest explorations into deep space.\u201cThe stars aligned \u2014 we all wanted to reach kids together,\u201d said Roz Nowicki, executive vice president at Peanuts Worldwide.Peanuts Worldwide plans to unveil details next week at Comic-Con International in San Diego.Read more:You\u2019re a good Canadian, Charlie Brown: $345 million DHX deal is a smart move for \u2018Peanuts\u2019Exclusive: Thanks to the \u2018Peanuts Movie,\u2019 here\u2019s your new Little Red-Haired Girl. The two are marking the 50th anniversary of their Apollo 10 campaign with a new range of projects.  \u2018Peanuts\u2019 and NASA are collaborating again \u2014 five decades after Snoopy\u2019s moon mission",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Peanuts\u2019 and NASA are collaborating again \u2014 five decades after Snoopy\u2019s moon mission (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1213",
        "date": "2018-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/07/10/peanuts-and-nasa-are-collaborating-again-five-decades-after-snoopys-moon-landing-connection/",
        "text": "EVEN BEFORE\u00a0man had landed on the moon, Snoopy had landed his name on NASA equipment. Now, \u201cPeanuts\u201d and the space agency will launch a new phase of partnership.Peanuts Worldwide and NASA will announce on Tuesday that they have entered into a multiyear Space Act Agreement, executives at Peanuts tell The Washington Post\u2019s Comic Riffs. The partnership is engineered \u201cto inspire a passion for space exploration and STEM\u201d education among students, according to Peanuts Worldwide. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJean Schulz, widow of \u201cPeanuts\u201d creator Charles M. \u201cSparky\u201d Schulz, said that the initiative continues the cartoonist\u2019s enthusiasm for NASA, noting: \u201cIt was all very personal for Sparky.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA first approached Schulz in the mid-1960s about putting Snoopy \u2014 famously an aviator in \u201cPeanuts\u201d fantasy sequences \u2014 on its spaceflight safety materials. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the agency\u2019s Silver Snoopy Award \u2014 an honor that recognizes achievements by NASA employees and contractors \u2014 and in 1969,\u00a0the Apollo 10 lunar mission named modules for hard-luck Charlie Brown and his beagle, Snoopy.AdvertisementCraig Schulz, the cartoonist\u2019s youngest son and \u201cThe Peanuts Movie\u201d producer, noted that his father called the Apollo 10 naming \u201cthe proudest moment in his career.\u201dAdded Jean Schulz: \u201cSparky saw that if these men were willing to risk their lives for a mission such as this, he certainly could bless the use of his characters.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe new era of collaboration aims to create\u00a0entertainment content \u2014 including publishing, merchandising and interactive projects \u2014 that can help popularize science and tech education.\u201cWith its new mission for \u2018Peanuts,\u2019 NASA now has the chance to branch off, or rather \u2018STEM-off,\u2019 its 50 years of success using Snoopy as a symbol for human spaceflight safety, while at the same time being able to engage a new generation with a set of highly relatable and widely recognizable characters,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, the editor of collectSPACE and past online program director for the National Space Society.\u201cThe \u2018Peanuts\u2019 gang are as diverse in their personality and approach as are the many opportunities that await those who embrace science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects,\u201d continued Pearlman, an expert on the cultural intersection of space and pop culture, from collectibles to educational guides.For the new campaign, Astronaut Snoopy will be the face of STEM-based school curriculums with a focus on America\u2019s latest explorations into deep space.\u201cThe stars aligned \u2014 we all wanted to reach kids together,\u201d said Roz Nowicki, executive vice president at Peanuts Worldwide.Peanuts Worldwide plans to unveil details next week at Comic-Con International in San Diego.Read more:You\u2019re a good Canadian, Charlie Brown: $345 million DHX deal is a smart move for \u2018Peanuts\u2019Exclusive: Thanks to the \u2018Peanuts Movie,\u2019 here\u2019s your new Little Red-Haired Girl. The two are marking the 50th anniversary of their Apollo 10 campaign with a new range of projects.  \u2018Peanuts\u2019 and NASA are collaborating again \u2014 five decades after Snoopy\u2019s moon mission",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Valiant Comics executive editor says the company is poised for a breakout moment (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1214",
        "date": "2018-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/04/13/new-valiant-comics-executive-editor-says-its-is-poised-for-a-breakout-moment/",
        "text": "Valiant has been one of the top comics publishers outside the big two of Marvel and DC Comics since its rebirth in 2012.\u00a0And now\u00a0Joe Illidge, who just took over as executive editor, thinks it\u2019s poised for\u00a0an even bigger breakout moment \u2014 especially as\u00a0it gears\u00a0up for this summer\u2019s \u201cHarbinger Wars 2\u201d and future entertainment deals with Sony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter starting his career in comics as an intern at Milestone Media in the early 1990s, Illidge moved to editing \u201cBatman\u201d\u00a0for DC Comics at the turn of the century. He was most recently a senior editor at Lion Forge imprint Catalyst Prime.\u201cFor me, it was an opportunity to work with a highly respected publisher that has great relationships with creators, fans and the retailers,\u201d Illidge told The Washington Post\u2019s Comic Riffs.Story continues below advertisementIllidge says his new position will give him a bird\u2019s-eye view of the Valiant universe, working with editorial staff members to outline the future publishing plan of Valiant and create ways to expand its audience. Valiant Comics includes comic book titles \u201cBloodshot,\u201d \u201cShadowman\u201d and \u201cX-O Manowar.\u201dAdvertisementHe\u2019ll oversee the upcoming \u201cHarbinger Wars 2\u201d crossover event, featuring many Valiant characters \u2014 a follow-up to its initial event in\u00a02013. And with a \u201cBloodshot\u201d movie starring Vin Diesel rumored to start production later this year, Illidge is convinced that Valiant\u2019s movie deal with Sony will bring new sets of eyes to the publisher in the near future.\u201cI feel like with the upcoming \u2018Bloodshot\u2019 film \u2026 that is going to allow the larger mass audience to become aware of Valiant,\u201d Illidge said. \u201cIt\u2019s of crucial importance that the Valiant universe is ready to accommodate all those new potential fans.\u201dIt\u2019s not just movie deals that has Illidge excited about coming to work for Valiant. He says that its comics reach across multiple genres and that Valiant can\u2019t just be labeled a superhero universe. \u201cShadowman\u201d is a horror comic. \u201cX-O Manowar\u201d is deep-space science fiction. Popular heroine series \u201cFaith\u201d falls into the young adult category.Faith and politics will collide when Hillary Clinton appears in Valiant Comics\u201cYou can tell stories in almost any genre in Valiant,\u201d Illidge said. \u201cI think [that] is a quality that no other multilayered universe in the North American [comic book publishing] space or the global market has.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne potential gold mine Illidge sees at Valiant is \u201cShadowman,\u201d a supernatural series (being written by Andy Diggle and illustrated by Stephen Segovia) based on a character that debuted in 1992. Illidge says \u201cShadowman\u201d combines\u00a0the vibes of two recent Hollywood blockbusters, \u201cGet Out\u201d and \u201cBlack Panther.\u201d A \u201cShadowman\u201d movie is in development from Sony with Reginald Hudlin attached to direct.\u201cYou\u2019re dealing with a male black lead. You\u2019re dealing with the legacy of the Shadowman power going back decades and centuries,\u201d Illidge said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s horror, so it connects to personal identity in these ways that are really painfully and humanly true but are also scary and horrifying.\u201dIn his previous position as senior editor of Lion Forge/Catalyst Prime,\u00a0he\u00a0was a constant voice for diversity within comic book panels and for the creative talent behind those comics. But in looking back at Catalyst, Illidge is reminded of a time when he was working on Batman comics with legendary Batman writer/editor Dennis O\u2019Neil. When O\u2019Neil left, he said, what he wanted most for Batman comics was to see things O\u2019Neil never would have done. Illidge says he wants the same for Catalyst Prime.\u201cI\u2019m very thankful to the co-owners of Lion Forge \u2026 for giving me the opportunity to close the circle on a debt I felt I had to comics, to fans and to the founders of Milestone, and so I\u2019ve done that,\u201d Illidge said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be great to see that evolve and go in other directions.\u201dRead more:From political jokes to superhero laughs: A Colbert writer takes on \u2018Quantum and Woody\u2019 Joe Illidge expects Valiant's audience to grow as the publisher aims to win big at the box office and comic book shops. New Valiant Comics executive editor says the company is poised for a breakout moment",
        "author": "David Betancourt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Observation\u2019: A brilliant science fiction game that puts the player in an unfamiliar situation (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1215",
        "date": "2019-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/08/07/observation-brilliant-science-fiction-game-that-puts-player-an-unfamiliar-situation/",
        "text": "ObservationDeveloped by: No CodeWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Devolver DigitalAvailable on: PC, PlayStation 4Story-focused video games often invite some sort of identification with a relatable protagonist. \u201cObservation,\u201d a captivating sci-fi-puzzle-game from a number of the creative minds behind \u201cAlien Isolation,\u201d takes a slightly different approach. Rather than cast players in the role of an astronaut struggling for survival onboard a damaged space station, \u201cObservation\u201d inserts players into the circuits of the onboard AI. And because it is difficult to overlook how unnatural it is for a human mind to mimic the smooth functionality of a machine, the game effects a gap between the player and the player\u2019s avatar that is intriguingly disorienting. \u201cObservation\u2019s\u201d peculiar strength is in harnessing and undermining one\u2019s capacity for detachment. The game opens with Dr. Emma Fisher, an astronaut on an International Space Station, sending out an S.O.S. call after an incident knocks the station from its trajectory and damages its operating AI, S.A.M. After Emma reboots the system, the first task for the player is to accept or reject her voice authentication by moving a slider along the screen that serves as a voice analyzer then clicking a tab to indicate S.A.M.\u2019s response.Curious to see what would happen if I decided to be uncooperative, I rejected Emma\u2019s voice signature a couple of times before she ran a bypass code on me. Since I was the ghost in the machine, I took perverse pleasure in that exchange. As I recollected past crises with uncooperative computers, I wondered how long I\u2019d keep up an apathetic front.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot for long.One of the first dramatic moments occurs after Emma directs you to see if different modules on the station are still functional. Odd symbols and coordinates flash across the screen which looks like an artfully distorted video feed. (Like \u201cAlien Isolation,\u201d \u201cObservation\u201d channels an analogue vibe.) A high-pitched sound swells in the background prompting a reasonably panicked Emma to ask S.A.M. what\u2019s going on. There is nothing the player can do but watch as the words \u201cBring Her\u201d briefly appear on the screen followed by a flash to a mysterious landscape then grows dark. It's interesting to have your avatar do things you don't understand; in the game, no one is all-powerful or outside of the scope of someone else\u2019s observation.The situation grows increasingly strange after Emma realizes the station is hovering near Saturn and S.A.M. admits that he took them there but doesn\u2019t know why. From that point on, I was committed to helping Emma however I could. Usually that meant consulting one of the game\u2019s sub-menus to locate cameras throughout the station that I could access and, from there, manipulate electronic devices in the vicinity \u2014 monitors, hatch doors, laptops, etc.Though it is easy to feel detached behind a camera, working through a number of the game\u2019s puzzles reminded me that I was a varyingly slow witted-human. Listening to Emma chide me to hurry up with some urgent matter or feeling at a loss for what to do next made me aware that I made for a poor AI companion.The puzzles in \u201cObservation\u2019 are varied. They feel \u201ctechnical\u201d without being overly so. There are knobs to adjust, coordinates to enter, schematics to copy, and wires to connect. These user interfaces are well designed and further the game\u2019s retro aesthetic. At a certain point, Emma hooks S.A.M. up to a spherical device so that he can float around and outside of the ship. Guiding the Connection Sphere through the ship\u2019s corridors lends to the impression that one is orchestrating a series of lovely tracking shots. The game\u2019s cinematic flair is obviously indebted to films such as \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d and \u201cGravity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough \u201cObservation\u2019s\u201d story ultimately falls back on one of the biggest tropes in pop culture \u2014 multiple dimensions \u2014 I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. On an audiovisual level this is a beautifully executed game with good voice acting. Aspiring space cadets take note.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Wolfenstein: Youngblood\u2019: It\u2019s all about your friends\u2018Fire Emblem: The Three Houses\u2019 is a fun strategy game \u2014 if you have enough hours in the day\u2018Sea of Solitude\u2019 is a well-meaning misfire\u2018The Sinking City\u2019 sets a mood but struggles to go anywhere from there Rather than cast players in the role of an astronaut struggling for survival onboard a damaged space station, 'Observation' inserts players into the circuits of the AI. \u2018Observation\u2019: A brilliant science fiction game that puts the player in an unfamiliar situation",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Observation\u2019: A brilliant science fiction game that puts the player in an unfamiliar situation (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1216",
        "date": "2019-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/08/07/observation-brilliant-science-fiction-game-that-puts-player-an-unfamiliar-situation/",
        "text": "ObservationDeveloped by: No CodeWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPublished by: Devolver DigitalAvailable on: PC, PlayStation 4Story-focused video games often invite some sort of identification with a relatable protagonist. \u201cObservation,\u201d a captivating sci-fi-puzzle-game from a number of the creative minds behind \u201cAlien Isolation,\u201d takes a slightly different approach. Rather than cast players in the role of an astronaut struggling for survival onboard a damaged space station, \u201cObservation\u201d inserts players into the circuits of the onboard AI. And because it is difficult to overlook how unnatural it is for a human mind to mimic the smooth functionality of a machine, the game effects a gap between the player and the player\u2019s avatar that is intriguingly disorienting. \u201cObservation\u2019s\u201d peculiar strength is in harnessing and undermining one\u2019s capacity for detachment. The game opens with Dr. Emma Fisher, an astronaut on an International Space Station, sending out an S.O.S. call after an incident knocks the station from its trajectory and damages its operating AI, S.A.M. After Emma reboots the system, the first task for the player is to accept or reject her voice authentication by moving a slider along the screen that serves as a voice analyzer then clicking a tab to indicate S.A.M.\u2019s response.Curious to see what would happen if I decided to be uncooperative, I rejected Emma\u2019s voice signature a couple of times before she ran a bypass code on me. Since I was the ghost in the machine, I took perverse pleasure in that exchange. As I recollected past crises with uncooperative computers, I wondered how long I\u2019d keep up an apathetic front.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot for long.One of the first dramatic moments occurs after Emma directs you to see if different modules on the station are still functional. Odd symbols and coordinates flash across the screen which looks like an artfully distorted video feed. (Like \u201cAlien Isolation,\u201d \u201cObservation\u201d channels an analogue vibe.) A high-pitched sound swells in the background prompting a reasonably panicked Emma to ask S.A.M. what\u2019s going on. There is nothing the player can do but watch as the words \u201cBring Her\u201d briefly appear on the screen followed by a flash to a mysterious landscape then grows dark. It's interesting to have your avatar do things you don't understand; in the game, no one is all-powerful or outside of the scope of someone else\u2019s observation.The situation grows increasingly strange after Emma realizes the station is hovering near Saturn and S.A.M. admits that he took them there but doesn\u2019t know why. From that point on, I was committed to helping Emma however I could. Usually that meant consulting one of the game\u2019s sub-menus to locate cameras throughout the station that I could access and, from there, manipulate electronic devices in the vicinity \u2014 monitors, hatch doors, laptops, etc.Though it is easy to feel detached behind a camera, working through a number of the game\u2019s puzzles reminded me that I was a varyingly slow witted-human. Listening to Emma chide me to hurry up with some urgent matter or feeling at a loss for what to do next made me aware that I made for a poor AI companion.The puzzles in \u201cObservation\u2019 are varied. They feel \u201ctechnical\u201d without being overly so. There are knobs to adjust, coordinates to enter, schematics to copy, and wires to connect. These user interfaces are well designed and further the game\u2019s retro aesthetic. At a certain point, Emma hooks S.A.M. up to a spherical device so that he can float around and outside of the ship. Guiding the Connection Sphere through the ship\u2019s corridors lends to the impression that one is orchestrating a series of lovely tracking shots. The game\u2019s cinematic flair is obviously indebted to films such as \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d and \u201cGravity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough \u201cObservation\u2019s\u201d story ultimately falls back on one of the biggest tropes in pop culture \u2014 multiple dimensions \u2014 I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. On an audiovisual level this is a beautifully executed game with good voice acting. Aspiring space cadets take note.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Recent game reviews:\u2018Wolfenstein: Youngblood\u2019: It\u2019s all about your friends\u2018Fire Emblem: The Three Houses\u2019 is a fun strategy game \u2014 if you have enough hours in the day\u2018Sea of Solitude\u2019 is a well-meaning misfire\u2018The Sinking City\u2019 sets a mood but struggles to go anywhere from there Rather than cast players in the role of an astronaut struggling for survival onboard a damaged space station, 'Observation' inserts players into the circuits of the AI. \u2018Observation\u2019: A brilliant science fiction game that puts the player in an unfamiliar situation",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "To the Moon and Back With Michael Collins, 1930-2021 (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1217",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-and-back-with-michael-collins-1930-2021-11619806447?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=8",
        "text": "What Mike gave our nation is hard to express. He was a fearless test pilot, inveterate scholar, cheerful crewmate; he was calm under pressure, self-disciplined, knew every detail of the Columbia command module. He was also a lifelong friend, focused on others and often hardest on himself. \nMike\u2019s book, \u201cCarrying the Fire: An Astronaut\u2019s Journeys\u201d (1974), is detailed and aptly named. A gifted writer, Mike put into words the extraordinariness of our shared experience\u2014his, Neil\u2019s, mine and our nation\u2019s. He focused on the mission, team, nation and journey, less on himself.\nMike was the one who orbited the moon 30 times alone, focused on us, making sure we stayed close. He was the one who, on Gemini 10 in 1966, walked in space and proved orbital rendezvous with another spacecraft, a vital step in America\u2019s eventual moon missions. And Mike was first among friends\u2014gracious, self-deprecating and always quick with a smile. \n\n\nIn a sense, Mike was our engine, the one who \u201ccarried the fire\u201d to the moon and back. His mastery of the command module preceded him. The entire astronaut corps revered his dedication. His mastery gave us confidence. Whatever happened on that first mission, Mike would figure out how to get us home. And he did. \nAfter the moon, Mike kept serving. In 1970 he became assistant secretary of state for public affairs, helping America inspire others, lead with grace, spread \u201cpeace for all mankind.\u201d The following year he became director of the Air and Space Museum, and in 1978 he earned a promotion to undersecretary of the Smithsonian. \nPersonally, Mike was a source of peace and cheer, whimsically growing a mustache on our moon mission, which he showcased later, in quarantine, with his hallmark smile. Mike was the best of America, someone who instinctively put himself out for others, a lifetime commitment. He felt no mission was too hard, no challenge beyond trying, and that we should always be ready to serve. He was that example. I will miss my friend. America had no better friend.\nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. As part of the Apollo 11 mission, he was one of the first men to walk on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty My fellow astronaut was a great pilot, a great friend and a great patriot. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "To the Moon and Back With Michael Collins, 1930-2021 (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1218",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-and-back-with-michael-collins-1930-2021-11619806447?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=31",
        "text": "What Mike gave our nation is hard to express. He was a fearless test pilot, inveterate scholar, cheerful crewmate; he was calm under pressure, self-disciplined, knew every detail of the Columbia command module. He was also a lifelong friend, focused on others and often hardest on himself. \nMike\u2019s book, \u201cCarrying the Fire: An Astronaut\u2019s Journeys\u201d (1974), is detailed and aptly named. A gifted writer, Mike put into words the extraordinariness of our shared experience\u2014his, Neil\u2019s, mine and our nation\u2019s. He focused on the mission, team, nation and journey, less on himself.\nMike was the one who orbited the moon 30 times alone, focused on us, making sure we stayed close. He was the one who, on Gemini 10 in 1966, walked in space and proved orbital rendezvous with another spacecraft, a vital step in America\u2019s eventual moon missions. And Mike was first among friends\u2014gracious, self-deprecating and always quick with a smile. \n\n\nIn a sense, Mike was our engine, the one who \u201ccarried the fire\u201d to the moon and back. His mastery of the command module preceded him. The entire astronaut corps revered his dedication. His mastery gave us confidence. Whatever happened on that first mission, Mike would figure out how to get us home. And he did. \nAfter the moon, Mike kept serving. In 1970 he became assistant secretary of state for public affairs, helping America inspire others, lead with grace, spread \u201cpeace for all mankind.\u201d The following year he became director of the Air and Space Museum, and in 1978 he earned a promotion to undersecretary of the Smithsonian. \nPersonally, Mike was a source of peace and cheer, whimsically growing a mustache on our moon mission, which he showcased later, in quarantine, with his hallmark smile. Mike was the best of America, someone who instinctively put himself out for others, a lifetime commitment. He felt no mission was too hard, no challenge beyond trying, and that we should always be ready to serve. He was that example. I will miss my friend. America had no better friend.\nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. As part of the Apollo 11 mission, he was one of the first men to walk on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty My fellow astronaut was a great pilot, a great friend and a great patriot. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "To the Moon and Back With Michael Collins, 1930-2021 (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1219",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-and-back-with-michael-collins-1930-2021-11619806447?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=31",
        "text": "What Mike gave our nation is hard to express. He was a fearless test pilot, inveterate scholar, cheerful crewmate; he was calm under pressure, self-disciplined, knew every detail of the Columbia command module. He was also a lifelong friend, focused on others and often hardest on himself. \nMike\u2019s book, \u201cCarrying the Fire: An Astronaut\u2019s Journeys\u201d (1974), is detailed and aptly named. A gifted writer, Mike put into words the extraordinariness of our shared experience\u2014his, Neil\u2019s, mine and our nation\u2019s. He focused on the mission, team, nation and journey, less on himself.\n\n\n\n\nMike was the one who orbited the moon 30 times alone, focused on us, making sure we stayed close. He was the one who, on Gemini 10 in 1966, walked in space and proved orbital rendezvous with another spacecraft, a vital step in America\u2019s eventual moon missions. And Mike was first among friends\u2014gracious, self-deprecating and always quick with a smile. \n\n\nIn a sense, Mike was our engine, the one who \u201ccarried the fire\u201d to the moon and back. His mastery of the command module preceded him. The entire astronaut corps revered his dedication. His mastery gave us confidence. Whatever happened on that first mission, Mike would figure out how to get us home. And he did. \nAfter the moon, Mike kept serving. In 1970 he became assistant secretary of state for public affairs, helping America inspire others, lead with grace, spread \u201cpeace for all mankind.\u201d The following year he became director of the Air and Space Museum, and in 1978 he earned a promotion to undersecretary of the Smithsonian. \nPersonally, Mike was a source of peace and cheer, whimsically growing a mustache on our moon mission, which he showcased later, in quarantine, with his hallmark smile. Mike was the best of America, someone who instinctively put himself out for others, a lifetime commitment. He felt no mission was too hard, no challenge beyond trying, and that we should always be ready to serve. He was that example. I will miss my friend. America had no better friend.\nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. As part of the Apollo 11 mission, he was one of the first men to walk on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty My fellow astronaut was a great pilot, a great friend and a great patriot. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ansel Adams of Outer Space (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1220",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ansel-adams-of-outer-space-1505431637?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=22",
        "text": "Today, thanks to a multitude of interplanetary probes, any kid with an internet connection can see dusty sunsets on Mars, sweeping glaciers on Pluto, punctured terrain on asteroids. Space agencies are adding to this repository all the time: In July NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft flew over Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot, an enormous, centuries-old storm.\nBut the robotic explorer that stands out for the sheer enchantment of its imagery is Cassini, which launched toward Saturn in 1997 and was set to dive into the planet\u2019s atmosphere\u2014and to its destruction\u2014Friday.\n\n\nCassini is the perfect coupling of photographer and subject. Saturn\u2019s intricate rings, elegant latitudinal bands, and magnificent polar swirls make it easily the most picturesque of our planetary neighbors. Adding to its splendor is the remarkable diversity of its 62 moons, from haze-shrouded Titan to spongelike Hyperion.\nCassini\u2019s images remind me of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ansel Adams\u2019s\n\n\n\n iconic photos of the American West, in that both changed the way people see these places. Just as Yosemite appears in our mind\u2019s eye as it did in an Adams portrait, we visualize Saturn the way Cassini captured it. The mission\u2019s operators went to great lengths\u2014that is, did the requisite orbital calculations\u2014to ensure the spacecraft was at the right spot to capture a halo moving across Saturn\u2019s sunlit rings or two moons lining up in a perfect pose.\nUnlike Adams, the Cassini scientists are motivated not only by aesthetics but also science. As Titan\u2019s northern hemisphere emerged from the darkness of winter in 2009, Cassini registered the dazzling glint of sunlight reflecting off a lake, confirming that liquid fills its vast northern basins. Fly-bys of another moon, Enceladus, recorded striking backlit imagery of its icy plumes. Cassini then passed directly through the spray to sample the escaping material.\nYet images taken to address scientific questions often transcend that purpose, revealing the stark beauty of extraterrestrial landscapes. A cynic might dismiss Cassini the way that the street photographer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henri Cartier-Bresson\n\n\n\n once denounced Adams for focusing on \u201crocks and trees\u201d while \u201cthe world is falling to pieces.\u201d\nI beg to differ. Just as Adams\u2019s photos inspired a lasting appreciation for nature and conservation, Cassini\u2019s will stir a passion for exploration, even in kids growing up far from mission control. Long after the probe takes its deadly plunge into Saturn, its images will stand as a testament to humanity\u2019s higher aspirations.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at Toronto\u2019s York University in Toronto, is author of \u201cNeutrino Hunters.\u201d A scientific mission to Saturn produces aesthetic dividends. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ansel Adams of Outer Space (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1221",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ansel-adams-of-outer-space-1505431637?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=87",
        "text": "Today, thanks to a multitude of interplanetary probes, any kid with an internet connection can see dusty sunsets on Mars, sweeping glaciers on Pluto, punctured terrain on asteroids. Space agencies are adding to this repository all the time: In July NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft flew over Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot, an enormous, centuries-old storm.\n\n\n\n\nBut the robotic explorer that stands out for the sheer enchantment of its imagery is Cassini, which launched toward Saturn in 1997 and was set to dive into the planet\u2019s atmosphere\u2014and to its destruction\u2014Friday.\n\n\nCassini is the perfect coupling of photographer and subject. Saturn\u2019s intricate rings, elegant latitudinal bands, and magnificent polar swirls make it easily the most picturesque of our planetary neighbors. Adding to its splendor is the remarkable diversity of its 62 moons, from haze-shrouded Titan to spongelike Hyperion.\nCassini\u2019s images remind me of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ansel Adams\u2019s\n\n\n\n iconic photos of the American West, in that both changed the way people see these places. Just as Yosemite appears in our mind\u2019s eye as it did in an Adams portrait, we visualize Saturn the way Cassini captured it. The mission\u2019s operators went to great lengths\u2014that is, did the requisite orbital calculations\u2014to ensure the spacecraft was at the right spot to capture a halo moving across Saturn\u2019s sunlit rings or two moons lining up in a perfect pose.\nUnlike Adams, the Cassini scientists are motivated not only by aesthetics but also science. As Titan\u2019s northern hemisphere emerged from the darkness of winter in 2009, Cassini registered the dazzling glint of sunlight reflecting off a lake, confirming that liquid fills its vast northern basins. Fly-bys of another moon, Enceladus, recorded striking backlit imagery of its icy plumes. Cassini then passed directly through the spray to sample the escaping material.\nYet images taken to address scientific questions often transcend that purpose, revealing the stark beauty of extraterrestrial landscapes. A cynic might dismiss Cassini the way that the street photographer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henri Cartier-Bresson\n\n\n\n once denounced Adams for focusing on \u201crocks and trees\u201d while \u201cthe world is falling to pieces.\u201d\nI beg to differ. Just as Adams\u2019s photos inspired a lasting appreciation for nature and conservation, Cassini\u2019s will stir a passion for exploration, even in kids growing up far from mission control. Long after the probe takes its deadly plunge into Saturn, its images will stand as a testament to humanity\u2019s higher aspirations.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at Toronto\u2019s York University in Toronto, is author of \u201cNeutrino Hunters.\u201d A scientific mission to Saturn produces aesthetic dividends. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ansel Adams of Outer Space (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1222",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ansel-adams-of-outer-space-1505431637?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=77",
        "text": "Today, thanks to a multitude of interplanetary probes, any kid with an internet connection can see dusty sunsets on Mars, sweeping glaciers on Pluto, punctured terrain on asteroids. Space agencies are adding to this repository all the time: In July NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft flew over Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot, an enormous, centuries-old storm.\nBut the robotic explorer that stands out for the sheer enchantment of its imagery is Cassini, which launched toward Saturn in 1997 and was set to dive into the planet\u2019s atmosphere\u2014and to its destruction\u2014Friday.\n\n\nCassini is the perfect coupling of photographer and subject. Saturn\u2019s intricate rings, elegant latitudinal bands, and magnificent polar swirls make it easily the most picturesque of our planetary neighbors. Adding to its splendor is the remarkable diversity of its 62 moons, from haze-shrouded Titan to spongelike Hyperion.\nCassini\u2019s images remind me of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ansel Adams\u2019s\n\n\n\n iconic photos of the American West, in that both changed the way people see these places. Just as Yosemite appears in our mind\u2019s eye as it did in an Adams portrait, we visualize Saturn the way Cassini captured it. The mission\u2019s operators went to great lengths\u2014that is, did the requisite orbital calculations\u2014to ensure the spacecraft was at the right spot to capture a halo moving across Saturn\u2019s sunlit rings or two moons lining up in a perfect pose.\nUnlike Adams, the Cassini scientists are motivated not only by aesthetics but also science. As Titan\u2019s northern hemisphere emerged from the darkness of winter in 2009, Cassini registered the dazzling glint of sunlight reflecting off a lake, confirming that liquid fills its vast northern basins. Fly-bys of another moon, Enceladus, recorded striking backlit imagery of its icy plumes. Cassini then passed directly through the spray to sample the escaping material.\nYet images taken to address scientific questions often transcend that purpose, revealing the stark beauty of extraterrestrial landscapes. A cynic might dismiss Cassini the way that the street photographer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henri Cartier-Bresson\n\n\n\n once denounced Adams for focusing on \u201crocks and trees\u201d while \u201cthe world is falling to pieces.\u201d\nI beg to differ. Just as Adams\u2019s photos inspired a lasting appreciation for nature and conservation, Cassini\u2019s will stir a passion for exploration, even in kids growing up far from mission control. Long after the probe takes its deadly plunge into Saturn, its images will stand as a testament to humanity\u2019s higher aspirations.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at Toronto\u2019s York University in Toronto, is author of \u201cNeutrino Hunters.\u201d A scientific mission to Saturn produces aesthetic dividends. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ansel Adams of Outer Space (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1223",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ansel-adams-of-outer-space-1505431637?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=113",
        "text": "Today, thanks to a multitude of interplanetary probes, any kid with an internet connection can see dusty sunsets on Mars, sweeping glaciers on Pluto, punctured terrain on asteroids. Space agencies are adding to this repository all the time: In July NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft flew over Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot, an enormous, centuries-old storm.\n\n\n\n\nBut the robotic explorer that stands out for the sheer enchantment of its imagery is Cassini, which launched toward Saturn in 1997 and was set to dive into the planet\u2019s atmosphere\u2014and to its destruction\u2014Friday.\n\n\nCassini is the perfect coupling of photographer and subject. Saturn\u2019s intricate rings, elegant latitudinal bands, and magnificent polar swirls make it easily the most picturesque of our planetary neighbors. Adding to its splendor is the remarkable diversity of its 62 moons, from haze-shrouded Titan to spongelike Hyperion.\nCassini\u2019s images remind me of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ansel Adams\u2019s\n\n\n\n iconic photos of the American West, in that both changed the way people see these places. Just as Yosemite appears in our mind\u2019s eye as it did in an Adams portrait, we visualize Saturn the way Cassini captured it. The mission\u2019s operators went to great lengths\u2014that is, did the requisite orbital calculations\u2014to ensure the spacecraft was at the right spot to capture a halo moving across Saturn\u2019s sunlit rings or two moons lining up in a perfect pose.\nUnlike Adams, the Cassini scientists are motivated not only by aesthetics but also science. As Titan\u2019s northern hemisphere emerged from the darkness of winter in 2009, Cassini registered the dazzling glint of sunlight reflecting off a lake, confirming that liquid fills its vast northern basins. Fly-bys of another moon, Enceladus, recorded striking backlit imagery of its icy plumes. Cassini then passed directly through the spray to sample the escaping material.\nYet images taken to address scientific questions often transcend that purpose, revealing the stark beauty of extraterrestrial landscapes. A cynic might dismiss Cassini the way that the street photographer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henri Cartier-Bresson\n\n\n\n once denounced Adams for focusing on \u201crocks and trees\u201d while \u201cthe world is falling to pieces.\u201d\nI beg to differ. Just as Adams\u2019s photos inspired a lasting appreciation for nature and conservation, Cassini\u2019s will stir a passion for exploration, even in kids growing up far from mission control. Long after the probe takes its deadly plunge into Saturn, its images will stand as a testament to humanity\u2019s higher aspirations.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at Toronto\u2019s York University in Toronto, is author of \u201cNeutrino Hunters.\u201d A scientific mission to Saturn produces aesthetic dividends. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "Don\u2019t Help Russia Make It to the Moon (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1224",
        "date": "2019-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-help-russia-make-it-to-the-moon-11569538678?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=14",
        "text": "To meet the deadline, some officials want to make agreements with America\u2019s partners in the International Space Station to participate in the proposed lunar-orbiting Gateway station. Canada, Japan and the Europeans shouldn\u2019t be a problem. Russia, on the other hand, not only is working with China on lunar efforts; its own space operations are beset with problems that range from mysterious holes in its\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ISS\n\n\n segment to failures of the Soyuz spacecraft system. Yet Russia\u2019s space agency, Roscosmos, is proposing to take part in the Gateway project by building an air lock as well as providing backup launch capability. \nIt\u2019s an open question whether it can do so without a U.S. subsidy, but in any case Russian participation would open the way for a permanent base on the moon, perhaps in partnership with China. Any Russian rocket capable of putting a manned spacecraft into lunar orbit would also be able to send a lander to the surface. \nA Russian moonbase would prevent the U.S. and its allies from dominating the Earth-moon system and would make it harder to establish a space-commerce regime friendly to free enterprise. The longer it takes for Russia and China to gain a manned foothold on the moon, the easier it will be to entrench U.S. interests there\u2014and eventually elsewhere in the solar system. \n\n\nSome in the administration and the bureaucracy worry that if the Russians are excluded from Gateway, they\u2019ll respond by reducing or ending their role in the Earth-orbiting ISS. They now sell NASA seats on Soyuz capsules for more than $60 million a trip. But by early 2020 the U.S. expects to regain the capacity to send astronauts to the ISS, which it lost when the space shuttle was grounded in 2011. \nSince the early 1990s, NASA has ignored its traditional \u201cno exchange of funds\u201d rule covering international space cooperation agreements. For what seemed sound strategic reasons, the U.S. subsidized Moscow\u2019s space efforts, first with the shuttle-Mir projects in 1994-98, now with the ISS and the Soyuz flights as well as by purchasing RD-180 rocket engines to power the Atlas V launch vehicle. \nDoes America want to continue these arrangements? They\u2019ve done nothing to build Russian goodwill and arguably cause more trouble than they\u2019re worth, especially when President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n gains leverage by threatening to ground U.S. astronauts. NASA doesn\u2019t need Russian technology, so the Trump administration can face the Kremlin from a position of strength.\nTo get to the moon, NASA is developing the large Space Launch System booster and the Orion capsule. But it shouldn\u2019t make the mistake it made with the shuttle, which for two decades was the only way the U.S. had to send people into space. Luckily\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX is building a rocket that could easily be adapted to go to the moon. A commercial American launcher is a far better alternative than anything the Russians might offer.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty In choosing a backup rocket provider, NASA should favor Musk over Moscow. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Don\u2019t Help Russia Make It to the Moon (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1225",
        "date": "2019-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-help-russia-make-it-to-the-moon-11569538678?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=51",
        "text": "To meet the deadline, some officials want to make agreements with America\u2019s partners in the International Space Station to participate in the proposed lunar-orbiting Gateway station. Canada, Japan and the Europeans shouldn\u2019t be a problem. Russia, on the other hand, not only is working with China on lunar efforts; its own space operations are beset with problems that range from mysterious holes in its\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ISS\n\n\n segment to failures of the Soyuz spacecraft system. Yet Russia\u2019s space agency, Roscosmos, is proposing to take part in the Gateway project by building an air lock as well as providing backup launch capability. \nIt\u2019s an open question whether it can do so without a U.S. subsidy, but in any case Russian participation would open the way for a permanent base on the moon, perhaps in partnership with China. Any Russian rocket capable of putting a manned spacecraft into lunar orbit would also be able to send a lander to the surface. \nA Russian moonbase would prevent the U.S. and its allies from dominating the Earth-moon system and would make it harder to establish a space-commerce regime friendly to free enterprise. The longer it takes for Russia and China to gain a manned foothold on the moon, the easier it will be to entrench U.S. interests there\u2014and eventually elsewhere in the solar system. \n\n\nSome in the administration and the bureaucracy worry that if the Russians are excluded from Gateway, they\u2019ll respond by reducing or ending their role in the Earth-orbiting ISS. They now sell NASA seats on Soyuz capsules for more than $60 million a trip. But by early 2020 the U.S. expects to regain the capacity to send astronauts to the ISS, which it lost when the space shuttle was grounded in 2011. \nSince the early 1990s, NASA has ignored its traditional \u201cno exchange of funds\u201d rule covering international space cooperation agreements. For what seemed sound strategic reasons, the U.S. subsidized Moscow\u2019s space efforts, first with the shuttle-Mir projects in 1994-98, now with the ISS and the Soyuz flights as well as by purchasing RD-180 rocket engines to power the Atlas V launch vehicle. \nDoes America want to continue these arrangements? They\u2019ve done nothing to build Russian goodwill and arguably cause more trouble than they\u2019re worth, especially when President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n gains leverage by threatening to ground U.S. astronauts. NASA doesn\u2019t need Russian technology, so the Trump administration can face the Kremlin from a position of strength.\nTo get to the moon, NASA is developing the large Space Launch System booster and the Orion capsule. But it shouldn\u2019t make the mistake it made with the shuttle, which for two decades was the only way the U.S. had to send people into space. Luckily\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX is building a rocket that could easily be adapted to go to the moon. A commercial American launcher is a far better alternative than anything the Russians might offer.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty In choosing a backup rocket provider, NASA should favor Musk over Moscow. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "America\u2019s Military Needs a Space Corps (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1226",
        "date": "2017-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-military-needs-a-space-corps-1513898910?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=21",
        "text": "This longstanding weakness in U.S. military posture is only beginning to be addressed. National security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n announced in October that his team will rewrite the Obama-era rules of engagement for space warfare. To judge by President Trump\u2019s record in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the new rules probably will give commanders more authority to respond quickly if an enemy attacks U.S. satellites. But that may not be enough to handle the threats in space, which grow more dangerous all the time. \nWhat\u2019s needed is a new, independent organization focused on regaining\u2014and then keeping\u2014military superiority in space. The House version of this year\u2019s National Defense Authorization Act provided for the creation of a new Space Corps\u2014a separate military service carved out of existing operations and placed under the Air Force secretary, just as the Marines are under the Navy secretary. That would have been a good step, since the new service would\u2019ve had the single-minded focus necessary to take up the challenge of fighting beyond the atmosphere.\nBut the White House and the Pentagon opposed the idea, arguing that the Space Corps would represent a new layer of unneeded bureaucracy. In the end, Congress removed the provision before the bill passed. Instead Congress passed a set of reforms that strip the Air Force secretary and staff of much of their power over space-systems procurement and gives it to the deputy undersecretary of defense for space and to Air Force Space Command. Lawmakers hope that these changes will force the Pentagon to focus its efforts better. \n\n\nFor years the Pentagon has paid lip service to the need to do something more to protect America\u2019s space assets. Since 2007, when China conducted its first hard-kill test of an antisatellite weapon, it has been obvious that the U.S. needs to prepare for the possibility of war in space. But for various budgetary and ideological reasons, the Air Force as a whole has done little to prepare. The Obama administration\u2019s approach was characterized by wishful thinking and half-baked, unfunded proposals\u2014such as the idea that attacks on U.S. spacecraft could be deterred by international public opinion, or that \u201cdisaggregated\u201d arrays of smaller satellites would be hard to shoot down.\nThe 2010 National Space Policy promised that the U.S. would \u201cdefend our space systems and contribute to the defense of allied space systems and, if deterrence fails, defeat efforts to attack them.\u201d Yet the Obama administration did almost nothing to back up these words. It also did nothing to develop offensive capacity in space, a logical part of any deterrent. Even worse, since the Clinton administration canceled the space-based part of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ronald Reagan\u2019s\n\n\n\n Strategic Defense Initiative in 1993, the U.S. has failed to develop orbiting weapons that can defend the homeland from ballistic missiles. \nThe Obama administration\u2019s ideological hostility to American space power was evident. It diverted resources away from military space programs, especially long-term research and development. It tried to use the arms-control process, particularly the Space Code of Conduct, to ensure that the U.S. (and, in theory, other countries) would be forever constrained from developing space weapons. \nEven the Obama administration however, could not bring itself to dismantle the small Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system put in place by the George W. Bush administration\u2014notwithstanding the Democrats\u2019 insistence, going back to Reagan, that missile shields were both impossible and undesirable. That\u2019s all the more reason to establish the Space Corps while Republicans still hold Congress and the White House. Once the U.S. has the capability to fight and win in space, future Democratic administrations will have to accept it. \nPresident Trump\u2019s new National Security Strategy acknowledges that some nations think \u201cthe ability to attack space assets offers an asymmetric advantage and as a result are pursuing a range of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.\u201d Mr. Trump promises that if U.S. spacecraft are attacked, America will respond \u201cat a time, place, manner and domain of our own choosing.\u201d Strong words, especially absent the capacity to back them up. In the end only a dedicated new force can develop the systems, doctrines and tactics needed to make deterrence credible. \nMr. Dinerman writes on space policy and national security. An adversary using swarms of antisatellite weapons could leave the U.S. blind, deaf and lost. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "America\u2019s Military Needs a Space Corps (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1227",
        "date": "2017-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-military-needs-a-space-corps-1513898910?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=106",
        "text": "This longstanding weakness in U.S. military posture is only beginning to be addressed. National security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n announced in October that his team will rewrite the Obama-era rules of engagement for space warfare. To judge by President Trump\u2019s record in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the new rules probably will give commanders more authority to respond quickly if an enemy attacks U.S. satellites. But that may not be enough to handle the threats in space, which grow more dangerous all the time. \nWhat\u2019s needed is a new, independent organization focused on regaining\u2014and then keeping\u2014military superiority in space. The House version of this year\u2019s National Defense Authorization Act provided for the creation of a new Space Corps\u2014a separate military service carved out of existing operations and placed under the Air Force secretary, just as the Marines are under the Navy secretary. That would have been a good step, since the new service would\u2019ve had the single-minded focus necessary to take up the challenge of fighting beyond the atmosphere.\n\n\n\n\nBut the White House and the Pentagon opposed the idea, arguing that the Space Corps would represent a new layer of unneeded bureaucracy. In the end, Congress removed the provision before the bill passed. Instead Congress passed a set of reforms that strip the Air Force secretary and staff of much of their power over space-systems procurement and gives it to the deputy undersecretary of defense for space and to Air Force Space Command. Lawmakers hope that these changes will force the Pentagon to focus its efforts better. \n\n\nFor years the Pentagon has paid lip service to the need to do something more to protect America\u2019s space assets. Since 2007, when China conducted its first hard-kill test of an antisatellite weapon, it has been obvious that the U.S. needs to prepare for the possibility of war in space. But for various budgetary and ideological reasons, the Air Force as a whole has done little to prepare. The Obama administration\u2019s approach was characterized by wishful thinking and half-baked, unfunded proposals\u2014such as the idea that attacks on U.S. spacecraft could be deterred by international public opinion, or that \u201cdisaggregated\u201d arrays of smaller satellites would be hard to shoot down.\nThe 2010 National Space Policy promised that the U.S. would \u201cdefend our space systems and contribute to the defense of allied space systems and, if deterrence fails, defeat efforts to attack them.\u201d Yet the Obama administration did almost nothing to back up these words. It also did nothing to develop offensive capacity in space, a logical part of any deterrent. Even worse, since the Clinton administration canceled the space-based part of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ronald Reagan\u2019s\n\n\n\n Strategic Defense Initiative in 1993, the U.S. has failed to develop orbiting weapons that can defend the homeland from ballistic missiles. \nThe Obama administration\u2019s ideological hostility to American space power was evident. It diverted resources away from military space programs, especially long-term research and development. It tried to use the arms-control process, particularly the Space Code of Conduct, to ensure that the U.S. (and, in theory, other countries) would be forever constrained from developing space weapons. \nEven the Obama administration however, could not bring itself to dismantle the small Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system put in place by the George W. Bush administration\u2014notwithstanding the Democrats\u2019 insistence, going back to Reagan, that missile shields were both impossible and undesirable. That\u2019s all the more reason to establish the Space Corps while Republicans still hold Congress and the White House. Once the U.S. has the capability to fight and win in space, future Democratic administrations will have to accept it. \nPresident Trump\u2019s new National Security Strategy acknowledges that some nations think \u201cthe ability to attack space assets offers an asymmetric advantage and as a result are pursuing a range of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.\u201d Mr. Trump promises that if U.S. spacecraft are attacked, America will respond \u201cat a time, place, manner and domain of our own choosing.\u201d Strong words, especially absent the capacity to back them up. In the end only a dedicated new force can develop the systems, doctrines and tactics needed to make deterrence credible. \nMr. Dinerman writes on space policy and national security. An adversary using swarms of antisatellite weapons could leave the U.S. blind, deaf and lost. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos, Branson and the Vikings (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1228",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-branson-galactic-blue-origin-vikings-11627070792?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=6",
        "text": "The Vikings have been associated with space before, as with the grossly misnamed Viking 1 and 2 robot Mars probes in the 1970s. I say misnamed because the real appeal of the Vikings is our fascination with the prospect of human beings exploring the unknown. Mr. Bezos, Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n ;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n and the space shuttle crews, as well as explorers like Columbus tap into a universal need to admire and honor those who risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory and stretch the boundaries of the unknown.\nOur current crop of new-space billionaires have muscled government aside, revolutionizing the space industry with systems like SpaceX\u2019s multiple small satellite launches and supersonic retropulsion technology for landing spacecraft in atmosphere-thin environments like Mars. To them, space represents the last great frontier for bold new initiatives. It also represents a place where the Viking spirit has found a new mission and a new home.\n\n\nViking raids were also essentially private-sector enterprises. Voyages were undertaken by individual chieftains and heads of households, sometimes with no more than 30 warriors on a ship at a time. The first recorded successful attack on the English coastline, at Portland in 789, consisted of only three longships. They turned the technology of sail- and oar-powered longships into a tool for building wealth, transforming civilization in the process. From 790 to roughly 1000, boatloads of Danish and Norwegian adventurers set out every spring to descend on Europe\u2019s littoral from the North Sea to the Mediterranean\u2014while their Swedish counterparts used river routes to penetrate deep into northeastern Europe and Russia, reaching as far south as Constantinople. \nWe tend to think of these raids as motivated by plunder and pillage. But they made the Vikings the precursors of globalization, with trade routes reaching from Normandy and the Mediterranean to Constantinople and Baghdad; to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and eventually North America, with the landing of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leif Erickson\n\n\n\n in Newfoundland in 1000. The wealth that circulated through those routes helped to lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and laid the foundations for the great seaborne Spanish, English and Dutch empires.\nIt may be hard to envision Messrs. Bezos and Branson as Viking chieftains. But their goals translate those of the first great Norse adventurers into a modern context\u2014not only seeking dangerous thrills or plunder for its own sake, but seeing space as a new source of wealth and opportunity for the world. \nThe vision of these men and women venturing into space symbolizes the bravery and perseverance we all need to overcome danger and adversity, and to find our unique path in this world. And as we emerge from the pandemic, this is a message we need now more than ever. \nThat\u2019s why exploring this last frontier requires people on board, and why the end of the space shuttle program in 2011 was such a setback. It shortened our horizons, not only as Americans in an age of \u201cmanaged decline\u201d but as human beings.\nThe space entrepreneurs are picking up where government programs left off. They breathe the Viking spirit of entrepreneurship on the edge of the unknown\u2014a spirit that, a millennium after the last longships were laid to rest, still fascinates and inspires. \nMr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of \u201cThe Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World,\u201d forthcoming in August. They risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory in search of opportunity for the world. ",
        "author": "Arthur Herman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos, Branson and the Vikings (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1229",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-branson-galactic-blue-origin-vikings-11627070792?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=5",
        "text": "The Vikings have been associated with space before, as with the grossly misnamed Viking 1 and 2 robot Mars probes in the 1970s. I say misnamed because the real appeal of the Vikings is our fascination with the prospect of human beings exploring the unknown. Mr. Bezos, Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n ;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n and the space shuttle crews, as well as explorers like Columbus tap into a universal need to admire and honor those who risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory and stretch the boundaries of the unknown.\n\n\n\n\nOur current crop of new-space billionaires have muscled government aside, revolutionizing the space industry with systems like SpaceX\u2019s multiple small satellite launches and supersonic retropulsion technology for landing spacecraft in atmosphere-thin environments like Mars. To them, space represents the last great frontier for bold new initiatives. It also represents a place where the Viking spirit has found a new mission and a new home.\n\n\nViking raids were also essentially private-sector enterprises. Voyages were undertaken by individual chieftains and heads of households, sometimes with no more than 30 warriors on a ship at a time. The first recorded successful attack on the English coastline, at Portland in 789, consisted of only three longships. They turned the technology of sail- and oar-powered longships into a tool for building wealth, transforming civilization in the process. From 790 to roughly 1000, boatloads of Danish and Norwegian adventurers set out every spring to descend on Europe\u2019s littoral from the North Sea to the Mediterranean\u2014while their Swedish counterparts used river routes to penetrate deep into northeastern Europe and Russia, reaching as far south as Constantinople. \nWe tend to think of these raids as motivated by plunder and pillage. But they made the Vikings the precursors of globalization, with trade routes reaching from Normandy and the Mediterranean to Constantinople and Baghdad; to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and eventually North America, with the landing of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leif Erickson\n\n\n\n in Newfoundland in 1000. The wealth that circulated through those routes helped to lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and laid the foundations for the great seaborne Spanish, English and Dutch empires.\nIt may be hard to envision Messrs. Bezos and Branson as Viking chieftains. But their goals translate those of the first great Norse adventurers into a modern context\u2014not only seeking dangerous thrills or plunder for its own sake, but seeing space as a new source of wealth and opportunity for the world. \nThe vision of these men and women venturing into space symbolizes the bravery and perseverance we all need to overcome danger and adversity, and to find our unique path in this world. And as we emerge from the pandemic, this is a message we need now more than ever. \nThat\u2019s why exploring this last frontier requires people on board, and why the end of the space shuttle program in 2011 was such a setback. It shortened our horizons, not only as Americans in an age of \u201cmanaged decline\u201d but as human beings.\nThe space entrepreneurs are picking up where government programs left off. They breathe the Viking spirit of entrepreneurship on the edge of the unknown\u2014a spirit that, a millennium after the last longships were laid to rest, still fascinates and inspires. \nMr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of \u201cThe Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World,\u201d forthcoming in August. They risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory in search of opportunity for the world. ",
        "author": "Arthur Herman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos, Branson and the Vikings (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1230",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-branson-galactic-blue-origin-vikings-11627070792?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=16",
        "text": "The Vikings have been associated with space before, as with the grossly misnamed Viking 1 and 2 robot Mars probes in the 1970s. I say misnamed because the real appeal of the Vikings is our fascination with the prospect of human beings exploring the unknown. Mr. Bezos, Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n ;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n and the space shuttle crews, as well as explorers like Columbus tap into a universal need to admire and honor those who risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory and stretch the boundaries of the unknown.\nOur current crop of new-space billionaires have muscled government aside, revolutionizing the space industry with systems like SpaceX\u2019s multiple small satellite launches and supersonic retropulsion technology for landing spacecraft in atmosphere-thin environments like Mars. To them, space represents the last great frontier for bold new initiatives. It also represents a place where the Viking spirit has found a new mission and a new home.\n\n\nViking raids were also essentially private-sector enterprises. Voyages were undertaken by individual chieftains and heads of households, sometimes with no more than 30 warriors on a ship at a time. The first recorded successful attack on the English coastline, at Portland in 789, consisted of only three longships. They turned the technology of sail- and oar-powered longships into a tool for building wealth, transforming civilization in the process. From 790 to roughly 1000, boatloads of Danish and Norwegian adventurers set out every spring to descend on Europe\u2019s littoral from the North Sea to the Mediterranean\u2014while their Swedish counterparts used river routes to penetrate deep into northeastern Europe and Russia, reaching as far south as Constantinople. \nWe tend to think of these raids as motivated by plunder and pillage. But they made the Vikings the precursors of globalization, with trade routes reaching from Normandy and the Mediterranean to Constantinople and Baghdad; to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and eventually North America, with the landing of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leif Erickson\n\n\n\n in Newfoundland in 1000. The wealth that circulated through those routes helped to lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and laid the foundations for the great seaborne Spanish, English and Dutch empires.\nIt may be hard to envision Messrs. Bezos and Branson as Viking chieftains. But their goals translate those of the first great Norse adventurers into a modern context\u2014not only seeking dangerous thrills or plunder for its own sake, but seeing space as a new source of wealth and opportunity for the world. \nThe vision of these men and women venturing into space symbolizes the bravery and perseverance we all need to overcome danger and adversity, and to find our unique path in this world. And as we emerge from the pandemic, this is a message we need now more than ever. \nThat\u2019s why exploring this last frontier requires people on board, and why the end of the space shuttle program in 2011 was such a setback. It shortened our horizons, not only as Americans in an age of \u201cmanaged decline\u201d but as human beings.\nThe space entrepreneurs are picking up where government programs left off. They breathe the Viking spirit of entrepreneurship on the edge of the unknown\u2014a spirit that, a millennium after the last longships were laid to rest, still fascinates and inspires. \nMr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of \u201cThe Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World,\u201d forthcoming in August. They risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory in search of opportunity for the world. ",
        "author": "Arthur Herman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos, Branson and the Vikings (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1231",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-branson-galactic-blue-origin-vikings-11627070792?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=26",
        "text": "The Vikings have been associated with space before, as with the grossly misnamed Viking 1 and 2 robot Mars probes in the 1970s. I say misnamed because the real appeal of the Vikings is our fascination with the prospect of human beings exploring the unknown. Mr. Bezos, Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n ;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n and the space shuttle crews, as well as explorers like Columbus tap into a universal need to admire and honor those who risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory and stretch the boundaries of the unknown.\nOur current crop of new-space billionaires have muscled government aside, revolutionizing the space industry with systems like SpaceX\u2019s multiple small satellite launches and supersonic retropulsion technology for landing spacecraft in atmosphere-thin environments like Mars. To them, space represents the last great frontier for bold new initiatives. It also represents a place where the Viking spirit has found a new mission and a new home.\n\n\nViking raids were also essentially private-sector enterprises. Voyages were undertaken by individual chieftains and heads of households, sometimes with no more than 30 warriors on a ship at a time. The first recorded successful attack on the English coastline, at Portland in 789, consisted of only three longships. They turned the technology of sail- and oar-powered longships into a tool for building wealth, transforming civilization in the process. From 790 to roughly 1000, boatloads of Danish and Norwegian adventurers set out every spring to descend on Europe\u2019s littoral from the North Sea to the Mediterranean\u2014while their Swedish counterparts used river routes to penetrate deep into northeastern Europe and Russia, reaching as far south as Constantinople. \nWe tend to think of these raids as motivated by plunder and pillage. But they made the Vikings the precursors of globalization, with trade routes reaching from Normandy and the Mediterranean to Constantinople and Baghdad; to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and eventually North America, with the landing of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leif Erickson\n\n\n\n in Newfoundland in 1000. The wealth that circulated through those routes helped to lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and laid the foundations for the great seaborne Spanish, English and Dutch empires.\nIt may be hard to envision Messrs. Bezos and Branson as Viking chieftains. But their goals translate those of the first great Norse adventurers into a modern context\u2014not only seeking dangerous thrills or plunder for its own sake, but seeing space as a new source of wealth and opportunity for the world. \nThe vision of these men and women venturing into space symbolizes the bravery and perseverance we all need to overcome danger and adversity, and to find our unique path in this world. And as we emerge from the pandemic, this is a message we need now more than ever. \nThat\u2019s why exploring this last frontier requires people on board, and why the end of the space shuttle program in 2011 was such a setback. It shortened our horizons, not only as Americans in an age of \u201cmanaged decline\u201d but as human beings.\nThe space entrepreneurs are picking up where government programs left off. They breathe the Viking spirit of entrepreneurship on the edge of the unknown\u2014a spirit that, a millennium after the last longships were laid to rest, still fascinates and inspires. \nMr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of \u201cThe Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World,\u201d forthcoming in August. They risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory in search of opportunity for the world. ",
        "author": "Arthur Herman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos, Branson and the Vikings (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1232",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-branson-galactic-blue-origin-vikings-11627070792?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=26",
        "text": "The Vikings have been associated with space before, as with the grossly misnamed Viking 1 and 2 robot Mars probes in the 1970s. I say misnamed because the real appeal of the Vikings is our fascination with the prospect of human beings exploring the unknown. Mr. Bezos, Mr. Branson,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n ;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n and the space shuttle crews, as well as explorers like Columbus tap into a universal need to admire and honor those who risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory and stretch the boundaries of the unknown.\n\n\n\n\nOur current crop of new-space billionaires have muscled government aside, revolutionizing the space industry with systems like SpaceX\u2019s multiple small satellite launches and supersonic retropulsion technology for landing spacecraft in atmosphere-thin environments like Mars. To them, space represents the last great frontier for bold new initiatives. It also represents a place where the Viking spirit has found a new mission and a new home.\n\n\nViking raids were also essentially private-sector enterprises. Voyages were undertaken by individual chieftains and heads of households, sometimes with no more than 30 warriors on a ship at a time. The first recorded successful attack on the English coastline, at Portland in 789, consisted of only three longships. They turned the technology of sail- and oar-powered longships into a tool for building wealth, transforming civilization in the process. From 790 to roughly 1000, boatloads of Danish and Norwegian adventurers set out every spring to descend on Europe\u2019s littoral from the North Sea to the Mediterranean\u2014while their Swedish counterparts used river routes to penetrate deep into northeastern Europe and Russia, reaching as far south as Constantinople. \nWe tend to think of these raids as motivated by plunder and pillage. But they made the Vikings the precursors of globalization, with trade routes reaching from Normandy and the Mediterranean to Constantinople and Baghdad; to the British Isles, Iceland, Greenland and eventually North America, with the landing of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leif Erickson\n\n\n\n in Newfoundland in 1000. The wealth that circulated through those routes helped to lift Europe out of the Dark Ages and laid the foundations for the great seaborne Spanish, English and Dutch empires.\nIt may be hard to envision Messrs. Bezos and Branson as Viking chieftains. But their goals translate those of the first great Norse adventurers into a modern context\u2014not only seeking dangerous thrills or plunder for its own sake, but seeing space as a new source of wealth and opportunity for the world. \nThe vision of these men and women venturing into space symbolizes the bravery and perseverance we all need to overcome danger and adversity, and to find our unique path in this world. And as we emerge from the pandemic, this is a message we need now more than ever. \nThat\u2019s why exploring this last frontier requires people on board, and why the end of the space shuttle program in 2011 was such a setback. It shortened our horizons, not only as Americans in an age of \u201cmanaged decline\u201d but as human beings.\nThe space entrepreneurs are picking up where government programs left off. They breathe the Viking spirit of entrepreneurship on the edge of the unknown\u2014a spirit that, a millennium after the last longships were laid to rest, still fascinates and inspires. \nMr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of \u201cThe Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World,\u201d forthcoming in August. They risk their lives to venture into uncharted territory in search of opportunity for the world. ",
        "author": "Arthur Herman"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018Red Team\u2019 Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1233",
        "date": "2017-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-red-team-exercise-would-strengthen-climate-science-1492728579?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=25",
        "text": "The national-security community pioneered the \u201cRed Team\u201d methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce\u2014or at least understand\u2014uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations such as intelligence assessments, spacecraft design and major industrial operations. It is very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated.\nThe public is largely unaware of the intense debates within climate science. At a recent national laboratory meeting, I observed more than 100 active government and university researchers challenge one another as they strove to separate human impacts from the climate\u2019s natural variability. At issue were not nuances but fundamental aspects of our understanding, such as the apparent\u2014and unexpected\u2014slowing of global sea-level rise over the past two decades.\nSummaries of scientific assessments meant to inform decision makers, such as the United Nations\u2019 Summary for Policymakers, largely fail to capture this vibrant and developing science. Consensus statements necessarily conceal judgment calls and debates and so feed the \u201csettled,\u201d \u201choax\u201d and \u201cdon\u2019t know\u201d memes that plague the political dialogue around climate change. We scientists must better portray not only our certainties but also our uncertainties, and even things we may never know. Not doing so is an advisory malpractice that usurps society\u2019s right to make choices fully informed by risk, economics and values. Moving from oracular consensus statements to an open adversarial process would shine much-needed light on the scientific debates.\n\n\nGiven the importance of climate projections to policy, it is remarkable that they have not been subject to a Red Team exercise. Here\u2019s how it might work: The focus would be a published scientific report meant to inform policy such as the U.N.\u2019s Summary for Policymakers or the U.S. Government\u2019s National Climate Assessment. A Red Team of scientists would write a critique of that document and a Blue Team would rebut that critique. Further exchanges of documents would ensue to the point of diminishing returns. A commission would coordinate and moderate the process and then hold hearings to highlight points of agreement and disagreement, as well as steps that might resolve the latter. The process would unfold in full public view: the initial report, the exchanged documents and the hearings. \nA Red/Blue exercise would have many benefits. It would produce a traceable public record that would allow the public and decision makers a better understanding of certainties and uncertainties. It would more firmly establish points of agreement and identify urgent research needs. Most important, it would put science front and center in policy discussions, while publicly demonstrating scientific reasoning and argument. The inherent tension of a professional adversarial process would enhance public interest, offering many opportunities to show laymen how science actually works. (In 2014 I conducted a workshop along these lines for the American Physical Society.)\nCongress or the executive branch should convene a climate science Red/Blue exercise as a step toward resolving, or at least illuminating, differing perceptions of climate science. While the Red and Blue Teams should be knowledgeable and avowedly opinionated scientists, the commission should have a balanced membership of prominent individuals with technical credentials, led by co-chairmen who are forceful, knowledgeable and independent of the climate-science community. The Rogers Commission for the Challenger disaster in 1986, the Energy Department\u2019s Huizenga/Ramsey Review of Cold Fusion in 1989, and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission of the late 1990s are models for the kind of fact-based rigor and transparency needed.\nThe outcome of a Red/Blue exercise for climate science is not preordained, which makes such a process all the more valuable. It could reveal the current consensus as weaker than claimed. Alternatively, the consensus could emerge strengthened if Red Team criticisms were countered effectively. But whatever the outcome, we scientists would have better fulfilled our responsibilities to society, and climate policy discussions would be better informed. For those reasons, all who march to advocate policy making based upon transparent apolitical science should support a climate science Red Team exercise.\nMr. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, is director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He served as undersecretary of energy for science during President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n first term. Put the \u2018consensus\u2019 to a test, and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process. ",
        "author": "Steven Koonin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Shines in the Shadow of Mars (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1234",
        "date": "2017-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/venus-shines-in-the-shadow-of-mars-1497213413?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=24",
        "text": "The American infatuation with Mars has a lot to do with its potential to support life. Mars is half the size of Earth and home to a flimsy atmosphere, a frigid climate and horrendous dust storms. But the red planet might have harbored microbes long ago, and it could play host to well-equipped astronauts in the not-too-distant future.\nVenus\u2019s inhospitability wasn\u2019t always a given. As recently as the 1960s, some scientists thought Venus would be like Earth because it is similar in size, mass and composition. The Soviet engineers who designed Venera-4, the first spacecraft to penetrate the Venusian haze 50 years ago, geared it for flotation in case of a water landing. But the probe perished before it reached the planet\u2019s surface, after encountering hellish temperatures, bone-crushing pressure, and sulfuric-acid clouds.\nEarth and Venus may have resembled each other long ago but diverged. Farther from the sun, Earth held on to much of its water, while early oceans on Venus boiled off into space. As carbon dioxide built up in the Venusian atmosphere, it trapped more heat, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect and present-day temperatures hot enough to melt lead.\n\n\nEven though conditions on Venus are uninviting, scientists searching for potentially habitable planets around other stars are keen to understand how two similar worlds turned out so differently. Researchers want to learn how its surface is rejuvenated geologically, and why Venus spins in the opposite direction to the other planets. Scientists aren\u2019t sure how active its volcanoes are or whether it has lightning. They are also puzzled as to why clouds whip around the planet every four Earth days, at super-hurricane speeds, but Venus itself rotates at a leisurely 243-day pace. \nDespite the lure of mysterious Venus, NASA hasn\u2019t dispatched a dedicated probe since the radar-mapping\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Magellan\n\n\n\n mission ended more than two decades ago. The European orbiter Venus Express kept watch for eight years until 2014, revealing a surprisingly cold region and a tenuous layer of ozone high in the atmosphere. In December 2015, a refrigerator-sized Japanese spacecraft named Akatsuki\u2014meaning \u201cdawn\u201d\u2014survived a near-fatal engine failure to reach Venus\u2019s midst after a five-year delay. \nNASA had a chance to make amends to Venus earlier this year. Among five mission concepts vying for a slot on the space agency\u2019s Discovery program, two proposed a visit to Venus. One aimed to drop a probe that would sample the air, and the other proposed mapping Venus\u2019s surface at high resolution from orbit. But NASA announced in January that neither had made the cut.\nGiven all that scientists expect to learn from Venus, the planet does not deserve to remain in its sibling\u2019s shadow.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at York University in Toronto, is the author of \u201cStrange New Worlds\u201d (Princeton University Press, 2011). The second planet deserves more study because once it may have been like Earth. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Shines in the Shadow of Mars (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1235",
        "date": "2017-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/venus-shines-in-the-shadow-of-mars-1497213413?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=93",
        "text": "The American infatuation with Mars has a lot to do with its potential to support life. Mars is half the size of Earth and home to a flimsy atmosphere, a frigid climate and horrendous dust storms. But the red planet might have harbored microbes long ago, and it could play host to well-equipped astronauts in the not-too-distant future.\nVenus\u2019s inhospitability wasn\u2019t always a given. As recently as the 1960s, some scientists thought Venus would be like Earth because it is similar in size, mass and composition. The Soviet engineers who designed Venera-4, the first spacecraft to penetrate the Venusian haze 50 years ago, geared it for flotation in case of a water landing. But the probe perished before it reached the planet\u2019s surface, after encountering hellish temperatures, bone-crushing pressure, and sulfuric-acid clouds.\n\n\n\n\nEarth and Venus may have resembled each other long ago but diverged. Farther from the sun, Earth held on to much of its water, while early oceans on Venus boiled off into space. As carbon dioxide built up in the Venusian atmosphere, it trapped more heat, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect and present-day temperatures hot enough to melt lead.\n\n\nEven though conditions on Venus are uninviting, scientists searching for potentially habitable planets around other stars are keen to understand how two similar worlds turned out so differently. Researchers want to learn how its surface is rejuvenated geologically, and why Venus spins in the opposite direction to the other planets. Scientists aren\u2019t sure how active its volcanoes are or whether it has lightning. They are also puzzled as to why clouds whip around the planet every four Earth days, at super-hurricane speeds, but Venus itself rotates at a leisurely 243-day pace. \nDespite the lure of mysterious Venus, NASA hasn\u2019t dispatched a dedicated probe since the radar-mapping\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Magellan\n\n\n\n mission ended more than two decades ago. The European orbiter Venus Express kept watch for eight years until 2014, revealing a surprisingly cold region and a tenuous layer of ozone high in the atmosphere. In December 2015, a refrigerator-sized Japanese spacecraft named Akatsuki\u2014meaning \u201cdawn\u201d\u2014survived a near-fatal engine failure to reach Venus\u2019s midst after a five-year delay. \nNASA had a chance to make amends to Venus earlier this year. Among five mission concepts vying for a slot on the space agency\u2019s Discovery program, two proposed a visit to Venus. One aimed to drop a probe that would sample the air, and the other proposed mapping Venus\u2019s surface at high resolution from orbit. But NASA announced in January that neither had made the cut.\nGiven all that scientists expect to learn from Venus, the planet does not deserve to remain in its sibling\u2019s shadow.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at York University in Toronto, is the author of \u201cStrange New Worlds\u201d (Princeton University Press, 2011). The second planet deserves more study because once it may have been like Earth. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Shines in the Shadow of Mars (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1236",
        "date": "2017-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/venus-shines-in-the-shadow-of-mars-1497213413?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=81",
        "text": "The American infatuation with Mars has a lot to do with its potential to support life. Mars is half the size of Earth and home to a flimsy atmosphere, a frigid climate and horrendous dust storms. But the red planet might have harbored microbes long ago, and it could play host to well-equipped astronauts in the not-too-distant future.\nVenus\u2019s inhospitability wasn\u2019t always a given. As recently as the 1960s, some scientists thought Venus would be like Earth because it is similar in size, mass and composition. The Soviet engineers who designed Venera-4, the first spacecraft to penetrate the Venusian haze 50 years ago, geared it for flotation in case of a water landing. But the probe perished before it reached the planet\u2019s surface, after encountering hellish temperatures, bone-crushing pressure, and sulfuric-acid clouds.\nEarth and Venus may have resembled each other long ago but diverged. Farther from the sun, Earth held on to much of its water, while early oceans on Venus boiled off into space. As carbon dioxide built up in the Venusian atmosphere, it trapped more heat, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect and present-day temperatures hot enough to melt lead.\n\n\nEven though conditions on Venus are uninviting, scientists searching for potentially habitable planets around other stars are keen to understand how two similar worlds turned out so differently. Researchers want to learn how its surface is rejuvenated geologically, and why Venus spins in the opposite direction to the other planets. Scientists aren\u2019t sure how active its volcanoes are or whether it has lightning. They are also puzzled as to why clouds whip around the planet every four Earth days, at super-hurricane speeds, but Venus itself rotates at a leisurely 243-day pace. \nDespite the lure of mysterious Venus, NASA hasn\u2019t dispatched a dedicated probe since the radar-mapping\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Magellan\n\n\n\n mission ended more than two decades ago. The European orbiter Venus Express kept watch for eight years until 2014, revealing a surprisingly cold region and a tenuous layer of ozone high in the atmosphere. In December 2015, a refrigerator-sized Japanese spacecraft named Akatsuki\u2014meaning \u201cdawn\u201d\u2014survived a near-fatal engine failure to reach Venus\u2019s midst after a five-year delay. \nNASA had a chance to make amends to Venus earlier this year. Among five mission concepts vying for a slot on the space agency\u2019s Discovery program, two proposed a visit to Venus. One aimed to drop a probe that would sample the air, and the other proposed mapping Venus\u2019s surface at high resolution from orbit. But NASA announced in January that neither had made the cut.\nGiven all that scientists expect to learn from Venus, the planet does not deserve to remain in its sibling\u2019s shadow.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at York University in Toronto, is the author of \u201cStrange New Worlds\u201d (Princeton University Press, 2011). The second planet deserves more study because once it may have been like Earth. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Shines in the Shadow of Mars (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1237",
        "date": "2017-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/venus-shines-in-the-shadow-of-mars-1497213413?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=120",
        "text": "The American infatuation with Mars has a lot to do with its potential to support life. Mars is half the size of Earth and home to a flimsy atmosphere, a frigid climate and horrendous dust storms. But the red planet might have harbored microbes long ago, and it could play host to well-equipped astronauts in the not-too-distant future.\nVenus\u2019s inhospitability wasn\u2019t always a given. As recently as the 1960s, some scientists thought Venus would be like Earth because it is similar in size, mass and composition. The Soviet engineers who designed Venera-4, the first spacecraft to penetrate the Venusian haze 50 years ago, geared it for flotation in case of a water landing. But the probe perished before it reached the planet\u2019s surface, after encountering hellish temperatures, bone-crushing pressure, and sulfuric-acid clouds.\n\n\n\n\nEarth and Venus may have resembled each other long ago but diverged. Farther from the sun, Earth held on to much of its water, while early oceans on Venus boiled off into space. As carbon dioxide built up in the Venusian atmosphere, it trapped more heat, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect and present-day temperatures hot enough to melt lead.\n\n\nEven though conditions on Venus are uninviting, scientists searching for potentially habitable planets around other stars are keen to understand how two similar worlds turned out so differently. Researchers want to learn how its surface is rejuvenated geologically, and why Venus spins in the opposite direction to the other planets. Scientists aren\u2019t sure how active its volcanoes are or whether it has lightning. They are also puzzled as to why clouds whip around the planet every four Earth days, at super-hurricane speeds, but Venus itself rotates at a leisurely 243-day pace. \nDespite the lure of mysterious Venus, NASA hasn\u2019t dispatched a dedicated probe since the radar-mapping\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Magellan\n\n\n\n mission ended more than two decades ago. The European orbiter Venus Express kept watch for eight years until 2014, revealing a surprisingly cold region and a tenuous layer of ozone high in the atmosphere. In December 2015, a refrigerator-sized Japanese spacecraft named Akatsuki\u2014meaning \u201cdawn\u201d\u2014survived a near-fatal engine failure to reach Venus\u2019s midst after a five-year delay. \nNASA had a chance to make amends to Venus earlier this year. Among five mission concepts vying for a slot on the space agency\u2019s Discovery program, two proposed a visit to Venus. One aimed to drop a probe that would sample the air, and the other proposed mapping Venus\u2019s surface at high resolution from orbit. But NASA announced in January that neither had made the cut.\nGiven all that scientists expect to learn from Venus, the planet does not deserve to remain in its sibling\u2019s shadow.\nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and dean of science at York University in Toronto, is the author of \u201cStrange New Worlds\u201d (Princeton University Press, 2011). The second planet deserves more study because once it may have been like Earth. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "America Gets Back Into the Space Race (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1238",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-gets-back-into-the-space-race-11590532974?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=41",
        "text": "Since the Space Shuttle\u2019s final mission, in July 2011, the U.S. has relied on Russia\u2019s Soyuz to transport NASA crew members to and from the ISS. After 30 years and two catastrophic accidents, it was time to retire the shuttle. But NASA failed multiple times to develop a replacement. The Obama administration canceled\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\u2019s\n\n\n\n Constellation project, and with it the affordable Ares 1 rocket, based on shuttle technology. Instead they chose to build on the Commercial Orbital Transportation System contracts and gave\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and SpaceX responsibility for the spacecraft. The plan was to have the Boeing Starliner and the SpaceX Crew Dragon ready in 2017. \nThe contracts allowed Boeing and SpaceX to build their designs with minimal government supervision. While NASA carefully ensured that both vehicles met its safety requirements, the companies were free to maintain their methods and internal cultures. So far SpaceX appears to have done a better job. Boeing\u2019s December 2019 Starliner test flight to the ISS failed, revealing serious software problems that require a second unmanned test flight later this year. In spite of having, according to one report, 38% more funding from NASA, the aerospace giant may lose to its upstart competitor. \nIf SpaceX\u2019s first manned flight goes as planned, the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company will win the lion\u2019s share of the NASA contract to send astronauts to the ISS. It will also compete with the Russians to send crews from Europe, Japan and elsewhere to the station. No doubt Mr. Musk will find room for a few paying tourists. \n\n\nMuch of SpaceX\u2019s effort is concentrated on its ambitious Starship development program, which aims to build a fully reusable launch vehicle that can enter orbit and ultimately conduct manned missions to the moon and even Mars. While Starship has made real progress, SpaceX has won contracts that will keep its current Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets busy for a long time. \nMeanwhile, there\u2019s also the question of what the Crew Dragon or its derivatives do aside from serving as a taxi to and from low-Earth orbit. One suggestion is that it serve as a lifeboat attached to the ISS. In theory it could be modified to serve the same function on NASA\u2019s planned lunar orbiting space station, the Gateway. Other derivatives could be developed to allow it to fly between space stations or, if equipped with an air lock, to serve as a \u201cconstruction shack\u201d when the space industry decides to create large orbiting structures such as solar power satellites, factories or processing plants for minerals mined on the moon, asteroids or elsewhere. Such facilities may need human builders and repairmen. New versions of the Crew Dragon might be used much as helicopters are used to take workers to oil platforms. \nGetting Americans flying into space on American craft is long overdue. The U.S. is in a civil and military space race with China, which just used its new Long March 5B launch vehicle to put a prototype of a new capsule into orbit. Beijing\u2019s slow, steady breakout into space will be a major international\u2014and extraterrestrial\u2014challenge of the next decade. \nMr. Dinerman writes about space and national security. Elon Musk\u2019s company plans to launch a pair of astronauts into orbit Wednesday. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "America Gets Back Into the Space Race (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1239",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-gets-back-into-the-space-race-11590532974?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=44",
        "text": "Since the Space Shuttle\u2019s final mission, in July 2011, the U.S. has relied on Russia\u2019s Soyuz to transport NASA crew members to and from the ISS. After 30 years and two catastrophic accidents, it was time to retire the shuttle. But NASA failed multiple times to develop a replacement. The Obama administration canceled\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\u2019s\n\n\n\n Constellation project, and with it the affordable Ares 1 rocket, based on shuttle technology. Instead they chose to build on the Commercial Orbital Transportation System contracts and gave\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and SpaceX responsibility for the spacecraft. The plan was to have the Boeing Starliner and the SpaceX Crew Dragon ready in 2017. \nThe contracts allowed Boeing and SpaceX to build their designs with minimal government supervision. While NASA carefully ensured that both vehicles met its safety requirements, the companies were free to maintain their methods and internal cultures. So far SpaceX appears to have done a better job. Boeing\u2019s December 2019 Starliner test flight to the ISS failed, revealing serious software problems that require a second unmanned test flight later this year. In spite of having, according to one report, 38% more funding from NASA, the aerospace giant may lose to its upstart competitor. \nIf SpaceX\u2019s first manned flight goes as planned, the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company will win the lion\u2019s share of the NASA contract to send astronauts to the ISS. It will also compete with the Russians to send crews from Europe, Japan and elsewhere to the station. No doubt Mr. Musk will find room for a few paying tourists. \n\n\nMuch of SpaceX\u2019s effort is concentrated on its ambitious Starship development program, which aims to build a fully reusable launch vehicle that can enter orbit and ultimately conduct manned missions to the moon and even Mars. While Starship has made real progress, SpaceX has won contracts that will keep its current Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets busy for a long time. \nMeanwhile, there\u2019s also the question of what the Crew Dragon or its derivatives do aside from serving as a taxi to and from low-Earth orbit. One suggestion is that it serve as a lifeboat attached to the ISS. In theory it could be modified to serve the same function on NASA\u2019s planned lunar orbiting space station, the Gateway. Other derivatives could be developed to allow it to fly between space stations or, if equipped with an air lock, to serve as a \u201cconstruction shack\u201d when the space industry decides to create large orbiting structures such as solar power satellites, factories or processing plants for minerals mined on the moon, asteroids or elsewhere. Such facilities may need human builders and repairmen. New versions of the Crew Dragon might be used much as helicopters are used to take workers to oil platforms. \nGetting Americans flying into space on American craft is long overdue. The U.S. is in a civil and military space race with China, which just used its new Long March 5B launch vehicle to put a prototype of a new capsule into orbit. Beijing\u2019s slow, steady breakout into space will be a major international\u2014and extraterrestrial\u2014challenge of the next decade. \nMr. Dinerman writes about space and national security. Elon Musk\u2019s company plans to launch a pair of astronauts into orbit Wednesday. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13 Reminds Us of Hard Things Worth Doing (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1240",
        "date": "2020-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-13-reminds-us-of-hard-things-worth-doing-11586557692?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=13",
        "text": "On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was supposed to be the third mission to land men on the moon, after Apollo 11 and 12 the previous year. Thirteen was no less daring than its predecessors, but the launch wasn\u2019t front-page news. By 1970, space travel was no longer a novelty and few Americans tuned in for the launch. At that time, no one could have imagined that the mission would become one of the most harrowing odysseys in American history.\nWhen things went wrong on the Apollo 13 mission, it captured the world\u2019s attention. News of the oxygen-tank explosion and crippled service module jolted the public awake to the drama unfolding 200,000 miles from Earth. Americans were reminded that space exploration is high-risk work demanding exceptional technical competence and bravery.\nFortunately, the flight engineers at Mission Control in Houston and the astronauts hurtling toward the moon understood the complex dangers space holds. The rescue mission wasn\u2019t solely the product of improvisation, but of an innovative and cooperative workforce ready to take on any challenge. \n\n\nFor four vexing days, the Apollo 13 flight crew endured bitter conditions. The astronauts powered down all nonessential systems, which caused cabin temperatures to drop near freezing. Some food became inedible. Drinking water was rationed to ensure the cramped lunar module would operate longer than planned. The ground crew worked for 87 hours straight to come up with possible solutions. At one point, the crew flew through space with only the sun as a guide, a reminder of the original meaning of \u201castronaut,\u201d which is derived from the Greek for \u201cstar\u201d and \u201csailor.\u201d\nBenefiting from extensive planning and rigorous training and testing, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration overcame the obstacles of insufficient oxygen, water and power. Apollo 13 splashed down in the South Pacific, its lunar module ingeniously repurposed as a lifeboat. No one familiar with the perils of the mission can look at duct tape, plastic bags and cardboard the same ever again.\nOn this golden anniversary of NASA\u2019s most successful failure, the nation honors the physical and intellectual courage of the astronauts, as well as the diligence and ingenuity of the ground crew that kept Americans alive aboard a crippled spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles from home. Apollo 13 revealed more than technical talent. It reminded the world of America\u2019s frontier spirit. In the face of seemingly impossible odds, Americans didn\u2019t let fear paralyze us. Instead we joined together, working calmly and efficiently to find a solution. \nAmerica has an ambitious future in space exploration. NASA\u2019s Artemis program is working to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024, which in turn will help prepare for humanity\u2019s next giant leap to Mars. Artemis will require state-of-the-art technology and push the boundaries of human knowledge like never before. It will also demand the same courage, ingenuity and devotion Americans showed in Apollo 13. We, as a nation, must continue to do hard things. That\u2019s how we soar into the heavens and progress as a civilization.\nMr. Lovell was commander of Apollo 13. Mr. Bridenstine is administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty American history shows we are capable of ingenuity, devotion and great courage. ",
        "author": "Jim Lovell and Jim Bridenstine"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13 Reminds Us of Hard Things Worth Doing (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1241",
        "date": "2020-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-13-reminds-us-of-hard-things-worth-doing-11586557692?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=46",
        "text": "On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was supposed to be the third mission to land men on the moon, after Apollo 11 and 12 the previous year. Thirteen was no less daring than its predecessors, but the launch wasn\u2019t front-page news. By 1970, space travel was no longer a novelty and few Americans tuned in for the launch. At that time, no one could have imagined that the mission would become one of the most harrowing odysseys in American history.\nWhen things went wrong on the Apollo 13 mission, it captured the world\u2019s attention. News of the oxygen-tank explosion and crippled service module jolted the public awake to the drama unfolding 200,000 miles from Earth. Americans were reminded that space exploration is high-risk work demanding exceptional technical competence and bravery.\nFortunately, the flight engineers at Mission Control in Houston and the astronauts hurtling toward the moon understood the complex dangers space holds. The rescue mission wasn\u2019t solely the product of improvisation, but of an innovative and cooperative workforce ready to take on any challenge. \n\n\nFor four vexing days, the Apollo 13 flight crew endured bitter conditions. The astronauts powered down all nonessential systems, which caused cabin temperatures to drop near freezing. Some food became inedible. Drinking water was rationed to ensure the cramped lunar module would operate longer than planned. The ground crew worked for 87 hours straight to come up with possible solutions. At one point, the crew flew through space with only the sun as a guide, a reminder of the original meaning of \u201castronaut,\u201d which is derived from the Greek for \u201cstar\u201d and \u201csailor.\u201d\nBenefiting from extensive planning and rigorous training and testing, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration overcame the obstacles of insufficient oxygen, water and power. Apollo 13 splashed down in the South Pacific, its lunar module ingeniously repurposed as a lifeboat. No one familiar with the perils of the mission can look at duct tape, plastic bags and cardboard the same ever again.\nOn this golden anniversary of NASA\u2019s most successful failure, the nation honors the physical and intellectual courage of the astronauts, as well as the diligence and ingenuity of the ground crew that kept Americans alive aboard a crippled spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles from home. Apollo 13 revealed more than technical talent. It reminded the world of America\u2019s frontier spirit. In the face of seemingly impossible odds, Americans didn\u2019t let fear paralyze us. Instead we joined together, working calmly and efficiently to find a solution. \nAmerica has an ambitious future in space exploration. NASA\u2019s Artemis program is working to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024, which in turn will help prepare for humanity\u2019s next giant leap to Mars. Artemis will require state-of-the-art technology and push the boundaries of human knowledge like never before. It will also demand the same courage, ingenuity and devotion Americans showed in Apollo 13. We, as a nation, must continue to do hard things. That\u2019s how we soar into the heavens and progress as a civilization.\nMr. Lovell was commander of Apollo 13. Mr. Bridenstine is administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty American history shows we are capable of ingenuity, devotion and great courage. ",
        "author": "Jim Lovell and Jim Bridenstine"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13 Reminds Us of Hard Things Worth Doing (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1242",
        "date": "2020-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-13-reminds-us-of-hard-things-worth-doing-11586557692?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=57",
        "text": "On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was supposed to be the third mission to land men on the moon, after Apollo 11 and 12 the previous year. Thirteen was no less daring than its predecessors, but the launch wasn\u2019t front-page news. By 1970, space travel was no longer a novelty and few Americans tuned in for the launch. At that time, no one could have imagined that the mission would become one of the most harrowing odysseys in American history.\nWhen things went wrong on the Apollo 13 mission, it captured the world\u2019s attention. News of the oxygen-tank explosion and crippled service module jolted the public awake to the drama unfolding 200,000 miles from Earth. Americans were reminded that space exploration is high-risk work demanding exceptional technical competence and bravery.\n\n\n\n\nFortunately, the flight engineers at Mission Control in Houston and the astronauts hurtling toward the moon understood the complex dangers space holds. The rescue mission wasn\u2019t solely the product of improvisation, but of an innovative and cooperative workforce ready to take on any challenge. \n\n\nFor four vexing days, the Apollo 13 flight crew endured bitter conditions. The astronauts powered down all nonessential systems, which caused cabin temperatures to drop near freezing. Some food became inedible. Drinking water was rationed to ensure the cramped lunar module would operate longer than planned. The ground crew worked for 87 hours straight to come up with possible solutions. At one point, the crew flew through space with only the sun as a guide, a reminder of the original meaning of \u201castronaut,\u201d which is derived from the Greek for \u201cstar\u201d and \u201csailor.\u201d\nBenefiting from extensive planning and rigorous training and testing, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration overcame the obstacles of insufficient oxygen, water and power. Apollo 13 splashed down in the South Pacific, its lunar module ingeniously repurposed as a lifeboat. No one familiar with the perils of the mission can look at duct tape, plastic bags and cardboard the same ever again.\nOn this golden anniversary of NASA\u2019s most successful failure, the nation honors the physical and intellectual courage of the astronauts, as well as the diligence and ingenuity of the ground crew that kept Americans alive aboard a crippled spacecraft hundreds of thousands of miles from home. Apollo 13 revealed more than technical talent. It reminded the world of America\u2019s frontier spirit. In the face of seemingly impossible odds, Americans didn\u2019t let fear paralyze us. Instead we joined together, working calmly and efficiently to find a solution. \nAmerica has an ambitious future in space exploration. NASA\u2019s Artemis program is working to land the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024, which in turn will help prepare for humanity\u2019s next giant leap to Mars. Artemis will require state-of-the-art technology and push the boundaries of human knowledge like never before. It will also demand the same courage, ingenuity and devotion Americans showed in Apollo 13. We, as a nation, must continue to do hard things. That\u2019s how we soar into the heavens and progress as a civilization.\nMr. Lovell was commander of Apollo 13. Mr. Bridenstine is administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty American history shows we are capable of ingenuity, devotion and great courage. ",
        "author": "Jim Lovell and Jim Bridenstine"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now, Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1243",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-moon-mission-mars-exploration-11634495445?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=4",
        "text": "Nearly 25 years ago, when I testified before Congress on space-related developments\u2014and delays\u2014my primary concern was that we were failing to approach the future with the same energy, ambition, vision and execution that characterized our moon missions. Areas of particular concern included American leadership in near-Earth orbit, heavy launch, reusability, public-private partnerships, international cooperation, pioneering civilian space tourism and getting back to the moon and on to Mars. \nConsistent with those missions, NASA, Congress, multiple administrations and private industry have made new investments. But American leadership in space is growing more urgent. Successfully advancing science and engineering, putting civilians in orbit on private rockets, widening launch options, and encouraging public-private partnership are good for the future. \nNeeded now are two other factors, which seem contradictory but are not. First, America must again lead\u2014with the enthusiasm of recent missions\u2014in returning to the moon and then taking humans to Mars. Other nations, not least China, are on that trajectory. \n\n\nFor reasons tied to national pride and security, natural expansion of science, engineering, exploration, environmental preservation and setting goals fitted to the next generation, we must shift deeper into space, elevate our eyes and press forward and outward. \nSecond, we must apply lessons of the past. After Apollo, America and the Russians cooperated in space, first with Apollo-Soyuz and later shared Space Station missions, by putting U.S. astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft and using Russian RD-180 engines in our Atlas rockets. Competition evolved to cooperation. \nWith a dozen nations aiming for bigger roles in space, ample room exists to rethink international cooperation. Competition may always exist, but militarizing space would be our loss. \nRecent launches have awakened America\u2019s latent interest in space travel, including our legacy of pioneering human space exploration. America should assert itself in getting back to the moon, exploring that orb, and from there staging for permanent human presence on Mars. These are achievable goals that can be pursued through a mix of cooperation and competition.\nFifty-two years ago,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Collins,\n\n\n\n and I were part of humankind\u2019s first moon landing. That event excited the world and inspired countless human advances. We are now at another inflection point, a chance for American leadership in space. Let\u2019s take it. \nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Petersen and Bill McGurn. America should be taking the lead in space exploration again. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now, Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1244",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-moon-mission-mars-exploration-11634495445?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=3",
        "text": "Nearly 25 years ago, when I testified before Congress on space-related developments\u2014and delays\u2014my primary concern was that we were failing to approach the future with the same energy, ambition, vision and execution that characterized our moon missions. Areas of particular concern included American leadership in near-Earth orbit, heavy launch, reusability, public-private partnerships, international cooperation, pioneering civilian space tourism and getting back to the moon and on to Mars. \nConsistent with those missions, NASA, Congress, multiple administrations and private industry have made new investments. But American leadership in space is growing more urgent. Successfully advancing science and engineering, putting civilians in orbit on private rockets, widening launch options, and encouraging public-private partnership are good for the future. \n\n\n\n\nNeeded now are two other factors, which seem contradictory but are not. First, America must again lead\u2014with the enthusiasm of recent missions\u2014in returning to the moon and then taking humans to Mars. Other nations, not least China, are on that trajectory. \n\n\nFor reasons tied to national pride and security, natural expansion of science, engineering, exploration, environmental preservation and setting goals fitted to the next generation, we must shift deeper into space, elevate our eyes and press forward and outward. \nSecond, we must apply lessons of the past. After Apollo, America and the Russians cooperated in space, first with Apollo-Soyuz and later shared Space Station missions, by putting U.S. astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft and using Russian RD-180 engines in our Atlas rockets. Competition evolved to cooperation. \nWith a dozen nations aiming for bigger roles in space, ample room exists to rethink international cooperation. Competition may always exist, but militarizing space would be our loss. \nRecent launches have awakened America\u2019s latent interest in space travel, including our legacy of pioneering human space exploration. America should assert itself in getting back to the moon, exploring that orb, and from there staging for permanent human presence on Mars. These are achievable goals that can be pursued through a mix of cooperation and competition.\nFifty-two years ago,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Collins,\n\n\n\n and I were part of humankind\u2019s first moon landing. That event excited the world and inspired countless human advances. We are now at another inflection point, a chance for American leadership in space. Let\u2019s take it. \nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Petersen and Bill McGurn. America should be taking the lead in space exploration again. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now, Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1245",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-moon-mission-mars-exploration-11634495445?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=14",
        "text": "Nearly 25 years ago, when I testified before Congress on space-related developments\u2014and delays\u2014my primary concern was that we were failing to approach the future with the same energy, ambition, vision and execution that characterized our moon missions. Areas of particular concern included American leadership in near-Earth orbit, heavy launch, reusability, public-private partnerships, international cooperation, pioneering civilian space tourism and getting back to the moon and on to Mars. \nConsistent with those missions, NASA, Congress, multiple administrations and private industry have made new investments. But American leadership in space is growing more urgent. Successfully advancing science and engineering, putting civilians in orbit on private rockets, widening launch options, and encouraging public-private partnership are good for the future. \n\n\n\n\nNeeded now are two other factors, which seem contradictory but are not. First, America must again lead\u2014with the enthusiasm of recent missions\u2014in returning to the moon and then taking humans to Mars. Other nations, not least China, are on that trajectory. \n\n\nFor reasons tied to national pride and security, natural expansion of science, engineering, exploration, environmental preservation and setting goals fitted to the next generation, we must shift deeper into space, elevate our eyes and press forward and outward. \nSecond, we must apply lessons of the past. After Apollo, America and the Russians cooperated in space, first with Apollo-Soyuz and later shared Space Station missions, by putting U.S. astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft and using Russian RD-180 engines in our Atlas rockets. Competition evolved to cooperation. \nWith a dozen nations aiming for bigger roles in space, ample room exists to rethink international cooperation. Competition may always exist, but militarizing space would be our loss. \nRecent launches have awakened America\u2019s latent interest in space travel, including our legacy of pioneering human space exploration. America should assert itself in getting back to the moon, exploring that orb, and from there staging for permanent human presence on Mars. These are achievable goals that can be pursued through a mix of cooperation and competition.\nFifty-two years ago,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Collins,\n\n\n\n and I were part of humankind\u2019s first moon landing. That event excited the world and inspired countless human advances. We are now at another inflection point, a chance for American leadership in space. Let\u2019s take it. \nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Petersen and Bill McGurn. America should be taking the lead in space exploration again. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now, Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1246",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-moon-mission-mars-exploration-11634495445?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=20",
        "text": "Nearly 25 years ago, when I testified before Congress on space-related developments\u2014and delays\u2014my primary concern was that we were failing to approach the future with the same energy, ambition, vision and execution that characterized our moon missions. Areas of particular concern included American leadership in near-Earth orbit, heavy launch, reusability, public-private partnerships, international cooperation, pioneering civilian space tourism and getting back to the moon and on to Mars. \nConsistent with those missions, NASA, Congress, multiple administrations and private industry have made new investments. But American leadership in space is growing more urgent. Successfully advancing science and engineering, putting civilians in orbit on private rockets, widening launch options, and encouraging public-private partnership are good for the future. \nNeeded now are two other factors, which seem contradictory but are not. First, America must again lead\u2014with the enthusiasm of recent missions\u2014in returning to the moon and then taking humans to Mars. Other nations, not least China, are on that trajectory. \n\n\nFor reasons tied to national pride and security, natural expansion of science, engineering, exploration, environmental preservation and setting goals fitted to the next generation, we must shift deeper into space, elevate our eyes and press forward and outward. \nSecond, we must apply lessons of the past. After Apollo, America and the Russians cooperated in space, first with Apollo-Soyuz and later shared Space Station missions, by putting U.S. astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft and using Russian RD-180 engines in our Atlas rockets. Competition evolved to cooperation. \nWith a dozen nations aiming for bigger roles in space, ample room exists to rethink international cooperation. Competition may always exist, but militarizing space would be our loss. \nRecent launches have awakened America\u2019s latent interest in space travel, including our legacy of pioneering human space exploration. America should assert itself in getting back to the moon, exploring that orb, and from there staging for permanent human presence on Mars. These are achievable goals that can be pursued through a mix of cooperation and competition.\nFifty-two years ago,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Collins,\n\n\n\n and I were part of humankind\u2019s first moon landing. That event excited the world and inspired countless human advances. We are now at another inflection point, a chance for American leadership in space. Let\u2019s take it. \nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Petersen and Bill McGurn. America should be taking the lead in space exploration again. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now, Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1247",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-moon-mission-mars-exploration-11634495445?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=19",
        "text": "Nearly 25 years ago, when I testified before Congress on space-related developments\u2014and delays\u2014my primary concern was that we were failing to approach the future with the same energy, ambition, vision and execution that characterized our moon missions. Areas of particular concern included American leadership in near-Earth orbit, heavy launch, reusability, public-private partnerships, international cooperation, pioneering civilian space tourism and getting back to the moon and on to Mars. \nConsistent with those missions, NASA, Congress, multiple administrations and private industry have made new investments. But American leadership in space is growing more urgent. Successfully advancing science and engineering, putting civilians in orbit on private rockets, widening launch options, and encouraging public-private partnership are good for the future. \n\n\n\n\nNeeded now are two other factors, which seem contradictory but are not. First, America must again lead\u2014with the enthusiasm of recent missions\u2014in returning to the moon and then taking humans to Mars. Other nations, not least China, are on that trajectory. \n\n\nFor reasons tied to national pride and security, natural expansion of science, engineering, exploration, environmental preservation and setting goals fitted to the next generation, we must shift deeper into space, elevate our eyes and press forward and outward. \nSecond, we must apply lessons of the past. After Apollo, America and the Russians cooperated in space, first with Apollo-Soyuz and later shared Space Station missions, by putting U.S. astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft and using Russian RD-180 engines in our Atlas rockets. Competition evolved to cooperation. \nWith a dozen nations aiming for bigger roles in space, ample room exists to rethink international cooperation. Competition may always exist, but militarizing space would be our loss. \nRecent launches have awakened America\u2019s latent interest in space travel, including our legacy of pioneering human space exploration. America should assert itself in getting back to the moon, exploring that orb, and from there staging for permanent human presence on Mars. These are achievable goals that can be pursued through a mix of cooperation and competition.\nFifty-two years ago,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Collins,\n\n\n\n and I were part of humankind\u2019s first moon landing. That event excited the world and inspired countless human advances. We are now at another inflection point, a chance for American leadership in space. Let\u2019s take it. \nMr. Aldrin is a former astronaut. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Petersen and Bill McGurn. America should be taking the lead in space exploration again. ",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Reach for the Stars, Mr. Trump (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1248",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/reach-for-the-stars-mr-trump-1490309847?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=25",
        "text": "NASA and the Trump administration face three challenges if they want to ensure that the ISS is a success rather than a boondoggle. First, there must be a way to send American astronauts to and from the station on an American vehicle.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n were supposed to have their systems ready this year, but delays are common in the aerospace industry. Neither company is expected to be ready to operate until 2018 at the earliest. \nMr. Trump and his still-to-be-named NASA administrator shouldn\u2019t have any trouble negotiating a new agreement with those companies. But if NASA needs to buy additional seats on Russia\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft instead, things could become more difficult.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n may want to condition ISS operations on extraneous issues, such as what he would call \u201cspace weaponization\u201d and missile defense. \n\n\nThe second problem\u2014which involves not only the Russians but all the other partner nations\u2014is what to do with the property after 2024, when under current plans it will become uninhabitable. Moscow has already announced plans to detach its modules from the orbiting structure and use them as the basis of a new Russian space station. The other partners are waiting to see what the U.S. will do. \nThe third problem is a budgetary one: NASA does not want to continue indefinitely spending $2 billion to $3 billion a year on ISS operations. It would rather find a way to \u201ccommercialize\u201d the facility, so that private industry would pay for day-to-day expenses, while NASA contracts for specific services. Space policy expert Scott Pace of George Washington University has said this creates a danger of \u201cmagical thinking\u201d: NASA may be deluding itself about the risks and benefits of commercialization. How much control over the space station, for example, would NASA be willing to surrender in exchange for a substantial private investment?\nFor Mr. Trump this is a challenge that will depend on his negotiating skills and on his desire to leave a distinctive mark on the U.S. space program. For starters, he will have to decide what to do. Does he want to crash the whole thing into the South Pacific, as the Russians did with their\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mir Space Station\n\n\n\n in 2001? Does he want to keep it going as a (mostly) U.S.-owned research facility? If he wants to privatize the ISS, he\u2019ll have to decide what exactly he means by privatization and how America\u2019s international partners will respond to such an initiative. \nGetting the ISS decision out of the way early is essential if NASA is to move on intelligently to the next stage of human exploration of the solar system. The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Obama\n\n\n\n -era asteroid mission was never truly serious. America\u2019s choices are still what they were in 2009, when Mr. Obama decided to cancel\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\u2019s\n\n\n\n Constellation program to return to the moon and then go on to Mars. Do we want to go directly to the Red Planet, or do we want to land on the moon and build a manned outpost there? \nFor decades NASA has spent more than enough time and money studying these questions. In Mr. Trump we may have a president interested not in funding yet another series of studies and reports, but in actually building something and going somewhere.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space policy and national security. The International Space Station is the ultimate real-estate deal. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Reach for the Stars, Mr. Trump (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1249",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/reach-for-the-stars-mr-trump-1490309847?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=86",
        "text": "NASA and the Trump administration face three challenges if they want to ensure that the ISS is a success rather than a boondoggle. First, there must be a way to send American astronauts to and from the station on an American vehicle.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n were supposed to have their systems ready this year, but delays are common in the aerospace industry. Neither company is expected to be ready to operate until 2018 at the earliest. \nMr. Trump and his still-to-be-named NASA administrator shouldn\u2019t have any trouble negotiating a new agreement with those companies. But if NASA needs to buy additional seats on Russia\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft instead, things could become more difficult.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n may want to condition ISS operations on extraneous issues, such as what he would call \u201cspace weaponization\u201d and missile defense. \n\n\nThe second problem\u2014which involves not only the Russians but all the other partner nations\u2014is what to do with the property after 2024, when under current plans it will become uninhabitable. Moscow has already announced plans to detach its modules from the orbiting structure and use them as the basis of a new Russian space station. The other partners are waiting to see what the U.S. will do. \nThe third problem is a budgetary one: NASA does not want to continue indefinitely spending $2 billion to $3 billion a year on ISS operations. It would rather find a way to \u201ccommercialize\u201d the facility, so that private industry would pay for day-to-day expenses, while NASA contracts for specific services. Space policy expert Scott Pace of George Washington University has said this creates a danger of \u201cmagical thinking\u201d: NASA may be deluding itself about the risks and benefits of commercialization. How much control over the space station, for example, would NASA be willing to surrender in exchange for a substantial private investment?\nFor Mr. Trump this is a challenge that will depend on his negotiating skills and on his desire to leave a distinctive mark on the U.S. space program. For starters, he will have to decide what to do. Does he want to crash the whole thing into the South Pacific, as the Russians did with their\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mir Space Station\n\n\n\n in 2001? Does he want to keep it going as a (mostly) U.S.-owned research facility? If he wants to privatize the ISS, he\u2019ll have to decide what exactly he means by privatization and how America\u2019s international partners will respond to such an initiative. \nGetting the ISS decision out of the way early is essential if NASA is to move on intelligently to the next stage of human exploration of the solar system. The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Obama\n\n\n\n -era asteroid mission was never truly serious. America\u2019s choices are still what they were in 2009, when Mr. Obama decided to cancel\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\u2019s\n\n\n\n Constellation program to return to the moon and then go on to Mars. Do we want to go directly to the Red Planet, or do we want to land on the moon and build a manned outpost there? \nFor decades NASA has spent more than enough time and money studying these questions. In Mr. Trump we may have a president interested not in funding yet another series of studies and reports, but in actually building something and going somewhere.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space policy and national security. The International Space Station is the ultimate real-estate deal. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Reach for the Stars, Mr. Trump (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1250",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/reach-for-the-stars-mr-trump-1490309847?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=127",
        "text": "NASA and the Trump administration face three challenges if they want to ensure that the ISS is a success rather than a boondoggle. First, there must be a way to send American astronauts to and from the station on an American vehicle.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n were supposed to have their systems ready this year, but delays are common in the aerospace industry. Neither company is expected to be ready to operate until 2018 at the earliest. \n\n\n\n\nMr. Trump and his still-to-be-named NASA administrator shouldn\u2019t have any trouble negotiating a new agreement with those companies. But if NASA needs to buy additional seats on Russia\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft instead, things could become more difficult.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n may want to condition ISS operations on extraneous issues, such as what he would call \u201cspace weaponization\u201d and missile defense. \n\n\nThe second problem\u2014which involves not only the Russians but all the other partner nations\u2014is what to do with the property after 2024, when under current plans it will become uninhabitable. Moscow has already announced plans to detach its modules from the orbiting structure and use them as the basis of a new Russian space station. The other partners are waiting to see what the U.S. will do. \nThe third problem is a budgetary one: NASA does not want to continue indefinitely spending $2 billion to $3 billion a year on ISS operations. It would rather find a way to \u201ccommercialize\u201d the facility, so that private industry would pay for day-to-day expenses, while NASA contracts for specific services. Space policy expert Scott Pace of George Washington University has said this creates a danger of \u201cmagical thinking\u201d: NASA may be deluding itself about the risks and benefits of commercialization. How much control over the space station, for example, would NASA be willing to surrender in exchange for a substantial private investment?\nFor Mr. Trump this is a challenge that will depend on his negotiating skills and on his desire to leave a distinctive mark on the U.S. space program. For starters, he will have to decide what to do. Does he want to crash the whole thing into the South Pacific, as the Russians did with their\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mir Space Station\n\n\n\n in 2001? Does he want to keep it going as a (mostly) U.S.-owned research facility? If he wants to privatize the ISS, he\u2019ll have to decide what exactly he means by privatization and how America\u2019s international partners will respond to such an initiative. \nGetting the ISS decision out of the way early is essential if NASA is to move on intelligently to the next stage of human exploration of the solar system. The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Obama\n\n\n\n -era asteroid mission was never truly serious. America\u2019s choices are still what they were in 2009, when Mr. Obama decided to cancel\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\u2019s\n\n\n\n Constellation program to return to the moon and then go on to Mars. Do we want to go directly to the Red Planet, or do we want to land on the moon and build a manned outpost there? \nFor decades NASA has spent more than enough time and money studying these questions. In Mr. Trump we may have a president interested not in funding yet another series of studies and reports, but in actually building something and going somewhere.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space policy and national security. The International Space Station is the ultimate real-estate deal. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Treat China as the Nuclear Superpower It Is (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1251",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/treat-china-as-the-nuclear-superpower-it-is-11573686026?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=14",
        "text": "It was unnecessary when China was a neophyte and the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were nuked up with scores of thousands of warheads and delivery vehicles, making nuclear stability a question for the two superpowers alone. Nuclear strategy must account for analogies to the three-body problem in physics\u2014i.e., there is neither predictability nor stability when more than two bodies act on each other. Unless one (like a spacecraft too small to perturb the orbital relationship between two planets, or the early Chinese nuclear capacity, dwarfed by that of the U.S. and the Soviets) is de minimis. \nA perilously neglected problem of the past 20 years or so is that China is no longer so bereft of nuclear weapons as to be dismissible. If the relationship among the now three dominant nuclear powers is not clarified and disciplined, China\u2019s maturing nuclear warfare capabilities will remain both a direct threat to the U.S. and a potent destabilizer of the balance of terror. We know of its rapidly growing families of silo-based, mobile, sea-based, and bomber-deliverable short-, intermediate-, and intercontinental-range delivery systems. We also know that China\u2019s nuclear infrastructure\u2014including production and certain modes of deployment\u2014is housed in an astounding 3,000 miles of elaborate tunnels.\nThis means we have little knowledge of what China actually possesses, and because we cannot do without such intelligence, bringing China into a control regime is critical. To paraphrase\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Ilhan Omar\n\n\n\n (Philo-Semite, Minn.), it\u2019s all about the verification, baby. And finally an American administration realizes it.\n\n\nThat this has struck a nerve in China was perhaps inadvertently revealed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zhou Bo,\n\n\n\n a senior colonel of the Chinese People\u2019s Liberation Army. In a recent article on these pages, he states that China\u2019s Ministry of National Defense laughed at Chinese inclusion, because \u201ceither the U.S. and Russia would need to bring their nuclear arsenals down to China\u2019s level, or China would need to increase the size of its arsenal drastically.\u201d Why would China possibly object? Unless of course more warheads and delivery vehicles than it admits to were to be secreted in the immense tunnel network known as the Great Underground Wall. And were China as innocuous and lightly armed as he claims, what would be the harm of inspections?\nThe administration should vigorously pursue this initiative and refuse to let it drop or to treat it as a sacrificial chip in the trade war (it is far more important than that). Success is guaranteed one way or another. Either China will be brought into a system of nuclear stabilization, or it will reveal to the world that it is hiding something very dangerous. No reason exists for anyone other than China\u2014if it is determined upon deception\u2014to oppose such an exercise, but inevitably, in the West, some will.\nContrary to longstanding positions in regard to American nuclear weapons and arms control in general, they will say that numbers don\u2019t matter. So what if China amasses an overwhelming nuclear force in its tunnels? As long as the U.S. has the minimum required to inflict unacceptable damage on China (or Russia) there is no need to worry about bean counting.\nBut we don\u2019t define acceptable damage, they do. Especially because China has (as do Russia and North Korea but not the U.S.) invulnerable mobile missiles, numbers are important not merely psychologically but, in the horrific nuclear calculus, in making a first strike conceivable by assuring the capacity for second, third, or even fourth strikes.\nIn simple terms, if I can strike and reduce your nuclear deterrent without hitting your cities, you will have only enough to retaliate against my cities. But if in exchange for that I can reduce your entire country to glass, you will not retaliate. Mere recognition of this puts me in a commanding position without actually resorting to nuclear war. This is only one reason why numbers matter, and the calculus is further complicated by missile defense and the counters to it.\nSuffice it to say that China learned in facing the massively greater American nuclear deterrent that its options were severely limited. Now its ambitions are such that it wants to turn the tables. Once, the West crippled China with the opium trade. Now China supplies American addicts with fentanyl. Once, the West sold China manufactured goods in exchange for commodities. Now China sells us manufactured goods in exchange for commodities. Once, Western military bases ringed the world. Now, as the West retreats, China is installing networks of bases in almost exact imitation.\nWhat are the odds\u2014contrary to common sense and to China\u2019s perceived interests, goals, ambitions, plans, declarations, and recent actions\u2014that, taking into account the almost unimaginable 3,000 miles of tunnels, it has only the relatively small numbers of weapons that Col. Zhou affirms? China should be eager to join the two o If Beijing really has only a tiny number of warheads, why are they housed in a 3,000-mile tunnel system? ",
        "author": "Mark Helprin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Make Pluto Great Again (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1252",
        "date": "2019-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-pluto-great-again-11573411628?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=14",
        "text": "For NASA the important question is not the nomenclature of Pluto, but whether or not to send a follow-up probe there. The New Horizons mission has been wildly and surprisingly successful. Launched in 2006 over the objections of a small but very noisy antinuclear group that felt threatened by the spacecraft\u2019s plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generator, at the time it was the fastest spacecraft in history.\nStill, it didn\u2019t reach Pluto until 2015, when the pictures it sent back to Earth fascinated scientists and the public alike. America\u2019s space agency proved again that, given the chance, it can generate a \u201cwow factor\u201d that other nations can only envy. \nThe little spacecraft flew by Ultima Thule, which no one disputes is a Kuiper belt object, in January 2019. Again the pictures, which showed two spheres mashed together, were extraordinary. New Horizons is now on its way to photograph other entities in the far reaches of our solar system. It has enough fuel for at least another decade.\n\n\nNASA and planetary scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern,\n\n\n\n the driving force behind New Horizons, have started thinking about another mission to Pluto, one that probably wouldn\u2019t be launched until at least 2027 and thus won\u2019t reach its destination until the mid-2030s. By then a new crop of planetary scientists will have come of age and will be ready to study whatever the new vehicle sends back to Earth. \nThe yet-unnamed mission is planned to go into orbit around Pluto and will be designed to stay there for a couple of years before using the gravity of the moon Charon to swing itself out on a further mission to explore the Kuiper belt. If successful, it could still be sending back data to Earth in the 2050s. Fortunately the cost of launching spacecraft into orbit or to the edge of our system has been reduced since 2006.\nIf NASA and Congress do decide to launch this mission, the Pluto debate will inevitably reignite. In his good-natured 2009 attack on Pluto the planet, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson decried \u201cPluto\u2019s disproportionate grip on the hearts and souls of the American public.\u201d A decade later, the fight is far from over. \nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty As the debate over its planetary status heats up again, NASA contemplates sending another probe. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Make Pluto Great Again (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1253",
        "date": "2019-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-pluto-great-again-11573411628?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=53",
        "text": "For NASA the important question is not the nomenclature of Pluto, but whether or not to send a follow-up probe there. The New Horizons mission has been wildly and surprisingly successful. Launched in 2006 over the objections of a small but very noisy antinuclear group that felt threatened by the spacecraft\u2019s plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generator, at the time it was the fastest spacecraft in history.\nStill, it didn\u2019t reach Pluto until 2015, when the pictures it sent back to Earth fascinated scientists and the public alike. America\u2019s space agency proved again that, given the chance, it can generate a \u201cwow factor\u201d that other nations can only envy. \n\n\n\n\nThe little spacecraft flew by Ultima Thule, which no one disputes is a Kuiper belt object, in January 2019. Again the pictures, which showed two spheres mashed together, were extraordinary. New Horizons is now on its way to photograph other entities in the far reaches of our solar system. It has enough fuel for at least another decade.\n\n\nNASA and planetary scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern,\n\n\n\n the driving force behind New Horizons, have started thinking about another mission to Pluto, one that probably wouldn\u2019t be launched until at least 2027 and thus won\u2019t reach its destination until the mid-2030s. By then a new crop of planetary scientists will have come of age and will be ready to study whatever the new vehicle sends back to Earth. \nThe yet-unnamed mission is planned to go into orbit around Pluto and will be designed to stay there for a couple of years before using the gravity of the moon Charon to swing itself out on a further mission to explore the Kuiper belt. If successful, it could still be sending back data to Earth in the 2050s. Fortunately the cost of launching spacecraft into orbit or to the edge of our system has been reduced since 2006.\nIf NASA and Congress do decide to launch this mission, the Pluto debate will inevitably reignite. In his good-natured 2009 attack on Pluto the planet, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson decried \u201cPluto\u2019s disproportionate grip on the hearts and souls of the American public.\u201d A decade later, the fight is far from over. \nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty As the debate over its planetary status heats up again, NASA contemplates sending another probe. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Make Pluto Great Again (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1254",
        "date": "2019-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-pluto-great-again-11573411628?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=49",
        "text": "For NASA the important question is not the nomenclature of Pluto, but whether or not to send a follow-up probe there. The New Horizons mission has been wildly and surprisingly successful. Launched in 2006 over the objections of a small but very noisy antinuclear group that felt threatened by the spacecraft\u2019s plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generator, at the time it was the fastest spacecraft in history.\nStill, it didn\u2019t reach Pluto until 2015, when the pictures it sent back to Earth fascinated scientists and the public alike. America\u2019s space agency proved again that, given the chance, it can generate a \u201cwow factor\u201d that other nations can only envy. \nThe little spacecraft flew by Ultima Thule, which no one disputes is a Kuiper belt object, in January 2019. Again the pictures, which showed two spheres mashed together, were extraordinary. New Horizons is now on its way to photograph other entities in the far reaches of our solar system. It has enough fuel for at least another decade.\n\n\nNASA and planetary scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern,\n\n\n\n the driving force behind New Horizons, have started thinking about another mission to Pluto, one that probably wouldn\u2019t be launched until at least 2027 and thus won\u2019t reach its destination until the mid-2030s. By then a new crop of planetary scientists will have come of age and will be ready to study whatever the new vehicle sends back to Earth. \nThe yet-unnamed mission is planned to go into orbit around Pluto and will be designed to stay there for a couple of years before using the gravity of the moon Charon to swing itself out on a further mission to explore the Kuiper belt. If successful, it could still be sending back data to Earth in the 2050s. Fortunately the cost of launching spacecraft into orbit or to the edge of our system has been reduced since 2006.\nIf NASA and Congress do decide to launch this mission, the Pluto debate will inevitably reignite. In his good-natured 2009 attack on Pluto the planet, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson decried \u201cPluto\u2019s disproportionate grip on the hearts and souls of the American public.\u201d A decade later, the fight is far from over. \nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty As the debate over its planetary status heats up again, NASA contemplates sending another probe. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Make Pluto Great Again (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1255",
        "date": "2019-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-pluto-great-again-11573411628?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=63",
        "text": "For NASA the important question is not the nomenclature of Pluto, but whether or not to send a follow-up probe there. The New Horizons mission has been wildly and surprisingly successful. Launched in 2006 over the objections of a small but very noisy antinuclear group that felt threatened by the spacecraft\u2019s plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generator, at the time it was the fastest spacecraft in history.\nStill, it didn\u2019t reach Pluto until 2015, when the pictures it sent back to Earth fascinated scientists and the public alike. America\u2019s space agency proved again that, given the chance, it can generate a \u201cwow factor\u201d that other nations can only envy. \nThe little spacecraft flew by Ultima Thule, which no one disputes is a Kuiper belt object, in January 2019. Again the pictures, which showed two spheres mashed together, were extraordinary. New Horizons is now on its way to photograph other entities in the far reaches of our solar system. It has enough fuel for at least another decade.\n\n\nNASA and planetary scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern,\n\n\n\n the driving force behind New Horizons, have started thinking about another mission to Pluto, one that probably wouldn\u2019t be launched until at least 2027 and thus won\u2019t reach its destination until the mid-2030s. By then a new crop of planetary scientists will have come of age and will be ready to study whatever the new vehicle sends back to Earth. \nThe yet-unnamed mission is planned to go into orbit around Pluto and will be designed to stay there for a couple of years before using the gravity of the moon Charon to swing itself out on a further mission to explore the Kuiper belt. If successful, it could still be sending back data to Earth in the 2050s. Fortunately the cost of launching spacecraft into orbit or to the edge of our system has been reduced since 2006.\nIf NASA and Congress do decide to launch this mission, the Pluto debate will inevitably reignite. In his good-natured 2009 attack on Pluto the planet, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson decried \u201cPluto\u2019s disproportionate grip on the hearts and souls of the American public.\u201d A decade later, the fight is far from over. \nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty As the debate over its planetary status heats up again, NASA contemplates sending another probe. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Exploration May Take Off in 2018 (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1256",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-exploration-may-take-off-in-2018-1517876693?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=71",
        "text": "Developing and building the Falcon 9 Heavy has been a remarkable achievement. When it becomes operational, it will be the most economical way to put payloads into space. Access to space at the prices SpaceX will be able to offer\u2014less than $50 a pound to low Earth orbit, I estimate\u2014will radically alter the nature of the U.S. space industry. If all goes well, SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n will start providing passenger service to the international space station sometime in 2018.\nNASA is reworking its plans to send manned spacecraft beyond low Earth orbit. Sometime in the next decade it hopes to start building either a moon base or a small \u201cgateway\u201d space station near the moon. Anyone hoping to see American astronauts on Mars will have to wait. But with more-efficient heavy-lift technology, NASA will be able to send people to Mars sometime in the 2030s. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Tesla Roadster car aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Dec. 6, 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPACEX/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nLow-cost access to space is changing the economics of the solar system. Companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries are hoping to mine the asteroids and set up bases on the moon and elsewhere. Nations large and small are working out ways that their citizens and companies can enjoy property rights on what the old Outer Space Treaty called \u201ccelestial bodies.\u201d\n\n\nMeanwhile, NASA and other space agencies are constantly discovering new resources\u2014such as the water ice on Mars\u2014that could be valuable someday. Some NASA staffers believe they are continuing in the tradition of Lewis and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clark.\n\n\n\n Centuries from now it wouldn\u2019t be surprising to see NASA remembered, more than anything, for its Mars probes and missions to the asteroids.\nUnfortunately, America\u2019s space ambitions will remain aspirational so long as Congress continues to fail to pass budgets on schedule. Path-breaking single projects\u2014such as the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope\u2014may succeed despite delays and cost overruns. But if Americans want to return to the moon, they need to demand steady leadership and bipartisan cooperation. In the current political climate this seems like too much to ask, but President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n has surprised us before. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Dinerman\n\n\n\n writes on space policy and national security. NASA and private companies move beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Exploration May Take Off in 2018 (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1257",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-exploration-may-take-off-in-2018-1517876693?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=103",
        "text": "Developing and building the Falcon 9 Heavy has been a remarkable achievement. When it becomes operational, it will be the most economical way to put payloads into space. Access to space at the prices SpaceX will be able to offer\u2014less than $50 a pound to low Earth orbit, I estimate\u2014will radically alter the nature of the U.S. space industry. If all goes well, SpaceX and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n will start providing passenger service to the international space station sometime in 2018.\n\n\n\n\nNASA is reworking its plans to send manned spacecraft beyond low Earth orbit. Sometime in the next decade it hopes to start building either a moon base or a small \u201cgateway\u201d space station near the moon. Anyone hoping to see American astronauts on Mars will have to wait. But with more-efficient heavy-lift technology, NASA will be able to send people to Mars sometime in the 2030s. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Tesla Roadster car aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Dec. 6, 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPACEX/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nLow-cost access to space is changing the economics of the solar system. Companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries are hoping to mine the asteroids and set up bases on the moon and elsewhere. Nations large and small are working out ways that their citizens and companies can enjoy property rights on what the old Outer Space Treaty called \u201ccelestial bodies.\u201d\n\n\nMeanwhile, NASA and other space agencies are constantly discovering new resources\u2014such as the water ice on Mars\u2014that could be valuable someday. Some NASA staffers believe they are continuing in the tradition of Lewis and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clark.\n\n\n\n Centuries from now it wouldn\u2019t be surprising to see NASA remembered, more than anything, for its Mars probes and missions to the asteroids.\nUnfortunately, America\u2019s space ambitions will remain aspirational so long as Congress continues to fail to pass budgets on schedule. Path-breaking single projects\u2014such as the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope\u2014may succeed despite delays and cost overruns. But if Americans want to return to the moon, they need to demand steady leadership and bipartisan cooperation. In the current political climate this seems like too much to ask, but President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n has surprised us before. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Dinerman\n\n\n\n writes on space policy and national security. NASA and private companies move beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "When We Sent Rock Stars to Space (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1258",
        "date": "2017-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-we-sent-rock-stars-to-space-1504549839?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=23",
        "text": "Berry\u2019s 1958 classic is among the 27 musical selections mounted on Voyager 1, the NASA spacecraft launched 40 years ago Sept. 5. The songs were etched onto the \u201cGolden Record,\u201d a gold-plated copper disk, encased in electroplated metal with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Carl Sagan, the late astronomer who compiled the far-out album, worked with dozens of advisers, critics and musicologists to choose the 90 minutes of music. He viewed the effort as \u201ca creditable attempt to convey human emotions\u201d to the cosmic crowd. \nWhat to include on Earth\u2019s Greatest Hits was hotly debated. In addition to \u201cJohnny B. Goode,\u201d three American songs are included\u2014none by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elvis Presley,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Dylan\n\n\n\n or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Sinatra.\n\n\n\n So what made the cut?\nFirst there is a wordless moan called \u201cDark Was the Night\u201d by 1920s blues singer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blind Willie Johnson.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Timothy Ferris,\n\n\n\n who helped produce the Golden Record, called it \u201cone of the most fundamentally moving pieces of music ever recorded.\u201d Also included is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Louis Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cMelancholy Blues,\u201d which ethnomusicologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Lomax\n\n\n\n singled out as the best example of African-Americans\u2019 rediscovering their musical voice. The fourth entry is a Navajo night chant used to initiate boys and girls into the tribe\u2019s ceremonial life.\n\n\nHalf the Golden Record\u2019s music is Western, opening with a movement from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bach\u2019s\n\n\n\n Second\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brandenburg\n\n\n\n Concerto and moving on to parts of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beethoven\u2019s\n\n\n\n Fifth Symphony and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mozart\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Magic Flute.\u201d The other half ranges from Senegalese percussion, to Solomon Islander pan pipes, to a reflective 2,500-year-old Chinese song called \u201cFlowing Streams.\u201d\nAlthough some groups like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jefferson Starship\n\n\n\n volunteered their tunes\u2014which Sagan politely declined\u2014not every selection was easily accessible. Robert E. Brown, then the director of the Center for World Music in Berkeley, Calif., had put atop his world\u2019s greatest list an Indian raga called \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jaat Kahan Ho.\n\n\n\n \u201d But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ann Druyan,\n\n\n\n who served on Sagan\u2019s committee, couldn\u2019t locate a recording of the song and pleaded for an alternative. When Brown refused, an exasperated Ms. Druyan began phoning Indian restaurants. Eventually she found a New York appliance store with three unopened copies of \u201cJaat Kahan Ho\u201d under a madras-covered card table.\nThe Golden Record was sent with a stylus and playing instructions. But the chances an extraterrestrial will ever find the probe seem infinitesimal. Voyager 1, already 13 billion miles from Earth, won\u2019t reach another star\u2014prosaically named AC +79 3888\u2014until the year 40272, and fully orbiting the Milky Way will take another 225 million years. Still, to paraphrase a \u201960s anthem that didn\u2019t make the cut, time is on our side. One distant day an E.T.-like creature may stumble upon the disc, cue up \u201cJohnny B. Goode,\u201d and cry out with celestial exuberance: \u201cOh my, but that little Earthling boy could play!\u201d\nMr. Cianciolo is chief editor at Emerson & Church Publishers in Medfield, Mass. Forty years ago NASA launched Voyager 1\u2014and 27 musical picks. ",
        "author": "Jerry Cianciolo"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lessons of Apollo 1 Resonate Today (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1259",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lessons-of-apollo-1-resonate-today-1485477464?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=27",
        "text": "Apollo 1 was supposed to be a test flight in low-Earth orbit. Instead the command module was consumed by fire during a rehearsal. It became the first time NASA had to conduct an investigation of a fatal accident. It would not be the last.\nNor would it be the last time a grandstanding politician, in this case Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Mondale,\n\n\n\n took cheap shots at the space agency rather than study the available facts. In May 1967 NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n had to remind senators: \u201cIt is a hard fact of life in this kind of research and development that success cannot be achieved without a certain amount of experimentation in design to find the limits that can be safely reached.\u201d \nAfter a thorough investigation, NASA identified the causes, among them: \u201ca sealed cabin, pressurized with a high-pressure oxygen atmosphere\u201d; extensive \u201ccombustible material in the cabin\u201d; \u201cvulnerable\u201d wiring and plumbing; and \u201cinadequate provisions\u201d for rescue or escape. A review board observed that \u201cestablished requirements were not followed with regard to the pre-test constraints list.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Apollo 1 crew, from left, Edward H. White II, Virgil I. \"Gus\" Grissom, and Roger B. Chaffee.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Johnson Space Center/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNASA and its contractors took those lessons to heart and revised the spacecraft design. Most important, they rededicated themselves to following protocols strictly. The lessons of Apollo 1 made possible the ultimate success of the Apollo project\u2014putting men on the moon, starting with Apollo 11 in 1969, and saving three astronauts in the 1970 Apollo 13 emergency.\n\n\nBut NASA\u2019s culture of uncompromising engineering excellence faded after the final Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Lack of presidential leadership, budget cuts and national malaise all contributed to the culture that led to the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia space shuttle disasters.\nThe Columbia Accident Investigation Board reported that the agency had developed a habit it called \u201cthe normalization of deviance.\u201d Instead of the intolerant, rigid engineering-management culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA\u2019s leaders became complacent. \nNow, when NASA no longer sends humans into space, one has to worry about how they will handle safety in the new age of commercial space transportation. The Apollo era is long gone, the shuttles are grounded, and NASA is struggling to find a way to send astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.\nBut great hopes and great plans are still part of the American space enterprise. \u201cWe stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space,\u201d President Trump said in his inaugural address. The sacrifice of Grissom, White, Chaffee and the other lost spacefarers reminds us that our human migration off the planet will always require hard work and readiness to take great risks.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security. The disaster 50 years ago helped NASA get to the moon. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lessons of Apollo 1 Resonate Today (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1260",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lessons-of-apollo-1-resonate-today-1485477464?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=102",
        "text": "Apollo 1 was supposed to be a test flight in low-Earth orbit. Instead the command module was consumed by fire during a rehearsal. It became the first time NASA had to conduct an investigation of a fatal accident. It would not be the last.\nNor would it be the last time a grandstanding politician, in this case Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Mondale,\n\n\n\n took cheap shots at the space agency rather than study the available facts. In May 1967 NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n had to remind senators: \u201cIt is a hard fact of life in this kind of research and development that success cannot be achieved without a certain amount of experimentation in design to find the limits that can be safely reached.\u201d \nAfter a thorough investigation, NASA identified the causes, among them: \u201ca sealed cabin, pressurized with a high-pressure oxygen atmosphere\u201d; extensive \u201ccombustible material in the cabin\u201d; \u201cvulnerable\u201d wiring and plumbing; and \u201cinadequate provisions\u201d for rescue or escape. A review board observed that \u201cestablished requirements were not followed with regard to the pre-test constraints list.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Apollo 1 crew, from left, Edward H. White II, Virgil I. \"Gus\" Grissom, and Roger B. Chaffee.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Johnson Space Center/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNASA and its contractors took those lessons to heart and revised the spacecraft design. Most important, they rededicated themselves to following protocols strictly. The lessons of Apollo 1 made possible the ultimate success of the Apollo project\u2014putting men on the moon, starting with Apollo 11 in 1969, and saving three astronauts in the 1970 Apollo 13 emergency.\n\n\nBut NASA\u2019s culture of uncompromising engineering excellence faded after the final Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Lack of presidential leadership, budget cuts and national malaise all contributed to the culture that led to the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia space shuttle disasters.\nThe Columbia Accident Investigation Board reported that the agency had developed a habit it called \u201cthe normalization of deviance.\u201d Instead of the intolerant, rigid engineering-management culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA\u2019s leaders became complacent. \nNow, when NASA no longer sends humans into space, one has to worry about how they will handle safety in the new age of commercial space transportation. The Apollo era is long gone, the shuttles are grounded, and NASA is struggling to find a way to send astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.\nBut great hopes and great plans are still part of the American space enterprise. \u201cWe stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space,\u201d President Trump said in his inaugural address. The sacrifice of Grissom, White, Chaffee and the other lost spacefarers reminds us that our human migration off the planet will always require hard work and readiness to take great risks.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security. The disaster 50 years ago helped NASA get to the moon. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lessons of Apollo 1 Resonate Today (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1261",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lessons-of-apollo-1-resonate-today-1485477464?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=89",
        "text": "Apollo 1 was supposed to be a test flight in low-Earth orbit. Instead the command module was consumed by fire during a rehearsal. It became the first time NASA had to conduct an investigation of a fatal accident. It would not be the last.\nNor would it be the last time a grandstanding politician, in this case Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Mondale,\n\n\n\n took cheap shots at the space agency rather than study the available facts. In May 1967 NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n had to remind senators: \u201cIt is a hard fact of life in this kind of research and development that success cannot be achieved without a certain amount of experimentation in design to find the limits that can be safely reached.\u201d \nAfter a thorough investigation, NASA identified the causes, among them: \u201ca sealed cabin, pressurized with a high-pressure oxygen atmosphere\u201d; extensive \u201ccombustible material in the cabin\u201d; \u201cvulnerable\u201d wiring and plumbing; and \u201cinadequate provisions\u201d for rescue or escape. A review board observed that \u201cestablished requirements were not followed with regard to the pre-test constraints list.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Apollo 1 crew, from left, Edward H. White II, Virgil I. \"Gus\" Grissom, and Roger B. Chaffee.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Johnson Space Center/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNASA and its contractors took those lessons to heart and revised the spacecraft design. Most important, they rededicated themselves to following protocols strictly. The lessons of Apollo 1 made possible the ultimate success of the Apollo project\u2014putting men on the moon, starting with Apollo 11 in 1969, and saving three astronauts in the 1970 Apollo 13 emergency.\n\n\nBut NASA\u2019s culture of uncompromising engineering excellence faded after the final Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Lack of presidential leadership, budget cuts and national malaise all contributed to the culture that led to the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia space shuttle disasters.\nThe Columbia Accident Investigation Board reported that the agency had developed a habit it called \u201cthe normalization of deviance.\u201d Instead of the intolerant, rigid engineering-management culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA\u2019s leaders became complacent. \nNow, when NASA no longer sends humans into space, one has to worry about how they will handle safety in the new age of commercial space transportation. The Apollo era is long gone, the shuttles are grounded, and NASA is struggling to find a way to send astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.\nBut great hopes and great plans are still part of the American space enterprise. \u201cWe stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space,\u201d President Trump said in his inaugural address. The sacrifice of Grissom, White, Chaffee and the other lost spacefarers reminds us that our human migration off the planet will always require hard work and readiness to take great risks.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security. The disaster 50 years ago helped NASA get to the moon. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lessons of Apollo 1 Resonate Today (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1262",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lessons-of-apollo-1-resonate-today-1485477464?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=132",
        "text": "Apollo 1 was supposed to be a test flight in low-Earth orbit. Instead the command module was consumed by fire during a rehearsal. It became the first time NASA had to conduct an investigation of a fatal accident. It would not be the last.\nNor would it be the last time a grandstanding politician, in this case Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Mondale,\n\n\n\n took cheap shots at the space agency rather than study the available facts. In May 1967 NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n had to remind senators: \u201cIt is a hard fact of life in this kind of research and development that success cannot be achieved without a certain amount of experimentation in design to find the limits that can be safely reached.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nAfter a thorough investigation, NASA identified the causes, among them: \u201ca sealed cabin, pressurized with a high-pressure oxygen atmosphere\u201d; extensive \u201ccombustible material in the cabin\u201d; \u201cvulnerable\u201d wiring and plumbing; and \u201cinadequate provisions\u201d for rescue or escape. A review board observed that \u201cestablished requirements were not followed with regard to the pre-test constraints list.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Apollo 1 crew, from left, Edward H. White II, Virgil I. \"Gus\" Grissom, and Roger B. Chaffee.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Johnson Space Center/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNASA and its contractors took those lessons to heart and revised the spacecraft design. Most important, they rededicated themselves to following protocols strictly. The lessons of Apollo 1 made possible the ultimate success of the Apollo project\u2014putting men on the moon, starting with Apollo 11 in 1969, and saving three astronauts in the 1970 Apollo 13 emergency.\n\n\nBut NASA\u2019s culture of uncompromising engineering excellence faded after the final Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Lack of presidential leadership, budget cuts and national malaise all contributed to the culture that led to the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia space shuttle disasters.\nThe Columbia Accident Investigation Board reported that the agency had developed a habit it called \u201cthe normalization of deviance.\u201d Instead of the intolerant, rigid engineering-management culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA\u2019s leaders became complacent. \nNow, when NASA no longer sends humans into space, one has to worry about how they will handle safety in the new age of commercial space transportation. The Apollo era is long gone, the shuttles are grounded, and NASA is struggling to find a way to send astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond.\nBut great hopes and great plans are still part of the American space enterprise. \u201cWe stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space,\u201d President Trump said in his inaugural address. The sacrifice of Grissom, White, Chaffee and the other lost spacefarers reminds us that our human migration off the planet will always require hard work and readiness to take great risks.\nMr. Dinerman writes on space and national security. The disaster 50 years ago helped NASA get to the moon. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Need Our Private Space (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1263",
        "date": "2018-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-our-private-space-1519949961?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=100",
        "text": "This reaction seems to stem from a misreading of the Trump administration\u2019s intentions. The new policy in no way suggests that America will abandon low Earth orbit to go back to the moon. Instead, it suggests that the administration is preparing for the next stage of space exploration. Just as the end of the space shuttle program heralded the beginning of private spaceflight, the end of the old space station will usher in the era of the commercial development of low Earth orbit. \n\n\n\n\nApart from reforming operation of the ISS, how would commercializing low Earth orbit work? At least three companies\u2014Bigelow Aerospace, Axiom Space, and NanoRacks\u2014have plans to deploy private space stations by the early 2020s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bigelow\n\n\n\n already has worked with NASA by attaching a small-scale prototype of its inflatable space station module to the ISS.\n\n\nThe aim would be to develop commercial markets for these new private space stations to ensure their independence. They could be serviced by commercial spaceships such as the Boeing Starliner and the SpaceX Dragon at a much lower cost than NASA currently pays to maintain the International Space Station. Private companies such as Bigelow are as enthusiastic about the privatization plan as politicians are angry.\nThe International Space Station, meanwhile, may remain operational only until 2024. In theory, the orbiting laboratory could keep flying until about 2028, before radiation and micrometeorites wear it down. If the international partners cannot agree to a four-year extension without the U.S., it will have to retire sooner.\nThe Trump administration should be applauded for starting the transition from a government-owned space station to the era of commercial space facilities. The process would be necessary even if money were not needed to take Americans back to the moon.\nAmerica should not abandon low Earth orbit. But that goal cannot be fulfilled by clinging to the International Space Station indefinitely. It can only be accomplished by commercial space stations, freeing NASA to lead the great push to the moon, to Mars\u2014and beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Whittington\n\n\n\n is a writer in Houston. Trump is setting the stage for commerce in low Earth orbit. ",
        "author": "Mark R. Whittington"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Case Against Space Tourism (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1264",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-spacex-bezos-musk-galactic-branson-tourism-space-11626968962?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=5",
        "text": "The intrepid astro-billionaires admit there are risks involved, but they don\u2019t dwell on them. So far only Mr. Musk, whose company is widely admired by NASA insiders, has emphasized the risks. Speaking of his plans to send crews to Mars before the end of the decade, he said, \u201ca bunch of people will probably die in the beginning.\u201d Mr. Musk is right. Space travel is dangerous, and a question worth asking is: How many will die? \nThe last time there was talk about sending an ordinary person into space, NASA was doing the talking. In 1985\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe\n\n\n\n beat out more than 11,000 other applicants to win a seat on the space shuttle Challenger. Almost overnight, she became a national celebrity: America\u2019s teacher in space.\n\n\n\n\nNASA had a journalist-in-space program ready to go, with applicants including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Cronkite\n\n\n\n and Norman Mailer. \u201cThey are probably taking a journalist on the principle that Earth could not but be improved having one fewer on it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Will\n\n\n\n quipped at the time.\n\n\nWhen reporters asked McAuliffe whether she was nervous about rocketing into orbit, she repeated what she had been told: that the shuttle was as safe as a passenger jet. In fact, like today\u2019s Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic vehicles, the space shuttle was an engineering experiment in progress.\nAfter several scrubs due to weather and technical glitches, Challenger blasted off on Jan. 28, 1986, one of the coldest mornings ever recorded at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rubber O-rings that sealed the shuttle\u2019s million-pound rocket boosters didn\u2019t work as well in cold weather\u2014a fact known to NASA\u2019s managers and engineers\u2014but nobody shared that information with the crew. \nThe O-rings failed, leading to an explosion over Cape Canaveral that millions of Americans will never forget. McAuliffe and her six crewmates didn\u2019t die instantly; Challenger\u2019s crew compartment, sheared from the rest of the shuttle, rose for another 20 seconds, then fell for more than two minutes before crashing into the Atlantic at 207 miles an hour. During those excruciating minutes the crew behaved heroically, trying to save the mission and one another. But the space shuttle, despite its early successes, was an experimental vehicle. So are today\u2019s commercial spaceships. \nYet wealthy hobbyists are lining up to ride in them. One bidder paid $28 million to join Mr. Bezos on a coming Blue Origin mission. Hundreds more have bid $200,000 to $250,000 for a ride on the next Virgin Galactic flight. One social-media influencer, whose seat will be paid for by her employer, the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, claims the near future of space travel will be about more than \u201csending engineers to space; we\u2019re going to be sending poets and communicators and artists and athletes.\u201d There is talk of in-flight ping-pong and champagne.\nThere is little talk of the Challenger or the Columbia, which burned up on re-entry in 2003, killing seven more astronauts. Both disasters led to investigations and reforms, and by the time the shuttle program ended in 2011, U.S. astronauts had helped build the International Space Station, the shuttle era\u2019s crowning achievement. All three of today\u2019s space-tourism firms plan to zoom clients to the space station and back no later than next year. \nIt is easy to imagine a near future in which these companies are moving quickly to outdo one another. Corporate concerns might soon match the pressures NASA executives faced when they chose to launch Challenger on the worst possible day. During a teleconference the night before Challenger\u2019s launch, engineers recommended waiting for warmer weather. One boss told a holdout to \u201ctake off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.\u201d The engineers caved in; the shuttle blew up. \nWhat happens if the billionaires\u2019 early triumphs lead to a similar sort of overconfidence and corner-cutting? Suppose one of their companies takes the lead in citizen spacefaring. How intense will the pressure on the others become? How soon might some harried executive say, \u201cSpaceX is launching today. How long do you want me to wait?\u201d That\u2019s a prescription for the kind of decision-making that gets astronauts\u2014or ordinary people in space suits\u2014killed. \n\u201cNobody expects the worst to happen,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Ciannilli,\n\n\n\n a NASA engineer who helped comb the Texas countryside for debris from Columbia, tells me. He now leads a lessons-learned program for the agency, giving talks in hope of preventing the next space disaster. \nMr. Ciannilli supports the new launches. \u201cNASA\u2019s not the only game in town anymore,\u201d he says. At the same time he urges companies to remember that spaceships are the most complex and dangerous machines ever built, and to take precautions to avoid the hubris that helped destroy Challenger and Columbia. Without constant diligence, he says, \u201cMurphy\u2019s Law is gonna get you.\u201d And when Murphy\u2019s Law s Professional astronauts have a full understanding of the risks. Civilians like Christa McAuliffe don\u2019t. ",
        "author": "Kevin Cook"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Case Against Space Tourism (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1265",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-spacex-bezos-musk-galactic-branson-tourism-space-11626968962?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=16",
        "text": "The intrepid astro-billionaires admit there are risks involved, but they don\u2019t dwell on them. So far only Mr. Musk, whose company is widely admired by NASA insiders, has emphasized the risks. Speaking of his plans to send crews to Mars before the end of the decade, he said, \u201ca bunch of people will probably die in the beginning.\u201d Mr. Musk is right. Space travel is dangerous, and a question worth asking is: How many will die? \nThe last time there was talk about sending an ordinary person into space, NASA was doing the talking. In 1985\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe\n\n\n\n beat out more than 11,000 other applicants to win a seat on the space shuttle Challenger. Almost overnight, she became a national celebrity: America\u2019s teacher in space.\nNASA had a journalist-in-space program ready to go, with applicants including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Cronkite\n\n\n\n and Norman Mailer. \u201cThey are probably taking a journalist on the principle that Earth could not but be improved having one fewer on it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Will\n\n\n\n quipped at the time.\n\n\nWhen reporters asked McAuliffe whether she was nervous about rocketing into orbit, she repeated what she had been told: that the shuttle was as safe as a passenger jet. In fact, like today\u2019s Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic vehicles, the space shuttle was an engineering experiment in progress.\nAfter several scrubs due to weather and technical glitches, Challenger blasted off on Jan. 28, 1986, one of the coldest mornings ever recorded at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rubber O-rings that sealed the shuttle\u2019s million-pound rocket boosters didn\u2019t work as well in cold weather\u2014a fact known to NASA\u2019s managers and engineers\u2014but nobody shared that information with the crew. \nThe O-rings failed, leading to an explosion over Cape Canaveral that millions of Americans will never forget. McAuliffe and her six crewmates didn\u2019t die instantly; Challenger\u2019s crew compartment, sheared from the rest of the shuttle, rose for another 20 seconds, then fell for more than two minutes before crashing into the Atlantic at 207 miles an hour. During those excruciating minutes the crew behaved heroically, trying to save the mission and one another. But the space shuttle, despite its early successes, was an experimental vehicle. So are today\u2019s commercial spaceships. \nYet wealthy hobbyists are lining up to ride in them. One bidder paid $28 million to join Mr. Bezos on a coming Blue Origin mission. Hundreds more have bid $200,000 to $250,000 for a ride on the next Virgin Galactic flight. One social-media influencer, whose seat will be paid for by her employer, the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, claims the near future of space travel will be about more than \u201csending engineers to space; we\u2019re going to be sending poets and communicators and artists and athletes.\u201d There is talk of in-flight ping-pong and champagne.\nThere is little talk of the Challenger or the Columbia, which burned up on re-entry in 2003, killing seven more astronauts. Both disasters led to investigations and reforms, and by the time the shuttle program ended in 2011, U.S. astronauts had helped build the International Space Station, the shuttle era\u2019s crowning achievement. All three of today\u2019s space-tourism firms plan to zoom clients to the space station and back no later than next year. \nIt is easy to imagine a near future in which these companies are moving quickly to outdo one another. Corporate concerns might soon match the pressures NASA executives faced when they chose to launch Challenger on the worst possible day. During a teleconference the night before Challenger\u2019s launch, engineers recommended waiting for warmer weather. One boss told a holdout to \u201ctake off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.\u201d The engineers caved in; the shuttle blew up. \nWhat happens if the billionaires\u2019 early triumphs lead to a similar sort of overconfidence and corner-cutting? Suppose one of their companies takes the lead in citizen spacefaring. How intense will the pressure on the others become? How soon might some harried executive say, \u201cSpaceX is launching today. How long do you want me to wait?\u201d That\u2019s a prescription for the kind of decision-making that gets astronauts\u2014or ordinary people in space suits\u2014killed. \n\u201cNobody expects the worst to happen,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Ciannilli,\n\n\n\n a NASA engineer who helped comb the Texas countryside for debris from Columbia, tells me. He now leads a lessons-learned program for the agency, giving talks in hope of preventing the next space disaster. \nMr. Ciannilli supports the new launches. \u201cNASA\u2019s not the only game in town anymore,\u201d he says. At the same time he urges companies to remember that spaceships are the most complex and dangerous machines ever built, and to take precautions to avoid the hubris that helped destroy Challenger and Columbia. Without constant diligence, he says, \u201cMurphy\u2019s Law is gonna get you.\u201d And when Murphy\u2019s Law strik Professional astronauts have a full understanding of the risks. Civilians like Christa McAuliffe don\u2019t. ",
        "author": "Kevin Cook"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Case Against Space Tourism (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1266",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-spacex-bezos-musk-galactic-branson-tourism-space-11626968962?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=18",
        "text": "The intrepid astro-billionaires admit there are risks involved, but they don\u2019t dwell on them. So far only Mr. Musk, whose company is widely admired by NASA insiders, has emphasized the risks. Speaking of his plans to send crews to Mars before the end of the decade, he said, \u201ca bunch of people will probably die in the beginning.\u201d Mr. Musk is right. Space travel is dangerous, and a question worth asking is: How many will die? \nThe last time there was talk about sending an ordinary person into space, NASA was doing the talking. In 1985\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe\n\n\n\n beat out more than 11,000 other applicants to win a seat on the space shuttle Challenger. Almost overnight, she became a national celebrity: America\u2019s teacher in space.\n\n\n\n\nNASA had a journalist-in-space program ready to go, with applicants including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Cronkite\n\n\n\n and Norman Mailer. \u201cThey are probably taking a journalist on the principle that Earth could not but be improved having one fewer on it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Will\n\n\n\n quipped at the time.\n\n\nWhen reporters asked McAuliffe whether she was nervous about rocketing into orbit, she repeated what she had been told: that the shuttle was as safe as a passenger jet. In fact, like today\u2019s Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic vehicles, the space shuttle was an engineering experiment in progress.\nAfter several scrubs due to weather and technical glitches, Challenger blasted off on Jan. 28, 1986, one of the coldest mornings ever recorded at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rubber O-rings that sealed the shuttle\u2019s million-pound rocket boosters didn\u2019t work as well in cold weather\u2014a fact known to NASA\u2019s managers and engineers\u2014but nobody shared that information with the crew. \nThe O-rings failed, leading to an explosion over Cape Canaveral that millions of Americans will never forget. McAuliffe and her six crewmates didn\u2019t die instantly; Challenger\u2019s crew compartment, sheared from the rest of the shuttle, rose for another 20 seconds, then fell for more than two minutes before crashing into the Atlantic at 207 miles an hour. During those excruciating minutes the crew behaved heroically, trying to save the mission and one another. But the space shuttle, despite its early successes, was an experimental vehicle. So are today\u2019s commercial spaceships. \nYet wealthy hobbyists are lining up to ride in them. One bidder paid $28 million to join Mr. Bezos on a coming Blue Origin mission. Hundreds more have bid $200,000 to $250,000 for a ride on the next Virgin Galactic flight. One social-media influencer, whose seat will be paid for by her employer, the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, claims the near future of space travel will be about more than \u201csending engineers to space; we\u2019re going to be sending poets and communicators and artists and athletes.\u201d There is talk of in-flight ping-pong and champagne.\nThere is little talk of the Challenger or the Columbia, which burned up on re-entry in 2003, killing seven more astronauts. Both disasters led to investigations and reforms, and by the time the shuttle program ended in 2011, U.S. astronauts had helped build the International Space Station, the shuttle era\u2019s crowning achievement. All three of today\u2019s space-tourism firms plan to zoom clients to the space station and back no later than next year. \nIt is easy to imagine a near future in which these companies are moving quickly to outdo one another. Corporate concerns might soon match the pressures NASA executives faced when they chose to launch Challenger on the worst possible day. During a teleconference the night before Challenger\u2019s launch, engineers recommended waiting for warmer weather. One boss told a holdout to \u201ctake off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.\u201d The engineers caved in; the shuttle blew up. \nWhat happens if the billionaires\u2019 early triumphs lead to a similar sort of overconfidence and corner-cutting? Suppose one of their companies takes the lead in citizen spacefaring. How intense will the pressure on the others become? How soon might some harried executive say, \u201cSpaceX is launching today. How long do you want me to wait?\u201d That\u2019s a prescription for the kind of decision-making that gets astronauts\u2014or ordinary people in space suits\u2014killed. \n\u201cNobody expects the worst to happen,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Ciannilli,\n\n\n\n a NASA engineer who helped comb the Texas countryside for debris from Columbia, tells me. He now leads a lessons-learned program for the agency, giving talks in hope of preventing the next space disaster. \nMr. Ciannilli supports the new launches. \u201cNASA\u2019s not the only game in town anymore,\u201d he says. At the same time he urges companies to remember that spaceships are the most complex and dangerous machines ever built, and to take precautions to avoid the hubris that helped destroy Challenger and Columbia. Without constant diligence, he says, \u201cMurphy\u2019s Law is gonna get you.\u201d And when Murphy\u2019s Law strikes again, its unlucky victims should be professional astronauts with a full understanding of the risks. \nMr. Cook is author of \u201cThe Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and NASA\u2019s Challenger Disaster.\u201d Professional astronauts have a full understanding of the risks. Civilians like Christa McAuliffe don\u2019t. ",
        "author": "Kevin Cook"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Case Against Space Tourism (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1267",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-spacex-bezos-musk-galactic-branson-tourism-space-11626968962?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=26",
        "text": "The intrepid astro-billionaires admit there are risks involved, but they don\u2019t dwell on them. So far only Mr. Musk, whose company is widely admired by NASA insiders, has emphasized the risks. Speaking of his plans to send crews to Mars before the end of the decade, he said, \u201ca bunch of people will probably die in the beginning.\u201d Mr. Musk is right. Space travel is dangerous, and a question worth asking is: How many will die? \nThe last time there was talk about sending an ordinary person into space, NASA was doing the talking. In 1985\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe\n\n\n\n beat out more than 11,000 other applicants to win a seat on the space shuttle Challenger. Almost overnight, she became a national celebrity: America\u2019s teacher in space.\nNASA had a journalist-in-space program ready to go, with applicants including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Cronkite\n\n\n\n and Norman Mailer. \u201cThey are probably taking a journalist on the principle that Earth could not but be improved having one fewer on it,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Will\n\n\n\n quipped at the time.\n\n\nWhen reporters asked McAuliffe whether she was nervous about rocketing into orbit, she repeated what she had been told: that the shuttle was as safe as a passenger jet. In fact, like today\u2019s Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic vehicles, the space shuttle was an engineering experiment in progress.\nAfter several scrubs due to weather and technical glitches, Challenger blasted off on Jan. 28, 1986, one of the coldest mornings ever recorded at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The rubber O-rings that sealed the shuttle\u2019s million-pound rocket boosters didn\u2019t work as well in cold weather\u2014a fact known to NASA\u2019s managers and engineers\u2014but nobody shared that information with the crew. \nThe O-rings failed, leading to an explosion over Cape Canaveral that millions of Americans will never forget. McAuliffe and her six crewmates didn\u2019t die instantly; Challenger\u2019s crew compartment, sheared from the rest of the shuttle, rose for another 20 seconds, then fell for more than two minutes before crashing into the Atlantic at 207 miles an hour. During those excruciating minutes the crew behaved heroically, trying to save the mission and one another. But the space shuttle, despite its early successes, was an experimental vehicle. So are today\u2019s commercial spaceships. \nYet wealthy hobbyists are lining up to ride in them. One bidder paid $28 million to join Mr. Bezos on a coming Blue Origin mission. Hundreds more have bid $200,000 to $250,000 for a ride on the next Virgin Galactic flight. One social-media influencer, whose seat will be paid for by her employer, the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences, claims the near future of space travel will be about more than \u201csending engineers to space; we\u2019re going to be sending poets and communicators and artists and athletes.\u201d There is talk of in-flight ping-pong and champagne.\nThere is little talk of the Challenger or the Columbia, which burned up on re-entry in 2003, killing seven more astronauts. Both disasters led to investigations and reforms, and by the time the shuttle program ended in 2011, U.S. astronauts had helped build the International Space Station, the shuttle era\u2019s crowning achievement. All three of today\u2019s space-tourism firms plan to zoom clients to the space station and back no later than next year. \nIt is easy to imagine a near future in which these companies are moving quickly to outdo one another. Corporate concerns might soon match the pressures NASA executives faced when they chose to launch Challenger on the worst possible day. During a teleconference the night before Challenger\u2019s launch, engineers recommended waiting for warmer weather. One boss told a holdout to \u201ctake off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.\u201d The engineers caved in; the shuttle blew up. \nWhat happens if the billionaires\u2019 early triumphs lead to a similar sort of overconfidence and corner-cutting? Suppose one of their companies takes the lead in citizen spacefaring. How intense will the pressure on the others become? How soon might some harried executive say, \u201cSpaceX is launching today. How long do you want me to wait?\u201d That\u2019s a prescription for the kind of decision-making that gets astronauts\u2014or ordinary people in space suits\u2014killed. \n\u201cNobody expects the worst to happen,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Ciannilli,\n\n\n\n a NASA engineer who helped comb the Texas countryside for debris from Columbia, tells me. He now leads a lessons-learned program for the agency, giving talks in hope of preventing the next space disaster. \nMr. Ciannilli supports the new launches. \u201cNASA\u2019s not the only game in town anymore,\u201d he says. At the same time he urges companies to remember that spaceships are the most complex and dangerous machines ever built, and to take precautions to avoid the hubris that helped destroy Challenger and Columbia. Without constant diligence, he says, \u201cMurphy\u2019s Law is gonna get you.\u201d And when Murphy\u2019s Law strik Professional astronauts have a full understanding of the risks. Civilians like Christa McAuliffe don\u2019t. ",
        "author": "Kevin Cook"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fly Me to the Moon, Mr. Bridenstine (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1268",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fly-me-to-the-moon-mr-bridenstine-1525302618?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=76",
        "text": "The George W. Bush-era Constellation Program would have sent American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, but President Obama scotched it in 2010 in favor of a mission to Mars. Now NASA has received orders from President Trump to reverse course again\u2014drop Mars and focus on the moon. \nIn some ways the prospects for a successful lunar mission look better than they have in decades. NASA now has several significant advantages that it previously lacked. A growing commercial space sector stands eager to work with the government on a moon shot, and numerous American allies\u2014including Germany, India, Japan and Israel\u2014are embarked on efforts to land robots on the lunar surface. \n\n\n\n\nSoon after Mr. Obama canceled Constellation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study suggesting that re-establishing a presence on the moon first could make the eventual exploration of Mars much more feasible. The dark craters at the lunar poles potentially contain billions of tons of ice, which, believe it or not, researchers say can be refined into rocket fuel. One day soon an American spaceship en route to Mars could swing by the moon to refuel. \n\n\nMr. Bridenstine may be asked to do what hasn\u2019t been done since the Apollo program was shuttered in the early \u201970s, but the Trump administration is unlikely to give him Apollo-level budgets. He will also have to fulfill NASA\u2019s other mandates, including planetary exploration and Earth science. The latter featured prominently in his confirmation hearings. Mr. Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma, expressed skepticism of climate change during his time in Congress. Expect an annual replay of the nomination drama when Congress debates funding for the space agency.\nIf Mr. Bridenstine works hard and smart, and has a measure of luck, he will hasten the day when American astronauts return to explore the moon\u2019s secrets. The stakes are high. There are no guarantees that Mr. Trump\u2019s successor, whomever that may be, will be as open to the idea. This opportunity may not come again soon. \nNo pressure, Mr. Bridenstine.\nMr. Whittington is author of \u201cWhy is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?\u201d and \u201cThe Moon, Mars and Beyond.\u201d Can NASA\u2019s new chief get there without Apollo-level budgets? ",
        "author": "Mark R. Whittington"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fly Me to the Moon, Mr. Bridenstine (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1269",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fly-me-to-the-moon-mr-bridenstine-1525302618?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=68",
        "text": "The George W. Bush-era Constellation Program would have sent American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, but President Obama scotched it in 2010 in favor of a mission to Mars. Now NASA has received orders from President Trump to reverse course again\u2014drop Mars and focus on the moon. \nIn some ways the prospects for a successful lunar mission look better than they have in decades. NASA now has several significant advantages that it previously lacked. A growing commercial space sector stands eager to work with the government on a moon shot, and numerous American allies\u2014including Germany, India, Japan and Israel\u2014are embarked on efforts to land robots on the lunar surface. \nSoon after Mr. Obama canceled Constellation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study suggesting that re-establishing a presence on the moon first could make the eventual exploration of Mars much more feasible. The dark craters at the lunar poles potentially contain billions of tons of ice, which, believe it or not, researchers say can be refined into rocket fuel. One day soon an American spaceship en route to Mars could swing by the moon to refuel. \n\n\nMr. Bridenstine may be asked to do what hasn\u2019t been done since the Apollo program was shuttered in the early \u201970s, but the Trump administration is unlikely to give him Apollo-level budgets. He will also have to fulfill NASA\u2019s other mandates, including planetary exploration and Earth science. The latter featured prominently in his confirmation hearings. Mr. Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma, expressed skepticism of climate change during his time in Congress. Expect an annual replay of the nomination drama when Congress debates funding for the space agency.\nIf Mr. Bridenstine works hard and smart, and has a measure of luck, he will hasten the day when American astronauts return to explore the moon\u2019s secrets. The stakes are high. There are no guarantees that Mr. Trump\u2019s successor, whomever that may be, will be as open to the idea. This opportunity may not come again soon. \nNo pressure, Mr. Bridenstine.\nMr. Whittington is author of \u201cWhy is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?\u201d and \u201cThe Moon, Mars and Beyond.\u201d Can NASA\u2019s new chief get there without Apollo-level budgets? ",
        "author": "Mark R. Whittington"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fly Me to the Moon, Mr. Bridenstine (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1270",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fly-me-to-the-moon-mr-bridenstine-1525302618?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=96",
        "text": "The George W. Bush-era Constellation Program would have sent American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, but President Obama scotched it in 2010 in favor of a mission to Mars. Now NASA has received orders from President Trump to reverse course again\u2014drop Mars and focus on the moon. \nIn some ways the prospects for a successful lunar mission look better than they have in decades. NASA now has several significant advantages that it previously lacked. A growing commercial space sector stands eager to work with the government on a moon shot, and numerous American allies\u2014including Germany, India, Japan and Israel\u2014are embarked on efforts to land robots on the lunar surface. \n\n\n\n\nSoon after Mr. Obama canceled Constellation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study suggesting that re-establishing a presence on the moon first could make the eventual exploration of Mars much more feasible. The dark craters at the lunar poles potentially contain billions of tons of ice, which, believe it or not, researchers say can be refined into rocket fuel. One day soon an American spaceship en route to Mars could swing by the moon to refuel. \n\n\nMr. Bridenstine may be asked to do what hasn\u2019t been done since the Apollo program was shuttered in the early \u201970s, but the Trump administration is unlikely to give him Apollo-level budgets. He will also have to fulfill NASA\u2019s other mandates, including planetary exploration and Earth science. The latter featured prominently in his confirmation hearings. Mr. Bridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma, expressed skepticism of climate change during his time in Congress. Expect an annual replay of the nomination drama when Congress debates funding for the space agency.\nIf Mr. Bridenstine works hard and smart, and has a measure of luck, he will hasten the day when American astronauts return to explore the moon\u2019s secrets. The stakes are high. There are no guarantees that Mr. Trump\u2019s successor, whomever that may be, will be as open to the idea. This opportunity may not come again soon. \nNo pressure, Mr. Bridenstine.\nMr. Whittington is author of \u201cWhy is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?\u201d and \u201cThe Moon, Mars and Beyond.\u201d Can NASA\u2019s new chief get there without Apollo-level budgets? ",
        "author": "Mark R. Whittington"
    },
    {
        "title": "Let\u2019s Make America Too Prosperous to Hate (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1271",
        "date": "2020-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lets-make-america-too-prosperous-to-hate-11591311131?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=44",
        "text": "Then the Chinese Communist Party brought the economy to a screeching pandemic halt. Beijing hid the truth about human-to-human transmission and community spread of the novel coronavirus, with help from a politically compromised World Health Organization. China halted domestic travel in January to contain the virus but kept allowing Chinese nationals to travel internationally through the end of March, spreading the virus around the globe. \nMore than 100,000 Americans have died. More than 40 million are out of work, and those in inner cities and minority communities have borne much of the brunt. What is perhaps most stunning about this biological Chernobyl is the passivity with which many Americans have responded. Rather than an entire nation rising up in loud protest against China\u2019s actions\u2014or its snuffing out of freedom in Hong Kong\u2014arsonists, looters, anarchists and hate merchants are savaging cities across America under the false flag of social justice.\n\n\nIt\u2019s true that Minneapolis police officers, in extinguishing the life of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Floyd,\n\n\n\n dishonored the uniform and tore the fabric of American society. Those responsible should swiftly face trial and, if convicted, suffer the full consequences of their actions. It\u2019s also true that this is the time to be opening businesses, not looting and burning them. Those who have chosen senseless violent rage over righteous peaceful indignation should also feel the full force of justice.\nMeantime, if we have learned anything from the pandemic, it is something the president has understood for more than three decades: To be both prosperous and secure, America must bring its manufacturing and supply chains home, particularly from countries that mean to do us harm. That\u2019s how we become too prosperous to hate.\nIt\u2019s also why the most important event this past week wasn\u2019t the burning and looting of America\u2019s cities. It was Saturday\u2019s launch of the Falcon 9 rocket, the first manned U.S. space mission in almost a decade. The SpaceX launch is an example of the technological and industrial revolution America needs\u2014of investment in America working for American workers.\nThe new \u201cMade in the USA frontier\u201d will feature a gleaming, high-tech factory floor. American workers will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 3-D printers, best-in-class robots and all the other tools of the digital age. This will be a factory engaged in high-value-added manufacturing guided by artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. It will deliver unparalleled productivity and the real wage gains and rising incomes that come with it. \nIf the protesters of today don\u2019t find gainful employment in America\u2019s high-tech factories of tomorrow, the 21st-century American Dream will turn into a nightmare of racial division and class warfare. In that future, we will fall prey to an authoritarian and increasingly powerful predator intent on world domination. \nIt is time for the American people to understand the broader international environment and strategic competition that threatens to erode their freedoms and destroy upward mobility. Together, we must succeed in becoming too prosperous to hate. With such success, the strength of our democracy and economy will remain beacons to the world.\nMr. Navarro is an assistant to the president and director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Wonder Land: Coronavirus lesson #1: The U.S. is willing to shut down for three months, but that\u2019s about it. Images: Getty/Twitter/Lawler50/via Reuters Composite: Mark Kelly Lessons from coronavirus, last week\u2019s space launch and this week\u2019s protests and violent disorder. ",
        "author": "Peter Navarro"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u2018Small Step\u2019 Brought the Moon Down to Earth (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1272",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/neil-armstrongs-small-step-brought-the-moon-down-to-earth-11563573775?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=58",
        "text": "Moonrise, the most elegant ceremony in the heavens, is the monthly ancient dream. Here I am, the moon announces, the Expected One. \nThe coyotes went silent after their first outburst. Fireflies blinked in the humid summer night. Mosquitoes came to us to claim their drop of blood.\n\n\n\n\nThen the clouds cleared away, except for the crocodile\u2019s head. And the full moon, with impassive serenity, ascended, like a great communion wafer, into the cloud crocodile\u2019s jaws. \n\n\nThe moon for eons was a distant, mystic object and a metaphor\u2014a favorite of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shakespeare\u2019s\n\n\n\n , as in \u201cA Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u201d or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cleopatra\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cvisiting moon.\u201d It was the force that caused the tides to surge and heave, and the Earth to bulge, like a child\u2019s iridescent soap bubble drawn swiftly through the air; it was the mysterious presence that caused lunatics in psychiatric wards\u2014the \u201cmoon mad\u201d\u2014to grow crazier, so that nurses worked double shifts. The moon was Earth\u2019s calendar and measured out months as history cycled along through time. Time is, in part, the moon\u2019s invention. Its enigmatic brilliance and regularity called forth a pagan reverence. The moon was primordial and mysterious\u2014intimate to women\u2019s physiology and their life force. It became a romantic and a sentimental totem, the objective correlative of love. \nBut after men landed on the moon 50 years ago Saturday, the metaphysics seemed to change. Even the moon\u2019s gender seemed to change. \u201cOne small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n said as his space boots pressed down into the powder. \nMaybe that moment signaled the old order\u2019s last unambiguous moment of glory. People didn\u2019t think it odd in those days that virtually everyone involved\u2014at Mission Control in Houston, at the launch site near Cape Canaveral, Fla. and where the rocket was built in Huntsville, Ala.\u2014was white, male and American. Life magazine followed the astronauts minutely, at work and at home. The men wore buzz cuts and short-sleeve shirts and drove Mustangs or Corvettes, and their wives had beehive hairdos. The moon program was driven by an immense cultural self-confidence, now vanished.\nWith the lunar module\u2019s landing half a century ago, the moon that had earlier been poetic and mythic and religious entered into a different dimension altogether\u2014that of the strategic, the military, the geopolitical, the merely technological. Today interest in the moon may be mostly commercial. \nThe race to the moon started with the Soviets\u2019 orbiting of Sputnik in 1957. Control of space, from which nuclear weapons might be launched, became an urgent new aspect of the Cold War. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy\u2019s\n\n\n\n promise to send a man to the moon by the end of the 1960s reasserted the idea of space as a setting for romance and adventure.\nIn his inaugural address, JFK said we will go anywhere, \u201cpay any price.\u201d Anywhere included the moon. The New Frontier had a new frontier. The space program represented the clean and heroic and virtuous exercise of American wealth and power aiming at the stars. Americans called their rockets Apollo, after the Greek god of such good things as healing and poetry and sun and light and knowledge. The war in Vietnam, pursued simultaneously, was a sort of anti-moonshot\u2014unclean, unheroic and unvirtuous, a descent into humiliation and quagmire.\nThe Apollo program became expensive (the mathematician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Norbert Wiener\n\n\n\n called it the \u201cmoondoggle\u201d). It cost $150 billion in today\u2019s dollars, which was still a good deal less than the price of the war. America would lose in Vietnam\u2014that was clear by the summer of \u201969. It was some consolation to have the countervailing victory in space. The moon mission was a magnificent feat of applied science, technology, skill, daring, discipline, ingenuity, focus and political will\u2014the final manifestation, it may be, of an American near-unanimity that had prevailed from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and made possible the winning of World War II. \nYet the final achievement sabotaged the old mystique. The Victorian critic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Bagehot\n\n\n\n said of the British monarchy, \u201cWe must not let daylight in upon magic.\u201d The result is apt to be banal and debunking\u2014the effect Toto achieved by drawing aside the curtain and revealing the Wizard of Oz as he worked his thunder machine. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, at the moment they made history, at the same time brought on a curious bathos. They let daylight in upon the magic of the moon. They walked about for a little while on the pockmarked desolation, a lifeless moonscape that, seen up close on black-and-white TV sets, had none of the formerly imagined charm or mystery. The astronauts might as well have set down in the ugliest patch of Utah. \nBut no doubt the moon can be improved on. Fifty years on, it is left to entrepreneurial imaginations, like those of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Bezos\n\n\n\n or Richard Branson, to develop the commercial possibilities of space tourism: luxury hotels in zero gravity, for example. An expensive chocolate will hover above your pillow. \nMr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty Apollo 11 was the apogee of an era of dreams and the start of an age of division and small-mindedness. ",
        "author": "Lance Morrow"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Space Treaty to Stop the Sky From Falling (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1273",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-space-treaty-to-stop-debris-antisatellite-junk-orbit-kessler-syndrome-russia-weapon-11637074865?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=17",
        "text": "Orbital debris has been a problem since the dawn of the Space Age. The first piece was the rocket body from Sputnik I in 1957. There are at least half a million pieces the size of a marble, and many millions more too small to track. Because objects in orbit travel at 17,500 miles an hour, even tiny fragments can destroy space assets upon impact. \nSpace junk poses dangers to human life and well-being. Also on Monday, astronauts aboard the International Space Station had to implement emergency protocols due to close-passing debris\u2014whether from Russia\u2019s test or another source, we can\u2019t be sure. Celestial collisions create a vicious circle: More debris causes more collisions causes more debris. This feedback loop, which space scientists call Kessler syndrome, threatens all orbital activities.\n\n\n\n\nAnother major concern is economic damage. Morgan Stanley estimates the space economy, currently valued at about $400 billion a year, could grow to $1 trillion by 2040. Much of that activity, especially satellite internet, relies on low-Earth orbital integrity. The private sector won\u2019t bear the large upfront costs of placing valuable hardware in orbit if celestial trash makes satellite operations too risky.\n\n\nIt\u2019s time for the spacefaring nations to get serious about debris. Before we can discipline hostile actors, we need to wrestle with a subtler foe: bad incentives. The proliferation of debris is a classic tragedy of the commons. Specific orbital slots can be rationed, but orbit itself can\u2019t be owned. Governments bear little of the cost their debris creates for others. The predictable result: too much junk.\nWhile the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prevents governments from extending their jurisdiction into space, they retain authority over objects put into space\u2014including the right to destroy them. International law must change if we want to keep orbit usable.\nThere\u2019s no way forward but an explicit agreement among spacefaring nations, including America, China and Russia. Striking one is no small task. But the U.S. has a crucial advantage: unquestioned leadership in space capabilities. It should use that position, supplemented by diplomatic and economic pressure, to prevent other nations from making space a junk yard.\nA foundational principle of space law is that space \u201cshall be free for exploration and use by all States.\u201d That principle has no force if rogue nations can litter in orbit without consequence. The U.S. should make mitigating space debris a priority. This means leading the charge in curbing tests of antisatellite weapons.\nMr. Salter is an associate professor of economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, a research fellow with TTU\u2019s Free Market Institute, and a senior fellow with the Sound Money Project.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Bill McGurn and Mene Ukueberuwa. Images: Acton Institute/AP/AFP via Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly Debris in orbit poses dangers to human life and well-being. ",
        "author": "Alexander William Salter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Opens Outer Space for Business (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1274",
        "date": "2020-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-opens-outer-space-for-business-11587316780?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=44",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a manned moon mission in 2024, followed by a \u201csustained lunar presence.\u201d The U.S. National Space Council, led by Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence,\n\n\n\n has been quietly working on an international agreement known as the Artemis Accords, which would clarify the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and provide a solid basis for private enterprise to operate on the moon, Mars and beyond.\nThe Outer Space Treaty, to which the U.S. and all other major countries are parties, bars \u201cnational appropriation\u201d and sovereignty over the moon and other so-called celestial bodies, declaring that space activities \u201cshall be the province of all mankind.\u201d Some have read into that provision a prohibition on the private appropriation of resources. The executive order rejects that position: \u201cOuter space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons.\u201d\n\n\nRussia responded to Mr. Trump\u2019s move by objecting to \u201cattempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to actually seize territories of other planets.\u201d The Russian space program, still a source of national pride, has been falling behind those of the U.S., China and even Europe.\nThe Trump order also rejects the 1979 Moon Treaty, which was intended to supplant the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Treaty purports to ban private exploitation of space resources and mandate that any such activity take place under the supervision of an international authority with a rake-off going to Third World governments. President Carter initially supported the pact, but facing popular opposition, the Senate never took up ratification. Mr. Trump\u2019s statement specifically notes that only 17 of the 95 members of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space have ratified the Moon Treaty. None have a major space program.\nAs a follow up to the executive order, the administration has been quietly preparing the Artemis Accords, which it plans to present first to America\u2019s partners on the International Space Station\u2014Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia\u2014and later to other nations. Parties would \u201caffirm that the extraction and utilization of space resources does not constitute national appropriation under Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty.\u201d\nThat would enable NASA\u2019s planned moon base to proceed and protect private companies that hope to build and operate facilities there or elsewhere. It would ensure that the U.S. and other nations, as well as firms under their jurisdiction, can build settlements and commercial operations throughout the solar system.\nThere\u2019s a lot of wealth in space. A 79-foot-wide asteroid could hold 33.000 tons of extractable material, including $50 million worth of platinum. The 2-mile-wide asteroid 1986 DA could be worth $7 trillion. But that will require massive investment in new technology, and investors need assurance that they won\u2019t pour billions into capturing an asteroid or mining the moon only to be told the resulting product isn\u2019t theirs.\nIn some ways the administration\u2019s policy is a logical continuation of the Obama-era drive for space commercialization. In 2015 President Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which provides that \u201ca U.S. citizen engaged in the commercial recovery of an asteroid or space resource .\u00a0.\u00a0. shall be entitled to .\u00a0.\u00a0. possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s order ensures that international obligations will be supportive and not destructive of such efforts.\nOne important concept included in the Artemis Accords proposal is the idea that bases on celestial bodies will be surrounded by \u201csafety zones.\u201d The need to deconflict operations in places where multiple nations and companies build bases should be obvious. One knowledgeable source indicates that these zones will normally extend about 50 yards from any habitat or base.\nThe Trump White House and the National Space Council are extremely supportive of private enterprise in space. Other administrations going back to Reagan have paid lip service to this idea, but until now none have been willing to take on the legal and political obstacles. The administration has pushed hard for full funding of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs. But as Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX has shown, there\u2019s plenty of space out there for corporate activities, too. The executive order and the Artemis Accords together provide a basis for America\u2019s prosperous future in space and promise such a future for other spacefaring nations as well.\nMr. Dinerman writes about space and national security. Mr. Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, teaches and writes about space law. An executive order and a prospective international agreement aim to make celestial mining an attractive investment. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman and Glenn Harlan Reynolds"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Opens Outer Space for Business (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1275",
        "date": "2020-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-opens-outer-space-for-business-11587316780?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=46",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a manned moon mission in 2024, followed by a \u201csustained lunar presence.\u201d The U.S. National Space Council, led by Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence,\n\n\n\n has been quietly working on an international agreement known as the Artemis Accords, which would clarify the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and provide a solid basis for private enterprise to operate on the moon, Mars and beyond.\nThe Outer Space Treaty, to which the U.S. and all other major countries are parties, bars \u201cnational appropriation\u201d and sovereignty over the moon and other so-called celestial bodies, declaring that space activities \u201cshall be the province of all mankind.\u201d Some have read into that provision a prohibition on the private appropriation of resources. The executive order rejects that position: \u201cOuter space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons.\u201d\n\n\nRussia responded to Mr. Trump\u2019s move by objecting to \u201cattempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to actually seize territories of other planets.\u201d The Russian space program, still a source of national pride, has been falling behind those of the U.S., China and even Europe.\nThe Trump order also rejects the 1979 Moon Treaty, which was intended to supplant the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Treaty purports to ban private exploitation of space resources and mandate that any such activity take place under the supervision of an international authority with a rake-off going to Third World governments. President Carter initially supported the pact, but facing popular opposition, the Senate never took up ratification. Mr. Trump\u2019s statement specifically notes that only 17 of the 95 members of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space have ratified the Moon Treaty. None have a major space program.\nAs a follow up to the executive order, the administration has been quietly preparing the Artemis Accords, which it plans to present first to America\u2019s partners on the International Space Station\u2014Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia\u2014and later to other nations. Parties would \u201caffirm that the extraction and utilization of space resources does not constitute national appropriation under Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty.\u201d\nThat would enable NASA\u2019s planned moon base to proceed and protect private companies that hope to build and operate facilities there or elsewhere. It would ensure that the U.S. and other nations, as well as firms under their jurisdiction, can build settlements and commercial operations throughout the solar system.\nThere\u2019s a lot of wealth in space. A 79-foot-wide asteroid could hold 33.000 tons of extractable material, including $50 million worth of platinum. The 2-mile-wide asteroid 1986 DA could be worth $7 trillion. But that will require massive investment in new technology, and investors need assurance that they won\u2019t pour billions into capturing an asteroid or mining the moon only to be told the resulting product isn\u2019t theirs.\nIn some ways the administration\u2019s policy is a logical continuation of the Obama-era drive for space commercialization. In 2015 President Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which provides that \u201ca U.S. citizen engaged in the commercial recovery of an asteroid or space resource .\u00a0.\u00a0. shall be entitled to .\u00a0.\u00a0. possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s order ensures that international obligations will be supportive and not destructive of such efforts.\nOne important concept included in the Artemis Accords proposal is the idea that bases on celestial bodies will be surrounded by \u201csafety zones.\u201d The need to deconflict operations in places where multiple nations and companies build bases should be obvious. One knowledgeable source indicates that these zones will normally extend about 50 yards from any habitat or base.\nThe Trump White House and the National Space Council are extremely supportive of private enterprise in space. Other administrations going back to Reagan have paid lip service to this idea, but until now none have been willing to take on the legal and political obstacles. The administration has pushed hard for full funding of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs. But as Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX has shown, there\u2019s plenty of space out there for corporate activities, too. The executive order and the Artemis Accords together provide a basis for America\u2019s prosperous future in space and promise such a future for other spacefaring nations as well.\nMr. Dinerman writes about space and national security. Mr. Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, teaches and writes about space law. An executive order and a prospective international agreement aim to make celestial mining an attractive investment. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman and Glenn Harlan Reynolds"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Opens Outer Space for Business (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1276",
        "date": "2020-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-opens-outer-space-for-business-11587316780?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=56",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a manned moon mission in 2024, followed by a \u201csustained lunar presence.\u201d The U.S. National Space Council, led by Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence,\n\n\n\n has been quietly working on an international agreement known as the Artemis Accords, which would clarify the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and provide a solid basis for private enterprise to operate on the moon, Mars and beyond.\n\n\n\n\nThe Outer Space Treaty, to which the U.S. and all other major countries are parties, bars \u201cnational appropriation\u201d and sovereignty over the moon and other so-called celestial bodies, declaring that space activities \u201cshall be the province of all mankind.\u201d Some have read into that provision a prohibition on the private appropriation of resources. The executive order rejects that position: \u201cOuter space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons.\u201d\n\n\nRussia responded to Mr. Trump\u2019s move by objecting to \u201cattempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to actually seize territories of other planets.\u201d The Russian space program, still a source of national pride, has been falling behind those of the U.S., China and even Europe.\nThe Trump order also rejects the 1979 Moon Treaty, which was intended to supplant the Outer Space Treaty. The Moon Treaty purports to ban private exploitation of space resources and mandate that any such activity take place under the supervision of an international authority with a rake-off going to Third World governments. President Carter initially supported the pact, but facing popular opposition, the Senate never took up ratification. Mr. Trump\u2019s statement specifically notes that only 17 of the 95 members of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space have ratified the Moon Treaty. None have a major space program.\nAs a follow up to the executive order, the administration has been quietly preparing the Artemis Accords, which it plans to present first to America\u2019s partners on the International Space Station\u2014Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia\u2014and later to other nations. Parties would \u201caffirm that the extraction and utilization of space resources does not constitute national appropriation under Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty.\u201d\nThat would enable NASA\u2019s planned moon base to proceed and protect private companies that hope to build and operate facilities there or elsewhere. It would ensure that the U.S. and other nations, as well as firms under their jurisdiction, can build settlements and commercial operations throughout the solar system.\nThere\u2019s a lot of wealth in space. A 79-foot-wide asteroid could hold 33.000 tons of extractable material, including $50 million worth of platinum. The 2-mile-wide asteroid 1986 DA could be worth $7 trillion. But that will require massive investment in new technology, and investors need assurance that they won\u2019t pour billions into capturing an asteroid or mining the moon only to be told the resulting product isn\u2019t theirs.\nIn some ways the administration\u2019s policy is a logical continuation of the Obama-era drive for space commercialization. In 2015 President Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which provides that \u201ca U.S. citizen engaged in the commercial recovery of an asteroid or space resource .\u00a0.\u00a0. shall be entitled to .\u00a0.\u00a0. possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States.\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s order ensures that international obligations will be supportive and not destructive of such efforts.\nOne important concept included in the Artemis Accords proposal is the idea that bases on celestial bodies will be surrounded by \u201csafety zones.\u201d The need to deconflict operations in places where multiple nations and companies build bases should be obvious. One knowledgeable source indicates that these zones will normally extend about 50 yards from any habitat or base.\nThe Trump White House and the National Space Council are extremely supportive of private enterprise in space. Other administrations going back to Reagan have paid lip service to this idea, but until now none have been willing to take on the legal and political obstacles. The administration has pushed hard for full funding of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs. But as Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX has shown, there\u2019s plenty of space out there for corporate activities, too. The executive order and the Artemis Accords together provide a basis for America\u2019s prosperous future in space and promise such a future for other spacefaring nations as well.\nMr. Dinerman writes about space and national security. Mr. Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, teaches and writes about space law. An executive order and a prospective international agreement aim to make celestial mining an attractive investment. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman and Glenn Harlan Reynolds"
    },
    {
        "title": "Celebrate Columbus\u2019s Achievements (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1277",
        "date": "2021-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/columbus-achievements-history-explorers-objectivity-day-11633896366?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=20",
        "text": "I doubt my abilities will be so convincing on behalf of Columbus, who achieved great things and is worthy of being honored for them with a national holiday, but I must express what I know to be true. His incredible feats of exploration were due to individual qualities that Americans should find admirable, and once did in near unanimity. Holding historical figures to modern standards of morality is a method of antihistorical political control\u2014much like the pseudohistory I grew up being taught in the Soviet Union.\nMy earliest memories of my father are not of chess, but of his gift to me of a globe and our reading the stories of the great explorers together\u2014stories by authors like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stefan Zweig,\n\n\n\n not communist propagandists. So I was prepared to be critical when the Soviet history books portrayed these men as callow imperialists who exploited the natives the way their capitalist descendants exploited the proletariat. This also prepared me to hear the same tropes repeated by Western leftists today.\n\n\nThis caricature of Columbus as little more than a rapacious villain is as simplistic and wrongheaded as the version of him as a savior-hero who proved the world was round. As usual, reality is complex and doesn\u2019t provide easy, comfortable answers. \nIt could be said that Columbus\u2019s years of navigating the Spanish courts and courtiers was a greater feat than navigating the Atlantic, which hardly went as planned. He was driven but diplomatic, traits he employed in his dealings with indigenous communities of the Americas, where he and his men also committed atrocities in the name of holy conquest.\nAs I said, I\u2019m not here to praise the man but to celebrate his deeds. Columbus taught himself Latin to study ancient and medieval manuscripts for clues about the circumference of the globe and his prospective journeys. True, his calculations were wildly off, overestimating the size of Asia and underestimating the size of the globe. But he also knew that he had to make the mission sound easier, like any startup seeking venture capital. Columbus yearned to fulfill the prophecy of Seneca\u2019s Medea: \u201cAn age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed.\u201d And so he did, in four remarkable voyages that charted and changed the world.\nRevisionism has a vital role in history, as we discover new information and apply new insights to past events. There should be no place for whitewashing and jingoism in the service of a supposedly patriotic agenda\u2014or any agenda. We must teach the good and the bad of our leaders, our founders, our heroes and saints.\nOtherwise, myths take hold too easily, such as the Confederate \u201cLost Cause,\u201d left to fester like an open wound. Its infection has spread into the 21st century. There should be no honoring those who fought a war against the Union to preserve the evil institution of slavery\u2014which, critically, even some of its defenders at the time understood as evil.\nComparing American statues of Columbus to those of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert E. Lee\n\n\n\n fails this test of context. The call for objectivity applies also to those who would judge a 15th-century European who took outrageous risks and performed incredible feats of exploration to advance modern civilization. Humanism and the Enlightenment were still two centuries away. The year of Columbus\u2019s iconic voyage, 1492, was also the year Spain expelled many Jews and subjected others to the horrors of the Inquisition.\nThe line of ambitious explorers runs through Columbus to the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk.\n\n\n\n Their accomplishments should not blind us to their flaws, but neither should their flaws blind us to their achievements. Honoring great deeds and risk-takers who defy conventional wisdom can inspire others to follow in their footsteps, be it into uncharted waters or outer space, and we sorely need such daring today.\nWe too, are complex. We are capable of judgment and reason, unlike the \u201cbrutish beasts\u201d invoked by Marc Antony. History is not a zero-sum game. We can honor indigenous people and all they represent\u2014and all they lost\u2014without erasing the greatest achievements of the Age of Discovery. I will be celebrating Columbus Day, and I hope you\u2019ll join me.\nMr. Kasparov is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and the Human Rights Foundation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Wonder Land: Biden has said, \u2018I am a capitalist\u2019 and \u2018I am not a socialist.\u2019 Here's why both statements are false. Images: Image Of Sport/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly We should acknowledge his flaws, but his treatment by the left is reminiscent of communist propaganda. ",
        "author": "Garry Kasparov"
    },
    {
        "title": "Celebrate Columbus\u2019s Achievements (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1278",
        "date": "2021-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/columbus-achievements-history-explorers-objectivity-day-11633896366?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=20",
        "text": "I doubt my abilities will be so convincing on behalf of Columbus, who achieved great things and is worthy of being honored for them with a national holiday, but I must express what I know to be true. His incredible feats of exploration were due to individual qualities that Americans should find admirable, and once did in near unanimity. Holding historical figures to modern standards of morality is a method of antihistorical political control\u2014much like the pseudohistory I grew up being taught in the Soviet Union.\n\n\n\n\nMy earliest memories of my father are not of chess, but of his gift to me of a globe and our reading the stories of the great explorers together\u2014stories by authors like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stefan Zweig,\n\n\n\n not communist propagandists. So I was prepared to be critical when the Soviet history books portrayed these men as callow imperialists who exploited the natives the way their capitalist descendants exploited the proletariat. This also prepared me to hear the same tropes repeated by Western leftists today.\n\n\nThis caricature of Columbus as little more than a rapacious villain is as simplistic and wrongheaded as the version of him as a savior-hero who proved the world was round. As usual, reality is complex and doesn\u2019t provide easy, comfortable answers. \nIt could be said that Columbus\u2019s years of navigating the Spanish courts and courtiers was a greater feat than navigating the Atlantic, which hardly went as planned. He was driven but diplomatic, traits he employed in his dealings with indigenous communities of the Americas, where he and his men also committed atrocities in the name of holy conquest.\nAs I said, I\u2019m not here to praise the man but to celebrate his deeds. Columbus taught himself Latin to study ancient and medieval manuscripts for clues about the circumference of the globe and his prospective journeys. True, his calculations were wildly off, overestimating the size of Asia and underestimating the size of the globe. But he also knew that he had to make the mission sound easier, like any startup seeking venture capital. Columbus yearned to fulfill the prophecy of Seneca\u2019s Medea: \u201cAn age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed.\u201d And so he did, in four remarkable voyages that charted and changed the world.\nRevisionism has a vital role in history, as we discover new information and apply new insights to past events. There should be no place for whitewashing and jingoism in the service of a supposedly patriotic agenda\u2014or any agenda. We must teach the good and the bad of our leaders, our founders, our heroes and saints.\nOtherwise, myths take hold too easily, such as the Confederate \u201cLost Cause,\u201d left to fester like an open wound. Its infection has spread into the 21st century. There should be no honoring those who fought a war against the Union to preserve the evil institution of slavery\u2014which, critically, even some of its defenders at the time understood as evil.\nComparing American statues of Columbus to those of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert E. Lee\n\n\n\n fails this test of context. The call for objectivity applies also to those who would judge a 15th-century European who took outrageous risks and performed incredible feats of exploration to advance modern civilization. Humanism and the Enlightenment were still two centuries away. The year of Columbus\u2019s iconic voyage, 1492, was also the year Spain expelled many Jews and subjected others to the horrors of the Inquisition.\nThe line of ambitious explorers runs through Columbus to the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk.\n\n\n\n Their accomplishments should not blind us to their flaws, but neither should their flaws blind us to their achievements. Honoring great deeds and risk-takers who defy conventional wisdom can inspire others to follow in their footsteps, be it into uncharted waters or outer space, and we sorely need such daring today.\nWe too, are complex. We are capable of judgment and reason, unlike the \u201cbrutish beasts\u201d invoked by Marc Antony. History is not a zero-sum game. We can honor indigenous people and all they represent\u2014and all they lost\u2014without erasing the greatest achievements of the Age of Discovery. I will be celebrating Columbus Day, and I hope you\u2019ll join me.\nMr. Kasparov is chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and the Human Rights Foundation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Wonder Land: Biden has said, \u2018I am a capitalist\u2019 and \u2018I am not a socialist.\u2019 Here's why both statements are false. Images: Image Of Sport/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly We should acknowledge his flaws, but his treatment by the left is reminiscent of communist propaganda. ",
        "author": "Garry Kasparov"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bring Missile Defense Down To Earth (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1279",
        "date": "2019-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bring-missile-defense-down-to-earth-11548890589?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=65",
        "text": "By far the best way to protect the U.S. from attack by a rogue nation like North Korea is to destroy an intercontinental ballistic missile as it leaves the launchpad and heads for the outer atmosphere. During this \u201cboost phase\u201d\u2014which lasts 200 to 300 seconds\u2014an ICBM is at its slowest and most vulnerable, and its intense heat signature is easier for long-distance sensors to detect. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Opinion: Morning Editorial Report All the day's Opinion headlines. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe new report recognizes the need to develop boost-phase intercepts as part of a layered antimissile defense, but proposes to do the job using directed energy or laser weapons: \u201cDeveloping scalable, efficient, and compact high-energy laser technology, and integrating it into an airborne platform holds the potential to provide a future-cost effective capability to destroy boosting missiles.\u201d \nUnfortunately, such weapons are still the stuff of dreams, despite research spanning more than four decades. There are huge technical challenges associated with building a laser powerful enough to smash a missile but small enough to fit on an airplane. A decade ago engineers evaluated an airborne laser mounted on an adapted Boeing 747. It was slow and unwieldy and never showed it could actually destroy a target the way an explosive ordnance can.\n\nA better system exists: kinetic interceptors, or remotely piloted drones armed with two-stage defensive rockets that are fast and agile enough to catch a missile before the end of its boost phase. While the Missile Defense Agency has admitted that a drone-based system is feasible, the idea doesn\u2019t seem to fit in the Pentagon\u2019s big picture. Even if the MDA manages to reach its goal of testing a low-power laser interceptor by 2023, developing one as efficient as today\u2019s drone-based interceptors will take much longer. \n\n\nOpinion Live EventJoin us on March 4 as WSJ Opinion\u2019s Paul Gigot leads a \u201cState of TV News\u201d panel discussion including Fox Business\u2019s Maria Bartiromo, CBS\u2019s Christy Tanner and \u201cNetwork\u201d actor Tony Goldwyn. Included in your admission to the event is a ticket to see \u201cNetwork\u201d on Broadway at a subsequent date.\n\n\nThe new report does discuss kinetic interceptors in the section arguing for a vast new space-based missile-defense program. \u201cThe space-basing of interceptors may provide the opportunity to engage offensive missiles in their most vulnerable initial boost phase of flight,\u201d it argues\u2014even though it would involve thousands of armed satellites and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.\nThere is widespread agreement among missile-defense experts that the challenges of establishing a space-based system are nearly insuperable. The number of satellites required would run into the hundreds, possibly thousands; inevitable cascading collisions would affect the orbits of civil and commercial satellites. Quite apart from the international diplomatic challenge of \u201cweaponizing space,\u201d the $300 billion price tag the National Academy of Sciences attached in 2012 to the entire life cycle of the system is surely too low. \nDefenders of a space-based system will say that SDI was once thought impossible, too. True, but SDI produced real technology\u2014such as hit-to-kill, rocket-based kinetic systems of which Patriot, Thaad and Aegis are operational examples\u2014that is available now. Previous space-based laser systems such as Brilliant Pebbles never proved feasible.\nResearch on laser and space-based ballistic-missile defense should continue. As acting Defense Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Shanahan\n\n\n\n points out in the MDR\u2019s preface, we are on the threshold of a new era of maturing missile technologies and emerging threats, including from space. The Pentagon deserves two strong cheers for addressing these challenges. But until they offer a more realistic assessment of the future of missile defense, and the public can ask why we\u2019re pushing missile defense into outer space when the real answers are right here on Earth, the third cheer will have to wait. \nMr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Remotely piloted drones are better suited than space-based lasers for shooting down ICBMs. ",
        "author": "Arthur Herman"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Probe Sails Into the Solar Wind (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1280",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-new-probe-sails-into-the-solar-wind-1533855271?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=18",
        "text": "I came to know Eugene Parker in the 1990s as a fellow astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. By that time he was a legend who had built a completely new field. No one had expected that when he first proposed the concept of solar wind in 1958.\nBack then, scientists tended to believe that the space between our sun and the planets was empty. Mr. Parker suggested instead that it contained a wind of the sun\u2019s particles and magnetic fields. When he submitted his paper to the Astrophysical Journal, it was rejected. The paper saw the light of day only because the journal\u2019s editor, future Nobel laureate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar,\n\n\n\n agreed to publish it over the reviewers\u2019 objections. \nBut Mr. Parker never wavered, and no one could find a problem with his physics or math. He was vindicated four years later, when NASA\u2019s Mariner 2 probe confirmed the existence of solar wind.\n\n\nFor this breakthrough and his work since, Mr. Parker is regarded as the father of modern heliophysics. As NASA scientists tell it, the decision to name the new probe after him\u2014the first time that honor has been bestowed on a living person\u2014was easy.\nGreat advances in science often stem from a willingness to challenge convention. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 after he insisted that the sun was the center of the solar system. Everyone scoffed at the 19th-century physician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ignaz Semmelweis\n\n\n\n when he argued that doctors ought to wash their hands between patients. The science of plate tectonics, proposed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfred Wegener\n\n\n\n in 1912, didn\u2019t become widely accepted until the 1970s.\nScientists can be narrow-minded like anyone else. But the scientific method overcomes this failing, as new theories and ideas are constantly tested against data. Science demands a willingness to challenge and be challenged.\nAt 91, Mr. Parker still loves the unexpected. Discussing the solar probe recently, he said that \u201cwe have to be prepared for some surprises\u2014things that we never thought of, or things that we thought of but were not correct.\u201d\nThe launch of the Parker Solar Probe vindicates not only Eugene Parker\u2019s ideas but also his vision of science as an arena for both uncommon daring and humility. It\u2019s never clear where the next great advance will come from, or how it may challenge today\u2019s assumptions. To forge new paths, scientists must be brave enough to try new ideas\u2014and confident enough to risk being proven wrong.\nMs. Olinto is dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Its namesake, Eugene Parker, is a living legend of astrophysics. ",
        "author": "Angela V. Olinto"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Probe Sails Into the Solar Wind (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1281",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-new-probe-sails-into-the-solar-wind-1533855271?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=72",
        "text": "I came to know Eugene Parker in the 1990s as a fellow astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. By that time he was a legend who had built a completely new field. No one had expected that when he first proposed the concept of solar wind in 1958.\nBack then, scientists tended to believe that the space between our sun and the planets was empty. Mr. Parker suggested instead that it contained a wind of the sun\u2019s particles and magnetic fields. When he submitted his paper to the Astrophysical Journal, it was rejected. The paper saw the light of day only because the journal\u2019s editor, future Nobel laureate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar,\n\n\n\n agreed to publish it over the reviewers\u2019 objections. \n\n\n\n\nBut Mr. Parker never wavered, and no one could find a problem with his physics or math. He was vindicated four years later, when NASA\u2019s Mariner 2 probe confirmed the existence of solar wind.\n\n\nFor this breakthrough and his work since, Mr. Parker is regarded as the father of modern heliophysics. As NASA scientists tell it, the decision to name the new probe after him\u2014the first time that honor has been bestowed on a living person\u2014was easy.\nGreat advances in science often stem from a willingness to challenge convention. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 after he insisted that the sun was the center of the solar system. Everyone scoffed at the 19th-century physician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ignaz Semmelweis\n\n\n\n when he argued that doctors ought to wash their hands between patients. The science of plate tectonics, proposed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfred Wegener\n\n\n\n in 1912, didn\u2019t become widely accepted until the 1970s.\nScientists can be narrow-minded like anyone else. But the scientific method overcomes this failing, as new theories and ideas are constantly tested against data. Science demands a willingness to challenge and be challenged.\nAt 91, Mr. Parker still loves the unexpected. Discussing the solar probe recently, he said that \u201cwe have to be prepared for some surprises\u2014things that we never thought of, or things that we thought of but were not correct.\u201d\nThe launch of the Parker Solar Probe vindicates not only Eugene Parker\u2019s ideas but also his vision of science as an arena for both uncommon daring and humility. It\u2019s never clear where the next great advance will come from, or how it may challenge today\u2019s assumptions. To forge new paths, scientists must be brave enough to try new ideas\u2014and confident enough to risk being proven wrong.\nMs. Olinto is dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Its namesake, Eugene Parker, is a living legend of astrophysics. ",
        "author": "Angela V. Olinto"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Probe Sails Into the Solar Wind (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1282",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-new-probe-sails-into-the-solar-wind-1533855271?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=65",
        "text": "I came to know Eugene Parker in the 1990s as a fellow astrophysicist at the University of Chicago. By that time he was a legend who had built a completely new field. No one had expected that when he first proposed the concept of solar wind in 1958.\nBack then, scientists tended to believe that the space between our sun and the planets was empty. Mr. Parker suggested instead that it contained a wind of the sun\u2019s particles and magnetic fields. When he submitted his paper to the Astrophysical Journal, it was rejected. The paper saw the light of day only because the journal\u2019s editor, future Nobel laureate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar,\n\n\n\n agreed to publish it over the reviewers\u2019 objections. \nBut Mr. Parker never wavered, and no one could find a problem with his physics or math. He was vindicated four years later, when NASA\u2019s Mariner 2 probe confirmed the existence of solar wind.\n\n\nFor this breakthrough and his work since, Mr. Parker is regarded as the father of modern heliophysics. As NASA scientists tell it, the decision to name the new probe after him\u2014the first time that honor has been bestowed on a living person\u2014was easy.\nGreat advances in science often stem from a willingness to challenge convention. Galileo was convicted of heresy in 1633 after he insisted that the sun was the center of the solar system. Everyone scoffed at the 19th-century physician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ignaz Semmelweis\n\n\n\n when he argued that doctors ought to wash their hands between patients. The science of plate tectonics, proposed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfred Wegener\n\n\n\n in 1912, didn\u2019t become widely accepted until the 1970s.\nScientists can be narrow-minded like anyone else. But the scientific method overcomes this failing, as new theories and ideas are constantly tested against data. Science demands a willingness to challenge and be challenged.\nAt 91, Mr. Parker still loves the unexpected. Discussing the solar probe recently, he said that \u201cwe have to be prepared for some surprises\u2014things that we never thought of, or things that we thought of but were not correct.\u201d\nThe launch of the Parker Solar Probe vindicates not only Eugene Parker\u2019s ideas but also his vision of science as an arena for both uncommon daring and humility. It\u2019s never clear where the next great advance will come from, or how it may challenge today\u2019s assumptions. To forge new paths, scientists must be brave enough to try new ideas\u2014and confident enough to risk being proven wrong.\nMs. Olinto is dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago. Its namesake, Eugene Parker, is a living legend of astrophysics. ",
        "author": "Angela V. Olinto"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mobile Games Rethink Ads: Roadblock or Reward? (WSJ: Consumer Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1283",
        "date": "2017-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mobile-games-rethink-ads-roadblock-or-reward-1503234001?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=115",
        "text": "Rather than treat ads as a necessary evil, a mandatory toll booth players have to pass through, developers increasingly are embedding them into games as an optional experience that players can choose in exchange for rewards.\n\n\n\n\nThe shift in strategy has lifted the gates on a torrent of mobile-game ad revenue. This year, mobile games are on track to generate $39.8 billion in ad revenue world-wide, up almost 90% from $21.1 billion in 2015, according to App Annie Inc., an app data and analytics firm. It projects the number will climb to $49 billion in 2018.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGame makers hope \u201crewarded ads\u201d will extend the boom in mobile-game advertising and help them continue diversifying beyond players\u2019 in-app purchases. These purchases generate considerable revenue for game makers but are dependent on a minority of dedicated players who are big spenders on virtual goods. \n\n\nRewarded ads are an alternative for them. Players who engage receive in-game perks such as extra lives or virtual currency. A recent promotion from Electronic Arts Inc.\u2019s \u201cFIFA Mobile,\u201d for example, gave players the option to acquire free virtual characters and other items if they shared an ad from Coca-Cola Co. through the soccer game\u2019s messaging system.\nDozens of brands including Ford Motor Co. and McDonald\u2019s Corp. advertise in EA\u2019s mobile games, up from just a handful five years ago, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dave Madden,\n\n\n\n head of global brand partnerships. The company doesn\u2019t report ad revenue but it \u201cis definitely a growth area,\u201d he said.\nMobile games are especially attractive to brands \u201cbecause they\u2019re highly engaging,\u201d said Tom Goodwin, head of innovation at ad agency Zenith USA, a unit of Publicis Groupe SA. People are spending more time on mobile devices, and brands need ways to reach them, he said.\nIn the first half of 2017, 78% of the top 50 grossing games on Apple Inc.\u2019s and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s U.S. app stores featured ads, up from 45% a year earlier and 29% in 2015, according to analytics firm Apptopia Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn an Electronic Arts promotion, mobile-game players can earn virtual characters or other perks if they share an ad from Coca-Cola within the game\u2019s messaging system. Shown, a Coca-Cola ad in an EA mobile game.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n COCA-COLA/Electronic Arts\n \n\n\n\nStill, even today players dislike many of the ad formats in games. Video, for example, is potentially more engaging than traditional banner ads, but it is also riskier. During a 15- or 30 -second video, players have ample opportunity to close the app and open another.\nParallel Space Inc. chose not to include any ads in \u201cHades\u2019 Star,\u201d a game about space exploration released in July\u2014the Canadian startup\u2019s first. \u201cAds are very disruptive,\u201d said company founder Andreas Papathanasis, a former game developer with Supercell Oy, of Helsinki. \u201cIf you want a long-term relationship with players, ads don\u2019t make any sense.\u201d\nThat is why rewarded ads are changing so many developers\u2019 minds. Some 62% of developers said player retention increased or stabilized after they introduced video ads with rewards, according to a 2016 study from Unity Technologies Inc., whose game-creation software includes tools for advertising.\nJamie Lynn, a 21-year-old Florida college student, says she spends about 15 minutes a day playing games like King\u2019s \u201cCandy Crush Saga\u201d and Supercell\u2019s \u201cHay Day\u201d and tolerates ads that offer rewards. \u201cThey make me feel as though my time is more worthwhile,\u201d she said. \nWhen\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Akhavan\n\n\n\n arrived in 2013 at Glu Mobile Inc., publisher of games such as \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kim Kardashian\n\n\n\n : Hollywood,\u201d the chief revenue officer discovered a lot of resistance to ads at Glu Mobile. That has changed. In the second quarter, Glu had $12.4 million in quarterly ad revenue, up from $2.4 million in the same quarter of 2013.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMobile-game fans played King Digital\u2019s \u2018Farm Heroes Saga\u2019 at a promotional party on the San Francisco Bay in May 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Invision for King Digital Entert\n \n\n\n\nThe secret to making ads work, he said, is to be strategic about when they run and who sees them. Glu often serves ads after a level of play has been completed, because there is a natural pause then, Mr. Akhavan said, and it serves them more frequently to players who don\u2019t make in-app purchases.\nAnalysts routinely press King on when it will move from testing to rolling out ads to all games for its 314 million monthly active users. They cite Zynga Inc., which last year generated about $194 million from ads with roughly a fifth as many users as King has today.\nEvan Wingren, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc., said, \u201cPeople from the investment community are looking at that, saying if Zynga does it, why can\u2019t King?\u201d Mobile developers such as Activision Blizzard Inc.\u2019s King Digital have stopped resisting in-game ads and are ringing up revenue gains with messages from companies like Nestl\u00e9 SA and Visa Inc. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Corrections & Amplifications (WSJ: Corrections) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1284",
        "date": "2018-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/corrections-amplifications-1534297427?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=18",
        "text": "Rhonda Vetere\u2019s first name was misspelled as Rhoda in a photo caption with a Life & Arts article Tuesday about high-stakes charity fundraising.\nA chart illustrating the U.S.\u2019s trade imbalance with South Korea, which accompanied an Aug. 8 World News article about trade tensions, showed imports and exports in billions of dollars. The chart didn\u2019t indicate the data were in billions.\n\nA July 26 decline in Facebook Inc. shares shaved more than $119 billion from the company\u2019s value. An Aug. 7 Page One article about Facebook\u2019s discussions with banks about possibly sharing data incorrectly said that the decline was more than $120 billion.\nAstronaut Josh Cassada\u2019s first name was incorrectly given as John in a U.S. Watch article on Aug. 4 about NASA assigning crews to ride on commercial spacecraft. \nNearly 45 million people have student-loan debt. A June 15 Page One article about bankruptcy judges who are trying to help borrowers incorrectly said that hundreds of thousands of people have student loans.\nReaders can alert The Wall Street Journal to any errors in news articles by emailing wsjcontact@wsj.com or by calling 888-410-2667. Corrections & Amplifications for the edition of Aug. 15, 2018. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Corrections: March 11, 2020 (NYT: Corrections) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1285",
        "date": "2020-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/pageoneplus/corrections-march-11-2020.html",
        "text": "Corrections that appeared in print on Wednesday, March 11, 2020. Corrections that appeared in print on Wednesday, March 11, 2020. An article on Friday about a temporary disruption in communications between NASA and a robotic probe, Voyager 2, misstated the probe\u2019s distance from Earth. Voyager 2 is more than 11 billion miles from Earth, not 13 billion. (Voyager 1, the spacecraft\u2019s twin, is more than 13 billion miles from Earth.)",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Corrections: Sept. 17, 2021 (NYT: Corrections) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1286",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/pageoneplus/corrections-sept-17-2021.html",
        "text": "Corrections that appeared in print on Friday, Sept. 17, 2021. Corrections that appeared in print on Friday, Sept. 17, 2021. An article about the Inspiration4 mission misstated the distance of the Inspiration4 crew from Earth. They are farther from Earth than anyone since space shuttle crews visited the Hubble telescope in the 1990s, not farther than anyone since the Apollo missions ended in the 1970s.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Quite a Distance Off (NYT: Crosswords & Games) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1287",
        "date": "2017-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/crosswords/quite-a-distance-off-garp-scales-nobel.html",
        "text": "Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Andrea Carla Michaels help continue our celebration of the 75th anniversary of The New York Times Crossword. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Andrea Carla Michaels help continue our celebration of the 75th anniversary of The New York Times Crossword. MONDAY PUZZLE \u2014 We are a society that tends to walk around with our eyes glued to our smartphones, but today\u2019s puzzle is a wonderful reminder to \u201clook up,\u201d as my Facebook friend Aryan Mishra likes to say. Mr. Mishra, currently a 17-year-old student in Delhi, India, achieved prominence in 2014 when he and a fellow student discovered an asteroid in a competition and, if he continues in his chosen path as an aspiring astronaut, he might well eventually meet up with one of today\u2019s crossword constructors.",
        "author": "By Deb Amlen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Renowned Conductor Adds Air France Pilot to R\u00e9sum\u00e9 (WSJ: Culture) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1288",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/renowned-conductor-adds-air-france-pilot-to-resume-11579179600?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=49",
        "text": "Mr. Harding will focus the next year solely on flying as a first officer, or co-pilot, on medium-haul flights out of Paris. Long hauls would eventually follow. His plan is to take a yearlong sabbatical and then resume concerts and gradually achieve a 50/50 split between the two careers.\n\u201cConductors tend to retire at 95, and pilots at 65,\u201d he said after a concert at Lincoln Center\u2019s David Geffen Hall last week. \u201cI\u2019ve got another 20 years I can fly, and that would give me the chance to have a full career and experience different aircraft and at some point become a captain. Conducting is something you keep doing until you\u2019re no longer physically able.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Harding, who made his debut as a professional conductor at 17 and was until last year the music director of the Orchestre de Paris, had wanted to fly since he was a child.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Harding, at left, landing an Airbus A320 at Ch\u00e2teauroux-Centre Airport in D\u00e9ols, France, Aug. 14, 2018, as part of his qualification.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andrew Staples\n \n\n\n\nWhile traveling as a conductor, he would call up flying schools and, for a price, be taken up in a plane and shown how it works. But not until he was about to turn 40 and seeking a new challenge did he decide to get his pilot\u2019s license. The tangible side of flying appealed to him.\n\u201cWith music, you have to be comfortable with the fact that there very often aren\u2019t answers to your big questions,\u201d Mr. Harding said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to say, \u2018OK, I\u2019ll try my best to understand, but in the end I have to go with the feeling.\u2019 There\u2019s a part of me that has a problem with that. I\u2019m much more comfortable with it now that I have another thing where I can put my more rational side.\u201d\nAfter he obtained a private pilot\u2019s license, the next stage was instrument flying. Then pursuit of a multiengine rating, followed by theory exams for the airline transport pilot license. Along the way, he gained his commercial license, a multi-crew certificate and ultimately A320 type rating certification, which he achieved in August 2018 through an Air France program before then undergoing its rigorous selection process.\n\u201cI don\u2019t think I had an afternoon off in four years because, if I wasn\u2019t conducting, I was flying or studying,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Harding conducting the New York Philharmonic on Jan. 10 in a performance of Richard Strauss\u2019s \u2018An Alpine Symphony.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elizabeth Yuan/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nA spokesman for Air France said Mr. Harding will join the airline in May. Among its pilots, Mr. Harding would be the sole conductor and music professional. But the ranks also include: Jason Lamy-Chappuis, France\u2019s Olympic gold champion in the Nordic combined, who joined a year ago; and world aerobatics champion Aude Lemordant, who has been able to pursue both careers simultaneously. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet was also an Air France pilot, and the airline adapted his schedule to accommodate space mission training.\nIn a commencement speech to the airline\u2019s 2017 class of captains, Mr. Harding spoke as a conductor, a member of a different field, who nonetheless draws on the same skills and qualities. Those include: collective performance, rigor, communication, adaptability, humility, the ability to prioritize and digest large amounts of information, error management and situational awareness, in aviation-speak.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Harding, in his dressing room at David Geffen Hall, says flight training made him a better conductor and leader.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elizabeth Yuan/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMr. Harding urged the captains to share their love for the job.\n\u201cYou are people who see the planet like a map, see the sun every day of the year and literally connect the world. We have the two most beautiful professions that exist,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope, if all goes well, to see you very soon in the cockpit.\u201d\n\n\nWSJ Archives How He Has Grown (Oct. 28, 2010) \n\n\nLast week, the New York Philharmonic\u2019s chairman emeritus, Oscar Schafer, mentioned Mr. Harding\u2019s additional career while introducing him during an open rehearsal. The orchestra, led by Mr. Harding, then launched into Edvard Grieg\u2019s Piano Concerto in A minor.\nThe program also featured Richard Strauss\u2019s \u201cAn Alpine Symphony,\u201d requiring more than 100 musicians onstage and a dozen brass musicians offstage.\n\u201cThis particular piece is one of the largest, greatest pieces we have in our trumpet repertoire and is quite challenging and demanding,\u201d said Chris Martin, principal trumpet. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have a conductor on the podium who knows that\u2014he knows the tricky passages. To feel some empathy from the conductor is satisfying.\u201d\nWrite to Elizabeth Yuan at elizabeth.yuan@wsj.com Conductor Daniel Harding will oversee his final concert of the season in Stockholm in June. Then he will leave the podium for the cockpit of an Air France Airbus A320. ",
        "author": "Elizabeth Yuan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Renowned Conductor Adds Air France Pilot to R\u00e9sum\u00e9 (WSJ: Culture) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1289",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/renowned-conductor-adds-air-france-pilot-to-resume-11579179600?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=48",
        "text": "Mr. Harding will focus the next year solely on flying as a first officer, or co-pilot, on medium-haul flights out of Paris. Long hauls would eventually follow. His plan is to take a yearlong sabbatical and then resume concerts and gradually achieve a 50/50 split between the two careers.\n\u201cConductors tend to retire at 95, and pilots at 65,\u201d he said after a concert at Lincoln Center\u2019s David Geffen Hall last week. \u201cI\u2019ve got another 20 years I can fly, and that would give me the chance to have a full career and experience different aircraft and at some point become a captain. Conducting is something you keep doing until you\u2019re no longer physically able.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Harding, who made his debut as a professional conductor at 17 and was until last year the music director of the Orchestre de Paris, had wanted to fly since he was a child.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Harding, at left, landing an Airbus A320 at Ch\u00e2teauroux-Centre Airport in D\u00e9ols, France, Aug. 14, 2018, as part of his qualification.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andrew Staples\n \n\n\n\nWhile traveling as a conductor, he would call up flying schools and, for a price, be taken up in a plane and shown how it works. But not until he was about to turn 40 and seeking a new challenge did he decide to get his pilot\u2019s license. The tangible side of flying appealed to him.\n\u201cWith music, you have to be comfortable with the fact that there very often aren\u2019t answers to your big questions,\u201d Mr. Harding said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to say, \u2018OK, I\u2019ll try my best to understand, but in the end I have to go with the feeling.\u2019 There\u2019s a part of me that has a problem with that. I\u2019m much more comfortable with it now that I have another thing where I can put my more rational side.\u201d\nAfter he obtained a private pilot\u2019s license, the next stage was instrument flying. Then pursuit of a multiengine rating, followed by theory exams for the airline transport pilot license. Along the way, he gained his commercial license, a multi-crew certificate and ultimately A320 type rating certification, which he achieved in August 2018 through an Air France program before then undergoing its rigorous selection process.\n\u201cI don\u2019t think I had an afternoon off in four years because, if I wasn\u2019t conducting, I was flying or studying,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Harding conducting the New York Philharmonic on Jan. 10 in a performance of Richard Strauss\u2019s \u2018An Alpine Symphony.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elizabeth Yuan/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nA spokesman for Air France said Mr. Harding will join the airline in May. Among its pilots, Mr. Harding would be the sole conductor and music professional. But the ranks also include: Jason Lamy-Chappuis, France\u2019s Olympic gold champion in the Nordic combined, who joined a year ago; and world aerobatics champion Aude Lemordant, who has been able to pursue both careers simultaneously. Astronaut Thomas Pesquet was also an Air France pilot, and the airline adapted his schedule to accommodate space mission training.\nIn a commencement speech to the airline\u2019s 2017 class of captains, Mr. Harding spoke as a conductor, a member of a different field, who nonetheless draws on the same skills and qualities. Those include: collective performance, rigor, communication, adaptability, humility, the ability to prioritize and digest large amounts of information, error management and situational awareness, in aviation-speak.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Harding, in his dressing room at David Geffen Hall, says flight training made him a better conductor and leader.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elizabeth Yuan/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMr. Harding urged the captains to share their love for the job.\n\u201cYou are people who see the planet like a map, see the sun every day of the year and literally connect the world. We have the two most beautiful professions that exist,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope, if all goes well, to see you very soon in the cockpit.\u201d\n\n\nWSJ Archives How He Has Grown (Oct. 28, 2010) \n\n\nLast week, the New York Philharmonic\u2019s chairman emeritus, Oscar Schafer, mentioned Mr. Harding\u2019s additional career while introducing him during an open rehearsal. The orchestra, led by Mr. Harding, then launched into Edvard Grieg\u2019s Piano Concerto in A minor.\nThe program also featured Richard Strauss\u2019s \u201cAn Alpine Symphony,\u201d requiring more than 100 musicians onstage and a dozen brass musicians offstage.\n\u201cThis particular piece is one of the largest, greatest pieces we have in our trumpet repertoire and is quite challenging and demanding,\u201d said Chris Martin, principal trumpet. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to have a conductor on the podium who knows that\u2014he knows the tricky passages. To feel some empathy from the conductor is satisfying.\u201d\nWrite to Elizabeth Yuan at elizabeth.yuan@wsj.com Conductor Daniel Harding will oversee his final concert of the season in Stockholm in June. Then he will leave the podium for the cockpit of an Air France Airbus A320. ",
        "author": "Elizabeth Yuan"
    },
    {
        "title": "MDA and ICEYE sign agreement to integrate X-band SAR satellite into MDA's CHORUS constellation (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1290",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mda-and-iceye-sign-agreement-to-integrate-x-band-sar-satellite-into-mda-s-chorus-constellation-01639553707?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=2",
        "text": "PARIS, Dec. 15, 2021 /CNW/ - MDA Ltd. (TSX: MDA) and ICEYE today announced at the World Satellite Business Week event that they have entered into an agreement for ICEYE to supply an X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) spacecraft for CHORUS, MDA's next generation commercial Earth observation mission. A collaborative multi-sensor constellation, CHORUS brings together diverse and unique imagery and data sources, changing how and when we see the world by providing a new level of real-time insight and innovative Earth observation services. \n\n Building on the legendary RADARSAT program, CHORUS will include C-band and X-band SAR satellites operating in a unique mid-inclination orbit with day or night imaging in all weather conditions. An essential element of the CHORUS constellation, the X-band spacecraft will fly in the same mid-inclination orbit with the identical ground track as the MDA-built C-band SAR satellite. \n\n\n This revolutionary approach will provide the most extensive radar imaging capacity available on the market, with higher imaging performance, higher frequency imaging, variable imaging times, more imaging time per orbit, fast tasking, faster delivery timelines and Near Real-Time (NRT) data exploitation aided by machine-learning and artificial intelligence. \n\n Adding a trailing high-resolution X-band SAR satellite to a powerful C-band SAR satellite will also unlock new use cases, including tipping and cueing techniques that allow MDA's leading broad area sensor to monitor an area of interest (the \"tip\") and to zoom in on objects of interest (the \"cue\") using the trailing high resolution sensor. \n\n Combining C-band and X-band capabilities, CHORUS will significantly enhance existing services and enable new applications not feasible with existing SAR satellites. Features include: \n -- Designed with a focus on maritime surveillance applications, CHORUS will \n have dedicated vessel detection imaging modes with an imaging capacity to \n collect an area equal to 40% of the global Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) \n -- or over 55 million square kilometres -- every day using the 25m Vessel \n Detection Mode. \n \n -- CHORUS will enable a new level of precision all-weather satellite \n monitoring of icebergs in the North Atlantic. This is currently achieved \n by crewed aircraft observations supplemented with Earth observation \n satellite imagery. \n \n -- The mission will enable tipping and cueing operations between wide area \n surveillance to high-resolution point target monitoring. This unique \n capability is especially useful, when fused with space-based Automatic \n Identification System (AIS) data, for use cases such as broad area ship \n detection and vessel classification to support dark vessel detection \n activities. \n \n -- The X-band satellite will operate in a trailing orbit which will enhance \n image correlation, allowing for more effective image fusion, measurements, \n exploitation and event or object characterization. \n The companies also announced that they have signed a separate distribution agreement that will allow MDA to sell ICEYE's existing and future X-band data to select RADARSAT-2 customers as well as to develop value-added products to immediately take advantage of advanced information data integration and analytics from these two types of SAR sensors. \n\n MDA owns and operates RADARSAT-2, one of the world's most capable commercial broad-area imaging satellites. With over 20 imaging modes, and established customers in over 45 countries, RADARSAT-2 delivers operationally reliable products and services supporting a number of use cases, including marine surveillance, ice monitoring, disaster management, environmental monitoring, resource management and mapping. \n\n ICEYE operates the world's largest commercial constellation of SAR satellites and has launched 14 spacecraft to date. The company is planning to further expand its constellation with at least four additional satellites by mid-2022, with the objective of reaching an average access time of three hours anywhere on the globe. \n\n QUOTE \n\n \"We are thrilled to be working with ICEYE to add the X-band satellite for our ground-breaking CHORUS constellation. We now have two best-in-class technologies working together in harmony to bring new insights and actionable data for our customers' demanding requirements. The agreement to distribute ICEYE data starting now to our RADARSAT-2 customers enables immediate action on the expansion of our information services roadmap.\" \n\n -- Mike Greenley, Chief Executive Officer, MDA \n\n \"With these pivotal agreements, we recognize an excellent opportunity to showcase the very best of ICEYE's capabilities and expertise with MDA. ICEYE will ensure the latest high-performance X-band SAR satellite technology and data are seamlessly integrated and always available as part of MDA's CHORUS constellation. We are very proud to strengthe  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "MDA and ICEYE sign agreement to integrate X-band SAR satellite into MDA's CHORUS constellation (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1291",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mda-and-iceye-sign-agreement-to-integrate-x-band-sar-satellite-into-mda-s-chorus-constellation-01639553707?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=4",
        "text": "PARIS, Dec. 15, 2021 /CNW/ - MDA Ltd. (TSX: MDA) and ICEYE today announced at the World Satellite Business Week event that they have entered into an agreement for ICEYE to supply an X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) spacecraft for CHORUS, MDA's next generation commercial Earth observation mission. A collaborative multi-sensor constellation, CHORUS brings together diverse and unique imagery and data sources, changing how and when we see the world by providing a new level of real-time insight and innovative Earth observation services. \n\n Building on the legendary RADARSAT program, CHORUS will include C-band and X-band SAR satellites operating in a unique mid-inclination orbit with day or night imaging in all weather conditions. An essential element of the CHORUS constellation, the X-band spacecraft will fly in the same mid-inclination orbit with the identical ground track as the MDA-built C-band SAR satellite. \n\n\n This revolutionary approach will provide the most extensive radar imaging capacity available on the market, with higher imaging performance, higher frequency imaging, variable imaging times, more imaging time per orbit, fast tasking, faster delivery timelines and Near Real-Time (NRT) data exploitation aided by machine-learning and artificial intelligence. \n\n Adding a trailing high-resolution X-band SAR satellite to a powerful C-band SAR satellite will also unlock new use cases, including tipping and cueing techniques that allow MDA's leading broad area sensor to monitor an area of interest (the \"tip\") and to zoom in on objects of interest (the \"cue\") using the trailing high resolution sensor. \n\n Combining C-band and X-band capabilities, CHORUS will significantly enhance existing services and enable new applications not feasible with existing SAR satellites. Features include: \n -- Designed with a focus on maritime surveillance applications, CHORUS will \n have dedicated vessel detection imaging modes with an imaging capacity to \n collect an area equal to 40% of the global Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) \n -- or over 55 million square kilometres -- every day using the 25m Vessel \n Detection Mode. \n \n -- CHORUS will enable a new level of precision all-weather satellite \n monitoring of icebergs in the North Atlantic. This is currently achieved \n by crewed aircraft observations supplemented with Earth observation \n satellite imagery. \n \n -- The mission will enable tipping and cueing operations between wide area \n surveillance to high-resolution point target monitoring. This unique \n capability is especially useful, when fused with space-based Automatic \n Identification System (AIS) data, for use cases such as broad area ship \n detection and vessel classification to support dark vessel detection \n activities. \n \n -- The X-band satellite will operate in a trailing orbit which will enhance \n image correlation, allowing for more effective image fusion, measurements, \n exploitation and event or object characterization. \n The companies also announced that they have signed a separate distribution agreement that will allow MDA to sell ICEYE's existing and future X-band data to select RADARSAT-2 customers as well as to develop value-added products to immediately take advantage of advanced information data integration and analytics from these two types of SAR sensors. \n\n MDA owns and operates RADARSAT-2, one of the world's most capable commercial broad-area imaging satellites. With over 20 imaging modes, and established customers in over 45 countries, RADARSAT-2 delivers operationally reliable products and services supporting a number of use cases, including marine surveillance, ice monitoring, disaster management, environmental monitoring, resource management and mapping. \n\n ICEYE operates the world's largest commercial constellation of SAR satellites and has launched 14 spacecraft to date. The company is planning to further expand its constellation with at least four additional satellites by mid-2022, with the objective of reaching an average access time of three hours anywhere on the globe. \n\n QUOTE \n\n \"We are thrilled to be working with ICEYE to add the X-band satellite for our ground-breaking CHORUS constellation. We now have two best-in-class technologies working together in harmony to bring new insights and actionable data for our customers' demanding requirements. The agreement to distribute ICEYE data starting now to our RADARSAT-2 customers enables immediate action on the expansion of our information services roadmap.\" \n\n -- Mike Greenley, Chief Executive Officer, MDA \n\n \"With these pivotal agreements, we recognize an excellent opportunity to showcase the very best of ICEYE's capabilities and expertise with MDA. ICEYE will ensure the latest high-performance X-band SAR satellite technology and data are seamlessly integrated and always available as part of MDA's CHORUS constellation. We are very proud to strengthe  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "MDA and ICEYE sign agreement to integrate X-band SAR satellite into MDA's CHORUS constellation (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1292",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mda-and-iceye-sign-agreement-to-integrate-x-band-sar-satellite-into-mda-s-chorus-constellation-01639553707?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=11",
        "text": "PARIS, Dec. 15, 2021 /CNW/ - MDA Ltd. (TSX: MDA) and ICEYE today announced at the World Satellite Business Week event that they have entered into an agreement for ICEYE to supply an X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) spacecraft for CHORUS, MDA's next generation commercial Earth observation mission. A collaborative multi-sensor constellation, CHORUS brings together diverse and unique imagery and data sources, changing how and when we see the world by providing a new level of real-time insight and innovative Earth observation services. \n\n Building on the legendary RADARSAT program, CHORUS will include C-band and X-band SAR satellites operating in a unique mid-inclination orbit with day or night imaging in all weather conditions. An essential element of the CHORUS constellation, the X-band spacecraft will fly in the same mid-inclination orbit with the identical ground track as the MDA-built C-band SAR satellite. \n\n\n This revolutionary approach will provide the most extensive radar imaging capacity available on the market, with higher imaging performance, higher frequency imaging, variable imaging times, more imaging time per orbit, fast tasking, faster delivery timelines and Near Real-Time (NRT) data exploitation aided by machine-learning and artificial intelligence. \n\n Adding a trailing high-resolution X-band SAR satellite to a powerful C-band SAR satellite will also unlock new use cases, including tipping and cueing techniques that allow MDA's leading broad area sensor to monitor an area of interest (the \"tip\") and to zoom in on objects of interest (the \"cue\") using the trailing high resolution sensor. \n\n Combining C-band and X-band capabilities, CHORUS will significantly enhance existing services and enable new applications not feasible with existing SAR satellites. Features include: \n -- Designed with a focus on maritime surveillance applications, CHORUS will \n have dedicated vessel detection imaging modes with an imaging capacity to \n collect an area equal to 40% of the global Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) \n -- or over 55 million square kilometres -- every day using the 25m Vessel \n Detection Mode. \n \n -- CHORUS will enable a new level of precision all-weather satellite \n monitoring of icebergs in the North Atlantic. This is currently achieved \n by crewed aircraft observations supplemented with Earth observation \n satellite imagery. \n \n -- The mission will enable tipping and cueing operations between wide area \n surveillance to high-resolution point target monitoring. This unique \n capability is especially useful, when fused with space-based Automatic \n Identification System (AIS) data, for use cases such as broad area ship \n detection and vessel classification to support dark vessel detection \n activities. \n \n -- The X-band satellite will operate in a trailing orbit which will enhance \n image correlation, allowing for more effective image fusion, measurements, \n exploitation and event or object characterization. \n The companies also announced that they have signed a separate distribution agreement that will allow MDA to sell ICEYE's existing and future X-band data to select RADARSAT-2 customers as well as to develop value-added products to immediately take advantage of advanced information data integration and analytics from these two types of SAR sensors. \n\n MDA owns and operates RADARSAT-2, one of the world's most capable commercial broad-area imaging satellites. With over 20 imaging modes, and established customers in over 45 countries, RADARSAT-2 delivers operationally reliable products and services supporting a number of use cases, including marine surveillance, ice monitoring, disaster management, environmental monitoring, resource management and mapping. \n\n ICEYE operates the world's largest commercial constellation of SAR satellites and has launched 14 spacecraft to date. The company is planning to further expand its constellation with at least four additional satellites by mid-2022, with the objective of reaching an average access time of three hours anywhere on the globe. \n\n QUOTE \n\n \"We are thrilled to be working with ICEYE to add the X-band satellite for our ground-breaking CHORUS constellation. We now have two best-in-class technologies working together in harmony to bring new insights and actionable data for our customers' demanding requirements. The agreement to distribute ICEYE data starting now to our RADARSAT-2 customers enables immediate action on the expansion of our information services roadmap.\" \n\n -- Mike Greenley, Chief Executive Officer, MDA \n\n \"With these pivotal agreements, we recognize an excellent opportunity to showcase the very best of ICEYE's capabilities and expertise with MDA. ICEYE will ensure the latest high-performance X-band SAR satellite technology and data are seamlessly integrated and always available as part of MDA's CHORUS constellation. We are very proud to strengthe  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "AVANTI ENERGY GRANTS STOCK OPTIONS (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1293",
        "date": "2021-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/avanti-energy-grants-stock-options-01640783123?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=2",
        "text": "About Avanti Energy \n\n Avanti Energy is focused on the exploration, development and production of helium across western Canada and the United States. Avanti's professional oil and gas exploration and production team is actively targeting untapped potential helium reserves to help meet the increasing global demand for an irreplaceable and scarce element critical to advanced technology, medical and space exploration industries. For more information, please go to the Company's website at www.avantienergy.com. \n\n\n\n\n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n\n The information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information. \n\n Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. \n\n SOURCE Avanti Energy Inc. \n\n View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/December2021/29/c6881.html \n\n /CONTACT: \n\n For corporate and shareholder inquiries, please contact: Avanti Energy, Investor Relations, Phone: 403-394-0409, Email: investors@avantienergy.com, Avanti Energy Inc., Website: www.avantienergy.com \nCopyright CNW Group 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "AVANTI ENERGY ANNOUNCES SPUD OF FIRST HELIUM WELL ON GREATER KNAPPEN AREA IN MONTANA (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1294",
        "date": "2021-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/avanti-energy-announces-spud-of-first-helium-well-on-greater-knappen-area-in-montana-01640870528?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=1",
        "text": "\"Spuddng the first of three appraisal wells in Greater Knappen is a significant milestone for our Company,\" said Chris Bakker, CEO of Avanti Energy. \"We have reviewed dozens of opportunities in the past year and selected this as a high priority area for the Company's inaugural drilling program. To have assembled the land, completed the internal systems required to undertake an initial multi-well helium drill program and be spudding before year end is an achievement of which the entire team is incredibly proud.\" \n\n\n\n\n\n Greater Knappen Area Highlights: \n\n -- 69,000 acres of potential helium-rich properties across both Montana and \n Alberta, over which the Company maintains 100%-ownership. \n \n -- 10 closed structural highs, exhibiting relief of 70m to >200m, that \n are ideal for trapping helium. \n \n -- In 2021 helium production commenced from a well drilled in the immediate \n area by a separate company, from the same zones targeted by Avanti's \n technical team, further validating the Company's model. \n \n -- Other wells surrounding Avanti's lands have high helium shows \n in multiple Devonian and Cambrian targets with helium percentages of up \n to 2% and nitrogen percentages of up to 96%. \n Avanti continues toevaluate multiple opportunities across Western Canada and the United States to build an industry-leading helium company with a premier portfolio of prospective lands. \n\n About Avanti Energy \n\n Avanti Energy is focused on the exploration, development and production of helium across western Canada and the United States. Avanti's professional oil and gas exploration and production team is actively targeting untapped potential helium reserves to help meet the increasing global demand for an irreplaceable and scarce element critical to advanced technology, medical and space exploration industries. For more information, please go to the Company's website at www.avantienergy.com. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n The information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions, and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information. \n\n Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. \n\n SOURCE Avanti Energy Inc. \n\n View original content: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/December2021/30/c9629.html \n\n /CONTACT: \n\n For corporate and shareholder inquiries, please contact: Avanti Energy, Investor Relations, Phone: 403-394-0409, Email: investors@avantienergy.com \nCopyright CNW Group 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "MDA announces CHORUS as the name of its next market-leading commercial Earth Observation mission (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1295",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mda-announces-chorus-as-the-name-of-its-next-market-leading-commercial-earth-observation-mission-01639488939?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=5",
        "text": "A collaborative multi-sensor constellation, CHORUS will bring together multiple diverse and unique perspectives in harmony, opening the aperture and the art of the possible to provide a new level of real-time insight about our planet. CHORUS builds on the strong heritage of the RADARSAT program and brings forward innovative new technologies and operations concepts to deliver a significantly enhanced capability. \n\n\n\n\n\n The powerful C-band SAR satellite will provide broad area coverage in concert with a smaller trailing X-band SAR satellite for higher resolution data collection and Near Real-Time (NRT) cross-cueing day or night and in all weather conditions. The X-band satellite will fly in the same mid-inclination orbit with the identical ground track as the MDA-built C-band SAR satellite. \n\n\n By collecting and integrating data from the individual satellites, CHORUS will provide the most extensive radar imaging capacity available on the market in one system, ranging from industry leading broad area coverage with a 700km-wide swath to sub-metre very high resolution spotlight images. \n\n In keeping with RADARSAT heritage, CHORUS will showcase unique capability for maritime surveillance and other time-critical applications, such as land intelligence and disaster response. This NRT capability will be enabled through fast-tasking for tactical operations and direct downlinks to a global network of cloud-enabled ground stations. \n\n Responding to customer needs, MDA will advance a new commercial vision to bring multiple capabilities and sensors together as one. The unique CHORUS mission will be scalable and able to incorporate and integrate multiple additional collaborative space-based or terrestrial sensors and technology. \n\n With core C-band and X-band sensors operating in a unique mid-inclination orbit, CHORUS will support higher imaging frequency between the mid-latitude areas of the northern and southern hemispheres. With tipping and cueing techniques, higher imaging performance, more imaging time per orbit, fast-tasking, faster delivery timelines and NRT data exploitation aided by machine-learning and artificial intelligence, CHORUS will offer advanced, innovative and disruptive Earth observation services, including: \n -- protection of national security and sovereignty by providing critical \n time sensitive data and intelligence on maritime and land activities; \n \n -- detection of illegal activities such as overfishing, deforestation, or \n bilge water dumping; \n \n -- monitoring of crops, critical infrastructure, transportation corridors, \n coastal erosion and the effects of climate change; \n \n -- provision of timely information to support humanitarian aid disaster \n response in response to floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes and \n marine oil spills; and \n \n -- routine systematic observations for a variety of applications natural \n resources, industrial and geographic applications including agriculture, \n forestry, mining and exploration activities. \n QUOTE \n\n \"The greatest moments in Earth exploration happen collaboratively, when diverse insights and information are united to create something bigger and more meaningful. With C-band SAR, we are able to find a needle in a haystack. With the addition of X-band data, we will be able to thread that needle. By pushing the envelope and creating flexibility to integrate additional data sources and sensors, we want others to join our CHORUS and help us change how and when we see the world.\" \n\n -- Mike Greenley, Chief Executive Officer, MDA \n\n LINKS \n\n www.mda.space \n\n CHORUS animated logo \n\n MDA Announces RADARSAT-2 Continuity Mission \n\n MDA releases first details of its next generation commercial Earth observation mission \n\n SOCIAL MEDIA \n \nTwitter: www.twitter.com/MDA_space \nFacebook: www.facebook.com/MDAspace \nLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/mdaspace \nYouTube: www.youtube.com/c/mdaspace \nInstagram: www.instagram.com/MDA_space \n \n ABOUT MDA \n\n Serving the world from its Canadian home and global offices, MDA (TSX:MDA) is an international space mission partner and a robotics, satellite systems and geointelligence pioneer with a 50-year story of firsts on and above the Earth. With over 2,200 employees across Canada, the US and the UK, MDA is leading the charge towards viable Moon colonies, enhanced Earth observation, communication in a hyper-connected world, and more. With a track record of making space ambitions come true, MDA enables highly skilled people to continually push boundaries, tackle big challenges, and imagine solutions that inspire and endure to change the world for the better, on the ground and in the stars. \n\n SOURCE MDA Inc. \n\n View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/December2021/14/c7023.html \n\n /CONTACT: \n\n MEDIA CONTACT: Amy MacLeod, amy.macleod@mda.space, 613-796-6937 \n\n /Web site: https://mda.space \nCop  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "MDA announces CHORUS as the name of its next market-leading commercial Earth Observation mission (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1296",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mda-announces-chorus-as-the-name-of-its-next-market-leading-commercial-earth-observation-mission-01639488939?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=11",
        "text": "A collaborative multi-sensor constellation, CHORUS will bring together multiple diverse and unique perspectives in harmony, opening the aperture and the art of the possible to provide a new level of real-time insight about our planet. CHORUS builds on the strong heritage of the RADARSAT program and brings forward innovative new technologies and operations concepts to deliver a significantly enhanced capability. \n\n The powerful C-band SAR satellite will provide broad area coverage in concert with a smaller trailing X-band SAR satellite for higher resolution data collection and Near Real-Time (NRT) cross-cueing day or night and in all weather conditions. The X-band satellite will fly in the same mid-inclination orbit with the identical ground track as the MDA-built C-band SAR satellite. \n\n\n By collecting and integrating data from the individual satellites, CHORUS will provide the most extensive radar imaging capacity available on the market in one system, ranging from industry leading broad area coverage with a 700km-wide swath to sub-metre very high resolution spotlight images. \n\n In keeping with RADARSAT heritage, CHORUS will showcase unique capability for maritime surveillance and other time-critical applications, such as land intelligence and disaster response. This NRT capability will be enabled through fast-tasking for tactical operations and direct downlinks to a global network of cloud-enabled ground stations. \n\n Responding to customer needs, MDA will advance a new commercial vision to bring multiple capabilities and sensors together as one. The unique CHORUS mission will be scalable and able to incorporate and integrate multiple additional collaborative space-based or terrestrial sensors and technology. \n\n With core C-band and X-band sensors operating in a unique mid-inclination orbit, CHORUS will support higher imaging frequency between the mid-latitude areas of the northern and southern hemispheres. With tipping and cueing techniques, higher imaging performance, more imaging time per orbit, fast-tasking, faster delivery timelines and NRT data exploitation aided by machine-learning and artificial intelligence, CHORUS will offer advanced, innovative and disruptive Earth observation services, including: \n -- protection of national security and sovereignty by providing critical \n time sensitive data and intelligence on maritime and land activities; \n \n -- detection of illegal activities such as overfishing, deforestation, or \n bilge water dumping; \n \n -- monitoring of crops, critical infrastructure, transportation corridors, \n coastal erosion and the effects of climate change; \n \n -- provision of timely information to support humanitarian aid disaster \n response in response to floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes and \n marine oil spills; and \n \n -- routine systematic observations for a variety of applications natural \n resources, industrial and geographic applications including agriculture, \n forestry, mining and exploration activities. \n QUOTE \n\n \"The greatest moments in Earth exploration happen collaboratively, when diverse insights and information are united to create something bigger and more meaningful. With C-band SAR, we are able to find a needle in a haystack. With the addition of X-band data, we will be able to thread that needle. By pushing the envelope and creating flexibility to integrate additional data sources and sensors, we want others to join our CHORUS and help us change how and when we see the world.\" \n\n -- Mike Greenley, Chief Executive Officer, MDA \n\n LINKS \n\n www.mda.space \n\n CHORUS animated logo \n\n MDA Announces RADARSAT-2 Continuity Mission \n\n MDA releases first details of its next generation commercial Earth observation mission \n\n SOCIAL MEDIA \n \nTwitter: www.twitter.com/MDA_space \nFacebook: www.facebook.com/MDAspace \nLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/mdaspace \nYouTube: www.youtube.com/c/mdaspace \nInstagram: www.instagram.com/MDA_space \n \n ABOUT MDA \n\n Serving the world from its Canadian home and global offices, MDA (TSX:MDA) is an international space mission partner and a robotics, satellite systems and geointelligence pioneer with a 50-year story of firsts on and above the Earth. With over 2,200 employees across Canada, the US and the UK, MDA is leading the charge towards viable Moon colonies, enhanced Earth observation, communication in a hyper-connected world, and more. With a track record of making space ambitions come true, MDA enables highly skilled people to continually push boundaries, tackle big challenges, and imagine solutions that inspire and endure to change the world for the better, on the ground and in the stars. \n\n SOURCE MDA Inc. \n\n View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/December2021/14/c7023.html \n\n /CONTACT: \n\n MEDIA CONTACT: Amy MacLeod, amy.macleod@mda.space, 613-796-6937 \n\n /Web site: https://mda.space \nCopyrig  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "MDA announces CHORUS as the name of its next market-leading commercial Earth Observation mission (WSJ: CW Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1297",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mda-announces-chorus-as-the-name-of-its-next-market-leading-commercial-earth-observation-mission-01639488939?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=9",
        "text": "A collaborative multi-sensor constellation, CHORUS will bring together multiple diverse and unique perspectives in harmony, opening the aperture and the art of the possible to provide a new level of real-time insight about our planet. CHORUS builds on the strong heritage of the RADARSAT program and brings forward innovative new technologies and operations concepts to deliver a significantly enhanced capability. \n\n\n\n\n\n The powerful C-band SAR satellite will provide broad area coverage in concert with a smaller trailing X-band SAR satellite for higher resolution data collection and Near Real-Time (NRT) cross-cueing day or night and in all weather conditions. The X-band satellite will fly in the same mid-inclination orbit with the identical ground track as the MDA-built C-band SAR satellite. \n\n\n By collecting and integrating data from the individual satellites, CHORUS will provide the most extensive radar imaging capacity available on the market in one system, ranging from industry leading broad area coverage with a 700km-wide swath to sub-metre very high resolution spotlight images. \n\n In keeping with RADARSAT heritage, CHORUS will showcase unique capability for maritime surveillance and other time-critical applications, such as land intelligence and disaster response. This NRT capability will be enabled through fast-tasking for tactical operations and direct downlinks to a global network of cloud-enabled ground stations. \n\n Responding to customer needs, MDA will advance a new commercial vision to bring multiple capabilities and sensors together as one. The unique CHORUS mission will be scalable and able to incorporate and integrate multiple additional collaborative space-based or terrestrial sensors and technology. \n\n With core C-band and X-band sensors operating in a unique mid-inclination orbit, CHORUS will support higher imaging frequency between the mid-latitude areas of the northern and southern hemispheres. With tipping and cueing techniques, higher imaging performance, more imaging time per orbit, fast-tasking, faster delivery timelines and NRT data exploitation aided by machine-learning and artificial intelligence, CHORUS will offer advanced, innovative and disruptive Earth observation services, including: \n -- protection of national security and sovereignty by providing critical \n time sensitive data and intelligence on maritime and land activities; \n \n -- detection of illegal activities such as overfishing, deforestation, or \n bilge water dumping; \n \n -- monitoring of crops, critical infrastructure, transportation corridors, \n coastal erosion and the effects of climate change; \n \n -- provision of timely information to support humanitarian aid disaster \n response in response to floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes and \n marine oil spills; and \n \n -- routine systematic observations for a variety of applications natural \n resources, industrial and geographic applications including agriculture, \n forestry, mining and exploration activities. \n QUOTE \n\n \"The greatest moments in Earth exploration happen collaboratively, when diverse insights and information are united to create something bigger and more meaningful. With C-band SAR, we are able to find a needle in a haystack. With the addition of X-band data, we will be able to thread that needle. By pushing the envelope and creating flexibility to integrate additional data sources and sensors, we want others to join our CHORUS and help us change how and when we see the world.\" \n\n -- Mike Greenley, Chief Executive Officer, MDA \n\n LINKS \n\n www.mda.space \n\n CHORUS animated logo \n\n MDA Announces RADARSAT-2 Continuity Mission \n\n MDA releases first details of its next generation commercial Earth observation mission \n\n SOCIAL MEDIA \n \nTwitter: www.twitter.com/MDA_space \nFacebook: www.facebook.com/MDAspace \nLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/mdaspace \nYouTube: www.youtube.com/c/mdaspace \nInstagram: www.instagram.com/MDA_space \n \n ABOUT MDA \n\n Serving the world from its Canadian home and global offices, MDA (TSX:MDA) is an international space mission partner and a robotics, satellite systems and geointelligence pioneer with a 50-year story of firsts on and above the Earth. With over 2,200 employees across Canada, the US and the UK, MDA is leading the charge towards viable Moon colonies, enhanced Earth observation, communication in a hyper-connected world, and more. With a track record of making space ambitions come true, MDA enables highly skilled people to continually push boundaries, tackle big challenges, and imagine solutions that inspire and endure to change the world for the better, on the ground and in the stars. \n\n SOURCE MDA Inc. \n\n View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/December2021/14/c7023.html \n\n /CONTACT: \n\n MEDIA CONTACT: Amy MacLeod, amy.macleod@mda.space, 613-796-6937 \n\n /Web site: https://mda.space \nCop  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018I got to live out one of my dreams\u2019: Navy goalie practices with St. Louis Blues (WP: D.C. Sports Bog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1298",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2018/10/03/i-got-live-out-one-my-dreams-navy-goalie-practices-with-st-louis-blues/",
        "text": "It was one-on-one: Vladimir Tarasenko, three-time NHL all-star and St. Louis Blues right winger, versus Luke Markus, the Naval Academy\u2019s club hockey team goaltender.Tarasenko skated in hard from the right and bluffed a shot to the top left corner of the net. Markus lunged to defend it, then looked down to realize he\u2019d been fooled. The puck slid through his legs. Markus laughed and smiled so big, teammates could see it through his face mask at center ice. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Blues spent a long weekend in Annapolis at the end of September and beginning of October, a team bonding trip before a preseason meeting with the Capitals. On Sunday, they practiced at the Naval Academy as the Midshipmen\u2019s club team looked on.Story continues below advertisementSt. Louis coaches asked whether there was another goalie around so the team could get some extra shots on net. Navy players started hollering for Markus to get his pads on.Advertisement\u201cWe give each other a hard time all the time. I thought I was going to get my stuff on and [the Blues] were going to say, \u2018Buddy, come on now. You can\u2019t skate with us,\u2019\" he said.Instead, coaches told him to get in goal as some of the NHL\u2019s best fired shots at him. Then they played an intrasquad game of three-on-three. Then a shootout drill.Navy teammates lined the rink mouths agape as the practice went on and on. In all, Markus, a senior, was on the ice with the team for close to an hour.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was a dream,\u201d he said. \u201cI got live out one of my dreams.\u201dWhen the Blues needed a practice goalie, @NavyHockey's Luke Markus put pads on as fast as he could. https://t.co/wkGxrxY3PE #stlblues pic.twitter.com/ggmJxZIeWb\u2014 St. Louis Blues (@StLouisBlues) September 30, 2018\n\nFor years, hockey and the Navy had been two diametrically opposed aspirations for Markus. He started skating at age 3 and picked up a hockey stick at 4. By 5, he played on his first travel team as a defenseman and goaltender. By 6, goalie was his only spot on the ice.AdvertisementWhen he reached middle school, he figured out just how good he\u2019d become at blocking pucks. If he went to prep school, there was a path to college hockey and from there, who knows?But over summer vacation, his father took him to see one of the final space shuttle launches in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\u201cI watched that spacecraft go up and thought, that is the coolest thing I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. I want to do that,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementHe started studying up on astronauts and learned that more than 50 had graduated from the Naval Academy, more than any other service institution. That\u2019s where he\u2019d go to college, he resolved, even if the Midshipmen don\u2019t have a varsity hockey team.He tried out for the club team his freshman year, and made the A team (Navy fields two levels of club hockey teams). Soon he was the starting net minder. Years after imagining he\u2019d have to give up hockey in college, he\u2019s still on the ice almost daily.Advertisement\u201cEvery day of these past four years have been a gift,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just extra hockey. I thought I was done.\u201dInstead, he spent the past weekend sharing a locker room with the Blues and showing them around the Naval Academy. Before the team returned to St. Louis, goalie Jake Allen left a practice jersey, a pair of hockey pants and a hat in Markus\u2019s locker.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve had a few NHL teams come through here,\u201d Markus said, noting other franchises that have stopped in Annapolis on trips through the District, and the NHL Winter Classic game between the Capitals and Maple Leafs. \u201cThey\u2019ve all been incredibly nice and thoughtful of what we do, but this whole organization has been so genuine wanting to learn about what we do and grateful for what we do.\u201cThey absolutely made us feel part of the team. You\u2019ve got a locker room full of guys here rooting for the Blues this season.\u201dRead more on the Capitals:The Stanley Cup started Alex Ovechkin\u2019s summer of joy. It might never end.Experts still don\u2019t believe in the Stanley Cup champion CapitalsHow the Capitals kept the team together for another Stanley Cup runThe Capitals' Stanley Cup rings feature 252 diamonds, 35 rubies and a sapphire Senior goalkeeper Luke Markus wants to become an astronaut. \u2018I got to live out one of my dreams\u2019: Navy goalie practices with St. Louis Blues",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "Brian Mitchell on Jay Gruden\u2019s Redskins: \u2018They think everything is a joke\u2019 (WP: D.C. Sports Bog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1299",
        "date": "2018-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2018/10/10/brian-mitchell-jay-grudens-redskins-they-think-everything-is-joke/",
        "text": "There was plenty of blame to go around after the Redskins' blowout loss Monday night, but for some, including NBC Sports Washington analyst Brian Mitchell, it started with Jay Gruden. After the Saints embarrassed the Redskins in New Orleans, Mitchell ripped Washington\u2019s preparedness. He said players aren\u2019t taking their jobs seriously enough and suggested that\u2019s a reflection of their head coach. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThere were things that happened after the bye week that made me start to question a lot of things,\u201d Mitchell said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got guys getting a break \u2014 a veteran day after a bye. Hell, you just were off for seven days and you come back and you need a veteran day? .\u2009.\u2009. Guys are still blowing assignments, can\u2019t keep their coverages, can\u2019t communicate properly. And you know what? We always talk about players taking on the personality of their coach, and I\u2019m going to say this: Yes, they\u2019re taking on the personality of their coach. They think everything is a joke. They think everything is easy, and they\u2019re not going out there busting their a \u2014 to become the best players they can be.\u201dThe Redskins are now 2-3 coming off a bye under Gruden, who is 30-37-1 overall in the regular season with Washington. On a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Gruden vowed that his veteran team will \u201cclean it up\u201d and avoid a repeat of Monday\u2019s debacle. If the Redskins don\u2019t turn things around, Mitchell suggested it might be time for a change at the top.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cListen, if Jay can\u2019t get them to play better, maybe somebody else needs to come in here,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to hold my tongue anymore. If you cannot coach the team properly, you can\u2019t get the guys to play their best, then damn it, you shouldn\u2019t be the coach, point blank. And I\u2019m sure a lot of fans feel the same way.\u201dLast night has @BMitchliveNBCS asking a lot of questions and one big one in particular: Is Jay Gruden the right coach for this team?(via @croppmetcalfe) pic.twitter.com/GwpWddVXs9\u2014 NBC Sports Redskins (@NBCSRedskins) October 9, 2018\n\nOn his podcast, Kevin Sheehan echoed some of what Mitchell said. He pointed to the personal foul penalty on safety Montae Nicholson that negated a third-down stop on the Saints' second drive as the latest example of a recurring problem of discipline under Gruden.\u201cWe\u2019ve talked about \u2018Camp Jay\u2019 and loose Jay and no culture of where you\u2019re fearful of making a mistake like that,\u201d Sheehan said. \u201cI don\u2019t know that Nicholson will even be punished for that. I don\u2019t know if there will be a deterrent created for others. That\u2019s part of why I think Jay, and I\u2019ve said this for multiple years running, is no better than, say, a middling coach, average coach. He does some of the things very well. He\u2019s an offensive guy. I like it. I like the way he designs guys to get open. It would be nice if they had a quarterback that would throw it to the guys who were open. But there\u2019s always been sort of this lack of discipline with Jay Gruden, stupid penalties. It was an ugly night from that perspective, going back to a performance that just lacked professionalism.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor the record, the Redskins have ranked 29th, 17th, 23rd and sixth in total penalties over the past four seasons.Jay Gruden, Redskins have several problems to fixFormer Redskins safety and NFL Network analyst Will Blackmon engaged in a Twitter Q&A with fans Tuesday and was asked about Gruden\u2019s ability to prepare a team.\u201cHe let us be ourselves,\u201d said Blackmon, who played for Gruden in 2015 and 2016. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt prepared. Coaches only have a certain amount of time to coach us. We are professionals. We must take advantage of the rest of our day.\u201dHe let us be ourselves. I've always felt prepared. Coaches only have a certain amount of time to coach us. We are professionals, we must take advantage of the rest of our day. https://t.co/wMKqAwJsLo\u2014 Will Blackmon (@WillBlackmon) October 9, 2018\n\nThe Team 980 host Steve Czaban called Monday\u2019s loss \u201cas bad as it could be and then some.\u201d\u201c[Monday] night, our coach called the effort, and I quote, debauchery,\u201d Czaban said. \u201cSir, that word doesn\u2019t mean what you think it means. Debauchery. Noun. Excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures. Our coach can\u2019t even find the right words to describe his own t--- that he has authored as our head coach in that awful game last night. . . . Now the number of systems on board the spaceship that is the Redskins that is either malfunctioning or outright on fire has alarmingly tripled overnight. By my count, the systems now that are either on meltdown or burning include the coach\u2019s ability to prepare the team and scheme and make halftime adjustments, QB1, RB1, WR1, DB1 and maybe some other things I\u2019m not mentioning here. The only good thing about where we are right now, aside from the fact that, hey, we\u2019re in first place \u2014 the only thing good is that there is another football game .\u2009.\u2009. coming up in the blink of an eye, on a short week. That is actually a good thing.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCzaban also made the argument that Alex Smith\u2019s interception in the third quarter Monday was the Redskins' worst play since the \u201cSwinging Gate.\u201d Kirk Cousins would like a word.I believe this is the single worst Redskins play since \u201cSwinging Gate.\u201d Skins fans: change my mind. https://t.co/OEUFJbRpBa\u2014 Steve Czaban (@czabe) October 9, 2018\n\nThe Redskins Talk podcast crew of J.P. Finlay, Mitch Tischler and Rich Tandler described Monday\u2019s performance as atrocious, bad, horrible, ugly, disappointing, embarrassing and humiliating.\u201cIt\u2019s probably too early to talk about Jay Gruden\u2019s job, but this pattern cannot persist, of playing one great game, one poor game,\u201d Tandler said. \u201cEventually, whether it\u2019s fair or not, it comes down to the coach.\"Finally, in non-Gruden-related commentary, NFL analyst Brian Baldinger highlighted a missed opportunity for the Redskins' defense on the Saints' second drive that could have changed the complexion of the game. After defensive lineman Daron Payne forced a fumble by Saints running back Mark Ingram, linebacker Pernell McPhee failed to pounce on the loose ball and Ingram was able to recover.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe ball is out!\u201d Baldinger said. \u201cIt\u2019s your ball. You created it! You got to get the loose balls. You got to get the loose balls, man.\u201dAt some point, the Redskins' players have to make plays or the heat on Gruden will only intensify..@Redskins DL MEMO: learn how to recover a fumble. There is a technique to it . This ball bounced on the turf for an eternity. #BaldysBreakdowns pic.twitter.com/BerB2NGMP3\u2014 Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) October 9, 2018\n\nRedskins in NFL Power RankingsESPN: 17 (Last week: 19)USA Today: 14 (LW: 10)SB Nation: 19 (LW: 17)Bleacher Report: 15 (LW: 19)NFL.com: 18 (LW: 15)Pro Football Talk: 23 (LW: 20)The Washington Post: 17 (LW: 14)Read more on the Redskins:Redskins can\u2019t sustain success and Jay Gruden is running out of timeJosh Norman is paid to be the focus of the Redskins' defense, not the distractionMichael Thomas taunts Josh Norman on Twitter: \u2018I was punking you all night\u2019Redskins-Saints takeaways: Defense gives up too many big playsThe Redskins showed us nothing. Fortunately for them, neither has the NFC East.Hail or Fail: Redskins' Monday night misery continues against the Saints Mitchell and others put the heat on Washington's coach after embarrassing loss in New Orleans. Brian Mitchell on Jay Gruden\u2019s Redskins: \u2018They think everything is a joke\u2019",
        "author": "Scott Allen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | At beer-soaked, grimy old RFK Stadium, one last hurrah (WP: D.C. Sports Bog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1300",
        "date": "2017-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2017/10/22/at-beer-soaked-grimy-old-rfk-stadium-one-last-hurrah/",
        "text": "\u201cThis is it,\u201d Paul Abugattas said Sunday afternoon, as fireworks blasted off and full cups of beers flew through the air and D.C. United kicked off its last-ever game at RFK Stadium. Then he hugged a nearby friend, a 49-year-old Washington native who had flown home from Colorado to say goodbye to the city\u2019s most beloved pile of concrete. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWashington has\u00a0bid farewell to RFK Stadium before, on other days overflowing with other emotions. There was anger in 1971, when the Senators\u2019 final game before skipping town was cut one out short by fans running rampant on the field. There was nostalgia in 1996, when Redskins fans overwhelmed security at the team\u2019s final game in the District, pouring onto the field to dig up pieces of turf as souvenirs. There was excitement in 2007, when the Nationals moved across town to their shiny new home, leaving United behind.American soccer made its home at funky, aging RFK StadiumThe emotions on this afternoon felt mostly like love \u2014 for a place as anachronistic in modern sports as black-and-white newsreels or foam fingers, score hotlines or 10-cent hog dogs. Nothing about the 56-year-old stadium fits in 2017; not the architecture, not the dark and reeking concourses, not the peeling paint, not the amenities that would embarrass a minor league baseball team. And yet more than 41,000 people \u2014 soccer lifers, D.C. sports fans and hardcore United supporters \u2014 pumped the joint full of electricity, and love, at least one last time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a broken-down dirty old dump, but it\u2019s our broken-down dirty old dump,\u201d said longtime United fan Brad Clements, words repeated over and over throughout the afternoon, often with some homey profanities mixed in.Like me, Clements had climbed into the stadium\u2019s especially decrepit upper deck during the first half of United\u2019s season-ending 2-1 loss to the New York Red Bulls, just to wander around and soak in the view. Behind him was that unforgettable look toward the city\u2019s core: the broad expanse of East Capitol Street, the Capitol dome, the Washington Monument. That vista is so different from those offered at Nationals Park and Capital One Arena, which are tucked into tighter quarters and almost sneak up on you. Don\u2019t even mention FedEx Field, that alien spaceship plopped down among gas stations and fast-food chains.D.C. United celebrates its past on emotional final day at RFK StadiumBut RFK was pasted into the city\u2019s design, a place you pointed out to relatives from the top of the National Cathedral, a place that beckoned as you biked east from Capitol Hill or drove west from Maryland or followed the crowds from the nearby Metro station. You saw the familiar swooping profile looming in front of you, and you felt like you were heading someplace important, to a building that mattered.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFrom day one \u2014 Oct. 7, 1961 \u2014 D.C. Stadium [as it was then called] was centered in this city\u2019s scheme of things as sports stadiums elsewhere seldom are,\u201d the great critic Benjamin Forgey wrote, a quarter-century ago this week. \u201cThe stadium, despite its rather anonymous architectural image, did and does say \u2018Washington\u2019 in a unique way.\u201dUnited\u2019s fans inherited that uniqueness after the Redskins bolted for Maryland \u2014 and then they hopped it up with smoke bombs and sweat and soul. Perched in the highest reaches of the stadium, Clements wasn\u2019t the only one taking in the bouncing stands and the supporters who had helped turn this generic multi-use stadium into a temple of American soccer.Good beer shower. Some people are gonna need refills pic.twitter.com/BhYeBjYdQj\u2014 Dan Steinberg (@dcsportsbog) October 22, 2017\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s a throwback. All the new stadiums \u2014 like Yankee Stadium \u2014 they feel like a mall,\u201d said 28-year old Mark Cunningham, a Washington sports fan who came by himself to this, his first United game, sitting alone in the very top row. As he talked, the crowd howled; \u201cDoesn\u2019t the noise feel different?\u201d Cunningham asked. \u201cThat roar? I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s pretty pure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPurity in putrefaction, maybe, but he\u2019s not wrong. There was an official program of events on Sunday, with an alumni game and a postgame ceremony and 90 minutes of Major League Soccer in between. But, as with so many other afternoons at RFK Stadium, it often felt like the fans were in charge of the agenda. They orchestrated the cheers. They took over the concourse at halftime with a raucous, ear-piercing drum circle, happy chaos created together by\u00a0old men and shirtless 20-somethings and kids on parents\u2019 shoulders. (\u201cA little hectic, but a lot of fun,\u201d said 13-year-old Nellie Hartell, when she emerged with her father from the pulsating mob.)They waved flags, clapped to and beyond the final whistle. Then some of them stomped on those\u00a0classic orange seats until they splintered, looking for a souvenir. There was something ad hoc about it all, something populist. Somehow, the adults in suits had allowed the people control over this one last venue.It's a show pic.twitter.com/oEEGoaHxDQ\u2014 Dan Steinberg (@dcsportsbog) October 22, 2017\n\n\u201cThe inmates kind of ran the asylum here for two decades,\u201d said Paul Sotoudeh, a longtime leader of the Screaming Eagles, one of the largest supporters groups. \u201cThe myth of RFK, the legend of RFK \u2014 we got to create that on our own.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPlaces like this, the only thing going on is the game,\u201d said James Lambert, another Screaming Eagles leader. \u201cThere aren\u2019t many stadiums left where the game is the event.\u201d\u201cIt ignores any appearance of corporate professionalism,\u201d added Alex Harkavy, as fans in front of him deployed red-tinted smoke and chanted profanities about the visiting Red Bulls. \u201cIt stood the test of time as a lesson in pure functionality. You\u2019re always going to have fun here, and there aren\u2019t stadiums meant to do that anymore.\u201dSomeone is getting a souvenir pic.twitter.com/VY5llxGXCR\u2014 Dan Steinberg (@dcsportsbog) October 22, 2017\n\nAnd so fans\u00a0met boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives here; \u201cThis was the old MySpace,\u201d said one, who found two different boyfriends at this stadium. They\u00a0got drunk in the infamous Lot 8 as 20-somethings, and then grew up and brought their kids here as 30- and 40-somethings. Some\u00a0went from childhood to adulthood in the building, like Carlos Castellon, who was 7 when he attended MLS Cup in 1997, \u201cand I\u2019ve been here ever since,\u201d he said. Others \u2014 like United Coach Ben Olsen \u2014 spent the prime of their lives roaming the place\u2019s ridiculous catwalks or tunnels or green\u00a0centerpiece; \u201c20 years of my life was spent on this field,\u201d Olsen told the crowd after the game.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a community,\u201d as United legend John Harkes put it, using a word so many others had\u00a0hinted at all afternoon. \u201cIt\u2019s gritty. It\u2019s real. It\u2019s authentic. And we love it.\u201dBounce pic.twitter.com/OFfoi2GvsE\u2014 Dan Steinberg (@dcsportsbog) October 22, 2017\n\nIt\u2019s also well past its prime, easier to mourn when something better awaits. Some supporters are nervous about whether they\u2019ll be as central to the game-day experience at the new, corporate-branded stadium at Buzzard Point. Others can\u2019t wait to inhabit a place that doesn\u2019t smell, a place that will take United out of its decaying time warp and\u00a0into modernity.And there will still be more events at RFK, as the city tries to figure out how best to use the valuable site. That means at least one more goodbye \u2014 in the form of a wrecking ball \u2014 and more retrospectives, and more memories. But it\u2019s hard to imagine a more loving goodbye than the one the old pile of concrete received on this night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLook at it,\u201d said\u00a0Srdan Bastaic, another longtime supporter, shirtless and spent after hours of screaming, as he scanned the emptying building. \u201cI don\u2019t know, man. It\u2019s beautiful, isn\u2019t it?\u201dMore on RFK Stadium:American soccer made its home at aging, funky RFK StadiumD.C. United celebrates its past on emotional final day at RFK StadiumFreddy Adu, without a soccer club, returns to RFK StadiumRFK and its sports teams: A brief history in photosUnited played nearly 450 matches at RFK. Here are the top 20 memorable moments.Ten of the greatest games in RFK history, across all sportsD.C. Sports Bog: See who you can find in D.C. United\u2019s \u2018Last Call at RFK\u2019 artworkSvrluga: As RFK Stadium loses its final tenant, let\u2019s remember the richness it housed At this ridiculous stadium, one last night of love. At beer-soaked, grimy old RFK Stadium, one last hurrah",
        "author": "Dan Steinberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Like you were inside a drum\u2019: Readers share their memories from RFK Stadium (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1301",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/09/06/like-you-were-inside-drum-readers-share-their-memories-rfk-stadium/",
        "text": "The year was 1984, the Washington Redskins were playing the Detroit Lions, and the rain was coming down at RFK Stadium. Watching the game from his Fairfax, Va., home, 13-year-old Tapio Christiansen joked with his father that they should head to the stadium and take seats from the fans already leaving to escape the deluge. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis dad told him to get in the car, and the father and son walked through the turnstiles just in time for the second half. It was Christiansen\u2019s first and last time at RFK Stadium.\u201cIt sounded like you were inside a drum,\u201d Christiansen, now 48, told The Washington Post. \u201cYou felt the building reverberate.\u201dIn light of the District\u2019s plans to tear down RFK Stadium by 2021, The Post asked readers to share their memories from the past 58 years. One hundred people have written.Many talked about the Redskins\u2019 glory years or attending baseball games at RFK. Others wrote about the concerts over the years, such as the time a woman was struck by lightning at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1998.When Stephen A. Silver first heard the news of the demolition, he said, it was devastating. Silver, 49, told The Post he went to games as a preteen in the early 1980s, and he sees RFK as \u201cone of the focal points\u201d of his childhood.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just the greatest joy in the world as a kid with my dad,\u201d he said. \u201cNo one would have their voice by the end of the day.\u201dBack in the Redskins\u2019 \u201cheyday,\u201d games were \u201criotous and fun,\u201d said Mary Clark, 72, who also used to go to games with her father. \u201cGood old RFK\u201d was a true home field, Clark said, and she\u2019s not sure the same aura can be duplicated in today\u2019s massive, state-of-the-art domes.\u201cThe stadium would literally shake,\u201d she added. \u201cIt was just a thrill.\u201dBye-bye, bouncy seats: District to raze RFK Stadium by 2021Empty parking lots surrounding RFK have already given way to recreational turf fields as part of a $35.8 million complex that opened in June. It\u2019s the first phase in a redevelopment plan from Events D.C., the District\u2019s convention and sports authority.Story continues below advertisementThe demolition of RFK will make it easier for the District to move ahead with plans over the next 5 to 7 years to build a $500 million recreational and event space for residents and tourists, Events DC President Gregory A. O\u2019Dell said.AdvertisementJoel Church, 41, lives a \u201cstone\u2019s throw\u201d from the stadium today and said he has always seen the place as a \u201clovable\u201d dump that still, from afar, has a beauty to it \u2014 like some \u201calien spacecraft crash-landed kind of off into the distance.\u201dRFK Stadium was home to thriving professional sports teams for years but now the land is vacant. Here\u2019s what the District could do with the site. (Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)In June 1995, Church went to HFStival at RFK Stadium when he was 16 years old. The Ramones were headlining, and Church went with friends from his Maryland high school. Over the phone, he decreed it a \u201cmini \u201990s Woodstock.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe concert had \u201c17 bands for 17 bucks,\u201d Church said, and it was one of many concerts he attended at RFK. He was a teenager and an avid fan of rock music.\u201cIt was my first one,\u201d Church said. \u201cI had my first kiss there.\u201dChurch said he remembers dancing in the rain while Blind Melon\u2019s \u201cNo Rain\u201d played over the PA system just for the occasion.Advertisement\u201cWe were all just skipping around, and it just felt very innocent,\u201d he added.Jim Tomlin, 63, grew up in Bethesda and saw \u201cquite a few\u201d concerts at RFK \u2014 such as when the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers played on a hot and humid summer day in 1973 \u2014 but he remembers it for the experience, not necessarily the acoustics.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was cavernous,\u201d Tomlin told The Post. \u201cYou would never be able to understand the words they were singing.\u201dTomlin said RFK is still eerily similar to what it once was. Tomlin went to his fair share of D.C. United games at the stadium, as a season-ticket holder for a time. He remembers watching a friendly match one day when a piece of concrete fell into a section nearby.\u201cWe all just stared at each other and said, \u2018What are we in for here?\u2019 \u201d Tomlin said with a laugh.Tomlin said he has been to Buzzard Point to see the team in its new stadium, but Audi Field isn\u2019t the same to him. It\u2019s a different space and a younger crowd.AdvertisementTomlin still lives in the area and said he has decided he\u2019ll be there when they start tearing RFK down.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt would be like having a friend who\u2019s terminally ill,\u201d Tomlin said. \u201cThe stadium was a big part of my life, so I\u2019d like to see it through the end of its life.\u201dRobert McCartney contributed to this report.What questions do you have about D.C. or the region? Ask The Post.Read more:While stadium rusts away, newly opened Fields at RFK offers glimpse into site\u2019s futureDel. Norton floats a new way for District to control RFK Stadium site The Washington Post asked readers to share their memories from the past 58 years. One hundred people have written. \u2018Like you were inside a drum\u2019: Readers share their memories from RFK Stadium",
        "author": "Teddy Amenabar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: In March, planets loiter together in the evening and morning heavens (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1302",
        "date": "2018-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/skywatch-in-march-planets-loiter-together-in-the-evening-and-morning-heavens/2018/02/24/913755e6-1998-11e8-8b08-027a6ccb38eb_story.html",
        "text": "Planets loiter together in the evening and morning heavens, clocks turn forward, spring emerges and the calendar presents a blue moon. March defines madness. After sunset, the sporty planets Mercury and Venus show up like a pitcher and catcher reporting to spring training. These planetary companions conjunct within the first few days of March. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe luminous Venus has emerged from a two-month hiatus, as it was hiding in the sun\u2019s glare. Together with the fleet Mercury, find the duo in the western sky at dusk, low on the horizon. Which planet is which? Venus (-3.9 magnitude, very bright) looks like an LED flashlight shining in your face, while a more-muted Mercury (-1.3 magnitude, bright) is dimmer. The new moon is March 17, so catch the skinny, young crescent moon near the planetary pair on March 18 before the fleet Mercury slides from view days later. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJupiter (-2.2 magnitude, very bright) rises before midnight until the time change March 11. Then it will ascend the eastern heavens starting around midnight and rise in the 11 p.m. hour again, later in the month. It will be easy to spot Jupiter before dawn in the southern heavens as the waning, gibbous moon approaches the large, gassy planet on March 6 and passes it March 7. Mars (0.8 magnitude, visible) rises at about 2 a.m. now, roughly an hour before Saturn (0.6 magnitude, visible) early in March. But throughout the month, the two planets play catch up for a conjunction in early April. Scandalous though this may sound, find Mars (0.5 magnitude, brightening) and Saturn late in March in the south-southeast pre-dawn skies hanging out in Sagittarius \u2014 just above the constellation\u2019s teapot dome. They will be 1.5 degrees apart by March 31, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.The first full moon of the next month occurs March 1 at 7:51 p.m. Eastern time and the second full moon in a month \u2014 popularly known as the blue moon \u2014 is March 31 at 8:37 a.m. Eastern time, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. February didn\u2019t get a full moon, as January scored a full moon and a blue moon. A double blue moon in a given year hasn\u2019t happened since 1999, and will happen next in 2037. The next blue moon is Oct. 31, 2020. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe lose an hour when we turn our clocks forward on Sunday, March 11, as Daylight saving time starts. Spring officially starts at the vernal equinox March 20 at 12:15 p.m. Eastern time, according to the observatory, as the sun appears to cross into the Northern Hemisphere. Incidentally, for the Washington area on March 17, daylight (12 hours, 1 minute) virtually matches darkness (11 hours, 59 minutes). Down-to-Earth Events\n\u25cf\nFeb. 26 \u2014 \u201cHow Geckos Helped the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Make Some Really Cool Robotics,\u201d a talk by Aaron Parness, of the laboratory, at the Moving Beyond Earth gallery, National Air and Space Museum on the Mall. 1:30 p.m. airandspace.si.edu.\nStory continues below advertisement\u25cf\nMarch 5 \u2014 \u201cRecycling Crustal Bits on Earth and Europa,\u201d a talk by University of Maryland professor Jessica Sunshine, at the university\u2019s observatory, College Park. See the night sky delights through telescopes afterward, weather permitting. 8 p.m. www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse.\nAdvertisement\u25cf\nMarch 9 \u2014 \u201cEclipses: Using Shadows to Shed New Light,\u201d a lecture by NASA\u2019s Thomas Zurbuchen, in which he will describe NASA projects that use shadows to comprehend the cosmos. The lecture is hosted by the Philosophical Society of Washington at the John Wesley Powell Auditorium, adjacent to the Cosmos Club, 2170 Florida Avenue NW. 8 p.m. philsoc.org.\n\u25cf\nMarch 10 \u2014 \u201cWhy Send Spacecraft to Comets?\u201d \u2014 a talk by astronomer Ludmilla Kolokolova at the regular meeting of the National Capital Astronomers. University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. 7:30 p.m. capitalastronomers.org.\nStory continues below advertisement\u25cf\nMarch 11 \u2014 \u201cOrigin of the Earth and Moon,\u201d a talk by Miki Nakajima, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science, in which she will explain that our lunar neighbor was probably formed by a collision between Earth and an impactor. At the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club meeting, 163 Research Hall, George Mason University. 7 p.m. novac.com.\n\u25cf\nMarch 20 \u2014 Listen to an astronomy talk at the University of Maryland observatory, followed by the real heavens through telescopes afterward, weather permitting. 8 p.m. astro.umd.edu/openhouse.\n\u25cf\nMarch 21 \u2014 \u201cThe Vernal Equinox: The First Day of Spring,\u201d a program at the Montgomery College Planetarium, Takoma Park. 7 p.m. goo.gl/q9iwrS.\nBlaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com. A roundup of astronomy news and events. Skywatch: In March, planets loiter together in the evening and morning heavens",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Today in D.C.: Headlines to start your Tuesday in D.C., Maryland and Virginia (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1303",
        "date": "2021-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/01/26/dc-news-live-updates/",
        "text": "Good morning \u2014 it\u2019s Tuesday. Grab your coffee or tea. If you haven\u2019t heard, dogs are officially back in the White House. President Biden\u2019s German shepherds, Champ and Major, relaxed on the White House lawn Sunday.Today\u2019s weather: The remnants of last night\u2019s wintry weather continue to hound our region through the morning hours into the early afternoon before finally drying out. Temperatures only manage to move up through the 30s. Highs: 35-40. Here are the top stories for TuesdayFive men were shot, one fatally, when at least one person opened fire inside a corner market in Southeast Washington on Monday morning.Prince George\u2019s County canceled vaccine appointments for nonresidents Monday. County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks said the jurisdiction came to the decision after hearing from residents who were unable to make appointments.Peter Snyder, a social media pioneer, investor and former Fox News contributor, announced he will seek the GOP nomination for this year\u2019s race for Virginia governor.Get local news delivered to your inbox: Morning (8 a.m.) | Afternoon (4 p.m.)Listen to Capital Weather Gang\u2019s morning weather report on your smart speaker.Virginia reports most daily virus-related deaths since start of the pandemicReturn to menuBy Teddy Amenabar1:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkCoronavirus figures released by the District, Maryland and Virginia on Tuesday showed 6,384 additional cases in the region and 165 deaths.The Washington region reported 165 fatalities Tuesday, the most daily coronavirus-related deaths since the start of the pandemic. The confirmed cases Tuesday are roughly three times the number of daily cases reported around the region in May and June, according to The Washington Post\u2019s tracker.More than 14,000 people from the District, Maryland and Virginia have died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Those who have died include activists, writers, firefighters and pastors. They worked in grocery stores, drove public buses and taught children. Read about their lives here.The DistrictReported cases: 195Reported deaths: 9In the past seven days, the District has reported 1,441 new cases.MarylandReported cases: 1,482Reported deaths: 63In the past seven days, Maryland has reported 14,434 new cases.VirginiaReported cases: 4,707Reported deaths: 93In the past seven days, Virginia has reported 32,250 new cases.The Washington Post is tracking the number of reported coronavirus cases in the Washington region. Follow the trends here.Read more about coronavirus cases in the DMV:Coronavirus vaccination appointments canceled in D.C. region as health officials confront scarce supplyYour questions about coronavirus vaccines, answeredAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWashington\u2019s past: Moon rock lands in D.C.Return to menuBy Teddy Amenabar11:02 a.m.Link copiedLinkTwo months after launching into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins came to Washington \u2014 and they brought some souvenirs.Armstrong and Aldrin collected 49 pounds of lunar material while on the moon, according to Teasel Muir-Harmony, a curator of the Smithsonian\u2019s Apollo Spacecraft Collection. (Collins remained in the command capsule in orbit during the 21\u00bd-hour lunar landing.)The two-pound lunar rock in the photo above, which bears the catchy name \u201c10020,\u201d was the first piece of lunar material on display for the public. At the time, Muir-Harmony told The Post the rare rock was compared to the Smithsonian\u2019s Hope Diamond.The National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall didn\u2019t exist yet. Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins attended a private ceremony at the Smithsonian\u2019s Arts and Industries Building, where they took pictures with the lunar rock. The Smithsonian event was one calendar item in a long line of parades and other events held across the country for the astronauts.This photograph was taken by Marion S. Trikosko and is dated in a collection from the Library of Congress on Sept. 16, 1969, but according to other photos and articles of the event, the private event at the Smithsonian was on Sept. 15. The next day, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins addressed a joint session of Congress.This is one part in a series where we share a piece of the District\u2019s past. If you have a story or a photo you\u2019d like to share, please email postlocal@washpost.com \u2014 and thank you in advance.More on the Apollo missions:Listen to Moonrise, The Post\u2019s podcast on the United States\u2019 decision to go to the moonApollo rocks showed how the moon was made, and now they\u2019re about to solve more mysteriesHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSea-level rise is \u2018the hidden threat\u2019 for Anne Arundel waterfront homes Return to menuBy Selene San Felice10:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJoan Stansfield loves the homes she sells in Shady Side so much, she bought two for herself.The Anne Arundel County town has become her escape from the bustle of Washington, where she practices real estate sales. She can watch the sunset on the Chesapeake and catch crabs off her dock.\u201cYou get off Route 4 and it\u2019s just like, \u2018Phew.\u2019 This boulder comes off your shoulders and the stress comes off. .\u2009.\u2009. It\u2019s chill, raw rustic beauty,\u201d she said.Shady Side and southern Anne Arundel \u201care on fire with people buying. Prices are ramping up.\u201dBut those dream homes could become a nightmare, according to scientists who say sea level rise is coming to flood homes and vital roads in areas such as Anne Arundel County. Stansfield didn\u2019t know this because, like homeowners and real estate agents around the state, she wasn\u2019t given information scientists say is vital to the future of homes like hers.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThese Turkish brothers found their calling in D.C., championing the Black music sceneReturn to menuBy David A. Taylor10:31 a.m.Link copiedLinkTurkish filmmaker Umran Safter has a special place in her heart for Washington. She had the international premiere of her first documentary feature, \u201cEye of Istanbul,\u201d at the 2016 Washington, DC Independent Film Festival, where it won the award for best of the festival.Her new film brought her back to D.C. for the story of Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, the brothers behind Atlantic Records, and their early years as sons of Turkish ambassador Mehmet Munir Ertegun. The Erteguns, she says, \u201cresisted all sorts of political pressure in the 1930s and 1940s\u201d as they regularly hosted \u201cBlack jazz artists on special jazz evenings at the Turkish Embassy in Washington.\u201dAs teenagers, Ahmet and Nesuhi were smitten by jazz when they heard Duke Ellington play in London and were excited about moving to his hometown. But when they arrived, they were disappointed to find how racially segregated the city was. \u201cWhen I first came to Washington, the stores downtown didn\u2019t carry any jazz records or blues records,\u201d Ahmet said in a 2002 interview. \u201cI had to go to the Black section of Washington for the shops that sold records of the music we wanted to buy.\u201dRead the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDThe war secretary who barricaded himself in his office during an impeachment trialAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementResidents ask high court to block removal of Richmond\u2019s Robert E. Lee statueReturn to menuBy Gregory S. Schneider10:08 a.m.Link copiedLinkRICHMOND \u2014 A small group of residents seeking to keep the state's giant statue of Robert E. Lee standing on Monument Avenue filed an appeal Monday with the Supreme Court of Virginia, arguing that a lower-court judge erred in ruling that Gov. Ralph Northam (D) could remove the figure.The filing came hours after the Northam administration had workers erect metal fencing around the statue, saying it was preparing to take Lee down if the high court cleared the way.\u201cThat\u2019s wishful thinking,\u201d said lawyer Patrick McSweeney, who represents five residents challenging Northam\u2019s action.A spokeswoman for Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) noted Monday that his office has asked the court to expedite its handling of any appeal, and the court said it would consider the request.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDTrial will determine fate of Northam\u2019s effort to remove Richmond statue of Robert E. LeeAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat to know about the coronavirus vaccine rollout in D.C., Maryland and Virginia Return to menuBy Julie Weil9:51 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe vaccine for the novel coronavirus is now available in the D.C. region. But the rollout has been bumpy, and many residents have questions about how local governments are administering doses. Here\u2019s what we know right now.Who can get a vaccine right now in the DMV?D.C., Maryland and Virginia, like most of the country, are vaccinating health-care workers and people living in nursing homes. The District is offering doses to residents 65 and older and to public and charter school teachers and law enforcement officials. Most of Virginia is offering doses to residents 65 and older as well as front-line workers and people with underlying health conditions. Maryland is vaccinating seniors 65 and older, along with teachers, firefighters, law enforcement officers, day-care providers and other essential workers.Is there enough vaccine for everyone who is now eligible to get one?At the moment, no. Every state gets a new allotment of doses each week. When the District and parts of Virginia opened vaccine appointments to senior citizens on Jan. 11, they had far fewer doses available than the number of seniors eligible to claim those appointments.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementMount Pleasant has quietly become a national model for resisting gentrificationReturn to menuBy Jefferson Morley9:32 a.m.Link copiedLinkOn Monday afternoon, June 1, the city of Washington was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Seven days after the killing of George Floyd, scenes of mobs, flames, cops and chaos looped endlessly on screens large and small, interrupted only by images of boarded-up windows and now the spectacle of a phalanx of uniformed soldiers routing peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square across the street from the White House.I was sitting an 11-minute drive north of the mayhem at the carryout end of the Marx Cafe bar in the neighborhood of Mount Pleasant. The regulars who lined the bar \u2014 masked and (sort of) socially distanced \u2014 stared up in appalled silence at a TV as the president hoisted a Bible. The country was disintegrating during happy hour. Mayor Muriel Bowser\u2019s 7 p.m. curfew order was fast approaching. The crowd thinned.Across the street at the Best World supermarket, co-owner Young Pak was closing early. Pak and her husband bought the store a decade ago and have served the neighborhood ever since in economical style. The store\u2019s large, unprotected plate-glass windows looked vulnerable to the worst of intentions floating in the Washington air that night. Pak locked herself in, and I hurried home.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDLike a good neighbor, Pennyroyal Station is there for youAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement Perspective: Dogs are the heroes of this pandemicReturn to menuBy Petula Dvorak9:11 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe dogs are here, and they\u2019re the ones saving us, in so many ways.Thank you, Chica, our sweet terrier mix from Puerto Rico, for every night you knew to curl up just behind my knees when I couldn\u2019t fall asleep, fretting about school and riots and my family.Thank you, Glitch, our lanky old hound from New Orleans, for knowing the right moment to put your head on my angsting husband\u2019s knee. You did that little thing with your eyebrows \u2014 scientists say dogs developed eyebrow communication to better connect with us \u2014 looked at him with your caramel eyes, wagged that white tip at the end of your black-whip tail, and defused World War III.And thanks to them both for racing into the boys\u2019 rooms like a nurses\u2019 brigade when one of them began raging in frustration over the 763rd hour of Zoom school or a fight with a friend or a blowout in Overwatch, and pressing your furry bodies to them like big, warm poultices of love and comfort.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDSo many pets have been adopted during the pandemic that shelters are running outAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpeaker at D.C. pro-Trump rally charged with encouraging mobReturn to menuBy Rachel Weiner and Spencer Hsu8:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkA prominent speaker at a \u201cStop the Steal\u201d rally held by Trump supporters in Washington the day before the storming of the Capitol was taken into custody Monday on charges of impeding police during the riot.Brandon Straka, 44, of New York was arrested in Nebraska on a felony charge of interfering with police during civil disorder, and illegal entry and disorderly conduct on restricted Capitol grounds.The arrest came as federal prosecutors in court filings condemned what they called the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which delayed the certification of Joe Biden\u2019s electoral victory, led to the deaths of four rioters and one police officer, and resulted in assaults on about 139 Capitol and D.C. police officers.\u201cEvery person who was present without authority in the Capitol on January 6 contributed to the chaos of that day and the danger posed to law enforcement, the Vice President, Members of Congress, and the peaceful transfer of power,\u201d U.S. counterterrorism and public-corruption prosecutors wrote Sunday in documents for one arrestee who had been photographed with zip ties in his hand during the riot.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDJustice Department, FBI debate not charging some of the Capitol riotersWashington Monument went unlit Sunday, officials sayReturn to menuBy Martin Weil8:26 a.m.Link copiedLinkOn Saturday, officials announced that the Washington Monument would be closed out of coronavirus concerns. On Sunday night, the monument\u2019s exterior lighting did not go on, and it almost may have seemed that the great obelisk and famed symbol of Washington was fading away.But that\u2019s not so. On Monday, the National Park Service said the outage was \u201ccaused by the failure of the timeclock that turns the lights on each evening and off in the morning.\u201d While a faulty part was being replaced, the Park Service said, the lights would be operated manually, to keep the monument illuminated nightly.It appeared on Monday night that the 555-foot tall masonry structure once again formed a gleaming part of Washington\u2019s night skyline.It remained unclear, however, when the monument would again be open to visitors.On Saturday, the Park Service said the monument would be closed \u201cuntil further notice\u201d to protect staff and visitors against the coronavirus.The closing was consistent with guidance offered by local and federal authorities, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Park Service said.Businessman Pete Snyder joins race for Virginia governorReturn to menuBy Laura Vozzella8:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkRICHMOND \u2014 Pete Snyder, a social media pioneer, investor and former Fox News contributor, will seek the GOP nomination in this year\u2019s race for Virginia governor, promising to be a disrupting force in state politics.After flirting with a bid for months, Snyder, 48, will release a campaign video on Tuesday that touts his business savvy while slamming outgoing Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat trying to reclaim the office he held from 2014 to 2018.\u201cMy career has been about building businesses, creating new industries, making dreams become reality \u2014 all while disrupting the status quo,\u201d Snyder says in the video. \u201cWe\u2019ve had eight years of failed leadership by Northam, McAuliffe and the rest of the career politicians. It\u2019s clear we need change.\u201dSnyder makes no explicit reference to his rivals for the GOP nomination: Del. Kirk Cox (Colonial Heights), a former speaker of the House of Delegates; state Sen. Amanda F. Chase (Chesterfield); and Sergio de la Pe\u00f1a, a retired Army colonel.A fifth Republican, former Carlyle Group executive Glenn Youngkin, has filed paperwork to establish a campaign and indicated he will formally announce his bid soon.Read the full storyArrowRightMother heard gunshots before finding 22-year-old son fatally wounded in Southeast D.C.Return to menuBy Peter Hermann and Clarence Williams7:43 a.m.Link copiedLinkEdward Wade got his coffee from a corner store on Good Hope Road in Southeast Washington on Monday morning but wanted something else. He headed across the street to another market as his mother waited for him in her car.The moment he disappeared inside, Christine Wade heard gunshots. She ran into the store to find her 22-year-old son dying. Police said four other men were wounded in the shooting just before 9 a.m. at the market in the heart of Anacostia.\u201cI can\u2019t even describe it,\u201d Christine Wade, 39, said later, noting that her son had graduated from Anacostia High School and was attending college in Richmond. \u201cI was numb. I was just rubbing his head and touching his neck to see if had a pulse.\u201dEdward Wade died in the store as his mother watched and police and paramedics arrived.Read the full storyArrowRightD.C. warns a maglev stop at Mount Vernon Square would bring disruption Return to menuBy Luz Lazo7:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkA station for a maglev train line that would take passengers from Washington to Baltimore in 15 minutes could alter a D.C. neighborhood and bring more vehicle and pedestrian traffic to the area, District officials said Monday.A maglev station in the Mount Vernon Square area has the potential to change the character of the neighborhood and bring \u201csubstantial construction and long-term operational implications on nearby properties,\u201d Andrew Trueblood, director of the D.C. Office of Planning, said in a statement that urged residents and city leaders to engage in the federal review of the multibillion-dollar project.The 40-mile \u201csuperconducting magnetic levitation train system,\u201d commonly called a maglev, is planned as the first leg of a system that would carry passengers from Washington to New York in an hour. D.C. leaders are urging public engagement during the planning process, but the city has not officially taken a position on the project.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDTen months into the pandemic, transit systems in the Washington suburbs have a long way to normalMurder suspect staged scene after beating, police sayReturn to menuBy Dan Morse7:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAfter attacking his friend with a baseball bat and a knife, Maryland court records allege, Jose Lara-Chacon faced a choice: Call 911 immediately, flee or create an alibi.Lara-Chacon went with the alibi, according to prosecutors.\u201cHe placed the knife back in his deceased friend\u2019s hand to make it seem like the friend had attacked him,\u201d Montgomery County Assistant State\u2019s Attorney Elizabeth Haynos said in court Monday.District Court Judge Sherri Koch ordered Lara-Chacon, 24, of Wheaton, held without bond pending further court actions.\u201cThe allegations in this case are extremely violent,\u201d Koch said.Lara-Chacon is charged with first-degree murder in the Friday night death of Dimer Josue Diaz Martinez, 21. Authorities say Lara-Chacon hit the victim twice in the head with the bat and slashed his throat with the knife.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDMontgomery County records a sixth homicide in 2021 The latest news, weather and coronavirus updates to start Tuesday, Jan. 26, in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Today in D.C. Headlines to start your Tuesday in D.C., Maryland and Virginia",
        "author": "Dana Hedgpeth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Today in D.C.: Headlines to start your Monday in D.C., Maryland and Virginia (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1304",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/12/21/dc-news-live-updates-monday/",
        "text": "Good morning \u2014 It\u2019s Monday. Grab your coffee or tea. Start your morning with the latest news from around the Washington region. Looking for Tuesday\u2019s news? Join us here.Here are the top stories for MondayHealth officials in the Washington region say they will receive fewer doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines than originally projected this month.A Virginia man was arrested over an alleged plan to kidnap a 12-year-old girl in California. In 2018, he mounted a long-shot bid as an independent candidate for Virginia\u2019s 10th Congressional District.Starting on Wednesday, the District is shutting down indoor dining for three weeks. Local restaurants are preparing to pivot to takeout and delivery orders.Get local news delivered to your inbox: Morning (8 a.m.) | Afternoon (4 p.m.)Listen to Capital Weather Gang\u2019s morning weather report on your smart speaker.D.C., Maryland and Virginia add 6,446 virus cases, 32 deathsReturn to menuBy Teddy Amenabar11:27 a.m.Link copiedLinkCoronavirus figures released by D.C., Maryland and Virginia on Monday showed 6,446 additional cases in the region and 32 deaths.The total number of daily reported cases in the region is slighter higher than the rolling seven-day average. Starting on Wednesday, the District is shutting down indoor dining for three weeks. In Maryland, Baltimore City and two counties have already banned indoor dining. Virginia restaurants can offer indoor dining but must stop selling alcohol at 10 p.m. and close by midnight.More than 10,000 people from D.C., Maryland and Virginia have died of covid-19. Those who have died were activists, writers, firefighters and pastors. They worked in grocery stores, drove public buses and taught children. Read about their lives here.D.C.Reported cases: 139Reported deaths: 5In the past seven days, the District has reported 1,702 new cases.MarylandReported cases: 2,265Reported deaths: 23In the past seven days, Maryland has reported 16,112 new cases.VirginiaReported cases: 4,042Reported deaths: 4In the past seven days, Virginia has reported 25,741 new cases.The Washington Post is tracking the number of reported coronavirus cases in the Washington region. Follow the trends here.Read more about coronavirus cases in the DMV:Hogan issues order requiring coronavirus test after out-of-state travelMore than 10,000 people in D.C., Maryland and Virginia have died of covid-19AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDel. Mark Levine joins the crowded race for Virginia lieutenant governorReturn to menuBy Laura Vozzella11:00 a.m.Link copiedLinkRICHMOND \u2014 Del. Mark H. Levine on Monday will declare himself a candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia, becoming the 12th contender to jump into the 2021 race.A lawyer first propelled into political activism by the murder of his sister in 1996, Levine (D-Alexandria) promised to work across the aisle to address issues ranging from economic opportunity to domestic violence.\u201cInjustice really gets under my skin,\u201d Levine said in a written statement ahead of his announcement. \u201cAll our lives we\u2019ve been told \u2018that\u2019s just the way things are.\u2019 But I\u2019ve found \u2014 if you\u2019re persistent and creative, get the details right, and work with others of good will \u2014 even the toughest problems can be solved.\u201dIf elected, Levine, 54, would become Virginia\u2019s first openly gay statewide elected official as well as the first Jewish person elected statewide.Murder, custody and justice: The making of a political candidateVirginia Democrats will pick their nominee in a primary this summer. Other contenders are: Del. Hala S. Ayala (Prince William), former Virginia Democratic Party chairman Paul Goldman, Del. Elizabeth R. Guzman (Prince William), Norfolk City Council member Andria P. McClellan, Fairfax County NAACP President Sean Perryman, Del. Sam Rasoul (Roanoke) and Arlington County businessman Xavier Warren.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA Black VMI cadet was threatened with a lynching, then with expulsion Return to menuBy Ian Shapira10:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe intercom boomed in the predawn hour of Hell Week at the Virginia Military Institute, and a group of upperclassmen slammed open the doors to the freshman barracks rooms. It was time for a morning run. Rafael Jenkins, a prized VMI basketball recruit, said he threw on his gym clothes and hydration pack, then grabbed his \u201cRat Bible,\u201d a booklet of campus rules, rituals and history.As the 19-year-old cadet waited in the hallway to use the bathroom that August day in 2018, the group of upperclassmen shouted more orders.Sound off, they yelled.Jenkins and the other first-year \u201crats\u201d at the nation\u2019s oldest state-supported military college knew what they had to do. They had to open the Rat Bible, flip to the page listing the 10 VMI students killed fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of New Market and shout the full names of the slain cadets, their ranks and home states.At first, Jenkins, who is Black and Hispanic, chanted their names softly. He\u2019d yelled them earlier in Hell Week \u2014 VMI\u2019s grueling initiation for new students \u2014 to avoid confrontations, but now the ritual seemed too racist to countenance. Why, he thought, should anyone glorify those who fought and died for slavery? So, he chugged from his hydration pack, assuming the upperclass enforcers wouldn\u2019t stop him from drinking water.Read more of The Post\u2019s reporting:A Black man will lead VMI for the first time in history, amid racism investigationVMI cadets attack Black students, women on anonymous chat app as furor over racism growsRead the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementMaryland football opts out of bowl considerationReturn to menuBy Emily Giambalvo10:20 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Maryland football team told the Big Ten that it would decline a bowl invitation, a team spokesman said Sunday. It\u2019s uncertain whether the Terrapins (2-3) would have been selected for a bowl game even if they had kept themselves in consideration.Maryland canceled what would have been its final game of the regular season Saturday because of a coronavirus outbreak within the program. The team paused all practices Thursday, so preparation for a bowl game would have been difficult.Maryland joins a number of other college football teams that chose to end their 2020 campaigns early after months of navigating a season that featured game cancellations, frequent testing and stringent protocols necessary to play during a pandemic.The Terps finished the season with two wins \u2014 in overtime against Minnesota on Oct. 30 and at Penn State on Nov. 7. The Big Ten planned a nine-game schedule across nine weeks after deciding in September to hold its season, but four of Maryland\u2019s games were ultimately canceled because of the coronavirus, the most of any team in the conference. Only two Big Ten teams, Rutgers and Penn State, played nine games in the regular season as planned.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDThe bowl schedule is filled out, but it\u2019s altered and diminished by the coronavirus pandemicAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDriver dies in Rock Creek Park as car leaves road, police sayReturn to menuBy Martin Weil10:01 a.m.Link copiedLinkA car left the southbound lanes of Rock Creek Parkway near Beach Drive shortly after 5 p.m. Sunday and came to rest on the bike trail, police said.The driver died at the scene, said Sgt. Roselyn Norment, a Park Police spokeswoman.The site of the crash was near the Taft Bridge on Connecticut Avenue NW.The name and age of the driver and the cause of the crash were not immediately available.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWorkers remove Virginia\u2019s statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from U.S. CapitolReturn to menuBy Gregory S. Schneider9:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkWorkers have removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that represented Virginia in the U.S. Capitol, laboring in the wee hours of Monday morning to take the figure out of Statuary Hall.Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had requested the removal over the summer after a commission chartered by the General Assembly decided that a man who fought to uphold slavery was not a fitting symbol for a diverse and modern state.Lee had stood with George Washington since 1909 as Virginia\u2019s representative in the Capitol\u2019s honorary hall, where every state gets two statues.In place of Lee, the state commission has recommended installing a likeness of Barbara Johns, who as a 16-year-old in 1951 protested poor conditions at her all-Black high school in the town of Farmville. Johns\u2019s court case became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down racial segregation in public schools nationwide.Here\u2019s a video shared by Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine:4:02 am. 12/21/20. Crypt of the US Capitol. pic.twitter.com/2ttGecsj5B\u2014 Tim Kaine (@timkaine) December 21, 2020\n\nRead the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDCivil rights leader Barbara Johns may replace Robert E. Lee as a statue in the U.S. CapitolAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBethesda-based Lockheed Martin to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.4 billion Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkLockheed Martin, the world\u2019s largest defense contractor, announced Sunday it would acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, a rocket engine and missile manufacturer, for $4.4 billion.\u201cAcquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne will preserve and strengthen an essential component of the domestic defense base and reduce costs for our customers and the American taxpayer,\u201d James Taiclet, president and CEO of Bethesda-based Lockheed, said in a statement. \u201cThis transaction enhances Lockheed Martin\u2019s support of critical U.S. and allied security missions and retains national leadership in space and hypersonic technology. We look forward to welcoming their talented team and expanding Lockheed Martin\u2019s position as the leading provider of 21st century warfare solutions.\u201dAerojet Rocketdyne has revenue of about $2 billion and about 5,000 employees across the country. The company manufacturers the RS-25 engines to be used on NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket, which is designed to fly astronauts to the moon, as well as propulsion systems that are already used in several of Lockheed\u2019s defense systems.Lockheed makes the Orion spacecraft that would fly atop the SLS rocket. The acquisition will give Lockheed a stake in the rocket, which is made primarily by Boeing.Read the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDA NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitted its bid.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementProud Boys leader says he burned Black Lives Matter banner stolen from D.C. churchReturn to menuBy Peter Hermann9:40 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, said he participated in the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner that had been ripped from the facade of a historic Black church during unrest in downtown Washington following a rally earlier this month for President Trump.Tarrio, chairman of the male-chauvinist organization with ties to white nationalism, said in an interview with The Washington Post that he would plead guilty to destruction of property, pay the church the cost of the banner and surrender to authorities if that criminal charge is filed.\u201cI\u2019ll fly there on my own dime,\u201d said Tarrio, who was in Miami on Friday. \u201cI have nothing to hide.\u201d He spoke in a telephone interview days after D.C. police and the FBI posted rewards in their search for people responsible in the case.Tarrio wrote on social media that he was speaking out against the advice of his attorney: \u201cSo let me make this simple. I did it.\u201dA spokesman for D.C. police said the investigation is continuing and that they consider the incident a potential hate crime.Tarrio \u2014 who also posted comments related to the burning on two social media sites, Parler and Telegram \u2014 said he would not admit to committing a hate crime. He said he was not motivated by race, religion or political ideology, but because he believes the Black Lives Matter movement \u201chas terrorized the citizens of this country.\u201dRead the full storyArrowRightArticleOutlineRELATEDProud Boys sparked clashes during pro-Trump rally, D.C. officials sayAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPerspective: Does Dwayne Haskins have a future in Washington?Return to menuBy Barry Svrluga9:33 a.m.Link copiedLinkJust when you were ready to declare Dwayne Haskins\u2019s Washington future dead and just when it appeared imperative that a 36-year-old quarterback with a titanium rod in his leg return to have any hope of the playoffs, the fourth quarter happened Sunday. Scratching your head? That\u2019s not an exclusive club. For some reason, Haskins is polarizing, and Sunday provided fodder for both the he-will-never-get-it and the he-still-has-a-chance camps.Fifteen minutes of football doesn\u2019t determine a player\u2019s future, and in Haskins\u2019s case, a fine fourth quarter of a 20-15 loss to Seattle on Sunday at FedEx Field won\u2019t mean he\u2019s the Washington Football Team\u2019s quarterback in 2021 or beyond. Indeed, Coach Ron Rivera said without hesitation Sunday: \u201cAlex Smith\u2019s our starting quarterback right now. If he\u2019s healthy and he\u2019s ready to roll, he will.\u201dWashington\u2019s roll \u2014 a four-game winning streak in which it became both interesting and relevant \u2014 stopped Sunday, but the NFC East title is still within reach. That\u2019s the narrow view: Beat Carolina at home next week and close with a victory at Philadelphia \u2014 realistic goals \u2014 and Washington will host a playoff game.But it\u2019s hard to step away from this performance Sunday and not be befuddled by Haskins.Read more on the Washington Football Team:Four takeaways from Washington\u2019s 20-15 loss to the SeahawksWashington doesn\u2019t have \u2018the best defense in football\u2019 yet, and it showed against the SeahawksRead the full storyArrowRightThe Army wants water restrictions near the Wharf. Residents and D.C. leaders call it an overreach.Return to menuBy Luz Lazo9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkCommercial and recreational boat traffic on the Washington Channel has grown significantly since the Wharf opened along the Southwest Waterfront three years ago, becoming a destination for visitors arriving by land and water.The water is the biggest draw in the city\u2019s newest neighborhood, attracting thousands of visitors to the mile-long waterfront promenade who pump money into the city\u2019s coffers. But residents and city leaders say part of that success is threatened by a proposal that would restrict the use of the waters south of the booming area.D.C. at odds with federal government over multibillion-dollar redevelopment of Union StationThe Wharf\u2019s neighbor, Fort McNair, wants to create a marked zone that would take up to one-third of the channel along the Army post, which it says will protect military assets. The plan has triggered a rebuke from boaters, neighbors and D.C. elected leaders, who argue that the proposed restriction would be an unnecessary overreach.At the request of Fort McNair, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers \u2014 responsible for maintaining the nation\u2019s navigable waterways \u2014 is proposing a perimeter extending up to 150 meters (492 feet) at its widest point. In that zone, watercraft could pass by but would be \u201cprohibited from anchoring, mooring or loitering.\u201dOfficials said the zone would create a security buffer between activity in the water and military facilities, including the homes of top military officers. No other military base with access to the water in the nation\u2019s capital has such a restriction on its shorelines.Read the full storyArrowRightWashington Monument to reopen Monday, National Park Service says Return to menuBy Martin Weil8:59 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Washington Monument will reopen on Monday after a brief closure, the National Park Service said.The monument was closed Friday after a coronavirus-related incident, officials said. A staff shortage occurred when some National Park Service employees went into quarantine after a visit by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, who tested positive for the virus, officials said.Visitors can ride to the top of the monument by elevator. The pandemic has limited the number of people permitted into the elevator at any given time, and they must be spaced six feet apart.Read more from The Post:Washington Monument shuttered after interior secretary tests positive for the coronavirusOn July Fourth, 40,000 Americans cheered a new landmark: the Washington MonumentCongress has extended pandemic aid for the jobless and for renters. Here\u2019s what you need to know. Return to menuBy Kyle Swenson8:33 a.m.Link copiedLinkAs Democrats and Republicans in Congress continue to finalize the details of a $900 billion coronavirus relief package, lawmakers apparently have avoided sending millions from spiraling into economic disaster.The economic policies passed with the Cares Act have served as life support for Americans displaced by the pandemic\u2019s devastating sweep. As many as 40 million \u2014 or 1 in 4 Americans \u2014 have received benefits from these programs since March. Still, according to a recently published report by the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame, poverty has risen each month since June, to 11.7 percent in November. Without the Cares Act, those numbers would be worse, experts say.\u201cThe unemployment insurance system has never been so ill-prepared to handle a recession as it was in 2020,\u201d said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality. \u201cWe entered the pandemic unusually ill-equipped to handle it. What policymakers to some extent understood immediately is they had to take unprecedented measures.\u201dBut key parts of those measures are set to expire next week, with additional protections running out Dec. 31. Leaders on the Hill worked into the weekend on a package that reportedly includes a new round of stimulus checks and an extension of the national eviction moratorium.Read more from The Post:Senate majority leader announces approximately $900 billion deal on emergency relief packageHere\u2019s what\u2019s in the new $900 billion stimulus packageRead the full storyArrowRightReview: Pupatella is a budding chain that still delivers the goods Return to menuBy Tim Carman8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkWashingtonians were well-versed with Neapolitan pizza by 2007 when a young couple debuted their fire-engine-red Pupatella cart on a stretch of bricks near the Ballston Metro station. 2Amys may have had a certificate hanging on its wall, verifying that the pizzeria adhered to Neapolitan traditions, but Pupatella had something perhaps more important tucked away in that spotless mobile trailer: Enzo Algarme, the guy in the dark sunglasses who called Naples home.Algarme was still punching the clock as an embryologist when he and Anastasiya Algarme (nee Laufenberg) started selling pizzas on the streets of Arlington, many months before the gourmet food truck revolution hit Washington in 2009. The cart was something of a consolation prize. Enzo and Anastasiya had hoped to open a bricks-and-mortar restaurant, but they ran into the same stone wall that blocks many newcomers from entering the hospitality industry: They had no track record and no credit history to sway banks or landlords to give them a shot.Biting into a pie pulled straight from the oven was still a novelty on the streets in 2007, and maybe we lowered our expectations a notch as a result. But Enzo Algarme had no interest in being graded on a curve. He was fresh off a six-month apprenticeship at Il Pizzaiolo del Presidente, a Naples institution that caters more to locals than tourists. Enzo applied the same techniques and ingredients that he learned back home to his tin-can pizzeria in Ballston, down to the ultrafine 00 flour and San Marzano tomatoes.This article originally published on Oct. 20.Read more from The Post:These are the D.C. area\u2019s 10 best pizzasThere has never been a better time for takeout pizzaRead the full storyArrowRightFamily holds vigil for man shot while driving with infant son Return to menuBy Katie Mettler7:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkPastor Leathia Pinder had preached about the Bible\u2019s wailing women many times before, about their raw grief for their community and their children.When she got the calls Dec. 12 from her daughters, their cousins and eventually a D.C. police detective, she felt the pain of the wailing women herself.Her second-eldest child, 35-year-old Antoine Lamont Pierce, was dead \u2014 shot three times while driving with his 6-month-old son near the intersection of 21st Street and Benning Road. In the past year, she had lost her brother and husband, and now she would have to bury her son.\u201cThat\u2019s a cry from a core of your heart and the depths of your belly,\u201d Pinder said. \u201cI\u2019m numb. I\u2019m numb with not knowing what to think, how to feel, what to say.\u201dAt a vigil at her church in Capitol Heights on Saturday afternoon, she asked the small crowd of family and friends to pray for mothers like her and for the children, including her son\u2019s six kids, \u201cwho are now fatherless.\u201d\u201cLet us grab these babies,\u201d she implored the crowd. \u201cLet not a Black child be slain on these streets.\u201dChildren have been witnesses to or victims of a string of shooting deaths this year in the District, compounding the grief of a city reeling from a 21 percent spike in homicides as it continues to fight the deadly coronavirus pandemic and economic hardships.Read the full storyArrowRight The latest news, weather and coronavirus updates to start Monday, Dec. 21, in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. Today in D.C. Headlines to start your Monday in D.C., Maryland and Virginia",
        "author": "Dana Hedgpeth"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Cooley, 82, a retired NASA engineer from Maryland, dies of covid-19 (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1305",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/james-cooley-82-a-retired-nasa-engineer-from-maryland-dies-of-covid-19/2020/06/10/00f37e18-a74b-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html",
        "text": "For more than three decades, James Cooley devoted his mathematics talent to the nation\u2019s space program, tackling challenges such as the orbital mechanics of satellites and puzzling out various aspects of mission design for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy the time he retired from the center in Greenbelt, Md., in 1997, Cooley had risen to become an aerospace engineer with supervisory duties, according to NASA. Cooley and his wife, Brenda, spent the next 20 years living in retirement in Greenbelt, relishing visits from their children and grandchildren and rooting for the Terrapins sports teams at the nearby University of Maryland.A few years ago, according to their son, the Cooleys moved to the Riderwood retirement community in Silver Spring, where they could get more help with daily life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut when Andrew Cooley called his father on his 82nd birthday on April 17, something was different.\u201cHe didn\u2019t sound right,\u201d Andrew Cooley recalled. \u201cHe sounded off.\u201dEleven days later, James Cooley died of covid-19 at Prince George\u2019s Hospital Center. He had been taken to the hospital on April 26 after a nursing aide noticed he was suffering from shortness of breath, with a fever and a cough.Until then, Andrew Cooley said, his father had dealt with some health issues related to a stroke he suffered in 1996, but he was still in decent shape, able to walk and eat and take his medicine. The novel coronavirus caused a sudden and rapid decline.\u201cI was quite shocked,\u201d his son said.Those we have lost to coronavirus in Maryland, D.C. and VirginiaAndrew Cooley said the family was unable to say goodbye in person to his father because of pandemic restrictions.Story continues below advertisementThe family plans to bury his remains in his native Massachusetts at some point soon. Meanwhile, Brenda Cooley, who has Alzheimer\u2019s disease, had to move to a new memory-care facility after her husband died. The logistics of these transitions have been challenging.Advertisement\u201cBecause of covid, everything was 10 times more complicated and difficult,\u201d Andrew Cooley said.James Lawrence Cooley was born in Northampton, Mass., and raised in a rural area in nearby Pelham.He graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a bachelor\u2019s degree in math in 1960, and married fellow student Brenda Brizzolari a year later, after she graduated with a degree in education.Story continues below advertisementCooley earned a master\u2019s degree in math from Pennsylvania State University in 1962, and the couple settled in Maryland the following year, when he landed a job with NASA as the nation was making a push to put men on the moon.Cooley once described his work for a career-profile project of the Mathematical Association of America. \u201cMathematics and mathematical approaches are used a great deal in modeling physical systems and designing NASA missions,\u201d he wrote.Advertisement\u201cAny spacecraft mission is a team effort involving engineers, physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians. One rapidly realizes it is necessary to have a background in and learn the language of engineering, physics, and astronomy.Story continues below advertisement\u201cComputer and computer science knowledge is also indispensable. Thus I always recommend some minor courses in these fields for a mathematics undergraduate or graduate student.\u201dIn addition to his wife and son, who lives in Crofton, Md., he is survived by his daughter, Deborah Cooley of Greenbelt, two granddaughters and a great-grandson.For many years, Cooley enjoyed jogging and wine tasting. He was devoted to the Terps, and was often in the stands at Maryland football and basketball games. He and his wife also liked to attend other campus activities, including concerts and theater events in College Park.\u201cBeing part of U-Md. gave him that community focus,\u201d Andrew Cooley said. \u201cIt really was a central part of their lives.\u201d\n\n Cooley, a math expert, had worked 34 years at the Goddard Space Flight Center. James Cooley, 82, a retired NASA engineer from Maryland, dies of covid-19",
        "author": "Nick Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Cooley, 82, a retired NASA engineer from Maryland, dies of covid-19 (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1306",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/james-cooley-82-a-retired-nasa-engineer-from-maryland-dies-of-covid-19/2020/06/10/00f37e18-a74b-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html",
        "text": "For more than three decades, James Cooley devoted his mathematics talent to the nation\u2019s space program, tackling challenges such as the orbital mechanics of satellites and puzzling out various aspects of mission design for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy the time he retired from the center in Greenbelt, Md., in 1997, Cooley had risen to become an aerospace engineer with supervisory duties, according to NASA. Cooley and his wife, Brenda, spent the next 20 years living in retirement in Greenbelt, relishing visits from their children and grandchildren and rooting for the Terrapins sports teams at the nearby University of Maryland.A few years ago, according to their son, the Cooleys moved to the Riderwood retirement community in Silver Spring, where they could get more help with daily life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut when Andrew Cooley called his father on his 82nd birthday on April 17, something was different.\u201cHe didn\u2019t sound right,\u201d Andrew Cooley recalled. \u201cHe sounded off.\u201dEleven days later, James Cooley died of covid-19 at Prince George\u2019s Hospital Center. He had been taken to the hospital on April 26 after a nursing aide noticed he was suffering from shortness of breath, with a fever and a cough.Until then, Andrew Cooley said, his father had dealt with some health issues related to a stroke he suffered in 1996, but he was still in decent shape, able to walk and eat and take his medicine. The novel coronavirus caused a sudden and rapid decline.\u201cI was quite shocked,\u201d his son said.Those we have lost to coronavirus in Maryland, D.C. and VirginiaAndrew Cooley said the family was unable to say goodbye in person to his father because of pandemic restrictions.Story continues below advertisementThe family plans to bury his remains in his native Massachusetts at some point soon. Meanwhile, Brenda Cooley, who has Alzheimer\u2019s disease, had to move to a new memory-care facility after her husband died. The logistics of these transitions have been challenging.Advertisement\u201cBecause of covid, everything was 10 times more complicated and difficult,\u201d Andrew Cooley said.James Lawrence Cooley was born in Northampton, Mass., and raised in a rural area in nearby Pelham.He graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a bachelor\u2019s degree in math in 1960, and married fellow student Brenda Brizzolari a year later, after she graduated with a degree in education.Story continues below advertisementCooley earned a master\u2019s degree in math from Pennsylvania State University in 1962, and the couple settled in Maryland the following year, when he landed a job with NASA as the nation was making a push to put men on the moon.Cooley once described his work for a career-profile project of the Mathematical Association of America. \u201cMathematics and mathematical approaches are used a great deal in modeling physical systems and designing NASA missions,\u201d he wrote.Advertisement\u201cAny spacecraft mission is a team effort involving engineers, physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians. One rapidly realizes it is necessary to have a background in and learn the language of engineering, physics, and astronomy.Story continues below advertisement\u201cComputer and computer science knowledge is also indispensable. Thus I always recommend some minor courses in these fields for a mathematics undergraduate or graduate student.\u201dIn addition to his wife and son, who lives in Crofton, Md., he is survived by his daughter, Deborah Cooley of Greenbelt, two granddaughters and a great-grandson.For many years, Cooley enjoyed jogging and wine tasting. He was devoted to the Terps, and was often in the stands at Maryland football and basketball games. He and his wife also liked to attend other campus activities, including concerts and theater events in College Park.\u201cBeing part of U-Md. gave him that community focus,\u201d Andrew Cooley said. \u201cIt really was a central part of their lives.\u201d\n\n Cooley, a math expert, had worked 34 years at the Goddard Space Flight Center. James Cooley, 82, a retired NASA engineer from Maryland, dies of covid-19",
        "author": "Nick Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Cooley, 82, a retired NASA engineer from Maryland, dies of covid-19 (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1307",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/james-cooley-82-a-retired-nasa-engineer-from-maryland-dies-of-covid-19/2020/06/10/00f37e18-a74b-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html",
        "text": "For more than three decades, James Cooley devoted his mathematics talent to the nation\u2019s space program, tackling challenges such as the orbital mechanics of satellites and puzzling out various aspects of mission design for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy the time he retired from the center in Greenbelt, Md., in 1997, Cooley had risen to become an aerospace engineer with supervisory duties, according to NASA. Cooley and his wife, Brenda, spent the next 20 years living in retirement in Greenbelt, relishing visits from their children and grandchildren and rooting for the Terrapins sports teams at the nearby University of Maryland.A few years ago, according to their son, the Cooleys moved to the Riderwood retirement community in Silver Spring, where they could get more help with daily life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut when Andrew Cooley called his father on his 82nd birthday on April 17, something was different.\u201cHe didn\u2019t sound right,\u201d Andrew Cooley recalled. \u201cHe sounded off.\u201dEleven days later, James Cooley died of covid-19 at Prince George\u2019s Hospital Center. He had been taken to the hospital on April 26 after a nursing aide noticed he was suffering from shortness of breath, with a fever and a cough.Until then, Andrew Cooley said, his father had dealt with some health issues related to a stroke he suffered in 1996, but he was still in decent shape, able to walk and eat and take his medicine. The novel coronavirus caused a sudden and rapid decline.\u201cI was quite shocked,\u201d his son said.Those we have lost to coronavirus in Maryland, D.C. and VirginiaAndrew Cooley said the family was unable to say goodbye in person to his father because of pandemic restrictions.Story continues below advertisementThe family plans to bury his remains in his native Massachusetts at some point soon. Meanwhile, Brenda Cooley, who has Alzheimer\u2019s disease, had to move to a new memory-care facility after her husband died. The logistics of these transitions have been challenging.Advertisement\u201cBecause of covid, everything was 10 times more complicated and difficult,\u201d Andrew Cooley said.James Lawrence Cooley was born in Northampton, Mass., and raised in a rural area in nearby Pelham.He graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a bachelor\u2019s degree in math in 1960, and married fellow student Brenda Brizzolari a year later, after she graduated with a degree in education.Story continues below advertisementCooley earned a master\u2019s degree in math from Pennsylvania State University in 1962, and the couple settled in Maryland the following year, when he landed a job with NASA as the nation was making a push to put men on the moon.Cooley once described his work for a career-profile project of the Mathematical Association of America. \u201cMathematics and mathematical approaches are used a great deal in modeling physical systems and designing NASA missions,\u201d he wrote.Advertisement\u201cAny spacecraft mission is a team effort involving engineers, physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians. One rapidly realizes it is necessary to have a background in and learn the language of engineering, physics, and astronomy.Story continues below advertisement\u201cComputer and computer science knowledge is also indispensable. Thus I always recommend some minor courses in these fields for a mathematics undergraduate or graduate student.\u201dIn addition to his wife and son, who lives in Crofton, Md., he is survived by his daughter, Deborah Cooley of Greenbelt, two granddaughters and a great-grandson.For many years, Cooley enjoyed jogging and wine tasting. He was devoted to the Terps, and was often in the stands at Maryland football and basketball games. He and his wife also liked to attend other campus activities, including concerts and theater events in College Park.\u201cBeing part of U-Md. gave him that community focus,\u201d Andrew Cooley said. \u201cIt really was a central part of their lives.\u201d\n\n Cooley, a math expert, had worked 34 years at the Goddard Space Flight Center. James Cooley, 82, a retired NASA engineer from Maryland, dies of covid-19",
        "author": "Nick Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "An asteroid could destroy humanity like it did dinosaurs. A Hopkins team has a plan to save the world. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1308",
        "date": "2019-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/an-asteroid-could-destroy-humanity-like-it-did-dinosaurs-a-hopkins-team-has-a-plan-to-save-the-world/2019/02/04/a43550ee-28a6-11e9-8eef-0d74f4bf0295_story.html",
        "text": "A team of scientists, astronomers and engineers meets weekly in a conference room on a Howard County, Md., research campus and plans to save the world.\u201cKeep calm and carry DART,\u201d reads a poster on the wall.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDART \u2014 the Double Asteroid Redirection Test \u2014 is their plan to avert catastrophe. It\u2019s also NASA\u2019s first mission not to explore space, but to defend against it. The research team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel plans to launch a spacecraft, speed it up really fast and smash it into an asteroid.The impact, they hope, will bump the big space rock off course \u2014 actually more like nudge it slightly. Someday, the thinking goes, this method may save people from the fate of the dinosaurs.Story continues below advertisement\u201cKind of like a big missile,\u201d said Elena Adams, the mission\u2019s lead engineer. \u201cIt\u2019s very exciting. You are actually doing something for the fate of humanity.\u201dAdvertisementAn estimated 100 tons of space debris falls to Earth every day, according to scientists with NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. This debris is mostly dust and sand.Occasionally, space sends something bigger.In February 2013, a fiery meteor cut across the Siberian sky. It came streaking down as fast as 40,000 mph. Then came a midair explosion, a flash and boom.The shock wave blew out windows across the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. A factory roof collapsed. More than 1,000 people were hurt, mostly from shattered glass. Scientists estimate the meteor unleashed a force stronger than the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima.Story continues below advertisementThe rock was about the size of a school bus. That\u2019s a pebble compared to a meteor believed to have exploded over remote Siberia in 1908, flattening hundreds of square miles of forests. Researchers estimate that fireball equaled 185 Hiroshima bombs and heated the air to near 50,000 degrees. If the Tunguska meteor had arrived, say, three hours later, it could have obliterated Moscow, said Lindley Johnson, whose title with NASA is planetary defense officer.Advertisement\u201cThat probably would have changed the entire history of the 20th century,\u201d said Johnson, who runs NASA\u2019s asteroid defense programs. \u201cThese are natural disasters that we need to be aware of.\u201dSome time in a span of several hundred thousand years, scientists say, an asteroid even larger could strike Earth and wreak global disaster. They believe a meteor 8 to 10 kilometers in diameter crashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve found all the nearest asteroids that size. We\u2019re safe from that,\u201d said Paul Chodas, who runs an asteroid search team at the NASA lab in California.But smaller asteroids can unleash megatons of energy, too.\u201cEven down to the 1-kilometer size, if it hits in the right spot, could cause global devastation,\u201d Chodas said. \u201cIt\u2019s the small asteroids that pose the risk.\u201dAdvertisementIn the 1990s, Congress ordered NASA to locate dangerous asteroids in the solar system. Researchers today aim to catalogue the orbits of 90 percent of asteroids 460 feet or bigger.They predict 25,000 of them hurtle through the solar system. Chodas said they have found and charted about a third of them. The researchers can calculate each asteroid\u2019s trajectory decades into the future.Story continues below advertisementScientists have long debated what to do if they discover one on a collision course with Earth.Hollywood portrayed such events in \u201cDeep Impact\u201d and \u201cArmageddon.\u201d In both movies, mankind narrowly escapes doom by planting nuclear bombs and blowing the asteroids to pieces.It\u2019s not that easy.NASA has considered nuking an asteroid with warheads, but that risks turning a single incoming rock into a shower of debris as happened in \u201cDeep Impact.\u201d Another plan calls for flying a spacecraft beside the asteroid and gradually drawing it off course like a gravity tractor.AdvertisementDART offers a third strategy, and will be the first to be given a live test.\u201cIt\u2019s the simplest and most effective,\u201d Chodas said.Story continues below advertisementNow the team at the Hopkins laboratory in Laurel has begun the final design and construction of the DART spacecraft. About the size of a Honda Civic, it\u2019s scheduled for launch in summer 2021.While it sounds simple, the crash mission involves some tricky engineering.The target is the tiny moon of an asteroid. The two bodies are collectively named Didymos, or Greek for \u201ctwin.\u201d They orbit the sun between Earth and the Asteroid Belt. The moon is not much bigger than the Washington Monument \u2014 minuscule in the scale of space.\u201cThis is by far the smallest object anyone has ever flown a spacecraft into,\u201d said Andy Cheng, the mission\u2019s co-lead and chief scientist in APL\u2019s space department.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft will be powered by solar panels that unfurl like wings. Its journey will take more than one year, and the researchers mostly will be flying blind.\u201cWe don\u2019t see the moon of the asteroid until we\u2019re just an hour away,\u201d said Adams, the engineer. \u201cThat last hour is going to be really thrilling.\u201dThey plan for DART to reach speeds as fast as 15,000 miles per hour. The crash in October 2022 will fling debris from the asteroid moon. A small satellite will accompany the DART spacecraft to measure the effect.The team wants to hit the asteroid moon with enough force to bump it, but not break it apart. The moon orbits the asteroid at a speed of about seven inches per second. They hope to change the speed by about a centimeter, or .39 of an inch, per second.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re just going to give it a love tap,\u201d said Andy Rivkin, the mission\u2019s other co-lead and planetary astronomer at APL.AdvertisementIn theory, taps over time could deflect an asteroid off a course for Earth.One impact may suffice if scientists have enough warning time. An imminent asteroid strike, however, would require multiple launches and impacts.\u201cYou could have a constant stream,\u201d Rivkin said. \u201cEach one nudges it a bit more.\u201dIt\u2019s humanity\u2019s best plan to save Earth, but one the team hopes they never have to use.\u2014 Baltimore Sun\n Hopkins Applied Physics Lab is testing a plan to knock away an asteroid heading for Earth. An asteroid could destroy humanity like it did dinosaurs. A Hopkins team has a plan to save the world.",
        "author": "Tim Prudente"
    },
    {
        "title": "An asteroid could destroy humanity like it did dinosaurs. A Hopkins team has a plan to save the world. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1309",
        "date": "2019-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/an-asteroid-could-destroy-humanity-like-it-did-dinosaurs-a-hopkins-team-has-a-plan-to-save-the-world/2019/02/04/a43550ee-28a6-11e9-8eef-0d74f4bf0295_story.html",
        "text": "A team of scientists, astronomers and engineers meets weekly in a conference room on a Howard County, Md., research campus and plans to save the world.\u201cKeep calm and carry DART,\u201d reads a poster on the wall.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDART \u2014 the Double Asteroid Redirection Test \u2014 is their plan to avert catastrophe. It\u2019s also NASA\u2019s first mission not to explore space, but to defend against it. The research team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel plans to launch a spacecraft, speed it up really fast and smash it into an asteroid.The impact, they hope, will bump the big space rock off course \u2014 actually more like nudge it slightly. Someday, the thinking goes, this method may save people from the fate of the dinosaurs.Story continues below advertisement\u201cKind of like a big missile,\u201d said Elena Adams, the mission\u2019s lead engineer. \u201cIt\u2019s very exciting. You are actually doing something for the fate of humanity.\u201dAdvertisementAn estimated 100 tons of space debris falls to Earth every day, according to scientists with NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. This debris is mostly dust and sand.Occasionally, space sends something bigger.In February 2013, a fiery meteor cut across the Siberian sky. It came streaking down as fast as 40,000 mph. Then came a midair explosion, a flash and boom.The shock wave blew out windows across the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. A factory roof collapsed. More than 1,000 people were hurt, mostly from shattered glass. Scientists estimate the meteor unleashed a force stronger than the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima.Story continues below advertisementThe rock was about the size of a school bus. That\u2019s a pebble compared to a meteor believed to have exploded over remote Siberia in 1908, flattening hundreds of square miles of forests. Researchers estimate that fireball equaled 185 Hiroshima bombs and heated the air to near 50,000 degrees. If the Tunguska meteor had arrived, say, three hours later, it could have obliterated Moscow, said Lindley Johnson, whose title with NASA is planetary defense officer.Advertisement\u201cThat probably would have changed the entire history of the 20th century,\u201d said Johnson, who runs NASA\u2019s asteroid defense programs. \u201cThese are natural disasters that we need to be aware of.\u201dSome time in a span of several hundred thousand years, scientists say, an asteroid even larger could strike Earth and wreak global disaster. They believe a meteor 8 to 10 kilometers in diameter crashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve found all the nearest asteroids that size. We\u2019re safe from that,\u201d said Paul Chodas, who runs an asteroid search team at the NASA lab in California.But smaller asteroids can unleash megatons of energy, too.\u201cEven down to the 1-kilometer size, if it hits in the right spot, could cause global devastation,\u201d Chodas said. \u201cIt\u2019s the small asteroids that pose the risk.\u201dAdvertisementIn the 1990s, Congress ordered NASA to locate dangerous asteroids in the solar system. Researchers today aim to catalogue the orbits of 90 percent of asteroids 460 feet or bigger.They predict 25,000 of them hurtle through the solar system. Chodas said they have found and charted about a third of them. The researchers can calculate each asteroid\u2019s trajectory decades into the future.Story continues below advertisementScientists have long debated what to do if they discover one on a collision course with Earth.Hollywood portrayed such events in \u201cDeep Impact\u201d and \u201cArmageddon.\u201d In both movies, mankind narrowly escapes doom by planting nuclear bombs and blowing the asteroids to pieces.It\u2019s not that easy.NASA has considered nuking an asteroid with warheads, but that risks turning a single incoming rock into a shower of debris as happened in \u201cDeep Impact.\u201d Another plan calls for flying a spacecraft beside the asteroid and gradually drawing it off course like a gravity tractor.AdvertisementDART offers a third strategy, and will be the first to be given a live test.\u201cIt\u2019s the simplest and most effective,\u201d Chodas said.Story continues below advertisementNow the team at the Hopkins laboratory in Laurel has begun the final design and construction of the DART spacecraft. About the size of a Honda Civic, it\u2019s scheduled for launch in summer 2021.While it sounds simple, the crash mission involves some tricky engineering.The target is the tiny moon of an asteroid. The two bodies are collectively named Didymos, or Greek for \u201ctwin.\u201d They orbit the sun between Earth and the Asteroid Belt. The moon is not much bigger than the Washington Monument \u2014 minuscule in the scale of space.\u201cThis is by far the smallest object anyone has ever flown a spacecraft into,\u201d said Andy Cheng, the mission\u2019s co-lead and chief scientist in APL\u2019s space department.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft will be powered by solar panels that unfurl like wings. Its journey will take more than one year, and the researchers mostly will be flying blind.\u201cWe don\u2019t see the moon of the asteroid until we\u2019re just an hour away,\u201d said Adams, the engineer. \u201cThat last hour is going to be really thrilling.\u201dThey plan for DART to reach speeds as fast as 15,000 miles per hour. The crash in October 2022 will fling debris from the asteroid moon. A small satellite will accompany the DART spacecraft to measure the effect.The team wants to hit the asteroid moon with enough force to bump it, but not break it apart. The moon orbits the asteroid at a speed of about seven inches per second. They hope to change the speed by about a centimeter, or .39 of an inch, per second.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re just going to give it a love tap,\u201d said Andy Rivkin, the mission\u2019s other co-lead and planetary astronomer at APL.AdvertisementIn theory, taps over time could deflect an asteroid off a course for Earth.One impact may suffice if scientists have enough warning time. An imminent asteroid strike, however, would require multiple launches and impacts.\u201cYou could have a constant stream,\u201d Rivkin said. \u201cEach one nudges it a bit more.\u201dIt\u2019s humanity\u2019s best plan to save Earth, but one the team hopes they never have to use.\u2014 Baltimore Sun\n Hopkins Applied Physics Lab is testing a plan to knock away an asteroid heading for Earth. An asteroid could destroy humanity like it did dinosaurs. A Hopkins team has a plan to save the world.",
        "author": "Tim Prudente"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science equipment and cheese sent into space from Virginia, NASA says (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1310",
        "date": "2020-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/science-equipment-and-cheese-sent-into-space-from-virginia-nasa-says/2020/02/17/e4f58254-51ed-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html",
        "text": "A rocket that was launched last week from Virginia soil carried into space, among other things, a supply of cheese.An Antares rocket launched a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft from Wallops Island on Virginia\u2019s Atlantic Coast on Saturday, NASA said. Northrop Grumman\u2019s CRS-13 mission successfully launched at 3:21 p.m., NASA said. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cargo craft held about 7,500 pounds of science experiments and supplies for the International Space Station, the agency said. It is set to arrive about 4:05 a.m. on Tuesday morning.After required items were stowed on the NG-13 Cygnus, a NASA official said, room was found \u201cto send hard cheddar and manchego cheese.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA few other treats also went up, according to the official, NASA\u2019s Ven C. Feng, including candies and chocolate, as well as maple and almond butter granola with almond milk.AdvertisementFeng, a manager with the space station program, also listed fresh food that included apples, oranges, cherry tomatoes, onions and garlic. The fresh garlic, he said, is \u201cquickly becoming a crew favorite.\u201dIt might appear then that while the discipline of astronauts is well known, their lives may also include some spice.Local newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.)Like PostLocal on Facebook | Follow @postlocal on Twitter | Latest local news The resupply mission was bound for the International Space Station. Science equipment and cheese sent into space from Virginia, NASA says",
        "author": "Martin Weil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science equipment and cheese sent into space from Virginia, NASA says (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1311",
        "date": "2020-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/science-equipment-and-cheese-sent-into-space-from-virginia-nasa-says/2020/02/17/e4f58254-51ed-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html",
        "text": "A rocket that was launched last week from Virginia soil carried into space, among other things, a supply of cheese.An Antares rocket launched a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft from Wallops Island on Virginia\u2019s Atlantic Coast on Saturday, NASA said. Northrop Grumman\u2019s CRS-13 mission successfully launched at 3:21 p.m., NASA said. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cargo craft held about 7,500 pounds of science experiments and supplies for the International Space Station, the agency said. It is set to arrive about 4:05 a.m. on Tuesday morning.After required items were stowed on the NG-13 Cygnus, a NASA official said, room was found \u201cto send hard cheddar and manchego cheese.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA few other treats also went up, according to the official, NASA\u2019s Ven C. Feng, including candies and chocolate, as well as maple and almond butter granola with almond milk.AdvertisementFeng, a manager with the space station program, also listed fresh food that included apples, oranges, cherry tomatoes, onions and garlic. The fresh garlic, he said, is \u201cquickly becoming a crew favorite.\u201dIt might appear then that while the discipline of astronauts is well known, their lives may also include some spice.Local newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.)Like PostLocal on Facebook | Follow @postlocal on Twitter | Latest local news The resupply mission was bound for the International Space Station. Science equipment and cheese sent into space from Virginia, NASA says",
        "author": "Martin Weil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science equipment and cheese sent into space from Virginia, NASA says (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1312",
        "date": "2020-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/science-equipment-and-cheese-sent-into-space-from-virginia-nasa-says/2020/02/17/e4f58254-51ed-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html",
        "text": "A rocket that was launched last week from Virginia soil carried into space, among other things, a supply of cheese.An Antares rocket launched a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft from Wallops Island on Virginia\u2019s Atlantic Coast on Saturday, NASA said. Northrop Grumman\u2019s CRS-13 mission successfully launched at 3:21 p.m., NASA said. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cargo craft held about 7,500 pounds of science experiments and supplies for the International Space Station, the agency said. It is set to arrive about 4:05 a.m. on Tuesday morning.After required items were stowed on the NG-13 Cygnus, a NASA official said, room was found \u201cto send hard cheddar and manchego cheese.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA few other treats also went up, according to the official, NASA\u2019s Ven C. Feng, including candies and chocolate, as well as maple and almond butter granola with almond milk.AdvertisementFeng, a manager with the space station program, also listed fresh food that included apples, oranges, cherry tomatoes, onions and garlic. The fresh garlic, he said, is \u201cquickly becoming a crew favorite.\u201dIt might appear then that while the discipline of astronauts is well known, their lives may also include some spice.Local newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.)Like PostLocal on Facebook | Follow @postlocal on Twitter | Latest local news The resupply mission was bound for the International Space Station. Science equipment and cheese sent into space from Virginia, NASA says",
        "author": "Martin Weil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Water is fine when you\u2019re thirsty. When it drips from the ceiling? Not so much. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1313",
        "date": "2019-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/water-is-fine-when-youre-thirsty-when-it-drips-from-the-ceiling-not-so-much/2019/01/06/10cdbe08-1038-11e9-8938-5898adc28fa2_story.html",
        "text": "A Chinese spacecraft landed on the moon last week. The first thing it did was look for water. Bad idea. H2O? More like H2 Woe.I know water\u2019s important \u2014 humans can\u2019t live without it, etc. \u2014 but, man, do I hate the stuff. Around the same time China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 probe touched down on the lunar surface, a contractor was touching down in my house. He was trying to figure out why water drips from my living room ceiling every now and then. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019m sick of water. The Washington area just completed the soggiest year on record: 66.28 inches of rain and melted snow. Oh, the rain seems like a good idea when you want to replenish parched reservoirs or grow cruciferous vegetables, but when it\u2019s coming down from the ceiling or up from the basement it\u2019s not quite so pleasant.Story continues below advertisementOur ceiling started getting moist soon after we\u2019d had the whole inside of our house painted. We had only a few months to enjoy it. One morning I looked up and noticed there were ugly, puckered rings in one corner of the pristine ceiling, proto-stalactites like you might see in a cavern. The wall below was covered with rippled, suppurating sores where the vile liquid had trickled down.AdvertisementWater! But from where? So far, three different investigators have tried to solve the mystery.The first was our handyman, who cut neat inspection holes in the ceiling nearest the wall and on the wall just above the baseboard.Nothing was actively dripping, so that seemed to rule out the bane of every homeowner\u2019s existence: a leaky pipe. A pinhole leak would have meant a real ceiling-smasher: Whac-a-Mole with a sledgehammer to track down the evil permeable tube.Story continues below advertisementThis was in the middle of our torrential 2018. The handyman noticed that the guys who had installed our storm windows a while back hadn\u2019t put weep holes at the base of the living room window frame. Weep holes \u2014 and is there a more grim term? \u2014 prevent rainwater from flooding the sill and coming into the house.As for the ceiling, the replacement shutters around an upstairs window hung on shaky mortar. He thought windblown rain could be coming in there.AdvertisementHe caulked some cracks with silicone and drilled a few weep holes in the sill. The next time it rained, the inside of our house remained mercifully dry.But then one sunny morning I noticed it was leaking again. This was \u2014 cue shrieking \u201cPsycho\u201d violins \u2014 while My Lovely Wife was in the shower off our bedroom. That shower isn\u2019t above that bit of ceiling, but that is the monomaniacal insidiousness of water: It seeks the lowest point and will traverse all manner of beams and joists to get there.Story continues below advertisementSo: a plumbing problem. We called a plumber.He performed all manner of experiments, mainly designed to see if the shower pan was cracked. It was not. He quizzed us about our showering habits. He perked up when we told him we turned the shower head against the shower wall while the water warmed so we wouldn\u2019t get a blast of water in the face when we opened the shower door.AdvertisementHe surmised that bad grout and cracked tiles were allowing water in. Retiling was the answer. We called a contractor.The contractor didn\u2019t think hairline cracks were the problem. Perhaps water was going in an open screw hole on the trim plate. Or spilling out at the diverter. Or bubbling up around the drain in some perversion of the Coriolis effect.Story continues below advertisementHe performed his own forensic tests. He had to admit the pan wasn\u2019t cracked, but when he directed the shower head in a certain direction he was rewarded with drips through the holes that had been cut months earlier in the plaster downstairs.He decided that one corner of the shower \u2014 above the pan but below the tiles the plumber had fingered as the culprit \u2014 had a gap in it.Caulking the fissure might fix it \u2014 for a while anyway. We\u2019d know it had stopped working when our ceiling started leaking again, no doubt right after we\u2019d repaired the plaster holes.AdvertisementAnd so that\u2019s where we are. Caulking doesn\u2019t seem like the solution. We could replace all the tiles, but the contractor told us they\u2019re probably set tight in an inch or two of 80-year-old concrete. It would be a sledgehammer job.Besides, contractors don\u2019t really like to retile tiny 1940s showers. They like to build sparkling new bathrooms.We haven\u2019t done anything. We use a different shower, and every time we do we scan the ceiling for signs of precipitation.Twitter: @johnkelly\n For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. Why is it raining inside our house? And how much will it cost to fix it? Water is fine when you\u2019re thirsty. When it drips from the ceiling? Not so much.",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | She hopes to change what people think an astronaut looks like (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1314",
        "date": "2021-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/black-woman-change-astronaut-image/2021/08/28/d6b5ccd4-078c-11ec-a266-7c7fe02fa374_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cWhat do astronauts look like?\u201dThat question sits at the top of the Instagram page that Lisa Alcindor, an aspiring astronaut, created. Next to it, a photo shows a figure hidden beneath a darkened helmet, allowing the mind for a moment to imagine the characteristics of the person wearing it and consider its own notions of what a space traveler looks like. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIs it a man or a woman? Is it someone who is tall or short? It is a person who seems more comfortable sitting in a lab or dancing at a party?Whatever image a person conjures, it probably doesn\u2019t match the one that a quick downward scroll of the page reveals. The photos of Alcindor show a young, striking Black woman whose long lashes reach toward the front of that helmet when she has it on.Story continues below advertisementThey show a woman who one day models a bubble-gum colored suit with a leopard-print blouse and on another day sits grinning in front of a rocket engine.AdvertisementIn one photo, she holds up a gold-adorned wrist and balances on her hand a complex-looking piece of machinery. The words next to it read, \u201cWhen you hold a $2 million satellite in the palm of your hand.\u201dAlcindor, who is 34 and lives in Northern Virginia, has not yet flown to space. But she is trying hard to get there, and in the process, she is trying to change how people think of astronauts \u2014 and themselves.\u201cMy goal is to show people that they truly are limitless,\u201d she says when we talk on a recent afternoon.Story continues below advertisementLately, conversations about space travel have orbited around the names of White male billionaires. On July 20, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos rocketed beyond the edge of space in the New Shepard spacecraft developed by his Blue Origin company. That endeavor, which was watched by people across the nation, came nine days after Richard Branson took a similar suborbital space flight on Virgin Galactic\u2019s Unity 22.Advertisement\u201cBest day ever,\u201d Bezos said after his flight.\u201cThe experience of a lifetime,\u201d Branson said during his.Both flights marked milestones in a space race that had already seen Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX fly people to the International Space Station.Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceFor anyone interested in space travel, those endeavors have been fascinating to witness. They have also made space travel feel a distant dream for anyone who doesn\u2019t have deep pockets. In an auction for a seat on Bezos\u2019s flight, the top bidder offered $28\u2008million. When that person had to postpone, another winning bid landed an 18-year-old from a wealthy family on the flight instead.Story continues below advertisementAlcindor\u2019s path has not been paved with the same bricks. She is someone who is trying to use her ordinary means to reach extraordinary heights \u2014 literally. And through social media, she is taking people on the journey with her.Advertisement\u201cIt was a childhood dream of mine to go to space so immma just live vicariously through your ig,\u201d one person wrote on her page.\u201cWe want to write a children\u2019s book about you. You are a living legend!\u201d wrote another.\u201cYou are goals,\u201d wrote yet another. \u201cI show my daughter your page .\u2009.\u2009. black girl magic.\u201dPhotos on the page show Alcindor learning to scuba dive, standing next to the late physicist Freeman Dyson and flying a helicopter \u2014 all experiences she sees as helping her toward her ultimate goal.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBeing a pilot, it takes a different level of meditation,\u201d Alcindor says. \u201cMy first flight lesson, I almost fainted. I\u2019m Black and I almost turned pink. You feel everything. The plane is so light that you feel the fuel when it\u2019s dissipating.\u201dIt would have been easy to give up, she says, but she now has 26 hours of flight time.Advertisement\u201cI was like, \u2018I got to finish this, because that\u2019s what astronauts do,\u2019\u2009\u201d she says.When Alcindor talks, it can be hard to keep up with everything she says. She can go from describing why she loves to dance in the styles of jazz and ballet to explaining how to perform a saltwater corrosion test on aviation metals.Her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 shows that the PhD candidate has a bachelor\u2019s degree in economics and works at the Pentagon as a contractor. Before that, it shows, she held a contracting job that involved designing body armor at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. Her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 also details her work with NASA on a program involving \u201cthe next generation main rocket propulsion system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor a while, Alcindor says, she felt torn between her artistic interests and her work. She questioned how much she could be herself in jobs where not many co-workers were young, Black or women. During her time with NASA, she says, people in her dance classes didn\u2019t know she spent her days talking about rockets and the people at her work had no idea she had dance shoes in her car.AdvertisementThen she saw the movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d which shows the vital roles Black women at NASA played during the early years of the country\u2019s space program. The movie is set in the past, but Alcindor saw her present self in it. She even recognized some of the machinery depicted.She credits the movie with sparking her desire to explore space and helping her embrace all parts of herself: her flair for fashion, her talent for singing (a skill that got her to Hollywood Week on \u201cAmerican Idol\u201d) and her passion for her work.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe more I sat in my woman-ness, the more I was a better leader,\u201d she says.She also learned that being a woman wasn\u2019t a detriment to her mission \u2014 at least not physically. The thickness of her hips makes her more aerodynamic, she says, and a woman can still bear children after traveling to space. She recalls asking astronaut Susan Helms that question after rushing to an event to hear the astronaut speak. Alcindor says becoming a mother one day and showing what mothers can achieve are important to her.AdvertisementAlcindor has applied to Space for Humanity\u2019s Citizen Astronaut Program, and a post on her Instagram page shows she has made it to a second round. She spent recent days going over her application again to make sure it fully reflects her. In one part, she had to decide whether she wanted to represent the United States or Haiti, both of which are part of her identity.Story continues below advertisementThe nonprofit has not yet sent a crew into space but hopes to be able to share a schedule later this year, Executive Director Rachel Lyons said in an email. So far, the organization has received about 4,000 applications.\u201cWe are looking for people who are leaders in their community,\u201d said Lyons. \u201cPeople who have a commitment to positively impacting our world. We\u2019re passionate about the Overview Effect: the cognitive shift that occurs when astronauts view our Earth from space, as a small, interconnected, fragile, floating blue ball of life in an infinite universe.Advertisement\u201cThese astronauts gain an understanding of the miraculousness of life, and the uniqueness of our existence,\u201d Lyons added. \u201cThey recognize that, as humans, our commonalities far outweigh our differences. They often return with a call to action around taking care of our planet and taking care of each other.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere is, of course, no telling whether the organization will pick Alcindor for the program or whether she will have to find another way to reach the stars.Her journey has not been without challenges. Growing up in Miami and attending school next to a public-housing project, she never knew if her family was broke or had money, she says. But in trying to make herself a better candidate for space travel, her bills have mounted. (I learned about her when I happened to see a GoFundMe page she created to pay for the remaining hours of flight time she needs for her pilot\u2019s license.)AdvertisementBut she\u2019s adamant that she won\u2019t give up. She knows people are watching her and seeing themselves. Black girls. Women in male-dominated fields. People who dropped a dream before they could pursue it. She says she hopes to reach all of them and show them that they are limitless.\u201cWhat you thought you were best at might be because you haven\u2019t had the opportunity to explore yourself,\u201d she says. \u201cI hope someone who\u2019s never picked up the piano will pick it up and someone who\u2019s never flown before will do a discovery flight.\u201dA goal she set early on was to meet four astronauts, and she has. One of them is pictured on her Instagram page.The photo shows Alcindor standing next to Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to travel to space. In large letters across the image are the words \u201cWhat do ASTRONAUTS look like?\u201d\n\nRead more from Theresa Vargas: A former cop created a program to help Baltimore kids. Now, she\u2019s hoping to give them more: a permanent safe haven.A girl\u2019s reaction to the Nationals Park shooting made the world look at D.C.\u2019s gun violence problem\u2018Dear Khloe\u2019: A Black girl hated her natural hair, and then 101 women spoke about finding beauty in theirs Lisa Alcindor comes from ordinary means and is trying to reach the most extraordinary heights. She hopes to change what people think an astronaut looks like",
        "author": "Theresa Vargas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | She hopes to change what people think an astronaut looks like (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1315",
        "date": "2021-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/black-woman-change-astronaut-image/2021/08/28/d6b5ccd4-078c-11ec-a266-7c7fe02fa374_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cWhat do astronauts look like?\u201dThat question sits at the top of the Instagram page that Lisa Alcindor, an aspiring astronaut, created. Next to it, a photo shows a figure hidden beneath a darkened helmet, allowing the mind for a moment to imagine the characteristics of the person wearing it and consider its own notions of what a space traveler looks like. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIs it a man or a woman? Is it someone who is tall or short? It is a person who seems more comfortable sitting in a lab or dancing at a party?Whatever image a person conjures, it probably doesn\u2019t match the one that a quick downward scroll of the page reveals. The photos of Alcindor show a young, striking Black woman whose long lashes reach toward the front of that helmet when she has it on.Story continues below advertisementThey show a woman who one day models a bubble-gum colored suit with a leopard-print blouse and on another day sits grinning in front of a rocket engine.AdvertisementIn one photo, she holds up a gold-adorned wrist and balances on her hand a complex-looking piece of machinery. The words next to it read, \u201cWhen you hold a $2 million satellite in the palm of your hand.\u201dAlcindor, who is 34 and lives in Northern Virginia, has not yet flown to space. But she is trying hard to get there, and in the process, she is trying to change how people think of astronauts \u2014 and themselves.\u201cMy goal is to show people that they truly are limitless,\u201d she says when we talk on a recent afternoon.Story continues below advertisementLately, conversations about space travel have orbited around the names of White male billionaires. On July 20, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos rocketed beyond the edge of space in the New Shepard spacecraft developed by his Blue Origin company. That endeavor, which was watched by people across the nation, came nine days after Richard Branson took a similar suborbital space flight on Virgin Galactic\u2019s Unity 22.Advertisement\u201cBest day ever,\u201d Bezos said after his flight.\u201cThe experience of a lifetime,\u201d Branson said during his.Both flights marked milestones in a space race that had already seen Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX fly people to the International Space Station.Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceFor anyone interested in space travel, those endeavors have been fascinating to witness. They have also made space travel feel a distant dream for anyone who doesn\u2019t have deep pockets. In an auction for a seat on Bezos\u2019s flight, the top bidder offered $28\u2008million. When that person had to postpone, another winning bid landed an 18-year-old from a wealthy family on the flight instead.Story continues below advertisementAlcindor\u2019s path has not been paved with the same bricks. She is someone who is trying to use her ordinary means to reach extraordinary heights \u2014 literally. And through social media, she is taking people on the journey with her.Advertisement\u201cIt was a childhood dream of mine to go to space so immma just live vicariously through your ig,\u201d one person wrote on her page.\u201cWe want to write a children\u2019s book about you. You are a living legend!\u201d wrote another.\u201cYou are goals,\u201d wrote yet another. \u201cI show my daughter your page .\u2009.\u2009. black girl magic.\u201dPhotos on the page show Alcindor learning to scuba dive, standing next to the late physicist Freeman Dyson and flying a helicopter \u2014 all experiences she sees as helping her toward her ultimate goal.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBeing a pilot, it takes a different level of meditation,\u201d Alcindor says. \u201cMy first flight lesson, I almost fainted. I\u2019m Black and I almost turned pink. You feel everything. The plane is so light that you feel the fuel when it\u2019s dissipating.\u201dIt would have been easy to give up, she says, but she now has 26 hours of flight time.Advertisement\u201cI was like, \u2018I got to finish this, because that\u2019s what astronauts do,\u2019\u2009\u201d she says.When Alcindor talks, it can be hard to keep up with everything she says. She can go from describing why she loves to dance in the styles of jazz and ballet to explaining how to perform a saltwater corrosion test on aviation metals.Her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 shows that the PhD candidate has a bachelor\u2019s degree in economics and works at the Pentagon as a contractor. Before that, it shows, she held a contracting job that involved designing body armor at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. Her r\u00e9sum\u00e9 also details her work with NASA on a program involving \u201cthe next generation main rocket propulsion system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor a while, Alcindor says, she felt torn between her artistic interests and her work. She questioned how much she could be herself in jobs where not many co-workers were young, Black or women. During her time with NASA, she says, people in her dance classes didn\u2019t know she spent her days talking about rockets and the people at her work had no idea she had dance shoes in her car.AdvertisementThen she saw the movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d which shows the vital roles Black women at NASA played during the early years of the country\u2019s space program. The movie is set in the past, but Alcindor saw her present self in it. She even recognized some of the machinery depicted.She credits the movie with sparking her desire to explore space and helping her embrace all parts of herself: her flair for fashion, her talent for singing (a skill that got her to Hollywood Week on \u201cAmerican Idol\u201d) and her passion for her work.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe more I sat in my woman-ness, the more I was a better leader,\u201d she says.She also learned that being a woman wasn\u2019t a detriment to her mission \u2014 at least not physically. The thickness of her hips makes her more aerodynamic, she says, and a woman can still bear children after traveling to space. She recalls asking astronaut Susan Helms that question after rushing to an event to hear the astronaut speak. Alcindor says becoming a mother one day and showing what mothers can achieve are important to her.AdvertisementAlcindor has applied to Space for Humanity\u2019s Citizen Astronaut Program, and a post on her Instagram page shows she has made it to a second round. She spent recent days going over her application again to make sure it fully reflects her. In one part, she had to decide whether she wanted to represent the United States or Haiti, both of which are part of her identity.Story continues below advertisementThe nonprofit has not yet sent a crew into space but hopes to be able to share a schedule later this year, Executive Director Rachel Lyons said in an email. So far, the organization has received about 4,000 applications.\u201cWe are looking for people who are leaders in their community,\u201d said Lyons. \u201cPeople who have a commitment to positively impacting our world. We\u2019re passionate about the Overview Effect: the cognitive shift that occurs when astronauts view our Earth from space, as a small, interconnected, fragile, floating blue ball of life in an infinite universe.Advertisement\u201cThese astronauts gain an understanding of the miraculousness of life, and the uniqueness of our existence,\u201d Lyons added. \u201cThey recognize that, as humans, our commonalities far outweigh our differences. They often return with a call to action around taking care of our planet and taking care of each other.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere is, of course, no telling whether the organization will pick Alcindor for the program or whether she will have to find another way to reach the stars.Her journey has not been without challenges. Growing up in Miami and attending school next to a public-housing project, she never knew if her family was broke or had money, she says. But in trying to make herself a better candidate for space travel, her bills have mounted. (I learned about her when I happened to see a GoFundMe page she created to pay for the remaining hours of flight time she needs for her pilot\u2019s license.)AdvertisementBut she\u2019s adamant that she won\u2019t give up. She knows people are watching her and seeing themselves. Black girls. Women in male-dominated fields. People who dropped a dream before they could pursue it. She says she hopes to reach all of them and show them that they are limitless.\u201cWhat you thought you were best at might be because you haven\u2019t had the opportunity to explore yourself,\u201d she says. \u201cI hope someone who\u2019s never picked up the piano will pick it up and someone who\u2019s never flown before will do a discovery flight.\u201dA goal she set early on was to meet four astronauts, and she has. One of them is pictured on her Instagram page.The photo shows Alcindor standing next to Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to travel to space. In large letters across the image are the words \u201cWhat do ASTRONAUTS look like?\u201d\n\nRead more from Theresa Vargas: A former cop created a program to help Baltimore kids. Now, she\u2019s hoping to give them more: a permanent safe haven.A girl\u2019s reaction to the Nationals Park shooting made the world look at D.C.\u2019s gun violence problem\u2018Dear Khloe\u2019: A Black girl hated her natural hair, and then 101 women spoke about finding beauty in theirs Lisa Alcindor comes from ordinary means and is trying to reach the most extraordinary heights. She hopes to change what people think an astronaut looks like",
        "author": "Theresa Vargas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | \u2018Alien\u2019 scared me silly 40 years ago. Today, my chest bursts with affection for it. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1316",
        "date": "2019-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alien-scared-me-silly-40-years-ago-today-my-chest-bursts-with-affection-for-it/2019/06/09/b3d4ef06-8ab1-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html",
        "text": "When \u201cAlien\u201d opened on May\u00a025, 1979, it began its Washington engagement at a single theater: the Uptown on Connecticut Avenue NW, in 70mm and Dolby sound. That\u2019s where I saw it with Todd Belt, who was a year behind me at Rockville High School.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, when I say \u201cI saw it\u201d I mean I saw a lot of it. Half of it, at least. I spent the rest of the film staring at the back of the seat in front of me, abjectly muttering, \u201cHow can the federal government allow a movie this scary to be shown in public?\u201d I was 17.The Washington Post\u2019s Gary Arnold gave \u201cAlien\u201d a rave review when it came out, writing that the film \u201cis certain to take a respected place along the classics of cinematic suspense and horror.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Evening Star\u2019s reviewer, Tom Dowling, wrote that \u201cAlien\u201d was \u201cthe ultimate slick, expensive and ingenious sci-fi/horror film.\u201d He didn\u2019t mean that in a good way. Dowling dismissed \u201cAlien\u201d as \u201ca disembodied, coldly inhuman, deeply alien film.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cAlien,\u201d with a screenplay by Dan O\u2019Bannon, became the biggest movie of the summer of \u201979. It was one of the first major studio films to make space look unglamorous and to depict the humans who go there not as strong-chinned, right-stuff heroes, but as working schlubs eager for a paycheck.\u201cIt really is not the traditional kind of space adventure where you have a hero and a sidekick and a damsel in distress,\u201d said Margaret Weitekamp, a curator in the space history department at the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cIn this case they\u2019ve transformed that. I think in some ways that comes out of the moment in the 1970s when there is a turn toward the more dystopian.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWeitekamp is a decade younger than I am and so didn\u2019t get her first exposure to \u201cAlien\u201d in a darkened theater surrounded by strangers. \u201cI suspect I probably rented it at Blockbuster in the late \u201980s, probably because I had seen or wanted to see the sequel, \u2018Aliens,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said.AdvertisementIn 2003, the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of American History welcomed into its collection a 3-foot-tall plaster-of-Paris xenomorph egg that was used as a prop in \u201cAliens.\u201d It may not be a moon rock or a first lady\u2019s dress, but it\u2019s iconic just the same. The National Air and Space Museum has a set of 103 \u201cAlien\u201d trading cards.Said Weitekamp: \u201cFrom the earliest years of the museum \u2014 which predates the 1976 building on the Mall \u2014 there\u2019s been an interest in how spaceflight has been imagined and then how that connects with what becomes possible in terms of actual spaceflight.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCulture is one of America\u2019s greatest exports, she said, and the entertainments we produce help form our national identity. Among the science-fiction objects in the Air and Space collection is the 11-foot studio model of the Starship Enterprise from \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which came to the Smithsonian in 1974.AdvertisementOf course, that TV series never got as horrific as \u201cAlien,\u201d notwithstanding the occasional green-skinned alien woman who tried to seduce Captain Kirk.That was another notable thing about \u201cAlien\u201d: a female protagonist, or as Post critic Arnold wrote of Ripley, \u201cthe most courageous and resourceful heroine seen on the screen in years.\u201dThe role that would go to Sigourney Weaver had originally been written for a man. In an interview published in the Evening Star a few days after the movie opened, director Ridley Scott said it was changed to a woman not for any feminist reason, but because the producers felt that with a heroine, audiences wouldn\u2019t be quite so confident the humans would win. Um, thanks?Story continues below advertisementAfter a few weeks at the Uptown, \u201cAlien\u201d moved to wider release in the D.C. area. You may have seen it at the Jerry Lewis Theatre in District Heights, the Springfield Mall Cinema 1, Loehmann\u2019s Plaza in Falls Church or the ABC Drive-In in Oxon Hill.AdvertisementNewsweek\u2019s Jack Kroll said \u201cAlien\u201d would \u201cscare the peanuts right out of your M&M\u2019s.\u201d He was right. Despite that, it has since become one of my favorite films. If I come across \u201cAlien\u201d while channel-grazing, I am drawn to it as inexorably as the Nostromo was drawn to LV-426.I sometimes wonder if the people who design today\u2019s spacecraft and space stations are fans, too. I hope so. And I hope these NASA rocket scientists see \u201cAlien\u201d as a cautionary tale, a reminder that you shouldn\u2019t have too many nooks and crannies in your spaceship, that even one evil robot is one too many, and that when a contaminated crew member is knocking at the airlock door, don\u2019t let him in.Twitter: @johnkelly\n For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. No one can hear you scream in space, but you could sure hear me at the Uptown theater. \u2018Alien\u2019 scared me silly 40 years ago. Today, my chest bursts with affection for it.",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | \u2018Alien\u2019 scared me silly 40 years ago. Today, my chest bursts with affection for it. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1317",
        "date": "2019-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alien-scared-me-silly-40-years-ago-today-my-chest-bursts-with-affection-for-it/2019/06/09/b3d4ef06-8ab1-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html",
        "text": "When \u201cAlien\u201d opened on May\u00a025, 1979, it began its Washington engagement at a single theater: the Uptown on Connecticut Avenue NW, in 70mm and Dolby sound. That\u2019s where I saw it with Todd Belt, who was a year behind me at Rockville High School.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, when I say \u201cI saw it\u201d I mean I saw a lot of it. Half of it, at least. I spent the rest of the film staring at the back of the seat in front of me, abjectly muttering, \u201cHow can the federal government allow a movie this scary to be shown in public?\u201d I was 17.The Washington Post\u2019s Gary Arnold gave \u201cAlien\u201d a rave review when it came out, writing that the film \u201cis certain to take a respected place along the classics of cinematic suspense and horror.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Evening Star\u2019s reviewer, Tom Dowling, wrote that \u201cAlien\u201d was \u201cthe ultimate slick, expensive and ingenious sci-fi/horror film.\u201d He didn\u2019t mean that in a good way. Dowling dismissed \u201cAlien\u201d as \u201ca disembodied, coldly inhuman, deeply alien film.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cAlien,\u201d with a screenplay by Dan O\u2019Bannon, became the biggest movie of the summer of \u201979. It was one of the first major studio films to make space look unglamorous and to depict the humans who go there not as strong-chinned, right-stuff heroes, but as working schlubs eager for a paycheck.\u201cIt really is not the traditional kind of space adventure where you have a hero and a sidekick and a damsel in distress,\u201d said Margaret Weitekamp, a curator in the space history department at the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cIn this case they\u2019ve transformed that. I think in some ways that comes out of the moment in the 1970s when there is a turn toward the more dystopian.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWeitekamp is a decade younger than I am and so didn\u2019t get her first exposure to \u201cAlien\u201d in a darkened theater surrounded by strangers. \u201cI suspect I probably rented it at Blockbuster in the late \u201980s, probably because I had seen or wanted to see the sequel, \u2018Aliens,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said.AdvertisementIn 2003, the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of American History welcomed into its collection a 3-foot-tall plaster-of-Paris xenomorph egg that was used as a prop in \u201cAliens.\u201d It may not be a moon rock or a first lady\u2019s dress, but it\u2019s iconic just the same. The National Air and Space Museum has a set of 103 \u201cAlien\u201d trading cards.Said Weitekamp: \u201cFrom the earliest years of the museum \u2014 which predates the 1976 building on the Mall \u2014 there\u2019s been an interest in how spaceflight has been imagined and then how that connects with what becomes possible in terms of actual spaceflight.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCulture is one of America\u2019s greatest exports, she said, and the entertainments we produce help form our national identity. Among the science-fiction objects in the Air and Space collection is the 11-foot studio model of the Starship Enterprise from \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which came to the Smithsonian in 1974.AdvertisementOf course, that TV series never got as horrific as \u201cAlien,\u201d notwithstanding the occasional green-skinned alien woman who tried to seduce Captain Kirk.That was another notable thing about \u201cAlien\u201d: a female protagonist, or as Post critic Arnold wrote of Ripley, \u201cthe most courageous and resourceful heroine seen on the screen in years.\u201dThe role that would go to Sigourney Weaver had originally been written for a man. In an interview published in the Evening Star a few days after the movie opened, director Ridley Scott said it was changed to a woman not for any feminist reason, but because the producers felt that with a heroine, audiences wouldn\u2019t be quite so confident the humans would win. Um, thanks?Story continues below advertisementAfter a few weeks at the Uptown, \u201cAlien\u201d moved to wider release in the D.C. area. You may have seen it at the Jerry Lewis Theatre in District Heights, the Springfield Mall Cinema 1, Loehmann\u2019s Plaza in Falls Church or the ABC Drive-In in Oxon Hill.AdvertisementNewsweek\u2019s Jack Kroll said \u201cAlien\u201d would \u201cscare the peanuts right out of your M&M\u2019s.\u201d He was right. Despite that, it has since become one of my favorite films. If I come across \u201cAlien\u201d while channel-grazing, I am drawn to it as inexorably as the Nostromo was drawn to LV-426.I sometimes wonder if the people who design today\u2019s spacecraft and space stations are fans, too. I hope so. And I hope these NASA rocket scientists see \u201cAlien\u201d as a cautionary tale, a reminder that you shouldn\u2019t have too many nooks and crannies in your spaceship, that even one evil robot is one too many, and that when a contaminated crew member is knocking at the airlock door, don\u2019t let him in.Twitter: @johnkelly\n For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. No one can hear you scream in space, but you could sure hear me at the Uptown theater. \u2018Alien\u2019 scared me silly 40 years ago. Today, my chest bursts with affection for it.",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | \u2018Alien\u2019 scared me silly 40 years ago. Today, my chest bursts with affection for it. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1318",
        "date": "2019-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/alien-scared-me-silly-40-years-ago-today-my-chest-bursts-with-affection-for-it/2019/06/09/b3d4ef06-8ab1-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html",
        "text": "When \u201cAlien\u201d opened on May\u00a025, 1979, it began its Washington engagement at a single theater: the Uptown on Connecticut Avenue NW, in 70mm and Dolby sound. That\u2019s where I saw it with Todd Belt, who was a year behind me at Rockville High School.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, when I say \u201cI saw it\u201d I mean I saw a lot of it. Half of it, at least. I spent the rest of the film staring at the back of the seat in front of me, abjectly muttering, \u201cHow can the federal government allow a movie this scary to be shown in public?\u201d I was 17.The Washington Post\u2019s Gary Arnold gave \u201cAlien\u201d a rave review when it came out, writing that the film \u201cis certain to take a respected place along the classics of cinematic suspense and horror.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Evening Star\u2019s reviewer, Tom Dowling, wrote that \u201cAlien\u201d was \u201cthe ultimate slick, expensive and ingenious sci-fi/horror film.\u201d He didn\u2019t mean that in a good way. Dowling dismissed \u201cAlien\u201d as \u201ca disembodied, coldly inhuman, deeply alien film.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cAlien,\u201d with a screenplay by Dan O\u2019Bannon, became the biggest movie of the summer of \u201979. It was one of the first major studio films to make space look unglamorous and to depict the humans who go there not as strong-chinned, right-stuff heroes, but as working schlubs eager for a paycheck.\u201cIt really is not the traditional kind of space adventure where you have a hero and a sidekick and a damsel in distress,\u201d said Margaret Weitekamp, a curator in the space history department at the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cIn this case they\u2019ve transformed that. I think in some ways that comes out of the moment in the 1970s when there is a turn toward the more dystopian.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWeitekamp is a decade younger than I am and so didn\u2019t get her first exposure to \u201cAlien\u201d in a darkened theater surrounded by strangers. \u201cI suspect I probably rented it at Blockbuster in the late \u201980s, probably because I had seen or wanted to see the sequel, \u2018Aliens,\u2019\u00a0\u201d she said.AdvertisementIn 2003, the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of American History welcomed into its collection a 3-foot-tall plaster-of-Paris xenomorph egg that was used as a prop in \u201cAliens.\u201d It may not be a moon rock or a first lady\u2019s dress, but it\u2019s iconic just the same. The National Air and Space Museum has a set of 103 \u201cAlien\u201d trading cards.Said Weitekamp: \u201cFrom the earliest years of the museum \u2014 which predates the 1976 building on the Mall \u2014 there\u2019s been an interest in how spaceflight has been imagined and then how that connects with what becomes possible in terms of actual spaceflight.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCulture is one of America\u2019s greatest exports, she said, and the entertainments we produce help form our national identity. Among the science-fiction objects in the Air and Space collection is the 11-foot studio model of the Starship Enterprise from \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which came to the Smithsonian in 1974.AdvertisementOf course, that TV series never got as horrific as \u201cAlien,\u201d notwithstanding the occasional green-skinned alien woman who tried to seduce Captain Kirk.That was another notable thing about \u201cAlien\u201d: a female protagonist, or as Post critic Arnold wrote of Ripley, \u201cthe most courageous and resourceful heroine seen on the screen in years.\u201dThe role that would go to Sigourney Weaver had originally been written for a man. In an interview published in the Evening Star a few days after the movie opened, director Ridley Scott said it was changed to a woman not for any feminist reason, but because the producers felt that with a heroine, audiences wouldn\u2019t be quite so confident the humans would win. Um, thanks?Story continues below advertisementAfter a few weeks at the Uptown, \u201cAlien\u201d moved to wider release in the D.C. area. You may have seen it at the Jerry Lewis Theatre in District Heights, the Springfield Mall Cinema 1, Loehmann\u2019s Plaza in Falls Church or the ABC Drive-In in Oxon Hill.AdvertisementNewsweek\u2019s Jack Kroll said \u201cAlien\u201d would \u201cscare the peanuts right out of your M&M\u2019s.\u201d He was right. Despite that, it has since become one of my favorite films. If I come across \u201cAlien\u201d while channel-grazing, I am drawn to it as inexorably as the Nostromo was drawn to LV-426.I sometimes wonder if the people who design today\u2019s spacecraft and space stations are fans, too. I hope so. And I hope these NASA rocket scientists see \u201cAlien\u201d as a cautionary tale, a reminder that you shouldn\u2019t have too many nooks and crannies in your spaceship, that even one evil robot is one too many, and that when a contaminated crew member is knocking at the airlock door, don\u2019t let him in.Twitter: @johnkelly\n For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. No one can hear you scream in space, but you could sure hear me at the Uptown theater. \u2018Alien\u2019 scared me silly 40 years ago. Today, my chest bursts with affection for it.",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | I once made fun of UFOs. Now the U.S. government is giving me second thoughts. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1319",
        "date": "2021-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/washington-government-ufo/2021/06/06/2658f87e-c575-11eb-93f5-ee9558eecf4b_story.html",
        "text": "Suddenly, all of Washington seems like a scene from a Hollywood film. No, the film isn\u2019t \u201cMr. Smith Goes to Washington.\u201d It isn\u2019t even \u201cNational Treasure.\u201d Space aliens may be responsible for the mood that currently grips the capital, but the movie isn\u2019t \u201cThe Day the Earth Stood Still,\u201d either.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe movie is \u201cGalaxy Quest,\u201d the 1999 \u201cStar Trek\u201d sendup. And the scene is the one where a disillusioned sci-fi fanboy, played by Justin Long, gets a call from TV spaceship captain Tim Allen, who tells Long it was all real after all. \u201cOh, my God, I knew it!\u201d exclaims Long. \u201cI knew it!\u201dYup. Our government now says extraterrestrials could be joyriding around our planet. UFOs could be real, except we\u2019re not supposed to call them UFOs. The new term is UAPs: unidentified aerial phenomena.Story continues below advertisementIt turns out the Pentagon had a secret office investigating reports of unexplained objects. Politicians have demanded answers and a report is due any day now. Military pilots \u2014 not known for flights of fancy \u2014 have been on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d describing their close encounters.AdvertisementFrankly, the cockpit videos have been pretty disappointing \u2014 the ghostly lozenges, saucers and spinning pyramids look more Pong than Xbox \u2014 but the top guns seemed pretty astounded.All of this puts me in an awkward spot. In 2010, I attended a news conference at the National Press Club where ufologists claimed that alien spaceships had been systematically hovering over our country\u2019s nuclear missile silos.Story continues below advertisementThe column I wrote about it fairly dripped with contempt. After every outlandish claim, I inserted a prissy, \u201cHmmm.\u201dAfter my column ran, a reader from Castro Valley, Calif., emailed me, writing: \u201cWhen the truth really comes out about how the military and others have lied to the American public for over the past 60 years about the existence of ETs, the members of the press, like yourself, will be asking themselves, \u2018Where were we all this time?\u2019\u2009\u201dAdvertisementHmmm.Rereading my column now kind of makes me cringe. A letter to the editor criticizing it ran under the headline \u201cThe UFOs deserve better.\u201dIt turns out that UFO people \u2014 the people who believe in UFOs \u2014 have really good memories. Two years after that first column, I wrote one about the so-called \u201cWashington Flap\u201d of 1952. That\u2019s when unidentified flying objects were picked up on Reagan National Airport\u2019s radar.Story continues below advertisementThe craft were supposedly spotted by Capt. S.C. \u201cCasey\u201d Pierman of Capital Air Flight 807, who told the airport\u2019s tower he saw six bright lights streaking across the sky, \u201clike falling stars without tails.\u201dF-94 jets were scrambled from Delaware\u2019s New Castle Air Force Base, but those pilots saw nothing.The following weekend, the radar blips were back. This time, an Air Force pilot did see them.Advertisement\u201cI tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet,\u201d pilot William Patterson told investigators. \u201cI was at my maximum speed but\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them.\u201dA headline on the front page of The Washington Post read: \u201c\u2009\u2018Saucer\u2019 Outran Jet, Pilot Says.\u201d The Air Force said that a temperature inversion \u2014 a layer of cold air trapped under a layer of warm air \u2014 had tricked the radar.Story continues below advertisementIn other words: no aliens. I wrote that asking whether there were any alien spacecraft over Washington in 1952 was like asking whether there were any witches in Salem, Mass., in 1692.This prompted another letter to the editor: \u201cThe Post continues to allow a columnist whose bias on unidentified flying objects has been revealed in previous articles to write on the subject.\u201dAdvertisementWell, today the official U.S. government position is basically: We\u2019re not saying these things are proof that aliens exist, but we\u2019re not not saying that, either.Should I be eating crow? Not necessarily. Recently in the New Republic, writer Jason Colavito profiled some of the leading boosters of UAP scholarship. Some of these folks hold some pretty weird beliefs, including that these craft aren\u2019t piloted by extraterrestrials (or Chinese drone operators), but by interdimensional demons.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s enough to make me long for the less-controversial topic of whether Bigfoot is real.Still, there was something prescient about that Castro Valley letter writer, who in 2010 predicted that the \u201cmembers of the press, like yourself, will be asking themselves, \u2018Where were we all this time?\u2019\u201dI should probably be more open-minded and less snarky. And I will never again underestimate the power of the UFO people, who live the motto of \u201cGalaxy Quest\u2019s\u201d fictitious space captain: \u201cNever give up, never surrender.\u201d\n\nTwitter: @johnkellyFor previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. Alien spacecraft? The Pentagon isn\u2019t saying that. But it\u2019s not not saying that, either. I once made fun of UFOs. Now the U.S. government is giving me second thoughts.",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | I once made fun of UFOs. Now the U.S. government is giving me second thoughts. (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1320",
        "date": "2021-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/washington-government-ufo/2021/06/06/2658f87e-c575-11eb-93f5-ee9558eecf4b_story.html",
        "text": "Suddenly, all of Washington seems like a scene from a Hollywood film. No, the film isn\u2019t \u201cMr. Smith Goes to Washington.\u201d It isn\u2019t even \u201cNational Treasure.\u201d Space aliens may be responsible for the mood that currently grips the capital, but the movie isn\u2019t \u201cThe Day the Earth Stood Still,\u201d either.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe movie is \u201cGalaxy Quest,\u201d the 1999 \u201cStar Trek\u201d sendup. And the scene is the one where a disillusioned sci-fi fanboy, played by Justin Long, gets a call from TV spaceship captain Tim Allen, who tells Long it was all real after all. \u201cOh, my God, I knew it!\u201d exclaims Long. \u201cI knew it!\u201dYup. Our government now says extraterrestrials could be joyriding around our planet. UFOs could be real, except we\u2019re not supposed to call them UFOs. The new term is UAPs: unidentified aerial phenomena.Story continues below advertisementIt turns out the Pentagon had a secret office investigating reports of unexplained objects. Politicians have demanded answers and a report is due any day now. Military pilots \u2014 not known for flights of fancy \u2014 have been on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d describing their close encounters.AdvertisementFrankly, the cockpit videos have been pretty disappointing \u2014 the ghostly lozenges, saucers and spinning pyramids look more Pong than Xbox \u2014 but the top guns seemed pretty astounded.All of this puts me in an awkward spot. In 2010, I attended a news conference at the National Press Club where ufologists claimed that alien spaceships had been systematically hovering over our country\u2019s nuclear missile silos.Story continues below advertisementThe column I wrote about it fairly dripped with contempt. After every outlandish claim, I inserted a prissy, \u201cHmmm.\u201dAfter my column ran, a reader from Castro Valley, Calif., emailed me, writing: \u201cWhen the truth really comes out about how the military and others have lied to the American public for over the past 60 years about the existence of ETs, the members of the press, like yourself, will be asking themselves, \u2018Where were we all this time?\u2019\u2009\u201dAdvertisementHmmm.Rereading my column now kind of makes me cringe. A letter to the editor criticizing it ran under the headline \u201cThe UFOs deserve better.\u201dIt turns out that UFO people \u2014 the people who believe in UFOs \u2014 have really good memories. Two years after that first column, I wrote one about the so-called \u201cWashington Flap\u201d of 1952. That\u2019s when unidentified flying objects were picked up on Reagan National Airport\u2019s radar.Story continues below advertisementThe craft were supposedly spotted by Capt. S.C. \u201cCasey\u201d Pierman of Capital Air Flight 807, who told the airport\u2019s tower he saw six bright lights streaking across the sky, \u201clike falling stars without tails.\u201dF-94 jets were scrambled from Delaware\u2019s New Castle Air Force Base, but those pilots saw nothing.The following weekend, the radar blips were back. This time, an Air Force pilot did see them.Advertisement\u201cI tried to make contact with the bogies below 1,000 feet,\u201d pilot William Patterson told investigators. \u201cI was at my maximum speed but\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them.\u201dA headline on the front page of The Washington Post read: \u201c\u2009\u2018Saucer\u2019 Outran Jet, Pilot Says.\u201d The Air Force said that a temperature inversion \u2014 a layer of cold air trapped under a layer of warm air \u2014 had tricked the radar.Story continues below advertisementIn other words: no aliens. I wrote that asking whether there were any alien spacecraft over Washington in 1952 was like asking whether there were any witches in Salem, Mass., in 1692.This prompted another letter to the editor: \u201cThe Post continues to allow a columnist whose bias on unidentified flying objects has been revealed in previous articles to write on the subject.\u201dAdvertisementWell, today the official U.S. government position is basically: We\u2019re not saying these things are proof that aliens exist, but we\u2019re not not saying that, either.Should I be eating crow? Not necessarily. Recently in the New Republic, writer Jason Colavito profiled some of the leading boosters of UAP scholarship. Some of these folks hold some pretty weird beliefs, including that these craft aren\u2019t piloted by extraterrestrials (or Chinese drone operators), but by interdimensional demons.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s enough to make me long for the less-controversial topic of whether Bigfoot is real.Still, there was something prescient about that Castro Valley letter writer, who in 2010 predicted that the \u201cmembers of the press, like yourself, will be asking themselves, \u2018Where were we all this time?\u2019\u201dI should probably be more open-minded and less snarky. And I will never again underestimate the power of the UFO people, who live the motto of \u201cGalaxy Quest\u2019s\u201d fictitious space captain: \u201cNever give up, never surrender.\u201d\n\nTwitter: @johnkellyFor previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. Alien spacecraft? The Pentagon isn\u2019t saying that. But it\u2019s not not saying that, either. I once made fun of UFOs. Now the U.S. government is giving me second thoughts.",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | In space, no one can hear you bark: We\u2019re teaching our dog about going into orbit (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1321",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/john-kelly-dog-archie/2021/07/18/4f3776b0-e66a-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html",
        "text": "Bezos. Branson. Musk.Archie. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHow did my dog \u2014 a 7-year-old Labrador retriever \u2014 find himself among the world\u2019s space barons? Well, it\u2019s a funny story.Like many geniuses, Archie is a bit odd in the head. No offense to Elon, Jeff and Sir Richard, but a lot of their behavior \u2014 their tics and weird enthusiasms \u2014 is excusable only in the super-rich. If the guy next to you on the bus screamed that everyone should invest in cryptocurrency, you\u2019d find another seat. If a normal person gave his kid a name that\u2019s a string of seemingly random capital letters, you\u2019d call child protective services. If your brother-in-law bought land in the desert and started clearing the rocks to make a \u201cspacecraft landing strip,\u201d you\u2019d stop inviting him to Thanksgiving. Story continues below advertisementBillionaires get a pass.Of course, Archie isn\u2019t a billionaire. But he is a disrupter. When we first adopted him, almost a year ago, he disrupted right on our living room floor. Thankfully, he hasn\u2019t done that again. That\u2019s because Archie is capable of learning. He learned that he should poop outside.AdvertisementAnd like most dogs, Archie is very attentive. Dogs pay attention to their owners\u2019 every move. They scrutinize our habits and routines. They know which cupboard holds the dog treats, which shoes we put on just before we walk them, what the word \u201cvet\u201d means and then \u2014 after we notice how stressed they get when we say \u201cvet\u201d \u2014 how \u201cV-E-T\u201d means the same thing as \u201cvet.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDogs are furry sponges.Unfortunately, Archie is a furry, neurotic sponge. He\u2019s a rescue dog who was spirited out of some apparently unpleasant situation in the South. He suffers from separation anxiety. Archie is very sweet, but the minute we leave him alone, he gets distressed: racing around the house, whimpering, barking and standing on the couch so he can look out the living room window like a ship captain\u2019s bride awaiting her husband\u2019s return.AdvertisementWe put our name down for an appointment with a veterinarian who specializes in calming neurotic dogs, but she\u2019s so backed up it may be months before we get Archie on the couch, so to speak. In the meantime, we\u2019re trying a few of our own methods to calm him. We halfheartedly tried a crate but he cried even more. We filled a hollow rubber toy \u2014 a kong \u2014 with peanut butter and treats but he ignored it and we\u2019d return to find it untouched.Story continues below advertisementOnly one thing seems to work. Its success depends on subterfuge.My Lovely Wife is the alpha in our house. Archie glommed onto her from the start. He likes me but he really likes Ruth. So what we do is this: When we go out, we walk from the living room into the study and close that door behind us. Then Ruth pulls up a YouTube video on her computer of herself speaking over Zoom to college students in the Netherlands. It\u2019s a lecture that before the pandemic she would have delivered in person. She sets the video to loop itself repeatedly and then we quietly go out the study door that leads to the backyard. We sneak around to the car, get in and drive away.AdvertisementIt seems to be working.Story continues below advertisementWe started with quick trips to the store and back, but we\u2019ve been able to leave Archie for up to four hours. When we return \u2014 go through the back door, turn off the video, enter the living room via the study \u2014 he\u2019s usually curled up on the floor. He\u2019s not all sweaty and agitated, like he is when he thinks we\u2019re gone. Archie hears his master\u2019s voice and chills.But here\u2019s the thing: Ruth is a lawyer who works in the satellite industry. She\u2019s involved with things like orbits, spectrum rights and space debris. And that\u2019s what she talks about in that lecture: the pros and cons of a low-earth orbit vs. a geosynchronous one, the Ku frequency band vs. the Ka band, the international laws that regulate human-made objects in space.Archie has heard Ruth\u2019s lecture over and over and over again. Surely it\u2019s all been penetrating that canine cranium of his. It\u2019s only a matter of time before Archie makes his move, sending up his own constellation of bone-shaped satellites or launching a spaceship to sniff out Uranus, every dog\u2019s favorite planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs Archie said to us the other day: \u201cYou know, the first animal in space was a dog. How you Laika that?\u201dFur goodness sakeWhat wacko accommodations have you made for your pet? Have you tried to outsmart your dog or trick your cat? Send the details \u2014 with \u201cPet Smart\u201d in the subject line \u2014 to me at john.kelly@washpost.com.\n\nTwitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. When we leave the house, Archie the yellow Labrador listens to an arcane YouTube video. In space, no one can hear you bark: We\u2019re teaching our dog about going into orbit",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | In space, no one can hear you bark: We\u2019re teaching our dog about going into orbit (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1322",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/john-kelly-dog-archie/2021/07/18/4f3776b0-e66a-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html",
        "text": "Bezos. Branson. Musk.Archie. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHow did my dog \u2014 a 7-year-old Labrador retriever \u2014 find himself among the world\u2019s space barons? Well, it\u2019s a funny story.Like many geniuses, Archie is a bit odd in the head. No offense to Elon, Jeff and Sir Richard, but a lot of their behavior \u2014 their tics and weird enthusiasms \u2014 is excusable only in the super-rich. If the guy next to you on the bus screamed that everyone should invest in cryptocurrency, you\u2019d find another seat. If a normal person gave his kid a name that\u2019s a string of seemingly random capital letters, you\u2019d call child protective services. If your brother-in-law bought land in the desert and started clearing the rocks to make a \u201cspacecraft landing strip,\u201d you\u2019d stop inviting him to Thanksgiving. Story continues below advertisementBillionaires get a pass.Of course, Archie isn\u2019t a billionaire. But he is a disrupter. When we first adopted him, almost a year ago, he disrupted right on our living room floor. Thankfully, he hasn\u2019t done that again. That\u2019s because Archie is capable of learning. He learned that he should poop outside.AdvertisementAnd like most dogs, Archie is very attentive. Dogs pay attention to their owners\u2019 every move. They scrutinize our habits and routines. They know which cupboard holds the dog treats, which shoes we put on just before we walk them, what the word \u201cvet\u201d means and then \u2014 after we notice how stressed they get when we say \u201cvet\u201d \u2014 how \u201cV-E-T\u201d means the same thing as \u201cvet.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDogs are furry sponges.Unfortunately, Archie is a furry, neurotic sponge. He\u2019s a rescue dog who was spirited out of some apparently unpleasant situation in the South. He suffers from separation anxiety. Archie is very sweet, but the minute we leave him alone, he gets distressed: racing around the house, whimpering, barking and standing on the couch so he can look out the living room window like a ship captain\u2019s bride awaiting her husband\u2019s return.AdvertisementWe put our name down for an appointment with a veterinarian who specializes in calming neurotic dogs, but she\u2019s so backed up it may be months before we get Archie on the couch, so to speak. In the meantime, we\u2019re trying a few of our own methods to calm him. We halfheartedly tried a crate but he cried even more. We filled a hollow rubber toy \u2014 a kong \u2014 with peanut butter and treats but he ignored it and we\u2019d return to find it untouched.Story continues below advertisementOnly one thing seems to work. Its success depends on subterfuge.My Lovely Wife is the alpha in our house. Archie glommed onto her from the start. He likes me but he really likes Ruth. So what we do is this: When we go out, we walk from the living room into the study and close that door behind us. Then Ruth pulls up a YouTube video on her computer of herself speaking over Zoom to college students in the Netherlands. It\u2019s a lecture that before the pandemic she would have delivered in person. She sets the video to loop itself repeatedly and then we quietly go out the study door that leads to the backyard. We sneak around to the car, get in and drive away.AdvertisementIt seems to be working.Story continues below advertisementWe started with quick trips to the store and back, but we\u2019ve been able to leave Archie for up to four hours. When we return \u2014 go through the back door, turn off the video, enter the living room via the study \u2014 he\u2019s usually curled up on the floor. He\u2019s not all sweaty and agitated, like he is when he thinks we\u2019re gone. Archie hears his master\u2019s voice and chills.But here\u2019s the thing: Ruth is a lawyer who works in the satellite industry. She\u2019s involved with things like orbits, spectrum rights and space debris. And that\u2019s what she talks about in that lecture: the pros and cons of a low-earth orbit vs. a geosynchronous one, the Ku frequency band vs. the Ka band, the international laws that regulate human-made objects in space.Archie has heard Ruth\u2019s lecture over and over and over again. Surely it\u2019s all been penetrating that canine cranium of his. It\u2019s only a matter of time before Archie makes his move, sending up his own constellation of bone-shaped satellites or launching a spaceship to sniff out Uranus, every dog\u2019s favorite planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs Archie said to us the other day: \u201cYou know, the first animal in space was a dog. How you Laika that?\u201dFur goodness sakeWhat wacko accommodations have you made for your pet? Have you tried to outsmart your dog or trick your cat? Send the details \u2014 with \u201cPet Smart\u201d in the subject line \u2014 to me at john.kelly@washpost.com.\n\nTwitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. When we leave the house, Archie the yellow Labrador listens to an arcane YouTube video. In space, no one can hear you bark: We\u2019re teaching our dog about going into orbit",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "D.C., Northern Virginia begin gradual reopening, but some businesses remain closed; coronavirus infects 100,000 in region (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1323",
        "date": "2020-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/05/29/coronavirus-dc-maryland-virginia-live-updates/",
        "text": "The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia was 102,059 on Friday, with 50,988 cases in Maryland, 42,533 in Virginia and 8,538 in the District. The number of virus-related deaths reached 2,466 in Maryland, 1,358 in Virginia and 460 in the District, for a total of 4,284 fatalities. Here are some of the most significant recent developments as the region responds to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19:\u2022 The District and Northern Virginia are taking steps to reopen today, gradually loosening stay-at-home rules that have been in place because of the pandemic, as business owners are stocking up on hand sanitizer and putting up signs requiring masks.\u2022 On Friday, 85 days after the novel coronavirus appeared in the Washington region, the number of known infections in D.C., Maryland and Virginia surpassed 100,000. That means six in every 1,000 residents have tested positive for the virus. At least 13,000 patients have been hospitalized, according to state data, and 4,239 have died.\u2022 Starting today, all passengers and visitors will be required to wear face coverings at Reagan National and Dulles International airports. Children under the age of 10 and people who have medical conditions that prevent them from wearing face coverings will be exempted from the requirement, airport officials said.\u2022 Maryland\u2019s two largest D.C. suburbs will begin to lift shutdown restrictions Monday, the final pieces of a tentative reopening for the Washington area. Both Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) and Prince George\u2019s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D) said declining trends in hospitalizations for the coronavirus would allow them to ease the closure of nonessential businesses Monday.When will D.C. reopen? | What is open in Virginia? | What is open in Maryland? | Known coronavirus cases in the region | How to get testedThe live blog is closed Return to menuBy Samantha Schmidt7:27 p.m.Link copiedLinkPlease read The Post\u2019s continuing coverage here.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWizards cautiously begin voluntary player workouts as Washington reopensReturn to menuBy Candace Buckner7:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Washington Wizards reopened their practice facility and began voluntary player workouts on Friday, returning to a semblance of normal for the first time since the NBA shut down more than two months ago.The Wizards became one of the last teams in the league to return to their practice facility, located in Southeast D.C., as the organization waited on the city to begin Phase 1 of reopening. The District began its reopening at 12:01 a.m. Friday, as the D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser lifted some restrictions. However, contact sports remain banned on city fields.League rules prohibit players from participating in scrimmages and coming into contact with one another during workouts. Workouts on Friday would have consisted of individual players either getting up shots on the court \u2014 with a team staffer wearing a mask and gloves rebounding the ball \u2014 or using the weight room with strict physical distancing and hygiene protocols in place.Late Friday afternoon, Isaac Bonga, Anzejs Pasecniks and Jerome Robinson were spotted entering the facility for voluntary workouts, and underwent a thorough routine before even touching a basketball.According to a video about safety protocols that was released by the team, players who want to work out are required to use an ear thermometer, provided by the team, at their residence to check and report their temperatures to the athletic trainer before arriving to the practice facility. Once they have pulled into the parking lot, players must wait in their car before getting summoned inside by a trainer. The team recommends that players leave their phone, along with their keys and hat, inside the car before entering the facility.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDistrict will close some public roads to through traffic, allow \u2018streateries\u2019 to help restauranteurs Return to menuBy Michael Laris6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkD.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said Friday the city will allow battered restaurants to space out their tables in public streets, in parking spaces and on sidewalks after a quick application, creating \u201cstreateries.\u201dBowser said the city will also close some city streets to through traffic to make walking and biking safer. D.C. lawmakers who had called for such action applauded the move. The mayor\u2019s ReOpen DC advisory group earlier this month called for similar efforts, including \u201cdiversifying our streets.\u201dJeff Marootian, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation, said the city will put up signs and barricades creating \u201cslow streets\u201d in communities across the city. Through traffic will be prohibited, and the speed limit will be 15 miles per hour, even below the new, citywide default speed limit of 20 miles per hour officials also announced Friday.Marootian said officials are still determining how many miles will be covered. The first stretches of road will be disclosed next week.\u201cWe intend for this to be a robust network,\u201d built over several months, he said.D.C. lawmakers said they are still pushing legislation to create a broader network of dedicated, protected lanes for commuting by bike given disruptions to transit caused by the virus.Bowser said the plan for more restaurant seating in public places will be implemented swiftly. Officials said restaurateurs\u2019 applications to the city should take just days.The mayor said the changes will help the District \u201creimagine our roadways,\u201d echoing similar moves in cities across the country.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA muted happy hour as D.C. patios and rooftops reopen Return to menuBy Jessica Contrera, Justin Jouvenal and Perry Stein6:23 p.m.Link copiedLinkHappy hour arrived at Whiskey Charlie on the Wharf, and the only person admiring the stunning rooftop view was the bartender.Kyle Kauffman, 47, straightened the glasses of sliced lemons and alcohol-soaked cherries, waiting for customers.\u201cOn a day like today, they should have been here already,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get the word out that we are open.\u201dKauffman had been jazzed to be behind the bar again. He spent the afternoon perfecting new custom cocktails, knowing he would have to serve them in plastic disposable cups for safety.He has been thinking of himself as lucky, to work at a place with plenty of outdoor space to welcome customers back. Now he couldn\u2019t help but wonder if, without many tips, he would be making even less than he did on unemployment.At 5:15 p.m., a woman in a summery blue dress arrived on the rooftop.\u201cHey there!\u201d Kauffman asked. \u201cFirst one back!\u201dHe served her a plastic cup of sauvignon blanc.In Adams Morgan, the Lauriol Plaza restaurant had converted its parking lot into an additional patio, setting up about three dozen tables to make room for more diners.Dance music thumped from a tiki bar, and the doors of jumbo slice joints had thrown open their doors for the hungry and tipsy to get floppy takeaway pizza. But there was something missing from one of D.C.\u2019s most popular spots for happy hour: the drinkers.There were just a smattering of parties on the 18th Street strip, a far cry from the throngs of revelers that spilled from its sidewalks on a typical Friday night before the pandemic.One couple, who said they had been in careful isolation during the stay-at-home order, had ventured out to the front patio of Pop\u2019s Sea Bar. They had reserved the single table there for a two-hour block from 4 to 6 p.m. and were drinking white wine and Pabst.\u201cI came out to support a local business and support people who are friends of mine,\u201d the man said. \u201cWe live in the neighborhood. Maybe by going out and setting a precedent of keeping it safe, others will do the same.\u201dThey felt reassured that Pop\u2019s had an isolated outdoor table, disposable menus and was participating in contact tracing. They had to sign a release, saying they understood the bar\u2019s rules.What was it like to venture out again?\u201cIt\u2019s pretty weird,\u201d the man said. \u201cI\u2019m nervous. I\u2019m anxious.\u201dHe noted that walkers had edged away from the couple as they passed on the sidewalk. Just then, a woman passing by paused and exclaimed: \u201cIt\u2019s so nice to see people drinking wine!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirginia hospitals respond to gradual reopening with a warningReturn to menuBy Jenna Portnoy4:42 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe phased reopening will do nothing to change policies and procedures in place at Virginia Hospital Center in Alexandria, chief medical officer Jeff DiLisi said Friday afternoon. He said around the country even a gradual relaxing of stay-at-home orders has resulted in a surge of cases.\u201cWhat we\u2019re going to be watching is maybe two to three weeks from now what happens to our admissions in the hospital and who we see coming into the ER,\u201d he said.People should not use their newfound freedom to dine outdoors at a restaurant or to get a haircut as permission to take risks, DiLisi said.\u201cThe policies that are laid out for Phase 1, if people take them seriously, wearing masks and practicing social distancing, hopefully we can go to Phase 2,\u201d he said. Otherwise, \u201cwe could certainly see a bump up.\u201d Virginia Hospital Center treated as many as 100 coronavirus patients at once at the peak of infection in late April to early May, he said.Paul Skolnik, an infectious-disease physician and chair of medicine for Carilion Clinic, which operates Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, said like many parts of the country that have reported relatively few cases, there\u2019s significant resistance to preventive measures among some in Southwest Virginia.\u201cThere are many license plates in Southwest Virginia that have the logo, \u2018Don\u2019t Tread on Me,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a particularly helpful viewpoint when we\u2019re talking about use of masks and social distancing.\u201d Some residents have incorrectly translated the governor\u2019s reopening guidelines to mean that hand hygiene and other measures are less important, Skolnik said.\u201cIn fact, they\u2019re even more important than they were before so we can control any risk of a second wave or a surge especially in Southwest Virginia where we\u2019ve been able to manage things so we haven\u2019t had as many cases,\u201d he said.The Roanoke hospital was treating nine coronavirus-positive patients on Friday, he said.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPotomac Mills remains a ghost town mall as stores reopenReturn to menuBy Petula Dvorak4:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe excitement of reopening fizzled a bit once shoppers made it inside the ghost town mall at Potomac Mills.\u201cHello, beautiful!\u201d Mimi said to each longhair woman who passed by her kiosk, Straight Ahead. She wanted to straighten their hair with her line of hair tools. All day, she had no takers.\u201cNo one. Not one,\u201d she said, rolling her eyes.Her boss, Giovanni, who said he could not give out their last names, was optimistic.\u201cPeople need to feel safe,\u201d he said. \u201cThey will. Maybe a little later.\u201d The Zen Relax massage kiosk had only two customers all day.\u201cWe have sanitizer, we have masks, we are careful,\u201d said frustrated masseur Kevin Yan. \u201cBut not too many people are ready to be touched.\u201d Most of the big-name stores were closed. Vans and Vera Bradley, Tommy Bahama and Bloomingdale\u2019s, Lego and Lacoste were dark.About half of the food court stands were open, but chairs and tables were stacked and roped off. To-go was the only option.The spaceship and racecar rides were cocooned in plastic wrap. The playground was closed.\u201cIt\u2019s a little depressing. All the stores I like aren\u2019t open,\u201d said Ana Prada, who came with her family from Stafford for a shopping day.\u201cYou can\u2019t try anything on, the fitting rooms are closed,\u201d she said. \u201cSo you have to go home and try it on, then return it if it doesn\u2019t fit. And that doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u201d Her daughter Kylah Prada was supposed to be at school for her last day as a sophomore. The mall wasn\u2019t as uplifting as she had hoped it would be, but she was happy to be out of the house. Plus, she found some cute tops at Forever 21.\u201cIt\u2019s weird,\u201d the 15-year-old said. \u201cBut this makes it feel like it\u2019s coming back, slowly.\u201d The stores that opened seemed to be the ones that draw Gen Z. And they were popping.\u201cWe\u2019ve been so busy from the moment we opened,\u201d said a cashier at Against All Odds, the place with cropped Champion hoodies, Tommy Hilfiger fanny packs and Superdry Windbreakers.Lashay Williams and her crew were loving the fresh summer T-shirts they had.\u201cI\u2019m so happy to be out,\u201d said Williams, 24, who usually works stadium security and sports events in the District, where she lives.She\u2019s been cooped up and needed to get to some shoe stores.\u201cIt\u2019s a start,\u201d she said. \u201cI just put in for a new job. It feels like everything is restarting.\u201d AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementMaryland Democrats press Hogan on testing transparency Return to menuBy Erin Cox3:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Democrats in Maryland\u2019s congressional delegation have asked Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to publicize a detailed testing plan required by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the latest in a wave of pressure on the governor to explain the state\u2019s response to the pandemic.The CDC plan is supposed to outline Maryland\u2019s strategy for deploying $205 million in federal cash designated to enhance testing. Maryland\u2019s congressional leaders want the governor to focus on black, Latino and other minority communities disproportionately affected by the virus.\u201cWe urge you to outline how you will target testing resources to the hardest hit communities in Maryland, particularly communities of color,\u201d the nine Democrats in the state\u2019s 10-member delegation wrote to Hogan on Friday. \u201c\u2026 We urge you to make your plan submission public so Marylanders have a full understanding of the State\u2019s testing goals and how these federal resources will be put to use.\u201dHogan spokesman Michael Ricci said the administration\u2019s initial report will \u201creflect our long-term testing strategy and note how we have hit our short-term goal of 10,000 tests per day, broadened criteria to include those who are asymptomatic, expanded community-based testing throughout the state, announced agreements with CVS and Walmart to conduct testing on-site, authorized the state\u2019s nearly 1,200 pharmacies to administer tests, and directly allocated test kits to local jurisdictions \u2014 all of which has helped bring the state\u2019s positivity rate down to 12.0 percent.\u201dRicci said a full report is not due until June 15. He did not say whether the administration would release either report to the public.Friday\u2019s letter, coordinated by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D), comes as Democrats across the state have pressured Hogan and his administration to reveal more details about why the 500,000 test kits he purchased from South Korea have not been widely deployed.Last week, the congressmen wrote Hogan a separate letter asking him to develop a detailed plan to help minority communities the same way he developed plans to treat hot spots in nursing homes and poultry plants. As of Friday, the letter had not been answered.Democrats who lead the Maryland General Assembly have criticized the governor for not answering questions about the state\u2019s response to the crisis. On Wednesday, health department officials for the fifth consecutive week canceled an appearance before a committee of state lawmakers.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBreweries, wineries now allowed to open in Maryland for outdoor serviceReturn to menuBy Erin Cox3:07 p.m.Link copiedLinkGov. Larry Hogan (R) on Friday issued an executive order allowing breweries, wineries and distilleries in Maryland to serve patrons outdoors.The order also allows them to ship craft beer, wine or alcohol directly to consumers, which is not otherwise allowed under Maryland\u2019s alcohol laws. It follows the eased restrictions, effective at 5 p.m. Friday, that already permitted bars and restaurants to do outdoor dining.Hogan also renewed a separate executive order that bars cellphone, cable, Internet and utility companies from shutting off service or charging late fees. That moratorium remains in effect until July 1.Among the first Maryland wineries to reopen was Big Cork Vineyards, in Washington County. The vineyard has adapted in several ways during the pandemic, offering virtual wine tastings as well as delivery and pickup. Now it has opened its outdoor patio seating for customers to pick up a bottle of wine and enjoy it outside.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs D.C. reopens, local Masonic lodge hands out free lunchesReturn to menuBy Justin Wm. Moyer3:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkOutside the east entrance of the U Street Metro station Friday afternoon, French Bryant, leader of a nearby D.C. Masonic lodge, stood next to a table overflowing with bagged lunches as the Crush Funk Brass Band played \u201cWhen the Saints Go Marching In.\u201dAs many D.C. businesses reopen, Bryant and his lodge brethren were there to hand out free sandwiches and cookies to anyone who wanted one \u2014 no questions asked. Just as the coronavirus has hampered the District\u2019s bars and eateries, it has held back the work of the men of Charles Datcher Lodge No. 15.\u201cThey say everything\u2019s secret \u2014 you can Google \u2018Masonry\u2019 and everything comes up,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cReally what we\u2019re here to do is give back to the community.\u201dBryant, who works on equal-opportunity complaints for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the lodge was unsure how to safely do outreach work as the pandemic unfolded. The 33-year-old lives in Southern Maryland with his wife and was under a stay-at-home order \u2014 the lodge members couldn\u2019t gather at all, let alone gather to distribute needed supplies at a safe distance.Not all the lunches were distributed, but French said the remainder would be dropped off at a local homeless shelter. Crush Funk, which Bryant met while playing trumpet in a band at Bowie State University, inspired some street-corner dancing as well.\u201cWhen people come by and they see young guys doing good things, it helps them to see that there are still good people out there,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cWe\u2019re here to help.\u201dMetro reports no significant uptick in ridersReturn to menuBy Justin George2:31 p.m.Link copiedLinkMetro has not seen a noticeable increase in its ridership, officials said early Friday afternoon. Passengers on both bus and rail have been mostly made up of commuters who cannot work from home. The easing of business restrictions in the District and Northern Virginia hasn\u2019t impacted buses or rail cars, the public transit agency said.\u201cIt\u2019s been extremely light, as it has been since mid-March,\u201d Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said. \u201cAnd this morning\u2019s ridership is very much in line with what we\u2019ve seen in recent weeks.\u201dAs of noon, Stessel said, Metrorail had logged 17,000 passenger trips, which is slightly up compared to last Friday but down compared to the same day two weeks ago.Ridership has shown a slight uptick with better weather, transit officials said, but it has not been significant enough to prompt Metro to run more buses or trains.Metro\u2019s ridership this week remained at historic lows \u2014 down at least 90 percent from pre-pandemic levels on rail and around 70 percent on Metrobus. The levels have been consistent since mid-March, when the transit agency cut back service and closed down several stations to fight the spread of the coronavirus.In Old Town Alexandria, King Street stirs to life Return to menuBy Peter Jamison2:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkMai Ngo, owner of King Street Souvenirs, placed a few parameters on her first dining experience at an Old Town Alexandria restaurant in months.She didn\u2019t want to fall asleep after eating or get drunk.Beyond that, Ngo wanted to order a somewhat extravagant, celebratory meal. So when she crossed the street shortly before noon Friday to occupy one of the newly set up tables outside the Warehouse, she ordered crawfish linguine. With bread and a salad. And iced tea, much as she would have liked something more festive \u2014 after all, she was returning to work at her souvenir business.\u201cIt feels great,\u201d she said as she worked her way through the salad. \u201cWe all have to be careful,\u201d she added. \u201cYou can stay home if you want. But we have a choice to live life.\u201dAround her, King Street was stirring to life after months of relative inactivity. It was muggy, and a hazy late-morning sun beat down on the restaurant workers measuring the distance between outdoor tables and shoppers tentatively peeking into establishments where they could finally browse the wares again in person. Crowds were not yet out in force, but the shift in Old Town\u2019s atmosphere was unmistakable.Around the corner from where Ngo was eating, Kathy Schumacher was browsing the sale racks \u2014 all clearance shoes available for $35 a pair \u2014 at Comfort One Shoes. Cradling a box of Ecco sandals, Schumacher said it was time for Virginia\u2019s economy to reopen.\u201cOur country was founded on risk,\u201d she said, and to get through the coronavirus pandemic, \u201cwe may need some of that spirit.\u201dRisks were what Jesse Maas was busy trying to avoid down the street. The director of operations at Fish Market and neighboring Pop\u2019s Ice Cream oversaw his staff as they set up outdoor tables at least six feet apart, with extra space around the entrances to both establishments to allow people to come and go for takeout without getting too close to dine-in customers.The block of King between Union and Lee streets had been blocked to car traffic so restaurants could expand their outdoor seating into the roadway. A group of city workers walked by, spray-painting the outer boundaries of where Fish Market and other eateries could set up tables.\u201cMy honest opinion \u2014 I'll probably get in trouble for saying this \u2014 I would open 100 percent,\u201d Maas said, allowing customers to dine indoors and out. \u201cAnd if you feel afraid, or you feel like you\u2019re in danger, you have the right to stay home.\u201dMaas, who has three children, said he was furloughed in the early days of the quarantine. Business at Fish Market and Pop\u2019s plummeted. He said he felt restaurants had been unfairly singled out for closure, and that they were just as safe for the public as grocery stores and other businesses that had been deemed essential and allowed to continue operating.\u201cYou walk into your local grocery store, you\u2019ve got people grabbing avocados to see if they\u2019re ripe. I think at restaurants, you\u2019re just as safe,\u201d Maas said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to come off as this guy who doesn\u2019t care about the coronavirus, because I very much do. But we\u2019re just trying to survive.\u201dReopened D.C. souvenir shop awaits tourists yet to comeReturn to menuBy Justin George2:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Friday morning, Gi H. Chung rode the McPherson Square Metro station escalator underground, walked over to the Metro Variety souvenir shop that greets passengers just before the turnstiles, unlocked the door and flipped on the neon \u201cOPEN\u201d sign for the first time since March 15.He put out a box of disposable gloves and free surgical masks to both entice customers and to protect his business and personal health. Then he waited. He paced around the store and made sure his biggest seller \u2014 T-shirts with the U.S. seal \u2014 stayed sharply folded. He waited some more. He sat down and began reading a newspaper.But inside, he said, he was worried. Chung, 55, survived the past few months on savings, but he said he will soon have trouble if his store doesn\u2019t start making up for lost business.\u201cRent is big money,\u201d he said. \u201cIf customers don\u2019t come, we don\u2019t have business. If we don\u2019t have business, we can\u2019t make rent.\u201dThe past 2\u00bd months were the first time he recalls closing his seven-day-a-week tchotchke store, which he has run in various iterations at different D.C. locations for 35 years. Inside his presidential superstore, the deeply partisan divide of today collides, clashes and coexists in a tiny space. Bobbleheads for presidents Trump and Obama sit together near coffee mugs with Hillary Clinton figurines standing inside. A kiosk holds scores of $2.99 magnets of the American Flag or bald eagle, and miniature Liberty Bells and Trump troll dolls line nearby shelves.About seven years ago, Trump pushed Chung out of his store at the Old Post Office Pavilion at 1100 Pennsylvania NW when the then-New York magnate redeveloped the site into the Trump International Hotel. Now, with his store resituated at McPherson Square, Chung once again must make room for Trump, whose memorabilia takes up a good percentage of his store.Chung\u2019s souvenir business relies on tourists, and he said he doesn\u2019t know when they will return. He keeps alert for when the Smithsonian museums will reopen, which he said is a true barometer for recovery and a harbinger for District tourism.\u201cWhen is back up? When is normal? No one knows,\u201d he said. \u201cMy business is the souvenir business. Maybe it will pick up. Maybe it will pick up next year.\u201dAs the day wore on with no customers, Chung walked outside his store to stretch. He said he typically walks between two and three hours a day to work off the stress.Then he walked back in, past the 50-percent-off clearance sandwich board sign at the door and past the \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d ball cap staring out the storefront window.University System of Maryland expects some in-person teaching this fall Return to menuBy Nick Anderson1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkMaryland\u2019s public universities are moving toward at least some in-person teaching in the fall term after a spring disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.The University System of Maryland, which oversees 15 universities and higher education centers, said Friday that campus-restart plans will vary from school to school. The flagship University of Maryland at College Park, which has about 41,000 students, has not yet disclosed how it will operate in the fall.But the system\u2019s guidance, outlined in a four-page statement, clearly signaled that higher education leaders anticipate a mix of teaching and learning methods.Schools \u201cwill welcome students back to campus this fall in a hybrid fashion, combining at least some on-campus, in-person instruction with remote learning,\u201d the system said. Schools expect to announce plans over the next two weeks.Most students at residential universities will begin in mid- to late August, the system said. Some schools will halt in-person instruction by Thanksgiving, but others may continue to hold face-to-face classes for the entire term. Still to be determined are the mix of \u201cresidential students\u201d and \u201cremote students\u201d at each school, as well as plans for athletics.The system serves about 172,000 students statewide, from Frostburg State University in the west to the University Maryland-Eastern Shore.Morgan State University in Baltimore and St. Mary\u2019s College of Maryland, both public, are not part of the system.Colleges and universities nationwide were forced to switch to remote instruction in March as the virus crisis intensified. Students stuck at home since then are growing anxious to know whether they will be allowed to return to campus. Pawnshop expects rush of business at start of next month Return to menuBy Justin Wm. Moyer1:43 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt Crown Pawnbrokers on 14th Street NW, Michael Crown stood wearing a face mask and latex gloves in the entryway of the business his great-grandfather founded as a tailor shop in the 1930s. The store had survived the 1968 riots following the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination. After closing at the beginning of the pandemic, it is trying to survive social distancing, with a cone and \u201cX\u201d marks on the sidewalk indicating where customers should stand.\u201cNot a lot of people are working right now,\u201d Crown said. \u201cWe\u2019re still here giving out loans for people in need.\u201dThough the shop was empty Friday and had been hurt by the emptying out of downtown D.C., Crown said business was steady after the weathered a run on video game systems during the shutdown. A pawnshop is, after all, an essential financial institution. Crown offers four-month loans at 5 percent interest per month, with customers providing items such as jewelry or saxophones as collateral.Those he serves need cash for transportation, \u201cor just food,\u201d he said \u2014 many loans are for less than $100. He expected a rush on the first of the month, when people buy back the items they pawned in previous weeks to get by.\u201cIf you come by Monday at 9 a.m., there will be a line,\u201d Crown said. \u201cEveryone will be receiving their checks.\u201dCrown wasn\u2019t sure what would happen next. He thought the city had opened too quickly amid a not-that-dramatic drop in coronavirus cases and said he has done all he can to make the store safe \u2014 installing plexiglass and having employees wear face shields. Even if the city moves past its Phase 1 reopening, he plans to keep the protections in place.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to get it back to normal again,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re here for the long run. Obviously.\u201d See the latest coronavirus news and developments Friday in the Washington region. D.C., Northern Virginia begin gradual reopening, but some businesses remain closed; coronavirus infects 100,000 in region",
        "author": "Samantha Schmidt"
    },
    {
        "title": "D.C., Northern Virginia begin gradual reopening, but some businesses remain closed; coronavirus infects 100,000 in region (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1324",
        "date": "2020-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/05/29/coronavirus-dc-maryland-virginia-live-updates/",
        "text": "The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia was 102,059 on Friday, with 50,988 cases in Maryland, 42,533 in Virginia and 8,538 in the District. The number of virus-related deaths reached 2,466 in Maryland, 1,358 in Virginia and 460 in the District, for a total of 4,284 fatalities. Here are some of the most significant recent developments as the region responds to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19:\u2022 The District and Northern Virginia are taking steps to reopen today, gradually loosening stay-at-home rules that have been in place because of the pandemic, as business owners are stocking up on hand sanitizer and putting up signs requiring masks.\u2022 On Friday, 85 days after the novel coronavirus appeared in the Washington region, the number of known infections in D.C., Maryland and Virginia surpassed 100,000. That means six in every 1,000 residents have tested positive for the virus. At least 13,000 patients have been hospitalized, according to state data, and 4,239 have died.\u2022 Starting today, all passengers and visitors will be required to wear face coverings at Reagan National and Dulles International airports. Children under the age of 10 and people who have medical conditions that prevent them from wearing face coverings will be exempted from the requirement, airport officials said.\u2022 Maryland\u2019s two largest D.C. suburbs will begin to lift shutdown restrictions Monday, the final pieces of a tentative reopening for the Washington area. Both Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) and Prince George\u2019s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D) said declining trends in hospitalizations for the coronavirus would allow them to ease the closure of nonessential businesses Monday.When will D.C. reopen? | What is open in Virginia? | What is open in Maryland? | Known coronavirus cases in the region | How to get testedThe live blog is closed Return to menuBy Samantha Schmidt7:27 p.m.Link copiedLinkPlease read The Post\u2019s continuing coverage here.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWizards cautiously begin voluntary player workouts as Washington reopensReturn to menuBy Candace Buckner7:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Washington Wizards reopened their practice facility and began voluntary player workouts on Friday, returning to a semblance of normal for the first time since the NBA shut down more than two months ago.The Wizards became one of the last teams in the league to return to their practice facility, located in Southeast D.C., as the organization waited on the city to begin Phase 1 of reopening. The District began its reopening at 12:01 a.m. Friday, as the D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser lifted some restrictions. However, contact sports remain banned on city fields.League rules prohibit players from participating in scrimmages and coming into contact with one another during workouts. Workouts on Friday would have consisted of individual players either getting up shots on the court \u2014 with a team staffer wearing a mask and gloves rebounding the ball \u2014 or using the weight room with strict physical distancing and hygiene protocols in place.Late Friday afternoon, Isaac Bonga, Anzejs Pasecniks and Jerome Robinson were spotted entering the facility for voluntary workouts, and underwent a thorough routine before even touching a basketball.According to a video about safety protocols that was released by the team, players who want to work out are required to use an ear thermometer, provided by the team, at their residence to check and report their temperatures to the athletic trainer before arriving to the practice facility. Once they have pulled into the parking lot, players must wait in their car before getting summoned inside by a trainer. The team recommends that players leave their phone, along with their keys and hat, inside the car before entering the facility.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDistrict will close some public roads to through traffic, allow \u2018streateries\u2019 to help restauranteurs Return to menuBy Michael Laris6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkD.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said Friday the city will allow battered restaurants to space out their tables in public streets, in parking spaces and on sidewalks after a quick application, creating \u201cstreateries.\u201dBowser said the city will also close some city streets to through traffic to make walking and biking safer. D.C. lawmakers who had called for such action applauded the move. The mayor\u2019s ReOpen DC advisory group earlier this month called for similar efforts, including \u201cdiversifying our streets.\u201dJeff Marootian, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation, said the city will put up signs and barricades creating \u201cslow streets\u201d in communities across the city. Through traffic will be prohibited, and the speed limit will be 15 miles per hour, even below the new, citywide default speed limit of 20 miles per hour officials also announced Friday.Marootian said officials are still determining how many miles will be covered. The first stretches of road will be disclosed next week.\u201cWe intend for this to be a robust network,\u201d built over several months, he said.D.C. lawmakers said they are still pushing legislation to create a broader network of dedicated, protected lanes for commuting by bike given disruptions to transit caused by the virus.Bowser said the plan for more restaurant seating in public places will be implemented swiftly. Officials said restaurateurs\u2019 applications to the city should take just days.The mayor said the changes will help the District \u201creimagine our roadways,\u201d echoing similar moves in cities across the country.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA muted happy hour as D.C. patios and rooftops reopen Return to menuBy Jessica Contrera, Justin Jouvenal and Perry Stein6:23 p.m.Link copiedLinkHappy hour arrived at Whiskey Charlie on the Wharf, and the only person admiring the stunning rooftop view was the bartender.Kyle Kauffman, 47, straightened the glasses of sliced lemons and alcohol-soaked cherries, waiting for customers.\u201cOn a day like today, they should have been here already,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get the word out that we are open.\u201dKauffman had been jazzed to be behind the bar again. He spent the afternoon perfecting new custom cocktails, knowing he would have to serve them in plastic disposable cups for safety.He has been thinking of himself as lucky, to work at a place with plenty of outdoor space to welcome customers back. Now he couldn\u2019t help but wonder if, without many tips, he would be making even less than he did on unemployment.At 5:15 p.m., a woman in a summery blue dress arrived on the rooftop.\u201cHey there!\u201d Kauffman asked. \u201cFirst one back!\u201dHe served her a plastic cup of sauvignon blanc.In Adams Morgan, the Lauriol Plaza restaurant had converted its parking lot into an additional patio, setting up about three dozen tables to make room for more diners.Dance music thumped from a tiki bar, and the doors of jumbo slice joints had thrown open their doors for the hungry and tipsy to get floppy takeaway pizza. But there was something missing from one of D.C.\u2019s most popular spots for happy hour: the drinkers.There were just a smattering of parties on the 18th Street strip, a far cry from the throngs of revelers that spilled from its sidewalks on a typical Friday night before the pandemic.One couple, who said they had been in careful isolation during the stay-at-home order, had ventured out to the front patio of Pop\u2019s Sea Bar. They had reserved the single table there for a two-hour block from 4 to 6 p.m. and were drinking white wine and Pabst.\u201cI came out to support a local business and support people who are friends of mine,\u201d the man said. \u201cWe live in the neighborhood. Maybe by going out and setting a precedent of keeping it safe, others will do the same.\u201dThey felt reassured that Pop\u2019s had an isolated outdoor table, disposable menus and was participating in contact tracing. They had to sign a release, saying they understood the bar\u2019s rules.What was it like to venture out again?\u201cIt\u2019s pretty weird,\u201d the man said. \u201cI\u2019m nervous. I\u2019m anxious.\u201dHe noted that walkers had edged away from the couple as they passed on the sidewalk. Just then, a woman passing by paused and exclaimed: \u201cIt\u2019s so nice to see people drinking wine!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirginia hospitals respond to gradual reopening with a warningReturn to menuBy Jenna Portnoy4:42 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe phased reopening will do nothing to change policies and procedures in place at Virginia Hospital Center in Alexandria, chief medical officer Jeff DiLisi said Friday afternoon. He said around the country even a gradual relaxing of stay-at-home orders has resulted in a surge of cases.\u201cWhat we\u2019re going to be watching is maybe two to three weeks from now what happens to our admissions in the hospital and who we see coming into the ER,\u201d he said.People should not use their newfound freedom to dine outdoors at a restaurant or to get a haircut as permission to take risks, DiLisi said.\u201cThe policies that are laid out for Phase 1, if people take them seriously, wearing masks and practicing social distancing, hopefully we can go to Phase 2,\u201d he said. Otherwise, \u201cwe could certainly see a bump up.\u201d Virginia Hospital Center treated as many as 100 coronavirus patients at once at the peak of infection in late April to early May, he said.Paul Skolnik, an infectious-disease physician and chair of medicine for Carilion Clinic, which operates Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, said like many parts of the country that have reported relatively few cases, there\u2019s significant resistance to preventive measures among some in Southwest Virginia.\u201cThere are many license plates in Southwest Virginia that have the logo, \u2018Don\u2019t Tread on Me,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a particularly helpful viewpoint when we\u2019re talking about use of masks and social distancing.\u201d Some residents have incorrectly translated the governor\u2019s reopening guidelines to mean that hand hygiene and other measures are less important, Skolnik said.\u201cIn fact, they\u2019re even more important than they were before so we can control any risk of a second wave or a surge especially in Southwest Virginia where we\u2019ve been able to manage things so we haven\u2019t had as many cases,\u201d he said.The Roanoke hospital was treating nine coronavirus-positive patients on Friday, he said.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPotomac Mills remains a ghost town mall as stores reopenReturn to menuBy Petula Dvorak4:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe excitement of reopening fizzled a bit once shoppers made it inside the ghost town mall at Potomac Mills.\u201cHello, beautiful!\u201d Mimi said to each longhair woman who passed by her kiosk, Straight Ahead. She wanted to straighten their hair with her line of hair tools. All day, she had no takers.\u201cNo one. Not one,\u201d she said, rolling her eyes.Her boss, Giovanni, who said he could not give out their last names, was optimistic.\u201cPeople need to feel safe,\u201d he said. \u201cThey will. Maybe a little later.\u201d The Zen Relax massage kiosk had only two customers all day.\u201cWe have sanitizer, we have masks, we are careful,\u201d said frustrated masseur Kevin Yan. \u201cBut not too many people are ready to be touched.\u201d Most of the big-name stores were closed. Vans and Vera Bradley, Tommy Bahama and Bloomingdale\u2019s, Lego and Lacoste were dark.About half of the food court stands were open, but chairs and tables were stacked and roped off. To-go was the only option.The spaceship and racecar rides were cocooned in plastic wrap. The playground was closed.\u201cIt\u2019s a little depressing. All the stores I like aren\u2019t open,\u201d said Ana Prada, who came with her family from Stafford for a shopping day.\u201cYou can\u2019t try anything on, the fitting rooms are closed,\u201d she said. \u201cSo you have to go home and try it on, then return it if it doesn\u2019t fit. And that doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u201d Her daughter Kylah Prada was supposed to be at school for her last day as a sophomore. The mall wasn\u2019t as uplifting as she had hoped it would be, but she was happy to be out of the house. Plus, she found some cute tops at Forever 21.\u201cIt\u2019s weird,\u201d the 15-year-old said. \u201cBut this makes it feel like it\u2019s coming back, slowly.\u201d The stores that opened seemed to be the ones that draw Gen Z. And they were popping.\u201cWe\u2019ve been so busy from the moment we opened,\u201d said a cashier at Against All Odds, the place with cropped Champion hoodies, Tommy Hilfiger fanny packs and Superdry Windbreakers.Lashay Williams and her crew were loving the fresh summer T-shirts they had.\u201cI\u2019m so happy to be out,\u201d said Williams, 24, who usually works stadium security and sports events in the District, where she lives.She\u2019s been cooped up and needed to get to some shoe stores.\u201cIt\u2019s a start,\u201d she said. \u201cI just put in for a new job. It feels like everything is restarting.\u201d AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementMaryland Democrats press Hogan on testing transparency Return to menuBy Erin Cox3:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Democrats in Maryland\u2019s congressional delegation have asked Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to publicize a detailed testing plan required by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the latest in a wave of pressure on the governor to explain the state\u2019s response to the pandemic.The CDC plan is supposed to outline Maryland\u2019s strategy for deploying $205 million in federal cash designated to enhance testing. Maryland\u2019s congressional leaders want the governor to focus on black, Latino and other minority communities disproportionately affected by the virus.\u201cWe urge you to outline how you will target testing resources to the hardest hit communities in Maryland, particularly communities of color,\u201d the nine Democrats in the state\u2019s 10-member delegation wrote to Hogan on Friday. \u201c\u2026 We urge you to make your plan submission public so Marylanders have a full understanding of the State\u2019s testing goals and how these federal resources will be put to use.\u201dHogan spokesman Michael Ricci said the administration\u2019s initial report will \u201creflect our long-term testing strategy and note how we have hit our short-term goal of 10,000 tests per day, broadened criteria to include those who are asymptomatic, expanded community-based testing throughout the state, announced agreements with CVS and Walmart to conduct testing on-site, authorized the state\u2019s nearly 1,200 pharmacies to administer tests, and directly allocated test kits to local jurisdictions \u2014 all of which has helped bring the state\u2019s positivity rate down to 12.0 percent.\u201dRicci said a full report is not due until June 15. He did not say whether the administration would release either report to the public.Friday\u2019s letter, coordinated by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D), comes as Democrats across the state have pressured Hogan and his administration to reveal more details about why the 500,000 test kits he purchased from South Korea have not been widely deployed.Last week, the congressmen wrote Hogan a separate letter asking him to develop a detailed plan to help minority communities the same way he developed plans to treat hot spots in nursing homes and poultry plants. As of Friday, the letter had not been answered.Democrats who lead the Maryland General Assembly have criticized the governor for not answering questions about the state\u2019s response to the crisis. On Wednesday, health department officials for the fifth consecutive week canceled an appearance before a committee of state lawmakers.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBreweries, wineries now allowed to open in Maryland for outdoor serviceReturn to menuBy Erin Cox3:07 p.m.Link copiedLinkGov. Larry Hogan (R) on Friday issued an executive order allowing breweries, wineries and distilleries in Maryland to serve patrons outdoors.The order also allows them to ship craft beer, wine or alcohol directly to consumers, which is not otherwise allowed under Maryland\u2019s alcohol laws. It follows the eased restrictions, effective at 5 p.m. Friday, that already permitted bars and restaurants to do outdoor dining.Hogan also renewed a separate executive order that bars cellphone, cable, Internet and utility companies from shutting off service or charging late fees. That moratorium remains in effect until July 1.Among the first Maryland wineries to reopen was Big Cork Vineyards, in Washington County. The vineyard has adapted in several ways during the pandemic, offering virtual wine tastings as well as delivery and pickup. Now it has opened its outdoor patio seating for customers to pick up a bottle of wine and enjoy it outside.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs D.C. reopens, local Masonic lodge hands out free lunchesReturn to menuBy Justin Wm. Moyer3:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkOutside the east entrance of the U Street Metro station Friday afternoon, French Bryant, leader of a nearby D.C. Masonic lodge, stood next to a table overflowing with bagged lunches as the Crush Funk Brass Band played \u201cWhen the Saints Go Marching In.\u201dAs many D.C. businesses reopen, Bryant and his lodge brethren were there to hand out free sandwiches and cookies to anyone who wanted one \u2014 no questions asked. Just as the coronavirus has hampered the District\u2019s bars and eateries, it has held back the work of the men of Charles Datcher Lodge No. 15.\u201cThey say everything\u2019s secret \u2014 you can Google \u2018Masonry\u2019 and everything comes up,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cReally what we\u2019re here to do is give back to the community.\u201dBryant, who works on equal-opportunity complaints for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the lodge was unsure how to safely do outreach work as the pandemic unfolded. The 33-year-old lives in Southern Maryland with his wife and was under a stay-at-home order \u2014 the lodge members couldn\u2019t gather at all, let alone gather to distribute needed supplies at a safe distance.Not all the lunches were distributed, but French said the remainder would be dropped off at a local homeless shelter. Crush Funk, which Bryant met while playing trumpet in a band at Bowie State University, inspired some street-corner dancing as well.\u201cWhen people come by and they see young guys doing good things, it helps them to see that there are still good people out there,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cWe\u2019re here to help.\u201dMetro reports no significant uptick in ridersReturn to menuBy Justin George2:31 p.m.Link copiedLinkMetro has not seen a noticeable increase in its ridership, officials said early Friday afternoon. Passengers on both bus and rail have been mostly made up of commuters who cannot work from home. The easing of business restrictions in the District and Northern Virginia hasn\u2019t impacted buses or rail cars, the public transit agency said.\u201cIt\u2019s been extremely light, as it has been since mid-March,\u201d Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said. \u201cAnd this morning\u2019s ridership is very much in line with what we\u2019ve seen in recent weeks.\u201dAs of noon, Stessel said, Metrorail had logged 17,000 passenger trips, which is slightly up compared to last Friday but down compared to the same day two weeks ago.Ridership has shown a slight uptick with better weather, transit officials said, but it has not been significant enough to prompt Metro to run more buses or trains.Metro\u2019s ridership this week remained at historic lows \u2014 down at least 90 percent from pre-pandemic levels on rail and around 70 percent on Metrobus. The levels have been consistent since mid-March, when the transit agency cut back service and closed down several stations to fight the spread of the coronavirus.In Old Town Alexandria, King Street stirs to life Return to menuBy Peter Jamison2:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkMai Ngo, owner of King Street Souvenirs, placed a few parameters on her first dining experience at an Old Town Alexandria restaurant in months.She didn\u2019t want to fall asleep after eating or get drunk.Beyond that, Ngo wanted to order a somewhat extravagant, celebratory meal. So when she crossed the street shortly before noon Friday to occupy one of the newly set up tables outside the Warehouse, she ordered crawfish linguine. With bread and a salad. And iced tea, much as she would have liked something more festive \u2014 after all, she was returning to work at her souvenir business.\u201cIt feels great,\u201d she said as she worked her way through the salad. \u201cWe all have to be careful,\u201d she added. \u201cYou can stay home if you want. But we have a choice to live life.\u201dAround her, King Street was stirring to life after months of relative inactivity. It was muggy, and a hazy late-morning sun beat down on the restaurant workers measuring the distance between outdoor tables and shoppers tentatively peeking into establishments where they could finally browse the wares again in person. Crowds were not yet out in force, but the shift in Old Town\u2019s atmosphere was unmistakable.Around the corner from where Ngo was eating, Kathy Schumacher was browsing the sale racks \u2014 all clearance shoes available for $35 a pair \u2014 at Comfort One Shoes. Cradling a box of Ecco sandals, Schumacher said it was time for Virginia\u2019s economy to reopen.\u201cOur country was founded on risk,\u201d she said, and to get through the coronavirus pandemic, \u201cwe may need some of that spirit.\u201dRisks were what Jesse Maas was busy trying to avoid down the street. The director of operations at Fish Market and neighboring Pop\u2019s Ice Cream oversaw his staff as they set up outdoor tables at least six feet apart, with extra space around the entrances to both establishments to allow people to come and go for takeout without getting too close to dine-in customers.The block of King between Union and Lee streets had been blocked to car traffic so restaurants could expand their outdoor seating into the roadway. A group of city workers walked by, spray-painting the outer boundaries of where Fish Market and other eateries could set up tables.\u201cMy honest opinion \u2014 I'll probably get in trouble for saying this \u2014 I would open 100 percent,\u201d Maas said, allowing customers to dine indoors and out. \u201cAnd if you feel afraid, or you feel like you\u2019re in danger, you have the right to stay home.\u201dMaas, who has three children, said he was furloughed in the early days of the quarantine. Business at Fish Market and Pop\u2019s plummeted. He said he felt restaurants had been unfairly singled out for closure, and that they were just as safe for the public as grocery stores and other businesses that had been deemed essential and allowed to continue operating.\u201cYou walk into your local grocery store, you\u2019ve got people grabbing avocados to see if they\u2019re ripe. I think at restaurants, you\u2019re just as safe,\u201d Maas said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to come off as this guy who doesn\u2019t care about the coronavirus, because I very much do. But we\u2019re just trying to survive.\u201dReopened D.C. souvenir shop awaits tourists yet to comeReturn to menuBy Justin George2:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Friday morning, Gi H. Chung rode the McPherson Square Metro station escalator underground, walked over to the Metro Variety souvenir shop that greets passengers just before the turnstiles, unlocked the door and flipped on the neon \u201cOPEN\u201d sign for the first time since March 15.He put out a box of disposable gloves and free surgical masks to both entice customers and to protect his business and personal health. Then he waited. He paced around the store and made sure his biggest seller \u2014 T-shirts with the U.S. seal \u2014 stayed sharply folded. He waited some more. He sat down and began reading a newspaper.But inside, he said, he was worried. Chung, 55, survived the past few months on savings, but he said he will soon have trouble if his store doesn\u2019t start making up for lost business.\u201cRent is big money,\u201d he said. \u201cIf customers don\u2019t come, we don\u2019t have business. If we don\u2019t have business, we can\u2019t make rent.\u201dThe past 2\u00bd months were the first time he recalls closing his seven-day-a-week tchotchke store, which he has run in various iterations at different D.C. locations for 35 years. Inside his presidential superstore, the deeply partisan divide of today collides, clashes and coexists in a tiny space. Bobbleheads for presidents Trump and Obama sit together near coffee mugs with Hillary Clinton figurines standing inside. A kiosk holds scores of $2.99 magnets of the American Flag or bald eagle, and miniature Liberty Bells and Trump troll dolls line nearby shelves.About seven years ago, Trump pushed Chung out of his store at the Old Post Office Pavilion at 1100 Pennsylvania NW when the then-New York magnate redeveloped the site into the Trump International Hotel. Now, with his store resituated at McPherson Square, Chung once again must make room for Trump, whose memorabilia takes up a good percentage of his store.Chung\u2019s souvenir business relies on tourists, and he said he doesn\u2019t know when they will return. He keeps alert for when the Smithsonian museums will reopen, which he said is a true barometer for recovery and a harbinger for District tourism.\u201cWhen is back up? When is normal? No one knows,\u201d he said. \u201cMy business is the souvenir business. Maybe it will pick up. Maybe it will pick up next year.\u201dAs the day wore on with no customers, Chung walked outside his store to stretch. He said he typically walks between two and three hours a day to work off the stress.Then he walked back in, past the 50-percent-off clearance sandwich board sign at the door and past the \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d ball cap staring out the storefront window.University System of Maryland expects some in-person teaching this fall Return to menuBy Nick Anderson1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkMaryland\u2019s public universities are moving toward at least some in-person teaching in the fall term after a spring disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.The University System of Maryland, which oversees 15 universities and higher education centers, said Friday that campus-restart plans will vary from school to school. The flagship University of Maryland at College Park, which has about 41,000 students, has not yet disclosed how it will operate in the fall.But the system\u2019s guidance, outlined in a four-page statement, clearly signaled that higher education leaders anticipate a mix of teaching and learning methods.Schools \u201cwill welcome students back to campus this fall in a hybrid fashion, combining at least some on-campus, in-person instruction with remote learning,\u201d the system said. Schools expect to announce plans over the next two weeks.Most students at residential universities will begin in mid- to late August, the system said. Some schools will halt in-person instruction by Thanksgiving, but others may continue to hold face-to-face classes for the entire term. Still to be determined are the mix of \u201cresidential students\u201d and \u201cremote students\u201d at each school, as well as plans for athletics.The system serves about 172,000 students statewide, from Frostburg State University in the west to the University Maryland-Eastern Shore.Morgan State University in Baltimore and St. Mary\u2019s College of Maryland, both public, are not part of the system.Colleges and universities nationwide were forced to switch to remote instruction in March as the virus crisis intensified. Students stuck at home since then are growing anxious to know whether they will be allowed to return to campus. Pawnshop expects rush of business at start of next month Return to menuBy Justin Wm. Moyer1:43 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt Crown Pawnbrokers on 14th Street NW, Michael Crown stood wearing a face mask and latex gloves in the entryway of the business his great-grandfather founded as a tailor shop in the 1930s. The store had survived the 1968 riots following the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination. After closing at the beginning of the pandemic, it is trying to survive social distancing, with a cone and \u201cX\u201d marks on the sidewalk indicating where customers should stand.\u201cNot a lot of people are working right now,\u201d Crown said. \u201cWe\u2019re still here giving out loans for people in need.\u201dThough the shop was empty Friday and had been hurt by the emptying out of downtown D.C., Crown said business was steady after the weathered a run on video game systems during the shutdown. A pawnshop is, after all, an essential financial institution. Crown offers four-month loans at 5 percent interest per month, with customers providing items such as jewelry or saxophones as collateral.Those he serves need cash for transportation, \u201cor just food,\u201d he said \u2014 many loans are for less than $100. He expected a rush on the first of the month, when people buy back the items they pawned in previous weeks to get by.\u201cIf you come by Monday at 9 a.m., there will be a line,\u201d Crown said. \u201cEveryone will be receiving their checks.\u201dCrown wasn\u2019t sure what would happen next. He thought the city had opened too quickly amid a not-that-dramatic drop in coronavirus cases and said he has done all he can to make the store safe \u2014 installing plexiglass and having employees wear face shields. Even if the city moves past its Phase 1 reopening, he plans to keep the protections in place.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to get it back to normal again,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re here for the long run. Obviously.\u201d See the latest coronavirus news and developments Friday in the Washington region. D.C., Northern Virginia begin gradual reopening, but some businesses remain closed; coronavirus infects 100,000 in region",
        "author": "Samantha Schmidt"
    },
    {
        "title": "D.C., Northern Virginia begin gradual reopening, but some businesses remain closed; coronavirus infects 100,000 in region (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1325",
        "date": "2020-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/05/29/coronavirus-dc-maryland-virginia-live-updates/",
        "text": "The number of known coronavirus cases in the District, Maryland and Virginia was 102,059 on Friday, with 50,988 cases in Maryland, 42,533 in Virginia and 8,538 in the District. The number of virus-related deaths reached 2,466 in Maryland, 1,358 in Virginia and 460 in the District, for a total of 4,284 fatalities. Here are some of the most significant recent developments as the region responds to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19:\u2022 The District and Northern Virginia are taking steps to reopen today, gradually loosening stay-at-home rules that have been in place because of the pandemic, as business owners are stocking up on hand sanitizer and putting up signs requiring masks.\u2022 On Friday, 85 days after the novel coronavirus appeared in the Washington region, the number of known infections in D.C., Maryland and Virginia surpassed 100,000. That means six in every 1,000 residents have tested positive for the virus. At least 13,000 patients have been hospitalized, according to state data, and 4,239 have died.\u2022 Starting today, all passengers and visitors will be required to wear face coverings at Reagan National and Dulles International airports. Children under the age of 10 and people who have medical conditions that prevent them from wearing face coverings will be exempted from the requirement, airport officials said.\u2022 Maryland\u2019s two largest D.C. suburbs will begin to lift shutdown restrictions Monday, the final pieces of a tentative reopening for the Washington area. Both Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) and Prince George\u2019s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D) said declining trends in hospitalizations for the coronavirus would allow them to ease the closure of nonessential businesses Monday.When will D.C. reopen? | What is open in Virginia? | What is open in Maryland? | Known coronavirus cases in the region | How to get testedThe live blog is closed Return to menuBy Samantha Schmidt7:27 p.m.Link copiedLinkPlease read The Post\u2019s continuing coverage here.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWizards cautiously begin voluntary player workouts as Washington reopensReturn to menuBy Candace Buckner7:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Washington Wizards reopened their practice facility and began voluntary player workouts on Friday, returning to a semblance of normal for the first time since the NBA shut down more than two months ago.The Wizards became one of the last teams in the league to return to their practice facility, located in Southeast D.C., as the organization waited on the city to begin Phase 1 of reopening. The District began its reopening at 12:01 a.m. Friday, as the D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser lifted some restrictions. However, contact sports remain banned on city fields.League rules prohibit players from participating in scrimmages and coming into contact with one another during workouts. Workouts on Friday would have consisted of individual players either getting up shots on the court \u2014 with a team staffer wearing a mask and gloves rebounding the ball \u2014 or using the weight room with strict physical distancing and hygiene protocols in place.Late Friday afternoon, Isaac Bonga, Anzejs Pasecniks and Jerome Robinson were spotted entering the facility for voluntary workouts, and underwent a thorough routine before even touching a basketball.According to a video about safety protocols that was released by the team, players who want to work out are required to use an ear thermometer, provided by the team, at their residence to check and report their temperatures to the athletic trainer before arriving to the practice facility. Once they have pulled into the parking lot, players must wait in their car before getting summoned inside by a trainer. The team recommends that players leave their phone, along with their keys and hat, inside the car before entering the facility.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDistrict will close some public roads to through traffic, allow \u2018streateries\u2019 to help restauranteurs Return to menuBy Michael Laris6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkD.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said Friday the city will allow battered restaurants to space out their tables in public streets, in parking spaces and on sidewalks after a quick application, creating \u201cstreateries.\u201dBowser said the city will also close some city streets to through traffic to make walking and biking safer. D.C. lawmakers who had called for such action applauded the move. The mayor\u2019s ReOpen DC advisory group earlier this month called for similar efforts, including \u201cdiversifying our streets.\u201dJeff Marootian, director of the D.C. Department of Transportation, said the city will put up signs and barricades creating \u201cslow streets\u201d in communities across the city. Through traffic will be prohibited, and the speed limit will be 15 miles per hour, even below the new, citywide default speed limit of 20 miles per hour officials also announced Friday.Marootian said officials are still determining how many miles will be covered. The first stretches of road will be disclosed next week.\u201cWe intend for this to be a robust network,\u201d built over several months, he said.D.C. lawmakers said they are still pushing legislation to create a broader network of dedicated, protected lanes for commuting by bike given disruptions to transit caused by the virus.Bowser said the plan for more restaurant seating in public places will be implemented swiftly. Officials said restaurateurs\u2019 applications to the city should take just days.The mayor said the changes will help the District \u201creimagine our roadways,\u201d echoing similar moves in cities across the country.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA muted happy hour as D.C. patios and rooftops reopen Return to menuBy Jessica Contrera, Justin Jouvenal and Perry Stein6:23 p.m.Link copiedLinkHappy hour arrived at Whiskey Charlie on the Wharf, and the only person admiring the stunning rooftop view was the bartender.Kyle Kauffman, 47, straightened the glasses of sliced lemons and alcohol-soaked cherries, waiting for customers.\u201cOn a day like today, they should have been here already,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get the word out that we are open.\u201dKauffman had been jazzed to be behind the bar again. He spent the afternoon perfecting new custom cocktails, knowing he would have to serve them in plastic disposable cups for safety.He has been thinking of himself as lucky, to work at a place with plenty of outdoor space to welcome customers back. Now he couldn\u2019t help but wonder if, without many tips, he would be making even less than he did on unemployment.At 5:15 p.m., a woman in a summery blue dress arrived on the rooftop.\u201cHey there!\u201d Kauffman asked. \u201cFirst one back!\u201dHe served her a plastic cup of sauvignon blanc.In Adams Morgan, the Lauriol Plaza restaurant had converted its parking lot into an additional patio, setting up about three dozen tables to make room for more diners.Dance music thumped from a tiki bar, and the doors of jumbo slice joints had thrown open their doors for the hungry and tipsy to get floppy takeaway pizza. But there was something missing from one of D.C.\u2019s most popular spots for happy hour: the drinkers.There were just a smattering of parties on the 18th Street strip, a far cry from the throngs of revelers that spilled from its sidewalks on a typical Friday night before the pandemic.One couple, who said they had been in careful isolation during the stay-at-home order, had ventured out to the front patio of Pop\u2019s Sea Bar. They had reserved the single table there for a two-hour block from 4 to 6 p.m. and were drinking white wine and Pabst.\u201cI came out to support a local business and support people who are friends of mine,\u201d the man said. \u201cWe live in the neighborhood. Maybe by going out and setting a precedent of keeping it safe, others will do the same.\u201dThey felt reassured that Pop\u2019s had an isolated outdoor table, disposable menus and was participating in contact tracing. They had to sign a release, saying they understood the bar\u2019s rules.What was it like to venture out again?\u201cIt\u2019s pretty weird,\u201d the man said. \u201cI\u2019m nervous. I\u2019m anxious.\u201dHe noted that walkers had edged away from the couple as they passed on the sidewalk. Just then, a woman passing by paused and exclaimed: \u201cIt\u2019s so nice to see people drinking wine!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirginia hospitals respond to gradual reopening with a warningReturn to menuBy Jenna Portnoy4:42 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe phased reopening will do nothing to change policies and procedures in place at Virginia Hospital Center in Alexandria, chief medical officer Jeff DiLisi said Friday afternoon. He said around the country even a gradual relaxing of stay-at-home orders has resulted in a surge of cases.\u201cWhat we\u2019re going to be watching is maybe two to three weeks from now what happens to our admissions in the hospital and who we see coming into the ER,\u201d he said.People should not use their newfound freedom to dine outdoors at a restaurant or to get a haircut as permission to take risks, DiLisi said.\u201cThe policies that are laid out for Phase 1, if people take them seriously, wearing masks and practicing social distancing, hopefully we can go to Phase 2,\u201d he said. Otherwise, \u201cwe could certainly see a bump up.\u201d Virginia Hospital Center treated as many as 100 coronavirus patients at once at the peak of infection in late April to early May, he said.Paul Skolnik, an infectious-disease physician and chair of medicine for Carilion Clinic, which operates Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, said like many parts of the country that have reported relatively few cases, there\u2019s significant resistance to preventive measures among some in Southwest Virginia.\u201cThere are many license plates in Southwest Virginia that have the logo, \u2018Don\u2019t Tread on Me,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a particularly helpful viewpoint when we\u2019re talking about use of masks and social distancing.\u201d Some residents have incorrectly translated the governor\u2019s reopening guidelines to mean that hand hygiene and other measures are less important, Skolnik said.\u201cIn fact, they\u2019re even more important than they were before so we can control any risk of a second wave or a surge especially in Southwest Virginia where we\u2019ve been able to manage things so we haven\u2019t had as many cases,\u201d he said.The Roanoke hospital was treating nine coronavirus-positive patients on Friday, he said.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPotomac Mills remains a ghost town mall as stores reopenReturn to menuBy Petula Dvorak4:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe excitement of reopening fizzled a bit once shoppers made it inside the ghost town mall at Potomac Mills.\u201cHello, beautiful!\u201d Mimi said to each longhair woman who passed by her kiosk, Straight Ahead. She wanted to straighten their hair with her line of hair tools. All day, she had no takers.\u201cNo one. Not one,\u201d she said, rolling her eyes.Her boss, Giovanni, who said he could not give out their last names, was optimistic.\u201cPeople need to feel safe,\u201d he said. \u201cThey will. Maybe a little later.\u201d The Zen Relax massage kiosk had only two customers all day.\u201cWe have sanitizer, we have masks, we are careful,\u201d said frustrated masseur Kevin Yan. \u201cBut not too many people are ready to be touched.\u201d Most of the big-name stores were closed. Vans and Vera Bradley, Tommy Bahama and Bloomingdale\u2019s, Lego and Lacoste were dark.About half of the food court stands were open, but chairs and tables were stacked and roped off. To-go was the only option.The spaceship and racecar rides were cocooned in plastic wrap. The playground was closed.\u201cIt\u2019s a little depressing. All the stores I like aren\u2019t open,\u201d said Ana Prada, who came with her family from Stafford for a shopping day.\u201cYou can\u2019t try anything on, the fitting rooms are closed,\u201d she said. \u201cSo you have to go home and try it on, then return it if it doesn\u2019t fit. And that doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u201d Her daughter Kylah Prada was supposed to be at school for her last day as a sophomore. The mall wasn\u2019t as uplifting as she had hoped it would be, but she was happy to be out of the house. Plus, she found some cute tops at Forever 21.\u201cIt\u2019s weird,\u201d the 15-year-old said. \u201cBut this makes it feel like it\u2019s coming back, slowly.\u201d The stores that opened seemed to be the ones that draw Gen Z. And they were popping.\u201cWe\u2019ve been so busy from the moment we opened,\u201d said a cashier at Against All Odds, the place with cropped Champion hoodies, Tommy Hilfiger fanny packs and Superdry Windbreakers.Lashay Williams and her crew were loving the fresh summer T-shirts they had.\u201cI\u2019m so happy to be out,\u201d said Williams, 24, who usually works stadium security and sports events in the District, where she lives.She\u2019s been cooped up and needed to get to some shoe stores.\u201cIt\u2019s a start,\u201d she said. \u201cI just put in for a new job. It feels like everything is restarting.\u201d AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementMaryland Democrats press Hogan on testing transparency Return to menuBy Erin Cox3:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Democrats in Maryland\u2019s congressional delegation have asked Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to publicize a detailed testing plan required by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the latest in a wave of pressure on the governor to explain the state\u2019s response to the pandemic.The CDC plan is supposed to outline Maryland\u2019s strategy for deploying $205 million in federal cash designated to enhance testing. Maryland\u2019s congressional leaders want the governor to focus on black, Latino and other minority communities disproportionately affected by the virus.\u201cWe urge you to outline how you will target testing resources to the hardest hit communities in Maryland, particularly communities of color,\u201d the nine Democrats in the state\u2019s 10-member delegation wrote to Hogan on Friday. \u201c\u2026 We urge you to make your plan submission public so Marylanders have a full understanding of the State\u2019s testing goals and how these federal resources will be put to use.\u201dHogan spokesman Michael Ricci said the administration\u2019s initial report will \u201creflect our long-term testing strategy and note how we have hit our short-term goal of 10,000 tests per day, broadened criteria to include those who are asymptomatic, expanded community-based testing throughout the state, announced agreements with CVS and Walmart to conduct testing on-site, authorized the state\u2019s nearly 1,200 pharmacies to administer tests, and directly allocated test kits to local jurisdictions \u2014 all of which has helped bring the state\u2019s positivity rate down to 12.0 percent.\u201dRicci said a full report is not due until June 15. He did not say whether the administration would release either report to the public.Friday\u2019s letter, coordinated by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D), comes as Democrats across the state have pressured Hogan and his administration to reveal more details about why the 500,000 test kits he purchased from South Korea have not been widely deployed.Last week, the congressmen wrote Hogan a separate letter asking him to develop a detailed plan to help minority communities the same way he developed plans to treat hot spots in nursing homes and poultry plants. As of Friday, the letter had not been answered.Democrats who lead the Maryland General Assembly have criticized the governor for not answering questions about the state\u2019s response to the crisis. On Wednesday, health department officials for the fifth consecutive week canceled an appearance before a committee of state lawmakers.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBreweries, wineries now allowed to open in Maryland for outdoor serviceReturn to menuBy Erin Cox3:07 p.m.Link copiedLinkGov. Larry Hogan (R) on Friday issued an executive order allowing breweries, wineries and distilleries in Maryland to serve patrons outdoors.The order also allows them to ship craft beer, wine or alcohol directly to consumers, which is not otherwise allowed under Maryland\u2019s alcohol laws. It follows the eased restrictions, effective at 5 p.m. Friday, that already permitted bars and restaurants to do outdoor dining.Hogan also renewed a separate executive order that bars cellphone, cable, Internet and utility companies from shutting off service or charging late fees. That moratorium remains in effect until July 1.Among the first Maryland wineries to reopen was Big Cork Vineyards, in Washington County. The vineyard has adapted in several ways during the pandemic, offering virtual wine tastings as well as delivery and pickup. Now it has opened its outdoor patio seating for customers to pick up a bottle of wine and enjoy it outside.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs D.C. reopens, local Masonic lodge hands out free lunchesReturn to menuBy Justin Wm. Moyer3:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkOutside the east entrance of the U Street Metro station Friday afternoon, French Bryant, leader of a nearby D.C. Masonic lodge, stood next to a table overflowing with bagged lunches as the Crush Funk Brass Band played \u201cWhen the Saints Go Marching In.\u201dAs many D.C. businesses reopen, Bryant and his lodge brethren were there to hand out free sandwiches and cookies to anyone who wanted one \u2014 no questions asked. Just as the coronavirus has hampered the District\u2019s bars and eateries, it has held back the work of the men of Charles Datcher Lodge No. 15.\u201cThey say everything\u2019s secret \u2014 you can Google \u2018Masonry\u2019 and everything comes up,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cReally what we\u2019re here to do is give back to the community.\u201dBryant, who works on equal-opportunity complaints for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said the lodge was unsure how to safely do outreach work as the pandemic unfolded. The 33-year-old lives in Southern Maryland with his wife and was under a stay-at-home order \u2014 the lodge members couldn\u2019t gather at all, let alone gather to distribute needed supplies at a safe distance.Not all the lunches were distributed, but French said the remainder would be dropped off at a local homeless shelter. Crush Funk, which Bryant met while playing trumpet in a band at Bowie State University, inspired some street-corner dancing as well.\u201cWhen people come by and they see young guys doing good things, it helps them to see that there are still good people out there,\u201d Bryant said. \u201cWe\u2019re here to help.\u201dMetro reports no significant uptick in ridersReturn to menuBy Justin George2:31 p.m.Link copiedLinkMetro has not seen a noticeable increase in its ridership, officials said early Friday afternoon. Passengers on both bus and rail have been mostly made up of commuters who cannot work from home. The easing of business restrictions in the District and Northern Virginia hasn\u2019t impacted buses or rail cars, the public transit agency said.\u201cIt\u2019s been extremely light, as it has been since mid-March,\u201d Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said. \u201cAnd this morning\u2019s ridership is very much in line with what we\u2019ve seen in recent weeks.\u201dAs of noon, Stessel said, Metrorail had logged 17,000 passenger trips, which is slightly up compared to last Friday but down compared to the same day two weeks ago.Ridership has shown a slight uptick with better weather, transit officials said, but it has not been significant enough to prompt Metro to run more buses or trains.Metro\u2019s ridership this week remained at historic lows \u2014 down at least 90 percent from pre-pandemic levels on rail and around 70 percent on Metrobus. The levels have been consistent since mid-March, when the transit agency cut back service and closed down several stations to fight the spread of the coronavirus.In Old Town Alexandria, King Street stirs to life Return to menuBy Peter Jamison2:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkMai Ngo, owner of King Street Souvenirs, placed a few parameters on her first dining experience at an Old Town Alexandria restaurant in months.She didn\u2019t want to fall asleep after eating or get drunk.Beyond that, Ngo wanted to order a somewhat extravagant, celebratory meal. So when she crossed the street shortly before noon Friday to occupy one of the newly set up tables outside the Warehouse, she ordered crawfish linguine. With bread and a salad. And iced tea, much as she would have liked something more festive \u2014 after all, she was returning to work at her souvenir business.\u201cIt feels great,\u201d she said as she worked her way through the salad. \u201cWe all have to be careful,\u201d she added. \u201cYou can stay home if you want. But we have a choice to live life.\u201dAround her, King Street was stirring to life after months of relative inactivity. It was muggy, and a hazy late-morning sun beat down on the restaurant workers measuring the distance between outdoor tables and shoppers tentatively peeking into establishments where they could finally browse the wares again in person. Crowds were not yet out in force, but the shift in Old Town\u2019s atmosphere was unmistakable.Around the corner from where Ngo was eating, Kathy Schumacher was browsing the sale racks \u2014 all clearance shoes available for $35 a pair \u2014 at Comfort One Shoes. Cradling a box of Ecco sandals, Schumacher said it was time for Virginia\u2019s economy to reopen.\u201cOur country was founded on risk,\u201d she said, and to get through the coronavirus pandemic, \u201cwe may need some of that spirit.\u201dRisks were what Jesse Maas was busy trying to avoid down the street. The director of operations at Fish Market and neighboring Pop\u2019s Ice Cream oversaw his staff as they set up outdoor tables at least six feet apart, with extra space around the entrances to both establishments to allow people to come and go for takeout without getting too close to dine-in customers.The block of King between Union and Lee streets had been blocked to car traffic so restaurants could expand their outdoor seating into the roadway. A group of city workers walked by, spray-painting the outer boundaries of where Fish Market and other eateries could set up tables.\u201cMy honest opinion \u2014 I'll probably get in trouble for saying this \u2014 I would open 100 percent,\u201d Maas said, allowing customers to dine indoors and out. \u201cAnd if you feel afraid, or you feel like you\u2019re in danger, you have the right to stay home.\u201dMaas, who has three children, said he was furloughed in the early days of the quarantine. Business at Fish Market and Pop\u2019s plummeted. He said he felt restaurants had been unfairly singled out for closure, and that they were just as safe for the public as grocery stores and other businesses that had been deemed essential and allowed to continue operating.\u201cYou walk into your local grocery store, you\u2019ve got people grabbing avocados to see if they\u2019re ripe. I think at restaurants, you\u2019re just as safe,\u201d Maas said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to come off as this guy who doesn\u2019t care about the coronavirus, because I very much do. But we\u2019re just trying to survive.\u201dReopened D.C. souvenir shop awaits tourists yet to comeReturn to menuBy Justin George2:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Friday morning, Gi H. Chung rode the McPherson Square Metro station escalator underground, walked over to the Metro Variety souvenir shop that greets passengers just before the turnstiles, unlocked the door and flipped on the neon \u201cOPEN\u201d sign for the first time since March 15.He put out a box of disposable gloves and free surgical masks to both entice customers and to protect his business and personal health. Then he waited. He paced around the store and made sure his biggest seller \u2014 T-shirts with the U.S. seal \u2014 stayed sharply folded. He waited some more. He sat down and began reading a newspaper.But inside, he said, he was worried. Chung, 55, survived the past few months on savings, but he said he will soon have trouble if his store doesn\u2019t start making up for lost business.\u201cRent is big money,\u201d he said. \u201cIf customers don\u2019t come, we don\u2019t have business. If we don\u2019t have business, we can\u2019t make rent.\u201dThe past 2\u00bd months were the first time he recalls closing his seven-day-a-week tchotchke store, which he has run in various iterations at different D.C. locations for 35 years. Inside his presidential superstore, the deeply partisan divide of today collides, clashes and coexists in a tiny space. Bobbleheads for presidents Trump and Obama sit together near coffee mugs with Hillary Clinton figurines standing inside. A kiosk holds scores of $2.99 magnets of the American Flag or bald eagle, and miniature Liberty Bells and Trump troll dolls line nearby shelves.About seven years ago, Trump pushed Chung out of his store at the Old Post Office Pavilion at 1100 Pennsylvania NW when the then-New York magnate redeveloped the site into the Trump International Hotel. Now, with his store resituated at McPherson Square, Chung once again must make room for Trump, whose memorabilia takes up a good percentage of his store.Chung\u2019s souvenir business relies on tourists, and he said he doesn\u2019t know when they will return. He keeps alert for when the Smithsonian museums will reopen, which he said is a true barometer for recovery and a harbinger for District tourism.\u201cWhen is back up? When is normal? No one knows,\u201d he said. \u201cMy business is the souvenir business. Maybe it will pick up. Maybe it will pick up next year.\u201dAs the day wore on with no customers, Chung walked outside his store to stretch. He said he typically walks between two and three hours a day to work off the stress.Then he walked back in, past the 50-percent-off clearance sandwich board sign at the door and past the \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d ball cap staring out the storefront window.University System of Maryland expects some in-person teaching this fall Return to menuBy Nick Anderson1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkMaryland\u2019s public universities are moving toward at least some in-person teaching in the fall term after a spring disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.The University System of Maryland, which oversees 15 universities and higher education centers, said Friday that campus-restart plans will vary from school to school. The flagship University of Maryland at College Park, which has about 41,000 students, has not yet disclosed how it will operate in the fall.But the system\u2019s guidance, outlined in a four-page statement, clearly signaled that higher education leaders anticipate a mix of teaching and learning methods.Schools \u201cwill welcome students back to campus this fall in a hybrid fashion, combining at least some on-campus, in-person instruction with remote learning,\u201d the system said. Schools expect to announce plans over the next two weeks.Most students at residential universities will begin in mid- to late August, the system said. Some schools will halt in-person instruction by Thanksgiving, but others may continue to hold face-to-face classes for the entire term. Still to be determined are the mix of \u201cresidential students\u201d and \u201cremote students\u201d at each school, as well as plans for athletics.The system serves about 172,000 students statewide, from Frostburg State University in the west to the University Maryland-Eastern Shore.Morgan State University in Baltimore and St. Mary\u2019s College of Maryland, both public, are not part of the system.Colleges and universities nationwide were forced to switch to remote instruction in March as the virus crisis intensified. Students stuck at home since then are growing anxious to know whether they will be allowed to return to campus. Pawnshop expects rush of business at start of next month Return to menuBy Justin Wm. Moyer1:43 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt Crown Pawnbrokers on 14th Street NW, Michael Crown stood wearing a face mask and latex gloves in the entryway of the business his great-grandfather founded as a tailor shop in the 1930s. The store had survived the 1968 riots following the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination. After closing at the beginning of the pandemic, it is trying to survive social distancing, with a cone and \u201cX\u201d marks on the sidewalk indicating where customers should stand.\u201cNot a lot of people are working right now,\u201d Crown said. \u201cWe\u2019re still here giving out loans for people in need.\u201dThough the shop was empty Friday and had been hurt by the emptying out of downtown D.C., Crown said business was steady after the weathered a run on video game systems during the shutdown. A pawnshop is, after all, an essential financial institution. Crown offers four-month loans at 5 percent interest per month, with customers providing items such as jewelry or saxophones as collateral.Those he serves need cash for transportation, \u201cor just food,\u201d he said \u2014 many loans are for less than $100. He expected a rush on the first of the month, when people buy back the items they pawned in previous weeks to get by.\u201cIf you come by Monday at 9 a.m., there will be a line,\u201d Crown said. \u201cEveryone will be receiving their checks.\u201dCrown wasn\u2019t sure what would happen next. He thought the city had opened too quickly amid a not-that-dramatic drop in coronavirus cases and said he has done all he can to make the store safe \u2014 installing plexiglass and having employees wear face shields. Even if the city moves past its Phase 1 reopening, he plans to keep the protections in place.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to get it back to normal again,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re here for the long run. Obviously.\u201d See the latest coronavirus news and developments Friday in the Washington region. D.C., Northern Virginia begin gradual reopening, but some businesses remain closed; coronavirus infects 100,000 in region",
        "author": "Samantha Schmidt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Washington National Cathedral\u2019s hawk is named Millennium Falcon. How stupid are we? (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1326",
        "date": "2018-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/washington-national-cathedrals-hawk-is-named-millennium-falcon-how-stupid-are-we/2018/03/05/8ed050ea-2088-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html",
        "text": "I must say, the people at the Audubon Naturalist Society are taking the erroneous name given to the red-tailed hawk living atop Washington National Cathedral much better than I am. In fact, they\u2019re shrugging off the misnomer like water from a\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009. well, you know.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn case you hadn\u2019t heard, the cathedral recently had an online \u201cname the raptor\u201d poll. Among the decidedly ecclesiastical choices \u2014 Grace, Gloria, Vesper, Deacon, etc. \u2014 was Millennium. That\u2019s as in Millennium Falcon, the spaceship that Han Solo pilots in the Star Wars movies. The cathedral already has a grotesque carved to look like Darth Vader, so the name was in keeping with George Lucas\u2019s oeuvre.Red-tailed hawk at Washington National Cathedral gets a nameThat\u2019s the name a majority of the voters picked: Millennium Falcon, even though the bird is not a falcon but a hawk. Hawks have feathered \u201cfingers\u201d at the ends of their wings, instead of the tapered points that falcon wings come to. Falcons such as the peregrine are rarer in our area.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is what happens when you let the public vote. Sometimes, we can\u2019t be trusted. Look at that research vessel in Britain, which, if the public had had its way, would have been christened Boaty McBoatface. (It became RRS Sir David Attenborough, with an underwater vehicle it carries bearing the BMcB moniker.)I figured that ornithologists and other bird-lovers would surely share my sense of outrage. I mean, a hawk isn\u2019t a falcon. With our skyscrapers, chemicals and habitat destruction, humans are killing millions of birds a year. Shouldn\u2019t we at least be able to properly differentiate among the victims?But Alison Pierce at the Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase, Md., was more forgiving. \u201cHawk Solo would have been a more taxonomically-correct choice,\u201d she wrote in an email. \u201cBut since hawks and falcons are both part of the order Falconiformes, we\u2019re willing to give them a pass on Millennium Falcon. As the D.C. region\u2019s consummate birdwatchers and lovers, we think it\u2019s cool that so many area residents appreciate the beauty of the red-tailed hawk, which is one of our most common raptors.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlison said that at least the cathedral\u2019s bird hasn\u2019t been named after one of the bad guys from Star Wars. They could have gone with Jabba the Hawk, she pointed out.In fact, Alison said, Star Wars villains lend themselves to all sorts of avian appellations: Kylo Wren instead of Kylo Ren; Emperor Passerine instead of Emperor Palpatine (passerines are perching birds); Dodo Fett instead of Boba Fett; General Grebe-ous instead of General Grievous, and Count Cuckoo instead of Count Dooku.I just thought of two: Princess Rhea and Luke Flycatcher.Alison said that whatever the bird at the cathedral is named, we should delight in the fact that red-tailed hawks possess almost Jedi-like powers. They have vision eight times sharper than a human\u2019s and the ability to dive at 150 mph.Story continues below advertisementMay the feathers be with you.Saddle upBirds come in flocks, unless they\u2019re crows, in which case they come in murders: a murder of crows. Bernie Markstein of Silver Spring, Md., thinks a group of dockless bike-share bicycles all together on a sidewalk should have a similar name.You can park a dockless bike-share bicycle anywhere. But you shouldn\u2019t.He suggested: a biathlon of bikes (\u201csounds good, but is clearly wrong,\u201d Bernie wrote); a clutch of bikes; a cabal of bikes; a pedal of bikes; an attire of bikes (\u201cnice pun with little meaning\u201d); a brake of bikes; a stumble of bikes (\u201ca nod to \u2002your column\u201d); a whir of bikes; a flight of bikes.AdvertisementI kind of like a name inspired by the aftermath of last week\u2019s windstorm: a tangle of bikes.A nice finishFrom two wheels to four: John Huber of Montgomery Village, Md., wonders where he can get the type of car polish he sees on all the automakers\u2019 TV commercials.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis must be some truly wonderful stuff, since none of the vehicles shown driving through miles of backcountry, snow-covered roads have any evidence of dirt, salt spray or slush splashes on them,\u201d John wrote. \u201cThey remain immaculately clean.\u201dTongue in cheek, John wonders how mere mortals can get their hands on this magical stuff.Wrote John: \u201cI realize that the carwash association and paint manufacturers, among others, may be hiding this trade secret, but I\u2019m sure you can get to the bottom of it.\u201dAre you kidding? I\u2019m not going up against Big Polish. I don\u2019t want to get waxed.Twitter: @johnkelly\nFor previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/people/john-kelly. Oh, lighten up, John. It\u2019s all in good fun. It least it isn\u2019t named Jabba the Hawk. Washington National Cathedral\u2019s hawk is named Millennium Falcon. How stupid are we?",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "D.C.\u2019s venerated Emerson school shuttered after 168 years amid pandemic pressures (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1327",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/emerson-preparatory-school-dc-closed-pandemic/2021/10/29/5798aaa0-073e-11ec-ba15-9c4f59a60478_story.html",
        "text": "Annual tuition at Emerson Preparatory School was $29,000, yet Jackson Janney\u2019s last year at the struggling private high school began in the basement of a downtown Washington hotel.There were no desks or whiteboards. His music teacher would bring out an iPad and an easel to teach lessons. Guests walked by as he prepared for the SAT in the lobby. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJanney, who graduated in 2020, was one of the last students at Emerson Preparatory School, a venerated, 168-year-old D.C. institution that educated those who didn\u2019t fit in elsewhere. After developing a reputation as a refuge for generations of troubled teens trying to turn their lives around, the school closed at the end of this past school year \u2014 a victim of the District\u2019s white-hot real estate market and the pressures of the pandemic.Story continues below advertisementThose most recently in charge of Emerson, Janney said, didn\u2019t understand what made it so special. New leadership couldn\u2019t re-create the school\u2019s unique learning environment as it endured serial moves from the townhouse it had occupied since 1937 to the U Street corridor to a Massachusetts Avenue hotel.AdvertisementJanney and his classmates spent about two months at the hotel before relocating to the fourth floor of a Dupont Circle building \u2014 raw office space with tiny rooms, Janney said. There was no furniture, no paintings or decorations, and no common areas for students to gather.\u201cIt didn\u2019t look like a school. It didn\u2019t feel like a school,\u201d said Janney, who came to Emerson in the second semester of his freshman year. \u201cAnd it didn\u2019t feel like what the school was like before.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA few months later, the pandemic hit, and school was out forever.Anthony Muehlberger, who worked at Emerson as a teacher and administrator for more than two decades before it closed, said its staff was informed in June 2020 that the school would move online. Teachers were invited to apply for entry-level, part-time positions as online tutors.AdvertisementAn institution that had delivered personalized education in classes with an average size of seven would no longer have full-time employees or in-person contact. Instead, Emerson offered distance courses through the University of Nebraska High School, a onetime correspondence school.\u201cThere was a collective feeling of frustration that stemmed from the idea that this amazing little place, with its deep, weird roots, seemed like it had been treated at the end like a business model that simply hadn\u2019t worked out,\u201d Muehlberger wrote in an email.Story continues below advertisementIn a June 2020 email obtained from a former teacher, head of school Peri-Anne Chobot wrote that \u201cif we did not restructure our model Emerson would be forced to close.\u201d The school wanted to keep \u201cclass sizes small while consciously addressing affordability in a post-pandemic climate,\u201d the email said.AdvertisementChobot did not respond to phone or email requests for comment. An auto-reply from her Emerson email address said the school closed because of \u201cthe global and local economic impact related to the COVID-19 pandemic, together with other conditions that were not conducive to operating.\u201d\u201cIn the event Emerson is able to reopen an announcement will be posted,\u201d the email said.Story continues below advertisementIn a recent interview, former Emerson board chair Annette Rossi, whose daughter attended the school, said its undoing was \u201cdecades in the making.\u201dThe school never had an endowment, she said. In 2017, it left its townhouse.\u00a0Rossi said the building\u2019s landlord \u201cpushed us out,\u201d but the landlord said the school was in search of a larger space.Unlike other D.C. private schools, the school had no alumni association, according to Rossi. Emerson was paid about $12,000 by the city for each special education student it accepted \u2014 about 20 of 40 students enrolled at one point, Rossi said \u2014 but it cost more than $25,000 to educate each one.AdvertisementStill, Rossi said, Emerson was \u201cturning a curve\u201d when the pandemic struck. The school had hired Chobot \u2014 a veteran administrator \u2014 for her understanding of education finance. Chobot would turn out to be Emerson\u2019s last president.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe had applied for grants,\u201d Rossi said. \u201cWe had big plans to expand. Our numbers were growing \u2026 We were just crushed by the pandemic and urban renewal.\u201d She added: \u201cWe were gentrified out of our neighborhood like other family-run businesses.\u201dRossi said Chobot did the best she could: \u201cShe was in an unenviable position \u2026 The school was on the brink of closing.\u201dGeorge Barrell Emerson \u2014 a progressive educator and cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson \u2014 founded the school that bore his name in 1852 to prepare male students for Harvard, according to Emerson\u2019s now-defunct website. The school became Washington\u2019s first coed prep school in 1920 and moved to a townhouse at 1324 18th Street NW in 1937.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlumni include luminaries such as Watergate-era judge John Sirica and Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto. In an email, acclaimed science fiction author William Gibson \u2014 who attended the school from 1969 to 1970 \u2014 said an Emerson English teacher \u201cprofoundly contributed to my sense of how science fiction should be written.\u201dForrest Malone, a former Emerson student, graduated in 2005 only to start working there in 2010, teaching American history and other subjects.\u201cThe best teachers I ever had in my life were at Emerson,\u201d he said. \u201cThe most unique conversations \u2014 conversations that I never imagined happening as a 15-year-old or 16-year-old \u2014 happened at Emerson.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMalone said he came to Emerson in ninth grade to avoid a \u201cpsychotically competitive environment\u201d in D.C.\u2019s private schools. He was engaged by the school\u2019s offbeat curriculum, which included a class called \u201cAdvanced Topics in Space Exploration\u201d \u2014 referred to as \u201cAdvanced Space Ships.\u201dAdvertisementEmerson was supposed to be a quick way through high school for Brendan Canty, a young musician who would become the drummer for D.C. punk bands Rites of Spring and Fugazi. Before he found fame, Canty was just another student struggling at Woodrow Wilson High School because he kept skipping classes.Things were different at Emerson, Canty said. He actually enjoyed it. Canty was surrounded by quirky, creative people \u2014 artists, photographers and musicians.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was an interesting bunch of kids who I would say were kind of like the island of misfit toys a little bit,\u201d said Canty, 55. \u201cIt was a great alternative.\u201dMuehlberger said Emerson offered this alternative education even though it \u201ccalled itself a prep school.\u201d\u201cIt seemed very formal but was definitely a place where kids were coming who were having issues with other schools,\u201d he said. \u201cKids with anxiety. Kids with drug problems who were just not making it in the big environment of a public school. Kids who just needed something else.\u201dAdvertisementStudent enrollment in grades nine through 12 was kept under 60. There were no sports or class rankings. Courses included screenwriting and \u201cWestern and Non-Western Medicine\u201d alongside traditional English, math and science. Tuition was $29,000 annually compared with, for example, Sidwell Friends, which charges students in its upper school around $48,000.As the District gentrified, however, Emerson could no longer afford to be weird. First, the family who owned Emerson\u2019s Dupont Circle home \u2014 the descendants John Julian Humphrey Sr., the school\u2019s head for more than five decades \u2014 sold it for $2.3 million in 2001 after his death to fund his widow\u2019s retirement.Carol Humphrey \u2014 the dean\u2019s daughter who\u00a0worked at the school from 1988 until 2009, eventually becoming its associate director \u2014 said the family sold the building to a parent at the school, who, according to public records, flipped the property in 2006 for $4.1 million.AdvertisementSmall schools in the D.C. region battle high real estate prices and salaries, Humphrey said, but the school helped students who \u201cprobably never would have finished school.\u201dAs Emerson migrated around downtown Washington, it lost sight of its purpose, Muehlberger said. Forced to compete for students with private-school powerhouses like Georgetown Day School, it flailed.Malone said Emerson\u2019s move to the hotel \u2014 a move made at the last minute after the start of the 2019 academic year was delayed \u2014 was out of character.Part of the school\u2019s appeal was the Emerson\u2019s townhouse, he said. Teaching in the hotel was okay \u2014 Malone preferred the large conference table even if, occasionally, there was no paper or whiteboard \u2014 but the vibe was different.Rossi, the former board member, said the school was \u201cvery lucky\u201d to secure its temporary lodgings. The hotel was happy to have the students, she said, and parents were able to come and go.Even before the pandemic, Malone said, Emerson was fading. It had a few famous alumni, but they weren\u2019t very engaged. Perhaps a school like Emerson was no longer needed.\u201cThere is not really room for niche private schools the way there once was because so many schools are becoming accommodating to all kinds of different students,\u201d Malone said. \u201cEverybody is sort of accepting everybody.\u201dNow, the townhouse at 1324 18th Street NW, with a transom that reads \u201cEmerson Institute,\u201d is vacant. The advocacy organization that owned the building relocated to a shared workspace and sold the building in September.In May, Emerson graduated its remaining 12 seniors, and the school helped place its younger students elsewhere. No more are coming.Muehlberger said those who studied and worked at Emerson will keep the hope it once offered misfits alive.\u201cEmerson may have closed, but it is not dead \u2014 it lives on in us,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt was ridiculous and special.\u201d\n\nEllie Silverman and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report. Emerson Preparatory School, the alma mater of actor Jared Leto and sci-fi author William Gibson, closed this year amid pandemic woes. D.C.\u2019s venerated Emerson school shuttered after 168 years amid pandemic pressures",
        "author": "Justin Wm. Moyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "D.C.\u2019s venerated Emerson school shuttered after 168 years amid pandemic pressures (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1328",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/emerson-preparatory-school-dc-closed-pandemic/2021/10/29/5798aaa0-073e-11ec-ba15-9c4f59a60478_story.html",
        "text": "Annual tuition at Emerson Preparatory School was $29,000, yet Jackson Janney\u2019s last year at the struggling private high school began in the basement of a downtown Washington hotel.There were no desks or whiteboards. His music teacher would bring out an iPad and an easel to teach lessons. Guests walked by as he prepared for the SAT in the lobby. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJanney, who graduated in 2020, was one of the last students at Emerson Preparatory School, a venerated, 168-year-old D.C. institution that educated those who didn\u2019t fit in elsewhere. After developing a reputation as a refuge for generations of troubled teens trying to turn their lives around, the school closed at the end of this past school year \u2014 a victim of the District\u2019s white-hot real estate market and the pressures of the pandemic.Story continues below advertisementThose most recently in charge of Emerson, Janney said, didn\u2019t understand what made it so special. New leadership couldn\u2019t re-create the school\u2019s unique learning environment as it endured serial moves from the townhouse it had occupied since 1937 to the U Street corridor to a Massachusetts Avenue hotel.AdvertisementJanney and his classmates spent about two months at the hotel before relocating to the fourth floor of a Dupont Circle building \u2014 raw office space with tiny rooms, Janney said. There was no furniture, no paintings or decorations, and no common areas for students to gather.\u201cIt didn\u2019t look like a school. It didn\u2019t feel like a school,\u201d said Janney, who came to Emerson in the second semester of his freshman year. \u201cAnd it didn\u2019t feel like what the school was like before.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA few months later, the pandemic hit, and school was out forever.Anthony Muehlberger, who worked at Emerson as a teacher and administrator for more than two decades before it closed, said its staff was informed in June 2020 that the school would move online. Teachers were invited to apply for entry-level, part-time positions as online tutors.AdvertisementAn institution that had delivered personalized education in classes with an average size of seven would no longer have full-time employees or in-person contact. Instead, Emerson offered distance courses through the University of Nebraska High School, a onetime correspondence school.\u201cThere was a collective feeling of frustration that stemmed from the idea that this amazing little place, with its deep, weird roots, seemed like it had been treated at the end like a business model that simply hadn\u2019t worked out,\u201d Muehlberger wrote in an email.Story continues below advertisementIn a June 2020 email obtained from a former teacher, head of school Peri-Anne Chobot wrote that \u201cif we did not restructure our model Emerson would be forced to close.\u201d The school wanted to keep \u201cclass sizes small while consciously addressing affordability in a post-pandemic climate,\u201d the email said.AdvertisementChobot did not respond to phone or email requests for comment. An auto-reply from her Emerson email address said the school closed because of \u201cthe global and local economic impact related to the COVID-19 pandemic, together with other conditions that were not conducive to operating.\u201d\u201cIn the event Emerson is able to reopen an announcement will be posted,\u201d the email said.Story continues below advertisementIn a recent interview, former Emerson board chair Annette Rossi, whose daughter attended the school, said its undoing was \u201cdecades in the making.\u201dThe school never had an endowment, she said. In 2017, it left its townhouse.\u00a0Rossi said the building\u2019s landlord \u201cpushed us out,\u201d but the landlord said the school was in search of a larger space.Unlike other D.C. private schools, the school had no alumni association, according to Rossi. Emerson was paid about $12,000 by the city for each special education student it accepted \u2014 about 20 of 40 students enrolled at one point, Rossi said \u2014 but it cost more than $25,000 to educate each one.AdvertisementStill, Rossi said, Emerson was \u201cturning a curve\u201d when the pandemic struck. The school had hired Chobot \u2014 a veteran administrator \u2014 for her understanding of education finance. Chobot would turn out to be Emerson\u2019s last president.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe had applied for grants,\u201d Rossi said. \u201cWe had big plans to expand. Our numbers were growing \u2026 We were just crushed by the pandemic and urban renewal.\u201d She added: \u201cWe were gentrified out of our neighborhood like other family-run businesses.\u201dRossi said Chobot did the best she could: \u201cShe was in an unenviable position \u2026 The school was on the brink of closing.\u201dGeorge Barrell Emerson \u2014 a progressive educator and cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson \u2014 founded the school that bore his name in 1852 to prepare male students for Harvard, according to Emerson\u2019s now-defunct website. The school became Washington\u2019s first coed prep school in 1920 and moved to a townhouse at 1324 18th Street NW in 1937.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlumni include luminaries such as Watergate-era judge John Sirica and Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto. In an email, acclaimed science fiction author William Gibson \u2014 who attended the school from 1969 to 1970 \u2014 said an Emerson English teacher \u201cprofoundly contributed to my sense of how science fiction should be written.\u201dForrest Malone, a former Emerson student, graduated in 2005 only to start working there in 2010, teaching American history and other subjects.\u201cThe best teachers I ever had in my life were at Emerson,\u201d he said. \u201cThe most unique conversations \u2014 conversations that I never imagined happening as a 15-year-old or 16-year-old \u2014 happened at Emerson.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMalone said he came to Emerson in ninth grade to avoid a \u201cpsychotically competitive environment\u201d in D.C.\u2019s private schools. He was engaged by the school\u2019s offbeat curriculum, which included a class called \u201cAdvanced Topics in Space Exploration\u201d \u2014 referred to as \u201cAdvanced Space Ships.\u201dAdvertisementEmerson was supposed to be a quick way through high school for Brendan Canty, a young musician who would become the drummer for D.C. punk bands Rites of Spring and Fugazi. Before he found fame, Canty was just another student struggling at Woodrow Wilson High School because he kept skipping classes.Things were different at Emerson, Canty said. He actually enjoyed it. Canty was surrounded by quirky, creative people \u2014 artists, photographers and musicians.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was an interesting bunch of kids who I would say were kind of like the island of misfit toys a little bit,\u201d said Canty, 55. \u201cIt was a great alternative.\u201dMuehlberger said Emerson offered this alternative education even though it \u201ccalled itself a prep school.\u201d\u201cIt seemed very formal but was definitely a place where kids were coming who were having issues with other schools,\u201d he said. \u201cKids with anxiety. Kids with drug problems who were just not making it in the big environment of a public school. Kids who just needed something else.\u201dAdvertisementStudent enrollment in grades nine through 12 was kept under 60. There were no sports or class rankings. Courses included screenwriting and \u201cWestern and Non-Western Medicine\u201d alongside traditional English, math and science. Tuition was $29,000 annually compared with, for example, Sidwell Friends, which charges students in its upper school around $48,000.As the District gentrified, however, Emerson could no longer afford to be weird. First, the family who owned Emerson\u2019s Dupont Circle home \u2014 the descendants John Julian Humphrey Sr., the school\u2019s head for more than five decades \u2014 sold it for $2.3 million in 2001 after his death to fund his widow\u2019s retirement.Carol Humphrey \u2014 the dean\u2019s daughter who\u00a0worked at the school from 1988 until 2009, eventually becoming its associate director \u2014 said the family sold the building to a parent at the school, who, according to public records, flipped the property in 2006 for $4.1 million.AdvertisementSmall schools in the D.C. region battle high real estate prices and salaries, Humphrey said, but the school helped students who \u201cprobably never would have finished school.\u201dAs Emerson migrated around downtown Washington, it lost sight of its purpose, Muehlberger said. Forced to compete for students with private-school powerhouses like Georgetown Day School, it flailed.Malone said Emerson\u2019s move to the hotel \u2014 a move made at the last minute after the start of the 2019 academic year was delayed \u2014 was out of character.Part of the school\u2019s appeal was the Emerson\u2019s townhouse, he said. Teaching in the hotel was okay \u2014 Malone preferred the large conference table even if, occasionally, there was no paper or whiteboard \u2014 but the vibe was different.Rossi, the former board member, said the school was \u201cvery lucky\u201d to secure its temporary lodgings. The hotel was happy to have the students, she said, and parents were able to come and go.Even before the pandemic, Malone said, Emerson was fading. It had a few famous alumni, but they weren\u2019t very engaged. Perhaps a school like Emerson was no longer needed.\u201cThere is not really room for niche private schools the way there once was because so many schools are becoming accommodating to all kinds of different students,\u201d Malone said. \u201cEverybody is sort of accepting everybody.\u201dNow, the townhouse at 1324 18th Street NW, with a transom that reads \u201cEmerson Institute,\u201d is vacant. The advocacy organization that owned the building relocated to a shared workspace and sold the building in September.In May, Emerson graduated its remaining 12 seniors, and the school helped place its younger students elsewhere. No more are coming.Muehlberger said those who studied and worked at Emerson will keep the hope it once offered misfits alive.\u201cEmerson may have closed, but it is not dead \u2014 it lives on in us,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt was ridiculous and special.\u201d\n\nEllie Silverman and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report. Emerson Preparatory School, the alma mater of actor Jared Leto and sci-fi author William Gibson, closed this year amid pandemic woes. D.C.\u2019s venerated Emerson school shuttered after 168 years amid pandemic pressures",
        "author": "Justin Wm. Moyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 363-foot projection of a rocket will be flashed on the Washington Monument to celebrate Apollo 11 anniversary (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1329",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-363-foot-projection-of-a-rocket-will-be-flashed-on-the-washington-monument-to-celebrate-apollo-11-anniversary/2019/07/11/9bb09124-a3c9-11e9-b8c8-75dae2607e60_story.html",
        "text": "A 363-foot projection of a rocket will be flashed on one side of the Washington Monument next week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is sponsoring events to honor the Apollo 11 mission of July 20, 1969. The mission, which launched astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins from Earth on a Saturn V rocket, culminated with Aldrin and Armstrong successfully landing on the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightApollo at 50: In search of heroes and simplicityPart of the commemoration includes \u201cApollo 50 Festival\u201d live performances, exhibits and speakers. Those events will take place July 18 to 20 on the Mall between Fourth and Seventh streets NW.Story continues below advertisementAs part of the celebration, the image of a 363-foot Saturn V rocket will be projected on the east side of the Washington Monument from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m. on July 16, July 17 and July 18.AdvertisementOn July 19 and 20 at the monument, a free show with archival footage will \u201cre-create the launch of Apollo 11 and tell the story of the first moon landing,\u201d the Smithsonian said. The show runs at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. both nights.Viewers can see the show from areas on the Mall in front of the Smithsonian Castle between Ninth and 12th streets NW. For information, go to airandspace.si.edu/go-for-the-moon.The event is being sponsored by the Air and Space Museum and the Department of the Interior and will be produced by 59 Productions, which has handled the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and other high-profile events.Don\u2019t recall Apollo 11? Global festivities have you coveredIn a statement, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said: \u201cAlmost 50 years ago, the Apollo 11 mission captivated the world as two American astronauts were the first to step foot on the moon, forever changing space exploration.\u201dLocal newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.)Like PostLocal on Facebook | Follow @postlocal on Twitter | Latest local news A number of events are planned next week on the Mall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic moon mission. A 363-foot projection of a rocket will be flashed on the Washington Monument to celebrate Apollo 11 anniversary",
        "author": "Dana Hedgpeth"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 363-foot projection of a rocket will be flashed on the Washington Monument to celebrate Apollo 11 anniversary (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1330",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-363-foot-projection-of-a-rocket-will-be-flashed-on-the-washington-monument-to-celebrate-apollo-11-anniversary/2019/07/11/9bb09124-a3c9-11e9-b8c8-75dae2607e60_story.html",
        "text": "A 363-foot projection of a rocket will be flashed on one side of the Washington Monument next week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is sponsoring events to honor the Apollo 11 mission of July 20, 1969. The mission, which launched astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins from Earth on a Saturn V rocket, culminated with Aldrin and Armstrong successfully landing on the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightApollo at 50: In search of heroes and simplicityPart of the commemoration includes \u201cApollo 50 Festival\u201d live performances, exhibits and speakers. Those events will take place July 18 to 20 on the Mall between Fourth and Seventh streets NW.Story continues below advertisementAs part of the celebration, the image of a 363-foot Saturn V rocket will be projected on the east side of the Washington Monument from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m. on July 16, July 17 and July 18.AdvertisementOn July 19 and 20 at the monument, a free show with archival footage will \u201cre-create the launch of Apollo 11 and tell the story of the first moon landing,\u201d the Smithsonian said. The show runs at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. both nights.Viewers can see the show from areas on the Mall in front of the Smithsonian Castle between Ninth and 12th streets NW. For information, go to airandspace.si.edu/go-for-the-moon.The event is being sponsored by the Air and Space Museum and the Department of the Interior and will be produced by 59 Productions, which has handled the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and other high-profile events.Don\u2019t recall Apollo 11? Global festivities have you coveredIn a statement, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said: \u201cAlmost 50 years ago, the Apollo 11 mission captivated the world as two American astronauts were the first to step foot on the moon, forever changing space exploration.\u201dLocal newsletters: Local headlines (8 a.m.) | Afternoon Buzz (4 p.m.)Like PostLocal on Facebook | Follow @postlocal on Twitter | Latest local news A number of events are planned next week on the Mall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic moon mission. A 363-foot projection of a rocket will be flashed on the Washington Monument to celebrate Apollo 11 anniversary",
        "author": "Dana Hedgpeth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who is Julie Swetnick, the third Kavanaugh accuser? (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1331",
        "date": "2018-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/who-is-julie-swetnick-the-third-kavanaugh-accuser/2018/09/26/91e16ed8-c1bc-11e8-97a5-ab1e46bb3bc7_story.html",
        "text": "Julie Swetnick, who last week became the third woman to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, is an experienced Web developer in the Washington area who has held multiple security clearances for her work on government-related networks. She also has a history of legal disputes in several states. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe child of two government bureaucrats \u2014 her father worked on the lunar orbiter for NASA, and her mother was a geologist at the Atomic Energy Commission \u2014 has spent most of her life around Washington. Now 55, she grew up in Maryland and graduated in 1980 from Gaithersburg High School, located in a far less affluent section of the same county where Kavanaugh lived and attended an exclusive prep school.Swetnick\u2019s father, 95, said Wednesday that he was shocked to learn from a Washington Post reporter that his daughter had made the explosive allegations. She said in an affidavit that Kavanaugh was present at a house party in 1982 where she alleges she was the victim of a gang rape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKavanaugh immediately issued a statement in response: \u201cThis is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone. I don\u2019t know who this is and this never happened.\u201dKavanaugh says he is the victim of \u2018character assassination\u2019 as third woman comes forwardInterviewed at his home in Silver Spring, Md., Martin Swetnick said he had no idea that his daughter was suddenly in the news as he hadn\u2019t spoken to her in 10 years. He had long fallen out of regular contact with his children, the retired space scientist said, an estrangement he blames on his focus on career over family.\u201cThe only time we communicate is on my birthday when she sends me an email,\u201d Swetnick said.Swetnick said he worked for the Department of Defense and NASA, as the \u201cprogram scientist for unmanned lunar exploration,\u201d and was often away from home.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI was busy traveling around the country,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a good relationship.\u201dAdvertisementHe said his daughter was born in Brooklyn but grew up in Silver Spring and then Montgomery Village, where she lived while attending high school. He described her as a \u201ctypical girl.\u201d\u201cShe was not shy,\u201d he said. \u201cShe was a good-looking girl.\u201dAccording to her online r\u00e9sum\u00e9, Swetnick attended Montgomery College, a community college, where she took pre-med courses. But by the mid-1990s, she had jumped into the exploding world of Web development, accumulating a string of IT and software certifications. A contract job at the State Department started her on government work.Story continues below advertisementHer experience has included work for U.S. embassies, Customs and Border Protection and the Internal Revenue Service. She has held security clearances at the Departments of State, Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security, according to her r\u00e9sum\u00e9.Advertisement\u201cShe never went to college, but she bootstrapped herself and became a computer expert,\u201d her father said. \u201cShe\u2019s a sharp woman.\u201dOn her r\u00e9sum\u00e9, Swetnick described herself this way: \u201cShe is a hands-on team player; having no problem stepping into new or difficult roles, situations and projects,\u201d it says. \u201cShe is highly professional, ethical, responsible and hard working.\u201dAs she moved among government contracting jobs, Swetnick has repeatedly encountered trouble paying her taxes.Story continues below advertisementIn 2015, the state of Maryland filed an interstate lien against her property in the District. The bill included over $32,000 in unpaid taxes from 2008, and another $27,000 in interest on the seven-year-old debt. Court records reflect the full amount due of nearly $63,000 was satisfied 15 months later, in December 2016. It is not clear from court records whether the bill was paid or if the lien was released because of a decision that the bill was unwarranted.AdvertisementSimilarly, the IRS in 2016 assessed Swetnick a bill of over $40,000 in unpaid taxes from 2014. The federal government filed a lien on her property for the amount in 2017. The debt was listed as satisfied and the lien was released in March of this year.Miami-Dade County, Fla., court records show Swetnick was involved in a 2001 domestic-violence case filed by Richard Vinneccy, who told Politico that she threatened him after they broke up. But the case was dismissed less than two weeks later when they failed to appear in court.Story continues below advertisementIn 1993, Swetnick accused a Maryland podiatrist and his wife of harassing her with repeated phone calls in a complaint filed with state prosecutors. The case was withdrawn two months later.Swetnick now lives in a newly built apartment complex in City Center, an expensive enclave in downtown Washington. There is almost no trace of her on social media. One of the few online tidbits that appear to be posted by her: a five-star Yellow Pages review of Bistro Provence in Bethesda.Advertisement\u201cYannick Cam\u2019s done it again!\u201d wrote a \u201cjswetnick\u201d in 2010. \u201c.\u2009.\u2009. Great French cuisine, a wonderful wine selection, indoor and outdoor dining, and authentic atmosphere.\u201dChristine Blasey Ford moved 3,000 miles to reinvent her life. It wasn\u2019t far enough.Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sat down for his first TV interview since facing allegations of sexual misconduct. Here are some highlights. (Melissa Macaya/The Washington Post)Swetnick\u2019s accusations against Kavanaugh came the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee heard from Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who said Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party when they were both teenagers. A second woman, Deborah Ramirez, told the New Yorker magazine that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when they were both at Yale. Kavanaugh has unequivocally denied both allegations, as he did in response to Swetnick last week.Story continues below advertisementAfter President Trump ordered a new background investigation into Kavanaugh, The Washington Post reported Sunday that the FBI has reached out to Ramirez and Ford, but not Swetnick.AdvertisementSwetnick, through her attorney Michael Avenatti, has been asking for days to talk with the FBI as well. But Avenatti, a possible 2020 presidential candidate who has battled Trump on behalf of adult film star Stormy Daniels, tweeted on Sunday that neither he nor Swetnick had heard from the bureau: \u201cStill no word from the FBI. Ramirez was questioned despite never submitting a sworn stmt. Ford was permitted to testify despite never submitting a sworn stmt. My client submitted a sworn stmt and has security clearances, & yet Trump will not allow her to be questioned or testify.\u201dAccording to her affidavit, Swetnick met Kavanaugh and his friend and Georgetown Prep classmate Mark Judge in the early 1980s at house parties. Swetnick, who is two years older than Kavanaugh, alleges that the teens who attended tried getting girls drunk \u201cso they could then be \u2018gang raped\u2019 in a side room or bedroom by a \u2018train\u2019 of numerous boys,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their \u2018turn\u2019 with a girl inside the room. These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSwetnick said she herself had been gang raped in one of these trains \u201cwhere Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present\u201d and soon after, told two others about her experience.Advertisement\u201cDuring the incident, I was incapacitated without my consent and unable to fight off the boys raping me,\u201d she said, adding that she was \u201cdrugged with Quaaludes or something similar .\u2009.\u2009. \u201dOne of Swetnick\u2019s high school teachers \nremembers her as a student who got A\u2019s and B\u2019s.\u201cShe was a good student,\u201d said David Kahn, 76, who taught Swetnick\u2019s modern world history class at Gaithersburg High. \u201cShe was relatively quiet but was sharp and pleasant.\u201dSwetnick\u2019s father said he could shed little light on his daughter\u2019s high school years. \u201cI was busy traveling around the country,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a good relationship.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said Swetnick wasn\u2019t closely supervised by her parents but never mentioned any type of sexual assault as a teen or showed any signs of trauma or depression.\u201cMaybe we were poor parents,\u201d he said. \u201cShe lived her life. We didn\u2019t discuss it.\u201dAdvertisementIf her father wasn\u2019t paying close attention, some of the family\u2019s neighbors were.Donald Fontaine said he will never forget how the Swetnicks welcomed his own family to their Montgomery Village cul-de-sac in 1969 or 1970.\u201cWe were the first black family to move here, and the guy got fired for selling us this house,\u201d recalled Fontaine, 89, during an interview in that same house. The Swetnicks, including a young Julie, brought over cake and fruit.\u201cThat\u2019s why I remember how appreciative we were when the Swetnicks welcomed us,\u201d said Fontaine, who was a scientist at IBM.Told of the accusations, Fontaine said he would \u201ccertainly believe her.\u201d\u201cShe was not a flirtatious girl,\u201d Fontaine said. \u201cShe was a pretty intelligent young lady.\u201dThe neighborhood was stocked with scientists and federal government employees, recalled another neighbor, Bob Shewmaker, 78.\u201cIt was all PhD\u2019s and master degrees around here,\u201d said Shewmaker, who said he had a security clearance from his time at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, where Swetnick\u2019s mother worked for a time.As the kids got older, the neighborhood became home to many parties, some in houses and others held in open fields.\u201cThe party thing was going on,\u201d recalled Shewmaker, who said he instantly recognized Swetnick when her face appeared on television Wednesday. \u201cThere\u2019s no question about that.\u201dAt least one of Kavanaugh\u2019s classmates scoffed at the notion that Swetnick would have been a regular at parties with Georgetown Prep students.\u201cNever heard of her,\u201d said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because members of the class have agreed not to speak on the record to reporters. \u201cI don\u2019t remember anyone from Prep hanging out with public school girls, especially from Gaithersburg.\u201dBut Swetnick\u2019s attorney, Avenatti, said her credibility should be assessed in the light of the background checks she had previously passed to secure multiple security clearances.\u201cShe has been fully vetted, time and time again,\u201d Avenatti said on MSNBC. \u201cShe is an honest and courageous woman.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this story misspelled Richard Vinneccy\u2019s name. Marc Fisher, Aaron C. Davis, Julie Tate, Alice Crites, Andrew Ba Tran and Donna St. George contributed to this report.Read more:Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford moved 3,000 miles to reinvent her life. It wasn\u2019t far enough.The elite world of Brett KavanaughChristine Blasey Ford\u2019s family has been nearly silent amid outpouring of supportThe scathing ad 1,600 black women bought to oppose Clarence Thomas The 55-year-old Web developer has held multiple security clearances for work on government-related networks. Who is Julie Swetnick, the third Kavanaugh accuser?",
        "author": "Michael E. Miller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | History\u2019s most boneheaded predictions were compiled in this government report (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1332",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/wrong-predictions-government/2021/09/07/14e828ea-0fed-11ec-bc8a-8d9a5b534194_story.html",
        "text": "Few things in life are as satisfying as serving up a heaping helping of \u201cI told you so.\u201dSomething like that must have been on the mind of the U.S. politician or bureaucrat who in the mid-1960s commissioned a wonderfully readable 48-page government report known internally as \u201cThe Erroneous Predictions Multilith.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe document was produced by the Legislative Reference Service \u2014 what we today call the Congressional Research Service \u2014 and it is a compilation of some of history\u2019s most spectacularly wrong forecasts. (Why \u201cmultilith\u201d? That refers to the printing process used to produce such publications.)The full title of the report is \u201cErroneous Predictions and Negative Comments Concerning Exploration, Territorial Expansion, Scientific and Technological Development; Selected Statements.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI learned of the report from Dennis Chesters and Cynthia Lockley of Adelphi, Md. Dennis is a retired NASA scientist. Cynthia is a senior fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. They are curious who commissioned the report \u2014 and why \u2014 and wondered if I could find out.AdvertisementWe\u2019ll get to that, but first, here\u2019s a taste of \u201cThe Erroneous Predictions Multilith.\u201d It starts in 1486 with the royal committee that advised the king and queen of Spain not to fund a numskull named Christopher Columbus. Sailing west to Asia, the committee insisted, would take an impossibly long three years. And, besides, there was nothing between Europe and that destination but a vast, featureless ocean.Speaking of vast and featureless, nearly 400 years later, New York Rep. Orange Ferriss couldn\u2019t believe the United States paid Russia $7 million for the Alaska Territories. \u201cOf what possible commercial importance can this territory be to us?\u201d he fumed in Congress.Story continues below advertisementIn 1892, Alabama Rep. Hilary A. Herbert wanted to \u201cput in the knife\u201d into funding for the U.S. Geological Survey. Herbert said the agency wasn\u2019t necessary to \u201ccarry on the government\u201d and it didn\u2019t contribute to \u201cthe protection of life or liberty or property.\u201dAdvertisementRep. Henry C. Snodgrass of Tennessee felt the same way about establishing the National Zoo. \u201cI do not believe the American people, hundreds and thousands of whom are today without homes, ought to be taxed to afford shelter and erect homes for snakes, raccoons, opossums, bears and all the creeping and slimy things of the earth,\u201d he said in 1892.Three decades earlier, Sen. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania wondered why Congress was being asked to fund the Smithsonian Institution. \u201cI am tired of all this thing called science here,\u201d Cameron said.Story continues below advertisementWrong calls on technology make especially delicious reading now.Writing about airplanes in the March 1904 issue of Popular Science Monthly, Octave Chanute proclaimed: \u201cThe machines will eventually be fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.\u201dAdvertisementAstronomer William H. Pickering didn\u2019t see much of a future for airplanes, either. Replace Atlantic steamships with passenger airplanes? Pshaw!Said Pickering: \u201cIt seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCapitalists with their own yachts made me think of today\u2019s space-obsessed billionaires. And space, I think, is what prompted the creation of the report. It was compiled by a Legislative Reference Service researcher named Nancy T. Gamarra, who wrote other reports of a technical nature.She prepared it at the behest of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. The first draft came out in 1967. A revised draft was issued in 1969. My guess is that someone on the committee was getting grief from constituents about the cost of the U.S. space program. \u201cThe Erroneous Predictions Multilith\u201d was a way to silence critics: You don\u2019t want to go into space? What if Columbus hadn\u2019t sailed the ocean blue?AdvertisementThis is only a guess because the current policy of the Congressional Research Service is to treat all research requests as confidential. I can see why. I bet a bunch of senators and representatives are even now badgering CRS with \u201cHow do I delete \u2014 I mean really delete \u2014 my browser history and all of my text messages?\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt would be just awful if the names of those congresspeople were made public.Anyway, back to the report. In 1839, the French surgeon Alfred Velpeau wrote that he saw no future for anesthesia, insisting that \u201c \u2018Knife\u2019 and \u2018pain\u2019 are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.\u201dThere\u2019s even a section on early opposition to vaccination. Edward Jenner\u2019s attempts to use relatively harmless cowpox to prevent deadly smallpox prompted one 18th-century doctor to complain: \u201cSmallpox is a visitation from God, but the cowpox is produced by presumptuous man; the former was what Heaven ordained, the latter is, perhaps, a daring violation of our holy religion.\u201dThe more things change, eh?Isaac Newton said that he was able to make his discoveries only by standing upon the shoulders of giants. All too often, we have to stand under the heels of idiots.\n\nTwitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. Why did Congress commission a list of erroneous forecasts? I have my ideas. History\u2019s most boneheaded predictions were compiled in this government report",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | History\u2019s most boneheaded predictions were compiled in this government report (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1333",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/wrong-predictions-government/2021/09/07/14e828ea-0fed-11ec-bc8a-8d9a5b534194_story.html",
        "text": "Few things in life are as satisfying as serving up a heaping helping of \u201cI told you so.\u201dSomething like that must have been on the mind of the U.S. politician or bureaucrat who in the mid-1960s commissioned a wonderfully readable 48-page government report known internally as \u201cThe Erroneous Predictions Multilith.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe document was produced by the Legislative Reference Service \u2014 what we today call the Congressional Research Service \u2014 and it is a compilation of some of history\u2019s most spectacularly wrong forecasts. (Why \u201cmultilith\u201d? That refers to the printing process used to produce such publications.)The full title of the report is \u201cErroneous Predictions and Negative Comments Concerning Exploration, Territorial Expansion, Scientific and Technological Development; Selected Statements.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI learned of the report from Dennis Chesters and Cynthia Lockley of Adelphi, Md. Dennis is a retired NASA scientist. Cynthia is a senior fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. They are curious who commissioned the report \u2014 and why \u2014 and wondered if I could find out.AdvertisementWe\u2019ll get to that, but first, here\u2019s a taste of \u201cThe Erroneous Predictions Multilith.\u201d It starts in 1486 with the royal committee that advised the king and queen of Spain not to fund a numskull named Christopher Columbus. Sailing west to Asia, the committee insisted, would take an impossibly long three years. And, besides, there was nothing between Europe and that destination but a vast, featureless ocean.Speaking of vast and featureless, nearly 400 years later, New York Rep. Orange Ferriss couldn\u2019t believe the United States paid Russia $7 million for the Alaska Territories. \u201cOf what possible commercial importance can this territory be to us?\u201d he fumed in Congress.Story continues below advertisementIn 1892, Alabama Rep. Hilary A. Herbert wanted to \u201cput in the knife\u201d into funding for the U.S. Geological Survey. Herbert said the agency wasn\u2019t necessary to \u201ccarry on the government\u201d and it didn\u2019t contribute to \u201cthe protection of life or liberty or property.\u201dAdvertisementRep. Henry C. Snodgrass of Tennessee felt the same way about establishing the National Zoo. \u201cI do not believe the American people, hundreds and thousands of whom are today without homes, ought to be taxed to afford shelter and erect homes for snakes, raccoons, opossums, bears and all the creeping and slimy things of the earth,\u201d he said in 1892.Three decades earlier, Sen. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania wondered why Congress was being asked to fund the Smithsonian Institution. \u201cI am tired of all this thing called science here,\u201d Cameron said.Story continues below advertisementWrong calls on technology make especially delicious reading now.Writing about airplanes in the March 1904 issue of Popular Science Monthly, Octave Chanute proclaimed: \u201cThe machines will eventually be fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.\u201dAdvertisementAstronomer William H. Pickering didn\u2019t see much of a future for airplanes, either. Replace Atlantic steamships with passenger airplanes? Pshaw!Said Pickering: \u201cIt seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive to any but the capitalist who could own his own yacht.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCapitalists with their own yachts made me think of today\u2019s space-obsessed billionaires. And space, I think, is what prompted the creation of the report. It was compiled by a Legislative Reference Service researcher named Nancy T. Gamarra, who wrote other reports of a technical nature.She prepared it at the behest of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. The first draft came out in 1967. A revised draft was issued in 1969. My guess is that someone on the committee was getting grief from constituents about the cost of the U.S. space program. \u201cThe Erroneous Predictions Multilith\u201d was a way to silence critics: You don\u2019t want to go into space? What if Columbus hadn\u2019t sailed the ocean blue?AdvertisementThis is only a guess because the current policy of the Congressional Research Service is to treat all research requests as confidential. I can see why. I bet a bunch of senators and representatives are even now badgering CRS with \u201cHow do I delete \u2014 I mean really delete \u2014 my browser history and all of my text messages?\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt would be just awful if the names of those congresspeople were made public.Anyway, back to the report. In 1839, the French surgeon Alfred Velpeau wrote that he saw no future for anesthesia, insisting that \u201c \u2018Knife\u2019 and \u2018pain\u2019 are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.\u201dThere\u2019s even a section on early opposition to vaccination. Edward Jenner\u2019s attempts to use relatively harmless cowpox to prevent deadly smallpox prompted one 18th-century doctor to complain: \u201cSmallpox is a visitation from God, but the cowpox is produced by presumptuous man; the former was what Heaven ordained, the latter is, perhaps, a daring violation of our holy religion.\u201dThe more things change, eh?Isaac Newton said that he was able to make his discoveries only by standing upon the shoulders of giants. All too often, we have to stand under the heels of idiots.\n\nTwitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. Why did Congress commission a list of erroneous forecasts? I have my ideas. History\u2019s most boneheaded predictions were compiled in this government report",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | A truly magnetic personality: Capt. J.P. Ault and his amazing ship, the Carnegie (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1334",
        "date": "2019-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-truly-magnetic-personality-capt-jp-ault-and-his-amazing-ship-the-carnegie/2019/09/13/052ee022-d58b-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html",
        "text": "Among the gravestones at the Fort Lincoln Cemetery, just over the District line in Brentwood, Md., is one marking the final resting place of James Percy Ault\n: born 1881, died 1929. Ault was, the marker notes, \u201cCmdr. of the Carnegie.\u201d\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnswer Man prefers a different title: magnetician.Like the researchers Answer Man wrote about in this space last week, J.P. Ault worked for the Carnegie Institution for Science off Broad Branch Road in the District\u2019s Northwest. While those other scientists plumbed the mysteries of the atom, Ault studied the invisible magnetic forces that enshroud our planet. He did this by captaining one of the oddest ships ever to sail the seas. Tragically, his life ended aboard it.Story continues below advertisementAult and his colleagues in the institution\u2019s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism studied a vexing problem: The north that a compass points toward usually isn\u2019t true north. If you don\u2019t know the exact variation between what your compass reads and what it should read, you\u2019ll have trouble figuring out exactly where you are. Over the course of a sea journey, these errors can put mariners far off their intended course.AdvertisementTo make accurate charts, Carnegie Institution researchers first chartered a yacht called the Galilee, which sailed from 1905 to 1908. But the iron and steel in the ship affected the researchers\u2019 readings.Louis A. Bauer, Carnegie\u2019s director, suggested a new kind of vessel: a ship virtually free of ferrous metal. And thus was born the Carnegie, a \u201cnonmagnetic\u201d ship constructed at the Tebo Yacht Basin in Brooklyn, N.Y., and launched in 1909.Story continues below advertisementThe Carnegie\u2019s hull was wood. So were many of the nails holding her together: spikes of hard locust. Other fasteners were bronze or copper. So was the stove and most of the engine, which was powered by gas produced from coal, though most of the motive power came from the 12,900 square feet of sail.The anchors were bronze and lowered not on chains but on lines made from thick hemp. The crew of 25 ate with silver cutlery.Advertisement\u201cThe sailors may not carry jackknives nor are observers permitted to carry about with them any iron or steel,\u201d wrote the New York Times. \u201cSteel belt buckles, for instance, are taboo. Some wit has gone so far even as to say that a man with an iron constitution is not allowed aboard.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Carnegie was 155 feet long and weighed 246 tons. That included a negligible 600 pounds of iron and steel. Ironically, a boat funded by a steel magnate \u2014 Andrew Carnegie \u2014 had as little steel as possible.\u201cThe ship itself was kind of like the space shuttle of its time,\u201d the Carnegie Institution\u2019s Shaun Hardy told Answer Man.When the Carnegie paid a visit to Hamburg, 3,000 people were waiting at the dock to welcome it and take a tour.The Carnegie was at sea for years at a time. On its seven voyages, it covered nearly 300,000 miles crisscrossing the oceans.AdvertisementIts crew took regular measurements with finely calibrated compasses. The readings were entered in logbooks. Copies were sealed in buoyant, waterproof barrels that were marked with instructions to forward them to the nearest U.S. Consulate. The barrels were then dropped in shipping lanes with the expectation they\u2019d be picked up by passing vessels.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s how they transmitted the data back to Washington,\u201d Hardy said.On May 1, 1928, the Carnegie left its berth at Washington\u2019s harbor for what would turn out to be its final voyage. The ship had been extensively refitted, an operation that included swapping out its old engine for a new one that ran not on coal gas, but on gasoline.On Nov. 29, 1929, the Carnegie lay anchored in the harbor of Apia, the largest city on the Pacific Ocean island of Samoa. Ault sat in a deck chair as gasoline was pumped into a holding tank.AdvertisementA spark ignited fumes in the hold. The explosion blew Ault into the water, killing him and cabin boy Tony Kolar. The Carnegie burned to the water line.Story continues below advertisementAs Ault\u2019s body made its long journey back to Washington, The Washington Post eulogized him: \u201cThe record of Capt. Ault and of the Carnegie will not be written in water, but in something more enduring, as science and mankind in general learn to appreciate what they have done to add to the knowledge of the world.\u201dQuestions, pleaseHelp Answer Man add to the knowledge of the Washington area. Send your questions to answerman@washpost.com.Twitter: @johnkelly\nFor previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly. For 20 years, a unique research vessel from Washington sailed the seven seas. A truly magnetic personality: Capt. J.P. Ault and his amazing ship, the Carnegie",
        "author": "John Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: Cassini spacecraft set to crash into Saturn this month (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1335",
        "date": "2017-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/skywatch-cassini-spacecraft-set-to-crash-into-saturn-this-month/2017/09/02/c524875a-8f16-11e7-84c0-02cc069f2c37_story.html",
        "text": " A roundup of astronomy news and events for the month. Skywatch: Cassini spacecraft set to crash into Saturn this month",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Reaches Deal to Merge With Vector SPAC (WSJ: Deals) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1336",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-nears-deal-to-merge-with-vector-spac-11614556800?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=26",
        "text": "Vector Acquisition, backed by technology-focused private-equity firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vector Capital,\n\n \n raised $300 million in a September initial public offering. It is one of hundreds of SPACs, which go public without a business and then look for one or more to combine with, to raise money in recent months, as a blank-check wave has taken hold on Wall Street and Silicon Valley alike.\nRocket Lab, whose backers have included defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp., is seen as a front-runner among a new breed of so-called small-launch providers. The startup has already launched 97 satellites for the government and for private companies for applications including research and communications. While a handful of established companies including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX focus on sending huge satellites into higher orbits, there are more than 100 new small-rocket ventures around the world that aim to serve lighter satellites. In addition to Rocket Lab, British entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n \u2018s Virgin Orbit LLC is an increasingly large player in the field.\n\n\nAnother one of Mr. Branson\u2019s entities, space-tourism company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\nwent public through a SPAC merger in 2019\u2014putting it at the forefront of the blank-check deal frenzy.\nRocket Lab\u2019s deal with Vector includes additional funds of about $470 million in the form of a so-called private investment in public equity from investors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n BlackRock Inc.\n\n\n and Neuberger Berman Group LLC. Such investments often accompany SPAC deals.\nRocket Lab expects to use proceeds from the deal to fund development of a medium-lift \u201cNeutron\u201d launch vehicle tailored for use in satellite mega-constellations, space missions and commercial spaceflight. The Neutron rocket is expected to be able to lift most satellites forecast to launch in the coming years and be positioned as a lower-cost alternative to larger vehicles.\nRocket Lab also has deal-making ambitions. Indeed, industry officials anticipate that a shakeout eventually may leave just a handful of survivors among small-launch providers.\nWrite to Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com The deal would take the space-transportation startup public, valuing it at around $4.1 billion. ",
        "author": "Cara Lombardo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Reaches Deal to Merge With Vector SPAC (WSJ: Deals) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1337",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-nears-deal-to-merge-with-vector-spac-11614556800?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=10",
        "text": "Vector Acquisition, backed by technology-focused private-equity firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vector Capital,\n\n \n raised $300 million in a September initial public offering. It is one of hundreds of SPACs, which go public without a business and then look for one or more to combine with, to raise money in recent months, as a blank-check wave has taken hold on Wall Street and Silicon Valley alike.\n\n\n\n\nRocket Lab, whose backers have included defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp., is seen as a front-runner among a new breed of so-called small-launch providers. The startup has already launched 97 satellites for the government and for private companies for applications including research and communications. While a handful of established companies including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX focus on sending huge satellites into higher orbits, there are more than 100 new small-rocket ventures around the world that aim to serve lighter satellites. In addition to Rocket Lab, British entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n \u2018s Virgin Orbit LLC is an increasingly large player in the field.\n\n\nAnother one of Mr. Branson\u2019s entities, space-tourism company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\nwent public through a SPAC merger in 2019\u2014putting it at the forefront of the blank-check deal frenzy.\nRocket Lab\u2019s deal with Vector includes additional funds of about $470 million in the form of a so-called private investment in public equity from investors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n BlackRock Inc.\n\n\n and Neuberger Berman Group LLC. Such investments often accompany SPAC deals.\nRocket Lab expects to use proceeds from the deal to fund development of a medium-lift \u201cNeutron\u201d launch vehicle tailored for use in satellite mega-constellations, space missions and commercial spaceflight. The Neutron rocket is expected to be able to lift most satellites forecast to launch in the coming years and be positioned as a lower-cost alternative to larger vehicles.\nRocket Lab also has deal-making ambitions. Indeed, industry officials anticipate that a shakeout eventually may leave just a handful of survivors among small-launch providers.\nWrite to Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com The deal would take the space-transportation startup public, valuing it at around $4.1 billion. ",
        "author": "Cara Lombardo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Reaches Deal to Merge With Vector SPAC (WSJ: Deals) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1338",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-nears-deal-to-merge-with-vector-spac-11614556800?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=33",
        "text": "Vector Acquisition, backed by technology-focused private-equity firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vector Capital,\n\n \n raised $300 million in a September initial public offering. It is one of hundreds of SPACs, which go public without a business and then look for one or more to combine with, to raise money in recent months, as a blank-check wave has taken hold on Wall Street and Silicon Valley alike.\nRocket Lab, whose backers have included defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp., is seen as a front-runner among a new breed of so-called small-launch providers. The startup has already launched 97 satellites for the government and for private companies for applications including research and communications. While a handful of established companies including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX focus on sending huge satellites into higher orbits, there are more than 100 new small-rocket ventures around the world that aim to serve lighter satellites. In addition to Rocket Lab, British entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n \u2018s Virgin Orbit LLC is an increasingly large player in the field.\n\n\nAnother one of Mr. Branson\u2019s entities, space-tourism company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic,\nwent public through a SPAC merger in 2019\u2014putting it at the forefront of the blank-check deal frenzy.\nRocket Lab\u2019s deal with Vector includes additional funds of about $470 million in the form of a so-called private investment in public equity from investors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n BlackRock Inc.\n\n\n and Neuberger Berman Group LLC. Such investments often accompany SPAC deals.\nRocket Lab expects to use proceeds from the deal to fund development of a medium-lift \u201cNeutron\u201d launch vehicle tailored for use in satellite mega-constellations, space missions and commercial spaceflight. The Neutron rocket is expected to be able to lift most satellites forecast to launch in the coming years and be positioned as a lower-cost alternative to larger vehicles.\nRocket Lab also has deal-making ambitions. Indeed, industry officials anticipate that a shakeout eventually may leave just a handful of survivors among small-launch providers.\nWrite to Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com The deal would take the space-transportation startup public, valuing it at around $4.1 billion. ",
        "author": "Cara Lombardo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside Beats President Luke Wood\u2019s John Lautner-Designed L.A. Home (WSJ: Design) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1339",
        "date": "2018-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-beats-president-luke-woods-john-lautner-designed-l-a-home-1516028062?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=104",
        "text": "Reiner and his architect spent the next eight years working on the house, devising contraptions\u00a0to control its environs (the master-bed headboard, for instance, operated every light on the property). But Reiner never occupied\u00a0Silvertop, as he christened the house. Derailed and financially drained by numerous side projects\u2014including contributions for the preservation of L.A.\u2019s Watts Towers\u2014he abandoned his Atomic Age masterwork. In 1974, it was sold in bankruptcy to a neighboring couple, the Burchills, who made it habitable, moved in and stayed for 40 years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNew woodwork in the kitchen.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Magnus M\u00e5rding for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nAnd it might have stayed unfinished if Apple hadn\u2019t bought Beats Electronics.\u00a0Shortly after that $3 billion deal closed, in August 2014, the president of Beats, Luke Wood, and his wife, Sophia Nardin,\u00a0a writer,\u00a0put in a bid for Silvertop. Having lived nearby for 20 years, the couple\u2014who met as undergraduates at Wesleyan\u2014knew about the house but had been searching for a site to build their own dream dwelling from the ground up.\u00a0Wood, a former guitarist and music industry veteran who joined Beats in 2011 to work, in part, on product development with founders Dr. Dre and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jimmy Iovine,\n\n\n\n found himself\u00a0drawn to the idea of completing what Reiner had started, bringing Silvertop and its James Bond atmosphere into the 21st century\u2014by applying a Steve Jobs overlay.\n\n\n\n\nSilvertop\u2019s $7.5 million listing created a minor frenzy among midcentury architecture aficionados. Rivals for the property included Hedi Slimane, at the time the creative director of Yves Saint Laurent, and Benedikt Taschen, founder of Germany\u2019s Taschen publishing house. Slimane says he hoped to use the 4,700-square-foot home and its 960-square-foot guesthouse as a studio. \u201cI went to see it a few times. It was completely untouched, a true masterpiece,\u201d Slimane said via email. As the bidding escalated, Taschen, who owns another Lautner in Los Angeles known as the Chemosphere, promised to best any offer. Wood and Nardin \u201chad their kids with them; we just really liked them,\u201d says Susan Burchill, whose mother, Jacklyn Burchill, died several months after selling Silvertop to the couple for $8.55 million.\n\n\nWood bought every book he could find on Lautner, who had been largely overlooked by the East Coast architectural establishment until after his death in 1994, at age 83. Known for his futuristic approach and deft use of space with complex building sites, the onetime Frank Lloyd Wright prot\u00e9g\u00e9 was hailed by his mentor as the \u201csecond best\u201d architect in the world (after Wright). \u201cI consider John Lautner to be the missing link between Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry,\u201d says architect Frank Escher, who oversaw Lautner\u2019s archives and placed them at L.A.\u2019s Getty Center.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWood and Nardin in the living room.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Magnus M\u00e5rding for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nSouthern California is dotted with Lautners, many owned by fashion or entertainment luminaries. Designer Jeremy Scott owns two Lautners, in Los Angeles and Palm Springs. The actress Kelly Lynch and her husband, producer Mitch Glazer, own a Lautner in L.A.\u2019s Los Feliz hills. Bob Hope\u2019s former Palm Springs Lautner home, with its spaceship curvilinear roof, hosted Louis Vuitton\u2019s 2016 cruise collection show. One Lautner-designed residence, perched above L.A.\u2019s Sunset Strip, has even been bequeathed to LACMA by its owner, James Goldstein.\nWhen Wood and Nardin bought Silvertop, it had a leaky roof, a cramped kitchen added by the Burchills and a host of midcentury technological headaches. The couple enlisted architect Barbara Bestor, who had designed Beats\u2019 corporate offices in L.A. and who had tipped them off to Silvertop\u2019s impending sale. The choice was closely monitored by Lautnerphiles, as well as members of\u00a0the Los Angeles Conservancy, some of whom doubted that Bestor, known for her bohemian aesthetic and marine-grade plywood finishes, was the right person to tackle a landmark renovation. \u201cI was skeptical. She wasn\u2019t the obvious choice as an architect to do a renovation like this,\u201d says interior designer Jamie Bush, who created Silvertop\u2019s\u00a0new\u00a0furnishings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe chaise in the master bedroom is from Phase Design.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Magnus M\u00e5rding for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nBestor hunkered down with Lautner\u2019s original ideas, recorded in hundreds of sketches housed at the Lautner archives at the Getty.\u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t want to be the Hun,\u201d she says.\u00a0Her work on Silvertop is now receiving plaudits (Bush calls it \u201cballsy\u201d) for its insertion of modern amenities that feel in tune with the home\u2019s original intent.\u00a0To gain insight into Lautner, she brought in a general contractor, Lynn Call, who had worked with\u00a0the architect\u00a0decades earlier. As the team investigated how to realize the original plans\u2014such as Lautner\u2019s idea for a crow\u2019s-nest v One of Lautner\u2019s masterworks was left unfinished until Wood and his wife decided to realize his plan\u2014and update it for the 21st century. ",
        "author": "Christina Binkley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla Posts Record Quarterly Earnings on Supply-Chain Resilience (WSJ: Earnings) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1340",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-poised-for-record-quarterly-earnings-on-supply-chain-resilience-11634722200?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=19",
        "text": "The company on Wednesday said it also benefited from cutting some expenses. The efficiency gains, combined with greater vehicle output, more-than offset higher supply costs and other factors, including a reduction in the average price of the vehicles the company sold in the period. \nThe car maker reported a $1.6 billion third-quarter profit, up from $331 million a year earlier, on record revenue of $13.8 billion. The results beat Wall Street expectations of a profit of around $1.3 billion and $13.6 billion in revenue. \n\nTesla is more vertically integrated than many auto makers, helping the company navigate the chip shortage more smoothly than some of its competitors, analysts said. Supply chain problems still took their toll.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe skeleton of a Tesla car at a showroom in China, now home to Tesla\u2019s largest auto plant by output.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sheldon Cooper/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cDue to parts shortages and logistics variability, we have not been able to run our factories at full capacity,\u201d Tesla Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn said on an analyst call, adding that customers are having to wait longer for vehicles. \nMr. Kirkhorn said the company needs to continue pushing to lower outlays given rising commodity and labor costs. \u201cWe have to overcome cost increases that are outside of our control,\u201d he said. \nAnalysts expect Tesla\u2019s vehicle deliveries to continue to climb in the current quarter to around 266,000, according to FactSet\u2014positioning the company to hand over nearly 900,000 vehicles to customers in 2021. The company has said it is aiming to increase deliveries by more than 50% over last year\u2019s total of nearly half a million vehicles.\nTesla is aiming to lay the groundwork for further growth by starting to produce vehicles at two new factories by the end of the year, one in the Austin, Texas, area, where the company is moving its headquarters; the other outside Berlin. \nHowever, Mr. Kirkhorn said Tesla doesn\u2019t expect to deliver vehicles produced at either factory to customers this year. \u201cIt\u2019s possible the stars align and things move quickly. It\u2019s possible that we\u2019re spending the bulk of next year working on ramping these factories. It\u2019s just very hard to say,\u201d he said. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nTesla shares have soared in recent weeks, closing Wednesday around $866, near their record close of $883.09 in January. The stock fell less than 1% in after-hours trading after the company posted results.\nChief Executive Elon Musk suggested at the company\u2019s annual shareholders\u2019 meeting earlier this month that parts shortages were contributing to Tesla product delays. The company has postponed the rollout of its Cybertruck pickup by about a year. Production is now likely to start in late 2022. Output of the company\u2019s long-delayed semitrailer truck, originally due in 2019, has been pushed back even further\u2014to 2023.\n\u201cWe were just basically limited by multiple supply-chain shortages, like so many supply chains of so many types, not just chips,\u201d Mr. Musk said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla will move its headquarters to Austin, Texas, said CEO Elon Musk, comparing the current crowded operations at the factory in Fremont, Calif., to \u2018Spam in a can.\u2019 He said the electric-vehicle maker would continue expanding in California. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. Musk, a mainstay of Tesla\u2019s earnings calls, didn\u2019t participate in the quarterly analyst briefing. The CEO, who also runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and has complained about his workload, said in July that he would no longer be participating in the company\u2019s earnings calls by default.\nSome other CEOs also sometimes sit out earnings calls. But Tesla\u2019s more than $800 billion valuation is widely viewed as being closely tied to Mr. Musk\u2019s leadership. \nMr. Musk said in January that he expected to be chief executive of Tesla for several years, but that nobody should have such a role forever. \u201cThe mission isn\u2019t over yet and we\u2019ve still got a long way to go before we can really make a dent on the world on accelerating the advent of sustainable energy,\u201d he said at the time. \nThe company is facing increased scrutiny of its advanced driver-assistance tools, which help with tasks such as navigating within a lane on the highway.\nLast week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal auto-safety regulator, voiced concern that a lack of transparency related to such features\u2014which don\u2019t make vehicles autonomous\u2014could undermine safety oversight. The agency opened an investigation into Tesla\u2019s Autopilot driver-assistance system in August after a series of crashes involving Teslas and one or more parked emergency vehicles.\nNHTSA, as part of its investigation, has asked Tesla to provide volumes of information about its advanced driver-assistance technology. Th Elon Musk\u2019s electric-vehicle maker notches a third consecutive record quarterly profit, thanks in part to its ability to navigate persistent global supply-chain disruptions. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla Posts Record Quarterly Earnings on Supply-Chain Resilience (WSJ: Earnings) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1341",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-poised-for-record-quarterly-earnings-on-supply-chain-resilience-11634722200?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=19",
        "text": "The company on Wednesday said it also benefited from cutting some expenses. The efficiency gains, combined with greater vehicle output, more-than offset higher supply costs and other factors, including a reduction in the average price of the vehicles the company sold in the period. \n\n\n\n\nThe car maker reported a $1.6 billion third-quarter profit, up from $331 million a year earlier, on record revenue of $13.8 billion. The results beat Wall Street expectations of a profit of around $1.3 billion and $13.6 billion in revenue. \n\nTesla is more vertically integrated than many auto makers, helping the company navigate the chip shortage more smoothly than some of its competitors, analysts said. Supply chain problems still took their toll.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe skeleton of a Tesla car at a showroom in China, now home to Tesla\u2019s largest auto plant by output.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sheldon Cooper/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cDue to parts shortages and logistics variability, we have not been able to run our factories at full capacity,\u201d Tesla Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn said on an analyst call, adding that customers are having to wait longer for vehicles. \nMr. Kirkhorn said the company needs to continue pushing to lower outlays given rising commodity and labor costs. \u201cWe have to overcome cost increases that are outside of our control,\u201d he said. \nAnalysts expect Tesla\u2019s vehicle deliveries to continue to climb in the current quarter to around 266,000, according to FactSet\u2014positioning the company to hand over nearly 900,000 vehicles to customers in 2021. The company has said it is aiming to increase deliveries by more than 50% over last year\u2019s total of nearly half a million vehicles.\nTesla is aiming to lay the groundwork for further growth by starting to produce vehicles at two new factories by the end of the year, one in the Austin, Texas, area, where the company is moving its headquarters; the other outside Berlin. \nHowever, Mr. Kirkhorn said Tesla doesn\u2019t expect to deliver vehicles produced at either factory to customers this year. \u201cIt\u2019s possible the stars align and things move quickly. It\u2019s possible that we\u2019re spending the bulk of next year working on ramping these factories. It\u2019s just very hard to say,\u201d he said. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nTesla shares have soared in recent weeks, closing Wednesday around $866, near their record close of $883.09 in January. The stock fell less than 1% in after-hours trading after the company posted results.\nChief Executive Elon Musk suggested at the company\u2019s annual shareholders\u2019 meeting earlier this month that parts shortages were contributing to Tesla product delays. The company has postponed the rollout of its Cybertruck pickup by about a year. Production is now likely to start in late 2022. Output of the company\u2019s long-delayed semitrailer truck, originally due in 2019, has been pushed back even further\u2014to 2023.\n\u201cWe were just basically limited by multiple supply-chain shortages, like so many supply chains of so many types, not just chips,\u201d Mr. Musk said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla will move its headquarters to Austin, Texas, said CEO Elon Musk, comparing the current crowded operations at the factory in Fremont, Calif., to \u2018Spam in a can.\u2019 He said the electric-vehicle maker would continue expanding in California. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. Musk, a mainstay of Tesla\u2019s earnings calls, didn\u2019t participate in the quarterly analyst briefing. The CEO, who also runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and has complained about his workload, said in July that he would no longer be participating in the company\u2019s earnings calls by default.\nSome other CEOs also sometimes sit out earnings calls. But Tesla\u2019s more than $800 billion valuation is widely viewed as being closely tied to Mr. Musk\u2019s leadership. \nMr. Musk said in January that he expected to be chief executive of Tesla for several years, but that nobody should have such a role forever. \u201cThe mission isn\u2019t over yet and we\u2019ve still got a long way to go before we can really make a dent on the world on accelerating the advent of sustainable energy,\u201d he said at the time. \nThe company is facing increased scrutiny of its advanced driver-assistance tools, which help with tasks such as navigating within a lane on the highway.\nLast week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal auto-safety regulator, voiced concern that a lack of transparency related to such features\u2014which don\u2019t make vehicles autonomous\u2014could undermine safety oversight. The agency opened an investigation into Tesla\u2019s Autopilot driver-assistance system in August after a series of crashes involving Teslas and one or more parked emergency vehicles.\nNHTSA, as part of its investigation, has asked Tesla to provide volumes of information about its advanced driver-assistance technology Elon Musk\u2019s electric-vehicle maker notches a third consecutive record quarterly profit, thanks in part to its ability to navigate persistent global supply-chain disruptions. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Middle East turmoil is disrupting a vital resource for nuclear energy, space flight and birthday balloons (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1342",
        "date": "2017-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/middle-east-turmoil-is-disrupting-a-vital-resource-for-nuclear-energy-space-flight-and-birthday-balloons/",
        "text": "The diplomatic and trade embargo on the tiny Middle Eastern nation of Qatar is creating devastating ripple effects around the globe, including in one little-noticed market: helium.No, helium is not just for filling balloons and making your voice sound like Mickey Mouse. The ultralight gas is widely used in medical imaging, technology manufacturing and nuclear reactors. And the blockade of Qatar, the source of roughly one-fourth of the world\u2019s helium supply, could soon cause destabilizing shortages and skyrocketing prices in this essential global market. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn 2015, Qatar supplied 27.2 percent of the global supply, according to IHS Markit, a research firm. In terms of global helium reserves, or the total amount available that could be tapped, Qatar is tied with Iran for the second-largest source, containing 17 percent of the world\u2019s helium.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe country with the largest amount of helium is actually the United States, which has a little more than one-third of global resources, mostly near the oil and gas fields of Kansas and Oklahoma. Yet the analysts at IHS Markit say the shortfall from Qatar likely can\u2019t be met by increasing production from these aging American fields. Although American producers could benefit from higher global helium prices, they probably won\u2019t be able to boost production enough to meet the demand that is left over from falling Qatari production.Helium is often extracted from natural gas, an abundant resource in Qatar. Helium can be captured both at natural gas deposits and at the processing plants where the gas is transformed into a liquid for shipment.Most Qatari helium travels by land through Saudi Arabia\u00a0to the port at Dubai, from where it is shipped to markets around the world. But on June 5, Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, cut off air, land and sea links with Qatar, accusing the country of supporting terrorism and being a secret ally of Iran. Qatar has denied the charges and protested that the blockade is having a brutal humanitarian impact, cutting off access to food, medical products and other imported goods.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProduction at Qatar\u2019s two helium plants, which are co-operated by the\u00a0state-owned Qatar Petroleum and Exxon Mobil, has ground to a halt, IHS Markit said. Analysts say this could soon send the price of helium skyrocketing and lead to global shortages for some manufacturers.As the lightest known gas, helium has a variety of uses in magnetic resonance imaging, semiconductors, fiber optics, welding and even spacecraft.The Earth has a finite supply of helium, and for years analysts have cautioned about potential long-term shortages. Volatility in the market in recent years encouraged some businesses to recycle helium or find less efficient substitutes. The U.S. government has stockpiled helium for nearly a century, although it has sold off most of these resources in the past few decades.Story continues below advertisementThe blockade shows no immediate signs of resolution. On Friday, Saudi Arabia and its allies issued a list of 13 demands for lifting the blockade, giving Qatar 10 days to cut ties to groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and shut down the broadcaster Al Jazeera.AdvertisementIn an editorial in The Washington Post last week, Qatar\u2019s ambassador to the United States called these claims a \u201csmokescreen for an attempt to infringe upon Qatar\u2019s sovereignty and punish Qatar for its independence.\u201dIn comments June 9, President Trump appeared to express support for the blockade. \u201cThe nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to stop the funding of terrorism.\u201dSome analysts have seen Trump's support of the blockade and his May 20 visit to\u00a0Riyadh as emboldening Saudi Arabia's actions.\u00a0Yet in subsequent remarks, the U.S. State Department criticized Saudi Arabia and its allies for failing to clearly justify the embargo on Qatar, where the United States maintains a military base. Qatar supplies more than a quarter of the world's helium, but it can't get shipments out. Middle East turmoil is disrupting a vital resource for nuclear energy, space flight and birthday balloons",
        "author": "Ana Swanson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How much is a moon rock really worth? (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1343",
        "date": "2018-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/13/how-much-is-a-moon-rock-really-worth/",
        "text": "A Tennessee woman is suing NASA for the right to keep a vial of what she says is moon dust, given to her by astronaut Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.The financial stakes in the lawsuit are potentially quite high: Just last summer, for instance, a bag containing a trace of moon dust from Apollo 11 sold at auction for $1.8 million. The Tennessee woman, Laura Cicco, has a lot more than just a trace: \u201cprobably 10 to 15 cubic centimeters\u201d of the stuff, her lawyer estimates. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPutting a valuation on that much moon dust is nearly impossible, given\u00a0the rarity of the material and the legal murkiness surrounding ownership of it (more on that in a bit). But that doesn't mean we can't try.Story continues below advertisementLet us start with how much it costs to get a moon rock. According to NASA, human astronauts have ferried\u00a0a grand total of\u00a0842 pounds of lunar material from the\u00a0moon's surface to Earth during the Apollo missions. Unmanned Luna missions sent by the former Soviet Union brought back about three quarters of a pound more. Material from the moon can also end up on Earth in the form of lunar meteorites, but for the purposes of this discussion we are only considering moon rocks brought back by humans and their spacecraft.AdvertisementIn 2003 the federal government actually put a price tag on some of its returned moon rocks, in the course of a criminal case involving a group of NASA interns who stole a safe full of moon rocks from a Johnson Space Center laboratory.\u00a0NASA assessed the value of the rocks at around $50,800 per gram in 1973 dollars, based on the total cost of retrieving the samples. That works to just a hair over $300,000 a gram in today's currency.Let us pause for a little back-of-the-envelope math: If we accept that Cicco has 10 to 15 cubic centimeters of lunar material at an average density of 1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, that means she has 15 grams to 22.5 grams of moon dust, which at $300,000 a gram works out to somewhere between $4.5 million and $6.8 million dollars. Not bad for a vial of dirt.Story continues below advertisementSo there you have it? Not quite.AdvertisementJust because it cost that much to\u00a0get a moon rock\u00a0does not mean someone will pay you that much for said rock. In terms of what people actually will pay for a retrieved moon rock, we have very little data to work from because these things have hardly ever been legally sold.NASA maintains that \u201clunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. Government property.\u201d\u00a0In other words, the\u00a0government owns it,\u00a0and you can't sell it.\u201cNo Apollo moon rock or loose quantity of moon dust has ever been sold legally,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, who edits collectspace.com, a website about space memorabilia. \u201cThere is no specific law that addresses moon rock ownership, but the United States considers the samples to be a national treasure and theft of such falls under the laws applying to theft of government property.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThose guidelines, however, only pertain to lunar material acquired during the Apollo missions. There is also the much smaller quantity of moon rocks brought back by the Soviet Luna missions in the 1970s. Some of that material has made it to legal auction: In 1993, for instance, 0.2 grams of lunar soil from one of those missions sold for $442,500, according to Pearlman. Apply that valuation, adjusted for inflation, to Laura Cicco's 10-15 grams and you end up with a potential price well above $40 million.But again, Cicco's soil is allegedly from the Apollo missions, which puts her in a precarious legal position regardless of how it was obtained. In her court filing, Cicco maintains there is \u201cno law against private persons owning lunar material,\u201d which\u00a0is difficult to square with\u00a0NASA's assertion of federal ownership of all lunar material.\u201cThis question of private ownership needs to be answered,\u201d said Cicco's lawyer, Christopher McHugh. \u201cI know there are multiple individuals out there with lunar material.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is also the question of the provenance of the dust. In her filing, Cicco submitted laboratory test results that gave conflicting results as to whether the dust was likely to be of lunar origin. \u201cIt may be possible that some dust from the earth became mingled with this likely lunar sample,\u201d the analyst concluded.But Pearlman has his doubts. He says the color of the dust in the vial does not look like the color of other samples he has seen, and he says moreover that\u00a0the quarantine returning Apollo astronauts were subject to would have made it extremely difficult for Neil Armstrong to take any samples home with him after his mission.McHugh says he \u201ccan't speak to [Cicco's] plans\u201d as to whether she intends to sell the dust. But if the court rules in her favor and she successfully takes the dust to auction, it could prove to be one of the most\u00a0\u2014 if not\u00a0the most\u00a0\u2014 expensive pieces of space memorabilia ever sold.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPearlman, for his part, hopes future space exploration will make these questions less fraught. \u201cPerhaps someday in the hopefully-not-too-distant future, humanity will return to the moon and begin delivering quantities of lunar material back to Earth,\u201d he said. This year NASA announced that it hopes to return humans to the moon in the next decade.Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Robert Pearlman's name. The economics of moon rocks, explained. How much is a moon rock really worth?",
        "author": "Christopher Ingraham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How much is a moon rock really worth? (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1344",
        "date": "2018-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/13/how-much-is-a-moon-rock-really-worth/",
        "text": "A Tennessee woman is suing NASA for the right to keep a vial of what she says is moon dust, given to her by astronaut Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.The financial stakes in the lawsuit are potentially quite high: Just last summer, for instance, a bag containing a trace of moon dust from Apollo 11 sold at auction for $1.8 million. The Tennessee woman, Laura Cicco, has a lot more than just a trace: \u201cprobably 10 to 15 cubic centimeters\u201d of the stuff, her lawyer estimates. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPutting a valuation on that much moon dust is nearly impossible, given\u00a0the rarity of the material and the legal murkiness surrounding ownership of it (more on that in a bit). But that doesn't mean we can't try.Story continues below advertisementLet us start with how much it costs to get a moon rock. According to NASA, human astronauts have ferried\u00a0a grand total of\u00a0842 pounds of lunar material from the\u00a0moon's surface to Earth during the Apollo missions. Unmanned Luna missions sent by the former Soviet Union brought back about three quarters of a pound more. Material from the moon can also end up on Earth in the form of lunar meteorites, but for the purposes of this discussion we are only considering moon rocks brought back by humans and their spacecraft.AdvertisementIn 2003 the federal government actually put a price tag on some of its returned moon rocks, in the course of a criminal case involving a group of NASA interns who stole a safe full of moon rocks from a Johnson Space Center laboratory.\u00a0NASA assessed the value of the rocks at around $50,800 per gram in 1973 dollars, based on the total cost of retrieving the samples. That works to just a hair over $300,000 a gram in today's currency.Let us pause for a little back-of-the-envelope math: If we accept that Cicco has 10 to 15 cubic centimeters of lunar material at an average density of 1.5 grams per cubic centimeter, that means she has 15 grams to 22.5 grams of moon dust, which at $300,000 a gram works out to somewhere between $4.5 million and $6.8 million dollars. Not bad for a vial of dirt.Story continues below advertisementSo there you have it? Not quite.AdvertisementJust because it cost that much to\u00a0get a moon rock\u00a0does not mean someone will pay you that much for said rock. In terms of what people actually will pay for a retrieved moon rock, we have very little data to work from because these things have hardly ever been legally sold.NASA maintains that \u201clunar material retrieved from the Moon during the Apollo Program is U.S. Government property.\u201d\u00a0In other words, the\u00a0government owns it,\u00a0and you can't sell it.\u201cNo Apollo moon rock or loose quantity of moon dust has ever been sold legally,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, who edits collectspace.com, a website about space memorabilia. \u201cThere is no specific law that addresses moon rock ownership, but the United States considers the samples to be a national treasure and theft of such falls under the laws applying to theft of government property.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThose guidelines, however, only pertain to lunar material acquired during the Apollo missions. There is also the much smaller quantity of moon rocks brought back by the Soviet Luna missions in the 1970s. Some of that material has made it to legal auction: In 1993, for instance, 0.2 grams of lunar soil from one of those missions sold for $442,500, according to Pearlman. Apply that valuation, adjusted for inflation, to Laura Cicco's 10-15 grams and you end up with a potential price well above $40 million.But again, Cicco's soil is allegedly from the Apollo missions, which puts her in a precarious legal position regardless of how it was obtained. In her court filing, Cicco maintains there is \u201cno law against private persons owning lunar material,\u201d which\u00a0is difficult to square with\u00a0NASA's assertion of federal ownership of all lunar material.\u201cThis question of private ownership needs to be answered,\u201d said Cicco's lawyer, Christopher McHugh. \u201cI know there are multiple individuals out there with lunar material.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is also the question of the provenance of the dust. In her filing, Cicco submitted laboratory test results that gave conflicting results as to whether the dust was likely to be of lunar origin. \u201cIt may be possible that some dust from the earth became mingled with this likely lunar sample,\u201d the analyst concluded.But Pearlman has his doubts. He says the color of the dust in the vial does not look like the color of other samples he has seen, and he says moreover that\u00a0the quarantine returning Apollo astronauts were subject to would have made it extremely difficult for Neil Armstrong to take any samples home with him after his mission.McHugh says he \u201ccan't speak to [Cicco's] plans\u201d as to whether she intends to sell the dust. But if the court rules in her favor and she successfully takes the dust to auction, it could prove to be one of the most\u00a0\u2014 if not\u00a0the most\u00a0\u2014 expensive pieces of space memorabilia ever sold.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPearlman, for his part, hopes future space exploration will make these questions less fraught. \u201cPerhaps someday in the hopefully-not-too-distant future, humanity will return to the moon and begin delivering quantities of lunar material back to Earth,\u201d he said. This year NASA announced that it hopes to return humans to the moon in the next decade.Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Robert Pearlman's name. The economics of moon rocks, explained. How much is a moon rock really worth?",
        "author": "Christopher Ingraham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senate approves sprawling $250 billion bill to curtail China\u2019s economic and military ambitions (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1345",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/06/08/senate-china-science-technology/",
        "text": "The Senate voted on Tuesday to adopt an approximately $250 billion bill to counter China\u2019s growing economic and military prowess, hoping that major investments in science \u2014 and fresh punishments targeting Beijing \u2014 might give the United States a lasting edge.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a chamber often racked by partisan division, Democrats and Republicans found rare accord over the sprawling measure, known as the United States Innovation and Competition Act, as lawmakers warned that Washington risked ceding the country\u2019s technological leadership to one of its foremost geopolitical adversaries. The proposal commits billions of dollars in federal funds across a wide array of research areas. It pours more than $50 billion in immediate funding into U.S. businesses that manufacture the sort of ultrasmall, in-demand computer chips that power consumer and military devices, which many companies source from China. And it paves the way for the next generation of space exploration at a time when Washington and Beijing are increasingly setting their eyes on the stars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith it, lawmakers also approved a host of proposals that seek to limit China\u2019s economic aspirations and curb its political influence. The bill opens the door for new sanctions targeting Beijing over its human rights practices, commissions a new study about the origin of the coronavirus and calls for a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics. It even authorizes $300 million specifically to counter the political influence of the Chinese Communist Party.\u201cI have watched China take advantage of us in ways legal and illegal over the years,\u201d Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the lead author of the bill, said during an interview before its passage. \u201cThe number one thing China was doing to take advantage of us \u2026 was investing heavily in research and science. And if we didn\u2019t do something about it, they would become the number one economy in the world.\u201dThe bill still must be adopted by the House, where some Democrats have raised early concerns with the Senate\u2019s approach. Its passage comes on the same day the White House organized a new task force to address potential disruptions in the U.S. supply chain, seeking to further boost U.S. manufacturing of key medicines and technology at a time when many of those products and materials are made in countries including China.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor some experts, the burst of activity invoked the specter of the Cold War, when the United States spent once-unfathomable sums to counter the growing reach of the Soviet Union. Decades later, some lawmakers have shied away from the same comparison with Beijing, even as they authorized massive investments to better position U.S. businesses against their Chinese counterparts.\u201cThis is not about a zero-sum relationship or resurrecting a Cold War mentality,\u201d Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a speech earlier in the debate.The Senate\u2019s effort also marks an evolution from the economic confrontations between the United States and China under President Donald Trump. During the last administration, the White House waged a trade war against Beijing, imposing massive tariffs in a tit-for-tat that analysts say caused deep damage to some parts of the U.S. economy. Democrats led by President Biden have tried to dial back Trump\u2019s approach and rhetoric, even as they increasingly have come to share in some of Trump\u2019s alarm about Beijing\u2019s rise.Was Trump\u2019s China trade war worth it?\u201cThe underlying anxiety about China is similar,\u201d said Scott Kennedy, the senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But he said it had \u201cbroadened\u201d beyond a trade dispute into a more ideological clash between China\u2019s authoritarian communist system and \u201cfree-market democracies and the liberal international order.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLawmakers adopted the bill, led by Schumer and Republican Sen. Todd C. Young (Ind.), on a bipartisan, 68-to-32 vote. The Biden administration earlier this month said it supported passage of the research-focused elements of the bill, describing them as \u201cmajor investments in our long-term economic resilience and competitiveness.\u201dDemocrats emphasized that their work on the legislation shows how the two parties can find common ground on a wide array of economic issues, perhaps setting the stage for progress in debates including major upgrades to U.S. infrastructure. But it was not without incident, after a small group of Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) upended lawmakers\u2019 efforts to pass the bill swiftly \u2014 at one point holding up the chamber\u2019s work for days to lament the way in which the legislation had been crafted.Lawmakers authorized the lion\u2019s share of the money under the new legislation, totaling $190 billion, for a major rethinking of federal science, technology and research spending. They created a new technology division within the National Science Foundation to focus on emerging areas including artificial intelligence. The Senate also gave a green light to $10 billion for the Commerce Department to invest in new technology hubs so that other regions and cities across the country can attract the same sort of economic opportunities as Silicon Valley.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere will be millions of Americans in good-paying jobs because of the investments we\u2019re making in the next 10 years,\u201d Schumer said. \u201cThere will be new industries starting, and hopefully, not just in New York City and in San Francisco and in Austin, but also smaller places.\u201dMany of the federal science investments reflect an implicit attempt to battle back China, relying on new federal spending to keep pace with a country that some analysts say is investing more than 2 percent of its gross domestic product annually in research and development. To justify the expense, lawmakers cited economic as well as national security concerns, emphasizing that the United States cannot afford to allow Beijing to dominate emerging fields \u2014 and serve in some cases as the foremost supplier of sensitive tech equipment.\u201cThis is an opportunity for the United States to strike a below\u2026 answering the unfair competition we\u2019re seeing from communist China,\u201d said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who helped prepare the measure.What you need to know about the global chip shortageThe concern has been particularly acute around computer chips, which Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the chamber\u2019s Commerce Committee, described in the days leading up to the vote as the \u201coil of the 21st century.\u201d A wide array of U.S. businesses, from tech giants like Apple and Samsung to automakers such as General Motors, are struggling to navigate a global shortage in semiconductors that has threatened delays in manufacturing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe approximately $53 billion included in the Senate\u2019s bill may not immediately ease the supply crunch, experts say. But like much of the spending authorized this week, it aims to deliver longer-term improvements \u2014 including new financing, for example, so that chipmakers can produce more semiconductors domestically and stave off shortages in the future.\u201cThis is a long-term solution,\u201d said Andy Halataei, the executive vice president of government affairs at the Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington-based trade group that counts Intel and other tech giants as members. \u201cWhen the bill is signed into law, we\u2019re definitely talking about years of construction and building facilities.\u201dThe chip funding still troubled some lawmakers: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for days criticized the measure because the money did not come with significant strings attached. He sought to prohibit companies from taking federal aid to subsidize their manufacturing, then purchasing back stock or padding their executives\u2019 pay, although Sanders did not prevail in pushing for his amendment. He ultimately voted against the bill.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe broad nature of the bill also opened the door for lawmakers to push some of their pet projects, raising alarms among both parties. Senators secured earlier in the debate a prohibition on the sale of shark fins, for example, and a provision requiring online merchants to reveal the country of origin behind the goods they sell \u2014 except in the case of cooked king crab. At one point, a trio of Republican senators even tried to ban research on human-animal hybrids, though the effort ultimately faltered.Amazon and other retailers oppose measure to require country-of-origin labeling for goods sold onlineIn the version that passed the Senate, lawmakers did leave intact a $10 billion authorization for two lunar lander contracts, a provision that could benefit Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. Cantwell, whose committee oversees NASA and helped craft the bill, spearheaded the spending as part of a bipartisan amendment adopted earlier in the debate. Her efforts ignited a controversy because Blue Origin is based in her home state.Sanders sought to strip the funding, describing it as a \u201cBezos bailout,\u201d but his efforts ultimately did not succeed. Cantwell, however, defended the provision on Tuesday by stressing NASA needs to invest in \u201cmany kinds of systems\u201d to ensure its missions succeed. Earlier this month, Blue Origin praised lawmakers for their approach, noting in a statement: \u201cContinued competition will safeguard America\u2019s space industrial base and get America back to the Moon as quickly as possible.\u201dThe rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.Lawmakers also included a host of provisions that take more explicit aim with China in a move that risks ratcheting up bilateral tensions in the years after Trump openly sparred with Beijing. The Senate bill officially designated China the \u201cgreatest geopolitical and geoeconomic challenge\u201d to U.S. foreign policy, and it committed an additional $15 billion to countering that threat \u2014 including combating Chinese influence and disinformation online.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor some Republicans, the provisions still did not go far enough: Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), for example, said lawmakers needed to do more to make sure technologies funded by the U.S. government did not ultimately land in Chinese hands. Some of his attempts to toughen enforcement ultimately failed, and Rubio voted against the bill.\u201cWhat if a year from now we find out \u2014 you\u2019re going to read an article two years from now, whenever \u2014 that says, \u2018The Chinese have stolen a quarter \u2014 25, 30 percent \u2014 of the [intellectual property] developed by the money that\u2019s put forward in the bill that was passed?\u2019 We\u2019re all going to feel pretty stupid around here,\u201d Rubio said in a speech.Yet some liberals thought the bill was too strong, prompting more than 65 groups to raise alarms about the \u201cCold War mentality\u201d of the bill, which they say could feed \u201cracism, violence, xenophobia and white nationalism.\u201d Some House Democrats have echoed those concerns, raising the potential that the bill may change further as debate proceeds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Senate Democrats have labored to play down concerns that the measure is anti-China, and Schumer in particular stressed it reflected a belief Congress should \u201cbuild ourselves up rather than just tear them down.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s aimed mainly at having America progress economically,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the threat of China or another country \u2026 leading in science is a real threat to the country, and we should deal with it not by being angry at them but by doing the right thing for ourselves.\u201d The Senate voted Tuesday to adopt a roughly $250 billion bill to counter China\u2019s growing economic and military prowess, hoping that major investments in science \u2014 and fresh punishments targeting Beijing \u2014 might give the U.S. a lasting edge. Senate approves sprawling $250 billion bill to curtail China\u2019s economic and military ambitions",
        "author": "Tony Romm"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senate approves sprawling $250 billion bill to curtail China\u2019s economic and military ambitions (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1346",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/06/08/senate-china-science-technology/",
        "text": "The Senate voted on Tuesday to adopt an approximately $250 billion bill to counter China\u2019s growing economic and military prowess, hoping that major investments in science \u2014 and fresh punishments targeting Beijing \u2014 might give the United States a lasting edge.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a chamber often racked by partisan division, Democrats and Republicans found rare accord over the sprawling measure, known as the United States Innovation and Competition Act, as lawmakers warned that Washington risked ceding the country\u2019s technological leadership to one of its foremost geopolitical adversaries. The proposal commits billions of dollars in federal funds across a wide array of research areas. It pours more than $50 billion in immediate funding into U.S. businesses that manufacture the sort of ultrasmall, in-demand computer chips that power consumer and military devices, which many companies source from China. And it paves the way for the next generation of space exploration at a time when Washington and Beijing are increasingly setting their eyes on the stars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith it, lawmakers also approved a host of proposals that seek to limit China\u2019s economic aspirations and curb its political influence. The bill opens the door for new sanctions targeting Beijing over its human rights practices, commissions a new study about the origin of the coronavirus and calls for a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics. It even authorizes $300 million specifically to counter the political influence of the Chinese Communist Party.\u201cI have watched China take advantage of us in ways legal and illegal over the years,\u201d Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the lead author of the bill, said during an interview before its passage. \u201cThe number one thing China was doing to take advantage of us \u2026 was investing heavily in research and science. And if we didn\u2019t do something about it, they would become the number one economy in the world.\u201dThe bill still must be adopted by the House, where some Democrats have raised early concerns with the Senate\u2019s approach. Its passage comes on the same day the White House organized a new task force to address potential disruptions in the U.S. supply chain, seeking to further boost U.S. manufacturing of key medicines and technology at a time when many of those products and materials are made in countries including China.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor some experts, the burst of activity invoked the specter of the Cold War, when the United States spent once-unfathomable sums to counter the growing reach of the Soviet Union. Decades later, some lawmakers have shied away from the same comparison with Beijing, even as they authorized massive investments to better position U.S. businesses against their Chinese counterparts.\u201cThis is not about a zero-sum relationship or resurrecting a Cold War mentality,\u201d Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a speech earlier in the debate.The Senate\u2019s effort also marks an evolution from the economic confrontations between the United States and China under President Donald Trump. During the last administration, the White House waged a trade war against Beijing, imposing massive tariffs in a tit-for-tat that analysts say caused deep damage to some parts of the U.S. economy. Democrats led by President Biden have tried to dial back Trump\u2019s approach and rhetoric, even as they increasingly have come to share in some of Trump\u2019s alarm about Beijing\u2019s rise.Was Trump\u2019s China trade war worth it?\u201cThe underlying anxiety about China is similar,\u201d said Scott Kennedy, the senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But he said it had \u201cbroadened\u201d beyond a trade dispute into a more ideological clash between China\u2019s authoritarian communist system and \u201cfree-market democracies and the liberal international order.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLawmakers adopted the bill, led by Schumer and Republican Sen. Todd C. Young (Ind.), on a bipartisan, 68-to-32 vote. The Biden administration earlier this month said it supported passage of the research-focused elements of the bill, describing them as \u201cmajor investments in our long-term economic resilience and competitiveness.\u201dDemocrats emphasized that their work on the legislation shows how the two parties can find common ground on a wide array of economic issues, perhaps setting the stage for progress in debates including major upgrades to U.S. infrastructure. But it was not without incident, after a small group of Republicans led by Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) upended lawmakers\u2019 efforts to pass the bill swiftly \u2014 at one point holding up the chamber\u2019s work for days to lament the way in which the legislation had been crafted.Lawmakers authorized the lion\u2019s share of the money under the new legislation, totaling $190 billion, for a major rethinking of federal science, technology and research spending. They created a new technology division within the National Science Foundation to focus on emerging areas including artificial intelligence. The Senate also gave a green light to $10 billion for the Commerce Department to invest in new technology hubs so that other regions and cities across the country can attract the same sort of economic opportunities as Silicon Valley.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere will be millions of Americans in good-paying jobs because of the investments we\u2019re making in the next 10 years,\u201d Schumer said. \u201cThere will be new industries starting, and hopefully, not just in New York City and in San Francisco and in Austin, but also smaller places.\u201dMany of the federal science investments reflect an implicit attempt to battle back China, relying on new federal spending to keep pace with a country that some analysts say is investing more than 2 percent of its gross domestic product annually in research and development. To justify the expense, lawmakers cited economic as well as national security concerns, emphasizing that the United States cannot afford to allow Beijing to dominate emerging fields \u2014 and serve in some cases as the foremost supplier of sensitive tech equipment.\u201cThis is an opportunity for the United States to strike a below\u2026 answering the unfair competition we\u2019re seeing from communist China,\u201d said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who helped prepare the measure.What you need to know about the global chip shortageThe concern has been particularly acute around computer chips, which Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the chamber\u2019s Commerce Committee, described in the days leading up to the vote as the \u201coil of the 21st century.\u201d A wide array of U.S. businesses, from tech giants like Apple and Samsung to automakers such as General Motors, are struggling to navigate a global shortage in semiconductors that has threatened delays in manufacturing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe approximately $53 billion included in the Senate\u2019s bill may not immediately ease the supply crunch, experts say. But like much of the spending authorized this week, it aims to deliver longer-term improvements \u2014 including new financing, for example, so that chipmakers can produce more semiconductors domestically and stave off shortages in the future.\u201cThis is a long-term solution,\u201d said Andy Halataei, the executive vice president of government affairs at the Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington-based trade group that counts Intel and other tech giants as members. \u201cWhen the bill is signed into law, we\u2019re definitely talking about years of construction and building facilities.\u201dThe chip funding still troubled some lawmakers: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for days criticized the measure because the money did not come with significant strings attached. He sought to prohibit companies from taking federal aid to subsidize their manufacturing, then purchasing back stock or padding their executives\u2019 pay, although Sanders did not prevail in pushing for his amendment. He ultimately voted against the bill.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe broad nature of the bill also opened the door for lawmakers to push some of their pet projects, raising alarms among both parties. Senators secured earlier in the debate a prohibition on the sale of shark fins, for example, and a provision requiring online merchants to reveal the country of origin behind the goods they sell \u2014 except in the case of cooked king crab. At one point, a trio of Republican senators even tried to ban research on human-animal hybrids, though the effort ultimately faltered.Amazon and other retailers oppose measure to require country-of-origin labeling for goods sold onlineIn the version that passed the Senate, lawmakers did leave intact a $10 billion authorization for two lunar lander contracts, a provision that could benefit Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. Cantwell, whose committee oversees NASA and helped craft the bill, spearheaded the spending as part of a bipartisan amendment adopted earlier in the debate. Her efforts ignited a controversy because Blue Origin is based in her home state.Sanders sought to strip the funding, describing it as a \u201cBezos bailout,\u201d but his efforts ultimately did not succeed. Cantwell, however, defended the provision on Tuesday by stressing NASA needs to invest in \u201cmany kinds of systems\u201d to ensure its missions succeed. Earlier this month, Blue Origin praised lawmakers for their approach, noting in a statement: \u201cContinued competition will safeguard America\u2019s space industrial base and get America back to the Moon as quickly as possible.\u201dThe rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.Lawmakers also included a host of provisions that take more explicit aim with China in a move that risks ratcheting up bilateral tensions in the years after Trump openly sparred with Beijing. The Senate bill officially designated China the \u201cgreatest geopolitical and geoeconomic challenge\u201d to U.S. foreign policy, and it committed an additional $15 billion to countering that threat \u2014 including combating Chinese influence and disinformation online.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor some Republicans, the provisions still did not go far enough: Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), for example, said lawmakers needed to do more to make sure technologies funded by the U.S. government did not ultimately land in Chinese hands. Some of his attempts to toughen enforcement ultimately failed, and Rubio voted against the bill.\u201cWhat if a year from now we find out \u2014 you\u2019re going to read an article two years from now, whenever \u2014 that says, \u2018The Chinese have stolen a quarter \u2014 25, 30 percent \u2014 of the [intellectual property] developed by the money that\u2019s put forward in the bill that was passed?\u2019 We\u2019re all going to feel pretty stupid around here,\u201d Rubio said in a speech.Yet some liberals thought the bill was too strong, prompting more than 65 groups to raise alarms about the \u201cCold War mentality\u201d of the bill, which they say could feed \u201cracism, violence, xenophobia and white nationalism.\u201d Some House Democrats have echoed those concerns, raising the potential that the bill may change further as debate proceeds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Senate Democrats have labored to play down concerns that the measure is anti-China, and Schumer in particular stressed it reflected a belief Congress should \u201cbuild ourselves up rather than just tear them down.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s aimed mainly at having America progress economically,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the threat of China or another country \u2026 leading in science is a real threat to the country, and we should deal with it not by being angry at them but by doing the right thing for ourselves.\u201d The Senate voted Tuesday to adopt a roughly $250 billion bill to counter China\u2019s growing economic and military prowess, hoping that major investments in science \u2014 and fresh punishments targeting Beijing \u2014 might give the U.S. a lasting edge. Senate approves sprawling $250 billion bill to curtail China\u2019s economic and military ambitions",
        "author": "Tony Romm"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Top Trump official promises a \u2018gas station\u2019 on the moon (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1347",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/02/top-trump-official-promises-a-gas-station-on-the-moon/",
        "text": "Imagine blasting off from Earth in a rocket ship, stopping at a rest stop on the moon to refuel and then heading out to Mars or an asteroid.To space experts, this is a possibility that might happen in some of our lifetimes. But President Trump's commerce secretary says it's likely to happen far sooner than that. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cYou're going to end up with the moon being a type of gas station,\u201d\u00a0said Wilbur Ross in an interview Friday at the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing conference.Asked whether a gas station on the moon would happen in the next decade, Ross replied: It's coming \u201ca lot sooner than that.\u201dNASA scientists have been studying the idea of having some sort of landing and refueling station on the moon \u2014 or near it. It's difficult to send rockets from Earth directly to Mars or an asteroid because they need to carry large amounts of fuel to go such a long distance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMaking a pit stop\u00a0near the moon\u00a0could be ideal because, as scientists recently discovered, there's water on the moon. That's key, because the elements that make up water \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 are used for rocket fuel.Trump wants a military 'space force.' Here's whyBut right now, it's just an idea on paper. It will take years to build anything like a \u201cgas station,\u201d experts say, and it might not be feasible. NASA will need consistent funding, and the president and Congress can't change their minds about the mission, as has happened in the past.Then there's the big question about whether the water on the moon is usable for rocket fuel. It's unclear how much is there or how easy it would be to extract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are very sure there is water there, but questions remain about exactly how much is there and what form it is in,\u201d said\u00a0Bethany Ehlmann, professor of planetary science at Caltech who has worked on the Mars rovers.AdvertisementEvery scientist, astronaut and space policy expert with whom The Washington Post spoke said the \u201cgas station\u201d Ross\u00a0mentioned is at least a decade away, if it even happens.\u201cI\u00a0would categorize\u00a0it as\u00a0extremely optimistic thinking to do a gas station in 10 years,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, although he added\u00a0that \u201csome of this will happen in people's lifetimes.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRoss talks about a \u201cgas station\u201d on the surface of the moon, but NASA's current plan is to build a \u201clunar outpost\u201d that is in the moon's orbit. The official name of the project is the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, and the first part of the gateway is targeted for launch in 2022.The gateway is mainly meant to function as a research and exploration base that can ultimately host humans, similar to the International Space Station.Advertisement\u201cNone of this exists yet,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cWe don't even have the rocket we are going to use operating yet.\u201dNASA is working on a new launch system (dubbed the Space Launch System) with the goal of a first launch in 2020, a reminder that many elements have to fall into place for the Trump administration's vision to come to pass.The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run ventureRoss says there are huge incentives to develop this \u201cgas station,\u201d because humans have a lot of reasons to be in space more often: space tourism, for example, or the mining of gold and platinum from asteroids.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is already a $340 billion business. We think it will be into the trillions within not a huge number of years,\u201d Ross said. \u201cSpace is the next truly huge frontier and a huge, huge opportunity for the United States.\u201dRoss is a member of Trump's National Space Council that is quickly reimagining America's future in space. The Trump administration has scrapped plans to go to Mars and has directed NASA to focus on the moon. The hope is that once the United States returns to the moon, it will be easier to get to Mars \u2014 and beyond.AdvertisementThere are concerns that some scientific research projects might get the ax as the Trump administration shifts resources. The administration has proposed making the International Space Station a commercial venture\u00a0in a few years, and NASA recently canceled plans for a moon rover, although recently confirmed\u00a0NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted Friday\u00a0that more scientific missions are coming soon: \u201cWe\u2019re committed to lunar exploration @NASA ...\u00a0More landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners. Ad astra!\u201d (Latin for \u201cto the stars\u201d).Story continues below advertisementRoss is getting more heavily involved in space policy because of the growth of private companies such as\u00a0Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin\u00a0in space travel, exploration and commercial activities. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The commerce secretary has promised more \u201csensible\u201d regulation of the\u00a0blossoming\u00a0industry, including how to manage the many satellites circling Earth.Whether a \u201cgas station\u201d will be built is uncertain, but the race for the United States to return to the moon\u00a0and build a presence there has begun. But even the lunar gateway might not be finished before Trump leaves office.Advertisement\u201cThe Trump administration is likely to get credit for starting this, but it's probably going to get finished on another president's watch,\u201d said a former NASA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.Staff writer Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Related\u00a0Meet Trump's new NASA administrator\u00a0Why the White House wants to create a traffic cop for spaceBezos's Blue Origin, Musk's SpaceX and Orbital ATK are racing to be the first to send people to space Trump wants the United States back on the moon with a refueling station for rockets, but there a lot of hurdles before that can happen. Top Trump official promises a \u2018gas station\u2019 on the moon",
        "author": "Heather Long"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Top Trump official promises a \u2018gas station\u2019 on the moon (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1348",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/02/top-trump-official-promises-a-gas-station-on-the-moon/",
        "text": "Imagine blasting off from Earth in a rocket ship, stopping at a rest stop on the moon to refuel and then heading out to Mars or an asteroid.To space experts, this is a possibility that might happen in some of our lifetimes. But President Trump's commerce secretary says it's likely to happen far sooner than that. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cYou're going to end up with the moon being a type of gas station,\u201d\u00a0said Wilbur Ross in an interview Friday at the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing conference.Asked whether a gas station on the moon would happen in the next decade, Ross replied: It's coming \u201ca lot sooner than that.\u201dNASA scientists have been studying the idea of having some sort of landing and refueling station on the moon \u2014 or near it. It's difficult to send rockets from Earth directly to Mars or an asteroid because they need to carry large amounts of fuel to go such a long distance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMaking a pit stop\u00a0near the moon\u00a0could be ideal because, as scientists recently discovered, there's water on the moon. That's key, because the elements that make up water \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 are used for rocket fuel.Trump wants a military 'space force.' Here's whyBut right now, it's just an idea on paper. It will take years to build anything like a \u201cgas station,\u201d experts say, and it might not be feasible. NASA will need consistent funding, and the president and Congress can't change their minds about the mission, as has happened in the past.Then there's the big question about whether the water on the moon is usable for rocket fuel. It's unclear how much is there or how easy it would be to extract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are very sure there is water there, but questions remain about exactly how much is there and what form it is in,\u201d said\u00a0Bethany Ehlmann, professor of planetary science at Caltech who has worked on the Mars rovers.AdvertisementEvery scientist, astronaut and space policy expert with whom The Washington Post spoke said the \u201cgas station\u201d Ross\u00a0mentioned is at least a decade away, if it even happens.\u201cI\u00a0would categorize\u00a0it as\u00a0extremely optimistic thinking to do a gas station in 10 years,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, although he added\u00a0that \u201csome of this will happen in people's lifetimes.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRoss talks about a \u201cgas station\u201d on the surface of the moon, but NASA's current plan is to build a \u201clunar outpost\u201d that is in the moon's orbit. The official name of the project is the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, and the first part of the gateway is targeted for launch in 2022.The gateway is mainly meant to function as a research and exploration base that can ultimately host humans, similar to the International Space Station.Advertisement\u201cNone of this exists yet,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cWe don't even have the rocket we are going to use operating yet.\u201dNASA is working on a new launch system (dubbed the Space Launch System) with the goal of a first launch in 2020, a reminder that many elements have to fall into place for the Trump administration's vision to come to pass.The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run ventureRoss says there are huge incentives to develop this \u201cgas station,\u201d because humans have a lot of reasons to be in space more often: space tourism, for example, or the mining of gold and platinum from asteroids.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is already a $340 billion business. We think it will be into the trillions within not a huge number of years,\u201d Ross said. \u201cSpace is the next truly huge frontier and a huge, huge opportunity for the United States.\u201dRoss is a member of Trump's National Space Council that is quickly reimagining America's future in space. The Trump administration has scrapped plans to go to Mars and has directed NASA to focus on the moon. The hope is that once the United States returns to the moon, it will be easier to get to Mars \u2014 and beyond.AdvertisementThere are concerns that some scientific research projects might get the ax as the Trump administration shifts resources. The administration has proposed making the International Space Station a commercial venture\u00a0in a few years, and NASA recently canceled plans for a moon rover, although recently confirmed\u00a0NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted Friday\u00a0that more scientific missions are coming soon: \u201cWe\u2019re committed to lunar exploration @NASA ...\u00a0More landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners. Ad astra!\u201d (Latin for \u201cto the stars\u201d).Story continues below advertisementRoss is getting more heavily involved in space policy because of the growth of private companies such as\u00a0Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin\u00a0in space travel, exploration and commercial activities. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The commerce secretary has promised more \u201csensible\u201d regulation of the\u00a0blossoming\u00a0industry, including how to manage the many satellites circling Earth.Whether a \u201cgas station\u201d will be built is uncertain, but the race for the United States to return to the moon\u00a0and build a presence there has begun. But even the lunar gateway might not be finished before Trump leaves office.Advertisement\u201cThe Trump administration is likely to get credit for starting this, but it's probably going to get finished on another president's watch,\u201d said a former NASA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.Staff writer Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Related\u00a0Meet Trump's new NASA administrator\u00a0Why the White House wants to create a traffic cop for spaceBezos's Blue Origin, Musk's SpaceX and Orbital ATK are racing to be the first to send people to space Trump wants the United States back on the moon with a refueling station for rockets, but there a lot of hurdles before that can happen. Top Trump official promises a \u2018gas station\u2019 on the moon",
        "author": "Heather Long"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Top Trump official promises a \u2018gas station\u2019 on the moon (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1349",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/02/top-trump-official-promises-a-gas-station-on-the-moon/",
        "text": "Imagine blasting off from Earth in a rocket ship, stopping at a rest stop on the moon to refuel and then heading out to Mars or an asteroid.To space experts, this is a possibility that might happen in some of our lifetimes. But President Trump's commerce secretary says it's likely to happen far sooner than that. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cYou're going to end up with the moon being a type of gas station,\u201d\u00a0said Wilbur Ross in an interview Friday at the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing conference.Asked whether a gas station on the moon would happen in the next decade, Ross replied: It's coming \u201ca lot sooner than that.\u201dNASA scientists have been studying the idea of having some sort of landing and refueling station on the moon \u2014 or near it. It's difficult to send rockets from Earth directly to Mars or an asteroid because they need to carry large amounts of fuel to go such a long distance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMaking a pit stop\u00a0near the moon\u00a0could be ideal because, as scientists recently discovered, there's water on the moon. That's key, because the elements that make up water \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 are used for rocket fuel.Trump wants a military 'space force.' Here's whyBut right now, it's just an idea on paper. It will take years to build anything like a \u201cgas station,\u201d experts say, and it might not be feasible. NASA will need consistent funding, and the president and Congress can't change their minds about the mission, as has happened in the past.Then there's the big question about whether the water on the moon is usable for rocket fuel. It's unclear how much is there or how easy it would be to extract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are very sure there is water there, but questions remain about exactly how much is there and what form it is in,\u201d said\u00a0Bethany Ehlmann, professor of planetary science at Caltech who has worked on the Mars rovers.AdvertisementEvery scientist, astronaut and space policy expert with whom The Washington Post spoke said the \u201cgas station\u201d Ross\u00a0mentioned is at least a decade away, if it even happens.\u201cI\u00a0would categorize\u00a0it as\u00a0extremely optimistic thinking to do a gas station in 10 years,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus and founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, although he added\u00a0that \u201csome of this will happen in people's lifetimes.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRoss talks about a \u201cgas station\u201d on the surface of the moon, but NASA's current plan is to build a \u201clunar outpost\u201d that is in the moon's orbit. The official name of the project is the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, and the first part of the gateway is targeted for launch in 2022.The gateway is mainly meant to function as a research and exploration base that can ultimately host humans, similar to the International Space Station.Advertisement\u201cNone of this exists yet,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cWe don't even have the rocket we are going to use operating yet.\u201dNASA is working on a new launch system (dubbed the Space Launch System) with the goal of a first launch in 2020, a reminder that many elements have to fall into place for the Trump administration's vision to come to pass.The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run ventureRoss says there are huge incentives to develop this \u201cgas station,\u201d because humans have a lot of reasons to be in space more often: space tourism, for example, or the mining of gold and platinum from asteroids.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is already a $340 billion business. We think it will be into the trillions within not a huge number of years,\u201d Ross said. \u201cSpace is the next truly huge frontier and a huge, huge opportunity for the United States.\u201dRoss is a member of Trump's National Space Council that is quickly reimagining America's future in space. The Trump administration has scrapped plans to go to Mars and has directed NASA to focus on the moon. The hope is that once the United States returns to the moon, it will be easier to get to Mars \u2014 and beyond.AdvertisementThere are concerns that some scientific research projects might get the ax as the Trump administration shifts resources. The administration has proposed making the International Space Station a commercial venture\u00a0in a few years, and NASA recently canceled plans for a moon rover, although recently confirmed\u00a0NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted Friday\u00a0that more scientific missions are coming soon: \u201cWe\u2019re committed to lunar exploration @NASA ...\u00a0More landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners. Ad astra!\u201d (Latin for \u201cto the stars\u201d).Story continues below advertisementRoss is getting more heavily involved in space policy because of the growth of private companies such as\u00a0Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin\u00a0in space travel, exploration and commercial activities. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The commerce secretary has promised more \u201csensible\u201d regulation of the\u00a0blossoming\u00a0industry, including how to manage the many satellites circling Earth.Whether a \u201cgas station\u201d will be built is uncertain, but the race for the United States to return to the moon\u00a0and build a presence there has begun. But even the lunar gateway might not be finished before Trump leaves office.Advertisement\u201cThe Trump administration is likely to get credit for starting this, but it's probably going to get finished on another president's watch,\u201d said a former NASA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.Staff writer Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Related\u00a0Meet Trump's new NASA administrator\u00a0Why the White House wants to create a traffic cop for spaceBezos's Blue Origin, Musk's SpaceX and Orbital ATK are racing to be the first to send people to space Trump wants the United States back on the moon with a refueling station for rockets, but there a lot of hurdles before that can happen. Top Trump official promises a \u2018gas station\u2019 on the moon",
        "author": "Heather Long"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The next eclipse is on Mars (WP: Economic Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1350",
        "date": "2017-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/08/18/mars-has-eclipses-we-have-video/",
        "text": "Are you going through eclipse withdrawal? Mars has you covered.Earth typically experiences anywhere from four to seven eclipses in a year, counting\u00a0partial solar eclipses (when the moon doesn't fully obscure the sun) and\u00a0lunar eclipses (when the earth's shadow partially obscures the moon).WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Mars, however, solar eclipses are practically a daily event. Mars has two moons \u2014 tiny, potato-shaped satellites named Phobos and Deimos, after the Greek deities of fear and dread, respectively. For a sense of how small they are, here's a NASA illustration comparing them with the size of Earth's moon. FROM LEFT: Deimos, Phobos and the Earth's moon. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems/Texas A&M University)But Mars' moons orbit at a much closer distance than our own Moon orbits ours. While the moon is about 238,000 miles away from Earth (give or take), Phobos is only about 6,000 miles away from the surface of Mars.The great American eclipse is finally hereAmong other things, that proximity causes it to rotate incredibly fast, circling around Mars in under eight hours. A person standing on Mars would see it cross the sky twice in one day. Because of its small size, it appears smaller than our own moon does to us.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere's what Phobos looks like in the Martian afternoon sky to the Mars Curiosity rover:Phobos' close, fast orbit\u00a0makes it cross paths with the sun fairly often \u2014 near-daily. But because the moon is so small it never fully occludes the sun to create a total eclipse. Part of the sun's disc is always visible.The Mars Curiosity rover captured real-time video of this happening on Aug. 20, 2013.Here's how a Martian solar eclipse appeared from the vantage point of NASA's Curiosity rover in Gale Crater. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/TAMU)Here are a few still shots captured by the rover during that event.Against the solar backdrop, you can clearly make out Phobos' irregular shape, which it partly owes to being so small that it doesn't exert enough gravity to pull itself into a proper sphere. A person weighing 150 pounds on Earth would weigh only two ounces on Phobos.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBecause this eclipse occurred near midday at Curiosity's location on Mars,\u201d NASA explains, \u201cPhobos was nearly overhead, closer to the rover than it would have been earlier in the morning or later in the afternoon. This timing made Phobos' silhouette larger against the sun \u2014 as close to a total eclipse of the sun as is possible from Mars.\u201dHere's a wide-angle shot of a 2010\u00a0Mars eclipse\u00a0taken by the Opportunity rover.What about the other Martian moon? Deimos orbits more than twice as far away from Mars and is smaller to boot, making it much less visible in the Martian sky. When Deimos crosses paths with the sun, it's more properly called a transit, rather than an eclipse.In this photo of a Deimos transit taken by the Opportunity rover in 2004,\u00a0the moon basically looks like a sunspot.Other planets experience eclipses, too, although we haven't observed any of them from the ground up. Here, for instance, is a Hubble telescope image of Jupiter's moon Io casting a shadow on Jupiter's surface.From Jupiter, the sun appears much smaller than it does in our own sky. A number of the planet's moons obscure it completely, creating not an eclipse but an occultation \u2014 an astronomical term for when one object is completely hidden by another one of much larger apparent size.\u00a0Because Jupiter has at least 69 moons, it sometimes experiences\u00a0multiple eclipses and occultations\u00a0simultaneously.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA similar situation holds on Saturn, Uranus and even faraway Neptune. Eclipses can happen on Pluto, too.But our own total eclipses on Earth are one-of-a-kind. Because of the similarity between the apparent sizes of the moon and sun when viewed from Earth, our total eclipses block out the entirety of the sun's disc while leaving\u00a0the luminous corona \u2014 the sun's fiery atmosphere \u2014 plainly visible in the darkened sky.That event happens nowhere else in the solar system \u2014 not even on Mars. Stunning photos and video footage from NASA's Mars rovers show the Red Planet has eclipses. The next eclipse is on Mars",
        "author": "Christopher Ingraham"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA wants to get to the moon \u2018as fast as possible.\u2019 But countries like China and India are racing there, too. (WP: Economy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1351",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/nasa-wants-to-get-to-the-moon-as-fast-as-possible-but-countries-like-china-and-india-are-racing-there-too/2019/02/14/d2944b90-2bec-11e9-b2fc-721718903bfc_story.html",
        "text": "During the height of the Space Age, the United States and the Soviet Union bushwhacked a frantic path to the lunar surface, landing nearly 20 spacecraft softly on the moon between 1966 and 1976, including the six carrying NASA\u2019s Apollo astronauts.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after the last of these missions, a robotic Soviet probe that brought back six ounces of lunar soil, Earth\u2019s closest neighbor was virtually abandoned. The public and politicians lost interest. While the occasional orbiter has launched to survey the moonsince then,in more than 42 years only one spacecraft touched down softly on the lunar surface: China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 3 in 2013.However, the moon, often referred to as the eighth continent, is again the center of a reinvigorated space race that, like any good Hollywood reboot, features a new cast of characters and novel story lines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is the rise of China, which on Jan. 3 landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first. This month, an Israeli spacecraft destined for the moon is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. If successful, it would make Israel the fourth country, after the United States, Russia and China, to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.Later this year \u2014 the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing \u2014 two more moon missions are planned, one by India and another, by China. On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the space agency intends to partner with the private sector to land an American spacecraft on the moon as early as this year.\u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201dNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesIf those landings are successful, it would set a record: the most soft lunar landings in a single year, surpassing 1966 and 1972, which each saw three vehicles touch down. (At the beginning of the Space Age, many spacecraft ended up crashing into the moon.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration has said a return to the moon is a top priority. And NASA this month announced a plan to develop spacecraft capable of bringing humans to the lunar surface by 2028. That\u2019s a key step, NASA says, in building a permanent presence on and near the moon.\u201cThis time, when we go to the moon, we\u2019re actually going to stay,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to leave flags and footprints, and then come home, to not go back for another 50 years.\u201dLike the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the new lunar activity is fueled by national pride and a quest for scientific discovery in a high-stakes contest among countries, especially with China.Yet, unlike the Apollo era, this Space Age is being driven by a third factor: greed. A growing number of corporations are benefiting from new technologies and wealthy backers chasing an unproven dream that a lucrative business can be built on the moon and deep space by extracting the metals and resources on the surface on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the prospect of a self-sustaining lunar-mining economy may be little more than a chimera, the moon is drawing investors and explorers the way the promise of the American West once did. As a result, several ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA wants to get to the moon \u2018as fast as possible.\u2019 But countries like China and India are racing there, too. (WP: Economy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1352",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/nasa-wants-to-get-to-the-moon-as-fast-as-possible-but-countries-like-china-and-india-are-racing-there-too/2019/02/14/d2944b90-2bec-11e9-b2fc-721718903bfc_story.html",
        "text": "During the height of the Space Age, the United States and the Soviet Union bushwhacked a frantic path to the lunar surface, landing nearly 20 spacecraft softly on the moon between 1966 and 1976, including the six carrying NASA\u2019s Apollo astronauts.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after the last of these missions, a robotic Soviet probe that brought back six ounces of lunar soil, Earth\u2019s closest neighbor was virtually abandoned. The public and politicians lost interest. While the occasional orbiter has launched to survey the moonsince then,in more than 42 years only one spacecraft touched down softly on the lunar surface: China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 3 in 2013.However, the moon, often referred to as the eighth continent, is again the center of a reinvigorated space race that, like any good Hollywood reboot, features a new cast of characters and novel story lines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is the rise of China, which on Jan. 3 landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first. This month, an Israeli spacecraft destined for the moon is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. If successful, it would make Israel the fourth country, after the United States, Russia and China, to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.Later this year \u2014 the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing \u2014 two more moon missions are planned, one by India and another, by China. On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the space agency intends to partner with the private sector to land an American spacecraft on the moon as early as this year.\u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201dNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesIf those landings are successful, it would set a record: the most soft lunar landings in a single year, surpassing 1966 and 1972, which each saw three vehicles touch down. (At the beginning of the Space Age, many spacecraft ended up crashing into the moon.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration has said a return to the moon is a top priority. And NASA this month announced a plan to develop spacecraft capable of bringing humans to the lunar surface by 2028. That\u2019s a key step, NASA says, in building a permanent presence on and near the moon.\u201cThis time, when we go to the moon, we\u2019re actually going to stay,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to leave flags and footprints, and then come home, to not go back for another 50 years.\u201dLike the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the new lunar activity is fueled by national pride and a quest for scientific discovery in a high-stakes contest among countries, especially with China.Yet, unlike the Apollo era, this Space Age is being driven by a third factor: greed. A growing number of corporations are benefiting from new technologies and wealthy backers chasing an unproven dream that a lucrative business can be built on the moon and deep space by extracting the metals and resources on the surface on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the prospect of a self-sustaining lunar-mining economy may be little more than a chimera, the moon is drawing investors and explorers the way the promise of the American West once did. As a result, several ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA wants to get to the moon \u2018as fast as possible.\u2019 But countries like China and India are racing there, too. (WP: Economy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1353",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/nasa-wants-to-get-to-the-moon-as-fast-as-possible-but-countries-like-china-and-india-are-racing-there-too/2019/02/14/d2944b90-2bec-11e9-b2fc-721718903bfc_story.html",
        "text": "During the height of the Space Age, the United States and the Soviet Union bushwhacked a frantic path to the lunar surface, landing nearly 20 spacecraft softly on the moon between 1966 and 1976, including the six carrying NASA\u2019s Apollo astronauts.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after the last of these missions, a robotic Soviet probe that brought back six ounces of lunar soil, Earth\u2019s closest neighbor was virtually abandoned. The public and politicians lost interest. While the occasional orbiter has launched to survey the moonsince then,in more than 42 years only one spacecraft touched down softly on the lunar surface: China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 3 in 2013.However, the moon, often referred to as the eighth continent, is again the center of a reinvigorated space race that, like any good Hollywood reboot, features a new cast of characters and novel story lines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is the rise of China, which on Jan. 3 landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first. This month, an Israeli spacecraft destined for the moon is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. If successful, it would make Israel the fourth country, after the United States, Russia and China, to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.Later this year \u2014 the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing \u2014 two more moon missions are planned, one by India and another, by China. On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the space agency intends to partner with the private sector to land an American spacecraft on the moon as early as this year.\u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201dNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesIf those landings are successful, it would set a record: the most soft lunar landings in a single year, surpassing 1966 and 1972, which each saw three vehicles touch down. (At the beginning of the Space Age, many spacecraft ended up crashing into the moon.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration has said a return to the moon is a top priority. And NASA this month announced a plan to develop spacecraft capable of bringing humans to the lunar surface by 2028. That\u2019s a key step, NASA says, in building a permanent presence on and near the moon.\u201cThis time, when we go to the moon, we\u2019re actually going to stay,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to leave flags and footprints, and then come home, to not go back for another 50 years.\u201dLike the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the new lunar activity is fueled by national pride and a quest for scientific discovery in a high-stakes contest among countries, especially with China.Yet, unlike the Apollo era, this Space Age is being driven by a third factor: greed. A growing number of corporations are benefiting from new technologies and wealthy backers chasing an unproven dream that a lucrative business can be built on the moon and deep space by extracting the metals and resources on the surface on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the prospect of a self-sustaining lunar-mining economy may be little more than a chimera, the moon is drawing investors and explorers the way the promise of the American West once did. As a result, several ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA wants to get to the moon \u2018as fast as possible.\u2019 But countries like China and India are racing there, too. (WP: Economy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1354",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/nasa-wants-to-get-to-the-moon-as-fast-as-possible-but-countries-like-china-and-india-are-racing-there-too/2019/02/14/d2944b90-2bec-11e9-b2fc-721718903bfc_story.html",
        "text": "During the height of the Space Age, the United States and the Soviet Union bushwhacked a frantic path to the lunar surface, landing nearly 20 spacecraft softly on the moon between 1966 and 1976, including the six carrying NASA\u2019s Apollo astronauts.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after the last of these missions, a robotic Soviet probe that brought back six ounces of lunar soil, Earth\u2019s closest neighbor was virtually abandoned. The public and politicians lost interest. While the occasional orbiter has launched to survey the moonsince then,in more than 42 years only one spacecraft touched down softly on the lunar surface: China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 3 in 2013.However, the moon, often referred to as the eighth continent, is again the center of a reinvigorated space race that, like any good Hollywood reboot, features a new cast of characters and novel story lines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is the rise of China, which on Jan. 3 landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first. This month, an Israeli spacecraft destined for the moon is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. If successful, it would make Israel the fourth country, after the United States, Russia and China, to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.Later this year \u2014 the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing \u2014 two more moon missions are planned, one by India and another, by China. On Thursday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the space agency intends to partner with the private sector to land an American spacecraft on the moon as early as this year.\u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible,\u201d he told reporters. \u201cWe\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201dNASA is about to launch astronauts into space again \u2013 and a massive business for big companiesIf those landings are successful, it would set a record: the most soft lunar landings in a single year, surpassing 1966 and 1972, which each saw three vehicles touch down. (At the beginning of the Space Age, many spacecraft ended up crashing into the moon.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration has said a return to the moon is a top priority. And NASA this month announced a plan to develop spacecraft capable of bringing humans to the lunar surface by 2028. That\u2019s a key step, NASA says, in building a permanent presence on and near the moon.\u201cThis time, when we go to the moon, we\u2019re actually going to stay,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to leave flags and footprints, and then come home, to not go back for another 50 years.\u201dLike the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the new lunar activity is fueled by national pride and a quest for scientific discovery in a high-stakes contest among countries, especially with China.Yet, unlike the Apollo era, this Space Age is being driven by a third factor: greed. A growing number of corporations are benefiting from new technologies and wealthy backers chasing an unproven dream that a lucrative business can be built on the moon and deep space by extracting the metals and resources on the surface on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the prospect of a self-sustaining lunar-mining economy may be little more than a chimera, the moon is drawing investors and explorers the way the promise of the American West once did. As a result, several ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deere shares increase despite profit drop; early Lyft investors can divest from Monday (WP: Economy) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1355",
        "date": "2019-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/deere-shares-increase-despite-profit-drop-early-lyft-investors-can-divest-from-monday/2019/08/16/64320100-c02b-11e9-9b73-fd3c65ef8f9c_story.html",
        "text": "Deere shares increase despite profit dropWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDeere\u2019s shares jumped after it pledged to lower its costs and offered an outlook cut that was less than some investors feared as it fights to overcome a disruptive trade war and a slowing global economy.The world\u2019s top tractor maker gained the most in seven months, climbing as much as 5.1\u00a0percent after announcing earnings Friday to recover some of the losses earlier in the week. While quarterly earnings trailed the average estimate, its guidance and a vow to boost efficiency may have comforted investors battered by a tumultuous two weeks in agriculture markets. American growers are resisting major purchases as the U.S.-China trade war stretches into a second year and after a season when wild weather battered their crops. An escalation in trade tensions led to China halting purchases of American farm products, while corn prices tanked Monday when the U.S. government came out with acreage and yield numbers that exceeded estimates.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s been so much negative sentiment with the erosion of the trade environment and then the disastrous WASDE report,\u201d said Chris Ciolino, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst. \u201cPeople were bracing for more doom and gloom.\u201dWith production costs in some segments rising, the Moline, Ill.-based company said it\u2019s \u201cinitiating a series of actions to make the organization more structurally efficient and profitable.\u201dFor fiscal 2019, equipment sales are now projected to rise about 4 percent, with net income forecast at $3.2 billion, Deere said in a statement. Three months ago, it predicted 5\u00a0percent equipment sales growth and $3.3 billion profit.While Deere remains positive on general economic conditions, it lowered guidance for construction and forestry and expects fiscal 2019 economic growth in the United States to be in line with 2018, downgrading a previous forecast for acceleration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn a net basis, quarterly profit slipped to $899 million from $910 million a year ago. Sales fell 3 percent.\u2014 Bloomberg NewsLyft's early investors can divest on MondaySome early investors in the ride-hailing company Lyft, one of the most anticipated yet disappointing IPOs of the year, will get their first opportunity to sell shares on Monday.The lockup expiry was brought ahead from Sept. 24, as the original date would have fallen within Lyft\u2019s blackout period ahead of third-quarter earnings.Lyft estimated that about 258\u00a0million class A shares may become eligible for sale at the market open on Aug. 19. The company had 280 million Class A shares outstanding as of July 31, according to Bloomberg data. Including Class B shares, equity award plans and restricted stock units, the total diluted number of shares stood at about 341.5\u00a0million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s shares gained as much as 1.8 percent in New York on Friday.In a report published after Lyft\u2019s earnings on Aug. 7, D.A. Davidson analyst Tom White said the company\u2019s co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer will not be selling shares at the time of the lockup expiry.Lyft\u2019s latest quarterly results, which surpassed expectations, outshone larger rival Uber, which reported a \u201cmessy\u201d quarter, analysts said. Lyft shares have fallen 12 percent since reporting earnings on Aug. 7.\u2014 Bloomberg NewsWells Fargo piled onto an increasingly gloomy outlook for banks on Friday, cutting its price targets and earnings estimates for more than a dozen stocks. The firm reduced its annual estimates by about 6 percent for 2020-2021 and also trimmed expectations for the second half of 2019. Wells Fargo expects about 30 basis points of net interest margin compression between 2018 and 2021, vs. earlier expectations that bank industry NIM would increase about 10 basis points over that period. Wells Fargo said disclosures suggest more downside at current interest rate levels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChampagne, caviar and seared tuna will be on the menu for Virgin Galactic\u00a0astronauts in training when they arrive at the company's new home in the desert scrublands of southern New Mexico. As for when the actual flights will begin, no one's saying yet. Virgin Galactic offered journalists a tour of their new headquarters and customer center this week at Spaceport America, declaring the facility \"operationally ready\" for space tourism.\u00a0\u2014 Bloomberg News A roundup of financial news from around the world. Deere shares increase despite profit drop; early Lyft investors can divest from Monday",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "MIT Media Lab director resigns after new report on hidden ties to Jeffrey Epstein (WP: Education) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1356",
        "date": "2019-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/07/head-mit-media-lab-resigns-amid-scandal-over-jeffrey-epstein-donations/",
        "text": "The head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Media Lab resigned on Saturday and stepped down from the boards of several organizations following revelations that the lab accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from disgraced billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement comes a day after the New Yorker reported that Media Lab director Joi Ito and his colleagues worked to conceal the financier\u2019s donations and affiliation with the program. Epstein died last month in jail as he faced federal charges of sex trafficking of minors. Ito, who confirmed his resignation to The Post, notified members of the Media Lab of his departure in an email just after 3 p.m. Saturday.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI want to apologize again for my errors in judgment,\u201d he wrote in the email provided to The Washington Post by a graduate student at the lab. \u201cI have spent the last days and weeks listening to all of you and I want to thank you again for sharing your insights and perspectives with me, and allowing me [to] begin to try to make amends. After giving the matter a great deal of thought, I have chosen to resign as Director of the Media Lab and as a Professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately.\u201dAdvertisementIn a letter to the university, MIT President L. Rafael Reif called the allegations \u201cdeeply disturbing,\u201d adding that the school would hire a law firm to conduct an internal investigation into Epstein\u2019s donations.The layers of Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s connectionsThe Media Lab studies the application of technology to several fields, including medicine, agriculture, health, media, space exploration and artificial intelligence, according to its website. It has an annual operating budget of $80 million. Ito had served as its director since September 2011.Story continues below advertisementThe Epstein conflagration has swept up the Eastern Seaboard, first in the tony enclaves of Palm Beach, Fla., where the financier was known to party alongside Donald Trump, before moving on to New York, where Epstein allegedly ran a sex-trafficking ring from his Upper East Side mansion for years. Epstein died by suicide last month while in federal custody.AdvertisementNow, it has engulfed Cambridge.According to the New Yorker\u2019s Ronan Farrow, Epstein was listed as a \u201cdisqualified\u201d donor in MIT\u2019s database, and the Media Lab classified his donations as anonymous and kept his name off Ito\u2019s calendar. In a September 2014 email obtained by Farrow, Ito asked Epstein to help fund a researcher, writing \u201cCould you re-up/top-off with another $100K so we can extend his contract another year?\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a subsequent email with the subject line \u201cJeffrey Epstein money,\u201d Farrow reports, Ito instructed his staff to \u201cmake sure this gets accounted for as anonymous.\u201d Farrow writes that staff also raised objections to a 2015 visit from Epstein, according to Signe Swenson, a former employee at the lab who resigned in 2016.These reports go beyond what Ito revealed last month.On Aug. 15, five days after Epstein\u2019s death, Ito disclosed in a blog post that the Lab had accepted money from the billionaire \u201cthrough some of the foundations he controlled\u201d and that the donations had been made with his knowledge and permission. Ito also disclosed that he allowed Epstein to \u201cinvest in several of my funds which invest in tech start-up companies outside of MIT.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIto apologized for his dealings with Epstein but insisted that \u201cin all of my interactions with Epstein, I was never involved in, never heard him talk about, and never saw any evidence of the horrific acts that he was accused of.\u201dIto vowed to raise and donate funds equal to Epstein\u2019s contribution to the Media Lab to nonprofits that combat sex trafficking.MIT received about $800,000 over the course of 20 years from foundations that Epstein controlled, according to an Aug. 22 letter to the university from Reif, MIT\u2019s president.\u201cAll of those gifts went either to the MIT Media Lab or to Professor Seth Lloyd,\u201d who teaches mechanical engineering and physics, Reif said. He also announced that an internal panel had been convened to look into the donations and to examine the university\u2019s policies on such gifts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe New York Times later reported that Ito took about $1.7 million from Epstein over the past decade.As a result of the disclosures, two researchers affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, Ethan Zuckerman and J. Nathan Matias, a visiting scholar, resigned in protest in late August, the New York Times reported. At a meeting on Sept. 4, MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, an architect, appeared to defend the program\u2019s initial decision to take Epstein\u2019s money several years ago, the MIT Technology Review reported. After an outcry, Negroponte said that given what the public now knows about Epstein\u2019s behavior, his money would and should not be accepted.Story continues below advertisementEpstein had tried to use his money to ingratiate himself with the academic elite long before the first accusations against him became public in the mid-2000s. Epstein donated extensively to universities including MIT and Harvard, which has said it would not return a $6.5 million donation that the financier made in 2003, before he pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges of soliciting prostitution.AdvertisementAfter Epstein served a prison sentence he sought to rebuild his reputation, an effort that may have involved once again establishing his status among the scientific elite. In an Aug. 22 apology to Epstein\u2019s victims, Lloyd, the MIT mechanical engineering and physics professor, called his decisions to accept grants from Epstein \u201cprofessional as well as moral failings.\u201dWhile Ito maintained supporters after his initial disclosure, the new reports appear to have dealt him a blow.Story continues below advertisementOn Saturday, several organizations said Ito would step down from their boards. He resigned from the board of trustees of the American nonprofit Knight Foundation, spokesman Andrew Sherry confirmed, as well as the New York Times Co. board of directors, according to a company spokeswoman. The MacArthur Foundation announced he had stepped down from its board of directors as well.AdvertisementAn August petition supporting Ito with over 200 signatures from friends and the MIT community has been updated to clarify that these signatures \u201cshould not be read as continued support of Joi staying on as Media Lab Director following the most recent revelations\u201d in the New Yorker.Before Ito\u2019s resignations, prominent women in the media world such as Xeni Jardin had spoken out on social media against his ties to Epstein, and writer Anand Giridharadas announced he would leave the jury for the Media Lab\u2019s Disobedience Award.Story continues below advertisementArwa Mboya, 25, a second-year graduate student at the Media Lab wrote a guest column in MIT\u2019s student newspaper, the Tech, last Thursday, calling on Ito to resign.\u201cI feel vindicated, like I\u2019m not crazy,\u201d she said to The Post in the wake of Ito\u2019s resignation. \u201cI\u2019m okay that it took a few weeks to happen. I thought he was wrong from the beginning.\u201dRead more:Epstein\u2019s donations to universities reveal a painful truth about philanthropy Joi Ito also stepped down from the boards of the New York Times Company and the MacArthur Foundation MIT Media Lab director resigns after new report on hidden ties to Jeffrey Epstein",
        "author": "Kayla Epstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Faces Head for Capitol Hill (WSJ: Election 2020) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1357",
        "date": "2020-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/congresss-new-faces-include-ex-astronaut-citadels-first-female-grad-11605106196?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=38",
        "text": "The gains reflect longstanding efforts by GOP organizations such as the National Republican Congressional Committee, Congressional Leadership Fund and Winning for Women, which invested heavily in 2020 races. Many of the new GOP women won back seats lost to Democrats in the previous cycle.\nWhile Democrats lost seats this year in the House, they are set to bring more Black members and women to their caucus, and more young faces. The overall split in the House currently stands at 218 Democrats and 202 Republicans, with several seats still to be decided.\n\n\nHere are some people to watch for in the next Congress.\n\n\n\n\nSenate\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMark Kelly of Arizona defeated the Republican incumbent to pick up a seat for the Democrats.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cheney Orr/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Kelly\n\n\n\n : He beat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Martha McSally\n\n\n\n in Arizona, moving the seat to Democratic control. Mr. Kelly is a retired U.S. Navy combat pilot and National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut and flew the first of his four missions into space in 2001 aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. He has spent more than 50 days in space and has an identical twin brother,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly,\n\n\n\n who was also an astronaut. Mr. Kelly, 56 years old, is married to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot and badly injured in 2011.\nTogether, they founded the organization now known as Giffords, which helps fund candidates who back legislation to expand background checks for gun purchases, and has pushed for gun safety legislation in Congress. He joins former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Luj\u00e1n\n\n\n\n as new Democrats in the Senate.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTommy Tuberville, a former Auburn football coach, won the Alabama seat the Republicans lost in 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tommy Tuberville\n\n\n\n : The former football coach defeated\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Doug Jones\n\n\n\n in Alabama, winning the seat that Republicans lost in 2017. Mr. Tuberville is best known in the state for coaching Auburn\u2019s football team, where he took the Tigers to eight consecutive bowl games and had a 13-0 season in 2004. He also coached at the University of Mississippi, Texas Tech University and the University of Cincinnati.\nMr. Tuberville, 66, aligned himself closely with President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n during the campaign and is expected to advocate for Mr. Trump\u2019s policies as he represents his conservative state. In the Senate, he is joined by the new Republicans\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cynthia Lummis\n\n\n\n of Wyoming,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Hagerty\n\n\n\n in Tennessee and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Marshall\n\n\n\n in Kansas.\n\n\n\n\nHouse Republicans\n\n\n\n\n\n\nByron Donalds, who will represent the Naples, Fla., area, cast himself as a politically incorrect Black man.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Steve Cannon/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Byron Donalds\n\n\n\n : He may be the only Black member in the Republican conference in the next Congress, with one race in Utah featuring a Black Republican still uncalled. He will represent the Naples, Fla., area, which he recently represented in the state legislature. Mr. Donalds, 42, cast himself to voters as \u201ca strong, Trump-supporting, gun-owning, liberty-loving, pro-life, politically incorrect Black man\u201d and has said he plans to join the Congressional Black Caucus. In Utah,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Burgess Owens,\n\n\n\n who is Black, is running to unseat Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Ben McAdams.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNancy Mace of South Carolina, the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, defeated a freshman Democrat.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mic Smith/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nancy Mace\n\n\n\n : She will represent South Carolina\u2019s low country after beating freshman Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Joe Cunningham\n\n\n\n to move the seat to Republican control. In 1999, she became the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, the military school in South Carolina. Ms. Mace, 42, is a single mother of two children, which she spoke about in the race. She served in the state legislature.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYvette Herrell defeated the Democratic incumbent in a rematch of the 2018 race to represent a rural New Mexico district.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jacqueline Devine/Daily News/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yvette Herrell\n\n\n\n : She beat Democratic Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xochitl Torres Small\n\n\n\n in a rematch of the 2018 election to represent a rural New Mexico district. She will be the first Republican woman Native American in Congress, as a Cherokee Nation member. A former member of the state legi On their way to Washington are a pastor and registered nurse; the first woman to graduate from the Citadel; a former college football coach; and a retired astronaut. Some races yet to be called. ",
        "author": "Natalie Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden speaks on health care, calls Trump refusal to concede \u2018an embarrassment\u2019 (WP: Elections) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1358",
        "date": "2020-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2020/11/10/joe-biden-trump-election-live-updates/",
        "text": "Please NoteThe Washington Post is providing this important election information free to all readers. Get election results and other major news delivered to your inbox by signing up for breaking news email alerts.President-elect Joe Biden continued at a news conference Tuesday to project the authority of an incoming president even as President Trump resists conceding the race. Biden defended the Affordable Care Act soon after the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving President Barack Obama\u2019s signature health-care law. He also called Trump\u2019s refusal to concede \u201can embarrassment\u201d and said he may start naming Cabinet members as soon as this month. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters that legal challenges being pressed by Trump are \u201cno reason for alarm\u201d and would not prevent a new administration, \u201cif there is one,\u201d from taking office in January. Biden said he has not yet spoken to McConnell, but intends to in the \u201cnot too distant future.\u201dAlso, Sen. Thom Tillis is projected by Edison Research to hold onto his seat in North Carolina, beating Cal Cunningham, one of the candidates Democrats had hoped would swing the Senate in their direction. Control rests on the two runoffs in Georgia.Here\u2019s what to know now:A majority of the Supreme Court appeared ready Tuesday to uphold most of the Affordable Care Act in the face of a challenge from Republican-led states and the Trump administration.The White House has instructed senior government leaders to block cooperation with Biden\u2019s transition team, escalating a standoff that threatens to impede the transfer of power and prompting the Biden team to consider legal action.Biden has begun taking calls from foreign leaders and weighing whom to appoint to top White House positions, with several of his longtime advisers expected to take senior roles.Attorney General William P. Barr gave federal prosecutors approval to pursue allegations of \u201cvote tabulation irregularities\u201d in certain cases before results are certified \u2014 a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy.Biden doesn\u2019t need ballots that arrived after Election Day to win PennsylvaniaReturn to menuBy Colby Itkowitz9:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkPennsylvania\u2019s top elections official, Kathy Boockvar, said about 10,000 mail-in ballots were received in counties across the state after polls closed on Election Day, taking the air out of lawsuit brought by state Republicans seeking to discard ballots received between 8 p.m. on Nov. 3 and 6 p.m. on Nov. 5.Biden is leading Trump in Pennsylvania by more than 45,000 votes, meaning even if the Republicans\u2019 legal challenge was successful and those late-arriving ballots were tossed, Biden would still win the state.Pennsylvania counties are still working through about 94,000 provisional ballots given to people who voted in person on Election Day but required extra verification.\u201cMillions of Pennsylvanians voted and made their voices heard in a free, fair and open election last week. I am so proud of the election officials and poll workers who worked tirelessly, amid a pandemic, so voters could decide this election,\u201d Secretary of the Commonwealth Boockvar said in a statement.Republicans have multiple legal challenges going in Pennsylvania. They petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and stop the counting of late-arriving ballots and to ensure they were being segregated from other ballots.Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who received the petition because he is the justice responsible for that region, did not order the counting be stopped but did tell the counties they had to comply with state guidance to keep the late ballots separate \u2014 which they were already doing.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs states press forward with vote counts, Trump advisers privately express pessimism about heading off Biden\u2019s winReturn to menuBy Amy Gardner, Tom Hamburger, Jon Swaine and Josh Dawsey8:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkSix states where Trump has threatened to challenge his defeat continued their march toward declaring certified election results in the coming weeks, as his advisers privately acknowledged that Biden\u2019s official victory is less a question of \u201cif\u201d than \u201cwhen.\u201d Trump began the day tweeting about \u201cBALLOT COUNTING ABUSE\u201d as he and his allies touted unproved claims that election fraud had tainted the election in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Vice President Pence gave a presentation to GOP senators on Capitol Hill about new litigation expected in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia \u2014 imploring them to stick with the president, according several Republicans in the room.But even some of the president\u2019s most publicly pugilistic aides, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and informal adviser Corey Lewandowski, have said privately that they are concerned about the lawsuits\u2019 chances for success unless more evidence surfaces, according to people familiar with their views.Trump met with advisers again Tuesday afternoon to discuss whether there is a path forward, said a person with knowledge of the discussions, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. The person said Trump plans to keep fighting but understands it is going to be difficult. \u201cHe is all over the place. It changes from hour to hour,\u201d the person said.In the states, Democratic and some Republican officials said they have seen no evidence of fraud on a scale sufficient to overturn the results. \u201cThere is no evidence of widespread voter fraud,\u201d one GOP official in Georgia said.Read the story hereAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump campaign says it is filing new lawsuit in Michigan claiming voting irregularitiesReturn to menuBy Tom Hamburger8:12 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump\u2019s campaign said it was a filing federal lawsuit in Michigan on Tuesday evening asking for an emergency ruling declaring that Republican voters were denied their constitutional rights in the way votes were counted in the state and seeking to stop certification of the results.The lawsuit will be the second the campaign has filed in Michigan. A lawsuit filed in the Michigan courts by the campaign last week was dismissed by a state Court of Claims judge who said the suit lacked merit.The new case will include affidavits from more than 100 witnesses describing improper counting of ballots, votes cast by dead people and tabulation and software errors, according to Trump campaign lawyers. They said the affidavits will describe how Republican poll watchers at the TCF Center in Detroit, where absentee votes were counted, were ridiculed and their complaints were often ignored. The actions violated the guarantee of equal protection under the law, according to Matt Morgan, the campaign\u2019s general counsel.A Michigan election law expert who represents Democrats dismissed the new suit.\u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine a viable claim on the grounds they are asserting,\u201d said Chris Trebilcock, who has been monitoring the lawsuits that are landing in Michigan.Of four lawsuits filed in the state so far by the Trump campaign and allied groups, three have been dismissed, he said. And the Trump campaign would have to prove substantial fraud to upend Joe Biden\u2019s win in the state, which he secured by nearly 150,000 votes.But at the opening of the evening phone conference, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said it was not at all clear that Biden had won the election.In any case, he said, the 71.5 million people who voted for Trump \u201cdeserve to trust in the security of the election. Murtaugh said it will take a while to get to a final result but ultimately, he argued, Trump would be victorious. \u201cWe are telling the president\u2019s supporters that they will need to have patience. We are not going to eat the apple in one bite,\u201d he said.Counties in Michigan are supposed to certify by Nov. 17 and then the results go to a state canvassing board for certification. That board must meet on Nov. 23.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementRepublican Sen. Pat Toomey says Biden \u2018likely\u2019 next president and Trump should begin transitionReturn to menuBy Colby Itkowitz8:07 p.m.Link copiedLinkSen. Patrick J. Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania \u2014 one of the handful of battleground states that Trump won in 2016 and lost this year \u2014 said Biden is the \u201clikely\u201d winner and that the president should begin the transition process.Toomey, who is not running for reelection when his term is up in 2022, struck a delicate balance, not quite accepting that Biden is the president-elect, but acknowledging the reality of the results.\u201cWe\u2019re on a path it looks likely Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States. It\u2019s not 100% certain but it is quite likely,\u201d Toomey said in an interview with Pittsburgh\u2019s Action News 4. \u201cSo I think a transition process ought to begin.\u201dToomey did not foreclose the idea that Trump could still win through recounts and court challenges, but called it an \u201cunlikely scenario.\u201d Most Senate Republicans have embraced Trump\u2019s baseless claims that voting irregularities and fraud cost him the election and are refusing to acknowledge Biden as the next president. Only four Senate Republicans, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have congratulated Biden on his win.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPostal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials sayReturn to menuBy Shawn Boburg and Jacob Bogage7:12 p.m.Link copiedLinkA Pennsylvania postal worker whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations, according to three officials briefed on the investigation and a statement from a House congressional committee.Richard Hopkins\u2019s claim that a postmaster in Erie, Pa., instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in a letter to the Justice Department calling for a federal investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities and fraud, a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy.But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S. Postal Service\u2019s Office of Inspector General that the allegations were not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting his claims, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tweeted late Tuesday that the \u201cwhistleblower completely RECANTED.\u201dHopkins did not respond to messages seeking comment.The reversal comes as Trump has refused to concede to Biden, citing unproven allegations about widespread voter fraud in an attempt to swing the results in his favor. Republicans held up Hopkins\u2019s claims as among the most credible because he signed an affidavit swearing that he overheard a supervisor instructing colleagues to backdate ballots mailed after Nov. 3.Read the story here. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTop Wisconsin election official says \u2018no evidence\u2019 so far of problems with state\u2019s voteReturn to menuBy Rosalind Helderman6:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkWisconsin\u2019s top election official said in a statement Tuesday evening that \u201cno evidence\u201d has been provided to the state that \u201csupports allegations of systematic or widespread election issues\u201d in the state, where Biden holds a slim 20,500-vote lead over Trump.Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said that while the state\u2019s results are still unofficial \u2014 counties are currently triple-checking results before submitting them to the state \u2014 she had \u201cnot seen any credible information to cast any doubt on those unofficial results.\u201dWolfe\u2019s statement comes as the Trump campaign continues to maintain there were \u201cirregularities\u201d in the Wisconsin vote \u2014 but has provided no evidence nor cited any specific examples of potential problems. The campaign says it plans to request a recount in the state, which is allowed given that Biden\u2019s margin of victory is under 1 percent. The campaign cannot file a petition for the recount until after a county completes its canvass, which must occur by Nov. 17.Wolfe noted that every step of the voting process is open to observers in Wisconsin. This includes voting at the polls on Election Day and the counting of absentee ballots (some localities live-streamed the absentee count.) Every ballot also has a paper trail, she noted, which is currently being rechecked before certification.\u201cUnfortunately, we are seeing many concerns that result from this unsubstantiated misinformation,\u201d Wolfe said. \u201cWe want Wisconsin\u2019s voters to know we hear their concerns and to provide facts on these processes to combat the rumors and misinformation.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementGOP Sen. Thom Tillis projected to win Senate race in North CarolinaReturn to menuBy Colby Itkowitz5:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkRepublican Sen. Thom Tillis is the projected winner in the North Carolina Senate race, according to Edison Research, which made the call a few hours after Democrat Cal Cunningham conceded the race.Cunningham \u2014 who Democrats considered one of their best chances to flip a Senate seat this year \u2014 fell short, as did many Democrats challenging an incumbent Republican senator. The Democrats flipped two seats, one in Arizona and one in Colorado, giving them 48 seats to the Republicans\u2019 49 seats. \u201cThe voters have spoken and I respect their decision,\u201d Cunningham said in a statement in which he shared that he\u2019d just called Tillis to congratulate him.\u201cThis was a hard-fought campaign and I wish nothing but the best to Cal and his family going forward,\u201d Tillis said in a statement. \u201cI am confident that we all can come together and meet this moment and am ready to get to work.\u201dThe balance of power in the Senate won\u2019t be known until after dual runoff elections for Georgia\u2019s two Senate seats on Jan. 5. The winners of those races will determine which party has the majority. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPence cancels Florida vacationReturn to menuBy Josh Dawsey5:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkVice President Pence is no longer going to Florida on vacation as planned this week, administration officials say. Pence is instead staying back in Washington as the president seeks to overturn results in a number of states with unproven allegations of widespread voter fraud, officials say.Pence argued to senators Tuesday they should stick with the president and gave a presentation on legal actions the team planned to file in many states. But Pence has been largely out of the limelight and did not attend a news conference that he was invited to attend in Philadelphia last week to allege fraudThe invitation by some of the president\u2019s outside advisers was declined by Marc Short, the vice president\u2019s chief of staff, who believed it would be inappropriate for him to attend.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs Arizona count ticks on, Democratic volunteers race to make sure ballots are not rejectedReturn to menuBy Hannah Knowles4:34 p.m.Link copiedLinkTOLLESON, Ariz. \u2014 It took her three tries to get the right door, and then no one answered. Maria Hern\u00e1ndez started walking back to her car to find the next person on her list at risk of losing his or her vote.Then a woman came out of the house. It was the voter\u2019s mom. Hern\u00e1ndez explained that her daughter needed to call the county by Tuesday to confirm that the signature on her ballot\u2019s envelope was hers.\u201cIt\u2019ll take her, like, one minute,\u201d Hern\u00e1ndez said, offering her own phone number for any questions. The woman agreed to remind her daughter.\u201cBiden is so close,\u201d Hern\u00e1ndez said as she left.Days after Biden was declared the victor in the White House race, the vote in Arizona remains too close to call and the margin is narrowing.Read the full storyArrowRightBiden names transition teams to gather information about federal agenciesReturn to menuBy Lisa Rein3:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkEven as the Trump administration blocked his access to the government, President-elect Joe Biden forged ahead Tuesday with a key step in the transition of power: naming teams that will begin gathering information about federal operations.Biden\u2019s transition team has assembled a list of 500 experts in federal policy from diplomacy to space exploration who will form the backbone of the effort to prepare to lead the U.S. government in January, learning from the workforce there now what to expect at every agency on personnel, technology, policy and program matters.\u201cIt\u2019s about getting the Cabinet leaders ready to lead, equipping them with the information they need,\u201d a Biden transition official said in advance of the public rollout.Read the full storyArrowRightBiden says Trump\u2019s refusal to concede is \u2018an embarrassment\u2019 that \u2018will not help the president\u2019s legacy\u2019Return to menuBy Felicia Sonmez3:27 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident-elect Joe Biden said Nov. 10 that President Trump's refusal to concede \"will not help the president's legacy.\" (The Washington Post)In remarks in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday afternoon, Biden weighed in on Trump\u2019s refusal to concede the presidential race, denouncing the president\u2019s actions and suggesting that Americans are \u201cready to unite.\u201d\u201cWell, I just think it\u2019s an embarrassment, quite frankly,\u201d Biden said of Trump\u2019s insistence that he won the race. \u201cThe only thing that \u2014 how can I say this tactfully? \u2014 I think it will not help the president\u2019s legacy.\u201dBiden chose his words carefully, noting several times in his exchange with reporters that \u201cthere\u2019s only one president at a time.\u201d But he also maintained that \u201cnothing\u2019s going to stop\u201d the transition effort as he moves forward with selecting Cabinet nominees and take other steps in the next two months.\u201cI\u2019m confident that the fact that they\u2019re not willing to acknowledge we won at this point is not of much consequence in our planning and what we\u2019re able to do between now and January 20th,\u201d Biden said. He added that he hopes to \u201cbe in a position to let people know at least a couple [Cabinet members] that we want before Thanksgiving.\u201dThe president-elect referred to his conversations with a half-dozen world leaders since the race was called in his favor Saturday. He said those leaders \u201care hopeful that the United States\u2019 democratic institutions are viewed once again as being strong and enduring.\u201dBiden played down concerns about the transition team\u2019s current lack of access to classified information, telling reporters, \u201cIt would be nice to have it, but it\u2019s not critical\u201d and noting that \u201cI\u2019m not in a position to make any decisions on those issues anyway.\u201dHe said he looks forward to speaking to both Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at some point, and he declined to specifically criticize McConnell for refusing to acknowledge his win.\u201cI think that the whole Republican Party has been put in a position \u2014 with a few notable exceptions \u2014 of being mildly intimidated by the sitting president,\u201d Biden said.Biden also pushed back against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo\u2019s statement earlier Tuesday that there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.\u201cSo far, there is no evidence of any of the assertions made by the president or Secretary of State Pompeo,\u201d Biden said. Then he laughingly repeated: \u201cSecretary of State Pompeo.\u201dUltimately, Biden said, \u201cit\u2019s all going to come to fruition on January 20th, and between now and then, my hope and expectation is that the American people do know, do understand that there has been a transition \u2014 even among Republicans who are people who voted for the president.\"\u201cI understand the sense of loss,\u201d Biden said. \u201cI get that. But I think the majority of the people who voted for the president \u2026 I think they understand that we have to come together. I think they\u2019re ready to unite. And I believe we can pull the country out of this bitter politics that we\u2019ve seen for the last the last five, six, seven years.\u201dAs the news conference concluded, a reporter asked one final question: How do you expect to work with Republicans if they won\u2019t even acknowledge you as president-elect?\u201cThey will,\u201d Biden responded with a smile. \u201cThey will.\u201dWorld leaders call to congratulate Biden, he tells them \u2018America is back\u2019Return to menuBy John Wagner and Colby Itkowitz2:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkBiden spoke by phone Tuesday with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Ireland\u2019s Prime Minister Miche\u00e1l Martin, who each called to congratulate him on his victory, according to the president-elect\u2019s transition team.\u201cFirst of all, I\u2019m letting them know that America is back,\u201d Biden said during a news conference when asked what he\u2019s told the world leaders. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be back in the game. It\u2019s not America alone,\u201d he said, a shot at Trump\u2019s isolationist agenda.\u201cI feel confident that we\u2019re going to be able to put America back in a place of respect that it had before,\u201d he said.In separate conversations with the world leaders, Biden spoke about working together to combat global issues such as the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, according to a readout from the Biden team.Earlier, Johnson shared on Twitter that he and Biden had spoken.\u201cI just spoke to @JoeBiden to congratulate him on his election,\u201d Johnson tweeted. \u201cI look forward to strengthening the partnership between our countries and to working with him on our shared priorities \u2014 from tackling climate change, to promoting democracy and building back better from the pandemic.\u201dA spokesman for 10 Downing Street said Johnson had \u201cwarmly congratulated\u201d Biden and invited him to a climate change summit that the United Kingdom is hosting in Glasgow next year.\u201cThey also looked forward to seeing each other in person,\u201d according to the British readout of the call.Biden began taking calls from foreign leaders Monday, speaking with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.\u201cWe\u2019ve worked with each other before, and we\u2019re ready to pick up on that work and tackle the challenges and opportunities facing our two countries \u2014 including climate change and COVID-19,\u201d Trudeau said in a message posted on social media. \u201c.\u2009.\u2009. President-elect @JoeBiden and I agreed to keep in touch and work closely together.\u201dBiden said during the news conference that he\u2019s spoken to six world leaders, and owes many more a return phone call.Analysis: Energy lobbyists prepare for Biden, despite Trump\u2019s refusal to concedeReturn to menuBy Dino Grandoni2:30 p.m.Link copiedLinkNot every Republican lawmaker has publicly acknowledged that Biden won the presidential election as Trump refuses to concede. But trade groups often aligned with the GOP have already come to grips with the power change coming in Washington.Over the last several days, representatives from manufacturers, coal-mining companies, oil producers and other industries have congratulated the president-elect on his victory \u2014 and signaled they are interested in helping shape Biden\u2019s plans to tackle climate change.Biden\u2019s proposal to spend $2 trillion over four years to reduce emissions while creating jobs was written in coordination with environmental activists and labor unions, and now companies want a seat at the table.Read the full storyArrowRightPence to visit Georgia on Nov. 20 to campaign for GOP senatorsReturn to menuBy Felicia Sonmez and Erica Werner1:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkVice President Pence told Senate Republicans at their weekly luncheon Tuesday that he will travel to Georgia later this month to campaign for the state\u2019s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, according to a Republican who attended the luncheon.Both Perdue and Loeffler are facing hotly contested January runoff elections that are likely to determine which party controls the Senate. Pence said he will visit the state Nov. 20, according to the participant in the luncheon, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the vice president\u2019s remarks.Georgia has already witnessed an estimated $150 million in advertising in the initial Senate campaigns. Both Perdue and Loeffler \u2014 as well as Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock \u2014 and their various outside supporters expect to try to nationalize the race and focus their messaging on the impact that victories could have for each side, with Democrats trying to achieve a historically high Black turnout normally associated with a presidential race.Paul Kane contributed to this report. The president-elect spoke in Delaware on the importance of the Affordable Care Act. The president's refusal to concede has picked up support from key Republicans, despite a lack of evidence of widespread fraud. Biden speaks on health care, calls Trump refusal to concede \u2018an embarrassment\u2019",
        "author": "Felicia Sonmez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Bacteria Draws Focus of Researchers (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1359",
        "date": "2017-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-bacteria-draws-focus-of-researchers-1487682001?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=26",
        "text": "\u201cWe see they are responding in ways that are completely unexpected,\u201d said microbiologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cheryl Nickerson\n\n\n\n at Arizona State University\u2019s Biodesign Institute, who studies how bacteria behave in space. \u201cWhat are bacteria going to do over a long duration as we get farther and farther from Earth?\u201d\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers have studied bacteria in space since the 1960s, when U.S. scientists discovered that E.coli and salmonella grew twice as fast in orbit as on Earth. Soviet-era Russian researchers in the 1970s determined that infectious microbes like staphylococcus aboard their spacecraft had increased resistance to five common antibiotics. Not until 2006, though, did scientists led by Dr. Nickerson prove in tests with laboratory animals that some bacteria actually became more lethal while in orbit.\n\n\nThis month, NASA plans to begin tests of an antibiotic-resistant superbug called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA, in a controlled experiment aboard the space station. Later this year, NASA expects to launch a satellite to test how E. coli bacteria react to different doses of antibiotics in weightlessness. \nExperts in space medicine at NASA, the European Space Agency, and Russia\u2019s Roscomos worry that relatively harmless pathogens may change in unpredictable ways during voyages between the planets or in the confines of a Moon base.\n\u201cAs we look at longer-term missions, we have to know the risks and how to protect the health of these astronauts,\u201d said microbiologist Kasthuri Venkateswaran at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who studies the micro-organisms found aboard the space station.\nAlthough data are sketchy, the history of spaceflight is a catalog of minor infections.\nCosmonauts on the Soviet space station Mir, which was operational from 1986 to 2001, endured conjunctivitis, food poisoning and acute respiratory illnesses, according to a 2015 study in the journal Infection and Drug Resistance. During NASA\u2019s space shuttle program, from 1981 to 2011, 29 astronauts officially reported severe head colds, fevers, stomach ailments or other nagging infections while in orbit\u2014none of them life-threatening. Among all shuttle crew members, 75% took medications for minor ailments during their space flights, according to a survey of astronaut health records by Brown University infectious disease expert Dr. Leonard Mermel.\nOn the space station, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners and disinfectant wipes help keep infections in check. Food is often irradiated to kill bacteria. As a result, the space station is much cleaner than the average home on Earth. Even so, researchers at Austria\u2019s Medical University of Graz last year reported in the journal Microbiome that they had identified 85 types of bacteria on the station, most of them resistant to clinical antibiotics.\nDr. Venkateswaran identified bacteria that cause respiratory illness and acne on the space station, by analyzing DNA from a station air filter and a vacuum cleaner bag. In October, he reported in the journal mSphere that a fungus growing on a space station window, called Aspergillus fumigatus and known to cause allergic reactions, respiratory illness and bloodstream infections, was more virulent than the same mold on Earth.\nNew DNA analytical techniques also are revealing that microgravity\u2014the state of weightlessness\u2014affects microbes that normally live in the stomach and intestines of space station astronauts, where the bacteria normally bolster the immune system, according to a new study of nine astronauts by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.\n\u201cThe astronauts\u2019 gut and skin microbiomes change in space, although we still don\u2019t know if those changes have any impact on astronauts\u2019 health,\u201d said Institute genomics expert Hernan Lorenzi.\nTo discover why microbes behave so differently in low gravity, aerospace engineer Luis Zea and his colleagues at the University of Colorado last year compared E.coli bacteria on the space station and on Earth. Their results show that the cells grew 13 times faster in orbit and that dozens of E.coli genes were more active in space than on Earth, he said.\n\u201cEvery item in the experiment was identical in space and on the ground,\u201d Mr. Zea said. \u201cBut still we are seeing these differences in space.\u201d\nSeeking more effective countermeasures, microbiologists are taking advantage of recent advances in low-cost, high-speed gene sequencing machines and DNA databases. In August, space station crew member Kathleen Rubins became the first person to sequence DNA in orbit, using a new hand-held device made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. in the U.K. \nNASA officials called it a step toward a time when space travelers may be able to identify dangerous microbes aboard their spacecraft and diagnose their own illnesses.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Researchers grappling with the effects of spaceflight on the human body are stepping up efforts to discover what makes microbes more tenacious in space. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Bacteria Draws Focus of Researchers (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1360",
        "date": "2017-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-bacteria-draws-focus-of-researchers-1487682001?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=87",
        "text": "\u201cWe see they are responding in ways that are completely unexpected,\u201d said microbiologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cheryl Nickerson\n\n\n\n at Arizona State University\u2019s Biodesign Institute, who studies how bacteria behave in space. \u201cWhat are bacteria going to do over a long duration as we get farther and farther from Earth?\u201d\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers have studied bacteria in space since the 1960s, when U.S. scientists discovered that E.coli and salmonella grew twice as fast in orbit as on Earth. Soviet-era Russian researchers in the 1970s determined that infectious microbes like staphylococcus aboard their spacecraft had increased resistance to five common antibiotics. Not until 2006, though, did scientists led by Dr. Nickerson prove in tests with laboratory animals that some bacteria actually became more lethal while in orbit.\n\n\nThis month, NASA plans to begin tests of an antibiotic-resistant superbug called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA, in a controlled experiment aboard the space station. Later this year, NASA expects to launch a satellite to test how E. coli bacteria react to different doses of antibiotics in weightlessness. \nExperts in space medicine at NASA, the European Space Agency, and Russia\u2019s Roscomos worry that relatively harmless pathogens may change in unpredictable ways during voyages between the planets or in the confines of a Moon base.\n\u201cAs we look at longer-term missions, we have to know the risks and how to protect the health of these astronauts,\u201d said microbiologist Kasthuri Venkateswaran at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who studies the micro-organisms found aboard the space station.\nAlthough data are sketchy, the history of spaceflight is a catalog of minor infections.\nCosmonauts on the Soviet space station Mir, which was operational from 1986 to 2001, endured conjunctivitis, food poisoning and acute respiratory illnesses, according to a 2015 study in the journal Infection and Drug Resistance. During NASA\u2019s space shuttle program, from 1981 to 2011, 29 astronauts officially reported severe head colds, fevers, stomach ailments or other nagging infections while in orbit\u2014none of them life-threatening. Among all shuttle crew members, 75% took medications for minor ailments during their space flights, according to a survey of astronaut health records by Brown University infectious disease expert Dr. Leonard Mermel.\nOn the space station, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners and disinfectant wipes help keep infections in check. Food is often irradiated to kill bacteria. As a result, the space station is much cleaner than the average home on Earth. Even so, researchers at Austria\u2019s Medical University of Graz last year reported in the journal Microbiome that they had identified 85 types of bacteria on the station, most of them resistant to clinical antibiotics.\nDr. Venkateswaran identified bacteria that cause respiratory illness and acne on the space station, by analyzing DNA from a station air filter and a vacuum cleaner bag. In October, he reported in the journal mSphere that a fungus growing on a space station window, called Aspergillus fumigatus and known to cause allergic reactions, respiratory illness and bloodstream infections, was more virulent than the same mold on Earth.\nNew DNA analytical techniques also are revealing that microgravity\u2014the state of weightlessness\u2014affects microbes that normally live in the stomach and intestines of space station astronauts, where the bacteria normally bolster the immune system, according to a new study of nine astronauts by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.\n\u201cThe astronauts\u2019 gut and skin microbiomes change in space, although we still don\u2019t know if those changes have any impact on astronauts\u2019 health,\u201d said Institute genomics expert Hernan Lorenzi.\nTo discover why microbes behave so differently in low gravity, aerospace engineer Luis Zea and his colleagues at the University of Colorado last year compared E.coli bacteria on the space station and on Earth. Their results show that the cells grew 13 times faster in orbit and that dozens of E.coli genes were more active in space than on Earth, he said.\n\u201cEvery item in the experiment was identical in space and on the ground,\u201d Mr. Zea said. \u201cBut still we are seeing these differences in space.\u201d\nSeeking more effective countermeasures, microbiologists are taking advantage of recent advances in low-cost, high-speed gene sequencing machines and DNA databases. In August, space station crew member Kathleen Rubins became the first person to sequence DNA in orbit, using a new hand-held device made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. in the U.K. \nNASA officials called it a step toward a time when space travelers may be able to identify dangerous microbes aboard their spacecraft and diagnose their own illnesses.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Researchers grappling with the effects of spaceflight on the human body are stepping up efforts to discover what makes microbes more tenacious in space. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Bacteria Draws Focus of Researchers (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1361",
        "date": "2017-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-bacteria-draws-focus-of-researchers-1487682001?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=130",
        "text": "\u201cWe see they are responding in ways that are completely unexpected,\u201d said microbiologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cheryl Nickerson\n\n\n\n at Arizona State University\u2019s Biodesign Institute, who studies how bacteria behave in space. \u201cWhat are bacteria going to do over a long duration as we get farther and farther from Earth?\u201d\n\n\n\n\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers have studied bacteria in space since the 1960s, when U.S. scientists discovered that E.coli and salmonella grew twice as fast in orbit as on Earth. Soviet-era Russian researchers in the 1970s determined that infectious microbes like staphylococcus aboard their spacecraft had increased resistance to five common antibiotics. Not until 2006, though, did scientists led by Dr. Nickerson prove in tests with laboratory animals that some bacteria actually became more lethal while in orbit.\n\n\nThis month, NASA plans to begin tests of an antibiotic-resistant superbug called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA, in a controlled experiment aboard the space station. Later this year, NASA expects to launch a satellite to test how E. coli bacteria react to different doses of antibiotics in weightlessness. \nExperts in space medicine at NASA, the European Space Agency, and Russia\u2019s Roscomos worry that relatively harmless pathogens may change in unpredictable ways during voyages between the planets or in the confines of a Moon base.\n\u201cAs we look at longer-term missions, we have to know the risks and how to protect the health of these astronauts,\u201d said microbiologist Kasthuri Venkateswaran at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who studies the micro-organisms found aboard the space station.\nAlthough data are sketchy, the history of spaceflight is a catalog of minor infections.\nCosmonauts on the Soviet space station Mir, which was operational from 1986 to 2001, endured conjunctivitis, food poisoning and acute respiratory illnesses, according to a 2015 study in the journal Infection and Drug Resistance. During NASA\u2019s space shuttle program, from 1981 to 2011, 29 astronauts officially reported severe head colds, fevers, stomach ailments or other nagging infections while in orbit\u2014none of them life-threatening. Among all shuttle crew members, 75% took medications for minor ailments during their space flights, according to a survey of astronaut health records by Brown University infectious disease expert Dr. Leonard Mermel.\nOn the space station, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners and disinfectant wipes help keep infections in check. Food is often irradiated to kill bacteria. As a result, the space station is much cleaner than the average home on Earth. Even so, researchers at Austria\u2019s Medical University of Graz last year reported in the journal Microbiome that they had identified 85 types of bacteria on the station, most of them resistant to clinical antibiotics.\nDr. Venkateswaran identified bacteria that cause respiratory illness and acne on the space station, by analyzing DNA from a station air filter and a vacuum cleaner bag. In October, he reported in the journal mSphere that a fungus growing on a space station window, called Aspergillus fumigatus and known to cause allergic reactions, respiratory illness and bloodstream infections, was more virulent than the same mold on Earth.\nNew DNA analytical techniques also are revealing that microgravity\u2014the state of weightlessness\u2014affects microbes that normally live in the stomach and intestines of space station astronauts, where the bacteria normally bolster the immune system, according to a new study of nine astronauts by researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md.\n\u201cThe astronauts\u2019 gut and skin microbiomes change in space, although we still don\u2019t know if those changes have any impact on astronauts\u2019 health,\u201d said Institute genomics expert Hernan Lorenzi.\nTo discover why microbes behave so differently in low gravity, aerospace engineer Luis Zea and his colleagues at the University of Colorado last year compared E.coli bacteria on the space station and on Earth. Their results show that the cells grew 13 times faster in orbit and that dozens of E.coli genes were more active in space than on Earth, he said.\n\u201cEvery item in the experiment was identical in space and on the ground,\u201d Mr. Zea said. \u201cBut still we are seeing these differences in space.\u201d\nSeeking more effective countermeasures, microbiologists are taking advantage of recent advances in low-cost, high-speed gene sequencing machines and DNA databases. In August, space station crew member Kathleen Rubins became the first person to sequence DNA in orbit, using a new hand-held device made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. in the U.K. \nNASA officials called it a step toward a time when space travelers may be able to identify dangerous microbes aboard their spacecraft and diagnose their own illnesses.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Researchers grappling with the effects of spaceflight on the human body are stepping up efforts to discover what makes microbes more tenacious in space. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Missions to Explore Asteroids (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1362",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-plans-two-500-million-missions-to-explore-asteroids-1483567307?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=27",
        "text": "\u201cThis is an opportunity to explore a new type of world\u2014not one of rock or ice, but of metal,\u201d said Psyche principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. \u201c16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a [planet\u2019s] core.\u201d\nBoth missions are funded through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Discovery program, a relatively low-cost interplanetary exploration effort in which mission expense is capped at around $500 million, including launch costs. They were winnowed from 27 competing proposals.\n\n\nSqueezed by cost overruns and budget cuts, however, the space agency has launched only one new Discovery mission every four or five years, about half the rate originally envisioned. Last year, the agency delayed until 2018 the launch of its next scheduled Discovery mission\u2014a probe called InSight designed to land on Mars\u2014because of technical problems, adding about $153 million to its cost.\n\n\nMore on NASA Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) SpaceX Has Delayed First Manned NASA Launch to 2018 from 2017 (Dec. 13, 2016) \n\n\nDespite their relatively modest aims, the Discovery missions have a record of significant scientific finds.\nThe program\u2019s Messenger probe, launched in 2004, became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and detected craters there brimming with frozen water before crashing into the planet as planned in 2015. The Dawn mission is currently mapping the dwarf planet Ceres for the first time.\nSurveying the far reaches of interstellar space, the Kepler Space telescope, a $600 million Discovery mission launched in 2009, discovered more than 2,400 planets circling distant stars\u2014so many alien worlds that astronomers concluded that there must be planets around most of the billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.\nIn an earlier announcement Tuesday, the agency said it plans to launch a $188 million astronomy mission in 2020 to probe neutron stars, pulsars and black holes. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, as it is called, will use three space telescopes to measure the polarization of cosmic X-rays.\nNot until 2019 will agency planners decide on their next major billion-dollar interplanetary mission. Last month, the agency requested preliminary proposals for a range of ambitious concepts, including a probe to Saturn, a mission to Venus and an in-depth tour of the so-called Trojan asteroids that orbit near Jupiter.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA officials set their sights on asteroids, announcing plans to launch two $500 million interplanetary probes targeted at these relics from the creation of the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Missions to Explore Asteroids (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1363",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-plans-two-500-million-missions-to-explore-asteroids-1483567307?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=102",
        "text": "\u201cThis is an opportunity to explore a new type of world\u2014not one of rock or ice, but of metal,\u201d said Psyche principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. \u201c16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a [planet\u2019s] core.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBoth missions are funded through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Discovery program, a relatively low-cost interplanetary exploration effort in which mission expense is capped at around $500 million, including launch costs. They were winnowed from 27 competing proposals.\n\n\nSqueezed by cost overruns and budget cuts, however, the space agency has launched only one new Discovery mission every four or five years, about half the rate originally envisioned. Last year, the agency delayed until 2018 the launch of its next scheduled Discovery mission\u2014a probe called InSight designed to land on Mars\u2014because of technical problems, adding about $153 million to its cost.\n\n\nMore on NASA Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) SpaceX Has Delayed First Manned NASA Launch to 2018 from 2017 (Dec. 13, 2016) \n\n\nDespite their relatively modest aims, the Discovery missions have a record of significant scientific finds.\nThe program\u2019s Messenger probe, launched in 2004, became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and detected craters there brimming with frozen water before crashing into the planet as planned in 2015. The Dawn mission is currently mapping the dwarf planet Ceres for the first time.\nSurveying the far reaches of interstellar space, the Kepler Space telescope, a $600 million Discovery mission launched in 2009, discovered more than 2,400 planets circling distant stars\u2014so many alien worlds that astronomers concluded that there must be planets around most of the billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.\nIn an earlier announcement Tuesday, the agency said it plans to launch a $188 million astronomy mission in 2020 to probe neutron stars, pulsars and black holes. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, as it is called, will use three space telescopes to measure the polarization of cosmic X-rays.\nNot until 2019 will agency planners decide on their next major billion-dollar interplanetary mission. Last month, the agency requested preliminary proposals for a range of ambitious concepts, including a probe to Saturn, a mission to Venus and an in-depth tour of the so-called Trojan asteroids that orbit near Jupiter.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA officials set their sights on asteroids, announcing plans to launch two $500 million interplanetary probes targeted at these relics from the creation of the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Missions to Explore Asteroids (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1364",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-plans-two-500-million-missions-to-explore-asteroids-1483567307?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=90",
        "text": "\u201cThis is an opportunity to explore a new type of world\u2014not one of rock or ice, but of metal,\u201d said Psyche principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. \u201c16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a [planet\u2019s] core.\u201d\nBoth missions are funded through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Discovery program, a relatively low-cost interplanetary exploration effort in which mission expense is capped at around $500 million, including launch costs. They were winnowed from 27 competing proposals.\n\n\nSqueezed by cost overruns and budget cuts, however, the space agency has launched only one new Discovery mission every four or five years, about half the rate originally envisioned. Last year, the agency delayed until 2018 the launch of its next scheduled Discovery mission\u2014a probe called InSight designed to land on Mars\u2014because of technical problems, adding about $153 million to its cost.\n\n\nMore on NASA Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) SpaceX Has Delayed First Manned NASA Launch to 2018 from 2017 (Dec. 13, 2016) \n\n\nDespite their relatively modest aims, the Discovery missions have a record of significant scientific finds.\nThe program\u2019s Messenger probe, launched in 2004, became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and detected craters there brimming with frozen water before crashing into the planet as planned in 2015. The Dawn mission is currently mapping the dwarf planet Ceres for the first time.\nSurveying the far reaches of interstellar space, the Kepler Space telescope, a $600 million Discovery mission launched in 2009, discovered more than 2,400 planets circling distant stars\u2014so many alien worlds that astronomers concluded that there must be planets around most of the billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.\nIn an earlier announcement Tuesday, the agency said it plans to launch a $188 million astronomy mission in 2020 to probe neutron stars, pulsars and black holes. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, as it is called, will use three space telescopes to measure the polarization of cosmic X-rays.\nNot until 2019 will agency planners decide on their next major billion-dollar interplanetary mission. Last month, the agency requested preliminary proposals for a range of ambitious concepts, including a probe to Saturn, a mission to Venus and an in-depth tour of the so-called Trojan asteroids that orbit near Jupiter.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA officials set their sights on asteroids, announcing plans to launch two $500 million interplanetary probes targeted at these relics from the creation of the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Missions to Explore Asteroids (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1365",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-plans-two-500-million-missions-to-explore-asteroids-1483567307?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=134",
        "text": "\u201cThis is an opportunity to explore a new type of world\u2014not one of rock or ice, but of metal,\u201d said Psyche principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. \u201c16 Psyche is the only known object of its kind in the solar system, and this is the only way humans will ever visit a [planet\u2019s] core.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBoth missions are funded through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Discovery program, a relatively low-cost interplanetary exploration effort in which mission expense is capped at around $500 million, including launch costs. They were winnowed from 27 competing proposals.\n\n\nSqueezed by cost overruns and budget cuts, however, the space agency has launched only one new Discovery mission every four or five years, about half the rate originally envisioned. Last year, the agency delayed until 2018 the launch of its next scheduled Discovery mission\u2014a probe called InSight designed to land on Mars\u2014because of technical problems, adding about $153 million to its cost.\n\n\nMore on NASA Thiel Pushes to Add Commercial-Space Backers to Trump NASA Team (Dec. 21, 2016) SpaceX Has Delayed First Manned NASA Launch to 2018 from 2017 (Dec. 13, 2016) \n\n\nDespite their relatively modest aims, the Discovery missions have a record of significant scientific finds.\nThe program\u2019s Messenger probe, launched in 2004, became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and detected craters there brimming with frozen water before crashing into the planet as planned in 2015. The Dawn mission is currently mapping the dwarf planet Ceres for the first time.\nSurveying the far reaches of interstellar space, the Kepler Space telescope, a $600 million Discovery mission launched in 2009, discovered more than 2,400 planets circling distant stars\u2014so many alien worlds that astronomers concluded that there must be planets around most of the billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.\nIn an earlier announcement Tuesday, the agency said it plans to launch a $188 million astronomy mission in 2020 to probe neutron stars, pulsars and black holes. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, as it is called, will use three space telescopes to measure the polarization of cosmic X-rays.\nNot until 2019 will agency planners decide on their next major billion-dollar interplanetary mission. Last month, the agency requested preliminary proposals for a range of ambitious concepts, including a probe to Saturn, a mission to Venus and an in-depth tour of the so-called Trojan asteroids that orbit near Jupiter.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA officials set their sights on asteroids, announcing plans to launch two $500 million interplanetary probes targeted at these relics from the creation of the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Signs Off After 13 Years of Running Rings Around Saturn (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1366",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cassinis-legacy-new-missions-to-find-life-on-ocean-worlds-1505467804?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=22",
        "text": "\u201cI am going to call this the end of mission,\u201d Cassini program manager Earl Maize announced to the JPL control room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface. Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nNASA mission managers intentionally steered the probe to its doom in order to avoid contaminating Saturn\u2019s icy moons with Earthly bacteria that might have survived the rigors of space or radioactive plutonium-238 fuel from its small nuclear power generators. But the mission\u2019s end also marks a beginning. For the past 13 years, the probe has been studying the ringed planet and its moons. Among its most surprising and influential findings were the discoveries of liquid oceans on two of its moons: Enceladus and Titan. That has emboldened the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to embark on new interplanetary missions to examine if simple life-forms exist in outer space. Under the agency\u2019s Ocean Worlds program launched in 2016, NASA will explore the universe\u2019s diverse oceans, with Enceladus and Titan, along with Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, the leading contenders for potential life-breeding environments. Oceans are among the most habitable places scientists know about, according to Curt Niebur, NASA\u2019s lead program scientist for outer-planet exploration. Here on Earth, some posit life may have evolved at hydrothermal vents, geysers at the bottom of the ocean.\n\n\nRelated Coverage Cassini\u2019s Final Mission: Solve the Mysteries of Saturn\u2019s Rings Cassini\u2019s Last Dance With Saturn 11 Years of Cassini Saturn Photos Saturn Moon May be Hospitable to Life \n\n\nNot long ago, astronomers thought oceans were an anomaly, found on only Earth and Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa. Now, scientists say there has been a paradigm shift in how they see the universe, in large part thanks to Cassini. \u201cMaybe these ocean worlds are not the one-off places that we thought,\u201d said Dr. Niebur. \u201cMaybe, they\u2019re actually common in not just the solar system, but in the universe. That\u2019s where the implications get really profound.\u201d When Cassini flew by Enceladus, it gave planetary scientists and astrobiologists a peek at water-containing plumes squirting out of the icy moon\u2019s southern pole. These plumes, which scientists concluded were spewing material from a liquid ocean trapped under miles of ice, also contain other compounds that scientists say are important building blocks of life: hydrogen, salt and ammonia. \u201cThis is very important. Since the discovery, we are thinking that Enceladus may be a good place to search for extraterrestrial life, and this was not expected at all before Cassini,\u201d said Fran\u00e7ois Raulin, a scientist who worked on Cassini. Astronomers have put together a proposal for a mission called Enceladus Life Finder to go back and study its plumes more closely, according to Linda Spilker, a Cassini mission project scientist at NASA. The team expects a decision in December, she said. Scientists have proposed missions to Titan, but none are scheduled so far.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Cassini spacecraft is shown diving between Saturn and its innermost ring. The maneuver was part of its final mission to better understand the planet\u2019s rings.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Jupiter\u2019s Europa is up first in the Ocean Worlds life-finding tours. In the 1990s, data from the Galileo orbiter suggested that the moon had an ice-capped ocean and plumes, much like Enceladus. A mission to the Jovian moon, dubbed Europa Clipper, is now scheduled for the 2020s. Researchers and engineers are working to build the sensors and instruments necessary to study this moon in greater detail. Cassini wasn\u2019t equipped to find life, but Dr. Niebur said the data it acquired has been \u201cinvaluable\u201d in helping scientists figure out what life-detecting instruments future spacecraft should carry. Those tools include mass spectrometers to allow scientists to measure complex molecules, such as proteins and cellular compartments; DNA sequencers that work in deep space; and ground-penetrating radars to explore beneath Europa\u2019s icy crust. These would help scientists figure out where it might be easiest to sample. While these technologies should, in theory, help astrobiologists sleuth out signs of life on other planets, questions remain. To start, scientists have yet to define what might constitute \u201clife\u201d on other planets, according to Mary Voytek, NASA\u2019s senior scientist for astrobiology, so there is some debate about what to measure. Dr. Voytek developed the \u201cLife Detection Ladder,\u201d which describes general indicators of life on Earth. The giant spreadsheet includes basic elements like water, amino acids, genetic material a NASA\u2019s aging Cassini spacecraft plunged like a falling torch into the atmosphere of Saturn early Friday morning, ending in a blaze of burning plastic and molten aluminum its 13 years of exploration around the ringed planet. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez, Robert Lee Hotz and Dipti Kapadia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Signs Off After 13 Years of Running Rings Around Saturn (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1367",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cassinis-legacy-new-missions-to-find-life-on-ocean-worlds-1505467804?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=77",
        "text": "\u201cI am going to call this the end of mission,\u201d Cassini program manager Earl Maize announced to the JPL control room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface. Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nNASA mission managers intentionally steered the probe to its doom in order to avoid contaminating Saturn\u2019s icy moons with Earthly bacteria that might have survived the rigors of space or radioactive plutonium-238 fuel from its small nuclear power generators. But the mission\u2019s end also marks a beginning. For the past 13 years, the probe has been studying the ringed planet and its moons. Among its most surprising and influential findings were the discoveries of liquid oceans on two of its moons: Enceladus and Titan. That has emboldened the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to embark on new interplanetary missions to examine if simple life-forms exist in outer space. Under the agency\u2019s Ocean Worlds program launched in 2016, NASA will explore the universe\u2019s diverse oceans, with Enceladus and Titan, along with Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, the leading contenders for potential life-breeding environments. Oceans are among the most habitable places scientists know about, according to Curt Niebur, NASA\u2019s lead program scientist for outer-planet exploration. Here on Earth, some posit life may have evolved at hydrothermal vents, geysers at the bottom of the ocean.\n\n\nRelated Coverage Cassini\u2019s Final Mission: Solve the Mysteries of Saturn\u2019s Rings Cassini\u2019s Last Dance With Saturn 11 Years of Cassini Saturn Photos Saturn Moon May be Hospitable to Life \n\n\nNot long ago, astronomers thought oceans were an anomaly, found on only Earth and Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa. Now, scientists say there has been a paradigm shift in how they see the universe, in large part thanks to Cassini. \u201cMaybe these ocean worlds are not the one-off places that we thought,\u201d said Dr. Niebur. \u201cMaybe, they\u2019re actually common in not just the solar system, but in the universe. That\u2019s where the implications get really profound.\u201d When Cassini flew by Enceladus, it gave planetary scientists and astrobiologists a peek at water-containing plumes squirting out of the icy moon\u2019s southern pole. These plumes, which scientists concluded were spewing material from a liquid ocean trapped under miles of ice, also contain other compounds that scientists say are important building blocks of life: hydrogen, salt and ammonia. \u201cThis is very important. Since the discovery, we are thinking that Enceladus may be a good place to search for extraterrestrial life, and this was not expected at all before Cassini,\u201d said Fran\u00e7ois Raulin, a scientist who worked on Cassini. Astronomers have put together a proposal for a mission called Enceladus Life Finder to go back and study its plumes more closely, according to Linda Spilker, a Cassini mission project scientist at NASA. The team expects a decision in December, she said. Scientists have proposed missions to Titan, but none are scheduled so far.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Cassini spacecraft is shown diving between Saturn and its innermost ring. The maneuver was part of its final mission to better understand the planet\u2019s rings.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Jupiter\u2019s Europa is up first in the Ocean Worlds life-finding tours. In the 1990s, data from the Galileo orbiter suggested that the moon had an ice-capped ocean and plumes, much like Enceladus. A mission to the Jovian moon, dubbed Europa Clipper, is now scheduled for the 2020s. Researchers and engineers are working to build the sensors and instruments necessary to study this moon in greater detail. Cassini wasn\u2019t equipped to find life, but Dr. Niebur said the data it acquired has been \u201cinvaluable\u201d in helping scientists figure out what life-detecting instruments future spacecraft should carry. Those tools include mass spectrometers to allow scientists to measure complex molecules, such as proteins and cellular compartments; DNA sequencers that work in deep space; and ground-penetrating radars to explore beneath Europa\u2019s icy crust. These would help scientists figure out where it might be easiest to sample. While these technologies should, in theory, help astrobiologists sleuth out signs of life on other planets, questions remain. To start, scientists have yet to define what might constitute \u201clife\u201d on other planets, according to Mary Voytek, NASA\u2019s senior scientist for astrobiology, so there is some debate about what to measure. Dr. Voytek developed the \u201cLife Detection Ladder,\u201d which describes general indicators of life on Earth. The giant spreadsheet includes basic elements like water, amino acids, genetic material a NASA\u2019s aging Cassini spacecraft plunged like a falling torch into the atmosphere of Saturn early Friday morning, ending in a blaze of burning plastic and molten aluminum its 13 years of exploration around the ringed planet. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez, Robert Lee Hotz and Dipti Kapadia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Signs Off After 13 Years of Running Rings Around Saturn (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1368",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cassinis-legacy-new-missions-to-find-life-on-ocean-worlds-1505467804?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=113",
        "text": "\u201cI am going to call this the end of mission,\u201d Cassini program manager Earl Maize announced to the JPL control room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface. Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nNASA mission managers intentionally steered the probe to its doom in order to avoid contaminating Saturn\u2019s icy moons with Earthly bacteria that might have survived the rigors of space or radioactive plutonium-238 fuel from its small nuclear power generators. But the mission\u2019s end also marks a beginning. For the past 13 years, the probe has been studying the ringed planet and its moons. Among its most surprising and influential findings were the discoveries of liquid oceans on two of its moons: Enceladus and Titan. That has emboldened the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to embark on new interplanetary missions to examine if simple life-forms exist in outer space. Under the agency\u2019s Ocean Worlds program launched in 2016, NASA will explore the universe\u2019s diverse oceans, with Enceladus and Titan, along with Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, the leading contenders for potential life-breeding environments. Oceans are among the most habitable places scientists know about, according to Curt Niebur, NASA\u2019s lead program scientist for outer-planet exploration. Here on Earth, some posit life may have evolved at hydrothermal vents, geysers at the bottom of the ocean.\n\n\nRelated Coverage Cassini\u2019s Final Mission: Solve the Mysteries of Saturn\u2019s Rings Cassini\u2019s Last Dance With Saturn 11 Years of Cassini Saturn Photos Saturn Moon May be Hospitable to Life \n\n\nNot long ago, astronomers thought oceans were an anomaly, found on only Earth and Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa. Now, scientists say there has been a paradigm shift in how they see the universe, in large part thanks to Cassini. \u201cMaybe these ocean worlds are not the one-off places that we thought,\u201d said Dr. Niebur. \u201cMaybe, they\u2019re actually common in not just the solar system, but in the universe. That\u2019s where the implications get really profound.\u201d When Cassini flew by Enceladus, it gave planetary scientists and astrobiologists a peek at water-containing plumes squirting out of the icy moon\u2019s southern pole. These plumes, which scientists concluded were spewing material from a liquid ocean trapped under miles of ice, also contain other compounds that scientists say are important building blocks of life: hydrogen, salt and ammonia. \u201cThis is very important. Since the discovery, we are thinking that Enceladus may be a good place to search for extraterrestrial life, and this was not expected at all before Cassini,\u201d said Fran\u00e7ois Raulin, a scientist who worked on Cassini. Astronomers have put together a proposal for a mission called Enceladus Life Finder to go back and study its plumes more closely, according to Linda Spilker, a Cassini mission project scientist at NASA. The team expects a decision in December, she said. Scientists have proposed missions to Titan, but none are scheduled so far.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Cassini spacecraft is shown diving between Saturn and its innermost ring. The maneuver was part of its final mission to better understand the planet\u2019s rings.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Jupiter\u2019s Europa is up first in the Ocean Worlds life-finding tours. In the 1990s, data from the Galileo orbiter suggested that the moon had an ice-capped ocean and plumes, much like Enceladus. A mission to the Jovian moon, dubbed Europa Clipper, is now scheduled for the 2020s. Researchers and engineers are working to build the sensors and instruments necessary to study this moon in greater detail. Cassini wasn\u2019t equipped to find life, but Dr. Niebur said the data it acquired has been \u201cinvaluable\u201d in helping scientists figure out what life-detecting instruments future spacecraft should carry. Those tools include mass spectrometers to allow scientists to measure complex molecules, such as proteins and cellular compartments; DNA sequencers that work in deep space; and ground-penetrating radars to explore beneath Europa\u2019s icy crust. These would help scientists figure out where it might be easiest to sample. While these technologies should, in theory, help astrobiologists sleuth out signs of life on other planets, questions remain. To start, scientists have yet to define what might constitute \u201clife\u201d on other planets, according to Mary Voytek, NASA\u2019s senior scientist for astrobiology, so there is some debate about what to measure. Dr. Voytek developed the \u201cLife Detection Ladder,\u201d which describes general indicators of life on Earth. The giant spreadsheet includes basic elements like water, amino acids, genetic material a NASA\u2019s aging Cassini spacecraft plunged like a falling torch into the atmosphere of Saturn early Friday morning, ending in a blaze of burning plastic and molten aluminum its 13 years of exploration around the ringed planet. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez, Robert Lee Hotz and Dipti Kapadia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dark, Cameras, Action: Scientists and Amateurs Prepare for Solar Eclipse (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1369",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dark-cameras-action-scientists-and-amateurs-prepare-for-solar-eclipse-1502703002?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=89",
        "text": "Although an eclipse lasts mere minutes, the event offers scientists a rare opportunity to study the sun and its properties, including the corona, the wispy fringe of outer atmosphere normally obscured by the star\u2019s blinding brightness. \n\n\n\n\nResearchers say understanding the sun is key to unlocking many mysteries of space. \u201cIt is the Rosetta Stone of all stars,\u201d says astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science, who plans to watch the eclipse aboard an agency jet off the coast of Oregon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This August, the U.S. will experience the first total solar eclipse seen from the U.S. coast to coast in nearly a century. Here's how the eclipse works, and why scientists are keeping a close eye on it. Illustration: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAt NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists plan to marshal an armada of 50 high-altitude balloons, 11 orbiting satellites, the international space station and thousands of ground-based telescopes. Scientists ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini: 20-Year Saturn Mission Nears Grand Finale (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1370",
        "date": "2017-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cassini-20-year-mission-to-saturn-nears-grand-finale-1505318915?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=77",
        "text": "NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency along with several other countries contributed to the instruments and science for Cassini. This video looks at the team of scientists who worked on the Cassini mission and relives the past few decades of tension, hurdles and scientific successes. After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will make its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. WSJ talks to the scientists behind the project that led to never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface. Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Tech Astronomers Use To Explore the Universe\u2019s Many Planets (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1371",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tech-astronomers-use-to-explore-the-universes-many-planets-1496674800?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=93",
        "text": "In the southern hemisphere of the constellation Eridanus, the star Epsilon Eridani is home to the closest planetary system around a star similar to the early Sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook\n \n\n\n\nNot so long ago, Earth seemed all but alone in the universe, with only the barren worlds of our own solar system as companions in the cosmos. Now astronomers are finding exotic planets almost everywhere they look.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist conception of the KELT-9 system. The host star is a hot, rapidly rotating star that is almost twice as hot as our sun. It blasts its nearby planet KELT-9b with massive amounts of ultraviolet and optical radiation, leading to a dayside temperature of 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter that most stars and only 2000 degrees cooler than the sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Monday, researchers led by astronomer Scott Gaudi at Ohio State University announced the discovery of the hottest planet in the known universe, circling a star about 650 light years from Earth. On KELT-9b, as it called, the surface temperature reaches 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014 hotter than many stars, they reported in Nature. They spotted it with two telescopes in Arizona and South Africa especially designed to spot planets orbiting very bright stars.\n\n\nAll told, astronomers have found roughly 3,600 planets orbiting more than 2,700 distant stars so far and dozens of them are deemed to be potentially hospitable to life, scientists say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s conception of the extrasolar ring system circling J1407b. The rings are shown eclipsing the young sun-like star J1407, as they would have appeared in early 2007.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ron Miller\n \n\n\n\nThere are so many exoplanets, as these alien worlds are called, that some scientists calculate that each star in the Milky Way likely has at least one planet in orbit around it. One exoplanet orbits its star backward; one takes 80,000 years to complete a single orbit\u2014a record among exoplanets. Others confound traditional theories of planet formation and the evolution of solar systems. \nMany more travel in solitary darkness around our galaxy, untethered to any one star. There are more starless wandering planets than there are stars in the universe, scientists say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis was the first compact solar system discovered by Kepler, and it revealed that a system can be tightly packed, with at least five planets within the orbit of Mercury, and still be stable\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nTo date, scientists have found planets hot enough to rain lava. Others are ice balls. There is a Jupiter-size giant with the density of Styrofoam and a world of carbon that might have a diamond core. Using data from the SuperWASP project, a consortium of U.K. universities that searches for exoplanets using two telescopes in Africa, astronomers detected an immense alien world called J1407b with rings 200 times larger than those around Saturn.\nUsing NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope, researchers in 2011 discovered an unusually compact solar system containing six rocky planets orbiting a single sun-like star called Kepler-11, approximately 2,000 light years from Earth. It suggested that multiple small-planet systems, like ours, may be common.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe young exoplanet, K2-33b, is a bit larger than Neptune and makes a complete orbit around its star every five days.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nThere are worlds almost as old as the universe itself. The oldest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, called PSR B1 620-26b, is about 13 billion years old, more than twice as old as Earth\u2019s 4.5 billion years. It formed barely 1 billion years after our universe\u2019s birth in the big bang.\nThere are worlds so young that they emerged only recently from the cosmic nursery. The planet K2-33b is only 5 million to 10 million years old. Astronomers using NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii discovered it in 2016.\nPlanets around double stars\u2014like the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars\u2014are relatively common, astronomers have discovered. Depending on how closely they orbit these paired stars, such planets might be hospitable to life, according to astronomers who studied a stellar pair called Kepler-35A and B, which host a planet called Kepler-35b.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn theory, a planet like Kepler-35b, about eight times the size of Earth, could retain water and be hospitable for life if located the right distance way from its paired stars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL/CalTech\n \n\n\n\nAt least 360 of the planets found so far are terrestrial, planetary scientists say, meaning there is the chance their rocky structure may resemble our home world. And by latest count, 52 of them orbit their stars in a zone where the temperature isn\u2019t too cold or too hot to support liquid water\u2014considered an essential ingredient for the evolution of life as we know it. Researchers, though, don\u2019t know whether water is actually present on them.\nMany of these newly discovered alien worlds are too far away for scientists to detect their atmospheres directly. But by analyzing how starlight is filtered through the gases that envelope some exoplanets, researchers have obtained revealing hints.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLocated about 437 light years away, HAT-P-26b orbits a star roughly twice as old as the sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/GSFC\n \n\n\n\nFor example, a recent study combining observations from NASA\u2019s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes reveals that the distant planet HAT-P-26b has a primitive atmosphere composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. The researchers determined that its atmosphere is relatively clear of clouds and has a strong water signature, although the planet isn\u2019t a water world. This is the best measurement of water to date on an exoplanet of this size, the scientists said.\nAstronomers discovered clear skies and steamy water vapor on a gaseous planet outside our solar system by combining data from three of NASA\u2019s space telescopes\u2014Hubble, Spitzer and Kepler. The planet is about the size of Neptune, making it the smallest planet from which molecules of any kind have been detected.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKepler-7b (left), which is 1.5 times the radius of Jupiter (right), is the first exoplanet to have its clouds mapped.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT\n \n\n\n\nThe closest of these promising Earth-sized worlds orbits a cool red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri about 4.2 light years away. European astronomers say that the exoplanet Proxima b, as it is called, has 1.3 times the mass of Earth and circles its star so closely that it takes only 11 days to complete a single orbit. Computer simulations earlier this year by researchers at NASA\u2019s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., suggest that radiation and flares of charged particles from its star may make that world unfit for life.\nA carbon copy of Earth, warm and wet enough for the chemistry of life, has yet to be discovered. Researchers at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., so far have surveyed dozens of planet-hosting stars for transmissions from alien civilizations using arrays of radio telescopes on Earth. They\u2019ve found nothing yet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis artist\u2019s impression shows a view of the surface of the planet Proxima b orbiting in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on its surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ESO/M. Kornmesser Scientists hope that the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes and space missions will speed the pace of exploration ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Tech Astronomers Use To Explore the Universe\u2019s Many Planets (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1372",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tech-astronomers-use-to-explore-the-universes-many-planets-1496674800?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=81",
        "text": "In the southern hemisphere of the constellation Eridanus, the star Epsilon Eridani is home to the closest planetary system around a star similar to the early Sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook\n \n\n\n\nNot so long ago, Earth seemed all but alone in the universe, with only the barren worlds of our own solar system as companions in the cosmos. Now astronomers are finding exotic planets almost everywhere they look.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist conception of the KELT-9 system. The host star is a hot, rapidly rotating star that is almost twice as hot as our sun. It blasts its nearby planet KELT-9b with massive amounts of ultraviolet and optical radiation, leading to a dayside temperature of 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter that most stars and only 2000 degrees cooler than the sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)\n \n\n\n\nOn Monday, researchers led by astronomer Scott Gaudi at Ohio State University announced the discovery of the hottest planet in the known universe, circling a star about 650 light years from Earth. On KELT-9b, as it called, the surface temperature reaches 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014 hotter than many stars, they reported in Nature. They spotted it with two telescopes in Arizona and South Africa especially designed to spot planets orbiting very bright stars.\n\n\nAll told, astronomers have found roughly 3,600 planets orbiting more than 2,700 distant stars so far and dozens of them are deemed to be potentially hospitable to life, scientists say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s conception of the extrasolar ring system circling J1407b. The rings are shown eclipsing the young sun-like star J1407, as they would have appeared in early 2007.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ron Miller\n \n\n\n\nThere are so many exoplanets, as these alien worlds are called, that some scientists calculate that each star in the Milky Way likely has at least one planet in orbit around it. One exoplanet orbits its star backward; one takes 80,000 years to complete a single orbit\u2014a record among exoplanets. Others confound traditional theories of planet formation and the evolution of solar systems. \nMany more travel in solitary darkness around our galaxy, untethered to any one star. There are more starless wandering planets than there are stars in the universe, scientists say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis was the first compact solar system discovered by Kepler, and it revealed that a system can be tightly packed, with at least five planets within the orbit of Mercury, and still be stable\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nTo date, scientists have found planets hot enough to rain lava. Others are ice balls. There is a Jupiter-size giant with the density of Styrofoam and a world of carbon that might have a diamond core. Using data from the SuperWASP project, a consortium of U.K. universities that searches for exoplanets using two telescopes in Africa, astronomers detected an immense alien world called J1407b with rings 200 times larger than those around Saturn.\nUsing NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope, researchers in 2011 discovered an unusually compact solar system containing six rocky planets orbiting a single sun-like star called Kepler-11, approximately 2,000 light years from Earth. It suggested that multiple small-planet systems, like ours, may be common.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe young exoplanet, K2-33b, is a bit larger than Neptune and makes a complete orbit around its star every five days.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nThere are worlds almost as old as the universe itself. The oldest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, called PSR B1 620-26b, is about 13 billion years old, more than twice as old as Earth\u2019s 4.5 billion years. It formed barely 1 billion years after our universe\u2019s birth in the big bang.\nThere are worlds so young that they emerged only recently from the cosmic nursery. The planet K2-33b is only 5 million to 10 million years old. Astronomers using NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii discovered it in 2016.\nPlanets around double stars\u2014like the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars\u2014are relatively common, astronomers have discovered. Depending on how closely they orbit these paired stars, such planets might be hospitable to life, according to astronomers who studied a stellar pair called Kepler-35A and B, which host a planet called Kepler-35b.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn theory, a planet like Kepler-35b, about eight times the size of Earth, could retain water and be hospitable for life if located the right distance way from its paired stars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL/CalTech\n \n\n\n\nAt least 360 of the planets found so far are terrestrial, planetary scientists say, meaning there is the chance their rocky structure may resemble our home world. And by latest count, 52 of them orbit their stars in a zone where the temperature isn\u2019t t Scientists hope that the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes and space missions will speed the pace of exploration ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Tech Astronomers Use To Explore the Universe\u2019s Many Planets (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1373",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tech-astronomers-use-to-explore-the-universes-many-planets-1496674800?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=121",
        "text": "In the southern hemisphere of the constellation Eridanus, the star Epsilon Eridani is home to the closest planetary system around a star similar to the early Sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook\n \n\n\n\nNot so long ago, Earth seemed all but alone in the universe, with only the barren worlds of our own solar system as companions in the cosmos. Now astronomers are finding exotic planets almost everywhere they look.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist conception of the KELT-9 system. The host star is a hot, rapidly rotating star that is almost twice as hot as our sun. It blasts its nearby planet KELT-9b with massive amounts of ultraviolet and optical radiation, leading to a dayside temperature of 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter that most stars and only 2000 degrees cooler than the sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Monday, researchers led by astronomer Scott Gaudi at Ohio State University announced the discovery of the hottest planet in the known universe, circling a star about 650 light years from Earth. On KELT-9b, as it called, the surface temperature reaches 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014 hotter than many stars, they reported in Nature. They spotted it with two telescopes in Arizona and South Africa especially designed to spot planets orbiting very bright stars.\n\n\nAll told, astronomers have found roughly 3,600 planets orbiting more than 2,700 distant stars so far and dozens of them are deemed to be potentially hospitable to life, scientists say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s conception of the extrasolar ring system circling J1407b. The rings are shown eclipsing the young sun-like star J1407, as they would have appeared in early 2007.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ron Miller\n \n\n\n\nThere are so many exoplanets, as these alien worlds are called, that some scientists calculate that each star in the Milky Way likely has at least one planet in orbit around it. One exoplanet orbits its star backward; one takes 80,000 years to complete a single orbit\u2014a record among exoplanets. Others confound traditional theories of planet formation and the evolution of solar systems. \nMany more travel in solitary darkness around our galaxy, untethered to any one star. There are more starless wandering planets than there are stars in the universe, scientists say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis was the first compact solar system discovered by Kepler, and it revealed that a system can be tightly packed, with at least five planets within the orbit of Mercury, and still be stable\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nTo date, scientists have found planets hot enough to rain lava. Others are ice balls. There is a Jupiter-size giant with the density of Styrofoam and a world of carbon that might have a diamond core. Using data from the SuperWASP project, a consortium of U.K. universities that searches for exoplanets using two telescopes in Africa, astronomers detected an immense alien world called J1407b with rings 200 times larger than those around Saturn.\nUsing NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope, researchers in 2011 discovered an unusually compact solar system containing six rocky planets orbiting a single sun-like star called Kepler-11, approximately 2,000 light years from Earth. It suggested that multiple small-planet systems, like ours, may be common.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe young exoplanet, K2-33b, is a bit larger than Neptune and makes a complete orbit around its star every five days.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nThere are worlds almost as old as the universe itself. The oldest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, called PSR B1 620-26b, is about 13 billion years old, more than twice as old as Earth\u2019s 4.5 billion years. It formed barely 1 billion years after our universe\u2019s birth in the big bang.\nThere are worlds so young that they emerged only recently from the cosmic nursery. The planet K2-33b is only 5 million to 10 million years old. Astronomers using NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii discovered it in 2016.\nPlanets around double stars\u2014like the desert planet Tatooine in Star Wars\u2014are relatively common, astronomers have discovered. Depending on how closely they orbit these paired stars, such planets might be hospitable to life, according to astronomers who studied a stellar pair called Kepler-35A and B, which host a planet called Kepler-35b.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn theory, a planet like Kepler-35b, about eight times the size of Earth, could retain water and be hospitable for life if located the right distance way from its paired stars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL/CalTech\n \n\n\n\nAt least 360 of the planets found so far are terrestrial, planetary scientists say, meaning there is the chance their rocky structure may resemble our home world. And by latest count, 52 of them orbit their stars in a zone where the temperature isn Scientists hope that the next generation of planet-hunting telescopes and space missions will speed the pace of exploration ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Detect Two Merged Black Holes (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1374",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-detect-two-merged-black-holes-1496329200?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=93",
        "text": "A mathematical simulation of the warped space-time near two merging black holes, consistent with LIGO's observation of the event dubbed GW170104. The colored bands are gravitational-wave peaks and troughs, with the colors getting brighter as the wave amplitude increases.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n LIGO/Caltech/MIT/SXS Collaboration\n \n\n\n\nThe discovery, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, offers new clues to how black holes can grow to many times the mass of the sun, like those that lurk at the heart of virtually every galaxy, and hints at the role they may play in the evolution of the universe. More than a thousand scientists were involved in the effort, led by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\nThe announcement marks the third time in just over a year that the LIGO researchers have successfully detected an object by measuring the physical warping of space caused by gravitational waves. All three discoveries involved black holes\u2014massive objects that cannot be seen directly by ordinary means because their gravity is so intense that no matter, light or other radiation appears to escape.\n\n\n\u201cBefore our discoveries, we didn\u2019t even know for sure that black holes truly existed,\u201d said LIGO astrophysicist Laura Cadonati at the Georgia Institute of Technology. \nIn their newest work, researchers at sprawling LIGO installations located in Livingston, La., and Hanford, Wash., registered the gravitational tremors from the crush of two ancient black holes, each one spinning on its axis like a tornado as they spiraled together and then joined in a violent embrace. In an explosive third of a second, they released the combined energy of two stars\u2014more energy in that instant than from all the light from all the galaxies in the universe, the scientists said.\n\n\nMore in Science\n\n\n\n\nOzone Hole Above Antarctica Shrinks to Smallest Size on Record \nOctober 23, 2019 \n\n\nBird Populations Plunge in North America\nSeptember 19, 2019 \n\n\nClimate Experts Advise Eating More Vegetables, Less Meat \nAugust 8, 2019 \n\n\nAbout One Million Species Face Risk of Extinction, U.N. Report Says\nMay 7, 2019 \n\n\n\n\nTo pick up the perturbations, the detectors monitored how long it takes a controlled laser beam to travel between suspended mirrors. Ripples in space-time can alter the distance measured by the light beam, causing the amount of light falling on the LIGO photo-detectors to vary minutely. Only the most violent events in the cosmos produce waves strong enough to register.\n\u201cNormally, we don\u2019t think of the nothing of space as having properties,\u201d said Caltech physicist Michael Landry, head of the Hanford LIGO facility. \u201cWe register the passage of those gravitational waves as they change the length of our two detectors.\u201d\nThe scientists calculated that one black hole was 19 times the mass of the sun and its companion was 31 times the mass of the sun. They merged into a single black hole about 49 times the mass of the sun, said LIGO physicist Bangalore Sathyaprakash at Pennsylvania State University and the U.K.\u2019s Cardiff University.\nIn the years ahead, the researchers expect gravitational waves to unveil a universe to which conventional telescopes, scanning the sky for visible light and other electromagnetic wavelengths, are blind.\n\u201cWe are really moving to a new astronomy of gravitational waves,\u201d said MIT physicist David Shoemaker, the LIGO project\u2019s elected spokesman.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tLIGO physicist Bangalore Sathyaprakash is at Pennsylvania State University and the U.K.\u2019s Cardiff University. His first name was misspelled as Banglaore in an earlier version of this article. (June 1, 2017) Researchers have detected the violent merger of two black holes, demonstrating how astrophysicists are using newly discovered gravitational waves to reveal forces shaping the cosmos. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "How JFK Sent the U.S. to the Moon (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1375",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jfk-took-the-u-s-to-the-moon-11554385885?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=63",
        "text": "This July marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landing that fulfilled Kennedy\u2019s pledge. Unfortunately, he didn\u2019t live to see the Eagle make its successful landing during the Apollo 11 mission. Everybody at NASA in 1969 knew, however, that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n feat wouldn\u2019t have happened without Kennedy\u2019s commitment. As astronaut Buzz Aldrin later reflected, Kennedy had the courage \u201cto reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil.\u201d\nThe moonshot was the right goal for the historical moment. In October 1957, the Soviet Union had stunned America by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, setting off a frantic race to improve U.S. capabilities in space. Kennedy had made the issue his own during his run for president in 1960, when he accused the Eisenhower administration of having allowed the U.S. to fall behind, vowing that he would \u201crebuild the stature of American science and education.\u201d In his famous televised debate with GOP nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n Kennedy recalled the vice president\u2019s so-called \u201cKitchen Debate\u201d with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the year before: \u201cYou yourself said to Khrushchev, \u2018You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we\u2019re ahead of you in color television.\u2019 I will take my television in black and white. I want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nOnce Kennedy beat Nixon to become America\u2019s 35th president, he quickly embraced manned space exploration as essential to winning the Cold War. For each Soviet achievement in space, NASA fired back with a win of its own. When Soviet cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first man in space, NASA responded with astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard\u2019s\n\n\n\n suborbital flight; when the Soviets sent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gherman Titov\n\n\n\n into orbit around the Earth, NASA did the same with John Glenn. Cities such as Houston, St. Louis and Huntsville, Ala. were transformed by NASA\u2019s mobilization. At the center of it all was Kennedy, whose sheer enthusiasm overcame skeptics and persuaded America to shoulder the moonshot program\u2019s enormous price tag of $25 billion (around $180 billion in today\u2019s dollars).\n\n\nRELATED Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever \n\n\nOn Nov. 16, 1963, Kennedy traveled to NASA\u2019s launch complex at Cape Canaveral to be briefed on the Apollo program, in which three-man crews would be sent on progressively more ambitious missions. He beamed with pride at a two-stage Saturn C-1 booster rocket, then embarked on a helicopter tour with astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Grissom\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Cooper.\n\n\n\n From Florida, Kennedy headed to Texas for a two-day, five-city swing to promote NASA. Working the rope line after a speech at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Kennedy asked Cooper to go to Dallas with him the next day. \u201cHe said he could use a \u2018space hero\u2019 with him,\u201d Cooper later recalled. \u201cI couldn\u2019t make the trip because some important systems tests were scheduled at the Cape for the next day: November 22, 1963.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, July 20, 1969. (AP Photo/NASA/Neil Armstrong)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThat day, at 11:55 CST, President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. When the NASA astronauts learned of the assassination, they were both grief-stricken and anxious that Apollo\u2019s funding would dry up without its chief cheerleader in the White House.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jacqueline Kennedy\n\n\n\n also feared that Apollo would wither unless Americans saw it as a memorial to her husband: \u201cI kept thinking,\u201d she recalled, \u201cthat\u2019s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten.\u201d Shortly after the president\u2019s burial, Mrs. Kennedy met with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson\n\n\n\n in the Oval Office and reminded him of how her husband had roused America to a great national purpose.\n\n\nSoon Johnson would be using the same emotional plea, evoking the martyred Kennedy whenever Congress tried to slash the Apollo budget. In the Senate, Johnson\u2019s 1964 presidential rival,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barry Goldwater,\n\n\n\n wanted to shift funding from Apollo to the U.S. Air Force. Former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n a longtime critic, complained that the moonshot was a \u201cstunt\u201d that diverted resources from more useful military and civilian applications of space science. On the Democratic side, a proposal by Arkansas Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J. William Fulbright\n\n\n\n to cut 10% from Apollo\u2019s 1965 funding came within four votes of passing.\nJohnson, a NASA booster since his Senate days, embraced Apollo as part of the competition with global communism. He didn\u2019t think the U.S. could afford to be \u201cfirst on Earth and second in space.\u201d And while NASA\u2019s budget did in fact fall annually after its high point of $5.9 billion in 1966, neither this decline nor the 1967 training disaster that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Chaffee\n\n\n\n and Ed White were enough to derail Apollo. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNeil Armstrong left the first footprint on the moon on July 20, 1969.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn the spring of 1969, NASA announced a July launch date for Apollo 11, the long-anticipated lunar mission. If it succeeded, history would credit Kennedy with willing the moonshot into being, though another president\u2014Richard Nixon, Kennedy\u2019s 1960 presidential rival\u2014would have the honor of presiding over the launch. In early summer, Democrats Bill Moyers, Johnson\u2019s former press secretary, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Patrick Moynihan,\n\n\n\n the future senator from New York, lobbied Nixon to name the Apollo 11 spacecraft after Kennedy. They received a chilly reception. \nIn the end, not only did Nixon decline to name the rocket after his former rival, but he declined to invoke Kennedy\u2019s name at all when astronaut Neil Armstrong left the first human footprint on the lunar surface on July 20 at 10:56 p.m. EDT, declaring it \u201cone small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d For Nixon, however, and for many other Americans, Apollo soon lost its luster. After celebrating Apollo 11\u2019s success as \u201cthe greatest week in the history of the world since the creation\u201d and then presiding over five more Apollo missions, Nixon began promoting budget cutbacks and restructuring. \n\n\n\n\u201cThe last Apollo command module flew a largely symbolic mission in July 1975, marking the end of the space race.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe final three Apollo missions were canceled outright, their Saturn V launch vehicles becoming museum exhibits. The last Apollo command module flew a largely symbolic mission in July 1975, docking in orbit with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft as a symbol of detente. It marked the end not only of Apollo but of the Cold War space race that had propelled Kennedy\u2019s lunar dream.\nIn 2009, the columnist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Krauthammer\n\n\n\n lamented the change in public sentiment about space exploration. \u201cA vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage \u2018the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.\u2019 We came, we saw, we retreated. How could we?\u201d \nThis spring, Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n declared that NASA will once again send astronauts to the moon by 2024, as part of a new space race with China. This grand objective will succeed only if NASA employs the same all-hands-on-deck approach that it perfected under Kennedy\u2019s visionary leadership.\n\u2014Mr. Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University. This essay is adapted from his new book \u201cAmerican Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race,\u201d published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is a division of News Corp).\n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 President Kennedy\u2019s challenge to the nation led to a space-race victory he didn\u2019t live to see. ",
        "author": "Douglas Brinkley"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019re Still Dreaming of Mars and Martians (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1376",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-still-dreaming-of-mars-and-martians-11613656624?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=9",
        "text": "The purpose of these missions is to study the composition of Mars\u2019s soil and atmosphere. The one thing they\u2019re certain not to find is what humanity long dreamed of finding on the red planet: an intelligent species with a civilization and technology comparable to our own. For almost a century, from the 1880s to the 1960s, Martians were humanity\u2019s favorite shorthand for extraterrestrial life. Science fiction as a literary genre grew up with Martians, starting with H.G. Wells\u2019s 1898 novel \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d about invaders from the red planet. So did the movies, which have used Mars as a showcase for special effects since Thomas Edison\u2019s 1910 film \u201cA Trip to Mars.\u201d Martians were so popular in the early 20th century that the word itself now has a nostalgic feel, conjuring the past\u2019s dream of a future that never came to be.\n\n\n\n\u201cThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable.\u201d\n\n\n\nThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable. Before the rise of modern astronomy, writers who imagined journeys to outer space generally picked the moon as a destination\u2014naturally enough, since it\u2019s far more conspicuous than Mars to the naked eye. The earliest such tale is the 2nd-century Greek work \u201cA True Story,\u201d in which the narrator\u2019s ship is caught in a whirlwind and carried through the air for seven days and nights until it lands on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMatt Damon played an astronaut stranded on Mars in the 2015 movie \u201cThe Martian.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe shift to Mars as the most popular setting for space fantasy began in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published a map of the planet that included features he called canali or \u201cchannels.\u201d Schiaparelli didn\u2019t believe these were artificial or carried water, but when canali was translated into English as \u201ccanals,\u201d it was easy for readers to assume that they must be large-scale engineering projects\u2014which meant that there must be Martians capable of building them.\n\n\nNo one did more to popularize this idea than the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who claimed to have observed even more detailed canal networks. In his 1906 book \u201cMars and Its Canals,\u201d he argued that they were built by the inhabitants of Mars to transport water from the polar ice caps. The fact that the canals spanned the whole globe proved that Martians weren\u2019t divided into warring nations, like us, but knew how to cooperate for the common good: \u201cWhether increasing common sense or increasing necessity was the spur that drove the Martians to this eminently sagacious state we cannot say, but it is certain that reached it they have,\u201d Lowell wrote.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA (Originally Published Feb. 10, 2021)\n \n\n\nAstronomers with better telescopes and fewer preconceptions soon concluded that the Martian canals were an optical illusion. But in the absence of real knowledge about conditions on Mars, the idea that Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor might be home to an advanced civilization proved too irresistible to give up. Writers and then filmmakers made up stories about Martians for the same reason as Percival Lowell: They were a perfect vehicle for reflecting on and criticizing humanity.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat is your favorite Martian story? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nIn \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d H.G. Wells imagined Martians that were terrifyingly unlike us in physical terms\u2014\u201cthe most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive,\u201d with \u201chuge round bodies\u2014or, rather, heads\u2014about four feet in diameter\u201d and \u201csixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight.\u201d But in Wells\u2019s Darwinian vision, the Martians are very much like us in their indifference to the suffering of other species. As they rampage through London in giant metal tripods armed with heat rays, they give humans a taste of what it\u2019s like to be displaced as the apex predator. Fortunately, in the end natural selection comes to our rescue, when it turns out that the Martians are highly vulnerable to earthly germs that we have evolved to resist. \nHalf a century later, in his 1950 classic \u201cThe Martian Chronicles,\u201d Ray Bradbury turned the tables by imagining humans as the invaders. In short stories inspired by the Midwestern vignettes of Sherwood Anderson\u2019s \u201cWinesburg, Ohio,\u201d the book traces the arc of human encounters with Martians starting with our first landing, which it imagines taking place in 1999. In Bradbury\u2019s version we bring our germs with us to Mars, nearly wiping out the native inhabitants, who have telepathic brains and transparent b Long before probes discovered the truth about Mars, stories about its inhabitants helped us understand the best and worst of humanity. ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019re Still Dreaming of Mars and Martians (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1377",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-still-dreaming-of-mars-and-martians-11613656624?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=27",
        "text": "The purpose of these missions is to study the composition of Mars\u2019s soil and atmosphere. The one thing they\u2019re certain not to find is what humanity long dreamed of finding on the red planet: an intelligent species with a civilization and technology comparable to our own. For almost a century, from the 1880s to the 1960s, Martians were humanity\u2019s favorite shorthand for extraterrestrial life. Science fiction as a literary genre grew up with Martians, starting with H.G. Wells\u2019s 1898 novel \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d about invaders from the red planet. So did the movies, which have used Mars as a showcase for special effects since Thomas Edison\u2019s 1910 film \u201cA Trip to Mars.\u201d Martians were so popular in the early 20th century that the word itself now has a nostalgic feel, conjuring the past\u2019s dream of a future that never came to be.\n\n\n\n\u201cThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable.\u201d\n\n\n\nThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable. Before the rise of modern astronomy, writers who imagined journeys to outer space generally picked the moon as a destination\u2014naturally enough, since it\u2019s far more conspicuous than Mars to the naked eye. The earliest such tale is the 2nd-century Greek work \u201cA True Story,\u201d in which the narrator\u2019s ship is caught in a whirlwind and carried through the air for seven days and nights until it lands on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMatt Damon played an astronaut stranded on Mars in the 2015 movie \u201cThe Martian.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe shift to Mars as the most popular setting for space fantasy began in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published a map of the planet that included features he called canali or \u201cchannels.\u201d Schiaparelli didn\u2019t believe these were artificial or carried water, but when canali was translated into English as \u201ccanals,\u201d it was easy for readers to assume that they must be large-scale engineering projects\u2014which meant that there must be Martians capable of building them.\n\n\nNo one did more to popularize this idea than the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who claimed to have observed even more detailed canal networks. In his 1906 book \u201cMars and Its Canals,\u201d he argued that they were built by the inhabitants of Mars to transport water from the polar ice caps. The fact that the canals spanned the whole globe proved that Martians weren\u2019t divided into warring nations, like us, but knew how to cooperate for the common good: \u201cWhether increasing common sense or increasing necessity was the spur that drove the Martians to this eminently sagacious state we cannot say, but it is certain that reached it they have,\u201d Lowell wrote.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA (Originally Published Feb. 10, 2021)\n \n\n\nAstronomers with better telescopes and fewer preconceptions soon concluded that the Martian canals were an optical illusion. But in the absence of real knowledge about conditions on Mars, the idea that Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor might be home to an advanced civilization proved too irresistible to give up. Writers and then filmmakers made up stories about Martians for the same reason as Percival Lowell: They were a perfect vehicle for reflecting on and criticizing humanity.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat is your favorite Martian story? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nIn \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d H.G. Wells imagined Martians that were terrifyingly unlike us in physical terms\u2014\u201cthe most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive,\u201d with \u201chuge round bodies\u2014or, rather, heads\u2014about four feet in diameter\u201d and \u201csixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight.\u201d But in Wells\u2019s Darwinian vision, the Martians are very much like us in their indifference to the suffering of other species. As they rampage through London in giant metal tripods armed with heat rays, they give humans a taste of what it\u2019s like to be displaced as the apex predator. Fortunately, in the end natural selection comes to our rescue, when it turns out that the Martians are highly vulnerable to earthly germs that we have evolved to resist. \nHalf a century later, in his 1950 classic \u201cThe Martian Chronicles,\u201d Ray Bradbury turned the tables by imagining humans as the invaders. In short stories inspired by the Midwestern vignettes of Sherwood Anderson\u2019s \u201cWinesburg, Ohio,\u201d the book traces the arc of human encounters with Martians starting with our first landing, which it imagines taking place in 1999. In Bradbury\u2019s version we bring our germs with us to Mars, nearly wiping out the native inhabitants, who have telepathic brains and transparent b Long before probes discovered the truth about Mars, stories about its inhabitants helped us understand the best and worst of humanity. ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019re Still Dreaming of Mars and Martians (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1378",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-still-dreaming-of-mars-and-martians-11613656624?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=24",
        "text": "The purpose of these missions is to study the composition of Mars\u2019s soil and atmosphere. The one thing they\u2019re certain not to find is what humanity long dreamed of finding on the red planet: an intelligent species with a civilization and technology comparable to our own. For almost a century, from the 1880s to the 1960s, Martians were humanity\u2019s favorite shorthand for extraterrestrial life. Science fiction as a literary genre grew up with Martians, starting with H.G. Wells\u2019s 1898 novel \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d about invaders from the red planet. So did the movies, which have used Mars as a showcase for special effects since Thomas Edison\u2019s 1910 film \u201cA Trip to Mars.\u201d Martians were so popular in the early 20th century that the word itself now has a nostalgic feel, conjuring the past\u2019s dream of a future that never came to be.\n\n\n\n\u201cThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable.\u201d\n\n\n\nThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable. Before the rise of modern astronomy, writers who imagined journeys to outer space generally picked the moon as a destination\u2014naturally enough, since it\u2019s far more conspicuous than Mars to the naked eye. The earliest such tale is the 2nd-century Greek work \u201cA True Story,\u201d in which the narrator\u2019s ship is caught in a whirlwind and carried through the air for seven days and nights until it lands on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMatt Damon played an astronaut stranded on Mars in the 2015 movie \u201cThe Martian.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe shift to Mars as the most popular setting for space fantasy began in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published a map of the planet that included features he called canali or \u201cchannels.\u201d Schiaparelli didn\u2019t believe these were artificial or carried water, but when canali was translated into English as \u201ccanals,\u201d it was easy for readers to assume that they must be large-scale engineering projects\u2014which meant that there must be Martians capable of building them.\n\n\nNo one did more to popularize this idea than the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who claimed to have observed even more detailed canal networks. In his 1906 book \u201cMars and Its Canals,\u201d he argued that they were built by the inhabitants of Mars to transport water from the polar ice caps. The fact that the canals spanned the whole globe proved that Martians weren\u2019t divided into warring nations, like us, but knew how to cooperate for the common good: \u201cWhether increasing common sense or increasing necessity was the spur that drove the Martians to this eminently sagacious state we cannot say, but it is certain that reached it they have,\u201d Lowell wrote.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA (Originally Published Feb. 10, 2021)\n \n\n\nAstronomers with better telescopes and fewer preconceptions soon concluded that the Martian canals were an optical illusion. But in the absence of real knowledge about conditions on Mars, the idea that Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor might be home to an advanced civilization proved too irresistible to give up. Writers and then filmmakers made up stories about Martians for the same reason as Percival Lowell: They were a perfect vehicle for reflecting on and criticizing humanity.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat is your favorite Martian story? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nIn \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d H.G. Wells imagined Martians that were terrifyingly unlike us in physical terms\u2014\u201cthe most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive,\u201d with \u201chuge round bodies\u2014or, rather, heads\u2014about four feet in diameter\u201d and \u201csixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight.\u201d But in Wells\u2019s Darwinian vision, the Martians are very much like us in their indifference to the suffering of other species. As they rampage through London in giant metal tripods armed with heat rays, they give humans a taste of what it\u2019s like to be displaced as the apex predator. Fortunately, in the end natural selection comes to our rescue, when it turns out that the Martians are highly vulnerable to earthly germs that we have evolved to resist. \nHalf a century later, in his 1950 classic \u201cThe Martian Chronicles,\u201d Ray Bradbury turned the tables by imagining humans as the invaders. In short stories inspired by the Midwestern vignettes of Sherwood Anderson\u2019s \u201cWinesburg, Ohio,\u201d the book traces the arc of human encounters with Martians starting with our first landing, which it imagines taking place in 1999. In Bradbury\u2019s version we bring our germs with us to Mars, nearly wiping out the native inhabitants, who have telepathic brains and transparent b Long before probes discovered the truth about Mars, stories about its inhabitants helped us understand the best and worst of humanity. ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019re Still Dreaming of Mars and Martians (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1379",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-still-dreaming-of-mars-and-martians-11613656624?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=28",
        "text": "The purpose of these missions is to study the composition of Mars\u2019s soil and atmosphere. The one thing they\u2019re certain not to find is what humanity long dreamed of finding on the red planet: an intelligent species with a civilization and technology comparable to our own. For almost a century, from the 1880s to the 1960s, Martians were humanity\u2019s favorite shorthand for extraterrestrial life. Science fiction as a literary genre grew up with Martians, starting with H.G. Wells\u2019s 1898 novel \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d about invaders from the red planet. So did the movies, which have used Mars as a showcase for special effects since Thomas Edison\u2019s 1910 film \u201cA Trip to Mars.\u201d Martians were so popular in the early 20th century that the word itself now has a nostalgic feel, conjuring the past\u2019s dream of a future that never came to be.\n\n\n\n\u201cThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable. Before the rise of modern astronomy, writers who imagined journeys to outer space generally picked the moon as a destination\u2014naturally enough, since it\u2019s far more conspicuous than Mars to the naked eye. The earliest such tale is the 2nd-century Greek work \u201cA True Story,\u201d in which the narrator\u2019s ship is caught in a whirlwind and carried through the air for seven days and nights until it lands on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMatt Damon played an astronaut stranded on Mars in the 2015 movie \u201cThe Martian.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe shift to Mars as the most popular setting for space fantasy began in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published a map of the planet that included features he called canali or \u201cchannels.\u201d Schiaparelli didn\u2019t believe these were artificial or carried water, but when canali was translated into English as \u201ccanals,\u201d it was easy for readers to assume that they must be large-scale engineering projects\u2014which meant that there must be Martians capable of building them.\n\n\nNo one did more to popularize this idea than the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who claimed to have observed even more detailed canal networks. In his 1906 book \u201cMars and Its Canals,\u201d he argued that they were built by the inhabitants of Mars to transport water from the polar ice caps. The fact that the canals spanned the whole globe proved that Martians weren\u2019t divided into warring nations, like us, but knew how to cooperate for the common good: \u201cWhether increasing common sense or increasing necessity was the spur that drove the Martians to this eminently sagacious state we cannot say, but it is certain that reached it they have,\u201d Lowell wrote.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA (Originally Published Feb. 10, 2021)\n \n\n\nAstronomers with better telescopes and fewer preconceptions soon concluded that the Martian canals were an optical illusion. But in the absence of real knowledge about conditions on Mars, the idea that Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor might be home to an advanced civilization proved too irresistible to give up. Writers and then filmmakers made up stories about Martians for the same reason as Percival Lowell: They were a perfect vehicle for reflecting on and criticizing humanity.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat is your favorite Martian story? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nIn \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d H.G. Wells imagined Martians that were terrifyingly unlike us in physical terms\u2014\u201cthe most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive,\u201d with \u201chuge round bodies\u2014or, rather, heads\u2014about four feet in diameter\u201d and \u201csixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight.\u201d But in Wells\u2019s Darwinian vision, the Martians are very much like us in their indifference to the suffering of other species. As they rampage through London in giant metal tripods armed with heat rays, they give humans a taste of what it\u2019s like to be displaced as the apex predator. Fortunately, in the end natural selection comes to our rescue, when it turns out that the Martians are highly vulnerable to earthly germs that we have evolved to resist. \nHalf a century later, in his 1950 classic \u201cThe Martian Chronicles,\u201d Ray Bradbury turned the tables by imagining humans as the invaders. In short stories inspired by the Midwestern vignettes of Sherwood Anderson\u2019s \u201cWinesburg, Ohio,\u201d the book traces the arc of human encounters with Martians starting with our first landing, which it imagines taking place in 1999. In Bradbury\u2019s version we bring our germs with us to Mars, nearly wiping out the native inhabitants, who have telepathic brains and transparent bodies, like \u201cthe thin, phosphorescent membrane of a gelatinous sea fish.\u201d The few Martian survivors are abused and aggressively missionized by the human colonists; only a few humans in the book are sympathetic or curious about the species they have replaced.\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIt is, of course, a parable of the European conquest of the Americas, and Bradbury uses Mars and Martians to mount a harsh critique of the American character: \u201cThe rockets were American and the men were American and it stayed that way,\u201d he writes. Finally, the same human qualities that led to the downfall of the Martians spell doom for humanity itself. In the last part of \u201cThe Martian Chronicles,\u201d Earth is destroyed in a nuclear war, leaving the colonists on Mars to try to start a new, better civilization.\nLooking at Mars through a telescope started us fantasizing about Martians; looking at it closer up brought those fantasies to an end. In July 1965, the Mariner 4 probe performed the first ever flyby of the red planet, showing that its atmosphere was much too thin to sustain liquid water or advanced life. Today\u2019s probes hope to find evidence of primitive microbes at best.\nBut just because Martians don\u2019t exist doesn\u2019t mean they never will. The ultimate goal of today\u2019s Mars exploration is to determine whether permanent human settlement is feasible. Elon Musk, for one, believes that it is. His master plan for SpaceX involves building a fleet of interstellar rockets that can ferry tens of thousands of colonists. The same idea has inspired a new generation of Martian fiction, which grapples more realistically with the difficulties of sustaining human life on an airless planet.\nKim Stanley Robinson\u2019s Mars trilogy\u2014\u201cRed Mars,\u201d \u201cGreen Mars\u201d and \u201cBlue Mars,\u201d published in 1992-96\u2014imagines the gradual terraforming of the planet, making its climate more earthlike. And in \u201cThe Martian,\u201d the 2011 novel by Andy Weir\u2014later adapted into a movie starring Matt Damon\u2014the title refers to a human astronaut who must fight to survive when he is stranded on Mars. This Robinson Crusoe tale shows how far our Martian dreams have shrunk\u2014from a grand alien civilization to a single Homo sapiens clinging to life. But it\u2019s also a sign that the last chapter of the Martian story has yet to be written. Long before probes discovered the truth about Mars, stories about its inhabitants helped us understand the best and worst of humanity. ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019re Still Dreaming of Mars and Martians (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1380",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-still-dreaming-of-mars-and-martians-11613656624?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=34",
        "text": "The purpose of these missions is to study the composition of Mars\u2019s soil and atmosphere. The one thing they\u2019re certain not to find is what humanity long dreamed of finding on the red planet: an intelligent species with a civilization and technology comparable to our own. For almost a century, from the 1880s to the 1960s, Martians were humanity\u2019s favorite shorthand for extraterrestrial life. Science fiction as a literary genre grew up with Martians, starting with H.G. Wells\u2019s 1898 novel \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d about invaders from the red planet. So did the movies, which have used Mars as a showcase for special effects since Thomas Edison\u2019s 1910 film \u201cA Trip to Mars.\u201d Martians were so popular in the early 20th century that the word itself now has a nostalgic feel, conjuring the past\u2019s dream of a future that never came to be.\n\n\n\n\u201cThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable.\u201d\n\n\n\nThat humanity would fixate on Martians rather than Venusians or Saturnites wasn\u2019t inevitable. Before the rise of modern astronomy, writers who imagined journeys to outer space generally picked the moon as a destination\u2014naturally enough, since it\u2019s far more conspicuous than Mars to the naked eye. The earliest such tale is the 2nd-century Greek work \u201cA True Story,\u201d in which the narrator\u2019s ship is caught in a whirlwind and carried through the air for seven days and nights until it lands on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMatt Damon played an astronaut stranded on Mars in the 2015 movie \u201cThe Martian.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe shift to Mars as the most popular setting for space fantasy began in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published a map of the planet that included features he called canali or \u201cchannels.\u201d Schiaparelli didn\u2019t believe these were artificial or carried water, but when canali was translated into English as \u201ccanals,\u201d it was easy for readers to assume that they must be large-scale engineering projects\u2014which meant that there must be Martians capable of building them.\n\n\nNo one did more to popularize this idea than the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who claimed to have observed even more detailed canal networks. In his 1906 book \u201cMars and Its Canals,\u201d he argued that they were built by the inhabitants of Mars to transport water from the polar ice caps. The fact that the canals spanned the whole globe proved that Martians weren\u2019t divided into warring nations, like us, but knew how to cooperate for the common good: \u201cWhether increasing common sense or increasing necessity was the spur that drove the Martians to this eminently sagacious state we cannot say, but it is certain that reached it they have,\u201d Lowell wrote.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA (Originally Published Feb. 10, 2021)\n \n\n\nAstronomers with better telescopes and fewer preconceptions soon concluded that the Martian canals were an optical illusion. But in the absence of real knowledge about conditions on Mars, the idea that Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor might be home to an advanced civilization proved too irresistible to give up. Writers and then filmmakers made up stories about Martians for the same reason as Percival Lowell: They were a perfect vehicle for reflecting on and criticizing humanity.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat is your favorite Martian story? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nIn \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d H.G. Wells imagined Martians that were terrifyingly unlike us in physical terms\u2014\u201cthe most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive,\u201d with \u201chuge round bodies\u2014or, rather, heads\u2014about four feet in diameter\u201d and \u201csixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight.\u201d But in Wells\u2019s Darwinian vision, the Martians are very much like us in their indifference to the suffering of other species. As they rampage through London in giant metal tripods armed with heat rays, they give humans a taste of what it\u2019s like to be displaced as the apex predator. Fortunately, in the end natural selection comes to our rescue, when it turns out that the Martians are highly vulnerable to earthly germs that we have evolved to resist. \nHalf a century later, in his 1950 classic \u201cThe Martian Chronicles,\u201d Ray Bradbury turned the tables by imagining humans as the invaders. In short stories inspired by the Midwestern vignettes of Sherwood Anderson\u2019s \u201cWinesburg, Ohio,\u201d the book traces the arc of human encounters with Martians starting with our first landing, which it imagines taking place in 1999. In Bradbury\u2019s version we bring our germs with us to Mars, nearly wiping out the native inhabitants, who have telepathic brains and transparent b Long before probes discovered the truth about Mars, stories about its inhabitants helped us understand the best and worst of humanity. ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Kubrick\u2019s \u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 Saw Into the Future (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1381",
        "date": "2018-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey-saw-into-the-future-1520609361?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=20",
        "text": "The film\u2019s previews were an unmitigated disaster. Its story line encompassed an exceptional temporal sweep, starting with the initial contact between pre-human ape-men and an omnipotent alien civilization and then vaulting forward to later encounters between Homo sapiens and the elusive aliens, represented throughout by the film\u2019s iconic metallic-black monolith. Although featuring visual effects of unprecedented realism and power, Kubrick\u2019s panoramic journey into space and time made few concessions to viewer understanding. The film was essentially a nonverbal experience. Its first words came only a good half-hour in.\nAudience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day\u2019s reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie \u201ca thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.\u201d And yet that afternoon, a long line\u2014comprised predominantly of younger people\u2014extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee.\nStung by the initial reactions and under great pressure from MGM, Kubrick soon cut almost 20 minutes from the film. Although \u201c2001\u201d remained willfully opaque and open to interpretation, the trims removed redundancies, and the film spoke more clearly. Critics began to come around. In her review for the Boston Globe, Marjorie Adams, who had seen the shortened version, called it \u201cthe world\u2019s most extraordinary film. Nothing like it has ever been shown in Boston before, or for that matter, anywhere. The film is as exciting as the discovery of a new dimension in life.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cStanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank.\u201d\n\n\n\nAlthough incomprehensible by prevailing Hollywood standards, Kubrick\u2019s cryptic, mostly dialogue-free structure fit well with the radical avant-garde artistic innovations of the period, and the movie was an immediate countercultural hit. John Lennon quipped, \u201c\u20182001\u2019? I see it every week,\u201d and David Bowie was inspired to record his hit single \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d just under a year later\u2014a clear allusion to the film. \u201c2001\u201d became a genuine late-\u201960s cultural happening and a bellwether of the decade\u2019s generational divide. With ticket sales brisk from day one, the production ended up the highest-grossing film of 1968. \u201cAs for the dwindling minority who still don\u2019t like it, that\u2019s their problem, not ours,\u201d Clarke wrote. \u201cStanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank.\u201d\n\n\nFifty years later, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d is widely recognized as ranking among the most influential movies ever made. The most respected poll of such things, conducted every decade by the British Film Institute\u2019s Sight & Sound magazine, asks the world\u2019s leading directors and critics to name the 100 greatest films of all time. The last BFI decadal survey, conducted in 2012, placed it at No. 2 among directors and No. 6 among critics. Not bad for a film that critic Pauline Kael had waited a contemptuous 10 months before dismissing as \u201ctrash masquerading as art\u201d in the pages of Harper\u2019s.\nAlthough the film\u2019s vision of humanity expanding throughout the solar system proved overoptimistic, its portrait of a screen-based, technology-mediated future now seems almost uncannily accurate, and it devastatingly evokes the dehumanization that can result from such communication. As for the cyclopean HAL-9000 supercomputer, often considered the most human character in \u201c2001,\u201d it foreshadowed our anxious contemporary discussion about the potentially dystopian impact of artificial-intelligence technologies.\nThe film\u2019s extraordinary predictive realism was entirely premeditated, the result of Kubrick and Clarke\u2019s questing, cerebral commitment to scientific and technical accuracy. By all accounts the production was run less like a big-budget Hollywood production than an extended futurological R&D exercise. A broad slate of top aerospace and computer companies were brought on board as consultants and advisers, with such leading innovators as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM,\n\n\n Bell Labs and Hewlett-Packard all playing important roles.\nIn the summer of 1965, Kubrick received two detailed Bell Labs reports written by A. Michael Noll (a trailblazer in the development of digital arts and 3-D animation) and information theorist John R. Pierce (who coined the term \u201ctransistor\u201d and headed the team that built the first communications satellite). They recommended that the spacecraft systems in \u201c2001\u201d all feature multiple \u201cfairly large, flat and rectangular\u201d screens, with \u201cno indication of the massive depth of equipment behind them.\u201d Flat screens were, of course, unknown in the \u201960s\u2014at least outside of movie theaters\u2014and they helped to ensure 2001\u2019s futuristic sheen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe film featured forward-looking flat-screen tablet computers.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mary Evans/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe role of the film\u2019s sentien Now 50 years old, the famously opaque science-fiction classic anticipated flat-screen technology and artificial intelligence (but no, HAL was not a spoof of IBM). ",
        "author": "Michael Benson"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Kubrick\u2019s \u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 Saw Into the Future (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1382",
        "date": "2018-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey-saw-into-the-future-1520609361?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=78",
        "text": "The film\u2019s previews were an unmitigated disaster. Its story line encompassed an exceptional temporal sweep, starting with the initial contact between pre-human ape-men and an omnipotent alien civilization and then vaulting forward to later encounters between Homo sapiens and the elusive aliens, represented throughout by the film\u2019s iconic metallic-black monolith. Although featuring visual effects of unprecedented realism and power, Kubrick\u2019s panoramic journey into space and time made few concessions to viewer understanding. The film was essentially a nonverbal experience. Its first words came only a good half-hour in.\nAudience walkouts numbered well over 200 at the New York premiere on April 3, 1968, and the next day\u2019s reviews were almost uniformly negative. Writing in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris called the movie \u201ca thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.\u201d And yet that afternoon, a long line\u2014comprised predominantly of younger people\u2014extended down Broadway, awaiting the first matinee.\n\n\n\n\nStung by the initial reactions and under great pressure from MGM, Kubrick soon cut almost 20 minutes from the film. Although \u201c2001\u201d remained willfully opaque and open to interpretation, the trims removed redundancies, and the film spoke more clearly. Critics began to come around. In her review for the Boston Globe, Marjorie Adams, who had seen the shortened version, called it \u201cthe world\u2019s most extraordinary film. Nothing like it has ever been shown in Boston before, or for that matter, anywhere. The film is as exciting as the discovery of a new dimension in life.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cStanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank.\u201d\n\n\n\nAlthough incomprehensible by prevailing Hollywood standards, Kubrick\u2019s cryptic, mostly dialogue-free structure fit well with the radical avant-garde artistic innovations of the period, and the movie was an immediate countercultural hit. John Lennon quipped, \u201c\u20182001\u2019? I see it every week,\u201d and David Bowie was inspired to record his hit single \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d just under a year later\u2014a clear allusion to the film. \u201c2001\u201d became a genuine late-\u201960s cultural happening and a bellwether of the decade\u2019s generational divide. With ticket sales brisk from day one, the production ended up the highest-grossing film of 1968. \u201cAs for the dwindling minority who still don\u2019t like it, that\u2019s their problem, not ours,\u201d Clarke wrote. \u201cStanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank.\u201d\n\n\nFifty years later, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d is widely recognized as ranking among the most influential movies ever made. The most respected poll of such things, conducted every decade by the British Film Institute\u2019s Sight & Sound magazine, asks the world\u2019s leading directors and critics to name the 100 greatest films of all time. The last BFI decadal survey, conducted in 2012, placed it at No. 2 among directors and No. 6 among critics. Not bad for a film that critic Pauline Kael had waited a contemptuous 10 months before dismissing as \u201ctrash masquerading as art\u201d in the pages of Harper\u2019s.\nAlthough the film\u2019s vision of humanity expanding throughout the solar system proved overoptimistic, its portrait of a screen-based, technology-mediated future now seems almost uncannily accurate, and it devastatingly evokes the dehumanization that can result from such communication. As for the cyclopean HAL-9000 supercomputer, often considered the most human character in \u201c2001,\u201d it foreshadowed our anxious contemporary discussion about the potentially dystopian impact of artificial-intelligence technologies.\nThe film\u2019s extraordinary predictive realism was entirely premeditated, the result of Kubrick and Clarke\u2019s questing, cerebral commitment to scientific and technical accuracy. By all accounts the production was run less like a big-budget Hollywood production than an extended futurological R&D exercise. A broad slate of top aerospace and computer companies were brought on board as consultants and advisers, with such leading innovators as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM,\n\n\n Bell Labs and Hewlett-Packard all playing important roles.\nIn the summer of 1965, Kubrick received two detailed Bell Labs reports written by A. Michael Noll (a trailblazer in the development of digital arts and 3-D animation) and information theorist John R. Pierce (who coined the term \u201ctransistor\u201d and headed the team that built the first communications satellite). They recommended that the spacecraft systems in \u201c2001\u201d all feature multiple \u201cfairly large, flat and rectangular\u201d screens, with \u201cno indication of the massive depth of equipment behind them.\u201d Flat screens were, of course, unknown in the \u201960s\u2014at least outside of movie theaters\u2014and they helped to ensure 2001\u2019s futuristic sheen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe film featured forward-looking flat-screen tablet computers.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mary Evans/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe role of the film\u2019s sentient supercomputer, originally named Athena, grew throughout the film\u2019s development, under the influence of discussions that Kubrick and Clarke held with MIT cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky and British cryptologist and mathematician I. J. Good. The computer\u2019s physical look resulted from advice provided by IBM\u2019s influential design bureau-think-tank\u2014the Apple Industrial Design Group of its day\u2014then led by industrial designer Eliot Noyes.\nIn July 1965, Noyes and his team provided drawings of astronauts floating within a kind of \u201cbrain room\u201d\u2014a concept that Kubrick initially rejected but later recognized as having intriguing dramatic possibilities. The astronaut Dave Bowman\u2019s methodical lobotomization of the computer after it\u2014or rather, \u201che\u201d\u2014had killed off the rest of the crew, conducted within the dappled red confines of the film\u2019s remarkable brain-room set, remains one of the most powerfully disturbing scenes ever committed to celluloid.\nHAL stood for \u201cHeuristic Algorithmic,\u201d a Minsky suggestion. The computer\u2019s homicidal tendencies emerged only gradually, forcing the production to remove its original IBM nameplate and to substitute another acronym\u2014a kind of subliminal cognate, with \u201cHAL\u201d being displaced from \u201cIBM\u201d by only one letter in each case, something that both Kubrick and Clarke strenuously denied was intentional.\nAnother fascinating result of the production\u2019s consultation with Big Blue was the film\u2019s forward-looking flat-screen tablet computers, which retained their IBM logos and were called \u201cNewspads.\u201d Constructed long before such technologies were feasible, the movie\u2019s seemingly portable Newspads were actually welded to the tables on which they appeared casually placed, with hidden 16mm film projectors recessed underneath to provide content for their frosted-glass displays.\nIn the film\u2019s final cut, the Newspads were only used by the astronauts to watch a TV program ostensibly from the BBC and were thus largely indistinguishable from the various other displays embedded in the sets. But the production had received permission from the New York Times to use its logo, and Kubrick\u2019s designers had mocked up a digital front page for the Newspads, complete with multiple story choices to be accessed by touch-screen command. If the page had been used, the movie would almost certainly now be seen as having predicted the internet.\nMore than four decades later, however, the predictive futurism of \u201c2001\u201d was decisively ratified when Apple released its first iPad in 2010. Samsung issued a similar device a year later, and Apple immediately sued for patent infringement. That August the Korean company filed a response in federal court in San Jose, Calif., asserting that Apple couldn\u2019t possibly have invented the iPad because the device had already been envisioned in \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d\nSamsung\u2019s unusual defense, which featured both stills and YouTube links from the film, was ultimately ruled inadmissible as evidence, but it confirmed what many fans have long appreciated: the continuing relevance and still-startling prescience of Kubrick\u2019s masterpiece.\n\u2014Mr. Benson is the author of \u201cSpace Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece,\u201d which will be published on April 3 by Simon & Schuster.\n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nThe Spontaneous Origins of Language\nFebruary 26, 2022 Now 50 years old, the famously opaque science-fiction classic anticipated flat-screen technology and artificial intelligence (but no, HAL was not a spoof of IBM). ",
        "author": "Michael Benson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Asteroid Peril Isn\u2019t Science Fiction (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1383",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-asteroid-peril-isnt-science-fiction-11562339356?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=15",
        "text": "Scientists at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that the big rock was headed toward Denver. Unless the asteroid could be deflected, two million people would have to be relocated, and the city would be obliterated.\nAll of this was hair-raising but, fortunately, not real: The scientists were participating in a highly dramatized but scientifically plausible \u201chypothetical asteroid impact scenario\u201d at the International Academy of Astronautics\u2019 sixth Planetary Defense Conference, held in College Park, Md. \n\n\nThe sky wasn\u2019t falling this time, but the underlying questions are still urgent. Many scientists argue that the most effective way to deal with a threat from a small asteroid would be to send up an unmanned spacecraft armed with a nuclear explosive device (they hesitate to call it a bomb) to blow it up or nudge it off course. Nuking an incoming asteroid is also the preferred Hollywood method\u2014it worked spectacularly well for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Willis\n\n\n\n in the exciting but scientifically challenged 1998 film \u201cArmageddon\u201d\u2014but the nuclear option faces serious hurdles in the real world. Sending nuclear weapons into space, even to save Denver, makes lots of people nervous and could violate international treaties governing the militarization of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBruce Willis tries to save the Earth from an incoming asteroid in \u2018Armageddon\u2019 (1998).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Touchstone Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nSo after some heated debate, the scientists assembled in Maryland decided to deploy a fleet of unmanned, nonnuclear \u201ckinetic impactor\u201d spacecraft against the incoming asteroid. Kinetic impactors are essentially cannonball technology: You pack a spacecraft with a payload of solid metal and then crash it head-on into the asteroid, in hopes not of destroying it but of reducing its speed by a tiny fraction. That way, by the time it reaches its predicted rendezvous point with Earth, our planet will have already moved on in its orbit, and the asteroid will fly harmlessly by. \nAt least in theory. In the Maryland scenario, NASA, the European Space Agency, Japan, Russia and China all launched hastily designed and untested kinetic impactor ships. Three of them smashed into the asteroid. The main body of the asteroid was deflected and would miss Earth. Denver was saved! Unfortunately, one of the kinetic impacts inadvertently broke off a 200-foot-wide chunk of the asteroid\u2014and that hurtling fragment was now on track to hit New York City.\nThe only hope was to destroy the fragment with a nuclear device. But existing ground-launched, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles weren\u2019t designed to take on an asteroid in space, and there simply wasn\u2019t time to launch a nuclear-armed spacecraft to intercept the asteroid chunk. New York would just have to take the hit. Millions of people were evacuated, the asteroid exploded in a fireball over Central Park\u2014and Manhattan was wiped off the map. \nMercifully, Manhattan is still very much with us. But the war game was a reminder that asteroid defense isn\u2019t science fiction but a serious and necessary venture. \n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nWhy Millennials Want Their Parents\u2019 Vinyl Records\nMarch 12, 2022 \n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nTrue, the chances of a civilization-destroying asteroid impact are exceedingly small, at least in the foreseeable future. Asteroid strikes that cause regional devastation and catastrophic global climate change occur, on average, only about once every 100,000 years or more. On the other end of the scale, Earth is routinely bombarded by small asteroids that almost always burn up or blow up high in the atmosphere, creating meteors or fireballs that are visually spectacular but pose little or no danger. In December 2018, for example, a 30-foot-wide asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over the Bering Sea with the explosive force of a dozen Hiroshima atomic bombs\u2014but except for a few satellites and sensor systems, no one noticed.\nThe most immediate threat isn\u2019t from the largest or smallest asteroids but from those in between. Over the past two decades, asteroid hunters with NASA and other international space agencies have identified and tracked the orbits of more than 20,000 asteroids\u2014also known as near-Earth objects\u2014that pass through our neighborhood as they orbit the sun. Of those, about 2,000 are classified as potentially hazardous\u2014asteroids that are large enough (greater than 150 yards in diameter) to cause local destruction and that come close enough to Earth to someday pose a threat. \nThe good news is that scientists don\u2019t expect any of these known asteroids to collide with Earth within at least the next century. Some will come pretty close, though: On an unlucky Friday the 13th in April 2029, the thousand-foot-wide asteroid Apophis will pass a mere 19,000 miles from Even if we managed to spot a small but dangerous asteroid heading for Earth, we currently have no means to stop it. ",
        "author": "Gordon L. Dillow"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Asteroid Peril Isn\u2019t Science Fiction (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1384",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-asteroid-peril-isnt-science-fiction-11562339356?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=53",
        "text": "Scientists at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that the big rock was headed toward Denver. Unless the asteroid could be deflected, two million people would have to be relocated, and the city would be obliterated.\nAll of this was hair-raising but, fortunately, not real: The scientists were participating in a highly dramatized but scientifically plausible \u201chypothetical asteroid impact scenario\u201d at the International Academy of Astronautics\u2019 sixth Planetary Defense Conference, held in College Park, Md. \n\n\nThe sky wasn\u2019t falling this time, but the underlying questions are still urgent. Many scientists argue that the most effective way to deal with a threat from a small asteroid would be to send up an unmanned spacecraft armed with a nuclear explosive device (they hesitate to call it a bomb) to blow it up or nudge it off course. Nuking an incoming asteroid is also the preferred Hollywood method\u2014it worked spectacularly well for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Willis\n\n\n\n in the exciting but scientifically challenged 1998 film \u201cArmageddon\u201d\u2014but the nuclear option faces serious hurdles in the real world. Sending nuclear weapons into space, even to save Denver, makes lots of people nervous and could violate international treaties governing the militarization of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBruce Willis tries to save the Earth from an incoming asteroid in \u2018Armageddon\u2019 (1998).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Touchstone Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nSo after some heated debate, the scientists assembled in Maryland decided to deploy a fleet of unmanned, nonnuclear \u201ckinetic impactor\u201d spacecraft against the incoming asteroid. Kinetic impactors are essentially cannonball technology: You pack a spacecraft with a payload of solid metal and then crash it head-on into the asteroid, in hopes not of destroying it but of reducing its speed by a tiny fraction. That way, by the time it reaches its predicted rendezvous point with Earth, our planet will have already moved on in its orbit, and the asteroid will fly harmlessly by. \nAt least in theory. In the Maryland scenario, NASA, the European Space Agency, Japan, Russia and China all launched hastily designed and untested kinetic impactor ships. Three of them smashed into the asteroid. The main body of the asteroid was deflected and would miss Earth. Denver was saved! Unfortunately, one of the kinetic impacts inadvertently broke off a 200-foot-wide chunk of the asteroid\u2014and that hurtling fragment was now on track to hit New York City.\nThe only hope was to destroy the fragment with a nuclear device. But existing ground-launched, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles weren\u2019t designed to take on an asteroid in space, and there simply wasn\u2019t time to launch a nuclear-armed spacecraft to intercept the asteroid chunk. New York would just have to take the hit. Millions of people were evacuated, the asteroid exploded in a fireball over Central Park\u2014and Manhattan was wiped off the map. \nMercifully, Manhattan is still very much with us. But the war game was a reminder that asteroid defense isn\u2019t science fiction but a serious and necessary venture. \n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nTrue, the chances of a civilization-destroying asteroid impact are exceedingly small, at least in the foreseeable future. Asteroid strikes that cause regional devastation and catastrophic global climate change occur, on average, only about once every 100,000 years or more. On the other end of the scale, Earth is routinely bombarded by small asteroids that almost always burn up or blow up high in the atmosphere, creating meteors or fireballs that are visually spectacular but pose little or no danger. In December 2018, for example, a 30-foot-wide asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over the Bering Sea with the explosive force of a dozen Hiroshima atomic bombs\u2014but except for a few satellites and sensor systems, no one noticed.\nThe most immediate threat isn\u2019t from the largest or smallest asteroids but from those in between. Over the past two decades, asteroid hunters with NASA and other international space agencies have identified and tracked the orbits of more than 20,000 asteroids\u2014also known as near-Earth objects\u2014that pass through our neighborhood as they orbit the sun. Of those, about 2,000 are classified as potentially hazardous\u2014asteroids that are large enough (greater than 150 yards in diameter) to cause local destruction and that come close enough to Earth to someday pose a threat. \nThe good news is that scientists don\u2019t expect any of these known asteroids to collide with Earth within at least the next century. Some will come pretty close, though: On an unlucky Friday the 13th in April 2029, the thousand-foot-wide asteroid Apophis will pass a mere 19,000 miles from Earth\u2014closer than t Even if we managed to spot a small but dangerous asteroid heading for Earth, we currently have no means to stop it. ",
        "author": "Gordon L. Dillow"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Asteroid Peril Isn\u2019t Science Fiction (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1385",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-asteroid-peril-isnt-science-fiction-11562339356?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=54",
        "text": "Scientists at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that the big rock was headed toward Denver. Unless the asteroid could be deflected, two million people would have to be relocated, and the city would be obliterated.\nAll of this was hair-raising but, fortunately, not real: The scientists were participating in a highly dramatized but scientifically plausible \u201chypothetical asteroid impact scenario\u201d at the International Academy of Astronautics\u2019 sixth Planetary Defense Conference, held in College Park, Md. \n\n\nThe sky wasn\u2019t falling this time, but the underlying questions are still urgent. Many scientists argue that the most effective way to deal with a threat from a small asteroid would be to send up an unmanned spacecraft armed with a nuclear explosive device (they hesitate to call it a bomb) to blow it up or nudge it off course. Nuking an incoming asteroid is also the preferred Hollywood method\u2014it worked spectacularly well for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Willis\n\n\n\n in the exciting but scientifically challenged 1998 film \u201cArmageddon\u201d\u2014but the nuclear option faces serious hurdles in the real world. Sending nuclear weapons into space, even to save Denver, makes lots of people nervous and could violate international treaties governing the militarization of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBruce Willis tries to save the Earth from an incoming asteroid in \u2018Armageddon\u2019 (1998).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Touchstone Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nSo after some heated debate, the scientists assembled in Maryland decided to deploy a fleet of unmanned, nonnuclear \u201ckinetic impactor\u201d spacecraft against the incoming asteroid. Kinetic impactors are essentially cannonball technology: You pack a spacecraft with a payload of solid metal and then crash it head-on into the asteroid, in hopes not of destroying it but of reducing its speed by a tiny fraction. That way, by the time it reaches its predicted rendezvous point with Earth, our planet will have already moved on in its orbit, and the asteroid will fly harmlessly by. \nAt least in theory. In the Maryland scenario, NASA, the European Space Agency, Japan, Russia and China all launched hastily designed and untested kinetic impactor ships. Three of them smashed into the asteroid. The main body of the asteroid was deflected and would miss Earth. Denver was saved! Unfortunately, one of the kinetic impacts inadvertently broke off a 200-foot-wide chunk of the asteroid\u2014and that hurtling fragment was now on track to hit New York City.\nThe only hope was to destroy the fragment with a nuclear device. But existing ground-launched, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles weren\u2019t designed to take on an asteroid in space, and there simply wasn\u2019t time to launch a nuclear-armed spacecraft to intercept the asteroid chunk. New York would just have to take the hit. Millions of people were evacuated, the asteroid exploded in a fireball over Central Park\u2014and Manhattan was wiped off the map. \nMercifully, Manhattan is still very much with us. But the war game was a reminder that asteroid defense isn\u2019t science fiction but a serious and necessary venture. \n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nTrue, the chances of a civilization-destroying asteroid impact are exceedingly small, at least in the foreseeable future. Asteroid strikes that cause regional devastation and catastrophic global climate change occur, on average, only about once every 100,000 years or more. On the other end of the scale, Earth is routinely bombarded by small asteroids that almost always burn up or blow up high in the atmosphere, creating meteors or fireballs that are visually spectacular but pose little or no danger. In December 2018, for example, a 30-foot-wide asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over the Bering Sea with the explosive force of a dozen Hiroshima atomic bombs\u2014but except for a few satellites and sensor systems, no one noticed.\nThe most immediate threat isn\u2019t from the largest or smallest asteroids but from those in between. Over the past two decades, asteroid hunters with NASA and other international space agencies have identified and tracked the orbits of more than 20,000 asteroids\u2014also known as near-Earth objects\u2014that pass through our neighborhood as they orbit the sun. Of those, about 2,000 are classified as potentially hazardous\u2014asteroids that are large enough (greater than 150 yards in diameter) to cause local destruction and that come close enough to Earth to someday pose a threat. \nThe good news is that scientists don\u2019t expect any of these known asteroids to collide with Earth within at least the next century. Some will come pretty close, though: On an unlucky Friday the 13th in April 2029, the thousand-foot-wide asteroid Apophis will pass a mere 19,000 miles from Earth\u2014closer than t Even if we managed to spot a small but dangerous asteroid heading for Earth, we currently have no means to stop it. ",
        "author": "Gordon L. Dillow"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Asteroid Peril Isn\u2019t Science Fiction (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1386",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-asteroid-peril-isnt-science-fiction-11562339356?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=59",
        "text": "Scientists at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory calculated that the big rock was headed toward Denver. Unless the asteroid could be deflected, two million people would have to be relocated, and the city would be obliterated.\n\n\n\n\nAll of this was hair-raising but, fortunately, not real: The scientists were participating in a highly dramatized but scientifically plausible \u201chypothetical asteroid impact scenario\u201d at the International Academy of Astronautics\u2019 sixth Planetary Defense Conference, held in College Park, Md. \n\n\nThe sky wasn\u2019t falling this time, but the underlying questions are still urgent. Many scientists argue that the most effective way to deal with a threat from a small asteroid would be to send up an unmanned spacecraft armed with a nuclear explosive device (they hesitate to call it a bomb) to blow it up or nudge it off course. Nuking an incoming asteroid is also the preferred Hollywood method\u2014it worked spectacularly well for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Willis\n\n\n\n in the exciting but scientifically challenged 1998 film \u201cArmageddon\u201d\u2014but the nuclear option faces serious hurdles in the real world. Sending nuclear weapons into space, even to save Denver, makes lots of people nervous and could violate international treaties governing the militarization of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBruce Willis tries to save the Earth from an incoming asteroid in \u2018Armageddon\u2019 (1998).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Touchstone Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nSo after some heated debate, the scientists assembled in Maryland decided to deploy a fleet of unmanned, nonnuclear \u201ckinetic impactor\u201d spacecraft against the incoming asteroid. Kinetic impactors are essentially cannonball technology: You pack a spacecraft with a payload of solid metal and then crash it head-on into the asteroid, in hopes not of destroying it but of reducing its speed by a tiny fraction. That way, by the time it reaches its predicted rendezvous point with Earth, our planet will have already moved on in its orbit, and the asteroid will fly harmlessly by. \nAt least in theory. In the Maryland scenario, NASA, the European Space Agency, Japan, Russia and China all launched hastily designed and untested kinetic impactor ships. Three of them smashed into the asteroid. The main body of the asteroid was deflected and would miss Earth. Denver was saved! Unfortunately, one of the kinetic impacts inadvertently broke off a 200-foot-wide chunk of the asteroid\u2014and that hurtling fragment was now on track to hit New York City.\nThe only hope was to destroy the fragment with a nuclear device. But existing ground-launched, nuclear-armed ballistic missiles weren\u2019t designed to take on an asteroid in space, and there simply wasn\u2019t time to launch a nuclear-armed spacecraft to intercept the asteroid chunk. New York would just have to take the hit. Millions of people were evacuated, the asteroid exploded in a fireball over Central Park\u2014and Manhattan was wiped off the map. \nMercifully, Manhattan is still very much with us. But the war game was a reminder that asteroid defense isn\u2019t science fiction but a serious and necessary venture. \n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nTrue, the chances of a civilization-destroying asteroid impact are exceedingly small, at least in the foreseeable future. Asteroid strikes that cause regional devastation and catastrophic global climate change occur, on average, only about once every 100,000 years or more. On the other end of the scale, Earth is routinely bombarded by small asteroids that almost always burn up or blow up high in the atmosphere, creating meteors or fireballs that are visually spectacular but pose little or no danger. In December 2018, for example, a 30-foot-wide asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over the Bering Sea with the explosive force of a dozen Hiroshima atomic bombs\u2014but except for a few satellites and sensor systems, no one noticed.\nThe most immediate threat isn\u2019t from the largest or smallest asteroids but from those in between. Over the past two decades, asteroid hunters with NASA and other international space agencies have identified and tracked the orbits of more than 20,000 asteroids\u2014also known as near-Earth objects\u2014that pass through our neighborhood as they orbit the sun. Of those, about 2,000 are classified as potentially hazardous\u2014asteroids that are large enough (greater than 150 yards in diameter) to cause local destruction and that come close enough to Earth to someday pose a threat. \nThe good news is that scientists don\u2019t expect any of these known asteroids to collide with Earth within at least the next century. Some will come pretty close, though: On an unlucky Friday the 13th in April 2029, the thousand-foot-wide asteroid Apophis will pass a mere 19,000 miles from Earth\u2014closer than the satellites that bring us DISH TV.\nBut here\u2019s the bad news: Hundreds of thousands of other near-Earth asteroids, both large and small, haven\u2019t been identified. We have no idea where they are and where they are going. On Feb. 15, 2013, a relatively small, 60-foot-wide asteroid traveling at 43,000 mph exploded in the atmosphere near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, sending out a blast wave that injured 1,500 people. No one had seen the asteroid coming. \n\n\n\n\u201cIn 2013, a relatively small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere near a Russian city, sending out a blast wave that injured 1,500 people.\u201d\n\n\n\nWe need to find and track these unknown invaders as soon as possible. But while NASA\u2019s \u201cplanetary defense\u201d budget has been steadily increasing over the past decade, the $150 million allocated in 2019 for asteroid detection, asteroid tracking and related programs amounts to less than 1% of the space agency\u2019s $21.5 billion budget. \nNor is it clear that we could deflect a small but dangerous asteroid heading our way even if we did spot it. No asteroid-deflection method has ever been tested in real-space conditions\u2014and, as the conference\u2019s war game demonstrated, using untested technology always entails a risk that the mission could go terribly wrong. \nIn 2021, NASA intends to launch its Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission to try the kinetic impactor deflection method against a nonthreatening asteroid called Didymos. More tests will be required before we can achieve even a modest planetary defense capability. (Because of legal and political objections, NASA has no plans to test nuclear-explosive asteroid-deflection methods in space.) \nOver its 4.5 billion-year history, Earth has been hit millions of times by powerful asteroids, and it will inevitably be hit again\u2014whether two centuries from now or next Tuesday. So it isn\u2019t a question of whether humankind will have to confront the prospect of a destructive asteroid hurtling our way; it is only a question of when.\n\u2014Mr. Dillow is the author, most recently, of \u201cFire in the Sky: Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth\u201d (Scribner). Even if we managed to spot a small but dangerous asteroid heading for Earth, we currently have no means to stop it. ",
        "author": "Gordon L. Dillow"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1387",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-mars-and-beyond-1517592270?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=20",
        "text": "Nearly 50 years after the first moon landing in 1969, we\u2019re on the verge of a new golden age of exploration. But there are significant differences this time. The Falcon Heavy rocket that took off from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral was privately built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX. It is one of several commercial ventures working alongside NASA, which plans to launch its own giant moon rocket late next year. Returning to the moon is a first priority for all of these projects\u2014but only as a steppingstone to interplanetary travel. It has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\nThe SpaceX venture features Mr. Musk\u2019s usual showmanship. The rocket, among other accomplishments, blasted a cherry-red Tesla sports car into solar orbit. But the successful launch, coming after several years of delay, is also a serious business. \nMr. Musk has already shown the commercial viability of his smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which can land and be reused, like the U.S. space shuttle, making it much less expensive than other rockets. He used the same strategy for the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9s lashed together. SpaceX also recently sent one of its unmanned Dragon space capsules to the international space station and back for NASA, and is vying with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n starting in 2019 to launch NASA astronauts. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Space Launch System, or SLS, is being readied for a 2019 target to put an unmanned capsule in lunar orbit, and later a manned capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/MSFC\n \n\n\n\nAs for NASA, it plans to test its taller, more powerful new rocket, the 212-foot Space Launch System, as soon as December 2019. The SLS is close to the size, profile and power of the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions. Its first launch will send an unmanned Orion space capsule into orbit around the moon. If things go smoothly\u2014a big \u201cif,\u201d considering the many delays in that program since early this decade\u2014the SLS could take four astronauts to an orbit around the moon in 2022. The SLS may cost as much as a billion dollars per launch, whereas a reusable Falcon Heavy could cost a 10th of that.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA then plans to construct a space station orbiting the moon, dubbed the Deep Space Gateway. Current plans call for four SLS missions to build it by 2026, with the help of Russia, Japan, the European Union and Canada for key components. Mr. Musk recently added the idea of a station sited on the moon to his own plans, though he provided little detail beyond calling it \u201cMoon Base Alpha.\u201d \n\n\nNASA intends to use its station as a base for building a rocket bound for Mars and possibly for the belt of asteroids that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft planned for the journey employs huge solar panels to generate power for its ion-thrust engines, technology that works only in the vacuum of space. Labeled the Deep Space Transport, its first two-year round trip is slated sometime after 2033.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of a vehicle docking with NASA's planned lunar orbiting station, the Deep Space Gateway (left), meant to also serve as a base to build a transport to Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX calls its version the Interplanetary Transport System, to be powered by an even bigger rocket that Mr. Musk calls the BFR (with \u201cF\u201d standing for just what you think). As he imagines it, the ship would carry a small colonizing force of dozens of people, who would make fuel for the return trip by synthesizing materials found on Mars. On Monday, he also announced he intended to move on to use that bigger rocket, rather than the Falcon Heavy, to carry humans into space. \nThe cost of rocket technology has dropped dramatically since the Apollo missions of the 1960s consumed some 5% of the federal budget. More players, both public and private, now have the financial and technical resources to join the nascent space race. \nIndia sent a probe to Mars in 2014. China plans to send astronauts to the moon and unmanned probes to Mars, followed by a manned mission. Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is funding his own space port in Texas for his Blue Origin project, which has successfully reused its \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket for suborbital flights, on which it intends to take passengers. Google co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n and other Silicon Valley billionaires have formed a company called Planetary Resources to explore the commercial possibilities of landing on asteroids to mine for rare elements used in electronics.\n\n\nMore from Review\n\n\n\n\nWhy Millennials Want Their Parents\u2019 Vinyl Records\nMarch 12, 2022 \n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, A new spirit of exploration is being fueled by tech entrepreneurs, big plans at NASA and worries about the fate of the Earth. ",
        "author": "Michio Kaku"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1388",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-mars-and-beyond-1517592270?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=79",
        "text": "Nearly 50 years after the first moon landing in 1969, we\u2019re on the verge of a new golden age of exploration. But there are significant differences this time. The Falcon Heavy rocket that took off from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral was privately built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX. It is one of several commercial ventures working alongside NASA, which plans to launch its own giant moon rocket late next year. Returning to the moon is a first priority for all of these projects\u2014but only as a steppingstone to interplanetary travel. It has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\nThe SpaceX venture features Mr. Musk\u2019s usual showmanship. The rocket, among other accomplishments, blasted a cherry-red Tesla sports car into solar orbit. But the successful launch, coming after several years of delay, is also a serious business. \nMr. Musk has already shown the commercial viability of his smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which can land and be reused, like the U.S. space shuttle, making it much less expensive than other rockets. He used the same strategy for the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9s lashed together. SpaceX also recently sent one of its unmanned Dragon space capsules to the international space station and back for NASA, and is vying with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n starting in 2019 to launch NASA astronauts. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Space Launch System, or SLS, is being readied for a 2019 target to put an unmanned capsule in lunar orbit, and later a manned capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/MSFC\n \n\n\n\nAs for NASA, it plans to test its taller, more powerful new rocket, the 212-foot Space Launch System, as soon as December 2019. The SLS is close to the size, profile and power of the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions. Its first launch will send an unmanned Orion space capsule into orbit around the moon. If things go smoothly\u2014a big \u201cif,\u201d considering the many delays in that program since early this decade\u2014the SLS could take four astronauts to an orbit around the moon in 2022. The SLS may cost as much as a billion dollars per launch, whereas a reusable Falcon Heavy could cost a 10th of that.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA then plans to construct a space station orbiting the moon, dubbed the Deep Space Gateway. Current plans call for four SLS missions to build it by 2026, with the help of Russia, Japan, the European Union and Canada for key components. Mr. Musk recently added the idea of a station sited on the moon to his own plans, though he provided little detail beyond calling it \u201cMoon Base Alpha.\u201d \n\n\nNASA intends to use its station as a base for building a rocket bound for Mars and possibly for the belt of asteroids that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft planned for the journey employs huge solar panels to generate power for its ion-thrust engines, technology that works only in the vacuum of space. Labeled the Deep Space Transport, its first two-year round trip is slated sometime after 2033.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of a vehicle docking with NASA's planned lunar orbiting station, the Deep Space Gateway (left), meant to also serve as a base to build a transport to Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX calls its version the Interplanetary Transport System, to be powered by an even bigger rocket that Mr. Musk calls the BFR (with \u201cF\u201d standing for just what you think). As he imagines it, the ship would carry a small colonizing force of dozens of people, who would make fuel for the return trip by synthesizing materials found on Mars. On Monday, he also announced he intended to move on to use that bigger rocket, rather than the Falcon Heavy, to carry humans into space. \nThe cost of rocket technology has dropped dramatically since the Apollo missions of the 1960s consumed some 5% of the federal budget. More players, both public and private, now have the financial and technical resources to join the nascent space race. \nIndia sent a probe to Mars in 2014. China plans to send astronauts to the moon and unmanned probes to Mars, followed by a manned mission. Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is funding his own space port in Texas for his Blue Origin project, which has successfully reused its \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket for suborbital flights, on which it intends to take passengers. Google co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n and other Silicon Valley billionaires have formed a company called Planetary Resources to explore the commercial possibilities of landing on asteroids to mine for rare elements used in electronics.\n\n\nMore from Review\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe stat A new spirit of exploration is being fueled by tech entrepreneurs, big plans at NASA and worries about the fate of the Earth. ",
        "author": "Michio Kaku"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1389",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-mars-and-beyond-1517592270?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=73",
        "text": "Nearly 50 years after the first moon landing in 1969, we\u2019re on the verge of a new golden age of exploration. But there are significant differences this time. The Falcon Heavy rocket that took off from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral was privately built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX. It is one of several commercial ventures working alongside NASA, which plans to launch its own giant moon rocket late next year. Returning to the moon is a first priority for all of these projects\u2014but only as a steppingstone to interplanetary travel. It has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\nThe SpaceX venture features Mr. Musk\u2019s usual showmanship. The rocket, among other accomplishments, blasted a cherry-red Tesla sports car into solar orbit. But the successful launch, coming after several years of delay, is also a serious business. \nMr. Musk has already shown the commercial viability of his smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which can land and be reused, like the U.S. space shuttle, making it much less expensive than other rockets. He used the same strategy for the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9s lashed together. SpaceX also recently sent one of its unmanned Dragon space capsules to the international space station and back for NASA, and is vying with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n starting in 2019 to launch NASA astronauts. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Space Launch System, or SLS, is being readied for a 2019 target to put an unmanned capsule in lunar orbit, and later a manned capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/MSFC\n \n\n\n\nAs for NASA, it plans to test its taller, more powerful new rocket, the 212-foot Space Launch System, as soon as December 2019. The SLS is close to the size, profile and power of the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions. Its first launch will send an unmanned Orion space capsule into orbit around the moon. If things go smoothly\u2014a big \u201cif,\u201d considering the many delays in that program since early this decade\u2014the SLS could take four astronauts to an orbit around the moon in 2022. The SLS may cost as much as a billion dollars per launch, whereas a reusable Falcon Heavy could cost a 10th of that.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA then plans to construct a space station orbiting the moon, dubbed the Deep Space Gateway. Current plans call for four SLS missions to build it by 2026, with the help of Russia, Japan, the European Union and Canada for key components. Mr. Musk recently added the idea of a station sited on the moon to his own plans, though he provided little detail beyond calling it \u201cMoon Base Alpha.\u201d \n\n\nNASA intends to use its station as a base for building a rocket bound for Mars and possibly for the belt of asteroids that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft planned for the journey employs huge solar panels to generate power for its ion-thrust engines, technology that works only in the vacuum of space. Labeled the Deep Space Transport, its first two-year round trip is slated sometime after 2033.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of a vehicle docking with NASA's planned lunar orbiting station, the Deep Space Gateway (left), meant to also serve as a base to build a transport to Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX calls its version the Interplanetary Transport System, to be powered by an even bigger rocket that Mr. Musk calls the BFR (with \u201cF\u201d standing for just what you think). As he imagines it, the ship would carry a small colonizing force of dozens of people, who would make fuel for the return trip by synthesizing materials found on Mars. On Monday, he also announced he intended to move on to use that bigger rocket, rather than the Falcon Heavy, to carry humans into space. \nThe cost of rocket technology has dropped dramatically since the Apollo missions of the 1960s consumed some 5% of the federal budget. More players, both public and private, now have the financial and technical resources to join the nascent space race. \nIndia sent a probe to Mars in 2014. China plans to send astronauts to the moon and unmanned probes to Mars, followed by a manned mission. Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is funding his own space port in Texas for his Blue Origin project, which has successfully reused its \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket for suborbital flights, on which it intends to take passengers. Google co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n and other Silicon Valley billionaires have formed a company called Planetary Resources to explore the commercial possibilities of landing on asteroids to mine for rare elements used in electronics.\n\n\nMore from Review\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe stat A new spirit of exploration is being fueled by tech entrepreneurs, big plans at NASA and worries about the fate of the Earth. ",
        "author": "Michio Kaku"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1390",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-mars-and-beyond-1517592270?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=71",
        "text": "Nearly 50 years after the first moon landing in 1969, we\u2019re on the verge of a new golden age of exploration. But there are significant differences this time. The Falcon Heavy rocket that took off from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral was privately built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX. It is one of several commercial ventures working alongside NASA, which plans to launch its own giant moon rocket late next year. Returning to the moon is a first priority for all of these projects\u2014but only as a steppingstone to interplanetary travel. It has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\nThe SpaceX venture features Mr. Musk\u2019s usual showmanship. The rocket, among other accomplishments, blasted a cherry-red Tesla sports car into solar orbit. But the successful launch, coming after several years of delay, is also a serious business. \nMr. Musk has already shown the commercial viability of his smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which can land and be reused, like the U.S. space shuttle, making it much less expensive than other rockets. He used the same strategy for the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9s lashed together. SpaceX also recently sent one of its unmanned Dragon space capsules to the international space station and back for NASA, and is vying with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n starting in 2019 to launch NASA astronauts. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Space Launch System, or SLS, is being readied for a 2019 target to put an unmanned capsule in lunar orbit, and later a manned capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/MSFC\n \n\n\n\nAs for NASA, it plans to test its taller, more powerful new rocket, the 212-foot Space Launch System, as soon as December 2019. The SLS is close to the size, profile and power of the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions. Its first launch will send an unmanned Orion space capsule into orbit around the moon. If things go smoothly\u2014a big \u201cif,\u201d considering the many delays in that program since early this decade\u2014the SLS could take four astronauts to an orbit around the moon in 2022. The SLS may cost as much as a billion dollars per launch, whereas a reusable Falcon Heavy could cost a 10th of that.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA then plans to construct a space station orbiting the moon, dubbed the Deep Space Gateway. Current plans call for four SLS missions to build it by 2026, with the help of Russia, Japan, the European Union and Canada for key components. Mr. Musk recently added the idea of a station sited on the moon to his own plans, though he provided little detail beyond calling it \u201cMoon Base Alpha.\u201d \n\n\nNASA intends to use its station as a base for building a rocket bound for Mars and possibly for the belt of asteroids that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft planned for the journey employs huge solar panels to generate power for its ion-thrust engines, technology that works only in the vacuum of space. Labeled the Deep Space Transport, its first two-year round trip is slated sometime after 2033.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of a vehicle docking with NASA's planned lunar orbiting station, the Deep Space Gateway (left), meant to also serve as a base to build a transport to Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX calls its version the Interplanetary Transport System, to be powered by an even bigger rocket that Mr. Musk calls the BFR (with \u201cF\u201d standing for just what you think). As he imagines it, the ship would carry a small colonizing force of dozens of people, who would make fuel for the return trip by synthesizing materials found on Mars. On Monday, he also announced he intended to move on to use that bigger rocket, rather than the Falcon Heavy, to carry humans into space. \nThe cost of rocket technology has dropped dramatically since the Apollo missions of the 1960s consumed some 5% of the federal budget. More players, both public and private, now have the financial and technical resources to join the nascent space race. \nIndia sent a probe to Mars in 2014. China plans to send astronauts to the moon and unmanned probes to Mars, followed by a manned mission. Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is funding his own space port in Texas for his Blue Origin project, which has successfully reused its \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket for suborbital flights, on which it intends to take passengers. Google co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n and other Silicon Valley billionaires have formed a company called Planetary Resources to explore the commercial possibilities of landing on asteroids to mine for rare elements used in electronics.\n\n\nMore from Review\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe stat A new spirit of exploration is being fueled by tech entrepreneurs, big plans at NASA and worries about the fate of the Earth. ",
        "author": "Michio Kaku"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1391",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-the-moon-mars-and-beyond-1517592270?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=103",
        "text": "Nearly 50 years after the first moon landing in 1969, we\u2019re on the verge of a new golden age of exploration. But there are significant differences this time. The Falcon Heavy rocket that took off from the launchpad at Cape Canaveral was privately built by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX. It is one of several commercial ventures working alongside NASA, which plans to launch its own giant moon rocket late next year. Returning to the moon is a first priority for all of these projects\u2014but only as a steppingstone to interplanetary travel. It has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\nThe SpaceX venture features Mr. Musk\u2019s usual showmanship. The rocket, among other accomplishments, blasted a cherry-red Tesla sports car into solar orbit. But the successful launch, coming after several years of delay, is also a serious business. \n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk has already shown the commercial viability of his smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which can land and be reused, like the U.S. space shuttle, making it much less expensive than other rockets. He used the same strategy for the Falcon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9s lashed together. SpaceX also recently sent one of its unmanned Dragon space capsules to the international space station and back for NASA, and is vying with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n starting in 2019 to launch NASA astronauts. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Space Launch System, or SLS, is being readied for a 2019 target to put an unmanned capsule in lunar orbit, and later a manned capsule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/MSFC\n \n\n\n\nAs for NASA, it plans to test its taller, more powerful new rocket, the 212-foot Space Launch System, as soon as December 2019. The SLS is close to the size, profile and power of the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions. Its first launch will send an unmanned Orion space capsule into orbit around the moon. If things go smoothly\u2014a big \u201cif,\u201d considering the many delays in that program since early this decade\u2014the SLS could take four astronauts to an orbit around the moon in 2022. The SLS may cost as much as a billion dollars per launch, whereas a reusable Falcon Heavy could cost a 10th of that.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt has suddenly become fashionable again to talk of reaching for the stars.\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA then plans to construct a space station orbiting the moon, dubbed the Deep Space Gateway. Current plans call for four SLS missions to build it by 2026, with the help of Russia, Japan, the European Union and Canada for key components. Mr. Musk recently added the idea of a station sited on the moon to his own plans, though he provided little detail beyond calling it \u201cMoon Base Alpha.\u201d \n\n\nNASA intends to use its station as a base for building a rocket bound for Mars and possibly for the belt of asteroids that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft planned for the journey employs huge solar panels to generate power for its ion-thrust engines, technology that works only in the vacuum of space. Labeled the Deep Space Transport, its first two-year round trip is slated sometime after 2033.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArtist\u2019s rendering of a vehicle docking with NASA's planned lunar orbiting station, the Deep Space Gateway (left), meant to also serve as a base to build a transport to Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX calls its version the Interplanetary Transport System, to be powered by an even bigger rocket that Mr. Musk calls the BFR (with \u201cF\u201d standing for just what you think). As he imagines it, the ship would carry a small colonizing force of dozens of people, who would make fuel for the return trip by synthesizing materials found on Mars. On Monday, he also announced he intended to move on to use that bigger rocket, rather than the Falcon Heavy, to carry humans into space. \nThe cost of rocket technology has dropped dramatically since the Apollo missions of the 1960s consumed some 5% of the federal budget. More players, both public and private, now have the financial and technical resources to join the nascent space race. \nIndia sent a probe to Mars in 2014. China plans to send astronauts to the moon and unmanned probes to Mars, followed by a manned mission. Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is funding his own space port in Texas for his Blue Origin project, which has successfully reused its \u201cNew Shepard\u201d rocket for suborbital flights, on which it intends to take passengers. Google co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n and other Silicon Valley billionaires have formed a company called Planetary Resources to explore the commercial possibilities of landing on asteroids to mine for rare elements used in electronics.\n\n\nMore from Review\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n A new spirit of exploration is being fueled by tech entrepreneurs, big plans at NASA and worries about the fate of the Earth. ",
        "author": "Michio Kaku"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Age-Old Secrets of Modern Scams (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1392",
        "date": "2020-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-age-old-secrets-of-modern-scams-11598673662?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=11",
        "text": "But if the aim was to trick the celebrities\u2019 millions of social media followers out of piles of money, it was something of a flop. The alleged culprits made off with an estimated $118,000, a pittance compared with a similar but less-noticed scam in June in which hackers impersonating Mr. Musk on YouTube took victims for as much as $464,000.\nAnyone puzzled by the difference could learn a lot from the history of forgery. Whether the medium is papyrus, canvas or a digital screen, impostor scams succeed less because of technical skill\u2014like breaking into a high-profile account or imitating an artist\u2019s brush strokes\u2014than because of the ability to tell a convincing story, to plant a lie in an otherwise true tale.\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\nWhy Millennials Want Their Parents\u2019 Vinyl Records\nMarch 12, 2022 \n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe Twitter hackers got inside the accounts of famous people whose influence they sought to exploit, but posted generic messages that sounded a lot like one another and not particularly like the account holders. In the YouTube scam, on the other hand, channels disguised with the SpaceX logo played real video of Musk speaking at a conference. Framing the footage were captions about a \u201cSpecial Event\u201d that tied the video to the thrilling launches, days earlier, of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 spacecraft. \n\n\nThe videos were live-streamed, as if Musk\u2019s 2-for-1 bitcoin giveaway were unspooling in real time to viewers lucky enough to tune in. A linked website with \u201cSpaceX\u201d in its URL quelled doubt with a thoughtful-sounding message: \u201cWe understand the financial uncertainty that some people may be facing right now. SpaceX is here to offer all the help that we can.\u201d Tucked into the alphanumeric bitcoin addresses where victims were asked to send money were the words \u201cMusk\u201d and \u201cSpace.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cOnline bitcoin scammers impersonate Elon Musk more often than any other individual.\u201d\n\n\n\nKey to this immersive tale was its bogus protagonist. More than any other CEO, Mr. Musk, a tech-world sage with a reputation as an unpredictable iconoclast, seemed like someone who might well give cryptocurrency to strangers for his own inscrutable reasons. \u201cIf this was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Gates,\n\n\n\n I would\u2019ve just scrolled past it,\u201d a savvy internet user who nearly fell for the YouTube fraud told the online investigations website Bellingcat.\nOnline bitcoin scammers impersonate Mr. Musk more often than any other individual, according to data compiled by the website bitcoinwhoswho.com. Some 415 unique bitcoin addresses this year have been associated with impostor scams featuring Mr. Musk or his companies Tesla and SpaceX. \nIt\u2019s tempting to dismiss the victims of social media scams as naive. But fakes have hoodwinked the brilliant and powerful, too, by dangling prestige, riches or a chance to rewrite history. \nIn the Middle Ages, a manuscript surfaced that claimed to be written by the 4th-century Roman emperor Constantine. It begins by retelling a well-known story about Pope Sylvester I curing Constantine of leprosy, a brush stroke of historical context. In the wholly invented second part, the emperor goes on to give the pope and his successors an extraordinary thank-you gift: supreme power over the secular world. The so-called \u201cDonation of Constantine\u201d would shape centuries of history before an Italian critic in the 15th century exposed it as an audacious forgery, rife with \u201ccontradictions, impossibilities, stupidities, barbarisms and absurdities.\u201d\nIn April 1983, the German magazine Stern began publishing what it believed was a cache of Hitler\u2019s lost diaries\u201460 volumes, for which it had paid some $4 million. Within days, German authorities announced that they were fakes, composed by a small-time hustler who drew historical details from the very same books Stern\u2019s fact-checkers used to verify the diaries. How did the magazine miss such obvious problems? One reason, experts have argued, is that the diaries told a story many Germans wanted to hear--one that concentrated attention on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adolf Hitler\n\n\n\n at a time when most citizens were still loathe to consider their own complicity in the Holocaust.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe papyrus fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, which made headlines in 2012, turned out to be a modern forgery.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Harvard Divinity School\n \n\n\n\nPerhaps the most spectacular forgery of the 21st century is the so-called Gospel of Jesus\u2019s Wife, a Coptic papyrus fragment that made international headlines in 2012. In its bombshell line, Jesus speaks to his followers about a woman who appears to be Mary Magdalene, calling her \u201cmy wife\u201d and saying, \u201cShe is able to be my disciple.\u201d A Harvard Divinity School professor named\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Karen King\n\n\n\n announced the dis From medieval forgers to online Elon Musk impersonators, con artists tell stories their victims want to hear. ",
        "author": "Ariel Sabar"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Godfather of Critical Race Theory (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1393",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-godfather-of-critical-race-theory-11624627522?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=20",
        "text": "In their book \u201cCritical Race Theory: An Introduction,\u201d Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list several of its core premises, including the view that \u201cracism is ordinary, not aberrational,\u201d and that it \u201cserves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group,\u201d that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times\u2019s 1619 Project and bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo\u2019s \u201cWhite Fragility\u201d and Ibram X. Kendi\u2019s \u201cHow to Be an Antiracist.\u201d Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other institutions.\nThese ideas have now become a major target of conservative activism. In September 2020, the Trump administration issued a memo instructing executive branch departments to cancel \u201cany training on \u2018critical race theory,\u2019\u201d which it equated with teaching \u201cthat the United States is an inherently racist or evil country.\u201d This year, legislators and school boards in many states have introduced proposals to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in schools, with Florida\u2019s State Board of Education adopting such a rule earlier this month.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rally against critical race theory in Leesburg, Va., June 12.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFar more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: \u201cFaces at the Bottom of the Well,\u201d the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather of critical race theory.\n\n\nBell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today\u2019s controversies. In \u201cFaces,\u201d he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic sense of \u201cthe permanence of racism\u201d\u2014the book\u2019s subtitle. Bell\u2019s thought has been an important influence on some of today\u2019s most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander.\nDerrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell\u2019s work: Can traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans, or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the law?\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIn 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As he writes in \u201cFaces,\u201d \u201cWhen I agreed to become Harvard\u2019s first black faculty member\u2026I did so on the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be the pioneer, the trailblazer.\u201d But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law School.\nThese experiences inform \u201cFaces at the Bottom of the Well,\u201d which is made up of nine fables, some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean, with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks\u2014a kind of cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.\nThese far-fetched scenarios allow Bell to explore very real questions about belonging and trust. Are Black people at home in America, or should they think of themselves as sojourners in a land that will never belong to them? Is racism a social problem that can be solved, or is it a permanent condition like mortality, which can only be met with defiance?\nNot every story in \u201cFaces\u201d has a dark ending, but most do\u2014especially the last and most famous, \u201cThe Space Traders.\u201d In this tale, aliens arrive on earth and make the U.S. government an offer: In exchange for miraculous technologies that can heal the environment and ensure prosperity, they demand to carry off the entire Black population of the U.S. in their spaceships. When a referendum is held on whether to accept the aliens\u2019 offer, \u201cyes\u201d wins with 70% of the vote.\n\n\n\n\u201cBell suggests that the overwhelming majority of white Americans would agree to send their Black fellow citizens to an unknown fate. \u201d\n\n\n\nSince the U.S. population was about 12% Black in the 1990 census, Bell is suggesting that the overwhelming majority of white Americans would agree to send their Black fellow citizens to an unknown fate. This conclusion reflects his theory of \u201cinterest convergence,\u201d which says that white Americans will only act in the interests of Black people if it also serves their own interest. When the interests of whites and Blacks are opposed, Bell argues, whites will always choose to put their own interest first.\nFor Bell, this is the lesson of American history. As he observes in \u201cThe Space Traders,\u201d \u201cWithout the compromises on slavery in the Constitution of 1787, there would be no America.\u201d Similarly, after the Civil War, whites in the North and South sacrificed the rights of former slaves for the sake of sectional reconciliation. Bell suggests that the same thing would happen in the alien scenario, and the story ends with a nightmarish vision of Black Americans being herded onto spaceships: \u201cHeads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived.\u201d\nThe image suggests that 400 years of American history have changed nothing in the relationship between Blacks and whites. At the heart of the debate over critical race theory, then and now, is whether such a view is justified. Ms. Alexander, author of the 2010 bestseller \u201cThe New Jim Crow,\u201d wrote in the foreword to a 2018 reissue of \u201cFaces\u201d that \u201cAs a law student, I read nearly every word Bell wrote; as a civil rights lawyer, I was haunted by his words and ultimately forced to admit the truth of them.\u201d\nOther commentators have strongly disagreed. The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where \u201cI heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell\u2019s own life, as well as the fact that Harvard\u2019s black law students\u2019 organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim.\u201d Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as \u201cmore a jeremiad than an analysis.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cBell argues that the struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn the conclusion to \u201cFaces,\u201d Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus\u2019s eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands \u201crecognition of the futility of action\u201d while insisting \u201cthat action must be taken.\u201d \nTo the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: \u201cIf you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?\u201d \nFor his supporters and critics alike, Derrick Bell remains a central figure. Nearly three decades after the publication of his most widely read book, his stark vision of the racial divide in American society and history has retained its power to provoke debate and activism across the political spectrum. In the 1992 book \u201cFaces at the Bottom of the Well,\u201d Derrick Bell used the techniques of fiction to dramatize his ideas about racism. ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Godfather of Critical Race Theory (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1394",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-godfather-of-critical-race-theory-11624627522?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=28",
        "text": "In their book \u201cCritical Race Theory: An Introduction,\u201d Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list several of its core premises, including the view that \u201cracism is ordinary, not aberrational,\u201d and that it \u201cserves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group,\u201d that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times\u2019s 1619 Project and bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo\u2019s \u201cWhite Fragility\u201d and Ibram X. Kendi\u2019s \u201cHow to Be an Antiracist.\u201d Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other institutions.\nThese ideas have now become a major target of conservative activism. In September 2020, the Trump administration issued a memo instructing executive branch departments to cancel \u201cany training on \u2018critical race theory,\u2019\u201d which it equated with teaching \u201cthat the United States is an inherently racist or evil country.\u201d This year, legislators and school boards in many states have introduced proposals to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in schools, with Florida\u2019s State Board of Education adopting such a rule earlier this month.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rally against critical race theory in Leesburg, Va., June 12.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nFar more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: \u201cFaces at the Bottom of the Well,\u201d the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather of critical race theory.\n\n\nBell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today\u2019s controversies. In \u201cFaces,\u201d he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic sense of \u201cthe permanence of racism\u201d\u2014the book\u2019s subtitle. Bell\u2019s thought has been an important influence on some of today\u2019s most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander.\nDerrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell\u2019s work: Can traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans, or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the law?\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIn 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As he writes in \u201cFaces,\u201d \u201cWhen I agreed to become Harvard\u2019s first black faculty member\u2026I did so on the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be the pioneer, the trailblazer.\u201d But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law School.\nThese experiences inform \u201cFaces at the Bottom of the Well,\u201d which is made up of nine fables, some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean, with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks\u2014a kind of cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.\nThese far-fetched scenarios allow Bell to explore very real questions about belonging and trust. Are Black people at home in America, or should they think of themselves as sojourners in a land that will never belong to them? Is racism a social problem that can be solved, or is it a permanent condition like mortality, which can only be met with defiance?\nNot every story in \u201cFaces\u201d has a dark ending, but most do\u2014especially the last and most famous, \u201cThe Space Traders.\u201d In this tale, aliens arrive on earth and make the U.S. government an offer: In exchange for miraculous technologies that can heal the environment and ensure prosperity, they demand to carry off the entire Black population of the U.S. in their spaceships. When a referendum is held on whether to accept the aliens\u2019 offer, \u201cyes\u201d wins with 70% of the vote.\n\n\n\n\u201cBell suggests that the overwhelming majority of white Americans would agree to send their Black fellow citizens to an unknown fate. \u201d\n\n\n\nSince the U.S. population was about 12% Black in the 1990 census, Bell is suggesting that the overw In the 1992 book \u201cFaces at the Bottom of the Well,\u201d Derrick Bell used the techniques of fiction to dramatize his ideas about racism. ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Limits of Extra-Terrestrial Freakiness (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1395",
        "date": "2018-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-limits-of-extra-terrestrial-freakiness-1528384511?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=74",
        "text": "If we consult the laws of physics, however, they tell us that life can work\u2014and evolve\u2014only in certain ways, wherever it is found. Aliens would have to resemble the forms of life that we already know.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe dictates of physics have produced a shared fundamental design.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nConsider our own creatures of land, sea and air. The mole, for instance, is a burrowing animal that spends its life underground, so it must be able to tunnel, no matter what planet it lives on. Tunneling requires the application of sufficient force over a small area, governed by a simple equation: Pressure is equal to force divided by area. Moles thus have pointy faces and short stubby feet that allow them to generate sufficient pressure. Worms are cylindrical, but they also have to tunnel, which explains why they come to a point, too.\nIn water, the laws of hydrodynamics explain the sleek, tapered body shape shared by the shark (a fish), the dolphin (a mammal) and the extinct ichthyosaur reptile, which plied the Mesozoic oceans. Although underwater creatures come in many shapes and sizes, if the objective is to move fast to chase prey or elude predators, physics drives evolution toward the same slender solutions. As the Rutgers paleontologist George McGhee pointed out a decade ago, this would also hold for fast-swimming creatures on distant worlds.\n\n\nIn the air, the similar wing designs that we find in birds, bats and extinct pterodactyls are guided by the laws of aerodynamics. There are just a few solutions to the need to lift a creature into the atmosphere. Recent work by the biologist Michael Dickinson of the University of California at Berkeley and colleagues has shown that even insect flight is exquisitely shaped by these laws: To lift the fat little body of a bumblebee into the air, every feature of its wing is finely tuned. Insect bodies and wings come in many varieties, but the dictates of physics have produced a shared fundamental design.\nSmall insects like ladybugs take advantage of physics to travel in a distinctive way. They use a combination of capillary forces, friction and a thin coating of water to stick themselves to the undersides of leaves or sides of walls, their mass small enough for those forces to overcome gravity. For larger creatures, gravity wins. \nPhysics also can explain why evolution has rejected certain attributes. In the 1980s, Michael LaBarbera, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, famously explored a favorite counterfactual for the field: Why don\u2019t animals have wheels? Almost every form of human transport, from cars to trains, uses wheels, so why wouldn\u2019t evolution select for it? \nThe answer, of course, is that legs are the best way to maneuver across the irregularities of a planetary landscape, up cliffs and through muddy swamps. True, tumbleweeds roll across the desert, and many bacteria move themselves through fluids by spinning whip-like appendages, but these are not good choices for negotiating the unpredictable ruggedness of land. Any alien friends whom we encounter will have legs, not wheels. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nE.T., from the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie, looks enough like the relatively advanced creatures on Earth to be governed by the same universal laws of physics\u2014but then there is that finger, and that gravity-defying bicycle ride.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Universal/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nWe also find limitations dictated by physics at the smallest scale of life\u2019s architecture: in the proteins that make up our bodies and carry out the chemical reactions in our cells. Proteins are like necklaces, strung together from multiples of 20 types of amino acids. The number of possible combinations is inconceivably large, however, far exceeding the count of all the stars in the known universe. Still, no matter what their arrangement, the amino acids fold themselves into just a handful of helical shapes and sheets. A protein molecule needs to collapse into a stable state\u2014what physicists call a low-energy state. As it turns out, only a few types of structures meet that requirement. \nConformity to the laws of physics does not mean complete biological uniformity. It is in the details that evolutionary chance can have its way, producing the cornucopia of life that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Darwin,\n\n\n\n in the final chapter of \u201cThe Origin of Species\u201d referred to as \u201cendless forms most beautiful.\u201d Yet underlying this magnificent profusion, the laws of physics have restricted the forms of living things in predictable ways, from the molecular level to the most visible body features.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Simon Conway-Morris,\n\n\n\n an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge, has spent his career painstakingly charting and cataloging this vast array of similarities, bringing wide scientific notice to such \u201cconvergent\u201d evolution. \nAnd, yes, our own form is also shaped by these rules. Our eyes, which let us see by collecting electromagnetic radiation, work according to the same principles that we use to build cameras: Lens and iris work together to focus and control the light. Evolution has sculpted our bones to a thickness that is just right to hold us fast against the ever-present gravity of the Earth, yet not so heavy as to weigh us down. Our upright posture, with limbs free to build tools and manipulate the world using the powerful computer in our skulls, is a hallmark of physics. \n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAliens, if we ever meet them, are unlikely to be copies of us. Their multifarious organs and limbs\u2014nothing in physics says that they must have two legs and two arms in the same places as us\u2014may be arranged in different ways. But they, too, will bear the indelible imprint of the laws of physics, which work their way through everything in the universe, from a worm to a wormhole. Creatures akin to E.T. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yoda\n\n\n\n are more likely than sentient blobs as our interplanetary neighbors. \nTo emerge from the state of nature as an intelligent creature\u2014to step outside the unrelenting demands of natural section\u2014is not to escape physical laws. Any aliens who have learned to build spaceships, communicate over distances and probe the mysteries of the universe will be similar to us in their technological and behavioral capacities. The laws of physics both fashion the products of evolution and channel the capacities of any intelligence it may bring forth. No living thing can escape convergence: Physics is life\u2019s silent commander, no matter how clever you may be. \n The similarities carved by physics bring beautiful symmetry, efficiency and regularity to the living world. But the accidents of chance and evolutionary history play a no less crucial role: They produce the endless idiosyncratic variety that we see across all of nature\u2014and even account, in no small measure, for our own individuality and charm.\n\u2014Mr. Cockell is a professor of astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh. This essay is adapted from his new book, \u201cThe Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution,\u201d to be published by Basic Books on June 19. The evolution of life everywhere in the universe is constrained by the laws of physics, which means that aliens would have to resemble creatures we already know. ",
        "author": "ByCharles S. Cockell"
    },
    {
        "title": "How JFK Sent the U.S. to the Moon (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1396",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jfk-took-the-u-s-to-the-moon-11554385885?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=16",
        "text": "This July marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landing that fulfilled Kennedy\u2019s pledge. Unfortunately, he didn\u2019t live to see the Eagle make its successful landing during the Apollo 11 mission. Everybody at NASA in 1969 knew, however, that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n feat wouldn\u2019t have happened without Kennedy\u2019s commitment. As astronaut Buzz Aldrin later reflected, Kennedy had the courage \u201cto reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil.\u201d\nThe moonshot was the right goal for the historical moment. In October 1957, the Soviet Union had stunned America by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, setting off a frantic race to improve U.S. capabilities in space. Kennedy had made the issue his own during his run for president in 1960, when he accused the Eisenhower administration of having allowed the U.S. to fall behind, vowing that he would \u201crebuild the stature of American science and education.\u201d In his famous televised debate with GOP nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n Kennedy recalled the vice president\u2019s so-called \u201cKitchen Debate\u201d with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the year before: \u201cYou yourself said to Khrushchev, \u2018You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we\u2019re ahead of you in color television.\u2019 I will take my television in black and white. I want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust.\u201d\nOnce Kennedy beat Nixon to become America\u2019s 35th president, he quickly embraced manned space exploration as essential to winning the Cold War. For each Soviet achievement in space, NASA fired back with a win of its own. When Soviet cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first man in space, NASA responded with astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard\u2019s\n\n\n\n suborbital flight; when the Soviets sent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gherman Titov\n\n\n\n into orbit around the Earth, NASA did the same with John Glenn. Cities such as Houston, St. Louis and Huntsville, Ala. were transformed by NASA\u2019s mobilization. At the center of it all was Kennedy, whose sheer enthusiasm overcame skeptics and persuaded America to shoulder the moonshot program\u2019s enormous price tag of $25 billion (around $180 billion in today\u2019s dollars).\n\n\nRELATED Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever \n\n\nOn Nov. 16, 1963, Kennedy traveled to NASA\u2019s launch complex at Cape Canaveral to be briefed on the Apollo program, in which three-man crews would be sent on progressively more ambitious missions. He beamed with pride at a two-stage Saturn C-1 booster rocket, then embarked on a helicopter tour with astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Grissom\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Cooper.\n\n\n\n From Florida, Kennedy headed to Texas for a two-day, five-city swing to promote NASA. Working the rope line after a speech at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Kennedy asked Cooper to go to Dallas with him the next day. \u201cHe said he could use a \u2018space hero\u2019 with him,\u201d Cooper later recalled. \u201cI couldn\u2019t make the trip because some important systems tests were scheduled at the Cape for the next day: November 22, 1963.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, July 20, 1969. (AP Photo/NASA/Neil Armstrong)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThat day, at 11:55 CST, President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. When the NASA astronauts learned of the assassination, they were both grief-stricken and anxious that Apollo\u2019s funding would dry up without its chief cheerleader in the White House.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jacqueline Kennedy\n\n\n\n also feared that Apollo would wither unless Americans saw it as a memorial to her husband: \u201cI kept thinking,\u201d she recalled, \u201cthat\u2019s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten.\u201d Shortly after the president\u2019s burial, Mrs. Kennedy met with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson\n\n\n\n in the Oval Office and reminded him of how her husband had roused America to a great national purpose.\n\n\nSoon Johnson would be using the same emotional plea, evoking the martyred Kennedy whenever Congress tried to slash the Apollo budget. In the Senate, Johnson\u2019s 1964 presidential rival,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barry Goldwater,\n\n\n\n wanted to shift funding from Apollo to the U.S. Air Force. Former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n a longtime critic, complained that the moonshot was a \u201cstunt\u201d that diverted resources from more useful military and civilian applications of space science. On the Democratic side, a proposal by Arkansas Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J. William Fulbright\n\n\n\n to cut 10% from Apollo\u2019s 1965 funding came within four votes of passing.\nJohnson, a NASA booster since his Senate days, embraced Apollo as part of the competition with global communism. He didn\u2019t think the U.S. could afford to be \u201cfirst on Earth and second in space.\u201d And while NASA\u2019s budget did in fact fall annually after its high point of $5.9 billion in 1966 President Kennedy\u2019s challenge to the nation led to a space-race victory he didn\u2019t live to see. ",
        "author": "Douglas Brinkley"
    },
    {
        "title": "How JFK Sent the U.S. to the Moon (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1397",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jfk-took-the-u-s-to-the-moon-11554385885?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=57",
        "text": "This July marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landing that fulfilled Kennedy\u2019s pledge. Unfortunately, he didn\u2019t live to see the Eagle make its successful landing during the Apollo 11 mission. Everybody at NASA in 1969 knew, however, that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n feat wouldn\u2019t have happened without Kennedy\u2019s commitment. As astronaut Buzz Aldrin later reflected, Kennedy had the courage \u201cto reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil.\u201d\nThe moonshot was the right goal for the historical moment. In October 1957, the Soviet Union had stunned America by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, setting off a frantic race to improve U.S. capabilities in space. Kennedy had made the issue his own during his run for president in 1960, when he accused the Eisenhower administration of having allowed the U.S. to fall behind, vowing that he would \u201crebuild the stature of American science and education.\u201d In his famous televised debate with GOP nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n Kennedy recalled the vice president\u2019s so-called \u201cKitchen Debate\u201d with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the year before: \u201cYou yourself said to Khrushchev, \u2018You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we\u2019re ahead of you in color television.\u2019 I will take my television in black and white. I want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust.\u201d\nOnce Kennedy beat Nixon to become America\u2019s 35th president, he quickly embraced manned space exploration as essential to winning the Cold War. For each Soviet achievement in space, NASA fired back with a win of its own. When Soviet cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first man in space, NASA responded with astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard\u2019s\n\n\n\n suborbital flight; when the Soviets sent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gherman Titov\n\n\n\n into orbit around the Earth, NASA did the same with John Glenn. Cities such as Houston, St. Louis and Huntsville, Ala. were transformed by NASA\u2019s mobilization. At the center of it all was Kennedy, whose sheer enthusiasm overcame skeptics and persuaded America to shoulder the moonshot program\u2019s enormous price tag of $25 billion (around $180 billion in today\u2019s dollars).\n\n\nRELATED Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever \n\n\nOn Nov. 16, 1963, Kennedy traveled to NASA\u2019s launch complex at Cape Canaveral to be briefed on the Apollo program, in which three-man crews would be sent on progressively more ambitious missions. He beamed with pride at a two-stage Saturn C-1 booster rocket, then embarked on a helicopter tour with astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Grissom\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Cooper.\n\n\n\n From Florida, Kennedy headed to Texas for a two-day, five-city swing to promote NASA. Working the rope line after a speech at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Kennedy asked Cooper to go to Dallas with him the next day. \u201cHe said he could use a \u2018space hero\u2019 with him,\u201d Cooper later recalled. \u201cI couldn\u2019t make the trip because some important systems tests were scheduled at the Cape for the next day: November 22, 1963.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, July 20, 1969. (AP Photo/NASA/Neil Armstrong)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThat day, at 11:55 CST, President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. When the NASA astronauts learned of the assassination, they were both grief-stricken and anxious that Apollo\u2019s funding would dry up without its chief cheerleader in the White House.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jacqueline Kennedy\n\n\n\n also feared that Apollo would wither unless Americans saw it as a memorial to her husband: \u201cI kept thinking,\u201d she recalled, \u201cthat\u2019s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten.\u201d Shortly after the president\u2019s burial, Mrs. Kennedy met with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson\n\n\n\n in the Oval Office and reminded him of how her husband had roused America to a great national purpose.\n\n\nSoon Johnson would be using the same emotional plea, evoking the martyred Kennedy whenever Congress tried to slash the Apollo budget. In the Senate, Johnson\u2019s 1964 presidential rival,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barry Goldwater,\n\n\n\n wanted to shift funding from Apollo to the U.S. Air Force. Former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n a longtime critic, complained that the moonshot was a \u201cstunt\u201d that diverted resources from more useful military and civilian applications of space science. On the Democratic side, a proposal by Arkansas Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J. William Fulbright\n\n\n\n to cut 10% from Apollo\u2019s 1965 funding came within four votes of passing.\nJohnson, a NASA booster since his Senate days, embraced Apollo as part of the competition with global communism. He didn\u2019t think the U.S. could afford to be \u201cfirst on Earth and second in space.\u201d And while NASA\u2019s budget did in fact fall annually after its high point of $5.9 billion in 1966 President Kennedy\u2019s challenge to the nation led to a space-race victory he didn\u2019t live to see. ",
        "author": "Douglas Brinkley"
    },
    {
        "title": "How JFK Sent the U.S. to the Moon (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1398",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jfk-took-the-u-s-to-the-moon-11554385885?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=75",
        "text": "This July marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landing that fulfilled Kennedy\u2019s pledge. Unfortunately, he didn\u2019t live to see the Eagle make its successful landing during the Apollo 11 mission. Everybody at NASA in 1969 knew, however, that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n feat wouldn\u2019t have happened without Kennedy\u2019s commitment. As astronaut Buzz Aldrin later reflected, Kennedy had the courage \u201cto reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil.\u201d\nThe moonshot was the right goal for the historical moment. In October 1957, the Soviet Union had stunned America by launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, setting off a frantic race to improve U.S. capabilities in space. Kennedy had made the issue his own during his run for president in 1960, when he accused the Eisenhower administration of having allowed the U.S. to fall behind, vowing that he would \u201crebuild the stature of American science and education.\u201d In his famous televised debate with GOP nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n Kennedy recalled the vice president\u2019s so-called \u201cKitchen Debate\u201d with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the year before: \u201cYou yourself said to Khrushchev, \u2018You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we\u2019re ahead of you in color television.\u2019 I will take my television in black and white. I want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nOnce Kennedy beat Nixon to become America\u2019s 35th president, he quickly embraced manned space exploration as essential to winning the Cold War. For each Soviet achievement in space, NASA fired back with a win of its own. When Soviet cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first man in space, NASA responded with astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard\u2019s\n\n\n\n suborbital flight; when the Soviets sent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gherman Titov\n\n\n\n into orbit around the Earth, NASA did the same with John Glenn. Cities such as Houston, St. Louis and Huntsville, Ala. were transformed by NASA\u2019s mobilization. At the center of it all was Kennedy, whose sheer enthusiasm overcame skeptics and persuaded America to shoulder the moonshot program\u2019s enormous price tag of $25 billion (around $180 billion in today\u2019s dollars).\n\n\nRELATED Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever \n\n\nOn Nov. 16, 1963, Kennedy traveled to NASA\u2019s launch complex at Cape Canaveral to be briefed on the Apollo program, in which three-man crews would be sent on progressively more ambitious missions. He beamed with pride at a two-stage Saturn C-1 booster rocket, then embarked on a helicopter tour with astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Grissom\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Cooper.\n\n\n\n From Florida, Kennedy headed to Texas for a two-day, five-city swing to promote NASA. Working the rope line after a speech at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Kennedy asked Cooper to go to Dallas with him the next day. \u201cHe said he could use a \u2018space hero\u2019 with him,\u201d Cooper later recalled. \u201cI couldn\u2019t make the trip because some important systems tests were scheduled at the Cape for the next day: November 22, 1963.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, July 20, 1969. (AP Photo/NASA/Neil Armstrong)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThat day, at 11:55 CST, President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. When the NASA astronauts learned of the assassination, they were both grief-stricken and anxious that Apollo\u2019s funding would dry up without its chief cheerleader in the White House.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jacqueline Kennedy\n\n\n\n also feared that Apollo would wither unless Americans saw it as a memorial to her husband: \u201cI kept thinking,\u201d she recalled, \u201cthat\u2019s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten.\u201d Shortly after the president\u2019s burial, Mrs. Kennedy met with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson\n\n\n\n in the Oval Office and reminded him of how her husband had roused America to a great national purpose.\n\n\nSoon Johnson would be using the same emotional plea, evoking the martyred Kennedy whenever Congress tried to slash the Apollo budget. In the Senate, Johnson\u2019s 1964 presidential rival,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barry Goldwater,\n\n\n\n wanted to shift funding from Apollo to the U.S. Air Force. Former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n a longtime critic, complained that the moonshot was a \u201cstunt\u201d that diverted resources from more useful military and civilian applications of space science. On the Democratic side, a proposal by Arkansas Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J. William Fulbright\n\n\n\n to cut 10% from Apollo\u2019s 1965 funding came within four votes of passing.\nJohnson, a NASA booster since his Senate days, embraced Apollo as part of the competition with global communism. He didn\u2019t think the U.S. could afford to be \u201cfirst on Earth and second in space.\u201d And while NASA\u2019s budget did in fact fall annually after its high point of $5.9 billion in President Kennedy\u2019s challenge to the nation led to a space-race victory he didn\u2019t live to see. ",
        "author": "Douglas Brinkley"
    },
    {
        "title": "JFK, John Glenn and the Fight for \u2018Space for Peace\u2019 (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1399",
        "date": "2021-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jfk-john-glenn-and-the-fight-for-space-for-peace-11622260860?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=21",
        "text": "\u201cSpace Fight,\u201d cheered Aviation Week. Yet this was more than a turf war. At stake was the very purpose of the U.S. space program. Would the nation stay committed to \u201cspace for peace,\u201d the policy of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight D. Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n the outgoing president? Or would the new administration see space as the Air Force did: an arena of the Cold War, a battlefront on which armed conflict might be inevitable? The decision was Kennedy\u2019s to make\u2014though it would come to depend, as events unfolded, on an astronaut named John Glenn.\n\n\n\n\u201cTo the Air Force top brass, the existence of NASA was an affront. \u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo the Air Force top brass, the existence of NASA was an affront. The Space Act of 1958, which created NASA and gave it control over human spaceflight, was a rebuke to every military planner with fantasies of orbital fighter planes or space stations teeming with missiles. At a time when the Soviet Union was achieving one \u201cfirst\u201d after another\u2014the first satellite, the first animal in orbit, the first unmanned craft to reach the lunar surface\u2014Eisenhower held to his view that space exploration served no national security interest. As a concession, he allowed the Air Force to continue development of the X-20, a high-altitude bomber, but the \u201cman-in-space\u201d program, Project\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury,\n\n\n was NASA\u2019s domain.\nKennedy\u2019s election gave the generals cause for hope. \u201cIf the Soviets control space,\u201d he had said during the campaign, \u201cthey can control earth.\u201d In the eyes of the world, he argued, \u201csecond in space\u201d meant second in science and technology, second in military power, second in the struggle between freedom and totalitarian rule. In late 1960, a classified U.S. Information Agency report\u2014which caused a stir when it leaked\u2014revealed that Soviet superiority in space was eroding global confidence in the U.S. \u201cSatellite pessimism,\u201d analysts called it. Pressure was building for a show of strength in space.\n\n\nAnd NASA held a weakening hand. The astronauts were popular with the public, but the manned program was well behind schedule and marred by failure. Rockets exploded on the launchpad; payloads ended up in the sea. Rumors circulated that Kennedy would transfer Mercury to the military or cancel it altogether\u2014a course that his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, preferred.\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe time was ripe,\u201d as an internal Air Force history put it, for the U.S. Air Force \u201cto initiate an aggressive information campaign\u201d aimed at swaying Kennedy to abandon his predecessor\u2019s approach. Speeches were given, articles were planted and an Air Force Committee sounded alarms about \u201cthe military implications of the frequency and payload size of the Soviet space launches.\u201d\nThe Air Force misjudged its audience. For all his martial rhetoric, Kennedy was no more willing to militarize space than Eisenhower had been. Kennedy wanted to surpass the Russians in space, but on the basis of engineering, not armaments. (On Earth it was a different story: the arms race intensified.) This, he believed, would have a deterrent effect in space. He also saw a propaganda advantage to be gained from space exploration \u201cfor the benefit of mankind,\u201d as the Space Act decreed. In March 1961, he issued a rebuke: \u201cIt is not now, nor has it ever been, my intention to subordinate the activities in space of NASA to those of the Department of Defense.\u201d\nBut this was not the last word. The following month, a Soviet Air Force pilot, Yuri Gagarin, became the first human being in space, orbiting once before returning safely. \u201cI want to see the country mobilized to a wartime basis,\u201d a congressman thundered at a hearing the next day. \u201cBecause we are at war.\u201d Others raised the prospect of Soviet tanks or a missile base on the moon. It seemed unlikely that a missile fired from the lunar surface would be as accurate as one fired from, say, Irkutsk, but few doubted that Russia would test the proposition. The Cold War was entering a more dangerous phase: In August, the Soviets began building a wall in Berlin and testing new, nightmarishly powerful nuclear weapons.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJohn Glenn during his historic flight on Friendship 7, Feb. 20, 1962.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAs \u201cthe hour of maximum danger\u201d drew near, in Kennedy\u2019s phrase, his hopes came to rest on the fate of John Glenn\u2014who, as a Marine pilot in World War II and Korea, had brought the self-effacing values of small-town Ohio to the fiercest kinds of air combat. Glenn\u2019s easy, sunny manner made him the most admired of the Mercury astronauts, and in late 1961 he was given its most critical mission yet: the first orbital flight. In mid-1961 NASA had twice managed to launch a man into space, but these had been \u201csuborbital\u201d flights, up and down in 15 minutes. It fell to Glenn to end the Soviet monopoly on orbital flight.\n\n\n\n\u201cGlenn projected confidence, but privately he began to reckon with the possibility of becoming the first man to die in space.\u201d\n\n\n\nGlenn projected confidence. Privately, though, he began to reckon with the possibility of becoming a casualty of the Cold War, the first man to die in space. Ten times over the course of four months, his flight was scrubbed\u2014postponed due to bad weather or what NASA, with studied imprecision, called \u201ctechnical difficulties.\u201d Alone in crew quarters, he scripted a recording to be played for his teenage children, Lyn and Dave, if he failed to make it back alive. The handwritten script\u2014never published until now\u2014began on a suitably grim note. \u201cIf you hear this,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI\u2019ve been killed.\u201d He urged his children to \u201cbe glad, as I am, that my life was not wasted...We tried hard, and got to a high point. Now it\u2019s up to others to get a little higher.\u201d\nOn February 20, 1962, for five thrilling hours, Glenn flew higher than any American ever had. His capsule, Friendship 7, circled the planet three times and splashed down safely. Across the free world, people wept with relief. \u201cA spell has been broken,\u201d a West German newspaper proclaimed; no longer would Soviet space flights suggest \u201csome deep deficiency in the democratic order.\u201d For the Air Force, however, there was no mistaking what Glenn\u2019s success meant. As an internal report acknowledged, the \u201ccampaign to win a larger role in space and to modify the \u2018space for peace\u2019 policy came to an end, at least temporarily.\u201d\nToday, six decades later, a new space race is underway, wrenching open old questions about the purpose of the U.S. program. NASA, newly energized, is at the forefront of scientific discovery, but space is increasingly a forum for military brinkmanship, not only with Russia but also now with China. Alert to the challenge, President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Joe Biden\n \n\n\n\n has pledged his full support for the U.S. Space Force, whose mission is to \u201cdefend our way of life on Earth through our interests in space.\u201d Thirty years after the Cold War\u2019s end, the U.S. military\u2019s presence in space is well-established\u2014and expanding. \n\u2014This essay is adapted from Mr. Shesol\u2019s new book, \u201cMercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War,\u201d which will be published on June 1 by W.W. Norton. By putting the first American in orbit in 1962, NASA ensured a civilian future for space exploration. ",
        "author": "Jeff Shesol"
    },
    {
        "title": "JFK, John Glenn and the Fight for \u2018Space for Peace\u2019 (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1400",
        "date": "2021-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jfk-john-glenn-and-the-fight-for-space-for-peace-11622260860?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=29",
        "text": "\u201cSpace Fight,\u201d cheered Aviation Week. Yet this was more than a turf war. At stake was the very purpose of the U.S. space program. Would the nation stay committed to \u201cspace for peace,\u201d the policy of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight D. Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n the outgoing president? Or would the new administration see space as the Air Force did: an arena of the Cold War, a battlefront on which armed conflict might be inevitable? The decision was Kennedy\u2019s to make\u2014though it would come to depend, as events unfolded, on an astronaut named John Glenn.\n\n\n\n\u201cTo the Air Force top brass, the existence of NASA was an affront. \u201d\n\n\n\nTo the Air Force top brass, the existence of NASA was an affront. The Space Act of 1958, which created NASA and gave it control over human spaceflight, was a rebuke to every military planner with fantasies of orbital fighter planes or space stations teeming with missiles. At a time when the Soviet Union was achieving one \u201cfirst\u201d after another\u2014the first satellite, the first animal in orbit, the first unmanned craft to reach the lunar surface\u2014Eisenhower held to his view that space exploration served no national security interest. As a concession, he allowed the Air Force to continue development of the X-20, a high-altitude bomber, but the \u201cman-in-space\u201d program, Project\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury,\n\n\n was NASA\u2019s domain.\nKennedy\u2019s election gave the generals cause for hope. \u201cIf the Soviets control space,\u201d he had said during the campaign, \u201cthey can control earth.\u201d In the eyes of the world, he argued, \u201csecond in space\u201d meant second in science and technology, second in military power, second in the struggle between freedom and totalitarian rule. In late 1960, a classified U.S. Information Agency report\u2014which caused a stir when it leaked\u2014revealed that Soviet superiority in space was eroding global confidence in the U.S. \u201cSatellite pessimism,\u201d analysts called it. Pressure was building for a show of strength in space.\n\n\nAnd NASA held a weakening hand. The astronauts were popular with the public, but the manned program was well behind schedule and marred by failure. Rockets exploded on the launchpad; payloads ended up in the sea. Rumors circulated that Kennedy would transfer Mercury to the military or cancel it altogether\u2014a course that his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, preferred.\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe time was ripe,\u201d as an internal Air Force history put it, for the U.S. Air Force \u201cto initiate an aggressive information campaign\u201d aimed at swaying Kennedy to abandon his predecessor\u2019s approach. Speeches were given, articles were planted and an Air Force Committee sounded alarms about \u201cthe military implications of the frequency and payload size of the Soviet space launches.\u201d\nThe Air Force misjudged its audience. For all his martial rhetoric, Kennedy was no more willing to militarize space than Eisenhower had been. Kennedy wanted to surpass the Russians in space, but on the basis of engineering, not armaments. (On Earth it was a different story: the arms race intensified.) This, he believed, would have a deterrent effect in space. He also saw a propaganda advantage to be gained from space exploration \u201cfor the benefit of mankind,\u201d as the Space Act decreed. In March 1961, he issued a rebuke: \u201cIt is not now, nor has it ever been, my intention to subordinate the activities in space of NASA to those of the Department of Defense.\u201d\nBut this was not the last word. The following month, a Soviet Air Force pilot, Yuri Gagarin, became the first human being in space, orbiting once before returning safely. \u201cI want to see the country mobilized to a wartime basis,\u201d a congressman thundered at a hearing the next day. \u201cBecause we are at war.\u201d Others raised the prospect of Soviet tanks or a missile base on the moon. It seemed unlikely that a missile fired from the lunar surface would be as accurate as one fired from, say, Irkutsk, but few doubted that Russia would test the proposition. The Cold War was entering a more dangerous phase: In August, the Soviets began building a wall in Berlin and testing new, nightmarishly powerful nuclear weapons.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJohn Glenn during his historic flight on Friendship 7, Feb. 20, 1962.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAs \u201cthe hour of maximum danger\u201d drew near, in Kennedy\u2019s phrase, his hopes came to rest on the fate of John Glenn\u2014who, as a Marine pilot in World War II and Korea, had brought the self-effacing values of small-town Ohio to the fiercest kinds of air combat. Glenn\u2019s easy, sunny manner made him the most admired of the Mercury astronauts, and in late 1961 he was given its most critical mission yet: the first orbital flight. In mid-1961 NASA had twice managed to launch a man into space, but these had been \u201csuborbital\u201d By putting the first American in orbit in 1962, NASA ensured a civilian future for space exploration. ",
        "author": "Jeff Shesol"
    },
    {
        "title": "JFK, John Glenn and the Fight for \u2018Space for Peace\u2019 (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1401",
        "date": "2021-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jfk-john-glenn-and-the-fight-for-space-for-peace-11622260860?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=29",
        "text": "\u201cSpace Fight,\u201d cheered Aviation Week. Yet this was more than a turf war. At stake was the very purpose of the U.S. space program. Would the nation stay committed to \u201cspace for peace,\u201d the policy of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dwight D. Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n the outgoing president? Or would the new administration see space as the Air Force did: an arena of the Cold War, a battlefront on which armed conflict might be inevitable? The decision was Kennedy\u2019s to make\u2014though it would come to depend, as events unfolded, on an astronaut named John Glenn.\n\n\n\n\u201cTo the Air Force top brass, the existence of NASA was an affront. \u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo the Air Force top brass, the existence of NASA was an affront. The Space Act of 1958, which created NASA and gave it control over human spaceflight, was a rebuke to every military planner with fantasies of orbital fighter planes or space stations teeming with missiles. At a time when the Soviet Union was achieving one \u201cfirst\u201d after another\u2014the first satellite, the first animal in orbit, the first unmanned craft to reach the lunar surface\u2014Eisenhower held to his view that space exploration served no national security interest. As a concession, he allowed the Air Force to continue development of the X-20, a high-altitude bomber, but the \u201cman-in-space\u201d program, Project\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury,\n\n\n was NASA\u2019s domain.\nKennedy\u2019s election gave the generals cause for hope. \u201cIf the Soviets control space,\u201d he had said during the campaign, \u201cthey can control earth.\u201d In the eyes of the world, he argued, \u201csecond in space\u201d meant second in science and technology, second in military power, second in the struggle between freedom and totalitarian rule. In late 1960, a classified U.S. Information Agency report\u2014which caused a stir when it leaked\u2014revealed that Soviet superiority in space was eroding global confidence in the U.S. \u201cSatellite pessimism,\u201d analysts called it. Pressure was building for a show of strength in space.\n\n\nAnd NASA held a weakening hand. The astronauts were popular with the public, but the manned program was well behind schedule and marred by failure. Rockets exploded on the launchpad; payloads ended up in the sea. Rumors circulated that Kennedy would transfer Mercury to the military or cancel it altogether\u2014a course that his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, preferred.\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe time was ripe,\u201d as an internal Air Force history put it, for the U.S. Air Force \u201cto initiate an aggressive information campaign\u201d aimed at swaying Kennedy to abandon his predecessor\u2019s approach. Speeches were given, articles were planted and an Air Force Committee sounded alarms about \u201cthe military implications of the frequency and payload size of the Soviet space launches.\u201d\nThe Air Force misjudged its audience. For all his martial rhetoric, Kennedy was no more willing to militarize space than Eisenhower had been. Kennedy wanted to surpass the Russians in space, but on the basis of engineering, not armaments. (On Earth it was a different story: the arms race intensified.) This, he believed, would have a deterrent effect in space. He also saw a propaganda advantage to be gained from space exploration \u201cfor the benefit of mankind,\u201d as the Space Act decreed. In March 1961, he issued a rebuke: \u201cIt is not now, nor has it ever been, my intention to subordinate the activities in space of NASA to those of the Department of Defense.\u201d\nBut this was not the last word. The following month, a Soviet Air Force pilot, Yuri Gagarin, became the first human being in space, orbiting once before returning safely. \u201cI want to see the country mobilized to a wartime basis,\u201d a congressman thundered at a hearing the next day. \u201cBecause we are at war.\u201d Others raised the prospect of Soviet tanks or a missile base on the moon. It seemed unlikely that a missile fired from the lunar surface would be as accurate as one fired from, say, Irkutsk, but few doubted that Russia would test the proposition. The Cold War was entering a more dangerous phase: In August, the Soviets began building a wall in Berlin and testing new, nightmarishly powerful nuclear weapons.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJohn Glenn during his historic flight on Friendship 7, Feb. 20, 1962.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAs \u201cthe hour of maximum danger\u201d drew near, in Kennedy\u2019s phrase, his hopes came to rest on the fate of John Glenn\u2014who, as a Marine pilot in World War II and Korea, had brought the self-effacing values of small-town Ohio to the fiercest kinds of air combat. Glenn\u2019s easy, sunny manner made him the most admired of the Mercury astronauts, and in late 1961 he was given its most critical mission yet: the first orbital flight. In mid-1961 NASA had twice managed to launch a man into space, but these had been \u201csu By putting the first American in orbit in 1962, NASA ensured a civilian future for space exploration. ",
        "author": "Jeff Shesol"
    },
    {
        "title": "After \u2018Wonder Woman,\u2019 Let\u2019s Cast More Women in Bit Parts Too (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1402",
        "date": "2017-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-wonder-woman-lets-cast-more-women-in-bit-parts-too-1500048119?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=91",
        "text": "But we working actors still have a way to go. My dream is to see more women playing roles so minor that their characters don\u2019t even merit a proper name. \nThe vast majority of actors today are vying not to play Wonder Woman but to get cast for one-day-stint roles like Chihuahua Owner, Underdeveloped Clone and Mayor\u2019s Sycophantic Assistant. In my 30 years in the business, I\u2019ve played many parts, but I\u2019ll always remember my moment as Woman in Bathroom in the 1997 romantic comedy \u201c\u2019Til There Was You\u201d: I was a stranger who offered\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sarah Jessica Parker\n\n\n\n unsolicited dating advice in a restaurant restroom, and the gig put me over the minimum earnings needed to qualify for the actors\u2019 union health-insurance plan. \n\n\n\n\nSupporting players don\u2019t have entourages, on-call masseuses or personal assistants. The freelance working actor cobbles together an annual income that is usually in the range of the median for Los Angeles. Sometimes the bit parts are steppingstones to larger roles; sometimes they are relationship-builders with directors or producers; sometimes they are the career. But here\u2019s the thing about those working actors: They\u2019re mostly men. \n\n\nA 2016 study by the USC Annenberg School found that female characters comprised only some 29% of all speaking roles in films. (We fared better in television and best in streaming media, where female roles made up 38% of speaking roles.) Some of these parts pass in a blink. In \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d after the Navy SEALs kill Osama bin Laden, an actor identified in the screenplay only as Commanding Officer barks, \u201cAll stations: target secure, target secure.\u201d Most people in the theater didn\u2019t notice Commanding Officer\u2014but I did, because that\u2019s a gig I would have liked to have had a shot at. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 2011 movie \u2018Atlas Shrugged: Part I\u2019 features Taylor Schilling as the heroine Dagny Taggart (center) and the author as Reporter #2 (holding a microphone, at right).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rocky Mountain Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe minor parts I most covet, the ones I hope will support me in my rapidly approaching dotage, are what I call \u201cforgettable exposition roles.\u201d These are the ubiquitous craggy faced gentlemen who play scowling cabinet members or stodgy generals and declare, \u201cMr. President, there\u2019s an emergency in sector seven.\u201d Those parts usually go to men\u2014not least because directors are most often male. \n\n\nRelated Reading \u2018Wonder Woman\u2019 Director Blasts Through Hollywood\u2019s Glass Ceiling Female Actors Lean In With Buddy Films Lynda Obst: Hollywood, Sexism and the Making of \u2018Thelma & Louise\u2019 \n\n\nPut a woman behind the camera, and you\u2019ll see 5.4% more girls and women on the screen, says the USC study. \u201cWonder Woman,\u201d the first superhero blockbuster with a female director, has 72 credited roles listed on IMDB.com, and 41 of them went to women. Of course, the film is set amid World War I, which means that Ms. Jenkins needed to cast a lot of male soldiers. \nBut \u201cTransformers: The Last Knight,\u201d with a male director, has no such justification. Out of its 84 credited roles on IMDb, a whopping 19 went to females. Men played plenty of parts that, according to their IMDb descriptions, were hardly gender-specific: Government Suit, U.K. Prime Minister and four roles for Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists.\n\n\nMore Essays From Review\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThat none of the JPL engineers were women didn\u2019t go unnoticed by female scientists.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carolyn Porco,\n\n\n\n the imaging science team leader for the Cassini space mission, told me, \u201cI\u2019ve been working with JPL for decades now, and I can tell you: These days, there are female engineers all over the place.\u201d In \u201cThe Martian,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Damon\u2019s\n\n\n\n character survives, in part, by modifying equipment from the Mars Pathfinder Lander designed by JPL. The movie\u2019s cast includes four bit parts for JPL Pathfinder Team members. All of them were men, even though the real-life Pathfinder team included several female engineers. \nI hope that we can do better, and soon. For one thing, those day-player roles can make a career. Early on,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brad Pitt\n\n\n\n was cast as Waiter, Boy at Beach and Preppy Kid at Fight. For another, I\u2019m not getting any younger, and judges\u2019 robes are so wonderfully forgiving. Maybe, if I stop dying my hair and moisturizing, I will one day be gray and jowly enough to have the privilege of uttering a line of forgettable dialogue, like the Judge in the new hit \u201cBaby Driver\u201d who gets to say, \u201cDescribe your relationship with the defendant.\u201d \nA girl can dream.\n\u2014Ms. Gurwitch is an actress and the author of \u201cWherever You Go, There They Are: Stories About My Family You Might Relate To\u201d (Blue Rider Press). An actress dreams of seeing more women playing roles so minor that their characters don\u2019t even merit a proper name ",
        "author": "Annabelle Gurwitch"
    },
    {
        "title": "After \u2018Wonder Woman,\u2019 Let\u2019s Cast More Women in Bit Parts Too (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1403",
        "date": "2017-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-wonder-woman-lets-cast-more-women-in-bit-parts-too-1500048119?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=80",
        "text": "But we working actors still have a way to go. My dream is to see more women playing roles so minor that their characters don\u2019t even merit a proper name. \nThe vast majority of actors today are vying not to play Wonder Woman but to get cast for one-day-stint roles like Chihuahua Owner, Underdeveloped Clone and Mayor\u2019s Sycophantic Assistant. In my 30 years in the business, I\u2019ve played many parts, but I\u2019ll always remember my moment as Woman in Bathroom in the 1997 romantic comedy \u201c\u2019Til There Was You\u201d: I was a stranger who offered\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sarah Jessica Parker\n\n\n\n unsolicited dating advice in a restaurant restroom, and the gig put me over the minimum earnings needed to qualify for the actors\u2019 union health-insurance plan. \nSupporting players don\u2019t have entourages, on-call masseuses or personal assistants. The freelance working actor cobbles together an annual income that is usually in the range of the median for Los Angeles. Sometimes the bit parts are steppingstones to larger roles; sometimes they are relationship-builders with directors or producers; sometimes they are the career. But here\u2019s the thing about those working actors: They\u2019re mostly men. \n\n\nA 2016 study by the USC Annenberg School found that female characters comprised only some 29% of all speaking roles in films. (We fared better in television and best in streaming media, where female roles made up 38% of speaking roles.) Some of these parts pass in a blink. In \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d after the Navy SEALs kill Osama bin Laden, an actor identified in the screenplay only as Commanding Officer barks, \u201cAll stations: target secure, target secure.\u201d Most people in the theater didn\u2019t notice Commanding Officer\u2014but I did, because that\u2019s a gig I would have liked to have had a shot at. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 2011 movie \u2018Atlas Shrugged: Part I\u2019 features Taylor Schilling as the heroine Dagny Taggart (center) and the author as Reporter #2 (holding a microphone, at right).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rocky Mountain Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe minor parts I most covet, the ones I hope will support me in my rapidly approaching dotage, are what I call \u201cforgettable exposition roles.\u201d These are the ubiquitous craggy faced gentlemen who play scowling cabinet members or stodgy generals and declare, \u201cMr. President, there\u2019s an emergency in sector seven.\u201d Those parts usually go to men\u2014not least because directors are most often male. \n\n\nRelated Reading \u2018Wonder Woman\u2019 Director Blasts Through Hollywood\u2019s Glass Ceiling Female Actors Lean In With Buddy Films Lynda Obst: Hollywood, Sexism and the Making of \u2018Thelma & Louise\u2019 \n\n\nPut a woman behind the camera, and you\u2019ll see 5.4% more girls and women on the screen, says the USC study. \u201cWonder Woman,\u201d the first superhero blockbuster with a female director, has 72 credited roles listed on IMDB.com, and 41 of them went to women. Of course, the film is set amid World War I, which means that Ms. Jenkins needed to cast a lot of male soldiers. \nBut \u201cTransformers: The Last Knight,\u201d with a male director, has no such justification. Out of its 84 credited roles on IMDb, a whopping 19 went to females. Men played plenty of parts that, according to their IMDb descriptions, were hardly gender-specific: Government Suit, U.K. Prime Minister and four roles for Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists.\n\n\nMore Essays From Review\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThat none of the JPL engineers were women didn\u2019t go unnoticed by female scientists.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carolyn Porco,\n\n\n\n the imaging science team leader for the Cassini space mission, told me, \u201cI\u2019ve been working with JPL for decades now, and I can tell you: These days, there are female engineers all over the place.\u201d In \u201cThe Martian,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Damon\u2019s\n\n\n\n character survives, in part, by modifying equipment from the Mars Pathfinder Lander designed by JPL. The movie\u2019s cast includes four bit parts for JPL Pathfinder Team members. All of them were men, even though the real-life Pathfinder team included several female engineers. \nI hope that we can do better, and soon. For one thing, those day-player roles can make a career. Early on,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brad Pitt\n\n\n\n was cast as Waiter, Boy at Beach and Preppy Kid at Fight. For another, I\u2019m not getting any younger, and judges\u2019 robes are so wonderfully forgiving. Maybe, if I stop dying my hair and moisturizing, I will one day be gray and jowly enough to have the privilege of uttering a line of forgettable dialogue, like the Judge in the new hit \u201cBaby Driver\u201d who gets to say, \u201cDescribe your relationship with the defendant.\u201d \nA girl can dream.\n\u2014Ms. Gurwitch is an actress and the author of \u201cWherever You Go, There They Are: Stories About My Family You Might Relate To\u201d (Blue Rid An actress dreams of seeing more women playing roles so minor that their characters don\u2019t even merit a proper name ",
        "author": "Annabelle Gurwitch"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Challenger Disaster and Its Lessons for Today (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1404",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenger-disaster-and-its-lessons-for-today-11611844185?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=9",
        "text": "Although space shuttle launches had become routine by 1986, more Americans than usual were tuned in that morning because the crew included the first civilian astronaut, \u201cteacher in space\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ronald Reagan\n\n\n\n was the first public official to tout the teacher-in-space program two years before, though the idea of including a civilian in the shuttle program had been contemplated at NASA for several years. McAuliffe was chosen from more than 11,000 applicants. Her death made the destruction of Challenger all the more emotionally wrenching and tragic.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHigh-school teacher Christa McAuliffe during her training on a shuttle simulator at the Johnson Space Center on Sept. 13, 1985, four months before the Challenger flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe first question that terrible day was how the government, and especially President Reagan, would respond. Reagan postponed his State of the Union address, which had been scheduled to take place that evening, and set out to craft a speech to the nation that would especially reach the hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who had watched the disaster on live TV in their classrooms. \nUnlike President Richard Nixon, who had a pre-written speech ready in case the first Apollo moon mission failed in 1969, Reagan\u2019s staff had to improvise from scratch, with no time for the usual process for presidential statements. The job of drafting Reagan\u2019s remarks fell to his speechwriter\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peggy Noonan.\n\n\n\n The result was a 650-word speech that took less than five minutes for Reagan to deliver, but it ranks near the top of his many memorable speeches. Reagan\u2019s reputation as \u201cthe great communicator\u201d seldom found its mark more fully than that day.\n\n\nThe closing sentence, derived from a famous World War II-era poem by Canadian Air Force pilot\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Gillespie Magee,\n\n\n\n is the most recalled part of Reagan\u2019s speech: \u201cWe will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and \u2018slipped the surly bonds of earth\u2019 to \u2018touch the face of God.\u2019\u201d But the middle of the speech, where Reagan addressed himself to the schoolchildren of America about the harsh lesson of human tragedy, is where the important message is conveyed: Risk is a part of the human story. \u201cThe future doesn\u2019t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.\u201d Reagan spoke to the families of all the lost astronauts over the following days; they all told him our space program must continue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Ronald Reagan delivers his speech from the Oval Office, hours after the Challenger disaster.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nFrom the polarized politics of today, many Americans look back on the Reagan years with gauzy nostalgia and marvel at the moments of national unity, wondering if we can ever match it again. But the partisan divisions then were just as intense. That very morning, House Speaker Thomas P. \u201cTip\u201d O\u2019Neill (D-Mass) had exchanged bitter words with Reagan over the administration\u2019s budget. Still, there was a difference, almost hard to imagine today. O\u2019Neill was able to write later that the Challenger speech was \u201cReagan at his best; It was a trying day for all Americans, and Ronald Reagan spoke to our highest ideals.\u201d\nAnother difference between then and today was the absence of social media to amplify misinformation and invective. There were rumors and false claims galore at the time anyway, such as that the White House had pressured NASA to launch that morning so as to coincide with Reagan\u2019s scheduled State of the Union speech. But the slower news cycle and communications technology limited the spread of such claims. One shudders to think how the false stories would have spread with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook.\n\nThe likely causes of the Challenger explosion\u2014faulty O-rings on the booster rockets\u2014were being publicly discussed within hours, as was also the case in the second space shuttle disaster, the explosion of the Columbia on re-entry in 2003 because of damaged heat-shield tiles. Despite criticism that NASA was less than forthcoming in the immediate aftermath of Challenger, there was no coverup, suppression of information or media censorship. The contrast with how the Soviet Union for many years never announced their space launches until after they had taken place (let alone their silence about Chernobyl a few months after Challenger), or how China has repeatedly covered up disease outbreaks over the last two decades, is a telling lesson in the difference between open and closed societies.\n\n\n\n\u201cFinding the right way to manage risk is a never-ending argument.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe aftermath of Challenger, which saw a special commission set up to investigate the causes of the disaster through public hearings, Thirty-five years after the tragedy, we still struggle to assess complicated risks, while recalling Reagan\u2019s admonition that the future \u2018belongs to the brave\u2019 ",
        "author": "Steven F. Hayward"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Challenger Disaster and Its Lessons for Today (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1405",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenger-disaster-and-its-lessons-for-today-11611844185?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=35",
        "text": "Although space shuttle launches had become routine by 1986, more Americans than usual were tuned in that morning because the crew included the first civilian astronaut, \u201cteacher in space\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ronald Reagan\n\n\n\n was the first public official to tout the teacher-in-space program two years before, though the idea of including a civilian in the shuttle program had been contemplated at NASA for several years. McAuliffe was chosen from more than 11,000 applicants. Her death made the destruction of Challenger all the more emotionally wrenching and tragic.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHigh-school teacher Christa McAuliffe during her training on a shuttle simulator at the Johnson Space Center on Sept. 13, 1985, four months before the Challenger flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe first question that terrible day was how the government, and especially President Reagan, would respond. Reagan postponed his State of the Union address, which had been scheduled to take place that evening, and set out to craft a speech to the nation that would especially reach the hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren who had watched the disaster on live TV in their classrooms. \nUnlike President Richard Nixon, who had a pre-written speech ready in case the first Apollo moon mission failed in 1969, Reagan\u2019s staff had to improvise from scratch, with no time for the usual process for presidential statements. The job of drafting Reagan\u2019s remarks fell to his speechwriter\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peggy Noonan.\n\n\n\n The result was a 650-word speech that took less than five minutes for Reagan to deliver, but it ranks near the top of his many memorable speeches. Reagan\u2019s reputation as \u201cthe great communicator\u201d seldom found its mark more fully than that day.\n\n\nThe closing sentence, derived from a famous World War II-era poem by Canadian Air Force pilot\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Gillespie Magee,\n\n\n\n is the most recalled part of Reagan\u2019s speech: \u201cWe will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and \u2018slipped the surly bonds of earth\u2019 to \u2018touch the face of God.\u2019\u201d But the middle of the speech, where Reagan addressed himself to the schoolchildren of America about the harsh lesson of human tragedy, is where the important message is conveyed: Risk is a part of the human story. \u201cThe future doesn\u2019t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.\u201d Reagan spoke to the families of all the lost astronauts over the following days; they all told him our space program must continue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Ronald Reagan delivers his speech from the Oval Office, hours after the Challenger disaster.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nFrom the polarized politics of today, many Americans look back on the Reagan years with gauzy nostalgia and marvel at the moments of national unity, wondering if we can ever match it again. But the partisan divisions then were just as intense. That very morning, House Speaker Thomas P. \u201cTip\u201d O\u2019Neill (D-Mass) had exchanged bitter words with Reagan over the administration\u2019s budget. Still, there was a difference, almost hard to imagine today. O\u2019Neill was able to write later that the Challenger speech was \u201cReagan at his best; It was a trying day for all Americans, and Ronald Reagan spoke to our highest ideals.\u201d\nAnother difference between then and today was the absence of social media to amplify misinformation and invective. There were rumors and false claims galore at the time anyway, such as that the White House had pressured NASA to launch that morning so as to coincide with Reagan\u2019s scheduled State of the Union speech. But the slower news cycle and communications technology limited the spread of such claims. One shudders to think how the false stories would have spread with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook.\n\nThe likely causes of the Challenger explosion\u2014faulty O-rings on the booster rockets\u2014were being publicly discussed within hours, as was also the case in the second space shuttle disaster, the explosion of the Columbia on re-entry in 2003 because of damaged heat-shield tiles. Despite criticism that NASA was less than forthcoming in the immediate aftermath of Challenger, there was no coverup, suppression of information or media censorship. The contrast with how the Soviet Union for many years never announced their space launches until after they had taken place (let alone their silence about Chernobyl a few months after Challenger), or how China has repeatedly covered up disease outbreaks over the last two decades, is a telling lesson in the difference between open and closed societies.\n\n\n\n\u201cFinding the right way to manage risk is a never-ending argument.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe aftermath of Challenger, which saw a special commission set up to investigate the causes of the disaster through public hearings, Thirty-five years after the tragedy, we still struggle to assess complicated risks, while recalling Reagan\u2019s admonition that the future \u2018belongs to the brave\u2019 ",
        "author": "Steven F. Hayward"
    },
    {
        "title": "Still Stepping Into the Twilight Zone (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1406",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/still-stepping-into-the-twilight-zone-11556184600?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=61",
        "text": "What is it about \u201cThe Twilight Zone\u201d that still compels us to enter? The answer is rooted in the life of its creator, Rod Serling. Born in 1924 to a middle-class Jewish family in Binghamton, N.Y., Serling fought in the Pacific during World War II and was awarded a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and the Philippine Liberation Medal for his service. But the senseless death he\u2019d witnessed\u2014including a colleague crushed to death by an armament shipment accidentally dropped on his head\u2014left him in what he called a state of shell shock. \u201cI was bitter about everything and at loose ends when I got out of the service,\u201d he told his daughter years later. \u201cI think I turned to writing to get it off my chest.\u201d Early on in his career, he won a string of Emmys for literate, highbrow teleplays, but he soon locked horns with censors who found his moralizing tenor too strident for national TV.\nStirred by the 1955 murder of Emmett Till\u2014a black 14-year-old boy brutally lynched after being accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store in Mississippi\u2014Serling wrote a script about a violent man who singles out and murders an elderly Jew and is then acquitted by his bigoted neighbors, just as Till\u2019s murderers had been. The show\u2019s sponsor,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n U.S. Steel,\n\n\n would have none of it, insisting that the killer be identified not as an anti-Semitic maniac but rather as \u201cjust a good, decent American boy momentarily gone wrong.\u201d Frustrated by the corporation\u2019s determination to ignore racism\u2019s deep roots, Serling grumbled that trying to tell meaningful stories in an industry governed by big money was like \u201cstriking out at social evil with a feather duster.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJordan Peele is the host of the 2019 reboot of the \u2018The Twilight Zone.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CBS\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHe was looking for a way to cut through the noise, and it occurred to him that he might succeed if he disguised his jeremiads as strange and thrilling tales of science fiction. Just how effective this conceit could be was evident from the very first episode of \u201cThe Twilight Zone\u201d series, which aired on CBS on October 2, 1959. Instead of lulling viewers with froth, or dragging them back to the same exhausting conflicts they had seen on the evening news, Serling regaled them with tales of flying saucers and Martians and otherworldly magic. Only once you stopped to think about them did the stories reveal themselves as provocations, dealing with weighty issues like prejudice and inequality and the fragility of modern life. \n\n\nConsider \u201cThe Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,\u201d which aired on March 4, 1960. One of the show\u2019s most celebrated episodes, it opens with Serling\u2019s signature narration. \u201cA tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an ice cream vendor,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment\u2014before the monsters came.\u201d \nThe monsters, of course, are us. Frightened by a sudden flash of light and a temporary loss of power, Maple Street\u2019s residents grow convinced that they\u2019re being invaded by shape-shifting aliens. Before too long, they turn on each other and set their tree-lined little world on fire in a riot fueled by paranoia and violence. Not that the aliens weren\u2019t real: In one final twist, the camera pans to a nearby hill, where the invading extraterrestrials are watching, delighted by how little effort it took to get the people of Earth to destroy themselves.\n\u201cThe tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout,\u201d Serling muses as the episode draws to its end. \u201cThere are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices\u2014to be found only in the minds of men.\u201d \nIt was a blunt message, but it resonated in large part because it reflected a reality its viewers understood well. Rapid social and technological change was upending the lives of ordinary Americans, making them nervous about the future and inclined to cling to old biases. From the atomic bomb and the space race to the transistor radio and the pacemaker, new inventions were arriving too quickly for anyone to grasp their true potential\u2014or threat. \u201cThe Twilight Zone\u201d didn\u2019t have a large audience\u2014the most popular show of the early 1960s, \u201cGunsmoke,\u201d had an average Nielsen rating of 40, while Serling\u2019s creation hovered at 18\u2014but those who watched it, including many critics and intellectuals, loved the show fiercely for the profundity of its meditations on technology and social upheaval.\nBy focusing so many of his episodes on slightly exaggerated versions of the same contraptions that were delighting and terrifying Americans\u2014a bomb that instantly destroyed all life on earth or a stopwatch that could freeze time\u2014Serling cajoled his viewers to embrace their existential insecurities and ask the most feverish questions that haunted their imaginations. If, less than 60 years after the Wright Brothers conducted their first successful flight, the U.S. was already gearing up to send a man to outer space, could little green aliens with malevolent intentions really be far behind? And what, really, kept the same devastation visited on Hiroshima from descending on Hartford? \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the episode \u2018Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,\u2019 William Shatner (left) observes a gremlin on the wing of an airplane.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nRod Serling\u2019s dark vision of change was so bold and inventive that we still turn to it whenever some newfangled gadget is foisted upon us today. When Jordan Peele wanted to comment on our fundamental fear of technology in this year\u2019s \u201cTwilight Zone\u201d remake, all he had to do was reimagine another of the original show\u2019s most famous episodes, \u201cNightmare at 20,000 Feet.\u201d In Peele\u2019s retelling, the protagonist isn\u2019t an anxious man spotting a gremlin gnawing on the wiring of his airplane\u2019s engine, as in the first version, but an anxious man who listens to a podcast informing him that the flight he\u2019s on is about to crash. The twist ending is different, but the underlying fears are the same, and the outcome is just as bleak as the one dreamed up decades ago by Serling and his writers. \nTechnology might have grown sleeker, more intrusive and more disruptive, but we still haven\u2019t found a better way to wrestle with the demons of progress than to return to the stories Serling told 60 years ago\u2014stories that explore, as the show\u2019s opening narration ominously put it, \u201cthe middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition\u2026between the pit of man\u2019s fears and the summit of his knowledge.\u201d Maybe we never will. But then again, a story about a society that keeps telling itself the same morality tales over and over again yet fails to learn their lessons would make for a very fine episode of \u201cThe Twilight Zone.\u201d \n\u2014Mr. Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine and a co-host of its podcast, Unorthodox.\n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 Sixty years after its debut, Rod Serling\u2019s classic TV series continues to speak to our fears about social change and technology. ",
        "author": "Liel Leibovitz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Future of Programmable Materials (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1407",
        "date": "2017-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-future-of-programmable-materials-1509728150?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=84",
        "text": "The question for the future is: What if we could make all of our stuff as flexible and responsive as the computer? Or, at least, what would it take to create many more everyday objects capable of adapting to our shifting tasks, needs and desires? Why can\u2019t the materials in a building automatically respond to changes in the weather? Why can\u2019t we reconfigure our living room by ordering four chairs to reshape themselves into a table? Why can\u2019t we program robots to help us out in dangerous, unpredictable situations? In our age of advanced synthetic materials and ever more powerful computers, these things may not be as far off as they sound. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA tiny origami bot from MIT, made from pig intestine, can unfold itself.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Melanie Gonick/MIT\n \n\n\n\nVarious teams of researchers are working, for instance, on paper-like robots that can fold themselves origami-style. Part of what makes traditional origami enjoyable is that you can make complex structures from a small set of rules. But why do all the folding ourselves? \n\n\n\n\nA simple origami robot consists of a piece of flat material that permits a certain set of folds. Along those folds are mechanized hinges. The material also contains circuitry allowing it to talk to a computer, so you can program the robot to fold in particular sequences to create different shapes.\n\n\nDaniela Rus, director of the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, envisions origami bots that can shape themselves into tools to perform medical procedures or deliver drugs inside the body. In a demonstration by her team in May 2016, a tiny origami bot made from pig intestine was able to unfold itself from a swallowed capsule in a simulated stomach and move across the stomach wall with the help of an external magnet.\n\n\nSimilar robots could be useful in larger forms. If the material and folds can hold in place firmly enough, you could have a flat sheet that converts itself into a chair, a table, a vase or anything else. The technology also could be a step toward a \u201cuniversal tool,\u201d capable of turning into anything you might find in a tool kit. That would be a big plus in environments where packing efficiency is important, such as outer space or combat zones. \nA different kind of programming is involved in the elegant, membrane-like structure of the HygroScope, created in 2012 by the architect Achim Menges and doctoral student Steffen Reichert, both at the University of Stuttgart. The HygroScope is made of thin pieces of wood and synthetic composites carefully engineered to bend in response to humidity\u2014without motors or computers. Now on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it is more than just a beautiful object. It is a forerunner for what may one day be a more environmentally friendly and energy-efficient way to regulate the climate within a building. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoombots are softball-sized blocks that can rotate and dock with each other.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Biorobotics Laboratory/EPFL\n \n\n\n\nAs for the living space in the house of the future, wouldn\u2019t it be convenient if your furniture could reconfigure itself according to your changing needs? A robotics group at \u00c9cole Polytechnique F\u00e9d\u00e9rale de Lausanne in Switzerland has created Roombots, which are basically rounded, softball-sized blocks that can rotate and dock with each other. Because they can rotate, they can move, either by wiggling along or by connecting together to make simple wheels. Because they can dock, they can be formed into large complex assemblies, such as chairs and desks.\n\n\nRelated reading To Keep Up With AI, We\u2019ll Need High-Tech Brains How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds \n\n\nOnce perfected, such robots would mean that the objects in your house could come to you, a particularly valuable feature for people with limited mobility. It also would make furniture more adaptable and comfortable. You could have a table that scales its height and breadth to suit a particular task, for example, or a light that moves to the optimum location.\nSuch machines could be especially useful in dealing with dangerous environments. A swarm of small robots that can assemble and disassemble on command might be deployed to do reconnaissance in a combat zone or to survey damage after a natural disaster. And if one component gets damaged or destroyed in the process, the rest would be able to reassemble and carry on.\nIn 2014, a computer science group at Harvard demonstrated another project, Kilobots, which is a swarm of 1,024 tiny, simple robots. They look like watch batteries with three stiff little legs, and they move around by wobbling. Using a simple algorithm, they can wobble into any two-dimensional shape, such as a star or (a very impractical) wrench.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKilobots move around by wobbling.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Rubenstein/Harvard University\n \n\n\n\nThe swarm currently takes about 6 hours to reshape, so there\u2019s no need to worry that it will suddenly take the form of a killer robot like the T-1000 from \u201cThe Terminator\u201d movie. But there is great potential for a relatively inexpensive, controllable swarm of robot ants capable of working together. Like termites, they might be able to build structures by carefully moving the right parts into place. Winged versions might be able to act as robotic crop-pollinators.\nEven in its simplest forms, there are many possible uses for programmable matter that could improve our lives. Imagine, for example, going to IKEA to shop for the next generation of origami robots: You buy a flat board, take it home, and instead of reaching for that little Allen wrench, just tell it to assemble itself into a desk or a dresser. We estimate that for this innovation alone, humanity would save just over 800 billion hours of labor a year.\n\u2014This essay is adapted from the Weinersmiths\u2019 new book, \u201cSoonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That\u2019ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything,\u201d published by Penguin Press.\n\n\nMore Essays from Review\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nThe Spontaneous Origins of Language\nFebruary 26, 2022 A table that comes to you, a sheet that turns into a chair: A new generation of products and tools promises to move and shift to meet our needs. ",
        "author": "Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Imperial Overreach of China\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1408",
        "date": "2020-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-imperial-overreach-of-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-11601558851?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=40",
        "text": "The Belt and Road \u201cis neither a Marshall Plan nor a geostrategic concept,\u201d China\u2019s top diplomat,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wang Yi,\n\n\n\n said in 2018. In fact, it is even more ambitious. The Marshall Plan harnessed the equivalent of $130 billion to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. Since the Belt and Road\u2019s announcement in 2013, China has signed $460 billion in construction contracts across more than 140 countries, according to the American Enterprise Institute. The initiative now reaches into Africa, Latin America, cyberspace and even outer space. And as China is learning in place after place, it is much harder to develop economies than to rebuild them.\nIn the first place, Chinese officials will likely come to regret making Pakistan, in their words, the \u201cflagship\u201d of the Belt and Road Initiative, with some 40 projects, valued at an estimated $25 billion, under way there. Beijing believes that it can succeed in transforming the country after Washington has struggled for decades there. But it shouldn\u2019t count on it.\nIn the 1950s, Western economists arrived in Pakistan and tried to help the newly independent country fashion a long-term development plan. But as poorly coordinated aid poured in, Pakistani officials resisted setting priorities and making difficult reforms. \u201cWhen I went to Pakistan, I had the $60 million to spend and no plan, no program, nothing,\u201d recalled\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Bell,\n\n\n\n who oversaw U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan in the mid-1950s. Asked for a list of priorities, the head of Pakistan\u2019s Economic Planning Ministry replied, \u201cNo, we need everything, we need everything.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (left) meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing, Oct. 9, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Liu Weibing/Xinhua/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nIntended to last 18 months, the foreign advisory mission launched more than a half-century ago essentially never ended. Eventually, the World Bank stepped in as well, and over the years, the U.S. has provided Pakistan with more than $80 billion in aid. Last year, the International Monetary Fund bailed out Pakistan for the 22nd time. If neighboring Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, Pakistan is the black hole of foreign assistance.\n\n\nHubris partly explains why Chinese officials have bet big on Pakistan and other risky markets. China\u2019s own rise, after all, has been fueled by dramatic infrastructure spending. Its top leaders have all ascended in a system that rewards GDP growth, which they have learned to boost through building infrastructure. After weathering the 2008 financial crisis, during which Western institutions struggled so visibly, Chinese leaders concluded that their playbook was superior and would work abroad.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn its zeal to build, China has backed projects that the U.S. wisely avoided long ago.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn its zeal to build, China has backed projects that the U.S. wisely avoided long ago. In 1973, Pakistan asked the U.S. to build a port in Baluchistan, its largest and least-populated region, and offered to provide the U.S. Navy with access to it. \u201cThis would probably cost some hundreds of millions of dollars, and the political impact of the project will depend in part on its not being a white elephant,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Henry Kissinger\n\n\n\n cautioned in a memo that year to President Nixon.\nDecades later, China granted Pakistan\u2019s wish and built the port, but very little has arrived at its docks, which remain largely disconnected from urban areas inland. Meanwhile, China\u2019s activities have angered India, which rejects the Belt and Road\u2019s path through territory in the north that Pakistan and India both claim.\nChina faces even more checks on its power abroad than its imperial predecessors. In June, a Kenyan court ruled that China\u2019s contract for a $3 billion railway between Nairobi and Mombasa was illegal because it violated public procurement practices. When Britain built the first railway between those cities more than a century ago, it didn\u2019t have to contend with international standards, local courts, investigative reporters or cellphone cameras.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe Belt and Road Initiative suffers from a gross lack of transparency and accountability.\u201d\n\n\n\nBelt and Road also suffers from a gross lack of transparency and accountability. China has no firm criteria for what qualifies as a project and keeps lending details secret. This allows Beijing to make friends in high places abroad, but it also raises the likelihood that commercially dubious projects will get the green light. And once Belt and Road projects are approved, China often struggles to monitor them.\nOn the ground, China\u2019s massive state-owned enterprises, which include seven of the world\u2019s 10 largest construction companies, run the show. These bloated giants often have more personnel, technical expertise and local relationships than the government officials charged with supervising them. Desperate to find new work, these firms want to b Xi Jinping\u2019s signature foreign project is poorly defined, badly mismanaged and visibly failing. ",
        "author": "Jonathan E. Hillman"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Does Outer Space Smell Like? (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1409",
        "date": "2020-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-does-outer-space-smell-like-11603512060?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=34",
        "text": "A similar process cooked up the entire universe as we know it. The original recipe from the Chef of the cosmos goes something like this. Mix a dozen kinds of elementary particles together with four fundamental forces, and set aside. After a few hundred million years, the particles have combined to form atoms, a hundred different kinds. After another long stretch, many of those atoms have combined to form molecules\u2014and the mix begins to smell, in ways that our earthbound noses could theoretically detect.\n\n\n\n\u201cIndividual grains of interstellar dust are microscopically tiny, but their influence on the development of the cosmos is huge. \u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMolecules in outer space exist because their atoms happened to bump into each other and stick. The most abundant atoms in space include hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, whose particular electron-sharing tendencies naturally lead to the formation of small molecules like oxygen gas, water and carbon monoxide and dioxide. Carbon atoms also readily bond with each other to form long chainlike molecules, as well as six-cornered ring molecules. The chains and rings\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n nestle\n\n\n together with others of their kind and can aggregate to form ever larger masses: cosmic soot.\nThe dark swirls in the molecular clouds are a mixture of carbon soot and similar aggregates of primordial minerals. These various particles make up what\u2019s called interstellar dust. The individual grains of interstellar dust are microscopically tiny, but their influence on the development of the cosmos is huge. They provide a solid surface to which free-floating atoms and small molecules can stick, encouraging chemical activity, new reactions, larger molecules. On them the material world became increasingly diverse, complex, capable of further development. And to the nose of the cosmic Chef, it became aromatic\u2014billions of years before our own sun began to shine.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Eagle Nebula, 5,700 light years from Earth, emits clouds of dust that facilitate chemical reactions in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn 2020, the roster of known interstellar molecules numbers more than 200. Let\u2019s start with the simplest cosmic molecules for which we have smell receptors, those made of just three or four atoms. (Two-atom sodium chloride is salty and hydrogen chloride is sour, but no two-atom molecules are aromatic.) We don\u2019t have receptors for water, carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide, though all are important in the air we breathe.\n\n\nBut two other simple volatiles have very familiar smells. Hydrogen sulfide combines the elements hydrogen and sulfur in a molecule whose smell we can detect in very small traces, possibly because higher concentrations can be irritating and even fatal. We typically identify the smell as \u201ceggy\u201d because it\u2019s the characteristic note of freshly cooked eggs\u2014or when it\u2019s stinkily strong, \u201crotten-eggy,\u201d because it escapes from decomposing organic matter of all kinds. But Earth\u2019s volcanoes and hot springs have been emitting this molecule since long before the earliest organisms or eggs. Better to call its primeval smell \u201csulfurous\u201d or \u201csulfidic.\u201d Other sulfur volatiles give garlic, onions and cabbage their strong identities, but they also contribute to the aromatic appeal of roasted meats and coffee, and add \u201cexotic\u201d notes in some fruits and wines.\n\n\nMore in Ideas\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmmonia, with an atom of nitrogen at its center, was one of the first molecules detected in interstellar space. It\u2019s also found in the atmospheres of the gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune\u2014and in household cleaning products, overripe cheese and salami, underripe animal manure and urine. Its smell is that of unscented household cleaner, which is about 30% ammonia. Smelling salts are also made from ammonia, because it\u2019s irritating and triggers strong physical reflexes; prolonged exposure can be fatal.\nThe majority of primordial molecules larger than four atoms contain carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the cosmos after hydrogen, helium and oxygen. Mothball- and lighter-fluid-like naphthalene is a double-ring ten-carbon molecule, used to kill moths and as a fuel in cigarette lighters and camp stoves. Wine lovers know a modified version of naphthalene as the prized \u201ckerosene\u201d note of well-aged Rieslings.\n\n\n\n\u201cBring oxygen into the structures of carbon chains and the smell register begins to shift.\u201d\n\n\n\nAll of these primordial volatiles have something in common: an absence of oxygen, the universe\u2019s third most abundant element. Bring oxygen into the structures of carbon chains and the smell register begins to shift. Chemical, irritating formaldehyde, with one carbon atom, is a preservative used in biology labs, embalming and manufacturing; it\u2019s a known carcinogen. Fresh, green-apple-like acetaldehyde, with two carbon atoms, is found in many fermented foods, including yogurt and aged wines. Solventy acetone is a three-carbon chain and is commonly used in nail polish remover. It\u2019s also detectable on our own breath when we haven\u2019t eaten for a few hours; our body produces it when it\u2019s low on carbohydrate fuel and has to start burning fat for energy.\nThere are also interstellar alcohols, two in number. Vodka- and solvent-like methanol and ethanol are the one- and two-carbon alcohols, both of them intoxicating. Methanol is known as methyl or wood alcohol and is extremely toxic. Ethanol and ethyl alcohol are the chemical names for what we commonly call alcohol; after water, it\u2019s the primary component of all wines, beers and distilled spirits. \nThe interstellar fatty acids, also two to date, are sour to the taste like other acids. Sharp, slightly vinegary formic acid is the one-carbon volatile acid, a chemical weapon found in ants and other insects but turned against them by the anteater, which relies on it to help digest them. Acetic acid is the two-carbon volatile acid, and very familiar: It\u2019s the defining molecule in vinegar, produced from molecules of ethanol by bacteria that can grow in beers and wines.\nThe smells of Earth will always be our reference points; all this imaginary sniffing around the cosmos is very much perception at second hand. Yet the molecules in outer space aren\u2019t foreign to us at all. True, they\u2019re not an especially appealing bunch. Many are austere and harsh, qualities that seem a fitting reflection of their original birthplace. If we\u2019d been assisting the Chef of the cosmos from the Big Bang on, so that the smells of Earth were among the last we experienced rather than the first, then cooked eggs, rotting greens, vinegar and alcohol would remind us of dust clouds, atoms first meeting atoms long enough to start a relationship, their simple newborn offspring pointing the way toward the great molecular and odorous diversity of our world. \n\u2014Mr. McGee is a writer on the science of food and cooking. This essay is adapted from his new book \u201cNose Dive: A Field Guide to the World\u2019s Smells,\u201d published this week by Penguin Press. The molecules that give eggs, vinegar and nail polish remover their distinctive odor are also found in clouds of interstellar dust. ",
        "author": "Harold McGee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson: Science Needs Better Marketing (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1410",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/neil-degrasse-tyson-on-the-pandemic-year-science-needs-better-marketing-11616106660?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=26",
        "text": "If the enterprise of science were some newfangled, untested way of knowing, one might empathize with these sentiments. But the people who battle against science are the same ones who, for instance, wield and embrace their pocket-sized smartphones, which merge state-of-the-art engineering, mathematics, information technology and space physics. It\u2019s an educator\u2019s conundrum indeed.\n\n\n\n\nSo perhaps what I really learned during the pandemic year is that science needs better marketing\u2014refined and persistent\u2014so that no one will ever again take its discoveries for granted.\n\n\nImagine the ad campaigns: We fly through the air at 500 mph, seated in a cushioned chair, inside a 100-ton metal tube, 30,000 feet above the ground\u2014because of science. We communicate with practically anyone we\u2019ve ever met, in an instant, no matter where they are in the world\u2014because of science. We obtain immediate access to all the compiled knowledge of the world, at our fingertips\u2014because of science. Neither you nor your mother died in childbirth\u2014because of science. Most people used to die at 65 or 45 or younger, but we don\u2019t anymore\u2014because of science. And we are able to glean accurate insights about Earth\u2019s past, present and future, especially its climate, our ecosystem and the forces we exert upon them\u2014because of science.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe bastions of anti-maskers, thinking they cannot spread the virus to others, look as silly as a swimming pool with a designated \u2018Peeing Section.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nIn that future, Covid-19 would never have become a pandemic. Everyone would have understood the risks of transmission. And the bastions of anti-maskers, thinking they cannot spread the virus to others, would look as silly as a swimming pool with a designated \u201cPeeing Section.\u201d\nUntil then, let\u2019s not forget the efforts of lab scientists. Nobody writes stories about not dying by not contracting Covid-19. So it\u2019s time to praise the researchers who developed vaccines in record time. If heroes save lives, then they are superheroes who have saved the lives of millions\u2014because of science.\n\u2014Dr. Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York\u2019s American Museum of Natural History. His book \u201cCosmic Queries\u201d was published this month by National Geographic.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat can scientists and educators do to improve the public\u2019s understanding of science? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\n\nLessons of the Pandemic YearLeaders in business, politics, science and the arts reflect on what the pandemic has taught them\u2014about themselves, society and the path ahead.View the Full SeriesTom HanksNever Play Solitaire AgainNaomi OsakaFinding Success Off the CourtTim CookThe Urgency of Racial JusticeJennifer DoudnaThe Power of Mission-Driven ScienceRon DeSantisDon\u2019t Trust the ElitesNeil deGrasse TysonScience Needs Better MarketingSandra BoyntonBirthday Cakes Are EssentialCondoleezza RiceThe Inequalities of American Work Many people who love their high-tech smartphones refused to trust scientists when it came to Covid-19. \u201cScience needs better marketing\u2014refined and persistent\u2014so that no one will ever again take its discoveries for granted,\u201d says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. ",
        "author": "Neil deGrasse Tyson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil deGrasse Tyson: Science Needs Better Marketing (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1411",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/neil-degrasse-tyson-on-the-pandemic-year-science-needs-better-marketing-11616106660?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=33",
        "text": "If the enterprise of science were some newfangled, untested way of knowing, one might empathize with these sentiments. But the people who battle against science are the same ones who, for instance, wield and embrace their pocket-sized smartphones, which merge state-of-the-art engineering, mathematics, information technology and space physics. It\u2019s an educator\u2019s conundrum indeed.\nSo perhaps what I really learned during the pandemic year is that science needs better marketing\u2014refined and persistent\u2014so that no one will ever again take its discoveries for granted.\n\n\nImagine the ad campaigns: We fly through the air at 500 mph, seated in a cushioned chair, inside a 100-ton metal tube, 30,000 feet above the ground\u2014because of science. We communicate with practically anyone we\u2019ve ever met, in an instant, no matter where they are in the world\u2014because of science. We obtain immediate access to all the compiled knowledge of the world, at our fingertips\u2014because of science. Neither you nor your mother died in childbirth\u2014because of science. Most people used to die at 65 or 45 or younger, but we don\u2019t anymore\u2014because of science. And we are able to glean accurate insights about Earth\u2019s past, present and future, especially its climate, our ecosystem and the forces we exert upon them\u2014because of science.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe bastions of anti-maskers, thinking they cannot spread the virus to others, look as silly as a swimming pool with a designated \u2018Peeing Section.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nIn that future, Covid-19 would never have become a pandemic. Everyone would have understood the risks of transmission. And the bastions of anti-maskers, thinking they cannot spread the virus to others, would look as silly as a swimming pool with a designated \u201cPeeing Section.\u201d\nUntil then, let\u2019s not forget the efforts of lab scientists. Nobody writes stories about not dying by not contracting Covid-19. So it\u2019s time to praise the researchers who developed vaccines in record time. If heroes save lives, then they are superheroes who have saved the lives of millions\u2014because of science.\n\u2014Dr. Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York\u2019s American Museum of Natural History. His book \u201cCosmic Queries\u201d was published this month by National Geographic.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat can scientists and educators do to improve the public\u2019s understanding of science? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\n\nLessons of the Pandemic YearLeaders in business, politics, science and the arts reflect on what the pandemic has taught them\u2014about themselves, society and the path ahead.View the Full SeriesTom HanksNever Play Solitaire AgainNaomi OsakaFinding Success Off the CourtTim CookThe Urgency of Racial JusticeJennifer DoudnaThe Power of Mission-Driven ScienceRon DeSantisDon\u2019t Trust the ElitesNeil deGrasse TysonScience Needs Better MarketingSandra BoyntonBirthday Cakes Are EssentialCondoleezza RiceThe Inequalities of American Work Many people who love their high-tech smartphones refused to trust scientists when it came to Covid-19. \u201cScience needs better marketing\u2014refined and persistent\u2014so that no one will ever again take its discoveries for granted,\u201d says astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. ",
        "author": "Neil deGrasse Tyson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Experiment That Made Einstein Famous (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1412",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-experiment-that-made-einstein-famous-11550158131?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=65",
        "text": "The special theory of relativity, published by Einstein in 1905, introduced a new understanding of space and time, including the equation that linked energy, mass and the speed of light: E = mc\u00b2. It was followed 10 years later by his general theory, in which Einstein extended the concept to include accelerated motion and gravity, based on a highly sophisticated mathematical conception of \u201cspace-time.\u201d\nBut for all of its later fame, the theory of relativity made no impact on the general public when first published in 1905. Even some distinguished scientists rejected it. In 1910, the great physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ernest Rutherford\n\n\n\n joked that Anglo-Saxons like himself had \u201ctoo much sense\u201d to understand such an abstruse theory. To overcome such skepticism, Einstein had to find a way for his ideas to be experimentally confirmed.\n\n\n\n\nHis solution had to do with the way that light travels through the cosmos. According to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Isaac Newton\u2019s\n\n\n\n theory of gravity, which had been generally accepted by physicists since the 17th century, light rays are attracted by gravitational forces because light is made of tiny particles that Newton called \u201ccorpuscles.\u201d On their journey from a distant star to our eyes on Earth, the trajectory of these particles would be very slightly curved or \u201cdeflected\u201d by the gravity of the sun.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlbert Einstein ca. 1905, the year he published the special theory of relativity.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Topical Press Agency/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nEinstein agreed with Newton\u2019s idea, but in 1915-16 he used his general theory of relativity to recalculate the deflection of light and found that it would actually be twice the amount predicted by Newton. If the magnitude of the actual deflection could be measured, it would show whose theory of gravity was correct, Newton\u2019s or Einstein\u2019s. \u201cThe examination of the correctness or otherwise of this deduction is a problem of the greatest importance, the early solution of which is to be expected of astronomers,\u201d wrote Einstein.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe astronomical expeditions faced formidable technical problems, from monkeys interfering with the telescopes to high temperatures and cloudy skies.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe first opportunity to test Einstein\u2019s predictions would come on May 29, 1919, when a total solar eclipse would allow telescopes to observe starlight as it passed the rim of the darkened solar disc. Exceptional care would be required, given that Einstein\u2019s calculated deflection was only 1.7 seconds of arc\u2014that is, a displacement of a mere sixtieth of a millimeter on a photographic plate.\n\n\nThe opportunity was seized by the British Astronomer Royal,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Dyson,\n\n\n\n and a leading Cambridge astronomer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur Eddington,\n\n\n\n who had become a convinced advocate of general relativity. In 1917, even as World War I was raging, Dyson persuaded the British government to budget \u00a31,000 for a team of four astronomers led by Eddington to observe the coming eclipse. Two would be stationed on Principe, an island off the coast of West Africa, and the other two in Sobral, a city in northeastern Brazil. \nBoth expeditions faced formidable technical problems, from monkeys interfering with the telescopes to high temperatures (which distorted the photographs) and cloudy skies. As Eddington, in Principe, recorded in his diary, \u201cThe first 10 photographs show practically no stars. The last six show a few images which I hope will give us what we need; but it is very disappointing.\u201d The measurements on one plate agreed with Einstein\u2019s predicted deflection, and another provided at least some further confirmation. Eddington sent Dyson a noncommittal telegram: \u201cThrough cloud. Hopeful.\u201d \nOnce back in England, Eddington developed four more Principe plates. He detected in them Einstein\u2019s value for the deflection of starlight, though within a rather large margin of error. Fortunately, the Sobral plates provided conclusive support for Einstein\u2019s theory.\nIn November 1919, Eddington presented his conclusions to a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society in London. The greatest names in British physics, astronomy and mathematics attended, though not Einstein himself, who remained in Berlin. J.J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron and president of the Royal Society, declared that \u201cthis is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton\u2019s day. If it is sustained that Einstein\u2019s reasoning holds good\u2026then it is the result of one of the highest achievements of human thought.\u201d\nAlmost immediately, the British proof of a German theory was seen\u2014in Britain, at least\u2014as a sign of hope for international reconciliation after World War I. But in defeated Germany, Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity was regarded with growing and often anti-Semitic suspicion, culminating in the publication of \u201cA Hundred Authors against Einstein\u201d in 1931. As Einstein wrote in 1921 to a German colleague, \u201cThe English have behaved much more nobly than our colleagues here.\u201d\nFew people, English or otherwise, have ever fully understood general relativity. Einstein himself was baffled that the theory had elicited such \u201cpassionate resonance\u201d and made him an international celebrity. But of the theory itself there is no doubt: In the century since 1919, general relativity has been confirmed again and again by increasingly accurate astronomical measurements. Today it accounts for both the amazing accuracy of the Global Positioning System and for our understanding of the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.\n\u2014Mr. Robinson is the author of \u201cEinstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity\u201d (2015). His new book on Einstein will published later this year by Yale University Press.\n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nWhat Putin\u2019s Nuclear Threats Mean for the U.S.\nMarch 3, 2022 One hundred years ago, an extraordinary feat of astronomy proved that the theory of relativity was true ",
        "author": "Andrew Robinson"
    },
    {
        "title": "White wine on the Red Planet? Scientists in Georgia are hunting for a perfect Martian grape. (WP: Europe) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1413",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/white-wine-on-the-red-planet-scientists-in-georgia-are-hunting-for-a-perfect-martian-grape/2019/01/06/c28d3570-fe21-11e8-a17e-162b712e8fc2_story.html",
        "text": "TBILISI, Georgia \u2014 Georgia promotes itself as the world\u2019s birthplace of wine. So it seems only natural that the country is trying to figure out what varietal might be sipped one day on Mars.That is the thinking behind the IX Millennium project, which is seeking to develop grapevines fit for the possible Red Planet agriculture pods. The team also wants to put a Georgian stamp on one of the more unusual research fronts related to a dreamed-of Mars colony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut it\u2019s definitely not without merits.The research may help answer questions about radiation, dust and other challenges for life-sustaining agriculture on Mars. And after all, who wouldn\u2019t want a glass of Martian wine to welcome a new year (687 Earth days long) on a new planet?Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf we\u2019re going to live on Mars one day, Georgia needs to contribute. Our ancestors brought wine to Earth, so we can do the same to Mars,\u201d said Nikoloz Doborjginidze, founder of Georgia\u2019s Space Research Agency and an adviser to the Ministry of Education and Science, which is part of the wine project.AdvertisementA consortium of entrepreneurs and academics also are involved in IX Millennium, which refers to the\u00a0tradition of viticulture in Georgia going back more than 8,000 years in this land between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea.\u00a0Endless debates are engaged on wine\u2019s origins, but Georgia makes as credible a claim as any.The quest for a Martian-friendly grape (which now looks as if it could be a white) began in 2016 when entrepreneur Elon Musk boasted that his company\u00a0SpaceX could launch its first manned mission to Mars in 2024, a decade sooner than NASA\u2019s most optimistic timetable.Story continues below advertisementThat inspired the Georgian team to begin looking at grapes for space. But others, too, are trying to figure out what might grow in protected gardens on Mars.Watch: The moment the InSight explorer landed on MarsScientists in Peru have been successfully growing potatoes in a mock Martian environment, part of a slew of experiments run in conjunction with NASA on extraterrestrial agriculture. The U.S. space agency already has salad crops aboard the International Space Station and will soon branch out into tomatoes and spicy peppers.AdvertisementSo far, food in space has been developed mostly with nutrition and calories in mind, said Ralph Fritsche, NASA\u2019s food production project manager. This means grapes have not made the NASA menu. But that does not mean NASA is a buzzkill.Story continues below advertisement\u201cRight now, we\u2019re worried about keeping the crews healthy but also happy. They have to be able to survive, so maybe there\u2019s a pathway for [alcohol] in the future,\u201d Fritsche said.\u00a0The company that makes Budweiser is already on the case. In 2017, it sent an experimental batch of barley seeds into space, part of its research into microgravity beer for places such as Mars.In Georgia, the team is about to embark on experiments on grape varieties and Mars-like soil.Early this year, the group hopes to establish the country\u2019s first vertical-farming lab inside a hotel in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. A company called Space Farms plans floor-to-ceiling pods with grapes next to strawberries and arugula \u2014 plants with heaps of vitamins and whose seeds could eventually be taken on long space journeys.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVertical farming \u2014 using limited space, minimal human support and hydroponic lights \u2014 could help determine which grapes will thrive in the biodome colonies envisioned for Mars.Next, Tbilisi\u2019s Business Technology University, or BTU, plans to test various soils before simulating a Martian environment in a laboratory, complete with subzero temperatures, high carbon monoxide levels and air pressure that is equivalent to 20,000 feet altitude on Earth.Knowing what Martian happy hour will taste like will take some time, though. The project doesn\u2019t expect to know which Georgian grapevines will be most suitable for Mars until at least 2022.\u00a0Yet clues are already emerging.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementContrary to common understanding \u2014 at least among those in former Soviet republics \u2014 red wine does not seem the best bet. Georgian scientists have a hunch that white grapes will fare better on Mars.\u00a0Listen to the sound of Mars\u201cWhites tend to be more resistant to viruses,\u201d said\u00a0Levan Ujmajuridze, director of the country\u2019s vineyard laboratory, holding up a glass of white Georgian wine to admire the color against the sun\u2019s low rays. \u201cSo I\u2019d imagine they\u2019ll do well against radiation, too. Their skin could reflect it.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementUjmajuridze is in the gardens of Saguramo, just north of Tbilisi, where the government conducts experiments in its vast outdoor grape library, where nearly all of Georgia\u2019s 500 varieties have been planted on trellises in organized rows.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementA smile spreads across his face when he imagines drinking Georgian wine on Mars. \u201cSoon we\u2019ll begin testing our grapes for radiation,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019d never had the need before.\u201d\u00a0One candidate for Mars is\u00a0rkatsiteli, a robust and common wine high in acidity with hints of pineapple and fennel and a fiery kick.Students at BTU will soon subject the grapes, which are characterized by a reddish splotch near the stem, to high levels of radiation. They believe rkatsiteli\u2019s sturdy skin should survive the\u00a0dust storms on Mars, whose particles could make their way into the man-made laboratories.\u00a0AdvertisementWhite grapes\u2019 potential came as a surprise to the Georgian consortium, who have not forgotten the advice given by Soviet officials\u00a0in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster: Drink red wine or vodka.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementAmerican researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine later concluded the Soviets could have been onto something. They found that red wine contains resveratrol, a natural antioxidant that can protect cells from radiation damage.When Georgia was part of the Soviet Union, Georgian vineyards supplied much of the vast nation. But with Communist-driven cultivation restrictions, the number of grape varieties shrank dramatically to fewer than 20.\u00a0Now, the government is restoring its vast gene pool of grapes. Wines not made in more than a century are being revived by Ujmajuridze\u2019s team.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cSo grapes from our past could be part of our future,\u201d said Ana Lomtadze, project manager for IX Millennium. \u201cOur final goal is to colonize Mars, but our work could also be helpful for us back on Earth.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIn 2017,\u00a0a study showed shards of clay vessels had been found in central Georgia that contained wine residue from eight millennia ago.\u00a0\u201cThis story shows why we deserve to bring wine to Mars,\u201d said David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum, where the Neolithic pot takes center stage alongside a bronze toastmaster and silver belt depicting a wine-guzzling banquet.\u00a0Whatever happens, part of Georgia will always be in the cosmos.\u00a0In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts, carrying the famous \u201cgolden record\u201d containing sounds and messages from Earth. Among the 27 pieces of music were Mozart, Chuck Berry \u2014 and a Georgian choral folk song called \u201cChakrulo.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementAt the time, Moscow furiously objected, insisting NASA should include a Russian song. But the soaring sounds of the Georgian choir prevailed.\u201cThis allowed Georgia to start thinking in terms of firsts in space,\u201d said Ramaz Bluashvili, a TV space presenter and director, and son of one of the \u201cChakrulo\u201d singers.\u00a0\u201cScientists need inspiration, and with inspiration, you need wine. Once you take wine to Mars, everyone will follow.\u201d\u00a0Earliest evidence of wine found in giant, 8,000-year-old jarsNext stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate of NASA\u2019s new roverWant to honor George W. Bush? Send a crew to Mars.Today\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news Georgia\u2019s winemaking culture goes back 8,000 years. Now it wants to grow grapes on Mars. White wine on the Red Planet? Scientists in Georgia are hunting for a perfect Martian grape.",
        "author": "Amie Ferris-Rotman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts make harrowing escape, but Russian rocket failure roils NASA (WP: Europe) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1414",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/american-russian-alive-after-soyuz-rocket-headed-to-space-station-fails-on-launch/2018/10/11/b9f3ae88-cd36-11e8-920f-dd52e1ae4570_story.html",
        "text": "MOSCOW \u2014 A Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned two minutes after liftoff Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station, triggering an automatic abort command that forced the two-member crew \u2014 an American and a Russian \u2014 to make a harrowing parachute landing in their capsule, 200 miles from the launch site in the steppes of Kazakhstan. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightU.S. astronaut Tyler N. \u201cNick\u201d Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin had made it halfway to space before suddenly going in the other direction. They fell about 31 miles back to the ground, according to NASA. They were quickly located by rescue teams and flown back to the launch site for an emotional reunion with their families.The failure of the Soyuz MS-10 rocket effectively halts all American and Russian access to space pending an investigation into what went wrong. For seven years, since NASA retired the space shuttle, the United States has relied on Russian hardware to ferry Americans to and from the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThursday\u2019s dramatic developments ratcheted up pressure on Boeing and SpaceX, the two companies that were supposed to have commercial spacecraft ready for launch this year but have experienced delays and are not expected to be ready until the middle of next year at the earliest.Three crew members currently on the space station are in no danger, NASA said. They have adequate supplies for an extended mission beyond their planned Dec.\u00a013 return and can get home in a spare Soyuz spacecraft currently attached to the space station. But there are limits to how long the Soyuz module can remain in orbit before its fuel is no longer reliable.Another three-person crew is scheduled to launch in December for the station, but that mission is imperiled by Thursday\u2019s rocket failure. NASA officials said it\u2019s possible that at some point the astronauts in space will have to return to Earth with no crew to replace them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is not eager to abandon, even temporarily, the $100\u00a0billion orbital laboratory, which requires constant maintenance and has never before been operated solely by ground commands.Big decisions lie ahead, but on Thursday, U.S. and Russian officials expressed relief after the close brush with disaster. This was a terrifying day \u2014 but not a tragic one because the escape system worked.\u201cIt wasn\u2019t quite the day that we planned, but it is great to have Nick and Alexey at least back on the ground,\u201d said Kenny Todd, who directs space station operations for NASA. \u201cThis is a very difficult business that we\u2019re in. And it can absolutely humble you.\u201dBooster failureThe launch looked good until a red light illuminated inside the capsule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFailure of the booster,\u201d a translator called out at mission control near Moscow, according to a transcript on Russian state television.AdvertisementThe computers took over. The capsule automatically separated from the rocket. The crew felt a jolt and then quickly reported being weightless: They were in free fall back to Earth.The crew members then initiated a \u201cballistic\u201d trajectory that put Hague and Ovchinin under more than six times the force of gravity and put the capsule into a spin.\u201cWe are getting ready for the G loads,\u201d Ovchinin reported to mission control. \u201cG load is 6.7.\u201dThey were briefly out of contact during the 34-minute descent. NASA\u2019s deputy chief astronaut, G. Reid Wiseman, said his heart was pounding as he wondered where the capsule would come down. At that point only gravity was in control, and rescue teams in helicopters raced to where they thought the capsule would land.Story continues below advertisementParachutes deployed automatically. The gray capsule tumbled onto its side on a grassy flatland. A photograph showed one crew member kneeling, the other reclining against the parachute fabric, while three rescuers approached.AdvertisementHague and Ovchinin were examined by medical officials and deemed in good shape.\u201cGlad our friends are fine,\u201d tweeted Alexander Gerst from the European Space Agency, the station commander. \u201cSpaceflight is hard. And we keep trying for the benefit of humankind.\u201dRussia suggests sabotage on the International Space StationRussian officials said crewed space launches have been suspended pending an investigation into the malfunction. Russia\u2019s Interfax news agency also said all uncrewed launches could be halted for the rest of the year, citing space program sources.Story continues below advertisementThursday\u2019s launch failure came at a dicey moment in the U.S.-Russia space partnership. The two nations have been congenial 250 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface even when events on the ground, such as the Russian annexation of Crimea or the interference of Russia in the 2016 election, have stoked tensions.AdvertisementBut the United States and Russia have been at odds over the cause of a small hole discovered in August on the Soyuz module \u2014 Soyuz MS-09 \u2014 currently docked at the space station. Moscow says the hole, now repaired, was the result of deliberate drilling and has suggested sabotage, while the U.S. space agency said this week that investigators will determine the cause.\u00a0Companies in the Cosmos: A series from The Washington PostAgainst that backdrop, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine traveled to Kazakhstan to witness Thursday\u2019s launch and meet his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin of Roscosmos. The summit turned far more dramatic than either had imagined.Story continues below advertisementRogozin said he was forming a state commission to investigate what caused the failure. It was the first time the Soyuz had failed on a launch to the 20-year-old International Space Station. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov, who oversees space flight, promised to share all information from the investigation with the United States.Commercial space raceThe failure puts tremendous pressure on NASA and the two companies \u2014 SpaceX and Boeing \u2014 it is counting on to fly its astronauts to the space station. Both companies have faced repeated delays. NASA recently announced that neither would fly even an uncrewed test flight this year and that the first flights with astronauts on board wouldn\u2019t happen until the middle of 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe like having more than one operational system, and right now, by my count, we have zero,\u201d said Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator who was a strong advocate for commercial crew during the Obama administration.\u201cYou can look back at the decisions that were made \u2014 like retiring the shuttle, like Congress not providing the funding in the first years of commercial crew, which has delayed the availability of SpaceX and Boeing. In retrospect those don\u2019t look like wise decisions,\u201d said space policy expert John M. Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University.In June, the spacecraft Boeing plans to use to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station suffered a significant setback when officials discovered a propellant leak during a test.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX also has suffered setbacks but says it is ready to fly its first test mission to the station \u2014 without astronauts \u2014 in January. Still, Phil McAlister, who oversees the commercial crew program for NASA, recently warned that \u201claunch dates will still have some uncertainty, and we anticipate they may change as we get closer to launch.\u201dAdvertisementThe last time Moscow\u2019s space program had a crewed launch failure was during the Soviet era in 1983, when a Soyuz booster exploded. Cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov jettisoned and landed safely near the launchpad.Achenbach reported from Washington. Christian Davenport in Los Angeles and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.Space, nuclear, polar bears: Russia and the U.S. still agree on some thingsNASA talking to companies about taking over the International Space StationToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news A Russian Soyuz MS-10 rocket was carrying two crew when a booster malfunctioned. Russia halted all crewed space flights, probably extending the time in orbit for the current space station team. Astronauts make harrowing escape, but Russian rocket failure roils NASA",
        "author": "Anton Troianovski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts make harrowing escape, but Russian rocket failure roils NASA (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1415",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/american-russian-alive-after-soyuz-rocket-headed-to-space-station-fails-on-launch/2018/10/11/b9f3ae88-cd36-11e8-920f-dd52e1ae4570_story.html",
        "text": "MOSCOW \u2014 A Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned two minutes after liftoff Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station, triggering an automatic abort command that forced the two-member crew \u2014 an American and a Russian \u2014 to make a harrowing parachute landing in their capsule, 200 miles from the launch site in the steppes of Kazakhstan. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightU.S. astronaut Tyler N. \u201cNick\u201d Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin had made it halfway to space before suddenly going in the other direction. They fell about 31 miles back to the ground, according to NASA. They were quickly located by rescue teams and flown back to the launch site for an emotional reunion with their families.The failure of the Soyuz MS-10 rocket effectively halts all American and Russian access to space pending an investigation into what went wrong. For seven years, since NASA retired the space shuttle, the United States has relied on Russian hardware to ferry Americans to and from the space station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThursday\u2019s dramatic developments ratcheted up pressure on Boeing and SpaceX, the two companies that were supposed to have commercial spacecraft ready for launch this year but have experienced delays and are not expected to be ready until the middle of next year at the earliest.Three crew members currently on the space station are in no danger, NASA said. They have adequate supplies for an extended mission beyond their planned Dec.\u00a013 return and can get home in a spare Soyuz spacecraft currently attached to the space station. But there are limits to how long the Soyuz module can remain in orbit before its fuel is no longer reliable.Another three-person crew is scheduled to launch in December for the station, but that mission is imperiled by Thursday\u2019s rocket failure. NASA officials said it\u2019s possible that at some point the astronauts in space will have to return to Earth with no crew to replace them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is not eager to abandon, even temporarily, the $100\u00a0billion orbital laboratory, which requires constant maintenance and has never before been operated solely by ground commands.Big decisions lie ahead, but on Thursday, U.S. and Russian officials expressed relief after the close brush with disaster. This was a terrifying day \u2014 but not a tragic one because the escape system worked.\u201cIt wasn\u2019t quite the day that we planned, but it is great to have Nick and Alexey at least back on the ground,\u201d said Kenny Todd, who directs space station operations for NASA. \u201cThis is a very difficult business that we\u2019re in. And it can absolutely humble you.\u201dBooster failureThe launch looked good until a red light illuminated inside the capsule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFailure of the booster,\u201d a translator called out at mission control near Moscow, according to a transcript on Russian state television.AdvertisementThe computers took over. The capsule automatically separated from the rocket. The crew felt a jolt and then quickly reported being weightless: They were in free fall back to Earth.The crew members then initiated a \u201cballistic\u201d trajectory that put Hague and Ovchinin under more than six times the force of gravity and put the capsule into a spin.\u201cWe are getting ready for the G loads,\u201d Ovchinin reported to mission control. \u201cG load is 6.7.\u201dThey were briefly out of contact during the 34-minute descent. NASA\u2019s deputy chief astronaut, G. Reid Wiseman, said his heart was pounding as he wondered where the capsule would come down. At that point only gravity was in control, and rescue teams in helicopters raced to where they thought the capsule would land.Story continues below advertisementParachutes deployed automatically. The gray capsule tumbled onto its side on a grassy flatland. A photograph showed one crew member kneeling, the other reclining against the parachute fabric, while three rescuers approached.AdvertisementHague and Ovchinin were examined by medical officials and deemed in good shape.\u201cGlad our friends are fine,\u201d tweeted Alexander Gerst from the European Space Agency, the station commander. \u201cSpaceflight is hard. And we keep trying for the benefit of humankind.\u201dRussia suggests sabotage on the International Space StationRussian officials said crewed space launches have been suspended pending an investigation into the malfunction. Russia\u2019s Interfax news agency also said all uncrewed launches could be halted for the rest of the year, citing space program sources.Story continues below advertisementThursday\u2019s launch failure came at a dicey moment in the U.S.-Russia space partnership. The two nations have been congenial 250 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface even when events on the ground, such as the Russian annexation of Crimea or the interference of Russia in the 2016 election, have stoked tensions.AdvertisementBut the United States and Russia have been at odds over the cause of a small hole discovered in August on the Soyuz module \u2014 Soyuz MS-09 \u2014 currently docked at the space station. Moscow says the hole, now repaired, was the result of deliberate drilling and has suggested sabotage, while the U.S. space agency said this week that investigators will determine the cause.\u00a0Companies in the Cosmos: A series from The Washington PostAgainst that backdrop, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine traveled to Kazakhstan to witness Thursday\u2019s launch and meet his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin of Roscosmos. The summit turned far more dramatic than either had imagined.Story continues below advertisementRogozin said he was forming a state commission to investigate what caused the failure. It was the first time the Soyuz had failed on a launch to the 20-year-old International Space Station. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov, who oversees space flight, promised to share all information from the investigation with the United States.Commercial space raceThe failure puts tremendous pressure on NASA and the two companies \u2014 SpaceX and Boeing \u2014 it is counting on to fly its astronauts to the space station. Both companies have faced repeated delays. NASA recently announced that neither would fly even an uncrewed test flight this year and that the first flights with astronauts on board wouldn\u2019t happen until the middle of 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe like having more than one operational system, and right now, by my count, we have zero,\u201d said Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator who was a strong advocate for commercial crew during the Obama administration.\u201cYou can look back at the decisions that were made \u2014 like retiring the shuttle, like Congress not providing the funding in the first years of commercial crew, which has delayed the availability of SpaceX and Boeing. In retrospect those don\u2019t look like wise decisions,\u201d said space policy expert John M. Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University.In June, the spacecraft Boeing plans to use to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station suffered a significant setback when officials discovered a propellant leak during a test.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX also has suffered setbacks but says it is ready to fly its first test mission to the station \u2014 without astronauts \u2014 in January. Still, Phil McAlister, who oversees the commercial crew program for NASA, recently warned that \u201claunch dates will still have some uncertainty, and we anticipate they may change as we get closer to launch.\u201dAdvertisementThe last time Moscow\u2019s space program had a crewed launch failure was during the Soviet era in 1983, when a Soyuz booster exploded. Cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov jettisoned and landed safely near the launchpad.Achenbach reported from Washington. Christian Davenport in Los Angeles and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.Space, nuclear, polar bears: Russia and the U.S. still agree on some thingsNASA talking to companies about taking over the International Space StationToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news A Russian Soyuz MS-10 rocket was carrying two crew when a booster malfunctioned. Russia halted all crewed space flights, probably extending the time in orbit for the current space station team. Astronauts make harrowing escape, but Russian rocket failure roils NASA",
        "author": "Anton Troianovski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Europe Seeks Out New Frontiers in Space Race (WSJ: Europe) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1416",
        "date": "2019-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-seeks-out-new-frontiers-in-space-race-11551090635?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=16",
        "text": "The OneWeb communications satellites were produced in France by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE,\n\n\n a global leader in space equipment, and their launch will be handled by Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier rocket company. But the concept\u2014mass-producing hundreds of inexpensive satellites resembling refrigerators rather than custom-building a handful of bus-sized spacecraft\u2014came from an American entrepreneur,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler.\n\n\n\n \nAirbus Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Enders\n\n\n\n jumped to partner with Mr. Wyler largely to shake up his own satellite operation\u2014and Europe\u2019s view of its role beyond the atmosphere. In a sign of European hunger for outside thinking, Airbus is installing OneWeb\u2019s assembly line that will build at least 650 satellites in Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center.\nWith the initial OneWeb-designed satellites produced in France, assembly will move to Florida where the joint venture will finish manufacturing the rest. If things go well, Airbus later hopes also to build constellations for other satellite operators at the Florida facility.\n\n\n\u201cIn many ways, OneWeb is a wonderful flag carrier for Europe,\u201d said Mr. Wyler. \u201cCreating an assembly line and related procedures is very important to many of those countries.\u201d\nFor decades, Europe was a world leader in space probes, satellites and launchers. It contributed several of the most sophisticated elements of the international space station. Pan-European ventures leveraged private and government investments to remain a strong second place behind much heftier U.S. spending led by the Pentagon.\nBut Europe\u2019s momentum has stalled amid budget constraints, pressure from other entrants like China and India and eroding national consensus\u2014leaving it caught between Washington and Beijing.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX and a new wave of U.S. rocket ventures, combined with a raft of startup micro-satellite producers, have slashed prices and upended the business of sending commercial payloads into orbit. More recently China staked a claim to rivaling the U.S., including deploying antisatellite weapons and eventually launching its own space station.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 6.0.4Stars RealigningSurging space activity in the U.S. and China is leaving Europe behind.Source: Space FoundationCreated with Highcharts 6.0.4.launchesEuropeRussiaChinaU.S.2009\u201910\u201911\u201912\u201913\u201914\u201915\u201916\u201917\u2019180510152025303540\n\n\n\nIn response, U.S. military leaders are dramatically increasing spending. Simultaneously, they are investing billions in new rocket-propulsion, satellite-defense, missile-warning and ground-surveillance systems.\n\u201cIn Europe, we do not have a clear collective sense of where we are going together on space matters,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elzbieta Bienkowska,\n\n\n\n the European Union\u2019s commissioner for industry, said recently. She said the issue is \u201ca question of strategic autonomy and technological dependence.\u201d \nHuman conquest of space\u2014exciting and romantic\u2014is largely about worldly priorities like defense and business. The U.S.-Soviet space race was really over military superiority. Satellite technology was bankrolled by demand for spy satellites and communications. GPS\u2014the U.S. Global Positioning System\u2014was created by the Pentagon for use by troops.\nThe strategic rivalry between Washington and Beijing is again fueling a push to the moon and beyond, while U.S. entrepreneurs such as Mr. Musk, with his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n are chasing commercial opportunities in space.\nEurope isn\u2019t a military power, so it isn\u2019t talking about moonshots. Civilian space leaders have voiced openness to scientific collaboration and potential human missions with China, something anathema to Congress and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Europeans still lack consensus on how to deal with NASA\u2019s planned lunar gateway project to create a platform for refueling rockets and housing astronauts.\n\u201cWe want our international partners to step up and maybe provide landers and space tugs,\u201d NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said last summer. But\u00a0after the requests met ambivalence across Europe, the NASA chief now talks about going \u201cback to the moon as fast as possible\u201d using U.S. hardware.\nEurope\u2019s commercial space contractors, meanwhile, grew accustomed to a virtual monopoly assembling a small number of communications or scientific satellites for multinational organizations, each costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But that segment, too, has been overtaken by evolving technologies emphasizing smaller, cheaper and faster development.\n\u201cFor Europe, the question is, how do we remain in the race? How do we preserve our autonomy in space?\u201d said Arianespace Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n St\u00e9phane Israel.\n\n\n\n \nArianespace\u2014once secure as Europe\u2019s pre-eminent launch option\u2014is trying to stay i Six small prototype satellites slated for launch this week amount to a light payload with weighty significance: a new vision for Europe\u2019s troubled space programs. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Europe Seeks Out New Frontiers in Space Race (WSJ: Europe) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1417",
        "date": "2019-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-seeks-out-new-frontiers-in-space-race-11551090635?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=59",
        "text": "The OneWeb communications satellites were produced in France by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE,\n\n\n a global leader in space equipment, and their launch will be handled by Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier rocket company. But the concept\u2014mass-producing hundreds of inexpensive satellites resembling refrigerators rather than custom-building a handful of bus-sized spacecraft\u2014came from an American entrepreneur,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler.\n\n\n\n \nAirbus Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Enders\n\n\n\n jumped to partner with Mr. Wyler largely to shake up his own satellite operation\u2014and Europe\u2019s view of its role beyond the atmosphere. In a sign of European hunger for outside thinking, Airbus is installing OneWeb\u2019s assembly line that will build at least 650 satellites in Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center.\nWith the initial OneWeb-designed satellites produced in France, assembly will move to Florida where the joint venture will finish manufacturing the rest. If things go well, Airbus later hopes also to build constellations for other satellite operators at the Florida facility.\n\n\n\u201cIn many ways, OneWeb is a wonderful flag carrier for Europe,\u201d said Mr. Wyler. \u201cCreating an assembly line and related procedures is very important to many of those countries.\u201d\nFor decades, Europe was a world leader in space probes, satellites and launchers. It contributed several of the most sophisticated elements of the international space station. Pan-European ventures leveraged private and government investments to remain a strong second place behind much heftier U.S. spending led by the Pentagon.\nBut Europe\u2019s momentum has stalled amid budget constraints, pressure from other entrants like China and India and eroding national consensus\u2014leaving it caught between Washington and Beijing.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX and a new wave of U.S. rocket ventures, combined with a raft of startup micro-satellite producers, have slashed prices and upended the business of sending commercial payloads into orbit. More recently China staked a claim to rivaling the U.S., including deploying antisatellite weapons and eventually launching its own space station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn response, U.S. military leaders are dramatically increasing spending. Simultaneously, they are investing billions in new rocket-propulsion, satellite-defense, missile-warning and ground-surveillance systems.\n\u201cIn Europe, we do not have a clear collective sense of where we are going together on space matters,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elzbieta Bienkowska,\n\n\n\n the European Union\u2019s commissioner for industry, said recently. She said the issue is \u201ca question of strategic autonomy and technological dependence.\u201d \nHuman conquest of space\u2014exciting and romantic\u2014is largely about worldly priorities like defense and business. The U.S.-Soviet space race was really over military superiority. Satellite technology was bankrolled by demand for spy satellites and communications. GPS\u2014the U.S. Global Positioning System\u2014was created by the Pentagon for use by troops.\nThe strategic rivalry between Washington and Beijing is again fueling a push to the moon and beyond, while U.S. entrepreneurs such as Mr. Musk, with his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n are chasing commercial opportunities in space.\nEurope isn\u2019t a military power, so it isn\u2019t talking about moonshots. Civilian space leaders have voiced openness to scientific collaboration and potential human missions with China, something anathema to Congress and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Europeans still lack consensus on how to deal with NASA\u2019s planned lunar gateway project to create a platform for refueling rockets and housing astronauts.\n\u201cWe want our international partners to step up and maybe provide landers and space tugs,\u201d NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said last summer. But\u00a0after the requests met ambivalence across Europe, the NASA chief now talks about going \u201cback to the moon as fast as possible\u201d using U.S. hardware.\nEurope\u2019s commercial space contractors, meanwhile, grew accustomed to a virtual monopoly assembling a small number of communications or scientific satellites for multinational organizations, each costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But that segment, too, has been overtaken by evolving technologies emphasizing smaller, cheaper and faster development.\n\u201cFor Europe, the question is, how do we remain in the race? How do we preserve our autonomy in space?\u201d said Arianespace Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n St\u00e9phane Israel.\n\n\n\n \nArianespace\u2014once secure as Europe\u2019s pre-eminent launch option\u2014is trying to stay in the game by developing a new, less-expensive booster and eventually, phasing in its first reusable rocket engines. Many of those initiatives are years behind U.S. efforts. Mr. Israel last month complained publicly that his rocket-development p Six small prototype satellites slated for launch this week amount to a light payload with weighty significance: a new vision for Europe\u2019s troubled space programs. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Europe Seeks Out New Frontiers in Space Race (WSJ: Europe) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1418",
        "date": "2019-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-seeks-out-new-frontiers-in-space-race-11551090635?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=78",
        "text": "The OneWeb communications satellites were produced in France by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE,\n\n\n a global leader in space equipment, and their launch will be handled by Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier rocket company. But the concept\u2014mass-producing hundreds of inexpensive satellites resembling refrigerators rather than custom-building a handful of bus-sized spacecraft\u2014came from an American entrepreneur,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler.\n\n\n\n \nAirbus Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Enders\n\n\n\n jumped to partner with Mr. Wyler largely to shake up his own satellite operation\u2014and Europe\u2019s view of its role beyond the atmosphere. In a sign of European hunger for outside thinking, Airbus is installing OneWeb\u2019s assembly line that will build at least 650 satellites in Florida, near the Kennedy Space Center.\n\n\n\n\nWith the initial OneWeb-designed satellites produced in France, assembly will move to Florida where the joint venture will finish manufacturing the rest. If things go well, Airbus later hopes also to build constellations for other satellite operators at the Florida facility.\n\n\n\u201cIn many ways, OneWeb is a wonderful flag carrier for Europe,\u201d said Mr. Wyler. \u201cCreating an assembly line and related procedures is very important to many of those countries.\u201d\nFor decades, Europe was a world leader in space probes, satellites and launchers. It contributed several of the most sophisticated elements of the international space station. Pan-European ventures leveraged private and government investments to remain a strong second place behind much heftier U.S. spending led by the Pentagon.\nBut Europe\u2019s momentum has stalled amid budget constraints, pressure from other entrants like China and India and eroding national consensus\u2014leaving it caught between Washington and Beijing.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX and a new wave of U.S. rocket ventures, combined with a raft of startup micro-satellite producers, have slashed prices and upended the business of sending commercial payloads into orbit. More recently China staked a claim to rivaling the U.S., including deploying antisatellite weapons and eventually launching its own space station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn response, U.S. military leaders are dramatically increasing spending. Simultaneously, they are investing billions in new rocket-propulsion, satellite-defense, missile-warning and ground-surveillance systems.\n\u201cIn Europe, we do not have a clear collective sense of where we are going together on space matters,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elzbieta Bienkowska,\n\n\n\n the European Union\u2019s commissioner for industry, said recently. She said the issue is \u201ca question of strategic autonomy and technological dependence.\u201d \nHuman conquest of space\u2014exciting and romantic\u2014is largely about worldly priorities like defense and business. The U.S.-Soviet space race was really over military superiority. Satellite technology was bankrolled by demand for spy satellites and communications. GPS\u2014the U.S. Global Positioning System\u2014was created by the Pentagon for use by troops.\nThe strategic rivalry between Washington and Beijing is again fueling a push to the moon and beyond, while U.S. entrepreneurs such as Mr. Musk, with his Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n are chasing commercial opportunities in space.\nEurope isn\u2019t a military power, so it isn\u2019t talking about moonshots. Civilian space leaders have voiced openness to scientific collaboration and potential human missions with China, something anathema to Congress and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Europeans still lack consensus on how to deal with NASA\u2019s planned lunar gateway project to create a platform for refueling rockets and housing astronauts.\n\u201cWe want our international partners to step up and maybe provide landers and space tugs,\u201d NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said last summer. But\u00a0after the requests met ambivalence across Europe, the NASA chief now talks about going \u201cback to the moon as fast as possible\u201d using U.S. hardware.\nEurope\u2019s commercial space contractors, meanwhile, grew accustomed to a virtual monopoly assembling a small number of communications or scientific satellites for multinational organizations, each costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But that segment, too, has been overtaken by evolving technologies emphasizing smaller, cheaper and faster development.\n\u201cFor Europe, the question is, how do we remain in the race? How do we preserve our autonomy in space?\u201d said Arianespace Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n St\u00e9phane Israel.\n\n\n\n \nArianespace\u2014once secure as Europe\u2019s pre-eminent launch option\u2014is trying to stay in the game by developing a new, less-expensive booster and eventually, phasing in its first reusable rocket engines. Many of those initiatives are years behind U.S. efforts. Mr. Israel last month complained publicly that his rocket-developme Six small prototype satellites slated for launch this week amount to a light payload with weighty significance: a new vision for Europe\u2019s troubled space programs. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Headless Torso Identified as Journalist Missing From Submarine (WSJ: Europe) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1419",
        "date": "2017-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/headless-torso-identified-as-journalist-missing-from-submarine-1503494391?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=23",
        "text": "Mr. Madsen, 46, was then arrested on preliminary manslaughter charges. Her family said that the freelance journalist was working on a story about Mr. Madsen.\nThe torso was found Monday on a beach by a member of the public who was cycling on Copenhagen\u2019s southern Amager island. Copenhagen police said Tuesday that her head, arms and legs had \u201cdeliberately been cut off\u201d her body.\n\n\nDNA tests confirmed the torso is Ms. Wall\u2019s, Copenhagen police investigator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jens Moeller Jensen\n\n\n\n told reporters Wednesday. He said it was attached to a piece of metal \u201clikely with the purpose to make it sink.\u201d\nThe body \u201cwashed ashore after having been at sea for a while,\u201d he said. He added police found marks on the torso indicating someone tried to press air out of the body so that it wouldn\u2019t float.\nDried blood belonging to Ms. Wall was also found inside the submarine, he said.\nThe cause of the journalist\u2019s death isn\u2019t yet known, police said, adding they were still looking for the rest of her body.\nMr. Madsen, who remains in police custody, initially told investigators that Ms. Wall disembarked from the submarine several hours into their trip and that he didn\u2019t know what happened to her afterward. He later told authorities \u201can accident occurred onboard that led to her death\u201d and he \u201cburied\u201d her at sea.\nMr. Madsen\u2019s defense lawyer said her client still maintains that he didn\u2019t kill Ms. Wall, and that the discovery of her torso doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s guilty.\nThe journalist\u2019s boyfriend alerted authorities Aug. 11 that the 40-ton, nearly 18-meter-long (60-foot-long) sub, named the UC3 Nautilus, hadn\u2019t returned from a test run. The Danish navy then launched a search operation. Mr. Madsen was picked up by a private boat.\nMr. Madsen made headlines when he launched the submarine on May 3, 2008.\nA self-taught aerospace engineer, Mr. Madsen was one of several entrepreneurs who founded an association known as Copenhagen Suborbitals to develop and construct a manned spacecraft and submarines.\nThe group split in 2014, and Nautilus, described as the world\u2019s largest privately built submarine, is currently owned by Mr. Madsen\u2019s company Rocket Madsen Space Lab.\nCopyright 2017 Associated Press A headless torso found on a beach off Copenhagen has been identified as that of missing Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who is believed to have died on an amateur-built submarine. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Memes, merchandise and Mars cocktails: Russia\u2019s mania for Elon Musk has no bounds (WP: Europe) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1420",
        "date": "2021-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-musk-tesla-mars/2021/11/25/f63eab4e-4179-11ec-9404-50a28a88b9cd_story.html",
        "text": "MOSCOW \u2014 One of the most popular memes in Russia is, fittingly, an ode to Elon Musk \u2014 the Tesla chief executive, SpaceX founder, aspiring Mars colonizer and arguably Russians\u2019 favorite international figure.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cHow do you like that, Elon Musk?\u201d said captions in a digital satire of Russia\u2019s technological savvy. Examples include potholes covered up by grass or an old car driving in reverse on the highway. Musk, also a lover of memes, responded to one in Russian: \u201chaha how cool.\u201dAs if Russians needed another reason to adore him.Musk is rare figure who holds near-universal appeal in a country not easily impressed, especially by outsiders. But why?Some say it\u2019s his adventures in space exploration, a topic enveloped in Soviet-era nostalgia for Russians.But others suggest that the Musk fandom is a commentary on Russian society, where big opportunities and entrepreneurial risk-taking are uncommon. Or maybe it\u2019s a reaction against wealthy and state-protected oligarchs often accused of corruption \u2014 and lacking Musk\u2019s eccentric and eclectic online persona.And many Russians consider Musk\u2019s story \u2014 immigrating to the United States from South Africa and finding success \u2014 an inspiration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe became a bright antithesis to Russian capitalism, a guide on how you can get rich in the right way and how you can spend the money you earned in the right way,\u201d said Alexey Firsov, who founded the Platforma sociological research and consulting firm and wrote a report on Musk\u2019s mass popularity in Russia.\u201cThe Russian environment could not produce this cultlike figure,\u201d Firsov added. \u201cAnd it is an easy import because Musk is not associated with some Wall Street billionaire, he is not a native American and he engages with Russia. So he is not perceived as a stranger, and this image is important to a stratum of people who are in need of one.\u201dTwitter said sell. So Musk sold some Tesla shares.While the mega-rich Musk has his critics in the United States and elsewhere \u2014 in large part because of tax issues and his hard-charging style \u2014 his fan club in Russia extends all the way to the Kremlin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn February, Musk tagged the Kremlin on Twitter to ask for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on the Clubhouse social media app. Though a face-to-face between Putin and Musk isn\u2019t currently being prepared \u2014 and it certainly wouldn\u2019t happen via Clubhouse \u2014 Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The Washington Post that Moscow is genuinely interested.\u201cPutin shows great interest in the topic of technology, innovation and visionary ideas and we are convinced that in this area, there are many extremely interesting topics for him to talk about with Musk,\u201d Peskov said. \u201cThe president very much appreciates the opportunity to communicate with such visionaries.\u201dSpace EnvyA few months after Musk asked Putin to chat on Clubhouse, the Kremlin made its own request to Musk. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, invited Musk to address a student forum via video link.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk agreed, shocking budding rocket scientists who got to ask Musk questions during a 45-minute session in May.\u201cNow my friends introduce me to people as a person who talked to Elon Musk,\u201d said 19-year-old Danil Gavrilov, a second-year student at Samara National Research University and member of RocketLAV, a student group that builds models of rockets.\u201cHe\u2019s been an inspiration to me since I was a child,\u201d Gavrilov said of Musk. \u201cTo me, he\u2019s a person who sets impossible goals and then achieves them \u2014 and not only in rocket-building.\u201dDuring his appearance, Musk praised Russian scientists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program. He also said that \u201cwe\u2019re close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia, and I think that would be great.\u201d\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of talent and energy and Russia,\u201d Musk told the attendees. \u201cHopefully that energy continues into the future, and I would just like to strongly encourage people to strive to make the future better than the past and to be optimistic about the future.\u201dIn 2001, Musk visited Moscow on a hunt for repurposed intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. He was just starting his space endeavors and wanted to send something \u2014 anything \u2014 to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Russians didn\u2019t offer Musk as good a deal as he\u2019d hoped. That experience, which his partners described as insulting in a 2012 interview with GQ magazine, fueled Musk to build his own rockets. He founded SpaceX the next year.Since then, Musk has been a perpetual thorn for Russia\u2019s space agency, Roscosmos.Musk and Dmitry Rogozin, the director of Roscosmos, have engaged in several public spats. After Rogozin was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 for his role in the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, he suggested that U.S. astronauts \u2014 who at the time depended on Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station \u2014 should get there by jumping on trampolines.Story continues below advertisementAfter SpaceX broke Russia\u2019s nine-year monopoly on ferrying crew to the space station last May, sending two U.S. astronauts into orbit, Musk quipped: \u201cThe trampoline is working.\u201dAdvertisementThe feud only boosted Musk\u2019s popularity among Russians. Firsov, the sociologist, said Musk \u201ccontrasts with the stereotypes Russians have regarding space programs that are mostly bureaucratic, lacking leaps of imagination unlike Musk with his Mars plans.\u201dEven Rogozin appears to be an admirer \u2014 albeit a begrudging one.In comments to Russian state television in August, Rogozin said he would extend three special invites for the launch of Russia\u2019s Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft: to Musk \u201cwhom we respect in Russia\u201d \u2026 and also fellow space adventurers Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Rogozin has also offered to have Musk over for tea at his home. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisement\u201cI hope that someday our billionaire oligarchs will start spending their money not on the usual yachts and vanity fairs, but on the development of space technologies and expanding knowledge about space,\u201d Rogozin said on Twitter in July.AdvertisementMusk responded with two clapping emoji.Merchandise and Mars cocktailsPavel Antonov, a 29-year-old bartender, showed how to make his signature Mars cocktail at The Bix bar in Moscow on Nov. 23. (Mary Ilyushina, Julie Yoon/The Washington Post)Pavel Antonov\u2019s life goal can be traced back to the 2016 movie \u201cPassengers,\u201d a sci-fi romance that takes place on a luxury spaceship. One character in the movie is Arthur, an android bartender played by Michael Sheen. Arthur provides smiling relief amid the chaos.\u201cI immediately thought Musk will definitely need such a person who would distract from all problems,\u201d Antonov said. \u201cFor at least one hour, you can sit at the bar, forget about everything and talk about neutral topics. From then on, I decided that I want to be the first bartender on Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo get Musk\u2019s attention, Antonov, a 29-year-old bartender at Moscow\u2019s The Bix, started a social media campaign in April. He tried tweeting at Musk, both in Russian and English. In one of his Instagram posts, an astronaut in a space suit has a (photoshopped) cocktail shaker in his hand.AdvertisementIt didn\u2019t get a response from Musk. But Antonov did get some validation. In August, SpaceX posted a position for a \u201cSpaceport Mixologist.\u201dSince then, Antonov has acquired a \u201cMartian Deed\u201d with his name on it \u2014 a novelty gift from a friend.Antonov also has perfected a signature cocktail for Mars. It\u2019s bright blue, representing space, Antonov said, with a red cherry dropped in like the Red Planet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cProbably the decisive thing that inspired me to follow Musk is when he said that you shouldn\u2019t be afraid of failure,\u201d Antonov said. \u201cI think, here in Russia, if you make one mistake, it follows you. His view seems to be that if you make a mistake, you get experience and learn from it and won\u2019t make it again. I think it\u2019s unique for people in Russia.\u201dMusk merchandise can easily be found online. One specialty retailer sells a sweatshirt with Musk as a Russian Orthodox icon. Another, founded by designer Kirill Karavaev, seizes on Musk\u2019s viral moments with well-timed designs. A T-shirt with a cartoonlike Musk bouncing on a trampoline was released earlier this year \u2014 a reference to Musk\u2019s trampoline jab at Rogozin.\u00a0One of Karavaev\u2019s best-selling shirts was a sketch of Musk\u2019s face and the words, \u201cHow do you like that, Elon Musk?\u201d \u2014 the popular Russian meme.Advertisement\u201cI wore it myself,\u201d said Karavaev, who drives a Tesla. \u201cYou can feel that people here really like Musk and want to wear something with his image.\u201d (Despite no official sales or charging stations in the country, approximately 200 Teslas are estimated to be on Russia\u2019s streets.)\u201cI think Russians love him because he turns rules and institutions upside down to make something new,\u201d Karavaev added. \u201cMaybe in Russia, we just like those kinds of people.\u201d\n\nOpinion: Elon Musk breaks the billionaire mode \u2014 by acting like a big baby on the InternetAfter Bezos challenge rejected, NASA moves ahead with ties to Musk\u2019s SpaceXMusk says he move Tesla headquarters from California to Texas Even the Kremlin is a fan. Memes, merchandise and Mars cocktails: Russia\u2019s mania for Elon Musk has no bounds",
        "author": "Isabelle Khurshudyan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Memes, merchandise and Mars cocktails: Russia\u2019s mania for Elon Musk has no bounds (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1421",
        "date": "2021-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-musk-tesla-mars/2021/11/25/f63eab4e-4179-11ec-9404-50a28a88b9cd_story.html",
        "text": "MOSCOW \u2014 One of the most popular memes in Russia is, fittingly, an ode to Elon Musk \u2014 the Tesla chief executive, SpaceX founder, aspiring Mars colonizer and arguably Russians\u2019 favorite international figure.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cHow do you like that, Elon Musk?\u201d said captions in a digital satire of Russia\u2019s technological savvy. Examples include potholes covered up by grass or an old car driving in reverse on the highway. Musk, also a lover of memes, responded to one in Russian: \u201chaha how cool.\u201dAs if Russians needed another reason to adore him.Musk is rare figure who holds near-universal appeal in a country not easily impressed, especially by outsiders. But why?Some say it\u2019s his adventures in space exploration, a topic enveloped in Soviet-era nostalgia for Russians.But others suggest that the Musk fandom is a commentary on Russian society, where big opportunities and entrepreneurial risk-taking are uncommon. Or maybe it\u2019s a reaction against wealthy and state-protected oligarchs often accused of corruption \u2014 and lacking Musk\u2019s eccentric and eclectic online persona.And many Russians consider Musk\u2019s story \u2014 immigrating to the United States from South Africa and finding success \u2014 an inspiration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe became a bright antithesis to Russian capitalism, a guide on how you can get rich in the right way and how you can spend the money you earned in the right way,\u201d said Alexey Firsov, who founded the Platforma sociological research and consulting firm and wrote a report on Musk\u2019s mass popularity in Russia.\u201cThe Russian environment could not produce this cultlike figure,\u201d Firsov added. \u201cAnd it is an easy import because Musk is not associated with some Wall Street billionaire, he is not a native American and he engages with Russia. So he is not perceived as a stranger, and this image is important to a stratum of people who are in need of one.\u201dTwitter said sell. So Musk sold some Tesla shares.While the mega-rich Musk has his critics in the United States and elsewhere \u2014 in large part because of tax issues and his hard-charging style \u2014 his fan club in Russia extends all the way to the Kremlin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn February, Musk tagged the Kremlin on Twitter to ask for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on the Clubhouse social media app. Though a face-to-face between Putin and Musk isn\u2019t currently being prepared \u2014 and it certainly wouldn\u2019t happen via Clubhouse \u2014 Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The Washington Post that Moscow is genuinely interested.\u201cPutin shows great interest in the topic of technology, innovation and visionary ideas and we are convinced that in this area, there are many extremely interesting topics for him to talk about with Musk,\u201d Peskov said. \u201cThe president very much appreciates the opportunity to communicate with such visionaries.\u201dSpace EnvyA few months after Musk asked Putin to chat on Clubhouse, the Kremlin made its own request to Musk. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, invited Musk to address a student forum via video link.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk agreed, shocking budding rocket scientists who got to ask Musk questions during a 45-minute session in May.\u201cNow my friends introduce me to people as a person who talked to Elon Musk,\u201d said 19-year-old Danil Gavrilov, a second-year student at Samara National Research University and member of RocketLAV, a student group that builds models of rockets.\u201cHe\u2019s been an inspiration to me since I was a child,\u201d Gavrilov said of Musk. \u201cTo me, he\u2019s a person who sets impossible goals and then achieves them \u2014 and not only in rocket-building.\u201dDuring his appearance, Musk praised Russian scientists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program. He also said that \u201cwe\u2019re close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia, and I think that would be great.\u201d\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of talent and energy and Russia,\u201d Musk told the attendees. \u201cHopefully that energy continues into the future, and I would just like to strongly encourage people to strive to make the future better than the past and to be optimistic about the future.\u201dIn 2001, Musk visited Moscow on a hunt for repurposed intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. He was just starting his space endeavors and wanted to send something \u2014 anything \u2014 to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Russians didn\u2019t offer Musk as good a deal as he\u2019d hoped. That experience, which his partners described as insulting in a 2012 interview with GQ magazine, fueled Musk to build his own rockets. He founded SpaceX the next year.Since then, Musk has been a perpetual thorn for Russia\u2019s space agency, Roscosmos.Musk and Dmitry Rogozin, the director of Roscosmos, have engaged in several public spats. After Rogozin was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 for his role in the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, he suggested that U.S. astronauts \u2014 who at the time depended on Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station \u2014 should get there by jumping on trampolines.Story continues below advertisementAfter SpaceX broke Russia\u2019s nine-year monopoly on ferrying crew to the space station last May, sending two U.S. astronauts into orbit, Musk quipped: \u201cThe trampoline is working.\u201dAdvertisementThe feud only boosted Musk\u2019s popularity among Russians. Firsov, the sociologist, said Musk \u201ccontrasts with the stereotypes Russians have regarding space programs that are mostly bureaucratic, lacking leaps of imagination unlike Musk with his Mars plans.\u201dEven Rogozin appears to be an admirer \u2014 albeit a begrudging one.In comments to Russian state television in August, Rogozin said he would extend three special invites for the launch of Russia\u2019s Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft: to Musk \u201cwhom we respect in Russia\u201d \u2026 and also fellow space adventurers Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Rogozin has also offered to have Musk over for tea at his home. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisement\u201cI hope that someday our billionaire oligarchs will start spending their money not on the usual yachts and vanity fairs, but on the development of space technologies and expanding knowledge about space,\u201d Rogozin said on Twitter in July.AdvertisementMusk responded with two clapping emoji.Merchandise and Mars cocktailsPavel Antonov, a 29-year-old bartender, showed how to make his signature Mars cocktail at The Bix bar in Moscow on Nov. 23. (Mary Ilyushina, Julie Yoon/The Washington Post)Pavel Antonov\u2019s life goal can be traced back to the 2016 movie \u201cPassengers,\u201d a sci-fi romance that takes place on a luxury spaceship. One character in the movie is Arthur, an android bartender played by Michael Sheen. Arthur provides smiling relief amid the chaos.\u201cI immediately thought Musk will definitely need such a person who would distract from all problems,\u201d Antonov said. \u201cFor at least one hour, you can sit at the bar, forget about everything and talk about neutral topics. From then on, I decided that I want to be the first bartender on Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo get Musk\u2019s attention, Antonov, a 29-year-old bartender at Moscow\u2019s The Bix, started a social media campaign in April. He tried tweeting at Musk, both in Russian and English. In one of his Instagram posts, an astronaut in a space suit has a (photoshopped) cocktail shaker in his hand.AdvertisementIt didn\u2019t get a response from Musk. But Antonov did get some validation. In August, SpaceX posted a position for a \u201cSpaceport Mixologist.\u201dSince then, Antonov has acquired a \u201cMartian Deed\u201d with his name on it \u2014 a novelty gift from a friend.Antonov also has perfected a signature cocktail for Mars. It\u2019s bright blue, representing space, Antonov said, with a red cherry dropped in like the Red Planet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cProbably the decisive thing that inspired me to follow Musk is when he said that you shouldn\u2019t be afraid of failure,\u201d Antonov said. \u201cI think, here in Russia, if you make one mistake, it follows you. His view seems to be that if you make a mistake, you get experience and learn from it and won\u2019t make it again. I think it\u2019s unique for people in Russia.\u201dMusk merchandise can easily be found online. One specialty retailer sells a sweatshirt with Musk as a Russian Orthodox icon. Another, founded by designer Kirill Karavaev, seizes on Musk\u2019s viral moments with well-timed designs. A T-shirt with a cartoonlike Musk bouncing on a trampoline was released earlier this year \u2014 a reference to Musk\u2019s trampoline jab at Rogozin.\u00a0One of Karavaev\u2019s best-selling shirts was a sketch of Musk\u2019s face and the words, \u201cHow do you like that, Elon Musk?\u201d \u2014 the popular Russian meme.Advertisement\u201cI wore it myself,\u201d said Karavaev, who drives a Tesla. \u201cYou can feel that people here really like Musk and want to wear something with his image.\u201d (Despite no official sales or charging stations in the country, approximately 200 Teslas are estimated to be on Russia\u2019s streets.)\u201cI think Russians love him because he turns rules and institutions upside down to make something new,\u201d Karavaev added. \u201cMaybe in Russia, we just like those kinds of people.\u201d\n\nOpinion: Elon Musk breaks the billionaire mode \u2014 by acting like a big baby on the InternetAfter Bezos challenge rejected, NASA moves ahead with ties to Musk\u2019s SpaceXMusk says he move Tesla headquarters from California to Texas Even the Kremlin is a fan. Memes, merchandise and Mars cocktails: Russia\u2019s mania for Elon Musk has no bounds",
        "author": "Isabelle Khurshudyan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Memes, merchandise and Mars cocktails: Russia\u2019s mania for Elon Musk has no bounds (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1422",
        "date": "2021-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-musk-tesla-mars/2021/11/25/f63eab4e-4179-11ec-9404-50a28a88b9cd_story.html",
        "text": "MOSCOW \u2014 One of the most popular memes in Russia is, fittingly, an ode to Elon Musk \u2014 the Tesla chief executive, SpaceX founder, aspiring Mars colonizer and arguably Russians\u2019 favorite international figure.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cHow do you like that, Elon Musk?\u201d said captions in a digital satire of Russia\u2019s technological savvy. Examples include potholes covered up by grass or an old car driving in reverse on the highway. Musk, also a lover of memes, responded to one in Russian: \u201chaha how cool.\u201dAs if Russians needed another reason to adore him.Musk is rare figure who holds near-universal appeal in a country not easily impressed, especially by outsiders. But why?Some say it\u2019s his adventures in space exploration, a topic enveloped in Soviet-era nostalgia for Russians.But others suggest that the Musk fandom is a commentary on Russian society, where big opportunities and entrepreneurial risk-taking are uncommon. Or maybe it\u2019s a reaction against wealthy and state-protected oligarchs often accused of corruption \u2014 and lacking Musk\u2019s eccentric and eclectic online persona.And many Russians consider Musk\u2019s story \u2014 immigrating to the United States from South Africa and finding success \u2014 an inspiration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe became a bright antithesis to Russian capitalism, a guide on how you can get rich in the right way and how you can spend the money you earned in the right way,\u201d said Alexey Firsov, who founded the Platforma sociological research and consulting firm and wrote a report on Musk\u2019s mass popularity in Russia.\u201cThe Russian environment could not produce this cultlike figure,\u201d Firsov added. \u201cAnd it is an easy import because Musk is not associated with some Wall Street billionaire, he is not a native American and he engages with Russia. So he is not perceived as a stranger, and this image is important to a stratum of people who are in need of one.\u201dTwitter said sell. So Musk sold some Tesla shares.While the mega-rich Musk has his critics in the United States and elsewhere \u2014 in large part because of tax issues and his hard-charging style \u2014 his fan club in Russia extends all the way to the Kremlin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn February, Musk tagged the Kremlin on Twitter to ask for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on the Clubhouse social media app. Though a face-to-face between Putin and Musk isn\u2019t currently being prepared \u2014 and it certainly wouldn\u2019t happen via Clubhouse \u2014 Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The Washington Post that Moscow is genuinely interested.\u201cPutin shows great interest in the topic of technology, innovation and visionary ideas and we are convinced that in this area, there are many extremely interesting topics for him to talk about with Musk,\u201d Peskov said. \u201cThe president very much appreciates the opportunity to communicate with such visionaries.\u201dSpace EnvyA few months after Musk asked Putin to chat on Clubhouse, the Kremlin made its own request to Musk. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, invited Musk to address a student forum via video link.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk agreed, shocking budding rocket scientists who got to ask Musk questions during a 45-minute session in May.\u201cNow my friends introduce me to people as a person who talked to Elon Musk,\u201d said 19-year-old Danil Gavrilov, a second-year student at Samara National Research University and member of RocketLAV, a student group that builds models of rockets.\u201cHe\u2019s been an inspiration to me since I was a child,\u201d Gavrilov said of Musk. \u201cTo me, he\u2019s a person who sets impossible goals and then achieves them \u2014 and not only in rocket-building.\u201dDuring his appearance, Musk praised Russian scientists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program. He also said that \u201cwe\u2019re close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia, and I think that would be great.\u201d\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of talent and energy and Russia,\u201d Musk told the attendees. \u201cHopefully that energy continues into the future, and I would just like to strongly encourage people to strive to make the future better than the past and to be optimistic about the future.\u201dIn 2001, Musk visited Moscow on a hunt for repurposed intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. He was just starting his space endeavors and wanted to send something \u2014 anything \u2014 to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Russians didn\u2019t offer Musk as good a deal as he\u2019d hoped. That experience, which his partners described as insulting in a 2012 interview with GQ magazine, fueled Musk to build his own rockets. He founded SpaceX the next year.Since then, Musk has been a perpetual thorn for Russia\u2019s space agency, Roscosmos.Musk and Dmitry Rogozin, the director of Roscosmos, have engaged in several public spats. After Rogozin was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 for his role in the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, he suggested that U.S. astronauts \u2014 who at the time depended on Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station \u2014 should get there by jumping on trampolines.Story continues below advertisementAfter SpaceX broke Russia\u2019s nine-year monopoly on ferrying crew to the space station last May, sending two U.S. astronauts into orbit, Musk quipped: \u201cThe trampoline is working.\u201dAdvertisementThe feud only boosted Musk\u2019s popularity among Russians. Firsov, the sociologist, said Musk \u201ccontrasts with the stereotypes Russians have regarding space programs that are mostly bureaucratic, lacking leaps of imagination unlike Musk with his Mars plans.\u201dEven Rogozin appears to be an admirer \u2014 albeit a begrudging one.In comments to Russian state television in August, Rogozin said he would extend three special invites for the launch of Russia\u2019s Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft: to Musk \u201cwhom we respect in Russia\u201d \u2026 and also fellow space adventurers Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. Rogozin has also offered to have Musk over for tea at his home. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisement\u201cI hope that someday our billionaire oligarchs will start spending their money not on the usual yachts and vanity fairs, but on the development of space technologies and expanding knowledge about space,\u201d Rogozin said on Twitter in July.AdvertisementMusk responded with two clapping emoji.Merchandise and Mars cocktailsPavel Antonov, a 29-year-old bartender, showed how to make his signature Mars cocktail at The Bix bar in Moscow on Nov. 23. (Mary Ilyushina, Julie Yoon/The Washington Post)Pavel Antonov\u2019s life goal can be traced back to the 2016 movie \u201cPassengers,\u201d a sci-fi romance that takes place on a luxury spaceship. One character in the movie is Arthur, an android bartender played by Michael Sheen. Arthur provides smiling relief amid the chaos.\u201cI immediately thought Musk will definitely need such a person who would distract from all problems,\u201d Antonov said. \u201cFor at least one hour, you can sit at the bar, forget about everything and talk about neutral topics. From then on, I decided that I want to be the first bartender on Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo get Musk\u2019s attention, Antonov, a 29-year-old bartender at Moscow\u2019s The Bix, started a social media campaign in April. He tried tweeting at Musk, both in Russian and English. In one of his Instagram posts, an astronaut in a space suit has a (photoshopped) cocktail shaker in his hand.AdvertisementIt didn\u2019t get a response from Musk. But Antonov did get some validation. In August, SpaceX posted a position for a \u201cSpaceport Mixologist.\u201dSince then, Antonov has acquired a \u201cMartian Deed\u201d with his name on it \u2014 a novelty gift from a friend.Antonov also has perfected a signature cocktail for Mars. It\u2019s bright blue, representing space, Antonov said, with a red cherry dropped in like the Red Planet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cProbably the decisive thing that inspired me to follow Musk is when he said that you shouldn\u2019t be afraid of failure,\u201d Antonov said. \u201cI think, here in Russia, if you make one mistake, it follows you. His view seems to be that if you make a mistake, you get experience and learn from it and won\u2019t make it again. I think it\u2019s unique for people in Russia.\u201dMusk merchandise can easily be found online. One specialty retailer sells a sweatshirt with Musk as a Russian Orthodox icon. Another, founded by designer Kirill Karavaev, seizes on Musk\u2019s viral moments with well-timed designs. A T-shirt with a cartoonlike Musk bouncing on a trampoline was released earlier this year \u2014 a reference to Musk\u2019s trampoline jab at Rogozin.\u00a0One of Karavaev\u2019s best-selling shirts was a sketch of Musk\u2019s face and the words, \u201cHow do you like that, Elon Musk?\u201d \u2014 the popular Russian meme.Advertisement\u201cI wore it myself,\u201d said Karavaev, who drives a Tesla. \u201cYou can feel that people here really like Musk and want to wear something with his image.\u201d (Despite no official sales or charging stations in the country, approximately 200 Teslas are estimated to be on Russia\u2019s streets.)\u201cI think Russians love him because he turns rules and institutions upside down to make something new,\u201d Karavaev added. \u201cMaybe in Russia, we just like those kinds of people.\u201d\n\nOpinion: Elon Musk breaks the billionaire mode \u2014 by acting like a big baby on the InternetAfter Bezos challenge rejected, NASA moves ahead with ties to Musk\u2019s SpaceXMusk says he move Tesla headquarters from California to Texas Even the Kremlin is a fan. Memes, merchandise and Mars cocktails: Russia\u2019s mania for Elon Musk has no bounds",
        "author": "Isabelle Khurshudyan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Kremlin cares about protests on the other side of Russia (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1423",
        "date": "2020-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-protests-far-east-putin-khabarovsk/2020/08/04/84567d0a-d261-11ea-826b-cc394d824e35_story.html",
        "text": "The Russian government official sounded concerned in comments to Sergei Furgal, the governor of a province in Russia\u2019s Far East: \u201cYour rating is going up, and the president\u2019s is falling.\u201dThe official was President Vladimir Putin\u2019s envoy to the Far East, Yuri Trutnev, according to an independent online news outlet, DVHAB, the first to publish the secret recording of Furgal\u2019s dressing-down in November in Khabarovsk province, bordering China in Russia\u2019s southeast corner. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBeing more popular than Putin is not a recipe for political longevity. Furgal was arrested last month, flown to Moscow and charged in connection with four killings in 2004 and 2005 \u2014 allegations that Putin\u2019s opponents decry as a sham. Furgal denies the charges.Since early July, thousands of protesters in Khabarovsk have joined daily, leaderless marches supporting the now-fired Furgal and calling for Putin to go \u2014 the sharpest regional challenge to Putin\u2019s 20-year rule as president and prime minister.Khabarovsk has been a thorn in Putin\u2019s side before. It was the only region where his United Russia party lost its dominance in regional elections in September, winning just two seats in the local legislature. Then, in a nationwide vote last month on constitutional amendments that paved the way for Putin to govern until 2036, Khabarovsk had one of the lowest turnouts in the nation, just 44 percent compared with the national average of 68\u00a0percent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Khabarovsk protests have sparked recent small rallies in support of Khabarovsk in some other cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, easily dispersed by riot police. But they send an alarming message to the Kremlin at a challenging time for Putin. The economy is battered by falling oil prices and the coronavirus pandemic, and there is no clear path for authorities to re-energize Putin\u2019s image.Russia's political gameThe Khabarovsk crisis also reveals some of the cracks in Russia\u2019s tightly managed authoritarian state, where co-opted opposition parties buy into the system by providing a veneer of pluralistic politics while generally supporting the Kremlin.Putin knows how to rule as an autocrat. He is struggling with the pandemic.Furgal\u2019s party, the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is part of the game. But Furgal did not exactly play by the rules.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe defeated the Kremlin-backed candidate for governor in 2018 with nearly 70 percent of the vote and has since added to that popularity. Many Khabarovsk residents believe Furgal is being punished by Moscow for being more popular than Putin. The office of the Kremlin\u2019s Far East official, Trutnev, did not respond to requests for comment on the case.The Kremlin has not been ",
        "author": "Robyn Dixon"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a Russian court, Alexei Navalny loses again but still has the last word (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1424",
        "date": "2021-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-navalny-court-putin/2021/02/19/0985c016-706a-11eb-8651-6d3091eac63f_story.html",
        "text": "MOSCOW \u2014 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny lost in court Saturday \u2014 twice \u2014 but again used his time in the dock to expound on why he stands against President Vladimir Putin, no matter the personal risk.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight Even as Russian authorities try to crush Navalny's stature and his activist network, a series of court hearings has offered him an unexpected public forum for commentary that has run from the serious to the sublime. From the glass-enclosed cage used for defendants, he has talked about a salted cucumber recipe and mused about his lonely path \u2014 jailed for standing against the regime.He has called the judge in his libel case \"Obersturmbannf\u00fchrer\" \u2014 a Nazi paramilitary rank \u2014 and described Putin as an old man quivering in his bunker, terrified of his own people.Story continues below advertisementAn Instagram post attributed to him Wednesday mused about spaceships and the risks of living in confinement.AdvertisementNot expecting justice from a judiciary with an acquittal rate of less than half a percent, Navalny used his time in the dock in two recent court trials to ram home his message that Russia\u2019s criminal justice system is a sham used to silence Putin\u2019s critics.What to know about Navalny\u2019s protest movement in Russia \u2014 and why it unnerves PutinHe called the cases \u201cperformances\u201d trumped up by the authorities to instill fear in the population or to smear him, but he has seized the stage they afford for his own purposes.In separate proceedings Saturday, he was convicted of libel and lost an appeal against jail time. A third case, involving embezzlement allegations and up to 10 years in prison, is pending.Story continues below advertisementAt the appeal hearing Saturday, Navalny mused on the meaning of life and the importance of religious belief, telling the truth and doing what was right, no matter how hard the consequences.AdvertisementHe said the authorities were using the trials against him \u201cshowing me they can do as they want, like jugglers.\u201cOrdinary people who look at this think, \u2018What if I run into the judicial system? Do I stand a chance?\u2019 \u201dThe goal of power, he said, was to make people like him feel isolated, alone and frightened.Navalny said if he was not willing to take risks, he would just be a bunch of molecules floating through space.He was not enjoying prison but said \u201cI do not feel any regret. On the contrary, I feel satisfaction. In a difficult moment, I have not betrayed the commandments.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe court rejected his appeal against the jail term but shortened it slightly to two years and six months to take into account the time he has spent under house arrest.The Kremlin has rejected a judgment by the European Court of Human Rights calling for Navalny\u2019s immediate release.AdvertisementNavalny said the libel case, in which he is accused of defaming a World War II veteran, is designed as a smear. On Monday, a state media presenter, Vladimir Solovyov, compared Navalny unfavorably to Hitler, who he said had fought bravely as a soldier \u2014 \u201cunlike this codpiece F\u00fchrer,\u201d a reference to a state security agent\u2019s comment that the opposition leader\u2019s underwear was poisoned in an August attack.Story continues below advertisementThe libel allegation stemmed from Navalny\u2019s tweet criticizing a group of people \u2014 including actors, other celebrities, sports figures and one war veteran, 94-year-old Ignat Artemenko \u2014 who appeared in a RT network propaganda video urging Russians to support constitutional changes that could keep Putin in power until 2036. Navalny called the participants traitors and lackeys.For Kremlin critic Navalny, 10 hours in court and more ahead over alleged defamation of veteranJudge Vera Akimova fined him 850,000 rubles, or about $11,500. His lawyers argued that his tweet was not libelous because the activist was voicing an opinion, not an assertion capable of being proved factual or otherwise.When the judge repeatedly struck out the questions Navalny raised during the trial, he addressed her from his glass prisoner\u2019s cage as Obersturmbannf\u00fchrer and likened the hearing to a Nazi interrogation, adding that she would look good with a German machine gun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his final words before the libel verdict Saturday, Navalny said Putin\u2019s United Russia party \u2014 which faces testing parliamentary elections in September \u2014 \u201chas turned into an enormous pig which guzzles from a trough of oil and dollars.\u201d He said the regime was using the libel case to pretend it cared about veterans.Authorities have restricted Navalny\u2019s ability to use the hearing as a platform, with Akimova barring video of the proceedings. However, state media aired his rant against the judge at length, while also reporting that his remarks could trigger yet more charges \u2014 of insulting the court.\u201cNavalny\u2019s hysterics continue, and in the meantime his team, guided by sponsors from the United States, Canada and Europe, are preparing a military coup in the country,\u201d state TV presenter Yevgeny Popov said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy Tuesday, the third day of the hearing, Navalny said the case was so ridiculous he might just as well talk about cucumbers as the law.\u201cEvery moment of this case is obvious legal nonsense,\u201d he said, veering off to tell how he had to order salt repeatedly to his cell, only to finally get three kilograms all at once.\u201cNow I have a lot of cucumbers and three kilos of salt. Since it makes no sense to talk about any legal issues here, maybe, prosecutor and your honor, you know some good recipes for salted cucumbers,\u201d he said.By Saturday he said people had sent him some fun recipes by post and he managed to salt his cucumbers in a plastic bag. He even made a strange kind of ice cream, melting butter in a kettle, then whipping it up with sour cream and putting it in his fridge.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m going to miss dinner,\u201d Navalny said when the judge was tardy to read the verdict. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter, I\u2019ll eat my pickles.\u201dAdvertisementAccording to the independent investigative media website Proyekt, the libel case grew out of a vast Kremlin-directed campaign involving state security service agents, state media propagandists, regional governors and ambitious freelancers all working to discredit Navalny. In August, Proyekt published a WhatsApp message that it said was from the presidential administration to all regional policy groups in June initiating an operation against Navalny \u2014 based on his tweet \u2014 in the lead-up to the Jun. 25 to July 1 vote on the constitutional changes.\u201cColleagues, we must urgently organize an information campaign (responses, quotes, rebukes) defending the WWII veteran insulted by A. Navalny. The campaign is to run *until 1 July*,\u201d the message said. It asked participants to initiate news articles citing other veterans, patriots \u201cor simply any high-profile or well-known individuals\u201d and to submit the articles and links to it.At the appeal hearing Saturday, Navalny said he dreamed of a future when Russia was not only free but also happy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDespite the fact that our country is built on injustice and we constantly face it and see its worst form, armed injustice, tens of millions of people want the truth and sooner or later they will get it,\u201d he said.Navalny is finding other ways to communicate. A post on his Instagram account Wednesday, made on his behalf, said that being in jail was not so hard but felt rather like a space voyage \u201cto a beautiful new world.\u201d\u201cCould I, a fan of books and movies about space, refuse such a flight, even if it lasts three years? Obviously no,\u201d he wrote.\u201cThere\u2019s just one big difference from space movies. I have no weapons at all. What if the ship is attacked by xenomorphs? I doubt I could fight them off with a kettle.\u201dSpace travel is \u201cdangerous,\u201d Navalny added. The voyage could take years longer than expected, or it could take him nowhere.\n\nIn Russia, tough new laws and stepped-up defiance abroad mark Putin\u2019s shift toward unfettered controlEven from jail, Navalny knows how to enrage Putin. This time it\u2019s with a viral video. The opposition leader has used his trials to ram home his message that the Russian justice system is a sham. In a Russian court, Alexei Navalny loses again but still has the last word",
        "author": "Robyn Dixon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Serious about climate change? Get serious about peat. (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1425",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/10/cop26-peat-carbon/",
        "text": "GARSTANG, England \u2014 Moor, bog, fen, mire, flush, swamp, slough. Peatlands have gotten a bum rap. They\u2019re inhospitable, useless. Too wet to plow, too dry to fish, the old farmers say.Scorned as anaerobic wastelands, dissed in the popular imagination, imagined as the eerie Dead Marshes in \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d or the forbidding Grimpen Mire in \u201cThe Hound of the Baskervilles.\u201d When bad things go down in Charles Dickens, the scene is set in a forbidding moor. All slander, said Christian Dunn, wetlands scientist at Bangor University in Wales.\u201cPeat is the superhero of the natural world,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese waterlogged, acidic, low-nutrient ecosystems are the most carbon-dense lands on Earth. You want to safely store carbon for a thousand years? Nothing beats peat. It\u2019s nature\u2019s vault.From the boreal north to the tropical south, from Scotland\u2019s grouse moors to the vast tracts recently discovered in the Congo Basin, the Earth\u2019s peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the planet\u2019s forests combined \u2014 though they cover only a tenth of the landmass.\u201cIf you\u2019re serious about slowing climate change,\u201d Dunn said, \u201cyou must get serious about peat.\u201dMost people, if they think about peat at all, might think, meh, garden mulch?(Dunn begs you: \u201cDo not buy peat to feed your petunias.\u201d Its sale is being phased out in Britain. In America, availability remained unrestricted.)Climate scientists have long appreciated the role oceans and forests play to store mega-amounts of carbon. But only now is the power of peat coming into sharper focus \u2014 along with the need to preserve the pristine bogs that remain and restore what\u2019s been damaged.\u2018Carbon bombs\u2019Alongside this new respect comes anxiety among researchers that the carbon buried within these mires can be rapidly released in a warming world.Peatlands are only 3 percent of the land surface but store as much as 30 percent of all the carbon locked in the soil. Release that, and the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will go kaboom, accelerating the Earth on its trajectory toward catastrophic warming. It\u2019s scary enough that climatologists have a term for the scenario: a \u201ccarbon bomb\u201d hidden in all that peat.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor centuries, we\u2019ve drained peatlands,\u201d said Dunn. \u201cWe\u2019ve degraded the peat \u2014 trashed it, burned it, bagged it \u2014 and released just staggering amounts of carbon into our atmosphere.\u201dAn enormous missing contribution to global warming may have been right under our feetLong before the industrial revolution began, farmers were emitting carbon by turning over the peat to plant crops. Investigators at France\u2019s Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences have found that this mass conversion could have added 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equivalent to seven years of current emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuge amounts of peat still exist: in Canada, Russia, Finland, Europe, Alaska and around the tropics. But it is estimated that worldwide, about 15 percent of peat has already been lost.In the modern era, farmers have even been paid by governments, encouraged by tax breaks and cash subsidies, to convert peatlands.There\u2019s a reason Indonesia is one of the top five greenhouse gas emitters in the world \u2014 and it is not just coal. It is the clearing of peat for palm oil plantations, with farmers setting fires that burn deep in the fibrous soil and smolder for months.\u201cIt\u2019s an almost criminal amount of carbon,\u201d Dunn said.Not too late?Preserving peat is now considered a powerful tool to counter climbing emissions. It is among what the United Nations considers legitimate \u201cnature-based solutions\u201d \u2014 the buzzwords for using woodlands, mangroves, marshes, kelp forests and bogs to soak up carbon.The idea is that humanity\u2019s greatest ally against climate change can be the Earth itself.Britain is one of the first countries to put peat at the center of its strategy to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. At the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, the British government is highlighting its pledge to spend more than $1 billion by 2025 on peat restoration, woodland creation and the management of the two habitats.Prime Minister Boris Johnson in October promised to restore at least 86,000 acres of degraded peatlands in England by 2025 \u2014 and 690,000 by 2050, an area equal to the size of Rhode Island. The Scottish government is even more ambitious (it has less land, but more peat) and aims to repair 618,000 acres by 2030.Meet the superheroPeatlands are wetlands, with a twist.\u201cWatch your step,\u201d said Sarah Johnson, a peat project manager with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, which protects a bog in northeast England called Winmarleigh Moss.When you tread upon healthy peat, the ground can feel squishy. Your step is bouncy, like walking on a mattress, except that bounce comes from layers of plants and moss that have been laid down, at one millimeter a year, since the last ice age.Johnson explained that these waterlogged ecosystems are unique, because they slow decomposition way down \u2014 and so the dead plants remain, but they don\u2019t really rot, and they keep storing the carbon they removed from the atmosphere via photosynthesis.Unlike a forest, where trees fall and decompose, recycled by bugs and fungi, peat accumulates year after year. It\u2019s like the carbon cycle stops, said Chris Evans, a biogeochemist at the U.K. Center for Ecology & Hydrology.\u201cThe really interesting thing about peat is that it\u2019s been storing this carbon for thousands of years. It\u2019s been doing this before there were human beings,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if you can keep it wet, peat can keep storing carbon for a very, very long time.\u201dA recent study by Moors for the Future Partnership in Britain examined a single blanket bog in Derbyshire and found the amount of carbon locked up was equivalent to the annual emissions of eight coal-fired power stations.Sink becomes sourceBritain was once covered in peatlands. London is built on a former one. Now, most lowland peat is gone.In Holme Fen north of Cambridge, a landowner in 1848 had a post driven through 22 feet of peat until it hit the clay substrate. As the land was drained over the next 170 years, the surface of the peat subsided by 13 feet \u2014 like a shrinking sponge sitting on a kitchen countertop.Today, just 20 percent of the United Kingdom\u2019s peatlands are considered \u201cnear natural.\u201d Much of the disturbed peat is no longer a net sink, storing carbon. It is now a source of greenhouse gases, an emitter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists calculate that peatlands in Britain are releasing approximately 23 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent each year, making them one of the top contributors to the country\u2019s greenhouse emissions from land use.\u201cThe first thing you have to do in a leaky spaceship is plug the hole,\u201d said Richard Lindsay, a specialist in peatland ecosystems at the University of East London.Stop draining peatlands and start repairing them by keeping them wet, he said.Yet, there is an inherent tension in Britain\u2019s strategy to reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the century, in part through nature-based solutions. Until recently, when the government wanted to grow trees in Britain to store carbon, where did it plant them? \u201cOn the cheapest, most marginal land,\u201d Lindsay said. On peat.And because waterlogged trees would die, he said, \u201cyou have to drain the peat to plant the trees.\u201dCarbon farms of the futureOut at Winmarleigh Moss, they\u2019re testing a new idea: \u201ccarbon farming.\u201d In which the \u201ccrop\u201d is the carbon a farmer is locking into the peat. Mike Longden, a peatland initiative officer with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, stood on a berm and explained the farm.The team took five aces of an unloved degraded peatland, drained in the 1970s, and rebuilt the dikes, pumps and plumbing. They stripped off the top four inches of nutrient-rich top soil, left over from when sheep grazed the pasture, and planted 150,000 plugs of the new cover crop, sphagnum moss. Then they brought the water level back to the field to re-wet the new moss and existing five feet of unoxidized peat below.The newly planted moss is looking happy and healthy. As it grows, it will carpet the site, and the bottom of the moss will just sit there in watery acidic conditions, to form \u2014 presto! \u2014 new peat.Who will pay for it? Rob Stoneman, director of landscape recovery at the Wildlife Trusts, says very soon the government will probably pay land managers a few hundred dollars an acre to store carbon in a reclaimed peat bog. Corporations, too, might buy even more for credits from the carbon farmers of the future to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.\u201cThe thinking is, that if you are going to get to net-zero as promised in Britain, somebody is going to subsidize this,\u201d Stoneman said.For a thousand years?\u201cAt least for a while,\u201d Stoneman said.Read more:Boris Johnson used to mock \u2018eco-doomsters.\u2019 Now he\u2019s a climate champion.Prince Charles, once dismissed as a plant-talking oddball, takes his environmental bona fides to COP26COP26 host U.K. pledges to phase out coal power while considering its first new coal mine in 30 years Peat could be a \u201ccarbon bomb\u201d or a climate change solution. Serious about climate change? Get serious about peat.",
        "author": "William Booth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lights, camera, blast off: Rocket launches Russian film crew to make first-ever feature in space (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1426",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/05/russia-rocket-film-crew-first-space-movie-orbit/",
        "text": "Russia\u2019s latest space mission had some unusual passengers \u2014 an actress and a film director who are set to make the world\u2019s first feature-length movie shot in space.A Soyuz rocket carrying actress Yulia Peresild and film maker Klim Shipenko, as well as cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, lifted off just before 5 a.m. Eastern time from a launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt docked at the International Space Station \u201cafter just two orbits around the Earth,\u201d Russia\u2019s space agency Roscosmos said in a tweet shortly after 8 a.m. Eastern time. \u201cWelcome to the ISS!\u201dThe passengers will spend about 12 days at the ISS, shooting about 35 minutes of the film, which has the working title \u201cThe Challenge.\u201d Peresild will play a doctor who has to race to save the life of a crew member in space, according to the space agency\u2019s website for the project.Peresild, who was chosen from thousands of applicants for the role, has previously described the project as \u201ca miracle, an incredible chance.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTraining for the film was \u201cpsychologically, physically and morally hard,\u201d she told a news conference on Monday, in quotes carried by the Associated Press. Meanwhile, Shipenko lost 33 pounds while preparing for the flight, Roscosmos said.Two Russian cosmonauts who are already on the ISS \u2014 Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov \u2014 are also expected to feature in the film, with Novitskiy set to return to Earth with Peresild, Shipenko and Shkaplerov later this month.Russia announced its cosmic moviemaking ambitions last year, shortly after NASA said it would work with Tom Cruise on a film on the ISS.Russia and the United States have long competed to make space history, with Russia sending the first human into space in 1961, and the United States\u2019 Apollo 11 landing humans on the moon in 1969.Ellen Francis contributed to this report.correctionRussia sent the first human into space in 1961. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Russia did so in 1962. The article has been corrected.Read more:NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million.How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.NASA has a new challenge to reaching the moon by 2024: Its $1 billion spacesuit program A Soyuz MS-19 launched a Russian actress and director into orbit. Lights, camera, blast off: Rocket launches Russian film crew to make first-ever feature in space",
        "author": "Helier Cheung"
    },
    {
        "title": "Queen Elizabeth II expresses irritation at world leaders who won\u2019t commit to COP climate summit (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1427",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/queen-cop26-microphone/2021/10/15/9de57fb2-2d93-11ec-b17d-985c186de338_story.html",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Queen Elizabeth II is not amused.Britain's monarch has hit out at world leaders who \"talk\" but they \"don't do\" on climate change \u2014 remarks that have been interpreted as expressing a degree of exasperation at possible no-shows for the upcoming COP26 climate conference in Glasgow.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightHer remarks weren't meant for public consumption \u2014 this is the queen, after all, an expert at giving nothing away \u2014 but were picked up on a microphone. During the opening of the Welsh Parliament in Cardiff on Thursday, the queen was talking to her daughter-in-law, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, and Elin Jones, the parliament\u2019s president officer. Her comments were picked up on a live stream, and although parts are inaudible, she can be heard talking about the climate conference.Story continues below advertisement\u201cExtraordinary, isn\u2019t it? I\u2019ve been hearing all about COP,\u201d the queen said, according to video and audio recordings analyzed by the Daily Mirror. \u201cStill don\u2019t know who is coming .\u2009.\u2009. We only know about people who are not coming .\u2009.\u2009. It\u2019s really irritating when they talk, but they don\u2019t do.\u201dPrince William: Let\u2019s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live onJones then replied: \u201cExactly. It\u2019s a time for doing .\u2009.\u2009. and watching your grandson on the television this morning saying there\u2019s no point going to space, we need to save the Earth.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cYes, I read about it,\u201d the queen said, smiling broadly.Prince William on Thursday said there should be more focus on fixing this planet than on space tourism. He is promoting his new Earthshot Prize for environmental innovators, to be awarded Sunday.NEW: The Queen has hit out at world leaders of countries including China, Russia and Australia for failing to commit to next month's\u00a0United Nations Climate Change conference (COP26) in Glasgow, saying \"It\u2019s really irritating when they talk, but they don\u2019t do.\u201d pic.twitter.com/w0jggM767w\u2014 Russell Myers (@rjmyers) October 14, 2021\n\nBritain\u2019s 95-year-old monarch will attend the U.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, next month in Glasgow \u2014 along with senior members of the British royal family.Story continues below advertisementThe White House on Thursday confirmed that President Biden plans to attend the \u201cleaders summit\u201d during the first two days of the conference.Biden to meet with Pope Francis to discuss coronavirus, climate change, caring for poorFormer president Barack Obama also plans to go, his office said Friday. Obama was president when the United States signed on to the Paris agreement and committed to reducing emissions that contribute to climate change. In Glasgow, he will meet with young activists and deliver remarks on \u201cthe important progress made in the five years since the Paris Agreement took effect\u201d and the need for \u201cmore robust action going forward by all of us,\u201d spokesperson Hannah Hankins said.AdvertisementSeveral world leaders, however, have still not confirmed their attendance, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and India\u2019s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Story continues below advertisementAustralian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who previously said he was unsure if he would attend because of the coronavirus pandemic, confirmed his attendance on Friday.The queen\u2019s remarks offer unusual insight into her thinking. It\u2019s extraordinarily rare to hear anything from her. She has given exactly zero interviews during her long reign and is supposed to remain politically neutral.The British prime minister meets with the queen on a weekly basis, but traditionally those conversations stay private. Things do slip out, usually not intentionally. Former prime minister David Cameron was mortified when he found out there was a microphone recording his conversation about the queen\u2019s reaction to the Scottish independence referendum.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther countries\u2019 leaders aren\u2019t bound by the same conventions. When President Biden met the queen at Windsor Castle in June, he relayed to reporters that she had asked him about China\u2019s Xi and Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin.British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the queen\u2019s comments on the COP26 conference should not have been publicized. Speaking to Sky News, he said, \u201cI think comments made in private should stay private, but we all share the desire to see progress made and we know there will be hundreds of leaders coming to Glasgow for COP.\u201d\u201cI don\u2019t think her comments were for broadcast,\u201d he added.\n\nGreta Thunberg says world leaders\u2019 talk on climate change is \u2018blah blah blah\u2019What you need to know about the U.N. climate summit this fall \u2014 and why it mattersQueen Elizabeth is behind a royal push to cut plastic waste Her remarks weren\u2019t meant for public consumption but were picked up on a microphone. Queen Elizabeth II expresses irritation at world leaders who won\u2019t commit to COP climate summit",
        "author": "Karla Adam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Prince William: Let\u2019s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live on (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1428",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/14/prince-william-earth-space-tourism-race/",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Prince William, second in line to the British throne, has urged people to focus on saving Earth rather than exploring space. He made the remarks as 90-year-old actor William Shatner became the oldest person to fly to the edge of space aboard a rocket operated by Jeff Bezos\u2019s company, Blue Origin. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWilliam, Duke of Cambridge, told the BBC that society needs \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet,\u201d and not focused on \u201ctrying to find the next place to go and live.\u201dHis comments come as world leaders and scientists continue to grapple with the climate change emergency and as activists demand less talk and more concrete action.Greta Thunberg says world leaders\u2019 talk on climate change is \u2018blah blah blah\u2019While the prince did not directly name billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, who are busy launching out-of-this-world trips as part of their own commercial space tourism programs, he made his stance clear: Making Earth a better place to live amid the growing threat of climate change should be prioritized to protect future generations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf we\u2019re not careful, we\u2019re robbing from our children\u2019s future through what we do now,\u201d he said as he explained that becoming a parent had prodded him to look at the world differently.\u201cI want the things that I\u2019ve enjoyed \u2014 the outdoor life, nature, the environment \u2014 I want that to be there for my children,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd not just my children but everyone else\u2019s children.\u201dThe duke has three children with his wife, Catherine: Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.William was interviewed ahead of this weekend\u2019s Earthshot Prize ceremony in London, an initiative founded by the prince in an effort to acknowledge those working to find solutions to some of the world\u2019s most pressing environmental issues.Story continues below advertisementShatner\u2019s flight, along with three other civilian astronauts, was the latest installment in a private space movement that has outpaced NASA.AdvertisementThe crew\u2019s 10-minute flight came three months after Bezos flew to space on his company\u2019s New Shepard rocket. (Amazon founder Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cWhat you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,\u201d Shatner told Bezos after the mission, while describing the beauty of the scenes he had witnessed.During the interview, William credited his father, Prince Charles, with working for several decades to raise awareness about the dangers the planet is facing.In an interview with the BBC earlier this week, Charles spoke out about his personal efforts to combat the climate crisis, which include pumping wine and cheese byproducts into his Aston Martin sports car to reduce his carbon footprint.Story continues below advertisementWhen asked if it took a lot of energy \u201cto heat a palace,\u201d the prince said he had installed solar panels at Clarence House, one of the many royal residencies.AdvertisementNew research published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change revealed that at least 85 percent of the world\u2019s population has experienced weather events made worse by climate change.Young people in their teens and 20s say they are becoming increasingly anxious about what their future holds \u2014 from floods to wildfires to extreme heat waves.In a survey across 17 countries, the Pew Research Center found that more and more people regard climate change as a growing threat.Read more:Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?Queen Elizabeth is behind a royal push to cut plastic wasteCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race He made the remarks as 90-year-old actor William Shatner became the oldest person to fly to the edge of space. Prince William: Let\u2019s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live on",
        "author": "Jennifer Hassan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Prince William: Let\u2019s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live on (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1429",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/14/prince-william-earth-space-tourism-race/",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Prince William, second in line to the British throne, has urged people to focus on saving Earth rather than exploring space. He made the remarks as 90-year-old actor William Shatner became the oldest person to fly to the edge of space aboard a rocket operated by Jeff Bezos\u2019s company, Blue Origin. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWilliam, Duke of Cambridge, told the BBC that society needs \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet,\u201d and not focused on \u201ctrying to find the next place to go and live.\u201dHis comments come as world leaders and scientists continue to grapple with the climate change emergency and as activists demand less talk and more concrete action.Greta Thunberg says world leaders\u2019 talk on climate change is \u2018blah blah blah\u2019While the prince did not directly name billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, who are busy launching out-of-this-world trips as part of their own commercial space tourism programs, he made his stance clear: Making Earth a better place to live amid the growing threat of climate change should be prioritized to protect future generations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf we\u2019re not careful, we\u2019re robbing from our children\u2019s future through what we do now,\u201d he said as he explained that becoming a parent had prodded him to look at the world differently.\u201cI want the things that I\u2019ve enjoyed \u2014 the outdoor life, nature, the environment \u2014 I want that to be there for my children,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd not just my children but everyone else\u2019s children.\u201dThe duke has three children with his wife, Catherine: Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.William was interviewed ahead of this weekend\u2019s Earthshot Prize ceremony in London, an initiative founded by the prince in an effort to acknowledge those working to find solutions to some of the world\u2019s most pressing environmental issues.Story continues below advertisementShatner\u2019s flight, along with three other civilian astronauts, was the latest installment in a private space movement that has outpaced NASA.AdvertisementThe crew\u2019s 10-minute flight came three months after Bezos flew to space on his company\u2019s New Shepard rocket. (Amazon founder Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cWhat you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,\u201d Shatner told Bezos after the mission, while describing the beauty of the scenes he had witnessed.During the interview, William credited his father, Prince Charles, with working for several decades to raise awareness about the dangers the planet is facing.In an interview with the BBC earlier this week, Charles spoke out about his personal efforts to combat the climate crisis, which include pumping wine and cheese byproducts into his Aston Martin sports car to reduce his carbon footprint.Story continues below advertisementWhen asked if it took a lot of energy \u201cto heat a palace,\u201d the prince said he had installed solar panels at Clarence House, one of the many royal residencies.AdvertisementNew research published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change revealed that at least 85 percent of the world\u2019s population has experienced weather events made worse by climate change.Young people in their teens and 20s say they are becoming increasingly anxious about what their future holds \u2014 from floods to wildfires to extreme heat waves.In a survey across 17 countries, the Pew Research Center found that more and more people regard climate change as a growing threat.Read more:Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?Queen Elizabeth is behind a royal push to cut plastic wasteCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space race He made the remarks as 90-year-old actor William Shatner became the oldest person to fly to the edge of space. Prince William: Let\u2019s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live on",
        "author": "Jennifer Hassan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earthshot Prize: These innovations could win 1 million pounds from Prince William (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1430",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/earthshot-finalists-prince-william/2021/10/15/399b3398-2ba5-11ec-b17d-985c186de338_story.html",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Britain's Prince William is trying to help save the planet by helping inventors save the planet. On Sunday, he is hosting a kind of Oscars awards and broadcast \u2014 for an audience into green hydrogen energy, coral reef restoration and using insects in compost toilets.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightThe heir of the heir to the British throne is the founder of the Earthshot Prize, which will give 1\u2008million pounds ($1.4\u2008million) each to innovators whose ideas could help mitigate climate change and address some of Earth\u2019s most pressing environmental problems. Ahead of the inaugural awards ceremony, the Duke of Cambridge has been speaking out on climate, with remarks that, by royal standards, have been a wee bit sharp.Prince William: Let\u2019s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live onHe told the BBC there should be more focus on fixing this planet than finding another one to live on. The comments were widely viewed as a swipe at billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, all engaged in the space tourism race \u2014 though Bezos has also pledged $1 billion to land and sea conservation and Musk\u2019s money comes largely from his electric car business. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPrince William\u2019s answer to the climate crisis has been to use his profile \u2014 and money from \u201cfounding partners\u201d \u2014 to launch the Earthshot, self-billed as the \u201cmost prestigious global environment prize in history.\u201dEvery year until 2030, five winners will be selected.More than 750 candidates were put forward by a panel of more than 200 experts. Fifteen finalists were shortlisted. They are vying for the prize money, and also grant money and venture capital support to help scale up.Among the boldfaced names judging the final round: nonagenarian British TV naturalist David Attenborough, Jordan\u2019s Queen Rania, actress Cate Blanchett, singer Shakira and basketball giant Yao Ming.Story continues below advertisementSome of the winners will join Prince William when he attends COP26, the upcoming global climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland.AdvertisementHere are a handful of the eye-catching projects:Solar-powered ironingIn parts of India, roaming \u201cironing wallahs\u201d use charcoal-powered irons to press wrinkles out of clothes. There are an estimated 10\u2008million ironing carts that each burn \u2014 on average \u2014 about 11 pounds of charcoal per day.Vinisha Umashankar, a 14-year-old student from India\u2019s southern Tamil Nadu state, has invented a solar-powered ironing cart to help reduce pollution in cities, including her own. The cart is attached to a bicycle, meaning it\u2019s mobile, and it has solar panels on its roof. It takes about five hours in bright sunshine to fully charge, and vendors can use the iron for six hours a day.Story continues below advertisementShe told The Washington Post that the ironing-cart concept could be applied to other street vendors, too. \u201cSoon, there may be solar veg-carts or ice-cream carts, you never know,\u201d she said. She added that teenagers \u201ccan definitely be good innovators. We are at an age where we have so much energy and drive. .\u2009.\u2009. Our youth definitely has the power to do good in this world.\u201dLiving sea wallsAs the oceans rise in the warming world, humans will build sea walls to protect their cities. Already, the built coastal infrastructure \u2014 walls, pilings, pontoons, marinas \u2014 is greater than the area of all the planet\u2019s mangrove and sea grass forests.AdvertisementTraditional sea walls are mostly barren, as they lack shelter to encourage the biodiversity of a natural environment. But Living Seawalls, a project started by the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, deploys ocean scientists and industrial designers to create \u201chabitat panels,\u201d plates about the size of a large pizza pie that can be screwed onto the sea walls and mimic natural formations, such as rock pools and mangrove roots.Story continues below advertisementUpon these panels, life does grow. The panels are built of \u201creinforced concrete from 3-D printed molds to form complex habitat geometries,\u201d the developers say. They are available in 10 designs \u2014 with names like \u201ckelp holdfast\u201d and \u201csponge fingers.\u201dThe Earthshot judges report early positive results: \u201cLiving Seawalls have 36\u2008percent more marine species than flat sea walls after only two years. Eighty-five species now thrive among the panels.\u201dA pollution-tracking appWhen Ma Jun worked as an investigative journalist for the South China Morning Post, he reported on the impact of air and water pollution created by the booming economy. As an environmental activist, he realized that to fight pollution, you have to measure it and share that information, leading him to found Blue Map.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Map is China\u2019s first public environmental database, accessible via smartphone, offering citizens detailed information on emissions and effluents, from 40,000 factories, bolstered by 160,000 air- and water-quality data points, collected each day.Users can employ this \u201cbig data\u201d to \u201cname and shame\u201d offending businesses and municipalities \u2014 and produce results.\u201cWith 10 million downloads, Blue Map\u2019s network of concerned citizens becomes part of the multi-stakeholder initiative that is changing China\u2019s cities,\u201d the Earthshot judges say. \u201cIt also teaches the world a lesson \u2014 that clever innovation, combined with public participation, is a recipe for progress.\u201dPaying locals to protect forestsDespite the crucial role that forests play in protecting wildlife and buffering climate change, global tree loss is accelerating. Last year, nearly 7 percent more trees were lost than the year before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe government of Costa Rica, one of the finalists, thinks it has a model that others could use to reverse deforestation. The government pays its farmers not to cut trees.In the 1970s and \u201980s, Costa Rica had some of the worst deforestation rates in the world, as locals toppled trees to make way for crops and cattle farming.In 1997, the government took drastic action by introducing a \u201cpayments for environmental services\u201d program, which rewards landowners \u2014 via direct bank payments \u2014 for protecting the forest, reforestation, sustainable forest management and agroforestry. The financial incentives have proved crucial in helping Costa Rica become the first tropical country to not only stop but to reverse deforestation.Electricity to goOlugbenga Olubanjo grew up poor in Nigeria, one of 70\u2008million people in the African nation without reliable electricity. He founded the start-up Reeddi, which provides portable rechargeable battery units to consumers from a vending machine powered by solar panels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementReeddi rents its solar-powered energy capsule, a lithium battery, for $0.50 a day, by cash, mobile phone app or debit card. You take the unit home and are given reward points when you return it.The United Nations reports that there are 600\u2008million people living without access to electricity in Africa. The Earthshot judges think this could be a clean, green, sensible way to bridge the gap.The company says it provides units to over 600 households. If scaled up, with the help of prize money, that number could grow to 12,000 by 2022. Reeddi says its customers use their capsules to power laptops, TVs, fans, lights, radios, phones and, for barbers and beauty salons, hair clippers.Poop-eating fly larvaeUrban sanitation is a growing problem in cities around the world, especially in sprawling city slums that don\u2019t have sewer systems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Nairobi-based company called Sanergy is helping to clean up cities by converting human waste into products that can be used by farmers.Sanergy builds waterless toilets that don\u2019t need to be connected to a sewer system. Underneath the toilets are blue barrels that, when filled, are removed and taken to a recycling factory. There, it\u2019s time for creepy crawlies to get to work. The human waste is consumed by black soldier fly larvae, which in turn transform the feces into organic fertilizer and other agricultural products that can be used by local farmers.\n\n\n\nQueen Elizabeth II expresses irritation at world leaders who won\u2019t commit to COP climate summitPrince Charles says his Aston Martin runs on wine and cheese byproducts The inaugural awards will be presented on Sunday. Earthshot Prize: These innovations could win 1 million pounds from Prince William",
        "author": "Karla Adam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earthshot Prize: These innovations could win 1 million pounds from Prince William (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1431",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/earthshot-finalists-prince-william/2021/10/15/399b3398-2ba5-11ec-b17d-985c186de338_story.html",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Britain's Prince William is trying to help save the planet by helping inventors save the planet. On Sunday, he is hosting a kind of Oscars awards and broadcast \u2014 for an audience into green hydrogen energy, coral reef restoration and using insects in compost toilets.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightThe heir of the heir to the British throne is the founder of the Earthshot Prize, which will give 1\u2008million pounds ($1.4\u2008million) each to innovators whose ideas could help mitigate climate change and address some of Earth\u2019s most pressing environmental problems. Ahead of the inaugural awards ceremony, the Duke of Cambridge has been speaking out on climate, with remarks that, by royal standards, have been a wee bit sharp.Prince William: Let\u2019s focus on saving Earth, not exploring space for new planet to live onHe told the BBC there should be more focus on fixing this planet than finding another one to live on. The comments were widely viewed as a swipe at billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson, all engaged in the space tourism race \u2014 though Bezos has also pledged $1 billion to land and sea conservation and Musk\u2019s money comes largely from his electric car business. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPrince William\u2019s answer to the climate crisis has been to use his profile \u2014 and money from \u201cfounding partners\u201d \u2014 to launch the Earthshot, self-billed as the \u201cmost prestigious global environment prize in history.\u201dEvery year until 2030, five winners will be selected.More than 750 candidates were put forward by a panel of more than 200 experts. Fifteen finalists were shortlisted. They are vying for the prize money, and also grant money and venture capital support to help scale up.Among the boldfaced names judging the final round: nonagenarian British TV naturalist David Attenborough, Jordan\u2019s Queen Rania, actress Cate Blanchett, singer Shakira and basketball giant Yao Ming.Story continues below advertisementSome of the winners will join Prince William when he attends COP26, the upcoming global climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland.AdvertisementHere are a handful of the eye-catching projects:Solar-powered ironingIn parts of India, roaming \u201cironing wallahs\u201d use charcoal-powered irons to press wrinkles out of clothes. There are an estimated 10\u2008million ironing carts that each burn \u2014 on average \u2014 about 11 pounds of charcoal per day.Vinisha Umashankar, a 14-year-old student from India\u2019s southern Tamil Nadu state, has invented a solar-powered ironing cart to help reduce pollution in cities, including her own. The cart is attached to a bicycle, meaning it\u2019s mobile, and it has solar panels on its roof. It takes about five hours in bright sunshine to fully charge, and vendors can use the iron for six hours a day.Story continues below advertisementShe told The Washington Post that the ironing-cart concept could be applied to other street vendors, too. \u201cSoon, there may be solar veg-carts or ice-cream carts, you never know,\u201d she said. She added that teenagers \u201ccan definitely be good innovators. We are at an age where we have so much energy and drive. .\u2009.\u2009. Our youth definitely has the power to do good in this world.\u201dLiving sea wallsAs the oceans rise in the warming world, humans will build sea walls to protect their cities. Already, the built coastal infrastructure \u2014 walls, pilings, pontoons, marinas \u2014 is greater than the area of all the planet\u2019s mangrove and sea grass forests.AdvertisementTraditional sea walls are mostly barren, as they lack shelter to encourage the biodiversity of a natural environment. But Living Seawalls, a project started by the Sydney Institute of Marine Science, deploys ocean scientists and industrial designers to create \u201chabitat panels,\u201d plates about the size of a large pizza pie that can be screwed onto the sea walls and mimic natural formations, such as rock pools and mangrove roots.Story continues below advertisementUpon these panels, life does grow. The panels are built of \u201creinforced concrete from 3-D printed molds to form complex habitat geometries,\u201d the developers say. They are available in 10 designs \u2014 with names like \u201ckelp holdfast\u201d and \u201csponge fingers.\u201dThe Earthshot judges report early positive results: \u201cLiving Seawalls have 36\u2008percent more marine species than flat sea walls after only two years. Eighty-five species now thrive among the panels.\u201dA pollution-tracking appWhen Ma Jun worked as an investigative journalist for the South China Morning Post, he reported on the impact of air and water pollution created by the booming economy. As an environmental activist, he realized that to fight pollution, you have to measure it and share that information, leading him to found Blue Map.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Map is China\u2019s first public environmental database, accessible via smartphone, offering citizens detailed information on emissions and effluents, from 40,000 factories, bolstered by 160,000 air- and water-quality data points, collected each day.Users can employ this \u201cbig data\u201d to \u201cname and shame\u201d offending businesses and municipalities \u2014 and produce results.\u201cWith 10 million downloads, Blue Map\u2019s network of concerned citizens becomes part of the multi-stakeholder initiative that is changing China\u2019s cities,\u201d the Earthshot judges say. \u201cIt also teaches the world a lesson \u2014 that clever innovation, combined with public participation, is a recipe for progress.\u201dPaying locals to protect forestsDespite the crucial role that forests play in protecting wildlife and buffering climate change, global tree loss is accelerating. Last year, nearly 7 percent more trees were lost than the year before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe government of Costa Rica, one of the finalists, thinks it has a model that others could use to reverse deforestation. The government pays its farmers not to cut trees.In the 1970s and \u201980s, Costa Rica had some of the worst deforestation rates in the world, as locals toppled trees to make way for crops and cattle farming.In 1997, the government took drastic action by introducing a \u201cpayments for environmental services\u201d program, which rewards landowners \u2014 via direct bank payments \u2014 for protecting the forest, reforestation, sustainable forest management and agroforestry. The financial incentives have proved crucial in helping Costa Rica become the first tropical country to not only stop but to reverse deforestation.Electricity to goOlugbenga Olubanjo grew up poor in Nigeria, one of 70\u2008million people in the African nation without reliable electricity. He founded the start-up Reeddi, which provides portable rechargeable battery units to consumers from a vending machine powered by solar panels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementReeddi rents its solar-powered energy capsule, a lithium battery, for $0.50 a day, by cash, mobile phone app or debit card. You take the unit home and are given reward points when you return it.The United Nations reports that there are 600\u2008million people living without access to electricity in Africa. The Earthshot judges think this could be a clean, green, sensible way to bridge the gap.The company says it provides units to over 600 households. If scaled up, with the help of prize money, that number could grow to 12,000 by 2022. Reeddi says its customers use their capsules to power laptops, TVs, fans, lights, radios, phones and, for barbers and beauty salons, hair clippers.Poop-eating fly larvaeUrban sanitation is a growing problem in cities around the world, especially in sprawling city slums that don\u2019t have sewer systems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Nairobi-based company called Sanergy is helping to clean up cities by converting human waste into products that can be used by farmers.Sanergy builds waterless toilets that don\u2019t need to be connected to a sewer system. Underneath the toilets are blue barrels that, when filled, are removed and taken to a recycling factory. There, it\u2019s time for creepy crawlies to get to work. The human waste is consumed by black soldier fly larvae, which in turn transform the feces into organic fertilizer and other agricultural products that can be used by local farmers.\n\n\n\nQueen Elizabeth II expresses irritation at world leaders who won\u2019t commit to COP climate summitPrince Charles says his Aston Martin runs on wine and cheese byproducts The inaugural awards will be presented on Sunday. Earthshot Prize: These innovations could win 1 million pounds from Prince William",
        "author": "Karla Adam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia\u2019s space chief pens stargazing ballads. They also serve Moscow\u2019s political orbit. (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1432",
        "date": "2020-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-space-roscosmos-songs/2020/12/27/f6c4959e-3741-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html",
        "text": "ST. PETERSBURG \u2014 Austerity measures are gripping the Russian space agency Roscosmos, with management facing up to a 20\u00a0percent salary hit and staff layoffs predicted.What\u2019s more, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported this month that top officials were fired at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a vast spaceport being built in Russia\u2019s Far East. Accusations of corruption have surrounded the spaceport\u2019s construction since the release of a report last year by opposition leader Alexei Navalny\u2019s now-defunct Anti-Corruption Foundation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRoscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin is trying to craft a more upbeat tune \u2014 literally.Rogozin \u2014 a longtime songwriter who mixes a bit of Venus and Vegas \u2014 has lent his name to an album\u2019s worth of patriotic space-themed songs released last month on the agency\u2019s official website. Three of the songs he wrote himself, though all are performed by other singers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe album\u2019s version of Ro",
        "author": "Josh Nadeau"
    },
    {
        "title": "Leaps for Humankind (WSJ: Exhibit) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1433",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaps-for-humankind-11550859706?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=16",
        "text": "Gene Kranz,\n\n\n\n chief flight director of the Apollo program, recalls in a short essay the \u201cmarvelous merger of the cultures of the [computer-savvy] young and old\u2026. It was just a magical time.\u201d But in space flight, disaster was never far away. Three astronauts died in a fire during a 1967 rehearsal for Apollo 1, and two space shuttles broke up in flight, the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, taking 14 lives. \nLater pages of \u201cThe NASA Archives\u201d focus on Mars landings and photos taken by the agency\u2019s space telescopes. Now almost 30 years old, the Hubble Space Telescope captured the Pillars of Creation\u2014vast gas-and-dust towers in a nebula about 7,000 light years away, where new stars are being formed.\nFor some astronauts, however, it was the Earth itself that provided the most electrifying views. An essay in the book quotes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Anders,\n\n\n\n who orbited the moon during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. From space, our home planet \u201creminded me of a Christmas tree ornament,\u201d Mr. Anders said. \u201cVery fragile, delicate...the most beautiful thing I\u2019d ever seen.\u201d \n\n\n\u2014Peter Saenger\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Nasa Archives\u2019A look at some dramatic images from the history of space exploration\u00a0\u00a0Workers surround an X-15 on the ground in 1961. Three operational X-15s flew 199 test flights overall, reaching the edges of space as NASA\u2019s program geared up.NASA1 of 8\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 8Hide CaptionWorkers surround an X-15 on the ground in 1961. Three operational X-15s flew 199 test flights overall, reaching the edges of space as NASA\u2019s program geared up.NASA A new book, \u201cThe NASA Archives,\u201d features dramatic images from the history of space exploration ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Leaps for Humankind (WSJ: Exhibit) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1434",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaps-for-humankind-11550859706?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=59",
        "text": "Gene Kranz,\n\n\n\n chief flight director of the Apollo program, recalls in a short essay the \u201cmarvelous merger of the cultures of the [computer-savvy] young and old\u2026. It was just a magical time.\u201d But in space flight, disaster was never far away. Three astronauts died in a fire during a 1967 rehearsal for Apollo 1, and two space shuttles broke up in flight, the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, taking 14 lives. \nLater pages of \u201cThe NASA Archives\u201d focus on Mars landings and photos taken by the agency\u2019s space telescopes. Now almost 30 years old, the Hubble Space Telescope captured the Pillars of Creation\u2014vast gas-and-dust towers in a nebula about 7,000 light years away, where new stars are being formed.\nFor some astronauts, however, it was the Earth itself that provided the most electrifying views. An essay in the book quotes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Anders,\n\n\n\n who orbited the moon during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. From space, our home planet \u201creminded me of a Christmas tree ornament,\u201d Mr. Anders said. \u201cVery fragile, delicate...the most beautiful thing I\u2019d ever seen.\u201d \n\n\n\u2014Peter Saenger\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Nasa Archives\u2019A look at some dramatic images from the history of space exploration\u00a0\u00a0Workers surround an X-15 on the ground in 1961. Three operational X-15s flew 199 test flights overall, reaching the edges of space as NASA\u2019s program geared up.NASA1 of 8\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 8Hide CaptionWorkers surround an X-15 on the ground in 1961. Three operational X-15s flew 199 test flights overall, reaching the edges of space as NASA\u2019s program geared up.NASA A new book, \u201cThe NASA Archives,\u201d features dramatic images from the history of space exploration ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Leaps for Humankind (WSJ: Exhibit) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1435",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/leaps-for-humankind-11550859706?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=78",
        "text": "Gene Kranz,\n\n\n\n chief flight director of the Apollo program, recalls in a short essay the \u201cmarvelous merger of the cultures of the [computer-savvy] young and old\u2026. It was just a magical time.\u201d But in space flight, disaster was never far away. Three astronauts died in a fire during a 1967 rehearsal for Apollo 1, and two space shuttles broke up in flight, the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003, taking 14 lives. \nLater pages of \u201cThe NASA Archives\u201d focus on Mars landings and photos taken by the agency\u2019s space telescopes. Now almost 30 years old, the Hubble Space Telescope captured the Pillars of Creation\u2014vast gas-and-dust towers in a nebula about 7,000 light years away, where new stars are being formed.\n\n\n\n\nFor some astronauts, however, it was the Earth itself that provided the most electrifying views. An essay in the book quotes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Anders,\n\n\n\n who orbited the moon during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. From space, our home planet \u201creminded me of a Christmas tree ornament,\u201d Mr. Anders said. \u201cVery fragile, delicate...the most beautiful thing I\u2019d ever seen.\u201d \n\n\n\u2014Peter Saenger\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Nasa Archives\u2019A look at some dramatic images from the history of space exploration\u00a0\u00a0Workers surround an X-15 on the ground in 1961. Three operational X-15s flew 199 test flights overall, reaching the edges of space as NASA\u2019s program geared up.NASA1 of 8\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 8Hide CaptionWorkers surround an X-15 on the ground in 1961. Three operational X-15s flew 199 test flights overall, reaching the edges of space as NASA\u2019s program geared up.NASA A new book, \u201cThe NASA Archives,\u201d features dramatic images from the history of space exploration ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Journey Through and of the Stars (WSJ: Exhibition Review) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1436",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/journey-through-and-of-the-stars-11582748293?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=13",
        "text": "New York\nAs we are thrust along a spacecraft\u2019s trajectory through the blackness of space, heading toward Saturn, I think of how far we\u2019ve traveled. I am not referring to that unmanned Cassini spacecraft with its 13-year exploration of that planet, nor to the distances traversed within this meticulous, otherworldly 25-minute survey of the solar system in the Hayden Planetarium\u2019s newest space show at the American Museum of Natural History, \u201cWorlds Beyond Earth.\u201d No, I\u2019m referring to how far we have traveled in thinking about planetariums. \nThat voyage has roughly extended from the 692 holes punched in the 1913 17-foot Atwood Sphere, evoking stars in the Chicago sky, past the projector invented by Carl Zeiss Optical Works a decade later, which cast the light of planets and stars across screened domes, to the latest technology updated at the Hayden last year: Christie Digital\u2019s \u201cfulldome\u201d laser projectors, said to provide \u201cthe world\u2019s most advanced planetarium projection system\u201d accompanied by state-of-the-art speakers and vibrating seats.\n\nThis means that when we catapult into Saturn\u2019s gossamer rings, we see they are composed of house-size rocks and we feel the frantic jostling. The show\u2019s vistas\u2014like the roiling surface of Jupiter\u2019s moon Io, or the methane lakes of Saturn\u2019s moon Titan\u2014are also not speculations; they are vivid realizations of data gathered by a half-century of unmanned missions.\nThe show is a marvelous virtual tour of other worlds. But it also helps reveal something about the planetarium\u2019s evolution, suggesting both what has been gained and lost. Some transformations are alluded to in the pre-show video, \u201cStories in the Sky.\u201d\nWith digital technology, the video explains, the planetarium has moved away from \u201cthe classic way people think about planetariums.\u201d What was that classic way? The pre-millennial Hayden included a mural depicting the cosmology of the Blackfeet Indians along with representations of the Aztec calendar. And when the show began, you would look up and see the sky at dusk, surrounded by a darkening silhouette of the New York skyline. \nWe would often gasp as \u201cnight\u201d fell and the dome seemed to dissolve into a field of stars. A guide wielding an arrow-shaped flashlight beam might then outline an order in the heavens, showing, perhaps, the constellations of a mythological skyscape, or revealing how the visible sky has altered over the centuries. In the classic planetarium, we learned that our ancestors created myths and discerned laws, and that even now\u2014tonight\u2014we can look up at the sky, identify constellations and perceive a cosmos, an order.\nBut while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Copernicus\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Galileo\n\n\n\n revealed that humanity is not at the center of the universe, now humanity is no longer at the center of the planetarium. By the time the Hayden rebooted in 2000, the planetarium ceased being about projecting the human imagination outward; instead, it became an attempt to project the cosmos inward, imprinting it on the imagination, even stupefying it. At the Hayden\u2019s major shows, allusions to myth or constellations or an earthly vantage point have been discarded. Humanity\u2019s inconsequence is graphically represented in the building\u2019s spiraling \u201cCosmic Pathway,\u201d a walk through the universe\u2019s history, beginning with the Big Bang. Each inch represents more than 3 million years. After 360 feet and 13 billion years, we finally reach human history; it has the width of a human hair. \nThis is indeed what cosmology tells us, and what the technology now shows. Zeiss projectors, which defined the 20th century planetarium, showed the stars as seen from Earth. Contemporary technologies let us enter the sky itself. We can stand\u2014or not stand\u2014anywhere. In the introductory video, the astrophysicist and director of the Hayden, Neil deGrasse Tyson, points out that at the planetarium the question is no longer \u201cI wonder what the sky is going to look like tonight.\u201d It is \u201cWhere are you going to take me on this next voyage?\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the show, visualizations based on 13 years of data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft will show viewers Saturn's rings\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AMNH\n \n\n\n\nThis approach offers risks as well as promises. I have seen shows at other planetariums that turn such voyages into little more than theme-park rides. But here, the approach also illuminates. This show is \u201ccurated\u201d (the museum\u2019s word) by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Denton Ebel,\n\n\n\n the chairman of the division of physical sciences, with a script by the geologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Natalie Starkey,\n\n\n\n narration by Lupita Nyong\u2019o, a score by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Miller,\n\n\n\n and masterful imagery overseen by the museum\u2019s \u201cdirector of astrovisualization,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carter Emmart.\n\n\n\n \nIn this show, the Earth is never completely left behind. Throughout our solar system, aspects of Earth\u2019s environment\u2014such as magnetic fields, atmosphere, A new show at the Hayden Planetarium reveals as much about the history of planetariums themselves as it does our solar system. ",
        "author": "Edward Rothstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Journey Through and of the Stars (WSJ: Exhibition Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1437",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/journey-through-and-of-the-stars-11582748293?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=48",
        "text": "New York\nAs we are thrust along a spacecraft\u2019s trajectory through the blackness of space, heading toward Saturn, I think of how far we\u2019ve traveled. I am not referring to that unmanned Cassini spacecraft with its 13-year exploration of that planet, nor to the distances traversed within this meticulous, otherworldly 25-minute survey of the solar system in the Hayden Planetarium\u2019s newest space show at the American Museum of Natural History, \u201cWorlds Beyond Earth.\u201d No, I\u2019m referring to how far we have traveled in thinking about planetariums. \n\n\n\n\nThat voyage has roughly extended from the 692 holes punched in the 1913 17-foot Atwood Sphere, evoking stars in the Chicago sky, past the projector invented by Carl Zeiss Optical Works a decade later, which cast the light of planets and stars across screened domes, to the latest technology updated at the Hayden last year: Christie Digital\u2019s \u201cfulldome\u201d laser projectors, said to provide \u201cthe world\u2019s most advanced planetarium projection system\u201d accompanied by state-of-the-art speakers and vibrating seats.\n\nThis means that when we catapult into Saturn\u2019s gossamer rings, we see they are composed of house-size rocks and we feel the frantic jostling. The show\u2019s vistas\u2014like the roiling surface of Jupiter\u2019s moon Io, or the methane lakes of Saturn\u2019s moon Titan\u2014are also not speculations; they are vivid realizations of data gathered by a half-century of unmanned missions.\nThe show is a marvelous virtual tour of other worlds. But it also helps reveal something about the planetarium\u2019s evolution, suggesting both what has been gained and lost. Some transformations are alluded to in the pre-show video, \u201cStories in the Sky.\u201d\nWith digital technology, the video explains, the planetarium has moved away from \u201cthe classic way people think about planetariums.\u201d What was that classic way? The pre-millennial Hayden included a mural depicting the cosmology of the Blackfeet Indians along with representations of the Aztec calendar. And when the show began, you would look up and see the sky at dusk, surrounded by a darkening silhouette of the New York skyline. \nWe would often gasp as \u201cnight\u201d fell and the dome seemed to dissolve into a field of stars. A guide wielding an arrow-shaped flashlight beam might then outline an order in the heavens, showing, perhaps, the constellations of a mythological skyscape, or revealing how the visible sky has altered over the centuries. In the classic planetarium, we learned that our ancestors created myths and discerned laws, and that even now\u2014tonight\u2014we can look up at the sky, identify constellations and perceive a cosmos, an order.\nBut while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Copernicus\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Galileo\n\n\n\n revealed that humanity is not at the center of the universe, now humanity is no longer at the center of the planetarium. By the time the Hayden rebooted in 2000, the planetarium ceased being about projecting the human imagination outward; instead, it became an attempt to project the cosmos inward, imprinting it on the imagination, even stupefying it. At the Hayden\u2019s major shows, allusions to myth or constellations or an earthly vantage point have been discarded. Humanity\u2019s inconsequence is graphically represented in the building\u2019s spiraling \u201cCosmic Pathway,\u201d a walk through the universe\u2019s history, beginning with the Big Bang. Each inch represents more than 3 million years. After 360 feet and 13 billion years, we finally reach human history; it has the width of a human hair. \nThis is indeed what cosmology tells us, and what the technology now shows. Zeiss projectors, which defined the 20th century planetarium, showed the stars as seen from Earth. Contemporary technologies let us enter the sky itself. We can stand\u2014or not stand\u2014anywhere. In the introductory video, the astrophysicist and director of the Hayden, Neil deGrasse Tyson, points out that at the planetarium the question is no longer \u201cI wonder what the sky is going to look like tonight.\u201d It is \u201cWhere are you going to take me on this next voyage?\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the show, visualizations based on 13 years of data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft will show viewers Saturn's rings\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AMNH\n \n\n\n\nThis approach offers risks as well as promises. I have seen shows at other planetariums that turn such voyages into little more than theme-park rides. But here, the approach also illuminates. This show is \u201ccurated\u201d (the museum\u2019s word) by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Denton Ebel,\n\n\n\n the chairman of the division of physical sciences, with a script by the geologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Natalie Starkey,\n\n\n\n narration by Lupita Nyong\u2019o, a score by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Miller,\n\n\n\n and masterful imagery overseen by the museum\u2019s \u201cdirector of astrovisualization,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carter Emmart.\n\n\n\n \nIn this show, the Earth is never completely left behind. Throughout our solar system, aspects of Earth\u2019s environment\u2014such as magnetic fields, atmosphere, water and volcanoes\u2014reappear, but that system has only a very narrow region, the show tells us, where temperatures could support life. Astrophysicists suggest this \u201cGoldilocks zone\u201d (because it is \u201cjust right\u201d) encompasses Venus, Earth and Mars. But Venus suffers from a \u201cgreenhouse effect\u201d causing surface temperatures that can melt lead, and Mars, some 3.5 billion years ago, suffered from \u201cdramatic climate change\u201d that turned it into a \u201cfailed Earth.\u201d Only our planet flourishes. The show ends with a warning about its sustainability, a now-ritualistic conclusion. \nBut this allusion is quite different from the relevance of the classic planetarium, which was inspired by human experience and then led us deeper into space. The cosmos, we learned, was also a part of earthly history. What was seen in the stars made navigation possible; it allowed measurements and predictions, agriculture and calendars. Hayden\u2019s major shows now eclipse such themes. Why? There must be a way to illuminate both the human-based cosmos within which we live and the deep space being explored. \nRight now we can be amazed at facts, simulations and sensations. But for a flavor of older planetariums, we can use phone apps that identify constellations, planets and galaxies when held up to the sky. They also allow us to see the heavens itself and experience the phenomenon that lay at the planetarium\u2019s origins and still accounts for much of its power: simple wonder at the night sky, from which all explorations still begin.\n\u2014Mr. Rothstein is the Journal\u2019s Critic at Large. A new show at the Hayden Planetarium reveals as much about the history of planetariums themselves as it does our solar system. ",
        "author": "Edward Rothstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Journey Through and of the Stars (WSJ: Exhibition Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1438",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/journey-through-and-of-the-stars-11582748293?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=47",
        "text": "New York\nAs we are thrust along a spacecraft\u2019s trajectory through the blackness of space, heading toward Saturn, I think of how far we\u2019ve traveled. I am not referring to that unmanned Cassini spacecraft with its 13-year exploration of that planet, nor to the distances traversed within this meticulous, otherworldly 25-minute survey of the solar system in the Hayden Planetarium\u2019s newest space show at the American Museum of Natural History, \u201cWorlds Beyond Earth.\u201d No, I\u2019m referring to how far we have traveled in thinking about planetariums. \nThat voyage has roughly extended from the 692 holes punched in the 1913 17-foot Atwood Sphere, evoking stars in the Chicago sky, past the projector invented by Carl Zeiss Optical Works a decade later, which cast the light of planets and stars across screened domes, to the latest technology updated at the Hayden last year: Christie Digital\u2019s \u201cfulldome\u201d laser projectors, said to provide \u201cthe world\u2019s most advanced planetarium projection system\u201d accompanied by state-of-the-art speakers and vibrating seats.\n\nThis means that when we catapult into Saturn\u2019s gossamer rings, we see they are composed of house-size rocks and we feel the frantic jostling. The show\u2019s vistas\u2014like the roiling surface of Jupiter\u2019s moon Io, or the methane lakes of Saturn\u2019s moon Titan\u2014are also not speculations; they are vivid realizations of data gathered by a half-century of unmanned missions.\nThe show is a marvelous virtual tour of other worlds. But it also helps reveal something about the planetarium\u2019s evolution, suggesting both what has been gained and lost. Some transformations are alluded to in the pre-show video, \u201cStories in the Sky.\u201d\nWith digital technology, the video explains, the planetarium has moved away from \u201cthe classic way people think about planetariums.\u201d What was that classic way? The pre-millennial Hayden included a mural depicting the cosmology of the Blackfeet Indians along with representations of the Aztec calendar. And when the show began, you would look up and see the sky at dusk, surrounded by a darkening silhouette of the New York skyline. \nWe would often gasp as \u201cnight\u201d fell and the dome seemed to dissolve into a field of stars. A guide wielding an arrow-shaped flashlight beam might then outline an order in the heavens, showing, perhaps, the constellations of a mythological skyscape, or revealing how the visible sky has altered over the centuries. In the classic planetarium, we learned that our ancestors created myths and discerned laws, and that even now\u2014tonight\u2014we can look up at the sky, identify constellations and perceive a cosmos, an order.\nBut while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Copernicus\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Galileo\n\n\n\n revealed that humanity is not at the center of the universe, now humanity is no longer at the center of the planetarium. By the time the Hayden rebooted in 2000, the planetarium ceased being about projecting the human imagination outward; instead, it became an attempt to project the cosmos inward, imprinting it on the imagination, even stupefying it. At the Hayden\u2019s major shows, allusions to myth or constellations or an earthly vantage point have been discarded. Humanity\u2019s inconsequence is graphically represented in the building\u2019s spiraling \u201cCosmic Pathway,\u201d a walk through the universe\u2019s history, beginning with the Big Bang. Each inch represents more than 3 million years. After 360 feet and 13 billion years, we finally reach human history; it has the width of a human hair. \nThis is indeed what cosmology tells us, and what the technology now shows. Zeiss projectors, which defined the 20th century planetarium, showed the stars as seen from Earth. Contemporary technologies let us enter the sky itself. We can stand\u2014or not stand\u2014anywhere. In the introductory video, the astrophysicist and director of the Hayden, Neil deGrasse Tyson, points out that at the planetarium the question is no longer \u201cI wonder what the sky is going to look like tonight.\u201d It is \u201cWhere are you going to take me on this next voyage?\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the show, visualizations based on 13 years of data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft will show viewers Saturn's rings\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AMNH\n \n\n\n\nThis approach offers risks as well as promises. I have seen shows at other planetariums that turn such voyages into little more than theme-park rides. But here, the approach also illuminates. This show is \u201ccurated\u201d (the museum\u2019s word) by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Denton Ebel,\n\n\n\n the chairman of the division of physical sciences, with a script by the geologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Natalie Starkey,\n\n\n\n narration by Lupita Nyong\u2019o, a score by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Miller,\n\n\n\n and masterful imagery overseen by the museum\u2019s \u201cdirector of astrovisualization,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carter Emmart.\n\n\n\n \nIn this show, the Earth is never completely left behind. Throughout our solar system, aspects of Earth\u2019s environment\u2014such as magnetic fields, atmosphere, A new show at the Hayden Planetarium reveals as much about the history of planetariums themselves as it does our solar system. ",
        "author": "Edward Rothstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Journey Through and of the Stars (WSJ: Exhibition Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1439",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/journey-through-and-of-the-stars-11582748293?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=59",
        "text": "New York\nAs we are thrust along a spacecraft\u2019s trajectory through the blackness of space, heading toward Saturn, I think of how far we\u2019ve traveled. I am not referring to that unmanned Cassini spacecraft with its 13-year exploration of that planet, nor to the distances traversed within this meticulous, otherworldly 25-minute survey of the solar system in the Hayden Planetarium\u2019s newest space show at the American Museum of Natural History, \u201cWorlds Beyond Earth.\u201d No, I\u2019m referring to how far we have traveled in thinking about planetariums. \n\n\n\n\nThat voyage has roughly extended from the 692 holes punched in the 1913 17-foot Atwood Sphere, evoking stars in the Chicago sky, past the projector invented by Carl Zeiss Optical Works a decade later, which cast the light of planets and stars across screened domes, to the latest technology updated at the Hayden last year: Christie Digital\u2019s \u201cfulldome\u201d laser projectors, said to provide \u201cthe world\u2019s most advanced planetarium projection system\u201d accompanied by state-of-the-art speakers and vibrating seats.\n\nThis means that when we catapult into Saturn\u2019s gossamer rings, we see they are composed of house-size rocks and we feel the frantic jostling. The show\u2019s vistas\u2014like the roiling surface of Jupiter\u2019s moon Io, or the methane lakes of Saturn\u2019s moon Titan\u2014are also not speculations; they are vivid realizations of data gathered by a half-century of unmanned missions.\nThe show is a marvelous virtual tour of other worlds. But it also helps reveal something about the planetarium\u2019s evolution, suggesting both what has been gained and lost. Some transformations are alluded to in the pre-show video, \u201cStories in the Sky.\u201d\nWith digital technology, the video explains, the planetarium has moved away from \u201cthe classic way people think about planetariums.\u201d What was that classic way? The pre-millennial Hayden included a mural depicting the cosmology of the Blackfeet Indians along with representations of the Aztec calendar. And when the show began, you would look up and see the sky at dusk, surrounded by a darkening silhouette of the New York skyline. \nWe would often gasp as \u201cnight\u201d fell and the dome seemed to dissolve into a field of stars. A guide wielding an arrow-shaped flashlight beam might then outline an order in the heavens, showing, perhaps, the constellations of a mythological skyscape, or revealing how the visible sky has altered over the centuries. In the classic planetarium, we learned that our ancestors created myths and discerned laws, and that even now\u2014tonight\u2014we can look up at the sky, identify constellations and perceive a cosmos, an order.\nBut while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Copernicus\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Galileo\n\n\n\n revealed that humanity is not at the center of the universe, now humanity is no longer at the center of the planetarium. By the time the Hayden rebooted in 2000, the planetarium ceased being about projecting the human imagination outward; instead, it became an attempt to project the cosmos inward, imprinting it on the imagination, even stupefying it. At the Hayden\u2019s major shows, allusions to myth or constellations or an earthly vantage point have been discarded. Humanity\u2019s inconsequence is graphically represented in the building\u2019s spiraling \u201cCosmic Pathway,\u201d a walk through the universe\u2019s history, beginning with the Big Bang. Each inch represents more than 3 million years. After 360 feet and 13 billion years, we finally reach human history; it has the width of a human hair. \nThis is indeed what cosmology tells us, and what the technology now shows. Zeiss projectors, which defined the 20th century planetarium, showed the stars as seen from Earth. Contemporary technologies let us enter the sky itself. We can stand\u2014or not stand\u2014anywhere. In the introductory video, the astrophysicist and director of the Hayden, Neil deGrasse Tyson, points out that at the planetarium the question is no longer \u201cI wonder what the sky is going to look like tonight.\u201d It is \u201cWhere are you going to take me on this next voyage?\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the show, visualizations based on 13 years of data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft will show viewers Saturn's rings\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AMNH\n \n\n\n\nThis approach offers risks as well as promises. I have seen shows at other planetariums that turn such voyages into little more than theme-park rides. But here, the approach also illuminates. This show is \u201ccurated\u201d (the museum\u2019s word) by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Denton Ebel,\n\n\n\n the chairman of the division of physical sciences, with a script by the geologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Natalie Starkey,\n\n\n\n narration by Lupita Nyong\u2019o, a score by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Miller,\n\n\n\n and masterful imagery overseen by the museum\u2019s \u201cdirector of astrovisualization,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carter Emmart.\n\n\n\n \nIn this show, the Earth is never completely left behind. Throughout our solar system, aspects of Earth\u2019s environment\u2014such as magnetic fields, atmosph A new show at the Hayden Planetarium reveals as much about the history of planetariums themselves as it does our solar system. ",
        "author": "Edward Rothstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Expedition: Fashion From the Extreme\u2019 Review: Survival Couture (WSJ: Exhibition Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1440",
        "date": "2017-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/expedition-fashion-from-the-extreme-review-survival-couture-1505851766?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=113",
        "text": "New York\n\n\nThose familiar with the habitat dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History will feel a jolt of recognition at the entrance of \u201cExpedition: Fashion From the Extreme,\u201d the Museum at FIT\u2019s gallant new show. There it is, the Serengeti Plain diorama\u2014same gnarled tree, same golden grasslands\u2014but instead of zebras and gazelles we have five khaki safari outfits. Two are the real thing: a suit made by Abercrombie & Fitch (1913-15) and a jacket by Burberry (1940). The other three are playful appropriations that include a tawny pair of lace-up safari tunics by Yves Saint Laurent (1968) and a Ralph Lauren-meets-Karen Blixen ensemble (1984). What a perfect metaphor for an exhibition that heads off into uncharted territory.\n\n\nExpedition: Fashion From the Extreme \n\n\n\nThe Museum at FIT\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThrough Jan. 6, 2018\n\n\n\n\nMore Exhibition Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018City of Cinema: Paris 1850-1900\u2019 Review: City of Lights, Camera, Action\nFebruary 24, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Reinvention and Restlessness: Fashion in the Nineties\u2019 Review: Decoding a Decade\nFebruary 5, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects\u2019 Review: Magnificent Obsession\nJanuary 29, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cExpedition\u201d is the first major exhibition to show how clothing that was developed to preserve life in extreme environments went on to inspire couture and ready-to-wear fashion. As\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patricia Mears,\n\n\n\n FIT deputy director and the curator of this show, writes in the exhibition brochure: \u201cExpeditions to the North and South poles, the highest mountain peaks, the depths of the ocean, and outer space have been widely covered in the press for more than a century. But it was not until the 1960s that these endeavors began to influence fashion.\u201d\nLeaving the sunny cradle of mankind behind, Ms. Mears divides the show into four areas of exploration: Arctic, Mountaineering, Deep Sea and Outer Space. The main gallery is painted a deep blue-black that here glows ultraviolet, there oceanic teal. White icebergs and snowcaps create frigid landscapes, blanched reefs invoke leagues under the sea, and in the center of the gallery a circular metal scaffold supports a hovering cylinder of light, the abstraction of a spaceship. A white noise of howls, wind and water sounds the elemental. The show contains 65 ensembles\u2014the most historic and fragile presented in plexiglass cubes, as if preserved in blocks of ice. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPierre Cardin\u2019s Cosmocorps collection (1967)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Yoshi Takata/Archives Pierre Cardin\n \n\n\n\n\u201cExpedition\u201d begins in the Arctic because polar navigation came first, cresting in the years 1880 to 1920. This section contains two stunning touchstones: the head-to-toe fur ensemble of blue fox and polar bear that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew Henson\n\n\n\n wore in 1909, when he reached the North Pole with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Peary\n\n\n\n and four Inuit men; and a Siberian funerary robe of intricately patterned fur piecework, dating to about 1900 and exceedingly rare because these robes were burned with the body. Both these garments speak to a time when skins and furs were vital for polar survival. (The exhibition\u2019s superb companion book tells of how\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Scott\n\n\n\n and his team, unwisely outfitted in Western textiles, perished in 1912 in Antarctica.) \n\n\n\n\n\n\nJunya Watanabe coat (fall/winter 2014)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Museum at FIT\n \n\n\n\nIn the 1960s, Vogue editor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Diana Vreeland\n\n\n\n pushed geographical boundaries with fashion shoots that were themselves expeditions to harsh yet breathtaking climes, and even the great couturier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Madame Gr\u00e8s,\n\n\n\n famous for Grecian pleating, acknowledged expeditioneers with a 1969 apr\u00e8s ski outfit that included wolf-fur pants, here on display.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Issey Miyake\u2019s\n\n\n\n white felt and faux fur jacket (1997) is pure Sherpa chic, while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Karl Lagerfeld,\n\n\n\n in 2010, channeled Peary and Henson with an outrageous Chewbacca-like faux fur suit for men. A black silk gown from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yohji Yamamoto\u2019s\n\n\n\n acclaimed fall/winter 2000 collection suggests a snow queen in Victorian mourning.\n\nMountaineering takes us into thin air, where heavy furs would hinder attempts to climb Everest and K2, respectively summited in 1953 and 1954. Eddie Bauer\u2019s goose-down Skyliner jacket (1936)\u2014to-the-waist, with diamond-shaped quilting, volumetric yet lightweight\u2014led the way. Juxtaposed with Bauer\u2019s trim little Skyliner is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles James\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1937 masterpiece, a white silk and eiderdown evening jacket, its quilting of biomorphic arabesques both fantastical and frightening. Down would go hip-hop with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tommy Hilfiger\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cpuffers,\u201d this one in gold (1999); sci-fi with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Junya Watanabe\u2019s\n\n\n\n puffer of predatory black ribbing (2014); and haute with Demna Gvasali The first major exhibition to show how designers were inspired by clothing developed to preserve life in extreme environments. ",
        "author": "Laura Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Far Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier for Grievance (WSJ: Exhibition Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1441",
        "date": "2019-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/far-out-suits-habs-and-labs-for-outer-space-review-the-final-frontier-for-grievance-11567854001?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=55",
        "text": "After the first moon landing, as optimistic plans were made for the exploration of outer space, the Princeton University physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gerard K. O\u2019Neill\n\n\n\n wrote \u201cThe High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space\u201d (1976). Under NASA\u2019s direction, Mr. O\u2019Neill commissioned artists and designers to visualize his ideas. We see some here, in the gallery in which the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has mounted \u201cFar Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space.\u201d They are exuberant sci-fi imaginings of a world of play, leisure and invention, painted by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Guidice.\n\n\n\n \n\n\nFar Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space \n\n\n\nSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThrough Jan. 20, 2020\n\n\nIn one, people with mini-jet-packs frolic midair; below them a group sits chatting on an outdoor deck. The sky is a brilliant blue and plants grow profusely in a hyper-modern city. In another painting, a bucolic earthly landscape carpets the rim of an enormous spinning torus. These images portray \u201creplica worlds with manicured nature and a neighborhood feel,\u201d the exhibition notes. And their character is \u201cinspired by the Bay Area.\u201d Outer space, we see, is a reflection of home. \nBut home, the exhibition suggests, also promises more troubling visions. Suspended from the ceiling are pieces of what seems to be an exploding space suit: \u201cFinding My Way Home 1\u201d (2010) by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tavares Strachan.\n\n\n\n The artist is said to be concerned with \u201cimbalances\u201d in the \u201ccolonization\u201d of space, and this work comments on a \u201cgap between the allure of space travel and historically disenfranchised communities.\u201d Another example, \u201cCosmorama\u201d (2018)\u2014a wall-size illuminated matrix of surreal images by the activist artistic group Design Earth\u2014means to evoke the \u201cenvironmental consequences\u201d of \u201chuman expansion into space.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nCristina de Middel\u2019s \u2018Umeko Suit\u2019 from the series \u2018The Afronauts\u2019 (2012)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cristina De Middel\n \n\n\n\nThese works see space as a reflection of a very different kind of home, a reflection the exhibition\u2014with its 78 artifacts ranging from NASA documents to eclectic film clips\u2014seems to endorse. But what is the nature of this contrast?\n\nIn part, the creators of this exhibition\u2014the museum\u2019s curator of architecture and design,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher,\n\n\n\n and that department\u2019s associate curator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joseph Becker\n\n\n\n \u2014celebrate the space program and its origins by showing the intimate relationship between real artifacts and those that were imagined. We see a \u201crefurbished\u201d space suit, for example, used by NASA in 1960 in the Mercury program next to others that are entirely fictional, including a \u201cClavius Base Space Suit\u201d designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harry Lange\n\n\n\n for the film \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d (1968). Similar juxtapositions occur throughout, mixing the actual (photographs of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n on the moon) with the imagined (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Arno\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1980s drawings of an astronaut in a space station\u2019s \u201cLife Sciences Module\u201d). \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRick Guidice\u2019s \u2018Cylindrical Colonies, Interior View\u2019 (1976)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA Ames Research Center History Archives\n \n\n\n\nIn many cases, we see, the achievements have grown out of fantasy. Science-fiction writers of the 20th century shaped the way outer space was approached and popular science followed, leading to practical programs and designs. One vitrine shows a series of articles (1952-54) from Collier\u2019s magazine called \u201cMan Will Conquer Space Soon,\u201d in which scientists and artists imagine journeys to the moon and Mars. By the 1970s, countercultural visionaries like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stewart Brand\n\n\n\n (his 1977 \u201cSpace Colonies\u201d is here) were imagining utopian communities in space. \nThe pursuit of outer space from the 1950s through the 1970s was connected, in fact, with expectations of expanded knowledge and possibility. And despite the occasional Bay Area-type misfires, the outer space that took shape in both imagination and reality reflected those expectations.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRick Guidice\u2019s \u2018Bernal Spheres, Agricultural Modules in Cutaway View\u2019 (1976)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA Ames Research Center History Archives\n \n\n\n\nThe more recent artifacts here are quite different. They really dismiss space as a realm offering new possibilities or human transformation (no wonder public interest has waned). Instead, earthly discontents as determined by political doctrine (e.g., \u201chistorically disenfranchised communities\u201d) are exported, colonizing space with alien concepts. This impulse also reflects this museum\u2019s preoccupations. Progressive-style questions confront the visitor from the moment of entry, inscribed on the museum\u2019s main staircase: \u201cAre race and class related? Who discriminates against you? Is race a feminist issue?\u201d\nThe result is that space becomes another realm in which identity-based grievances are nurtured and promoted, rather than one in which they might be left behind or transcended, or environmental issues overcome. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Sachs\u2019s \u2018Mary's Suit\u2019 (2019)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tom Sachs/Genevieve Hanson\n \n\n\n\nThe exhibition also emphasizes its perspective by adding to the array of space suits something called an \u201cUmeko Suit\u201d made of puffy green cloth and a red-patterned kerchief. It was created by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cristina de Middel\n\n\n\n as part of a series of objects, images and texts she called \u201cThe Afronauts\u201d (2012), inspired by a bizarre project run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edward Mukuka Nkoloso,\n\n\n\n a Zambian grade-school science teacher who believed that in 1964, under his leadership, Zambia could beat the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the moon. He trained 12 Zambian astronauts by rolling them down a hill inside an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, asserting it would be \u201cthe only way humans can walk on the moon.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Man Will Conquer Space Soon\u2019 Collier\u2019s cover (March 22, 1952)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Clayton\n \n\n\n\nWe are meant to view this escapade as a playful illustration of how space exploration has been tainted by exclusion of the \u201chistorically disenfranchised.\u201d But disenfranchisement is irrelevant. Instead we are reminded that what made the space program possible was the combination of imagination and knowledge, reflected in so many of the exhibition\u2019s other artifacts, along with the conviction that space may resemble home, but it also moves beyond it.\n\u2014Mr. Rothstein is the Journal\u2019s Critic at Large. An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art looks at the way imagination has shaped our quest for the stars, but also loads interstellar exploration with Earthbound troubles. ",
        "author": "Edward Rothstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Far Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier for Grievance (WSJ: Exhibition Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1442",
        "date": "2019-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/far-out-suits-habs-and-labs-for-outer-space-review-the-final-frontier-for-grievance-11567854001?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=67",
        "text": "After the first moon landing, as optimistic plans were made for the exploration of outer space, the Princeton University physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gerard K. O\u2019Neill\n\n\n\n wrote \u201cThe High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space\u201d (1976). Under NASA\u2019s direction, Mr. O\u2019Neill commissioned artists and designers to visualize his ideas. We see some here, in the gallery in which the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has mounted \u201cFar Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space.\u201d They are exuberant sci-fi imaginings of a world of play, leisure and invention, painted by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Guidice.\n\n\n\n \n\n\nFar Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space \n\n\n\nSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThrough Jan. 20, 2020\n\n\nIn one, people with mini-jet-packs frolic midair; below them a group sits chatting on an outdoor deck. The sky is a brilliant blue and plants grow profusely in a hyper-modern city. In another painting, a bucolic earthly landscape carpets the rim of an enormous spinning torus. These images portray \u201creplica worlds with manicured nature and a neighborhood feel,\u201d the exhibition notes. And their character is \u201cinspired by the Bay Area.\u201d Outer space, we see, is a reflection of home. \nBut home, the exhibition suggests, also promises more troubling visions. Suspended from the ceiling are pieces of what seems to be an exploding space suit: \u201cFinding My Way Home 1\u201d (2010) by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tavares Strachan.\n\n\n\n The artist is said to be concerned with \u201cimbalances\u201d in the \u201ccolonization\u201d of space, and this work comments on a \u201cgap between the allure of space travel and historically disenfranchised communities.\u201d Another example, \u201cCosmorama\u201d (2018)\u2014a wall-size illuminated matrix of surreal images by the activist artistic group Design Earth\u2014means to evoke the \u201cenvironmental consequences\u201d of \u201chuman expansion into space.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nCristina de Middel\u2019s \u2018Umeko Suit\u2019 from the series \u2018The Afronauts\u2019 (2012)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cristina De Middel\n \n\n\n\nThese works see space as a reflection of a very different kind of home, a reflection the exhibition\u2014with its 78 artifacts ranging from NASA documents to eclectic film clips\u2014seems to endorse. But what is the nature of this contrast?\n\nIn part, the creators of this exhibition\u2014the museum\u2019s curator of architecture and design,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher,\n\n\n\n and that department\u2019s associate curator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joseph Becker\n\n\n\n \u2014celebrate the space program and its origins by showing the intimate relationship between real artifacts and those that were imagined. We see a \u201crefurbished\u201d space suit, for example, used by NASA in 1960 in the Mercury program next to others that are entirely fictional, including a \u201cClavius Base Space Suit\u201d designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harry Lange\n\n\n\n for the film \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d (1968). Similar juxtapositions occur throughout, mixing the actual (photographs of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n on the moon) with the imagined (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Arno\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1980s drawings of an astronaut in a space station\u2019s \u201cLife Sciences Module\u201d). \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRick Guidice\u2019s \u2018Cylindrical Colonies, Interior View\u2019 (1976)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA Ames Research Center History Archives\n \n\n\n\nIn many cases, we see, the achievements have grown out of fantasy. Science-fiction writers of the 20th century shaped the way outer space was approached and popular science followed, leading to practical programs and designs. One vitrine shows a series of articles (1952-54) from Collier\u2019s magazine called \u201cMan Will Conquer Space Soon,\u201d in which scientists and artists imagine journeys to the moon and Mars. By the 1970s, countercultural visionaries like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stewart Brand\n\n\n\n (his 1977 \u201cSpace Colonies\u201d is here) were imagining utopian communities in space. \nThe pursuit of outer space from the 1950s through the 1970s was connected, in fact, with expectations of expanded knowledge and possibility. And despite the occasional Bay Area-type misfires, the outer space that took shape in both imagination and reality reflected those expectations.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRick Guidice\u2019s \u2018Bernal Spheres, Agricultural Modules in Cutaway View\u2019 (1976)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA Ames Research Center History Archives\n \n\n\n\nThe more recent artifacts here are quite different. They really dismiss space as a realm offering new possibilities or human transformation (no wonder public interest has waned). Instead, earthly discontents as determined by political doctrine (e.g., \u201chistorically disenfranchised communities\u201d) are exported, colonizing space with alien concepts. This impulse also reflects this museum\u2019s preoccupations. Progressive-style questions confront the visitor from the moment of entry, inscribed on the museum\u2019s main staircase: \u201cAre race and class related? W An exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art looks at the way imagination has shaped our quest for the stars, but also loads interstellar exploration with Earthbound troubles. ",
        "author": "Edward Rothstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Designs Cabin to Keep Passengers in the Moment (WSJ: Experience Report) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1443",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-phones-in-space-virgin-galactic-designs-cabin-to-keep-passengers-in-the-moment-11595960406?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=35",
        "text": "Safety fears have since been allayed, at least for some: Virgin Galactic said about 600 people have spent as much as $250,000 a ticket, though the timing of their trips is unclear: The company hasn\u2019t confirmed when it plans to begin launching tourists into space.\nNow, for the first time, customers get to see where they will spend their 90-minute trip out of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The designers said they spent years creating a cabin that balanced familiar elements from air travel with the considerations of a visit to space.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe cabin, which houses six reclining seats tailored to each passenger\u2019s height and weight, aims to provide the astronauts with a sort of photo frame for the Earth as the craft climbs out of the atmosphere.\n\nThe black halo-style frames of the 12 passenger windows are designed to blend into the darkness of outer space. Interior LED lighting will switch off at the flight\u2019s peak, putting the focus on the Earth. \nBut despite the cinematic setup, passengers won\u2019t be able to take their own photos. Smartphones and most other personal effects are banned from the flight, the company said, to prevent them from flying loose in the cabin. \nSmartphones can\u2019t do the spectacle justice in any case, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeremy Brown,\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\u2019s design director. \u201cThe intense dark blackness of space and the intense brightness of the Earth is something you cannot capture on a hand-held device,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCameras built into the windows will let passengers capture a portrait of themselves with the Earth.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\nInstead, 16 cameras installed throughout the cabin and two more outside will record video and take still photos throughout the flight. The cameras are built into the passenger window frames, angled to capture a portrait of each novice astronaut with the Earth in the background.\n\u201cWe want customers to savor every moment of this experience and one way of doing that is saying, \u2018Relax, you can ensure that this experience is fully recorded,\u2019\u201d Mr. Brown said.\nAt the height of the flight, passengers will be encouraged to unbuckle their harnesses and float in zero gravity. A circular mirror covering the entire back of the cabin will allow passengers to see themselves gliding around. Soft furnishings are intended to limit injury, while windows, seats and other objects double as grips for maneuvering while floating.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Attenborough,\n\n\n\n commercial director for Virgin Galactic, said the passenger experience was developed alongside the spaceship\u2019s engineering components and design.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\u201cWe started thinking about the consumer experience from the moment we started the company, because Virgin is a consumer brand at heart,\u201d Mr. Attenborough said.\nThe company hired London-based design agency Seymourpowell Ltd. to collaborate on the cabin design shortly after Mr. Branson, founder of Virgin Group Ltd., formed the Virgin Galactic unit in 2004.\nThe designers interviewed astronauts to understand basic needs in space, such as stretchy uniforms and easy-to-buckle five-point harnesses. But the research also helped designers pinpoint the most awe-inspiring moments on a journey into space, including the quiet right before the rocket motor fires, the sky\u2019s shift from blue to purple to black on rapid ascent, and the bath of natural light reflected from the Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAt the height of the flight, passengers will be encouraged to unbuckle their harnesses and float in zero gravity.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic\n \n\n\n\nThese moments will be highlighted when passengers undergo three-day training sessions to prepare for the flight at Virgin Galactic\u2019s base, Spaceport America, in New Mexico\u2019s Jornada del Muerto desert. \nDuring the flight itself, passengers will encounter mood lighting, seat-back information screens and commentary from the ground crew. \nThe pilots, who will sit in an open flight deck, have been selected partly for their communication skills and ability to keep first-time astronauts calm. Last month, Virgin Galactic completed its second successful test flight, reaching a height of more than 55 miles. NASA defines outer space as anything 50 miles above sea level.\nProfessionals will test the training program and the cabin design before it opens to commercial passengers. Virgin Galactic has given no time frame, although Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides\n\n\n\n told investors in February that flying Mr. Branson into space on a commercial flight was the company\u2019s priority for 2020. It suspended operations one month later to help fight the spread of the new coronavi Space tourists won\u2019t be able to take their phones aboard, but the spaceship includes a giant mirror so they can watch themselves float around and 16 cameras in the cabin to catch all the action. ",
        "author": "Katie Deighton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | I visited the National Cathedral and came away converted \u2014 to gothic architecture (WP: Express) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1444",
        "date": "2018-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2018/09/27/i-visited-national-cathedral-came-away-converted-gothic-architecture/",
        "text": "If I were Christian, I think I\u2019d be an Episcopalian. I\u2019m basing this on a T-shirt I found in the Washington National Cathedral\u2019s gift shop last week, one that listed many convincing reasons, including \u201cAll of the pageantry, none of the guilt.\u201d Another reason, not listed on the shirt, is that Episcopalians can attend services at the National Cathedral \u2014 one of the most gorgeous buildings in the D.C. area. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019d been to the cathedral for concerts, but before last week I\u2019d never taken a tour. The $12 fee seems fair for a place that runs entirely on donations and volunteers. One such volunteer, a woman in a purple robe, called my tour group to order.\u201cWelcome to your church. The cathedral was started by some men who lived here in town, Washington, in 1880,\u201d she said. Before then, \u201cthere was no place in the nation\u2019s capital for the whole country to come together to celebrate anything. There was no place in the nation\u2019s capital where the whole country can come together to cry for a president\u2019s death. We needed a cathedral for the whole country.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOur guide drew our attention to the flying buttresses and pointed arches, which mark the cathedral\u2019s architecture as Gothic. That struck me as odd. Why would cathedral designers at the turn of the 20th century hew to a 14th-century style? I asked the guide.\u201cWe thought it would be good for your church,\u201d she responded.That didn\u2019t really answer my question, but I can\u2019t quibble with their decision. The National Cathedral \u2014 like all Gothic cathedrals \u2014 was designed to overwhelm and awe. The pointed arches draw the eye up toward the heavens, while stained-glass windows bathe you in glorious multicolored light. Intricate carvings cover nearly every surface \u2014 some so high up, you can\u2019t appreciate them without binoculars. It\u2019s way too much to take in, and that\u2019s the point. Gothic architecture reinforces the idea that there are worlds beyond comprehension.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven this backdrop, I think we were all surprised when our tour guide pointed out a stained-glass window devoted to science and technology.\u201cThat\u2019s the Space Window,\u201d she said of the deep-blue piece \u2014 added in the 1970s \u2014 with spheres representing the planets, and a line suggesting the trajectory of a spacecraft. \u201cThe astronauts liked the design, but they said, \u2018You know, something\u2019s missing.\u2019 So they gave us a piece of moon rock \u2014 you can see it up at the top in the red sphere. Your piece of moon rock. Your cathedral.\u201dOur guide had me so convinced the National Cathedral was my cathedral, I asked if there might be Jewish services on occasion.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNo, not really,\u201d she said. \u201cThe Muslims have tried to have prayers in here, but everywhere you turn there is a Christian symbol. So it\u2019s a little difficult.\u201dAdvertisementThroughout the cathedral, you can find two stories, our guide continued. One is a religious story \u2014 the Old Testament and the New \u2014 and the other is the story of America. Our next stop, the War Memorial Chapel, illustrated that fascinating double narrative.\u201cIt honors those who died for their beliefs: belief in faith, belief in freedom,\u201d our guide said of the chapel. The stained-glass window above the altar depicts biblical scenes alongside ones inspired by American history, including Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Abraham Lincoln emancipating the slaves and the D-Day invasion of World War II.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe latest addition to the chapel is a small stone cross that was cut from the Pentagon\u201d after the 9/11 attacks, she said. \u201cThey carved it and sent it here because they figured that\u2019s where it belongs.\u201dAdvertisementOur guide then led us to a narrow space between the high altar and the choir seating area.\u201cThere\u2019s our organist,\u201d the guide said as a man quickly disappeared behind wood panels. \u201cOur organ has 10,600 pipes. One of them is 32 feet long. It lies down beneath the floor and it makes a very deep rumble.\u201dWe didn\u2019t get to hear the organ, but I\u2019ve gone to organ concerts at the cathedral before, and I strongly recommend checking one out \u2014 they\u2019re held most Sundays at 5:15 p.m. ($10 suggested donation). Our guide noted that Mondays through Thursdays at 5:30 p.m., the boys or girls choirs close out the day with a short evensong program, and attending those concerts is free.Story continues below advertisementPlease don\u2019t tell my rabbi, but I\u2019ve actually sung in the National Cathedral before \u2014 at a singalong hosted by the Cathedral Choral Society \u2014 and it was one of the most spiritual experiences of my life. We were performing Mozart\u2019s Requiem, and as the last light of the day flickered through the rose window, I was overwhelmed by the beauty, the mystery and the majesty of creation.AdvertisementI also had a more mundane realization: Immersive art is all the rage these days, but you don\u2019t have to stand in line at the next big Hirshhorn show to experience a large-scale, site-specific installation. Just visit \u201cyour cathedral\u201d \u2014 ideally when there\u2019s music inside.More adventures with the StaycationerTouring the Pentagon is dullsville, unless you get your cell phone confiscatedHave you been to the Smithsonian\u2019s best Air and Space Museum? Hint: It\u2019s not in D.C.A visit to Decatur House, one of the mysterious homes of Lafayette Square Want to be moved by a site-specific art installation? You don't have to stand in line at the Hirshhorn, just pay a visit to your local, world-class cathedral. I visited the National Cathedral and came away converted \u2014 to gothic architecture",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | I visited the National Cathedral and came away converted \u2014 to gothic architecture (WP: Express) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1445",
        "date": "2018-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2018/09/27/i-visited-national-cathedral-came-away-converted-gothic-architecture/",
        "text": "If I were Christian, I think I\u2019d be an Episcopalian. I\u2019m basing this on a T-shirt I found in the Washington National Cathedral\u2019s gift shop last week, one that listed many convincing reasons, including \u201cAll of the pageantry, none of the guilt.\u201d Another reason, not listed on the shirt, is that Episcopalians can attend services at the National Cathedral \u2014 one of the most gorgeous buildings in the D.C. area. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019d been to the cathedral for concerts, but before last week I\u2019d never taken a tour. The $12 fee seems fair for a place that runs entirely on donations and volunteers. One such volunteer, a woman in a purple robe, called my tour group to order.\u201cWelcome to your church. The cathedral was started by some men who lived here in town, Washington, in 1880,\u201d she said. Before then, \u201cthere was no place in the nation\u2019s capital for the whole country to come together to celebrate anything. There was no place in the nation\u2019s capital where the whole country can come together to cry for a president\u2019s death. We needed a cathedral for the whole country.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOur guide drew our attention to the flying buttresses and pointed arches, which mark the cathedral\u2019s architecture as Gothic. That struck me as odd. Why would cathedral designers at the turn of the 20th century hew to a 14th-century style? I asked the guide.\u201cWe thought it would be good for your church,\u201d she responded.That didn\u2019t really answer my question, but I can\u2019t quibble with their decision. The National Cathedral \u2014 like all Gothic cathedrals \u2014 was designed to overwhelm and awe. The pointed arches draw the eye up toward the heavens, while stained-glass windows bathe you in glorious multicolored light. Intricate carvings cover nearly every surface \u2014 some so high up, you can\u2019t appreciate them without binoculars. It\u2019s way too much to take in, and that\u2019s the point. Gothic architecture reinforces the idea that there are worlds beyond comprehension.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven this backdrop, I think we were all surprised when our tour guide pointed out a stained-glass window devoted to science and technology.\u201cThat\u2019s the Space Window,\u201d she said of the deep-blue piece \u2014 added in the 1970s \u2014 with spheres representing the planets, and a line suggesting the trajectory of a spacecraft. \u201cThe astronauts liked the design, but they said, \u2018You know, something\u2019s missing.\u2019 So they gave us a piece of moon rock \u2014 you can see it up at the top in the red sphere. Your piece of moon rock. Your cathedral.\u201dOur guide had me so convinced the National Cathedral was my cathedral, I asked if there might be Jewish services on occasion.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNo, not really,\u201d she said. \u201cThe Muslims have tried to have prayers in here, but everywhere you turn there is a Christian symbol. So it\u2019s a little difficult.\u201dAdvertisementThroughout the cathedral, you can find two stories, our guide continued. One is a religious story \u2014 the Old Testament and the New \u2014 and the other is the story of America. Our next stop, the War Memorial Chapel, illustrated that fascinating double narrative.\u201cIt honors those who died for their beliefs: belief in faith, belief in freedom,\u201d our guide said of the chapel. The stained-glass window above the altar depicts biblical scenes alongside ones inspired by American history, including Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, Abraham Lincoln emancipating the slaves and the D-Day invasion of World War II.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe latest addition to the chapel is a small stone cross that was cut from the Pentagon\u201d after the 9/11 attacks, she said. \u201cThey carved it and sent it here because they figured that\u2019s where it belongs.\u201dAdvertisementOur guide then led us to a narrow space between the high altar and the choir seating area.\u201cThere\u2019s our organist,\u201d the guide said as a man quickly disappeared behind wood panels. \u201cOur organ has 10,600 pipes. One of them is 32 feet long. It lies down beneath the floor and it makes a very deep rumble.\u201dWe didn\u2019t get to hear the organ, but I\u2019ve gone to organ concerts at the cathedral before, and I strongly recommend checking one out \u2014 they\u2019re held most Sundays at 5:15 p.m. ($10 suggested donation). Our guide noted that Mondays through Thursdays at 5:30 p.m., the boys or girls choirs close out the day with a short evensong program, and attending those concerts is free.Story continues below advertisementPlease don\u2019t tell my rabbi, but I\u2019ve actually sung in the National Cathedral before \u2014 at a singalong hosted by the Cathedral Choral Society \u2014 and it was one of the most spiritual experiences of my life. We were performing Mozart\u2019s Requiem, and as the last light of the day flickered through the rose window, I was overwhelmed by the beauty, the mystery and the majesty of creation.AdvertisementI also had a more mundane realization: Immersive art is all the rage these days, but you don\u2019t have to stand in line at the next big Hirshhorn show to experience a large-scale, site-specific installation. Just visit \u201cyour cathedral\u201d \u2014 ideally when there\u2019s music inside.More adventures with the StaycationerTouring the Pentagon is dullsville, unless you get your cell phone confiscatedHave you been to the Smithsonian\u2019s best Air and Space Museum? Hint: It\u2019s not in D.C.A visit to Decatur House, one of the mysterious homes of Lafayette Square Want to be moved by a site-specific art installation? You don't have to stand in line at the Hirshhorn, just pay a visit to your local, world-class cathedral. I visited the National Cathedral and came away converted \u2014 to gothic architecture",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "The inaugural FantasyWood Festival aims to enchant and engage (WP: Express) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1446",
        "date": "2019-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2019/05/21/first-annual-fantasywood-festival-aims-enchant-engage/",
        "text": "Over Memorial Day weekend, Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods will become a playground for people with overactive imaginations. As you explore the forest, you\u2019ll come upon all kinds of fantastical creatures \u2014 fairies and unicorns, of course, but also a crew of stranded space aliens and a giant sock monster who wants you to tell him a joke. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s all part of the first FantasyWood Festival, which is being produced by a trio of organizations: the Inner Arbor Trust, which manages Merriweather Park; the Circus Siren Pod mermaid performance group; and ManneqArt, a Laurel, Md.-based arts nonprofit run by fashion designer Lee Andersen.\u201cOur mission is to inspire creativity,\u201d Andersen says. \u201cAnd the Symphony Woods is such a beautiful environment to grow a fantasy festival, which is something that\u2019s unusual for this area.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFantasy festivals \u2014 which are like Renaissance fairs minus the historical elements \u2014 have been popping up around the country, and the 51-acre Merriweather Park, in Columbia, Md., seemed like a perfect place for one, Andersen says. It was, after all, where the famous Maryland Renaissance Festival debuted in 1977 and lived for eight years before moving to its current home in Crownsville, Md. The Maryland Ren Fest is now the second-largest event of its kind in the country \u2014 proving that folks in the greater D.C. area have vivid imaginations and love dressing up, Andersen says. She hopes the FantasyWood Festival provides just such an opportunity.\u201cWe are really encouraging people to come in costume and as characters of their own invention,\u201d she says.At the heart of the festival will be The Quest, a competition in which teams of two will journey around the woods looking for opportunities to complete up to 26 missions. One such mission is to join a werewolf pack and learn the beasts\u2019 special howls. Another involves writing a secret message in invisible ink and, later, making it appear by warming the paper in the steamy snores of a 40-foot (mechanical) dragon.There will also be missions involving fairies and unicorns, but The Quest isn\u2019t all sweetness and light. At a witches\u2019 cottage, you\u2019ll need to find a key to free a little girl (actually a grown man in a tutu) being held captive. You can also climb into witches\u2019 cauldrons and choose the other ingredients you\u2019d like in your \u201cyou stew.\u201d Entry in The Quest costs $10 per team, and the duo that completes 20 missions in the least amount of time wins a gift basket.\u201cParticipation is a huge part of this festival. That\u2019s why we came up with The Quest \u2014 so you\u2019re not just looking at unicorns, you\u2019re petting the unicorns; you\u2019re not just getting pictures with the giant sock monster, you\u2019re telling him jokes,\u201d Andersen says. But feel free to spectate, she adds. \u201cPart of the entertainment is watching other people go through The Quest, watching them sing a love song to a mermaid, or learning how to do a pirate dance.\u201dThere\u2019s plenty for non-questers to do, especially at the park\u2019s Chrysalis stage, which will play host to a variety of performances, including highlights from the fantasy rock musical \u201cMagic Under Glass\u201d by the Columbia Center for Theatrical Arts. You can also hang out at whimsically themed bars with drinks for the 21-and-over crowd, get a snack at the Sand-Witches\u2019 Kitchen and explore the many structures that Andersen and her merry crew of volunteers have made, including a Hobbit house and the totaled spaceship that left those poor aliens stranded.\u201cWe\u2019ve had so much fun building all these things, but we think they will be even more fun to play in,\u201d Andersen says.Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, 10431 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, Md.; Sat. & Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m., $14 per day ($12 for kids 3-12), Mon., 10 a.m.-3 p.m., $12 ($8 for kids 3-12), $19-$24 for weekend pass. Over Memorial Day weekend, Merriweather Park will be filled with fairies, unicorns, mermaids and monsters. Accept The Quest, and you can become part of the story, too. The inaugural FantasyWood Festival aims to enchant and engage",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The National Museum of Health and Medicine is a fascinating nightmare (WP: Express) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1447",
        "date": "2019-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2019/01/17/national-museum-health-medicine-is-fascinating-nightmare/",
        "text": "With all the Smithsonians and the National Gallery of Art closed by the federal shutdown, now\u2019s a good time to visit D.C.\u2019s lesser-known museums. That\u2019s why, last week, I headed to the National Museum of Health and Medicine \u2014 a Department of Defense-funded institution that\u2019s escaped the shutdown (so far) because it\u2019s run by contractors. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough this museum once sat on the National Mall, it\u2019s now located more than a mile from the nearest Metro station in an obscure corner of Silver Spring. That\u2019s really for the best, because this museum is essentially a collection of spare body parts. Floating brains, a woman\u2019s disintegrating face, children\u2019s skeletons, conjoined fetuses in a jar \u2014 these are not things a casual tourist wants to encounter, especially right before lunch.As I took in these morbid artifacts, I found myself wishing for a docent \u2014 someone to explain what I should be gleaning from these bits and pieces, and maybe how they helped advance medical research and education. Alas, tours at this museum are self-guided, and most of the body parts on display have minimal labeling. This left me with lots of worrisome questions. For instance, as I gazed at a jar of preserved male genitals, complete with wisps of pubic hair, I wondered how they ended up in the hands of the U.S. military, and what I \u2014 and other, more medically focused folks \u2014 could learn from looking at them.For the first hour of my visit, I considered these questions alone, but then a family of five arrived. The leader of the crew, a future physician assistant, told me she brought her parents, aunt and nephew there because the Mall\u2019s museums were closed.\u201cLook, Mom, is this real?\u201d said the nephew, who had found the (real) skeleton of a 5-year-old child. \u201cHe\u2019s got a big ol\u2019 cabbage head just like you,\u201d his mom replied. \u201cWhat happened to him?\u201d the boy asked, which was my question too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne display near the back of the museum provided a little context. This museum, said the wall text, was started at the beginning of the Civil War to help train field surgeons and advance military medicine. By the end of the conflict, the museum had some 4,000 skeletal specimens depicting all kinds of injuries, which the U.S. government then used to create an eight-volume publication that became an important reference for physicians worldwide. The collection, which has since grown to about 25 million artifacts, including bones, organs and medical devices, is still used for research today, the exhibit concluded.The many shattered bones and bruised brains on display struck me, primarily, as evidence of the terrible cost of war, but several exhibits also emphasized the skill of military medical personnel. For instance, one gallery that featured a piece of floor from an Iraq war field hospital noted that 98 percent of the people who arrived at this tent hospital alive left alive, despite grievous injuries.At the center of the museum, I found its most famous artifacts: the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln, fragments from the president\u2019s skull and the bloodstained shirtsleeves of one of his physicians. Nearby text described the path of the bullet and the useless probing of his doctors \u2014 all interesting stuff, but I can\u2019t say I learned much from this exhibit, especially when compared with similar ones at Ford\u2019s Theatre and the National Museum of American History, which delve sensitively into the details of Lincoln\u2019s assassination and its political aftermath.Right before leaving, I found the most random exhibit in a very random museum \u2014 a case containing, among other things, a gilded skull, the skeleton of a monkey that returned alive from an early U.S. space mission, a slide of a tumor extracted from Ulysses S. Grant, a couple of James Garfield\u2019s vertebrae, and a square of lace made by a mental patient at Saint Elizabeths, depicting her hallucinations.I can only imagine the conversation that led to this dadaist assemblage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCurator 1: \u201cWhere should we put the space monkey?\u201dCurator 2: \u201cThere\u2019s room next to the presidential tumor.\u201dCurator 1: \u201cMakes sense to me!\u201dDon\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m glad that the National Museum of Health and Medicine exists. Even as the collection\u2019s scientific uses are supplanted by medical imaging and other modern technology, it remains a fascinating, and perhaps important, glimpse into the gory legacy of war.More adventures with the StaycationerUnlock the secrets of the Freemasons at this Alexandria museumD.C.\u2019s 8 major monuments, rankedThe Frederick Douglass house: D.C.\u2019s answer to Monticello A collection of medical specimens dating back to the Civil War, this museum is not for the squeamish. The National Museum of Health and Medicine is a fascinating nightmare",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The National Museum of Health and Medicine is a fascinating nightmare (WP: Express) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1448",
        "date": "2019-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2019/01/17/national-museum-health-medicine-is-fascinating-nightmare/",
        "text": "With all the Smithsonians and the National Gallery of Art closed by the federal shutdown, now\u2019s a good time to visit D.C.\u2019s lesser-known museums. That\u2019s why, last week, I headed to the National Museum of Health and Medicine \u2014 a Department of Defense-funded institution that\u2019s escaped the shutdown (so far) because it\u2019s run by contractors. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThough this museum once sat on the National Mall, it\u2019s now located more than a mile from the nearest Metro station in an obscure corner of Silver Spring. That\u2019s really for the best, because this museum is essentially a collection of spare body parts. Floating brains, a woman\u2019s disintegrating face, children\u2019s skeletons, conjoined fetuses in a jar \u2014 these are not things a casual tourist wants to encounter, especially right before lunch.As I took in these morbid artifacts, I found myself wishing for a docent \u2014 someone to explain what I should be gleaning from these bits and pieces, and maybe how they helped advance medical research and education. Alas, tours at this museum are self-guided, and most of the body parts on display have minimal labeling. This left me with lots of worrisome questions. For instance, as I gazed at a jar of preserved male genitals, complete with wisps of pubic hair, I wondered how they ended up in the hands of the U.S. military, and what I \u2014 and other, more medically focused folks \u2014 could learn from looking at them.For the first hour of my visit, I considered these questions alone, but then a family of five arrived. The leader of the crew, a future physician assistant, told me she brought her parents, aunt and nephew there because the Mall\u2019s museums were closed.\u201cLook, Mom, is this real?\u201d said the nephew, who had found the (real) skeleton of a 5-year-old child. \u201cHe\u2019s got a big ol\u2019 cabbage head just like you,\u201d his mom replied. \u201cWhat happened to him?\u201d the boy asked, which was my question too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne display near the back of the museum provided a little context. This museum, said the wall text, was started at the beginning of the Civil War to help train field surgeons and advance military medicine. By the end of the conflict, the museum had some 4,000 skeletal specimens depicting all kinds of injuries, which the U.S. government then used to create an eight-volume publication that became an important reference for physicians worldwide. The collection, which has since grown to about 25 million artifacts, including bones, organs and medical devices, is still used for research today, the exhibit concluded.The many shattered bones and bruised brains on display struck me, primarily, as evidence of the terrible cost of war, but several exhibits also emphasized the skill of military medical personnel. For instance, one gallery that featured a piece of floor from an Iraq war field hospital noted that 98 percent of the people who arrived at this tent hospital alive left alive, despite grievous injuries.At the center of the museum, I found its most famous artifacts: the bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln, fragments from the president\u2019s skull and the bloodstained shirtsleeves of one of his physicians. Nearby text described the path of the bullet and the useless probing of his doctors \u2014 all interesting stuff, but I can\u2019t say I learned much from this exhibit, especially when compared with similar ones at Ford\u2019s Theatre and the National Museum of American History, which delve sensitively into the details of Lincoln\u2019s assassination and its political aftermath.Right before leaving, I found the most random exhibit in a very random museum \u2014 a case containing, among other things, a gilded skull, the skeleton of a monkey that returned alive from an early U.S. space mission, a slide of a tumor extracted from Ulysses S. Grant, a couple of James Garfield\u2019s vertebrae, and a square of lace made by a mental patient at Saint Elizabeths, depicting her hallucinations.I can only imagine the conversation that led to this dadaist assemblage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCurator 1: \u201cWhere should we put the space monkey?\u201dCurator 2: \u201cThere\u2019s room next to the presidential tumor.\u201dCurator 1: \u201cMakes sense to me!\u201dDon\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m glad that the National Museum of Health and Medicine exists. Even as the collection\u2019s scientific uses are supplanted by medical imaging and other modern technology, it remains a fascinating, and perhaps important, glimpse into the gory legacy of war.More adventures with the StaycationerUnlock the secrets of the Freemasons at this Alexandria museumD.C.\u2019s 8 major monuments, rankedThe Frederick Douglass house: D.C.\u2019s answer to Monticello A collection of medical specimens dating back to the Civil War, this museum is not for the squeamish. The National Museum of Health and Medicine is a fascinating nightmare",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Is the Smithsonian\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center the better Air and Space Museum? (WP: Express) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1449",
        "date": "2018-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2018/08/23/is-the-smithsonians-udvar-hazy-center-the-better-air-and-space-museum/",
        "text": "I wonder how many of the 7 million people who visit the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall each year know that there\u2019s another, arguably better and definitely bigger Air and Space Museum just 26 miles away. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center isn\u2019t exactly a secret \u2014 it draws around 1.6 million visitors a year \u2014 but it could definitely handle more people. On a recent weekday, the center\u2019s massive exhibit hall was only speckled with tourists, but they made up for their numbers with outsize enthusiasm. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThis airplane goes 2,000 miles per hour WITHOUT EVEN TRYING,\u201d I overheard one preteen boy say to his family while standing next to the museum\u2019s Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. \u201cIt could go faster than any missile!\u201dOn the other side of the plane, one of the museum\u2019s volunteer tour guides was giving the grown-up version of the same talk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis puppy flew from L.A. to D.C. in 64 minutes,\u201d he said. \u201cHow many of you made it from downtown to here in 64 minutes?\u201dNo one raised their hand, and this is probably a clue as to why Udvar-Hazy is relatively under-visited. It took me two hours to get to the Chantilly, Va., museum on public transportation, and it would have taken more than an hour by car. (One smart tourist I chatted with said he made Udvar-Hazy his first stop after arriving at Dulles airport.)The guide continued dazzling us with details about the Blackbird. When flying upward of Mach 3, the airplane\u2019s titanium surface heated up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. In fact, some Blackbird pilots actually warmed up their lunches \u2014 tubes of food that they squirted through ports in their flight suits \u2014 by pressing them against the airplane\u2019s quartz windows.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs that group continued on to the space section of the museum, I tagged along with another tour group that was approaching the museum\u2019s most famous artifact, the Enola Gay.\u201cDoes everyone here know who Enola Gay is?\u201d the guide said.I was baffled. Of course, I know what \u2009Enola Gay is \u2014 it\u2019s the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb that, on Aug. 6, 1945, instantly flattened 6 square miles of Hiroshima and ultimately killed around 135,000 people, mostly civilians. But I had no idea who Enola Gay was.\u201cIt was the pilot\u2019s mother,\u201d the guide said.I had a lot of questions. What was the pilot\u2019s relationship with his mother like? What did she think about having her name forever linked with a deadly atomic bomb? And what kind of name is Enola, anyway?Story continues below advertisementI didn\u2019t get a chance to ask before the guide buried us in an avalanche of mundane facts \u2014 how many similar planes were built, and where, and by what companies. He never once mentioned the death toll at Hiroshima, or the argument for the bomb\u2019s use \u2014 namely, that it brought a swift end to a war that would have cost even more lives had it continued. The nearby placard was also mute on these topics. That\u2019s too bad, because just before the tour stopped by, I overheard British-accented children debating whether the bomb had killed a hundred people or a thousand.AdvertisementThe tour group moved on to a corner of the museum where a dozen or so German World War II aircraft are parked. The sight of that sea of swastikas painted on airplane tails turned my blood to ice. (I\u2019m Jewish, and my great-grandfather emigrated from Germany just before the war \u2014 though you don\u2019t exactly need a personal connection to have a major emotional response to the Holocaust.)\u201cThe captured German stuff is really something else,\u201d our guide said. He pointed out one technological marvel \u2014 the first jet bomber, an Arado Ar 234 B-2 Blitz. Then he moved his laser pointer to another, the Dornier Do 335 A-0 Pfeil, one of the fastest propeller-driven aircraft ever built.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWith aircraft like this, why didn\u2019t Germany win the air war?\u201d our guide asked. \u201cThe answer is, they came along too late. They were running out of pilots. They were running out of fuel, and they had \u2018quality control\u2019 issues,\u201d he said, making air quotes. The Nazis used slave labor to build the airplanes, and some concentration camp prisoners intentionally sabotaged the parts, our guide explained.AdvertisementLooking around the hangar, it suddenly dawned on me that most of these marvelous machines were built for killing or spying. In search of something more uplifting, I made my way to the spaceflight hangar, where I found my first tour group standing beside the space shuttle Discovery.\u201cDiscovery went 39 times into space and back,\u201d the guide said, adding that, in its astonishing 30-year career, the shuttle made major contributions to science \u2014 for instance, putting the Hubble telescope into orbit in 1990, and delivering parts, crew members and scientific equipment to the International Space Station on several occasions.As I made the lengthy trip home from the museum, my mind buzzed with questions \u2014 about U.S. history, about the role of war in advancing technology, and about how ambitious scientific endeavors can be a rallying point for international cooperation. I guess that\u2019s the hazard of visiting an incredible museum like Udvar-Hazy; it stays with you long after you\u2019ve gone home. The Chantilly, Va., museum isn\u2019t exactly a secret \u2014 it draws around 1.6 million visitors a year \u2014 but it could definitely handle more people. Is the Smithsonian\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center the better Air and Space Museum?",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Is the Smithsonian\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center the better Air and Space Museum? (WP: Express) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1450",
        "date": "2018-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2018/08/23/is-the-smithsonians-udvar-hazy-center-the-better-air-and-space-museum/",
        "text": "I wonder how many of the 7 million people who visit the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall each year know that there\u2019s another, arguably better and definitely bigger Air and Space Museum just 26 miles away. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center isn\u2019t exactly a secret \u2014 it draws around 1.6 million visitors a year \u2014 but it could definitely handle more people. On a recent weekday, the center\u2019s massive exhibit hall was only speckled with tourists, but they made up for their numbers with outsize enthusiasm. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThis airplane goes 2,000 miles per hour WITHOUT EVEN TRYING,\u201d I overheard one preteen boy say to his family while standing next to the museum\u2019s Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. \u201cIt could go faster than any missile!\u201dOn the other side of the plane, one of the museum\u2019s volunteer tour guides was giving the grown-up version of the same talk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis puppy flew from L.A. to D.C. in 64 minutes,\u201d he said. \u201cHow many of you made it from downtown to here in 64 minutes?\u201dNo one raised their hand, and this is probably a clue as to why Udvar-Hazy is relatively under-visited. It took me two hours to get to the Chantilly, Va., museum on public transportation, and it would have taken more than an hour by car. (One smart tourist I chatted with said he made Udvar-Hazy his first stop after arriving at Dulles airport.)The guide continued dazzling us with details about the Blackbird. When flying upward of Mach 3, the airplane\u2019s titanium surface heated up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. In fact, some Blackbird pilots actually warmed up their lunches \u2014 tubes of food that they squirted through ports in their flight suits \u2014 by pressing them against the airplane\u2019s quartz windows.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs that group continued on to the space section of the museum, I tagged along with another tour group that was approaching the museum\u2019s most famous artifact, the Enola Gay.\u201cDoes everyone here know who Enola Gay is?\u201d the guide said.I was baffled. Of course, I know what \u2009Enola Gay is \u2014 it\u2019s the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb that, on Aug. 6, 1945, instantly flattened 6 square miles of Hiroshima and ultimately killed around 135,000 people, mostly civilians. But I had no idea who Enola Gay was.\u201cIt was the pilot\u2019s mother,\u201d the guide said.I had a lot of questions. What was the pilot\u2019s relationship with his mother like? What did she think about having her name forever linked with a deadly atomic bomb? And what kind of name is Enola, anyway?Story continues below advertisementI didn\u2019t get a chance to ask before the guide buried us in an avalanche of mundane facts \u2014 how many similar planes were built, and where, and by what companies. He never once mentioned the death toll at Hiroshima, or the argument for the bomb\u2019s use \u2014 namely, that it brought a swift end to a war that would have cost even more lives had it continued. The nearby placard was also mute on these topics. That\u2019s too bad, because just before the tour stopped by, I overheard British-accented children debating whether the bomb had killed a hundred people or a thousand.AdvertisementThe tour group moved on to a corner of the museum where a dozen or so German World War II aircraft are parked. The sight of that sea of swastikas painted on airplane tails turned my blood to ice. (I\u2019m Jewish, and my great-grandfather emigrated from Germany just before the war \u2014 though you don\u2019t exactly need a personal connection to have a major emotional response to the Holocaust.)\u201cThe captured German stuff is really something else,\u201d our guide said. He pointed out one technological marvel \u2014 the first jet bomber, an Arado Ar 234 B-2 Blitz. Then he moved his laser pointer to another, the Dornier Do 335 A-0 Pfeil, one of the fastest propeller-driven aircraft ever built.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWith aircraft like this, why didn\u2019t Germany win the air war?\u201d our guide asked. \u201cThe answer is, they came along too late. They were running out of pilots. They were running out of fuel, and they had \u2018quality control\u2019 issues,\u201d he said, making air quotes. The Nazis used slave labor to build the airplanes, and some concentration camp prisoners intentionally sabotaged the parts, our guide explained.AdvertisementLooking around the hangar, it suddenly dawned on me that most of these marvelous machines were built for killing or spying. In search of something more uplifting, I made my way to the spaceflight hangar, where I found my first tour group standing beside the space shuttle Discovery.\u201cDiscovery went 39 times into space and back,\u201d the guide said, adding that, in its astonishing 30-year career, the shuttle made major contributions to science \u2014 for instance, putting the Hubble telescope into orbit in 1990, and delivering parts, crew members and scientific equipment to the International Space Station on several occasions.As I made the lengthy trip home from the museum, my mind buzzed with questions \u2014 about U.S. history, about the role of war in advancing technology, and about how ambitious scientific endeavors can be a rallying point for international cooperation. I guess that\u2019s the hazard of visiting an incredible museum like Udvar-Hazy; it stays with you long after you\u2019ve gone home. The Chantilly, Va., museum isn\u2019t exactly a secret \u2014 it draws around 1.6 million visitors a year \u2014 but it could definitely handle more people. Is the Smithsonian\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center the better Air and Space Museum?",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Is the Smithsonian\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center the better Air and Space Museum? (WP: Express) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1451",
        "date": "2018-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2018/08/23/is-the-smithsonians-udvar-hazy-center-the-better-air-and-space-museum/",
        "text": "I wonder how many of the 7 million people who visit the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall each year know that there\u2019s another, arguably better and definitely bigger Air and Space Museum just 26 miles away. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center isn\u2019t exactly a secret \u2014 it draws around 1.6 million visitors a year \u2014 but it could definitely handle more people. On a recent weekday, the center\u2019s massive exhibit hall was only speckled with tourists, but they made up for their numbers with outsize enthusiasm. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThis airplane goes 2,000 miles per hour WITHOUT EVEN TRYING,\u201d I overheard one preteen boy say to his family while standing next to the museum\u2019s Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. \u201cIt could go faster than any missile!\u201dOn the other side of the plane, one of the museum\u2019s volunteer tour guides was giving the grown-up version of the same talk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis puppy flew from L.A. to D.C. in 64 minutes,\u201d he said. \u201cHow many of you made it from downtown to here in 64 minutes?\u201dNo one raised their hand, and this is probably a clue as to why Udvar-Hazy is relatively under-visited. It took me two hours to get to the Chantilly, Va., museum on public transportation, and it would have taken more than an hour by car. (One smart tourist I chatted with said he made Udvar-Hazy his first stop after arriving at Dulles airport.)The guide continued dazzling us with details about the Blackbird. When flying upward of Mach 3, the airplane\u2019s titanium surface heated up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, he said. In fact, some Blackbird pilots actually warmed up their lunches \u2014 tubes of food that they squirted through ports in their flight suits \u2014 by pressing them against the airplane\u2019s quartz windows.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs that group continued on to the space section of the museum, I tagged along with another tour group that was approaching the museum\u2019s most famous artifact, the Enola Gay.\u201cDoes everyone here know who Enola Gay is?\u201d the guide said.I was baffled. Of course, I know what \u2009Enola Gay is \u2014 it\u2019s the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb that, on Aug. 6, 1945, instantly flattened 6 square miles of Hiroshima and ultimately killed around 135,000 people, mostly civilians. But I had no idea who Enola Gay was.\u201cIt was the pilot\u2019s mother,\u201d the guide said.I had a lot of questions. What was the pilot\u2019s relationship with his mother like? What did she think about having her name forever linked with a deadly atomic bomb? And what kind of name is Enola, anyway?Story continues below advertisementI didn\u2019t get a chance to ask before the guide buried us in an avalanche of mundane facts \u2014 how many similar planes were built, and where, and by what companies. He never once mentioned the death toll at Hiroshima, or the argument for the bomb\u2019s use \u2014 namely, that it brought a swift end to a war that would have cost even more lives had it continued. The nearby placard was also mute on these topics. That\u2019s too bad, because just before the tour stopped by, I overheard British-accented children debating whether the bomb had killed a hundred people or a thousand.AdvertisementThe tour group moved on to a corner of the museum where a dozen or so German World War II aircraft are parked. The sight of that sea of swastikas painted on airplane tails turned my blood to ice. (I\u2019m Jewish, and my great-grandfather emigrated from Germany just before the war \u2014 though you don\u2019t exactly need a personal connection to have a major emotional response to the Holocaust.)\u201cThe captured German stuff is really something else,\u201d our guide said. He pointed out one technological marvel \u2014 the first jet bomber, an Arado Ar 234 B-2 Blitz. Then he moved his laser pointer to another, the Dornier Do 335 A-0 Pfeil, one of the fastest propeller-driven aircraft ever built.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWith aircraft like this, why didn\u2019t Germany win the air war?\u201d our guide asked. \u201cThe answer is, they came along too late. They were running out of pilots. They were running out of fuel, and they had \u2018quality control\u2019 issues,\u201d he said, making air quotes. The Nazis used slave labor to build the airplanes, and some concentration camp prisoners intentionally sabotaged the parts, our guide explained.AdvertisementLooking around the hangar, it suddenly dawned on me that most of these marvelous machines were built for killing or spying. In search of something more uplifting, I made my way to the spaceflight hangar, where I found my first tour group standing beside the space shuttle Discovery.\u201cDiscovery went 39 times into space and back,\u201d the guide said, adding that, in its astonishing 30-year career, the shuttle made major contributions to science \u2014 for instance, putting the Hubble telescope into orbit in 1990, and delivering parts, crew members and scientific equipment to the International Space Station on several occasions.As I made the lengthy trip home from the museum, my mind buzzed with questions \u2014 about U.S. history, about the role of war in advancing technology, and about how ambitious scientific endeavors can be a rallying point for international cooperation. I guess that\u2019s the hazard of visiting an incredible museum like Udvar-Hazy; it stays with you long after you\u2019ve gone home. The Chantilly, Va., museum isn\u2019t exactly a secret \u2014 it draws around 1.6 million visitors a year \u2014 but it could definitely handle more people. Is the Smithsonian\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center the better Air and Space Museum?",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | We spent the night at the Smithsonian, and it was pretty freaking rad (WP: Express) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1452",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/08/10/we-spent-the-night-at-the-smithsonian-and-it-was-pretty-freaking-rad/",
        "text": "I woke up Saturday morning next to a large jar of something disgusting. \u201cAgg, worms!\u201d I exclaimed. \u201cActually, those are krill,\u201d explained Colette, sitting up in her sleeping bag. \u201cThey pretty much form the foundation of the ocean food web,\u201d she added, paraphrasing a label on a nearby wall.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat was just one of the many things I learned while camping overnight at the National Museum of Natural History, which, like many D.C.-area institutions, offers folks the opportunity to spend the night for around $135 a person (see chart). Despite the hefty price tag, these programs \u2014 which include an evening\u2019s worth of educational activities \u2014 are wildly popular and sell out quickly. Why are people so eager to sleep on an uncomfortable floor in a room full of strangers? And why are they paying to hang out in a museum that\u2019s usually free? I had no idea, which is why I enlisted my friend Tori, 36, and her daughter Colette, 9, to join me on this sleepover and find out.The three of us arrived at 7:30 p.m., just in time for the official briefing. As we entered the museum\u2019s main cafe, we were given a supply kit with a flashlight pen, a workbook and a sugar cookie in the shape of a dinosaur. Brigitte Blachere, a Smithsonian Associates program manager, called us to order.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTonight, you\u2019ll be going on an extreme exploration,\u201d she said, explaining that we would be following the directions in our workbooks to 11 stations around the museum. At each station, we\u2019d complete a few tasks to earn a stamp, and if we got all 11, we\u2019d be official Smithsonian Junior Explorers.Before she let us go, Blachere had the kids make a pledge. \u201cRepeat after me,\u201d she said. \u201cI promise. To have fun. And to make sure. My adult. Participates in all the activities. And puts away their cellphone.\u201d The kids shouted that last bit with zeal.It was 8 p.m. by the time we were let loose in the museum, which gave us about three hours to complete all the tasks in our workbook. We raced to our first assigned zone: Mammal Hall. Task No. 1 was to find examples of \u201cextreme\u201d mammals, such as the largest living rodent. Tori and I roamed the 25,000-square-foot hall searching for giant rats for about 10 minutes before Colette told us the answer she knew all along.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a capybara,\u201d she said. \u201cThey live in South America. Dad ate one once.\u201dEven with Colette\u2019s help, we were well behind schedule when we got to the next station, the \u201cHuman Origins\u201d section of the museum. A museum volunteer gave us our mission: \u201cYou\u2019re a hunter-gatherer and you have to collect plants and animals for your tribe.\u201d The food was pictured on cards scattered around the exhibit.The cards were pretty easy to find, and we gathered more than a dozen in just a few minutes. \u201cThis is a lot easier than the first section,\u201d I said. I was wrong. When we turned in our cards, the volunteer informed us that we had just poisoned our entire tribe.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is oleander,\u201d she said, pointing out a card depicting a plant with lovely pink flowers. \u201cIt\u2019s highly toxic.\u201dShe sent us back into the wilderness to try again. We eventually succeeded at the task, which earned us a chance to chuck a spear at a cardboard cutout of a buffalo. After a few of her throws fell short, Colette ran up to the buffalo and clobbered it with the spear.Advertisement\u201cColette!\u201d I yelled. \u201cThat\u2019s cheating.\u201d \u201cMaybe humans evolved to cheat,\u201d she replied.Taking Colette\u2019s quip as inspiration, Tori and I assessed our situation and realized there was no way we were going to make it to all of the activity stations. So instead of following the directions in the book, we decided to wander around and look for the activities that seemed the most fun.Story continues below advertisementThis turned out to be a great strategy, one that led us to a marine biologist magician who seemed to make specific fish appear on his socks, a darkened exhibit full of skeletons that we explored by flashlight, and a station where we attempted to eat marshmallows like a T. rex \u2014 without using our hands.It was about 10 p.m. when I parked myself at a table with kids making totem poles out of paper towel tubes. A woman explained that we would be modeling our totem poles on the ones created by American Indian tribes from the Pacific Northwest, but as far as I was concerned, the main point of this activity was sitting. I was beat, and so were the two 12-year-olds at my table.\u201cWhy are we getting sleepy?\u201d the boy asked.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t even know,\u201d the girl replied. \u201cEvery time I learn, I get sleepy.\u201dAs the two decorated their tubes, I noticed their father peering intensely at his lap. He was on his smartphone, I realized. Cheater! Luckily for him, his kids were too involved in coloring to notice and I, pretending to craft in order to sit, was certainly not going to turn him in.When activity time wrapped up at 10:45 p.m., my team had completed only seven of the 11 stations. I surveyed a few other adults, and most teams had similar results. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a prize or anything,\u201d one kid quipped.It was time for us to pick the places where we\u2019d bed down for the night, and the moment was fraught. I knew we didn\u2019t want to be anywhere near the perpetually squeaking escalators, and any spot too close to a bathroom was sure to be subject to night-long foot traffic. We settled on a corner of an exhibit about the Arctic Ocean. There was a little more taxidermy present than I would have preferred \u2014 a polar bear loomed over us, and birds peered out at us from glass cases with little beady eyes. But the semi-privacy of three partitions was unbeatable, so we set up there.Despite my strange camp companions, I fell asleep almost immediately.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe next morning, I padded through Ocean Hall and took a look around. Though I would have preferred to sleep in my own bed, there is something undeniably magical about being in a quiet, dark museum. Mummies, animals, skeletons \u2014 they all take on an eerie luminescence, as if they might come to life. So if you have the cash and a kid, or a friend with a kid, consider spending the night at your favorite museum. Just be sure to wear comfy sneakers. And look out for krill.Want to spend the night at a museum?You\u2019re in luck \u2014 there are a few more sleepovers happening as part of the Smithsonian series, and at least two of D.C.\u2019s other museums offer overnight opportunities well into the fall. If you\u2019re interested, sign up ASAP \u2014 these events can sell out fast in our city of nerds. (Note: With the exception of the National Zoo\u2019s, these programs require children to be accompanied by adults and vice versa.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNational Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center\nSaturday, $135Age range: 8-12Where you get to sleep: Near the space shuttle DiscoveryWhat you\u2019ll do when awake: Future pilots can work their way from \u201csergeant\u201d to \u201cgeneral\u201d by completing tasks around the museum that enhance their understanding of the physics of flight, including making kites and paper airplanes. Breakfast the next morning: your choice of items from the museum\u2019s McDonald\u2019s cafe.National Zoo (family)\nVarious dates, $125-$175Age range: 6 and upWhere you get to sleep: In a tent on the zoo grounds, within earshot of all sorts of wild animal callsWhat you\u2019ll do when awake: Participants get an exclusive, keeper-led tour of backstage areas of the zoo. Available tours include the Cheetah Conservation Station, Reptile Discovery Center, Elephant Community Center and Small Mammal House. Afterward, enjoy camp games and snacks.National Zoo (adults only)\nAug. 26, $188Age range: 21 and upWhere you get to sleep: Same as above, but without any wild children calls to wake you up.What you\u2019ll do when awake: Same as above, but this time the post-tour snacks include wine.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNational Archives\nOct. 14, $125Age range: 8-12Where you get to sleep: In the rotunda next to the Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of IndependenceWhat you\u2019ll do when awake: At this space-themed sleepover, families will get to chat with NASA astronaut George Zamka, explore the Archives\u2019 NASA records and play games with museum educators. Then, the next morning, Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero will make you chocolate chip pancakes.International Spy Museum\nNov. 4, $115Age range: 9-13Where you get to sleep: Anywhere you want in the third-floor exhibition galleriesWhat you\u2019ll do when awake: Kids and adult participants interrogate an actual former spy, and then complete a spy mission together at a simulated cocktail party. Then they split up, with kids forming small teams to complete missions around the museum, while adults surveil them from nearby.More adventures with the StaycationerI visited and reviewed every single restroom on the MallThe National Archives: Where confused tourists look at replicasDuck boat tours are ear-bleeding fun Why do people pay around $135 to sleep on uncomfortable floors in otherwise free D.C. museums? We went to find out. We spent the night at the Smithsonian, and it was pretty freaking rad",
        "author": "Sadie Dingfelder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | President Trump\u2019s false claim that Clinton wouldn\u2019t have sent humans to Mars (WP: Fact Checker) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1453",
        "date": "2018-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/03/18/president-trumps-false-claim-that-clinton-wouldnt-have-sent-humans-to-mars/",
        "text": "\u201cVery soon we are going to Mars. You wouldn\u2019t have been going to Mars if my opponent won, that I can tell you. You wouldn\u2019t even be thinking about it.\u201d\u2014 President Trump, in remarks at the Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, Calif., March 13, 2018WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Fact Checker usually focuses on earthly matters, but this time we\u2019re setting our sights on our planetary neighbor millions of miles away. The president wants the United States to explore more of the Solar System and speaks wistfully of the last moon landing by American astronauts in 1972. In December, Trump signed a directive calling on NASA to return to the moon and\u00a0to boldly go where no man has gone before.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars,\u201d Trump said Dec. 11. \u201cAnd perhaps, someday, to many worlds beyond.\u201dAdvertisementThis spacefaring effort would not be happening if Hillary Clinton was president, Trump said March 13. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t even be thinking about it,\u201d he said.The claim seemed a little moony. Exploring Mars\u00a0is not a partisan issue. Did Clinton support or oppose plans to get humans on Mars?The FactsNASA has spent years preparing\u00a0a \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d and currently plans to have astronauts orbiting the planet in the 2030s. Trump has called space\u00a0travel a priority and his administration\u00a0could choose to\u00a0speed things up, a NASA spokeswoman said.Story continues below advertisementUnder Trump, NASA announced plans for\u00a0the\u00a0Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, which\u00a0would be built in the 2020s. This\u00a0is\u00a0a key step,\u00a0since astronauts would use this platform orbiting the moon\u00a0as a testing ground in\u00a0deep space and then as a\u00a0hub between Earth and Mars.AdvertisementUnder President Barack Obama, NASA began to work on a reusable rocket ship\u00a0designed to take crews from Earth to Mars and then back and forth from Mars to the moon platform. (\u201cOur next goal is to get to Mars,\u201d Obama said in 2016.)The plan, in a nutshell, is to hopscotch from Earth to the moon to Mars over several decades. NASA does not yet have a solid target date for landing on the Red Planet.\u00a0The first big step is building the moon-orbiting gateway and then\u00a0traveling to the area around Mars, such as \u201clow-Mars orbit or one of the Martian moons,\u201d NASA says.Story continues below advertisementAfter all this, NASA says, the next step would be\u00a0sending astronauts to land on Mars, perhaps sometime in the late 2030s. (Elon Musk of SpaceX is building his own\u00a0spaceship and says\u00a0it could be test-flying to Mars in 2019. But word to the wise: Musk adds there\u2019s a \u201cgood chance you will die.\u201d)AdvertisementSo what does Clinton have to say about all this?Fact Checker Meg Kelly unearthed a video clip showing that Clinton has been talking about getting humans on Mars since at least 1999. As first lady, Clinton helped launch the \u201cMars Millennium Project,\u201d an educational campaign \u201cto imagine a new life on the red planet.\u201dIn a 1999 speech\u00a0to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Clinton said this project was \u201cchallenging schoolchildren around the nation in conjunction with NASA to design a community that they would want to live on the planet Mars in the year 2030.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMore recently, during the 2016 race, Clinton\u2019s campaign submitted written responses to questions about space travel\u00a0from\u00a0ScienceDebate.org. She said one of her goals\u00a0would have been\u00a0to \u201cadvance our ability to make human exploration of Mars a reality.\u201d (In response to the same questions, \u201cTrump did not formally support a human Mars exploration program or other specific initiatives,\u201d Space News noted.)Advertisement\u201cToday, thanks to a series of successful American robotic explorers, we know more about the Red Planet than ever before,\u201d Clinton said. \u201cA goal of my administration will be to expand this knowledge even further and advance our ability to make human exploration of Mars a reality.\u201dPresumably, this would have meant supporting the same \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d initiatives that have enjoyed Obama and Trump\u2019s support. Jake Sullivan, who served as Clinton\u2019s top policy adviser during the campaign, confirmed that Clinton \u201cproposed to advance plans for human exploration of Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementClinton even visited a factory in Michigan\u00a0making parts and tooling for the Space Launch System. That\u2019s the rocket for\u00a0the\u00a0Orion\u00a0spaceship NASA is building for the Mars\u00a0voyage and other deep-space destinations. \u201cI got to see what\u2019s happening here to help build the SLS rocket that is going to go from Macomb to Mars,\u201d Clinton said in August 2016.AdvertisementThe White House did not respond to our request\u00a0for comment.The Pinocchio TestSpace, the final frontier, was very much on Clinton\u2019s mind in 2016. Unlike Trump, Clinton was on the record during the campaign supporting efforts to get humans to Mars one day.It\u2019s not clear that the American plan for Martian colonization would be unfolding any differently had Clinton won the presidency, since NASA\u2019s \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d\u00a0initiative predates Trump and builds on what Obama did. And in any case,\u00a0Americans\u00a0are not expected to be\u00a0walking on\u00a0Mars during the four or eight years of the current administration.Story continues below advertisementIt doesn\u2019t take a rocket scientist to get this right, so the president earns Four Pinocchios.Four Pinocchios(About our rating scale)Send us facts to check by filling out this formKeep tabs on Trump\u2019s promises with our Trump Promise TrackerAdvertisementSign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter Share the Facts 2018-03-18 15:13:31 UTC Washington Post 1 1 5 Washington Post Rating: Four Pinocchios \u201cVery soon we are going to Mars. You wouldn\u2019t have been going to Mars if my opponent won, that I can tell you. You wouldn\u2019t even be thinking about it.\u201d Donald Trump President www.whitehouse.gov in remarks at the Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, Calif. Tuesday, March 13, 2018 2018-03-13 Read More info The president spaced out while describing Clinton's position on Mars exploration. President Trump\u2019s false claim that Clinton wouldn\u2019t have sent humans to Mars",
        "author": "Salvador Rizzo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | President Trump\u2019s false claim that Clinton wouldn\u2019t have sent humans to Mars (WP: Fact Checker) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1454",
        "date": "2018-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/03/18/president-trumps-false-claim-that-clinton-wouldnt-have-sent-humans-to-mars/",
        "text": "\u201cVery soon we are going to Mars. You wouldn\u2019t have been going to Mars if my opponent won, that I can tell you. You wouldn\u2019t even be thinking about it.\u201d\u2014 President Trump, in remarks at the Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, Calif., March 13, 2018WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Fact Checker usually focuses on earthly matters, but this time we\u2019re setting our sights on our planetary neighbor millions of miles away. The president wants the United States to explore more of the Solar System and speaks wistfully of the last moon landing by American astronauts in 1972. In December, Trump signed a directive calling on NASA to return to the moon and\u00a0to boldly go where no man has gone before.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars,\u201d Trump said Dec. 11. \u201cAnd perhaps, someday, to many worlds beyond.\u201dAdvertisementThis spacefaring effort would not be happening if Hillary Clinton was president, Trump said March 13. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t even be thinking about it,\u201d he said.The claim seemed a little moony. Exploring Mars\u00a0is not a partisan issue. Did Clinton support or oppose plans to get humans on Mars?The FactsNASA has spent years preparing\u00a0a \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d and currently plans to have astronauts orbiting the planet in the 2030s. Trump has called space\u00a0travel a priority and his administration\u00a0could choose to\u00a0speed things up, a NASA spokeswoman said.Story continues below advertisementUnder Trump, NASA announced plans for\u00a0the\u00a0Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, which\u00a0would be built in the 2020s. This\u00a0is\u00a0a key step,\u00a0since astronauts would use this platform orbiting the moon\u00a0as a testing ground in\u00a0deep space and then as a\u00a0hub between Earth and Mars.AdvertisementUnder President Barack Obama, NASA began to work on a reusable rocket ship\u00a0designed to take crews from Earth to Mars and then back and forth from Mars to the moon platform. (\u201cOur next goal is to get to Mars,\u201d Obama said in 2016.)The plan, in a nutshell, is to hopscotch from Earth to the moon to Mars over several decades. NASA does not yet have a solid target date for landing on the Red Planet.\u00a0The first big step is building the moon-orbiting gateway and then\u00a0traveling to the area around Mars, such as \u201clow-Mars orbit or one of the Martian moons,\u201d NASA says.Story continues below advertisementAfter all this, NASA says, the next step would be\u00a0sending astronauts to land on Mars, perhaps sometime in the late 2030s. (Elon Musk of SpaceX is building his own\u00a0spaceship and says\u00a0it could be test-flying to Mars in 2019. But word to the wise: Musk adds there\u2019s a \u201cgood chance you will die.\u201d)AdvertisementSo what does Clinton have to say about all this?Fact Checker Meg Kelly unearthed a video clip showing that Clinton has been talking about getting humans on Mars since at least 1999. As first lady, Clinton helped launch the \u201cMars Millennium Project,\u201d an educational campaign \u201cto imagine a new life on the red planet.\u201dIn a 1999 speech\u00a0to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Clinton said this project was \u201cchallenging schoolchildren around the nation in conjunction with NASA to design a community that they would want to live on the planet Mars in the year 2030.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMore recently, during the 2016 race, Clinton\u2019s campaign submitted written responses to questions about space travel\u00a0from\u00a0ScienceDebate.org. She said one of her goals\u00a0would have been\u00a0to \u201cadvance our ability to make human exploration of Mars a reality.\u201d (In response to the same questions, \u201cTrump did not formally support a human Mars exploration program or other specific initiatives,\u201d Space News noted.)Advertisement\u201cToday, thanks to a series of successful American robotic explorers, we know more about the Red Planet than ever before,\u201d Clinton said. \u201cA goal of my administration will be to expand this knowledge even further and advance our ability to make human exploration of Mars a reality.\u201dPresumably, this would have meant supporting the same \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d initiatives that have enjoyed Obama and Trump\u2019s support. Jake Sullivan, who served as Clinton\u2019s top policy adviser during the campaign, confirmed that Clinton \u201cproposed to advance plans for human exploration of Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementClinton even visited a factory in Michigan\u00a0making parts and tooling for the Space Launch System. That\u2019s the rocket for\u00a0the\u00a0Orion\u00a0spaceship NASA is building for the Mars\u00a0voyage and other deep-space destinations. \u201cI got to see what\u2019s happening here to help build the SLS rocket that is going to go from Macomb to Mars,\u201d Clinton said in August 2016.AdvertisementThe White House did not respond to our request\u00a0for comment.The Pinocchio TestSpace, the final frontier, was very much on Clinton\u2019s mind in 2016. Unlike Trump, Clinton was on the record during the campaign supporting efforts to get humans to Mars one day.It\u2019s not clear that the American plan for Martian colonization would be unfolding any differently had Clinton won the presidency, since NASA\u2019s \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d\u00a0initiative predates Trump and builds on what Obama did. And in any case,\u00a0Americans\u00a0are not expected to be\u00a0walking on\u00a0Mars during the four or eight years of the current administration.Story continues below advertisementIt doesn\u2019t take a rocket scientist to get this right, so the president earns Four Pinocchios.Four Pinocchios(About our rating scale)Send us facts to check by filling out this formKeep tabs on Trump\u2019s promises with our Trump Promise TrackerAdvertisementSign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter Share the Facts 2018-03-18 15:13:31 UTC Washington Post 1 1 5 Washington Post Rating: Four Pinocchios \u201cVery soon we are going to Mars. You wouldn\u2019t have been going to Mars if my opponent won, that I can tell you. You wouldn\u2019t even be thinking about it.\u201d Donald Trump President www.whitehouse.gov in remarks at the Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, Calif. Tuesday, March 13, 2018 2018-03-13 Read More info The president spaced out while describing Clinton's position on Mars exploration. President Trump\u2019s false claim that Clinton wouldn\u2019t have sent humans to Mars",
        "author": "Salvador Rizzo"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Buy Iron Man\u2019s Watch (WSJ: Fashion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1455",
        "date": "2019-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-buy-iron-mans-watch-11571316435?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=65",
        "text": "Also up for grabs in the same auction\u2014dubbed \u201cGame Changers\u201d at Phillips auction house in New York\u2014are golfer Jack Nicklaus\u2019s 1966 gold Rolex Day-Date, actor Marlon Brando\u2019s Apocalypse Now Rolex GMT Master and a two-watch collection from the late U.S. senator and astronaut John Glenn.\n\n\n\n\nOne of Glenn\u2019s watches might be the oddest token of national gratitude he received after his February 1962 space flight, which pushed the U.S. into the space-race lead. In July of that year, the Anti-Superstition Society of Chicago, a club whose members strolled under ladders, smashed mirrors and cuddled black cats to prove such occurrences did not engender bad luck, presented Glenn with a watch featuring an unusual dial. Instead of the numerals 1-12, the numeral 13 appears on the dial 12 times. Wearing the watch, the Society said, would prove that the number 13 was not to be feared.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe LeCoultre \u201cLucky 13\u201d was presented by the Chicago Anti-Superstition Society to Lt. Colonel John H. Glenn Jr. to commemorate his historic achievement of becoming the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Courtesy of Phillips\n \n\n\n\nThe 1962 watch has a Swiss Jaeger-LeCoultre movement inside a gold-filled, American-made case. Phillips puts the estimate at $20,000 to $40,000.\n\n\nThe second Glenn watch up for auction is a Breitling Navitimer\u2014a pilot watch that debuted in the 1950s equipped with a circular slide rule for calculating fuel consumption, air speeds and rates of ascent and descent. Glenn\u2019s fellow astronaut Scott Carpenter suggested a few tweaks to the Navitimer, including adopting a 24-hour dial that would be more useful during space flight. The 1962 version of the watch owned by Glenn is known as the Navitimer \u201cScott Carpenter\u201d Cosmonaute, and could fetch between $40,000 and $80,000.\nAdded cachet and higher auction prices often accompany watches that have a famous backstory. In December 2017, the previously lost Woodward-Newman Rolex Daytona, purchased by Joanne Woodward and worn by her husband Paul Newman, sold at Phillips for $17,752,500. \nNone of the \u201cGame Changers\u201d watches are expected to top Newman\u2019s price, says Paul Boutros, Phillips\u2019s head of watches for the Americas. \u201cAll of these watches have rock-solid provenance and each of the people connected to the watches was a larger-than-life figure,\u201d he says. \u201cEach watch tells a great story.\u201d \nBoutros believes Glenn\u2019s watches appeal to a different audience than the merely celebrity-obsessed. \u201cThere will be museums and brands bidding at the sale, in addition to private collectors and people who are into space exploration,\u201d he says. A portion of sales will go to the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Proceeds from Downey\u2019s Urwerk will go to Random Act Funding, a philanthropic organization started by the actor and his wife, film producer Susan Downey.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Rolex GMT-Master was worn by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s film Apocalypse Now, released in 1979.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Courtesy of Phillips\n \n\n\n\nAccording to Urwerk, Downey liked one of its watches he had seen in a magazine. He first wore one in Spider-Man: Homecoming. The actor did not buy the UR-105 CT Iron for Avengers: Endgame, but borrowed it for filming from Urwerk, which still owns the watch.\nUrwerk is an independent Swiss brand that produces 150 watches a year. Its watches are unconventional in appearance, with hour hands called \u201csatellites\u201d that skim along the minute gauge. The company\u2019s watchmakers Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei claim diverse inspirations, including Star Wars\u2019s Millennium Falcon. A major December watch auction\u2014already noteworthy for featuring a watch owned by Marlon Brando\u2014adds timepieces from astronaut John Glenn and Robert Downey Jr.\u2019s Iron Man ",
        "author": "Michael Clerizio"
    },
    {
        "title": "Swedish Watches Show Signs of Viking Past and Stellar Future (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1456",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/fashion/watches-sweden.html",
        "text": "Timepieces being made in Sweden range from one with Viking patterns to another developed in collaboration with an astronaut. Timepieces being made in Sweden range from one with Viking patterns to another developed in collaboration with an astronaut. LINKOPING, Sweden \u2014 In a dark forge outside this historic university city, sparks flew as Johan Gustafsson hammered a metallic sandwich of layers of nickel, iron and two types of Swedish steel. His aim was to create the characteristic stripes and swirls found in Damascus steel.",
        "author": "By Penelope Colston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Swedish Watches Show Signs of Viking Past and Stellar Future (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1457",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/fashion/watches-sweden.html",
        "text": "Timepieces being made in Sweden range from one with Viking patterns to another developed in collaboration with an astronaut. Timepieces being made in Sweden range from one with Viking patterns to another developed in collaboration with an astronaut. LINKOPING, Sweden \u2014 In a dark forge outside this historic university city, sparks flew as Johan Gustafsson hammered a metallic sandwich of layers of nickel, iron and two types of Swedish steel. His aim was to create the characteristic stripes and swirls found in Damascus steel.",
        "author": "By Penelope Colston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Refugee Designer Shines a Light on Global Issues (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1458",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/fashion/refugees-fashion-slow-factory.html",
        "text": "C\u00e9line Semaan, born in Beirut, designs and sells products that raise awareness around issues such as the plight of refugees or the threat of global warming. C\u00e9line Semaan, born in Beirut, designs and sells products that raise awareness around issues such as the plight of refugees or the threat of global warming. In summer 2014, a German astronaut on the International Space Station posted an image to his Twitter account with the caption, \u201cMy saddest photo yet.\u201d It showed the lights of the Gaza Strip from above; what the astronaut saw but the static shot did not capture were rockets flying over the strip amid the region\u2019s 50-day war between Israel and Palestine.",
        "author": "By Valeriya Safronova"
    },
    {
        "title": "Refugee Designer Shines a Light on Global Issues (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1459",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/fashion/refugees-fashion-slow-factory.html",
        "text": "C\u00e9line Semaan, born in Beirut, designs and sells products that raise awareness around issues such as the plight of refugees or the threat of global warming. C\u00e9line Semaan, born in Beirut, designs and sells products that raise awareness around issues such as the plight of refugees or the threat of global warming. In summer 2014, a German astronaut on the International Space Station posted an image to his Twitter account with the caption, \u201cMy saddest photo yet.\u201d It showed the lights of the Gaza Strip from above; what the astronaut saw but the static shot did not capture were rockets flying over the strip amid the region\u2019s 50-day war between Israel and Palestine.",
        "author": "By Valeriya Safronova"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Bookseller to Blue Origin: A Look Back at the Career of Jeff Bezos (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1460",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/from-bookseller-to-blue-origin-a-look-back-at-the-career-of-jeff-bezos/B524ACA3-28DE-4944-B74B-97CF15B78BF6?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=6",
        "text": " Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos successfully completed the first manned mission of Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft. In this video, WSJ looks back at the remarkable career of the world\u2019s richest man. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spaceship Delays, Explained (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1461",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/boeings-starliner-spaceship-delays-explained/4B2F5B19-AADD-43CF-9E99-9EB73CCBDFF3?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=19",
        "text": " Boeing\u2019s Starliner spaceship has been hampered by a string of errors and delays. WSJ\u2019s Micah Maidenberg explains why Boeing has struggled to launch the Starliner on schedule and what\u2019s next for the aerospace giant\u2019s space program. Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ultimate Italian Fantasy Life Is Mimi Thorisson\u2019s Reality (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1462",
        "date": "2020-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mimi-thorisson-cookbook-old-world-italian-interview-11597765426?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=13",
        "text": "Cuisine is not usually a reason for uprooting a large family and moving to a new country, but in the Thorissons\u2019 case, it was. In spring 2018, they decided to leave the M\u00e9doc, crossing over to the Italian side of the Alps, to the agriculturally rich Piedmont region, which is home to the Slow Food movement. The goal was to truly live out, and not stage, the life they wanted to capture for Mimi\u2019s next cookbook, Old World Italian. With the Piedmontese capital of Turin as their home base, they have devoted the past two years to discovering the country\u2019s culinary riches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChopping zucchini blossoms.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nMimi, 47, grew up in Hong Kong, but she spent every summer in her mother\u2019s hometown in the south of France, and she has made a name for herself by celebrating an idyllic vision of French country cuisine. She credits her interest in cooking to her mother\u2019s sister, Francine, whose husband was from Piedmont. Thanks to her aunt, Mimi says, she had a jump start on the local cuisine. \u201cI always knew about the food, all the Barolo, brasato, vitello tonnato,\u201d she recalls. \n\n\n\n\nA former model, Mimi learned her trade by eating, cooking and writing and by befriending chefs. Before they moved to the M\u00e9doc, the Thorissons lived in Paris, where they started to write a food guide. Together they spent nearly two years photographing some of the city\u2019s best restaurants, interviewing the chefs in their kitchens and absorbing their expertise. Though the project was put on hold, it served as a foundation for Mimi\u2019s career shift into cooking and writing. One of the chefs they met during that time was Alain Passard, of the three-Michelin-star Arp\u00e8ge, whom they visit on trips to Paris. \u201cHe is able to make vegetables gastronomic,\u201d Mimi says, adding that in the early \u201900s, Passard inspired people like herself to move to the country or grow a vegetable garden. \u201cI love the simplicity of her cuisine\u2014generous and respectful of the seasons,\u201d Passard says. \u201cMimi understood early that the most beautiful culinary book has been written by nature.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\u00a0\u00a0The apartment\u2019s doorbell.Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine1 of 9\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 9Hide CaptionThe apartment\u2019s doorbell.Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine\n\n\nIn 2010, seeking a bucolic lifestyle and more space for their growing household, the Thorissons moved to the M\u00e9doc. In 2011, after Mimi had given birth to their daughter Ga\u00efa, she created the blog Manger, which first brought her the attention of the food world. \u201cI started a blog because one night I was very sad. I was missing everybody, and I was tired. Ga\u00efa was a baby, and I was in the kitchen,\u201d she recalls of those early days in the countryside. \u201cAll the candles were lit, and I had this beautiful view. I just started a blog behind Oddur\u2019s back.\u201d \n\n\nManger was featured on another blog, A Cup of Jo, and then Bon App\u00e9tit and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martha Stewart\n\n\n\n picked it up too. Mimi ended up with a book contract with Clarkson Potter and two TV shows on Canal Plus, La Table de Mimi and Les Desserts de Mimi. In 2015, the couple began opening the doors to their home, a 19th-century former hotel, for cooking and photography workshops.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLIBERAL ARTS The dining room features a midcentury painting found in Bordeaux.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nIt was Oddur, 50, who first fell for Turin, somewhat by chance. Being a large family, they often split up when they travel, with half going by car or plane and the other half by train. On one occasion four years ago, Oddur decided to reroute his group through Turin, a city he had never visited. He parked illegally in front of the restaurant Porto di Savona, where he and the kids had a memorable lunch overlooking the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, one of the largest Baroque-style squares in Europe. And he was hooked. Soon after, the Thorissons returned for a guide Oddur was writing for Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveler. The onetime Italian capital, Turin mixes grand Baroque palaces with stretches of arcades housing pharmacies and trattorias. \u201cTorino has this special grandness, elegance and understatedness,\u201d Mimi says. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what we like. Understated.\u201d \nThe family visited Turin eight more times before making the move in June 2018. They found a 19th-century piano nobile apartment and arrived with nearly nothing, intending to start from scratch. (They brought along only a midcentury plywood chair by Cherner and a 19th-century painting of a gentleman with a cigar.) They wanted a classic Italian residence filled slowly and carefully with pieces from flea markets and antiques stores. Their first two acquisitions were from a nearby market, a Piedmontese farm table for the dining room and an oval marble one for the kitchen. \u201cOften our lives have been determined by a table, a dining table. It\u2019s our life, the table. It\u2019s food and family,\u201d Mimi says. Outside a carpenter\u2019s The food writer and her family have settled into a new life in Italy, all the while exploring and uncovering the country\u2019s gastronomic treasures for her latest book, \u201cOld World Italian.\u201d ",
        "author": "Ahnna Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ultimate Italian Fantasy Life Is Mimi Thorisson\u2019s Reality (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1463",
        "date": "2020-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mimi-thorisson-cookbook-old-world-italian-interview-11597765426?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=47",
        "text": "Cuisine is not usually a reason for uprooting a large family and moving to a new country, but in the Thorissons\u2019 case, it was. In spring 2018, they decided to leave the M\u00e9doc, crossing over to the Italian side of the Alps, to the agriculturally rich Piedmont region, which is home to the Slow Food movement. The goal was to truly live out, and not stage, the life they wanted to capture for Mimi\u2019s next cookbook, Old World Italian. With the Piedmontese capital of Turin as their home base, they have devoted the past two years to discovering the country\u2019s culinary riches.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChopping zucchini blossoms.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nMimi, 47, grew up in Hong Kong, but she spent every summer in her mother\u2019s hometown in the south of France, and she has made a name for herself by celebrating an idyllic vision of French country cuisine. She credits her interest in cooking to her mother\u2019s sister, Francine, whose husband was from Piedmont. Thanks to her aunt, Mimi says, she had a jump start on the local cuisine. \u201cI always knew about the food, all the Barolo, brasato, vitello tonnato,\u201d she recalls. \n\n\n\n\nA former model, Mimi learned her trade by eating, cooking and writing and by befriending chefs. Before they moved to the M\u00e9doc, the Thorissons lived in Paris, where they started to write a food guide. Together they spent nearly two years photographing some of the city\u2019s best restaurants, interviewing the chefs in their kitchens and absorbing their expertise. Though the project was put on hold, it served as a foundation for Mimi\u2019s career shift into cooking and writing. One of the chefs they met during that time was Alain Passard, of the three-Michelin-star Arp\u00e8ge, whom they visit on trips to Paris. \u201cHe is able to make vegetables gastronomic,\u201d Mimi says, adding that in the early \u201900s, Passard inspired people like herself to move to the country or grow a vegetable garden. \u201cI love the simplicity of her cuisine\u2014generous and respectful of the seasons,\u201d Passard says. \u201cMimi understood early that the most beautiful culinary book has been written by nature.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\u00a0\u00a0The apartment\u2019s doorbell.Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine1 of 9\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 9Hide CaptionThe apartment\u2019s doorbell.Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine\n\n\nIn 2010, seeking a bucolic lifestyle and more space for their growing household, the Thorissons moved to the M\u00e9doc. In 2011, after Mimi had given birth to their daughter Ga\u00efa, she created the blog Manger, which first brought her the attention of the food world. \u201cI started a blog because one night I was very sad. I was missing everybody, and I was tired. Ga\u00efa was a baby, and I was in the kitchen,\u201d she recalls of those early days in the countryside. \u201cAll the candles were lit, and I had this beautiful view. I just started a blog behind Oddur\u2019s back.\u201d \n\n\nManger was featured on another blog, A Cup of Jo, and then Bon App\u00e9tit and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martha Stewart\n\n\n\n picked it up too. Mimi ended up with a book contract with Clarkson Potter and two TV shows on Canal Plus, La Table de Mimi and Les Desserts de Mimi. In 2015, the couple began opening the doors to their home, a 19th-century former hotel, for cooking and photography workshops.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLIBERAL ARTS The dining room features a midcentury painting found in Bordeaux.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Danilo Scarpati for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nIt was Oddur, 50, who first fell for Turin, somewhat by chance. Being a large family, they often split up when they travel, with half going by car or plane and the other half by train. On one occasion four years ago, Oddur decided to reroute his group through Turin, a city he had never visited. He parked illegally in front of the restaurant Porto di Savona, where he and the kids had a memorable lunch overlooking the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, one of the largest Baroque-style squares in Europe. And he was hooked. Soon after, the Thorissons returned for a guide Oddur was writing for Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveler. The onetime Italian capital, Turin mixes grand Baroque palaces with stretches of arcades housing pharmacies and trattorias. \u201cTorino has this special grandness, elegance and understatedness,\u201d Mimi says. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly what we like. Understated.\u201d \nThe family visited Turin eight more times before making the move in June 2018. They found a 19th-century piano nobile apartment and arrived with nearly nothing, intending to start from scratch. (They brought along only a midcentury plywood chair by Cherner and a 19th-century painting of a gentleman with a cigar.) They wanted a classic Italian residence filled slowly and carefully with pieces from flea markets and antiques stores. Their first two acquisitions were from a nearby market, a Piedmontese farm table for the dining room and an oval marble one for the kitchen. \u201cOften our lives have been determined by a table, a dining table. It\u2019s our life, the table. It\u2019s food and family,\u201d Mimi says. Outside a carpenter\u2019s The food writer and her family have settled into a new life in Italy, all the while exploring and uncovering the country\u2019s gastronomic treasures for her latest book, \u201cOld World Italian.\u201d ",
        "author": "Ahnna Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "As SpaceX Takes Off, Small Rocket Startups Fall Behind (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1464",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/as-spacex-takes-off-small-rocket-startups-fall-behind/742DFCBC-0023-44CF-887B-34F8CA75946E?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=54",
        "text": " On May 30, SpaceX and NASA launched the first orbital human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle Program ended in 2011. But as SpaceX dominates the headlines, a large number of small launch startups are poised to fail. Photo: AP/John Raoux ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China's Plan to Conquer the Moon, Mars and More (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1465",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/china-plan-to-conquer-the-moon-mars-and-more/202774E8-3A3C-4A8B-99C7-9455D2D58477?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=12",
        "text": " This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China's Plan to Conquer the Moon, Mars and More (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1466",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/china-plan-to-conquer-the-moon-mars-and-more/202774E8-3A3C-4A8B-99C7-9455D2D58477?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=43",
        "text": " This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China's Plan to Conquer the Moon, Mars and More (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1467",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/china-plan-to-conquer-the-moon-mars-and-more/202774E8-3A3C-4A8B-99C7-9455D2D58477?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=51",
        "text": " This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Sets Its Sights on the Next Era of Space Tourism (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1468",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/blue-origin-sets-its-sights-on-the-next-era-of-space-tourism/4D30C9EC-B4D7-4E1F-A725-43C1F08018AA?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=7",
        "text": " Blue Origin plans to launch its first passenger spaceflight on July 20 with billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos and three others on board. The flight, which will have at least one paying passenger, is being hailed as the next step in a new era of space tourism. Photo illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Sets Its Sights on the Next Era of Space Tourism (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1469",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/blue-origin-sets-its-sights-on-the-next-era-of-space-tourism/4D30C9EC-B4D7-4E1F-A725-43C1F08018AA?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=28",
        "text": " Blue Origin plans to launch its first passenger spaceflight on July 20 with billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos and three others on board. The flight, which will have at least one paying passenger, is being hailed as the next step in a new era of space tourism. Photo illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Boeing\u2019s Starliner Test Launch Is Mission Critical (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1470",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/why-boeings-starliner-test-launch-is-mission-critical/BD8F48BF-8B3D-4DCA-BAE0-F3473C6D094D?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=33",
        "text": " After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Boeing\u2019s Starliner Test Launch Is Mission Critical (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1471",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/why-boeings-starliner-test-launch-is-mission-critical/BD8F48BF-8B3D-4DCA-BAE0-F3473C6D094D?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=34",
        "text": " After years of cost overruns, errors and delays, Boeing\u2019s space program is facing a major test: Later this year it will likely make its second attempt to launch its Starliner crew capsule to the International Space Station. WSJ looks at the company\u2019s path to this crucial moment, and what\u2019s riding on the test flight\u2019s success. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Tom Hanks Is Now Officially America\u2019s Captain in \u2018Greyhound\u2019 (WSJ: Film) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1472",
        "date": "2020-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-hanks-is-now-officially-americas-captain-with-apple-tv-s-greyhound-11594216500?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=12",
        "text": "\u201cThe reason Tom Hanks fits so well into the role of a captain is because he\u2019s a curious and empathetic and goal-oriented person himself. He\u2019s a creative leader,\u201d says Aaron Schneider, who directed \u201cGreyhound,\u201d from a script Mr. Hanks wrote for himself, adapting a 1955 novel. The movie premieres Friday on Apple TV+. \u201cWhen he brings that to the role of a captain in a film, it\u2019s like sliding into a comfortable shoe. And he matches the role in a way that audiences find comforting.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Which Streaming Services Are Right for You? Take the WSJ Quiz.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n Jess Kuronen\n\n\nMr. Hanks\u2019s movie captains clearly have crisis-management skills. What else can they teach about leadership?\n\nCapt. Jim Lovell in \u2018Apollo 13\u2019 (1995) Leadership lesson: Managing unexpected change\nApollo 13 astronauts were supposed to walk on the moon, but\u2026 \u201cHouston, we have a problem.\u201d Plan B is to return to Earth in a damaged spacecraft. As mission commander Jim Lovell, Mr. Hanks must hold the ship and his disappointed team together. \u201cJust breathe normal, fellas,\u201d he reassures co-pilots Fred Haise and Jack Swigert as they scramble to repair the carbon dioxide scrubbers. When they ogle the moon regretfully, he reminds them to focus on details of their revised objective: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna need a contingency if we lose comm with Houston. Freddo, let\u2019s get an idea where we stand on the consumables. Jack, get into the Odyssey and bag up all the water you can before it freezes in there\u2026Let\u2019s go home.\u201d\nThe takeaway: When plans go awry, a strong boss needs to adapt decisively and gracefully, rallying the team to give the revised course as much energy as the original one. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as a space captain in \u2018Apollo 13.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Universal/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nCapt. John Miller in \u2018Saving Private Ryan\u2019 (1998) Leadership lesson: Keeping the company on mission\nThe traumatic carnage of the Normandy invasion is barely behind them, and there\u2019s a war to be won. But U.S. Army Capt. Miller\u2019s unit has orders to locate PFC James Ryan and get him home before he becomes the fourth Ryan brother killed in action. The captain, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher back home, must keep his team on mission while they question the sense of risking eight men\u2019s lives to save one. When sharpshooter Jackson complains the job is a waste of his skills, Capt. Miller jokes to the soldiers, \u201cPay attention to Jackson, this is the way to gripe.\u201d A tragedy illustrates the peril of straying from the mission. \u201cGet your gear. Let\u2019s go,\u201d Capt. Miller tells the soldiers after one of them nearly deserts. He leads by example, wins his team\u2019s trust, and sacrifices himself to get the mission done. \nThe takeaway: The more chaos there is, the easier it is for a team to get distracted and lose focus on its key assignment. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as an army captain in \u2018Saving Private Ryan.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n DreamWorks/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\n\n\nFor more to watch: Want to Be a Young Influencer? Maybe Not Escape Stressful Times\u2026in the Great Depression? Welcome to \u2018Fortnite\u2019\u2014Enjoy the Concert \n\n\nCapt. Richard Phillips in \u2018Captain Phillips\u2019 (2013) Leadership lesson: Negotiating under pressure\nRichard Phillips is no Jean-Claude Van Damme. When armed Somali pirates board his civilian cargo ship, he needs to use his wits. First he must negotiate with his own crew, merchant seamen who complain that they didn\u2019t sign up to fight crime. With the pirates\u2019 rifles pointed at him, his eyes move constantly. He seeks every resource and advantage to alert his crew to dangers and guide rescuers. Most of all, he gets inside the heads of the hijackers, appealing to their reason, fears, and pride. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a man injured. Take the money out of the safe, and let\u2019s call it a day,\u201d he offers the pirate leader. In the end, he outplays the pirates.\nThe takeaway: Understanding what everyone wants, from employees to competitors, is vital to success.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as a civilian cargo ship captain in \u2018Captain Phillips.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nCapt. Chesley Sullenberger in \u2018Sully\u2019 (2016) Leadership lesson: Owning your decisions\nIt\u2019s remarkable that while lauded as a national hero for landing a damaged passenger jet on the Hudson River in 2009, saving all 155 people aboard, Capt. Sullenberger was called to task for what he might have done differently. Investigators question Sully\u2019s personal life and his rundown of what happened. Computer simulations second-guess his decisions. The probe fills Mr. Hanks\u2019s character with self-doubt. \u201cI did the best I could,\u201d he tells his wife, as if he failed. But he defends his choices. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t time for calculati In a new movie, Hanks is a World War II sea captain. We look at the other times the actor has taken the helm. ",
        "author": "Don Steinberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tom Hanks Is Now Officially America\u2019s Captain in \u2018Greyhound\u2019 (WSJ: Film) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1473",
        "date": "2020-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-hanks-is-now-officially-americas-captain-with-apple-tv-s-greyhound-11594216500?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=36",
        "text": "\u201cThe reason Tom Hanks fits so well into the role of a captain is because he\u2019s a curious and empathetic and goal-oriented person himself. He\u2019s a creative leader,\u201d says Aaron Schneider, who directed \u201cGreyhound,\u201d from a script Mr. Hanks wrote for himself, adapting a 1955 novel. The movie premieres Friday on Apple TV+. \u201cWhen he brings that to the role of a captain in a film, it\u2019s like sliding into a comfortable shoe. And he matches the role in a way that audiences find comforting.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Which Streaming Services Are Right for You? Take the WSJ Quiz.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n Jess Kuronen\n\n\nMr. Hanks\u2019s movie captains clearly have crisis-management skills. What else can they teach about leadership?\n\nCapt. Jim Lovell in \u2018Apollo 13\u2019 (1995) Leadership lesson: Managing unexpected change\nApollo 13 astronauts were supposed to walk on the moon, but\u2026 \u201cHouston, we have a problem.\u201d Plan B is to return to Earth in a damaged spacecraft. As mission commander Jim Lovell, Mr. Hanks must hold the ship and his disappointed team together. \u201cJust breathe normal, fellas,\u201d he reassures co-pilots Fred Haise and Jack Swigert as they scramble to repair the carbon dioxide scrubbers. When they ogle the moon regretfully, he reminds them to focus on details of their revised objective: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna need a contingency if we lose comm with Houston. Freddo, let\u2019s get an idea where we stand on the consumables. Jack, get into the Odyssey and bag up all the water you can before it freezes in there\u2026Let\u2019s go home.\u201d\nThe takeaway: When plans go awry, a strong boss needs to adapt decisively and gracefully, rallying the team to give the revised course as much energy as the original one. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as a space captain in \u2018Apollo 13.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Universal/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nCapt. John Miller in \u2018Saving Private Ryan\u2019 (1998) Leadership lesson: Keeping the company on mission\nThe traumatic carnage of the Normandy invasion is barely behind them, and there\u2019s a war to be won. But U.S. Army Capt. Miller\u2019s unit has orders to locate PFC James Ryan and get him home before he becomes the fourth Ryan brother killed in action. The captain, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher back home, must keep his team on mission while they question the sense of risking eight men\u2019s lives to save one. When sharpshooter Jackson complains the job is a waste of his skills, Capt. Miller jokes to the soldiers, \u201cPay attention to Jackson, this is the way to gripe.\u201d A tragedy illustrates the peril of straying from the mission. \u201cGet your gear. Let\u2019s go,\u201d Capt. Miller tells the soldiers after one of them nearly deserts. He leads by example, wins his team\u2019s trust, and sacrifices himself to get the mission done. \nThe takeaway: The more chaos there is, the easier it is for a team to get distracted and lose focus on its key assignment. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as an army captain in \u2018Saving Private Ryan.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n DreamWorks/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\n\n\nFor more to watch: Want to Be a Young Influencer? Maybe Not Escape Stressful Times\u2026in the Great Depression? Welcome to \u2018Fortnite\u2019\u2014Enjoy the Concert \n\n\nCapt. Richard Phillips in \u2018Captain Phillips\u2019 (2013) Leadership lesson: Negotiating under pressure\nRichard Phillips is no Jean-Claude Van Damme. When armed Somali pirates board his civilian cargo ship, he needs to use his wits. First he must negotiate with his own crew, merchant seamen who complain that they didn\u2019t sign up to fight crime. With the pirates\u2019 rifles pointed at him, his eyes move constantly. He seeks every resource and advantage to alert his crew to dangers and guide rescuers. Most of all, he gets inside the heads of the hijackers, appealing to their reason, fears, and pride. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a man injured. Take the money out of the safe, and let\u2019s call it a day,\u201d he offers the pirate leader. In the end, he outplays the pirates.\nThe takeaway: Understanding what everyone wants, from employees to competitors, is vital to success.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as a civilian cargo ship captain in \u2018Captain Phillips.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nCapt. Chesley Sullenberger in \u2018Sully\u2019 (2016) Leadership lesson: Owning your decisions\nIt\u2019s remarkable that while lauded as a national hero for landing a damaged passenger jet on the Hudson River in 2009, saving all 155 people aboard, Capt. Sullenberger was called to task for what he might have done differently. Investigators question Sully\u2019s personal life and his rundown of what happened. Computer simulations second-guess his decisions. The probe fills Mr. Hanks\u2019s character with self-doubt. \u201cI did the best I could,\u201d he tells his wife, as if he failed. But he defends his choices. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t time for calculati In a new movie, Hanks is a World War II sea captain. We look at the other times the actor has taken the helm. ",
        "author": "Don Steinberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tom Hanks Is Now Officially America\u2019s Captain in \u2018Greyhound\u2019 (WSJ: Film) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1474",
        "date": "2020-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tom-hanks-is-now-officially-americas-captain-with-apple-tv-s-greyhound-11594216500?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=43",
        "text": "\u201cThe reason Tom Hanks fits so well into the role of a captain is because he\u2019s a curious and empathetic and goal-oriented person himself. He\u2019s a creative leader,\u201d says Aaron Schneider, who directed \u201cGreyhound,\u201d from a script Mr. Hanks wrote for himself, adapting a 1955 novel. The movie premieres Friday on Apple TV+. \u201cWhen he brings that to the role of a captain in a film, it\u2019s like sliding into a comfortable shoe. And he matches the role in a way that audiences find comforting.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Which Streaming Services Are Right for You? Take the WSJ Quiz.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n Jess Kuronen\n\n\nMr. Hanks\u2019s movie captains clearly have crisis-management skills. What else can they teach about leadership?\n\nCapt. Jim Lovell in \u2018Apollo 13\u2019 (1995) Leadership lesson: Managing unexpected change\nApollo 13 astronauts were supposed to walk on the moon, but\u2026 \u201cHouston, we have a problem.\u201d Plan B is to return to Earth in a damaged spacecraft. As mission commander Jim Lovell, Mr. Hanks must hold the ship and his disappointed team together. \u201cJust breathe normal, fellas,\u201d he reassures co-pilots Fred Haise and Jack Swigert as they scramble to repair the carbon dioxide scrubbers. When they ogle the moon regretfully, he reminds them to focus on details of their revised objective: \u201cWe\u2019re gonna need a contingency if we lose comm with Houston. Freddo, let\u2019s get an idea where we stand on the consumables. Jack, get into the Odyssey and bag up all the water you can before it freezes in there\u2026Let\u2019s go home.\u201d\nThe takeaway: When plans go awry, a strong boss needs to adapt decisively and gracefully, rallying the team to give the revised course as much energy as the original one. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as a space captain in \u2018Apollo 13.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Universal/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nCapt. John Miller in \u2018Saving Private Ryan\u2019 (1998) Leadership lesson: Keeping the company on mission\nThe traumatic carnage of the Normandy invasion is barely behind them, and there\u2019s a war to be won. But U.S. Army Capt. Miller\u2019s unit has orders to locate PFC James Ryan and get him home before he becomes the fourth Ryan brother killed in action. The captain, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher back home, must keep his team on mission while they question the sense of risking eight men\u2019s lives to save one. When sharpshooter Jackson complains the job is a waste of his skills, Capt. Miller jokes to the soldiers, \u201cPay attention to Jackson, this is the way to gripe.\u201d A tragedy illustrates the peril of straying from the mission. \u201cGet your gear. Let\u2019s go,\u201d Capt. Miller tells the soldiers after one of them nearly deserts. He leads by example, wins his team\u2019s trust, and sacrifices himself to get the mission done. \nThe takeaway: The more chaos there is, the easier it is for a team to get distracted and lose focus on its key assignment. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as an army captain in \u2018Saving Private Ryan.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n DreamWorks/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\n\n\nFor more to watch: Want to Be a Young Influencer? Maybe Not Escape Stressful Times\u2026in the Great Depression? Welcome to \u2018Fortnite\u2019\u2014Enjoy the Concert \n\n\nCapt. Richard Phillips in \u2018Captain Phillips\u2019 (2013) Leadership lesson: Negotiating under pressure\nRichard Phillips is no Jean-Claude Van Damme. When armed Somali pirates board his civilian cargo ship, he needs to use his wits. First he must negotiate with his own crew, merchant seamen who complain that they didn\u2019t sign up to fight crime. With the pirates\u2019 rifles pointed at him, his eyes move constantly. He seeks every resource and advantage to alert his crew to dangers and guide rescuers. Most of all, he gets inside the heads of the hijackers, appealing to their reason, fears, and pride. \u201cYou\u2019ve got a man injured. Take the money out of the safe, and let\u2019s call it a day,\u201d he offers the pirate leader. In the end, he outplays the pirates.\nThe takeaway: Understanding what everyone wants, from employees to competitors, is vital to success.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Hanks as a civilian cargo ship captain in \u2018Captain Phillips.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nCapt. Chesley Sullenberger in \u2018Sully\u2019 (2016) Leadership lesson: Owning your decisions\nIt\u2019s remarkable that while lauded as a national hero for landing a damaged passenger jet on the Hudson River in 2009, saving all 155 people aboard, Capt. Sullenberger was called to task for what he might have done differently. Investigators question Sully\u2019s personal life and his rundown of what happened. Computer simulations second-guess his decisions. The probe fills Mr. Hanks\u2019s character with self-doubt. \u201cI did the best I could,\u201d he tells his wife, as if he failed. But he defends his choices. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t time for calculati In a new movie, Hanks is a World War II sea captain. We look at the other times the actor has taken the helm. ",
        "author": "Don Steinberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek\u2019 Lives Long and Prospers in Pop Culture (WSJ: Film) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1475",
        "date": "2018-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-trek-lives-long-and-prospers-in-pop-culture-1515931186?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=80",
        "text": "He wrote \u201cPlease Stand By,\u201d an independent film about a young autistic woman, played by Dakota Fanning, on a daring road trip to enter her script for a \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode in a contest. It opens on Jan. 26.\nHe isn\u2019t the only filmmaker influenced by the long-running franchise.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quentin Tarantino,\n\n\n\n director of \u201cKill Bill\u201d and \u201cPulp Fiction,\u201d is a Trekkie who is, according to Deadline, working on a \u201cStar Trek\u201d project with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.J. Abrams,\n\n\n\n who produced the last three movies. Paramount Pictures, which owns the \u201cStar Trek\u201d film rights, said it had no information to share, while representatives for Messrs. Tarantino and Abrams didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\n\nPart of the appeal may lie in \u201cStar Trek\u2019s\u201d ongoing television series, with its self-contained morality-play structure and multiracial, multinational and multispecies starship crews. \n\u201c \u2018Trek\u2019 has always put the highest premium on the idea that what we perceive as \u2018other\u2019 is really not so different from who we are,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Kurtzman,\n\n\n\n executive producer of the new \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d and writer for two \u201cStar Trek\u201d films. \u201cThat\u2019s always relevant, but particularly right now with the country so divided.\u201d \n\u201cThe secret of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 is that no matter what happens, good or bad, humanity will still be recognizable in the 24th century and beyond,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ira Steven Behr,\n\n\n\n who is co-directing a documentary about \u201cStar Trek: Deep Space Nine\u201d due later this year. \u201cThe human spirit wants to believe in a better tomorrow.\u201d\nHere are a few more recent nods to \u201cTrek\u201d:\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSeth MacFarlane and Scott Grimes in \u2018The Orville\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Becker/FOX\n \n\n\n\n\u2018The Orville\u2019 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seth MacFarlane\u2019s\n\n\n\n Fox series about a diverse spaceship crew, which returns for its second season this year though the exact date hasn\u2019t been announced, doesn\u2019t merely borrow starship and character designs from \u201cStar Trek.\u201d It adopts the original TV show\u2019s hopeful view of the future and the format of having each episode dramatize a new alien encounter to deliver a lesson about humanity.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJesse Plemons, right, plays a \u2018Star Trek\u2019-inspired captain in \u2018Black Mirror\u2019s season premiere.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jonathan Prime/Netflix\n \n\n\n\n\u2018Black Mirror\u2019 \u201cUSS Callister,\u201d the first episode of this\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n series\u2019 new season (available since late December), uses our familiarity with the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d as a point of departure for the usual \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d voyage into discomfort. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDakota Fanning plays a Trekkie on the road in \u2018Please Stand By.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Magnolia Pictures\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jesse Plemons\n\n\n\n (\u201cBreaking Bad,\u201d \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d) plays a demanding \u201cSpace Fleet\u201d captain, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cristin Milioti\n\n\n\n (\u201cHow I Met Your Mother\u201d) is a resourceful new science officer. \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d creator and writer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Brooker\n\n\n\n says he grew up watching the original \u201cTrek\u201d and thought its vivid colors, utopian ideals and 1960s-era gender politics would contrast well against the real-life modern office workplace that his \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d episode also depicts. \n\u2018Please Stand By\u2019 Ms. Fanning, playing the creative, autistic Wendy, asserts her independence by leaving her group home to transport a \u201cStar Trek\u201d script she wrote to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Paramount\n\n\n Studios in Los Angeles. Mr. Golamco, a lifelong \u201dStar Trek\u201d maniac, was inspired by a magazine article featuring a teenage girl who composed fan-fiction stories.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSonequa Martin-Green plays First Officer Michael Burnham in \u2018Star Trek: Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jan Thijs/CBS\n \n\n\n\n\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 The first new \u201cTrek\u201d series in more than a decade premiered last fall to attract subscribers to CBS\u2019s All Access streaming service. Its first season resumed this month with the new characters entering a \u201cmirror universe\u201d that transforms them into inverse versions of themselves. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe documentary \u2018What We Left Behind\u2019 looks back at \u2018Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,\u2019 which aired from 1993 to 1999. Its cast included, from back row, Michael Dorn, Terry Farrell, Cirroc Lofton; from front row, Armin Shimerman, Rene Auberjonois, Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Colm Meaney.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CBS/Photofest\n \n\n\n\nSet on the USS Discovery, \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d stars Sonequa Martin-Green (\u201cThe Walking Dead\u201d) as a rebellious officer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Jones\n\n\n\n (the creature in \u201cThe Shape of Water\u201d) goes incognito once again as Saru, an alien science officer in the mold of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Spock\n\n\n\n or Data.\n\u2018What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine\u2019 Mr. Behr and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Never mind that other sci-fi movie with \u201cStar\u201d in its name: \u201cStar Trek\u201d has inspired a recent and surprising glut of TV shows and movies that reference it. ",
        "author": "Don Steinberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek\u2019 Lives Long and Prospers in Pop Culture (WSJ: Film) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1476",
        "date": "2018-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-trek-lives-long-and-prospers-in-pop-culture-1515931186?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=74",
        "text": "He wrote \u201cPlease Stand By,\u201d an independent film about a young autistic woman, played by Dakota Fanning, on a daring road trip to enter her script for a \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode in a contest. It opens on Jan. 26.\nHe isn\u2019t the only filmmaker influenced by the long-running franchise.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quentin Tarantino,\n\n\n\n director of \u201cKill Bill\u201d and \u201cPulp Fiction,\u201d is a Trekkie who is, according to Deadline, working on a \u201cStar Trek\u201d project with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.J. Abrams,\n\n\n\n who produced the last three movies. Paramount Pictures, which owns the \u201cStar Trek\u201d film rights, said it had no information to share, while representatives for Messrs. Tarantino and Abrams didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\n\nPart of the appeal may lie in \u201cStar Trek\u2019s\u201d ongoing television series, with its self-contained morality-play structure and multiracial, multinational and multispecies starship crews. \n\u201c \u2018Trek\u2019 has always put the highest premium on the idea that what we perceive as \u2018other\u2019 is really not so different from who we are,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Kurtzman,\n\n\n\n executive producer of the new \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d and writer for two \u201cStar Trek\u201d films. \u201cThat\u2019s always relevant, but particularly right now with the country so divided.\u201d \n\u201cThe secret of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 is that no matter what happens, good or bad, humanity will still be recognizable in the 24th century and beyond,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ira Steven Behr,\n\n\n\n who is co-directing a documentary about \u201cStar Trek: Deep Space Nine\u201d due later this year. \u201cThe human spirit wants to believe in a better tomorrow.\u201d\nHere are a few more recent nods to \u201cTrek\u201d:\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSeth MacFarlane and Scott Grimes in \u2018The Orville\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Becker/FOX\n \n\n\n\n\u2018The Orville\u2019 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seth MacFarlane\u2019s\n\n\n\n Fox series about a diverse spaceship crew, which returns for its second season this year though the exact date hasn\u2019t been announced, doesn\u2019t merely borrow starship and character designs from \u201cStar Trek.\u201d It adopts the original TV show\u2019s hopeful view of the future and the format of having each episode dramatize a new alien encounter to deliver a lesson about humanity.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJesse Plemons, right, plays a \u2018Star Trek\u2019-inspired captain in \u2018Black Mirror\u2019s season premiere.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jonathan Prime/Netflix\n \n\n\n\n\u2018Black Mirror\u2019 \u201cUSS Callister,\u201d the first episode of this\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n series\u2019 new season (available since late December), uses our familiarity with the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d as a point of departure for the usual \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d voyage into discomfort. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDakota Fanning plays a Trekkie on the road in \u2018Please Stand By.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Magnolia Pictures\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jesse Plemons\n\n\n\n (\u201cBreaking Bad,\u201d \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d) plays a demanding \u201cSpace Fleet\u201d captain, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cristin Milioti\n\n\n\n (\u201cHow I Met Your Mother\u201d) is a resourceful new science officer. \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d creator and writer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Brooker\n\n\n\n says he grew up watching the original \u201cTrek\u201d and thought its vivid colors, utopian ideals and 1960s-era gender politics would contrast well against the real-life modern office workplace that his \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d episode also depicts. \n\u2018Please Stand By\u2019 Ms. Fanning, playing the creative, autistic Wendy, asserts her independence by leaving her group home to transport a \u201cStar Trek\u201d script she wrote to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Paramount\n\n\n Studios in Los Angeles. Mr. Golamco, a lifelong \u201dStar Trek\u201d maniac, was inspired by a magazine article featuring a teenage girl who composed fan-fiction stories.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSonequa Martin-Green plays First Officer Michael Burnham in \u2018Star Trek: Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jan Thijs/CBS\n \n\n\n\n\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 The first new \u201cTrek\u201d series in more than a decade premiered last fall to attract subscribers to CBS\u2019s All Access streaming service. Its first season resumed this month with the new characters entering a \u201cmirror universe\u201d that transforms them into inverse versions of themselves. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe documentary \u2018What We Left Behind\u2019 looks back at \u2018Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,\u2019 which aired from 1993 to 1999. Its cast included, from back row, Michael Dorn, Terry Farrell, Cirroc Lofton; from front row, Armin Shimerman, Rene Auberjonois, Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Colm Meaney.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CBS/Photofest\n \n\n\n\nSet on the USS Discovery, \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d stars Sonequa Martin-Green (\u201cThe Walking Dead\u201d) as a rebellious officer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Jones\n\n\n\n (the creature in \u201cThe Shape of Water\u201d) goes incognito once again as Saru, an alien science officer in the mold of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Spock\n\n\n\n or Data.\n\u2018What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine\u2019 Mr. Behr and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Never mind that other sci-fi movie with \u201cStar\u201d in its name: \u201cStar Trek\u201d has inspired a recent and surprising glut of TV shows and movies that reference it. ",
        "author": "Don Steinberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek\u2019 Lives Long and Prospers in Pop Culture (WSJ: Film) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1477",
        "date": "2018-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-trek-lives-long-and-prospers-in-pop-culture-1515931186?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=81",
        "text": "He wrote \u201cPlease Stand By,\u201d an independent film about a young autistic woman, played by Dakota Fanning, on a daring road trip to enter her script for a \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode in a contest. It opens on Jan. 26.\n\n\n\n\nHe isn\u2019t the only filmmaker influenced by the long-running franchise.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quentin Tarantino,\n\n\n\n director of \u201cKill Bill\u201d and \u201cPulp Fiction,\u201d is a Trekkie who is, according to Deadline, working on a \u201cStar Trek\u201d project with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.J. Abrams,\n\n\n\n who produced the last three movies. Paramount Pictures, which owns the \u201cStar Trek\u201d film rights, said it had no information to share, while representatives for Messrs. Tarantino and Abrams didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\n\nPart of the appeal may lie in \u201cStar Trek\u2019s\u201d ongoing television series, with its self-contained morality-play structure and multiracial, multinational and multispecies starship crews. \n\u201c \u2018Trek\u2019 has always put the highest premium on the idea that what we perceive as \u2018other\u2019 is really not so different from who we are,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Kurtzman,\n\n\n\n executive producer of the new \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d and writer for two \u201cStar Trek\u201d films. \u201cThat\u2019s always relevant, but particularly right now with the country so divided.\u201d \n\u201cThe secret of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 is that no matter what happens, good or bad, humanity will still be recognizable in the 24th century and beyond,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ira Steven Behr,\n\n\n\n who is co-directing a documentary about \u201cStar Trek: Deep Space Nine\u201d due later this year. \u201cThe human spirit wants to believe in a better tomorrow.\u201d\nHere are a few more recent nods to \u201cTrek\u201d:\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSeth MacFarlane and Scott Grimes in \u2018The Orville\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Becker/FOX\n \n\n\n\n\u2018The Orville\u2019 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seth MacFarlane\u2019s\n\n\n\n Fox series about a diverse spaceship crew, which returns for its second season this year though the exact date hasn\u2019t been announced, doesn\u2019t merely borrow starship and character designs from \u201cStar Trek.\u201d It adopts the original TV show\u2019s hopeful view of the future and the format of having each episode dramatize a new alien encounter to deliver a lesson about humanity.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJesse Plemons, right, plays a \u2018Star Trek\u2019-inspired captain in \u2018Black Mirror\u2019s season premiere.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jonathan Prime/Netflix\n \n\n\n\n\u2018Black Mirror\u2019 \u201cUSS Callister,\u201d the first episode of this\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n series\u2019 new season (available since late December), uses our familiarity with the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d as a point of departure for the usual \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d voyage into discomfort. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDakota Fanning plays a Trekkie on the road in \u2018Please Stand By.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Magnolia Pictures\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jesse Plemons\n\n\n\n (\u201cBreaking Bad,\u201d \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d) plays a demanding \u201cSpace Fleet\u201d captain, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cristin Milioti\n\n\n\n (\u201cHow I Met Your Mother\u201d) is a resourceful new science officer. \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d creator and writer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Brooker\n\n\n\n says he grew up watching the original \u201cTrek\u201d and thought its vivid colors, utopian ideals and 1960s-era gender politics would contrast well against the real-life modern office workplace that his \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d episode also depicts. \n\u2018Please Stand By\u2019 Ms. Fanning, playing the creative, autistic Wendy, asserts her independence by leaving her group home to transport a \u201cStar Trek\u201d script she wrote to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Paramount\n\n\n Studios in Los Angeles. Mr. Golamco, a lifelong \u201dStar Trek\u201d maniac, was inspired by a magazine article featuring a teenage girl who composed fan-fiction stories.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSonequa Martin-Green plays First Officer Michael Burnham in \u2018Star Trek: Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jan Thijs/CBS\n \n\n\n\n\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 The first new \u201cTrek\u201d series in more than a decade premiered last fall to attract subscribers to CBS\u2019s All Access streaming service. Its first season resumed this month with the new characters entering a \u201cmirror universe\u201d that transforms them into inverse versions of themselves. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe documentary \u2018What We Left Behind\u2019 looks back at \u2018Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,\u2019 which aired from 1993 to 1999. Its cast included, from back row, Michael Dorn, Terry Farrell, Cirroc Lofton; from front row, Armin Shimerman, Rene Auberjonois, Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Colm Meaney.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CBS/Photofest\n \n\n\n\nSet on the USS Discovery, \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d stars Sonequa Martin-Green (\u201cThe Walking Dead\u201d) as a rebellious officer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Jones\n\n\n\n (the creature in \u201cThe Shape of Water\u201d) goes incognito once again as Saru, an alien science officer in the mold of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Spock\n\n\n\n or Data.\n\u2018What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine\u2019 Mr. Behr and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Zappone\n\n\n\n raised $647,891 on Indiegogo, a record for a documentary on the crowdfunding site, for this look back at the 1990s \u201cStar Trek\u201d series. \u201cDS9\u201d is considered an outlier among \u201cStar Trek\u201d shows, as it focused on long-running story lines more than single-episode adventures and was set on a space station rather than a ship. \u201cWe boldly went nowhere,\u201d says Mr. Behr, a \u201cDS9\u201d producer before co-directing \u201cWhat We Left Behind\u201d with Mr. Zappone, who previously made the Spock-umentary \u201cFor the Love of Spock.\u201d \u201cWhat We Left Behind\u201d is slated for release later this year. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 1999 movie \u2018Galaxy Quest\u2019 starred Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver and Tony Shalhoub. Amazon Studios is developing a version for TV.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\n\u2018Galaxy Quest\u2019 In development for Amazon Studios is a TV version of \u201cGalaxy Quest,\u201d the 1999 comedy starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Allen,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sigourney Weaver\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Rickman\n\n\n\n as former stars of a \u201cTrek\u201d-like TV show who are recruited to help real space aliens. Rickman died in 2016, and it isn\u2019t clear whether the other stars will return. Amazon hasn\u2019t said much about its revival, but it is being made by the TV unit of Paramount, which owns \u201cGalaxy Quest\u201d as well as \u201cStar Trek\u201d film rights. Never mind that other sci-fi movie with \u201cStar\u201d in its name: \u201cStar Trek\u201d has inspired a recent and surprising glut of TV shows and movies that reference it. ",
        "author": "Don Steinberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "12 Movies for 12 Weeks of Summer (WSJ: Film) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1478",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/12-movies-for-12-weeks-of-summer-11623254881?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=28",
        "text": "The coming weeks mark the arrival of movies that have been circling Hollywood for months if not years. It\u2019s still a long way back to ticket sales before Covid-19, and a small number of high-profile films also will have simultaneous releases on streaming platforms. But early signs of pent-up demand have given the industry reason for hope. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHere, 12 movies for the 12 weeks of summer. \n\n\u2018In the Heights\u2019 June 10, in theaters and on HBO Max; Warner Bros. Pictures\nIt was one of the first big movies to get bumped from 2020. Now \u201cIn the Heights\u201d plays as a sweaty, close-contact reminder of a world before Covid restrictions\u2014or a celebration of their end. \nThe film, adapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s Tony-winning debut musical, follows characters in Manhattan\u2019s Washington Heights neighborhood as they grapple with the forces of family, cultural roots and ambition. The singing and dancing play out in tight quarters (in a bodega, a salon, a car service) as well as in streets and parks.\nThe movie was shot mostly on location in New York in summer, 2019. The massive Highbridge Park public pool became a stage for one of the movie\u2019s biggest numbers, \u201c96,000,\u201d about a winning lottery ticket. Director Jon M. Chu marshaled the cast, hundreds of extras, and synchronized swimmers to pull off his vision of \u201can Esther Williams, Busby Berkeley number, but with people with tattoos and piercings and all shapes and sizes.\u201d\nLast December, when Warner Bros. announced release dates for its 2021 slate, Mr. Chu initially worried that the impact of \u201cIn the Heights\u201d would be muted as a streaming release. Now, as a summer of reopening hits, the movie\u2019s simultaneous release in theaters seems well timed, he says: \u201cYou throw a dart at the board for a release day, and it happens to land on the moment people are coming out and the moment we need this.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway\u2019 June 11, in theaters; Sony Pictures\nPandemic escapism arrives in the form of a self-aware rabbit movie that teases its own critics. Movie reviewers who knocked the first \u201cPeter Rabbit\u201d from 2018 may hear their words quoted back to them by animals in the sequel. It\u2019s some mild needling from director Will Gluck, who wants viewers to know he\u2019s well aware that his first movie ruffled Beatrix Potter purists.\n\u201cThe storyline is about how people react to beloved literature being bastardized into Hollywood things,\u201d he says. \u201cA lot of the stuff that went into the second movie is taken directly from people\u2019s reactions to the first.\u201d\nThe animation-live action hybrid film stars James Corden as the voice of Peter and Margot Robbie as Flopsy, with some choice lines reserved for Sia\u2019s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson return as author Bea and her now-husband Thomas McGregor. \nThe new villain is a slick publisher desperate for IP who wants to capitalize on the Peter Rabbit brand. He pushes dumb ideas, like a book where Peter and his friends go to outer space. Bea is drawn in, though she warns, \u201cI\u2019d be spinning in my grave if it was ever adapted into some sassy hip-fest purely for commercial gain, probably by an American.\u201d \n\u201cMy movies,\u201d the American director says, \u201care very meta.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018F9\u2019 June 25, in theaters; Universal Pictures\nDirector Justin Lin returns with his fifth film in the \u201cFast & Furious\u201d franchise, this time diving deeper into the back stories of key characters. Ticket sales are bound to be read as a bellwether for the box office.\nJohn Cena makes his debut as Jakob, the wayward brother of Dom (Vin Diesel), and a skilled assassin (also, an excellent driver). The movie marks the return of Sung Kang\u2019s character Han\u2014a street racer and thief who was left for dead in an earlier installment.\nAnother milestone for \u201cF9\u201d: It will screen at the Cannes Film Festival, a highbrow embrace for any action movie. Universal Pictures calls \u201cFast & Furious\u201d its most profitable and longest-running franchise. The car count alone is staggering: More than 12,000 cars have been used in all the films, according to the studio, with roughly one car destroyed for every 49 seconds of film.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\u2018Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)\u2019 July 2, in theaters and on Hulu; Searchlight Pictures\nA drum solo by 19-year-old Stevie Wonder is one of many performances with goosebump potential in a concert film that amends the musical record of 1969. It unearths a festival held the same summer as Woodstock, but forgotten despite a stacked lineup, including Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, Nina Simone, the Staples Singers, and Mahalia Jackson. The Harlem Cultural Festival, a six-week series of free concerts, was a cross-section of Black music in a powerful phase\u2014all captured in high-quality video footage that went unseen for half a century.\nBilly Davis Jr. and Marilyn McC Movie theaters are back. From the big-budget musical \u201cIn the Heights\u201d and the Marvel extravaganza \u201cBlack Widow\u201d to buzzy dramas and documentaries, here\u2019s a selection of anticipated films coming this summer. ",
        "author": "Ellen Gamerman and John Jurgensen"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Sputnik\u2019: Red Scared (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1479",
        "date": "2020-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sputnik-review-red-scared-11597353687?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=11",
        "text": "More Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs in \u201cAlien,\u201d the parasite\u2014or is it a symbiote?\u2014enters the picture via outer space. It\u2019s 1983, and a Soviet spacecraft parachutes to Earth in Kazakhstan after a mission beset by mysterious disaster. The sole survivor, a cosmonaut named Veshnyakov (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pyotr Fyodorov\n\n\n\n ), is taken to a secret medical facility, his mind clouded by amnesia, for evaluation by a celebrated but controversial physician,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tatyana Klimova.\n\n\n\n (She\u2019s played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oksana Akinshina,\n\n\n\n who was brilliant almost two decades ago as the traumatized teenager in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lukas Moodysson\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cLilya 4-Ever.\u201d)\nCan Tatyana penetrate the cloud? And figure out what\u2019s going on with the cosmonaut\u2019s wonky hormone levels? More to the point, can she deal with his inner monster once it\u2019s out? All I can say is that the doc doubles down on her Hippocratic Oath. She does her best to do no harm to Veshnyakov and to the exceedingly unpleasant tenant that leaves his body at night to forage for human flesh, then returns, a Hyde to his Jekyll, to while away the daytime hours.\nThis is a feature debut for the director,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Egor Abramenko,\n\n\n\n who developed his full-length film from a 2017 short, \u201cThe Passenger.\u201d (The script was written by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oleg Malovichko\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrei Zolotarev.\n\n\n\n The production was designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mariya Slavina\n\n\n\n and photographed by Maxim Zhukov.) It\u2019s classic without being a classic in the sense that low-budget horror flicks often provide talented young filmmakers an access route to bigger things\u2014the best-known example of that being\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Corman\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1963 release, \u201cDementia 13,\u201d which was directed by a then-unknown 24-year-old named\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Coppola.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPyotr Fyodorov and Oksana Akinshina\n\n\n Photo: \n \n IFC Midnight\n \n\n\n\nWhat the future holds for Mr. Abramenko remains to be seen\u2014he\u2019s already made a name for himself in Russian TV commercial and video production. But he knows how to make the most of significant moments in a script that sometimes descends into potboiling, and he\u2019s very good at directing actors or\u2014this takes wisdom too\u2014allowing them to display their art. Ms. Akinshina\u2019s performance is subtle but powerful, suffused with passion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Fedor Bondarchuk\n\n\n\n (whose father was the distinguished director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergei Bondarchuk\n\n\n\n ) brings a steely malevolence to the role of Semiradov, a Soviet functionary who, far from being frightened by such monstrous events, looks at the rapacious alien and sees a weapons system aborning.\n\nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com A Soviet cosmonaut returns to Earth after a mysterious accident with a malevolent creature hitching a ride inside him in Egor Abramenko\u2019s horror debut. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Sputnik\u2019: Red Scared (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1480",
        "date": "2020-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/sputnik-review-red-scared-11597353687?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=41",
        "text": "More Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs in \u201cAlien,\u201d the parasite\u2014or is it a symbiote?\u2014enters the picture via outer space. It\u2019s 1983, and a Soviet spacecraft parachutes to Earth in Kazakhstan after a mission beset by mysterious disaster. The sole survivor, a cosmonaut named Veshnyakov (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pyotr Fyodorov\n\n\n\n ), is taken to a secret medical facility, his mind clouded by amnesia, for evaluation by a celebrated but controversial physician,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tatyana Klimova.\n\n\n\n (She\u2019s played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oksana Akinshina,\n\n\n\n who was brilliant almost two decades ago as the traumatized teenager in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lukas Moodysson\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cLilya 4-Ever.\u201d)\nCan Tatyana penetrate the cloud? And figure out what\u2019s going on with the cosmonaut\u2019s wonky hormone levels? More to the point, can she deal with his inner monster once it\u2019s out? All I can say is that the doc doubles down on her Hippocratic Oath. She does her best to do no harm to Veshnyakov and to the exceedingly unpleasant tenant that leaves his body at night to forage for human flesh, then returns, a Hyde to his Jekyll, to while away the daytime hours.\nThis is a feature debut for the director,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Egor Abramenko,\n\n\n\n who developed his full-length film from a 2017 short, \u201cThe Passenger.\u201d (The script was written by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oleg Malovichko\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrei Zolotarev.\n\n\n\n The production was designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mariya Slavina\n\n\n\n and photographed by Maxim Zhukov.) It\u2019s classic without being a classic in the sense that low-budget horror flicks often provide talented young filmmakers an access route to bigger things\u2014the best-known example of that being\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Corman\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1963 release, \u201cDementia 13,\u201d which was directed by a then-unknown 24-year-old named\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Coppola.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nPyotr Fyodorov and Oksana Akinshina\n\n\n Photo: \n \n IFC Midnight\n \n\n\n\nWhat the future holds for Mr. Abramenko remains to be seen\u2014he\u2019s already made a name for himself in Russian TV commercial and video production. But he knows how to make the most of significant moments in a script that sometimes descends into potboiling, and he\u2019s very good at directing actors or\u2014this takes wisdom too\u2014allowing them to display their art. Ms. Akinshina\u2019s performance is subtle but powerful, suffused with passion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Fedor Bondarchuk\n\n\n\n (whose father was the distinguished director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergei Bondarchuk\n\n\n\n ) brings a steely malevolence to the role of Semiradov, a Soviet functionary who, far from being frightened by such monstrous events, looks at the rapacious alien and sees a weapons system aborning.\n\nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com A Soviet cosmonaut returns to Earth after a mysterious accident with a malevolent creature hitching a ride inside him in Egor Abramenko\u2019s horror debut. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Alien: Covenant\u2019 Review: Nothing New Under the Chest (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1481",
        "date": "2017-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/alien-covenant-review-nothing-new-under-the-chest-1495129122?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=87",
        "text": "More Film Reviews \u2018The Commune\u2019 \n\n\nSeizing on the only source of sustained vitality in the director\u2019s 2012 film \u201cPrometheus,\u201d they\u2019ve made the most of it this time around. \u201cPrometheus,\u201d a sci-fi adventure set in the \u201cAlien\u201d universe, was concerned with such cosmic questions as the origin of life. But the answers it came up with were awfully lame, and all but one of its characters were cut from space-age cardboard. The exception was an intricately appealing android. His name was David, he was played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Fassbender,\n\n\n\n and he stole the show with supra-human aplomb. The good news is that David is back, in a way that doubles down, or more properly up, on his potential and gives Mr. Fassbender lots to do. (The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Danny McBride,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Billy Crudup,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Demi\u00e1n Bichir\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carmen Ejogo.\n\n\n\n ) And the bad news? This new \u201cAlien\u201d prequel is mostly a gore fest, which may be great news for gluttons of the genre.\nThe Covenant of the title is a spaceship carrying 2,000 colonists, along with unspecified numbers of frozen embryos, from Earth to a supposedly habitable planet on the far side of the galaxy. The colonists are sleeping deeply, since the trip is scheduled to take seven years, but the crew is rudely awakened by incipient calamity in the form of a neutrino burst. Extensive damage is sustained, followed by extensive repairs that are at least as interesting as watching the road being paved in \u201cCars.\u201d\nStill, the repairs have their own logic, which is more than can be said of a detour to a nearby planet on the strength of a rogue transmission that features\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Denver\n\n\n\n singing \u201cTake Me Home, Country Roads.\u201d The stop is opposed by Daniels (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Katherine Waterston\n\n\n\n ), the ship\u2019s second-in-command, who is clearly not a John Denver fan. (Ms. Waterston gives a strong performance, even if Daniels can\u2019t touch\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sigourney Weaver\u2019s\n\n\n\n powerful presence as Ripley in the four chapters of the main series.) Yet the detour is taken all the same, an impulsive exploration of an uncharted planet that looks like paradise, though any fan of horror stories\u2014or anyone who\u2019s read Ray Bradbury\u2014will know instantly that it\u2019s anything but.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Alien: Covenant\u2019 is directed by Ridley Scott\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox\n \n\n\n\nA case could be made that \u201cAlien: Covenant,\u201d being very much a horror story, has shrewdly forgone logic and plausibility in favor of letting the audience get ahead of, and savor in advance, the plot\u2019s most lurid developments. (Not those involving Mr. Fassbender, I hasten to say.) Thus the explorers dispense with sensible precautions. They don\u2019t bother to wear space helmets. They stray heedlessly from their ship, leaving its cargo door wide open. Venturing deep into caves, they touch gloppy stuff that shouldn\u2019t be touched, especially because it moves. Once the worst happens\u2014and this is a franchise in which the worst happens over and over again\u2014basic quarantine procedures are thrown to the solar winds. The results can be funny, as well as scary, but not \u201cSpaceballs\u201d funny, not \u201cThe Bad News Bears\u201d funny. The cumulative impact of this silly stuff is a sense of laziness or fatigue, a breaking of faith with those in the audience who may have come expecting something new.\n\nBy the same token, many \u201cAlien\u201d fans will come looking for something old, and that\u2019s in bloodily abundant supply. It may well be sufficient, considering the excitement that an \u201cAlien\u201d logo can still elicit, almost four decades after the original hit the screen. The key word, of course, is \u201coriginal.\u201d No one knew what was coming the first time around, any more than they knew, nearly two decades before that, what would happen to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Janet Leigh\n\n\n\n when she stepped into the shower. In today\u2019s movie business originality is often seen as a risk, and carbon copies can be perfectly acceptable, despite the disappearance of carbon paper. In that context, the action sequences of \u201cAlien: Covenant\u201d give satisfaction, while the android element\u2014to use a bland, spoiler-free term\u2014provides ample food for thought and cause for worry, machine-learning being what it is and soon will be.\nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com Ridley Scott\u2019s latest is a gore fest that draws from the previous film in the franchise. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Alien: Covenant\u2019 Review: Nothing New Under the Chest (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1482",
        "date": "2017-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/alien-covenant-review-nothing-new-under-the-chest-1495129122?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=122",
        "text": "More Film Reviews \u2018The Commune\u2019 \n\n\nSeizing on the only source of sustained vitality in the director\u2019s 2012 film \u201cPrometheus,\u201d they\u2019ve made the most of it this time around. \u201cPrometheus,\u201d a sci-fi adventure set in the \u201cAlien\u201d universe, was concerned with such cosmic questions as the origin of life. But the answers it came up with were awfully lame, and all but one of its characters were cut from space-age cardboard. The exception was an intricately appealing android. His name was David, he was played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Fassbender,\n\n\n\n and he stole the show with supra-human aplomb. The good news is that David is back, in a way that doubles down, or more properly up, on his potential and gives Mr. Fassbender lots to do. (The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Danny McBride,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Billy Crudup,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Demi\u00e1n Bichir\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carmen Ejogo.\n\n\n\n ) And the bad news? This new \u201cAlien\u201d prequel is mostly a gore fest, which may be great news for gluttons of the genre.\nThe Covenant of the title is a spaceship carrying 2,000 colonists, along with unspecified numbers of frozen embryos, from Earth to a supposedly habitable planet on the far side of the galaxy. The colonists are sleeping deeply, since the trip is scheduled to take seven years, but the crew is rudely awakened by incipient calamity in the form of a neutrino burst. Extensive damage is sustained, followed by extensive repairs that are at least as interesting as watching the road being paved in \u201cCars.\u201d\nStill, the repairs have their own logic, which is more than can be said of a detour to a nearby planet on the strength of a rogue transmission that features\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Denver\n\n\n\n singing \u201cTake Me Home, Country Roads.\u201d The stop is opposed by Daniels (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Katherine Waterston\n\n\n\n ), the ship\u2019s second-in-command, who is clearly not a John Denver fan. (Ms. Waterston gives a strong performance, even if Daniels can\u2019t touch\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sigourney Weaver\u2019s\n\n\n\n powerful presence as Ripley in the four chapters of the main series.) Yet the detour is taken all the same, an impulsive exploration of an uncharted planet that looks like paradise, though any fan of horror stories\u2014or anyone who\u2019s read Ray Bradbury\u2014will know instantly that it\u2019s anything but.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Alien: Covenant\u2019 is directed by Ridley Scott\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox\n \n\n\n\nA case could be made that \u201cAlien: Covenant,\u201d being very much a horror story, has shrewdly forgone logic and plausibility in favor of letting the audience get ahead of, and savor in advance, the plot\u2019s most lurid developments. (Not those involving Mr. Fassbender, I hasten to say.) Thus the explorers dispense with sensible precautions. They don\u2019t bother to wear space helmets. They stray heedlessly from their ship, leaving its cargo door wide open. Venturing deep into caves, they touch gloppy stuff that shouldn\u2019t be touched, especially because it moves. Once the worst happens\u2014and this is a franchise in which the worst happens over and over again\u2014basic quarantine procedures are thrown to the solar winds. The results can be funny, as well as scary, but not \u201cSpaceballs\u201d funny, not \u201cThe Bad News Bears\u201d funny. The cumulative impact of this silly stuff is a sense of laziness or fatigue, a breaking of faith with those in the audience who may have come expecting something new.\n\nBy the same token, many \u201cAlien\u201d fans will come looking for something old, and that\u2019s in bloodily abundant supply. It may well be sufficient, considering the excitement that an \u201cAlien\u201d logo can still elicit, almost four decades after the original hit the screen. The key word, of course, is \u201coriginal.\u201d No one knew what was coming the first time around, any more than they knew, nearly two decades before that, what would happen to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Janet Leigh\n\n\n\n when she stepped into the shower. In today\u2019s movie business originality is often seen as a risk, and carbon copies can be perfectly acceptable, despite the disappearance of carbon paper. In that context, the action sequences of \u201cAlien: Covenant\u201d give satisfaction, while the android element\u2014to use a bland, spoiler-free term\u2014provides ample food for thought and cause for worry, machine-learning being what it is and soon will be.\nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com Ridley Scott\u2019s latest is a gore fest that draws from the previous film in the franchise. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Telluride, Peak Experiences on Screen (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1483",
        "date": "2018-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-telluride-peak-experiences-on-screen-1536266188?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=71",
        "text": "The three triumphs were\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRoma,\u201d a loving tribute to the dominant figure of his childhood, a domestic servant, and one of the most beautiful films I\u2019ve ever seen (high-altitude language, but it\u2019s true);\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pawel Pawlikowski\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cCold War,\u201d a passionate love story (yes, there\u2019s a recurrent theme here) that plays out, with musical accompaniment and political resonance, across three decades in postwar Europe; and Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s \u201cShoplifters,\u201d a compact masterpiece about a scruffy family that isn\u2019t what it seems, and love that\u2019s the real thing. More about them later, but I\u2019ll note for now that the first two were shot in black-and-white so radiant or evocative that you may think you\u2019re watching some sort of super-color; and that both are being distributed by new-media titans: Netflix has \u201cRoma,\u201d Amazon Studios has \u201cCold War.\u201d Thus does the new guard take on the old, while blurring the line between theatrical and home-screenable. (Be sure to see these films in a theater before they\u2019re poured into the Big Stream.)\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch a clip from the movie \u2018Shoplifters.\u2019 Photo: Magnolia Pictures\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDeciding which films to see at Telluride is an annual dilemma, given the festival\u2019s devotion to cinema history or obscure gems, and how tempting it can be to preview mainstream features before their commercial release. An unusually lustrous\u2014though admittedly esoteric\u2014gem was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Friedler\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cIt Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story.\u201d This documentary, enhanced by haunting animation, celebrates the seminal jazz label Blue Note Records and its founders,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfred Lion\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Wolff.\n\n\n\n As young Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, they identified with black American jazz players living in a segregated society, and they created a company that honored the musicians\u2019 art.\n\nRed meat for cinephiles was served in \u201cThe Other Side of the Wind,\u201d a florid parody of a newly emergent Hollywood that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Orson Welles\n\n\n\n shot between 1970 and 1975, plus two documentaries about the production\u2019s genesis. Welles, who died in 1985, never finished editing his film; legal and financial problems proved insuperable. But the task was taken on by the prominent Hollywood producer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Marshall,\n\n\n\n who, over the course of 40 years, led efforts to locate the pieces and pull them together into a dramatic whole. The result premiered at Telluride to instant critical acclaim. I found it grandiloquent and emotionally vacant, notwithstanding some hilarious sendups of the period\u2019s pretensions.\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch the trailer for \u2018First Man,\u2019 starring Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy. Photo: Universal Pictures\n \n\n\n\u201cFirst Man,\u201d directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Damien Chazelle\n\n\n\n (\u201cLa La Land\u201d), does eloquent justice to the history of America\u2019s space exploration through the story of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n (Ryan Gosling), the first man to set foot on the moon. The grand adventure started for narrow reasons\u2014a race with the Soviet Union\u2014and the film has been narrowly criticized for not showing an American flag being planted on the lunar surface, as if it were somehow essential to a mission that represented a triumph for our species. Unlike \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d with its joyous swagger, \u201cFirst Man\u201d focuses on costs and losses\u2014the famously private Armstrong was devastated by the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Karen, from a brain tumor\u2014but it\u2019s thrilling in its depictions of space flight, and the climactic landing on a black-and-white moonscape.\nFine performances and skillful direction were in generous supply.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Olivia Colman\n\n\n\n is simply dazzling as a fragile, volatile and sometimes dotty Queen Anne in \u201cThe Favourite,\u201d a zestful period piece directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oleg Ivenko,\n\n\n\n a Ukrainian dancer in his acting debut, is persuasive in \u201cThe White Crow,\u201d a strong drama, directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ralph Fiennes,\n\n\n\n about the young Soviet ballet star\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rudolf Nureyev\n\n\n\n and his sensational defection to the West at the height of the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicole Kidman\n\n\n\n brings her virtuosity to bear in \u201cBoy Erased,\u201d which co-stars and was directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Edgerton\n\n\n\n ; she\u2019s the mother of a gay young man, played affectingly by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lucas Hedges,\n\n\n\n who is forced to undergo the science-free lunacy of so-called conversion therapy.\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch the trailer for the movie \u2018The Front Runner,\u2019 starring Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons and Alfred Molina. Photo: Sony Pictures\n \n\n\nAt least four of the films in this year\u2019s festival turned on the same archetype\u2014a gifted, ambitious and rigidly repressed male.\nIn \u201cFirst Man\u201d it\u2019s the hero, whose repression becomes anguishing in a goodbye scene with his two young sons. In \u201cFree Solo,\u201d a brilliant documentary opening nationally at the end of this month, it\u2019s the rock climber\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Honnold\n\n\n\n ; he achieved the all-but-unthinkable when he climbed El Capitan, the 3,000-foot Yosemite cliff, without climbing equipment. In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jason Reitman\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Front Runner,\u201d it\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gary Hart\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hugh Jackman\n\n\n\n ), the Colorado senator whose 1988 bid for the presidency was destroyed by his marital infidelity and a scandal-hungry press corps that brought it to light. (The film functions as the polar opposite of such journalists-as-heroes sagas as \u201cAll the President\u2019s Men\u201d or \u201cSpotlight.\u201d) In \u201cWatergate\u2014Or, How We Learned to Stop an Out-of-Control President,\u201d a remarkable 260-minute documentary by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Ferguson,\n\n\n\n it is, of course,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon,\n\n\n\n the prime exemplar, at least until now, of public servants who can break our hearts, or our institutions, because they lack access to the stirrings of their own hearts.\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch a clip from the movie \u2018Cold War,\u2019 starring Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot. Photo: Amazon Studios\n \n\n\nMr. Ferguson\u2019s film is itself a worthy exemplar of the long-form or serial format that\u2019s increasingly popular, in streaming dramas as well as documentaries; it goes on for more than four hours because it needs that much time to make its cumulative case. Still, the best of the festival\u2019s feature films demonstrated the enduring power of concision and compression. \u201cCold War\u201d distills decades of history and oceans of love into 85 minutes. \u201cShoplifters\u201d takes two minutes more than two hours to weave a Japanese tapestry of Dickensian complexity. Mr. Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s glorious \u201cRoma\u201d\u2014the title comes from the prosperous Mexico City neighborhood in which he was raised\u2014memorializes the indigenous maid who served him and his family as a human comfort zone, but, exploding with life, it also takes in Mexican politics and the plight of the nation\u2019s poor. Movies may have lost their place at the center of pop culture, but nothing can touch them at their magical best. The 45th Telluride Film Festival revealed fresh cinematic energy and passion, especially in Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s \u2018Roma,\u2019 Pawel Pawlikowski\u2019s \u2018Cold War\u2019 and Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s \u2018Shoplifters.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Telluride, Peak Experiences on Screen (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1484",
        "date": "2018-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-telluride-peak-experiences-on-screen-1536266188?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=64",
        "text": "The three triumphs were\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRoma,\u201d a loving tribute to the dominant figure of his childhood, a domestic servant, and one of the most beautiful films I\u2019ve ever seen (high-altitude language, but it\u2019s true);\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pawel Pawlikowski\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cCold War,\u201d a passionate love story (yes, there\u2019s a recurrent theme here) that plays out, with musical accompaniment and political resonance, across three decades in postwar Europe; and Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s \u201cShoplifters,\u201d a compact masterpiece about a scruffy family that isn\u2019t what it seems, and love that\u2019s the real thing. More about them later, but I\u2019ll note for now that the first two were shot in black-and-white so radiant or evocative that you may think you\u2019re watching some sort of super-color; and that both are being distributed by new-media titans: Netflix has \u201cRoma,\u201d Amazon Studios has \u201cCold War.\u201d Thus does the new guard take on the old, while blurring the line between theatrical and home-screenable. (Be sure to see these films in a theater before they\u2019re poured into the Big Stream.)\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch a clip from the movie \u2018Shoplifters.\u2019 Photo: Magnolia Pictures\n \n\n\nDeciding which films to see at Telluride is an annual dilemma, given the festival\u2019s devotion to cinema history or obscure gems, and how tempting it can be to preview mainstream features before their commercial release. An unusually lustrous\u2014though admittedly esoteric\u2014gem was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Friedler\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cIt Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story.\u201d This documentary, enhanced by haunting animation, celebrates the seminal jazz label Blue Note Records and its founders,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfred Lion\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Wolff.\n\n\n\n As young Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, they identified with black American jazz players living in a segregated society, and they created a company that honored the musicians\u2019 art.\n\nRed meat for cinephiles was served in \u201cThe Other Side of the Wind,\u201d a florid parody of a newly emergent Hollywood that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Orson Welles\n\n\n\n shot between 1970 and 1975, plus two documentaries about the production\u2019s genesis. Welles, who died in 1985, never finished editing his film; legal and financial problems proved insuperable. But the task was taken on by the prominent Hollywood producer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Marshall,\n\n\n\n who, over the course of 40 years, led efforts to locate the pieces and pull them together into a dramatic whole. The result premiered at Telluride to instant critical acclaim. I found it grandiloquent and emotionally vacant, notwithstanding some hilarious sendups of the period\u2019s pretensions.\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch the trailer for \u2018First Man,\u2019 starring Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy. Photo: Universal Pictures\n \n\n\n\u201cFirst Man,\u201d directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Damien Chazelle\n\n\n\n (\u201cLa La Land\u201d), does eloquent justice to the history of America\u2019s space exploration through the story of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n (Ryan Gosling), the first man to set foot on the moon. The grand adventure started for narrow reasons\u2014a race with the Soviet Union\u2014and the film has been narrowly criticized for not showing an American flag being planted on the lunar surface, as if it were somehow essential to a mission that represented a triumph for our species. Unlike \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d with its joyous swagger, \u201cFirst Man\u201d focuses on costs and losses\u2014the famously private Armstrong was devastated by the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Karen, from a brain tumor\u2014but it\u2019s thrilling in its depictions of space flight, and the climactic landing on a black-and-white moonscape.\nFine performances and skillful direction were in generous supply.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Olivia Colman\n\n\n\n is simply dazzling as a fragile, volatile and sometimes dotty Queen Anne in \u201cThe Favourite,\u201d a zestful period piece directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oleg Ivenko,\n\n\n\n a Ukrainian dancer in his acting debut, is persuasive in \u201cThe White Crow,\u201d a strong drama, directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ralph Fiennes,\n\n\n\n about the young Soviet ballet star\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rudolf Nureyev\n\n\n\n and his sensational defection to the West at the height of the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicole Kidman\n\n\n\n brings her virtuosity to bear in \u201cBoy Erased,\u201d which co-stars and was directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Edgerton\n\n\n\n ; she\u2019s the mother of a gay young man, played affectingly by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lucas Hedges,\n\n\n\n who is forced to undergo the science-free lunacy of so-called conversion therapy.\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch the trailer for the movie \u2018The Front Runner,\u2019 starring Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons and Alfred Molina. Photo: Sony Pictures\n \n\n\nAt least four of the films in this year\u2019s festival turned on the same archetype\u2014a gifted, ambitious and rigidly repressed male.\nIn \u201cFirst Man\u201d it\u2019s the hero, whose repression The 45th Telluride Film Festival revealed fresh cinematic energy and passion, especially in Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s \u2018Roma,\u2019 Pawel Pawlikowski\u2019s \u2018Cold War\u2019 and Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s \u2018Shoplifters.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Telluride, Peak Experiences on Screen (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1485",
        "date": "2018-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-telluride-peak-experiences-on-screen-1536266188?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=88",
        "text": "The three triumphs were\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRoma,\u201d a loving tribute to the dominant figure of his childhood, a domestic servant, and one of the most beautiful films I\u2019ve ever seen (high-altitude language, but it\u2019s true);\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pawel Pawlikowski\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cCold War,\u201d a passionate love story (yes, there\u2019s a recurrent theme here) that plays out, with musical accompaniment and political resonance, across three decades in postwar Europe; and Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s \u201cShoplifters,\u201d a compact masterpiece about a scruffy family that isn\u2019t what it seems, and love that\u2019s the real thing. More about them later, but I\u2019ll note for now that the first two were shot in black-and-white so radiant or evocative that you may think you\u2019re watching some sort of super-color; and that both are being distributed by new-media titans: Netflix has \u201cRoma,\u201d Amazon Studios has \u201cCold War.\u201d Thus does the new guard take on the old, while blurring the line between theatrical and home-screenable. (Be sure to see these films in a theater before they\u2019re poured into the Big Stream.)\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch a clip from the movie \u2018Shoplifters.\u2019 Photo: Magnolia Pictures\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDeciding which films to see at Telluride is an annual dilemma, given the festival\u2019s devotion to cinema history or obscure gems, and how tempting it can be to preview mainstream features before their commercial release. An unusually lustrous\u2014though admittedly esoteric\u2014gem was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Friedler\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cIt Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story.\u201d This documentary, enhanced by haunting animation, celebrates the seminal jazz label Blue Note Records and its founders,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfred Lion\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Wolff.\n\n\n\n As young Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, they identified with black American jazz players living in a segregated society, and they created a company that honored the musicians\u2019 art.\n\nRed meat for cinephiles was served in \u201cThe Other Side of the Wind,\u201d a florid parody of a newly emergent Hollywood that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Orson Welles\n\n\n\n shot between 1970 and 1975, plus two documentaries about the production\u2019s genesis. Welles, who died in 1985, never finished editing his film; legal and financial problems proved insuperable. But the task was taken on by the prominent Hollywood producer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Marshall,\n\n\n\n who, over the course of 40 years, led efforts to locate the pieces and pull them together into a dramatic whole. The result premiered at Telluride to instant critical acclaim. I found it grandiloquent and emotionally vacant, notwithstanding some hilarious sendups of the period\u2019s pretensions.\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch the trailer for \u2018First Man,\u2019 starring Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy. Photo: Universal Pictures\n \n\n\n\u201cFirst Man,\u201d directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Damien Chazelle\n\n\n\n (\u201cLa La Land\u201d), does eloquent justice to the history of America\u2019s space exploration through the story of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n (Ryan Gosling), the first man to set foot on the moon. The grand adventure started for narrow reasons\u2014a race with the Soviet Union\u2014and the film has been narrowly criticized for not showing an American flag being planted on the lunar surface, as if it were somehow essential to a mission that represented a triumph for our species. Unlike \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d with its joyous swagger, \u201cFirst Man\u201d focuses on costs and losses\u2014the famously private Armstrong was devastated by the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Karen, from a brain tumor\u2014but it\u2019s thrilling in its depictions of space flight, and the climactic landing on a black-and-white moonscape.\nFine performances and skillful direction were in generous supply.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Olivia Colman\n\n\n\n is simply dazzling as a fragile, volatile and sometimes dotty Queen Anne in \u201cThe Favourite,\u201d a zestful period piece directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oleg Ivenko,\n\n\n\n a Ukrainian dancer in his acting debut, is persuasive in \u201cThe White Crow,\u201d a strong drama, directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ralph Fiennes,\n\n\n\n about the young Soviet ballet star\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rudolf Nureyev\n\n\n\n and his sensational defection to the West at the height of the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicole Kidman\n\n\n\n brings her virtuosity to bear in \u201cBoy Erased,\u201d which co-stars and was directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Edgerton\n\n\n\n ; she\u2019s the mother of a gay young man, played affectingly by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lucas Hedges,\n\n\n\n who is forced to undergo the science-free lunacy of so-called conversion therapy.\n\n\n\n\n\n Watch the trailer for the movie \u2018The Front Runner,\u2019 starring Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons and Alfred Molina. Photo: Sony Pictures\n \n\n\nAt least four of the films in this year\u2019s festival turned on the same archetype\u2014a gifted, ambitious and rigidly repressed male.\nIn \u201cFirst Man\u201d it\u2019s the hero, whose repres The 45th Telluride Film Festival revealed fresh cinematic energy and passion, especially in Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s \u2018Roma,\u2019 Pawel Pawlikowski\u2019s \u2018Cold War\u2019 and Hirokazu Kore-eda\u2019s \u2018Shoplifters.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ad Astra\u2019 Review: Up There Solo (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1486",
        "date": "2019-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ad-astra-review-up-there-solo-11568921970?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=51",
        "text": "More Film Reviews \u2018Downton Abbey\u2019 \u2018Where\u2019s My Roy Cohn?\u2019 \n\n\nFew movie heroes are as solitary as Roy McBride (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brad Pitt\n\n\n\n ), an overachieving astronaut whose father, Clifford (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tommy Lee Jones\n\n\n\n ), was\u2014and perhaps is\u2014the most famous American space explorer, a combination\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Yeager,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Flash Gordon.\n\n\n\n Nearly three decades earlier (the film is set in \u201cthe near future\u201d), he disappeared on a mission to contact extraterrestrial life, which is presumed to exist, judging by the opening titles\u2014which also suggest that such a belief is rooted in desperation about the state of life on Earth, and a hope that solutions might be found elsewhere.\nThere is a hallucinogenic opening sequence during which all this is sketchily and portentously explained, but the first real action takes place on the International Space Antenna, which sends signals skyward and is stationed near the ceiling of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. When the massive antenna is struck by an electrical storm coming from an unknown source in space, Roy\u2014whose heart rate, someone notes, has never risen above 80 BPM\u2014plummets to earth with preternatural cool, keeping his head even as shrapnel from above is punching holes in his parachute.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBrad Pitt as Roy McBride\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Twentieth Century Fox\n \n\n\n\nStill, Roy is unnerved by what his superiors ask him to do next: record a message that will be beamed toward Neptune, Clifford\u2019s presumed destination and the source of the destructive impulses. Is Clifford alive? Does he need help? What can be done? That the elder McBride is somehow responsible for the attacks is the unspoken message, but much is unspoken in \u201cAd Astra\u201d (the screenplay is by Mr. Gray and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ethan Gross\n\n\n\n ): Why doesn\u2019t Space Com quite trust Roy? And why doesn\u2019t Roy trust Space Com? Perhaps because Roy thinks the government was responsible for his fatherless childhood. And that if Clifford is alive it wants to kill him again.\n\n\u201cAd Astra\u201d will remind viewers of other recent and very ruminative space movies, including \u201cGravity,\u201d \u201cMoon\u201d and \u201cFirst Man.\u201d But where those films looked out, \u201cAd Astra\u201d looks in\u2014and the way it does so is the signature of the film and the heart of Mr. Pitt\u2019s performance. After each crisis or mission or irregular incident, Roy is subjected to a \u201cpsych eval,\u201d an interrogation by computer during which he has to explain his feelings in a manner that convinces the program he\u2019s being honest with it. And with himself. Has he found a way to game the software? No one will think so: The responses are too naked and deep, the effort too painful. Roy\u2019s ego has been scoured in a way that suggests psychoanalysis as a journey into deepest space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Ad Astra\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Twentieth Century Fox\n \n\n\n\nTo lavish too much praise on Mr. Pitt\u2019s performance would be to somehow suggest he isn\u2019t already among the best actors on screen. He is. Between this film and the current \u201cOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood,\u201d he could and should be a double Oscar nominee next year. If he\u2019s not, it doesn\u2019t mean his performance in \u201cAd Astra\u201d isn\u2019t an epic one.\nAnd what of the traveler to Neptune? In his last known transmission, Clifford talked of seeing the face of the Almighty and of an inevitable reunion \u201cin exultation\u201d with his alien brothers and sisters. He\u2019s mad, and his idea of God as a destination is just one of the symptoms. But the real issue is ego, which has driven the man to virtually widow his wife and orphan a son who has been left unmoored and unable to connect with anything but a computer. (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Liv Tyler\n\n\n\n materializes throughout the film as Roy\u2019s estranged wife.) All of which may strike some viewers as biblical, Shakespearean and/or Greek. It\u2019s certainly unforgettable.\n\u2014Mr. Anderson is a Journal TV critic. Joe Morgenstern is on vacation. Brad Pitt stars as an astronaut whose father disappeared on a mission to contact extraterrestrial life in James Gray\u2019s sci-fi look at the loneliness and isolation of space. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ad Astra\u2019 Review: Up There Solo (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1487",
        "date": "2019-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ad-astra-review-up-there-solo-11568921970?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=66",
        "text": "More Film Reviews \u2018Downton Abbey\u2019 \u2018Where\u2019s My Roy Cohn?\u2019 \n\n\nFew movie heroes are as solitary as Roy McBride (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brad Pitt\n\n\n\n ), an overachieving astronaut whose father, Clifford (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tommy Lee Jones\n\n\n\n ), was\u2014and perhaps is\u2014the most famous American space explorer, a combination\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Yeager,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Flash Gordon.\n\n\n\n Nearly three decades earlier (the film is set in \u201cthe near future\u201d), he disappeared on a mission to contact extraterrestrial life, which is presumed to exist, judging by the opening titles\u2014which also suggest that such a belief is rooted in desperation about the state of life on Earth, and a hope that solutions might be found elsewhere.\n\n\n\n\nThere is a hallucinogenic opening sequence during which all this is sketchily and portentously explained, but the first real action takes place on the International Space Antenna, which sends signals skyward and is stationed near the ceiling of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. When the massive antenna is struck by an electrical storm coming from an unknown source in space, Roy\u2014whose heart rate, someone notes, has never risen above 80 BPM\u2014plummets to earth with preternatural cool, keeping his head even as shrapnel from above is punching holes in his parachute.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBrad Pitt as Roy McBride\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Twentieth Century Fox\n \n\n\n\nStill, Roy is unnerved by what his superiors ask him to do next: record a message that will be beamed toward Neptune, Clifford\u2019s presumed destination and the source of the destructive impulses. Is Clifford alive? Does he need help? What can be done? That the elder McBride is somehow responsible for the attacks is the unspoken message, but much is unspoken in \u201cAd Astra\u201d (the screenplay is by Mr. Gray and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ethan Gross\n\n\n\n ): Why doesn\u2019t Space Com quite trust Roy? And why doesn\u2019t Roy trust Space Com? Perhaps because Roy thinks the government was responsible for his fatherless childhood. And that if Clifford is alive it wants to kill him again.\n\n\u201cAd Astra\u201d will remind viewers of other recent and very ruminative space movies, including \u201cGravity,\u201d \u201cMoon\u201d and \u201cFirst Man.\u201d But where those films looked out, \u201cAd Astra\u201d looks in\u2014and the way it does so is the signature of the film and the heart of Mr. Pitt\u2019s performance. After each crisis or mission or irregular incident, Roy is subjected to a \u201cpsych eval,\u201d an interrogation by computer during which he has to explain his feelings in a manner that convinces the program he\u2019s being honest with it. And with himself. Has he found a way to game the software? No one will think so: The responses are too naked and deep, the effort too painful. Roy\u2019s ego has been scoured in a way that suggests psychoanalysis as a journey into deepest space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Ad Astra\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Twentieth Century Fox\n \n\n\n\nTo lavish too much praise on Mr. Pitt\u2019s performance would be to somehow suggest he isn\u2019t already among the best actors on screen. He is. Between this film and the current \u201cOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood,\u201d he could and should be a double Oscar nominee next year. If he\u2019s not, it doesn\u2019t mean his performance in \u201cAd Astra\u201d isn\u2019t an epic one.\nAnd what of the traveler to Neptune? In his last known transmission, Clifford talked of seeing the face of the Almighty and of an inevitable reunion \u201cin exultation\u201d with his alien brothers and sisters. He\u2019s mad, and his idea of God as a destination is just one of the symptoms. But the real issue is ego, which has driven the man to virtually widow his wife and orphan a son who has been left unmoored and unable to connect with anything but a computer. (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Liv Tyler\n\n\n\n materializes throughout the film as Roy\u2019s estranged wife.) All of which may strike some viewers as biblical, Shakespearean and/or Greek. It\u2019s certainly unforgettable.\n\u2014Mr. Anderson is a Journal TV critic. Joe Morgenstern is on vacation. Brad Pitt stars as an astronaut whose father disappeared on a mission to contact extraterrestrial life in James Gray\u2019s sci-fi look at the loneliness and isolation of space. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Boys State\u2019 Review: Politics, Alarming and Disarming (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1488",
        "date": "2020-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boys-state-review-politics-alarming-and-disarming-11597354008?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=39",
        "text": "Boys State the national institution\u2014there\u2019s a Girls State too\u2014is a civics education program, sponsored by the American Legion, that\u2019s been around since the mid-1930s. The idea is to bring high-school juniors together in each of the United States for a weeklong exercise that involves building their own state government. The participants, randomly assigned to one of two political parties, the Nationalists and the Federalists, decide among themselves what their parties stand for, campaign for support and build coalitions if possible, then hold mock elections for state offices that culminate in a gubernatorial race. (Previous participants include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lamar Alexander,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samuel Alito,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cory Booker,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dick Cheney,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Clinton\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rush Limbaugh.\n\n\n\n ) In the film, which was shot in 2018 in Texas, 1,000 or so young men descend on Austin, the state capital, to play out their version of contemporary electoral politics. The compelling question is whether the process will be as polarized, savage and dispiriting as its counterpart in what passes these days for real life.\n\n\nMore Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe answer is yes, to a ghastly degree\u2014there\u2019s plenty of vituperation, misrepresentation, banal slogans and attack ads (on Instagram). But the kids\u2019 aspirations and machinations are complicated, and occasionally heartening. A few of them want more than the toxic endorphins of crushing, dominating or, to use the chilling words of the favorite for Party Chairman of the Federalists, pressuring the other party \u201cinto an absolute state of submission.\u201d These outliers are searching for, and in several cases embodying, a spirit of reconciliation, a reason for hope.\nIt\u2019s easy to imagine one of them, the son of an undocumented mother (who later became a legal resident), being described as a previous Boys State participant in a future when he\u2019s holding a position of national leadership. That\u2019s not just a spectator\u2019s judgment. Several of his peers in both the Nationalists and Federalists see him destined for bigger things too. So what\u2019s his name? Far be it from me to diminish your delight in discovering it for yourself when you see the film, or diminish your suspense in finding out who becomes Governor.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRobert MacDougall\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Apple TV+\n \n\n\n\nThe young Texans in the program are predominantly conservative. If the film has a bias, it\u2019s skepticism about party politics. The first words on screen are those of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Washington,\n\n\n\n who, in his 1796 farewell address, warned that political parties were likely \u201cto become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.\u201d That\u2019s not how the Boys State boys see it, of course. They\u2019re into gleeful game-playing at the outset, as if the Nationalists and Federalists were booze-free fraternities\u2014\u201cOur masculinity will not be infringed,\u201d one kid declares, only partly in jest\u2014and then into unconscious or semiconscious mimicry as they emulate the sort of candidates we all see on TV, ticking off talking points with robotic affect.\n\nProducts of a combative culture, most of the boys seem to be breeding true as pols in training. Never mind that one of them proposes, as a platform plank, defense against alien invaders\u2014from outer space, not other nations. That\u2019s part of the fun of being 17, as most of them are, and away from home for a weeklong taste of adult activity. What\u2019s less amusing is the background cynicism and backroom scheming. One particularly charismatic youngster, a football player who could be mistaken for a movie star in training, remarks, pseudo-sagely, \u201cSometimes you gotta say what you gotta say to win. Sometimes you can\u2019t win on what you believe in your heart.\u201d Another kid says, almost lasciviously, \u201cWe\u2019ll introduce shock and awe. It\u2019ll be awesome.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRene Otero\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Apple TV+\n \n\n\n\nThen there\u2019s the narrowness of their frames of reference. No one expects a high-school junior to be a junior Socrates, but the debates here turn, with ritual rhetoric, only on the usual subjects of immigration, abortion and gun control, as if such matters as education, crumbling infrastructure, the advances and challenges of science, or America\u2019s place in the world had been declared out of bounds. And the rhetoric itself is dismaying, the vocabulary impoverished. Many young Americans, the documentary reminds us, can\u2019t speak very well these days, a point that\u2019s unintentionally emphasized by one of the participants who seems blessed by an orator gene; it\u2019s no surprise when the end titles tell us he went on to win an award for extemporaneous speaking.\nIf the film sheds a baleful light on how some kids view participatory politics, it brings much better news about the capacity for surprise that can set young political animals apart from the pack. The born orator fancies himself an enabler of other aspirants to high office, yet he\u2019s also a born organizer, ready for the fray. The football player with movie-star quality seems hollow and doctrinaire at first, yet he turns out to be self-reflective, intellectually agile and remarkably generous. And the film\u2019s real star, the one from a poor family, considers himself with genuine modesty \u201cthe quiet voice in the storm,\u201d yet he discovers the power of his ideas during the course of the week, and makes himself heard more affectingly than anyone else. These days we take inspiration from politics wherever we manage to find it. \u201cBoys State\u201d is a good place to look.\nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com A documentary looks at competitive campaigns through the lens of a program for high school students, offering both concerns and hope. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New View From the Couch (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1489",
        "date": "2020-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-view-from-the-couch-11584652755?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=46",
        "text": "Beginning this week I\u2019ll be suggesting feature films and documentaries that may be of special interest, with instructions on where to find them in the vast cybermall of streaming sites. (For a start, think about giving yourself a subscription to the Criterion Channel, a rich resource for American and international classics.) \nAt the moment fans all over the web are sharing lists of their favorite outbreak flicks. Most include such genuinely terrifying films as, yes, you guessed it, \u201cOutbreak\u201d (a disease similar to Ebola) and \u201cContagion\u201d (a disease eerily similar to the novel coronavirus). My own picks are less topical. That\u2019s not to minimize the gravity of the situation, but only to note that movies have many ways of mixing relevance with flights of fancy, extravagant action, historical resonance or the welcome distraction of silly fun.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBrad Pitt and Bruce Willis in \u201812 Monkeys\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nWhen I reviewed \u201c12 Monkeys\u201d in 1996\u2014can it really have been that long ago?\u2014I called it \u201c\u2018Die Hard\u2019 with a virus.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Terry Gilliam\u2019s\n\n\n\n dystopian phantasmagoria, streaming on Showtime, stars\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Willis\n\n\n\n as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Cole,\n\n\n\n a time traveler who tries to change the course of a pandemic that has banished mankind from the surface of the earth to its steaming bowels. James first appears in our midst in a state of seemingly terminal discombobulation; he insists he\u2019s been sent from the future to find a pure form of the virus that has ravaged his world. For his troubles he is diagnosed as suffering from a Cassandra complex (in Greek mythology Cassandra had the gift of prophecy but no one believed her), pumped with Thorazine and locked up in a psych ward, where he meets a seriously deranged animal-rights activist (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brad Pitt\n\n\n\n ) and a beautiful, open-minded psychiatrist (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Madeleine Stowe\n\n\n\n ) who\u2019s not so sure James is certifiable.\n\nSome movies come and go in a matter of weeks or months, while others find a permanent place in our collective consciousness. \u201c12 Monkeys\u201d became a cultural keeper mainly, but not only, by virtue of its graphic distinction:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Beecroft\n\n\n\n designed the spectacular production, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Pratt\n\n\n\n did the superb cinematography. Mr. Willis is at once commanding and affecting. Mr. Pitt is terrific playing a relatively minor character. He\u2019s far more memorable here than in the muddled \u201cWorld War Z,\u201d where he starred as a former United Nations operative who tracks down a lethal pathogen to neutralize a global plague of computer-generated zombies.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018The Andromeda Strain\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nMany lists of outbreak movies have included \u201cThe Andromeda Strain,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Wise\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1971 screen version of the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Crichton\n\n\n\n novel (it streams on Amazon Prime Video). I\u2019m not a fan. Much of the action is plodding, despite the provocative premise\u2014a lethal organism from outer space comes to Earth via a satellite probe\u2014and the script suffers from the same problem that afflicted the book, a cluttered climax lacking in dramatic clarity. (A Universal executive who worked on the production once told me that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lew Wasserman,\n\n\n\n the Hollywood titan running the studio at the time, summoned Crichton to a meeting to talk about improving the ending for the film version, but they never got around to the subject at hand. Wasserman, eager to impress the celebrated author, had instructed his secretary to put through all of his calls.)\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018The X From Outer Space\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Criterion Collection\n \n\n\n\nThe premise of \u201cThe X From Outer Space,\u201d available on the Criterion Channel, is similar\u2014scientists return from Mars with spores that precipitate a global calamity. But no one can accuse this 1967 camp classic from Japan of being plodding. It is, in a word, ludicrous. In additional words it is cheesy, tacky, shrewdly goofy, dulcetly daffy, gleefully silly and absurdly entertaining. Does nonsense like this really have a place in the urgency of the moment? Watch those spores grow into a 200-foot-tall rubber-suit space chicken and you may be glad that it does.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTom Cruise in \u2018Mission: Impossible 2\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Paramount/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nPhysical action has a time-honored place in mainstream movies. \u201cMission: Impossible 2\u201d (rent or buy it on iTunes or Amazon) combines kinetic sequences of uncommon exuberance\u2014the director was the Hong Kong action wizard\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Woo\n\n\n\n \u2014with a world-wide hunt for a genetically modified virus dubbed Chimera. The virus is, of course, bad, but an antivirus isn Joe Morgenstern recommends some movie magic in the time of shuttered cinemas. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Captain Marvel\u2019 Review: Woman but No Wonder (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1490",
        "date": "2019-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/captain-marvel-review-woman-but-no-wonder-11551907713?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=77",
        "text": "As the jumble-shop plot starts to unfold, her identity is that of a warrior in training with an elite group of Kree, an advanced civilization on a far-off planet. Making her way to the vicinity of our humble globe, she hurtles down from outer space and crashes through the roof of a Blockbuster store\u2014it\u2019s 1995 on Earth\u2014where she notes without comment a videotape of \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201d This 21st exploration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has a singular distinction; it\u2019s the first to be led by a female superhero without help from a superguy. Yet the film doesn\u2019t give Ms. Larson enough good stuff to fulfill her role\u2019s potential. Her Captain Marvel is an appealing character who becomes an impressive one, wrapped in a shimmering aura of blue and white energy. What\u2019s missing, though, is what helped make \u201cWonder Woman\u201d an exemplary figure of female empowerment two years ago: unforced warmth, along with strength, and flashes of delight.\nThe extended preface offers reason to expect better, given the lectures the heroine gets from her Kree mentor, a martinet named Yon-Rogg (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jude Law\n\n\n\n ): \u201cThere\u2019s nothing more dangerous to a warrior than emotion,\u201d he tells her at one point. \u201cControl your impulses,\u201d he says at another. That sounds like definitive male arrogance to Carol, just as it will to female members of the audience who\u2019ve come up against the persistent notion that women are too emotional or impulsive to do jobs best left to stable, reliable men. Yon-Rogg\u2019s advice provides a perfect setup for his student to go her own way and define her femininity fully. And soon enough she\u2019s struggling with mysteries and challenges that should elicit exactly the sort of quicksilver feelings Ms. Larson conjured so memorably in \u201cShort Term 12\u201d and in her Oscar-winning performance in \u201cRoom.\u201d (Her directors here were\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anna Boden\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ryan Fleck.\n\n\n\n )\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBrie Larson\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Marvel Studios\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor openers, Carol isn\u2019t sure who she really is. She believes herself to be a Kree fighter named Vers (a remnant of Danvers that\u2019s pronounced \u201cverse\u201d), but she\u2019s beset by fugitive memories of being someone else in another life. She\u2019s supposed to be fighting Skrulls, vile shape-shifting creatures that have infested our planet and threaten the entire galaxy. But their shapes shift bewilderingly\u2014by now you may have seen the trailer in which Ms. Larson, in full Kree battle regalia, punches out a sweet-faced granny on the subway\u2014and their vileness comes into question along with everything else Carol thought she knew about herself and the world around her.\n\nIn other words, this woman is a candidate for genuine heroism. Yet there\u2019s a fundamental dissonance between the depth of her plight and the shallow disorganization of the script, which is credited to the directors and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. In sequence after sequence, \u201cCaptain Marvel\u201d settles for extended stretches of conventional action tropes, interspersed for a while with unsurprising flashbacks\u2014of Carol as a little kid who likes to go fast on go-karts; as a young woman who goes fast on her motorcycle; and as a young Air Force pilot who must endure male jet jockeys saying dumb things like \u201cYou\u2019re a decent pilot but you\u2019re too emotional; you do know why they call it a cockpit, don\u2019t you?\u201d (Captain Marvel as a woman isn\u2019t a radical concept. She descends most notably from the comic-book character Carol Danvers, a superheroine who was known as Ms. Marvel before attaining, in 2012, her captaincy.)\nSome of the action is spectacular; it\u2019s a Marvel production, after all, and Marvel knows how to do things in a big way, or, in this case, in a way that looks bigger than it feels. (Huge as its revenues will be, \u201cCaptain Marvel\u201d is essentially a bridge between last year\u2019s \u201cAvengers: Infinity War\u201d and next month\u2019s \u201cAvengers: Endgame.\u201d) And Ms. Larson does as well as the material allows, meaning that she\u2019s bright, brisk, pleasingly wry and touchingly troubled until she is finally\u2014finally\u2014transformed into Captain Marvel, a galactic protector without peer.\nAt that point the movie should reward her, and us, with at least a moment of sheer joy, but it does not. It does, however, get occasional lifts from a funny cat, Goose, who coughs up a hairball to end all hairballs. And it benefits greatly from the presence of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samuel L. Jackson\n\n\n\n as Nick Fury\u2014not the mature and formidable mastermind he has played in previous Marvel movies, but a young Nick who will one day become director of the counterterrorism agency S.H.I.E.L.D. Since it\u2019s the 1990s, S.H.I.E.L.D. is only a modest task force, not the power it\u2019s destined to be, and Nick is only an underling who, assigned to investigate reports of an alien invasion, becomes Carol\u2019s buddy and her partner in anticrime. Mr. Jackson is the beneficiary, by the way, of digital technology that has youthened his featu Brie Larson stars in the female-focused epic that\u2019s heavy on action but light on saving graces. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Midnight Sky\u2019: Reaching Out in the Void (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1491",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-midnight-sky-review-reaching-out-in-the-void-11607629148?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=41",
        "text": "More Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nHe plays Augustine, an aging scientist and the last person left at an Arctic observatory after a catastrophe, described only as \u201ca mistake,\u201d has rendered most of the planet uninhabitable. Grievously ill and dependent on blood transfusions that he manages himself, he turns down an offer of evacuation in order to face his solitary fate. But Augustine\u2019s isolation doesn\u2019t last. He\u2019s jolted by a status-board notification of the astronauts\u2019 impending return from deep space; they\u2019ve been away for two years, exploring a planet for possible colonization, and have no idea what has happened at home. Then he\u2019s startled by the sudden appearance, right there in the observatory kitchen, of a little girl in a yellow dress and sneakers. (She\u2019s played delightfully by Caoillin Springall, who was only 6 years old at the time of production.) Who is she? Was she left behind by evacuees? Impossible to know, because she doesn\u2019t speak, and no way to ask, since all communications are down.\n\n\n\n\nSolitude\u2014existential and seemingly implacable\u2014provides the film\u2019s theme; the urgent human need to break out of it provides the action. The astronauts, including Ms. Jones\u2019s Sully and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Oyelowo\u2019s\n\n\n\n Adewole, the mission commander, don\u2019t understand why they can\u2019t reach mission control or anyone else on Earth. Augustine can\u2019t tell them what happened, let alone warn them off. When a radio link is finally established it quickly fails, prompting the scientist to embark\u2014yes, with the little girl bundled up in a parka\u2014on a perilous trek to another Arctic station with a stronger transmitter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFelicity Jones\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NETFLIX\n \n\n\n\nThat\u2019s the most suspenseful part of the film, but also the most conventional, a sort of \u201cRevenant Redux.\u201d (No accident, since the screenplay was written by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark L. Smith,\n\n\n\n who adapted \u201cThe Revenant\u201d with its director,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\n\n\n\n ; Mr. Smith\u2019s adaptation here is, in the main, astute and admirably spare.) The most affecting part is Augustine\u2019s reaching out to the space ship, with its precious human cargo. He\u2019s had one quasi-fatherhood thrust upon him by the mysterious child, who draws a flower to tell him that her name is Iris; another father-daughter relationship is implicit in his desperate concern for Sully, whose fate becomes intertwined with his own.\n\nSeeing Mr. Clooney in the role is a shock. Gone is the jauntily handsome figure we\u2019re accustomed to. Augustine is weary, frightened, regretful of a loveless past evoked in flashback, and just plain old, with a beard so luxuriant it looks animated. He is also, now and then, warm and funny. It won\u2019t give away too much to tell you that Augustine and Iris can\u2019t connect fully until, sharing a wordless dinner that includes potatoes and green peas, they line up their peas on the table, then flick them at each other like kids shooting marbles.\nThis is some of the best work of Mr. Clooney\u2019s career, and I\u2019m not forgetting his performances in \u201cThree Kings,\u201d \u201cUp in the Air\u201d or \u201cThe Descendants.\u201d His direction is exemplary too, both in its management of an elaborate and quite beautiful physical production and its collaboration with the other actors. Ms. Jones is ardent and strong as Sully, who really is up in the air, floating weightlessly in lyrical sequences that recall another of Mr. Clooney\u2019s films,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cGravity.\u201d The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tiffany Boone,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Demi\u00e1n Bichir\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kyle Chandler.\n\n\n\n The production was designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bissell.\n\n\n\n The cinematographer was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Ruhe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexandre Desplat\n\n\n\n did the lovely music.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeorge Clooney and Caoillin Springall\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\nThe film isn\u2019t perfect. The narrative piles crisis upon crisis, from a fat fire in the observatory kitchen to spectacular repair efforts in space and a startling sequence that involves droplets of blood. The pace, paradoxically, can be awfully slow, but it may seem less so to home viewers with plenty of time and patience; the metabolic rate of motion pictures will be changing in the streaming era, to an extent we can\u2019t foresee.\nIn the here and now, though, \u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d makes a dramatic case for planetary stewardship, and a stirring one for the connections we crave. In the course of those deep-space repairs the astronauts start to sing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Diamond\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSweet Caroline,\u201d of all things, then get into it with flat-out glee George Clooney directs and stars in this post-apocalypic saga that intertwines the stories of an Arctic researcher, returning astronauts, and a mysterious little girl. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Midnight Sky\u2019: Reaching Out in the Void (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1492",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-midnight-sky-review-reaching-out-in-the-void-11607629148?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=28",
        "text": "More Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nHe plays Augustine, an aging scientist and the last person left at an Arctic observatory after a catastrophe, described only as \u201ca mistake,\u201d has rendered most of the planet uninhabitable. Grievously ill and dependent on blood transfusions that he manages himself, he turns down an offer of evacuation in order to face his solitary fate. But Augustine\u2019s isolation doesn\u2019t last. He\u2019s jolted by a status-board notification of the astronauts\u2019 impending return from deep space; they\u2019ve been away for two years, exploring a planet for possible colonization, and have no idea what has happened at home. Then he\u2019s startled by the sudden appearance, right there in the observatory kitchen, of a little girl in a yellow dress and sneakers. (She\u2019s played delightfully by Caoillin Springall, who was only 6 years old at the time of production.) Who is she? Was she left behind by evacuees? Impossible to know, because she doesn\u2019t speak, and no way to ask, since all communications are down.\nSolitude\u2014existential and seemingly implacable\u2014provides the film\u2019s theme; the urgent human need to break out of it provides the action. The astronauts, including Ms. Jones\u2019s Sully and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Oyelowo\u2019s\n\n\n\n Adewole, the mission commander, don\u2019t understand why they can\u2019t reach mission control or anyone else on Earth. Augustine can\u2019t tell them what happened, let alone warn them off. When a radio link is finally established it quickly fails, prompting the scientist to embark\u2014yes, with the little girl bundled up in a parka\u2014on a perilous trek to another Arctic station with a stronger transmitter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFelicity Jones\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NETFLIX\n \n\n\n\nThat\u2019s the most suspenseful part of the film, but also the most conventional, a sort of \u201cRevenant Redux.\u201d (No accident, since the screenplay was written by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark L. Smith,\n\n\n\n who adapted \u201cThe Revenant\u201d with its director,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\n\n\n\n ; Mr. Smith\u2019s adaptation here is, in the main, astute and admirably spare.) The most affecting part is Augustine\u2019s reaching out to the space ship, with its precious human cargo. He\u2019s had one quasi-fatherhood thrust upon him by the mysterious child, who draws a flower to tell him that her name is Iris; another father-daughter relationship is implicit in his desperate concern for Sully, whose fate becomes intertwined with his own.\n\nSeeing Mr. Clooney in the role is a shock. Gone is the jauntily handsome figure we\u2019re accustomed to. Augustine is weary, frightened, regretful of a loveless past evoked in flashback, and just plain old, with a beard so luxuriant it looks animated. He is also, now and then, warm and funny. It won\u2019t give away too much to tell you that Augustine and Iris can\u2019t connect fully until, sharing a wordless dinner that includes potatoes and green peas, they line up their peas on the table, then flick them at each other like kids shooting marbles.\nThis is some of the best work of Mr. Clooney\u2019s career, and I\u2019m not forgetting his performances in \u201cThree Kings,\u201d \u201cUp in the Air\u201d or \u201cThe Descendants.\u201d His direction is exemplary too, both in its management of an elaborate and quite beautiful physical production and its collaboration with the other actors. Ms. Jones is ardent and strong as Sully, who really is up in the air, floating weightlessly in lyrical sequences that recall another of Mr. Clooney\u2019s films,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cGravity.\u201d The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tiffany Boone,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Demi\u00e1n Bichir\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kyle Chandler.\n\n\n\n The production was designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bissell.\n\n\n\n The cinematographer was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Ruhe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexandre Desplat\n\n\n\n did the lovely music.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeorge Clooney and Caoillin Springall\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\nThe film isn\u2019t perfect. The narrative piles crisis upon crisis, from a fat fire in the observatory kitchen to spectacular repair efforts in space and a startling sequence that involves droplets of blood. The pace, paradoxically, can be awfully slow, but it may seem less so to home viewers with plenty of time and patience; the metabolic rate of motion pictures will be changing in the streaming era, to an extent we can\u2019t foresee.\nIn the here and now, though, \u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d makes a dramatic case for planetary stewardship, and a stirring one for the connections we crave. In the course of those deep-space repairs the astronauts start to sing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Diamond\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSweet Caroline,\u201d of all things, then get into it with flat-out glee. \u201cH George Clooney directs and stars in this post-apocalypic saga that intertwines the stories of an Arctic researcher, returning astronauts, and a mysterious little girl. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Midnight Sky\u2019: Reaching Out in the Void (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1493",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-midnight-sky-review-reaching-out-in-the-void-11607629148?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=37",
        "text": "More Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nHe plays Augustine, an aging scientist and the last person left at an Arctic observatory after a catastrophe, described only as \u201ca mistake,\u201d has rendered most of the planet uninhabitable. Grievously ill and dependent on blood transfusions that he manages himself, he turns down an offer of evacuation in order to face his solitary fate. But Augustine\u2019s isolation doesn\u2019t last. He\u2019s jolted by a status-board notification of the astronauts\u2019 impending return from deep space; they\u2019ve been away for two years, exploring a planet for possible colonization, and have no idea what has happened at home. Then he\u2019s startled by the sudden appearance, right there in the observatory kitchen, of a little girl in a yellow dress and sneakers. (She\u2019s played delightfully by Caoillin Springall, who was only 6 years old at the time of production.) Who is she? Was she left behind by evacuees? Impossible to know, because she doesn\u2019t speak, and no way to ask, since all communications are down.\nSolitude\u2014existential and seemingly implacable\u2014provides the film\u2019s theme; the urgent human need to break out of it provides the action. The astronauts, including Ms. Jones\u2019s Sully and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Oyelowo\u2019s\n\n\n\n Adewole, the mission commander, don\u2019t understand why they can\u2019t reach mission control or anyone else on Earth. Augustine can\u2019t tell them what happened, let alone warn them off. When a radio link is finally established it quickly fails, prompting the scientist to embark\u2014yes, with the little girl bundled up in a parka\u2014on a perilous trek to another Arctic station with a stronger transmitter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFelicity Jones\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NETFLIX\n \n\n\n\nThat\u2019s the most suspenseful part of the film, but also the most conventional, a sort of \u201cRevenant Redux.\u201d (No accident, since the screenplay was written by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark L. Smith,\n\n\n\n who adapted \u201cThe Revenant\u201d with its director,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\n\n\n\n ; Mr. Smith\u2019s adaptation here is, in the main, astute and admirably spare.) The most affecting part is Augustine\u2019s reaching out to the space ship, with its precious human cargo. He\u2019s had one quasi-fatherhood thrust upon him by the mysterious child, who draws a flower to tell him that her name is Iris; another father-daughter relationship is implicit in his desperate concern for Sully, whose fate becomes intertwined with his own.\n\nSeeing Mr. Clooney in the role is a shock. Gone is the jauntily handsome figure we\u2019re accustomed to. Augustine is weary, frightened, regretful of a loveless past evoked in flashback, and just plain old, with a beard so luxuriant it looks animated. He is also, now and then, warm and funny. It won\u2019t give away too much to tell you that Augustine and Iris can\u2019t connect fully until, sharing a wordless dinner that includes potatoes and green peas, they line up their peas on the table, then flick them at each other like kids shooting marbles.\nThis is some of the best work of Mr. Clooney\u2019s career, and I\u2019m not forgetting his performances in \u201cThree Kings,\u201d \u201cUp in the Air\u201d or \u201cThe Descendants.\u201d His direction is exemplary too, both in its management of an elaborate and quite beautiful physical production and its collaboration with the other actors. Ms. Jones is ardent and strong as Sully, who really is up in the air, floating weightlessly in lyrical sequences that recall another of Mr. Clooney\u2019s films,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cGravity.\u201d The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tiffany Boone,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Demi\u00e1n Bichir\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kyle Chandler.\n\n\n\n The production was designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bissell.\n\n\n\n The cinematographer was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Ruhe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexandre Desplat\n\n\n\n did the lovely music.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeorge Clooney and Caoillin Springall\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\nThe film isn\u2019t perfect. The narrative piles crisis upon crisis, from a fat fire in the observatory kitchen to spectacular repair efforts in space and a startling sequence that involves droplets of blood. The pace, paradoxically, can be awfully slow, but it may seem less so to home viewers with plenty of time and patience; the metabolic rate of motion pictures will be changing in the streaming era, to an extent we can\u2019t foresee.\nIn the here and now, though, \u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d makes a dramatic case for planetary stewardship, and a stirring one for the connections we crave. In the course of those deep-space repairs the astronauts start to sing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Diamond\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cSweet Caroline,\u201d of all things, then get into it with flat-out glee. \u201cH George Clooney directs and stars in this post-apocalypic saga that intertwines the stories of an Arctic researcher, returning astronauts, and a mysterious little girl. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Factory in a Fishbowl (WSJ: Full Disclosure) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1494",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-factory-in-a-fishbowl-1525716237?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=96",
        "text": "Though the plant is closely guarded against outsiders\u2014rarely open to media, analysts, let alone competitors\u2014the eyes of the industry are on Tesla\u2019s production line. This is largely due to Mr. Musk\u2019s bravado and ambitious goals. Inasmuch as the 46-year-old billionaire has captured the public attention with sexy electric cars, rockets and plans to colonize Mars, he has also trained an intense spotlight on the company\u2019s attempt to build its own production system. Even early cars intended for employees are being reviewed and inspected on the internet.\n\n\n\n\nThe result is a car company that looks more like a software company\u2014making changes as it goes along and pushing through product updates to cars already on the road. Doug Field, a former Apple Inc. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n F -1.07%\n\n\n engineer who is now Tesla\u2019s engineering chief, notes that, rather than \u201cbatch large changes all at once,\u201d Tesla continues to make tweaks after a product launches, much as the software industry does.\n\n\nSome issues require more than a quick reboot: Tesla\u2019s current production pace of roughly 325 Model 3s a day isn\u2019t enough to stanch cash outflows, which touched $1 billion in the first quarter. During an interview last week, Mr. Musk sat across a conference table wearing a flannel shirt and a fatigued expression and echoed his critics: \u201cIf we don\u2019t solve the production we\u2019re going to die.\u201d\n\u201cI need to create a case example of what can be done,\u201d Mr. Musk said. He had just finished a contentious earnings call in which he dismissed two analysts\u2019 queries about Tesla\u2019s capital requirements and customer reservations for the Model 3 sedan as \u201cboring, bonehead questions,\u201d largely reflecting his growing frustration with people who short-sell the stock.\nIf Mr. Musk gets distracted, it\u2019s not just because he runs several companies\u2014including Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014at the same time. He spent a significant chunk of the weeks leading up to Wednesday\u2019s call working on business problems that need fixing if Tesla is going to find black ink.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla stocks and bonds fell after an unusual earnings call threatened investors\u2019 faith at a pivotal time for the company. These are the highlights. Photo: Reuters/Joe Skipper\n \n\n\nIn late April, he decided to go to the company\u2019s battery factory in Nevada to try to unclog a production bottleneck. It threatened to cap Model 3 production at about half of the 5,000 weekly target.\nThe factory needed seven hours to produce a battery pack, a relative eternity in an auto industry that needs to keep assembly lines humming or risk burning enormous amounts of cash. Workers and engineers had been debating solutions for months, and Mr. Musk sat down with them to slash production time to 70 minutes by entirely reordering the way that assembly of batteries flowed.\n\u201cMy co-workers and I were all giving high-fives at the end of [our] shift,\u201d one technician at the Nevada factory said. \u201cHe came in and eliminated 80% of the problems we were having.\u201d\nThat episode is reflective of an auto maker that is more flawed than its bigger peers but also more nimble, determined to make dramatic changes on the fly in order to address product quality, production snags and consumer claims in real time.\nThat 4,000 electric Teslas (including the S and X models) roll off the assembly line in a typical week in Fremont is a miracle to those who have followed the company from its genesis in 2003. The Model 3 and predecessors S and X are transformative, refreshingly simple inside, lightning fast and better for the planet than the Jeep Wrangler I drive to the office.\nIn some ways, Tesla is updating the Japanese principle of \u201ckaizen,\u201d or \u201ccontinuous improvement,\u201d an approach to manufacturing that swept the auto industry in the \u201880s and \u201890s. Mr. Field said Tesla practices \u201ccontinual disapproval\u201d of its processes and is \u201calmost religious\u201d in sweating over everything from seat costs to the best way to attach a roof rack to its $35,000 sedan.\nIn another example, critics and analysts chided Tesla for the gaps where the Model 3\u2019s body panels come together\u2014a topic that was under intense internal discussion, Mr. Field said while walking around a Model 3 near the test track. The company changed the factory tooling so that items like the cover to the tow hook behind the front bumper went from being an awkward fit to a seamless one.\nAuto giants typically would iron out such problems in a preproduction phase, making changes before a model reached dealer showrooms. For Tesla, that phase was atypically public, however. Some of the cars sold to employees or those holding early reservations were acquired by car reviewers or industry analysts willing to pay a premium.\nConsider the A-pillar, the support at the front of the car that holds a side of the windshield. Initially, the A-pillar on the Model 3 wasn\u2019t fitting snugly with the roof liner and the edge of the dashboard\u2014which w Tesla\u2019s unique approach to car making is being put to a severe test at a former Toyota assembly plant in Northern California. ",
        "author": "John D. Stoll"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hundreds of covid cases reported at Tesla plant following Musk\u2019s defiant reopening, county data shows (WP: Future of Transportation) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1495",
        "date": "2021-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundreds-covid-cases-reported-tesla-plant-following-musks-defiant-reopening-county-data-shows/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Tesla\u2019s Bay Area production plant recorded hundreds of covid-19 cases following CEO Elon Musk\u2019s defiant reopening of the plant in May, according to county-level data obtained by a legal transparency website.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe document, obtained by the website PlainSite following a court ruling this year, showed Tesla received around 10 reports of covid-19 in May when the plant reopened, and saw a steady rise in cases all the way up to 125 in December, as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus peaked around the country. The revelation follows The Washington Post\u2019s reporting in June that there had been multiple covid-19 cases reported at Tesla\u2019s facilities in Fremont, Calif., after Musk decided to reopen despite a countywide stay-at-home order, daring officials to arrest him.Story continues below advertisementThe data, covering the months between May and December, showed there were around 450 total reported cases. Roughly 10,000 people work at the plant.Elon Musk moved to Texas and embraced celebrity. Can Tesla run on Autopilot?For nearly a year, the Alameda County Public Health Department said it could not release data on the number of cases under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which grants privacy for health records.Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Nov. 14, 2020, he \u201cmost likely\u201d had a moderate case of the novel coronavirus, a day before a SpaceX spacecraft was set to launch. (Reuters)As part of an agreement struck in mid-May allowing Tesla to reopen, Tesla was required to report positive cases to the health department. Despite around 10 cases in May, according to the data, the health department told The Post in early June that there were no known cases of workplace infections affecting county residents.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTesla and the Alameda County Public Health Department and representatives did not respond to a request for comment.Tesla defied county orders so it could restart production. Days later, workers tested positive for the coronavirus.Musk fought vigorously against the county-mandated shutdown, arguing Tesla should be allowed to continue producing cars despite the stay-at-home orders. In late April, he railed against the government mandates, hurling expletives during an earnings call and calling them \u201cfascist.\u201d By May 11, he said Tesla was reopening, ultimately drawing support from anti-shutdown crowds and even President Donald Trump.\u201cTesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules,\u201d he wrote on Twitter. \u201cI will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020\n\nTesla also came under fire for its treatment of workers. It had promised they could remain home if they felt uncomfortable returning to the line. The Post reported in late June and July that workers concerned about covid exposure received termination notices after they did not return to work.The return of erratic Elon Musk: During coronavirus, Tesla CEO spreads misinformation and over-promises on ventilatorsThe data released by Alameda County shows there were 19 reported cases in June and 58 reported cases at the plant in July.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk drew criticism for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, after initially calling panic over the disease \u201cdumb\u201d and predicting there would be \u201cclose to zero new cases\u201d by last April.On Friday, he sent a tweet casting doubt on aspects of coronavirus vaccines, despite medical experts\u2019 assurances that they are safe and encouragement to the broader public to receive both doses of those that require it. Alameda County had initially denied issuing the data, citing requirements under healthy privacy law. Hundreds of covid cases reported at Tesla plant following Musk\u2019s defiant reopening, county data shows",
        "author": "Faiz Siddiqui"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Bay Area ordered millions to shelter in place. Elon Musk had Tesla employees report to work anyway. (WP: Future of Transportation) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1496",
        "date": "2020-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/18/bay-area-ordered-millions-shelter-place-elon-musk-had-tesla-employees-report-work-anyway/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 About two weeks ago, as stock markets plunged, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted: \u201cThe coronavirus panic is dumb.\u201dThat attitude appeared to stretch into this week. Despite a Bay Area-wide shelter-in-place order, he and other Tesla workers continued to work at the company\u2019s factory in Fremont, part of Alameda County. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe move placed Musk in an unusual standoff with local officials, who said the factory does not qualify as \u201cessential business,\u201d the exemption for the roughly 7 million residents who are otherwise supposed to remain in place. Violation of the order carries a potential misdemeanor charge.\u201cThey are not essential during the health crisis,\u201d said Sgt. Ray Kelly, spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff\u2019s Office, which is handling coronavirus-related inquiries for the county. \u201cIt\u2019s not an issue that we are going to take lightly considering the fact that it\u2019s a big employer in the state and the county with 10,000 employees that come in every day to work in the factory.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater Wednesday, Kelly said that Tesla had committed to reducing its workforce from 10,000 to 2,500 employees amid the order.One factory worker, who declined to be named citing a fear of retaliation, said the parking lot was full Thursday morning. Workers were being given masks and having their temperature\u2014but it was otherwise business as usual as the company continued to build cars. The workforce is only slowly dwindling as some workers stay home as the order continues, the worker added.Silicon Valley has been at the heart of the U.S. novel coronavirus outbreak, with some of the first reported cases of community spread. In response, six Bay Area counties issued a joint order taking effect Tuesday to limit the spread of the disease, telling everyone to stay home except for grocery shopping or other necessities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther tech giants including Apple, Google and Facebook headquartered in the counties affected by the order said they were sending workers home last week even before residents were ordered to shelter in place. Musk appeared to be the only tech CEO to resist drastic changes.The coronavirus panic is dumb\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2020\n\nLate Monday, Musk sent an email to staff saying he would be at work Tuesday.\u201cFirst, I\u2019d like to be super clear that if you feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable, please don\u2019t feel obligated to come to work,\u201d he wrote in an email to staff late Monday, according to the website Electrek, which obtained the memo shortly after it was sent. \u201cI will personally be at work, but that is just me. Totally OK if you want to stay home for any reason.\u201dTeslas still go much farther on a single charge than their competitors. But the strategy carries risks.Fremont police spokeswoman Geneva Bosques said county attorneys are discussing the language in the order and whether Tesla is among the companies that qualifies for an exemption, but enforcement was not under discussion. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLast week, Musk tweeted, \u201cFear is the mind-killer.\u201cAnd late Wednesday, as he continued to question what he called a \u201cpanic,\" he appeared to offer his company\u2019s resources. \u201cWe will make ventilators if there is a shortage\", he said, in response to a tweet pleading for him to take the matter seriously.\u201cWhich hospitals have these shortages you speak of right now?\u201d he then asked.Tesla makes cars with sophisticated hvac systems. SpaceX makes spacecraft with life support systems. Ventilators are not difficult, but cannot be produced instantly. Which hospitals have these shortages you speak of right now?\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2020\n\n(Researchers have said the pandemic could leave cities thousands of ventilators short as patients pour into hospitals.) Tesla has been ramping up production to deliver its Model Y crossover SUV this month, its biggest launch since the Model 3 in 2017 and expected to be popular among new buyers who have flocked from sedans to SUVs in huge numbers. The company said on its last quarterly analyst call in January that it would be shipping the vehicles earlier than expected, boosting the company\u2019s already high stock price. Tesla on Monday announced that Model Y deliveries had begun.Model Y deliveries begin!https://t.co/ZhuiM5MTOf pic.twitter.com/3gX6MBPmhp\u2014 Tesla (@Tesla) March 16, 2020\n\nThe rollout was important because Tesla has previously struggled to deliver new vehicles as it shifted production. The company was slow to meet production targets for its Model 3 sedan, prompting concerns about its initial ability to meet mass-market demand.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe move to keep the assembly line going prompted rebukes from Tesla critics, who said it was a reckless decision prioritizing a dubious short-term benefit over the long-term impact on the company and region. Tesla\u2019s stock sunk about 16 percent by the day\u2019s closing, outpacing average market losses for Wednesday. The stock was trading at $361, more than $600 lower than an all-time intraday high set in February.My car was in a hit-and-run. Then I learned it recorded the whole thing.Tesla also appears to be alone among major American automakers in keeping its factory running. Detroit\u2019s Big Three automakers, General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler, announced Wednesday they would close their plants until at least the end of the month, following a push from their United Auto Workers-backed workforces.Tesla previously resisted workforce efforts to unionize, drawing accusations of union-busting. A judge ruled in September that the company violated federal labor law by targeting union activity at its plant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk is infamous for implementing a hustle-oriented culture at Tesla, including runs he called \u201cproduction hell\u201d and \u201cdelivery logistics hell.\u201d He\u2019s known to sleep in the factory during busy times and has even put up workers in a tent at the plant to handle production needs.How Elon Musk went from sleeping in the factory to being on the cusp of launching a crew into spaceAccording to the Alameda County Public Health Department order issued Monday, businesses can engage in the \u201cminimum necessary activities to maintain the value of the business\u2019s inventory, ensure security, process payroll and employee benefits\u201d and related matters. The company also can continue the \u201cminimum necessary activities to facilitate employees of the business being able to continue to work remotely [from] their residences,\u201d according to the order.Scott Galloway, a New York University Stern School of Business professor of marketing and frequent critic of Musk, said the CEO was putting employees and the company itself at risk with his decision. He said the situation reflected the lack of a governance structure to rein Musk in.\u201cI think every CEO has to make a decision between the economic well-being of the company and the risk you\u2019re subjecting your employees to in the longer term, while opening the company to legal liability,\u201d he said. \u201cI would argue that the downside risk he\u2019s subjecting himself and his shareholders to is much bigger than the upside.\u201d County officials told Tesla it was not essential and could only maintain \u201cminimum basic operations.\u201d The Bay Area ordered millions to shelter in place. Elon Musk had Tesla employees report to work anyway.",
        "author": "Faiz Siddiqui"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla is like an \u2018iPhone on wheels.\u2019 And consumers are locked into its ecosystem.  (WP: Future of Transportation) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1497",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/14/tesla-apple-tech/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Tesla released its futuristic \u201cFull Self-Driving\u201d package last year to great fanfare, criticism and the usual stream of video uploads showing off cars that could seemingly drive themselves.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen something strange happened.The electric vehicle giant revoked access for some drivers, it said. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter in March that some users who had received access to the company\u2019s most advanced driver-assistance features \u201cdid not pay sufficient attention to the road.\u201d Tesla did not say how it made the determination or who among the feature\u2019s 2,000 beta testers \u2014 who shelled out thousands for the package that Tesla now priced at $10,000 \u2014 would lose access. Story continues below advertisementBut in Silicon Valley, the decision reflected a well-understood formula: Consumers are the subject, and tech giants are in control.AdvertisementFrom the time they hit the mass market nearly a decade ago, Tesla\u2019s vehicles have garnered reputations as \u201ciPhones on wheels,\u201d a revolutionary technological leap that did for cars what Apple\u2019s smartphone did for consumer tech. They offered large touch screens, a vast charging network and groundbreaking performance that delivered on the dream of electrification seemingly without compromise, where competing products failed to stitch all aspects of that formula into one.Consumers can pay a price for being locked into Tesla\u2019s universe, reliant on the automaker for everything from simple repairs to upgrades and software updates. (Jonathan Baran/The Washington Post)Elon Musk moved to Texas and embraced celebrity. Can Tesla run on Autopilot?Like Apple, Tesla built its brand on exclusivity and aspirational products, prioritizing the experience of ownership as much as the utility of the device itself. And both companies have integrated software with hardware in a way that revolutionized their industries, making the transition to new technologies relatively intuitive for even the non-tech-savvy user.Story continues below advertisementBut consumers can pay a price for being locked into Tesla\u2019s universe, like Apple customers in the computer giant\u2019s ecosystem. They are at the mercy of Tesla\u2019s way of doing things, from car repairs to software updates.AdvertisementIt\u2019s no accident the companies have a lot in common, according to a half-dozen former employees who worked for both Tesla and Apple, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the workplace dynamics and for fear of retaliation. Tesla hired managers who brought members of their teams from Apple, importing its design language and culture. Meanwhile, those employees could be dismissive of the automotive expertise within its ranks, the former employees said.\u201cTesla is not an automotive company, it\u2019s a tech company that builds cars,\u201d said one former employee of both companies who worked in products.Story continues below advertisementThat also translates to the company\u2019s leadership. Musk, who recently crowned himself \u201cTechnoking\u201d of Tesla, has taken after Apple co-founder and Silicon Valley demigod Steve Jobs in more ways than one, some of the workers said.Tesla gave workers permission to stay home rather than risk getting covid-19. Then it sent termination notices.Musk has been known to spend meetings scrolling on his phone, before lashing out over decisions he viewed as misguided, outbursts that would often precede a firing, according to the employees.Advertisement\u201cIn the same way Steve Jobs could be cutthroat and terse and explosive, Elon is the same way,\u201d said the former employee, who worked at the companies under both men.The companies\u2019 shared vision includes an emphasis on some forms of proprietary technology. Tesla uses a unique charging connector, similar to Apple products with their \u201cLightning\u201d connectors. It has built out what it says is the world\u2019s largest fast-charging network, consisting of more than 25,000 Superchargers. The cars\u2019 groundbreaking over-the-air updates mean users can be subject to sudden performance changes if products become out of date \u2014 like battery throttling for which Apple has come under fire. Tesla\u2019s unique systems have also proved difficult for government authorities investigating crashes to decode, a problem that echoes federal authorities\u2019 difficulty unlocking Apple devices.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a far cry from a traditional auto industry built largely on standardization \u2014 from gas pumps to windshield wipers, to in-car infotainment systems with Apple CarPlay and Android integration. Tesla has its own touch-screen interface that can prove to be a learning curve for new adopters, though it enables a user experience uniquely suited for its cars \u2014 an integration of hardware and software reminiscent of Apple.AdvertisementTesla, Musk and Apple did not respond to multiple detailed requests for comment. Tesla disbanded its media relations team last year.Teslas still go much farther on a single charge than their competitors. But the strategy carries risks.Tesla and Musk have said they want their technology to be embraced by other players in the industry. They have promoted open-source software and criticized the overuse of patents, and Musk has even said Tesla\u2019s Superchargers are \u201cbeing made accessible to other electric cars,\u201d though it\u2019s unclear whether any agreements are actually in place.They are, although it\u2019s kind low-key. Tesla Superchargers are being made accessible to other electric cars.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2020\n\nApple says its closed-source environments help it keep its products secure and free of hostile software. Some critics disagree, pointing to areas where the computer giant falls short.Story continues below advertisementTesla\u2019s performance has dazzled investors. The company\u2019s stock has skyrocketed in recent months, prompting Musk to tweet in March that he sees Tesla becoming the world\u2019s biggest company, surpassing even Apple\u2019s more than $2 trillion market cap. (By late April, Tesla was worth more than $675 billion.)Tesla is putting \u2018self-driving\u2019 in the hands of drivers amid criticism the tech is not readyIn recent years, some current and former employees said, Tesla has become the more attractive workplace for some in Silicon Valley.AdvertisementFueling that recruiting: The prospect of working for a visionary CEO or a company with a goal to change the world. Musk has overseen Tesla\u2019s modern development into the industry leader in electric vehicles. And Tesla has pitched that vision to many who were otherwise concerned about its scrappy, start-up environment that paled in comparison to the state-of-the-art \u201cspaceship\u201d headquarters of Apple or the food and beverage perks of Google or Facebook.Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger\u2019s syndrome during SNL monologueOne corporate recruiter in Silicon Valley described the funnel of interchanging talent between Apple and Tesla as \u201cincestuous.\u201d The companies share talent pools of engineers from top schools, the current and former workers said, though Tesla is much less concerned about a person\u2019s formal education credentials than Apple, they said. The person recently in charge of Tesla\u2019s vehicle and mobile user interface design, for example, was previously a senior art director at Apple, though he recently departed Tesla as well. Tesla hired Apple alumnus George Blankenship to lead its retail strategy a decade ago, putting sleek showrooms in malls and city centers, mimicking the experience-focused store model he had pioneered at Apple.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere is a strong Tesla-to-Apple pipeline that is well-known within both companies,\u201d said another recruiter.AdvertisementEven Musk has publicly heaped praise on Apple and its workers.\u201cIt\u2019s a great company with a lot of talented people. I love their products,\u201d he wrote on Twitter in 2015, saying he was glad to hear about plans that Apple was developing an electric vehicle.Automotive alums from Detroit did not garner the same respect, however. \u201cThere was no empathy for these people in Michigan,\u201d said the recruiter, describing how Tesla expected them to jump at any opportunity to work in Silicon Valley. And in the halls of Tesla, the auto alums were regarded as \u201cdinosaurs,\u201d the former products employee recalled.Tesla\u2019s new \u2018Cybertruck\u2019 promised unbreakable windows. They broke onstage.That talent swap with Apple has helped Tesla build a car company that attempts to mimic the successes of the older tech giant, the current and former workers say, in some cases foisting new designs on consumers without market research to back them up.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think that we have an empathy problem, a systemic empathy problem, in Silicon Valley,\u201d one of the former employees said, pointing to what he regarded as the companies\u2019 elite attitudes and disdain for market research.The former employees pointed to polarizing product unveilings like the Cybertruck, which took the proven design of the pickup truck and transformed it into an apocalyptic stainless steel behemoth.Then there are the system updates.Months after buying a used Tesla Model S for nearly $46,000, Harpreet Singh began to notice the car wouldn\u2019t travel far enough on a single charge to cover his work trips frequently stretching more than 200 miles.Story continues below advertisementTesla had taken about 40 miles of range off his used Model S, which began with 265 miles, in what Tesla said was an effort to protect the battery. The update also slowed down charging times, Singh said. Tesla ultimately agreed to replace what it later concluded was a faulty battery, but at the expense of what Singh has found is slower acceleration.AdvertisementAfter the car and its new battery were working properly, Singh began to dread system updates, because they introduced new problems like the shorter range and decreased charging rates.Singh said he thinks about it like other tech updates. \u201cI\u2019m so comfortable with Windows 8. \u2026 Why do I have to change to Windows 10? And then everything breaks,\u201d said Singh, 33, of Cypress, Tex. \u201cSame thing here. \u2026 They can do anything to do it.\u201dFederal safety officials probe alleged Tesla battery defectsThat issue, among others, led to a lawsuit from Tesla owners who allege the company issued software updates that reduced range, lengthened charging times and ultimately cut into the value of their vehicles. The plaintiff named in the 2019 class-action complaint, David Rasmussen, 64, of Victorville, Calif., said his used Tesla Model S went from 252 miles of rated range to 217 miles following the software changes. And he said some owners tried to find workarounds to resist software updates.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an open investigation into Tesla\u2019s battery management software updates.Tesla has argued it uses over-the-air updates for safety improvements and to enhance the ownership experience.Tesla agrees to recall 135,000 vehicles over touch screen failures after sparring with regulatorsApple was accused of \u201cthrottling\u201d old devices, slowing down customers\u2019 iPhones to preserve their batteries as operating systems updated, essentially nudging them into buying new devices. The company agreed in late 2020 to pay $113 million to settle an investigation by nearly three dozen states on the matter. The agreements with states did not require Apple to admit guilt.Tesla isn\u2019t the only automaker updating its vehicles over the air, but it has made a mark on the industry by using the technology to introduce dramatic changes that affect driving dynamics, even improving the cars\u2019 brakes overnight. Some of the changes would require a trip to the dealer for any other automaker. Jaguar, for example, boosted the range of its I-PACE electric vehicles by 12 miles in 2019, but the tweak required an in-person service to unlock.Some of the employees who made the leap between Tesla and Apple said they found Tesla to be sloppier on execution. Tesla put still-developing products, from Autopilot software to its newest cars, in the hands of consumers without the steady hand and design direction preventing the software bugs and quality control flaws.Tesla billed its \u201cAutopilot\u201d driver-assistance suite as a way to enable the car to drive itself, with its ultimate iteration \u201cFull Self-Driving\u201d ushering in the era of fully autonomous vehicles for consumers. But industry competitors and safety-minded officials are wary of Tesla\u2019s nomenclature, saying it paints an impression far beyond the vehicles\u2019 actual capabilities.Tesla running on \u2018Autopilot\u2019 repeatedly veered toward the spot where Apple engineer later crashed and died, federal investigators sayOwners have taken notice of the shortcomings. Stephen Raynor, an attorney who lives Richardson, Tex., was alarmed when his Model S equipped with Full Self-Driving abruptly veered toward a highway barrier as it approached a toll road exit near his home.\u201cIt\u2019s just not ready for prime time,\u201d he said of Tesla\u2019s Autopilot suite. \u201cIt just didn\u2019t read it right and it wanted to go left and the exit was right.\u201dTesla has argued that Autopilot carries a nearly 10 times lower chance of a crash than a vehicle in normal driving. The company says its connected fleet enables it to \u201cdevelop features that can help Tesla drivers mitigate or avoid accidents.\u201d And Tesla says its over-the-air software updates allow it to make safety enhancements well after a car has been delivered.Apple\u2018s focus on hardware and software integration has in some cases meant higher costs, limited compatibility and little customization. Apple didn\u2019t want users to manipulate its closed-source environments or mess with its meticulously designed products.Tesla has made similar design decisions, even ones viewed as user-hostile, or that flew in the face of common industry practice. The company recently debuted a \u201cyoke\u201d-style steering wheel for its refreshed Model S. With a half-moon shape that sacrificed ergonomics for a racing-inspired, futuristic look, the component was criticized as a downgrade to user-friendliness, which analysts said had implications for safety.A Tesla will operate without a person in the driver\u2019s seat, Consumer Reports findsAnd Tesla has even stated it aims to phase out the gear selector, replacing the standard park, reverse, drive and neutral setup with a gear \u201cswipe\u201d option in the cars\u2019 center screens, to flick between drive and reverse. Tesla said it ultimately wants its cars to predict whether they should be going forward or backward.Apple, too, had made design decisions that struck some as tone-deaf. Jobs famously eschewed market research, saying it was instead the job of the company to show customers what they wanted. The company nixed the ubiquitous headphone jack from its smartphones, forcing the adoption of Bluetooth ear buds, and has eliminated certain ports in favor of thinness and streamlined design, making users rely on dongles to connect accessories. And it came under a swarm of criticism for its \u201cbutterfly keyboard,\u201d a space-saving component noted for its tendency to break before Apple phased it out.Adding to the pattern: a trend toward shorter life spans generally associated with tech devices vs. traditional cars.Consumers and critics balked earlier this year when Tesla\u2019s acting general counsel argued with regulators that its cars\u2019 iPad-like touch screens should not be expected to last the life span of the vehicle, an argument that was anathema to an industry used to \u201cautomotive grade\u201d components. That was a key issue for Tesla because the touch screens serve as a command center for the car, hosting the climate controls, navigation and music, and even functions such as opening the glove box.After initially sparring with regulators, Tesla agreed to recall tens of thousands of Model S and X vehicles over the touch screen failures.A Tesla Model S erupted \u2018like a flamethrower.\u2019 It renewed old safety concerns about the trailblazing sedans.\u201cIt\u2019s like its superpower and Achilles\u2019 heel at the same time: It doesn\u2019t do things by the rule book,\u201d said a former senior employee.Analysts said Tesla turned the traditional carmaker-owner relationship on its head.\u201cThe argument that equipment on modern cars that cost that much is not expected to last that long \u2014 that is a major violation of the auto industry as we know it,\u201d said Mike Ramsey, an automotive analyst at the firm Gartner\u2019s CIO Research Group. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to adopt the consumer electronics ethos, you can\u2019t do it halfway.\u201dTesla floats fully self-driving cars. Many are worried about what that will unleash.Full self-driving features are also not transferrable between cars, meaning an owner who has shelled out $10,000 for the software would have to buy it for their next Tesla as well.Musk has said, however, that Tesla will look into upping the trade-in value for a vehicle with Full Self-Driving, after some owners complained about having to purchase it twice.Looking into this. No question that FSD should be viewed as reasonably valuable when doing a trade-in.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 18, 2021\n\nTesla has also sought to restrict how drivers use the features it bills as self-driving, suggesting they could not, for instance, use them for ride-hailing on Uber and Lyft. Instead they could leverage them only for Tesla\u2019s own ride-hailing network built by a fleet that Musk envisioned would consist of 1 million robo-taxis by 2020, a target date that proved overly optimistic.Owners also face difficulty finding easy repairs and frequently turn to Tesla out of fear they will void their warranties. Raynor, the Texas attorney, said his Model S touch screen suddenly went half-blank for two days, limiting access to features such as the backup camera and climate controls.\u201cWith all the electronics, very few mechanics want to get near it,\u201d he said.Reed Albergotti contributed to this report. Tesla is bringing the strategies pioneered by Apple to the auto industry. Consumers are learning that\u2019s not always a good thing. Tesla is like an \u2018iPhone on wheels.\u2019 And consumers are locked into its ecosystem. ",
        "author": "Faiz Siddiqui"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla is debuting the quickest-ever production car. But the question looms: Can Elon Musk still deliver? (WP: Future of Transportation) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1498",
        "date": "2021-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/10/tesla-elon-musk-delivery-event/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Elon Musk took the stage just before midnight Eastern time on Thursday night to introduce what he claims is the world\u2019s quickest and safest car, which he said will be produced by the hundreds within weeks.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt remains to be seen whether those claims hold up, or if they follow a familiar pattern of overpromising for the electric car company. The Tesla CEO appeared about half-hour late at the company\u2019s Fremont, Calif., production facility to announce a revolutionary debut for Tesla, dubbed Plaid. The car promises to be the first in mass production to carry sub-two-second zero-to-60 speeds, making it the world\u2019s quickest car available to buy. Tesla promised a 390-mile range and more than 1,000 horsepower, propelling it to speeds up to 200 mph, although it\u2019s unclear whether the car would reach those speeds in the variation being delivered to consumers. It\u2019s listed at about $130,000 on Tesla\u2019s website, before potential savings such as government incentives.Thinking of buying an electric vehicle? Read this first.With the debut, Musk ruminated on why a car would ever need to be built to such extreme specifications.\u201cWe\u2019ve got to show that an electric car is the best car hands down,\u201d he said. \u201cWith the Plaid Model S, what you have is a car that is quicker than any sports car, faster than any Porsche, safer than any Volvo, in the same car. ... It really feels like you\u2019re driving in the future.\u201dThe car\u2019s name is a reference to the movie \u201cSpaceballs.\u201d In the space-action parody, stars brightly streak past as the spaceship enters \u201cLudicrous\u201d speed, the velocity eventually represented by an equally ridiculous pattern: \u201cPlaid.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMissing from the evening? Fans have been clamoring for updates on Tesla\u2019s Cybertruck, Semi and Roadster, the company\u2019s most anticipated upcoming releases \u2014 all of which were set for 2020 or 2021 debuts on their earlier timelines. But the promises have not materialized as the company has struggled with its characteristic overpromising. There was no update on the other models.\u201cI think maybe as just a general rule with Tesla: Regardless of what they say, they\u2019re over-optimistic on when it\u2019s going to be available,\u201d said Gene Munster, managing partner at the venture capital firm Loup Ventures, who added that the company \u201ceventually delivers.\u201dTesla is like an \u2018iPhone on wheels.\u2019 And consumers are locked into its ecosystem.Instead this week, fans were treated to a classic Elon Musk diversion: Tesla said it would no longer build its fully featured, premier Model S, dubbed the Plaid Plus.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Plaid Plus was supposed to be the top-end luxury sedan offered by the company. The less-expensive Model S Plaid, he argued in a tweet, delivered good enough performance to render its counterpart unnecessary. Both would be luxury sport sedans well out of the price range of the typical consumer, exceeding $100,000, unlike the more mass-market-aimed Cybertruck and the more popular Tesla Model 3 and Model Y.\u201cPlaid+ is canceled. No need, as Plaid is just so good,\u201d wrote Musk, in a surprise to fans, as he simultaneously announced that the Model S Plaid would hit the road this week.Plaid+ is canceled. No need, as Plaid is just so good.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 6, 2021\n\nBased on Thursday\u2019s announcement, the car is unconventional even by Tesla standards.Story continues below advertisementIt carries a yoke-style steering wheel, a half-moon shape that increases visibility for the driver but that has also been criticized as an ergonomic downgrade. The car eliminates a gear selector stalk, Musk said, automating that function. Rather than a turn signal stalk the user pushes up or down, the steering wheel features left and right arrows the user presses.AdvertisementDrivers will be able to swipe into reverse or drive using the touch screen, but ultimately Tesla has said it wants to leave gear selection up to automation.\u201cIf you\u2019re changing from forward to reverse in particular situations, it\u2019ll try to remember that and geocode it to particular locations,\u201d Musk said, adding the eventual goal is \u201cminimizing the amount of input that you do until the car just reads your mind.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMusk said the car would carry quicker charging than past models, adding 187 miles of charging range in 15 minutes. He said Tesla would aim for the car to carry the lowest probability of injury of any car tested by safety authorities.Musk said the car also delivers PlayStation 5-level gaming performance and could run the popular title \u201cCyberpunk 2077.\u201d Deliveries, he said, would begin immediately, as Tesla fulfilled the first 25 orders right away and would soon ramp up to several hundred cars per week.Advertisement\u201cThis car crushes,\u201d Musk concluded.Tesla has struggled with its pace of production in the past. With its mass-market Model 3, some workers were shifted into a production tent outside the factory as the company worked around-the-clock to fulfill orders. The Model S is a lower-production vehicle and the top-end Plaid version will carry even fewer orders, but Tesla anticipates it will build a thousand per week within months.The cancellation of the Plaid Plus, which was set at about $150,000, came as a disappointment to many who awaited its promised 520-mile range and new battery technology, announced in a similar presentation in September. And the company has been mum on specific timelines for its debut pickup, the Cybertruck; its sports car, the Roadster; and its long-haul truck, the Tesla Semi. Musk said in a tweet in January that production for the Roadster would begin next year.Finishing engineering this year, production starts next year. Aiming to have release candidate design drivable late summer. Tri-motor drive system & advanced battery work were important precursors.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2021\n\nTesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJerome Guillen, the head of Tesla Heavy Trucking, left the company on June 3, Tesla announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this week, raising questions about the status of that project.On social media, Tesla superfans and casual observers alike have sought an update on Tesla\u2019s futuristic pickup, which Tesla originally said was slated for production this year. Munster said Tesla risks letting the competition catch up to it, especially after Ford announced its F-150 Lightning electric pickup to great fanfare last month.Elon Musk moved to Texas and embraced celebrity. Can Tesla run on Autopilot?The cancellation of the Plaid Plus means Tesla will miss an opportunity to debut its new 4680 battery cell, the advanced battery composition it announced at a presentation last September. The Plaid Plus was set to include the new cell, which would be more densely packed and provide 16 percent more range, Tesla said in September, with power and energy outputs far higher than today\u2019s batteries are capable of.When it comes to product announcements, \u201cyou have to translate what Tesla says,\u201d Munster said. \u201cMost things are going to take longer than you think, but eventually they\u2019re going to get there.\u201d Tesla debuted the world's quickest production car on Thursday, in an event just as notable for what it did not include. Tesla is debuting the quickest-ever production car. But the question looms: Can Elon Musk still deliver?",
        "author": "Faiz Siddiqui"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tax the Rich: Good or Bad Idea? (WSJ: Future View) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1499",
        "date": "2021-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-the-rich-good-or-bad-wealth-rate-unrealized-capital-gains-investment-build-back-better-11638916192?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=3",
        "text": "A wealth tax seems to be politically popular largely because it promises to raise revenue from only the wealthiest citizens. As is often the case, however, the politically popular option isn\u2019t the most effective. Calculating the wealth of a multibillionaire, as opposed to income, is famously difficult. The tax would require substantial work to enforce\u2014especially as existing loopholes are exploited and new ones are added, and every assessment is challenged by the best accountants and tax lawyers that money can buy. There are worries that the whole tax could even be found unconstitutional and never get off the ground.\n\n\nHigh earners can be made to pay more in taxes, but not this way. Since much of their wealth is stored in capital investments, it would be more effective to raise the top tax rate for long-term capital gains. The highest income-tax rate is 37%; for long-term capital gains, it is a comparatively pitiful 20%. Democrats propose to raise it to 25%.\nA higher long-term capital-gains tax, matched with regulation of the tax dodge of securities-backed lines of credit, would capture revenue with significantly less difficulty.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicholas Tunks,\n\n\n\n University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, finance, economics and accounting\n\nDon\u2019t Tax Unrealized Gains\nIn 1963, President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy\n\n\n\n said, \u201cThe tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital from static to more dynamic situations, the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth of the economy.\u201d That was 58 years ago. Today\u2019s Democrats have gone beyond defying\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n JFK\n\n\n\n by seeking to raise the capital-gains tax. They are now proposing a tax on unrealized capital gains.\nThe proposal is unserious. Our current capital-gains tax applies to the cash that flows when financial assets are sold. Unrealized gains, however, are only on paper. In a given year, investors might see 10% growth in the stocks they own. But they realize that 10% only if they sell the stock, which might occur decades in the future. Under this new proposal, the government would tax investors on unrealized gains, even if they have no money in-hand to show for it.\nMy generation will rely on the future economic growth spurred by investments made today. We want a country that values hard work and doesn\u2019t take away more of our money\u2014especially money we don\u2019t even have.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joe Pitts,\n\n\n\n Arizona State University, civic and economic thought\nImmoral Tax Avoidance\nAs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Franklin\n\n\n\n put it, \u201cNothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.\u201d He might as well have mentioned a third item: tax avoidance.\nWe have all heard from the ultrawealthy the argument that they started from nothing but worked hard and therefore deserve their fortunes and should not be subject to high taxation. \nThe argument does not work. Political philosopher\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Rawls\u2019s\n\n\n\n distinction between expectations and moral deserts shows why. Even though individuals can form \u201clegitimate expectations\u201d to receive rewards from their efforts or great talents, they do not morally deserve such outcomes as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n $297 billion fortune. We have expectations of keeping our wealth because we happen to live in a society that values the particular skills we have, which is nothing of our own doing.\nMost would agree that we do not morally deserve the prize from a winning lottery ticket, because it is up to random chance. The same logic applies to Mr. Musk: His possession of spectacular wealth is due to the morally arbitrary reason that our society happens at the moment to value online-payment systems, spacecraft and electric cars. His wealth owes as much to social conditions as it does to his personal talents.\nLike all successful CEOs, Mr. Musk has dedicated hard work to build his empire. But can he claim to deserve everything he owns? No. Is his act of legal tax avoidance a refusal to acknowledge this social origins of this wealth? It most certainly is.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Pan,\n\n\n\n University of California, economics and data science\n\nThe Right Choice\nElon Musk is selling 10% of his Tesla stock, valued at $1.1 billion. He had held these shares for more than a year, so the proceeds will be categorized as long-term capital gains, which are taxed at lower rates than income or short-term capital gains. By selling now, Mr. Musk will be taxed on his gain at the maximum rate, 20%. The House Democrats proposed to raise the long-term rate to 25%. If that passes, Mr. Musk will have saved $55 million in taxes by selling now rather than later. Smart move.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jessica Hrabovecky,\n\n\n\n Quinnipiac University, accounting\nClick here to submit a response to next week\u2019s Future View. \nIf you are intere Students discuss raising rates. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "A Smarter Way to Look at the Stars (WSJ: Gear & Gadgets) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1500",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-smarter-way-to-look-at-the-stars-11571402597?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=49",
        "text": "The Montpellier-based Vaonis bills its device (about $4,412, vaonis.com) as the world\u2019s first connected, all-in-one telescope revealing mysteries of deep space on command via phones and tablets. As you may imagine, your first stop on this cosmic adventure is an app store. From there, setup is simple, although the machine, a white, roughly 25-pound U-shaped body with a pivoting lens housed in its center, takes a few minutes to orient itself. \nOnce calibrated, Stellina can automatically point itself toward any of a hundred-plus preset nebulae, star clusters, galaxies and other points of astronomical interest. We recommend skipping neighboring planets, though\u2014with the len\u2019s fixed focal length of 400 mm, even Jupiter appears tiny.\nCalling Stellina a telescope is a bit of a misnomer. Vaonis describes it as an \u201cobservation station,\u201d but it\u2019s really an astrophotography lab you can haul around in a large knapsack. While conventional telescopes require you to look through an eye piece, Stellina repeatedly captures images of an incomprehensibly distant object\u2014often for up to an hour\u2014then overlays those images to turn a mere smudge of light into a crisply rendered view accessed on your hand-held device via the app. \n\n\nOn-screen, you can fiddle with various filters (including one for light pollution) and processors to easily amplify image quality\u2014the sort of tweaks that normally require painstaking work by professional astronomers or obsessive amateurs. That said, the radius of Stellina\u2019s onboard Wi-Fi system is frustratingly small\u2014our screen lost its link when we were even a few paces away. \nWe invited some Vassar College astronomy students to take Stellina for a spin outside their massive campus observatory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. They were impressed by how the Stellina, essentially a hobbyist\u2019s tool, in some ways outperformed their apparatus, but bemoaned the loss of romance. For sophomore Patricia \u201cPipa\u201d Fernandez, the experience was \u201conly slightly more satisfying than looking at the objects on Google Images.\u201d \nThose seeking a more direct cosmic connection might cool their rockets until February, when the crowdfunded Unistellar eVscope ships for a slightly less astronomical $2,999. The startup, which has a \u201ccitizen science\u201d partnership with the SETI Institute, boasts that its smart scope is 100 times more powerful than a classic at-home telescope, while retaining the all-important-to-some, familiar eyepiece. \nThe Wall Street Journal is not compensated by retailers listed in its articles as outlets for products. Listed retailers frequently are not the sole retail outlets.\n\n\nMore in Gear & Gadget\n\n\n\n\nAmericans Are Snapping Up Bidets, but Does Your Bathroom Need One?\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nAre At-Home Food Sensitivity Tests a Waste of Money?\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nWhy Coffee Nerds Want This Manual Espresso Machine\nFebruary 23, 2022 \n\n\nThe Best Soda Makers for At-Home Fizzing\nFebruary 17, 2022 \n\n\nAre Standing Desks Really Better for Your Back? It Depends...\nFebruary 9, 2022 The first app-connected telescope captures wonders of our galaxy. But does the experience count if you\u2019re staring at the cosmos on an iPhone screen? ",
        "author": "Erik Baard"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Smarter Way to Look at the Stars (WSJ: Gear & Gadgets) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1501",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-smarter-way-to-look-at-the-stars-11571402597?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=54",
        "text": "The Montpellier-based Vaonis bills its device (about $4,412, vaonis.com) as the world\u2019s first connected, all-in-one telescope revealing mysteries of deep space on command via phones and tablets. As you may imagine, your first stop on this cosmic adventure is an app store. From there, setup is simple, although the machine, a white, roughly 25-pound U-shaped body with a pivoting lens housed in its center, takes a few minutes to orient itself. \nOnce calibrated, Stellina can automatically point itself toward any of a hundred-plus preset nebulae, star clusters, galaxies and other points of astronomical interest. We recommend skipping neighboring planets, though\u2014with the len\u2019s fixed focal length of 400 mm, even Jupiter appears tiny.\n\n\n\n\nCalling Stellina a telescope is a bit of a misnomer. Vaonis describes it as an \u201cobservation station,\u201d but it\u2019s really an astrophotography lab you can haul around in a large knapsack. While conventional telescopes require you to look through an eye piece, Stellina repeatedly captures images of an incomprehensibly distant object\u2014often for up to an hour\u2014then overlays those images to turn a mere smudge of light into a crisply rendered view accessed on your hand-held device via the app. \n\n\nOn-screen, you can fiddle with various filters (including one for light pollution) and processors to easily amplify image quality\u2014the sort of tweaks that normally require painstaking work by professional astronomers or obsessive amateurs. That said, the radius of Stellina\u2019s onboard Wi-Fi system is frustratingly small\u2014our screen lost its link when we were even a few paces away. \nWe invited some Vassar College astronomy students to take Stellina for a spin outside their massive campus observatory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. They were impressed by how the Stellina, essentially a hobbyist\u2019s tool, in some ways outperformed their apparatus, but bemoaned the loss of romance. For sophomore Patricia \u201cPipa\u201d Fernandez, the experience was \u201conly slightly more satisfying than looking at the objects on Google Images.\u201d \nThose seeking a more direct cosmic connection might cool their rockets until February, when the crowdfunded Unistellar eVscope ships for a slightly less astronomical $2,999. The startup, which has a \u201ccitizen science\u201d partnership with the SETI Institute, boasts that its smart scope is 100 times more powerful than a classic at-home telescope, while retaining the all-important-to-some, familiar eyepiece. \nThe Wall Street Journal is not compensated by retailers listed in its articles as outlets for products. Listed retailers frequently are not the sole retail outlets.\n\n\nMore in Gear & Gadget\n\n\n\n\nAmericans Are Snapping Up Bidets, but Does Your Bathroom Need One?\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nAre At-Home Food Sensitivity Tests a Waste of Money?\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nWhy Coffee Nerds Want This Manual Espresso Machine\nFebruary 23, 2022 \n\n\nThe Best Soda Makers for At-Home Fizzing\nFebruary 17, 2022 \n\n\nAre Standing Desks Really Better for Your Back? It Depends...\nFebruary 9, 2022 The first app-connected telescope captures wonders of our galaxy. But does the experience count if you\u2019re staring at the cosmos on an iPhone screen? ",
        "author": "Erik Baard"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | It\u2019s not just Trump: Western media has long treated black and brown countries like \u2018shitholes\u2019 (WP: Global Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1502",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/01/12/its-not-just-trump-western-media-has-long-treated-black-and-brown-countries-like-shitholes/",
        "text": "The president of the United States essentially called black and brown countries \u201cshitholes.\u201d The Internet is aflame with outrage over his comments. There are already many calls to apologize, and there will be more to come. But let\u2019s be real: U.S. media has long treated black and brown countries like \u201cshitholes.\u201d This TV-loving president is a product of a media culture that has systemically covered places in Africa and places like Haiti only as war-ravaged, disease-ridden and impoverished \u2014 when these countries are even deemed worthy of coverage at all. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightStudies\u00a0show\u00a0headlines from major Western media outlets are largely negative when it comes to Africa. It was just last year that a New York Times opinions essay about Congo waxed on about monkey brains and how the country was perhaps better off 100 years ago under colonialism. Only with Africa coverage can programs such as \u201c60 Minutes\u201d get away with parachuting American journalists to Liberia to report on ebola \u2014 and not interview a single Liberian on camera for the story. Western media and literature are riddled with cliche-white savior journalism. That helps to explain why Louise Linton, the now-wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, was able to publish an article in the Telegraph (which was later removed from its website) based on her cliche-addled, self-published memoir about her gap year in Zambia. She wrote in the book that Africa is rife with hidden dangers: \u201cI witnessed random acts of violence, contracted malaria and had close encounters with lions, elephants, crocodiles and snakes.\u201dNever mind that lazy \u201cOoga-Booga\u201d journalism\u00a0(as journalist Howard French calls its) fails to reckon with the fact that African countries are home to some of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Never mind that long before mobile money-sharing systems such as Venmo came to the United States, countries like Kenya were using mobile platforms including M-Pesa. Never mind that African countries are beginning to produce their own cars, embrace biometric technology and venture into space exploration. When it comes to Africa, American media is rarely interested in positive headlines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow\u00a0Karen Attiah\u2018s opinionsFollowAddMy first foray into anything resembling journalism came during my undergrad days at Northwestern, when I wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Northwestern challenging an interview that painted Ghana as a place riddled with diseased children and food that tastes like newspaper. Since then, I have spent much of my adult writing life trying to counter these harmful narratives about Africa: trying to convince people that black and brown nations aren\u2019t \u201cshitholes\u201d and that black and brown people are not subhuman.Trump\u2019s comments are just the latest proof that the United States is being led by a man who is an unabashed white supremacist, one who aims to implement policies that will make America white again by limiting immigration from black and brown countries and deporting those who are already here. But in the storm of mainstream anger, it is hypocritical of the media to fail to reckon with and correct its own practices of reporting on black and brown countries and how this coverage affects perceptions about very real people. It is hypocritical of the media to fail to reckon with and correct its own practices. Opinion: It\u2019s not just Trump: Western media has long treated black and brown countries like \u2018shitholes\u2019",
        "author": "Karen Attiah"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Facing a dim present, Putin turns back to glorious Stalin (WP: Global Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1503",
        "date": "2020-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/08/facing-dim-present-putin-turns-back-glorious-stalin/",
        "text": "Andrei Kolesnikov is a senior fellow and the chair of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center.Moscow intellectuals like to joke that our dark past is in fact our bright future. Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly seems to think so \u2014 and he\u2019s not joking. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightEvery year on May 9, Russia celebrates the Soviet victory in World War II with a public holiday and an ostentatious military parade. This year, the covid-19 outbreak forced the Kremlin to postpone the parade. The festivities have ended up being limited to a military flyover and traditional fireworks display.It turns out that the present isn\u2019t quite as easy to control as the past. For years, Putin has been relying on the glories of history to try to galvanize the masses and distract them from current social problems \u2014 above all, the declining economy, sagging living standards and the paralysis of the political system. For the current regime, the victory over Nazism is a cornerstone of its national ideology and legitimacy. And as official policy becomes increasingly strident in its defense of the past, so, too, does its defense of the man most closely identified with the greatest triumphs of Soviet power: Joseph Stalin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe creeping Stalinization of consciousness has been underway for years. According to the Levada Analytical Center, an independent pollster, the number of Russians expressing their \u201crespect\u201d for Stalin increased from 29 percent in 2018 to 41 percent in 2019. Stalin\u2019s personal approval rating in his role in Russian history has also been growing steadily, reaching 70 percent last year. (Only 19 percent of those surveyed gave the dictator a negative assessment.) Forty-six percent of respondents in the same survey agreed that the successes achieved in the Soviet era justify the human sacrifices made during Stalinism. The opposite view was held by 45 percent \u2014 affirming that many Russians still hold starkly divergent views on the past.Stalin \u2014 as an imaginary rather than actual historical figure, the embodiment of an idea of order and justice \u2014 is at the core of Russian perceptions of the glorious past. The Kremlin has done nothing to halt the creeping rehabilitation of Stalin; in fact, it is happy to encourage the cliches of Soviet success wherever it can.Putin\u2019s historical rhetoric increasingly echoes Stalin\u2019s. When Stalin sent troops off to the front lines against the Nazi invaders on Nov. 7, 1941, he explicitly invoked Great Russian patriotism rather than Marxism-Leninism; Putin now uses the same language. The Kremlin has given new life to Soviet historical symbols. When listing the country\u2019s accomplishments, the average Russian will remember only victory in World War II, Yuri Gagarin\u2019s status as the first man in space, the country\u2019s leading role in space exploration and, in a pinch, the \u201creturn\u201d of Crimea to the Russian Federation. Small wonder that the average Russian is inclined to share Putin\u2019s view of the Soviet collapse as \u201ca major geopolitical disaster of the [twentieth] century.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe state has not yet gone so far as to justify Stalin openly and officially. But the growing embrace of the Soviet dictator\u2019s logic and actions has had a palpable effect on Russian policy. Official versions of historical events have changed in recent years to suit the Kremlin\u2019s current agenda.The secret protocol to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to carve up parts of eastern Europe into \u201careas of influence,\u201d was officially condemned under Mikhail Gorbachev (after decades of denial that it ever existed). Now the same agreement is presented by senior Russian officials as a victory for Soviet diplomacy that made it possible to postpone Russia\u2019s entry into the war (until 1941) and to create buffer zones in the Stalin-annexed territories of the Baltic states, western Ukraine, western Belarus and Bessarabia. It\u2019s symptomatic that Russian propaganda resorted to the same rhetoric during the 2014 annexation of Crimea as was used during the \u201cliberation\u201d of Ukrainian and Belarusian lands: Both Stalin\u2019s USSR and Putin\u2019s Russia \u201ccame to help their brethren.\u201dThe foundation of the current Kremlin ideology is a defensive narrative: that we have always been attacked and forced to defend ourselves. Another line of defense is history. The regime seeks to protect history from \u201cfalsifications,\u201d a word often applied to professional analysis of an issue and the debunking of myths.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kremlin excels at issuing moral judgments and monopolizing historical discourse, and no one else has the right to discuss any World War II-related events. The Siege of Leningrad is the biggest taboo. When writer Yelena Chizhova, herself the daughter of survivors of the siege, argued that the siege and starvation of the city resulted from Stalin\u2019s hatred for Leningraders, the regime unleashed a propaganda campaign against her. Members of parliament joined in, and prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into her comments.A leader who can only offer the country its past as the future will unwittingly drive himself into a trap, taking all Russians with him. If Stalin is both our past and future, what development of the country can we hope for? In preventing the nation from having a serious conversation about its troubled past, the Kremlin makes it harder to find a way forward. And this is a more serious obstacle to Russia\u2019s development than all of its current economic hardships.Read more:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVladimir Kara-Murza: Vladimir Putin has a popularity problem \u2014 and the Kremlin knows itMichael Carpenter: Putin has just made two huge mistakes \u2014 and his timing couldn\u2019t be worseThe Post\u2019s View: Putin is brazenly trying to make himself president for lifeVladimir Kara-Murza: Vladimir Putin and his minions continue to whitewash the Stalinist pastMarc A. Thiessen: The New York Times keeps whitewashing communism\u2019s crimes The Kremlin is increasingly seeking legitimacy in the Soviet past. Opinion: Facing a dim present, Putin turns back to glorious Stalin",
        "author": "Andrei Kolesnikov"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The Glasgow climate summit has already achieved success. But time is running short. (WP: Global Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1504",
        "date": "2021-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/03/glasgow-summit-climate-change-john-kerry/",
        "text": "John F. Kerry is the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate. He was secretary of state from 2013 to 2017.The world has entered the decisive decade for confronting the climate crisis. This week\u2019s global climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, has already helped summon more ambition to face this emergency than the world has ever seen. In that regard, the summit has already achieved success. We can still avoid a catastrophe, but time is running short. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightOn the plus side, countries representing almost 65 percent of global gross domestic product have stepped up to meet the goal of holding the rise in warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times \u2014 what science tells us will prevent the most devastating impacts from warming. Those countries include the 27 that make up the European Union, Britain, Canada, South Korea, Japan and South Africa.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndia aims to build 450 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030 and the United States has agreed to partner with them in that effort. Major oil producers, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, are announcing stronger steps and zero emissions goals. And more than 100 nations representing 70 percent of the global economy have joined the pledge we initiated with the European Union to significantly reduce emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. Reducing methane emissions is the single fastest option we have to slow warming.For its part, the United States rejoined the Paris climate agreement on President Biden\u2019s first day in office. This spring, the president went even further, pledging to reduce our emissions in line with the 1.5 degree limit, and putting the United States on pace to meet the net-zero emissions deadline.To get there, he laid out the most ambitious climate agenda in our history. It plans for a carbon-free power system by 2035 and quadruples funding for clean-technology research, development and demonstration. It invests in our forests and fragile ecosystems, protecting our natural treasures while ensuring every community is ready to meet the climate challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFifty years ago, a moonshot defined the space race. Today, the Biden administration\u2019s energy earth shots will marshal innovation and investment in the next generation of technologies to produce a clean-energy revolution.But while we have made progress in averting runaway warming, more needs to be done. A sizable gap remains in cutting global carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030, which is critical to put the world on a realistic path to reach the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 and avoid calamity.Too many countries are still not doing enough. Unfortunately, no country or region can overcome the climate crisis alone. We have seen remarkable progress in just a matter of months, but we must all accelerate our efforts.Story continues below advertisementThe massive technological transformations we need to save lives, improve health and protect our waters, land and air also present the greatest economic opportunity since the Industrial Revolution. The private sector is forging ahead. Last year, wind and solar accounted for 90 percent of new electricity capacity in the world, and are now more often than not the cheapest power sources available. The world\u2019s highest-valued car company only makes electric vehicles and many of its competitors are racing to keep up. Even steel and cement manufacturers are following suit. Investors bet half a trillion dollars on the clean energy transition. Several of the largest U.S. banks will commit more than $4 trillion to this new economy over the next decade. A new generation of jobs awaits the countries that meet global demand for clean technologies.AdvertisementAfter Glasgow, we all must remain committed to the ambitious goals and concrete actions required during this decisive decade. Countries must revisit their plans to ensure that they align with the global 1.5 degree goal. The private sector must redouble its efforts to reinvent our global economy.And every single one of us needs to do our part. Shop climate consciously. Ensure your employer invests in sustainability. Talk to your friends and neighbors about this issue, and support politicians who will address this crisis head on. This is the fight of our lives, and all of it matters. We can still avoid a catastrophe, but more countries must step up. Opinion: The Glasgow climate summit has already achieved success. But time is running short.",
        "author": "John F. Kerry"
    },
    {
        "title": "12 things to do in the D.C. area the weekend of Nov. 3-5 (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1505",
        "date": "2017-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/going-out-guide/wp/2017/11/02/12-things-to-do-in-the-d-c-area-the-weekend-of-nov-3-5/",
        "text": "Friday, Nov. 3Chinese Menu Comedy Invitational at the DC Arts Center:\u00a0The Chinese Menu Comedy Invitational is a festival for serious fans of improvisational comedy: Over the course of two nights, improv teams and solo performers from as far afield as Boston, New York City and Los Angeles take the stage for five shows, including a special appearance by Alex Berg of L.A.\u2019s Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Through\u00a0Saturday. Performance times vary. $10-$15. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightReal to Reel Contest at Miracle Theatre: Story District and DC Shorts team up to present a contest pairing live storytelling and filmmaking. Area storytellers share a narrative arc \u2014 complete with characters, drama and tension \u2014 that filmmakers must re-create in a film shot in five days after hearing the stories for the first time. Storytellers present their stories Friday, and films will be screened in the same place Nov. 10.\u00a07 p.m. $20 per event; $30 for both.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement'Tamayo: The New York Years' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum: Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) had strong ties to his homeland and to the American art world. This retrospective of his colorful paintings explores his relationship with the art scene in New York, where he spent many years during his career. The works include urban-themed pieces such as 1937\u2019s \u201cNew York Seen From the Terrace.\u201d Through March 18. Free.Korean Film Festival at the\u00a0Freer and Sackler galleries: The Korean Film Festival returns to the Freer and Sackler galleries' Meyer Auditorium, with a screening of \u201cOkja,\u201d Bong Joon-ho's 2017 film about genetically modified super pigs, followed by a video Q&A with the director. The evening also includes a K-Pop dance party, curator-led tours of the galleries, free samples of Korean cuisine and a cash bar. 5:30 to 9 p.m. Free.Saturday, Nov. 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCollege Park Blues Festival at the University of Maryland's Ritchie Coliseum:\u00a0Lady D & the Rogue Johnsen Trio took first place in the D.C. Blues Society\u2019s recent Battle of the Bands, while Patty Reese and Dave Chappell were named the best duo. Both earned spots at the annual International Blues Challenge in Memphis next year. The only downside? They have to pay their own way. To help out, the D.C. Blues Society is turning the 10th annual College Park Blues Festival into a \u201cMemphis or Bust!\u201d fundraiser with performances by both winners, the District\u2019s Bad Influence Band and Colorado\u2019s Lionel Young Band, which won the International Blues Challenge in 2011. The event also features vendors and a craft beer garden. 6 to 11 p.m. Free.Novemberfest at Rustico:\u00a0Think of Novemberfest as a hyperlocal and seasonal version of its sister Snallygaster festival: If there are Virginia breweries you\u2019ve heard about but haven\u2019t been able to try \u2014 say, the Veil, Aslin, Reason or Pen Druid \u2014 then this is your chance to sample them. About 30 producers are bringing at least 80 varieties of beer and cider, from hazy IPAs and wet-hop ales to comforting, fall-friendly stouts and brown ales. Noon to 5 p.m.\u00a0$10 at the door. Drink tickets cost $1 inside. Advance passes are $25, which includes 20 food and drink tickets.Christmas markets at the embassies of the Czech Republic and Slovakia: How convenient that the Czech Christmas Market and the Slovak Christmas Market\u00a0fall on the same day. The two embassies, located a mile apart in Van Ness, will have vendors selling glass ornaments, textiles, crystals, jewelry and wine, as well as children singing traditional carols.\u00a0Each also promises holiday cookies and mulled wine, though only the Czech Republic promises a nativity scene with live animals. Czech Market: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Slovakian Market: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement'A Concert for Tomorrow's Ancestors' at the National Museum of the American Indian: This concert combines celebrations of Native American Heritage Month and\u00a0Dia de los Muertos,\u00a0with traditional Mexican folk music by the Sones de M\u00e9xico Ensemble. 3 p.m. Free.Found in Space at the National Air and Space Museum: The latest after-hours museum event from Brightest Young Things takes over the National Air and Space Museum, providing a chance for you to\u00a0see historic planes and spacecraft without having to elbow groups of schoolchildren out of the way. In addition to DJs and an open bar, the evening includes TED-style talks with actual rocket scientists and astrobiologists, a paper airplane contest, planetarium shows, astronaut ice cream tastings, face painting and other spacey fun.\u00a08:30 p.m. to midnight. $50-$55.Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at DC9: In her music, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith strives to create a magical and peaceful world, populating sonic forests with the organic and the synthetic as she augments her synthesizer symphonies with her ethereal voice and birdlike woodwinds. Smith\u2019s new album explores the birth-to-death life cycle, and builds her most fantastical world yet \u2014 from within. 6:30 p.m. $12-$15.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSunday, Nov. 5Words, Beats and Life Festival at the Kennedy Center: Local\u00a0nonprofit organization Words, Beats and Life sponsors this celebration of hip-hop culture. The day starts with a three-on-three break dancing competition featuring B-boy and B-girl teams from across the country, with the finalists going head-to-head on the Millennium Stage at 6 p.m. Throughout the day, 30 local artists will create graffiti-inspired works of art while DJ Vico Vibez spins music to get their creative juices flowing. Noon to 7 p.m. Free.Imagine Dragons at Capital One Arena: Imagine Dragons made a splash with their breakout single, 2012\u2019s \u201cRadioactive,\u201d which was nominated for record of the year and won best rock performance at the Grammys. Their latest release, \u201cEvolve,\u201d featuring the track \u201cThunder,\u201d debuted at No. 1 on Billboard\u2019s rock and alternative charts over the summer. 7:30 p.m. $86-$459.\u2014 Fritz Hahn, Macy Freeman, Chris Kelly, Winyan Soo Hoo and Savannah StephensRead more:The Hotlist: The best things to see, eat, drink and do in NovemberMeet the new \u2018Mean Girls,\u2019 bound for Broadway in Tina Fey\u2019s musical adaptationA\u00a0new cafe in Adams Morgan wants to make you feel like you\u2019re in Italy Catch award-winning blues performers at the College Park Blues Festival on Saturday. 12 things to do in the D.C. area the weekend of Nov. 3-5",
        "author": "Going Out Guide staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1506",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-coolest-ways-to-celebrate-the-apollo-11-anniversary-around-dc-this-week/2019/07/15/f2a8fa14-a1b9-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe choose to go to the moon,\u201d President John F. Kennedy declared in Houston in September 1962. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat audacious goal was achieved less than seven years later, and as we approach the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking their first steps on the Sea of Tranquility, the Washington area is abuzz with commemorations. Expect model rockets flying through the air, priceless artifacts on display and historic footage projected on the Washington Monument.Related coverage: 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11The National Air and Space Museum is keeper of some of America\u2019s most important space artifacts \u2014 rockets, spacesuits, a touchable moon rock, the space shuttle Discovery \u2014 which makes it a natural focus for the area\u2019s biggest celebrations. There are numerous free events and special exhibits at the main museum and the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, but there are plenty of other happenings around the region, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNever mind that no human has set foot on the moon since 1972, as return missions have been endorsed and then scrapped. The golden anniversary of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins\u2019s voyage is a chance to celebrate previously unthinkable scientific achievement, America\u2019s victory in the space race, and maybe get a new generation of astronauts and scientists hooked on planetary exploration.How did NASA put a man on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.Neil Armstrong's spacesuit returns to the Air and Space MuseumIn July 2015, the Smithsonian launched an ambitious Kickstarter campaign that hoped to raise $500,000 to preserve and display the spacesuit Armstrong wore when he took his first steps on the moon. It hit its goal in five days and ultimately raised more than $700,000. The restored suit, which hasn\u2019t been on display since 2006, will eventually be a centerpiece of the museum\u2019s Destination Moon exhibit, currently scheduled to open in 2022. But for now, the suit, which is still covered with lunar dust, will be shown at the main museum in a \u201cstate-of-the-art display case\u201d in the Wright Brothers exhibit, near a piece of the original Wright Brothers Flyer that Armstrong carried on the Apollo mission. On display during regular museum hours. Independence Avenue at Sixth Street SW. Free.Neil Armstrong spacesuit at Nationals ParkAs part of the restoration of Armstrong\u2019s Apollo 11 spacesuit, Smithsonian researchers made a 3-D scan that has since been turned into a series of life-size statues on display at Major League Baseball stadiums throughout the country \u2014 including Nationals Park. Located on the main concourse near the home plate gate, the statue has interactive portions that, when scanned with a smartphone camera, show videos about Apollo 11.On view during home games through the end of the season. 1500 South Capitol St. SE. Free with admission to the game. The Nationals\u2019 next home game is July 22.Saturn V rocket and 'Go for the Moon' on the Washington MonumentFor five nights, the Washington Monument will be turned into the tallest projection screen in town. A life-size, 363-foot image of a Saturn V rocket will be projected onto the 555-foot monument July 16-18 between 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. The Saturn V, the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, carried most of the Apollo missions into space. On July 19 and 20, the projections will change to \u201cApollo 50: Go for the Moon,\u201d a 17-minute program shown on the monument and a series of screens on the Mall. (A public viewing area with the best sightlines will be in front of the Smithsonian Castle, and the projections will begin at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m.) \nJuly 16-18, 9:30 to 11:30 p.m.; July 19-20, 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. Free.Apollo 11 Film Festival at the National Archives\nThe National Archives is celebrating the anniversary with discussions, documents and documentaries. A display in the building\u2019s East Rotunda features official government records and plans for the Apollo 11 mission, while the William G. McGowan Theater hosts a series of events, including a screening of the recent \u201cApollo 11\u201d documentary followed by a roundtable with director Todd Douglas Miller and NASA\u2019s chief historian (July 18 at 7 p.m.); the original 1970 NASA documentary \u201cMoonwalk One,\u201d which goes into detail about the moon walk and mission control (July 19 at 3 p.m.) and the critically acclaimed 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic \u201cFirst Man\u201d (July 20 at 2 p.m.). All events are free, but reservations are recommended. July 17-20. Times vary. Free.Review: The Imax documentary \u2018Apollo 11\u2019 is a virtual round-trip ticket to the moonApollo 50 Festival outside the Air and Space Museum\u201cGo for the Moon\u201d may be past some kids\u2019 bedtimes, but this festival outside the Air and Space Museum is decidedly more family-friendly, with hands-on activities starring the cast of PBS\u2019 animated \u201cReady Jet Go\u201d and Lego-building projects, and booths covering an array of topics, such as Mars rovers and everyday technology that was originally developed for NASA. July 18-19, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; July 20, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free.Discover the Moon Day at the Air and Space MuseumThe best day of the year for selenophiles covers a wide spectrum of moon-related topics. Meet curators who will discuss Neil Armstrong\u2019s spacesuit and meteorites from the moon; see the lunar surface in 3-D, recent images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or a planetarium show about lunar expeditions; walk in Armstrong and Aldrin\u2019s footsteps and learn about their experiments; or try piloting a mini-robot explorer. There\u2019s also a story time for the youngest visitors. July 19, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.Model-rocket contest at Goddard Space Flight CenterOnly hardcore space fans probably realize that NASA\u2019s oldest space flight facility isn\u2019t at Cape Canaveral or in Houston: It\u2019s the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, which continues to operate the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Hubble Space Telescope, among other key duties. Its visitors center covers current missions but also includes an outdoor \u201cRocket Garden\u201d with full-size rockets to see. The star, especially now, is \u201ca genuine nonflying \u2018boilerplate\u2019 mock-up\u201d of the Apollo crew capsule, which was used for training. There\u2019s also a moon rock brought back by Apollo 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo celebrate the anniversary, Goddard and the National Association of Rocketry are hosting a model-rocket contest that includes a narrated launch of models of historic NASA spacecraft and a contest to see which rocketeers can land a model rocket closest to a site on \u201cthe moon,\u201d with prizes for the top adult and youth participants.July 20, noon to 4 p.m. (registration begins on-site at noon). 9432 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt. Free.'NSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50' and 'NSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary' at the Kennedy Center\nMembers of the National Symphony Orchestra are performing two separate concerts on July 20 to honor Apollo 11. The first, \u201cNSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50,\u201d is a program honoring \u201cthe past, present, and future of space exploration.\u201d Later that night in the Concert Hall, \u201cNSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary\u201d marries music and video, including performances by Pharrell Williams and Kacey Musgraves, an appearance by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, a world premiere by composer Michael Giacchino, and a never-before-seen 1997 video of David Bowie performing \u201cSpace Oddity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJuly 20. 2700 F St. NW. NSO Project: 6 p.m. Free. NSO Pops: 9 p.m. $129-$149. \"The Eagle Has Landed\" at the Air and Space MuseumAt 10:56 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. The exact moment of the golden anniversary will be marked at the Air and Space Museum, which is staying open until 2 a.m. for the occasion. Highlights include space trivia competitions, stargazing, a spacesuit fashion show, scavenger hunts through the museum, and a performance by Quindar, an electronic music duo that remixes NASA\u2019s audio archive. The museum\u2019s theater will show a variety of films throughout the night, including documentaries and the short comedy \u201cTo Plant a Flag,\u201d capped with an after-midnight screening of \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d July 20, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Films require free or purchased tickets.'By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs' and 'Moons and Celestial Bodies' film series at the National Gallery of ArtMost Apollo commemorations focus on the underlying science of the missions: massive rocket engines that get payloads into space or spacesuits that can withstand a wide spectrum of lunar conditions. The National Gallery of Art, though, wants visitors to use the other side of their brains, seeing Charles Le Morvan\u2019s 1914 photogravures as not just maps of the Moon, but art. The exhibition includes stereoscope prints of the full moon taken by 19th-century photographers and more familiar images of the surface from the Apollo 11 astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis weekend, the \u201cMoons and Celestial Bodies\u201d film series shows how space travel has been portrayed on-screen, from the silent 1902 classic \u201cA Trip to the Moon\u201d (July 20 at 3 p.m.) to 1983\u2019s \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d (July 20 at 11 a.m.) by way of the 1976 cult favorite \u201cThe Man Who Fell to Earth,\u201d starring David Bowie (July 21 at 4:30 p.m.).Exhibition: Through Jan. 5. Films: July 20-21, times vary. Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Free.'One Giant Leap' at Maryland Science CenterThe Maryland Science Center in Baltimore has a fixation on space, thanks to its popular planetarium and a permanent interactive exhibition space titled \u201cSpaceLink,\u201d which lets kids perform experiments to discover the composition of a comet, or, at special events, meet astronauts who lived on the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor the anniversary, the Science Center staff created a special planetarium show, \u201cOne Small Step,\u201d that documents the round-trip journey to the moon, while hands-on activities include crafting \u201cDIY astronaut tools.\u201d A special Saturday program also includes lectures, building a lunar lander and a chance to see a moon rock.\u201cOne Small Step\u201d is shown twice daily through July 31. 601 Light St., Baltimore. $19.95-$25.95; \u201cSpaceLink\u201d and the planetarium shows are included in admission price.Space Window at Washington National CathedralThere are pieces of the moon scattered all over the world, on display in museums in Berlin, Sydney, Montreal and Annapolis (at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum). There\u2019s a piece you can touch at the National Air and Space Museum. But the most beautiful and unexpected place to encounter the moon is at Washington National Cathedral.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1974, the Apollo 11 crew presented the cathedral with a seven gram, 3.6 billion-year-old sliver of basalt collected on the first moon walk and preserved inside a nitrogen-filled container. The rock sits on the south side of the nave at the heart of a stained glass design covering three lancet windows, depicting a vast cosmos of colorful swirls and dark celestial globes.Viewable during the cathedral\u2019s daily operating hours. 3101 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $8-$12, free on Sundays. A late-night party at the Air & Space Museum, a rocket projected on the Washington Monument and more. The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week",
        "author": "Fritz Hahn"
    },
    {
        "title": "The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1507",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-coolest-ways-to-celebrate-the-apollo-11-anniversary-around-dc-this-week/2019/07/15/f2a8fa14-a1b9-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe choose to go to the moon,\u201d President John F. Kennedy declared in Houston in September 1962. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat audacious goal was achieved less than seven years later, and as we approach the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking their first steps on the Sea of Tranquility, the Washington area is abuzz with commemorations. Expect model rockets flying through the air, priceless artifacts on display and historic footage projected on the Washington Monument.Related coverage: 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11The National Air and Space Museum is keeper of some of America\u2019s most important space artifacts \u2014 rockets, spacesuits, a touchable moon rock, the space shuttle Discovery \u2014 which makes it a natural focus for the area\u2019s biggest celebrations. There are numerous free events and special exhibits at the main museum and the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, but there are plenty of other happenings around the region, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNever mind that no human has set foot on the moon since 1972, as return missions have been endorsed and then scrapped. The golden anniversary of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins\u2019s voyage is a chance to celebrate previously unthinkable scientific achievement, America\u2019s victory in the space race, and maybe get a new generation of astronauts and scientists hooked on planetary exploration.How did NASA put a man on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.Neil Armstrong's spacesuit returns to the Air and Space MuseumIn July 2015, the Smithsonian launched an ambitious Kickstarter campaign that hoped to raise $500,000 to preserve and display the spacesuit Armstrong wore when he took his first steps on the moon. It hit its goal in five days and ultimately raised more than $700,000. The restored suit, which hasn\u2019t been on display since 2006, will eventually be a centerpiece of the museum\u2019s Destination Moon exhibit, currently scheduled to open in 2022. But for now, the suit, which is still covered with lunar dust, will be shown at the main museum in a \u201cstate-of-the-art display case\u201d in the Wright Brothers exhibit, near a piece of the original Wright Brothers Flyer that Armstrong carried on the Apollo mission. On display during regular museum hours. Independence Avenue at Sixth Street SW. Free.Neil Armstrong spacesuit at Nationals ParkAs part of the restoration of Armstrong\u2019s Apollo 11 spacesuit, Smithsonian researchers made a 3-D scan that has since been turned into a series of life-size statues on display at Major League Baseball stadiums throughout the country \u2014 including Nationals Park. Located on the main concourse near the home plate gate, the statue has interactive portions that, when scanned with a smartphone camera, show videos about Apollo 11.On view during home games through the end of the season. 1500 South Capitol St. SE. Free with admission to the game. The Nationals\u2019 next home game is July 22.Saturn V rocket and 'Go for the Moon' on the Washington MonumentFor five nights, the Washington Monument will be turned into the tallest projection screen in town. A life-size, 363-foot image of a Saturn V rocket will be projected onto the 555-foot monument July 16-18 between 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. The Saturn V, the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, carried most of the Apollo missions into space. On July 19 and 20, the projections will change to \u201cApollo 50: Go for the Moon,\u201d a 17-minute program shown on the monument and a series of screens on the Mall. (A public viewing area with the best sightlines will be in front of the Smithsonian Castle, and the projections will begin at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m.) \nJuly 16-18, 9:30 to 11:30 p.m.; July 19-20, 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. Free.Apollo 11 Film Festival at the National Archives\nThe National Archives is celebrating the anniversary with discussions, documents and documentaries. A display in the building\u2019s East Rotunda features official government records and plans for the Apollo 11 mission, while the William G. McGowan Theater hosts a series of events, including a screening of the recent \u201cApollo 11\u201d documentary followed by a roundtable with director Todd Douglas Miller and NASA\u2019s chief historian (July 18 at 7 p.m.); the original 1970 NASA documentary \u201cMoonwalk One,\u201d which goes into detail about the moon walk and mission control (July 19 at 3 p.m.) and the critically acclaimed 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic \u201cFirst Man\u201d (July 20 at 2 p.m.). All events are free, but reservations are recommended. July 17-20. Times vary. Free.Review: The Imax documentary \u2018Apollo 11\u2019 is a virtual round-trip ticket to the moonApollo 50 Festival outside the Air and Space Museum\u201cGo for the Moon\u201d may be past some kids\u2019 bedtimes, but this festival outside the Air and Space Museum is decidedly more family-friendly, with hands-on activities starring the cast of PBS\u2019 animated \u201cReady Jet Go\u201d and Lego-building projects, and booths covering an array of topics, such as Mars rovers and everyday technology that was originally developed for NASA. July 18-19, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; July 20, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free.Discover the Moon Day at the Air and Space MuseumThe best day of the year for selenophiles covers a wide spectrum of moon-related topics. Meet curators who will discuss Neil Armstrong\u2019s spacesuit and meteorites from the moon; see the lunar surface in 3-D, recent images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or a planetarium show about lunar expeditions; walk in Armstrong and Aldrin\u2019s footsteps and learn about their experiments; or try piloting a mini-robot explorer. There\u2019s also a story time for the youngest visitors. July 19, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.Model-rocket contest at Goddard Space Flight CenterOnly hardcore space fans probably realize that NASA\u2019s oldest space flight facility isn\u2019t at Cape Canaveral or in Houston: It\u2019s the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, which continues to operate the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Hubble Space Telescope, among other key duties. Its visitors center covers current missions but also includes an outdoor \u201cRocket Garden\u201d with full-size rockets to see. The star, especially now, is \u201ca genuine nonflying \u2018boilerplate\u2019 mock-up\u201d of the Apollo crew capsule, which was used for training. There\u2019s also a moon rock brought back by Apollo 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo celebrate the anniversary, Goddard and the National Association of Rocketry are hosting a model-rocket contest that includes a narrated launch of models of historic NASA spacecraft and a contest to see which rocketeers can land a model rocket closest to a site on \u201cthe moon,\u201d with prizes for the top adult and youth participants.July 20, noon to 4 p.m. (registration begins on-site at noon). 9432 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt. Free.'NSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50' and 'NSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary' at the Kennedy Center\nMembers of the National Symphony Orchestra are performing two separate concerts on July 20 to honor Apollo 11. The first, \u201cNSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50,\u201d is a program honoring \u201cthe past, present, and future of space exploration.\u201d Later that night in the Concert Hall, \u201cNSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary\u201d marries music and video, including performances by Pharrell Williams and Kacey Musgraves, an appearance by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, a world premiere by composer Michael Giacchino, and a never-before-seen 1997 video of David Bowie performing \u201cSpace Oddity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJuly 20. 2700 F St. NW. NSO Project: 6 p.m. Free. NSO Pops: 9 p.m. $129-$149. \"The Eagle Has Landed\" at the Air and Space MuseumAt 10:56 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. The exact moment of the golden anniversary will be marked at the Air and Space Museum, which is staying open until 2 a.m. for the occasion. Highlights include space trivia competitions, stargazing, a spacesuit fashion show, scavenger hunts through the museum, and a performance by Quindar, an electronic music duo that remixes NASA\u2019s audio archive. The museum\u2019s theater will show a variety of films throughout the night, including documentaries and the short comedy \u201cTo Plant a Flag,\u201d capped with an after-midnight screening of \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d July 20, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Films require free or purchased tickets.'By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs' and 'Moons and Celestial Bodies' film series at the National Gallery of ArtMost Apollo commemorations focus on the underlying science of the missions: massive rocket engines that get payloads into space or spacesuits that can withstand a wide spectrum of lunar conditions. The National Gallery of Art, though, wants visitors to use the other side of their brains, seeing Charles Le Morvan\u2019s 1914 photogravures as not just maps of the Moon, but art. The exhibition includes stereoscope prints of the full moon taken by 19th-century photographers and more familiar images of the surface from the Apollo 11 astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis weekend, the \u201cMoons and Celestial Bodies\u201d film series shows how space travel has been portrayed on-screen, from the silent 1902 classic \u201cA Trip to the Moon\u201d (July 20 at 3 p.m.) to 1983\u2019s \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d (July 20 at 11 a.m.) by way of the 1976 cult favorite \u201cThe Man Who Fell to Earth,\u201d starring David Bowie (July 21 at 4:30 p.m.).Exhibition: Through Jan. 5. Films: July 20-21, times vary. Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Free.'One Giant Leap' at Maryland Science CenterThe Maryland Science Center in Baltimore has a fixation on space, thanks to its popular planetarium and a permanent interactive exhibition space titled \u201cSpaceLink,\u201d which lets kids perform experiments to discover the composition of a comet, or, at special events, meet astronauts who lived on the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor the anniversary, the Science Center staff created a special planetarium show, \u201cOne Small Step,\u201d that documents the round-trip journey to the moon, while hands-on activities include crafting \u201cDIY astronaut tools.\u201d A special Saturday program also includes lectures, building a lunar lander and a chance to see a moon rock.\u201cOne Small Step\u201d is shown twice daily through July 31. 601 Light St., Baltimore. $19.95-$25.95; \u201cSpaceLink\u201d and the planetarium shows are included in admission price.Space Window at Washington National CathedralThere are pieces of the moon scattered all over the world, on display in museums in Berlin, Sydney, Montreal and Annapolis (at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum). There\u2019s a piece you can touch at the National Air and Space Museum. But the most beautiful and unexpected place to encounter the moon is at Washington National Cathedral.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1974, the Apollo 11 crew presented the cathedral with a seven gram, 3.6 billion-year-old sliver of basalt collected on the first moon walk and preserved inside a nitrogen-filled container. The rock sits on the south side of the nave at the heart of a stained glass design covering three lancet windows, depicting a vast cosmos of colorful swirls and dark celestial globes.Viewable during the cathedral\u2019s daily operating hours. 3101 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $8-$12, free on Sundays. A late-night party at the Air & Space Museum, a rocket projected on the Washington Monument and more. The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week",
        "author": "Fritz Hahn"
    },
    {
        "title": "The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1508",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-coolest-ways-to-celebrate-the-apollo-11-anniversary-around-dc-this-week/2019/07/15/f2a8fa14-a1b9-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe choose to go to the moon,\u201d President John F. Kennedy declared in Houston in September 1962. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat audacious goal was achieved less than seven years later, and as we approach the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking their first steps on the Sea of Tranquility, the Washington area is abuzz with commemorations. Expect model rockets flying through the air, priceless artifacts on display and historic footage projected on the Washington Monument.Related coverage: 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11The National Air and Space Museum is keeper of some of America\u2019s most important space artifacts \u2014 rockets, spacesuits, a touchable moon rock, the space shuttle Discovery \u2014 which makes it a natural focus for the area\u2019s biggest celebrations. There are numerous free events and special exhibits at the main museum and the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, but there are plenty of other happenings around the region, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNever mind that no human has set foot on the moon since 1972, as return missions have been endorsed and then scrapped. The golden anniversary of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins\u2019s voyage is a chance to celebrate previously unthinkable scientific achievement, America\u2019s victory in the space race, and maybe get a new generation of astronauts and scientists hooked on planetary exploration.How did NASA put a man on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.Neil Armstrong's spacesuit returns to the Air and Space MuseumIn July 2015, the Smithsonian launched an ambitious Kickstarter campaign that hoped to raise $500,000 to preserve and display the spacesuit Armstrong wore when he took his first steps on the moon. It hit its goal in five days and ultimately raised more than $700,000. The restored suit, which hasn\u2019t been on display since 2006, will eventually be a centerpiece of the museum\u2019s Destination Moon exhibit, currently scheduled to open in 2022. But for now, the suit, which is still covered with lunar dust, will be shown at the main museum in a \u201cstate-of-the-art display case\u201d in the Wright Brothers exhibit, near a piece of the original Wright Brothers Flyer that Armstrong carried on the Apollo mission. On display during regular museum hours. Independence Avenue at Sixth Street SW. Free.Neil Armstrong spacesuit at Nationals ParkAs part of the restoration of Armstrong\u2019s Apollo 11 spacesuit, Smithsonian researchers made a 3-D scan that has since been turned into a series of life-size statues on display at Major League Baseball stadiums throughout the country \u2014 including Nationals Park. Located on the main concourse near the home plate gate, the statue has interactive portions that, when scanned with a smartphone camera, show videos about Apollo 11.On view during home games through the end of the season. 1500 South Capitol St. SE. Free with admission to the game. The Nationals\u2019 next home game is July 22.Saturn V rocket and 'Go for the Moon' on the Washington MonumentFor five nights, the Washington Monument will be turned into the tallest projection screen in town. A life-size, 363-foot image of a Saturn V rocket will be projected onto the 555-foot monument July 16-18 between 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. The Saturn V, the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, carried most of the Apollo missions into space. On July 19 and 20, the projections will change to \u201cApollo 50: Go for the Moon,\u201d a 17-minute program shown on the monument and a series of screens on the Mall. (A public viewing area with the best sightlines will be in front of the Smithsonian Castle, and the projections will begin at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m.) \nJuly 16-18, 9:30 to 11:30 p.m.; July 19-20, 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. Free.Apollo 11 Film Festival at the National Archives\nThe National Archives is celebrating the anniversary with discussions, documents and documentaries. A display in the building\u2019s East Rotunda features official government records and plans for the Apollo 11 mission, while the William G. McGowan Theater hosts a series of events, including a screening of the recent \u201cApollo 11\u201d documentary followed by a roundtable with director Todd Douglas Miller and NASA\u2019s chief historian (July 18 at 7 p.m.); the original 1970 NASA documentary \u201cMoonwalk One,\u201d which goes into detail about the moon walk and mission control (July 19 at 3 p.m.) and the critically acclaimed 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic \u201cFirst Man\u201d (July 20 at 2 p.m.). All events are free, but reservations are recommended. July 17-20. Times vary. Free.Review: The Imax documentary \u2018Apollo 11\u2019 is a virtual round-trip ticket to the moonApollo 50 Festival outside the Air and Space Museum\u201cGo for the Moon\u201d may be past some kids\u2019 bedtimes, but this festival outside the Air and Space Museum is decidedly more family-friendly, with hands-on activities starring the cast of PBS\u2019 animated \u201cReady Jet Go\u201d and Lego-building projects, and booths covering an array of topics, such as Mars rovers and everyday technology that was originally developed for NASA. July 18-19, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; July 20, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free.Discover the Moon Day at the Air and Space MuseumThe best day of the year for selenophiles covers a wide spectrum of moon-related topics. Meet curators who will discuss Neil Armstrong\u2019s spacesuit and meteorites from the moon; see the lunar surface in 3-D, recent images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or a planetarium show about lunar expeditions; walk in Armstrong and Aldrin\u2019s footsteps and learn about their experiments; or try piloting a mini-robot explorer. There\u2019s also a story time for the youngest visitors. July 19, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.Model-rocket contest at Goddard Space Flight CenterOnly hardcore space fans probably realize that NASA\u2019s oldest space flight facility isn\u2019t at Cape Canaveral or in Houston: It\u2019s the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, which continues to operate the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Hubble Space Telescope, among other key duties. Its visitors center covers current missions but also includes an outdoor \u201cRocket Garden\u201d with full-size rockets to see. The star, especially now, is \u201ca genuine nonflying \u2018boilerplate\u2019 mock-up\u201d of the Apollo crew capsule, which was used for training. There\u2019s also a moon rock brought back by Apollo 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo celebrate the anniversary, Goddard and the National Association of Rocketry are hosting a model-rocket contest that includes a narrated launch of models of historic NASA spacecraft and a contest to see which rocketeers can land a model rocket closest to a site on \u201cthe moon,\u201d with prizes for the top adult and youth participants.July 20, noon to 4 p.m. (registration begins on-site at noon). 9432 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt. Free.'NSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50' and 'NSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary' at the Kennedy Center\nMembers of the National Symphony Orchestra are performing two separate concerts on July 20 to honor Apollo 11. The first, \u201cNSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50,\u201d is a program honoring \u201cthe past, present, and future of space exploration.\u201d Later that night in the Concert Hall, \u201cNSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary\u201d marries music and video, including performances by Pharrell Williams and Kacey Musgraves, an appearance by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, a world premiere by composer Michael Giacchino, and a never-before-seen 1997 video of David Bowie performing \u201cSpace Oddity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJuly 20. 2700 F St. NW. NSO Project: 6 p.m. Free. NSO Pops: 9 p.m. $129-$149. \"The Eagle Has Landed\" at the Air and Space MuseumAt 10:56 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. The exact moment of the golden anniversary will be marked at the Air and Space Museum, which is staying open until 2 a.m. for the occasion. Highlights include space trivia competitions, stargazing, a spacesuit fashion show, scavenger hunts through the museum, and a performance by Quindar, an electronic music duo that remixes NASA\u2019s audio archive. The museum\u2019s theater will show a variety of films throughout the night, including documentaries and the short comedy \u201cTo Plant a Flag,\u201d capped with an after-midnight screening of \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d July 20, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Films require free or purchased tickets.'By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs' and 'Moons and Celestial Bodies' film series at the National Gallery of ArtMost Apollo commemorations focus on the underlying science of the missions: massive rocket engines that get payloads into space or spacesuits that can withstand a wide spectrum of lunar conditions. The National Gallery of Art, though, wants visitors to use the other side of their brains, seeing Charles Le Morvan\u2019s 1914 photogravures as not just maps of the Moon, but art. The exhibition includes stereoscope prints of the full moon taken by 19th-century photographers and more familiar images of the surface from the Apollo 11 astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis weekend, the \u201cMoons and Celestial Bodies\u201d film series shows how space travel has been portrayed on-screen, from the silent 1902 classic \u201cA Trip to the Moon\u201d (July 20 at 3 p.m.) to 1983\u2019s \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d (July 20 at 11 a.m.) by way of the 1976 cult favorite \u201cThe Man Who Fell to Earth,\u201d starring David Bowie (July 21 at 4:30 p.m.).Exhibition: Through Jan. 5. Films: July 20-21, times vary. Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Free.'One Giant Leap' at Maryland Science CenterThe Maryland Science Center in Baltimore has a fixation on space, thanks to its popular planetarium and a permanent interactive exhibition space titled \u201cSpaceLink,\u201d which lets kids perform experiments to discover the composition of a comet, or, at special events, meet astronauts who lived on the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor the anniversary, the Science Center staff created a special planetarium show, \u201cOne Small Step,\u201d that documents the round-trip journey to the moon, while hands-on activities include crafting \u201cDIY astronaut tools.\u201d A special Saturday program also includes lectures, building a lunar lander and a chance to see a moon rock.\u201cOne Small Step\u201d is shown twice daily through July 31. 601 Light St., Baltimore. $19.95-$25.95; \u201cSpaceLink\u201d and the planetarium shows are included in admission price.Space Window at Washington National CathedralThere are pieces of the moon scattered all over the world, on display in museums in Berlin, Sydney, Montreal and Annapolis (at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum). There\u2019s a piece you can touch at the National Air and Space Museum. But the most beautiful and unexpected place to encounter the moon is at Washington National Cathedral.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1974, the Apollo 11 crew presented the cathedral with a seven gram, 3.6 billion-year-old sliver of basalt collected on the first moon walk and preserved inside a nitrogen-filled container. The rock sits on the south side of the nave at the heart of a stained glass design covering three lancet windows, depicting a vast cosmos of colorful swirls and dark celestial globes.Viewable during the cathedral\u2019s daily operating hours. 3101 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $8-$12, free on Sundays. A late-night party at the Air & Space Museum, a rocket projected on the Washington Monument and more. The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week",
        "author": "Fritz Hahn"
    },
    {
        "title": "The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1509",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-coolest-ways-to-celebrate-the-apollo-11-anniversary-around-dc-this-week/2019/07/15/f2a8fa14-a1b9-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe choose to go to the moon,\u201d President John F. Kennedy declared in Houston in September 1962. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat audacious goal was achieved less than seven years later, and as we approach the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking their first steps on the Sea of Tranquility, the Washington area is abuzz with commemorations. Expect model rockets flying through the air, priceless artifacts on display and historic footage projected on the Washington Monument.Related coverage: 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11The National Air and Space Museum is keeper of some of America\u2019s most important space artifacts \u2014 rockets, spacesuits, a touchable moon rock, the space shuttle Discovery \u2014 which makes it a natural focus for the area\u2019s biggest celebrations. There are numerous free events and special exhibits at the main museum and the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, but there are plenty of other happenings around the region, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNever mind that no human has set foot on the moon since 1972, as return missions have been endorsed and then scrapped. The golden anniversary of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins\u2019s voyage is a chance to celebrate previously unthinkable scientific achievement, America\u2019s victory in the space race, and maybe get a new generation of astronauts and scientists hooked on planetary exploration.How did NASA put a man on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.Neil Armstrong's spacesuit returns to the Air and Space MuseumIn July 2015, the Smithsonian launched an ambitious Kickstarter campaign that hoped to raise $500,000 to preserve and display the spacesuit Armstrong wore when he took his first steps on the moon. It hit its goal in five days and ultimately raised more than $700,000. The restored suit, which hasn\u2019t been on display since 2006, will eventually be a centerpiece of the museum\u2019s Destination Moon exhibit, currently scheduled to open in 2022. But for now, the suit, which is still covered with lunar dust, will be shown at the main museum in a \u201cstate-of-the-art display case\u201d in the Wright Brothers exhibit, near a piece of the original Wright Brothers Flyer that Armstrong carried on the Apollo mission. On display during regular museum hours. Independence Avenue at Sixth Street SW. Free.Neil Armstrong spacesuit at Nationals ParkAs part of the restoration of Armstrong\u2019s Apollo 11 spacesuit, Smithsonian researchers made a 3-D scan that has since been turned into a series of life-size statues on display at Major League Baseball stadiums throughout the country \u2014 including Nationals Park. Located on the main concourse near the home plate gate, the statue has interactive portions that, when scanned with a smartphone camera, show videos about Apollo 11.On view during home games through the end of the season. 1500 South Capitol St. SE. Free with admission to the game. The Nationals\u2019 next home game is July 22.Saturn V rocket and 'Go for the Moon' on the Washington MonumentFor five nights, the Washington Monument will be turned into the tallest projection screen in town. A life-size, 363-foot image of a Saturn V rocket will be projected onto the 555-foot monument July 16-18 between 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. The Saturn V, the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, carried most of the Apollo missions into space. On July 19 and 20, the projections will change to \u201cApollo 50: Go for the Moon,\u201d a 17-minute program shown on the monument and a series of screens on the Mall. (A public viewing area with the best sightlines will be in front of the Smithsonian Castle, and the projections will begin at 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m.) \nJuly 16-18, 9:30 to 11:30 p.m.; July 19-20, 9:30, 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. Free.Apollo 11 Film Festival at the National Archives\nThe National Archives is celebrating the anniversary with discussions, documents and documentaries. A display in the building\u2019s East Rotunda features official government records and plans for the Apollo 11 mission, while the William G. McGowan Theater hosts a series of events, including a screening of the recent \u201cApollo 11\u201d documentary followed by a roundtable with director Todd Douglas Miller and NASA\u2019s chief historian (July 18 at 7 p.m.); the original 1970 NASA documentary \u201cMoonwalk One,\u201d which goes into detail about the moon walk and mission control (July 19 at 3 p.m.) and the critically acclaimed 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic \u201cFirst Man\u201d (July 20 at 2 p.m.). All events are free, but reservations are recommended. July 17-20. Times vary. Free.Review: The Imax documentary \u2018Apollo 11\u2019 is a virtual round-trip ticket to the moonApollo 50 Festival outside the Air and Space Museum\u201cGo for the Moon\u201d may be past some kids\u2019 bedtimes, but this festival outside the Air and Space Museum is decidedly more family-friendly, with hands-on activities starring the cast of PBS\u2019 animated \u201cReady Jet Go\u201d and Lego-building projects, and booths covering an array of topics, such as Mars rovers and everyday technology that was originally developed for NASA. July 18-19, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; July 20, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Free.Discover the Moon Day at the Air and Space MuseumThe best day of the year for selenophiles covers a wide spectrum of moon-related topics. Meet curators who will discuss Neil Armstrong\u2019s spacesuit and meteorites from the moon; see the lunar surface in 3-D, recent images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or a planetarium show about lunar expeditions; walk in Armstrong and Aldrin\u2019s footsteps and learn about their experiments; or try piloting a mini-robot explorer. There\u2019s also a story time for the youngest visitors. July 19, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free.Model-rocket contest at Goddard Space Flight CenterOnly hardcore space fans probably realize that NASA\u2019s oldest space flight facility isn\u2019t at Cape Canaveral or in Houston: It\u2019s the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, which continues to operate the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Hubble Space Telescope, among other key duties. Its visitors center covers current missions but also includes an outdoor \u201cRocket Garden\u201d with full-size rockets to see. The star, especially now, is \u201ca genuine nonflying \u2018boilerplate\u2019 mock-up\u201d of the Apollo crew capsule, which was used for training. There\u2019s also a moon rock brought back by Apollo 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo celebrate the anniversary, Goddard and the National Association of Rocketry are hosting a model-rocket contest that includes a narrated launch of models of historic NASA spacecraft and a contest to see which rocketeers can land a model rocket closest to a site on \u201cthe moon,\u201d with prizes for the top adult and youth participants.July 20, noon to 4 p.m. (registration begins on-site at noon). 9432 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt. Free.'NSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50' and 'NSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary' at the Kennedy Center\nMembers of the National Symphony Orchestra are performing two separate concerts on July 20 to honor Apollo 11. The first, \u201cNSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50,\u201d is a program honoring \u201cthe past, present, and future of space exploration.\u201d Later that night in the Concert Hall, \u201cNSO Pops: Apollo 11: A 50th Anniversary\u201d marries music and video, including performances by Pharrell Williams and Kacey Musgraves, an appearance by Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, a world premiere by composer Michael Giacchino, and a never-before-seen 1997 video of David Bowie performing \u201cSpace Oddity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJuly 20. 2700 F St. NW. NSO Project: 6 p.m. Free. NSO Pops: 9 p.m. $129-$149. \"The Eagle Has Landed\" at the Air and Space MuseumAt 10:56 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. The exact moment of the golden anniversary will be marked at the Air and Space Museum, which is staying open until 2 a.m. for the occasion. Highlights include space trivia competitions, stargazing, a spacesuit fashion show, scavenger hunts through the museum, and a performance by Quindar, an electronic music duo that remixes NASA\u2019s audio archive. The museum\u2019s theater will show a variety of films throughout the night, including documentaries and the short comedy \u201cTo Plant a Flag,\u201d capped with an after-midnight screening of \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d July 20, 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Films require free or purchased tickets.'By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs' and 'Moons and Celestial Bodies' film series at the National Gallery of ArtMost Apollo commemorations focus on the underlying science of the missions: massive rocket engines that get payloads into space or spacesuits that can withstand a wide spectrum of lunar conditions. The National Gallery of Art, though, wants visitors to use the other side of their brains, seeing Charles Le Morvan\u2019s 1914 photogravures as not just maps of the Moon, but art. The exhibition includes stereoscope prints of the full moon taken by 19th-century photographers and more familiar images of the surface from the Apollo 11 astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis weekend, the \u201cMoons and Celestial Bodies\u201d film series shows how space travel has been portrayed on-screen, from the silent 1902 classic \u201cA Trip to the Moon\u201d (July 20 at 3 p.m.) to 1983\u2019s \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d (July 20 at 11 a.m.) by way of the 1976 cult favorite \u201cThe Man Who Fell to Earth,\u201d starring David Bowie (July 21 at 4:30 p.m.).Exhibition: Through Jan. 5. Films: July 20-21, times vary. Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Free.'One Giant Leap' at Maryland Science CenterThe Maryland Science Center in Baltimore has a fixation on space, thanks to its popular planetarium and a permanent interactive exhibition space titled \u201cSpaceLink,\u201d which lets kids perform experiments to discover the composition of a comet, or, at special events, meet astronauts who lived on the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor the anniversary, the Science Center staff created a special planetarium show, \u201cOne Small Step,\u201d that documents the round-trip journey to the moon, while hands-on activities include crafting \u201cDIY astronaut tools.\u201d A special Saturday program also includes lectures, building a lunar lander and a chance to see a moon rock.\u201cOne Small Step\u201d is shown twice daily through July 31. 601 Light St., Baltimore. $19.95-$25.95; \u201cSpaceLink\u201d and the planetarium shows are included in admission price.Space Window at Washington National CathedralThere are pieces of the moon scattered all over the world, on display in museums in Berlin, Sydney, Montreal and Annapolis (at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum). There\u2019s a piece you can touch at the National Air and Space Museum. But the most beautiful and unexpected place to encounter the moon is at Washington National Cathedral.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1974, the Apollo 11 crew presented the cathedral with a seven gram, 3.6 billion-year-old sliver of basalt collected on the first moon walk and preserved inside a nitrogen-filled container. The rock sits on the south side of the nave at the heart of a stained glass design covering three lancet windows, depicting a vast cosmos of colorful swirls and dark celestial globes.Viewable during the cathedral\u2019s daily operating hours. 3101 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $8-$12, free on Sundays. A late-night party at the Air & Space Museum, a rocket projected on the Washington Monument and more. The coolest ways to celebrate the Apollo 11 anniversary around D.C. this week",
        "author": "Fritz Hahn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are the movies that wowed Washington Post critics in 2020 (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1510",
        "date": "2020-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/best-reviewed-movies-2020/2020/12/21/0783a5fa-3ef4-11eb-8db8-395dedaaa036_story.html",
        "text": "The list of narrative films that wowed our critics this year \u2014 garnering three or more stars out of four \u2014 ought to silence anyone who claims that because of the pandemic, there was little worth watching this year. Some of these titles, of course, opened just before theaters shut down nine months ago, but a few didn\u2019t hit the multiplex or art house until recently, as bricks-and-mortar cinemas started to reopen. Most, as you might expect, went straight to streaming services. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the purpose of this list, we eliminated documentaries \u2014 although we dearly love them \u2014 and stuck to movies that are available to stream from home. (If you want to see \u201cNews of the World,\u201d \u201cPromising Young Woman\u201d or \u201cOne Night in Miami\u201d \u2014 all opening in theaters Christmas Day, and all earning three or more stars \u2014 you\u2019ll have to leave the house for now. But perhaps not for long: The window between theatrical release and streaming availability has shortened dramatically.)There\u2019s lots to like here \u2014 and, hopefully, to discover for the first time: action, animation, drama and comedy.\n\nThe 40-Year-Old Version (R)\u201cIt\u2019s a foregone conclusion that \u2018The Forty-Year-Old Version\u2019 will be compared to films by Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Judd Apatow, the latter of whom is referenced in the title and the steady stream of vulgar humor that courses through [writer-director-star Radha] Blank\u2019s dialogue. But even with those obvious references, she\u2019s crafted something all her own.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann Hornaday7500 (R)\u201cAs the co-pilot of a hijacked commercial airliner dealing with an injured arm and moral dilemmas after his captain (Carlo Kitzlinger) is killed, Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivers a commanding performance in \u20187500,\u2019 a lean, admirably tense thriller that, over the course of a nail-biting hour and a half, takes place almost entirely behind the locked door of the cockpit.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Assistant (R)\u201cSomewhere between a joke-free version of \u2018Horrible Bosses\u2019 and a horror story lies \u2018The Assistant,\u2019 an icky yet highly watchable workplace drama centering on a young woman who toils in the New York office of the chairman of a Miramax-like film production company that is haunted by an unseen presence.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanBest movies of 2020: Diverse thrills, chills, Dickensian laughs and a pandemic-friendly trip to GreeceBabyteeth (Unrated)\u201cOf the actresses who played the four March sisters in last year\u2019s Oscar-winning adaptation of \u2018Little Women,\u2019 Eliza Scanlen, as Beth, was the least well-known \u2014 and sadly, the least raved-over for her performance. Now the Australian actress has a second chance to win your attention, in \u2018Babyteeth.\u2019\u00a0\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanBlow the Man Down (R)\u201cWriting-directing team Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy make a smashing feature debut with a film that obeys the most cherished crime-thriller conventions while infusing them with just the right amount of stylization and personal commentary.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Ann HornadayBorat Subsequent Moviefilm (R)\u201cAs he did in his comedy show \u2018Who Is America?,\u2019 [Sacha Baron] Cohen, assisted by his stable of co-screenwriters, has a genius for leveraging the vanity of his non-actor victims to entice them to step, willingly, onto his cleverly camouflaged comedy land mines.\u2019 (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Boys in the Band (R)\u201cThe 1968 play \u2018The Boys in the Band\u2019 \u2014 both pioneering and polarizing for its simultaneously honest and stagy depiction of pre-Stonewall-era male homosexuality \u2014 gets a handsome, impeccably acted Netflix film adaptation by director Joe Mantello, based on Mantello\u2019s own 50th-anniversary Broadway revival in 2018.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanCome Away (PG)\u201cEchoing such recent films as \u2018The Personal History of David Copperfield\u2019 and \u2018Enola Holmes,\u2019 \u2018Come Away\u2019 takes place in a bracingly pluralistic 19th-century England, giving the story added verve and resonance.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayDa 5 Bloods (R)\u201c\u00a0\u2018Da 5 Bloods\u2019 is most invigorating when [director Spike] Lee is most sharply polemical, whether it\u2019s during that vibrant prologue, or when he stops to drop some knowledge in interstitial flashes of history, wisdom and exuberant wit.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayEmma (PG)\u201cLove may or may not make the world go round, but [Jane] Austen\u2019s trick \u2014 repeated here by [director Autumn] de Wilde \u2014 is in making us believe, for a minute, that matters of the heart matter more than anything else on Earth.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanEnola Holmes (PG-13)\u201cMillie Bobby Brown makes a high-spirited leading-role movie debut in \u2018Enola Holmes,\u2019 which on paper might sound like a starchy exercise in feminist revisionism, but winds up executing that agenda with wit, pacey storytelling and an overarching mood of cracking good fun.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayFirst Cow (PG-13)\u201cOn its face, this simple tale, set in the Oregon territory in the early 19th century, couldn\u2019t be more fable-like, up to and including the majestic, if not literally magical bovine creature at its center. But, like most of [director Kelly] Reichardt\u2019s films, this one contains multitudes.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Half of It (PG-13)\u201cWritten and directed with tart intelligence by Alice Wu, and featuring some dazzling breakout performances, this breezy, self-aware and utterly adorable coming-of-age tale keeps one eye on literary and cinematic classics, and the other firmly on a future full of exploration, self-expression and buoyant expectation.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayHow to Build a Girl (R)\u201c\u00a0\u2018How to Build a Girl\u2019 is adapted by British essayist Caitlin Moran from her semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, and has been directed with a quippy lightness and madcap dashes of magical realism by Coky Giedroyc.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayI Used to Go Here (Unrated)\u201cBolstered by an ensemble of game young actors including Josh Wiggins, Forrest Goodluck, Brandon Daley and Rammel Chan, [Gillian] Jacobs delivers a winning portrait of a young woman trapped between two worlds, both inside and out; there\u2019s a wonderful shot of her posing with her friends at a baby shower, holding her new book in front of her like her own baby bump.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayI'm Your Woman (R)\u201c\u00a0\u2018I\u2019m Your Woman\u2019 isn\u2019t so much off-kilter as it is ballasted by a different, perhaps lower center of gravity. The title sounds exploitative \u2014 perhaps even silly \u2014 but the tale it spins is one of power and, ultimately, of coming unexpectedly, satisfyingly, into one\u2019s own.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanKajillionaire (R)\u201cBut what appears to be a wry portrayal of eccentric off-the-gridders becomes something much weirder, deeper and more unsettling as \u2018Kajillionaire\u2019s\u2019 true subject matter emerges. The film is spiked with amusing touches, especially the off-kilter physical comedy at which [writer-director Miranda] July excels.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe King of Staten Island (R)\u201cOn its face, \u2018The King of Staten Island\u2019 may look like a thwarted, entitled young man getting his act together, but it gains momentum to become a portrait of trauma and unresolved grief.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayLet Him Go (R)\u201cThe faces of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are given equal prominence on the poster for \u2018Let Him Go\u2019 \u2014 next to the long barrel of a gun and a house on fire \u2014 but it\u2019s Lane who gets top billing, deservedly, in this surprisingly gripping and moving modern western about two mothers, at odds over the fate of a small boy.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Life Ahead (PG-13)\u201c\u00a0\u2018The Life Ahead\u2019 might be a familiar story, but as a showcase for [Sophia] Loren\u2019s sensuality, star power and unfailing instincts, it feels both classic and exhilaratingly new.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayMa Rainey's Black Bottom (R)\u201cIn George C. Wolfe\u2019s captivating adaptation of August Wilson\u2019s play, [Viola Davis] exerts the primary centrifugal pull on a production that obeys the confines of Wilson\u2019s tight staging \u2014 the story takes place in a Chicago recording studio over the course of one day \u2014 but never feels cramped or limited.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Midnight Sky (PG-13)\u201cAs director, [George] Clooney juggles the interconnecting stories adroitly, never giving away the tricks he\u2019s playing on the audience while spinning the yarn, much of which, at least on the [spaceship] Aether, has explicitly to do with hope and longing.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanMulan (PG-13)Yifei Liu is perfectly cast as the title character, a girl living in Han Dynasty China who disguises herself as a boy to fight northern invaders, throwing herself into the film\u2019s martial arts sequences, trick riding and gravity-defying action with serene confidence and athleticism. (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayNever Rarely Sometimes Always (PG-13)\u201cWith \u2018Never Rarely Sometimes Always,\u2019 [writer-director Eliza] Hittman does an excruciatingly accurate job of conveying the complexities of the abortion debate. But perhaps even more valuably, she portrays the misogynistic social space it takes place in.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Old Guard (R)\u201cAlthough [KiKi] Layne and [Charlize] Theron form the beating heart of what could have been a disposable diversion, [director Gina] Prince-Bythewood provides ample support by way of an ensemble that includes Matthias Schoenaerts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayOnward (PG)\u201c\u00a0\u2018Onward\u2019s\u2019 biggest handicap may, ironically, be its [Pixar] pedigree, which means that it will inevitably be compared with some of the greatest animated films \u2014 some of the greatest films, period \u2014 of modern cinema. And yet, even though it starts with hesitant steps and hits some roadblocks along the way, \u2018Onward\u2019 is ultimately a trip worth taking.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Kristen Page-KirbyOrdinary Love (R)\u201c[Lesley] Manville plays Joan, and [Liam] Neeson her husband Tom, in a moving story that is bookended by two Christmases, taking us through 12 months of medical tests, surgeries, therapeutic treatments and their side effects, and the aftermath.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Outpost (R)\u201cSkillfully directed by Rod Lurie, this engrossing and deeply wrenching thriller dances the same fine line as most latter-day movies that want to honor service and sacrifice, without lapsing into empty triumphalism.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Personal History of David Copperfield (PG)\u201c[Armando] Iannucci captures the meaning and the music of the classic tale \u2014 about a young man defining and redefining himself through comfort and cruelty, penury and privilege \u2014 by way of a gifted and bracingly pluralistic cast.\u201d (Various platforms.) \u2014 Ann HornadayPremature (Unrated)\u201cDrenched in tenderness and sensuality, \u2018Premature\u2019 is brimming with life, with director Rashaad Ernesto Green brilliantly capturing the picnics, house parties and street scenes of Harlem that burst with teasing, talky energy.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Prom (PG-13)\u201cDirected by Ryan Murphy with a \u2018Glee\u2019-tastic affinity for big numbers staged in school corridors, \u2018The Prom\u2019 streams to your home at an ideal moment. I\u2019m not talking about the holidays; I refer instead to the nine-month-long drought in being able to sit in a theater and watch a show in which stories unfold with actors improbably bursting into song.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Peter MarksResidue (TV-MA)\u201cTo the degree that this film reflects [writer-director Merawi] Gerima\u2019s own journey \u2014 he grew up in Northeast, the son of filmmaker and Howard University film professor Haile Gerima \u2014 it is a poignant, deeply personal statement of a filmmaker wrestling with art\u2019s proper place in a troubled and unjust world.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadaySaint Frances (Unrated)\u201c[Director Alex] Thompson and [writer/star Kelly] O\u2019Sullivan bring sensitivity and an observant touch to the weighty proceedings: There\u2019s no overwrought hand-wringing when Bridget decides to get an abortion, simply an assurance that she is in control of her life.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Hau ChuSelah and the Spades (R)\u201cIn this teen comedy presented as highly ritualized political theater, [writer-director Tayarisha] Poe reframes an entire cinematic canon of mean-girl cliques, Tracy Flicks and adolescent shticks to come up with a language \u2014 and salient points about female authority, autonomy and self-worth \u2014 all her own.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Ann HornadayShirley (R)\u201cAs she did in 2018\u2019s \u2018Her Smell,\u2019 [Elisabeth] Moss delivers a ferocious star turn in a film that functions primarily as a showcase for her tough, uncompromising talents.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadaySmall Axe (Unrated)(\u201cSmall Axe\u201d is an anthology film series consisting of five individual films: \u201cMangrove,\u201d \u201cLovers Rock,\u201d \u201cRed, White and Blue,\u201d \u201cAlex Wheatle\u201d and \u201cEducation.\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSince making his astonishing feature debut in 2008 with \u2018Hunger,\u2019 [filmmaker Steve] McQueen \u2014 whose 2013 film \u201812 Years a Slave\u2019 won best picture \u2014 has developed a cinematic language all his own. It\u2019s a vernacular that\u2019s simultaneously expansive and microscopically detailed; ruthless, and filled with tenderness and compassion.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe unbreakable gaze of Steve McQueen: \u2018I\u2019m asking you, please, look\u2019Sonic the Hedgehog (PG)\u201c\u00a0\u2018Sonic the Hedgehog\u2019 may have one moment of flatulence, but this hybrid of live-action and CGI animation gets away with it, otherwise bypassing the all-too-common cheap laughs for a story that\u2019s loaded with smart humor, snappy dialogue and the big blue heart beating at its center.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Kristen Page-KirbySorry We Missed You (Unrated)\u201cWith its depiction of razor-thin margins (commercial and personal), this absorbing and ultimately shattering portrayal of the costs of a late-capitalist system obsessed with convenience, efficiency and nanosecond precision couldn\u2019t be more timely.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadaySound of Metal (R) \u201c\u00a0\u2018Sound of Metal\u2019 opens and closes with tight close-ups on Riz Ahmed, the actor whose performance carries this story of a drummer going deaf. It\u2019s a small film made larger by Ahmed\u2019s ability to take something so interior \u2014 hearing loss \u2014 and make it so visible, so palpable.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanSwallow (R)\u201cIn \u2018Swallow,\u2019 [Haley] Bennett finally comes into her own as the kind of leading lady who is more than just a pretty face, and can occupy the screen and hold it, with commanding authority. In a supremely canny move, Bennett produced this unnerving, creepily atmospheric thriller, in which she plays a wealthy, somewhat abstracted housewife making a perverse bid for self-determination.\u2019 (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Trial of the Chicago 7 (R)\u201cIntercutting moments from the speaking gigs [Abbie] Hoffman performed on campuses throughout the trial, [writer-director Aaron] Sorkin reveals someone far more thoughtful and widely read than the somewhat frightening frizzy-haired enfant terrible of public memory.\u201d (Netflix)\u2014 Ann HornadayThe Trip to Greece (Unrated)\u201cOne of the chief pleasures of the \u2018Trip\u2019 movies are their unapologetic worship of pleasure itself: [Director Michael] Winterbottom photographs \u2018The Trip to Greece\u2019 with sparkling, sun-kissed luxuriance, keeping things at a pacey but unhurried clip and using Michael Nyman\u2019s lilting and meditative music to its fullest advantage.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann Hornaday These 42 narrative features \u2014 all available to stream \u2014 earned our highest praise. Here are the movies that wowed Washington Post critics in 2020",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are the movies that wowed Washington Post critics in 2020 (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1511",
        "date": "2020-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/best-reviewed-movies-2020/2020/12/21/0783a5fa-3ef4-11eb-8db8-395dedaaa036_story.html",
        "text": "The list of narrative films that wowed our critics this year \u2014 garnering three or more stars out of four \u2014 ought to silence anyone who claims that because of the pandemic, there was little worth watching this year. Some of these titles, of course, opened just before theaters shut down nine months ago, but a few didn\u2019t hit the multiplex or art house until recently, as bricks-and-mortar cinemas started to reopen. Most, as you might expect, went straight to streaming services. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the purpose of this list, we eliminated documentaries \u2014 although we dearly love them \u2014 and stuck to movies that are available to stream from home. (If you want to see \u201cNews of the World,\u201d \u201cPromising Young Woman\u201d or \u201cOne Night in Miami\u201d \u2014 all opening in theaters Christmas Day, and all earning three or more stars \u2014 you\u2019ll have to leave the house for now. But perhaps not for long: The window between theatrical release and streaming availability has shortened dramatically.)There\u2019s lots to like here \u2014 and, hopefully, to discover for the first time: action, animation, drama and comedy.\n\nThe 40-Year-Old Version (R)\u201cIt\u2019s a foregone conclusion that \u2018The Forty-Year-Old Version\u2019 will be compared to films by Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Judd Apatow, the latter of whom is referenced in the title and the steady stream of vulgar humor that courses through [writer-director-star Radha] Blank\u2019s dialogue. But even with those obvious references, she\u2019s crafted something all her own.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann Hornaday7500 (R)\u201cAs the co-pilot of a hijacked commercial airliner dealing with an injured arm and moral dilemmas after his captain (Carlo Kitzlinger) is killed, Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivers a commanding performance in \u20187500,\u2019 a lean, admirably tense thriller that, over the course of a nail-biting hour and a half, takes place almost entirely behind the locked door of the cockpit.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Assistant (R)\u201cSomewhere between a joke-free version of \u2018Horrible Bosses\u2019 and a horror story lies \u2018The Assistant,\u2019 an icky yet highly watchable workplace drama centering on a young woman who toils in the New York office of the chairman of a Miramax-like film production company that is haunted by an unseen presence.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanBest movies of 2020: Diverse thrills, chills, Dickensian laughs and a pandemic-friendly trip to GreeceBabyteeth (Unrated)\u201cOf the actresses who played the four March sisters in last year\u2019s Oscar-winning adaptation of \u2018Little Women,\u2019 Eliza Scanlen, as Beth, was the least well-known \u2014 and sadly, the least raved-over for her performance. Now the Australian actress has a second chance to win your attention, in \u2018Babyteeth.\u2019\u00a0\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanBlow the Man Down (R)\u201cWriting-directing team Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy make a smashing feature debut with a film that obeys the most cherished crime-thriller conventions while infusing them with just the right amount of stylization and personal commentary.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Ann HornadayBorat Subsequent Moviefilm (R)\u201cAs he did in his comedy show \u2018Who Is America?,\u2019 [Sacha Baron] Cohen, assisted by his stable of co-screenwriters, has a genius for leveraging the vanity of his non-actor victims to entice them to step, willingly, onto his cleverly camouflaged comedy land mines.\u2019 (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Boys in the Band (R)\u201cThe 1968 play \u2018The Boys in the Band\u2019 \u2014 both pioneering and polarizing for its simultaneously honest and stagy depiction of pre-Stonewall-era male homosexuality \u2014 gets a handsome, impeccably acted Netflix film adaptation by director Joe Mantello, based on Mantello\u2019s own 50th-anniversary Broadway revival in 2018.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanCome Away (PG)\u201cEchoing such recent films as \u2018The Personal History of David Copperfield\u2019 and \u2018Enola Holmes,\u2019 \u2018Come Away\u2019 takes place in a bracingly pluralistic 19th-century England, giving the story added verve and resonance.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayDa 5 Bloods (R)\u201c\u00a0\u2018Da 5 Bloods\u2019 is most invigorating when [director Spike] Lee is most sharply polemical, whether it\u2019s during that vibrant prologue, or when he stops to drop some knowledge in interstitial flashes of history, wisdom and exuberant wit.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayEmma (PG)\u201cLove may or may not make the world go round, but [Jane] Austen\u2019s trick \u2014 repeated here by [director Autumn] de Wilde \u2014 is in making us believe, for a minute, that matters of the heart matter more than anything else on Earth.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanEnola Holmes (PG-13)\u201cMillie Bobby Brown makes a high-spirited leading-role movie debut in \u2018Enola Holmes,\u2019 which on paper might sound like a starchy exercise in feminist revisionism, but winds up executing that agenda with wit, pacey storytelling and an overarching mood of cracking good fun.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayFirst Cow (PG-13)\u201cOn its face, this simple tale, set in the Oregon territory in the early 19th century, couldn\u2019t be more fable-like, up to and including the majestic, if not literally magical bovine creature at its center. But, like most of [director Kelly] Reichardt\u2019s films, this one contains multitudes.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Half of It (PG-13)\u201cWritten and directed with tart intelligence by Alice Wu, and featuring some dazzling breakout performances, this breezy, self-aware and utterly adorable coming-of-age tale keeps one eye on literary and cinematic classics, and the other firmly on a future full of exploration, self-expression and buoyant expectation.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayHow to Build a Girl (R)\u201c\u00a0\u2018How to Build a Girl\u2019 is adapted by British essayist Caitlin Moran from her semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, and has been directed with a quippy lightness and madcap dashes of magical realism by Coky Giedroyc.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayI Used to Go Here (Unrated)\u201cBolstered by an ensemble of game young actors including Josh Wiggins, Forrest Goodluck, Brandon Daley and Rammel Chan, [Gillian] Jacobs delivers a winning portrait of a young woman trapped between two worlds, both inside and out; there\u2019s a wonderful shot of her posing with her friends at a baby shower, holding her new book in front of her like her own baby bump.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayI'm Your Woman (R)\u201c\u00a0\u2018I\u2019m Your Woman\u2019 isn\u2019t so much off-kilter as it is ballasted by a different, perhaps lower center of gravity. The title sounds exploitative \u2014 perhaps even silly \u2014 but the tale it spins is one of power and, ultimately, of coming unexpectedly, satisfyingly, into one\u2019s own.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanKajillionaire (R)\u201cBut what appears to be a wry portrayal of eccentric off-the-gridders becomes something much weirder, deeper and more unsettling as \u2018Kajillionaire\u2019s\u2019 true subject matter emerges. The film is spiked with amusing touches, especially the off-kilter physical comedy at which [writer-director Miranda] July excels.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe King of Staten Island (R)\u201cOn its face, \u2018The King of Staten Island\u2019 may look like a thwarted, entitled young man getting his act together, but it gains momentum to become a portrait of trauma and unresolved grief.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayLet Him Go (R)\u201cThe faces of Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are given equal prominence on the poster for \u2018Let Him Go\u2019 \u2014 next to the long barrel of a gun and a house on fire \u2014 but it\u2019s Lane who gets top billing, deservedly, in this surprisingly gripping and moving modern western about two mothers, at odds over the fate of a small boy.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Life Ahead (PG-13)\u201c\u00a0\u2018The Life Ahead\u2019 might be a familiar story, but as a showcase for [Sophia] Loren\u2019s sensuality, star power and unfailing instincts, it feels both classic and exhilaratingly new.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayMa Rainey's Black Bottom (R)\u201cIn George C. Wolfe\u2019s captivating adaptation of August Wilson\u2019s play, [Viola Davis] exerts the primary centrifugal pull on a production that obeys the confines of Wilson\u2019s tight staging \u2014 the story takes place in a Chicago recording studio over the course of one day \u2014 but never feels cramped or limited.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Midnight Sky (PG-13)\u201cAs director, [George] Clooney juggles the interconnecting stories adroitly, never giving away the tricks he\u2019s playing on the audience while spinning the yarn, much of which, at least on the [spaceship] Aether, has explicitly to do with hope and longing.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanMulan (PG-13)Yifei Liu is perfectly cast as the title character, a girl living in Han Dynasty China who disguises herself as a boy to fight northern invaders, throwing herself into the film\u2019s martial arts sequences, trick riding and gravity-defying action with serene confidence and athleticism. (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayNever Rarely Sometimes Always (PG-13)\u201cWith \u2018Never Rarely Sometimes Always,\u2019 [writer-director Eliza] Hittman does an excruciatingly accurate job of conveying the complexities of the abortion debate. But perhaps even more valuably, she portrays the misogynistic social space it takes place in.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Old Guard (R)\u201cAlthough [KiKi] Layne and [Charlize] Theron form the beating heart of what could have been a disposable diversion, [director Gina] Prince-Bythewood provides ample support by way of an ensemble that includes Matthias Schoenaerts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadayOnward (PG)\u201c\u00a0\u2018Onward\u2019s\u2019 biggest handicap may, ironically, be its [Pixar] pedigree, which means that it will inevitably be compared with some of the greatest animated films \u2014 some of the greatest films, period \u2014 of modern cinema. And yet, even though it starts with hesitant steps and hits some roadblocks along the way, \u2018Onward\u2019 is ultimately a trip worth taking.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Kristen Page-KirbyOrdinary Love (R)\u201c[Lesley] Manville plays Joan, and [Liam] Neeson her husband Tom, in a moving story that is bookended by two Christmases, taking us through 12 months of medical tests, surgeries, therapeutic treatments and their side effects, and the aftermath.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanThe Outpost (R)\u201cSkillfully directed by Rod Lurie, this engrossing and deeply wrenching thriller dances the same fine line as most latter-day movies that want to honor service and sacrifice, without lapsing into empty triumphalism.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Personal History of David Copperfield (PG)\u201c[Armando] Iannucci captures the meaning and the music of the classic tale \u2014 about a young man defining and redefining himself through comfort and cruelty, penury and privilege \u2014 by way of a gifted and bracingly pluralistic cast.\u201d (Various platforms.) \u2014 Ann HornadayPremature (Unrated)\u201cDrenched in tenderness and sensuality, \u2018Premature\u2019 is brimming with life, with director Rashaad Ernesto Green brilliantly capturing the picnics, house parties and street scenes of Harlem that burst with teasing, talky energy.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Prom (PG-13)\u201cDirected by Ryan Murphy with a \u2018Glee\u2019-tastic affinity for big numbers staged in school corridors, \u2018The Prom\u2019 streams to your home at an ideal moment. I\u2019m not talking about the holidays; I refer instead to the nine-month-long drought in being able to sit in a theater and watch a show in which stories unfold with actors improbably bursting into song.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Peter MarksResidue (TV-MA)\u201cTo the degree that this film reflects [writer-director Merawi] Gerima\u2019s own journey \u2014 he grew up in Northeast, the son of filmmaker and Howard University film professor Haile Gerima \u2014 it is a poignant, deeply personal statement of a filmmaker wrestling with art\u2019s proper place in a troubled and unjust world.\u201d (Netflix) \u2014 Ann HornadaySaint Frances (Unrated)\u201c[Director Alex] Thompson and [writer/star Kelly] O\u2019Sullivan bring sensitivity and an observant touch to the weighty proceedings: There\u2019s no overwrought hand-wringing when Bridget decides to get an abortion, simply an assurance that she is in control of her life.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Hau ChuSelah and the Spades (R)\u201cIn this teen comedy presented as highly ritualized political theater, [writer-director Tayarisha] Poe reframes an entire cinematic canon of mean-girl cliques, Tracy Flicks and adolescent shticks to come up with a language \u2014 and salient points about female authority, autonomy and self-worth \u2014 all her own.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Ann HornadayShirley (R)\u201cAs she did in 2018\u2019s \u2018Her Smell,\u2019 [Elisabeth] Moss delivers a ferocious star turn in a film that functions primarily as a showcase for her tough, uncompromising talents.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadaySmall Axe (Unrated)(\u201cSmall Axe\u201d is an anthology film series consisting of five individual films: \u201cMangrove,\u201d \u201cLovers Rock,\u201d \u201cRed, White and Blue,\u201d \u201cAlex Wheatle\u201d and \u201cEducation.\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSince making his astonishing feature debut in 2008 with \u2018Hunger,\u2019 [filmmaker Steve] McQueen \u2014 whose 2013 film \u201812 Years a Slave\u2019 won best picture \u2014 has developed a cinematic language all his own. It\u2019s a vernacular that\u2019s simultaneously expansive and microscopically detailed; ruthless, and filled with tenderness and compassion.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe unbreakable gaze of Steve McQueen: \u2018I\u2019m asking you, please, look\u2019Sonic the Hedgehog (PG)\u201c\u00a0\u2018Sonic the Hedgehog\u2019 may have one moment of flatulence, but this hybrid of live-action and CGI animation gets away with it, otherwise bypassing the all-too-common cheap laughs for a story that\u2019s loaded with smart humor, snappy dialogue and the big blue heart beating at its center.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Kristen Page-KirbySorry We Missed You (Unrated)\u201cWith its depiction of razor-thin margins (commercial and personal), this absorbing and ultimately shattering portrayal of the costs of a late-capitalist system obsessed with convenience, efficiency and nanosecond precision couldn\u2019t be more timely.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadaySound of Metal (R) \u201c\u00a0\u2018Sound of Metal\u2019 opens and closes with tight close-ups on Riz Ahmed, the actor whose performance carries this story of a drummer going deaf. It\u2019s a small film made larger by Ahmed\u2019s ability to take something so interior \u2014 hearing loss \u2014 and make it so visible, so palpable.\u201d (Amazon Prime) \u2014 Michael O\u2019SullivanSwallow (R)\u201cIn \u2018Swallow,\u2019 [Haley] Bennett finally comes into her own as the kind of leading lady who is more than just a pretty face, and can occupy the screen and hold it, with commanding authority. In a supremely canny move, Bennett produced this unnerving, creepily atmospheric thriller, in which she plays a wealthy, somewhat abstracted housewife making a perverse bid for self-determination.\u2019 (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann HornadayThe Trial of the Chicago 7 (R)\u201cIntercutting moments from the speaking gigs [Abbie] Hoffman performed on campuses throughout the trial, [writer-director Aaron] Sorkin reveals someone far more thoughtful and widely read than the somewhat frightening frizzy-haired enfant terrible of public memory.\u201d (Netflix)\u2014 Ann HornadayThe Trip to Greece (Unrated)\u201cOne of the chief pleasures of the \u2018Trip\u2019 movies are their unapologetic worship of pleasure itself: [Director Michael] Winterbottom photographs \u2018The Trip to Greece\u2019 with sparkling, sun-kissed luxuriance, keeping things at a pacey but unhurried clip and using Michael Nyman\u2019s lilting and meditative music to its fullest advantage.\u201d (Various platforms) \u2014 Ann Hornaday These 42 narrative features \u2014 all available to stream \u2014 earned our highest praise. Here are the movies that wowed Washington Post critics in 2020",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The best things to see, drink and do in July in the D.C. area (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1512",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-best-things-to-see-drink-and-do-in-july-in-the-dc-area/2019/06/26/9d6b7e90-92a1-11e9-b570-6416efdc0803_story.html",
        "text": "Circuses large and smallPerformer David Dimitri, a veteran of the Big Apple Circus and Cirque du Soleil, where he was known for his high-wire act, stars in the traveling one-man circus \u201cL\u2019homme Cirque,\u201d now in residenceshow opens Thursday June 27 at North Bethesda\u2019s Strathmore through July 7. In a tent set up on Strathmore\u2019s grounds, Dimitri performs his signature act, of course, as well as a human cannonball trick and other acrobatic surprises. For something a bit more extravagant, look to Cirque du Soleil, which is bringing its \u201cVolta\u201d show \u2014 inspired by such street sports as BMX biking and skating \u2014 to Tysons II, beginning July 26 and running through Sept. 8. Tickets to \u201cL\u2019homme Cirque\u201d (through July 7) are $20-$30; VIP $75. Tickets to \u201cVolta\u201d (July 26-Sept. 8) are $49 to $285. \u2014 Michael O\u2019Sullivan WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe high wire of going it alone in \u2018One Man Circus\u2019Independence Day celebrations, July 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe addition of the \u201cSalute to America\u201d at the Lincoln Memorial on July 4 has thrown a monkey wrench into Washington\u2019s usual Independence Day celebrations. The fireworks are moving to West Potomac Park, so the view from your favorite viewing spot may change. Traffic and security zones are in flux due to a presidential motorcade. It\u2019s enough to make you want to flee D.C. And yet, some things go on as usual: A Capitol Fourth, the PBS concert with Vanessa Carlton, \u201cSesame Street\u201d muppets and the National Symphony Orchestra, will be on the Mall beginning at 8 p.m. Rooftop bars are hosting parties, ranging from the pricey ($275 at the W) to affordable (free, with drink specials, at Crimson, 12 Stories and others). And if you\u2019d rather stay out of the city altogether, there are small-town options with parades and fireworks all over the area, including Leesburg, Falls Church and Annapolis. \u2014 Fritz HahnFive homegrown Fourth of Julys worth celebratingVisionary Pets on Parade at American Visionary Art Museum, July 4Every summer since its opening, the Visionary Art Museum hosts one of the area\u2019s most idiosyncratic (and silly) Independence Day events: a parade of costumed pets and their human companions. For the 24th annual Visionary Pets on Parade, expect mostly pooches \u2014 animals have to be on-leash or carried \u2014 and mostly in some variant of red-white-and-blue finery. This being Baltimore, you should also expect the unexpected: Some participants have been known to bring pet goats, iguanas and tortoises, and costumes can include wigs, swim goggles and other forms of public humiliation of Man\u2019s Best Friend. Whether you choose to walk the route, which starts at 9 a.m. at the museum\u2019s Federal Hill home, or just spectate, it\u2019s all in good fun. Prizes will be handed out for best (and \u201cmost visionary\u201d) costume, and the free event ends with a talent show. 9 a.m. Free. \u2014 M.O.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementD.C. Art Book Fair at National Museum of Women in the Arts, July 7Founded in 2016 by the D.C. Art Book Collective, a group united by the love of the printed page, this curated fair relocated in 2017 from Union Market to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, an institution with a well-established respect for (and well-regarded collection of) artists\u2019 books. The family-friendly event in the museum\u2019s Great Hall spotlights the work of area creatives working in a variety of paper-based mediums: zines, comics, limited-edition (or one-of-a kind) artists\u2019 books and art prints. Noon. Free. \u2014 M.O.Free Shakespeare, July 9-21Free Shakespeare is one of Washington\u2019s great summer traditions. The Shakespeare Theatre Company\u2019s annual Free for All is an encore of last year\u2019s \u201cHamlet,\u201d an innovative modern take starring Michael Urie as the Prince of Denmark. As in previous years, tickets can be acquired through an online lottery or by old-fashioned waiting in line: 200 tickets will be released at the box office two hours before each performance. If you prefer your Bard alfresco, head to one of the dozen performances of \u201cMuch Ado About Nothing\u201d held across Prince George\u2019s and Montgomery counties, including at Brookside Gardens (July 9) and on the grounds of the Riversdale House Museum (July 16). This year\u2019s family-friendly production features a band performing traditional Italian music. Free for All: July 10-21 at Sidney Harman Hall. Shakespeare in the Parks: July 9-21 at various parks and historic sites. Free. \u2014 F.H.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLibrary of Congress Summer Film Festival\n, July 11-Aug. 15There are plenty of outdoor film screenings in the D.C. area, but none can match the setting at the Library of Congress\u2019s annual summer series. On one side of the lawn is the landmark Library. Across the street is the hulking Supreme Court. Just peeping out above the trees and to the right of the screen is the dome of the U.S. Capitol. Most people don\u2019t associate the Library with movies, but it\u2019s home to the National Film Registry, a collection of American motion pictures \u201cdeemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.\u201d Every summer, the Library screens a selection of films from the Registry on its north lawn; this year\u2019s calendar includes \u201cMary Poppins\u201d (July 11), \u201cJaws\u201d (Aug. 1) and \u201cJurassic Park\u201d (Aug. 15). Bring a blanket and a picnic, and arrive early to secure a spot and hear live music by the Washington Performing Arts. Thursdays at sunset through Aug. 15. Free. \u2014 F.H.Blerdcon\n, July 12-14; \nOtakon\n, July 26-28AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSummer is the season of the fan convention, and if you\u2019re anywhere in the vicinity of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center over the weekend of July 26-28, you\u2019ll know it\u2019s time for Otakon: the neighboring streets will be aswarm with costumed fans of Asian pop culture, including anime, manga, music, movies, video games and more. (The Japanese word otaku refers to people with obsessive interests.) Earlier in the month, you\u2019ll find a fan convention of a different sort \u2014 one that celebrates not a genre, but a fan demographic: the black nerd, or blerd. Over the weekend of July 12-14, the annual Blerdcon gathering will take over Crystal City\u2019s Hyatt Regency Hotel, with special guests including actress Rachel True (\u201cThe Craft\u201d); singer and voice actress Estelle (\u201cSteven Universe\u201d); and voice actor Beau Billingslea (\u201cCowboy Bebop\u201d). Inaugurated in 2017, Blerdcon was created specifically for pop-culture Fans of Color, but touts its diversity and inclusivity: LGBTQ fans, disabled fans, fans from the international community \u2014 really, any and all fans \u2014 are welcome. Blerdcon passes are $25-$55; VIP passes $200; ages 12 and younger free. Otakon passes are $40-$95; ages 8 and younger free. \u2014 M.O.Punk Black Fest at the Pinch, July 13 The world of rock music is overwhelmingly white and not always inclusive. But for the past four years, Punk Black has made serious headway in shifting the status quo. The concert series, which started in Atlanta, spotlights some of the country\u2019s best rock acts, all featuring people of color. Now, Punk Black is raising the stakes by bringing its traveling festival to more U.S. cities this year \u2014 including D.C.\u2019s seminal punk venue, the Pinch. Nine bands from around the country helm the city\u2019s inaugural festival, including such locals as hardcore punks Supreme Commander, hip-hop and metal fusion group Throwdown Syndicate and rockers the Courtland Experiment. 5 p.m. $15. \u2014 Stephanie WilliamsAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018Let the Good Times Roll\u2019: Denizens Brewing Company\u2019s Fifth Anniversary\n, July 13Over the past five years, Denizens Brewing has helped turn downtown Silver Spring into a beer destination. The spacious beer garden attracts families, pets and cornhole players on summer afternoons. Festivals starring sour beers and Maryland cask ales have spread the gospel of those esoteric styles. Meanwhile, Denizens\u2019 flagship beers can be found on taps around the area. That demand is the reason that Denizens opened a larger brewing facility in Riverdale Park earlier this year, but the focus shifts back to the original spot as Denizens gets set to mark its fifth anniversary. The New Orleans-themed party includes live music from the Naptown Brass Band, a drag show, a special menu of po\u2019 boys and hurricanes, and late-night dancing to a DJ. Don\u2019t miss the debut of PGC Premium Lager in cans, too. 5 p.m. Free. \u2014 F.H.Lotus and Water Lily Festival at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, July 13-14 Cherry blossoms aren\u2019t the only natural wonder in town. Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens is home to another visually stunning sight \u2014 lotus and water lilies \u2014 and when they\u2019re in full bloom, they could give the city\u2019s hallmark pink trees a run for their money. Kenilworth\u2019s annual festival devoted to these vibrant flowers stretches over two days this year and is chock full of music and dance performances, games and arts and crafts that are all free and enjoyable for the entire family. And, of course, this is the prime time to catch the lotus and lilies at their peak. 10 a.m. Free. \u2014 S.W.Nas with the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap, July 14AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s rare, but sometimes an artist can debut with an album that arrives so fully-formed that it sets an unreasonable bar for the rest of their career. Case in point: \u201cIllmatic.\u201d In 1994, Nas released his landmark album, filled with evocative and nimbly-rhymed stories of his rise out of the projects of New York City. It would be one thing just to tell a good story, but the Queens-raised rapper showed off the whole package in just under 40 minutes, with production that melts you into its world. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of \u201cIllmatic,\u201d Nas is partnering with the National Symphony Orchestra to add even more layers to his classic album. 6:30 p.m. (gates open). Sold out. \u2014 Hau Chu50th anniversary celebrations of the Apollo moon landing, July 14-20Neil Armstrong took \u201cone small step for a man\u201d on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, but the moon landing, and the \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d that it represents, is being celebrated across Washington this month. The most visible event is the Smithsonian\u2019s \u201cApollo 50 Festival,\u201d which includes the debut of Armstrong\u2019s renovated spacesuit (July 16), a \u201cDiscover the Moon\u201d family day (July 19), and a late-night party marking the exact time Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface (July 20). The National Gallery of Art memorializes the Apollo missions with \u201cBy the Light of the Silvery Moon\u201d (opening July 14), an exhibition that includes 19th-century images of the moon and NASA photographs, and the Kennedy Center offers a pair of performances on July 20: On the Millennium Stage, \u201cNSO Project \u2014 Apollo 11 @ 50\u201d pays tribute to space exploration with the National Symphony Orchestra; and \u201cNSO Pops: Apollo 11: A Fiftieth Anniversary\u201d marries music and video, including performances by Pharrell Williams and Natasha Bedingfield, a new work by composer Michael Giacchino, and a never-before-seen 1997 performance of David Bowie singing \u201cSpace Oddity.\u201d Most events free; NSO Pops performance, $29-$149. \n\u2014 F.H.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChristian Scott aTunde Adjuah at City Winery, July 14Anytime the subject of jazz comes up in the 21st century, music fans seem to gravitate toward the question of: Who will be the genre\u2019s savior? Jazz might not need saving if Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah keeps pushing it into another dimension. Listen to his latest album, \u201cAncestral Recall,\u201d for his seamless blending of the modern sounds of hip-hop and techno with a swath of diverse rhythms from African diaspora communities. The 36-year-old New Orleans-born artist would probably reject the label of jazz himself in favor of his preferred \u201cstretch music,\u201d when referring to his dynamic alchemy of sounds. This includes near-impossible sounding polyrhythmic drums feverishly bouncing around with flutes and Adjuah\u2019s dizzying trumpet. 6 and 9:30 p.m. $28-$38. \u2014 H.C.\u2018How Did This Get Made?\u2019 at Constitution Hall, July 21For nearly a decade, comedians and actors Paul Scheer (\u201cBlack Monday\u201d), June Diane Raphael (\u201cGrace and Frankie\u201d) and Jason Mantzoukas (\u201cThe Good Place\u201d) have been giving people a reason to sit through bad movies. While they\u2019re not capable of turning \u201cBurlesque,\u201d \u201cThe Meg,\u201d or \u201cSuper Mario Bros.\u201d into cinematic masterpieces, the trio\u2019s long-running podcast, \u201cHow Did This Get Made?,\u201d does make watching those films worthwhile. On each episode, the improv veterans and a celebrity guest hilariously dissect a terrible movie by running through the plot (and any plot holes), quoting memorable lines and questioning odd artistic choices. The group regularly hosts live recordings of the show in Los Angeles and has appeared in D.C. at the Bentzen Ball. Now they\u2019re bringing the podcast on the road with a full tour, for which each date\u2019s movie will be announced in advance. 7:30 p.m. $45. \u2014 Rudi GreenbergCiti Open at Rock Creek Tennis Center, July 27-Aug. 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne of Washington\u2019s best summer sports traditions was plenty good enough when you got the chance to catch a couple of notable names in tennis as they tuned up for the U.S. Open. But since 2015, the level of play has risen. You might not get the Williams sisters or the Federers and Nadals of the world, but you will see excellent athletes playing their hearts out in the sweltering summer sun. Slated to compete on the men\u2019s side are the sixth-ranked player in the world, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and local phenom Frances Tiafoe. And the women\u2019s draw features two marquee Americans, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys. Times vary. $15-$750. \u2014 H.C.Corinne Bailey Rae at Lincoln Theatre, July 30Corinne Bailey Rae\u2019s minimalist R&B is delicate but by no means sleepy. The British musician channels a cargo-vessel-worth of emotions into her lush songs, giving them a vivid sense of purpose and place. \u201cThe Heart Speaks in Whispers,\u201d Rae\u2019s 2016 record, is where she does this best. The album explores a range of moods and sounds, which all seamlessly flow together into a velvety-smooth listen. 6:30 p.m. (doors). $40. \u2014 S.W. It\u2019s festival season, with events celebrating everything from lotuses and water lilies to free Shakespeare. The best things to see, drink and do in July in the D.C. area",
        "author": "Going Out Guide staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "What you need to know about visiting D.C. museums now (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1513",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/06/26/dc-museum-reopenings-coronavirus/",
        "text": "correctionA previous version of this article said Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 9, 1865. Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, and died the following day. This version has been corrected. Washington\u2019s tourist attractions continue their seesaw battle with coronavirus restrictions. The National Gallery of Art stopped limiting capacity and requiring timed admission tickets at its East and West buildings on July 12. The Smithsonian lifted its mask mandates on June 28 and stopped requiring timed passes at most museums on July 20. However, on July 29, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced that masks would be required in all indoor settings in Washington beginning July 31. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRegardless of where a museum is located, it\u2019s best to check websites and social media before visiting, and not just for mask requirements or other health and safety policies. Attractions are operating on limited schedules, so not all exhibits may be open, and days and hours might have changed. The Smithsonian\u2019s hours have returned to normal, but most museums are only open five days per week. The National Museum of American History is open Friday through Tuesday, for instance; next door, the National Museum of Natural History is open Wednesday through Sunday.This list will be updated as institutions announce or change their plans.Now openAnacostia Community Museum: The only Smithsonian museum to focus on Washington reopened on Aug. 6 with \u201cFood for the People: Eating & Activism in Greater Washington.\u201d The indoor and outdoor exhibit examines issues of unequal access to supermarkets and healthy food, the low pay and harsh conditions for farm and restaurant workers, and how activists push for change. Open Tuesday through Saturday. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArtechouse: Melding interactive art with cutting-edge technology, Artechouse is a much different experience than the museums a few blocks away on the Mall. The cherry blossom-inspired installation \u201cRenewal 2121,\u2033 open through Sept. 6, places visitors a century into the future, \u201cin an industrial city where nature fights to survive amid an overdeveloped metropolis.\u201d Capacity is limited, and timed-admission tickets are required. Open daily. $17-$24.Ford\u2019s Theatre: No audiences will watch actors perform on Ford\u2019s Theatre\u2019s stage until October, but the historic site, where John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, welcomes visitors for self-guided tours. Advance tickets are required. The museum displays the clothes Lincoln was wearing on the night of his death as well as Booth\u2019s Derringer pistol, and examines Lincoln\u2019s presidency. Visitors can also go into the historic theater to see the Presidential Box, where Lincoln was shot, though the Petersen House (also known as the House Where Lincoln Died) and the exhibit on the Aftermath of the assassination remain closed. Open Wednesday through Sunday. $3.The Kennedy Center and Ford's Theatre to require proof of vaccination or negative coronavirus test for showsGlenstone: The much-buzzed-about Potomac, Md. art museum reopened the indoor pavilions housing its permanent collection on May 6, two months after the 300 acres of grounds, dotted with sculptures by Richard Serra, Michael Heizer and Jeff Koons, among other contemporary artists, reopened to visitors as \u201can outdoor experience.\u201d Glenstone\u2019s Gallery reopened April 8 with a major exhibit on artist Faith Ringgold. The museum\u2019s summer hours, which run through Sept. 5, allow visitors to wander the grounds or visit the Gallery until 7 p.m. (Visitors must schedule a visit on the Glenstone website in advance to participate.) Students, active-duty military personnel, employees of other museums and visitors who arrive on the Route 301 Montgomery County Ride On bus are guaranteed admission, even if they don\u2019t have a reservation. Masks are required indoors. Open Thursday through Sunday. Free, reservations required. Tickets can be reserved up to one month in advance, with a new batch of tickets released at 10 a.m. on the first of the month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHillwood Estate and Gardens: Marjorie Merriweather Post\u2019s Northwest D.C. estate lifted requirements for timed-entry tickets and advance reservations on June 12. No in-person tours are offered at this time, so download the Hillwood app for guided tours of the mansion and gardens before a visit. Masks are not required in the sprawling gardens, but must be worn indoors. Open Tuesday through Sunday. $5-$18. Ages 5 and younger free.The Hirshhorn Museum: On Aug. 20, the Hirshhorn becomes the last of the major museums on the Mall to welcome back visitors. \u201cMark Bradford: Pickett\u2019s Charge,\u201d \u201cBarbara Kruger: Belief+Doubt\u201d and \u201cMarcel Duchamp: The Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection\u201d are all on display. (\u201cOne With Eternity,\u201d the eagerly awaited Yayoi Kusama exhibition that was scheduled to open in April 2020 has been postponed indefinitely.) In September, the museum will unveil a new multimedia exhibit with works by Laurie Anderson and a site-specific scrim wrapping around the building with portraits by Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Open Wednesday through Sunday. Free.International Spy Museum: The museum, which moved to an expansive new building in L\u2019Enfant Plaza in 2019, reopened Jan. 23 with a limited capacity and extra distancing. (The museum now recommends a minimum of two hours to explore.) Many of the interactive elements have been modified to reduce contact, but some elements are temporarily closed \u2014 including the sections in which visitors crawl through an air duct, and attempt to escape East Berlin by hiding in a Trabant. Open daily. $16.95-$24.95. Ages 6 and younger free.The Kreeger Museum: The Kreeger is one of the most beautiful museums in Washington. Its collection includes important Impressionists and members of the Washington Color School, and displays of African, Asian and pre-Columbian art. The Kreeger, which reopened April 1, welcomes visitors to its galleries for four 50-minute timed-entry slots per day, beginning at 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. When the 50 minutes are up, visitors are directed outside to the sculpture garden, which includes works of art along a wooded trail. Visitors who don\u2019t wish to spend time indoors are allowed to proceed directly to the sculpture garden. Open Tuesday to Saturday. Suggested donation $10 adults, $8 students, military and seniors.The best place to experience art right now is at one of these sculpture gardensLibrary of Congress: The Library of Congress fully reopened its iconic Jefferson Building on July 15. The Library is open Thursday through Saturday for self-guided tours, and free timed admission passes are required. Passes can be claimed up to 30 days in advance from loc.gov/visit. Open Thursday through Saturday. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMount Vernon: Social-distancing rules at George Washington\u2019s historic estate mean visitors must reserve tickets for timed guided tours of the first floor of the mansion, and the upper floors remain closed. Still, the family-friendly museum is open, minus hands-on history area, and all 160 acres of the grounds are accessible, including the gardens, slave cabins, distillery, farming demonstrations and the first president\u2019s tomb. Masks are required indoors. Open daily. $13-$26. Ages 5 and younger free.Museum of the Bible: The Museum of the Bible reopened on Jan. 29. Most of the interactive exhibits are open, along with the Milk and Honey Cafe, while the Virtual Reality Tour of the Lands of the Bible and the hands-on children\u2019s area are closed. Advance tickets are recommended. Open Wednesday through Monday. $9.99-$19.99. Ages 6 and younger free.National Air and Space Museum: In pre-pandemic times, the National Air and Space Museum was one of the most popular attractions in North America, with more than 7 million visits per year in 2016 and 2017. When the museum on the Mall reopened on July 30, however, more than half the building remained closed because of an ongoing renovation. (The first eight of the \u201creimagined\u201d galleries are expected to debut in fall 2022.) A number of must-see objects are on display, including the Wright Brothers Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis and a test version of the Apollo Lunar Module, as well as exhibits on the space race and human spaceflight, but check the museum\u2019s website for details about what\u2019s on view. Open Thursday through Monday. Free.National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center: The Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., was the first Smithsonian museum to reopen to the public on May 5. Some amenities, such as the Imax theater and the observation tower, are closed for social distancing requirements, and portions of the museum are closed for repairs to the roof. Still, the museum has put Alan Shepard\u2019s Mercury capsule, Freedom 7, on display for the first time, and many highlights, such as the space shuttle Discovery, are on view as usual. Masks are required for visitors aged 2 and older. Open daily. Admission is free; parking costs $15.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNational Aquarium: Sharks, puffins and golden lion tamarins continue to delight generations of visitors at the National Aquarium in Baltimore\u2019s Inner Harbor. Capacity is limited, admission is by timed-entry tickets, and some exhibits are temporarily closed. Masks are required for visitors older than 5. Open daily. $29.95-$39.95. Ages 2 and younger free.National Archives: The National Archives has reopened the Rotunda, home to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Some other galleries, including the \u201cRightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote\u201d exhibit, reopened Aug. 16. Capacity is limited and entry tickets are required from recreation.gov. No walk-up tickets are available. Open daily. Free entry; $1 convenience fee per ticket.National Building Museum: The National Building Museum closed \u201ctemporarily\u201d in December 2019 for renovations to the iconic Great Hall. Then came the coronavirus, and finally, 16 months later, it reopened to the public on April 9. In addition to the permanent exhibitions, there are three new exhibits, including the Gun Violence Memorial Project \u2014 four glass houses filled with objects remembering victims of gun violence. The popular Play Work Build hands-on area has reopened, but only 20 people are allowed inside at once, and timed passes are included in admission. Advance tickets are suggested, but not required. Open Friday through Sunday. $10 adults, $7 youth, students and seniors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Gallery of Art: The National Gallery of Art dropped its requirement for timed-entry tickets on July 12, becoming the first museum on the Mall to do so. Hours have been expanded to 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., instead of the previous 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Open daily. Free.National Museum of African American History and Culture: It was tough to get passes to the National Museum of African American History and Culture before the pandemic. Free tickets can be reserved on the museum\u2019s website up to 30 days in advance, and same-day tickets are released every day at 8:15 a.m. For social distancing reasons, visitors will follow one-way paths through the museum, and some exhibits, including the segregated Southern Railway Car and Edisto Island Slave Cabin, will remain closed. The Sweet Home Cafe is also closed. Open Wednesday through Sunday. Free.National Museum of African Art: The National Museum of African Art reopened on July 16. The museum is finally able to welcome visitors to \u201cCaravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa,\u201d which was scheduled to open in April 2020. The exhibition, which includes 300 works from the eighth to 15th centuries, and features artifacts loaned from museums in Nigeria, Mali and Morocco, will run through Feb. 27. Open Wednesday through Sunday. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNational Museum of American History: The Star Spangled Banner, the First Ladies\u2019 gowns and the ruby slippers from \u201cThe Wizard of Oz\u201d are back on display after the National Museum of American History reopened on May 21. Most of the museum is open as usual, with only a few exhibitions, such as the hands-on Spark!Lab and Places of Invention, closed. (The full list of what\u2019s open is on the museum website.) The museum operates on a different schedule than some other Smithsonian museums, open Friday to Tuesday instead of Wednesday to Sunday. That\u2019s worth remembering if you\u2019re trying to visit several museums in the same day. Visitors will enter the museum on the Constitution Avenue side and exit onto the Mall. Open Friday to Tuesday. Free.National Museum of the American Indian: Most exhibitions are open, with some one-way traffic to help with social distancing, though the hand-on activity center, theaters and the vaunted Mitsitam Cafe are closed. Open Wednesday through Sunday. Free.National Museum of Asian Art: The Freer Gallery of Art reopened on July 16. The Freer\u2019s breathtaking \u201cHokusai: Mad About Painting,\u201d showing the paintings and drawings of Katsushika Hokusai, has added new works, including the rarely seen \u201cBreaking Waves,\u201d created 15 years after the artist\u2019s more famous woodblock print, \u201cGreat Wave off Kanagawa.\u201d The Sackler Gallery will remain closed until November for exhibition construction. Open Friday through Tuesday. Free.National Museum of Natural History: The Smithsonian\u2019s most popular museum, which drew 4.8 million visitors in 2019, finally reopened to the public on June 18. Major exhibits, including the fossil hall with its 66-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex; the Hope Diamond; and the timely \u2014 and recently updated \u2014 \u201cOutbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World\u201d are open, though some attractions, such as the Insect Zoo and the Butterfly Pavilion, are still closed. Open Wednesday through Sunday. Free.National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum: The two museums share the historic Patent Office Building and the Kogod Courtyard. Visitors to the Portrait Gallery should note that the popular portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama are on a nationwide tour through May 2022. Open Wednesday to Sunday. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNational Postal Museum: After 17 months of pandemic-induced closure, the National Postal Museum reopened on Aug. 27 \u2014 the final Smithsonian museum in Washington to do so. Much more than cases full of old stamps, the Postal Museum shows how Americans have stayed in contact over three centuries, and the vital importance of communication, whether it\u2019s between British colonists fermenting revolution or soldiers waiting for letters from home. Open Friday to Tuesday. Free.National Zoo: The National Zoo reopened on May 21, and, more importantly, panda cub Xiao Qi Ji met his fans for the first time. Free timed-entry passes are required to enter the Zoo. Open daily. Admission is free. Parking at the Zoo costs $30 per vehicle, which includes six entry passes.The Phillips Collection: America\u2019s first modern art museum reopened March 6, along with \u201cSeeing Differently,\u201d a centennial exhibition drawing from the permanent collection. Timed tickets are available up to four weeks in advance. Tickets for additional weeks are released for on Tuesdays, opening for members at 10 a.m. and for the public at noon. Open Tuesday through Sunday. $10-$16.Phillips Collection is turning 100 and showing what future of classic museums can bePlanet Word: Planet Word, an interactive museum dedicated to exploring and having fun with language, opened in the historic Franklin School building on Franklin Square last October. It closed the following month, and reopened its doors April 1. Admission is limited, with advance reservations required, and styluses are provided for use with the many touch screens throughout the building. Open Thursday through Sunday. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRenwick Gallery: The Renwick is home to the Smithsonian\u2019s collection of decorative arts. Open Wednesday to Sunday. Free.Smithsonian Castle: The Smithsonian Institution\u2019s original building, completed in 1855, serves as the Smithsonian\u2019s visitors center, with highlights from various collections. It\u2019s also the site of founder James Smithson\u2019s crypt. Open daily. Free.Tudor Place: This grand house, on a five-acre Georgetown hilltop, was designed by William Thornton, the architect of the U.S. Capitol, for Martha Washington\u2019s granddaughter, and completed in 1816. It has been a museum since the 1980s, but the gardens \u2014 a place of respite with circular boxwood hedges, a profusion of roses and old tulip poplar trees dotting a landscaped \u201cnatural\u201d lawn \u2014 have become the real destination for those who live or work in the neighborhood. Free, timed tickets are required to visit the house and gardens for self-guided tours. Picnics are welcome. Open Saturday and Sunday. Free; donations accepted.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The U.S. memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime reopened May 17. Timed tickets are required, and can be reserved 30 days in advance. Health screening questions will be required before visitors enter the building. Open Thursday to Tuesday. Free, with $1 transaction fee per ticket reservation.The Washington Monument: The Washington Monument is the only memorial on the National Mall that requires advance tickets. Unfortunately, it\u2019s not helpful for planners: Timed tickets are made available at 10 a.m. each day on recreation.gov, and are good for visits the following day. One ticket covers up to four people; if you have a group of six, you need two tickets. However, no more than eight people can ride together in the elevator to the top. Open daily. Free, with $1 reservation fee per ticket.The region's history comes alive in these immersive guided toursOutdoor areasPlease note that access to facilities, such as restrooms and cafes, is limited. Check before going.Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center: It\u2019s not often that a walk in the woods leads to a modern sculpture by Jules Olitski, Minoru Niizuma or Gerhard Marcks, but that\u2019s what makes the Annmarie Sculpture Garden in Solomons, Md., one of the area\u2019s most engaging art experiences. Visitors to the 30-acre sculpture garden follow trails winding past clearings and under the trees. Sometimes the art is next to the path, and sometimes it\u2019s first seen from a distance. With areas for children, including a riverside playhouse; plant displays; and a separate \u201cWomen\u2019s Walk\u201d looking at bronze female forms, this is a garden that appeals to many different audiences. Open daily. Suggested donation $5.With scenic views of covered bridges and lighthouses, these road trips show the best of the great outdoorsDumbarton Oaks: Dumbarton Oaks, which had reopened its gardens to annual pass holders in April, began allowing the public back with timed-entry tickets and limited capacity on May 15. Hours are limited \u2014 just 3 to 6 p.m. \u2014 but it\u2019s a chance to enjoy being outdoors in one of the area\u2019s most beautiful and dynamic landscaped gardens. The museum remains closed. Open Tuesday through Sunday. $7.Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden: Two new works have joined more than 30 pieces already on display in the Hirshhorn\u2019s sunken Sculpture Garden: \u201cWe Come in Peace,\u201d a female figure with five faces that stands more than 12-feet-tall by Huma Bhabha \u2014 whose title references the 1951 sci-fi film \u201cThe Day the Earth Stood Still\u201d \u2014 and Sterling Ruby\u2019s \u201cDouble Candle,\u201d a pair of monumental bronze candles. Open daily. Free.Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens: Known for the summer display of lotuses and waterlilies, this large collection of water gardens and marshland is one of Washington\u2019s outdoor treasures throughout the year. The river walk and other trails are open, and photo opportunities abound. Open daily. Free.Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens are in bloom. How to make the most of this hidden gem.National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden: The National Gallery\u2019s beloved sculpture garden has gone back to its extended hours (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.), allowing more time to enjoy fresh air and art by Alexander Calder, Barry Flanagan and Louise Bourgeois. The Pavilion Cafe serves snacks, coffee, beer and wine. Open daily. Free.National Gallery of Art to bring live music back to its Sculpture Garden beginning July 29U.S. National Arboretum: After two reopening periods with limited hours, the Arboretum\u2019s 446 acres of gardens, trees and trails are now open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum reopened June 1, and the Administration Building remains closed. Open daily. Free.How to make the most of the National Arboretum, from the redwood grove to the secret pavilionReopening later this yearThe National Postal Museum\u2019s Aug. 27 reopening was the final piece of the Smithsonian\u2019s phased reopening plan. The Sackler Gallery and the historic Arts and Industries Building are slated to reopen in November.The National Children\u2019s Museum, located at the Ronald Reagan Building, will reopen on Sept. 2.This story was originally published June 26, 2020. It has been updated. The Smithsonian has reopened all of its museums in Washington. What you need to know about visiting D.C. museums now",
        "author": "Fritz Hahn"
    },
    {
        "title": "13 things to do in the D.C. area this week (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1514",
        "date": "2019-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/03/04/things-do-dc-area-this-week/",
        "text": "Monday, March 4Cass McCombs at Union Stage: Cass McCombs manages to say a lot \u2014 but yet so little \u2014 on his latest album. The singer-songwriter is a bit of an enigma when it comes to sharing details about his personal life, and he doubles down on this with his latest album, \u201cTip of the Sphere.\u201d He traverses through a sprawling list of topics \u2014 capitalism, the apocalypse and death, for starters \u2014 while keeping the focus largely off himself. Through it all, he brazenly takes creative liberties with his rock-infused sound, adding brushstrokes of Americana, psychedelic rock, jazz and even spoken word on the dark and brooding \u201cAmerican Canyon Sutra.\u201d \u201cTip of the Sphere\u201d zigzags through a number of themes and soundscapes yet keeps a clear, grounded focus that never backs down. 7:30 p.m. $22. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u2018Confection\u2019 at the Folger Theatre: Comfortable shoes and a taste for sweets are two prerequisites for \u201cConfection\u201d ticket holders: During this immersive 45-minute experience from lauded New York theater company Third Rail Projects, audience members will trail actors through the Folger\u2019s ornate Paster and Sedgwick-Bond reading rooms. Commissioned by the Folger Theatre to coincide with the \u201cFirst Chefs\u201d exhibit, this performance, inspired by late 17th-century aristocracy, spans theater and dance \u2014 and includes bite-size desserts for audience members as part of the show. Through March 24. $40-$60.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday, March 5Mardi Gras Extravaganza at the Showroom: It\u2019s not a Mardi Gras party without a Hurricane, and at this year\u2019s Extravaganza, mixologists will face off to create the best version of this classic New Orleans cocktail. The Hurricane contest isn\u2019t the only thing that will make you feel like you\u2019re in NOLA: This third annual bash features live music and all the Southern-inspired dishes you can eat. Bayou Bakery owner and New Orleans native David Guas, chef Spike Mendelsohn, and mixologist Gina Chersevani will join in for the Fat Tuesday party, along with eateries like ChiKo, District Doughnut and Rocklands. The $55 ticket benefits D.C. Central Kitchen. 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. $55.Olumide at the Fillmore Silver Spring: Growing up in Riverdale, Md., Michael Olumide Ogunnubi \u2014 who performs as Olumide \u2014 saw hip-hop as a way to fool around with his siblings, imitating music videos on VHS or recording Weird Al-styled parodies with a USB microphone borrowed from a PlayStation. But after feasting on a diet of such aughts heavyweights as 50 Cent, the Game, T.I., Ludacris and Chamillionaire, the 27-year-old talent got more serious about his craft, quietly recording music and eventually releasing it into the world. 8 p.m. $35.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement[After years sharpening his craft, Olumide is using the crowd as his energy catalyst]Wednesday, March 6Karamo Brown at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue: When Netflix\u2019s \u201cQueer Eye\u201d arrived last year, it was one of the few revivals met with near-universal praise. Season 3 is set to arrive on the streaming service March 15, and culture expert Karamo Brown, who helps subjects with the more intangible parts of their makeover, shares his life story at Sixth and I in a conversation with NPR\u2019s Sam Sanders that\u2019s tied to Brown\u2019s new memoir, \u201cKaramo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing, and Hope.\u201d 7 p.m. $40-$55.[14 things to see, drink and do around the D.C. area in March]Story continues below advertisementNjomza at Songbyrd: Last month, Ariana Grande became the first solo artist to simultaneously claim the top three spots on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, and Njomza helped make it happen. With songwriting credits on Grande\u2019s No. 1 single, \u201c7 Rings,\u201d the budding R&B/pop star has the chops to craft slick, memorable hooks, which she delivers twofold on her 2018 Motown Records debut, \u201cVacation.\u201d The EP is a sonic voyage around the globe \u2014 dance hall, reggae, British garage and more worldly influences are sprinkled throughout. Unlike Grande, Njomza doesn\u2019t have a chart-topping single of her own \u2014 yet \u2014 but she\u2019s definitely onto something. 8 p.m. $15-$20.Advertisement\u2018Queen of Basel\u2019 at Studio Theatre: The glitzy Miami art fair Art Basel is the setting for this reimagining of August Strindberg\u2019s 1888 play \u201cMiss Julie,\u201d and in this version, the titular queen of this festival is hotel heiress Julie Montoya. In playwright Hilary Bettis\u2019s \u201cQueen of Basel,\u201d Julie finds herself hiding out in a little-used kitchen after getting dramatically dumped by her fiance. Cocktail waitress and Venezuelan refugee Christine and her Uber-driving fiance, John, are tasked with comforting Julie, and their chance meeting turns into an exploration of class, power, citizenship and Latino identity. Through April 7. $20-$111.Thursday, March 7Story continues below advertisementHip-Hop Block Party at the Postal Museum: In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Postal Service\u2019s stamp in honor of hip-hop culture \u2014 which depicts a street dancer breaking it down in front of a boombox \u2014 the Postal Museum is throwing a party. Thursday night\u2019s festivities at this Union Station neighbor will try to evoke a neighborhood block party with dancing and live music courtesy of the DMV Hip Hop Orchestra. Preregistration tickets are all accounted for, but organizers promise to accommodate the waitlist until the museum is at capacity for this after-hours celebration. 6 to 8 p.m. Free.Advertisement[Kassim: The rapper whose essence is soul]New African Film Festival at AFI Silver: This 15th annual showcase of contemporary African cinema features 37 films from 22 countries, including several U.S. premieres. One highlight of many is \u201cThe Boy Who Harnessed the Wind\u201d (March 16 at 7 p.m.), a Netflix film that marks the feature directorial debut of Oscar-nominated actor Chiwetel Ejiofor. Set in Malawi, the film tells the true story of William Kamkwamba, who, as a teenager, designed and built a makeshift wind turbine to power appliances in his village, using trees, bicycle parts and junkyard scraps. Through March 17. $13 general admission.Story continues below advertisementFriday, March 8NSO Declassified: International Women\u2019s Day at the Kennedy Center: Singer Ben Folds was a surprise pick as the National Symphony Orchestra\u2019s artistic adviser almost two years ago. His primary role has been programming the \u201cDeclassified\u201d series of Friday night concerts, which places the orchestra alongside artists and performers from other genres. For International Women\u2019s Day, Folds curated a lineup of talented women ranging from the night\u2019s host, comedian Sarah Silverman, to singer/songwriter Julien Baker, who crafts achingly intimate songs. The pre-show, which starts at 8 p.m., includes such festivities as a beer tasting from Alexandria\u2019s Port City Brewing \u2014 and if you stick around, there\u2019s post-show karaoke until midnight. 9 p.m. $25-$75.AdvertisementCensored Double IPA release party at Dacha Beer Garden: In anticipation of International Women\u2019s Day, some of the women in charge of sourcing and distributing the wide selection of beers found around the District gathered at DC Brau to talk shop and brew beer. Their creation, in partnership with the female brewers at the Northeast brewery, is a double IPA named Censored, which tastes like tropical fruits and orange marmalade with notes of jasmine tea. Your first chance to try it comes Friday at the Shaw beer garden \u2014 and it will be available in very limited quantities at shops around the area. 3 p.m. to midnight. Free admission; drinks priced individually.Story continues below advertisement\u2018Rise Up\u2019 at the Newseum: This year marks the 50th anniversary of the police raid on Greenwich Village\u2019s Stonewall Inn tavern, and the Newseum\u2019s new \u201cRise Up\u201d exhibition traces gay rights activists\u2019 efforts from Stonewall\u2019s landmark protests through the AIDS crisis, the fight for marriage equality and beyond. See print articles, images and historic artifacts that tell the story of how the LGBTQ community worked over the past half-century to dismantle stereotypes and end discrimination. Through Dec. 31. $14.95-$24.95.FootsXColes and Oh He Dead at Union Stage: The cover of FootsXColes\u2019s \u201cSitting in Outer Space\u201d is a collage that juxtaposes the Old World with a cylindrical space station right out of cyberpunk touchstone \u201cNeuromancer.\u201d That anachronism-futurism divide is alive all across the album, which bounds between woozy, left-field hip-hop beats and intergalactic soul-funk. At this show, the DMV duo will be joined by another D.C.-based pair, Oh He Dead. Rather than stargazing like FootsXColes, Oh He Dead is firmly footed on the ground, turning out bluesy, rootsy soul music that\u2019s brought to life by the wounded-but-defiant vocal harmonies of Cynthia Johnson and Andrew Valenti. 8 p.m. $12-$15.\u2014 Hau Chu, Adele Chapin, Rudi Greenberg, Chris Kelly, Michael O\u2019Sullivan and Stephanie Williams Singer Cass McCombs returns to D.C. on Monday in support of his new album \"Tip of the Sphere.\" 13 things to do in the D.C. area this week",
        "author": "Going Out Guide staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "The most romantic places in Washington (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1515",
        "date": "2017-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/going-out-guide/wp/2017/11/01/the-most-romantic-places-in-washington/",
        "text": "Every good love story\u00a0has a dreamy soundtrack,\u00a0a passionate cast of characters and an enchanting setting.\u00a0To help you figure out the last one, here's a list of our favorite spots around town to visit with your beloved.\u00a0Many of these destinations are secluded, making them an ideal place for canoodling or planting that first kiss. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeridian Hill ParkOn a nice day, finding a spot around the water at Meridian Hill Park can be the start of a pleasurable afternoon spent getting to know each other. Fall brings a bundled-up crowd and a blanket of red, brown and orange leaves, but if you're there on a Sunday during the summer, be sure to catch the drum circle, as musicians play an impromptu performances until about dusk.Bounded by Euclid, 15th, W and 16th streets NW. 202-619-7111.Iron GateStory continues below advertisementTry to plan your trip to this historic restaurant in the springtime, when the wisteria branches covering the dreamy courtyard are in full bloom. Thanks to heaters and blankets, even colder months can make for a romantic date night in the alfresco portion of the restaurant \u2014 and give you a good excuse to cuddle up. Plates are meant for sharing, so pick a few of the Mediterranean-leaning dishes and ask your server for recommendations on the restaurant's nearly 400-bottle wine list. Advertisement1734 N St. NW. 202-524-5202.Spanish StepsWhether you knew to seek them out \u2014 or accidentally stumbled upon them while wandering through Kalorama \u2014 the secluded Spanish Steps wow every time. Inspired by the marvel of the same name in Rome, the stairs are ensconced by magnolia trees and lead to a fountain with a lion\u2019s head. Pack a picnic \u2014 or an engagement ring.1725 22nd St. NW. No phone.C&O CanalStory continues below advertisementAs you meander the serene footpaths of the Georgetown portion of the C&O Canal, it\u2019s fun to imagine the site as a once-bustling hub of transportation. A number of overpasses grant you privacy and provide cover for a quick kiss if PDA isn't your thing. Seek out\u00a0the graffiti cliffs, a particularly scenic portion of the canal that's covered in vibrant art.1057 Thomas Jefferson St. NW. 301-739-4200.Bar PilarAdvertisementThis 14th Street bar and restaurant \u2014 named after Ernest Hemingway\u2019s boat \u2014 has been a staple of the neighborhood for over a decade. But the real reason you\u2019ll want to bring a date here is to snag the intimate two-seater near the staircase, or what staff members call the \u201cmake out cove.\u201d The love seat provides plenty of privacy as you get to know your date over a strong old fashioned. 1833 14th St. NW. 202-265-1751.Crispus Attucks ParkStory continues below advertisementLush, leafy and clandestine, this small park is beloved by those in-the-know. Only accessible by an alley \u2014 unless you\u2019re fortunate enough to live in one of the townhouses that make up its borders \u2014 it\u2019s worth visiting\u00a0year round, including during the winter when the neighborhood strings lights in the trees, encouraging you to walk around with hot cocoa, hand-in-hand.23 U St. NW. No phone.The National Gallery of Art Sculpture GardenAdvertisementIn the winter, couples can make figure-eights on the ice amid sculptures by Joan Mir\u00f3. In the summer, the setting is home to Jazz in the Garden, one of the\u00a0most iconic D.C. date\u00a0nights. The venerable museum offers its own charms, but\u00a0in a city full of apartment dwellers, the outdoor space is a year-round lure.700 Constitution Ave. NW. 202-216-9397.Church and StateStory continues below advertisementOnce you find the easy-to-miss door and make it upstairs to this church-inspired bar, make a beeline for the mock confessional. Outfitted with plush sofas and dim lighting, the covert space tricks you into believing there\u2019s no one else around \u2014 other than the bartender who hands you drinks via a small sliding screen. 1236 H St. NE. 202-399-2323.Moongate GardenMoongate Garden \u2014 located between the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Smithsonian Castle \u2014 is an oasis within an oasis. Tucked within the Enid A. Haupt Garden, this leafy hideaway is accessible via two keyhole shaped granite moon gates that spill into a tranquil park. In the spring, the cherry blossoms add a pop of pink.12 Independence Ave. SW. 202-633-2220.The mezzanine at 9:30 ClubAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile this no-frills concert venue may not scream\u00a0\u201cromance,\u201d the mezzanine on the second level is a remote part of the club where you can\u00a0nuzzle under your\u00a0date's arm without feeling cramped. (Quick access to a bar doesn\u2019t hurt.) The distance from the stage gives you a birds-eye view of the performance as well as a chance to\u00a0have a stimulating conversation\u00a0and find a common rhythm.815 V St. NW. 202-265-0930.Bishop's GardenThe Bishop's Garden at Washington National Cathedral was built to mimic the walled-off estates and grounds of medieval cathedrals. Its winding paths and rose garden are a gorgeous setting for a walk. See if you can spot the hidden Darth Vader grotesque and the outer space-themed stain glass window on the cathedral.Wisconsin and Massachusetts avenues NW. 202-537-6200.The Terrace at the Kennedy CenterAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore a performance or just because you're in the neighborhood, slip out of the Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer onto the terrace with a couple of glasses of wine and soak up the stellar view of the Potomac River. On Independence Day, smart folk looking for a new view of the fireworks flock here, too.2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600.United States National ArboretumWalking among the original 1828 Corinthian columns from the U.S. Capitol can feel like you're touring Greek ruins, and there's plenty more at the Arboretum that makes it a perfect getaway in the city: a koi pond and bonsai; damp mossy forest; and perfectly manicured lawns. In the spring, find a quiet corner of the park, lay out a blanket and simply enjoy the day. 3501 New York Ave. NE. 202-245-2726.Little SerowStory continues below advertisementForgo menu deliberation and give in\u00a0at this basement nook where servers in 1950s attire and one of the city's best chefs ship out course after course of the hot, sour cuisine from the Isaan region of Northern Thailand. At $45 per person, dining at Little Serow is a relative bargain, but reservations aren't accepted; would-be diners must wait it out for seating. Improve your odds by going on a weeknight. 1511 17th St. NW. No phone.Dumbarton OaksAdvertisementWhat a difference a couple of blocks makes. The din of Georgetown shoppers quickly gives way to an idyllic street lined with trees and stunning homes near the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, which sit on 10 acres at the highest point in Georgetown. The spot feels like a secret sanctuary, and the property begs for exploration\u00a0of the varied landscaping \u2014 the day lilies on Crabapple Hill, the sprawling forsythia along the northern perimeter, the 900-flower rose garden and the orchard of peach, apple and cherry trees. Although picnicking is not permitted, visitors can take baskets of food to Montrose Park, just a short walk down R Street. 1703 32nd St. NW. 202-339-6401.Read more:We\u2019ll never agree about D.C.\u2019s best bars, but we ranked them anywayThe best margherita pizzas in the D.C. area, ranked The city is filled with secluded and scenic spots where love can blossom, no matter the season. The most romantic places in Washington",
        "author": "Holley Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "The most romantic places in Washington (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1516",
        "date": "2017-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/going-out-guide/wp/2017/11/01/the-most-romantic-places-in-washington/",
        "text": "Every good love story\u00a0has a dreamy soundtrack,\u00a0a passionate cast of characters and an enchanting setting.\u00a0To help you figure out the last one, here's a list of our favorite spots around town to visit with your beloved.\u00a0Many of these destinations are secluded, making them an ideal place for canoodling or planting that first kiss. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeridian Hill ParkOn a nice day, finding a spot around the water at Meridian Hill Park can be the start of a pleasurable afternoon spent getting to know each other. Fall brings a bundled-up crowd and a blanket of red, brown and orange leaves, but if you're there on a Sunday during the summer, be sure to catch the drum circle, as musicians play an impromptu performances until about dusk.Bounded by Euclid, 15th, W and 16th streets NW. 202-619-7111.Iron GateStory continues below advertisementTry to plan your trip to this historic restaurant in the springtime, when the wisteria branches covering the dreamy courtyard are in full bloom. Thanks to heaters and blankets, even colder months can make for a romantic date night in the alfresco portion of the restaurant \u2014 and give you a good excuse to cuddle up. Plates are meant for sharing, so pick a few of the Mediterranean-leaning dishes and ask your server for recommendations on the restaurant's nearly 400-bottle wine list. Advertisement1734 N St. NW. 202-524-5202.Spanish StepsWhether you knew to seek them out \u2014 or accidentally stumbled upon them while wandering through Kalorama \u2014 the secluded Spanish Steps wow every time. Inspired by the marvel of the same name in Rome, the stairs are ensconced by magnolia trees and lead to a fountain with a lion\u2019s head. Pack a picnic \u2014 or an engagement ring.1725 22nd St. NW. No phone.C&O CanalStory continues below advertisementAs you meander the serene footpaths of the Georgetown portion of the C&O Canal, it\u2019s fun to imagine the site as a once-bustling hub of transportation. A number of overpasses grant you privacy and provide cover for a quick kiss if PDA isn't your thing. Seek out\u00a0the graffiti cliffs, a particularly scenic portion of the canal that's covered in vibrant art.1057 Thomas Jefferson St. NW. 301-739-4200.Bar PilarAdvertisementThis 14th Street bar and restaurant \u2014 named after Ernest Hemingway\u2019s boat \u2014 has been a staple of the neighborhood for over a decade. But the real reason you\u2019ll want to bring a date here is to snag the intimate two-seater near the staircase, or what staff members call the \u201cmake out cove.\u201d The love seat provides plenty of privacy as you get to know your date over a strong old fashioned. 1833 14th St. NW. 202-265-1751.Crispus Attucks ParkStory continues below advertisementLush, leafy and clandestine, this small park is beloved by those in-the-know. Only accessible by an alley \u2014 unless you\u2019re fortunate enough to live in one of the townhouses that make up its borders \u2014 it\u2019s worth visiting\u00a0year round, including during the winter when the neighborhood strings lights in the trees, encouraging you to walk around with hot cocoa, hand-in-hand.23 U St. NW. No phone.The National Gallery of Art Sculpture GardenAdvertisementIn the winter, couples can make figure-eights on the ice amid sculptures by Joan Mir\u00f3. In the summer, the setting is home to Jazz in the Garden, one of the\u00a0most iconic D.C. date\u00a0nights. The venerable museum offers its own charms, but\u00a0in a city full of apartment dwellers, the outdoor space is a year-round lure.700 Constitution Ave. NW. 202-216-9397.Church and StateStory continues below advertisementOnce you find the easy-to-miss door and make it upstairs to this church-inspired bar, make a beeline for the mock confessional. Outfitted with plush sofas and dim lighting, the covert space tricks you into believing there\u2019s no one else around \u2014 other than the bartender who hands you drinks via a small sliding screen. 1236 H St. NE. 202-399-2323.Moongate GardenMoongate Garden \u2014 located between the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Smithsonian Castle \u2014 is an oasis within an oasis. Tucked within the Enid A. Haupt Garden, this leafy hideaway is accessible via two keyhole shaped granite moon gates that spill into a tranquil park. In the spring, the cherry blossoms add a pop of pink.12 Independence Ave. SW. 202-633-2220.The mezzanine at 9:30 ClubAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile this no-frills concert venue may not scream\u00a0\u201cromance,\u201d the mezzanine on the second level is a remote part of the club where you can\u00a0nuzzle under your\u00a0date's arm without feeling cramped. (Quick access to a bar doesn\u2019t hurt.) The distance from the stage gives you a birds-eye view of the performance as well as a chance to\u00a0have a stimulating conversation\u00a0and find a common rhythm.815 V St. NW. 202-265-0930.Bishop's GardenThe Bishop's Garden at Washington National Cathedral was built to mimic the walled-off estates and grounds of medieval cathedrals. Its winding paths and rose garden are a gorgeous setting for a walk. See if you can spot the hidden Darth Vader grotesque and the outer space-themed stain glass window on the cathedral.Wisconsin and Massachusetts avenues NW. 202-537-6200.The Terrace at the Kennedy CenterAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore a performance or just because you're in the neighborhood, slip out of the Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer onto the terrace with a couple of glasses of wine and soak up the stellar view of the Potomac River. On Independence Day, smart folk looking for a new view of the fireworks flock here, too.2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600.United States National ArboretumWalking among the original 1828 Corinthian columns from the U.S. Capitol can feel like you're touring Greek ruins, and there's plenty more at the Arboretum that makes it a perfect getaway in the city: a koi pond and bonsai; damp mossy forest; and perfectly manicured lawns. In the spring, find a quiet corner of the park, lay out a blanket and simply enjoy the day. 3501 New York Ave. NE. 202-245-2726.Little SerowStory continues below advertisementForgo menu deliberation and give in\u00a0at this basement nook where servers in 1950s attire and one of the city's best chefs ship out course after course of the hot, sour cuisine from the Isaan region of Northern Thailand. At $45 per person, dining at Little Serow is a relative bargain, but reservations aren't accepted; would-be diners must wait it out for seating. Improve your odds by going on a weeknight. 1511 17th St. NW. No phone.Dumbarton OaksAdvertisementWhat a difference a couple of blocks makes. The din of Georgetown shoppers quickly gives way to an idyllic street lined with trees and stunning homes near the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, which sit on 10 acres at the highest point in Georgetown. The spot feels like a secret sanctuary, and the property begs for exploration\u00a0of the varied landscaping \u2014 the day lilies on Crabapple Hill, the sprawling forsythia along the northern perimeter, the 900-flower rose garden and the orchard of peach, apple and cherry trees. Although picnicking is not permitted, visitors can take baskets of food to Montrose Park, just a short walk down R Street. 1703 32nd St. NW. 202-339-6401.Read more:We\u2019ll never agree about D.C.\u2019s best bars, but we ranked them anywayThe best margherita pizzas in the D.C. area, ranked The city is filled with secluded and scenic spots where love can blossom, no matter the season. The most romantic places in Washington",
        "author": "Holley Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where to watch the solar eclipse in Washington (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1517",
        "date": "2017-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/going-out-guide/wp/2017/08/17/where-to-watch-the-solar-eclipse-in-washington/",
        "text": "Monday's solar eclipse is a very big deal: A total solar eclipse visible from the West Coast to the East Coast hasn't occurred since 1918. While D.C. will only get a partial solar eclipse, it's still worth seeing.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe eclipse will begin at 1:17 p.m. and last until 4:01 p.m., according to NASA. The peak will come at 2:42 p.m., when 81 percent of the sun will be covered. If you can sneak out of the office for a few minutes, museums and science facilities in the area will be holding eclipse viewing parties with telescopes and other activities, while bars and restaurants are getting in on the act with themed cocktails and events. Remember: You shouldn't look at the eclipse without protective glasses. Though they may run out, the locations below are giving away free glasses, except where noted. If you need a pair, try your local library or Warby Parker, which has free American Paper Optics safety glasses at its stores. The American Astronomical Society also has a list of reputable vendors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement[The Capital Weather Gang's guide to watching the solar eclipse in the Washington area]Jump to:\u00a0Museum and science facilities\u00a0| Bar and restaurantsMuseum and science facilitiesNASA Goddard Space Flight Center: The Goddard Visitor Center is hosting a public viewing event from noon to 3 p.m. with a live screening of NASA TV's coverage and NASA staff available to answer questions. Viewing glasses will not be provided.\u00a08800 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt. Free.National Air and Space Museum and Udvar-Hazy Center:\u00a0Both locations of the Air and Space Museum will have public programs with safe viewing through solar telescopes and free glasses beginning at 1 p.m. Family activities, which begin at 10:30 a.m. downtown and 11 a.m. in Chantilly, include making pinhole eclipse viewers and planetarium shows. The downtown museum will also feature shadow puppets, stories and an appearance by Mindy Thomas, the host of NPR's \u201cWow in the World.\u201d\u00a0Independence Avenue and Sixth Street SW;\u00a014390 Air and Space Museum Pky., Chantilly. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNational Archives: The National Archives will have special solar telescopes at its Constitution Avenue entrance from 1 to 4 p.m., and a display inside with archival material about previous solar eclipses.\u00a0Constitution Avenue between Seventh and Ninth Streets NW. Free.The National Zoo:\u00a0Solar telescopes loaned by the Air and Space Museum will be set up on Pachyderm Plaza from 1 to 4 p.m., and free safety glasses will also be available.\u00a03001 Connecticut Ave., NW. Free.University of Maryland Observatory: The University of Maryland has its own observatory near the College Park campus, but members of its astronomy department will be on the plaza at the Physical Science Complex from 1 to 3 p.m. with telescopes and free eclipse glasses.\u00a04296 Stadium Dr., College Park. Free.The strangest, scariest eclipse myths throughout historyBar and restaurantsCitybar: The rooftop bar above the Hyatt Place hotel near L'Enfant Plaza\u00a0hosts a\u00a0party beginning at 1 p.m. Tickets include a buffet from 1 to 3 p.m. and viewing glasses; expect such featured drinks as Troegs Sunshine Pils and Victory Moonglow Weizenbock beers.\u00a0400 E St. SW. $15 in advance, $20 at the door.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDNV Rooftop Bar: Happy hour begins at 1 p.m. at the Donovan Hotel, where specials include $4 Sapporo drafts and $5 house wine. (The full menu, including frozen cocktails and boozy Popsicles, is also available.) Pick up a pair of free protective glasses and groove to DJ Lee while waiting for the sky to darken. The Little Miss Whoopie truck will be outside with moon pies from 1 to 4 p.m., and the first 99 customers get a moon or whoopie pie for half price.\u00a01155 14th St. NW. Free.Fairmont Hotel: The West End hotel's Here Comes the Sun, But Wait Until Dark party, held in its courtyard, includes $5 Blue Moon and Corona beers \u2014 a corona is the plasma around the sun visible\u00a0during an eclipse \u2014 and a $10 Dark Side of the Sun rum cocktail, beginning at 11 a.m. Oatmeal raisin moon pies ($5) are available for snacking, and everyone receives a free pair of protective glasses.\u00a02401 M St. NW. Free.Radiator:\u00a0The rooftop bar and pool deck is usually limited to hotel guests during the day, but Radiator is making an exception for the eclipse. Doors open at 1 p.m. for an extended happy hour with $5 beers, $6 wine and $7 orange crushes and frozen drinks. Free eclipse viewing glasses will be available.\u00a01430 Rhode Island Ave. NW. Free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTop of the Gate: Two cocktails have been created for the eclipse viewing event at the Watergate Hotel's rooftop bar. The stunner is the rum-based Eclipse Pico ($16), which is garnished with a blackened orange, making the cocktail resemble the eclipse. The bar opens at 1 p.m. for viewing; glasses will not be provided.\u00a02650 Virginia Ave. NW. Free.Read more:The best events of D.C. Beer Week9 new restaurants to try around Washington Bars and restaurants are getting in on the act with themed cocktails, while museum and science facilities will have telescopes and experts on hand to field questions. Where to watch the solar eclipse in Washington",
        "author": "Fritz Hahn"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Goes to Space With Blue Origin (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1518",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/william-shatner-goes-to-space-with-blue-origin/1C31A6E9-7DC2-4849-975B-C7B101B1E726?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=3",
        "text": " The actor who played Captain Kirk on 'Star Trek' has gone to space in real life. William Shatner joined three other passengers on Blue Origin's second crewed space flight. Wall Street Journal reporter Micah Maidenberg joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss what this could signal about the future of space tourism, and whether high-profile passengers could move the industry forward. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Goes to Space With Blue Origin (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1519",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/william-shatner-goes-to-space-with-blue-origin/1C31A6E9-7DC2-4849-975B-C7B101B1E726?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=20",
        "text": " The actor who played Captain Kirk on 'Star Trek' has gone to space in real life. William Shatner joined three other passengers on Blue Origin's second crewed space flight. Wall Street Journal reporter Micah Maidenberg joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss what this could signal about the future of space tourism, and whether high-profile passengers could move the industry forward. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA's Webb Space Telescope Will See Into Deep Space (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1520",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/how-nasa-webb-space-telescope-will-see-into-deep-space/235750CB-5E4C-4440-B0C9-BA58BE3ECD6D?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=3",
        "text": " After more than a decade of delays, the most powerful space telescope ever built is set to be launched this weekend. Once in action, the James Webb Space Telescope will replace the Hubble, which has been orbiting Earth for 30 years. Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the new telescope works and why astronomers say it will be worth the wait. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA's Webb Space Telescope Will See Into Deep Space (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1521",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/how-nasa-webb-space-telescope-will-see-into-deep-space/235750CB-5E4C-4440-B0C9-BA58BE3ECD6D?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=3",
        "text": " After more than a decade of delays, the most powerful space telescope ever built is set to be launched this weekend. Once in action, the James Webb Space Telescope will replace the Hubble, which has been orbiting Earth for 30 years. Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the new telescope works and why astronomers say it will be worth the wait. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA's Webb Space Telescope Will See Into Deep Space (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1522",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/how-nasa-webb-space-telescope-will-see-into-deep-space/235750CB-5E4C-4440-B0C9-BA58BE3ECD6D?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=3",
        "text": " After more than a decade of delays, the most powerful space telescope ever built is set to be launched this weekend. Once in action, the James Webb Space Telescope will replace the Hubble, which has been orbiting Earth for 30 years. Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the new telescope works and why astronomers say it will be worth the wait. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "A man on a plane said he had a bomb. Passengers \u2018pounced.\u2019 (WP: Gridlock) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1523",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2017/06/01/a-man-on-a-plane-said-he-had-a-bomb-passengers-pounced/",
        "text": "The drama started shortly after Malaysia Airlines Flight 128 took off from Melbourne.A passenger stood up, grabbed a flight attendant by the arm and told the 337 passengers aboard the Kuala Lumpur-bound plane that he had a bomb, witnesses said.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cHe was saying, \u2018I\u2019m going to blow the f\u2011\u2011\u2011ing plane up, I\u2019m going to blow the plane up,\u2019 \u201d passenger Andrew Leoncelli told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. \u201cHe was agitated, is the best description; 100 percent, he was agitated.\u201d As the man walked toward the cockpit, demanding to see the pilot, the flight attendant he clutched screamed for help, witnesses said.But passengers were already mobilizing.\u201cIn that one second, there were four of us out of our seats and we pounced on him; he just didn\u2019t expect it at all,\u201d passenger Scott Lodge told Sky News Australia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAll of a sudden, someone has him in a chokehold and got his arm behind his back, and the other guy eventually choked him and he passed out.\u201dPassengers then took the man to the front of the aircraft and tied him up with belts as the pilot turned the plane around.It landed in Australia and sat in an isolated area for 90 minutes, according to the Associated Press. SWAT\u00a0team members boarded the plane, grabbed the man and let the passengers off.Delta says pilot who struck a passenger was trying to break up a fightAuthorities have identified the man as Manodh Marks, a 25-year-old Sri Lankan living in Australia on a student visa, the AP reported.\u00a0He was studying to be a chef.As officials investigated the incident, they\u00a0began to suspect that mental illness \u2014 and not terrorism \u2014 was behind the dramatic scene on the Wednesday flight to Kuala Lumpur.Story continues below advertisementUltimately, authorities determined there was no bomb.The object passengers saw in Marks\u2019s hand was a Bluetooth speaker or possibly an amplifier.Some passengers said the man appeared to be intoxicated.AdvertisementOne said he had glassy eyes.Marks was charged with making false threats and endangering the safety of an aircraft. If convicted, he could spend a decade in prison on each charge.In court Thursday, the man\u2019s lawyer, Tess Dunsford, told the magistrate that Marks had a \u201cpsychiatric illness,\u201d according to the AP. He did not ask for bail or enter a plea; his next court date is scheduled for Aug. 24.Australian authorities screened all the bags on the plane and were working Thursday to return them to the other passengers, who were put up in hotels in Australia for the night, according to Malaysia Airlines.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, the airline said Flight 128 \u201cwas forced to turn back to Melbourne Airport due to a disruptive passenger. The airline\u2019s cabin crew with the help of one passenger managed to restrain the passenger who was immediately handcuffed and subdued.\u201dAdvertisementThe statement added: \u201cMalaysia Airlines wishes to extend its appreciation to everyone involved during the emergency situation.\u201d\u2018Come on, hit me!\u2019 American Airlines grounds flight attendant after video shows confrontation.Wednesday\u2019s altercation was the latest in a steady stream of airline drama this year.In April, videos showed a bleeding passenger being forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight after refusing to leave the aircraft voluntarily. It sparked a public relations crisis for United, which ultimately settled with the man for an undisclosed amount.Story continues below advertisementSince then, viral videos have showed a family getting booted from a JetBlue flight over a\u00a0misunderstanding about a birthday cake,\u00a0pilots hitting passengers\u00a0and passengers brawling with each other\u00a0and police.In late April, a\u00a0Delta Air Lines passenger said he was kicked off a plane for using the restroom.For Malaysia Airlines, the most notable incidents have been deadly.AdvertisementMalaysia Flight 17\u00a0was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, killing the 283 passengers and 15 crew members aboard. Investigators have said they believe Russian-backed separatists were responsible, but no one has been charged.Just four months before that, Malaysia Flight 370 disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Crews combed the vast ocean for nearly three years, but the most expensive aviation search in history yielded nothing: The plane and the 239 people it was carrying have not been found.Read more:This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.Tiger mauls British zookeeper to death in \u2018freak accident\u2019Residents of halfway house found two men dead from overdoses \u2014 their drug counselorsScientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beach The plane landed in Australia, where authorities determined that there was no bomb. A man on a plane said he had a bomb. Passengers \u2018pounced.\u2019",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Behind the scenes as FAA prepares for Space X launch (WP: Gridlock) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1524",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2020/05/30/behind-scenes-faa-prepares-space-x-launch/",
        "text": "From a command center in Warrenton, Va., a special team at the Federal Aviation Administration will be keeping a close watch on the historic launch of the first astronauts from U.S. soil in almost a decade. Two NASA astronauts are headed to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 booster. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s a very exciting day for us,\u201d Duane Freer, manager of space operations at the FAA, said in an interview on Wednesday, just hours before the mission\u2019s scheduled launch, which was later postponed because of weather. \u201cThis has been a long time in the making. There\u2019s a lot on the line for the country.\u201d NASA officials rescheduled the launch for Saturday, pending weather.SpaceX launch live updatesThe postponement didn\u2019t faze Freer and his team, who are accustomed to such last minute changes.Story continues below advertisementAfter all, the FAA has long played key role in space launches, managing of airspace to ensure safe takeoffs and landings. Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla., was no different. In preparation, the FAA imposed temporary flight restrictions in a 40 nautical mile area around the launch site. Similar restrictions will be put into place for Saturday\u2019s possible launch.AdvertisementThe launch is also an opportunity for the FAA to test new tools it\u2019s developed to carry out its traditional role of managing the nation\u2019s airspace.With a growing number of companies seeking to commercialize space travel, the agency has focused on developing new systems for more efficiently managing airspace. In the past, FAA may have had to close airspace for days around a launch site in preparation. Today while those closures may last only hours, they still can prove disruptive to air traffic. The FAA\u2019s air traffic controllers coordinate up to 43,000 flights in the U.S. a day. At any given time, there can be 5,000 aircraft in the skies.Story continues below advertisementA FAA program known as the Space Data Integrator (SDI), however, seeks to integrate commercial air traffic with commercial space traffic by allowing air traffic controllers to see rockets just as they do airplanes. The shift would mean the agency could monitor traffic with great accuracy, potentially reducing the length of time that airspace must be closed off for space launches.Advertisement\u201cThe past paradigm is that you just close off areas of airspace for hours at a time,\u201d Freer said.The #FAA\u2019s Ed Springer is at @NASAKennedy waiting for today\u2019s @SpaceX launch. Watch as he describes how we handle the #airspace around the launch site. Learn more about #HumanSpaceflight at https://t.co/XpKG1HvXp4. #LaunchAmerica #FAASpace #STEM pic.twitter.com/n7EHdnaT4f\u2014 The FAA \u2708\ufe0f (@FAANews) May 27, 2020\n\nBut once SDI becomes operational, expected later this year, Freer said those closures may shorten because \u201cwe\u2019re going to be able to be more dynamic because we\u2019ll be able to see the vehicle and see where it is and we\u2019ll be able to react quicker.\u201d Story continues below advertisementFreer is part of a team of air traffic and commercial space transportation experts working on SDI.Four hours before launch, members of the Joint Space Operations Group (JSpOG,) made up of representatives from FAA\u2019s air traffic organization and office of commercial space transportation, are expected to arrive at the Warrenton center to begin coordinating with air traffic control facilities and with the 45th Space Wing, the military unit responsible for all space launch operations from the East Coast.AdvertisementFreer said planning for the Space X launch began several weeks in advance with the development of an airspace management plan. The FAA works with partners including Airlines for America, the International Air Transport Association and the National Business Aircraft Association on a plan that ensures a safe launch that also seeks to limit the impact on the commercial aviation system.Story continues below advertisementFor the launch of Space X\u2019s Dragon capsule, SDI will operate in shadow mode, allowing FAA\u2019s team to determine whether it was conforming to expectations, or as Freer put it, \u201cDoing what we expect it to do.\u201d Telemetry data received from the launch and reentry operator, which will allow FAA\u2019s team to watch the rocket\u2019s progress, will also help experts more quickly identify potential \u201chazard areas\u201d \u2014 another key component of ensuring safe pre- and post-launch operations. Should there be any issues with the launch, JPpOG will be poised to act.The team will be closely monitoring an array of large screen displays and monitors that show aircraft hazard areas and live air traffic in areas around the launch site. They use handsets to communicate with each other.Given concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus, the team will practice social distancing. The room also is cleaned before and after the missions. From a command center in Warrenton, Va., a special team of experts from the Federal Aviation Administration are gathering data as part of a program that will help incorporate commercial space operations into the current national airspace system. Behind the scenes as FAA prepares for Space X launch",
        "author": "Lori Aratani"
    },
    {
        "title": "Behind the scenes as FAA prepares for Space X launch (WP: Gridlock) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1525",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2020/05/30/behind-scenes-faa-prepares-space-x-launch/",
        "text": "From a command center in Warrenton, Va., a special team at the Federal Aviation Administration will be keeping a close watch on the historic launch of the first astronauts from U.S. soil in almost a decade. Two NASA astronauts are headed to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 booster. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s a very exciting day for us,\u201d Duane Freer, manager of space operations at the FAA, said in an interview on Wednesday, just hours before the mission\u2019s scheduled launch, which was later postponed because of weather. \u201cThis has been a long time in the making. There\u2019s a lot on the line for the country.\u201d NASA officials rescheduled the launch for Saturday, pending weather.SpaceX launch live updatesThe postponement didn\u2019t faze Freer and his team, who are accustomed to such last minute changes.Story continues below advertisementAfter all, the FAA has long played key role in space launches, managing of airspace to ensure safe takeoffs and landings. Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla., was no different. In preparation, the FAA imposed temporary flight restrictions in a 40 nautical mile area around the launch site. Similar restrictions will be put into place for Saturday\u2019s possible launch.AdvertisementThe launch is also an opportunity for the FAA to test new tools it\u2019s developed to carry out its traditional role of managing the nation\u2019s airspace.With a growing number of companies seeking to commercialize space travel, the agency has focused on developing new systems for more efficiently managing airspace. In the past, FAA may have had to close airspace for days around a launch site in preparation. Today while those closures may last only hours, they still can prove disruptive to air traffic. The FAA\u2019s air traffic controllers coordinate up to 43,000 flights in the U.S. a day. At any given time, there can be 5,000 aircraft in the skies.Story continues below advertisementA FAA program known as the Space Data Integrator (SDI), however, seeks to integrate commercial air traffic with commercial space traffic by allowing air traffic controllers to see rockets just as they do airplanes. The shift would mean the agency could monitor traffic with great accuracy, potentially reducing the length of time that airspace must be closed off for space launches.Advertisement\u201cThe past paradigm is that you just close off areas of airspace for hours at a time,\u201d Freer said.The #FAA\u2019s Ed Springer is at @NASAKennedy waiting for today\u2019s @SpaceX launch. Watch as he describes how we handle the #airspace around the launch site. Learn more about #HumanSpaceflight at https://t.co/XpKG1HvXp4. #LaunchAmerica #FAASpace #STEM pic.twitter.com/n7EHdnaT4f\u2014 The FAA \u2708\ufe0f (@FAANews) May 27, 2020\n\nBut once SDI becomes operational, expected later this year, Freer said those closures may shorten because \u201cwe\u2019re going to be able to be more dynamic because we\u2019ll be able to see the vehicle and see where it is and we\u2019ll be able to react quicker.\u201d Story continues below advertisementFreer is part of a team of air traffic and commercial space transportation experts working on SDI.Four hours before launch, members of the Joint Space Operations Group (JSpOG,) made up of representatives from FAA\u2019s air traffic organization and office of commercial space transportation, are expected to arrive at the Warrenton center to begin coordinating with air traffic control facilities and with the 45th Space Wing, the military unit responsible for all space launch operations from the East Coast.AdvertisementFreer said planning for the Space X launch began several weeks in advance with the development of an airspace management plan. The FAA works with partners including Airlines for America, the International Air Transport Association and the National Business Aircraft Association on a plan that ensures a safe launch that also seeks to limit the impact on the commercial aviation system.Story continues below advertisementFor the launch of Space X\u2019s Dragon capsule, SDI will operate in shadow mode, allowing FAA\u2019s team to determine whether it was conforming to expectations, or as Freer put it, \u201cDoing what we expect it to do.\u201d Telemetry data received from the launch and reentry operator, which will allow FAA\u2019s team to watch the rocket\u2019s progress, will also help experts more quickly identify potential \u201chazard areas\u201d \u2014 another key component of ensuring safe pre- and post-launch operations. Should there be any issues with the launch, JPpOG will be poised to act.The team will be closely monitoring an array of large screen displays and monitors that show aircraft hazard areas and live air traffic in areas around the launch site. They use handsets to communicate with each other.Given concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus, the team will practice social distancing. The room also is cleaned before and after the missions. From a command center in Warrenton, Va., a special team of experts from the Federal Aviation Administration are gathering data as part of a program that will help incorporate commercial space operations into the current national airspace system. Behind the scenes as FAA prepares for Space X launch",
        "author": "Lori Aratani"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next Mars rover is brawniest and brainiest one yet (WP: Health) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1526",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/nasas-next-mars-rover-is-brawniest-and-brainiest-one-yet/2020/07/27/cb8c330a-d030-11ea-826b-cc394d824e35_story.html",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 With eight successful Mars landings, NASA is upping the ante with its newest rover.The spacecraft Perseverance \u2014 set for liftoff this week \u2014 is NASA\u2019s brawniest and brainiest Martian rover yet.FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightIt sports the latest landing tech, plus the most cameras and microphones ever assembled to capture the sights and sounds of Mars. Its super-sanitized sample return tubes \u2014 for rocks that could hold evidence of past Martian life \u2014 are the cleanest items ever bound for space. A helicopter is even tagging along for an otherworldly test flight. This summer\u2019s third and final mission to Mars \u2014 after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope orbiter and China\u2019s Quest for Heavenly Truth orbiter-rover combo \u2014 begins with a launch scheduled for Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral. Like the other spacecraft, Perseverance should reach the red planet next February following a journey spanning seven months and more than 300 million miles (480 million kilometers).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine doesn\u2019t see it as a competition. \u201cBut certainly we welcome more explorers to deliver more science than ever before,\u201d he said following a launch review Monday, \u201cand we look forward to seeing what it is that they\u2019re able to discover.\u201dHere\u2019s a peek at Perseverance:PERSEVERANCE VS. CURIOSITY:The six-wheeled, car-sized Perseverance is a copycat of NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover, prowling Mars since 2012, but with more upgrades and bulk. Its 7-foot (2-meter) robotic arm has a stronger grip and bigger drill for collecting rock samples, and it\u2019s packed with 23 cameras, most of them in color, plus two more on Ingenuity, the hitchhiking helicopter. The cameras will provide the first glimpse of a parachute billowing open at Mars, with two microphones letting Earthlings eavesdrop for the first time. Once home to a river delta and lake, Jezero Crater is NASA\u2019s riskiest Martian landing site yet because of boulders and cliffs, hopefully avoided by the spacecraft\u2019s self-navigating systems. Perseverance has more self-driving capability, too, so it can cover more ground than Curiosity. The enhancements make for a higher mission price tag: nearly $3 billion.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSAMPLE COLLECTION:Perseverance will drill into rocks most likely to hold signs of ancient life and stash the collection on the ground to await a future rover. Forty-three sample tubes are on board this rover, each one meticulously scrubbed and baked to remove Earthly microbes. NASA wants to avoid introducing organic molecules from Earth to the returning Martian samples. Each tube can hold one-half ounce (15 grams) of core samples, and the goal is to gather about a pound (0.5 kilogram) altogether for return to Earth. NASA hopes to launch the pickup mission in 2026 and get the samples back on Earth by 2031 \u2014 at the soonest.HELICOPTER DEMO:The 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter, Ingenuity, will travel to Mars clutching the rover\u2019s belly and, a few months after touchdown, attempt to fly solo. Once dropping onto the Martian surface, Ingenuity will start out like a baby bird, rising 10 feet (3 meters) into the planet\u2019s extremely thin atmosphere and flying forward up to 6 feet (2 meters). With each attempt, it will try to go a little higher and farther. \u201cIt really is like the Wright brothers\u2019 moment,\u201d said project manager MiMi Aung. She has one month to squeeze in as many helicopter hops as possible before the rover moves on to more pressing geologic work. The future could see next-generation helicopters scouting out distant Martian territory for astronauts or even robots.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHUMAN BENEFITS:Besides the helicopter, Perseverance carries other experiments that could directly benefit astronauts at Mars. An instrument the size of a car battery will covert atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen, an essential ingredient for rocket propellant and breathing systems. Another instrument, zapping rocks with lasers to identify organic molecules and minerals, carries samples of spacesuit material. NASA wants to see how the fabrics withstand the harsh Martian environment. It will be the 2030s at best, according to NASA, before astronauts venture to Mars.COOL STOWAWAYS:A couple Martian meteorites are finally headed home, or at least slivers of them to be used as calibration targets by laser-shooting instruments aboard Perseverance. Other cool stowaways: silicon chips bearing the names of nearly 11 million people who signed up, as well as a small plate showing Earth and Mars on opposite sides of the sun with the message \u201cexplore as one\u201d in Morse code tucked into the solar rays. There\u2019s also a plaque paying tribute to medical workers on the pandemic\u2019s front lines. The coronavirus is preventing hundreds of scientists and other team members from traveling to Cape Canaveral for the launch.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. NASA is upping the ante with its newest rover headed to Mars NASA\u2019s next Mars rover is brawniest and brainiest one yet",
        "author": "Marcia Dunn\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues (WP: Health) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1527",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/nasas-hubble-successor-delayed-again-by-virus-other-issues/2020/07/16/eee068e2-c7b3-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues.Officials announced Thursday that the James Webb Space Telescope \u2014 the space agency\u2019s top science priority \u2014 is now scheduled to launch on Oct. 31, 2021. The previous target date was March 2021. FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightThis next-generation observatory \u2014 designed to peer farther into space and further back into time than any other spacecraft \u2014 originally was supposed to fly more than a decade ago. The previous two-year-plus delay, announced in 2018, was due to worker error and hardware problems. Until COVID-19 struck, everything was finally going well, officials said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMission success is critical, but team safety is our highest priority,\u201d said NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk.AdvertisementNASA stressed that the costs stemming from the latest postponement will not exceed the $8.8 billion spending cap for development set by Congress. Budget reserves set aside two years ago during the last major assessment will cover any additional expenses, said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency\u2019s science mission chief.Nearly half the delay, about three months, is attributed to COVID-19. The outbreak has slowed work on the telescope by prime contractor Northrop Grumman in Southern California.Another four months of padding was needed in the schedule to meet the new launch date, officials said, and lessons learned in spacecraft testing made clear just how much more time was needed. A critical acoustic and vibration test, for instance, is planned on the fully assembled telescope next month. Technicians also want to reopen and refold Webb\u2019s massive sun shield \u2014 the size of a tennis court \u2014 once more. The sun shield is needed to keep the infrared telescope cold once in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA plans to ship Webb next summer to its European launch site in French Guiana \u2014 Europe\u2019s contribution to the mission.\u201cOf course, it\u2019s hard to predict a year plus from now how things will be here and there,\u201d said program director Gregory Robinson.Set to soar on an European Ariane rocket, Webb is destined for a point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, well beyond astronauts\u2019 reach. The orbiting Hubble, by contrast, was repeatedly serviced by shuttle astronauts following its 1990 launch. It\u2019s expected to continue working into the 2030s, officials said Thursday.NASA wants an overlap in operations between Hubble and Webb. The new telescope, once launched, will look at many of the same things Hubble has \u2014 and will.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFor me, it will be seeing old friends with completely new eyes,\u201d said program scientist Eric Smith.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of launch delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues",
        "author": "Marcia Dunn\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues (WP: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1528",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/nasas-hubble-successor-delayed-again-by-virus-other-issues/2020/07/16/eee068e2-c7b3-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues.Officials announced Thursday that the James Webb Space Telescope \u2014 the space agency\u2019s top science priority \u2014 is now scheduled to launch on Oct. 31, 2021. The previous target date was March 2021. FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightThis next-generation observatory \u2014 designed to peer farther into space and further back into time than any other spacecraft \u2014 originally was supposed to fly more than a decade ago. The previous two-year-plus delay, announced in 2018, was due to worker error and hardware problems. Until COVID-19 struck, everything was finally going well, officials said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMission success is critical, but team safety is our highest priority,\u201d said NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk.AdvertisementNASA stressed that the costs stemming from the latest postponement will not exceed the $8.8 billion spending cap for development set by Congress. Budget reserves set aside two years ago during the last major assessment will cover any additional expenses, said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency\u2019s science mission chief.Nearly half the delay, about three months, is attributed to COVID-19. The outbreak has slowed work on the telescope by prime contractor Northrop Grumman in Southern California.Another four months of padding was needed in the schedule to meet the new launch date, officials said, and lessons learned in spacecraft testing made clear just how much more time was needed. A critical acoustic and vibration test, for instance, is planned on the fully assembled telescope next month. Technicians also want to reopen and refold Webb\u2019s massive sun shield \u2014 the size of a tennis court \u2014 once more. The sun shield is needed to keep the infrared telescope cold once in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA plans to ship Webb next summer to its European launch site in French Guiana \u2014 Europe\u2019s contribution to the mission.\u201cOf course, it\u2019s hard to predict a year plus from now how things will be here and there,\u201d said program director Gregory Robinson.Set to soar on an European Ariane rocket, Webb is destined for a point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, well beyond astronauts\u2019 reach. The orbiting Hubble, by contrast, was repeatedly serviced by shuttle astronauts following its 1990 launch. It\u2019s expected to continue working into the 2030s, officials said Thursday.NASA wants an overlap in operations between Hubble and Webb. The new telescope, once launched, will look at many of the same things Hubble has \u2014 and will.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFor me, it will be seeing old friends with completely new eyes,\u201d said program scientist Eric Smith.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of launch delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues",
        "author": "Marcia Dunn\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues (WP: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1529",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/nasas-hubble-successor-delayed-again-by-virus-other-issues/2020/07/16/eee068e2-c7b3-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues.Officials announced Thursday that the James Webb Space Telescope \u2014 the space agency\u2019s top science priority \u2014 is now scheduled to launch on Oct. 31, 2021. The previous target date was March 2021. FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightThis next-generation observatory \u2014 designed to peer farther into space and further back into time than any other spacecraft \u2014 originally was supposed to fly more than a decade ago. The previous two-year-plus delay, announced in 2018, was due to worker error and hardware problems. Until COVID-19 struck, everything was finally going well, officials said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMission success is critical, but team safety is our highest priority,\u201d said NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk.AdvertisementNASA stressed that the costs stemming from the latest postponement will not exceed the $8.8 billion spending cap for development set by Congress. Budget reserves set aside two years ago during the last major assessment will cover any additional expenses, said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency\u2019s science mission chief.Nearly half the delay, about three months, is attributed to COVID-19. The outbreak has slowed work on the telescope by prime contractor Northrop Grumman in Southern California.Another four months of padding was needed in the schedule to meet the new launch date, officials said, and lessons learned in spacecraft testing made clear just how much more time was needed. A critical acoustic and vibration test, for instance, is planned on the fully assembled telescope next month. Technicians also want to reopen and refold Webb\u2019s massive sun shield \u2014 the size of a tennis court \u2014 once more. The sun shield is needed to keep the infrared telescope cold once in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA plans to ship Webb next summer to its European launch site in French Guiana \u2014 Europe\u2019s contribution to the mission.\u201cOf course, it\u2019s hard to predict a year plus from now how things will be here and there,\u201d said program director Gregory Robinson.Set to soar on an European Ariane rocket, Webb is destined for a point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, well beyond astronauts\u2019 reach. The orbiting Hubble, by contrast, was repeatedly serviced by shuttle astronauts following its 1990 launch. It\u2019s expected to continue working into the 2030s, officials said Thursday.NASA wants an overlap in operations between Hubble and Webb. The new telescope, once launched, will look at many of the same things Hubble has \u2014 and will.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFor me, it will be seeing old friends with completely new eyes,\u201d said program scientist Eric Smith.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of launch delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues",
        "author": "Marcia Dunn\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues (WP: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1530",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/nasas-hubble-successor-delayed-again-by-virus-other-issues/2020/07/16/eee068e2-c7b3-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues.Officials announced Thursday that the James Webb Space Telescope \u2014 the space agency\u2019s top science priority \u2014 is now scheduled to launch on Oct. 31, 2021. The previous target date was March 2021. FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightThis next-generation observatory \u2014 designed to peer farther into space and further back into time than any other spacecraft \u2014 originally was supposed to fly more than a decade ago. The previous two-year-plus delay, announced in 2018, was due to worker error and hardware problems. Until COVID-19 struck, everything was finally going well, officials said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMission success is critical, but team safety is our highest priority,\u201d said NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk.AdvertisementNASA stressed that the costs stemming from the latest postponement will not exceed the $8.8 billion spending cap for development set by Congress. Budget reserves set aside two years ago during the last major assessment will cover any additional expenses, said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency\u2019s science mission chief.Nearly half the delay, about three months, is attributed to COVID-19. The outbreak has slowed work on the telescope by prime contractor Northrop Grumman in Southern California.Another four months of padding was needed in the schedule to meet the new launch date, officials said, and lessons learned in spacecraft testing made clear just how much more time was needed. A critical acoustic and vibration test, for instance, is planned on the fully assembled telescope next month. Technicians also want to reopen and refold Webb\u2019s massive sun shield \u2014 the size of a tennis court \u2014 once more. The sun shield is needed to keep the infrared telescope cold once in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA plans to ship Webb next summer to its European launch site in French Guiana \u2014 Europe\u2019s contribution to the mission.\u201cOf course, it\u2019s hard to predict a year plus from now how things will be here and there,\u201d said program director Gregory Robinson.Set to soar on an European Ariane rocket, Webb is destined for a point 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, well beyond astronauts\u2019 reach. The orbiting Hubble, by contrast, was repeatedly serviced by shuttle astronauts following its 1990 launch. It\u2019s expected to continue working into the 2030s, officials said Thursday.NASA wants an overlap in operations between Hubble and Webb. The new telescope, once launched, will look at many of the same things Hubble has \u2014 and will.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFor me, it will be seeing old friends with completely new eyes,\u201d said program scientist Eric Smith.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. The launch of NASA\u2019s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope faces seven more months of launch delay, this time because of the pandemic and technical issues NASA\u2019s Hubble successor delayed again by virus, other issues",
        "author": "Marcia Dunn\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "Salty lake, ponds may be gurgling beneath South Pole on Mars (WP: Health) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1531",
        "date": "2020-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/salty-lake-ponds-may-be-gurgling-beneath-mars-south-pole/2020/09/28/3b8d478a-01cc-11eb-b92e-029676f9ebec_story.html",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 A network of salty ponds may be gurgling beneath Mars\u2019 South Pole alongside a large underground lake, raising the prospect of tiny, swimming Martian life.Italian scientists reported their findings Monday, two years after identifying what they believed to be a large buried lake. They widened their coverage area by a couple hundred miles, using even more data from a radar sounder on the European Space Agency\u2019s Mars Express orbiter. FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightIn the latest study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy, the scientists provide further evidence of this salty underground lake, estimated to be 12 miles to 18 miles (20 kilometers to 30 kilometers) across and buried 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) beneath the icy surface.Story continues below advertisementEven more tantalizing, they\u2019ve also identified three smaller bodies of water surrounding the lake. These ponds appear to be of various sizes and are separate from the main lake.AdvertisementRoughly 4 billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, like Earth. But the red planet eventually morphed into the barren, dry world it remains today.The research team led by Roma Tre University\u2019s Sebastian Emanuel Lauro used a method similar to what\u2019s been used on Earth to detect buried lakes in the Antarctic and Canadian Arctic. They based their findings on more than 100 radar observations by Mars Express from 2010 to 2019; the spacecraft was launched in 2003.All this potential water raises the possibility of microbial life on \u2014 or inside \u2014 Mars. High concentrations of salt are likely keeping the water from freezing at this frigid location, the scientists noted. The surface temperature at the South Pole is an estimated minus 172 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 113 degrees Celsius), and gets gradually warmer with depth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese bodies of water are potentially interesting biologically and \u201cfuture missions to Mars should target this region,\u201d the researchers wrote.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Scientists say they\u2019ve discovered a network of salty ponds beneath the South Pole on Mars Salty lake, ponds may be gurgling beneath South Pole on Mars",
        "author": "Marcia Dunn\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "America\u2019s love-hate relationship with the fidget spinner: Is technology to blame for our restlessness? (WP: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1532",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/05/19/americas-love-hate-relationship-with-the-fidget-spinner-is-technology-to-blame-for-our-restlessness/",
        "text": "You\u2019ve probably seen\u00a0the kid spinning a thing that looks like a miniature alien spaceship on his thumb and wondered what that was all about. Or maybe you\u2019ve noticed a co-worker secretly fiddling with a cube\u00a0with buttons on it under the conference table.FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightThese odd-shaped, oddly addictive objects \u2014 designed to let you channel extra energy into your fingers as you go about your day \u2014 are fidgets. And all of a sudden, it seems, they\u2019re everywhere. Marketers compare the new obsession with Pok\u00e9mon Go or the hula hoops of generations past, but a whole scientific mythology is emerging that makes them\u00a0much more than a simple toy.\u00a0It has to do with the idea that spinning, tapping, clicking, squeezing and bending may be able to increase your focus, relieve stress and alleviate symptoms like anxiety.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey can be very engaging,\u201d says Katherine Isbister, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who is studying the phenomenon. \u201cThere\u2019s a certain kinesthetic characteristic that makes them feel good in the hand.\u201dAdvertisementSome people swear by them, especially when it comes to helping them get through boring or unpleasant tasks. Moms have been known to\u00a0buy them by the\u00a0bag to keep their kids occupied while running errands.\u00a0But the fidgets, especially the spinny kind, are\u00a0also driving a lot of other people crazy.The basic\u00a0three-pronged version, which can be found for about $5 to $7 at local toy stores and for less online, is held\u00a0in between your thumb and index finger. You spin and then let go of one finger so that the fidget balances on the other.\u00a0These come in every color of the rainbow and then some \u2014 camo, tie-dye and, for anyone wanting some bling, rose gold.Story continues below advertisementHundreds of schools across the country have reportedly banned fidgets. Administrators\u00a0at MS 442 in Brooklyn wrote in a recent Facebook post that \u201calthough seeming harmless,\u201d they can pull\u00a0student and staff attention away from class and can even be dangerous if thrown.\u00a0Cristina Bolusi Zawacki, a sixth-grade English teacher, referred\u00a0to them as \u201chelicopters of distraction\u201d in a blog post that went viral.Advertisement\u201cTrust me \u2026 fidget spinners are the effing worst,\u201d she wrote.Kids love those fidget spinner toys. But are they too much of a distraction?And just this week, a parent in Texas\u00a0warned others via Facebook that the gadgets can come apart and pose a choking hazard. Her 10-year-old had swallowed one of the bearings and had to be taken to the hospital, she said.Story continues below advertisementIsbister believes that America\u2019s love-hate relationship with fidgets\u00a0may reflect how human beings have always been creatures who\u00a0occupied our days by doing things with our hands.\u00a0We\u2019ve carved arrows out of sticks, tilled soil for crops, built automobiles. But technology has phased out much hands-on work in recent decades.At the same time, the more scientists look into\u00a0physical activity, the more they are learning that the ways we move our bodies impact neurological functioning. Some theorize that all of us have an\u00a0optimal state of being when we are able to learn, create or perform at our best. This is why mindfulness meditation may be so in vogue and why \u201cbrain breaks\u201d \u2014 stretching, jumping around or other types of exercise \u2014 in between periods of desk-work are now a regular part of the school day in parts\u00a0of\u00a0the country.Could it be, Isbister wondered, that we fidget because we have taken away the \u201cinteresting tactile experiences\u201d of our world as we shift more to using digital devices?Isbister and her collaborator, Michael Karlesky, have been soliciting examples of things people fidget with in a\u00a0Tumblr.\u00a0Contributors report the usual, like hair and paper clips, but there are also some unusual fidgets, including a piece of painted concrete someone picked up.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s little actual science on the gadgets now on the market. But the theories behind why they might\u00a0help you and\u00a0your children do your work\u00a0are intriguing and related to that broader area of study about the effect of physical movement on neurological functioning.One of the only controlled studies on fidgeting involved\u00a0children with\u00a0attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The 2015 study, published in Child Neuropsychology, looked at\u00a044\u00a0school-age boys and girls. Twenty-six had ADHD, and 18 did not.For kids without ADHD, fidgeting didn\u2019t seem to impact performance positively or negatively on a cognitive test. But for those with the disorder, the study showed that the fidgeting appeared to be linked with cognitive performance. The more the children fidgeted, the more accurate their answers. The more they were still, the more answers they got wrong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJulie Schweitzer, a psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor at the University of California at Davis, theorized that moving a lot may actually be beneficial for those children with ADHD, which is why they do it. Hyperactivity may be for them \u201ca mechanism for cognitive self-regulation,\u201d she wrote.In a paper Isbister and Karlesky presented at a 2014 conference, they described the concept of a \u201cphysical margin\u00a0space\u00a0surrounding digital workspaces in which users often physically perform elements of their thinking in the form of\u00a0doodling, fiddling, and fidgeting.\u201d They said\u00a0that \u201cfidget widgets,\u201d as they call them, may help \u201cshape cognitive state to\u00a0support a user\u2019s productivity and creativity in their primary tasks.\u201dThe work of University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who studies attention, distraction and boredom, provides some of the theoretical foundation for Isbister and Karlesky\u2019s hypothesis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLleras explains that fidgeting could be a way of modulating people\u2019s arousal or engagement in an activity. But the relationship isn\u2019t linear; rather, it goes in kind of an inverted U shape. What that means is that an individual\u00a0may be able to use fidgeting (with a fidget device or not) to get themselves\u00a0to a certain level of arousal or engagement that\u2019s good to\u00a0increase their\u00a0performance. But at some point\u00a0too much\u00a0fidgeting can become a liability, which is when performance goes down.\u201cWhen you are perfectly matched to the environment\u00a0and stimulated in the right way, you can do things for hours, like professional athletes,\u201d he says.Lleras\u00a0himself fidgets. Many years ago, he says, he saw someone flicking\u00a0their pen along their thumb so it spun. He thought it was cool and decided to start doing it. He noticed he would do it more during lectures or meetings where he really needed to concentrate hard. \u201cIt would make things more interesting,\u201d he recalled.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe recently purchased his two elementary-age children fidget spinners. However, Lleras says, \u201cI have absolutely no hope it\u2019s going to help them concentrate better. I don\u2019t see them interacting with them in a way that would be a real fidget\u00a0device for homework or in class. For them, it's just a fun toy.\u201dRead more:Fidgeting might be good for your health, new study suggestsMove aside, fidget spinners: The newest kid craze is a sticky substance called slime In past centuries, people worked with their hands all day on building tools and farming. Could fidgets be a way for people now to channel that energy while focusing their minds on cognitive tasks? America\u2019s love-hate relationship with the fidget spinner: Is technology to blame for our restlessness?",
        "author": "Ariana Eunjung Cha"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want to be an astronaut? Europe is recruiting for the first time in 11 years. (WP: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1533",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/want-to-be-an-astronaut-europe-is-recruiting-for-the-first-time-in-11-years/2021/02/19/cd78590a-716b-11eb-93be-c10813e358a2_story.html",
        "text": "Europe is to recruit new astronauts for the first time in 11 years as leading space-faring nations set their sights on missions to the Moon and, eventually, Mars.The European Space Agency (ESA) is looking to add up to 26 permanent and reserve astronauts. It is strongly encouraging women to apply and is looking into how it might add people with disabilities to its roster to boost diversity among crews. FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirusArrowRightBut it won\u2019t be easy to land one of the coveted positions, it warned at a news conference last week.First, ESA expects a \u201cvery high number\u201d of applications to come in during the eight-week recruitment drive from March 31, said Lucy van der Tas, ESA head of talent acquisition.Story continues below advertisementSecond, those whose applications are accepted will undergo a rigorous six-stage selection process that will take until October 2022.Advertisement\u201cCandidates need to be mentally prepared for this process,\u201d van der Tas said.Adapting technology that enabled humans to be in space could open the opportunity for people with disabilities, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti said.\u201cWhen it comes to space travel, we are all disabled,\u201d Cristoforetti added.Human space flight looks set for a revival.After years in which the only launch site for crewed flights to space was Baikonur in the steppes of Kazakhstan, cooperation with private companies like SpaceX has raised prospects for more human missions.Requirements for an astronaut job at ESA include a master\u2019s degree in natural sciences, engineering, mathematics or computer science and three years of postgraduate experience.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great opportunity. .\u2009.\u2009. It will be an opportunity to learn a lot about yourselves,\u201d Cristoforetti said.\n\u2014 Reuters\n The European Space Agency is looking to add up to 26 permanent and reserve astronauts. It is strongly encouraging women to apply. Want to be an astronaut? Europe is recruiting for the first time in 11 years.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Isn\u2019t Keeping Florida Crowds From SpaceX Launch (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1534",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/health/spacex-launch-crowds-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Many beachside hotels along the state\u2019s Space Coast were already at capacity before Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch, a local tourism executive said. Many beachside hotels along the state\u2019s Space Coast were already at capacity before Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch, a local tourism executive said. NASA has urged spectators to stay away from the Kennedy Space Center for Wednesday\u2019s SpaceX launch to limit the spread of the coronavirus. But officials from cities and counties around the launch site, an area known as Florida\u2019s Space Coast, are expecting large crowds to gather to watch the country\u2019s first astronaut launch in nine years.",
        "author": "By Mariel Padilla"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Isn\u2019t Keeping Florida Crowds From SpaceX Launch (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1535",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/health/spacex-launch-crowds-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Many beachside hotels along the state\u2019s Space Coast were already at capacity before Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch, a local tourism executive said. Many beachside hotels along the state\u2019s Space Coast were already at capacity before Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch, a local tourism executive said. NASA has urged spectators to stay away from the Kennedy Space Center for Wednesday\u2019s SpaceX launch to limit the spread of the coronavirus. But officials from cities and counties around the launch site, an area known as Florida\u2019s Space Coast, are expecting large crowds to gather to watch the country\u2019s first astronaut launch in nine years.",
        "author": "By Mariel Padilla"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Isn\u2019t Keeping Florida Crowds From SpaceX Launch (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1536",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/health/spacex-launch-crowds-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Many beachside hotels along the state\u2019s Space Coast were already at capacity before Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch, a local tourism executive said. Many beachside hotels along the state\u2019s Space Coast were already at capacity before Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch, a local tourism executive said. NASA has urged spectators to stay away from the Kennedy Space Center for Wednesday\u2019s SpaceX launch to limit the spread of the coronavirus. But officials from cities and counties around the launch site, an area known as Florida\u2019s Space Coast, are expecting large crowds to gather to watch the country\u2019s first astronaut launch in nine years.",
        "author": "By Mariel Padilla"
    },
    {
        "title": "You\u2019re Getting Very Sleepy. (So Is Everyone Else.) (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1537",
        "date": "2018-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/health/sleep-productivity-economy.html",
        "text": "Fewer people in industrialized countries are getting adequate sleep. Fewer people in industrialized countries are getting adequate sleep. Inadequate sleep causes more than $400 billion in economic losses annually in the United States and results in 1.23 million lost days of work each year, researchers have found. ",
        "author": "By Bilal Choudhry"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We Need Each Other\u2019: Seniors Are Drawn to New Housing Arrangements (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1538",
        "date": "2019-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/health/seniors-housing-sharing-villages.html",
        "text": "Older Americans are exploring housing alternatives, including villages and home-sharing. Older Americans are exploring housing alternatives, including villages and home-sharing. After her husband died, Freda Schaeffer was left on her own in a three-bedroom house in Brooklyn. \u201cI was lonely,\u201d she confessed. And she worried about finances, because \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of expenses in a house.\u201d",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We Need Each Other\u2019: Seniors Are Drawn to New Housing Arrangements (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1539",
        "date": "2019-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/health/seniors-housing-sharing-villages.html",
        "text": "Older Americans are exploring housing alternatives, including villages and home-sharing. Older Americans are exploring housing alternatives, including villages and home-sharing. After her husband died, Freda Schaeffer was left on her own in a three-bedroom house in Brooklyn. \u201cI was lonely,\u201d she confessed. And she worried about finances, because \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of expenses in a house.\u201d",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Not Whether You Were Exposed to the Virus. It\u2019s How Much. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1540",
        "date": "2020-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/health/coronavirus-transmission-dose.html",
        "text": "The pathogen is proving a familiar adage: The dose makes the poison. The pathogen is proving a familiar adage: The dose makes the poison. When experts recommend wearing masks, staying at least six feet away from others, washing your hands frequently and avoiding crowded spaces, what they\u2019re really saying is: Try to minimize the amount of virus you encounter.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why False Positives Merit Concern, Too (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1541",
        "date": "2020-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/health/coronavirus-testing-false-positive.html",
        "text": "False negatives are not the only troublesome outcome of a faulty coronavirus test. False negatives are not the only troublesome outcome of a faulty coronavirus test. In the high-stakes world of coronavirus testing, one mistake has taken center stage: the dreaded false negative, wherein a test mistakenly deems an infected person to be virus-free.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We Learned in 2019: Health and Medicine (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1542",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/health/what-we-learned-2019.html",
        "text": "Developments in medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. Developments in medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. It\u2019s not easy to say that any particular development in health or medicine was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we would opt for these unforgettable events and findings. ",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We Learned in 2018: Health and Medicine (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1543",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/health/what-we-learned-2018.html",
        "text": "Developments in medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. Developments in medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. It\u2019s not easy to say that any particular development in health or medicine was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we\u2019d opt for these unforgettable events and findings. ",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "In the W.H.O.\u2019s Coronavirus Stumbles, Some Scientists See a Pattern (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1544",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-world-health-organization.html",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s advice sometimes lags behind rapidly evolving research into the coronavirus, experts contend. The agency\u2019s advice sometimes lags behind rapidly evolving research into the coronavirus, experts contend. Even as the World Health Organization leads the worldwide response to the coronavirus pandemic, the agency is failing to take stock of rapidly evolving research findings and to communicate clearly about them, several scientists warned on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "In the W.H.O.\u2019s Coronavirus Stumbles, Some Scientists See a Pattern (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1545",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-world-health-organization.html",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s advice sometimes lags behind rapidly evolving research into the coronavirus, experts contend. The agency\u2019s advice sometimes lags behind rapidly evolving research into the coronavirus, experts contend. Even as the World Health Organization leads the worldwide response to the coronavirus pandemic, the agency is failing to take stock of rapidly evolving research findings and to communicate clearly about them, several scientists warned on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Getting One Vaccine Is Good. How About Mix-and-Match? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1546",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/health/coronavirus-vaccine-astrazeneca-pfizer.html",
        "text": "Researchers are exploring the possible benefits of pairing doses from two different Covid-19 vaccines. Researchers are exploring the possible benefits of pairing doses from two different Covid-19 vaccines. In January, Britain made a change to its vaccine guidelines that shocked many health experts: If the second dose of one vaccine wasn\u2019t available, patients could be given a different one.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Bus Ride Turned Into a Coronavirus Superspreader Event (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1547",
        "date": "2020-09-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/health/coronavirus-bus-china.html",
        "text": "One-third of passengers aboard a bus were infected by a fellow passenger, scientists reported. One-third of passengers aboard a bus were infected by a fellow passenger, scientists reported. In late January, as the new coronavirus was beginning to spread from China\u2019s Hubei Province, a group of lay Buddhists traveled by bus to a temple ceremony in the city of Ningbo \u2014 hundreds of miles from Wuhan, center of the epidemic.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Swiss Cheese Model of Pandemic Defense (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1548",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/coronavirus-swiss-cheese-infection-mackay.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s not edible, but it can save lives. The virologist Ian Mackay explains how. It\u2019s not edible, but it can save lives. The virologist Ian Mackay explains how. Lately, in the ongoing conversation about how to defeat the coronavirus, experts have made reference to the \u201cSwiss cheese model\u201d of pandemic defense.",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Battle of the Thermostat\u2019: Cold Rooms May Hurt Women\u2019s Productivity (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1549",
        "date": "2019-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/health/women-temperature-tests.html",
        "text": "In a new study, women scored better on tests they took in warmer rooms. In a new study, women scored better on tests they took in warmer rooms. It is a truth universally acknowledged \u2014 or at least, much discussed on social media \u2014 that a woman who works in an office is in want of a sweater.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Battle Plan for a War on Rare Diseases (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1550",
        "date": "2018-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/health/matthew-might-rare-diseases.html",
        "text": "Dr. Matthew Might is developing a strategy for people seeking treatments for little-known ailments. Dr. Matthew Might is developing a strategy for people seeking treatments for little-known ailments. A decade ago, when their son Bertrand was still an infant, Matthew Might and his wife, Cristina, realized that there was something terribly wrong.",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Navigate Your Community Reopening? Remember the Four C\u2019s (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1551",
        "date": "2020-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/health/virus-reopenings.html",
        "text": "Close contact, confined spaces, crowds, choices \u2014 these are the considerations to ponder now. Close contact, confined spaces, crowds, choices \u2014 these are the considerations to ponder now. When the country was largely under lockdown, at least the rules were mostly clear. Essential workers ventured out; everyone else sheltered in. Bars and restaurants were closed except for dining out; hair salons and spas were shuttered. Outings were limited to the supermarket or the drugstore.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Navigate Your Community Reopening? Remember the Four C\u2019s (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1552",
        "date": "2020-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/health/virus-reopenings.html",
        "text": "Close contact, confined spaces, crowds, choices \u2014 these are the considerations to ponder now. Close contact, confined spaces, crowds, choices \u2014 these are the considerations to ponder now. When the country was largely under lockdown, at least the rules were mostly clear. Essential workers ventured out; everyone else sheltered in. Bars and restaurants were closed except for dining out; hair salons and spas were shuttered. Outings were limited to the supermarket or the drugstore.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Summer camp advice \u2014 keep masks and distancing \u2014 gets an update from the C.D.C. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1553",
        "date": "2021-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/25/health/covid-summercamp-cdc.html",
        "text": "The updated guidance was issued just weeks before many U.S. camps resume operations in mid-May. The updated guidance was issued just weeks before many U.S. camps resume operations in mid-May. Children going to camp this summer can be within three feet of peers in the same-group settings, but they must wear masks at all times, federal health officials say. The only times children should remove their masks is when they are swimming, napping, eating or drinking; they should be spaced far apart for these activities, positioned head to toe for naps and seated at least six feet apart for meals, snacks and water breaks.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Reopen Offices Safely (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1554",
        "date": "2021-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/health/coronavirus-reopening-office.html",
        "text": "Flush the taps, focus on indoor air quality and consider getting creative about staff schedules. Flush the taps, focus on indoor air quality and consider getting creative about staff schedules. For the last 15 months, many American offices sat essentially empty. Conference rooms and cubicles went unused, elevators uncalled, files untouched. Whiteboards became time capsules. Succulents had to fend for themselves.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Short Answers to Hard Questions About Health Threats From Hurricane Harvey (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1555",
        "date": "2017-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/health/hurricane-harvey-health.html",
        "text": "Can you get a bacterial infection from the floodwaters? Is the drinking water supply safe? Can you get a bacterial infection from the floodwaters? Is the drinking water supply safe? The devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston has brought a host of health questions from residents of the area and concerned relatives and friends. Here are some answers to common questions showing up in Google searches and on Facebook.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan and Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Short Answers to Hard Questions About Health Threats From Hurricane Harvey (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1556",
        "date": "2017-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/health/hurricane-harvey-health.html",
        "text": "Can you get a bacterial infection from the floodwaters? Is the drinking water supply safe? Can you get a bacterial infection from the floodwaters? Is the drinking water supply safe? The devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston has brought a host of health questions from residents of the area and concerned relatives and friends. Here are some answers to common questions showing up in Google searches and on Facebook.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan and Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Early Signals of Dementia in Driving and Credit Scores (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1557",
        "date": "2021-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/health/dementia-behavior-alzheimers.html",
        "text": "The pathologies underlying brain decline can begin years before symptoms emerge. Can everyday behavior provide warning? The pathologies underlying brain decline can begin years before symptoms emerge. Can everyday behavior provide warning? Learning your odds of eventually developing dementia \u2014 a pressing concern for many, especially those with a family history of it \u2014 requires medical testing and counseling. But what if everyday behavior, like overlooking a couple of credit card payments or habitually braking while driving, could foretell your risk?",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Early Signals of Dementia in Driving and Credit Scores (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1558",
        "date": "2021-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/health/dementia-behavior-alzheimers.html",
        "text": "The pathologies underlying brain decline can begin years before symptoms emerge. Can everyday behavior provide warning? The pathologies underlying brain decline can begin years before symptoms emerge. Can everyday behavior provide warning? Learning your odds of eventually developing dementia \u2014 a pressing concern for many, especially those with a family history of it \u2014 requires medical testing and counseling. But what if everyday behavior, like overlooking a couple of credit card payments or habitually braking while driving, could foretell your risk?",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "C.D.C. Closes Some Offices Over Bacteria Discovery (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1559",
        "date": "2020-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/health/cdc-legionnaires-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "The move highlights the risk of Legionnaires\u2019 disease outbreaks when buildings are reopened after coronavirus lockdowns. The move highlights the risk of Legionnaires\u2019 disease outbreaks when buildings are reopened after coronavirus lockdowns. The nation\u2019s foremost public health agency is learning that it is not immune to the complex effects of the coronavirus pandemic.",
        "author": "By Max Horberry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tuberculosis, Like Covid, Spreads by Breathing, Scientists Report (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1560",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/health/tuberculosis-transmission-aerosols.html",
        "text": "The finding upends conventional wisdom regarding coughing, long thought to be the main route of transmission. The finding upends conventional wisdom regarding coughing, long thought to be the main route of transmission. Upending centuries of medical dogma, a team of South African researchers has found that breathing may be a bigger contributor to the spread of tuberculosis than coughing, the signature symptom.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Not Just Pre-Existing Conditions. Voters Weigh Many Health Issues on State Ballots (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1561",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/health/health-ballot-states-midterms.html",
        "text": "Referendums include issues from Medicaid expansion to abortion, dialysis costs to indoor vaping, and much more. Referendums include issues from Medicaid expansion to abortion, dialysis costs to indoor vaping, and much more. Health care has been a dominant issue on the campaign trail this fall, with voters particularly worried about continuing insurance protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions. But on Election Day, they will decide a number of other important health care questions for their states through ballot initiatives.",
        "author": "By Abby Goodnough and Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Not Just Pre-Existing Conditions. Voters Weigh Many Health Issues on State Ballots (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1562",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/health/health-ballot-states-midterms.html",
        "text": "Referendums include issues from Medicaid expansion to abortion, dialysis costs to indoor vaping, and much more. Referendums include issues from Medicaid expansion to abortion, dialysis costs to indoor vaping, and much more. Health care has been a dominant issue on the campaign trail this fall, with voters particularly worried about continuing insurance protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions. But on Election Day, they will decide a number of other important health care questions for their states through ballot initiatives.",
        "author": "By Abby Goodnough and Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond Biden: How Close Is Too Close? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1563",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/health/psychology-metoo-biden.html",
        "text": "Psychologists have studied personal space and physical contact for decades. Here's why people get so uncomfortable. Psychologists have studied personal space and physical contact for decades. Here's why people get so uncomfortable. On Wednesday, the former vice president and potential presidential candidate Joe Biden released a video in which he discussed the importance of personal space. \u201cSocial norms have begun to change,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ve shifted, and boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset \u2014 and I get it.\u201d",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is the Future of the Pandemic (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1564",
        "date": "2020-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/health/coronavirus-pandemic-curve-scenarios.html",
        "text": "Covid-19 isn\u2019t going away soon. Two recent studies mapped out the possible shapes of its trajectory. Covid-19 isn\u2019t going away soon. Two recent studies mapped out the possible shapes of its trajectory. By now we know \u2014 contrary to false predictions \u2014 that the novel coronavirus will be with us for a rather long time.",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Medical Class \u2018Minted by the Pandemic\u2019 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1565",
        "date": "2020-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/health/medical-school-coronavirus-students.html",
        "text": "Across the nation, medical students are graduating directly into the path of an epic health crisis. Across the nation, medical students are graduating directly into the path of an epic health crisis. Preparations for the Cadaver Ball, at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, begin in the fall. Radial Grooves, an a cappella group, selects two songs to perform; the campus hip-hop and bhangra groups choreograph routines. This year\u2019s theme was the \u201cRoaring 2020s,\u201d which was a relief to the class president, Varun Menon, because it meant that the only costume he needed was a tuxedo. (Last year\u2019s class president had the unfortunate task of tracking down a full P.T. Barnum get-up, when the theme was \u201cThe Greatest Show.\u201d)",
        "author": "By Emma Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Coronavirus Patients Betrayed by Their Own Immune Systems (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1566",
        "date": "2020-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-cytokine-storm-immune-system.html",
        "text": "A \u201ccytokine storm\u201d becomes an all-too-frequent phenomenon, particularly among the young. But treatments are being tested. A \u201ccytokine storm\u201d becomes an all-too-frequent phenomenon, particularly among the young. But treatments are being tested. The 42-year-old man arrived at a hospital in Paris on March 17 with a fever, cough and the \u201cground glass opacities\u201d in both lungs that are a trademark of infection with the new coronavirus.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dad Got the Vaccine, but No One Else Did \u2014 Yet (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1567",
        "date": "2020-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/health/covid-vaccine-health-workers-families.html",
        "text": "Vaccinated health workers must navigate another new normal: households in which not all family members are immunized. Vaccinated health workers must navigate another new normal: households in which not all family members are immunized. On the morning of Dec. 16, the threat of a Virginia snowstorm canceled school for 7-year-old Alain Bell. He instead spent the morning scribbling a scowling face in black marker onto his father\u2019s newly vaccinated upper arm.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Delta Variant: What Scientists Know (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1568",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/health/delta-variant-covid.html",
        "text": "The variant is spreading rapidly worldwide and fueling new outbreaks in the U.S., mainly among the unvaccinated. The variant is spreading rapidly worldwide and fueling new outbreaks in the U.S., mainly among the unvaccinated. The spread of the super-contagious Delta variant has prompted new restrictions around the world and spurred stark new warnings from public health officials.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Laurie Santos Says Self-Care Doesn\u2019t Have to Be Selfish (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1569",
        "date": "2020-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/health/laurie-santos-covid-happiness.html",
        "text": "The expert in positive psychology has a few simple ideas for sustaining mental well-being as Covid-19 continues. The expert in positive psychology has a few simple ideas for sustaining mental well-being as Covid-19 continues. Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast, is a leading expert in positive psychology, a relatively young field. Since she began teaching \u201cThe Science of Well-Being\u201d in 2018, it has become the most popular course in Yale\u2019s history, with nearly a quarter of students enrolling. The class, now online for free, applies what Dr. Santos calls a \u201cpreventative medicine approach\u201d to mental health \u2014 harnessing science and evidence to help people lead more fulfilling lives.",
        "author": "By Hope Reese"
    },
    {
        "title": "C.D.C. Calls on Schools to Reopen, Downplaying Health Risks (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1570",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/health/cdc-schools-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s statement followed earlier criticism from President Trump that its guidelines for reopening were too \u201ctough.\u201d The agency\u2019s statement followed earlier criticism from President Trump that its guidelines for reopening were too \u201ctough.\u201d WASHINGTON \u2014 The nation\u2019s top public health agency issued a full-throated call to reopen schools in a statement that aligned with President Trump\u2019s pressure on communities, listing numerous benefits of being in school and downplaying the potential health risks.",
        "author": "By Abby Goodnough"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Proposes Ways to Improve Care for Kidney Disease and Increase Transplants (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1571",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/health/trump-kidney-disease-transplant.html",
        "text": "The administration set ambitious goals to move people out of traditional dialysis and to encourage organ donations. The administration set ambitious goals to move people out of traditional dialysis and to encourage organ donations. President Trump issued a sweeping set of proposals aimed at improving medical care for the tens of millions of Americans who have kidney disease, a long-overlooked condition that kills more people than breast cancer.",
        "author": "By Reed Abelson and Katie Thomas"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Know About Breakthrough Infections and the Delta Variant (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1572",
        "date": "2021-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/covid-breakthrough-delta-variant.html",
        "text": "Scientific understanding of the coronavirus variant is changing quickly. Here\u2019s a recap of the most important findings. Scientific understanding of the coronavirus variant is changing quickly. Here\u2019s a recap of the most important findings. Citing new evidence that vaccinated Americans with so-called breakthrough infections can carry as much coronavirus as unvaccinated people do, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month urged residents of high-transmission areas to wear masks in public indoor spaces, regardless of their vaccination status.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018They See Us as the Enemy\u2019: School Nurses Battle Covid-19, and Angry Parents (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1573",
        "date": "2021-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/13/health/coronavirus-school-nurses.html",
        "text": "School nurses, who were already stretched thin before the pandemic, say that they are overworked and overwhelmed. School nurses, who were already stretched thin before the pandemic, say that they are overworked and overwhelmed. When a junior high school student in western Oregon tested positive for the coronavirus last month, Sherry McIntyre, a school nurse, quarantined two dozen of the student\u2019s football teammates. The players had spent time together in the locker room unmasked, and, according to local guidelines, they could not return to school for at least 10 days.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hot New Back-to-School Accessory? An Air Quality Monitor. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1574",
        "date": "2021-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/health/coronavirus-ventilation-carbon-dioxide.html",
        "text": "Parents are sneaking carbon dioxide monitors into their children\u2019s schools to determine whether the buildings are safe. Parents are sneaking carbon dioxide monitors into their children\u2019s schools to determine whether the buildings are safe. When Lizzie Rothwell, an architect in Philadelphia, sent her son to third grade this fall, she stocked his blue L.L. Bean backpack with pencils, wide-ruled paper \u2014 and a portable carbon dioxide monitor.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Mexico, Childbirth in Covid\u2019s Shadow (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1575",
        "date": "2020-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/health/mexico-coronavirus-birth-pregnancy-midwives.html",
        "text": "Midwives and doctors struggle to help women give birth safely during the grim days of the pandemic. Midwives and doctors struggle to help women give birth safely during the grim days of the pandemic. Rafaela L\u00f3pez Ju\u00e1rez was determined that if she ever had another child, she would try to give birth at home with a trusted midwife, surrounded by family. Her first birth at a hospital had been a traumatic ordeal, and her perspective changed drastically afterward, when she trained to become a professional midwife.",
        "author": "By Janet Jarman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Psychiatrist Will See You Online Now (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1576",
        "date": "2020-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/health/virtual-therapy-psychiatry-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Experts have long predicted that psychotherapy was poised to go virtual. The pandemic may prove them right. Experts have long predicted that psychotherapy was poised to go virtual. The pandemic may prove them right. For about two years, Michael Raymos made the drive from Modesto, Calif., to Sacramento and back for therapy, and for the therapist, who could listen to stories of childhood abuse and gently unwind their hold on the present. Those regular office sessions, at a clinic at the University of California, Davis, created a strong bond, and Mr. Raymos came to rely on them to manage symptoms of post-traumatic stress and the emotional weight of a neurodegenerative disorder that struck him in 2012, in the prime of adulthood.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Some Teens, It\u2019s Been a Year of Anxiety and Trips to the E.R. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1577",
        "date": "2021-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/health/coronavirus-mental-health-teens.html",
        "text": "During the pandemic, suicidal thinking is up. And families find that hospitals can\u2019t handle adolescents in crisis. During the pandemic, suicidal thinking is up. And families find that hospitals can\u2019t handle adolescents in crisis. When the pandemic first hit the Bay Area last spring, Ann thought that her son, a 17-year-old senior, was finally on track to finish high school. He had kicked a heavy marijuana habit and was studying in virtual classes while school was closed.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Some Coronavirus Patients Show Signs of Brain Ailments (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1578",
        "date": "2020-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-stroke-seizures-confusion.html",
        "text": "Doctors have observed neurological symptoms, including confusion, stroke and seizures, in a small subset of Covid-19 patients. Doctors have observed neurological symptoms, including confusion, stroke and seizures, in a small subset of Covid-19 patients. Neurologists around the world say that a small subset of patients with Covid-19 are developing serious impairments of the brain.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Some Coronavirus Patients Show Signs of Brain Ailments (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1579",
        "date": "2020-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-stroke-seizures-confusion.html",
        "text": "Doctors have observed neurological symptoms, including confusion, stroke and seizures, in a small subset of Covid-19 patients. Doctors have observed neurological symptoms, including confusion, stroke and seizures, in a small subset of Covid-19 patients. Neurologists around the world say that a small subset of patients with Covid-19 are developing serious impairments of the brain.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lovers Share Colonies of Skin Microbes, Study Finds (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1580",
        "date": "2017-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/health/microbes-couples-cohabitation.html",
        "text": "Couples who live together come to share similar communities of bodily bacteria \u2014 especially on the feet. Couples who live together come to share similar communities of bodily bacteria \u2014 especially on the feet. Couples who live together share a lot of things: beds, bathrooms, food, toiletries. But one thing they might not expect to share? Skin bacteria.",
        "author": "By Aneri Pattani"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Simple Way to Save Lives as Covid-19 Hits Poorer Nations. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1581",
        "date": "2020-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/health/coronavirus-oxygen-africa.html",
        "text": "Aid agencies are scrambling to get oxygen equipment to low-income countries where the coronavirus is rapidly spreading. Aid agencies are scrambling to get oxygen equipment to low-income countries where the coronavirus is rapidly spreading. As the coronavirus pandemic hits more impoverished countries with fragile health care systems, global health authorities are scrambling for supplies of a simple treatment that saves lives: oxygen.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Simple Way to Save Lives as Covid-19 Hits Poorer Nations. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1582",
        "date": "2020-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/health/coronavirus-oxygen-africa.html",
        "text": "Aid agencies are scrambling to get oxygen equipment to low-income countries where the coronavirus is rapidly spreading. Aid agencies are scrambling to get oxygen equipment to low-income countries where the coronavirus is rapidly spreading. As the coronavirus pandemic hits more impoverished countries with fragile health care systems, global health authorities are scrambling for supplies of a simple treatment that saves lives: oxygen.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Progress in Kidney Care Starts at Home (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1583",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/health/kidney-renal-dialysis-elderly.html",
        "text": "A new Medicare program aims to increase the proportion of patients using home dialysis and receiving transplants. A new Medicare program aims to increase the proportion of patients using home dialysis and receiving transplants. Come January, there may be many more people like Mary Prochaska.",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who Can Adopt a Native American Child? A Texas Couple vs. 573 Tribes (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1584",
        "date": "2019-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/health/navajo-children-custody-fight.html",
        "text": "A bitter custody battle threatens affirmative action laws, tribal rights, and the future of one little girl. A bitter custody battle threatens affirmative action laws, tribal rights, and the future of one little girl. FORT WORTH \u2014 The 3-year-old boy who could upend a 40-year-old law aimed at protecting Native American children barreled into the suburban living room, merrily defying his parents\u2019 prediction that he might be shy. He had a thatch of night-black hair and dark eyes that glowed with mischievous curiosity. As he pumped a stranger\u2019s hand and scampered off to bounce on an indoor trampoline, his Superman cape floated behind him, as if trying to catch up.",
        "author": "By Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to (Literally) Drive the Coronavirus Away (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1585",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/health/coronavirus-transmission-cars.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the transmission risk inside a car? An airflow study offers some insight for passengers and drivers alike. What\u2019s the transmission risk inside a car? An airflow study offers some insight for passengers and drivers alike. Over the past year, as the health authorities have tried to curb the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers have trained their scientific attention on a variety of potentially risky environments: places where large groups of people gather and the novel coronavirus has ample opportunity to spread. They have swabbed surfaces on cruise ships, tracked case numbers in gyms, sampled ventilation units in hospitals, mapped seating arrangements in restaurants and modeled boarding procedures in airplanes.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to (Literally) Drive the Coronavirus Away (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1586",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/health/coronavirus-transmission-cars.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the transmission risk inside a car? An airflow study offers some insight for passengers and drivers alike. What\u2019s the transmission risk inside a car? An airflow study offers some insight for passengers and drivers alike. Over the past year, as the health authorities have tried to curb the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers have trained their scientific attention on a variety of potentially risky environments: places where large groups of people gather and the novel coronavirus has ample opportunity to spread. They have swabbed surfaces on cruise ships, tracked case numbers in gyms, sampled ventilation units in hospitals, mapped seating arrangements in restaurants and modeled boarding procedures in airplanes.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018How Did We Not Know?\u2019 Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1587",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/health/suicide-guns-prevention.html",
        "text": "The toll of self-inflicted gun deaths has led to an unusual alliance between suicide-prevention advocates and gun-rights proponents. The toll of self-inflicted gun deaths has led to an unusual alliance between suicide-prevention advocates and gun-rights proponents. SPOKANE, Wash. \u2014 Shanna Torp has never been uneasy around guns. Her father, a retired trucker, kept a gun in the cab when he was on the road. When Ms. Torp, a debt collector from Post Falls, Idaho, goes camping, she takes a rifle to ward off cougars and bears.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "No More Than 10 People in One Place, Trump Said. But Why? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1588",
        "date": "2020-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/health/coronavirus-social-distancing-crowd-size.html",
        "text": "The recommendations of federal agencies and other jurisdictions for limiting crowd sizes have varied widely in recent days. The recommendations of federal agencies and other jurisdictions for limiting crowd sizes have varied widely in recent days. As the new coronavirus continues to spread, state and local governments are shutting down schools and businesses and setting limits on the sizes of public gatherings. The latest recommendation announced Monday by the federal government to promote social distancing and limit the transmission of the coronavirus: no more than 10 people in one place.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Mental Distress Comes Home (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1589",
        "date": "2020-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-mental-health.html",
        "text": "The pandemic has closed many mental-health residential centers, sending residents home to families ill equipped for the challenges. The pandemic has closed many mental-health residential centers, sending residents home to families ill equipped for the challenges. The panic spirals up from somewhere in Connor Langan\u2019s midsection, and so quickly that his face changes; wild in the eyes, his upper lip trembling, he sometimes punches a wall in frustration. Such episodes resulted in Connor, 17, being placed on leave from high school late last year, and in early March he agreed to enroll at Mountain Valley, a New Hampshire residential program well known for addressing anxiety problems in young people.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Daily Coronavirus Testing at Home? Many Experts Are Skeptical (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1590",
        "date": "2020-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/health/coronavirus-rapid-test.html",
        "text": "The buzzy idea is impractical, critics said. And there isn\u2019t yet real-world data to show it will work. The buzzy idea is impractical, critics said. And there isn\u2019t yet real-world data to show it will work. Over the past few weeks, a Harvard scientist has made headlines for a bold idea to curb the spread of the coronavirus: rolling out so-called antigen tests, a decades-old underdog in testing technology, to tens of millions of Americans for near-daily, at-home use.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Daily Coronavirus Testing at Home? Many Experts Are Skeptical (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1591",
        "date": "2020-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/health/coronavirus-rapid-test.html",
        "text": "The buzzy idea is impractical, critics said. And there isn\u2019t yet real-world data to show it will work. The buzzy idea is impractical, critics said. And there isn\u2019t yet real-world data to show it will work. Over the past few weeks, a Harvard scientist has made headlines for a bold idea to curb the spread of the coronavirus: rolling out so-called antigen tests, a decades-old underdog in testing technology, to tens of millions of Americans for near-daily, at-home use.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tim Ferriss, the Man Who Put His Money Behind Psychedelic Medicine (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1592",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/health/ferriss-psychedelic-drugs-depression.html",
        "text": "The author of \u201cThe 4-Hour Workweek\u201d is behind a surge in funding for clinical research into psychedelic drugs. The author of \u201cThe 4-Hour Workweek\u201d is behind a surge in funding for clinical research into psychedelic drugs. The announcement on Wednesday that Johns Hopkins Medicine was starting a new center to study psychedelic drugs for mental disorders was the latest chapter in a decades-long push by health nonprofits and wealthy donors to shake up psychiatry from the outside, bypassing the usual channels.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tim Ferriss, the Man Who Put His Money Behind Psychedelic Medicine (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1593",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/health/ferriss-psychedelic-drugs-depression.html",
        "text": "The author of \u201cThe 4-Hour Workweek\u201d is behind a surge in funding for clinical research into psychedelic drugs. The author of \u201cThe 4-Hour Workweek\u201d is behind a surge in funding for clinical research into psychedelic drugs. The announcement on Wednesday that Johns Hopkins Medicine was starting a new center to study psychedelic drugs for mental disorders was the latest chapter in a decades-long push by health nonprofits and wealthy donors to shake up psychiatry from the outside, bypassing the usual channels.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Parents Need to Know About the C.D.C.\u2019s Covid School Guidelines (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1594",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/health/cdc-schools-guidelines-parents.html",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s advice on distancing, masks and vaccination brings the coming school year a bit more into focus. The agency\u2019s advice on distancing, masks and vaccination brings the coming school year a bit more into focus. With less than a month to go before many schools begin reopening for the fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday released new guidelines for preventing Covid-19 transmission in schools.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes and Sarah Mervosh"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Riot Amid a Pandemic: Did the Virus, Too, Storm the Capitol? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1595",
        "date": "2021-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/health/coronavirus-capitol-riot.html",
        "text": "Some scientists fear that the mayhem on Capitol Hill may prove to have been a so-called super-spreading event. Some scientists fear that the mayhem on Capitol Hill may prove to have been a so-called super-spreading event. The mob that stormed the Capitol on Wednesday did not just threaten the heart of American democracy. To scientists who watched dismayed as the scenes unfolded on television, the throngs of unmasked intruders who wandered through hallways and into private offices may also have transformed the riot into a super-spreader event.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1596",
        "date": "2020-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-restrictions-us.html",
        "text": "Scientists who have fought pandemics describe difficult measures needed to defend the United States against a fast-moving pathogen. Scientists who have fought pandemics describe difficult measures needed to defend the United States against a fast-moving pathogen. Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1597",
        "date": "2020-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/health/coronavirus-restrictions-us.html",
        "text": "Scientists who have fought pandemics describe difficult measures needed to defend the United States against a fast-moving pathogen. Scientists who have fought pandemics describe difficult measures needed to defend the United States against a fast-moving pathogen. Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1598",
        "date": "2017-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effects.html",
        "text": "Research on Russian cosmonauts suggests that salt makes you hungry but not thirsty, and may help burn calories. Research on Russian cosmonauts suggests that salt makes you hungry but not thirsty, and may help burn calories. The salt equation taught to doctors for more than 200 years is not hard to understand.",
        "author": "By Gina Kolata"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1599",
        "date": "2017-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/salt-health-effects.html",
        "text": "Research on Russian cosmonauts suggests that salt makes you hungry but not thirsty, and may help burn calories. Research on Russian cosmonauts suggests that salt makes you hungry but not thirsty, and may help burn calories. The salt equation taught to doctors for more than 200 years is not hard to understand.",
        "author": "By Gina Kolata"
    },
    {
        "title": "Emerging Coronavirus Variants May Pose Challenges to Vaccines (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1600",
        "date": "2021-01-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/health/coronavirus-variants-immunity.html",
        "text": "Laboratory studies of mutations circulating in South Africa suggest they may dodge some of the body\u2019s immune responses. Laboratory studies of mutations circulating in South Africa suggest they may dodge some of the body\u2019s immune responses. The steady drumbeat of reports about new variants of the coronavirus \u2014 first in Britain, then in South Africa, Brazil and the United States \u2014 has brought a new worry: Will vaccines protect against these altered versions of the virus?",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Doctors Welcome New Depression Drug, Cautiously (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1601",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/health/depression-drugs-ketamine.html",
        "text": "Esketamine, the nasal-spray antidepressant recently approved by the F.D.A., is promising, but using it entails some practical challenges. Esketamine, the nasal-spray antidepressant recently approved by the F.D.A., is promising, but using it entails some practical challenges. Doctors welcomed federal approval this week of a new, fast-acting nasal spray for depression. But also they expressed concerns about its cost and long-term effects, as well as the logistics of administering it in accordance with safety requirements.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "After 6 Months, Important Mysteries About Coronavirus Endure (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1602",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/health/coronavirus-mysteries.html",
        "text": "Times journalists summarize some of the most critical things that scientists and public health officials have yet to understand. Times journalists summarize some of the most critical things that scientists and public health officials have yet to understand. [Follow our live coronavirus pandemic updates.]",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Next Trick: Pulling Coronavirus Out of Thin Air (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1603",
        "date": "2021-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/health/coronavirus-testing-airborne-aerosol-indoor.html",
        "text": "Thermo Fisher Scientific\u2019s new air sampler can help monitor for airborne pathogens, and signals renewed interest in bioaerosol surveillance. Thermo Fisher Scientific\u2019s new air sampler can help monitor for airborne pathogens, and signals renewed interest in bioaerosol surveillance. A decade ago, when the firefighter John Burke earned his master\u2019s degree in health care emergency management, he wrote his thesis on pandemic planning. So when the coronavirus hit last spring, Mr. Burke, now the fire chief in Sandwich, Mass., was ready.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Next Trick: Pulling Coronavirus Out of Thin Air (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1604",
        "date": "2021-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/health/coronavirus-testing-airborne-aerosol-indoor.html",
        "text": "Thermo Fisher Scientific\u2019s new air sampler can help monitor for airborne pathogens, and signals renewed interest in bioaerosol surveillance. Thermo Fisher Scientific\u2019s new air sampler can help monitor for airborne pathogens, and signals renewed interest in bioaerosol surveillance. A decade ago, when the firefighter John Burke earned his master\u2019s degree in health care emergency management, he wrote his thesis on pandemic planning. So when the coronavirus hit last spring, Mr. Burke, now the fire chief in Sandwich, Mass., was ready.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Medical Workers Should Use Respirator Masks, Not Surgical Masks (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1605",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/health/masks-surgical-N95-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "The surgical masks used in risky settings like hospitals offer much less protection against the coronavirus, an analysis found. The surgical masks used in risky settings like hospitals offer much less protection against the coronavirus, an analysis found. A new analysis of 172 studies, funded by the World Health Organization, confirms what scientists have said for months: N95 and other respirator masks are far superior to surgical or cloth masks in protecting essential medical workers against the coronavirus.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Advice on Airborne Virus Transmission Vanishes From C.D.C. Website (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1606",
        "date": "2020-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/health/coronavirus-cdc-aerosols.html",
        "text": "The new guidance, published only on Friday, had acknowledged that fine particles floating in air may spread the virus. The new guidance, published only on Friday, had acknowledged that fine particles floating in air may spread the virus. Just days after publishing significant new guidance on airborne transmission of the coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday withdrew the advice, saying only that it had been \u201cposted in error\u201d on the agency\u2019s website.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Much Nature Is Enough? 120 Minutes a Week, Doctors Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1607",
        "date": "2019-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/health/nature-outdoors-health.html",
        "text": "Researchers have now quantified the ideal amount of time needed to reap the health benefits of the great outdoors. Researchers have now quantified the ideal amount of time needed to reap the health benefits of the great outdoors. It\u2019s a medical fact: Spending time outdoors, especially in green spaces, is good for you. ",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stay 6 Feet Apart, We\u2019re Told. But How Far Can Air Carry Coronavirus? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1608",
        "date": "2020-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/health/coronavirus-six-feet.html",
        "text": "Most of the big droplets travel a mere six feet. The role of tiny aerosols is the \u201ctrillion-dollar question.\u201d Most of the big droplets travel a mere six feet. The role of tiny aerosols is the \u201ctrillion-dollar question.\u201d The rule of thumb, or rather feet, has been to stand six feet apart in public. That\u2019s supposed to be a safe distance if a person nearby is coughing or sneezing and is infected with the novel coronavirus, spreading droplets that may carry virus particles.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh, James Gorman and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Juul Targeted Schools and Youth Camps, House Panel on Vaping Claims (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1609",
        "date": "2019-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/health/juul-teens-vaping.html",
        "text": "Lawmakers grilled company officials about financing programs aimed at appealing to young people that familiarized them with Juul\u2019s products. Lawmakers grilled company officials about financing programs aimed at appealing to young people that familiarized them with Juul\u2019s products. WASHINGTON \u2014 Last summer, with public concern about teenage vaping growing, Juul Labs paid a charter school organization in Baltimore $134,000 to set up a five-week summer camp to teach children healthy lifestyles.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Could the Pandemic Prompt an \u2018Epidemic of Loss\u2019 of Women in the Sciences? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1610",
        "date": "2021-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/health/women-stem-pandemic.html",
        "text": "Even before the pandemic, many female scientists felt unsupported in their fields. Now, some are hitting a breaking point. Even before the pandemic, many female scientists felt unsupported in their fields. Now, some are hitting a breaking point. Like many women during the pandemic, Alisa Stephens found working from home to be a series of wearying challenges.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Black Americans Are Living Longer, C.D.C. Reports (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1611",
        "date": "2017-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/health/black-americans-death-rate-cdc-study.html",
        "text": "Disparities between blacks and whites in death rates and life expectancy are disappearing over time, according to federal researchers. Disparities between blacks and whites in death rates and life expectancy are disappearing over time, according to federal researchers. Black Americans still have a higher death rate over all than whites, but the gap is closing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Gina Kolata"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Does the Coronavirus Variant Spread? Here\u2019s What Scientists Know (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1612",
        "date": "2020-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/health/coronavirus-variant-transmission.html",
        "text": "Contagiousness is the hallmark of the mutated virus surfacing in the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries. Contagiousness is the hallmark of the mutated virus surfacing in the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries. A more contagious form of the coronavirus has begun circulating in the United States.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Novel Way to Combat Covid-19 in Nursing Homes: Strike Teams (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1613",
        "date": "2020-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/health/Covid-nursing-homes.html",
        "text": "Borrowing from a model used for natural disasters, states are sending teams of responders to help facilities with outbreaks. Borrowing from a model used for natural disasters, states are sending teams of responders to help facilities with outbreaks. HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. \u2014 The coronavirus entered Cherry Springs Village quietly, then struck with force. Nearly every staff member and resident of the long-term care facility would become infected.",
        "author": "By Hannah Critchfield"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Novel Way to Combat Covid-19 in Nursing Homes: Strike Teams (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1614",
        "date": "2020-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/health/Covid-nursing-homes.html",
        "text": "Borrowing from a model used for natural disasters, states are sending teams of responders to help facilities with outbreaks. Borrowing from a model used for natural disasters, states are sending teams of responders to help facilities with outbreaks. HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. \u2014 The coronavirus entered Cherry Springs Village quietly, then struck with force. Nearly every staff member and resident of the long-term care facility would become infected.",
        "author": "By Hannah Critchfield"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Can the Covid Masks Finally Come Off? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1615",
        "date": "2021-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/health/covid-mask-mandate.html",
        "text": "Although the end of mask mandates is in sight, restrictions should remain in place through the holidays, experts say. Although the end of mask mandates is in sight, restrictions should remain in place through the holidays, experts say. Amid the turmoil of the last two years \u2014 a period that included a deadly pandemic, mass layoffs, an ugly presidential election and an attack on the United States Capitol \u2014 some of the fiercest political debates in America have been waged over a nearly weightless piece of fabric: the face mask.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Something Bothering You? Tell It to Woebot. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1616",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/health/artificial-intelligence-therapy-woebot.html",
        "text": "When your therapist is a bot, you can reach it at 2 a.m. But will it really understand your problems? When your therapist is a bot, you can reach it at 2 a.m. But will it really understand your problems? \u201cI understand that you\u2019re experiencing a relationship problem, is that right?\u201d",
        "author": "By Karen Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Breakthrough Covid Cases: Uncommon and Often Mild, but Not Always (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1617",
        "date": "2021-08-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/health/covid-breakthrough-infection.html",
        "text": "Vaccination remains the best defense, health experts say. But some infections occur regardless, and can come as a traumatic surprise. Vaccination remains the best defense, health experts say. But some infections occur regardless, and can come as a traumatic surprise. For Moira Smith and her mother, July promised a glimmer of normalcy after months of isolation. The two flew from Alaska to Houston and visited family, celebrating the first birthday of their cousin\u2019s granddaughter. Ms. Smith\u2019s mother bought a patterned pink onesie to give as a gift, and they all snapped photos of the baby\u2019s face smeared with chocolate.",
        "author": "By Emma Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forget Backstage Passes or V.I.P. Bracelets. Vaccination Cards Are the New Ticket. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1618",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/vaccine-requirement-business-perks.html",
        "text": "Tossing their masks, jumping on side-by-side treadmills, sharing peanuts next to fellow sports fans, the vaccinated find special freedoms await. Tossing their masks, jumping on side-by-side treadmills, sharing peanuts next to fellow sports fans, the vaccinated find special freedoms await. At Fort Bragg, soldiers who have gotten their coronavirus vaccines can go to a gym where no masks are required, with no limits on who can work out together. Treadmills are on and zipping, unlike those in 13 other gyms where unvaccinated troops can\u2019t use the machines, everyone must mask up and restrictions remain on how many can bench-press at one time.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Steinhauer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forget Backstage Passes or V.I.P. Bracelets. Vaccination Cards Are the New Ticket. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1619",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/vaccine-requirement-business-perks.html",
        "text": "Tossing their masks, jumping on side-by-side treadmills, sharing peanuts next to fellow sports fans, the vaccinated find special freedoms await. Tossing their masks, jumping on side-by-side treadmills, sharing peanuts next to fellow sports fans, the vaccinated find special freedoms await. At Fort Bragg, soldiers who have gotten their coronavirus vaccines can go to a gym where no masks are required, with no limits on who can work out together. Treadmills are on and zipping, unlike those in 13 other gyms where unvaccinated troops can\u2019t use the machines, everyone must mask up and restrictions remain on how many can bench-press at one time.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Steinhauer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forget Backstage Passes or V.I.P. Bracelets. Vaccination Cards Are the New Ticket. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1620",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/health/vaccine-requirement-business-perks.html",
        "text": "Tossing their masks, jumping on side-by-side treadmills, sharing peanuts next to fellow sports fans, the vaccinated find special freedoms await. Tossing their masks, jumping on side-by-side treadmills, sharing peanuts next to fellow sports fans, the vaccinated find special freedoms await. At Fort Bragg, soldiers who have gotten their coronavirus vaccines can go to a gym where no masks are required, with no limits on who can work out together. Treadmills are on and zipping, unlike those in 13 other gyms where unvaccinated troops can\u2019t use the machines, everyone must mask up and restrictions remain on how many can bench-press at one time.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Steinhauer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Vaccinated People Are Getting \u2018Breakthrough\u2019 Infections (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1621",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/health/coronavirus-breakthrough-infections-delta.html",
        "text": "The vaccines are effective at preventing serious illness and death, but they are not a golden shield against the coronavirus. The vaccines are effective at preventing serious illness and death, but they are not a golden shield against the coronavirus. A wedding in Oklahoma leads to 15 vaccinated guests becoming infected with the coronavirus. Raucous Fourth of July celebrations disperse the virus from Provincetown, Mass., to dozens of places across the country, sometimes carried by fully vaccinated celebrants.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moderna Vaccine Highly Effective in Adolescents, Company Says (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1622",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/health/coronavirus-moderna-vaccine-adolescents.html",
        "text": "The U.S., which has a surplus of vaccines, could soon have two options for teens while many countries face shortages. The U.S., which has a surplus of vaccines, could soon have two options for teens while many countries face shortages. Moderna said on Tuesday that its coronavirus vaccine, authorized only for use in adults, was powerfully effective in 12- to 17-year-olds. In a clinical trial of the vaccine in adolescents, there were no cases of symptomatic Covid-19 among fully vaccinated teens, the company reported in a news release.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Fight Deadly Candida Auris, New York State Proposes New Tactics (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1623",
        "date": "2019-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/health/candida-auris-hospitals-ny.html",
        "text": "The state health department calls on hospitals to do more to fight Candida auris, a mystery germ spreading the globe. The state health department calls on hospitals to do more to fight Candida auris, a mystery germ spreading the globe. New York State health officials are considering rigorous new requirements for hospitals and nursing homes to prevent the spread of a deadly drug-resistant fungus called Candida auris.",
        "author": "By Matt Richtel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Huge Covid-19 Studies Are Retracted After Scientists Sound Alarms (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1624",
        "date": "2020-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/health/coronavirus-hydroxychloroquine.html",
        "text": "The reports, published in two leading journals, were retracted after authors could not verify an enormous database of medical records. The reports, published in two leading journals, were retracted after authors could not verify an enormous database of medical records. The studies, published in renowned scientific journals, produced astounding results and altered the course of research into the coronavirus pandemic.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin and Ellen Gabler"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Shadowy Industry Group Shapes Food Policy Around the World (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1625",
        "date": "2019-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/health/ilsi-food-policy-india-brazil-china.html",
        "text": "The International Life Sciences Institute, with branches in 17 countries, is funded by giants of the food and drug industries. The International Life Sciences Institute, with branches in 17 countries, is funded by giants of the food and drug industries. When the Indian government bowed to powerful food companies last year and postponed its decision to put red warning labels on unhealthy packaged food, officials also sought to placate critics of the delay by creating an expert panel to review the proposed labeling system, which would have gone far beyond what other countries have done in the battle to combat soaring obesity rates.",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vaccinated Americans, Let the Unmasked Gatherings Begin (but Start Small) (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1626",
        "date": "2021-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/health/coronavirus-cdc-vaccinated-guidelines.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C. on Monday released long-awaited advice for immunized people, a glimpse at the next stage of the coronavirus pandemic. The C.D.C. on Monday released long-awaited advice for immunized people, a glimpse at the next stage of the coronavirus pandemic. Federal health officials on Monday told millions of Americans now vaccinated against the coronavirus that they could again embrace a few long-denied freedoms, like gathering in small groups at home without masks or social distancing, offering a hopeful glimpse at the next phase of the pandemic.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "She\u2019s 13, and the Source of a Family\u2019s Covid-19 Outbreak (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1627",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/health/covid-teenagers-infection.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C. and four state health departments described how one girl spread the coronavirus to 11 relatives during a gathering. The C.D.C. and four state health departments described how one girl spread the coronavirus to 11 relatives during a gathering. Adolescents who contract Covid-19 usually do not get as sick as adults and often experience few if any symptoms, but they can spread the novel coronavirus that causes the disease to others.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Searching Tardigrades for Lifesaving Secrets (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1628",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/health/tardigrades-suspended-animation.html",
        "text": "Researchers are drawing inspiration from the proteins that they think let hearty water bears cheat time by decelerating their biology. Researchers are drawing inspiration from the proteins that they think let hearty water bears cheat time by decelerating their biology. There are many instances in medicine when it would be helpful to stop, or greatly slow down, time. Doing so could spare a limb from amputation, prevent paralysis after a stroke or save your life following a heart attack.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Coronavirus Is a Master of Mixing Its Genome, Worrying Scientists (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1629",
        "date": "2021-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/health/covid-variants-genome-recombination.html",
        "text": "New studies underscore how coronaviruses frequently mix their genetic components \u2014 which could contribute to the rise of dangerous variants. New studies underscore how coronaviruses frequently mix their genetic components \u2014 which could contribute to the rise of dangerous variants. In recent weeks, scientists have sounded the alarm about new variants of the coronavirus that carry a handful of tiny mutations, some of which seem to make vaccines less effective.",
        "author": "By Roxanne Khamsi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Doctor, Your Patient Is Waiting. It\u2019s a Red Panda. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1630",
        "date": "2018-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/health/medical-training-zoos.html",
        "text": "Medical students at Harvard take part in an elective with veterinarians, learning about diseases and treatments between animals and humans. Medical students at Harvard take part in an elective with veterinarians, learning about diseases and treatments between animals and humans.  BOSTON \u2014 Hoppy,  a young red panda, was the first patient of the day, carried \u2014  and anesthetized \u2014 into the exam room so he could get a physical. ",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cancer Patients Are Getting Robotic Surgery. There\u2019s No Evidence It\u2019s Better. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1631",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/health/robotic-surgery-cancer.html",
        "text": "High-tech surgical robots aren\u2019t an improvement over traditional operations, the F.D.A. warns. For some patients, the robots may be worse. High-tech surgical robots aren\u2019t an improvement over traditional operations, the F.D.A. warns. For some patients, the robots may be worse. Robotic surgery was never approved for mastectomy or any other cancer-related treatment, but that has hardly deterred doctors in the operating suite. The equipment is widely used to operate on patients with various malignancies, from breast cancer to prostate cancer.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Virus Spread Where Restaurants Reopened or Mask Mandates Were Absent (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1632",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/health/coronavirus-restaurant-dining-masks.html",
        "text": "C.D.C. researchers found that coronavirus infections and death rates rose in U.S. counties permitting in-person dining or not requiring masks. C.D.C. researchers found that coronavirus infections and death rates rose in U.S. counties permitting in-person dining or not requiring masks. Even as officials in Texas and Mississippi lifted statewide mask mandates, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday offered fresh evidence of the importance of face coverings, reporting that mask-wearing mandates were linked to fewer infections with the coronavirus and Covid-19 deaths in counties across the United States.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Coronavirus May Be Adrift in Indoor Air, C.D.C. Acknowledges (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1633",
        "date": "2020-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/health/cdc-coronavirus-airborne-indoor-air.html",
        "text": "After removing guidance from its website acknowledging \u201cairborne\u201d transmission, the agency cited evidence that indoor air can carry virus-laden particles. After removing guidance from its website acknowledging \u201cairborne\u201d transmission, the agency cited evidence that indoor air can carry virus-laden particles. Two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down a statement about airborne transmission of the coronavirus, the agency on Monday replaced it with language citing new evidence that the virus can spread beyond six feet indoors.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Coronavirus Infected Some, but Not All, in a Restaurant (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1634",
        "date": "2020-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/health/airflow-coronavirus-restaurants.html",
        "text": "A limited study by Chinese researchers suggests the role played by air currents in spreading the illness in enclosed spaces. A limited study by Chinese researchers suggests the role played by air currents in spreading the illness in enclosed spaces. In January, at a restaurant in Guangzhou, China, one diner infected with the novel coronavirus but not yet feeling sick appeared to have spread the disease to nine other people. One of the restaurant\u2019s air-conditioners apparently blew the virus particles around the dining room.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Researchers Halt Trials of Promising Sickle Cell Treatment (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1635",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/health/sickle-cell-gene-therapy-bluebird.html",
        "text": "Two patients in a gene therapy study developed cancer years after treatment. It is not clear whether the therapy was responsible. Two patients in a gene therapy study developed cancer years after treatment. It is not clear whether the therapy was responsible. Just when it seemed that a new gene therapy for sickle cell disease was sailing toward success, the company developing the treatment found that two patients now have cancer and halted the trial.",
        "author": "By Gina Kolata"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Viral Epidemic Splintering Into Deadly Pieces (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1636",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/health/coronavirus-future-america.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s not just one coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Now there are many, each requiring its own mix of solutions. There\u2019s not just one coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Now there are many, each requiring its own mix of solutions. Once again, the coronavirus is ascendant. As infections mount across the country, it is dawning on Americans that the epidemic is now unstoppable, and that no corner of the nation will be left untouched.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gregg Gonsalves Blends Activism and Science (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1637",
        "date": "2019-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/gonsalves-aids-actup-epidemiology.html",
        "text": "The former Act Up campaigner is now an epidemiologist \u2014 and MacArthur grantee \u2014 searching for new ways to halt epidemics. The former Act Up campaigner is now an epidemiologist \u2014 and MacArthur grantee \u2014 searching for new ways to halt epidemics. Last fall, the MacArthur Foundation announced their annual \u201cgenius awards.\u201d One name in particular stood out: Gregg Gonsalves, 55, an assistant professor of microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health.",
        "author": "By Claudia Dreifus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gregg Gonsalves Blends Activism and Science (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1638",
        "date": "2019-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/gonsalves-aids-actup-epidemiology.html",
        "text": "The former Act Up campaigner is now an epidemiologist \u2014 and MacArthur grantee \u2014 searching for new ways to halt epidemics. The former Act Up campaigner is now an epidemiologist \u2014 and MacArthur grantee \u2014 searching for new ways to halt epidemics. Last fall, the MacArthur Foundation announced their annual \u201cgenius awards.\u201d One name in particular stood out: Gregg Gonsalves, 55, an assistant professor of microbial diseases at the Yale School of Public Health.",
        "author": "By Claudia Dreifus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s Travail: A Virus That Thrives Indoors (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1639",
        "date": "2020-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/02/health/trump-infected-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "The coronavirus can linger in the air in tiny particles. The president has disdained precautions in a variety of indoor settings. The coronavirus can linger in the air in tiny particles. The president has disdained precautions in a variety of indoor settings. On Saturday, President Trump met with Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the nominee to the Supreme Court, and others in the Oval Office. On Tuesday, he debated former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in an indoor hall, neither with a mask, talking at high volume and often without pause.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Fight Virus in Prisons, C.D.C. Suggests More Screenings (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1640",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/health/coronavirus-prisons-cdc.html",
        "text": "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that detention facilities are hot spots for infection and recommended regular symptom screenings. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that detention facilities are hot spots for infection and recommended regular symptom screenings. Jails and prisons are among the most challenging places to control the outbreak of the coronavirus. Similar to cruise ships and nursing homes, detention facilities have crowded living spaces and shared dining areas, as well as communal bathrooms and a lack of space to isolate infected detainees, all of which makes physical distancing practices difficult to achieve.",
        "author": "By David Waldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Germs in Your Gut Are Talking to Your Brain. Scientists Want to Know What They\u2019re Saying. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1641",
        "date": "2019-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/health/microbiome-brain-behavior-dementia.html",
        "text": "The body\u2019s microbial community may influence the brain and behavior, perhaps even playing a role in dementia, autism and other disorders. The body\u2019s microbial community may influence the brain and behavior, perhaps even playing a role in dementia, autism and other disorders. In 2014 John Cryan, a professor at University College Cork in Ireland, attended a meeting in California about Alzheimer\u2019s disease. He wasn\u2019t an expert on dementia. Instead, he studied the microbiome, the trillions of microbes inside the healthy human body.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is the Coronavirus Getting Better at Airborne Transmission? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1642",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/health/coronavirus-aerosols-airborne.html",
        "text": "The Alpha variant traveled more efficiently in small droplets, two new studies found. The Delta variant may have continued this evolution. The Alpha variant traveled more efficiently in small droplets, two new studies found. The Delta variant may have continued this evolution. Newer variants of the coronavirus like Alpha and Delta are highly contagious, infecting far more people than the original virus. Two new studies offer a possible explanation: The virus is evolving to spread more efficiently through air.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Does Widespread Disinfecting Kill the Coronavirus? It\u2019s Under Debate (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1643",
        "date": "2020-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/health/disinfectant-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Spraying streets and inside buildings might calm a worried public, but it\u2019s too early to know whether such efforts reduce transmission. Spraying streets and inside buildings might calm a worried public, but it\u2019s too early to know whether such efforts reduce transmission. The images are compelling: Fire trucks in Tehran or Manila spray the streets. Amazon tests a disinfectant fog inside a warehouse, hoping to calm workers\u2019 fears and get them back on the job. TV commercials show health care workers cleaning chairs where blood donors sat. Families nervously wipe their mail and newly delivered groceries.",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Genomic Tests Aim to Diagnose Deadly Infections Faster (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1644",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/health/genomic-diagnostic-tests.html",
        "text": "Rapid genomic tests are poised to change the way doctors diagnose and treat infections, but their cost may limit widespread use. Rapid genomic tests are poised to change the way doctors diagnose and treat infections, but their cost may limit widespread use. Ryan Springer\u2019s mystery illness began last summer with a dull ache in his chest. Over the next few days, the symptoms grew more alarming: sharp pain with every breath, a rapid heartbeat and a spiking fever.",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Medical Career, at a Cost: Infertility (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1645",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/health/women-doctors-infertility.html",
        "text": "Physicians are raising awareness of the reproductive toll that work stress, long hours, sleep deprivation and years of training can exact. Physicians are raising awareness of the reproductive toll that work stress, long hours, sleep deprivation and years of training can exact. From the start, Dr. Ariela Marshall, a hematologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, proceeded with the conviction that if she worked harder, longer and better, she would succeed. And she did: She graduated as high school valedictorian, attended an elite university and was accepted into a top medical school.",
        "author": "By Jacqueline Mroz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus May Increase Premature Births, Studies Suggest (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1646",
        "date": "2020-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/health/covid-pregnancy-premature-birth.html",
        "text": "New studies provide more evidence that pregnant women may get severe Covid-19 symptoms and have an increased risk of pregnancy loss. New studies provide more evidence that pregnant women may get severe Covid-19 symptoms and have an increased risk of pregnancy loss. Pregnant women who are infected with the coronavirus and hospitalized are at risk for developing serious complications, and may face an elevated risk for delivering their babies prematurely, according to new studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They may also be at greater risk of losing the pregnancy or having a stillbirth.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Congress Weighs Repeal of Tax Credit for Rare Disease Drugs (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1647",
        "date": "2017-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/health/republican-tax-plan-orphan-drugs-rare-diseases.html",
        "text": "Long untouchable, the incentive for development of orphan drugs is now a Republican target as lawmakers consider a broad tax overhaul. Long untouchable, the incentive for development of orphan drugs is now a Republican target as lawmakers consider a broad tax overhaul. A decades-old tax credit designed to spur cures for rare diseases has been so successful that it\u2019s now become a target in the House Republican tax plan.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas and Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Infections Rise, C.D.C. Urges Some Vaccinated Americans to Wear Masks Again (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1648",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/health/covid-cdc-masks-vaccines-delta-variant.html",
        "text": "In communities with growing caseloads, vaccinated and unvaccinated people should return to wearing masks indoors in public areas, health officials said. In communities with growing caseloads, vaccinated and unvaccinated people should return to wearing masks indoors in public areas, health officials said. Revising a decision made just two months ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday that people vaccinated against the coronavirus should resume wearing masks in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Airborne Coronavirus: What You Should Do Now (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1649",
        "date": "2020-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/health/coronavirus-airborne-aerosols.html",
        "text": "How to protect yourself from a virus that may be floating indoors? Better ventilation, for starters. And keep wearing those masks. How to protect yourself from a virus that may be floating indoors? Better ventilation, for starters. And keep wearing those masks. The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "C.D.C. Traces Covid Outbreaks in Gyms, Urging Stricter Precautions (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1650",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/health/coronavirus-gyms-outbreaks.html",
        "text": "Coronavirus cases at fitness centers in Chicago and Honolulu were linked to carelessness about masks and symptoms, federal health officials found. Coronavirus cases at fitness centers in Chicago and Honolulu were linked to carelessness about masks and symptoms, federal health officials found. Public health officials on Wednesday urged gym-goers to wear masks when they work out and to remain six feet apart, as new research described the rapid spread of coronavirus infections during high-intensity exercise classes at gyms in Honolulu and Chicago.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "One 18-Hour Flight, Four Coronavirus Infections (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1651",
        "date": "2021-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/health/coronavirus-airline-passengers-outbreak.html",
        "text": "An outbreak aboard a September flight from Dubai to New Zealand offers researchers, and airlines, an opportunity to study in-transit contagion. An outbreak aboard a September flight from Dubai to New Zealand offers researchers, and airlines, an opportunity to study in-transit contagion. The millions of airline passengers who traveled over the holidays experienced firsthand the unsettling uncertainties that come with flying during a pandemic. The anxious glances. The awkward semi-distancing. The haphazard mask etiquette, and the absence of regular service.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "One 18-Hour Flight, Four Coronavirus Infections (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1652",
        "date": "2021-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/health/coronavirus-airline-passengers-outbreak.html",
        "text": "An outbreak aboard a September flight from Dubai to New Zealand offers researchers, and airlines, an opportunity to study in-transit contagion. An outbreak aboard a September flight from Dubai to New Zealand offers researchers, and airlines, an opportunity to study in-transit contagion. The millions of airline passengers who traveled over the holidays experienced firsthand the unsettling uncertainties that come with flying during a pandemic. The anxious glances. The awkward semi-distancing. The haphazard mask etiquette, and the absence of regular service.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Antibody Tests: Can You Trust the Results? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1653",
        "date": "2020-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/health/coronavirus-antibody-tests.html",
        "text": "A team of scientists worked around the clock to evaluate 14 antibody tests. A few worked as advertised. Most did not. A team of scientists worked around the clock to evaluate 14 antibody tests. A few worked as advertised. Most did not. The researchers worked around the clock, in shifts of three to five hours, hoping to stave off weariness and keep their minds sharp for the delicate task.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Talking Can Generate Coronavirus Droplets That Linger Up to 14 Minutes (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1654",
        "date": "2020-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-infections.html",
        "text": "A new study shows how respiratory droplets produced during normal conversation may be just as important in transmitting disease, especially indoors. A new study shows how respiratory droplets produced during normal conversation may be just as important in transmitting disease, especially indoors. Coughs or sneezes may not be the only way people transmit infectious pathogens like the novel coronavirus to one another. Talking can also launch thousands of droplets so small they can remain suspended in the air for eight to 14 minutes, according to a new study.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "Talking Can Generate Coronavirus Droplets That Linger Up to 14 Minutes (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1655",
        "date": "2020-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-infections.html",
        "text": "A new study shows how respiratory droplets produced during normal conversation may be just as important in transmitting disease, especially indoors. A new study shows how respiratory droplets produced during normal conversation may be just as important in transmitting disease, especially indoors. Coughs or sneezes may not be the only way people transmit infectious pathogens like the novel coronavirus to one another. Talking can also launch thousands of droplets so small they can remain suspended in the air for eight to 14 minutes, according to a new study.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Chicago, a New Approach to Gay and Bisexual Men With Prostate Cancer (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1656",
        "date": "2021-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/health/prostate-gay-sex-cancer.html",
        "text": "A new clinic focuses on patients left grappling with the aftermath of treatment in ways that are rarely appreciated by doctors. A new clinic focuses on patients left grappling with the aftermath of treatment in ways that are rarely appreciated by doctors. CHICAGO \u2014 Matthew Curtin learned he had prostate cancer after a routine physical examination in October 2019, when test results indicated there was a problem. A biopsy confirmed the news, and doctors told him that surgery to remove his prostate was the best option.",
        "author": "By Steve Kenny"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Vaccine Could Slow Disease That Kills 600 Children a Day (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1657",
        "date": "2017-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/health/rotavirus-vaccine.html",
        "text": "A lower-cost vaccine provides strong protection against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease, and could be particularly useful in poorer countries, researchers said. A lower-cost vaccine provides strong protection against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease, and could be particularly useful in poorer countries, researchers said. A new vaccine against a diarrheal disease that kills about 600 children a day worked well in a large trial in Africa and appears to be a practical way to protect millions of children, scientists said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Juul May Get Billions in Deal With One of World\u2019s Largest Tobacco Companies (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1658",
        "date": "2018-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/health/juul-altria-e-cigarettes.html",
        "text": "A deal between the e-cigarette start-up and Altria, the maker of Marlboros, would create a powerful partnership in marketing and lobbying. A deal between the e-cigarette start-up and Altria, the maker of Marlboros, would create a powerful partnership in marketing and lobbying. E-cigarette maker Juul, which has vowed to make cigarettes obsolete, is near to inking a deal to become business partners with Altria, one of the world\u2019s largest tobacco companies.",
        "author": "By Matt Richtel and Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Small Gatherings Spread the Virus, but Are They Causing the Surge? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1659",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/health/coronavirus-holiday-gatherings.html",
        "text": "Yes, the coronavirus can be transmitted over cocktails and dinners. But these get-togethers may not account for the huge rise in cases. Yes, the coronavirus can be transmitted over cocktails and dinners. But these get-togethers may not account for the huge rise in cases. As states struggle to contain the resurgent coronavirus, many officials are laying the blame on an unexpected source: people gathering with family and friends.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Biggest Monster\u2019 Is Spreading. And It\u2019s Not the Coronavirus. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1660",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/health/coronavirus-tuberculosis-aids-malaria.html",
        "text": "Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people each year. Lockdowns and supply-chain disruptions threaten progress against the disease as well as H.I.V. and malaria. Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people each year. Lockdowns and supply-chain disruptions threaten progress against the disease as well as H.I.V. and malaria. It begins with a mild fever and malaise, followed by a painful cough and shortness of breath. The infection prospers in crowds, spreading to people in close reach. Containing an outbreak requires contact tracing, as well as isolation and treatment of the sick for weeks or months.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Has the Era of Overzealous Cleaning Finally Come to an End? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1661",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygiene-cleaning-surfaces.html",
        "text": "This week, the C.D.C. acknowledged what scientists have been saying for months: The risk of catching the coronavirus from surfaces is low. This week, the C.D.C. acknowledged what scientists have been saying for months: The risk of catching the coronavirus from surfaces is low. When the coronavirus began to spread in the United States last spring, many experts warned of the danger posed by surfaces. Researchers reported that the virus could survive for days on plastic or stainless steel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that if someone touched one of these contaminated surfaces \u2014 and then touched their eyes, nose or mouth \u2014 they could become infected.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Has the Era of Overzealous Cleaning Finally Come to an End? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1662",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-hygiene-cleaning-surfaces.html",
        "text": "This week, the C.D.C. acknowledged what scientists have been saying for months: The risk of catching the coronavirus from surfaces is low. This week, the C.D.C. acknowledged what scientists have been saying for months: The risk of catching the coronavirus from surfaces is low. When the coronavirus began to spread in the United States last spring, many experts warned of the danger posed by surfaces. Researchers reported that the virus could survive for days on plastic or stainless steel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised that if someone touched one of these contaminated surfaces \u2014 and then touched their eyes, nose or mouth \u2014 they could become infected.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ganges Brims With Dangerous Bacteria (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1663",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/health/ganges-drug-resistant-bacteria.html",
        "text": "This sacred river offers clues to the spread of one of the world\u2019s most daunting health problems: germs impervious to common medicines. This sacred river offers clues to the spread of one of the world\u2019s most daunting health problems: germs impervious to common medicines. GANGOTRI, India \u2014 High in the Himalayas, it\u2019s easy to see why the Ganges River is considered sacred.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr. and Poras Chaudhary"
    },
    {
        "title": "Doctors May Have Found Secretive New Organs in the Center of Your Head (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1664",
        "date": "2020-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/health/saliva-glands-new-organs.html",
        "text": "They appear to be a fourth pair of large salivary glands, tucked into the space where the nasal cavity meets the throat. They appear to be a fourth pair of large salivary glands, tucked into the space where the nasal cavity meets the throat. After millenniums of careful slicing and dicing, it might seem as though scientists have figured out human anatomy. A few dozen organs, a couple of hundred bones and connective tissue to tie it all together.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Measles Outbreak Infects 695, Highest Number Since 2000 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1665",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/health/measles-outbreaks-us.html",
        "text": "The outbreak, linked to skepticism about vaccines, has led to extraordinary measures, including $1,000 fines and bans on unvaccinated children in public. The outbreak, linked to skepticism about vaccines, has led to extraordinary measures, including $1,000 fines and bans on unvaccinated children in public. The number of measles cases in the United States has risen to 695, the highest annual number recorded since the disease was declared eliminated in this country in 2000, federal health officials said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Virus Spreads, C.D.C. Draws Up an Urgent Battle Plan (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1666",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/health/coronavirus-cdc-recommendations.html",
        "text": "The multipronged advice, for individuals and state and local officials, may augur a national strategy in the months to come, experts said. The multipronged advice, for individuals and state and local officials, may augur a national strategy in the months to come, experts said. With coronavirus infections soaring across the nation, federal health officials on Friday urged Americans in the most forceful language yet to take steps to protect themselves \u2014 starting with consistent, proper use of masks \u2014 and pressed local governments to adopt 10 public health measures deemed necessary to contain the pandemic.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin and Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Virus Spreads, C.D.C. Draws Up an Urgent Battle Plan (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1667",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/health/coronavirus-cdc-recommendations.html",
        "text": "The multipronged advice, for individuals and state and local officials, may augur a national strategy in the months to come, experts said. The multipronged advice, for individuals and state and local officials, may augur a national strategy in the months to come, experts said. With coronavirus infections soaring across the nation, federal health officials on Friday urged Americans in the most forceful language yet to take steps to protect themselves \u2014 starting with consistent, proper use of masks \u2014 and pressed local governments to adopt 10 public health measures deemed necessary to contain the pandemic.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin and Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plexiglass Barriers Won\u2019t Stop the Virus at the Debate, Experts Warn (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1668",
        "date": "2020-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/health/coronavirus-debate-pence-harris.html",
        "text": "The measures taken to protect Mike Pence, Kamala Harris and others will not prevent airborne transmission, the greatest threat in this setting. The measures taken to protect Mike Pence, Kamala Harris and others will not prevent airborne transmission, the greatest threat in this setting. A box fan, an air filter \u2014 and duct tape to attach them.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Juul Bought Ads Appearing on Cartoon Network and Other Youth Sites, Suit Claims (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1669",
        "date": "2020-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/health/juul-vaping-lawsuit.html",
        "text": "The case, brought by Massachusetts after a lengthy investigation, presents some of the strongest evidence the vaping company was marketing to teenagers. The case, brought by Massachusetts after a lengthy investigation, presents some of the strongest evidence the vaping company was marketing to teenagers. Juul Labs, the vaping company that has long insisted it never marketed its products to teenagers, purchased ad space in its early days on numerous youth-focused websites, including those of Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network, Seventeen magazine and educational sites for middle school and high school students, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Massachusetts attorney general.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Call on C.D.C. to Set Air Standards for Workplaces, Now (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1670",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/health/coronavirus-aerosols-workplaces.html",
        "text": "The agency has not fully reckoned with airborne transmission of the coronavirus in settings like hospitals, schools and meatpacking plants, experts said. The agency has not fully reckoned with airborne transmission of the coronavirus in settings like hospitals, schools and meatpacking plants, experts said. Nearly a year after scientists showed that the coronavirus can be inhaled in tiny droplets called aerosols that linger indoors in stagnant air, more than a dozen experts are calling on the Biden administration to take immediate action to limit airborne transmission of the virus in high-risk settings like meatpacking plants and prisons.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Call on C.D.C. to Set Air Standards for Workplaces, Now (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1671",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/health/coronavirus-aerosols-workplaces.html",
        "text": "The agency has not fully reckoned with airborne transmission of the coronavirus in settings like hospitals, schools and meatpacking plants, experts said. The agency has not fully reckoned with airborne transmission of the coronavirus in settings like hospitals, schools and meatpacking plants, experts said. Nearly a year after scientists showed that the coronavirus can be inhaled in tiny droplets called aerosols that linger indoors in stagnant air, more than a dozen experts are calling on the Biden administration to take immediate action to limit airborne transmission of the virus in high-risk settings like meatpacking plants and prisons.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Schoolchildren Seem Unlikely to Fuel Coronavirus Surges, Scientists Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1672",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/health/coronavirus-schools-children.html",
        "text": "Researchers once feared that school reopenings might spread the virus through communities. But so far there is little evidence that it\u2019s happening. Researchers once feared that school reopenings might spread the virus through communities. But so far there is little evidence that it\u2019s happening. Months into the school year, school reopenings across the United States remain a patchwork of plans: in-person, remote and hybrid; masked and not; socially distanced and not. But amid this jumble, one clear pattern is emerging.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Schoolchildren Seem Unlikely to Fuel Coronavirus Surges, Scientists Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1673",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/health/coronavirus-schools-children.html",
        "text": "Researchers once feared that school reopenings might spread the virus through communities. But so far there is little evidence that it\u2019s happening. Researchers once feared that school reopenings might spread the virus through communities. But so far there is little evidence that it\u2019s happening. Months into the school year, school reopenings across the United States remain a patchwork of plans: in-person, remote and hybrid; masked and not; socially distanced and not. But amid this jumble, one clear pattern is emerging.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Omicron Will Surge Despite Biden\u2019s New Plan, Scientists Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1674",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/health/omicron-covid-biden-scientists.html",
        "text": "Public health experts fear that the highly contagious variant cannot be stopped without harsh measures that the public will no longer tolerate. Public health experts fear that the highly contagious variant cannot be stopped without harsh measures that the public will no longer tolerate. Even as President Biden on Tuesday outlined new plans for battling the highly contagious Omicron variant, public health experts warned that the measures would not be sufficient to prevent a grim rise in infections and hospitalizations over the next few weeks.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin and Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Response to Trump, a Dutch Minister Launches \u2018She Decides\u2019 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1675",
        "date": "2017-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/health/lilianne-ploumen-abortion-gag-rule-she-decides.html",
        "text": "Lilianne Ploumen a trade minister in the Netherlands, mobilized support for global family-planning groups threatened by an executive order from President Trump. Lilianne Ploumen a trade minister in the Netherlands, mobilized support for global family-planning groups threatened by an executive order from President Trump. President Trump last month signed an executive order barring American aid to international organizations that discuss abortion as a family-planning option with clients. American law already forbids the use of taxpayer money to fund the procedure itself.",
        "author": "By Claudia Dreifus"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Covid, Then Psychosis: \u2018The Most Terrifying Thing I\u2019ve Ever Experienced\u2019 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1676",
        "date": "2021-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/health/covid-psychosis.html",
        "text": "Like a small number of Covid survivors with no previous mental illness, Ivan Agerton developed psychotic symptoms weeks after his coronavirus infection. Like a small number of Covid survivors with no previous mental illness, Ivan Agerton developed psychotic symptoms weeks after his coronavirus infection. Ivan Agerton pulled his wife, Emily, into their bedroom closet, telling her not to bring her cellphone.",
        "author": "By Pam Belluck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Black Leaders Denounce Juul\u2019s $7.5 Million Gift to Medical School (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1677",
        "date": "2019-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/science/juul-meharry-grant-vaping.html",
        "text": "Juul is giving Meharry Medical College, a historically black institution, money for a research center that will study, among other things, Juul. Juul is giving Meharry Medical College, a historically black institution, money for a research center that will study, among other things, Juul. Earlier this month, Meharry Medical College, a 143-year-old historically black institution in Tennessee, proudly announced that it had received the second-largest grant in its history \u2014 $7.5 million to start a center to study public health issues that affect African-Americans.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vaccinated Americans May Go Without Masks in Most Places, Federal Officials Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1678",
        "date": "2021-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/health/coronavirus-masks-cdc.html",
        "text": "Fully vaccinated people do not have to wear masks or maintain social distance indoors or outdoors, with some exceptions, the C.D.C. advised. Fully vaccinated people do not have to wear masks or maintain social distance indoors or outdoors, with some exceptions, the C.D.C. advised. Federal health officials on Thursday advised Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus that they could stop wearing masks or maintaining social distance in most settings, the clearest sign yet that the pandemic might be nearing an end in the United States.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin, Apoorva Mandavilli and Noah Weiland"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vaccinated Americans May Go Without Masks in Most Places, Federal Officials Say (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1679",
        "date": "2021-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/health/coronavirus-masks-cdc.html",
        "text": "Fully vaccinated people do not have to wear masks or maintain social distance indoors or outdoors, with some exceptions, the C.D.C. advised. Fully vaccinated people do not have to wear masks or maintain social distance indoors or outdoors, with some exceptions, the C.D.C. advised. Federal health officials on Thursday advised Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus that they could stop wearing masks or maintaining social distance in most settings, the clearest sign yet that the pandemic might be nearing an end in the United States.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin, Apoorva Mandavilli and Noah Weiland"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Covid Vaccine Data, L.G.B.T.Q. People Fear Invisibility (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1680",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/health/coronavirus-lgbtq.html",
        "text": "Few states collect sexual orientation or gender identity data, so no one knows how many people in some communities are getting vaccinated. Few states collect sexual orientation or gender identity data, so no one knows how many people in some communities are getting vaccinated. When Josie Nixon visited her health insurer\u2019s website seeking a coronavirus vaccine, she felt invisible: On a registration form that collected personal and demographic information, the 29-year-old Denver resident had to select \u201cother\u201d for her gender.",
        "author": "By Jillian Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Covid Vaccine Data, L.G.B.T.Q. People Fear Invisibility (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1681",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/health/coronavirus-lgbtq.html",
        "text": "Few states collect sexual orientation or gender identity data, so no one knows how many people in some communities are getting vaccinated. Few states collect sexual orientation or gender identity data, so no one knows how many people in some communities are getting vaccinated. When Josie Nixon visited her health insurer\u2019s website seeking a coronavirus vaccine, she felt invisible: On a registration form that collected personal and demographic information, the 29-year-old Denver resident had to select \u201cother\u201d for her gender.",
        "author": "By Jillian Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ebola\u2019s Legacy: Children With Cataracts (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1682",
        "date": "2017-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/health/ebola-survivors-cataracts.html",
        "text": "Cataracts usually afflict the old, but doctors in Africa have been shocked to find them in Ebola survivors as young as 5. Cataracts usually afflict the old, but doctors in Africa have been shocked to find them in Ebola survivors as young as 5. FREETOWN, Sierra Leone \u2014 Hoisted onto the operating table by a nurse, Aminata Conteh, a spunky 8-year-old, crossed her skinny ankles jauntily and held stock-still as doctors numbed her eye and then pierced it with a needle to withdraw a sample of fluid.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ebola\u2019s Legacy: Children With Cataracts (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1683",
        "date": "2017-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/health/ebola-survivors-cataracts.html",
        "text": "Cataracts usually afflict the old, but doctors in Africa have been shocked to find them in Ebola survivors as young as 5. Cataracts usually afflict the old, but doctors in Africa have been shocked to find them in Ebola survivors as young as 5. FREETOWN, Sierra Leone \u2014 Hoisted onto the operating table by a nurse, Aminata Conteh, a spunky 8-year-old, crossed her skinny ankles jauntily and held stock-still as doctors numbed her eye and then pierced it with a needle to withdraw a sample of fluid.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith Takes Aim at Racial Gaps in Health Care (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1684",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/health/coronavirus-marcella-nunez-smith.html",
        "text": "Appointed head of the incoming administration\u2019s task force on health equity, the Yale University scientist \u201cis not sitting in her ivory tower.\u201d Appointed head of the incoming administration\u2019s task force on health equity, the Yale University scientist \u201cis not sitting in her ivory tower.\u201d Growing up in the United States Virgin Islands, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith saw firsthand what can happen in a community with limited access to health care. Her father, Moleto \u201cBishop\u201d Smith Sr., was only in his 40s when he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him partly paralyzed and with slurred speech.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Juul Closes Deal with Tobacco Giant Altria (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1685",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/health/juul-reaches-deal-with-tobacco-giant-altria.html",
        "text": "Altria is paying $12.8 billion to acquire a 35 percent stake of the popular vaping start-up. Public health advocates criticized the union. Altria is paying $12.8 billion to acquire a 35 percent stake of the popular vaping start-up. Public health advocates criticized the union. The tobacco giant Altria, maker of Marlboro and other top-selling brands of cigarettes, has agreed to pay nearly $13 billion for a 35 percent stake in Juul Labs, the wildly popular vaping company that burst on the scene in 2015 with a mission to render cigarettes obsolete.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan and Matt Richtel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Juul Closes Deal with Tobacco Giant Altria (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1686",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/health/juul-reaches-deal-with-tobacco-giant-altria.html",
        "text": "Altria is paying $12.8 billion to acquire a 35 percent stake of the popular vaping start-up. Public health advocates criticized the union. Altria is paying $12.8 billion to acquire a 35 percent stake of the popular vaping start-up. Public health advocates criticized the union. The tobacco giant Altria, maker of Marlboro and other top-selling brands of cigarettes, has agreed to pay nearly $13 billion for a 35 percent stake in Juul Labs, the wildly popular vaping company that burst on the scene in 2015 with a mission to render cigarettes obsolete.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan and Matt Richtel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Conference Room Air Making You Dumber? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1687",
        "date": "2019-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/health/conference-room-air.html",
        "text": "A small body of evidence suggests that when it comes to decision making, indoor air may matter more than we have realized. A small body of evidence suggests that when it comes to decision making, indoor air may matter more than we have realized. You\u2019re holed up with colleagues in a meeting room for two hours, hashing out a plan. Risks are weighed, decisions are made. Then, as you emerge, you realize it was much, much warmer and stuffier in there than in the rest of the office.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is This Tissue a New Organ? Maybe. A Conduit for Cancer? It Seems Likely. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1688",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/health/new-organ-interstitium.html",
        "text": "A new study reveals a network of tissue that acts as a \u201chighway of moving fluid\u201d but loses its shape when viewed. A new study reveals a network of tissue that acts as a \u201chighway of moving fluid\u201d but loses its shape when viewed. Researchers have made new discoveries about the in-between spaces in the human body, and some say it\u2019s time to rewrite the anatomy books.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fast-Acting Depression Drug, Newly Approved, Could Help Millions (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1689",
        "date": "2019-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/health/depression-treatment-ketamine-fda.html",
        "text": "A nasal spray version of the drug ketamine has shown promise as an antidepressant, even if its properties still aren\u2019t well understood. A nasal spray version of the drug ketamine has shown promise as an antidepressant, even if its properties still aren\u2019t well understood. Of the 16 million American adults who live with depression, as many as one-quarter gain little or no benefit from available treatments, whether drugs or talk therapy. They represent perhaps the greatest unmet need in psychiatry. On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved a prescription treatment intended to help them, a fast-acting drug derived from an old and widely used anesthetic, ketamine. ",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1690",
        "date": "2020-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/health/coronavirus-schools-reopening.html",
        "text": "Younger children in particular are ill-served by remote learning, according to a report issued by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. Younger children in particular are ill-served by remote learning, according to a report issued by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. Wading into the contentious debate over reopening schools, an influential committee of scientists and educators on Wednesday recommended that, wherever possible, younger children and those with special needs should attend school in person.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a Handful of States, Early Data Hint at a Rise in Breakthrough Infections (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1691",
        "date": "2021-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/health/covid-vaccinated-infections.html",
        "text": "With the arrival of the contagious Delta variant, Covid hospitalizations and deaths among vaccinated Americans also may have increased, according to preliminary figures. With the arrival of the contagious Delta variant, Covid hospitalizations and deaths among vaccinated Americans also may have increased, according to preliminary figures. Since Americans first began rolling up their sleeves for coronavirus vaccines, health officials have said that those who are immunized are very unlikely to become infected, or to suffer serious illness or death. But preliminary data from seven states hint that the arrival of the Delta variant in July may have altered the calculus.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "W.H.O. to Review Evidence of Airborne Transmission of Coronavirus (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1692",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/coronavirus-aerosols-who.html",
        "text": "The World Health Organization plans to update its advice after hundreds of experts urged the agency to reconsider the risk of aerosol transmission. The World Health Organization plans to update its advice after hundreds of experts urged the agency to reconsider the risk of aerosol transmission. After hundreds of experts urged the World Health Organization to review mounting scientific research, the agency acknowledged on Tuesday that airborne transmission of the coronavirus may be a threat in indoor spaces.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "W.H.O. to Review Evidence of Airborne Transmission of Coronavirus (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1693",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/coronavirus-aerosols-who.html",
        "text": "The World Health Organization plans to update its advice after hundreds of experts urged the agency to reconsider the risk of aerosol transmission. The World Health Organization plans to update its advice after hundreds of experts urged the agency to reconsider the risk of aerosol transmission. After hundreds of experts urged the World Health Organization to review mounting scientific research, the agency acknowledged on Tuesday that airborne transmission of the coronavirus may be a threat in indoor spaces.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Experts Urge Strict Workplace Air Quality Standards, in Wake of Pandemic (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1694",
        "date": "2021-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/health/aerosols-covid-workplace.html",
        "text": "The researchers issued a call to action to improve indoor air quality as a safeguard against the spread of contagions like the coronavirus. The researchers issued a call to action to improve indoor air quality as a safeguard against the spread of contagions like the coronavirus. Clean water in 1842, food safety in 1906, a ban on lead-based paint in 1971. These sweeping public health reforms transformed not just our environment but expectations for what governments can do.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can This Judge Solve the Opioid Crisis? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1695",
        "date": "2018-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/health/opioid-crisis-judge-lawsuits.html",
        "text": "The Ohio federal judge overseeing hundreds of opioid lawsuits wants a swift settlement with solutions. But first he must tame skeptical legal lions. The Ohio federal judge overseeing hundreds of opioid lawsuits wants a swift settlement with solutions. But first he must tame skeptical legal lions. CLEVELAND \u2014 Here are a few choice mutterings from the scrum of lawyers outside Courtroom 18B, about the federal judge who summoned them to a closed-door conference on hundreds of opioid lawsuits:",
        "author": "By Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can This Judge Solve the Opioid Crisis? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1696",
        "date": "2018-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/health/opioid-crisis-judge-lawsuits.html",
        "text": "The Ohio federal judge overseeing hundreds of opioid lawsuits wants a swift settlement with solutions. But first he must tame skeptical legal lions. The Ohio federal judge overseeing hundreds of opioid lawsuits wants a swift settlement with solutions. But first he must tame skeptical legal lions. CLEVELAND \u2014 Here are a few choice mutterings from the scrum of lawyers outside Courtroom 18B, about the federal judge who summoned them to a closed-door conference on hundreds of opioid lawsuits:",
        "author": "By Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s what we know about the C.D.C.\u2019s new mask recommendations for vaccinated people. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1697",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/health/cdc-masks-indoors-delta-variant.html",
        "text": "The new guidance calls for masks in schools and indoors in areas with low rates of vaccination for everyone regardless of vaccination status. The new guidance calls for masks in schools and indoors in areas with low rates of vaccination for everyone regardless of vaccination status. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended on Tuesday that people vaccinated against the coronavirus resume wearing masks in schools and in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging, marking a sharp turnabout from their advice just two months ago.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik, Apoorva Mandavilli and Sheryl Gay Stolberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1698",
        "date": "2020-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-transmission.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C. director says new data about people who are infected but symptom-free could lead the agency to recommend broadened use of masks. The C.D.C. director says new data about people who are infected but symptom-free could lead the agency to recommend broadened use of masks. As many as 25 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus may not show symptoms, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns \u2014 a startlingly high number that complicates efforts to predict the pandemic\u2019s course and strategies to mitigate its spread.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1699",
        "date": "2020-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-transmission.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C. director says new data about people who are infected but symptom-free could lead the agency to recommend broadened use of masks. The C.D.C. director says new data about people who are infected but symptom-free could lead the agency to recommend broadened use of masks. As many as 25 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus may not show symptoms, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns \u2014 a startlingly high number that complicates efforts to predict the pandemic\u2019s course and strategies to mitigate its spread.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Infected but Feeling Fine: The Unwitting Coronavirus Spreaders (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1700",
        "date": "2020-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/health/coronavirus-asymptomatic-transmission.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C. director says new data about people who are infected but symptom-free could lead the agency to recommend broadened use of masks. The C.D.C. director says new data about people who are infected but symptom-free could lead the agency to recommend broadened use of masks. As many as 25 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus may not show symptoms, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns \u2014 a startlingly high number that complicates efforts to predict the pandemic\u2019s course and strategies to mitigate its spread.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Coronavirus Can Be Airborne Indoors, W.H.O. Says (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1701",
        "date": "2020-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/health/virus-aerosols-who.html",
        "text": "The agency also explained more directly that people without symptoms may spread the virus. The acknowledgments should have come sooner, some experts said. The agency also explained more directly that people without symptoms may spread the virus. The acknowledgments should have come sooner, some experts said. The coronavirus may linger in the air in crowded indoor spaces, spreading from one person to the next, the World Health Organization acknowledged on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "He Called Older Employees \u2018Dead Wood.\u2019 Two Sued for Age Discrimination. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1702",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/health/age-discrimination-ohio-state.html",
        "text": "State governments \u201care still learning there\u2019s an age law,\u201d said one attorney, despite the fact it has been on the books for decades. State governments \u201care still learning there\u2019s an age law,\u201d said one attorney, despite the fact it has been on the books for decades.  It\u2019s a stressful thing to sue your former employer for age discrimination.",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "Three Feet or Six? Distancing Guideline for Schools Stirs Debate (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1703",
        "date": "2021-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/health/coronavirus-schools-social-distance.html",
        "text": "Some public health officials say it\u2019s time for the C.D.C. to loosen its social distancing guidelines for classrooms, but the idea has detractors. Some public health officials say it\u2019s time for the C.D.C. to loosen its social distancing guidelines for classrooms, but the idea has detractors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is clear and consistent in its social distancing recommendation: To reduce the risk of contracting the coronavirus, people should remain at least six feet away from others who are not in their households. The guideline holds whether you are eating in a restaurant, lifting weights at a gym or learning long division in a fourth-grade classroom.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "People Are Still Having Sex. So Why Are S.T.D. Rates Dropping? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1704",
        "date": "2020-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/health/covid-std-testing.html",
        "text": "Public health officials believe many cases are going undetected as clinics close during the pandemic and testing supplies are diverted to coronavirus screening. Public health officials believe many cases are going undetected as clinics close during the pandemic and testing supplies are diverted to coronavirus screening. For the first time in years, rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, which had been on track in 2020 to hit record highs in the United States, have taken an abrupt downturn.",
        "author": "By Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Citing New Data, Pfizer Outlines Case for Booster Shots (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1705",
        "date": "2021-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/health/pfizer-booster-shots.html",
        "text": "Pfizer\u2019s coronavirus vaccine may become slightly weaker over time, the company reported. But experts said that most people won\u2019t need boosters anytime soon. Pfizer\u2019s coronavirus vaccine may become slightly weaker over time, the company reported. But experts said that most people won\u2019t need boosters anytime soon. Pfizer reported on Wednesday that the power of its two-dose Covid vaccine wanes slightly over time, but nonetheless offers lasting and robust protection against serious disease. The company suggested that a third shot could improve immunity, but whether boosters will be widely needed is far from settled, the subject of heated debate among scientists.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer, Apoorva Mandavilli and Sharon LaFraniere"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Improve and Protect Nursing Homes From Outbreaks (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1706",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/health/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html",
        "text": "More than a third of America\u2019s Covid-19 deaths can be traced back to these facilities. Experts suggest several ways to make them safer. More than a third of America\u2019s Covid-19 deaths can be traced back to these facilities. Experts suggest several ways to make them safer. The doctors, researchers and advocates who have been paying close attention for years are appalled at the way the coronavirus has devastated the nation\u2019s nursing homes \u2014 but they\u2019re not shocked.",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Improve and Protect Nursing Homes From Outbreaks (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1707",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/health/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html",
        "text": "More than a third of America\u2019s Covid-19 deaths can be traced back to these facilities. Experts suggest several ways to make them safer. More than a third of America\u2019s Covid-19 deaths can be traced back to these facilities. Experts suggest several ways to make them safer. The doctors, researchers and advocates who have been paying close attention for years are appalled at the way the coronavirus has devastated the nation\u2019s nursing homes \u2014 but they\u2019re not shocked.",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "Masks Again? Delta Variant\u2019s Spread Prompts Reconsideration of Precautions. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1708",
        "date": "2021-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/health/coronavirus-delta-variant-masks.html",
        "text": "Los Angeles County and the W.H.O. warned that even immunized people should wear masks indoors. Some scientists agreed, but urged a localized approach. Los Angeles County and the W.H.O. warned that even immunized people should wear masks indoors. Some scientists agreed, but urged a localized approach. Throughout the pandemic, masks have ranked among the most contentious public health measures in the United States, symbolizing a bitter partisan divide over the role of government and individual liberties.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin, Apoorva Mandavilli and Shawn Hubler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forget Spas and Bars. Hotels Tout Housekeeping to Lure Back Travelers. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1709",
        "date": "2020-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/health/coronavirus-hotels-infect.html",
        "text": "Hilton has partnered with Lysol, Four Seasons with Johns Hopkins Medicine. But new research shows hotels can be easily contaminated by the coronavirus. Hilton has partnered with Lysol, Four Seasons with Johns Hopkins Medicine. But new research shows hotels can be easily contaminated by the coronavirus. When Beau Phillips checked into a hotel near Toledo recently, a table in front of the counter barricaded him from getting too close to the clerk, who wore a mask and stood behind a plastic window.",
        "author": "By Matt Richtel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forget Spas and Bars. Hotels Tout Housekeeping to Lure Back Travelers. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1710",
        "date": "2020-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/health/coronavirus-hotels-infect.html",
        "text": "Hilton has partnered with Lysol, Four Seasons with Johns Hopkins Medicine. But new research shows hotels can be easily contaminated by the coronavirus. Hilton has partnered with Lysol, Four Seasons with Johns Hopkins Medicine. But new research shows hotels can be easily contaminated by the coronavirus. When Beau Phillips checked into a hotel near Toledo recently, a table in front of the counter barricaded him from getting too close to the clerk, who wore a mask and stood behind a plastic window.",
        "author": "By Matt Richtel"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Thought Hemophilia Was a \u2018Lifelong Thing.\u2019 They May Be Wrong. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1711",
        "date": "2018-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/health/hemophilia-gene-therapy.html",
        "text": "Experimental gene therapies have yielded promising results in early trials. But the drugs have left some patients worried that success will not last. Experimental gene therapies have yielded promising results in early trials. But the drugs have left some patients worried that success will not last.  Scientists are edging closer to defeating a longtime enemy of human health: hemophilia, the inability to form blood clots. ",
        "author": "By Gina Kolata"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Coronavirus More Often Strikes Children of Color (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1712",
        "date": "2020-09-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/health/coronavirus-children-minorities.html",
        "text": "Children in minority communities are much more likely to become infected and severely ill. Many have parents who are frontline workers, experts say. Children in minority communities are much more likely to become infected and severely ill. Many have parents who are frontline workers, experts say. One of the notable features of the new coronavirus, evident early in the pandemic, was that it largely spared children. Some become severely ill, but deaths have been few, compared to adults.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Better Kind of Nursing Home (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1713",
        "date": "2017-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/health/green-houses-nursing-homes.html",
        "text": "At Green Houses, residents have more independence and facilities are less institutional \u2014 a big improvement over most nursing homes, new research finds. At Green Houses, residents have more independence and facilities are less institutional \u2014 a big improvement over most nursing homes, new research finds. Lots of things look different when you step into a small Green House nursing home.",
        "author": "By Paula Span"
    },
    {
        "title": "Airborne Coronavirus Detected in Wuhan Hospitals (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1714",
        "date": "2020-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/health/coronavirus-hospital-aerosols.html",
        "text": "While the RNA of the virus was found in tiny droplets in China, scientists don\u2019t know if it was capable of transmitting the virus. While the RNA of the virus was found in tiny droplets in China, scientists don\u2019t know if it was capable of transmitting the virus. Adding to growing evidence that the novel coronavirus can spread through air, scientists have identified genetic markers of the virus in airborne droplets, many with diameters smaller than one-ten-thousandth of an inch.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Birthday Present in 2021? A Covid Vaccine. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1715",
        "date": "2021-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/health/covid-vaccine-12-yr-olds.html",
        "text": "Turning 12 has taken on added significance this summer, as tweens line up for shots allowing them to see friends and play sports again. Turning 12 has taken on added significance this summer, as tweens line up for shots allowing them to see friends and play sports again. Zoe Tu, a seventh grader in Brooklyn, likes to celebrate her birthday with dulce de leche Haagen-Dazs ice cream cake. This year, her 12th, was no exception, but the day was also marked by a treat of another kind: her Covid vaccine.",
        "author": "By Emma Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Keep the Coronavirus at Bay Indoors (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1716",
        "date": "2020-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/27/health/coronavirus-transmission-indoors.html",
        "text": "Tips for dodging the virus as Americans retreat from colder weather: Open the windows, buy an air filter \u2014 and forget the UV lights. Tips for dodging the virus as Americans retreat from colder weather: Open the windows, buy an air filter \u2014 and forget the UV lights. As the autumn chill ushers people back into homes, classrooms and offices, the coronavirus may resurge even in states that have so far restrained its spread.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018I Am Totally Burned Out\u2019: Patients Watch Health Care Debate With Dread (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1717",
        "date": "2017-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/health/obamacare-repeal-healthcare-anxiety.html",
        "text": "The war in Congress over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act has brought anxiety to the people whose health insurance is at risk. The war in Congress over repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act has brought anxiety to the people whose health insurance is at risk. Ever since the November election, when the fate of her family\u2019s health coverage was suddenly up for grabs, Meghan Borland has been consumed by each twitch and turn of the political debate. She has gone to protests, met with her congressman, lost sleep, shed tears.",
        "author": "By Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "239 Experts With One Big Claim: The Coronavirus Is Airborne (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1718",
        "date": "2020-07-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/239-experts-with-one-big-claim-the-coronavirus-is-airborne.html",
        "text": "The W.H.O. has resisted mounting evidence that viral particles floating indoors are infectious, some scientists say. The agency maintains the research is still inconclusive. The W.H.O. has resisted mounting evidence that viral particles floating indoors are infectious, some scientists say. The agency maintains the research is still inconclusive. The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Coronavirus Infected Hundreds at a Georgia Summer Camp (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1719",
        "date": "2020-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/health/coronavirus-children-camp.html",
        "text": "The camp took precautions but did not require campers to wear masks, the C.D.C. reported. Singing and cheering may have helped spread the virus. The camp took precautions but did not require campers to wear masks, the C.D.C. reported. Singing and cheering may have helped spread the virus. As schools and universities plan for the new academic year, and administrators grapple with complex questions about how to keep young people safe, a new report about a coronavirus outbreak at a sleepaway camp in Georgia provides fresh reasons for concern.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "C.D.C. Recommends Sweeping Changes to American Offices (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1720",
        "date": "2020-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/health/cdc-coronavirus-offices.html",
        "text": "Temperature checks, desk shields and no public transit: The guidelines would remake office life. Some may decide it\u2019s easier to keep employees at home. Temperature checks, desk shields and no public transit: The guidelines would remake office life. Some may decide it\u2019s easier to keep employees at home. Upon arriving at work, employees should get a temperature and symptom check.",
        "author": "By Matt Richtel"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Big Tobacco Hooked Children on Sugary Drinks (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1721",
        "date": "2019-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/health/big-tobacco-kool-aid-sugar-obesity.html",
        "text": "Researchers combing through archives discovered that cigarette makers had applied their marketing wizardry to sweetened beverages and turned generations of children into loyal customers. Researchers combing through archives discovered that cigarette makers had applied their marketing wizardry to sweetened beverages and turned generations of children into loyal customers. What do these ads featuring Joe Camel, Kool-Aid Man and the maniacal mascot for Hawaiian Punch have in common?",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Limiting Indoor Capacity Can Reduce Coronavirus Infections, Study Shows (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1722",
        "date": "2020-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/health/covid-indoor-venues-infections.html",
        "text": "Research using cellphone data in 10 U.S. cities last spring could help influence officials\u2019 decisions on new restrictions as cases resurge around the country. Research using cellphone data in 10 U.S. cities last spring could help influence officials\u2019 decisions on new restrictions as cases resurge around the country. Restaurants, gyms, cafes and other crowded indoor venues accounted for some 8 in 10 new infections in the early months of the U.S. coronavirus epidemic, according to a new analysis that could help officials around the world now considering curfews, partial lockdowns and other measures in response to renewed outbreaks.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Does Your Local Doctor Have a Coronavirus Test for You? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1723",
        "date": "2020-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/health/coronavirus-doctors-office.html",
        "text": "Primary care physicians, to whom many anxious patients turn first when their health declines, can\u2019t always provide tests\u00a0\u2014\u00a0or answers about where to get them. Primary care physicians, to whom many anxious patients turn first when their health declines, can\u2019t always provide tests\u00a0\u2014\u00a0or answers about where to get them. In recent months, Dr. Denise Hooks-Anderson has grown accustomed to saying \u201cno.\u201d",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Couldn\u2019t Quit Smoking. Then She Tried Juul. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1724",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/health/vaping-juul-nicotine-quit-smokers.html",
        "text": "Millions embrace e-cigarettes as smoking cessation aids. Will restricting the devices for teenagers put former adult smokers who vape at risk to start again? Millions embrace e-cigarettes as smoking cessation aids. Will restricting the devices for teenagers put former adult smokers who vape at risk to start again? Try as she might, Brittany Kligman couldn\u2019t free herself of a pack-a-day cigarette habit, eight years in duration. And she ached to.",
        "author": "By Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018This Is Really Scary\u2019: Kids Struggle With Long Covid (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1725",
        "date": "2021-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/health/long-covid-kids.html",
        "text": "Lingering physical, mental and neurological symptoms are affecting children as well as adults, including many who had mild reactions to the initial coronavirus infection. Lingering physical, mental and neurological symptoms are affecting children as well as adults, including many who had mild reactions to the initial coronavirus infection. Will Grogan stared blankly at his ninth-grade biology classwork. It was material he had mastered the day before, but it looked utterly unfamiliar.",
        "author": "By Pam Belluck"
    },
    {
        "title": "School Closures in the Spring Saved Lives, Study Asserts (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1726",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/health/covid-school-reopening.html",
        "text": "But, experts caution, the findings highlight a period when few precautions were in place, and do not apply to current discussions about reopening schools. But, experts caution, the findings highlight a period when few precautions were in place, and do not apply to current discussions about reopening schools. In a new analysis, pediatric researchers have estimated that the states\u2019 decisions to close schools last spring likely saved tens of thousands of lives from Covid-19 and prevented many more coronavirus infections.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey and Pam Belluck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Covid Overload: U.S. Hospitals Are Running Out of Beds for Patients (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1727",
        "date": "2020-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/health/covid-hospitals-overload.html",
        "text": "As the coronavirus pandemic surges across the country, hospitals are facing a crisis-level shortage of beds and staff to provide adequate care for patients. As the coronavirus pandemic surges across the country, hospitals are facing a crisis-level shortage of beds and staff to provide adequate care for patients. In excruciating pain with lesions on her face and scalp, Tracey Fine lay for 13 hours on a gurney in an emergency room hallway.",
        "author": "By Reed Abelson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flushing the Toilet May Fling Coronavirus Aerosols All Over (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1728",
        "date": "2020-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/health/coronavirus-toilets-flushing.html",
        "text": "A new study shows how turbulence from a toilet bowl can create a large plume that is potentially infectious to a bathroom\u2019s next visitor. A new study shows how turbulence from a toilet bowl can create a large plume that is potentially infectious to a bathroom\u2019s next visitor. Here\u2019s one more behavior to be hyper-aware of in order to prevent coronavirus transmission: what you do after you use the toilet.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Known Covid Case Was Vendor at Wuhan Market, Scientist Says (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1729",
        "date": "2021-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-wuhan-market-lab-leak.html",
        "text": "A new review of early Covid-19 cases in the journal Science will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over how the pandemic began. A new review of early Covid-19 cases in the journal Science will revive, though certainly not settle, the debate over how the pandemic began. A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China reported on Thursday that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had most likely gotten the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests that the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many miles from it.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer, Benjamin Mueller and Chris Buckley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aboard the Diamond Princess, a Case Study in Aerosol Transmission (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1730",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/health/diamond-princess-coronavirus-aerosol.html",
        "text": "A computer model of the cruise-ship outbreak found that the virus spread most readily in microscopic droplets light enough to linger in the air. A computer model of the cruise-ship outbreak found that the virus spread most readily in microscopic droplets light enough to linger in the air. In a year of endless viral outbreaks, the details of the Diamond Princess tragedy seem like ancient history. On Jan. 20, one infected passenger boarded the cruise ship; a month later, more than 700 of the 3,711 passengers and crew members had tested positive, with many falling seriously ill. The invader moved as swiftly and invisibly as the perpetrators on Agatha Christie\u2019s Orient Express, leaving doctors and health officials with only fragmentary evidence to sift through.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey and James Glanz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aboard the Diamond Princess, a Case Study in Aerosol Transmission (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1731",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/health/diamond-princess-coronavirus-aerosol.html",
        "text": "A computer model of the cruise-ship outbreak found that the virus spread most readily in microscopic droplets light enough to linger in the air. A computer model of the cruise-ship outbreak found that the virus spread most readily in microscopic droplets light enough to linger in the air. In a year of endless viral outbreaks, the details of the Diamond Princess tragedy seem like ancient history. On Jan. 20, one infected passenger boarded the cruise ship; a month later, more than 700 of the 3,711 passengers and crew members had tested positive, with many falling seriously ill. The invader moved as swiftly and invisibly as the perpetrators on Agatha Christie\u2019s Orient Express, leaving doctors and health officials with only fragmentary evidence to sift through.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey and James Glanz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Covid Antibody Drugs Go Unused as Need Soars (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1732",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/covid-antibody-treatment.html",
        "text": "While such treatments are promising, their use has been slowed by testing lags, overwhelmed hospitals and a perception the therapies are only for well-connected people. While such treatments are promising, their use has been slowed by testing lags, overwhelmed hospitals and a perception the therapies are only for well-connected people. When federal regulators approved two antibody treatments last month for emergency use in high-risk Covid-19 patients, doctors worried there would not be enough to go around.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas and Rebecca Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Covid Antibody Drugs Go Unused as Need Soars (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1733",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/covid-antibody-treatment.html",
        "text": "While such treatments are promising, their use has been slowed by testing lags, overwhelmed hospitals and a perception the therapies are only for well-connected people. While such treatments are promising, their use has been slowed by testing lags, overwhelmed hospitals and a perception the therapies are only for well-connected people. When federal regulators approved two antibody treatments last month for emergency use in high-risk Covid-19 patients, doctors worried there would not be enough to go around.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas and Rebecca Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Covid Antibody Drugs Go Unused as Need Soars (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1734",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/covid-antibody-treatment.html",
        "text": "While such treatments are promising, their use has been slowed by testing lags, overwhelmed hospitals and a perception the therapies are only for well-connected people. While such treatments are promising, their use has been slowed by testing lags, overwhelmed hospitals and a perception the therapies are only for well-connected people. When federal regulators approved two antibody treatments last month for emergency use in high-risk Covid-19 patients, doctors worried there would not be enough to go around.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas and Rebecca Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Reopen Schools: What Science and Other Countries Teach Us (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1735",
        "date": "2020-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/health/coronavirus-schools-reopen.html",
        "text": "The pressure to bring American students back to classrooms is intense, but the calculus is tricky with infections still out of control in many communities. The pressure to bring American students back to classrooms is intense, but the calculus is tricky with infections still out of control in many communities. As school districts across the United States consider whether and how to restart in-person classes, their challenge is complicated by a pair of fundamental uncertainties: No nation has tried to send children back to school with the virus raging at levels like America\u2019s, and the scientific research about transmission in classrooms is limited.",
        "author": "By Pam Belluck, Apoorva Mandavilli and Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Digital Pill Approved to Worries About Biomedical \u2018Big Brother\u2019 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1736",
        "date": "2017-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/health/digital-pill-fda.html",
        "text": "The medicine, an antipsychotic drug, has a sensor that will show doctors whether and when patients are taking it. Other medicines will follow, experts say. The medicine, an antipsychotic drug, has a sensor that will show doctors whether and when patients are taking it. Other medicines will follow, experts say. For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill \u2014 a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine.",
        "author": "By Pam Belluck"
    },
    {
        "title": "HPV Vaccine Expanded for People Ages 27 to 45 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1737",
        "date": "2018-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/health/hpv-virus-vaccine-cancer.html",
        "text": "The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of Gardasil 9, a vaccine against nine strains of the human papillomavirus for older age groups. The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of Gardasil 9, a vaccine against nine strains of the human papillomavirus for older age groups. The HPV vaccine, which prevents cervical cancer and other malignancies, is now approved for men and women from 27 to 45-years-old, the Food and Drug Administration said on Friday.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady and Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "F.D.A. Authorizes Moderna Vaccine, Adding Millions of Doses to U.S. Supply (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1738",
        "date": "2020-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/health/covid-vaccine-fda-moderna.html",
        "text": "The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, clearing the way for millions more Americans to be immunized next week. The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, clearing the way for millions more Americans to be immunized next week. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna for emergency use, allowing the shipment of millions more doses across the nation and intensifying the debate over who will be next in line to get inoculated.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady, Abby Goodnough and Noah Weiland"
    },
    {
        "title": "F.D.A. Authorizes Moderna Vaccine, Adding Millions of Doses to U.S. Supply (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1739",
        "date": "2020-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/health/covid-vaccine-fda-moderna.html",
        "text": "The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, clearing the way for millions more Americans to be immunized next week. The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, clearing the way for millions more Americans to be immunized next week. The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized the coronavirus vaccine made by Moderna for emergency use, allowing the shipment of millions more doses across the nation and intensifying the debate over who will be next in line to get inoculated.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady, Abby Goodnough and Noah Weiland"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Doctors Cut Their Opioids, Patients Turn to a Risky Treatment for Back Pain (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1740",
        "date": "2018-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/health/opioids-spinal-injections.html",
        "text": "The drive to reduce opioid use has led patients to clinics offering off-label painkiller injections. Pfizer asked the F.D.A. to ban the treatment years ago. The drive to reduce opioid use has led patients to clinics offering off-label painkiller injections. Pfizer asked the F.D.A. to ban the treatment years ago. WASHINGTON \u2014 An injectable drug that the manufacturer says is too dangerous to use along the spine is growing in popularity for back pain as doctors turn away from opioids.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Supplement Makers Touting Cures for Alzheimer\u2019s and Other Diseases Get F.D.A. Warning (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1741",
        "date": "2019-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/health/Alzheimers-drug-fda.html",
        "text": "The agency warned 12 dietary supplement companies to stop marketing such products for disease treatments, and called for tougher regulation of the $40 billon industry. The agency warned 12 dietary supplement companies to stop marketing such products for disease treatments, and called for tougher regulation of the $40 billon industry. The Food and Drug Administration on Monday warned 12 sellers of dietary supplements to stop claiming their products can cure diseases ranging from Alzheimer\u2019s to cancer to diabetes.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "F.D.A. Moves to Restrict Flavored E-Cigarette Sales to Teenagers (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1742",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/health/e-cigarettes-teenage-vaping.html",
        "text": "The agency spells out its proposal to require retailers to wall off sections of stores to limit access, a move opposed by many convenience stores. The agency spells out its proposal to require retailers to wall off sections of stores to limit access, a move opposed by many convenience stores. WASHINGTON \u2014 With a few weeks left in his tenure as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Wednesday moved to restrict sales of flavored e-cigarettes to try to reduce the soaring rate of teenage vaping.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Reversal, F.D.A. Calls for Limits on Who Gets Alzheimer\u2019s Drug (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1743",
        "date": "2021-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/health/aduhelm-alzheimers-fda.html",
        "text": "The agency faced criticism for approving Aduhelm for all Alzheimer\u2019s patients. Now it recommends that the drug be given only to those with mild symptoms. The agency faced criticism for approving Aduhelm for all Alzheimer\u2019s patients. Now it recommends that the drug be given only to those with mild symptoms. Under fire for approving a questionable drug for all Alzheimer\u2019s patients, the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday greatly narrowed its previous recommendation and is now suggesting that only those with mild memory or thinking problems should receive it.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Robbins and Pam Belluck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Birx Says U.S. Epidemic Is in a \u2018New Phase\u2019 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1744",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/health/dr-birx-coronavirus-phase.html",
        "text": "She and other top health officials in the Trump administration warn states of a deepening spread of the coronavirus, in both rural and urban areas. She and other top health officials in the Trump administration warn states of a deepening spread of the coronavirus, in both rural and urban areas. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the Trump administration\u2019s coronavirus coordinator, said on Sunday that the nation was in a \u201cnew phase\u201d of the coronavirus epidemic that was much more sprawling across the country than last spring\u2019s outbreaks in major cities like New York and Seattle.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plan to Ditch the Mask After Vaccination? Not So Fast. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1745",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/health/coronavirus-vaccination-transmission.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s not clear how easily vaccinated people may spread the virus, but the answer to that question is coming soon. Until then, scientists urge caution. It\u2019s not clear how easily vaccinated people may spread the virus, but the answer to that question is coming soon. Until then, scientists urge caution. With 50 million Americans at least partly immunized against the coronavirus, and millions more joining the ranks every day, the urgent question on many minds is: When can I throw away my mask?",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Know About the Covid Antibody Drugs That Could Help Many (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1746",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/coronavirus-antibody-drugs.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s information about who these therapies can help, how much they cost and how to find out if you can get them where you live. Here\u2019s information about who these therapies can help, how much they cost and how to find out if you can get them where you live. Two new antibody treatments have shown promise in keeping high-risk Covid-19 patients out of the hospital.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas and Rebecca Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Know About the Covid Antibody Drugs That Could Help Many (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1747",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/coronavirus-antibody-drugs.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s information about who these therapies can help, how much they cost and how to find out if you can get them where you live. Here\u2019s information about who these therapies can help, how much they cost and how to find out if you can get them where you live. Two new antibody treatments have shown promise in keeping high-risk Covid-19 patients out of the hospital.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas and Rebecca Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Know About the Covid Antibody Drugs That Could Help Many (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1748",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/health/coronavirus-antibody-drugs.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s information about who these therapies can help, how much they cost and how to find out if you can get them where you live. Here\u2019s information about who these therapies can help, how much they cost and how to find out if you can get them where you live. Two new antibody treatments have shown promise in keeping high-risk Covid-19 patients out of the hospital.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas and Rebecca Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Opioid Trial Takes Aim at Johnson & Johnson (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1749",
        "date": "2019-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/health/opioid-trial-oklahoma-johnsonandjohnson.html",
        "text": "Having settled with Purdue Pharma and Teva, Oklahoma will now try to blame Johnson & Johnson for its opioid disaster. Nearly 1,900 lawsuits remain nationwide. Having settled with Purdue Pharma and Teva, Oklahoma will now try to blame Johnson & Johnson for its opioid disaster. Nearly 1,900 lawsuits remain nationwide. Did the people who brought you baby powder and baby shampoo also bring you the opioid crisis?",
        "author": "By Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Suicides Declined Over All in 2020 but May Have Risen Among People of Color (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1750",
        "date": "2021-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/health/coronavirus-suicide-cdc.html",
        "text": "Despite dire predictions, the number of suicides fell by 5 percent over all. Still, smaller studies suggested the trends were much worse among nonwhite Americans. Despite dire predictions, the number of suicides fell by 5 percent over all. Still, smaller studies suggested the trends were much worse among nonwhite Americans. Ever since the pandemic started, mental health experts have worried that grief, financial strain and social isolation may take an unbearable toll on American psyches. Some warned that the coronavirus had created the \u201cperfect storm\u201d for a rise in suicides.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Surgery in the Womb, a Baby Kicks Up Hope (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1751",
        "date": "2018-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/health/baby-spina-bifida-surgery.html",
        "text": "Baby Boy Royer, who underwent an operation for spina bifida as a fetus, had the biggest defect that the surgical team had attempted to repair. Baby Boy Royer, who underwent an operation for spina bifida as a fetus, had the biggest defect that the surgical team had attempted to repair. HOUSTON \u2014 For a small person who had surgery before he was even born, and who\u2019d just spent an hour and a half squeezing through a tight space that clamped down on his head every few minutes, Baby Boy Royer was showing a feisty spirit.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "Clinical Trials of Coronavirus Drugs Are Taking Longer Than Expected (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1752",
        "date": "2020-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/health/covid-19-antibody-treatments.html",
        "text": "Antibody trials sponsored by Regeneron and Eli Lilly are off to a slow start because of a dearth of tests, overwhelmed hospitals and reluctant patients. Antibody trials sponsored by Regeneron and Eli Lilly are off to a slow start because of a dearth of tests, overwhelmed hospitals and reluctant patients. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc in the United States and treatments are needed more than ever, clinical trials for some of the most promising experimental drugs are taking longer than expected.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas"
    },
    {
        "title": "7 Young People on Their Views of Gender (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1753",
        "date": "2017-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/health/trans-gender-children-youth.html",
        "text": "Annie Tritt has been photographing young people whose sense of gender goes beyond the binary norm. These are a few of their thoughts and pictures. Annie Tritt has been photographing young people whose sense of gender goes beyond the binary norm. These are a few of their thoughts and pictures. About\u00a0two\u00a0years ago, I began photographing transgender and\u00a0\u201cgender-expansive\u201d\u00a0children and young adults\u00a0in the United States and Europe. I wanted to ask this question: \u201cWho are we beyond ideas tied to our gender?\u201d The answer is critical\u00a0not only to\u00a0the transgender community, I believe, but to\u00a0everyone.",
        "author": "By Annie Tritt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Denmark Raises Antibiotic-Free Pigs. Why Can\u2019t the U.S.? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1754",
        "date": "2019-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/health/pigs-antibiotics-denmark.html",
        "text": "American pigs are raised on a liberal diet of antibiotics, fueling the rise of resistant germs. Danish pork producers are proving there\u2019s a better way. American pigs are raised on a liberal diet of antibiotics, fueling the rise of resistant germs. Danish pork producers are proving there\u2019s a better way. BILLUND, Denmark \u2014 How many rounds of antibiotics does it take to raise a Danish pig?",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A Smoking Gun\u2019: Infectious Coronavirus Retrieved From Hospital Air (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1755",
        "date": "2020-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/health/coronavirus-aerosols-indoors.html",
        "text": "Airborne virus plays a significant role in community transmission, many experts believe. A new study fills in the missing piece: Floating virus can infect cells. Airborne virus plays a significant role in community transmission, many experts believe. A new study fills in the missing piece: Floating virus can infect cells. Skeptics of the notion that the coronavirus spreads through the air \u2014 including many expert advisers to the World Health Organization \u2014 have held out for one missing piece of evidence: proof that floating respiratory droplets called aerosols contain live virus, and not just fragments of genetic material.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virus Variant First Found in Britain Now Spreading Rapidly in U.S. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1756",
        "date": "2021-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/health/coronavirus-variant-us-spread.html",
        "text": "A new study bolsters the prediction by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the so-called B.1.1.7 variant will dominate Covid-19 cases by March. A new study bolsters the prediction by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the so-called B.1.1.7 variant will dominate Covid-19 cases by March. A more contagious variant of the coronavirus first found in Britain is spreading rapidly in the United States, doubling roughly every 10 days, according to a new study.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Nursing Is in Crisis\u2019: Staff Shortages Put Patients at Risk (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1757",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/health/covid-nursing-shortage-delta.html",
        "text": "\u201cWhen hospitals are understaffed, people die,\u201d one expert warned as the U.S. health systems reach a breaking point in the face of the Delta variant. \u201cWhen hospitals are understaffed, people die,\u201d one expert warned as the U.S. health systems reach a breaking point in the face of the Delta variant. Cyndy O\u2019Brien, an emergency room nurse at Ocean Springs Hospital on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, could not believe her eyes as she arrived for work. There were people sprawled out in their cars gasping for air as three ambulances with gravely ill patients idled in the parking lot. Just inside the front doors, a crush of anxious people jostled to get the attention of an overwhelmed triage nurse.",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Huge Study of Coronavirus Cases in India Offers Some Surprises to Scientists (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1758",
        "date": "2020-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/health/covid-india-children.html",
        "text": "The rate of death went down in patients over 65. Researchers also found that children of all ages became infected and spread the virus to others. The rate of death went down in patients over 65. Researchers also found that children of all ages became infected and spread the virus to others. With 1.3 billion people jostling for space, India has always been a hospitable environment for infectious diseases of every kind. And the coronavirus has proved to be no exception: The country now has more than six million cases, second only to the United States.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Despite Claims, Trump Rarely Uses Wartime Law in Battle Against Covid (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1759",
        "date": "2020-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/health/Covid-Trump-Defense-Production-Act.html",
        "text": "The president often criticized the Defense Production Act as anti-business. Now he\u2019s campaigning on having frequently used the law to ramp up production of medical gear. The president often criticized the Defense Production Act as anti-business. Now he\u2019s campaigning on having frequently used the law to ramp up production of medical gear. [Follow our live analysis of the Biden inauguration.]",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Virus-Hunter Falls Prey to a Virus He Underestimated (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1760",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/health/coronavirus-peter-piot.html",
        "text": "Peter Piot, 71, one of the giants of Ebola and AIDS research, is still battling a coronavirus infection that hit him \u201clike a bus\u201d in March. Peter Piot, 71, one of the giants of Ebola and AIDS research, is still battling a coronavirus infection that hit him \u201clike a bus\u201d in March. \u201cThis is the revenge of the viruses,\u201d said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. \u201cI\u2019ve made their lives difficult. Now they\u2019re trying to get me.\u201d",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Despite Promises, Testing Delays Leave Americans \u2018Flying Blind\u2019 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1761",
        "date": "2020-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/health/coronavirus-testing-us.html",
        "text": "Even as new and faster tests become available, lengthy delays to obtain results continue and test materials are running low, compounding the crises hospitals are facing. Even as new and faster tests become available, lengthy delays to obtain results continue and test materials are running low, compounding the crises hospitals are facing. Three weeks ago, Dr. Elaine Cham, a pathologist at a large children\u2019s hospital in California, had a sense that the nation\u2019s coronavirus testing mess was finally getting under control.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan and Katie Thomas"
    },
    {
        "title": "New C.D.C. Chief Saw Coca-Cola as Ally in Obesity Fight (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1762",
        "date": "2017-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/health/brenda-fitzgerald-cdc-coke.html",
        "text": "Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald said she would consider taking money from Coke for C.D.C. programs despite the agency\u2019s having cut ties with the company in the past. Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald said she would consider taking money from Coke for C.D.C. programs despite the agency\u2019s having cut ties with the company in the past. Update: Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald resigned on Jan. 31, 2018, following questions about her investments in tobacco and other stock.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "New C.D.C. Chief Saw Coca-Cola as Ally in Obesity Fight (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1763",
        "date": "2017-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/health/brenda-fitzgerald-cdc-coke.html",
        "text": "Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald said she would consider taking money from Coke for C.D.C. programs despite the agency\u2019s having cut ties with the company in the past. Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald said she would consider taking money from Coke for C.D.C. programs despite the agency\u2019s having cut ties with the company in the past. Update: Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald resigned on Jan. 31, 2018, following questions about her investments in tobacco and other stock.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "New C.D.C. Chief Saw Coca-Cola as Ally in Obesity Fight (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1764",
        "date": "2017-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/health/brenda-fitzgerald-cdc-coke.html",
        "text": "Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald said she would consider taking money from Coke for C.D.C. programs despite the agency\u2019s having cut ties with the company in the past. Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald said she would consider taking money from Coke for C.D.C. programs despite the agency\u2019s having cut ties with the company in the past. Update: Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald resigned on Jan. 31, 2018, following questions about her investments in tobacco and other stock.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Psychedelic Drug Passes a Big Test for PTSD Treatment (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1765",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/health/mdma-approval.html",
        "text": "A new study shows that MDMA, known as Ecstasy or Molly, can bring relief when paired with talk therapy to those with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. A new study shows that MDMA, known as Ecstasy or Molly, can bring relief when paired with talk therapy to those with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. In an important step toward medical approval, MDMA, the illegal drug popularly known as Ecstasy or Molly, was shown to bring relief to those suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder when paired with talk therapy.",
        "author": "By Rachel Nuwer"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Looks Like Health Insurance, but It\u2019s Not. \u2018Just Trust God,\u2019 Buyers Are Told. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1766",
        "date": "2020-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/health/christian-health-care-insurance.html",
        "text": "Some state regulators are scrutinizing nonprofit Christian cost-sharing ministries that enroll Americans struggling to pay for medical care, but aren\u2019t legally bound to cover their members\u2019 claims. Some state regulators are scrutinizing nonprofit Christian cost-sharing ministries that enroll Americans struggling to pay for medical care, but aren\u2019t legally bound to cover their members\u2019 claims. Eight-year-old Blake Collie was at the swimming pool when he got a frightening headache. His parents rushed him to the emergency room only to learn he had a brain aneurysm. Blake spent nearly two months in the hospital. ",
        "author": "By Reed Abelson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vaping Links to Covid Risk Are Becoming Clear (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1767",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/health/covid-vaping-smoking.html",
        "text": "Researchers are starting to home in on the ways in which the use of e-cigarettes raises the chances of catching the virus, and suffering its worst effects. Researchers are starting to home in on the ways in which the use of e-cigarettes raises the chances of catching the virus, and suffering its worst effects. Twenty-year-old Janan Moein vaped his first pen a year ago. By late fall, he was blowing through several THC-laced cartridges a week \u2014 more, he said, than most people can handle.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Coronavirus Is More Likely to \u2018Superspread\u2019 Than the Flu (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1768",
        "date": "2020-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/health/coronavirus-superspreading-contagion.html",
        "text": "Most people won\u2019t spread the virus widely. The few who do are probably in the wrong place at the wrong time in their infection, new models suggest. Most people won\u2019t spread the virus widely. The few who do are probably in the wrong place at the wrong time in their infection, new models suggest. For a spiky sphere just 120 nanometers wide, the coronavirus can be a remarkably cosmopolitan traveler.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Juul-alikes\u2019 Are Filling Shelves With Sweet, Teen-Friendly Nicotine Flavors (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1769",
        "date": "2019-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/health/juul-flavors-nicotine.html",
        "text": "Juul, worried about further damage to its reputation as it tries to remake its public image, has filed lawsuits and a complaint with the International Trade Commission. Juul, worried about further damage to its reputation as it tries to remake its public image, has filed lawsuits and a complaint with the International Trade Commission. The purveyors of Strawberry Milk, Peach Madness and Froopy (tastes like Froot Loops) e-cigarette pods are having a very good year.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Can and Can\u2019t Be Learned From a Doctor in China Who Pioneered Masks (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1770",
        "date": "2021-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/health/wu-lien-teh-china-masks.html",
        "text": "Dr. Wu Lien-Teh helped change the course of a plague epidemic in the early 20th century and promoted the use of masks as a public health tool. Dr. Wu Lien-Teh helped change the course of a plague epidemic in the early 20th century and promoted the use of masks as a public health tool. In late 1910, a deadly plague started spreading in the northeast regions of China, reaching the large city of Harbin. Tens of thousands of people coughed up blood; their skin pruned and turned purple. They all died.",
        "author": "By Wudan Yan"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Can and Can\u2019t Be Learned From a Doctor in China Who Pioneered Masks (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1771",
        "date": "2021-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/health/wu-lien-teh-china-masks.html",
        "text": "Dr. Wu Lien-Teh helped change the course of a plague epidemic in the early 20th century and promoted the use of masks as a public health tool. Dr. Wu Lien-Teh helped change the course of a plague epidemic in the early 20th century and promoted the use of masks as a public health tool. In late 1910, a deadly plague started spreading in the northeast regions of China, reaching the large city of Harbin. Tens of thousands of people coughed up blood; their skin pruned and turned purple. They all died.",
        "author": "By Wudan Yan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vaccine Injury Claims Are Few and Far Between (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1772",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/health/vaccine-injury-claims.html",
        "text": "Data from a federal program designed to compensate people harmed by vaccines shows how rare it is for someone to claim they were hurt after getting vaccinated. Data from a federal program designed to compensate people harmed by vaccines shows how rare it is for someone to claim they were hurt after getting vaccinated. At a time when the failure to immunize children is driving the biggest measles outbreak in decades, a little-known database offers one way to gauge the safety of vaccines. ",
        "author": "By Pam Belluck and Reed Abelson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mount Sinai Seeks to Expand School Virus Testing Program (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1773",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/health/coronavirus-mount-sinai-kipp-schools.html",
        "text": "The health system, which is preparing to open a new laboratory that could process 100,000 tests a day, wants to take its program to public schools this fall. The health system, which is preparing to open a new laboratory that could process 100,000 tests a day, wants to take its program to public schools this fall. Every week, students at KIPP Infinity Middle School, in West Harlem, file into a large auditorium and take their places on the designated floor markings, making sure to stand six feet apart. Then they pull down their masks and fill sterile tubes with their spit.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mount Sinai Seeks to Expand School Virus Testing Program (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1774",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/health/coronavirus-mount-sinai-kipp-schools.html",
        "text": "The health system, which is preparing to open a new laboratory that could process 100,000 tests a day, wants to take its program to public schools this fall. The health system, which is preparing to open a new laboratory that could process 100,000 tests a day, wants to take its program to public schools this fall. Every week, students at KIPP Infinity Middle School, in West Harlem, file into a large auditorium and take their places on the designated floor markings, making sure to stand six feet apart. Then they pull down their masks and fill sterile tubes with their spit.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Covid-Linked Syndrome in Children Is Growing, and Cases Are More Severe (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1775",
        "date": "2021-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/health/covid-children-inflammatory-syndrome.html",
        "text": "The condition, which usually emerges several weeks after infection, is still rare, but can be dangerous. \u201cA higher percentage of them are really critically ill,\u201d one doctor said. The condition, which usually emerges several weeks after infection, is still rare, but can be dangerous. \u201cA higher percentage of them are really critically ill,\u201d one doctor said. Fifteen-year-old Braden Wilson was frightened of Covid-19. He was careful to wear masks and only left his house, in Simi Valley, Calif., for things like orthodontist checkups and visits with his grandparents nearby.",
        "author": "By Pam Belluck"
    },
    {
        "title": "32 Days on a Ventilator: One Covid Patient\u2019s Fight to Breathe Again (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1776",
        "date": "2020-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/health/coronavirus-patient-ventilator.html",
        "text": "Jim Bello, 49 and healthy, fell gravely ill, highlighting agonizing mysteries of the coronavirus. Doctors\u2019 relentless effort to save him was a roller-coaster of devastating and triumphant twists. Jim Bello, 49 and healthy, fell gravely ill, highlighting agonizing mysteries of the coronavirus. Doctors\u2019 relentless effort to save him was a roller-coaster of devastating and triumphant twists. HINGHAM, Mass. \u2014 \u201cIs he going to make it?\u201d Kim Bello asked, clutching her phone, alone in her yard.",
        "author": "By Pam Belluck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why You Shouldn\u2019t Worry About Studies Showing Waning Coronavirus Antibodies (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1777",
        "date": "2020-10-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/health/coronavirus-antibodies-studies.html",
        "text": "Experts say it\u2019s normal for levels of antibodies to drop after clearing an infection, and that they represent just one arm of the immune response against a virus. Experts say it\u2019s normal for levels of antibodies to drop after clearing an infection, and that they represent just one arm of the immune response against a virus. The portion of people in Britain with detectable antibodies to the coronavirus fell by roughly 27 percent over a period of three months this summer, researchers reported Monday, prompting fears that immunity to the virus is short-lived.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "F.D.A. Accuses Juul and Altria of Backing Off Plan to Stop Youth Vaping (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1778",
        "date": "2019-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/health/fda-juul-altria-youth-vaping.html",
        "text": "Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the terms of the new partnership between the two companies appear to undermine pledges they made to keep flavored nicotine pods off store shelves. Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says the terms of the new partnership between the two companies appear to undermine pledges they made to keep flavored nicotine pods off store shelves. WASHINGTON \u2014 The Food and Drug Administration is accusing Juul and Altria of reneging on promises they made to the government to keep e-cigarettes away from minors.",
        "author": "By Sheila Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "On Native American Land, Contact Tracing Is Saving Lives (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1779",
        "date": "2020-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/health/coronavirus-contact-tracing-apaches.html",
        "text": "As the coronavirus spread on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona, medical teams sought out residents who might have been exposed. The effort paid off in unexpected ways. As the coronavirus spread on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona, medical teams sought out residents who might have been exposed. The effort paid off in unexpected ways. The coronavirus is raging through the White Mountain Apache tribe. Spread across a large reservation in eastern Arizona, the Apaches have been infected at more than 10 times the rate of people in the state as a whole.",
        "author": "By Gina Kolata and Tom\u00e1s Karmelo Amaya"
    },
    {
        "title": "States Turn to an Unproven Method of Execution: Nitrogen Gas (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1780",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/health/death-penalty-nitrogen-executions.html",
        "text": "As problems mount with lethal injection, Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma are developing protocols for using nitrogen to carry out the death penalty. Little science exists about the method. As problems mount with lethal injection, Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma are developing protocols for using nitrogen to carry out the death penalty. Little science exists about the method. Hamstrung by troubles with lethal injection \u2014 gruesomely botched attempts, legal battles and growing difficulty obtaining the drugs \u2014 states are looking for alternative ways to carry out the death penalty. High on the list for some is a method that has never been used before: inhaling nitrogen gas.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady and Jan Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flu Patients Arrive in Droves, and a Hospital Rolls Out the \u2018Surge Tent\u2019 (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1781",
        "date": "2018-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/health/flu-symptoms-virus-hospital.html",
        "text": "The worst flu season in nearly a decade has filled emergency rooms and strained resources at medical centers. Hospitalization and infection rates are among the highest in two decades. The worst flu season in nearly a decade has filled emergency rooms and strained resources at medical centers. Hospitalization and infection rates are among the highest in two decades. ALLENTOWN, Pa. \u2014 By mid-January, the flu season at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest here in Allentown was bad enough to justify dragging out the \u201csurge tent.\u201d",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Behind the Masks, a Mystery: How Often Do the Vaccinated Spread the Virus? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1782",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/health/cdc-masks-vaccinated-transmission.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C.\u2019s new masking advice was based in part on data showing that the virus can thrive in the airways of vaccinated people. The findings are expected on Friday. The C.D.C.\u2019s new masking advice was based in part on data showing that the virus can thrive in the airways of vaccinated people. The findings are expected on Friday. The recommendation that vaccinated people in some parts of the country dust off their masks was based largely on one troublesome finding, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going Up? Not So Fast: Strict New Rules to Govern Elevator Culture (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1783",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/health/coronavirus-elevator-reopen.html",
        "text": "Small, crowded, enclosed spaces are petri dishes for the coronavirus. But in urban office buildings, elevators are a necessity, so companies are wrestling with how to make them safer. Small, crowded, enclosed spaces are petri dishes for the coronavirus. But in urban office buildings, elevators are a necessity, so companies are wrestling with how to make them safer. Kiss the elevator pitch goodbye \u2014 at least if it takes place in an elevator.",
        "author": "By Matt Richtel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Helping Drug Users Survive, Not Abstain: \u2018Harm Reduction\u2019 Gains Federal Support (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1784",
        "date": "2021-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/health/overdose-harm-reduction-covid.html",
        "text": "Overdoses have surged during the pandemic. Now, for the first time, Congress has appropriated funds specifically for programs that distribute clean syringes and other supplies meant to protect users. Overdoses have surged during the pandemic. Now, for the first time, Congress has appropriated funds specifically for programs that distribute clean syringes and other supplies meant to protect users. GREENSBORO, N.C. \u2014 The thin young man quietly took in the room as he waited for the free supplies meant to help him avoid dying: sterile water and cookers to dissolve illicit drugs; clean syringes; alcohol wipes to prevent infection; and naloxone, a medicine that can reverse overdoses. A sign on the wall \u2014 \u201cWe stand for loving drug users just the way they are\u201d \u2014 felt like an embrace.",
        "author": "By Abby Goodnough"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Ravaged a Choir. But Isolation Helped Contain It. (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1785",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/health/coronavirus-choir.html",
        "text": "One sick singer attended choir practice, infecting 52 others, two of whom died. A study released by the C.D.C. shows that self-isolation and tracing efforts helped contain the outbreak. One sick singer attended choir practice, infecting 52 others, two of whom died. A study released by the C.D.C. shows that self-isolation and tracing efforts helped contain the outbreak. It was a chilly evening in Mount Vernon, Wash., on March 10, when a group of singers met for choir practice at a church, just as they did most Tuesday nights.",
        "author": "By David Waldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now the U.S. Has Lots of Ventilators, but Too Few Specialists to Operate Them (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1786",
        "date": "2020-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/health/Covid-ventilators-stockpile.html",
        "text": "A burst of production solved the dire shortage that defined the first wave of the coronavirus. But the surplus may not be enough to prevent large numbers of deaths. A burst of production solved the dire shortage that defined the first wave of the coronavirus. But the surplus may not be enough to prevent large numbers of deaths. As record numbers of coronavirus cases overwhelm hospitals across the United States, there is something strikingly different from the surge that inundated cities in the spring: No one is clamoring for ventilators.",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now the U.S. Has Lots of Ventilators, but Too Few Specialists to Operate Them (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1787",
        "date": "2020-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/health/Covid-ventilators-stockpile.html",
        "text": "A burst of production solved the dire shortage that defined the first wave of the coronavirus. But the surplus may not be enough to prevent large numbers of deaths. A burst of production solved the dire shortage that defined the first wave of the coronavirus. But the surplus may not be enough to prevent large numbers of deaths. As record numbers of coronavirus cases overwhelm hospitals across the United States, there is something strikingly different from the surge that inundated cities in the spring: No one is clamoring for ventilators.",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "C.D.C. Weighs Advising Everyone to Wear a Mask (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1788",
        "date": "2020-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/health/cdc-masks-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Widespread use of nonmedical masks could reduce community transmission. But recommending their broad use could also cause a run on the kind of masks that health care workers desperately need. Widespread use of nonmedical masks could reduce community transmission. But recommending their broad use could also cause a run on the kind of masks that health care workers desperately need. Should healthy people be wearing masks when they\u2019re outside to protect themselves and others?",
        "author": "By Abby Goodnough and Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Twin Inside a Twin: In Colombia, an Extraordinary Birth (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1789",
        "date": "2019-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/health/twins-fetus-colombia.html",
        "text": "What appeared to be a cyst in a healthy fetus turned out to be an unformed twin \u201cabsorbed\u201d early in pregnancy, connected by a second umbilical cord and still growing. What appeared to be a cyst in a healthy fetus turned out to be an unformed twin \u201cabsorbed\u201d early in pregnancy, connected by a second umbilical cord and still growing. A Colombian woman has given birth to a baby whose abdomen contained the tiny, half-formed \u2014 but still growing \u2014 body of her own twin sister.",
        "author": "By Donald G. McNeil Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Happens if Obamacare Is Struck Down? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1790",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/health/obamacare-trump-health.html",
        "text": "The Affordable Care Act touches the lives of most Americans. Some 21 million could lose health insurance if the Trump administration were to succeed in having the law ruled unconstitutional. The Affordable Care Act touches the lives of most Americans. Some 21 million could lose health insurance if the Trump administration were to succeed in having the law ruled unconstitutional. Updated: July 9, 2019",
        "author": "By Reed Abelson, Abby Goodnough and Robert Pear"
    },
    {
        "title": "Johnson & Johnson\u2019s Coronavirus Vaccine Protects Monkeys, Study Finds (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1791",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/health/covid-19-vaccine-monkeys.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s the second study in a week to report promising results in monkeys for a vaccine candidate. But the real test will come with human trials that are now underway. It\u2019s the second study in a week to report promising results in monkeys for a vaccine candidate. But the real test will come with human trials that are now underway. An experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson protected monkeys from infection in a new study. It is the second vaccine candidate to show promising results in monkeys this week.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden Inherits a Vaccine Supply Unlikely to Grow Before April (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1792",
        "date": "2021-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/health/biden-covid-vaccine-supply.html",
        "text": "But with 200 million doses pledged for the first quarter of the year, some experts say President Biden\u2019s plan for 100 million shots in 100 days is far too modest. But with 200 million doses pledged for the first quarter of the year, some experts say President Biden\u2019s plan for 100 million shots in 100 days is far too modest. As the Biden administration takes power with a pledge to tame the most dire public health crisis in a century, one pillar of its strategy is to significantly increase the supply of Covid-19 vaccines.",
        "author": "By Sharon LaFraniere and Noah Weiland"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will Protests Set Off a Second Viral Wave? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1793",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/health/protests-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Across the country, mayors, public health experts and other officials worry that even though many protesters are wearing masks, the risk of new coronavirus cases will increase as thousands gather. Across the country, mayors, public health experts and other officials worry that even though many protesters are wearing masks, the risk of new coronavirus cases will increase as thousands gather. Mass protests against police brutality that have brought thousands of people out of their homes and onto the streets in cities across America are raising the specter of new coronavirus outbreaks, prompting political leaders, physicians and public health experts to warn that the crowds could cause a surge in cases.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will Protests Set Off a Second Viral Wave? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1794",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/health/protests-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Across the country, mayors, public health experts and other officials worry that even though many protesters are wearing masks, the risk of new coronavirus cases will increase as thousands gather. Across the country, mayors, public health experts and other officials worry that even though many protesters are wearing masks, the risk of new coronavirus cases will increase as thousands gather. Mass protests against police brutality that have brought thousands of people out of their homes and onto the streets in cities across America are raising the specter of new coronavirus outbreaks, prompting political leaders, physicians and public health experts to warn that the crowds could cause a surge in cases.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cruise Ships May Set Sail on Sunday, but Only With Crew (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1795",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/health/covid-cruise-ships-cdc.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C. has issued a conditional order toward certifying companies that can prove they can protect passengers and crews from the coronavirus. Actual travel by sea is still a distant wish. The C.D.C. has issued a conditional order toward certifying companies that can prove they can protect passengers and crews from the coronavirus. Actual travel by sea is still a distant wish. Cruise ships can prepare to set sail again beginning Sunday under a conditional order issued by U.S. health officials that aims to mitigate the risk of Covid-19 transmission at sea by requiring a host of measures, including testing and quarantine, all designed to keep crews and passengers safe.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cruise Ships May Set Sail on Sunday, but Only With Crew (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1796",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/health/covid-cruise-ships-cdc.html",
        "text": "The C.D.C. has issued a conditional order toward certifying companies that can prove they can protect passengers and crews from the coronavirus. Actual travel by sea is still a distant wish. The C.D.C. has issued a conditional order toward certifying companies that can prove they can protect passengers and crews from the coronavirus. Actual travel by sea is still a distant wish. Cruise ships can prepare to set sail again beginning Sunday under a conditional order issued by U.S. health officials that aims to mitigate the risk of Covid-19 transmission at sea by requiring a host of measures, including testing and quarantine, all designed to keep crews and passengers safe.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "A.C.L.U. Warns Against Fever-Screening Tools for Coronavirus (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1797",
        "date": "2020-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/health/coronavirus-aclu-fever.html",
        "text": "A report by the civil liberties group contends that reliance on thermal cameras and temperature-sensing guns to resume work at factories and offices and to encourage travel is flawed and intrusive. A report by the civil liberties group contends that reliance on thermal cameras and temperature-sensing guns to resume work at factories and offices and to encourage travel is flawed and intrusive. Airports, office buildings, warehouses and restaurant chains are rushing to install new safety measures like fever-scanning cameras and infrared temperature-sensing guns. But the American Civil Liberties Union warned on Tuesday against using the tools to screen people for possible coronavirus symptoms, saying the devices were often inaccurate, ineffective and intrusive.",
        "author": "By Natasha Singer"
    },
    {
        "title": "This City\u2019s Overdose Deaths Have Plunged. Can Others Learn From It? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1798",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/health/opioid-overdose-deaths-dayton.html",
        "text": "Dayton, Ohio, had one of the highest overdose death rates in the nation in 2017. The city made many changes, and fatal overdoses are down more than 50 percent from last year. Dayton, Ohio, had one of the highest overdose death rates in the nation in 2017. The city made many changes, and fatal overdoses are down more than 50 percent from last year. DAYTON, Ohio \u2014 Dr. Randy Marriott clicked open the daily report he gets on drug overdoses in the county. Only one in the last 24 hours \u2014 stunningly low compared to the long lists he used to scroll through last year in a grim morning routine.",
        "author": "By Abby Goodnough"
    },
    {
        "title": "This City\u2019s Overdose Deaths Have Plunged. Can Others Learn From It? (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1799",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/health/opioid-overdose-deaths-dayton.html",
        "text": "Dayton, Ohio, had one of the highest overdose death rates in the nation in 2017. The city made many changes, and fatal overdoses are down more than 50 percent from last year. Dayton, Ohio, had one of the highest overdose death rates in the nation in 2017. The city made many changes, and fatal overdoses are down more than 50 percent from last year. DAYTON, Ohio \u2014 Dr. Randy Marriott clicked open the daily report he gets on drug overdoses in the county. Only one in the last 24 hours \u2014 stunningly low compared to the long lists he used to scroll through last year in a grim morning routine.",
        "author": "By Abby Goodnough"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Speed Vaccination, Some Call for Delaying Second Shots (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1800",
        "date": "2021-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/health/covid-vaccine-second-dose-delay.html",
        "text": "Stretching the time between the first and second doses would greatly accelerate the rate at which people get at least partial protection. But some experts fear it could also lead to new variants. Stretching the time between the first and second doses would greatly accelerate the rate at which people get at least partial protection. But some experts fear it could also lead to new variants. The prospect of a fourth wave of the coronavirus, with new cases climbing sharply in the Upper Midwest, has reignited a debate among vaccine experts over how long to wait between the first and second doses. Extending that period would swiftly increase the number of people with the partial protection of a single shot, but some experts fear it could also give rise to dangerous new variants.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Insurers Battle Families Over Costly Drug for Fatal Disease (NYT: Health) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1801",
        "date": "2017-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/health/duchenne-muscular-dystrophy-drug-exondys-51.html",
        "text": "The case of Exondys 51 poses emotionally charged issues for families of young boys with a rare illness, who are fighting companies to get coverage for an expensive drug approved on a lower bar of proof. The case of Exondys 51 poses emotionally charged issues for families of young boys with a rare illness, who are fighting companies to get coverage for an expensive drug approved on a lower bar of proof. Nolan and Jack Willis, twins from upstate New York, and just 10 other boys took part in a clinical trial that led to the approval last fall of the very first drug to treat their rare, deadly muscle disease.",
        "author": "By Katie Thomas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Research on Astronauts Lead to Better Sleep on Earth? (WSJ: Health & Wellness) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1802",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-research-on-astronauts-lead-to-a-good-nights-sleep-on-earth-1528118081?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=19",
        "text": "Tests aboard the international space station\u2014including $11 million worth of adjustable LED lighting that mimics the changing spectrum of natural sunlight through the day\u2014may help the next generation of astronauts sleep soundly on space flights. The research also may improve the quality of slumber for shift workers, bleary business travelers and insomniacs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe six-member Expedition 54 crew in the Japanese Kibo laboratory module of the international space station on Feb. 18, 2018.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nMany astronauts lose sleep because they have severed an intimate connection with the natural 24-hour cycle of sunset and sunrise under which humankind evolved on Earth, researchers discovered. Like many body functions, sleep is regulated by exposure to light, which sets a biological tempo called the circadian rhythm. To address the problem, spacecraft engineers and sleep physiologists are trying to put things in a different light. For the past 18 months, astronauts have been replacing the 85 fluorescent lights aboard the international space station\u2014similar to those used in hospitals, warehouses and office cubicles\u2014with energy-efficient LED lighting that can help reset the body clock because their light can affect production of a sleep-related hormone called melatonin. \u201cIt is like the sun in a box,\u201d said flight surgeon Smith Johnston at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who supervises astronaut medical \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAboard the international space station, Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke held an early version of the lights designed in part to help astronauts sleep and work better.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nmatters. The experimental fixtures have three settings that simulate changes in natural sunlight throughout the day. The first is rich in blue wavelengths of light like the noonday sun, for normal work lighting. The second setting is brighter and more intensely blue to heighten alertness during emergencies. The third is low in blue and rich in red, like the afterglow of the setting sun, to promote sound sleep. \u201cThis is something you can do in your own home,\u201d said Harvard neuroscientist Steven Lockley at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital who studies lighting. \u201cIt is just a matter of choosing the right light bulb for the right time of day.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Scientists are studying bed-bound subjects to delve into the long-term effects of weightlessness, with implications not just for astronauts headed to Mars, but for those still back on Earth. \n \n\n\nAstronauts in orbit often can\u2019t sleep soundly because they are disturbed by noise, stifling air and odors, space agency records show. Sleep deprivation can muddle their thinking, dull their reflexes, and make them accident-prone. In fact, three-quarters of astronauts in orbit take Ambien or other medication to fall asleep, according to space-agency medical studies and sleep logs. \u201cSleeping in space is a challenge,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly,\n\n\n\n a former NASA astronaut who spent an entire year aboard the international space station. \u201cI would be Velcro-ed to the wall, wearing long johns because I was cold, ear plugs, and a hat. I\u2019d have my knees pulled up because my back hurt.\u201d In the largest study of sleep in space so far, Harvard Medical School physiologist Laura Barger and her colleagues in 2014 analyzed the sleep patterns of 85 astronauts during space missions. The average astronaut slept just 6 hours a night, they reported in the Lancet Neurology. \u201cAny of us can shave our sleep for a day or two,\u201d said George Brainard, a light and biology researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. \u201cOn a long mission to Mars, a lapse in performance or a lapse in alertness can cause an error fatal to the entire mission.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Scott Kelly had his morning espresso aboard the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn low Earth orbit, where the sun rises and sets every 90 minutes or so, the lighting cues that orchestrate everything from hormones to eating habits are abnormal. Researchers led by Erin Flynn-Evans at the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., found that astronauts typically lost an hour\u2019s sleep every night because they were no longer synchronized with a 24-hour day. They suffered a kind of jet lag caused by the mismatch between their workday, their own internal timer and the activity of their cells. Aboard the space station, the interior lights weren\u2019t strong enough to ensure the body\u2019s master clock kept proper time, which could affect immune function, brain metabolism, blood chemistry and digestion, experts said. In a study published last month in the Lancet Psychiatry, scientists at the University of Glasgow found that disrupted circadian rhythms also heighten the risk of mood disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder The lights that NASA is testing on sleep-deprived astronauts in space may also help people on planet Earth get more rest. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Research on Astronauts Lead to Better Sleep on Earth? (WSJ: Health & Wellness) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1803",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-research-on-astronauts-lead-to-a-good-nights-sleep-on-earth-1528118081?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=74",
        "text": "Tests aboard the international space station\u2014including $11 million worth of adjustable LED lighting that mimics the changing spectrum of natural sunlight through the day\u2014may help the next generation of astronauts sleep soundly on space flights. The research also may improve the quality of slumber for shift workers, bleary business travelers and insomniacs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe six-member Expedition 54 crew in the Japanese Kibo laboratory module of the international space station on Feb. 18, 2018.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nMany astronauts lose sleep because they have severed an intimate connection with the natural 24-hour cycle of sunset and sunrise under which humankind evolved on Earth, researchers discovered. Like many body functions, sleep is regulated by exposure to light, which sets a biological tempo called the circadian rhythm. To address the problem, spacecraft engineers and sleep physiologists are trying to put things in a different light. For the past 18 months, astronauts have been replacing the 85 fluorescent lights aboard the international space station\u2014similar to those used in hospitals, warehouses and office cubicles\u2014with energy-efficient LED lighting that can help reset the body clock because their light can affect production of a sleep-related hormone called melatonin. \u201cIt is like the sun in a box,\u201d said flight surgeon Smith Johnston at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who supervises astronaut medical \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAboard the international space station, Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke held an early version of the lights designed in part to help astronauts sleep and work better.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nmatters. The experimental fixtures have three settings that simulate changes in natural sunlight throughout the day. The first is rich in blue wavelengths of light like the noonday sun, for normal work lighting. The second setting is brighter and more intensely blue to heighten alertness during emergencies. The third is low in blue and rich in red, like the afterglow of the setting sun, to promote sound sleep. \u201cThis is something you can do in your own home,\u201d said Harvard neuroscientist Steven Lockley at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital who studies lighting. \u201cIt is just a matter of choosing the right light bulb for the right time of day.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Scientists are studying bed-bound subjects to delve into the long-term effects of weightlessness, with implications not just for astronauts headed to Mars, but for those still back on Earth. \n \n\n\nAstronauts in orbit often can\u2019t sleep soundly because they are disturbed by noise, stifling air and odors, space agency records show. Sleep deprivation can muddle their thinking, dull their reflexes, and make them accident-prone. In fact, three-quarters of astronauts in orbit take Ambien or other medication to fall asleep, according to space-agency medical studies and sleep logs. \u201cSleeping in space is a challenge,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly,\n\n\n\n a former NASA astronaut who spent an entire year aboard the international space station. \u201cI would be Velcro-ed to the wall, wearing long johns because I was cold, ear plugs, and a hat. I\u2019d have my knees pulled up because my back hurt.\u201d In the largest study of sleep in space so far, Harvard Medical School physiologist Laura Barger and her colleagues in 2014 analyzed the sleep patterns of 85 astronauts during space missions. The average astronaut slept just 6 hours a night, they reported in the Lancet Neurology. \u201cAny of us can shave our sleep for a day or two,\u201d said George Brainard, a light and biology researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. \u201cOn a long mission to Mars, a lapse in performance or a lapse in alertness can cause an error fatal to the entire mission.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Scott Kelly had his morning espresso aboard the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn low Earth orbit, where the sun rises and sets every 90 minutes or so, the lighting cues that orchestrate everything from hormones to eating habits are abnormal. Researchers led by Erin Flynn-Evans at the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., found that astronauts typically lost an hour\u2019s sleep every night because they were no longer synchronized with a 24-hour day. They suffered a kind of jet lag caused by the mismatch between their workday, their own internal timer and the activity of their cells. Aboard the space station, the interior lights weren\u2019t strong enough to ensure the body\u2019s master clock kept proper time, which could affect immune function, brain metabolism, blood chemistry and digestion, experts said. In a study published last month in the Lancet Psychiatry, scientists at the University of Glasgow found that disrupted circadian rhythms also heighten the risk of mood disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Mark Vande Hei alongside the international space station during a spacewalk on Oct. 10, 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI do think there is growing evidence there are medical consequences,\u201d said Rockefeller University biologist Michael Young, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Medicine for work on the genetic regulation of biological clocks. Sleep researchers are trying to understand the hazards of interplanetary jet lag, spurred by tentative plans to launch the first of what SpaceX CEO Elon Musk predicts could be a million Mars colonists starting in 2024. NASA plans its first Mars mission sometime after 2030. \u201cImagine sitting on a plane and the trip takes years,\u201d said psychiatrist Mathias Basner, an expert in sleep and chronobiology at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cWe know next to nothing about how people will respond in these environments.\u201d The lights that NASA is testing on sleep-deprived astronauts in space may also help people on planet Earth get more rest. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Research on Astronauts Lead to Better Sleep on Earth? (WSJ: Health & Wellness) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1804",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-research-on-astronauts-lead-to-a-good-nights-sleep-on-earth-1528118081?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=67",
        "text": "Tests aboard the international space station\u2014including $11 million worth of adjustable LED lighting that mimics the changing spectrum of natural sunlight through the day\u2014may help the next generation of astronauts sleep soundly on space flights. The research also may improve the quality of slumber for shift workers, bleary business travelers and insomniacs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe six-member Expedition 54 crew in the Japanese Kibo laboratory module of the international space station on Feb. 18, 2018.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nMany astronauts lose sleep because they have severed an intimate connection with the natural 24-hour cycle of sunset and sunrise under which humankind evolved on Earth, researchers discovered. Like many body functions, sleep is regulated by exposure to light, which sets a biological tempo called the circadian rhythm. To address the problem, spacecraft engineers and sleep physiologists are trying to put things in a different light. For the past 18 months, astronauts have been replacing the 85 fluorescent lights aboard the international space station\u2014similar to those used in hospitals, warehouses and office cubicles\u2014with energy-efficient LED lighting that can help reset the body clock because their light can affect production of a sleep-related hormone called melatonin. \u201cIt is like the sun in a box,\u201d said flight surgeon Smith Johnston at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who supervises astronaut medical \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAboard the international space station, Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke held an early version of the lights designed in part to help astronauts sleep and work better.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nmatters. The experimental fixtures have three settings that simulate changes in natural sunlight throughout the day. The first is rich in blue wavelengths of light like the noonday sun, for normal work lighting. The second setting is brighter and more intensely blue to heighten alertness during emergencies. The third is low in blue and rich in red, like the afterglow of the setting sun, to promote sound sleep. \u201cThis is something you can do in your own home,\u201d said Harvard neuroscientist Steven Lockley at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital who studies lighting. \u201cIt is just a matter of choosing the right light bulb for the right time of day.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Scientists are studying bed-bound subjects to delve into the long-term effects of weightlessness, with implications not just for astronauts headed to Mars, but for those still back on Earth. \n \n\n\nAstronauts in orbit often can\u2019t sleep soundly because they are disturbed by noise, stifling air and odors, space agency records show. Sleep deprivation can muddle their thinking, dull their reflexes, and make them accident-prone. In fact, three-quarters of astronauts in orbit take Ambien or other medication to fall asleep, according to space-agency medical studies and sleep logs. \u201cSleeping in space is a challenge,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly,\n\n\n\n a former NASA astronaut who spent an entire year aboard the international space station. \u201cI would be Velcro-ed to the wall, wearing long johns because I was cold, ear plugs, and a hat. I\u2019d have my knees pulled up because my back hurt.\u201d In the largest study of sleep in space so far, Harvard Medical School physiologist Laura Barger and her colleagues in 2014 analyzed the sleep patterns of 85 astronauts during space missions. The average astronaut slept just 6 hours a night, they reported in the Lancet Neurology. \u201cAny of us can shave our sleep for a day or two,\u201d said George Brainard, a light and biology researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. \u201cOn a long mission to Mars, a lapse in performance or a lapse in alertness can cause an error fatal to the entire mission.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Scott Kelly had his morning espresso aboard the international space station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn low Earth orbit, where the sun rises and sets every 90 minutes or so, the lighting cues that orchestrate everything from hormones to eating habits are abnormal. Researchers led by Erin Flynn-Evans at the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., found that astronauts typically lost an hour\u2019s sleep every night because they were no longer synchronized with a 24-hour day. They suffered a kind of jet lag caused by the mismatch between their workday, their own internal timer and the activity of their cells. Aboard the space station, the interior lights weren\u2019t strong enough to ensure the body\u2019s master clock kept proper time, which could affect immune function, brain metabolism, blood chemistry and digestion, experts said. In a study published last month in the Lancet Psychiatry, scientists at the University of Glasgow found that disrupted circadian rhythms also heighten the risk of mood disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder The lights that NASA is testing on sleep-deprived astronauts in space may also help people on planet Earth get more rest. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellites sweeping over Earth are turned into sound at NASA pavilion (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1805",
        "date": "2018-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/satellites-sweeping-over-earth-are-turned-into-sound-at-nasa-pavilion/2018/06/01/a161f1e0-6431-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.html",
        "text": "You may not give them any thought, but NASA satellites are constantly sweeping overhead, their equipment trained on the planet below.As they move, they observe Earth\u2019s weather, oceans, atmosphere and more. The data they beam back to Earth is used to predict weather, understand climate change and track environmental changes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInside a giant aluminum shell on the grounds of the Huntington Library near Pasadena, Calif., the movements of the spacecraft create an otherworldly soundscape. NASA\u2019s Orbit Pavilion, open through September 2019, turns research activities into sound. Go inside the nautilus-shaped sculpture and you\u2019ll hear sounds assigned to different Earth science satellites and the International Space Station as each of them crosses over.Story continues below advertisementEach NASA instrument has been given a sound that represents its mission, such as crashing waves and desert winds. As the satellite moves overhead, its trajectory is reflected through 28 surround-sound speakers.AdvertisementThe experience recruits listeners\u2019 ears and minds, reminding them spacecraft are always tracking Earth. Nineteen satellites and the ISS \u2014 which makes 16 rotations around Earth each day \u2014 are part of the mix.The pavilion is the brainchild of the Studio at JPL, a workshop based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that\u2019s tasked with making space exploration accessible to the public. Dan Goods and David Delgado, two visual strategists at JPL, spearheaded the project and worked with Shane Myrbeck, a sound artist, to create the immersive experience.Story continues below advertisementThe shell itself, designed by Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang, offers glimpses of the sky through its aluminum panels. Those views are a reminder that someone\u2019s always watching and that there\u2019s plenty of wonder to record.Can\u2019t make it to California? Catch a video of the pavilion at vimeo.com/190270237, or listen to a 2016 panel discussion on how the aerospace industry shaped California.NASA astronaut reveals the lows of space travel\u2018Houston: We have a podcast\u2019There\u2019s so much more than you knew to the Titanic search An otherworldly exhibit reminds us how science is tracking our weather and surroundings. Satellites sweeping over Earth are turned into sound at NASA pavilion",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellites sweeping over Earth are turned into sound at NASA pavilion (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1806",
        "date": "2018-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/satellites-sweeping-over-earth-are-turned-into-sound-at-nasa-pavilion/2018/06/01/a161f1e0-6431-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.html",
        "text": "You may not give them any thought, but NASA satellites are constantly sweeping overhead, their equipment trained on the planet below.As they move, they observe Earth\u2019s weather, oceans, atmosphere and more. The data they beam back to Earth is used to predict weather, understand climate change and track environmental changes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInside a giant aluminum shell on the grounds of the Huntington Library near Pasadena, Calif., the movements of the spacecraft create an otherworldly soundscape. NASA\u2019s Orbit Pavilion, open through September 2019, turns research activities into sound. Go inside the nautilus-shaped sculpture and you\u2019ll hear sounds assigned to different Earth science satellites and the International Space Station as each of them crosses over.Story continues below advertisementEach NASA instrument has been given a sound that represents its mission, such as crashing waves and desert winds. As the satellite moves overhead, its trajectory is reflected through 28 surround-sound speakers.AdvertisementThe experience recruits listeners\u2019 ears and minds, reminding them spacecraft are always tracking Earth. Nineteen satellites and the ISS \u2014 which makes 16 rotations around Earth each day \u2014 are part of the mix.The pavilion is the brainchild of the Studio at JPL, a workshop based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that\u2019s tasked with making space exploration accessible to the public. Dan Goods and David Delgado, two visual strategists at JPL, spearheaded the project and worked with Shane Myrbeck, a sound artist, to create the immersive experience.Story continues below advertisementThe shell itself, designed by Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang, offers glimpses of the sky through its aluminum panels. Those views are a reminder that someone\u2019s always watching and that there\u2019s plenty of wonder to record.Can\u2019t make it to California? Catch a video of the pavilion at vimeo.com/190270237, or listen to a 2016 panel discussion on how the aerospace industry shaped California.NASA astronaut reveals the lows of space travel\u2018Houston: We have a podcast\u2019There\u2019s so much more than you knew to the Titanic search An otherworldly exhibit reminds us how science is tracking our weather and surroundings. Satellites sweeping over Earth are turned into sound at NASA pavilion",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellites sweeping over Earth are turned into sound at NASA pavilion (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1807",
        "date": "2018-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/satellites-sweeping-over-earth-are-turned-into-sound-at-nasa-pavilion/2018/06/01/a161f1e0-6431-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.html",
        "text": "You may not give them any thought, but NASA satellites are constantly sweeping overhead, their equipment trained on the planet below.As they move, they observe Earth\u2019s weather, oceans, atmosphere and more. The data they beam back to Earth is used to predict weather, understand climate change and track environmental changes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInside a giant aluminum shell on the grounds of the Huntington Library near Pasadena, Calif., the movements of the spacecraft create an otherworldly soundscape. NASA\u2019s Orbit Pavilion, open through September 2019, turns research activities into sound. Go inside the nautilus-shaped sculpture and you\u2019ll hear sounds assigned to different Earth science satellites and the International Space Station as each of them crosses over.Story continues below advertisementEach NASA instrument has been given a sound that represents its mission, such as crashing waves and desert winds. As the satellite moves overhead, its trajectory is reflected through 28 surround-sound speakers.AdvertisementThe experience recruits listeners\u2019 ears and minds, reminding them spacecraft are always tracking Earth. Nineteen satellites and the ISS \u2014 which makes 16 rotations around Earth each day \u2014 are part of the mix.The pavilion is the brainchild of the Studio at JPL, a workshop based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that\u2019s tasked with making space exploration accessible to the public. Dan Goods and David Delgado, two visual strategists at JPL, spearheaded the project and worked with Shane Myrbeck, a sound artist, to create the immersive experience.Story continues below advertisementThe shell itself, designed by Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang, offers glimpses of the sky through its aluminum panels. Those views are a reminder that someone\u2019s always watching and that there\u2019s plenty of wonder to record.Can\u2019t make it to California? Catch a video of the pavilion at vimeo.com/190270237, or listen to a 2016 panel discussion on how the aerospace industry shaped California.NASA astronaut reveals the lows of space travel\u2018Houston: We have a podcast\u2019There\u2019s so much more than you knew to the Titanic search An otherworldly exhibit reminds us how science is tracking our weather and surroundings. Satellites sweeping over Earth are turned into sound at NASA pavilion",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say? NASA lets you hear. (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1808",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-does-a-rocket-launch-sound-like-what-did-neil-armstrong-really-say-nasa-lets-you-hear/2019/03/22/ddc8a6d8-4a77-11e9-93d0-64dbcf38ba41_story.html",
        "text": "What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say when he first stepped onto the surface of the Moon? The answers \u2014 and hours of riveting audio \u2014 are on NASA\u2019s account at SoundCloud.com/NASA.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space agency has uploaded hundreds of tracks and podcasts to the sound-sharing platform. The sounds are diverse, fascinating, frequently updated and free of charge. You can browse individual tracks, but a good way to get started is by using playlists that collect related sounds, such as the ones put on the Golden Record.The duplicate gold-plated copper disks went into space with Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977. Collected by a committee chaired by cosmologist Carl Sagan, the records were designed to be listened to by any advanced alien civilization that might intercept them. You can tune in, too. They are thought-provoking time (and planet) capsules, which include greetings in different languages and various Earth sounds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are also playlists with sounds from the Juno, Apollo and space shuttle missions, among others, and podcasts that cover science, history, astronaut training and more.The sounds are eclectic, informative and even creepy \u2014 as in the haunting radio emissions of Saturn and its moon, Enceladus, as captured during the \u201cgrand finale\u201d run of NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, which was launched in October 1997. A \u201csound tour\u201d of NASA\u2019s Robotic Operations Center includes clicks, buzzes and clangs (and an expert explanation of each sound). And there are countdowns galore.Most of the sounds are licensed under a Creative Commons license, which allows users to share and adapt as long as they give credit and use the pieces for noncommercial purposes. So put on your headphones, strap on your imaginary space helmet \u2014 and feel free to adapt, remix and share the sounds of space exploration.The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weirdThe bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space The space agency\u2019s SoundCloud site offers playlists of radio emissions, Apollo and space shuttle missions, and podcasts about science, history and astronaut training. What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say? NASA lets you hear.",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say? NASA lets you hear. (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1809",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-does-a-rocket-launch-sound-like-what-did-neil-armstrong-really-say-nasa-lets-you-hear/2019/03/22/ddc8a6d8-4a77-11e9-93d0-64dbcf38ba41_story.html",
        "text": "What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say when he first stepped onto the surface of the Moon? The answers \u2014 and hours of riveting audio \u2014 are on NASA\u2019s account at SoundCloud.com/NASA.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space agency has uploaded hundreds of tracks and podcasts to the sound-sharing platform. The sounds are diverse, fascinating, frequently updated and free of charge. You can browse individual tracks, but a good way to get started is by using playlists that collect related sounds, such as the ones put on the Golden Record.The duplicate gold-plated copper disks went into space with Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977. Collected by a committee chaired by cosmologist Carl Sagan, the records were designed to be listened to by any advanced alien civilization that might intercept them. You can tune in, too. They are thought-provoking time (and planet) capsules, which include greetings in different languages and various Earth sounds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are also playlists with sounds from the Juno, Apollo and space shuttle missions, among others, and podcasts that cover science, history, astronaut training and more.The sounds are eclectic, informative and even creepy \u2014 as in the haunting radio emissions of Saturn and its moon, Enceladus, as captured during the \u201cgrand finale\u201d run of NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, which was launched in October 1997. A \u201csound tour\u201d of NASA\u2019s Robotic Operations Center includes clicks, buzzes and clangs (and an expert explanation of each sound). And there are countdowns galore.Most of the sounds are licensed under a Creative Commons license, which allows users to share and adapt as long as they give credit and use the pieces for noncommercial purposes. So put on your headphones, strap on your imaginary space helmet \u2014 and feel free to adapt, remix and share the sounds of space exploration.The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weirdThe bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space The space agency\u2019s SoundCloud site offers playlists of radio emissions, Apollo and space shuttle missions, and podcasts about science, history and astronaut training. What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say? NASA lets you hear.",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say? NASA lets you hear. (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1810",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-does-a-rocket-launch-sound-like-what-did-neil-armstrong-really-say-nasa-lets-you-hear/2019/03/22/ddc8a6d8-4a77-11e9-93d0-64dbcf38ba41_story.html",
        "text": "What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say when he first stepped onto the surface of the Moon? The answers \u2014 and hours of riveting audio \u2014 are on NASA\u2019s account at SoundCloud.com/NASA.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space agency has uploaded hundreds of tracks and podcasts to the sound-sharing platform. The sounds are diverse, fascinating, frequently updated and free of charge. You can browse individual tracks, but a good way to get started is by using playlists that collect related sounds, such as the ones put on the Golden Record.The duplicate gold-plated copper disks went into space with Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977. Collected by a committee chaired by cosmologist Carl Sagan, the records were designed to be listened to by any advanced alien civilization that might intercept them. You can tune in, too. They are thought-provoking time (and planet) capsules, which include greetings in different languages and various Earth sounds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are also playlists with sounds from the Juno, Apollo and space shuttle missions, among others, and podcasts that cover science, history, astronaut training and more.The sounds are eclectic, informative and even creepy \u2014 as in the haunting radio emissions of Saturn and its moon, Enceladus, as captured during the \u201cgrand finale\u201d run of NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, which was launched in October 1997. A \u201csound tour\u201d of NASA\u2019s Robotic Operations Center includes clicks, buzzes and clangs (and an expert explanation of each sound). And there are countdowns galore.Most of the sounds are licensed under a Creative Commons license, which allows users to share and adapt as long as they give credit and use the pieces for noncommercial purposes. So put on your headphones, strap on your imaginary space helmet \u2014 and feel free to adapt, remix and share the sounds of space exploration.The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weirdThe bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space The space agency\u2019s SoundCloud site offers playlists of radio emissions, Apollo and space shuttle missions, and podcasts about science, history and astronaut training. What does a rocket launch sound like? What did Neil Armstrong really say? NASA lets you hear.",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tool around the amazing Red Planet without leaving home (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1811",
        "date": "2018-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/tool-around-the-amazing-red-planet-without-leaving-home/2018/11/02/d7c61e86-dc73-11e8-b732-3c72cbf131f2_story.html",
        "text": "Sick of life right now on Earth?\u00a0Head to Mars instead.\u00a0Virtually, that is.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGoogle Mars\u00a0lets you explore the Red Planet without the 140-million-mile journey.It\u2019s one of the most detailed maps of the planet ever made, thanks to data collected from NASA satellites and then put together in association with NASA scientists at Arizona State University.\u00a0 On Google Mars, the Red Planet isn\u2019t red. If you choose the elevation map, it\u2019s a rainbow of craters and hills. Look at it through the visible light spectrum, and it\u2019s gray, which lets you view more surface detail.You can view the planet with imagery from the infrared spectrum, too. Those images portray how cold or hot it is on the planet\u2019s surface. They even show Martian clouds and atmospheric dust.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe interface will feel familiar if you\u2019ve ever used Google Maps \u2014 you can zoom, search for different planetary features or just browse.\u00a0AdvertisementThe map lets you tool around Mars using your mouse, but you can also click links that lead you to its plains, ridges, craters, mountains, canyons and dunes. You can explore its regions and find out how they got their names (Lomonosov crater, for instance, got its name from a Russian scientist who discovered the law of conservation of mass).\u00a0Google Earth Pro lets you visit Mars, too, with an even more detailed, more fascinating map that lets you see the planet\u2019s surface in 3-D. It\u2019s a free download. Spending time soaring around an alien planet can be a nice antidote to your earthly woes.A 12-mile-body-of-water lies beneath a Mars ice capCuriosity\u2019s five-year journey across Mars \u2014 in one stunning photoNASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019 Google Mars\u00a0lets you explore it in numerous ways without the 140-million-mile journey. Tool around the amazing Red Planet without leaving home",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "100 years ago, an eclipse changed the known laws of physics and made Einstein Einstein (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1812",
        "date": "2019-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/100-years-ago-an-eclipse-changed-the-known-laws-of-physics-and-made-einstein-einstein/2019/05/28/8fbac9b2-8096-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html",
        "text": "On May 29, 1919, a solar eclipse forever altered our conception of gravity, rewrote the laws of physics and turned a 40-year-old, wild-haired scientist into a global celebrity \u2014 the very personification of scientific genius.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was a very good day for Albert Einstein.The 1919 eclipse across South America and Africa provided direct evidence for Einstein\u2019s mind-bending theory of gravity. He proposed in 1915 that gravity isn\u2019t a spooky force acting across space but rather is a feature of the essence of space and time. Gravity is the warping and curving of the fabric of the universe. Einstein\u2019s theory \u2014 the general theory of relativity \u2014 was hailed by the physicist J.J. Thomson as \u201cone of the greatest achievements of human thought.\u201d It has been confirmed by many more observations over the century, including the detection of gravitational waves and the first picture of a black hole just this year. He cracked a fundamental code of the universe.AdvertisementEinstein's equations break down in a black hole. Here's why this photo, the first ever released image of a black hole, is such a big deal. (Billy Tucker/The Washington Post)Story continues below advertisementAnd yet: Something\u2019s amiss.Although Einstein seemed to have the final word on how the universe is put together, more recent probing of deep space as well as the inner workings of atoms have found places where the theory breaks down.For example, inside a black hole, Einstein\u2019s equations suggest that matter and energy become so compressed they reach infinite density. But what does that mean? The theorists suspect it means they need a better theory.\u201cYou can\u2019t calculate anything beyond that point, once the numbers become infinite. You\u2019ve lost all control,\u201d says Emil Mottola, a theoretical physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t tell you that nature can\u2019t do that, but it\u2019s very suspicious.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe same problem applies when cosmologists rewind the film reel of the universe\u2019s expansion for the past 13 billion years and reach the very beginning of time and space, the so-called big bang. Einstein\u2019s theory doesn\u2019t quite work at the creation.AdvertisementNotoriously \u2014 at least among theoretical physicists \u2014 general relativity doesn\u2019t explain how gravity works at the tiniest of scales, the realm of subatomic particles.Dark matter has never been directly observed, but its existence is inferred through its gravitational effects, such as on the motion of stars in galaxies. Conceivably it could be some kind of modification of the gravitational force that wasn\u2019t predicted by Einstein, said Lee Smolin, a theorist at the Perimeter Institute.Story continues below advertisementDark energy, another cosmic mystery, is whatever is driving the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. This seeming anti-gravity acceleration was detected only in the late 1990s and strongly suggests that the universe will expand forever. So why is this happening?\u201cWe don\u2019t know. That\u2019s why we call it \u2018dark energy\u2019,\u201d says Gabriela Gonzalez, a professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University.Advertisement\u201cI think there are plenty of mysteries that I hope to see the solution to in my lifetime,\u201d she said. \u201cAll these things need theories that can be confirmed by experiments. They need theories that have predictions.\u201dWhich brings us back to Einstein, and the eclipse.Story continues below advertisementEinstein had emerged from obscurity in 1905 with a series of astonishing papers that obliterated classical notions about time and space. But his greatest achievement came a decade later, in 1915, when he described the equations governing gravity. He\u2019d figured out a fundamental feature of the universe, using merely the power of his brain. But was it true? What if his equations were just a mathematical fancy, something that looked nifty on paper but did not correspond to physical reality?Einstein proposed an experimental test. A solar eclipse would block the sun\u2019s light and allow scientists to study starlight passing close to the sun. His theory predicted that the sun\u2019s gravitational field would displace the starlight by a certain amount compared to where they would be under classical theories of gravity.AdvertisementBritish astronomer Arthur Eddington led an expedition to observe the eclipse from two locations, one in Brazil and one on the island of Principe near the African coast.Story continues below advertisementThe stars backed Einstein.When the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, announced the results in November of that year, newspapers ran front-page stories and Einstein became famous all over the planet.In his biography of Einstein, author Walter Isaacson recounts an exchange between Einstein and a graduate student, Ilse Schneider, when news came that the theory had been upheld. She asked him, she later recalled, what he would have thought if the eclipse observations had contradicted his theory.\u201cThen I would have been sorry for the dear Lord; the theory is correct,\u201d Einstein said.Mottola notes that, since the days of Euclid and Aristotle, space and time had been seen as a passive stage for the events of the universe, unaffected by the comings and goings of planets and stars. But Einstein said that wasn\u2019t so: Space and time were affected by matter, and even light has to obey the geometry of curved space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe modern world depends on accepting this cosmic truth. Spacecraft trajectories have to take general relativity into account. So does GPS. So does military targeting.Einstein\u2019s theory carried astonishing implications for exotic things out there in the universe, not least of which are black holes. Perhaps the most thunderous modern confirmation of Einstein came with the detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves; a century later, scientists found them.The universe has not run out of surprises, and theoretical physicists remain in business. The questions don\u2019t tend to get easier over time. When Mottola is asked about what happened, exactly, at the beginning of the universe, he says, \u201cSometimes you have to say you don\u2019t know.\u201d A brief history of gravity and LIGOScientists detect gravitational waves from black holes mergingSee the first image of a black hole, from the Event Horizon Telescope General relativity explains gravity in most situations, but the universe hasn\u2019t run out of mysteries 100 years ago, an eclipse changed the known laws of physics and made Einstein Einstein",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errors (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1813",
        "date": "2018-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasas-next-great-space-telescope-is-stuck-on-earth-after-screwy-errors/2018/07/24/742f17d4-8e93-11e8-8322-b5482bf5e0f5_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to be a million miles from Earth by now, peering deep into the universe and back in time to when stars were first assembling into galaxies. But its launch is still years and billions of dollars away, and mission success depends on many delicate things going exactly right. The telescope unfortunately has some screws loose. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd washers. And nuts.Technicians discovered that rogue screws fell off during a test this spring. This was among several forehead-smacking errors and design flaws that have put off until March 2021 the launch of the telescope, which has so far cost taxpayers about $7.4 billion and now has an estimated price tag of $9.7 billion.Story continues below advertisementThe travails of the Webb will be the focus of two days of testimony, starting Wednesday, before the House Science Committee. Among those appearing and certain to face difficult questions will be NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Wes Bush, the CEO of the primary contractor, Northrop Grumman.AdvertisementThe Webb\u2019s problems have rattled many powerful constituencies. NASA is embarrassed and dismayed by the human errors that have snarled its biggest robotic science project, which was identified by the astronomy community back in 2000 as its top priority.The U.S. aerospace industry, which is dealing with a wave of retirements, needs to prove to national leaders that it remains as competent as when it put people on the moon. The same companies that build civilian space telescopes also build spy satellites. Earlier this year, a classified Defense Department satellite code-named Zuma was lost after it failed to separate from a rocket booster. That satellite was built by Northrop Grumman.Story continues below advertisementAn independent review board report this summer declared that the Webb is potentially vulnerable to 344 different \u201csingle-point-failures\u201d \u2014 an extraordinary number for any mission. That means if a single metal strut fails, or a single cable gets snagged, \u201cwe have a ten-billion-dollar paperweight sitting out there,\u201d said astrophysicist Grant Tremblay of the ",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errors (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1814",
        "date": "2018-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasas-next-great-space-telescope-is-stuck-on-earth-after-screwy-errors/2018/07/24/742f17d4-8e93-11e8-8322-b5482bf5e0f5_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to be a million miles from Earth by now, peering deep into the universe and back in time to when stars were first assembling into galaxies. But its launch is still years and billions of dollars away, and mission success depends on many delicate things going exactly right. The telescope unfortunately has some screws loose. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd washers. And nuts.Technicians discovered that rogue screws fell off during a test this spring. This was among several forehead-smacking errors and design flaws that have put off until March 2021 the launch of the telescope, which has so far cost taxpayers about $7.4 billion and now has an estimated price tag of $9.7 billion.Story continues below advertisementThe travails of the Webb will be the focus of two days of testimony, starting Wednesday, before the House Science Committee. Among those appearing and certain to face difficult questions will be NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Wes Bush, the CEO of the primary contractor, Northrop Grumman.AdvertisementThe Webb\u2019s problems have rattled many powerful constituencies. NASA is embarrassed and dismayed by the human errors that have snarled its biggest robotic science project, which was identified by the astronomy community back in 2000 as its top priority.The U.S. aerospace industry, which is dealing with a wave of retirements, needs to prove to national leaders that it remains as competent as when it put people on the moon. The same companies that build civilian space telescopes also build spy satellites. Earlier this year, a classified Defense Department satellite code-named Zuma was lost after it failed to separate from a rocket booster. That satellite was built by Northrop Grumman.Story continues below advertisementAn independent review board report this summer declared that the Webb is potentially vulnerable to 344 different \u201csingle-point-failures\u201d \u2014 an extraordinary number for any mission. That means if a single metal strut fails, or a single cable gets snagged, \u201cwe have a ten-billion-dollar paperweight sitting out there,\u201d said astrophysicist Grant Tremblay of the ",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errors (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1815",
        "date": "2018-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasas-next-great-space-telescope-is-stuck-on-earth-after-screwy-errors/2018/07/24/742f17d4-8e93-11e8-8322-b5482bf5e0f5_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to be a million miles from Earth by now, peering deep into the universe and back in time to when stars were first assembling into galaxies. But its launch is still years and billions of dollars away, and mission success depends on many delicate things going exactly right. The telescope unfortunately has some screws loose. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd washers. And nuts.Technicians discovered that rogue screws fell off during a test this spring. This was among several forehead-smacking errors and design flaws that have put off until March 2021 the launch of the telescope, which has so far cost taxpayers about $7.4 billion and now has an estimated price tag of $9.7 billion.Story continues below advertisementThe travails of the Webb will be the focus of two days of testimony, starting Wednesday, before the House Science Committee. Among those appearing and certain to face difficult questions will be NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Wes Bush, the CEO of the primary contractor, Northrop Grumman.AdvertisementThe Webb\u2019s problems have rattled many powerful constituencies. NASA is embarrassed and dismayed by the human errors that have snarled its biggest robotic science project, which was identified by the astronomy community back in 2000 as its top priority.The U.S. aerospace industry, which is dealing with a wave of retirements, needs to prove to national leaders that it remains as competent as when it put people on the moon. The same companies that build civilian space telescopes also build spy satellites. Earlier this year, a classified Defense Department satellite code-named Zuma was lost after it failed to separate from a rocket booster. That satellite was built by Northrop Grumman.Story continues below advertisementAn independent review board report this summer declared that the Webb is potentially vulnerable to 344 different \u201csingle-point-failures\u201d \u2014 an extraordinary number for any mission. That means if a single metal strut fails, or a single cable gets snagged, \u201cwe have a ten-billion-dollar paperweight sitting out there,\u201d said astrophysicist Grant Tremblay of the ",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is there a mysterious Planet Nine lurking in our solar system beyond Neptune? (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1816",
        "date": "2018-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/is-there-a-mysterious-planet-nine-lurking-in-our-solar-system-beyond-neptune/2018/08/31/1957c8ca-a495-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html",
        "text": "Many astronomers remain convinced a once-in-a-generation discovery is in the offing \u2014 one that would rewrite textbooks down to the elementary school level. \u201cEvery time we take a picture,\u201d said Surhud More, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo, \u201cthere is this possibility that Planet Nine exists in the shot.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCircumstantial evidence continues to accumulate for the existence of Planet Nine, the hypothetical body thought to be lurking in our solar system far beyond Neptune. But no telescope has been able to spot it.Michael Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, says he feels \u201ceternally optimistic\u201d that someone will soon find it, but there\u2019s reason to believe that Planet Nine, if it exists, might be essentially invisible to existing observatories.Story continues below advertisementThe first evidence for Planet Nine surfaced in 2014, when the discovery of a planetoid revealed that a handful of mini ice-worlds in the outermost reaches of the solar system followed suspiciously similar paths around the sun. \u201cIf things are in the same orbit, then something\u2019s pushing them,\u201d said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and the co-discoverer of the 2014 planetoid.AdvertisementBrown and his colleague Konstantin Batygin made a specific prediction two years later: The \u201cperturber,\u201d as they call it, should weigh between five and 20 Earth masses and follow an elliptical orbit hundreds or even 1,000 times more distant from the sun than Earth.Out there, space gets dark alarmingly fast. Planets twice as far away look 16 times dimmer: The intensity of the sunlight weakens by a factor of four going out and then four times again coming back. At an orbital distance of 600 astronomical units (an AU is the distance between Earth and the sun), Planet Nine would be 160,000 times dimmer than Neptune is at 30 AU. At 1,000 AU, it would appear more than 1 million times weaker. \u201cThere\u2019s really a brick wall, basically, at 1,000 AU,\u201d said Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s partly why laying eyes on the planet has proved so tough. Both Brown and Sheppard are leading teams that are searching for the planet with the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. Subaru has a wide field of view, which helps the teams scour a potential search area that\u2019s the size of 4,000 full moons. Over the past two years, each team has secured about a week of viewing time each year. With perfect weather, that would theoretically have been enough time to cover most of the area of interest. But windy and cloudy nights have scuttled many planned observations.AdvertisementEven if the astronomers do soon cover the search area, cosmically bad luck could keep the planet hidden. Perhaps it\u2019s lost in the light pollution of the Milky Way, or hiding in the glare of a bright star. Worse, it could be in the part of its orbit that takes it beyond that 1,000-AU wall. Waiting for it to swing back around would take thousands of years.Hence the need for backup detection plans. One idea is to look for the heat glow such a planet should emit directly. Luhman essentially ruled out the existence of anything bigger and warmer than a gas giant such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune with a 2014 analysis of infrared data. But physicists expect a smaller, colder Planet Nine to shine in the millimeter part of the spectrum, which is between infrared light and microwaves.Story continues below advertisementCurrent millimeter telescopes in Antarctica and Chile could detect Planet Nine today should it stray across their search field, according to Gilbert Holder, a cosmologist at the University of Illinois. Yet those instruments are mapping the cosmic microwave background (CMB), or the light left over from the start of the universe, so they\u2019re not necessarily pointed in the right direction at the right times. Holder is waiting for the Next Generation CMB Experiment, which his preliminary calculations estimate could pick up a planet as small as Earth at 1,000 AU. \u201cThere would be nowhere for Planet Nine to hide once this thing was turned on,\u201d he said.AdvertisementThat moment, however, remains the better part of a decade away, and less-patient souls wonder if signs of Planet Nine might lie buried in today\u2019s data sets. In addition to glowing with millimeter light, the predicted body would ever so slightly sculpt the paths of the known planets. It should gravitationally nudge the gas giants, for instance, even if by only a dozen meters over the course of an orbit 5 billion kilometers long.After more than a decade of tracking the Cassini spacecraft\u2019s path through the Saturnian system, some researchers think the ringed planet\u2019s orbit differs from what their models predict. \u201cThere\u2019s a pattern,\u201d said Matthew Holman, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He compared a model of Saturn\u2019s orbit to Cassini data and found a hint of something unknown.Story continues below advertisementBut researchers from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which maintains its own finely tuned model of the solar system, disagree. Every time Cassini fired its thrusters or made another planetary flyby, uncertainty crept into the records of the probe\u2019s speed and location. Each model handles these sources of error differently, and JPL\u2019s algorithms suggest there\u2019s more than enough of such noise to obscure any Planet Nine signal.AdvertisementNow that the Cassini mission is over, conclusive answers may have to wait for more-precise sensors. One idea is gravitationally mapping the entire solar system with a network of souped-up accelerometers akin to those in smartphones. Makan Mohageg, a physicist at JPL, believes groups of atoms cooled to the point at which they act like waves could do the trick. The interference between two such wavelike matter packets is extremely sensitive to movement. Place into orbit three or four sensors based on this technology, Mohageg said, and you can pinpoint the location of unknown gravitational disturbances. His group sent a test device to the International Space Station in May.Even if Planet Nine isn\u2019t out there, the hunt is turning up other finds. Sheppard will soon confirm the discovery (and, in some cases, the rediscovery) of small moons of Jupiter. More, who works with Brown on the Subaru survey, is mapping the dark-matter halo around our galaxy by targeting flickering stars. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to find anything that goes bump in the night, really,\u201d Sheppard said.This story was produced by Quanta Magazine.NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsAstronomy site is your guide to the universe, one picture at a timeAstronomers dazzled by brilliant supernova Scientists accumulate circumstantial evidence, but no telescope has yet spotted it. Is there a mysterious Planet Nine lurking in our solar system beyond Neptune?",
        "author": "Charlie Wood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s a chance to explore Saturn with two members of Cassini-Huygens mission (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1817",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/heres-a-chance-to-explore-saturn-with-two-members-of-cassini-huygens-mission/2018/03/16/0bfbcb6a-260d-11e8-b79d-f3d931db7f68_story.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s not every day that you can give a planet its due. And Saturn \u2014 the second-largest planet and sixth from the sun \u2014 deserves plenty of awe and accolades. The massive planet is almost mesmerizingly beautiful, and its rings have seduced both researchers and amateur astronomers since they were first spotted by Galileo in 1610.\n WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, you can take your love of the ringed planet to the next level at \u201cAn Ode to Saturn\u201d on March 26 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Busboys and Poets at Fifth and K streets NW in Washington. The free event is sponsored by the DC Science Cafe and features two NASA scientists who have devoted their careers to the planet.Michael Flasar and Carrie Anderson don\u2019t just love Saturn \u2014 they\u2019ve helped explore it. Both were part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons, which met with a spectacular end in 2017 after the spacecraft dipped and dived between Saturn\u2019s rings. In September, it crashed into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere, but not before delivering some seriously valuable scientific data and photographs of the planet and its rings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlasar and Anderson will discuss the mission and what\u2019s left to discover, and help crush some popular myths about the planet. You might even end up waxing poetic about the planet yourself.Can\u2019t attend the event? You can still feel the love \u2014 the Cassini mission website at saturn.jpl.nasa.gov is a resource for all things Saturn.The Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a 20-year missionSee the most moving photo from the Cassini mission The March 26 event at Busboys and Poets is organized by DC Science Cafe. Here\u2019s a chance to explore Saturn with two members of Cassini-Huygens mission",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in October (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1818",
        "date": "2019-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-october/2019/09/28/53a07744-e138-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html",
        "text": "Draw back the cosmic curtain on October\u2019s night sky to see the month begin with the sliver of a young moon in the darkened southwestern heavens on Oct. 1. By the next evening, the moon gains more heft.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe waxing moon approaches the quite bright Jupiter (-2 magnitude) on Oct. 3 and, from our earthly perspective, this young moon and Jupiter pull within 2 degrees of each other, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. In clear night skies, note that Jupiter has company, as the red supergiant star Antares appears to the lower right of our largest planet.The fattening first-quarter moon sashays Oct. 5 to Saturn (0.5 magnitude, bright, but dimmer than Jupiter.) The ringed planet is to the upper left of Jupiter. The moon snuggles with Saturn that evening in the handle region of the constellation Sagittarius\u2019 tea kettle shape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the end of the month, the young moon ghoulishly treats our eyes to another dance with large, gaseous Jupiter on Oct. 31.Very low on the evening\u2019s west-southwest horizon, Venus emerges from a summer break, but stays low until December.Mars returns from its summer vacation, where the planet hid in the sun\u2019s glare, but it loiters low on the morning\u2019s eastern horizon in late October.The Orionids peak on the evening of Oct. 21-22. For this year\u2019s Orionids, don\u2019t expect much. It is predicted to be a small shower, with about 20 meteors each hour at peak, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Shooting stars are tiny bits of comet dust left behind as comets whiz by the sun. For the Orionids, it\u2019s specks of Halley\u2019s comet. Earth strikes these dusty trails, and these bits burn in our atmosphere, providing a free autumnal show.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf you\u2019re persistent, wait outside during the later evening and look up, you\u2019ll probably see a few meteors in an hour. On Oct. 22, the last quarter moon rises at 12:37 a.m., in the eastern time zone, according to the observatory. The moon\u2019s light will probably wash out some of the shower\u2019s peak.Down-to-Earth Events:\n\u25cfOct. 4 \u2014 \u201cImmortal Spacecraft: The Rise of In-Space Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing,\u201d a lecture by NASA\u2019s Benjamin Reed, at the Philosophical Society of Washington. Powell Auditorium, Cosmos Club, 2170 Florida Ave. NW. 8 p.m. pswscience.org.\n\u25cfOct. 5 \u2014 The 37th Annual Northern Virginia Astronomy Club Star Gaze. Chat with astronomers, view the sun safely through filters and revel in night sky wonder observing through telescopes. At C.M. Crockett Park, 10066 Rogues Rd., Midland, Va. Parking $7 for non-Fauquier County residents. 3-11 p.m. Entrance to park ends at 9 p.m. novac.com.\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cfOct. 5 \u2014 \u201cExploring the Sky,\u201d hosted by the National Capital Astronomers and the National Park Service, at Rock Creek Park, near the Nature Center in the field south of Military and Glover roads NW. 7:30 p.m. capitalastronomers.org.\n\u25cfOct. 5 \u2014 Enjoy an astronomy talk before viewing the heavens through telescopes, weather permitting, at the University of Maryland\u2019s Observatory, College Park. 9 p.m. astro.umd.edu/openhouse.\n\u25cfOct. 6 \u2014 \u201cLooking Up at the Stars,\u201d public sky gazing at Patuxent River Park, 16000 Croom Airport Rd., Upper Marlboro. Hosted by Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, in partnership with the Southern Maryland Astronomical Society. 8-10:30 p.m. Weather permitting. mncppc.org.\nStory continues below advertisement\u25cfOct. 7 \u2014 \u201cStars Tonight\u201d at the David M. Brown Planetarium, 1426 N. Quincy St., Arlington, adjacent to Washington-Lee High School. 7:30 p.m. $3. apsva.us/planetarium-overview.\nAdvertisement\u25cfOct. 12 \u2014 Physicist Duilia Demello of Catholic University discusses interacting galaxies and star formation at the National Capital Astronomers meeting, held at the University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. 7:30 p.m. \ncapitalastronomers.org.\n\u25cfOct. 20 \u2014 Learn about astronomy and then view the night sky through telescopes, weather permitting, at the University of Maryland\u2019s Observatory, College Park. 9 p.m. astro.umd.edu/openhouse.\n\u25cfOct. 22 \u2014 \u201cUSS Hornet: Stories of the Apollo 11 Recovery,\u201d panel discussion, with Clancy Navy diver Clancy Hatleberg, flight surgeon Bill Carpentier, aviator Bruce Johnson, and historian Robert Fish, author of \u201cHornet Plus Three: The Story of the Apollo 11 Recovery.\u201d Lockheed Martin Imax Theater, National Air and Space Museum, Washington. 8 p.m. For tickets and webcast detail: airandspace.si.edu.\n\u25cfNov. 1 \u2014 \u201cTess\u2019 Exoplanets: Results of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Mission,\u201d a lecture by George Ricker, TESS principal investigator, at the Philosophical Society of Washington. Powell Auditorium, Cosmos Club, 2170 Florida Ave. NW. 8 p.m. pswscience.org.\nBlaine Friedlander can be reached at PostSkyWatch@yahoo.com. Note that Jupiter has company, as the red supergiant star Antares appears to the lower right of our largest planet. Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in October",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye takes on creationists and science deniers (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1819",
        "date": "2018-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/bill-nye-takes-on-creationists-and-science-deniers/2018/04/13/8191254c-3d95-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html",
        "text": "Bill Nye is immediately recognizable to an entire generation that grew up with his wacky experiments and Science Guy persona.But what\u2019s behind the lab coat?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt turns out he\u2019s a man focused on fighting science denial. \u201cBill Nye: Science Guy,\u201d a POV documentary that premieres on PBS Wednesday, follows him as he tries to carry out this seemingly impossible mission. Filmmakers David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg delve into Nye\u2019s past, his personal life and his current obsession with countering climate-change deniers and creationists who don\u2019t believe in human evolution. It\u2019s a controversial strategy among scientists, some of whom think that it doesn\u2019t make sense to shine a spotlight on anti-science views. But Nye disagrees with that viewpoint as passionately as he differs with the deniers themselves.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat makes for good television, and the film should generate plenty of debate about Nye and his tactics.Nye is CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit founded by his mentor, Carl Sagan. The documentary follows Nye through the launch in 2015 of LightSail 1, a spacecraft powered by solar radiation. The real story, though, is Nye\u2019s struggles to fill Sagan\u2019s shoes. Sagan, who died in 1996, also grappled with science skeptics, and Nye has taken up his work in even more embattled times.The film is packed with tense moments as Nye confronts figures including Joe Bastardi, a meteorologist and cable-news commentator who denies humans\u2019 involvement in global warming. As Nye and Bastardi spar over the planet\u2019s future, we see their similarities \u2014 including their passion, effective use of media and worries about the lasting impact of their work \u2014 as clearly as their differences.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNye\u2019s work is cast as heroic, but it\u2019s also endless. In a dramatic moment, a person attending a Nye-led conversation on climate change abruptly leaves the room when Nye says the majority of scientists agree that humans cause climate change. It\u2019s a reminder that, despite his take-on-all-comers stance toward science skeptics, Nye doesn\u2019t win every battle to persuade deniers they are wrong.The March for Science was a moment made for Bill NyeThis ancient climate catastrophe is our best clue about Earth\u2019s future PBS documentary follows the Science Guy as he fights science denial. Bill Nye takes on creationists and science deniers",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sunbeam-sailing spacecraft deemed \u2018mission success\u2019 in Earth orbit (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1820",
        "date": "2019-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sunbeam-sailing-spacecraft-deemed-mission-success-in-earth-orbit/2019/08/02/f72161de-b46b-11e9-8949-5f36ff92706e_story.html",
        "text": "A small crowdfunded satellite promoted by TV host and science educator Bill Nye has been propelled into a higher orbit using only the force of sunlight blowing against its sail in space, a novel propulsion developers say could \u201cdemocratize\u201d spaceflight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe LightSail 2 spacecraft, about the size of a loaf of bread, was launched into orbit in June and unfurled a tinfoil-like solar sail designed to steer and push the spacecraft, using the momentum of tiny particles of light called photons emanating from the sun, into a higher orbit. The satellite was developed by the Planetary Society, a space ",
        "author": "Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sunbeam-sailing spacecraft deemed \u2018mission success\u2019 in Earth orbit (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1821",
        "date": "2019-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sunbeam-sailing-spacecraft-deemed-mission-success-in-earth-orbit/2019/08/02/f72161de-b46b-11e9-8949-5f36ff92706e_story.html",
        "text": "A small crowdfunded satellite promoted by TV host and science educator Bill Nye has been propelled into a higher orbit using only the force of sunlight blowing against its sail in space, a novel propulsion developers say could \u201cdemocratize\u201d spaceflight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe LightSail 2 spacecraft, about the size of a loaf of bread, was launched into orbit in June and unfurled a tinfoil-like solar sail designed to steer and push the spacecraft, using the momentum of tiny particles of light called photons emanating from the sun, into a higher orbit. The satellite was developed by the Planetary Society, a space ",
        "author": "Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1822",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-and-pence-push-america-first-agenda-to-the-moon-and-outer-space/2019/04/25/61ce9df4-5f98-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil.\u201dVice President Pence, rhetorically planting a new American flag on the moon, spoke to leaders of the U.S. space community last month in Huntsville, Ala. He came to deliver a dramatic message: The administration was unsatisfied by NASA\u2019s plan to return to the moon in 2028. That\u2019s not fast enough, Pence said. He ordered NASA to get there within five years \u2014 before, he didn\u2019t need to add, the end of what might be a second term for President Trump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn multiple ways, the Trump administration is trying to project the president\u2019s Make America Great Again rhetoric into space. Trump has vowed to ramp up the nation\u2019s missile defense system with a space-based layer that\u2019s \u201cultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and, obviously, of our offense.\u201d And he\u2019s pushed for the creation of a Space Force, a sixth branch of the U.S. military.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a major shift. Space policy has always served national interests, but the United States has increasingly entered into partnerships for exploration and science. The gleaming example is the International Space Station, a joint venture that has survived geopolitical strife among member nations.The celebrated first direct image of a black hole, unveiled this month, came from an international collaboration involving telescopes on four continents. The image was created by turning the entire globe into one giant radio antenna. In a 2015 breakthrough, physicists from universities and research institutes in more than a dozen nations pooled their energies to detect gravitational waves for the first time.And NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, includes instruments provided by Canada and Europe, and it will launch on Europe\u2019s Ariane rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, U.S. space policy has been relatively immune to the most intense partisan battles in Washington. Democrats and Republicans have supported each other\u2019s favored projects \u2014 a big new telescope over here, a big new rocket over there.But NASA remains an agency in the executive branch, answering to the dictates of the White House as well as powerful members of Congress. After the space shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003, President George W. Bush\u2019s administration decided NASA should retire the shuttle fleet and invest in new hardware to send astronauts to the moon by 2020.President Barack Obama was cool to the moon plan, saying been there, done that. And a presidential committee appointed by Obama concluded that the agency didn\u2019t have enough money to make the moon plan plausible. Obama ordered the agency to send astronauts to an asteroid and then eventually to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s election led to another pivot. Trump came into office hoping to do something dramatic in space. He expressed disappointment that NASA couldn\u2019t send humans to Mars in his first term. Pence took the helm of the National Space Council, a White House unit that had been moribund for a generation and that now put civilian and military space operations under one roof. The administration told NASA to reverse course again and cobble together a moon program, ASAP.How much the new MAGA-in-space rhetoric will translate into reality is unclear. Without additional funding from Congress or a change in the laws of physics, NASA has little chance of putting boots on the moon within Pence\u2019s five-year time frame. But Pence\u2019s speech certainly energized the aerospace community and jolted NASA, in part by signaling that the administration would consider a moon plan that used commercial spacecraft and not merely the hardware directly developed and owned by NASA.It\u2019s also unclear if the Space Force will materialize as a separate military service. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle aren\u2019t sure it\u2019s necessary. There\u2019s already a space command within the Air Force. To be clear: This would not involve some kind of military deployment of uniformed personnel in space, as in the movie \u201cStarship Troopers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States, like every other technologically advanced nation, is increasingly reliant on space for military and economic strength and needs to be prepared to protect its fleet of satellites. India blew up a satellite a few weeks ago in a demonstration of technological capability. China did the same thing in 2007 in a test that alarmed the Pentagon and national security agencies and created a cloud of space debris.Pence has called space \u201cthe newest war-fighting domain.\u201d That language has been adopted by top Pentagon officials.\u201cHaving carefully observed our dependencies on space, China and Russia have developed new technologies, strategies, tactics, and asymmetric capabilities specifically intended to deny our freedom of operation in space. While we would prefer space remain free from conflict, they have made space a war-fighting domain,\u201d acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in prepared Senate testimony earlier this month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his March\u00a026 speech in Huntsville, Pence cited China\u2019s recent success in landing the first robotic probe on the moon\u2019s little-explored far side. That mission \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dChina has plans for a sample-return mission later this year, and India hopes to put a lander and a rover near the lunar south pole. Israel recently attempted to land a probe, which crashed. And Japan and Russia both are working on missions involving lunar landers.The European Space Agency has for many years been a reliable partner of NASA in major space missions, but after Pence\u2019s speech, the Europeans had to reassess the relationship.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in contact with NASA to discuss how Europe could play a role, and we are part of the game,\u201d Jan Woerner, director general of the European Space Agency, told The Washington Post. He noted that the Europeans are still providing a service module for NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, which could play a role in a lunar mission. And he said he is asking his colleagues to speed up development of elements that could be used for an ascent module to take astronauts off the moon during a lunar landing mission.AdvertisementHe said he hopes cooperation, rather than competition, drives space policy in the future.\u201cThere is no fence in space; therefore, we can work together, above all earthly borders,\u201d Woerner said. \u201cBut of course there is also a political will behind space, and this is what Vice President Pence said. This is different from what is done in Europe, but we are different people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementScott Pace, a White House officials who serves as executive secretary of the National Space Council, said the reason NASA may use American-only hardware for a moon mission was pragmatic. International partners simply won\u2019t have time to craft crucial elements of a 2024 lunar landing, he said. The United States already has a NASA-owned rocket and capsule in the works \u2014 both much-delayed, over budget and controversial \u2014 and could potentially tap into the burgeoning commercial space industry for important elements of the moon mission architecture.AdvertisementPace said international partners didn\u2019t buy into NASA\u2019s earlier Mars aspirations and had begun to drift away. The moon is a more plausible near-term target, Pace said, and the partners will be part of longer-term lunar exploration.\u201cSpace in general is an environment where it helps to have partners,\u201d said Laura Grego, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. \u201cIt\u2019s expensive, it can be dangerous, and, of course, it is the province of all human beings.\u201dTrump channels Reagan\u2019s plan for a \u201cStar Wars\u201d missile defenseSee the first direct image of a black holeNASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission NASA\u2019s human spaceflight strategy could leave out allies in Europe. Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1823",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-and-pence-push-america-first-agenda-to-the-moon-and-outer-space/2019/04/25/61ce9df4-5f98-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil.\u201dVice President Pence, rhetorically planting a new American flag on the moon, spoke to leaders of the U.S. space community last month in Huntsville, Ala. He came to deliver a dramatic message: The administration was unsatisfied by NASA\u2019s plan to return to the moon in 2028. That\u2019s not fast enough, Pence said. He ordered NASA to get there within five years \u2014 before, he didn\u2019t need to add, the end of what might be a second term for President Trump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn multiple ways, the Trump administration is trying to project the president\u2019s Make America Great Again rhetoric into space. Trump has vowed to ramp up the nation\u2019s missile defense system with a space-based layer that\u2019s \u201cultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and, obviously, of our offense.\u201d And he\u2019s pushed for the creation of a Space Force, a sixth branch of the U.S. military.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a major shift. Space policy has always served national interests, but the United States has increasingly entered into partnerships for exploration and science. The gleaming example is the International Space Station, a joint venture that has survived geopolitical strife among member nations.The celebrated first direct image of a black hole, unveiled this month, came from an international collaboration involving telescopes on four continents. The image was created by turning the entire globe into one giant radio antenna. In a 2015 breakthrough, physicists from universities and research institutes in more than a dozen nations pooled their energies to detect gravitational waves for the first time.And NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, includes instruments provided by Canada and Europe, and it will launch on Europe\u2019s Ariane rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, U.S. space policy has been relatively immune to the most intense partisan battles in Washington. Democrats and Republicans have supported each other\u2019s favored projects \u2014 a big new telescope over here, a big new rocket over there.But NASA remains an agency in the executive branch, answering to the dictates of the White House as well as powerful members of Congress. After the space shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003, President George W. Bush\u2019s administration decided NASA should retire the shuttle fleet and invest in new hardware to send astronauts to the moon by 2020.President Barack Obama was cool to the moon plan, saying been there, done that. And a presidential committee appointed by Obama concluded that the agency didn\u2019t have enough money to make the moon plan plausible. Obama ordered the agency to send astronauts to an asteroid and then eventually to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s election led to another pivot. Trump came into office hoping to do something dramatic in space. He expressed disappointment that NASA couldn\u2019t send humans to Mars in his first term. Pence took the helm of the National Space Council, a White House unit that had been moribund for a generation and that now put civilian and military space operations under one roof. The administration told NASA to reverse course again and cobble together a moon program, ASAP.How much the new MAGA-in-space rhetoric will translate into reality is unclear. Without additional funding from Congress or a change in the laws of physics, NASA has little chance of putting boots on the moon within Pence\u2019s five-year time frame. But Pence\u2019s speech certainly energized the aerospace community and jolted NASA, in part by signaling that the administration would consider a moon plan that used commercial spacecraft and not merely the hardware directly developed and owned by NASA.It\u2019s also unclear if the Space Force will materialize as a separate military service. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle aren\u2019t sure it\u2019s necessary. There\u2019s already a space command within the Air Force. To be clear: This would not involve some kind of military deployment of uniformed personnel in space, as in the movie \u201cStarship Troopers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States, like every other technologically advanced nation, is increasingly reliant on space for military and economic strength and needs to be prepared to protect its fleet of satellites. India blew up a satellite a few weeks ago in a demonstration of technological capability. China did the same thing in 2007 in a test that alarmed the Pentagon and national security agencies and created a cloud of space debris.Pence has called space \u201cthe newest war-fighting domain.\u201d That language has been adopted by top Pentagon officials.\u201cHaving carefully observed our dependencies on space, China and Russia have developed new technologies, strategies, tactics, and asymmetric capabilities specifically intended to deny our freedom of operation in space. While we would prefer space remain free from conflict, they have made space a war-fighting domain,\u201d acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in prepared Senate testimony earlier this month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his March\u00a026 speech in Huntsville, Pence cited China\u2019s recent success in landing the first robotic probe on the moon\u2019s little-explored far side. That mission \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dChina has plans for a sample-return mission later this year, and India hopes to put a lander and a rover near the lunar south pole. Israel recently attempted to land a probe, which crashed. And Japan and Russia both are working on missions involving lunar landers.The European Space Agency has for many years been a reliable partner of NASA in major space missions, but after Pence\u2019s speech, the Europeans had to reassess the relationship.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in contact with NASA to discuss how Europe could play a role, and we are part of the game,\u201d Jan Woerner, director general of the European Space Agency, told The Washington Post. He noted that the Europeans are still providing a service module for NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, which could play a role in a lunar mission. And he said he is asking his colleagues to speed up development of elements that could be used for an ascent module to take astronauts off the moon during a lunar landing mission.AdvertisementHe said he hopes cooperation, rather than competition, drives space policy in the future.\u201cThere is no fence in space; therefore, we can work together, above all earthly borders,\u201d Woerner said. \u201cBut of course there is also a political will behind space, and this is what Vice President Pence said. This is different from what is done in Europe, but we are different people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementScott Pace, a White House officials who serves as executive secretary of the National Space Council, said the reason NASA may use American-only hardware for a moon mission was pragmatic. International partners simply won\u2019t have time to craft crucial elements of a 2024 lunar landing, he said. The United States already has a NASA-owned rocket and capsule in the works \u2014 both much-delayed, over budget and controversial \u2014 and could potentially tap into the burgeoning commercial space industry for important elements of the moon mission architecture.AdvertisementPace said international partners didn\u2019t buy into NASA\u2019s earlier Mars aspirations and had begun to drift away. The moon is a more plausible near-term target, Pace said, and the partners will be part of longer-term lunar exploration.\u201cSpace in general is an environment where it helps to have partners,\u201d said Laura Grego, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. \u201cIt\u2019s expensive, it can be dangerous, and, of course, it is the province of all human beings.\u201dTrump channels Reagan\u2019s plan for a \u201cStar Wars\u201d missile defenseSee the first direct image of a black holeNASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission NASA\u2019s human spaceflight strategy could leave out allies in Europe. Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1824",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-and-pence-push-america-first-agenda-to-the-moon-and-outer-space/2019/04/25/61ce9df4-5f98-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil.\u201dVice President Pence, rhetorically planting a new American flag on the moon, spoke to leaders of the U.S. space community last month in Huntsville, Ala. He came to deliver a dramatic message: The administration was unsatisfied by NASA\u2019s plan to return to the moon in 2028. That\u2019s not fast enough, Pence said. He ordered NASA to get there within five years \u2014 before, he didn\u2019t need to add, the end of what might be a second term for President Trump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn multiple ways, the Trump administration is trying to project the president\u2019s Make America Great Again rhetoric into space. Trump has vowed to ramp up the nation\u2019s missile defense system with a space-based layer that\u2019s \u201cultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and, obviously, of our offense.\u201d And he\u2019s pushed for the creation of a Space Force, a sixth branch of the U.S. military.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a major shift. Space policy has always served national interests, but the United States has increasingly entered into partnerships for exploration and science. The gleaming example is the International Space Station, a joint venture that has survived geopolitical strife among member nations.The celebrated first direct image of a black hole, unveiled this month, came from an international collaboration involving telescopes on four continents. The image was created by turning the entire globe into one giant radio antenna. In a 2015 breakthrough, physicists from universities and research institutes in more than a dozen nations pooled their energies to detect gravitational waves for the first time.And NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, includes instruments provided by Canada and Europe, and it will launch on Europe\u2019s Ariane rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, U.S. space policy has been relatively immune to the most intense partisan battles in Washington. Democrats and Republicans have supported each other\u2019s favored projects \u2014 a big new telescope over here, a big new rocket over there.But NASA remains an agency in the executive branch, answering to the dictates of the White House as well as powerful members of Congress. After the space shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003, President George W. Bush\u2019s administration decided NASA should retire the shuttle fleet and invest in new hardware to send astronauts to the moon by 2020.President Barack Obama was cool to the moon plan, saying been there, done that. And a presidential committee appointed by Obama concluded that the agency didn\u2019t have enough money to make the moon plan plausible. Obama ordered the agency to send astronauts to an asteroid and then eventually to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s election led to another pivot. Trump came into office hoping to do something dramatic in space. He expressed disappointment that NASA couldn\u2019t send humans to Mars in his first term. Pence took the helm of the National Space Council, a White House unit that had been moribund for a generation and that now put civilian and military space operations under one roof. The administration told NASA to reverse course again and cobble together a moon program, ASAP.How much the new MAGA-in-space rhetoric will translate into reality is unclear. Without additional funding from Congress or a change in the laws of physics, NASA has little chance of putting boots on the moon within Pence\u2019s five-year time frame. But Pence\u2019s speech certainly energized the aerospace community and jolted NASA, in part by signaling that the administration would consider a moon plan that used commercial spacecraft and not merely the hardware directly developed and owned by NASA.It\u2019s also unclear if the Space Force will materialize as a separate military service. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle aren\u2019t sure it\u2019s necessary. There\u2019s already a space command within the Air Force. To be clear: This would not involve some kind of military deployment of uniformed personnel in space, as in the movie \u201cStarship Troopers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States, like every other technologically advanced nation, is increasingly reliant on space for military and economic strength and needs to be prepared to protect its fleet of satellites. India blew up a satellite a few weeks ago in a demonstration of technological capability. China did the same thing in 2007 in a test that alarmed the Pentagon and national security agencies and created a cloud of space debris.Pence has called space \u201cthe newest war-fighting domain.\u201d That language has been adopted by top Pentagon officials.\u201cHaving carefully observed our dependencies on space, China and Russia have developed new technologies, strategies, tactics, and asymmetric capabilities specifically intended to deny our freedom of operation in space. While we would prefer space remain free from conflict, they have made space a war-fighting domain,\u201d acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in prepared Senate testimony earlier this month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his March\u00a026 speech in Huntsville, Pence cited China\u2019s recent success in landing the first robotic probe on the moon\u2019s little-explored far side. That mission \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dChina has plans for a sample-return mission later this year, and India hopes to put a lander and a rover near the lunar south pole. Israel recently attempted to land a probe, which crashed. And Japan and Russia both are working on missions involving lunar landers.The European Space Agency has for many years been a reliable partner of NASA in major space missions, but after Pence\u2019s speech, the Europeans had to reassess the relationship.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in contact with NASA to discuss how Europe could play a role, and we are part of the game,\u201d Jan Woerner, director general of the European Space Agency, told The Washington Post. He noted that the Europeans are still providing a service module for NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, which could play a role in a lunar mission. And he said he is asking his colleagues to speed up development of elements that could be used for an ascent module to take astronauts off the moon during a lunar landing mission.AdvertisementHe said he hopes cooperation, rather than competition, drives space policy in the future.\u201cThere is no fence in space; therefore, we can work together, above all earthly borders,\u201d Woerner said. \u201cBut of course there is also a political will behind space, and this is what Vice President Pence said. This is different from what is done in Europe, but we are different people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementScott Pace, a White House officials who serves as executive secretary of the National Space Council, said the reason NASA may use American-only hardware for a moon mission was pragmatic. International partners simply won\u2019t have time to craft crucial elements of a 2024 lunar landing, he said. The United States already has a NASA-owned rocket and capsule in the works \u2014 both much-delayed, over budget and controversial \u2014 and could potentially tap into the burgeoning commercial space industry for important elements of the moon mission architecture.AdvertisementPace said international partners didn\u2019t buy into NASA\u2019s earlier Mars aspirations and had begun to drift away. The moon is a more plausible near-term target, Pace said, and the partners will be part of longer-term lunar exploration.\u201cSpace in general is an environment where it helps to have partners,\u201d said Laura Grego, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. \u201cIt\u2019s expensive, it can be dangerous, and, of course, it is the province of all human beings.\u201dTrump channels Reagan\u2019s plan for a \u201cStar Wars\u201d missile defenseSee the first direct image of a black holeNASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission NASA\u2019s human spaceflight strategy could leave out allies in Europe. Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1825",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-and-pence-push-america-first-agenda-to-the-moon-and-outer-space/2019/04/25/61ce9df4-5f98-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil.\u201dVice President Pence, rhetorically planting a new American flag on the moon, spoke to leaders of the U.S. space community last month in Huntsville, Ala. He came to deliver a dramatic message: The administration was unsatisfied by NASA\u2019s plan to return to the moon in 2028. That\u2019s not fast enough, Pence said. He ordered NASA to get there within five years \u2014 before, he didn\u2019t need to add, the end of what might be a second term for President Trump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn multiple ways, the Trump administration is trying to project the president\u2019s Make America Great Again rhetoric into space. Trump has vowed to ramp up the nation\u2019s missile defense system with a space-based layer that\u2019s \u201cultimately going to be a very, very big part of our defense and, obviously, of our offense.\u201d And he\u2019s pushed for the creation of a Space Force, a sixth branch of the U.S. military.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a major shift. Space policy has always served national interests, but the United States has increasingly entered into partnerships for exploration and science. The gleaming example is the International Space Station, a joint venture that has survived geopolitical strife among member nations.The celebrated first direct image of a black hole, unveiled this month, came from an international collaboration involving telescopes on four continents. The image was created by turning the entire globe into one giant radio antenna. In a 2015 breakthrough, physicists from universities and research institutes in more than a dozen nations pooled their energies to detect gravitational waves for the first time.And NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, includes instruments provided by Canada and Europe, and it will launch on Europe\u2019s Ariane rocket from a spaceport in French Guiana.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, U.S. space policy has been relatively immune to the most intense partisan battles in Washington. Democrats and Republicans have supported each other\u2019s favored projects \u2014 a big new telescope over here, a big new rocket over there.But NASA remains an agency in the executive branch, answering to the dictates of the White House as well as powerful members of Congress. After the space shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003, President George W. Bush\u2019s administration decided NASA should retire the shuttle fleet and invest in new hardware to send astronauts to the moon by 2020.President Barack Obama was cool to the moon plan, saying been there, done that. And a presidential committee appointed by Obama concluded that the agency didn\u2019t have enough money to make the moon plan plausible. Obama ordered the agency to send astronauts to an asteroid and then eventually to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s election led to another pivot. Trump came into office hoping to do something dramatic in space. He expressed disappointment that NASA couldn\u2019t send humans to Mars in his first term. Pence took the helm of the National Space Council, a White House unit that had been moribund for a generation and that now put civilian and military space operations under one roof. The administration told NASA to reverse course again and cobble together a moon program, ASAP.How much the new MAGA-in-space rhetoric will translate into reality is unclear. Without additional funding from Congress or a change in the laws of physics, NASA has little chance of putting boots on the moon within Pence\u2019s five-year time frame. But Pence\u2019s speech certainly energized the aerospace community and jolted NASA, in part by signaling that the administration would consider a moon plan that used commercial spacecraft and not merely the hardware directly developed and owned by NASA.It\u2019s also unclear if the Space Force will materialize as a separate military service. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle aren\u2019t sure it\u2019s necessary. There\u2019s already a space command within the Air Force. To be clear: This would not involve some kind of military deployment of uniformed personnel in space, as in the movie \u201cStarship Troopers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States, like every other technologically advanced nation, is increasingly reliant on space for military and economic strength and needs to be prepared to protect its fleet of satellites. India blew up a satellite a few weeks ago in a demonstration of technological capability. China did the same thing in 2007 in a test that alarmed the Pentagon and national security agencies and created a cloud of space debris.Pence has called space \u201cthe newest war-fighting domain.\u201d That language has been adopted by top Pentagon officials.\u201cHaving carefully observed our dependencies on space, China and Russia have developed new technologies, strategies, tactics, and asymmetric capabilities specifically intended to deny our freedom of operation in space. While we would prefer space remain free from conflict, they have made space a war-fighting domain,\u201d acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in prepared Senate testimony earlier this month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his March\u00a026 speech in Huntsville, Pence cited China\u2019s recent success in landing the first robotic probe on the moon\u2019s little-explored far side. That mission \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dChina has plans for a sample-return mission later this year, and India hopes to put a lander and a rover near the lunar south pole. Israel recently attempted to land a probe, which crashed. And Japan and Russia both are working on missions involving lunar landers.The European Space Agency has for many years been a reliable partner of NASA in major space missions, but after Pence\u2019s speech, the Europeans had to reassess the relationship.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in contact with NASA to discuss how Europe could play a role, and we are part of the game,\u201d Jan Woerner, director general of the European Space Agency, told The Washington Post. He noted that the Europeans are still providing a service module for NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, which could play a role in a lunar mission. And he said he is asking his colleagues to speed up development of elements that could be used for an ascent module to take astronauts off the moon during a lunar landing mission.AdvertisementHe said he hopes cooperation, rather than competition, drives space policy in the future.\u201cThere is no fence in space; therefore, we can work together, above all earthly borders,\u201d Woerner said. \u201cBut of course there is also a political will behind space, and this is what Vice President Pence said. This is different from what is done in Europe, but we are different people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementScott Pace, a White House officials who serves as executive secretary of the National Space Council, said the reason NASA may use American-only hardware for a moon mission was pragmatic. International partners simply won\u2019t have time to craft crucial elements of a 2024 lunar landing, he said. The United States already has a NASA-owned rocket and capsule in the works \u2014 both much-delayed, over budget and controversial \u2014 and could potentially tap into the burgeoning commercial space industry for important elements of the moon mission architecture.AdvertisementPace said international partners didn\u2019t buy into NASA\u2019s earlier Mars aspirations and had begun to drift away. The moon is a more plausible near-term target, Pace said, and the partners will be part of longer-term lunar exploration.\u201cSpace in general is an environment where it helps to have partners,\u201d said Laura Grego, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. \u201cIt\u2019s expensive, it can be dangerous, and, of course, it is the province of all human beings.\u201dTrump channels Reagan\u2019s plan for a \u201cStar Wars\u201d missile defenseSee the first direct image of a black holeNASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission NASA\u2019s human spaceflight strategy could leave out allies in Europe. Trump and Pence push \u2018America First\u2019 agenda to the moon and outer space",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1826",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-the-space-age-taught-us-earth-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/2019/06/18/b7454e78-65cd-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html",
        "text": "Mars was supposed to be next. Surely the moon was just a steppingstone in the conquest of space. For many people who came of age during the Apollo era, it seemed reasonable to assume that in short order the entire solar system would be our stomping ground. Eventually we\u2019d be visiting stars. \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which debuted in 1966, seemed a plausible vision of human destiny. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHalf a century after Apollo 11, we have been forced again and again to recalibrate our expectations.The exploration of deep space by flesh-and-blood human beings no longer looks inevitable. It doesn\u2019t look especially affordable under plausible government budgets in the post-Space Race era, and private-sector dreams may never quite pencil out, as they say. Space travel remains dangerous; the catastrophic loss of two space shuttle crews proved that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s also been a more subtle revelation from half a century\u2019s experience with spaceflight. Going into space has given us a greater appreciation of our connection to the Earth.Apollo 11 anniversary: Follow the coverageThe human body goes haywire when hurled into space and away from the familiar environment of the Earth\u2019s surface. We learned this by doing it. And our innate terrestrial nature is both biological and psychological: Astronauts in orbit spend a lot of their free time looking out the window, toward home.Maybe the most important thing we\u2019ve learned from the Space Age is that we\u2019re Earthlings.Bodies in revoltWhen astronaut Scott Kelly went into orbit in 2015 for a nearly year-long mission, his immune system initially went bonkers. It acted as if under attack by a virus. At the cellular level, his body was screaming: Where\u2019s the gravity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fluids in his body wound up in the wrong places, an occupational hazard for astronauts. The effects include insomnia and blurred vision. And although his genetic code didn\u2019t change, his gene expression \u2014 the creation of proteins that are the workhorses of the body \u2014 did undergo pronounced changes, with some genes turning off and others turning on.Astronauts adapt to zero gravity and perform their jobs well. But then they face another jolt when they return to Earth. Kelly suffered from painful rashes, swollen legs, nausea and flulike symptoms. His gene expression mostly returned to its normal state, but not entirely. Kelly said he didn\u2019t feel quite right for about eight months.While Scott orbited the Earth, his twin brother, Mark, went about his business on the surface, pausing to let researchers sample his blood, urine, etc., for comparison with his sibling in space. NASA said its Twins Study revealed no showstoppers \u2014 nothing that would prevent an eventual human mission to Mars, the agency\u2019s long-term goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the study provided a reminder that space travel is brutal on human bodies, which are adapted for life on this particular planet. Our bones lose density. Muscles can atrophy. Astronauts have to exercise two hours a day to keep from wasting away. We can live in space, but that environment doesn\u2019t really agree with us.\u201cWe are fairly exquisitely designed for this planet, and we\u2019re fairly fragile physiologically when you get off this planet,\u201d study co-author Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, told The Washington Post.In the Hollywood version of spaceflight, no one ever worries about the composition of the air in the spaceship. But as Scott Kelly can attest, the air in the International Space Station can be a bit off. Kelly says high levels of carbon dioxide can cause malaise, especially in areas of poor air circulation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kelly brothers participated in a recent NASA-sponsored media teleconference to discuss the Twins Study, during which one of the researchers, Stuart Lee, said the air on the ISS \u201cis very close to what we have on the ground.\u201d The CO2 levels, he went on, are 0.3 percent of the air, compared to about 0.03 percent on the Earth\u2019s surface.Scott Kelly quickly chimed in: \u201cSo it\u2019s 10 times higher, Stuart. Right?\u201d\u201cSo, yeah, it\u2019s 10 times higher,\u201d Lee acknowledged.Then there\u2019s radiation. Earth\u2019s magnetic field protects the ISS from much of the radiation of space. But an astronaut journeying to Mars would not have that protection and would be particularly vulnerable to \u201ccosmic rays,\u201d which are elementary particles of galactic origin that travel at nearly the speed of light and could potentially cause cancer, genetic damage and acute radiation sickness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman psychology is another area of concern for NASA. Scott Kelly could look out a window and see the Earth. He could call home. He could be in touch, in real time. But a one-way trip to Mars using current technology would take at least six months \u2014 and probably longer. A radio signal between the spacecraft and the Earth would take minutes to travel across the interplanetary distances, rendering a normal conversation impossible. Boredom is a danger. So are interpersonal conflicts among crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s a certainty when people go to Mars some of those people are going to suffer major psychiatric symptoms because that\u2019s just the nature of the way people are,\u201d said Twins Study co-author Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University.A human being is a composite organism \u2014 a collaboration involving trillions of microbes, most of them residing in our gut. The microbes emerge from, and have intimate connections to, the Earth. Mars not only doesn\u2019t have the kind of air, water, gravity and radiation that we\u2019re used to, it also, almost surely, doesn\u2019t have the right kind of bacteria.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNone of this prevents a human mission to Mars or other places in space. Never underestimate the ingenuity of future generations. But the greatest technological leaps since Apollo have occurred in the realm of 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s \u2014 the digital revolution. Robots do well in space. Any mission to the moon or Mars has to justify a human presence.NASA plans to put another rover on Mars soon, one designed to obtain soil samples that can someday be sent back to Earth robotically. It\u2019s a scientific echo of what the Apollo astronauts did. The difference this time: No humans in the loop.Alexa, bring us a Mars rock.Mars: Fallback plan?The most passionate advocates for space exploration say we have no alternative. They see it as an existential imperative, because bad things can happen to good planets (ask the dinosaurs that didn\u2019t have a backup plan 66 million years ago when a giant rock hit the Earth). And humans could trigger their own demise: Someone could engineer a particularly bad germ. We\u2019re already desperate to solve the climate crisis caused by human activity, and nuclear war remains a terrifying possibility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe late Stephen Hawking was among the smart folks saying we need a fallback option. \u201cAlthough the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,\u201d Hawking said, according to a November 2016 Newsweek article. \u201cBy that time, we should have spread out into space and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.\u201dApollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin echoed that opinion in a recent op-ed in The Post espousing \u201cthe great migration of humankind to Mars.\u201d He wrote that we have no alternative: \u201c[H]uman nature \u2014 and potentially the ultimate survival of our species \u2014 demands humanity\u2019s continued outward reach into the universe. .\u2009.\u2009. We explore, or we expire.\u201dElon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has said that the central purpose of his company is to create a human civilization on Mars so that we can be a two-planet species. He is not talking about a mere Antarctica-style research outpost: He wants to build cities on Mars, a completely self-sustaining civilization, which would preserve humanity in case something dire happened to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk and his brilliant engineers have achieved great success with SpaceX and the electric car company Tesla, and so people once skeptical of Musk\u2019s bold talk tend to hedge their bets these days. Yes, he overpromises, but he is persistent.Still, SpaceX and Musk can\u2019t simply wave away the technological and budgetary challenges that have prevented NASA and every other space agency around the world from attempting a Mars mission. (Or maybe he can: When Musk was asked a couple of years ago about the radiation hazard in interplanetary space, he said he wasn\u2019t worried about it. Problem solved!)In 2017 President Trump asked NASA\u2019s acting administrator if the agency could send humans to Mars by 2020. Answer: Not a chance. Mars is not an object parked in space beyond the moon. In his book \u201cThe Moon,\u201d author Oliver Morton writes of the moon, \u201c[It] is not just the nearest outpost of the elsewhere; it is also the furthest reach of here. It is in thrall to the Earth, its face cupped by the hands of gravity so strongly that it cannot turn its gaze away from ours.\u201d Mars, however, is in thrall to the sun. Mars can be as much as 249 million miles from Earth. Almost any conceivable mission to Mars requires something like a 500-day stay on the Red Planet before the orbits of the planets permit a journey home.Although Musk sees Mars as a fixer-upper planet, it would require a heck of a lot of fixin\u2019. That\u2019s the message from the other tycoon with a space company \u2014 Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post. Bezos favors the gradual migration of heavy industry into space, so that Earth can become a protected sanctuary. He doesn\u2019t see Mars as a Plan B, saying in 2016: \u201cThink about it: no whiskey, no bacon, no swimming pools, no oceans, no hiking, no urban centers. Eventually Mars might be amazing. But that\u2019s a long way in the future. This planet is incredible.\u201dScott Kelly has no delusions about Mars as a potential mulligan: \u201cIt will always be easier to take care of this planet than to make Mars into another Earth. It is not our lifeboat.\u201dThe great physicist Freeman Dyson once hypothesized that this is the most interesting of all possible universes and that we exist to make it so. And maybe he\u2019s right.But science has told us again and again \u2014 and this is a deeply humbling message \u2014 that the universe is not about us.What\u2019s certain is that, in the foreseeable future, there\u2019s no plausible do-over in space. The Earth is not disposable. Here we make our stand.That\u2019s what we learned from going into space.Our moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactorThe hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck Star Trekking put on hold as visionaries appreciate the home planet anew What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1827",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-the-space-age-taught-us-earth-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/2019/06/18/b7454e78-65cd-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html",
        "text": "Mars was supposed to be next. Surely the moon was just a steppingstone in the conquest of space. For many people who came of age during the Apollo era, it seemed reasonable to assume that in short order the entire solar system would be our stomping ground. Eventually we\u2019d be visiting stars. \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which debuted in 1966, seemed a plausible vision of human destiny. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHalf a century after Apollo 11, we have been forced again and again to recalibrate our expectations.The exploration of deep space by flesh-and-blood human beings no longer looks inevitable. It doesn\u2019t look especially affordable under plausible government budgets in the post-Space Race era, and private-sector dreams may never quite pencil out, as they say. Space travel remains dangerous; the catastrophic loss of two space shuttle crews proved that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s also been a more subtle revelation from half a century\u2019s experience with spaceflight. Going into space has given us a greater appreciation of our connection to the Earth.Apollo 11 anniversary: Follow the coverageThe human body goes haywire when hurled into space and away from the familiar environment of the Earth\u2019s surface. We learned this by doing it. And our innate terrestrial nature is both biological and psychological: Astronauts in orbit spend a lot of their free time looking out the window, toward home.Maybe the most important thing we\u2019ve learned from the Space Age is that we\u2019re Earthlings.Bodies in revoltWhen astronaut Scott Kelly went into orbit in 2015 for a nearly year-long mission, his immune system initially went bonkers. It acted as if under attack by a virus. At the cellular level, his body was screaming: Where\u2019s the gravity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fluids in his body wound up in the wrong places, an occupational hazard for astronauts. The effects include insomnia and blurred vision. And although his genetic code didn\u2019t change, his gene expression \u2014 the creation of proteins that are the workhorses of the body \u2014 did undergo pronounced changes, with some genes turning off and others turning on.Astronauts adapt to zero gravity and perform their jobs well. But then they face another jolt when they return to Earth. Kelly suffered from painful rashes, swollen legs, nausea and flulike symptoms. His gene expression mostly returned to its normal state, but not entirely. Kelly said he didn\u2019t feel quite right for about eight months.While Scott orbited the Earth, his twin brother, Mark, went about his business on the surface, pausing to let researchers sample his blood, urine, etc., for comparison with his sibling in space. NASA said its Twins Study revealed no showstoppers \u2014 nothing that would prevent an eventual human mission to Mars, the agency\u2019s long-term goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the study provided a reminder that space travel is brutal on human bodies, which are adapted for life on this particular planet. Our bones lose density. Muscles can atrophy. Astronauts have to exercise two hours a day to keep from wasting away. We can live in space, but that environment doesn\u2019t really agree with us.\u201cWe are fairly exquisitely designed for this planet, and we\u2019re fairly fragile physiologically when you get off this planet,\u201d study co-author Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, told The Washington Post.In the Hollywood version of spaceflight, no one ever worries about the composition of the air in the spaceship. But as Scott Kelly can attest, the air in the International Space Station can be a bit off. Kelly says high levels of carbon dioxide can cause malaise, especially in areas of poor air circulation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kelly brothers participated in a recent NASA-sponsored media teleconference to discuss the Twins Study, during which one of the researchers, Stuart Lee, said the air on the ISS \u201cis very close to what we have on the ground.\u201d The CO2 levels, he went on, are 0.3 percent of the air, compared to about 0.03 percent on the Earth\u2019s surface.Scott Kelly quickly chimed in: \u201cSo it\u2019s 10 times higher, Stuart. Right?\u201d\u201cSo, yeah, it\u2019s 10 times higher,\u201d Lee acknowledged.Then there\u2019s radiation. Earth\u2019s magnetic field protects the ISS from much of the radiation of space. But an astronaut journeying to Mars would not have that protection and would be particularly vulnerable to \u201ccosmic rays,\u201d which are elementary particles of galactic origin that travel at nearly the speed of light and could potentially cause cancer, genetic damage and acute radiation sickness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman psychology is another area of concern for NASA. Scott Kelly could look out a window and see the Earth. He could call home. He could be in touch, in real time. But a one-way trip to Mars using current technology would take at least six months \u2014 and probably longer. A radio signal between the spacecraft and the Earth would take minutes to travel across the interplanetary distances, rendering a normal conversation impossible. Boredom is a danger. So are interpersonal conflicts among crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s a certainty when people go to Mars some of those people are going to suffer major psychiatric symptoms because that\u2019s just the nature of the way people are,\u201d said Twins Study co-author Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University.A human being is a composite organism \u2014 a collaboration involving trillions of microbes, most of them residing in our gut. The microbes emerge from, and have intimate connections to, the Earth. Mars not only doesn\u2019t have the kind of air, water, gravity and radiation that we\u2019re used to, it also, almost surely, doesn\u2019t have the right kind of bacteria.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNone of this prevents a human mission to Mars or other places in space. Never underestimate the ingenuity of future generations. But the greatest technological leaps since Apollo have occurred in the realm of 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s \u2014 the digital revolution. Robots do well in space. Any mission to the moon or Mars has to justify a human presence.NASA plans to put another rover on Mars soon, one designed to obtain soil samples that can someday be sent back to Earth robotically. It\u2019s a scientific echo of what the Apollo astronauts did. The difference this time: No humans in the loop.Alexa, bring us a Mars rock.Mars: Fallback plan?The most passionate advocates for space exploration say we have no alternative. They see it as an existential imperative, because bad things can happen to good planets (ask the dinosaurs that didn\u2019t have a backup plan 66 million years ago when a giant rock hit the Earth). And humans could trigger their own demise: Someone could engineer a particularly bad germ. We\u2019re already desperate to solve the climate crisis caused by human activity, and nuclear war remains a terrifying possibility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe late Stephen Hawking was among the smart folks saying we need a fallback option. \u201cAlthough the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,\u201d Hawking said, according to a November 2016 Newsweek article. \u201cBy that time, we should have spread out into space and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.\u201dApollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin echoed that opinion in a recent op-ed in The Post espousing \u201cthe great migration of humankind to Mars.\u201d He wrote that we have no alternative: \u201c[H]uman nature \u2014 and potentially the ultimate survival of our species \u2014 demands humanity\u2019s continued outward reach into the universe. .\u2009.\u2009. We explore, or we expire.\u201dElon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has said that the central purpose of his company is to create a human civilization on Mars so that we can be a two-planet species. He is not talking about a mere Antarctica-style research outpost: He wants to build cities on Mars, a completely self-sustaining civilization, which would preserve humanity in case something dire happened to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk and his brilliant engineers have achieved great success with SpaceX and the electric car company Tesla, and so people once skeptical of Musk\u2019s bold talk tend to hedge their bets these days. Yes, he overpromises, but he is persistent.Still, SpaceX and Musk can\u2019t simply wave away the technological and budgetary challenges that have prevented NASA and every other space agency around the world from attempting a Mars mission. (Or maybe he can: When Musk was asked a couple of years ago about the radiation hazard in interplanetary space, he said he wasn\u2019t worried about it. Problem solved!)In 2017 President Trump asked NASA\u2019s acting administrator if the agency could send humans to Mars by 2020. Answer: Not a chance. Mars is not an object parked in space beyond the moon. In his book \u201cThe Moon,\u201d author Oliver Morton writes of the moon, \u201c[It] is not just the nearest outpost of the elsewhere; it is also the furthest reach of here. It is in thrall to the Earth, its face cupped by the hands of gravity so strongly that it cannot turn its gaze away from ours.\u201d Mars, however, is in thrall to the sun. Mars can be as much as 249 million miles from Earth. Almost any conceivable mission to Mars requires something like a 500-day stay on the Red Planet before the orbits of the planets permit a journey home.Although Musk sees Mars as a fixer-upper planet, it would require a heck of a lot of fixin\u2019. That\u2019s the message from the other tycoon with a space company \u2014 Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post. Bezos favors the gradual migration of heavy industry into space, so that Earth can become a protected sanctuary. He doesn\u2019t see Mars as a Plan B, saying in 2016: \u201cThink about it: no whiskey, no bacon, no swimming pools, no oceans, no hiking, no urban centers. Eventually Mars might be amazing. But that\u2019s a long way in the future. This planet is incredible.\u201dScott Kelly has no delusions about Mars as a potential mulligan: \u201cIt will always be easier to take care of this planet than to make Mars into another Earth. It is not our lifeboat.\u201dThe great physicist Freeman Dyson once hypothesized that this is the most interesting of all possible universes and that we exist to make it so. And maybe he\u2019s right.But science has told us again and again \u2014 and this is a deeply humbling message \u2014 that the universe is not about us.What\u2019s certain is that, in the foreseeable future, there\u2019s no plausible do-over in space. The Earth is not disposable. Here we make our stand.That\u2019s what we learned from going into space.Our moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactorThe hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck Star Trekking put on hold as visionaries appreciate the home planet anew What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1828",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-the-space-age-taught-us-earth-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/2019/06/18/b7454e78-65cd-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html",
        "text": "Mars was supposed to be next. Surely the moon was just a steppingstone in the conquest of space. For many people who came of age during the Apollo era, it seemed reasonable to assume that in short order the entire solar system would be our stomping ground. Eventually we\u2019d be visiting stars. \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which debuted in 1966, seemed a plausible vision of human destiny. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHalf a century after Apollo 11, we have been forced again and again to recalibrate our expectations.The exploration of deep space by flesh-and-blood human beings no longer looks inevitable. It doesn\u2019t look especially affordable under plausible government budgets in the post-Space Race era, and private-sector dreams may never quite pencil out, as they say. Space travel remains dangerous; the catastrophic loss of two space shuttle crews proved that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s also been a more subtle revelation from half a century\u2019s experience with spaceflight. Going into space has given us a greater appreciation of our connection to the Earth.Apollo 11 anniversary: Follow the coverageThe human body goes haywire when hurled into space and away from the familiar environment of the Earth\u2019s surface. We learned this by doing it. And our innate terrestrial nature is both biological and psychological: Astronauts in orbit spend a lot of their free time looking out the window, toward home.Maybe the most important thing we\u2019ve learned from the Space Age is that we\u2019re Earthlings.Bodies in revoltWhen astronaut Scott Kelly went into orbit in 2015 for a nearly year-long mission, his immune system initially went bonkers. It acted as if under attack by a virus. At the cellular level, his body was screaming: Where\u2019s the gravity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fluids in his body wound up in the wrong places, an occupational hazard for astronauts. The effects include insomnia and blurred vision. And although his genetic code didn\u2019t change, his gene expression \u2014 the creation of proteins that are the workhorses of the body \u2014 did undergo pronounced changes, with some genes turning off and others turning on.Astronauts adapt to zero gravity and perform their jobs well. But then they face another jolt when they return to Earth. Kelly suffered from painful rashes, swollen legs, nausea and flulike symptoms. His gene expression mostly returned to its normal state, but not entirely. Kelly said he didn\u2019t feel quite right for about eight months.While Scott orbited the Earth, his twin brother, Mark, went about his business on the surface, pausing to let researchers sample his blood, urine, etc., for comparison with his sibling in space. NASA said its Twins Study revealed no showstoppers \u2014 nothing that would prevent an eventual human mission to Mars, the agency\u2019s long-term goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the study provided a reminder that space travel is brutal on human bodies, which are adapted for life on this particular planet. Our bones lose density. Muscles can atrophy. Astronauts have to exercise two hours a day to keep from wasting away. We can live in space, but that environment doesn\u2019t really agree with us.\u201cWe are fairly exquisitely designed for this planet, and we\u2019re fairly fragile physiologically when you get off this planet,\u201d study co-author Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, told The Washington Post.In the Hollywood version of spaceflight, no one ever worries about the composition of the air in the spaceship. But as Scott Kelly can attest, the air in the International Space Station can be a bit off. Kelly says high levels of carbon dioxide can cause malaise, especially in areas of poor air circulation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kelly brothers participated in a recent NASA-sponsored media teleconference to discuss the Twins Study, during which one of the researchers, Stuart Lee, said the air on the ISS \u201cis very close to what we have on the ground.\u201d The CO2 levels, he went on, are 0.3 percent of the air, compared to about 0.03 percent on the Earth\u2019s surface.Scott Kelly quickly chimed in: \u201cSo it\u2019s 10 times higher, Stuart. Right?\u201d\u201cSo, yeah, it\u2019s 10 times higher,\u201d Lee acknowledged.Then there\u2019s radiation. Earth\u2019s magnetic field protects the ISS from much of the radiation of space. But an astronaut journeying to Mars would not have that protection and would be particularly vulnerable to \u201ccosmic rays,\u201d which are elementary particles of galactic origin that travel at nearly the speed of light and could potentially cause cancer, genetic damage and acute radiation sickness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman psychology is another area of concern for NASA. Scott Kelly could look out a window and see the Earth. He could call home. He could be in touch, in real time. But a one-way trip to Mars using current technology would take at least six months \u2014 and probably longer. A radio signal between the spacecraft and the Earth would take minutes to travel across the interplanetary distances, rendering a normal conversation impossible. Boredom is a danger. So are interpersonal conflicts among crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s a certainty when people go to Mars some of those people are going to suffer major psychiatric symptoms because that\u2019s just the nature of the way people are,\u201d said Twins Study co-author Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University.A human being is a composite organism \u2014 a collaboration involving trillions of microbes, most of them residing in our gut. The microbes emerge from, and have intimate connections to, the Earth. Mars not only doesn\u2019t have the kind of air, water, gravity and radiation that we\u2019re used to, it also, almost surely, doesn\u2019t have the right kind of bacteria.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNone of this prevents a human mission to Mars or other places in space. Never underestimate the ingenuity of future generations. But the greatest technological leaps since Apollo have occurred in the realm of 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s \u2014 the digital revolution. Robots do well in space. Any mission to the moon or Mars has to justify a human presence.NASA plans to put another rover on Mars soon, one designed to obtain soil samples that can someday be sent back to Earth robotically. It\u2019s a scientific echo of what the Apollo astronauts did. The difference this time: No humans in the loop.Alexa, bring us a Mars rock.Mars: Fallback plan?The most passionate advocates for space exploration say we have no alternative. They see it as an existential imperative, because bad things can happen to good planets (ask the dinosaurs that didn\u2019t have a backup plan 66 million years ago when a giant rock hit the Earth). And humans could trigger their own demise: Someone could engineer a particularly bad germ. We\u2019re already desperate to solve the climate crisis caused by human activity, and nuclear war remains a terrifying possibility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe late Stephen Hawking was among the smart folks saying we need a fallback option. \u201cAlthough the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,\u201d Hawking said, according to a November 2016 Newsweek article. \u201cBy that time, we should have spread out into space and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.\u201dApollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin echoed that opinion in a recent op-ed in The Post espousing \u201cthe great migration of humankind to Mars.\u201d He wrote that we have no alternative: \u201c[H]uman nature \u2014 and potentially the ultimate survival of our species \u2014 demands humanity\u2019s continued outward reach into the universe. .\u2009.\u2009. We explore, or we expire.\u201dElon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has said that the central purpose of his company is to create a human civilization on Mars so that we can be a two-planet species. He is not talking about a mere Antarctica-style research outpost: He wants to build cities on Mars, a completely self-sustaining civilization, which would preserve humanity in case something dire happened to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk and his brilliant engineers have achieved great success with SpaceX and the electric car company Tesla, and so people once skeptical of Musk\u2019s bold talk tend to hedge their bets these days. Yes, he overpromises, but he is persistent.Still, SpaceX and Musk can\u2019t simply wave away the technological and budgetary challenges that have prevented NASA and every other space agency around the world from attempting a Mars mission. (Or maybe he can: When Musk was asked a couple of years ago about the radiation hazard in interplanetary space, he said he wasn\u2019t worried about it. Problem solved!)In 2017 President Trump asked NASA\u2019s acting administrator if the agency could send humans to Mars by 2020. Answer: Not a chance. Mars is not an object parked in space beyond the moon. In his book \u201cThe Moon,\u201d author Oliver Morton writes of the moon, \u201c[It] is not just the nearest outpost of the elsewhere; it is also the furthest reach of here. It is in thrall to the Earth, its face cupped by the hands of gravity so strongly that it cannot turn its gaze away from ours.\u201d Mars, however, is in thrall to the sun. Mars can be as much as 249 million miles from Earth. Almost any conceivable mission to Mars requires something like a 500-day stay on the Red Planet before the orbits of the planets permit a journey home.Although Musk sees Mars as a fixer-upper planet, it would require a heck of a lot of fixin\u2019. That\u2019s the message from the other tycoon with a space company \u2014 Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post. Bezos favors the gradual migration of heavy industry into space, so that Earth can become a protected sanctuary. He doesn\u2019t see Mars as a Plan B, saying in 2016: \u201cThink about it: no whiskey, no bacon, no swimming pools, no oceans, no hiking, no urban centers. Eventually Mars might be amazing. But that\u2019s a long way in the future. This planet is incredible.\u201dScott Kelly has no delusions about Mars as a potential mulligan: \u201cIt will always be easier to take care of this planet than to make Mars into another Earth. It is not our lifeboat.\u201dThe great physicist Freeman Dyson once hypothesized that this is the most interesting of all possible universes and that we exist to make it so. And maybe he\u2019s right.But science has told us again and again \u2014 and this is a deeply humbling message \u2014 that the universe is not about us.What\u2019s certain is that, in the foreseeable future, there\u2019s no plausible do-over in space. The Earth is not disposable. Here we make our stand.That\u2019s what we learned from going into space.Our moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactorThe hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck Star Trekking put on hold as visionaries appreciate the home planet anew What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1829",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-the-space-age-taught-us-earth-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/2019/06/18/b7454e78-65cd-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html",
        "text": "Mars was supposed to be next. Surely the moon was just a steppingstone in the conquest of space. For many people who came of age during the Apollo era, it seemed reasonable to assume that in short order the entire solar system would be our stomping ground. Eventually we\u2019d be visiting stars. \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which debuted in 1966, seemed a plausible vision of human destiny. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHalf a century after Apollo 11, we have been forced again and again to recalibrate our expectations.The exploration of deep space by flesh-and-blood human beings no longer looks inevitable. It doesn\u2019t look especially affordable under plausible government budgets in the post-Space Race era, and private-sector dreams may never quite pencil out, as they say. Space travel remains dangerous; the catastrophic loss of two space shuttle crews proved that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s also been a more subtle revelation from half a century\u2019s experience with spaceflight. Going into space has given us a greater appreciation of our connection to the Earth.Apollo 11 anniversary: Follow the coverageThe human body goes haywire when hurled into space and away from the familiar environment of the Earth\u2019s surface. We learned this by doing it. And our innate terrestrial nature is both biological and psychological: Astronauts in orbit spend a lot of their free time looking out the window, toward home.Maybe the most important thing we\u2019ve learned from the Space Age is that we\u2019re Earthlings.Bodies in revoltWhen astronaut Scott Kelly went into orbit in 2015 for a nearly year-long mission, his immune system initially went bonkers. It acted as if under attack by a virus. At the cellular level, his body was screaming: Where\u2019s the gravity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fluids in his body wound up in the wrong places, an occupational hazard for astronauts. The effects include insomnia and blurred vision. And although his genetic code didn\u2019t change, his gene expression \u2014 the creation of proteins that are the workhorses of the body \u2014 did undergo pronounced changes, with some genes turning off and others turning on.Astronauts adapt to zero gravity and perform their jobs well. But then they face another jolt when they return to Earth. Kelly suffered from painful rashes, swollen legs, nausea and flulike symptoms. His gene expression mostly returned to its normal state, but not entirely. Kelly said he didn\u2019t feel quite right for about eight months.While Scott orbited the Earth, his twin brother, Mark, went about his business on the surface, pausing to let researchers sample his blood, urine, etc., for comparison with his sibling in space. NASA said its Twins Study revealed no showstoppers \u2014 nothing that would prevent an eventual human mission to Mars, the agency\u2019s long-term goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the study provided a reminder that space travel is brutal on human bodies, which are adapted for life on this particular planet. Our bones lose density. Muscles can atrophy. Astronauts have to exercise two hours a day to keep from wasting away. We can live in space, but that environment doesn\u2019t really agree with us.\u201cWe are fairly exquisitely designed for this planet, and we\u2019re fairly fragile physiologically when you get off this planet,\u201d study co-author Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, told The Washington Post.In the Hollywood version of spaceflight, no one ever worries about the composition of the air in the spaceship. But as Scott Kelly can attest, the air in the International Space Station can be a bit off. Kelly says high levels of carbon dioxide can cause malaise, especially in areas of poor air circulation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kelly brothers participated in a recent NASA-sponsored media teleconference to discuss the Twins Study, during which one of the researchers, Stuart Lee, said the air on the ISS \u201cis very close to what we have on the ground.\u201d The CO2 levels, he went on, are 0.3 percent of the air, compared to about 0.03 percent on the Earth\u2019s surface.Scott Kelly quickly chimed in: \u201cSo it\u2019s 10 times higher, Stuart. Right?\u201d\u201cSo, yeah, it\u2019s 10 times higher,\u201d Lee acknowledged.Then there\u2019s radiation. Earth\u2019s magnetic field protects the ISS from much of the radiation of space. But an astronaut journeying to Mars would not have that protection and would be particularly vulnerable to \u201ccosmic rays,\u201d which are elementary particles of galactic origin that travel at nearly the speed of light and could potentially cause cancer, genetic damage and acute radiation sickness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman psychology is another area of concern for NASA. Scott Kelly could look out a window and see the Earth. He could call home. He could be in touch, in real time. But a one-way trip to Mars using current technology would take at least six months \u2014 and probably longer. A radio signal between the spacecraft and the Earth would take minutes to travel across the interplanetary distances, rendering a normal conversation impossible. Boredom is a danger. So are interpersonal conflicts among crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s a certainty when people go to Mars some of those people are going to suffer major psychiatric symptoms because that\u2019s just the nature of the way people are,\u201d said Twins Study co-author Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University.A human being is a composite organism \u2014 a collaboration involving trillions of microbes, most of them residing in our gut. The microbes emerge from, and have intimate connections to, the Earth. Mars not only doesn\u2019t have the kind of air, water, gravity and radiation that we\u2019re used to, it also, almost surely, doesn\u2019t have the right kind of bacteria.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNone of this prevents a human mission to Mars or other places in space. Never underestimate the ingenuity of future generations. But the greatest technological leaps since Apollo have occurred in the realm of 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s \u2014 the digital revolution. Robots do well in space. Any mission to the moon or Mars has to justify a human presence.NASA plans to put another rover on Mars soon, one designed to obtain soil samples that can someday be sent back to Earth robotically. It\u2019s a scientific echo of what the Apollo astronauts did. The difference this time: No humans in the loop.Alexa, bring us a Mars rock.Mars: Fallback plan?The most passionate advocates for space exploration say we have no alternative. They see it as an existential imperative, because bad things can happen to good planets (ask the dinosaurs that didn\u2019t have a backup plan 66 million years ago when a giant rock hit the Earth). And humans could trigger their own demise: Someone could engineer a particularly bad germ. We\u2019re already desperate to solve the climate crisis caused by human activity, and nuclear war remains a terrifying possibility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe late Stephen Hawking was among the smart folks saying we need a fallback option. \u201cAlthough the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,\u201d Hawking said, according to a November 2016 Newsweek article. \u201cBy that time, we should have spread out into space and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.\u201dApollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin echoed that opinion in a recent op-ed in The Post espousing \u201cthe great migration of humankind to Mars.\u201d He wrote that we have no alternative: \u201c[H]uman nature \u2014 and potentially the ultimate survival of our species \u2014 demands humanity\u2019s continued outward reach into the universe. .\u2009.\u2009. We explore, or we expire.\u201dElon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has said that the central purpose of his company is to create a human civilization on Mars so that we can be a two-planet species. He is not talking about a mere Antarctica-style research outpost: He wants to build cities on Mars, a completely self-sustaining civilization, which would preserve humanity in case something dire happened to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk and his brilliant engineers have achieved great success with SpaceX and the electric car company Tesla, and so people once skeptical of Musk\u2019s bold talk tend to hedge their bets these days. Yes, he overpromises, but he is persistent.Still, SpaceX and Musk can\u2019t simply wave away the technological and budgetary challenges that have prevented NASA and every other space agency around the world from attempting a Mars mission. (Or maybe he can: When Musk was asked a couple of years ago about the radiation hazard in interplanetary space, he said he wasn\u2019t worried about it. Problem solved!)In 2017 President Trump asked NASA\u2019s acting administrator if the agency could send humans to Mars by 2020. Answer: Not a chance. Mars is not an object parked in space beyond the moon. In his book \u201cThe Moon,\u201d author Oliver Morton writes of the moon, \u201c[It] is not just the nearest outpost of the elsewhere; it is also the furthest reach of here. It is in thrall to the Earth, its face cupped by the hands of gravity so strongly that it cannot turn its gaze away from ours.\u201d Mars, however, is in thrall to the sun. Mars can be as much as 249 million miles from Earth. Almost any conceivable mission to Mars requires something like a 500-day stay on the Red Planet before the orbits of the planets permit a journey home.Although Musk sees Mars as a fixer-upper planet, it would require a heck of a lot of fixin\u2019. That\u2019s the message from the other tycoon with a space company \u2014 Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post. Bezos favors the gradual migration of heavy industry into space, so that Earth can become a protected sanctuary. He doesn\u2019t see Mars as a Plan B, saying in 2016: \u201cThink about it: no whiskey, no bacon, no swimming pools, no oceans, no hiking, no urban centers. Eventually Mars might be amazing. But that\u2019s a long way in the future. This planet is incredible.\u201dScott Kelly has no delusions about Mars as a potential mulligan: \u201cIt will always be easier to take care of this planet than to make Mars into another Earth. It is not our lifeboat.\u201dThe great physicist Freeman Dyson once hypothesized that this is the most interesting of all possible universes and that we exist to make it so. And maybe he\u2019s right.But science has told us again and again \u2014 and this is a deeply humbling message \u2014 that the universe is not about us.What\u2019s certain is that, in the foreseeable future, there\u2019s no plausible do-over in space. The Earth is not disposable. Here we make our stand.That\u2019s what we learned from going into space.Our moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactorThe hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck Star Trekking put on hold as visionaries appreciate the home planet anew What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1830",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-the-space-age-taught-us-earth-is-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds/2019/06/18/b7454e78-65cd-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html",
        "text": "Mars was supposed to be next. Surely the moon was just a steppingstone in the conquest of space. For many people who came of age during the Apollo era, it seemed reasonable to assume that in short order the entire solar system would be our stomping ground. Eventually we\u2019d be visiting stars. \u201cStar Trek,\u201d which debuted in 1966, seemed a plausible vision of human destiny. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHalf a century after Apollo 11, we have been forced again and again to recalibrate our expectations.The exploration of deep space by flesh-and-blood human beings no longer looks inevitable. It doesn\u2019t look especially affordable under plausible government budgets in the post-Space Race era, and private-sector dreams may never quite pencil out, as they say. Space travel remains dangerous; the catastrophic loss of two space shuttle crews proved that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s also been a more subtle revelation from half a century\u2019s experience with spaceflight. Going into space has given us a greater appreciation of our connection to the Earth.Apollo 11 anniversary: Follow the coverageThe human body goes haywire when hurled into space and away from the familiar environment of the Earth\u2019s surface. We learned this by doing it. And our innate terrestrial nature is both biological and psychological: Astronauts in orbit spend a lot of their free time looking out the window, toward home.Maybe the most important thing we\u2019ve learned from the Space Age is that we\u2019re Earthlings.Bodies in revoltWhen astronaut Scott Kelly went into orbit in 2015 for a nearly year-long mission, his immune system initially went bonkers. It acted as if under attack by a virus. At the cellular level, his body was screaming: Where\u2019s the gravity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fluids in his body wound up in the wrong places, an occupational hazard for astronauts. The effects include insomnia and blurred vision. And although his genetic code didn\u2019t change, his gene expression \u2014 the creation of proteins that are the workhorses of the body \u2014 did undergo pronounced changes, with some genes turning off and others turning on.Astronauts adapt to zero gravity and perform their jobs well. But then they face another jolt when they return to Earth. Kelly suffered from painful rashes, swollen legs, nausea and flulike symptoms. His gene expression mostly returned to its normal state, but not entirely. Kelly said he didn\u2019t feel quite right for about eight months.While Scott orbited the Earth, his twin brother, Mark, went about his business on the surface, pausing to let researchers sample his blood, urine, etc., for comparison with his sibling in space. NASA said its Twins Study revealed no showstoppers \u2014 nothing that would prevent an eventual human mission to Mars, the agency\u2019s long-term goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the study provided a reminder that space travel is brutal on human bodies, which are adapted for life on this particular planet. Our bones lose density. Muscles can atrophy. Astronauts have to exercise two hours a day to keep from wasting away. We can live in space, but that environment doesn\u2019t really agree with us.\u201cWe are fairly exquisitely designed for this planet, and we\u2019re fairly fragile physiologically when you get off this planet,\u201d study co-author Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, told The Washington Post.In the Hollywood version of spaceflight, no one ever worries about the composition of the air in the spaceship. But as Scott Kelly can attest, the air in the International Space Station can be a bit off. Kelly says high levels of carbon dioxide can cause malaise, especially in areas of poor air circulation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kelly brothers participated in a recent NASA-sponsored media teleconference to discuss the Twins Study, during which one of the researchers, Stuart Lee, said the air on the ISS \u201cis very close to what we have on the ground.\u201d The CO2 levels, he went on, are 0.3 percent of the air, compared to about 0.03 percent on the Earth\u2019s surface.Scott Kelly quickly chimed in: \u201cSo it\u2019s 10 times higher, Stuart. Right?\u201d\u201cSo, yeah, it\u2019s 10 times higher,\u201d Lee acknowledged.Then there\u2019s radiation. Earth\u2019s magnetic field protects the ISS from much of the radiation of space. But an astronaut journeying to Mars would not have that protection and would be particularly vulnerable to \u201ccosmic rays,\u201d which are elementary particles of galactic origin that travel at nearly the speed of light and could potentially cause cancer, genetic damage and acute radiation sickness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman psychology is another area of concern for NASA. Scott Kelly could look out a window and see the Earth. He could call home. He could be in touch, in real time. But a one-way trip to Mars using current technology would take at least six months \u2014 and probably longer. A radio signal between the spacecraft and the Earth would take minutes to travel across the interplanetary distances, rendering a normal conversation impossible. Boredom is a danger. So are interpersonal conflicts among crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s a certainty when people go to Mars some of those people are going to suffer major psychiatric symptoms because that\u2019s just the nature of the way people are,\u201d said Twins Study co-author Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University.A human being is a composite organism \u2014 a collaboration involving trillions of microbes, most of them residing in our gut. The microbes emerge from, and have intimate connections to, the Earth. Mars not only doesn\u2019t have the kind of air, water, gravity and radiation that we\u2019re used to, it also, almost surely, doesn\u2019t have the right kind of bacteria.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNone of this prevents a human mission to Mars or other places in space. Never underestimate the ingenuity of future generations. But the greatest technological leaps since Apollo have occurred in the realm of 0\u2019s and 1\u2019s \u2014 the digital revolution. Robots do well in space. Any mission to the moon or Mars has to justify a human presence.NASA plans to put another rover on Mars soon, one designed to obtain soil samples that can someday be sent back to Earth robotically. It\u2019s a scientific echo of what the Apollo astronauts did. The difference this time: No humans in the loop.Alexa, bring us a Mars rock.Mars: Fallback plan?The most passionate advocates for space exploration say we have no alternative. They see it as an existential imperative, because bad things can happen to good planets (ask the dinosaurs that didn\u2019t have a backup plan 66 million years ago when a giant rock hit the Earth). And humans could trigger their own demise: Someone could engineer a particularly bad germ. We\u2019re already desperate to solve the climate crisis caused by human activity, and nuclear war remains a terrifying possibility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe late Stephen Hawking was among the smart folks saying we need a fallback option. \u201cAlthough the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,\u201d Hawking said, according to a November 2016 Newsweek article. \u201cBy that time, we should have spread out into space and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.\u201dApollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin echoed that opinion in a recent op-ed in The Post espousing \u201cthe great migration of humankind to Mars.\u201d He wrote that we have no alternative: \u201c[H]uman nature \u2014 and potentially the ultimate survival of our species \u2014 demands humanity\u2019s continued outward reach into the universe. .\u2009.\u2009. We explore, or we expire.\u201dElon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has said that the central purpose of his company is to create a human civilization on Mars so that we can be a two-planet species. He is not talking about a mere Antarctica-style research outpost: He wants to build cities on Mars, a completely self-sustaining civilization, which would preserve humanity in case something dire happened to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk and his brilliant engineers have achieved great success with SpaceX and the electric car company Tesla, and so people once skeptical of Musk\u2019s bold talk tend to hedge their bets these days. Yes, he overpromises, but he is persistent.Still, SpaceX and Musk can\u2019t simply wave away the technological and budgetary challenges that have prevented NASA and every other space agency around the world from attempting a Mars mission. (Or maybe he can: When Musk was asked a couple of years ago about the radiation hazard in interplanetary space, he said he wasn\u2019t worried about it. Problem solved!)In 2017 President Trump asked NASA\u2019s acting administrator if the agency could send humans to Mars by 2020. Answer: Not a chance. Mars is not an object parked in space beyond the moon. In his book \u201cThe Moon,\u201d author Oliver Morton writes of the moon, \u201c[It] is not just the nearest outpost of the elsewhere; it is also the furthest reach of here. It is in thrall to the Earth, its face cupped by the hands of gravity so strongly that it cannot turn its gaze away from ours.\u201d Mars, however, is in thrall to the sun. Mars can be as much as 249 million miles from Earth. Almost any conceivable mission to Mars requires something like a 500-day stay on the Red Planet before the orbits of the planets permit a journey home.Although Musk sees Mars as a fixer-upper planet, it would require a heck of a lot of fixin\u2019. That\u2019s the message from the other tycoon with a space company \u2014 Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and owner of The Washington Post. Bezos favors the gradual migration of heavy industry into space, so that Earth can become a protected sanctuary. He doesn\u2019t see Mars as a Plan B, saying in 2016: \u201cThink about it: no whiskey, no bacon, no swimming pools, no oceans, no hiking, no urban centers. Eventually Mars might be amazing. But that\u2019s a long way in the future. This planet is incredible.\u201dScott Kelly has no delusions about Mars as a potential mulligan: \u201cIt will always be easier to take care of this planet than to make Mars into another Earth. It is not our lifeboat.\u201dThe great physicist Freeman Dyson once hypothesized that this is the most interesting of all possible universes and that we exist to make it so. And maybe he\u2019s right.But science has told us again and again \u2014 and this is a deeply humbling message \u2014 that the universe is not about us.What\u2019s certain is that, in the foreseeable future, there\u2019s no plausible do-over in space. The Earth is not disposable. Here we make our stand.That\u2019s what we learned from going into space.Our moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactorThe hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck Star Trekking put on hold as visionaries appreciate the home planet anew What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Houston, We Have a Podcast\u2019: The people of NASA have some good stories to tell (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1831",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/houston-we-have-a-podcast-the-people-of-nasa-have-some-good-stories-to-tell/2018/04/06/9a4e4876-3827-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html",
        "text": "Podcasts are all the rage right now, and NASA has gotten into the game. \u201cHouston, We Have a Podcast\u201d \u2014 a play on the words uttered when a space ship lifts off \u2014 is the official podcast of NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center, and it is definitely a good companion when you\u2019re out and about or just doing some spring cleaning.\n WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEvery week, the center, which is home to the International Space Station\u2019s mission control and which trains humans for space flight, puts out the meaty podcast that will send you into the depths of the great beyond. The podcast features plenty of astronauts reliving their greatest accomplishments and talking about their rigorous training. Recent episodes bring you audio from inside the Orion, the capsule that NASA is developing to carry a crew of four astronauts into deep space, and along Scott Tingle\u2019s path from test pilot to astronaut. (Tingle is currently orbiting Earth in the International Space Station.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstronauts are not the only professionals showing their stuff, though. The show overflows with the voices of the engineers, researchers and mission control flight directors who develop and test NASA\u2019s most complex technology and protect astronauts during their flights. There\u2019s historical information on pioneering missions and space explorers, too. \u201cHouston, We Have a Podcast\u201d launched in July 2017. So far, there are nearly 40 episodes, most well over an hour in length and featuring transcripts, to catch up on. That\u2019s enough to spur on your most ambitious spacefaring dreams \u2014 even if you\u2019re holding a broom instead of a telescope. Catch up with previous episodes and find out how to subscribe at nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP. NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get thereA 6-year-old tells NASA to make Pluto a planet again: \u2018You need to fix this problem for me\u2019 The podcast features plenty of astronauts on their rigorous training and greatest accomplishments. \u2018Houston, We Have a Podcast\u2019: The people of NASA have some good stories to tell",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Houston, We Have a Podcast\u2019: The people of NASA have some good stories to tell (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1832",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/houston-we-have-a-podcast-the-people-of-nasa-have-some-good-stories-to-tell/2018/04/06/9a4e4876-3827-11e8-9c0a-85d477d9a226_story.html",
        "text": "Podcasts are all the rage right now, and NASA has gotten into the game. \u201cHouston, We Have a Podcast\u201d \u2014 a play on the words uttered when a space ship lifts off \u2014 is the official podcast of NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center, and it is definitely a good companion when you\u2019re out and about or just doing some spring cleaning.\n WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEvery week, the center, which is home to the International Space Station\u2019s mission control and which trains humans for space flight, puts out the meaty podcast that will send you into the depths of the great beyond. The podcast features plenty of astronauts reliving their greatest accomplishments and talking about their rigorous training. Recent episodes bring you audio from inside the Orion, the capsule that NASA is developing to carry a crew of four astronauts into deep space, and along Scott Tingle\u2019s path from test pilot to astronaut. (Tingle is currently orbiting Earth in the International Space Station.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstronauts are not the only professionals showing their stuff, though. The show overflows with the voices of the engineers, researchers and mission control flight directors who develop and test NASA\u2019s most complex technology and protect astronauts during their flights. There\u2019s historical information on pioneering missions and space explorers, too. \u201cHouston, We Have a Podcast\u201d launched in July 2017. So far, there are nearly 40 episodes, most well over an hour in length and featuring transcripts, to catch up on. That\u2019s enough to spur on your most ambitious spacefaring dreams \u2014 even if you\u2019re holding a broom instead of a telescope. Catch up with previous episodes and find out how to subscribe at nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP. NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get thereA 6-year-old tells NASA to make Pluto a planet again: \u2018You need to fix this problem for me\u2019 The podcast features plenty of astronauts on their rigorous training and greatest accomplishments. \u2018Houston, We Have a Podcast\u2019: The people of NASA have some good stories to tell",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Sammies\u2019 honor government\u2019s best and most innovative employees (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1833",
        "date": "2018-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/sammies-honor-governments-best-and-most-innovative-employees/2018/10/01/0ac8d06c-c342-11e8-97a5-ab1e46bb3bc7_story.html",
        "text": "Peggy Honein vividly remembers the day in 2016 when an obscure virus went from a curiosity to a major public health threat. There were disturbing reports out of Brazil of newborns with tiny heads, and the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were trying to determine why that was happening. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cOne of the most important moments was when the CDC\u2019s lab first found evidence in some samples that Zika was destroying the brain tissue of newborns,\u201d Honein recalled in an interview.Honein quickly assembled an emergency response team of nearly 200 people to monitor, study and respond to the Zika virus. The team eventually figured out that the virus was transmitted by mosquito bites as well as \nsexual contact.Story continues below advertisementThe CDC released recommendations for travel by pregnant women and women of childbearing age across the Americas and is still monitoring 7,300 children in the United States and its territories for long-term health problems. Those include developmental delays, seizures and vision problems, among others.Advertisement\u201cThe Zika story really isn\u2019t over,\u201d said Honein, director of the CDC\u2019s congenital and developmental disorders division. \u201cWe still are following these children.\u201d And Zika remains a threat in nearly 100 countries, she said.Honein will be awarded a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal at a gala Tuesday night. Considered the \u201cOscars of government service,\u201d the \u201cSammies\u201d are given by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that tries to make government more effective.Story continues below advertisementThe awards will be given to seven employees or teams from across the government, along with a first-ever \u201cSpirit of Service\u201d award to Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, for his work to advance space exploration and national security. His Amazon Web Services provides secure cloud computing used by the intelligence community, the military and first responders to collect, analyze and share information in real time, according to the award citation. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) AdvertisementThe awards come at a time of heightened friction between the federal workforce and President Trump, who has vowed to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d of ineffective government agencies and reduce the number of federal employees.\u201cThese are not normal times for our nation\u2019s civil servants. Yet, they continue to serve in extraordinary ways, and we need to recognize and celebrate their important work,\u201d Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said in a news release.Story continues below advertisementThe top honor, Federal Employee of the Year, will be presented to Daniel L. Kastner, scientific director of the intramural research division of the National Institutes of Health\u2019s Human Genome Research Institute. Kastner discovered the genetic underpinnings of a family of debilitating \u201cautoinflammatory\u201d diseases using very early maps of the human genome more than 20 years ago.Advertisement\u201cWhat we\u2019ve discovered is a family of diseases that are inherited disorders of inflammation,\u201d Kastner said in an interview. Therapies based on this research have been used to treat strokes, fevers, arthritis and pain caused by these disorders.The Career Achievement Medal will be given to Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, who developed surveillance systems for the CDC that revealed the prevalence of autism, developmental disabilities and other conditions. In 1968, Yeargin-Allsopp became the first African American woman admitted to Emory University\u2019s medical school.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI feel that I\u2019ve done the best I can do with the gifts and talents that I\u2019ve been given,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we all should do.\u201dOther winners include:\u25cf\n\u25cf Karen D. Dodge of the Federal Trade Commission and Margaret Moeser of the Justice Department, who won the Homeland Security and Law Enforcement Medal. They led civil and criminal investigations that forced Western Union to admit it allowed con artists to use its service to collect payments related to scams. The company forfeited $586\u00a0million to reimburse victims.Advertisement\u25cf Andrew M. Herscowitz and the Power Africa Team of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who will receive the National Security and International Affairs Medal. They brought together the private sector, financial institutions, 12 federal agencies and foreign governments to provide electricity to more than 50\u00a0million people in sub-Saharan Africa.Story continues below advertisement\u25cf Marcella Jacobs and the Digital Service team of the Department of Veterans Affairs, who will be given the Management Excellence Medal for streamlining online processes for veterans to simplify applying for and receiving benefits.\u25cf Parimal Kopardekar and a team at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center, who designed a traffic management system for drones, including rules and technologies that will allow commercial drones to safely deliver packages, monitor traffic and aid search-and-rescue operations.AdvertisementAn eighth award, the fourth annual Service to America Medals People\u2019s Choice Award, chosen by the public, was given in July to Alison Smith of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. Smith pioneered the use of nanomaterials to mark sensitive military equipment with a \u201cfingerprint\u201d to guard against the use of counterfeit products.2017 Sammies are therapy for feds during tough times under Trump\u2018We save people\u2019s lives\u2019: 2016 SammiesTrump could learn from honored employees A fed who led the U.S. response to the Zika virus is among this year\u2019s honorees. \u2018Sammies\u2019 honor government\u2019s best and most innovative employees",
        "author": "Lenny Bernstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo rocks showed how the moon was made, and now they\u2019re about to solve more mysteries (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1834",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/apollo-rocks-showed-how-the-moon-was-made-and-now-theyre-about-to-solve-more-mysteries/2019/05/12/e3919a16-6de5-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html",
        "text": "HOUSTON \u2014 The first person to set foot on the moon had one last task before he came home.Neil Armstrong needed to pick up rocks \u2014 as many as he could carry, as interesting as he could find. The material he collected would constitute humanity\u2019s first samples taken from another world. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith less than 10\u00a0minutes to go before the end of his moonwalk, Armstrong used tongs to pile about 20 rocks into a specialized collection box. Deciding it wasn\u2019t full enough, he scooped an additional 13\u00a0pounds of lunar soil into the container.Today, a tablespoon of that soil sits in a sealed dish in a locked and windowless lab at Johnson Space Center in Houston. It is a prized piece of the Apollo program\u2019s greatest scientific legacy: nearly 850 pounds of moon rocks.Story continues below advertisementFor 50 years, research on these rocks has transformed our understanding of the moon, revealing the circumstances of its birth and the reasons for its mottled face. Now, NASA has decided to release three new samples for analysis \u2014 samples that no scientist has touched.AdvertisementThe upcoming experiments, on vacuum-sealed cores and a long-frozen rock, can be performed only once, at the precise moment the samples are opened. That\u2019s why the materials have been held back since they were retrieved from the moon, said Ryan Zeigler, who curates the Apollo rocks collection. NASA was waiting for the right scientists, with the right technologies, at the right time.With Apollo\u00a011\u2019s 50th anniversary this year and renewed interest in the moon ahead of a proposed return mission, Zeigler said, the right time is now.Highlights from the Apollo 11 mission on July 21, 1969. (NASA)NASA\u2019s Lunar Sample Laboratory, a maze of gleaming metal cabinets and spotless linoleum floors, was built in the 1970s to house the rocks brought back from six moon missions.Listen on Post Reports: NASA to release new samples of moon rocks for scientific analysisA sophisticated HVAC system, designed to keep the air 1,000 times cleaner than in the outside world, fills the facility with a faint artificial breeze. Scientists enter only after donning special white jumpsuits, caps and booties to limit contamination.These are some of the most valuable rocks in the solar system, Zeigler said. Just look at what they have revealed so far.Before the Apollo\u00a011 mission, scientists couldn\u2019t agree on where the moon came from. It\u2019s a misfit in the solar system \u2014 much larger relative to its planet than almost any other moon. Some speculated that it was once an independent object that was \u201ccaptured\u201d by Earth\u2019s gravity. Others proposed that the satellite formed in orbit alongside Earth when the planets were coalescing out of a primordial dust disc. Many grade-school textbooks taught that it was, in fact, a blob of Earth that had been flung away by our planet\u2019s spin; the Pacific Ocean was thought to be a scar from this ancient loss.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of those theories had to be discarded as soon as scientists saw the first Apollo rocks.The moon materials were extraordinarily ancient \u2014 as old as 4.5\u2009billion years. Although they contained many of the same chemicals as rocks from Earth, they were startlingly poor in \u201cvolatiles\u201d \u2014 molecules like water and carbon dioxide that easily vaporize when heated. Some contained features produced only in cataclysms \u2014 showers of meteorites, blasts from volcanoes, or barrages of particles from the sun.At a conference to discuss the initial findings six months after Apollo\u00a011 returned to Earth, no one could agree on what all this evidence meant.Then, toward the end of the conference, geologist John Wood explained how the clues fit together. He realized that the strange white flecks in Armstrong\u2019s hastily gathered soil sample belonged to an unusual type of rock called anorthosite, which forms when the mineral feldspar crystallizes out of molten rock.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt some point, Wood reasoned, the moon must have been completely covered in a magma ocean, in which anorthosite rocks floated like icebergs. The molten world would have cast an eerie, blood-red glow in Earth\u2019s night skies.To confirm Wood\u2019s theory, scientists needed bigger and better samples. They got what they wanted in 1971, when Apollo\u00a015 astronauts James Irwin and David Scott uncovered a half-pound chunk of anorthosite on the rim of a crater in the moon\u2019s northern hemisphere.Cleaning the dirt off the rock\u2019s exterior, Scott realized what he was holding and started to shout. \u201cOh, boy!\u201d\u201cGuess what we just found,\u201d he exclaimed, as Irwin laughed with delight. \u201cGuess what we just found! I think we found what we came for. .\u2009.\u2009. What a beaut.\u201dThat sample came to be known as \u201cthe Genesis rock\u201d \u2014 a nod to the role it played in helping scientists unravel the story of the moon\u2019s origins. It sits inside its own glass case, not far from the dish containing Armstrong\u2019s soil.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese exact samples told us how the moon formed,\u201d Zeigler said.About 4.5\u2009billion years ago, the theory goes, a long-gone giant planet called Theia, named for the mother of the Greek moon goddess, smashed into the newly formed Earth. The impact shattered both Theia and the proto-Earth and splashed millions of tons of material into space. Some of the rock coalesced in orbit around the Earth, and our satellite was born. The heaviest bits sank to the moon\u2019s center, while the light minerals floated to the top of the worldwide magma ocean and crystallized, forming the thin anorthosite crust. The rocks and dust retrieved by Armstrong and Scott are relics of this long-ago tumult.Many researchers were skeptical of this \u201cgiant impact hypothesis\u201d when it was first proposed in the mid-1970s. Astrophysicist Alastair Cameron, one of the architects of the hypothesis, recalled a colleague dismissing one of his presentations as \u201ccosmic schmoo.\u201d The idea seemed too arbitrary, too catastrophic, too strange.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the evidence was strange, Cameron pointed out, and only the giant impact seemed to fit it. It was big enough to generate the global magma ocean in which the anorthosite formed. It explained why the moon\u2019s and Earth\u2019s chemical fingerprints were so similar \u2014 they formed from the same swirl of exploded rock. It accounted for the missing volatiles, which would have been blown into space when the Earth and Theia collided.The hypothesis was also supported by data from science experiments astronauts performed during their time on the lunar surface. Seismometers deployed by Armstrong\u2019s comrade Buzz Aldrin and his successors on later Apollo missions revealed that the moon has relatively little iron at its center. After the collision, the theory goes, heavy elements like iron sank into Earth\u2019s core while lighter elements were blasted away into what became the moon. (Notably, Earth is the densest planet in the solar system.)Other rocks have helped us \u201csee beyond the moon\u201d to the history of the whole solar system, Zeigler said. Most of Earth\u2019s geologic record has been weathered by water and wind or swallowed up by plate tectonics, but the moon\u2019s surface still bears the scars of every volcano that ever erupted and every meteor that ever crashed into it. Lunar samples provided evidence for an era called the Late Heavy Bombardment, when the inner planets were assaulted by a barrage of asteroids, right around the time that life arose on Earth. And by counting craters on areas of the moon whose ages are known from the Apollo samples, scientists have established a system for estimating the ages of features on other planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStudying material from the moon up close hasn\u2019t completely explained its history. For one, researchers can find no molecular fingerprints of Theia \u2014 the object whose collision with Earth purportedly created the moon. Nor can scientists agree on how traces of water wound up inside the samples, when the global magma ocean should have boiled it all away.\u201cFor certain, the story is not complete,\u201d Zeigler said.NASA hopes that the three newly available samples \u2014 which represent half of all the lunar material the space agency has in reserve \u2014 will help answer these questions.Some researchers will look for traces of water in a rock that has been stored in a freezer for nearly 50\u00a0years. Others will seek out volatile molecules, including water, trapped inside tiny glass beads formed from lunar lava fountains that erupted billions of years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral teams will work together to examine the materials \n inside pristine vacuum tubes that were sealed by astronauts while they were still on the moon. The way the rocks are layered may offer insight about landslides that shape the lunar landscape in the absence of wind, weather and life. Captured gases carry clues about how the material was altered by radiation, which in turn will help scientists understand how long the rock was exposed to light before astronauts boxed it up and carried it away.Some measurements, like the analysis of the captured gas, can only be made at the moment the canisters are opened. Scientists will spend months rehearsing the experiment on practice tubes containing samples from Antarctica before the big event.\u201cIt\u2019s exciting to open up something new,\u201d said Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center who will lead the gas analysis. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what we\u2019ll find.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference meeting in Houston this spring \u2014 the 50th event since the one where the Apollo\u00a011 samples were first discussed all those years ago \u2014 announcements about the upcoming experiments were met with loud applause.Humans took their final steps on the surface of the Moon 45 years ago. Their dust-grimed spacesuits remind us that space exploration is a dirty business. (William Neff / The Washington Post)The United States hasn\u2019t taken any new material from the moon since the last Apollo landing in 1972, and no lunar rocks have been brought to Earth since the Soviets\u2019 Luna\u00a024 probe flew four years after that. China has plans for a sample return mission this year, and President Trump has directed NASA to send astronauts back to the moon by 2024. But a 2011 law bars U.S. federal scientists from collaborating with China\u2019s space agency, and a lack of funding for NASA has raised skepticism about Trump\u2019s proposed moon shot.To fully answer lingering questions, \u201cwe need a better global representation of lunar rock types,\u201d Cohen said. And for that, \u201cwe need to go back.\u201dBut in the meantime, she said, the decision to open the Apollo samples is like \u201ca mini mission\u201d unto itself; one more chance to probe a piece of another place; one more chapter in the story of the moon.NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon missionIn a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private companyInside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new Mars rover As Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary nears, NASA has decided to release three new samples for scientific analysis. Apollo rocks showed how the moon was made, and now they\u2019re about to solve more mysteries",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomy site is your guide to the universe, one picture at a time (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1835",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/astronomy-site-is-your-guide-to-the-universe-one-picture-at-a-time/2018/05/11/4a867890-5389-11e8-a551-5b648abe29ef_story.html",
        "text": "Have you ever wished for a personal guide to the planets, stars and solar system? A site called Astronomy Picture of the Day has you covered.A service of NASA\u2019s Astrophysics Science Division, the Goddard Space Flight Center and Michigan Technological University, the site offers up mind-blowing photography and mind-boggling explanations of the phenomena it portrays. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAPOD, as it\u2019s nicknamed, has a simple mission: Post one photo of something in the universe each day, along with an explanation from a professional astronomer.Luckily, there\u2019s no lack of great space photography and neat phenomena to explore. The site wins points for sheer variety \u2014 recent pix have included a visualization of the entire observable universe, a 2011 image of the space shuttle Endeavour cutting through clouds and a trippy picture of the Stickney Crater, the largest on the Martian moon Phobos. A robust archive saves the pictures you may have missed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollowing APOD gives you glimpses of the heavens from every vantage point and mood. Its layout is comfortably low-tech, with plenty of perks: It\u2019s on social media, too, and is translated into dozens of languages. You can even submit photos if you want to add to the fun.You don\u2019t need to be an expert to get something out of APOD: Its explanations are accessible, and there are plenty of links if you want to learn more. APOD may be simple, but it\u2019s not simplistic. Whether you\u2019re looking for a quick fix of astronomical wonder or an explanation of something you never knew existed, your curiosity will be well rewarded.This star is the farthest ever seenScientists detect signal from \u2018cosmic dawn\u2019Ancient Earth Globe lets you travel back in time NASA and partners publish a daily picture of the planets and stars. Astronomy site is your guide to the universe, one picture at a time",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Universal Life\u2019: An insider\u2019s look at NASA\u2019s hunt for other worlds, organisms (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1836",
        "date": "2019-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/universal-life-an-insiders-look-at-nasas-hunt-for-other-worlds-organisms/2019/02/01/5ca8d3c4-24a8-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s out there?When the Kepler space telescope hurtled into space in 2009, the answer to that question became a matter of when, not if. The telescope\u2019s launch kicked off NASA\u2019s first attempt to hunt for planets outside our solar system. It yielded the discoveries of more than 2,600 confirmed planets. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne, or even some, of those exoplanets might have the conditions needed to sustain life. In his new book, \u201cUniversal Life: An Inside Look Behind the Race to Discover Life Beyond Earth,\u201d astrophysicist Alan Boss gives the reader an up-close look at the Kepler project, its amazing journey and the search in the past two decades for Earthlike planets in our galaxy.Story continues below advertisementBoss, an accomplished scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, has long contributed to NASA\u2019s exoplanet exploration program (including as past chair of the executive committee of the program\u2019s analysis group). In the book, he gives a comprehensive view of Kepler\u2019s origins and contributions to our knowledge of possible life in the great beyond.AdvertisementNASA retired Kepler late last year after it ran out of fuel. By then, the telescope had observed more than 530,000 stars and had traveled 94 million miles through space, according to NASA. Boss gives a brisk, detailed tour of its dizzying contributions to science. The book is packed with the budget woes and scientific celebrations (and acronyms) that make up life at NASA. It covers the agency insiders who are making discovery possible in tiny, sometimes frustrating steps. Each chapter is broken into small, vignette-type sections with such titles as \u201cCan We Build It Any Faster?\u201d and \u201cHey, I Had That Idea First.\u201dThese bite-sized segments make the fire hose of material accessible. So does his conversational tone. Reading the book is like sitting in the office with someone who\u2019s eager to explain the ins and outs of the science and the program.Story continues below advertisementBoss also has an upbeat take on what comes next thanks to Kepler.\u201cWe now know that Earthlike planets are universal, and we expect that life will be just as universal,\u201d he says.So long Kepler, and thanks for all the planetsVideo: Out of gas, mission over for Kepler telescopeKepler telescope finds Earth-size, potentially habitable planets are commonNewest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars An astrophysicist writes what we\u2019ve learned from the Kepler space telescope. \u2018Universal Life\u2019: An insider\u2019s look at NASA\u2019s hunt for other worlds, organisms",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Universal Life\u2019: An insider\u2019s look at NASA\u2019s hunt for other worlds, organisms (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1837",
        "date": "2019-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/universal-life-an-insiders-look-at-nasas-hunt-for-other-worlds-organisms/2019/02/01/5ca8d3c4-24a8-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s out there?When the Kepler space telescope hurtled into space in 2009, the answer to that question became a matter of when, not if. The telescope\u2019s launch kicked off NASA\u2019s first attempt to hunt for planets outside our solar system. It yielded the discoveries of more than 2,600 confirmed planets. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne, or even some, of those exoplanets might have the conditions needed to sustain life. In his new book, \u201cUniversal Life: An Inside Look Behind the Race to Discover Life Beyond Earth,\u201d astrophysicist Alan Boss gives the reader an up-close look at the Kepler project, its amazing journey and the search in the past two decades for Earthlike planets in our galaxy.Story continues below advertisementBoss, an accomplished scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, has long contributed to NASA\u2019s exoplanet exploration program (including as past chair of the executive committee of the program\u2019s analysis group). In the book, he gives a comprehensive view of Kepler\u2019s origins and contributions to our knowledge of possible life in the great beyond.AdvertisementNASA retired Kepler late last year after it ran out of fuel. By then, the telescope had observed more than 530,000 stars and had traveled 94 million miles through space, according to NASA. Boss gives a brisk, detailed tour of its dizzying contributions to science. The book is packed with the budget woes and scientific celebrations (and acronyms) that make up life at NASA. It covers the agency insiders who are making discovery possible in tiny, sometimes frustrating steps. Each chapter is broken into small, vignette-type sections with such titles as \u201cCan We Build It Any Faster?\u201d and \u201cHey, I Had That Idea First.\u201dThese bite-sized segments make the fire hose of material accessible. So does his conversational tone. Reading the book is like sitting in the office with someone who\u2019s eager to explain the ins and outs of the science and the program.Story continues below advertisementBoss also has an upbeat take on what comes next thanks to Kepler.\u201cWe now know that Earthlike planets are universal, and we expect that life will be just as universal,\u201d he says.So long Kepler, and thanks for all the planetsVideo: Out of gas, mission over for Kepler telescopeKepler telescope finds Earth-size, potentially habitable planets are commonNewest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars An astrophysicist writes what we\u2019ve learned from the Kepler space telescope. \u2018Universal Life\u2019: An insider\u2019s look at NASA\u2019s hunt for other worlds, organisms",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Universal Life\u2019: An insider\u2019s look at NASA\u2019s hunt for other worlds, organisms (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1838",
        "date": "2019-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/universal-life-an-insiders-look-at-nasas-hunt-for-other-worlds-organisms/2019/02/01/5ca8d3c4-24a8-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s out there?When the Kepler space telescope hurtled into space in 2009, the answer to that question became a matter of when, not if. The telescope\u2019s launch kicked off NASA\u2019s first attempt to hunt for planets outside our solar system. It yielded the discoveries of more than 2,600 confirmed planets. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne, or even some, of those exoplanets might have the conditions needed to sustain life. In his new book, \u201cUniversal Life: An Inside Look Behind the Race to Discover Life Beyond Earth,\u201d astrophysicist Alan Boss gives the reader an up-close look at the Kepler project, its amazing journey and the search in the past two decades for Earthlike planets in our galaxy.Story continues below advertisementBoss, an accomplished scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, has long contributed to NASA\u2019s exoplanet exploration program (including as past chair of the executive committee of the program\u2019s analysis group). In the book, he gives a comprehensive view of Kepler\u2019s origins and contributions to our knowledge of possible life in the great beyond.AdvertisementNASA retired Kepler late last year after it ran out of fuel. By then, the telescope had observed more than 530,000 stars and had traveled 94 million miles through space, according to NASA. Boss gives a brisk, detailed tour of its dizzying contributions to science. The book is packed with the budget woes and scientific celebrations (and acronyms) that make up life at NASA. It covers the agency insiders who are making discovery possible in tiny, sometimes frustrating steps. Each chapter is broken into small, vignette-type sections with such titles as \u201cCan We Build It Any Faster?\u201d and \u201cHey, I Had That Idea First.\u201dThese bite-sized segments make the fire hose of material accessible. So does his conversational tone. Reading the book is like sitting in the office with someone who\u2019s eager to explain the ins and outs of the science and the program.Story continues below advertisementBoss also has an upbeat take on what comes next thanks to Kepler.\u201cWe now know that Earthlike planets are universal, and we expect that life will be just as universal,\u201d he says.So long Kepler, and thanks for all the planetsVideo: Out of gas, mission over for Kepler telescopeKepler telescope finds Earth-size, potentially habitable planets are commonNewest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars An astrophysicist writes what we\u2019ve learned from the Kepler space telescope. \u2018Universal Life\u2019: An insider\u2019s look at NASA\u2019s hunt for other worlds, organisms",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Just for kids: A fun trip into games, comics, activities and stories about space (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1839",
        "date": "2019-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/just-for-kids-a-fun-trip-into-games-comics-activities-and-stories-about-space/2019/04/04/2b64bf66-556e-11e9-814f-e2f46684196e_story.html",
        "text": "On Earth\u2019s surface, it\u2019s hard to get kids to stop gazing at their screens.A new magazine, Astronomy for Kids, prompts children to look at the stars instead.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe special child-focused magazine, on newsstands now, contains 100 pages of games, comics, activities and articles about space and astronomy, from how telescopes work to a glimpse at the stars during every season. The full-color magazine includes 11 hands-on projects that use science, technology, engineering and math concepts. Kids can learn how to track the moon\u2019s phases, view the sun safely and make their own map of the solar system.Articles have been kid-size, and information is presented in a variety of different formats, such as comics and trivia tidbits, to appeal to children of different ages. The magazine is ad-light, too.Story continues below advertisementMagazine readers may have so much fun browsing that they won\u2019t even realize how much new information they\u2019ve learned about planets, stars and space tech.AdvertisementThere\u2019s just one problem with the magazine, which is a full-size, kid-oriented version of the adult publication Astronomy. Since it\u2019s so activity-oriented, your kids may destroy it with scissors and markers in no time.Can\u2019t quite convince your kid to look away from their screen of choice? Never fear \u2014 the magazine is also available as a digital download at bit.ly/astronomyforkids.Astronomy for Kids is on newsstands until June 10.Facts about earthquakes your kids will want to knowThe man who developed timeout for kids stands by his now hotly debated ideaFrankenstein game teaches kids about science A new magazine, Astronomy for Kids, features a hundred pages of out-of-this-world information. Just for kids: A fun trip into games, comics, activities and stories about space",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Mania and SPAC-Mania Go Hand in Hand (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1840",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-mania-and-spac-mania-go-hand-in-hand-11620727485?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=8",
        "text": "This is mostly a cosmetic problem, since it doesn\u2019t involve a drain of cash. Still, investors enamored with the final frontier should be worried about regulators\u2019 eagerness to cool the SPAC market. Dealogic data show new issues slowing to a trickle, though this could be in part due to broader financial trends, or a hangover from the record $103 billion already raised this year.\nSPACs\u2014public investment vehicles that raise funds to acquire a private company\u2014have become a shortcut to listing for glamorous ventures with few revenues but bold forecasts. Electric vehicles have been a popular theme, but the industry arguably most revolutionized by the financing fad is space.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Virgin Galactic's biggest rallies were tied to retail-investorspeculationVirgin Galactic, cumulative change in prices and flowsSources: VandaTrack (retail flows), FactSet (price)Note: Flows are 30-day rolling sumsCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2%Initial interest in VirginGameStop maniaStock priceNet retail inflowsDec. 2019'20'21-25002505007501,0001,250\n\n\n\nBefore 2019, investors had no clear way to embrace their cosmic dreams. Space businesses were either part of big conglomerates such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\n\n\n or, more recently, private firms owned by billionaires, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin. Crucially, insiders had no easy way of getting out, making space startups even riskier.\n\n\nAll of this changed when former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n executive turned SPAC investor Chamath Palihapitiya acquired Virgin Galactic, a brainchild of British billionaire Richard Branson. Amateur traders quickly embraced a company that aims to charge $250,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere. Case in point: The stock hit new highs during the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop\n\n\n market craze in February.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2The SPAC Boom Is CoolingSpecial-purpose acquisition vehicles, monthly value of new issuesSource: DealogicCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2billionSEC statement2019'200102030$40\n\n\n\nVirgin paved the way for a new ecosystem. Space SPACs were emerging until very recently, including one chaired by former Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg. In a recent report,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IHS Markit\n\n\n highlights $10 billion dollars worth of space-related SPAC transactions that are waiting to complete. The targets are launch specialists Rocket Lab and Astra, satellite-data analytics firms BlackSky and Spire Global, and Momentus, a \u201clast mile delivery\u201d service for spacecraft.\nYet some deals could fall through\u2014and future ones might not happen at all\u2014if scrutiny increases under new SEC Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gary Gensler.\n\n\n\n SPACs must return money to shareholders if they don\u2019t complete deals within a set time frame. Momentus\u2019 deal with Stable Road is currently at risk for this reason.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Pending space SPAC deals, potential equity valueSource: IHS MarkitCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Rocket LabAstra SpaceSpire GlobalMomentusBlackSky$0 billion$0.5$1$1.5$2$2.5$3$3.5$4$4.5\n\n\n\nTaking Virgin as a bellwether, enthusiasm is certainly waning. Mr. Branson and Mr. Palihapitiya recently sold big chunks of their stakes. On Monday, the company hinted at its next flight being delayed yet again, just as competition from Blue Origin is heating up.\nSome analysts forecast that space can become a trillion dollar market in 30 years\u2019 time, but this is still science fiction. While Virgin\u2019s business model is feasible on paper, it faces vast challenges. Launching satellites is a promising area, but valuations above $2 billion for a startup seem very inflated. As for plans to mine asteroids, sketched by a couple of private companies in recent years, they are probably as ludicrous as they sound.\nRegulators are right to worry that SPACs have opened a door to wild speculation. Yet the conquest of space is by its nature a speculative endeavor, and perhaps needed some irrational exuberance to help wake it from a 50-year slumber. As venture capitalist Bill Janeway argues, lofty expectations only ever become reality through some form of bubble that fuels the next technological revolution. You simply can\u2019t spell space without SPAC.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Investors enamored with the final frontier should be worried about regulators\u2019 eagerness to cool the SPAC market. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Mania and SPAC-Mania Go Hand in Hand (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1841",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-mania-and-spac-mania-go-hand-in-hand-11620727485?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=8",
        "text": "This is mostly a cosmetic problem, since it doesn\u2019t involve a drain of cash. Still, investors enamored with the final frontier should be worried about regulators\u2019 eagerness to cool the SPAC market. Dealogic data show new issues slowing to a trickle, though this could be in part due to broader financial trends, or a hangover from the record $103 billion already raised this year.\n\n\n\n\nSPACs\u2014public investment vehicles that raise funds to acquire a private company\u2014have become a shortcut to listing for glamorous ventures with few revenues but bold forecasts. Electric vehicles have been a popular theme, but the industry arguably most revolutionized by the financing fad is space.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Virgin Galactic's biggest rallies were tied to retail-investor speculationVirgin Galactic, cumulative change in prices and flowsSources: VandaTrack (retail flows), FactSet (price)Note: Flows are 30-day rolling sumsCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2%Initial interest in VirginGameStop maniaStock priceNet retail inflowsDec. 2019'20'21-25002505007501,0001,250\n\n\n\nBefore 2019, investors had no clear way to embrace their cosmic dreams. Space businesses were either part of big conglomerates such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\n\n\n or, more recently, private firms owned by billionaires, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin. Crucially, insiders had no easy way of getting out, making space startups even riskier.\n\n\nAll of this changed when former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n executive turned SPAC investor Chamath Palihapitiya acquired Virgin Galactic, a brainchild of British billionaire Richard Branson. Amateur traders quickly embraced a company that aims to charge $250,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere. Case in point: The stock hit new highs during the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop\n\n\n market craze in February.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2The SPAC Boom Is CoolingSpecial-purpose acquisition vehicles, monthly value of new issuesSource: DealogicCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2billionSEC statement2019'200102030$40\n\n\n\nVirgin paved the way for a new ecosystem. Space SPACs were emerging until very recently, including one chaired by former Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg. In a recent report,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IHS Markit\n\n\n highlights $10 billion dollars worth of space-related SPAC transactions that are waiting to complete. The targets are launch specialists Rocket Lab and Astra, satellite-data analytics firms BlackSky and Spire Global, and Momentus, a \u201clast mile delivery\u201d service for spacecraft.\nYet some deals could fall through\u2014and future ones might not happen at all\u2014if scrutiny increases under new SEC Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gary Gensler.\n\n\n\n SPACs must return money to shareholders if they don\u2019t complete deals within a set time frame. Momentus\u2019 deal with Stable Road is currently at risk for this reason.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Pending space SPAC deals, potential equity valueSource: IHS MarkitCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Rocket LabAstra SpaceSpire GlobalMomentusBlackSky$0 billion$0.5$1$1.5$2$2.5$3$3.5$4$4.5\n\n\n\nTaking Virgin as a bellwether, enthusiasm is certainly waning. Mr. Branson and Mr. Palihapitiya recently sold big chunks of their stakes. On Monday, the company hinted at its next flight being delayed yet again, just as competition from Blue Origin is heating up.\nSome analysts forecast that space can become a trillion dollar market in 30 years\u2019 time, but this is still science fiction. While Virgin\u2019s business model is feasible on paper, it faces vast challenges. Launching satellites is a promising area, but valuations above $2 billion for a startup seem very inflated. As for plans to mine asteroids, sketched by a couple of private companies in recent years, they are probably as ludicrous as they sound.\nRegulators are right to worry that SPACs have opened a door to wild speculation. Yet the conquest of space is by its nature a speculative endeavor, and perhaps needed some irrational exuberance to help wake it from a 50-year slumber. As venture capitalist Bill Janeway argues, lofty expectations only ever become reality through some form of bubble that fuels the next technological revolution. You simply can\u2019t spell space without SPAC.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Investors enamored with the final frontier should be worried about regulators\u2019 eagerness to cool the SPAC market. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Mania and SPAC-Mania Go Hand in Hand (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1842",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-mania-and-spac-mania-go-hand-in-hand-11620727485?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=22",
        "text": "This is mostly a cosmetic problem, since it doesn\u2019t involve a drain of cash. Still, investors enamored with the final frontier should be worried about regulators\u2019 eagerness to cool the SPAC market. Dealogic data show new issues slowing to a trickle, though this could be in part due to broader financial trends, or a hangover from the record $103 billion already raised this year.\n\n\n\n\nSPACs\u2014public investment vehicles that raise funds to acquire a private company\u2014have become a shortcut to listing for glamorous ventures with few revenues but bold forecasts. Electric vehicles have been a popular theme, but the industry arguably most revolutionized by the financing fad is space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBefore 2019, investors had no clear way to embrace their cosmic dreams. Space businesses were either part of big conglomerates such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin\n\n\n or, more recently, private firms owned by billionaires, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin. Crucially, insiders had no easy way of getting out, making space startups even riskier.\n\n\nAll of this changed when former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n executive turned SPAC investor Chamath Palihapitiya acquired Virgin Galactic, a brainchild of British billionaire Richard Branson. Amateur traders quickly embraced a company that aims to charge $250,000 for a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere. Case in point: The stock hit new highs during the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop\n\n\n market craze in February.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin paved the way for a new ecosystem. Space SPACs were emerging until very recently, including one chaired by former Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenburg. In a recent report,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IHS Markit\n\n\n highlights $10 billion dollars worth of space-related SPAC transactions that are waiting to complete. The targets are launch specialists Rocket Lab and Astra, satellite-data analytics firms BlackSky and Spire Global, and Momentus, a \u201clast mile delivery\u201d service for spacecraft.\nYet some deals could fall through\u2014and future ones might not happen at all\u2014if scrutiny increases under new SEC Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gary Gensler.\n\n\n\n SPACs must return money to shareholders if they don\u2019t complete deals within a set time frame. Momentus\u2019 deal with Stable Road is currently at risk for this reason.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTaking Virgin as a bellwether, enthusiasm is certainly waning. Mr. Branson and Mr. Palihapitiya recently sold big chunks of their stakes. On Monday, the company hinted at its next flight being delayed yet again, just as competition from Blue Origin is heating up.\nSome analysts forecast that space can become a trillion dollar market in 30 years\u2019 time, but this is still science fiction. While Virgin\u2019s business model is feasible on paper, it faces vast challenges. Launching satellites is a promising area, but valuations above $2 billion for a startup seem very inflated. As for plans to mine asteroids, sketched by a couple of private companies in recent years, they are probably as ludicrous as they sound.\nRegulators are right to worry that SPACs have opened a door to wild speculation. Yet the conquest of space is by its nature a speculative endeavor, and perhaps needed some irrational exuberance to help wake it from a 50-year slumber. As venture capitalist Bill Janeway argues, lofty expectations only ever become reality through some form of bubble that fuels the next technological revolution. You simply can\u2019t spell space without SPAC.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Investors enamored with the final frontier should be worried about regulators\u2019 eagerness to cool the SPAC market. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mom-and-Pop Investors\u2019 Craze for Space Tourism Survives Coronavirus (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1843",
        "date": "2020-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mom-and-pop-investors-craze-for-space-tourism-survives-coronavirus-11584355118?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=17",
        "text": "Yet individual investors, or at least internet forum punters, are still all in. Data by retail electronic investing platform Robinhood shows that the number of holders of the stock rose at an even faster pace than its price, and has remained stable even after the market rout.\n\n\nCreated with Highstock 6.1.1Investors' enthusiasm doesn't extend to the whole space economyCumulative change in price since Virgin Galactic's reverse IPO in October 2019Source: FactSetCreated with Highstock 6.1.1%Virgin GalacticHoldings Inc.S&P 500 IndexProcure Space ETFOct. \u201919Nov.Dec.Jan. \u201920Feb.March-50050100150200250300\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBig-money investors have never been along for the ride. In February, before the selloff, Virgin Galactic made the list of top-12 most-shorted shares, according to financial analytics firm S3 Partners. This may be one stock where the old Wall Street clich\u00e9 about professionals profiting at the expense of amateurs holds true. \n\n\nVirgin\u2019s equity liftoff has left other space-related stocks behind, including much more promising satellite-based firms. The only available specialist ETF, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Procure Space ETF\n\n\n \u2014which trades as \u201cUFO\u201d\u2014has actually underperformed the S&P 500 and fallen in line with travel and tourism stocks during the rout. This mania is purely about Virgin and its offer to be weightless for four minutes in the lower thermosphere.\nThere is a market for this, but it isn\u2019t clear how big. About 600 people have already pre-booked tickets for a cost of around $225,000 each, and the company expects to fly 3,200 people between this year and 2023. To meet Virgin\u2019s revenue guidance with this number of passengers, future astronauts will need to pay almost double as much. Part of this may come from selling upgrades to passengers, but ticket prices will almost certainly need to go up as well.\nQuestions remain about the sustainability of the model. Even the wealthiest people may only take the trip of a lifetime once\u2014particularly if the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX end up offering trips to actual outer space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in October last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n brendan mcdermid/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe company\u2019s short-term plans don\u2019t look completely unreasonable on a spreadsheet, but could easily hit real-world obstacles. Back in 2014, a fatality already delayed the first flight of the company\u2019s SpaceShipTwo until later this year\u2014if it does indeed happen. The massive complexity of the endeavor makes Virgin\u2019s calendar very optimistic: It includes building four more ships by the end of 2023 and then creating additional spaceports. The death of a passenger could end the whole thing.\nThe sharp selloff in Virgin\u2019s stock makes its valuation less otherworldly than a month ago. Ultimately, though, its long-term prospects may rely on the company\u2019s promise to evolve its technology toward enabling hypersonic travel. This could potentially allow business passengers to travel from New York to Sydney in a couple of hours.\nEven if such dreams were to materialize, though, the Concorde sets a bad precedent for how much people are willing to pay to fly faster. The profitability of the aviation industry has instead been predicated on improving fuel efficiency, and concerns about the environment make that an even higher priority.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 6.1.1Virgin Galactic will most likely need to raise ticket pricesVirgin Galactic revenue per passenger guidance. The numbers are far above the price at whichfuture astronauts have so far pre-booked their tickets.Source: The companyCreated with Highcharts 6.1.1.thousandPre-booked ticket price2020\u201921\u201922\u2019230100200300400$500\n\n\n\nIn any case, it is unclear that Virgin\u2019s first-mover advantage would amount to much. Larger aerospace manufacturers appear much better positioned to come up with the mature technology that airlines would end up operating.\nAmong individual investors, there seem to be enough space enthusiasts willing to trust that this venture can boldly go where no one has gone before. Everyone else, though, should definitely have a bad feeling about this.\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com The coronavirus has brought markets crashing back to Earth, but its gravity isn\u2019t restraining mom-and-pop investors\u2019 enthusiasm for space-tourism venture Virgin Galactic. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mom-and-Pop Investors\u2019 Craze for Space Tourism Survives Coronavirus (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1844",
        "date": "2020-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mom-and-pop-investors-craze-for-space-tourism-survives-coronavirus-11584355118?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=43",
        "text": "Yet individual investors, or at least internet forum punters, are still all in. Data by retail electronic investing platform Robinhood shows that the number of holders of the stock rose at an even faster pace than its price, and has remained stable even after the market rout.\n\n\nCreated with Highstock 6.1.1Investors' enthusiasm doesn't extend to the whole space economyCumulative change in price since Virgin Galactic's reverse IPO in October 2019Source: FactSetCreated with Highstock 6.1.1%Virgin GalacticHoldings Inc.S&P 500 IndexProcure SpaceETFOct. \u201919Nov.Dec.Jan. \u201920Feb.March-50050100150200250300\n\n\n\nBig-money investors have never been along for the ride. In February, before the selloff, Virgin Galactic made the list of top-12 most-shorted shares, according to financial analytics firm S3 Partners. This may be one stock where the old Wall Street clich\u00e9 about professionals profiting at the expense of amateurs holds true. \n\n\nVirgin\u2019s equity liftoff has left other space-related stocks behind, including much more promising satellite-based firms. The only available specialist ETF, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Procure Space ETF\n\n\n \u2014which trades as \u201cUFO\u201d\u2014has actually underperformed the S&P 500 and fallen in line with travel and tourism stocks during the rout. This mania is purely about Virgin and its offer to be weightless for four minutes in the lower thermosphere.\nThere is a market for this, but it isn\u2019t clear how big. About 600 people have already pre-booked tickets for a cost of around $225,000 each, and the company expects to fly 3,200 people between this year and 2023. To meet Virgin\u2019s revenue guidance with this number of passengers, future astronauts will need to pay almost double as much. Part of this may come from selling upgrades to passengers, but ticket prices will almost certainly need to go up as well.\nQuestions remain about the sustainability of the model. Even the wealthiest people may only take the trip of a lifetime once\u2014particularly if the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX end up offering trips to actual outer space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in October last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n brendan mcdermid/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe company\u2019s short-term plans don\u2019t look completely unreasonable on a spreadsheet, but could easily hit real-world obstacles. Back in 2014, a fatality already delayed the first flight of the company\u2019s SpaceShipTwo until later this year\u2014if it does indeed happen. The massive complexity of the endeavor makes Virgin\u2019s calendar very optimistic: It includes building four more ships by the end of 2023 and then creating additional spaceports. The death of a passenger could end the whole thing.\nThe sharp selloff in Virgin\u2019s stock makes its valuation less otherworldly than a month ago. Ultimately, though, its long-term prospects may rely on the company\u2019s promise to evolve its technology toward enabling hypersonic travel. This could potentially allow business passengers to travel from New York to Sydney in a couple of hours.\nEven if such dreams were to materialize, though, the Concorde sets a bad precedent for how much people are willing to pay to fly faster. The profitability of the aviation industry has instead been predicated on improving fuel efficiency, and concerns about the environment make that an even higher priority.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 6.1.1Virgin Galactic will most likely need to raise ticket pricesVirgin Galactic revenue per passenger guidance. The numbers are far above theprice at which future astronauts have so far pre-booked their tickets.Source: The companyCreated with Highcharts 6.1.1.thousandPre-booked ticket price2020\u201921\u201922\u2019230100200300400$500\n\n\n\nIn any case, it is unclear that Virgin\u2019s first-mover advantage would amount to much. Larger aerospace manufacturers appear much better positioned to come up with the mature technology that airlines would end up operating.\nAmong individual investors, there seem to be enough space enthusiasts willing to trust that this venture can boldly go where no one has gone before. Everyone else, though, should definitely have a bad feeling about this.\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com The coronavirus has brought markets crashing back to Earth, but its gravity isn\u2019t restraining mom-and-pop investors\u2019 enthusiasm for space-tourism venture Virgin Galactic. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shooting Rich People Into Space Isn\u2019t the Final Frontier (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1845",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/shooting-rich-people-into-space-isnt-the-final-frontier-11562678612?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=19",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic needs the money to prove that its spaceships can operate commercially. Last December, it finally made it to space after 14 years and many setbacks. Its SpaceShipTwo can take six passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere, 68 miles above sea level\u2014barely past the official space threshold. Each ticket would cost $250,000.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cAs we look back on the decade of Apollo with wonder and gratitude, I believe we can do so with the excitement that comes from knowing we are at the dawn of a new Space Age,\u201d Mr. Branson said Tuesday on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter.\n\n\nThe moment might seem ripe to get investors to pay for sending stuff to space. Technology billionaires like Tesla\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n have created a lot of publicity by marketing their own space ventures. Analysts at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n estimated earlier this year that the space economy will be worth more than $800 billion in annual revenue by 2030, with space tourism making up $3 billion.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Heard Alert The first word on what Wall Street is talking about. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nHowever, an early pioneer like Virgin Galactic may have lost its window of opportunity.\nLast month, NASA said it would allow monthlong stays by private citizens at the International Space Station for $35,000 a night. The cost of flying there would currently be around $50 million a seat, but Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX is progressively lowering the price of rocket launches. A SpaceShipTwo ticket now offers less bang for billionaires\u2019 buck.\nBoth SpaceX and Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin could do space tourism as a sideshow while concentrating on the one segment of the commercial space race that is reliably profitable: satellites. Firms like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n EchoStar\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n make fat margins by specializing in satellite telecommunications, and have their eyes set on growing segments such as wireless internet on planes. Startups like OneWeb and Planet Labs are designing a next generation of smaller satellites.\nLowering the cost of putting satellites in orbit could prove a moneymaker for space firms. Washington\u2019s renewed interest in going back to the moon could also provide SpaceX and Blue Origin with juicy government contracts. These are unlikely to be very profitable, but should boost research and development.\nSpaceShipTwo can be used to deploy satellites, but its main purpose is tourism. While space itself may be infinite, demand for travel to space probably isn\u2019t. UBS estimates capacity for 50 suborbital trips a year. If Virgin flew them all, this would mean annual ticket revenues of $50 million. Developing the ship alone has already cost about $400 million.\nThe indirect route Virgin Galactic has taken to the stock market should also give investors pause. SCH\u2019s existing listing will spare the company the scrutiny of an initial public offering.\nIt will take more than rocket science to make shooting the superrich into space an appealing investment proposition.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tVirgin Atlantic is not involved in Virgin Galactic. A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Virgin Galactic as Virgin Atlantic in one instance. (July 10, 2019)\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tSCH investors will take a 49% stake in the combined company, which will have an enterprise value of $1.5 billion. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the value is \u20ac1.5 billion. (July 9, 2019)\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com British billionaire Richard Branson\u2019s dream of shooting people into space may echo Apollo 11\u2019s epic moon landing 50 years ago this month, but for investors it could end up looking more like the Apollo 13 fiasco. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shooting Rich People Into Space Isn\u2019t the Final Frontier (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1846",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/shooting-rich-people-into-space-isnt-the-final-frontier-11562678612?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=58",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic needs the money to prove that its spaceships can operate commercially. Last December, it finally made it to space after 14 years and many setbacks. Its SpaceShipTwo can take six passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere, 68 miles above sea level\u2014barely past the official space threshold. Each ticket would cost $250,000.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cAs we look back on the decade of Apollo with wonder and gratitude, I believe we can do so with the excitement that comes from knowing we are at the dawn of a new Space Age,\u201d Mr. Branson said Tuesday on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter.\n\n\nThe moment might seem ripe to get investors to pay for sending stuff to space. Technology billionaires like Tesla\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n have created a lot of publicity by marketing their own space ventures. Analysts at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n estimated earlier this year that the space economy will be worth more than $800 billion in annual revenue by 2030, with space tourism making up $3 billion.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Heard Alert The first word on what Wall Street is talking about. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nHowever, an early pioneer like Virgin Galactic may have lost its window of opportunity.\nLast month, NASA said it would allow monthlong stays by private citizens at the International Space Station for $35,000 a night. The cost of flying there would currently be around $50 million a seat, but Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX is progressively lowering the price of rocket launches. A SpaceShipTwo ticket now offers less bang for billionaires\u2019 buck.\nBoth SpaceX and Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin could do space tourism as a sideshow while concentrating on the one segment of the commercial space race that is reliably profitable: satellites. Firms like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n EchoStar\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n make fat margins by specializing in satellite telecommunications, and have their eyes set on growing segments such as wireless internet on planes. Startups like OneWeb and Planet Labs are designing a next generation of smaller satellites.\nLowering the cost of putting satellites in orbit could prove a moneymaker for space firms. Washington\u2019s renewed interest in going back to the moon could also provide SpaceX and Blue Origin with juicy government contracts. These are unlikely to be very profitable, but should boost research and development.\nSpaceShipTwo can be used to deploy satellites, but its main purpose is tourism. While space itself may be infinite, demand for travel to space probably isn\u2019t. UBS estimates capacity for 50 suborbital trips a year. If Virgin flew them all, this would mean annual ticket revenues of $50 million. Developing the ship alone has already cost about $400 million.\nThe indirect route Virgin Galactic has taken to the stock market should also give investors pause. SCH\u2019s existing listing will spare the company the scrutiny of an initial public offering.\nIt will take more than rocket science to make shooting the superrich into space an appealing investment proposition.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tVirgin Atlantic is not involved in Virgin Galactic. A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Virgin Galactic as Virgin Atlantic in one instance. (July 10, 2019)\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tSCH investors will take a 49% stake in the combined company, which will have an enterprise value of $1.5 billion. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the value is \u20ac1.5 billion. (July 9, 2019)\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com British billionaire Richard Branson\u2019s dream of shooting people into space may echo Apollo 11\u2019s epic moon landing 50 years ago this month, but for investors it could end up looking more like the Apollo 13 fiasco. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company? (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1847",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-virgin-galactic-truly-a-space-company-11626085517?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=6",
        "text": "The market impact of Mr. Branson beating his rival to the punch shouldn\u2019t be underestimated. Because Virgin Galactic is one of few high-profile space companies to trade, it has become a favorite in the retail-investor community. Flow tracker VandaTrack shows that the buzz around the launch has sucked in retail money, helping to double Virgin\u2019s share price relative to the start of the year. The company announced plans to cash it in Monday with a $500 million stock issue that pushed down the price of outstanding shares more than 10%.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Virgin Galactic, share priceSource: FactSetCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Aug. 2019'20'2101020304050$60\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeing first, though, doesn\u2019t mean going furthest. Blue Origin has poked fun at its rival by pointing out that its New Shepard is a true vertical landing and takeoff rocket rather than a \u201chigh-altitude airplane\u201d like Virgin\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, and that it will actually fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line that some international organizations use to define the edge of space, 62 miles above sea level.\n\nOf course, arbitrary definitions about where space starts don\u2019t matter for the purpose of giving people a few minutes of weightlessness. Vindicating Mr. Branson\u2019s vision, there seems to be tangible demand for this experience: 600 people have already reserved tickets for between $200,000 and $250,000 a piece, Virgin says, and 400 more want to book when sales resume soon. Based on the company\u2019s revenue estimates, fares will rise to between $300,000 and $400,000.\nIt is not an experience everyone can afford. Analysts at Cowen estimate a $600 billion addressable market based on a survey of high net-worth individuals, but such numbers are wild guesses. Virgin has a $12 billion market capitalization but almost no revenues. Still, it is feasible that it can attract enough customers to turn a profit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic founder Richard Branson carried crew member Sirisha Bandla on his shoulders after their flight to space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andres Leighton/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe issue is that investors are taking on enormous risks: A single deadly accident could end the entire enterprise. To compensate them, space-tourism companies must also offer the potential of left-field gains on a galactic scale. The space economy still has untapped possibilities and has historically served to incubate new technologies such as artificial limbs, cordless vacuums and GPS positioning.\nThis is where doubts about Virgin being a true space enterprise start to bite. Blue Origin sees suborbital flights as a steppingstone to go to the Moon and beyond. By contrast, the thrill ride is at Virgin\u2019s core: Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier,\n\n\n\n who used to work for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Disney\u2019s\n\n\n theme-park business, is likely to focus on creating an immersive space-themed experience at the company\u2019s spaceport. Longer term, Virgin is hoping to adapt its space plane for hypersonic trips within our planet.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2For All Mankind (Or At Least Rich People)Virgin Galactic ticket prices, average estimate by analystsSource: Visible AlphaCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2thousand2018'19'20'21'22'23'24'25'26'27'28'29'30050100150200250300350$400\n\n\n\nWill there ever be much demand for two-hour flights between New York and Sydney? Despite recent attempts to bring back supersonic flights, the last 50 years show that airline economics is all about flying cheaper, not faster.\nHowever it pans out, when compared with plans by Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n company SpaceX to colonize outer space, Virgin\u2019s ambitions could end up looking too grounded. As companies that travel further into space eventually tap public markets, glamour-seeking investors may find better options to boldly go where no one has gone before.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Despite its successful flights to the edge of space, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic may be too down to Earth in its long-term promise. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company? (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1848",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-virgin-galactic-truly-a-space-company-11626085517?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=17",
        "text": "The market impact of Mr. Branson beating his rival to the punch shouldn\u2019t be underestimated. Because Virgin Galactic is one of few high-profile space companies to trade, it has become a favorite in the retail-investor community. Flow tracker VandaTrack shows that the buzz around the launch has sucked in retail money, helping to double Virgin\u2019s share price relative to the start of the year. The company announced plans to cash it in Monday with a $500 million stock issue that pushed down the price of outstanding shares more than 10%.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Virgin Galactic, share priceSource: FactSetCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Aug. 2019'20'2101020304050$60\n\n\n\nBeing first, though, doesn\u2019t mean going furthest. Blue Origin has poked fun at its rival by pointing out that its New Shepard is a true vertical landing and takeoff rocket rather than a \u201chigh-altitude airplane\u201d like Virgin\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, and that it will actually fly above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line that some international organizations use to define the edge of space, 62 miles above sea level.\n\nOf course, arbitrary definitions about where space starts don\u2019t matter for the purpose of giving people a few minutes of weightlessness. Vindicating Mr. Branson\u2019s vision, there seems to be tangible demand for this experience: 600 people have already reserved tickets for between $200,000 and $250,000 a piece, Virgin says, and 400 more want to book when sales resume soon. Based on the company\u2019s revenue estimates, fares will rise to between $300,000 and $400,000.\nIt is not an experience everyone can afford. Analysts at Cowen estimate a $600 billion addressable market based on a survey of high net-worth individuals, but such numbers are wild guesses. Virgin has a $12 billion market capitalization but almost no revenues. Still, it is feasible that it can attract enough customers to turn a profit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic founder Richard Branson carried crew member Sirisha Bandla on his shoulders after their flight to space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andres Leighton/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe issue is that investors are taking on enormous risks: A single deadly accident could end the entire enterprise. To compensate them, space-tourism companies must also offer the potential of left-field gains on a galactic scale. The space economy still has untapped possibilities and has historically served to incubate new technologies such as artificial limbs, cordless vacuums and GPS positioning.\nThis is where doubts about Virgin being a true space enterprise start to bite. Blue Origin sees suborbital flights as a steppingstone to go to the Moon and beyond. By contrast, the thrill ride is at Virgin\u2019s core: Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier,\n\n\n\n who used to work for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Disney\u2019s\n\n\n theme-park business, is likely to focus on creating an immersive space-themed experience at the company\u2019s spaceport. Longer term, Virgin is hoping to adapt its space plane for hypersonic trips within our planet.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2For All Mankind (Or At Least Rich People)Virgin Galactic ticket prices, average estimate by analystsSource: Visible AlphaCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2thousand2018'19'20'21'22'23'24'25'26'27'28'29'30050100150200250300350$400\n\n\n\nWill there ever be much demand for two-hour flights between New York and Sydney? Despite recent attempts to bring back supersonic flights, the last 50 years show that airline economics is all about flying cheaper, not faster.\nHowever it pans out, when compared with plans by Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n company SpaceX to colonize outer space, Virgin\u2019s ambitions could end up looking too grounded. As companies that travel further into space eventually tap public markets, glamour-seeking investors may find better options to boldly go where no one has gone before.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Branson and Bezos Are Going to Space: How Their Trips Will Differ\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Despite its successful flights to the edge of space, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic may be too down to Earth in its long-term promise. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shooting Rich People Into Space Isn\u2019t the Final Frontier (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1849",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/shooting-rich-people-into-space-isnt-the-final-frontier-11562678612?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=53",
        "text": "Created with Highcharts 6.0.4Giant LeapAnnual revenue in the space economySource: UBS estimatesCreated with Highcharts 6.0.420162030 forecastCommercialex. TVCommercial ex. TVCommercialTVCommercial TVCommercialspacehardwareCommercial space hardwareNon-U.S.governmentsNon-U.S. governmentsU.S. militaryU.S. civilgovernmentU.S. civil governmentCommercialspace launchCommercial space launch$0 billion$200$400\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic needs the money to prove that its spaceships can operate commercially. Last December, it finally made it to space after 14 years and many setbacks. Its SpaceShipTwo can take six passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere, 68 miles above sea level\u2014barely past the official space threshold. Each ticket would cost $250,000.\n\u201cAs we look back on the decade of Apollo with wonder and gratitude, I believe we can do so with the excitement that comes from knowing we are at the dawn of a new Space Age,\u201d Mr. Branson said Tuesday on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter.\n\n\nThe moment might seem ripe to get investors to pay for sending stuff to space. Technology billionaires like Tesla\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and Amazon\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n have created a lot of publicity by marketing their own space ventures. Analysts at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n estimated earlier this year that the space economy will be worth more than $800 billion in annual revenue by 2030, with space tourism making up $3 billion.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Heard Alert The first word on what Wall Street is talking about. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nHowever, an early pioneer like Virgin Galactic may have lost its window of opportunity.\nLast month, NASA said it would allow monthlong stays by private citizens at the International Space Station for $35,000 a night. The cost of flying there would currently be around $50 million a seat, but Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX is progressively lowering the price of rocket launches. A SpaceShipTwo ticket now offers less bang for billionaires\u2019 buck.\nBoth SpaceX and Mr. Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin could do space tourism as a sideshow while concentrating on the one segment of the commercial space race that is reliably profitable: satellites. Firms like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n EchoStar\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n make fat margins by specializing in satellite telecommunications, and have their eyes set on growing segments such as wireless internet on planes. Startups like OneWeb and Planet Labs are designing a next generation of smaller satellites.\nLowering the cost of putting satellites in orbit could prove a moneymaker for space firms. Washington\u2019s renewed interest in going back to the moon could also provide SpaceX and Blue Origin with juicy government contracts. These are unlikely to be very profitable, but should boost research and development.\nSpaceShipTwo can be used to deploy satellites, but its main purpose is tourism. While space itself may be infinite, demand for travel to space probably isn\u2019t. UBS estimates capacity for 50 suborbital trips a year. If Virgin flew them all, this would mean annual ticket revenues of $50 million. Developing the ship alone has already cost about $400 million.\nThe indirect route Virgin Galactic has taken to the stock market should also give investors pause. SCH\u2019s existing listing will spare the company the scrutiny of an initial public offering.\nIt will take more than rocket science to make shooting the superrich into space an appealing investment proposition.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tVirgin Atlantic is not involved in Virgin Galactic. A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Virgin Galactic as Virgin Atlantic in one instance. (July 10, 2019)\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tSCH investors will take a 49% stake in the combined company, which will have an enterprise value of $1.5 billion. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the value is \u20ac1.5 billion. (July 9, 2019)\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com British billionaire Richard Branson\u2019s dream of shooting people into space may echo Apollo 11\u2019s epic moon landing 50 years ago this month, but for investors it could end up looking more like the Apollo 13 fiasco. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic: To the Thermosphere With Too Much Love (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1850",
        "date": "2020-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-to-the-thermosphere-with-too-much-love-11597586400?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=34",
        "text": "But second-quarter results released in early August contained disappointing news. Virgin said that its first passenger flight, which will carry Mr. Branson himself, has been pushed back from this year into 2021.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0Virgin Galactic's share priceSource: FactSetAs of Aug. 14Created with Highcharts 8.1.0Jan. 2020Aug.5101520253035$40\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, the company keeps reporting big losses. For now, it only makes revenue by providing small engineering services\u2014in the second quarter, revenues were zero. Roughly 700 customers have made prepayments on flights, but Virgin still needs cash and this month issued new shares, diluting existing investors. Those customers got a discounted ticket price of around $225,000 each, which the company says will need to go up once flights start.\n\n\nShort sellers are circling, conscious that the rally can partly be explained by individual investors\u2019 love for \u201csexy\u201d companies. But those betting against the stock keep getting burned. This year, they have clocked $372 million in mark-to-market losses on Virgin, according to financial analytics firm S3 Partners.\nThe company has kept positive headlines coming. In July, it announced that the former head of Walt Disney\u2019s international parks, Michael Colglazier, would become the company\u2019s new chief executive. He has the ideal profile to lead what is essentially a thrill ride for the super rich.\n\n\n\nHeard on the Street's Summertime Stock Picks Leaderboard\n\n1764 readers playing with a total of 3390 picks\n\n\n\nRank\nPick\nMade By\nReturn\n\n\n\n296.\nBUY Qurate Retail Inc. Series A\nLee\n65.1%\n\n438.\nBUY Axon Enterprise Inc.\nSindreu\n57.2%\n\n642.\nBUY Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V.\nWilmot\n43.2%\n\n673.\nBUY Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd.\nWong\n42.6%\n\n840.\nBUY Qualcomm Inc.\nGallagher\n34.4%\n\n\n\nUpdated Dec. 17, 2020 at 4:05 p.m. ET\n\nSee All Picks \u00bb\n\n\n\n\n\nThen, former chief executive and current Chief Space Officer George Whitesides released details of an early design for a supersonic aircraft, to be developed in partnership with British manufacturer Rolls-Royce\u2014the maker of the engines that once powered the Concorde. It would be faster than the defunct Anglo-French jet, which stopped operating in 2003.\nEvolving the company\u2019s technology to enable two-hour business flights between distant cities like New York and Sydney has been Virgin\u2019s long-term pitch to investors. The space economy could generate $800 billion in annual revenue by 2030, while the supersonic jet gives Virgin a claim on disrupting the much larger conventional airline market. Even small slices of these two pies could justify the market\u2019s enthusiasm.\nBut hoping that Virgin can develop a commercially viable aircraft\u2014one employing very different technologies to those of SpaceShipTwo\u2014remains an ultra-long shot for which there isn\u2019t even a tentative time horizon. It also remains unclear whether customers want to revive the Concorde: The last 60 years have consistently shown that aviation economics revolve around making planes more fuel-efficient, not faster. Environmental concerns reinforce that trend.\nIn both space tourism and supersonic travel, Virgin will compete against better-resourced players, like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0Virgin Galactic, profit/lossSource: The companyCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0.million3Q20184Q1Q\u2019192Q3Q4Q1Q\u2019202Q-80-60-40-20$0\n\n\n\nIn the shorter term, Virgin stock is vulnerable to a sudden shift in market sentiment if bad news becomes harder to overlook. In such a complex enterprise, accidents are a potentially fatal risk: When SpaceShipTwo finally made it to space in 2018, it did so after years of setbacks, including a crash that killed a co-pilot.\nOn paper, Virgin Galactic\u2019s ambitions lie within the realm of possibility. Investment cases based on too many \u201cifs\u201d and \u201ccoulds,\u201d though, have a history of making investors look like space cadets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how their companies are approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Virgin Galactic hasn\u2019t proven that it can take tourists to space, yet it has already taken stock investors to the skies. Maintaining the buzz will be a struggle. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic: To the Thermosphere With Too Much Love (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1851",
        "date": "2020-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactic-to-the-thermosphere-with-too-much-love-11597586400?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=13",
        "text": "But second-quarter results released in early August contained disappointing news. Virgin said that its first passenger flight, which will carry Mr. Branson himself, has been pushed back from this year into 2021.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, the company keeps reporting big losses. For now, it only makes revenue by providing small engineering services\u2014in the second quarter, revenues were zero. Roughly 700 customers have made prepayments on flights, but Virgin still needs cash and this month issued new shares, diluting existing investors. Those customers got a discounted ticket price of around $225,000 each, which the company says will need to go up once flights start.\n\n\nShort sellers are circling, conscious that the rally can partly be explained by individual investors\u2019 love for \u201csexy\u201d companies. But those betting against the stock keep getting burned. This year, they have clocked $372 million in mark-to-market losses on Virgin, according to financial analytics firm S3 Partners.\nThe company has kept positive headlines coming. In July, it announced that the former head of Walt Disney\u2019s international parks, Michael Colglazier, would become the company\u2019s new chief executive. He has the ideal profile to lead what is essentially a thrill ride for the super rich.\n\n\n\nHeard on the Street's Summertime Stock Picks Leaderboard\n\n1764 readers playing with a total of 3390 picks\n\n\n\nRank\nPick\nMade By\nReturn\n\n\n\n296.\nBUY Qurate Retail Inc. Series A\nLee\n65.1%\n\n438.\nBUY Axon Enterprise Inc.\nSindreu\n57.2%\n\n642.\nBUY Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V.\nWilmot\n43.2%\n\n673.\nBUY Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd.\nWong\n42.6%\n\n840.\nBUY Qualcomm Inc.\nGallagher\n34.4%\n\n\n\nUpdated Dec. 17, 2020 at 4:05 p.m. ET\n\nSee All Picks \u00bb\n\n\n\n\n\nThen, former chief executive and current Chief Space Officer George Whitesides released details of an early design for a supersonic aircraft, to be developed in partnership with British manufacturer Rolls-Royce\u2014the maker of the engines that once powered the Concorde. It would be faster than the defunct Anglo-French jet, which stopped operating in 2003.\nEvolving the company\u2019s technology to enable two-hour business flights between distant cities like New York and Sydney has been Virgin\u2019s long-term pitch to investors. The space economy could generate $800 billion in annual revenue by 2030, while the supersonic jet gives Virgin a claim on disrupting the much larger conventional airline market. Even small slices of these two pies could justify the market\u2019s enthusiasm.\nBut hoping that Virgin can develop a commercially viable aircraft\u2014one employing very different technologies to those of SpaceShipTwo\u2014remains an ultra-long shot for which there isn\u2019t even a tentative time horizon. It also remains unclear whether customers want to revive the Concorde: The last 60 years have consistently shown that aviation economics revolve around making planes more fuel-efficient, not faster. Environmental concerns reinforce that trend.\nIn both space tourism and supersonic travel, Virgin will compete against better-resourced players, like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the shorter term, Virgin stock is vulnerable to a sudden shift in market sentiment if bad news becomes harder to overlook. In such a complex enterprise, accidents are a potentially fatal risk: When SpaceShipTwo finally made it to space in 2018, it did so after years of setbacks, including a crash that killed a co-pilot.\nOn paper, Virgin Galactic\u2019s ambitions lie within the realm of possibility. Investment cases based on too many \u201cifs\u201d and \u201ccoulds,\u201d though, have a history of making investors look like space cadets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how their companies are approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Virgin Galactic hasn\u2019t proven that it can take tourists to space, yet it has already taken stock investors to the skies. Maintaining the buzz will be a struggle. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "WeWork\u2019s Lord & Taylor Deal: Savvy Move or Top of the Market? (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1852",
        "date": "2017-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/weworks-lord-taylor-deal-savvy-move-or-top-of-the-market-1508867388?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=110",
        "text": "Nothing lasts forever. But WeWork is going to be on the job for a while.\n\n\n\n\nThe deep-pocketed real estate startup may not have intended such a message with its pending takeover of one of America\u2019s oldest retail properties. Indeed, its acquisition of Lord & Taylor\u2019s flagship building in New York City for $850 million is already generating comparisons with previous technology cycles\u2014and the deals that marked their peak.\n\n\nBut snapping up a New York City landmark is a far cry from AOL buying\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Time Warner.\n\n\n And today\u2019s private technology marketplace has evolved a bit as well. A flood of money from a wider variety of sources has made it easy for companies to continue to tap the well. Note that WeWork\u2019s most recent investment was an impressive $4.4 billion from Japan\u2019s SoftBank, which isn\u2019t the sort of investor looking to make a quick buck. That kind of cash, and none of the annoyances of being a public company, give WeWork some staying power, even if the business struggles.\nIt\u2019s fair to ask whether WeWork\u2019s business of upselling shared office space with Silicon Valley-like trappings is indeed worth the $20 billion valuation private investors have hung on it. But clearly there is value in creating spaces where people and companies want to work and in exporting to the rest of the country some of the ingredients that make Silicon Valley thrive. As every retailer knows, having a very visible location on a place like Fifth Avenue almost pays for itself in brand promotion.\nA frothy multiple is hardly unique to WeWork. But that doesn\u2019t mean the company won\u2019t put down some roots for the long haul.\n\u2014Dan Gallagher\nTop of the Market Buyers should have noticed nearby reminders of bubbles past when they bought an aging department store\nIt\u2019s true, they don\u2019t ring a bell at the top. Instead, they do a big deal.\nIn 1989, months before Japan\u2019s stock and real estate bubble began to collapse,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mitsubishi Estate\n\n\n bought controlling interest in the company that controlled Rockefeller Center. In 2000, right before the dot-com bubble imploded, America Online announced plans to acquire Time Warner. And on Tuesday, real estate startup WeWork announced that it had entered into a complex deal to acquire Lord & Taylor\u2019s flagship New York City store for $850 million. About a year ago, the landmark building was appraised at $650 million.\nWeWork, with private valuation of $20 billion, is only the fourth most valuable startup in the U.S. after Uber Technologies, Airbnb and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies. Like those companies, it aims to disrupt an existing business\u2014in WeWork\u2019s case, subleasing office space. This entails creating co-working spaces with common areas kitted out with clich\u00e9d Silicon Valley trappings like kegs and foosball tables.\nWeWork so far isn\u2019t profitable, and the moat around its business doesn\u2019t seem particularly wide. Like many other highly valued startups, it has so far refrained from going public. What it would be worth in a two-sided market\u2014where prices are set by investors not just buying shares but also selling them\u2014is unclear.\nThe reminders of bubbles past are close enough to the Lord & Taylor building that they must have registered with the deal makers. From the building, you can see Rockefeller Center, and the Time Warner Center is just around the corner. WeWork\u2019s deal to buy a century-old department store building may add another icon to excess to the neighborhood.\n\u2014By Justin Lahart\nWrite to Justin Lahart at justin.lahart@wsj.com Real estate startup WeWork is buying Lord & Taylor\u2019s flagship New York City location for $850 million and intends to convert the landmark building into its office headquarters. Heard on the Street examines the pros and the cons of the deal. ",
        "author": "Dan Gallagher and Justin Lahart"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon at $1,000, Wall Street\u2019s Not-So-Bold Call (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1853",
        "date": "2017-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-at-1-000-wall-streets-not-so-bold-call-1491835177?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=125",
        "text": "Get financial insights and commentary on global investing from The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Heard on the Street team. Subscribe to the podcast.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon\u2019s soaring market value\u2014up more than 50% in the past 12 months to more than $430 billion\u2014allows founder and CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n to sell about $1 billion of his shares each year to fund his space exploration venture. But that hasn\u2019t stopped Wall Street from seeing the stars. Ten analysts now predict Amazon\u2019s shares will eclipse the $1,000 mark in the next year, and 13 others have price targets within 5% of that goal, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.\nA heady projection, considering that $1,000 would represent a multiple of about 140 times this year\u2019s expected earnings. Amazon, of course, has never really been burdened by traditional measures of valuation. Its shares have averaged about 117 times forward earnings over the past decade, according to FactSet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWall Street expects Amazon\u2019s earnings to keep growing strongly, though the company\u2019s history of spending big in times of plenty makes that a moving target. Wall Street has chopped its 2017 EPS target for Amazon by 17% since the company\u2019s fourth-quarter report in February contained hints of another heavy investment year to come.\n\nStill, Amazon today isn\u2019t quite the Amazon of old, trying to survive on razor-thin retail margins. Its fast-growing Web-services business has altered the company\u2019s earnings and cash flow dramatically, as have other offerings. Brian Nowak of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n estimates that Amazon\u2019s Prime membership, advertising and credit card programs generated about $9.3 billion in revenue last year and will grow to about $12.7 billion this year\u2014all with a combined operating margin of around 70%. Helpful, as Amazon still needs all the fuel it can get. Ten analysts now predict Amazon\u2019s shares will eclipse the $1,000 mark in the next year, and 13 others have price targets within 5% of that goal. ",
        "author": "Dan Gallagher"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Two Musk Decisions in 2016 Put Tesla Into Trouble (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1854",
        "date": "2018-08-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-two-musk-decisions-in-2016-put-tesla-into-trouble-1535103002?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=89",
        "text": "Despite all of his recent public statements, Mr. Musk does not appear to have learned from these mistakes. With investors still valuing Tesla as if its only trouble is keeping up with insatiable demand, the risk to the stock is very high.\n\n\n\n\nAt the start of 2016, the stock market was tumbling. Shares of Tesla were down and shares of Mr. Musk\u2019s other public company, SolarCity, were down even more. SolarCity, like its competitors that sold solar panels to homeowners, was in severe financial straits.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk tried to reverse the declines. He unveiled the mass-market Model 3, which was supposed to sell for $35,000, potentially expanding the company\u2019s market exponentially. Later, even before the Model 3 design was complete, he called the car \u201cthe biggest consumer product launch ever.\u201d On a conference call with analysts that day, Mr. Musk said he expected that Tesla would make 100,000 to 200,000 Model 3s in the second half of 2017. Tesla\u2019s shares nearly doubled in the next year. That number turned out to be about 4,000.\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s other fateful decision that year was to merge SolarCity into Tesla.\nThat move quelled worries about SolarCity filing for bankruptcy, but saddled Tesla with another unprofitable business and stuffed $3 billion in extra debt onto its balance sheet. To sell investors on the deal, Mr. Musk pitched product ideas that have yet to result in meaningful revenue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAt Tesla, Mr. Musk\u2019s promises forced the company to borrow an additional $1.8 billion and rush to boost production of the Model 3, which proved costly. After initial struggles, sales have grown rapidly but costs have risen even faster. The operating leverage\u2014increasing profit margins on each extra dollar of revenue\u2014that Tesla needs remains elusive.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla\u2019s shares were up nearly 9% in after-hours trading on Aug. 1 following the company\u2019s Q2 results, with the stock rising through parts of the earnings call. Here are some of the highlights. Photo: Associated Press\n \n\n\nTesla is under increasing pressure to generate cash after burning through $1.8 billion in the first six months of this year. The company has about $1.3 billion in convertible debt due in November and March. It had $3 billion in accounts payable and just $2.2 billion in cash on hand as of June 30. Including capitalized leases, long-term debt tops $11 billion, according to FactSet.\nTesla\u2019s suppliers are starting to worry about being paid what they\u2019re owed. Mr. Musk grew so frustrated about the scrutiny his projections have received that he tweeted he had a deal in place to take Tesla private. That tweet and Mr. Musk\u2019s optimistic projections for the Model 3 are under scrutiny by the SEC. Soon after he felt the need to email that Tesla was not going bankrupt. \nMr. Musk may have believed that letting SolarCity fail would dent the reputation he built at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal\n\n\n and his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies. That could have hurt all of his businesses, including Tesla, which was regularly selling stock to fund its growth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTesla has several options to get out of its current jam. It could scale back production plans for the Model 3 to the point that it could produce them profitably. Tesla says it will turn a profit this quarter but given its history of overly optimistic forecasts, even persistently bullish analysts are skeptical, predicting it will lose $1.19 a share. But a profit is possible, largely because Model 3s are selling for $50,000 and more rather than the promised $35,000. A financial option, assuming the SEC lets it, would be to sell stock, but Tesla has repeatedly said it has no plans to do so. \nAnother riskier option is to persuade holders of the $1.3 billion in convertible debt who are due to be paid back in the coming months, to accept stock in Tesla instead of cash, according to Vicki Bryan, founder of research firm Bond Angle. She forecasts that move would minimize the dilution suffered by current investors while significantly reducing near-term debt, and give Tesla an extra six- to seven-month window to preserve its cash.\nWhatever Tesla chooses to do, Mr. Musk needs to show that there has been a lesson learned. If not, investors should be skeptical of any plan he offers. \nWrite to Charley Grant at charles.grant@wsj.com At the start of 2016, the stock market was tumbling. Shares of Tesla were down and shares of Elon Musk\u2019s other public company, SolarCity, were down even more. His solutions\u2014hyping the Model 3 and merging SolarCity into Tesla\u2014have pressured the car maker. ",
        "author": "Charley Grant"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is the Space Race You Are Looking For (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1855",
        "date": "2021-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-the-space-race-you-are-looking-for-11630407745?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=16",
        "text": "Space-related headlines have mostly centered on British billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n racing to leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Of their two companies, only Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic\u2014from which Virgin Orbit was spun out in 2017\u2014is publicly traded following a 2019 SPAC deal, making it the focus of the \u201cmeme stock\u201d craze. The firm\u2019s enterprise value trades at a staggering 69 times the earnings it is expected to generate in 2025.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFootage of Mr. Branson floating around was an effective publicity stunt for space investing. Yet the new crop of companies deserves more attention.\n\n\nMiniaturization has slashed the cost of making satellites. A constellation of them launched into low orbits, such as the Starlink system designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, opens up countless applications. To be sure, early movers like OneWeb have already run into trouble, echoing the disappointment that followed a previous wave of satellite ambitions in the 1990s. Yet the prize is big enough to attract enduring interest: Of the $1 trillion in revenues that analysts at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n expect of the space economy by 2040, half might come from satellites.\nFor satellite companies looking for a launch partner, a big rocket like SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 offers a price per kilogram that is hard to beat, but they still need to compete for shared space on board. The newcomers\u2019 small rockets could instead provide dedicated services to specific orbits. If the price is affordable enough, they could be a game changer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit promises the lowest unit costs by deploying its rockets from a 747 aircraft at 35,000 feet, and has already completed two successful launches. Astra has a star-studded management team, a NASA contract and a record of rapid progress, but on Saturday it failed to reach orbit for the third consecutive time.\nRocket Lab is probably the safest bet: It has already delivered more than 100 satellites with its Electron rocket, and is also designing a medium-size reusable rocket, the Neutron, to gain an edge in completing bigger satellite networks. Virgin Orbit, by contrast, will only be able to enlarge its rockets so much before they can\u2019t fit on a plane anymore.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace tourism might be able to make money. Virgin Galactic already had 600 people booked onto flights, and is now selling tickets at double the price. But investors are paying a lot for a thrill ride to the thermosphere that could shut if a single customer dies. Rocket Lab is trading at a more modest 28 times the earnings that the company forecasts for 2025, while Astra hovers at around four times. Based on the details of its SPAC deal, Virgin Orbit\u2019s enterprise value is slightly above six times expected earnings.\nIntense competition among these startups almost certainly means many will fail. Historically, transportation booms have almost always burned investors. Still, for risk-happy stock pickers eager to join the latest space race, the 2021 class of SPAC targets offers new hope.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson\u2019s trip to the edge of space opens the door to space tourism. But the company\u2019s long-term vision may be too down to Earth for space-loving investors, says WSJ writer Jon Sindreu. Photo: Virgin Galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Shooting rich people into space gets all the press, but investors probably should pay closer attention to the more humdrum business of launching small satellites. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is the Space Race You Are Looking For (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1856",
        "date": "2021-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-is-the-space-race-you-are-looking-for-11630407745?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=4",
        "text": "Space-related headlines have mostly centered on British billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n racing to leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Of their two companies, only Mr. Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic\u2014from which Virgin Orbit was spun out in 2017\u2014is publicly traded following a 2019 SPAC deal, making it the focus of the \u201cmeme stock\u201d craze. The firm\u2019s enterprise value trades at a staggering 69 times the earnings it is expected to generate in 2025.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2The new rocket companies are targeting the light-weight market...Maximum rocket payload in trips to the low Earth orbitSource: The companiesNote: Astra's payload is for a Sun-synchronous orbitCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Falcon 9 (SpaceX)Ariane 5 (Arianespace)Atlas V (ULA)LauncherOne (Virgin Orbit)Rocket 3 (Astra)Electron (Rocket Lab)0 Kg5,00010,00015,00020,00025,000\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFootage of Mr. Branson floating around was an effective publicity stunt for space investing. Yet the new crop of companies deserves more attention.\n\n\nMiniaturization has slashed the cost of making satellites. A constellation of them launched into low orbits, such as the Starlink system designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, opens up countless applications. To be sure, early movers like OneWeb have already run into trouble, echoing the disappointment that followed a previous wave of satellite ambitions in the 1990s. Yet the prize is big enough to attract enduring interest: Of the $1 trillion in revenues that analysts at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n expect of the space economy by 2040, half might come from satellites.\nFor satellite companies looking for a launch partner, a big rocket like SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 offers a price per kilogram that is hard to beat, but they still need to compete for shared space on board. The newcomers\u2019 small rockets could instead provide dedicated services to specific orbits. If the price is affordable enough, they could be a game changer.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2...but satellites are a market with enormous growth potentialGlobal space economy, estimated future revenuesSources: Morgan Stanley, Haver AnalyticsCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Satellite launchSatellite manufacturingGround equipmentTV, radio & broadbandSatellite servicesEarth observationNon-satellite industry2020'25'30'35'4000.250.500.75$1.00 trillion\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit promises the lowest unit costs by deploying its rockets from a 747 aircraft at 35,000 feet, and has already completed two successful launches. Astra has a star-studded management team, a NASA contract and a record of rapid progress, but on Saturday it failed to reach orbit for the third consecutive time.\nRocket Lab is probably the safest bet: It has already delivered more than 100 satellites with its Electron rocket, and is also designing a medium-size reusable rocket, the Neutron, to gain an edge in completing bigger satellite networks. Virgin Orbit, by contrast, will only be able to enlarge its rockets so much before they can\u2019t fit on a plane anymore.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Enterprise value to 2025 Ebitda*Sources: The companies (earnings), FactSet (enterprise values), Visible Alpha (analyst projections)* Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, based on the companies' official projectionsexcept Virgin Galactic, which is based on average analyst forecastsCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Virgin GalacticRocket LabVirgin OrbitBlackSkyAstraMomentus0 times10203040506070\n\n\n\nSpace tourism might be able to make money. Virgin Galactic already had 600 people booked onto flights, and is now selling tickets at double the price. But investors are paying a lot for a thrill ride to the thermosphere that could shut if a single customer dies. Rocket Lab is trading at a more modest 28 times the earnings that the company forecasts for 2025, while Astra hovers at around four times. Based on the details of its SPAC deal, Virgin Orbit\u2019s enterprise value is slightly above six times expected earnings.\nIntense competition among these startups almost certainly means many will fail. Historically, transportation booms have almost always burned investors. Still, for risk-happy stock pickers eager to join the latest space race, the 2021 class of SPAC targets offers new hope.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson\u2019s trip to the edge of space opens the door to space tourism. But the company\u2019s long-term vision may be too down to Earth for space-loving investors, says WSJ writer Jon Sindreu. Photo: Virgin Galactic/Reuters\n \n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Shooting rich people into space gets all the press, but investors probably should pay closer attention to the more humdrum business of launching small satellites. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s Quest Could Get Bumpier (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1857",
        "date": "2019-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/virgin-galactics-quest-could-get-bumpier-11572284206?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=19",
        "text": "The company is the brainchild of British billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n who aims to charge other rich people $250,000 to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the lower thermosphere, starting next year.\n\n\n\n\nOn Monday, its shares quickly jumped to almost 8% above their opening price of $12.01.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYet the profitability of outer space remains unproven in most segments of the market. Some startups likely have a future, such as OneWeb and Planet Labs, which are designing a next generation of smaller satellites, or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elon Musk\u2019s\n\n\n\n rocket-maker SpaceX, which is already getting contracts from NASA. Others, like asteroid miner Planetary Resources, already have fallen out of favor.\n\n\nThe industry\u2019s very existence, however, is in some part due to a broader flood of money going into private and venture capital, driven by low interest rates and an extra-long economic expansion in the U.S. Between 2013 and 2018, money going into space ventures amounted to almost $14 billion, compared with roughly $6 billion in the 2007-2012 period, data by specialist consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology show. Most of it came from a sudden injection of venture capital funding. This used to be about 9% of the total and is now almost 55%.\nSCH itself is part of a recent\u2014and worrying\u2014spurt of a special kind of funds that are given blank checks to invest in growth enterprises.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic claims to already have 600 customers in line, which means that its goal to fly 1,500 people by 2023 is ambitious but not impossible.\nBut years of delays prove how difficult it may be for the firm to keep to a schedule that is digestible to watchers of quarterly results. Meanwhile, if there are any accidents then its $2.3 billion valuation could incinerate. In the longer run, it is unclear whether a few minutes of weightlessness will still tempt the megarich if SpaceX and other recent entrants can offer something better.\nPublic markets used to be where the money was, but given all the return-hungry money still sloshing around private markets, the extra scrutiny attached to listing a company like Virgin Galactic seems less worth it. The poor receptions afforded to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Uber,\nPeloton \n\n\n and WeWork showcase that public investors are less reliably star-struck these days.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here\u2019s how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally published April 20, 2019) Stock exchanges may prove to be a less hospitable environment for the new space ventures than the risk-hungry private markets. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Rocketing Stock That Won\u2019t Fall Back to Earth (WSJ: Heard on the Street) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1858",
        "date": "2019-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-rocketing-stock-that-wont-fall-back-to-earth-11566481571?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=56",
        "text": "A Rocketdyne F-1 engine injector plate on display at The Museum of Flight in Tukwila, Wash., on July 18. This piece from Apollo 11\u2019s Saturn V rocket was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Paul Christian Gordon/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nAfter a post-Cold War drought in demand for rockets, the U.S. seems to be ready to engage in a new space race\u2014this time with China\u2014to return to the moon. Aerojet is one of the key contractors involved in the development of Space Launch System, NASA\u2019s new heavy-load space rocket.\n\n\n\n\nThis has sparked investor interest in space-related companies, giving Aerojet\u2019s stock another bump this year. Analysts at UBS estimate that the space economy will be worth more than $800 billion in annual revenue by 2030. A new generation of mini-satellites is a particularly big profit opportunity for the rocket companies that will launch them into space.\n\n\nTrue, competition is heating up. Aerojet\u2019s products are expensive, and SLS has been saddled with delays and a cost overrun of almost $2 billion. Technology tycoons\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n are both trying to build cheaper rockets with their own space ventures\u2014SpaceX and Blue Origin, respectively.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHowever, Aerojet seems to be succeeding in slashing costs, for example, by moving out of Rancho Cordova, Calif., and expanding its workforce in Arkansas. Its margins have almost caught up with the broader U.S. aerospace industry\u2019s.\nIt also has an edge that many of the new entrants don\u2019t: It can pitch its products as offering lower risk, thanks to nearly 80 years of accumulated expertise and intellectual property. As the company\u2019s Chief Financial Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Lundstrom\n\n\n\n puts it: \u201cIt is rocket science, and we\u2019ve been here from the beginning.\u201d\nEven better than being at the center of one positive industry trend is being at the center of two. In June,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Technologies\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon\n\n\n announced their intention to merge into the world\u2019s third-biggest aerospace conglomerate. Investors have been looking for further consolidation in the industry and some see Aerojet as a target.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis is because the UTC-Raytheon deal may partly be motivated by a need to bid more aggressively for government defense programs, with competition increasing after a six-year goldilocks period for contractors. Last year, defense giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman\n\n\n bought Orbital ATK, Aerojet\u2019s main competitor in building solid rocket boosters. Thanks to this move, it has become the sole bidder for the Pentagon\u2019s new $85 billion intercontinental ballistic system, after Boeing pulled out in July.\nImpressive as the rally in Aerojet\u2019s shares has been, its earnings have mostly kept pace. The company\u2019s valuation has merely caught up with the rest of the industry: Market value including debt is now equivalent to 12.6 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, compared with 12.4 times for the broader U.S. aerospace sector.\nNow that investors have acknowledged its comeback story, the rocket maker may finally reach escape velocity.\n\n\n\nHeard on the Street's Summertime Stock Picks Leaderboard\n\n3789 readers playing with a total of 7250 picks\n\n\n\nRank\nPick\nMade By\nReturn\n\n\n\n210.\nBUY Crocs Inc.\nWong\n69.9%\n\n518.\nSELL Beyond Meat Inc.\nSilva Laughlin\n49.9%\n\n1221.\nBUY Brunswick Corp.\nLahart\n31.4%\n\n1327.\nBUY Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc.\nJakab\n28.8%\n\n1898.\nBUY Electronic Arts Inc.\nGallagher\n20.3%\n\n\n\nUpdated Feb. 13, 2020 at 4:05 p.m. ET\n\nSee All Picks \u00bb\n\n\n\n\n\nWrite to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com Aerojet Rocketdyne can benefit both from renewed interest in outer space and the consolidation of the defense industry. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "CES goes full pandemic with smart masks, stickers to detect covid and the biggest WiFi update in years (WP: Help Desk) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1859",
        "date": "2021-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/11/ces/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 At CES, the tech industry\u2019s biggest showcase, covid-19 has inspired new products to power extreme digital living. Here comes a big WiFi update, smart masks and even robot comfort cats.The pandemic has also forced the event online. Instead of gathering 171,268 geeks in Las Vegas for a week of gadget demos, schmoozing and hiking conference halls, CES this year is all virtual, featuring thousands of competing Zoom streams at all times of the day and night. We warmed up our webcams and watched hours of product presentations so you don\u2019t have to. Help Desk: Technology coverage that makes tech work for youArrowRightSure, the news may be focused on fighting a killer virus and America\u2019s constitutional crisis. But in a way, consumer tech has never been more relevant. Hear us out: Sales for the U.S. tech industry hit historic highs in 2020, according to the NPD Group, rising 17 percent because so many people were buying notebooks, tablets, headphones, TVs and smartwatches.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe pandemic has given millions of Americans a new online normal that would have sounded far-fetched just two years ago. Now many of us go to work, school, doctor\u2019s visits, yoga classes, parties, weddings and even funerals in front of cameras and screens. A quarter of Americans are tracking vitals on smartwatches and fitness trackers. A good WiFi connection has become nearly as important as electricity.CES 2021 is still happening \u2014 without Vegas, crowds, prototypes or germsSamsung\u2019s CES keynote presentation, a half-hour video, calls its focus a \u201cBetter Normal for All.\u201d The best products of CES 2021 are trying to figure out how to make digital living work better. For one, we\u2019re very excited for the arrival of a new kind of WiFi \u2014 called 6E \u2014 that offers the best new hope in more than a decade to address America\u2019s top tech problem: flaky connections.But make no mistake, this CES has still been chock-full of weird, pointless or just plain bad ideas \u2014 more than ever, given that companies didn\u2019t actually have to show working prototypes in face-to-face demonstrations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd this CES also brings a moment of reckoning for the tech industry\u2019s role in fighting the coronavirus. In 2020, we heard endless ideas for gadgets and gizmos to zap viruses and help keep people safe. Companies pitched smart cities as a way to track the virus and encourage social distancing, and smartphones as tools to conduct contact tracing and offer exposure alerts. Yet as we endure America\u2019s deadliest phase of the pandemic yet, little of this tech has made a significant impact. Will new technologies or new ways of tech companies working with governments make a difference in 2021?Help Desk: Ask our tech columnist a questionHere are our finds for the best, most intriguing and weirdest products of CES 2021.Samsung Galaxy S21: More lenses, less moneySamsung has new flagship phones it promises work better and cost less than last year\u2019s models.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe world\u2019s largest smartphone maker unveiled the Galaxy S21, a line of three 5G Android phones that pack new capabilities but also shave $200 off the price of equivalent models from the previous Galaxy S20 line. The S21 starts at $800, while the larger-screen S21+ costs $1,000, and an S21 Ultra model with an even-larger screen and more cameras costs $1,200.The S21 features a new wraparound metal design on the back left corner. And, on the Ultra model, Samsung has added a fourth back camera to help it zoom ahead of what rival iPhones can do.Read more about the Galaxy S21 at our first look.Bose Sport Open Earbuds: Headphones that don\u2019t go in your earsTotally wireless headphones like Apple\u2019s AirPods are one of the biggest consumer tech trends of the last five years. Now Bose has given the form a major redesign: Instead of sticking inside your ear canals, its newest headphones hover just outside of them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe idea behind the Sport Open Earbuds is that some people don\u2019t like having equipment in their ear canals, particularly when they\u2019re working out. Earbuds that make contact can put pressure on sensitive areas, get sweaty, or just fly out if you move too fast. For runners and bikers, headphones that close you off to the world can also be dangerous, because you need to be able to hear approaching cars and trains.The new Sport Open Earbuds latch onto the back of your ears and point their small speakers so that the sound heads straight for your eardrums while allowing ambient noise to mix in. We haven\u2019t had a chance to listen but worry it might be annoying to the people around you. Bose says the sound beaming from its buds gets \u201ccanceled\u201d everywhere but your eardrums and is nearly undetectable to others. Bose first built this tech, which it calls OpenAudio, into a product called Frames that turns ordinary-looking glasses into headphones.The Sport Open Earbuds are splash-resistant and can last up to eight hours on a single charge.$200, shipping in January.BioButton: A sticker to detect coronavirus symptomsReopening society could get some help from a disposable wireless device that promises to turn vital signs into a warning about coronavirus symptoms.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe BioButton, about the size of a silver dollar, sticks to your upper chest with a medical adhesive and uses sensors to continuously track your skin temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate, activity level and sleep. Maker BioIntelliSense says, after a few days, a BioButton can collect enough data to help identify if you have symptoms of a possible coronavirus infection \u2014 even if you don\u2019t notice you\u2019re sick.At CES, BioIntelliSense announced a collaboration with the American College of Cardiology, which will offer the BioButton as a covid screening option to its members attending its annual meeting in May. UCHealth in Colorado is also using BioButtons to monitor health-care workers who receive coronavirus vaccines. BioIntelliSense hopes the tech could also be used to make vacation destinations, cruises and even workplaces safer.In 2020, we reached peak Internet. Here\u2019s what worked \u2014 and what flopped.There have also been efforts to detect coronavirus symptoms with consumer wearables like Fitbits and Oura Rings, but they\u2019re still being studied by researchers. The BioButton has already been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration to collect vital signs at home, and BioIntelliSense says an earlier version of its device using the same sensors proved to be as accurate as devices used in hospitals at measuring heart rate, temperature and respiration. (Geoffrey has been wearing one for a few days, finding it reports typical vital signs and its sticker holds up through exercise and showers.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDetecting the coronavirus in all that body data is another challenge. BioIntelliSense says its software is good enough to spot symptoms of an infection after a few days \u2014 but can\u2019t yet tell the difference between the coronavirus and the flu. (The company is currently conducting a nationwide clinical test funded by the Defense Department and led by Philips to validate how long it takes to detect covid.) Constant monitoring of vital signs is certainly much more useful than screening efforts like spot temperature checks, which are based on just one point in time.If the idea catches on, there will be ethical and privacy concerns to work out. BioIntelliSense CEO James Mault says he thinks it\u2019s important for use of devices like the BioButton to remain entirely optional, and for consumers to maintain control over their own vital-sign data.$1 per day for up to 60 days of continuous monitoring, though pricing will vary by program sponsor.The fur-covered robot from Japanese company Yukai Engineering is like a lap cat with a swishing tail but without the head, legs or aptitude for destruction. (The Washington Post)Petit Qoobo: A furry robot that will make you feel less aloneGadgets can be a reflection of our times. That includes products to help us counter crippling anxiety.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Petit Qoobo is like a cat, without a head or legs or fleas or a soul. A round fuzzy ball with a stubby moving tail, it is a portable-sized robotic companion designed to soothe you. It has a bit of weight to it, so it feels like a real pet resting peacefully in your lap while you watch cable news. And its tail swishes automatically in 80 different movements when it hears the sound of your voice or when you pet it.Available in four realistic shades of faux fur, the Petit Qoobo is designed to be \u201creminiscent of skittish, young animals,\u201d says its Japanese maker, Yukai Engineering. The company has even given it a faint heartbeat sound you can hear and feel when you snuggle it. Yukai believes the Qoobo provides its owners with comfort \u2014 something everyone could probably use a bit more of going into 2021.Previewed as a prototype at last year\u2019s CES, the Petit Qoobo is back as a final product. The company previously released a larger version, which is available in a handful of stores, but says people were interested in something smaller they could carry around with them, like a purse dog. Demand for its larger version has gone up during the pandemic, the company says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs many are having to stay inside and some may be more in solitary conditions, we feel that many are looking for items that could function as a companion,\u201d said Yukai\u2019s Saaya Okuda.$110, available in Japan, with plans to expand.WiFi 6E: Help for home network congestionCES is ushering in one of the biggest changes to wireless network tech in years. Called WiFi 6E, it\u2019s technically a new industry standard for routers and wireless gadgets such as phones and laptops. For all your apps and devices that want to stream data, it\u2019s the equivalent of adding a whole new lane to your home\u2019s information superhighway.How does that work? 6E routers and devices can access a new wireless spectrum that was previously off-limits to WiFi. If you\u2019ve messed around with routers over the years, you might know that first came the 2.4 GHz radio, then came dual-band routers that also tapped into 5 GHz (which can carry more data). WiFi 6E adds a third: 6 GHz. This new band isn\u2019t actually much faster, but it\u2019s far less crowded from neighbors and other devices \u2014 meaning your connection should be more reliable.\u201cI think it\u2019s huge,\u201d says Netgear\u2019s vice president of product management, Sandeep Harpalani. \u201cIt\u2019s solving this issue you have today of the huge number of devices in the home.\u201dOne downside: 6 GHz signals also can\u2019t travel as far through your house, but they\u2019ll be extremely helpful when devices are closer together.To take advantage of WiFi 6E, you\u2019ll need to buy a new router ",
        "author": "Geoffrey A. Fowler"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Apple didn\u2019t announce: An iPhone 12 (WP: Help Desk) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1860",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/15/iphone12-apple-event/",
        "text": "All the usual ingredients of an Apple fall announcement were there. Dramatic drone shots of the spaceship-like campus, a brief nod to the current woes of the world, executives rattling off superlatives about lightly upgraded gadgets.Help Desk: Technology coverage that makes tech work for youArrowRightBut Tuesday\u2019s Apple \u201cevent\u201d \u2014 a prerecorded video people agreed to watch on the Internet at the same time \u2014 was missing something big: new iPhones. Where were you, iPhone 12, if that\u2019s even your real name? The omission isn\u2019t a surprise, but it\u2019s still unusual. For a company that built its brand on innovation, Apple has become pretty predictable. Every fall it announces its latest iPhones. The company has announced new iPhones every September since 2012. The year prior, in 2011, the iPhone 4s was announced in October.Story continues below advertisementHowever, Apple has delayed the release of its phones before, most recently the iPhone X, which wasn\u2019t in stores until November.Apple Event 2020: A new Apple Watch, iPad Air, Fitness+ and moreWhen is the iPhone 12 coming?Analysts expect the new phones to be announced in October at the earliest. Apple confirmed that the iPhone would be late on an earnings call back in July, when Luca Maestri, the company\u2019s chief financial officer, said iPhone supply was going to be available a few weeks later than usual.AdvertisementA month might not seem like a big deal, but Apple wants all its new products released and in stock ahead of the holiday rush. That should be especially true if that rush could be dampened by fewer people shopping in stores and families not having holiday gatherings because of the novel coronavirus.A month seems long. What am I even waiting for?Apple is expected to release four new iPhone models, ranging in size from 5.4 to 6.7 inches. If they follow Apple\u2019s most recent naming conventions \u2014 and the overused trend of slapping \u201cMax\u201d and \u201cPro\u201d on the end of every product name \u2014 we could get an iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Max, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max. Minor upgrades could include tweaks to the exterior design and better cameras, including a depth-sensing back camera. As for design, the new iPad Air that Apple announced Tuesday has flat edges, which could be a sign of what\u2019s to come on any new iPhones.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe main addition will likely be support for 5G, the cellular network that promises lightning-fast download and upload speeds ... eventually.Every new iPhone needs one big enticing feature to persuade people to give up the still-functioning iPhone they bought two or so years ago. The iPhone 11, for example, added an impressive lowlight mode and tried to make \u201cslofies\u201d happen. IPhone sales have been slowing for years, thanks to an end to carrier subsidies and Apple offering inexpensive battery replacements. But with so many people stuck at home and connecting happily over their WiFi, its unclear whether 5G will be the jolt to sales Apple wants.The 5G lie: The network of the future is still slowWhy is it delayed? This is 2020. Up is down, the country is simultaneously on fire and fending off hurricanes. Apple CEO Tim Cook is presenting new products to an invisible audience, and we\u2019re still in the throes of a pandemic that has hit Apple sales, stores and production.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApple warned investors that the virus was disrupting production back in February. In addition to issues with its supply chain, much of Apple\u2019s U.S. staff has been working from home, and its stores worldwide have had to shut down, although many have reopened with new restrictions.Apple unveiled the next line of Apple Watches, which includes a more affordable model SE, at its Sept. 15 event. (Apple)Fine, no iPhone 12 today. What can I buy soon?Apple announced two new Apple Watches, including a lower-cost Apple Watch SE and the Apple Watch Series 6, which can measure blood oxygen levels. Both will be available September 18. A new 8th generation iPad will start at $329 and also be out at the end of week. The $599 and up iPad Air, however, isn\u2019t coming until some time in October.Story continues below advertisementAdditionally, sometime before the end of 2020, Apple says you\u2019ll be able to sign up for the new Fitness+ service which will cost $10 a month. Its all-in-one Apple One bundle of various services is coming this fall starting at $15 a month.AdvertisementAnd the company already released a new phone earlier this year, the lower-cost iPhone SE. An update to its last beloved iPhone SE, cherished for being small enough to fit into the smallest pocket and sturdy enough to open a beer, the new SE is only the same in name and price range.For a quick hit of newness, the latest operating systems will be available tomorrow, including the new iOS.People still love Apple\u2019s small iPhone SE, even as the company moves on to bigger thingsDo you absolutely have to get something that can connect to 5G right this second? Well, Veruca Salt, Samsung and OnePlus are here for you and already sell their own 5G phones. The 5G networks, however, still have some catching up to do. Apple announced a new Apple Watch, updated iPads, and an online fitness service on Tuesday. But the missing iPhone 12 loomed large. What Apple didn\u2019t announce: An iPhone 12",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s bid to dip into Pell Grant reserves to fund NASA faces uphill battle (WP: Higher Education) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1861",
        "date": "2019-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/05/15/trumps-bid-dip-into-pell-grant-reserves-fund-nasa-faces-uphill-battle/",
        "text": "The Trump administration faces sharp criticism over a budget request to divert $3.9 billion in federal student aid to pay for other programs, including a NASA initiative to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon missionCongressional Democrats and higher education advocates say the White House is jeopardizing the sustainability of the Pell Grant program, the primary source of federal grant aid for millions of students whose families typically earn less than $60,000 a year. The program is running an estimated $9 billion surplus that advocates say must be preserved to ward off potential funding cuts in the future. \u201cTo cut the cornerstone federal investment in Americans\u2019 human capital to pay for continued space exploration \u2014 an endeavor more reliant on the ongoing and long-term investment in a highly educated future workforce than almost any other \u2014 is the height of irony,\u201d said Jessica Thompson, policy and planning director at the Institute for College Access and Success, an advocacy group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a budget amendment sent to Congress this week, the White House asked lawmakers to pull out $1.9 billion in reserve funds from the Pell program on top of another $2 billion cut requested in the original fiscal 2020 budget. The administration said cuts to the surplus will have no immediate impact on Pell recipients and the program should have sufficient discretionary funds until 2023.That expectation, however, is reliant on continued declines in participation in the Pell program. As the economy rebounded from the last major recession and the job market improved, fewer Pell-eligible students have enrolled in college, leading to a surplus of program funding. But that could change if the country suffers another economic downturn, said Jonathan S. Fansmith, director of government relations at the American Council on Education, which represents college and university presidents.\u201cYou don\u2019t have to go far back to see why this matters. In 2010, 2011 and 2012, Pell was running shortfalls because there were a lot of people impacted by the recession and returning to school,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re one economic downturn away from being in that situation again. The amount you can maintain for the overall funding is a bulwark against harming students.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPell Grant award to rise, but program reserves remain in jeopardyThe purchasing power of the Pell Grant has waned in the face of rising college costs. Thompson noted that the maximum Pell Grant for the 2019-2020 academic year, ringing in at $6,195, will cover the lowest chunk of public college costs in history. Because the grant is no longer automatically adjusted to keep pace with inflation, the mismatch in need and award appears likely to grow.In the last academic year, the U.S. Education Department said the $30 billion Pell program benefited more than 5.7 million college students. The federal agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the White House proposal.Dipping into the reserve fund has become a perennial issue in Washington. The Trump administration has sought cuts to the Pell surplus in each of its budgets. Congress has siphoned off money from the reserve \u2014 but to fund other higher education initiatives, such as offering Pell Grants year round instead of for two semesters.It looks as if the government can afford to revive year-round grants for needy college studentsPell has benefited from bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, and congressional leaders say there is no way lawmakers will reverse course to back Trump\u2019s plans for NASA. Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), ranking Democrat on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees education spending, said the budget amendment \u201cwill be dead on arrival in Congress.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cRepublicans and Democrats in Congress have been working together to increase the amount of money students can receive through Pell Grants \u2014 and if President Trump wants to invest in NASA, he should support bipartisan efforts to raise the spending caps to pay for it,\u201d Murray said.Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who chairs the subcommittee, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Trump\u2019s proposal.House lawmakers have made their position on Pell funding clear by refusing the White House\u2019s initial request to take money from the reserve and by boosting the maximum award in an appropriations bill that passed last week.Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.), chair of the House appropriations subcommittee on labor, health and human services and education, echoed Murray\u2019s sentiments that the White House budget amendment has no chance of clearing Congress.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPresident Trump and his team should stop wasting their time on theatrics,\u201d DeLauro said. \u201cWe passed a substantive .\u2009.\u2009. funding bill out of the Appropriations Committee last week \u2014 one that makes critical investments in low-income and first-generation students by increasing the maximum Pell Grant, federal work study, and other grant aid. I look forward to passing our bill out of the House in short order.\u201dEven if the Pell reserves remain intact this year, Fansmith worries that policymakers are looking at the program\u2019s funding as a slush fund for other priorities.\u201cIt sets a pretty troubling precedent about the idea that these are funds that can be allocated anywhere across the budget, even outside the appropriations bill which has authority over it,\u201d Fansmith said. Congressional Democrats say the White House request to pull $3.9 billion out of the grant program for low-income college students is a no-go. Trump\u2019s bid to dip into Pell Grant reserves to fund NASA faces uphill battle",
        "author": "Danielle Douglas-Gabriel"
    },
    {
        "title": "As college leaders wonder what to make of Trump, one takes comfort in what he hasn\u2019t said (WP: Higher Education) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1862",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/01/06/as-college-leaders-wonder-what-to-make-of-trump-one-takes-comfort-in-what-he-hasnt-said/",
        "text": "Higher education lobbyists have been torn over President Obama during his eight years in the White House. They cheered his support of funding for student financial aid and scientific research but they chafed at his efforts to hold colleges accountable for results and to expand civil rights enforcement to combat sexual assault. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, they wonder what to make of President-elect Donald Trump. Many of the nation\u2019s academics worry about Trump\u2019s rhetoric on climate change, immigration, health care and other issues following a divisive campaign.But Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Association of American Universities, said she takes comfort in what Trump has not said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe haven\u2019t heard anything from the president-elect that says he\u2019s anti-science,\u201d Coleman said this week in a visit to The Washington Post\u2019s newsroom. \u201cI\u2019m not going to make any presumptions.\u201dAdvertisementHigher education and science policy were not major issues during the general election campaign. But Trump spelled out some views for the website sciencedebate.org. In response to a question on innovation, he said:\u201c[T]he federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia. Though there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, health care and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous.\u201dWhat that statement will mean when the Republican-led Congress starts sending budget bills to the Trump White House is an open question. But Coleman said AAU will join with other groups to push for federal investment to keep the United States in a position of global leadership on research.Story continues below advertisementThe National Science Foundation reported in November that federal funding of higher education research and development had declined for a fourth straight year \u2014 to $37.9 billion in fiscal 2015, down from $40.8 billion in fiscal 2011.The AAU, a group of 62 prominent research universities, is an influential voice in Washington. Its membership, including some state flagships and top private universities, is by invitation only. The AAU has for decades helped push for federal funding of scientific research, a cause that generally draws bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. But debates have arisen over research funding in recent years, especially following the steep budget cuts that took effect in 2013, known as the sequester.Sequester cuts university research funds\u201cSequestration scares us to death,\u201d Coleman said, noting that the AAU and other groups worry that budget cutting could resume. \u201cWe understand we are still vulnerable.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso unknown is how federal funding for Pell grants will fare during the Trump administration. Those grants, which grew under Obama, are a cornerstone of college access for economically disadvantaged students. In general, Coleman said, she wants federal and state governments to keep in mind the strategic importance of higher education. She said she worries about the nation \u201cturning its back\u201d on a sector that serves an enormous public good.After years of neglect, public higher ed is at a tipping pointColeman, a biochemist, became AAU president in May. She was president of the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2014, and before that she led the University of Iowa.The AAU in recent years has sought to help universities understand the prevalence of sexual assault among students. It organized a groundbreaking survey on that topic in 2015 of 150,000 students at 27 prominent schools. The survey found that more than 20 percent of female undergraduates said they had been victims of sexual assault and misconduct.Survey: More than 1 in 5 female undergrads at top schools suffer sexual attacksThe AAU survey came as the Obama administration was pressing a campaign to stop sexual violence at colleges. The Office for Civil Rights in the Education Department has opened investigations of more than 220 colleges and universities for their handling of sexual violence complaints. Republicans on Capitol Hill have urged the incoming Trump administration to rein in the OCR, and in coming weeks colleges will be watching closely for signs of a new federal approach on sexual assault and other civil rights issues.\u201cIt is hard for me to envision that OCR would simply abandon\u201d enforcement, Coleman said.Trump could reverse Obama\u2019s actions on college sex assault, transgender rightsFor many colleges and universities, another key question as Trump prepares to take office on Jan. 20 is whether he will follow through on a campaign promise to reverse certain Obama policies on immigration. In particular, academic leaders worry about the fate of undocumented students who immigrated to the United States before age 16 and obtained protection against deportation through the policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.College leaders: Save program shielding students from deportationColeman told The Post she was encouraged when Trump appeared to soften his position toward these students in an interview with Time magazine published in December. \u201cWe\u2019re going to work something out that\u2019s going to make people happy and proud,\u201d Trump told Time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementExactly what will happen to DACA beneficiaries and other young immigrants in similar circumstances \u2014 sometimes called \u201cdreamers\u201d \u2014 \u00a0remains unknown. But higher education leaders hope to nudge Trump toward a position that will leave their undocumented students unharmed.Soon after Trump was quoted in Time, the AAU released a statement from Coleman: \u201cAs the President-elect said, this is a situation that calls for a humanitarian approach. We stand ready to work with the incoming administration as it seeks to implement such an approach, which we hope will permit students to continue their education and contribute to American excellence.\u201dThis episode reflects a tactic that might be repeated often as higher ed lobbyists seek to work with a man few had anticipated would win the White House: Sift through Trump\u2019s various, sometimes conflicting, statements on a given issue. Find one that matches your objectives. Highlight it, push for it, and hope.\u201cThe results of the election did surprise me,\u201d Coleman said. \u201cBut the electorate spoke. Here we are.\u201d The higher education lobby seeks to work with a man few expected to win the presidency. Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Association of American Universities, doesn't want to make any presumptions about what's to come.  As college leaders wonder what to make of Trump, one takes comfort in what he hasn\u2019t said",
        "author": "Nick Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The ground is cold, but the seed market is open for business (WP: Home & Garden) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1863",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/the-ground-is-cold-but-the-seed-market-is-open-for-business/2019/01/22/927e24f2-19ba-11e9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s too early to start seeds for the spring garden, unless you are into such things as artichokes and celery, but seed packets are showing up in all the usual places \u2014 in seed racks at stores, in old-fashioned paper catalogues and online.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis misalignment of seed availability and seed starting may be put down to canny merchandising, but as long as you don\u2019t jump the gun and start the seeds too early, there\u2019s no harm in going on a seed binge in midwinter. You might turn our whole system of consumerism on its head: Pay Now, Live Later. Seed starting is all about timing, and often it\u2019s about equipment \u2014 seed trays under lights, etc. \u2014 but the easiest entree into nascent plants is to select flowers and vegetables you can sow directly in prepared garden beds. The first varieties for this are peas, sweet peas and fava beans, which will endure a while in the cold winter soil and suddenly spring up in March. I was thinking of stuffing dozens of garden and snow peas along my fence lines in early February, but the arrival of ground-freezing temperatures may have delayed that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPeppers should be started indoors under lights in early March, a good two or three weeks before tomatoes, and they germinate quickly and vigorously with heating mats placed beneath the seed trays. Gardeners in my orbit are coming to the conclusion that tomato plants can be difficult in our hot, humid summers, but their cousin, the pepper, seems to lap up the heat, even in last year\u2019s monsoon.But back to the present. The danger at the moment is in buying more seeds than you will ever use; I am not safe around a seed rack or a catalogue. The problem isn\u2019t so much pure impulse-purchasing as delusion. I think my little community garden plot is Doctor Who\u2019s time-and-space-bending spaceship, the TARDIS. I open the gate and 450 square feet turns into an acre, ready to welcome hundreds of varieties.I have learned to lower my ambitions somewhat with vegetables, but I am gripped by the need for annual flowers, once my area of least interest. I cannot explain this turnaround, except to say that flowers enliven the edible garden in unexpected ways. One example is nasturtium. I sowed seeds of three varieties last spring in a narrow border given over to rosemary and salvias. The nasturtiums stayed small and scrawny, hating the heat, but once things cooled off in October they just exploded into display. In another corner, the tithonia grew robust and floriferous. Elsewhere, zinnias refused to germinate (rain-soaked soil) and the amaranth was scant and stunted (my neglect).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll the failures seem to do little to diminish the zealous anticipation that overtakes you around the January seed rack. Seeds are packages of life and can die if neglected, but if you keep them in the fridge, most will last three years or so. Hence, the new purchases tend to add to the existing inventory and, at some point, you have to go through all those crumpled, opened and half-used seed packets and decide what to pitch.Growing seeds for consumers is a peculiar business, and its commercial structure is complicated. For the most part, our favorite seed companies don\u2019t grow the seed themselves. The Cherokee Purple tomato seed you buy on a rack at the big-box store may have come from the same seed farmer who supplied your tony mail-order catalogue, or a start-up that exists solely online. Prices can vary quite a bit for the same product, and it pays to shop around (consider seed counts or packet weights for valid comparisons). Some of the best bargains are found at mass merchandisers, but late last summer when I wanted Asian greens and head lettuces for a fall garden, I had to go to a foodie seed catalogue and somehow spent $70 on a dozen or so packets. I can\u2019t complain; I\u2019ve had fresh salads from early October until last weekend and along the way discovered a delightful Chinese cabbage named Tokyo Bekana, a robust, lime-green beauty.Wholesale producers such as Wild West Seed in Albany, Ore., contract with an army of farmers to raise seed. Most varieties are raised in the northwestern United States, but some crops are grown by farmers in China, India, France, Poland and elsewhere. Wild West provides the seed, monitors the crops, determines the harvest date and then cleans and packages the seed, said John Wahlert, the sales manager.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApplewood Seed in Arvada, Colo., similarly works with hundreds of farmers around the globe, along with other production companies with their own growers. The cost of seed is linked to how much seed a plant produces and how easy it is to get to it. Sunflowers are willing partners, but columbines are stinting. Butterfly weed, with all its fluff, is hard to process. Marigolds \u201cproduce a lot of seed but are expensive to clean,\u201d said General Manager Norm Poppe.So yes, a lot of hidden effort goes into getting those seeds to the gardener, and we should acknowledge and celebrate that. For people intimidated by seeds, transplants will show up in garden centers in late winter and early spring, which allows you to bypass the preseason ritual of starting your own. The transplants are convenient and timesaving but at a cost beyond money. It\u2019s like baking a pie with ready-made pastry. There is nothing more satisfying in the kitchen than making a pie from scratch and nothing more rewarding in the garden than raising your own plants from seed. It gets to the process of the enterprise but also, and more importantly, to its magic. Turning tiny sleeping grains into a living plant to feed your family and the butterflies, what could be more divine than that?@adrian_higgins on Twitter\n\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWayward, wind-blown leaves can smother emerging bulbs and turf grass and should be raked and added to the compost pile. Using a leaf blower in temperatures below freezing can cause wind burn and other damage to evergreens.\u2014 Adrian HigginsMore from Lifestyle:Mild weather brings unusual activity to the January gardenIf 2018\u2019s rains wrecked your garden, it might be time to try something newMoss is no weed. As long as you don\u2019t jump the gun and start the seeds too early, there\u2019s no harm in going on a buying binge in midwinter. The ground is cold, but the seed market is open for business",
        "author": "Adrian Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Funko Toy King Brian Mariotti Turned a California Castle Into His \u2018Dream House\u2019 (WSJ: Homes) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1864",
        "date": "2021-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/funko-brian-mariotti-california-home-11624550871?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=21",
        "text": "Most people are not Brian Mariotti.\n\n\n Sitting in recessed spaces built along the walls of the theater room are larger than life-sized statues of Star Wars characters and various Star Wars weapons and helmets. Damon Casarez for The Wall Street Journal The ceiling of the theater room is hand screened fabric over an acoustic base (the goal was to create the energy burst of a Star Wars spaceship at warp speed). The walls are covered in fabric for sound control. Damon Casarez for The Wall Street Journal Jars of candy sit in a bar at the back of the theater room, next to some Star Wars weapons. Damon Casarez for The Wall Street Journal The theater room has 18 chocolate leather recliners on three ascending raised platforms and a 20-foot screen powered by a professional level 4K Max laser projector. Damon Casarez for The Wall Street Journal \n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m obsessive,\u201d says the 53-year-old, who turned toy company Funko into the entity responsible for many of the large-headed, collectible pop vinyl characters sold around the world today. Mr. Mariotti and his wife Shannon Mariotti, 53, first spotted the house on the jewel box island of Coronado, Calif., in 2016 during one of the weekend bike rides they\u2019d take around their vacation home. Known as the W.A. Gunn House, and just a block from the famed Coronado beach, it was built for a Michigan furniture maker in 1925, designed by renowned San Diego architect Richard Requa and designated a historic residence in 2004. \u201cThis was the dream house. The one that was never attainable,\u201d says Mr. Mariotti. Since it wasn\u2019t for sale, he asked his real-estate agent to knock on the door and negotiate. It took four months to get them to agree, but in February 2017, the couple paid $12.2 million, which Mr. Mariotti calls a premium, for what was a 6,000-square-foot house on half an acre. Deciding they\u2019d like more space around them, they then negotiated with the owners of the 2,500-square-foot house next door, securing that in 2018 by buying and renovating another house nearby for their former neighbors\u2014a swap that cost them around $6 million in total. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nShannon Mariotti met Mr. Mariotti when he was running a jungle-themed nightclub in Bothell Wash. and she was a representative for restaurant wholesaler Sysco.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Damon Casarez for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA swimming pool with mosaic tiles is surrounded by a French stone patio and a garden, landscaped with sculptures amid century-old olive and magnolia trees.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Damon Casarez for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe Mariottis liked the home\u2019s Old Hollywood, Spanish vibe, but not the wall-to-wall carpet and popcorn ceilings inside. They wanted the same heavy wood ceiling beams\u2014but they wanted them all over the house and not as dark. The character of the house cried out to them for old stone fireplaces instead of ones made of plaster, multi-angled, vaulted ceilings, hand-stenciled designs on the walls and reclaimed terra-cotta floor tiles from Italy. They also wanted a less claustrophobic floor plan. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Mariotti told architect Kim Grant and contractor Jim Papenhausen that he had in his mind the image of the Eagles\u2019 \u201cHotel California\u201d album cover, with the castle-like house with palm trees.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\nThe goal was to make everything new look as old as possible, says Paul Schatz, owner of Interior Design Imports. Working with San Diego architect Kim Grant, landscape architect Theresa Clark, and Papenhausen Construction, he replaced almost every single material in the house and designed furniture and lighting\u2014or found antique pieces\u2014for every room. The original Spanish red roof tiles were stripped and replaced by tiles in different shades of red, stacked to give a waved effect. Mr. Schatz used wall tiles hand painted with designs that were in accordance to 1920s-1930s Spanish Colonial interior architecture. New wood beams were hand distressed and finished to be indistinguishable from the original beams. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Mariotti\u2019s home office is on the third floor in the turret room at the top of the tower. It has a lot of toys. His favorites tend toward the nostalgic, including Scooby-Doo characters, Tony The Tiger and the mascot for Bob\u2019s Big Boy Restaurant.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Damon Casarez for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Real Estate From aspirational residences to major commercial deals. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nOf the overall look and feel, Ms. Grant, of Kim Grant Design Inc., says Mr. Mariotti had in his mind the image of the Eagles\u2019 \u201cHotel California\u201d album cover, with the castle-like house with palm trees. She says the house is referred to locally as the \u201cCoronado Castle.\u201d They turned the house next door, which was set back from the road, into a 4 \u00bd car garage. The extra land, where the neighboring house\u2019s fr The chief executive of the wildly popular toy company spent more than $20 million creating a fun-filled home with a \u201cStar Wars\u201d-theme home theater and a six-hole putting green. ",
        "author": "Nancy Keates"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finding God on a Mars Colony (WSJ: Houses of Worship) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1865",
        "date": "2017-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/finding-god-on-a-mars-colony-1510868616?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=108",
        "text": "Many astronauts have had religious experiences in space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Duke,\n\n\n\n who went to the moon with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo\n\n\n\n 16, was inspired to become a lay witness for Christ.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Irwin,\n\n\n\n a moon walker with Apollo 15, searched for Noah\u2019s Ark after returning home.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gene Cernan,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edgar Mitchell\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rusty\n\n\n\n Schweickart have also been very public about the metaphysical effects of leaving the Earth. No doubt future astronauts will report similar awakenings.\n\n\n\n\nBut a few reflections from isolated astronauts won\u2019t truly shake the world. Rather, colonizing other planets could help revive a more elevated sense of what it means to be human. For centuries, people felt so strategically positioned in the universe as to sense a preordained relationship with its underlying reality. The most primitive expression of this was the belief that humanity stood at the geographic center of the firmament.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicolaus Copernicus\n\n\n\n nudged Homo sapiens off their privileged celestial perch in 1543 by showing that the sun, not the Earth, is the center of the solar system. This was followed by a long line of humiliating scientific demotions, each of which made it easier for people to imagine themselves as accidentally intelligent animals, not divine favorites.\nThe result in our own time? As the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rev. James Heiser,\n\n\n\n a Lutheran Bishop who co-founded the Mars Society, said in his 2013 address to the organization\u2019s annual convention, many people have become comfortable speaking of humanity as a virus the Earth might be better off without.\nAfter nearly five centuries of diminishing importance, the colonization of space promises to rehabilitate humankind\u2019s self-image. We may still have to accept that we live in an obscure corner of the cosmos, but soon\u2014for the first time in history\u2014we may be spreading life throughout the darkness.\nNot all of what settlers need would have to be lugged from Earth, explains\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Zubrin,\n\n\n\n president of the Mars Society, in \u201cThe Case for Mars\u201d (Free Press, 2011). Water is plentiful at the Martian poles, and oxygen is trapped everywhere on the surface as iron oxide. The planet\u2019s methane could be used for fuel.\nEarth\u2019s moon is looking more appealing as well. Although it lacks an atmosphere, the moon has the distinct advantage of being close. Its surface has supplies of iron, silicon and aluminum, as well as traces of carbon, nitrogen and other elements needed to sustain humans.\nA little farther out, Saturn\u2019s moon Titan is believed to have everything required to sustain a colony. Beyond the solar system things get hazier. The closest star to our own has at least one Earth-size planet nearby, Proxima b, which is warm enough for liquid water, although its presence has yet to be confirmed.\nIt is one thing to hear scientists discuss the fortuitous biochemistry that allows carbon-based life to thrive on Earth. It will be quite another to witness the construction of human settlements on the moon, Mars and beyond. As Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aldrin\n\n\n\n said in 1999, space colonization is, beyond anything, \u201ca spiritual question in the broadest sense, one promising a revitalization of humanity and a rebirth of hope.\u201d\nHumanity may not be at the geographic center of the cosmos, and we may not even be the only highly intelligent life form. But the deeper that a chosen few of us push into space, the clearer it will be to the rest how astonishingly tuned the universe is to our presence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Andrews\n\n\n\n was executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy (1999-2009). Renewed space exploration could spark humanity\u2019s spiritual reawakening. ",
        "author": "Lewis Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shooting the Moon (WSJ: Icons) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1866",
        "date": "2019-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/shooting-the-moon-11559315158?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=15",
        "text": "That photo will go on public view for what appears to be the first time at New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing with \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,\u201d an exhibition featuring about 170 lunar photographs that runs from July 3 to Sept. 22. Meanwhile, from July 14 to Jan. 5, 2020, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will present \u201cBy the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs to Apollo 11.\u201d The anniversary is also inspiring other shows of moon-related art and artifacts at Seattle\u2019s Museum of Flight, Paris\u2019s Grand Palais and London\u2019s Royal Museums Greenwich.\nSince the mid-19th century, lunar photography has been used in the scientific study of the moon, says Met curator Mia Fineman. But she adds that such photos are also a way of expressing artistic imagination and capturing our fantasies about the moon\u2014another world that is easy to see yet beyond our reach, an age-old symbol of mystery and desire.\nAfter Draper, it didn\u2019t take long for moon photography to improve exponentially. In the 1860s, it was possible to view detailed moon photos in 3-D, using stereoscopic viewers; the National Gallery show begins with 3-D photos by British astronomer Warren De La Rue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJohn Adams Whipple\u2019s 1852 daguerreotype \u201cView of the Moon.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John G. Wolbach Library, Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Mass.\n \n\n\n\nBy the turn of the 20th century, the French astronomers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maurice Loewy\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pierre Puiseux\n\n\n\n were immersed in a 14-year project to create a complete atlas of the moon, made up of about 80 photographs. And in 1902 \u201cA Trip to the Moon,\u201d an early French science-fiction film directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s,\n\n\n\n became an international hit by using special effects to show a spaceship shot out of a cannon and a race of moon-creatures. A six-minute excerpt from the film is part of the Met exhibition. Ms. Fineman points out that with the age of flight just beginning\u2014the Wright Brothers flew in 1903\u2014reaching the moon may have begun to seem like a real, if remote, possibility.\n\n\nFine-art photographers also began to turn their attention to the moon. The young American photographer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edward Steichen\n\n\n\n employed a surprising amount of camera trickery to create his famous 1904 image \u201cThe Pond\u2014Moonrise,\u201d which depicts a low ridge of trees with feathery branches, perfectly reflected in a pond and silhouetted against a rising moon. Ms. Fineman thinks it isn\u2019t certain whether the celestial object reflected in the pond was originally the moon or the sun; Steichen touched it up with pigment, using layers of Prussian blue to create a vision of how moonlight dissolves objects into a misty atmosphere.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn image from Maurice Loewy and Pierre Puiseux\u2019s moon atlas, \u2018Photographie Lunaire\u2019 (1903).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n National Gallery of Art, Washington\n \n\n\n\nScience and art joined hands in 1962 when NASA created its artists\u2019 cooperation program, intended to sponsor artworks to commemorate the new space program. The stipends started at just $800, but some big names joined up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Norman Rockwell,\n\n\n\n working in realistic mode, produced \u201cBehind Apollo 11,\u201d which depicted not only the astronauts but also their wives, scientists like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun\n\n\n\n and launchpad workers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Rauschenberg,\n\n\n\n a forerunner of pop art, produced 34 space-related lithographs and 19 collages and drawings. Included in the Met show is an untitled 1969 piece that features a tracing of his own foot, which may allude to Buzz Aldrin\u2019s famed snapshot of a boot print in moon dust. \nMr. Aldrin\u2019s photograph is featured in the exhibitions at the Met and the National Gallery. The Met\u2019s show also includes a photograph that, though little known, had tremendous importance: the first image of the dark side of the moon, photographed in 1959 by a Soviet spacecraft. Because the moon revolves on its axis at almost the same speed that it orbits the Earth, the dark side always faces away from our planet and had never before been seen by human beings. It turned out to be more densely cratered than the bright side and had far fewer maria\u2014the lunar plains that appear as dark spots on the Earth-facing side.\nMs. Fineman hopes that \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse\u201d will inspire a new generation of moonwatchers. \u201cI hope a 12-year-old kid coming to the show will find a telescope and look at the moon with their own eyes,\u201d she says. \u201cOr make a photograph.\u201d\n\n\nMore Icons\n\n\n\n\nA Guard\u2019s-Eye View of Art\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nDonatello in Florence\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nCreating a Public for Traditional Art\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nThe Human Body Laid Bare in Art\nFebruary 18, 2022 Fifty years after the moon landing, two shows look back at the history of lunar photography and art. ",
        "author": "Peter Saenger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shooting the Moon (WSJ: Icons) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1867",
        "date": "2019-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/shooting-the-moon-11559315158?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=60",
        "text": "That photo will go on public view for what appears to be the first time at New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing with \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,\u201d an exhibition featuring about 170 lunar photographs that runs from July 3 to Sept. 22. Meanwhile, from July 14 to Jan. 5, 2020, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will present \u201cBy the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs to Apollo 11.\u201d The anniversary is also inspiring other shows of moon-related art and artifacts at Seattle\u2019s Museum of Flight, Paris\u2019s Grand Palais and London\u2019s Royal Museums Greenwich.\nSince the mid-19th century, lunar photography has been used in the scientific study of the moon, says Met curator Mia Fineman. But she adds that such photos are also a way of expressing artistic imagination and capturing our fantasies about the moon\u2014another world that is easy to see yet beyond our reach, an age-old symbol of mystery and desire.\n\n\n\n\nAfter Draper, it didn\u2019t take long for moon photography to improve exponentially. In the 1860s, it was possible to view detailed moon photos in 3-D, using stereoscopic viewers; the National Gallery show begins with 3-D photos by British astronomer Warren De La Rue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJohn Adams Whipple\u2019s 1852 daguerreotype \u201cView of the Moon.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John G. Wolbach Library, Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Mass.\n \n\n\n\nBy the turn of the 20th century, the French astronomers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maurice Loewy\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pierre Puiseux\n\n\n\n were immersed in a 14-year project to create a complete atlas of the moon, made up of about 80 photographs. And in 1902 \u201cA Trip to the Moon,\u201d an early French science-fiction film directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s,\n\n\n\n became an international hit by using special effects to show a spaceship shot out of a cannon and a race of moon-creatures. A six-minute excerpt from the film is part of the Met exhibition. Ms. Fineman points out that with the age of flight just beginning\u2014the Wright Brothers flew in 1903\u2014reaching the moon may have begun to seem like a real, if remote, possibility.\n\n\nFine-art photographers also began to turn their attention to the moon. The young American photographer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edward Steichen\n\n\n\n employed a surprising amount of camera trickery to create his famous 1904 image \u201cThe Pond\u2014Moonrise,\u201d which depicts a low ridge of trees with feathery branches, perfectly reflected in a pond and silhouetted against a rising moon. Ms. Fineman thinks it isn\u2019t certain whether the celestial object reflected in the pond was originally the moon or the sun; Steichen touched it up with pigment, using layers of Prussian blue to create a vision of how moonlight dissolves objects into a misty atmosphere.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn image from Maurice Loewy and Pierre Puiseux\u2019s moon atlas, \u2018Photographie Lunaire\u2019 (1903).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n National Gallery of Art, Washington\n \n\n\n\nScience and art joined hands in 1962 when NASA created its artists\u2019 cooperation program, intended to sponsor artworks to commemorate the new space program. The stipends started at just $800, but some big names joined up.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Norman Rockwell,\n\n\n\n working in realistic mode, produced \u201cBehind Apollo 11,\u201d which depicted not only the astronauts but also their wives, scientists like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun\n\n\n\n and launchpad workers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Rauschenberg,\n\n\n\n a forerunner of pop art, produced 34 space-related lithographs and 19 collages and drawings. Included in the Met show is an untitled 1969 piece that features a tracing of his own foot, which may allude to Buzz Aldrin\u2019s famed snapshot of a boot print in moon dust. \nMr. Aldrin\u2019s photograph is featured in the exhibitions at the Met and the National Gallery. The Met\u2019s show also includes a photograph that, though little known, had tremendous importance: the first image of the dark side of the moon, photographed in 1959 by a Soviet spacecraft. Because the moon revolves on its axis at almost the same speed that it orbits the Earth, the dark side always faces away from our planet and had never before been seen by human beings. It turned out to be more densely cratered than the bright side and had far fewer maria\u2014the lunar plains that appear as dark spots on the Earth-facing side.\nMs. Fineman hopes that \u201cApollo\u2019s Muse\u201d will inspire a new generation of moonwatchers. \u201cI hope a 12-year-old kid coming to the show will find a telescope and look at the moon with their own eyes,\u201d she says. \u201cOr make a photograph.\u201d\n\n\nMore Icons\n\n\n\n\nDonatello in Florence\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nCreating a Public for Traditional Art\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nThe Human Body Laid Bare in Art\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Art of Sound\nFebruary 11, 2022 Fifty years after the moon landing, two shows look back at the history of lunar photography and art. ",
        "author": "Peter Saenger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteorites Are Art From Outer Space (WSJ: Icons) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1868",
        "date": "2020-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/meteorites-are-art-from-outer-space-11598637257?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=38",
        "text": "According to Mr. Hyslop, some meteorite buyers want the thrill of owning something so ancient; in rare cases, meteorites can contain material older than the solar system, which formed 4.6 billion years ago. Others love the crystalline, jewelry-like aspects of meteorites, using them in necklaces, wedding rings and earrings. \nMeteorites can also be seen as natural works of art. In an essay accompanying the sale, Mr. Hyslop notes that a stone meteorite found less than a year ago by Berber nomads in the Sahara desert resembles the work of the American sculptor Ken Price, whose abstract works are made out of fired clay. The meteorite might have acquired its unusual tubular shape during its outer-space journey or after it fell to Earth. In the \u201cDeep Impact\u201d auction, it fetched $37,500.\n\n\n\n\nMost meteorites come from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. When two asteroids collide, as happens fairly often, they can hurl the resulting debris onto a path that eventually leads to Earth. More rarely, meteorites come from material ejected into space when an asteroid strikes the surfaces of the moon or Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA fragment of the Murchison meteorite, which contains elements that are up to 7 billion years old, sold at Christie\u2019s for $30,000.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2020\n \n\n\n\nOne of the highlights of the Christie\u2019s auction was a fragment of the Murchison meteorite, gathered from an Australian site north of Melbourne, where its fall was observed in 1969. The rocks, whose plain, dark appearance belies their importance, preserve stardust that\u2019s 5 to 7 billion years old. \u201cThese are the oldest solid materials ever found,\u201d wrote\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philipp Heck,\n\n\n\n a curator at Chicago\u2019s Field Museum and lead author of a study of the meteorite published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. At Christie\u2019s, a Murchison fragment measuring about 2 inches by 2 inches by 1 inch, or the size of a small bottle of hand sanitizer, was estimated to sell for $12,000-$18,000 and fetched $30,000.\n\n\nMeteorites often shatter on their way to Earth, but traders and collectors cut them up in other ways. Meteorites are sometimes sliced to display the crystals inside, as with the Esquel meteorite discovered in Argentina about 70 years ago. Its embedded crystals are olivine, a mineral from which the gemstone peridot is derived. Christie\u2019s asked up to $25,000 for the 0.1 inch-thick, roughly 6-by-8 inch slice; it sold for $37,500.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn iron meteorite found in the town of Gibeon in Namibia\u2019s Kalahari Desert.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2020\n \n\n\n\nTo give an idea of how the market has changed since 1990, longtime collector\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Darryl Pitt\n\n\n\n cites iron meteorites found near the town of Gibeon in Namibia\u2019s Kalahari Desert. They sold for as little as $16 a kilogram in the early 1990s, but then prices began to rise: \u201cI kept the meteorites I coveted and quickly flipped the specimens I didn\u2019t want for $25 per kilo, and I thought I was a genius.\u201d Today, Mr. Pitt says, \u201cthe most shapeless Gibeon meteorite will sell for $850 per kilogram. Aesthetic specimens\u2014which I liken to natural sculpture from outer space\u2014sell for far more.\u201d\nAmong the aesthetically pleasing meteorites on auction this year, Mr. Hyslop was partial to a twisting, slender Gibeon meteorite that almost resembles a sea-horse. The Martian meteorite sold by Heritage looks more like a traditional space rock, with one area \u201cranging from brown to reddish-pink and consistent with a Red Planet origin.\u201d Experts authenticate Martian or lunar rocks by comparing their makeup to samples analyzed by Martian landers or brought home from the moon by astronauts.\nBehind the price-tag talk, meteorite-lovers frequently display a sense of gravity (not the Newtonian kind) about the age of these objects. As Mr. Hyslop says of the Murchison rock: \u201cIt\u2019s quite humbling when you hold these things. It\u2019s the oldest thing you can touch.\u201d\n\n\nMore Icons\n\n\n\n\nDonatello in Florence\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nCreating a Public for Traditional Art\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nThe Human Body Laid Bare in Art\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Art of Sound\nFebruary 11, 2022 The newest collecting market involves some of the oldest objects on the planet. ",
        "author": "Peter Saenger"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth, Smashing Into Things (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1869",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-satellitesa-speeding-mass-of-space-junk-puts-them-at-risk-1505226427?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=23",
        "text": "Within a few years there might be another 20,000 or so small craft launched into a narrow band of space around Earth, more than 10 times the number of all working satellites in orbit today. The growth is spurred by advances in miniaturization, low-cost electronics and rocketry. Companies, space agencies, universities and even elementary-school students are jockeying for position. The traffic jam heightens the hazards of junk encircling Earth. The U.S. Air Force tracks 23,000 objects in orbit the size of a baseball or larger\u2014most of it derelict rocket parts, decommissioned spacecraft or wreckage. Aerospace experts said there may be millions more hazardous splinters too small to track.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n An ever-growing cloud of satellites, derelict rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft is circling the earth, raising the risk of costly orbital collisions. Video/Gabe Johnson/WSJ. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nAt risk are the international space station, the Hubble Space Telescope and hundreds of satellites used for communications, national security, weather forecasting and navigation. The Satellite Industry Association estimates that about $127 billion in annual revenue from satellite services is vulnerable.\n\n\nTraveling at orbital speeds up to 17,000 miles an hour, even an aluminum pellet 1-centimeter wide packs the kinetic equivalent of a 400-pound safe moving at 60 miles an hour. Last year, a scrap barely bigger than a grain of salt blew a hole in the European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel 1-B satellite, knocking off five pieces that narrowly missed a nearby satellite. In June, something jolted the AMC9 telecommunications satellite, owned by Luxembourg-based SES, disrupting data and broadcast services over the U.S. and Mexico. \u201cThis is the first time this has happened to us,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Markus Payer,\n\n\n\n\n vice president for corporate communications at SES, which operates 65 satellites. Company engineers re-established control of the crippled craft and hope to park it in a \u201cgraveyard\u201d orbit where it won\u2019t threaten other spacecraft. The incident is costing SES about $23 million in lost revenues this year and another $44 million in the value of the spacecraft itself. Unchecked, the\u00a0growing debris in orbit \u201cmight make some regions of space unusable in the future, and that would impact everybody\u2014everybody who uses a mobile phone, who gets television, who relies on weather forecasts,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Holger Krag,\n\n\n\n\n head of the European Space Agency\u2019s Space Debris Office. A growing band of debris and tiny satellites imperils the Hubble Space Telescope and equipment used for phones, national security and weather forecasting. Officials worry the clutter might eventually make some parts of space unusable. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth, Smashing Into Things (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1870",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-satellitesa-speeding-mass-of-space-junk-puts-them-at-risk-1505226427?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=88",
        "text": "Within a few years there might be another 20,000 or so small craft launched into a narrow band of space around Earth, more than 10 times the number of all working satellites in orbit today. The growth is spurred by advances in miniaturization, low-cost electronics and rocketry. Companies, space agencies, universities and even elementary-school students are jockeying for position. The traffic jam heightens the hazards of junk encircling Earth. The U.S. Air Force tracks 23,000 objects in orbit the size of a baseball or larger\u2014most of it derelict rocket parts, decommissioned spacecraft or wreckage. Aerospace experts said there may be millions more hazardous splinters too small to track.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n An ever-growing cloud of satellites, derelict rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft is circling the earth, raising the risk of costly orbital collisions. Video/Gabe Johnson/WSJ. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nAt risk are the international space station, the Hubble Space Telescope and hundreds of satellites used for communications, national security, weather forecasting and navigation. The Satellite Industry Association estimates that about $127 billion in annual revenue from satellite services is vulnerable.\n\n\nTraveling at orbital speeds up to 17,000 miles an hour, even an aluminum pellet 1-centimeter wide packs the kinetic equivalent of a 400-pound safe moving at 60 miles an hour. Last year, a scrap barely bigger than a grain of salt blew a hole in the European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel 1-B satellite, knocking off five pieces that narrowly missed a nearby satellite. In June, something jolted the AMC9 telecommunications satellite, owned by Luxembourg-based SES, disrupting data and broadcast services over the U.S. and Mexico. \u201cThis is the first time this has happened to us,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Markus Payer,\n\n\n\n\n vice president for corporate communications at SES, which operates 65 satellites. Company engineers re-established control of the crippled craft and hope to park it in a \u201cgraveyard\u201d orbit where it won\u2019t threaten other spacecraft. The incident is costing SES about $23 million in lost revenues this year and another $44 million in the value of the spacecraft itself. Unchecked, the\u00a0growing debris in orbit \u201cmight make some regions of space unusable in the future, and that would impact everybody\u2014everybody who uses a mobile phone, who gets television, who relies on weather forecasts,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Holger Krag,\n\n\n\n\n head of the European Space Agency\u2019s Space Debris Office. A growing band of debris and tiny satellites imperils the Hubble Space Telescope and equipment used for phones, national security and weather forecasting. Officials worry the clutter might eventually make some parts of space unusable. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth, Smashing Into Things (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1871",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-satellitesa-speeding-mass-of-space-junk-puts-them-at-risk-1505226427?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=77",
        "text": "Within a few years there might be another 20,000 or so small craft launched into a narrow band of space around Earth, more than 10 times the number of all working satellites in orbit today. The growth is spurred by advances in miniaturization, low-cost electronics and rocketry. Companies, space agencies, universities and even elementary-school students are jockeying for position. The traffic jam heightens the hazards of junk encircling Earth. The U.S. Air Force tracks 23,000 objects in orbit the size of a baseball or larger\u2014most of it derelict rocket parts, decommissioned spacecraft or wreckage. Aerospace experts said there may be millions more hazardous splinters too small to track.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n An ever-growing cloud of satellites, derelict rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft is circling the earth, raising the risk of costly orbital collisions. Video/Gabe Johnson/WSJ. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nAt risk are the international space station, the Hubble Space Telescope and hundreds of satellites used for communications, national security, weather forecasting and navigation. The Satellite Industry Association estimates that about $127 billion in annual revenue from satellite services is vulnerable.\n\n\nTraveling at orbital speeds up to 17,000 miles an hour, even an aluminum pellet 1-centimeter wide packs the kinetic equivalent of a 400-pound safe moving at 60 miles an hour. Last year, a scrap barely bigger than a grain of salt blew a hole in the European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel 1-B satellite, knocking off five pieces that narrowly missed a nearby satellite. In June, something jolted the AMC9 telecommunications satellite, owned by Luxembourg-based SES, disrupting data and broadcast services over the U.S. and Mexico. \u201cThis is the first time this has happened to us,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Markus Payer,\n\n\n\n\n vice president for corporate communications at SES, which operates 65 satellites. Company engineers re-established control of the crippled craft and hope to park it in a \u201cgraveyard\u201d orbit where it won\u2019t threaten other spacecraft. The incident is costing SES about $23 million in lost revenues this year and another $44 million in the value of the spacecraft itself. Unchecked, the\u00a0growing debris in orbit \u201cmight make some regions of space unusable in the future, and that would impact everybody\u2014everybody who uses a mobile phone, who gets television, who relies on weather forecasts,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Holger Krag,\n\n\n\n\n head of the European Space Agency\u2019s Space Debris Office. A growing band of debris and tiny satellites imperils the Hubble Space Telescope and equipment used for phones, national security and weather forecasting. Officials worry the clutter might eventually make some parts of space unusable. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth, Smashing Into Things (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1872",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-satellitesa-speeding-mass-of-space-junk-puts-them-at-risk-1505226427?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=114",
        "text": "Within a few years there might be another 20,000 or so small craft launched into a narrow band of space around Earth, more than 10 times the number of all working satellites in orbit today. The growth is spurred by advances in miniaturization, low-cost electronics and rocketry. Companies, space agencies, universities and even elementary-school students are jockeying for position. The traffic jam heightens the hazards of junk encircling Earth. The U.S. Air Force tracks 23,000 objects in orbit the size of a baseball or larger\u2014most of it derelict rocket parts, decommissioned spacecraft or wreckage. Aerospace experts said there may be millions more hazardous splinters too small to track.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n An ever-growing cloud of satellites, derelict rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft is circling the earth, raising the risk of costly orbital collisions. Video/Gabe Johnson/WSJ. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nAt risk are the international space station, the Hubble Space Telescope and hundreds of satellites used for communications, national security, weather forecasting and navigation. The Satellite Industry Association estimates that about $127 billion in annual revenue from satellite services is vulnerable.\n\n\nTraveling at orbital speeds up to 17,000 miles an hour, even an aluminum pellet 1-centimeter wide packs the kinetic equivalent of a 400-pound safe moving at 60 miles an hour. Last year, a scrap barely bigger than a grain of salt blew a hole in the European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel 1-B satellite, knocking off five pieces that narrowly missed a nearby satellite. In June, something jolted the AMC9 telecommunications satellite, owned by Luxembourg-based SES, disrupting data and broadcast services over the U.S. and Mexico. \u201cThis is the first time this has happened to us,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Markus Payer,\n\n\n\n\n vice president for corporate communications at SES, which operates 65 satellites. Company engineers re-established control of the crippled craft and hope to park it in a \u201cgraveyard\u201d orbit where it won\u2019t threaten other spacecraft. The incident is costing SES about $23 million in lost revenues this year and another $44 million in the value of the spacecraft itself. Unchecked, the\u00a0growing debris in orbit \u201cmight make some regions of space unusable in the future, and that would impact everybody\u2014everybody who uses a mobile phone, who gets television, who relies on weather forecasts,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Holger Krag,\n\n\n\n\n head of the European Space Agency\u2019s Space Debris Office. A growing band of debris and tiny satellites imperils the Hubble Space Telescope and equipment used for phones, national security and weather forecasting. Officials worry the clutter might eventually make some parts of space unusable. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Observe Massive Landslide  on \u2018Ducky\u2019-Shaped Comet (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1873",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-observe-massive-landslide-on-ducky-shaped-comet-1490106602?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=25",
        "text": "It is the first time such a sequence of events has been observed on a comet, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy. So-called \u201coutbursts\u201d of dust occur frequently on comets, but scientists didn\u2019t know what caused them. Comets, chunks of dust-coated ice scientists fondly call \u201cdirty snowballs\u201d, are some of the most geologically active\u2014and unpredictable\u2014bodies in the solar system, said Maurizio Pajola, a postdoc at NASA Ames Research Center in California, who led the research. \u201cThey are like cats, they do whatever they want.\u201d Rosetta crashed into the comet it had been orbiting, called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in September 2016, but scientists are still going through the data and images it collected. The images that document 67P\u2019s landslide were taken over a few days in July 2015. Images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft captured comet\u2019s landslide and the ensuing burst of dust\u2014a first, according to new research. ",
        "author": "Ellie Kincaid"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Observe Massive Landslide  on \u2018Ducky\u2019-Shaped Comet (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1874",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-observe-massive-landslide-on-ducky-shaped-comet-1490106602?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=97",
        "text": "It is the first time such a sequence of events has been observed on a comet, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy. So-called \u201coutbursts\u201d of dust occur frequently on comets, but scientists didn\u2019t know what caused them. Comets, chunks of dust-coated ice scientists fondly call \u201cdirty snowballs\u201d, are some of the most geologically active\u2014and unpredictable\u2014bodies in the solar system, said Maurizio Pajola, a postdoc at NASA Ames Research Center in California, who led the research. \u201cThey are like cats, they do whatever they want.\u201d Rosetta crashed into the comet it had been orbiting, called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in September 2016, but scientists are still going through the data and images it collected. The images that document 67P\u2019s landslide were taken over a few days in July 2015. Images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft captured comet\u2019s landslide and the ensuing burst of dust\u2014a first, according to new research. ",
        "author": "Ellie Kincaid"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Observe Massive Landslide  on \u2018Ducky\u2019-Shaped Comet (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1875",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-observe-massive-landslide-on-ducky-shaped-comet-1490106602?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=86",
        "text": "It is the first time such a sequence of events has been observed on a comet, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy. So-called \u201coutbursts\u201d of dust occur frequently on comets, but scientists didn\u2019t know what caused them. Comets, chunks of dust-coated ice scientists fondly call \u201cdirty snowballs\u201d, are some of the most geologically active\u2014and unpredictable\u2014bodies in the solar system, said Maurizio Pajola, a postdoc at NASA Ames Research Center in California, who led the research. \u201cThey are like cats, they do whatever they want.\u201d Rosetta crashed into the comet it had been orbiting, called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in September 2016, but scientists are still going through the data and images it collected. The images that document 67P\u2019s landslide were taken over a few days in July 2015. Images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft captured comet\u2019s landslide and the ensuing burst of dust\u2014a first, according to new research. ",
        "author": "Ellie Kincaid"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Observe Massive Landslide  on \u2018Ducky\u2019-Shaped Comet (WSJ: In Depth) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1876",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-observe-massive-landslide-on-ducky-shaped-comet-1490106602?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=127",
        "text": "It is the first time such a sequence of events has been observed on a comet, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy. So-called \u201coutbursts\u201d of dust occur frequently on comets, but scientists didn\u2019t know what caused them. Comets, chunks of dust-coated ice scientists fondly call \u201cdirty snowballs\u201d, are some of the most geologically active\u2014and unpredictable\u2014bodies in the solar system, said Maurizio Pajola, a postdoc at NASA Ames Research Center in California, who led the research. \u201cThey are like cats, they do whatever they want.\u201d Rosetta crashed into the comet it had been orbiting, called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in September 2016, but scientists are still going through the data and images it collected. The images that document 67P\u2019s landslide were taken over a few days in July 2015. Images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft captured comet\u2019s landslide and the ensuing burst of dust\u2014a first, according to new research. ",
        "author": "Ellie Kincaid"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | A photographer explores the mystique behind her memories of Crimea (WP: In Sight) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1877",
        "date": "2019-03-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2019/03/25/photographer-explores-mystique-behind-her-memories-crimea/",
        "text": "When I was a child, Crimea always seemed like a sacred, apolitical place. It had distinctive mythology and traces of ancient civilizations. It was there that I saw the sea for the first time. Yearly trips were somewhat like visiting a favorite grandmother during holidays, a time free from worries.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe already rich mythological layer of the peninsula was constantly fed by local legends. Rocks, bays, rivers and groves became participants in epic stories. Natural locations were endowed with wonderful properties and received names. In our time, these myths formed the basis of excursion routes popular in Crimea. Pilgrimages to places of power \u2014 one of the leading destinations of the tourism business. Dozens of places in Crimea are considered sacred in various spiritual teachings. The Soviet era gave the peninsula new mythological constructions \u2014 totalitarian cults and enthusiastic utopias of space exploration. World War II became the main collective trauma and the main object of the mythologization of the new time. During this period, the leading status returns to the image of the warrior, praising the special army romance. After the war, there was a new wave of immigrants from the Soviet countries, caused by the need to support agricultural land after the mass deportation of more than 180,000 Crimean Tatars and 40,000 representatives of other nations.After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peninsula became part of Ukraine but in early 2014 was annexed into Russian territory. Exposed from under its romantic history, Crimea would then become known as the center of political conflicts. Perhaps these conflicts will one day become another layer of mythology. For now, the country of my childhood has transformed into an isolated island on the map of Russia.In Sight is The Washington Post\u2019s photography blog for visual narrative. This platform showcases compelling and diverse imagery from staff and freelance photographers, news agencies and archives. If you are interested in submitting a story to In Sight, please complete this form.More on In Sight:\u2018Everyone was leaving, and we were trying to get back in\u2019: A photographer remembers the end of the Soviet Afghan War\u2018Etched, carved and broken\u2019: A photographer\u2019s view of the world\u2019s largest underground marble quarryMeet the men living deep in the Ozarks, away from the fray Stanislava Novgorodtseva has been observing Crimea transform since her childhood. A photographer explores the mystique behind her memories of Crimea",
        "author": "Stanislava Novgorodtseva"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | A photographer explores the mystique behind her memories of Crimea (WP: In Sight) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1878",
        "date": "2019-03-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2019/03/25/photographer-explores-mystique-behind-her-memories-crimea/",
        "text": "When I was a child, Crimea always seemed like a sacred, apolitical place. It had distinctive mythology and traces of ancient civilizations. It was there that I saw the sea for the first time. Yearly trips were somewhat like visiting a favorite grandmother during holidays, a time free from worries.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe already rich mythological layer of the peninsula was constantly fed by local legends. Rocks, bays, rivers and groves became participants in epic stories. Natural locations were endowed with wonderful properties and received names. In our time, these myths formed the basis of excursion routes popular in Crimea. Pilgrimages to places of power \u2014 one of the leading destinations of the tourism business. Dozens of places in Crimea are considered sacred in various spiritual teachings. The Soviet era gave the peninsula new mythological constructions \u2014 totalitarian cults and enthusiastic utopias of space exploration. World War II became the main collective trauma and the main object of the mythologization of the new time. During this period, the leading status returns to the image of the warrior, praising the special army romance. After the war, there was a new wave of immigrants from the Soviet countries, caused by the need to support agricultural land after the mass deportation of more than 180,000 Crimean Tatars and 40,000 representatives of other nations.After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peninsula became part of Ukraine but in early 2014 was annexed into Russian territory. Exposed from under its romantic history, Crimea would then become known as the center of political conflicts. Perhaps these conflicts will one day become another layer of mythology. For now, the country of my childhood has transformed into an isolated island on the map of Russia.In Sight is The Washington Post\u2019s photography blog for visual narrative. This platform showcases compelling and diverse imagery from staff and freelance photographers, news agencies and archives. If you are interested in submitting a story to In Sight, please complete this form.More on In Sight:\u2018Everyone was leaving, and we were trying to get back in\u2019: A photographer remembers the end of the Soviet Afghan War\u2018Etched, carved and broken\u2019: A photographer\u2019s view of the world\u2019s largest underground marble quarryMeet the men living deep in the Ozarks, away from the fray Stanislava Novgorodtseva has been observing Crimea transform since her childhood. A photographer explores the mystique behind her memories of Crimea",
        "author": "Stanislava Novgorodtseva"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Vincent Fournier\u2019s \u2018Space Utopia\u2019: Space exploration as humanity\u2019s great adventure  (WP: In Sight) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1879",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2019/03/18/vincent-fourniers-space-utopia-space-exploration-humanitys-great-adventure/",
        "text": "The images in Vincent Fournier\u2019s new book, \u201cSpace Utopia,\u201d are reminiscent of a Stanley Kubrick film. Over the course of 10 years, Fournier explored space centers on the world, from a Mars research station in San Rafael Swell, Utah, to the TeamIndus Space Facility in Bangalore, India, documenting the spaces and the people who filled them. His photographs are composed thoughtfully, showing his awareness of shape, scale and color. The quality of light in Fournier\u2019s images give them a cinematic feeling. They seem magical and similar to a childhood dream. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFournier found inspiration for these photographs in television shows, movies, comic books and sci-fi novels from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as childhood memories of visits to science museums. When the space race began, leaving the planet was a \u201ccollective dream.\u201d Many still share the current desire to keep exploring the opportunities that may lie beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Fournier photographed space centers and artifacts that were an integral part of space exploration in the 1950s and 1960s. He also photographed progress being made toward future journeys to space, such as astronauts training for Mars in the desert of Utah. Fournier says of his work:\u201cSpace exploration is humanity\u2019s great adventure, a leap into the unknown, towards a dark light, beyond Earth\u2019s protective atmosphere and the gravity that keeps us there. Space represents the universal desire not only to contemplate the sky, but also to fall there. Desire, from the Latin word desiderare, means regret and nostalgia for a lost star. But how can we desire something that we don\u2019t know? Could it be that the starsdusts that we are do remember this primitive time where we floated in space? Men would then be like gods fallen from heaven, nostalgic and unconscious of this star that they lost?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe photographs in Fournier\u2019s book are ethereal. Small human figures often stand in juxtaposition in wide-open spaces or next to massive equipment. The colors are rich, and the light is soft. The photos feel hopeful, like the dream explore the unknown. \u201cSpace Utopia\u201d by Vincent Fournier, published by Rizzoli, is available now.In Sight is The Washington Post\u2019s photography blog for visual narrative. This platform showcases compelling and diverse imagery from staff and freelance photographers, news agencies and archives. If you are interested in submitting a story to In Sight, please complete this form.More on In Sight:Candy-colored explosions in the sky: The stunning phenomenon of the aurora borealisSurreal images from Belgium\u2019s Aalst Carnival, a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity\u2018The residue on these screens that I am shooting is not just grime. It is evidence of the otherwise invisible.\u2019 Vincent Fournier's new book Space Utopia is full of dreamy images that explore human exploration of space. The collection of photographs, made from 2007 to 2017, show space centers and artifacts that were imperative to early trips beyond Earth's atmosphere as well as current progress towards journeys to Mars. Vincent Fournier\u2019s \u2018Space Utopia\u2019: Space exploration as humanity\u2019s great adventure ",
        "author": "Annaliese Nurnberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Vincent Fournier\u2019s \u2018Space Utopia\u2019: Space exploration as humanity\u2019s great adventure  (WP: In Sight) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1880",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2019/03/18/vincent-fourniers-space-utopia-space-exploration-humanitys-great-adventure/",
        "text": "The images in Vincent Fournier\u2019s new book, \u201cSpace Utopia,\u201d are reminiscent of a Stanley Kubrick film. Over the course of 10 years, Fournier explored space centers on the world, from a Mars research station in San Rafael Swell, Utah, to the TeamIndus Space Facility in Bangalore, India, documenting the spaces and the people who filled them. His photographs are composed thoughtfully, showing his awareness of shape, scale and color. The quality of light in Fournier\u2019s images give them a cinematic feeling. They seem magical and similar to a childhood dream. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFournier found inspiration for these photographs in television shows, movies, comic books and sci-fi novels from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as childhood memories of visits to science museums. When the space race began, leaving the planet was a \u201ccollective dream.\u201d Many still share the current desire to keep exploring the opportunities that may lie beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Fournier photographed space centers and artifacts that were an integral part of space exploration in the 1950s and 1960s. He also photographed progress being made toward future journeys to space, such as astronauts training for Mars in the desert of Utah. Fournier says of his work:\u201cSpace exploration is humanity\u2019s great adventure, a leap into the unknown, towards a dark light, beyond Earth\u2019s protective atmosphere and the gravity that keeps us there. Space represents the universal desire not only to contemplate the sky, but also to fall there. Desire, from the Latin word desiderare, means regret and nostalgia for a lost star. But how can we desire something that we don\u2019t know? Could it be that the starsdusts that we are do remember this primitive time where we floated in space? Men would then be like gods fallen from heaven, nostalgic and unconscious of this star that they lost?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe photographs in Fournier\u2019s book are ethereal. Small human figures often stand in juxtaposition in wide-open spaces or next to massive equipment. The colors are rich, and the light is soft. The photos feel hopeful, like the dream explore the unknown. \u201cSpace Utopia\u201d by Vincent Fournier, published by Rizzoli, is available now.In Sight is The Washington Post\u2019s photography blog for visual narrative. This platform showcases compelling and diverse imagery from staff and freelance photographers, news agencies and archives. If you are interested in submitting a story to In Sight, please complete this form.More on In Sight:Candy-colored explosions in the sky: The stunning phenomenon of the aurora borealisSurreal images from Belgium\u2019s Aalst Carnival, a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity\u2018The residue on these screens that I am shooting is not just grime. It is evidence of the otherwise invisible.\u2019 Vincent Fournier's new book Space Utopia is full of dreamy images that explore human exploration of space. The collection of photographs, made from 2007 to 2017, show space centers and artifacts that were imperative to early trips beyond Earth's atmosphere as well as current progress towards journeys to Mars. Vincent Fournier\u2019s \u2018Space Utopia\u2019: Space exploration as humanity\u2019s great adventure ",
        "author": "Annaliese Nurnberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "In the Elevator With The First Female Space Tourist (WSJ: In the Elevator) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1881",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-the-elevator-with/in-the-elevator-with-the-first-female-space-tourist/A3577C06-F60A-40DA-A904-5D9F4DC54CE8?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=18",
        "text": " WSJ's Joanna Stern \"bumps into\" Anousheh Ansari, the CEO of XPrize and the first Iranian woman to go to space. The two discuss what's next for space tourism, whether Elon Musk is going to make it to Mars, and going to the bathroom in zero gravity. Photo: Andria Chamberlin for The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "In the Elevator With The First Female Space Tourist (WSJ: In the Elevator) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1882",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-the-elevator-with/in-the-elevator-with-the-first-female-space-tourist/A3577C06-F60A-40DA-A904-5D9F4DC54CE8?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=62",
        "text": " WSJ's Joanna Stern \"bumps into\" Anousheh Ansari, the CEO of XPrize and the first Iranian woman to go to space. The two discuss what's next for space tourism, whether Elon Musk is going to make it to Mars, and going to the bathroom in zero gravity. Photo: Andria Chamberlin for The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Google Street View\u2019s latest destination: The International Space Station (WP: Innovations) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1883",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/07/21/google-street-views-latest-destination-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "You\u2019ve used Google Street View to check out a new apartment, map traffic before you hit the road and search for haunting slices of the everyday world.Now, the comprehensive terrestrial mapping system has gone extraterrestrial, allowing users to peer inside the International Space Station\u00a0from their computer 248 miles below with 360-degree, panoramic views. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFloat in space w/ new @Google Street View of @Space_Station! See where crew exercise, conduct @ISS_Research + more: https://t.co/gJycxkdHcX pic.twitter.com/VqesnouCYs\u2014 NASA (@NASA) July 20, 2017\n\nThe Street View imagery was captured by Thomas Pesquet, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, who spent six months aboard the ISS before returning to earth in June.Google Street View, which is featured in Google Maps and Google World, was launched in 2007 and quickly expanded locations around the globe, including places as remote as Mount Everest base camp\u00a0and as offbeat as Scotland\u2019s Loch Ness. The vast majority of Street View\u2019s photography is shot by a vehicle, whose movement is available to fans online.The search for the Loch Ness monster has moved online, thanks to GoogleGoogle\u2019s foray into space is the first time Street\u00a0View imagery was captured beyond planet Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post about his experience, Pesquet wrote that \u201cit was difficult to find the words or take a picture that accurately describes the feeling of being in space.\u201d\u201cWorking with Google on my latest mission, I captured Street View imagery to show what the ISS looks like from the inside, and share what it\u2019s like to look down on Earth from space,\u201d he added.The virtual tour allows users to peek into areas where astronauts eat, exercise, work and even bathe.Pesquet\u2019s imagery reveal an environment that may look a bit cramped and chaotic \u2014 if not altogether dizzying \u2014 to humans anchored on earth, but some of the scenes from inside the ISS are downright mesmerizing.Story continues below advertisementThe images were captured using DSLR cameras and then \u201cstitched together\u201d back on earth to create panoramic views.Pesquet noted that the ISS is a \u201cbusy place\u201d with six crew members working and researching 12 hours a day.Advertisement\u201cThere are a lot of obstacles up there, and we had limited time to capture the imagery, so we had to be confident that our approach would work. Oh, and there\u2019s that whole zero gravity thing,\u201d he wrote.Floating through the ISS online, you\u2019ll notice clickable dots with detailed descriptions of the space and its objects to help viewers understand what they\u2019re looking at. Pesquet noted that this is the first time annotations \u2014 \u201chelpful little notes that pop up as you explore the ISS\u201d \u2014 have been added to Street View imagery.The ISS is a \u201clarge spacecraft\u201d that orbits around Earth at more than 17,500 miles per hour and is home for astronauts from around the world, according to NASA. The ISS is made up of many pieces that were constructed by astronauts beginning in 1998. By 2000, as more pieces of the station were added, the station was ready for people, according to NASA. Portions of the station are connected via modules known as \u201cnodes,\u201d according to NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe first crew arrived on November 2, 2000,\u201d NASA wrote. \u201cPeople have lived on the space station ever since. Over time more pieces have been added. NASA and its partners around the world finished the space station in 2011.\u201dNASA compares the inside of the station to the inside of a house, noting that the structure \u2014 which weighs almost one million pounds and covers an area the side of a football field \u2014 has five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gymnasium and a big bay window.The station houses labs from the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe.\u201cWe can collect data on the Earth\u2019s oceans, atmosphere, and land surface,\u201d Pesquet wrote. \u201cWe can conduct experiments and studies that we wouldn\u2019t be able to do from Earth, like monitoring how the human body reacts to microgravity, solving mysteries of the immune system, studying cyclones to alert populations and governments when a storm is approaching, or monitoring marine litter \u2014 the rapidly increasing amount waste found in our oceans.\u201dSeveral times a week, Mission Control at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston determines where Earthlings can spot the station from the ground below from thousands of locations all over the globe. To find out the best time to see the station from your town, click here.Read more:\u00a0How doctors used virtual reality to save the lives of conjoined twin sistersHow a fish tank helped hack a casinoSamsung to manufacture iPhone chips for Apple again, report says The virtual tour allows users to peek into areas where astronauts eat, exercise, work and even bathe. Google Street View\u2019s latest destination: The International Space Station",
        "author": "Peter Holley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Google Street View\u2019s latest destination: The International Space Station (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1884",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/07/21/google-street-views-latest-destination-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "You\u2019ve used Google Street View to check out a new apartment, map traffic before you hit the road and search for haunting slices of the everyday world.Now, the comprehensive terrestrial mapping system has gone extraterrestrial, allowing users to peer inside the International Space Station\u00a0from their computer 248 miles below with 360-degree, panoramic views. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFloat in space w/ new @Google Street View of @Space_Station! See where crew exercise, conduct @ISS_Research + more: https://t.co/gJycxkdHcX pic.twitter.com/VqesnouCYs\u2014 NASA (@NASA) July 20, 2017\n\nThe Street View imagery was captured by Thomas Pesquet, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, who spent six months aboard the ISS before returning to earth in June.Google Street View, which is featured in Google Maps and Google World, was launched in 2007 and quickly expanded locations around the globe, including places as remote as Mount Everest base camp\u00a0and as offbeat as Scotland\u2019s Loch Ness. The vast majority of Street View\u2019s photography is shot by a vehicle, whose movement is available to fans online.The search for the Loch Ness monster has moved online, thanks to GoogleGoogle\u2019s foray into space is the first time Street\u00a0View imagery was captured beyond planet Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post about his experience, Pesquet wrote that \u201cit was difficult to find the words or take a picture that accurately describes the feeling of being in space.\u201d\u201cWorking with Google on my latest mission, I captured Street View imagery to show what the ISS looks like from the inside, and share what it\u2019s like to look down on Earth from space,\u201d he added.The virtual tour allows users to peek into areas where astronauts eat, exercise, work and even bathe.Pesquet\u2019s imagery reveal an environment that may look a bit cramped and chaotic \u2014 if not altogether dizzying \u2014 to humans anchored on earth, but some of the scenes from inside the ISS are downright mesmerizing.Story continues below advertisementThe images were captured using DSLR cameras and then \u201cstitched together\u201d back on earth to create panoramic views.Pesquet noted that the ISS is a \u201cbusy place\u201d with six crew members working and researching 12 hours a day.Advertisement\u201cThere are a lot of obstacles up there, and we had limited time to capture the imagery, so we had to be confident that our approach would work. Oh, and there\u2019s that whole zero gravity thing,\u201d he wrote.Floating through the ISS online, you\u2019ll notice clickable dots with detailed descriptions of the space and its objects to help viewers understand what they\u2019re looking at. Pesquet noted that this is the first time annotations \u2014 \u201chelpful little notes that pop up as you explore the ISS\u201d \u2014 have been added to Street View imagery.The ISS is a \u201clarge spacecraft\u201d that orbits around Earth at more than 17,500 miles per hour and is home for astronauts from around the world, according to NASA. The ISS is made up of many pieces that were constructed by astronauts beginning in 1998. By 2000, as more pieces of the station were added, the station was ready for people, according to NASA. Portions of the station are connected via modules known as \u201cnodes,\u201d according to NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe first crew arrived on November 2, 2000,\u201d NASA wrote. \u201cPeople have lived on the space station ever since. Over time more pieces have been added. NASA and its partners around the world finished the space station in 2011.\u201dNASA compares the inside of the station to the inside of a house, noting that the structure \u2014 which weighs almost one million pounds and covers an area the side of a football field \u2014 has five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gymnasium and a big bay window.The station houses labs from the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe.\u201cWe can collect data on the Earth\u2019s oceans, atmosphere, and land surface,\u201d Pesquet wrote. \u201cWe can conduct experiments and studies that we wouldn\u2019t be able to do from Earth, like monitoring how the human body reacts to microgravity, solving mysteries of the immune system, studying cyclones to alert populations and governments when a storm is approaching, or monitoring marine litter \u2014 the rapidly increasing amount waste found in our oceans.\u201dSeveral times a week, Mission Control at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston determines where Earthlings can spot the station from the ground below from thousands of locations all over the globe. To find out the best time to see the station from your town, click here.Read more:\u00a0How doctors used virtual reality to save the lives of conjoined twin sistersHow a fish tank helped hack a casinoSamsung to manufacture iPhone chips for Apple again, report says The virtual tour allows users to peek into areas where astronauts eat, exercise, work and even bathe. Google Street View\u2019s latest destination: The International Space Station",
        "author": "Peter Holley"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX wants to beam Internet down to Earth. Here\u2019s how it will start. (WP: Innovations) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1885",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/02/16/spacex-wants-to-beam-internet-down-to-earth-heres-how-itll-start/",
        "text": "SpaceX is preparing to\u00a0hit another orbital milestone with the launch of a pair of experimental satellites on Sunday that are designed to beam an ultrafast, lag-free Internet connection down to Earth.The test satellites, dubbed Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b, are a part of a years-long plan by chief executive Elon Musk to create a\u00a0fleet of orbiting devices\u00a0to blanket the globe in wireless broadband connectivity. SpaceX ultimately intends to put about 12,000 broadband satellites in low Earth orbit, and Sunday\u2019s payload will mark the company\u2019s first\u00a0attempt at realizing the dream. The\u00a0initial satellites in the network are\u00a0expected to come online\u00a0next year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSatellite broadband is already available. But it\u2019s slow, expensive and not really accessible to the masses. The goal of SpaceX and almost a dozen other companies is to deliver fast,\u00a0reliable Internet access to virtually everyone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementContemporary satellite broadband is mostly used by companies and organizations that require Internet access in remote environments or in specific scenarios, not residential connectivity.\u00a0First-responders to a natural disaster, for example, can spend hundreds of dollars a day for a 5 Mbps connection, which they use to coordinate relief efforts. The shipping and aviation industries have also been known to use conventional satellite data services.But\u00a0for consumers,\u00a0companies such as SpaceX believe a different approach could help lower costs and increase reliability, making\u00a0satellite broadband\u00a0practical for everyday use. The\u00a0idea involves\u00a0placing satellites much lower in orbit, reducing the amount of time it takes for signals to travel from ground-based antennas up to space and back down again \u2014 and broadening the potential user base to include the entire world.To ensure consistent coverage, providers of next-gen satellite broadband will need to put up many more satellites, as well as develop\u00a0accurate tracking technology that\u00a0lets devices on the ground communicate with them without missing a beat. And they\u2019ll need to use radio frequencies that are known for their\u00a0low-lag\u00a0physical properties. SpaceX\u2019s network plans to use airwaves in the Ka-, Ku- and V-bands \u2014 with\u00a0about\u00a04,400 K-band satellites\u00a0and\u00a0more than\u00a07,000 V-band satellites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome critics of satellite broadband have warned of the risk of creating more debris in space that could prove harmful to other space operations. In October, a pair of U.S. senators sent a letter to the\u00a0Federal Communications Commission asking the\u00a0FCC to coordinate with other federal agencies on space junk in light of the plans by SpaceX and others to add thousands of new\u00a0 satellites to Earth\u2019s orbit.\u201cCollisions with debris as small as 10 cm can catastrophically damage satellites, and debris as small as 1 cm can disable spacecraft,\u201d wrote Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). \u201cEach collision exponentially increases the likelihood of another collision, creating a potential cascade that could severely inhibit future telecommunications, national security, and other space-based activity in the\u00a0[low Earth orbit] environment.\u201dCompanies have sought for years to make satellite Internet a reality, due to the growing\u00a0demand \u2014 and\u00a0commercial opportunities \u2014\u00a0linked to\u00a0broadband.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe FCC gave testing approval last year to OneWeb, a SpaceX competitor run by a former Google engineer that\u2019s also planning its own constellation of broadband satellites. And this week, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he was urging his four colleagues at the agency to support giving SpaceX a similar endorsement.\u201cSatellite technology can help reach Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach,\u201d said Pai in a statement Wednesday. \u201cAnd it can offer more competition where terrestrial Internet access is already available.\u201dSpaceX didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment on its satellites.Story continues below advertisementWell-heeled tech companies,\u00a0such as Google and Facebook, whose business depends on capturing a large audience of Internet users, have periodically explored the idea of beaming broadband down to Earth from satellites, balloons or even hovering drones. But aside from Google\u2019s balloon idea,\u00a0Project Loon, few of these proposals have taken off.AdvertisementThe need for robust, high-speed Internet access is especially pressing in developing countries, which lack traditional Internet infrastructure. More than half of the world\u2019s population still doesn\u2019t have an Internet connection, according to a 2017 United Nations report. Of those people, about six in 10 live in the Asia-Pacific region, while\u00a0two in 10 live in Africa.But poor broadband penetration is an issue in wealthy countries, too. As many as 60 million urban Americans and 16 million rural Americans still aren\u2019t connected to the Internet, according to the research firm IHS Markit. The company is launching its first test satellites on Sunday. SpaceX wants to beam Internet down to Earth. Here\u2019s how it will start.",
        "author": "Brian Fung"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Force is using virtual-reality headsets to train its Guardians to work on satellites (WP: Innovations) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1886",
        "date": "2021-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/space-force-virtual-reality-training/",
        "text": "The U.S. Space Force is using virtual reality headsets to launch satellite mission operators into places they\u2019ve never been before.The military branch, started under former president Donald Trump, is working with government contractor SAIC on a gamified training platform that allows employees to interact with full-scale digital replicas of national security satellites. The platform lets the armed forces practice responding to missile warning scenarios and collaborate in cyberspace. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThey\u2019re not exactly rehearsing how to destroy alien spaceships. But if satellite solar panels need to be fixed, they can practice doing that \u2014 without having to travel to space to do it. If a spacecraft needs to be repositioned, they can execute that too. If troops need more information about a mission, it\u2019s as simple as pressing a button. No space suits or textbooks necessary.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe branch\u2019s main purpose is to improve national-security capabilities in space, according to the Pentagon. More directly, Space Force\u2019s job is to maintain, protect and expand the U.S. fleet of advanced military satellites.The contract with SAIC was established to create a virtual replica of space stations, mission control rooms and satellites, which can be difficult or costly to get to. That way, the space agency can streamline operations and train teams on what to expect before being launched on a mission.\u201cSometimes you go to these demos, and it\u2019s just some nondescript room, but it doesn\u2019t really look like your (real world) environment,\u201d said John Lynch, program director for SAIC, who manages the firm\u2019s contract with the Space and Missile Systems Center. \u201cWe wanted the experience (to feel) like you were actually there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTypically, experiential training requires custom simulators that could cost millions of dollars to build. The contractor worked to bring costs down by developing a cloud-based platform that can be updated over-the-air and deployed on a mass scale.One innovation we won\u2019t be seeing soon: Over-the-air chargingThe outcome is a video game-like experience accessible on Facebook\u2019s Oculus Quest headsets.Essentially, they\u2019re in cyberspace with colleagues where they role-play as if they were at international space stations and mission control centers.The simulation experience is pretty straightforward. Space Force troops, which have officially been dubbed \u201cGuardians,\u201d can choose from predesigned avatars before being launched into a virtual lobby where they wait for up to seven others to join in.Story continues below advertisementInstructors or field experts can digitally lead them into the satellite simulation to teleport around the satellite, chat with other troops, pull levers and press buttons as if they were on an actual worksite. They can open the satellite\u2019s front to examine its internal mechanics and press information icons for greater context.AdvertisementUp close, the digitized satellite is detailed, with 3-D solar panels, antennas and visible nuts and bolts. It\u2019s modeled after a missile warning spacecraft that\u2019s part of the agency\u2019s Space Based Infrared System constellation.Toggles on gaming controllers allow users to pick items up, draw images in midair and use laser pointers to spotlight specific areas on the satellite or elsewhere in the room.Story continues below advertisementOculus Quest headsets retail for $299 and are cheaper to buy and send out than immersive alternatives. VR competitors such as the HTC Vive retail for $499 and require high-powered gaming laptops to run. The Oculus Quest is a stand-alone unit, with no cords attached, making it more appealing for exploration scenarios, according to Scott Hungerford, game development specialty manager at SAIC.The company says it didn\u2019t have a deal with Facebook when it bought the headsets last spring.AdvertisementThe satellite training platform is one of the latest projects from SAIC, a $7.1 billion technology support company based in Reston, Va. The Army awarded the firm an $830 million contract in February to provide engineering, software and simulation for the Department of Defense.Story continues below advertisementThe Space Force is the sixth branch of the U.S. military and the first new military service since the Air Force\u2019s creation in 1947. The force relies on SAIC to modernize satellite ground systems at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado.Moving forward, SAIC plans to bolster the platform with tools such as magnifying glasses so that officers can take a closer look at satellite parts. The contractor is also looking toward augmented reality experiences, where users can train using real-world screens wrapped in virtual environments. The latest branch of the military hired a contractor to develop simulations of satellite missions. Space Force is using virtual-reality headsets to train its Guardians to work on satellites",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Force is using virtual-reality headsets to train its Guardians to work on satellites (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1887",
        "date": "2021-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/space-force-virtual-reality-training/",
        "text": "The U.S. Space Force is using virtual reality headsets to launch satellite mission operators into places they\u2019ve never been before.The military branch, started under former president Donald Trump, is working with government contractor SAIC on a gamified training platform that allows employees to interact with full-scale digital replicas of national security satellites. The platform lets the armed forces practice responding to missile warning scenarios and collaborate in cyberspace. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThey\u2019re not exactly rehearsing how to destroy alien spaceships. But if satellite solar panels need to be fixed, they can practice doing that \u2014 without having to travel to space to do it. If a spacecraft needs to be repositioned, they can execute that too. If troops need more information about a mission, it\u2019s as simple as pressing a button. No space suits or textbooks necessary.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe branch\u2019s main purpose is to improve national-security capabilities in space, according to the Pentagon. More directly, Space Force\u2019s job is to maintain, protect and expand the U.S. fleet of advanced military satellites.The contract with SAIC was established to create a virtual replica of space stations, mission control rooms and satellites, which can be difficult or costly to get to. That way, the space agency can streamline operations and train teams on what to expect before being launched on a mission.\u201cSometimes you go to these demos, and it\u2019s just some nondescript room, but it doesn\u2019t really look like your (real world) environment,\u201d said John Lynch, program director for SAIC, who manages the firm\u2019s contract with the Space and Missile Systems Center. \u201cWe wanted the experience (to feel) like you were actually there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTypically, experiential training requires custom simulators that could cost millions of dollars to build. The contractor worked to bring costs down by developing a cloud-based platform that can be updated over-the-air and deployed on a mass scale.One innovation we won\u2019t be seeing soon: Over-the-air chargingThe outcome is a video game-like experience accessible on Facebook\u2019s Oculus Quest headsets.Essentially, they\u2019re in cyberspace with colleagues where they role-play as if they were at international space stations and mission control centers.The simulation experience is pretty straightforward. Space Force troops, which have officially been dubbed \u201cGuardians,\u201d can choose from predesigned avatars before being launched into a virtual lobby where they wait for up to seven others to join in.Story continues below advertisementInstructors or field experts can digitally lead them into the satellite simulation to teleport around the satellite, chat with other troops, pull levers and press buttons as if they were on an actual worksite. They can open the satellite\u2019s front to examine its internal mechanics and press information icons for greater context.AdvertisementUp close, the digitized satellite is detailed, with 3-D solar panels, antennas and visible nuts and bolts. It\u2019s modeled after a missile warning spacecraft that\u2019s part of the agency\u2019s Space Based Infrared System constellation.Toggles on gaming controllers allow users to pick items up, draw images in midair and use laser pointers to spotlight specific areas on the satellite or elsewhere in the room.Story continues below advertisementOculus Quest headsets retail for $299 and are cheaper to buy and send out than immersive alternatives. VR competitors such as the HTC Vive retail for $499 and require high-powered gaming laptops to run. The Oculus Quest is a stand-alone unit, with no cords attached, making it more appealing for exploration scenarios, according to Scott Hungerford, game development specialty manager at SAIC.The company says it didn\u2019t have a deal with Facebook when it bought the headsets last spring.AdvertisementThe satellite training platform is one of the latest projects from SAIC, a $7.1 billion technology support company based in Reston, Va. The Army awarded the firm an $830 million contract in February to provide engineering, software and simulation for the Department of Defense.Story continues below advertisementThe Space Force is the sixth branch of the U.S. military and the first new military service since the Air Force\u2019s creation in 1947. The force relies on SAIC to modernize satellite ground systems at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado.Moving forward, SAIC plans to bolster the platform with tools such as magnifying glasses so that officers can take a closer look at satellite parts. The contractor is also looking toward augmented reality experiences, where users can train using real-world screens wrapped in virtual environments. The latest branch of the military hired a contractor to develop simulations of satellite missions. Space Force is using virtual-reality headsets to train its Guardians to work on satellites",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Force is using virtual-reality headsets to train its Guardians to work on satellites (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1888",
        "date": "2021-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/space-force-virtual-reality-training/",
        "text": "The U.S. Space Force is using virtual reality headsets to launch satellite mission operators into places they\u2019ve never been before.The military branch, started under former president Donald Trump, is working with government contractor SAIC on a gamified training platform that allows employees to interact with full-scale digital replicas of national security satellites. The platform lets the armed forces practice responding to missile warning scenarios and collaborate in cyberspace. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThey\u2019re not exactly rehearsing how to destroy alien spaceships. But if satellite solar panels need to be fixed, they can practice doing that \u2014 without having to travel to space to do it. If a spacecraft needs to be repositioned, they can execute that too. If troops need more information about a mission, it\u2019s as simple as pressing a button. No space suits or textbooks necessary.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe branch\u2019s main purpose is to improve national-security capabilities in space, according to the Pentagon. More directly, Space Force\u2019s job is to maintain, protect and expand the U.S. fleet of advanced military satellites.The contract with SAIC was established to create a virtual replica of space stations, mission control rooms and satellites, which can be difficult or costly to get to. That way, the space agency can streamline operations and train teams on what to expect before being launched on a mission.\u201cSometimes you go to these demos, and it\u2019s just some nondescript room, but it doesn\u2019t really look like your (real world) environment,\u201d said John Lynch, program director for SAIC, who manages the firm\u2019s contract with the Space and Missile Systems Center. \u201cWe wanted the experience (to feel) like you were actually there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTypically, experiential training requires custom simulators that could cost millions of dollars to build. The contractor worked to bring costs down by developing a cloud-based platform that can be updated over-the-air and deployed on a mass scale.One innovation we won\u2019t be seeing soon: Over-the-air chargingThe outcome is a video game-like experience accessible on Facebook\u2019s Oculus Quest headsets.Essentially, they\u2019re in cyberspace with colleagues where they role-play as if they were at international space stations and mission control centers.The simulation experience is pretty straightforward. Space Force troops, which have officially been dubbed \u201cGuardians,\u201d can choose from predesigned avatars before being launched into a virtual lobby where they wait for up to seven others to join in.Story continues below advertisementInstructors or field experts can digitally lead them into the satellite simulation to teleport around the satellite, chat with other troops, pull levers and press buttons as if they were on an actual worksite. They can open the satellite\u2019s front to examine its internal mechanics and press information icons for greater context.AdvertisementUp close, the digitized satellite is detailed, with 3-D solar panels, antennas and visible nuts and bolts. It\u2019s modeled after a missile warning spacecraft that\u2019s part of the agency\u2019s Space Based Infrared System constellation.Toggles on gaming controllers allow users to pick items up, draw images in midair and use laser pointers to spotlight specific areas on the satellite or elsewhere in the room.Story continues below advertisementOculus Quest headsets retail for $299 and are cheaper to buy and send out than immersive alternatives. VR competitors such as the HTC Vive retail for $499 and require high-powered gaming laptops to run. The Oculus Quest is a stand-alone unit, with no cords attached, making it more appealing for exploration scenarios, according to Scott Hungerford, game development specialty manager at SAIC.The company says it didn\u2019t have a deal with Facebook when it bought the headsets last spring.AdvertisementThe satellite training platform is one of the latest projects from SAIC, a $7.1 billion technology support company based in Reston, Va. The Army awarded the firm an $830 million contract in February to provide engineering, software and simulation for the Department of Defense.Story continues below advertisementThe Space Force is the sixth branch of the U.S. military and the first new military service since the Air Force\u2019s creation in 1947. The force relies on SAIC to modernize satellite ground systems at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado.Moving forward, SAIC plans to bolster the platform with tools such as magnifying glasses so that officers can take a closer look at satellite parts. The contractor is also looking toward augmented reality experiences, where users can train using real-world screens wrapped in virtual environments. The latest branch of the military hired a contractor to develop simulations of satellite missions. Space Force is using virtual-reality headsets to train its Guardians to work on satellites",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Google\u2019s new \u2018time crystals\u2019 could be a breakthrough for long-awaited quantum computers (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1889",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/12/timecrystal-google/",
        "text": "Time crystals sound like majestic objects from science fiction movies that unlock passageways to alternative universes. In the Marvel universe, the \u201ctime stone\u201d gives wielders control over the past, present and future.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile that remains a fantasy, scientists have successfully created micro-scale time crystals for years \u2014 not for powering intergalactic spaceships but for energizing ultrapowerful computers. \u201cTime crystals are like a rest stop on the road to building a quantum computer,\u201d said Norman Yao, a molecular physicist at the University of California at Berkeley.It\u2019s an area of interest for Google, which, along with physicists at Stanford and Princeton universities, claims to have developed a \u201cscalable approach\u201d to time crystal creation using the company\u2019s Sycamore quantum computer.Story continues below advertisementIn a paper published last month on the research-sharing platform Arxiv.org, a team of more than 100 scientists describes setting up an array of 20 quantum particles, or qubits, to serve as a time crystal. During experiments, they applied algorithms that spun the qubits upward and downward, generating a controllable reaction that could be sustained \u201cfor infinitely long times,\u201d according to the paper.AdvertisementTime crystals are scientific oddities made of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern in space. This design enables them to shift shape over time without losing energy or overheating. Since time crystals continuously evolve and don\u2019t seem to require much energy input, they may be useful for quantum computers, which rely on extremely fragile qubits that are prone to decay.How should autonomous cars make life-or-death decisions? In the best of worlds, they won\u2019t.Quantum computing is weighed down by hard-to-control qubits, which are error prone and often die. Time crystals might introduce a better method for sustaining quantum computing, according to Yao, who published a blueprint for making time crystals in 2017.Story continues below advertisement\u201cTime crystals are a weighted benchmark, showing that your system has the requisite level of control,\u201d Yao said.The scientists involved in Google\u2019s research say they can\u2019t discuss their findings as they undergo peer review.AdvertisementHowever, the work tackles an area where physicists have long hoped for a breakthrough.\u201cThe consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,\u201d Roderich Moessner, a co-author of the Google paper, told Quanta Magazine.The time crystal concept was first proposed in 2012 by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, who wondered whether atoms could be arranged in time similar to their arrangement in ordinary crystals.Story continues below advertisementEssentially, he wondered whether a closed system could spin, oscillate or move in a repetitious manner. What followed was a healthy dose of scrutiny from the broader physics community, years of university experiments with and without Wilczek, and testing to see whether his vision was possible.The definition expanded to include objects that would be activated by an external influence such as a shake, stir or a laser strike.Advertisement\u201cThe definition is somewhat fluid. But if you want to call it a new state of matter, you want it to be autonomous and not have stirring,\u201d Wilczek said.Early experiments pumped ions with lasers so they would artificially pulsate. It was useful but difficult to scale, Wilczek added.Story continues below advertisementBy 2017, scientists from Harvard University and the University of Maryland revealed they created micro-scale time crystals at frigid temperatures in a lab. Both passed peer review. More recently, a team from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands published findings in July on its approach to building a time crystal inside a diamond. (Those findings haven\u2019t undergone peer review.)Time crystals are a tough concept to grasp, but scientists say you can think of them like a perpetual motion machine, adding a caveat to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that any isolated system will degenerate into a more disordered state or entropy. Their existence also undermines Newton\u2019s first law of motion, detailing how an object must react to motion.AdvertisementTime crystals are the first objects created that spontaneously break \u201ctime-translation symmetry\u201d or the idea that a stable object, such as solids, liquids, gases and plasma, will remain the same throughout time.Story continues below advertisementGoogle\u2019s work produced a time crystal that functioned for milliseconds, but the research looks promising, Wilczek said. The assumption is that once the hardware is more advanced, the resulting time crystals would last longer, he added.\u201cNothing lasts forever, not even diamonds, their protons will eventually decay,\u201d Wilczek said. \u201cIf you can make something that has time crystal behavior that lasts millions of cycles, or thousands of cycles, it can support sensitive technologies. You can do a lot even if it\u2019s not perfect.\u201d Researchers at Google, Stanford and Princeton say they used Google\u2019s quantum computer to demonstrate a \u201ctime crystal.\u201d Google\u2019s new \u2018time crystals\u2019 could be a breakthrough for long-awaited quantum computers",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Why I remain optimistic about Tesla (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1890",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/07/21/why-i-remain-optimistic-about-tesla/",
        "text": "Tesla\u2019s stock price recently took a hit because of concerns about its delivery capabilities and about increasing competition from carmakers who are switching their product lines to electric. With a market cap still exceeding $50 billion, it can be easy to argue that Tesla\u2019s price remains severely inflated, especially when you compare it with those of GM and Ford \u2014 which produce 20 times more revenue. You can understand why Tesla remains one of the most shorted stocks \u2014 with billions of dollars in bets against it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Tesla has an advantage that many people don\u2019t understand: It is much more than an automotive company; it is a technology company building technology platforms. With these, it is positioning itself to also become the leading player in the energy industry and sharing economy. It will bring the same integration, data analysis and elegance to these industries as it did to cars.I have\u00a0referred to my Tesla Model S as \u201ca spaceship that travels on land.\u201d It drives differently from any other kind of car, and is lightning fast, smooth and slick. To me, other electric vehicles, such as the BMW i3, the Mercedes B-Class, the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt, all of which I have driven, seem by\u00a0comparison to be a clumsy repackaging of old technologies. They feel more like cassette players than iPods. I have every expectation that Tesla\u2019s Model 3, which I have on order, will be almost as good as my Model S, despite costing half as much.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTesla cars have been designed from the ground up as computers on wheels. Almost every function is controlled by software, and this enables the company to continually analyze data and optimize its functioning \u2014 just as Google Search and Apple Siri do. With the billions of miles\u2019 worth of driving data it is gathering, Tesla is on track to deliver full autonomous driving capability earlier than many other car manufacturers will. And because all of its new cars, including the Model 3, come equipped with the sensors that will be\u00a0necessary to\u00a0the autopilot software once it\u2019s released, Tesla has a considerable advantage over its rivals.In July 2016, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would use these technologies to enable a ride-sharing platform called the Tesla Network, through which owners will be able to rent out their cars as autonomous taxis, thereby recouping their investments and even making profits from their cars.\u00a0 As he explained, \u201cSince most cars are only in use by their owner for 5 percent to 10 percent of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.\u201d With highly sought-after cars and a head start, Tesla could grab a significant share of the vehicle-sharing economy \u2014 an economy that is expected to transform the transportation industry and disrupt the automobile market.Tesla is already diversifying its businesses so that it doesn\u2019t sink with the automotive industry when this happens. Underlying the Tesla cars is another technology platform that it is commercializing: the battery. Tesla\u2019s Powerwall is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that provides homes with the storage of solar-captured energy for use at night or during power outages. This complements the solar roof tiles that Tesla is selling, which look like ordinary tiles and are priced competitively. So what you have is what Musk has called \u201ca smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works.\u201d This is the kind of advantage and elegance that came with the Apple iPhone, which integrated music, telephony, and computer applications into one device.In the same way as Tesla could make car ownership a revenue generator for its drivers, it could do the same for solar power. Homeowners could share their excess energy with other homeowners and provide charging stations for others\u2019 Tesla vehicles. This would also dramatically expand the Tesla supercharger network, enabling charging of cars almost anywhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn a larger scale, Tesla is offering utility companies grid-scale energy-storage systems, demand for which will enable it to scale up its production and gain a cost advantage. It has just won a bid to provide the government of South Australia with the world\u2019s largest lithium-ion battery system \u2014 129 MWh of storage, deliverable at up to 100MW, enough to power more than 30,000 homes. Musk committed to having the system installed in a record 100 days. And the data Tesla gathers from this installation will allow it to optimize energy-storage operations as its self-driving data enables it to optimize its cars.Yes, Tesla has had production issues and missed delivery targets. But that is how technology companies work: They iterate until they get things right; they think big, take risks and change the world. They make extremely optimistic projections and often miss these, and this is what causes investors to panic and short stocks. But when these companies shoot for the moon, they achieve much more than they might otherwise. This is why they often end up being the most valuable of all \u2014 and defying gravity. Tesla has an advantage that many people don\u2019t understand: It is much more than an automotive company; it is a technology company. Why I remain optimistic about Tesla",
        "author": "Vivek Wadhwa"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Self-driving cars should leave us all unsettled. Here\u2019s why. (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1891",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/04/24/self-driving-cars-should-leave-us-all-unsettled-heres-why/",
        "text": "It is a warm autumn morning, and I am walking through downtown Mountain View, Calif., when I see it. A small vehicle that looks like a cross between a golf cart and a Jetson-esque, bubble-topped spaceship glides to a stop at an intersection. Someone is sitting in the passenger seat, but no one seems to be sitting in the driver seat. How odd, I think. And then I realize I am looking at a Google car. The technology giant is headquartered in Mountain View, and the company is road-testing its diminutive autonomous cars there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is my first encounter with a fully autonomous vehicle on a public road in an unstructured setting.The Google car waits patiently as a pedestrian passes in front of it.\u00a0 Another car across the intersection signals a left-hand turn, but the Google car has the right of way. The automated vehicle takes the initiative and smoothly accelerates through the intersection. The passenger, I notice, appears preternaturally calm.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI am both amazed and unsettled. I have heard from friends and colleagues that my reaction is not uncommon. A driverless car can challenge many assumptions about human superiority to machines.Though I live in Silicon Valley, the reality of a driverless car is one of the most startling manifestations of the future unknowns we all face in this age of rapid technology development. Learning to drive is a rite of passage for people in materially rich nations (and becoming so in the rest of the world): a symbol of freedom, of power, and of the agency of adulthood, a parable of how brains can overcome physical limitations to expand the boundaries of what is physically possible. The act of driving a car is one that, until very recently, seemed a problem only the human brain could solve.[The simple question about self-driving cars that we still can\u2019t answer]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDriving is a combination of continuous mental risk assessment, sensory awareness, and judgment, all adapting to extremely variable surrounding conditions. Not long ago, the task seemed too complicated for robots to handle. Now, robots can drive with greater skill than humans \u2014 at least on the highways. Soon the public conversation will be about whether humans should be allowed to take control of the wheel at all.This paradigm shift will not be without costs or controversies. For sure, widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles will eliminate the jobs of the millions of Americans whose living comes of driving cars, trucks, and buses (and eventually all those who pilot planes and ships). We will begin sharing our cars, in a logical extension of Uber and Lyft. But how will we handle the inevitable software faults that result in human casualties? And how will we program the machines to make the right decisions when faced with impossible choices \u2014 such as whether an autonomous car should drive off a cliff to spare a busload of children at the cost of killing the car\u2019s human passenger?I was surprised, upon my first sight of a Google car on the street, at how mixed my emotions were. I\u2019ve come to realize that this emotional admixture reflects the countercurrents that the bow waves of these technologies are rocking all of us with: trends toward efficiency, instantaneity, networking, accessibility, and multiple simultaneous media streams, with consequences that include unemployment, cognitive and social inadequacy, isolation, distraction, and cognitive and emotional overload.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce, technology was a discrete business dominated by business systems and some cool gadgets. Slowly but surely, though, it crept into more corners of our lives. Today, that creep has become a headlong rush. Technology is taking over everything: every part of our lives, every part of society, every waking moment of every day. Increasingly pervasive data networks and connected devices are enabling rapid communication and processing of information, ushering in unprecedented shifts \u2014 in everything from biology, energy and media to politics, food and transportation \u2014 that are redefining our future. Naturally we\u2019re uneasy; we should be. The majority of us, and our environment, may receive only the backlash of technologies chiefly designed to benefit a few. We need to feel a sense of control over our own lives; and that necessitates actually having some.[Why Nissan\u2019s CEO says the human brain still trumps artificial intelligence]The perfect metaphor for this uneasy feeling is the Google car. We welcome a better future, but we worry about the loss of control, of pieces of our identity, and most importantly of freedom. What are we yielding to technology? How can we decide whether technological innovation that alters our lives is worth the sacrifice?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe noted science-fiction writer William Gibson, a favorite of hackers and techies, said in a 1999 radio interview (though apparently not for the first time): \u201cThe future is already here; it\u2019s just not very evenly distributed.\u201d Nearly two decades later \u2014 though the potential now exists for most of us, including the very poor, to participate in informed decision-making as to its distribution and even as to bans on use of certain technologies \u2014 Gibson\u2019s observation remains valid.I make my living thinking about the future and discussing it with others, and am privileged to live in what to most is the future. I drive an amazing Tesla Model S electric vehicle. My house, in Menlo Park, close to Stanford University, is a \u201cpassive\u201d home that extracts virtually no electricity from the grid and expends minimal energy on heating or cooling. My iPhone is cradled with electronic sensors that I can place against my chest to generate a detailed electrocardiogram to send to my doctors, from anywhere on Earth.Many of the entrepreneurs and researchers I talk with about breakthrough technologies such as artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are building a better future at a breakneck pace. One team built a fully functional surgical-glove prototype to deliver tactile guidance for doctors during examinations \u2014 in three weeks. Another team\u2019s visualization software, which can tell farmers the health of their crops using images from off-the-shelf drone-flying video cameras, took four weeks to build.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe distant future, then, is no longer distant. Rather, the institutions we expect to gauge and perhaps forestall new technologies\u2019 hazards, to distribute their benefits, and to help us understand and incorporate them are drowning in a sea of change as the pace of technological change outstrips them.[The government failed U.S. workers on global trade. It must do better on technology.]The shifts and the resulting massive ripple effects will, if we choose to let them, change the way in which we live, how long we live for, and the very nature of being human. Even if my futuristic life sounds unreal, its current state is something we may laugh at within a decade as a primitive existence \u2014 because our technologists now have the tools to enable the greatest alteration of our experience of life since the dawn of humankind. As in all other manifest shifts \u2014 from the use of fire to the rise of agriculture and the development of sailing vessels, internal-combustion engines, and computing \u2014 this one will arise from breathtaking advances in technology. It is far larger, though, is happening far faster, and may be far more stressful to those living through this new epoch. Inability to understand it will make our lives and the world seem even more out of control.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA broad range of technologies are now advancing at an exponential pace, everything from artificial intelligence to genomics to robotics and synthetic biology. They are making amazing and scary things possible \u2014 at the same time.Broadly speaking, we will, jointly, choose one of two possible futures.\u00a0 The first is a utopian \u201cStar Trek\u201d future in which our wants and needs are met, in which we focus our lives on the attainment of knowledge and betterment of mankind. The other is a \u201cMad Max\u201d dystopia: a frightening and alienating future, in which civilization destroys itself.These are both worlds of science fiction created by Hollywood, but either could come true. We are already capable of creating a world of tricorders, replicators, remarkable transportation technologies, general wellness and an abundance of food, water and energy. On the other hand, we are capable too now of ushering in a jobless economy; the end of all privacy; invasive medical-record keeping; eugenics; and an ever worsening spiral of economic inequality: conditions that could create an unstable, Orwellian or violent future that might undermine the very technology-driven progress that we so eagerly anticipate. And we know that it is possible to inadvertently unwind civilization\u2019s progress. It is precisely what Europe did when, after the Roman Empire, humanity slid into the Dark Ages, a period during which significant chunks of knowledge and technology that the Romans had hard won through trial and error disappeared from the face of the Earth. To unwind our own civilization\u2019s amazing progress will require merely cataclysmic instability.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is the choices we all make which\u00a0will determine the outcome. Technology will surely create upheaval and destroy industries and jobs. It will change our lives for better and for worse simultaneously. But we can reach \u201cStar Trek\u201d if we can share the prosperity we are creating and soften its negative impacts; ensure that the benefits outweigh the risks; and gain greater autonomy rather than becoming dependent on technology.The oldest technology of all is probably fire, even older than the stone tools that our ancestors invented. It could cook meat and provide warmth; and it could burn down forests. Every technology since this has had the same bright and dark sides. Technology is a tool; it is how we use it that makes it good or bad. There is a continuum limited only by the choices we make jointly. And all of us have a role in deciding where the lines should be drawn.This is an excerpt from Vivek Wadhwa\u2019s new book, \u201cThe Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future.\u201d The reality of a driverless car is one of the most startling manifestations of the future unknowns we all face in this age of rapid technology development. Self-driving cars should leave us all unsettled. Here\u2019s why.",
        "author": "Vivek Wadhwa"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch this butterfly-inspired robot undergo mechanical metamorphosis (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1892",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/09/27/watch-this-butterfly-inspired-robot-undergo-mechanical-metamorphosis/",
        "text": "When you picture futuristic robots, you probably imagine a machine that behaves like Optimus Prime \u2014 nimbly transforming itself into different shapes and combinations at will.That\u00a0remains a distant fantasy, but researchers at MIT say a new model for adaptive machines is beginning to emerge, one founded upon transforming from the outside (instead of the inside) using different exoskeletons. In the future, researchers say, similar models may make it possible for microrobots to perform surgeries from inside the human body or make space exploration more feasible. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe robot is known as \u201cPrimer,\u201d a centimeter-long, cubed-shaped machine developed by researchers from MIT\u2019s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) that uses magnets to walk, roll, sail and glide with the help of different origami-like exoskeletons. Made of foldable plastic, the exoskeletons can be manipulated using a heat pad and then dissolved once the robot is immersed in water, researchers said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDaniela Rus, CSAIL director and principal investigator of the project, calls the transformation \u2014 which has been documented on film (below) \u2014 a \u201ccostume change\u201d and says Primer was inspired by one of nature\u2019s most iconic reconfigurations: butterfly metamorphosis.\u201cEach costume change gives the robot a new power,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s really a new way of thinking about how you would get one robot to perform different tasks instead of making a really complex robot \u2014 or numerous complex robots \u2014 for multiple tasks.\u201dEach iteration of Primer has a different advantage, researchers said. The \u201cWheel-bot,\u201d for example, has wheels that allow the machine to move twice as fast as \u201cWalk-bot.\u201d The \u201cBoat-bot,\u201d meanwhile, can float on water and carry nearly twice its weight, and the \u201cGlider-bot\u201d can quickly travel across \u201clong\u201d distances.Eric Diller, a microrobotics expert and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, said that form-changing robots have been created at larger sizes, but they\u2019ve been limited to two shapes \u2014\u00a0\u201copen\u201d and \u201cclosed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause Primer\u2019s exoskeleton can be folded into new shapes in a few seconds, Diller said he envisions a scenario involving rapid fabrication of robots.\u201cI could envision devices like these being used in \u2018micro-factories\u2019 where prefabricated parts and tools would enable a single microrobot to do many complex tasks on demand,\u201d he said.\u201cImagine future applications for space exploration, where you could send a single robot with a stack of exoskeletons to Mars,\u201d says postdoc Shuguang Li, one of the co-authors of the study. \u201cThe robot could then perform different tasks by wearing different \u2018outfits.\u2019\u2009\u201dFor years now, futurists have dreamed about tiny robots someday being unleashed inside the human body to perform surgeries without cuts or infections. Rus said she can imagine her model being used accordingly: a patient swallowing one pill that contains a robot and other pills that contain various exoskeletons and tools for surgery.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResearchers said similar robots could also be used in space exploration by sending a single robot with multiple exoskeletons to Mars, where it could adapt using its wardrobe of \u201coutfits.\u201d\u201cImagine making these machines at the larger scale and sending them to a disaster site,\u201d Rus said. \u201cUsing different exoskeletons, the machine could first map the space and then dig or remove debris to clean up the site, depending on the needs of the operation.\u201dRus said her team wants to expand the robot\u2019s capabilities and plans to create more exoskeletons that give Primer the ability to drive through water, burrowing in sand and camouflaging itself.\u201cThis is futuristic stuff,\u201d she said, \u201cbut the ideas we are introducing are beginning to be realized in the real world, and that\u2019s really cool.\u201dMORE READING:\u00a0Reporting a hate crime is notoriously hard. Can this digital tool change that?Teenage suicide is extremely difficult to predict. That\u2019s why some experts are turning to machines for help.This underwater \u2018Ironman\u2019 jet pack lets you swim faster than Michael Phelps The robot known as \u201cPrimer\u201d can transform from a boat to a glider in seconds.  Watch this butterfly-inspired robot undergo mechanical metamorphosis",
        "author": "Peter Holley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla asserts Autopilot \u2018unequivocally makes the world safer\u2019 \u2014 days after fiery, fatal crash (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1893",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2018/03/31/tesla-asserts-autopilot-unequivocally-makes-the-world-safer-days-after-fiery-fatal-crash/",
        "text": "For more than a decade, Tesla chief executive\u00a0Elon Musk has been trying to convince the car-buying masses that it is okay to entrust our lives to a hodgepodge of sensors and algorithms.But the automaker\u2019s safety reassurances faced another challenge last week, as\u00a0a\u00a0sobering image made its way around the world:\u00a0a photo of a Tesla SUV,\u00a0battered and charred and missing two front wheels after a fiery wreck that\u00a0left a father of two dead. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Friday the company tried to explain the\u00a0March 23 crash that killed Walter Huang, an Apple engineer whose electric SUV was on Autopilot mode when it crashed into a median on Highway 101 in Mountain View, Calif. In about 560 words, Tesla sought to counter that alarming photo,\u00a0using statistics and figures to argue that an artificially intelligent driver is still safer than a human one.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill,\u00a0Tesla had to acknowledge two realities made clear by Huang\u2019s death: Autonomous vehicle\u00a0technology is still in its infancy, and, because no tech is perfect, people in even the most advanced cars will still be involved in\u00a0fatal crashes.\u201cIn the past, when we have brought up statistical safety points, we have been criticized for doing so, implying that we lack empathy for the tragedy that just occurred,\u201d the company\u2019s statement said. \u201cNothing could be further from the truth. We care deeply for and feel indebted to those who chose to put their trust in us. However, we must also care about people now and in the future whose lives may be saved if they know that Autopilot improves safety.\u201dFeds investigating after a Tesla on autopilot barreled into a parked firetruckThe company said it was \u201cincredibly sorry\u201d for the loss Huang\u2019s family suffered. A friend described Huang, 38, as \u201cjust a straight-up, caring guy.\u201d He was also an early Tesla adopter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuang\u2019s\u00a0family members told\u00a0San Francisco ABC affiliate KGO-TV that\u00a0Huang had complained to his Tesla dealership that his SUV would swerve toward the same median where he was later killed. It was unclear Saturday whether the company had identified the issue before the crash, or what\u00a0\u2014 if anything \u2014 it had done to address it.In its statement, Tesla said several things contributed to\u00a0the crash. The highway crash attenuator, a safety\u00a0barrier that is supposed to absorb much of the force of a high-speed crash, that Huang\u2019s SUV smacked into had been crushed in a previous wreck\u00a0and could not disperse the force of\u00a0the Tesla\u2019s collision.Airbnb for cars is here. And the rental car giants are not happy.Huang also shared some of the blame, Tesla said. Even in Autopilot, Tesla\u2019s vehicles are only semiautonomous, the company said. The driver is expected to remain alert and ready to take over if something comes up that the vehicle cannot handle. Huang apparently wasn\u2019t paying enough attention, Tesla said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver\u2019s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds before the collision,\u201d the company said. He had \u201cabout five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.\u201dBut the biggest question \u2014 why the Autopilot steered into the barrier in the first place \u2014 remains unaddressed. The National Transportation Safety Board, the California Highway Patrol and Tesla are all investigating.What is clear is that the crash \u2014 and the safety questions it raises \u2014 have contributed to a tough week for Tesla and others who want to make cars that drive themselves ubiquitous on American roads.Tesla debuted its more affordable sedan, the Tesla Model 3, to the public at its showroom in Washington, DC. The electric car starts at about $35,000. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)Tesla\u2019s stock tumbled\u00a0after the crash. Adding to its woes, the company recalled 123,000 Model S sedans\u00a0on Thursday after it found that corroding bolts in cold climates could lead to power steering failure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe automaker also has been stymied by the logistical demands of putting new cars on the road at the ambitious pace set by its CEO.\u00a0In May 2016, Musk said Tesla would \u201caim to produce 100,000 to 200,000 Model 3s in the second half\u201d of 2017, The Washington Post wrote. Model 3 sales in that period totaled 1,770.Tesla\u2019s \u2018transformative year\u2019 is hitting a brick wallLast\u00a0August, Musk said the company would be producing 5,000 units a week by the end of the year. But by October, Musk said that ramping up production was \u201cmanufacturing hell\u201d and that the company\u2019s current forecast is for 5,000 Model X vehicles a week by the end of June.\u201cMusk is struggling with the \u2026 prosaic mission of assembling a passenger car here on Earth,\u201d The Post\u2019s Steven Mufson wrote, comparing Musk\u2019s ambitions for\u00a0space exploration\u00a0to his earthly ones. \u201cAnd in explaining a series of production misses over the past two years, some analysts say Musk has undermined his own credibility by repeatedly overpromising.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, after Huang\u2019s crash, the company that\u00a0built his car is still making strong statements.\u00a0 Autopilot reduces crash rates by as much as 40 percent, Tesla\u2019s statement said. A person driving a Tesla with Autopilot hardware is 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident.\u201cTesla Autopilot does not prevent all accidents \u2014 such a standard would be impossible \u2014 but it makes them much less likely to occur,\u201d the statement said. \u201cIt unequivocally makes the world safer for the vehicle occupants, pedestrians and cyclists.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this story suggested that Tesla and its chief executive Elon Musk encouraged drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel. Tesla says its Autopilot technology is not meant to relieve drivers of responsibility for being alert or in control, or for having their hands on the wheel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Family that is feared dead in SUV plunge had troubled home life, neighbors sayA teen died in a car crash \u2014 then the state of Tennessee billed her for the broken guardrailA truck crashed into a horse-drawn buggy, killing 3 children on their way to churchAn SUV crashed into a classroom near Sydney, killing two studentsA mother purposely drove SUV with her three children off a cliff, police say The automaker argues that an artificially intelligent driver is still better than a human one. Tesla asserts Autopilot \u2018unequivocally makes the world safer\u2019 \u2014 days after fiery, fatal crash",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Ready to book your satellite launch online? The rocket industry looks to run more like an airline. (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1894",
        "date": "2017-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/11/09/ready-to-book-your-satellite-launch-online-the-rocket-industry-looks-to-run-more-like-an-airline/",
        "text": "After decades of building commercial airliners, Boeing is now developing something that looks like a plane and sometimes acts like a plane \u2014 but is not a plane.The company\u2019s latest invention is instead a spaceplane. The Phantom Express, as it is known, would perform like one of the many jets in Boeing\u2019s vast fleet, landing on a runway with a 737-like wingspan, able to take off quickly on demand \u2014 just fuel up and go. But instead of carrying passengers, it would launch satellites into orbit. And if all goes to plan, soon it would be able to fly to the stratosphere or beyond 10 times in 10 days under a test program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFast and affordable access to space has long been a sci-fi fantasy, but now it is also the goal of the Pentagon, the intelligence community and an increasing number of businesses, particularly when it comes to delivering a new generation of satellites over the Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral firms are working on flying on a weekly, if not daily basis, making a once-rarefied event as routine as commercial air travel. Some are even allowing customers to order a launch online \u2014 just enter the number and mass of your satellites, and the orbital inclination, as if choosing toppings on a pizza delivery.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to bring the know-how from our Boeing commercial aircraft folks on turning around large, complex machines in a very short amount of time,\u201d said Steven Johnston, the director of launch for Boeing\u2019s Phantom Works division.The market for these new launches is being driven by a revolution in satellite technology that is dramatically reducing their size. Just as computers have gone from massive mainframes to handheld devices, satellites have shrunk from the size of garbage trucks to that of shoe boxes. To meet the potential demand, there are more than 40 small launch vehicles in development around the world, said Phil Smith, a space analyst at Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. But given the cost and risk of space travel, he warned that not all of them will endure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere is a rush to address this perceived demand, and only a handful will survive,\u201d he said.One company that spotted the early potential for frequent flight is SpaceX, the rocketmaker founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk. SpaceX has launched 16 times this year, more than many space-going nations, and Musk has said SpaceX\u2019s goal is to launch more and faster in the coming years.It\u2019s a goal shared by several other firms, and one that has captured the attention of the White House. Over the summer, Vice President Pence visited Stratolaunch, a firm started by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. In a hangar in Mojave, Calif., Stratolaunch is building what would be the world\u2019s largest plane, with a wingspan even greater than that of the World War II-era wooden giant Spruce Goose, to ferry as many as three small rockets to cruising altitude. Once aloft, the rockets would drop and then \u201cair launch\u201d to orbit. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson also visited the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile in Mojave, Pence also stopped by Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company whose sister company, Virgin Orbit, is also developing a small launch vehicle, LauncherOne. While much of the attention has been on flying humans to suborbital space, Branson has already signed several satellite companies as customers in an effort to \u201chelp us understand our home planet, keep us safe, grow the world\u2019s economies, and expand the limits of human knowledge,\u201d the company said.And Branson is finding investors ready to open their wallets. He recently announced that Saudi Arabia intends to invest about $1 billion in his space ventures.The new satellites have many potential uses. Companies such as OneWeb and SpaceX want to put up hundreds, if not thousands, of small satellites that would beam the Internet to every corner of the Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOthers see possibilities for new weather satellites and eyes-in-the-sky to monitor the health of the planet. That\u2019s what got Peter Beck to start Rocket Lab. His company is developing a small rocket called Electron that had a test launch earlier this year in New Zealand.Instead of relying on a couple dozen weather satellites, \u201cwhat would happen if we replaced them with 300 state-of-the-art technology satellites to take the true pulse of the planet?\u201d Beck said. \u201cYou\u2019d leapfrog an order of magnitude in your understanding of the planet.\u201dPlanet, a San Francisco-based company, has already launched 190 small satellites for Earth monitoring, and it has 10 more scheduled to go soon.Story continues below advertisementU.S. national security officials, meanwhile, have long been dependent on space for the GPS signals that guide precision weapons, communication for soldiers on the battlefield and spying on the enemy.AdvertisementUnder the DARPA program, Boeing\u2019s Phantom Express \u201cis intended to really revolutionize space access by making recurring reusable launch operations aircraftlike,\u201d Boeing\u2019s Johnston said.The company\u2019s spaceplane would launch vertically, while carrying another rocket, space-shuttle-like, on its back. Once aloft, the piggybacking rocket would detach and then shoot off into orbit, and the spaceplane would land on a runway, ready to fly again.\u00a0The company hopes to demonstrate that it can fly to at least as high as 150,000 feet repeatedly \u2014 10 times in 10 days \u2014 by 2020.Story continues below advertisementCompanies such as Vector and Rocket Lab, which have already had test launches of their vehicles that\u00a0are designed for even smaller payloads, seem closer to operation. Rocket Lab, which uses a 3-D printer to make a large portion of its engines, has another test flight scheduled later this year and already has enough customers to launch once a month for nearly two years, Beck said.AdvertisementHis company would charge $5 million a launch, which it heralds as \u201ca drastic cost reduction\u201d compared to competitors.Vector recently announced a deal for three launches out of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops, Va. Ultimately the goal is to \u201cbecome a lot more like an airline business than a rocket business,\u201d said Jim Cantrell, a SpaceX veteran who founded Vector. \u201cWe\u2019re shooting for the idea of multiple launches per day.\u201dHe knows that there are skeptics who think he is crazy. \u201cI\u2019m not asking you to believe me,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m asking you to watch me.\u201d As satellites shrink in size, a new industry of small rockets designed to launch frequently is popping up. Ready to book your satellite launch online? The rocket industry looks to run more like an airline.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Silicon Valley Retreat Where \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Meets \u2018Star Wars\u2019 (WSJ: Inside Story) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1895",
        "date": "2018-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-silicon-valley-retreat-where-star-trek-meets-star-wars-1544111405?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=68",
        "text": "Now a 49-year-old tech entrepreneur, Mr. Qurashi has made futuristic features a reality in his gadget-filled Northern California home, where he can open the shades while lying in bed and set the temperature of the shower before entering the bathroom. \n\n\n\n\nEven the home\u2019s appearance pays homage to \u201cStar Trek,\u201d thanks to Mr. Qurashi\u2019s architect wife, Malika Junaid, 43, who designed the ultramodern steel-and-glass structure. The focal point is what Ms. Junaid calls \u201ca very abstracted version of the Starship Enterprise\u201d: a circular glass dining room that juts out over the indoor swimming pool. Suspended 10 feet in the air, \u201cit\u2019s kind of ready to take off,\u201d says Ms. Junaid, who took her husband\u2019s first name as her surname when they got married.\n\n\n\n\n\n Architect Malika Junaid gives a tour of her $10 million home, which was designed with her Trekkie family in mind. It\u2019s full of automations, an elevator and what she calls an abstract Starship Enterprise.\n \n\n\nOther nods to \u201cStar Trek\u201d include a transparent suction elevator that whisks riders up and down in reference to the famous line, \u201cBeam me up, Scotty!\u201d Also beloved by Mr. Qurashi and the couple\u2019s two daughters, Mishal, 14, and Alisha, 12, is \u201cStar Wars.\u201d In the 18-seat home theater, the ceiling is decorated with images of the Millennium Falcon and two other Star Wars spaceships, while on the back wall are lines from the opening of \u201cStar Wars.\u201d \n\nThe six-bedroom house is located in Los Altos Hills, a wealthy, rural enclave in Silicon Valley. Standing in the home theater on an October afternoon, Mr. Qurashi and Ms. Junaid chat enthusiastically about cameras that use artificial intelligence and playfully debate the relative merits of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple\n\n\n Watches vs. Fitbits. Mr. Qurashi previously worked at tech companies including VMware, but he\u2019s now primarily an investor. \u201cHey Siri, turn off the theater lights,\u201d he says to his watch by way of demonstration. \u201cHe\u2019s showing off, considering I don\u2019t like the Apple Watch,\u201d says his wife with an affectionate eye roll. \u201cI like my little Fitbit.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nA Sci-Fi Fan\u2019s Dream HomeInspired by her husband\u2019s love of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 and \u2018Star Wars,\u2019 an architect creates a high-tech home bursting with gadgetry.\u00a0\u00a0The circular dining room in the home of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fan Junaid Qurashi is an \u2019abstracted version of the Starship Enterprise.\u2019 The house was designed by his architect wife, Malika Junaid.Vivian Johnson for The Wall Street Journal1 of 22\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 22Hide CaptionThe circular dining room in the home of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fan Junaid Qurashi is an \u2019abstracted version of the Starship Enterprise.\u2019 The house was designed by his architect wife, Malika Junaid.Vivian Johnson for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Real Estate From aspirational residences to major commercial deals. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nTechnology is everywhere in the house, which took roughly three years and $10 million to build. It is a smart home ne plus ultra: the lights, sound, climate and security cameras\u2014even the pool temperature\u2014can be controlled by smartphones, Apple Watch, Siri and Alexa, and control panels throughout the home, including a Star Trek-esque console. In the kitchen, a 19-foot-long backsplash retracts at the wave of a hand, revealing a hidden storage space for appliances. Behind that, a second pane of glass moves up and down to conceal another, narrow kitchen that can be used by caterers. An upper cabinet door that might be out of reach for some visitors is mechanized so it closes automatically. Another button prompts a spice rack to emerge from within the long, white kitchen island. \nTo bring their vision to fruition, the couple relied on technology integrator ZettaComm, the home automation company ELAN, and Nortek Security & Control. \u201cWe were looking for partners who would say \u2018Hey, let\u2019s try this,\u2019\u201d Ms. Junaid said.\nDespite the high-tech, ultramodern aesthetic\u2014and as a kind of antidote to it\u2014the couple also wanted to embrace their love of outdoors and the home\u2019s rural setting. The house is perched on approximately 2.7 acres of wooded hillside they discovered while trail-running, and bought for about $2 million. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls maximize views of the surrounding gnarled oak trees and a distant San Francisco Bay. Deer and wild turkeys wander on to the patio. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe ultramodern exterior.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Vivian Johnson for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\nMore from Mansion\n\n\n\n\nThis Couple Turned a Big Empty Loft Into an Intimate Family Home\nJanuary 27, 2022 \n\n\nHow to Fill a Home With Art Without Making It Feel Like a Museum\nJanuary 5, 2022 \n\n\nA Manhattan Couple Finds Home Happiness Moving to Chicago\nNovember 23, 2021 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cOnce you get into the house, we wanted to be able to feel like you\u2019re part of nature,\u201d said Ms. Junaid, a co-founder of the Los Altos-based M\u2022Designs Architects. She said she is currently working on a number of residential projects in Los Altos Hills, and used her home as an opportunity to experiment. \nOne such undertaking: Next to the swimming pool is a two-story, glass airplane hangar door the couple modified to work in a residential setting. At the touch of a button it pivots upward, opening the pool and most of the home\u2019s living areas to the outdoors. \u201cWe\u2019re waiting for birds to fly in, but that hasn\u2019t happened yet,\u201d said Ms. Junaid.\nMost summer weekends that door stays open, while the girls and their friends hang out in the pool or outdoor bocce court. The family is also installing a climbing wall and zip lines. \u201cOnce their work is done, we don\u2019t want them on computers,\u201d Ms. Junaid said. \u201cWe want them outside.\u201d\nArt was another important design influence; Ms. Junaid paints in her spare time. One of her favorite works is Michelangelo\u2019s Sistine Chapel, so the family re-created a portion of \u201cThe Creation of Adam\u201d with a custom tile design on the bottom of the pool. From the glass dining room above, diners can look directly down on to the hand of God.\nOne of Ms. Junaid\u2019s favorite features is the family\u2019s seven chickens, who live in a specially built enclosure just off the kitchen. Leading the way outside, she headed straight into their pen with a paper cup full of feed. \u201cThese three are the babies,\u201d she says. \u201cThey eat anything and everything, which is leftovers, tomatoes, cucumbers.\u201d\nBack inside the kitchen, an equally enthused Mr. Qurashi shows off an iPhone photo of the chickens\u2019 eggs. When asked about the contrast between the home\u2019s high-tech vibe and pastoral surroundings, Ms. Junaid says: \u201cWe all have a lot of things that we depend on for the comfort of everyday living. But nature is why we moved here.\u201d\nWrite to Candace Taylor at Candace.Taylor@wsj.com In a rural California enclave, a tech entrepreneur and architect create an ultramodern smart home inspired by science fiction. ",
        "author": "Candace Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear NASA: What\u2019s in It for Me? (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1896",
        "date": "2020-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dear-nasa-whats-in-it-for-me-11607900349?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=10",
        "text": "As we recalled during the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing last year, space travel is a great challenge, a destiny just out of reach\u2014until it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s aspirational and inspirational. Even so, wise guys (like me) note that after billions poured into the space program, all we got were Tang and Velcro. Earthwise, that\u2019s not so far off. It\u2019s called space because, let\u2019s face it, there\u2019s not much in it.\n\n\nRead More Inside View\n\n\n\n\nPutin\u2019s \u2018Vertical\u2019 Empire Will Fall\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nMake Populism Pop Again\nFebruary 27, 2022 \n\n\nWho Built That Spaceship?\nFebruary 13, 2022 \n\n\nWealth Is Knowledge\nFebruary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Get Smart\u2019 About Biden\u2019s Chaos\nJanuary 30, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nYes, communication satellites are important, as is GPS, which helps Uber steer a car toward you. But note that GPS first got off the ground in 1973 because it was funded for Nudet, or nuclear detonation detection\u2014military tech, not space exploration. To be fair, NASA was an early customer of Silicon Valley, but quickly abandoned state-of-the-art chips in favor of highly reliable older ones.\nStill, progress marches along. We now have a Space Force, founded a year ago this week. Boldly go! Last month, a privately funded SpaceX rocket and capsule safely ferried four astronauts to the International Space Station, an amazing accomplishment for all anti-big-government types. Astronauts will conduct experiments of unknown value to earthly pursuits. There have been 3,000 such experiments in 20 years, though nothing earth-shattering. Can spiders build webs in space? Not quite the right stuff. Last week Chuck Yeager died. Oh, and an Israeli former space officer says the Earth has been contacted by a \u201cGalactic Federation.\u201d Uh huh.\n\n\nDon\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m fascinated by fiery launches and rocket stages that land on floating platforms for reuse. But I\u2019m more in the \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for me?\u201d camp. Communications, imaging and even travel benefit all of us. Going to Mars? I\u2019m not so sure.\nHow about we mine asteroids for metals and even water?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s\nJeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and Google\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Schmidt\n\n\n\n were big proponents. But that funding spreadsheet never worked because, upon landing on Earth, the prices of those commodities would quickly drop through the floor. Good for earthlings, but not so good for return on investment, which is probably why it hasn\u2019t been attempted.\nChina\u2019s robotic Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft went to the moon to collect rocks (no they\u2019re minerals\u2014Jesus, Marie). Uh, couldn\u2019t we just lend them some of ours from 50 years ago? No one has yet found \u201cSpace Odyssey\u201d monoliths on the moon, but one just showed up in Utah. Weird. In October, using infrared imaging, NASA actually did find water on the moon\u2019s sunlit side. This after the Europeans\u2019 2004 discovery of ice on the south pole of Mars. Rockets need hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, so maybe interplanetary travel will actually be a possibility someday.\nOr so dreams\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who envisions a million-population city on Mars by 2050. He thinks he\u2019ll send cargo ships to Mars in 2024 and then humans will follow in February 2027 when Earth and Mars are closer to each other. Watch the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n series \u201cAway\u201d for a taste. I\u2019m skeptical. Mr. Musk often has a fantastical relationship with schedules, so maybe pad a few years, or decades, on.\nTinfoil-hat toppers, and many in Silicon Valley, fear Armageddon is coming and see Mars as our safety valve. Mr. Musk wants \u201cenough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else\u201d (perhaps enough to keep buying Teslas). Let\u2019s hurry up and colonize Mars so humans can escape World War III or Covid-30. Maybe he watches too much sci-fi. On his own nickel, though, go for it.\nOn Wednesday Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX tested a new Starship SN8 rocket prototype. Designed for Mars, the 8-mile test flight was a success but its return ended in a fireball\u2014what Mr. Musk called a \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201d Gotta stick the landing! \nMeanwhile, back on the third rock from the sun, maybe there is utility to all this. Mr. Musk also intends the Starship to make 39-minute suborbital flights between New York and Shanghai, compared with 15 hours today for the 7,000-mile journey. Take a boat to a floating platform, launch into the lower stratosphere, reach a peak of 16,000 miles an hour (Mach 20) and then re-enter and carefully land on another floating launchpad offshore.\nIf all goes well, and I mean all, SpaceX thinks they\u2019ll run commercial flights by the end of the decade at a cost of $2 million. That\u2019s $20,000 a passenger\u2014no meal. I\u2019ll believe it when I see it, but when they say seat backs in their full, upright position and seat belts securely fastened, I think I\u2019ll listen. Hopefully, the captain has more than a dimmer knob.\nWrite to kessler@wsj.com.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Bill McGurn, Allysia Finley and Dan Henninger. Space exploration could provide big technological benefits, but we\u2019re still waiting. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear NASA: What\u2019s in It for Me? (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1897",
        "date": "2020-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dear-nasa-whats-in-it-for-me-11607900349?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=28",
        "text": "As we recalled during the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing last year, space travel is a great challenge, a destiny just out of reach\u2014until it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s aspirational and inspirational. Even so, wise guys (like me) note that after billions poured into the space program, all we got were Tang and Velcro. Earthwise, that\u2019s not so far off. It\u2019s called space because, let\u2019s face it, there\u2019s not much in it.\n\n\nRead More Inside View\n\n\n\n\nPutin\u2019s \u2018Vertical\u2019 Empire Will Fall\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nMake Populism Pop Again\nFebruary 27, 2022 \n\n\nWho Built That Spaceship?\nFebruary 13, 2022 \n\n\nWealth Is Knowledge\nFebruary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Get Smart\u2019 About Biden\u2019s Chaos\nJanuary 30, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nYes, communication satellites are important, as is GPS, which helps Uber steer a car toward you. But note that GPS first got off the ground in 1973 because it was funded for Nudet, or nuclear detonation detection\u2014military tech, not space exploration. To be fair, NASA was an early customer of Silicon Valley, but quickly abandoned state-of-the-art chips in favor of highly reliable older ones.\nStill, progress marches along. We now have a Space Force, founded a year ago this week. Boldly go! Last month, a privately funded SpaceX rocket and capsule safely ferried four astronauts to the International Space Station, an amazing accomplishment for all anti-big-government types. Astronauts will conduct experiments of unknown value to earthly pursuits. There have been 3,000 such experiments in 20 years, though nothing earth-shattering. Can spiders build webs in space? Not quite the right stuff. Last week Chuck Yeager died. Oh, and an Israeli former space officer says the Earth has been contacted by a \u201cGalactic Federation.\u201d Uh huh.\n\n\nDon\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m fascinated by fiery launches and rocket stages that land on floating platforms for reuse. But I\u2019m more in the \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for me?\u201d camp. Communications, imaging and even travel benefit all of us. Going to Mars? I\u2019m not so sure.\nHow about we mine asteroids for metals and even water?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s\nJeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and Google\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Schmidt\n\n\n\n were big proponents. But that funding spreadsheet never worked because, upon landing on Earth, the prices of those commodities would quickly drop through the floor. Good for earthlings, but not so good for return on investment, which is probably why it hasn\u2019t been attempted.\nChina\u2019s robotic Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft went to the moon to collect rocks (no they\u2019re minerals\u2014Jesus, Marie). Uh, couldn\u2019t we just lend them some of ours from 50 years ago? No one has yet found \u201cSpace Odyssey\u201d monoliths on the moon, but one just showed up in Utah. Weird. In October, using infrared imaging, NASA actually did find water on the moon\u2019s sunlit side. This after the Europeans\u2019 2004 discovery of ice on the south pole of Mars. Rockets need hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, so maybe interplanetary travel will actually be a possibility someday.\nOr so dreams\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who envisions a million-population city on Mars by 2050. He thinks he\u2019ll send cargo ships to Mars in 2024 and then humans will follow in February 2027 when Earth and Mars are closer to each other. Watch the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n series \u201cAway\u201d for a taste. I\u2019m skeptical. Mr. Musk often has a fantastical relationship with schedules, so maybe pad a few years, or decades, on.\nTinfoil-hat toppers, and many in Silicon Valley, fear Armageddon is coming and see Mars as our safety valve. Mr. Musk wants \u201cenough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else\u201d (perhaps enough to keep buying Teslas). Let\u2019s hurry up and colonize Mars so humans can escape World War III or Covid-30. Maybe he watches too much sci-fi. On his own nickel, though, go for it.\nOn Wednesday Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX tested a new Starship SN8 rocket prototype. Designed for Mars, the 8-mile test flight was a success but its return ended in a fireball\u2014what Mr. Musk called a \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201d Gotta stick the landing! \nMeanwhile, back on the third rock from the sun, maybe there is utility to all this. Mr. Musk also intends the Starship to make 39-minute suborbital flights between New York and Shanghai, compared with 15 hours today for the 7,000-mile journey. Take a boat to a floating platform, launch into the lower stratosphere, reach a peak of 16,000 miles an hour (Mach 20) and then re-enter and carefully land on another floating launchpad offshore.\nIf all goes well, and I mean all, SpaceX thinks they\u2019ll run commercial flights by the end of the decade at a cost of $2 million. That\u2019s $20,000 a passenger\u2014no meal. I\u2019ll believe it when I see it, but when they say seat backs in their full, upright position and seat belts securely fastened, I think I\u2019ll listen. Hopefully, the captain has more than a dimmer knob.\nWrite to kessler@wsj.com.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Bill McGurn, Allysia Finley and Dan Henninger. Space exploration could provide big technological benefits, but we\u2019re still waiting. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear NASA: What\u2019s in It for Me? (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1898",
        "date": "2020-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dear-nasa-whats-in-it-for-me-11607900349?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=40",
        "text": "As we recalled during the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing last year, space travel is a great challenge, a destiny just out of reach\u2014until it isn\u2019t. It\u2019s aspirational and inspirational. Even so, wise guys (like me) note that after billions poured into the space program, all we got were Tang and Velcro. Earthwise, that\u2019s not so far off. It\u2019s called space because, let\u2019s face it, there\u2019s not much in it.\n\n\nRead More Inside View\n\n\n\n\nPutin\u2019s \u2018Vertical\u2019 Empire Will Fall\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nMake Populism Pop Again\nFebruary 27, 2022 \n\n\nWho Built That Spaceship?\nFebruary 13, 2022 \n\n\nWealth Is Knowledge\nFebruary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Get Smart\u2019 About Biden\u2019s Chaos\nJanuary 30, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYes, communication satellites are important, as is GPS, which helps Uber steer a car toward you. But note that GPS first got off the ground in 1973 because it was funded for Nudet, or nuclear detonation detection\u2014military tech, not space exploration. To be fair, NASA was an early customer of Silicon Valley, but quickly abandoned state-of-the-art chips in favor of highly reliable older ones.\nStill, progress marches along. We now have a Space Force, founded a year ago this week. Boldly go! Last month, a privately funded SpaceX rocket and capsule safely ferried four astronauts to the International Space Station, an amazing accomplishment for all anti-big-government types. Astronauts will conduct experiments of unknown value to earthly pursuits. There have been 3,000 such experiments in 20 years, though nothing earth-shattering. Can spiders build webs in space? Not quite the right stuff. Last week Chuck Yeager died. Oh, and an Israeli former space officer says the Earth has been contacted by a \u201cGalactic Federation.\u201d Uh huh.\n\n\nDon\u2019t get me wrong, I\u2019m fascinated by fiery launches and rocket stages that land on floating platforms for reuse. But I\u2019m more in the \u201cWhat\u2019s in it for me?\u201d camp. Communications, imaging and even travel benefit all of us. Going to Mars? I\u2019m not so sure.\nHow about we mine asteroids for metals and even water?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s\nJeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and Google\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Schmidt\n\n\n\n were big proponents. But that funding spreadsheet never worked because, upon landing on Earth, the prices of those commodities would quickly drop through the floor. Good for earthlings, but not so good for return on investment, which is probably why it hasn\u2019t been attempted.\nChina\u2019s robotic Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft went to the moon to collect rocks (no they\u2019re minerals\u2014Jesus, Marie). Uh, couldn\u2019t we just lend them some of ours from 50 years ago? No one has yet found \u201cSpace Odyssey\u201d monoliths on the moon, but one just showed up in Utah. Weird. In October, using infrared imaging, NASA actually did find water on the moon\u2019s sunlit side. This after the Europeans\u2019 2004 discovery of ice on the south pole of Mars. Rockets need hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, so maybe interplanetary travel will actually be a possibility someday.\nOr so dreams\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n who envisions a million-population city on Mars by 2050. He thinks he\u2019ll send cargo ships to Mars in 2024 and then humans will follow in February 2027 when Earth and Mars are closer to each other. Watch the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n series \u201cAway\u201d for a taste. I\u2019m skeptical. Mr. Musk often has a fantastical relationship with schedules, so maybe pad a few years, or decades, on.\nTinfoil-hat toppers, and many in Silicon Valley, fear Armageddon is coming and see Mars as our safety valve. Mr. Musk wants \u201cenough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else\u201d (perhaps enough to keep buying Teslas). Let\u2019s hurry up and colonize Mars so humans can escape World War III or Covid-30. Maybe he watches too much sci-fi. On his own nickel, though, go for it.\nOn Wednesday Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX tested a new Starship SN8 rocket prototype. Designed for Mars, the 8-mile test flight was a success but its return ended in a fireball\u2014what Mr. Musk called a \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201d Gotta stick the landing! \nMeanwhile, back on the third rock from the sun, maybe there is utility to all this. Mr. Musk also intends the Starship to make 39-minute suborbital flights between New York and Shanghai, compared with 15 hours today for the 7,000-mile journey. Take a boat to a floating platform, launch into the lower stratosphere, reach a peak of 16,000 miles an hour (Mach 20) and then re-enter and carefully land on another floating launchpad offshore.\nIf all goes well, and I mean all, SpaceX thinks they\u2019ll run commercial flights by the end of the decade at a cost of $2 million. That\u2019s $20,000 a passenger\u2014no meal. I\u2019ll believe it when I see it, but when they say seat backs in their full, upright position and seat belts securely fastened, I think I\u2019ll listen. Hopefully, the captain has more than a dimmer knob.\nWrite to kessler@wsj.com.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Bill McGurn, Allysia Finley and Dan Henning Space exploration could provide big technological benefits, but we\u2019re still waiting. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth to Techies: Let\u2019s Map It All (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1899",
        "date": "2021-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/earth-to-techies-lets-map-it-all-11614531885?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=8",
        "text": "To find out, I recently spent some (Zoom) time with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Jablonsky,\n\n\n\n CEO of Maxar Technologies, a Westminster, Colo.-based satellite and imaging company that, as far as I can tell, is the state of the art.\nCircling every 94 minutes, Maxar\u2019s satellites survey 3.5 million square kilometers of the Earth every day to capture images that are accurate down to a meter and are stored in a massive data set. Each satellite\u2019s camera can be swung up to 50 degrees from overhead. Maxar has 17 years of imaging history. It stores 120 petabytes of data on Amazon\u2019s servers.\nThe military, naturally, is its most important customer. Maxar\u2019s data set and 3-D point clouds can track enemy missile launchers or tanks or anything else, and note changes in case of a threat. Generals then have the option, as Mr. Jablonsky put it with one of my new favorite expressions, to \u201csend kinetic energy down range.\u201d\n\n\nRead More Inside View\n\n\n\n\nPutin\u2019s \u2018Vertical\u2019 Empire Will Fall\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nMake Populism Pop Again\nFebruary 27, 2022 \n\n\nWho Built That Spaceship?\nFebruary 13, 2022 \n\n\nWealth Is Knowledge\nFebruary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Get Smart\u2019 About Biden\u2019s Chaos\nJanuary 30, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nGoogle Maps is a customer too, using the imagery to help create maps and look for changes\u2014the shops in an average strip mall turn over by 25% every year. Autonomous-vehicle manufacturers will be an emerging market, to map terrain and then to deal with the growing complexity of insurance. Google probably doesn\u2019t want to be liable in an accident, so autonomous car makers may need to purchase their own mapping data.\n\n\nThis year Maxar starts a big upgrade. For \u201c$600 million all in, launched and insured,\u201d Mr. Jablonsky tells me, six new satellites known as Worldview Legion will have 50% more coverage and higher accuracy, down to a third of a meter. They\u2019ll fly both polar and other loops so they can revisit the same site up to 15 times a day. For commercial uses, I think this might put the U.S. five years ahead of anyone else\u2014maybe 10.\nBut here\u2019s where it gets fascinating. Mr. Jablonsky talks of Maxar\u2019s plan, with all its data, to create a \u201cdigital twin of the planet\u201d\u2014basically a 3-D model of the world that can be updated almost in real time. That\u2019s perfect for flight simulators but eventually can allow optical navigation for aircraft to fly without GPS. Think of an automated Drone Racing League with jet fighters. The 3-D model is key: Russia jammed GPS during its adventures in Ukraine. And anyone who read\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Clancy\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRed Storm Rising\u201d knows that when a hot war starts, the first things taken out are the communications and navigation satellites.\nA little dreaming reveals lots of new markets for Earth\u2019s digital twin. Mr. Jablonsky notes that there are tons of drones flying around taking images that don\u2019t really know where they are. Gaming could be a huge market\u2014envision battle simulations based on real maps and 3-D models.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nintendo\u2019s\n\n\n augmented-reality Pok\u00e9mon Go craze from 2016 could use an update. Imagine our world with digital creatures to interact with or (more likely) eliminate! Then think of the billions of smartphone cameras and the database of images that can be mapped to the real world.\nThere is competition from the low end. The Journal\u2019s Christopher Mims recently wrote about Lacuna Space, Swarm Technologies and other emerging satellite companies that hope to track everything from container ships to penguins. Fascinating applications\u2014there\u2019s room for a few players in this market.\nThe history of Silicon Valley is disruption via lower-cost solutions to everything: computers, phones, media, video and on and on. But there\u2019s a paradox very few talk about. Sometimes the best solution comes from the highest-cost solution because you can push the state of the art before others. Like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel\n\n\n microprocessors until recently. And Google search. And Amazon Web Services. The trick is to spend the most on fixed assets and then charge a marginal rate to customers. Sometimes, as with software, the marginal cost is zero, so you can charge what the market can bear. Maybe that\u2019s true with satellites too. The military pays a big chunk of the cost of the system, but there\u2019s little additional cost to provide maps and other imaging services downstream.\nWith eyes in the sky, do I worry about privacy? Sure\u2014a friend snooping my house on Google Maps once asked if I had bought a new car. Technology is always multiuse: military, commercial, gaming. But it\u2019s often the things no one thought about that are the most exciting. When GPS first went up, no one thought that Uber and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lyft\n\n\n would be one of its best use cases. Same for telemedicine with smartphone cameras. Each time, we give up a little of our privacy but gain huge benefits. With sensible controls, I think that\u2019s a worthy trade-off.\nWrite to kessler@wsj.com.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Repo Imaging the world down to the meter will soon spur a navigation breakthrough. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth to Techies: Let\u2019s Map It All (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1900",
        "date": "2021-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/earth-to-techies-lets-map-it-all-11614531885?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=24",
        "text": "To find out, I recently spent some (Zoom) time with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Jablonsky,\n\n\n\n CEO of Maxar Technologies, a Westminster, Colo.-based satellite and imaging company that, as far as I can tell, is the state of the art.\nCircling every 94 minutes, Maxar\u2019s satellites survey 3.5 million square kilometers of the Earth every day to capture images that are accurate down to a meter and are stored in a massive data set. Each satellite\u2019s camera can be swung up to 50 degrees from overhead. Maxar has 17 years of imaging history. It stores 120 petabytes of data on Amazon\u2019s servers.\nThe military, naturally, is its most important customer. Maxar\u2019s data set and 3-D point clouds can track enemy missile launchers or tanks or anything else, and note changes in case of a threat. Generals then have the option, as Mr. Jablonsky put it with one of my new favorite expressions, to \u201csend kinetic energy down range.\u201d\n\n\nRead More Inside View\n\n\n\n\nPutin\u2019s \u2018Vertical\u2019 Empire Will Fall\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nMake Populism Pop Again\nFebruary 27, 2022 \n\n\nWho Built That Spaceship?\nFebruary 13, 2022 \n\n\nWealth Is Knowledge\nFebruary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Get Smart\u2019 About Biden\u2019s Chaos\nJanuary 30, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nGoogle Maps is a customer too, using the imagery to help create maps and look for changes\u2014the shops in an average strip mall turn over by 25% every year. Autonomous-vehicle manufacturers will be an emerging market, to map terrain and then to deal with the growing complexity of insurance. Google probably doesn\u2019t want to be liable in an accident, so autonomous car makers may need to purchase their own mapping data.\n\n\nThis year Maxar starts a big upgrade. For \u201c$600 million all in, launched and insured,\u201d Mr. Jablonsky tells me, six new satellites known as Worldview Legion will have 50% more coverage and higher accuracy, down to a third of a meter. They\u2019ll fly both polar and other loops so they can revisit the same site up to 15 times a day. For commercial uses, I think this might put the U.S. five years ahead of anyone else\u2014maybe 10.\nBut here\u2019s where it gets fascinating. Mr. Jablonsky talks of Maxar\u2019s plan, with all its data, to create a \u201cdigital twin of the planet\u201d\u2014basically a 3-D model of the world that can be updated almost in real time. That\u2019s perfect for flight simulators but eventually can allow optical navigation for aircraft to fly without GPS. Think of an automated Drone Racing League with jet fighters. The 3-D model is key: Russia jammed GPS during its adventures in Ukraine. And anyone who read\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Clancy\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRed Storm Rising\u201d knows that when a hot war starts, the first things taken out are the communications and navigation satellites.\nA little dreaming reveals lots of new markets for Earth\u2019s digital twin. Mr. Jablonsky notes that there are tons of drones flying around taking images that don\u2019t really know where they are. Gaming could be a huge market\u2014envision battle simulations based on real maps and 3-D models.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nintendo\u2019s\n\n\n augmented-reality Pok\u00e9mon Go craze from 2016 could use an update. Imagine our world with digital creatures to interact with or (more likely) eliminate! Then think of the billions of smartphone cameras and the database of images that can be mapped to the real world.\nThere is competition from the low end. The Journal\u2019s Christopher Mims recently wrote about Lacuna Space, Swarm Technologies and other emerging satellite companies that hope to track everything from container ships to penguins. Fascinating applications\u2014there\u2019s room for a few players in this market.\nThe history of Silicon Valley is disruption via lower-cost solutions to everything: computers, phones, media, video and on and on. But there\u2019s a paradox very few talk about. Sometimes the best solution comes from the highest-cost solution because you can push the state of the art before others. Like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel\n\n\n microprocessors until recently. And Google search. And Amazon Web Services. The trick is to spend the most on fixed assets and then charge a marginal rate to customers. Sometimes, as with software, the marginal cost is zero, so you can charge what the market can bear. Maybe that\u2019s true with satellites too. The military pays a big chunk of the cost of the system, but there\u2019s little additional cost to provide maps and other imaging services downstream.\nWith eyes in the sky, do I worry about privacy? Sure\u2014a friend snooping my house on Google Maps once asked if I had bought a new car. Technology is always multiuse: military, commercial, gaming. But it\u2019s often the things no one thought about that are the most exciting. When GPS first went up, no one thought that Uber and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lyft\n\n\n would be one of its best use cases. Same for telemedicine with smartphone cameras. Each time, we give up a little of our privacy but gain huge benefits. With sensible controls, I think that\u2019s a worthy trade-off.\nWrite to kessler@wsj.com.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Repo Imaging the world down to the meter will soon spur a navigation breakthrough. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Metaverse Is Already Here (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1901",
        "date": "2021-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-is-already-here-virtual-reality-headset-oculus-11640525817?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=2",
        "text": "This has been tried before. A virtual space called \u201cSecond Life\u201d launched in 2003. You could buy digital property and clothes with real money and hang out with other blocky avatars. It was early days. Naysayers in Silicon Valley liked to say that \u201cSecond Life\u201d was for those who didn\u2019t have a first one.\nThe metaverse marks another interface transition. Green and amber text monitors gave way to Apple\u2019s and Windows\u2019 graphical user interface, making computers much easier to use. Then slow modems connected us to the internet and we used the barren search-page interfaces of Yahoo and Google. Eventually graphics and photos sneaked in, especially as blogs and social networks boomed, and smartphones with cameras turned many into photo bugs. Then video was added, peaking this year with TikTok and multi-tile Zoom calls. Each interface iteration means humans spend less time navigating the computer and more time harnessing its power.\n\n\nRead More Inside View\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPutin\u2019s \u2018Vertical\u2019 Empire Will Fall\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nMake Populism Pop Again\nFebruary 27, 2022 \n\n\nWho Built That Spaceship?\nFebruary 13, 2022 \n\n\nWealth Is Knowledge\nFebruary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Get Smart\u2019 About Biden\u2019s Chaos\nJanuary 30, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThink of the metaverse as another change of perspective. Videogames have 3D worlds already, a big jump from 2D Tetris. Epic Games, maker of \u201cFortnite,\u201d has more than 350 million registered users. Roblox, for younger gamers, has more than 160 million active users. There are thousands of 3D games on smartphones. An estimated 2.5 billion people play videogames daily, a $150 billion market. My guess is this is where Facebook will go shopping\u2014after it begs for permission from the Federal Trade Commission.\n\n\nNo one reads a videogame instruction manual; players learn by doing. Entire generations have learned how to interact with computers by playing videogames, even if they were mostly killing one another virtually. \nFacebook paid $3 billion for virtual-reality headset maker Oculus in 2014 and likely has poured in billions more. Facebook is pushing virtual-reality social platform Horizon Worlds, on which people can meet and interact and perhaps do commerce eventually. Fitness and education are huge potential metaverse markets.\nI\u2019ve played around with virtual-reality prototypes since dreadlocked technologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jaron Lanier\n\n\n\n pioneered them in the late 1980s. I bought a developer kit for the original Oculus Rift in 2012 and Google Glass in 2013. In 2019 I tried Magic Leap\u2019s artificial-reality glasses, which beam photons directly onto your retina to display 3D objects in the real world\u2014truly amazing but limited and cumbersome. Now I own a $299 Oculus Quest 2, which looks like a pair of opaque ski goggles. It is spectacular. I\u2019ve boxed virtually and explored the International Space Station and Antarctica. In real life I can ride any roller coaster, but I began to feel nauseated after using the Oculus for an hour. Staring at screens an inch from your eyeballs takes some getting used to. And be careful\u2014a guy I know ended up in the hospital after falling over his living-room furniture.\nIt is early innings, but never underestimate how quickly technology advances once there is a big market that lowers costs. How will it all be paid for? \u201cAds .\u00a0.\u00a0. will probably be a meaningful part of the metaverse, too,\u201d Mr. Zuckerberg noted.\nMany real-world problems will sneak into this new world. An early tester of Facebook\u2019s Horizon Worlds posted a few weeks ago that her avatar was groped by another avatar. I had to think for a while about whether that was even possible. I\u2019m against all sexual harassment, and this shows the metaverse has a lot of rules and boundaries to work through.\nEventually, will we see virtual artwork and nonfungible tokens hanging on infinitely expandable walls? Virtual fitness fanatics? Real-estate developers buying up virtual worlds? Self-replicating virtual cyborg Terminators? Maybe, but I guarantee that the metaverse, like all new technology, will be far different from whatever we can dream up today. But definitely keep one of those airline barf bags around.\nWrite to kessler@wsj.com.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Wonder Land: With social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, we have democratized neurosis. Images: Getty Images/Walt Disney via Everett Collection Composite: Mark Kelly Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s new platform builds on the success of popular videogames. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Stock Market Fails a Breathalyzer (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1902",
        "date": "2021-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/low-interest-rate-dow-35000-joby-aviation-carvana-coinbase-beyond-meat-investing-11631464939?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=13",
        "text": "I can go on. Used-car sales platform Carvana is worth more than Volvo, Honda, Ford or Hyundai.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbnb\n\n\n is worth more than Marriott and Hilton combined. Crypto-exchange\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Coinbase\n\n\n is worth more than the Nasdaq. I live at the intersection of innovation and disruption, but when companies are worth more than any possible reality, watch out.\nHow about those meme stocks still getting hyped on Reddit\u2019s WallStreetBets? Those who bid\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop\n\n\n shares into the stratosphere waved at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings\n\n\n as they soared by. A year ago, the stock was $6 and it is now $190\u2014some dupes paid $483, game over. Short sellers Melvin Capital, Point 72 and D1 Capital focused on fundamentals and got their assets handed to them. Shorts lost more than $9 billion between January and June.\nNew Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ryan Cohen,\n\n\n\n who is driving change at GameStop, may be a retail genius for turning around Chewy, but Redditors may want to put in a call to hedge-fund manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eddie Lampert,\n\n\n\n who bought Kmart and merged it with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sears\n\n\n in 2005, as a highly touted \u201cintegrated retail\u201d play, combining stores and online sales, eerily similar to the argument for investing in GameStop today. The stock peaked at $135 in 2007. It is now at $0.30 as the company languishes in bankruptcy. A 1970s Sears Johnny Miller leisure suit is worth more.\n\n\n\nAMC Entertainment\u2019s\n\n\n stock was scraping $2 at the end of 2020. It is now $50 thanks in part to Robinhood speculators, and the company has smartly raised cash. But what about fundamentals? Theaters are still sparse, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Disney\n\n\n and others are willingly putting blockbusters directly onto their streaming services\u2014ask\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scarlett Johansson\n\n\n\n about Black Widow\u2019s ticket sales. Theaters are the new roller rinks.\n\n\nRead More Inside View\n\n\n\n\nPutin\u2019s \u2018Vertical\u2019 Empire Will Fall\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nMake Populism Pop Again\nFebruary 27, 2022 \n\n\nWho Built That Spaceship?\nFebruary 13, 2022 \n\n\nWealth Is Knowledge\nFebruary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Get Smart\u2019 About Biden\u2019s Chaos\nJanuary 30, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nVenture capital is cuckoo. After investing $120 billion in the 2000 dot-com frenzy, and just $16 billion in 2002, U.S. venture capital invested $130 billion in 2020 and then $140 billion in the first half of 2021. Startups these days raise money as \u201cthe Uber of gardening\u201d or \u201cSpace as a Service.\u201d Oh wait, the latter was WeWork\u2019s pitch, whose founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adam Neumann\n\n\n\n declared in 2017, \u201cour valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.\u201d Is \u201cspirituality\u201d the S in SPAC?\nAnd check this out: In June, an Italian artist auctioned an invisible statue for $18,000\u2014in reality it was an empty box the artist claimed was a \u201cspace full of energy.\u201d WeWork energy? Yeah, maybe fundamentals are a quaint relic of a bygone era.\nThe Federal Reserve deserves most of the blame. Near-zero interest rates means the market has no true north to help compare stock valuations with reality. We are navigating turbulent seas with a spinning compass. Former Fed Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William McChesney Martin\n\n\n\n once explained that the Fed\u2019s job was \u201cto take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going.\u201d From the looks of it, the entire market would blow about a 0.35 (as in Dow 35000) on a breathalyzer test.\nSo no, fundamentals don\u2019t matter\u2014well, until they do. In 1989 Tokyo real estate sold for as much as $139,000 a square foot\u2014350 times the value in Manhattan. At that price, Tokyo\u2019s Imperial Palace was worth more than all the real estate in California. Not anymore after Japan\u2019s triptych of lost decades.\nYahoo was once worth $125 billion and AOL $200 billion during the dot-com bubble. Both are worth 99% less today. Tesla CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n recently tweeted, \u201cI thought 1999 was peak insanity, but 2021 is 1000% more insane!\u201d Remember, when the selling starts, fear of missing out turns into fear of losing everything as speculators jump like rats off a sinking ship.\nToday\u2019s negative real yields don\u2019t reflect reality. The Fed has warned it plans on tapering bond and mortgage purchases later this year. Someone is at least reaching for the punch bowl. The compass may stop spinning soon. Until then and always, stick with fundamentals.\nWrite to kessler@wsj.com.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: Is he following the science, or his political needs? Image: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images Beyond Meat, with pea protein, is worth more than the global market for peas. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lessons From a Trip to the Moon (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1903",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-a-trip-to-the-moon-11563137910?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=58",
        "text": "Each program in the guidance computer used a 12-word, 16-bit data-storage unit known as a Core Set. The system had handled countless complicated tasks through the takeoff, approach and orbit, but something had gone wrong during the landing attempt. Turns out a radar used to track the Command Module was overrunning the Core Sets with bad data. Fortunately, the guidance computer had been designed to crash and reboot when that happened, and not lose data so it could continue its guidance function.\n\n\n\n\nImagine sitting in a tin can, about to make history, trusting a computer with your life, already white-knuckled, and getting the early equivalent of the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death. Each time the alarm sounded, the display went blank for 10 seconds as the computer crashed and rebooted. There were five alarms and crashes in four minutes, the last at 2,000 feet. With no clear sign of any systems malfunctioning, the astronauts and Mission Control scrambled to make sense. Armstrong\u2019s heart rate hit 150. The display finally returned 800 feet above the lunar surface. Noting no data was lost, the flight controller in Houston,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Duke,\n\n\n\n replied, \u201cEagle, looking great. You\u2019re GO.\u201d\n\n\nThere are many lessons from Apollo 11, and you\u2019ll hear them all week. First, timing is everything: Inspired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy,\n\n\n\n all six lunar landings occurred during\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon\u2019s\n\n\n\n first term. Another obvious and overlooked lesson is that technology is an indispensable yet imperfect tool. I\u2019ve had my iPhone crash trying to hail an Uber. I know, First World problem.\nApollo 11 was a source of pride, but also confusion. Whenever hurricanes and other freaky weather hit in the \u201970s, my grandmother would explain it by insisting, \u201cThey touched something up there on the moon.\u201d Sadly, climate thinking hasn\u2019t advanced much.\nPeople often ask whether space exploration is worth the cost. I\u2019ve certainly been in and out of the \u201cWe went to the moon and all we got were Velcro and Tang\u201d camp. Doubters now insist the money should have been spent to fight poverty in inner cities.\nSure, NASA was never productive or scaled to launch thousands or millions of us into space. But it did spark an era of hard science and forced engineering schools to deliver talent. NASA was one of the first major buyers of integrated circuits, a marvel of quantum physics. But we also got rockets, satellites and cheap digital communications\u2014all required for that Uber ride. Those technology spinoffs have created trillion-dollar industries and enough societal wealth finally to tackle poverty and other problems. Maybe it all would have happened without a moon landing. But counterfactual history is for movie plots.\nPerhaps the public-sector green/clean movement will have similar productive byproducts: molten-salt energy storage, bio-benign plastic (I hate paper straws!) or fabrics that generate electricity as you jog. I\u2019m not advocating giant government projects\u2014just encouraging big, hairy, audacious goals. Government seeds, industry grows.\nThe spiritual lessons might be the loftiest. In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1968 movie, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d\u2014based on a 1948\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur C. Clarke\n\n\n\n short story\u2014black monoliths keep showing up: first on earth, then the moon, on Jupiter and finally in the fifth dimension. Confusing. There are lots of guesses about what that all meant. I like the simplest\u2014that some higher being put those monoliths just out of man\u2019s reach to stimulate our desire to progress civilization enough to reach them. With each achievement the goal posts move further out of reach, just like life. The moon itself was our real-life monolith. It was out there, beyond our reach, until it wasn\u2019t. And progress is a continuum\u2014on to the next goal.\nSo was the moon landing one giant leap? A quest for greatness? I don\u2019t know; maybe it was just a really cool thing to do. If nothing else, the manned spaceflight provided psychic energy for many decades. What manager hasn\u2019t demanded, \u201cIf we could put a man on the moon, surely you can finish this project on deadline\u201d? But for careers, goals and life, I like the \u201c1202\u201d lesson: Ignore confusing signals telling you to stop. Fifty years ago, Apollo 11 demonstrated both the perils and promise of innovation. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lessons From a Trip to the Moon (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1904",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-a-trip-to-the-moon-11563137910?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=54",
        "text": "Each program in the guidance computer used a 12-word, 16-bit data-storage unit known as a Core Set. The system had handled countless complicated tasks through the takeoff, approach and orbit, but something had gone wrong during the landing attempt. Turns out a radar used to track the Command Module was overrunning the Core Sets with bad data. Fortunately, the guidance computer had been designed to crash and reboot when that happened, and not lose data so it could continue its guidance function.\nImagine sitting in a tin can, about to make history, trusting a computer with your life, already white-knuckled, and getting the early equivalent of the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death. Each time the alarm sounded, the display went blank for 10 seconds as the computer crashed and rebooted. There were five alarms and crashes in four minutes, the last at 2,000 feet. With no clear sign of any systems malfunctioning, the astronauts and Mission Control scrambled to make sense. Armstrong\u2019s heart rate hit 150. The display finally returned 800 feet above the lunar surface. Noting no data was lost, the flight controller in Houston,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Duke,\n\n\n\n replied, \u201cEagle, looking great. You\u2019re GO.\u201d\n\n\nThere are many lessons from Apollo 11, and you\u2019ll hear them all week. First, timing is everything: Inspired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy,\n\n\n\n all six lunar landings occurred during\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon\u2019s\n\n\n\n first term. Another obvious and overlooked lesson is that technology is an indispensable yet imperfect tool. I\u2019ve had my iPhone crash trying to hail an Uber. I know, First World problem.\nApollo 11 was a source of pride, but also confusion. Whenever hurricanes and other freaky weather hit in the \u201970s, my grandmother would explain it by insisting, \u201cThey touched something up there on the moon.\u201d Sadly, climate thinking hasn\u2019t advanced much.\nPeople often ask whether space exploration is worth the cost. I\u2019ve certainly been in and out of the \u201cWe went to the moon and all we got were Velcro and Tang\u201d camp. Doubters now insist the money should have been spent to fight poverty in inner cities.\nSure, NASA was never productive or scaled to launch thousands or millions of us into space. But it did spark an era of hard science and forced engineering schools to deliver talent. NASA was one of the first major buyers of integrated circuits, a marvel of quantum physics. But we also got rockets, satellites and cheap digital communications\u2014all required for that Uber ride. Those technology spinoffs have created trillion-dollar industries and enough societal wealth finally to tackle poverty and other problems. Maybe it all would have happened without a moon landing. But counterfactual history is for movie plots.\nPerhaps the public-sector green/clean movement will have similar productive byproducts: molten-salt energy storage, bio-benign plastic (I hate paper straws!) or fabrics that generate electricity as you jog. I\u2019m not advocating giant government projects\u2014just encouraging big, hairy, audacious goals. Government seeds, industry grows.\nThe spiritual lessons might be the loftiest. In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1968 movie, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d\u2014based on a 1948\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur C. Clarke\n\n\n\n short story\u2014black monoliths keep showing up: first on earth, then the moon, on Jupiter and finally in the fifth dimension. Confusing. There are lots of guesses about what that all meant. I like the simplest\u2014that some higher being put those monoliths just out of man\u2019s reach to stimulate our desire to progress civilization enough to reach them. With each achievement the goal posts move further out of reach, just like life. The moon itself was our real-life monolith. It was out there, beyond our reach, until it wasn\u2019t. And progress is a continuum\u2014on to the next goal.\nSo was the moon landing one giant leap? A quest for greatness? I don\u2019t know; maybe it was just a really cool thing to do. If nothing else, the manned spaceflight provided psychic energy for many decades. What manager hasn\u2019t demanded, \u201cIf we could put a man on the moon, surely you can finish this project on deadline\u201d? But for careers, goals and life, I like the \u201c1202\u201d lesson: Ignore confusing signals telling you to stop. Fifty years ago, Apollo 11 demonstrated both the perils and promise of innovation. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lessons From a Trip to the Moon (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1905",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-a-trip-to-the-moon-11563137910?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=70",
        "text": "Each program in the guidance computer used a 12-word, 16-bit data-storage unit known as a Core Set. The system had handled countless complicated tasks through the takeoff, approach and orbit, but something had gone wrong during the landing attempt. Turns out a radar used to track the Command Module was overrunning the Core Sets with bad data. Fortunately, the guidance computer had been designed to crash and reboot when that happened, and not lose data so it could continue its guidance function.\nImagine sitting in a tin can, about to make history, trusting a computer with your life, already white-knuckled, and getting the early equivalent of the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death. Each time the alarm sounded, the display went blank for 10 seconds as the computer crashed and rebooted. There were five alarms and crashes in four minutes, the last at 2,000 feet. With no clear sign of any systems malfunctioning, the astronauts and Mission Control scrambled to make sense. Armstrong\u2019s heart rate hit 150. The display finally returned 800 feet above the lunar surface. Noting no data was lost, the flight controller in Houston,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Duke,\n\n\n\n replied, \u201cEagle, looking great. You\u2019re GO.\u201d\n\n\nThere are many lessons from Apollo 11, and you\u2019ll hear them all week. First, timing is everything: Inspired by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy,\n\n\n\n all six lunar landings occurred during\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon\u2019s\n\n\n\n first term. Another obvious and overlooked lesson is that technology is an indispensable yet imperfect tool. I\u2019ve had my iPhone crash trying to hail an Uber. I know, First World problem.\nApollo 11 was a source of pride, but also confusion. Whenever hurricanes and other freaky weather hit in the \u201970s, my grandmother would explain it by insisting, \u201cThey touched something up there on the moon.\u201d Sadly, climate thinking hasn\u2019t advanced much.\nPeople often ask whether space exploration is worth the cost. I\u2019ve certainly been in and out of the \u201cWe went to the moon and all we got were Velcro and Tang\u201d camp. Doubters now insist the money should have been spent to fight poverty in inner cities.\nSure, NASA was never productive or scaled to launch thousands or millions of us into space. But it did spark an era of hard science and forced engineering schools to deliver talent. NASA was one of the first major buyers of integrated circuits, a marvel of quantum physics. But we also got rockets, satellites and cheap digital communications\u2014all required for that Uber ride. Those technology spinoffs have created trillion-dollar industries and enough societal wealth finally to tackle poverty and other problems. Maybe it all would have happened without a moon landing. But counterfactual history is for movie plots.\nPerhaps the public-sector green/clean movement will have similar productive byproducts: molten-salt energy storage, bio-benign plastic (I hate paper straws!) or fabrics that generate electricity as you jog. I\u2019m not advocating giant government projects\u2014just encouraging big, hairy, audacious goals. Government seeds, industry grows.\nThe spiritual lessons might be the loftiest. In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1968 movie, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d\u2014based on a 1948\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur C. Clarke\n\n\n\n short story\u2014black monoliths keep showing up: first on earth, then the moon, on Jupiter and finally in the fifth dimension. Confusing. There are lots of guesses about what that all meant. I like the simplest\u2014that some higher being put those monoliths just out of man\u2019s reach to stimulate our desire to progress civilization enough to reach them. With each achievement the goal posts move further out of reach, just like life. The moon itself was our real-life monolith. It was out there, beyond our reach, until it wasn\u2019t. And progress is a continuum\u2014on to the next goal.\nSo was the moon landing one giant leap? A quest for greatness? I don\u2019t know; maybe it was just a really cool thing to do. If nothing else, the manned spaceflight provided psychic energy for many decades. What manager hasn\u2019t demanded, \u201cIf we could put a man on the moon, surely you can finish this project on deadline\u201d? But for careers, goals and life, I like the \u201c1202\u201d lesson: Ignore confusing signals telling you to stop. Fifty years ago, Apollo 11 demonstrated both the perils and promise of innovation. ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space (WP: Inspired Life) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1906",
        "date": "2018-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02/01/this-amateur-astronomer-found-a-satellite-lost-in-space/",
        "text": "Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley was in his home office on a recent evening, using his radio equipment to scan space in a needle-in-a-haystack search for a spy satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force.Tilley, 47, launches himself on missions like this nightly. Since he was about 8, he has been a devoted but earthbound space explorer, looking for hidden satellites in the sky for hours on end. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs he scanned the skies that night a few weeks ago, he did not find what he was looking for, but he came across something possibly even better: a different satellite, a weather craft NASA lost more than a decade ago. NASA had searched for the spacecraft, worth about $150 million, for two years before giving up.Story continues below advertisementFor an amateur astronomer, it was the stuff of dreams.\u201cBy far, it\u2019s the most important thing I\u2019ve discovered,\u201d said Tilley, an electrical engineer. \u201cIt\u2019s a\u00a0pretty cool thing in my world.\u201dTilley, who lives in British Columbia, had single-handedly located the weather-tracking spacecraft IMAGE, which NASA launched in 2000 and lost contact with five years later.At dinner, he told his wife about his discovery. She told him to tell NASA.Advertisement\u201cI said, \u2018Well, how do I do that?\u2019 \u201d Tilley said. \u201cShe said, \u2018If you can find a satellite in space, surely you can find who built the thing.\u2019 \u201dSo Tilley posted on Twitter what he had found. Then he got some names of scientists who had worked on the project and sent some emails.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen I woke up, my inbox was filled with emails from people who worked on it in the early 2000s,\u201d Tilley said.NASA confirmed his discovery through identification data collected by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Now the agency is\u00a0trying to learn more about the condition of IMAGE and see whether it can once again collect the data the craft was initially sent up to gather.\u201cWe are all very, very excited we might get the satellite back,\u201d said Patricia Reiff, who was co-investigator for the IMAGE satellite and is a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. She had worked on the project since its inception in 1989.The most surprising recruit in college basketball is a bus driver. And he\u2019s 38.NASA had stopped looking for IMAGE in 2007 because of funding, she said, and she did not expect it to ever be found again. The problem now is, because IMAGE\u2019s technology is so old, NASA has to be creative in finding ways to communicate with the craft\u2019s aging software.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mission of IMAGE was to collect space weather data that would affect technology such as GPS devices and radio waves. The satellite had\u00a0been doing its job efficiently until 2005 when it went dead. Scientists say they believe there was a glitch in its battery that caused it to shut down. It may have recharged using solar power after being inactive for over a decade and was sending a homing signal out in space, waiting for someone to find it.That someone was Tilley.\u201cThey\u2019d given up looking for it, and I happened to stumble across it,\u201d he said.Tilley traces his interest in space back to a \u201c60 Minutes\u201d special he saw when he was a kid. His father was an amateur radio operator, so he was able to use his father\u2019s equipment found around the house to tinker and explore.Story continues below advertisementHe said his love of space is not fueled by the goal of discovering satellites or other man-made objects. He loves exploration for the journey. It is not so bad to find something important that\u00a0had once eluded brilliant scientists.Advertisement\u201cYou feel like you\u2019ve contributed something of value to science,\u201d he said.NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal.Caption information below the photo of Tilley\u2019s camera has been updated. He did not, as it previously indicated, use the camera to track IMAGE.Read more:\u00a0Senator invites custodian to State of the Union: \u2018He works hard behind the scenes\u2019Husband with Alzheimer\u2019s forgot he was married to his wife of 38 years. He proposed, and they married again.This family grew up picking cotton. Decades later, they returned to the place they sharecropped \u2014 as homeowners. With his home equipment, Scott Tilley went on a needle-in-a-haystack search and found a NASA satellite that had been lost for more than a decade Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space",
        "author": "Allison Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space (WP: Inspired Life) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1907",
        "date": "2018-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02/01/this-amateur-astronomer-found-a-satellite-lost-in-space/",
        "text": "Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley was in his home office on a recent evening, using his radio equipment to scan space in a needle-in-a-haystack search for a spy satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force.Tilley, 47, launches himself on missions like this nightly. Since he was about 8, he has been a devoted but earthbound space explorer, looking for hidden satellites in the sky for hours on end. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs he scanned the skies that night a few weeks ago, he did not find what he was looking for, but he came across something possibly even better: a different satellite, a weather craft NASA lost more than a decade ago. NASA had searched for the spacecraft, worth about $150 million, for two years before giving up.Story continues below advertisementFor an amateur astronomer, it was the stuff of dreams.\u201cBy far, it\u2019s the most important thing I\u2019ve discovered,\u201d said Tilley, an electrical engineer. \u201cIt\u2019s a\u00a0pretty cool thing in my world.\u201dTilley, who lives in British Columbia, had single-handedly located the weather-tracking spacecraft IMAGE, which NASA launched in 2000 and lost contact with five years later.At dinner, he told his wife about his discovery. She told him to tell NASA.Advertisement\u201cI said, \u2018Well, how do I do that?\u2019 \u201d Tilley said. \u201cShe said, \u2018If you can find a satellite in space, surely you can find who built the thing.\u2019 \u201dSo Tilley posted on Twitter what he had found. Then he got some names of scientists who had worked on the project and sent some emails.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen I woke up, my inbox was filled with emails from people who worked on it in the early 2000s,\u201d Tilley said.NASA confirmed his discovery through identification data collected by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Now the agency is\u00a0trying to learn more about the condition of IMAGE and see whether it can once again collect the data the craft was initially sent up to gather.\u201cWe are all very, very excited we might get the satellite back,\u201d said Patricia Reiff, who was co-investigator for the IMAGE satellite and is a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. She had worked on the project since its inception in 1989.The most surprising recruit in college basketball is a bus driver. And he\u2019s 38.NASA had stopped looking for IMAGE in 2007 because of funding, she said, and she did not expect it to ever be found again. The problem now is, because IMAGE\u2019s technology is so old, NASA has to be creative in finding ways to communicate with the craft\u2019s aging software.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mission of IMAGE was to collect space weather data that would affect technology such as GPS devices and radio waves. The satellite had\u00a0been doing its job efficiently until 2005 when it went dead. Scientists say they believe there was a glitch in its battery that caused it to shut down. It may have recharged using solar power after being inactive for over a decade and was sending a homing signal out in space, waiting for someone to find it.That someone was Tilley.\u201cThey\u2019d given up looking for it, and I happened to stumble across it,\u201d he said.Tilley traces his interest in space back to a \u201c60 Minutes\u201d special he saw when he was a kid. His father was an amateur radio operator, so he was able to use his father\u2019s equipment found around the house to tinker and explore.Story continues below advertisementHe said his love of space is not fueled by the goal of discovering satellites or other man-made objects. He loves exploration for the journey. It is not so bad to find something important that\u00a0had once eluded brilliant scientists.Advertisement\u201cYou feel like you\u2019ve contributed something of value to science,\u201d he said.NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal.Caption information below the photo of Tilley\u2019s camera has been updated. He did not, as it previously indicated, use the camera to track IMAGE.Read more:\u00a0Senator invites custodian to State of the Union: \u2018He works hard behind the scenes\u2019Husband with Alzheimer\u2019s forgot he was married to his wife of 38 years. He proposed, and they married again.This family grew up picking cotton. Decades later, they returned to the place they sharecropped \u2014 as homeowners. With his home equipment, Scott Tilley went on a needle-in-a-haystack search and found a NASA satellite that had been lost for more than a decade Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space",
        "author": "Allison Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space (WP: Inspired Life) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1908",
        "date": "2018-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02/01/this-amateur-astronomer-found-a-satellite-lost-in-space/",
        "text": "Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley was in his home office on a recent evening, using his radio equipment to scan space in a needle-in-a-haystack search for a spy satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force.Tilley, 47, launches himself on missions like this nightly. Since he was about 8, he has been a devoted but earthbound space explorer, looking for hidden satellites in the sky for hours on end. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs he scanned the skies that night a few weeks ago, he did not find what he was looking for, but he came across something possibly even better: a different satellite, a weather craft NASA lost more than a decade ago. NASA had searched for the spacecraft, worth about $150 million, for two years before giving up.Story continues below advertisementFor an amateur astronomer, it was the stuff of dreams.\u201cBy far, it\u2019s the most important thing I\u2019ve discovered,\u201d said Tilley, an electrical engineer. \u201cIt\u2019s a\u00a0pretty cool thing in my world.\u201dTilley, who lives in British Columbia, had single-handedly located the weather-tracking spacecraft IMAGE, which NASA launched in 2000 and lost contact with five years later.At dinner, he told his wife about his discovery. She told him to tell NASA.Advertisement\u201cI said, \u2018Well, how do I do that?\u2019 \u201d Tilley said. \u201cShe said, \u2018If you can find a satellite in space, surely you can find who built the thing.\u2019 \u201dSo Tilley posted on Twitter what he had found. Then he got some names of scientists who had worked on the project and sent some emails.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen I woke up, my inbox was filled with emails from people who worked on it in the early 2000s,\u201d Tilley said.NASA confirmed his discovery through identification data collected by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Now the agency is\u00a0trying to learn more about the condition of IMAGE and see whether it can once again collect the data the craft was initially sent up to gather.\u201cWe are all very, very excited we might get the satellite back,\u201d said Patricia Reiff, who was co-investigator for the IMAGE satellite and is a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. She had worked on the project since its inception in 1989.The most surprising recruit in college basketball is a bus driver. And he\u2019s 38.NASA had stopped looking for IMAGE in 2007 because of funding, she said, and she did not expect it to ever be found again. The problem now is, because IMAGE\u2019s technology is so old, NASA has to be creative in finding ways to communicate with the craft\u2019s aging software.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mission of IMAGE was to collect space weather data that would affect technology such as GPS devices and radio waves. The satellite had\u00a0been doing its job efficiently until 2005 when it went dead. Scientists say they believe there was a glitch in its battery that caused it to shut down. It may have recharged using solar power after being inactive for over a decade and was sending a homing signal out in space, waiting for someone to find it.That someone was Tilley.\u201cThey\u2019d given up looking for it, and I happened to stumble across it,\u201d he said.Tilley traces his interest in space back to a \u201c60 Minutes\u201d special he saw when he was a kid. His father was an amateur radio operator, so he was able to use his father\u2019s equipment found around the house to tinker and explore.Story continues below advertisementHe said his love of space is not fueled by the goal of discovering satellites or other man-made objects. He loves exploration for the journey. It is not so bad to find something important that\u00a0had once eluded brilliant scientists.Advertisement\u201cYou feel like you\u2019ve contributed something of value to science,\u201d he said.NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal.Caption information below the photo of Tilley\u2019s camera has been updated. He did not, as it previously indicated, use the camera to track IMAGE.Read more:\u00a0Senator invites custodian to State of the Union: \u2018He works hard behind the scenes\u2019Husband with Alzheimer\u2019s forgot he was married to his wife of 38 years. He proposed, and they married again.This family grew up picking cotton. Decades later, they returned to the place they sharecropped \u2014 as homeowners. With his home equipment, Scott Tilley went on a needle-in-a-haystack search and found a NASA satellite that had been lost for more than a decade Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space",
        "author": "Allison Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space (WP: Inspired Life) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1909",
        "date": "2018-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/02/01/this-amateur-astronomer-found-a-satellite-lost-in-space/",
        "text": "Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley was in his home office on a recent evening, using his radio equipment to scan space in a needle-in-a-haystack search for a spy satellite operated by the U.S. Air Force.Tilley, 47, launches himself on missions like this nightly. Since he was about 8, he has been a devoted but earthbound space explorer, looking for hidden satellites in the sky for hours on end. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs he scanned the skies that night a few weeks ago, he did not find what he was looking for, but he came across something possibly even better: a different satellite, a weather craft NASA lost more than a decade ago. NASA had searched for the spacecraft, worth about $150 million, for two years before giving up.Story continues below advertisementFor an amateur astronomer, it was the stuff of dreams.\u201cBy far, it\u2019s the most important thing I\u2019ve discovered,\u201d said Tilley, an electrical engineer. \u201cIt\u2019s a\u00a0pretty cool thing in my world.\u201dTilley, who lives in British Columbia, had single-handedly located the weather-tracking spacecraft IMAGE, which NASA launched in 2000 and lost contact with five years later.At dinner, he told his wife about his discovery. She told him to tell NASA.Advertisement\u201cI said, \u2018Well, how do I do that?\u2019 \u201d Tilley said. \u201cShe said, \u2018If you can find a satellite in space, surely you can find who built the thing.\u2019 \u201dSo Tilley posted on Twitter what he had found. Then he got some names of scientists who had worked on the project and sent some emails.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen I woke up, my inbox was filled with emails from people who worked on it in the early 2000s,\u201d Tilley said.NASA confirmed his discovery through identification data collected by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Now the agency is\u00a0trying to learn more about the condition of IMAGE and see whether it can once again collect the data the craft was initially sent up to gather.\u201cWe are all very, very excited we might get the satellite back,\u201d said Patricia Reiff, who was co-investigator for the IMAGE satellite and is a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University. She had worked on the project since its inception in 1989.The most surprising recruit in college basketball is a bus driver. And he\u2019s 38.NASA had stopped looking for IMAGE in 2007 because of funding, she said, and she did not expect it to ever be found again. The problem now is, because IMAGE\u2019s technology is so old, NASA has to be creative in finding ways to communicate with the craft\u2019s aging software.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mission of IMAGE was to collect space weather data that would affect technology such as GPS devices and radio waves. The satellite had\u00a0been doing its job efficiently until 2005 when it went dead. Scientists say they believe there was a glitch in its battery that caused it to shut down. It may have recharged using solar power after being inactive for over a decade and was sending a homing signal out in space, waiting for someone to find it.That someone was Tilley.\u201cThey\u2019d given up looking for it, and I happened to stumble across it,\u201d he said.Tilley traces his interest in space back to a \u201c60 Minutes\u201d special he saw when he was a kid. His father was an amateur radio operator, so he was able to use his father\u2019s equipment found around the house to tinker and explore.Story continues below advertisementHe said his love of space is not fueled by the goal of discovering satellites or other man-made objects. He loves exploration for the journey. It is not so bad to find something important that\u00a0had once eluded brilliant scientists.Advertisement\u201cYou feel like you\u2019ve contributed something of value to science,\u201d he said.NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal.Caption information below the photo of Tilley\u2019s camera has been updated. He did not, as it previously indicated, use the camera to track IMAGE.Read more:\u00a0Senator invites custodian to State of the Union: \u2018He works hard behind the scenes\u2019Husband with Alzheimer\u2019s forgot he was married to his wife of 38 years. He proposed, and they married again.This family grew up picking cotton. Decades later, they returned to the place they sharecropped \u2014 as homeowners. With his home equipment, Scott Tilley went on a needle-in-a-haystack search and found a NASA satellite that had been lost for more than a decade Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in space",
        "author": "Allison Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kids in wheelchairs get epic Halloween costumes. It makes all the difference.  (WP: Inspired Life) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1910",
        "date": "2018-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/10/25/kids-wheelchairs-get-epic-halloween-costumes-finally-love-trick-or-treating/",
        "text": "The first time Heather Thorup took her son trick-or-treating in his wheelchair, she came home in tears, upset that Carter watched the action from the sidewalk as other children ran by him with their candy-filled buckets, ignoring him in his Incredible Hulk costume.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt hurt that people didn\u2019t even notice him,\u201d Thorup, 32, said, vowing to her husband that night she wouldn\u2019t take Carter, who has a congenital genetic disorder, trick-or-treating the following year. Then last year, she came across the Halloween workshop at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Salt Lake City, where volunteers turned her son\u2019s wheelchair into the Batmobile and suited him up in a Batman costume. All the kids in their Clinton, Utah, neighborhood swarmed Carter to get a closer look at him and his crime-fighting wheels. It was the first time, Thorup said, that Halloween was fun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt used to be that I could never get Carter close enough to the porch while trick-or-treating,\u201d she said. \u201cBut now, because of his costume, everyone comes to him.\u201dAt the Shriners hospital costume clinic, volunteers armed with power tools, cardboard, paint and PVC pipe transform kids' wheelchairs into stagecoaches, magic carpets, school buses, tea cups and pirate ships. They create handmade firetrucks, racecars and princess carriages, then \u201cwrap\u201d them around children and their wheelchairs in time for Halloween.Carter, now 8, returned to Shriners with his mom last week for a new hero costume. This year, he\u2019s going trick-or-treating as an Optimus Prime Transformer.\u201cIt\u2019s the coolest idea ever to do this for kids,\u201d said Thorup, as a \u201cpit crew\u201d of four swarmed around her son to size up his wheelchair and figure out the best way to transform his wheelchair.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMatt Lowell, director of the Utah hospital\u2019s seating and mobility program, came up with the idea of a decorating day in 2016 after hearing from parents that it was difficult to find or make Halloween costumes that included a wheelchair.\"We had no idea what we were doing, but we learned as we went along,\u201d said Lowell, 44. \u201cIt turned out to be the most rewarding thing we'd done all year.\"Last year, volunteers built everything from a space shuttle and safari Jeep to a taco truck and a \u201cMonsters, Inc.\u201d door for 20 disabled children. And last week, 28 young patients showed up in shifts to have their wheelchairs turned into any costume they could dream up.Story continues below advertisementAfter talking to the parents of some of the children at the Shriners costume clinic, Lowell said he went home touched by what he\u2019d learned.\u201cI heard things like, \u2018My boy went from being the kid nobody wanted to trick-or-treat with to the coolest kid on the block,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThey now feel included, and that\u2019s how it should be.\u201dAdvertisementHappy tears spilled from Julie Cheever's eyes as she watched volunteers turn her son, Drew, 4, into Woody from his favorite movie, \u201cToy Story,\u201d and then put together a horse, \u201cBullseye,\u201d for him to ride from his wheelchair.\"This is my 'neigh'!\" exclaimed Drew, using his word for \u201chorse\u201d and grabbing hold of the red reins. \u201cGiddy-up, neigh! Giddy-up!\"Cheever, a single mom of six from Salt Lake City, said Drew, her youngest, uses a wheelchair because he has spina bifida.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen a child is in a wheelchair, people often look past them, and Halloween is no exception,\u201d Cheever said. \u201cBut when they suddenly have this big, fantastic costume, all of that changes. Everyone wants to see it and talk to Drew. It\u2019s made a huge difference.\u201dKen Kozole, who helped create Drew\u2019s costume and has worked in the hospital\u2019s wheelchair and seating program for 21 years, said watching the boy\u2019s reaction made him realize how something as simple as a stuffed horse can brighten a child\u2019s life.Advertisement\u201cWe put the hat on [Drew] and all of a sudden, he\u2019s Woody,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what I love most \u2014 just watching these kids act out once their costumes are finished. It\u2019s a joy to watch them and their parents just enjoying the moment, having a good time. That\u2019s what brings it all home.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNo project is too challenging for the costume crew, said Lowell, who has families submit costume choices in early October so that he can purchase supplies with funds donated for the cause.\"Last year, we had a troll doll named Poppy coming out of a cupcake that had us thinking quite a bit,\u201d he said, \u201cBut we did it. And this year, we have a white rabbit in a teacup and Superman coming out of a phone booth. Whatever it takes, we'll get it done.\"After learning about the creative decorating going on in Salt Lake City, costume supplier Spirit Halloween decided to donate to the hospital\u2019s costume fund and work with Lowell and other volunteers to design four wheelchair-friendly costumes to sell nationally online for $100 each.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA princess carriage and monster truck are available this season in limited quantities on Spirit Halloween website. The site had a rocket ship and racecar that already sold out.\u201cWe\u2019re so inspired by this hospital and what they\u2019re doing,\u201d said Todd Lowe, a zone manager for Spirit Halloween. \u201cKids with physical limitations deserve to participate in Halloween the same as any kid.\"Back at the hospital, Mayra Bekins, a 52-year-old mother of seven from West Valley City, Utah, pitched in to help design her daughter Rachel's turquoise Princess Jasmine costume, complete with a flying carpet. Rachel, 8, was born with cerebral palsy, and can still use a walker, but Bekins knows the day is coming when her daughter will need to use a wheelchair all the time.A few years ago, she dressed up her entire family, including Rachel, as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"I've always loved Halloween,\u201d she said.This year, though, she was happy to have help with Rachel\u2019s costume.\"It's wonderful how they helped pull it all together,\u201d she said, waving at Rachel as she maneuvered her \u201cflying carpet\u201d in circles on the hospital's rec room floor.There was a flurry of activity going on in seven stations around her. In the booths next to hers, a 4-year-old girl was getting outfitted with a pirate ship and a 19-year-old teen who loves taking the bus to school is having his wheelchair transformed into a bright yellow bus with him as the driver.\u201cEvery parent here feels the same way, we can\u2019t thank them enough,\u201d said Bekins. \u201cThey help everyone to see there is more to each child than a wheelchair. These costumes help bring out the magic.\u201dRead more:They opened their home to dozens of young people. Then he learned he could give one more thing: A kidney. Her autistic son didn\u2019t like to be photographed. She got a dinosaur costume and the results went viral. Volunteers armed with power tools, cardboard, paint and PVC pipe transform kids' wheelchairs into stagecoaches, magic carpets, school buses, tea cups and pirate ships. Kids in wheelchairs get epic Halloween costumes. It makes all the difference. ",
        "author": "Cathy Free"
    },
    {
        "title": "He got 2 million people to say they\u2019d storm Area 51. Now he\u2019s planning an alien festival. (WP: Internet Culture) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1911",
        "date": "2019-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/12/he-got-million-people-say-theyd-storm-area-now-hes-planning-an-alien-festival/",
        "text": "The call to raid an Air Force base for aliens was a joke, drawing on decades of conspiracy theories.Then 2 million people signed on to the Facebook event.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAuthorities warned against any attempt to enter the base. And now, unless plans go awry, hordes of strangers will, indeed, gather in the Nevada desert next month near a secretive government facility called Area 51. The man who created the Internet sensation, Storm Area 51 \u2014 They Can\u2019t Stop All of Us, is planning a real-life festival called Alien Stock near the remote base within the Nevada Test and Training Range, a couple hours\u2019 drive northwest of Las Vegas. The three-day festival set to start Sept. 20, a celebration of aliens that promises surprise performances, art installations and camping, is expected to pack a tiny town already overrun by media attention and a spike in extraterrestrial enthusiasm.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith just over a month left to plan and some residents reportedly less than thrilled about the attention, the organizers are focused on the logistics of bringing thousands to a town of 54 people, as counted in the last Census. They\u2019re fending off suggestions they could be planning the next Fyre Festival, the 2017 event that fell apart spectacularly and led to fraud charges.Half a million people signed up to storm Area 51. What happens if they actually show?And the Internet frenzy over Storm Area 51 has thrust Rachel, Nev., into a new limelight and tested residents\u2019 patience.\u201cOf course it\u2019s scary,\u201d said Connie West, whose alien-themed inn declares on its website that it is \u201cBOOKED SOLID FOR ALIEN-STOCK.\u201d \u201cBut I\u2019m excited,\u201d she told The Washington Post. \u201cHow can I not be?\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe U.S. government denied Area 51\u2019s existence for decades before a public records request in 2013 showed it to be real. Government documents make no mention of aliens, describing the site as an aircraft testing area. But revelations two years ago of a $22 million Defense Department program on \u201canomalous aerospace threats,\u201d commonly known as UFOs, have helped keep speculation about the Nevada facility alive.AdvertisementRachel has long embraced the rumors of hidden aliens and their spacecraft. A town welcome sign notes an extraterrestrial population as well as a human one \u2014 there\u2019s no head count, just a question mark \u2014 and visitors drive down the Extraterrestrial Highway. A questions-and-answers page linked on Rachel\u2019s official website tackles inquiries like \u201cAre there UFOs at Area 51?\u201d (no) and \u201cIs there an Area 52?\u201d (yes, about 65 miles away).But not everyone is happy about the prospect of so many visitors in September, West said.Story continues below advertisementAn owner of what Rachel\u2019s website calls the town\u2019s only remaining business, West has been flooded with media requests since Area 51 blew up online. She says she stopped counting the interviews at 153.\u201cWe live in a quiet little place because we like it quiet,\u201d she said.Brock Daily, an Arkansas college student and one of the organizers of the festival, told The Post he\u2019s expecting 5,000 to 30,000 people to show up for Alien Stock, which Daily said he pitched to Storm Area 51 creator Mathew Roberts last month. The 20-year-old said it\u2019s hard to share precise interest numbers because they just started publicizing.AdvertisementBut any total in the thousands will pose logistical challenges in a place as small and rural as Rachel. A prominent notice on the town\u2019s website warns festivalgoers of the limited infrastructure. \u201cThere is no gas and no store. \u2026 We expect cell service and the Internet to be offline,\u201d the note reads. \u201cCredit card [processing] will not work, so bring enough cash.\u201dLincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee said his office is working with local, state and federal law enforcement to prepare for a \u201cvery large but unknown number of visitors.\u201dDaily said he and Roberts are working to make sure that people who show up will have access to basics such as water, bathrooms and space. He dismissed comparisons to the disastrous Fyre Festival, saying Alien Stock is not looking to make a profit: It isn\u2019t charging entrance fees, though attendees will have to rent a parking spot or campsite from West for $60 to $140. The organizers ask that people donate any amount toward the festivities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlien Stock bills itself as \u201ca meeting place for all the believers\u201d \u2014 people at least intrigued by the possibility of extraterrestrial life \u2014 Daily explained, though he guesses some will come just to witness an online phenomenon come to life. Most details on the entertainment have yet to be released; the only planned guest publicized online is a rock-and-roll group called Wily Savage.\u201cWith a normal festival, you have a business structure that\u2019s already lined out,\u201d Daily said. \u201cYou have a theme and an idea that you\u2019re going to try to market to the public. Whereas with us we had this monster on our hands.\u201dRoberts, who did not respond to an inquiry from The Post, told a California news station that he wants the event to be a \u201cpositive, enjoyable, safe and profitable for the rural area of Nevada.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJoking discussion beneath a Friday post announcing the festival on the Storm Area 51 Facebook page took a more conspiratorial view of the event\u2019s motives.\u201cDistraction \u2026 well played government,\u201d one person commented.Read more:The fountain pen-obsessed entrepreneur behind 8chan, the Internet\u2019s most notorious hate forum\u2018We need answers. Lots of them.\u2019 What\u2019s known and what\u2019s next after Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s deathCaregivers taunted a 91-year old with dementia on video, lawsuit says. They\u2019ve been fired and charged. Hordes of strangers are expected to gather in the Nevada desert next month near a secretive government facility. He got 2 million people to say they\u2019d storm Area 51. Now he\u2019s planning an alien festival.",
        "author": "Hannah Knowles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Human beings \u2014 not technology \u2014 are the scariest things in \u2018Black Mirror\u2019s\u2019 Season 4 (WP: Internet Culture) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1912",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/01/01/human-beings-not-technology-are-the-scariest-things-in-black-mirrors-season-4/",
        "text": "SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains extensive spoilers for the new season of \u201cBlack Mirror.\u201d\u201cBlack Mirror,\u201d and its creator Charlie Brooker, are sometimes spoken about in terms of prophetic ability.\u00a0That 2011 episode about a prime minister and a pig\u00a0resonated\u00a0in the real world. There\u2019s \u201cThe Waldo Moment,\u201d which generated\u00a0viral headlines crediting the episode with predicting President Trump\u2019s rise to power. And then there\u2019s \u201cNosedive,\u201d the episode set in a world where a person\u2019s life depends on their rating out of\u00a0five on a social media app \u2014 enter China\u2019s idea for a \u201csocial credit\u201d system. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d is also about the present. The anthology series\u2019 futuristic technologies of varying plausibility are used as vessels to say something about what we\u2019re capable of doing to ourselves and to each other \u2014 right now.\u00a0In\u00a0Season 4\u2019s\u00a0six episodes,\u00a0which premiered Friday on Netflix, human beings, not technology, are the scariest things.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCrocodile,\u201d a bleak and difficult episode co-starring Andrea Riseborough and a tone-perfect Icelandic landscape, is a story about a successful woman who kills people\u00a0to protect her past from ruining her future. The technology is a powerful machine that collects memories, controlled by a smart, ethical and kind insurance investigator played by Kiran Sonia Sawar.The technology isn\u2019t\u00a0the reason Riseborough\u2019s character begins to kill; instead, it\u2019s a figure from her past who\u00a0plans to dredge\u00a0up their mutual secret using the most analog of media: an anonymous letter sent to the police.The technological trick that makes \u201cUSS Callister\u201d \u2014\u00a0widely considered the standout episode of the season \u2014\u00a0possible is one Brooker has used before on \u201cBlack Mirror.\u201d It\u2019s a good one: Place\u00a0a real human consciousness into the line of fire of the sort of human cruelty we\u2019re capable of through technology \u2014 when we think no one is looking, or no one can hold us accountable. In \u201cCallister,\u201d those consciousnesses live inside a private, simulation video game controlled by Robert Daly, the quiet IRL CTO of a tech company, played by\u00a0Jesse Plemons.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring his downtime at home, Daly\u00a0built a simulator to let him be the captain aboard the USS Callister \u2014 the spaceship from his favorite TV show. His crew comprises the stolen, captive human consciousnesses of several of his co-workers, each of whom has committed some perceived slight against Plemons\u2019s character in the real world. All Daly needs to do to create a new prisoner is steal a sample of their DNA, which he does to his new employee,\u00a0Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti). Cole, who is kind and admiring of Daly\u2019s work, doesn\u2019t smile at him enough once, earning her DNA a one-way trip to the Callister.The episode jumps back and forth between Daly\u2019s world and the real world, as the imprisoned Cole consciousness tries to free herself and her fellow co-worker clones from Daly\u2019s godlike control. The successful\u00a0episode accomplishes two things at once: It\u2019s a thrilling space adventure story, and it effectively embodies the cruelty of the toxic masculinity it seeks to condemn. For Daly, what might feel like an outlet for his pent-up resentment and anger from being the Nice Guy nobody appreciates is shown uncompromisingly as the violence that it really is.By 2017, a wide segment of the world\u2019s online population has\u00a0seen or experienced the sort of online cruelty Callister dramatizes, but the episode will have particular and obvious resonances\u00a0for women in tech and video games who have experienced\u00a0mobs of online harassment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe structure of \u201cBlack Museum,\u201d a story about violence against black Americans, is simple enough: Nish,\u00a0played by\u00a0Letitia Wright, follows\u00a0Rolo Haynes (Douglas Hodge) through a tour of Haynes\u2019s Black Museum, a crumbling roadside attraction in the middle of the American desert. The museum is filled with technological artifacts that are each connected to a crime. Regular \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d viewers know many of the stories already \u2014 the objects come from previous episodes. But not all of them: Two new ones (for viewers, at least) lead Haynes into\u00a0the mini stories that give this episode its anthology feel.In one mini-story, Haynes tells the tale of a doctor who became addicted\u00a0to the experience of feeling his patients\u2019 pain through a new device. The short tale is told as dark entertainment: It contains both the sort of brutal violence you\u2019d expect in a torture porn film and an intentionally gratuitous joke about an erection. In the second story line, a man agrees to share his brain with the consciousness of his comatose wife. When her constant presence leads to nagging and fighting, the wife is removed from her former husband\u2019s skull and placed into that of a stuffed toy monkey.But then the anthology premise is dropped, and the viewer learns what Haynes and, secretly, Nish, knew all along: The main attraction of the Black Museum is the imprisoned consciousness of a black man who died on death row \u2014 despite substantial questions over his guilt. Haynes once profited handsomely off the torture of this man\u2019s consciousness, allowing busloads of\u00a0giddy tourists to pull the lever and electrocute him.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe most coveted souvenir of the Black Museum? A keychain that contains a piece of his consciousness at the moment of electrocution,\u00a0his face screaming in real agony, forever. The new, terrible souvenir technology comes from an old idea: Photographs of lynchings were once sold as commodities to white Americans, often in the form of a\u00a0postcard\u00a0or stereograph.Nish visits the Black Museum when it\u2019s all but\u00a0abandoned by visitors, the consciousness of Haynes\u2019s prisoner\u00a0tortured into a vegetable-like state.\u00a0He\u2019s no fun to electrocute anymore, even for the hardcore sadists and white supremacists who kept Haynes\u2019s doors open after the waves of tourists stopped coming.Nish hasn\u2019t forgotten: She\u2019s the man\u2019s daughter.Story continues below advertisementAs she reveals who she is, she speaks about another sort of pain \u2014 the kind that remains when an injustice is\u00a0abandoned without being fully righted, even as other injustices are committed on top of it. It takes no future technological breakthrough to connect what Nish says to our current reality. There are resonances here with essays, interviews and articles written by black writers about the trauma of repeated, viral, black death.AdvertisementMore unplanned was another resonance with current events: One day after this episode was released, Eric Garner\u2019s daughter Erica died at the age of 27.\u201cEven the protesters got bored after awhile, soon as it was clear the state wouldn\u2019t do a d\u2014 thing about clearing him,\u201d Nish says. \u201cThey just moved on to the next viral miscarriage of justice that you could hang a hashtag off.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBoth \u201cCallister\u201d and \u201cBlack Museum\u201d have revenge endings. They\u2019re not quite the happy endings of \u201cSan Junipero\u201d\u00a0from Season 3, or this season\u2019s \u201cHang the DJ,\u201d but not as bleak and hopeless as viewers have come to dread from the show. The good\u00a0side wins;\u00a0as in Kafka\u2019s \u201cIn the Penal Colony,\u201d the bad guys meet their demise through the tech they once controlled and misused.The repetition of the human consciousness theme, and the twinned revenge endings in the first and last episode of the series, are fine. But as I watched \u201cBlack Museum,\u201d I felt as if I was seeing the show press itself up against the glass of a\u00a0paradox\u00a0it will never really be able to escape.As many have noted before, \u201cBlack Mirror\u201d is not a show for Luddites. It invites us to enjoy and dread the possibilities presented by technology. In doing so, it also asks us to do the same of human violence. The British anthology series is at its scariest when it's about our current reality.  Human beings \u2014 not technology \u2014 are the scariest things in \u2018Black Mirror\u2019s\u2019 Season 4",
        "author": "Abby Ohlheiser"
    },
    {
        "title": "Endeavor Shares Rise in Market Debut (WSJ: IPOs) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1913",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/endeavor-shares-rise-in-market-debut-11619717301?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=31",
        "text": "The company, known for representing Hollywood\u2019s biggest talents such as Dwayne Johnson and Charlize Theron, also owns the giant sports and modeling agency IMG Worldwide Inc. and the Miss Universe pageant. In 2016, Endeavor bought part of Zuffa LLC, owner and operator of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cAs far as where the world is going, we\u2019re in every right sector right now,\u201d Endeavor\u2019s Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ari Emanuel\n\n\n\n said in an interview Thursday. He said the company is well positioned to attract investors interested in stocks that stand to benefit from a global economy that is reopening.\n\nLast month, the company said it was once again pursuing an IPO, after calling off a plan to go public in 2019. Endeavor publicly filed for an IPO in May 2019 but tabled those plans later in the year after WeWork\u2019s parent company had a high-profile shelving of its offering, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Peloton Interactive Inc.\u2019s\ndebut fizzled.\nAs part of the March announcement, the company also said it was planning to take full ownership of UFC.\nEndeavor also said at the time that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n chief executive of Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, had been nominated to the company\u2019s board.\nAlongside the public offering, Endeavor has engaged in a separate private placement that includes a mix of high-profile investors such as Fidelity Management & Research Co., Dragoneer Investment Group LLC and Elliott Management Corp. That funding will go toward buying out the 49.9% it doesn\u2019t already own of UFC.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUFC President Dana White before the public listing of Endeavor Group Holdings Inc. in New York on Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n shannon stapleton/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Emanuel said that securing the financing outside of the IPO took about six months, but doing so took some of the risks out of the IPO process.\nAfter their attempt at a public offering in 2019, he said: \u201cWe decided to take a big chunk of the variability of that process out.\u201d\nEndeavor expects $1.8 billion in proceeds from the offering and concurrent private placements.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n served as lead underwriter on the IPO, a role it didn\u2019t hold in the 2019 offering. \nThe company, along with other major Hollywood agencies, has begun producing content because the entertainment industry looks much different than at the company\u2019s founding in 1995, when the power wielded by agencies was more pronounced than now.\nEndeavor\u2019s biggest source of revenue now is its entertainment and sports division, which negotiates media-distribution deals on behalf of more than 150 clients, including the International Olympic Committee and the National Football League.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Deals Alert Major news in the world of deals and deal-makers. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nEndeavor\u2019s shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EDR.\nEndeavor diversified the scope of its business beyond traditional Hollywood deal-making as A-list stars\u2019 salaries have contracted in recent years\u2014reducing agency revenue.\nHowever, the decision to expand into sports, music and live events has hurt the company amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has entailed the cancellation or postponement of large public gatherings.\nWrite to Kimberly Chin at kimberly.chin@wsj.com and Maureen Farrell at maureen.farrell@wsj.com The entertainment company\u2019s shares rose 12.5% in their market debut, capping off a two-year effort to go public. ",
        "author": "Kimberly Chin and Maureen Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Endeavor to Jump Into Public Offering Again (WSJ: IPOs) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1914",
        "date": "2021-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/endeavor-to-jump-into-public-offering-again-11617231896?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=33",
        "text": "As part of the deal in a separate private placement that will take place at the time of the IPO, Endeavor will raise nearly $1.8 billion from a mix of high-profile investors. They include Fidelity Management & Research Co., Dragoneer Investment Group LLC and Elliott Management Corp. That funding will go toward buying out the 49.9% it doesn\u2019t own of Ultimate Fighting Championship.\n\n\n\n\nEndeavor will raise additional funds from public market investors but didn\u2019t reveal what it plans to raise.\n\n\nIn its filing, Endeavor also revealed that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n CEO of Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, had been nominated to the company\u2019s board.\n\n\nRise in SPACs Odell Beckham Jr. Joins SPAC Surge The Celebrities From Serena Williams to A-Rod Fueling the SPAC Boom \n\n\nThe company\u2019s move to jump into the public market bandwagon comes as investors are clamoring for newly-minted shares of fast-growing companies from videogame platforms such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Roblox Corp.\n\n\n to food-delivery companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DoorDash Inc.\n\n\n The IPO market has also been fueled by a rise in special-purpose acquisition companies.\nEndeavor publicly filed for an IPO in May 2019 but tabled those plans later in the year after WeWork\u2019s parent company had a high-profile shelving of its offering, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Peloton Interactive Inc.\u2019s\ndebut fizzled. WeWork agreed last week to merge with a SPAC in a deal that would take the shared-office provider public this year.\nThe company, known for representing Hollywood\u2019s biggest talent like Dwayne Johnson and Charlize Theron, also owns the giant sports and modeling agency IMG Worldwide Inc. and the Miss Universe pageant. In 2016, Endeavor bought part of Zuffa LLC, owner and operator of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.\nThe company, along with other major Hollywood agencies, has begun producing content because the entertainment industry looks much different than at the company\u2019s founding in 1995, when the power wielded by agencies was more pronounced than now.\nThe company later merged with the William Morris Agency. Endeavor has been trying to reinvent itself as an international entertainment and marketing powerhouse but remains heavily dependent on its business of representing actors, athletes and others.\nEndeavor\u2019s biggest source of revenue now is its entertainment and sports division, which negotiates media-distribution deals on behalf of more than 150 clients, including the International Olympic Committee and the National Football League.\nEndeavor applied to list its units on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EDR.\nEndeavor\u2019s decision to diversify the scope of its business beyond traditional Hollywood deal-making made sense, as A-list stars\u2019 salaries have contracted in recent years\u2014reducing agency revenue. However, the decision to expand into sports, music and live events has hurt the company amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has entailed the cancellation or postponement of large public gatherings. \nLast year, the company secured a $260 million term loan to help shore up the entertainment company\u2019s live sporting and in-person events business amid a round of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures.\nWrite to Kimberly Chin at kimberly.chin@wsj.com and Maureen Farrell at maureen.farrell@wsj.com The Hollywood entertainment company had shelved its IPO plans in late 2019. ",
        "author": "Kimberly Chin and Maureen Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hi, It\u2019s Venus. Congratulations on Your Discovery. Now Leave Us Alone. (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1915",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hi-its-venus-congratulations-on-your-discovery-now-leave-us-alone-11600180379?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=11",
        "text": "Stay away.\n\n\nWe\u2019re serious. We\u2019re not interested. No missions to Venus, no exploratory spacecraft, no sleepovers. That goes for your space-crazed billionaires as well as your governments. If we wake up one morning and look out and see Bezos, Musk and Branson wandering around in bespoke spacesuits, we\u2019re going to be really ticked off.\nWe mean no hostility. We\u2019re actually a very nice planet. It\u2019s just that we\u2019re not terribly impressed by what you\u2019ve got going on down there. \nEarth looks like a mess. You\u2019ve got health crises, environmental crises, political crises. You keep fighting about face masks. You haven\u2019t figured out how to deliver french fries without having them get soggy and disgusting. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns continue to stink.\nNo wonder so many of you want to abandon Earth for another planet.\nLeave us alone. Keep right where you are.\n\n\n\n\u201cIf we start having you all up here, pretty soon, the Martians and Jupiterians are going to want to come, too.\u201d\n\n\n\nWe know you\u2019d like it here. That\u2019s what scares us. You\u2019d all move to Venus in an instant. We\u2019ve got beautiful weather (800 degrees Fahrenheit, like August in Scottsdale), minimal traffic, a decent cost of living. On Venus, you can buy a three-bedroom for, like, $135,000. That\u2019s with a two-car garage and outdoor space. \nCrazy, right?\nWe even have a Chipotle. Really. Your genius scientists just think we have traces of phosphine. But we got our own Chipotle, like, three years ago. They\u2019re supposed to be opening a second one in a couple of months. \nWe also have a Buffalo Wild Wings. And a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lowe\u2019s.\n\n\n There are also some really good food trucks around here; there\u2019s one that makes oat milk gelato. Not to brag, but the culinary scene on Venus is vastly underrated. We went to this wood-fired pizza place the other night and it was insanely good.\nIn fairness, you\u2019ve got some good stuff over there, too. Earth does have its desirable attributes. We\u2019re jealous of the Grand Canyon, the Amazon rainforest, the Serengeti, fried clams and the first days of autumn sweater weather in Central Park. We\u2019d give anything to see a Packers game at Lambeau. And to meet\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Warren Buffett.\n\n\n\n And Beyonc\u00e9. \n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nThe Over-the-Top Stress of College Acceptance Season\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\nStop Reading This Lousy Column, and Read a Book Instead\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nBut we live in a fragile solar system. We can only handle so much. If we start having you all up here, pretty soon, the Martians and Jupiterians are going to want to come, too. Trust us: you don\u2019t want a bunch of Martians and Jupiterians sleeping on your couch, drinking all your beer. We\u2019ve been there before, and they left this place a mess. \nIn theory, we could meet you halfway. Pick out a spot and just go there. There\u2019s a Sunoco rest stop about 15 million miles from here that has surprisingly terrific hot dogs.\nOr we could always text. Texting works. Check your smartphone plan. The first 20 texts to Venus are supposed to be free. The next 20 are just $34 million per text. \nIn the meantime, cool your enthusiasm. Tell Elon, Jeff and Sir Richard to settle down and stick to cars, books and planes. We\u2019re not your escape plan. Venus is not Earth 2. We don\u2019t want an NHL franchise. We already have all of your\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n passwords. \nWe wish you the best in figuring it out. We have every faith you can save your planet. \nIf not, try Pluto. They\u2019re pretty lonely and bored out there.\nSincerely,\nVenus\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat would you say in response to the citizens of Venus? Join the conversation below. After a scientific breakthrough, a message from a faraway neighbor. ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hi, It\u2019s Venus. Congratulations on Your Discovery. Now Leave Us Alone. (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1916",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hi-its-venus-congratulations-on-your-discovery-now-leave-us-alone-11600180379?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=37",
        "text": "Stay away.\n\n\nWe\u2019re serious. We\u2019re not interested. No missions to Venus, no exploratory spacecraft, no sleepovers. That goes for your space-crazed billionaires as well as your governments. If we wake up one morning and look out and see Bezos, Musk and Branson wandering around in bespoke spacesuits, we\u2019re going to be really ticked off.\nWe mean no hostility. We\u2019re actually a very nice planet. It\u2019s just that we\u2019re not terribly impressed by what you\u2019ve got going on down there. \nEarth looks like a mess. You\u2019ve got health crises, environmental crises, political crises. You keep fighting about face masks. You haven\u2019t figured out how to deliver french fries without having them get soggy and disgusting. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns continue to stink.\nNo wonder so many of you want to abandon Earth for another planet.\nLeave us alone. Keep right where you are.\n\n\n\n\u201cIf we start having you all up here, pretty soon, the Martians and Jupiterians are going to want to come, too.\u201d\n\n\n\nWe know you\u2019d like it here. That\u2019s what scares us. You\u2019d all move to Venus in an instant. We\u2019ve got beautiful weather (800 degrees Fahrenheit, like August in Scottsdale), minimal traffic, a decent cost of living. On Venus, you can buy a three-bedroom for, like, $135,000. That\u2019s with a two-car garage and outdoor space. \nCrazy, right?\nWe even have a Chipotle. Really. Your genius scientists just think we have traces of phosphine. But we got our own Chipotle, like, three years ago. They\u2019re supposed to be opening a second one in a couple of months. \nWe also have a Buffalo Wild Wings. And a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lowe\u2019s.\n\n\n There are also some really good food trucks around here; there\u2019s one that makes oat milk gelato. Not to brag, but the culinary scene on Venus is vastly underrated. We went to this wood-fired pizza place the other night and it was insanely good.\nIn fairness, you\u2019ve got some good stuff over there, too. Earth does have its desirable attributes. We\u2019re jealous of the Grand Canyon, the Amazon rainforest, the Serengeti, fried clams and the first days of autumn sweater weather in Central Park. We\u2019d give anything to see a Packers game at Lambeau. And to meet\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Warren Buffett.\n\n\n\n And Beyonc\u00e9. \n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\nStop Reading This Lousy Column, and Read a Book Instead\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\nModest New Year\u2019s Resolutions for 2022\nDecember 31, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nBut we live in a fragile solar system. We can only handle so much. If we start having you all up here, pretty soon, the Martians and Jupiterians are going to want to come, too. Trust us: you don\u2019t want a bunch of Martians and Jupiterians sleeping on your couch, drinking all your beer. We\u2019ve been there before, and they left this place a mess. \nIn theory, we could meet you halfway. Pick out a spot and just go there. There\u2019s a Sunoco rest stop about 15 million miles from here that has surprisingly terrific hot dogs.\nOr we could always text. Texting works. Check your smartphone plan. The first 20 texts to Venus are supposed to be free. The next 20 are just $34 million per text. \nIn the meantime, cool your enthusiasm. Tell Elon, Jeff and Sir Richard to settle down and stick to cars, books and planes. We\u2019re not your escape plan. Venus is not Earth 2. We don\u2019t want an NHL franchise. We already have all of your\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n passwords. \nWe wish you the best in figuring it out. We have every faith you can save your planet. \nIf not, try Pluto. They\u2019re pretty lonely and bored out there.\nSincerely,\nVenus\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat would you say in response to the citizens of Venus? Join the conversation below. After a scientific breakthrough, a message from a faraway neighbor. ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hi, It\u2019s Venus. Congratulations on Your Discovery. Now Leave Us Alone. (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1917",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hi-its-venus-congratulations-on-your-discovery-now-leave-us-alone-11600180379?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=40",
        "text": "Stay away.\n\n\nWe\u2019re serious. We\u2019re not interested. No missions to Venus, no exploratory spacecraft, no sleepovers. That goes for your space-crazed billionaires as well as your governments. If we wake up one morning and look out and see Bezos, Musk and Branson wandering around in bespoke spacesuits, we\u2019re going to be really ticked off.\nWe mean no hostility. We\u2019re actually a very nice planet. It\u2019s just that we\u2019re not terribly impressed by what you\u2019ve got going on down there. \nEarth looks like a mess. You\u2019ve got health crises, environmental crises, political crises. You keep fighting about face masks. You haven\u2019t figured out how to deliver french fries without having them get soggy and disgusting. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns continue to stink.\nNo wonder so many of you want to abandon Earth for another planet.\nLeave us alone. Keep right where you are.\n\n\n\n\u201cIf we start having you all up here, pretty soon, the Martians and Jupiterians are going to want to come, too.\u201d\n\n\n\nWe know you\u2019d like it here. That\u2019s what scares us. You\u2019d all move to Venus in an instant. We\u2019ve got beautiful weather (800 degrees Fahrenheit, like August in Scottsdale), minimal traffic, a decent cost of living. On Venus, you can buy a three-bedroom for, like, $135,000. That\u2019s with a two-car garage and outdoor space. \nCrazy, right?\nWe even have a Chipotle. Really. Your genius scientists just think we have traces of phosphine. But we got our own Chipotle, like, three years ago. They\u2019re supposed to be opening a second one in a couple of months. \nWe also have a Buffalo Wild Wings. And a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lowe\u2019s.\n\n\n There are also some really good food trucks around here; there\u2019s one that makes oat milk gelato. Not to brag, but the culinary scene on Venus is vastly underrated. We went to this wood-fired pizza place the other night and it was insanely good.\nIn fairness, you\u2019ve got some good stuff over there, too. Earth does have its desirable attributes. We\u2019re jealous of the Grand Canyon, the Amazon rainforest, the Serengeti, fried clams and the first days of autumn sweater weather in Central Park. We\u2019d give anything to see a Packers game at Lambeau. And to meet\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Warren Buffett.\n\n\n\n And Beyonc\u00e9. \n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nThe Over-the-Top Stress of College Acceptance Season\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\nStop Reading This Lousy Column, and Read a Book Instead\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nBut we live in a fragile solar system. We can only handle so much. If we start having you all up here, pretty soon, the Martians and Jupiterians are going to want to come, too. Trust us: you don\u2019t want a bunch of Martians and Jupiterians sleeping on your couch, drinking all your beer. We\u2019ve been there before, and they left this place a mess. \nIn theory, we could meet you halfway. Pick out a spot and just go there. There\u2019s a Sunoco rest stop about 15 million miles from here that has surprisingly terrific hot dogs.\nOr we could always text. Texting works. Check your smartphone plan. The first 20 texts to Venus are supposed to be free. The next 20 are just $34 million per text. \nIn the meantime, cool your enthusiasm. Tell Elon, Jeff and Sir Richard to settle down and stick to cars, books and planes. We\u2019re not your escape plan. Venus is not Earth 2. We don\u2019t want an NHL franchise. We already have all of your\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n passwords. \nWe wish you the best in figuring it out. We have every faith you can save your planet. \nIf not, try Pluto. They\u2019re pretty lonely and bored out there.\nSincerely,\nVenus\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat would you say in response to the citizens of Venus? Join the conversation below. After a scientific breakthrough, a message from a faraway neighbor. ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Was News: The Decade\u2019s Biggest Stories (WSJ: Journal Reports: Decade in Review) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1918",
        "date": "2019-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-was-news-the-decades-biggest-stories-11576630800?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=14",
        "text": "Photo: \n \n Charles Dharapak/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nApril 15\u2013Iceland Volcano Halts Europe Flights Ash from eruptions drifts across continent, forcing \u2018unprecedented\u2019 airspace closure; disruptions will continue April 20\u2013Deepwater Horizon Gulf rig blast jolts oil world; 11 missing; potential blow to industry\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gerald Herbert/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nJuly 15\u2013Dodd-Frank Passes Law remakes U.S. financial landscape, will touch most Americans; bankers gird for fight over fine printAug. 2\u2013Ford Sells Volvo Buyer is China\u2019s Zhejiang Geely Holding GroupDec. 12\u2013A&P Files for Bankruptcy Company was the U.S.\u2019s first national supermarket chain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJan. 14\u2013Arab Spring Tunisians oust president, U.S. applauds change of power; rare popular uprising is shock to Arab world\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n MARTIN BUREAU/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nJan. 20\u2013Power Shifts Atop Google Internet giant says co-founder \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n will replace CEO Eric SchmidtJan. 31\u2013Syria Strongman: Time for \u2018Reform\u2019 In a rare interview, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bashar al-Assad\n\n\n\n said that protests in the region are ushering in a \u2018new era\u2019 in the Middle East, and that Arab rulers would need to do more to accommodate their people\u2019s rising political and economic aspirations.Feb. 16\u2013Borders Closings Bookseller Borders begins a new chapter\u202611Feb. 16\u2013Computer Thumps \u2018Jeopardy\u2019 Minds IBM to unveil pact to develop commercial applications in health-care sectorMarch 11\u2013Quake, Tsunami Slam Japan Death toll in the hundreds; government orders mass evacuation near damaged nuclear plantsMay 2\u2013U.S. Forces Kill \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Osama bin Laden\n\n\n\n President Obama says Sept. 11 attacks avenged in commando assault on Pakistani compound\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Pete Souza/The White House/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMay 19\u2013LinkedIn IPO Price at High End Site\u2019s $4.25 billion valuation raises eyebrows; supporters point to growthMay 30\u2013Germany to Forsake Its Nuclear Reactors Action follows nuclear crisis in JapanJuly 21\u2013Space Shuttle Era Comes to a Close Russia is poised to take leadership in manned space travel as final mission of NASA\u2019s 30-year program is completedAug. 5\u2013Credit Downgrade for U.S. Government S&P strips U.S. of top rating, shaking a cornerstone of the global financial systemOct. 5\u2013Steve Jobs Dies at 56 Apple co-founder transformed technology, media, retailing and built one of the world\u2019s most valuable companies\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Pictures Ltd./Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOct. 12\u2013The iPhone Finds Its Voice Features in the 4S include a system that answers questions out loud and learns a user\u2019s speechNov. 4\u2013Rolling the Dice on \u2018Co-Working\u2019 WeWork buys property in Manhattan near Holland TunnelNov. 20\u2013Syria Tension Grows Attack that appeared to target ruling party\u2019s headquarters stokes fear of more-violent civil conflictDec. 15\u2013Battle Flag Comes Down in Baghdad U.S. closes its mission on uncertain note: Troops depart, as America leaves the world\u2019s largest diplomatic presence behind; tensions arise between Shiites, Sunnis\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mario Tama/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDec. 17\u2013North Korean Leader Is Dead Kim Jong Il\u2019s passing opens a new and potentially dangerous period of transition and instability\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJan. 11\u2013Hostess on the Shelf Twinkies maker files for chapter 11 protectionMarch 4\u2013Putin Wins Third Term in Disputed Victory Amid middle-class revolt, Kremlin boss reclaims Russian presidencyMay 18\u2013Facebook\u2019s IPO Sputters Underwriters forced to prop up IPO of social network; only a 23-cent rise\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n EMMANUEL DUNAND/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMay 21\u2013A New Home for Computer Screens: The Face Wearable glasses showing turn-by-turn driving directions, or displaying email and text messages, could be the futureMay 25\u2013Space-Chase Billionaires Some of the terrestrial world\u2019s wealthiest men, including Elon Musk, are backing private spacecraft\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brendan Hoffman/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nJune 1\u2013New Cancer Drugs Use Body\u2019s Own Defenses Efforts to harness the power of the immune system against cancer are beginning to bear fruit after decades of frustrationOct. 28\u2013Uber and Lyft Face Bumpy Road Taxi apps see soaring demand, but cities say they violate the lawOct. 29\u2013Sandy Hits Coast, Floods New York Storm sends cars floating through the streets of lower Manhattan\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Abramson for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nNov. 6\u2013Obama Wins Second Term Victory sets up a test of whether the president can forge a productive second term in a divided political systemNov. 10\u2013China\u2019s New Boss Party chief Xi Jinping has charisma, a common touch and a b A timeline of the past 10 years, told through The Wall Street Journal\u2019s coverage. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What Was News: The Decade\u2019s Biggest Stories (WSJ: Journal Reports: Decade in Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1919",
        "date": "2019-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-was-news-the-decades-biggest-stories-11576630800?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=48",
        "text": "Photo: \n \n Charles Dharapak/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nApril 15\u2013Iceland Volcano Halts Europe Flights Ash from eruptions drifts across continent, forcing \u2018unprecedented\u2019 airspace closure; disruptions will continue April 20\u2013Deepwater Horizon Gulf rig blast jolts oil world; 11 missing; potential blow to industry\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gerald Herbert/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nJuly 15\u2013Dodd-Frank Passes Law remakes U.S. financial landscape, will touch most Americans; bankers gird for fight over fine printAug. 2\u2013Ford Sells Volvo Buyer is China\u2019s Zhejiang Geely Holding GroupDec. 12\u2013A&P Files for Bankruptcy Company was the U.S.\u2019s first national supermarket chain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJan. 14\u2013Arab Spring Tunisians oust president, U.S. applauds change of power; rare popular uprising is shock to Arab world\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n MARTIN BUREAU/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nJan. 20\u2013Power Shifts Atop Google Internet giant says co-founder \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n will replace CEO Eric SchmidtJan. 31\u2013Syria Strongman: Time for \u2018Reform\u2019 In a rare interview, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bashar al-Assad\n\n\n\n said that protests in the region are ushering in a \u2018new era\u2019 in the Middle East, and that Arab rulers would need to do more to accommodate their people\u2019s rising political and economic aspirations.Feb. 16\u2013Borders Closings Bookseller Borders begins a new chapter\u202611Feb. 16\u2013Computer Thumps \u2018Jeopardy\u2019 Minds IBM to unveil pact to develop commercial applications in health-care sectorMarch 11\u2013Quake, Tsunami Slam Japan Death toll in the hundreds; government orders mass evacuation near damaged nuclear plantsMay 2\u2013U.S. Forces Kill \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Osama bin Laden\n\n\n\n President Obama says Sept. 11 attacks avenged in commando assault on Pakistani compound\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Pete Souza/The White House/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMay 19\u2013LinkedIn IPO Price at High End Site\u2019s $4.25 billion valuation raises eyebrows; supporters point to growthMay 30\u2013Germany to Forsake Its Nuclear Reactors Action follows nuclear crisis in JapanJuly 21\u2013Space Shuttle Era Comes to a Close Russia is poised to take leadership in manned space travel as final mission of NASA\u2019s 30-year program is completedAug. 5\u2013Credit Downgrade for U.S. Government S&P strips U.S. of top rating, shaking a cornerstone of the global financial systemOct. 5\u2013Steve Jobs Dies at 56 Apple co-founder transformed technology, media, retailing and built one of the world\u2019s most valuable companies\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Pictures Ltd./Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOct. 12\u2013The iPhone Finds Its Voice Features in the 4S include a system that answers questions out loud and learns a user\u2019s speechNov. 4\u2013Rolling the Dice on \u2018Co-Working\u2019 WeWork buys property in Manhattan near Holland TunnelNov. 20\u2013Syria Tension Grows Attack that appeared to target ruling party\u2019s headquarters stokes fear of more-violent civil conflictDec. 15\u2013Battle Flag Comes Down in Baghdad U.S. closes its mission on uncertain note: Troops depart, as America leaves the world\u2019s largest diplomatic presence behind; tensions arise between Shiites, Sunnis\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mario Tama/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDec. 17\u2013North Korean Leader Is Dead Kim Jong Il\u2019s passing opens a new and potentially dangerous period of transition and instability\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJan. 11\u2013Hostess on the Shelf Twinkies maker files for chapter 11 protectionMarch 4\u2013Putin Wins Third Term in Disputed Victory Amid middle-class revolt, Kremlin boss reclaims Russian presidencyMay 18\u2013Facebook\u2019s IPO Sputters Underwriters forced to prop up IPO of social network; only a 23-cent rise\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n EMMANUEL DUNAND/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMay 21\u2013A New Home for Computer Screens: The Face Wearable glasses showing turn-by-turn driving directions, or displaying email and text messages, could be the futureMay 25\u2013Space-Chase Billionaires Some of the terrestrial world\u2019s wealthiest men, including Elon Musk, are backing private spacecraft\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brendan Hoffman/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nJune 1\u2013New Cancer Drugs Use Body\u2019s Own Defenses Efforts to harness the power of the immune system against cancer are beginning to bear fruit after decades of frustrationOct. 28\u2013Uber and Lyft Face Bumpy Road Taxi apps see soaring demand, but cities say they violate the lawOct. 29\u2013Sandy Hits Coast, Floods New York Storm sends cars floating through the streets of lower Manhattan\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Abramson for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nNov. 6\u2013Obama Wins Second Term Victory sets up a test of whether the president can forge a productive second term in a divided political systemNov. 10\u2013China\u2019s New Boss Party chief Xi Jinping has charisma, a common touch and a b A timeline of the past 10 years, told through The Wall Street Journal\u2019s coverage. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Reveals His Best and Worst Personal Investments (WSJ: Journal Reports: Funds & ETFs) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1920",
        "date": "2018-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-reveals-his-best-and-worst-personal-investments-1533521401?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=90",
        "text": "Journal Report Insights from The Experts Read more at WSJ.com/FundsETFs More in Investing in Funds & ETFs The 8 Best Market Predictors My Boss Makes What?! (It\u2019s Better to Know) Small-Town Retirement Isn\u2019t \u2018Mayberry\u2019 U.S.-Stock Funds Rose 2.5% in July Mutual Fund or ETF? How to Pick \n\n\n\u201cAll I could think of on stage\u2014Friday night, Saturday matinee, Saturday night\u2014was my loss,\u201d the 87-year-old actor says. \u201cI realized then what a mistake I made because I\u2019m sure my performance suffered.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMr. Shatner, known best as a \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain on TV and in movies, says the experience taught him never to gamble with his money like that again.\n\n\u201cWhen I go to Las Vegas with family and friends,\u201d he says, \u201cI take a certain amount of money along knowing I\u2019m going to lose that, but I don\u2019t go beyond that.\u201d\nBut he has learned that he can\u2019t give up gambling completely\u2014because show business is a series of bets.\nFor example, in the 1960s, when a producer named Gene Roddenberry asked Mr. Shatner to shoot a pilot for a TV show about a group of space explorers\u2014immediately after another pilot he had shot had been rejected\u2014he decided to go with it.\n\u201cThe bet is always there,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve got two albums and a book coming out in the next three or four months\u2026a country-music album and then a Christmas album, and a book on how I feel about aging. Hopefully you\u2019ll love all three. But it\u2019s a bet.\u201d\nHere, Mr. Shatner remembers a couple of the other bets he has made.\nBest Bet: A Morris Minor Car Investment: $400\nGains: A career as an actor\nBorn in Montreal in 1931, Mr. Shatner grew up in a family that he says \u201cat best was lower middle class. My dad worked very hard, we always had food on the table, but the luxuries were not there.\u201d\nThe first car he bought cost only $50, but he says he had to enter and exit through the window and pull over at a gas station every 5 miles to have another batch of oil poured into the engine.\nHis second car changed his life.\nIn the mid-1950s, he borrowed $200 from his dad and saved $200 he made from mucking out stables and working as a bag boy at a grocery store to purchase a four-seat Morris Minor. He packed it full of \u201call my worldly goods\u201d and set out for Toronto to become a professional actor.\n\u201cWhen I crossed a bridge over something and a truck was coming at me, the wave of air that the truck was pushing in front of it made this little car shudder enough for me to think, \u2018It\u2019s going over into the water,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Shatner says, \u201cand if it were to do so, everything I had in this world, and me, would be lost in the water.\u201d\nThe Minor got him to Toronto and, by turns, to a stellar career.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Morris Minor similar to Mr. Shatner\u2019s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n iStockphoto/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe takeaway: Mr. Shatner says the experience of growing up without extra money, and having to save it for things like his Morris Minor by doing rough work, taught him the value of a dollar. It is a lesson he carried with him into his early career\u2014when he was making just enough money to get by\u2014until today, when he\u2019s no longer living paycheck to paycheck.\n\u201cI know what being poor is,\u201d he says. \u201cI either did my laundry or ate a meal when I was a young actor. So, the value of a dollar and saving a dollar is very real to me. And although I\u2019m not anywhere near that, that memory is always there.\u201d\nWorst Bet: His Priceline Stock Investment: Spokesperson fees\nLosses: \u201cI don\u2019t even want to go there.\u201d\nIn the late \u201990s, executives at Priceline.com were so thrilled with the radio commercials that William Shatner recorded for the then-little-known travel company that they asked the former captain of the USS Enterprise to record some TV commercials.\nThere was just one problem, Mr. Shatner says: They didn\u2019t have enough money to pay him.\n\n\nPreviously in Best Bet/Worst Bet LendingTree\u2019s Doug Lebda (July 2018) Arnold Schwarzenegger (June 2018) Finance author David Bach (May 2018) Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk (April 2018) Financial executive Sallie Krawcheck (March 2018) \u2018Shark Tank\u2019 panelist Daymond John (January 2018) Venture capitalist Cyan Banister (December 2017) \n\n\nMr. Shatner decided that there was commercial potential in the company\u2019s idea of bidding on hotel rooms, airplane tickets and rental cars online. He went back to Priceline.com and said that he would do the commercials in exchange for stock. The company agreed, and gave him shares when they were worth around a dollar apiece. The only catch was that he couldn\u2019t sell them.\nAt first, this restriction didn\u2019t seem like an issue. The stock was going in only one direction and climbed well above $100 a share.\n\u201cI had a good hunk of stock,\u201d Mr. Shatner says. \u201cI was rich.\u201d\nThen 2000 happened. The bubble burst and Priceline.com, like the rest of its peers online, went into free fall. By the time Mr. Shatner cashed out in 2002, the stock was back down around a dollar a share. Today, Priceline\u2014now listed on Nasdaq as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Booking Holding The \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor got rich on Priceline stock, before his gains vaporized. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018Space ETF\u2019 Hopes Its Trading Symbol (UFO) Isn\u2019t a Warning (WSJ: Journal Reports: Funds/ETFs) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1921",
        "date": "2019-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-space-etf-hopes-its-trading-symbol-ufo-isnt-a-warning-11562637780?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=70",
        "text": "UFO aims to invest at least 80% of its assets in companies that derive a majority of their revenue from space-related activities, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Chanin,\n\n\n\n chief executive of fund manager ProcureAM. This includes satellite manufacturers, where the space-related nature of the work is clear. However, it can also include companies in sectors like telecommunications or television, so long as they rely on space-related activities. The fund\u2019s top 10 holdings include names like satellite manufacturer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Maxar Technologies\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications,\n\n IRDM -0.99%\n\n\n which oversees the global Iridium constellation of communications satellites. About 20% of the fund is invested in companies that are heavily involved in the space business without it being their main focus\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n EADSY 2.64%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing,\n\n BA 0.29%\n\n\n for instance.\n\n\n\n\nThe goal is to provide investors with access to a rapidly growing industry, says Mr. Chanin. He points to research from Morgan Stanley, published in November, that predicted the global space industry could generate $1.1 trillion or more in revenue by 2040, up from $350 billion today. Mr. Chanin says he is particularly excited by the opportunities presented by satellite delivery of broadband internet access.\n\n\nUFO provides a convenient way to access an exciting theme, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neena Mishra,\n\n\n\n director of ETF research at Zacks Investment Research. However, she notes that many of the high-profile companies in the growing industry\u2014such as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic\u2014are privately owned, and so unavailable through the fund, though they do have some partnerships with public companies.\nMr. Cowan is a writer in Northern Ireland. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.\n\n\nJournal Report Insights from The Experts Read more at wsj.com/fundsreport More in Investing in Funds & ETFs The Capital of ETFs: Wheaton, Ill. The No. 1 Fund Manager Is\u2026 U.S.-Stock Funds Are Up 17% in 2019 Your Retirement, Hour by Hour Should You Invest in \u2018Pre-IPO\u2019 Funds? Procure Space ETF focuses on satellite makers and other companies that get most of their revenue from space-related work. ",
        "author": "Gerrard Cowan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want to Invest in Space? Try These ETFs (WSJ: Journal Reports: Funds/ETFs) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1922",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/want-to-invest-in-space-try-these-etfs-11620478801?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=31",
        "text": "Before\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n was shooting cars into orbit, space exploration was a purely governmental affair. Aerospace and defense companies were building the rockets, and many of them still are.\n\n\n\n\nFunds with large positions in companies like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing,\n\n BA -0.10%\n\nLockheed Martin\n\n LMT -0.97%\n\n\n or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman\n\n NOC -1.18%\n\n\n tend to have lower volatility and turnover than funds focused on the newer, high-growth companies that compete in space. Aerospace and defense ETFs come in both actively managed and passive, or index, varieties. On the passive side,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense\n\n\n ETF (ITA) and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SPDR S&P Aerospace & Defense\n\n\n ETF (XAR) offer broad exposure to the old guard of companies in this sector and low turnover. ITA has an expense ratio of 0.44% and XAR 0.35%. \n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat kinds of thematic ETFs interest you as an investor? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOn the active side, the leveraged fund\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Direxion Daily Aerospace & Defense Bull 3X Shares\n\n\n (DFEN) is designed for short-term investing. This fund\u2019s goal is to provide triple the daily return of the Dow Jones U.S. Select Aerospace & Defense Index; but it can also triple the losses if the market goes the other way. You\u2019ll also have to pay up for it: With an expense ratio of 0.99%, DFEN is more expensive than an unleveraged ETF. Leveraged ETFs have grown in popularity with investors in recent years, but it is best to work with your financial adviser to determine whether a short-term fund is best for your thematic investment goals.\n\n\nThe innovators The space industry is still small relative to other parts of the economy. But a number of high-profile private and listed companies have emerged recently, with both a public-sector and consumer focus on space\u2014including Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson.\n\n\n\n \nEven companies like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dish Network\n\n DISH -1.39%\n\n\n have a significant investment in space through their use of low-orbit satellites to enhance television and internet service. The launch of the U.S. Space Force in 2019 has also opened a new avenue for government contracts for a broader range of companies.\nTwo SPDR funds will give you passive or index-fund access to the innovators\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SPDR S&P Kensho Future Security\n\n\n ETF (FITE) and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SPDR S&P Kensho Final Frontiers\n\n\n ETF (ROKT).\nFITE has an expense ratio of 0.45% and invests in companies that are focused on new areas of national-security importance, including space. FITE is a bit of a combo platter in that it offers exposure to companies that will respond to many of the mandates of the Space Force. The fund has a mix of investments in aerospace and defense, cybersecurity, drone development\u2014a range of companies that are going to have a space tie-in even if they aren\u2019t making rockets or supplying parts for rockets.\nROKT, meanwhile, isn\u2019t a pure space play. The fund invests in companies that explore \u201cdeep space and the deep sea,\u201d according to its fact sheet. The fund\u2019s current investment weighting is about 66% aerospace and defense (or space), and 34% research, industrial materials and other components used in space and deep-sea exploration\u2014companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Hexcel Corp.\n\n HXL 0.83%\n\n\n , which makes high-performance composite materials and other components used in both types of exploration. The fund has an expense ratio of 0.45%.\n\nProcure Space\n\n\n ETF (UFO) from ProcureAM offers the most direct exposure to space innovators. UFO invests only in companies that derive a majority of their revenue from space. You\u2019ll get access to Virgin Galactic in UFO, but also Dish,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sirius XM\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Weathernews\n\n\n \u2014companies with significant investments in satellites for consumer use. UFO is a bit pricier with an expense ratio of 0.75% and does invest in smaller space-focused companies. which may be more volatile.\nFinally, the newest entrant: ARK Invest\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ARK Space Exploration & Innovation\n\n\n ETF (ARKX) will give you exposure to the innovators and adjacent companies that are poised to benefit from space exploration. Because ARKX has a broader mandate, you\u2019ll get access to Virgin Galactic but also companies like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deere\n\n DE 2.52%\n\n\n & Co. that will benefit from improvements in GPS and other satellite technologies. ARKX is actively managed, so the holdings may change over time and the expense ratio is the same as UFO at 0.75%.\nMs. McCann is a writer in New York. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.\n\n\nJournal Report Insights from The Experts Read more at wsj.com/fundsreport More in Investing in F As the options expand, investors can choose from an array of approaches. ",
        "author": "Bailey McCann"
    },
    {
        "title": "During Covid-19, the Girl Scouts\u2019 Cookies Didn\u2019t Crumble (WSJ: Journal Reports: Leadership) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1923",
        "date": "2020-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/during-covid-19-the-girl-scouts-cookies-didnt-crumble-11603562400?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=34",
        "text": "\u201cWe need to meet the girls where they are, and they are very technical,\u201d says Ms. Batty.\n\n\nShare Your Thoughts\n\n\n\nWhat do you see as the role of Girl Scouts today? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nAnother of Ms. Batty\u2019s goals is to increase racial diversity in the Girl Scouts. In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, Girl Scout membership was 71% white, while the U.S. population of girls was just 51% white.\n\n\nMs. Batty, who is 61 and has a law degree from New York University, worked for nearly three decades in the legal department of Exxon Mobil Corp., primarily overseas, on sales and acquisitions of companies, refineries and drilling rights. From 2006 to 2009, she was general counsel of Exxon Mobil Japan.\nShe spoke with The Wall Street Journal about how being a Girl Scout affected her life and where she wants to take the organization now. Edited excerpts follow.\nWSJ: Although the decline has slowed in recent years, Girl Scout membership has fallen to 1.7 million recently from 2.5 million in 2008. What is driving membership today?\nMS. BATTY: Membership trends are basically driven by two things: increased choice for girl activities, and girls\u2019 interests. There are just a lot more choices than there were 50 years ago.\nOur retention numbers are very good, especially during the pandemic. This year we\u2019ve seen higher retention in every grade from middle school to high school. Among 11th graders, retention climbed by 6 percentage points.\nWSJ: Why is retention improving? \nMS. BATTY: When the coronavirus first hit, we went virtual. We started a program we call Girl Scouts at Home, and we have activities either run by GSUSA or by certain local Girl Scout councils for various age groups. We saw great engagement especially from our older girls. Through the virtual activities, they are not only meeting the girls in their troop but girls across the U.S. and around the world who have the same interests they do.\nMore than1,000 girls from all 50 states and eight countries participated in an online event about space exploration.\nWSJ: What are your plans for increasing membership? Will Girl Scouts at Home be a part of it? \nMS. BATTY: Our digital offerings have been very successful, and we will continue to offer virtual and hybrid activities even after the pandemic. \nWe\u2019ll continue to keep our programming and events updated and relevant to keep girls interested and engaged, and we\u2019ve simplified resources for troop leaders. We also partner with some faith-based organizations for girls to have troops at churches or synagogues or mosques, and we have a Spanish-speaking program for girls whose first language is Spanish.\nWSJ: Are there locations or communities you are targeting for growth? \nMS. BATTY: No. We are in every ZIP Code, and we are a program that is appropriate for any and every girl. We want rural girls. We want urban girls. We want girls who are interested in STEM\u2014science, technology, engineering and math\u2014and girls who are interested in acting. \nWSJ: Does the diversity of the Girl Scout membership match that of the U.S. population? \nMS. BATTY: It does not, and we are working so that it does. That is a priority because our program is appropriate for all girls. One of the things that I am hoping we are going to work on is making sure that all girls feel welcome. It is one thing to say that any girl can join. It is another thing to make sure that all girls feel welcome and feel like they belong.\nWSJ: What steps will you take to make that happen? \nMS. BATTY: GSUSA will be doing a movement-wide audit to understand where the greatest need for this work is. We are looking at our programs, our training, our language, all of that. Diversity, equity and inclusion isn\u2019t just about numbers, and getting more girls in Girl Scouts. It\u2019s about making people feel welcome and ensuring that all girls feel they belong in Girl Scouts. The worst thing would be to get the members and then have them leave us.\nWSJ: Do you think that your own racial identity is symbolic of those diversity goals? Is it helpful in any way? \nMS. BATTY: I don\u2019t know if it is helpful. I don\u2019t know if it is symbolic. I think that it is 2020, and it is time for us to have a Black CEO. I was actually kind of surprised that I was the first. My mother was a Girl Scout. I was a Girl Scout. So there have been Girl Scouts of all colors, races, denominations, forever, and I just think we need to reinforce that.\nWSJ: Is there a particular professional challenge you faced that felt similar to the challenges you are facing as CEO of the Girl Scouts. \nMS. BATTY: There is actually. One of my last jobs at Exxon Mobil was general counsel of Exxon Mobil Japan. Japanese culture is very male-dominated. It is also very homogenous. And here comes this Black woman as general counsel, and I didn\u2019t speak Japanese. Business was conducted in English, but around the office they spoke Japanese. It was very daunting.\nFast-forward to my first days as CEO. I have been on the board of GSUSA so I knew the executive team, but I didn\u2019t know the people underneath the executive team, and it is all virtual. It is the virtual part of it that makes it similar to Japan. You can\u2019t walk around, get to know people and learn the nuances of the office.\nIn both situations I tried to listen and learn as much as I could before making major decisions. In Japan, I spent time learning Japanese so I could better understand. In my current position, I have had listening sessions with Council CEOs, GSUSA employees and girls. This week I am talking to leaders and volunteers. Some things have been affirmed. Some things have been new. Some things I didn\u2019t recognize at all.\nWSJ: One of the goals of your predecessor was to expand the STEM programs in Girl Scouts. How has that affected the Girl Scout experience? \nMS. BATTY: We have always had badges that were mechanical and STEM-related. I think what changed is that people now recognize that we have more STEM experiences for girls than probably any other organization in the world, including the federal government. Last year, the girls participated in over one million STEM experiences, and there is no other organization that can say that.\nWSJ: How did the Girl Scouts affect your life? Was there an experience that was especially important?\nMS. BATTY: I began my Girl Scout career as a Brownie and as a member of the Nassau County Council in New York. One of my most influential memories as a Girl Scout was being a member of the first class of girl delegates to the 1975 Girl Scouts National Council Session, where I was given the opportunity to speak against a proposed amendment to our constitution. I felt a real sense of accomplishment, and I think it sparked my interest in becoming a lawyer. \nWSJ: The coronavirus hit during this year\u2019s cookie season. Did the Girl Scouts get stuck with excess inventory?\nMS. BATTY: Actually, the girls were amazing. They set up virtual cookie booths. They called their friends. And GSUSA set up a program called Cookie Care, and a number of our girls sold cookies through that. So, in the end, we did not end up with any more inventory than we normally do. It was good. We teach the girls to be entrepreneurial, and they did that in a safe way. And they sold their cookies. \nWSJ: What lessons did the Girl Scouts learn from the shift to the virtual sales, and how will the girls apply those this year?\nMS. BATTY: We have digital platforms for them to sell cookies, and they were creative with setting up virtual cookie booths. One troop shot a Facebook live video, and that is how they sold their cookies.\nMs. Oliver is a writer in New York. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.\n\n\nJournal Report Insights from The Experts Read more at wsj.com/csuitereport More in C-Suite Strategies How Consumers Really Use Online Reviews Peloton\u2019s Plan to Keep Things Rolling After the Pandemic Ends Technology Can Help With a Career Change During Covid The Impact on Companies if Women Leave the Workforce Inside Fitbit\u2019s Quest to Be Your Health Monitor Test Your Knowledge of Management Trends The new interim CEO talks about arresting the decline in membership, increasing diversity, and cookie sales ",
        "author": "Suzanne Oliver"
    },
    {
        "title": "During Covid-19, the Girl Scouts\u2019 Cookies Didn\u2019t Crumble (WSJ: Journal Reports: Leadership) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1924",
        "date": "2020-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/during-covid-19-the-girl-scouts-cookies-didnt-crumble-11603562400?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=45",
        "text": "\u201cWe need to meet the girls where they are, and they are very technical,\u201d says Ms. Batty.\n\n\nShare Your Thoughts\n\n\n\nWhat do you see as the role of Girl Scouts today? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nAnother of Ms. Batty\u2019s goals is to increase racial diversity in the Girl Scouts. In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, Girl Scout membership was 71% white, while the U.S. population of girls was just 51% white.\n\n\nMs. Batty, who is 61 and has a law degree from New York University, worked for nearly three decades in the legal department of Exxon Mobil Corp., primarily overseas, on sales and acquisitions of companies, refineries and drilling rights. From 2006 to 2009, she was general counsel of Exxon Mobil Japan.\nShe spoke with The Wall Street Journal about how being a Girl Scout affected her life and where she wants to take the organization now. Edited excerpts follow.\nWSJ: Although the decline has slowed in recent years, Girl Scout membership has fallen to 1.7 million recently from 2.5 million in 2008. What is driving membership today?\nMS. BATTY: Membership trends are basically driven by two things: increased choice for girl activities, and girls\u2019 interests. There are just a lot more choices than there were 50 years ago.\nOur retention numbers are very good, especially during the pandemic. This year we\u2019ve seen higher retention in every grade from middle school to high school. Among 11th graders, retention climbed by 6 percentage points.\nWSJ: Why is retention improving? \nMS. BATTY: When the coronavirus first hit, we went virtual. We started a program we call Girl Scouts at Home, and we have activities either run by GSUSA or by certain local Girl Scout councils for various age groups. We saw great engagement especially from our older girls. Through the virtual activities, they are not only meeting the girls in their troop but girls across the U.S. and around the world who have the same interests they do.\nMore than1,000 girls from all 50 states and eight countries participated in an online event about space exploration.\nWSJ: What are your plans for increasing membership? Will Girl Scouts at Home be a part of it? \nMS. BATTY: Our digital offerings have been very successful, and we will continue to offer virtual and hybrid activities even after the pandemic. \nWe\u2019ll continue to keep our programming and events updated and relevant to keep girls interested and engaged, and we\u2019ve simplified resources for troop leaders. We also partner with some faith-based organizations for girls to have troops at churches or synagogues or mosques, and we have a Spanish-speaking program for girls whose first language is Spanish.\nWSJ: Are there locations or communities you are targeting for growth? \nMS. BATTY: No. We are in every ZIP Code, and we are a program that is appropriate for any and every girl. We want rural girls. We want urban girls. We want girls who are interested in STEM\u2014science, technology, engineering and math\u2014and girls who are interested in acting. \nWSJ: Does the diversity of the Girl Scout membership match that of the U.S. population? \nMS. BATTY: It does not, and we are working so that it does. That is a priority because our program is appropriate for all girls. One of the things that I am hoping we are going to work on is making sure that all girls feel welcome. It is one thing to say that any girl can join. It is another thing to make sure that all girls feel welcome and feel like they belong.\nWSJ: What steps will you take to make that happen? \nMS. BATTY: GSUSA will be doing a movement-wide audit to understand where the greatest need for this work is. We are looking at our programs, our training, our language, all of that. Diversity, equity and inclusion isn\u2019t just about numbers, and getting more girls in Girl Scouts. It\u2019s about making people feel welcome and ensuring that all girls feel they belong in Girl Scouts. The worst thing would be to get the members and then have them leave us.\nWSJ: Do you think that your own racial identity is symbolic of those diversity goals? Is it helpful in any way? \nMS. BATTY: I don\u2019t know if it is helpful. I don\u2019t know if it is symbolic. I think that it is 2020, and it is time for us to have a Black CEO. I was actually kind of surprised that I was the first. My mother was a Girl Scout. I was a Girl Scout. So there have been Girl Scouts of all colors, races, denominations, forever, and I just think we need to reinforce that.\nWSJ: Is there a particular professional challenge you faced that felt similar to the challenges you are facing as CEO of the Girl Scouts. \nMS. BATTY: There is actually. One of my last jobs at Exxon Mobil was general counsel of Exxon Mobil Japan. Japanese culture is very male-dominated. It is also very homogenous. And here comes this Black woman as general counsel, and I didn\u2019t speak Japanese. Business was conducted in English, but around the office they spoke Japanese. It was very daunting.\nFast-forward to my first days as CEO. I have been on the board The new interim CEO talks about arresting the decline in membership, increasing diversity, and cookie sales ",
        "author": "Suzanne Oliver"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk vs. Charlie Ergen and the Battle Over Spectrum (WSJ: Journal Reports: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1925",
        "date": "2021-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-charlie-ergen-battle-of-billionaires-11633714306?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=14",
        "text": "In later filings with the FCC, Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, told the regulator it needed those airwaves, which sit above 12 gigahertz on the wireless spectrum, free and clear for its Starlink swarm of satellites to beam high-speed broadband internet service to disconnected homes across the country. SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment for this article.\n\n\n\n\nThe Tesla billionaire\u2019s main antagonist in this case is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dish Network Corp.\n\n DISH -1.39%\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Ergen,\n\n\n\n another mogul with a history of tangling with regulators. Mr. Ergen\u2019s Dish and his allies\u2014who include Dell Computer founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Dell\n\n\n\n through his personal investment fund, MSD Capital\u2014are pressing the government to allow cellphone towers to send high-speed internet signals over the same airwaves. SpaceX and fellow satellite operator OneWeb oppose changes that they say threaten their goal of expanding internet access from the skies. \n\n\nMr. Ergen made his fortune launching satellites but has said his company\u2019s future lies in ultrafast fifth-generation wireless service on the ground. Mr. Musk\u2019s businesses, which include electric cars and rocket launches that ferry NASA astronauts to space, also include satellite broadband service.\nThis is the kind of skirmish that companies often wage in Washington over finite resources subject to government rules\u2014but with more-prominent personalities and a nastier edge than most telecom disputes. Fights over wireless spectrum are becoming increasingly common as technological advances like 5G let companies stream data in ways considered impossible a few years ago, spurring new demand for space on the airwaves to carry those signals.\nSpaceX says its new Starlink broadband service is already providing cablelike internet speeds to more than 90,000 customers. The FCC granted the company $885 million in incentives to provide more connections to areas of the U.S. that lack true broadband. Dish and its allies argue that looser rules for the 12 GHz frequencies would help the company build a network that will connect smartphones, factory machines and vehicle sensors with the kind of ultrafast internet speeds that 5G promises to deliver.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX rocket returned to Earth in September after delivering Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe roots of controversy The controversy has been developing for years. Dish and its rival DirecTV have long had the first right to use the 12 GHz spectrum to support TV broadcasts beamed by satellites in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles above the Earth. But much of the spectrum sits unused. Dish and DirecTV send many signals over frequencies outside the band in dispute, and their customer bases continue to shrink as viewers cut the pay-TV cord and adopt online streaming services.\nStarlink engineers, meanwhile, have spent the past six years working on a plan to make satellite internet speeds competitive with those of traditional broadband cable companies. The company has already used low-cost rocket launches to hurl hundreds of satellites into orbit just 340 miles from Earth, cutting down on the time it takes for broadband signals to travel between the satellites and customers\u2019 dishes. \nThe FCC granted Starlink\u2019s low-flying satellites \u201csecondary\u201d permission to use 12 GHz airwaves, which means they couldn\u2019t interfere with transmissions to Dish and DirecTV\u2019s older geostationary satellites. Both sides point their transmissions in different directions, so the dual use wasn\u2019t considered a problem. \nThe dispute grew out of Dish\u2019s ambitions to expand its 5G network, which remains under construction. The company now wants the right to send cellular signals over the same 12 GHz airwaves it uses for satellite transmissions, taking steps to prevent either type of signal from interfering with the other. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDish Network says it doesn\u2019t want a fight with SpaceX.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Marshall Mantel/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nNo end in sight The Musk-Ergen standoff is unlikely to see a quick resolution. Mr. Pai\u2019s FCC ended up drafting what most observers consider a \u201cneutral\u201d document that kicked the can down the road. The agency, now led by acting Chairwoman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jessica Rosenworcel,\n\n\n\n is still missing a full slate of commissioners, hampering its ability to tackle controversial policy issues.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUp in the Air\n\n\n\nTraditional satellite-TV providers have long beamed signals from geostationary orbits high above the Earth over many frequencies. Their broadcasts run straight from a few fixed points in the sky.\n\n\nElon Musk's Starlink sends Internet data through satellites circling the globe at low-Earth orbits that demand thousands of fast-moving satellites to maintain coverage. Interference with geostationary satellites is unlikely because their signals travel in a different direction.\n\n\nSome companies, including satellite operator Dish Network, want to use 12 gigahertz frequencies for 5G on the ground. Opponents including Starlink say signals from cell towers would disrupt their low-Earth orbit transmissions.\n\n\n\nKevin Hand/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoth sides have claimed the other misrepresents the science behind their services. \u201cThere\u2019s definitely a lot of hostility in a lot of the filings,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Farrar,\n\n\n\n president of TMF Associates, a telecom consulting firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. SpaceX has been especially aggressive defending its turf against would-be interlopers, Mr. Farrar says.\nIn a March filing with the FCC, SpaceX accused Dish of making \u201cincreasingly desperate claims to support its quest to add even more frequencies to its warehouse of unused spectrum,\u201d adding that Mr. Ergen\u2019s company would be better off building the network it promised \u201crather than spending its time trying to take service away from the customers of those actually delivering on promises.\u201d\nDish told regulators that SpaceX was the one seeking to monopolize a resource that it doesn\u2019t need. The 12-gigahertz band in question is a small part of the many wavelengths Mr. Musk\u2019s satellites can use to beam data to customers, the company argued. \u201cSpaceX continues a practice that has become familiar: do not cede any ground except inch by inch,\u201d Dish wrote in a letter to the commission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Blum,\n\n\n\n Dish\u2019s public-policy chief, says SpaceX\u2019s pushback against potential ground-based users of the spectrum in question is unnecessary in light of recent technological advances that would allow signals from satellites and cellular towers to share the same frequencies. \n\u201cWe don\u2019t want to fight with them,\u201d he says. \u201cWe don\u2019t need to fight.\u201d\nBut Starlink has said in many filings that sharing the spectrum won\u2019t work. Indeed, Mr. Musk has argued that new companies using 12 GHz signals would kill the business model his company built over several years of planning.\n\u201cStarlink is good in and of itself,\u201d Mr. Musk said at Vox Media\u2019s Code 2021 conference. \u201cIt\u2019s a very nice complement, and a necessary complement, to 5G and fiber, and will provide a revenue stream to develop our next-generation rocket.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla will move its headquarters to Austin, Texas, said CEO Elon Musk, comparing the current crowded operations at the factory in Fremont, Calif., to \u2018Spam in a can.\u2019 He said the electric-vehicle maker would continue expanding in California. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. FitzGerald is a Wall Street Journal reporter in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com. The two moguls want rules to favor their visions for high-speed broadband service. Is there space enough for the two of them? ",
        "author": "Drew FitzGerald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk vs. Charlie Ergen and the Battle Over Spectrum (WSJ: Journal Reports: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1926",
        "date": "2021-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-charlie-ergen-battle-of-billionaires-11633714306?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=20",
        "text": "In later filings with the FCC, Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, told the regulator it needed those airwaves, which sit above 12 gigahertz on the wireless spectrum, free and clear for its Starlink swarm of satellites to beam high-speed broadband internet service to disconnected homes across the country. SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment for this article.\n\n\n\n\nThe Tesla billionaire\u2019s main antagonist in this case is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dish Network Corp.\n\n DISH -1.39%\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Ergen,\n\n\n\n another mogul with a history of tangling with regulators. Mr. Ergen\u2019s Dish and his allies\u2014who include Dell Computer founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Dell\n\n\n\n through his personal investment fund, MSD Capital\u2014are pressing the government to allow cellphone towers to send high-speed internet signals over the same airwaves. SpaceX and fellow satellite operator OneWeb oppose changes that they say threaten their goal of expanding internet access from the skies. \n\n\nMr. Ergen made his fortune launching satellites but has said his company\u2019s future lies in ultrafast fifth-generation wireless service on the ground. Mr. Musk\u2019s businesses, which include electric cars and rocket launches that ferry NASA astronauts to space, also include satellite broadband service.\nThis is the kind of skirmish that companies often wage in Washington over finite resources subject to government rules\u2014but with more-prominent personalities and a nastier edge than most telecom disputes. Fights over wireless spectrum are becoming increasingly common as technological advances like 5G let companies stream data in ways considered impossible a few years ago, spurring new demand for space on the airwaves to carry those signals.\nSpaceX says its new Starlink broadband service is already providing cablelike internet speeds to more than 90,000 customers. The FCC granted the company $885 million in incentives to provide more connections to areas of the U.S. that lack true broadband. Dish and its allies argue that looser rules for the 12 GHz frequencies would help the company build a network that will connect smartphones, factory machines and vehicle sensors with the kind of ultrafast internet speeds that 5G promises to deliver.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX rocket returned to Earth in September after delivering Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe roots of controversy The controversy has been developing for years. Dish and its rival DirecTV have long had the first right to use the 12 GHz spectrum to support TV broadcasts beamed by satellites in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles above the Earth. But much of the spectrum sits unused. Dish and DirecTV send many signals over frequencies outside the band in dispute, and their customer bases continue to shrink as viewers cut the pay-TV cord and adopt online streaming services.\nStarlink engineers, meanwhile, have spent the past six years working on a plan to make satellite internet speeds competitive with those of traditional broadband cable companies. The company has already used low-cost rocket launches to hurl hundreds of satellites into orbit just 340 miles from Earth, cutting down on the time it takes for broadband signals to travel between the satellites and customers\u2019 dishes. \nThe FCC granted Starlink\u2019s low-flying satellites \u201csecondary\u201d permission to use 12 GHz airwaves, which means they couldn\u2019t interfere with transmissions to Dish and DirecTV\u2019s older geostationary satellites. Both sides point their transmissions in different directions, so the dual use wasn\u2019t considered a problem. \nThe dispute grew out of Dish\u2019s ambitions to expand its 5G network, which remains under construction. The company now wants the right to send cellular signals over the same 12 GHz airwaves it uses for satellite transmissions, taking steps to prevent either type of signal from interfering with the other. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDish Network says it doesn\u2019t want a fight with SpaceX.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Marshall Mantel/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nNo end in sight The Musk-Ergen standoff is unlikely to see a quick resolution. Mr. Pai\u2019s FCC ended up drafting what most observers consider a \u201cneutral\u201d document that kicked the can down the road. The agency, now led by acting Chairwoman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jessica Rosenworcel,\n\n\n\n is still missing a full slate of commissioners, hampering its ability to tackle controversial policy issues.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUp in the Air\n\n\n\nTraditional satellite-TV providers have long beamed signals from geostationary orbits high above the Earth over many frequencies. Their broadcasts run straight from a few fixed points in the sky.\n\n\nElon Musk's Starlink sends Internet data through satellites circling the globe at low-Earth orbits that demand thousands of fast-moving satellites to maintain coverage. Interference with geosta The two moguls want rules to favor their visions for high-speed broadband service. Is there space enough for the two of them? ",
        "author": "Drew FitzGerald"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Pilot Sian Proctor Talks About Her Journey\u2014and Returning to Earth (WSJ: Journal Reports: Year in Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1927",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-x-pilot-journey-returning-to-earth-11638376308?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=8",
        "text": "Finally, in September, Dr. Proctor piloted SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission as part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Inspiration4 With Four CiviliansSkip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 2:18ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Inspiration4 With Four CiviliansPlay video: Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Inspiration4 With Four Civilians\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission crew was in orbit for about three days before returning to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nShe says she wasn\u2019t scared as she listened to the countdown. Her fear, she says, has always been that the moment would not come, or that it would somehow slip away.\n\n\n\u201cWhen we got down to one minute,\u201d she says, \u201cI was like, \u2018All right, we\u2019re doing this. Let\u2019s go.\u2019 \u201d\nThe Wall Street Journal spoke to Dr. Proctor about her journey and about why she thinks solving challenges in human space travel can help humanity overcome problems here on Earth. Below are edited excerpts.\nWSJ: Did you bring any trinkets in your pocket to sell or give to family and friends?\nDR. PROCTOR: Oh, my goodness, yes. I brought a lot of things. I tried to bring as many people on this journey with me as possible. I brought 32 pieces of student artwork from my school. I brought poetry, which was digital. I also brought my \u201cStar Wars\u201d trading cards that I got when I was 13 years old. Those days as a kid really made me fall in love with not only science fiction, but the dream of being an astronaut.\nWSJ: Why do you think private space tourism is important?\nDR. PROCTOR: Access to new technology and new experiences is important. When we push people out of their comfort zone, that\u2019s when you learn the most, that\u2019s when you grow. And so you think: How do we give people experiences that fundamentally change them for the better, where they get a new perspective and love of our planet. It\u2019s not about space exploration in itself, it\u2019s about solving for space solves for Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 crew\u2014from left, Chris Sembroski, Dr. Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux\u2014at Kennedy Space Center in Florida before the launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWSJ: What has been solved for Earth with the money spent on private missions like this?\nDR. PROCTOR: When I say that, I\u2019m talking about the advancement of human space flight in general. The reality is every dollar spent on human space exploration is spent here with jobs. And then when we\u2019re talking about efficiency, you\u2019re talking about technology.\nSpace flight is fundamentally about efficiency in water, energy, shelter, food. Everything that we need to survive and thrive in space\u2014on the moon and Mars\u2014are the things that we need to survive here on Earth. And when we talk about the wicked problems here on Earth, guess what they are: food, energy, water, shelter, waste management, they\u2019re all the same things. Space enables us to become more efficient. You have to. And that efficiency technology makes us more efficient here on Earth.\n\n\nYear in Review: 2021\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n Read the full report The Metaverse: The Next Big Thing? A Global Plan to Fight the Pandemic Rediscovering the Joy of Travel A Silver Lining for Women in the Workplace Jon Batiste on Live Music The Future of TV \n\n\nWSJ: Do you think that space travel is important because the Earth may one day become uninhabitable?\nDR. PROCTOR: No. I think that solving for spacesolves for Earth, right down to us being able to stay on Earth until something beyond our control happens, like, you know, our sun expands, which is a long, long, long, long, long time away. Everything has a finite life. Our planet does have a finite life. And if humanity is going to survive, we will have to become Earth seed and go out and populate in order for humanity to live on. But we\u2019re talking millions and billions of years from now.\nWSJ: I have to ask, does the weightlessness in space feel at all like the sensation of being in an elevator going down?\nDR. PROCTOR: Nope. There is a little sense of that when you free fall. We did a zero G flight, so you get it for that moment. But it\u2019s that sustained, maintaining of zero gravity that really trips your brain, because you\u2019re like: OK, this isn\u2019t stopping. Now I have to manage being in this new fluidity of movement. And the orientation doesn\u2019t matter. And that\u2019s just incredible.\nThe most surprising thing for me was\u2014it\u2019s starting to slip away now\u2014for the first two to three weeks afterwards, my dreams were filled with me floating. I think my brain was trying to process.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 launch from Kennedy Space Center in September.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Kornelis is a writer in Bremerton, Wash. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com. A professor of geology, she was part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Pilot Sian Proctor Talks About Her Journey\u2014and Returning to Earth (WSJ: Journal Reports: Year in Review) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1928",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-x-pilot-journey-returning-to-earth-11638376308?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=1",
        "text": "Finally, in September, Dr. Proctor piloted SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission as part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission crew was in orbit for about three days before returning to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nShe says she wasn\u2019t scared as she listened to the countdown. Her fear, she says, has always been that the moment would not come, or that it would somehow slip away.\n\n\n\u201cWhen we got down to one minute,\u201d she says, \u201cI was like, \u2018All right, we\u2019re doing this. Let\u2019s go.\u2019 \u201d\nThe Wall Street Journal spoke to Dr. Proctor about her journey and about why she thinks solving challenges in human space travel can help humanity overcome problems here on Earth. Below are edited excerpts.\nWSJ: Did you bring any trinkets in your pocket to sell or give to family and friends?\nDR. PROCTOR: Oh, my goodness, yes. I brought a lot of things. I tried to bring as many people on this journey with me as possible. I brought 32 pieces of student artwork from my school. I brought poetry, which was digital. I also brought my \u201cStar Wars\u201d trading cards that I got when I was 13 years old. Those days as a kid really made me fall in love with not only science fiction, but the dream of being an astronaut.\nWSJ: Why do you think private space tourism is important?\nDR. PROCTOR: Access to new technology and new experiences is important. When we push people out of their comfort zone, that\u2019s when you learn the most, that\u2019s when you grow. And so you think: How do we give people experiences that fundamentally change them for the better, where they get a new perspective and love of our planet. It\u2019s not about space exploration in itself, it\u2019s about solving for space solves for Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 crew\u2014from left, Chris Sembroski, Dr. Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux\u2014at Kennedy Space Center in Florida before the launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWSJ: What has been solved for Earth with the money spent on private missions like this?\nDR. PROCTOR: When I say that, I\u2019m talking about the advancement of human space flight in general. The reality is every dollar spent on human space exploration is spent here with jobs. And then when we\u2019re talking about efficiency, you\u2019re talking about technology.\nSpace flight is fundamentally about efficiency in water, energy, shelter, food. Everything that we need to survive and thrive in space\u2014on the moon and Mars\u2014are the things that we need to survive here on Earth. And when we talk about the wicked problems here on Earth, guess what they are: food, energy, water, shelter, waste management, they\u2019re all the same things. Space enables us to become more efficient. You have to. And that efficiency technology makes us more efficient here on Earth.\n\n\nYear in Review: 2021\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n Read the full report The Metaverse: The Next Big Thing? A Global Plan to Fight the Pandemic Rediscovering the Joy of Travel A Silver Lining for Women in the Workplace Jon Batiste on Live Music The Future of TV \n\n\nWSJ: Do you think that space travel is important because the Earth may one day become uninhabitable?\nDR. PROCTOR: No. I think that solving for spacesolves for Earth, right down to us being able to stay on Earth until something beyond our control happens, like, you know, our sun expands, which is a long, long, long, long, long time away. Everything has a finite life. Our planet does have a finite life. And if humanity is going to survive, we will have to become Earth seed and go out and populate in order for humanity to live on. But we\u2019re talking millions and billions of years from now.\nWSJ: I have to ask, does the weightlessness in space feel at all like the sensation of being in an elevator going down?\nDR. PROCTOR: Nope. There is a little sense of that when you free fall. We did a zero G flight, so you get it for that moment. But it\u2019s that sustained, maintaining of zero gravity that really trips your brain, because you\u2019re like: OK, this isn\u2019t stopping. Now I have to manage being in this new fluidity of movement. And the orientation doesn\u2019t matter. And that\u2019s just incredible.\nThe most surprising thing for me was\u2014it\u2019s starting to slip away now\u2014for the first two to three weeks afterwards, my dreams were filled with me floating. I think my brain was trying to process.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 launch from Kennedy Space Center in September.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Kornelis is a writer in Bremerton, Wash. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com. A professor of geology, she was part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Pilot Sian Proctor Talks About Her Journey\u2014and Returning to Earth (WSJ: Journal Reports: Year in Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1929",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-x-pilot-journey-returning-to-earth-11638376308?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=13",
        "text": "Finally, in September, Dr. Proctor piloted SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission as part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission crew was in orbit for about three days before returning to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\nShe says she wasn\u2019t scared as she listened to the countdown. Her fear, she says, has always been that the moment would not come, or that it would somehow slip away.\n\n\n\u201cWhen we got down to one minute,\u201d she says, \u201cI was like, \u2018All right, we\u2019re doing this. Let\u2019s go.\u2019 \u201d\nThe Wall Street Journal spoke to Dr. Proctor about her journey and about why she thinks solving challenges in human space travel can help humanity overcome problems here on Earth. Below are edited excerpts.\nWSJ: Did you bring any trinkets in your pocket to sell or give to family and friends?\nDR. PROCTOR: Oh, my goodness, yes. I brought a lot of things. I tried to bring as many people on this journey with me as possible. I brought 32 pieces of student artwork from my school. I brought poetry, which was digital. I also brought my \u201cStar Wars\u201d trading cards that I got when I was 13 years old. Those days as a kid really made me fall in love with not only science fiction, but the dream of being an astronaut.\nWSJ: Why do you think private space tourism is important?\nDR. PROCTOR: Access to new technology and new experiences is important. When we push people out of their comfort zone, that\u2019s when you learn the most, that\u2019s when you grow. And so you think: How do we give people experiences that fundamentally change them for the better, where they get a new perspective and love of our planet. It\u2019s not about space exploration in itself, it\u2019s about solving for space solves for Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 crew\u2014from left, Chris Sembroski, Dr. Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux\u2014at Kennedy Space Center in Florida before the launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWSJ: What has been solved for Earth with the money spent on private missions like this?\nDR. PROCTOR: When I say that, I\u2019m talking about the advancement of human space flight in general. The reality is every dollar spent on human space exploration is spent here with jobs. And then when we\u2019re talking about efficiency, you\u2019re talking about technology.\nSpace flight is fundamentally about efficiency in water, energy, shelter, food. Everything that we need to survive and thrive in space\u2014on the moon and Mars\u2014are the things that we need to survive here on Earth. And when we talk about the wicked problems here on Earth, guess what they are: food, energy, water, shelter, waste management, they\u2019re all the same things. Space enables us to become more efficient. You have to. And that efficiency technology makes us more efficient here on Earth.\n\n\nYear in Review: 2021\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n Read the full report The Metaverse: The Next Big Thing? A Global Plan to Fight the Pandemic Rediscovering the Joy of Travel A Silver Lining for Women in the Workplace Jon Batiste on Live Music The Future of TV \n\n\nWSJ: Do you think that space travel is important because the Earth may one day become uninhabitable?\nDR. PROCTOR: No. I think that solving for spacesolves for Earth, right down to us being able to stay on Earth until something beyond our control happens, like, you know, our sun expands, which is a long, long, long, long, long time away. Everything has a finite life. Our planet does have a finite life. And if humanity is going to survive, we will have to become Earth seed and go out and populate in order for humanity to live on. But we\u2019re talking millions and billions of years from now.\nWSJ: I have to ask, does the weightlessness in space feel at all like the sensation of being in an elevator going down?\nDR. PROCTOR: Nope. There is a little sense of that when you free fall. We did a zero G flight, so you get it for that moment. But it\u2019s that sustained, maintaining of zero gravity that really trips your brain, because you\u2019re like: OK, this isn\u2019t stopping. Now I have to manage being in this new fluidity of movement. And the orientation doesn\u2019t matter. And that\u2019s just incredible.\nThe most surprising thing for me was\u2014it\u2019s starting to slip away now\u2014for the first two to three weeks afterwards, my dreams were filled with me floating. I think my brain was trying to process.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 launch from Kennedy Space Center in September.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Kornelis is a writer in Bremerton, Wash. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com. A professor of geology, she was part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Pilot Sian Proctor Talks About Her Journey\u2014and Returning to Earth (WSJ: Journal Reports: Year in Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1930",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-x-pilot-journey-returning-to-earth-11638376308?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=11",
        "text": "Finally, in September, Dr. Proctor piloted SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission as part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission crew was in orbit for about three days before returning to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nShe says she wasn\u2019t scared as she listened to the countdown. Her fear, she says, has always been that the moment would not come, or that it would somehow slip away.\n\n\n\u201cWhen we got down to one minute,\u201d she says, \u201cI was like, \u2018All right, we\u2019re doing this. Let\u2019s go.\u2019 \u201d\nThe Wall Street Journal spoke to Dr. Proctor about her journey and about why she thinks solving challenges in human space travel can help humanity overcome problems here on Earth. Below are edited excerpts.\nWSJ: Did you bring any trinkets in your pocket to sell or give to family and friends?\nDR. PROCTOR: Oh, my goodness, yes. I brought a lot of things. I tried to bring as many people on this journey with me as possible. I brought 32 pieces of student artwork from my school. I brought poetry, which was digital. I also brought my \u201cStar Wars\u201d trading cards that I got when I was 13 years old. Those days as a kid really made me fall in love with not only science fiction, but the dream of being an astronaut.\nWSJ: Why do you think private space tourism is important?\nDR. PROCTOR: Access to new technology and new experiences is important. When we push people out of their comfort zone, that\u2019s when you learn the most, that\u2019s when you grow. And so you think: How do we give people experiences that fundamentally change them for the better, where they get a new perspective and love of our planet. It\u2019s not about space exploration in itself, it\u2019s about solving for space solves for Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 crew\u2014from left, Chris Sembroski, Dr. Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux\u2014at Kennedy Space Center in Florida before the launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SpaceX/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWSJ: What has been solved for Earth with the money spent on private missions like this?\nDR. PROCTOR: When I say that, I\u2019m talking about the advancement of human space flight in general. The reality is every dollar spent on human space exploration is spent here with jobs. And then when we\u2019re talking about efficiency, you\u2019re talking about technology.\nSpace flight is fundamentally about efficiency in water, energy, shelter, food. Everything that we need to survive and thrive in space\u2014on the moon and Mars\u2014are the things that we need to survive here on Earth. And when we talk about the wicked problems here on Earth, guess what they are: food, energy, water, shelter, waste management, they\u2019re all the same things. Space enables us to become more efficient. You have to. And that efficiency technology makes us more efficient here on Earth.\n\n\nYear in Review: 2021\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n Read the full report The Metaverse: The Next Big Thing? A Global Plan to Fight the Pandemic Rediscovering the Joy of Travel A Silver Lining for Women in the Workplace Jon Batiste on Live Music The Future of TV \n\n\nWSJ: Do you think that space travel is important because the Earth may one day become uninhabitable?\nDR. PROCTOR: No. I think that solving for spacesolves for Earth, right down to us being able to stay on Earth until something beyond our control happens, like, you know, our sun expands, which is a long, long, long, long, long time away. Everything has a finite life. Our planet does have a finite life. And if humanity is going to survive, we will have to become Earth seed and go out and populate in order for humanity to live on. But we\u2019re talking millions and billions of years from now.\nWSJ: I have to ask, does the weightlessness in space feel at all like the sensation of being in an elevator going down?\nDR. PROCTOR: Nope. There is a little sense of that when you free fall. We did a zero G flight, so you get it for that moment. But it\u2019s that sustained, maintaining of zero gravity that really trips your brain, because you\u2019re like: OK, this isn\u2019t stopping. Now I have to manage being in this new fluidity of movement. And the orientation doesn\u2019t matter. And that\u2019s just incredible.\nThe most surprising thing for me was\u2014it\u2019s starting to slip away now\u2014for the first two to three weeks afterwards, my dreams were filled with me floating. I think my brain was trying to process.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Inspiration4 launch from Kennedy Space Center in September.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Kornelis is a writer in Bremerton, Wash. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com. A professor of geology, she was part of the first all-civilian crew to orbit the Earth. ",
        "author": "Chris Kornelis"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Facebook\u2019s Telepathic Texting Is Supposed to Work (WSJ: Keywords) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1931",
        "date": "2017-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-facebooks-telepathic-texting-is-supposed-to-work-1497182402?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=120",
        "text": "Are the methods crazy? Yes. Do neuroscientists and engineers outside Facebook express extreme doubt this will succeed? Yes. Facebook doesn\u2019t care and is investing millions in research that could produce a consumer gadget. \n\n\n\n\nAfter I spoke with project members, based at Facebook\u2019s mysterious Building 8 incubator for moonshots, it became clear that the company\u2019s larger goal is to make a handful of long-term bets on technologies that could define the next era of computing.\n\n\nWhen your face is stuck inside a VR headset or you\u2019re out walking around wearing a pair of augmented-reality glasses, you can\u2019t exactly reach for a keyboard or mouse, says Mark Chevillet, a physicist and neuroscientist who is Facebook\u2019s technical lead on the as-yet-unnamed project.\nThe initiative would give Facebook a way to control those systems hands-free. Messaging is just the beginning. Facebook isn\u2019t working on a brain implant\u2014though other Silicon Valley giants are. The answer could ultimately be as simple as a headband.\nTo pull it off, Facebook has enlisted a small in-house team, supplemented by 60 scientists and engineers from research institutions across the U.S., all receiving funding from Facebook. Their goal is to update an obscure, largely abandoned technology known as \u201cfast optical scattering,\u201d aka \u201cevent-related optical signal.\u201d Basically, you shine a light through the head and into the brain, then measure the light reflected back. \nIt sounds bonkers, but in one way or another, scientists have been using light to peer into the body for nearly a century.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nResearchers at UC Berkeley created \u2018semantic maps\u2019 that tile human cerebral cortex using natural speech.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alexander Huth/The Regents of the University of California\n \n\n\n\nWhen this technique is used on lab animals, their brains are exposed and researchers can directly observe brain cells expanding and contracting as they fire. The challenge for Dr. Chevillet\u2019s team is to accomplish the same thing in intact humans, when there\u2019s a layer of skull, skin and hair in the way. It\u2019s a problem that to date has been impossible to surmount.\nIf you\u2019ve ever pressed a flashlight into your hand and seen it glow, you know how light can make its way through human flesh. Facebook\u2019s researchers think they have a chance of success because they\u2019re developing sensors to identify the small number of photons that, after penetrating the skull and bouncing off a neuron, return to the detector instead of scattering in every direction.\nSensor technology that could in theory accomplish this\u2014developed at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and funded almost exclusively by the U.S. Department of Defense\u2014has to date benefited things like sonars, space exploration and observing the ground from the air through dense foliage. Thus far, the technology hasn\u2019t been pressed against anyone\u2019s head.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Krishna Shenoy,\n\n\n\n a pioneering neuroprosthetics researcher at Stanford University, says if there\u2019s any evidence Facebook\u2019s team could sense brain activity from outside the skull nearly as accurately as with implants, he hasn\u2019t seen it. Dr. Shenoy and his team have experimented with having humans type eight words a minute by moving a cursor on a virtual keyboard through thought alone\u2014but even that required a brain implant.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Dugan, at the F8 conference, comes from the Department of Defense\u2019s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by way of Google.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Facebook\n \n\n\n\nAnd repurposing U.S. military technology to observe the machinery of thought is only half of the Facebook research team\u2019s problem. The other challenge is transforming brain readings into actual words. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexander Huth,\n\n\n\n of the University of California, Berkeley, isn\u2019t connected to Facebook\u2019s project but has been working on how brains process language for eight years. His research revealed that words\u2014and the concepts that underlie them\u2014are spread across the surface of our brains. By observing which parts of a brain are active, you might be able to determine the word, or at least concept, that someone is thinking. \nDr. Huth argues that the greatest challenge in \u201creading\u201d minds is that we still know so little about how language works.\nAt Building 8, they\u2019re approaching this in a quintessentially Facebook way: by throwing artificial intelligence at it. Dr. Chevillet says that if he and his team can get enough data from the right parts of the brain, they could train a machine-learning algorithm that correlates neural activity with language to extract words from our heads. The method would be similar to how scientists train computers to understand spoken language.\nI explained Facebook\u2019s plan to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Barbour,\n\n\n\n managing vice president of NIRx Medical Technologies, a pioneer of a related (but distinct) light-based brain-imaging tech used in l Facebook\u2019s plan to enable us to type 100 words a minute just by thinking is a long shot, and it reflects the company\u2019s new approach to R&D. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims"
    },
    {
        "title": "Extraterrestrial Life and Your Smartphone\u2019s Screen (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1932",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-helped-make-your-smartphones-screen-possible-11634356804?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=20",
        "text": "The connection between humanity\u2019s boldest experiment in deep-space exploration and the gadgets in your hands is the technology to produce giant, ultrahigh-precision mirrors and lenses. Such \u201coptics\u201d weren\u2019t possible until NASA asked a handful of companies more than 20 years ago to bid on the rights to figure out a way.\nThe result, developed by a company called Tinsley Integrated Optical Systems, was a technique that enabled production of very large mirror surfaces that are so nearly flawless that any imperfections on their surface are only a few atoms thick. And that technology can also be involved in producing many displays\u2014using lasers to transform extra-large sheets of silicon deposited on glass\u2014significantly reducing the costs of electronic components for some displays.\n\n\nThe transfer of know-how from space telescopes to the manufacture of displays is the latest in a long line of commercial technologies with similar lineage, from digital-camera sensors to the Dustbuster, which was developed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Black & Decker\n\n\n out of its partnership with NASA. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nLaser company Coherent\u2019s linebeam system, used for producing high-resolution OLED displays, incorporates advances from the Webb telescope\u2019s optics.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Coherent, Inc.\n \n\n\n\nOne classic example is the Apollo guidance computer\u2014the first digital general-purpose, multitasking, interactive portable computer\u2014which was present on both the Apollo command module and the lunar lander. In its use of then-novel components like some of the world\u2019s first silicon microchips (aka integrated circuits), it paved the way for our modern world, from the internet to the innards of the same smartphones whose displays are in part due to the James Webb Space Telescope.\nSince the Apollo missions, NASA\u2019s need for engineers to accomplish feats that are impossible at the time it first sets forth its requirements, combined with its willingness to fund such development, have spurred companies to develop new technologies that end up affecting everyday life.\nFunding innovation through NASA and the Defense Department has long been America\u2019s favored method of \u201cindustrial policy\u201d\u2014that is, using government money to supplement private investment in new technologies. The difference between American industrial policy and the kind practiced in many other countries is that the U.S. government has long favored paying for research and development rather than aiding the scaling up of industries based on those innovations. This often means technologies like the LCD display are invented here but lead to giant industries elsewhere.\nWith the Webb telescope, the connection between space tech and regular-life tech is more than just the transfer of insights gained from research and development conducted on NASA\u2019s dime. It turns out that the very same factory where the mirrors for the space telescope were polished are now where the optics required for manufacture of OLED displays\u2014short for organic light emitting diode, the screens in the latest generation of smartphones\u2014are made.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNearly flawless silicon lenses like the one above are essential for high-end displays, and arose thanks to advances made during development of the Webb telescope.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Coherent, Inc.\n \n\n\n\nThe Webb telescope\u2019s primary mirror, which collects the interstellar snapshots, is made up of 18 hexagonal sections, each 1.32 meters in diameter, that will fold origami-style for flight, then unfold in space to make a surface 6.5 meters across, or more than 21 feet. All the gold-plated beryllium mirror sections must be so unblemished that they can collectively focus even the faintest whisper of the most distant celestial body into a detectable image.\n",
        "author": "Christopher Mims"
    },
    {
        "title": "Extraterrestrial Life and Your Smartphone\u2019s Screen (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1933",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-helped-make-your-smartphones-screen-possible-11634356804?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=20",
        "text": "The connection between humanity\u2019s boldest experiment in deep-space exploration and the gadgets in your hands is the technology to produce giant, ultrahigh-precision mirrors and lenses. Such \u201coptics\u201d weren\u2019t possible until NASA asked a handful of companies more than 20 years ago to bid on the rights to figure out a way.\n\n\n\n\nThe result, developed by a company called Tinsley Integrated Optical Systems, was a technique that enabled production of very large mirror surfaces that are so nearly flawless that any imperfections on their surface are only a few atoms thick. And that technology can also be involved in producing many displays\u2014using lasers to transform extra-large sheets of silicon deposited on glass\u2014significantly reducing the costs of electronic components for some displays.\n\n\nThe transfer of know-how from space telescopes to the manufacture of displays is the latest in a long line of commercial technologies with similar lineage, from digital-camera sensors to the Dustbuster, which was developed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Black & Decker\n\n\n out of its partnership with NASA. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nLaser company Coherent\u2019s linebeam system, used for producing high-resolution OLED displays, incorporates advances from the Webb telescope\u2019s optics.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Coherent, Inc.\n \n\n\n\nOne classic example is the Apollo guidance computer\u2014the first digital general-purpose, multitasking, interactive portable computer\u2014which was present on both the Apollo command module and the lunar lander. In its use of then-novel components like some of the world\u2019s first silicon microchips (aka integrated circuits), it paved the way for our modern world, from the internet to the innards of the same smartphones whose displays are in part due to the James Webb Space Telescope.\nSince the Apollo missions, NASA\u2019s need for engineers to accomplish feats that are impossible at the time it first sets forth its requirements, combined with its willingness to fund such development, have spurred companies to develop new technologies that end up affecting everyday life.\nFunding innovation through NASA and the Defense Department has long been America\u2019s favored method of \u201cindustrial policy\u201d\u2014that is, using government money to supplement private investment in new technologies. The difference between American industrial policy and the kind practiced in many other countries is that the U.S. government has long favored paying for research and development rather than aiding the scaling up of industries based on those innovations. This often means technologies like the LCD display are invented here but lead to giant industries elsewhere.\nWith the Webb telescope, the connection between space tech and regular-life tech is more than just the transfer of insights gained from research and development conducted on NASA\u2019s dime. It turns out that the very same factory where the mirrors for the space telescope were polished are now where the optics required for manufacture of OLED displays\u2014short for organic light emitting diode, the screens in the latest generation of smartphones\u2014are made.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNearly flawless silicon lenses like the one above are essential for high-end displays, and arose thanks to advances made during development of the Webb telescope.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Coherent, Inc.\n \n\n\n\nThe Webb telescope\u2019s primary mirror, which collects the interstellar snapshots, is made up of 18 hexagonal sections, each 1.32 meters in diameter, that will fold origami-style for flight, then unfold in space to make a surface 6.5 meters across, or more than 21 feet. All the gold-plated beryllium mirror sections must be so unblemished that they can collectively focus even the faintest whisper of the most distant celestial body into a detectable image.\n",
        "author": "Christopher Mims"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robot Boats Leave Autonomous Cars in Their Wake (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1934",
        "date": "2020-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/robot-boats-leave-autonomous-cars-in-their-wake-11598673601?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=35",
        "text": "The symbolism of sending a crewless, autonomous ship across an ocean in 2021\u2014as automation accelerates the economic divide among American workers\u2014might be a little on the nose, but its creators insist autonomous ships aren\u2019t about replacing people. Instead, this technology is intended to serve where crewed voyages are deemed too expensive\u2014or too risky. This is a common refrain among firms building autonomous ships: For the 70% of the Earth\u2019s surface covered by water, there are far too few humans and vessels, despite a pressing need for oceanographic data, scientific research, naval patrols and new means of transporting goods. This is in contrast to the situation on our roads, or even in our skies. Yet as with autonomous cars and aerial drones, launching an autonomous ship depends as much on risk tolerance as it does technical barriers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMeirwen Jenking-Rees works on the part of the Mayflower that will house the ship\u2019s science payload.\n\n\n\nHumans Need Not Apply Our oceans, even our inland waterways, are a vastly under-utilized asset, these pioneers of robot ships argue. We could utilize them more, and do so in ways that are cleaner and more efficient, if we could borrow from the way we\u2019ve successfully used robots to explore other places that were relatively free of obstacles, like outer space. After all, ships that don\u2019t have to protect humans from a harsh marine environment don\u2019t need pilothouses, bunks, flat decks\u2014or bathrooms.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill you follow the Mayflower\u2019s trans-Atlantic journey next year? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cIf you have a toilet on a ship, you need water on the ship. You can\u2019t put your s\u2014 into New York Harbor, and you have to take it into some sort of container and then, in port, suck it out,\u201d says Antoon Van Coillie, CEO of Belgian barge transportation company Zulu Associates. \u201cSo a toilet on a ship is a very expensive piece of equipment.\u201d Mr. Van Coillie\u2019s company, which uses crewed vessels to move shipping containers on inland rivers and canals, is exploring autonomy. He says it would make the business cost-competitive with trucking, especially in markets where congestion on roads is an issue. For U.K.-based Sea-Kit International, eliminating humans on its vessel means it can do with a 12-meter-long ship what would normally require a crewed one 60 meters long. The difference in size means a drastic reduction in fuel consumption: Sea-Kit\u2019s vessel consumes roughly 1/100th of a comparable crewed one.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn autonomous Sea-Kit vessel as it heads out of a harbor.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ENP Media\n \n\n\n\nThe three-year-old startup, winner of the 2019 Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, will soon deliver two vessels for underwater surveys. They\u2019re not fully autonomous, since they\u2019re monitored remotely by a human, but they operate without a crew aboard and can navigate independently from one waypoint to another. Two Norwegian companies, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kongsberg Maritime\n\n\n and Massterly, just unveiled a partnership with grocery distributor ASKO to deliver fully electric, minimally crewed barges in 2022. The barges will transport trailers full of goods across the Oslo fjord, in order to reduce emissions from truck transportation. Autonomous technology on board will be implemented in stages, and monitored for safety and performance by the Norwegian Maritime Authority. Kongsberg already offers small autonomous surface vessels to fishing fleets, and partially autonomous technology used on ferries. Much autonomous ship technology was born of military contracts. L3Harris has been producing autonomous ships for more than a decade for many of the world\u2019s navies. Unarmed and relatively small, these vessels are meant for cartography, mine detection and target practice. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a fully autonomous sub hunter in 2016, which it transferred to the U.S. Navy in 2018. Its successor, Sea Hunter II, is slated to launch by the end of the year, and its lead contractor is Leidos. High-Seas Adventure In many ways, autonomy is much easier on the ocean than on land. \u201cYou have a larger area to operate, and there\u2019s a lot less opportunity to collide with other vehicles or pedestrians,\u201d says Neil Tinmouth, chief operating officer of Sea-Kit. But as anyone who watches the Discovery Channel knows, the ocean is not to be trifled with. \u201cYes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u201d says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u201cBut it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Yes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u2019 says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u2018But it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u2019\n\n\n\nThat dynamism most often manifests as storms, and the North Atlantic is notorious for them, one reason the Mayflower team is waiting until spring to launch. The Mayflower is p Driverless ships don\u2019t have to worry about crowded roads. And they don\u2019t need bunks\u2014or toilets. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims | Photographs by James Arthur Allen for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robot Boats Leave Autonomous Cars in Their Wake (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1935",
        "date": "2020-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/robot-boats-leave-autonomous-cars-in-their-wake-11598673601?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=33",
        "text": "The symbolism of sending a crewless, autonomous ship across an ocean in 2021\u2014as automation accelerates the economic divide among American workers\u2014might be a little on the nose, but its creators insist autonomous ships aren\u2019t about replacing people. Instead, this technology is intended to serve where crewed voyages are deemed too expensive\u2014or too risky. This is a common refrain among firms building autonomous ships: For the 70% of the Earth\u2019s surface covered by water, there are far too few humans and vessels, despite a pressing need for oceanographic data, scientific research, naval patrols and new means of transporting goods. This is in contrast to the situation on our roads, or even in our skies. Yet as with autonomous cars and aerial drones, launching an autonomous ship depends as much on risk tolerance as it does technical barriers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMeirwen Jenking-Rees works on the part of the Mayflower that will house the ship\u2019s science payload.\n\n\n\nHumans Need Not Apply Our oceans, even our inland waterways, are a vastly under-utilized asset, these pioneers of robot ships argue. We could utilize them more, and do so in ways that are cleaner and more efficient, if we could borrow from the way we\u2019ve successfully used robots to explore other places that were relatively free of obstacles, like outer space. After all, ships that don\u2019t have to protect humans from a harsh marine environment don\u2019t need pilothouses, bunks, flat decks\u2014or bathrooms.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill you follow the Mayflower\u2019s trans-Atlantic journey next year? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cIf you have a toilet on a ship, you need water on the ship. You can\u2019t put your s\u2014 into New York Harbor, and you have to take it into some sort of container and then, in port, suck it out,\u201d says Antoon Van Coillie, CEO of Belgian barge transportation company Zulu Associates. \u201cSo a toilet on a ship is a very expensive piece of equipment.\u201d Mr. Van Coillie\u2019s company, which uses crewed vessels to move shipping containers on inland rivers and canals, is exploring autonomy. He says it would make the business cost-competitive with trucking, especially in markets where congestion on roads is an issue. For U.K.-based Sea-Kit International, eliminating humans on its vessel means it can do with a 12-meter-long ship what would normally require a crewed one 60 meters long. The difference in size means a drastic reduction in fuel consumption: Sea-Kit\u2019s vessel consumes roughly 1/100th of a comparable crewed one.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn autonomous Sea-Kit vessel as it heads out of a harbor.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ENP Media\n \n\n\n\nThe three-year-old startup, winner of the 2019 Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, will soon deliver two vessels for underwater surveys. They\u2019re not fully autonomous, since they\u2019re monitored remotely by a human, but they operate without a crew aboard and can navigate independently from one waypoint to another. Two Norwegian companies, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kongsberg Maritime\n\n\n and Massterly, just unveiled a partnership with grocery distributor ASKO to deliver fully electric, minimally crewed barges in 2022. The barges will transport trailers full of goods across the Oslo fjord, in order to reduce emissions from truck transportation. Autonomous technology on board will be implemented in stages, and monitored for safety and performance by the Norwegian Maritime Authority. Kongsberg already offers small autonomous surface vessels to fishing fleets, and partially autonomous technology used on ferries. Much autonomous ship technology was born of military contracts. L3Harris has been producing autonomous ships for more than a decade for many of the world\u2019s navies. Unarmed and relatively small, these vessels are meant for cartography, mine detection and target practice. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a fully autonomous sub hunter in 2016, which it transferred to the U.S. Navy in 2018. Its successor, Sea Hunter II, is slated to launch by the end of the year, and its lead contractor is Leidos. High-Seas Adventure In many ways, autonomy is much easier on the ocean than on land. \u201cYou have a larger area to operate, and there\u2019s a lot less opportunity to collide with other vehicles or pedestrians,\u201d says Neil Tinmouth, chief operating officer of Sea-Kit. But as anyone who watches the Discovery Channel knows, the ocean is not to be trifled with. \u201cYes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u201d says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u201cBut it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Yes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u2019 says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u2018But it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u2019\n\n\n\nThat dynamism most often manifests as storms, and the North Atlantic is notorious for them, one reason the Mayflower team is waiting until spring to launch. The Mayflower is p Driverless ships don\u2019t have to worry about crowded roads. And they don\u2019t need bunks\u2014or toilets. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims | Photographs by James Arthur Allen for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robot Boats Leave Autonomous Cars in Their Wake (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1936",
        "date": "2020-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/robot-boats-leave-autonomous-cars-in-their-wake-11598673601?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=41",
        "text": "The symbolism of sending a crewless, autonomous ship across an ocean in 2021\u2014as automation accelerates the economic divide among American workers\u2014might be a little on the nose, but its creators insist autonomous ships aren\u2019t about replacing people. Instead, this technology is intended to serve where crewed voyages are deemed too expensive\u2014or too risky. This is a common refrain among firms building autonomous ships: For the 70% of the Earth\u2019s surface covered by water, there are far too few humans and vessels, despite a pressing need for oceanographic data, scientific research, naval patrols and new means of transporting goods. This is in contrast to the situation on our roads, or even in our skies. Yet as with autonomous cars and aerial drones, launching an autonomous ship depends as much on risk tolerance as it does technical barriers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMeirwen Jenking-Rees works on the part of the Mayflower that will house the ship\u2019s science payload.\n\n\n\nHumans Need Not Apply Our oceans, even our inland waterways, are a vastly under-utilized asset, these pioneers of robot ships argue. We could utilize them more, and do so in ways that are cleaner and more efficient, if we could borrow from the way we\u2019ve successfully used robots to explore other places that were relatively free of obstacles, like outer space. After all, ships that don\u2019t have to protect humans from a harsh marine environment don\u2019t need pilothouses, bunks, flat decks\u2014or bathrooms.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill you follow the Mayflower\u2019s trans-Atlantic journey next year? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cIf you have a toilet on a ship, you need water on the ship. You can\u2019t put your s\u2014 into New York Harbor, and you have to take it into some sort of container and then, in port, suck it out,\u201d says Antoon Van Coillie, CEO of Belgian barge transportation company Zulu Associates. \u201cSo a toilet on a ship is a very expensive piece of equipment.\u201d Mr. Van Coillie\u2019s company, which uses crewed vessels to move shipping containers on inland rivers and canals, is exploring autonomy. He says it would make the business cost-competitive with trucking, especially in markets where congestion on roads is an issue. For U.K.-based Sea-Kit International, eliminating humans on its vessel means it can do with a 12-meter-long ship what would normally require a crewed one 60 meters long. The difference in size means a drastic reduction in fuel consumption: Sea-Kit\u2019s vessel consumes roughly 1/100th of a comparable crewed one.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn autonomous Sea-Kit vessel as it heads out of a harbor.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ENP Media\n \n\n\n\nThe three-year-old startup, winner of the 2019 Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, will soon deliver two vessels for underwater surveys. They\u2019re not fully autonomous, since they\u2019re monitored remotely by a human, but they operate without a crew aboard and can navigate independently from one waypoint to another. Two Norwegian companies, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kongsberg Maritime\n\n\n and Massterly, just unveiled a partnership with grocery distributor ASKO to deliver fully electric, minimally crewed barges in 2022. The barges will transport trailers full of goods across the Oslo fjord, in order to reduce emissions from truck transportation. Autonomous technology on board will be implemented in stages, and monitored for safety and performance by the Norwegian Maritime Authority. Kongsberg already offers small autonomous surface vessels to fishing fleets, and partially autonomous technology used on ferries. Much autonomous ship technology was born of military contracts. L3Harris has been producing autonomous ships for more than a decade for many of the world\u2019s navies. Unarmed and relatively small, these vessels are meant for cartography, mine detection and target practice. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a fully autonomous sub hunter in 2016, which it transferred to the U.S. Navy in 2018. Its successor, Sea Hunter II, is slated to launch by the end of the year, and its lead contractor is Leidos. High-Seas Adventure In many ways, autonomy is much easier on the ocean than on land. \u201cYou have a larger area to operate, and there\u2019s a lot less opportunity to collide with other vehicles or pedestrians,\u201d says Neil Tinmouth, chief operating officer of Sea-Kit. But as anyone who watches the Discovery Channel knows, the ocean is not to be trifled with. \u201cYes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u201d says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u201cBut it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Yes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u2019 says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u2018But it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u2019\n\n\n\nThat dynamism most often manifests as storms, and the North Atlantic is notorious for them, one reason the Mayflower team is waiting until spring to launch. The Mayflower is p Driverless ships don\u2019t have to worry about crowded roads. And they don\u2019t need bunks\u2014or toilets. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims | Photographs by James Arthur Allen for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robot Boats Leave Autonomous Cars in Their Wake (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1937",
        "date": "2020-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/robot-boats-leave-autonomous-cars-in-their-wake-11598673601?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=47",
        "text": "The symbolism of sending a crewless, autonomous ship across an ocean in 2021\u2014as automation accelerates the economic divide among American workers\u2014might be a little on the nose, but its creators insist autonomous ships aren\u2019t about replacing people. Instead, this technology is intended to serve where crewed voyages are deemed too expensive\u2014or too risky. This is a common refrain among firms building autonomous ships: For the 70% of the Earth\u2019s surface covered by water, there are far too few humans and vessels, despite a pressing need for oceanographic data, scientific research, naval patrols and new means of transporting goods. This is in contrast to the situation on our roads, or even in our skies. Yet as with autonomous cars and aerial drones, launching an autonomous ship depends as much on risk tolerance as it does technical barriers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMeirwen Jenking-Rees works on the part of the Mayflower that will house the ship\u2019s science payload.\n\n\n\nHumans Need Not Apply Our oceans, even our inland waterways, are a vastly under-utilized asset, these pioneers of robot ships argue. We could utilize them more, and do so in ways that are cleaner and more efficient, if we could borrow from the way we\u2019ve successfully used robots to explore other places that were relatively free of obstacles, like outer space. After all, ships that don\u2019t have to protect humans from a harsh marine environment don\u2019t need pilothouses, bunks, flat decks\u2014or bathrooms.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWill you follow the Mayflower\u2019s trans-Atlantic journey next year? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cIf you have a toilet on a ship, you need water on the ship. You can\u2019t put your s\u2014 into New York Harbor, and you have to take it into some sort of container and then, in port, suck it out,\u201d says Antoon Van Coillie, CEO of Belgian barge transportation company Zulu Associates. \u201cSo a toilet on a ship is a very expensive piece of equipment.\u201d Mr. Van Coillie\u2019s company, which uses crewed vessels to move shipping containers on inland rivers and canals, is exploring autonomy. He says it would make the business cost-competitive with trucking, especially in markets where congestion on roads is an issue. For U.K.-based Sea-Kit International, eliminating humans on its vessel means it can do with a 12-meter-long ship what would normally require a crewed one 60 meters long. The difference in size means a drastic reduction in fuel consumption: Sea-Kit\u2019s vessel consumes roughly 1/100th of a comparable crewed one.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn autonomous Sea-Kit vessel as it heads out of a harbor.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ENP Media\n \n\n\n\nThe three-year-old startup, winner of the 2019 Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize, will soon deliver two vessels for underwater surveys. They\u2019re not fully autonomous, since they\u2019re monitored remotely by a human, but they operate without a crew aboard and can navigate independently from one waypoint to another. Two Norwegian companies, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kongsberg Maritime\n\n\n and Massterly, just unveiled a partnership with grocery distributor ASKO to deliver fully electric, minimally crewed barges in 2022. The barges will transport trailers full of goods across the Oslo fjord, in order to reduce emissions from truck transportation. Autonomous technology on board will be implemented in stages, and monitored for safety and performance by the Norwegian Maritime Authority. Kongsberg already offers small autonomous surface vessels to fishing fleets, and partially autonomous technology used on ferries. Much autonomous ship technology was born of military contracts. L3Harris has been producing autonomous ships for more than a decade for many of the world\u2019s navies. Unarmed and relatively small, these vessels are meant for cartography, mine detection and target practice. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a fully autonomous sub hunter in 2016, which it transferred to the U.S. Navy in 2018. Its successor, Sea Hunter II, is slated to launch by the end of the year, and its lead contractor is Leidos. High-Seas Adventure In many ways, autonomy is much easier on the ocean than on land. \u201cYou have a larger area to operate, and there\u2019s a lot less opportunity to collide with other vehicles or pedestrians,\u201d says Neil Tinmouth, chief operating officer of Sea-Kit. But as anyone who watches the Discovery Channel knows, the ocean is not to be trifled with. \u201cYes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u201d says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u201cBut it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Yes, the ocean is a vast expanse of nothing,\u2019 says Don Scott, chief technology officer of Marine AI, which is building the autonomous Mayflower. \u2018But it\u2019s an incredibly dynamic expanse of nothingness.\u2019\n\n\n\nThat dynamism most often manifests as storms, and the North Atlantic is notorious for them, one reason the Mayflower team is waiting until spring to launch. The Mayflower is p Driverless ships don\u2019t have to worry about crowded roads. And they don\u2019t need bunks\u2014or toilets. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims | Photographs by James Arthur Allen for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1938",
        "date": "2021-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tiny-satellites-that-will-connect-cows-cars-and-shipping-containers-to-the-internet-11610168400?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=26",
        "text": "In the near future, it isn\u2019t unreasonable to imagine this evolving satellite technology could put a distress beacon in every automobile, allow remote monitoring of wildlife in any environment on earth, and track your\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n\n shipment\u2014not just when it\u2019s on a truck, but backward, all the way to the factory that produced it. And it could be done at a fraction of the cost of earlier satellite tracking systems.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThese novel networks of nanosats\u2014aka cubesats\u2014are a result of a number of factors.\n\nFirst, the satellites themselves are smaller, cheaper and more capable than ever. The smartphone industry has miniaturized all electronics, benefiting everything from cars to drones. Then there are falling launch costs, due to companies like SpaceX, active national space programs like India\u2019s, and an array of new launch technologies, from reusable boosters to 3-D-printed engines.\nJust as important, there\u2019s the rollout and adoption of new long-distance, low-power wireless communication standards that can work just as well in outer space as they do on the ground.\nLike so many innovations in their early days, from the internet to the smartphone, no one is quite sure what low-cost, low-power data relays from space will enable\u2014or whether there will be enough demand to sustain the many companies jostling to provide it. In the next year, hundreds of satellites from more than a dozen companies are set to launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rendering of how a Vigoride vehicle from Momentus can send small satellites into their final orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Momentus\n \n\n\n\nThese startups aren\u2019t going head-to-head with more expensive and ambitious efforts from the likes of Amazon and SpaceX, which aim to deliver high-speed internet to households and businesses. Those \u201cmegaconstellations\u201d of hundreds or even thousands of relatively large satellites cost billions of dollars; networks of up to 100 nanosats can cost in the tens of millions, say their operators.\nThe truly global \u201cInternet of Things\u201d these tiny satellites can enable would have been much more difficult to achieve even 24 months ago, says Alasdair Davies, director of the Arribada Initiative, which designs and builds satellite tracking and connectivity systems for researchers, including the penguin-watching ones.\nFor the penguin project, Mr. Davies created low-cost cameras that can withstand the harsh Antarctic conditions. While the images they grab are stored on SD cards and must be physically collected once a year, the cameras can report their status\u2014low battery, covered in ice, tipped over, etc.\u2014to their keepers in London via tiny satellites.\n\n\nMore Keywords\n\n\n\n\nThe Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar\u2019s Unpredictable Future\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nWhy EV-Battery \u2018Breakthroughs\u2019 Rarely Break Through\nFebruary 26, 2022 \n\n\nNFTs and Crypto Are the New Multilevel Marketing Schemes\nFebruary 19, 2022 \n\n\nThe Technology That\u2019s Helping Companies Thrive Amid the Supply-Chain Chaos\nFebruary 12, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nLacuna Space is a small Harwell, U.K.-based startup with three communications satellites in orbit and two more on the way. Two are about the size of a briefcase, the third as big as a shoebox.\nLike nearly all nanosatellite constellation startups, Lacuna Space needs to deploy dozens more satellites to cover the entire earth at all times. Presently, many customers testing the company\u2019s technology can only connect to the satellite two to four times a day, but for applications like monitoring remote infrastructure, such as the penguin cameras, that\u2019s often enough, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Spurrett,\n\n\n\n Lacuna Space\u2019s chief executive and founder. Lacuna Space\u2019s satellites connect to things on the ground using LoRaWAN networks, already widely used for earthbound devices sold by Amazon and others.\nNetherlands-based Smart Parks also uses LoRaWAN to connect rhinos and elephants into a sort of Internet of Megafauna. This is useful for managers of wildlife refuges who need to monitor these animals to prevent poaching\u2014and bring them back when they wander beyond park boundaries.\nAn elephant collar Smart Parks is testing in Malawi connects with LoRaWAN ground stations there, but can also connect to Lacuna Space\u2019s satellites, says Smart Parks co-founder Tim van Dam. Once that constellation is fully deployed, his company will use it to track animals into places\u2014deserts, forests, and transborder parks between countries in southern Africa\u2014where no other wireless signal is available. Because LoRaWAN systems require relatively little power and can work with flat antennas, they\u2019re well-suited to elephant collars, and should last up to 10 years on a single battery, says Mr. van Dam.\nAt least 16 companies are working on launching similar types of satellite networks, according to space research firm NSR. Each is le In the shadow of giants like SpaceX, more than a dozen startups are building their own globe-spanning networks of nanosatellites, enabling a new kind of everywhere, all-the-time connectivity for people, animals and assets on Earth. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Tiny Satellites That Will Connect Cows, Cars and Shipping Containers to the Internet (WSJ: Keywords: Christopher Mims) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1939",
        "date": "2021-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tiny-satellites-that-will-connect-cows-cars-and-shipping-containers-to-the-internet-11610168400?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=39",
        "text": "In the near future, it isn\u2019t unreasonable to imagine this evolving satellite technology could put a distress beacon in every automobile, allow remote monitoring of wildlife in any environment on earth, and track your\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n\n shipment\u2014not just when it\u2019s on a truck, but backward, all the way to the factory that produced it. And it could be done at a fraction of the cost of earlier satellite tracking systems.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology \n\n\n\n A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThese novel networks of nanosats\u2014aka cubesats\u2014are a result of a number of factors.\n\nFirst, the satellites themselves are smaller, cheaper and more capable than ever. The smartphone industry has miniaturized all electronics, benefiting everything from cars to drones. Then there are falling launch costs, due to companies like SpaceX, active national space programs like India\u2019s, and an array of new launch technologies, from reusable boosters to 3-D-printed engines.\nJust as important, there\u2019s the rollout and adoption of new long-distance, low-power wireless communication standards that can work just as well in outer space as they do on the ground.\nLike so many innovations in their early days, from the internet to the smartphone, no one is quite sure what low-cost, low-power data relays from space will enable\u2014or whether there will be enough demand to sustain the many companies jostling to provide it. In the next year, hundreds of satellites from more than a dozen companies are set to launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rendering of how a Vigoride vehicle from Momentus can send small satellites into their final orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Momentus\n \n\n\n\nThese startups aren\u2019t going head-to-head with more expensive and ambitious efforts from the likes of Amazon and SpaceX, which aim to deliver high-speed internet to households and businesses. Those \u201cmegaconstellations\u201d of hundreds or even thousands of relatively large satellites cost billions of dollars; networks of up to 100 nanosats can cost in the tens of millions, say their operators.\nThe truly global \u201cInternet of Things\u201d these tiny satellites can enable would have been much more difficult to achieve even 24 months ago, says Alasdair Davies, director of the Arribada Initiative, which designs and builds satellite tracking and connectivity systems for researchers, including the penguin-watching ones.\nFor the penguin project, Mr. Davies created low-cost cameras that can withstand the harsh Antarctic conditions. While the images they grab are stored on SD cards and must be physically collected once a year, the cameras can report their status\u2014low battery, covered in ice, tipped over, etc.\u2014to their keepers in London via tiny satellites.\n\n\nMore Keywords\n\n\n\n\nThe Russia-Ukraine Cyberwar\u2019s Unpredictable Future\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nWhy EV-Battery \u2018Breakthroughs\u2019 Rarely Break Through\nFebruary 26, 2022 \n\n\nNFTs and Crypto Are the New Multilevel Marketing Schemes\nFebruary 19, 2022 \n\n\nThe Technology That\u2019s Helping Companies Thrive Amid the Supply-Chain Chaos\nFebruary 12, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nLacuna Space is a small Harwell, U.K.-based startup with three communications satellites in orbit and two more on the way. Two are about the size of a briefcase, the third as big as a shoebox.\nLike nearly all nanosatellite constellation startups, Lacuna Space needs to deploy dozens more satellites to cover the entire earth at all times. Presently, many customers testing the company\u2019s technology can only connect to the satellite two to four times a day, but for applications like monitoring remote infrastructure, such as the penguin cameras, that\u2019s often enough, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Spurrett,\n\n\n\n Lacuna Space\u2019s chief executive and founder. Lacuna Space\u2019s satellites connect to things on the ground using LoRaWAN networks, already widely used for earthbound devices sold by Amazon and others.\nNetherlands-based Smart Parks also uses LoRaWAN to connect rhinos and elephants into a sort of Internet of Megafauna. This is useful for managers of wildlife refuges who need to monitor these animals to prevent poaching\u2014and bring them back when they wander beyond park boundaries.\nAn elephant collar Smart Parks is testing in Malawi connects with LoRaWAN ground stations there, but can also connect to Lacuna Space\u2019s satellites, says Smart Parks co-founder Tim van Dam. Once that constellation is fully deployed, his company will use it to track animals into places\u2014deserts, forests, and transborder parks between countries in southern Africa\u2014where no other wireless signal is available. Because LoRaWAN systems require relatively little power and can work with flat antennas, they\u2019re well-suited to elephant collars, and should last up to 10 years on a single battery, says Mr. van Dam.\nAt least 16 companies are working on launching similar types of satellite networks, according to space research firm NSR. Each i In the shadow of giants like SpaceX, more than a dozen startups are building their own globe-spanning networks of nanosatellites, enabling a new kind of everywhere, all-the-time connectivity for people, animals and assets on Earth. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims"
    },
    {
        "title": "If you had the chance to fly to space, would you? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1940",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/if-you-had-the-chance-to-fly-to-space-would-you/2018/11/02/8e84497a-c34e-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "This story is one in a series about U.S. human spaceflight.Only about 560 people have ever been to space. That may sound like a lot, but actually it\u2019s about the number of people who could fit on a very large passenger airplane or attend a medium-size elementary school.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHumans have been going to space since Yuri Gagarin flew in orbit around the Earth in 1961. But the rocket launches since then have been infrequent. Only 12 of NASA\u2019s astronauts walked on the moon during the Apollo-era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the space shuttle flew just 135 times during its 30-year career, or an average of almost five times a year. But now there are a few companies trying to open up space to ordinary people, maybe one day even to kids. Two of them \u2014 Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin \u2014 want to take tourists on trips to the edge of space. These people wouldn\u2019t orbit the Earth, but rather they would fly up and then come back down. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, also owns The Washington Post.)But they would get far away from the Earth\u2019s surface to break the bonds of gravity and experience weightlessness. For a few minutes, passengers would be able to unbuckle their seat belts and float around the spacecraft\u2019s cabin, and even perform somersaults.Outside their window, they would have an amazing view. They would see the curvature of the Earth. They would also see the thin line of the atmosphere, the layer of gases that surrounds the planet and absorbs harmful radiation from the sun, allowing life on Earth to exist.And even if it were in the middle of the day, the sky beyond would be dark.Another company, SpaceX, wants to take people on a trip into deep space on the massive rocket it is building. Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s chief executive, said recently that he would fly a Japanese billionaire named Yusaku Maezawa on a trip around the moon. Maezawa wants to invite several artists, including sculptors, painters, architects and film directors, to come with him and hopes the trip would help their work \u201cinspire the dreamer in all of us.\u201dFlying to space is very expensive. Virgin Galactic charges $250,000 a ticket. For that much money, you could buy a house in some places. Getting to space is also dangerous. In 2014, one of Virgin Galactic\u2019s test pilots died when the spacecraft he was flying suddenly came apart midflight. The company said it has fixed the problem and has resumed its test program.By next year, all three companies hope to fly people to space. It promises to be an exciting adventure, full of risk and thrills.Would you go?More in KidsPost\nNASA goes back to the moon on the way to MarsNew books on space explore the moon and beyondNew toys for science- and tech-loving kids Not many people have ever been, but now a few companies are opening up space to ordinary folks. If you had the chance to fly to space, would you?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "If you had the chance to fly to space, would you? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1941",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/if-you-had-the-chance-to-fly-to-space-would-you/2018/11/02/8e84497a-c34e-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "This story is one in a series about U.S. human spaceflight.Only about 560 people have ever been to space. That may sound like a lot, but actually it\u2019s about the number of people who could fit on a very large passenger airplane or attend a medium-size elementary school.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHumans have been going to space since Yuri Gagarin flew in orbit around the Earth in 1961. But the rocket launches since then have been infrequent. Only 12 of NASA\u2019s astronauts walked on the moon during the Apollo-era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the space shuttle flew just 135 times during its 30-year career, or an average of almost five times a year. But now there are a few companies trying to open up space to ordinary people, maybe one day even to kids. Two of them \u2014 Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin \u2014 want to take tourists on trips to the edge of space. These people wouldn\u2019t orbit the Earth, but rather they would fly up and then come back down. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, also owns The Washington Post.)But they would get far away from the Earth\u2019s surface to break the bonds of gravity and experience weightlessness. For a few minutes, passengers would be able to unbuckle their seat belts and float around the spacecraft\u2019s cabin, and even perform somersaults.Outside their window, they would have an amazing view. They would see the curvature of the Earth. They would also see the thin line of the atmosphere, the layer of gases that surrounds the planet and absorbs harmful radiation from the sun, allowing life on Earth to exist.And even if it were in the middle of the day, the sky beyond would be dark.Another company, SpaceX, wants to take people on a trip into deep space on the massive rocket it is building. Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s chief executive, said recently that he would fly a Japanese billionaire named Yusaku Maezawa on a trip around the moon. Maezawa wants to invite several artists, including sculptors, painters, architects and film directors, to come with him and hopes the trip would help their work \u201cinspire the dreamer in all of us.\u201dFlying to space is very expensive. Virgin Galactic charges $250,000 a ticket. For that much money, you could buy a house in some places. Getting to space is also dangerous. In 2014, one of Virgin Galactic\u2019s test pilots died when the spacecraft he was flying suddenly came apart midflight. The company said it has fixed the problem and has resumed its test program.By next year, all three companies hope to fly people to space. It promises to be an exciting adventure, full of risk and thrills.Would you go?More in KidsPost\nNASA goes back to the moon on the way to MarsNew books on space explore the moon and beyondNew toys for science- and tech-loving kids Not many people have ever been, but now a few companies are opening up space to ordinary folks. If you had the chance to fly to space, would you?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A new era in spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to Mars (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1942",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/a-new-era-in-spaceflight-back-to-the-moon-on-the-way-to-mars/2018/11/02/6aef26b0-c34e-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "This story is one in a series about U.S. human spaceflight.O n May 25, 1961, President John Kennedy issued a challenge to lawmakers, the new U.S. space agency and the American people.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,\u201d Kennedy said in a speech before Congress. It was an ambitious goal. But in July 1969, NASA would achieve it. Apollo 11 \u2014 with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard \u2014 landed on the lunar surface and made it back to Earth. This moonshot was no one-shot deal. Astronauts returned to the moon five times for further exploration.NASA announced this summer that it plans to head back there in the 2020s, about 50 years after astronauts last visited. But this time, the moon isn\u2019t considered a destination. It\u2019s a pit stop on the way to the next space goal: sending humans to Mars. To understand this new era of human spaceflight, it\u2019s important to look back at what Kennedy set in motion 57 years ago.A proving groundWhen Kennedy made his plea to Congress, the United States had just launched its first manned spacecraft. Alan Shepard made a 15-minute suborbital flight, traveling 115 miles up and then returning to Earth. The Soviet Union had sent the first man into space several weeks earlier. Not only had Yuri Gagarin\u2019s flight lasted longer \u2014 108 minutes \u2014 but he also completed a single orbit of the Earth. The United States was embarrassed. It didn\u2019t want the Soviets \u2014 the only other world superpower at the time \u2014 to get ahead in space exploration.\u201cThere was this battle for hearts and minds,\u201d says Teasel Muir-Harmony, space history curator at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. \u201cBeating the Soviets in space was important for the United States\u2019 place in the world.\u201dThe president had talked with NASA scientists about which achievement was within reach for the United States and perhaps further away for the Soviets.\u201cThe U.S. at the time was better at landings,\u201d Muir-Harmony said. \u201cThe Soviet Union at the time was having trouble with landings.\u201dSo they chose landing on the moon, which is on average 240,000 miles away. (The distance changes because its orbit is not a circle.) At that point, Gagarin had traveled the farthest from Earth \u2014 203 miles. Muir-Harmony said Kennedy purposely chose not to aim just one step ahead of the Soviets.\u201cIf we propose this program that\u2019s really bold .\u2009.\u2009. they\u2019d have to invest in new technologies,\u201d Muir-Harmony said. Members of Congress would debate spending nearly $1.7 billion on the space program for the next year.That money and billions more approved in the 1960s paid not only for the Apollo missions but also rockets and other technology that NASA has used in the decades since then. That, too, was part of Kennedy\u2019s pitch to Congress.\u201cThis gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself,\u201d he said.Back and forwardNASA has sent spacecraft to explore the far reaches of our solar system and beyond, but none has included humans. Instead, astronauts have been studying the effects of living and working in space by orbiting Earth, first on Skylab and since 2000 on the International Space Station (ISS).The missions have become more collaborative than competitive. NASA has four international partners: space agencies in Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe. More than 100 astronauts and cosmonauts have stayed on the ISS for long-term assignments. And private companies have partnered with NASA to take supplies to the station. Two companies, Boeing and SpaceX, are set to next year become the first private companies to ferry astronauts to the ISS.NASA aims to work with these partners and others as it moves toward human missions to Mars. The agency\u2019s leader, Jim Bridenstine, explained in September that the plan to get to Mars involves returning to the moon with landers, rovers, robots and humans.\u201cThe glory of the moon is that\u2019s it\u2019s only a three-day journey home,\u201d Bridenstine told members of Congress. \u201cSo we can prove all of the technologies, we can reduce all of the risks.\u201dAnd in the event of an emergency, NASA can get astronauts home quickly, he said. The journey from Mars, which is on average 140 million miles from Earth, would take about eight months.Bridenstine announced in October that NASA is planning to send scientific equipment to the moon in 2019 or 2020. A human trip to orbit the moon, on NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, would launch in 2023. An orbiting \u201cgateway,\u201d or a lunar space station, would follow. The gateway would allow humans and equipment to get to the moon\u2019s surface. Eventually it would serve as a launchpad to Mars.Meet NASA engineer Molly White, who works on OrionThese moon missions will be similar to Apollo in that the United States wants to prove its leadership in space exploration. But Muir-Harmony pointed out an important difference.\u201cWe want to expand our knowledge of the universe. We want to advance science,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s not an end goal.\u201dEditor\u2019s note: This story has been updated to include mention of NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft.More in KidsPost\nNew books on space explore the moon and beyondWould you fly to space? Private companies are gearing up to take you.NASA asks for help on creating Mars habitats President John Kennedy\u2019s challenge was to put a man on the moon, but a return has a different purpose. A new era in spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to Mars",
        "author": "Christina Barron"
    },
    {
        "title": "A new era in spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to Mars (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1943",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/a-new-era-in-spaceflight-back-to-the-moon-on-the-way-to-mars/2018/11/02/6aef26b0-c34e-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "This story is one in a series about U.S. human spaceflight.O n May 25, 1961, President John Kennedy issued a challenge to lawmakers, the new U.S. space agency and the American people.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,\u201d Kennedy said in a speech before Congress. It was an ambitious goal. But in July 1969, NASA would achieve it. Apollo 11 \u2014 with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard \u2014 landed on the lunar surface and made it back to Earth. This moonshot was no one-shot deal. Astronauts returned to the moon five times for further exploration.NASA announced this summer that it plans to head back there in the 2020s, about 50 years after astronauts last visited. But this time, the moon isn\u2019t considered a destination. It\u2019s a pit stop on the way to the next space goal: sending humans to Mars. To understand this new era of human spaceflight, it\u2019s important to look back at what Kennedy set in motion 57 years ago.A proving groundWhen Kennedy made his plea to Congress, the United States had just launched its first manned spacecraft. Alan Shepard made a 15-minute suborbital flight, traveling 115 miles up and then returning to Earth. The Soviet Union had sent the first man into space several weeks earlier. Not only had Yuri Gagarin\u2019s flight lasted longer \u2014 108 minutes \u2014 but he also completed a single orbit of the Earth. The United States was embarrassed. It didn\u2019t want the Soviets \u2014 the only other world superpower at the time \u2014 to get ahead in space exploration.\u201cThere was this battle for hearts and minds,\u201d says Teasel Muir-Harmony, space history curator at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. \u201cBeating the Soviets in space was important for the United States\u2019 place in the world.\u201dThe president had talked with NASA scientists about which achievement was within reach for the United States and perhaps further away for the Soviets.\u201cThe U.S. at the time was better at landings,\u201d Muir-Harmony said. \u201cThe Soviet Union at the time was having trouble with landings.\u201dSo they chose landing on the moon, which is on average 240,000 miles away. (The distance changes because its orbit is not a circle.) At that point, Gagarin had traveled the farthest from Earth \u2014 203 miles. Muir-Harmony said Kennedy purposely chose not to aim just one step ahead of the Soviets.\u201cIf we propose this program that\u2019s really bold .\u2009.\u2009. they\u2019d have to invest in new technologies,\u201d Muir-Harmony said. Members of Congress would debate spending nearly $1.7 billion on the space program for the next year.That money and billions more approved in the 1960s paid not only for the Apollo missions but also rockets and other technology that NASA has used in the decades since then. That, too, was part of Kennedy\u2019s pitch to Congress.\u201cThis gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself,\u201d he said.Back and forwardNASA has sent spacecraft to explore the far reaches of our solar system and beyond, but none has included humans. Instead, astronauts have been studying the effects of living and working in space by orbiting Earth, first on Skylab and since 2000 on the International Space Station (ISS).The missions have become more collaborative than competitive. NASA has four international partners: space agencies in Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe. More than 100 astronauts and cosmonauts have stayed on the ISS for long-term assignments. And private companies have partnered with NASA to take supplies to the station. Two companies, Boeing and SpaceX, are set to next year become the first private companies to ferry astronauts to the ISS.NASA aims to work with these partners and others as it moves toward human missions to Mars. The agency\u2019s leader, Jim Bridenstine, explained in September that the plan to get to Mars involves returning to the moon with landers, rovers, robots and humans.\u201cThe glory of the moon is that\u2019s it\u2019s only a three-day journey home,\u201d Bridenstine told members of Congress. \u201cSo we can prove all of the technologies, we can reduce all of the risks.\u201dAnd in the event of an emergency, NASA can get astronauts home quickly, he said. The journey from Mars, which is on average 140 million miles from Earth, would take about eight months.Bridenstine announced in October that NASA is planning to send scientific equipment to the moon in 2019 or 2020. A human trip to orbit the moon, on NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, would launch in 2023. An orbiting \u201cgateway,\u201d or a lunar space station, would follow. The gateway would allow humans and equipment to get to the moon\u2019s surface. Eventually it would serve as a launchpad to Mars.Meet NASA engineer Molly White, who works on OrionThese moon missions will be similar to Apollo in that the United States wants to prove its leadership in space exploration. But Muir-Harmony pointed out an important difference.\u201cWe want to expand our knowledge of the universe. We want to advance science,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s not an end goal.\u201dEditor\u2019s note: This story has been updated to include mention of NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft.More in KidsPost\nNew books on space explore the moon and beyondWould you fly to space? Private companies are gearing up to take you.NASA asks for help on creating Mars habitats President John Kennedy\u2019s challenge was to put a man on the moon, but a return has a different purpose. A new era in spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to Mars",
        "author": "Christina Barron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA aims to send robots to the moon (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1944",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasa-aims-to-send-robots-to-the-moon/2018/06/18/17ca8f54-7314-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html",
        "text": "The United States wants to send robotic explorers to the moon as soon as next year as a step toward sending astronauts there for the first time since 1972, a NASA official said Monday.NASA is planning lunar missions beginning next year aimed at developing the capacity for humans to return to the moon, said Cheryl Warner, a spokeswoman for the agency. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA will work with private companies, which have not yet been chosen, on the missions, Warner said in a phone interview.President Trump in December signed a directive that he said would enable astronauts to return to the moon and eventually lead a mission to Mars. Last month he ordered the government to review rules on commercial space flights.Americans first landed on the moon in 1969, reaching a goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and capping a decade-long space race with\u00a0Russia.Since then, U.S. efforts to explore beyond the Earth\u2019s orbit have mostly focused on remote unmanned spacecraft.Meet the astronauts who will launch from U.S. to the space stationMoon is much older than scientists thoughtJourney to Mars: Meet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir Project, which may launch as soon as next year, would be a step toward humans\u2019 return. NASA aims to send robots to the moon",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons to beam back images of the farthest world humans have ever explored (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1945",
        "date": "2018-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasas-new-horizons-to-beam-back-images-of-the-farthest-world-man-has-ever-explored/2018/12/28/5e131422-09fa-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft team that brought us close-ups of Pluto will ring in the new year by exploring an even more distant and mysterious world.NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past the scrawny, icy object nicknamed Ultima Thule (pronounced TOO-lee) soon after the stroke of midnight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUltima Thule will be the farthest world ever explored by humankind. It is 1 billion miles beyond Pluto and an astounding 4 billion miles from Earth, at the edge of the solar system. Its nickname means \u201cbeyond the known world.\u201d No spacecraft has visited anything so primitive. New Horizons, which launched in January 2006, flew past Pluto in 2015, providing the first close-up views of the dwarf planet.As dramatic and illuminating as the Pluto flyby was, scientists know even less about what to expect from Ultima Thule. Because it\u2019s so far away and so dim, they aren\u2019t even sure if it\u2019s a single mass. They suspect it is made up of two lobes, but it also could be two separate objects orbiting around each other.\u201cWe were already getting hints of what Pluto was going to be looking like well in advance of the day of closest approach,\u201d said Hal Weaver, the mission\u2019s project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. \u201cThis time, everything is going to be pretty much a mystery, we think, until the last hour or so.\u201dThe scientists hope to fly the spacecraft within about 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule, four times closer than its encounter with Pluto, to capture images and other data with as much resolution as possible. But that could depend on what, if anything, New Horizons spots in its path as Ultima Thule gets closer and brighter.Mission engineers were preparing for the possibility they would have to steer the speeding spacecraft as far as 6,200 miles from its target, if that means avoiding any bits of debris in space.\u201cA rice-sized pellet hitting the spacecraft in the wrong place could destroy it,\u201d Weaver said.The first signal back from New Horizons is expected about 10 a.m. New Year\u2019s Day, with the best images and data from Ultima Thule expected to come down later Tuesday and also on Wednesday, the scientists said.Any good data would be the first collected from a planetary object so far from Earth.Only the Voyager and Pioneer missions have traveled farther than New Horizons will, but they were taking relatively more crude observations of plasma and particles in space. When they launched in the 1970s, Weaver said, scientists \u201cdidn\u2019t even know what existed out there.\u201d \u2014 From news services\n\nMore in KidsPost\nNew Horizons is halfway to next destinationPluto and its moons are ready for their close-upFollow NASA\u2019s return to the moon and journey to Mars Scientists know very little about Ultima Thule, which spacecraft will fly by on New Year\u2019s Day. NASA\u2019s New Horizons to beam back images of the farthest world humans have ever explored",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Ever wondered what\u2019s floating around in space? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1946",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wondered-whats-floating-around-in-space/2018/05/11/67160698-4f28-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html",
        "text": "The night sky is full of stars, but it\u2019s also full of garbage.Humans put lots of satellites up there \u2014 about 1,700 working spacecraft are in orbit around our planet \u2014 and not every piece of machinery comes right back when its job is done. Many keep speeding through the sky long after scientists have lost touch, leaving them liable to crash into one another and break into small pieces. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimates that there are about 23,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10\u00a0centimeters (or about four inches), about 500,000 larger than one centimeter, and about 100,000,000 larger than one millimeter. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA piece of metal smaller than a sesame seed might not sound dangerous, but even these tiny bits can pose a big risk. The International Space Station navigates around the paths of the most dangerous hunks of junk, but tiny flakes of paint have managed to chip the craft\u2019s quadruple-thick windows. That\u2019s because space garbage moves fast.\u201cBecause of the super-high impact speed \u2014 more than 10 times the speed of a bullet 250 miles up \u2014 even a sub-millimeter debris could threaten astronauts when they conduct a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station,\u201d says J.D. Harrington, a NASA public affairs officer.Small debris can punch a hole in a satellite, while larger debris can crush one entirely \u2014 creating even more wreckage.\u201cThe threat from orbital debris is real,\u201d Harrington says. \u201cBecause of the ongoing space activities, the orbital debris problem is expected to worsen in the future and will present an even greater danger to future space missions.\u201dAn increase in orbital traffic \u2014 it\u2019s becoming easier and cheaper for countries, private companies and research groups to send objects up \u2014 means that our corner of space will have increasingly less space.NASA doesn\u2019t have plans to clean up what\u2019s there, but the agency is working to keep the problem from worsening by ensuring that each new mission includes clear arrangements to dispose of spacecraft that no longer work and any pieces they eject.And there are potential solutions in the works from others: At the 2017 European Conference on Space Debris, presenters discussed pushing junk off into a higher orbit, capturing it with nets and harpoons or magnets, and other ideas. In May, the International Space Station is expected to deploy a test project called RemoveDEBRIS, which will capture several pieces of pretend garbage before burning itself up in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.But while we wait for someone to design the ultimate space vacuum, are folks on Earth safe from the danger of falling debris? The short answer is yes. Junk falls down all the time: 200 pieces of debris reentered the atmosphere in 2016 alone. Most of that burns up and breaks down in the process, and the pieces that remain are unlikely to cause harm. Most of the Earth is either covered in ocean or has plenty of open space, so chances are any hunks of junk will hit spots without humans there to get hurt. There\u2019s only one known case of a human getting hit with a piece of spacecraft \u2014 Lottie Williams in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1997 \u2014 and she didn\u2019t even get a bruise from the accident. You\u2019re way, way more likely to get struck by lightning.More \u201cEver Wondered\u201d stories in KidsPostWhy do some flower return every spring?Why do cats spend a lot of time grooming themselves?Ever wondered why you hiccup? There\u2019s plenty of useless junk circling the planet, thanks to humans. Ever wondered what\u2019s floating around in space?",
        "author": "Rachel Feltman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ever wondered what\u2019s floating around in space? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1947",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wondered-whats-floating-around-in-space/2018/05/11/67160698-4f28-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html",
        "text": "The night sky is full of stars, but it\u2019s also full of garbage.Humans put lots of satellites up there \u2014 about 1,700 working spacecraft are in orbit around our planet \u2014 and not every piece of machinery comes right back when its job is done. Many keep speeding through the sky long after scientists have lost touch, leaving them liable to crash into one another and break into small pieces. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimates that there are about 23,000 pieces of space debris larger than 10\u00a0centimeters (or about four inches), about 500,000 larger than one centimeter, and about 100,000,000 larger than one millimeter. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA piece of metal smaller than a sesame seed might not sound dangerous, but even these tiny bits can pose a big risk. The International Space Station navigates around the paths of the most dangerous hunks of junk, but tiny flakes of paint have managed to chip the craft\u2019s quadruple-thick windows. That\u2019s because space garbage moves fast.\u201cBecause of the super-high impact speed \u2014 more than 10 times the speed of a bullet 250 miles up \u2014 even a sub-millimeter debris could threaten astronauts when they conduct a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station,\u201d says J.D. Harrington, a NASA public affairs officer.Small debris can punch a hole in a satellite, while larger debris can crush one entirely \u2014 creating even more wreckage.\u201cThe threat from orbital debris is real,\u201d Harrington says. \u201cBecause of the ongoing space activities, the orbital debris problem is expected to worsen in the future and will present an even greater danger to future space missions.\u201dAn increase in orbital traffic \u2014 it\u2019s becoming easier and cheaper for countries, private companies and research groups to send objects up \u2014 means that our corner of space will have increasingly less space.NASA doesn\u2019t have plans to clean up what\u2019s there, but the agency is working to keep the problem from worsening by ensuring that each new mission includes clear arrangements to dispose of spacecraft that no longer work and any pieces they eject.And there are potential solutions in the works from others: At the 2017 European Conference on Space Debris, presenters discussed pushing junk off into a higher orbit, capturing it with nets and harpoons or magnets, and other ideas. In May, the International Space Station is expected to deploy a test project called RemoveDEBRIS, which will capture several pieces of pretend garbage before burning itself up in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.But while we wait for someone to design the ultimate space vacuum, are folks on Earth safe from the danger of falling debris? The short answer is yes. Junk falls down all the time: 200 pieces of debris reentered the atmosphere in 2016 alone. Most of that burns up and breaks down in the process, and the pieces that remain are unlikely to cause harm. Most of the Earth is either covered in ocean or has plenty of open space, so chances are any hunks of junk will hit spots without humans there to get hurt. There\u2019s only one known case of a human getting hit with a piece of spacecraft \u2014 Lottie Williams in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1997 \u2014 and she didn\u2019t even get a bruise from the accident. You\u2019re way, way more likely to get struck by lightning.More \u201cEver Wondered\u201d stories in KidsPostWhy do some flower return every spring?Why do cats spend a lot of time grooming themselves?Ever wondered why you hiccup? There\u2019s plenty of useless junk circling the planet, thanks to humans. Ever wondered what\u2019s floating around in space?",
        "author": "Rachel Feltman"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars rover Perseverance lifts off for seven-month journey (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1948",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasas-mars-rover-perseverance-lifts-off-for-seven-month-journey/2020/07/30/f3b8f58e-d260-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html",
        "text": "The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built \u2014 a car-size vehicle with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers \u2014 blasted off Thursday as part of a long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA\u2019s Perseverance, named by a Northern Virginia middle schooler, rode a mighty Atlas V rocket into a clear morning sky in the world\u2019s third and final Mars launch of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions should reach the Red Planet in February after a journey of seven months and 300 million miles. The six-wheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny rock specimens that will be brought home in about 2031 in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries. The overall cost: more than $8 billion.In addition to addressing the life-on-Mars question, the mission could pave the way for the arrival of astronauts as early as the 2030s.\u201cThere\u2019s a reason we call the robot Perseverance. Because going to Mars is hard,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said just before liftoff. \u201cIt is always hard. It\u2019s never been easy. In this case, it\u2019s harder than ever before because we\u2019re doing it in the midst of a pandemic.\u201dThe United States, the only country to safely put a spacecraft on Mars, is seeking its ninth successful landing on the planet. More than half of the world\u2019s missions there have burned up, crashing or otherwise ending in failure.Launch controllers wore masks and sat spaced apart at the Cape Canaveral control center because of the coronavirus outbreak, which kept hundreds of scientists and other team members away from Perseverance\u2019s liftoff.\u201cThat was overwhelming. Overall, just \u2018Wow!\u2019\u201d said Alex Mather, the 13-year-old student at Lake Braddock Secondary in Burke, Virginia, who proposed the name Perseverance in a NASA competition and traveled to Cape Canaveral for the launch.If all goes well, the rover will descend to the Martian surface on February 18, 2021, in what NASA calls seven minutes of terror, in which the craft goes from 12,000 miles per hour to a complete stop. It is carrying 25 cameras and a pair of microphones to send sound and images back to Earth.Perseverance will aim for treacherous unexplored territory: Jezero Crater, a dusty expanse filled with boulders, cliffs, dunes and possibly rocks bearing signs of microbes from what was once a lake more than 3 billion years ago. The rover will store half-ounce rock samples in dozens of titanium tubes.It also will release a mini helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet, and test out other technology to prepare the way for future astronauts, including equipment for extracting oxygen from Mars\u2019s thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere.The plan is for NASA and the European Space Agency to launch a dune buggy in 2026 to fetch the rock samples, along with a rocket ship that will put the specimens into orbit around Mars. Then another spacecraft will capture the orbiting samples and bring them home.To definitively answer the profound question of whether life exists \u2014 or ever existed \u2014 beyond Earth, the samples must be analyzed by the best electron microscopes and other instruments, far too big to fit on a spacecraft, said NASA\u2019s original and now-retired Mars czar, Scott Hubbard\u201cI\u2019ve wanted to know if there was life elsewhere in the universe since I was 9 years old. That was more than 60 years ago,\u201d the 71-year-old Hubbard said from his Northern California cabin. \u201cBut just maybe, I\u2019ll live to see the fingerprints of life come back from Mars in one of those rock samples.\u201d\n\nMore in KidsPostWhere to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters before humans arrive.NASA lander detects \u201cmarsquake\u201d on the Red PlanetA new era of spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to MarsFrom craft store to spacecraft: Simple fabric will help us land on Mars The car-size vehicle will gather rock samples that will eventually be brought to Earth. NASA\u2019s Mars rover Perseverance lifts off for seven-month journey",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars rover Perseverance lifts off for seven-month journey (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1949",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasas-mars-rover-perseverance-lifts-off-for-seven-month-journey/2020/07/30/f3b8f58e-d260-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html",
        "text": "The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built \u2014 a car-size vehicle with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers \u2014 blasted off Thursday as part of a long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA\u2019s Perseverance, named by a Northern Virginia middle schooler, rode a mighty Atlas V rocket into a clear morning sky in the world\u2019s third and final Mars launch of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions should reach the Red Planet in February after a journey of seven months and 300 million miles. The six-wheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny rock specimens that will be brought home in about 2031 in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries. The overall cost: more than $8 billion.In addition to addressing the life-on-Mars question, the mission could pave the way for the arrival of astronauts as early as the 2030s.\u201cThere\u2019s a reason we call the robot Perseverance. Because going to Mars is hard,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said just before liftoff. \u201cIt is always hard. It\u2019s never been easy. In this case, it\u2019s harder than ever before because we\u2019re doing it in the midst of a pandemic.\u201dThe United States, the only country to safely put a spacecraft on Mars, is seeking its ninth successful landing on the planet. More than half of the world\u2019s missions there have burned up, crashing or otherwise ending in failure.Launch controllers wore masks and sat spaced apart at the Cape Canaveral control center because of the coronavirus outbreak, which kept hundreds of scientists and other team members away from Perseverance\u2019s liftoff.\u201cThat was overwhelming. Overall, just \u2018Wow!\u2019\u201d said Alex Mather, the 13-year-old student at Lake Braddock Secondary in Burke, Virginia, who proposed the name Perseverance in a NASA competition and traveled to Cape Canaveral for the launch.If all goes well, the rover will descend to the Martian surface on February 18, 2021, in what NASA calls seven minutes of terror, in which the craft goes from 12,000 miles per hour to a complete stop. It is carrying 25 cameras and a pair of microphones to send sound and images back to Earth.Perseverance will aim for treacherous unexplored territory: Jezero Crater, a dusty expanse filled with boulders, cliffs, dunes and possibly rocks bearing signs of microbes from what was once a lake more than 3 billion years ago. The rover will store half-ounce rock samples in dozens of titanium tubes.It also will release a mini helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet, and test out other technology to prepare the way for future astronauts, including equipment for extracting oxygen from Mars\u2019s thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere.The plan is for NASA and the European Space Agency to launch a dune buggy in 2026 to fetch the rock samples, along with a rocket ship that will put the specimens into orbit around Mars. Then another spacecraft will capture the orbiting samples and bring them home.To definitively answer the profound question of whether life exists \u2014 or ever existed \u2014 beyond Earth, the samples must be analyzed by the best electron microscopes and other instruments, far too big to fit on a spacecraft, said NASA\u2019s original and now-retired Mars czar, Scott Hubbard\u201cI\u2019ve wanted to know if there was life elsewhere in the universe since I was 9 years old. That was more than 60 years ago,\u201d the 71-year-old Hubbard said from his Northern California cabin. \u201cBut just maybe, I\u2019ll live to see the fingerprints of life come back from Mars in one of those rock samples.\u201d\n\nMore in KidsPostWhere to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters before humans arrive.NASA lander detects \u201cmarsquake\u201d on the Red PlanetA new era of spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to MarsFrom craft store to spacecraft: Simple fabric will help us land on Mars The car-size vehicle will gather rock samples that will eventually be brought to Earth. NASA\u2019s Mars rover Perseverance lifts off for seven-month journey",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Celebrate these unusual holidays to make 2021 even more fun (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1950",
        "date": "2021-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/unusual-holidays-can-make-2021-even-more-fun/2021/01/04/f8fc335a-3e3d-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html",
        "text": "The arrival of 2021 is reason enough to celebrate, but we at KidsPost always enjoy pointing out unusual holidays to add to your calendar. There are hundreds of unofficial days for foods, animals, hobbies, important causes and silly ideas. We\u2019ve chosen one for each month, so jot these down, learn something new and, most of all, have a fun year! WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNational Puzzle Day (January 29): Families went crazy for jigsaw puzzles in 2020, when they had lots of time at home during the coronavirus pandemic. The one-time wooden educational tool hadn\u2019t been that popular since the 1930s, when cardboard versions became inexpensive, reusable fun. Celebrate the day by pulling out a favorite jigsaw, or trying a crossword, Sudoku or brain teaser.Random Acts of Kindness Day (February 17): If you have encountered a homeless person and given money, that\u2019s a random act of kindness. The idea of this day is to get lots of people doing something kind for someone they don\u2019t know with no expectation of getting anything in return. This concept is trickier with social distancing, but even a big smile and a \u201chi!\u201d from across the street qualifies.National Scribble Day (March 27): You may think you\u2019re not an artist because you don\u2019t draw an object or a person exactly the way your eye sees it. Not true! Author Diane Alber created this day in 2019 to show kids that even a scribble can be a work of art.National Library Workers Day (April 6): It has been a tough year with many libraries closed for visitor browsing, research and in-person story hours. But library workers have risen to the occasion with online activities and pickup book bundles. Send a message thanking your school or community librarian today, and let them know what you\u2019re reading.National Astronaut Day (May 5): Sixty years ago on this date, Alan Shepard and his Freedom 7 spacecraft launched into space and came back about 15 minutes later. The quick trip put future astronauts on a path to spending days on the moon, then months at the International Space Station. On this day, check out what\u2019s going on at the space station and see if you can spot it passing overhead (spotthestation.nasa.gov).World Giraffe Day (June 21): The longest day in the Northern Hemisphere is the day to celebrate the animal with the longest neck. The once-plentiful species is estimated to have lost about 30 percent of its numbers in Africa in the past 30 years. Visit giraffeconservation.org to learn more and spread the word about protecting these majestic animals.I Forgot Day (July 2): Did you forget to call Grandma on her birthday or return that soccer ball you borrowed from a friend three months ago? Today is a good day to clean the slate. Make a list of things you meant to do but forgot. Work through the list, and don't get discouraged if you don't accomplish everything in one day. Just remember to keep the list in a place where you'll see it. Otherwise, you know what will happen.DOGust First (August 1): If your family is one of the many that adopted dogs from animal shelters last year, you may not know, for example, Luna or Cooper\u2019s actual birthday. The North Shore Animal League, a shelter in Port Washington, New York, thought of that problem in 2008 and picked today as the birthday of all shelter dogs. Give your pup extra love today, and consider what you can do to help other shelter dogs.World Rivers Day (September 26): The Potomac and Anacostia rivers are part of what makes the Washington, D.C. area so beautiful. But the rivers, and many others around the world, have been polluted by chemicals and littered with trash. They\u2019re getting cleaner, but more help is needed. To join people in 70 countries spending today improving local rivers, go to ",
        "author": "Christina Barron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space Station (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1951",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/spacex-launches-first-full-crew-to-the-international-space-station/2020/11/15/b6fe41b2-27ba-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday on the first full-fledged taxi flight for NASA by a private company.The Falcon rocket thundered into the night from Kennedy Space Center with three Americans and one Japanese, the second crew to be launched by SpaceX. The Dragon capsule on top \u2014 named Resilience by its crew in light of this year\u2019s many challenges, most notably covid-19 \u2014 reached orbit nine minutes later. It is due to reach the space station late Monday and remain there until spring. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA enters a new era of human space flight\u201cBy working together through these difficult times, you\u2019ve inspired the nation, the world, and in no small part the name of this incredible vehicle, Resilience,\u201d Commander Mike Hopkins said right before liftoff.Once reaching orbit, he radioed: \u201cThat was one heck of a ride.\u201dSidelined by the coronavirus himself, SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk was forced to monitor the action from afar. He tweeted that he \u201cmost likely\u201d had a moderate case of covid-19. NASA policy at Kennedy Space Center requires anyone testing positive for coronavirus to quarantine and remain isolated.Sunday\u2019s launch follows by just a few months SpaceX\u2019s two-pilot test flight. It kicks off what NASA hopes will be a long series of crew rotations between the United States and the space station, after years of delay. More people means more science research at the orbiting lab, according to officials.Cheers and applause erupted at SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, after the capsule reached orbit and the first-stage booster landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic. Musk tweeted a single red heart.The flight to the space station \u2014 27\u00bd hours door to door \u2014 should be entirely automated, although the crew can take control if needed. SpaceX had to deal with pressure pump spikes once the capsule reached orbit, but resolved the issue.The three-men, one-woman crew led by Hopkins, an Air Force colonel, named their capsule Resilience in a nod not only to the pandemic, but also racial injustice and contentious politics. It\u2019s about as diverse as space crews come, including physicist Shannon Walker, Navy Commander Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut on a long-term space station mission, and Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, who became the first person in almost 40 years to launch on three types of spacecraft.NASA turned to private companies to haul cargo and crew to the space station, after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011. SpaceX qualified for both. With Kennedy back in astronaut-launching action, NASA can stop buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. The last one cost $90 million.The commander of SpaceX\u2019s first crew, Doug Hurley, noted it\u2019s not just about saving money or easing the training burdens for crews.\u201cBottom line: I think it\u2019s just better for us to be flying from the United States if we can do that,\u201d he told the Associated Press last week.\n\nMore in KidsPostCan astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists sent some to the space station to learn more.Perseverance to is the new Mars rover, thanks to a Virginia seventh-graderRead stories related to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars Occasion marks what NASA plans to be regular liftoffs from Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space Station",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space Station (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1952",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/spacex-launches-first-full-crew-to-the-international-space-station/2020/11/15/b6fe41b2-27ba-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday on the first full-fledged taxi flight for NASA by a private company.The Falcon rocket thundered into the night from Kennedy Space Center with three Americans and one Japanese, the second crew to be launched by SpaceX. The Dragon capsule on top \u2014 named Resilience by its crew in light of this year\u2019s many challenges, most notably covid-19 \u2014 reached orbit nine minutes later. It is due to reach the space station late Monday and remain there until spring. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA enters a new era of human space flight\u201cBy working together through these difficult times, you\u2019ve inspired the nation, the world, and in no small part the name of this incredible vehicle, Resilience,\u201d Commander Mike Hopkins said right before liftoff.Once reaching orbit, he radioed: \u201cThat was one heck of a ride.\u201dSidelined by the coronavirus himself, SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk was forced to monitor the action from afar. He tweeted that he \u201cmost likely\u201d had a moderate case of covid-19. NASA policy at Kennedy Space Center requires anyone testing positive for coronavirus to quarantine and remain isolated.Sunday\u2019s launch follows by just a few months SpaceX\u2019s two-pilot test flight. It kicks off what NASA hopes will be a long series of crew rotations between the United States and the space station, after years of delay. More people means more science research at the orbiting lab, according to officials.Cheers and applause erupted at SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, after the capsule reached orbit and the first-stage booster landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic. Musk tweeted a single red heart.The flight to the space station \u2014 27\u00bd hours door to door \u2014 should be entirely automated, although the crew can take control if needed. SpaceX had to deal with pressure pump spikes once the capsule reached orbit, but resolved the issue.The three-men, one-woman crew led by Hopkins, an Air Force colonel, named their capsule Resilience in a nod not only to the pandemic, but also racial injustice and contentious politics. It\u2019s about as diverse as space crews come, including physicist Shannon Walker, Navy Commander Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut on a long-term space station mission, and Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, who became the first person in almost 40 years to launch on three types of spacecraft.NASA turned to private companies to haul cargo and crew to the space station, after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011. SpaceX qualified for both. With Kennedy back in astronaut-launching action, NASA can stop buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. The last one cost $90 million.The commander of SpaceX\u2019s first crew, Doug Hurley, noted it\u2019s not just about saving money or easing the training burdens for crews.\u201cBottom line: I think it\u2019s just better for us to be flying from the United States if we can do that,\u201d he told the Associated Press last week.\n\nMore in KidsPostCan astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists sent some to the space station to learn more.Perseverance to is the new Mars rover, thanks to a Virginia seventh-graderRead stories related to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars Occasion marks what NASA plans to be regular liftoffs from Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space Station",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space Station (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1953",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/spacex-launches-first-full-crew-to-the-international-space-station/2020/11/15/b6fe41b2-27ba-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday on the first full-fledged taxi flight for NASA by a private company.The Falcon rocket thundered into the night from Kennedy Space Center with three Americans and one Japanese, the second crew to be launched by SpaceX. The Dragon capsule on top \u2014 named Resilience by its crew in light of this year\u2019s many challenges, most notably covid-19 \u2014 reached orbit nine minutes later. It is due to reach the space station late Monday and remain there until spring. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA enters a new era of human space flight\u201cBy working together through these difficult times, you\u2019ve inspired the nation, the world, and in no small part the name of this incredible vehicle, Resilience,\u201d Commander Mike Hopkins said right before liftoff.Once reaching orbit, he radioed: \u201cThat was one heck of a ride.\u201dSidelined by the coronavirus himself, SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk was forced to monitor the action from afar. He tweeted that he \u201cmost likely\u201d had a moderate case of covid-19. NASA policy at Kennedy Space Center requires anyone testing positive for coronavirus to quarantine and remain isolated.Sunday\u2019s launch follows by just a few months SpaceX\u2019s two-pilot test flight. It kicks off what NASA hopes will be a long series of crew rotations between the United States and the space station, after years of delay. More people means more science research at the orbiting lab, according to officials.Cheers and applause erupted at SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, after the capsule reached orbit and the first-stage booster landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic. Musk tweeted a single red heart.The flight to the space station \u2014 27\u00bd hours door to door \u2014 should be entirely automated, although the crew can take control if needed. SpaceX had to deal with pressure pump spikes once the capsule reached orbit, but resolved the issue.The three-men, one-woman crew led by Hopkins, an Air Force colonel, named their capsule Resilience in a nod not only to the pandemic, but also racial injustice and contentious politics. It\u2019s about as diverse as space crews come, including physicist Shannon Walker, Navy Commander Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut on a long-term space station mission, and Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, who became the first person in almost 40 years to launch on three types of spacecraft.NASA turned to private companies to haul cargo and crew to the space station, after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011. SpaceX qualified for both. With Kennedy back in astronaut-launching action, NASA can stop buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. The last one cost $90 million.The commander of SpaceX\u2019s first crew, Doug Hurley, noted it\u2019s not just about saving money or easing the training burdens for crews.\u201cBottom line: I think it\u2019s just better for us to be flying from the United States if we can do that,\u201d he told the Associated Press last week.\n\nMore in KidsPostCan astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists sent some to the space station to learn more.Perseverance to is the new Mars rover, thanks to a Virginia seventh-graderRead stories related to the International Space Station, the moon and Mars Occasion marks what NASA plans to be regular liftoffs from Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space Station",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patches (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1954",
        "date": "2018-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasa-crews-show-their-creativity-in-long-history-of-mission-patches/2018/07/16/b16b9052-83bf-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html",
        "text": "One of the first tasks for a new astronaut crew is designing a mission patch. Crew members discuss what shape, colors and emblems it should have to show why their mission is special.Astronauts have been wearing official mission patches since 1965. There are more than 150 such patches, a treasure trove for collectors. Nearly all patches list the crew and display stars and stripes. Many show the space shuttle and the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter a deadly fire aboard Apollo 1 in 1967, all flammable materials \u2014 including embroidered patches \u2014 were banned from U.S. spacecraft. Since then, crew patches have been printed on special cloth.Other countries have their own mission patches. Ours come from a North Carolina company that also makes Girl Scout and Boy Scout patches.We picked some cool space patches to show you. There are lots more at the websites listed below.1969: To the moon we goApollo 11 was the first mission to put people on the moon. On July 20, 1969, about 530 million television viewers worldwide saw Neil Armstrong take \u201cone giant leap for mankind\u201d on the lunar surface.Apollo\u2019s three-man crew did not want their names on this patch. Instead, they wanted to honor everyone who had ever worked toward a successful lunar landing. The patch\u2019s bald eagle, our national emblem, was traced from a photo in a book about birds. It\u2019s clutching an olive branch as a sign of peace from Earth.1986: Thrills, then tearsImagine the excitement Christa McAuliffe felt on the morning of January 28, 1986. The New Hampshire educator was about to become the first civilian in space as part of the new Teacher in Space program. McAuliffe was thrilled to be picked from 11,000 applicants for what she saw as the ultimate field trip. She even got an apple next to her name on the mission patch.Classrooms around the country tuned in to watch the shuttle Challenger launch from Florida. But just 73 seconds after liftoff, Challenger exploded, killing all seven aboard. Faulty seals on the shuttle\u2019s solid rocket boosters were later blamed.1988: Kids name a shuttleIn 1988, U.S. students in kindergarten through 12th grade were asked to suggest a name for the newest shuttle, based on an exploratory or research sea vessel. Suggested names also needed to capture the spirit of future space discovery.Endeavour, an 18th-century British Navy research vessel captained by James Cook, was the most popular name sent in by the 6,000 schools that entered the contest. Based on the students\u2019 projects, two schools \u2014 in Mississippi and Georgia \u2014 were named national winners. The crew for Endeavour\u2019s first mission, in 1992, decided its patch would have the two schools\u2019 colors in the flags flying from Endeavour\u2019s masts.2011: Science in spaceThe shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2011, the next-to-last flight in the shuttle program. Endeavour\u2019s crew delivered and installed high-tech scientific equipment designed to better explain our universe. The shape of the crew\u2019s patch represents the international atomic symbol, showing an atom with particles called electrons circling the nucleus. Can you find the ISS and the shuttle?2018: The newest patchThere have been 56 official \u201cexpeditions\u201d to the space station since 2000. The current crew has three Americans, two Russians and a German. Their patch shows a dove holding an olive branch, along with images of the space station and the Soyuz rocket that brought them there. Length of stay at the station varies; the last crew was up there for more than five months.To see more patches, visit history.nasa.gov/mission_patches.html andhistory.nasa.gov/shuttle_patches.html.\nSee how astronauts design their mission patches at nasaeclips.arc.nasa.gov/video/ourworld/our-world-mission-patches. Always get an adult\u2019s permission before going online.At KidsPost, our mission is to inform and entertain you with stories about the news, books, sports, history and more. So we would like YOU to design a KidsPost patch we can publish in the future.Upload your original design \u2014 that means not copied \u2014 to wapo.st/kidspostpatch\n or have a parent or guardian send it, along with your name, age, address and the adult\u2019s email to KidsPost, The Washington Post, 1301 K St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071. The adult also must grant permission for you to enter the contest.The contest is open to ages 6 to 14. Entries (only one per person) are due by September 21. A winning design will be chosen based on creativity and execution. The winner will be notified by September 28 and will receive space-related books, a Kennedy Space Center bag, a stuffed animal astronaut and a KidsPost T-shirt.More in KidsPost\nMeet the astronauts who will launch into space from AmericaFind all our stories about NASA\u2019s Journey to MarsAstronaut encourages kids to flip for STEM Since 1965, astronauts have designed patches with symbols related to their journey. NASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patches",
        "author": "Marylou Tousignant"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patches (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1955",
        "date": "2018-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasa-crews-show-their-creativity-in-long-history-of-mission-patches/2018/07/16/b16b9052-83bf-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html",
        "text": "One of the first tasks for a new astronaut crew is designing a mission patch. Crew members discuss what shape, colors and emblems it should have to show why their mission is special.Astronauts have been wearing official mission patches since 1965. There are more than 150 such patches, a treasure trove for collectors. Nearly all patches list the crew and display stars and stripes. Many show the space shuttle and the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter a deadly fire aboard Apollo 1 in 1967, all flammable materials \u2014 including embroidered patches \u2014 were banned from U.S. spacecraft. Since then, crew patches have been printed on special cloth.Other countries have their own mission patches. Ours come from a North Carolina company that also makes Girl Scout and Boy Scout patches.We picked some cool space patches to show you. There are lots more at the websites listed below.1969: To the moon we goApollo 11 was the first mission to put people on the moon. On July 20, 1969, about 530 million television viewers worldwide saw Neil Armstrong take \u201cone giant leap for mankind\u201d on the lunar surface.Apollo\u2019s three-man crew did not want their names on this patch. Instead, they wanted to honor everyone who had ever worked toward a successful lunar landing. The patch\u2019s bald eagle, our national emblem, was traced from a photo in a book about birds. It\u2019s clutching an olive branch as a sign of peace from Earth.1986: Thrills, then tearsImagine the excitement Christa McAuliffe felt on the morning of January 28, 1986. The New Hampshire educator was about to become the first civilian in space as part of the new Teacher in Space program. McAuliffe was thrilled to be picked from 11,000 applicants for what she saw as the ultimate field trip. She even got an apple next to her name on the mission patch.Classrooms around the country tuned in to watch the shuttle Challenger launch from Florida. But just 73 seconds after liftoff, Challenger exploded, killing all seven aboard. Faulty seals on the shuttle\u2019s solid rocket boosters were later blamed.1988: Kids name a shuttleIn 1988, U.S. students in kindergarten through 12th grade were asked to suggest a name for the newest shuttle, based on an exploratory or research sea vessel. Suggested names also needed to capture the spirit of future space discovery.Endeavour, an 18th-century British Navy research vessel captained by James Cook, was the most popular name sent in by the 6,000 schools that entered the contest. Based on the students\u2019 projects, two schools \u2014 in Mississippi and Georgia \u2014 were named national winners. The crew for Endeavour\u2019s first mission, in 1992, decided its patch would have the two schools\u2019 colors in the flags flying from Endeavour\u2019s masts.2011: Science in spaceThe shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2011, the next-to-last flight in the shuttle program. Endeavour\u2019s crew delivered and installed high-tech scientific equipment designed to better explain our universe. The shape of the crew\u2019s patch represents the international atomic symbol, showing an atom with particles called electrons circling the nucleus. Can you find the ISS and the shuttle?2018: The newest patchThere have been 56 official \u201cexpeditions\u201d to the space station since 2000. The current crew has three Americans, two Russians and a German. Their patch shows a dove holding an olive branch, along with images of the space station and the Soyuz rocket that brought them there. Length of stay at the station varies; the last crew was up there for more than five months.To see more patches, visit history.nasa.gov/mission_patches.html andhistory.nasa.gov/shuttle_patches.html.\nSee how astronauts design their mission patches at nasaeclips.arc.nasa.gov/video/ourworld/our-world-mission-patches. Always get an adult\u2019s permission before going online.At KidsPost, our mission is to inform and entertain you with stories about the news, books, sports, history and more. So we would like YOU to design a KidsPost patch we can publish in the future.Upload your original design \u2014 that means not copied \u2014 to wapo.st/kidspostpatch\n or have a parent or guardian send it, along with your name, age, address and the adult\u2019s email to KidsPost, The Washington Post, 1301 K St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071. The adult also must grant permission for you to enter the contest.The contest is open to ages 6 to 14. Entries (only one per person) are due by September 21. A winning design will be chosen based on creativity and execution. The winner will be notified by September 28 and will receive space-related books, a Kennedy Space Center bag, a stuffed animal astronaut and a KidsPost T-shirt.More in KidsPost\nMeet the astronauts who will launch into space from AmericaFind all our stories about NASA\u2019s Journey to MarsAstronaut encourages kids to flip for STEM Since 1965, astronauts have designed patches with symbols related to their journey. NASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patches",
        "author": "Marylou Tousignant"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019S Opportunity rover says goodbye after 15 years (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1956",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasas-opportunity-rover-says-goodbye-after-15-years/2019/02/13/89c1c33e-2fc0-11e9-86ab-5d02109aeb01_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity, the Mars rover that was built to operate for just three months but kept going and going, was pronounced dead Wednesday, 15 years after it landed on the Red Planet.The six-wheeled vehicle\u2019s greatest achievement was discovering that Mars had water flowing on its surface. It was remarkably active until eight months ago, when it was hit by a ferocious dust storm. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFlight controllers tried numerous times to make contact and sent one final series of recovery commands Tuesday night along with one last wake-up song, Billie Holiday\u2019s \u201cI\u2019ll Be Seeing You.\u201d There was no response from space, only silence.Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science missions, broke the news to members of the Opportunity team in Pasadena, California.Given the silence from space, \u201cit is therefore that I\u2019m standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission as complete,\u201d Zurbruchen told a packed auditorium. \u201cIt\u2019s an emotional time.\u201dThe golf cart-size Opportunity outlived its twin, the Spirit rover, by several years. The two slow-moving vehicles landed on opposite sides of the planet in 2004 for a mission that was meant to last 90 days.In the end, Opportunity set endurance and distance records that could stand for years, if not decades. Opportunity roamed a record 28 miles around Mars and worked longer than any other lander.Opportunity was exploring Mars\u2019 Perseverance Valley when a dust storm hit. The storm was so intense that it darkened the sky for months, preventing sunlight from reaching the rover\u2019s solar panels.When the sky finally cleared, Opportunity remained silent. Its internal clock was possibly so scrambled that it no longer knew when to sleep or wake up to receive commands. Flight controllers sent more than 1,000 recovery commands.With project costs reaching about $500,000 a month, NASA decided there was no point in continuing.\u201cThis is a hard day,\u201d said project manager John Callas. \u201cEven though it\u2019s a machine and we\u2019re saying goodbye, it\u2019s still very hard and very poignant, but we had to do that. We came to that point.\u201d He added: \u201cIt comes time to say goodbye.\u201dScientists consider this the end of an era, now that Opportunity and Spirit are both gone.Opportunity was the fifth of eight spacecraft to successfully land on Mars. All belong to NASA. Only two remain working: the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover, prowling around since 2012, and the recently arrived InSight, which just this week placed a heat-sensing, self-hammering probe on the dusty red surface.Three more landers \u2014 from the United States, China and Europe \u2014 are due to launch next year.More in KidsPost\nYou want to know how your city will feel in 60 years? Head at least 300 miles south.Millions-year-old Grand Canyon became a national treasure 100 years agoSpanish teen used Legos to build himself an arm The Mars rover was declared dead by NASA after months of silence. NASA\u2019S Opportunity rover says goodbye after 15 years",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to launch Mars explorer with 2 tagalongs (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1957",
        "date": "2018-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasa-to-launch-mars-explorer-with-2-tagalongs/2018/05/04/fafaaf88-4fca-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s next Mars explorer is going to have company all the way to the Red Planet: a couple of puny yet groundbreaking sidekicks.Named after the characters in the 2008 animated movie, the small satellites WALL-E and EVE are hitching a ride on the Atlas V rocket set to launch early Saturday morning from California with the Mars InSight lander. InSight is WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightbeing sent to explore the planet\u2019s interior.Similar in size to a briefcase or large cereal box, the satellites will pop out from the rocket\u2019s upper stage following liftoff and high-tail it to Mars, a few thousand miles behind InSight. The two mini spacecraft will also be a few thousand miles apart from each other. That\u2019s to prevent any collisions or even close calls. While that may seem far apart, it\u2019s actually fairly close by space standards, according to Brian Clement, an engineer on the project at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. InSight will be stopping at Mars on November 26, WALL-E and EVE will zoom past the planet from about 2,200 miles out. NASA wants to see if WALL-E and EVE can transmit data to Earth from InSight during its descent to Mars. Once past Mars, WALL-E and EVE will remain in an elliptical orbit around the sun, together for years to come. But they won\u2019t work for long. Once they run out of fuel, they won\u2019t be able to point their solar wings toward the sun for recharging.It will be the first time little cube-shaped satellites, CubeSats as they\u2019re known, set sail for deep space. The journey will span 6\u00bd months and 300 million miles.More in KidsPost\nFind all our stories on the Journey to MarsInSight spacecraft launch delayedAstronaut encourages kids to flip for STEM WALL-E and EVE \u2014 satellites the size of a cereal box \u2014 will hitch a ride for their own mission. NASA to launch Mars explorer with 2 tagalongs",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to launch Mars explorer with 2 tagalongs (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1958",
        "date": "2018-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasa-to-launch-mars-explorer-with-2-tagalongs/2018/05/04/fafaaf88-4fca-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s next Mars explorer is going to have company all the way to the Red Planet: a couple of puny yet groundbreaking sidekicks.Named after the characters in the 2008 animated movie, the small satellites WALL-E and EVE are hitching a ride on the Atlas V rocket set to launch early Saturday morning from California with the Mars InSight lander. InSight is WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightbeing sent to explore the planet\u2019s interior.Similar in size to a briefcase or large cereal box, the satellites will pop out from the rocket\u2019s upper stage following liftoff and high-tail it to Mars, a few thousand miles behind InSight. The two mini spacecraft will also be a few thousand miles apart from each other. That\u2019s to prevent any collisions or even close calls. While that may seem far apart, it\u2019s actually fairly close by space standards, according to Brian Clement, an engineer on the project at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. InSight will be stopping at Mars on November 26, WALL-E and EVE will zoom past the planet from about 2,200 miles out. NASA wants to see if WALL-E and EVE can transmit data to Earth from InSight during its descent to Mars. Once past Mars, WALL-E and EVE will remain in an elliptical orbit around the sun, together for years to come. But they won\u2019t work for long. Once they run out of fuel, they won\u2019t be able to point their solar wings toward the sun for recharging.It will be the first time little cube-shaped satellites, CubeSats as they\u2019re known, set sail for deep space. The journey will span 6\u00bd months and 300 million miles.More in KidsPost\nFind all our stories on the Journey to MarsInSight spacecraft launch delayedAstronaut encourages kids to flip for STEM WALL-E and EVE \u2014 satellites the size of a cereal box \u2014 will hitch a ride for their own mission. NASA to launch Mars explorer with 2 tagalongs",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of Mars (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1959",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasas-insight-lander-touches-down-on-the-surface-of-mars/2018/11/26/89123c84-e9c0-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight lander touched down safely on the Martian surface Monday, after a six-month journey to the Red Planet.InSight\u2019s dangerous descent through the Martian atmosphere, after a trip of 300 million miles, had nerves stretched to the max. Although its scientists are old pros at this, NASA last attempted a landing on Mars six years ago. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe robot, designed to explore Mars\u2019s mysterious insides, went from 12,300 miles per hour to zero in six minutes as it pierced the atmosphere, popped out a parachute, fired descent engines and landed on three legs.Flight controllers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leaped out of their seats and erupted in screams, applause and laughter as the news came in. People hugged, shook hands, exchanged high-fives, pumped their fists, wiped away tears and danced in the aisles.\u201cFlawless,\u201d declared JPL\u2019s chief engineer, Rob Manning. \u201cWhat a relief.\u201d\u201cLanding on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration,\u201d InSight lead scientist Bruce Banerdt noted before the landing. \u201cIt\u2019s such a difficult thing, it\u2019s such a dangerous thing that there\u2019s always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong.\u201dNASA has pulled off seven successful landings on Mars in the past four decades. Only one touchdown failed. No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface.The stationary 800-pound lander will use its six-foot robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground.The self-hammering mole will burrow 16 feet down to measure the planet\u2019s internal heat, while the ultra-high-tech seismometer listens for possible marsquakes. Nothing like this has been attempted before at our smaller next-door neighbor, nearly 100 million miles away.No experiments have ever been moved robotically from the spacecraft to the Martian surface. No lander has dug deeper than several inches, and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.By examining the deepest, darkest interior of Mars, scientists hope to create 3-D images that could reveal how our solar system\u2019s rocky planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different. One of the big questions is what made Earth so friendly to life.Mars once had flowing rivers and lakes; the deltas and lake beds are now dry, and the planet is cold.The planetary know-how gained from InSight\u2019s two-year operation could even spill over to rocky worlds beyond our solar system, according to Banerdt. The findings on Mars could help explain the type of conditions at these exoplanets \u201cand how they fit into the story that we\u2019re trying to figure out for how planets form,\u201d he said.Concentrating on planetary building blocks, InSight has no life-detecting capability. That will be left for future rovers. NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 mission, for instance, will collect rocks for eventual return that could hold evidence of ancient life.Because it\u2019s been so long since NASA\u2019s last Martian landfall \u2014 the Curiosity rover in 2012 \u2014 Mars mania is gripping not only the space and science communities, but also everyday folks.Viewing parties were planned coast to coast at museums \u2014 including the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center \u2014 planetariums and libraries.NASA to launch explorer with 2 tagalongsInSight launch delayed because of leaky sealSee all of KidsPost Mars- and moon-related stories The robot will dig deep into the Red Planet to see what happened 4.5 billion years ago. NASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of Mars",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of Mars (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "1960",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasas-insight-lander-touches-down-on-the-surface-of-mars/2018/11/26/89123c84-e9c0-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight lander touched down safely on the Martian surface Monday, after a six-month journey to the Red Planet.InSight\u2019s dangerous descent through the Martian atmosphere, after a trip of 300 million miles, had nerves stretched to the max. Although its scientists are old pros at this, NASA last attempted a landing on Mars six years ago. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe robot, designed to explore Mars\u2019s mysterious insides, went from 12,300 miles per hour to zero in six minutes as it pierced the atmosphere, popped out a parachute, fired descent engines and landed on three legs.Flight controllers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leaped out of their seats and erupted in screams, applause and laughter as the news came in. People hugged, shook hands, exchanged high-fives, pumped their fists, wiped away tears and danced in the aisles.\u201cFlawless,\u201d declared JPL\u2019s chief engineer, Rob Manning. \u201cWhat a relief.\u201d\u201cLanding on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration,\u201d InSight lead scientist Bruce Banerdt noted before the landing. \u201cIt\u2019s such a difficult thing, it\u2019s such a dangerous thing that there\u2019s always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong.\u201dNASA has pulled off seven successful landings on Mars in the past four decades. Only one touchdown failed. No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface.The stationary 800-pound lander will use its six-foot robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground.The self-hammering mole will burrow 16 feet down to measure the planet\u2019s internal heat, while the ultra-high-tech seismometer listens for possible marsquakes. Nothing like this has been attempted before at our smaller next-door neighbor, nearly 100 million miles away.No experiments have ever been moved robotically from the spacecraft to the Martian surface. No lander has dug deeper than several inches, and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.By examining the deepest, darkest interior of Mars, scientists hope to create 3-D images that could reveal how our solar system\u2019s rocky planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different. One of the big questions is what made Earth so friendly to life.Mars once had flowing rivers and lakes; the deltas and lake beds are now dry, and the planet is cold.The planetary know-how gained from InSight\u2019s two-year operation could even spill over to rocky worlds beyond our solar system, according to Banerdt. The findings on Mars could help explain the type of conditions at these exoplanets \u201cand how they fit into the story that we\u2019re trying to figure out for how planets form,\u201d he said.Concentrating on planetary building blocks, InSight has no life-detecting capability. That will be left for future rovers. NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 mission, for instance, will collect rocks for eventual return that could hold evidence of ancient life.Because it\u2019s been so long since NASA\u2019s last Martian landfall \u2014 the Curiosity rover in 2012 \u2014 Mars mania is gripping not only the space and science communities, but also everyday folks.Viewing parties were planned coast to coast at museums \u2014 including the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center \u2014 planetariums and libraries.NASA to launch explorer with 2 tagalongsInSight launch delayed because of leaky sealSee all of KidsPost Mars- and moon-related stories The robot will dig deep into the Red Planet to see what happened 4.5 billion years ago. NASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of Mars",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of Mars (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1961",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasas-insight-lander-touches-down-on-the-surface-of-mars/2018/11/26/89123c84-e9c0-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight lander touched down safely on the Martian surface Monday, after a six-month journey to the Red Planet.InSight\u2019s dangerous descent through the Martian atmosphere, after a trip of 300 million miles, had nerves stretched to the max. Although its scientists are old pros at this, NASA last attempted a landing on Mars six years ago. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe robot, designed to explore Mars\u2019s mysterious insides, went from 12,300 miles per hour to zero in six minutes as it pierced the atmosphere, popped out a parachute, fired descent engines and landed on three legs.Flight controllers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leaped out of their seats and erupted in screams, applause and laughter as the news came in. People hugged, shook hands, exchanged high-fives, pumped their fists, wiped away tears and danced in the aisles.\u201cFlawless,\u201d declared JPL\u2019s chief engineer, Rob Manning. \u201cWhat a relief.\u201d\u201cLanding on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration,\u201d InSight lead scientist Bruce Banerdt noted before the landing. \u201cIt\u2019s such a difficult thing, it\u2019s such a dangerous thing that there\u2019s always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong.\u201dNASA has pulled off seven successful landings on Mars in the past four decades. Only one touchdown failed. No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface.The stationary 800-pound lander will use its six-foot robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground.The self-hammering mole will burrow 16 feet down to measure the planet\u2019s internal heat, while the ultra-high-tech seismometer listens for possible marsquakes. Nothing like this has been attempted before at our smaller next-door neighbor, nearly 100 million miles away.No experiments have ever been moved robotically from the spacecraft to the Martian surface. No lander has dug deeper than several inches, and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.By examining the deepest, darkest interior of Mars, scientists hope to create 3-D images that could reveal how our solar system\u2019s rocky planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different. One of the big questions is what made Earth so friendly to life.Mars once had flowing rivers and lakes; the deltas and lake beds are now dry, and the planet is cold.The planetary know-how gained from InSight\u2019s two-year operation could even spill over to rocky worlds beyond our solar system, according to Banerdt. The findings on Mars could help explain the type of conditions at these exoplanets \u201cand how they fit into the story that we\u2019re trying to figure out for how planets form,\u201d he said.Concentrating on planetary building blocks, InSight has no life-detecting capability. That will be left for future rovers. NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 mission, for instance, will collect rocks for eventual return that could hold evidence of ancient life.Because it\u2019s been so long since NASA\u2019s last Martian landfall \u2014 the Curiosity rover in 2012 \u2014 Mars mania is gripping not only the space and science communities, but also everyday folks.Viewing parties were planned coast to coast at museums \u2014 including the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center \u2014 planetariums and libraries.NASA to launch explorer with 2 tagalongsInSight launch delayed because of leaky sealSee all of KidsPost Mars- and moon-related stories The robot will dig deep into the Red Planet to see what happened 4.5 billion years ago. NASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of Mars",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA lander detects its first \u2018marsquake\u2019 on the Red Planet (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1962",
        "date": "2019-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasa-lander-detects-its-first-marsquake-on-the-red-planet/2019/04/24/4fc06458-5d77-11e9-a00e-050dc7b82693_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight lander picked up a gentle rumble on Mars, believed to be the first \u201cMarsquake\u201d ever detected.InSight\u2019s quake monitor recorded and measured the faint signal April 6, and scientists announced the finding Tuesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAlthough the rumble sounds like soft wind, scientists believe it came from within the Red Planet. The Paris Institute of Earth Physics\u2019s Philippe Lognonn\u00e9, who\u2019s in charge of the experiment, said it\u2019s exciting to finally have proof that Mars is still active. Mars is not nearly as geologically active as Earth and, like our moon, lacks tectonic plates. \u201cWe\u2019ve been waiting months for a signal like this,\u201d Lognonne said in a statement.InSight\u2019s lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said this carries on the scientific work begun by the Apollo moonwalkers nearly 50 years ago. The astronauts left behind seismometers, which are devices that measure ground movement.As for Mars, \u201cwe\u2019ve been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!\u201d Banerdt said in a statement.Researchers are still analyzing the data. By monitoring marsquakes, scientists hope to learn more about how rocky planets formed.The French seismometer was placed directly on the Martian surface in December, a few weeks after the spacecraft landed.InSight\u2019s other main experiment isn\u2019t going as well.The German-built drilling instrument \u2014 the mole \u2014 has managed to penetrate only a foot or two into Mars, far short of its goal to measure the planet\u2019s internal temperature. Engineers are still trying to figure out why and how the device got stuck.\u2014Associated Press\nMalawi is the first country to start using malaria vaccine on kidsTreasures saved as firefighters put out Notre Dame fireThings turning 50 this year Small rumble signals to scientists that Mars is still geologically active. NASA lander detects its first \u2018marsquake\u2019 on the Red Planet",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX flight is bringing creative minds to space (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1963",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/spacex-flight-is-bringing-creative-minds-to-space/2018/09/19/ab7e7f1a-b2cc-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html",
        "text": "Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be the first paying tourist to fly around the moon, and the 42-year-old said this week that he wants company for the week-long journey: Maezawa plans to invite six to eight artists, architects, designers and other creative people to join him on the SpaceX rocket \u201cto inspire the dreamer in all of us.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX founder Elon Musk announced Monday that the Big Falcon rocket is scheduled to make the trip in 2023.Maezawa said he wants his guests for the lunar orbit\u201cto see the moon up close, and the Earth in full view, and create work to reflect their experience.\u201d\u201cI wish to create amazing works of art for humankind,\u201d Maezawa said.Maezawa, a former musician, founded the retail firm Start Today in 1998 and built it into one of Japan\u2019s most successful companies. In 2012, he started the Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation to support young artists.Musk said the rocket is still in development and will make several test launches before it takes on passengers. The reusable 387-foot rocket is expected to cost about $5\u00a0billion.The mission will not involve a lunar landing. Astronauts last visited the moon during NASA\u2019s Apollo program. Twenty-four men flew to the moon from 1968 through 1972, and half of them made it to the lunar surface. The average distance from Earth to the moon is about 237,700 miles.SpaceX has its sights ultimately set on Mars. In 2010, it became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and safely return it to Earth.Maezawa didn\u2019t say who will be on his guest list for the spaceflight, but he said he\u2019d consider inviting Musk.\u201cMaybe we\u2019ll both be on it,\u201d Musk said with a smile.\u2014 Associated Press\n Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa won\u2019t take the first tourist trip to the moon alone. SpaceX flight is bringing creative minds to space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX flight is bringing creative minds to space (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1964",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/spacex-flight-is-bringing-creative-minds-to-space/2018/09/19/ab7e7f1a-b2cc-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html",
        "text": "Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be the first paying tourist to fly around the moon, and the 42-year-old said this week that he wants company for the week-long journey: Maezawa plans to invite six to eight artists, architects, designers and other creative people to join him on the SpaceX rocket \u201cto inspire the dreamer in all of us.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX founder Elon Musk announced Monday that the Big Falcon rocket is scheduled to make the trip in 2023.Maezawa said he wants his guests for the lunar orbit\u201cto see the moon up close, and the Earth in full view, and create work to reflect their experience.\u201d\u201cI wish to create amazing works of art for humankind,\u201d Maezawa said.Maezawa, a former musician, founded the retail firm Start Today in 1998 and built it into one of Japan\u2019s most successful companies. In 2012, he started the Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation to support young artists.Musk said the rocket is still in development and will make several test launches before it takes on passengers. The reusable 387-foot rocket is expected to cost about $5\u00a0billion.The mission will not involve a lunar landing. Astronauts last visited the moon during NASA\u2019s Apollo program. Twenty-four men flew to the moon from 1968 through 1972, and half of them made it to the lunar surface. The average distance from Earth to the moon is about 237,700 miles.SpaceX has its sights ultimately set on Mars. In 2010, it became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and safely return it to Earth.Maezawa didn\u2019t say who will be on his guest list for the spaceflight, but he said he\u2019d consider inviting Musk.\u201cMaybe we\u2019ll both be on it,\u201d Musk said with a smile.\u2014 Associated Press\n Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa won\u2019t take the first tourist trip to the moon alone. SpaceX flight is bringing creative minds to space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX flight is bringing creative minds to space (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1965",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/spacex-flight-is-bringing-creative-minds-to-space/2018/09/19/ab7e7f1a-b2cc-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html",
        "text": "Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be the first paying tourist to fly around the moon, and the 42-year-old said this week that he wants company for the week-long journey: Maezawa plans to invite six to eight artists, architects, designers and other creative people to join him on the SpaceX rocket \u201cto inspire the dreamer in all of us.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX founder Elon Musk announced Monday that the Big Falcon rocket is scheduled to make the trip in 2023.Maezawa said he wants his guests for the lunar orbit\u201cto see the moon up close, and the Earth in full view, and create work to reflect their experience.\u201d\u201cI wish to create amazing works of art for humankind,\u201d Maezawa said.Maezawa, a former musician, founded the retail firm Start Today in 1998 and built it into one of Japan\u2019s most successful companies. In 2012, he started the Tokyo-based Contemporary Art Foundation to support young artists.Musk said the rocket is still in development and will make several test launches before it takes on passengers. The reusable 387-foot rocket is expected to cost about $5\u00a0billion.The mission will not involve a lunar landing. Astronauts last visited the moon during NASA\u2019s Apollo program. Twenty-four men flew to the moon from 1968 through 1972, and half of them made it to the lunar surface. The average distance from Earth to the moon is about 237,700 miles.SpaceX has its sights ultimately set on Mars. In 2010, it became the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and safely return it to Earth.Maezawa didn\u2019t say who will be on his guest list for the spaceflight, but he said he\u2019d consider inviting Musk.\u201cMaybe we\u2019ll both be on it,\u201d Musk said with a smile.\u2014 Associated Press\n Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa won\u2019t take the first tourist trip to the moon alone. SpaceX flight is bringing creative minds to space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan to drop explosive on asteroid to collect what lies under the surface (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1966",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/japan-to-blow-up-part-of-an-asteroid-to-collect-what-lies-under-the-surface/2019/03/18/a1267f26-45b2-11e9-aaf8-4512a6fe3439_story.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s space agency said Monday that its Hayabusa2 spacecraft will follow last month\u2019s touchdown on a distant asteroid with another risky mission \u2014 dropping an explosive on the asteroid to make a crater and collect underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHayabusa2 made history on February 22 when it touched down on the boulder-strewn asteroid called Ryugu and collected surface fragments. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said Hayabusa2 will drop an impactor the size of a baseball weighing 4.4 pounds on the asteroid April 5 to collect samples from deep underground that have not been exposed to the sun or space rays.The mission will require the spacecraft to move quickly to the other side of the asteroid so that it won\u2019t get hit by flying shards from the blast, JAXA project engineer Takanao Saeki said. \u201cIt will be very challenging.\u201dWhile moving away, Hayabusa2 will leave a camera to capture the outcome. The spacecraft is to wait a few weeks before returning to the area above the crater for observations.The mission will allow JAXA scientists to analyze details of the crater to determine the history of the asteroid, said Koji Wada, who is in charge of the project.JAXA projects it will create a crater of up to 32 feet in diameter with a depth of 3.3 feet if the underground structure is soft. A crater created on a rocklike structure would be smaller.During its February touchdown, Hayabusa2 extended a sampler pipe and shot a pinball-like bullet into the asteroid surface to collect dust and tiny fragments.JAXA plans to have Hayabusa2 briefly land in the crater, but agency researcher Takashi Kubota said they might prioritize safety for the spacecraft and not do so. If it is successful, it would be the first time for a spacecraft to take materials from underground, Kubota said.Hayabusa2 is scheduled to leave the asteroid at the end of this year and take surface fragments and underground samples to Earth in late 2020 for analysis.\u2014 Associated Press\nA new era in American spaceflightIf you had a chance to fly to space, would you?Bennu, an ancient asteroid, gets its first visitor in billions of years Hayabusa2 made history last month by touching down on the asteroid. Japan to drop explosive on asteroid to collect what lies under the surface",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan to drop explosive on asteroid to collect what lies under the surface (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1967",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/japan-to-blow-up-part-of-an-asteroid-to-collect-what-lies-under-the-surface/2019/03/18/a1267f26-45b2-11e9-aaf8-4512a6fe3439_story.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s space agency said Monday that its Hayabusa2 spacecraft will follow last month\u2019s touchdown on a distant asteroid with another risky mission \u2014 dropping an explosive on the asteroid to make a crater and collect underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHayabusa2 made history on February 22 when it touched down on the boulder-strewn asteroid called Ryugu and collected surface fragments. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said Hayabusa2 will drop an impactor the size of a baseball weighing 4.4 pounds on the asteroid April 5 to collect samples from deep underground that have not been exposed to the sun or space rays.The mission will require the spacecraft to move quickly to the other side of the asteroid so that it won\u2019t get hit by flying shards from the blast, JAXA project engineer Takanao Saeki said. \u201cIt will be very challenging.\u201dWhile moving away, Hayabusa2 will leave a camera to capture the outcome. The spacecraft is to wait a few weeks before returning to the area above the crater for observations.The mission will allow JAXA scientists to analyze details of the crater to determine the history of the asteroid, said Koji Wada, who is in charge of the project.JAXA projects it will create a crater of up to 32 feet in diameter with a depth of 3.3 feet if the underground structure is soft. A crater created on a rocklike structure would be smaller.During its February touchdown, Hayabusa2 extended a sampler pipe and shot a pinball-like bullet into the asteroid surface to collect dust and tiny fragments.JAXA plans to have Hayabusa2 briefly land in the crater, but agency researcher Takashi Kubota said they might prioritize safety for the spacecraft and not do so. If it is successful, it would be the first time for a spacecraft to take materials from underground, Kubota said.Hayabusa2 is scheduled to leave the asteroid at the end of this year and take surface fragments and underground samples to Earth in late 2020 for analysis.\u2014 Associated Press\nA new era in American spaceflightIf you had a chance to fly to space, would you?Bennu, an ancient asteroid, gets its first visitor in billions of years Hayabusa2 made history last month by touching down on the asteroid. Japan to drop explosive on asteroid to collect what lies under the surface",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan to drop explosive on asteroid to collect what lies under the surface (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1968",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/japan-to-blow-up-part-of-an-asteroid-to-collect-what-lies-under-the-surface/2019/03/18/a1267f26-45b2-11e9-aaf8-4512a6fe3439_story.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s space agency said Monday that its Hayabusa2 spacecraft will follow last month\u2019s touchdown on a distant asteroid with another risky mission \u2014 dropping an explosive on the asteroid to make a crater and collect underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHayabusa2 made history on February 22 when it touched down on the boulder-strewn asteroid called Ryugu and collected surface fragments. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said Hayabusa2 will drop an impactor the size of a baseball weighing 4.4 pounds on the asteroid April 5 to collect samples from deep underground that have not been exposed to the sun or space rays.The mission will require the spacecraft to move quickly to the other side of the asteroid so that it won\u2019t get hit by flying shards from the blast, JAXA project engineer Takanao Saeki said. \u201cIt will be very challenging.\u201dWhile moving away, Hayabusa2 will leave a camera to capture the outcome. The spacecraft is to wait a few weeks before returning to the area above the crater for observations.The mission will allow JAXA scientists to analyze details of the crater to determine the history of the asteroid, said Koji Wada, who is in charge of the project.JAXA projects it will create a crater of up to 32 feet in diameter with a depth of 3.3 feet if the underground structure is soft. A crater created on a rocklike structure would be smaller.During its February touchdown, Hayabusa2 extended a sampler pipe and shot a pinball-like bullet into the asteroid surface to collect dust and tiny fragments.JAXA plans to have Hayabusa2 briefly land in the crater, but agency researcher Takashi Kubota said they might prioritize safety for the spacecraft and not do so. If it is successful, it would be the first time for a spacecraft to take materials from underground, Kubota said.Hayabusa2 is scheduled to leave the asteroid at the end of this year and take surface fragments and underground samples to Earth in late 2020 for analysis.\u2014 Associated Press\nA new era in American spaceflightIf you had a chance to fly to space, would you?Bennu, an ancient asteroid, gets its first visitor in billions of years Hayabusa2 made history last month by touching down on the asteroid. Japan to drop explosive on asteroid to collect what lies under the surface",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "From craft store to spacecraft: Simple fabric will help us land on Mars (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1969",
        "date": "2018-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/from-craft-store-to-spacecraft-a-simple-fabric-will-help-us-land-on-mars/2018/03/13/3a88c9d6-221d-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html",
        "text": "Imagine your body floating weightlessly through space \u2014 a slight push and pull would allow you to easily change speed and direction.Now, imagine having to send a 7,300-pound spacecraft racing through Mars\u2019s atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour. How would you safely land it on the Red Planet?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt turns out, with a lot of trial and error involving basic materials, such as nylon, that you can find in a fabric store. \u201cA lot of the times when we fail our parachutes [during testing], they failed spectacularly. I mean, it\u2019s like you\u2019re creating a confetti machine of nylon,\u201d said Ian Clark, a NASA investigator in charge of testing Martian conditions.\u201cMost of the material of the parachute is kind of very thin stuff \u2014 it\u2019s very lightweight nylon \u2014 not too dissimilar from what your camping tent is made out of, but actually somewhat lighter than even that. You know, the stuff that you could almost go into a Jo-Ann Fabrics and buy in rolls.\u201dClark\u2019s team is part of the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment, ASPIRE, a project within NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 mission to search for evidence of ancient life on Mars and store it for later return to Earth.The main goal of ASPIRE is to make sure the rover is able to successfully land on the Martian surface. The Curiosity rover that NASA landed on Mars in 2012 weighed less than the 2020 rover, so the team has to account for the heavier vehicle. The key improvement to the upcoming mission is ensuring the nylon on the parachute is stronger and lighter.Rocket and jet propulsion carries the rover most of the way, but the final drift onto the surface requires a parachute to cut through the challenging atmosphere of Mars.ASPIRE scientists test their rockets at a NASA facility in Wallops Island, Virginia. After collecting data and making adjustments from a November 2017 trial run, the team is getting ready for its next test, scheduled for March\u00a027.In the test, a rocket is launched over the Atlantic Ocean, and a vehicle containing the parachute and other measuring tools detaches from the rocket. The parachute opens to slow down this vehicle as it approaches the landing spot. While there is not an actual rover onboard the test vehicle, it matches the mass of the final product.The team then recovers the scientific instruments from the ocean and inspect the parachute.\u201cWe look over every square inch of the parachute. We want to see: Were stitches beginning to fail? Were some of the stitches popping?\u201d Clark said. \u201cKind of like you\u2019ve seen stitches failing on your jeans or T-shirt.\u201dIf too many stitches fail, the team tries to figure out what went wrong. Problems could vary from the stitching process to a flaw in how the parachute opens.While ASPIRE aims to produce a working parachute, Clark said the team is working on creating the ideal test for the parachute because there are still two test launches to come.One challenge with testing a parachute on Earth is that the speed of sound here is faster than on our neighboring planet. Sound causes drag, or resistance, on objects in flight. And scientists don\u2019t have a way to slow down sound.\u201cAt Mars, it\u2019s about [705 to 720 feet] per second. And at Earth, it\u2019s about [1,082 feet] per second \u2014 so it\u2019s almost 50\u00a0percent faster at Earth,\u201d Clark said.So what does that mean when the parachute is tested?\u201cIt means it\u2019s probably going to actually inflate faster at Earth than it would at Mars, and it could be more stressing,\u201d he said. \u201cBut not so [much] more stressing that we think it\u2019s not a good test to do anyway.\u201d NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 team is testing a parachute that will land its rover on the Red Planet. From craft store to spacecraft: Simple fabric will help us land on Mars",
        "author": "Hau Chu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stunning images of Mars keep coming 15 years after HiRISE camera first orbited the Red Planet (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1970",
        "date": "2021-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/stunning-images-of-mars-keep-coming-15-years-since-hirise-camera-first-orbited-the-red-planet/2021/03/16/17af5e30-7c96-11eb-a976-c028a4215c78_story.html",
        "text": "Images of Mars from the past decade have shown amazing craters, dust storms and colorful mineral deposits. The photos come from the most powerful camera ever sent to a planet. It\u2019s called High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, and it\u2019s helping scientists understand the planet where NASA has sent rovers and where it may send humans. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLaunched in 2005, the camera was designed to take detailed photos while orbiting the Red Planet. HiRISE has transmitted nearly 69,000 images since 2006 and is still sending pictures. The images are color-enhanced to allow scientists to see important details their eyes could not ordinarily detect.HiRISE photos helped NASA evaluate potential landing sites for the Perseverance rover to explore. Scientists selected Jezero Crater, a dried lake where they hope to find signs of ancient life on Mars.Meet Ingenuity, the mini-copter NASA is about to drop on MarsThe cost to build and launch Perseverance was about $2.4 billion, so NASA wanted to make sure it landed safely. NASA turned to HiRISE and studied 81 images of Jezero Crater to determine a safe landing target within the crater.\u201cWe\u2019re looking for a nice level area we can drive out of with no troubles,\u201d says Rich Zurek, project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. \u201cWe want to avoid hard things that are big, like rocks, and we want to avoid soft things like sand, that don\u2019t provide good traction.\u201dAfter Perseverance landed February 18, HiRISE continued to play a key role in the mission.\u201cYou can see the rover tracks with the HiRISE camera,\u201d Zurek says. \u201cYou can see where it\u2019s going and where it\u2019s been.\u201dWhen you\u2019re operating a robotic rover from about 140 million miles away, the ability to see its path is invaluable.HiRISE images have also given scientists a new understanding of what many people thought was a \u201cdead planet.\u201d\u201cThe largest breakthrough in Mars science that we\u2019ve learned from HiRISE images is that there are active geological processes at work today,\u201d says Candice Hansen, HiRISE deputy principal investigator. \u201cPrior to HiRISE, the conventional wisdom was that all the \u2018action\u2019 on Mars happened billions of years ago.\u201dThe camera takes many images of the same place at different times, which allows researchers to detect changes on the surface.\u201cWe\u2019ve seen avalanches off the northern polar cap,\u201d Hansen says. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen dunes migrate.\u201dScientists have even calculated how fast Mars\u2019s dunes travel \u2014 up to three feet in a Martian year (687 Earth days) \u2014 by examining HiRISE photos taken at different time intervals.Using HiRISE images, researchers are studying many of Mars\u2019s changing features, such as canyons, ice and craters. For example, one photo of an impact crater with steep slopes contained clues that led scientists to believe water may be seeping down its slopes. The sharp rim indicated it\u2019s a fresh, young crater. (Impact craters form when a meteoroid, asteroid or comet collides with a planet or moon.)So what\u2019s next for HiRISE?\u201cWe\u2019ve only covered less than 4 percent of Mars surface at the HiRISE resolution,\u201d says Zurek.If all goes well, this powerful camera will continue to operate and answer questions about the Red Planet for years to come, Zureck says. \u201cWe hope it will go for another decade.\u201d\n\nSlade is an engineer who worked on rockets and the author of \u201cMars Is: Stark Slopes, Silvery Snow, and Startling Surprises.\u201dFun factsThe HiRISE camera is orbiting Mars between 125 and 250 miles from its surface.HiRISE is riding on a spacecraft called the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO.It takes HiRISE images 15 minutes to travel roughly 140 million miles back to Earth.To see more fascinating HiRISE images, check out the catalogue at uahirise.org/catalog.More in KidsPostNASA\u2019s Mars rover Perseverance lifts off for seven-month journey\u2018Perseverance\u2019 is the next Mars rover, thanks to a creative seventh-graderA new era in American spaceflightRead all KidsPost stories related to the journey to Mars Thousands of detailed photos helped choose landing spot for Perseverance rover and further scientists\u2019 understanding of the planet\u2019s surface. Stunning images of Mars keep coming 15 years after HiRISE camera first orbited the Red Planet",
        "author": "Suzanne Slade"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018How We Got to the Moon\u2019 tells the story of NASA\u2019s 1960s venture in rich detail (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1971",
        "date": "2020-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/2020/10/11/29e6152e-052e-11eb-a2db-417cddf4816a_story.html",
        "text": "Author-illustrator John Rocco has worked on many kinds of projects over the years, including designing demigods for the covers of the Percy Jackson, Magnus Chase and Kane Chronicles book series. In his latest book, he focuses on heroes from a different realm: the human engineers and scientists who worked on the United States space program in the 1960s. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn researching, writing and illustrating \u201cHow We Got to the Moon,\u201d his first work of nonfiction, Rocco wanted to showcase the science and the human ingenuity that made the 1969 Apollo moon landing a reality. He also wanted to present the mission, which employed 400,000 people across the United States, as \u201ca blueprint\u201d for addressing current \u201cproblems that sometimes seem impossible, like climate change and racial injustice. If you look at how people came together back then, you can see a way through.\u201dThe Apollo program began in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy reset the space race against Russia with the goal of \u201clanding a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.\u201d Kennedy announced a startling deadline \u2014 \u201cbefore this decade is out\u201d \u2014 and NASA scientists and engineers went to work on their monumental task.\u201cEverything we had done before in space,\u201d says Rocco, \u201cwas minuscule compared to the journey to the moon.\u201dTo understand the thousands of decisions that went into the project, Rocco read widely and contacted more than 20 NASA engineers. Each had been responsible for a critical part of the mission, from the construction and testing of the rocket engines to the splashdown and recovery of the command module.Rocco\u2019s pictures and text make clear the risks and dangers of the project, especially for the astronauts.\u201cIf you were exposed to the vacuum of space,\u201d says Rocco, \u201call of the liquids in your body would start to boil away.\u201dA detailed illustration shows a special three-layer suit the astronauts wore to deal with that issue and several others.The book also explains and illustrates the basic scientific concepts and the problem-solving that were used to make the spacecraft as light as possible and address all of the mission\u2019s dangers.For example, to protect the Apollo spacecraft from being damaged by the extreme temperatures (from minus-240 degrees to 280 degrees) on its journey, a NASA manager came up with a technique the astronauts called the \u201cbarbecue roll\u201d: The crew set off a slow rotation of the spacecraft so that one side of the ship would not get too hot or too cold.Rocco also said it was important to give credit to as many individuals as possible who made the moon landing happen. They include \u201chuman computer\u201d Katherine Johnson, who worked on complex mathematical calculations, and software engineer Margaret Hamilton, who helped build a warning system that prevented astronaut errors from becoming deadly.A Rhode Island resident, Rocco has spent some of his coronavirus-pandemic isolation working on short video lessons for the book\u2019s website. It\u2019s a project that draws on his engineering background. \u201cBefore I began illustrating books, I was an art director and used a lot of motion graphics,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I am now using all my tools.\u201d\n\nA new space missionNASA flew its last space shuttle in July 2011, and until this year relied on Russia to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. At the end of May, two astronauts launched from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station on the first manned Space X mission and returned safely to Earth about two months later. The next astronaut launch is scheduled for later this month, and it will be the first fully operational crewed mission for SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Author-illustrator John Rocco has been impressed by the way SpaceX has built on the knowledge base that Apollo developed. Along with finishing \u201cHow We Got to the Moon,\u201d the missions have been a highlight of his year: \u201cI\u2019ve had so much fun watching what they\u2019re doing, including how they\u2019re reusing rockets.\u201dMore in KidsPostGirl uses her voice to encourage voting in \u201cLoretta Little Looks Back\u201d\u201cCondor Comeback\u201d tells the story of a bird that nearly disappearedRead KidsPost stories about NASA\u2019s new era of space travel John Rocco\u2019s new book is filled with illustrations that help explain the daunting task. \u2018How We Got to the Moon\u2019 tells the story of NASA\u2019s 1960s venture in rich detail",
        "author": "Abby McGanney Nolan"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018How We Got to the Moon\u2019 tells the story of NASA\u2019s 1960s venture in rich detail (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1972",
        "date": "2020-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/2020/10/11/29e6152e-052e-11eb-a2db-417cddf4816a_story.html",
        "text": "Author-illustrator John Rocco has worked on many kinds of projects over the years, including designing demigods for the covers of the Percy Jackson, Magnus Chase and Kane Chronicles book series. In his latest book, he focuses on heroes from a different realm: the human engineers and scientists who worked on the United States space program in the 1960s. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn researching, writing and illustrating \u201cHow We Got to the Moon,\u201d his first work of nonfiction, Rocco wanted to showcase the science and the human ingenuity that made the 1969 Apollo moon landing a reality. He also wanted to present the mission, which employed 400,000 people across the United States, as \u201ca blueprint\u201d for addressing current \u201cproblems that sometimes seem impossible, like climate change and racial injustice. If you look at how people came together back then, you can see a way through.\u201dThe Apollo program began in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy reset the space race against Russia with the goal of \u201clanding a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.\u201d Kennedy announced a startling deadline \u2014 \u201cbefore this decade is out\u201d \u2014 and NASA scientists and engineers went to work on their monumental task.\u201cEverything we had done before in space,\u201d says Rocco, \u201cwas minuscule compared to the journey to the moon.\u201dTo understand the thousands of decisions that went into the project, Rocco read widely and contacted more than 20 NASA engineers. Each had been responsible for a critical part of the mission, from the construction and testing of the rocket engines to the splashdown and recovery of the command module.Rocco\u2019s pictures and text make clear the risks and dangers of the project, especially for the astronauts.\u201cIf you were exposed to the vacuum of space,\u201d says Rocco, \u201call of the liquids in your body would start to boil away.\u201dA detailed illustration shows a special three-layer suit the astronauts wore to deal with that issue and several others.The book also explains and illustrates the basic scientific concepts and the problem-solving that were used to make the spacecraft as light as possible and address all of the mission\u2019s dangers.For example, to protect the Apollo spacecraft from being damaged by the extreme temperatures (from minus-240 degrees to 280 degrees) on its journey, a NASA manager came up with a technique the astronauts called the \u201cbarbecue roll\u201d: The crew set off a slow rotation of the spacecraft so that one side of the ship would not get too hot or too cold.Rocco also said it was important to give credit to as many individuals as possible who made the moon landing happen. They include \u201chuman computer\u201d Katherine Johnson, who worked on complex mathematical calculations, and software engineer Margaret Hamilton, who helped build a warning system that prevented astronaut errors from becoming deadly.A Rhode Island resident, Rocco has spent some of his coronavirus-pandemic isolation working on short video lessons for the book\u2019s website. It\u2019s a project that draws on his engineering background. \u201cBefore I began illustrating books, I was an art director and used a lot of motion graphics,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I am now using all my tools.\u201d\n\nA new space missionNASA flew its last space shuttle in July 2011, and until this year relied on Russia to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. At the end of May, two astronauts launched from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station on the first manned Space X mission and returned safely to Earth about two months later. The next astronaut launch is scheduled for later this month, and it will be the first fully operational crewed mission for SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Author-illustrator John Rocco has been impressed by the way SpaceX has built on the knowledge base that Apollo developed. Along with finishing \u201cHow We Got to the Moon,\u201d the missions have been a highlight of his year: \u201cI\u2019ve had so much fun watching what they\u2019re doing, including how they\u2019re reusing rockets.\u201dMore in KidsPostGirl uses her voice to encourage voting in \u201cLoretta Little Looks Back\u201d\u201cCondor Comeback\u201d tells the story of a bird that nearly disappearedRead KidsPost stories about NASA\u2019s new era of space travel John Rocco\u2019s new book is filled with illustrations that help explain the daunting task. \u2018How We Got to the Moon\u2019 tells the story of NASA\u2019s 1960s venture in rich detail",
        "author": "Abby McGanney Nolan"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018How We Got to the Moon\u2019 tells the story of NASA\u2019s 1960s venture in rich detail (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1973",
        "date": "2020-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/2020/10/11/29e6152e-052e-11eb-a2db-417cddf4816a_story.html",
        "text": "Author-illustrator John Rocco has worked on many kinds of projects over the years, including designing demigods for the covers of the Percy Jackson, Magnus Chase and Kane Chronicles book series. In his latest book, he focuses on heroes from a different realm: the human engineers and scientists who worked on the United States space program in the 1960s. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn researching, writing and illustrating \u201cHow We Got to the Moon,\u201d his first work of nonfiction, Rocco wanted to showcase the science and the human ingenuity that made the 1969 Apollo moon landing a reality. He also wanted to present the mission, which employed 400,000 people across the United States, as \u201ca blueprint\u201d for addressing current \u201cproblems that sometimes seem impossible, like climate change and racial injustice. If you look at how people came together back then, you can see a way through.\u201dThe Apollo program began in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy reset the space race against Russia with the goal of \u201clanding a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.\u201d Kennedy announced a startling deadline \u2014 \u201cbefore this decade is out\u201d \u2014 and NASA scientists and engineers went to work on their monumental task.\u201cEverything we had done before in space,\u201d says Rocco, \u201cwas minuscule compared to the journey to the moon.\u201dTo understand the thousands of decisions that went into the project, Rocco read widely and contacted more than 20 NASA engineers. Each had been responsible for a critical part of the mission, from the construction and testing of the rocket engines to the splashdown and recovery of the command module.Rocco\u2019s pictures and text make clear the risks and dangers of the project, especially for the astronauts.\u201cIf you were exposed to the vacuum of space,\u201d says Rocco, \u201call of the liquids in your body would start to boil away.\u201dA detailed illustration shows a special three-layer suit the astronauts wore to deal with that issue and several others.The book also explains and illustrates the basic scientific concepts and the problem-solving that were used to make the spacecraft as light as possible and address all of the mission\u2019s dangers.For example, to protect the Apollo spacecraft from being damaged by the extreme temperatures (from minus-240 degrees to 280 degrees) on its journey, a NASA manager came up with a technique the astronauts called the \u201cbarbecue roll\u201d: The crew set off a slow rotation of the spacecraft so that one side of the ship would not get too hot or too cold.Rocco also said it was important to give credit to as many individuals as possible who made the moon landing happen. They include \u201chuman computer\u201d Katherine Johnson, who worked on complex mathematical calculations, and software engineer Margaret Hamilton, who helped build a warning system that prevented astronaut errors from becoming deadly.A Rhode Island resident, Rocco has spent some of his coronavirus-pandemic isolation working on short video lessons for the book\u2019s website. It\u2019s a project that draws on his engineering background. \u201cBefore I began illustrating books, I was an art director and used a lot of motion graphics,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I am now using all my tools.\u201d\n\nA new space missionNASA flew its last space shuttle in July 2011, and until this year relied on Russia to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. At the end of May, two astronauts launched from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station on the first manned Space X mission and returned safely to Earth about two months later. The next astronaut launch is scheduled for later this month, and it will be the first fully operational crewed mission for SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Author-illustrator John Rocco has been impressed by the way SpaceX has built on the knowledge base that Apollo developed. Along with finishing \u201cHow We Got to the Moon,\u201d the missions have been a highlight of his year: \u201cI\u2019ve had so much fun watching what they\u2019re doing, including how they\u2019re reusing rockets.\u201dMore in KidsPostGirl uses her voice to encourage voting in \u201cLoretta Little Looks Back\u201d\u201cCondor Comeback\u201d tells the story of a bird that nearly disappearedRead KidsPost stories about NASA\u2019s new era of space travel John Rocco\u2019s new book is filled with illustrations that help explain the daunting task. \u2018How We Got to the Moon\u2019 tells the story of NASA\u2019s 1960s venture in rich detail",
        "author": "Abby McGanney Nolan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bennu, an ancient asteroid, gets its first visitor in billions of years (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1974",
        "date": "2018-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/bennu-an-ancient-asteroid-gets-its-first-visitor-in-billions-of-years/2018/12/04/f74be188-f7de-11e8-863c-9e2f864d47e7_story.html",
        "text": "After a two-year chase, a NASA spacecraft arrived Monday at the ancient asteroid Bennu, its first visitor in billions of years.The robotic explorer, OSIRIS-REx pulled within 12 miles of the diamond-shaped space rock. It will get even closer in the days ahead and go into orbit around Bennu on December 31. No spacecraft has ever orbited such a small cosmic body. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt is the first American attempt to gather asteroid samples for return to Earth, something only Japan has accomplished so far.Flight controllers clapped and exchanged high-fives once confirmation came through that OSIRIS-REx made it to Bennu \u2014 exactly one week after NASA landed a spacecraft on Mars.\u201cRelieved, proud, and anxious to start exploring!\u201d tweeted lead scientist Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona. \u201cTo Bennu and back!\u201dScientists are eager to study material from carbon-rich asteroids such as Bennu, which could hold evidence dating back to the beginning of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago.With Bennu some 76 million miles away, it took seven minutes for word to get from the spacecraft to flight controllers at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado. The company built the spacecraft there.About the size of an SUV, the\u00a0spacecraft\u00a0will shadow the asteroid for a year, before scooping up some gravel for return to Earth in 2023.A Japanese spacecraft, meanwhile, has been hanging out at another near-Earth asteroid since June, also for samples. It is Japan\u2019s second asteroid mission. This latest rock is named Ryugu and about double the size of Bennu.Ryugu\u2019s samples should be here by December 2020. OSIRIS-REx aims to collect at least two ounces of dust and gravel. The spacecraft won\u2019t land, but rather use a 10-foot mechanical arm in 2020 to touch down and vacuum up particles. The sample container would break loose and head toward Earth in 2021.The collection \u2014 parachuting down to Utah \u2014 would represent the biggest cosmic haul since the Apollo astronauts hand-delivered moon rocks to Earth in the late 1960s and early 1970s.NASA has brought back comet dust and solar wind particles before, but never asteroid samples.Both Bennu and Ryugu are considered potentially hazardous asteroids. That means they could smack Earth years from now. At worst, Bennu would carve out a crater during a projected close call 150 years from now.More in KidsPost\nThe International Space Station turned 20 this year. How much do you know about the ISS?For space travelers, fitness is a top priority.Ever wondered what\u2019s on the astronauts menu? Scientists hope collecting material will help them learn about the beginning of the solar system. Bennu, an ancient asteroid, gets its first visitor in billions of years",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1975",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/sports-car-to-get-a-ride-on-new-spacex-rocket/2018/02/05/d5144b06-0a99-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html",
        "text": "A scarlet Tesla Roadster from the assembly line of Elon Musk's electric automobile business is set to go this week where no sports car has gone before: outer space.The sleek, battery-powered hot rod is serving as a mock payload for the first test flight of Musk's new Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, set for liftoff as early as Tuesday by his other transportation business, Space Exploration Technologies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf the launch succeeds, the Falcon Heavy will rank as the most powerful rocket in operation today, and the mightiest space vehicle to blast off from the United States since NASA's Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.It would probably give California-based SpaceX a leg up on rival rocket companies seeking major contracts with NASA, the U.S. military, satellite companies and even paying space tourists.Propelled by 27 engines supplying three times the thrust of SpaceX's current workhorse Falcon 9 booster, the Falcon Heavy is basically constructed from three Falcon 9s bolted side-by-side, with the nose cone and payload capping the middle rocket.The spacecraft is set for liftoff from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida \u2014 the same pad used by the Saturn 5 that carried Apollo 11's three-man crew on their historic 1969 mission, which ended in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's first human steps on the lunar surface.The \"passenger\" riding atop the Falcon Heavy will be setting a record as the first car sent into solar orbit \u2014 a bit of cross-promotion dreamed up by Musk himself. \"I love the thought of a car driving apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,\" the billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder said in a Twitter post last month.Greater lift capacityThe Falcon Heavy is actually designed to carry payloads much heavier than a sports car, with SpaceX boasting its ability to place roughly 70 tons into standard low Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch.That is twice the lift capacity of the biggest existing rocket in America's space fleet \u2014 the Delta 4 Heavy of SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance (ULA) \u2014 for about one-fourth the cost.Arrival of the Falcon Heavy puts it in competition with the next big rocket under development by NASA as well, the heavy-lift Space Launch System, or SLS, which will be far more powerful than SpaceX's new jumbo rocket but also much more expensive to fly.The Trump administration recently signaled that NASA may contract with a commercial provider to launch the first component of its Deep Space Gateway, a lunar-orbiting research outpost planned as a successor to the International Space Station in the next decade and a jumping-off point for missions to Mars.SpaceX has lined up its first three paying missions for the Falcon Heavy, including the planned launch of two paying passengers on a tourist trip around the moon.Like the Falcon 9 that came before it, the Falcon Heavy is built to be used again. Each of the three main-stage boosters are designed to fly back to Earth after launch.The two side-boosters are supposed to touch down on landing pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while the central booster should land on a drone ship in the Atlantic. NASA\u2019s Ellen Stofan helps plan mission to MarsRocket explosion destroys students\u2019 experimentsJourney to Mars: Meet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir Falcon Heavy set to carry a Tesla Roadster to show off its cargo capacity. Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "1976",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/sports-car-to-get-a-ride-on-new-spacex-rocket/2018/02/05/d5144b06-0a99-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html",
        "text": "A scarlet Tesla Roadster from the assembly line of Elon Musk's electric automobile business is set to go this week where no sports car has gone before: outer space.The sleek, battery-powered hot rod is serving as a mock payload for the first test flight of Musk's new Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, set for liftoff as early as Tuesday by his other transportation business, Space Exploration Technologies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf the launch succeeds, the Falcon Heavy will rank as the most powerful rocket in operation today, and the mightiest space vehicle to blast off from the United States since NASA's Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.It would probably give California-based SpaceX a leg up on rival rocket companies seeking major contracts with NASA, the U.S. military, satellite companies and even paying space tourists.Propelled by 27 engines supplying three times the thrust of SpaceX's current workhorse Falcon 9 booster, the Falcon Heavy is basically constructed from three Falcon 9s bolted side-by-side, with the nose cone and payload capping the middle rocket.The spacecraft is set for liftoff from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida \u2014 the same pad used by the Saturn 5 that carried Apollo 11's three-man crew on their historic 1969 mission, which ended in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's first human steps on the lunar surface.The \"passenger\" riding atop the Falcon Heavy will be setting a record as the first car sent into solar orbit \u2014 a bit of cross-promotion dreamed up by Musk himself. \"I love the thought of a car driving apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,\" the billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder said in a Twitter post last month.Greater lift capacityThe Falcon Heavy is actually designed to carry payloads much heavier than a sports car, with SpaceX boasting its ability to place roughly 70 tons into standard low Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch.That is twice the lift capacity of the biggest existing rocket in America's space fleet \u2014 the Delta 4 Heavy of SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance (ULA) \u2014 for about one-fourth the cost.Arrival of the Falcon Heavy puts it in competition with the next big rocket under development by NASA as well, the heavy-lift Space Launch System, or SLS, which will be far more powerful than SpaceX's new jumbo rocket but also much more expensive to fly.The Trump administration recently signaled that NASA may contract with a commercial provider to launch the first component of its Deep Space Gateway, a lunar-orbiting research outpost planned as a successor to the International Space Station in the next decade and a jumping-off point for missions to Mars.SpaceX has lined up its first three paying missions for the Falcon Heavy, including the planned launch of two paying passengers on a tourist trip around the moon.Like the Falcon 9 that came before it, the Falcon Heavy is built to be used again. Each of the three main-stage boosters are designed to fly back to Earth after launch.The two side-boosters are supposed to touch down on landing pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while the central booster should land on a drone ship in the Atlantic. NASA\u2019s Ellen Stofan helps plan mission to MarsRocket explosion destroys students\u2019 experimentsJourney to Mars: Meet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir Falcon Heavy set to carry a Tesla Roadster to show off its cargo capacity. Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "1977",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/sports-car-to-get-a-ride-on-new-spacex-rocket/2018/02/05/d5144b06-0a99-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html",
        "text": "A scarlet Tesla Roadster from the assembly line of Elon Musk's electric automobile business is set to go this week where no sports car has gone before: outer space.The sleek, battery-powered hot rod is serving as a mock payload for the first test flight of Musk's new Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, set for liftoff as early as Tuesday by his other transportation business, Space Exploration Technologies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf the launch succeeds, the Falcon Heavy will rank as the most powerful rocket in operation today, and the mightiest space vehicle to blast off from the United States since NASA's Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.It would probably give California-based SpaceX a leg up on rival rocket companies seeking major contracts with NASA, the U.S. military, satellite companies and even paying space tourists.Propelled by 27 engines supplying three times the thrust of SpaceX's current workhorse Falcon 9 booster, the Falcon Heavy is basically constructed from three Falcon 9s bolted side-by-side, with the nose cone and payload capping the middle rocket.The spacecraft is set for liftoff from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida \u2014 the same pad used by the Saturn 5 that carried Apollo 11's three-man crew on their historic 1969 mission, which ended in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's first human steps on the lunar surface.The \"passenger\" riding atop the Falcon Heavy will be setting a record as the first car sent into solar orbit \u2014 a bit of cross-promotion dreamed up by Musk himself. \"I love the thought of a car driving apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,\" the billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder said in a Twitter post last month.Greater lift capacityThe Falcon Heavy is actually designed to carry payloads much heavier than a sports car, with SpaceX boasting its ability to place roughly 70 tons into standard low Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch.That is twice the lift capacity of the biggest existing rocket in America's space fleet \u2014 the Delta 4 Heavy of SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance (ULA) \u2014 for about one-fourth the cost.Arrival of the Falcon Heavy puts it in competition with the next big rocket under development by NASA as well, the heavy-lift Space Launch System, or SLS, which will be far more powerful than SpaceX's new jumbo rocket but also much more expensive to fly.The Trump administration recently signaled that NASA may contract with a commercial provider to launch the first component of its Deep Space Gateway, a lunar-orbiting research outpost planned as a successor to the International Space Station in the next decade and a jumping-off point for missions to Mars.SpaceX has lined up its first three paying missions for the Falcon Heavy, including the planned launch of two paying passengers on a tourist trip around the moon.Like the Falcon 9 that came before it, the Falcon Heavy is built to be used again. Each of the three main-stage boosters are designed to fly back to Earth after launch.The two side-boosters are supposed to touch down on landing pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while the central booster should land on a drone ship in the Atlantic. NASA\u2019s Ellen Stofan helps plan mission to MarsRocket explosion destroys students\u2019 experimentsJourney to Mars: Meet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir Falcon Heavy set to carry a Tesla Roadster to show off its cargo capacity. Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1978",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/sports-car-to-get-a-ride-on-new-spacex-rocket/2018/02/05/d5144b06-0a99-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html",
        "text": "A scarlet Tesla Roadster from the assembly line of Elon Musk's electric automobile business is set to go this week where no sports car has gone before: outer space.The sleek, battery-powered hot rod is serving as a mock payload for the first test flight of Musk's new Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, set for liftoff as early as Tuesday by his other transportation business, Space Exploration Technologies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf the launch succeeds, the Falcon Heavy will rank as the most powerful rocket in operation today, and the mightiest space vehicle to blast off from the United States since NASA's Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.It would probably give California-based SpaceX a leg up on rival rocket companies seeking major contracts with NASA, the U.S. military, satellite companies and even paying space tourists.Propelled by 27 engines supplying three times the thrust of SpaceX's current workhorse Falcon 9 booster, the Falcon Heavy is basically constructed from three Falcon 9s bolted side-by-side, with the nose cone and payload capping the middle rocket.The spacecraft is set for liftoff from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida \u2014 the same pad used by the Saturn 5 that carried Apollo 11's three-man crew on their historic 1969 mission, which ended in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's first human steps on the lunar surface.The \"passenger\" riding atop the Falcon Heavy will be setting a record as the first car sent into solar orbit \u2014 a bit of cross-promotion dreamed up by Musk himself. \"I love the thought of a car driving apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,\" the billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder said in a Twitter post last month.Greater lift capacityThe Falcon Heavy is actually designed to carry payloads much heavier than a sports car, with SpaceX boasting its ability to place roughly 70 tons into standard low Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch.That is twice the lift capacity of the biggest existing rocket in America's space fleet \u2014 the Delta 4 Heavy of SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance (ULA) \u2014 for about one-fourth the cost.Arrival of the Falcon Heavy puts it in competition with the next big rocket under development by NASA as well, the heavy-lift Space Launch System, or SLS, which will be far more powerful than SpaceX's new jumbo rocket but also much more expensive to fly.The Trump administration recently signaled that NASA may contract with a commercial provider to launch the first component of its Deep Space Gateway, a lunar-orbiting research outpost planned as a successor to the International Space Station in the next decade and a jumping-off point for missions to Mars.SpaceX has lined up its first three paying missions for the Falcon Heavy, including the planned launch of two paying passengers on a tourist trip around the moon.Like the Falcon 9 that came before it, the Falcon Heavy is built to be used again. Each of the three main-stage boosters are designed to fly back to Earth after launch.The two side-boosters are supposed to touch down on landing pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while the central booster should land on a drone ship in the Atlantic. NASA\u2019s Ellen Stofan helps plan mission to MarsRocket explosion destroys students\u2019 experimentsJourney to Mars: Meet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir Falcon Heavy set to carry a Tesla Roadster to show off its cargo capacity. Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1979",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/sports-car-to-get-a-ride-on-new-spacex-rocket/2018/02/05/d5144b06-0a99-11e8-95a5-c396801049ef_story.html",
        "text": "A scarlet Tesla Roadster from the assembly line of Elon Musk's electric automobile business is set to go this week where no sports car has gone before: outer space.The sleek, battery-powered hot rod is serving as a mock payload for the first test flight of Musk's new Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, set for liftoff as early as Tuesday by his other transportation business, Space Exploration Technologies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf the launch succeeds, the Falcon Heavy will rank as the most powerful rocket in operation today, and the mightiest space vehicle to blast off from the United States since NASA's Saturn 5 rockets last carried astronauts to the moon 45 years ago.It would probably give California-based SpaceX a leg up on rival rocket companies seeking major contracts with NASA, the U.S. military, satellite companies and even paying space tourists.Propelled by 27 engines supplying three times the thrust of SpaceX's current workhorse Falcon 9 booster, the Falcon Heavy is basically constructed from three Falcon 9s bolted side-by-side, with the nose cone and payload capping the middle rocket.The spacecraft is set for liftoff from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida \u2014 the same pad used by the Saturn 5 that carried Apollo 11's three-man crew on their historic 1969 mission, which ended in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's first human steps on the lunar surface.The \"passenger\" riding atop the Falcon Heavy will be setting a record as the first car sent into solar orbit \u2014 a bit of cross-promotion dreamed up by Musk himself. \"I love the thought of a car driving apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,\" the billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX founder said in a Twitter post last month.Greater lift capacityThe Falcon Heavy is actually designed to carry payloads much heavier than a sports car, with SpaceX boasting its ability to place roughly 70 tons into standard low Earth orbit at a cost of $90 million per launch.That is twice the lift capacity of the biggest existing rocket in America's space fleet \u2014 the Delta 4 Heavy of SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance (ULA) \u2014 for about one-fourth the cost.Arrival of the Falcon Heavy puts it in competition with the next big rocket under development by NASA as well, the heavy-lift Space Launch System, or SLS, which will be far more powerful than SpaceX's new jumbo rocket but also much more expensive to fly.The Trump administration recently signaled that NASA may contract with a commercial provider to launch the first component of its Deep Space Gateway, a lunar-orbiting research outpost planned as a successor to the International Space Station in the next decade and a jumping-off point for missions to Mars.SpaceX has lined up its first three paying missions for the Falcon Heavy, including the planned launch of two paying passengers on a tourist trip around the moon.Like the Falcon 9 that came before it, the Falcon Heavy is built to be used again. Each of the three main-stage boosters are designed to fly back to Earth after launch.The two side-boosters are supposed to touch down on landing pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while the central booster should land on a drone ship in the Atlantic. NASA\u2019s Ellen Stofan helps plan mission to MarsRocket explosion destroys students\u2019 experimentsJourney to Mars: Meet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir Falcon Heavy set to carry a Tesla Roadster to show off its cargo capacity. Sports car to get a ride on new SpaceX rocket",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA launches probe to circle the sun and possibly unlock mysteries (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1980",
        "date": "2018-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/nasa-launches-probe-to-circle-the-sun-and-possibly-unlock-mysteries/2018/08/13/9f9767a4-9678-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html",
        "text": "A NASA spacecraft hurtled Sunday toward the sun on a quest to unlock some of its mysteries by getting closer than any object sent before.If all goes well, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the wispy edges of the sun\u2019s corona, or outer atmosphere, in November. In the years ahead, it will gradually get within 3.8 million miles of the surface, its instruments protected from the extreme heat and radiation by a revolutionary new carbon heat shield and other high-tech wizardry. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAltogether, the Parker probe will make 24 close approaches to our star during the seven-year journey.\u201cWow, here we go. We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years,\u201d said Eugene Parker, the 91-year-old astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named.It was Parker who accurately theorized 60 years ago the existence of solar wind \u2014 the supersonic stream of charged particles blasting off the sun and coursing through space, sometimes wreaking havoc on electrical systems on Earth.As Parker and thousands of others watched, a Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe aloft, thundering into the clear, star-studded sky.NASA needed the mighty 23-story rocket, plus a third stage, to get the Parker probe \u2014 the size of a small car \u2014 racing toward the sun, 93 million miles from Earth.Among the mysteries scientists hope to solve: Why is the corona hundreds of times hotter than the surface, which is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit? And why is the sun\u2019s atmosphere continually expanding and accelerating?\u201cThe only way we can do that is to finally go up and touch the sun,\u201d said project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University. \u201cWe\u2019ve looked at it. We\u2019ve studied it from missions that are close in, even as close as the planet Mercury. But we have to go there.\u201dA better understanding of the sun\u2019s life-giving and sometimes violent nature could also enable Earthlings to better protect satellites and astronauts, along with the power grids society depends on, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s science mission chief.A mission to get close to our star has been on NASA\u2019s books since 1958. The trick was making the spacecraft compact and light enough to travel at incredible speeds and tough enough to withstand the punishing environment.\u201cWe\u2019ve had to wait so long for our technology to catch up with our dreams,\u201d Fox said.NASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patchesNASA aims to send robots to the moonRead about NASA\u2019s Journey to Mars Parker Solar Probe will get within 3.8 million miles of the star \u2014 much closer than previous missions. NASA launches probe to circle the sun and possibly unlock mysteries",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA craft \u2018touches\u2019 sun for first time (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1981",
        "date": "2021-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2021/12/16/nasa-craft-touches-sun-first-time/",
        "text": "A NASA spacecraft has officially \u201ctouched\u201d the sun, plunging through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona.Scientists announced the news Tuesday during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Parker Solar Probe actually flew through the corona in April during the spacecraft\u2019s eighth close approach to the sun. Scientists said it took a few months to get the data back and then several more months to confirm. \u201cFascinatingly exciting,\u201d said project scientist Nour Raouafi of Johns Hopkins University.Launched in 2018, Parker was 8 million miles from the center of the sun when it first crossed the jagged, uneven boundary between the solar atmosphere and outgoing solar wind. The spacecraft dipped in and out of the corona at least three times, each a smooth transition, according to scientists.\u201cThe first and most dramatic time we were below for about five hours. ... Now you might think five hours, that doesn\u2019t sound big,\u201d the University of Michigan\u2019s Justin Kasper told reporters. But he noted that Parker was moving so fast it covered a vast distance during that time, tearing along at more than 62 miles per second.The corona appeared dustier than expected, according to Raouafi. Future coronal excursions will help scientists better understand the origin of the solar wind, he said, and how it is heated and accelerated out into space. Because the sun lacks a solid surface, the corona is where the action is; exploring this magnetically intense region up close can help scientists better understand solar outbursts that can interfere with life on Earth.Preliminary data suggests Parker also dipped into the corona during its ninth close approach in August, but scientists said more analyses are needed. It made its 10th close approach last month.Parker will keep drawing ever closer to the sun and diving deeper into the corona until its grand finale orbit in 2025. NASA scientists needed several months to confirm after the craft touched the sun in April NASA craft \u2018touches\u2019 sun for first time",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars rover Perseverance lands safely on the Red Planet (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1982",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/mars-rover-perseverance-lands-safely-on-the-red-planet/2021/02/18/4704bc20-7232-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html",
        "text": "A NASA rover streaked through the orange Martian sky and landed on the planet Thursday, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGround controllers at the space agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, cheered and exchanged fist bumps and high-fives in triumph \u2014 and relief \u2014 on receiving confirmation that the six-wheeled Perseverance had touched down on the Red Planet. It took a tension-filled 11\u00bd minutes for the signal to reach Earth.\u201cTouchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life,\u201d flight controller Swati Mohan announced to backslapping colleagues wearing masks against the coronavirus.The rover lifted off in July to take advantage of the close alignment of Earth and Mars, journeying some 300 million miles in nearly seven months.\u2018Perseverance\u2019 to be the next Mars rover, thanks to a creative seventh-graderThe biggest, most advanced rover ever sent by NASA, Perseverance became the ninth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars, every one of them from the United States, beginning in the 1970s.The carsize, plutonium-powered vehicle arrived at Jezero Crater, hitting NASA\u2019s smallest and trickiest target yet: a 5-mile-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and fields of rock. Scientists believe that if life ever flourished on Mars, it would have happened 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, when water still flowed on the planet.Over the next two years, Percy, as it is nicknamed, will use its seven-foot arm to drill down and collect rock samples with possible signs of bygone microscopic life. Three to four dozen chalk-size samples will be sealed in tubes and set aside on Mars to be retrieved by a fetch rover and brought homeward by another rocket ship. The goal is to get them back to Earth as early as 2031.Scientists hope to answer one of the central questions of theology, philosophy and space exploration.\u201cAre we alone in this sort of vast cosmic desert, just flying through space, or is life much more common? Does it just emerge whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe?\u201d said deputy project scientist Ken Williford. \u201cWe\u2019re really on the verge of being able to potentially answer these enormous questions.\u201dThe rover carries a four-pound helicopter called Ingenuity, which will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth.Meet Ingenuity, the mini-copter NASA is about to drop on MarsPerseverance was on its own during the NASA-described \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d descent.Flight controllers waited helplessly as the preprogrammed spacecraft hit the thin, 95 percent carbon dioxide Martian atmosphere at 12,100 miles per hour, or 16 times the speed of sound, slowing as it plummeted.It released its 70-foot parachute, jettisoned its heat shield, and then used a rocket-steered platform known as a sky crane to lower the rover the final 60 or so feet to the surface.Perseverance promptly sent back a grainy, black-and-white photo of Mars\u2019s pockmarked surface, the rover\u2019s shadow visible in the picture. The rover appeared to have touched down about 35 yards from the nearest rocks.\u201cTake that, Jezero!\u201d a controller called out.Perseverance will conduct an experiment in which it will convert small amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen, a process that could be a boon to future astronauts by providing breathable air and an ingredient for rocket fuel.\n\nMore in KidsPostNASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of MarsLooking at a new era of U.S. human spaceflightWhere to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters.Read all of KidsPost\u2019s Mars- and moon-related stories The robot to collect surface samples and deploy tiny helicopter for first-ever controlled flight. Mars rover Perseverance lands safely on the Red Planet",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars rover Perseverance lands safely on the Red Planet (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1983",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/mars-rover-perseverance-lands-safely-on-the-red-planet/2021/02/18/4704bc20-7232-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html",
        "text": "A NASA rover streaked through the orange Martian sky and landed on the planet Thursday, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGround controllers at the space agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, cheered and exchanged fist bumps and high-fives in triumph \u2014 and relief \u2014 on receiving confirmation that the six-wheeled Perseverance had touched down on the Red Planet. It took a tension-filled 11\u00bd minutes for the signal to reach Earth.\u201cTouchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life,\u201d flight controller Swati Mohan announced to backslapping colleagues wearing masks against the coronavirus.The rover lifted off in July to take advantage of the close alignment of Earth and Mars, journeying some 300 million miles in nearly seven months.\u2018Perseverance\u2019 to be the next Mars rover, thanks to a creative seventh-graderThe biggest, most advanced rover ever sent by NASA, Perseverance became the ninth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars, every one of them from the United States, beginning in the 1970s.The carsize, plutonium-powered vehicle arrived at Jezero Crater, hitting NASA\u2019s smallest and trickiest target yet: a 5-mile-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and fields of rock. Scientists believe that if life ever flourished on Mars, it would have happened 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, when water still flowed on the planet.Over the next two years, Percy, as it is nicknamed, will use its seven-foot arm to drill down and collect rock samples with possible signs of bygone microscopic life. Three to four dozen chalk-size samples will be sealed in tubes and set aside on Mars to be retrieved by a fetch rover and brought homeward by another rocket ship. The goal is to get them back to Earth as early as 2031.Scientists hope to answer one of the central questions of theology, philosophy and space exploration.\u201cAre we alone in this sort of vast cosmic desert, just flying through space, or is life much more common? Does it just emerge whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe?\u201d said deputy project scientist Ken Williford. \u201cWe\u2019re really on the verge of being able to potentially answer these enormous questions.\u201dThe rover carries a four-pound helicopter called Ingenuity, which will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth.Meet Ingenuity, the mini-copter NASA is about to drop on MarsPerseverance was on its own during the NASA-described \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d descent.Flight controllers waited helplessly as the preprogrammed spacecraft hit the thin, 95 percent carbon dioxide Martian atmosphere at 12,100 miles per hour, or 16 times the speed of sound, slowing as it plummeted.It released its 70-foot parachute, jettisoned its heat shield, and then used a rocket-steered platform known as a sky crane to lower the rover the final 60 or so feet to the surface.Perseverance promptly sent back a grainy, black-and-white photo of Mars\u2019s pockmarked surface, the rover\u2019s shadow visible in the picture. The rover appeared to have touched down about 35 yards from the nearest rocks.\u201cTake that, Jezero!\u201d a controller called out.Perseverance will conduct an experiment in which it will convert small amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen, a process that could be a boon to future astronauts by providing breathable air and an ingredient for rocket fuel.\n\nMore in KidsPostNASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of MarsLooking at a new era of U.S. human spaceflightWhere to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters.Read all of KidsPost\u2019s Mars- and moon-related stories The robot to collect surface samples and deploy tiny helicopter for first-ever controlled flight. Mars rover Perseverance lands safely on the Red Planet",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars rover Perseverance lands safely on the Red Planet (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1984",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/mars-rover-perseverance-lands-safely-on-the-red-planet/2021/02/18/4704bc20-7232-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html",
        "text": "A NASA rover streaked through the orange Martian sky and landed on the planet Thursday, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGround controllers at the space agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, cheered and exchanged fist bumps and high-fives in triumph \u2014 and relief \u2014 on receiving confirmation that the six-wheeled Perseverance had touched down on the Red Planet. It took a tension-filled 11\u00bd minutes for the signal to reach Earth.\u201cTouchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life,\u201d flight controller Swati Mohan announced to backslapping colleagues wearing masks against the coronavirus.The rover lifted off in July to take advantage of the close alignment of Earth and Mars, journeying some 300 million miles in nearly seven months.\u2018Perseverance\u2019 to be the next Mars rover, thanks to a creative seventh-graderThe biggest, most advanced rover ever sent by NASA, Perseverance became the ninth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars, every one of them from the United States, beginning in the 1970s.The carsize, plutonium-powered vehicle arrived at Jezero Crater, hitting NASA\u2019s smallest and trickiest target yet: a 5-mile-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and fields of rock. Scientists believe that if life ever flourished on Mars, it would have happened 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, when water still flowed on the planet.Over the next two years, Percy, as it is nicknamed, will use its seven-foot arm to drill down and collect rock samples with possible signs of bygone microscopic life. Three to four dozen chalk-size samples will be sealed in tubes and set aside on Mars to be retrieved by a fetch rover and brought homeward by another rocket ship. The goal is to get them back to Earth as early as 2031.Scientists hope to answer one of the central questions of theology, philosophy and space exploration.\u201cAre we alone in this sort of vast cosmic desert, just flying through space, or is life much more common? Does it just emerge whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe?\u201d said deputy project scientist Ken Williford. \u201cWe\u2019re really on the verge of being able to potentially answer these enormous questions.\u201dThe rover carries a four-pound helicopter called Ingenuity, which will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth.Meet Ingenuity, the mini-copter NASA is about to drop on MarsPerseverance was on its own during the NASA-described \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d descent.Flight controllers waited helplessly as the preprogrammed spacecraft hit the thin, 95 percent carbon dioxide Martian atmosphere at 12,100 miles per hour, or 16 times the speed of sound, slowing as it plummeted.It released its 70-foot parachute, jettisoned its heat shield, and then used a rocket-steered platform known as a sky crane to lower the rover the final 60 or so feet to the surface.Perseverance promptly sent back a grainy, black-and-white photo of Mars\u2019s pockmarked surface, the rover\u2019s shadow visible in the picture. The rover appeared to have touched down about 35 yards from the nearest rocks.\u201cTake that, Jezero!\u201d a controller called out.Perseverance will conduct an experiment in which it will convert small amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen, a process that could be a boon to future astronauts by providing breathable air and an ingredient for rocket fuel.\n\nMore in KidsPostNASA\u2019s InSight lander touches down on the surface of MarsLooking at a new era of U.S. human spaceflightWhere to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters.Read all of KidsPost\u2019s Mars- and moon-related stories The robot to collect surface samples and deploy tiny helicopter for first-ever controlled flight. Mars rover Perseverance lands safely on the Red Planet",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "China collects moon samples to study on Earth (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1985",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/china-collects-moon-samples-to-study-on-earth/2020/12/02/1a22977e-2ad2-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html",
        "text": "A Chinese spacecraft took samples of the moon\u2019s surface Wednesday as part of a mission to bring lunar rocks back to Earth for the first time since the 1970s, the government said. The mission adds to a series of successes for the country\u2019s ambitious space program.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Chang\u2019e-5 probe landed Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon after descending from an orbiter, the China National Space Administration said. It released images of the barren landing site showing the lander\u2019s shadow. \u201cChang\u2019e has collected moon samples,\u201d the agency said in a statement.The probe, launched November 24 from the island of Hainan, is the latest venture by the space program that sent China\u2019s first astronaut into orbit in 2003. Beijing also has a spacecraft headed to Mars and aims to land a human on the moon.This week\u2019s landing is \u201ca historic step in China\u2019s cooperation with the international community in the peaceful use of outer space,\u201d said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.\u201cChina will continue to promote international cooperation and the exploration and use of outer space in the spirit of working for the benefit of all mankind,\u201d Hua said.Plans call for the lander to spend two days drilling into the lunar surface and collecting 4.4 pounds of rocks and debris. The top stage of the probe will be launched back into lunar orbit to transfer the samples to a capsule to take back to Earth, where it is to land in China\u2019s northern grasslands in mid-December.If it succeeds, it will be the first time scientists have obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks since the Soviet Union\u2019s Luna 24 probe in 1976.The samples are expected to be made available to scientists from other nations, although it is unclear how much access NASA will have due to U.S. government restrictions on cooperation with China\u2019s military-linked program.From the rocks and debris, scientists hope to learn more about the moon, including its precise age, as well as increased knowledge about other bodies in our solar system. Collecting samples, including from asteroids, is an increasing focus of many space programs.Chinese space program officials have said they envision future crewed missions along with robotic ones, including possibly a permanent research base. No timeline or other details have been announced.\n\n\u2014 Associated Press\n\nRead more from KidsPost:SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space StationCan astronauts grow plants in soil? Recent mission tests the idea.A new era begins in American spaceflight Scientists haven\u2019t had fresh moon rock since the Soviet Union\u2019s mission in 1976. China collects moon samples to study on Earth",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "China collects moon samples to study on Earth (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1986",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/china-collects-moon-samples-to-study-on-earth/2020/12/02/1a22977e-2ad2-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html",
        "text": "A Chinese spacecraft took samples of the moon\u2019s surface Wednesday as part of a mission to bring lunar rocks back to Earth for the first time since the 1970s, the government said. The mission adds to a series of successes for the country\u2019s ambitious space program.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Chang\u2019e-5 probe landed Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon after descending from an orbiter, the China National Space Administration said. It released images of the barren landing site showing the lander\u2019s shadow. \u201cChang\u2019e has collected moon samples,\u201d the agency said in a statement.The probe, launched November 24 from the island of Hainan, is the latest venture by the space program that sent China\u2019s first astronaut into orbit in 2003. Beijing also has a spacecraft headed to Mars and aims to land a human on the moon.This week\u2019s landing is \u201ca historic step in China\u2019s cooperation with the international community in the peaceful use of outer space,\u201d said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.\u201cChina will continue to promote international cooperation and the exploration and use of outer space in the spirit of working for the benefit of all mankind,\u201d Hua said.Plans call for the lander to spend two days drilling into the lunar surface and collecting 4.4 pounds of rocks and debris. The top stage of the probe will be launched back into lunar orbit to transfer the samples to a capsule to take back to Earth, where it is to land in China\u2019s northern grasslands in mid-December.If it succeeds, it will be the first time scientists have obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks since the Soviet Union\u2019s Luna 24 probe in 1976.The samples are expected to be made available to scientists from other nations, although it is unclear how much access NASA will have due to U.S. government restrictions on cooperation with China\u2019s military-linked program.From the rocks and debris, scientists hope to learn more about the moon, including its precise age, as well as increased knowledge about other bodies in our solar system. Collecting samples, including from asteroids, is an increasing focus of many space programs.Chinese space program officials have said they envision future crewed missions along with robotic ones, including possibly a permanent research base. No timeline or other details have been announced.\n\n\u2014 Associated Press\n\nRead more from KidsPost:SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space StationCan astronauts grow plants in soil? Recent mission tests the idea.A new era begins in American spaceflight Scientists haven\u2019t had fresh moon rock since the Soviet Union\u2019s mission in 1976. China collects moon samples to study on Earth",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "China collects moon samples to study on Earth (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1987",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/china-collects-moon-samples-to-study-on-earth/2020/12/02/1a22977e-2ad2-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html",
        "text": "A Chinese spacecraft took samples of the moon\u2019s surface Wednesday as part of a mission to bring lunar rocks back to Earth for the first time since the 1970s, the government said. The mission adds to a series of successes for the country\u2019s ambitious space program.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Chang\u2019e-5 probe landed Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the moon after descending from an orbiter, the China National Space Administration said. It released images of the barren landing site showing the lander\u2019s shadow. \u201cChang\u2019e has collected moon samples,\u201d the agency said in a statement.The probe, launched November 24 from the island of Hainan, is the latest venture by the space program that sent China\u2019s first astronaut into orbit in 2003. Beijing also has a spacecraft headed to Mars and aims to land a human on the moon.This week\u2019s landing is \u201ca historic step in China\u2019s cooperation with the international community in the peaceful use of outer space,\u201d said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.\u201cChina will continue to promote international cooperation and the exploration and use of outer space in the spirit of working for the benefit of all mankind,\u201d Hua said.Plans call for the lander to spend two days drilling into the lunar surface and collecting 4.4 pounds of rocks and debris. The top stage of the probe will be launched back into lunar orbit to transfer the samples to a capsule to take back to Earth, where it is to land in China\u2019s northern grasslands in mid-December.If it succeeds, it will be the first time scientists have obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks since the Soviet Union\u2019s Luna 24 probe in 1976.The samples are expected to be made available to scientists from other nations, although it is unclear how much access NASA will have due to U.S. government restrictions on cooperation with China\u2019s military-linked program.From the rocks and debris, scientists hope to learn more about the moon, including its precise age, as well as increased knowledge about other bodies in our solar system. Collecting samples, including from asteroids, is an increasing focus of many space programs.Chinese space program officials have said they envision future crewed missions along with robotic ones, including possibly a permanent research base. No timeline or other details have been announced.\n\n\u2014 Associated Press\n\nRead more from KidsPost:SpaceX launches first full crew to the International Space StationCan astronauts grow plants in soil? Recent mission tests the idea.A new era begins in American spaceflight Scientists haven\u2019t had fresh moon rock since the Soviet Union\u2019s mission in 1976. China collects moon samples to study on Earth",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket failure causes emergency landing for astronaut, cosmonaut (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1988",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/failed-rocket-causes-emergency-landing-for-astronaut-cosmonaut/2018/10/11/e9c43a90-cd74-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html",
        "text": "A booster rocket failed less than two minutes after launching an American and a Russian toward the International Space Station on Thursday, forcing an emergency \u2014 but safe \u2014 landing in Kazakhstan.It was the latest in a recent series of failures for the troubled Russian space program, which is used by the United States to carry its astronauts to the station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russia\u2019s Alexei Ovchinin were subjected to heavy gravitational forces as their capsule automatically detached from the Soyuz booster rocket and fell back to Earth at a sharper-than-normal angle. They landed near the city of Dzhezkazgan.\u201cThank God the crew is alive,\u201d said Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, when it became clear that they had landed safely.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who watched the launch at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome along with his Russian counterpart, tweeted that Hague and Ovchinin are in good condition. He added that a \u201cthorough investigation into the cause of the incident will be conducted.\u201dHague, 43, and Ovchinin, 47, lifted off as scheduled at 2:40 p.m. (4:40 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time) on Thursday from Baikonur. The astronauts were to dock at the International Space Station six hours after the launch and join an American, a Russian and a German currently aboard the station.But the three-stage Soyuz booster suffered an failure of its second stage about two minutes after launching. Search-and-rescue teams were immediately scrambled to recover the crew, and paratroopers were dropped from a plane to reach the site quickly.It was to be the first space mission for Hague, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2013. Ovchinin spent six months on the orbiting outpost in 2016.The astronauts were flown by helicopter to Dzhezkazgan and then by plane to Baikonur.NASA posted pictures of Hague and Ovchinin undergoing a medical checkup at Dzhezkazgan\u2019s airport. One of the pictures showed Hague smiling.Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said all manned launches will be suspended pending an investigation into the cause of the failure. He added that Russia will fully share all relevant information with the United States.The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is the only vehicle for ferrying crews to the space station following the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet. Russia stands to lose that monopoly in the coming years with the arrival of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon and Boeing\u2019s Starliner crew capsules.The last time the Russian space program had a manned launch failure was in 1983. Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov landed safely near the launchpad after the Soyuz explosion.More in KidsPost\nMeet some of the astronauts who will launch next year from U.S. soilMeet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir, a biologistNASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patches Nick Hague and Alexei Ovchinin were not hurt as capsule lands in Kazakhstan. Rocket failure causes emergency landing for astronaut, cosmonaut",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket failure causes emergency landing for astronaut, cosmonaut (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1989",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/failed-rocket-causes-emergency-landing-for-astronaut-cosmonaut/2018/10/11/e9c43a90-cd74-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html",
        "text": "A booster rocket failed less than two minutes after launching an American and a Russian toward the International Space Station on Thursday, forcing an emergency \u2014 but safe \u2014 landing in Kazakhstan.It was the latest in a recent series of failures for the troubled Russian space program, which is used by the United States to carry its astronauts to the station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russia\u2019s Alexei Ovchinin were subjected to heavy gravitational forces as their capsule automatically detached from the Soyuz booster rocket and fell back to Earth at a sharper-than-normal angle. They landed near the city of Dzhezkazgan.\u201cThank God the crew is alive,\u201d said Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, when it became clear that they had landed safely.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who watched the launch at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome along with his Russian counterpart, tweeted that Hague and Ovchinin are in good condition. He added that a \u201cthorough investigation into the cause of the incident will be conducted.\u201dHague, 43, and Ovchinin, 47, lifted off as scheduled at 2:40 p.m. (4:40 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time) on Thursday from Baikonur. The astronauts were to dock at the International Space Station six hours after the launch and join an American, a Russian and a German currently aboard the station.But the three-stage Soyuz booster suffered an failure of its second stage about two minutes after launching. Search-and-rescue teams were immediately scrambled to recover the crew, and paratroopers were dropped from a plane to reach the site quickly.It was to be the first space mission for Hague, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2013. Ovchinin spent six months on the orbiting outpost in 2016.The astronauts were flown by helicopter to Dzhezkazgan and then by plane to Baikonur.NASA posted pictures of Hague and Ovchinin undergoing a medical checkup at Dzhezkazgan\u2019s airport. One of the pictures showed Hague smiling.Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said all manned launches will be suspended pending an investigation into the cause of the failure. He added that Russia will fully share all relevant information with the United States.The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is the only vehicle for ferrying crews to the space station following the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet. Russia stands to lose that monopoly in the coming years with the arrival of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon and Boeing\u2019s Starliner crew capsules.The last time the Russian space program had a manned launch failure was in 1983. Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov landed safely near the launchpad after the Soyuz explosion.More in KidsPost\nMeet some of the astronauts who will launch next year from U.S. soilMeet astronaut candidate Jessica Meir, a biologistNASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patches Nick Hague and Alexei Ovchinin were not hurt as capsule lands in Kazakhstan. Rocket failure causes emergency landing for astronaut, cosmonaut",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet astronauts who will launch into space from America (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "1990",
        "date": "2018-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/meet-the-astronauts-who-will-launch-into-space-from-america/2018/06/15/3e39fbc2-592c-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html",
        "text": "Update: Astronaut Eric Boe was scheduled to travel to the International Space Station on the Boeing Starliner test flight. He was pulled from the flight for medical reasons. Astronaut Mike Fincke is set to take his place. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAstronaut Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor and two colleagues from Germany and Russia blasted off to the International Space Station this month. But before the big trip, Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor had another long trip: traveling about 6,800 miles to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The facility is the only place humans have been able to launch into space since the U.S.-based space shuttles were retired in 2011. But that will soon change. NASA plans to return manned space station launches to American soil. And the government agency is going to have help. NASA has paired with two companies \u2014 Boeing and SpaceX \u2014 to carry its crews into space.The companies are still working on the rockets, but they are aiming to take off at the end of the year. NASA has chosen four astronauts \u2014 all of whom have been to the space station \u2014 to fly on those missions. The astronauts will soon find out which two will go on which rocket, and they will begin special training.Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport, who covers the space industry, talked with the four recently at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and asked them a few questions for KidsPost.So meet Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Douglas Hurley and Sunita Williams. But stay tuned. We\u2019ll be checking in with them in the coming months as they prepare to take this new path to the International Space Station.Question and AnswerQ: Do you remember Apollo or early space shuttle missions?Robert Behnken: I really have no memories of the Apollo program. .\u2009.\u2009. I do remember the shuttle program pretty clearly. I do remember actually seeing a space shuttle make the transit across the country during a stopover at Scott Air Force Base, which was in Belleville, Illinois. I grew up [nearby] in St. Louis. .\u2009.\u2009. My dad took me over there, and we used a telephoto lens on a camera to take some photos of a space shuttle and get to see it with my own eyes, which was a neat thing to do.Eric Boe: I was about 5 at the time when my parents came in and said, \u201cCome watch this,\u201d and it was the moon landing in black and white.Sunita Williams: I was old enough to be in our basement with our black-and-white TV to see, you know, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon and thought, \u201cWow, that\u2019s really cool. That\u2019s amazing, spectacular.\u201d I was only 4 years old at the time but pretty, pretty amazing.Q: How are day-to-day things more difficult in space?Behnken: When you are in space, everything takes a different level of planning. It can be difficult to even find things that you\u2019ve stuffed in a bag to do an activity with. And so whenever you march down a path in space where you think about I\u2019m going to go do maintenance on this specific thing, I need a nice work area. I need a place to put all my stuff. I have to think about all those things before I even get started.Q: Most kids today don\u2019t remember shuttle launches. Why would the Boeing and SpaceX missions inspire them as the shuttle did in its day?Douglas Hurley: They can realize \u201cmaybe that\u2019s something I could do some day.\u201d By the time children of today are old enough to potentially be astronauts, who knows where we might be going? We might have a moon base by then. We may be already on our way to Mars. And you see with children all the time how excited they are about Mars and about the moon, and hopefully they\u2019ll be the ones that get to go do it.Boe: Being able to watch it live is always an amazing thing. .\u2009.\u2009. For kids it\u2019s just one of those things that will inspire them and they\u2019ll be people just like I was when I was a little kid and I watched the moon landing. Dreaming about the opportunity .\u2009.\u2009. to go in space.Wiliams: I think that it will show people that we can do this again. You can come to Florida and see a launch. .\u2009.\u2009. It\u2019s not like these grand plans from different countries like Russia and the United States. [Boeing and SpaceX] are companies that people are very used to seeing. .\u2009.\u2009. I think it brings it a little bit closer to home that they are part of it. .\u2009.\u2009. I really hope that these commercial crew launches really get people into the idea that they are part of space travel and space exploration.Q: What are you looking forward to most about returning to space in the space station?Behnken: You know I\u2019m really looking forward to taking advantage again of the big open areas on board the space station. I do have some things that I don\u2019t want to share because I want to surprise my son with them, but I have some things that I want to do or have him see me do in those big areas on board the space station \u2014 you know flips and bubbles and eating M&M\u2019s like Pac-Man across the space station. I want to do all those things, but I want to do them just for my son.Boe: What I\u2019m looking forward to most and returning to space is being in a completely different spaceship, so that\u2019ll be neat. .\u2009.\u2009. And you know I\u2019ve flown twice before. The first flight, [I] missed a lot of things just because you\u2019re busy doing your job .\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. So second flight I picked up a lot of details. So I think the third flight not only will I get to see a new spaceship, but I\u2019ll appreciate just being able to pick up a lot of the things that I missed on the first two flights.Hurley: I think it\u2019s the sights [and] the smells looking out the cupola again. [The cupola is a large round window on the station that provides amazing views of Earth.] Hopefully this flight [I\u2019ll be] getting a little more time to actually do some of that stuff. I have no idea if that\u2019s the case, but I hope so. .\u2009.\u2009. And then just being able to get this accomplished for the country. It\u2019s important. .\u2009.\u2009. It has been pushing seven years now that we haven\u2019t had this launch capability in the United States.Q: Have you requested any changes or upgrades on the new spacecraft that you wish you\u2019d had on shuttle or Soyuz?Williams: These new spacecraft have taken advantage of technology advances in the last 10, 20 years, and that\u2019s making these spacecraft smarter and probably safer and a little bit more automated, where the people inside don\u2019t have to be looking at every little thing. .\u2009.\u2009. So the situational awareness as well as the safety of these spacecraft I think is absolutely more than it was in the past, and that\u2019s because of technology advances in the last 20 years or so. So I\u2019m thinking these spacecraft are going to be pretty awesome. For more on the astronauts, read Christian Davenport\u2019s longer story at wapo.st/unsungastronauts.More in KidsPost:\nAstronauts get virtual test-drive of new ride to space stationThe space shuttle\u2019s benefits and limitsFind all our stories on NASA\u2019s Journey to Mars NASA is joining forces with 2 companies to ferry crews to the International Space Station. Meet astronauts who will launch into space from America",
        "author": "KidsPost"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet astronauts who will launch into space from America (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1991",
        "date": "2018-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/meet-the-astronauts-who-will-launch-into-space-from-america/2018/06/15/3e39fbc2-592c-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html",
        "text": "Update: Astronaut Eric Boe was scheduled to travel to the International Space Station on the Boeing Starliner test flight. He was pulled from the flight for medical reasons. Astronaut Mike Fincke is set to take his place. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAstronaut Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor and two colleagues from Germany and Russia blasted off to the International Space Station this month. But before the big trip, Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor had another long trip: traveling about 6,800 miles to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The facility is the only place humans have been able to launch into space since the U.S.-based space shuttles were retired in 2011. But that will soon change. NASA plans to return manned space station launches to American soil. And the government agency is going to have help. NASA has paired with two companies \u2014 Boeing and SpaceX \u2014 to carry its crews into space.The companies are still working on the rockets, but they are aiming to take off at the end of the year. NASA has chosen four astronauts \u2014 all of whom have been to the space station \u2014 to fly on those missions. The astronauts will soon find out which two will go on which rocket, and they will begin special training.Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport, who covers the space industry, talked with the four recently at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and asked them a few questions for KidsPost.So meet Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Douglas Hurley and Sunita Williams. But stay tuned. We\u2019ll be checking in with them in the coming months as they prepare to take this new path to the International Space Station.Question and AnswerQ: Do you remember Apollo or early space shuttle missions?Robert Behnken: I really have no memories of the Apollo program. .\u2009.\u2009. I do remember the shuttle program pretty clearly. I do remember actually seeing a space shuttle make the transit across the country during a stopover at Scott Air Force Base, which was in Belleville, Illinois. I grew up [nearby] in St. Louis. .\u2009.\u2009. My dad took me over there, and we used a telephoto lens on a camera to take some photos of a space shuttle and get to see it with my own eyes, which was a neat thing to do.Eric Boe: I was about 5 at the time when my parents came in and said, \u201cCome watch this,\u201d and it was the moon landing in black and white.Sunita Williams: I was old enough to be in our basement with our black-and-white TV to see, you know, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon and thought, \u201cWow, that\u2019s really cool. That\u2019s amazing, spectacular.\u201d I was only 4 years old at the time but pretty, pretty amazing.Q: How are day-to-day things more difficult in space?Behnken: When you are in space, everything takes a different level of planning. It can be difficult to even find things that you\u2019ve stuffed in a bag to do an activity with. And so whenever you march down a path in space where you think about I\u2019m going to go do maintenance on this specific thing, I need a nice work area. I need a place to put all my stuff. I have to think about all those things before I even get started.Q: Most kids today don\u2019t remember shuttle launches. Why would the Boeing and SpaceX missions inspire them as the shuttle did in its day?Douglas Hurley: They can realize \u201cmaybe that\u2019s something I could do some day.\u201d By the time children of today are old enough to potentially be astronauts, who knows where we might be going? We might have a moon base by then. We may be already on our way to Mars. And you see with children all the time how excited they are about Mars and about the moon, and hopefully they\u2019ll be the ones that get to go do it.Boe: Being able to watch it live is always an amazing thing. .\u2009.\u2009. For kids it\u2019s just one of those things that will inspire them and they\u2019ll be people just like I was when I was a little kid and I watched the moon landing. Dreaming about the opportunity .\u2009.\u2009. to go in space.Wiliams: I think that it will show people that we can do this again. You can come to Florida and see a launch. .\u2009.\u2009. It\u2019s not like these grand plans from different countries like Russia and the United States. [Boeing and SpaceX] are companies that people are very used to seeing. .\u2009.\u2009. I think it brings it a little bit closer to home that they are part of it. .\u2009.\u2009. I really hope that these commercial crew launches really get people into the idea that they are part of space travel and space exploration.Q: What are you looking forward to most about returning to space in the space station?Behnken: You know I\u2019m really looking forward to taking advantage again of the big open areas on board the space station. I do have some things that I don\u2019t want to share because I want to surprise my son with them, but I have some things that I want to do or have him see me do in those big areas on board the space station \u2014 you know flips and bubbles and eating M&M\u2019s like Pac-Man across the space station. I want to do all those things, but I want to do them just for my son.Boe: What I\u2019m looking forward to most and returning to space is being in a completely different spaceship, so that\u2019ll be neat. .\u2009.\u2009. And you know I\u2019ve flown twice before. The first flight, [I] missed a lot of things just because you\u2019re busy doing your job .\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. So second flight I picked up a lot of details. So I think the third flight not only will I get to see a new spaceship, but I\u2019ll appreciate just being able to pick up a lot of the things that I missed on the first two flights.Hurley: I think it\u2019s the sights [and] the smells looking out the cupola again. [The cupola is a large round window on the station that provides amazing views of Earth.] Hopefully this flight [I\u2019ll be] getting a little more time to actually do some of that stuff. I have no idea if that\u2019s the case, but I hope so. .\u2009.\u2009. And then just being able to get this accomplished for the country. It\u2019s important. .\u2009.\u2009. It has been pushing seven years now that we haven\u2019t had this launch capability in the United States.Q: Have you requested any changes or upgrades on the new spacecraft that you wish you\u2019d had on shuttle or Soyuz?Williams: These new spacecraft have taken advantage of technology advances in the last 10, 20 years, and that\u2019s making these spacecraft smarter and probably safer and a little bit more automated, where the people inside don\u2019t have to be looking at every little thing. .\u2009.\u2009. So the situational awareness as well as the safety of these spacecraft I think is absolutely more than it was in the past, and that\u2019s because of technology advances in the last 20 years or so. So I\u2019m thinking these spacecraft are going to be pretty awesome. For more on the astronauts, read Christian Davenport\u2019s longer story at wapo.st/unsungastronauts.More in KidsPost:\nAstronauts get virtual test-drive of new ride to space stationThe space shuttle\u2019s benefits and limitsFind all our stories on NASA\u2019s Journey to Mars NASA is joining forces with 2 companies to ferry crews to the International Space Station. Meet astronauts who will launch into space from America",
        "author": "KidsPost"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet astronauts who will launch into space from America (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1992",
        "date": "2018-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/meet-the-astronauts-who-will-launch-into-space-from-america/2018/06/15/3e39fbc2-592c-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html",
        "text": "Update: Astronaut Eric Boe was scheduled to travel to the International Space Station on the Boeing Starliner test flight. He was pulled from the flight for medical reasons. Astronaut Mike Fincke is set to take his place. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAstronaut Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor and two colleagues from Germany and Russia blasted off to the International Space Station this month. But before the big trip, Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor had another long trip: traveling about 6,800 miles to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The facility is the only place humans have been able to launch into space since the U.S.-based space shuttles were retired in 2011. But that will soon change. NASA plans to return manned space station launches to American soil. And the government agency is going to have help. NASA has paired with two companies \u2014 Boeing and SpaceX \u2014 to carry its crews into space.The companies are still working on the rockets, but they are aiming to take off at the end of the year. NASA has chosen four astronauts \u2014 all of whom have been to the space station \u2014 to fly on those missions. The astronauts will soon find out which two will go on which rocket, and they will begin special training.Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport, who covers the space industry, talked with the four recently at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and asked them a few questions for KidsPost.So meet Robert Behnken, Eric Boe, Douglas Hurley and Sunita Williams. But stay tuned. We\u2019ll be checking in with them in the coming months as they prepare to take this new path to the International Space Station.Question and AnswerQ: Do you remember Apollo or early space shuttle missions?Robert Behnken: I really have no memories of the Apollo program. .\u2009.\u2009. I do remember the shuttle program pretty clearly. I do remember actually seeing a space shuttle make the transit across the country during a stopover at Scott Air Force Base, which was in Belleville, Illinois. I grew up [nearby] in St. Louis. .\u2009.\u2009. My dad took me over there, and we used a telephoto lens on a camera to take some photos of a space shuttle and get to see it with my own eyes, which was a neat thing to do.Eric Boe: I was about 5 at the time when my parents came in and said, \u201cCome watch this,\u201d and it was the moon landing in black and white.Sunita Williams: I was old enough to be in our basement with our black-and-white TV to see, you know, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon and thought, \u201cWow, that\u2019s really cool. That\u2019s amazing, spectacular.\u201d I was only 4 years old at the time but pretty, pretty amazing.Q: How are day-to-day things more difficult in space?Behnken: When you are in space, everything takes a different level of planning. It can be difficult to even find things that you\u2019ve stuffed in a bag to do an activity with. And so whenever you march down a path in space where you think about I\u2019m going to go do maintenance on this specific thing, I need a nice work area. I need a place to put all my stuff. I have to think about all those things before I even get started.Q: Most kids today don\u2019t remember shuttle launches. Why would the Boeing and SpaceX missions inspire them as the shuttle did in its day?Douglas Hurley: They can realize \u201cmaybe that\u2019s something I could do some day.\u201d By the time children of today are old enough to potentially be astronauts, who knows where we might be going? We might have a moon base by then. We may be already on our way to Mars. And you see with children all the time how excited they are about Mars and about the moon, and hopefully they\u2019ll be the ones that get to go do it.Boe: Being able to watch it live is always an amazing thing. .\u2009.\u2009. For kids it\u2019s just one of those things that will inspire them and they\u2019ll be people just like I was when I was a little kid and I watched the moon landing. Dreaming about the opportunity .\u2009.\u2009. to go in space.Wiliams: I think that it will show people that we can do this again. You can come to Florida and see a launch. .\u2009.\u2009. It\u2019s not like these grand plans from different countries like Russia and the United States. [Boeing and SpaceX] are companies that people are very used to seeing. .\u2009.\u2009. I think it brings it a little bit closer to home that they are part of it. .\u2009.\u2009. I really hope that these commercial crew launches really get people into the idea that they are part of space travel and space exploration.Q: What are you looking forward to most about returning to space in the space station?Behnken: You know I\u2019m really looking forward to taking advantage again of the big open areas on board the space station. I do have some things that I don\u2019t want to share because I want to surprise my son with them, but I have some things that I want to do or have him see me do in those big areas on board the space station \u2014 you know flips and bubbles and eating M&M\u2019s like Pac-Man across the space station. I want to do all those things, but I want to do them just for my son.Boe: What I\u2019m looking forward to most and returning to space is being in a completely different spaceship, so that\u2019ll be neat. .\u2009.\u2009. And you know I\u2019ve flown twice before. The first flight, [I] missed a lot of things just because you\u2019re busy doing your job .\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. So second flight I picked up a lot of details. So I think the third flight not only will I get to see a new spaceship, but I\u2019ll appreciate just being able to pick up a lot of the things that I missed on the first two flights.Hurley: I think it\u2019s the sights [and] the smells looking out the cupola again. [The cupola is a large round window on the station that provides amazing views of Earth.] Hopefully this flight [I\u2019ll be] getting a little more time to actually do some of that stuff. I have no idea if that\u2019s the case, but I hope so. .\u2009.\u2009. And then just being able to get this accomplished for the country. It\u2019s important. .\u2009.\u2009. It has been pushing seven years now that we haven\u2019t had this launch capability in the United States.Q: Have you requested any changes or upgrades on the new spacecraft that you wish you\u2019d had on shuttle or Soyuz?Williams: These new spacecraft have taken advantage of technology advances in the last 10, 20 years, and that\u2019s making these spacecraft smarter and probably safer and a little bit more automated, where the people inside don\u2019t have to be looking at every little thing. .\u2009.\u2009. So the situational awareness as well as the safety of these spacecraft I think is absolutely more than it was in the past, and that\u2019s because of technology advances in the last 20 years or so. So I\u2019m thinking these spacecraft are going to be pretty awesome. For more on the astronauts, read Christian Davenport\u2019s longer story at wapo.st/unsungastronauts.More in KidsPost:\nAstronauts get virtual test-drive of new ride to space stationThe space shuttle\u2019s benefits and limitsFind all our stories on NASA\u2019s Journey to Mars NASA is joining forces with 2 companies to ferry crews to the International Space Station. Meet astronauts who will launch into space from America",
        "author": "KidsPost"
    },
    {
        "title": "Top travel toys and games for 2019 (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1993",
        "date": "2019-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/8-top-travel-toys-for-2019/2019/06/10/34192040-8b72-11e9-adf3-f70f78c156e8_story.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s an old saying that getting there is half the fun. That\u2019s true if you are hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But what if you\u2019re on a plane with nothing to see but clouds? Or stuck in traffic on a freeway? Not much fun. For those times, you might want something to distract and entertain you. We looked at dozens of new toys, games and activities, and selected a handful that are easy to pack for your summer travels. We can\u2019t guarantee that playing with them will provide half the fun of your vacation, but it would definitely be better than staring at clouds. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPuzzle it outDo you like to figure out how things fit together? These two palm-size games will have you puzzling for hours. Kanoodle Gravity (Educational Insights, $17.99) includes 10 colored pieces that stack up in a vertical board. Pick from 40 challenges that get increasingly difficult. The board, with colored blocks inside, snaps into a tray for storage, so the game fits easily into a seat pocket or suitcase.Future space travelers can navigate through an asteroid field in Asteroid Escape (SmartGames, $14.99). Pick a challenge and arrange the spaceship and seven squares with asteroids on the board. Use the one open space to maneuver the ship off the game board. It\u2019s no easy task with those pesky asteroids in the way.If you like cube games but are looking for something more creative, try Shashibo (Fun in Motion Toys, $19.99). This three-inch cube, which is held together with magnets, has a pattern on the outside and three on the inside. With twists and turns, you can form 70 geometric designs.Take and makeBuilding sets aren\u2019t always a good choice for taking on a trip. But Lego has several sets that make it easy to keep the little pieces from getting lost. The Friends Heart Box ($7.99) features one girl and accessories related to something she likes to do (play guitar, go camping). The pieces fit inside a heart-shaped box that also must be assembled. There are five sets, with about 85 pieces each, and all five stack together.Travelers who have more room should check out two new \u201cLego Movie 2\u201d sets. Emmet\u2019s Builder Box and Lucy\u2019s Builder Box (Lego, $29.99 each) include about 130 pieces and instructions to build three small models. Everything fits inside plastic mini briefcases with room to bring along a few other mini figures.Deal us inCard games and summer vacations went together even before Grandma was little. She probably played Go Fish and Old Maid. You might want something less traditional. Not Parent Approved ($24.99) definitely fits the bill. It\u2019s a fill-in-the-blank game \u2014 with the focus on awkward moments and toilet humor. The game starts with a burp contest to see who will read the cards (the Burp Boss). Players use cards in their hand to respond to statements such as \u201cMy sister is most annoying when she is .\u2009.\u2009.\u201d The Burp Boss determines which answers win points. The game is for four to 10 players \u2014 maybe even Grandma. It\u2019s your call as to whether she would want to be a Burp Boss. (Correction: An earlier version of this story listed the price of the game at $19.99. )Fluffy companionIf vacation means leaving your beloved pet back home, bring along Rescue Runts Babies (KD Kids, $9.99). The small plush animals are supposed to come straight from a pretend rescue organization. The dogs, cats and wild animals look scruffy at first, but new owners can brush their fur, add a ribbon collar and turn their crate into a little house or carrier. Certainly they won\u2019t take the place of Bailey the beagle or Sadie the Siamese, but they\u2019ll give you a furry friend for the ride.More in KidsPost\nThese travel toys we picked last time are still great optionsJoin the 2019 Summer Book Club: \u201cMake a Difference\u201d Puzzles, building sets and a fun card game are fun that\u2019s easy to pack. Top travel toys and games for 2019",
        "author": "Christina Barron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists discover shark teeth in rock found near Sue the T. rex (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1994",
        "date": "2019-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/scientists-discover-shark-teeth-in-rock-found-near-sue-the-t-rex/2019/01/22/7eb1d60e-1df6-11e9-8e21-59a09ff1e2a1_story.html",
        "text": "Scientists conducting a recent examination of the two tons of rock left over after the fossilized bones of the celebrated Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue were unearthed in the 1990s came across a surprise: shark teeth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe huge meat-eating dinosaur did not meet its death in a shark attack in some sort of \u201cJaws\u201d meets \u201cJurassic Park\u201d monster mash. But, scientists said Monday, when the 40\u00bd -foot-long Sue died some 67 million years ago, the beast fell into a South Dakota river teeming with sharks \u2014 small ones \u2014 thriving in the freshwater environment. The skeleton of Sue, the largest, most complete and best-preserved T. rex ever unearthed, is displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago, which kept the leftover rock for years in underground storage. That rock has now yielded fossils from other creatures that were Sue\u2019s neighbors including a shark species called Galagadon nordquistae.Galagadon, related to a group called carpet sharks found in Indo-Pacific seas today, measured one to two feet long, with teeth the size of a sand grain, about four-hundredths of an inch. Tyrannosaurus teeth were up to a foot long.If Galagadon ever interacted with Sue, it may have been when the thirsty dinosaur came to the river for a gulp of water.\u201cIt would not surprise me at all if a T. rex individual scared a little Galagadon as it lowered its head to drink,\u201d said North Carolina State University paleontologist Terry \u201cBucky\u201d Gates, lead author of the research published in the Journal of Paleontology.If Galagadon resembled its existing relatives, it was a blunt-faced bottom-dweller with barbels by its mouth like a catfish and camouflage patterning.\u201cThe teeth have an unusual shape with three unequal points and a wide apron at the root. Some of the teeth bear an uncanny resemblance to the spaceship in the 1980s arcade game \u2018Galaga,\u2019 which inspired the genus name,\u201d said co-author Pete Makovicky, a paleontologist and Field Museum dinosaur curator.Scientists also are studying fossils of at least two other shark species from Sue\u2019s river. Virtually all sharks live in the sea, though two freshwater species today reside permanently in rivers and lakes, and some other species venture into freshwater.\u201cI doubt Galagadon spent its whole life in freshwater habitats,\u201d Makovicky said, suggesting its river may have been connected to an inland sea 100 miles away that at the time split North America in half.More in KidsPost\nThe story behind dino poopNewly named dinosaur makes T. rex look tinyMeet Matt Carrano, dinosaur hunter Small sharks would have been no match for the king of the dinosaurs. Scientists discover shark teeth in rock found near Sue the T. rex",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters before humans arrive. (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1995",
        "date": "2018-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/where-to-stay-on-mars-robots-could-create-living-quarters-before-humans-arrive/2018/11/02/21120e40-c34e-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "This story is one in a series about U.S. human spaceflight.Would you like to go to Mars?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhere once that was a question for science-fiction books and movies, today it\u2019s a very real possibility. NASA, the U.S. space agency, expects to send people to the Red Planet in 20 to 25 years. Some private companies think they can do it even sooner. So forget about fictional little green Martians invading Earth. In the not-too-distant future, you could be packing for a trip to our solar system next-door neighbor \u2014 a voyage that, with current technology, would take about eight months each way.Think of the frequent-flier miles! At its closest, in August 2003, Mars was \u201cjust\u201d 34.8 million miles from Earth. On average, though, it\u2019s about 140 million miles away. The distance varies because both planets are constantly moving.After traveling all that way, you\u2019re probably going to want to stay awhile. NASA is working on two plans. One would have you and your fellow astronauts remain on Mars for a few weeks. The other plan has you staying for more than a year.In either case, where will you live in that desertlike environment? And what will you eat? In addition to the planet\u2019s thin atmosphere, its rocky, sandy surface lacks liquid water and endures weeks-long dust storms, so growing food outdoors is a dream decades away at best.These are among the millions of questions that scientists and engineers are tackling. And they\u2019re seeking ideas from all of us.Picking our brainsThe 3-D-printed Habitat Challenge is a five-year competition hosted by NASA and its partners to design housing for deep-space exploration, including trips to Mars.Basically, the pros want to see what the rest of us can come up with to build reusable shelters using recyclables and materials found on site.The competition, with $3.15 million in prize money, is in its third and final phase and will end in the spring.\u201cIt\u2019s been eye-opening to learn from people outside NASA their concept of what a house on Mars would look like,\u201d said Monsi Roman, program manager for this and similar NASA competitions at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what people can come up with when they\u2019re not constrained by money, time and other limits.\u201dNASA\u2019s goal, she said, is to have its experts look at an entry and think: \u201cYeah, that makes 100 percent sense. How can we not have thought about that before?\u201dRobots will go firstFor the competition\u2019s final phase, entrants are building virtual or reduced-scale models of their habitats. Each must be able to house four astronauts for one year and include space for cooking, sleeping and recreation in addition to a work area. Some plans include an indoor garden. All must offer protection from harmful radiation levels much higher than on Earth.The heart of the challenge is that the habitat must be ready for use before any astronauts arrive on Mars. Robots will go first and collect local materials to create a mixture called Martian concrete. One or more 3-D printers sent with the robots will use that concrete and other materials to build the habitat.Entries have come in various shapes and sizes. Team Zopherus from Arkansas won the first stage with a habitat that looks like the head of a Minion covered in brown rocks (without the goggles). A multi-legged landing vehicle moves like a giant spider and sends out buglike rover robots to collect stuff.Mississippi\u2019s Kahn-Yates team took third place with a sleek, shell-like design intended to lessen the effects of dust storms and let in more sunlight on a planet where the average temperature is minus-81 degrees!AI SpaceFactory of New York came in second with a candy-barrel design that builds up, not out, which the team says will make 3-D-printing easier. It\u2019s plain on the outside, and its futuristic interior has a bright \u201cskyroom\u201d on the top level. It\u2019s so awesome that one Earthling who viewed it online said, \u201cWe need that .\u2009.\u2009. here.\u201dTo see short videos from the top 5 teams in the first round of Phase 3, ask Mom or Dad to sign on to go.nasa.gov/2NBKUhm. Once there, click on the links under the photos on the right side of the page.More in KidsPost\nNASA heads back to the moon on the way to MarsEver wondered what\u2019s on an astronaut\u2019s menu?Would you fly to space? Several companies are preparing to take tourists. NASA\u2019s Habitat Challenge asks for designs that can be built by 3-D printers. Where to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters before humans arrive.",
        "author": "Marylou Tousignant"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ever wondered what\u2019s on the astronauts\u2019 menu? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "1996",
        "date": "2018-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/ever-wondered-whats-on-the-astronauts-menu/2018/11/02/cf9afbd0-c34d-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "This story is one in a series about U.S. human spaceflight.Neil Armstrong may have taken that first small step for man onto the moon, but it was John Glenn who took the first slurp of applesauce for humankind. Until he ate while orbiting Earth in 1962, scientists at NASA weren\u2019t sure humans could swallow and digest food while in space. Luckily, he chowed down in microgravity with no trouble. Today\u2019s astronauts sometimes spend months at a time living in the International Space Station (ISS), so they\u2019d get pretty hungry without a few snacks! WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOf course, while the human body is happy to take in a meal while hovering 250 miles above Earth, the process of cooking and eating food isn\u2019t exactly the same as it is back home. That\u2019s why NASA scientists are still working hard to perfect astronaut menus. A healthy diet is even more crucial for space farers than it is here on the surface, because spending time in space makes your body start to lose bone and muscle mass. NASA has to figure out how to send food up in a rocket, store it for as long as possible and make sure it delivers a perfect balance of nutrients \u2014 and it has to keep astronauts from getting bored, too!\u201cImagine trying to eat the same food for every meal for six months. You may get tired of the food and eat less than you need to maintain weight, health and performance. That\u2019s why we have to make sure there\u2019s a large variety of healthy food available for the astronauts to make choices,\u201d says F. Ryan Dowdy, ISS food system manager at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.Astronauts have about 200 food items to pick from. According to Dowdy, a lot of the options are surprisingly similar to meals we eat on Earth.\u201cWhether it\u2019s macaroni and cheese or chocolate pudding cake, it\u2019s important for the astronauts when eating to be reminded of home,\u201d he says. \u201cFood can be an important psychological comfort in the stressful environment of space.\u201dIt\u2019s the preparation that\u2019s unique: Food often has to sit in storage for six months before it even goes into space \u2014 and last for weeks or months at a time once it\u2019s up there \u2014 so NASA designs everything with a shelf life of at least two years. Macaroni and cheese is freeze-dried (meaning that most of the moisture is removed, which makes it safe to store at room temperature), and astronauts add hot water to it on the space station. Chocolate pudding cake is preserved similarly to canned food, but NASA puts it in a flexible pouch so it takes up less space.Some Earth foods are already perfectly fit for microgravity consumption. Tortillas, for example, are a great alternative to bread \u2014 they last a long time in storage, and they don\u2019t form crumbs that float around and get caught in important parts of the ship. Astronauts can also request small quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables whenever NASA sends supplies up, but for the most part, they\u2019re eating various combinations of super-durable stored foods.As NASA looks to the future of spaceflight \u2014 with missions to Mars, and perhaps even farther \u2014 the agency has to design even more durable food. It takes almost a year to get to Mars, and astronauts will have to bring food for the journey home, too. Dowdy says NASA is working to extend the shelf life of its foods to around five years, but experiments in space farming are also part of the plan.Astronauts on the ISS are able to farm plants such as lettuce in small quantities, but Dowdy says it will take some time before this is a sustainable source of calories. He thinks 3-D printed treats may also be on the menu someday soon. One thing is for sure: It\u2019s going to take a lot of scientific know-how to feed the space explorers of the future.More in KidsPost\nNASA heads back to the moon as a pit stop to MarsWould you fly in space? Several companies are offering the opportunity.New books on space explore the moon and beyond NASA provides about 200 choices on the space station, but travel to Mars poses new challenges. Ever wondered what\u2019s on the astronauts\u2019 menu?",
        "author": "Rachel Feltman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon appears to be active below the surface, scientists say (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1997",
        "date": "2019-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/moon-appears-to-be-active-below-the-surface-scientists-say/2019/05/14/3c09ccdc-765a-11e9-b7ae-390de4259661_story.html",
        "text": "The moon may be dynamic and tectonically active like Earth based on a new analysis revealed Monday of quakes measured by seismometers on the moon from 1969 and 1977.Researchers examining the seismic data gathered during NASA\u2019s Apollo missions traced the location of some of the quakes to step-shaped cliffs called scarps on the lunar surface that formed relatively recently, in geological terms, because of the ongoing shrinking of the moon as its hot interior cools. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt means that the moon has somehow managed to remain tectonically active after 4.51 billion years,\u201d said Smithsonian Institution planetary scientist Thomas Watters, who led the research published in the journal Nature Geoscience.Earth\u2019s tectonic activity is driven by its hot interior. The moon, which orbits our planet at a distance of about 239,000 miles, has a diameter of about 2,160 miles, a bit more than a quarter of Earth\u2019s diameter.Images from NASA\u2019s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showed that the moon has delicately shriveled as its interior has cooled over the eons, like a plump grape transforming into a smaller raisin. As a result, it has acquired thousands of small surface wrinkles in the form of surface features called thrust-fault scarps.These faults push one part of the lunar crust up and over the adjoining part, said University of Maryland geologist and study co-author Nicholas Schmerr. They can reach up to about 330 feet tall and extend for many miles.\u201cThis is exciting as it wasn\u2019t clear if the moon had already gone through this period billions of years ago and was tectonically dead, or if it was still active in the present,\u201d Schmerr said.U.S. astronauts placed seismometers on the lunar surface during the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15 and 16 missions, recording 28 shallow quakes up to almost 5 magnitude, which is moderate strength. Eight quakes occurred close to faults. Other events such as meteorite impacts can produce quakes, but those would produce different seismic signatures.Boulder movements and disturbed soil near the scarps also indicated tectonic activity.Watters said experts must be mindful that quakes may strike near these scarps when planning sites for future lunar exploration and a long-term human presence on the moon.The moon is not the solar system\u2019s only object shrinking with age. The innermost planet, Mercury, boasts many thrust faults.More in KidsPost\nNew books on space explore the moon and beyondA new era in spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to MarsRead KidsPost\u2019s collection of stories about the journey to the moon and Mars Quake-monitoring devices left on surface years ago provided data for new study. Moon appears to be active below the surface, scientists say",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "KidsPost\u2019s space poster contest winner: Moubon Kurukumbi of Fairfax, Virginia (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "1998",
        "date": "2018-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/kidsposts-space-poster-contest-winner-moubon-kurukumbi-of-fairfax-virginia/2018/11/05/5ab08824-c34f-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "Moubon Ray Kurukumbi loves to explore. The 11-year-old\u2019s curiosity about space exploration helped her create a bold design for KidsPost\u2019s \u201cAmerica\u2019s Return to Space\u201d poster contest. The Fairfax, Virginia, resident included symbols of strength, teamwork and patriotism.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAmerica is putting astronauts in space, and I took that literally. I wanted to show diversity,\u201d Moubon said. \u201cI wanted to put a deeper meaning in the poster and make it colorful, too.\u201d When thinking about depicting America in the poster, Moubon said the first thing she thought of was NeilArmstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. The U.S. flag and the moon were meant to take over the poster because that was the beginning of America\u2019s history in space, she said. The eagle symbolizes liberty and the fact that America has the independence to explore anything and anywhere. The hands reaching out represent teamwork and diversity.Her use of symbols and their placement made her poster a favorite among the contest judges.\u201cThe concept was well-thought out. It brought all the elements together in a very different way. Art is supposed to make you look and react, and this poster certainly did that,\u201d said Washington Post design editor Suzette Moyer.The Mosby Woods Elementary School student won tickets to the Astronaut Training Experience at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Central Florida as part of her prize package. She said she\u2019s excited to experience what it\u2019s like to live on Mars. Moubon\u2019s favorite planet is Saturn, because of its rings. She knows it\u2019s impossible to live there. At least for now.\u201cI like how space is never ending, and there is so much to discover,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is no specific map for it, so wherever we go, we will always find something new.\u201dMore in KidsPost\nA new era of spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to MarsNASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patchesWould you could fly in space? Private companies are gearing up for space tourists. Moubon\u2019s win landed her an astronaut training opportunity at the Kennedy Space Center. KidsPost\u2019s space poster contest winner: Moubon Kurukumbi of Fairfax, Virginia",
        "author": "Dara Elasfar"
    },
    {
        "title": "KidsPost\u2019s space poster contest winner: Moubon Kurukumbi of Fairfax, Virginia (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "1999",
        "date": "2018-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/kidsposts-space-poster-contest-winner-moubon-kurukumbi-of-fairfax-virginia/2018/11/05/5ab08824-c34f-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html",
        "text": "Moubon Ray Kurukumbi loves to explore. The 11-year-old\u2019s curiosity about space exploration helped her create a bold design for KidsPost\u2019s \u201cAmerica\u2019s Return to Space\u201d poster contest. The Fairfax, Virginia, resident included symbols of strength, teamwork and patriotism.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAmerica is putting astronauts in space, and I took that literally. I wanted to show diversity,\u201d Moubon said. \u201cI wanted to put a deeper meaning in the poster and make it colorful, too.\u201d When thinking about depicting America in the poster, Moubon said the first thing she thought of was NeilArmstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. The U.S. flag and the moon were meant to take over the poster because that was the beginning of America\u2019s history in space, she said. The eagle symbolizes liberty and the fact that America has the independence to explore anything and anywhere. The hands reaching out represent teamwork and diversity.Her use of symbols and their placement made her poster a favorite among the contest judges.\u201cThe concept was well-thought out. It brought all the elements together in a very different way. Art is supposed to make you look and react, and this poster certainly did that,\u201d said Washington Post design editor Suzette Moyer.The Mosby Woods Elementary School student won tickets to the Astronaut Training Experience at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Central Florida as part of her prize package. She said she\u2019s excited to experience what it\u2019s like to live on Mars. Moubon\u2019s favorite planet is Saturn, because of its rings. She knows it\u2019s impossible to live there. At least for now.\u201cI like how space is never ending, and there is so much to discover,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is no specific map for it, so wherever we go, we will always find something new.\u201dMore in KidsPost\nA new era of spaceflight: Back to the moon on the way to MarsNASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patchesWould you could fly in space? Private companies are gearing up for space tourists. Moubon\u2019s win landed her an astronaut training opportunity at the Kennedy Space Center. KidsPost\u2019s space poster contest winner: Moubon Kurukumbi of Fairfax, Virginia",
        "author": "Dara Elasfar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Top STEM toys are hands-on fun (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2000",
        "date": "2018-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/top-stem-toys-are-hands-on-fun/2018/10/26/3650491e-c0f3-11e8-9005-5104e9616c21_story.html",
        "text": "Do you remember in the movie \u201cToy Story,\u201d when puffed-up superhero Buzz Lightyear finds out what he really is?\u201cI\u2019m not a Space Ranger,\u201d he tells Woody sadly. \u201cI\u2019m just a toy. A stupid little insignificant toy.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWhoa, hey, wait a minute,\u201d Woody says. \u201cBeing a toy is a lot better than being a Space Ranger.\u201d Woody\u2019s right. Being a real toy is better than being a pretend space character. And Buzz would be thrilled to know that space and science toys are superhot right now.Microscopes, robots, rockets, marble mazes \u2014 these are just a few of the latest STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) recommendations from Stephanie Oppenheim, co-founder of the independent Oppenheim Toy Portfolio ratings group.If you want to become an engineer, scientist or space explorer, you need to be comfortable with math and science, \u201cand that begins by making STEM fun and engaging,\u201d she says, adding: \u201cWe love the new crop of toys that engage kids to learn how to code, rather than passively playing a video game. Learning how circuits work or building with blocks \u2014 all are hands-on experiences that build problem-solving skills essential for future advances in science.\u201dCheck out the STEM and space-themed toys on this page as well as other can\u2019t-miss toys at toyportfolio.com. Prices are those of the manufacturer. Shop around, and you might find a better deal.Botley the Coding Robot\nLearning Resources, $79.99.\n Age 5 and older.Botley pops out of the box ready for action. Even kindergartners can learn simple coding in minutes, with no phone or tablet required. Older kids will like the advanced features, with up to 120 steps to code. Kit has 77 pieces, including 40 coding cards, a remote programmer and various obstacles to challenge Botley. A 45-piece set is also available.STEM Starter Kit\nMy First Lab, $19.99.\n Age 6 and older.At last you can put your smartphone to good (that is, educational) use. This nifty gadget clips to any smartphone or tablet and turns it into a portable mini-microscope with 60x magnification. Take your own pictures or examine 15 prepared slides with 3-D specimens, including human hair and an insect leg. With this, your cellphone may be a welcome sight in science class.Inspiring Women: Katherine Johnson Doll\n\nMattel, $29.99. Age 6 and older. Use out of reach of younger children.\nWhat better inspiration for a budding female scientist than a real one: Katherine Johnson. A brilliant mathematician and physicist, Johnson calculated the trajectory, launch windows and emergency backup plans for several U.S. spaceflights and was critical to their success. She and other women who broke racial and gender barriers at NASA were featured in the 2016 movie \u201cHidden Figures.\u201dQ-BA-Maze 2.0: Rails Extreme Set\nMindWare, $99.95. Age 6 and older. \n\nIt\u2019s another marvelous marble maze from the magicians at MindWare. This year\u2019s set has 82 cubes, 18 straightaway rails, four coaster tubes, four marble catchers and 30 marbles. Double-exit cubes keep you in suspense about which way the marbles will run. Easy to assemble and reconfigure in many ways. \u201cGreat toy for any age, even 82,\u201d said one reviewer.Space Shuttle Explorer\nLego, $29.99. Ages 7 to 12.With this Creator 3-in-1 kit, you can build a shuttle with an opening payload bay and robotic arm, and then rebuild it as a moon station or a space rover. With 285 pieces, and the ability to add more from other Lego construction kits, the sky is the limit. Or should we say, space is the limit? The set includes a mini-astronaut for your own \u201cone small step\u201d adventures.Snap Circuits Bric: Structures\nElenco Electronics, $44.95. Age 8 and older.This intro to engineering and electricity combines circuitry kits with plastic building bricks. Kids can wire their builds with Snap Circuits lights, sounds, moving parts and 3-D circuits. In the process, they\u2019ll learn how skyscrapers light up, how drawbridges move and other cool things. The set includes 20 modules, 75 adapters and more than 140 colorful bricks. An idea booklet gets you launched with 20 projects.Luciana Vega\nAmerican Girl, $115. Age 8 and older.This aspiring astronaut is ready for an adventure in space. Like her American Girl doll predecessors, Luciana comes with a book relating her life story. And if your Nana\u2019s feeling extra generous this holiday season, tell her that Luciana would really love the flight suit ($28) and spacesuit with astronaut helmet ($75), both made just for her.Avengers Hero Inventor Kit\nLittleBits, $149.99. Age 8 and older.\nMarvel characters such as Bruce Banner (a.k.a. the Hulk), Iron Man and Shuri help kids create high-tech gear and invent identities with special powers for their own superheroes. The 18-plus activities focus on lights, sound, speed and action \u2014 controlled from a wearable sensor sleeve. To operate, an iPhone (iOS 10.0 or later) or Android (5.0 or later) is required. The good news: No grown-ups necessary.Duo-Scope Microscope\nMy First Lab, $69.99. Age 9 and older.This microscope uses the same technology that real lab technicians and scientists employ. \u201cDuo\u201d refers to two light sources, allowing for viewing of solid objects like bugs as well as slides. Duo-Scope is capable of 40x, 100x and 400x magnification. Accessories include five blank slides, four prepared slides, stains, tweezers, a petri dish and a manual with suggested experiments.Women of NASA\nLego, $24.99. Age 10 and older.\nDo you recognize the names Mae Jemison, Margaret Hamilton, Nancy Grace Roman and Sally Ride? If not, you will after building this 231-piece set honoring these pioneering women at NASA. The builds are small, but the women\u2019s accomplishments in the fields of astronomy, computer science, physics and engineering are big.More in KidsPost:\nFind all KidsPost stories related to spaceA look at the top toys of 2017Toy Fair 2018 is flush with poo-inspired games and trinkets Toys and games featuring science, tech, engineering and math will be hot for the holidays. Top STEM toys are hands-on fun",
        "author": "Marylou Tousignant"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts brought rocks back from the moon, but they also left \u2018gifts\u2019 behind (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2001",
        "date": "2019-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/astronauts-brought-rocks-back-from-the-moon-but-they-also-left-items-behind/2019/07/01/95d47360-5270-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html",
        "text": "Did you know that 12 people have visited the moon?It\u2019s been almost 50 years since the moon\u2019s first visitors arrived July 20, 1969. When Neil Armstrong took humans\u2019 first step on the lunar surface, 600 million people crowded around televisions to watch.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe world couldn\u2019t wait to see what the astronauts brought home \u2014 mysterious moondust and ancient rocks. But the astronauts didn\u2019t just take things from the moon. They left things behind, including science experiments, tools, backpacks, boots and food pouches. The astronauts also gave the moon a few special gifts. The Apollo 11 crew, the first moon walkers, brought a silicon disc the size of a 50-cent piece to leave on the moon. It contained \u201cgoodwill messages\u201d from leaders of 73 countries written in tiny letters etched on the disc. Each message promoted friendship. One from Pierre Trudeau, Canada\u2019s prime minister at the time, read: \u201cMan has reached out and touched the tranquil moon. May that high accomplishment allow man to rediscover the Earth and find peace there.\u201dThe disc was placed inside an aluminum capsule to protect it from harsh temperatures on the moon. The astronauts left the capsule in the Sea of Tranquility, the area where they landed and explored.In February 1971, Alan Shepard (Apollo 14) surprised the world when he bounced across the moon carrying a golf club and two golf balls he had smuggled onboard. With a TV camera rolling, Shepard attempted several one-handed swings before finally sending a ball soaring about 200 yards through space. Those two balls became unique gifts to the moon. (They\u2019re buried beneath the moondust.)When Charles Duke arrived on Apollo 16 in 1972, he brought a personal gift. On his last day, he placed a photo of his family \u2014 Duke, his wife and their two young sons \u2014 on the gray, dusty surface. But after all these years, the picture has probably faded to white, according to Dave Williams from NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.\u201cThe moon has no atmosphere, it has no protection from [ultraviolet] radiation, and so the sunlight is particularly intense,\u201d Williams explained.All six moon missions each left behind a U.S. flag planted in the rocky soil. But Williams says they\u2019ve probably vanished by now.\u201cThe flags were made of nylon,\u201d he said, \u201cso it\u2019s likely that the intense UV radiation, combined with the temperature extremes, may have caused them all to disintegrate over the past almost 50 years.\u201dThe last three missions \u2014 Apollo 15, 16 and 17 \u2014 each brought a lunar rover. Could future explorers take them out for a spin? Not so, Williams says.\u201cThey were battery-powered. On the moon, temperatures range from almost 250 degrees during the day to below minus-250 at night. This would destroy a battery.\u201dAlthough most items on the moon have been damaged by severe temperatures and harsh sunlight, Williams says, one kind of memento from the moon landings remains.\u201cWe can see the tracks the astronauts left behind in pictures taken today by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Since there is no air or water on the moon, there is almost nothing to wipe away the tracks, so some of them may last for millions of years.\u201dThose footprints are a permanent reminder of 12 brave visitors.Correction: An earlier version of this story described the goodwill disc left on the moon as silicone, a man-made compound. The disc was made of silicon, a natural element often used in computer chips. This story has been updated.Slade is the author of \u201cDaring Dozen: The Twelve Who Walked on the Moon\u201d and \u201cCountdown: 2979 Days to the Moon.\u201dMore in KidsPost\nU.S. plans return to the moon on the way to MarsEver wondered what\u2019s on the astronauts\u2019 menu?New books on space explore the moon and beyond Messages and mementos from Earth started with the Apollo 11 mission 50 years ago. Astronauts brought rocks back from the moon, but they also left \u2018gifts\u2019 behind",
        "author": "Suzanne Slade"
    },
    {
        "title": "Helicopter that\u2019s headed to Mars named Ingenuity (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2002",
        "date": "2020-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/helicopter-thats-headed-to-mars-named-ingenuity/2020/04/30/dfc2b3a4-8b2e-11ea-8ac1-bfb250876b7a_story.html",
        "text": "An Alabama high school student named NASA\u2019s first Mars helicopter that will be sent to the Red Planet later this summer.Ingenuity, the name submitted by Vaneeza Rupani, was selected for the four pound solar-powered helicopter, NASA said in a statement Wednesday. The name coined by the junior at Tuscaloosa County High School in Northport was one of 28,000 names submitted in NASA\u2019s \u201cName the Rover\u201d essay contest for K-12 students across the United States. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe ingenuity and brilliance of people working hard to overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel are what allow us all to experience the wonders of space exploration,\u201d Rupani wrote in her essay. \u201cIngenuity is what allows people to accomplish amazing things, and it allows us to expand our horizons to the edges of the universe.\u201dIn March, the space agency selected the name Perseverance for the Mars Rover based on the essay from Alex Mather, of Lake Braddock Secondary in Burke, Virginia. But NASA decided to come back to the submitted essays to also pick a name for the helicopter that will accompany the rover.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Ingenuity \u201cencapsulates the values that our helicopter tech demo will showcase.\u201d\u201cIt was really cool I got to be a part of something like this,\u201d Vaneeza told the Associated Press.Ingenuity has already completed testing in a NASA simulation chamber in Southern California. Next, it will be attached to the belly of the Perseverance, which will take off for Mars in July or August. After it arrives on the Red Planet, the helicopter will remain under a covering to protect it from debris until the timing is right for the aircraft to be deployed.It will then have a 31-day flight window to prove that powered flights can be accomplished on Mars, NASA said.This year\u2019s mission is part of a program that also includes missions to the moon to prepare for a possible human exploration of Mars. NASA plans to land the first woman and the next man on the moon in 2024, and set up a continued human presence \u201con and around\u201d the moon in eight years so they can use it to send astronauts to Mars.\n\nMore in KidsPostWhere to stay on Mars? Robots could create housing before humans arriveA new era of spaceflight: NASA heads to the moon on the way to MarsWould you fly to space? Private companies are gearing up to take you. Alabama high school student had suggested the name in an essay contest. Helicopter that\u2019s headed to Mars named Ingenuity",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mini helicopter makes historic flight on Mars (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2003",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/mini-helicopter-makes-historic-flight-on-mars/2021/04/19/ca2ea46e-9c97-11eb-9d05-ae06f4529ece_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s experimental helicopter Ingenuity rose into the thin air above the dusty red surface of Mars on Monday, achieving the first controlled, powered flight by an aircraft on another planet.The triumph was celebrated as a Wright Brothers moment. The mini four-pound copter even carried a bit of wing fabric from the Wright Flyer that made similar history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAltimeter data confirms that Ingenuity has performed its first flight, the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet,\u201d said the helicopter\u2019s chief pilot back on Earth, Havard Grip, his voice breaking as his teammates erupted in applause.It was a brief hop \u2014 just 39 seconds \u2014 but it accomplished all the major milestones.Project manager MiMi Aung was jubilant. \u201cWe\u2019ve been talking so long about our \u2018Wright Brothers moment,\u2019 and here it is,\u201d she said.Flight controllers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California declared success after receiving the data and images from the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity hitched a ride to Mars on Perseverance, clinging to the rover\u2019s belly upon their arrival in an ancient river delta in February.Meet Ingenuity, the mini-copter NASA is about to drop on MarsThe $85 million helicopter demo was considered high risk, yet high reward. \u201cEach world gets only one first flight,\u201d Aung observed earlier this month.Scientists cheered the news from around the world and even from space.\u201cA whole new way to explore the alien terrain in our solar system is now at our disposal,\u201d Nottingham Trent University astronomer Daniel Brown said from England.This first test flight \u2014 with more to come by Ingenuity \u2014 holds great promise, Brown noted. Future helicopters could serve as otherworldly scouts for rovers, and eventually astronauts, in difficult, dangerous locales.Ground controllers had to wait more than three hours before learning whether the preprogrammed flight had succeeded more than 170 million miles away.When the news finally came, the operations center filled with applause, cheers and laughter. More followed when the first black-and-white photo from Ingenuity appeared, showing the helicopter\u2019s shadow as it hovered above the surface of Mars. \u201cThe shadow of greatness, #MarsHelicopter first flight on another world complete!\u201d NASA astronaut Victor Glover tweeted from the International Space Station.Next came stunning color video of the copter\u2019s clean landing, taken by Perseverance, \u201cthe best host little Ingenuity could ever hope for,\u201d Aung said in thanking everyone.The helicopter hovered 30 seconds at its planned altitude of 10 feet.To accomplish all this, the helicopter\u2019s twin, counterrotating rotor blades needed to spin at 2,500 revolutions per minute \u2014 five times faster than on Earth. With an atmosphere just 1 percent the thickness of Earth\u2019s, engineers had to build a helicopter light enough \u2014 with blades spinning fast enough \u2014 to generate this otherworldly lift.More than six years in the making, Ingenuity is just 19 inches tall, a spindly four-legged chopper. Its fuselage, containing all the batteries, heaters and sensors, is the size of a tissue box. The carbon-fiber, foam-filled rotors are the biggest pieces: Each pair stretches four feet tip to tip.Up to five increasingly challenging flights are planned until the beginning of May. The team plans to test its limits and possibly wreck the craft after it sends its data back home.Until then, Perseverance will keep watch over Ingenuity. Flight engineers affectionately call them Percy and Ginny. \u201cBig sister\u2019s watching,\u201d said Malin Space Science Systems\u2019 Elsa Jensen, the rover\u2019s lead camera operator.\n\n\u2014 Associated Press\n\nRead more from KidsPost:Helicopter that will head to Mars is named IngenuityWhere to stay on Mars? Robots could create living quarters before humans arrive.Would you fly to space? Several companies are preparing to take tourists.Read more stories about Mars and NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program Ingenuity hovers 39 seconds, marking the first controlled, powered aircraft flight on another planet. Mini helicopter makes historic flight on Mars",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mini helicopter on Mars carries tiny piece of Wright brothers\u2019 1903 airplane (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2004",
        "date": "2021-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/mini-helicopter-on-mars-carries-tiny-piece-of-wright-brothers-1903-airplane/2021/03/24/7684f092-7c95-11eb-a976-c028a4215c78_story.html",
        "text": "A piece of the Wright brothers\u2019 first airplane is on Mars.NASA\u2019s experimental Martian helicopter holds a small swatch of fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, the space agency revealed Tuesday. The helicopter, named Ingenuity, hitched a ride to the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover, arriving last month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIngenuity will attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet no sooner than April 8. It will mark a \u201cWright brothers\u2019 moment,\u201d noted Bobby Braun, director for planetary science at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Meet Ingenuity, the mini-copter NASA is sending to MarsThe Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, the Wrights\u2019 hometown, donated the postage-stamp-size piece of muslin from the plane\u2019s bottom left wing at NASA\u2019s request. The airplane itself is at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.The swatch made the 300 million-mile journey to Mars with the blessing of the Wright brothers\u2019 great-grandniece and great-grandnephew, said park curator Steve Lucht.\u201cWilbur and Orville Wright would be pleased to know that a little piece of their 1903 Wright Flyer I, the machine that launched the Space Age by barely one quarter of a mile, is going to soar into history again on Mars!\u201d Amanda Wright Lane and Stephen Wright said in a statement provided by the park.Orville Wright was onboard for the world\u2019s first powered, controlled flight on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The brothers took turns, making four flights that day.A fragment of Wright Flyer wood and fabric flew to the moon with Apollo 11\u2019s Neil Armstrong in 1969. A swatch also accompanied John Glenn into orbit aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Both astronauts were from Ohio.NASA\u2019s four-pound helicopter will attempt to rise 10 feet into the extremely thin Martian air on its first hop. Up to five increasingly higher and longer flights are planned over the course of a month.The material is taped to a cable beneath the helicopter\u2019s solar panel.For now, Ingenuity remains attached to the rover\u2019s belly. A protective shield dropped away over the weekend, exposing the spindly, long-legged chopper.The helicopter airfield is right next to the rover\u2019s landing site in Jezero Crater. The rover will observe the test flights from a distant perch, before driving away to pursue its own mission: hunting for signs of ancient Martian life.Read more from KidsPost:Stunning images of Mars keep coming from HiRISE cameraMars rover Perseverance lands safely on the Red PlanetHelicopter that\u2019s headed to Mars named Ingenuity\u2018Perseverance\u2019 to be the next Mars rover, thanks to a creative seventh-graderRead KidsPost\u2019s archive of stories about NASA\u2019s Journey to Mars NASA\u2019s Ingenuity will attempt a flight milestone on another planet; the Wright Flyer did something similar on Earth. Mini helicopter on Mars carries tiny piece of Wright brothers\u2019 1903 airplane",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Poster contest ending soon: What\u2019s your vision of \u2018America\u2019s Return to Space\u2019? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2005",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/kidspost-poster-contest-whats-your-vision-of-americas-return-to-space/2018/09/14/7d189dea-b524-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html",
        "text": "The U.S. space program has been launching humans into space for more than 50 years, much of that time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since the last space shuttle flight in 2011, astronauts have been riding on Russian rockets, launched nearly 7,000 miles away. But Florida will host human spaceflight once again in the next year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo mark this new era, KidsPost is asking kids in grades five through eight to create a poster. What does \u201cAmerica\u2019s Return to Space\u201d look like? Where are astronauts going? How are they getting there? Where will they be going in the future? Take out your art supplies and show us.We know designing a poster takes time, so we are offering a really cool prize package. The contest winner and a parent will get tickets to an Astronaut Training Experience at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Central Florida. They will experience what it\u2019s like to live and work for a day on Mars. The prize also contains other fun space-related goodies. The winner\u2019s poster will appear as a full page in KidsPost on November 8. Two finalists, whose work also will be published in KidsPost, will receive space-themed books and a Kid",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Poster contest ending soon: What\u2019s your vision of \u2018America\u2019s Return to Space\u2019? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2006",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/kidspost-poster-contest-whats-your-vision-of-americas-return-to-space/2018/09/14/7d189dea-b524-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html",
        "text": "The U.S. space program has been launching humans into space for more than 50 years, much of that time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since the last space shuttle flight in 2011, astronauts have been riding on Russian rockets, launched nearly 7,000 miles away. But Florida will host human spaceflight once again in the next year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo mark this new era, KidsPost is asking kids in grades five through eight to create a poster. What does \u201cAmerica\u2019s Return to Space\u201d look like? Where are astronauts going? How are they getting there? Where will they be going in the future? Take out your art supplies and show us.We know designing a poster takes time, so we are offering a really cool prize package. The contest winner and a parent will get tickets to an Astronaut Training Experience at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Central Florida. They will experience what it\u2019s like to live and work for a day on Mars. The prize also contains other fun space-related goodies. The winner\u2019s poster will appear as a full page in KidsPost on November 8. Two finalists, whose work also will be published in KidsPost, will receive space-themed books and a Kid",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "International Space Station receives two deliveries in record 15 hours (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2007",
        "date": "2018-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/international-space-station-receives-two-deliveries-in-record-15-hours/2018/11/19/0e7be222-e434-11e8-8f5f-a55347f48762_story.html",
        "text": "The International Space Station has received two cargo deliveries in a record 15\u00a0hours.A U.S. commercial shipment arrived Monday, two days after blasting off from Virginia. NASA Astronaut Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor used the space station\u2019s robot arm to grab Northrop Grumman\u2019s capsule. It\u2019s named after Apollo 16 moonwalker and the first space shuttle commander John Young, who died in January. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe station\u2019s German commander, Alexander Gerst, tweeted, \u201cWelcome aboard, S.S. John Young!\u201dIce cream and other fresh food are the first things coming out.On Sunday, a Russian supply ship brought a full load.NASA says the deliveries are the quickest back-to-back shipments for the space station, which marks its 20th anniversary Tuesday. The supply ships will remain there for a few months, before being filled with trash and cut loose.For space travelers, fitness is a top priorityCalifornia wildfires claim at least 31 livesBest children\u2019s books of 2018 U.S. and Russian shipments arrived (including ice cream). International Space Station receives two deliveries in record 15 hours",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Could astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists hope ISS will help them get the dirt. (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2008",
        "date": "2020-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/could-astronauts-grow-plants-in-soil-scientists-are-floating-the-question/2020/11/06/2ca1a6ec-1de4-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html",
        "text": "NASA has sent a lot of strange stuff into space. It sent gold-plated music albums and photos on the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. It sent pieces of Kitty Hawk, the legendary Wright brothers\u2019 airplane, on Apollo 11. It sent a cargo tag, dug up at the historic Jamestown Settlement, on a space shuttle. And last month, it used a rocket to send dirt. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, soil actually. That\u2019s the mix of ground minerals, sand, organic matter and nutrients needed to grow food. Thirty-six vials of soil will be kept at the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS has been orbiting 254\u00a0miles above Earth for 20 years. After 30 days, the soils will be frozen until they can be sent home December 29.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to understand how the microorganisms in soils react in a microgravity environment,\u201d Morgan Irons says. (Microgravity means very low gravity. Despite what a lot of people may think, there is some gravity in space.)Irons is a soil scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Some of the soil at the ISS is hers. She dug it up from an organic farm plot on campus. Another soil sample is man-made from a waste product called biochar; and a third soil comes from Germany.When her portion of soil returns to its home planet, Irons will study it to see whether anything about it has changed from its time in space. Will it still form the clumps that mean it has the right structure to help seeds grow? Will it contain the same amounts and types of bacteria and fungi as when it left Earth?\u201cBacteria and fungi are so important for soil health and how plants [can get] the nutrients they need,\u201d Irons explains.NASA has already experimented with growing plants in space hydroponically \u2014 in water,without soil. Astronauts have experimented with growing them in clay \u201cpillows\u201d and in a special kind of gel. But this is the first time research is being done on whether they could be grown with natural soil taken from our own environments.Irons said this is important for a lot of reasons: It can help us better understand how to keep soil healthy on Earth. It can help us look for soil on other space bodies that might still contain microbes. And it can help us figure out how we might \u201crevitalize\u201d the soil on Mars, where NASA aims to send astronauts in the 2030s.NASA embarks on a new era in human space flight\u201cThat goes into what people in the space industry call \u2018in situ resource utilization,\u2019\u2009\u201d Irons said. That is, \u201chow can you use the resources you have on site, rather than, say, hauling up soil\u201d from Earth.Mars\u2019s surface is made up of a rocky material called regolith. The nutrients it contains aren\u2019t in the right form to be used by plants. Irons knows from experimenting with a similar kind of dirt that it turns hard like concrete when you add water. (So, no, the potatoes Matt Damon\u2019s character grows in the movie \u201cThe Martian\u201d wouldn\u2019t work in real life.)But \u201cif we can figure out what microorganisms we need to introduce to regolith, and what plants could survive in such a harsh environment,\u201d Irons says, maybe we can figure out how to grow crops on the Red Planet.Who\u2019s ready to be the first Martian farmer?\n\nMore in KidsPostLego rocket and science kits among the top toys of 2020Would you fly into space? Several companies are offering an opportunity.Ever wondered what\u2019s on the astronauts\u2019 menu?Astronauts complete SpaceX demo manned mission Several kinds of soil were recently sent to the space station to see how microgravity affects it. Could astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists hope ISS will help them get the dirt.",
        "author": "Lela Nargi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Could astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists hope ISS will help them get the dirt. (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2009",
        "date": "2020-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/could-astronauts-grow-plants-in-soil-scientists-are-floating-the-question/2020/11/06/2ca1a6ec-1de4-11eb-b532-05c751cd5dc2_story.html",
        "text": "NASA has sent a lot of strange stuff into space. It sent gold-plated music albums and photos on the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. It sent pieces of Kitty Hawk, the legendary Wright brothers\u2019 airplane, on Apollo 11. It sent a cargo tag, dug up at the historic Jamestown Settlement, on a space shuttle. And last month, it used a rocket to send dirt. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, soil actually. That\u2019s the mix of ground minerals, sand, organic matter and nutrients needed to grow food. Thirty-six vials of soil will be kept at the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS has been orbiting 254\u00a0miles above Earth for 20 years. After 30 days, the soils will be frozen until they can be sent home December 29.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to understand how the microorganisms in soils react in a microgravity environment,\u201d Morgan Irons says. (Microgravity means very low gravity. Despite what a lot of people may think, there is some gravity in space.)Irons is a soil scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Some of the soil at the ISS is hers. She dug it up from an organic farm plot on campus. Another soil sample is man-made from a waste product called biochar; and a third soil comes from Germany.When her portion of soil returns to its home planet, Irons will study it to see whether anything about it has changed from its time in space. Will it still form the clumps that mean it has the right structure to help seeds grow? Will it contain the same amounts and types of bacteria and fungi as when it left Earth?\u201cBacteria and fungi are so important for soil health and how plants [can get] the nutrients they need,\u201d Irons explains.NASA has already experimented with growing plants in space hydroponically \u2014 in water,without soil. Astronauts have experimented with growing them in clay \u201cpillows\u201d and in a special kind of gel. But this is the first time research is being done on whether they could be grown with natural soil taken from our own environments.Irons said this is important for a lot of reasons: It can help us better understand how to keep soil healthy on Earth. It can help us look for soil on other space bodies that might still contain microbes. And it can help us figure out how we might \u201crevitalize\u201d the soil on Mars, where NASA aims to send astronauts in the 2030s.NASA embarks on a new era in human space flight\u201cThat goes into what people in the space industry call \u2018in situ resource utilization,\u2019\u2009\u201d Irons said. That is, \u201chow can you use the resources you have on site, rather than, say, hauling up soil\u201d from Earth.Mars\u2019s surface is made up of a rocky material called regolith. The nutrients it contains aren\u2019t in the right form to be used by plants. Irons knows from experimenting with a similar kind of dirt that it turns hard like concrete when you add water. (So, no, the potatoes Matt Damon\u2019s character grows in the movie \u201cThe Martian\u201d wouldn\u2019t work in real life.)But \u201cif we can figure out what microorganisms we need to introduce to regolith, and what plants could survive in such a harsh environment,\u201d Irons says, maybe we can figure out how to grow crops on the Red Planet.Who\u2019s ready to be the first Martian farmer?\n\nMore in KidsPostLego rocket and science kits among the top toys of 2020Would you fly into space? Several companies are offering an opportunity.Ever wondered what\u2019s on the astronauts\u2019 menu?Astronauts complete SpaceX demo manned mission Several kinds of soil were recently sent to the space station to see how microgravity affects it. Could astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists hope ISS will help them get the dirt.",
        "author": "Lela Nargi"
    },
    {
        "title": "New books on space explore the moon and beyond (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2010",
        "date": "2018-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/new-books-on-space-explore-the-moon-and-beyond/2018/11/01/50e60dfc-d0b3-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html",
        "text": "How far away does the moon seem to you? The distance changes within every month, but it averages out at 240,000 miles, far enough that it took more than 400,000 American men and women nearly a decade to figure out how to send astronauts there and back. The four books here show how many challenges \u2014 including the basic laws of gravity \u2014 were involved as well as how much more there is to explore. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightApollo 8: The Mission That Changed Everything\nBy Martin W. Sandler. Age 10 and older.\nWhen President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, Americans became determined to win the space race against the Soviet Union. In this well-researched book, Martin Sandler focuses on the Apollo 8 spaceflight of December 1968, in which three astronauts attempted to go beyond the Earth\u2019s orbit to orbit the moon. Along with historical background, Sandler also gives a sense of what it was like to be on that mission, in the capsule, for more than six days. For starters, the flight simulators didn\u2019t quite prepare them for liftoff on the Saturn V rocket. Said astronaut Bill Anders, \u201cI felt like a rat in the jaws of a giant terrier.\u201d And just as the crew\u2019s photographs and telecasts brought their discoveries into American homes, this book fulfills a similar mission for readers born decades later.Countdown: 2979 Days to the Moon\nBy Suzanne Slade. Illustrated by Thomas Gonzalez. Ages 10 to 14.\nIn \u201cCountdown,\u201d Suzanne Slade and Thomas Gonzalez celebrate the teamwork that went into getting the first men onto the surface of the moon and back again in the summer of 1969. Alongside images that manage to seem both true to life and dreamlike, Slade clearly explains the engineering objectives (\u201cdesigning, building and testing four new crafts . . . that must work flawlessly together\u201d) as well as the emotional ups and downs experienced by the team. And although the story is full of great risks and bravery, Slade and Gonzalez also make room for lighter moments, as when the astronauts listen to music from a floating cassette-tape player.To the Moon and Back: My Apollo 11 Adventure\nBy Buzz Aldrin with Marianne J. Dyson. Ages 8 to 12. \nIn November 1966, Buzz Aldrin went into space for the first time. Less than three years later, he and Neil Armstrong became the first two humans to walk on the moon. In addition to featuring Aldrin\u2019s memories of these adventures, this book includes lots of photographs and pop-up models of such devices as the Saturn V rocket. The book\u2019s pullout cards discuss those exciting years from the point of view of Aldrin\u2019s daughter. Not yet a teenager, she and her two brothers got to stay up late and watch their father\u2019s moon walk on one of the first color TVs in their neighborhood.Space: The Definitive Visual Catalog of the Universe\nBy Sean Callery and Miranda Smith. Ages 8 to 12. \nThrough photographs and other images, this beautiful, information-packed book reveals all sorts of things we can\u2019t see with our own limited vision. The color of stars, for instance. Above a photo taken with the Hubble telescope, the authors explain how a star\u2019s color (red, white, yellow, orange or blue) indicates its surface temperature. This book contains a universe of discoveries \u2014 from our own solar system to the dark matter that astrophysicists are investigating from beyond.More in KidsPost\nThe top STEM toys are hands-on funNASA crews show their creativity in mission patchesFind more KidsPost stories related to space Four photo-filled books highlight the beginnings of spaceflight to recent discoveries. New books on space explore the moon and beyond",
        "author": "Abby McGanney Nolan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space junk from Russian weapons test causes ISS astronauts to seek shelter (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2011",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/international-space-station-debris/2021/11/15/7c11fda8-432c-11ec-9ea7-3eb2406a2e24_story.html",
        "text": "Space junk from a Russian weapons test threatened the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Monday and forced them to seek shelter in their docked capsules.The State Department confirmed that the debris was from an old Russian satellite destroyed in Monday\u2019s antisatellite weapons test.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was dangerous. It was reckless. It was irresponsible,\u201d said State Department spokesman Ned Price. The astronauts retreated into their docked capsules early Monday after being told of the last-minute threat. Mission Control had them close the hatches between the space station compartments again later in the day as a safety precaution.At least 1,500 pieces of the destroyed satellite were big enough to show up on radar, Price said. But other fragments were too small to track, yet still posed a danger to the space station as well as orbiting satellites.\u201cWe are going to continue to make very clear that we won\u2019t tolerate this kind of activity,\u201d Price said.NASA Mission Control said the heightened threat might continue for a couple of days and continue to interrupt the astronauts\u2019 work.NASA officials provided no immediate comment.How much do you know about the ISS? Take our quiz to find out.The Russian Space Agency said via Twitter that the astronauts were ordered into their docked capsules earlier in the day, in case they had to make a quick getaway. Later, the crew was \u201croutinely performing operations,\u201d the agency noted.\u201cFriends, everything is regular with us!\u201d tweeted the space station\u2019s commander, Russian Anton Shkaplerov.But the cloud of debris seemed to be posing a threat on each passing orbit. Mission Control informed the crew that the latest pass was expected to last seven minutes, and had them interrupt their science research to once again take safety precautions.Some 20,000 pieces of space junk are being tracked, including old and broken satellites. Last week, a fragment from an old Chinese satellite \u2014 the target of a missile-strike test in 2007 \u2014 came uncomfortably close. While it later was shown to be no threat, NASA had the space station move anyway.Since the SpaceX Crew-3 arrival on Thursday, the space station has been home to seven astronauts: four Americans, one German and two Russians.Read more from KidsPost:NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover collects two samples from MarsHiRISE camera provides stunning images of Mars for 15 years and countingFor space travelers, fitness is a top priorityTo our commentersA reminder from the KidsPost team: Our stories are geared to 7- to 13-year-olds. We welcome discussion from readers of all ages, but please follow our community rules and make comments appropriate for that age group. Russia\u2019s destruction of an old satellite created debris that posed a threat to the International Space Station, State Department says. Space junk from Russian weapons test causes ISS astronauts to seek shelter",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space junk from Russian weapons test causes ISS astronauts to seek shelter (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2012",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/international-space-station-debris/2021/11/15/7c11fda8-432c-11ec-9ea7-3eb2406a2e24_story.html",
        "text": "Space junk from a Russian weapons test threatened the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Monday and forced them to seek shelter in their docked capsules.The State Department confirmed that the debris was from an old Russian satellite destroyed in Monday\u2019s antisatellite weapons test.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was dangerous. It was reckless. It was irresponsible,\u201d said State Department spokesman Ned Price. The astronauts retreated into their docked capsules early Monday after being told of the last-minute threat. Mission Control had them close the hatches between the space station compartments again later in the day as a safety precaution.At least 1,500 pieces of the destroyed satellite were big enough to show up on radar, Price said. But other fragments were too small to track, yet still posed a danger to the space station as well as orbiting satellites.\u201cWe are going to continue to make very clear that we won\u2019t tolerate this kind of activity,\u201d Price said.NASA Mission Control said the heightened threat might continue for a couple of days and continue to interrupt the astronauts\u2019 work.NASA officials provided no immediate comment.How much do you know about the ISS? Take our quiz to find out.The Russian Space Agency said via Twitter that the astronauts were ordered into their docked capsules earlier in the day, in case they had to make a quick getaway. Later, the crew was \u201croutinely performing operations,\u201d the agency noted.\u201cFriends, everything is regular with us!\u201d tweeted the space station\u2019s commander, Russian Anton Shkaplerov.But the cloud of debris seemed to be posing a threat on each passing orbit. Mission Control informed the crew that the latest pass was expected to last seven minutes, and had them interrupt their science research to once again take safety precautions.Some 20,000 pieces of space junk are being tracked, including old and broken satellites. Last week, a fragment from an old Chinese satellite \u2014 the target of a missile-strike test in 2007 \u2014 came uncomfortably close. While it later was shown to be no threat, NASA had the space station move anyway.Since the SpaceX Crew-3 arrival on Thursday, the space station has been home to seven astronauts: four Americans, one German and two Russians.Read more from KidsPost:NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover collects two samples from MarsHiRISE camera provides stunning images of Mars for 15 years and countingFor space travelers, fitness is a top priorityTo our commentersA reminder from the KidsPost team: Our stories are geared to 7- to 13-year-olds. We welcome discussion from readers of all ages, but please follow our community rules and make comments appropriate for that age group. Russia\u2019s destruction of an old satellite created debris that posed a threat to the International Space Station, State Department says. Space junk from Russian weapons test causes ISS astronauts to seek shelter",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing-Embraer Deal Faces Political Backlash in Brazil (WSJ: Latin America) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2013",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-embraer-deal-faces-political-backlash-in-brazil-1530892008?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=71",
        "text": "Embraer was privatized in 1994, but \u201cit is still seen as a national asset by Brazilians, and one they don\u2019t want to lose,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n S\u00e9rgio Lazzarini,\n\n\n\n a professor at S\u00e3o Paulo business school Insper and author of books on crony capitalism in Brazil.\nThe front-runner in Brazil\u2019s elections, Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing former army captain, has largely backed the partnership with Boeing. Brazil, one of the most closed emerging-market economies, \u201ccannot isolate itself from the world,\u201d he said in a recent television interview.\n\n\nBut swaths of left-leaning politicians have opposed the takeover. The president of the Workers\u2019 Party, Sen. Gleisi Hoffmann, called it an attack on national sovereignty and decried the sale of national technology \u201cfor the price of a banana.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ciro Gomes,\n\n\n\n a center-left politician who ranks third in most polls, vowed to reverse the deal should he become president\u2014a scenario that is possible, but viewed as somewhat unlikely, analysts say.\n\n\nMore Airbus Chides Boeing Amid New Rivalry for Smaller Jets Boeing to Take Over Embraer\u2019s Commercial-Jet Business Defense Partnership With Embraer Will Test Brazil\u2019s Boeing Appetite Brazil\u2019s Labor Strife Exposes Roadblocks to Temer\u2019s Economic Agenda (May 31) Boeing Swoops In on Plane-Parts Specialist KLX (May 1) Brazil Turns Rightward, Heralding New Chapter for Latin America (April 8) \n\n\nUnions have called on the government to veto the deal with Boeing via its so-called golden share in Embraer, while others have accused the companies of trying to sneak through the takeover at a time when the soccer-mad nation is distracted by the World Cup.\nSet up by Brazil\u2019s military government in 1969, Embraer has gone from an unprofitable state company to one of the world\u2019s biggest producers of commercial jets. It is held up by many as a shining example of first-rate manufacturing in a developing country better known for producing soybeans, cattle and iron ore, and a cherished reminder of the nation\u2019s proud aviation history.\nIt was with mixed feelings, then, that Brazilians received the news\u00a0Thursday\u00a0that Embraer\u2019s commercial business, responsible for 58% of the company\u2019s revenue last year, was being sold off.\nBoeing will take an 80% stake in Embraer\u2019s commercial airplane and services business. Embraer will own the remaining 20%, with the right to force Boeing to buy it out over the next decade.\n\u201cEverything in Brazil that has any value\u201d gets sold to foreigners, said Tatia Jois, 40 years old, a film and television extra from S\u00e3o Paulo. \nEmbraer\u2019s success, though, has come because of its focus on global markets and independence from the government.\n\u201cThe real question we should be asking,\u201d said Mr. Lazzarini, \u201cis not why it\u2019s being sold, but why aren\u2019t there more companies like Embraer in Brazil?\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn aircraft is seen at the assembly line of Embraer in S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9 dos Campos in February.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n paulo whitaker/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nEmbraer\u2019s early bet on midsize plane production for the growing regional aviation market began to win the company orders in the U.S. in the 1980s.\u00a0 The company is now heavily dependent on the U.S. market, with more than 2000 employees in the U.S. and a factory in Florida. The North American market generated 57% of sales in 2017, while Brazil accounted for only 13%.\nBrazil\u2019s government has given Embraer relative freedom, standing back as the company purchased most of its parts from foreign players and announced heavy layoffs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to remain nimble.\nThe result of these efforts can be seen from the air above the lush sugar-cane fields of Gavi\u00e3o Peixoto in rural S\u00e3o Paulo, home to one of Embraer\u2019s gleaming production facilities. A vast campus of manicured green lawns and white and blue buildings extends across the horizon, punctuated by the longest private runway in the Southern Hemisphere, once an alternate landing site for the U.S. space shuttle.\nIn Gavi\u00e3o Peixoto, the company is building its new KC-390 military transport aircraft along with other planes, which on a recent day were scattered about the vast hangars like the abandoned toys of a child\u2019s playroom.\nThe defense business was excluded from\u00a0Thursday\u2019s\u00a0deal, but the two companies said they would explore a joint venture for certain defense products.\nBoeing and Embraer resumed talks about a joint venture in commercial aviation last year after rivals\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Bombardier Inc.\n\n\n started developing their own partnership plans at the Paris Air Show, according to people familiar with the situation.\n\u201cThe powerful partnership between Bombardier and Airbus had been threatening Embraer\u2019s leading position in the market for regional aviation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Victor Mizusaki\n\n\n\n at investment bank Bradesco BBI in S\u00e3o Paulo.\nAside from boosting Embraer\u2019s position in an increasingly challenging m Boeing\u2019s takeover of Embraer\u2019s commercial-jet business marks the end of an epic journey for one of Brazil\u2019s most successful companies, and the beginning of a potentially bitter political dispute. ",
        "author": "Samantha Pearson and Jeffrey Lewis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing-Embraer Deal Faces Political Backlash in Brazil (WSJ: Latin America) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2014",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-embraer-deal-faces-political-backlash-in-brazil-1530892008?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=92",
        "text": "Embraer was privatized in 1994, but \u201cit is still seen as a national asset by Brazilians, and one they don\u2019t want to lose,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n S\u00e9rgio Lazzarini,\n\n\n\n a professor at S\u00e3o Paulo business school Insper and author of books on crony capitalism in Brazil.\n\n\n\n\nThe front-runner in Brazil\u2019s elections, Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing former army captain, has largely backed the partnership with Boeing. Brazil, one of the most closed emerging-market economies, \u201ccannot isolate itself from the world,\u201d he said in a recent television interview.\n\n\nBut swaths of left-leaning politicians have opposed the takeover. The president of the Workers\u2019 Party, Sen. Gleisi Hoffmann, called it an attack on national sovereignty and decried the sale of national technology \u201cfor the price of a banana.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ciro Gomes,\n\n\n\n a center-left politician who ranks third in most polls, vowed to reverse the deal should he become president\u2014a scenario that is possible, but viewed as somewhat unlikely, analysts say.\n\n\nMore Airbus Chides Boeing Amid New Rivalry for Smaller Jets Boeing to Take Over Embraer\u2019s Commercial-Jet Business Defense Partnership With Embraer Will Test Brazil\u2019s Boeing Appetite Brazil\u2019s Labor Strife Exposes Roadblocks to Temer\u2019s Economic Agenda (May 31) Boeing Swoops In on Plane-Parts Specialist KLX (May 1) Brazil Turns Rightward, Heralding New Chapter for Latin America (April 8) \n\n\nUnions have called on the government to veto the deal with Boeing via its so-called golden share in Embraer, while others have accused the companies of trying to sneak through the takeover at a time when the soccer-mad nation is distracted by the World Cup.\nSet up by Brazil\u2019s military government in 1969, Embraer has gone from an unprofitable state company to one of the world\u2019s biggest producers of commercial jets. It is held up by many as a shining example of first-rate manufacturing in a developing country better known for producing soybeans, cattle and iron ore, and a cherished reminder of the nation\u2019s proud aviation history.\nIt was with mixed feelings, then, that Brazilians received the news\u00a0Thursday\u00a0that Embraer\u2019s commercial business, responsible for 58% of the company\u2019s revenue last year, was being sold off.\nBoeing will take an 80% stake in Embraer\u2019s commercial airplane and services business. Embraer will own the remaining 20%, with the right to force Boeing to buy it out over the next decade.\n\u201cEverything in Brazil that has any value\u201d gets sold to foreigners, said Tatia Jois, 40 years old, a film and television extra from S\u00e3o Paulo. \nEmbraer\u2019s success, though, has come because of its focus on global markets and independence from the government.\n\u201cThe real question we should be asking,\u201d said Mr. Lazzarini, \u201cis not why it\u2019s being sold, but why aren\u2019t there more companies like Embraer in Brazil?\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn aircraft is seen at the assembly line of Embraer in S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9 dos Campos in February.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n paulo whitaker/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nEmbraer\u2019s early bet on midsize plane production for the growing regional aviation market began to win the company orders in the U.S. in the 1980s.\u00a0 The company is now heavily dependent on the U.S. market, with more than 2000 employees in the U.S. and a factory in Florida. The North American market generated 57% of sales in 2017, while Brazil accounted for only 13%.\nBrazil\u2019s government has given Embraer relative freedom, standing back as the company purchased most of its parts from foreign players and announced heavy layoffs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to remain nimble.\nThe result of these efforts can be seen from the air above the lush sugar-cane fields of Gavi\u00e3o Peixoto in rural S\u00e3o Paulo, home to one of Embraer\u2019s gleaming production facilities. A vast campus of manicured green lawns and white and blue buildings extends across the horizon, punctuated by the longest private runway in the Southern Hemisphere, once an alternate landing site for the U.S. space shuttle.\nIn Gavi\u00e3o Peixoto, the company is building its new KC-390 military transport aircraft along with other planes, which on a recent day were scattered about the vast hangars like the abandoned toys of a child\u2019s playroom.\nThe defense business was excluded from\u00a0Thursday\u2019s\u00a0deal, but the two companies said they would explore a joint venture for certain defense products.\nBoeing and Embraer resumed talks about a joint venture in commercial aviation last year after rivals\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus SE\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Bombardier Inc.\n\n\n started developing their own partnership plans at the Paris Air Show, according to people familiar with the situation.\n\u201cThe powerful partnership between Bombardier and Airbus had been threatening Embraer\u2019s leading position in the market for regional aviation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Victor Mizusaki\n\n\n\n at investment bank Bradesco BBI in S\u00e3o Paulo.\nAside from boosting Embraer\u2019s position in an increasingly challengi Boeing\u2019s takeover of Embraer\u2019s commercial-jet business marks the end of an epic journey for one of Brazil\u2019s most successful companies, and the beginning of a potentially bitter political dispute. ",
        "author": "Samantha Pearson and Jeffrey Lewis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Steve Jobs still looms large at Apple. Tim Cook seems just fine with that. (WP: Leadership) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2015",
        "date": "2017-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2017/09/13/steve-jobs-still-loomed-large-at-apples-big-event-tim-cook-seems-just-fine-with-that/",
        "text": "Steve Jobs was literally a\u00a0towering presence at\u00a0Tim Cook's highly anticipated\u00a010th anniversary iPhone\u00a0launch\u00a0event\u00a0Tuesday. The late Apple co-founder's\u00a0name was on the auditorium where the event at the company's new spaceship campus\u00a0was held. Giant images of the company's iconic former chief executive stared out behind Cook as he opened the event and dedicated the space to him. And it was Jobs's voice \u2014 not Cook's \u2014 that the audience heard first. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\"One of the ways people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there,\" a recording of Jobs crackled\u00a0through the space. \"So we need to be true to who we are and remember what\u2019s really important to us. That\u2019s what\u2019s going to keep Apple 'Apple:' Is if we keep us\u00a0'us.' \"For the many Apple watchers\u00a0who've questioned whether Cook will\u00a0ever match the company's innovation mojo under Jobs, for the tech enthusiasts\u00a0who've\u00a0been waiting for\u00a0Apple's next big game-changing product platform, for the analysts\u00a0who've wondered whether this would be the moment when Cook\u00a0stepped\u00a0out of Jobs's shadow, Cook seemed to have an answer: He's fine with embracing\u00a0the legacy of his\u00a0predecessor.The iPhone is 10. Where does Apple go from here?\"I love hearing his voice and his inspiring message,\u00a0and it was only fitting that Steve\u00a0should open his theater,\" Cook said, appearing emotional in the tribute.\u00a0\"Steve's spirit and timeless philosophy on life will always be the DNA of Apple. His greatest gift \u2014 his greatest expression of\u00a0his appreciation\u00a0for humanity \u2014 would not be a single product. But rather, it would be Apple itself.\"\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn other words, Cook could be interpreted as saying, his biggest\u00a0job\u00a0isn't necessarily the splashy revelation of a new product, but the growth and continuation of the company itself.On that score, many Apple observers say Cook has\u00a0done well. Asymco analyst Horace Dediu said in a recent interview\u00a0that \"we want to make heroes, but I think it's actually harder to preserve something someone else builds.\"\u00a0When Jobs passed away, Dediu says, Cook defied critics who thought the end could be near,\u00a0even if his product launches haven't yet shaken up industries the way Jobs's did. \"He's kept the business not only operating but thriving and prospering and growing. That's a major thing for any follower of a founder to do.\"Indeed, having someone come in and shake things up may have been exactly the wrong thing for Apple after Jobs,\u00a0says Michael Cusumano, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. While he says Apple has lost ground to competitors and questions some recent moves \u2014 a premier-priced\u00a0iPhone; the move into content production \u2014 he\u00a0also thinks Cook has done better than expected.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"He\u2019s kept the company together and we didn\u2019t think anybody could succeed Steve\u00a0Jobs,\" he said. \"I think in terms of the psychology of the company, it was probably better not to have another technology visionary take over. I think it would have been too many clashes with people in the company Jobs had brought in and nurtured.\"\u00a0Yet the comparisons and the expectations are sure to remain.\u00a0Even if the iPhone has been perhaps the most successful consumer product in history \u2014 a truly \"lightning in a bottle thing,\" says Scott Anthony, managing director of the innovation consultancy Innosight \u2014 Cook is likely to keep\u00a0facing questions about how he measures up to that revolutionary yardstick. \"We still hold Apple\u00a0to that, because Apple,\u00a0in its 40-year history, has continually shown us that it can do that,\" Anthony said. \"It\u2019s totally unfair, but yet we will still demand it.\"\u00a0Tim Cook, the interview: Running Apple \u2018is sort of a lonely job\u2019Such comparisons\u00a0might\u00a0leave many CEOs ready to push their predecessor into the background, to minimize the icon's presence, to do less to remind everyone of the towering status\u00a0of the one\u00a0who came before. Especially when the company they lead is repeatedly being questioned for falling behind rivals like Amazon or Google in some areas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet Cook seems unfazed by it, even comfortable in the role of carrying the torch while finding ways to place his own stamp on the company. Last year,\u00a0when asked about filling Jobs's shoes in an interview with The Washington Post, Cook said, \"To me, Steve's not replaceable. By anyone.\" He said, \"I never viewed that as my role. I think it would have been a treacherous thing if I would have tried to do it.\"Tuesday's event was a reminder of that philosophy. Cook\u00a0opened with a tribute to Jobs. Near the end of the presentation, Apple's head of marketing Phil Schiller repeated\u00a0a Wayne Gretzky quote Jobs\u00a0used to introduce the iPhone 10 years ago \u2014 about skating to where the puck is going. And finally,\u00a0Cook reiterated Jobs's recorded phrase about humanity and making something wonderful. \"We hope you love what we introduced today,\" he said. \"I think Steve would be really proud of them.\"Read also:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApple unveils new iPhones, including a premium $999 versionLike On Leadership? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. Cook seems comfortable carrying the torch while finding ways to place his own stamp on the company. Steve Jobs still looms large at Apple. Tim Cook seems just fine with that.",
        "author": "Jena McGregor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s pay deal could theoretically be worth $55.8 billion \u2014 but he could also get nothing (WP: Leadership) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2016",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2018/01/23/elon-musks-new-pay-package-could-theoretically-be-worth-55-8-billion-but-none-of-its-guaranteed/",
        "text": "Tesla outlined a\u00a0potentially massive -- and massively unconventional -- compensation plan\u00a0for its unorthodox CEO on Tuesday, setting a\u00a0series of ambitious growth targets that, if various conditions are met, could theoretically net Elon Musk as much as $55.8 billion over the next decade, launching him to the top of\u00a0rankings of the world's richest people\u00a0and dwarfing the size of\u00a0past CEO stock and options grants. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe unusual package is based entirely on performance, guaranteeing no salary and no bonus, and\u00a0requires Musk to reach aggressive\u00a0market capitalization and financial\u00a0goals\u00a0in order to be paid. He would also have to\u00a0hold onto his shares for five years after he receives them before selling, a rare stipulation that's\u00a0viewed as\u00a0particularly shareholder-friendly.Yet\u00a0compensation experts said the biggest\u00a0message\u00a0Musk's new\u00a0pay plan may\u00a0be designed to send is not just that Tesla intends to take an unusually performance-driven approach to paying its CEO. It's that the company has galaxy-size ambitions for its growth and\u00a0aims to rival the planet's largest tech companies over the next decade. Musk would only receive the full payout if the company reaches a market capitalization of $650 billion, a more than ten-fold increase over its current\u00a0$59 billion market cap,\u00a0a future valuation that clocks in\u00a0just under the size of Microsoft's\u00a0value today.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDan Marcec, director of content for\u00a0the executive compensation and governance research firm Equilar, said the primary\u00a0purpose\u00a0of the plan's design may not be solely to tell investors how\u00a0Tesla\u00a0plans to pay its CEO.\"The message is we're really aggressive with our goals and we want to make it to the level\u00a0of Facebook and Microsoft and Google and Apple with our market size,\" he said.Sleepless nights, broken robots and mounting pressure: Musk offers rare glimpse inside Tesla\u2019s \u2018production hell\u2019Alan Johnson, an executive pay consultant based in New York,\u00a0also said the plan's design -- and Musks's continued involvement -- could be\u00a0a message\u00a0to\u00a0those concerned the\u00a0electric car maker has set \"audacious\" production goals it doesn't meet.\"Maybe the main purpose, or a big purpose, is to say 'we're going to grow into an adult company that makes a lot of money and [Musk] is going to be here,\"\u00a0Johnson\u00a0said.\u00a0\"He's not going to be off doing five other things.' \"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTesla, which declined to comment beyond its\u00a0news release and regulatory documents, said in a filing that \"our aspirations may appear ambitious to some, and impossible to others, and that is by design. We like setting challenging, hard-to-achieve goals for ourselves, and then focusing our efforts to make them happen. This is why we based this new award on stretch goals and why we gave Elon the ability to share in the upside in a way that is commensurate with the difficulty of achieving them.\"The news arrives while Tesla remains in the throes of \"production hell,\" a phrase Musk\u00a0used last summer to describe the months-long manufacturing crucible that would result in the creation of hundreds of thousands of Model 3s \u2014 the company's first mass-market vehicle.Nearly six months later, the company has yet to emerge at the\u00a0other end, the result of \"robot calibration issues\" at the Fremont, Calif., auto assembly plant and other challenges at Tesla's \"Gigafactory\" battery plant in Nevada.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThose issues have dramatically delayed the Model 3 rollout, so much so that even ardent fans of the company have begun to wonder about Tesla's long-term viability and Musk's ability to set realistic goals.\u00a0For months last year, Musk said he expected Tesla to produce 5,000 Model 3s\u00a0a\u00a0week by the end of 2017, a deadline he later pushed back to March. The company has now pushed that number back to June.In the filing, board members also acknowledged that\u00a0it is their \"strong belief that the best outcome for our stockholders is for Elon to continue leading the company over the long-term,\" addressing open speculation from some investors that Musk, who also runs Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u00a0and is known for his eclectic endeavors,\u00a0might not lead Tesla\u00a0for the long haul. To remain eligible for the pay plan, the filing states, Musk must continue as Tesla\u2019s CEO or serve as both executive chairman and chief product officer \"with all leadership ultimately reporting to him,\" the filing says,\u00a0though it offers the option of bringing in a CEO who would report to Musk.Musk has vast personal wealth.\u00a0Last year, according to Forbes, Musks's net worth\u00a0passed $20 billion for the first time, helped by the rising value of SpaceX, of which he owns more than half.This tax loophole led to massive CEO pay packages. Why eliminating it isn\u2019t likely to rein them in.Musk would also need to meet a series of revenue and earnings \u00a0goals,\u00a0as well as a staggering growth in market capitalization, in order to get paid.\u00a0The plan offers no\u00a0guaranteed cash\u00a0or equity payouts just by staying in the job; instead, he\u00a0will receive a 10-year grant of stock options\u00a0that vests in 12\u00a0installments. (A Tesla\u00a0filing says Musk\u00a0is subject to minimum wage requirements under California law but has never and does not accepted his salary.) To receive the first one, he will have to increase the company's market cap to $100 billion and meet one of the operational goals; for each additional \"tranche\" of options, Tesla's market cap must increase by an additional $50 billion increment and he must meet another of the financial targets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf\u00a0Musk meets all of the goals, doesn't sell any of his shares and\u00a0Tesla does not issue any more shares that would dilute the share price -- something Johnson called \"impossible\"\u00a0-- Musk's total haul could be worth $55.8 billion, according to a company filing. Yet Tesla\u00a0called that figure \"theoretical,\" as future dilution over time is a \"certainty,\" whether because\u00a0it\u00a0issues more shares or due to mergers or acquisitions.Still, meeting even some of the goals could\u00a0mean a massive payout for Musk. And even\u00a0at the amount Tesla\u00a0valued its options grant today\u00a0-- $2.6 billion\u00a0-- other large recent CEO\u00a0awards look\u00a0diminutive\u00a0in comparison. Musk's grant is\u00a0far larger than the\u00a0$376 million long-term equity grant awarded to Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2011, or the $91 million options grant that former Expedia (and current Uber) CEO Dara Khosrowshahi received in 2015.A notable difference, however, is that those\u00a0stock or options grants\u00a0were not all tied to\u00a0meeting performance targets,\u00a0as is the case with Musk's.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"We rarely, if ever, see 100\u00a0percent performance-based compensation,\" Equilar's Marcec said.\u00a0While companies have been linking\u00a0more and more of executives' pay to how well they perform, just under 54 percent of the\u00a0average compensation package is tied to performance, well under the 100 percent in\u00a0Musk's new plan.The new plan\u00a0mirrors a grant Tesla gave Musk in 2012, albeit at a much larger scale, which also put 100 percent of his pay at risk. One key difference, however, is that Musk won't immediately be able to sell his shares once he\u00a0vests in them. Rather, he'll have to wait five years, which should help prevent any efforts to make short-term boosts to the stock price.\"His holding period clearly links his personal wealth to the company's long-term success, which is what shareholders want to see,\" said Rosanna Landis Weaver, an executive compensation expert for the nonprofit As You Sow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough she\u00a0questions the massive size of the grant, the way it's designed is a good sign, she says: \"I wish more executives were paid in this fashion.\"With additional reporting by Peter Holley.Read also:Elon Musk is the unusual CEO who says his stock is overvaluedA new report suggests a fundamental idea behind CEO pay could be \u2018broken\u2019Like On Leadership? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes. Tesla's unconventional, potentially massive pay plan for Elon Musk signals its huge ambitions Elon Musk\u2019s pay deal could theoretically be worth $55.8 billion \u2014 but he could also get nothing",
        "author": "Jena McGregor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Big Data Hasn\u2019t Yet Made a Dent on Farms (WSJ: Leadership) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2017",
        "date": "2017-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-big-data-hasnt-yet-made-a-dent-on-farms-1494813720?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=87",
        "text": "But the revolution has been slow to catch on. Many farmers who used the digital services found it difficult to digest the mountains of information and figure out how to put it to use. Many others simply weren\u2019t sold on the idea, or couldn\u2019t afford the investment as crop prices fell.\n\n\nJournal Report Insights from The Experts Read more at WSJ.com/LeadershipReport More in Agriculture A Farm Grows in the City Ocean Shipping Changes Worry Farmers Farmers Adapt to Volatile Weather The Farm Crop in Your Reeboks Ultrafiltered Milk Causes a Fuss \n\n\nA new approach This has changed the outlook to the point where venture capitalists, who drove much of the investment into data-based farming, are approaching agriculture in a different way. Instead of betting on legions of companies that provide farmers information, they\u2019re now pumping money into companies that offer tools and services, such as robotic farm equipment, or on biotechnology and genetic editing of plants, that bring faster and more obvious results.\n\n\n\u201cIt has been a challenge, because the promise of technology hasn\u2019t been able to keep up with expectations,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Leclerc,\n\n\n\n chief executive of AgFunder, an online investment marketplace where companies seek funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn 2016, investments in data-driven agriculture\u2014known as precision agriculture\u2014fell 39% from a year earlier, according to AgFunder, due in part to a broader decline in drone investments. At the same time, investors see promise in agricultural technology that goes beyond data. Venture-capital investments in the agricultural sector overall rose to $560 million last year from $201 million in 2015, according to PitchBook\u2014and that total excludes hardware like satellites that can be used in agriculture but also have other uses.\nMeanwhile, many of the startups at the forefront of the drive toward data have struggled or shifted focus.\n\n\nJournal Report Podcast\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of the better-funded data-driven startups, FarmLink LLC entered liquidation in February. Its harvesting equipment gathered data on yields as it picked grain, to give farmers insights about how to plan for the next year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Geoffrey Berman,\n\n\n\n who represents FarmLink creditors, says the Kansas City, Mo., company shut down after it couldn\u2019t find additional funding.\nGrowing interest The mania for data-focused farming was sparked largely by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Monsanto Co.\n\n\n \u2019s nearly $1 billion acquisition of agriculture-data firm Climate Corp. in late 2013. Chasing after such success, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs plunged into companies that could both produce data and provide it to farmers.\nThe general theory: Farmers armed with hyperlocal data on soil, weather and runoff could program machinery to plant specific types of seeds and fertilizer. Once a tractor moves into a sandier type of soil, for instance, a different seed pops out best suited to the environment. Yields could soar.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDrones have been part of the mania for data-based farming. But the payoff for farmers hasn\u2019t been clear.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Scott Smith/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSince then, farmers have been deluged with data coming from countless sources, from soil sensors to outer space. But even if farmers want information from drones, satellites and on-ground sensors, it is hard to get the most out of them. Many farmers aren\u2019t trained on how to use software to deal with the data and integrate it with their farming equipment, and different types of machines don\u2019t always work together. Spotty or nonexistent cell reception in rural areas makes it hard for machines to communicate.\nThen there is problem of interpretation. While data will tell a farmer things like how much corn a chunk of a field is producing, it is far harder to understand why it is producing and what lessons can be applied to next year\u2019s crop.\n\u201cEverybody is still trying to figure out where the value in data is,\u201d says Aaron Ault, a corn and soy farmer on 3,000 acres in Indiana who is also involved in an effort with ties to Purdue University to better integrate agricultural data.\nFinding new ground Arama Kukutai, a partner at agtech-focused Finistere Ventures, says that as a result of the integration challenges, his firm is setting its sights on less-crowded agricultural areas.\nMr. Kukutai\u2019s firm has invested in Plenty United Inc., one of a handful of startups trying to grow leafy greens and other produce in dense indoor locations, through hydroponics and ultraviolet lighting. The theory is that these companies can produce crops like organic lettuce at a level similar to farms, but closer to cities.\n\n\nPrevious Agriculture Coverage The Next Hot Trends in Food Can Organic Food Feed the World? As Crop Prices Fall, Farmers Focus on Seeds Feedlot Beef and the Environment Cargill\u2019s Empire in a Changing World \n\n\nMr. Kukutai and other investors are also looking at robotics companies such as Blue Startups designed to use information to boost agricultural productivity are struggling. So now tech companies are changing their approach. ",
        "author": "Eliot Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Importing Extraterrestrial Life Could Be a Real Hazard (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2018",
        "date": "2020-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/importing-extraterrestrial-life-could-be-a-real-hazard-11582235271?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=13",
        "text": "Just imagine what would happen if a spacecraft brought back some life form completely unbridled by the experience of Earth\u2019s 500-million-year evolutionary history. Life would be imitating art and the 1971 sci-fi classic \u201cThe Andromeda Strain\u201d could become a reality. If the last couple of months are any indication, I think we could be in trouble. Are the billionaires going to underwrite the risk involved? \nKen Ratkovich\n\n\nBloomfield Hills, Mich. The 1971 sci-fi classic \u201cThe Andromeda Strain\u201d could become a reality. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "To Infinity and Beyond, or at Least to Mars (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2019",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-infinity-and-beyond-or-at-least-to-mars-11610130284?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=30",
        "text": "Past agency and administration commitment to sending humans to Mars has been fickle, ranging from extensive study teams producing viable roadmaps, to posters and slogans with little substance. Lunar programs to enable Mars are largely a distraction. No technologies for Mars require demonstration at the moon; landing on an airless moon has no bearing on systems needed for planetary atmospheres. The moon may be an exciting commercial destination, but not for the next generation of explorers. Mars is the next major step in human exploration, exciting the public, spurring new global partnerships, creating unimaginable technological spin-offs, and uniting us by pushing ever closer to answering \u201cAre we alone?\u201d in this vast universe of planets. NASA needs to make the financial and leadership commitments to land humans by 2040, and avoid distractions. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs prove we can do this, so let\u2019s get on with it! \nJ. Douglas McCuistion\n\n\n\n\nLothian, Md.\n\n\nMr. McCuistion was director, NASA Mars Exploration Program, 2004-12.\nMr. Brown portrays NASA\u2019s Artemis lunar program as a misguided attempt to reboot Apollo and argues that NASA should cancel it and send astronauts directly to Mars. While the president has made it clear that Mars is our destination, and that we will get there via the moon, Mr. Brown\u2019s \u201cplan\u201d is another expensive mission to nowhere. \nThe 2016 transition team at NASA, which I participated in, was composed of scientists, academics, businesspeople and an astronaut. Our perspectives varied, but we came to agree that America must return to the moon immediately and permanently. Doing that is technically, fiscally and politically possible. Over the last four years the vice president\u2019s National Space Council has engaged all of government in building a practical program that maximizes NASA\u2019s existing investments in deep-space exploration systems and empowers America\u2019s space entrepreneurs. It engages international partners from Japan to Italy in constructive competition with China\u2019s aggressive lunar aspirations. It establishes legal precedents for commercial space activities. It develops the infrastructure, capabilities and experience required for us to really get to Mars. Artemis has broad support in the space community and bipartisan backing in Congress. \nSince Gene Cernan left the moon 48 years ago, billions of dollars have been spent on cancelled NASA exploration programs. Mars and the moon are uninhabited today, not because we couldn\u2019t get there, but only because we have not maintained our focus. Let\u2019s finish this job for America and for the future of all humankind.\nGreg Autry\nVice president of Space Development, National Space Society\nYorba Linda, Calif. Mars is the next true destination for humans in space exploration. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "To Infinity and Beyond, or at Least to Mars (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2020",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-infinity-and-beyond-or-at-least-to-mars-11610130284?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=36",
        "text": "Past agency and administration commitment to sending humans to Mars has been fickle, ranging from extensive study teams producing viable roadmaps, to posters and slogans with little substance. Lunar programs to enable Mars are largely a distraction. No technologies for Mars require demonstration at the moon; landing on an airless moon has no bearing on systems needed for planetary atmospheres. The moon may be an exciting commercial destination, but not for the next generation of explorers. Mars is the next major step in human exploration, exciting the public, spurring new global partnerships, creating unimaginable technological spin-offs, and uniting us by pushing ever closer to answering \u201cAre we alone?\u201d in this vast universe of planets. NASA needs to make the financial and leadership commitments to land humans by 2040, and avoid distractions. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs prove we can do this, so let\u2019s get on with it! \nJ. Douglas McCuistion\nLothian, Md.\n\n\nMr. McCuistion was director, NASA Mars Exploration Program, 2004-12.\nMr. Brown portrays NASA\u2019s Artemis lunar program as a misguided attempt to reboot Apollo and argues that NASA should cancel it and send astronauts directly to Mars. While the president has made it clear that Mars is our destination, and that we will get there via the moon, Mr. Brown\u2019s \u201cplan\u201d is another expensive mission to nowhere. \nThe 2016 transition team at NASA, which I participated in, was composed of scientists, academics, businesspeople and an astronaut. Our perspectives varied, but we came to agree that America must return to the moon immediately and permanently. Doing that is technically, fiscally and politically possible. Over the last four years the vice president\u2019s National Space Council has engaged all of government in building a practical program that maximizes NASA\u2019s existing investments in deep-space exploration systems and empowers America\u2019s space entrepreneurs. It engages international partners from Japan to Italy in constructive competition with China\u2019s aggressive lunar aspirations. It establishes legal precedents for commercial space activities. It develops the infrastructure, capabilities and experience required for us to really get to Mars. Artemis has broad support in the space community and bipartisan backing in Congress. \nSince Gene Cernan left the moon 48 years ago, billions of dollars have been spent on cancelled NASA exploration programs. Mars and the moon are uninhabited today, not because we couldn\u2019t get there, but only because we have not maintained our focus. Let\u2019s finish this job for America and for the future of all humankind.\nGreg Autry\nVice president of Space Development, National Space Society\nYorba Linda, Calif. Mars is the next true destination for humans in space exploration. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "To Infinity and Beyond, or at Least to Mars (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2021",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-infinity-and-beyond-or-at-least-to-mars-11610130284?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=39",
        "text": "Past agency and administration commitment to sending humans to Mars has been fickle, ranging from extensive study teams producing viable roadmaps, to posters and slogans with little substance. Lunar programs to enable Mars are largely a distraction. No technologies for Mars require demonstration at the moon; landing on an airless moon has no bearing on systems needed for planetary atmospheres. The moon may be an exciting commercial destination, but not for the next generation of explorers. Mars is the next major step in human exploration, exciting the public, spurring new global partnerships, creating unimaginable technological spin-offs, and uniting us by pushing ever closer to answering \u201cAre we alone?\u201d in this vast universe of planets. NASA needs to make the financial and leadership commitments to land humans by 2040, and avoid distractions. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs prove we can do this, so let\u2019s get on with it! \nJ. Douglas McCuistion\n\n\n\n\nLothian, Md.\n\n\nMr. McCuistion was director, NASA Mars Exploration Program, 2004-12.\nMr. Brown portrays NASA\u2019s Artemis lunar program as a misguided attempt to reboot Apollo and argues that NASA should cancel it and send astronauts directly to Mars. While the president has made it clear that Mars is our destination, and that we will get there via the moon, Mr. Brown\u2019s \u201cplan\u201d is another expensive mission to nowhere. \nThe 2016 transition team at NASA, which I participated in, was composed of scientists, academics, businesspeople and an astronaut. Our perspectives varied, but we came to agree that America must return to the moon immediately and permanently. Doing that is technically, fiscally and politically possible. Over the last four years the vice president\u2019s National Space Council has engaged all of government in building a practical program that maximizes NASA\u2019s existing investments in deep-space exploration systems and empowers America\u2019s space entrepreneurs. It engages international partners from Japan to Italy in constructive competition with China\u2019s aggressive lunar aspirations. It establishes legal precedents for commercial space activities. It develops the infrastructure, capabilities and experience required for us to really get to Mars. Artemis has broad support in the space community and bipartisan backing in Congress. \nSince Gene Cernan left the moon 48 years ago, billions of dollars have been spent on cancelled NASA exploration programs. Mars and the moon are uninhabited today, not because we couldn\u2019t get there, but only because we have not maintained our focus. Let\u2019s finish this job for America and for the future of all humankind.\nGreg Autry\nVice president of Space Development, National Space Society\nYorba Linda, Calif. Mars is the next true destination for humans in space exploration. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The U.S. Must Outperform China in Science (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2022",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-must-outperform-china-in-science-11556311504?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=61",
        "text": "American students responded with waning interest in hard science and engineering, while those departments filled with overseas students, who graduate and return to their home countries, sometimes to teach at their countries\u2019 universities and to continue their research work there. This is how China\u2019s leading universities grew in international ranks to gain world leadership in many fields of science and engineering.\nTo address this fundamental failing we must strive to bring manufacturing back home, beginning with low corporate taxation, willing and well-educated labor, an easy regulatory regime and by nurturing entrepreneurship and engaging our academic institutions with the industry. It is only in such close, mutually beneficial cooperation that the right kind of culture will flourish, making government assistance either unnecessary or, where truly needed, far more effective.\n\n\n\n\nZdzislaw Meglicki\n\n\nBloomington, Ind.\nThe abbreviation NSF, used for \u201cnot sufficient funds,\u201d aptly describes the level of funding for the National Science Foundation, where I served as a program director. The NSF\u2019s annual funding level of about $8 billion a year is the same as what we as a nation spend on Halloween candy and costumes for one weekend. Lack of funding is hurting our ability to compete scientifically in many areas of research and to help establish the next generations of trained scientists and engineers. One possible way to help make American science great again is to guarantee full funding for any academically qualified U.S. citizen to get his or her graduate degree in STEM-related disciplines.\nPradeep Fulay, Ph.D.\nWexford, Pa.\nChina is a developing powerhouse, but that is due to its large population, its unfair trading practices and its forced business-partner \u201csharing\u201d or outright stealing of technology. China\u2019s spies may have done more for China\u2019s technology companies than have hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending. Meanwhile, the reason U.S. funding for basic scientific research as a percentage of the federal budget is half what it was in 1965 is that entitlement programs have squeezed spending in other areas. Just as government-employee pension and health obligations are crowding out spending for basic services in cities and states, federal entitlements are leaving items such as basic research and space exploration in the dust. \nTed Perkins\nRichmond, Va.\nIf we want to maintain America\u2019s leadership in biomedical research, we must remove some of the proverbial red tape that is tying the hands of our researchers. The U.S. is ceding biomedical-research leadership to China in multiple areas, including basic research such as gene-editing technologies using animal models, which China is implementing on a large scale, and human clinical research, where China is expanding clinical trials at a rapid pace. Reducing regulatory burdens will save taxpayer money and accelerate discovery and innovation. Multiple organizations have proposed changes to reduce regulatory burden in U.S. biomedical research but few, if any, of these changes have been implemented.\nMark W. Hamrick, Ph.D.\nAugusta, Ga. With each U.S. factory transferred to another country, we lost jobs, know-how, supply-and-distribution chains, career opportunities for America\u2019s young engineers, and interest in academic research and development on behalf of the industry. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The U.S. Must Outperform China in Science (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2023",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-must-outperform-china-in-science-11556311504?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=73",
        "text": "American students responded with waning interest in hard science and engineering, while those departments filled with overseas students, who graduate and return to their home countries, sometimes to teach at their countries\u2019 universities and to continue their research work there. This is how China\u2019s leading universities grew in international ranks to gain world leadership in many fields of science and engineering.\nTo address this fundamental failing we must strive to bring manufacturing back home, beginning with low corporate taxation, willing and well-educated labor, an easy regulatory regime and by nurturing entrepreneurship and engaging our academic institutions with the industry. It is only in such close, mutually beneficial cooperation that the right kind of culture will flourish, making government assistance either unnecessary or, where truly needed, far more effective.\n\n\n\n\nZdzislaw Meglicki\n\n\nBloomington, Ind.\nThe abbreviation NSF, used for \u201cnot sufficient funds,\u201d aptly describes the level of funding for the National Science Foundation, where I served as a program director. The NSF\u2019s annual funding level of about $8 billion a year is the same as what we as a nation spend on Halloween candy and costumes for one weekend. Lack of funding is hurting our ability to compete scientifically in many areas of research and to help establish the next generations of trained scientists and engineers. One possible way to help make American science great again is to guarantee full funding for any academically qualified U.S. citizen to get his or her graduate degree in STEM-related disciplines.\nPradeep Fulay, Ph.D.\nWexford, Pa.\nChina is a developing powerhouse, but that is due to its large population, its unfair trading practices and its forced business-partner \u201csharing\u201d or outright stealing of technology. China\u2019s spies may have done more for China\u2019s technology companies than have hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending. Meanwhile, the reason U.S. funding for basic scientific research as a percentage of the federal budget is half what it was in 1965 is that entitlement programs have squeezed spending in other areas. Just as government-employee pension and health obligations are crowding out spending for basic services in cities and states, federal entitlements are leaving items such as basic research and space exploration in the dust. \nTed Perkins\nRichmond, Va.\nIf we want to maintain America\u2019s leadership in biomedical research, we must remove some of the proverbial red tape that is tying the hands of our researchers. The U.S. is ceding biomedical-research leadership to China in multiple areas, including basic research such as gene-editing technologies using animal models, which China is implementing on a large scale, and human clinical research, where China is expanding clinical trials at a rapid pace. Reducing regulatory burdens will save taxpayer money and accelerate discovery and innovation. Multiple organizations have proposed changes to reduce regulatory burden in U.S. biomedical research but few, if any, of these changes have been implemented.\nMark W. Hamrick, Ph.D.\nAugusta, Ga. With each U.S. factory transferred to another country, we lost jobs, know-how, supply-and-distribution chains, career opportunities for America\u2019s young engineers, and interest in academic research and development on behalf of the industry. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear Andy: Going to Space Helps Us on Earth (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2024",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dear-andy-going-to-space-helps-us-on-earth-11608590606?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=40",
        "text": " Walk into any hospital-patient\u2019s room in America and see the life-saving benefit of our space program. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Don\u2019t shoot for the moon (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2025",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/dont-shoot-for-the-moon/2020/06/26/0ee9bbe4-b700-11ea-9a1d-d3db1cbe07ce_story.html",
        "text": "In their June 24 Wednesday Opinion essay,\u00a0\u201cSend the SpaceX Dragon to the moon,\u201d\u00a0Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam suggest ways they believe would give the United States a better chance of returning astronauts\u00a0to the moon by 2024. Aside from a reference to unspecified \u201ceconomic, scientific and world leadership goals,\u201d they give no hint of why 2024 is better than 2025 or 2026, but the later dates would be after a second term for President Trump would end. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWe beat the rest of the world to the moon more than 50 years ago. There\u2019s little to be gained in prestige\u00a0by doing it again. Scientifically, automated spacecraft can do essentially everything astronauts can, and at a small fraction of the cost. Some propose doing to the moon what we\u2019ve done to much of West Virginia and many other mining sites around the world. Surely there is nothing so valuable there that we need to do that, unless it\u2019s to access materials needed to build human habitats.\u00a0Why do that?Let\u2019s concentrate\u00a0on real problems here on Earth, including climate change, rather than create new ones on the moon, at huge cost.Bob Allnutt,\u00a0Bethesda The writer was an assistant administrator of NASA from 1967 to 1970 and associate deputy administrator from 1978 to 1983.  Opinion: Don\u2019t shoot for the moon",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Are only dog lovers hired as editors? (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2026",
        "date": "2021-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/27/readers-critique-post-are-only-dog-lovers-hired-editors/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightPet projectsRegarding the Aug. 19 special section \u201cWhat is she thinking?\u201d: When is the cat issue being published? My cats might insist I cancel my subscription if it isn\u2019t forthcoming.Analysis requires endless hours on the computer, and cats are right there planted on laps, ensuring their people stay on the job.Research companies should look into adding lap cats as a requirement if they want to increase worker productivity. It\u2019s hard to move a purring cat off your lap \u2014 easier to keep working.Story continues below advertisementC.E. Wray, CharlottesvilleThanks for the special section devoted to dogs. If my dog, Huckleberry, could write a letter, he probably would say, \u201cIt\u2019s about time! It was also nice to see my \u2018mom\u2019 read something in the paper that did not make her feel sad and worried about our future. I suggest this section become a regularly recurring feature. Here are a few topics [that my dog offers] for further consideration: Are the Postal Service, FedEx, UPS and Amazon [deliveries] really necessary? Can the climate be changed to get rid of thunder? And, last but not least, being constrained by a leash is an affront to my freedom as an American [dog].\u201dAdvertisementChristine Kohl, KensingtonStory continues below advertisement\u25cfWhat\u2019s right with these headlines?An Aug. 8 editorial was headlined \u201cWhat\u2019s not wrong about riches.\u201d Whenever there is a negative like that, the reader (at least I do) needs to stop and think, \u201cOkay, if I take the \u2018not\u2019 out, that must mean that there are things \u201cright\u201d about riches. Why not keep it simple and just say, \u201cWhat\u2019s right about riches\u201d?Kathleen Parker\u2019s op-ed the same day was headlined \u201cCuomo\u2019s downfall proves that hubris takes no prisoners.\u201d After reading the headline several times and seeking the input from a friend (who could shed no light on it, either), I couldn\u2019t figure out what it meant. What does \u201ctakes no prisoners\u201d in this context mean? I have no clue.Story continues below advertisementIn my humble opinion, a headline should be clear and simple so the typical reader can read it, understand it and decide whether to spend their limited reading time on that article or column.AdvertisementGrace Deitemyer, Rockville\u25cfWe\u2019ve lost our wayThe Post used to provide small maps along with articles that referred to locations that readers might not find familiar. I remember using The Post as an example of how to do it in more than one letter to the New York State Conservationist magazine. It finally added a map feature, though not the way The\u2009Post did it (which was better).So what happened? I\u2019m constantly pulling out my own maps to find out where a place is, but that is annoying, and sometimes I\u2019m too lazy. Even in the Aug. 15 Travel article \u201cIt\u2019s a mud, mud, mud, mud world,\u201d there was no map of the \u201cmudder\u201d area of the Netherlands. How many people know where that is?Story continues below advertisementLouise Donargo, FairfaxThe map that accompanied the Aug. 15 front-page article \u201cA glimpse of the American future\u201d had Minnesota and Wisconsin in the wrong places. As a kid in grade school many years ago, I had to learn the names, spelling, shapes and placement of the states.AdvertisementAround Lake Michigan, it was WI MI IL IN (Y my ill in).Brenda D. Woodson, Upper Marlboro\u25cfComically misinformedThe Aug. 15 \u201cMike du Jour\u201d cartoon [Arts & Style] made fun of those people who wear masks and keep social distance to stay alive.By making sensible precautions look ridiculous and contending that they are based not on reality but on tribal loyalties, the cartoon fed a bizarre narrative that public health is subject to political forces rather than to a vicious and uncaring virus.Story continues below advertisementThe Post is not obliged to carry propaganda.Karin Chenoweth, Silver Spring\u25cfSomething\u2019s not adding upThe fine Aug. 15 Metro article \u201cWorried about vaccination? Just listen to your Abuelina.\u201d was marred by an error that had the effect of understating an important point of the story.According to the piece, \u201cNow the vaccination rate among the Latino and Hispanic population is 9.2\u2009percent higher than the rate for non-Hispanic White residents, reaching 74.2 percent for Hispanics compared to 65 percent for non-Hispanic White residents as of Thursday.\u201d In comparing the two vaccination rates, the sentence confuses \u201cpercent\u201d with \u201cpercentage points.\u201d The figure of 74.2 percent is 9.2 percentage points higher than 65 percent, but it is 14 percent higher (9.2/65 = 0.14).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDaniel Horner, WashingtonIn their Aug. 15 Outlook essay, \u201cBoosters won\u2019t stop the delta variant. Here\u2019s the math.,\u201d Eleanor Murray and Ruby Barnard-Mayers made a commendable effort to explain the equation that determines the effective reproduction number for the delta variant and why it will be hard to stop the exponential growth in infections by getting that number below 1.Unfortunately, in their calculations, the authors cited an erroneous value of 35 million as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u2019s estimate of cumulative infections in the United States. The CDC estimate is in fact 120 million.They also used a \u201ctheoretical\u201d value of 30 percent for the effectiveness of previous infection in preventing a new infection instead of the actual value of 80\u2009percent found in a large field study published by the Lancet in March.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a result, their estimate understates the reduction in susceptibility due to previous infection by a factor of (120/35)*(0.8/0.3) = 9.1.It is good to understand equations. The most important thing to know about them is that they, like social media, can propagate an error and dress it up so that it is harder to spot. This is why all scientists are taught to guard against the possibility of \u201cgarbage in, garbage out.\u201dPaul Romer, New York\u25cfTime for a usage renaissanceI have appreciated The Post\u2019s coverage of the disastrous fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, especially the insightful essays by Philip Kennicott [\u201cHave we not learned anything?: Afghanistan doesn\u2019t need our comparisons,\u201d Aug. 17, Style] and Robin Givhan [\u201cAmerica\u2019s humiliation is more American hubris,\u201d news, Aug. 18]. As a medievalist, however, I could not help but notice the use of the term \u201cmedieval\u201d in both essays as synonym for \u201ccrude, violent, barbaric.\u201d I suggest that the editors of The Post discontinue this problematic usage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is manifestly false that the medieval world (ca. 500-1500) was a crude, violent, barbaric monolith. This is the period that produced the exquisite beauties of Tang poetry and Islamic calligraphy, the architectural marvels of Isfahan and Lalibela and Chartres, and an array of institutions (parliament, the university, trial by jury) that undergird today\u2019s efforts to promote social justice.But, more fundamentally, the use of the term \u201cmedieval\u201d as shorthand for \u201cbarbaric\u201d replicates the kind of oversimplified, hubristic thinking that Kennicott and Givhan decry. The medieval/modern binary casts us \u201cmoderns\u201d as civilized, sophisticated, enlightened while conjuring a crude \u201cother\u201d against whom we might generate a flattering self-image. Such binary thinking is at the root of oppressive ideologies, including that of the Taliban.It\u2019s time to give \u201cmedieval\u201d a rest.AdvertisementSarah McNamer, Washington\u25cfA true AmericanThe caption for the photograph that accompanied the Aug.\u200914 National Digest said that Elsa Cowboy\u2019s \u201cfather was a World War II army veteran and one of many Indigenous people who served in the [U.S.] military, despite not being a citizen.\u201dIn fact, all Indigenous peoples in the United States have had full U.S. citizenship since 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act became law. Although some restrictions and discrimination remained in many areas, it is still incorrect to state that they were not citizens of the United States from 1941 to 1945.Edward Tabor, Bethesda\u25cfThis isn\u2019t a Kubrick odysseyIt\u2019s rocket science and computer science.The Aug. 14 Politics & the Nation article concerning Boeing\u2019s oft-delayed attempt to launch a Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station, \u201cBoeing spacecraft will be pulled for repairs,\u201d said that an earlier attempt by the spacecraft to reach the ISS had a software problem. The article then stated that the Starliner\u2019s software problem put the Starliner \u201cin the orientation it thought it should be in.\u201dAdvertisementThe Starliner has software that programs the spacecraft for all possible scenarios the program managers consider are necessary for a successful flight. I would surmise the Starliner does not have a human brain capable of \u201cthought\u201d controlling the process. I would also surmise it does not have artificial intelligence controlling that same process.A newspaper should not ascribe \u201cthought\u201d to such a computer system.James Kout, Bowie\u25cfPuzzlingly hard to readI really like the Sunday Los Angeles Times Crossword puzzle in the Arts & Style section. However, I wish it were printed in a size that is legible to the unaided eye. It leaves me with an hours-long headache. The Magazine puzzle could also be enlarged.Sylvia S. Gordon, Alexandria\u25cfNot the same scaleThe Aug. 16 Style article \u201cMore bad behavior \u2014 even after #MeToo\u201d names and was accompanied by photos of former New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo, former movie producer Harvey Weinstein, former network executive Les Moonves and former senator Al Franken (D-Minn.).Weinstein was convicted of sex crimes; Franken was hounded out of office without an investigation or sense of proportion.It is a sad state of affairs when a humorous photo of hands hovering above a sleeping woman or a kiss in a USO show is viewed as equivalent to rape. I believe The Post owes Franken an apology for portraying him with Weinstein and Moonves as a face of \u201cbad behavior.\u201dJanice Mehler, Bethesda\u25cfA beef with beefAre you kidding me? The Aug. 20 Weekend cover story \u201cBurgers that taste just like summer\u201d with the subheadline \u201cSix special sandwiches to quench cravings, help fight the changing climate\u201d would be laughable on its face if climate change were a laughing matter.In no universe are hamburgers made from beef fighting climate change \u2014 whether grass-fed, regenerative or pasture-raised.An article about burgers that don\u2019t harm the environment would have featured some of the delicious and innovative plant-based burgers out there, such as Beyond and Impossible.Elissa Free, WashingtonThe writer is the co-president of the Veg Society of DC.\u25cfThrowing readers a curveballOn Aug. 18, I learned a new expression. As someone who grew up in Ireland, I am not familiar with baseball terminology. On a 6 a.m. news show, one sports-obsessed pundit, when discussing the catastrophic situation in Afghanistan, used the term \u201cswing for the fences,\u201d which went right over my head. Later, as I read my Post, there was that expression again, twice!In John Kelly\u2019s Metro column, \u201cReaders give sage advice on gratitude, patience and staying alive,\u201d Nick Allard, discussing advice given to him by David Dinkins, said, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to swing for the fences, just try the practical doable things best for your team.\u201dIn the Style section, there it was again in \u201cThe ironies and frailties of modern life,\u201d Karen Heller\u2019s review of Dana Spiotta\u2019s book \u201cWayward.\u201d When praising the works by this author, using terms such as \u201cmordant\u201d and \u201ccoruscating,\u201d Heller wrote, \u201cShe swings for the fences.\u201dNow, after Googling it, I know that expression means \u201cto put one\u2019s power into one\u2019s swing while batting so as to try to hit a home run.\u201d In other words, to overachieve. You are welcome, non-baseball fans.Mary Donegan, Columbia\u25cfEditing issues related to the editingAs if these \u201celection fraud\u201d folks aren\u2019t already a fringe problem that detracts from our country\u2019s attempt to move past the now-10-month-old election, the Aug. 15 news article \u201cGovernment warns of online extremism stirring violence\u201d contained a colossal editing error that will only add fuel to the unfounded election fraud claims: \u201cunsubstantiated claims of fraud related to the 2020 election fraud.\u201dC\u2019mon, man!Kevin A. Sweeney, Manassas\u25cfWe should\u2019ve passed on this idiomThe Aug. 16 Politics & the Nation article \u201cButtigieg\u2019s skillful inside game positions him for the future\u201d included the observation that some Democrats may question Vice President Harris\u2019s \u201cability to pick up the baton.\u201d I guess the writers did not watch enough of Olympic track and field to know that having to pick up a baton means the previous runner dropped it.Jean Lightner Norum, CharlottesvilleRead more:Readers critique The Post: A haunting photograph from Afghanistan that spoke volumesReaders critique The Post: A shot above the rest, Olympics editionReaders critique The Post: A little less snarky Washington cynicism on the Olympics, pleaseReaders critique The Post: An image that looked like a classic oil paintingReaders critique The Post: Strong feelings on food (especially garlic powder)More letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Are only dog lovers hired as editors?",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Are only dog lovers hired as editors? (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2027",
        "date": "2021-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/27/readers-critique-post-are-only-dog-lovers-hired-editors/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightPet projectsRegarding the Aug. 19 special section \u201cWhat is she thinking?\u201d: When is the cat issue being published? My cats might insist I cancel my subscription if it isn\u2019t forthcoming.Analysis requires endless hours on the computer, and cats are right there planted on laps, ensuring their people stay on the job.Research companies should look into adding lap cats as a requirement if they want to increase worker productivity. It\u2019s hard to move a purring cat off your lap \u2014 easier to keep working.Story continues below advertisementC.E. Wray, CharlottesvilleThanks for the special section devoted to dogs. If my dog, Huckleberry, could write a letter, he probably would say, \u201cIt\u2019s about time! It was also nice to see my \u2018mom\u2019 read something in the paper that did not make her feel sad and worried about our future. I suggest this section become a regularly recurring feature. Here are a few topics [that my dog offers] for further consideration: Are the Postal Service, FedEx, UPS and Amazon [deliveries] really necessary? Can the climate be changed to get rid of thunder? And, last but not least, being constrained by a leash is an affront to my freedom as an American [dog].\u201dAdvertisementChristine Kohl, KensingtonStory continues below advertisement\u25cfWhat\u2019s right with these headlines?An Aug. 8 editorial was headlined \u201cWhat\u2019s not wrong about riches.\u201d Whenever there is a negative like that, the reader (at least I do) needs to stop and think, \u201cOkay, if I take the \u2018not\u2019 out, that must mean that there are things \u201cright\u201d about riches. Why not keep it simple and just say, \u201cWhat\u2019s right about riches\u201d?Kathleen Parker\u2019s op-ed the same day was headlined \u201cCuomo\u2019s downfall proves that hubris takes no prisoners.\u201d After reading the headline several times and seeking the input from a friend (who could shed no light on it, either), I couldn\u2019t figure out what it meant. What does \u201ctakes no prisoners\u201d in this context mean? I have no clue.Story continues below advertisementIn my humble opinion, a headline should be clear and simple so the typical reader can read it, understand it and decide whether to spend their limited reading time on that article or column.AdvertisementGrace Deitemyer, Rockville\u25cfWe\u2019ve lost our wayThe Post used to provide small maps along with articles that referred to locations that readers might not find familiar. I remember using The Post as an example of how to do it in more than one letter to the New York State Conservationist magazine. It finally added a map feature, though not the way The\u2009Post did it (which was better).So what happened? I\u2019m constantly pulling out my own maps to find out where a place is, but that is annoying, and sometimes I\u2019m too lazy. Even in the Aug. 15 Travel article \u201cIt\u2019s a mud, mud, mud, mud world,\u201d there was no map of the \u201cmudder\u201d area of the Netherlands. How many people know where that is?Story continues below advertisementLouise Donargo, FairfaxThe map that accompanied the Aug. 15 front-page article \u201cA glimpse of the American future\u201d had Minnesota and Wisconsin in the wrong places. As a kid in grade school many years ago, I had to learn the names, spelling, shapes and placement of the states.AdvertisementAround Lake Michigan, it was WI MI IL IN (Y my ill in).Brenda D. Woodson, Upper Marlboro\u25cfComically misinformedThe Aug. 15 \u201cMike du Jour\u201d cartoon [Arts & Style] made fun of those people who wear masks and keep social distance to stay alive.By making sensible precautions look ridiculous and contending that they are based not on reality but on tribal loyalties, the cartoon fed a bizarre narrative that public health is subject to political forces rather than to a vicious and uncaring virus.Story continues below advertisementThe Post is not obliged to carry propaganda.Karin Chenoweth, Silver Spring\u25cfSomething\u2019s not adding upThe fine Aug. 15 Metro article \u201cWorried about vaccination? Just listen to your Abuelina.\u201d was marred by an error that had the effect of understating an important point of the story.According to the piece, \u201cNow the vaccination rate among the Latino and Hispanic population is 9.2\u2009percent higher than the rate for non-Hispanic White residents, reaching 74.2 percent for Hispanics compared to 65 percent for non-Hispanic White residents as of Thursday.\u201d In comparing the two vaccination rates, the sentence confuses \u201cpercent\u201d with \u201cpercentage points.\u201d The figure of 74.2 percent is 9.2 percentage points higher than 65 percent, but it is 14 percent higher (9.2/65 = 0.14).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDaniel Horner, WashingtonIn their Aug. 15 Outlook essay, \u201cBoosters won\u2019t stop the delta variant. Here\u2019s the math.,\u201d Eleanor Murray and Ruby Barnard-Mayers made a commendable effort to explain the equation that determines the effective reproduction number for the delta variant and why it will be hard to stop the exponential growth in infections by getting that number below 1.Unfortunately, in their calculations, the authors cited an erroneous value of 35 million as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u2019s estimate of cumulative infections in the United States. The CDC estimate is in fact 120 million.They also used a \u201ctheoretical\u201d value of 30 percent for the effectiveness of previous infection in preventing a new infection instead of the actual value of 80\u2009percent found in a large field study published by the Lancet in March.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a result, their estimate understates the reduction in susceptibility due to previous infection by a factor of (120/35)*(0.8/0.3) = 9.1.It is good to understand equations. The most important thing to know about them is that they, like social media, can propagate an error and dress it up so that it is harder to spot. This is why all scientists are taught to guard against the possibility of \u201cgarbage in, garbage out.\u201dPaul Romer, New York\u25cfTime for a usage renaissanceI have appreciated The Post\u2019s coverage of the disastrous fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, especially the insightful essays by Philip Kennicott [\u201cHave we not learned anything?: Afghanistan doesn\u2019t need our comparisons,\u201d Aug. 17, Style] and Robin Givhan [\u201cAmerica\u2019s humiliation is more American hubris,\u201d news, Aug. 18]. As a medievalist, however, I could not help but notice the use of the term \u201cmedieval\u201d in both essays as synonym for \u201ccrude, violent, barbaric.\u201d I suggest that the editors of The Post discontinue this problematic usage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is manifestly false that the medieval world (ca. 500-1500) was a crude, violent, barbaric monolith. This is the period that produced the exquisite beauties of Tang poetry and Islamic calligraphy, the architectural marvels of Isfahan and Lalibela and Chartres, and an array of institutions (parliament, the university, trial by jury) that undergird today\u2019s efforts to promote social justice.But, more fundamentally, the use of the term \u201cmedieval\u201d as shorthand for \u201cbarbaric\u201d replicates the kind of oversimplified, hubristic thinking that Kennicott and Givhan decry. The medieval/modern binary casts us \u201cmoderns\u201d as civilized, sophisticated, enlightened while conjuring a crude \u201cother\u201d against whom we might generate a flattering self-image. Such binary thinking is at the root of oppressive ideologies, including that of the Taliban.It\u2019s time to give \u201cmedieval\u201d a rest.AdvertisementSarah McNamer, Washington\u25cfA true AmericanThe caption for the photograph that accompanied the Aug.\u200914 National Digest said that Elsa Cowboy\u2019s \u201cfather was a World War II army veteran and one of many Indigenous people who served in the [U.S.] military, despite not being a citizen.\u201dIn fact, all Indigenous peoples in the United States have had full U.S. citizenship since 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act became law. Although some restrictions and discrimination remained in many areas, it is still incorrect to state that they were not citizens of the United States from 1941 to 1945.Edward Tabor, Bethesda\u25cfThis isn\u2019t a Kubrick odysseyIt\u2019s rocket science and computer science.The Aug. 14 Politics & the Nation article concerning Boeing\u2019s oft-delayed attempt to launch a Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station, \u201cBoeing spacecraft will be pulled for repairs,\u201d said that an earlier attempt by the spacecraft to reach the ISS had a software problem. The article then stated that the Starliner\u2019s software problem put the Starliner \u201cin the orientation it thought it should be in.\u201dAdvertisementThe Starliner has software that programs the spacecraft for all possible scenarios the program managers consider are necessary for a successful flight. I would surmise the Starliner does not have a human brain capable of \u201cthought\u201d controlling the process. I would also surmise it does not have artificial intelligence controlling that same process.A newspaper should not ascribe \u201cthought\u201d to such a computer system.James Kout, Bowie\u25cfPuzzlingly hard to readI really like the Sunday Los Angeles Times Crossword puzzle in the Arts & Style section. However, I wish it were printed in a size that is legible to the unaided eye. It leaves me with an hours-long headache. The Magazine puzzle could also be enlarged.Sylvia S. Gordon, Alexandria\u25cfNot the same scaleThe Aug. 16 Style article \u201cMore bad behavior \u2014 even after #MeToo\u201d names and was accompanied by photos of former New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo, former movie producer Harvey Weinstein, former network executive Les Moonves and former senator Al Franken (D-Minn.).Weinstein was convicted of sex crimes; Franken was hounded out of office without an investigation or sense of proportion.It is a sad state of affairs when a humorous photo of hands hovering above a sleeping woman or a kiss in a USO show is viewed as equivalent to rape. I believe The Post owes Franken an apology for portraying him with Weinstein and Moonves as a face of \u201cbad behavior.\u201dJanice Mehler, Bethesda\u25cfA beef with beefAre you kidding me? The Aug. 20 Weekend cover story \u201cBurgers that taste just like summer\u201d with the subheadline \u201cSix special sandwiches to quench cravings, help fight the changing climate\u201d would be laughable on its face if climate change were a laughing matter.In no universe are hamburgers made from beef fighting climate change \u2014 whether grass-fed, regenerative or pasture-raised.An article about burgers that don\u2019t harm the environment would have featured some of the delicious and innovative plant-based burgers out there, such as Beyond and Impossible.Elissa Free, WashingtonThe writer is the co-president of the Veg Society of DC.\u25cfThrowing readers a curveballOn Aug. 18, I learned a new expression. As someone who grew up in Ireland, I am not familiar with baseball terminology. On a 6 a.m. news show, one sports-obsessed pundit, when discussing the catastrophic situation in Afghanistan, used the term \u201cswing for the fences,\u201d which went right over my head. Later, as I read my Post, there was that expression again, twice!In John Kelly\u2019s Metro column, \u201cReaders give sage advice on gratitude, patience and staying alive,\u201d Nick Allard, discussing advice given to him by David Dinkins, said, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to swing for the fences, just try the practical doable things best for your team.\u201dIn the Style section, there it was again in \u201cThe ironies and frailties of modern life,\u201d Karen Heller\u2019s review of Dana Spiotta\u2019s book \u201cWayward.\u201d When praising the works by this author, using terms such as \u201cmordant\u201d and \u201ccoruscating,\u201d Heller wrote, \u201cShe swings for the fences.\u201dNow, after Googling it, I know that expression means \u201cto put one\u2019s power into one\u2019s swing while batting so as to try to hit a home run.\u201d In other words, to overachieve. You are welcome, non-baseball fans.Mary Donegan, Columbia\u25cfEditing issues related to the editingAs if these \u201celection fraud\u201d folks aren\u2019t already a fringe problem that detracts from our country\u2019s attempt to move past the now-10-month-old election, the Aug. 15 news article \u201cGovernment warns of online extremism stirring violence\u201d contained a colossal editing error that will only add fuel to the unfounded election fraud claims: \u201cunsubstantiated claims of fraud related to the 2020 election fraud.\u201dC\u2019mon, man!Kevin A. Sweeney, Manassas\u25cfWe should\u2019ve passed on this idiomThe Aug. 16 Politics & the Nation article \u201cButtigieg\u2019s skillful inside game positions him for the future\u201d included the observation that some Democrats may question Vice President Harris\u2019s \u201cability to pick up the baton.\u201d I guess the writers did not watch enough of Olympic track and field to know that having to pick up a baton means the previous runner dropped it.Jean Lightner Norum, CharlottesvilleRead more:Readers critique The Post: A haunting photograph from Afghanistan that spoke volumesReaders critique The Post: A shot above the rest, Olympics editionReaders critique The Post: A little less snarky Washington cynicism on the Olympics, pleaseReaders critique The Post: An image that looked like a classic oil paintingReaders critique The Post: Strong feelings on food (especially garlic powder)More letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Are only dog lovers hired as editors?",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Enough shoving cicadas down my throat (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2028",
        "date": "2021-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/readers-critique-the-post-enough-shoving-cicadas-down-my-throat/2021/06/04/8b388030-c542-11eb-8c18-fd53a628b992_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMaybe just eat popped cornThere have been several articles about eating cicadas in The Post recently, including \u201cIf you want to try to\u00a0eat\u00a0cicadas, now is the time\u201d [Food, May 19] and \u201cCicadas: The insect you can snack on: Spicy Popcorn Cicadas\u201d [Food, May 26]. But please don\u2019t \u2014 and not just because the insects could be carrying a fungus that\u2019s not great to ingest. Cicadas are fascinating animals that have inspired everyone from Bob Dylan to the U.S. Navy, which is attempting to copy their sound production capability for underwater communications. And there\u2019s a lot more we could learn from them, too. They tell time by tasting changes in the fluid in tree roots in the spring and can detect when the ground temperature is 64\u2009degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf eating cicadas is an attempt at \u201csustainability,\u201d it\u2019s a feeble one. Like most animals, cicadas have fallen victim to deforestation and climate change, primarily the result of animal agriculture. Instead of dreaming up new ways to exploit animals, it\u2019s much more eco-friendly for humans to get their nutrients from plants.Letting cicadas live will benefit everyone. They aerate lawns when they burrow, prune trees when they lay their eggs and provide fantastic natural fertilizer via their discarded exoskeletons. If cicadas can wait 17 years for one month of life, surely we\u2019re evolved enough to let them live it.Michelle Kretzer, NorfolkThe writer is a senior writer with the PETA Foundation.Story continues below advertisementReaders would have been well served had the May 26 John Kelly\u2019s Washington column about Charles Valentine Riley enjoying baked and fried cicadas for breakfast, \u201cUSDA scientist savored cicadas for breakfast,\u201d\u00a0 included the title of the referenced biography. The rich story of Riley\u2019s fascinating and productive life is told in \u201cCharles Valentine Riley: Founder of Modern Entomology\u201d\u00a0by W. Conner Sorensen, Edward H. Smith and Janet R. Smith, with Donald C. Weber.AdvertisementRobert Wallace, Reston\u25cfNow here you go againThe May 28 editorial \u201cTangled up in tax breaks\u201d certainly disclosed an outrageous injustice. It revealed a travesty of shocking proportions. To put Stevie Nicks as a songwriter in the same paragraph as Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Paul Simon was an injustice for the ages.Story continues below advertisementWhen it said \u201cStevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, 73 as of Wednesday \u2014 can you believe? \u2014 got $100\u2009million\u201d for her song catalogue, I think the writer was referring to her age as unbelievable. But what\u2019s unbelievable is that she got two-thirds of what Young received for his song catalogue.I do not mean to denigrate Fleetwood Mac, but the shallow, meaningless output from the one-trick pony that is Nicks does not belong in the same conversation as the other three songwriters in the editorial. And the editorial began and ended by referring to the 1960s. Nicks is a product of the 1970s. Dylan, Young and Simon are not only from a different decade than Nicks, but they also occupy a whole different universe.AdvertisementDavid Berenbaum, AnnandaleStory continues below advertisement\u25cfThe right name for a sacred riverCan The Post refer to the Ganges river by its proper name, Ganga [\u201cMystery surrounds bodies found in the\u00a0Ganges,\u201d The World, May\u200923]?The term Ganges is unheard of in India. There are 22\u2009official languages in India, and they all refer to the river as Ganga.Girls in India are named Ganga, after the goddess associated with the river, and not Ganges. The lore of Ganga descending from the heavens is mentioned in the ancient epics and texts. We lose all these cultural markers by referring to the river as Ganges.There is also the point of using a consistent nomenclature. If The Post uses Mumbai (not Bombay) and Chennai (not Madras), it stands to reason that the river that flows in that land be referred to as the Ganga, not Ganges.Story continues below advertisementMohan Pillalamarri, Vienna\u25cfWhat's old may not be new againThough I appreciated Rowan K. Flad\u2019s May 23 Outlook essay on Chinese archaeology, \u201cThis is a golden age for Chinese archaeology,\u201d I was somewhat surprised by his assertion that the discoveries at Sanxingdui are new.AdvertisementWhile this is an active dig, and it is exciting to read of new findings, the site is hardly new. I visited there in 2007, when there was already an extensive museum given over to the stunning and unusual artifacts that had been uncovered. These relics are, as Flad pointed out, quite unlike those found at sites such as Xi\u2019an and elsewhere, and certainly do challenge the notion of a singular thread of Chinese history. I had never heard of\u00a0Sanxingdui before my visit, and, having seen it, I shall never forget it.Story continues below advertisementAs Chinese President Xi Jinping and his supporters work to\u00a0promulgate\u00a0the myth that China\u2019s history and\u00a0civilization\u00a0are homogeneous, it is all the more important to recognize sites such as Sanxingdui as testimony to the rich diversity of China\u2019s cultural heritage.W. Luther Jett,\u00a0Washington GroveAdvertisement\u25cfWhat does a senator look like?The May 27 editorial about the late former senator John W. Warner, \u201cThe embodiment of patriotic public service,\u201d stated, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just that he looked the part of a senator.\u201d I\u2019m curious: What about the senator\u2019s looks were consistent with the job? That he was White? That he was male? That he was tall?\u00a0Not only does this language further educate the public that the job has additional requirements beyond intelligence, honesty, open-mindedness, collaborative spirit and a commitment to hard work, but this language may also underscore why some White men might feel comfortable with campaigning on the grievance that non-White male candidates are playing the \u201crace card\u201d or the \u201cgender card\u201d or both. I\u2019m disturbed that a Post editorial endorsed this descriptive statement about a key role in our government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementElizabeth Mumford, Chevy Chase\u25cfRest in peace, Ms. ConnerKudos to Theresa Vargas for yet another insightful column, \u201cIn death, will a Black trans woman finally be heard?\u201d [Metro, May 23]. In the tragic story about Nona Moselle Conner, we learned about the complex issues facing Black transgender women: violence, a lack of resources, homelessness, animosity from the public and family members, and numerous other obstacles. Thanks to Vargas for her unique ability in eliciting understanding and empathy from her readers, regardless of the subject matter. In this short column, she took us from feeling sadness and hopelessness to reflection and optimism.Story continues below advertisementThanks again for sharing the life of Nona Moselle Conner, a life that ended way too soon. May she rest in peace.Karen Gibbs,\u00a0Lusby\u25cf\u25cfIs the truth out there?A few cautionary statements about the May 24 front-page news article \u201cOnce UFOs, now UAPs \u2014 and a hot topic in D.C.\u201d:AdvertisementLogic dictates that you can\u2019t prove a positive statement using negative evidence. The term \u201cUFO\u201d is by definition negative (i.e., unidentified) and therefore not proof of anything.Investigation of UFOs requires known provenance of the observation, including date, time, location, weather, sea state, visible astronomical objects, military in region, sensors involved, sensors available but not involved, maintenance records of sensors, active parties present,\u00a0native parties present and witnesses after the fact. Project Blue Book examined 12,618 UFO cases spanning decades and discovered zero alien spacecraft.There is no natural law that says humans must know everything about what\u2019s going on in the night sky. During my astronomy days, I personally saw multiple UFO occurrences. They were ultimately resolved into two broad categories: natural events and deliberate human deception. (Watch the show \u201cImpractical Jokers\u201d to understand the human psyche.)AdvertisementIt is important for Post readers to understand the term \u201cUFO\u201d is not a synonym for alien spacecraft. It means exactly what the name says: unidentified.Blane Morse,\u00a0HerndonThe May 24 front-page article about UFOs brought back memories of one of my late uncles. He was career Air Force and shared many tales with me. One involved his time as commander of an Air Force base in the northern United States. He had scrambled fighters several times to go after things like those described in the article. The \u201cUFOs\u201d were picked up on radar and seen visually by pursuing fighter pilots. They would stop in midair (or so my uncle told me) and then zoom off.\u00a0I wondered whether my uncle was pulling my leg, but this stuff was no joke to him. He didn\u2019t tell people much about it for various reasons, including a security lid on such information and because it would sound crazy to most people. But I\u2019ve heard and seen enough to wonder.\u00a0It is my understanding that the term \u201cUFO\u201d came into being early in the Cold War. We were concerned about Soviet bombers coming in over the Arctic and established the Distant Early Warning Network (\u201cDEW line\u201d) to detect such possible attacks. Any aircraft in that part of the world that did not identify itself was considered an \u201cUnidentified Flying Object-UFO.\u201dAround that time, however, other aerial anomalies were picked up on radar and visually, and they rapidly took over the term \u201cUFO,\u201d which assumed a life of its own.\u00a0It was certainly fodder for Hollywood. I can\u2019t believe that the Pentagon is going to release findings on UFOs. How many, and how well-documented, will the findings be? I certainly look forward to any reports.Peter I. Hartsock,\u00a0Laytonsville\u25cf\u25cfThanks for these memoriesBravo to Stacey Waring for her beautiful and inspiring story, \u201c40 years ago, I hiked across U.S. with a group of strangers\u201d [Metro, May\u200926].\u00a0She told us about an amazing adventure that began with her reading a brief news item in another publication (Newsweek) that inspired her to join the HikaNation expedition to see America \u201cslowly.\u201dHer observations about the people, places and experiences during this remarkable journey gave marvelous insights about what it was like along the way.I worked as a reporter in Delaware in the early 1970s and could almost feel my toes digging into the sand at Cape Henlopen as she described the celebration that concluded their journey. And the additional photos with the online version were the icing on a delicious cake.Randolph Arndt, Clarksville\u25cfMore lesser prairie chicken is great newsI enjoyed the extensive article on President Biden\u2019s proposals to help the endangered lesser prairie chicken [\u201cBiden proposes protections for threatened bird species,\u201d news, May 27].Continuing along through The Post\u2019s pages that day, I came to the continuation of the front-page obituary for former senator John W. Warner, \u201c5-term senator from Va. often went his own way,\u201d which included a photo of Warner with President Richard M.\u2009Nixon, taken almost 50 years ago.\u00a0I knew the photographer was concentrating on the \u201cshot\u201d and did not notice that a bird appeared to be perched on Nixon\u2019s head. The recognition alarm went off in my head.\u00a0It was a prairie chicken! What were the odds of that?\u00a0A prairie chicken makes it into the A section not once, but twice, and in a completely unrelated way.\u00a0Made my day.John Olow,\u00a0Woodbine\u25cf\u25cfPlainly exquisiteRegarding the May 22 Sports article \u201cMickelson turns back the clock at the PGA\u201d:Many disagree with me, but, still, I declare that watching golf is far from boring or drab, and the sport is not slower than a snail. The article\u2019s writer, Chuck Culpepper, wrote beautifully and captured golf\u2019s idiosyncratic rhythm, one even its songbirds sing. I read Culpepper\u2019s prose, and I\u2019m transported to the course and its players once again. I cannot just r-e-a-d his pieces; I slowly inhale the beauty of his selections and the tapestry of his finished work.\u00a0\u00a0Thanks to Culpepper, and thanks to The Post for being just as satisfied as your readers are by his elegant prose and for always reestablishing the essence of \u201csport.\u201d Mr. Culpepper, your writing is just plain exquisite.Barbara Mita,\u00a0Orlando\u25cf\u25cfSpeaking of exquisite writingSay it ain\u2019t so. Could it possibly be that Thomas Boswell has never received the Baseball Writers\u2019 Association of America\u2019s Career Excellence Award for \u201cmeritorious contributions to baseball writing\u201d? Perhaps that may be corrected now that Boswell has (more or less) retired. If so, better late than never.John W. Outland, Henrico, Va.\u25cfSomething else needs pruningNot only has the artwork of the \u201cMark Trail\u201d comic strip gone down the tubes, but so has the content. Butterfly bushes are invasive, but they are also pretty and are fodder for not only butterflies but also hummingbirds and hummingbird moths, as well as the occasional bee.\u00a0Simply deadhead the flowers when they are spent to keep the bushes from seeding themselves. And keep them pruned down so you can reach the flowers to cut them off.And get rid of that strip.Emily Johnston, Sykesville, Md.\u25cfA widow's lossThe caption for a photograph with the May 26 front-page article \u201cIn a mixed Israeli town, ties that may never be repaired,\u201d said, in part, \u201cMarwa Hassouna, the wife of Musa Hassouna, comforts her 7-year-old daughter Monday as they visit Musa\u2019s grave.\u201d There\u2019s a word for the wife of a dead husband: \u201cwidow.\u201dTed Hochstadt, Falls Church\u25cfExpecting betterGene Weingarten\u2019s May 23 Washington Post Magazine column, \u201cThe new book of revelations,\u201d was mean-spirited. Weingarten obviously doesn\u2019t like gender-reveal parties, and he is not alone. They certainly are not everyone\u2019s cup of tea. But the very nasty tone and open mockery of expectant moms and dads who want to use them as an opportunity to celebrate the upcoming birth of their baby was uncalled for.Florence Starzynski, Arlington\u25cfRead more:\nReaders critique The Post: Stop the false equivalency on Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOCReaders critique The Post: Stop calling it the Capitol \u2018riot\u2019Readers critique The Post: This cartoon needed 1,000 words to explain itReaders critique The Post: An embarrassing decision to give this Civil War reenactment prominent coverageReaders critique The Post: As this photo shows us, less isn\u2019t always bestReaders critique The Post: This seemingly silly pose has a storied pastMore letters to the editor This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Enough shoving cicadas down my throat",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Invite neglected female artists to the table (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2029",
        "date": "2021-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/readers-critique-the-post-invite-neglected-female-artists-to-the-table/2021/06/11/a32cf8b4-cac0-11eb-afd0-9726f7ec0ba6_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBuckle up: We're going to learn about spaceflight nomenclatureRegarding the June 1 Health & Science article \u201cCall them astronauts or amateur \u2018rocket riders\u2019?\u201d: My answer is simple: We don\u2019t call everyone who boards an airplane a pilot, so why call everyone who flies on a spacecraft an astronaut? As a journalist who covered space for nearly 40\u2009years, I never thought that made sense. Nor did it make sense that each nation capable of sending humans into space had a different term \u2014 astronaut (U.S.), cosmonaut (Russia), and by some accounts, taikonaut (China).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHistorically, NASA has had three classes of humans in space: career astronauts (consisting of pilots and scientist/engineers, called mission specialists), payload specialists trained for on-orbit work on specific experiments or cargo, and spaceflight participants. Teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was killed in the 1986 Challenger accident, would have been the first in that last group. I was a finalist to be the first journalist in that category, and a labor union member was to be the next. NASA shelved the whole project after the Challenger accident. The \u201cparticipant\u201d label would have been okay by me. But one bit of NASA nomenclature was not. The space agency calls the pilot the \u201ccommander\u201d and the co-pilot the \u201cpilot.\u201d Fine, if they want to call the pilot \u201ccommander,\u201d but the publications I worked for (the Houston Post and Aviation Week) balked at calling the co-pilot (the equivalent of an airliner\u2019s \u201cfirst officer\u201d) the \u201cpilot.\u201d That was downright misleading.Jim Asker, Vienna\u25cfAs a bonus, this would do wonders for C-SPAN's ratingsThe May 30 front-page article \u201cTheir agenda at stake, Democrats size up filibuster\u201d reported that, \u201cOn\u00a0Friday, for the first time this congressional session, Republicans used the filibuster on a piece of legislation.\u201d But no Republican \u201ctalked a bill to death.\u201d No Republican stood in the well of the Senate and, in view of the guards who protected them, explained for hours why a Jan. 6 commission was unneeded. No one played Mr. Smith voicing a principled stand. No senator mimicked Sen. Ted Cruz\u2019s (R-Tex.) 21-hour stunt, including a recitation from Dr. Seuss, holding up consideration of Obamacare.\u00a0Neither party was associated with words put into the record and expending time while the world watched.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRepublicans only threatened to use the filibuster, and they achieved their goal while suffering none of the consequences. Like boys crying wolf, Republicans repeatedly have issued this empty threat and gotten away without having to pay the price of their theatrics. Democrats have quavered in fear of the consequences of eliminating filibusters that never actually occur in favor of some \u201clong game\u201d for far too long. Bring back actual filibusters, when senators must put themselves and their party in the spotlight for hours, and let\u2019s see how long the country will stand for politicians\u2019 obstruction while calling for \u201cunity.\u201dJonathan Doughty, Vienna\u25cfThis joke needs a makeover Did the June 3 \u201cReply All Lite\u201d comic really imply that women aren\u2019t good at math?\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIt may not say so directly, but would there be a man saying the same thing? Why doesn\u2019t the woman want a makeover on English or social studies instead? Yes, I know a woman creates that strip. Doesn\u2019t matter.Advertisement\u201cReply All Lite\u201d owes readers young and old better. We should be well past the equivalent of Barbie\u2019s \u201cMath is hard\u201d days.Caryn Ginsberg, Arlington\u25cfWe left out some contextThe June 4 front-page article \u201cBiden\u00a0hints at a tax concession\u201d stated that President Biden had proposed moving the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, and then made a concession by offering instead a minimum 15 percent rate. This was the president\u2019s second tax-rate concession. The first was proposing raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 25 percent. Without recognizing that this was the president\u2019s second concession offer, the whole tenor of the article changes.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisementJoe Venturato, Danbury, Conn.\u25cfWe left out some scare quotesSurely the headline for Dan Balz\u2019s May 30 The Sunday Take column, \u201cGOP push for election integrity may do the opposite,\u201d should have read, \u201cGOP push for \u2018election integrity\u2019 may do the opposite.\u201d The headline implied that the GOP effort is sincere, whereas it is quite the opposite.AdvertisementAs Balz correctly wrote, \u201cDonald Trump\u2019s \u2018big lie\u2019 has spawned a movement that under the guise of assuring election integrity threatens to do the opposite.\u201d The headline was inexcusably misleading.Mary von Euler, Chevy Chase\u25cfSports photographers leave everything on the pitchI\u2019m not much of a sports fan, but the photographs taken by Sean D. Elliot, Nuccio DiNuzzo, Jonathan Newton, Ian Walton and Filippo Monteforte in the May 29 Sports section were worth seeing. I was amazed at the positions the athletes found themselves in as they threw everything they had into a play.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementWith all the bad and sad news in the paper, it\u2019s time to recognize a superb job done by sports photographers every day.Mary Eileen Callan, Silver Spring\u25cf\u25cfTime to showcase art's neglected womenThe May 26 obituary for\u00a0Mary Beth Edelson, \u201cFeminist art movement\u2019s leader had a theme: Empowerment,\u201d\u00a0rightly acknowledged her days in Washington and impact on feminist art. The Post pictured her 1972 \u201cLast Supper\u201d collage, in which Edelson replaced Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s apostles with living female artists. She gave Washington painter Alma Thomas a seat at the table, but 69 more faces surround the scene, among them six D.C. artists: Enid Sanford, Lawra Gregory, Cynthia Bickley, Rosemary Wright, Jennie Lea Knight and Joan Danziger.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdelson showed at Henri Gallery, then a major stop on the P Street gallery strip. In the collage \u201c22 Others,\u201d she placed herself and her gallerist Henri Ehrsam with D.C. friends such as Post critic Paul Richard, Washington Star (and later Post) critic Benjamin Forgey, curator Walter Hopps and artists Gene Davis, Ed McGowin and Paul Reed.Of 82 \u201cLast Supper\u201d women, only sculptor Danziger remains active in the D.C. area, her work shown at the Katzen Arts Center (2012) and visible now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum\u2019s Luce Center. Some of these artists became \u201cnames\u201d early on, while others had to wait or missed out on recognition altogether. With dealers and historians now focused on art\u2019s neglected women, the time seems right for an exhibition that invites them all to the table.Jean Lawlor Cohen, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe writer is\u00a0an independent curator and co-author of \u201cWashington Art Matters: Art Life in the Capital 1940-1990.\u201d \u25cf\u25cfCome to think of it, why not peg the dollar to the tulip?In his May 29 letter, \u201cWhat\u2019s old is new again,\u201d Ric Blacksten proposed an equivalency between bitcoin and tulips. That was unfair. If the modern bitcoin market crashes completely, investors will be left with nothing. When the Dutch tulip-bulb market of the 17th century crashed, speculators were left with a lot of distinctive and beautiful flowers.Tom Ede, Washington\u25cfRoses smell great, but our puns really stinkA caption to a photograph of a rose harvest in Turkey that accompanied the June 2\u00a0Economy & Business Digest included a\u00a0pun on \u201crose.\u201d\u00a0I am not going to soft-petal my point here. For far too long, captions and articles in The Post routinely have included corny puns, and I am hoping that this letter will stem the practice once and for all. Though I always am glad to stay abreast of Turkey and get a leg up on problems that are thorns in its side, I also believe that forgoing cheap puns that only soil your reputation in favor of more literary practices will truly blossom in time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPeter Ward Comfort,Arlington\u25cfMissing in action: Women's sportsDuring March Madness and Women\u2019s History Month this March, I was reassured to see Sports columnist Sally Jenkins criticize the NCAA after the organization shortchanged collegiate women basketball players by providing them with substandard exercise equipment during the NCAA women\u2019s tournament in San Antonio [\u201cThe NCAA\u2019s message: Women are worth less,\u201d March 20].Jenkins laid into the NCAA for just not getting it: \u201cThe ludicrously inferior weight room these women were provided .\u2009.\u2009. a single rack of weights and a couple of yoga mats? That\u2019s nothing new, and it\u2019s no surprise. Nothing changes with these people. Ever.\u201dBut then I noticed something curious. Instead of expanded coverage of women\u2019s sports in The Post\u2019s printed Sports section, women\u2019s athletics seemed to disappear. By May, I decided to test this observation and found that, indeed, women were absent from the paper\u2019s Sports section for 13 days over the month.AdvertisementNo photographs of female athletes were included on: May 1, May 2, May 3, May 4, May 7, May 8, May 9, May 10, May 12, May 18, May 20, May 25 or May 27. Nothing but men.Can The Post\u2019s skewed sports coverage ever change? We\u2019ll see.Christopher Jones, Falls Church\u25cfMissing in action: A key disclosureThe June 1 front-page article \u201cAlzheimer\u2019s drug sparks fight over FDA approval\u201d\u00a0quoted Alzheimer\u2019s\u00a0researcher Stephen Salloway as favoring Food and Drug Administration approval of the Biogen/Esai drug aducanambab. Yet the article did not mention the possible\u00a0financial conflict he listed in an Alzheimer\u2019s drug study published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine: \u201creceiving grant support and consultation fees from Biogen, Esai.\u201dSuch disclosures are required by all medical journals, for obvious reasons.Leslie Norins, Naples, Fla.The writer is founder and chief executive of\u00a0Alzheimer\u2019s\u00a0Germ Quest, a nonprofit that encourages research to determine whether Alzheimer\u2019s disease is caused by an infectious agent.\u25cfHey, do any senators read this page?Paul Kane\u2019s May 30 @PKCapitol column about the late former senator John W. Warner (R-Va.), \u201cJohn\u00a0Warner\u2019s death is a reminder of how power has shifted to Senate leaders,\u201d reminded\u00a0me of another significant challenge Warner faced in Congress.I was on the Hill one morning in October 2001 for a Brookings Institution course on Congress when anthrax was discovered in congressional offices. Still reeling from the shock of 9/11, all regular business \u2014 including our class \u2014 ceased, and Congress quickly transitioned to emergency mode. Undeterred, a couple of us decided to stay nearby to observe events. We soon learned the House had closed and was no longer in session. But the Senate remained in session, so we walked up to the gallery and waited to see how it planned to proceed. We watched the senators somberly enter the chamber and sit at their desks. The frail Sen.\u2009Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) was escorted \u2014 nearly carried \u2014 by aides.\u00a0The final senators to arrive were Warner and then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). They entered the chamber together and from the Senate floor addressed the chamber, assuring everyone that it was their duty to keep the Senate in session as a unified institution dedicated to the rule of law serving the American people. They declared that the Senate would face the crisis together \u2014 undeterred by acts of terrorism.\u00a0It was a historic moment in democracy and a lesson in probity in the face of adversity. That day, Warner and Daschle demonstrated how senators can put aside politics and show real leadership. The current Senate would do well to heed their example.Arthur J. Horowitz, Washington\u25cfEveryone loves a hometown heroSydney Page\u2019s May 25 Metro article \u201cHow a car dealer saved a small town\u2019s prom\u201d\u00a0 captured a great small-town story and made it come alive.\u00a0It was truly Frank Capra stuff, and that never gets too old. It had a bad guy \u2014 the coronavirus \u2014 and a bunch of good guys.The perfect formula, told well.\u00a0Ken C. Mahieu, McLean\u25cfWhy animal research mattersI applaud Melanie D.G. Kaplan for her decision to adopt Hammy, a dog previously involved in necessary and beneficial health research, as she described in her June 1 Health & Science essay, \u201cHow a beagle used in a test lab opened my heart.\u201d\u00a0It sounds as though the 11-year-old beagle lives in a loving and caring home.\u00a0However, at the same time, some of the behaviors that Kaplan mentioned are not normal for former research animals. Most dogs previously involved in health studies adjust nicely to their \u201cforever homes.\u201d But, as is the case with any animal introduced to an entirely new environment during their lifetimes, the process takes time, and significant challenges can arise.\u00a0As an owner of a research hero named Lucy, I know firsthand how quickly a dog from a well-managed research facility adapts to a home environment. Homes for Animal Heroes uses trained volunteer fosters to help transition the animals from the research setting to an adoptive home.A few other things readers should know: First, health research in dogs is rare. Some 95 percent of animal studies involve rodents. That doesn\u2019t mean canine research is unnecessary. It\u2019s often critical. It helps us fight cancer and heart disease. Research in dogs benefits other dogs as well. Creating new veterinary treatments would be impossible without it.Animal research is not a black-and-white issue. And though many of us love our pets just as much as the writer loves Hammy, we also need to recognize the tremendous good that comes from their involvement in health research.\u00a0\u00a0Donna Goldsteen, Damascus\u25cf\u25cfRead more:Readers critique The Post: Enough shoving cicadas down my throatReaders critique The Post: Stop the false equivalency on Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOCReaders critique The Post: Stop calling it the Capitol \u2018riot\u2019Readers critique The Post: This cartoon needed 1,000 words to explain itReaders critique The Post: An embarrassing decision to give this Civil War reenactment prominent coverageReaders critique The Post: As this photo shows us, less isn\u2019t always bestMore letters to the editor This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Invite neglected female artists to the table",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Invite neglected female artists to the table (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2030",
        "date": "2021-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/readers-critique-the-post-invite-neglected-female-artists-to-the-table/2021/06/11/a32cf8b4-cac0-11eb-afd0-9726f7ec0ba6_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBuckle up: We're going to learn about spaceflight nomenclatureRegarding the June 1 Health & Science article \u201cCall them astronauts or amateur \u2018rocket riders\u2019?\u201d: My answer is simple: We don\u2019t call everyone who boards an airplane a pilot, so why call everyone who flies on a spacecraft an astronaut? As a journalist who covered space for nearly 40\u2009years, I never thought that made sense. Nor did it make sense that each nation capable of sending humans into space had a different term \u2014 astronaut (U.S.), cosmonaut (Russia), and by some accounts, taikonaut (China).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHistorically, NASA has had three classes of humans in space: career astronauts (consisting of pilots and scientist/engineers, called mission specialists), payload specialists trained for on-orbit work on specific experiments or cargo, and spaceflight participants. Teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was killed in the 1986 Challenger accident, would have been the first in that last group. I was a finalist to be the first journalist in that category, and a labor union member was to be the next. NASA shelved the whole project after the Challenger accident. The \u201cparticipant\u201d label would have been okay by me. But one bit of NASA nomenclature was not. The space agency calls the pilot the \u201ccommander\u201d and the co-pilot the \u201cpilot.\u201d Fine, if they want to call the pilot \u201ccommander,\u201d but the publications I worked for (the Houston Post and Aviation Week) balked at calling the co-pilot (the equivalent of an airliner\u2019s \u201cfirst officer\u201d) the \u201cpilot.\u201d That was downright misleading.Jim Asker, Vienna\u25cfAs a bonus, this would do wonders for C-SPAN's ratingsThe May 30 front-page article \u201cTheir agenda at stake, Democrats size up filibuster\u201d reported that, \u201cOn\u00a0Friday, for the first time this congressional session, Republicans used the filibuster on a piece of legislation.\u201d But no Republican \u201ctalked a bill to death.\u201d No Republican stood in the well of the Senate and, in view of the guards who protected them, explained for hours why a Jan. 6 commission was unneeded. No one played Mr. Smith voicing a principled stand. No senator mimicked Sen. Ted Cruz\u2019s (R-Tex.) 21-hour stunt, including a recitation from Dr. Seuss, holding up consideration of Obamacare.\u00a0Neither party was associated with words put into the record and expending time while the world watched.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRepublicans only threatened to use the filibuster, and they achieved their goal while suffering none of the consequences. Like boys crying wolf, Republicans repeatedly have issued this empty threat and gotten away without having to pay the price of their theatrics. Democrats have quavered in fear of the consequences of eliminating filibusters that never actually occur in favor of some \u201clong game\u201d for far too long. Bring back actual filibusters, when senators must put themselves and their party in the spotlight for hours, and let\u2019s see how long the country will stand for politicians\u2019 obstruction while calling for \u201cunity.\u201dJonathan Doughty, Vienna\u25cfThis joke needs a makeover Did the June 3 \u201cReply All Lite\u201d comic really imply that women aren\u2019t good at math?\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIt may not say so directly, but would there be a man saying the same thing? Why doesn\u2019t the woman want a makeover on English or social studies instead? Yes, I know a woman creates that strip. Doesn\u2019t matter.Advertisement\u201cReply All Lite\u201d owes readers young and old better. We should be well past the equivalent of Barbie\u2019s \u201cMath is hard\u201d days.Caryn Ginsberg, Arlington\u25cfWe left out some contextThe June 4 front-page article \u201cBiden\u00a0hints at a tax concession\u201d stated that President Biden had proposed moving the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, and then made a concession by offering instead a minimum 15 percent rate. This was the president\u2019s second tax-rate concession. The first was proposing raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 25 percent. Without recognizing that this was the president\u2019s second concession offer, the whole tenor of the article changes.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisementJoe Venturato, Danbury, Conn.\u25cfWe left out some scare quotesSurely the headline for Dan Balz\u2019s May 30 The Sunday Take column, \u201cGOP push for election integrity may do the opposite,\u201d should have read, \u201cGOP push for \u2018election integrity\u2019 may do the opposite.\u201d The headline implied that the GOP effort is sincere, whereas it is quite the opposite.AdvertisementAs Balz correctly wrote, \u201cDonald Trump\u2019s \u2018big lie\u2019 has spawned a movement that under the guise of assuring election integrity threatens to do the opposite.\u201d The headline was inexcusably misleading.Mary von Euler, Chevy Chase\u25cfSports photographers leave everything on the pitchI\u2019m not much of a sports fan, but the photographs taken by Sean D. Elliot, Nuccio DiNuzzo, Jonathan Newton, Ian Walton and Filippo Monteforte in the May 29 Sports section were worth seeing. I was amazed at the positions the athletes found themselves in as they threw everything they had into a play.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementWith all the bad and sad news in the paper, it\u2019s time to recognize a superb job done by sports photographers every day.Mary Eileen Callan, Silver Spring\u25cf\u25cfTime to showcase art's neglected womenThe May 26 obituary for\u00a0Mary Beth Edelson, \u201cFeminist art movement\u2019s leader had a theme: Empowerment,\u201d\u00a0rightly acknowledged her days in Washington and impact on feminist art. The Post pictured her 1972 \u201cLast Supper\u201d collage, in which Edelson replaced Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s apostles with living female artists. She gave Washington painter Alma Thomas a seat at the table, but 69 more faces surround the scene, among them six D.C. artists: Enid Sanford, Lawra Gregory, Cynthia Bickley, Rosemary Wright, Jennie Lea Knight and Joan Danziger.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdelson showed at Henri Gallery, then a major stop on the P Street gallery strip. In the collage \u201c22 Others,\u201d she placed herself and her gallerist Henri Ehrsam with D.C. friends such as Post critic Paul Richard, Washington Star (and later Post) critic Benjamin Forgey, curator Walter Hopps and artists Gene Davis, Ed McGowin and Paul Reed.Of 82 \u201cLast Supper\u201d women, only sculptor Danziger remains active in the D.C. area, her work shown at the Katzen Arts Center (2012) and visible now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum\u2019s Luce Center. Some of these artists became \u201cnames\u201d early on, while others had to wait or missed out on recognition altogether. With dealers and historians now focused on art\u2019s neglected women, the time seems right for an exhibition that invites them all to the table.Jean Lawlor Cohen, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe writer is\u00a0an independent curator and co-author of \u201cWashington Art Matters: Art Life in the Capital 1940-1990.\u201d \u25cf\u25cfCome to think of it, why not peg the dollar to the tulip?In his May 29 letter, \u201cWhat\u2019s old is new again,\u201d Ric Blacksten proposed an equivalency between bitcoin and tulips. That was unfair. If the modern bitcoin market crashes completely, investors will be left with nothing. When the Dutch tulip-bulb market of the 17th century crashed, speculators were left with a lot of distinctive and beautiful flowers.Tom Ede, Washington\u25cfRoses smell great, but our puns really stinkA caption to a photograph of a rose harvest in Turkey that accompanied the June 2\u00a0Economy & Business Digest included a\u00a0pun on \u201crose.\u201d\u00a0I am not going to soft-petal my point here. For far too long, captions and articles in The Post routinely have included corny puns, and I am hoping that this letter will stem the practice once and for all. Though I always am glad to stay abreast of Turkey and get a leg up on problems that are thorns in its side, I also believe that forgoing cheap puns that only soil your reputation in favor of more literary practices will truly blossom in time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPeter Ward Comfort,Arlington\u25cfMissing in action: Women's sportsDuring March Madness and Women\u2019s History Month this March, I was reassured to see Sports columnist Sally Jenkins criticize the NCAA after the organization shortchanged collegiate women basketball players by providing them with substandard exercise equipment during the NCAA women\u2019s tournament in San Antonio [\u201cThe NCAA\u2019s message: Women are worth less,\u201d March 20].Jenkins laid into the NCAA for just not getting it: \u201cThe ludicrously inferior weight room these women were provided .\u2009.\u2009. a single rack of weights and a couple of yoga mats? That\u2019s nothing new, and it\u2019s no surprise. Nothing changes with these people. Ever.\u201dBut then I noticed something curious. Instead of expanded coverage of women\u2019s sports in The Post\u2019s printed Sports section, women\u2019s athletics seemed to disappear. By May, I decided to test this observation and found that, indeed, women were absent from the paper\u2019s Sports section for 13 days over the month.AdvertisementNo photographs of female athletes were included on: May 1, May 2, May 3, May 4, May 7, May 8, May 9, May 10, May 12, May 18, May 20, May 25 or May 27. Nothing but men.Can The Post\u2019s skewed sports coverage ever change? We\u2019ll see.Christopher Jones, Falls Church\u25cfMissing in action: A key disclosureThe June 1 front-page article \u201cAlzheimer\u2019s drug sparks fight over FDA approval\u201d\u00a0quoted Alzheimer\u2019s\u00a0researcher Stephen Salloway as favoring Food and Drug Administration approval of the Biogen/Esai drug aducanambab. Yet the article did not mention the possible\u00a0financial conflict he listed in an Alzheimer\u2019s drug study published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine: \u201creceiving grant support and consultation fees from Biogen, Esai.\u201dSuch disclosures are required by all medical journals, for obvious reasons.Leslie Norins, Naples, Fla.The writer is founder and chief executive of\u00a0Alzheimer\u2019s\u00a0Germ Quest, a nonprofit that encourages research to determine whether Alzheimer\u2019s disease is caused by an infectious agent.\u25cfHey, do any senators read this page?Paul Kane\u2019s May 30 @PKCapitol column about the late former senator John W. Warner (R-Va.), \u201cJohn\u00a0Warner\u2019s death is a reminder of how power has shifted to Senate leaders,\u201d reminded\u00a0me of another significant challenge Warner faced in Congress.I was on the Hill one morning in October 2001 for a Brookings Institution course on Congress when anthrax was discovered in congressional offices. Still reeling from the shock of 9/11, all regular business \u2014 including our class \u2014 ceased, and Congress quickly transitioned to emergency mode. Undeterred, a couple of us decided to stay nearby to observe events. We soon learned the House had closed and was no longer in session. But the Senate remained in session, so we walked up to the gallery and waited to see how it planned to proceed. We watched the senators somberly enter the chamber and sit at their desks. The frail Sen.\u2009Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) was escorted \u2014 nearly carried \u2014 by aides.\u00a0The final senators to arrive were Warner and then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). They entered the chamber together and from the Senate floor addressed the chamber, assuring everyone that it was their duty to keep the Senate in session as a unified institution dedicated to the rule of law serving the American people. They declared that the Senate would face the crisis together \u2014 undeterred by acts of terrorism.\u00a0It was a historic moment in democracy and a lesson in probity in the face of adversity. That day, Warner and Daschle demonstrated how senators can put aside politics and show real leadership. The current Senate would do well to heed their example.Arthur J. Horowitz, Washington\u25cfEveryone loves a hometown heroSydney Page\u2019s May 25 Metro article \u201cHow a car dealer saved a small town\u2019s prom\u201d\u00a0 captured a great small-town story and made it come alive.\u00a0It was truly Frank Capra stuff, and that never gets too old. It had a bad guy \u2014 the coronavirus \u2014 and a bunch of good guys.The perfect formula, told well.\u00a0Ken C. Mahieu, McLean\u25cfWhy animal research mattersI applaud Melanie D.G. Kaplan for her decision to adopt Hammy, a dog previously involved in necessary and beneficial health research, as she described in her June 1 Health & Science essay, \u201cHow a beagle used in a test lab opened my heart.\u201d\u00a0It sounds as though the 11-year-old beagle lives in a loving and caring home.\u00a0However, at the same time, some of the behaviors that Kaplan mentioned are not normal for former research animals. Most dogs previously involved in health studies adjust nicely to their \u201cforever homes.\u201d But, as is the case with any animal introduced to an entirely new environment during their lifetimes, the process takes time, and significant challenges can arise.\u00a0As an owner of a research hero named Lucy, I know firsthand how quickly a dog from a well-managed research facility adapts to a home environment. Homes for Animal Heroes uses trained volunteer fosters to help transition the animals from the research setting to an adoptive home.A few other things readers should know: First, health research in dogs is rare. Some 95 percent of animal studies involve rodents. That doesn\u2019t mean canine research is unnecessary. It\u2019s often critical. It helps us fight cancer and heart disease. Research in dogs benefits other dogs as well. Creating new veterinary treatments would be impossible without it.Animal research is not a black-and-white issue. And though many of us love our pets just as much as the writer loves Hammy, we also need to recognize the tremendous good that comes from their involvement in health research.\u00a0\u00a0Donna Goldsteen, Damascus\u25cf\u25cfRead more:Readers critique The Post: Enough shoving cicadas down my throatReaders critique The Post: Stop the false equivalency on Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOCReaders critique The Post: Stop calling it the Capitol \u2018riot\u2019Readers critique The Post: This cartoon needed 1,000 words to explain itReaders critique The Post: An embarrassing decision to give this Civil War reenactment prominent coverageReaders critique The Post: As this photo shows us, less isn\u2019t always bestMore letters to the editor This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Invite neglected female artists to the table",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Invite neglected female artists to the table (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2031",
        "date": "2021-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/readers-critique-the-post-invite-neglected-female-artists-to-the-table/2021/06/11/a32cf8b4-cac0-11eb-afd0-9726f7ec0ba6_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBuckle up: We're going to learn about spaceflight nomenclatureRegarding the June 1 Health & Science article \u201cCall them astronauts or amateur \u2018rocket riders\u2019?\u201d: My answer is simple: We don\u2019t call everyone who boards an airplane a pilot, so why call everyone who flies on a spacecraft an astronaut? As a journalist who covered space for nearly 40\u2009years, I never thought that made sense. Nor did it make sense that each nation capable of sending humans into space had a different term \u2014 astronaut (U.S.), cosmonaut (Russia), and by some accounts, taikonaut (China).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHistorically, NASA has had three classes of humans in space: career astronauts (consisting of pilots and scientist/engineers, called mission specialists), payload specialists trained for on-orbit work on specific experiments or cargo, and spaceflight participants. Teacher Christa McAuliffe, who was killed in the 1986 Challenger accident, would have been the first in that last group. I was a finalist to be the first journalist in that category, and a labor union member was to be the next. NASA shelved the whole project after the Challenger accident. The \u201cparticipant\u201d label would have been okay by me. But one bit of NASA nomenclature was not. The space agency calls the pilot the \u201ccommander\u201d and the co-pilot the \u201cpilot.\u201d Fine, if they want to call the pilot \u201ccommander,\u201d but the publications I worked for (the Houston Post and Aviation Week) balked at calling the co-pilot (the equivalent of an airliner\u2019s \u201cfirst officer\u201d) the \u201cpilot.\u201d That was downright misleading.Jim Asker, Vienna\u25cfAs a bonus, this would do wonders for C-SPAN's ratingsThe May 30 front-page article \u201cTheir agenda at stake, Democrats size up filibuster\u201d reported that, \u201cOn\u00a0Friday, for the first time this congressional session, Republicans used the filibuster on a piece of legislation.\u201d But no Republican \u201ctalked a bill to death.\u201d No Republican stood in the well of the Senate and, in view of the guards who protected them, explained for hours why a Jan. 6 commission was unneeded. No one played Mr. Smith voicing a principled stand. No senator mimicked Sen. Ted Cruz\u2019s (R-Tex.) 21-hour stunt, including a recitation from Dr. Seuss, holding up consideration of Obamacare.\u00a0Neither party was associated with words put into the record and expending time while the world watched.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRepublicans only threatened to use the filibuster, and they achieved their goal while suffering none of the consequences. Like boys crying wolf, Republicans repeatedly have issued this empty threat and gotten away without having to pay the price of their theatrics. Democrats have quavered in fear of the consequences of eliminating filibusters that never actually occur in favor of some \u201clong game\u201d for far too long. Bring back actual filibusters, when senators must put themselves and their party in the spotlight for hours, and let\u2019s see how long the country will stand for politicians\u2019 obstruction while calling for \u201cunity.\u201dJonathan Doughty, Vienna\u25cfThis joke needs a makeover Did the June 3 \u201cReply All Lite\u201d comic really imply that women aren\u2019t good at math?\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIt may not say so directly, but would there be a man saying the same thing? Why doesn\u2019t the woman want a makeover on English or social studies instead? Yes, I know a woman creates that strip. Doesn\u2019t matter.Advertisement\u201cReply All Lite\u201d owes readers young and old better. We should be well past the equivalent of Barbie\u2019s \u201cMath is hard\u201d days.Caryn Ginsberg, Arlington\u25cfWe left out some contextThe June 4 front-page article \u201cBiden\u00a0hints at a tax concession\u201d stated that President Biden had proposed moving the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, and then made a concession by offering instead a minimum 15 percent rate. This was the president\u2019s second tax-rate concession. The first was proposing raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 25 percent. Without recognizing that this was the president\u2019s second concession offer, the whole tenor of the article changes.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisementJoe Venturato, Danbury, Conn.\u25cfWe left out some scare quotesSurely the headline for Dan Balz\u2019s May 30 The Sunday Take column, \u201cGOP push for election integrity may do the opposite,\u201d should have read, \u201cGOP push for \u2018election integrity\u2019 may do the opposite.\u201d The headline implied that the GOP effort is sincere, whereas it is quite the opposite.AdvertisementAs Balz correctly wrote, \u201cDonald Trump\u2019s \u2018big lie\u2019 has spawned a movement that under the guise of assuring election integrity threatens to do the opposite.\u201d The headline was inexcusably misleading.Mary von Euler, Chevy Chase\u25cfSports photographers leave everything on the pitchI\u2019m not much of a sports fan, but the photographs taken by Sean D. Elliot, Nuccio DiNuzzo, Jonathan Newton, Ian Walton and Filippo Monteforte in the May 29 Sports section were worth seeing. I was amazed at the positions the athletes found themselves in as they threw everything they had into a play.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementWith all the bad and sad news in the paper, it\u2019s time to recognize a superb job done by sports photographers every day.Mary Eileen Callan, Silver Spring\u25cf\u25cfTime to showcase art's neglected womenThe May 26 obituary for\u00a0Mary Beth Edelson, \u201cFeminist art movement\u2019s leader had a theme: Empowerment,\u201d\u00a0rightly acknowledged her days in Washington and impact on feminist art. The Post pictured her 1972 \u201cLast Supper\u201d collage, in which Edelson replaced Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s apostles with living female artists. She gave Washington painter Alma Thomas a seat at the table, but 69 more faces surround the scene, among them six D.C. artists: Enid Sanford, Lawra Gregory, Cynthia Bickley, Rosemary Wright, Jennie Lea Knight and Joan Danziger.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdelson showed at Henri Gallery, then a major stop on the P Street gallery strip. In the collage \u201c22 Others,\u201d she placed herself and her gallerist Henri Ehrsam with D.C. friends such as Post critic Paul Richard, Washington Star (and later Post) critic Benjamin Forgey, curator Walter Hopps and artists Gene Davis, Ed McGowin and Paul Reed.Of 82 \u201cLast Supper\u201d women, only sculptor Danziger remains active in the D.C. area, her work shown at the Katzen Arts Center (2012) and visible now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum\u2019s Luce Center. Some of these artists became \u201cnames\u201d early on, while others had to wait or missed out on recognition altogether. With dealers and historians now focused on art\u2019s neglected women, the time seems right for an exhibition that invites them all to the table.Jean Lawlor Cohen, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe writer is\u00a0an independent curator and co-author of \u201cWashington Art Matters: Art Life in the Capital 1940-1990.\u201d \u25cf\u25cfCome to think of it, why not peg the dollar to the tulip?In his May 29 letter, \u201cWhat\u2019s old is new again,\u201d Ric Blacksten proposed an equivalency between bitcoin and tulips. That was unfair. If the modern bitcoin market crashes completely, investors will be left with nothing. When the Dutch tulip-bulb market of the 17th century crashed, speculators were left with a lot of distinctive and beautiful flowers.Tom Ede, Washington\u25cfRoses smell great, but our puns really stinkA caption to a photograph of a rose harvest in Turkey that accompanied the June 2\u00a0Economy & Business Digest included a\u00a0pun on \u201crose.\u201d\u00a0I am not going to soft-petal my point here. For far too long, captions and articles in The Post routinely have included corny puns, and I am hoping that this letter will stem the practice once and for all. Though I always am glad to stay abreast of Turkey and get a leg up on problems that are thorns in its side, I also believe that forgoing cheap puns that only soil your reputation in favor of more literary practices will truly blossom in time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPeter Ward Comfort,Arlington\u25cfMissing in action: Women's sportsDuring March Madness and Women\u2019s History Month this March, I was reassured to see Sports columnist Sally Jenkins criticize the NCAA after the organization shortchanged collegiate women basketball players by providing them with substandard exercise equipment during the NCAA women\u2019s tournament in San Antonio [\u201cThe NCAA\u2019s message: Women are worth less,\u201d March 20].Jenkins laid into the NCAA for just not getting it: \u201cThe ludicrously inferior weight room these women were provided .\u2009.\u2009. a single rack of weights and a couple of yoga mats? That\u2019s nothing new, and it\u2019s no surprise. Nothing changes with these people. Ever.\u201dBut then I noticed something curious. Instead of expanded coverage of women\u2019s sports in The Post\u2019s printed Sports section, women\u2019s athletics seemed to disappear. By May, I decided to test this observation and found that, indeed, women were absent from the paper\u2019s Sports section for 13 days over the month.AdvertisementNo photographs of female athletes were included on: May 1, May 2, May 3, May 4, May 7, May 8, May 9, May 10, May 12, May 18, May 20, May 25 or May 27. Nothing but men.Can The Post\u2019s skewed sports coverage ever change? We\u2019ll see.Christopher Jones, Falls Church\u25cfMissing in action: A key disclosureThe June 1 front-page article \u201cAlzheimer\u2019s drug sparks fight over FDA approval\u201d\u00a0quoted Alzheimer\u2019s\u00a0researcher Stephen Salloway as favoring Food and Drug Administration approval of the Biogen/Esai drug aducanambab. Yet the article did not mention the possible\u00a0financial conflict he listed in an Alzheimer\u2019s drug study published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine: \u201creceiving grant support and consultation fees from Biogen, Esai.\u201dSuch disclosures are required by all medical journals, for obvious reasons.Leslie Norins, Naples, Fla.The writer is founder and chief executive of\u00a0Alzheimer\u2019s\u00a0Germ Quest, a nonprofit that encourages research to determine whether Alzheimer\u2019s disease is caused by an infectious agent.\u25cfHey, do any senators read this page?Paul Kane\u2019s May 30 @PKCapitol column about the late former senator John W. Warner (R-Va.), \u201cJohn\u00a0Warner\u2019s death is a reminder of how power has shifted to Senate leaders,\u201d reminded\u00a0me of another significant challenge Warner faced in Congress.I was on the Hill one morning in October 2001 for a Brookings Institution course on Congress when anthrax was discovered in congressional offices. Still reeling from the shock of 9/11, all regular business \u2014 including our class \u2014 ceased, and Congress quickly transitioned to emergency mode. Undeterred, a couple of us decided to stay nearby to observe events. We soon learned the House had closed and was no longer in session. But the Senate remained in session, so we walked up to the gallery and waited to see how it planned to proceed. We watched the senators somberly enter the chamber and sit at their desks. The frail Sen.\u2009Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) was escorted \u2014 nearly carried \u2014 by aides.\u00a0The final senators to arrive were Warner and then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). They entered the chamber together and from the Senate floor addressed the chamber, assuring everyone that it was their duty to keep the Senate in session as a unified institution dedicated to the rule of law serving the American people. They declared that the Senate would face the crisis together \u2014 undeterred by acts of terrorism.\u00a0It was a historic moment in democracy and a lesson in probity in the face of adversity. That day, Warner and Daschle demonstrated how senators can put aside politics and show real leadership. The current Senate would do well to heed their example.Arthur J. Horowitz, Washington\u25cfEveryone loves a hometown heroSydney Page\u2019s May 25 Metro article \u201cHow a car dealer saved a small town\u2019s prom\u201d\u00a0 captured a great small-town story and made it come alive.\u00a0It was truly Frank Capra stuff, and that never gets too old. It had a bad guy \u2014 the coronavirus \u2014 and a bunch of good guys.The perfect formula, told well.\u00a0Ken C. Mahieu, McLean\u25cfWhy animal research mattersI applaud Melanie D.G. Kaplan for her decision to adopt Hammy, a dog previously involved in necessary and beneficial health research, as she described in her June 1 Health & Science essay, \u201cHow a beagle used in a test lab opened my heart.\u201d\u00a0It sounds as though the 11-year-old beagle lives in a loving and caring home.\u00a0However, at the same time, some of the behaviors that Kaplan mentioned are not normal for former research animals. Most dogs previously involved in health studies adjust nicely to their \u201cforever homes.\u201d But, as is the case with any animal introduced to an entirely new environment during their lifetimes, the process takes time, and significant challenges can arise.\u00a0As an owner of a research hero named Lucy, I know firsthand how quickly a dog from a well-managed research facility adapts to a home environment. Homes for Animal Heroes uses trained volunteer fosters to help transition the animals from the research setting to an adoptive home.A few other things readers should know: First, health research in dogs is rare. Some 95 percent of animal studies involve rodents. That doesn\u2019t mean canine research is unnecessary. It\u2019s often critical. It helps us fight cancer and heart disease. Research in dogs benefits other dogs as well. Creating new veterinary treatments would be impossible without it.Animal research is not a black-and-white issue. And though many of us love our pets just as much as the writer loves Hammy, we also need to recognize the tremendous good that comes from their involvement in health research.\u00a0\u00a0Donna Goldsteen, Damascus\u25cf\u25cfRead more:Readers critique The Post: Enough shoving cicadas down my throatReaders critique The Post: Stop the false equivalency on Marjorie Taylor Greene and AOCReaders critique The Post: Stop calling it the Capitol \u2018riot\u2019Readers critique The Post: This cartoon needed 1,000 words to explain itReaders critique The Post: An embarrassing decision to give this Civil War reenactment prominent coverageReaders critique The Post: As this photo shows us, less isn\u2019t always bestMore letters to the editor This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Invite neglected female artists to the table",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Climate actions we can take now (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2032",
        "date": "2021-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/climate-actions-we-can-take-now/2021/07/07/ef078f24-de66-11eb-a27f-8b294930e95b_story.html",
        "text": "Charlie Warzel\u2019s June 30 Wednesday Opinion commentary, \u201cIt\u2019s not the heat. It\u2019s the existential dread.,\u201d rightfully concluded, \u201cTalking about our shared dread won\u2019t bring down the temperature or vanish the smoke, but leaning into the grimness is grounding.\u201d We need more than grounding.\u00a0We need more passengers on spaceship Earth transforming themselves into crew members. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWe need an Earth systems restoration corps. NASA\u2019s vision for an Earth System Observatory in space and President Biden\u2019s ground plan \u201cto tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad\u201d\u00a0have good intentions.\u00a0But nowhere in his 2,000-word news release are the 17 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals mentioned.\u00a0These goals are the only global comprehensive approach with the potential to functionally address most root causes of the existential threats we all face.Only when the global protection of human rights and the environment are more important than the protection of national sovereignty and corporate profits will our vital earth systems become sustainable and our dysfunctional human systems be fixed. Even if climate change is solved, humanity\u2019s food chain would still be threatened by loss of topsoil, declining biodiversity and dwindling fresh water supplies.\u00a0A comprehensive plan exists.\u00a0 We all need to make all of it happen.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement Chuck Woolery, RockvilleThe writer is a former chair of the\u00a0United Nations Association Council of Organizations.The July 1 editorial \u201cMelting in the Pacific Northwest\u201d was\u00a0right to glimpse a dystopian future in the current heat wave. It\u2019s true that greenhouse gases already emitted, also known as \u201clegacy emissions,\u201d lock in a certain amount of future warming and that we must zero out new emissions soon. Reaching net zero can\u2019t reverse global warming; it can only avoid making it worse. But that doesn\u2019t mean we must accept a future of routine heat domes and megadroughts because greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere can be drawn down, changing the trajectory of the climate. Such \u201cnegative emissions\u201d techniques are available \u2014 and some are scalable.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementA new McKinsey\u00a0study\u00a0finds we very likely cannot limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius without them, whereas with them we can meet climate goals. In fact, we could turn things around surprisingly rapidly.\u00a0For example, leading climate scientists recently\u00a0advocated\u00a0urgent research and action on removing excess atmospheric methane, a super-powerful greenhouse gas, by enhancing the natural methane oxidation process.\u00a0If successful, this could\u00a0roll warming back to 2005 levels.\u00a0Given our dire straits, there is no doubt we need a commitment to smart, targeted, carefully assessed, negative\u00a0emissions techniques \u2014 and then the courage to act.Peter Jenkins, Bethesda The writer is chair of the board of advisers of Methane Action.  Opinion: Climate actions we can take now",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The age of human space flight is over (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2033",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/the-age-of-human-space-flight-is-over/2021/03/05/82334b4a-7bb5-11eb-8c5e-32e47b42b51b_story.html",
        "text": "Regarding Mitch Daniels\u2019s March 1 op-ed, \u201cCan the U.S. put a human on Mars?\u201d:The question is not can we, but should we? If you want to do science, the answer is no. Think how many robots we could send to Mars for the cost of one crewed mission. Think how much more sophisticated those robots will become in the time it takes to get a human mission to Mars. And we have the technology right now to do it. No need to spend billions on a heavy-lift rocket. The age of crewed space flight is over. The International Space Station is an orbiting white elephant, sucking money out of true space exploration. Sell it for $1 to Elon Musk\u00a0and let him pay to ferry crews up. Mr. Daniels\u2019s vision of \u201cfree enterprise\u201d boldly leading the way is nothing more than billions and billions of taxpayer dollars flowing to giant corporations.\u00a0 Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThomas Beal, Glenn Dale\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: The age of human space flight is over",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The age of human space flight is over (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2034",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/the-age-of-human-space-flight-is-over/2021/03/05/82334b4a-7bb5-11eb-8c5e-32e47b42b51b_story.html",
        "text": "Regarding Mitch Daniels\u2019s March 1 op-ed, \u201cCan the U.S. put a human on Mars?\u201d:The question is not can we, but should we? If you want to do science, the answer is no. Think how many robots we could send to Mars for the cost of one crewed mission. Think how much more sophisticated those robots will become in the time it takes to get a human mission to Mars. And we have the technology right now to do it. No need to spend billions on a heavy-lift rocket. The age of crewed space flight is over. The International Space Station is an orbiting white elephant, sucking money out of true space exploration. Sell it for $1 to Elon Musk\u00a0and let him pay to ferry crews up. Mr. Daniels\u2019s vision of \u201cfree enterprise\u201d boldly leading the way is nothing more than billions and billions of taxpayer dollars flowing to giant corporations.\u00a0 Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThomas Beal, Glenn Dale\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: The age of human space flight is over",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The age of human space flight is over (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2035",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/the-age-of-human-space-flight-is-over/2021/03/05/82334b4a-7bb5-11eb-8c5e-32e47b42b51b_story.html",
        "text": "Regarding Mitch Daniels\u2019s March 1 op-ed, \u201cCan the U.S. put a human on Mars?\u201d:The question is not can we, but should we? If you want to do science, the answer is no. Think how many robots we could send to Mars for the cost of one crewed mission. Think how much more sophisticated those robots will become in the time it takes to get a human mission to Mars. And we have the technology right now to do it. No need to spend billions on a heavy-lift rocket. The age of crewed space flight is over. The International Space Station is an orbiting white elephant, sucking money out of true space exploration. Sell it for $1 to Elon Musk\u00a0and let him pay to ferry crews up. Mr. Daniels\u2019s vision of \u201cfree enterprise\u201d boldly leading the way is nothing more than billions and billions of taxpayer dollars flowing to giant corporations.\u00a0 Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThomas Beal, Glenn Dale\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: The age of human space flight is over",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | A billionaire\u2019s space travel leaves a big footprint (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2036",
        "date": "2021-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/a-billionaires-space-travel-leaves-a-big-footprint/2021/07/14/7da9ef52-e348-11eb-88c5-4fd6382c47cb_story.html",
        "text": "Regarding the July 10 Economy & Business article \u201cBranson counting down to his next exploit: A trip to the edge of space\u201d:Yes, it was exciting to watch the birth of space tourism. But isn\u2019t it also just another example of how the wealthy stomp all over Earth, and now space, with their Sasquatch-size carbon footprints? Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLeonard Kuentz, Gaithersburg  Opinion: A billionaire\u2019s space travel leaves a big footprint",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Be clear about what an \u2018algorithm\u2019 is (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2037",
        "date": "2021-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/05/free-for-all-letters-be-clear-about-what-an-algorithm-is/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightReflecting on Facebook coverageThe Oct. 27 front-page article \u201cFive points for anger, one for a \u2018like\u2019\u2009\u201d noted that Facebook uses the anger emoji to stimulate user engagement \u2014 but the headline on the article slyly used the same tactic. Five years ago, Facebook tried to address a decline in user engagement by introducing a whole gamut of new reaction emojis \u2014 all assigned with the same extra weight \u2014 to include anger, love, amusement, astonishment and sadness.Story continues below advertisementHowever, it was soon discovered, in the words of whistleblower Frances Haugen, that \u201canger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook,\u201d an insight not lost on the Post headline writers who prominently used both the word and the emoji in the headline. Intensifying the irony is the fact, revealed in Paragraph 25, that anger-boosting is a tactic now abandoned by Facebook. No matter. It still works for The Post.AdvertisementI am no fan of Facebook and believe its outsize, unethical, profit-seeking behavior poses a huge risk to the global community that relies on Facebook for human connection. But I also don\u2019t believe we can effectively critique Facebook\u2019s tactics when we mimic those tactics in the same breath. What hope do we have for an ethical media environment when Facebook is writing the playbook not just for itself but for reputable newspapers as well?Bel Mills, BurkeStory continues below advertisementThe Oct. 27 news article \u201cHow social media giant\u2019s algorithm shapes our feeds\u201d did not define the word, but it described an algorithm as \u201ca system that decides a post\u2019s position on the news feed based on predictions about each user\u2019s preferences and tendencies.\u201d That is not an algorithm; it is a complex piece of software, with perhaps hundreds if not thousands of lines of code. The software takes in a lot of variables and produces a potentially wide range of outputs. What you see in your feed might depend on what book you ordered online the day before or the news of a flood in New Jersey.AdvertisementRelying primarily on the work of Stanford professor Donald Knuth, computer scientists define an \u201calgorithm\u201d as a well-defined, finite set of steps that produces an unambiguous result. Sorting a list of names in alphabetical order, or finding the prime factors of an integer \u2014 that is what an algorithm does. Developing and understanding algorithms have been among the central accomplishments of computer scientists in the past decades. We should be proud of their work. Algorithms are not threatening or sinister, like the \u201cblob\u201d that terrorized Steve McQueen in that famous 1958 horror movie. Please be more careful when using the word.Paul E. Ceruzzi, KensingtonMaybe Sarah Palin can see it from thereRegarding the Oct. 28 Retropolis column, \u201cHotel where Trump allies plotted is no stranger to intrigue,\u201d about the historic guests who have taken up residence at the Willard hotel:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlease note the hotel is not across the street from the White House. One cannot see the White House from the Willard. It is a full two blocks away. To the east of the White House is the Treasury Building, then a combination of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, then the Hotel Washington, which has a fantastic view of the White House and grounds from its rooftop bar, and then the Willard hotel and a variety of new office buildings built in a complementary style of the latest renovation of the Willard.Thomas Bower, WashingtonThe interesting and informative article on intrigue at the historic Willard hotel omitted one particularly cogent observation. In 1862, New York lawyer and Civil War diarist George Templeton Strong ended his unflattering description of Washington, D.C., with: \u201cBeelzebub surely reigns here, and Willard\u2019s Hotel is his temple.\u201dWestbrook Murphy, EdgewaterHands-on leadershipThe beautiful Oct. 26 front-page article \u201cRushing to save his players\u201d brought me to tears with its description of coach Kevin McGill\u2019s tale of tragedy, love and hope. And photographer Toni L. Sandys perfectly captured \u201cCoach Kevin\u2019s\u201d literal \u201chands on\u201d leadership and compassion in her photo of the earnest young athletes listening to their coach, who, seemingly instinctively, connects with them through his outstretched hand on a young player\u2019s helmet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow wonderful that these preteens have such an inspiring and understanding mentor. Thank you for this thought-provoking, multidimensional story. I wish we could clone McGill.Barbara Morris, Falls ChurchDistastefulI was enjoying the Oct. 29 Style article about the dinner for presidential descendants, \u201cThe great-greatest of presidents,\u201d until I got to this line: \u201cThe pandemic postponed most of the plans until this year, and none of the best-known modern families \u2014 Kennedys, Clintons or Obamas \u2014 have joined thus far.\u201dTo not include the Bush family in the group of \u201cbest-known modern families\u201d is either ignorance or a glaring Democratic bias. The dinner was nonpartisan.Story continues below advertisementMary Rupp, Chevy ChaseSnubbing half of Nichols and MayThe Oct. 27 obituary for Mort Sahl, \u201cHis political comedy set the bar for future humorists,\u201d said, \u201cHe was regarded as a pathfinder for the more topical, personal or offbeat styles honed by Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, Joan Rivers and Mark Russell.\u201dAdvertisementWhat? Mike Nichols but not Elaine May? Surely this was an inadvertent omission.Caren Anton, RestonDeflating CarterIn his Oct. 20 Wednesday Opinion essay, \u201cThe Fed and inflation: What would Volcker do?,\u201d Robert J.\u2009Samuelson continued to misstate the history of Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker\u2019s historic role in curbing the high inflation of the 1970s, capped by double-digit inflation in 1980, assigning sole credit to President Ronald Reagan for supporting Volcker\u2019s \u201cferocious credit squeeze.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe failed to mention that President Jimmy Carter courageously nominated Volcker as Fed chair on July 25, 1979, with his reelection campaign about to begin, and supported him throughout the campaign, without once blaming Volcker for the high interest rates that were a key factor in Carter\u2019s defeat. Carter inherited high inflation from Presidents Richard M.\u2009Nixon and Gerald Ford. It got worse during his term in office because of poor labor productivity, a vicious wage-price spiral, a declining dollar and the radical Islamic Iranian revolution, which took almost 5\u2009million barrels of crude oil per day off the world market and led to a doubling of spot oil prices in one year, along with long gasoline lines at the pump.AdvertisementCarter was alert to the dangers of inflation from his earliest months in office, when most of us focused more on reducing unemployment and boosting growth. He sought to keep budget deficits low and spending tight, over the objection of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. By executive order, he created voluntary wage-price guidelines backed up by sanctions on government contractors that failed to follow them; created a labor-management council; deregulated the transportation system, telecommunications industry and banking to inject competition and lower prices; and developed the first regulatory review of federal regulations to seek the least costly way of achieving results and a paperwork reduction program. But when none of that halted the rise of inflation, over the objection of most of his advisers, he appointed Volcker to head the Fed, knowing that Volcker intended to crunch the money supply with a consequent rise in interest rates.It does no injustice to Reagan to set the historical record straight on Carter.Story continues below advertisementStuart E. Eizenstat, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementThe writer was chief White House domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 and author of \u201cPresident Carter: The White House Years.\u201dI\u2019ll say this much for Robert J. Samuelson: He\u2019s consistent. Again, in his Oct. 20 Wednesday Opinion essay, he praised President Ronald Reagan for empowering Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker to rein in inflation \u2014 while ignoring the president who appointed Volcker: Jimmy Carter.Samuelson\u2019s distortion of the record is particularly egregious considering that Carter lost reelection in 1980 in large part because he stuck with Volcker, and his successor reaped the electoral benefits of his sacrifice.Story continues below advertisementWhat I find most remarkable about Samuelson\u2019s critique, however, is that he never conceded that it\u2019s not \u201cloose money\u201d Fed policies but the natural burst of economic activity as we emerge from the pandemic that is doing the most to fuel inflation.AdvertisementAccordingly, to answer the question posed in his headline, I suspect Volcker would craft policies that take that into account, not fight battles that reference conditions nearly half a century ago.Steven Alan Honley, WashingtonThe nightmare before ChristmasCall me Scrooge, but running a KidsPost column entirely dedicated to Christmas gifts during Halloween week \u2014 \u201cAwesome puzzles, games, activity kits,\u201d Style, Oct. 27 \u2014 made me sick. And no, I haven\u2019t eaten all the Halloween candy.If you really want to skip Halloween because the KidsPost editors seemingly have no interest in the creation of homemade costumes, or great decorations, or the origins of the holiday, or healthier ways to celebrate than by gorging on candy, and skip Thanksgiving because KidsPost apparently doesn\u2019t give thanks, just focuses on \u201cgimme\u201d \u2014 then at least balance the greed with a small item on opportunities for kids to give to those less fortunate this season.Bah, humbug.Wendy Leibowitz, BethesdaDrawing the lineMatt Davies\u2019s Oct. 18 editorial cartoon on gerrymandering was perfect. It was amusing and gave the simplest explanation of what can be a confusing subject. Kudos to him.Marilyn Tublin, Silver SpringWhere all poems are above averageIt seems inconceivable that the lengthy Oct. 20 Style article on Garrison Keillor, \u201cFor Keillor, the woes appear gone,\u201d failed to note that his Prairie Home Productions continues to offer the Writer\u2019s Almanac on a daily basis via email. This is the same two-to-three-minute feature, including a poem, that ran on NPR stations for years before Keillor\u2019s ejection.Glen Ruh, AlexandriaMore Skynet than SkypeDavid Ignatius\u2019s statement in his Oct. 27 op-ed, \u201cThe Internet\u2019s problems run deeper than just Facebook,\u201d that \u201cthe Internet was created with an idealistic dream\u201d was incorrect. Please consult the Internet Society\u2019s 1997 \u201cBrief History of the Internet,\u201d available on the Web, which clearly shows the origin of the Internet as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project. The groundwork was laid at MIT back in the 1960s, courtesy of DARPA.The spread of misinformation should be everybody\u2019s concern, and calling DARPA projects \u201cidealistic\u201d sadly distorts their real outcomes. They were and are a military outfit.David Thomas, RockvilleA hanging offenseRegarding the Oct. 16 front-page article \u201cA new puzzle for word game creators: How not to offend\u201d:Speaking of puzzles, not to mention careful word choice \u2014 or across and down \u2014 try as I might, I cannot figure out how a framed picture can sit on a wall, a vertical surface, as noted in a caption.Mara Cherkasky, WashingtonMaybe not great against covid, but doesn\u2019t play nice with liceThe Oct. 30 news article \u201cHouse panel investigates 2 online medical businesses over virus treatments\u201d reported on the investigation by a House panel of whether two online businesses are pushing ineffective and dangerous treatments for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. One point in this important story was troublesome.The article described ivermectin as an \u201canimal parasite drug.\u201d However, ivermectin is also used to treat a variety of parasites in humans. By implying that ivermectin is only an animal drug when that is not the case, the article could easily feed existing thinking in society that the press and medical authorities cannot be trusted.A better approach would have been to say something to the effect that medical authorities report that there is no evidence that ivermectin is effective in treatment of covid. Though some might falsely dispute that truthful proposition, it would not have left The Post open to suggestions that it was being misleading. Given the pervasive distrust in society and the importance of following public health recommendations concerning covid, accuracy is important here.John Guttmann, WashingtonLet cooler heds prevailThe Oct. 24 front page was a near-perfect example of an appalling trend: headlines that cast every issue in terms of violent conflict. \u201cInside Facebook, Jan. 6 fueled a torrent of anger, regret,\u201d \u201cBattle for Va. House hinges on suburbs,\u201d \u201cMethane leaks in Russia imperil planet.\u201dThe most laughable and misleading example was \u201cExplosion of plate readers ignites fight over privacy.\u201d As it turned out, that incendiary headline was the reader\u2019s introduction to an interesting and well-reported article about a community conflict over license plate scanners and privacy issues.In every one of these articles, the reporting was sound and even solution-oriented, but the headlines verged on hysterical. Serious readers are discouraged by these bellicose cliches. Sensational headline writing makes a mockery of good journalism.Corey Flintoff, CheverlyRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsReaders critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditReaders critique The Post: Please have more respect for child-care professionalsMore letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Be clear about what an \u2018algorithm\u2019 is",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Be clear about what an \u2018algorithm\u2019 is (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2038",
        "date": "2021-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/05/free-for-all-letters-be-clear-about-what-an-algorithm-is/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightReflecting on Facebook coverageThe Oct. 27 front-page article \u201cFive points for anger, one for a \u2018like\u2019\u2009\u201d noted that Facebook uses the anger emoji to stimulate user engagement \u2014 but the headline on the article slyly used the same tactic. Five years ago, Facebook tried to address a decline in user engagement by introducing a whole gamut of new reaction emojis \u2014 all assigned with the same extra weight \u2014 to include anger, love, amusement, astonishment and sadness.Story continues below advertisementHowever, it was soon discovered, in the words of whistleblower Frances Haugen, that \u201canger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook,\u201d an insight not lost on the Post headline writers who prominently used both the word and the emoji in the headline. Intensifying the irony is the fact, revealed in Paragraph 25, that anger-boosting is a tactic now abandoned by Facebook. No matter. It still works for The Post.AdvertisementI am no fan of Facebook and believe its outsize, unethical, profit-seeking behavior poses a huge risk to the global community that relies on Facebook for human connection. But I also don\u2019t believe we can effectively critique Facebook\u2019s tactics when we mimic those tactics in the same breath. What hope do we have for an ethical media environment when Facebook is writing the playbook not just for itself but for reputable newspapers as well?Bel Mills, BurkeStory continues below advertisementThe Oct. 27 news article \u201cHow social media giant\u2019s algorithm shapes our feeds\u201d did not define the word, but it described an algorithm as \u201ca system that decides a post\u2019s position on the news feed based on predictions about each user\u2019s preferences and tendencies.\u201d That is not an algorithm; it is a complex piece of software, with perhaps hundreds if not thousands of lines of code. The software takes in a lot of variables and produces a potentially wide range of outputs. What you see in your feed might depend on what book you ordered online the day before or the news of a flood in New Jersey.AdvertisementRelying primarily on the work of Stanford professor Donald Knuth, computer scientists define an \u201calgorithm\u201d as a well-defined, finite set of steps that produces an unambiguous result. Sorting a list of names in alphabetical order, or finding the prime factors of an integer \u2014 that is what an algorithm does. Developing and understanding algorithms have been among the central accomplishments of computer scientists in the past decades. We should be proud of their work. Algorithms are not threatening or sinister, like the \u201cblob\u201d that terrorized Steve McQueen in that famous 1958 horror movie. Please be more careful when using the word.Paul E. Ceruzzi, KensingtonMaybe Sarah Palin can see it from thereRegarding the Oct. 28 Retropolis column, \u201cHotel where Trump allies plotted is no stranger to intrigue,\u201d about the historic guests who have taken up residence at the Willard hotel:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlease note the hotel is not across the street from the White House. One cannot see the White House from the Willard. It is a full two blocks away. To the east of the White House is the Treasury Building, then a combination of 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, then the Hotel Washington, which has a fantastic view of the White House and grounds from its rooftop bar, and then the Willard hotel and a variety of new office buildings built in a complementary style of the latest renovation of the Willard.Thomas Bower, WashingtonThe interesting and informative article on intrigue at the historic Willard hotel omitted one particularly cogent observation. In 1862, New York lawyer and Civil War diarist George Templeton Strong ended his unflattering description of Washington, D.C., with: \u201cBeelzebub surely reigns here, and Willard\u2019s Hotel is his temple.\u201dWestbrook Murphy, EdgewaterHands-on leadershipThe beautiful Oct. 26 front-page article \u201cRushing to save his players\u201d brought me to tears with its description of coach Kevin McGill\u2019s tale of tragedy, love and hope. And photographer Toni L. Sandys perfectly captured \u201cCoach Kevin\u2019s\u201d literal \u201chands on\u201d leadership and compassion in her photo of the earnest young athletes listening to their coach, who, seemingly instinctively, connects with them through his outstretched hand on a young player\u2019s helmet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow wonderful that these preteens have such an inspiring and understanding mentor. Thank you for this thought-provoking, multidimensional story. I wish we could clone McGill.Barbara Morris, Falls ChurchDistastefulI was enjoying the Oct. 29 Style article about the dinner for presidential descendants, \u201cThe great-greatest of presidents,\u201d until I got to this line: \u201cThe pandemic postponed most of the plans until this year, and none of the best-known modern families \u2014 Kennedys, Clintons or Obamas \u2014 have joined thus far.\u201dTo not include the Bush family in the group of \u201cbest-known modern families\u201d is either ignorance or a glaring Democratic bias. The dinner was nonpartisan.Story continues below advertisementMary Rupp, Chevy ChaseSnubbing half of Nichols and MayThe Oct. 27 obituary for Mort Sahl, \u201cHis political comedy set the bar for future humorists,\u201d said, \u201cHe was regarded as a pathfinder for the more topical, personal or offbeat styles honed by Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Mike Nichols, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, Joan Rivers and Mark Russell.\u201dAdvertisementWhat? Mike Nichols but not Elaine May? Surely this was an inadvertent omission.Caren Anton, RestonDeflating CarterIn his Oct. 20 Wednesday Opinion essay, \u201cThe Fed and inflation: What would Volcker do?,\u201d Robert J.\u2009Samuelson continued to misstate the history of Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker\u2019s historic role in curbing the high inflation of the 1970s, capped by double-digit inflation in 1980, assigning sole credit to President Ronald Reagan for supporting Volcker\u2019s \u201cferocious credit squeeze.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe failed to mention that President Jimmy Carter courageously nominated Volcker as Fed chair on July 25, 1979, with his reelection campaign about to begin, and supported him throughout the campaign, without once blaming Volcker for the high interest rates that were a key factor in Carter\u2019s defeat. Carter inherited high inflation from Presidents Richard M.\u2009Nixon and Gerald Ford. It got worse during his term in office because of poor labor productivity, a vicious wage-price spiral, a declining dollar and the radical Islamic Iranian revolution, which took almost 5\u2009million barrels of crude oil per day off the world market and led to a doubling of spot oil prices in one year, along with long gasoline lines at the pump.AdvertisementCarter was alert to the dangers of inflation from his earliest months in office, when most of us focused more on reducing unemployment and boosting growth. He sought to keep budget deficits low and spending tight, over the objection of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. By executive order, he created voluntary wage-price guidelines backed up by sanctions on government contractors that failed to follow them; created a labor-management council; deregulated the transportation system, telecommunications industry and banking to inject competition and lower prices; and developed the first regulatory review of federal regulations to seek the least costly way of achieving results and a paperwork reduction program. But when none of that halted the rise of inflation, over the objection of most of his advisers, he appointed Volcker to head the Fed, knowing that Volcker intended to crunch the money supply with a consequent rise in interest rates.It does no injustice to Reagan to set the historical record straight on Carter.Story continues below advertisementStuart E. Eizenstat, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementThe writer was chief White House domestic policy adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 and author of \u201cPresident Carter: The White House Years.\u201dI\u2019ll say this much for Robert J. Samuelson: He\u2019s consistent. Again, in his Oct. 20 Wednesday Opinion essay, he praised President Ronald Reagan for empowering Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker to rein in inflation \u2014 while ignoring the president who appointed Volcker: Jimmy Carter.Samuelson\u2019s distortion of the record is particularly egregious considering that Carter lost reelection in 1980 in large part because he stuck with Volcker, and his successor reaped the electoral benefits of his sacrifice.Story continues below advertisementWhat I find most remarkable about Samuelson\u2019s critique, however, is that he never conceded that it\u2019s not \u201cloose money\u201d Fed policies but the natural burst of economic activity as we emerge from the pandemic that is doing the most to fuel inflation.AdvertisementAccordingly, to answer the question posed in his headline, I suspect Volcker would craft policies that take that into account, not fight battles that reference conditions nearly half a century ago.Steven Alan Honley, WashingtonThe nightmare before ChristmasCall me Scrooge, but running a KidsPost column entirely dedicated to Christmas gifts during Halloween week \u2014 \u201cAwesome puzzles, games, activity kits,\u201d Style, Oct. 27 \u2014 made me sick. And no, I haven\u2019t eaten all the Halloween candy.If you really want to skip Halloween because the KidsPost editors seemingly have no interest in the creation of homemade costumes, or great decorations, or the origins of the holiday, or healthier ways to celebrate than by gorging on candy, and skip Thanksgiving because KidsPost apparently doesn\u2019t give thanks, just focuses on \u201cgimme\u201d \u2014 then at least balance the greed with a small item on opportunities for kids to give to those less fortunate this season.Bah, humbug.Wendy Leibowitz, BethesdaDrawing the lineMatt Davies\u2019s Oct. 18 editorial cartoon on gerrymandering was perfect. It was amusing and gave the simplest explanation of what can be a confusing subject. Kudos to him.Marilyn Tublin, Silver SpringWhere all poems are above averageIt seems inconceivable that the lengthy Oct. 20 Style article on Garrison Keillor, \u201cFor Keillor, the woes appear gone,\u201d failed to note that his Prairie Home Productions continues to offer the Writer\u2019s Almanac on a daily basis via email. This is the same two-to-three-minute feature, including a poem, that ran on NPR stations for years before Keillor\u2019s ejection.Glen Ruh, AlexandriaMore Skynet than SkypeDavid Ignatius\u2019s statement in his Oct. 27 op-ed, \u201cThe Internet\u2019s problems run deeper than just Facebook,\u201d that \u201cthe Internet was created with an idealistic dream\u201d was incorrect. Please consult the Internet Society\u2019s 1997 \u201cBrief History of the Internet,\u201d available on the Web, which clearly shows the origin of the Internet as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project. The groundwork was laid at MIT back in the 1960s, courtesy of DARPA.The spread of misinformation should be everybody\u2019s concern, and calling DARPA projects \u201cidealistic\u201d sadly distorts their real outcomes. They were and are a military outfit.David Thomas, RockvilleA hanging offenseRegarding the Oct. 16 front-page article \u201cA new puzzle for word game creators: How not to offend\u201d:Speaking of puzzles, not to mention careful word choice \u2014 or across and down \u2014 try as I might, I cannot figure out how a framed picture can sit on a wall, a vertical surface, as noted in a caption.Mara Cherkasky, WashingtonMaybe not great against covid, but doesn\u2019t play nice with liceThe Oct. 30 news article \u201cHouse panel investigates 2 online medical businesses over virus treatments\u201d reported on the investigation by a House panel of whether two online businesses are pushing ineffective and dangerous treatments for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. One point in this important story was troublesome.The article described ivermectin as an \u201canimal parasite drug.\u201d However, ivermectin is also used to treat a variety of parasites in humans. By implying that ivermectin is only an animal drug when that is not the case, the article could easily feed existing thinking in society that the press and medical authorities cannot be trusted.A better approach would have been to say something to the effect that medical authorities report that there is no evidence that ivermectin is effective in treatment of covid. Though some might falsely dispute that truthful proposition, it would not have left The Post open to suggestions that it was being misleading. Given the pervasive distrust in society and the importance of following public health recommendations concerning covid, accuracy is important here.John Guttmann, WashingtonLet cooler heds prevailThe Oct. 24 front page was a near-perfect example of an appalling trend: headlines that cast every issue in terms of violent conflict. \u201cInside Facebook, Jan. 6 fueled a torrent of anger, regret,\u201d \u201cBattle for Va. House hinges on suburbs,\u201d \u201cMethane leaks in Russia imperil planet.\u201dThe most laughable and misleading example was \u201cExplosion of plate readers ignites fight over privacy.\u201d As it turned out, that incendiary headline was the reader\u2019s introduction to an interesting and well-reported article about a community conflict over license plate scanners and privacy issues.In every one of these articles, the reporting was sound and even solution-oriented, but the headlines verged on hysterical. Serious readers are discouraged by these bellicose cliches. Sensational headline writing makes a mockery of good journalism.Corey Flintoff, CheverlyRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsReaders critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditReaders critique The Post: Please have more respect for child-care professionalsMore letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Be clear about what an \u2018algorithm\u2019 is",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: The serious underlying issue behind the annual turkey panic (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2039",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/03/readers-critique-post-serious-underlying-issue-behind-annual-turkey-panic/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe ABCs of T-U-R-K-E-YDavid Von Drehle\u2019s satirical and amusing diatribe on the satanic nature of turkeys, \u201cNo bones about it: The roast turkey was bequeathed to us by Satan\u201d [Sunday Opinion, Nov.\u200921], veiled the serious underlying issue behind the annual turkey panic. Namely, the hopeless incompetence of many Americans in the kitchen. I am amused annually by flummoxed wannabe turkey chefs who require the assistance of a \u201cturkey hotline\u201d when facing the overwhelming task engendered by this once-a-year ordeal. If you can\u2019t cook a turkey, you simply can\u2019t cook.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor these poor souls condemned to the eternal flames of kitchen hell, I offer salvation. Remove the giblets, put them in a pot of water with aromatic vegetables and simmer to a stock that can be used for soup or, if you dare to try, gravy. If this is too difficult, simply toss them. Place the turkey in a roasting pan and smear it with oil. Salt it inside and out. Place it in a 350-degree oven until it is done. You will know it is by the little thingy that pops up, the fact that the skin is golden brown and a meat thermometer, if you have one, that registers 165\u2009degrees in the thigh (which is the part of the turkey behind the breasts and connected to the drumstick).I apologize for the complexity of these instructions. If they are too byzantine for you to carry out, then I\u2019d suggest you order carryout from Von Drehle\u2019s favorite deli, where interestingly, when they cook the turkey, he finds it delicious.And, though I consider Von Drehle an excellent writer and know he would be a sparkling dinner companion, should he invite me to Thanksgiving dinner, I\u2019ll pass on his turkey.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNorman Dovberg, RestonA formula for dominancePaul Blackman\u2019s Nov. 20 Free for All letter \u201cThe full story of \u2018three-fifths\u2019\u2009\u201d was an attempt at myth-busting while engaging in gaslighting. The writer stated that the Southern states\u2019 political advantage was \u201cminimal\u201d and actually got worse after the Civil War. This argument obscured the larger point of the racist result of the Framers\u2019 acquiescence to allow Southern states to count any portion of their disenfranchised human \u201cproperty\u201d for political advantage.Andrew Wilson, AlexandriaPaul Blackman\u2019s defense of the Three-Fifths Compromise in his Free for All letter ignored the elephant in the room: Enslaved people could not vote. Counting disenfranchised enslaved people at all for purposes of allocating House seats gave the slaveholding states an unwarranted advantage in the House, irrespective of whether each enslaved person was counted as a full person or some lesser fraction. This is why the 14th Amendment would have reduced House representation for the Southern states if the former enslaved people were disenfranchised.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe failure to enforce that provision proves only that nothing changed for Southern Blacks as a result of the Civil War. They couldn\u2019t vote before the war, and they couldn\u2019t vote after the Ku Klux Klan forced an end to Reconstruction.Southern political dominance thrived either way.Sheldon H. Laskin, BaltimoreNot quite close enoughRegarding Dave McKenna\u2019s Nov. 20 Music Review \u201cAs close as a Genesis fan can get to paradise\u201d [Style]:Phil Collins did not play \u201ca schoolboy in the Beatles\u2019 1964 feature film \u2018A Hard Day\u2019s Night.\u2019\u2009\u201dThe \u201cdeserter\u201d schoolboy who banters with Ringo Starr in the film is David Janson (at the time billed \u201cDavid Jaxon\u201d). Collins was an extra in the final scene, one of the kids screaming in the audience as the Beatles played. He had no lines, was seen only very briefly or, in many cuts of the film, not at all.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso, the writer\u2019s assertion that Collins\u2019s touring with Genesis makes him \u201cseem the more selfless of the two Genesis frontmen\u201d (the other being Peter Gabriel, who quit the band many years ago) was extremely weird. Gabriel is a passionate and dedicated global human rights activist.Dalal Musa, Falls ChurchHappy journeys with \u2018Gridlock\u2019Regarding the Nov. 20 obituary for Ron Shaffer, \u201cWashington Post investigative reporter founded \u2018Dr. Gridlock\u2019 column\u201d:My husband and I were huge fans of Shaffer, a.k.a. \u201cDr. Gridlock.\u201d We consulted his recommendations before long trips up and down the Interstate 95 corridor, using his suggestions for avoiding traffic hot spots. We also read his columns for entertainment and enjoyed much of the back-and-forth between him and his faithful readers.Story continues below advertisementThe Post left out of his obituary one of his most famous letter writers: John Nestor. Nestor wrote a letter saying he always drove in the left lane at exactly the speed limit. It didn\u2019t matter if there was a huge line of drivers honking their horns; he steadily drove the speed limit. His letter set off a tirade of furious drivers saying Nestor should pull into another lane and let faster drivers pass. The name Nestor then became part of Dr. Gridlock\u2019s parlance \u2014 anyone who drove too slow in the left lane was \u201cNestoring.\u201d I believe the Style section even ran a profile of Nestor.AdvertisementTo this day, Dr. Gridlock lives on in our life. Whenever we are on the highway and someone is driving slowly in the left lane, we call out, \u201cNestoring!\u201dBeth Dugan, Chevy ChaseWorth your WeilMy appreciation to Martin Weil for his beautifully written \u201cA sparkling finish to a dreary day\u201d [Metro, Nov. 13]. I read his words on another rather dreary day and was immediately cheered.B.F. Farron, FairfaxWhat about diversifying female-dominated fields?The tone of the Nov. 16 Health & Science article on the experience of female engineers, \u201cLongtime female engineers reflect on their field,\u201d was a lament that there were not more women in the male-dominated profession. It reported that only 21 percent of college engineering students were female. Why don\u2019t we see an analogous article studying males in elementary education (21 to 24\u2009percent) or in nursing (about 12 percent of registered nurses)? Is gender diversity not important in these fields? Or does The Post champion only certain groups?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMark Scher, PotomacShe made a lasting impactRegarding the Nov. 22 obituary for Gladys M.\u2009Stern, \u201cLeader of Georgetown Day was dubbed \u2018doyenne of private school directors\u2019\u2009\u201d:I worked closely with Stern for more than 20 years as an assistant head at Georgetown Day School and was there for her final years at the school. I found the reliance on Len Downie for his perspective on Stern\u2019s life\u2019s work a very convenient in-house perspective and one of a very short duration at the end of an amazing career.Luckily, her impact on so many for so many years will far outlast a moment-in-time obituary.Walter Ailes, AtlantaA confusing sequence of eventsIf the Nov. 18 front-page synopsis of Travis McMichael\u2019s testimony was supposed to pique interest in reading the full article, it succeeded. Unfortunately, it also succeeded in causing confusion. The synopsis read, \u201cTravis McMichael testified that he feared for his life when Ahmaud Arbery grabbed his gun.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019d be fearful, too, if someone I was confronting grabbed his gun. That\u2019s probably not the scenario the writer wanted to describe, but that\u2019s how the synopsis could be understood. So, read the full article, if only to discover who grabbed whose gun.James Sherry, Winchester, Va.Pointed takes on a pointed takeI was surprised and disappointed to see two letters in the Nov. 20 Free For All section complaining about one of Michael Ramirez\u2019s political cartoons [\u201cDraw a line on cartoons\u201d].In an era when many political cartoons seem to have devolved into poorly drawn pablum for one side or another, I find Ramirez\u2019s cartoons to be a breath of fresh air. The talented Ramirez is one of the best draftsmen in editorial cartooning today, with opinions as sharp as his pen point. His great skill should be celebrated in the pages of The Post, alongside the great skill of The Post\u2019s liberal Ann Telnaes. Ramirez and Telnaes have been awarded the highest honors from the National Cartoonists Society. They are the true successors to the rich tradition of Herbert Block, a.k.a. Herblock.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHerblock would undoubtedly recoil at today\u2019s cartoonists who take the easy way out by substituting a Xeroxed face for a hand-drawn caricature. That misses the whole point of the art form.David Apatoff, McLeanI was glad to see two Nov. 20 Free for All letters exposing the Nov. 9 Drawing Board cartoon by Michael Ramirez for what it was: his very worst cartoon ever. I often like Ramirez. He can do what political cartoonists are meant to do, use humor to expose an uncomfortable truth or to blast some hypocrisy. But that particular cartoon was dishonest, lacking in any purpose but hatefulness.Susan Wallace, WashingtonDon\u2019t let the Corcoran\u2019s legacy \u2018vanish\u2019Sebastian Smee\u2019s Nov. 14 Great Works, In Focus column, \u201cA portrait that portends scandal, intrigue and, ultimately, the guillotine\u201d [Arts & Style], discussed \u00c9lisabeth Louise Vig\u00e9e Le Brun\u2019s portrait of Madame du Barry, a work well known to local audiences as part of the Clark Collection once exhibited at the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art. But, sadly, nowhere was credit given to Sen. William Andrews Clark, the original donor, or to the Corcoran.This omission by the National Gallery of Art might have been a clerical error or confirmation of what appears to be the systematic \u201cvanishing\u201dof the Corcoran just seven years after its doors were closed and the various parts of its collection and programs scattered.Yes, the National Gallery now owns this painting and many thousands of other works of art from the Corcoran, but one would hope it would follow professional practices by acknowledging the many sources and donors who made it possible for those works of art to come to public access and appreciation.The professional manner in which this information should have been published with the photograph is: \u201cNational Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (William A.\u2009Clark Collection),\u201d acknowledging the donor as well as the beloved museum that once provided an opportunity to enjoy this wonderful work of art for nearly a century.Linda Crocker Simmons, ArlingtonThe writer is curator emerita at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.This was a cheap shotThe Nov. 22 Sports article \u201cWilliams family values an authentic story\u201d discussed the authenticity of \u201cKing Richard,\u201d a movie about Richard Williams, the father of tennis greats Venus and Serena Williams. The article could have included the portrayal of the late Hall of Fame tennis coach Vic Braden. In the movie, he is depicted as giving a dismissive and snide response to Williams\u2019s request for Braden to coach his daughters.I could be diplomatic and say the portrayal was just dramatic license in the form of an uninformed, gratuitous effort to boost the film\u2019s Richard-Williams-against-the-odds narrative; that Braden was thoughtlessly added to the mix of naysayers Williams encountered.Or I could speak from the heart and say it was an undeserved cheap shot at a good man who is not around to set the record straight.I worked for Braden for more than 10 years and was privileged to keep a close friendship with him, despite distance, for 25 more years. He was one of the most thoughtful, kind and selfless people I have known, always boosting people\u2019s self-esteem, no matter their station in life, and always urging everyone to pursue their dreams. The words ascribed to him in the movie would never have entered his mind, much less crossed his lips.The treatment of Braden in that movie is especially egregious considering that Williams, in his own words in a video to Braden, described using Braden\u2019s pioneering work in tennis research and instruction in Williams\u2019s coaching of his daughters in their formative years.The filmmakers have crafted a good, watchable movie. But they owe an apology to Braden, the Braden family and the many people around the world who have been touched by Braden and his groundbreaking work.Michael K. McLaughlin, LaurelUncontroversialIn the Nov. 21 front-page article \u201cFake beagle-research claim deluges Fauci\u2019s phone line,\u201d Anthony S. Fauci, the U.S. government\u2019s top infectious-disease expert, was characterized as a \u201ccontroversial figure\u201d because of his support for masks and opposition to unproven covid-19 cures during the pandemic. When did it become \u201ccontroversial\u201d for a medical scientist to stand up for facts? Fauci has simply attempted to do his job as best he can despite incessant harassment from the uninformed and the misinformed, including elected members of Congress.To be \u201ccontroversial,\u201d there need to be facts worthy of debate on both sides. The purveyors of false rumors and outright lies should not be given the protection of a false equivalency that allows anyone to describe a dedicated professional such as Fauci as \u201ccontroversial.\u201dAmy Gillespie, CharlottesvilleJust call it \u2018Living\u2019With the unfortunate demise of local crime reports from the \u201cLocal Living\u201d section, the only truly \u201clocal\u201d news in the Nov. 18 District edition was the list of home sales. Everything else could have run in any paper in any town. Unless and until the section can provide more \u201clocal\u201d news and information (please try to find a way to bring the crime reports back!), a name change would seem to be in order.Paul Heaton, WashingtonHungry for clarityArticles in the Health & Science section often tend to suggest that what\u2019s known conventionally is not true. Consider the Nov. 23 article \u201cBreakfast doesn\u2019t have much to do with weight loss.\u201dThe problem is that this (and many such articles) cite studies that in most cases suggest there is no causal relationship between, say, eating or not eating breakfast and losing weight. A Post article that ran online said exactly the opposite. It quoted a nutritionist as saying, \u201cEating more earlier in the day can be beneficial because you\u2019re moving more throughout the day and burning more energy.\u201dA diversity of opinions, including ones that take contrarian views and challenge conventional wisdom, is very important for any kind of news outlet. However, articles that contradict each other probably confuse the readers. This is especially true when it comes to health and wellness.Pradeep Fulay, Wexford, Pa.Read more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: Listen up, hearing aid doubtersReaders critique The Post: For peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonReaders critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsReaders critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditMore letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: The serious underlying issue behind the annual turkey panic",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronauts (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2040",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/29/readers-critique-post-these-are-space-tourists-not-astronauts/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightDammit, Jim, you\u2019re a tourist, not an astronautThe Oct. 14 Economy & Business article \u201cBoldly going where dozens may go next\u201d used the terms \u201cprivate astronauts\u201d and \u201ccivilian astronauts.\u201d I have been disturbed by the use of these terms in The Post as well as elsewhere since they popped up. These space tourists \u2014 William Shatner and others \u2014 are not astronauts. Please stop using these terms. If they are astronauts, then people like me who board commercial airliners are \u201caviators.\u201d Story continues below advertisementGeorge Usher, Silver SpringUnderestimating loyaltyGeorge F. Will\u2019s measured and insightful assessment of Allen Guezlo\u2019s recent biography of Robert E. Lee, \u201cAn honest biography of Robert E. Lee\u201d [op-ed, Oct. 14], did justice to the author\u2019s non-ideological scholarship. But Mr. Will\u2019s assessment that \u201cat least 10 U.S. Army officers chose not to assist treason\u201d underestimated the loyalty shown by West Point graduates from states that seceded from the Union. Three hundred academy graduates were affiliated with slave states that officially seceded either by birth or residence. While 200 of them resigned their commissions and joined the Confederacy, 60 remained loyal to the Union. Unlike Robert E. Lee, these officers remained true to the oath they swore to the Constitution of the United States and drew their swords against their native states.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGordon Berg, GaithersburgThe writer is past president of the Civil War Roundtable of the District of Columbia.The whole truthThe Oct. 16 news article \u201cU.S. candor on its flaws is key to global clout, Biden says,\u201d reported on President Biden\u2019s trip to Connecticut for the dedication of the Dodd Center for Human Rights. The article briefly recounted Thomas J. Dodd\u2019s work prosecuting Nazis in Nuremberg after World War II. At the ceremony, Biden asserted that to reestablish itself as an advocate against human rights abuses elsewhere, the United States must acknowledge its own civil rights/human rights failures.What the president said is true. But two things struck me about the story: the ignorance of history and the failure to identify Dodd\u2019s history and acknowledge his flaws.Story continues below advertisementThe article correctly identified Dodd as the father of former senator Christopher J. Dodd. But it failed to state that Thomas Dodd had represented Connecticut in both the House and Senate, and that he had been censured by the Senate for converting campaign funds for personal use. It did not mention that columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson had found evidence that the senior Dodd had engaged in more widespread corruption and that the senator sued them in retaliation.AdvertisementThe story also failed to mention that Dodd, while a senator, had tried to have the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. arrested for speaking out against the Vietnam War.As Biden said, acknowledging flaws is a necessary first step. So let\u2019s acknowledge all of them \u2014 Thomas Dodd\u2019s and The Post\u2019s.Story continues below advertisementRobert Becker, WashingtonAll the feels, none of the factsI\u2019ve counted at least three articles, most recently the Oct. 19 news article \u201cFDA to allow mixing shots for boosters,\u201d in which The Post has asserted in some form that Johnson & Johnson vaccine recipients \u201chave felt left out because the vast majority\u201d of U.S. recipients got some other vaccine. But I\u2019ve never seen that assertion backed up by evidence.I\u2019m a J&J recipient, and I don\u2019t feel anything close to \u201cleft out.\u201d Rather, I feel grateful to have gotten a vaccine that significantly reduces my chances of dying from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Perhaps it\u2019s true that other J&J recipients \u201cfeel left out,\u201d but The Post ought to serve up some evidence of that. Does The Post have survey data on the point, in which case it would be reasonable to say how recipients \u201csay they feel\u201d? Or are reporters simply projecting, while conveniently adding a touch of drama? Or did they perhaps merely survey a handful of their friends and colleagues in the newsroom to reach that conclusion?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhatever the case, if The Post is going to tell us how J&J recipients \u201cfeel\u201d without first hooking us up to electrodes, it should cite a source.Matthew Freeman, RockvilleThe picture of greatnessKudos to the Oct. 19 front-page obituary for Gen.\u2009Colin L. Powell. The large-type four-word headline perfectly described him: \u201cTrailblazing warrior and statesman.\u201d The photograph made him real and showed his strength. His eyes showed focus and resolve, his serene mouth showed calmness, the wedding ring showed commitment and a personal life, and the medals on his chest showed that he has been extremely successful and brave.Thanks for the good combination of the headline and photo, which answer why Powell is so admired today and why he will go down in history for truly deserving the word \u201cgreat.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDiane Hendricks Bitsberger, BethesdaWe\u2019ve heard of a push-pull system, but this is ridiculousAn Oct. 18 Metro headline read: \u201cMetro pulls over half of its rail cars.\u201d And pushes the rest? So that\u2019s the problem!AdvertisementMarvin Lautzenheiser, SpringfieldJust Asking, and not rebutting, isn\u2019t enoughThe Oct. 17 Just Asking interview with Laura Ingraham in The Washington Post Magazine was disappointing, perhaps owing to the brevity of the format, which does not allow sufficient space for follow-up questions.In reply to the interviewer\u2019s entirely reasonable question, \u201cIf you want the government out of people\u2019s business, what about antiabortion laws?,\u201d Ingraham disingenuously answered that \u201cthe analogy is totally inapt.\u201d The \u201canalogy\u201d at issue was between a coronavirus vaccine mandate and antiabortion legislation, and it was, in fact, totally apt. Ingraham argued that abortion involves the certain termination of another life, whereas a person\u2019s decision not to be vaccinated carries \u201cno intent to harm\u201d and does not result in another person\u2019s \u201ccertain death.\u201d In this case, \u201cintent\u201d is irrelevant, because \u201charm\u201d to other people \u2014 sometimes death \u2014 almost always will be the result of someone\u2019s refusing vaccination.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngraham\u2019s illogical argument is refuted by the epidemiological facts and should have been rebutted \u2014 but not enough space was allotted for the interviewer to make this point.Elliot Wilner, BethesdaAnother initialism snafuAs a college English major and then a fledgling newspaper reporter, I was taught that an acronym was a word formed by the first letter or letters of a group of words. \u201cScuba\u201d and \u201cradar\u201d were the most frequent examples. Many writers now refer to any group of initials as an acronym, as did James Hohmann in his Oct. 14 Thursday Opinion column, \u201cCritical race theory is a potent issue in Virginia,\u201d in which he called CRT a previously obscure acronym.Story continues below advertisementRobert A. Legg, Athens, Ga.\u2018Frat houses\u2019? Oh brother.I object strongly to the use of the pejorative \u201cfrat houses\u201d in the Oct. 17 Business article \u201cFrom addiction to #AppleToo.\u201d That term is insulting to the millions of fraternity members who, like me, found fraternity life rewarding in many ways, including academic help, establishment of lifelong friendships, learning to function within a social group outside of family and cooperative living in a warm, friendly atmosphere within a cold, uncaring university setting.AdvertisementThe vast majority of fraternity members are not the drunk rowdies characterized by the movie \u201cAnimal House\u201d; in fact, they are serious students and well-behaved gentlemen. Please find another, less offensive term for the atmosphere described in the article.Al DiCenso, Easton, Md.A captivating cable of a Kabul cabalCompliments to photographer Lorenzo Tugnoli, who captured a moment in Kabul of elders holding their informal community court [\u201cTaliban\u2019s new challenge: Enforcing the law,\u201d front page, Oct. 20]. If only the Taliban\u2019s behavior reflected the serenity of that beautiful picture.Karen Goldberg, Reisterstown, Md.A dim viewMichael de Adder\u2019s Oct. 17 editorial cartoon portraying the Department of Justice asking conservative, Catholic (note the confessional and crucifix) Supreme Court justices to block the Texas abortion law went well beyond just poor taste. The cartoon, with its prejudicial stereotypes depicting Catholics opposing the U.S. government, called to mind the anti-Catholic propaganda used in the past by organizations such as the Know Nothing Party and the Ku Klux Klan.AdvertisementIf The Post wants to continue with its slogan, \u201cDemocracy Dies in Darkness,\u201d then that cartoon just dimmed The Post\u2019s light.John Enoch, FairfaxLet the joyous news be spreadI know The Post reports the news and does not make it, but the Oct. 17 front page sure hit readers with an overwhelming dose of depressing information. The front-page articles recorded six ways in which our society is falling apart.To be sure, those woeful stories are newsworthy, but might the paper consider adding a little sugar to the vinegar? Somewhere in the world, good people are doing good deeds. How about adding a section in the Sunday paper that greets work-weary readers with accounts of the uplifting, worthwhile accomplishments of praiseworthy individuals and organizations in our community, nation and world?Anthony J. Steinmeyer, WashingtonNo mandate to reportIt\u2019s perfectly legal for employers to require a vaccine as a condition of employment. It\u2019s perfectly legal for people to quit their jobs because they\u2019re unwilling to fulfill a condition of employment. I don\u2019t need a full story every time an anti-vaxxer quits or gets fired [\u201cWashington State fires Rolovich for failing to comply with vaccine mandate,\u201d Sports, Oct. 19, for example]. It\u2019s not newsworthy, and the attention paid to these folks is validating the epistemic stubbornness plaguing our discourse.AdvertisementSuzanne Summerlin, WashingtonNew and unimprovedI was surprised and disappointed to read in the Oct. 19 front-page article \u201cDerailment probe reveals faulty wheels on Metro cars\u201d that riders prefer the newer Metro cars to the older ones. What was the basis for that?I, for one, consistently seek out the older cars, sometimes letting two or three trains go by so I can get one with the older model.Why? The seats are more comfortable. I can catch 40 winks in an older car, but it\u2019s very hard to do that in the new ones.The lighting is softer. The new ones use LEDs, which create glare.Finally, the older ones provide a smoother ride, both in terms of bumpiness and in terms of smooth braking.Not everything that\u2019s new is better, and this is a perfect case in point.Mark W. Sherman, Takoma ParkSongs you don\u2019t know by heartI was fortunate to attend German tenor Jonas Kaufmann\u2019s performance at the Kennedy Center, reviewed by Michael Andor Brodeur in \u201cA lot of lieder by Liszt from singer, pianist\u201d [Style, Oct. 19]. It was a two-hour performance of German lieder. Many people are not familiar with German lieder. It is best described as a kind of musicalized poetry reading, and, though some poems, such as Goethe\u2019s \u201cWandrers Nachtlied II,\u201d were familiar to many, some of the poems set to music by Liszt were not. This created a problem.The Kennedy Center, though carefully screening the audience for proof of vaccination, presented the evening\u2019s program with the original German poem side by side with the English translation accessible by clicking on the QR code posted outside the Concert Hall. Although requested to turn off all electrical devices, if you wanted to follow the concert and if you didn\u2019t know German but wanted to know what Kaufmann was singing, you had to have your mobile phone on.Brodeur criticized the squippets of intrusive phones. Maybe we should return to printed rather than digital programs or provide some form of subtitles on the stage to assist in translation.German was my first language, but it is not the second language of most Americans.Christina M. Cerna, WashingtonRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditReaders critique The Post: Please have more respect for child-care professionalsReaders critique The Post: Surprised to see my brother\u2019s tractorMore letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronauts",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: This Beatles documentary review took us nowhere, man (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2041",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/10/readers-critique-post-this-beatles-documentary-review-took-us-nowhere-man/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSomething (actually, everything) in the way Chris Richards wrote about Peter Jackson\u2019s \u201cGet Back\u201d documentary detracted like no other of his writings \u2014 it was a hard day\u2019s read [Style, Dec.\u20091]. The headlines \u2014 \u201cWhere you once belonged vs. here and now\u201d and, on the continuation of Richards\u2019s Critic\u2019s Notebook, \u201cDig a pony, but don\u2019t flog a dead horse\u201d \u2014 were bad enough and made me gently weep, to say the least. But then Richards wrote that \u201cthe Beatles are overrated\u201d and used the terms \u201cirritating,\u201d \u201ctotally life-sucking\u201d and \u201cultimately unnecessary\u201d to describe the film \u2014 all of which I applied to his piece. I\u2019ve already watched \u201cGet Back\u201d several times and will again; for a lifelong fan, it\u2019s a wonderful opportunity to see how much the Beatles enjoyed, appreciated, loved, valued and inspired each other. Using the word \u201cimagine\u201d in the last sentence was the final bang of Richards\u2019s (unpolished) silver hammer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMarian Cavanagh, AlexandriaChris Richards\u2019s review of the \u201cGet Back\u201d documentary felt as thought it was written by someone who had no understanding of great art \u2014 rather than a critic who has spent a career devoted to appreciating music. Being a fly on the wall and observing the creative process of four of the brightest lights in music was a treasure. And yes, there were times when it was tedious and silly and unproductive, but anyone who knows the creative process understands its inherent messiness, and that\u2019s part of what the Beatles had to go through to create the gems that even Richards claims he loves. When have we ever seen that process play out in such ragged detail and depth at the hands of some of the most outstanding musicians and bandmates? Never.Can\u2019t we hold on to great art \u2014 Shakespeare, Mozart, van Gogh, etc. \u2014 without giving short shrift to emerging artists with fresh perspectives? And don\u2019t many of our musical talents of today still reference and revere the work of the Fab Four? Cherishing great art enhances our appreciation of current creativity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe documentary, if anything, showed how contemporary and vital the Beatles\u2019 work remains. Richards may be literally the only person we know who has seen \u201cGet Back\u201d who didn\u2019t feel it was a privilege to bear witness, warts and all.Kenneth Kirshbaum, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.Amy K. Harbison, OlneyWe\u2019re not \u2018fully vaccinated\u2019 yetThe term \u201cfully vaccinated\u201d frequently appears in coronavirus-related articles in The Post. However, in its current use, \u201cfully vaccinated\u201d is a misnomer with dangerous implications.People more than six months from their Pfizer or Moderna vaccinations, or more than two months from receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, are quite vulnerable to getting the coronavirus and spreading it to others, though they are less likely to become critically ill.Story continues below advertisementThus, there is a false sense of security for those who were vaccinated many months ago, leading to behavior that puts them at risk of coronavirus infection such as not masking indoors.AdvertisementRemoving \u201cfully vaccinated\u201d from the lexicon is impossible. As such, a new term should be used, such as \u201cfully vaccinated with a booster\u201d or \u201cfully boosted.\u201d This would avoid the confusion in the population at large. At some time in the future when coronavirus revaccination (i.e., booster) is done at regular intervals, this new term might be replaced in discussion with something like \u201cI received my yearly coronavirus vaccine.\u201d Let\u2019s hope that time comes in the not-too-distant future.Leonard Mermel, Providence, R.I.Story continues below advertisementThe writer is medical director of the Department of Epidemiology & Infection Prevention at Lifespan Hospital System.The wrong takeI am a gender-affirming medical doctor identified in Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson\u2019s Nov. 28 Outlook essay, \u201cThe mental health establishment is failing trans kids.\u201dAdvertisementThe essay misrepresented gender-affirming care, which is nuanced, complex and comprehensive. The writers mischaracterized transgender youths and pushed a damaging pseudoscientific narrative that serves to further limit health care for an already underserved, marginalized and vulnerable population. The writers leaned on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health\u2019s standards of care but failed to note that the standards acknowledge the damaging and irreversible consequences of an incongruent puberty, reject the stereotype of trans psychopathology and include harm-reduction strategies.Story continues below advertisementContrary to the anti-trans arguments spread throughout mass media and repeated by the writers, research shows that detransitioning and regret are rare, trans youth suicide rates are alarmingly high, and trans children supported in their identities have better mental health outcomes. One of their most egregious lies was that those opposed to gender-affirming care are being silenced. This article was proof that isn\u2019t true.Trans children deserve love, support and thoughtful medical care as much as cisgender children do. Pieces such as this are responsible for the closure of gender clinics, anti-trans sentiment and the spate of laws and regulations targeting trans youths.AdvertisementAJ Eckert, Hamden, Conn.Story continues below advertisementThe writer is medical director of the Gender & Life-Affirming Medicine Program at Anchor Health.It\u2019s not that easyHaving dedicated the past 20 years of my professional career to patient safety and quality in surgery, I was surprised and dismayed to see David L. Perlow\u2019s Nov. 28 Outlook essay, \u201cSurgeons sometimes operate on the wrong body part. There\u2019s an easy fix.\u201dA quick PubMed search reveals one opinion piece regarding Perlow\u2019s idea of wrong-site surgery in the Journal of the American Society for Health Care Risk Management published more than a decade ago. This journal is not a widely read publication and certainly not a mainstream journal in which wrong-site surgery would be discussed. PubMed also lists a letter to the editors of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery in 2003, in which Perlow again argued for his idea of wrong-site labeling. A serious discussion of this subject requires far more than anecdotes and unfounded opinions that suggest there is an easy fix to what is a complex matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWrong-site surgeries and other similar incidents are considered \u201cnever events.\u201d Processes such as the World Health Organization surgical safety checklist, the pre-procedure timeout and the post-procedure debrief have been created to mitigate the risks and avoid these never events.The adherence to these procedures is part of the culture of safety, which promotes and ensures the safety of the patient. Achieving this goal goes to the heart of what I do in both my civilian employment at the NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine system as well as my work with the U.S. Military Health System.This is a serious and sensitive subject that affects patients, surgeons, nurses and all other health-care professionals involved in the delivery of quality surgical care. As such, they deserve an opinion piece that is serious and sensitive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPierre F. Saldinger, New YorkThe writer is chairman of the Department of Surgery and surgeon in chief at NewYork- Presbyterian Queens.Sondheim\u2019s geniusA standing ovation for whoever asked Tim Page to write the Nov. 27 front-page obituary for Stephen Sondheim, \u201cBroadway giant gave new depth to musicals.\u201d Page knows music, knows theater, knows Sondheim\u2019s work and, most essentially, knows how to capture a complex life in a few hundred eloquent words.However, I urge Page and his readers not to shrug off Sondheim and Anthony Perkins\u2019s screenplay for \u201cThe Last of Sheila\u201d too blithely. I saw the movie in 1973 when it was released and again several decades later on Turner Classic Movies. It holds up well as a whodunit that plays fair; i.e., the audience gets all the clues to solve the mystery without any gimmicks or surprise revelations at the end.AdvertisementSondheim was a lyrical genius, a musical prodigy and, deservedly, a theatrical legend. On the basis of \u201cThe Last of Sheila\u201d alone, he also could have been a successful writer of mysteries.W. Edward Blain, RoanokeIt is a common human failing that when we accomplish something new, we feel compelled to trash our predecessors. David Von Drehle\u2019s Nov. 28 op-ed, \u201cStephen Sondheim\u2019s lyrical genius,\u201d gave appropriate high praise to Stephen Sondheim but insisted on denigrating his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, calling his plots \u201cthin\u201d and saying Sondheim\u2019s compositions revealed \u201ca hollowness in the older man\u2019s work.\u201dThe times in which these two wonderful artists were composing were very different. After the bloodiest war in human history, Hammerstein gave us stability, laughter and love, and his musicals reflect this. Ten years later, in the middle of the Vietnam War, Sondheim and others gave us bitter irony and pessimism.Yet Hammerstein wasn\u2019t naive. His \u201cYou\u2019ve Got to Be Carefully Taught\u201d from \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d attacked racism in a way few other artists did at that time. In \u201cThe Sound of Music,\u201d his ingenue\u2019s boyfriend turns out to be a Hitler Youth who turns in the whole family. In addition, Von Drehle criticized Hammerstein because his music is \u201chummable.\u201d Hummable 70 years later!Sondheim and his delightful \u201cGypsy\u201d and \u201cA Little Night Music\u201d stand on their own; yes, different from his mentor\u2019s, as Beethoven is different from Mozart. And I love them both.Rob Callard, WashingtonThe Dollies helped GIs. Now, can we help them?I thoroughly enjoyed reading Manuel Roig-Franzia\u2019s two articles on Jim Roberts\u2019s search for the two Donut Dollies [\u201cA bright presence in a bleak war,\u201d Style, Nov. 11, and \u201cThe Donut Dollies mystery has a sweet ending,\u201d Style, Nov. 27]. They merit thanks, and the thanks of a nation that has given them neither the recognition nor support they earned and deserve.Two years ago, our western Massachusetts town of Ashfield hosted the premiere of Norman Anderson\u2019s 2019 documentary, \u201cThe Donut Dollies,\u201d featuring his mother, Dorset Anderson, from the neighboring town of Cummington, and her lifelong friend and fellow Dollie, Mary Blanchard Bowe, since deceased, a likely result of Agent Orange poisoning while volunteering to spend a year in Vietnam boosting the morale of our troops on the front line there.In the discussion that followed the viewing, we learned that as volunteers the Donut Dollies were not entitled to any benefits, either from the American Red Cross, under whose auspice they served, or from the U.S. military, which, as Roig-Franzia noted, benefited greatly from their gift to our servicemen. Can we still right this wrong?Shepard Forman, Ashfield, Mass.The writer is founder and director emeritus of New York University\u2019s Center on International Cooperation.\u2018Darker\u2019 went deeperI read \u201cWhat Leonard Cohen got from wrestling with religion,\u201d David Kirby\u2019s Nov. 28 Book World review of Harry Freedman\u2019s \u201cLeonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius,\u201d with trepidation, considering The Post\u2019s savaging of Eric Clapton for the sin of wrong politics, but I came away happy with the reviewer, though not entirely with the review.Though the book\u2019s author, Freedman, says the \u201cStory of Isaac\u201d song shows Cohen\u2019s biblical affinity and point of view, Kirby more correctly wrote that he did not borrow from the Old Testament so much as he echoed it, especially as he grew older and closer to the time of his death.No one mentioned what I consider his final coming to the faith of his fathers in \u201cYou Want It Darker,\u201d his last and I feel his most spiritual song. In it, Cohen sings, or, rather, a chorus sings, \u201cHineni, I\u2019m ready, Lord,\u201d echoing all the way back to the sacrifice of Isaac, and now himself. I play it over and over, and it moves me always. \u201cHallelujah\u201d was great; this was his greatest.Joseph Schvimmer, GaithersburgKeep babies safeThe Dec. 2 Local Living article \u201cHow to pick nursery furniture that will evolve as children get older\u201d failed to take into account the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) on safe sleep. Babies\u2019 lives are at risk. In the United States, about 3,400 babies die each year from sudden infant death syndrome, accidental suffocation in a sleep environment leading to unexpected infant death. Soft objects and loose bedding are among the top dangers. Yet the article showed pillows in a crib and a soft blanket over the edge of a crib.The CDC and the AAP indicate that babies should share a room with a parent but sleep on a separate sleep surface. The very idea of a separate nursery for a baby to sleep in alone is counter to the recommendations. Please help keep babies safe!Peg Barratt, ArlingtonTrick and treatI was sorry to read (again) that some of The Post\u2019s regular crossword solvers do not enjoy the challenge posed by Evan Birnholz\u2019s odd and creative puzzles. The good news for these folks is that The Post already provides the good but conventional Sunday Crossword from the Los Angeles Times, printed in The Post\u2019s Arts & Style section.Birnholz\u2019s elaborate set of Halloween puzzles even attracted my wife\u2019s attention. Crosswords are not a priority for her, but she enjoys puzzles in general. We teamed up and spent a couple of fun hours following Birnholz\u2019s twisted trail.Birnholz is a treasure. His tricks are our treats.Harley Cahen, University ParkLet Freedom beIn her Dec. 2 Sports column, \u201cIn America, Freedom is about using, being used,\u201d Candace Buckner not only minimized Enes Kanter Freedom\u2019s athletic prowess but chided him for appearing on, God forbid, Fox News to celebrate his new U.S. citizenship.Freedom has been a quite valuable player on previous National Basketball Association teams and earned respect from fans and non-fans alike by taking personally dangerous stands against the intolerance of his former country, Turkey. Buckner\u2019s criticisms, to twist a phrase, praised him with faint damning.Stephen R. Fahey, OlneyDiplomacy\u2019s terrible priceThe Nov. 29 obituary for Justus Rosenberg, who worked with Varian Fry to smuggle Jews and other endangered refugees out of Vichy France, \u201cHelped European Jews flee Holocaust as part of storied rescue mission,\u201d stated that \u201cFry was forced to suspend his operations in 1941.\u201d Tragically, it was the Roosevelt administration that forced him to suspend his rescue mission.The Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime complained to Washington about Fry in late 1940. In response, Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the U.S. ambassador in Paris to inform Fry \u201cthat this Government cannot, repeat not, countenance .\u2009.\u2009. carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.\u201d When Fry refused to stop rescuing refugees, the Roosevelt administration canceled his passport, forcing him to leave France.Sadly, the policy of the U.S. administration before America\u2019s entry into the war was to maintain cordial, sometimes even friendly, relations with Nazi Germany and Vichy France \u2014 even at the price of sacrificing the refugee rescue mission undertaken by Fry, Rosenberg and their heroic comrades.Rafael Medoff, WashingtonThe writer is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.Look out, Rick StevesKudos to the team that put together the massive Nov. 21 history of Moscow\u2019s Tverskaya Street [\u201cWelcome to Tverskaya Street,\u201d Nov. 21, front page]. Future travelers should take it with them as a guide while roaming the street. Rick Steves, take note!Sharon Muir, SpringfieldNot harmless, not cuddlyRegarding the Nov. 24 front-page article \u201cWhite supremacists found liable in Va.\u201d:Publishing a picture of white supremacist Richard Spencer holding a stuffed animal helps spread an extremist\u2019s message.Much as we like to believe content is king, the science shows us that visual images remain in our memory much longer and with more impact than the written word. This photograph helped him convey that he is just a harmless guy who needs an emotional support stuffed animal rather than the violent alt-right leader that he is.Sue Stolov, BethesdaRead more Free for All letters:The serious underlying issue behind the annual turkey panicListen up, hearing aid doubtersFor peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonThese are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsMissing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusWhat were we smoking?More letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: This Beatles documentary review took us nowhere, man",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: This Beatles documentary review took us nowhere, man (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2042",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/10/readers-critique-post-this-beatles-documentary-review-took-us-nowhere-man/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSomething (actually, everything) in the way Chris Richards wrote about Peter Jackson\u2019s \u201cGet Back\u201d documentary detracted like no other of his writings \u2014 it was a hard day\u2019s read [Style, Dec.\u20091]. The headlines \u2014 \u201cWhere you once belonged vs. here and now\u201d and, on the continuation of Richards\u2019s Critic\u2019s Notebook, \u201cDig a pony, but don\u2019t flog a dead horse\u201d \u2014 were bad enough and made me gently weep, to say the least. But then Richards wrote that \u201cthe Beatles are overrated\u201d and used the terms \u201cirritating,\u201d \u201ctotally life-sucking\u201d and \u201cultimately unnecessary\u201d to describe the film \u2014 all of which I applied to his piece. I\u2019ve already watched \u201cGet Back\u201d several times and will again; for a lifelong fan, it\u2019s a wonderful opportunity to see how much the Beatles enjoyed, appreciated, loved, valued and inspired each other. Using the word \u201cimagine\u201d in the last sentence was the final bang of Richards\u2019s (unpolished) silver hammer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMarian Cavanagh, AlexandriaChris Richards\u2019s review of the \u201cGet Back\u201d documentary felt as thought it was written by someone who had no understanding of great art \u2014 rather than a critic who has spent a career devoted to appreciating music. Being a fly on the wall and observing the creative process of four of the brightest lights in music was a treasure. And yes, there were times when it was tedious and silly and unproductive, but anyone who knows the creative process understands its inherent messiness, and that\u2019s part of what the Beatles had to go through to create the gems that even Richards claims he loves. When have we ever seen that process play out in such ragged detail and depth at the hands of some of the most outstanding musicians and bandmates? Never.Can\u2019t we hold on to great art \u2014 Shakespeare, Mozart, van Gogh, etc. \u2014 without giving short shrift to emerging artists with fresh perspectives? And don\u2019t many of our musical talents of today still reference and revere the work of the Fab Four? Cherishing great art enhances our appreciation of current creativity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe documentary, if anything, showed how contemporary and vital the Beatles\u2019 work remains. Richards may be literally the only person we know who has seen \u201cGet Back\u201d who didn\u2019t feel it was a privilege to bear witness, warts and all.Kenneth Kirshbaum, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.Amy K. Harbison, OlneyWe\u2019re not \u2018fully vaccinated\u2019 yetThe term \u201cfully vaccinated\u201d frequently appears in coronavirus-related articles in The Post. However, in its current use, \u201cfully vaccinated\u201d is a misnomer with dangerous implications.People more than six months from their Pfizer or Moderna vaccinations, or more than two months from receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, are quite vulnerable to getting the coronavirus and spreading it to others, though they are less likely to become critically ill.Story continues below advertisementThus, there is a false sense of security for those who were vaccinated many months ago, leading to behavior that puts them at risk of coronavirus infection such as not masking indoors.AdvertisementRemoving \u201cfully vaccinated\u201d from the lexicon is impossible. As such, a new term should be used, such as \u201cfully vaccinated with a booster\u201d or \u201cfully boosted.\u201d This would avoid the confusion in the population at large. At some time in the future when coronavirus revaccination (i.e., booster) is done at regular intervals, this new term might be replaced in discussion with something like \u201cI received my yearly coronavirus vaccine.\u201d Let\u2019s hope that time comes in the not-too-distant future.Leonard Mermel, Providence, R.I.Story continues below advertisementThe writer is medical director of the Department of Epidemiology & Infection Prevention at Lifespan Hospital System.The wrong takeI am a gender-affirming medical doctor identified in Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson\u2019s Nov. 28 Outlook essay, \u201cThe mental health establishment is failing trans kids.\u201dAdvertisementThe essay misrepresented gender-affirming care, which is nuanced, complex and comprehensive. The writers mischaracterized transgender youths and pushed a damaging pseudoscientific narrative that serves to further limit health care for an already underserved, marginalized and vulnerable population. The writers leaned on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health\u2019s standards of care but failed to note that the standards acknowledge the damaging and irreversible consequences of an incongruent puberty, reject the stereotype of trans psychopathology and include harm-reduction strategies.Story continues below advertisementContrary to the anti-trans arguments spread throughout mass media and repeated by the writers, research shows that detransitioning and regret are rare, trans youth suicide rates are alarmingly high, and trans children supported in their identities have better mental health outcomes. One of their most egregious lies was that those opposed to gender-affirming care are being silenced. This article was proof that isn\u2019t true.Trans children deserve love, support and thoughtful medical care as much as cisgender children do. Pieces such as this are responsible for the closure of gender clinics, anti-trans sentiment and the spate of laws and regulations targeting trans youths.AdvertisementAJ Eckert, Hamden, Conn.Story continues below advertisementThe writer is medical director of the Gender & Life-Affirming Medicine Program at Anchor Health.It\u2019s not that easyHaving dedicated the past 20 years of my professional career to patient safety and quality in surgery, I was surprised and dismayed to see David L. Perlow\u2019s Nov. 28 Outlook essay, \u201cSurgeons sometimes operate on the wrong body part. There\u2019s an easy fix.\u201dA quick PubMed search reveals one opinion piece regarding Perlow\u2019s idea of wrong-site surgery in the Journal of the American Society for Health Care Risk Management published more than a decade ago. This journal is not a widely read publication and certainly not a mainstream journal in which wrong-site surgery would be discussed. PubMed also lists a letter to the editors of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery in 2003, in which Perlow again argued for his idea of wrong-site labeling. A serious discussion of this subject requires far more than anecdotes and unfounded opinions that suggest there is an easy fix to what is a complex matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWrong-site surgeries and other similar incidents are considered \u201cnever events.\u201d Processes such as the World Health Organization surgical safety checklist, the pre-procedure timeout and the post-procedure debrief have been created to mitigate the risks and avoid these never events.The adherence to these procedures is part of the culture of safety, which promotes and ensures the safety of the patient. Achieving this goal goes to the heart of what I do in both my civilian employment at the NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine system as well as my work with the U.S. Military Health System.This is a serious and sensitive subject that affects patients, surgeons, nurses and all other health-care professionals involved in the delivery of quality surgical care. As such, they deserve an opinion piece that is serious and sensitive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPierre F. Saldinger, New YorkThe writer is chairman of the Department of Surgery and surgeon in chief at NewYork- Presbyterian Queens.Sondheim\u2019s geniusA standing ovation for whoever asked Tim Page to write the Nov. 27 front-page obituary for Stephen Sondheim, \u201cBroadway giant gave new depth to musicals.\u201d Page knows music, knows theater, knows Sondheim\u2019s work and, most essentially, knows how to capture a complex life in a few hundred eloquent words.However, I urge Page and his readers not to shrug off Sondheim and Anthony Perkins\u2019s screenplay for \u201cThe Last of Sheila\u201d too blithely. I saw the movie in 1973 when it was released and again several decades later on Turner Classic Movies. It holds up well as a whodunit that plays fair; i.e., the audience gets all the clues to solve the mystery without any gimmicks or surprise revelations at the end.AdvertisementSondheim was a lyrical genius, a musical prodigy and, deservedly, a theatrical legend. On the basis of \u201cThe Last of Sheila\u201d alone, he also could have been a successful writer of mysteries.W. Edward Blain, RoanokeIt is a common human failing that when we accomplish something new, we feel compelled to trash our predecessors. David Von Drehle\u2019s Nov. 28 op-ed, \u201cStephen Sondheim\u2019s lyrical genius,\u201d gave appropriate high praise to Stephen Sondheim but insisted on denigrating his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, calling his plots \u201cthin\u201d and saying Sondheim\u2019s compositions revealed \u201ca hollowness in the older man\u2019s work.\u201dThe times in which these two wonderful artists were composing were very different. After the bloodiest war in human history, Hammerstein gave us stability, laughter and love, and his musicals reflect this. Ten years later, in the middle of the Vietnam War, Sondheim and others gave us bitter irony and pessimism.Yet Hammerstein wasn\u2019t naive. His \u201cYou\u2019ve Got to Be Carefully Taught\u201d from \u201cSouth Pacific\u201d attacked racism in a way few other artists did at that time. In \u201cThe Sound of Music,\u201d his ingenue\u2019s boyfriend turns out to be a Hitler Youth who turns in the whole family. In addition, Von Drehle criticized Hammerstein because his music is \u201chummable.\u201d Hummable 70 years later!Sondheim and his delightful \u201cGypsy\u201d and \u201cA Little Night Music\u201d stand on their own; yes, different from his mentor\u2019s, as Beethoven is different from Mozart. And I love them both.Rob Callard, WashingtonThe Dollies helped GIs. Now, can we help them?I thoroughly enjoyed reading Manuel Roig-Franzia\u2019s two articles on Jim Roberts\u2019s search for the two Donut Dollies [\u201cA bright presence in a bleak war,\u201d Style, Nov. 11, and \u201cThe Donut Dollies mystery has a sweet ending,\u201d Style, Nov. 27]. They merit thanks, and the thanks of a nation that has given them neither the recognition nor support they earned and deserve.Two years ago, our western Massachusetts town of Ashfield hosted the premiere of Norman Anderson\u2019s 2019 documentary, \u201cThe Donut Dollies,\u201d featuring his mother, Dorset Anderson, from the neighboring town of Cummington, and her lifelong friend and fellow Dollie, Mary Blanchard Bowe, since deceased, a likely result of Agent Orange poisoning while volunteering to spend a year in Vietnam boosting the morale of our troops on the front line there.In the discussion that followed the viewing, we learned that as volunteers the Donut Dollies were not entitled to any benefits, either from the American Red Cross, under whose auspice they served, or from the U.S. military, which, as Roig-Franzia noted, benefited greatly from their gift to our servicemen. Can we still right this wrong?Shepard Forman, Ashfield, Mass.The writer is founder and director emeritus of New York University\u2019s Center on International Cooperation.\u2018Darker\u2019 went deeperI read \u201cWhat Leonard Cohen got from wrestling with religion,\u201d David Kirby\u2019s Nov. 28 Book World review of Harry Freedman\u2019s \u201cLeonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius,\u201d with trepidation, considering The Post\u2019s savaging of Eric Clapton for the sin of wrong politics, but I came away happy with the reviewer, though not entirely with the review.Though the book\u2019s author, Freedman, says the \u201cStory of Isaac\u201d song shows Cohen\u2019s biblical affinity and point of view, Kirby more correctly wrote that he did not borrow from the Old Testament so much as he echoed it, especially as he grew older and closer to the time of his death.No one mentioned what I consider his final coming to the faith of his fathers in \u201cYou Want It Darker,\u201d his last and I feel his most spiritual song. In it, Cohen sings, or, rather, a chorus sings, \u201cHineni, I\u2019m ready, Lord,\u201d echoing all the way back to the sacrifice of Isaac, and now himself. I play it over and over, and it moves me always. \u201cHallelujah\u201d was great; this was his greatest.Joseph Schvimmer, GaithersburgKeep babies safeThe Dec. 2 Local Living article \u201cHow to pick nursery furniture that will evolve as children get older\u201d failed to take into account the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) on safe sleep. Babies\u2019 lives are at risk. In the United States, about 3,400 babies die each year from sudden infant death syndrome, accidental suffocation in a sleep environment leading to unexpected infant death. Soft objects and loose bedding are among the top dangers. Yet the article showed pillows in a crib and a soft blanket over the edge of a crib.The CDC and the AAP indicate that babies should share a room with a parent but sleep on a separate sleep surface. The very idea of a separate nursery for a baby to sleep in alone is counter to the recommendations. Please help keep babies safe!Peg Barratt, ArlingtonTrick and treatI was sorry to read (again) that some of The Post\u2019s regular crossword solvers do not enjoy the challenge posed by Evan Birnholz\u2019s odd and creative puzzles. The good news for these folks is that The Post already provides the good but conventional Sunday Crossword from the Los Angeles Times, printed in The Post\u2019s Arts & Style section.Birnholz\u2019s elaborate set of Halloween puzzles even attracted my wife\u2019s attention. Crosswords are not a priority for her, but she enjoys puzzles in general. We teamed up and spent a couple of fun hours following Birnholz\u2019s twisted trail.Birnholz is a treasure. His tricks are our treats.Harley Cahen, University ParkLet Freedom beIn her Dec. 2 Sports column, \u201cIn America, Freedom is about using, being used,\u201d Candace Buckner not only minimized Enes Kanter Freedom\u2019s athletic prowess but chided him for appearing on, God forbid, Fox News to celebrate his new U.S. citizenship.Freedom has been a quite valuable player on previous National Basketball Association teams and earned respect from fans and non-fans alike by taking personally dangerous stands against the intolerance of his former country, Turkey. Buckner\u2019s criticisms, to twist a phrase, praised him with faint damning.Stephen R. Fahey, OlneyDiplomacy\u2019s terrible priceThe Nov. 29 obituary for Justus Rosenberg, who worked with Varian Fry to smuggle Jews and other endangered refugees out of Vichy France, \u201cHelped European Jews flee Holocaust as part of storied rescue mission,\u201d stated that \u201cFry was forced to suspend his operations in 1941.\u201d Tragically, it was the Roosevelt administration that forced him to suspend his rescue mission.The Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime complained to Washington about Fry in late 1940. In response, Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the U.S. ambassador in Paris to inform Fry \u201cthat this Government cannot, repeat not, countenance .\u2009.\u2009. carrying on activities evading the laws of countries with which the United States maintains friendly relations.\u201d When Fry refused to stop rescuing refugees, the Roosevelt administration canceled his passport, forcing him to leave France.Sadly, the policy of the U.S. administration before America\u2019s entry into the war was to maintain cordial, sometimes even friendly, relations with Nazi Germany and Vichy France \u2014 even at the price of sacrificing the refugee rescue mission undertaken by Fry, Rosenberg and their heroic comrades.Rafael Medoff, WashingtonThe writer is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.Look out, Rick StevesKudos to the team that put together the massive Nov. 21 history of Moscow\u2019s Tverskaya Street [\u201cWelcome to Tverskaya Street,\u201d Nov. 21, front page]. Future travelers should take it with them as a guide while roaming the street. Rick Steves, take note!Sharon Muir, SpringfieldNot harmless, not cuddlyRegarding the Nov. 24 front-page article \u201cWhite supremacists found liable in Va.\u201d:Publishing a picture of white supremacist Richard Spencer holding a stuffed animal helps spread an extremist\u2019s message.Much as we like to believe content is king, the science shows us that visual images remain in our memory much longer and with more impact than the written word. This photograph helped him convey that he is just a harmless guy who needs an emotional support stuffed animal rather than the violent alt-right leader that he is.Sue Stolov, BethesdaRead more Free for All letters:The serious underlying issue behind the annual turkey panicListen up, hearing aid doubtersFor peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonThese are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsMissing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusWhat were we smoking?More letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: This Beatles documentary review took us nowhere, man",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: This photo of Biden seemed to continue a false narrative (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2043",
        "date": "2021-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/31/readers-critique-post-this-photo-biden-seemed-continue-false-narrative/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWe should have scratched this oneThe Dec. 11 front-page article \u201cEconomic fears imperil Biden\u2019s spending plan\u201d included a photograph of President Biden from the shoulders up looking down with the four fingers of his right hand scratching his eye/forehead. This action that any of us might do, if stopped at that exact moment, would make us look as if we were searching for a word or trying to remember something, when in fact, it is a common, everyday scratching motion. Story continues below advertisementThis photo could reinforce some people\u2019s notion that Mr. Biden is too old for office, is slow and not up to the task. And even worse, it could be interpreted as making fun of a man who occasionally does halt in his speech to grab a word because of a history of stuttering \u2014 nothing related to intellect or competence. \u201cA photo speaks a thousand words,\u201d and the use of this photo seemed a prejudicial and unfair continuation of a false narrative.AdvertisementVic Pfeiffer, Chestertown, Md.Deeper on \u2018Darker\u2019Joseph Schvimmer was correct in refuting in his Dec. 11 Free for All letter, \u201c\u2009\u2018Darker\u2019 went deeper,\u201d the implication in \u201cWhat Leonard Cohen got from wrestling with religion,\u201d David Kirby\u2019s Nov. 28 Book World review, that in my book \u201cLeonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius,\u201d I assert that Leonard Cohen borrowed from the Hebrew Bible. Cohen did not borrow. Rather, he did what great exponents of Midrash have done for centuries: He used the Bible as a canvas on which to paint new images, ideas and interpretations; metaphors for the age in which he lived.Story continues below advertisementSchvimmer was incorrect, however, to suggest that no one mentioned the archetypal Jewishness of \u201cYou Want It Darker,\u201d the song Cohen composed as he knew his life was drawing to a close. I devote several pages to the song.Advertisement\u201cYou Want It Darker\u201d is unparalleled in contemporary music as a response to impending death, not just because of Cohen\u2019s use of the evocative word \u201cHineni,\u201d \u201chere I am,\u201d the Hebrew Bible\u2019s ultimate expression of submission, but also because, backed by the cantor and choir of the synagogue where he grew up, Cohen does in the song what he did consistently throughout his career. He weaves Jewish, Christian and Holocaust imagery into an uncompromising yet submissive rebuke to the Divinity.Harry Freedman, LondonTrack vax cracksInstead of reporting the number of people vaccinated \u2014 discouragingly, only 62 percent of the population is fully vaccinated; far fewer with boosters \u2014 why not highlight the number of people unvaccinated?Story continues below advertisementThis is the crux of the problem. The 100 million unvaccinated \u201crefuseniks\u201d are the ones keeping the pandemic going.AdvertisementHarvey Bronstein, Arlington\u2018Tribalism\u2019 applied to only one tribeIn her Dec. 20 op-ed, \u201cJoe Manchin reflects the reality of W.Va. politics,\u201d Karen Tumulty wrote, \u201cPartisan tribalism, cultural issues and an attachment to the vanishing coal industry drive voter sentiment there, creating what is a paradoxical hostility to government.\u201dWhile leveling the charge of \u201cpartisan tribalism\u201d is insulting, far worse is failing to square this with West Virginia\u2019s shift from \u201crelatively recently among the most reliably blue states in the country.\u201d Tumulty seemed to imply that West Virginia\u2019s long history as a solid blue state was devoid of the \u201cpartisan tribalism\u201d that she now sees. Are we to believe that West Virginians became benighted \u201crelatively recently\u201d into a lesser cultural component than before? Are we to leave unquestioned her position that West Virginians should show their gratitude for a large share of transfer payments by voting for Democrats? Should we share her celebration that a press secretary issued a \u201cblistering statement\u201d on a senator\u2019s position that the Democrats\u2019 explanation for implementing the Build Back Better bill is unacceptable to his constituents?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI know West Virginians. I\u2019ve lived among them. I have many West Virginian friends. And, yes, some are \u201cflinty and self-reliant,\u201d rather like Henry David Thoreau. And they don\u2019t like having liberal elites explain perceived shortcomings, especially with terms like \u201cpartisan tribalism.\u201dCarl Thomason, Fredericksburg, Va.What lies beneathI have rarely seen such a clever use of the \u201cfold.\u201d The layout artist is to be congratulated on the Dec. 13 Style section design featuring the article \u201cThe air is too sweet.\u201d Having Ernie and Bert above the fold and Jim Henson and Frank Oz below was pure genius, and it illustrated that there are some things that a print edition can do that an electronic version can\u2019t.Rob Shutler, ArlingtonAlas, poor BoricSo, Brazilian Trump-like President Jair Bolsonaro was graced with a not-unflattering photograph [\u201cBolsonaro\u2019s big win in Time poll shows power of Telegram app,\u201d news, Dec. 19], while we had to wait until after the headline \u2014 \u201cFormer student activist wins the presidential election,\u201d news, Dec. 20] to even find out the name of a more consequential victor, Gabriel Boric, whose politics, leading to a \u201ccrushing victory,\u201d are closer to that of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (but have pragmatically edged a little closer to the center). And: no photo. (His tattoos, mentioned as the fourth word in the lead paragraph, are actually not visible in formal settings).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn the semi-positive side, the 35-year-old Boric, set to become the youngest president in Chile\u2019s sometimes tumultuous history, materialized on Page A11, whereas Bolsonaro was relegated to Page A20.Still, in an era when one is pummeled in The Post sometimes with quasi-poster-size photos, it seems a couple of pictorial inches could have been devoted to one of the Western Hemisphere\u2019s most consequential future leaders.Michael G. Kent, WashingtonLooking at only one side of the ledgerRegarding the Dec. 14 news article \u201cBiden, Manchin discuss spending bill as deadline looms\u201d:Puh-leeze stop calling it the \u201cspending\u201d bill.Other words could characterize the bill as benefiting people. Continued use of the word \u201cspending\u201d implies the proposed legislation has only costs without benefits, beneficiaries or purpose.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLynne Morsen, ArlingtonPutting the wrong story on a pedestalHow is it that the Metro section recently treated us to two long features about the pedestal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as violence in the region is often relegated to the \u201cLocal Digest\u201d?The Dec. 18 edition included a small article about the shooting of Baltimore police officer Keona Holley, who has since died, and the killing of a second individual, Justin Johnson [\u201cTwo men accused of shooting officer\u201d].Above the fold on the Metro cover was a long story about a possible time capsule in Lee\u2019s pedestal [\u201cLee\u2019s pedestal surrenders its evasive loot\u201d]. Which story is a priority?Story continues below advertisementPlease do not continue to treat shootings and police car chases that can lead to needless deaths as \u201cLocal Digest\u201d stories.Betty Booker, Salisbury, Md.Has Boeing lost its way?In \u201cWhen Boeing chose to put profit over quality, the result was tragedy\u201d [Book World, Dec. 19], Jon Gertner reviewed a book called \u201cFlying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing.\u201d The book\u2019s author, Peter Robison, examined the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max aircraft that killed hundreds of passengers and suggested that a great American corporation put profit ahead of quality.AdvertisementThis is not the Boeing I knew many years ago when I was the Defense Department\u2019s official responsible for buying aircraft and other equipment for the Vietnam War. Among the highest-priority items were helicopters. At Boeing\u2019s Vertol helicopter subsidiary, the order rate for twin-rotor Chinooks increased from five to 15 per month, but Vertol\u2019s deliveries were seriously behind schedule.Story continues below advertisementVertol had been a pioneer in the helicopter field and had recently been acquired by Boeing. It was highly regarded for its engineering ability but had limited production experience. Boeing tended to leave it alone, believing that rotary-winged aircraft required special knowledge that a maker of fixed-wing aircraft, such as Boeing, didn\u2019t possess.Bill Allen, Boeing\u2019s chief executive, told me that Boeing\u2019s hands-off policy had been a mistake. He said he was sending one of his top production executives from Seattle, Bob Tharrington, to take charge at Vertol. Tharrington responded as Allen was sure he would, and Vertol got back on schedule.AdvertisementAllen, one of the great leaders of aviation, told me privately and in confidence that Boeing was going to lose $200 million on the Chinook work. He never asked for any relief and never made any public outcry.Putting profit first was a thought that never would have occurred to Allen. His example is worth recalling as Boeing struggles to regain its peerless reputation.Paul R. Ignatius, WashingtonThe writer is a former assistant secretary of defense and secretary of the Navy.The other half of herpetologyIn the Dec. 12 \u201cMark Trail\u201d comic, Jules Rivera described salamanders as reptiles. Salamanders are amphibians. It\u2019s a significant difference because amphibians, unlike reptiles, must have an aquatic habitat to reproduce, and degradation or loss of those habitats critically impacts amphibian species.Though I appreciate Rivera\u2019s approach to modernizing a 75-year-old comic strip, \u201cMark Trail\u201d has always been impeccably accurate about natural history, and I hope Rivera will redouble her effort to keep that standard.Gerald J. Filbin, Rehoboth Beach, Del.A childish word searchThe Dec. 16 front-page article \u201cDespite diversity vows, wide racial gaps persist in corporate leadership\u201d was disappointing and frustrating. The headline claimed \u201cwide racial gaps,\u201d and the article asserted that a Post \u201creview of the 50 most valuable public companies reveals that Black employees represent a strikingly small fraction of top executives.\u201d But the review found that 8 percent of executives at the companies surveyed are Black, vs. 12 percent of the U.S. population \u2014 hardly a striking gap \u2014 and at 10 of the companies \u2014 28 percent of the companies that provided data \u2014 Blacks make up a greater percentage of corporate executives than they do of the general population. That\u2019s hardly evidence of a \u201cwide racial gap\u201d in which Blacks are \u201ca strikingly small fraction\u201d of executives.A centerpiece of the article simply ranked companies based on how many times the words \u201cdiversity,\u201d \u201cinclusion,\u201d \u201cequality,\u201d \u201cracial\u201d and \u201cjustice\u201d appeared in their 2020 annual reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Talk about valuing \u201cvirtue signaling\u201d over action. A quick review of the results shows that, of the four companies whose top executives are more than 20 percent Black, three had fewer mentions of those terms than the average. So, what\u2019s the benefit of The Post\u2019s highlighted word-search analysis?Half of the article concerned comments from one retired chief diversity and inclusion officer. The Post devoted a spot on the front page, more than a page and a half inside, and four authors and eight researchers to this article, but its weak analysis and hyperbolic claims failed to give the topic its due.Russell Frye, McLeanJustices through the agesThe Dec. 15 editorial \u201cReform, don\u2019t pack, the Supreme Court\u201d engaged in the journalistic sin of false equivalence when it stated that \u201cpresidents increasingly search for relatively young, ideologically zealous nominees rather than those with the most judicious temperament.\u2019\u2019 That statement is true of Republican presidents but not Democratic presidents.The four most recent Democratic appointees \u2014 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan \u2014 were nominated at an average age of 55; the seven most recent Republican appointees were nominated at an average age of 50, including three who were nominated before age 50: Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.Kenneth Jost, WashingtonThe writer is author of the annual series \u201cSupreme Court Yearbook.\u201dChampions of unsung musicIn her stimulating review of \u201cDvorak\u2019s Prophecy,\u201d Martha Anne Toll overlooked one salient fact: the local angle [\u201cHe saw a \u2018noble\u2019 future for Black and Indigenous composers. He was wrong.,\u201d Book World, Dec. 12]. The book\u2019s author, Joseph Horowitz, is executive producer of the PostClassical Ensemble, the peripatetic and eclectic group that has been enchanting and exciting listeners around D.C. for nearly 20 years. Led by the dynamic Spanish conductor Angel Gil-Ordo\u00f1ez, PCE has performed the classic music of many ethnic strains, from gamelan to gospel.Apropos of the new book\u2019s subtitle, \u201cAnd the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music,\u201d a recent PCE concert was devoted to that neglected repertoire (and included at least one world premiere). In January, the ensemble will present a concert version of Mahler\u2019s jazzy Fourth Symphony, featuring the virtuoso bass trombonist David Taylor.\u201cDvorak\u2019s Prophecy\u201d may lament the fact that the United States writ large has not pursued the Czech composer\u2019s lead in championing Black and Native classical composers. But in nearly every concert, PCE offers neglected or ignored works by great American musicians. I say, \u201cEncore!\u201dPhilip Kopper, Chevy ChaseCrash Tests for DummiesI do not believe the premise in the Dec. 22 op-ed by Susan Molinari and Beth Brooke, \u201cCrash test dummies are male. Women pay the price for that.,\u201d that women suffer more highway deaths and injuries because of underrepresentation in federal crash tests. The authors do not credit the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its diverse family of crash test dummies employed in various dynamic federal safety standards.Twenty years ago, the NHTSA recognized the vulnerability of women and children in air-bag-deployment crashes and developed a diverse family of crash test dummies for compliance testing. Starting with the Advanced Air Bags rulemaking (2000), the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Status Report stated, \u201cFor the first time, the automakers were directed to use dummies representing 5th percentile female, children 1, 3 and 6\u2009years old, in addition to the standard 50th percentile male dummy.\u201dSince then, it is my understanding, the fifth-percentile female dummy has been integrated into as many federal safety standards as possible and appropriate, such as dynamic side-impact crash testing. Considering the federal dynamic child safety seat requirements, I believe the interests of women and children are being fairly represented in federal crash test programs.John L. Jacobus, Silver SpringRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: What we left out of \u2018Images of 2021\u2019This Beatles documentary review took us nowhere, manThe serious underlying issue behind the annual turkey panicListen up, hearing aid doubtersFor peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonThese are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsMore letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: This photo of Biden seemed to continue a false narrative",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: What we left out of \u2018Images of 2021\u2019 (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2044",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/readers-critique-post-what-we-left-out-images-2021/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLight from the darkroomKudos to the photographers, editors and writers who pulled together the \u201cImages of 2021\u201d special section. The paper\u2019s work has been exceptional this year, and I can\u2019t imagine how they managed to make their best selects. I propose that from now to Jan. 7, The Post run a daily photograph on the front page \u201ccommemorating\u201d last January\u2019s insurrection at the Capitol. We always say \u201cnever forget,\u201d but it takes photos like these and others to remind readers, voters, members of Congress and party leaders just how frightening and dangerous that day was. They need to relive that event in all its horror so that they never, ever forgive the instigator and his enablers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf democracy dies in darkness, this photo record will bring it back to the light.Susan Bodiker, WashingtonI was more than a little surprised to find absent from \u201cImages of 2021\u201d a photograph from the pandemic memorial on the National Mall. My wife and I visited this memorial in September, at the time composed of nearly 700,000 white flags, each representing a life lost in the United States. Walking among the rows upon rows of flags helped me to deal with the trauma of these past several years. More than 400,000 people in the United States have died from the coronavirus so far this year.Reckoning with this massive tragedy, a local artist, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, came up with this memorial. The memorial was on the Mall, at the base of the Washington Monument, for less than three weeks. Images of this tribute to lives lost should be seen by all Americans.Jon Lickerman, Takoma ParkWhat a shame the Dec. 8 \u201cImages of 2021\u201d special section did not include a single photograph of this year\u2019s 17-year cicadas. Yes, there is a lot of strife and grief in the world, and we must not forget such things, but there is still room for joy and for miracles of nature that stand in plain sight. This year\u2019s cicadas were one of those moments that would have been especially therapeutic to include in the photo essay.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCharles Alexander, FrederickWhen it rains, we poreThe Nov. 29 front-page article about almost 50 years of precipitation reporting by Billy Barr in Gothic, Colo., \u201cChronicling snowfall, alone at 10,000 feet,\u201d was gratifying. His data strongly reinforce climate change concerns substantively. One missing piece in the article, that was surprising given the facing page of the jump, about volunteers who document bird interactions at feeders, was the lack of mention of CoCoRaHS. It is the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow Network, formed in 1998, that now boasts almost 25,000 volunteer reporters in North America and the Caribbean. Barr, the high-altitude reporter, has been a CoCoRaHS reporter for 17\u2009years.Story continues below advertisementI\u2019m on only my 5,644th report, so I\u2019m a mere piker. But I mention this to alert others in the area that they, too, can join cocorahs.org. Current reporters range from 5 to 103, so age is no barrier. On the day the article was published, there was only one report in D.C., 106\u2009in Maryland and 242 in Virginia; there is room for plenty more data in our area. Anyone, not merely the folks at CoCoRaHS, can see and process the data. It\u2019s useful to assess dramatic events, but also to compare with U.S. Geological Survey data on creek flow and flooding, for storm water assessments (how badly a creek floods with X inches of precipitation) and just the variability of data throughout an area. A fellow coconutter (my term) in Tennessee, who used to be my backup here, checks my data, noting when I\u2019ve topped the charts in Maryland, and reports on his big events in Tennessee.AdvertisementIt\u2019s fascinating, pretty easy and fun, and it\u2019s important data.Kit Gage, Silver SpringDon\u2019t call it \u2018assisted suicide\u2019Regarding the Dec. 7 Health & Science article \u201cHow end-of-life conversations can help patients and families\u201d:Story continues below advertisementThough end-of-life conversations comfort dying people psychologically, they can\u2019t relieve intolerable physical suffering.I led Compassion & Choices\u2019 grass-roots campaign to pass D.C.\u2019s medical-aid-in-dying law. To pass these laws, I work with terminally ill advocates, including D.C. ovarian cancer patient Mary Klein, whose tragic story The Post documented. Klein wanted this option to end her unbearable suffering gently.Klein is just one of many terminally ill advocates I have worked with in D.C. and Maryland, where we will pass a medical aid-in-dying law soon. These people benefit from discussing their end-of-life care options, including hospice and palliative care, but sometimes the only option that provides relief is medical aid in dying.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut using the term \u201cassisted suicide\u201d to describe medical aid in dying is inaccurate and offensive to terminally ill individuals, who want to live but their disease is killing them. They just want the option to end their suffering peacefully if it becomes intolerable.In fact, data from authorized jurisdictions shows one-third of terminally ill individuals who receive aid-in-dying medication don\u2019t end up taking it, but they get peace of mind from knowing they can take it if they need it.Donna Smith, WashingtonThe writer is D.C. and Maryland campaign director of Compassion & Choices.Shadow from the darkroomDominating the front of the Dec. 6 Metro section were two full-color photographs paying homage to over-the-top, non-newsworthy displays of conspicuous consumption. I found the photo of the preening model alongside a Rolls-Royce off-putting and superfluous in the extreme. At the very least, this non-story should have been buried deep in the Style section.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut wait, there\u2019s more. The most damning aspect of this page was that these photos and the subtle publicity for an elite hotel literally overshadowed the story below. That story, \u201cStrangers unite to foil 2 carjackings,\u201d rightly celebrated the admirable, brave and risky efforts of three strangers to follow would-be carjackers and guide police to their efforts to flee the scene. I think these Good Samaritans are infinitely more relevant to life in the DMV than that British luxury car and what the glitterati were wearing to a fashion show.Stephen D. Cohen, Bethesda\u2018Almost\u2019 is doing a lot of work hereThe Dec. 6 Politics & the Nation article \u201cMuslims see disparities in Jan. 6 investigation\u201d asserted that \u201cterrorist\u201d is \u201ca label that until recently was reserved almost exclusively for Muslim militants.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Post must be unfamiliar with the Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, Shining Path and that obscure group nobody could be expected to know about, the Irish Republican Army. All were frequently and explicitly labeled terrorists. Not a Muslim in the bunch.Thomas W. Lippman, WashingtonThe writer, a former Post Middle East correspondent, is a non-resident scholar with the Middle East Institute.A hero\u2019s sendoffThe caption for the Dec. 10 front-page photograph \u201cFarewell to a longtime GOP leader\u201d referred to former senator Elizabeth Dole \u201cwith a military escort.\u201d When that escort is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I think he should be identified. Gen. Mark A. Milley being the escort was part of the honor and respect accorded to the late former senator Robert J. Dole.Story continues below advertisementJane L. Gerson, RestonThe increasingly humorless PostI am still in shock about Gene Weingarten ending his Washington Post Magazine column. He was the only reason I opened the magazine. (I no longer do the weekend puzzle, and other stories are rarely of interest to me.) This is the second loss of a columnist that left me disappointed and feeling I am missing something important. The first loss was Couch Slouch \u2014 Norman Chad \u2014 who used to brighten my every Monday.AdvertisementI understand both Weingarten and Chad are irreplaceable, but maybe there is something The Post could do to fill the void? Alexandra Petri is still holding down the fort with her witty opinion columns, but I believe she should get reinforcements. I am hoping The Post will strongly consider taking appropriate steps in that direction. As a daily reader, I know I miss and need such columns.Agnieszka Pukniel, CheverlyWhat heroes deserveThe moving account of burial ceremonies for \u201cunclaimed veterans,\u201d \u201cA final salute for unclaimed veterans\u201d [Dec. 8, front page], was silent on the subject of Taps being rendered. Taps was designated by Congress in 2012 as the \u201cNational Song of Remembrance.\u201d Its sounding is statutorily mandated as an integral element of military honors.There is a shortage of buglers in active duty and volunteer honor guards, but thousands of civilian buglers are available nationwide to sound Taps when asked. Requests are entered via one of two national websites. The alternative is the playing of a recording of Taps. This falls far short of the respect owed to the veteran. All who organize such burials are encouraged to reach out for a volunteer live bugler.AdvertisementThomas M. Sneeringer, WashingtonThe writer is state director for Maryland of Bugles Across America.Morally rightI wish to acknowledge E.J. Dionne Jr.\u2019s statement in his Dec. 2 Thursday Opinion column, \u201cThe pro-gun, pro-life problem,\u201d that there are those of us who are pro-life and anti-gun. He acknowledged our \u201cmoral consistency.\u201dI make this point because he seemed to be saying we are doing right. I know of no other way to characterize it. He might not agree, but I am grateful to be acknowledged as being on the right and moral side of this issue. I give him much credit for acknowledging us.Dean DeBuck, McLean80 years later, remembering togetherMy thanks and commendation go to Brian Basset, creator of the \u201cRed and Rover\u201d daily cartoon. His Dec. 7 strip offered the most engaging and endearing tribute to Pearl Harbor Day that I have seen this year, or for many a year. In his cartoon\u2019s voice of the little boy explaining the day to his dog, he concluded with \u201ca lot of dogs lost their humans that day, many not much older than my brother.\u201d That brought tears to my eyes. And I was just barely old enough to remember the first Pearl Harbor Day. My dad and I heard the man on the radio say, \u201cPearl Harbor has been attacked by the Japanese.\u201d I asked my Dad, \u201cWhat does that mean?\u201d Dad said, \u201cI think it means we are going to war.\u201dJean Mackintosh Goldstrom, AlexandriaObjectively wrongThe Nov. 30 front-page headline on an article about steps taken by GOP leaders in Michigan to change election canvassing boards to favor them was an abject failure.Instead of saying \u201cGOP works to reshape election landscape,\u201d the headline should have clearly stated that the party is working to \u201cpoliticize\u201d the landscape. Journalists\u2019 role is not to be a neutral party but to present readers with evidence \u2014 and to take a pro-democracy stance. Clarity matters, as does truth.The Republican Party is in the process of methodically suppressing the vote at the state level and is relying on what experts such as New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen call \u201cfantasies.\u201d This profound shift to the right by the GOP needs to be explained unambiguously to readers. If mainstream news organizations such as The Post continue to strive for objectivity to the point of muddying the facts, the United States\u2019 days as a democracy are numbered.Alma Henderson, WashingtonAn overly star-studded productionRegarding the Dec. 4 Style review of the TV production of \u201cAnnie\u201d [\u201cA few hard knocks for \u2018Annie Live!\u2019\u2009\u201d]:The list of quibbles with the show did not include a blatant anachronism.In the scene where Daddy Warbucks and Annie meet with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, an American flag behind Roosevelt has its stars in staggered rows \u2014 it is apparently a 50-star (present-day) flag. The 50-star flag was adopted circa 1960. In the 1933 time frame of the show, the flag would have 48 stars, in six rows of eight. Surely the NBC props department \u2014 or the theatrical props agency from which NBC rents \u2014 has a 48-star flag somewhere.Martin Horn, AlexandriaFor lost journalists, room at the INNThe Washington Post Magazine\u2019s Dec. 5 \u201cLost Local News\u201d issue captured what\u2019s lost when local newspapers close, but it didn\u2019t capture the rebirth of journalism that\u2019s happening across the country, nor what people can do to support it right now.Nonprofit news expanded during the pandemic, with membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News\u2019s nonprofit news network growing to more than 350 newsrooms this year from 195 in 2019. Individual donations to those newsrooms \u2014 which INN has certified as independent and nonpartisan \u2014 are being matched and, in some cases, multiplied through the end of the year.Andrew Sherry, MiamiThe writer is a consultant to the Institute for Nonprofit News.Read more Free for All letters:This Beatles documentary review took us nowhere, manThe serious underlying issue behind the annual turkey panicListen up, hearing aid doubtersFor peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonThese are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsMissing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusMore letters to the editor This week's Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: What we left out of \u2018Images of 2021\u2019",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: For peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lesson (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2045",
        "date": "2021-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/19/free-for-all-letters-english-geography-lesson/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightI always enjoy reading William Booth\u2019s articles about people and events in Britain. He unfailingly treats British eccentricity with wry humor and tolerance. So, it was with delight that I found the Nov. 12 front-page article \u201cPeat: A \u2018superhero\u2019 in fight for the planet,\u201d Booth\u2019s account of the reclamation of peat bogs for the sake of climate health. However, he needed a small geography lesson! The area described in the article is indeed in Lancashire, which is not, as identified, in \u201cnortheast\u201d England, but rather in northwest England in what is known as Merseyside near Liverpool. My husband, who was born in that vicinity, would have taken The Post to task for such an egregious error.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJennifer Santley, Falls ChurchSacrificing truth for colorThe Nov. 7 front-page article \u201cThe vaccine countdown,\u201d about a small Washington state hospital with a staff divided on whether to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, committed a journalistic error by publishing direct quotes by \u201cboth sides\u201d (as if there are ever only two).Example: One person was quoted as saying, \u201cStop firing good people in the name of socialism.\u201d There are two errors in that sentence. No one was being \u201cfired\u201d; it was an employee\u2019s decision to leave the job. And requiring that staff safeguard themselves and others is not \u201csocialism\u201d; it\u2019s a necessity to vouchsafe the public welfare.Story continues below advertisementWhy does The Post (and so many other media outlets) think articles need \u201ccolor\u201d from quotes, even when the quotes spread false and misleading information? Please rethink this ridiculous practice, unless the statements are immediately followed with corrective language.Alice Cherbonnier, Cockeysville, Md.The \u2018Afghan blunder\u2019John Bolton, national security adviser to President Donald Trump from April 2018 through September 2019, was somewhat vague in his Nov. 3 op-ed, \u201cThe Afghan blunder already endangers security.\u201d It was not clear which blunder he was talking about.AdvertisementThe United States has spent about $1 trillion and many American lives, with additional contributions by NATO allies, to help set up a government in Afghanistan in hopes it would continue a democratic tradition after we left. A special goal was women\u2019s rightful place in society. Our objective over 20 years was to avoid the resurgence of the Taliban, which gave asylum to Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States. To that end, U.S. forces captured an important Taliban leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the founding fathers of the Taliban and an associate of Mohammad Omar, in 2010 and handed him over to Pakistan. Baradar was imprisoned in Pakistan after that.Story continues below advertisementMost Americans were tired of the long war in Afghanistan and wanted it to end. A reasonable approach, consistent with our objective, would have been to bolster the government under Ashraf Ghani that we had helped establish, take steps to minimize the risk of Taliban resurgence and then leave. One way to minimize the risk of Taliban resurgence would have been to ensure that Baradar stayed in prison and unable to incite Afghans to violence against the Ghani government.But that is not what Trump did. He requested that Pakistan release Baradar, which it did in October 2018. Bolton was national security adviser at that time. Did he agree with this action? On Trump\u2019s behalf, Zalmay Khalilzad negotiated the peace deal. Baradar refused to acknowledge Ghani\u2019s government as legitimate; Trump agreed to cut Ghani out of the deal. Eventually, Khalilzad and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a peace deal with Baradar, representing Afghanistan, in Doha, Qatar. The deal had a strict timeline with measurable milestones of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to be completed by May 1, 2021, and vague promises from the Taliban that it has not honored. There was not much contemporary news coverage.AdvertisementMost sensible people evaluating this deal handing over Afghanistan to Taliban control, bypassing the Ghani government, would consider it to be against everything the United States had fought for over a 20-year period. Was this what Bolton called the \u201cAfghan blunder\u201d? If not, why not?Story continues below advertisementArun Guha, Silver SpringAn editor who added joyI appreciated \u201cFormer Post copy editor was committed to local news and its fine details,\u201d the Nov.\u20098 obituary for Pamela Feigenbaum. Although I was saddened by her early death, I was pleased to learn who wrote those funny and clever headlines on Animal Watch.I loved Animal Watch and looked for it every week, often reading it to my husband. I clipped out many of those hilarious headlines and put them in my journal. My condolences to her family, and thanks to her for adding some joy to my days.AdvertisementCarol Goodloe, ArlingtonCase in pointJames Surowiecki\u2019s Nov. 14 Outlook essay, \u201cWhy do we buy covid lies? We\u2019re bad at math.,\u201d was interesting for its discussion of the general lack of understanding of statistical concepts, especially as applied to the coronavirus pandemic. This poor understanding is not just a result of statistics not generally being taught either in high school or college; in this case, it is also caused by private-sector and government employees not being clearly knowledgeable either, maybe unintentionally. Because of this problem, the government can mislead the population using incomplete information not obvious to the general population.Story continues below advertisementI also found it coincidental that a Nov. 12 The World article, \u201cHarnessing the sea\u2019s power \u2014 to make whisky?,\u201d contained an example of an associated problem \u2014 the lack of understanding of technical units, such as associated with electrical power. The article, which concerned using tidal flow to generate electricity, erred by mixing up the units used to discuss the process. The article stated that one of the tidal power system designs \u201cis rated for 2 megawatts, enough to power 2,000 homes a year.\u201d A power generation system can produce (probably a maximum) two megawatts (a watt is a unit of power). Over a year, the system, if used continuously, would produce approximately 17,500 kilowatt-hours of energy. Energy is what one purchases from the power company. For 2,000 houses, this is an energy use of about 8,760 kilowatt-hours per year. But the generator of this energy should last more than one year and should be able to provide this energy use for more than one year. Thus, the original statement contained irrelevant information. In addition, these were averaged numbers; the energy needed by the 2,000 houses might not be available at the times it is needed.AdvertisementThis discussion just shows that articles about technical matters should be reviewed by people with technical training before publication.David Griggs, ColumbiaAn \u2018infuriating\u2019 defenseIn \u201cAn infuriating indictment of Israel,\u201d [Book World, Nov. 7] Randy Rosenthal claimed that Sylvain Cypel\u2019s book \u201cThe State of Israel vs. the Jews\u201d \u201cpresents a one-sided condemnation of Israel\u2019s \u2018contempt for international law,\u2019 \u2018crime of apartheid\u2019 and \u2018systemic cruelty.\u2019\u2009\u201d The examples Rosenthal cited of Cypel\u2019s alleged one-sidedness do not bear out this charge, however.Story continues below advertisementThe preference that Israeli law gives to Jews over non-Jews does make Israel an \u201cethnocracy,\u201d rather than a democracy, as Cypel is hardly the first to note; the Israeli Supreme Court has indeed given \u201clegal cover\u201d to the theft of Palestinian land and homes; and Israel has had a history of supporting \u201cnefarious governments,\u201d from apartheid South Africa to Augusto Pinochet\u2019s Chile to Viktor Orban\u2019s Hungary.AdvertisementCypel was also correct to argue that Israelis\u2019 \u201cbarefaced racism\u201d toward Palestinians and African asylum-seekers \u201cappears to qualify Israel as a \u2018white supremacist state.\u2019\u2009\u201d Rosenthal called this a \u201cfallacy\u201d because, \u201cto actual white supremacists, Jews aren\u2019t White\u201d \u2014 a laughable objection.Rosenthal\u2019s pathetic attempts to discredit Cypel\u2019s indictment of Israel succeeded only in revealing how difficult it has become for any conscientious person to defend the subjugation and dehumanization of Palestinians in the name of protecting Jews.Story continues below advertisementCarolyn L. Karcher, WashingtonThe writer, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, is editor of \u201cReclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation.\u201d\u201cAn infuriating indictment of Israel that won\u2019t change anyone\u2019s mind,\u201d Randy Rosenthal\u2019s Nov. 7 Book World review of Sylvain Cypel\u2019s book \u201cThe State of Israel vs. the Jews,\u201d was full of biases.AdvertisementThe opening sentence read, \u201cSettlements aside, a Zionist is someone who supports a Jewish state in what is now Israel.\u201d It is a fallacy to separate Israel from settlements, for that is how Israel was established. Right from the start, Zionist political leaders wrote and said their project was based on the building of Jewish settlements, with the aim of replacing Palestinians as a majority in historical Palestine. And the intent of mainstream Zionist leaders was also to displace Palestinians from their lands, as documented by Israel\u2019s \u201cNew Historians.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs for racism, prominent Israeli leaders of European descent, who long dominated Israeli politics, were racist not only toward Palestinian Arabs but even toward Jews of Arab descent. For example, David Ben Gurion, the lead founder of the Israeli state, wrote: \u201cWe need people who are born workers. We have to pay attention to .\u2009.\u2009. Oriental Jews, both the Yemenite and Sephardic. Their standard of living and their needs are lower than the European workers are. They will be able to compete successfully with the Arab workers.\u201dPhilip Farah, ViennaAdvertisementThe writer is a board member of the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace.Unbalanced coverageI was glad to see the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference field hockey championship game covered in The Post, but the piece missed highlighting multiple significant details for readers [\u201cMorrison\u2019s red-letter day allows Cadets to cap undefeated season with title,\u201d Sports, Nov. 7].Focusing the article on one player made the piece unbalanced by excluding efforts of players and coaches in the game, and throughout the season on both teams, from both schools, for all readers.St. John\u2019s College High School and Bishop Ireton were first and second seeds all year. The St. John\u2019s team did not allow a goal in WCAC play all year. The Bishop Ireton team appeared in its first WCAC field hockey championship in school history. This detail was readily available and applicable to the reporting on the WCAC championship game.Gary Hermann, AlexandriaLet\u2019s just say he\u2019s a big dealThe excellent Nov. 7 Washington Post Magazine article about Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, \u201cThe man in the middle,\u201d said of Mayorkas, \u201cHe is a diminutive 62-year-old. (\u2018Just under\u2019 5-foot-7, he once cracked to me with a sly smile that said it\u2019s more than \u2018just\u2019 under.)\u201d A person who is 5 feet 7 inches tall is not \u201cdiminutive,\u201d which is defined sometimes as under 5 feet tall or \u201ctiny,\u201d \u201cnotably small.\u201d Millions of Americans are less than 5 feet 7 inches tall, including many women.I am sure the use of \u201cdiminutive\u201d was not meant as an insult or as a derogatory term, but it may be interpreted as such by many folks, including me, who are 5-7 or less.The great American hero Anthony S. Fauci is also about 5 feet 7 inches tall.Jerry Ward, Montgomery VillageDraw a line on cartoonsI am very disappointed \u2014 and disgusted \u2014 with the amount of far-right political cartoons in The Post lately.While I may disagree with opposing views and much of the blather of some of the right-wing opinion writers, I appreciate the forum and am happy there is a well-rounded space for all reasonable opinions.The cartoons, however, are a different matter. The Nov. 9 Drawing Board cartoon by Michael Ramirez was truly hateful and pernicious and had no place in The Post.Exactly what is the paper trying to prove or accomplish by printing far-right cartoons? Aren\u2019t they supposed to be an amusing caricature of current events? I don\u2019t think this one fit that bill, no matter one\u2019s political stance. And where will The Post draw the line? Today, Democrats are portrayed as anti-American, but tomorrow will it be \u201claughing\u201d off a suggestion of violence?And seriously, you know your audience. Republicans won\u2019t sign up because there are a few political cartoons with a right-wing stance.Most readers get just a little bit of solace from the day\u2019s news by looking at the political cartoons, me included. Don\u2019t show some sort of false equivalency and ruin this for us.Please do better.Jessica Peterson, Two Harbors, Minn.Never in my more than 40 years of reading The Post have I seen such an outrageous, insulting, egregious, outright infamous editorial cartoon as the Nov. 9 cartoon by Michael Ramirez. It was pure, jaw-dropping calumny. Progressives \u201chate America\u201d? A hammer-and-sickle in the word \u201cprogressives\u201d? Are you kidding me?And this on the day after a sitting congressman released a video in which he depicted himself attacking our president and murdering a member of the other party \u2014 who happened to be featured in this cartoon.P.A. Franklin, York, Pa.Off the mapThe Post fell into the trap of furthering propaganda about the red face of Virginia. The Nov. 4 front-page article \u201cA sharp turn looms in Virginia\u201d showed a graphic that burned red across a map, surrounded by headlines that, together, furthered the narrative that Virginia turned redder because of upset Democrats or Beltway politics. The problem with the article was not only the implications of the graphic but also that the numbers did not consider the difference in overall voters voting in the two compared years.The Democrats got more Virginians to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in 2021 vs. 2017 across the state by nearly 180,000.The map did not visualize this.By my calculations, the number of Virginia voters grew by about 460,000, and a whopping 660,000 more people voted in the 2021 election than in the 2017 governor\u2019s race. So what is the narrative then? More voters voted, and more voters voted for the Republican candidate. It could mean that the Democrats motivated nearly 180,000 of the overall 660,000 more who voted, but that too many liberal-leaning voters stayed home.As a liberal voter in Fairfax County, I can anecdotally relay that the governor\u2019s race seemed very low on the \u201cget the vote out\u201d thermometer. Sorry to say, but this one bit the dust more likely because Democratic-leaning voters didn\u2019t feel the heat, but conservative voters did \u2014 as they had some 485,000 more voters vote for the Republican candidate statewide than in 2017.Laura Monroe-Duprey, AlexandriaThe full story of \u2018three-fifths\u2019The Nov. 5 letter \u201cThe filibuster must go\u201d repeated the myth that it was \u201cthe Three-Fifths Compromise that gave outsize influence to Southern slave states.\u201dThe opposite is the case. As the Trump administration learned, for purposes of allocating House seats to the states, all people living in a state on a particular day are counted. It doesn\u2019t matter whether they are citizens or aliens; free, imprisoned or enslaved; enfranchised or disenfranchised; adults or children; propertied or propertyless. Following that policy, the South wanted enslaved people to count as full people for purposes of congressional representation; the North objected. What the South didn\u2019t want enslaved people counted at all for was the other one of the two things based on population: \u201cRepresentatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States .\u2009.\u2009. according to their respective Numbers.\u201d The North, of course, did want enslaved people counted for purposes of taxation. The famous compromise was intended to decrease somewhat the Southern taxation burden while similarly decreasing its representation in Congress. Because most taxes weren\u2019t deemed direct, the envisioned Southern benefit was minimal.What gave White Southerners outsize political influence was not the compromise but technically freeing the enslaved after the Civil War. Then Southern \u201cRedemption\u201d following Reconstruction reduced Black political power to minimally more than during slavery, but Blacks \u2014 despite the provision in the 14th Amendment to reduce representation proportionate to the number of disenfranchised adult male citizens to all such people \u2014 were counted as full people, rather than merely three-fifths for purposes of congressional apportionment.Paul H. Blackman, ArlingtonAt last, a reason to cheerApart from sports, we don\u2019t often get a chance to celebrate our home teams and local talent. So it was especially welcome to see a feature on the Washington National Opera\u2019s return to the stage [\u201cFor the WNO, a homecoming worth singing about,\u201d Style, Nov. 8].Michael Andor Brodeur\u2019s review of the singers, the musical selections and the tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg was thorough and even revelatory, including an explanation of the mysterious colored gloves. But he might have given a little more attention to the orchestra. I found the conductor and musicians to be in splendid form, and it was thrilling to see them fully onstage rather than semi-hidden in the orchestra pit. This town needs all the bravos (and bravas) it can get. Thanks to the Washington National Opera and Orchestra for giving us reason to cheer!Rayna Aylward, AnnandaleRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsReaders critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditReaders critique The Post: Please have more respect for child-care professionalsMore letters to the editor  Opinion: Readers critique The Post: For peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lesson",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Listen up, hearing aid doubters (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2046",
        "date": "2021-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/26/free-for-all-letters-hearing-aid-doubters-listen-up/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe Nov. 9 Health & Science article \u201cWill I look old if I start wearing hearing aids?\u201d was just one more in a long line of misguided and misinforming articles on hearing aids. While appearing to be supportive of people who need hearing aids, it perpetuated the idea that they are not covered by insurance and are not fun. My state-of-the-art hearing aids are fully covered by my standard Blue Cross and have Bluetooth connectivity to my phone, iPad, car sound system and computer. They are fun!Story continues below advertisementI suspect that ageism and historical hearing aid corporate interests account for fundamentally negative bias in these articles on hearing aids. I think the subject deserves a fresh, open-minded, updated examination.AdvertisementCasey Wichlacz, ViennaThe Ravens\u2019 far-flung flockThe heavy traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway heading south after Baltimore Ravens games is evidence that a lot of folks in the D.C. area are interested in the Ravens and attending games. Yet my newspaper, The Post, barely covers the team.We are a two-football-team region. The Post should reflect this.Abby Crowley, GreenbeltThe GOAT sports columnI have read many articles in The Post, but I have never read one as good as Sally Jenkins\u2019s Nov. 12 Sports column article about the discipline of Tom Brady, \u201cBrady\u2019s secret isn\u2019t much of a mystery: Self-discipline.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI am 71. I never have been disciplined. It is never too late to try. I will try.Steven Ross, Kew Gardens, N.Y.ThoughtlessRegarding the Nov. 14 Sports article \u201cHoyas flop out of the gate with a stunning loss to an Ivy League afterthought\u201d:AdvertisementMy late husband, whose obituary was in the Nov. 7 Post, was a graduate of Dartmouth College, an avid sports fan and reader of The Post for many years. I feel, and I know he would feel the same, that to use the term \u201cIvy League afterthought\u201d to describe the winning team seems unnecessarily snarky.Susan Gillespie, WashingtonThe definition of griefI grieved when I lost my wife, my brother and my sister over the past few months. I always had a hard time defining grief until I read the Nov. 14 obituary for Rabbi Earl Grollman, \u201cRabbi wrote books on grief and spent decades ministering to mourners,\u201d which quoted Grollman defining grief as \u201clove not wanting to let go because something has been lost from our life.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI will keep his obituary on hand to remind my children.James Wolan, BurkeSmall town, big problemsMy husband and I moved to Takoma Park in 1977, because it was affordable and we wanted to raise our kids in integrated schools. We have written the mayor and city council in support of the city employees\u2019 demand for higher wages.AdvertisementBut the Nov. 16 Metro article \u201cWorkers seek better benefits in Md. haven\u201d implied that if only city employees were paid more, they\u2019d be able to buy a home here. There is no wage increase possible that would allow employees to purchase a home in Takoma Park. Forget Victorian homes; modest bungalows sell for $600,000 or more. This is happening across the nation. Gentrification and skyrocketing home prices cannot be solved by our small-town government.Story continues below advertisementOur local government did, though, enact rent control, making us one of the more affordable places inside the Beltway. Roughly half of our households are rentals, and we\u2019re glad that after living here 45 years, our schools are still integrated.Also, I\u2019ll buy a beer at one of our local bars for any reporter who can manage to write about Takoma Park without using the words \u201cnuclear-free\u201d or \u201cgranola.\u201dBeth Baker, Takoma ParkHuman interest at the zooI enjoy human interest stories as much as the next person, but when someone is named National Zoo director, as Brandie Smith was, I\u2019m curious about her professional background. The Nov. 10 Metro article \u201cVeteran National Zoo curator Smith lands top job\u201d mentioned only Smith\u2019s undergraduate degree. One needs to consult her Smithsonian bio online to learn of her University of Maryland PhD and the focus of \u2014 indeed the existence of \u2014 her published research. Moreover, the article failed to note Smith\u2019s many years in conservation (an important part of the zoo\u2019s mission). And why report what her father did but not her mother? What does it mean anyway to be \u201cinvolved in the birth of three surviving [panda] cubs\u201d? Or to be \u201cfamiliar with the zoo\u2019s array of animals\u201d? Inquiring minds want to know!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s like writing about teachers being familiar with different kinds of children but not pointing out their commitment to education and fostering learning. I understand the press of deadlines but appreciate a more respectful, comprehensive story. For the record, I have never met Smith, although I\u2019d like to.Joan R. Goldberg, WashingtonBurying the lede hits a new lowWhatever happened to the \u201cwho, what, when, where\u201d rule of journalism that required the main points of an article to be summarized in the opening paragraph? The headline of the top left-hand article on the Nov. 14 front page was \u201cBiden\u2019s approval hits a new low.\u201d Nowhere, however, in the three paragraphs on that page was the reader informed what President Biden\u2019s approval rating now is. One had to go all the way to the middle of the second column of the article\u2019s continuation \u2014 some seven paragraphs later! \u2014 to learn that the president\u2019s approval rating is 41 percent. In between, the article provided a lot of interesting analysis and subsidiary conclusions, but it was hard to absorb them while searching for the basic information promised by the headline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven if the article itself was left unchanged, this glaring omission could have been rectified by simply changing the headline to read \u201cBiden\u2019s 41% approval rating hits a new low.\u201dDavid M. Cohen, Chevy ChaseCrushing our SpiritThe Post has done it again \u2014 in spades. The Nov. 15 Sports section devotes 786 square inches (114 on the front page of the section) to a very mediocre men\u2019s football team\u2019s middle-of-the-season game, including a large color photograph above the fold, and five more photos inside. Our local women\u2019s soccer team, now headed for its league championship game, got 17 square inches on the front page (no photo), and 72 square inches with one gray photo on Page D10, for a total of 89\u2009square inches, or 11 percent of the men\u2019s space. (This does not count the extra article on Page D6 about the injured football player.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven granted that men\u2019s football likely has more fans than women\u2019s soccer, this huge disparity in team coverage is a disgrace.Richard Larkin, ViennaGetting beta all the timeI take issue with the Nov. 12 Economy & Business article \u201cTesla\u2019s bumpy road with regulators,\u201d which reported on an issue with an update to the Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.I have a 2018 Tesla Model 3 AWD Dual Motor. The article should have mentioned that there about 2 million Teslas out there, and only about 11 percent of owners, or about 200,000, have paid for FSD. Also, for the FSD beta reported in the article, one needs to actively enroll and qualify, and about 6 percent of owners did that \u2014 the 12,000 cars noted in the article.Story continues below advertisementI am one of those 12,000 beta drivers, and I knew there were going to be issues when I qualified. I also knew that I could turn off all of the FSD stuff and drive normally.AdvertisementThis month, I drove from D.C. to Bethany Beach, Del., and back with the latest Tesla FSD beta software, and it was a magical trip. Yes, there were issues with some left and right turns and lane changes, but that is the definition of beta software: There are going to be some bugs that need to be fixed. Is the beta safe? Absolutely, and better than most drivers out there. Is it ready for prime time in the streets of D.C.? No, but it is only Level II of autonomous technology. Drivers are still in control and responsible.Pat Benic, WashingtonChilling prescience, Civil War editionEveryone has their perspective when traveling. And I enjoyed the Nov. 12 Weekend article about Richmond, \u201cFun found right down the tracks.\u201d There really is a great deal to see, taste and learn in and around Richmond.Richmond was a central player in the United States\u2019 most fragile period as a democracy. And it stands today as a reminder of what is good and bad in our nation. The \u201cgood\u201d is reflected in the diversity of its citizens, their accomplishments and neighborly approach to strangers. The reminder of the \u201cbad\u201d part can most notably and clearly be found in the Tredegar Iron Works, home to the American Civil War Museum, which I was very surprised to discover was ignored during the blithe tour of Richmond reported in this article.AdvertisementMore enlightening than a great find in a secondhand clothing store, more engaging than a visit to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and experiencing Kehinde Wiley\u2019s \u201cRumors of War\u201d (which I\u2019ve done) and certainly more fulfilling than a country waffle breakfast would have been a visit to the American Civil War Museum and a careful inspection of its displays and a close read of its presentations full of firsthand narrative from that period. One such display contained a quotation from Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman with chilling prescience that described his intent to \u201cmake them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.\u201d A fair reading of today\u2019s political and social climate in the United States appears to support the notion that there is a large segment of our population for whom that \u201cappeal\u201d has returned and in fact is growing.I suggest a return to Richmond and the American Civil War Museum to study and absorb the information it presents about our Civil War and use it to fashion a piece reminding Americans that conflict always results in catastrophe for all involved, and is especially devastating physically, economically and most corrosively to the spirit of the misguided. A lesson taught from time immemorial, and seemingly \u201clearned\u201d over and over again.Mark Koenig, BethesdaEven more light on Lee houseRegarding the Nov. 8 Metro article \u201cNo longer in dark on Lee marker\u2019s removal\u201d:There\u2019s another Robert E. Lee connection to the historic house now for sale on Oronoco Street in Alexandria: his in-laws. Mary Fitzhugh, who spent part of her girlhood in that home, married George Washington Parke Custis there in 1804, as Custis was building Arlington House (using enslaved and free labor) just up the Potomac. The couple in 1807 became parents to Mary Custis, who would marry Lee in 1831 at Arlington House.Charles S. Clark, ArlingtonChilling prescience, World War I editionI was taken with two prophetic observations in Michael E. Ruane\u2019s Nov. 11 Retropolis column concerning the centennial of the Tomb of the Unknowns, \u201cA century ago, borne to his tomb.\u201dThe comments by French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who led the allied armies in Europe in World War I, about the controversial Treaty of Versailles, which severely punished Germany: \u201cThis is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.\u201d How prophetic he was. As was British officer and later Field Marshal Archibald Wavell: \u201cAfter the \u2018war to end war,\u2019 they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making the \u2018Peace to end Peace.\u2019\u2009\u201dGermany was ground into the mud, and one of the most powerful results was the rise of the Nazis and the more horrific World War II. If there had been a Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Germany instead of the Versailles Treaty after World War I, history might very well have turned out much better, as was the case with the Marshall Plan following World War II. We have been strong allies with Germany for nearly 80 years. And Germany has been the economic and political anchor of a stable Europe.It had to be \u201cthe last war,\u201d H.G. Wells wrote in a 1914 collection of essays, \u201cThe War That Will End War.\u201d In the same year, Wells published \u201cThe World Set Free,\u201d which accurately described nuclear war, radioactive fallout, etc. Wells thought that nuclear weapons would help bring peace because of their terribleness. They certainly ended World War II, but not in the way Wells imagined with a world government and universal peace.Peter I. Hartsock, LaytonsvilleCasualties of climate changeThe photograph by Brian Inganga of Yusuf Abdullahi walking past the carcasses of his 40\u2002goats, a stark and haunting image that accompanied the Nov. 14 news article \u201c\u2009\u2018If they die, we all die\u2019: Drought fells Kenyan herds,\u201d provided on-the-ground context for the COP26 climate change meetings in Glasgow, Scotland: Poor nations are suffering the consequences of the consumer demands and commercialism of rich nations.The 21st century will continue to be marked by increasing numbers of climate-driven refugees. Where are the millions of displaced people to go? Rich nations need look no farther than their own borders to glimpse our inability to establish long-term, or even short-term, people-centered immigration policy. Climate change, environmental degradation and loss of life are in the here and now.COP26 says we are simply not ready to preserve our planet and the life it supports.Michael Katz, WashingtonThe taradiddle paradiddle: Playing \u2018both sides\u2019Catherine Rampell\u2019s Nov. 16 op-ed, \u201cDelusions on both sides of the aisle,\u201d provided a cogent explanation of the current inflation taradiddle. Rampell\u2019s analyses challenge and inform my thinking on important issues, so I was frustrated by the both-siderism of the accompanying headline. It is the same misinformation that Rampell tried to dispel.Both-siderism is often dismissed as sloppy journalism, but actually it is the seductive false-equivalence fallacy. As such, it leads to the false conclusion that both parties suffer from equally destructive delusions about inflation. In fact, Rampell identified asymmetrical misinformation by the two parties. She quoted Sen. John Barrasso\u2019s (Wyo.) declaration \u201cI would have never believed that Joe Biden in just 10 months in the presidency could bring us to a 30-year high of inflation\u201d as representing Republican rhetoric. Despite Barrasso\u2019s equivocal formulation, his statement is disinformation, intentional and not based on delusion. When Rampell turned to the Democrats\u2019 handling of rising inflation, she first identified the \u201cplaying down the phenomenon\u201d response based on economists\u2019 pre-delta optimism, followed by a rhetorical pivot to reasonable optimism that proposed legislation will address real inflation. This is an open response that can be engaged and challenged in a reasonable debate. It\u2019s hardly delusion or deception.Of course, perhaps there really are \u201cboth sides\u201d to this question: truth and taradiddle.William Darian Boggs, GreenbeltRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: For peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonReaders critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsReaders critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditReaders critique The Post: Please have more respect for child-care professionalsMore letters to the editor  Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Listen up, hearing aid doubters",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Listen up, hearing aid doubters (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2047",
        "date": "2021-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/26/free-for-all-letters-hearing-aid-doubters-listen-up/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe Nov. 9 Health & Science article \u201cWill I look old if I start wearing hearing aids?\u201d was just one more in a long line of misguided and misinforming articles on hearing aids. While appearing to be supportive of people who need hearing aids, it perpetuated the idea that they are not covered by insurance and are not fun. My state-of-the-art hearing aids are fully covered by my standard Blue Cross and have Bluetooth connectivity to my phone, iPad, car sound system and computer. They are fun!Story continues below advertisementI suspect that ageism and historical hearing aid corporate interests account for fundamentally negative bias in these articles on hearing aids. I think the subject deserves a fresh, open-minded, updated examination.AdvertisementCasey Wichlacz, ViennaThe Ravens\u2019 far-flung flockThe heavy traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway heading south after Baltimore Ravens games is evidence that a lot of folks in the D.C. area are interested in the Ravens and attending games. Yet my newspaper, The Post, barely covers the team.We are a two-football-team region. The Post should reflect this.Abby Crowley, GreenbeltThe GOAT sports columnI have read many articles in The Post, but I have never read one as good as Sally Jenkins\u2019s Nov. 12 Sports column article about the discipline of Tom Brady, \u201cBrady\u2019s secret isn\u2019t much of a mystery: Self-discipline.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI am 71. I never have been disciplined. It is never too late to try. I will try.Steven Ross, Kew Gardens, N.Y.ThoughtlessRegarding the Nov. 14 Sports article \u201cHoyas flop out of the gate with a stunning loss to an Ivy League afterthought\u201d:AdvertisementMy late husband, whose obituary was in the Nov. 7 Post, was a graduate of Dartmouth College, an avid sports fan and reader of The Post for many years. I feel, and I know he would feel the same, that to use the term \u201cIvy League afterthought\u201d to describe the winning team seems unnecessarily snarky.Susan Gillespie, WashingtonThe definition of griefI grieved when I lost my wife, my brother and my sister over the past few months. I always had a hard time defining grief until I read the Nov. 14 obituary for Rabbi Earl Grollman, \u201cRabbi wrote books on grief and spent decades ministering to mourners,\u201d which quoted Grollman defining grief as \u201clove not wanting to let go because something has been lost from our life.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI will keep his obituary on hand to remind my children.James Wolan, BurkeSmall town, big problemsMy husband and I moved to Takoma Park in 1977, because it was affordable and we wanted to raise our kids in integrated schools. We have written the mayor and city council in support of the city employees\u2019 demand for higher wages.AdvertisementBut the Nov. 16 Metro article \u201cWorkers seek better benefits in Md. haven\u201d implied that if only city employees were paid more, they\u2019d be able to buy a home here. There is no wage increase possible that would allow employees to purchase a home in Takoma Park. Forget Victorian homes; modest bungalows sell for $600,000 or more. This is happening across the nation. Gentrification and skyrocketing home prices cannot be solved by our small-town government.Story continues below advertisementOur local government did, though, enact rent control, making us one of the more affordable places inside the Beltway. Roughly half of our households are rentals, and we\u2019re glad that after living here 45 years, our schools are still integrated.Also, I\u2019ll buy a beer at one of our local bars for any reporter who can manage to write about Takoma Park without using the words \u201cnuclear-free\u201d or \u201cgranola.\u201dBeth Baker, Takoma ParkHuman interest at the zooI enjoy human interest stories as much as the next person, but when someone is named National Zoo director, as Brandie Smith was, I\u2019m curious about her professional background. The Nov. 10 Metro article \u201cVeteran National Zoo curator Smith lands top job\u201d mentioned only Smith\u2019s undergraduate degree. One needs to consult her Smithsonian bio online to learn of her University of Maryland PhD and the focus of \u2014 indeed the existence of \u2014 her published research. Moreover, the article failed to note Smith\u2019s many years in conservation (an important part of the zoo\u2019s mission). And why report what her father did but not her mother? What does it mean anyway to be \u201cinvolved in the birth of three surviving [panda] cubs\u201d? Or to be \u201cfamiliar with the zoo\u2019s array of animals\u201d? Inquiring minds want to know!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s like writing about teachers being familiar with different kinds of children but not pointing out their commitment to education and fostering learning. I understand the press of deadlines but appreciate a more respectful, comprehensive story. For the record, I have never met Smith, although I\u2019d like to.Joan R. Goldberg, WashingtonBurying the lede hits a new lowWhatever happened to the \u201cwho, what, when, where\u201d rule of journalism that required the main points of an article to be summarized in the opening paragraph? The headline of the top left-hand article on the Nov. 14 front page was \u201cBiden\u2019s approval hits a new low.\u201d Nowhere, however, in the three paragraphs on that page was the reader informed what President Biden\u2019s approval rating now is. One had to go all the way to the middle of the second column of the article\u2019s continuation \u2014 some seven paragraphs later! \u2014 to learn that the president\u2019s approval rating is 41 percent. In between, the article provided a lot of interesting analysis and subsidiary conclusions, but it was hard to absorb them while searching for the basic information promised by the headline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven if the article itself was left unchanged, this glaring omission could have been rectified by simply changing the headline to read \u201cBiden\u2019s 41% approval rating hits a new low.\u201dDavid M. Cohen, Chevy ChaseCrushing our SpiritThe Post has done it again \u2014 in spades. The Nov. 15 Sports section devotes 786 square inches (114 on the front page of the section) to a very mediocre men\u2019s football team\u2019s middle-of-the-season game, including a large color photograph above the fold, and five more photos inside. Our local women\u2019s soccer team, now headed for its league championship game, got 17 square inches on the front page (no photo), and 72 square inches with one gray photo on Page D10, for a total of 89\u2009square inches, or 11 percent of the men\u2019s space. (This does not count the extra article on Page D6 about the injured football player.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven granted that men\u2019s football likely has more fans than women\u2019s soccer, this huge disparity in team coverage is a disgrace.Richard Larkin, ViennaGetting beta all the timeI take issue with the Nov. 12 Economy & Business article \u201cTesla\u2019s bumpy road with regulators,\u201d which reported on an issue with an update to the Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.I have a 2018 Tesla Model 3 AWD Dual Motor. The article should have mentioned that there about 2 million Teslas out there, and only about 11 percent of owners, or about 200,000, have paid for FSD. Also, for the FSD beta reported in the article, one needs to actively enroll and qualify, and about 6 percent of owners did that \u2014 the 12,000 cars noted in the article.Story continues below advertisementI am one of those 12,000 beta drivers, and I knew there were going to be issues when I qualified. I also knew that I could turn off all of the FSD stuff and drive normally.AdvertisementThis month, I drove from D.C. to Bethany Beach, Del., and back with the latest Tesla FSD beta software, and it was a magical trip. Yes, there were issues with some left and right turns and lane changes, but that is the definition of beta software: There are going to be some bugs that need to be fixed. Is the beta safe? Absolutely, and better than most drivers out there. Is it ready for prime time in the streets of D.C.? No, but it is only Level II of autonomous technology. Drivers are still in control and responsible.Pat Benic, WashingtonChilling prescience, Civil War editionEveryone has their perspective when traveling. And I enjoyed the Nov. 12 Weekend article about Richmond, \u201cFun found right down the tracks.\u201d There really is a great deal to see, taste and learn in and around Richmond.Richmond was a central player in the United States\u2019 most fragile period as a democracy. And it stands today as a reminder of what is good and bad in our nation. The \u201cgood\u201d is reflected in the diversity of its citizens, their accomplishments and neighborly approach to strangers. The reminder of the \u201cbad\u201d part can most notably and clearly be found in the Tredegar Iron Works, home to the American Civil War Museum, which I was very surprised to discover was ignored during the blithe tour of Richmond reported in this article.AdvertisementMore enlightening than a great find in a secondhand clothing store, more engaging than a visit to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and experiencing Kehinde Wiley\u2019s \u201cRumors of War\u201d (which I\u2019ve done) and certainly more fulfilling than a country waffle breakfast would have been a visit to the American Civil War Museum and a careful inspection of its displays and a close read of its presentations full of firsthand narrative from that period. One such display contained a quotation from Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman with chilling prescience that described his intent to \u201cmake them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.\u201d A fair reading of today\u2019s political and social climate in the United States appears to support the notion that there is a large segment of our population for whom that \u201cappeal\u201d has returned and in fact is growing.I suggest a return to Richmond and the American Civil War Museum to study and absorb the information it presents about our Civil War and use it to fashion a piece reminding Americans that conflict always results in catastrophe for all involved, and is especially devastating physically, economically and most corrosively to the spirit of the misguided. A lesson taught from time immemorial, and seemingly \u201clearned\u201d over and over again.Mark Koenig, BethesdaEven more light on Lee houseRegarding the Nov. 8 Metro article \u201cNo longer in dark on Lee marker\u2019s removal\u201d:There\u2019s another Robert E. Lee connection to the historic house now for sale on Oronoco Street in Alexandria: his in-laws. Mary Fitzhugh, who spent part of her girlhood in that home, married George Washington Parke Custis there in 1804, as Custis was building Arlington House (using enslaved and free labor) just up the Potomac. The couple in 1807 became parents to Mary Custis, who would marry Lee in 1831 at Arlington House.Charles S. Clark, ArlingtonChilling prescience, World War I editionI was taken with two prophetic observations in Michael E. Ruane\u2019s Nov. 11 Retropolis column concerning the centennial of the Tomb of the Unknowns, \u201cA century ago, borne to his tomb.\u201dThe comments by French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who led the allied armies in Europe in World War I, about the controversial Treaty of Versailles, which severely punished Germany: \u201cThis is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.\u201d How prophetic he was. As was British officer and later Field Marshal Archibald Wavell: \u201cAfter the \u2018war to end war,\u2019 they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making the \u2018Peace to end Peace.\u2019\u2009\u201dGermany was ground into the mud, and one of the most powerful results was the rise of the Nazis and the more horrific World War II. If there had been a Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Germany instead of the Versailles Treaty after World War I, history might very well have turned out much better, as was the case with the Marshall Plan following World War II. We have been strong allies with Germany for nearly 80 years. And Germany has been the economic and political anchor of a stable Europe.It had to be \u201cthe last war,\u201d H.G. Wells wrote in a 1914 collection of essays, \u201cThe War That Will End War.\u201d In the same year, Wells published \u201cThe World Set Free,\u201d which accurately described nuclear war, radioactive fallout, etc. Wells thought that nuclear weapons would help bring peace because of their terribleness. They certainly ended World War II, but not in the way Wells imagined with a world government and universal peace.Peter I. Hartsock, LaytonsvilleCasualties of climate changeThe photograph by Brian Inganga of Yusuf Abdullahi walking past the carcasses of his 40\u2002goats, a stark and haunting image that accompanied the Nov. 14 news article \u201c\u2009\u2018If they die, we all die\u2019: Drought fells Kenyan herds,\u201d provided on-the-ground context for the COP26 climate change meetings in Glasgow, Scotland: Poor nations are suffering the consequences of the consumer demands and commercialism of rich nations.The 21st century will continue to be marked by increasing numbers of climate-driven refugees. Where are the millions of displaced people to go? Rich nations need look no farther than their own borders to glimpse our inability to establish long-term, or even short-term, people-centered immigration policy. Climate change, environmental degradation and loss of life are in the here and now.COP26 says we are simply not ready to preserve our planet and the life it supports.Michael Katz, WashingtonThe taradiddle paradiddle: Playing \u2018both sides\u2019Catherine Rampell\u2019s Nov. 16 op-ed, \u201cDelusions on both sides of the aisle,\u201d provided a cogent explanation of the current inflation taradiddle. Rampell\u2019s analyses challenge and inform my thinking on important issues, so I was frustrated by the both-siderism of the accompanying headline. It is the same misinformation that Rampell tried to dispel.Both-siderism is often dismissed as sloppy journalism, but actually it is the seductive false-equivalence fallacy. As such, it leads to the false conclusion that both parties suffer from equally destructive delusions about inflation. In fact, Rampell identified asymmetrical misinformation by the two parties. She quoted Sen. John Barrasso\u2019s (Wyo.) declaration \u201cI would have never believed that Joe Biden in just 10 months in the presidency could bring us to a 30-year high of inflation\u201d as representing Republican rhetoric. Despite Barrasso\u2019s equivocal formulation, his statement is disinformation, intentional and not based on delusion. When Rampell turned to the Democrats\u2019 handling of rising inflation, she first identified the \u201cplaying down the phenomenon\u201d response based on economists\u2019 pre-delta optimism, followed by a rhetorical pivot to reasonable optimism that proposed legislation will address real inflation. This is an open response that can be engaged and challenged in a reasonable debate. It\u2019s hardly delusion or deception.Of course, perhaps there really are \u201cboth sides\u201d to this question: truth and taradiddle.William Darian Boggs, GreenbeltRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: For peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonReaders critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsReaders critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditReaders critique The Post: Please have more respect for child-care professionalsMore letters to the editor  Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Listen up, hearing aid doubters",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Listen up, hearing aid doubters (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2048",
        "date": "2021-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/26/free-for-all-letters-hearing-aid-doubters-listen-up/",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe Nov. 9 Health & Science article \u201cWill I look old if I start wearing hearing aids?\u201d was just one more in a long line of misguided and misinforming articles on hearing aids. While appearing to be supportive of people who need hearing aids, it perpetuated the idea that they are not covered by insurance and are not fun. My state-of-the-art hearing aids are fully covered by my standard Blue Cross and have Bluetooth connectivity to my phone, iPad, car sound system and computer. They are fun!Story continues below advertisementI suspect that ageism and historical hearing aid corporate interests account for fundamentally negative bias in these articles on hearing aids. I think the subject deserves a fresh, open-minded, updated examination.AdvertisementCasey Wichlacz, ViennaThe Ravens\u2019 far-flung flockThe heavy traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway heading south after Baltimore Ravens games is evidence that a lot of folks in the D.C. area are interested in the Ravens and attending games. Yet my newspaper, The Post, barely covers the team.We are a two-football-team region. The Post should reflect this.Abby Crowley, GreenbeltThe GOAT sports columnI have read many articles in The Post, but I have never read one as good as Sally Jenkins\u2019s Nov. 12 Sports column article about the discipline of Tom Brady, \u201cBrady\u2019s secret isn\u2019t much of a mystery: Self-discipline.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI am 71. I never have been disciplined. It is never too late to try. I will try.Steven Ross, Kew Gardens, N.Y.ThoughtlessRegarding the Nov. 14 Sports article \u201cHoyas flop out of the gate with a stunning loss to an Ivy League afterthought\u201d:AdvertisementMy late husband, whose obituary was in the Nov. 7 Post, was a graduate of Dartmouth College, an avid sports fan and reader of The Post for many years. I feel, and I know he would feel the same, that to use the term \u201cIvy League afterthought\u201d to describe the winning team seems unnecessarily snarky.Susan Gillespie, WashingtonThe definition of griefI grieved when I lost my wife, my brother and my sister over the past few months. I always had a hard time defining grief until I read the Nov. 14 obituary for Rabbi Earl Grollman, \u201cRabbi wrote books on grief and spent decades ministering to mourners,\u201d which quoted Grollman defining grief as \u201clove not wanting to let go because something has been lost from our life.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI will keep his obituary on hand to remind my children.James Wolan, BurkeSmall town, big problemsMy husband and I moved to Takoma Park in 1977, because it was affordable and we wanted to raise our kids in integrated schools. We have written the mayor and city council in support of the city employees\u2019 demand for higher wages.AdvertisementBut the Nov. 16 Metro article \u201cWorkers seek better benefits in Md. haven\u201d implied that if only city employees were paid more, they\u2019d be able to buy a home here. There is no wage increase possible that would allow employees to purchase a home in Takoma Park. Forget Victorian homes; modest bungalows sell for $600,000 or more. This is happening across the nation. Gentrification and skyrocketing home prices cannot be solved by our small-town government.Story continues below advertisementOur local government did, though, enact rent control, making us one of the more affordable places inside the Beltway. Roughly half of our households are rentals, and we\u2019re glad that after living here 45 years, our schools are still integrated.Also, I\u2019ll buy a beer at one of our local bars for any reporter who can manage to write about Takoma Park without using the words \u201cnuclear-free\u201d or \u201cgranola.\u201dBeth Baker, Takoma ParkHuman interest at the zooI enjoy human interest stories as much as the next person, but when someone is named National Zoo director, as Brandie Smith was, I\u2019m curious about her professional background. The Nov. 10 Metro article \u201cVeteran National Zoo curator Smith lands top job\u201d mentioned only Smith\u2019s undergraduate degree. One needs to consult her Smithsonian bio online to learn of her University of Maryland PhD and the focus of \u2014 indeed the existence of \u2014 her published research. Moreover, the article failed to note Smith\u2019s many years in conservation (an important part of the zoo\u2019s mission). And why report what her father did but not her mother? What does it mean anyway to be \u201cinvolved in the birth of three surviving [panda] cubs\u201d? Or to be \u201cfamiliar with the zoo\u2019s array of animals\u201d? Inquiring minds want to know!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s like writing about teachers being familiar with different kinds of children but not pointing out their commitment to education and fostering learning. I understand the press of deadlines but appreciate a more respectful, comprehensive story. For the record, I have never met Smith, although I\u2019d like to.Joan R. Goldberg, WashingtonBurying the lede hits a new lowWhatever happened to the \u201cwho, what, when, where\u201d rule of journalism that required the main points of an article to be summarized in the opening paragraph? The headline of the top left-hand article on the Nov. 14 front page was \u201cBiden\u2019s approval hits a new low.\u201d Nowhere, however, in the three paragraphs on that page was the reader informed what President Biden\u2019s approval rating now is. One had to go all the way to the middle of the second column of the article\u2019s continuation \u2014 some seven paragraphs later! \u2014 to learn that the president\u2019s approval rating is 41 percent. In between, the article provided a lot of interesting analysis and subsidiary conclusions, but it was hard to absorb them while searching for the basic information promised by the headline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven if the article itself was left unchanged, this glaring omission could have been rectified by simply changing the headline to read \u201cBiden\u2019s 41% approval rating hits a new low.\u201dDavid M. Cohen, Chevy ChaseCrushing our SpiritThe Post has done it again \u2014 in spades. The Nov. 15 Sports section devotes 786 square inches (114 on the front page of the section) to a very mediocre men\u2019s football team\u2019s middle-of-the-season game, including a large color photograph above the fold, and five more photos inside. Our local women\u2019s soccer team, now headed for its league championship game, got 17 square inches on the front page (no photo), and 72 square inches with one gray photo on Page D10, for a total of 89\u2009square inches, or 11 percent of the men\u2019s space. (This does not count the extra article on Page D6 about the injured football player.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven granted that men\u2019s football likely has more fans than women\u2019s soccer, this huge disparity in team coverage is a disgrace.Richard Larkin, ViennaGetting beta all the timeI take issue with the Nov. 12 Economy & Business article \u201cTesla\u2019s bumpy road with regulators,\u201d which reported on an issue with an update to the Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology.I have a 2018 Tesla Model 3 AWD Dual Motor. The article should have mentioned that there about 2 million Teslas out there, and only about 11 percent of owners, or about 200,000, have paid for FSD. Also, for the FSD beta reported in the article, one needs to actively enroll and qualify, and about 6 percent of owners did that \u2014 the 12,000 cars noted in the article.Story continues below advertisementI am one of those 12,000 beta drivers, and I knew there were going to be issues when I qualified. I also knew that I could turn off all of the FSD stuff and drive normally.AdvertisementThis month, I drove from D.C. to Bethany Beach, Del., and back with the latest Tesla FSD beta software, and it was a magical trip. Yes, there were issues with some left and right turns and lane changes, but that is the definition of beta software: There are going to be some bugs that need to be fixed. Is the beta safe? Absolutely, and better than most drivers out there. Is it ready for prime time in the streets of D.C.? No, but it is only Level II of autonomous technology. Drivers are still in control and responsible.Pat Benic, WashingtonChilling prescience, Civil War editionEveryone has their perspective when traveling. And I enjoyed the Nov. 12 Weekend article about Richmond, \u201cFun found right down the tracks.\u201d There really is a great deal to see, taste and learn in and around Richmond.Richmond was a central player in the United States\u2019 most fragile period as a democracy. And it stands today as a reminder of what is good and bad in our nation. The \u201cgood\u201d is reflected in the diversity of its citizens, their accomplishments and neighborly approach to strangers. The reminder of the \u201cbad\u201d part can most notably and clearly be found in the Tredegar Iron Works, home to the American Civil War Museum, which I was very surprised to discover was ignored during the blithe tour of Richmond reported in this article.AdvertisementMore enlightening than a great find in a secondhand clothing store, more engaging than a visit to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and experiencing Kehinde Wiley\u2019s \u201cRumors of War\u201d (which I\u2019ve done) and certainly more fulfilling than a country waffle breakfast would have been a visit to the American Civil War Museum and a careful inspection of its displays and a close read of its presentations full of firsthand narrative from that period. One such display contained a quotation from Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman with chilling prescience that described his intent to \u201cmake them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.\u201d A fair reading of today\u2019s political and social climate in the United States appears to support the notion that there is a large segment of our population for whom that \u201cappeal\u201d has returned and in fact is growing.I suggest a return to Richmond and the American Civil War Museum to study and absorb the information it presents about our Civil War and use it to fashion a piece reminding Americans that conflict always results in catastrophe for all involved, and is especially devastating physically, economically and most corrosively to the spirit of the misguided. A lesson taught from time immemorial, and seemingly \u201clearned\u201d over and over again.Mark Koenig, BethesdaEven more light on Lee houseRegarding the Nov. 8 Metro article \u201cNo longer in dark on Lee marker\u2019s removal\u201d:There\u2019s another Robert E. Lee connection to the historic house now for sale on Oronoco Street in Alexandria: his in-laws. Mary Fitzhugh, who spent part of her girlhood in that home, married George Washington Parke Custis there in 1804, as Custis was building Arlington House (using enslaved and free labor) just up the Potomac. The couple in 1807 became parents to Mary Custis, who would marry Lee in 1831 at Arlington House.Charles S. Clark, ArlingtonChilling prescience, World War I editionI was taken with two prophetic observations in Michael E. Ruane\u2019s Nov. 11 Retropolis column concerning the centennial of the Tomb of the Unknowns, \u201cA century ago, borne to his tomb.\u201dThe comments by French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who led the allied armies in Europe in World War I, about the controversial Treaty of Versailles, which severely punished Germany: \u201cThis is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.\u201d How prophetic he was. As was British officer and later Field Marshal Archibald Wavell: \u201cAfter the \u2018war to end war,\u2019 they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making the \u2018Peace to end Peace.\u2019\u2009\u201dGermany was ground into the mud, and one of the most powerful results was the rise of the Nazis and the more horrific World War II. If there had been a Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Germany instead of the Versailles Treaty after World War I, history might very well have turned out much better, as was the case with the Marshall Plan following World War II. We have been strong allies with Germany for nearly 80 years. And Germany has been the economic and political anchor of a stable Europe.It had to be \u201cthe last war,\u201d H.G. Wells wrote in a 1914 collection of essays, \u201cThe War That Will End War.\u201d In the same year, Wells published \u201cThe World Set Free,\u201d which accurately described nuclear war, radioactive fallout, etc. Wells thought that nuclear weapons would help bring peace because of their terribleness. They certainly ended World War II, but not in the way Wells imagined with a world government and universal peace.Peter I. Hartsock, LaytonsvilleCasualties of climate changeThe photograph by Brian Inganga of Yusuf Abdullahi walking past the carcasses of his 40\u2002goats, a stark and haunting image that accompanied the Nov. 14 news article \u201c\u2009\u2018If they die, we all die\u2019: Drought fells Kenyan herds,\u201d provided on-the-ground context for the COP26 climate change meetings in Glasgow, Scotland: Poor nations are suffering the consequences of the consumer demands and commercialism of rich nations.The 21st century will continue to be marked by increasing numbers of climate-driven refugees. Where are the millions of displaced people to go? Rich nations need look no farther than their own borders to glimpse our inability to establish long-term, or even short-term, people-centered immigration policy. Climate change, environmental degradation and loss of life are in the here and now.COP26 says we are simply not ready to preserve our planet and the life it supports.Michael Katz, WashingtonThe taradiddle paradiddle: Playing \u2018both sides\u2019Catherine Rampell\u2019s Nov. 16 op-ed, \u201cDelusions on both sides of the aisle,\u201d provided a cogent explanation of the current inflation taradiddle. Rampell\u2019s analyses challenge and inform my thinking on important issues, so I was frustrated by the both-siderism of the accompanying headline. It is the same misinformation that Rampell tried to dispel.Both-siderism is often dismissed as sloppy journalism, but actually it is the seductive false-equivalence fallacy. As such, it leads to the false conclusion that both parties suffer from equally destructive delusions about inflation. In fact, Rampell identified asymmetrical misinformation by the two parties. She quoted Sen. John Barrasso\u2019s (Wyo.) declaration \u201cI would have never believed that Joe Biden in just 10 months in the presidency could bring us to a 30-year high of inflation\u201d as representing Republican rhetoric. Despite Barrasso\u2019s equivocal formulation, his statement is disinformation, intentional and not based on delusion. When Rampell turned to the Democrats\u2019 handling of rising inflation, she first identified the \u201cplaying down the phenomenon\u201d response based on economists\u2019 pre-delta optimism, followed by a rhetorical pivot to reasonable optimism that proposed legislation will address real inflation. This is an open response that can be engaged and challenged in a reasonable debate. It\u2019s hardly delusion or deception.Of course, perhaps there really are \u201cboth sides\u201d to this question: truth and taradiddle.William Darian Boggs, GreenbeltRead more Free for All letters:Readers critique The Post: For peat\u2019s sake, it\u2019s time for a geography lessonReaders critique The Post: These are space tourists \u2014 not astronautsReaders critique The Post: Missing an important point on pregnancy and the coronavirusReaders critique The Post: What were we smoking?Readers critique The Post: Carve out space for this artist\u2019s creditReaders critique The Post: Please have more respect for child-care professionalsMore letters to the editor  Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Listen up, hearing aid doubters",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Respect science, sure, but don\u2019t genuflect to it (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2049",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/respect-science-sure-but-dont-genuflect-to-it/2021/06/17/eb842c50-cd30-11eb-a224-bd59bd22197c_story.html",
        "text": "Whether the backlash against infectious-disease specialist Anthony S. Fauci is fair, Margaret Sullivan\u2019s account in her June 11 Style column, \u201cThe right needed a villain. They picked Fauci.,\u201d\u00a0cited a statement that should draw genuine concern. It appeared in one of the thousands of recently released emails in which Dr. Fauci asserts in part: \u201cI genuflect to no one but science.\u201d \u00a0 Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThis is a misguided attitude that politicians and much of the public have adopted as well. For all its benefits and insights, science is not a god; it is not some kind of divine oracle offering holy guidance and metaphysical truth. It is a tool created by humans to help them understand themselves and their world on a rational, impartial basis. In this, science has been highly successful. Nevertheless, it cannot make judgments; it cannot provide moral evaluations or define any \u201cproper\u201d set of actions.As President John F. Kennedy said regarding the United States\u2019 pursuit of the moon: \u201cSpace science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.\u201d Humans should not \u201cgenuflect\u201d to science; they should use it to inform their decisions and then accept responsibility themselves for choices they make.To put it simply, science warrants respect, not worship. Patrick Louis Knudsen, Fredericksburg, Va.\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: Respect science, sure, but don\u2019t genuflect to it",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Don\u2019t fan Fauci fever (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2050",
        "date": "2020-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/readers-critique-the-post-dont-fan-fauci-fever/2020/06/04/cd54741a-a4e1-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightDon't fan Fauci feverArticles in The Post, including the May 14 front-page article \u201cWith in-person college in limbo, gap-year option is complicated, too,\u201d have referred to Anthony S. Fauci, chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,\u00a0as \u201cthe nation\u2019s top-infectious disease expert.\u201d Fauci has been in government for more than three decades. There are others who are \u201ctop infectious-disease experts,\u201d just not in federal jobs. The media is creating a cultlike following for this one \u201cexpert.\u201dStory continues below advertisementJanie Wagstaff, Roxboro, N.C.Advertisement\u25cfThe Eddie Haskell in chiefPaul Farhi\u2019s robust appreciation in his May 20 Style article, \u201cBeaver was all \u201950s virtue. For subversiveness, leave it to Eddie.,\u201d of Ken Osmond\u2019s portrayal of Eddie Haskell highlighted \u201cthe wonder of it \u2014 the alluring thing to wannabe mischief-makers everywhere \u2014 was that Eddie usually got away with it. No one ever really called out his nonsense.\u201d In other words, he suffered no consequences, experienced no ill effects of his arch and errant behavior. Farhi wrote: \u201cWhat kind of kid says things like this: \u2018If you can make the other guy feel like a goon first, then you don\u2019t feel so much like a goon.\u2019 And what kind of adult does he become?\u201dStory continues below advertisementOne suggestion: a deluxe real estate mogul such as the 45th president of the United States.\u00a0Stanleigh Cohen, Baltimore\u25cfThis lede was a lieI was intrigued by the May 22 Friday Opinion column headline \u201cWe have to reopen \u2014 for health reasons.\u201d To be candid, I was skeptical, but because the column was written by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar II, I decided to see what he had to say.\u00a0AdvertisementHis first sentence: \u201cPresident Trump\u2019s top priority throughout the covid-19 crisis and his presidency has been protecting the health and well-being of Americans.\u201d Because the president has amply demonstrated that this was a complete fabrication on Azar\u2019s part, I read no further.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementJohn J. Landers, Bethesda\u25cfLithuania and the HolocaustVictor Nakas made a good point in his May 23 Free for All letter, \u201cDon\u2019t forget Lithuania\u2019s long struggle to be free.\u201d After the Red Army \u201cliberated\u201d Lithuania and the rest of Eastern Europe from the Nazis, Joseph Stalin installed a brutal dictatorship\u00a0that lasted 45\u2009years. Finally, in 1990, the communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe collapsed and democratic governments were installed.\u00a0One thing that Nakas failed to mention was that 120,000 Jewish Lithuanians were not able to celebrate either liberation. In the summer of 1941, after the German invasion, an estimated 13,000 Lithuanian fascists actively assisted the Germans in killing approximately 95 percent of the prewar Jewish population.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLithuanian complicity in the Holocaust is a sensitive subject in modern-day democratic Lithuania. The Lithuanian government has shown little interest in publicizing the book \u201cOur Own,\u201d about the killing of Lithuanian Jews, or making it required reading for high school students. Since 1990, Lithuania has been a thriving democracy, but it cannot overlook the tragic history of Lithuanian Jews.\u00a0 \u00a0Lee Hurwitz, Rockville\u25cfStereotypes are no jokeRather ironic that the May 16 Drawing Board sketch \u201cHunting Season in Georgia,\u201d by Horsey for the Seattle Times, depicted a stereotype of a certain segment of our society engaging in stereotyping another segment of our society.Story continues below advertisementThe joke is on all of us.\u00a0Let\u2019s all quit judging and start loving. Who is with me?Kevin Sweeney,\u00a0Manassas\u25cfD.C. fans hurt, tooAs a die-hard Washington Nationals and Capitals fan, I was excited to see the May 22 front-page article \u201cSports fans feel a loss. Experts say that\u2019s normal.,\u201d about the real pain of sports withdrawal. Trust me, I feel it on a daily basis. But couldn\u2019t The\u2009Post find any D.C. sports fans to interview? In the\u00a0 expansive article, I read about the New York Mets, Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox. I kept reading, expecting to see references to our home teams.AdvertisementFinally, Washington is hitting its stride with champion sports teams. The Nats just won the World Series. The Caps won the 2018 Stanley Cup and were primed to go all the way again. The Mystics won the 2019 WNBA championship. Any of this ring a bell?Story continues below advertisementMissing Opening Day after the Nats won a historic World Series was a huge disappointment for D.C. sports fans. Not being able to watch the Caps finish a league-leading season and see Alex Ovechkin make 50 goals again was also painful. Reading an article without reference to D.C. sports left me feeling empty.Joyce Figel, Washington\u25cfFinding sanctuaryThe caption for the photograph that accompanied the May 25 news article \u201cSome churches open as crowds flock to tourist hot spots\u201d had two errors. The procession in the photo wasn\u2019t \u201ccalled the Blessed Sacrament.\u201d\u00a0It was a procession of the Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated host displayed in a monstrance held by the priest. The caption also said the sanctuary of Our Lady of Hope Catholic Church in Queens was closed. One often sees the misuse of \u201csanctuary\u201d in The Post when it refers to a Catholic church. In Catholicism, the sanctuary is the area encompassing the altar where the priest celebrates (not holds, not delivers, not gives) Mass. The congregation sits in the nave of the church. Contrary to the use of the word in some Protestant churches, the \u201csanctuary\u201d is not the entire worship space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdward Jones, Springfield\u25cfIn poor taste I was shocked by the inclusion of a photograph of the space shuttle Challenger explosion with the May\u200927 news article \u201cAs countdown nears, risks to astronauts are not hidden.\u201d The article itself was appropriate, and one could choose to read it or not. But including that photo, basically of seven crew members being blown to bits, was unnecessary and in remarkably bad taste on the day we\u00a0were supposed to be sending two men back into space. It\u2019s a great historic photo, yes, but not for that day.Robert E. Smith, Rehoboth Beach, Del.\u25cfI thank Mark Tatulli for being one of the few cartoonists to honor Memorial Day, a sacred day of remembrance. I was deeply touched by the tribute in the May 25 \u201cLio.\u201d Lio\u2019s salute and the military cemetery brought tears to my eyes. For sadly, throughout history and now in the present, no matter what the cause, it is always the few who fight for the many.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd how thoughtful to have Lio wearing a mask. Lio\u2019s mask was such a profound tribute to the medical community and all the essential workers who place themselves and their loved ones at risk to keep us comfortable and safe at home.Every year on Memorial Day, we are given the opportunity to grieve and thank those who understand that freedom always comes with a price and a responsibility to protect freedom from harm. The opportunity to have a day of remembrance should not be taken lightly.\u00a0Some days, it seems there is more evil in life than good. Memorial Day reminds me that there were and are astonishing people in the United States who were and are willing do what needs to be done to vanquish evil and embrace with all their heart the good. Let us be like Lio. Let us stop and create a ritual to honor such a profound concept as Memorial Day.Alesia Willow Montana, ArlingtonI\u2019m a \u201cDoonesbury\u201d fan, but the strips during the week are archaic and unfunny. The \u201clatest\u201d ones deal with revisiting Woodstock, which even the strip plays as a flashback to an alternative universe.AdvertisementCertainly, there are other comic strips that address our current political and cultural situation. I\u2009believe there\u2019s more than enough material for several such comic strips.Wendy Leibowitz, Bethesda\u25cfNobody's prefectIt dismays me to see that The Post has a way to go before it achieves complete grammatical accuracy. A May 20 news headline read: \u201cFirst steps toward something normal, with a ways to go.\u201d I thought a singular noun should always follow the singular indefinite article \u201ca.\u201d Even though \u201cways\u201d is idiomatic in this context, it was jarring in a headline.Alice Markham, Reston\u25cfIn good tasteKudos for great recipes! In the novel coronavirus sequestration, I am cooking more. I have tried almost everything Joe Yonan or Ellie Krieger publishes. Fantastic practical recipes, with easy-to-follow directions. Yonan\u2019s bean broth \u201cliquid gold\u201d and soups were the best ever, and Ann Maloney\u2019s \u201cweird\u201d chocolate milk/mole chicken thighs were absolutely delicious! Thank you. Is it The Post\u2019s fault that I have gained [and lost the same] two pounds over and over?AdvertisementShelagh Smith, Rockville\u25cfPragmatism and idealsIn his review of Thomas Piketty\u2019s\u00a0\u201cCapital and Ideology,\u201d\u00a0James Kwak stated that, by selecting as its presumptive presidential nominee former vice president Joe Biden, \u201cthe Democratic Party electorate rejected its progressive wing\u201d [\u201cThe American ideology that props up inequality,\u201d Book World, May 24].No, Democratic primary voters and would-be voters \u2014 not all primaries have occurred \u2014 have fused progressivism and pragmatism. Whoever is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021, will be challenged to lead the United States\u2019 complicated modern society, especially after the past almost-four years of government by vanity, whim and spite. It\u2019s only reasonable to choose the remaining candidate with the most abundant and pertinent experience. Both Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spent years in the Senate, but Biden also spent eight years in the high-level, high-nuance communication that should surround the president.\u00a0Though I agree with Sanders\u2019s devout concern for ordinary workers, I also see how his fervent rhetoric \u2014 indeed, anybody\u2019s fervent rhetoric \u2014 can overwhelm people. I write as a lifelong \u201cbleeding-heart liberal\u201d who now struggles not to rant about her every last \u201ctypical liberal\u201d concern. Regular folks want to do right by their neighbors. They \u2014 we \u2014 also want to be pulled along, invited to the journey, not preached into submission. \u00a0Rachel Friedlander Tickner, Silver SpringAfter reading James Kwak\u2019s Book World review\u00a0of Thomas Piketty\u2019s book \u201cCapital and Ideology\u201d and Carlos Lozada\u2019s\u00a0May 24 review of \u201cTrumpocalypse\u201d by David Frum [\u201cWhat one term of \u2018Trumpocracy\u2019 has wrought\u201d], I decided I\u2019d had it with people blaming us, the American populace, for being part of the world\u2019s turn to, as Piketty writes, \u201canti-immigrant .\u2009.\u2009. and nativist ideologies\u201d and \u201cvirulent nationalism,\u201d and the \u201cwhite ethnic chauvinism\u201d cited by Frum.\u00a0I don\u2019t know what happened with voters in Brazil or the Philippines, two examples that lend global credence to this fascist-wave theory, but we didn\u2019t elect the man who stands for that here in the United States. We elected 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes. Enough people to populate a viable country rejected the snarling, shortsighted chauvinism of Donald Trump. The political expedient that brought in the electoral college so long ago no longer applies, as states are more homogenized by transportation\u00a0and communication advances, along with the United States\u2019 overwhelming urbanization.Yes, Lozada did allude to the electoral collegiate\u00a0nature of Trump\u2019s ascendancy, and Kwak, for his part, elucidated through Piketty the failings of the Democrats in trying to stop the populism of Trump (when we know it was the mythology against\u00a0Clinton, along with her lack of political skills, that meant a narrow Republican win). But we can still say, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t us!\u201dDaniel Evans, Reston\u25cfA masked criticismI am writing not to criticize the editor who chose the ridiculous photograph associated with the May 24 Metro article \u201cRespect, not rule, spurs Metro riders to wear masks.\u201dI am writing not to mock the inclusion of a photograph showing a female rider not wearing the very mask riders are showing \u201crespect\u201d in wearing (although it was protecting her neck from the novel coronavirus). I am not even ridiculing her or the editor who selected that photograph, ridiculous as it was. I am simply wondering how The Post chooses one or two of what must be hundreds of letters addressing this glaring blunder.\u00a0The article described those in dire need because of the spread of this disease, those \u201con razor-thin margins\u201d relying on staying healthy, as the article accurately noted. And those who \u201chave to take this seriously. If they say wear a mask, then wear a mask,\u201d as intelligently and cogently stated by Metro passenger Dominic Davis.I apologize for getting too far into the absurdity of the positioning of this picture and article, together. It spoke for itself.Martin Protas, Rockville\u25cfHead-spinning captionsPlease, please stop giving captions on groups of photographs as \u201cclockwise from top.\u201d Is it so hard to put a caption under each photo? The photos that ran on the jump of the May 20 front-page article \u201cA \u2018medical dictator\u2019 to some, a hero to others\u201d included four pictures with a caption that was difficult to parse. I was interested in knowing more about photographer Barbara J. Perenic\u2019s picture in particular: Who is on the left? On the right? Supporters? Opponents?Bob Bailey, Silver SpringThe May 16 Style article \u201cTake Pity on U.S.\u201d included a photograph caption that read: \u201cThe National Nurses United set out 88 empty pairs of shoes representing nurses who they say have died from covid-19 while demonstrating in Lafayette Square across from the White House on May 7.\u201d Really? Eighty-eight nurses died all at once in a demonstration?Nancy Modrak, Gainesville\u25cfLost with the TitanicThe May 20 Metro article \u201cExplorers may remove telegraph from Titanic\u201d was an interesting read and painted a detailed picture of the ethical complexities that accompany interaction with the Titanic\u2019s gravesite, but the sentence \u201cOperator Jack Phillips died after refusing to leave his flooded post\u201d could have led to confusion. That statement, while sequentially true, could lead one to falsely assume that Phillips died at his post while refusing to leave.Though there is some uncertainty surrounding the exact circumstance of Phillips\u2019s death, it is commonly accepted that he evacuated the telegraph room with assistant Harold Bride before they split up. Devoted to his position, Phillips did continue working after Capt. Edward Smith freed him of his duties (an act that Bride, who survived, reported to be quite moved by), but he did not die at his post.Hannah Sangillo, BethesdaRead more:Readers critique The Post: Don\u2019t amplify conspiracy theoriesReaders critique The Post: A photograph of otherworldly beautyReaders critique The Post: What the flyover coverage overlookedReaders critique The Post: Instead of \u2018euthanizing\u2019 pigs, let\u2019s work to give them a better lifeReaders critique The Post: Lists of the best sports films and songs left off these classicsReaders critique The Post: A strange photo for a serious subjectReaders critique The Post: Please reconcile conflicting information about the coronavirus \u2014 or SARS-CoV-2Readers critique The Post: This statue did not desperately need a maskMore letters to the editor This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Don\u2019t fan Fauci fever",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Don\u2019t fan Fauci fever (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2051",
        "date": "2020-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/readers-critique-the-post-dont-fan-fauci-fever/2020/06/04/cd54741a-a4e1-11ea-b473-04905b1af82b_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightDon't fan Fauci feverArticles in The Post, including the May 14 front-page article \u201cWith in-person college in limbo, gap-year option is complicated, too,\u201d have referred to Anthony S. Fauci, chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,\u00a0as \u201cthe nation\u2019s top-infectious disease expert.\u201d Fauci has been in government for more than three decades. There are others who are \u201ctop infectious-disease experts,\u201d just not in federal jobs. The media is creating a cultlike following for this one \u201cexpert.\u201dStory continues below advertisementJanie Wagstaff, Roxboro, N.C.Advertisement\u25cfThe Eddie Haskell in chiefPaul Farhi\u2019s robust appreciation in his May 20 Style article, \u201cBeaver was all \u201950s virtue. For subversiveness, leave it to Eddie.,\u201d of Ken Osmond\u2019s portrayal of Eddie Haskell highlighted \u201cthe wonder of it \u2014 the alluring thing to wannabe mischief-makers everywhere \u2014 was that Eddie usually got away with it. No one ever really called out his nonsense.\u201d In other words, he suffered no consequences, experienced no ill effects of his arch and errant behavior. Farhi wrote: \u201cWhat kind of kid says things like this: \u2018If you can make the other guy feel like a goon first, then you don\u2019t feel so much like a goon.\u2019 And what kind of adult does he become?\u201dStory continues below advertisementOne suggestion: a deluxe real estate mogul such as the 45th president of the United States.\u00a0Stanleigh Cohen, Baltimore\u25cfThis lede was a lieI was intrigued by the May 22 Friday Opinion column headline \u201cWe have to reopen \u2014 for health reasons.\u201d To be candid, I was skeptical, but because the column was written by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar II, I decided to see what he had to say.\u00a0AdvertisementHis first sentence: \u201cPresident Trump\u2019s top priority throughout the covid-19 crisis and his presidency has been protecting the health and well-being of Americans.\u201d Because the president has amply demonstrated that this was a complete fabrication on Azar\u2019s part, I read no further.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementJohn J. Landers, Bethesda\u25cfLithuania and the HolocaustVictor Nakas made a good point in his May 23 Free for All letter, \u201cDon\u2019t forget Lithuania\u2019s long struggle to be free.\u201d After the Red Army \u201cliberated\u201d Lithuania and the rest of Eastern Europe from the Nazis, Joseph Stalin installed a brutal dictatorship\u00a0that lasted 45\u2009years. Finally, in 1990, the communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe collapsed and democratic governments were installed.\u00a0One thing that Nakas failed to mention was that 120,000 Jewish Lithuanians were not able to celebrate either liberation. In the summer of 1941, after the German invasion, an estimated 13,000 Lithuanian fascists actively assisted the Germans in killing approximately 95 percent of the prewar Jewish population.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLithuanian complicity in the Holocaust is a sensitive subject in modern-day democratic Lithuania. The Lithuanian government has shown little interest in publicizing the book \u201cOur Own,\u201d about the killing of Lithuanian Jews, or making it required reading for high school students. Since 1990, Lithuania has been a thriving democracy, but it cannot overlook the tragic history of Lithuanian Jews.\u00a0 \u00a0Lee Hurwitz, Rockville\u25cfStereotypes are no jokeRather ironic that the May 16 Drawing Board sketch \u201cHunting Season in Georgia,\u201d by Horsey for the Seattle Times, depicted a stereotype of a certain segment of our society engaging in stereotyping another segment of our society.Story continues below advertisementThe joke is on all of us.\u00a0Let\u2019s all quit judging and start loving. Who is with me?Kevin Sweeney,\u00a0Manassas\u25cfD.C. fans hurt, tooAs a die-hard Washington Nationals and Capitals fan, I was excited to see the May 22 front-page article \u201cSports fans feel a loss. Experts say that\u2019s normal.,\u201d about the real pain of sports withdrawal. Trust me, I feel it on a daily basis. But couldn\u2019t The\u2009Post find any D.C. sports fans to interview? In the\u00a0 expansive article, I read about the New York Mets, Baltimore Orioles and Chicago White Sox. I kept reading, expecting to see references to our home teams.AdvertisementFinally, Washington is hitting its stride with champion sports teams. The Nats just won the World Series. The Caps won the 2018 Stanley Cup and were primed to go all the way again. The Mystics won the 2019 WNBA championship. Any of this ring a bell?Story continues below advertisementMissing Opening Day after the Nats won a historic World Series was a huge disappointment for D.C. sports fans. Not being able to watch the Caps finish a league-leading season and see Alex Ovechkin make 50 goals again was also painful. Reading an article without reference to D.C. sports left me feeling empty.Joyce Figel, Washington\u25cfFinding sanctuaryThe caption for the photograph that accompanied the May 25 news article \u201cSome churches open as crowds flock to tourist hot spots\u201d had two errors. The procession in the photo wasn\u2019t \u201ccalled the Blessed Sacrament.\u201d\u00a0It was a procession of the Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated host displayed in a monstrance held by the priest. The caption also said the sanctuary of Our Lady of Hope Catholic Church in Queens was closed. One often sees the misuse of \u201csanctuary\u201d in The Post when it refers to a Catholic church. In Catholicism, the sanctuary is the area encompassing the altar where the priest celebrates (not holds, not delivers, not gives) Mass. The congregation sits in the nave of the church. Contrary to the use of the word in some Protestant churches, the \u201csanctuary\u201d is not the entire worship space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdward Jones, Springfield\u25cfIn poor taste I was shocked by the inclusion of a photograph of the space shuttle Challenger explosion with the May\u200927 news article \u201cAs countdown nears, risks to astronauts are not hidden.\u201d The article itself was appropriate, and one could choose to read it or not. But including that photo, basically of seven crew members being blown to bits, was unnecessary and in remarkably bad taste on the day we\u00a0were supposed to be sending two men back into space. It\u2019s a great historic photo, yes, but not for that day.Robert E. Smith, Rehoboth Beach, Del.\u25cfI thank Mark Tatulli for being one of the few cartoonists to honor Memorial Day, a sacred day of remembrance. I was deeply touched by the tribute in the May 25 \u201cLio.\u201d Lio\u2019s salute and the military cemetery brought tears to my eyes. For sadly, throughout history and now in the present, no matter what the cause, it is always the few who fight for the many.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd how thoughtful to have Lio wearing a mask. Lio\u2019s mask was such a profound tribute to the medical community and all the essential workers who place themselves and their loved ones at risk to keep us comfortable and safe at home.Every year on Memorial Day, we are given the opportunity to grieve and thank those who understand that freedom always comes with a price and a responsibility to protect freedom from harm. The opportunity to have a day of remembrance should not be taken lightly.\u00a0Some days, it seems there is more evil in life than good. Memorial Day reminds me that there were and are astonishing people in the United States who were and are willing do what needs to be done to vanquish evil and embrace with all their heart the good. Let us be like Lio. Let us stop and create a ritual to honor such a profound concept as Memorial Day.Alesia Willow Montana, ArlingtonI\u2019m a \u201cDoonesbury\u201d fan, but the strips during the week are archaic and unfunny. The \u201clatest\u201d ones deal with revisiting Woodstock, which even the strip plays as a flashback to an alternative universe.AdvertisementCertainly, there are other comic strips that address our current political and cultural situation. I\u2009believe there\u2019s more than enough material for several such comic strips.Wendy Leibowitz, Bethesda\u25cfNobody's prefectIt dismays me to see that The Post has a way to go before it achieves complete grammatical accuracy. A May 20 news headline read: \u201cFirst steps toward something normal, with a ways to go.\u201d I thought a singular noun should always follow the singular indefinite article \u201ca.\u201d Even though \u201cways\u201d is idiomatic in this context, it was jarring in a headline.Alice Markham, Reston\u25cfIn good tasteKudos for great recipes! In the novel coronavirus sequestration, I am cooking more. I have tried almost everything Joe Yonan or Ellie Krieger publishes. Fantastic practical recipes, with easy-to-follow directions. Yonan\u2019s bean broth \u201cliquid gold\u201d and soups were the best ever, and Ann Maloney\u2019s \u201cweird\u201d chocolate milk/mole chicken thighs were absolutely delicious! Thank you. Is it The Post\u2019s fault that I have gained [and lost the same] two pounds over and over?AdvertisementShelagh Smith, Rockville\u25cfPragmatism and idealsIn his review of Thomas Piketty\u2019s\u00a0\u201cCapital and Ideology,\u201d\u00a0James Kwak stated that, by selecting as its presumptive presidential nominee former vice president Joe Biden, \u201cthe Democratic Party electorate rejected its progressive wing\u201d [\u201cThe American ideology that props up inequality,\u201d Book World, May 24].No, Democratic primary voters and would-be voters \u2014 not all primaries have occurred \u2014 have fused progressivism and pragmatism. Whoever is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021, will be challenged to lead the United States\u2019 complicated modern society, especially after the past almost-four years of government by vanity, whim and spite. It\u2019s only reasonable to choose the remaining candidate with the most abundant and pertinent experience. Both Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spent years in the Senate, but Biden also spent eight years in the high-level, high-nuance communication that should surround the president.\u00a0Though I agree with Sanders\u2019s devout concern for ordinary workers, I also see how his fervent rhetoric \u2014 indeed, anybody\u2019s fervent rhetoric \u2014 can overwhelm people. I write as a lifelong \u201cbleeding-heart liberal\u201d who now struggles not to rant about her every last \u201ctypical liberal\u201d concern. Regular folks want to do right by their neighbors. They \u2014 we \u2014 also want to be pulled along, invited to the journey, not preached into submission. \u00a0Rachel Friedlander Tickner, Silver SpringAfter reading James Kwak\u2019s Book World review\u00a0of Thomas Piketty\u2019s book \u201cCapital and Ideology\u201d and Carlos Lozada\u2019s\u00a0May 24 review of \u201cTrumpocalypse\u201d by David Frum [\u201cWhat one term of \u2018Trumpocracy\u2019 has wrought\u201d], I decided I\u2019d had it with people blaming us, the American populace, for being part of the world\u2019s turn to, as Piketty writes, \u201canti-immigrant .\u2009.\u2009. and nativist ideologies\u201d and \u201cvirulent nationalism,\u201d and the \u201cwhite ethnic chauvinism\u201d cited by Frum.\u00a0I don\u2019t know what happened with voters in Brazil or the Philippines, two examples that lend global credence to this fascist-wave theory, but we didn\u2019t elect the man who stands for that here in the United States. We elected 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes. Enough people to populate a viable country rejected the snarling, shortsighted chauvinism of Donald Trump. The political expedient that brought in the electoral college so long ago no longer applies, as states are more homogenized by transportation\u00a0and communication advances, along with the United States\u2019 overwhelming urbanization.Yes, Lozada did allude to the electoral collegiate\u00a0nature of Trump\u2019s ascendancy, and Kwak, for his part, elucidated through Piketty the failings of the Democrats in trying to stop the populism of Trump (when we know it was the mythology against\u00a0Clinton, along with her lack of political skills, that meant a narrow Republican win). But we can still say, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t us!\u201dDaniel Evans, Reston\u25cfA masked criticismI am writing not to criticize the editor who chose the ridiculous photograph associated with the May 24 Metro article \u201cRespect, not rule, spurs Metro riders to wear masks.\u201dI am writing not to mock the inclusion of a photograph showing a female rider not wearing the very mask riders are showing \u201crespect\u201d in wearing (although it was protecting her neck from the novel coronavirus). I am not even ridiculing her or the editor who selected that photograph, ridiculous as it was. I am simply wondering how The Post chooses one or two of what must be hundreds of letters addressing this glaring blunder.\u00a0The article described those in dire need because of the spread of this disease, those \u201con razor-thin margins\u201d relying on staying healthy, as the article accurately noted. And those who \u201chave to take this seriously. If they say wear a mask, then wear a mask,\u201d as intelligently and cogently stated by Metro passenger Dominic Davis.I apologize for getting too far into the absurdity of the positioning of this picture and article, together. It spoke for itself.Martin Protas, Rockville\u25cfHead-spinning captionsPlease, please stop giving captions on groups of photographs as \u201cclockwise from top.\u201d Is it so hard to put a caption under each photo? The photos that ran on the jump of the May 20 front-page article \u201cA \u2018medical dictator\u2019 to some, a hero to others\u201d included four pictures with a caption that was difficult to parse. I was interested in knowing more about photographer Barbara J. Perenic\u2019s picture in particular: Who is on the left? On the right? Supporters? Opponents?Bob Bailey, Silver SpringThe May 16 Style article \u201cTake Pity on U.S.\u201d included a photograph caption that read: \u201cThe National Nurses United set out 88 empty pairs of shoes representing nurses who they say have died from covid-19 while demonstrating in Lafayette Square across from the White House on May 7.\u201d Really? Eighty-eight nurses died all at once in a demonstration?Nancy Modrak, Gainesville\u25cfLost with the TitanicThe May 20 Metro article \u201cExplorers may remove telegraph from Titanic\u201d was an interesting read and painted a detailed picture of the ethical complexities that accompany interaction with the Titanic\u2019s gravesite, but the sentence \u201cOperator Jack Phillips died after refusing to leave his flooded post\u201d could have led to confusion. That statement, while sequentially true, could lead one to falsely assume that Phillips died at his post while refusing to leave.Though there is some uncertainty surrounding the exact circumstance of Phillips\u2019s death, it is commonly accepted that he evacuated the telegraph room with assistant Harold Bride before they split up. Devoted to his position, Phillips did continue working after Capt. Edward Smith freed him of his duties (an act that Bride, who survived, reported to be quite moved by), but he did not die at his post.Hannah Sangillo, BethesdaRead more:Readers critique The Post: Don\u2019t amplify conspiracy theoriesReaders critique The Post: A photograph of otherworldly beautyReaders critique The Post: What the flyover coverage overlookedReaders critique The Post: Instead of \u2018euthanizing\u2019 pigs, let\u2019s work to give them a better lifeReaders critique The Post: Lists of the best sports films and songs left off these classicsReaders critique The Post: A strange photo for a serious subjectReaders critique The Post: Please reconcile conflicting information about the coronavirus \u2014 or SARS-CoV-2Readers critique The Post: This statue did not desperately need a maskMore letters to the editor This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Don\u2019t fan Fauci fever",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Goodbye to Michael Collins, an American hero (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2052",
        "date": "2021-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/goodbye-to-michael-collins-an-american-hero/2021/05/04/72c5b552-a9ce-11eb-a8a7-5f45ddcdf364_story.html",
        "text": "Regarding the April 29 obituary for Michael Collins, \u201cNo moon footprint, but Apollo 11 astronaut made his mark\u201d:When I was a teenager, we went to the moon, \u201cnot because it was easy, but because it was hard.\u201d The excitement of astronauts strapping on top of giant rockets and blasting off to the stars captivated me. Hanging on the walls of my room were photos of the Apollo 11 crew, and the most inspiring of the three was Collins. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightToday, as we fight to eradicate the deadliest pandemic in 100 years and witness protests and violence in our streets and around our Capitol, we are reminded of the great challenges facing the United States and our democracy, and painfully learning none of this is easy.The United States has lost a real hero. But in the generations of men and women who continue to fly their big rockets to space, Collins\u2019s legacy inspires us all; he taught us that we can do \u201cthe hard stuff.\u201dDaniel Cohen, Silver Spring The writer is the director of the PBS documentary \u201cSpace Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope.\u201d\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: Goodbye to Michael Collins, an American hero",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two College Students Marry Quickly Before Escaping New York: \u2018The Only Way We Could Stay Together.\u2019 (WSJ: Life & Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2053",
        "date": "2020-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-college-students-marry-quickly-before-escaping-new-york-the-only-way-we-could-stay-together-11587562898?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=56",
        "text": "How did you meet?At the Columbia Space Initiative, a club at the Columbia University School of Engineering, in 2017\n\n\nBiggest change since pandemic?\u201cWe decided to get married,\u201d Mr. Karasev says. \u201cWe had to marry to not get separated.\u201d\nMikhail Karasev and Nathalie Hager, two Columbia University astro-engineering students deeply in love, had their eyes fixed on the stars. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nInstead of separating them, the coronavirus pandemic forced Mr. Karasev and Ms. Hager to take a leap of faith. The couple got married to ensure that they could live together in Berlin.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Nathalie Hager\n \n\n\n\nThen the Covid-19 pandemic hit New York City like a comet and threatened to tear them apart. By mid-March Columbia was shutting down most student housing and many people were heading home. Ms. Hager, 22, was urged by her German family to return to Berlin before transatlantic flights were canceled.\nMr. Karasev, a 21-year-old Russian citizen, couldn\u2019t join her because the European Union had shut the borders to foreigners. It seemed his dream of building a life with his girlfriend and creating machines for space exploration were over before getting off the ground.\nThe couple had first met in October 2017 at the Columbia Space Initiative, a club at the School of Engineering. Ms. Hager was specializing in astro-robotics. Mr. Karasev was leading a team that had designed a hand-held device that would allow astronauts to easily collect asteroid samples for analysis to assess the potential for mining. \n\u201cShe could leave, but I couldn\u2019t go with her,\u201d he says now. \u201cBut she didn\u2019t. She stayed. She told me that she would stay with me no matter what happened. \u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAs engineering students at Columbia University, Mr. Karasev and Ms. Hager shared a love of space exploration and skiing.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ignacio Ramirez\n \n\n\n\nPressed to leave the coronavirus hotspot of New York but promising to remain together, they felt their plight was hopeless. They spent hours reading German visa regulations and realized there was only one solution: \u201cWe decided to get married,\u201d Mr. Karasev says. \u201cWe had to marry to not get separated.\u201d\nA solution in hand, Mr. Karasev didn\u2019t realize that getting married in New York and obtaining permission to enter Germany would become such a moonshot. On March 15, as New York City began shutting schools, restaurants and theaters, the couple decided to get married and the next day, March 16, Mr. Karasev applied for a marriage license. They were delayed one day by the mandatory 24-hour waiting period. \nFinally at City Hall with a friend serving as last-minute witness, Ms. Hager chose not to wear a white dress, saving that for a more formal ceremony with friends and family in Germany. Instead, she wore a white jumpsuit. Mr. Karasev dug out the one suit he owned, purchased for an interview for an internship with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n LIFE IN QUARANTINE\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\nRead More From the Series A High-Tech Daily Prayer Unites a Family Isolation and Illness Give L.A. Writer and a Pitbull a Path to Commitment High-School Sweethearts Build New Rituals to Stay Close: The Lemonade Drop-Off Cyclists Strike Up a Friendship While Stranded Far From Home \n\n\nUntil then, every step of the way seemed perfunctory, Mr. Karasev recalls, but about to exchange vows, even without rings, he felt his emotions swell up inside. \u201cI was getting nervous,\u201d he says. \u201cThen we got called up and were looking at each other and I felt very much in love.\u201d\nMore hurdles loomed. The German consulate in New York had canceled their appointment to apply for a visa. Airlines were canceling flights to Europe and the clock was ticking. They went to the consulate without an appointment, only to find the office shuttered by corona. After several phone calls, an official finally agreed to meet them. Mr. Karasev still needed a residence permit, and in Berlin all public offices were also closed to contain the virus. Ms. Hager scoured the internet and found the email address of an official from the town clerk\u2019s office. He agreed to grant Mr. Karasev a residence permit and on March 25, they flew to Germany.\nIn early March, \u201cwe didn\u2019t know we would be married,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I wouldn\u2019t say taking this step was a risk. I really want to spend the rest of my life with this person. I felt this was really fast, but it was the only way we could stay together.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow have you been navigating love in this brave new world? Join the conversation below. Astro-engineering couple from Germany and Russia wed as desire to stay together and pressure to leave virus hotspot clash with EU visa rules. ",
        "author": "William Boston"
    },
    {
        "title": "IPCC Report Says Some Climate Change Effects May Be Irreversible (WSJ: Life & Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2054",
        "date": "2021-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-climate-change-effects-may-be-irreversible-u-n-panel-report-says-11628496000?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=17",
        "text": "\u201cThe impacts of the climate crisis, from extreme heat to wildfires to intense rainfall and flooding, will only continue to intensify unless we choose another course for ourselves and generations to come,\u201d said U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. \u201cWhat the world requires now is real action.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBritish Prime Minister Boris Johnson singled out the burning of coal, saying the world should \u201cconsign (it) to history.\u201d Issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization of 195 governments, the new report is drawn from a three-year analysis of 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies. It is the first major international assessment of climate-change research since 2013. The report highlights human responsibility for record heat waves, droughts, more intense storms and other extreme weather events seen around the world in recent years. It also sharpens estimates of how sensitive the climate is to rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases\u2014a key metric in forecasting the rise of global temperatures in the years ahead. \u201cIt is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land,\u201d the report says in its opening lines. \u201cHuman-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFlooding last month in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou killed dozens of people.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n noel celis/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe first of four IPCC reports expected in the next 15 months, the report is likely to be a major force in both geopolitics and business. It sets scientific baselines and offers guidance to negotiators regularly convened by the U.N. under the Paris Climate Agreement, which has become a benchmark for corporate as well as governmental efforts to curb emissions.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHas your community experienced a sudden change in weather this year? Share your stories with us. Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe next major climate negotiations, known as COP26 and scheduled to begin in Glasgow on Nov. 1, will bring together representatives from nearly every nation in the world to discuss new, more ambitious commitments for cutting emissions. Mr. Kerry has said the U.S. and other countries must use the talks to speed their efforts because those taken so far are failing to make the progress that scientific research says is necessary within about a decade. The report ties the types of extreme weather events seen in recent weeks\u2014historic heat waves in the Pacific Northwest, torrential floods in Europe and China, and forest fires in the U.S., Russia and elsewhere\u2014directly to climate change.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Dixie Fire in California\u2019s Lassen National Forest last month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Noah Berger/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve known for decades that the world is warming, but this report tells us that recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying, unprecedented in thousands of years,\u201d said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and the senior adviser for climate at the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. \u201cFurther, it is indisputable that human activities are causing climate change.\u201d The report \u201cconnects the dots in a way we really haven\u2019t seen before,\u201d said climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who wasn\u2019t involved with the report. \u201cThe message eerily resonates with what we\u2019re seeing this summer in Canada, the U.S. and Europe as extreme weather events play havoc on us and our infrastructure.\u201d Levels of carbon dioxide released into the air by the burning of fossil fuels, cement production and deforestation and other land-use changes reached a modern seasonal high of 419 parts per million in May. That is higher than at any time in the past 3.6 million years, according to NOAA.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In an interview with WSJ\u2019s Timothy Puko, U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry explains the roles he\u2019d like to see the private sector and countries play in fighting climate change. Photo: Rob Alcaraz/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAtmospheric levels of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, are now about 2\u00bd times their preindustrial levels and steadily rising, according to the International Energy Agency. In Glasgow, representatives from almost 200 countries are expected to present updated plans for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. They are working under a global agreement resulting from the 2015 Paris climate summit that called on nations to take steps to limit future global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). \u201cThis report tells us that we probably need even more action by all the major economies to work together to avoid even worse impacts than we\u2019re already seeing now,\u201d said Jane Lubchenco, deputy director for climate and the environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She wasn\u2019t involved in the IPCC effort. Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity have raised global temperatures by 1.1 degrees Celsius since around 1850, the report said. Without rapid reductions in emissions, global temperatures could rise more than an additional 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next 20 years, the report forecasts. \u201cWe know there is no going back from some changes in the climate system, but some can be slowed or stopped if emissions are reduced,\u201d said NOAA\u2019s Dr. Barrett. The report reflects new scientific methodologies honed in an era of growing climate disturbances. It draws on a better understanding of the complex dynamics of the changing atmosphere and greater stores of data about climate change dating back millions of years, as well as a more robust set of satellite measurements and more than 50 computer models of climate change.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElsa, by then downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm, hit Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic last month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Orlando Barria/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe are now much better at integrating all the information,\u201d said Gavin Schmidt, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s senior climate adviser and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York, who wasn\u2019t involved with the report. Last year, global temperatures tied for the warmest on record, capping the warmest decade in modern times. Oceans are warming, and sea level is increasing by 3.7 mm, or about 0.1 inch, a year, the scientists said in the report. Mountain glaciers, sea ice and polar ice sheets are steadily melting. Weather around the world has grown more extreme by many measures, the scientists said, with more frequent heat waves and prolonged droughts in some regions and heavier rainfall and flooding in others. \u201cWhen you see what has happened this summer with heat waves in Canada and the heavy precipitation in Germany, I think this is showing that even highly developed countries are not spared,\u201d said Sonia Seneviratne, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a lead co-author of the report. \u201cWe don\u2019t really have time to adapt anymore because the change is happening so quickly.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe flooding of Germany\u2019s Ahr River last month destroyed thousands of cars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Thomas Frey/DPA/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com and Timothy Puko at tim.puko@wsj.com Corrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tAn image was removed from this article at the request of Reuters. (Corrected on Feb. 3, 2022) Rising seas, melting ice caps and other effects of a warming climate may be irreversible for centuries and are unequivocally driven by greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity, a scientific panel working under the auspices of the United Nations said. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Timothy Puko"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Smart Way to Pack for Months in Space (WSJ: Life & Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2055",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smart-way-to-pack-for-several-months-in-outer-space-1488232977?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=87",
        "text": "Ms. Williams prepares for the underwater training exercise.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Todd Spoth for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nPacking to leave the planet is no small feat. Ms. Williams, 51, has made trips to the space station of 195 days and 127 days. Baggage preparations require at least a year of input from NASA scientists, doctors, nutritionists and engineers. Every item has to be vetted for compatibility with life in a zero-gravity, closed environment. Each astronaut gets a container the size of a large shoebox to fill with personal items.\n\u201cWe try to make sure they take things that keep them connected to their families and lives back home,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shannon Hartman,\n\n\n\n a space station psychological coordinator. They include favorite snacks and comfort food wherever possible\u2014in Ms. Williams\u2019s case, peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff, among other goodies. But there are limits.\n\n\nPotato chips have no place in space, Ms. Hartman says. \u201cThey crumble at liftoff, creating a lot of dust.\u201d Opening a package would release a flavored cloud hazardous to breathe in.\nNASA recently selected Ms. Williams as one of the first astronauts to participate in commercial space flights. She\u2019s been working with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and SpaceX as they develop their programs. The first flights are projected for 2018, and Ms. Williams expects to bring many of the same items she has brought in the past.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Williams in her civilian clothes by the test pool.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Todd Spoth for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nIn addition to family pictures, she brought an image of her Jack Russell terrier, Gorby, sewn into a cloth toy. \u201cIt was cool for school presentations, to show kids how things float,\u201d she says.\nMs. Williams grew up in Needham, Mass. Her father was a doctor from India. She travels with a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a book of Hindu philosophy.\nOn her 2007 mission to the space station, Ms. Williams completed the first marathon in orbit when she ran a simulated Boston marathon on the station\u2019s treadmill while her younger sister ran the marathon on earth. Ms. Williams only brought one pair of sneakers to space.\n\u201cYour shoes never get dirty because your feet don\u2019t touch the ground,\u201d she says.\nInside the space station, astronauts wear wool flight suits or utility pants and crew shirts. Their pants have Velcro on the outside to prevent things like camera lenses and tools from floating away.\n\n\n \nPersonal items, left, that NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams brings to space include, clockwise from top: Race number (she did the first in-space marathon in 2007 and first triathlon in 2012); child\u2019s drawing of Suni in a rocket; Boston Red Sox cap; T-shirt from underwater training center; eye-patch and bandana for Talk Like a Pirate Day; family photos; Red Sox bumper sticker; procedures flip book from her last mission; patriotic socks; photo of penguins, the name of her astronaut class; photo of her pet dog Gorby; comfy T-shirt from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Astronaut food is usually packed in vacuum-sealed plastic bags, pictured at the NASA Johnson Space Center nutrition lab, right.Photos: Todd Spoth for The Wall Street Journal(2)\n\n\n\nOn some trips, the Russians supply the clothing. \u201cI told them to surprise me. On my first mission, everything was blue. I felt like a smurf,\u201d she says.\nWithout gravity, the human body changes shape. \u201cYou have this fluid shift. Your head looks bigger, your legs look skinnier, your chest looks bigger. It\u2019s pretty spectacular,\u201d she says.\nThere isn\u2019t much cooking in orbit\u2014most food comes in sealed plastic bags that astronauts rehydrate or warm up by adding hot water. \u201cEverybody has a spoon, and it\u2019s theirs. I lost my spoon once for two days, and I was not a happy person,\u201d she recalls. \u201cWe finally found it up against a vent.\u201d\nOne thing Ms. Williams doesn\u2019t bring to space? A pillow.\nIn zero gravity, there\u2019s no need for head or neck support. Astronauts sleep in vertical bunks, like phone booths, \u201cstanding\u201d inside sleeping bags. \u201cYou\u2019re floating in this booth-cocoon all by yourself, no light and no sound,\u201d Ms. Williams says. \u201cSome people bungee themselves to the wall so it feels like you\u2019re in a bed. Those subconscious things are the hardest to get used to. It took me about a month.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Williams prepares to be lowered into the pool for her training.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Todd Spoth for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA look at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Todd Spoth for The Wall Street Journal Astronaut Sunita Williams explains how to prep for a trip to the international space station. No potato chips are allowed, but for her, Marshmallow Fluff is a must. ",
        "author": "Hilary Potkewitz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2056",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/18/billionaire-space-race/",
        "text": "The last time we watched rich boys and their toys going mano a mano was back in the aughts, when Microsoft\u2019s Paul Allen and Oracle\u2019s Larry Ellison tussled over who had the biggest private yacht in the world. After Allen commissioned his 416-foot superyacht Octopus, Ellison added an extension to his Rising Sun, bringing it to 452 feet in length. Size matters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the billionaire battle is for space, albeit short, suborbital flights. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, announced he would fly in his Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20. Then Richard Branson decided that he would take an hour-long jaunt on his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity space plane nine days earlier. He came, he floated in zero gravity, he conquered.And it had nothing, nothing to do with ego or any kind of billionaire rivalry, Branson insisted. \u201cI know everyone expects me to say yes,\u201d he said Wednesday on \u201cThe View.\u201d And then he felt compelled to add: \u201cI hate the word \u2018billionaire.\u2019 I started with 200 pounds.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has bought a ticket on Branson\u2019s rocket, according to news reports.And they can afford it. These three space musketeers bring a collective net worth of almost $400 billion to their out-of-this-world side hustles.To their fans, the promise of expanding our reach beyond this planet is thrilling. For critics, the money poured into private vanity projects is unforgivable when there is so much to be done right here on Earth. This race has only deepened the divide between those who love to see the very rich launch into space and those who wish they would never come back.Branson, worth an estimated $5 billion, got dragged all over social media when he mused after his flight: \u201cImagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space. And they will in turn, I think, inspire us back here on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson failed to note that a ticket on one of Galactic\u2019s flights currently goes for $250,000. More than 600 people have already signed up.Study Finds 70% Of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 Saved To Go To Space https://t.co/yNp8WFuuJK pic.twitter.com/GeZfmjCUQI\u2014 The Onion (@TheOnion) July 12, 2021\n\nWhat is a mere mortal to make of billionaires in space? It depends on how you feel about the Montgolfier brothers, the Wright brothers, NASA, the moon landing, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buzz Lightyear, income equality, tax breaks for the very rich, Space Force and \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201dBut here\u2019s the thing about billionaires: They don\u2019t really care what we think.Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Two years ago, business writer Geoffrey James identified key beliefs of the super-rich in his story \u201cHow to Think Like a Billionaire\u201d for Inc.com.\u201cSelf-made billionaires tend to believe that life is a meritocracy and that they\u2019ve become rich because they\u2019re superior to everyone else,\u201d wrote James. That leads to unlimited confidence: \u201cThe undeniable fact that they can buy just about anything they want becomes conflated into the belief that they can accomplish anything they want.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBillionaires are less concerned about breaking rules, partially because they can buy their way out of trouble but more because they believe every successful entrepreneur ignores conventional wisdom and how they\u2019re perceived in the moment. Their focus is almost always on the future. And what says \u201cfuture\u201d more than rocket science?Branson is the jokester who made a fortune in music, media, trains, planes and, he hopes, space travel with Virgin Galactic, which he founded in 2004. He wants to see people in space because \u2014 well, it\u2019s fun and everyone should get the chance to experience it. The goal is a company that will transport passengers to floating hotels or labs, or on supersonic transcontinental flights.Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new eraBezos, by contrast, has had a lifelong fascination with space. \u201cI never want to dismiss the role that ego, vanity or competitive instincts are playing in all these things,\u201d says Brad Stone, author of \u201cAmazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,\u201d but Bezos grew up reading science fiction and watching space launches with his grandfather, who worked at the Atomic Energy Commission. In his high school valedictorian speech, the future billionaire outlined his vision: \u201cSpace: the final frontier. Meet me there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis admiration for Star Trek\u2019s Captain Picard is well known, but he was more influenced by physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, who foresaw space stations orbiting Earth to house humans as life on Earth becomes untenable. Bezos \u201cis pursuing this as his personal passion, not just to go to space himself, but to build successful businesses in space just like he built a successful business on the Internet,\u201d says Stone.Bezos \u2014 who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post \u2014 was the first of the three to found a rocket company (Blue Origin in 2000). He picked his launch date, July 20, because it\u2019s the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the moon.Stone is still a little surprised Bezos is taking the risk. \u201cIt\u2019s a dramatic gesture and symbolizes the level of belief he has in that team and in the rocket,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s kind of breathtaking that someone who\u2019s worth 200 billion dollars is making himself a guinea pig.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt may be Musk who ultimately wins the billionaire space race.\u201cElon started SpaceX from a very different place than Branson and Bezos and their respective aerospace companies,\u201d says Ashlee Vance, author of \u201cElon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.\u201d \u201cHe had zero interest in space tourism. His interest was always more around deeper exploration of the solar system.\u201d Musk feels, the author adds, \u201clike the human species could be wiped out and that we need a backup plan on Mars or somewhere else.\u201d Bezos shares the same worries but focuses on infrastructure orbiting Earth.SpaceX \u2014 started in 2002, when Musk was worth only $180 million \u2014 is a successful commercial business with more than 100 rocket launches, astronauts sent to the International Space Station, and NASA and military contracts. By 2050, he\u2019d like to create a colony on Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk is game to join a Mars mission when the technology can get him there safely. \u201cI\u2019ve said I want to die on Mars,\u201d he explained in 2013. \u201cJust not on impact.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is supportive of anything that gets people excited about the cosmos. But he also believes that governments are better suited for long-term exploration, priorities and investment.\u201cPrivate enterprise will never lead a space frontier,\u201d Tyson said in a 2015 interview with BGR. \u201c \u2026 It\u2019s expensive. It\u2019s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you\u2019re dealing with things that haven\u2019t been done before.\u201dLos Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik was more blunt earlier this month: \u201cThe competition to be the first billionaire in space should mark a milestone in the towering vanity of the wealthy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLet\u2019s promptly dispense with the notion that any of these flights will add anything to our scientific knowledge, unless it\u2019s the establishment of a new metric for how long it takes for money to burn a hole in your pocket when you have more than you could possibly need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHiltzik, a self-described science and space geek, argues that Bezos and Musk are misguided in focusing on Plan B for a broken Earth. \u201cAnswers to global warming and disease are still much more accessible than fleeing Earth for space. The dream of interplanetary travel and colonization is the dream of schoolchildren, and it\u2019s time that the billionaires grew up.\u201dStill, if billionaires want to spend their fortunes blasting off into space, is it anyone else\u2019s business? American conservatives and libertarians say no, arguing that private companies create jobs and eliminate wasteful government spending. Liberals are angry and disappointed that billionaires have not spent more of their vast fortunes on terrestrial problems: Hunger, health care, education, and much more.\u201cI 100 percent agree that people who are in positions of wealth should spend most of their money, 90 percent or more of their money, trying to tackle these issues,\u201d Branson told the \u201cToday\u201d show Wednesday, \u201cbut we should also create new industries that can create 800 engineers, and scientists who can create wonderful things that can make space accessible at a fraction of the environmental cost that it\u2019s been in the past.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic said such accessibility \u201cwill be an overall benefit to society. The experience of space travel can hopefully lead to a changed perspective that will benefit the earth.\u201d Blue Origin and SpaceX did not respond to questions about their founders\u2019 investment in space vs. charitable giving.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted a version of what hundreds more expressed: \u201cHere on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor \u2014 but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space! Yes. It\u2019s time to tax the billionaires.\u201dAmerica in one photo pic.twitter.com/NMT61lzIYN\u2014 Michael (@Home_Halfway) July 13, 2021\n\nThe billions that Bezos and Musk pour into space might, under a different tax code, have gone into the federal coffers. Personally, Bezos paid about 1 percent in taxes from 2014 to 2018, and Musk paid just over 3 percent, according to a study released by ProPublica in June.IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report saysAnd if you think critics \u2014 or anything else \u2014 will stop Bezos from strapping onto a rocket into space Tuesday, you don\u2019t know jack. Er, Jeff.\u201cBezos has this conviction that when you do big things, people aren\u2019t going to understand it and you\u2019ve got to remain firm to your long-term vision,\u201d says Stone. \u201cAnd he believes this is a form of philanthropy, that by building this company and helping to usher in, like, a new Space Age, he will be helping humanity generations from now.\u201dTo infinity and beyond! Or maybe just a quick spin above Earth.Read more:An 18-year-old is flying to space with Jeff Bezos after the winner of a $28 million auction defers first flightRichard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? For Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, rocket ships have become the new superyachts. Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?",
        "author": "Roxanne Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2057",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/18/billionaire-space-race/",
        "text": "The last time we watched rich boys and their toys going mano a mano was back in the aughts, when Microsoft\u2019s Paul Allen and Oracle\u2019s Larry Ellison tussled over who had the biggest private yacht in the world. After Allen commissioned his 416-foot superyacht Octopus, Ellison added an extension to his Rising Sun, bringing it to 452 feet in length. Size matters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the billionaire battle is for space, albeit short, suborbital flights. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, announced he would fly in his Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20. Then Richard Branson decided that he would take an hour-long jaunt on his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity space plane nine days earlier. He came, he floated in zero gravity, he conquered.And it had nothing, nothing to do with ego or any kind of billionaire rivalry, Branson insisted. \u201cI know everyone expects me to say yes,\u201d he said Wednesday on \u201cThe View.\u201d And then he felt compelled to add: \u201cI hate the word \u2018billionaire.\u2019 I started with 200 pounds.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has bought a ticket on Branson\u2019s rocket, according to news reports.And they can afford it. These three space musketeers bring a collective net worth of almost $400 billion to their out-of-this-world side hustles.To their fans, the promise of expanding our reach beyond this planet is thrilling. For critics, the money poured into private vanity projects is unforgivable when there is so much to be done right here on Earth. This race has only deepened the divide between those who love to see the very rich launch into space and those who wish they would never come back.Branson, worth an estimated $5 billion, got dragged all over social media when he mused after his flight: \u201cImagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space. And they will in turn, I think, inspire us back here on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson failed to note that a ticket on one of Galactic\u2019s flights currently goes for $250,000. More than 600 people have already signed up.Study Finds 70% Of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 Saved To Go To Space https://t.co/yNp8WFuuJK pic.twitter.com/GeZfmjCUQI\u2014 The Onion (@TheOnion) July 12, 2021\n\nWhat is a mere mortal to make of billionaires in space? It depends on how you feel about the Montgolfier brothers, the Wright brothers, NASA, the moon landing, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buzz Lightyear, income equality, tax breaks for the very rich, Space Force and \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201dBut here\u2019s the thing about billionaires: They don\u2019t really care what we think.Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Two years ago, business writer Geoffrey James identified key beliefs of the super-rich in his story \u201cHow to Think Like a Billionaire\u201d for Inc.com.\u201cSelf-made billionaires tend to believe that life is a meritocracy and that they\u2019ve become rich because they\u2019re superior to everyone else,\u201d wrote James. That leads to unlimited confidence: \u201cThe undeniable fact that they can buy just about anything they want becomes conflated into the belief that they can accomplish anything they want.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBillionaires are less concerned about breaking rules, partially because they can buy their way out of trouble but more because they believe every successful entrepreneur ignores conventional wisdom and how they\u2019re perceived in the moment. Their focus is almost always on the future. And what says \u201cfuture\u201d more than rocket science?Branson is the jokester who made a fortune in music, media, trains, planes and, he hopes, space travel with Virgin Galactic, which he founded in 2004. He wants to see people in space because \u2014 well, it\u2019s fun and everyone should get the chance to experience it. The goal is a company that will transport passengers to floating hotels or labs, or on supersonic transcontinental flights.Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new eraBezos, by contrast, has had a lifelong fascination with space. \u201cI never want to dismiss the role that ego, vanity or competitive instincts are playing in all these things,\u201d says Brad Stone, author of \u201cAmazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,\u201d but Bezos grew up reading science fiction and watching space launches with his grandfather, who worked at the Atomic Energy Commission. In his high school valedictorian speech, the future billionaire outlined his vision: \u201cSpace: the final frontier. Meet me there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis admiration for Star Trek\u2019s Captain Picard is well known, but he was more influenced by physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, who foresaw space stations orbiting Earth to house humans as life on Earth becomes untenable. Bezos \u201cis pursuing this as his personal passion, not just to go to space himself, but to build successful businesses in space just like he built a successful business on the Internet,\u201d says Stone.Bezos \u2014 who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post \u2014 was the first of the three to found a rocket company (Blue Origin in 2000). He picked his launch date, July 20, because it\u2019s the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the moon.Stone is still a little surprised Bezos is taking the risk. \u201cIt\u2019s a dramatic gesture and symbolizes the level of belief he has in that team and in the rocket,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s kind of breathtaking that someone who\u2019s worth 200 billion dollars is making himself a guinea pig.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt may be Musk who ultimately wins the billionaire space race.\u201cElon started SpaceX from a very different place than Branson and Bezos and their respective aerospace companies,\u201d says Ashlee Vance, author of \u201cElon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.\u201d \u201cHe had zero interest in space tourism. His interest was always more around deeper exploration of the solar system.\u201d Musk feels, the author adds, \u201clike the human species could be wiped out and that we need a backup plan on Mars or somewhere else.\u201d Bezos shares the same worries but focuses on infrastructure orbiting Earth.SpaceX \u2014 started in 2002, when Musk was worth only $180 million \u2014 is a successful commercial business with more than 100 rocket launches, astronauts sent to the International Space Station, and NASA and military contracts. By 2050, he\u2019d like to create a colony on Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk is game to join a Mars mission when the technology can get him there safely. \u201cI\u2019ve said I want to die on Mars,\u201d he explained in 2013. \u201cJust not on impact.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is supportive of anything that gets people excited about the cosmos. But he also believes that governments are better suited for long-term exploration, priorities and investment.\u201cPrivate enterprise will never lead a space frontier,\u201d Tyson said in a 2015 interview with BGR. \u201c \u2026 It\u2019s expensive. It\u2019s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you\u2019re dealing with things that haven\u2019t been done before.\u201dLos Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik was more blunt earlier this month: \u201cThe competition to be the first billionaire in space should mark a milestone in the towering vanity of the wealthy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLet\u2019s promptly dispense with the notion that any of these flights will add anything to our scientific knowledge, unless it\u2019s the establishment of a new metric for how long it takes for money to burn a hole in your pocket when you have more than you could possibly need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHiltzik, a self-described science and space geek, argues that Bezos and Musk are misguided in focusing on Plan B for a broken Earth. \u201cAnswers to global warming and disease are still much more accessible than fleeing Earth for space. The dream of interplanetary travel and colonization is the dream of schoolchildren, and it\u2019s time that the billionaires grew up.\u201dStill, if billionaires want to spend their fortunes blasting off into space, is it anyone else\u2019s business? American conservatives and libertarians say no, arguing that private companies create jobs and eliminate wasteful government spending. Liberals are angry and disappointed that billionaires have not spent more of their vast fortunes on terrestrial problems: Hunger, health care, education, and much more.\u201cI 100 percent agree that people who are in positions of wealth should spend most of their money, 90 percent or more of their money, trying to tackle these issues,\u201d Branson told the \u201cToday\u201d show Wednesday, \u201cbut we should also create new industries that can create 800 engineers, and scientists who can create wonderful things that can make space accessible at a fraction of the environmental cost that it\u2019s been in the past.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic said such accessibility \u201cwill be an overall benefit to society. The experience of space travel can hopefully lead to a changed perspective that will benefit the earth.\u201d Blue Origin and SpaceX did not respond to questions about their founders\u2019 investment in space vs. charitable giving.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted a version of what hundreds more expressed: \u201cHere on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor \u2014 but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space! Yes. It\u2019s time to tax the billionaires.\u201dAmerica in one photo pic.twitter.com/NMT61lzIYN\u2014 Michael (@Home_Halfway) July 13, 2021\n\nThe billions that Bezos and Musk pour into space might, under a different tax code, have gone into the federal coffers. Personally, Bezos paid about 1 percent in taxes from 2014 to 2018, and Musk paid just over 3 percent, according to a study released by ProPublica in June.IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report saysAnd if you think critics \u2014 or anything else \u2014 will stop Bezos from strapping onto a rocket into space Tuesday, you don\u2019t know jack. Er, Jeff.\u201cBezos has this conviction that when you do big things, people aren\u2019t going to understand it and you\u2019ve got to remain firm to your long-term vision,\u201d says Stone. \u201cAnd he believes this is a form of philanthropy, that by building this company and helping to usher in, like, a new Space Age, he will be helping humanity generations from now.\u201dTo infinity and beyond! Or maybe just a quick spin above Earth.Read more:An 18-year-old is flying to space with Jeff Bezos after the winner of a $28 million auction defers first flightRichard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? For Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, rocket ships have become the new superyachts. Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?",
        "author": "Roxanne Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2058",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/18/billionaire-space-race/",
        "text": "The last time we watched rich boys and their toys going mano a mano was back in the aughts, when Microsoft\u2019s Paul Allen and Oracle\u2019s Larry Ellison tussled over who had the biggest private yacht in the world. After Allen commissioned his 416-foot superyacht Octopus, Ellison added an extension to his Rising Sun, bringing it to 452 feet in length. Size matters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the billionaire battle is for space, albeit short, suborbital flights. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, announced he would fly in his Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20. Then Richard Branson decided that he would take an hour-long jaunt on his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity space plane nine days earlier. He came, he floated in zero gravity, he conquered.And it had nothing, nothing to do with ego or any kind of billionaire rivalry, Branson insisted. \u201cI know everyone expects me to say yes,\u201d he said Wednesday on \u201cThe View.\u201d And then he felt compelled to add: \u201cI hate the word \u2018billionaire.\u2019 I started with 200 pounds.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has bought a ticket on Branson\u2019s rocket, according to news reports.And they can afford it. These three space musketeers bring a collective net worth of almost $400 billion to their out-of-this-world side hustles.To their fans, the promise of expanding our reach beyond this planet is thrilling. For critics, the money poured into private vanity projects is unforgivable when there is so much to be done right here on Earth. This race has only deepened the divide between those who love to see the very rich launch into space and those who wish they would never come back.Branson, worth an estimated $5 billion, got dragged all over social media when he mused after his flight: \u201cImagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space. And they will in turn, I think, inspire us back here on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson failed to note that a ticket on one of Galactic\u2019s flights currently goes for $250,000. More than 600 people have already signed up.Study Finds 70% Of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 Saved To Go To Space https://t.co/yNp8WFuuJK pic.twitter.com/GeZfmjCUQI\u2014 The Onion (@TheOnion) July 12, 2021\n\nWhat is a mere mortal to make of billionaires in space? It depends on how you feel about the Montgolfier brothers, the Wright brothers, NASA, the moon landing, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buzz Lightyear, income equality, tax breaks for the very rich, Space Force and \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201dBut here\u2019s the thing about billionaires: They don\u2019t really care what we think.Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Two years ago, business writer Geoffrey James identified key beliefs of the super-rich in his story \u201cHow to Think Like a Billionaire\u201d for Inc.com.\u201cSelf-made billionaires tend to believe that life is a meritocracy and that they\u2019ve become rich because they\u2019re superior to everyone else,\u201d wrote James. That leads to unlimited confidence: \u201cThe undeniable fact that they can buy just about anything they want becomes conflated into the belief that they can accomplish anything they want.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBillionaires are less concerned about breaking rules, partially because they can buy their way out of trouble but more because they believe every successful entrepreneur ignores conventional wisdom and how they\u2019re perceived in the moment. Their focus is almost always on the future. And what says \u201cfuture\u201d more than rocket science?Branson is the jokester who made a fortune in music, media, trains, planes and, he hopes, space travel with Virgin Galactic, which he founded in 2004. He wants to see people in space because \u2014 well, it\u2019s fun and everyone should get the chance to experience it. The goal is a company that will transport passengers to floating hotels or labs, or on supersonic transcontinental flights.Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new eraBezos, by contrast, has had a lifelong fascination with space. \u201cI never want to dismiss the role that ego, vanity or competitive instincts are playing in all these things,\u201d says Brad Stone, author of \u201cAmazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,\u201d but Bezos grew up reading science fiction and watching space launches with his grandfather, who worked at the Atomic Energy Commission. In his high school valedictorian speech, the future billionaire outlined his vision: \u201cSpace: the final frontier. Meet me there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis admiration for Star Trek\u2019s Captain Picard is well known, but he was more influenced by physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, who foresaw space stations orbiting Earth to house humans as life on Earth becomes untenable. Bezos \u201cis pursuing this as his personal passion, not just to go to space himself, but to build successful businesses in space just like he built a successful business on the Internet,\u201d says Stone.Bezos \u2014 who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post \u2014 was the first of the three to found a rocket company (Blue Origin in 2000). He picked his launch date, July 20, because it\u2019s the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the moon.Stone is still a little surprised Bezos is taking the risk. \u201cIt\u2019s a dramatic gesture and symbolizes the level of belief he has in that team and in the rocket,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s kind of breathtaking that someone who\u2019s worth 200 billion dollars is making himself a guinea pig.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt may be Musk who ultimately wins the billionaire space race.\u201cElon started SpaceX from a very different place than Branson and Bezos and their respective aerospace companies,\u201d says Ashlee Vance, author of \u201cElon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.\u201d \u201cHe had zero interest in space tourism. His interest was always more around deeper exploration of the solar system.\u201d Musk feels, the author adds, \u201clike the human species could be wiped out and that we need a backup plan on Mars or somewhere else.\u201d Bezos shares the same worries but focuses on infrastructure orbiting Earth.SpaceX \u2014 started in 2002, when Musk was worth only $180 million \u2014 is a successful commercial business with more than 100 rocket launches, astronauts sent to the International Space Station, and NASA and military contracts. By 2050, he\u2019d like to create a colony on Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk is game to join a Mars mission when the technology can get him there safely. \u201cI\u2019ve said I want to die on Mars,\u201d he explained in 2013. \u201cJust not on impact.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is supportive of anything that gets people excited about the cosmos. But he also believes that governments are better suited for long-term exploration, priorities and investment.\u201cPrivate enterprise will never lead a space frontier,\u201d Tyson said in a 2015 interview with BGR. \u201c \u2026 It\u2019s expensive. It\u2019s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you\u2019re dealing with things that haven\u2019t been done before.\u201dLos Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik was more blunt earlier this month: \u201cThe competition to be the first billionaire in space should mark a milestone in the towering vanity of the wealthy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLet\u2019s promptly dispense with the notion that any of these flights will add anything to our scientific knowledge, unless it\u2019s the establishment of a new metric for how long it takes for money to burn a hole in your pocket when you have more than you could possibly need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHiltzik, a self-described science and space geek, argues that Bezos and Musk are misguided in focusing on Plan B for a broken Earth. \u201cAnswers to global warming and disease are still much more accessible than fleeing Earth for space. The dream of interplanetary travel and colonization is the dream of schoolchildren, and it\u2019s time that the billionaires grew up.\u201dStill, if billionaires want to spend their fortunes blasting off into space, is it anyone else\u2019s business? American conservatives and libertarians say no, arguing that private companies create jobs and eliminate wasteful government spending. Liberals are angry and disappointed that billionaires have not spent more of their vast fortunes on terrestrial problems: Hunger, health care, education, and much more.\u201cI 100 percent agree that people who are in positions of wealth should spend most of their money, 90 percent or more of their money, trying to tackle these issues,\u201d Branson told the \u201cToday\u201d show Wednesday, \u201cbut we should also create new industries that can create 800 engineers, and scientists who can create wonderful things that can make space accessible at a fraction of the environmental cost that it\u2019s been in the past.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic said such accessibility \u201cwill be an overall benefit to society. The experience of space travel can hopefully lead to a changed perspective that will benefit the earth.\u201d Blue Origin and SpaceX did not respond to questions about their founders\u2019 investment in space vs. charitable giving.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted a version of what hundreds more expressed: \u201cHere on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor \u2014 but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space! Yes. It\u2019s time to tax the billionaires.\u201dAmerica in one photo pic.twitter.com/NMT61lzIYN\u2014 Michael (@Home_Halfway) July 13, 2021\n\nThe billions that Bezos and Musk pour into space might, under a different tax code, have gone into the federal coffers. Personally, Bezos paid about 1 percent in taxes from 2014 to 2018, and Musk paid just over 3 percent, according to a study released by ProPublica in June.IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report saysAnd if you think critics \u2014 or anything else \u2014 will stop Bezos from strapping onto a rocket into space Tuesday, you don\u2019t know jack. Er, Jeff.\u201cBezos has this conviction that when you do big things, people aren\u2019t going to understand it and you\u2019ve got to remain firm to your long-term vision,\u201d says Stone. \u201cAnd he believes this is a form of philanthropy, that by building this company and helping to usher in, like, a new Space Age, he will be helping humanity generations from now.\u201dTo infinity and beyond! Or maybe just a quick spin above Earth.Read more:An 18-year-old is flying to space with Jeff Bezos after the winner of a $28 million auction defers first flightRichard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? For Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, rocket ships have become the new superyachts. Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?",
        "author": "Roxanne Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2059",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/18/billionaire-space-race/",
        "text": "The last time we watched rich boys and their toys going mano a mano was back in the aughts, when Microsoft\u2019s Paul Allen and Oracle\u2019s Larry Ellison tussled over who had the biggest private yacht in the world. After Allen commissioned his 416-foot superyacht Octopus, Ellison added an extension to his Rising Sun, bringing it to 452 feet in length. Size matters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the billionaire battle is for space, albeit short, suborbital flights. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, announced he would fly in his Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20. Then Richard Branson decided that he would take an hour-long jaunt on his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity space plane nine days earlier. He came, he floated in zero gravity, he conquered.And it had nothing, nothing to do with ego or any kind of billionaire rivalry, Branson insisted. \u201cI know everyone expects me to say yes,\u201d he said Wednesday on \u201cThe View.\u201d And then he felt compelled to add: \u201cI hate the word \u2018billionaire.\u2019 I started with 200 pounds.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has bought a ticket on Branson\u2019s rocket, according to news reports.And they can afford it. These three space musketeers bring a collective net worth of almost $400 billion to their out-of-this-world side hustles.To their fans, the promise of expanding our reach beyond this planet is thrilling. For critics, the money poured into private vanity projects is unforgivable when there is so much to be done right here on Earth. This race has only deepened the divide between those who love to see the very rich launch into space and those who wish they would never come back.Branson, worth an estimated $5 billion, got dragged all over social media when he mused after his flight: \u201cImagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space. And they will in turn, I think, inspire us back here on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson failed to note that a ticket on one of Galactic\u2019s flights currently goes for $250,000. More than 600 people have already signed up.Study Finds 70% Of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 Saved To Go To Space https://t.co/yNp8WFuuJK pic.twitter.com/GeZfmjCUQI\u2014 The Onion (@TheOnion) July 12, 2021\n\nWhat is a mere mortal to make of billionaires in space? It depends on how you feel about the Montgolfier brothers, the Wright brothers, NASA, the moon landing, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buzz Lightyear, income equality, tax breaks for the very rich, Space Force and \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201dBut here\u2019s the thing about billionaires: They don\u2019t really care what we think.Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Two years ago, business writer Geoffrey James identified key beliefs of the super-rich in his story \u201cHow to Think Like a Billionaire\u201d for Inc.com.\u201cSelf-made billionaires tend to believe that life is a meritocracy and that they\u2019ve become rich because they\u2019re superior to everyone else,\u201d wrote James. That leads to unlimited confidence: \u201cThe undeniable fact that they can buy just about anything they want becomes conflated into the belief that they can accomplish anything they want.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBillionaires are less concerned about breaking rules, partially because they can buy their way out of trouble but more because they believe every successful entrepreneur ignores conventional wisdom and how they\u2019re perceived in the moment. Their focus is almost always on the future. And what says \u201cfuture\u201d more than rocket science?Branson is the jokester who made a fortune in music, media, trains, planes and, he hopes, space travel with Virgin Galactic, which he founded in 2004. He wants to see people in space because \u2014 well, it\u2019s fun and everyone should get the chance to experience it. The goal is a company that will transport passengers to floating hotels or labs, or on supersonic transcontinental flights.Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new eraBezos, by contrast, has had a lifelong fascination with space. \u201cI never want to dismiss the role that ego, vanity or competitive instincts are playing in all these things,\u201d says Brad Stone, author of \u201cAmazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,\u201d but Bezos grew up reading science fiction and watching space launches with his grandfather, who worked at the Atomic Energy Commission. In his high school valedictorian speech, the future billionaire outlined his vision: \u201cSpace: the final frontier. Meet me there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis admiration for Star Trek\u2019s Captain Picard is well known, but he was more influenced by physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, who foresaw space stations orbiting Earth to house humans as life on Earth becomes untenable. Bezos \u201cis pursuing this as his personal passion, not just to go to space himself, but to build successful businesses in space just like he built a successful business on the Internet,\u201d says Stone.Bezos \u2014 who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post \u2014 was the first of the three to found a rocket company (Blue Origin in 2000). He picked his launch date, July 20, because it\u2019s the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the moon.Stone is still a little surprised Bezos is taking the risk. \u201cIt\u2019s a dramatic gesture and symbolizes the level of belief he has in that team and in the rocket,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s kind of breathtaking that someone who\u2019s worth 200 billion dollars is making himself a guinea pig.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt may be Musk who ultimately wins the billionaire space race.\u201cElon started SpaceX from a very different place than Branson and Bezos and their respective aerospace companies,\u201d says Ashlee Vance, author of \u201cElon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.\u201d \u201cHe had zero interest in space tourism. His interest was always more around deeper exploration of the solar system.\u201d Musk feels, the author adds, \u201clike the human species could be wiped out and that we need a backup plan on Mars or somewhere else.\u201d Bezos shares the same worries but focuses on infrastructure orbiting Earth.SpaceX \u2014 started in 2002, when Musk was worth only $180 million \u2014 is a successful commercial business with more than 100 rocket launches, astronauts sent to the International Space Station, and NASA and military contracts. By 2050, he\u2019d like to create a colony on Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk is game to join a Mars mission when the technology can get him there safely. \u201cI\u2019ve said I want to die on Mars,\u201d he explained in 2013. \u201cJust not on impact.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is supportive of anything that gets people excited about the cosmos. But he also believes that governments are better suited for long-term exploration, priorities and investment.\u201cPrivate enterprise will never lead a space frontier,\u201d Tyson said in a 2015 interview with BGR. \u201c \u2026 It\u2019s expensive. It\u2019s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you\u2019re dealing with things that haven\u2019t been done before.\u201dLos Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik was more blunt earlier this month: \u201cThe competition to be the first billionaire in space should mark a milestone in the towering vanity of the wealthy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLet\u2019s promptly dispense with the notion that any of these flights will add anything to our scientific knowledge, unless it\u2019s the establishment of a new metric for how long it takes for money to burn a hole in your pocket when you have more than you could possibly need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHiltzik, a self-described science and space geek, argues that Bezos and Musk are misguided in focusing on Plan B for a broken Earth. \u201cAnswers to global warming and disease are still much more accessible than fleeing Earth for space. The dream of interplanetary travel and colonization is the dream of schoolchildren, and it\u2019s time that the billionaires grew up.\u201dStill, if billionaires want to spend their fortunes blasting off into space, is it anyone else\u2019s business? American conservatives and libertarians say no, arguing that private companies create jobs and eliminate wasteful government spending. Liberals are angry and disappointed that billionaires have not spent more of their vast fortunes on terrestrial problems: Hunger, health care, education, and much more.\u201cI 100 percent agree that people who are in positions of wealth should spend most of their money, 90 percent or more of their money, trying to tackle these issues,\u201d Branson told the \u201cToday\u201d show Wednesday, \u201cbut we should also create new industries that can create 800 engineers, and scientists who can create wonderful things that can make space accessible at a fraction of the environmental cost that it\u2019s been in the past.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic said such accessibility \u201cwill be an overall benefit to society. The experience of space travel can hopefully lead to a changed perspective that will benefit the earth.\u201d Blue Origin and SpaceX did not respond to questions about their founders\u2019 investment in space vs. charitable giving.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted a version of what hundreds more expressed: \u201cHere on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor \u2014 but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space! Yes. It\u2019s time to tax the billionaires.\u201dAmerica in one photo pic.twitter.com/NMT61lzIYN\u2014 Michael (@Home_Halfway) July 13, 2021\n\nThe billions that Bezos and Musk pour into space might, under a different tax code, have gone into the federal coffers. Personally, Bezos paid about 1 percent in taxes from 2014 to 2018, and Musk paid just over 3 percent, according to a study released by ProPublica in June.IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report saysAnd if you think critics \u2014 or anything else \u2014 will stop Bezos from strapping onto a rocket into space Tuesday, you don\u2019t know jack. Er, Jeff.\u201cBezos has this conviction that when you do big things, people aren\u2019t going to understand it and you\u2019ve got to remain firm to your long-term vision,\u201d says Stone. \u201cAnd he believes this is a form of philanthropy, that by building this company and helping to usher in, like, a new Space Age, he will be helping humanity generations from now.\u201dTo infinity and beyond! Or maybe just a quick spin above Earth.Read more:An 18-year-old is flying to space with Jeff Bezos after the winner of a $28 million auction defers first flightRichard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? For Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, rocket ships have become the new superyachts. Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?",
        "author": "Roxanne Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2060",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/18/billionaire-space-race/",
        "text": "The last time we watched rich boys and their toys going mano a mano was back in the aughts, when Microsoft\u2019s Paul Allen and Oracle\u2019s Larry Ellison tussled over who had the biggest private yacht in the world. After Allen commissioned his 416-foot superyacht Octopus, Ellison added an extension to his Rising Sun, bringing it to 452 feet in length. Size matters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the billionaire battle is for space, albeit short, suborbital flights. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, announced he would fly in his Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on July 20. Then Richard Branson decided that he would take an hour-long jaunt on his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity space plane nine days earlier. He came, he floated in zero gravity, he conquered.And it had nothing, nothing to do with ego or any kind of billionaire rivalry, Branson insisted. \u201cI know everyone expects me to say yes,\u201d he said Wednesday on \u201cThe View.\u201d And then he felt compelled to add: \u201cI hate the word \u2018billionaire.\u2019 I started with 200 pounds.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, has bought a ticket on Branson\u2019s rocket, according to news reports.And they can afford it. These three space musketeers bring a collective net worth of almost $400 billion to their out-of-this-world side hustles.To their fans, the promise of expanding our reach beyond this planet is thrilling. For critics, the money poured into private vanity projects is unforgivable when there is so much to be done right here on Earth. This race has only deepened the divide between those who love to see the very rich launch into space and those who wish they would never come back.Branson, worth an estimated $5 billion, got dragged all over social media when he mused after his flight: \u201cImagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space. And they will in turn, I think, inspire us back here on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson failed to note that a ticket on one of Galactic\u2019s flights currently goes for $250,000. More than 600 people have already signed up.Study Finds 70% Of Americans Have Less Than $1,000 Saved To Go To Space https://t.co/yNp8WFuuJK pic.twitter.com/GeZfmjCUQI\u2014 The Onion (@TheOnion) July 12, 2021\n\nWhat is a mere mortal to make of billionaires in space? It depends on how you feel about the Montgolfier brothers, the Wright brothers, NASA, the moon landing, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buzz Lightyear, income equality, tax breaks for the very rich, Space Force and \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201dBut here\u2019s the thing about billionaires: They don\u2019t really care what we think.Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Two years ago, business writer Geoffrey James identified key beliefs of the super-rich in his story \u201cHow to Think Like a Billionaire\u201d for Inc.com.\u201cSelf-made billionaires tend to believe that life is a meritocracy and that they\u2019ve become rich because they\u2019re superior to everyone else,\u201d wrote James. That leads to unlimited confidence: \u201cThe undeniable fact that they can buy just about anything they want becomes conflated into the belief that they can accomplish anything they want.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBillionaires are less concerned about breaking rules, partially because they can buy their way out of trouble but more because they believe every successful entrepreneur ignores conventional wisdom and how they\u2019re perceived in the moment. Their focus is almost always on the future. And what says \u201cfuture\u201d more than rocket science?Branson is the jokester who made a fortune in music, media, trains, planes and, he hopes, space travel with Virgin Galactic, which he founded in 2004. He wants to see people in space because \u2014 well, it\u2019s fun and everyone should get the chance to experience it. The goal is a company that will transport passengers to floating hotels or labs, or on supersonic transcontinental flights.Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new eraBezos, by contrast, has had a lifelong fascination with space. \u201cI never want to dismiss the role that ego, vanity or competitive instincts are playing in all these things,\u201d says Brad Stone, author of \u201cAmazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,\u201d but Bezos grew up reading science fiction and watching space launches with his grandfather, who worked at the Atomic Energy Commission. In his high school valedictorian speech, the future billionaire outlined his vision: \u201cSpace: the final frontier. Meet me there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis admiration for Star Trek\u2019s Captain Picard is well known, but he was more influenced by physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, who foresaw space stations orbiting Earth to house humans as life on Earth becomes untenable. Bezos \u201cis pursuing this as his personal passion, not just to go to space himself, but to build successful businesses in space just like he built a successful business on the Internet,\u201d says Stone.Bezos \u2014 who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post \u2014 was the first of the three to found a rocket company (Blue Origin in 2000). He picked his launch date, July 20, because it\u2019s the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the moon.Stone is still a little surprised Bezos is taking the risk. \u201cIt\u2019s a dramatic gesture and symbolizes the level of belief he has in that team and in the rocket,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s kind of breathtaking that someone who\u2019s worth 200 billion dollars is making himself a guinea pig.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt may be Musk who ultimately wins the billionaire space race.\u201cElon started SpaceX from a very different place than Branson and Bezos and their respective aerospace companies,\u201d says Ashlee Vance, author of \u201cElon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.\u201d \u201cHe had zero interest in space tourism. His interest was always more around deeper exploration of the solar system.\u201d Musk feels, the author adds, \u201clike the human species could be wiped out and that we need a backup plan on Mars or somewhere else.\u201d Bezos shares the same worries but focuses on infrastructure orbiting Earth.SpaceX \u2014 started in 2002, when Musk was worth only $180 million \u2014 is a successful commercial business with more than 100 rocket launches, astronauts sent to the International Space Station, and NASA and military contracts. By 2050, he\u2019d like to create a colony on Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk is game to join a Mars mission when the technology can get him there safely. \u201cI\u2019ve said I want to die on Mars,\u201d he explained in 2013. \u201cJust not on impact.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is supportive of anything that gets people excited about the cosmos. But he also believes that governments are better suited for long-term exploration, priorities and investment.\u201cPrivate enterprise will never lead a space frontier,\u201d Tyson said in a 2015 interview with BGR. \u201c \u2026 It\u2019s expensive. It\u2019s dangerous. You have uncertainty and risks, because you\u2019re dealing with things that haven\u2019t been done before.\u201dLos Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik was more blunt earlier this month: \u201cThe competition to be the first billionaire in space should mark a milestone in the towering vanity of the wealthy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLet\u2019s promptly dispense with the notion that any of these flights will add anything to our scientific knowledge, unless it\u2019s the establishment of a new metric for how long it takes for money to burn a hole in your pocket when you have more than you could possibly need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHiltzik, a self-described science and space geek, argues that Bezos and Musk are misguided in focusing on Plan B for a broken Earth. \u201cAnswers to global warming and disease are still much more accessible than fleeing Earth for space. The dream of interplanetary travel and colonization is the dream of schoolchildren, and it\u2019s time that the billionaires grew up.\u201dStill, if billionaires want to spend their fortunes blasting off into space, is it anyone else\u2019s business? American conservatives and libertarians say no, arguing that private companies create jobs and eliminate wasteful government spending. Liberals are angry and disappointed that billionaires have not spent more of their vast fortunes on terrestrial problems: Hunger, health care, education, and much more.\u201cI 100 percent agree that people who are in positions of wealth should spend most of their money, 90 percent or more of their money, trying to tackle these issues,\u201d Branson told the \u201cToday\u201d show Wednesday, \u201cbut we should also create new industries that can create 800 engineers, and scientists who can create wonderful things that can make space accessible at a fraction of the environmental cost that it\u2019s been in the past.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic said such accessibility \u201cwill be an overall benefit to society. The experience of space travel can hopefully lead to a changed perspective that will benefit the earth.\u201d Blue Origin and SpaceX did not respond to questions about their founders\u2019 investment in space vs. charitable giving.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted a version of what hundreds more expressed: \u201cHere on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor \u2014 but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space! Yes. It\u2019s time to tax the billionaires.\u201dAmerica in one photo pic.twitter.com/NMT61lzIYN\u2014 Michael (@Home_Halfway) July 13, 2021\n\nThe billions that Bezos and Musk pour into space might, under a different tax code, have gone into the federal coffers. Personally, Bezos paid about 1 percent in taxes from 2014 to 2018, and Musk paid just over 3 percent, according to a study released by ProPublica in June.IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report saysAnd if you think critics \u2014 or anything else \u2014 will stop Bezos from strapping onto a rocket into space Tuesday, you don\u2019t know jack. Er, Jeff.\u201cBezos has this conviction that when you do big things, people aren\u2019t going to understand it and you\u2019ve got to remain firm to your long-term vision,\u201d says Stone. \u201cAnd he believes this is a form of philanthropy, that by building this company and helping to usher in, like, a new Space Age, he will be helping humanity generations from now.\u201dTo infinity and beyond! Or maybe just a quick spin above Earth.Read more:An 18-year-old is flying to space with Jeff Bezos after the winner of a $28 million auction defers first flightRichard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? For Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, rocket ships have become the new superyachts. Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?",
        "author": "Roxanne Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The Klunch\u2019s \u2018How to Win a Race War\u2019 is deliberately offensive (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2061",
        "date": "2018-09-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/the-klunchs-how-to-win-a-race-war-is-deliberately-offensive/2018/09/25/3156d1d2-bfa2-11e8-9f4f-a1b7af255aa5_story.html",
        "text": "At one point in \u201cHow to Win a Race War,\u201d two characters escape from galactic devastation on a spacecraft traveling at warp speed. Presumably, the successful getaway renders them giddy.A comparable wave of relief rushes over you as you exit Ian Allen\u2019s play, a primer on \u2014 and parody of \u2014 white-supremacist race-war fiction. Not only is the change of pace gratifying after a three-plus-hour production, it\u2019s a mercy to leave behind the stew of bigotry, cruelty, paranoia and general demented ickiness that this world premiere is apparently spoofing but also necessarily presenting and maybe even implicating us in. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA nervy, timely, deliberately offensive, overlong piece of public-service playwriting produced by the Klunch, \u201cHow to Win a Race War\u201d serves up three tongue-in-cheek potboilers about epic racial conflict \u2014 the aforementioned space fantasia, a tale of a slave rebellion in the antebellum South, and a thriller about a modern-day neo-Nazi militia. All three narratives satirically allude to or depict racism-fueled insults, oppression, torture, rape and killing. One of them imagines an attack with acid-filled supersize water guns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAllen, the playwright and Klunch artistic director, stages what looks like a low-budget production, featuring mostly blunt or jokey performances by an all-male cast. Among the many distancing effects are pop-music interpolations and cursory costuming. For example, Connor Padilla wears a kerchief and a Miller Lite T-shirt in the antebellum playlet \u201cGet the Guns!\u201d to play Lilla, a quiet female slave owned by a rich Virginia widow, Evelyn (the bearded James Radack); before the story ends, Lilla sings a version of Gloria Gaynor\u2019s \u201cI Will Survive.\u201dJust as incongruously, the song \u201cYou\u2019ve Got a Friend\u201d crops up during the \u201cStar Wars\u201d-style adventure \u201cRinse and Repeat!,\u201d about a teacher (Darren Marquardt) and his son (Padilla), who join an Aryan rebellion against a society that oppresses white people. (Anderson Wells is the show\u2019s music director and assistant director.)The humor in \u201cHow to Win a Race War\u201d can be disorienting and thought-provoking. Allen inflates certain racial and identity-related stereotypes like giant balloons, so as to more incisively lambaste the mind-set that traffics in such prejudice. For instance, the militia-themed playlet \u201cKill All Infidels!\u201d depicts shrill, sex-crazed gay men-figures who fall victim to the schemes of the white-supremacist leader (Ned Read, the cast standout).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the case of the amped-up stereotypes, we are glimpsing caricature through the lens of parody \u2014 a dizzying vista, which forces you to think hard about your laughter. Similarly, the cliffhanger storytelling makes this long show watchable \u2014 but periodically you squirm at the thought that you are enjoying the suspense too much. In the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and white nationalists\u2019 hailing of the Trump presidency, the Old South and white-supremacist-terrorism playlets are particularly unnerving.Allen (\u201cLaura Bush Killed a Guy\u201d) has studied white-supremacist fiction. In a New York Times opinion piece this summer, he asserted that books such as \u201cThe Turner Diaries\u201d provide essential insights on our era\u2019s racist far right. If so, \u201cHow to Win a Race War\u201d may help fill a valuable educational function. But I would far rather have seen a documentary that covered this material in objective fashion, with less deliberate comedy and more succinctness.How to Win a Race War, written and directed by Ian Allen; set and lights, David C. Ghatan and William Spencer; props, Spencer; sound, Adrian Fontainebleau; costumes, Mei Chen; assistant costume, Dominic Hardy; video design, Christopher McKenzie; associate artistic director, Kate Debelack. With Brett Abelman, Grant Collins, Tony Greenberg, Matty Griffiths, Craig Houk, Will Low and Matthew Marcus. 3\u00a0hours, 20\u00a0minutes. Tickets: $25-$40. Through Oct.\u00a020 at D.C. Arts Center, 2438 18th St NW. theklunch.com. The play is a primer on and a parody of white supremacy. The Klunch\u2019s \u2018How to Win a Race War\u2019 is deliberately offensive",
        "author": "Celia Wren"
    },
    {
        "title": "Whisky pods, walking pods, living pods... Are we pod people now? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2062",
        "date": "2019-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/whisky-pods-walking-pods-living-pods-are-we-pod-people-now/2019/10/24/3e87870a-f50e-11e9-a285-882a8e386a96_story.html",
        "text": "In early October, Glenlivet, a Scottish whisky distillery, introduced its latest booze-delivery vessel: a transparent, sac-like pouch that dissolves in your mouth. Customers would now be able to drink Scotch as if they were eating a Gusher candy. Glenlivet called them \u201ccapsules,\u201d but everyone knew what they really were: pods.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThey were pods because they looked exactly like Tide Pods, the transparent, saclike pouches of laundry detergent that you\u2019re very much not supposed to eat. Tide Pods, in turn, had been part of a fleet of pod products (poducts?) to enter our atmosphere. iPods, Airpods and podcasts for our ears. Juul pods for our lungs. Tide Pods for our clothes. Pod is the name of several restaurants, and a new social network. The Pod Hotels, a chain of alternative \u201cmicrohotels,\u201d offer hip, cozy, compact spaces in cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Washington.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEdible Water Pods Could Replace Billions of Plastic Bottles Per Year,\u201d declared the headline of a 2018 article in E: The Environmental Magazine. Engineers hope self-driving \u201cpods\u201d \u2014 basically, slower shuttle vans piloted by machines \u2014 will reshape city roads. \u201cPod\u201d housing \u2014 basically, dorms for adults \u2014 has been proposed as a solution to housing crises in expensive cities where a growing number of people can\u2019t afford to live in normal homes.Are pods the future?Is the WalkingPod, which is kind of like a wearable tent, the future? Your feet are on the ground. There are zip-uppable windows for your face, arms and torso. Otherwise you are encased in plastic, like leftover food.\u201cWhen I think of a pod, I think of personal space,\u201d said Rick Pescovitz, the CEO of Under the Weather, the sporting-goods company responsible for this particular pod. \u201cWith outdoor and even indoor living, younger people want to have a smaller footprint and help the environment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPescovitz admits the WalkingPod is \u201calmost a joke-type item.\u201d But he also says it\u2019s great for sanitation workers, street vendors, ticket-takers, sports spectators, security guards, people who work on oil tankers.\u2009.\u2009. . And his company sells other pods, too \u2014 such as the StadiumPod, which is designed for bleacher-sitters.Maybe calling something a \u201cpod\u201d is just a marketing gimmick. Because what do person-sized tents have to do with thumb-size capsules full of laundry detergent, or whisky? What is the quality that makes all these things \u201cpods\u201d?\u201cIt comes from the shape that the material takes,\u201d said Rodrigo Garc\u00eda Gonz\u00e1lez, the co-founder and co-CEO of Notpla, which makes those edible membranes (made of seaweed, by the way) for Glenlivet\u2019s whisky pods.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s like a cocoon, a sleeping cocoon,\u201d said Topi Piispanen, the vice president of the Finnish company GoSleep, which sells (you guessed it!) sleeping pods. Also, privacy pods, which can function as a workspace or a phone booth. \u201cIt does resemble an egg shape,\u201d said Piispanen. \u201cThe shape represents new life. With our pods, you can revitalize yourself.\u201dThe Conker isn\u2019t exactly an egg shape, but it is also a pod \u2014 a living pod. It\u2019s a big, soccer ball-looking enclosure with heated floors and power sockets.\u201cThe strongest three-dimensional shape in the universe is a ball,\u201d says Jag Virdie, director at Conker Living and the mind behind the Conker. \u201cThere\u2019s a beautiful constant to it. It\u2019s a modular, future structure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA future structure. That might be the best way to understand why we are surrounded by things called pods: We live in the future now.Or, maybe not yet. Chances are you haven\u2019t come across one of these pods. They\u2019re niche products (though that hasn\u2019t stopped Under the Weather from selling 200,000 pods of various kinds). All the bells and whistles can make pods quite expensive, too. Some go for tens of thousands of dollars. Conker\u2019s living pods haven\u2019t even touched down in the United States yet (they\u2019re coming soon).The core ideas of pods \u2014 efficiency, mobility, replicability \u2014 have been central to decades-old futurist movements in architecture and design. Postwar Japan had the Metabolists, best known for the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. The towers hold 140 capsules that work as living or office spaces and can be detached or combined with others. They embodied a utopian idea of being able to plug in and out, making buildings more organic, said Chandler Ahrens, an associate professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHistorical parallels pop up the further you dig. Pescovitz\u2019s tentlike WalkingPod resembles the transparent Suitaloon bubble Michael Webb designed in 1967. The Conker living pod is a spiritual successor of the flying-saucer-shaped Futuro houses designed by Matti Suuronen.\u201cYou wonder what\u2019s inside of them,\u201d said Stephen Wallenfels, a Washington-based sci-fi writer and author of the 2009 novel \u201cPOD.\u201d \u201cAre they helpful or dangerous? For me, pods represent the unknown.\u201d\u201cOpen the pod bay doors, HAL,\u201d said Dr. David Bowman to his spaceship\u2019s intelligent computer system in \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d and pods are so often part of spaceship architecture. Escape pods. Hibernation pods. Medical pods. And it\u2019s not always humans who were using pods to help traverse the ocean of space and colonize new worlds. See: the \u201cpod people\u201d from \u201cInvasion of the Body Snatchers.\u201dIt was the pod bay doors in \u201c2001: A Space Oddyssey\u201d that inspired Vinnie Chieco, now a freelance writer and brand strategist, to come up with the iPod name for Apple\u2019s mp3 player when he worked on the small team brainstorming names for the device in 2001.It was a handheld, portable gadget that contained smaller things. It was an all-white device, similar to the interior of Dr. Bowman\u2019s ship. It had to connect to a computer to charge and download songs. You could take it with you, but it had to return to the mother ship.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLike a lot of spaceships in sci-fi, you could get into pods that would detach and reattach,\u201d Chieco said. \u201cAnd I thought, Wow. That works so well.\u201dNot everybody thought so, at first. \u201cAre you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?\u201d one Macrumors forum user of the iPod when it was announced. (Imagine if they had Twitter.)Glenlivet has faced similar skepticism about its new whisky pods \u2014 sorry, capsules. But company officials are optimistic. \u201cWe celebrate breaking conventions,\u201d says Miriam Eceolaza, director of Glenlivet. This month, during London Cocktail Week, she says, \u201cPeople were queuing for two hours to try the capsules.\u201dCorporate hype. Knee-jerk skepticism. Enthusiastic Brits quaffing scotch and seaweed. Welcome to the future, please enjoy your pods. If pods are the future, we\u2019ve arrived. Whisky pods, walking pods, living pods... Are we pod people now?",
        "author": "Travis DeShong"
    },
    {
        "title": "After months in lockdown, we need some new memories. But can you \u2018make\u2019 them? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2063",
        "date": "2021-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/07/25/making-memories-summer-vacation/",
        "text": "If 2020 was unforgettable for all the wrong reasons, then the pressure is on to make 2021 unforgettable for the right ones. We want to get out, have fun, and, of course, \u201cmake memories,\u201d in the words of advertisers and inspirational wooden signs in gift shops everywhere: the milestone birthday party, the postponed wedding, that special family vacation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThese memories will become, we hope, stories we will tell and retell, cherished flashbacks that will become part of our personal history. Maybe we\u2019ll splurge a little (life is too short to drink cheap wine, isn\u2019t it?) or finally book that round-the-world cruise. After the year we\u2019ve all had, the bucket list just got longer, and companies are eager to stoke that yearning with promises of \u201cmaking\u201d magical moments and life-changing experiences.But memory is a tricky thing. What we expect to remember and what we actually remember don\u2019t always match. Two people in the same place at the same time can have very different feelings and very different recollections. Or you plan, say, the perfect wedding and what everyone remembers is that the best man broke his leg on the dance floor. The best laid plans of moms and men often go awry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCan you make memories? The answer is \u2026 maybe.It all starts in the brain, which decides what to keep and what to discard using a process called \u201cencoding,\u201d where chemical reactions link different networks. Important facts are referred to as \u201csemantic\u201d memory; the vivid stories \u2014 the who, what, and when \u2014 are called \u201cepisodic memory.\u201d\u201cIf you\u2019re having a good time, there are regions of the brain that will be more active, like the prefrontal cortex, during both the encoding of that memory and also trying to retrieve all that memory later,\u201d says Scott Slotnick, a professor at Boston College and author of \u201cCognitive Neuroscience of Memory.\u201dThere\u2019s a specific kind of episodic memory called an autobiographical memory \u2014 a formative moment that becomes central to our sense of self. The brain gives priority to emotions, good and bad. Sensory triggers (sights, smells, sounds) can cause what is known as \u201cinvoluntary memory\u201d \u2014 for example, the madeleines in Marcel Proust\u2019s \u201cRemembrance of Things Past.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut there are other ways to boost the chances that the carefully planned event will make the memory book: focus and repetition.\u201cIf you\u2019re paying attention to a sunset or a great experience at Disneyland, then the brain is going to be more active,\u201d says Slotnick. \u201cSo then you\u2019re going to be more likely to sort of encode those as a good memory. If somebody is not paying attention to the experience \u2014 they\u2019re on their smartphone or distracted \u2014 they\u2019re not going to form those memories.\u201dAnd here\u2019s another trick: a good night\u2019s rest.\u201cSleep is also really important for laying down solid memory of the events that occurred the day before,\u201d says Slotnick. It\u2019s not the lighter state when we dream, but the deeper sleep where long-term memories are pruned or strengthened.Story continues below advertisementThere\u2019s a growing scientific consensus that we change a memory in every retelling, omitting and adding details until the original experience is significantly transformed. That doesn\u2019t stop people from repeating them, and memories become family history.Advertisement\u201cOne of the things that\u2019s important is that memory is kind of social exchange,\u201d says Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University. Traditionally, \u201cpart of a female role is creating social cohesion, family cohesion \u2014 it\u2019s pretty well-known that families with sisters, when the parents die, end up more cohesive than families with just brothers. The emotional work of women is very often actually creating and sharing these sort of memories.\u201dBut all the parents who are convinced that their children will have lifelong memories of that very special trip or birthday party? Not so fast.Story continues below advertisementInfants and toddlers are not going to have distinct, individual memories, she says. Children have a harder time remembering what they don\u2019t understand and don\u2019t really begin to create episodic memories until about 8 years old. What kids do remember is anything unexpected \u2014 say, no cake at a birthday party or running into a teacher outside the classroom.Which means, she says, that parents should cut themselves some slack. \u201cKids are as likely to remember a store-bought birthday cake as one lovingly homemade,\u201d she says, adding: \u201cAs with most things, I think \u2018relax\u2019 is the message.\u201dWhen asked what they would grab if their house was on fire, people list people, pets, phones and then old family photographs, the most tangible manifestation of memories. Photos trigger our brains to remember not just the moment captured on film, but the stories behind the image. Because personal photos are almost always taken at social gatherings, the memories tend to skew positive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScrapbooking \u2014 memories on steroids \u2014 enjoyed a decade of glory before everyone had a cellphone and therefore a personal, portable collection of photos. And now the irony: Having so many photos on our phones makes it harder to distinguish the memorable from the mundane.How to organize your travel photosBut the promise of creating special moments is a constant in advertising. You can \u2014 for $32 \u2014 score a sign explaining your errant housekeeping: \u201cPlease Excuse The Mess, Our Children Are Making Memories.\u201dThe trick is convincing consumers that a car, food or vacation will become part of their personal narrative. Subaru scored big with its 2015 \u201cMaking Memories\u201d commercial: A dad cleans out his old car while replaying highlights of his daughter\u2019s childhood, then tosses her the keys. The tagline? \u201cYou can pass down a Subaru Forrester, but you get to keep the memories.\u201d Lexus wants you to believe in \u201ca December to remember,\u201d with the car front and center in special family moments. And McCormick built an ad in its \u201cMaking Memories\u201d series around the idea that a properly spiced lasagna will become a cherished family tradition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut nowhere is the lure of memory-making as pervasive as it is in the travel industry. Carnival Cruise Lines used family photos for its \u201cMoments That Matter\u201d campaign; the Belle of Louisville, the oldest continuously operating river steamboat, introduced its \u201cMaking Memories Since 1914\u201d campaign this spring.And, of course, the mouse that roared: Is there any company better than Disney at tugging our heartstrings while picking our pockets? In 2011, it launched \u201cLet the Memories Begin,\u201d a three-year promotion using customer photos and videos in television and print ads. The memories start when the kids find out they\u2019re going to Disney World and last, according to the ads, \u201ca lifetime.\u201d Maybe for the parents, who pay thousands of dollars for the trip; what kids remember might be the $17.99 mouse ears.The hope is that these moments might even become touchstones of nostalgia, what Don Draper in \u201cMad Men\u201d called \u201ca twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.\u201d In an iconic scene of the Season 1 finale, the legendary advertising executive pitches his campaign for a Kodak Carousel slide projector. \u201cThis device isn\u2019t a spaceship, it\u2019s a time machine,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt takes us to a place where we ache to go again. To a place where we know we are loved.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so we come full circle. Google\u2019s 2020 Super Bowl ad was a sentimental tear-jerker about the longing to hold on to the good times. The commercial features a voice-over by an older man using his Google Assistant to store specific memories of his beloved late wife. The Assistant replies, \u201cOkay, I\u2019ll remember that.\u201dRemembrance of Things Past, 2.0.Read more:Aromas can evoke beloved journeys \u2014 or voyages not yet takenGo ahead and post your old travel photos. Experts say it can improve your mood. Advertisers and inspirational wooden signs love to talk about \u201cmaking memories.\u201d Your brain doesn't always cooperate. After months in lockdown, we need some new memories. But can you \u2018make\u2019 them?",
        "author": "Roxanne Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Horizons passes halfway between Pluto and next stop at edge of solar system (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2064",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/new-horizons-pass-halfway-mark-between-pluto-and-solar-system-outer-reaches/2017/04/05/dce3faf2-1a12-11e7-bcc2-7d1a0973e7b2_story.html",
        "text": " Spacecraft headed 466 million miles farther from Earth to object in Kuiper belt. New Horizons passes halfway mark between Pluto and next stop at edge of solar system",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists say alien life may be closer than we think \u2014 on an icy moon of Saturn (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2065",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/scientists-say-alien-life-may-be-closer-than-we-think--on-an-icy-moon-of-saturn/2017/04/13/ec97c756-2086-11e7-be2a-3a1fb24d4671_story.html",
        "text": " A NASA spacecraft has found favorable conditions for life, but more research is needed. Scientists say alien life may be closer than we think \u2014 on an icy moon of Saturn",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA spacecraft will head straight for the sun \u2014 farther than any probe before it (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2066",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/a-nasa-spacecraft-will-head-straight-for-the-sun--farther-than-any-probe-before-it/2017/06/01/44101fa0-46df-11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html",
        "text": " The mission aims to better understand how stars like ours work. A NASA spacecraft will head straight for the sun \u2014 farther than any probe before it",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini spacecraft burns up above Saturn, ending 20-year mission (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2067",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/cassini-spacecraft-burns-up-above-saturn-ending-13-year-mission/2017/09/15/0e12d31e-9a1f-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html",
        "text": " NASA collected more than 450,000 images as craft journeyed to and around the ringed planet. Cassini spacecraft burns up above Saturn, ending 20-year mission",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space tourism will surely be a blast, but can it also improve life on Earth? (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2068",
        "date": "2017-11-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/space-tourism-will-surely-be-a-blast-but-can-it-also-improve-life-on-earth/2017/11/28/c9abfa40-c3f2-11e7-aae0-cb18a8c29c65_story.html",
        "text": " One woman\u2019s experience floating in zero gravity offers a glimpse into how space travel might reshape society. Space tourism will surely be a blast, but can it also improve life on Earth?",
        "author": "Leigh Ann Henion"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut encourages kids to flip for STEM (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2069",
        "date": "2017-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/astronaut-links-up-with-kids-at-air-and-space-museum-to-share-his-love-of-science/2017/10/09/9481edb6-a7af-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html",
        "text": " Space station commander Randy Bresnik beams in to Air and Space Museum to share love of science. Astronaut encourages kids to flip for STEM",
        "author": "Marylou Tousignant"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts splash down off coast of Florida at the end of SpaceX mission (WP: Lifestyle) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2070",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/astronauts-splash-down-off-coast-of-florida-at-the-end-of-spacex-mission/2020/08/02/d3943fae-d1c3-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab_gallery.html",
        "text": " Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley make successful return from the International Space Station. Astronauts splash down off coast of Florida at the end of SpaceX mission",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | From Prince George\u2019s County to a Nobel Peace Prize (WP: Local Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2071",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/02/prince-georges-county-nobel-peace-prize/",
        "text": "Janice Lynch Schuster is a freelance writer who lives in Riva.Last month, when the Nobel Peace Prize was announced, my heart burst with pride for my youngest cousin, 41-year-old Colin Hourihan, who has worked at the World Food Programme (WFP) for most of his professional career. I\u2019d been up since before dawn, unsuccessfully willing away chronic insomnia, tracking the news and knitting a hat for a soon-to-be born baby in Ohio. I\u2019d been trying to wean myself from the news, the barrage of it all overwhelming my senses, leaving me teetering with it all most days. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut this news, my cousin, part of a Nobel Peace Prize-winning team? This could hardly be real. I promptly messaged Colin and, over the course of the weekend, we had a sustained conversation, both by text and voice, about his work, his organization\u2019s role in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the significance of the Nobel Peace Prize in his life and the lives of his colleagues around the world and, most compelling, the people they serve.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor if the work of a humanitarian is hard, challenging and full of sacrifice and danger, the work of the people they serve is magnitudes harder, more challenging and full of sacrifices and dangers for which they did not sign up. Colin and others like him agree to this work, often study for years to be prepared for it and take its successes and failures in stride, as if they\u2019d done something as challenging as launching a spaceship and as routine as making dinner.I thought myself lucky when he was born in 1979, toward the end of my senior year in high school at Greenbelt\u2019s Eleanor Roosevelt High School. Because my aunt and uncle lived in Greenbelt, I was one of the beautiful new baby\u2019s preferred babysitters. Being in charge of a newborn was a great reminder why I was too young to have one; a decade later, my delightful cousin, who by then had lived in the Philippines, El Salvador and Guatemala because of my uncle\u2019s work, charmed my husband and me so much that we decided to start a family.I don\u2019t recall feeling any particular concern about Colin\u2019s work or his career until a trip he made to Afghanistan in 2009. \u201cDon\u2019t worry, Jan,\u201d he told me. \u201cI stay in the guest house where Angelina Jolie stays when she\u2019s in Kabul. Nothing will happen to us.\u201d He might have been trying to reassure his older cousins and my mother, his aunt, but a few months later an armed group attacked a similar house, killing many of the aid workers who were in it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOccasionally over the years, I would hear where Colin was working: On the Libyan border with Egypt during the Arab Spring. After the Category 5 hurricane in the Philippines in 2013. In South Sudan in preparation for the wet season, when much of the country is cut off. In Cox\u2019s Bazar, Bangladesh, helping to build the largest refugee camp in the world. In the Bahamas, after last fall\u2019s devastating hurricane. He was seldom in one place for long, but, with a home base in Rome, it sounded more glamorous than it really is. It is a life.Over the years, his positions rotated. He now is on the road a bit less as he works with a team coordinating the delivery of critical medical items around the world. The need is escalating because of the coronavirus pandemic, and the work is achieved through the tireless efforts of various humanitarian and medical organizations, militaries and others around the world. He tells (to me) hair-raising stories of the months he spent in Bangladesh, working desperately with teammates to build what would become the refugee camp for the Rohingya people who have been driven from that country. Today, more than 740,000 people live in the refugee camp. Two of his colleagues, who spent many of those months with him in what he calls an \u201coffice in a box,\" perished in March 2019 in the Boeing 737 crash in Ethiopia that killed more than 20 people affiliated with the United Nations, including seven from WFP.Colin tells me that in addition to the exhilaration that he and his colleagues feel at having won this prestigious award, there is also a sense of disbelief and unworthiness. There are so many people working so hard around the world to help vulnerable people. Why choose the WFP?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPerhaps because, as the Nobel Committee noted in making the award, it does the challenging work of trying to end the use of \u201chunger as a weapon of war.\u201d So many ordinary things are weaponized that those of us who live securely do not know or see what others around the world endure \u2014 or die trying to endure. And so in winning the Nobel, WFP has a chance to educate, inspire and, yes, humble us. I certainly feel humbled knowing that the little boy I so adored has become a man I can only try to emulate. In 2019, WFP provided food assistance to nearly 100 million people in the more than 80 countries where it works. Eighty percent of WFP resources were focused on people living in conflict environments. By 2030, it is estimated that nearly half of the global poor will be living in fragile and conflict-affected situations.Prince George\u2019s County, where I grew up, has produced its share of basketball phenoms and politicians and geniuses (witness the founders of Google, one of whom went to Roosevelt, too). But peacemakers? We surely can count many of those in the ranks of former and current Peace Corps workers and other humanitarians. And a Nobel Peace Prize winner? I will have to do some research on that. Lesson learned: When I feel overwhelmed reading about the day\u2019s news, I remember that millions of people around the world have no say in living through it.Watch Opinions videos:Actor John Lithgow, author of the 'Trumpty Dumpty' poetry books, explains how he got mean \u2014 and empathetic \u2014 to write about the \"despotic age\" of Trump. (The Washington Post)Read more:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s: Our people are hungry. We need a leader who will feed them.David M. Beasley: Covid-19 could detonate a \u2018hunger pandemic.\u2019 With millions at risk, the world must act.Mark Leon Goldberg: Why the WHO deserves the Nobel Peace PrizeJos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s: How we\u2019ve served 1 million meals to Hurricane Dorian survivors in the BahamasChristine Emba: Foreign aid as a cash-only transaction? It\u2019s worth a try. When I feel overwhelmed reading about the day\u2019s news, I must remember that millions of people around the world have no say in living through it. Opinion: From Prince George\u2019s County to a Nobel Peace Prize",
        "author": "Janice Lynch Schuster"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Flooding is an existential threat to the Mall (WP: Local Opinions) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2072",
        "date": "2019-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/local-opinions/flooding-is-an-existential-threat-to-the-mall/2019/08/23/95c7defe-af20-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html",
        "text": "Albert H. Small is the originator of the National Mall Underground idea and a member of the National Mall Coalition board. Arthur Cotton Moore is the architect of the National Mall Underground concept and vice chair of the National Mall Coalition board. Judy Scott Feldman is chair of the National Mall Coalition board. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightOn July 8, the District experienced torrential rains and flash flooding that in a matter of minutes overflowed storm sewers, trapped people in cars and created havoc throughout the region. News photos flashed around the country, showing cars sloshing through floodwaters at Constitution Avenue at 15th Street, in full view of the Washington Monument and the White House, and revealed the shocking vulnerability of the nation\u2019s capital and the Mall.It was shocking, but it was not a surprise.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecent studies by the University of Maryland, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Park Service predict that urban flooding throughout the country will cause widespread inundation of heavily populated neighborhoods and our national parks. By 2050, the Mall museums and other vital parts of our American heritage could be underwater during a Category 3 hurricane from the combined impact of a rising Potomac River and runoff from heavy rains.Although the deployment on July 8 of new floodgates at the National Archives successfully protected our nation\u2019s treasures there, this is not a comprehensive solution. In fact, putting gates around all susceptible buildings along Constitution Avenue could force floodwaters north, toward Pennsylvania Avenue and downtown. That is not a desirable outcome, to say the least.We\u2019ve been here before. In June 2006, after three consecutive days of heavy rain, stormwater\n runoff from city streets at higher elevations flooded Smithsonian museums, the National Archives and other nearby buildings. An interagency, intergovernmental panel studied that disaster, predicted more frequent and more intense storms in coming years and considered several comprehensive solutions. Modest measures have been instituted, including the Archives floodgates. (The Park Service\u2019s 17th Street levee is intended to prevent Potomac River flooding, not stormwater flooding.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe are a long way from safeguarding one of the nation\u2019s most iconic places: the Mall and the thriving tourism industry that bolsters our city\u2019s and the region\u2019s economic vitality.There is a solution: The nonprofit National Mall Coalition has proposed an underground structure beneath the vast open space of the Mall, between the Ninth and 12th street tunnels. The National Mall Underground would function as a storm-water reservoir, absorbing 30 million gallons of floodwater \u2014 basically a 200-year-flood event such as occurred in 2006.This innovative proposal would be more than an empty box below ground, awaiting the next storm. The lower level of this multipurpose facility, when not in use as a reservoir, would provide parking for 150 tour buses, which have few places to go after discharging their passengers. The upper level, designed not to flood, would include car parking for tourists and a visitors\u2019 center with amenities including restrooms and food service.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOur coalition has briefed the District government, federal agencies, civic groups and other interested parties. One unexpected fruit of that coordination was a design modification to include a clean-energy component: a field of geothermal wells beneath the slab floor that would help cool nearby public buildings.We engaged the Army Corps of Engineers, supported by a unanimous resolution of the D.C. Council, to review the proposal. Though additional studies are warranted to turn the concept into a shovel-ready project, the Corps of Engineers\u2019 report concluded that flood risk \u201ccould be reduced significantly during a flood event by implementation of the Underground.\u201d It stated that \u201crevenue potential from parking fees and water credits may offer self-financing opportunities that attracts a public-private partnership.\u201dAnd here \u2014 the matter of funding \u2014 is where the National Mall Underground would provide additional benefits. Unlike other solutions that require public funding and political will that too often never materialize, the Underground could be built with private financing, the cost recovered over time from parking fees.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot everyone is on board. Some oppose more parking under any circumstances, despite the fact that tourist buses are ever-present. Others, including the Park Service, have different priorities or claim such a structure doesn\u2019t fit with their plans for the Mall. Ultimately, Congress \u2014 key members have been briefed on this project \u2014 is crucial to final approval.The challenge isn\u2019t going away. The District\u2019s emphasis on resiliency, especially green infrastructure that can absorb rain and ameliorate its impact, is a welcome priority. But we need more. Which is why the National Mall Underground deserves serious consideration by everyone who has the Mall\u2019s and the city\u2019s future well-being in mind.If someone has a better solution, then speak up, the sooner, the better. Let\u2019s get on with it, lest we lose this iconic stage for American democracy, the Mall.Read more:Chant\u00e9 Coleman: After Ellicott City, good news for the environmentHammad Atassi: A smart plan for protecting D.C. from the coming stormThe Post\u2019s View: Sea-level rise could be even worse than we\u2019ve been led to expect But we have a plan to prevent catastrophe. Opinion: Flooding is an existential threat to the Mall",
        "author": "Albert H. Small"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda. (WP: Made by History) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2073",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/04/trump-hyped-space-force-it-could-really-boost-bidens-agenda/",
        "text": "Undoing much of what President Trump has done will only require a stroke of Joe Biden\u2019s pen, since it was achieved by executive order. But one of Trump\u2019s more maligned ideas will prove more complicated to address. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, was established in 2019 to ensure \u201cAmerican superiority in space.\u201d True to form, Trump hyped the move as \u201cbig and important.\u201d It was certainly pricey: Space Force\u2019s yearly budget is around $15 billion. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDemocrats harshly criticized Space Force. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired astronaut, dismissed it as a \u201cdumb idea,\u201d explaining that the Air Force was already effectively protecting U.S. interests in space. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, called for its multibillion-dollar budget to be spent on health care rather than on the militarization of the Milky Way.Even entertainers got in on the act. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that Space Force sounded like the title of a Michael Bay blockbuster. Netflix made an actual show lampooning it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet it\u2019s unlikely that Biden will ax Space Force, as liberals are demanding. For one thing, a president has never abolished a branch of the military. For another, doing so requires a vote in Congress. And Republicans will be hard pressed to go along, wary of Trump\u2019s continued influence within their party.But that doesn\u2019t mean Space Force cannot become a tool for promoting Biden\u2019s agenda.Biden wants to sweep aside Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d ethos and restore U.S. leadership of the international community. The president-elect has been clear: His victory heralds America\u2019s return \u201cat the head of the table.\u201d And Space Force can be an integral part of that project, if Biden simply follows the lead of another Democratic president: John F. Kennedy.Story continues below advertisementWhen Americans think of Kennedy and the space program, they probably recall his 1962 speech pledging to put a man on the moon. For Kennedy, achieving this goal was a matter of national excellence. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon \u2026 not because [it\u2019s] easy, but because [it\u2019s] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills \u2026 we intend to win.\u201dAdvertisementAnd winning was key. It was the height of the Cold War, and the American-Soviet rivalry extended to a hair-raising space race. More than a year before, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth, becoming the first man ever to travel to space. The ball was now in the Americans\u2019 court. Top that \u2014 or let the U.S.S.R. declare victory in the space race. That\u2019s why the Kennedy administration targeted the moon.It also made for good politics at home. The Apollo program fit squarely with the young president\u2019s image as a swashbuckling leader. After all, Kennedy had made \u201cthe New Frontier\u201d the slogan of his presidential campaign \u2014 and what farther frontier was there than space?Story continues below advertisementKennedy\u2019s 1962 moon speech is one of the lasting memories of the Apollo program. And yet, it\u2019s not the most powerful \u2014 or most relevant \u2014 speech the president gave about space.AdvertisementOne year later, Kennedy revealed in an address to the United Nations that he had rethought the goal of America\u2019s space program. Gone from the agenda was winning. The president now told his fellow world leaders that the United States and the Soviet Union should go to the moon together. \u201cWhy \u2026 should man\u2019s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?\u201d Instead, \u201cthe representatives of all of our countries\u201d should be part of a joint lunar mission.This abrupt reversal of course reflected Kennedy\u2019s ambition to \u201cmove the world to a just and lasting peace,\u201d a byproduct of the harrowing 1962 Cuban missile crisis. While Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had narrowly averted nuclear Armageddon, the sobering moment had been an awakening for the president. Kennedy emerged a changed man, looking to bury the hatchet with the Soviet adversary, understanding that brinkmanship endangered humanity.Story continues below advertisementA nuclear test ban treaty with the U.S.S.R. had been the immediate consequence. But now Kennedy wanted to ride the momentum. He called for, among other things, the creation of a world center to \u201cwarn of epidemics and the adverse effects of certain drugs,\u201d \u201ca worldwide program of conservation\u201d to protect the environment and curb industrial pollution and \u201ca worldwide program of farm productivity and food distribution \u2026 [to] give every child the food he needs.\u201dAdvertisementBut it was the collective lunar mission that most powerfully symbolized Kennedy\u2019s internationalism. One need only imagine the message of unity sent to people around the globe if, at the apex of the Cold War, the flags of all the world\u2019s countries had been planted on the moon. It would be a point of pride for every human being, regardless of their country of origin.By getting Western and Eastern blocs to join forces on a common endeavor, Kennedy hoped to drastically reduce Cold War tensions. It was also his way of fostering an inclusive peace, the kind that in his words was not a \u201cPax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,\u201d but instead \u201cenables men and nations to grow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat, of course, never happened. Kennedy was killed two months after his U.N. speech. Immediately thereafter, the Apollo program became indelibly associated with the slain president\u2019s legacy. Indeed, only a week after Kennedy\u2019s death, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, renamed Cape Canaveral \u2014 where NASA launched its spacecrafts from \u2014 Cape Kennedy. Johnson also vowed to make good on his predecessor\u2019s promise to put an American on the moon.AdvertisementForgotten was Kennedy\u2019s more recent plea for a lunar expedition with the Soviets. Everyone instead remembered the speech he had given a year before which had made the nation dream.The United States eventually reached the moon in 1969. Although it represented a giant leap for mankind, it was a decidedly American achievement.Story continues below advertisementIn the 21st century, space will be once again at the heart of global affairs. The world\u2019s two richest men are already setting the trend. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is planning human colonies on Mars by 2050. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is working on massively reducing the cost of space travel. (The Amazon chief executive owns The Washington Post.) That would be a game-changer, enabling not only space tourism, but also other ventures such as asteroid mining \u2014 predicted to be a trillion-dollar industry. As Bezos says, we are \u201con the edge of a golden age of space exploration\u201d that will see \u201ca dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAdvertisementBut with opportunity comes risk. Another space race is underway. This time it could have grave consequences. Experts are warning it could lead to all-out war.China plans to become an \u201caerospace power\u201d and created its own space force in 2015, following Russia. Since then, Japan has also gotten itself a space force. And the United Kingdom is setting up its own, after calling Chinese and Russian actions in space \u201cirresponsible.\u201d Other countries will soon join this explosive space race.Story continues below advertisementNow is an urgent time to revive Kennedy\u2019s vision of a partnership between nations in space. Biden could dedicate Space Force to this very ideal. Under his command, it could take the lead in promoting peacemaking missions with other space forces, as well as forging economic ties \u2014 all to build a stable space community. Doing so would fulfill Biden\u2019s goal of resuming American leadership in the world while preventing future catastrophe.The stakes are high. Biden must ensure that in the conquest of space, as Kennedy put it, \u201call the world can be a winner.\u201d The new branch of the military is perfect for advancing Biden\u2019s international vision. Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda.",
        "author": "Theo Zenou"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda. (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2074",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/04/trump-hyped-space-force-it-could-really-boost-bidens-agenda/",
        "text": "Undoing much of what President Trump has done will only require a stroke of Joe Biden\u2019s pen, since it was achieved by executive order. But one of Trump\u2019s more maligned ideas will prove more complicated to address. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, was established in 2019 to ensure \u201cAmerican superiority in space.\u201d True to form, Trump hyped the move as \u201cbig and important.\u201d It was certainly pricey: Space Force\u2019s yearly budget is around $15 billion. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDemocrats harshly criticized Space Force. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired astronaut, dismissed it as a \u201cdumb idea,\u201d explaining that the Air Force was already effectively protecting U.S. interests in space. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, called for its multibillion-dollar budget to be spent on health care rather than on the militarization of the Milky Way.Even entertainers got in on the act. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that Space Force sounded like the title of a Michael Bay blockbuster. Netflix made an actual show lampooning it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet it\u2019s unlikely that Biden will ax Space Force, as liberals are demanding. For one thing, a president has never abolished a branch of the military. For another, doing so requires a vote in Congress. And Republicans will be hard pressed to go along, wary of Trump\u2019s continued influence within their party.But that doesn\u2019t mean Space Force cannot become a tool for promoting Biden\u2019s agenda.Biden wants to sweep aside Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d ethos and restore U.S. leadership of the international community. The president-elect has been clear: His victory heralds America\u2019s return \u201cat the head of the table.\u201d And Space Force can be an integral part of that project, if Biden simply follows the lead of another Democratic president: John F. Kennedy.Story continues below advertisementWhen Americans think of Kennedy and the space program, they probably recall his 1962 speech pledging to put a man on the moon. For Kennedy, achieving this goal was a matter of national excellence. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon \u2026 not because [it\u2019s] easy, but because [it\u2019s] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills \u2026 we intend to win.\u201dAdvertisementAnd winning was key. It was the height of the Cold War, and the American-Soviet rivalry extended to a hair-raising space race. More than a year before, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth, becoming the first man ever to travel to space. The ball was now in the Americans\u2019 court. Top that \u2014 or let the U.S.S.R. declare victory in the space race. That\u2019s why the Kennedy administration targeted the moon.It also made for good politics at home. The Apollo program fit squarely with the young president\u2019s image as a swashbuckling leader. After all, Kennedy had made \u201cthe New Frontier\u201d the slogan of his presidential campaign \u2014 and what farther frontier was there than space?Story continues below advertisementKennedy\u2019s 1962 moon speech is one of the lasting memories of the Apollo program. And yet, it\u2019s not the most powerful \u2014 or most relevant \u2014 speech the president gave about space.AdvertisementOne year later, Kennedy revealed in an address to the United Nations that he had rethought the goal of America\u2019s space program. Gone from the agenda was winning. The president now told his fellow world leaders that the United States and the Soviet Union should go to the moon together. \u201cWhy \u2026 should man\u2019s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?\u201d Instead, \u201cthe representatives of all of our countries\u201d should be part of a joint lunar mission.This abrupt reversal of course reflected Kennedy\u2019s ambition to \u201cmove the world to a just and lasting peace,\u201d a byproduct of the harrowing 1962 Cuban missile crisis. While Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had narrowly averted nuclear Armageddon, the sobering moment had been an awakening for the president. Kennedy emerged a changed man, looking to bury the hatchet with the Soviet adversary, understanding that brinkmanship endangered humanity.Story continues below advertisementA nuclear test ban treaty with the U.S.S.R. had been the immediate consequence. But now Kennedy wanted to ride the momentum. He called for, among other things, the creation of a world center to \u201cwarn of epidemics and the adverse effects of certain drugs,\u201d \u201ca worldwide program of conservation\u201d to protect the environment and curb industrial pollution and \u201ca worldwide program of farm productivity and food distribution \u2026 [to] give every child the food he needs.\u201dAdvertisementBut it was the collective lunar mission that most powerfully symbolized Kennedy\u2019s internationalism. One need only imagine the message of unity sent to people around the globe if, at the apex of the Cold War, the flags of all the world\u2019s countries had been planted on the moon. It would be a point of pride for every human being, regardless of their country of origin.By getting Western and Eastern blocs to join forces on a common endeavor, Kennedy hoped to drastically reduce Cold War tensions. It was also his way of fostering an inclusive peace, the kind that in his words was not a \u201cPax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,\u201d but instead \u201cenables men and nations to grow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat, of course, never happened. Kennedy was killed two months after his U.N. speech. Immediately thereafter, the Apollo program became indelibly associated with the slain president\u2019s legacy. Indeed, only a week after Kennedy\u2019s death, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, renamed Cape Canaveral \u2014 where NASA launched its spacecrafts from \u2014 Cape Kennedy. Johnson also vowed to make good on his predecessor\u2019s promise to put an American on the moon.AdvertisementForgotten was Kennedy\u2019s more recent plea for a lunar expedition with the Soviets. Everyone instead remembered the speech he had given a year before which had made the nation dream.The United States eventually reached the moon in 1969. Although it represented a giant leap for mankind, it was a decidedly American achievement.Story continues below advertisementIn the 21st century, space will be once again at the heart of global affairs. The world\u2019s two richest men are already setting the trend. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is planning human colonies on Mars by 2050. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is working on massively reducing the cost of space travel. (The Amazon chief executive owns The Washington Post.) That would be a game-changer, enabling not only space tourism, but also other ventures such as asteroid mining \u2014 predicted to be a trillion-dollar industry. As Bezos says, we are \u201con the edge of a golden age of space exploration\u201d that will see \u201ca dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAdvertisementBut with opportunity comes risk. Another space race is underway. This time it could have grave consequences. Experts are warning it could lead to all-out war.China plans to become an \u201caerospace power\u201d and created its own space force in 2015, following Russia. Since then, Japan has also gotten itself a space force. And the United Kingdom is setting up its own, after calling Chinese and Russian actions in space \u201cirresponsible.\u201d Other countries will soon join this explosive space race.Story continues below advertisementNow is an urgent time to revive Kennedy\u2019s vision of a partnership between nations in space. Biden could dedicate Space Force to this very ideal. Under his command, it could take the lead in promoting peacemaking missions with other space forces, as well as forging economic ties \u2014 all to build a stable space community. Doing so would fulfill Biden\u2019s goal of resuming American leadership in the world while preventing future catastrophe.The stakes are high. Biden must ensure that in the conquest of space, as Kennedy put it, \u201call the world can be a winner.\u201d The new branch of the military is perfect for advancing Biden\u2019s international vision. Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda.",
        "author": "Theo Zenou"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda. (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2075",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/04/trump-hyped-space-force-it-could-really-boost-bidens-agenda/",
        "text": "Undoing much of what President Trump has done will only require a stroke of Joe Biden\u2019s pen, since it was achieved by executive order. But one of Trump\u2019s more maligned ideas will prove more complicated to address. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, was established in 2019 to ensure \u201cAmerican superiority in space.\u201d True to form, Trump hyped the move as \u201cbig and important.\u201d It was certainly pricey: Space Force\u2019s yearly budget is around $15 billion. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDemocrats harshly criticized Space Force. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired astronaut, dismissed it as a \u201cdumb idea,\u201d explaining that the Air Force was already effectively protecting U.S. interests in space. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, called for its multibillion-dollar budget to be spent on health care rather than on the militarization of the Milky Way.Even entertainers got in on the act. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that Space Force sounded like the title of a Michael Bay blockbuster. Netflix made an actual show lampooning it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet it\u2019s unlikely that Biden will ax Space Force, as liberals are demanding. For one thing, a president has never abolished a branch of the military. For another, doing so requires a vote in Congress. And Republicans will be hard pressed to go along, wary of Trump\u2019s continued influence within their party.But that doesn\u2019t mean Space Force cannot become a tool for promoting Biden\u2019s agenda.Biden wants to sweep aside Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d ethos and restore U.S. leadership of the international community. The president-elect has been clear: His victory heralds America\u2019s return \u201cat the head of the table.\u201d And Space Force can be an integral part of that project, if Biden simply follows the lead of another Democratic president: John F. Kennedy.Story continues below advertisementWhen Americans think of Kennedy and the space program, they probably recall his 1962 speech pledging to put a man on the moon. For Kennedy, achieving this goal was a matter of national excellence. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon \u2026 not because [it\u2019s] easy, but because [it\u2019s] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills \u2026 we intend to win.\u201dAdvertisementAnd winning was key. It was the height of the Cold War, and the American-Soviet rivalry extended to a hair-raising space race. More than a year before, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth, becoming the first man ever to travel to space. The ball was now in the Americans\u2019 court. Top that \u2014 or let the U.S.S.R. declare victory in the space race. That\u2019s why the Kennedy administration targeted the moon.It also made for good politics at home. The Apollo program fit squarely with the young president\u2019s image as a swashbuckling leader. After all, Kennedy had made \u201cthe New Frontier\u201d the slogan of his presidential campaign \u2014 and what farther frontier was there than space?Story continues below advertisementKennedy\u2019s 1962 moon speech is one of the lasting memories of the Apollo program. And yet, it\u2019s not the most powerful \u2014 or most relevant \u2014 speech the president gave about space.AdvertisementOne year later, Kennedy revealed in an address to the United Nations that he had rethought the goal of America\u2019s space program. Gone from the agenda was winning. The president now told his fellow world leaders that the United States and the Soviet Union should go to the moon together. \u201cWhy \u2026 should man\u2019s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?\u201d Instead, \u201cthe representatives of all of our countries\u201d should be part of a joint lunar mission.This abrupt reversal of course reflected Kennedy\u2019s ambition to \u201cmove the world to a just and lasting peace,\u201d a byproduct of the harrowing 1962 Cuban missile crisis. While Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had narrowly averted nuclear Armageddon, the sobering moment had been an awakening for the president. Kennedy emerged a changed man, looking to bury the hatchet with the Soviet adversary, understanding that brinkmanship endangered humanity.Story continues below advertisementA nuclear test ban treaty with the U.S.S.R. had been the immediate consequence. But now Kennedy wanted to ride the momentum. He called for, among other things, the creation of a world center to \u201cwarn of epidemics and the adverse effects of certain drugs,\u201d \u201ca worldwide program of conservation\u201d to protect the environment and curb industrial pollution and \u201ca worldwide program of farm productivity and food distribution \u2026 [to] give every child the food he needs.\u201dAdvertisementBut it was the collective lunar mission that most powerfully symbolized Kennedy\u2019s internationalism. One need only imagine the message of unity sent to people around the globe if, at the apex of the Cold War, the flags of all the world\u2019s countries had been planted on the moon. It would be a point of pride for every human being, regardless of their country of origin.By getting Western and Eastern blocs to join forces on a common endeavor, Kennedy hoped to drastically reduce Cold War tensions. It was also his way of fostering an inclusive peace, the kind that in his words was not a \u201cPax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,\u201d but instead \u201cenables men and nations to grow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat, of course, never happened. Kennedy was killed two months after his U.N. speech. Immediately thereafter, the Apollo program became indelibly associated with the slain president\u2019s legacy. Indeed, only a week after Kennedy\u2019s death, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, renamed Cape Canaveral \u2014 where NASA launched its spacecrafts from \u2014 Cape Kennedy. Johnson also vowed to make good on his predecessor\u2019s promise to put an American on the moon.AdvertisementForgotten was Kennedy\u2019s more recent plea for a lunar expedition with the Soviets. Everyone instead remembered the speech he had given a year before which had made the nation dream.The United States eventually reached the moon in 1969. Although it represented a giant leap for mankind, it was a decidedly American achievement.Story continues below advertisementIn the 21st century, space will be once again at the heart of global affairs. The world\u2019s two richest men are already setting the trend. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is planning human colonies on Mars by 2050. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is working on massively reducing the cost of space travel. (The Amazon chief executive owns The Washington Post.) That would be a game-changer, enabling not only space tourism, but also other ventures such as asteroid mining \u2014 predicted to be a trillion-dollar industry. As Bezos says, we are \u201con the edge of a golden age of space exploration\u201d that will see \u201ca dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAdvertisementBut with opportunity comes risk. Another space race is underway. This time it could have grave consequences. Experts are warning it could lead to all-out war.China plans to become an \u201caerospace power\u201d and created its own space force in 2015, following Russia. Since then, Japan has also gotten itself a space force. And the United Kingdom is setting up its own, after calling Chinese and Russian actions in space \u201cirresponsible.\u201d Other countries will soon join this explosive space race.Story continues below advertisementNow is an urgent time to revive Kennedy\u2019s vision of a partnership between nations in space. Biden could dedicate Space Force to this very ideal. Under his command, it could take the lead in promoting peacemaking missions with other space forces, as well as forging economic ties \u2014 all to build a stable space community. Doing so would fulfill Biden\u2019s goal of resuming American leadership in the world while preventing future catastrophe.The stakes are high. Biden must ensure that in the conquest of space, as Kennedy put it, \u201call the world can be a winner.\u201d The new branch of the military is perfect for advancing Biden\u2019s international vision. Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda.",
        "author": "Theo Zenou"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda. (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2076",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/04/trump-hyped-space-force-it-could-really-boost-bidens-agenda/",
        "text": "Undoing much of what President Trump has done will only require a stroke of Joe Biden\u2019s pen, since it was achieved by executive order. But one of Trump\u2019s more maligned ideas will prove more complicated to address. Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, was established in 2019 to ensure \u201cAmerican superiority in space.\u201d True to form, Trump hyped the move as \u201cbig and important.\u201d It was certainly pricey: Space Force\u2019s yearly budget is around $15 billion. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDemocrats harshly criticized Space Force. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired astronaut, dismissed it as a \u201cdumb idea,\u201d explaining that the Air Force was already effectively protecting U.S. interests in space. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, called for its multibillion-dollar budget to be spent on health care rather than on the militarization of the Milky Way.Even entertainers got in on the act. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that Space Force sounded like the title of a Michael Bay blockbuster. Netflix made an actual show lampooning it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet it\u2019s unlikely that Biden will ax Space Force, as liberals are demanding. For one thing, a president has never abolished a branch of the military. For another, doing so requires a vote in Congress. And Republicans will be hard pressed to go along, wary of Trump\u2019s continued influence within their party.But that doesn\u2019t mean Space Force cannot become a tool for promoting Biden\u2019s agenda.Biden wants to sweep aside Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d ethos and restore U.S. leadership of the international community. The president-elect has been clear: His victory heralds America\u2019s return \u201cat the head of the table.\u201d And Space Force can be an integral part of that project, if Biden simply follows the lead of another Democratic president: John F. Kennedy.Story continues below advertisementWhen Americans think of Kennedy and the space program, they probably recall his 1962 speech pledging to put a man on the moon. For Kennedy, achieving this goal was a matter of national excellence. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon \u2026 not because [it\u2019s] easy, but because [it\u2019s] hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills \u2026 we intend to win.\u201dAdvertisementAnd winning was key. It was the height of the Cold War, and the American-Soviet rivalry extended to a hair-raising space race. More than a year before, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had orbited the Earth, becoming the first man ever to travel to space. The ball was now in the Americans\u2019 court. Top that \u2014 or let the U.S.S.R. declare victory in the space race. That\u2019s why the Kennedy administration targeted the moon.It also made for good politics at home. The Apollo program fit squarely with the young president\u2019s image as a swashbuckling leader. After all, Kennedy had made \u201cthe New Frontier\u201d the slogan of his presidential campaign \u2014 and what farther frontier was there than space?Story continues below advertisementKennedy\u2019s 1962 moon speech is one of the lasting memories of the Apollo program. And yet, it\u2019s not the most powerful \u2014 or most relevant \u2014 speech the president gave about space.AdvertisementOne year later, Kennedy revealed in an address to the United Nations that he had rethought the goal of America\u2019s space program. Gone from the agenda was winning. The president now told his fellow world leaders that the United States and the Soviet Union should go to the moon together. \u201cWhy \u2026 should man\u2019s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?\u201d Instead, \u201cthe representatives of all of our countries\u201d should be part of a joint lunar mission.This abrupt reversal of course reflected Kennedy\u2019s ambition to \u201cmove the world to a just and lasting peace,\u201d a byproduct of the harrowing 1962 Cuban missile crisis. While Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had narrowly averted nuclear Armageddon, the sobering moment had been an awakening for the president. Kennedy emerged a changed man, looking to bury the hatchet with the Soviet adversary, understanding that brinkmanship endangered humanity.Story continues below advertisementA nuclear test ban treaty with the U.S.S.R. had been the immediate consequence. But now Kennedy wanted to ride the momentum. He called for, among other things, the creation of a world center to \u201cwarn of epidemics and the adverse effects of certain drugs,\u201d \u201ca worldwide program of conservation\u201d to protect the environment and curb industrial pollution and \u201ca worldwide program of farm productivity and food distribution \u2026 [to] give every child the food he needs.\u201dAdvertisementBut it was the collective lunar mission that most powerfully symbolized Kennedy\u2019s internationalism. One need only imagine the message of unity sent to people around the globe if, at the apex of the Cold War, the flags of all the world\u2019s countries had been planted on the moon. It would be a point of pride for every human being, regardless of their country of origin.By getting Western and Eastern blocs to join forces on a common endeavor, Kennedy hoped to drastically reduce Cold War tensions. It was also his way of fostering an inclusive peace, the kind that in his words was not a \u201cPax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,\u201d but instead \u201cenables men and nations to grow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat, of course, never happened. Kennedy was killed two months after his U.N. speech. Immediately thereafter, the Apollo program became indelibly associated with the slain president\u2019s legacy. Indeed, only a week after Kennedy\u2019s death, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, renamed Cape Canaveral \u2014 where NASA launched its spacecrafts from \u2014 Cape Kennedy. Johnson also vowed to make good on his predecessor\u2019s promise to put an American on the moon.AdvertisementForgotten was Kennedy\u2019s more recent plea for a lunar expedition with the Soviets. Everyone instead remembered the speech he had given a year before which had made the nation dream.The United States eventually reached the moon in 1969. Although it represented a giant leap for mankind, it was a decidedly American achievement.Story continues below advertisementIn the 21st century, space will be once again at the heart of global affairs. The world\u2019s two richest men are already setting the trend. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is planning human colonies on Mars by 2050. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is working on massively reducing the cost of space travel. (The Amazon chief executive owns The Washington Post.) That would be a game-changer, enabling not only space tourism, but also other ventures such as asteroid mining \u2014 predicted to be a trillion-dollar industry. As Bezos says, we are \u201con the edge of a golden age of space exploration\u201d that will see \u201ca dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAdvertisementBut with opportunity comes risk. Another space race is underway. This time it could have grave consequences. Experts are warning it could lead to all-out war.China plans to become an \u201caerospace power\u201d and created its own space force in 2015, following Russia. Since then, Japan has also gotten itself a space force. And the United Kingdom is setting up its own, after calling Chinese and Russian actions in space \u201cirresponsible.\u201d Other countries will soon join this explosive space race.Story continues below advertisementNow is an urgent time to revive Kennedy\u2019s vision of a partnership between nations in space. Biden could dedicate Space Force to this very ideal. Under his command, it could take the lead in promoting peacemaking missions with other space forces, as well as forging economic ties \u2014 all to build a stable space community. Doing so would fulfill Biden\u2019s goal of resuming American leadership in the world while preventing future catastrophe.The stakes are high. Biden must ensure that in the conquest of space, as Kennedy put it, \u201call the world can be a winner.\u201d The new branch of the military is perfect for advancing Biden\u2019s international vision. Trump hyped Space Force. But it could really boost Biden\u2019s agenda.",
        "author": "Theo Zenou"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Centuries of U.S. imperialism made surfing an Olympic sport (WP: Made by History) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2077",
        "date": "2021-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/25/centuries-us-imperialism-made-surfing-an-olympic-sport/",
        "text": "For the first time, surfing will be an Olympic sport. Beginning on Sunday, 40 surfers from 17 nations will ride the waves at Shidashita Beach as part of the Tokyo Games. While traditional surfing powers such as the United States, Australia and South Africa are well represented among the competitors, countries such as Morocco, Peru and Germany have also sent surfers. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSurfing can be thrilling to watch. But the sport has gained a global presence not only because of the pleasures of wave riding.Surfing became a global sport because of the exercise of American power on the world stage. From 19th-century missionaries to 20th-century cold warriors, Americans have used surfing to accomplish the nation\u2019s diplomatic goals. The fact that surfing only now joins the ranks of Olympic events belies the sport\u2019s centuries-long international history.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen an expedition led by British Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii in the late 18th century, its members were astonished by Hawaiian board riders. By then Polynesian people had practiced wave riding in some form for millennia. After watching the aquatic spectacle, a surgeon aboard Cook\u2019s ship, the Resolution, wrote he \u201ccould not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea.\u201dWithin a few decades, however, American missionaries arriving in Hawaii would view this \u201csupreme pleasure\u201d as an impediment to their drive to Christianize the world.Missionaries constituted one of the largest groups of Americans to travel abroad in the 19th century. Protestant missionaries established footholds in Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands to spread Christianity along with American power and influence. Often, missionaries served as forerunners to American economic and political penetration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmerican missionaries first arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1820s. They sought to impose their morality and values while stamping out practices viewed as sinful and licentious. Missionaries helped pass laws that banned hula dancing and discouraged the wearing of leis. While surfing remained legal, practices associated with the sport, including nudity and gambling were not. As surfing historian Matt Warshaw concluded, \u201ctake away the sex and wagering and all of a sudden the whole thing was a lot less attractive.\u201dThe missionary emphasis on Calvinist ethics such as hard work and enterprise left little time for surfing. Missionary Hiram Bingham noted this relationship: \u201cThe decline and discontinuance of the use of the surf-board, as civilization advances, may be accounted for by the increase in modesty, industry, and religion.\u201dBy the turn of the 20th century, however, some Americans began to see surfing not as a sinful activity to be restrained but a tool to extend American power in the Pacific. During the second half of the 19th century, Hawaii became a destination for American investment in the island\u2019s burgeoning sugar industry. While ostensibly a monarchy under the control of native leaders, Hawaii came under the indirect control of American business executives, many of whom were the children of missionaries. This cadre of powerful Americans orchestrated a coup with the assistance of the Marines and pushed for annexation to the United States in 1898.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome White citizens of Hawaii, principally Alexander Hume Ford, turned to surfing to secure Hawaii as an outpost of the American empire. As historian Scott Laderman argues, \u201cwhen [Ford] found surfing and the incomparable thrill it represented, Ford found a lure for drawing white immigrants to Hawai\u2019i\u201d to strengthen America\u2019s imperial grasp.To attract fellow White Americans to the islands, Ford published dozens of articles extolling the pleasure and value of surfing. In Collier\u2019s magazine, for instance, he observed \u201cthere is a thrill like none other in all the world as you stand upon [a wave\u2019s] crest.\u201d Ford became one of the most prominent boosters of the sport, teaching Jack London to surf and founding the elite Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu. All of this was done not just in the pursuit of pleasure, but to enhance American power abroad.As Ford promoted surfing to White Americans, native Hawaiians brought the sport directly to international audiences. George Freeth traveled to California to perform surfing demonstrations for audiences from San Francisco to San Diego as part of Ford\u2019s plan to use surfing to sell Hawaii. During the first half of the 20th century, the most famous surfer in the world was Duke Kahanamoku. He sparked the development of surfing in Australia and New Zealand after an exhibition tour in 1914 and 1915. Also an accomplished swimmer, Kahanamoku represented the United States at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm; the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium; the 1924 Olympics in Paris and the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, tallying five medals in all.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWorld War II and the subsequent Cold War dramatically changed the position of the United States in the world. As the American military fanned out across the globe during the 1940s and 1950s to fight the war and, as Washington saw it, defend the peace, they brought surfing with them. Surfing and U.S. military involvement went hand in hand, bringing wave riding to places such as Japan, Vietnam and Central America.American tourists, too, did much to bring surfing to the wider world through travel. From France to Peru, South Africa to Indonesia, surfers spread what was stoking. Traveling surfers also engaged in the kind of small-scale, person-to-person diplomacy that became a central part of America\u2019s use of soft power to win hearts and minds during the Cold War.Illustrative of surfing\u2019s place in America\u2019s Cold War soft-power arsenal was the 1966 surf travel documentary \u201cThe Endless Summer.\u201d Directed by Bruce Brown, the film followed two White all-American teens from Southern California as they chased waves from Ghana to South Africa to Tahiti. The State Department even planned to screen the film at the Moscow Film Festival in 1967 to, as Laderman argues, illustrate \u201cthe pleasurable lifestyle promised by the capitalist system that made such leisure possible \u2026 [and] painted a portrait of the United States as a benevolent and sympathetic power.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmerican soft power was on display again at the Japan World Exposition in Osaka in 1970. Organizers of the U.S. pavilion at the exposition treated the event as a de facto competition with the Soviet Union. They turned to surfing to showcase the best of the United States. Just beyond displays of spacecraft and a moon rock, American exhibitioners featured 13 American-made boards and footage of surfers donated by Bruce Brown. After the conclusion of the exposition, a Japanese surf club eagerly purchased 10 of the boards to continue spreading the sport in that country.Some 50 years later, surfing will, once again, be part of an international competition in Japan. International sporting events are often touted as world unifying. But the Olympics also showcase international inequities. And the Olympic movement has faced criticism for corruption, scandals and the tacit endorsement of governments that regularly violate the human rights of their citizens.The history of surfing similarly shows that the sport is embedded in a history of imperialism. Surfing, much like the Olympics itself, would not exist as it does independent of how nations use sports as a tool of international relations. Americans brought surfing to the world, doing so in a way that buttressed American power around the globe \u2014 and while we may marvel at the athletes riding waves at the Games, this history will also be on display. With an eye toward U.S. power, Americans spread the sport making its Olympic debut. Centuries of U.S. imperialism made surfing an Olympic sport",
        "author": "Thomas Blake Earle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Want to honor George H.W. Bush? Send astronauts to Mars.  (WP: Made by History) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2078",
        "date": "2018-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/05/want-honor-george-hw-bush-send-astronauts-mars/",
        "text": "As we celebrate the extraordinary life and accomplishments of President George H.W. Bush, we should also recall some of his aspirations that remain unfulfilled a quarter-century after his presidency.During his White House run, Bush had been criticized for lacking vision. But on July 20, 1989, in a speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, he set out to confound that perception by announcing a bold new human spaceflight initiative that would send American astronauts to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe initiative faltered, but reinvigorating it would be a fitting tribute to his legacy at a moment when the nation could use a dream to unite around.Story continues below advertisementBush himself had played a small role during the first century of air flight. As one of the youngest pilots in the Navy during World War II, he flew 58 combat missions, survived being shot down and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came to understand the perils inherent in our aerospace efforts during this formative period, but he also recognized the advantages that our dominance in this sphere provided.AdvertisementTwo decades later, when he was elected to represent Houston in Congress at the height of the moon race, he became an important supporter of NASA. As vice president, he reengaged with the space program in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, arguing that \u201cthe greatest tribute we can pay to the \u2026 brave crew and their families is \u2026 to rededicate ourselves to America\u2019s leadership in space.\u201dAs president, Bush tried to set a sweeping new course for the space program. \u201cWithin one lifetime,\u201d the president reminded Americans, \u201cthe human race traveled from the dunes of Kitty Hawk to the dust of another world. Apollo is a monument to our nation\u2019s unparalleled ability to respond swiftly and successfully to a clearly stated challenge and to America\u2019s willingness to take great risks for great rewards. We had a challenge. We set a goal. And we achieved it. .\u2009.\u2009. In 1961 it took a crisis \u2014 the space race \u2014 to speed things up. Today we don\u2019t have a crisis; we have an opportunity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo seize this opportunity, Bush proposed a long-range, continuing commitment that included a space station, a trip back to the moon and, eventually, a crewed mission to Mars.AdvertisementThe new president was offering NASA, which at the time lacked a clear mission for its human spaceflight program, a lifeline, guaranteeing his support for an assertive Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). But the fiscal realities of the late 1980s, when budget deficits had exploded, required the organization to think in a new way.NASA, however, wasn\u2019t up to the job. Rather than thinking innovatively and offering new ideas for reaching the moon and Mars, the agency simply recycled concepts that had been dominant within the space program since its earliest days. Its plan included the construction of a substantial in-orbit infrastructure, where massive spacecraft for lunar and Mars exploration would be assembled before departing for their final destinations. Each alternative pathway identified by a study team required enormous capital expenditures. Over a 30-year implementation period, this initiative would have cost more than $500 billion. This would have required more than doubling the agency\u2019s budget.Story continues below advertisementThe tone-deafness of NASA\u2019s plan shocked the National Space Council. NSC Executive Secretary Mark Albrecht called it \u201cthe biggest \u2018F\u2019 flunk, you could ever get in government. .\u2009.\u2009. It was just so fabulously unaffordable, it showed no imagination.\u201d The report quickly turned Capitol Hill against the space agency, with one key congressional aide stating that SEI was dead on arrival.AdvertisementTragically for those who yearned for a long-range plan to explore Mars, the policy window that had briefly opened quickly closed. Major foreign policy developments \u2014 the fall of the Berlin Wall and Operation Desert Storm \u2014 left Bush with little time to resurrect his dreams of sending humans to Mars.Yet in some respects, these dreams did not die as SEI faded away. The dramatic failure of the initiative spurred reform within the space program, which began with Bush\u2019s appointment of Dan Goldin as NASA administrator. Goldin forced the space agency to accept that it had to live within its means, introducing a level of political pragmatism that had never been part of NASA\u2019s organizational culture.Story continues below advertisementThis provided room for innovative ideas to be taken seriously.During the 1990s, as NASA focused on building the International Space Station, long-term mission planners considered approaches like Mars Direct, which called for a direct flight from Earth to the Martian surface and back. Critically, the proposal envisioned chemically manufacturing rocket fuel using Mars\u2019s atmosphere. This eliminated the need to build a space station for in-orbit assembly of enormous spacecraft. As a result, Mars Direct was estimated to cost $50 billion to $100 billion, spread over a decade or two. It also offered the distinct advantage of allowing astronauts to explore the planetary surface for more than 500 days. (SEI had been pegged at 30 days.)AdvertisementFifteen years after the failure of SEI, and in the wake of the disaster with the shuttle Columbia, President George W. Bush took another critical step toward reinvigorating his father\u2019s vision. Bush eliminated the shuttle program, which had essentially marooned astronauts in Earth orbit because it proved incapable of supporting deep-space missions. This freed up resources for the development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of sending cargo and crew into deep space.Story continues below advertisementIn 2010, President Barack Obama announced the development of a Space Launch System that would support exploration of the moon and Mars. The initial version of this launcher is scheduled to launch in 2020, with crewed missions to the surface of the Red Planet potentially achievable by the mid-2030s.Today, nearly three decades after SEI was announced, we have made incredible advances in what we know about Mars, but this has been accomplished solely by robotic explorers. The Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers have all been smashing successes, and the recent landing of the InSight mission less than two weeks ago thrilled most Americans. But we have yet to adopt a program that can take the next giant leap for humankind that George H.W. Bush envisioned.AdvertisementThe failure of SEI offers important guidelines for policymakers looking to implement Bush\u2019s vision. First, the White House must provide NASA with clear written guidance regarding the fiscal constraints to consider when formulating any long-term plan. Second, consulting with Congress is essential to generating sufficient legislative support.Story continues below advertisementFinally, and perhaps most importantly, a competition of ideas that includes the entire space policy community, including government contractors, universities, think tanks and national laboratories, must guide the initiative. This would guarantee that decision-makers would be presented with a robust suite of technical alternatives for human spaceflight programs. Selecting the best possible technical approach for crewed deep-space exploration is critical, but SEI revealed that this cannot be the only consideration. Proposals must reflect the political and fiscal realities that bound what is possible if they hope to win the necessarily political and public support.In 1990, President Bush urged his fellow Americans \u201cto step forth with the will that the moment requires. Don\u2019t postpone greatness. History tells us what happens to nations that forget how to dream. The American people want us in space. So, let us continue the dream for our students, for ourselves, and for all humankind.\u201d At a time of domestic feuding and rising international tensions, perhaps such an undertaking is just what is needed to inspire and unite us as we face the challenges of the 21st century. The former president pushed for a crewed mission to Mars. Let\u2019s make that happen. Want to honor George H.W. Bush? Send astronauts to Mars. ",
        "author": "Thor Hogan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Want to honor George H.W. Bush? Send astronauts to Mars.  (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2079",
        "date": "2018-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/05/want-honor-george-hw-bush-send-astronauts-mars/",
        "text": "As we celebrate the extraordinary life and accomplishments of President George H.W. Bush, we should also recall some of his aspirations that remain unfulfilled a quarter-century after his presidency.During his White House run, Bush had been criticized for lacking vision. But on July 20, 1989, in a speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, he set out to confound that perception by announcing a bold new human spaceflight initiative that would send American astronauts to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe initiative faltered, but reinvigorating it would be a fitting tribute to his legacy at a moment when the nation could use a dream to unite around.Story continues below advertisementBush himself had played a small role during the first century of air flight. As one of the youngest pilots in the Navy during World War II, he flew 58 combat missions, survived being shot down and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came to understand the perils inherent in our aerospace efforts during this formative period, but he also recognized the advantages that our dominance in this sphere provided.AdvertisementTwo decades later, when he was elected to represent Houston in Congress at the height of the moon race, he became an important supporter of NASA. As vice president, he reengaged with the space program in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, arguing that \u201cthe greatest tribute we can pay to the \u2026 brave crew and their families is \u2026 to rededicate ourselves to America\u2019s leadership in space.\u201dAs president, Bush tried to set a sweeping new course for the space program. \u201cWithin one lifetime,\u201d the president reminded Americans, \u201cthe human race traveled from the dunes of Kitty Hawk to the dust of another world. Apollo is a monument to our nation\u2019s unparalleled ability to respond swiftly and successfully to a clearly stated challenge and to America\u2019s willingness to take great risks for great rewards. We had a challenge. We set a goal. And we achieved it. .\u2009.\u2009. In 1961 it took a crisis \u2014 the space race \u2014 to speed things up. Today we don\u2019t have a crisis; we have an opportunity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo seize this opportunity, Bush proposed a long-range, continuing commitment that included a space station, a trip back to the moon and, eventually, a crewed mission to Mars.AdvertisementThe new president was offering NASA, which at the time lacked a clear mission for its human spaceflight program, a lifeline, guaranteeing his support for an assertive Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). But the fiscal realities of the late 1980s, when budget deficits had exploded, required the organization to think in a new way.NASA, however, wasn\u2019t up to the job. Rather than thinking innovatively and offering new ideas for reaching the moon and Mars, the agency simply recycled concepts that had been dominant within the space program since its earliest days. Its plan included the construction of a substantial in-orbit infrastructure, where massive spacecraft for lunar and Mars exploration would be assembled before departing for their final destinations. Each alternative pathway identified by a study team required enormous capital expenditures. Over a 30-year implementation period, this initiative would have cost more than $500 billion. This would have required more than doubling the agency\u2019s budget.Story continues below advertisementThe tone-deafness of NASA\u2019s plan shocked the National Space Council. NSC Executive Secretary Mark Albrecht called it \u201cthe biggest \u2018F\u2019 flunk, you could ever get in government. .\u2009.\u2009. It was just so fabulously unaffordable, it showed no imagination.\u201d The report quickly turned Capitol Hill against the space agency, with one key congressional aide stating that SEI was dead on arrival.AdvertisementTragically for those who yearned for a long-range plan to explore Mars, the policy window that had briefly opened quickly closed. Major foreign policy developments \u2014 the fall of the Berlin Wall and Operation Desert Storm \u2014 left Bush with little time to resurrect his dreams of sending humans to Mars.Yet in some respects, these dreams did not die as SEI faded away. The dramatic failure of the initiative spurred reform within the space program, which began with Bush\u2019s appointment of Dan Goldin as NASA administrator. Goldin forced the space agency to accept that it had to live within its means, introducing a level of political pragmatism that had never been part of NASA\u2019s organizational culture.Story continues below advertisementThis provided room for innovative ideas to be taken seriously.During the 1990s, as NASA focused on building the International Space Station, long-term mission planners considered approaches like Mars Direct, which called for a direct flight from Earth to the Martian surface and back. Critically, the proposal envisioned chemically manufacturing rocket fuel using Mars\u2019s atmosphere. This eliminated the need to build a space station for in-orbit assembly of enormous spacecraft. As a result, Mars Direct was estimated to cost $50 billion to $100 billion, spread over a decade or two. It also offered the distinct advantage of allowing astronauts to explore the planetary surface for more than 500 days. (SEI had been pegged at 30 days.)AdvertisementFifteen years after the failure of SEI, and in the wake of the disaster with the shuttle Columbia, President George W. Bush took another critical step toward reinvigorating his father\u2019s vision. Bush eliminated the shuttle program, which had essentially marooned astronauts in Earth orbit because it proved incapable of supporting deep-space missions. This freed up resources for the development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of sending cargo and crew into deep space.Story continues below advertisementIn 2010, President Barack Obama announced the development of a Space Launch System that would support exploration of the moon and Mars. The initial version of this launcher is scheduled to launch in 2020, with crewed missions to the surface of the Red Planet potentially achievable by the mid-2030s.Today, nearly three decades after SEI was announced, we have made incredible advances in what we know about Mars, but this has been accomplished solely by robotic explorers. The Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers have all been smashing successes, and the recent landing of the InSight mission less than two weeks ago thrilled most Americans. But we have yet to adopt a program that can take the next giant leap for humankind that George H.W. Bush envisioned.AdvertisementThe failure of SEI offers important guidelines for policymakers looking to implement Bush\u2019s vision. First, the White House must provide NASA with clear written guidance regarding the fiscal constraints to consider when formulating any long-term plan. Second, consulting with Congress is essential to generating sufficient legislative support.Story continues below advertisementFinally, and perhaps most importantly, a competition of ideas that includes the entire space policy community, including government contractors, universities, think tanks and national laboratories, must guide the initiative. This would guarantee that decision-makers would be presented with a robust suite of technical alternatives for human spaceflight programs. Selecting the best possible technical approach for crewed deep-space exploration is critical, but SEI revealed that this cannot be the only consideration. Proposals must reflect the political and fiscal realities that bound what is possible if they hope to win the necessarily political and public support.In 1990, President Bush urged his fellow Americans \u201cto step forth with the will that the moment requires. Don\u2019t postpone greatness. History tells us what happens to nations that forget how to dream. The American people want us in space. So, let us continue the dream for our students, for ourselves, and for all humankind.\u201d At a time of domestic feuding and rising international tensions, perhaps such an undertaking is just what is needed to inspire and unite us as we face the challenges of the 21st century. The former president pushed for a crewed mission to Mars. Let\u2019s make that happen. Want to honor George H.W. Bush? Send astronauts to Mars. ",
        "author": "Thor Hogan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Want to honor George H.W. Bush? Send astronauts to Mars.  (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2080",
        "date": "2018-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/05/want-honor-george-hw-bush-send-astronauts-mars/",
        "text": "As we celebrate the extraordinary life and accomplishments of President George H.W. Bush, we should also recall some of his aspirations that remain unfulfilled a quarter-century after his presidency.During his White House run, Bush had been criticized for lacking vision. But on July 20, 1989, in a speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, he set out to confound that perception by announcing a bold new human spaceflight initiative that would send American astronauts to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe initiative faltered, but reinvigorating it would be a fitting tribute to his legacy at a moment when the nation could use a dream to unite around.Story continues below advertisementBush himself had played a small role during the first century of air flight. As one of the youngest pilots in the Navy during World War II, he flew 58 combat missions, survived being shot down and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. He came to understand the perils inherent in our aerospace efforts during this formative period, but he also recognized the advantages that our dominance in this sphere provided.AdvertisementTwo decades later, when he was elected to represent Houston in Congress at the height of the moon race, he became an important supporter of NASA. As vice president, he reengaged with the space program in the aftermath of the Challenger explosion, arguing that \u201cthe greatest tribute we can pay to the \u2026 brave crew and their families is \u2026 to rededicate ourselves to America\u2019s leadership in space.\u201dAs president, Bush tried to set a sweeping new course for the space program. \u201cWithin one lifetime,\u201d the president reminded Americans, \u201cthe human race traveled from the dunes of Kitty Hawk to the dust of another world. Apollo is a monument to our nation\u2019s unparalleled ability to respond swiftly and successfully to a clearly stated challenge and to America\u2019s willingness to take great risks for great rewards. We had a challenge. We set a goal. And we achieved it. .\u2009.\u2009. In 1961 it took a crisis \u2014 the space race \u2014 to speed things up. Today we don\u2019t have a crisis; we have an opportunity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo seize this opportunity, Bush proposed a long-range, continuing commitment that included a space station, a trip back to the moon and, eventually, a crewed mission to Mars.AdvertisementThe new president was offering NASA, which at the time lacked a clear mission for its human spaceflight program, a lifeline, guaranteeing his support for an assertive Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). But the fiscal realities of the late 1980s, when budget deficits had exploded, required the organization to think in a new way.NASA, however, wasn\u2019t up to the job. Rather than thinking innovatively and offering new ideas for reaching the moon and Mars, the agency simply recycled concepts that had been dominant within the space program since its earliest days. Its plan included the construction of a substantial in-orbit infrastructure, where massive spacecraft for lunar and Mars exploration would be assembled before departing for their final destinations. Each alternative pathway identified by a study team required enormous capital expenditures. Over a 30-year implementation period, this initiative would have cost more than $500 billion. This would have required more than doubling the agency\u2019s budget.Story continues below advertisementThe tone-deafness of NASA\u2019s plan shocked the National Space Council. NSC Executive Secretary Mark Albrecht called it \u201cthe biggest \u2018F\u2019 flunk, you could ever get in government. .\u2009.\u2009. It was just so fabulously unaffordable, it showed no imagination.\u201d The report quickly turned Capitol Hill against the space agency, with one key congressional aide stating that SEI was dead on arrival.AdvertisementTragically for those who yearned for a long-range plan to explore Mars, the policy window that had briefly opened quickly closed. Major foreign policy developments \u2014 the fall of the Berlin Wall and Operation Desert Storm \u2014 left Bush with little time to resurrect his dreams of sending humans to Mars.Yet in some respects, these dreams did not die as SEI faded away. The dramatic failure of the initiative spurred reform within the space program, which began with Bush\u2019s appointment of Dan Goldin as NASA administrator. Goldin forced the space agency to accept that it had to live within its means, introducing a level of political pragmatism that had never been part of NASA\u2019s organizational culture.Story continues below advertisementThis provided room for innovative ideas to be taken seriously.During the 1990s, as NASA focused on building the International Space Station, long-term mission planners considered approaches like Mars Direct, which called for a direct flight from Earth to the Martian surface and back. Critically, the proposal envisioned chemically manufacturing rocket fuel using Mars\u2019s atmosphere. This eliminated the need to build a space station for in-orbit assembly of enormous spacecraft. As a result, Mars Direct was estimated to cost $50 billion to $100 billion, spread over a decade or two. It also offered the distinct advantage of allowing astronauts to explore the planetary surface for more than 500 days. (SEI had been pegged at 30 days.)AdvertisementFifteen years after the failure of SEI, and in the wake of the disaster with the shuttle Columbia, President George W. Bush took another critical step toward reinvigorating his father\u2019s vision. Bush eliminated the shuttle program, which had essentially marooned astronauts in Earth orbit because it proved incapable of supporting deep-space missions. This freed up resources for the development of a heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of sending cargo and crew into deep space.Story continues below advertisementIn 2010, President Barack Obama announced the development of a Space Launch System that would support exploration of the moon and Mars. The initial version of this launcher is scheduled to launch in 2020, with crewed missions to the surface of the Red Planet potentially achievable by the mid-2030s.Today, nearly three decades after SEI was announced, we have made incredible advances in what we know about Mars, but this has been accomplished solely by robotic explorers. The Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers have all been smashing successes, and the recent landing of the InSight mission less than two weeks ago thrilled most Americans. But we have yet to adopt a program that can take the next giant leap for humankind that George H.W. Bush envisioned.AdvertisementThe failure of SEI offers important guidelines for policymakers looking to implement Bush\u2019s vision. First, the White House must provide NASA with clear written guidance regarding the fiscal constraints to consider when formulating any long-term plan. Second, consulting with Congress is essential to generating sufficient legislative support.Story continues below advertisementFinally, and perhaps most importantly, a competition of ideas that includes the entire space policy community, including government contractors, universities, think tanks and national laboratories, must guide the initiative. This would guarantee that decision-makers would be presented with a robust suite of technical alternatives for human spaceflight programs. Selecting the best possible technical approach for crewed deep-space exploration is critical, but SEI revealed that this cannot be the only consideration. Proposals must reflect the political and fiscal realities that bound what is possible if they hope to win the necessarily political and public support.In 1990, President Bush urged his fellow Americans \u201cto step forth with the will that the moment requires. Don\u2019t postpone greatness. History tells us what happens to nations that forget how to dream. The American people want us in space. So, let us continue the dream for our students, for ourselves, and for all humankind.\u201d At a time of domestic feuding and rising international tensions, perhaps such an undertaking is just what is needed to inspire and unite us as we face the challenges of the 21st century. The former president pushed for a crewed mission to Mars. Let\u2019s make that happen. Want to honor George H.W. Bush? Send astronauts to Mars. ",
        "author": "Thor Hogan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | At 101, NASA star Katherine Johnson has passed away. She blazed a path for #Blackgirlmagic. (WP: Made by History) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2081",
        "date": "2020-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/25/101-nasa-star-katherine-johnson-has-passed-away-she-blazed-path-blackgirlmagic/",
        "text": "After 101 years, Katherine Johnson left this earth with a contribution that far exceeds her work at NASA: She has inspired young black girls to reach for the stars. The film \u201cHidden Figures\u201d made famous her work calculating the trajectory the Mercury space capsule had to follow to reenter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. While these calculations were first derived by an electronic computer, astronaut John Glenn refused to launch until the computer\u2019s data were confirmed by manual calculation. And there was only one person he trusted fully to do that calculation: Johnson. Only when her work was complete did Glenn declare the mission a go. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs Glenn recognized, Johnson possessed a special talent. But her contribution was only possible because she worked as one of a group of black human computers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and NASA. While these women were only able to work there because the federal government had been formally desegregated, they still had to overcome a segregated workplace that often failed to recognize the sum of their contributions. Honoring the legacy of Johnson today means recognizing and uplifting their stories that are only beginning to be restored to history, more than 50 years after their climax in the 1960s.That 1962 launch of Mercury represented a major \u201cfirst\u201d for Americans in their quest to overtake the Soviets in the space race. It turned Glenn into a national hero as he became the first American to orbit the Earth and only the third American to go into space. It also validated the government\u2019s assertion that the United States could hold its own in the space race \u2014 and, by extension \u2014 protect its national security.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow this happened is the stuff of thrillers, really. In 1962, as the Mercury flight was being scheduled, NASA\u2019s electronic computers filled an entire room. They represented a technological advance, to be sure, but astronauts like Glenn still weren\u2019t fully confident in a machine\u2019s abilities to ensure their safety \u2014 and their very lives. One mathematical error could mean failing to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. It could mean sure death for the men in the capsule.As administrators explained, the challenges were numerous. NASA wanted Glenn\u2019s capsule to land in a specific place in the ocean. If it struck land, he would die. If it approached Earth at too shallow an angle, it would bounce off the planet\u2019s atmosphere. His anxieties intensified as weather and equipment failures caused cancellation of the launch five times.Here is where Katherine Johnson stepped in. The then-44-year-old was assigned to double-check the trajectory calculated by her electronic counterpart, the room-size IBM 7090 computer. When Glenn heard about this work, he requested that she perform the manual calculations before the launch. When asked about her calculations years later, Johnson explained that the trajectory followed by the Mercury module was an arch. All she had to do was calculate where the capsule would be at any given time. The calculations were tricky because Johnson had to factor in the rotation of the Earth, but she had years of experience doing similar computations. Her calculations verified the information the computer produced, and finally, on Feb. 20, the historic launch occurred successfully.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFour hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds after Mercury launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the capsule landed safely right where Johnson predicted, near Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean. The hero\u2019s welcome, reserved for Glenn, neglected to mention all the NASA employees whose work had made Glenn\u2019s safe orbit and return possible. Johnson wasn\u2019t the only one among them; black human computer Miriam Mann, a chemist who had begun working at NACA\u2019s Langley facility in 1943, also contributed to the preparations that made the first American\u2019s orbit of the Earth the initial step toward that \u201cone small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201dYet, while Glenn\u2019s orbit of the Earth was made possible by Katherine Johnson, it couldn\u2019t have seemed more irrelevant to most black Americans. With all the problems the already-turbulent 1960s were promising for them on Earth, how could they be preoccupied \u2014 or even interested \u2014 in what was happening beyond the Earth\u2019s atmosphere?Mainstream media\u2019s NASA coverage tended to focus on obvious heroes, like Glenn, ignoring the contributions of black women completely. But even black newspapers like New York\u2019s Amsterdam News and magazines like Ebony and Jet largely overlooked the Johnson\u2019s work and NASA more broadly. The Amsterdam News, America\u2019s oldest black newspaper, didn\u2019t cover the Mercury launch at all.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt wasn\u2019t until 1964 that Jet covered any NASA news, and then only with a paragraph-long piece under the headline \u201cNASA Has Difficulty In Hiring Negroes in Dixie.,\u201d reporting there were only 434 black employees among NASA\u2019s 9,200-person staff. Forty of these, Jet reported, worked in \u201cscientific, technical, and engineering jobs [and] [t]he remainder in unskilled and clerical jobs.\u201dA year later, in 1965, Ebony ran a short item on one of the black human computers at NASA accompanied by a photograph about Melba Roy. The article admired Roy\u2019s accomplishments as program production section chief at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., noting \u201c[s]he heads a team of mathematicians who design large-scale computer programs aimed at determining the orbits of spacecraft launched at Cape Kennedy, Fla.\u201d The article further referred to Roy as \u201cone of the few ranking women with NASA,\u201d though it didn\u2019t mention any of Roy\u2019s black female colleagues.Black women at NASA didn\u2019t attract feature-length attention in black media until 1992, when Mae Jemison, the first black woman to train as a NASA astronaut (she joined NASA in 1987), was featured on the cover of Jet. But even this coverage was deeply dissatisfying, failing to give the black women of NASA, including the many of them who preceded Jemison and paved the way for her, their full due.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese two magazines were vital to black communities as sources of entertainment and information about issues that were particularly relevant to them \u2014 issues that were so often overlooked by mainstream media. But like the mainstream media, these outlets failed to inform, engage and excite readers about the extent to which black women were transforming mathematical and scientific study. In doing so, they missed an opportunity to make the space race relevant to black Americans. They failed to elucidate the connections that would tie the space race to the race for civil rights, ultimately ignoring how the very existence of black human computers at NASA was a sign of the profound sociocultural shifts toward racial equality also launched during the 1960s.This story remained hidden from the public, but it was proudly told in my family. My grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, worked with Katherine Johnson and she told my mother, Miriam Mann Harris, who told the story to me. As a historian, I stand on the shoulders of giants without the resources that I have. I was able to win a grant from the Virginia Humanities Council and share my family\u2019s story with the world. The art of recovery is a privilege and will allow my daughter to hand our narrative to the next generation in the form of a book, and a digital archive.Like the movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d my research, which has been adapted to a play, focuses on the human computers as young girls with dreams. It aims to inspire others not just to think about space, but to consider the art of recovery and restoring the historical record, not just for Johnson and my grandmother, but all the black women whose labor have fueled technological, political and economic advancement without recognition. This generation might think that they invented the term, #Black Girl Magic. But it\u2019s a concept that has been a century \u2014 101 years since the birth of Katherine Johnson \u2014 in the making. NASA human computer Katherine Johnson took us to outer space and shaped history on Earth. At 101, NASA star Katherine Johnson has passed away. She blazed a path for #Blackgirlmagic.",
        "author": "Duchess Harris"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | At 101, NASA star Katherine Johnson has passed away. She blazed a path for #Blackgirlmagic. (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2082",
        "date": "2020-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/25/101-nasa-star-katherine-johnson-has-passed-away-she-blazed-path-blackgirlmagic/",
        "text": "After 101 years, Katherine Johnson left this earth with a contribution that far exceeds her work at NASA: She has inspired young black girls to reach for the stars. The film \u201cHidden Figures\u201d made famous her work calculating the trajectory the Mercury space capsule had to follow to reenter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. While these calculations were first derived by an electronic computer, astronaut John Glenn refused to launch until the computer\u2019s data were confirmed by manual calculation. And there was only one person he trusted fully to do that calculation: Johnson. Only when her work was complete did Glenn declare the mission a go. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs Glenn recognized, Johnson possessed a special talent. But her contribution was only possible because she worked as one of a group of black human computers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and NASA. While these women were only able to work there because the federal government had been formally desegregated, they still had to overcome a segregated workplace that often failed to recognize the sum of their contributions. Honoring the legacy of Johnson today means recognizing and uplifting their stories that are only beginning to be restored to history, more than 50 years after their climax in the 1960s.That 1962 launch of Mercury represented a major \u201cfirst\u201d for Americans in their quest to overtake the Soviets in the space race. It turned Glenn into a national hero as he became the first American to orbit the Earth and only the third American to go into space. It also validated the government\u2019s assertion that the United States could hold its own in the space race \u2014 and, by extension \u2014 protect its national security.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow this happened is the stuff of thrillers, really. In 1962, as the Mercury flight was being scheduled, NASA\u2019s electronic computers filled an entire room. They represented a technological advance, to be sure, but astronauts like Glenn still weren\u2019t fully confident in a machine\u2019s abilities to ensure their safety \u2014 and their very lives. One mathematical error could mean failing to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. It could mean sure death for the men in the capsule.As administrators explained, the challenges were numerous. NASA wanted Glenn\u2019s capsule to land in a specific place in the ocean. If it struck land, he would die. If it approached Earth at too shallow an angle, it would bounce off the planet\u2019s atmosphere. His anxieties intensified as weather and equipment failures caused cancellation of the launch five times.Here is where Katherine Johnson stepped in. The then-44-year-old was assigned to double-check the trajectory calculated by her electronic counterpart, the room-size IBM 7090 computer. When Glenn heard about this work, he requested that she perform the manual calculations before the launch. When asked about her calculations years later, Johnson explained that the trajectory followed by the Mercury module was an arch. All she had to do was calculate where the capsule would be at any given time. The calculations were tricky because Johnson had to factor in the rotation of the Earth, but she had years of experience doing similar computations. Her calculations verified the information the computer produced, and finally, on Feb. 20, the historic launch occurred successfully.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFour hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds after Mercury launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the capsule landed safely right where Johnson predicted, near Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean. The hero\u2019s welcome, reserved for Glenn, neglected to mention all the NASA employees whose work had made Glenn\u2019s safe orbit and return possible. Johnson wasn\u2019t the only one among them; black human computer Miriam Mann, a chemist who had begun working at NACA\u2019s Langley facility in 1943, also contributed to the preparations that made the first American\u2019s orbit of the Earth the initial step toward that \u201cone small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201dYet, while Glenn\u2019s orbit of the Earth was made possible by Katherine Johnson, it couldn\u2019t have seemed more irrelevant to most black Americans. With all the problems the already-turbulent 1960s were promising for them on Earth, how could they be preoccupied \u2014 or even interested \u2014 in what was happening beyond the Earth\u2019s atmosphere?Mainstream media\u2019s NASA coverage tended to focus on obvious heroes, like Glenn, ignoring the contributions of black women completely. But even black newspapers like New York\u2019s Amsterdam News and magazines like Ebony and Jet largely overlooked the Johnson\u2019s work and NASA more broadly. The Amsterdam News, America\u2019s oldest black newspaper, didn\u2019t cover the Mercury launch at all.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt wasn\u2019t until 1964 that Jet covered any NASA news, and then only with a paragraph-long piece under the headline \u201cNASA Has Difficulty In Hiring Negroes in Dixie.,\u201d reporting there were only 434 black employees among NASA\u2019s 9,200-person staff. Forty of these, Jet reported, worked in \u201cscientific, technical, and engineering jobs [and] [t]he remainder in unskilled and clerical jobs.\u201dA year later, in 1965, Ebony ran a short item on one of the black human computers at NASA accompanied by a photograph about Melba Roy. The article admired Roy\u2019s accomplishments as program production section chief at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., noting \u201c[s]he heads a team of mathematicians who design large-scale computer programs aimed at determining the orbits of spacecraft launched at Cape Kennedy, Fla.\u201d The article further referred to Roy as \u201cone of the few ranking women with NASA,\u201d though it didn\u2019t mention any of Roy\u2019s black female colleagues.Black women at NASA didn\u2019t attract feature-length attention in black media until 1992, when Mae Jemison, the first black woman to train as a NASA astronaut (she joined NASA in 1987), was featured on the cover of Jet. But even this coverage was deeply dissatisfying, failing to give the black women of NASA, including the many of them who preceded Jemison and paved the way for her, their full due.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese two magazines were vital to black communities as sources of entertainment and information about issues that were particularly relevant to them \u2014 issues that were so often overlooked by mainstream media. But like the mainstream media, these outlets failed to inform, engage and excite readers about the extent to which black women were transforming mathematical and scientific study. In doing so, they missed an opportunity to make the space race relevant to black Americans. They failed to elucidate the connections that would tie the space race to the race for civil rights, ultimately ignoring how the very existence of black human computers at NASA was a sign of the profound sociocultural shifts toward racial equality also launched during the 1960s.This story remained hidden from the public, but it was proudly told in my family. My grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, worked with Katherine Johnson and she told my mother, Miriam Mann Harris, who told the story to me. As a historian, I stand on the shoulders of giants without the resources that I have. I was able to win a grant from the Virginia Humanities Council and share my family\u2019s story with the world. The art of recovery is a privilege and will allow my daughter to hand our narrative to the next generation in the form of a book, and a digital archive.Like the movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d my research, which has been adapted to a play, focuses on the human computers as young girls with dreams. It aims to inspire others not just to think about space, but to consider the art of recovery and restoring the historical record, not just for Johnson and my grandmother, but all the black women whose labor have fueled technological, political and economic advancement without recognition. This generation might think that they invented the term, #Black Girl Magic. But it\u2019s a concept that has been a century \u2014 101 years since the birth of Katherine Johnson \u2014 in the making. NASA human computer Katherine Johnson took us to outer space and shaped history on Earth. At 101, NASA star Katherine Johnson has passed away. She blazed a path for #Blackgirlmagic.",
        "author": "Duchess Harris"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | How imperialism shaped the race to the moon (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2083",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/22/how-imperialism-shaped-race-moon/",
        "text": "This past weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and people across the United States and the world commemorated the moment by reading stories, gazing at monuments and watching documentaries of that moment when humans took one giant leap forward in cosmic travel.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis celebration comes at a time of renewed interest from both government and industry in space exploration. Billionaire Elon Musk is working to gain a foothold in the potentially lucrative private space travel industry through his SpaceX project. Meanwhile, President Trump\u2019s announcement of the Space Force \u2014 a new branch of the military staffed by an \u201celite group of joint warfighters specializing in the domain of space\u201d \u2014 has caused an avalanche of speculation, controversy and satire. Getting to the moon first seems to have given many Americans the impression that space is ours and ours alone to conquer. The moon wasn\u2019t always the final frontier. Early dreams of space travel extended well beyond its orbit: think the 1956 American sci-fi film \u201cForbidden Planet\u201d or the thrilling 1962 \u201cPlanet of the Storms,\u201d produced by the Soviet Union. When an American set foot on the moon, though, it became seen as the decisive victory, because the Cold War transformed utopian ideas about the possibilities of human advancement into an imperialistic battle for military and economic might. While the former may capture our sentiments today, the latter fuels the 21st-century space race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA century ago, fascination with space increased as the potential for global destruction grew larger. In Russia and the early Soviet Union, engineer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky began to theorize early ideas of rocketry and space travel. Amid the destruction of World War I, the upheaval of the Russian Revolution and the depression of the interwar period, Tsiolkovsky believed the cosmos could offer an alternative place for human settlement after impending global destruction. Artists, writers and engineers around the world accordingly depicted space as a new frontier, one that represented the zenith of human accomplishment.Utopian visions of space travel gave way to measured pragmatism and military competition after World War II, when the United States\u2019 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wreaked destruction unlike anything the world had ever seen. Once the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb in 1949, the specter of nuclear devastation haunted the globe and propelled Cold War paranoia.Out of this came the space race: a competition between the Soviet Union and the United States in which the winner would have an upper hand in launching missiles and defending against attacks. The U.S. and Soviet governments continued to portray space travel as a utopian dream to domestic, civilian audiences, framing it through art, music and pop culture as a romantic escape or glorious future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBehind the scenes, they engaged in a bare-knuckled competition for military might. Indeed, the United States was willing to collaborate with scientists such as former Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun to defeat the Soviets \u2014 a far cry from the space program\u2019s alleged utopian and pacifist goals.The Cold War was not just a military rivalry between superpowers. It was also an ideological one that pit communism against capitalism. The United States and the Soviet Union both sought to extend their influence across the world, deploying cultural propaganda and military force to attempt to bring countries such as India, Ghana, Cuba and Nicaragua into their sphere of control. \u201cNonaligned\u201d countries, especially the many African and Asian nations that fought for independence from imperial powers after World War II, became sites for proxy wars. The cosmos was no exception. Space represented the ultimate nonaligned sphere \u2014 a new territory for the planting of flags, ripe for colonization.For much of the 1960s, it was a contest the United States was losing. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 was swiftly followed by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u2019s success as the first man to orbit Earth in 1961. A series of cosmonauts came in the next few years, including Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman in space in 1963. (The United States did not send a woman into space for 20 more years, when Sally Ride flew aboard the Challenger in 1983.) In 1965, the Soviets further cemented their success with the flight of Alexei Leonov, who became the first man to do a spacewalk. Meanwhile, NASA suffered setbacks in the Apollo program and had to work to regain public support for what increasingly seemed like interstellar folly. The Soviets were dominant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped off the Apollo Lunar Module onto the uneven surface of the moon, it represented both the United States\u2019 first major success and a substantial escalation in the space race. Marred by accidents and malfunctions, the Soviet moonshot lagged far behind NASA\u2019s.The plaque left on the moon offers the inscription: \u201cHere men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.\u201d In many ways, this was true. Apollo 11 was a \u201cgiant leap\u201d for humankind, a momentous occasion in global history where utopian dreams and scientific pragmatism were perfectly aligned.Even more telling was Aldrin\u2019s planting of the American flag in the dusty lunar rocks. The mission was, at its core, a territorial conquest. The United States had gotten there first and staked its claim. All those to follow (and none did) would have to reckon with its projection of imperial might in space. In an era of terrestrial decolonization, the moon landing represented an extraterrestrial colonial victory for the United States.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe imperialism driving the moon landing matters today, especially because the parallels between now and then are striking: The United States is still fighting proxy wars and promoting capitalist ideology in countries undergoing political transition. The country is racing against economic and military powers such as China and Russia to lay claim to undeveloped natural resources in the Arctic. With each passing day, we come ever closer to environmental disaster. Trump\u2019s Space Force openly seeks to militarize space, not explore it.Fifty years on, the United States is less interested in cultivating cosmic hopes and aspirations than it is in projecting U.S. power \u2014 and we might do well to keep this in mind amid the celebratory stories, monuments and documentaries. It\u2019s not quite as simple or utopian as one \u201cgiant leap for mankind,\u201d as much as we might wish it were. Space may represent a new world, but more often than not, we bring our earthly baggage into orbit. The first ventures into space carried considerable earthly baggage. How imperialism shaped the race to the moon",
        "author": "Gabrielle Cornish"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | How imperialism shaped the race to the moon (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2084",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/22/how-imperialism-shaped-race-moon/",
        "text": "This past weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and people across the United States and the world commemorated the moment by reading stories, gazing at monuments and watching documentaries of that moment when humans took one giant leap forward in cosmic travel.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis celebration comes at a time of renewed interest from both government and industry in space exploration. Billionaire Elon Musk is working to gain a foothold in the potentially lucrative private space travel industry through his SpaceX project. Meanwhile, President Trump\u2019s announcement of the Space Force \u2014 a new branch of the military staffed by an \u201celite group of joint warfighters specializing in the domain of space\u201d \u2014 has caused an avalanche of speculation, controversy and satire. Getting to the moon first seems to have given many Americans the impression that space is ours and ours alone to conquer. The moon wasn\u2019t always the final frontier. Early dreams of space travel extended well beyond its orbit: think the 1956 American sci-fi film \u201cForbidden Planet\u201d or the thrilling 1962 \u201cPlanet of the Storms,\u201d produced by the Soviet Union. When an American set foot on the moon, though, it became seen as the decisive victory, because the Cold War transformed utopian ideas about the possibilities of human advancement into an imperialistic battle for military and economic might. While the former may capture our sentiments today, the latter fuels the 21st-century space race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA century ago, fascination with space increased as the potential for global destruction grew larger. In Russia and the early Soviet Union, engineer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky began to theorize early ideas of rocketry and space travel. Amid the destruction of World War I, the upheaval of the Russian Revolution and the depression of the interwar period, Tsiolkovsky believed the cosmos could offer an alternative place for human settlement after impending global destruction. Artists, writers and engineers around the world accordingly depicted space as a new frontier, one that represented the zenith of human accomplishment.Utopian visions of space travel gave way to measured pragmatism and military competition after World War II, when the United States\u2019 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wreaked destruction unlike anything the world had ever seen. Once the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb in 1949, the specter of nuclear devastation haunted the globe and propelled Cold War paranoia.Out of this came the space race: a competition between the Soviet Union and the United States in which the winner would have an upper hand in launching missiles and defending against attacks. The U.S. and Soviet governments continued to portray space travel as a utopian dream to domestic, civilian audiences, framing it through art, music and pop culture as a romantic escape or glorious future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBehind the scenes, they engaged in a bare-knuckled competition for military might. Indeed, the United States was willing to collaborate with scientists such as former Nazi engineer Wernher von Braun to defeat the Soviets \u2014 a far cry from the space program\u2019s alleged utopian and pacifist goals.The Cold War was not just a military rivalry between superpowers. It was also an ideological one that pit communism against capitalism. The United States and the Soviet Union both sought to extend their influence across the world, deploying cultural propaganda and military force to attempt to bring countries such as India, Ghana, Cuba and Nicaragua into their sphere of control. \u201cNonaligned\u201d countries, especially the many African and Asian nations that fought for independence from imperial powers after World War II, became sites for proxy wars. The cosmos was no exception. Space represented the ultimate nonaligned sphere \u2014 a new territory for the planting of flags, ripe for colonization.For much of the 1960s, it was a contest the United States was losing. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 was swiftly followed by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u2019s success as the first man to orbit Earth in 1961. A series of cosmonauts came in the next few years, including Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman in space in 1963. (The United States did not send a woman into space for 20 more years, when Sally Ride flew aboard the Challenger in 1983.) In 1965, the Soviets further cemented their success with the flight of Alexei Leonov, who became the first man to do a spacewalk. Meanwhile, NASA suffered setbacks in the Apollo program and had to work to regain public support for what increasingly seemed like interstellar folly. The Soviets were dominant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped off the Apollo Lunar Module onto the uneven surface of the moon, it represented both the United States\u2019 first major success and a substantial escalation in the space race. Marred by accidents and malfunctions, the Soviet moonshot lagged far behind NASA\u2019s.The plaque left on the moon offers the inscription: \u201cHere men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.\u201d In many ways, this was true. Apollo 11 was a \u201cgiant leap\u201d for humankind, a momentous occasion in global history where utopian dreams and scientific pragmatism were perfectly aligned.Even more telling was Aldrin\u2019s planting of the American flag in the dusty lunar rocks. The mission was, at its core, a territorial conquest. The United States had gotten there first and staked its claim. All those to follow (and none did) would have to reckon with its projection of imperial might in space. In an era of terrestrial decolonization, the moon landing represented an extraterrestrial colonial victory for the United States.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe imperialism driving the moon landing matters today, especially because the parallels between now and then are striking: The United States is still fighting proxy wars and promoting capitalist ideology in countries undergoing political transition. The country is racing against economic and military powers such as China and Russia to lay claim to undeveloped natural resources in the Arctic. With each passing day, we come ever closer to environmental disaster. Trump\u2019s Space Force openly seeks to militarize space, not explore it.Fifty years on, the United States is less interested in cultivating cosmic hopes and aspirations than it is in projecting U.S. power \u2014 and we might do well to keep this in mind amid the celebratory stories, monuments and documentaries. It\u2019s not quite as simple or utopian as one \u201cgiant leap for mankind,\u201d as much as we might wish it were. Space may represent a new world, but more often than not, we bring our earthly baggage into orbit. The first ventures into space carried considerable earthly baggage. How imperialism shaped the race to the moon",
        "author": "Gabrielle Cornish"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The United States needs more bureaucracy, not less (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2085",
        "date": "2017-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/09/america-needs-more-bureaucracy-not-less/",
        "text": "The long-promised repeal of Obamacare fails despite united Republican control of Washington. Career officials flee posts in the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security while hundreds of key posts remain vacant, many without even nominees. New Jersey shuts down beaches over the 4th of July weekend, while budget impasses strangle state governments in Illinois and Maine. Across the United States, angry citizens disrupt their representatives\u2019 town hall meetings, screaming, \u201cDo your job!\u201d At each level of American politics, partisan gridlock has ground government to a halt and prompted widespread charges of waste, fraud and corruption. A century ago, the solution to such problems \u2014 and the path to efficient, effective governance \u2014 seemed clear: Remove power from partisan politicians, confer authority on appointed experts and insulate those experts from political influence so they could better serve the public interest. But for the past half-century, American politicians moved in the opposite direction, undermining the idea of government as a profession requiring training, experience and commitment to public service \u2014 a crusade that has culminated in current attacks on the so-called deep state by President Trump supporters such as White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Fox News host Sean Hannity.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut the political disarray across the United States and the quiet professionalism of park rangers, federal prosecutors and Foreign Service officers should remind Americans of the benefits of competent administration. Might the cure for what ails us actually be \u2026 more bureaucracy?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA hundred years ago, there was a bipartisan consensus on the notion of an expert-driven government. Reformers such as President Theodore Roosevelt envisioned a professional government made up not of politicians or lawyers, but of educated, public-spirited bureaucrats. His contemporary and rival, Woodrow Wilson, thought that administration \u2014 the day-to-day operations of governance \u2014 should lie wholly outside the sphere of politics. \u201cAdministrative questions are not political questions,\u201d Wilson asserted.But those days are long past. Few contemporary Americans share their forebears\u2019 zest for empowering unelected experts. Contempt for bureaucrats has become one of the few places of common ground in contemporary American politics. Conservatives see bureaucracy as wasteful, corrupt interference with liberty, while liberals see it as undemocratic, elitist and vulnerable to\u00a0 capture by the rich and powerful.The reliance on expertise reached its apotheosis during World War II, when government officials managed the global war effort, oversaw prodigies of production and even built the atomic bomb. That luster faded in the postwar era.\u00a0During the 1960s, activists first on the left, then on the right, began to view reliance on expertise as incompatible with democratic citizenship. The popularity of President Ronald Reagan\u2019s favorite joke \u2014 \u201cthe most terrifying words in the English\u00a0language are: I\u2019m from the government and I\u2019m here to help\u201d \u2014 made clear how widespread that view had become by 1980.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot surprisingly, then, the federal bureaucracy has been shrinking for nearly half a century. The number of executive branch employees reached its peak in 1969, and while the current total nears that level, compared to the nation\u2019s population or GDP, the federal establishment remains a shadow of its former self.The Trump administration has taken this hostility to professional governance to the extreme, driving numerous career diplomats into early retirement, undermining the findings of its own experts at the Environmental Protection Agency and waging a rhetorical battle against the so-called deep state. But given the widespread dissatisfaction with politics-as-usual, perhaps Americans should reconsider the possibilities of government by professional experts.A century ago, progressive administrations such as Wilson\u2019s and Roosevelt\u2019s showed that expert-driven government could be effective government. Roosevelt confidant Gifford Pinchot, one of the founders of professional forestry in the United States, worked with his father to establish America\u2019s major forestry schools. These institutions trained the nation\u2019s first generation of professional foresters, many of whom followed Pinchot \u2014 who would serve as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service \u2014 into government service. For Pinchot, marrying dispassionate science with public power formed the prerequisite for good government and national greatness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPinchot\u2019s ally in Washington, Frederick Newell, built the United States Reclamation Service. An engineer by profession, Newell asserted that the \u201cwatchword of the engineer is efficiency,\u201d a belief he applied to government as well. That meant not only the optimal exploitation of the nation\u2019s resources through the erection of vast dams for irrigation, hydroelectric power and flood control, but also the efficient management of those projects by independent, scientifically-trained federal administrators. Newell sought financial as well as institutional autonomy for his agency, including an independent source of funding free from the vicissitudes of the congressional appropriations process.These progressive civil servants touted the efficacy and integrity of bureaucracy. \u201cGladly and fully do they recognize their responsibilities to the American people for one of the most important trusts ever placed into the hands of a group of men in modern times,\u201d gushed one of Pinchot\u2019s men about the administration\u2019s staff.They had a point: Consider some of the enduring accomplishments of unelected bureaucrats. The National Highway Traffic Safety Commission established rules that reduced the mortality rate on U.S. roads and improved the fuel efficiency of American vehicles. Granted authority to establish standards for emissions and dumping, the EPA has overseen remarkable improvements in water and air quality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor half a century, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. oversaw commercial banking and mortgage lending in the United States. While regulations sometimes irked depositors (who longed for higher interest rates) and often upset lenders (who wanted to pursue riskier strategies than the regulators allowed), unelected experts stabilized the financial sector and helped underwrite decades of postwar prosperity. When Congress gave in to outside pressure and loosened the regulatory reins in the early 1980s, the savings and loans industry collapsed. Still, through that crisis and even during the Great Recession, the nation avoided bank runs and nobody lost deposits in insured accounts \u2014 real risks when these corporations were chartered in the 1930s.To be sure, many progressive era supporters of expert governance seem naive to modern ears. It\u2019s hard for contemporary Americans to recognize bureaucrats in the descriptions of \u201cmen actuated by public spirit\u201d in the official reports of Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s administration. Yet many lasting achievements of American public life \u2014 from environmental protection and food safety to space exploration and economic stability \u2014 resulted from a willingness to confer authority on public-spirited professionals and to insulate them from the demands of partisan competition. In this rancorous era, Americans might well reconsider the advantages of bureaucracy. If too much partisanship is the problem, more bureaucracy might be the answer.  The United States needs more bureaucracy, not less",
        "author": "Bruce J. Schulman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Fear about China\u2019s new space weapon echoes older worries about war from space (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2086",
        "date": "2021-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/10/26/fear-about-chinas-new-space-weapon-echoes-older-worries-about-war-space/",
        "text": "Look up! The ghosts of space weapons past have once again darkened our cosmic doorway. Recently Britain\u2019s Financial Times reported that China flight-tested a new breed of space weapon when it launched a massive \u201cLong March\u201d rocket tipped with a nuclear-capable, hypersonic glider. The missile briefly entered orbit before descending on its target, which it missed by roughly two dozen miles. The report suggested that the test was evidence that China has \u201cmade astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and [is] far more advanced than US officials realised.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs one might expect, some commentators have seized upon the test to call U.S. security into doubt. And why not? The glider\u2019s physical capabilities are truly impressive. Its high lift-to-drag ratio, for instance, means that it can descend on its target unpowered and can fly much farther than the reentry vehicles of normal ICBM warheads. Hypersonic gliders zip along at lower altitudes and can maneuver, enabling them to hide from radar and missile defense systems. Not least, there is the weapon\u2019s ludicrous speed: Hypersonic weapons travel at speeds that literally change the surrounding molecules, either by breaking them apart (dissociation) or picking up electrical charge (ionization). That\u2019s fast.The Chinese test has disentombed long-buried fears of orbital bombardment that hark back to the Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union developed and tested a terrifying weapon that preoccupied U.S. leaders for more than two decades: the \u201cfractional orbital bombardment system\u201d (FOBS). Like the purported Chinese glider, FOBS permitted the Soviets, in theory, to orbit a nuclear warhead and deaccelerate it out of orbit onto earthly targets. Though the Kremlin abandoned the program in 1983, having never orbited a single warhead, FOBS\u2019s political and military significance continued to resonate long after the Cold War ended. Indeed, the history of the FOBS scare tells us much about how space weapons have figured in the American imagination and offers us a window into why the Chinese test isn\u2019t a cause for panic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy the time the American public first learned of FOBS in 1967 \u2014 the CIA had speculated about development of the system five years earlier, shortly after design work began \u2014 Cold War paranoia and an exploding science fiction literature had been priming readers for the news for more than 20 years. As early as July 1945, U.S. Army intelligence was regaling journalists with details of a massive Sonnengewehr, or \u201cSun Gun,\u201d that Nazi scientists had modeled for use in combat. Their blueprints called for a gigantic mirror that would harness solar rays and redirect them onto enemy cities and armies. Months later, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, physicist Louis Ridenour immediately connected the devastating power of the atomic bomb to satellite technology in a short story for Fortune magazine. \u201cPilot Lights of the Apocalypse\u201d ends when an underground command center outside San Francisco confuses an earthquake with an all-out nuclear strike from space, precipitating a cataclysmic world war. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, dozens of novels and short stories \u2014 Jeff Sutton\u2019s \u201cBombs in Orbit\u201d (1959) and Robert Heinlein\u2019s \u201cThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress\u201d (1966), for example \u2014 employed space-based bombardment as a dramatic device.These imaginative works reflected a threat that many serious observers felt was imminent. In the United States, the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division and the Rand Corporation conducted numerous studies that weighed the military benefits of orbital weapons. High-ranking generals hailed satellite bombardment as the \u201cnext logical step\u201d of deterrence. Books by defense analysts and military thinkers included orbital bombardment in their projections for the future of war.The Soviet Union, for its part, leaped in headfirst. The Kremlin initiated the first of three separate FOBS programs in March 1961. Within a few years, the other two prototypes were on display in Red Square parades. Radio Moscow bragged that \u201cthe main property of missiles of this class is their ability to hit enemy objectives literally from any direction, which makes them virtually invulnerable to antimissile defense means.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBluster and bluff perhaps, but it contained an element of truth.Unlike ICBMs, which traveled roughly 600 to 1,200 miles above the planet, FOBS missiles could dip as low as 125 miles. This lower flight path would dramatically reduce the 15 minutes of warning time U.S. ground stations could typically count on for missiles launched from Soviet territory. Because they used Earth\u2019s naturally occurring orbits, moreover, FOBS missiles could enjoy an unlimited flight range \u2014 a space bomber that need not refuel midflight. Most bone-chilling, FOBS weapons could deorbit along a polar axis, from south to north, thus bypassing the comprehensive system of radars the United States had established along stations in Alaska, Greenland and England, the vaunted Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. \u201cWe can launch missiles not only over the North Pole, but in the opposite direction, too,\u201d Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted in March 1962. \u201cAs the people say, you expect it to come by the front door, and it gets in the window.\u201dIt was easy, at the time, to believe that the superpowers were on the brink of a strategic revolution based on space weapons. Lawmakers, pundits and military leaders aggressively petitioned for a more aggressive posture against the Soviet Union in space, including crash programs for orbital bombardment, antisatellite weapons, even a lunar base. Barry Goldwater made it a pillar of his 1964 campaign for president. That same year, Phyllis Schlafly, who later gained notoriety for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, established herself as a defense intellectual with \u201cStrike from Space,\u201d in which she argued that the Kremlin had deliberately lured the United States to Vietnam as a distraction from FOBS. The only solution was to build an even stronger fleet of space weapons to maintain the U.S. nuclear deterrent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor policy entrepreneurs, fear itself had become a useful weapon.But what happened next contradicted the logic of the arms race and the Cold War more broadly. Scientists, and even some members of the military community, questioned the technical foundations of orbital bombardment and argued that FOBS was an inefficient delivery system compared to land- and submarine-launched ICBMs. Propelling a FOBS missile into orbit meant compromising on warhead mass, for example. Orbits made their paths predictable, and thus, possible to intercept.The Pentagon meanwhile abandoned its early studies on orbital bombardment in favor of a more tempered regime of reconnaissance and military support satellites. Official thought in the Kennedy and Johnson years held that if the United States refrained from weaponizing space, the Soviets might stay their hand as well. Over the course of 1966, U.S. and Soviet negotiators collaborated on an international agreement to govern the use of space \u201cexclusively for peaceful purposes.\u201d The resulting Outer Space Treaty, which entered force the following year, banned the stationing of nuclear weapons in orbit, on celestial bodies or \u201cin outer space in any other manner.\u201d Within a few years, dozens of countries had ratified the accord.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough FOBS tests continued for several years, the Soviet Union never orbited a bomb and instead phased out the program piece by piece. Fractional orbital bombardment never became the monster its phobics predicted it would be.The moral? Don\u2019t overreact.Though China\u2019s hypersonic glider appears to be just the kind of radical technology that could ignite a frantic new arms race, the history of FOBS demonstrates that the development of a weapons system, whether in the imagination, on a blueprint or on a factory floor, does not ensure its power to change the game.Context will always be queen. Rather than drive the strategic debate, FOBS unfolded amid the scare of the Cuban missile crisis, a robust nuclear arms control agenda and a U.S.-Soviet rivalry over which government could project the more peaceful and beneficent space program. The challenges faced by today\u2019s decision-makers are different, but certainly no less profound. New space weapons, though, will require the same things as the old: poise, patience and more than a dash of diplomacy. Here\u2019s hoping the recipe is around here somewhere. And that\u2019s exactly why there is no need to overreact. Fear about China\u2019s new space weapon echoes older worries about war from space",
        "author": "Stephen Buono"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The blunder that could cost the U.S. the new space race  (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2087",
        "date": "2019-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/26/blunder-that-could-cost-us-new-space-race/",
        "text": "Are we about to embark on a new space race?In January, China became the first sovereign state to soft-land a probe on the far side of the moon. It\u2019s no secret that China is working toward a future crewed mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis presents a serious challenge to American supremacy in space. President Trump has responded by pushing for a crewed lunar mission as early as 2024, with the ultimate aim of looking toward Mars. In addition to accelerating the United States\u2019 own space program, Trump\u2019s advisers are working to stall Chinese technological development by inhibiting access to the U.S. commercial space sector. They are also working to limit international intellectual exchange. Chinese students are experiencing long delays in processing their visas, and White House adviser Stephen Miller has even called for a blanket visa ban. Others are advocating a blacklist of companies from \u201caggressor states.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut such a combative approach would be a disaster. During the Cold War, the United States used such tactics to undermine China\u2019s technological development, and it backfired badly. An effort to deport Chinese scientists became a strategic own goal. Engineering experts, embittered at their rejection, hastened the process of technology transfer while paradoxically limiting American influence on Chinese science.The Chinese flaunted this history, a not-so-veiled warning to the United States, with their chosen lunar landing site: the von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n crater.Theodore von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n was a professor at the California Institute of Technology and Columbia University, and the mastermind of early aeronautical and astronautical engineering in the United States. Along with his graduate student Frank J. Malina, he pioneered the original American rocket program and co-founded NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His mathematical approaches to aerodynamics gave us the sweptback wings of the modern jet aircraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the tumultuous days of the 1940s, high-speed aircraft and rockets weren\u2019t just scientific developments \u2014 they were cutting-edge technologies thought to confer serious strategic advantage. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union jostled to acquire this new expertise. Governments were on high alert to ferret out potential spying, creating a tense political environment for those involved in classified research.The need for secrecy and the potential threat of communism created a problem for von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n and his team, because many in his orbit were already Communists, having joined the party in the 1930s. These included Malina and his friend, Chinese rocketeer Hsue-Shen Tsien (Qian Xuesen).Tsien and Malina had joined up in 1938 because they thought that the Communist Party was the most effective vehicle for tackling the rise of fascism abroad and systemic racism at home. They hated that the local Pasadena swimming pool ran one \u201cblacks only\u201d session on a Wednesday morning, only for the pool to be drained and cleaned for whites to return on Thursday morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, despite their convictions, Caltech\u2019s radical rocketeers came to have misgivings about the direction of communism, both in the United States and abroad. They hated the secret nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that was revealed in 1939, and they drifted away from communism throughout the 1940s.Malina was equally disappointed to see his rocket weaponized as the world\u2019s first nuclear missile, the Corporal. He eventually quit practical rocketry to pursue peace at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, a move that usefully placed him beyond the reach of the FBI.Not so for Tsien. Against the backdrop of the 1948 presidential election, he was accused of espionage along with eight other Chinese and Jewish colleagues. There wasn\u2019t any evidence that Tsien was a spy; rather his critique of fascism and his former membership in the Communist Party made him a liability to detractors such as Louis Gerhardus Dunn, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who contacted the FBI with unfounded allegations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Tsien attempted to return to China in 1949, he was thwarted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which cried foul at the engineering papers packed up in his luggage. Tsien wasn\u2019t a spy. The material was declassified and out of date. But its author presented more of a problem: What should they do with a U.S.-trained Chinese rocket expert with the liberty to move? Criminal charges were not likely, but as Caltech\u2019s president Lee DuBridge put it, Tsien \u201cwasn\u2019t going back to China to grow apples.\u201dIn fact, Tsien didn\u2019t want to return to China. He asked for von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n\u2019s help \u2014 the professor was by this time a senior Pentagon adviser \u2014 but was left bitterly disappointed in his old mentor. The crowning misery for Tsien was the INS attempt to deport him to demonstrate their uncompromising anti-communist stance.Even the State Department could see that handing over a rocket expert to a rival communist state under the guise of anti-communism wasn\u2019t the wisest plan. For four years, Tsien\u2019s departure was prohibited, and he was confined to Los Angeles County, forced to report to the INS office once a month. He couldn\u2019t even go to the beach. Eventually, without giving Tsien any choice, he was exchanged for American prisoners of war.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis detention made him resentful. \u201cI do not plan to come back,\u201d the indignant scientist told reporters at Los Angeles Harbor in September 1955. \u201cI plan to do my best to help Chinese people to build up their nation.\u201dChinese Premier Zhou Enlai was naturally delighted. With all that Tsien had learned from von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n, China went from being a country capable of producing bicycles and a simple car to being the third country to independently send humans into orbit.It took a few years, but the United States eventually felt the sting of its mistake. Derivatives of Tsien\u2019s Silkworm ballistic missile found their way to other countries and were fired at American forces or their allies, first in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and, most recently, by Yemen\u2019s Houthi rebels in 2016.Story continues below advertisementThe lesson: The impulse to undertake diplomatic hostility, to engage in antagonistic competition rather than cooperation in space, produced precisely the outcome it purported to avoid. Instead of stifling China\u2019s space program, it dramatically accelerated it.These days, as the FBI is once again canceling visas of Chinese professors, it\u2019s plain that of the two space powers, China is most alert to the power of this history. Landing its rover in the midst of the von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n crater has sent a clear, if provocative, message: Nothing propels China\u2019s planetary ambitions more than misguided attempts by the United States to play hardball. Hardball tactics will only advance China\u2019s space program. The blunder that could cost the U.S. the new space race ",
        "author": "Fraser MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The blunder that could cost the U.S. the new space race  (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2088",
        "date": "2019-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/26/blunder-that-could-cost-us-new-space-race/",
        "text": "Are we about to embark on a new space race?In January, China became the first sovereign state to soft-land a probe on the far side of the moon. It\u2019s no secret that China is working toward a future crewed mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis presents a serious challenge to American supremacy in space. President Trump has responded by pushing for a crewed lunar mission as early as 2024, with the ultimate aim of looking toward Mars. In addition to accelerating the United States\u2019 own space program, Trump\u2019s advisers are working to stall Chinese technological development by inhibiting access to the U.S. commercial space sector. They are also working to limit international intellectual exchange. Chinese students are experiencing long delays in processing their visas, and White House adviser Stephen Miller has even called for a blanket visa ban. Others are advocating a blacklist of companies from \u201caggressor states.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut such a combative approach would be a disaster. During the Cold War, the United States used such tactics to undermine China\u2019s technological development, and it backfired badly. An effort to deport Chinese scientists became a strategic own goal. Engineering experts, embittered at their rejection, hastened the process of technology transfer while paradoxically limiting American influence on Chinese science.The Chinese flaunted this history, a not-so-veiled warning to the United States, with their chosen lunar landing site: the von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n crater.Theodore von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n was a professor at the California Institute of Technology and Columbia University, and the mastermind of early aeronautical and astronautical engineering in the United States. Along with his graduate student Frank J. Malina, he pioneered the original American rocket program and co-founded NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His mathematical approaches to aerodynamics gave us the sweptback wings of the modern jet aircraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the tumultuous days of the 1940s, high-speed aircraft and rockets weren\u2019t just scientific developments \u2014 they were cutting-edge technologies thought to confer serious strategic advantage. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union jostled to acquire this new expertise. Governments were on high alert to ferret out potential spying, creating a tense political environment for those involved in classified research.The need for secrecy and the potential threat of communism created a problem for von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n and his team, because many in his orbit were already Communists, having joined the party in the 1930s. These included Malina and his friend, Chinese rocketeer Hsue-Shen Tsien (Qian Xuesen).Tsien and Malina had joined up in 1938 because they thought that the Communist Party was the most effective vehicle for tackling the rise of fascism abroad and systemic racism at home. They hated that the local Pasadena swimming pool ran one \u201cblacks only\u201d session on a Wednesday morning, only for the pool to be drained and cleaned for whites to return on Thursday morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, despite their convictions, Caltech\u2019s radical rocketeers came to have misgivings about the direction of communism, both in the United States and abroad. They hated the secret nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that was revealed in 1939, and they drifted away from communism throughout the 1940s.Malina was equally disappointed to see his rocket weaponized as the world\u2019s first nuclear missile, the Corporal. He eventually quit practical rocketry to pursue peace at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris, a move that usefully placed him beyond the reach of the FBI.Not so for Tsien. Against the backdrop of the 1948 presidential election, he was accused of espionage along with eight other Chinese and Jewish colleagues. There wasn\u2019t any evidence that Tsien was a spy; rather his critique of fascism and his former membership in the Communist Party made him a liability to detractors such as Louis Gerhardus Dunn, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who contacted the FBI with unfounded allegations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Tsien attempted to return to China in 1949, he was thwarted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which cried foul at the engineering papers packed up in his luggage. Tsien wasn\u2019t a spy. The material was declassified and out of date. But its author presented more of a problem: What should they do with a U.S.-trained Chinese rocket expert with the liberty to move? Criminal charges were not likely, but as Caltech\u2019s president Lee DuBridge put it, Tsien \u201cwasn\u2019t going back to China to grow apples.\u201dIn fact, Tsien didn\u2019t want to return to China. He asked for von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n\u2019s help \u2014 the professor was by this time a senior Pentagon adviser \u2014 but was left bitterly disappointed in his old mentor. The crowning misery for Tsien was the INS attempt to deport him to demonstrate their uncompromising anti-communist stance.Even the State Department could see that handing over a rocket expert to a rival communist state under the guise of anti-communism wasn\u2019t the wisest plan. For four years, Tsien\u2019s departure was prohibited, and he was confined to Los Angeles County, forced to report to the INS office once a month. He couldn\u2019t even go to the beach. Eventually, without giving Tsien any choice, he was exchanged for American prisoners of war.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis detention made him resentful. \u201cI do not plan to come back,\u201d the indignant scientist told reporters at Los Angeles Harbor in September 1955. \u201cI plan to do my best to help Chinese people to build up their nation.\u201dChinese Premier Zhou Enlai was naturally delighted. With all that Tsien had learned from von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n, China went from being a country capable of producing bicycles and a simple car to being the third country to independently send humans into orbit.It took a few years, but the United States eventually felt the sting of its mistake. Derivatives of Tsien\u2019s Silkworm ballistic missile found their way to other countries and were fired at American forces or their allies, first in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and, most recently, by Yemen\u2019s Houthi rebels in 2016.Story continues below advertisementThe lesson: The impulse to undertake diplomatic hostility, to engage in antagonistic competition rather than cooperation in space, produced precisely the outcome it purported to avoid. Instead of stifling China\u2019s space program, it dramatically accelerated it.These days, as the FBI is once again canceling visas of Chinese professors, it\u2019s plain that of the two space powers, China is most alert to the power of this history. Landing its rover in the midst of the von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n crater has sent a clear, if provocative, message: Nothing propels China\u2019s planetary ambitions more than misguided attempts by the United States to play hardball. Hardball tactics will only advance China\u2019s space program. The blunder that could cost the U.S. the new space race ",
        "author": "Fraser MacDonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Prepare Yourself for Space (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2089",
        "date": "2019-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/magazine/how-to-prepare-yourself-for-space.html",
        "text": "Rehearse basic bodily functions (use a diaper). Get counseling in advance. Rehearse basic bodily functions (use a diaper). Get counseling in advance. \u201cYou\u2019ve been trying not to pee in your pants your whole life,\u201d says the retired astronaut Scott Kelly, who wore a diaper for liftoff and landing on all four of his space missions. Going into orbit will require you to confront your body in ways you don\u2019t have to on Earth. Get over decades of conditioning by rehearsing basic bodily functions on land: Put on a diaper, lie on the floor with your legs up on the couch, and practice urinating without shame or gravity\u2019s assistance. (Don\u2019t, and you\u2019ll risk damaging your bladder when your body won\u2019t relieve itself in space.)",
        "author": "By Malia Wollan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Prepare Yourself for Space (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2090",
        "date": "2019-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/magazine/how-to-prepare-yourself-for-space.html",
        "text": "Rehearse basic bodily functions (use a diaper). Get counseling in advance. Rehearse basic bodily functions (use a diaper). Get counseling in advance. \u201cYou\u2019ve been trying not to pee in your pants your whole life,\u201d says the retired astronaut Scott Kelly, who wore a diaper for liftoff and landing on all four of his space missions. Going into orbit will require you to confront your body in ways you don\u2019t have to on Earth. Get over decades of conditioning by rehearsing basic bodily functions on land: Put on a diaper, lie on the floor with your legs up on the couch, and practice urinating without shame or gravity\u2019s assistance. (Don\u2019t, and you\u2019ll risk damaging your bladder when your body won\u2019t relieve itself in space.)",
        "author": "By Malia Wollan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robin Bell Doesn\u2019t Think Science Should Be Political (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2091",
        "date": "2018-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/magazine/robin-bell-doesnt-think-science-should-be-political.html",
        "text": "The geophysicist on climate-change deniers, optimism for the planet and women in STEM fields. The geophysicist on climate-change deniers, optimism for the planet and women in STEM fields. Last year, you began your tenure as the president-elect of the American Geophysical Union, a global organization of earth and space scientists who work on ensuring a sustainable future. Do you feel as if we\u2019re at a crossroads for climate change? Yes. We\u2019ve gone from a place where scientists predicted change from invisible gases, to where we could visibly see the change in the polar region, to now seeing it on our front doorsteps from warmer days, shorter winters and rising sea levels. Our knowledge of our planet has made science political, but it\u2019s not \u2014 it\u2019s a public resource.",
        "author": "By Molly Lambert"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can\u2019t Disaster Movies Evolve? (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2092",
        "date": "2021-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/magazine/george-clooney-midnight-sky.html",
        "text": "George Clooney\u2019s new apocalypse movie does what they all do: turn the end of the world into a personal issue. But the truth is we\u2019re all in it together. George Clooney\u2019s new apocalypse movie does what they all do: turn the end of the world into a personal issue. But the truth is we\u2019re all in it together. Everyone on Earth is dead, or will be soon. We don\u2019t know exactly what happened \u2014 fallout from a nuclear catastrophe? \u2014 but whatever it was, it\u2019s still spreading, still killing people, not going away. Some survivors are hiding underground, but they can\u2019t last long. There seem to be a few people left aboveground, near the planet\u2019s poles, but it\u2019s clear that whatever came for everyone else is also coming for them. We are doomed \u2014 all of us, that is, apart from the five astronauts aboard Aether, a spaceship en route back to Earth after scouting a potentially habitable moon of Jupiter.",
        "author": "By Peter C. Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Malaysian Insta-City Becomes a Flash Point for Chinese Colonialism \u2014 and Capital Flight (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2093",
        "date": "2018-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/magazine/a-malaysian-insta-city-becomes-a-flash-point-for-chinese-colonialism-and-capital-flight.html",
        "text": "The creation of man-made islands to host a new metropolis has come under fire from both local politicians and new rules in Beijing. The creation of man-made islands to host a new metropolis has come under fire from both local politicians and new rules in Beijing. Off the southern coast of Malaysia, a futuristic city is rising from the sea. An artificial island, the first of four that will anchor the projected $100 billion Forest City project, has materialized in the Straits of Johor, the channel that separates the Malay Peninsula from Singapore. Three years ago, this was open water. Today, a phalanx of half-built high-rises stretches across the new island, a flock of construction cranes hovering above. When completed, Forest City is expected to cover an area the size of four Central Parks and accommodate 700,000 residents. The metropolis will evoke a high-tech Atlantis, a \u201csmart\u201d eco-city where spacecraft-shaped towers will be draped with greenery, all motorized traffic will flow underground and every inch of the island cluster will be monitored by a state-of-the-art security system. In the words of a promotional video: \u201cIt is a pride and dream paradise for all mankind.\u201d",
        "author": "By Brook Larmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Art at the End of the World (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2094",
        "date": "2017-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/magazine/the-art-at-the-end-of-the-world.html",
        "text": "A pilgrimage (with children) to see \u2018\u2018Spiral Jetty,\u2019\u2019 Robert Smithson\u2019s profound testament to catastrophe. A pilgrimage (with children) to see \u2018\u2018Spiral Jetty,\u2019\u2019 Robert Smithson\u2019s profound testament to catastrophe. We were taking an airplane, I told our children, to see what I dramatically billed as \u2018\u2018the end of the world.\u2019\u2019",
        "author": "By Heidi Julavits"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Art at the End of the World (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2095",
        "date": "2017-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/magazine/the-art-at-the-end-of-the-world.html",
        "text": "A pilgrimage (with children) to see \u2018\u2018Spiral Jetty,\u2019\u2019 Robert Smithson\u2019s profound testament to catastrophe. A pilgrimage (with children) to see \u2018\u2018Spiral Jetty,\u2019\u2019 Robert Smithson\u2019s profound testament to catastrophe. We were taking an airplane, I told our children, to see what I dramatically billed as \u2018\u2018the end of the world.\u2019\u2019",
        "author": "By Heidi Julavits"
    },
    {
        "title": "Letter of Recommendation: Asteroid Day (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2096",
        "date": "2018-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-asteroid-day.html",
        "text": "It is the one holiday that grants permission to indulge in a spectacle of imagined global catastrophe. It is the one holiday that grants permission to indulge in a spectacle of imagined global catastrophe. Every few weeks, I wake up clammy from a dream in which I have failed to prepare myself for calamity. A frequent one has me flying down the freeway on cruise control when, out of nowhere, I decide to crawl into the back seat to grab something. I realize my mistake only as I feel the car begin to drift toward the median, but when I try to return to the front seat, my legs go limp. I always wake up before the crash.",
        "author": "By Erica Berry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Laurie Metcalf Was Hiding in Plain Sight (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2097",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/laurie-metcalf-lady-bird-roseanne.html",
        "text": "From \u201cLady Bird\u201d to \u201cThree Tall Women\u201d to a revival of \u201cRoseanne,\u201d the 62-year-old actress is finally showing off the extent of her range. From \u201cLady Bird\u201d to \u201cThree Tall Women\u201d to a revival of \u201cRoseanne,\u201d the 62-year-old actress is finally showing off the extent of her range. A unicorn, a monster, a phoenix, a machine, a heavyweight fighter, an astronaut, a superhero, a thoroughbred, a home-run hitter, a waitress juggling \u201c16 entrees, 42 starters, 16 desserts,\u201d a jazz virtuoso, LeBron James, Magellan, Snuffleupagus. The actress Laurie Metcalf has been compared to all of these things. To speak with her colleagues is to blush on her behalf. It is to hear words like \u201cpurity\u201d and \u201cdevotion\u201d and \u201cwork ethic,\u201d delivered with the sober intonations of people doing all they can to rescue them from clich\u00e9.",
        "author": "By Willa Paskin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Letter of Recommendation: Life Magazine (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2098",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-life-magazine.html",
        "text": "A youthful love of its articles and photographs led the writer to a life of travel \u2014 and to an unexpected encounter with a fellow adventurer. A youthful love of its articles and photographs led the writer to a life of travel \u2014 and to an unexpected encounter with a fellow adventurer. Life magazine was like life itself for me for about 12 years of my early youth, until we stopped renewing our subscription. I remember the images of the Korean War, the movie \u201cCleopatra,\u201d the funeral of William Faulkner (reported by William Styron), the space program and the Vietnam War. Life\u2019s photographs were brave and brilliant, capturing the human moment. Reading Life in a bungalow in Medford, Mass., I beheld a world that was remote and alluring, places I would never see, parties I would never attend, millionaires and up-and-comers I would never know. It was how the mass of people lived, vicariously, following the fortunes of famous names in magazines; how they still live, overlooked, grinding away, not celebrated, not up-and-coming.",
        "author": "By Paul Theroux"
    },
    {
        "title": "Adam Grant\u2019s Obsession: \u2018The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy\u2019 (WSJ: Magazine - Culture) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2099",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/adam-grant-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-11611840780?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=9",
        "text": "One of those books was a beat-up paperback copy of Douglas Adams\u2019s 1979 comedy sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy, which originated as a BBC radio broadcast and later spawned four book sequels, a stage show, video games, a movie and a TV adaptation. The story follows the life of Arthur Dent, the only person to survive an alien race\u2019s \u201chyperspace bypass\u201d construction project that leads to the Earth\u2019s destruction. Dent hitches a ride on a passing spacecraft and explores the galaxy. Throughout the book, Adams introduces tongue-in-cheek technologies, like the \u201cIdent-I-Eeze,\u201d a card designed to hold all of one\u2019s passwords, which is immediately stolen. Dent absorbs the lessons of the universe, including learning the meaning of life from a supercomputer. It\u2019s 42. (\u201c \u2018The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,\u2019 said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.\u201d)\nAfter reading The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide, Grant began to rethink his undergraduate thesis, which explored the motivations of workers by surveying writers and editors at a travel guide. Grant, who was a psychology major, had originally hypothesized that workers tend to be motivated by discrete and concrete aspects of the job, like compensation or title. With The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide, though, he realized that giving someone a raise and expecting this to produce long-term happiness in an otherwise miserable job is like saying the meaning of life is 42. It\u2019s providing a quantifiable solution to an unquantifiable problem. He turned his attention instead to a new hypothesis: Workers are motivated predominately by feelings of meaningfulness and purpose in their jobs. It was the first of many effects the novel would have on his professional work.\n\n\n\u201cThe book was a great reminder to appreciate the complexity and also the difficulty of answering a lot of the important questions,\u201d Grant says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Courtesy of Penguin Random House\n \n\n\n\nGrant, 39, grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. His mother was a teacher and his father an attorney. He was an all-American diver, an aspiring basketball player and a magician, making money in his teenage years and at Harvard by putting on shows for neighbors and friends. \u201cWhen people think about magic, they often are dazzled by the big stage illusions,\u201d he says. \u201cBut looking back, one of the things that it really impressed upon me is that some of the greatest mysteries of the universe are sitting right under our noses and even in between our ears.\u201d\nHe received his master\u2019s and Ph.D. degrees in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, completing both in a combined three years. In 2009, as a 28-year-old, he became the youngest-ever tenured professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and was ranked by students as the best professor for seven consecutive years. Today, he has a number of viral TED Talks and has written four bestselling books, including ones about success, nonconformity and building resilience (which he co-wrote with Facebook COO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sheryl Sandberg\n\n\n\n ), as well as the upcoming Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don\u2019t Know, out February 2, about reassessing our long-held assumptions and opinions.\nLike Grant, Adams was precocious, reading English at St. John\u2019s College, Cambridge, joining the Footlights student comedy club, acting in a few episodes of Monty Python and writing teleplays for the English sci-fi series Doctor Who. He was also an infamous procrastinator. His book editor once rented him a hotel room so that he\u2019d have no distractions until he\u2019d finished writing. He also sent himself on a writing retreat, hoping for quiet but spending most of his time chatting with the host.\nAdams\u2019s combination of procrastination with intense creativity piqued Grant\u2019s curiosity, in part leading him to study the overlap between creativity and procrastination.\n\u201cI\u2019d always thought of creative people as people who act in advance, who start early, who have a eureka moment and then can\u2019t wait to dive into it,\u201d says Grant. \u201cIt\u2019s very likely that I would have just dismissed the idea and moved on to something else if not for Douglas Adams.\u201d Grant began to question his prior beliefs. \u201cI started wondering, what if creativity was not entirely in spite of his procrastination?\u201d he says. \u201cWhat if some of it came because of it?\u201d\nLast year, Grant published a paper with Jihae Shin, one of his former graduate students at Wharton, that concluded employees who procrastinated a moderate amount were more productive and creative than those who only procrastinated a little bit (or who heavily procrastinated). One of the ways Grant and Shin showed this was by asking students to write a business proposal for an entrepreneur who had gotten $10,000 to start an online company. Participants were told to write \u201call the ideas that come to mind\u201d and then to choose one of the The bestselling organizational psychologist and author of the forthcoming \u2018Think Again\u2019 traces many of his academic insights on creativity, procrastination and motivation to Douglas Adams\u2019s comedy sci-fi classic. ",
        "author": "Cody Delistraty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Public or Private, Tesla Fans Are Along for the Ride (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2100",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-fans-sign-us-up-for-private-ride-with-elon-musk-1533902408?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=90",
        "text": "Whether individuals and some institutional investors will be able to stay in Tesla will depend on how a deal is structured, though. Some holders of Tesla stock could face hurdles to participating.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk has said he wants to take Tesla private, giving investors a choice: stay with the company or sell their shares and receive $420 cash for each. The more shareholders who opt to stay, the less cash the company or any new investor would have to pony up.\n\nAnd funding for a deal is a big question. Tesla, which has dwindling cash reserves and continues to generate negative free-cash flow, hasn\u2019t given any detail on how it would fund a buyout.\nMr. Musk tweeted \u201cfunding secured,\u201d but a later statement from several Tesla board members was less definitive. It said a meeting with Mr. Musk a week earlier had \u201calso addressed the funding for this to occur.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJames Stephenson\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Stephenson\n \n\n\n\nIndividual shareholders like Mr. Stephenson hold about 12% of Tesla\u2019s stock, according to FactSet, and many say they won\u2019t go. The 40-year-old financial analyst who lives in Florida said he wants to hold on to his Tesla shares, which he says number 169 and were worth around $60,000 based on Thursday\u2019s close.\n\u201cI\u2019m not going to sell at $420, and most other Tesla shareholders I\u2019ve spoken with aren\u2019t going to sell either,\u201d said Mr. Stephenson, adding he expects Tesla to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization over the next decade, versus around $60 billion today.\nMr. Musk said in one tweet this week that he would create \u201ca special purpose fund enabling anyone to stay with Tesla,\u201d but the car maker and Mr. Musk haven\u2019t elaborated on how such a vehicle would work. Usually, individual investors who don\u2019t meet certain income and asset criteria face steep regulatory barriers to participating in a buyout.\n\n\nMore Tesla Board\u2019s Independence Is Tested by Musk\u2019s Buyout Idea SEC Probes Tesla CEO Musk\u2019s Tweets Streetwise: Elon Musk\u2019s Flawed Plan for Tesla Shareholders Tesla\u2019s Big Question: Better or Worse Off as Private Company Tesla\u2019s Board Has Met Several Times to Discuss Going-Private Proposal Musk\u2019s Tesla Claim Could Land Him in Regulatory Trouble Elon Musk Tweets He Is Considering Taking Tesla Private \n\n\nWhat\u2019s more, almost 8% of Tesla shareholders are index funds that follow benchmarks that exclude unlisted companies, according to Morningstar. Most of those would likely have to cash out since they can\u2019t generally hold stock not included in public markets or an index.\nAn additional 24% of shareholders are mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that face limits on holdings of securities that don\u2019t trade easily. In most cases, they can\u2019t have more than 15% of their portfolio in illiquid securities.\nThese funds, which are among Tesla\u2019s biggest shareholders, have yet to say how they would react to a go-private transaction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n T. Rowe Price Associates,\n\n\n Tesla\u2019s second-largest holder after Mr. Musk, with a 9.2% stake, declined to comment. So, too, did No. 3 holder Fidelity Management & Research Co., with an 8.16% stake.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCraig Blanchfield\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blanchfield\n \n\n\n\nBaillie Gifford, the next largest holder, said in a statement: \u201cAs long-term shareholders, we will take time to reflect upon this development.\u201d\nVanguard Group, which is Tesla\u2019s sixth-largest holder, owns shares mostly through index funds, which would likely have to sell. \u201cOur active funds are technically able to invest in private companies, but it is rare for them to do so,\u201d a spokesman said.\nSome smaller fund managers say they are on board.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig Blanchfield,\n\n\n\n a portfolio manager at Mosaic Advisors, a money manager that oversees more than $241 million, said he wants to continue to hold Tesla shares. He said Tesla has already been a lucrative investment for him, as well as clients for whom he manages money.\nMr. Blanchfield added that Mr. Musk\u2019s penchant for success\u2014from revolutionizing payments with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal Holdings Inc.\n\n\n to building rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014is a key reason behind his plan to hold Tesla shares indefinitely. \u201cThis is an example of betting on the jockey, not the horse,\u201d said Mr. Blanchfield.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGalileo Russell\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Galileo Russell\n \n\n\n\nThe $174.7 million\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ark Industrial Innovation ETF,\n\n\n an actively managed fund from Ark Investment Management, is another committed bull. Tesla is its largest holding, accounting for 11.7% of the fund\u2019s portfolio, according to FactSet. Two other Ark ETFs own smaller stakes in Tesla.\n\u201cWe think that $420 is a very low price to pay for Tesla today,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tasha Keeney,\n\n\n\n an analyst with Ark Investment Management. The fund would prefer Tesla stay public because liquidity limits might push it to sell, b Plenty of Tesla\u2019s die-hard holders will stick with Elon Musk, no matter if the car maker is a public or private company; one is \u201cbetting on the jockey, not the horse.\u201d ",
        "author": "Michael Wursthorn  and Asjylyn Loder"
    },
    {
        "title": "ARK Investment Pushes Back on Upstart SPAC With Similar Name (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2101",
        "date": "2021-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ark-investment-pushes-back-on-upstart-spac-with-similar-name-11613159368?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=37",
        "text": "The SPAC\u2019s prospectus says it will \u201cfocus on US-based disruptive technology companies that we believe have significant growth prospects and the potential to generate attractive returns.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe SPAC, trading under the ticker symbol ARKIU, has also requested the tickers ARKI and ARKIW. It gained nearly 10% in its first three trading days.\n\n\n\u201cWe are not connected in any way with Ark Global Acquisition,\u201d said ARK Investment Management\u2019s Chief Operating Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Staudt,\n\n\n\n \u201cbut are extremely concerned that this company\u2019s adoption of the \u2018Ark\u2019 name and \u2018ARKI\u2019 ticker is causing confusion among investors who are mistakenly thinking that either our company\u2026or Cathie Wood organized it or are connected with it.\u201d\nArk Global rejected those concerns Friday.\n\u201cWe believe any investors or potential investors, in either company, are sophisticated enough to tell the difference between an ETF and a SPAC,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Roberts,\n\n\n\n a spokesman for Ark Global.\nFive of ARK\u2019s existing exchange-traded funds all have ticker symbols that begin with the letters ARK, including one with the ticker ARKW. On Jan. 13, ARK filed to launch another fund, ARK Space Exploration ETF, that would have the ticker ARKX.\nMr. Staudt added, \u201cThis new entity has the same stated focus as ARK Invest\u2014investment in disruptive technology. We believe that it is infringing ARK Invest\u2019s trademark, and have asked Ark Global Acquisition to immediately change its name.\u201d\nThe SPAC\u2019s spokesman countered that many brands share the term \u201cark\u201d and said its name is an acronym based on a mix of its founders\u2019 initials: Ark Global is headed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rich Williams\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Krenzer,\n\n\n\n the former chief executive and chief operating officer, respectively, of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Groupon Inc.\n\n\n Its chairman is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sultan Almaadeed,\n\n\n\n a former executive at the Qatar Investment Authority.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nWrite to Jason Zweig at intelligentinvestor@wsj.com The high-performing fund manager says investors are confusing a new, unaffiliated blank-check company called Ark Global Acquisition with Cathie Wood\u2019s firm. ",
        "author": "Jason Zweig"
    },
    {
        "title": "Payments Fintech Stripe Valued at $20 Billion in Latest Funding Round (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2102",
        "date": "2018-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/payments-fintech-stripe-valued-at-20-billion-in-latest-funding-round-1537994284?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=87",
        "text": "Investors have flocked to payments companies in recent years, betting that the volume of shopping happening over the internet and on mobile devices is poised to skyrocket. They also are wagering that barriers to some types of digital transactions are eroding, like businesses paying other businesses.\n\n\n\n\nAbout $18.6 billion in venture capital has gone to payments startups globally since the start of 2018, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, though that figure excludes Stripe\u2019s recent haul. That is nearly four times the amount of venture capital that payments companies raised in 2017 and includes Chinese fintech giant Ant Financial Services Group\u2019s $14 billion fundraising from June. Details of the Stripe fundraising were first reported by Bloomberg News.\n\n\nFounded in 2010 by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe developed technology that enables other startups and tech companies, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shopify Inc.\n\n\n and Lyft Inc., to accept payments made online and through mobile devices. It has since branched into other payments services, including letting businesses issue their own credit and debit cards through Stripe and a tie-up with makers of credit-card readers that allows Stripe to start processing sales for bricks-and-mortar retailers.\nThe new fundraising gives Stripe a valuation that is comparable to Silicon Valley heavyweights like Palantir Technologies Inc., WeWork Cos. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nStripe\u2019s rivals include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal Holdings Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Braintree unit and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Adyen\n\n\n NV, which has seen its shares nearly triple since its initial public offering in June. \nStripe\u2019s founders have long put off talk of going public. But investors recently awarded them with special supervoting shares that would them to keep control even after an IPO, The Wall Street Journal reported in May.\nWrite to Peter Rudegeair at Peter.Rudegeair@wsj.com Stripe said a new fundraising round values the company at roughly $20 billion, vaulting it into the ranks of the world\u2019s most valuable private companies. ",
        "author": "Peter Rudegeair"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saudi Campaign Seeks to Calm Investors Shaken by Anticorruption Drive (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2103",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-campaign-seeks-to-calm-investors-shaken-by-anticorruption-drive-1517826601?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=24",
        "text": "Officials said the trip is intended in part to shore up Saudi Arabia\u2019s image with investors and business after 350 of the country\u2019s business elite were arrested in November in what the government described as a corruption crackdown.\n\n\n\n\nThe country wants foreign money to help expand its economy beyond oil. At the center of that plan is the listing of Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as\u00a0Aramco, in what could be the largest ever IPO.\n\n\nRelated Reading Saudis Release Prince al-Waleed, One of the World\u2019s Richest Men (Jan. 28) Plea for Money Preceded Saudi Crackdown on Elites (Jan. 28) Saudi Arabia Moves Elites to Prison, Threatens Trial (Jan. 26) Saudi Prince Shakes Royal Family With Crackdown (Nov. 10) Broad Crackdown Reins In Saudi Arabia\u2019s Elite (Nov. 5) \n\n\nForeign investors have been concerned about the corruption campaign\u2019s lack of transparency, with well-known Saudi businessmen like billionaire Prince al-Waleed bin Talal detained for two months without explanation. Many say those concerns are likely to linger. \n\n\nWhile comprehensive data on money flows in and out of the country is hard to come by, Saudi Arabia-focused equity funds saw big outflows in the aftermath of the November arrests, data from EPFR Global shows. This year, such funds have started to see inflows as oil prices have risen.\n\u201cThe biggest concern is stability,\u201d said Shahzad Hasan, a London-based portfolio manager at Allianz Global Investors. \u201cFor years, the ruling family had an informal pact about how to rule and the situation was predictable. I\u2019m concerned this might turn the apple cart.\u201d\nA spokesman for the Saudi royal court referred all inquiries to the\u00a0government communications entity which didn\u2019t respond to requests for\u00a0comment. A spokeswoman for the Saudi embassy in Washington said the crown prince\u2019s visit to the U.S. was planned ahead of the corruption crackdown and referenced government data that\u00a0showed\u00a0$5.46 billion of capital flowed into the country in January, a near record.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe crown prince\u00a0is set to\u00a0meet with British Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theresa May\n\n\n\n and\u00a0discuss the Aramco listing, among other matters, according to the people\u00a0familiar with the matter. That visit underscores how the Saudis are still weighing options for where to list the IPO\u2019s international portion, a debate that has stalled the deal. Prince Mohammed favors New York, and Saudi energy minister\u00a0and Aramco chairman Khalid al-Falih, who will attend the London meeting, prefers the U.K., The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.\nA Downing Street spokesman declined to comment, and the Saudi embassy in London didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nWhile plans for the U.S. trip haven\u2019t been completed, Prince Mohammed is likely to go to Washington in early March and visit New York\u00a0and\u00a0Silicon Valley, according to\u00a0some of the people\u00a0familiar with the matter. \n\u201cIt is the kingdom roadshow to show that the economy is thriving, the business environment is safe and that it is keen on its U.S. relationship,\u201d said a senior Saudi official.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe\u00a0Saudis\u00a0will meet with U.S. oil companies, according to some of the people familiar with the matter. But the Saudi government has a long list of non-energy projects about which it is talking to foreign companies or investors. That includes talks between Aramco and Amazon to set up a massive data-storage center, a space tourism venture with British businessman Richard Branson and talks with a French company to establish dairy farming in the desert kingdom.\nRiyadh\u00a0has said it wants to raise an estimated $200 billion by privatizing state assets in the coming years.\nPrince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and a brother of Prince Mohammed, is helping organize the crown prince\u2019s trip to America, according to a spokeswoman for the Washington embassy.\nEven before the roadshow, Saudi officials have been contacting foreign business and investors to reassure them that dealing with Saudi is safe, according to some of the people familiar with the matter. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has huge ambitions for change in Saudi Arabia. But will his reforms also mean greater turbulence in the Middle East? WSJ's Niki Blasina reports. Photo: Getty\n \n\n\nPrince Khalid has been contacting U.S. companies, including in the oil industry, according to these people. The\u00a0spokeswoman for the Saudi embassy in the U.S. says the ambassador\u00a0regularly meets with business stakeholders, among others.\nThe crown prince also wants to reassure the French government over bilateral economic ties after\u00a0the detention of\u00a0Saudi billionaire Prince al-Waleed on unspecified corruption\u00a0allegations\u00a0charges had alarmed businesses\u00a0in France.\nPrince al-Waleed, who has large\u00a0holdings in\u00a0western companies such as Twitter,\u00a0had helped coordinate major investments in Saudi Arabia by French investors. He was released last Saturday\u00a0and claims his innocence, according to people close to him.\nPrince al-Waleed ha The Saudi government is embarking on a campaign of damage control after the abrupt detentions of wealthy businessmen spooked the foreign investors it needs to diversify its economy. ",
        "author": "Benoit Faucon, Georgi Kantchev and Nicolas Parasie"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 at 50: A Quiet Film Still Makes a Big Bang (WSJ: Masterpiece) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2104",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/2001-at-50-a-quiet-film-still-makes-a-big-bang-1523033090?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=70",
        "text": "It was into this age of concern about mutually assured destruction and exhilaration at the prospect of the \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d was released. Now a cornerstone of cinema, the film\u2019s place in history was far from certain. At its premiere in April, walkouts were plentiful and leading critics like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pauline Kael\n\n\n\n disdainful.\nKubrick\u2019s film is a meditation on man\u2019s enlightenment in four movements. In the distant past, a troop of hominids encounters a mysterious monolith and realizes that the bones littering its habitat are more than refuse, they\u2019re tools\u2014or weapons. They go to a watering hole and attack another group with their newfound technology. Victorious, the hominids\u2019 leader tosses his primitive club into the air and it transforms into a satellite. \nIn the second act, a scientist makes his way to a moon base to investigate a recent discovery: another monolith. This time, the slab emits a signal pointing to Jupiter. In the next section, a group journeys toward the planet. Their guide, an allegedly infallible AI named HAL, seems to be making errors in his calculations. When the astronauts decide to disconnect him, HAL goes on a rampage, exterminating all of the crew but one, Dave, who manages to give the computerized killer a digital lobotomy.\n\nFinally, as Dave approaches the signal\u2019s coordinates, he\u2019s pulled into a cosmological maelstrom, zooming through space and time in a surreal, kaleidoscopic sequence. He suddenly finds himself in an ornate room, and sees himself quickly age. At the foot of his deathbed, another monolith looms over his decrepit body, and he is transformed into a fetus in an amniotic sac, hovering over the Earth with his eyes wide open. \nIt was a minor miracle such an odd film even got made. With a minimum of dialogue\u2014the first line doesn\u2019t come until 25 minutes in, and the 2\u00bd-hour film has less than 40 minutes of actual dialogue\u2014and confounding meaning, \u201c2001\u201d was unlike anything seen before. MGM was betting big on an unproven genre. Way behind schedule and over budget, the expansive production seemed less like a film shoot and more like an actual space mission. \nKubrick wasn\u2019t easy to work with, either. He wrote \u201c2001\u201d with sci-fi paragon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur C. Clarke,\n\n\n\n but the mercurial director was dissatisfied with the collaboration and approached authors like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.G. Ballard\n\n\n\n to replace his co-writer. While Clarke was never dropped, many of his contributions were: In the end, Kubrick cut so much of his material that at the screening, close to tears, the writer left at intermission. A similar fate befell composer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex North.\n\n\n\n Kubrick hired him to write an original score for the film, then replaced it entirely in postproduction. \nWe can be grateful that Kubrick\u2019s vision for the movie, what he described as \u201ca nonverbal experience,\u201d survived. For all that\u2019s come since \u201c2001,\u201d the experience of watching it is still startling because it is a largely silent one. The movie\u2019s long stretches without speaking seem just as radical today as they did 50 years ago. Even more so now that we\u2019ve been conditioned to expect sci-fi to be full of fast talkers, laser barrages and theater-shaking explosions. \nThe lack of sound makes us acutely aware of the crushing isolation that would be endured on a 400-million-mile trip to Jupiter. And more than a decade before\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ridley Scott\n\n\n\n told us that \u201cin space, no one can hear you scream,\u201d Kubrick terrified us with the imposing silence of the void. We still hold our breath as HAL quietly takes over one of the ship\u2019s pods, creeps up on an astronaut performing a spacewalk, and uses it to send him silently hurtling to his death. \nWith the film\u2019s soup\u00e7on of sound, we\u2019re compelled to grab onto any noise we can and hold tight. This may be why Kubrick\u2019s pairings of images and sound registered so powerfully in the collective imagination, and continue to do so. It\u2019s impossible to watch a sunrise and not hear\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Strauss\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cAlso sprach Zarathustra.\u201d And who can separate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Johann Strauss II\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cBlue Danube\u201d from a gently pirouetting space station? \nThis cinematic take on the silence between the notes also gives us plenty of time to think about the movie\u2019s slippery meanings, and the film\u2019s openness to interpretation means our discussions about \u201c2001\u201d will never end. Theories abound about every aspect of the movie: Is it a Nietzschean allegory? Are the formidable monoliths purely technological? What are we to make of the floating \u201cStarchild\u201d at the movie\u2019s conclusion?\nThere\u2019s no straightforward answer to any questions one might have\u2014Kubrick was insistent about the ambiguity: \u201cI intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness.\u201d \nUnsurpri Stanley Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi cornerstone is just as radical today as when it opened in 1968. ",
        "author": "Brian P. Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 at 50: A Quiet Film Still Makes a Big Bang (WSJ: Masterpiece) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2105",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/2001-at-50-a-quiet-film-still-makes-a-big-bang-1523033090?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=69",
        "text": "It was into this age of concern about mutually assured destruction and exhilaration at the prospect of the \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d was released. Now a cornerstone of cinema, the film\u2019s place in history was far from certain. At its premiere in April, walkouts were plentiful and leading critics like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pauline Kael\n\n\n\n disdainful.\nKubrick\u2019s film is a meditation on man\u2019s enlightenment in four movements. In the distant past, a troop of hominids encounters a mysterious monolith and realizes that the bones littering its habitat are more than refuse, they\u2019re tools\u2014or weapons. They go to a watering hole and attack another group with their newfound technology. Victorious, the hominids\u2019 leader tosses his primitive club into the air and it transforms into a satellite. \nIn the second act, a scientist makes his way to a moon base to investigate a recent discovery: another monolith. This time, the slab emits a signal pointing to Jupiter. In the next section, a group journeys toward the planet. Their guide, an allegedly infallible AI named HAL, seems to be making errors in his calculations. When the astronauts decide to disconnect him, HAL goes on a rampage, exterminating all of the crew but one, Dave, who manages to give the computerized killer a digital lobotomy.\n\nFinally, as Dave approaches the signal\u2019s coordinates, he\u2019s pulled into a cosmological maelstrom, zooming through space and time in a surreal, kaleidoscopic sequence. He suddenly finds himself in an ornate room, and sees himself quickly age. At the foot of his deathbed, another monolith looms over his decrepit body, and he is transformed into a fetus in an amniotic sac, hovering over the Earth with his eyes wide open. \nIt was a minor miracle such an odd film even got made. With a minimum of dialogue\u2014the first line doesn\u2019t come until 25 minutes in, and the 2\u00bd-hour film has less than 40 minutes of actual dialogue\u2014and confounding meaning, \u201c2001\u201d was unlike anything seen before. MGM was betting big on an unproven genre. Way behind schedule and over budget, the expansive production seemed less like a film shoot and more like an actual space mission. \nKubrick wasn\u2019t easy to work with, either. He wrote \u201c2001\u201d with sci-fi paragon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur C. Clarke,\n\n\n\n but the mercurial director was dissatisfied with the collaboration and approached authors like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.G. Ballard\n\n\n\n to replace his co-writer. While Clarke was never dropped, many of his contributions were: In the end, Kubrick cut so much of his material that at the screening, close to tears, the writer left at intermission. A similar fate befell composer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex North.\n\n\n\n Kubrick hired him to write an original score for the film, then replaced it entirely in postproduction. \nWe can be grateful that Kubrick\u2019s vision for the movie, what he described as \u201ca nonverbal experience,\u201d survived. For all that\u2019s come since \u201c2001,\u201d the experience of watching it is still startling because it is a largely silent one. The movie\u2019s long stretches without speaking seem just as radical today as they did 50 years ago. Even more so now that we\u2019ve been conditioned to expect sci-fi to be full of fast talkers, laser barrages and theater-shaking explosions. \nThe lack of sound makes us acutely aware of the crushing isolation that would be endured on a 400-million-mile trip to Jupiter. And more than a decade before\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ridley Scott\n\n\n\n told us that \u201cin space, no one can hear you scream,\u201d Kubrick terrified us with the imposing silence of the void. We still hold our breath as HAL quietly takes over one of the ship\u2019s pods, creeps up on an astronaut performing a spacewalk, and uses it to send him silently hurtling to his death. \nWith the film\u2019s soup\u00e7on of sound, we\u2019re compelled to grab onto any noise we can and hold tight. This may be why Kubrick\u2019s pairings of images and sound registered so powerfully in the collective imagination, and continue to do so. It\u2019s impossible to watch a sunrise and not hear\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Strauss\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cAlso sprach Zarathustra.\u201d And who can separate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Johann Strauss II\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cBlue Danube\u201d from a gently pirouetting space station? \nThis cinematic take on the silence between the notes also gives us plenty of time to think about the movie\u2019s slippery meanings, and the film\u2019s openness to interpretation means our discussions about \u201c2001\u201d will never end. Theories abound about every aspect of the movie: Is it a Nietzschean allegory? Are the formidable monoliths purely technological? What are we to make of the floating \u201cStarchild\u201d at the movie\u2019s conclusion?\nThere\u2019s no straightforward answer to any questions one might have\u2014Kubrick was insistent about the ambiguity: \u201cI intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness.\u201d \nUnsurpri Stanley Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi cornerstone is just as radical today as when it opened in 1968. ",
        "author": "Brian P. Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 at 50: A Quiet Film Still Makes a Big Bang (WSJ: Masterpiece) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2106",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/2001-at-50-a-quiet-film-still-makes-a-big-bang-1523033090?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=98",
        "text": "It was into this age of concern about mutually assured destruction and exhilaration at the prospect of the \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stanley Kubrick\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d was released. Now a cornerstone of cinema, the film\u2019s place in history was far from certain. At its premiere in April, walkouts were plentiful and leading critics like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pauline Kael\n\n\n\n disdainful.\nKubrick\u2019s film is a meditation on man\u2019s enlightenment in four movements. In the distant past, a troop of hominids encounters a mysterious monolith and realizes that the bones littering its habitat are more than refuse, they\u2019re tools\u2014or weapons. They go to a watering hole and attack another group with their newfound technology. Victorious, the hominids\u2019 leader tosses his primitive club into the air and it transforms into a satellite. \n\n\n\n\nIn the second act, a scientist makes his way to a moon base to investigate a recent discovery: another monolith. This time, the slab emits a signal pointing to Jupiter. In the next section, a group journeys toward the planet. Their guide, an allegedly infallible AI named HAL, seems to be making errors in his calculations. When the astronauts decide to disconnect him, HAL goes on a rampage, exterminating all of the crew but one, Dave, who manages to give the computerized killer a digital lobotomy.\n\nFinally, as Dave approaches the signal\u2019s coordinates, he\u2019s pulled into a cosmological maelstrom, zooming through space and time in a surreal, kaleidoscopic sequence. He suddenly finds himself in an ornate room, and sees himself quickly age. At the foot of his deathbed, another monolith looms over his decrepit body, and he is transformed into a fetus in an amniotic sac, hovering over the Earth with his eyes wide open. \nIt was a minor miracle such an odd film even got made. With a minimum of dialogue\u2014the first line doesn\u2019t come until 25 minutes in, and the 2\u00bd-hour film has less than 40 minutes of actual dialogue\u2014and confounding meaning, \u201c2001\u201d was unlike anything seen before. MGM was betting big on an unproven genre. Way behind schedule and over budget, the expansive production seemed less like a film shoot and more like an actual space mission. \nKubrick wasn\u2019t easy to work with, either. He wrote \u201c2001\u201d with sci-fi paragon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur C. Clarke,\n\n\n\n but the mercurial director was dissatisfied with the collaboration and approached authors like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.G. Ballard\n\n\n\n to replace his co-writer. While Clarke was never dropped, many of his contributions were: In the end, Kubrick cut so much of his material that at the screening, close to tears, the writer left at intermission. A similar fate befell composer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex North.\n\n\n\n Kubrick hired him to write an original score for the film, then replaced it entirely in postproduction. \nWe can be grateful that Kubrick\u2019s vision for the movie, what he described as \u201ca nonverbal experience,\u201d survived. For all that\u2019s come since \u201c2001,\u201d the experience of watching it is still startling because it is a largely silent one. The movie\u2019s long stretches without speaking seem just as radical today as they did 50 years ago. Even more so now that we\u2019ve been conditioned to expect sci-fi to be full of fast talkers, laser barrages and theater-shaking explosions. \nThe lack of sound makes us acutely aware of the crushing isolation that would be endured on a 400-million-mile trip to Jupiter. And more than a decade before\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ridley Scott\n\n\n\n told us that \u201cin space, no one can hear you scream,\u201d Kubrick terrified us with the imposing silence of the void. We still hold our breath as HAL quietly takes over one of the ship\u2019s pods, creeps up on an astronaut performing a spacewalk, and uses it to send him silently hurtling to his death. \nWith the film\u2019s soup\u00e7on of sound, we\u2019re compelled to grab onto any noise we can and hold tight. This may be why Kubrick\u2019s pairings of images and sound registered so powerfully in the collective imagination, and continue to do so. It\u2019s impossible to watch a sunrise and not hear\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Strauss\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cAlso sprach Zarathustra.\u201d And who can separate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Johann Strauss II\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cBlue Danube\u201d from a gently pirouetting space station? \nThis cinematic take on the silence between the notes also gives us plenty of time to think about the movie\u2019s slippery meanings, and the film\u2019s openness to interpretation means our discussions about \u201c2001\u201d will never end. Theories abound about every aspect of the movie: Is it a Nietzschean allegory? Are the formidable monoliths purely technological? What are we to make of the floating \u201cStarchild\u201d at the movie\u2019s conclusion?\nThere\u2019s no straightforward answer to any questions one might have\u2014Kubrick was insistent about the ambiguity: \u201cI intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness.\u201d \nUnsu Stanley Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi cornerstone is just as radical today as when it opened in 1968. ",
        "author": "Brian P. Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawyer for Afghan girls\u2019 robotics team tells Oklahoma woman to stop taking credit for rescue (WP: Media) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2107",
        "date": "2021-08-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/afghan-girls-robotics-rescue-allyson-reneau/2021/08/26/7de4ba0c-05a7-11ec-a654-900a78538242_story.html",
        "text": "A lawyer for the famed all-girls Afghan robotics team has sent a cease-and-desist letter to an Oklahoma woman, telling her to stop taking credit for the girls\u2019 escape from Kabul and warning that her numerous media appearances endanger their organization\u2019s remaining members in Afghanistan.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe woman, Allyson Reneau, spoke last week to Today.com and then to several other media outlets, telling a story of her supposed involvement in the evacuation of several members of the robotics team, known internationally as the \u201cAfghan Dreamers.\u201d These outlets reported that she had \u201csaved\u201d the girls from probable oppression under the Taliban. But a lawyer for the team\u2019s parent organization, the Digital Citizen Fund, said that Reneau has overstated her role and has, in fact, put the girls and their families at risk because her repeated claims are undermining ongoing rescue efforts in the country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cContinuingly recycling old pictures with the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, many of whom are minors, as validation that you had anything to do with their immensely stressful and dangerous escape not only impacts the safety of the girls but it also significantly affects the safety of the members of the team who still remain in Afghanistan,\u201d wrote Kim Motley, a lawyer for the group and a Digital Citizen Fund board member, in a letter sent to Reneau just after midnight Wednesday. \u201cIt is highly unfortunate that you would use such a tragically horrible situation \u2026 for what appears to be your own personal gain.\u201dA spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, which helped evacuate many Afghans, including the robotics team members, also accused Reneau of taking credit for a rescue she had little to do with \u2014 and lambasted the U.S. media for making her a \u201cWhite savior.\u201dReneau denied that she has done anything but tell the truth. \u201c\u2018I\u2019m above board, and if you don\u2019t tell the truth, then you have nothing else to show for it,\u201d she told The Washington Post in a phone interview Wednesday. She said she was perplexed but undeterred by the \u201cblowback\u201d against her efforts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe attention I\u2019ve gotten has allowed me to help other Afghan women, so I don\u2019t see any reason for me to stop,\u201d she said.The dispute underscores how difficult it is to stop a media narrative once it begins to spread, especially in a fast-moving and chaotic story such as the one unfolding in Afghanistan, where news outlets are hungry for developments and feel-good stories.How Reneau became designated as a supposed hero of this particular evacuation started on Aug. 19, just days after the Taliban\u2019s swift takeover of Afghanistan, when Today.com published a story dramatically titled, \u201cOklahoma mom of 11 helps rescue 10 girls on Afghanistan\u2019s robotics team.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe story said that Reneau \u2014 an entrepreneur who graduated from Harvard\u2019s extension school in 2016 and serves on the board of the Mars Explore foundation \u2014 had met some of the girls at a 2019 space exploration conference in D.C. and then kept in touch with them.AdvertisementUnable to sleep as the Taliban advanced across Afghanistan, Reneau said, she resolved to get the girls out even if it meant flying across the world. \u201cI decided that Monday, I\u2019m just going to fly to Qatar \u2014 like a leap of faith \u2014 and see what I can do,\u201d she told Today.In the end, Reneau didn\u2019t get on the plane. She told Today that, instead, she contacted an old roommate who worked in the U.S. Embassy in Qatar and the two worked to secure paperwork for the girls\u2019 exit from Afghanistan.Story continues below advertisementThe Today story was substantially rewritten, with a note added at the bottom, after it was published \u2014 taking the focus off Reneau and quoting a board member of the robotics team\u2019s parent organization: \u201cUltimately the girls \u2018rescued\u2019 themselves.\u201d But the story of a heroic Oklahoma mother quickly spread across other media.AdvertisementCNN\u2019s Brianna Keilar interviewed Reneau, telling her, \u201cThis really is an extraordinary story that I think a lot of Americans who are feeling helpless and want to do something, they need to hear this.\u201d So did an NBC affiliate in Oklahoma. \u201cI just had an overwhelming, dreadful feeling that they were in a lot of danger,\u201d Reneau told the Oklahoma station.The New York Post inaccurately wrote that Reneau really had flown to Qatar. So did the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which suggested that President Biden put \u201cthis extraordinary woman\u201d in charge of the Afghanistan evacuation \u2014 before correcting the editorial to note that Reneau had not flown anywhere. (Reneau told The Washington Post that she never represented that she went to Qatar.)Story continues below advertisementThe story was also picked up by the Daily Mail, Business Insider and many local TV affiliates and overseas outlets, many of which initially made little mention of the crucial role of non-Americans in the girls\u2019 rescue.AdvertisementQatar coordinated the evacuation directly with representatives of the Digital Citizen Fund, the robotics team\u2019s parent organization, said Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Ibrahim AlHashmi.Roya Mahboob, an Afghan business executive and founder of the Digital Citizen Fund, contacted a Qatari diplomat about the girls on Aug. 13. Days later, the girls met with that government\u2019s ambassador to Afghanistan \u201cin a secure location,\u201d AlHashmi said. \u201cHe escorted them safely to the airport, where they were evacuated to Doha in a plane arranged by Qatar\u2019s armed forces.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the Qatari government never worked with Reneau or heard from the U.S. Embassy about her. (A spokesperson for the State Department said the agency could not confirm details of individual cases, citing privacy concerns.)\u201cShe took the agency from the girls and she claimed credit,\u201d AlHashmi said. \u201cThe media let her be a White savior, claiming the girls were saved by her. They came to global attention because of their work \u2026 so it should be about them and their courage and the work they have done. This should be the story that the media is focusing on, not a woman who is thousands of miles away who is claiming credit.\u201dAdvertisementThe robotics team has been internationally famous for years, and the fate of the members under the returning Taliban has been tracked by many outlets, including the The Washington Post, NBC News and the New York Times \u2014 which broke the news of the girls\u2019 exit from Afghanistan in an Aug. 19 story that made no mention of Reneau.Story continues below advertisementBut regardless of the framing, the media attention on their escape has brought on new dangers and underscored the complications of getting vulnerable people out of Afghanistan.Afghans often have large families, and the Taliban targets relatives left behind, said Arash Azizzada, an Afghan community organizer in Los Angeles who has been involved with evacuation efforts.\u201cFamily members of the robotics team have been in touch with me, asking me for assistance with evacuating their extended family because the media coverage has now put them in danger and they are now fearing retribution by the Taliban,\u201d Azizzada said.AdvertisementReneau \u2014 who was previously on the Today Show in 2011 (\u201cMom of 11 heads off to Harvard\u201d) \u2014 got on Today.com\u2019s radar when one her Facebook posts about the robotics teams was forwarded to a writer there.Story continues below advertisementMahboob then confirmed to Today.com that members of the team had met Reneau in the past and that the girls made it out of Afghanistan. But she said she never confirmed that Reneau played a central role in the evacuation.\u201cI am talking with so many people who say they want to support my program,\u201d Mahboob said through tears, \u201cbut no one else \u2026 then takes credit and makes it a story about themselves.\u201dReneau said she never sought the limelight. \u201cI got into this whole deal to rescue people. That was my goal. I didn\u2019t want it to turn into a media circus,\u201d Reneau said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about me being superwoman; it\u2019s about these girls.\u201dAdvertisementNot all of the Afghan robotics team members are out of the country. And in subsequent media appearances, Reneau has said she is still working to get more vulnerable women out, while also noting the work of the Qatari government and others. A Facebook fundraiser entitled Afghan Girls Rescue Fund has raised more than $50,000 with money going to Reneau\u2019s nonprofit organization. Reneau said that all of the funds raised will go to the girls who have left the country but isn\u2019t sure how to get them the money yet, given the dispute with their parent organization.She said has been inundated with requests from Afghan women since her media tour and is working with a former NASA general counsel and a Yale Law School team, and has \u201can extraction team on the ground\u201d in Afghanistan. \u201cI\u2019m not going to leave one behind,\u201d she told conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck on Tuesday. \u201cThe one thing I\u2019m missing is planes.\u201dBeck, who has an organization working on evacuating Christians and other religious minorities from the country, said he could provide the planes if she gets evacuees to the tarmac.\u201cWe\u2019re Americans, and we figure it out, don\u2019t we, Glenn?\u201d Reneau responded.\n\n\n\nAlice Crites contributed to this report. Several media outlets covered Allyson Reneau\u2019s efforts to \u2018save\u2019 the girls. Lawyer for Afghan girls\u2019 robotics team tells Oklahoma woman to stop taking credit for rescue",
        "author": "Sarah Ellison"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saudis Showcase Technology in Bid to Woo Business Leaders (WSJ: Middle East) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2108",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudis-showcase-technology-in-bid-to-woo-business-leaders-1509052001?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=85",
        "text": "In discussing a plan for a $500 billion utopian development on the Red Sea, Prince Mohammed appealed to \u201cdreamers who want to create something different and new.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nOrganized by the Public Investment Fund, the kingdom\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund, the event drew a who\u2019s who of the business world to Riyadh.\n\n\nMedia executive Arianna Huffington and former British Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tony Blair\n\n\n\n were among the guests rubbing shoulders with corporate titans such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carlyle Group\n\n\n LP co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Rubenstein\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Masayoshi Son,\n\n\n\n chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp. Executives from major banks such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Citigroup Inc.,\nCredit Suisse Group AG\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deutsche Bank AG\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.\n\n\n met with clients and discussed how they can benefit from the country\u2019s massive privatization program. V.I.P.s and their entourages filled up five-star hotels, and their cars snarled the Saudi capital\u2019s slow-moving traffic.\n\n\nRelated Saudi Arabia to Inject $1 Billion Into Virgin Galactic Space Venture Chinese Tech Giant Baidu Steps Back From Middle East Saudi Prince Pushes Greater Tolerance, Unveils Development Project (Oct. 24) \n\n\nThe main goal for many was getting access to investments by the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund. The kingdom is handling its most important investments at home and abroad through PIF, and the fund this week said it aims to nearly double the value of the assets it manages to around $400 billion by 2020.\nThe gathering also spawned several deals that bordered on science fiction. On Thursday, the PIF pledged to invest $1 billion in Virgin Group Ltd.\u2019s space units\u2014focused on spaceflight, satellite launch and space tourism\u2014with an option to invest a further $480 million. The deal was brokered by Prince Mohammed and British entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n the founder of Virgin Group, who flew to Riyadh for the occasion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Saudi man chatted with a robot on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Riyadh event.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n fayez nureldine/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAlso on Thursday, Russia\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund pledged to invest several billion dollars in the sprawling Red Sea development, called Neom, but declined to provide details of its plans other than to say it hoped to pave the way for Russian companies to invest in some of the project\u2019s key sectors, like solar energy and artificial intelligence.\nNeom is envisioned as a city with robots and flying and driverless cars, and would be powered entirely by renewable energy. But, in a country that has a poor record of completing mega projects, many wondered whether Neom will ever become reality.\nOne analyst called it \u201ca desert fantasy on a mega scale.\u201d A foreign banker agreed with Prince Mohammed that the city was \u201ca dream,\u201d but added: \u201cIt will stay a dream.\u201d\nWith the much-hyped projects, Saudi Arabia is showing a bold public commitment to shift from an ultraconservative state closed off to most outsiders to a far more modern one engaged with the world. The end goal, encapsulated in a government blueprint called Vision 2030, is to become a hub for global business\u00a0able to draw capital and talent from abroad.\n\u201cWe were an island of prosperity\u2014the country was stable and growing reasonably\u2014but very much an island,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mohammad El Kuwaiz,\n\n\n\n the head of Saudi Arabia\u2019s Capital Market Authority. \u201cWhat we have started to see, and we are very glad to see it in the capital-market realm, is the re-establishment of links with the rest of the world.\u201d\nThe kingdom is even opening up to robots: Saudi Arabia has symbolically granted citizenship to Sophia, a robot with humanlike features and speech, it said Wednesday. Other, simpler robots dotted the gilded conference grounds, answering questions and posing for selfies with guests.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSaudi Arabia has symbolically granted citizenship to a robot known as Sophia, it said Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Future Investment Initiatives\n \n\n\n\nBut to really attract foreign investment, Saudi Arabia has to overcome fundamental economic challenges. In a country where oil contributes more than 60% of government revenue, a prolonged period of low crude prices has forced the monarchy to introduce austerity measures. Unemployment has risen and consumer spending declined. Businesses in Saudi Arabia also complain about the challenge of meeting government regulations, such as requirements to hire a quota of Saudi citizens.\n\u201cThis is all very promising but the private sector continues to be burdened by the existing economic situation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tarek Fadlallah,\n\n\n\n CEO of Nomura Asset Management Middle East.\nWhether the conference is able to attract a similar crowd next year will depend on Saudi Arabia\u2019s ability to deliver on its promises for lucrative investment opportunities. The sputtering Saudi economy\u2014which contracted the last two quarters in a row\u2014may need to pick up, too.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Akira Sugano,\n\n\n\n an executive at Japan\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mizuho Financial Group Inc.,\n\n\n said, \u201cYou have to have some concrete results or they\u2019re not coming back.\u201d\nWrite to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com and Nicolas Parasie at nicolas.parasie@wsj.com Saudi Arabia this week set out to dazzle the world\u2019s business elite, who welcomed signs that an insular kingdom is opening up even though some expressed skepticism the monarchy could accomplish the grand goals it set out. ",
        "author": "Margherita Stancati and Nicolas Parasie"
    },
    {
        "title": "US Space Force deploys to vast new frontier: Arabian Desert (WP: Middle East) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2109",
        "date": "2020-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/us-space-force-deploys-to-vast-new-frontier-arabian-desert/2020/09/21/54827424-fbd0-11ea-b0e4-350e4e60cc91_story.html",
        "text": "DUBAI, United Arab Emirates \u2014 The newly formed U.S. Space Force is deploying troops to a vast new frontier: the Arabian Peninsula.Space Force now has a squadron of 20 airmen stationed at Qatar\u2019s Al-Udeid Air Base in its first foreign deployment. The force, pushed by President Donald Trump, represents the sixth branch of the U.S. military and the first new military service since the creation of the Air Force in 1947. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt has provoked skepticism in Congress, satire on Netflix, and, with its uncannily similar logo, \u201cStar Trek\u201d jokes about intergalactic battles.Future wars may be waged in outer space, but the Arabian Desert already saw what military experts dub the world\u2019s first \u201cspace war\u201d \u2014 the 1991 Desert Storm operation to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Today, the U.S. faces new threats in the region from Iran\u2019s missile program and efforts to jam, hack and blind satellites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re starting to see other nations that are extremely aggressive in preparing to extend conflict into space,\u201d Col. Todd Benson, director of Space Force troops at Al-Udeid, told The Associated Press. \u201cWe have to be able to compete and defend and protect all of our national interests.\u201dIn a swearing-in ceremony earlier this month at Al-Udeid, 20 Air Force troops, flanked by American flags and massive satellites, entered Space Force. Soon several more will join the unit of \u201ccore space operators\u201d who will run satellites, track enemy maneuvers and try to avert conflicts in space.\u201cThe missions are not new and the people are not necessarily new,\u201d Benson said.Story continues below advertisementThat troubles some American lawmakers who view the branch, with its projected force of 16,000 troops and 2021 budget of $15.4 billion, as a vanity project for Trump ahead of the November presidential election.AdvertisementConcerns over the weaponization of outer space are decades old. But as space becomes increasingly contested, military experts have cited the need for a space corps devoted to defending American interests.Threats from global competitors have grown since the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when the U.S. military first relied on GPS coordinates to tell troops where they were in the desert as they pushed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein\u2019s forces out of Kuwait.Story continues below advertisementBenson declined to name the \u201caggressive\u201d nations his airmen will monitor and potentially combat. But the decision to deploy Space Force personnel at Al-Udeid follows months of escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran.Hostilities between the two countries, ignited by Trump\u2019s unilateral withdrawal of the U.S. from Iran\u2019s nuclear accord, came to a head in January when U.S. forces killed a top Iranian general. Iran responded by launching ballistic missiles at American soldiers in Iraq.AdvertisementThis spring, Iran\u2019s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard launched its first satellite into space, revealing what experts describe as a secret military space program. The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on Iran\u2019s space agency, accusing it of developing ballistic missiles under the cover of a civilian program to set satellites into orbit.Story continues below advertisementWorld powers with more advanced space programs, like Russia and China, have made more threatening progress, U.S. officials contend. Last month, Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned that Russia and China were developing weapons that could knock out U.S. satellites, potentially scattering dangerous debris across space and paralyzing cell phones and weather forecasts, as well as American drones, fighter jets, aircraft carriers and even nuclear weapon controllers.\u201cThe military is very reliant on satellite communications, navigation and global missile warning,\u201d said Capt. Ryan Vickers, a newly inducted Space Force member at Al-Udeid.AdvertisementAmerican troops, he added, use GPS coordinates to track ships passing through strategic Gulf passageways \u201cto make sure they\u2019re not running into international waters of other nations.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world\u2019s oil flows, has been the scene of a series of tense encounters, with Iran seizing boats it claims had entered its waters. One disrupted signal or miscalculation could touch off a confrontation.For years, Iran has allegedly jammed satellite and radio signals to block foreign-based Farsi media outlets from broadcasting into the Islamic Republic, where radio and television stations are state-controlled.The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has warned that commercial aircraft cruising over the Persian Gulf could experience interference and communications jamming from Iran. Ships in the region have also reported \u201cspoofed\u201d communications from unknown entities falsely claiming to be U.S. or coalition warships, according to American authorities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not that hard to do, but we\u2019ve seen Iran and other countries become pretty darn efficient at doing it on a big scale,\u201d said Brian Weeden, an Air Force veteran and director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, which promotes peaceful uses of outer space. \u201cThere\u2019s a concern Iran could interfere with military broadband communications.\u201dResponding to questions from the AP, Alireza Miryousefi, a spokesman at Iran\u2019s mission to the United Nations, said \u201cIran will not tolerate interference in our affairs, and in accordance with international law, will respond to any attacks against our sovereignty.\u201d He added that Iran has faced numerous cyber attacks from the U.S. and Israel.Failing an international agreement that bars conventional arms, like ballistic missiles, from shooting down space assets, the domain will only become more militarized, said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. Russia and China have already created space force units and the Revolutionary Guard\u2019s sudden interest in satellite launches has heightened U.S. concerns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, American officials insist the new Space Force deployment aims to secure U.S. interests, not set off an extraterrestrial arms race.\u201cThe U.S. military would like to see a peaceful space,\u201d Benson, the director of Space Force troops stationed in Qatar, said. \u201cOther folks\u2019 behavior is kind of driving us to this point.\u201d___Follow Isabel DeBre on Twitter at www.twitter.com/IsabelDeBre.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Members of the newly formed U.S. Space Force are deploying troops to a vast new frontier: the Arabian Peninsula US Space Force deploys to vast new frontier: Arabian Desert",
        "author": "Isabel Debre\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Prince\u2019s $500 Billion Desert Dream: Flying Cars, Robot Dinosaurs and a Giant Artificial Moon (WSJ: Middle East) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2110",
        "date": "2019-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-princes-500-billion-desert-dream-flying-cars-robot-dinosaurs-and-a-giant-artificial-moon-11564097568?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=57",
        "text": "They\u2019ll fly drone taxis to work while robots clean their homes. Their city will supplant Silicon Valley in technology, Hollywood in entertainment and the French Riviera as a place to vacation. It will host a genetic-modification project to make people stronger. These ideas are laid out in 2,300 pages of confidential documents by consultants at Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co. and Oliver Wyman that The Wall Street Journal reviewed, and discussed in interviews with people involved in the project called Neom, a portmanteau of the Greek word for \u201cnew\u201d and the Arabic word for \u201cfuture.\u201d The documents, dated September 2018, offer the most detailed look inside Neom and its planning since the project was unveiled in 2017. Tasked by the crown prince, known as MBS, to help turn his imaginary city into a reality, the consultants created an expensive mix of science fiction and corporate buzzwords interrupted by uncomfortable realities: Local tribes would be forcibly relocated. A court system developed by law firm Latham & Watkins and labeled \u201cindependent\u201d would have judges reporting directly to the king, and operating under Shariah law, or Islamic jurisprudence. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSaudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, here speaking to U.S. journalist Maria Bartiromo in 2017, wants Neom to create new industries in entertainment, tourism and renewable energy while attracting residents from around the world, according to planning documents.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n FAYEZ NURELDINE/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThis should be an automated city where we can watch everything,\u201d Neom\u2019s MBS-led founding board said, according to the documents\u2014a city \u201cwhere a computer can notify crimes without having to report them or where all citizens can be tracked.\u201d Neom\u2019s board has adopted the consultants\u2019 recommendations, the documents show. The consulting firms and Latham declined to comment on the documents, which were completed before MBS\u2019s underlings allegedly killed journalist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jamal Khashoggi\n\n\n\n last fall, according to Saudi officials. Former Neom employees and people familiar with the project say they don\u2019t know how much of the plan will become reality due to potential funding issues and technological limitations. The Saudi government didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment on the plans for Neom. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNadhmi al-Nasr, the chief executive of Neom, said construction is underway for a project that \u201cis all about things that are necessarily future-oriented and visionary.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n fayez nureldine/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cNeom is all about things that are necessarily future-oriented and visionary,\u201d Neom Chief Executive Nadhmi al Nasr said in an emailed statement. \u201cSo we are talking about technology that is cutting edge and beyond\u2014and in some cases still in development and maybe theoretical.\u201d He said that construction is under way. The first projects include an airport and a resort, Neom said in a statement. The government has also built a palace at the site. Neom is the centerpiece of MBS\u2019s effort to transform an insular, oil-dependent kingdom into a country with an outward-looking, diversified economy. Rather than relying on petroleum revenue to fund purchases from foreign countries, MBS has said he wants Saudi Arabia to produce goods and services that Saudis currently buy abroad. He has proposed Neom as a Massachusetts-sized area with auto factories, hospitals, tech companies and resorts to keep Saudis spending domestically. But the plan to spend $500 billion building Neom from scratch, rather than investing in existing Saudi cities, reflects the kingdom\u2019s long-standing problems as much as MBS\u2019s ambitions. Foreign companies have long avoided investing there due to an opaque legal system, corruption, and social strictures banning alcohol and requiring women get a male relative\u2019s permission to travel. MBS found those structures so entrenched that it was easier to develop a new city than to change existing ones. \u201cStarting Neom from scratch, with independent systems and regulations, will ensure the availability of best services without social limitations,\u201d he said at Neom\u2019s first board meeting, according to the documents. Neom is the biggest, and most ambitious, in a series of futuristic cities that Gulf leaders have developed to help diversify away from oil dependence. In the United Arab Emirates, Dubai and Abu Dhabi have become major commercial hubs, as has Qatar\u2019s capital, Doha. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Photo Illustration by Anders Nilsen, Photo: Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\n\nThe Jetsons Come To Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia\u2019s crown prince wants to fill a barren stretch of desert with a Jetsons-style city-state of the future. The project, outlined in planning documents produced by a group of U.S. consultants, is so ambitious that it incorporates some technologies that don\u2019t even exist yet. 1. Flying Taxis: Scientists might take a flying taxi to work. \u201cDriving is just for fun, no longer for transportation (e.g. driving Ferrari next to the coast with a nice view),\u201d planning documents show. 2. Cloud Seeding: The desert won\u2019t always feel like the desert. \u201cCloud seeding\u201d could make it rain. 3. Robot Maids: Don\u2019t worry about household chores. While scientists are at work, their homes would be cleaned by robot maids. 4. State-of-the-Art Medical Facilities: Scientists would work on a project to modify the human genome to make people stronger. 5. World Class Restaurants: There would be fine dining galore in a city with the \u201chighest rate of Michelin-starred restaurants per inhabitant.\u201d 6. Dinosaur Robots: Residents could visit a Jurassic Park-style island of robot reptiles. 7. Glow-in-the-Dark Sand: The crown prince wants a beach that glows in the dark, like the face of a watch. 8. Alcohol: Alcohol is banned in the rest of Saudi Arabia. But it likely won\u2019t be here, say people familiar with the plan. 9. Robot Martial Arts: Robots would do more than just clean your house. They also could spar head to head in a \u201crobo-cage fight,\u201d one of many sports on offer. 10. Security: Cameras, drones and facial-recognition technology are planned to track everyone at all times. 11. Moon: A giant artificial moon would light up each night. One proposal suggests it could live-stream images from outer space, acting as an iconic landmark. \n\n\nBuilding Neom will require money Saudi Arabia doesn\u2019t have. The country has recently run budget deficits, and MBS has committed to bets like a $45 billion investment in a \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Softbank Group Corp.\n\n\n fund. The kingdom has used money borrowed from abroad to fund Neom\u2019s first stages, according to people familiar with the matter. Neom\u2019s reliance on foreign consultants reveals another deeply entrenched challenge. As a young nation without a single university until 1957, Saudi Arabia historically lacked expertise in planning, engineering and management. It turned to foreign experts like McKinsey, which has worked in Saudi Arabia for more than 40 years. McKinsey increased its Saudi staffing by acquiring a local consultancy called Elixir in 2017. Recently, the reliance on foreigners has been a sensitive topic for the Saudi government and its international partners, according to government officials. In 2017 the government detained Elixir\u2019s founder\u2014a McKinsey partner\u2014during a corruption crackdown. He was locked up and beaten over the course of a year, the Journal previously reported, before being released without explanation. McKinsey and the Saudi government have declined to comment on the case. Government officials\u2014including MBS, say people who\u2019ve spoken with him recently\u2014have questioned whether the kingdom pays Western consultants more than they\u2019re worth. Neom in a statement said the consultants have not used this project as an opportunity to run up the bills from Saudi Arabia. \u201cThe involvement of consultants has been productive and valuable,\u201d it said. The Neom documents illustrate the broad scope of the consultants\u2019 work. In addition to recommendations on urban planning, economic, legal and regulatory systems, McKinsey details using \u201cbig data\u201d - the use of computers to sift through volumes of information - and a \u201c13-pillar liveability framework\u201d to quantify how much people would like living in Neom and objectively prove it\u2019s the world\u2019s most livable place.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat would you like to see built in Saudi Arabia\u2019s new city-state of the future? How would you like living there? Join the conversation below. \n\n\nThe planning documents are also awash in leaps of faith. Neom aims to have \u201czero work/stress-related diseases,\u201d with residents working at startups or companies like \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n which Saudi officials are trying to lure with incentives like free energy and subsidized labor, according to the planning documents. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment. Residents\u2019 children would be schooled in the \u201cleading education system on the planet,\u201d with innovations like \u201chologram faculty.\u201d Though Neom is surrounded by desert, it will have many farmers markets. Temperatures will be cooler than Dubai, the documents say, and moderated by \u201ccloud seeding\u201d to make it rain. Because they live in the city with the \u201chighest GDP per capita,\u201d the documents say, a resident could indulge in a fancy dinner; Neom aims to have the \u201chighest rate of Michelin-starred restaurants per inhabitant.\u201d To keep Neom safe, cameras, drones and facial-recognition technology will let Saudi intelligence services track everyone. \u201cEverything can be recorded,\u201d the founding board declared. Neom planners have talked with \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n International Business Machines Corp.\n\n\n about building facial-recognition software, say people familiar with the conversations. IBM said it wasn\u2019t planning to bid for contracts related to facial-recognition technology at Neom and declined to comment on other potential work related to the project. Neom in a statement said the project is about \u201ctechnology in all sectors such as mobility, livability, health and medical, all of which will ensure we are providing the most attractive living environment on the planet.\u201d\n\n\n An October 2017 presentation in Riyadh, pictured here, featured a robot and a virtual reality presentation of the project, which is at the heart of prince\u2019s Neom program to diversify Saudi Arabia away from oil revenues. Photos: Faisal Al Nasser/Reuters\n\n\nA major goal is to attract large Western companies. Neom\u2019s board in 2017 suggested guaranteeing \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n billions in annual government purchases in exchange for Tesla moving automotive production to Neom \u2014and giving the kingdom a stake. Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund last year spent $2 billion to buy 5% of Tesla. CEO \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n later said he was taking Tesla private with the help of Saudi Arabia, but subsequently reversed himself and said he didn\u2019t plan to do that. MBS also wants Neom to host innovations like the \u201cApollo\u201d project with Softbank, which will create \u201ca new way of life from birth to death reaching genetic mutations to increase human strength and IQ.\u201d Softbank declined to comment. One potential reward for foreign companies is an investment fund that will commit money to businesses \u201cthat can contribute to Neom\u2019s vision and future,\u201d the Neom spokesman said, \u201ceither by locating their headquarters there or selling goods and services in Neom.\u201d Officials have asked foreign companies to invest in Neom as a condition for getting contracts, say people involved in those talks. One person involved in making such offers to IBM and other companies became concerned about whether the proposals were unethical, this person said. Neom in a statement said its governance standards help \u201censure the fair and competitive award of services.\u201d IBM declined to comment. One surprising element in conservative Saudi Arabia is a proposal to allow alcohol, say people familiar with the plan. With borders encompassing land acquired from Jordan and Egypt, Neom would function largely as a separate country. That allows MBS to argue that Western norms like drinking and bare female heads won\u2019t be introduced to the land of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. To develop Neom, the Saudi government plans to forcibly relocate more than 20,000 people, many whose families have inhabited the area for generations. One Boston Consulting Group relocation plan said that would take until 2025. Urged by MBS to move quickly, the date was moved up to 2022. Residents here say they\u2019ve heard only rumors. Some say relocation would be devastating. \u201cYou are dismembering an entire society. For us, it\u2019s like death,\u201d said one.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe beach at Sharma, a small village that is part of the kingdom\u2019s plan to create a new city-state in a seaside corner of Saudi Arabia.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rory Jones/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nWeeks after Neom was announced in 2017, residents visited regional governor Prince Fahd bin Sultan to ask whether they would be moved. He said he couldn\u2019t help, according to the residents. Prince Fahd\u2019s spokesman didn\u2019t respond to questions. Boston Consulting Group consultants advised following World Bank standards for forcible relocations. The board decided that perhaps some residents could stay if they\u2019re retrained to have Neom-appropriate skills. \u201cRelocating residents in the interest of public works projects is not uncommon in the Kingdom,\u201d the Neom statement said. People will receive compensation and benefits including a scholarship program to \u201cgain the skills necessary to be part of the Neom vision,\u201d it added. Neom began about four years ago, says a person familiar with the matter, shortly after MBS\u2019s father became king. Mulling how to overhaul the economy, the prince pulled up a map of his country on Google Earth and saw its northwest quadrant was a blank slate, according to this person.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMediterranean\nSea\n\n\nsyria\n\n\nleb.\n\n\niraq\n\n\nisr.\n\n\njordan\n\n\nCairo\n\n\nSite of planned\ncity Neom \n\n\negypt\n\n\nRiyadh\n\n\n300 miles\n\n\nsaudi\narabia\n\n\nRed\nSea\n\n\n300 km\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHe flew there and found a place where summer temperatures top 100 degrees, but nearby mountains get snow in the winter. In a January 2017 Neom board meeting, MBS made his ambitions clear: The prince \u201cenvisions Neom the largest city globally by GDP, and wanted to understand what he can get with up to 500 billion USD investment,\u201d according to the planning documents. Hoping to build a bridge across the Red Sea, MBS arranged with Egypt\u2019s president to acquire two uninhabited islands, sparking protests from thousands of Egyptians. And he got a message to Israeli leaders feeling out their reaction to Neom. They said Israeli companies could sell technology to Saudi Arabia for the project, says a person familiar with the matter. The government of Israel didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. The Egyptian government couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. To deliver his vision, MBS in 2017 hired \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Klaus Kleinfeld,\n\n\n\n who had been fired as CEO of Arconic Inc., a spinoff of aluminum maker \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alcoa Corp.\n\n\n And costs rose. Since the bridge to Egypt couldn\u2019t follow MBS\u2019s route due to a seismic fault, reengineering brought the bridge\u2019s estimate to $125 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. A Kleinfeld deputy\u2019s recommendation to develop a master plan for Neom\u2019s streets frustrated MBS. \u201cI don\u2019t want any roads or pavements. We are going to have flying cars in 2030!,\u2019\u201d the prince said, according to a person who reviewed meeting minutes. Mr. Kleinfeld and the deputy left Neom last year. Mr. Kleinfeld, the Saudi government and Neom declined comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSaudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, shakes hands with Klaus Kleinfeld in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, after Kleinfeld was appointed as Neom's CEO in 2017. Kleinfeld left Neom last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n saudi press agency/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nAnother challenge is what the legal system of this new city should look like. Latham found Saudi Arabia\u2019s opaque, unpredictable and religious-based justice system presented \u201cred flags\u201d to foreign investors, according to the planning documents. It suggested a new structure in which all judges will be appointed by\u2014and report to\u2014the king. They, like the regular Saudi judges, will comply with Sharia law, planning documents show. \u201cNeom law will be based on best practices in the areas of economic and business law, as well as feedback from potential investors and residents,\u201d Neom said in the statement to The Wall Street Journal. Construction on Neom is under way using thousands of foreign workers that in one section of the development were housed six to a tiny room as of June 17. Earlier this year, MBS issued a decree about an area called Silver Beach. \u201cI want the sand to glow,\u201d he said, according to two people familiar with the project. Engineers haven\u2019t figured out a safe way to do it. Each night, he told underlings, a fleet of drones should create the illusion of a rising moon\u2014crescent, half, full. \u201cThat\u2019s what he wants this future to be,\u201d a former executive said. To make that happen, Boston Consulting Group suggested partnering with NASA to make the fake moon \u201cthe biggest in the world.\u201d Write to Justin Scheck at justin.scheck@wsj.com, Rory Jones at rory.jones@wsj.com and Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com Saudi Arabia\u2019s crown prince turned to U.S. consultants for help imagining a massive new city-state in the northwest of his kingdom. What emerged was a Jetsons-style world of automation. ",
        "author": "Justin Scheck, Rory Jones and Summer Said"
    },
    {
        "title": "After the Gas and Bombs: The Health Crisis That\u2019s Killing Syria (WSJ: Middle East) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2111",
        "date": "2018-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-the-gas-and-bombs-the-health-crisis-thats-killing-syria-1523984870?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=77",
        "text": "The regime of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bashar al-Assad\n\n\n\n has targeted hospitals, clinics and medical personnel in a strategy to destroy the country\u2019s medical infrastructure. Between the fighting and the destruction done to the health-care system, today most people can\u2019t expect to live to 65. Many perish because they can\u2019t get medicine, or reach a hospital.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Syria once had hundreds of hospitals",
        "author": "Raja Abdulrahim   Photographs by Ahmed Deeb for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stocks to Watch: Mattel, Facebook, Boeing, Voya Financial, Allergan, Chegg (WSJ: MoneyBeat) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2112",
        "date": "2020-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/stocks-to-watch-mattel-facebook-boeing-voya-financial-allergan-chegg-11581328342?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=13",
        "text": "Facebook\n\n FB -3.89%\n\n\n : The government is challenging the company\u2019s transactions with its Irish subsidiary in a case that could shape enforcement of tax rules.\n\nBoeing\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n : NASA said it would review whether broader problems at Boeing contributed to its failure to detect software problems that spoiled the launch of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December.\n\n\n\nVoya Financial,\n\n VOYA 0.03%\n\n\n Allergan and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Chegg\n\n CHGG -1.86%\n\n\n are among the companies reporting earnings on Monday.\nThis is a version of the \u201cStocks to Watch\u201d section of our Markets newsletter. To receive it every morning via email, click here. Mattel, Facebook, Boeing, Voya Financial, Allergan and Chegg are some of the companies with shares expected to trade actively in Monday\u2019s session. ",
        "author": "James Willhite"
    },
    {
        "title": "WSJ City PM: Trump Trade Back in Favor, Signs of Brexit Progress (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2113",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-city-pm-trump-trade-back-in-favor-signs-of-brexit-progress-1506702675?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=22",
        "text": "The official word from the European Union is that it\u2019s unlikely to discuss Britain\u2019s future trade relationship for months. But some progress on post-Brexit matters might not be so far off.\n\nCitigroup is exploring the possibility of relocating staff to Paris as part of its Brexit contingency planning, reports FN. Jim Cowles, Citi\u2019s\u00a0Emea boss, said the bank is working on the assumption that a 'hard Brexit' will be triggered in April 2019, and that recent improvements to French labour laws had made Paris 'more attractive.'\nPresident Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have met with former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh to discuss his potential nomination as the next Fed chairman.\u00a0Warsh has been a critic of the Fed\u2019s aggressive monetary easing, warning that it increases risk of a financial bubble.\u00a0The dollar was boosted by the report.\nBank of England Governor Mark Carney on Friday said that policy makers are likely to raise their key interest rate if the UK economy continues on its current course, the latest signal the central bank\u00a0is readying its first interest-rate increase in more than a decade.\nElon Musk\u00a0has stunned space experts again, unveiling titillating details about plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and using it to launch a giant, fully reusable manned spacecraft to Mars\u2014potentially in less than a decade.\nCharles Bowman, a senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been named as the next Lord Mayor of the City of London, an ambassadorial role representing City businesses around the world.\nOptimism about US tax reform and hawkish comments from Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen fuelled a rally in financials that lifted most major stock indexes. Rising expectations for a US rate hike helped the dollar post its biggest three-day gain of the year while the euro slid after German elections. Here are five things that shaped the markets this week. \nMoves at Bank of America, Schroders and JP Morgan were among the big changes in jobs in the City and beyond over the past week. Here's the lowdown.\nMicrosoft's Satya Nadella and Bill Gates talk shop, the making of Blade Runner, the battle for an ancient statue. Here are some of our favourite off-duty reads for you to enjoy over the weekend.\nIN THE PAPERS\nJuncker Says Miracles Needed for Progress on Brexit Talks\u00a0- Guardian\u00a0\nMay Urges EU to Respond in Kind to New Tone on Brexit Talks\u00a0\u2500\u00a0Reuters\nMay Calls for EU to Guarantee British Citizens' Rights\u00a0\u2500\u00a0Bloomberg\nBritish Economy Grew More Slowly Than Expected\u00a0\u2500\u00a0The Times\nHow Gold Takes the Shine Off Britain's Trade Figures\u00a0\u2500\u00a0Sky News\nMARKETS TODAY\nUS share prices were broadly higher as the third quarter drew to an end on Friday, compounding gains made on Thursday.\nThe S&P 500 was 0.2% higher, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.5% by late morning in New York. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.1%, led lower by oil and pharmaceutical firms. All three major indices were on course to end the quarter higher, the Dow Jones for the eighth such period in a row.\nIn London, the FTSE 100 closed 0.7% higher on the day and 0.8% for the quarter. The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.5% on Friday and 2.2% over the past three months.\nCommodity firms lifted the London benchmark on Friday, with Anglo American and Antofagasta gaining more than 2%. ITV climbed 3.6% as Barclays upgraded the media firm. The index was boosted by a fall in the pound against the euro and the dollar after official statistics showed the UK economy grew at its slowest pace since 2013 in the year to June.  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "WSJ City PM: Trump Trade Back in Favor, Signs of Brexit Progress (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2114",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-city-pm-trump-trade-back-in-favor-signs-of-brexit-progress-1506702675?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=112",
        "text": "The official word from the European Union is that it\u2019s unlikely to discuss Britain\u2019s future trade relationship for months. But some progress on post-Brexit matters might not be so far off.\n\nCitigroup is exploring the possibility of relocating staff to Paris as part of its Brexit contingency planning, reports FN. Jim Cowles, Citi\u2019s\u00a0Emea boss, said the bank is working on the assumption that a 'hard Brexit' will be triggered in April 2019, and that recent improvements to French labour laws had made Paris 'more attractive.'\nPresident Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have met with former Federal Reserve governor Kevin Warsh to discuss his potential nomination as the next Fed chairman.\u00a0Warsh has been a critic of the Fed\u2019s aggressive monetary easing, warning that it increases risk of a financial bubble.\u00a0The dollar was boosted by the report.\nBank of England Governor Mark Carney on Friday said that policy makers are likely to raise their key interest rate if the UK economy continues on its current course, the latest signal the central bank\u00a0is readying its first interest-rate increase in more than a decade.\nElon Musk\u00a0has stunned space experts again, unveiling titillating details about plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and using it to launch a giant, fully reusable manned spacecraft to Mars\u2014potentially in less than a decade.\nCharles Bowman, a senior partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been named as the next Lord Mayor of the City of London, an ambassadorial role representing City businesses around the world.\nOptimism about US tax reform and hawkish comments from Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen fuelled a rally in financials that lifted most major stock indexes. Rising expectations for a US rate hike helped the dollar post its biggest three-day gain of the year while the euro slid after German elections. Here are five things that shaped the markets this week. \nMoves at Bank of America, Schroders and JP Morgan were among the big changes in jobs in the City and beyond over the past week. Here's the lowdown.\nMicrosoft's Satya Nadella and Bill Gates talk shop, the making of Blade Runner, the battle for an ancient statue. Here are some of our favourite off-duty reads for you to enjoy over the weekend.\nIN THE PAPERS\nJuncker Says Miracles Needed for Progress on Brexit Talks\u00a0- Guardian\u00a0\nMay Urges EU to Respond in Kind to New Tone on Brexit Talks\u00a0\u2500\u00a0Reuters\nMay Calls for EU to Guarantee British Citizens' Rights\u00a0\u2500\u00a0Bloomberg\nBritish Economy Grew More Slowly Than Expected\u00a0\u2500\u00a0The Times\nHow Gold Takes the Shine Off Britain's Trade Figures\u00a0\u2500\u00a0Sky News\nMARKETS TODAY\nUS share prices were broadly higher as the third quarter drew to an end on Friday, compounding gains made on Thursday.\nThe S&P 500 was 0.2% higher, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.5% by late morning in New York. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.1%, led lower by oil and pharmaceutical firms. All three major indices were on course to end the quarter higher, the Dow Jones for the eighth such period in a row.\nIn London, the FTSE 100 closed 0.7% higher on the day and 0.8% for the quarter. The Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.5% on Friday and 2.2% over the past three months.\nCommodity firms lifted the London benchmark on Friday, with Anglo American and Antofagasta gaining more than 2%. ITV climbed 3.6% as Barclays upgraded the media firm. The index was boosted by a fall in the pound against the euro and the dollar after official statistics showed the UK economy grew at its slowest pace since 2013 in the year to June.  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "WSJ Wealth Adviser Briefing: Targeting Renewables, Leveraged Buyouts Return, Electric Car Rush (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2115",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-wealth-adviser-briefing-targeting-renewables-leveraged-buyouts-return-electric-car-rush-01603360928?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=10",
        "text": "\u201cPortfolio managers that currently use AI [artificial intelligence] to screen patent filings and other data sources will broaden its use to meet the demands of an increasingly socially conscious investor,\u201d writes Forrester analyst Vijay Raghavan in the predictions, which the market research firm shared with Barron\u2019s Advisor. \u201cWe see the interest in ESG among retail investors as a point of differentiation in 2021 and table stakes in the years to come.\u201d\nBelow, some of the best analysis and insight from WSJ writers and columnists, the Dow Jones Newswires team and occasionally beyond, on investing, the wealth-management business and more.\n\nELECTION\nFinancial Firms Gear Up for Biden and an Emboldened Consumer Watchdog:\u00a0Companies are pushing to resolve pending cases with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Their thinking: The agency will get a lot more aggressive if Joe Biden becomes president.\nCORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK\nMore Corporate Bonds Are Rated Triple-A in China Despite Coronavirus Pandemic: \u00a0China\u2019s credit-rating firms are doling out more triple-A bond ratings, a trend that has continued this year in spite of the coronavirus pandemic and greater borrowing by companies in the world\u2019s second-largest economy.\nPLANNING & INVESTING\nSPACs Will Have a Tough Time Cleaning Up on Renewables: Special purpose acquisition companies are targeting the renewable-energy industry, but there is less of a direct incentive for going public.\nMARKET TALK\nFrom\u00a0Dow Jones Newswires\nSpace startups and established NASA contractors are getting a boost from stepped-up agency spending on projects to store and transfer fuel for future spacecraft in the weightlessness of space. Elon Musk's SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and a number of smaller space companies have received a total of more than $250M to develop, among other things, technologies to handle and store super-cold fuels in orbit. Additional funds are earmarked to support proposed lunar bases, including precision landing systems for potential landers and heat and power capabilities to increase the survivability of equipment sent to the moon's surface. Such advances are essential to explore the moon and establish long-term habitats for astronauts and scientists, a primary goal the White House and NASA have championed. (andy.pasztor@wsj.com)\nAt the end of August last year, Winnebago had a backlog of about 7,200 towable RVs and 1,800 motorhomes. This year, those figures were roughly 25,000 and 8,500, respectively -- a sign of the surging popularity of RVs as people look for ways to take outdoor vacations while avoiding large crowds during the Covid-19 pandemic. Winnebago notes that dealers can cancel orders in backlog without penalty, so the figures might not accurately reflect future sales. In the fiscal year that ended in August, unit deliveries rose year over year for every category of RV Winnebago produces except for Class C motorhomes, a relatively small production category. (matt.grossman@wsj.com; @mattgrossman)\nBUSINESS & PRACTICE\nLeveraged Buyouts Come Roaring Back After Coronavirus-Related Lull: Private-equity firms return to focus on mounting cash piles following assessment of shutdown damage.\nIMPACT INVESTING\nGMC\u2019s All-Electric Hummer Pickup Highlights GM\u2019s New Strategy on EVs:\u00a0After years of selling small cars for masses, company\u2019s latest electric entries get bigger, go up market.\nTALKING POINTS\u00a0\nNo Revenue, No Problem: Wall Street Rushes Into Electric Car and Truck Startups: Boom fueled by push toward electric vehicles, Tesla\u2019s stock rise and blank-check companies.\nTRAVEL & LIFESTYLE\nAirlines Have Rules About Face Masks\u2014That\u2019s Not Always Enough: Some passengers are pushing back against the measures that protect against the spread of coronavirus as the number of fliers has started to climb.\nABOUT US\nThe Wealth Adviser Briefing covers topics of interest to wealth managers, financial planners and other advisers. The content is curated by the Dow Jones Newswires team using articles from the Newswires, Barron's, MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal. The briefing is delivered to subscribers by email each workday morning at 6:30 a.m. ET. You can\u00a0sign up here for email delivery.\nWe welcome feedback. Please email\u00a0newsletters@dowjones.com\u00a0or contact Dwight Oestricher at dwight.oestricher@wsj.com Special purpose acquisition companies targeted the renewable-energy industry; private-equity firms returned to focus on mounting cash piles, and  Wall Street has rushed into electric car and truck startups. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "WSJ Wealth Adviser Briefing: Targeting Renewables, Leveraged Buyouts Return, Electric Car Rush (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2116",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-wealth-adviser-briefing-targeting-renewables-leveraged-buyouts-return-electric-car-rush-01603360928?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=45",
        "text": "\u201cPortfolio managers that currently use AI [artificial intelligence] to screen patent filings and other data sources will broaden its use to meet the demands of an increasingly socially conscious investor,\u201d writes Forrester analyst Vijay Raghavan in the predictions, which the market research firm shared with Barron\u2019s Advisor. \u201cWe see the interest in ESG among retail investors as a point of differentiation in 2021 and table stakes in the years to come.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBelow, some of the best analysis and insight from WSJ writers and columnists, the Dow Jones Newswires team and occasionally beyond, on investing, the wealth-management business and more.\n\nELECTION\nFinancial Firms Gear Up for Biden and an Emboldened Consumer Watchdog:\u00a0Companies are pushing to resolve pending cases with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Their thinking: The agency will get a lot more aggressive if Joe Biden becomes president.\nCORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK\nMore Corporate Bonds Are Rated Triple-A in China Despite Coronavirus Pandemic: \u00a0China\u2019s credit-rating firms are doling out more triple-A bond ratings, a trend that has continued this year in spite of the coronavirus pandemic and greater borrowing by companies in the world\u2019s second-largest economy.\nPLANNING & INVESTING\nSPACs Will Have a Tough Time Cleaning Up on Renewables: Special purpose acquisition companies are targeting the renewable-energy industry, but there is less of a direct incentive for going public.\nMARKET TALK\nFrom\u00a0Dow Jones Newswires\nSpace startups and established NASA contractors are getting a boost from stepped-up agency spending on projects to store and transfer fuel for future spacecraft in the weightlessness of space. Elon Musk's SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and a number of smaller space companies have received a total of more than $250M to develop, among other things, technologies to handle and store super-cold fuels in orbit. Additional funds are earmarked to support proposed lunar bases, including precision landing systems for potential landers and heat and power capabilities to increase the survivability of equipment sent to the moon's surface. Such advances are essential to explore the moon and establish long-term habitats for astronauts and scientists, a primary goal the White House and NASA have championed. (andy.pasztor@wsj.com)\nAt the end of August last year, Winnebago had a backlog of about 7,200 towable RVs and 1,800 motorhomes. This year, those figures were roughly 25,000 and 8,500, respectively -- a sign of the surging popularity of RVs as people look for ways to take outdoor vacations while avoiding large crowds during the Covid-19 pandemic. Winnebago notes that dealers can cancel orders in backlog without penalty, so the figures might not accurately reflect future sales. In the fiscal year that ended in August, unit deliveries rose year over year for every category of RV Winnebago produces except for Class C motorhomes, a relatively small production category. (matt.grossman@wsj.com; @mattgrossman)\nBUSINESS & PRACTICE\nLeveraged Buyouts Come Roaring Back After Coronavirus-Related Lull: Private-equity firms return to focus on mounting cash piles following assessment of shutdown damage.\nIMPACT INVESTING\nGMC\u2019s All-Electric Hummer Pickup Highlights GM\u2019s New Strategy on EVs:\u00a0After years of selling small cars for masses, company\u2019s latest electric entries get bigger, go up market.\nTALKING POINTS\u00a0\nNo Revenue, No Problem: Wall Street Rushes Into Electric Car and Truck Startups: Boom fueled by push toward electric vehicles, Tesla\u2019s stock rise and blank-check companies.\nTRAVEL & LIFESTYLE\nAirlines Have Rules About Face Masks\u2014That\u2019s Not Always Enough: Some passengers are pushing back against the measures that protect against the spread of coronavirus as the number of fliers has started to climb.\nABOUT US\nThe Wealth Adviser Briefing covers topics of interest to wealth managers, financial planners and other advisers. The content is curated by the Dow Jones Newswires team using articles from the Newswires, Barron's, MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal. The briefing is delivered to subscribers by email each workday morning at 6:30 a.m. ET. You can\u00a0sign up here for email delivery.\nWe welcome feedback. Please email\u00a0newsletters@dowjones.com\u00a0or contact Dwight Oestricher at dwight.oestricher@wsj.com Special purpose acquisition companies targeted the renewable-energy industry; private-equity firms returned to focus on mounting cash piles, and  Wall Street has rushed into electric car and truck startups. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Satellites\u2014Energy Journal (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2117",
        "date": "2018-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-satellitesenergy-journal-1519390437?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=72",
        "text": "Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk\u2019s venture Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched two prototype communications satellites into space this week.\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Thursday at 6:17 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a main mission to carry a Spanish radar-imaging satellite into a 320-mile high orbit.\nThe takeoff marked the 18th consecutive successful commercial launch for the firm.\nAlong for the ride were two of SpaceX\u2019s smaller experimental satellites. The firm plans to test their antennas and other systems.\nThe demonstration satellites are intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites SpaceX hopes to deploy in coming years.\nOIL FALLS\nOil prices edged down Friday morning. Brent crude, the global benchmark, was down 0.66% at $65.94 a barrel on London\u2019s Intercontinental Exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures were trading down 0.59% at $62.41 a barrel.\nU.S. INVESTORS ARE STILL WAITING TO SEE RETURNS FROM THEIR SHALE INVESTMENTS\nU.S. shale producers are responding in varied ways to pressure from investors who want a payout. Some firms have moved to pay dividends while others have never offered a payout or have not restored dividend cuts since the oil crash in 2014, Reuters reports.\nTRUMP IS SET TO HOLD A MEETING ABOUT BIOFUELS POLICY\nU.S. President Donald Trump announced a meeting scheduled for next week with lawmakers and cabinet officials to potentially revise U.S. biofuels policy, after a Pennsylvania refiner cited the regulation as the cause of its demise.\nFUTURECURVE\nToday: Baker Hughes releases weekly data on the number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S.\nMarch 5-9: Cambridge Energy Research Associates hosts the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston. The speakers include IHS Markit Vice Chairman Dr. Daniel Yergin and Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Arabia Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco.\nJune 5-6th: The London Crude Oil Summit. The speakers include Shell Vice President of Crude Trading Mike Muller and Franco Magnani CEO, of Eni Trading and Shipping.\nEXCLUSIVE: SOUTH SUDAN SEEKS TO PUMP UP ITS OIL OUTPUT South Sudan\u2019s Minister of Petroleum Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth stopped by London this week to shop around for partners to help kick-start the east African country's oil industry.\nThe sector has been hampered by internal violence following the country\u2019s secession from Sudan in 2011.\nInternational firms began prospecting for oil in unified Sudan more than three decades ago. In 2010 the country was the third biggest oil producer in Africa. Last year, South Sudan ranked as the eleventh biggest producer in the region, according to the International Energy Agency.\nSouth Sudan, which has 3.5 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, has largely made peace with its internal warring factions and patched up its relationship with its northern neighbor, Sudan, said Mr. Gatkuoth.\nLast year 139,000 barrels per day of the landlocked country\u2019s crude flowed through a vital pipeline that crosses Sudan, said the minister. Mr. Gatkuoth wants to increase the country\u2019s production to 480,000 barrels a day by 2019.\nThe following are edited excerpts from an interview on Tuesday with The Wall Street Journal.\nQ:\u00a0How does South Sudan\u2019s oil compete in a oversupplied market?\nA: The incentives are definitely there. The oil is very cheap to produce\u2026[at] $5 to $7 a barrel onshore. We have heavy crude and light crude and the oil is actually sweet. The laws of taxation are friendly to investors. We give them a grace period or we exempt them.\nQ: What\u2019s the relationship between South Sudan and the U.S. and what is affecting the investment from American companies?\nA: Well historically we are allies to the U.S\u2026because without the support of the U.S., South Sudan would not have achieved independence.\nOf course friends always differ in different areas. [The U.S. State Department announced] a unilateral arms embargo [in February] for South Sudan not to buy arms from the U.S...because they want to pressure us to make peace. But I was telling them this is actually not the best way to advise friends.\nQ: Are you concerned about the surge in U.S. shale oil production?\nA: I am concerned about it because it has an impact on the oil price. We have agreed that since the United Arab Emirates is now the president of OPEC, they will engage with our friends in the U.S. to see how we can work together instead of us stabilizing the market and them enjoying the market. SpaceX Launched Two Prototype Communications Satellites Into Space ",
        "author": "Neanda Salvaterra"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Satellites\u2014Energy Journal (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2118",
        "date": "2018-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-satellitesenergy-journal-1519390437?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=70",
        "text": "Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk\u2019s venture Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched two prototype communications satellites into space this week.\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Thursday at 6:17 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a main mission to carry a Spanish radar-imaging satellite into a 320-mile high orbit.\nThe takeoff marked the 18th consecutive successful commercial launch for the firm.\nAlong for the ride were two of SpaceX\u2019s smaller experimental satellites. The firm plans to test their antennas and other systems.\nThe demonstration satellites are intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites SpaceX hopes to deploy in coming years.\nOIL FALLS\nOil prices edged down Friday morning. Brent crude, the global benchmark, was down 0.66% at $65.94 a barrel on London\u2019s Intercontinental Exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures were trading down 0.59% at $62.41 a barrel.\nU.S. INVESTORS ARE STILL WAITING TO SEE RETURNS FROM THEIR SHALE INVESTMENTS\nU.S. shale producers are responding in varied ways to pressure from investors who want a payout. Some firms have moved to pay dividends while others have never offered a payout or have not restored dividend cuts since the oil crash in 2014, Reuters reports.\nTRUMP IS SET TO HOLD A MEETING ABOUT BIOFUELS POLICY\nU.S. President Donald Trump announced a meeting scheduled for next week with lawmakers and cabinet officials to potentially revise U.S. biofuels policy, after a Pennsylvania refiner cited the regulation as the cause of its demise.\nFUTURECURVE\nToday: Baker Hughes releases weekly data on the number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S.\nMarch 5-9: Cambridge Energy Research Associates hosts the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston. The speakers include IHS Markit Vice Chairman Dr. Daniel Yergin and Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Arabia Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco.\nJune 5-6th: The London Crude Oil Summit. The speakers include Shell Vice President of Crude Trading Mike Muller and Franco Magnani CEO, of Eni Trading and Shipping.\nEXCLUSIVE: SOUTH SUDAN SEEKS TO PUMP UP ITS OIL OUTPUT South Sudan\u2019s Minister of Petroleum Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth stopped by London this week to shop around for partners to help kick-start the east African country's oil industry.\nThe sector has been hampered by internal violence following the country\u2019s secession from Sudan in 2011.\nInternational firms began prospecting for oil in unified Sudan more than three decades ago. In 2010 the country was the third biggest oil producer in Africa. Last year, South Sudan ranked as the eleventh biggest producer in the region, according to the International Energy Agency.\nSouth Sudan, which has 3.5 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, has largely made peace with its internal warring factions and patched up its relationship with its northern neighbor, Sudan, said Mr. Gatkuoth.\nLast year 139,000 barrels per day of the landlocked country\u2019s crude flowed through a vital pipeline that crosses Sudan, said the minister. Mr. Gatkuoth wants to increase the country\u2019s production to 480,000 barrels a day by 2019.\nThe following are edited excerpts from an interview on Tuesday with The Wall Street Journal.\nQ:\u00a0How does South Sudan\u2019s oil compete in a oversupplied market?\nA: The incentives are definitely there. The oil is very cheap to produce\u2026[at] $5 to $7 a barrel onshore. We have heavy crude and light crude and the oil is actually sweet. The laws of taxation are friendly to investors. We give them a grace period or we exempt them.\nQ: What\u2019s the relationship between South Sudan and the U.S. and what is affecting the investment from American companies?\nA: Well historically we are allies to the U.S\u2026because without the support of the U.S., South Sudan would not have achieved independence.\nOf course friends always differ in different areas. [The U.S. State Department announced] a unilateral arms embargo [in February] for South Sudan not to buy arms from the U.S...because they want to pressure us to make peace. But I was telling them this is actually not the best way to advise friends.\nQ: Are you concerned about the surge in U.S. shale oil production?\nA: I am concerned about it because it has an impact on the oil price. We have agreed that since the United Arab Emirates is now the president of OPEC, they will engage with our friends in the U.S. to see how we can work together instead of us stabilizing the market and them enjoying the market. SpaceX Launched Two Prototype Communications Satellites Into Space ",
        "author": "Neanda Salvaterra"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Satellites\u2014Energy Journal (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2119",
        "date": "2018-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-satellitesenergy-journal-1519390437?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=101",
        "text": "Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk\u2019s venture Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched two prototype communications satellites into space this week.\n\nSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Thursday at 6:17 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a main mission to carry a Spanish radar-imaging satellite into a 320-mile high orbit.\nThe takeoff marked the 18th consecutive successful commercial launch for the firm.\nAlong for the ride were two of SpaceX\u2019s smaller experimental satellites. The firm plans to test their antennas and other systems.\nThe demonstration satellites are intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites SpaceX hopes to deploy in coming years.\nOIL FALLS\nOil prices edged down Friday morning. Brent crude, the global benchmark, was down 0.66% at $65.94 a barrel on London\u2019s Intercontinental Exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures were trading down 0.59% at $62.41 a barrel.\nU.S. INVESTORS ARE STILL WAITING TO SEE RETURNS FROM THEIR SHALE INVESTMENTS\nU.S. shale producers are responding in varied ways to pressure from investors who want a payout. Some firms have moved to pay dividends while others have never offered a payout or have not restored dividend cuts since the oil crash in 2014, Reuters reports.\nTRUMP IS SET TO HOLD A MEETING ABOUT BIOFUELS POLICY\nU.S. President Donald Trump announced a meeting scheduled for next week with lawmakers and cabinet officials to potentially revise U.S. biofuels policy, after a Pennsylvania refiner cited the regulation as the cause of its demise.\nFUTURECURVE\nToday: Baker Hughes releases weekly data on the number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S.\nMarch 5-9: Cambridge Energy Research Associates hosts the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston. The speakers include IHS Markit Vice Chairman Dr. Daniel Yergin and Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Arabia Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco.\nJune 5-6th: The London Crude Oil Summit. The speakers include Shell Vice President of Crude Trading Mike Muller and Franco Magnani CEO, of Eni Trading and Shipping.\nEXCLUSIVE: SOUTH SUDAN SEEKS TO PUMP UP ITS OIL OUTPUT South Sudan\u2019s Minister of Petroleum Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth stopped by London this week to shop around for partners to help kick-start the east African country's oil industry.\nThe sector has been hampered by internal violence following the country\u2019s secession from Sudan in 2011.\nInternational firms began prospecting for oil in unified Sudan more than three decades ago. In 2010 the country was the third biggest oil producer in Africa. Last year, South Sudan ranked as the eleventh biggest producer in the region, according to the International Energy Agency.\nSouth Sudan, which has 3.5 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, has largely made peace with its internal warring factions and patched up its relationship with its northern neighbor, Sudan, said Mr. Gatkuoth.\nLast year 139,000 barrels per day of the landlocked country\u2019s crude flowed through a vital pipeline that crosses Sudan, said the minister. Mr. Gatkuoth wants to increase the country\u2019s production to 480,000 barrels a day by 2019.\nThe following are edited excerpts from an interview on Tuesday with The Wall Street Journal.\nQ:\u00a0How does South Sudan\u2019s oil compete in a oversupplied market?\nA: The incentives are definitely there. The oil is very cheap to produce\u2026[at] $5 to $7 a barrel onshore. We have heavy crude and light crude and the oil is actually sweet. The laws of taxation are friendly to investors. We give them a grace period or we exempt them.\nQ: What\u2019s the relationship between South Sudan and the U.S. and what is affecting the investment from American companies?\nA: Well historically we are allies to the U.S\u2026because without the support of the U.S., South Sudan would not have achieved independence.\nOf course friends always differ in different areas. [The U.S. State Department announced] a unilateral arms embargo [in February] for South Sudan not to buy arms from the U.S...because they want to pressure us to make peace. But I was telling them this is actually not the best way to advise friends.\nQ: Are you concerned about the surge in U.S. shale oil production?\nA: I am concerned about it because it has an impact on the oil price. We have agreed that since the United Arab Emirates is now the president of OPEC, they will engage with our friends in the U.S. to see how we can work together instead of us stabilizing the market and them enjoying the market. SpaceX Launched Two Prototype Communications Satellites Into Space ",
        "author": "Neanda Salvaterra"
    },
    {
        "title": "Semiconductors Sending a Satisfying Signal (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2120",
        "date": "2017-05-17",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2017/05/17/semiconductor-sending-a-satisfying-signal/?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=122",
        "text": "Futures pointed to a 0.5% opening drop for the S&P 500, on track for its biggest daily decline in over a month. The Stoxx Europe 600 shed 0.4% following losses in Asia, while the dollar steadied below where it traded ahead of the November U.S. election.\n\nInvestors favored perceived market havens, with gold climbing 1% to $1,248.90 an ounce, the yen strengthening 0.8% against the dollar and 10-year Treasury yields edging down to 2.2938% from 2.329%.\nBREAKFAST BRIEFING\nSemiconductor stocks, a sector that tends to lead the broader market, have been performing quite well lately.\nThe PHLX Semiconductor index climbed 19% so far this year, including a 1.5% rise on Tuesday. Four-fifths of the 30 stocks in the index have risen more than the S&P 500's 7.2% climb so far in 2017.\nChip-maker stocks have long been buoyant, benefiting from technological advances and consolidation in the sector. One high-flying name,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nvidia Corp\n\n\n ., was the best performer in the S&P 500 last year, climbing more than 200%.\nThe rise this year may be sending a positive signal about the economy. Chips are used in pretty much everything these days, from commercial space exploration to talking teddy bears, which means that, like industrial commodities, they've become something of an economic indicator.\nGlobal semiconductor revenue is forecast to increase more than 12% this year, research firm Gartner said in April. That's after sales climbed 2.6% in 2016 to $343.5 billion, Gartner said.\n\"Q1 marked a great start to the year coming off both Q4 and full-year records in 2016,\" said Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer at chip-maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp\n\n\n ., in an earnings call last month after the company reported per-share profit that topped analyst expectations.\nBurgeoning growth in the semiconductor industry would be a welcome sign after a few months of patchy economic data. First quarter gross domestic product came in at just 0.7% on a seasonally-adjusted annual basis, raising questions about whether the economy is stalling.\nOther data have bounced back recently. Industrial production, a measure of output at factories, mines, and utilities, surged 1.0% in April from a month earlier, the Federal Reserve said Tuesday, its strongest gain in more than three years. That prompted the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to lift its real-time estimate of\u00a0second-quarter gross-domestic product to 4.1%.\nIf chip makers are to be believed, perhaps there's more gains in store for the market.\nDAILY FACTOID\nOn this day in 1961, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 700 for the first time, finishing the day at 705.52. It hits the milestone just over two years after breaking through the 600 barrier.\nMONEYBEAT PODCAST\nThe Wall Street Journal's Sarah Chaney joins Paul Vigna and Stephen Grocer to preview the week's economic calendar with a look at the housing market, manufacturing data and another week of earnings.\nSubscribe to the MoneyBeat podcast at\u00a0wsj.com\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes.\nKEY EVENTS\n10:30 a.m.: EIA Petroleum Status Report\nU.S. crude-oil stocks are expected to show a decrease in data from the Department of Energy, according to a survey of analysts and traders by The Wall Street Journal. Estimates from 13 analysts and traders surveyed showed that U.S. oil inventories are projected to have decreased by 2.2 million barrels, on average, in the week ended May 12. All 13 analysts expect stockpiles to shrink. Forecasts range from a decrease 3.7 million barrels to a decrease of 500,000 barrels. Gasoline stockpiles are expected to show an decrease of 900,000 barrels, on average, according to analysts.\nSTOCKS TO WATCH\nShares of Target are up 5.5% after it posted quarterly adjusted earnings and sales that outstripped Wall Street's expectations.\n\nValeant Pharmaceuticals International\n\u00a0is off 2% premarket after it and Actavis agreed to stay litigation related to Valean'st best-selling drug Xifaxan.\nShares of Advanced Micro Devices lost 5.3% after the chip maker late Tuesday laid out its new growth plans.\n\nCisco\n is set to report results after the market closes.\nTODAY'S VIDEO\nOne potential victim of President Trump's disclosure of sensitive information to Russian officials: Congress's ambitious legislative agenda. WSJ's Naftali Bendavid explains how the latest White House uproar could hurt Republicans' efforts on taxes and health care.\nNUMBER OF THE DAY\n4X\nThe Securities and Exchange Commission will reconsider its initial approval of a risky, first-of-its-kind exchange-traded fund that promises four times the daily price moves of S&P 500 futures contracts, the Journal is reporting.\nMUST READS\nTrump Asked Comey to End Flynn Probe, According to Memo:President Trump told James Comey that he hoped the director could find a way to drop the probe of Michael Flynn, according to people who saw a memo Comey wrote about the encounter.\nTurmoil Puts GOP Agenda at Risk: The latest revelation to buffet the White House\u2014that Trump allegedl Semiconductor stocks, a sector that tends to lead the broader market, have been performing quite well lately. The PHLX Semiconductor index climbed 19% so far this year, including a 1.5% rise on Tuesday. ",
        "author": "Ben Eisen"
    },
    {
        "title": "France\u2019s Total Rewards Investors After Oil Downturn\u2014Energy Journal (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2121",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/frances-total-rewards-investors-after-oil-downturnenergy-journal-1518094002?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=78",
        "text": "French oil giant Total SA capped off a choppy earnings season for major oil companies with some big news: it will raised dividends by 10% over the next three years and buy back $5 billion-worth of shares, writes The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Sara Kent.\n\nIt is the clearest sign yet that oil companies are turning the page on a painful three-year slump in oil prices that forced tough cost-cutting measures and sounded a clear note of confidence after earnings from Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. disappointed.\nStatoil ASA, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and ConocoPhillips have all announced higher investor payouts this year.\nThey followed British oil giant BP PLC\u2019s share buyback announced in October, a program of purchasing its own \u00a0stock that generally makes the remaining shares more valuable.\nThe companies are rewarding shareholders as profits return to the industry after a three-year slump in the market.\nOIL EDGES DOWN AMID U.S. OUTPUT SURGE\nOil prices continued to fall on Thursday on the back of surging U.S. production and rising inventories.\nBrent crude, the global benchmark, was down 0.70%, at $65.09 a barrel on London\u2019s Intercontinental Exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures were trading down 0.73% at $61.34 a barrel. In late January, Brent had climbed over $70 a barrel for the first time since 2014.\nCALIFORNIA VOWS ROADBLOCKS TO TRUMP\u2019S OIL OFFSHORE DRILLING PLAN\nCalifornia says it may block oil transports from offshore rigs through its state, in a bid to block the Trump administration\u2019s plan to greatly expand U.S. offshore drilling.\nTESLA SAYS IT IS MAKING PROGRESS ON MODEL 3 PRODUCTION ISSUES\nDespite its sizable losses in 2017, Tesla Inc. on Wednesday signaled it is making progress in overcoming production troubles building its latest electric-vehicle line.\nThe auto maker said in its quarterly financial report that it is on track to reach a milestone of making 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week by the end of the second quarter of 2018. In another coup for Tesla\u2019s Chief Executive Elon Musk, his side venture Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched a space rocket on Tuesday.\nFUTURECURVE\nFriday: Baker Hughes releases weekly data on the number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S.\nFebruary\u00a020-22, 2018: the Energy Institute hosts the International Petroleum Week, conference in London. The speakers at the event include BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley and Dr. Faith Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.\nMarch 9: Cambridge Energy Research Associates hosts the CERAWeek energy conference, in Houston. The speakers include the IHS Markit Vice Chairman Dr. Daniel Yergin and Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Arabia Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco. Big Oil Rewards Investors Again ",
        "author": "Neanda Salvaterra"
    },
    {
        "title": "France\u2019s Total Rewards Investors After Oil Downturn\u2014Energy Journal (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2122",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/frances-total-rewards-investors-after-oil-downturnenergy-journal-1518094002?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=102",
        "text": "French oil giant Total SA capped off a choppy earnings season for major oil companies with some big news: it will raised dividends by 10% over the next three years and buy back $5 billion-worth of shares, writes The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Sara Kent.\n\nIt is the clearest sign yet that oil companies are turning the page on a painful three-year slump in oil prices that forced tough cost-cutting measures and sounded a clear note of confidence after earnings from Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. disappointed.\nStatoil ASA, Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and ConocoPhillips have all announced higher investor payouts this year.\nThey followed British oil giant BP PLC\u2019s share buyback announced in October, a program of purchasing its own \u00a0stock that generally makes the remaining shares more valuable.\nThe companies are rewarding shareholders as profits return to the industry after a three-year slump in the market.\nOIL EDGES DOWN AMID U.S. OUTPUT SURGE\nOil prices continued to fall on Thursday on the back of surging U.S. production and rising inventories.\nBrent crude, the global benchmark, was down 0.70%, at $65.09 a barrel on London\u2019s Intercontinental Exchange. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, West Texas Intermediate futures were trading down 0.73% at $61.34 a barrel. In late January, Brent had climbed over $70 a barrel for the first time since 2014.\nCALIFORNIA VOWS ROADBLOCKS TO TRUMP\u2019S OIL OFFSHORE DRILLING PLAN\nCalifornia says it may block oil transports from offshore rigs through its state, in a bid to block the Trump administration\u2019s plan to greatly expand U.S. offshore drilling.\nTESLA SAYS IT IS MAKING PROGRESS ON MODEL 3 PRODUCTION ISSUES\nDespite its sizable losses in 2017, Tesla Inc. on Wednesday signaled it is making progress in overcoming production troubles building its latest electric-vehicle line.\nThe auto maker said in its quarterly financial report that it is on track to reach a milestone of making 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week by the end of the second quarter of 2018. In another coup for Tesla\u2019s Chief Executive Elon Musk, his side venture Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched a space rocket on Tuesday.\nFUTURECURVE\nFriday: Baker Hughes releases weekly data on the number of rigs drilling for oil in the U.S.\nFebruary\u00a020-22, 2018: the Energy Institute hosts the International Petroleum Week, conference in London. The speakers at the event include BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley and Dr. Faith Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.\nMarch 9: Cambridge Energy Research Associates hosts the CERAWeek energy conference, in Houston. The speakers include the IHS Markit Vice Chairman Dr. Daniel Yergin and Amin Nasser, president and CEO of Saudi Arabia Oil Co., or Saudi Aramco. Big Oil Rewards Investors Again ",
        "author": "Neanda Salvaterra"
    },
    {
        "title": "WSJ Wealth Adviser Briefing: Space Tourism, Banks Pressured, Weekend Life (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2123",
        "date": "2020-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-wealth-adviser-briefing-space-tourism-banks-pressured-weekend-life-01584439326?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=17",
        "text": "PLANNING & INVESTING\n\n\n\n\nMom-and-Pop Investors\u2019 Craze for Space Tourism Survives Coronavirus Rout:\u00a0The coronavirus has brought markets crashing back to Earth, but its gravity isn\u2019t restraining mom-and-pop investors\u2019 enthusiasm for space-tourism venture Virgin Galactic.\n\nMARKET TALK\nFrom\u00a0Dow Jones Newswires\nAs cruise lines have suspended sailings amid the Covid-19 health crisis, operators can expect steep operating losses in 2Q and 3Q, Instinet says. But they have enough borrowing capacity, cash and capex flexibility to stay afloat for about a year, the firm says, adding that they could return to profitability in three to fourth quarters if the federal government provides them with low or no-interest loan guarantees. Instinet estimates that Carnival is burning about $560M in cash each month, Royal Caribbean at $280M and Norwegian Cruise Line at $140M. Recovery could be steeper than in 2009-10 as the companies have diversified customers beyond retirees, and there is possibility of pent-up demand after the social-distancing period, according to Instinet. (dave.sebastian@wsj.com; @depsebastian)\nUS retail traffic plunged last week amid fears over the novel coronavirus, and things are about to get worse, analysts at Citi say. Same-store traffic tumbled 17.6% in the second week of March, with apparel traffic down 26.6%, Citi says, citing data from ShopperTrak, which uses cameras to count traffic to stores. The Citi analysts say they expect trends will look much worse next week, as many retailers have announced store closings in North America, and more are expected to follow suit. Citi last week cut its earnings estimates and target prices on a raft of retailers, but the analysts note that those adjustments didn't contemplate extended store closings, and that near-term estimates are likely to go lower across the board. (colin.kellaher@wsj.com)\nBUSINESS & PRACTICE\nAnother Problem for the Fed: Banks Pressured as Clients Scramble for Cash:\u00a0Companies around the world are drawing down their credit lines at the same time, forcing banks to cough up large sums of money on short notice and further straining a financial industry already hammered by sinking interest rates.\nIMPACT INVESTING\u00a0\nTravel vs. Environmentalism? Millennials Try to Do Both:\u00a0\u00a0Millennials face an ethical conundrum. On the one hand, they express a desire to travel more than previous generations. At the same time, though, they also are more passionate about the environment.\u00a0Those two things don\u2019t always go well together.\nTALKING POINTS\u00a0\nYour 401(k) May Do a Bit Better This Time:\u00a0Losses in near-retirement target-date funds in the recent selloff are less serious than in the financial crisis\u2014so far.\nTRAVEL & LIFESTYLE\nHow Coronavirus Remade American Life in One Weekend: Shutdowns reshape society, unmooring people from routines and activities that typically provide comfort in moments of crisis.\u00a0\nABOUT US\nThe Wealth Adviser Briefing covers topics of interest to wealth managers, financial planners and other advisers. The content is curated by the Dow Jones Newswires team using articles from the Newswires, Barron's, MarketWatch and The Wall Street Journal. The briefing is delivered to subscribers by email each workday morning at 6:30 a.m. ET. You can\u00a0sign up here for email delivery.\nFor more information about our services for financial professionals, please\u00a0visit our website.\nWe welcome feedback. Please email\u00a0newsletters@dowjones.com\u00a0or contact Dwight Oestricher at dwight.oestricher@wsj.com Mom-and-pop investors craze for space tourism survived despite coronavirus rout; banks are being pressured as clients scramble for cash, how the coronavirus remade American life over a weekend. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Giant Step for Gold (WSJ: Moneybeat Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2124",
        "date": "2017-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-giant-step-for-gold-1501531894?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=80",
        "text": "\u201cThe value of such an item cannot be determined,\u201d said the local police department in a statement.\nWell, not really. While the museum\u2019s Apollo spacesuit, moon rocks or Gemini VIII capsule are irreplaceable artifacts, the gold replica never went to space. For thieves, it is the weight, not the historic value that matters. In fact, the model is quite a bit more valuable than it was back in 1969 when Armstrong received it. An ounce of gold back then was worth just $41. Even adjusting for inflation, it is now worth nearly five times as much. A golden statue of the lunar lander used by the Apollo 11 astronauts was stolen from a museum in Ohio. Along with the other items on display, it is impossible to display. But the claim by local police that its value can not be determined isn't quite true - it can be calculated precisely if melted down. ",
        "author": "Spencer Jakab"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | AOC just played \u2018Among Us\u2019 on Twitch. Over 400,000 people came to watch. (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2125",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/22/aoc-just-played-among-us-twitch-over-400000-people-came-watch/",
        "text": "On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: \u201cAnyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote?\u201d \u201cAmong Us\u201d is an online game released in 2018 in which players on a spaceship try to root out a murderous alien impostor before it kills everyone. The game is similar in style to party games such as \u201cMafia\u201d or \u201cWerewolf.\u201d It has become enormously popular during the coronavirus pandemic. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPolitical scientists have plenty to say about politicians and the news media. However, they don\u2019t necessarily know as much as they should about current video games. That\u2019s why this post is a collaboration between a stereotypical clueless dad/political scientist, who stopped keeping up with video games around the time \u201cHalf-Life\u201d was released in 1998, and a teenager with impeccable gaming chops who carried out the primary research for this post.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAOC\u2019s initiative attracted enormous interest.After Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) \u2014 or AOC, as she is commonly known \u2014 posted her tweet, many creators and gamers replied, hoping to get a chance to play with the congresswoman. Those added to the stream included political streamer Hasan Piker, as well as popular gaming streamers Pokimane, Myth, Disguised Toast and Dr. Lupo, and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Over the next 48 hours, AOC kept people up to date on Twitter as she put together her own streaming setup and created a channel on the Twitch service, which allows people to stream video games and other activities to a live audience. Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Washington Post.AOC\u2019s experiment was highly successful by any reasonable measure. It had a peak live viewership of well over 400,000 people. AOC now has more than 600,000 Twitch followers and, according to the Verge, her initial videoclip accumulated over 4.7 million views by Wednesday morning. These are big numbers, suggesting that there is a large audience for politicians who are willing to do live gaming if they have the right profile.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGaming can allow politicians to reach an unconventional audience.So why might politicians want to play video games in front of a live audience? The answer is that it allows them to talk to an unconventional audience. As Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan recently wrote, most Americans pay little day-to-day attention to politics. Many of them vote, or can be persuaded to vote, but reaching them is tough precisely because they aren\u2019t likely to watch TV shows about politics or read articles about political issues. Politicians who want to attract these potential voters need to go where those voters are. That explains, for example, why President Barack Obama went on the daytime TV show \u201cThe View\u201d when he was in office.AOC said she wanted to play \u201cAmong Us\u201d to get out the vote. Although detailed demographic information isn\u2019t publicly available, it\u2019s a pretty safe bet that \u201cAmong Us\u201d players and Twitch users tend to be younger. Many of them (including the co-author of this article) are too young to vote. But those who are eligible to vote often don\u2019t. On average, young Americans are less likely to vote than other age groups. Playing \u201cAmong Us\u201d on Twitch is probably a good way to reach some of these potential voters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to encouraging people to vote in general, AOC also provided more specific information to left-leaning voters in New York by promoting the New York Working Families Party (NY-WFP) during her live stream. New York voters can vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-N.Y.), on the Democratic line, but they also have the unusual ability to vote for Biden and Harris as candidates of the NY-WFP. If they vote for Biden and Harris on the NY-WFP line, they not only signal their support for the left to Democratic leaders, but they also help keep the NY-WFP alive. Under new rules introduced by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the NY-WFP needs at least 2 percent of voter support in the presidential race if it is to keep its place on future ballots.So how did Ocasio-Cortez and Omar do?So how did AOC and Omar do as gamers? AOC was able to hold her own throughout the evening, even though she had very little experience with the game, and made fun of her mistakes. Omar struggled at the beginning because it was her first time playing the game. But once she understood the basic rules, she quickly became one of the most dangerous impostors on the stream. When she was randomly picked as the alien, Omar would take out crew member after crew member until, inevitably, one of the crew members\u2019 bodies was reported. After this, she was able to employ her debating skills to cast the blame on other members of the crew.Jack Farrell is a high school student. Video games can make for smart politics. AOC just played \u2018Among Us\u2019 on Twitch. Over 400,000 people came to watch.",
        "author": "Jack Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Amazon\u2019s next big TV series is based on Iain Banks\u2019s Culture novels. What are the Culture novels? (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2126",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/02/21/amazons-next-big-tv-series-is-based-on-iain-bankss-culture-novels-what-are-the-culture-novels/",
        "text": "Jeffrey P. Bezos, the CEO of Amazon (and owner of The Washington Post), has announced that Amazon Studios is adapting Iain M. Banks\u2019s Culture novels as a TV series. Bezos is a self-announced fan of these books, but they are relatively unknown in the United States, and did not sell as well as they deserved, even in Britain, where Banks was a famous author.\u00a0Reversing the stereotype, Banks subsidized his science fiction by writing \u2018literary\u2019 novels that sold much better. However, even if the Culture novels were never bestsellers, they have been extraordinarily influential on other writers, thinkers and, for that matter,\u00a0political scientists. Here\u2019s what you need to know. What are the Culture novels?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Culture novels are a series of science fiction novels written by Iain Banks (under the\u00a0notably transparent pseudonym \u2018Iain M. Banks\u2019) and published between 1987 and 2012. They\u00a0are\u00a0entries in a particular subgenre of science fiction called \u201cspace opera,\u201d which typically involves lots of space travel, extravagant plots, exotic planets, baroque aliens and mind-bogglingly enormous constructs. Banks\u2019s books had all of these elements and more, combined with a keenly ironic sensibility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNone of his science fiction books were nearly as\u00a0gruesome as his debut literary novel, \u201cThe Wasp Factory,\u201d of which an anonymous Irish Times reviewer said, \u201cIt\u2019s a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity.\u201d Even so, the unusual execution scene at the opening of his first Culture novel, \u201cConsider Phlebas,\u201d and the\u00a0actions of the Chairmaker in the second novel published in the series, \u201cUse of Weapons,\u201d spoke to his unusually grotesque sense of humor.The Culture novels are all set in the same universe but do not need to be read in any particular order. Many Banks fans think that \u201cUse of Weapons\u201d (which has a highly unusual structure, suggested to him by his fellow Scots sci-fi writer Ken MacLeod) is the best novel in the series and the best to start with. Other highlights include \u201cConsider Phlebas,\u201d \u201cThe Player of Games,\u201d \u201cExcession\u201d and \u201cLook to Windward.\u201dWhat is the Culture?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0common\u00a0element in all\u00a0the books is the Culture \u2014 a loosely connected interstellar civilization of human beings and artificial intelligences (Minds), living on planets, Orbitals (vast constructs), asteroids and enormous spaceships (General\u00a0Systems Vehicles). The Minds are vastly more intelligent than humans and take care of most of the difficult political, social and economic problems, leaving humans to play and work on interesting projects.The Culture is not the only civilization in the Galaxy, or the most powerful one (although truly powerful species tend to transcend the material galaxy sooner or later). However, it is both big and important enough to matter.What are the politics of the Culture?Story continues below advertisementAs Banks noted in numerous interviews, the Culture is a utopia. Specifically, since Banks was a socialist, it is a socialist and secular utopia.\u00a0When superhuman intelligences are in charge, a planned economy may possibly work. The Culture is also attractive to many libertarians, because it imagines\u00a0what human life might be under conditions of near-complete material abundance, where the distinctions between socialism and libertarianism become very blurry.AdvertisementViolence is nearly unknown \u2014 the few murderers receive medical treatment and are then followed around by a semi-intelligent \u201cslap drone\u201d for the rest of their lives. People live for hundreds of years (and, if they want, can be immortal, although this is considered to be in poor taste). They can \u2014 and do \u2014 change sexes regularly, enjoying life as a woman or a man, having children, making families and moving on. In general,\u00a0people in the Culture seem to have\u00a0as good a time as people can reasonably have and still be people.However, they aren\u2019t simple hedonists. They have an inherent sense\u00a0of how difficult it is to achieve a state of being in which humans are free to enjoy themselves without exploitation, and they have regular contact with other civilizations that aren\u2019t nearly as happy. Sometimes, people from the Culture try to meddle in these civilizations to help them. Most of the books focus on\u00a0the jarring collisions between the Culture and other species with other ways of life.Story continues below advertisementThe Culture is about the flaws as well as benefits of socially minded liberalismAdvertisementIt is clear that the Culture represents Banks\u2019s political ideals and that he\u2019d like to live in a society like the Culture (in one short story, Culture agents encounter our civilization and are suitably appalled). However, he\u2019s also keenly aware of the Culture\u2019s limits. It survives and prospers through acts (often carried out by the euphemistically titled Special Circumstances organization) that sometimes sit poorly with the Culture\u2019s professed values. Banks\u2019s imagined utopia is far more ambiguous than, for example, the Federation in \u201cStar Trek\u201d and perfectly willing, for example, to employ war criminals when it thinks it necessary for the greater good.The Culture novels make it clear that do-gooding\u00a0secularist socialism involves difficult moral choices. \u201cConsider Phlebas\u201d depicts a vast conflict between the Culture and the Idirans, a race of religious zealots. However, the Idirans are presented sympathetically (the protagonist is an agent working for them, who makes it clear that their resistance to the Culture\u2019s passive missionary activities for its values is not entirely irrational). Its values are sometimes in conflict with each other \u2014 how, for example, can the Culture\u2019s respect for autonomy be reconciled with the existence of an alien species (the Affront) whose entire form of social organization is based on the brutal\u00a0exploitation and subordination of females and junior males?Story continues below advertisementIt will be interesting to see how these questions transfer to the television screen. Amazon\u2019s most recent science fiction series, \u201cAltered Carbon,\u201d is also based on the novels of a science fiction writer based in Britain, but one whose plotlines are more testosterone-driven (literally so, in the case of his novel \u201cThirteen\u201c), and ideas are more politically straightforward. The Culture novels have a lot of excitement and surface spectacle. They also have considerable political depth and moral ambiguity. Making them work in a different medium is certainly possible, but it will involve a lot of hard and careful work. The Culture novels show how ambiguous a real utopia would be. Amazon\u2019s next big TV series is based on Iain Banks\u2019s Culture novels. What are the Culture novels?",
        "author": "Henry Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The new \u2018Star Trek\u2019 has gotten darker and more pessimistic \u2014 just like our politics (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2127",
        "date": "2017-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/04/star-trek-has-gotten-darker-and-less-optimistic-just-like-our-politics/",
        "text": "In the fifth episode of the new \u201cStar Trek\u201d television series, smuggler and trickster Harry Mudd unleashes a stream of resentment against Gabriel Lorca, captain of the USS Discovery. \u201cHave you ever bothered to look out of your spaceship down at the little guys below?\u201d he rants. \u201cThere are a lot more of us down there than there are you up here. And we\u2019re sick and tired of getting caught in your crossfire.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d set a decade before the adventures of Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock, is a dark and disconcerting take on the franchise. Mudd\u2019s populist anger is just one departure from the traditional interplanetary idealism of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe. In this fictional future, primal forces are warring against the technocratic Federation. Back in our world, nationalist populism is challenging the liberal international vision. \u201cStar Trek\u201d is once again a mirror on our politics and a lens into our possible future.Daenerys Targaryen, here\u2019s some advice from political science as you pursue the Iron ThroneOnce upon a time, \u2018Star Trek\u2019 was optimistic about the postwar world orderAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFifty years ago on our television screens, Capt. James T. Kirk chased Mudd through space much as the police pursue an erratic driver. Kirk charged Mudd with violations of the rules-based order, including \u201cgalaxy travel without a flight plan . . . failure to answer a starship\u2019s signal . . . effecting a menace to navigation.\u201d The USS Enterprise\u2019s mission was to explore space and add newly discovered territory to the Federation\u2019s zone of good governance. The five-year plan was to explore strange new worlds, establish and regulate commercial relationships and spread liberal values.The original series of the 1960s, and the \u201cNext Generation\u201d sequel of the 1980s, dramatized creator Gene Roddenberry\u2019s end of history theories, in which our better angels would triumph. It showed a future in which globalization became, almost literally, universal. By the time of \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation,\u201d this project seemed close to completion. In \u201cThe Next Generation,\u201d set 100 years after the original series, the Federation had integrated most of its enemies into its zone of peace and prosperity. Families lived aboard the supersized starship. The episodes were seminars in mediating disputes among species under the Federation\u2019s protective umbrella.Not any more, as you will see from the spoilers\u00a0below\u00a0\u00a0Here\u2019s why you should read Max Gladstone\u2019s fantasy novels if you\u2019re interested in politicsBy contrast, \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is warning us that things may get worse before they get better. The Harry Mudd of the 1960s series was a whimsical rogue; this new Mudd is furious. Armed with a time travel device, he engineers a recurring Groundhog Day massacre of everyone onboard the USS Discovery. And it\u2019s not just the bad guys who are more violent this time. The protagonist, Michael Burnham, commits mutiny and assaults her commanding officer in the first episode.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe show tells us that hundreds of years in the future, history will still have plenty of twists and turns left. The Federation is fighting a devastating war with the Klingons, an expansionist warrior race that was the original series\u2019 analog to the Soviet Union. In this new iteration, the Klingons are blood-and-soil isolationists. They decry the hypocrisy of a Federation that says \u201cwe come in peace.\u201d For the Klingons, the unspoken next line is \u201cso long as you remake yourselves in our image.\u201dForget \u2018House of Cards.\u2019 Watch \u2018The Thick of It\u2019 if you want to understand BritainThe Vulcans, Earth\u2019s essential allies, resent the interbreeding with humans that produced Mr. Spock and, in this new series, his adopted sister, Burnham. They are less positive-sum rationalists than purist ethno-nationalists. Capt. Lorca himself is an antihero. Faced with the capture of his previous ship, he blew it up as he escaped, killing the crew trapped on board. He imprisons and tortures a member of an alien species, using it to power the ship\u2019s engines. Later, his starship encounters a sickened space whale. Lorca tries to navigate around it; it\u2019s not his problem. He seems to relish the chance to cut some moral corners in the name of wartime expediency.Sometimes by accident, more often by design, the various \u201cStar Treks\u201d have reflected the politics of their eras. The franchise has often held out the hope of a better future. Not this time. \u201cDiscovery\u201d is a stark warning about where we may be headed. The triumph of the good is not inevitable. We may be boldly going where our species has so often gone in the past: in fear, toward violence and dissolution.Here\u2019s why you have to watch \u2018Occupied\u2019 \u2013 a near-future political nightmareStephen Benedict Dyson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and author of\u00a0 \u201cOtherworldly Politics: The International Relations of \u2018Star Trek,\u2019 \u2018Game of Thrones,\u2019 and \u2018Battlestar Galactica.\u2019 \u201d He is completing a book about televised political fiction. Angry nationalist populism is challenging the vision of intergalactic cooperation. Sound familiar? The new \u2018Star Trek\u2019 has gotten darker and more pessimistic \u2014 just like our politics",
        "author": "Stephen Benedict Dyson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The new \u2018Star Trek\u2019 has gotten darker and more pessimistic \u2014 just like our politics (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2128",
        "date": "2017-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/04/star-trek-has-gotten-darker-and-less-optimistic-just-like-our-politics/",
        "text": "In the fifth episode of the new \u201cStar Trek\u201d television series, smuggler and trickster Harry Mudd unleashes a stream of resentment against Gabriel Lorca, captain of the USS Discovery. \u201cHave you ever bothered to look out of your spaceship down at the little guys below?\u201d he rants. \u201cThere are a lot more of us down there than there are you up here. And we\u2019re sick and tired of getting caught in your crossfire.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d set a decade before the adventures of Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock, is a dark and disconcerting take on the franchise. Mudd\u2019s populist anger is just one departure from the traditional interplanetary idealism of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe. In this fictional future, primal forces are warring against the technocratic Federation. Back in our world, nationalist populism is challenging the liberal international vision. \u201cStar Trek\u201d is once again a mirror on our politics and a lens into our possible future.Daenerys Targaryen, here\u2019s some advice from political science as you pursue the Iron ThroneOnce upon a time, \u2018Star Trek\u2019 was optimistic about the postwar world orderAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFifty years ago on our television screens, Capt. James T. Kirk chased Mudd through space much as the police pursue an erratic driver. Kirk charged Mudd with violations of the rules-based order, including \u201cgalaxy travel without a flight plan . . . failure to answer a starship\u2019s signal . . . effecting a menace to navigation.\u201d The USS Enterprise\u2019s mission was to explore space and add newly discovered territory to the Federation\u2019s zone of good governance. The five-year plan was to explore strange new worlds, establish and regulate commercial relationships and spread liberal values.The original series of the 1960s, and the \u201cNext Generation\u201d sequel of the 1980s, dramatized creator Gene Roddenberry\u2019s end of history theories, in which our better angels would triumph. It showed a future in which globalization became, almost literally, universal. By the time of \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation,\u201d this project seemed close to completion. In \u201cThe Next Generation,\u201d set 100 years after the original series, the Federation had integrated most of its enemies into its zone of peace and prosperity. Families lived aboard the supersized starship. The episodes were seminars in mediating disputes among species under the Federation\u2019s protective umbrella.Not any more, as you will see from the spoilers\u00a0below\u00a0\u00a0Here\u2019s why you should read Max Gladstone\u2019s fantasy novels if you\u2019re interested in politicsBy contrast, \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is warning us that things may get worse before they get better. The Harry Mudd of the 1960s series was a whimsical rogue; this new Mudd is furious. Armed with a time travel device, he engineers a recurring Groundhog Day massacre of everyone onboard the USS Discovery. And it\u2019s not just the bad guys who are more violent this time. The protagonist, Michael Burnham, commits mutiny and assaults her commanding officer in the first episode.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe show tells us that hundreds of years in the future, history will still have plenty of twists and turns left. The Federation is fighting a devastating war with the Klingons, an expansionist warrior race that was the original series\u2019 analog to the Soviet Union. In this new iteration, the Klingons are blood-and-soil isolationists. They decry the hypocrisy of a Federation that says \u201cwe come in peace.\u201d For the Klingons, the unspoken next line is \u201cso long as you remake yourselves in our image.\u201dForget \u2018House of Cards.\u2019 Watch \u2018The Thick of It\u2019 if you want to understand BritainThe Vulcans, Earth\u2019s essential allies, resent the interbreeding with humans that produced Mr. Spock and, in this new series, his adopted sister, Burnham. They are less positive-sum rationalists than purist ethno-nationalists. Capt. Lorca himself is an antihero. Faced with the capture of his previous ship, he blew it up as he escaped, killing the crew trapped on board. He imprisons and tortures a member of an alien species, using it to power the ship\u2019s engines. Later, his starship encounters a sickened space whale. Lorca tries to navigate around it; it\u2019s not his problem. He seems to relish the chance to cut some moral corners in the name of wartime expediency.Sometimes by accident, more often by design, the various \u201cStar Treks\u201d have reflected the politics of their eras. The franchise has often held out the hope of a better future. Not this time. \u201cDiscovery\u201d is a stark warning about where we may be headed. The triumph of the good is not inevitable. We may be boldly going where our species has so often gone in the past: in fear, toward violence and dissolution.Here\u2019s why you have to watch \u2018Occupied\u2019 \u2013 a near-future political nightmareStephen Benedict Dyson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and author of\u00a0 \u201cOtherworldly Politics: The International Relations of \u2018Star Trek,\u2019 \u2018Game of Thrones,\u2019 and \u2018Battlestar Galactica.\u2019 \u201d He is completing a book about televised political fiction. Angry nationalist populism is challenging the vision of intergalactic cooperation. Sound familiar? The new \u2018Star Trek\u2019 has gotten darker and more pessimistic \u2014 just like our politics",
        "author": "Stephen Benedict Dyson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Trump\u2019s trip to Japan reveals some mixed signals (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2129",
        "date": "2019-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/29/trumps-trip-japan-reveals-some-mixed-signals/",
        "text": "On Tuesday, President Trump returned to Washington after a four-day visit to Japan. His trip came at the dawn of a new era in the country \u2014 after the first abdication of a Japanese emperor since 1817 and the ascension of Emperor Naruhito to the throne.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy inviting Trump to be the first foreign leader to meet with the new emperor, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe showcased how his country prioritizes its relationship with the United States \u2014 and with Trump specifically, who boasted last week about being \u201cthe guest of honor at the biggest event that they\u2019ve had in over 200 years.\u201d Abe\u2019s \u201ccharm offensive\u201d was in full swing. Aside from Trump\u2019s meeting with Emperor Naruhito and political photo ops, the Japanese government put together an impressive schedule designed to appeal to the president\u2019s tastes and cultivate personal relations between the two leaders, including ringside seats at a sumo tournament, golf, double cheeseburgers made with American beef and dinner at a traditional charcoal grill restaurant.Trump goes to Tokyo. There will be pomp and photo ops.The key takeaways? Predictably, the visit was more about ceremony than about policy substance, but it highlighted important dimensions of current U.S.-Japan relations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement1. U.S.-Japan trade talks have been temporarily delayedWhile the media attention has focused on U.S.-China trade, U.S.-Japan bilateral trade talks are also ongoing. Abe and Trump did not discuss substantive details of a U.S.-Japan pact, but they did address timing. Both agreed to \u201caccelerate\u201d the trade talks in line with the U.S. desire to conclude an agreement as soon as possible \u2014 but Trump also publicly commented that the deal would wait until after July. This delay is significant because it allows Abe to steer clear of controversial concessions to the United States until after he has finished navigating a potential double election.Trump has incentive to help Abe politically, since ensuring stable government seems likely to help smooth the negotiation process. And if Japan offers enough of the right kind of concessions in politicized sectors such as agriculture and automobiles, this could also help Trump to please his own domestic audiences.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen the United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement in 2017, it forfeited important Japanese trade concessions. Washington wants those concessions and more in the upcoming bilateral talks, as Trump made clear with frequent comments about the trade imbalance during his visit.Okay, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead. What was it?Aside from the potential concessions, talks with Japan will set expectations for negotiations with other U.S. trade partners. The Trump administration argues that imports of automobiles and auto parts harm U.S. national security because they hurt domestic producers and their ability to invest in new technologies. Japan and the European Union have six months to negotiate new deals with the United States before Washington imposes tariffs on these imports.Although Abe seemed to catch a break with the delay, the reprieve is likely to be brief. Trump implied that a deal could be announced as early as August, although Japan will probably attempt to delay negotiations further. Abe\u2019s government might also try to obtain better terms by offering to redress the trade imbalance through other means, such as additional defense procurement or investment in the United States by Japanese companies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement2. Security cooperation is generally strong \u2014 and expanding to new frontiersDespite Trump\u2019s well-known criticisms of alliances and burden-sharing, this visit was devoted to reaffirming the commitment of the United States and Japan to their long-standing security relationship. Trump visited the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka and gave a speech aboard the USS Wasp emphasizing American military might. He also visited the JS Kaga, an Izumo-class helicopter carrier that Tokyo views as a symbol of its increasing contributions to the alliance and to regional security.In addition, the two leaders announced plans for a U.S.-Japanese manned moon mission, a new area of bilateral cooperation that directly responds to recent Chinese actions. In January, China became the first country to land on the far side of the moon, and its space exploration ambitions have reinvigorated U.S. interest in returning to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Trump directly linked the joint mission to security concerns, saying, \u201cFrom a military standpoint, there is nothing more important right now than space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement3. But the allies continue to suffer from mixed signalsThe two leaders\u2019 symbolic displays of the strengths of the U.S.-Japan relationship danced around latent tensions in the security arena \u2014 as illustrated by their divergent treatments of the North Korean issue. For Japan, Trump\u2019s visit was an opportunity to coordinate policy and keep Tokyo\u2019s views in the picture \u2014 and minimize chances that Japan will be surprised by future developments in U.S. talks with North Korea.These are U.S. allies\u2019 3 big questions for the second Trump-Kim summitJapan scored at least one win. Trump met with the families of Japanese abductees on Monday, reaffirming U.S. support for securing the return of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a political boon for Abe, who has been an advocate for the abductees\u2019 return since early in his career.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHowever, the visit also exposed worrying gaps in the allies\u2019 perspectives. Trump minimized concerns about North Korea\u2019s recent short-range missile tests, claiming that he was personally not bothered by them. But the missiles that Trump dismissed as \u201csmall weapons\u201d pose a serious threat to Japan due to its proximity to the Korean Peninsula. Abe hedged. He expressed \u201cgreat regret\u201d over the tests and insisted that they violated U.N. policy, yet he also maintained that Japan and the United States are \u201cperfectly aligned\u201d with regard to sanctions.What happens now? Abe and Trump pulled off a showy demonstration of the bonds between their two countries. In addition to the personal rapport between the two leaders, the U.S. and Japan share many common interests \u2014 as well as common adversaries. However, Trump\u2019s trip also revealed persistent and troubling areas of divergence on issues such as trade and North Korea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States and Japan will eventually have to tackle these disagreements. But with this visit, that day of reckoning seems to have been postponed a while longer.Don\u2019t miss anything! Sign up to get TMC\u2019s smart analysis in your inbox, three days a week.Kristi Govella is an assistant professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at M\u0101noa, an adjunct fellow at the East-West Center and a National Asia Research Program fellow. The U.S. and Japan announced a joint moon mission \u2014 but seemed to postpone pressing trade and security issues. Trump\u2019s trip to Japan reveals some mixed signals",
        "author": "Kristi Govella"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Trump\u2019s trip to Japan reveals some mixed signals (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2130",
        "date": "2019-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/29/trumps-trip-japan-reveals-some-mixed-signals/",
        "text": "On Tuesday, President Trump returned to Washington after a four-day visit to Japan. His trip came at the dawn of a new era in the country \u2014 after the first abdication of a Japanese emperor since 1817 and the ascension of Emperor Naruhito to the throne.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy inviting Trump to be the first foreign leader to meet with the new emperor, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe showcased how his country prioritizes its relationship with the United States \u2014 and with Trump specifically, who boasted last week about being \u201cthe guest of honor at the biggest event that they\u2019ve had in over 200 years.\u201d Abe\u2019s \u201ccharm offensive\u201d was in full swing. Aside from Trump\u2019s meeting with Emperor Naruhito and political photo ops, the Japanese government put together an impressive schedule designed to appeal to the president\u2019s tastes and cultivate personal relations between the two leaders, including ringside seats at a sumo tournament, golf, double cheeseburgers made with American beef and dinner at a traditional charcoal grill restaurant.Trump goes to Tokyo. There will be pomp and photo ops.The key takeaways? Predictably, the visit was more about ceremony than about policy substance, but it highlighted important dimensions of current U.S.-Japan relations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement1. U.S.-Japan trade talks have been temporarily delayedWhile the media attention has focused on U.S.-China trade, U.S.-Japan bilateral trade talks are also ongoing. Abe and Trump did not discuss substantive details of a U.S.-Japan pact, but they did address timing. Both agreed to \u201caccelerate\u201d the trade talks in line with the U.S. desire to conclude an agreement as soon as possible \u2014 but Trump also publicly commented that the deal would wait until after July. This delay is significant because it allows Abe to steer clear of controversial concessions to the United States until after he has finished navigating a potential double election.Trump has incentive to help Abe politically, since ensuring stable government seems likely to help smooth the negotiation process. And if Japan offers enough of the right kind of concessions in politicized sectors such as agriculture and automobiles, this could also help Trump to please his own domestic audiences.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen the United States withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement in 2017, it forfeited important Japanese trade concessions. Washington wants those concessions and more in the upcoming bilateral talks, as Trump made clear with frequent comments about the trade imbalance during his visit.Okay, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead. What was it?Aside from the potential concessions, talks with Japan will set expectations for negotiations with other U.S. trade partners. The Trump administration argues that imports of automobiles and auto parts harm U.S. national security because they hurt domestic producers and their ability to invest in new technologies. Japan and the European Union have six months to negotiate new deals with the United States before Washington imposes tariffs on these imports.Although Abe seemed to catch a break with the delay, the reprieve is likely to be brief. Trump implied that a deal could be announced as early as August, although Japan will probably attempt to delay negotiations further. Abe\u2019s government might also try to obtain better terms by offering to redress the trade imbalance through other means, such as additional defense procurement or investment in the United States by Japanese companies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement2. Security cooperation is generally strong \u2014 and expanding to new frontiersDespite Trump\u2019s well-known criticisms of alliances and burden-sharing, this visit was devoted to reaffirming the commitment of the United States and Japan to their long-standing security relationship. Trump visited the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka and gave a speech aboard the USS Wasp emphasizing American military might. He also visited the JS Kaga, an Izumo-class helicopter carrier that Tokyo views as a symbol of its increasing contributions to the alliance and to regional security.In addition, the two leaders announced plans for a U.S.-Japanese manned moon mission, a new area of bilateral cooperation that directly responds to recent Chinese actions. In January, China became the first country to land on the far side of the moon, and its space exploration ambitions have reinvigorated U.S. interest in returning to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Trump directly linked the joint mission to security concerns, saying, \u201cFrom a military standpoint, there is nothing more important right now than space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement3. But the allies continue to suffer from mixed signalsThe two leaders\u2019 symbolic displays of the strengths of the U.S.-Japan relationship danced around latent tensions in the security arena \u2014 as illustrated by their divergent treatments of the North Korean issue. For Japan, Trump\u2019s visit was an opportunity to coordinate policy and keep Tokyo\u2019s views in the picture \u2014 and minimize chances that Japan will be surprised by future developments in U.S. talks with North Korea.These are U.S. allies\u2019 3 big questions for the second Trump-Kim summitJapan scored at least one win. Trump met with the families of Japanese abductees on Monday, reaffirming U.S. support for securing the return of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a political boon for Abe, who has been an advocate for the abductees\u2019 return since early in his career.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHowever, the visit also exposed worrying gaps in the allies\u2019 perspectives. Trump minimized concerns about North Korea\u2019s recent short-range missile tests, claiming that he was personally not bothered by them. But the missiles that Trump dismissed as \u201csmall weapons\u201d pose a serious threat to Japan due to its proximity to the Korean Peninsula. Abe hedged. He expressed \u201cgreat regret\u201d over the tests and insisted that they violated U.N. policy, yet he also maintained that Japan and the United States are \u201cperfectly aligned\u201d with regard to sanctions.What happens now? Abe and Trump pulled off a showy demonstration of the bonds between their two countries. In addition to the personal rapport between the two leaders, the U.S. and Japan share many common interests \u2014 as well as common adversaries. However, Trump\u2019s trip also revealed persistent and troubling areas of divergence on issues such as trade and North Korea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe United States and Japan will eventually have to tackle these disagreements. But with this visit, that day of reckoning seems to have been postponed a while longer.Don\u2019t miss anything! Sign up to get TMC\u2019s smart analysis in your inbox, three days a week.Kristi Govella is an assistant professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at M\u0101noa, an adjunct fellow at the East-West Center and a National Asia Research Program fellow. The U.S. and Japan announced a joint moon mission \u2014 but seemed to postpone pressing trade and security issues. Trump\u2019s trip to Japan reveals some mixed signals",
        "author": "Kristi Govella"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Will the March for Science backfire by politicizing science? It depends on this. (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2131",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/21/the-march-for-science-could-backfire-by-politicizing-science-this-might-help/",
        "text": "On Saturday, thousands of scientists and supporters will converge in Washington\u00a0and hundreds of other locations to March for Science. Organizers hope the march will launch a broader movement to increase the public profile of science and defend it from political attack. But some scientists worry that the event will depict scientists as a liberal constituency and increase polarization on science policy questions. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWill the anti-Trump protests continue? Probably.Will science activism expand public support or create division?Science and medicine are widely respected \u2014 but opinion is sharply polarized on some issuesScientists bring credibility to the march. That\u2019s a powerful political resource, especially considering the decline in public confidence in many other sources of authority.For 40 years, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked representative samples of Americans about their confidence in various institutions. Confidence in the scientific community has remained stable, with only recent evidence of a small partisan gap. Public confidence in medicine has declined but isn\u2019t divided by party.In fact, overall, Americans report considerably higher confidence in the scientific community and medicine than in any other institution named in the survey, barring the military:At the same time, public opinion about some science-related issues has become more polarized. Climate change is the most glaring example. As Patrick Egan and I outlined in a recent review article, mass opinion about climate change \u2014 and about environmental issues more generally \u2014 was remarkably unified well into the early 1990s. Once a partisan gap in attitudes emerged, it widened quickly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOpinion on climate change and the environment is now more divided than on just about any other public issue.This is what we learned by counting the women\u2019s marchesWill other science policy issues be polarized?The answer may depend, at least in part, on scientists themselves.In recent decades, science advocacy has focused on promoting the application of science in policymaking on issues, including climate change and the environment. Scientific organizations, professional associations and universities have developed fellowship programs and communication training to help scientists package their work in ways that can inform policy decisions. In fact, this weekend\u2019s march calls for \u201cevidence-based policies\u201d as one of its core principles.Story continues below advertisementBut such an approach could backfire in a politically polarized nation. Scientific certainty does not create certainty about a policy response. Policy decisions are fundamentally about values. Decision-makers\u2019 attitudes about risk, personal liberty, justice and the future all influence how they interpret and apply any evidence, including evidence from science.AdvertisementWhile scientists may think of their evidence as nonpartisan, the public may see it differently, especially when politicians, news media and policy stakeholders portray that evidence through the lens of their own values.Scientific research is still a bipartisan causeBut a different theme has begun to emerge from science advocacy: protecting science itself. Rather than trying to expand the influence of their research, many scientists are now trying to maintain access to the data, funding and agency partners that enable them to investigate scientific questions in the first place.In Trump\u2019s America, who\u2019s protesting and why? Here\u2019s our February reportThis appeal to protect scientific research is less likely to divide Americans than messages promoting the use of science in policymaking. Mass organization for the pursuit of science funding may indeed make scientists appear to be an interest group, but that group could be one bound by shared professional and economic interest, rather than shared political ideology.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen science is framed this way, a broad cross section of Americans support it. In 2016, when the GSS asked about support for national spending on more than 20 different spending targets, opinion on most issues was polarized by party. Scientific research was among the least polarized spending areas, after crime, highways and bridges, and space exploration. In contrast, spending on the environment was one of the three most polarizing issues.Americans in both parties enthusiastically buy books\u00a0about science, according to recent research on book purchases. But left and right are interested in different kinds of science \u2014 Democrats preferring basic science, and Republicans preferring books about applied and commercial science.Science advocates might want to make sure that their movement visibly include a full range of scientists \u2014 not just basic researchers but also applied scientists and technical professionals. That would help send signals that standing up for science reaches beyond ideology.When do protests actually work?Will science advocacy backfire?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe science community\u2019s effort to more actively engage in the public sphere could backfire. If science begins to be seen as a \u201cliberal\u201d pursuit, it risks losing public favor and the ability to attract the best talent.If, however, science advocates keep the focus on supporting scientific research in all its forms, scientists may be able\u00a0to protect their work from cuts in funding and support \u2014 even if the broader goals of evidence-based policymaking must take a back seat.Megan Mullin is associate professor of environmental politics and political science at Duke University. Follow her on Twitter @mullinmeg. Science can still be a bipartisan cause. Will the March for Science backfire by politicizing science? It depends on this.",
        "author": "Megan Mullin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Will the March for Science backfire by politicizing science? It depends on this. (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2132",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/04/21/the-march-for-science-could-backfire-by-politicizing-science-this-might-help/",
        "text": "On Saturday, thousands of scientists and supporters will converge in Washington\u00a0and hundreds of other locations to March for Science. Organizers hope the march will launch a broader movement to increase the public profile of science and defend it from political attack. But some scientists worry that the event will depict scientists as a liberal constituency and increase polarization on science policy questions. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWill the anti-Trump protests continue? Probably.Will science activism expand public support or create division?Science and medicine are widely respected \u2014 but opinion is sharply polarized on some issuesScientists bring credibility to the march. That\u2019s a powerful political resource, especially considering the decline in public confidence in many other sources of authority.For 40 years, the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked representative samples of Americans about their confidence in various institutions. Confidence in the scientific community has remained stable, with only recent evidence of a small partisan gap. Public confidence in medicine has declined but isn\u2019t divided by party.In fact, overall, Americans report considerably higher confidence in the scientific community and medicine than in any other institution named in the survey, barring the military:At the same time, public opinion about some science-related issues has become more polarized. Climate change is the most glaring example. As Patrick Egan and I outlined in a recent review article, mass opinion about climate change \u2014 and about environmental issues more generally \u2014 was remarkably unified well into the early 1990s. Once a partisan gap in attitudes emerged, it widened quickly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOpinion on climate change and the environment is now more divided than on just about any other public issue.This is what we learned by counting the women\u2019s marchesWill other science policy issues be polarized?The answer may depend, at least in part, on scientists themselves.In recent decades, science advocacy has focused on promoting the application of science in policymaking on issues, including climate change and the environment. Scientific organizations, professional associations and universities have developed fellowship programs and communication training to help scientists package their work in ways that can inform policy decisions. In fact, this weekend\u2019s march calls for \u201cevidence-based policies\u201d as one of its core principles.Story continues below advertisementBut such an approach could backfire in a politically polarized nation. Scientific certainty does not create certainty about a policy response. Policy decisions are fundamentally about values. Decision-makers\u2019 attitudes about risk, personal liberty, justice and the future all influence how they interpret and apply any evidence, including evidence from science.AdvertisementWhile scientists may think of their evidence as nonpartisan, the public may see it differently, especially when politicians, news media and policy stakeholders portray that evidence through the lens of their own values.Scientific research is still a bipartisan causeBut a different theme has begun to emerge from science advocacy: protecting science itself. Rather than trying to expand the influence of their research, many scientists are now trying to maintain access to the data, funding and agency partners that enable them to investigate scientific questions in the first place.In Trump\u2019s America, who\u2019s protesting and why? Here\u2019s our February reportThis appeal to protect scientific research is less likely to divide Americans than messages promoting the use of science in policymaking. Mass organization for the pursuit of science funding may indeed make scientists appear to be an interest group, but that group could be one bound by shared professional and economic interest, rather than shared political ideology.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen science is framed this way, a broad cross section of Americans support it. In 2016, when the GSS asked about support for national spending on more than 20 different spending targets, opinion on most issues was polarized by party. Scientific research was among the least polarized spending areas, after crime, highways and bridges, and space exploration. In contrast, spending on the environment was one of the three most polarizing issues.Americans in both parties enthusiastically buy books\u00a0about science, according to recent research on book purchases. But left and right are interested in different kinds of science \u2014 Democrats preferring basic science, and Republicans preferring books about applied and commercial science.Science advocates might want to make sure that their movement visibly include a full range of scientists \u2014 not just basic researchers but also applied scientists and technical professionals. That would help send signals that standing up for science reaches beyond ideology.When do protests actually work?Will science advocacy backfire?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe science community\u2019s effort to more actively engage in the public sphere could backfire. If science begins to be seen as a \u201cliberal\u201d pursuit, it risks losing public favor and the ability to attract the best talent.If, however, science advocates keep the focus on supporting scientific research in all its forms, scientists may be able\u00a0to protect their work from cuts in funding and support \u2014 even if the broader goals of evidence-based policymaking must take a back seat.Megan Mullin is associate professor of environmental politics and political science at Duke University. Follow her on Twitter @mullinmeg. Science can still be a bipartisan cause. Will the March for Science backfire by politicizing science? It depends on this.",
        "author": "Megan Mullin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Jeff Bezos\u2019s new plans for space have stirred up old fights in science fiction (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2133",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/10/jeff-bezoss-new-plans-space-have-stirred-up-old-fights-science-fiction/",
        "text": "Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos on Thursday debuted a new lunar landing module, to be constructed by his space exploration company, Blue Origin.As he has in previous speeches, Bezos \u2014 who also owns The Washington Post \u2014 made it clear that the moon is only the beginning. He wants to help kick-start a new multigenerational era of space exploration that would culminate in millions of humans living in space colonies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis vision is spurred by the ideas of the physicist Gerard K. O\u2019Neill, who proposed such colonies a generation ago, but it is firmly embedded in debates within science fiction. O\u2019Neill was engaged in fights that spanned science fiction and space exploration. New fights have emerged over the intervening decades. These fights help to explain the politics around Bezos\u2019s proposal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementO\u2019Neill was arguing against \u2018planetary chauvinism\u2019O\u2019Neill was opposed to traditional proposals for space colonization, which were aimed at colonizing planets. In his presentation, Bezos played excerpts from a famous televised argument between O\u2019Neill and the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov over the genre\u2019s lack of imagination. Asimov used the term \u201cplanetary chauvinism\u201d to refer to the systematic bias of science fiction toward planetary exploration. O\u2019Neill proposed an alternative vision in which human beings would not seek to colonize planets, but instead build their own enclosed cylindrical space habitats.Some people \u2014 including Bezos\u2019s chief rival in privatized space entrepreneurship, Elon Musk \u2014 have taken up the traditional idea of colonizing other planets. Musk wants to get people to Mars. Bezos attended O\u2019Neill\u2019s lectures and was clearly convinced by many of his arguments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementColonizing planets has many attractions. However, it also has a variety of associated problems. First, colonizing planets in the solar system would require people to live in enclosed spaces within extraordinarily hostile environments. Mars would be a very unpleasant place to live. So why not just live in an enclosed space? Second, planets are at the bottom of gravity wells, which make them poorly suited to serving as bases for further exploration (without as yet undeveloped technologies such as space elevators). Finally, from an engineering perspective, planets are inefficient habitats: Living creatures inhabit the planet\u2019s surface (or are relatively close to it, with the possible exception of some extremophile microorganisms), making little use of the rest of the planet. It is easy to envisage alternative structures that would have a more efficient ratio of surface to mass, including O\u2019Neill cylinders and (depending on exotic physics) more speculative megastructures.Science-fiction writers have proposed rings surrounding stars, spheres of matter that enclose them, and swarms of structures that do much the same thing. Bezos is a fan of the late Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, who described \u201cOrbitals,\u201d built out of vast flat plates orbiting a sun. Several novels by British writer Alastair Reynolds are set in a \u201cGlitter Band\u201d of O\u2019Neill cylinders, orbiting close to a quasi-inhabitable planet, while Linda Nagata\u2019s new novel \u201cEdges\u201d explores a future in which human-built Dyson swarms appear to have collapsed.Other arguments have sprung up in its wakeAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese are disagreements about how humans should colonize space. The more fundamental debate is over whether human beings should colonize space at all. Charles Stross, for example, has written a classic rejoinder to both O\u2019Neill\u2019s arguments about the \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d of space and proposals for planetary colonization. Space is really big and really hostile to DNA-based life. More recently, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of a classic series of books about \u201cterraforming\u201d Mars to make it more friendly to human life, has written a novel about interstellar exploration, Aurora, that is clearly intended to push back against the fascination with space exploration as an alternative to fixing our problems on Earth.One side of this fight is driven by concerns over inequality and global warming. Writers like Robinson worry that we have only one world \u2014 and we are screwing it up. They suggest that dreams of solar and extrasolar colonization are ways of ducking the real fight over figuring out how to prevent the one environment that we know human beings can inhabit \u2014 the planet Earth \u2014 from being irrevocably degraded.The other side is driven by the belief that there are effectively infinite resources available \u2014 once human beings figure out how to sustain a version of their civilization in space. Bezos argues that human beings either face a future of rationed resources or a future of infinitely expanding possibilities. He wants human beings to make the leap to space \u2014 and is prepared to put billions of dollars behind this ambition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnsurprisingly, this disagreement sometimes spills over into politics. The prominent science fiction writer Neal Stephenson\u2019s recent novel \u201cSeveneves\u201d depicts humans having to flee the Earth at short notice when it becomes uninhabitable. One of the major characters is a thinly disguised and unsympathetic portrait of Hillary Clinton. Poul Anderson\u2019s 1989 novel, \u201cThe Boat of a Million Years,\u201d presents an equally unflattering caricature of a politician based on the late senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), impeding the space program in favor of social spending. Other novels by writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi depict humans trapped in a world that has been ruined by global warming, while the triple-Hugo-winning \u201cBroken Earth\u201d trilogy by N.K. Jemisin shows humans being overwhelmed by vast geological forces.To say that these fights are science fictional is not to dismiss them. As writers like the late Thomas Disch have emphasized, science fiction has had an extraordinarily influential role in setting the scale of our social ambitions (Disch lamented that the literary science fiction writers whom he favored, like Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe and Paul Park, had less influence than those who were more interested in the engineering). Science fiction (and closely associated forms of nonfiction) provide the basic intellectual vocabulary that we use to think about big issues that connect technology, society and the environments we live in. As these issues become existential, science fiction is becoming increasingly important. Is planet Earth all that we have, or do we need to go to the stars? Jeff Bezos\u2019s new plans for space have stirred up old fights in science fiction",
        "author": "Henry Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Jeff Bezos\u2019s new plans for space have stirred up old fights in science fiction (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2134",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/10/jeff-bezoss-new-plans-space-have-stirred-up-old-fights-science-fiction/",
        "text": "Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos on Thursday debuted a new lunar landing module, to be constructed by his space exploration company, Blue Origin.As he has in previous speeches, Bezos \u2014 who also owns The Washington Post \u2014 made it clear that the moon is only the beginning. He wants to help kick-start a new multigenerational era of space exploration that would culminate in millions of humans living in space colonies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis vision is spurred by the ideas of the physicist Gerard K. O\u2019Neill, who proposed such colonies a generation ago, but it is firmly embedded in debates within science fiction. O\u2019Neill was engaged in fights that spanned science fiction and space exploration. New fights have emerged over the intervening decades. These fights help to explain the politics around Bezos\u2019s proposal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementO\u2019Neill was arguing against \u2018planetary chauvinism\u2019O\u2019Neill was opposed to traditional proposals for space colonization, which were aimed at colonizing planets. In his presentation, Bezos played excerpts from a famous televised argument between O\u2019Neill and the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov over the genre\u2019s lack of imagination. Asimov used the term \u201cplanetary chauvinism\u201d to refer to the systematic bias of science fiction toward planetary exploration. O\u2019Neill proposed an alternative vision in which human beings would not seek to colonize planets, but instead build their own enclosed cylindrical space habitats.Some people \u2014 including Bezos\u2019s chief rival in privatized space entrepreneurship, Elon Musk \u2014 have taken up the traditional idea of colonizing other planets. Musk wants to get people to Mars. Bezos attended O\u2019Neill\u2019s lectures and was clearly convinced by many of his arguments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementColonizing planets has many attractions. However, it also has a variety of associated problems. First, colonizing planets in the solar system would require people to live in enclosed spaces within extraordinarily hostile environments. Mars would be a very unpleasant place to live. So why not just live in an enclosed space? Second, planets are at the bottom of gravity wells, which make them poorly suited to serving as bases for further exploration (without as yet undeveloped technologies such as space elevators). Finally, from an engineering perspective, planets are inefficient habitats: Living creatures inhabit the planet\u2019s surface (or are relatively close to it, with the possible exception of some extremophile microorganisms), making little use of the rest of the planet. It is easy to envisage alternative structures that would have a more efficient ratio of surface to mass, including O\u2019Neill cylinders and (depending on exotic physics) more speculative megastructures.Science-fiction writers have proposed rings surrounding stars, spheres of matter that enclose them, and swarms of structures that do much the same thing. Bezos is a fan of the late Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, who described \u201cOrbitals,\u201d built out of vast flat plates orbiting a sun. Several novels by British writer Alastair Reynolds are set in a \u201cGlitter Band\u201d of O\u2019Neill cylinders, orbiting close to a quasi-inhabitable planet, while Linda Nagata\u2019s new novel \u201cEdges\u201d explores a future in which human-built Dyson swarms appear to have collapsed.Other arguments have sprung up in its wakeAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese are disagreements about how humans should colonize space. The more fundamental debate is over whether human beings should colonize space at all. Charles Stross, for example, has written a classic rejoinder to both O\u2019Neill\u2019s arguments about the \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d of space and proposals for planetary colonization. Space is really big and really hostile to DNA-based life. More recently, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of a classic series of books about \u201cterraforming\u201d Mars to make it more friendly to human life, has written a novel about interstellar exploration, Aurora, that is clearly intended to push back against the fascination with space exploration as an alternative to fixing our problems on Earth.One side of this fight is driven by concerns over inequality and global warming. Writers like Robinson worry that we have only one world \u2014 and we are screwing it up. They suggest that dreams of solar and extrasolar colonization are ways of ducking the real fight over figuring out how to prevent the one environment that we know human beings can inhabit \u2014 the planet Earth \u2014 from being irrevocably degraded.The other side is driven by the belief that there are effectively infinite resources available \u2014 once human beings figure out how to sustain a version of their civilization in space. Bezos argues that human beings either face a future of rationed resources or a future of infinitely expanding possibilities. He wants human beings to make the leap to space \u2014 and is prepared to put billions of dollars behind this ambition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnsurprisingly, this disagreement sometimes spills over into politics. The prominent science fiction writer Neal Stephenson\u2019s recent novel \u201cSeveneves\u201d depicts humans having to flee the Earth at short notice when it becomes uninhabitable. One of the major characters is a thinly disguised and unsympathetic portrait of Hillary Clinton. Poul Anderson\u2019s 1989 novel, \u201cThe Boat of a Million Years,\u201d presents an equally unflattering caricature of a politician based on the late senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), impeding the space program in favor of social spending. Other novels by writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi depict humans trapped in a world that has been ruined by global warming, while the triple-Hugo-winning \u201cBroken Earth\u201d trilogy by N.K. Jemisin shows humans being overwhelmed by vast geological forces.To say that these fights are science fictional is not to dismiss them. As writers like the late Thomas Disch have emphasized, science fiction has had an extraordinarily influential role in setting the scale of our social ambitions (Disch lamented that the literary science fiction writers whom he favored, like Ursula Le Guin, Gene Wolfe and Paul Park, had less influence than those who were more interested in the engineering). Science fiction (and closely associated forms of nonfiction) provide the basic intellectual vocabulary that we use to think about big issues that connect technology, society and the environments we live in. As these issues become existential, science fiction is becoming increasingly important. Is planet Earth all that we have, or do we need to go to the stars? Jeff Bezos\u2019s new plans for space have stirred up old fights in science fiction",
        "author": "Henry Farrell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Russia proved it can shoot down a satellite. Does this make space less secure?  (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2135",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/23/russia-proved-it-can-shoot-down-satellite-does-this-make-space-less-secure/",
        "text": "Russia tested a ground-based missile last week, destroying a defunct but still-orbiting Soviet satellite, Kosmos-1408. China, the United States and India have conducted similar operations in the past, but this was the first time that Russia undertook a live intercept of this kind.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Nov. 15 test took the world by surprise. What do we know about it \u2014 and what does it mean? What, exactly, did Russia test?The Russian military used an existing system, the PL-19 Nudol, to destroy the satellite. While information is sparse and contradictory, experts say Nudol has two alleged roles: as an antisatellite weapon and, more speculatively, as part of a new generation of the established antimissile system defending Moscow.Story continues below advertisementNudol\u2019s interceptor \u2014 the missile itself \u2014 is fired from a mobile launcher. Older generations of Russian and Soviet strategic antimissile systems were armed with nuclear weapons, but Nudol\u2019s interceptor carries a conventional warhead. Russia has tested the system many times before, but without performing an interception of a real satellite.AdvertisementWas the test dangerous?The Russian Ministry of Defense said the test \u201cdid not and will not pose a threat\u201d to other space users. The United States and its allies strongly disagree.A U.S. Department of State press statement reported that the test created a cloud of more than 1,500 pieces of space debris. The debris will now orbit the earth at the same altitude as the International Space Station, China\u2019s Tiangong space station, and satellites from several countries. Debris at this altitude travel at extremely high velocities \u2014 approximately 17,500 miles per hour \u2014 so even small pieces can inflict significant damage to other orbiting craft.Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he was \u201coutraged\u201d by the Russian test and reported that ISS crew, including Russian cosmonauts who are part of the international team, took emergency measures to protect themselves. The presence of the two Russians on the International Space Station, and their potential exposure to harm, makes Moscow\u2019s test even more puzzling.AdvertisementThe debris that such tests create can pose a long-term threat to other space users, depending on the circumstances. A 2008 U.S. antisatellite test didn\u2019t produce significant long-term space debris because it intercepted a satellite that was in the process of reentering the earth\u2019s atmosphere. But space detritus from China\u2019s 2007 test at a greater altitude remains a risk today. And the Russian test took place even higher above the earth\u2019s surface, thereby increasing the potential for greater and longer-term risk.What did China test in space, and why?Why would Russia test such a system?Story continues below advertisementThe most straightforward explanation is that Russia wanted to prove Nudol\u2019s capabilities as an antisatellite weapon. Moscow has a long history of developing \u201cco-orbital\u201d antisatellite systems \u2014 effectively satellites that would attack other satellites. Russia also has the capability to jam other countries\u2019 satellites without attacking them physically. With a successful interception, Russia has now confirmed its capability to launch missile attacks on satellites from the earth as well, in line with U.S., Indian and Chinese antisatellite capabilities.AdvertisementRussian antisatellite weapons pose a threat to the extensive U.S. military satellite network \u2014 which carries out a wide variety of essential intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, navigation and communications tasks. Russia probably wants the ability to impair U.S. and allied military operations during a war by attacking or disrupting these satellites.Don't miss any of TMC's smart analysis! Sign up for our newsletter.Experts also speculate that potential U.S. development of space-based systems capable of attacking targets on earth may be driving Russian development of this range of antisatellite weapons. This concern may seem far-fetched \u2014 the United States hasn\u2019t tested any such system \u2014 but Moscow has held such concerns since at least the 1980s.Story continues below advertisementAnd what does this mean for space security?Russia\u2019s test underlines the risks that antisatellite weapons pose to space security. An armaments race in space could lead to further deterioration of relations between major space powers such as the United States, Russia, India and China. During a crisis or conflict, attacks on adversary satellites that provide warning of a missile attack could be highly escalatory, potentially provoking fears of a surprise nuclear strike.AdvertisementHowever, the angry exchanges that this test has provoked suggest that the major space powers may not be prepared to tackle the long-standing obstacles in regulating the arms competition in this domain.The U.S. and Russia kept a bilateral nuclear weapons deal alive. The harder part comes next.Existing arms control agreements like the 1967 Outer Space Treaty do not cover antisatellite weapons. Washington, Moscow and others have been exploring the possibility of controlling this type of weapon for over 40 years, so far without significant progress.Story continues below advertisementThe United States dismissed previous proposals, while Russia recently objected to the United Kingdom\u2019s attempts to begin a U.N.-based process to regulate what countries can do in space. Differences over what to limit \u2014 and how \u2014 are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.For now, it appears that space will remain an important domain for the burgeoning arms competition between the major powers.Professors: Check out TMC\u2019s ever-expanding list of classroom topic guides.James J. Cameron is a postdoctoral fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project in the University of U.K. political science department. He is the author of \u201cThe Double Game: The Demise of America\u2019s First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation.\u201d The U.S., China and India have also tested anti-satellite weapons. Russia proved it can shoot down a satellite. Does this make space less secure? ",
        "author": "James J. Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Russia proved it can shoot down a satellite. Does this make space less secure?  (WP: Monkey Cage) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2136",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/23/russia-proved-it-can-shoot-down-satellite-does-this-make-space-less-secure/",
        "text": "Russia tested a ground-based missile last week, destroying a defunct but still-orbiting Soviet satellite, Kosmos-1408. China, the United States and India have conducted similar operations in the past, but this was the first time that Russia undertook a live intercept of this kind.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Nov. 15 test took the world by surprise. What do we know about it \u2014 and what does it mean? What, exactly, did Russia test?The Russian military used an existing system, the PL-19 Nudol, to destroy the satellite. While information is sparse and contradictory, experts say Nudol has two alleged roles: as an antisatellite weapon and, more speculatively, as part of a new generation of the established antimissile system defending Moscow.Story continues below advertisementNudol\u2019s interceptor \u2014 the missile itself \u2014 is fired from a mobile launcher. Older generations of Russian and Soviet strategic antimissile systems were armed with nuclear weapons, but Nudol\u2019s interceptor carries a conventional warhead. Russia has tested the system many times before, but without performing an interception of a real satellite.AdvertisementWas the test dangerous?The Russian Ministry of Defense said the test \u201cdid not and will not pose a threat\u201d to other space users. The United States and its allies strongly disagree.A U.S. Department of State press statement reported that the test created a cloud of more than 1,500 pieces of space debris. The debris will now orbit the earth at the same altitude as the International Space Station, China\u2019s Tiangong space station, and satellites from several countries. Debris at this altitude travel at extremely high velocities \u2014 approximately 17,500 miles per hour \u2014 so even small pieces can inflict significant damage to other orbiting craft.Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he was \u201coutraged\u201d by the Russian test and reported that ISS crew, including Russian cosmonauts who are part of the international team, took emergency measures to protect themselves. The presence of the two Russians on the International Space Station, and their potential exposure to harm, makes Moscow\u2019s test even more puzzling.AdvertisementThe debris that such tests create can pose a long-term threat to other space users, depending on the circumstances. A 2008 U.S. antisatellite test didn\u2019t produce significant long-term space debris because it intercepted a satellite that was in the process of reentering the earth\u2019s atmosphere. But space detritus from China\u2019s 2007 test at a greater altitude remains a risk today. And the Russian test took place even higher above the earth\u2019s surface, thereby increasing the potential for greater and longer-term risk.What did China test in space, and why?Why would Russia test such a system?Story continues below advertisementThe most straightforward explanation is that Russia wanted to prove Nudol\u2019s capabilities as an antisatellite weapon. Moscow has a long history of developing \u201cco-orbital\u201d antisatellite systems \u2014 effectively satellites that would attack other satellites. Russia also has the capability to jam other countries\u2019 satellites without attacking them physically. With a successful interception, Russia has now confirmed its capability to launch missile attacks on satellites from the earth as well, in line with U.S., Indian and Chinese antisatellite capabilities.AdvertisementRussian antisatellite weapons pose a threat to the extensive U.S. military satellite network \u2014 which carries out a wide variety of essential intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, navigation and communications tasks. Russia probably wants the ability to impair U.S. and allied military operations during a war by attacking or disrupting these satellites.Don't miss any of TMC's smart analysis! Sign up for our newsletter.Experts also speculate that potential U.S. development of space-based systems capable of attacking targets on earth may be driving Russian development of this range of antisatellite weapons. This concern may seem far-fetched \u2014 the United States hasn\u2019t tested any such system \u2014 but Moscow has held such concerns since at least the 1980s.Story continues below advertisementAnd what does this mean for space security?Russia\u2019s test underlines the risks that antisatellite weapons pose to space security. An armaments race in space could lead to further deterioration of relations between major space powers such as the United States, Russia, India and China. During a crisis or conflict, attacks on adversary satellites that provide warning of a missile attack could be highly escalatory, potentially provoking fears of a surprise nuclear strike.AdvertisementHowever, the angry exchanges that this test has provoked suggest that the major space powers may not be prepared to tackle the long-standing obstacles in regulating the arms competition in this domain.The U.S. and Russia kept a bilateral nuclear weapons deal alive. The harder part comes next.Existing arms control agreements like the 1967 Outer Space Treaty do not cover antisatellite weapons. Washington, Moscow and others have been exploring the possibility of controlling this type of weapon for over 40 years, so far without significant progress.Story continues below advertisementThe United States dismissed previous proposals, while Russia recently objected to the United Kingdom\u2019s attempts to begin a U.N.-based process to regulate what countries can do in space. Differences over what to limit \u2014 and how \u2014 are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.For now, it appears that space will remain an important domain for the burgeoning arms competition between the major powers.Professors: Check out TMC\u2019s ever-expanding list of classroom topic guides.James J. Cameron is a postdoctoral fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project in the University of U.K. political science department. He is the author of \u201cThe Double Game: The Demise of America\u2019s First Missile Defense System and the Rise of Strategic Arms Limitation.\u201d The U.S., China and India have also tested anti-satellite weapons. Russia proved it can shoot down a satellite. Does this make space less secure? ",
        "author": "James J. Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Landing Was a \u2018Moment of Hope and Achievement\u2019 (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2137",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moon-landing-was-a-moment-of-hope-and-achievement-11563153322?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=58",
        "text": "Where They Were I grew up in the \u201950s reading science fiction. I wanted to be an astronaut but it was a kid\u2019s dream. I followed the space program with meticulous care. When the moon landing happened, I was 23 and on board a nuclear sub peeking in and out of the Arctic ice cap in the North Sea. We knew about it, but very few details. It wasn\u2019t until I got home a month later that my mom, because she was a mom, saved newspapers and magazines from the event for me. I actually didn\u2019t see a video of it until many years later when a program on space aired on TV. When the lunar module landed I welled up with tears, not realizing how much it meant to me, even years later. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Crosby,\n\n\n\n 73, Portland, Maine\n\n\n\n\nWe were at the Electric Circus on St. Marks Place in New York\u2019s East Village, with scores of hippies primed for the event of a lifetime. The lights were dimmed down to replicate outer space and TV monitors (no jumbo screens yet) were placed in every corner while every song ever written with the word \u201cmoon\u201d in it boomed from the speakers.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsThis article was inspired by Wall Street Journal readers. Continue the discussion below.\n\n\nWe were primed and ready to be thrilled. When the lunar landing capsule touched down, the music stopped and everyone gathered around the monitors to watch. Thrilling, yes. Unforgettable, oh yes. Great memory of mankind stretching far beyond what we imagined was our reach. A moment of hope and achievement. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Loretta Miller,\n\n\n\n 74, Naples, Fla.\n\n\n\n\nI was 24 years old and a journalist on my first major magazine assignment to Europe. I was staying at the Atlantic Hotel in London, where the only television set was in the lobby. A large number of us, with pillows and blankets, camped out there overnight watching the moon landing. It was an event that united all of us, whatever our nationality, with collective wonder and delight. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy McCoy,\n\n\n\n 74, Florence, Az.\n\n\n\n\nI watched the moon landing in my orderly room upon returning from leave at Fort Bragg, N.C., on a portable and very grainy black-and-white television. I stood in awe as I watched \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n walk on the moon and I will never forget it. The moon landing offered a ray of hope that there were a few things right in the world. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Shulman,\n\n\n\n 76, Santa Fe, N.M.\n\n\n\n\nIn May of 1969, my husband and I were thrilled to welcome our second child, a daughter. She was born in Jacksonville, Fla., a city we had moved to the year before. Our son, Thomas, was two years old in 1969.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe liftoff for the moon shot was 150 miles south of Jacksonville. I couldn\u2019t miss it. In the early morning of July 16, I put baby Dineen in a bassinet in the back seat of our Volkswagen Beetle. Thomas was in the front seat in a child seat. The three of us took off for Cape Kennedy [the official name of Cape Canaveral until 1973], driving south on Interstate 95. As I remember, the drive was uneventful. Somewhere between Daytona Beach and Titusville, I found a parking place on the beach, along with what seemed like the rest of America. Everyone had a transistor radio to listen to the rocket countdown. As the countdown got near to the 60-second mark, I placed my son on the roof of the car and took the baby out of the car. The crowd cheered as the rocket lifted off at 9:32 a.m. The rocket was small and far away but still in our view. Everyone was happy and many were praying for the safety of the astronauts. On my return trip to Jacksonville, I planned to stop and visit a friend in Daytona. That did not happen after I heard a radio report that a million people were on the roads in Florida. Our little Beetle crept home to Jacksonville, to await four days hence, the day and hour that Neil Armstrong would make that first step on the moon, July 20, 1969. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anne Baker,\n\n\n\n Basalt, Colo.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMany who witnessed the moon landing as young people said it inspired them to pursue careers in science and technology.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Illustration: Tammy Lian/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nI was a 20-year-old seaman apprentice in the Navy, stationed at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., studying Russian. On the day of the moon landing, myself and other sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines excitedly awaited the first manned landing on the moon, as we watched the lone television in the day room of our barracks. Then we heard the words, \u201cHouston, the Eagle has landed!\u201d and we exploded into cheers and a spontaneous standing ovation. To employ an overused yet appropriate word: awesome! \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Douglass Davis,\n\n\n\n 70, Woodlands, Texas\n\n\n\n\nScattered around the \u201cmission control\u201d room were mission support rooms each staffed by specialists from the companies that designed and built pieces of the Apollo program.\n\n\nApollo 11, 50 Years Later The journey\u2019s impact, and the new race to the moon: Complete coverage at wsj.com/moonlanding A Hidden Hero of Apollo 11: Software An Apollo Guidance Computer\u2019s New Life How the Moon Landing Shaped Four Americans\u2019 Lives \n\n\nI was 33 at the time and had been working at Grumman on the thermal design of the lunar module for about six years. Our crew of six staffed that little room round the clock, some sleeping on the tables rather than returning to their motel rooms. We were stoked beyond belief. We had been through ground tests and previous missions that proved our design worked, maintaining the crew, propellants and electronics at livable temperatures through all the extreme conditions of the flight. But this was the final test with no do-overs! There was a television screen in the room that showed us what the world was seeing. Seeing that first step on the screen was the highlight of my professional life. Now, at the age of 83, I still cherish a picture I took of that television feed the moment of Armstrong stepped on the surface. We did good! \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Moe Tawil,\n\n\n\n 83, Manhattan Beach, Calif.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne WSJ member recalled a moon-landing viewing party at a Manhattan nightclub. Another said his father took test photos of the family TV set weeks earlier to prepare for the broadcast.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Illustration: Tammy Lian/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nWho They Were With My mother, father, younger sister and myself held hands and watched on our only television as the Eagle landed in 1969. My daddy had been born in Ohio in 1897, long before the Wright Brothers flew. He said that day: \u201cNow I have seen it all.\u201d It was magical and I\u2019ll never forget. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jo Anne Freeman,\n\n\n\n 75, Hudson, Fla.\n\n\n\n\nMy family and I were (and are) huge space-program fans. We were living in Ocala, Fla., from 1968 through 1973, and made many trips to Cape Kennedy for tours and to witness launches in person. On July 16, 1969, we were across the water from Launch Complex 39A for the launch of Apollo 11. We drove to the Cape in the middle of the night and Apollo 11 was lit up in spotlights, like a huge white needle pointing to the heavens. We all remember seeing the flash and smoke soon followed by the tremendous thundering roar that shook our bodies.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA photograph taken by the Rhodes family shows a crowed that gathered across from Cape Kennedy\u2019s Launch Complex 39A to witness the Apollo 11 launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Wanda Rhodes\n \n\n\n\nThe photos of the moon landing we still have were taken by my father, sitting on a piano bench in front of the TV with a camera to catch live man\u2019s first steps on the moon. He actually practiced taking pictures of the television screen weeks before. Looking at these photos is a very clear reminder of how excited we were. Of all our family memories, being together for the launch and landing is one of our most cherished. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Caxton Rhodes III,\n\n\n\n 60, San Francisco\n\n\n\n\n1969. I was a senior in high school. My father got me out of bed and we watched together. The space race inspired me to become the family\u2019s first college graduate. I graduated as a scientist, which I practiced for 40 working years\u2014the last 15 as a rocket scientist. I thank NASA and the U.S. space effort for a very rewarding and interesting career I might have otherwise not pursued. Government financial incentives for technical degrees made it possible for me, as our family would be classified today as the working poor. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Peterson,\n\n\n\n 68, Winona, Minn.\n\n\n\n\nI remember that evening very well. My family sat in the darkened living room staring at the blurry pictures on my parents\u2019 recently purchased Magnavox home entertainment center. That event brought the entire world together for a moment in history. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Scott,\n\n\n\n 69, southeast Wisconsin\n\n\n\n\nMy father, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sol Richer,\n\n\n\n always liked to go to Miami Beach, Fla., in July. I remember we stayed at the Marco Polo Hotel on the beach in 1969. There was a nightclub with famous acts like \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kenny Rogers\n\n\n\n and the First Edition, Sha Na Na and Vanity Fair, which thrilled me because I was a teenage musician. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Richer with her parents, Lillian and Sol Richer, in Miami Beach, Fla., where they watched the moon landing in their hotel room.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Nancy Richer\n \n\n\n\nMy father loved to talk and met a man who had come from Libya to get an international driver\u2019s license for his wife. On July 20,1969, [representatives of the] Department of Motor Vehicles came to the hotel from Tallahassee to take the man out to get his wife\u2019s driver\u2019s license. To celebrate, my parents and I, along with the Lybian family, went to the nightclub at the Marco Polo to hear Sha Na Na. After that, we went upstairs to our room staying up very late to see the moon landing. I\u2019ll never forget seeing those first steps by Neil Armstrong and hearing, \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d It was the best time of my life. I was so taken by the sight and sound of such greatness in communicating this history to the masses that I was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville\u2014to then become a broadcast engineer in 1975. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nancy Richer,\n\n\n\n 65, Knoxville, Tenn.\n\n\n\n\nI was 11 years old and living on Long Island when the moon landing occurred, and I still remember it vividly. As my family, along with friends from our suburban neighborhood, gathered around our only television to watch the landing, there was an excited and nervous energy in the room. Many of our neighbors worked for Grumman, which was responsible for building the LEM [Lunar Excursion Module] spacecraft that landed on the moon, and for them this had been the culmination of years of hard work and planning. Even as a young child, I could tell that the adults in the room were both excited to see a man actually set foot on the moon but also proud that they had been part of something that had seemed so ambitious when it was first proposed by President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy.\n\n\n\n For many of them, it was a moment where they felt both pride in their work and their country, and in being part of a team that helped fulfill the dreams of the late president. What still remains etched in my mind was, after astronaut Armstrong uttered his famous \u201cone small step for man\u201d declaration, the number of adults who said, \u201cWe did it.\u201d For them and for me, a young boy who then dreamed of becoming an astronaut, it was an affirmation that any challenge can be overcome and the only limits we face are those that we place on ourselves. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Taylor,\n\n\n\n 61, Clinton, N.J. Wall Street Journal members wrote in to share their memories of the historic Apollo 11 mission that brought astronauts to touch down on the surface of the moon for the first time, with the whole world watching. ",
        "author": "Amber Burton and Xavier Cousens"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, an Early Space Pioneer, Never Regained Its Lead (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2138",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-an-early-space-pioneer-never-regained-its-lead-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=15",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nIn recent years, launch malfunctions, construction accidents, corruption scandals and a dearth of expertise have compounded what observers say is a deepening crisis in Russia\u2019s space industry. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine that Russia will become a leader in space exploration again,\u201d said Pavel Luzin, a Moscow-based independent space policy and defense expert. Still, space has remained one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the U.S. hasn\u2019t collapsed amid tensions over issues such as the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and allegations that Moscow hacked the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Since shutting down the space shuttle program in 2011, the U.S. has depended on renting rides on Russian Soyuz rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan to get astronauts to the international space station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis undated photo shows a Russian Vostok rocket on its launcher, the type that sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around Earth in 1961.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut NASA has been vaulting forward on other space projects. It unveiled plans to accelerate human exploration of the moon, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a U.S.-led international project aimed at creating a lunar-orbit space station. It also is working on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, a joint effort with the European Space Agency for an interplanetary spacecraft. Russia has failed to make substantial progress on cosmic projects.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsHow has the space race with Russia affected research and development in the U.S.? Join the conversation below. \n\n\nMoscow\u2019s Angara family of launch vehicles has been under development since 1995 and isn\u2019t expected to become fully operational until the beginning of the 2020s, Mr. Luzin said. Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of Federation, a new-generation, partially reusable piloted spacecraft, keeps getting pushed back. In general, these projects have faced both financial and technological troubles, experts said. In light of these setbacks, \u201ceveryone understands perfectly well that there can be no race now\u201d between the U.S. and Russia, said Pavel Shubin, a Russian space historian. And the prospect of landing a man on the moon for the first time is out of Russia\u2019s reach for now, space experts said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a spacecraft for landing, we don\u2019t have the technologies\u2026we even don\u2019t have a large vehicle for such a mission,\u201d Mr. Luzin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nVitaly Egorov, a popular Russian blogger about space research, said that while Russia\u2019s space program no longer had an overt goal to compete with NASA, Russian politicians sometimes use the fact that \u201cAmericans fly on our engines, fly on our ships\u2026as internal propaganda\u201d aimed at bolstering Russian pride.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSoviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited a Soviet spacecraft in 1965, becoming the first person to walk in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nRepresentatives from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment about their views on U.S. space exploration, the alleged rivalry between Washington and Moscow in the space arena, and Russia\u2019s goals. But overall, the rivalry \u201cis not as important as it was during the Soviet Union,\u201d Mr. Egorov said. But senior Russian officials have made clear that the former space superpower isn\u2019t ready to give up its ambitions to restore its cosmic dominance. In June, Russian Prime Minister \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Medvedev\n\n\n\n told senior government officials that, as a pioneer in space, Russia needs to restore its leadership. \u201cThis is not only a matter of prestige, but also a matter of national security,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\nMr. Medvedev criticized the space agency for using its funds inefficiently. Although the government allocated around 260 billion rubles ($4.13 billion) for space projects in 2019\u2014most of which went to Roscosmos\u2014the agency had so far used less than a quarter of the money, he said. Government contracts for manned spac Russians still brim with pride over being the first nation to send a human into space. But ever since the U.S. leapfrogged the Soviet Union by landing a man on the moon 50 years ago this month, Russia never regained its lead. ",
        "author": "Ann M. Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, an Early Space Pioneer, Never Regained Its Lead (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2139",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-an-early-space-pioneer-never-regained-its-lead-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=56",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nIn recent years, launch malfunctions, construction accidents, corruption scandals and a dearth of expertise have compounded what observers say is a deepening crisis in Russia\u2019s space industry. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine that Russia will become a leader in space exploration again,\u201d said Pavel Luzin, a Moscow-based independent space policy and defense expert. Still, space has remained one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the U.S. hasn\u2019t collapsed amid tensions over issues such as the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and allegations that Moscow hacked the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Since shutting down the space shuttle program in 2011, the U.S. has depended on renting rides on Russian Soyuz rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan to get astronauts to the international space station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis undated photo shows a Russian Vostok rocket on its launcher, the type that sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around Earth in 1961.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut NASA has been vaulting forward on other space projects. It unveiled plans to accelerate human exploration of the moon, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a U.S.-led international project aimed at creating a lunar-orbit space station. It also is working on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, a joint effort with the European Space Agency for an interplanetary spacecraft. Russia has failed to make substantial progress on cosmic projects.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsHow has the space race with Russia affected research and development in the U.S.? Join the conversation below. \n\n\nMoscow\u2019s Angara family of launch vehicles has been under development since 1995 and isn\u2019t expected to become fully operational until the beginning of the 2020s, Mr. Luzin said. Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of Federation, a new-generation, partially reusable piloted spacecraft, keeps getting pushed back. In general, these projects have faced both financial and technological troubles, experts said. In light of these setbacks, \u201ceveryone understands perfectly well that there can be no race now\u201d between the U.S. and Russia, said Pavel Shubin, a Russian space historian. And the prospect of landing a man on the moon for the first time is out of Russia\u2019s reach for now, space experts said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a spacecraft for landing, we don\u2019t have the technologies\u2026we even don\u2019t have a large vehicle for such a mission,\u201d Mr. Luzin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nVitaly Egorov, a popular Russian blogger about space research, said that while Russia\u2019s space program no longer had an overt goal to compete with NASA, Russian politicians sometimes use the fact that \u201cAmericans fly on our engines, fly on our ships\u2026as internal propaganda\u201d aimed at bolstering Russian pride.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSoviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited a Soviet spacecraft in 1965, becoming the first person to walk in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nRepresentatives from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment about their views on U.S. space exploration, the alleged rivalry between Washington and Moscow in the space arena, and Russia\u2019s goals. But overall, the rivalry \u201cis not as important as it was during the Soviet Union,\u201d Mr. Egorov said. But senior Russian officials have made clear that the former space superpower isn\u2019t ready to give up its ambitions to restore its cosmic dominance. In June, Russian Prime Minister \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Medvedev\n\n\n\n told senior government officials that, as a pioneer in space, Russia needs to restore its leadership. \u201cThis is not only a matter of prestige, but also a matter of national security,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\nMr. Medvedev criticized the space agency for using its funds inefficiently. Although the government allocated around 260 billion rubles ($4.13 billion) for space projects in 2019\u2014most of which went to Roscosmos\u2014the agency had so far used less than a quarter of the money, he said. Government contracts for manned spac Russians still brim with pride over being the first nation to send a human into space. But ever since the U.S. leapfrogged the Soviet Union by landing a man on the moon 50 years ago this month, Russia never regained its lead. ",
        "author": "Ann M. Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, an Early Space Pioneer, Never Regained Its Lead (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2140",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-an-early-space-pioneer-never-regained-its-lead-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=53",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nIn recent years, launch malfunctions, construction accidents, corruption scandals and a dearth of expertise have compounded what observers say is a deepening crisis in Russia\u2019s space industry. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine that Russia will become a leader in space exploration again,\u201d said Pavel Luzin, a Moscow-based independent space policy and defense expert. Still, space has remained one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the U.S. hasn\u2019t collapsed amid tensions over issues such as the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and allegations that Moscow hacked the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Since shutting down the space shuttle program in 2011, the U.S. has depended on renting rides on Russian Soyuz rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan to get astronauts to the international space station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis undated photo shows a Russian Vostok rocket on its launcher, the type that sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around Earth in 1961.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut NASA has been vaulting forward on other space projects. It unveiled plans to accelerate human exploration of the moon, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a U.S.-led international project aimed at creating a lunar-orbit space station. It also is working on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, a joint effort with the European Space Agency for an interplanetary spacecraft. Russia has failed to make substantial progress on cosmic projects.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsHow has the space race with Russia affected research and development in the U.S.? Join the conversation below. \n\n\nMoscow\u2019s Angara family of launch vehicles has been under development since 1995 and isn\u2019t expected to become fully operational until the beginning of the 2020s, Mr. Luzin said. Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of Federation, a new-generation, partially reusable piloted spacecraft, keeps getting pushed back. In general, these projects have faced both financial and technological troubles, experts said. In light of these setbacks, \u201ceveryone understands perfectly well that there can be no race now\u201d between the U.S. and Russia, said Pavel Shubin, a Russian space historian. And the prospect of landing a man on the moon for the first time is out of Russia\u2019s reach for now, space experts said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a spacecraft for landing, we don\u2019t have the technologies\u2026we even don\u2019t have a large vehicle for such a mission,\u201d Mr. Luzin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nVitaly Egorov, a popular Russian blogger about space research, said that while Russia\u2019s space program no longer had an overt goal to compete with NASA, Russian politicians sometimes use the fact that \u201cAmericans fly on our engines, fly on our ships\u2026as internal propaganda\u201d aimed at bolstering Russian pride.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSoviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited a Soviet spacecraft in 1965, becoming the first person to walk in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nRepresentatives from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment about their views on U.S. space exploration, the alleged rivalry between Washington and Moscow in the space arena, and Russia\u2019s goals. But overall, the rivalry \u201cis not as important as it was during the Soviet Union,\u201d Mr. Egorov said. But senior Russian officials have made clear that the former space superpower isn\u2019t ready to give up its ambitions to restore its cosmic dominance. In June, Russian Prime Minister \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Medvedev\n\n\n\n told senior government officials that, as a pioneer in space, Russia needs to restore its leadership. \u201cThis is not only a matter of prestige, but also a matter of national security,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\nMr. Medvedev criticized the space agency for using its funds inefficiently. Although the government allocated around 260 billion rubles ($4.13 billion) for space projects in 2019\u2014most of which went to Roscosmos\u2014the agency had so far used less than a quarter of the money, he said. Government contracts for manned spac Russians still brim with pride over being the first nation to send a human into space. But ever since the U.S. leapfrogged the Soviet Union by landing a man on the moon 50 years ago this month, Russia never regained its lead. ",
        "author": "Ann M. Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, an Early Space Pioneer, Never Regained Its Lead (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2141",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-an-early-space-pioneer-never-regained-its-lead-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=53",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nIn recent years, launch malfunctions, construction accidents, corruption scandals and a dearth of expertise have compounded what observers say is a deepening crisis in Russia\u2019s space industry. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine that Russia will become a leader in space exploration again,\u201d said Pavel Luzin, a Moscow-based independent space policy and defense expert. Still, space has remained one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the U.S. hasn\u2019t collapsed amid tensions over issues such as the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and allegations that Moscow hacked the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Since shutting down the space shuttle program in 2011, the U.S. has depended on renting rides on Russian Soyuz rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan to get astronauts to the international space station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis undated photo shows a Russian Vostok rocket on its launcher, the type that sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around Earth in 1961.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut NASA has been vaulting forward on other space projects. It unveiled plans to accelerate human exploration of the moon, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a U.S.-led international project aimed at creating a lunar-orbit space station. It also is working on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, a joint effort with the European Space Agency for an interplanetary spacecraft. Russia has failed to make substantial progress on cosmic projects.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsHow has the space race with Russia affected research and development in the U.S.? Join the conversation below. \n\n\nMoscow\u2019s Angara family of launch vehicles has been under development since 1995 and isn\u2019t expected to become fully operational until the beginning of the 2020s, Mr. Luzin said. Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of Federation, a new-generation, partially reusable piloted spacecraft, keeps getting pushed back. In general, these projects have faced both financial and technological troubles, experts said. In light of these setbacks, \u201ceveryone understands perfectly well that there can be no race now\u201d between the U.S. and Russia, said Pavel Shubin, a Russian space historian. And the prospect of landing a man on the moon for the first time is out of Russia\u2019s reach for now, space experts said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a spacecraft for landing, we don\u2019t have the technologies\u2026we even don\u2019t have a large vehicle for such a mission,\u201d Mr. Luzin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nVitaly Egorov, a popular Russian blogger about space research, said that while Russia\u2019s space program no longer had an overt goal to compete with NASA, Russian politicians sometimes use the fact that \u201cAmericans fly on our engines, fly on our ships\u2026as internal propaganda\u201d aimed at bolstering Russian pride.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSoviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited a Soviet spacecraft in 1965, becoming the first person to walk in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nRepresentatives from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment about their views on U.S. space exploration, the alleged rivalry between Washington and Moscow in the space arena, and Russia\u2019s goals. But overall, the rivalry \u201cis not as important as it was during the Soviet Union,\u201d Mr. Egorov said. But senior Russian officials have made clear that the former space superpower isn\u2019t ready to give up its ambitions to restore its cosmic dominance. In June, Russian Prime Minister \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Medvedev\n\n\n\n told senior government officials that, as a pioneer in space, Russia needs to restore its leadership. \u201cThis is not only a matter of prestige, but also a matter of national security,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\nMr. Medvedev criticized the space agency for using its funds inefficiently. Although the government allocated around 260 billion rubles ($4.13 billion) for space projects in 2019\u2014most of which went to Roscosmos\u2014the agency had so far used less than a quarter of the money, he said. Government contracts for manned spac Russians still brim with pride over being the first nation to send a human into space. But ever since the U.S. leapfrogged the Soviet Union by landing a man on the moon 50 years ago this month, Russia never regained its lead. ",
        "author": "Ann M. Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, an Early Space Pioneer, Never Regained Its Lead (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2142",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-an-early-space-pioneer-never-regained-its-lead-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=69",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nIn recent years, launch malfunctions, construction accidents, corruption scandals and a dearth of expertise have compounded what observers say is a deepening crisis in Russia\u2019s space industry. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine that Russia will become a leader in space exploration again,\u201d said Pavel Luzin, a Moscow-based independent space policy and defense expert. Still, space has remained one of the few areas where cooperation between Russia and the U.S. hasn\u2019t collapsed amid tensions over issues such as the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria and allegations that Moscow hacked the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Since shutting down the space shuttle program in 2011, the U.S. has depended on renting rides on Russian Soyuz rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan to get astronauts to the international space station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis undated photo shows a Russian Vostok rocket on its launcher, the type that sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around Earth in 1961.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBut NASA has been vaulting forward on other space projects. It unveiled plans to accelerate human exploration of the moon, such as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a U.S.-led international project aimed at creating a lunar-orbit space station. It also is working on the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, a joint effort with the European Space Agency for an interplanetary spacecraft. Russia has failed to make substantial progress on cosmic projects.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsHow has the space race with Russia affected research and development in the U.S.? Join the conversation below. \n\n\nMoscow\u2019s Angara family of launch vehicles has been under development since 1995 and isn\u2019t expected to become fully operational until the beginning of the 2020s, Mr. Luzin said. Meanwhile, the maiden voyage of Federation, a new-generation, partially reusable piloted spacecraft, keeps getting pushed back. In general, these projects have faced both financial and technological troubles, experts said. In light of these setbacks, \u201ceveryone understands perfectly well that there can be no race now\u201d between the U.S. and Russia, said Pavel Shubin, a Russian space historian. And the prospect of landing a man on the moon for the first time is out of Russia\u2019s reach for now, space experts said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a spacecraft for landing, we don\u2019t have the technologies\u2026we even don\u2019t have a large vehicle for such a mission,\u201d Mr. Luzin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nVitaly Egorov, a popular Russian blogger about space research, said that while Russia\u2019s space program no longer had an overt goal to compete with NASA, Russian politicians sometimes use the fact that \u201cAmericans fly on our engines, fly on our ships\u2026as internal propaganda\u201d aimed at bolstering Russian pride.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSoviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov exited a Soviet spacecraft in 1965, becoming the first person to walk in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nRepresentatives from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment about their views on U.S. space exploration, the alleged rivalry between Washington and Moscow in the space arena, and Russia\u2019s goals. But overall, the rivalry \u201cis not as important as it was during the Soviet Union,\u201d Mr. Egorov said. But senior Russian officials have made clear that the former space superpower isn\u2019t ready to give up its ambitions to restore its cosmic dominance. In June, Russian Prime Minister \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Medvedev\n\n\n\n told senior government officials that, as a pioneer in space, Russia needs to restore its leadership. \u201cThis is not only a matter of prestige, but also a matter of national security,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\nMr. Medvedev criticized the space agency for using its funds inefficiently. Although the government allocated around 260 billion rubles ($4.13 billion) for space projects in 2019\u2014most of which went to Roscosmos\u2014the agency had so far used less than a quarter of the money, he said. Government contracts for manned spac Russians still brim with pride over being the first nation to send a human into space. But ever since the U.S. leapfrogged the Soviet Union by landing a man on the moon 50 years ago this month, Russia never regained its lead. ",
        "author": "Ann M. Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon-Landing Technology May Help New Transportation Take Flight (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2143",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/moon-landing-technology-may-help-new-transportation-take-flight-11563152461?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=15",
        "text": "Minimizing the size, weight and power consumption of tools used by the Apollo astronauts was among the most important advances spawned by the program, says Ella Atkins, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nThe then Black & Decker Manufacturing Co. was tasked with developing a drill for sampling the lunar surface, and had to design a new kind of battery motor, which paved the way for the launch of the Dustbuster in 1979.\n\nThe underlying battery technology used by the Apollo astronauts has been superseded by more efficient lithium-ion power plants. But the moon missions provided valuable insight into battery operation and a template for power-systems management in the harshest environments, Prof. Atkins says.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingMoonshot: How Apollo Launched the Digital RevolutionThe Apollo program to go to the moon marks the only time humans have left our home planet to set foot on another world. The biggest effect of this voyage was transforming the civilization it left behind.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nApollo also provided battery-related lessons on how to operate on \u201ca tight power budget\u201d and with containers that can prevent fires, the professor adds. The latter are being applied today to battery-powered aerial vehicles and undersea drones, as well as the next generation of jetliners.\nOther ideas drawing on groundwork laid by Apollo include hypersonic missiles that can reach anywhere on the planet in 15 minutes, people-carrying drones, the next generation of commercial airliners and the potential return of commercial supersonic travel.\nThe long duration of Apollo missions, compared with previous space flights, and the higher re-entry speeds of its capsules also helped drive research into materials that could withstand extreme temperature changes and afford better protection against micrometeorites. New aluminum and nickel-steel alloys were developed, along with techniques for adhesion and welding and specialized tooling, all of which now is being applied to some of the most cutting-edge aerospace technology under development.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApollo pushed suppliers to minimize tools\u2019 size, weight and power consumption. The Dustbuster grew out of a battery motor developed for drilling in lunar soil.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLACK+DECKER\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThis was technology that\u2019s translated very nicely into the aeronautics field,\u201d says James Hansen, professor of history at Auburn University and a longtime chronicler of the industry, including a biography of Neil Armstrong.\nThe Pentagon, to compete with technology being developed by China and Russia, has issued around $2.5 billion in contracts to develop hypersonic missiles able to travel at five times the speed of sound\u2014one-fifth the speed of Apollo 11.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and others working on hypersonic weapons are benefiting from Apollo-era research into heat-resistant materials, cooling technology and aerodynamic flight flows. A hypersonic missile flying in Earth\u2019s atmosphere can generate temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, akin to temperatures experienced by the Apollo flight capsule on re-entry.\nAerospace companies are now harvesting the titanium and other alloys that were introduced on the X-15 rocket plane made by North American Aviation\u2014now part of Boeing\u2014that was used as a test bed for the Apollo command module.\n\u201cWe have materials\u2014titanium, ceramics, etc.\u2014for the fastest stuff,\u201d says Kevin Bowcutt, a senior technical fellow at Boeing focused on hypersonics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe first era of supersonic passenger travel ended when the Concorde was retired in 2003. Materials developed for Apollo may help give rise to a second generation.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s previous foray into supersonic passenger transport, the SST, was killed by Congress in 1971. The SST was the second-largest aerospace program, after Apollo, but the mounting cost of the space program helped lead to its cancellation. The move nearly bankrupted the company, which had been counting on SST revenue to offset heavy investment to develop the 747 jumbo jet.\nOnly now is a new generation of supersonic passenger travel moving closer to reality. Boeing this year took a stake in Aerion Corp., a Nevada-based startup developing a business jet able to fly at twice the speed of sound. \nWith the U.S. committed to returning astronauts to the moon by 2024, lessons from Apollo also are being directed toward the next phase of the American space program. Lockheed Martin, to build its new Orion spacecraft for NASA, is using an aluminum-lithium alloy, a descendant The next generation of travel\u2014including the possible return of commercial supersonic airliners\u2014is looking to materials developed for the extreme conditions of the Apollo program. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon-Landing Technology May Help New Transportation Take Flight (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2144",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/moon-landing-technology-may-help-new-transportation-take-flight-11563152461?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=54",
        "text": "Minimizing the size, weight and power consumption of tools used by the Apollo astronauts was among the most important advances spawned by the program, says Ella Atkins, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nThe then Black & Decker Manufacturing Co. was tasked with developing a drill for sampling the lunar surface, and had to design a new kind of battery motor, which paved the way for the launch of the Dustbuster in 1979.\n\nThe underlying battery technology used by the Apollo astronauts has been superseded by more efficient lithium-ion power plants. But the moon missions provided valuable insight into battery operation and a template for power-systems management in the harshest environments, Prof. Atkins says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApollo also provided battery-related lessons on how to operate on \u201ca tight power budget\u201d and with containers that can prevent fires, the professor adds. The latter are being applied today to battery-powered aerial vehicles and undersea drones, as well as the next generation of jetliners.\nOther ideas drawing on groundwork laid by Apollo include hypersonic missiles that can reach anywhere on the planet in 15 minutes, people-carrying drones, the next generation of commercial airliners and the potential return of commercial supersonic travel.\nThe long duration of Apollo missions, compared with previous space flights, and the higher re-entry speeds of its capsules also helped drive research into materials that could withstand extreme temperature changes and afford better protection against micrometeorites. New aluminum and nickel-steel alloys were developed, along with techniques for adhesion and welding and specialized tooling, all of which now is being applied to some of the most cutting-edge aerospace technology under development.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApollo pushed suppliers to minimize tools\u2019 size, weight and power consumption. The Dustbuster grew out of a battery motor developed for drilling in lunar soil.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLACK+DECKER\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThis was technology that\u2019s translated very nicely into the aeronautics field,\u201d says James Hansen, professor of history at Auburn University and a longtime chronicler of the industry, including a biography of Neil Armstrong.\nThe Pentagon, to compete with technology being developed by China and Russia, has issued around $2.5 billion in contracts to develop hypersonic missiles able to travel at five times the speed of sound\u2014one-fifth the speed of Apollo 11.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and others working on hypersonic weapons are benefiting from Apollo-era research into heat-resistant materials, cooling technology and aerodynamic flight flows. A hypersonic missile flying in Earth\u2019s atmosphere can generate temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, akin to temperatures experienced by the Apollo flight capsule on re-entry.\nAerospace companies are now harvesting the titanium and other alloys that were introduced on the X-15 rocket plane made by North American Aviation\u2014now part of Boeing\u2014that was used as a test bed for the Apollo command module.\n\u201cWe have materials\u2014titanium, ceramics, etc.\u2014for the fastest stuff,\u201d says Kevin Bowcutt, a senior technical fellow at Boeing focused on hypersonics.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe first era of supersonic passenger travel ended when the Concorde was retired in 2003. Materials developed for Apollo may help give rise to a second generation.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nBoeing\u2019s previous foray into supersonic passenger transport, the SST, was killed by Congress in 1971. The SST was the second-largest aerospace program, after Apollo, but the mounting cost of the space program helped lead to its cancellation. The move nearly bankrupted the company, which had been counting on SST revenue to offset heavy investment to develop the 747 jumbo jet.\nOnly now is a new generation of supersonic passenger travel moving closer to reality. Boeing this year took a stake in Aerion Corp., a Nevada-based startup developing a business jet able to fly at twice the speed of sound. \nWith the U.S. committed to returning astronauts to the moon by 2024, lessons from Apollo also are being directed toward the next phase of the American space program. Lockheed Martin, to build its new Orion spacecraft for NASA, is using an aluminum-lithium alloy, a descendant of sorts of the aluminum alloy used in the Apollo command module.\nMr. Cameron is deputy chief of the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal. Email him at doug.cameron@wsj.com.\n\n\nApollo 11, 50 Years Later The journey\u2019s impact, and the new race to the moon:\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tComplete coverage at wsj.com/moonlanding A Hidden Hero of Apollo 11: Software Where Did All the Moonshots Go? An Apollo Guidance Computer\u2019s New Life How the M The next generation of travel\u2014including the possible return of commercial supersonic airliners\u2014is looking to materials developed for the extreme conditions of the Apollo program. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Nation Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2145",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nation-celebrates-the-50th-anniversary-of-apollo-11-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=14",
        "text": "In a hundred different ways this week, people nationwide celebrated the moon voyage that climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aldrin\n\n\n\n landed and walked on another world. Festivities ranged from reunions of Apollo-era NASA employees to lunar-themed $1,000-a-ticket galas. There are museum exhibits, documentary showings, television specials, scholarly lectures, art exhibitions and auctions of rare space memorabilia. There was an astronaut-themed pub crawl in Cocoa Beach, Fla., the unveiling of a statue of Neil Armstrong in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and an Apollo \u201cSplashdown 50 Celebration\u201d in Alameda, Calif.\u00a0 Festivities are set to peak on Saturday with a re-creation of the moon landing at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a musical tribute by the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin walking on the moon, July 20, 1969.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAmid so many events, Apollo 9 astronaut Russell \u201cRusty\u201d Schweickart, now 84, found a moment for reflection. \u201cTo me, the real importance of this anniversary is the overall reality of human beings first stepping off planet Earth into the cosmos; not in imagination, not via a robotic spacecraft, but human beings moving through the birth canal of mother Earth and into the universe,\u201d Mr.\u00a0 Schweickart said. \u201cThat is a historic moment that will be remembered for a thousand years.\u201d\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nAs the lunar module pilot during Apollo 16 in 1972, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Duke,\n\n\n\n now 83, was the youngest person to ever walk on the moon. \u201cWhat\u2019s the right way to observe this 50th anniversary?\u201d he said. \u201cWith pride.\u201d Mr. Duke has no trouble remembering where he was 50 years ago when Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility. He was the designated \u201cCapcom\u201d at NASA Mission Control in Houston, the only person permitted to talk directly to the astronauts. \u201cI think I was more tense in Mission Control during Apollo 11 than I was actually landing on the moon during Apollo 16,\u201d he said. The anniversary comes during a renewal of lunar exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe NASA Mission Control Center in Houston.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nOn Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization plans to launch a $142 million Chandrayaan-2 mission to the moon. Its unmanned spacecraft includes a lunar lander and a small rover. China landed the first probe on the far side of the moon earlier this year and plans a mission next year to collect lunar samples for return to Earth. Commercial launch firms, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin LLC, have lunar ambitions as well. For its part, NASA this week vowed to land people on the moon again by 2024, including the first woman to walk on the moon. \u201cHaving a woman astronaut on the moon is something that is long overdue,\u201d said NASA Administrator \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe week\u2019s festivities launched in Huntsville, Ala., where NASA developed the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 astronauts into space. There, student campers and hobbyists at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center on Monday set off almost 5,000 model rockets simultaneously, hoping for an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. On Tuesday in Florida, Apollo 11 astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Collins\n\n\n\n returned to Launch Complex 39A at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center to mark the precise moment\u20149:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969\u2014that the Saturn V rocket blasted off for the moon. About 100 of NASA\u2019s flight controllers and mission managers who handled the launch had a reunion in the firing room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana, left, speaks with Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins at Launch Complex 39A on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Frank Michaux/NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe, crew, felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. We knew that everyone would be looking at us, friend or foe, and we wanted to do the best we possibly could,\u201d Mr. Collins said. That evening, partygoers dined with veteran Apollo astronauts under the shadow of a Saturn V, now among the exhibits at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, at a fundraiser organized by the Aldrin Family Foundation. On the other side of the cou In a hundred different ways this week, people nationwide celebrated the moon voyage that climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on another world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Nation Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2146",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nation-celebrates-the-50th-anniversary-of-apollo-11-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=53",
        "text": "In a hundred different ways this week, people nationwide celebrated the moon voyage that climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aldrin\n\n\n\n landed and walked on another world. Festivities ranged from reunions of Apollo-era NASA employees to lunar-themed $1,000-a-ticket galas. There are museum exhibits, documentary showings, television specials, scholarly lectures, art exhibitions and auctions of rare space memorabilia. There was an astronaut-themed pub crawl in Cocoa Beach, Fla., the unveiling of a statue of Neil Armstrong in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and an Apollo \u201cSplashdown 50 Celebration\u201d in Alameda, Calif.\u00a0 Festivities are set to peak on Saturday with a re-creation of the moon landing at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a musical tribute by the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin walking on the moon, July 20, 1969.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAmid so many events, Apollo 9 astronaut Russell \u201cRusty\u201d Schweickart, now 84, found a moment for reflection. \u201cTo me, the real importance of this anniversary is the overall reality of human beings first stepping off planet Earth into the cosmos; not in imagination, not via a robotic spacecraft, but human beings moving through the birth canal of mother Earth and into the universe,\u201d Mr.\u00a0 Schweickart said. \u201cThat is a historic moment that will be remembered for a thousand years.\u201d\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nAs the lunar module pilot during Apollo 16 in 1972, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Duke,\n\n\n\n now 83, was the youngest person to ever walk on the moon. \u201cWhat\u2019s the right way to observe this 50th anniversary?\u201d he said. \u201cWith pride.\u201d Mr. Duke has no trouble remembering where he was 50 years ago when Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility. He was the designated \u201cCapcom\u201d at NASA Mission Control in Houston, the only person permitted to talk directly to the astronauts. \u201cI think I was more tense in Mission Control during Apollo 11 than I was actually landing on the moon during Apollo 16,\u201d he said. The anniversary comes during a renewal of lunar exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe NASA Mission Control Center in Houston.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nOn Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization plans to launch a $142 million Chandrayaan-2 mission to the moon. Its unmanned spacecraft includes a lunar lander and a small rover. China landed the first probe on the far side of the moon earlier this year and plans a mission next year to collect lunar samples for return to Earth. Commercial launch firms, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin LLC, have lunar ambitions as well. For its part, NASA this week vowed to land people on the moon again by 2024, including the first woman to walk on the moon. \u201cHaving a woman astronaut on the moon is something that is long overdue,\u201d said NASA Administrator \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe week\u2019s festivities launched in Huntsville, Ala., where NASA developed the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 astronauts into space. There, student campers and hobbyists at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center on Monday set off almost 5,000 model rockets simultaneously, hoping for an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. On Tuesday in Florida, Apollo 11 astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Collins\n\n\n\n returned to Launch Complex 39A at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center to mark the precise moment\u20149:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969\u2014that the Saturn V rocket blasted off for the moon. About 100 of NASA\u2019s flight controllers and mission managers who handled the launch had a reunion in the firing room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana, left, speaks with Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins at Launch Complex 39A on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Frank Michaux/NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe, crew, felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. We knew that everyone would be looking at us, friend or foe, and we wanted to do the best we possibly could,\u201d Mr. Collins said. That evening, partygoers dined with veteran Apollo astronauts under the shadow of a Saturn V, now among the exhibits at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, at a fundraiser organized by the Aldrin Family Foundation. On the other side of the cou In a hundred different ways this week, people nationwide celebrated the moon voyage that climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on another world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Nation Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2147",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nation-celebrates-the-50th-anniversary-of-apollo-11-11563537608?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=69",
        "text": "In a hundred different ways this week, people nationwide celebrated the moon voyage that climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo astronauts \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aldrin\n\n\n\n landed and walked on another world. Festivities ranged from reunions of Apollo-era NASA employees to lunar-themed $1,000-a-ticket galas. There are museum exhibits, documentary showings, television specials, scholarly lectures, art exhibitions and auctions of rare space memorabilia. There was an astronaut-themed pub crawl in Cocoa Beach, Fla., the unveiling of a statue of Neil Armstrong in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and an Apollo \u201cSplashdown 50 Celebration\u201d in Alameda, Calif.\u00a0 Festivities are set to peak on Saturday with a re-creation of the moon landing at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a musical tribute by the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin walking on the moon, July 20, 1969.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAmid so many events, Apollo 9 astronaut Russell \u201cRusty\u201d Schweickart, now 84, found a moment for reflection. \u201cTo me, the real importance of this anniversary is the overall reality of human beings first stepping off planet Earth into the cosmos; not in imagination, not via a robotic spacecraft, but human beings moving through the birth canal of mother Earth and into the universe,\u201d Mr.\u00a0 Schweickart said. \u201cThat is a historic moment that will be remembered for a thousand years.\u201d\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nAs the lunar module pilot during Apollo 16 in 1972, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Duke,\n\n\n\n now 83, was the youngest person to ever walk on the moon. \u201cWhat\u2019s the right way to observe this 50th anniversary?\u201d he said. \u201cWith pride.\u201d Mr. Duke has no trouble remembering where he was 50 years ago when Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility. He was the designated \u201cCapcom\u201d at NASA Mission Control in Houston, the only person permitted to talk directly to the astronauts. \u201cI think I was more tense in Mission Control during Apollo 11 than I was actually landing on the moon during Apollo 16,\u201d he said. The anniversary comes during a renewal of lunar exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe NASA Mission Control Center in Houston.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nOn Monday, the Indian Space Research Organization plans to launch a $142 million Chandrayaan-2 mission to the moon. Its unmanned spacecraft includes a lunar lander and a small rover. China landed the first probe on the far side of the moon earlier this year and plans a mission next year to collect lunar samples for return to Earth. Commercial launch firms, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin LLC, have lunar ambitions as well. For its part, NASA this week vowed to land people on the moon again by 2024, including the first woman to walk on the moon. \u201cHaving a woman astronaut on the moon is something that is long overdue,\u201d said NASA Administrator \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Perhaps the most dramatic moment of Apollo 11's mission to the moon was when the Eagle began its final descent to the lunar surface and the ship's computer became overloaded. Few were more nervous than the young computer programmer who had written the code for the landing. On the Apollo 11's 50th anniversary, WSJ sat down with programmer Don Eyles. Photo: Alexander Hotz/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe week\u2019s festivities launched in Huntsville, Ala., where NASA developed the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 astronauts into space. There, student campers and hobbyists at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center on Monday set off almost 5,000 model rockets simultaneously, hoping for an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. On Tuesday in Florida, Apollo 11 astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Collins\n\n\n\n returned to Launch Complex 39A at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center to mark the precise moment\u20149:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969\u2014that the Saturn V rocket blasted off for the moon. About 100 of NASA\u2019s flight controllers and mission managers who handled the launch had a reunion in the firing room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana, left, speaks with Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins at Launch Complex 39A on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Frank Michaux/NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe, crew, felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. We knew that everyone would be looking at us, friend or foe, and we wanted to do the best we possibly could,\u201d Mr. Collins said. That evening, partygoers dined with veteran Apollo astronauts under the shadow of a Saturn V, now among the exhibits at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, at a fundraiser organized by the Aldrin Family Foundation. On the other side of the cou In a hundred different ways this week, people nationwide celebrated the moon voyage that climaxed on July 20, 1969, when Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and walked on another world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Had a Hidden Hero: Software (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2148",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-had-a-hidden-hero-software-11563153001?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=58",
        "text": "Five times the onboard computer signaled an emergency like none Armstrong and crewmate \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Buzz Aldrin\n\n\n\n had practiced. In that moment, the lives of two astronauts, the efforts of more than 300,000 technicians, the labor of eight years at a cost of $25 billion, and the pride of a nation depended on a few lines of pioneering computer code.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn 18-inch-thick printout in Don Eyles\u2019s loft shows some of the computer code that controlled the Apollo lunar module\u2019s descent to the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nHumans had never risked so much on zeros and ones. Yet they decided to trust the machine and the binary two-digit code, and Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin reaped the glory as the first people to walk on the moon. \u201cThe software saved the mission,\u201d says Fred Martin, 85, who managed much of the Apollo software development. From the vantage of 50 years, we view the leap to another world as a singular triumph of humankind. By almost any standard, though, it is a victory for the machine, too, marking the most important 15 minutes in the history of computing. \u201cThey\u2019d put the computer at the center of this hugely ambitious project,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David C. Brock,\n\n\n\n director of the Computer History Museum\u2019s software history center. \u201cIt was a real test of that technology and everyone\u2019s beliefs and aspirations for it.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApollo 11\u2019s lunar module, Eagle, photographed from the command module after separating to begin its computer-guided descent to the lunar surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe Apollo guidance computer\u2014the first digital general-purpose, multitasking, interactive portable computer\u2014laid the foundations of much of the digital world we know today, from the fly-by-wire cockpits of commercial jetliners to the multitasking smartphones we carry in our pockets. In the airless void above the moon, wafer-thin silicon and the code that powered it came of age.Letting \u2018the kids\u2019 thrive Don Eyles unfurled a half-century-old, 18-inch-thick computer printout on a table in his loft on the Boston waterfront earlier this year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 75-year-old traced the maze of terse commands with his finger, proud of how little memory the interlocking tasks and routines required to land on the moon. It was poetry in the enigmatic commands of machine language. \u201cThey had to gamble that the kids would rise to the occasion,\u201d says Mr. Eyles. \u201cWe were brought into a sort of loose managerial situation and allowed to thrive.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDon Eyles, in his Boston loft, was just out of college when he went to work for MIT\u2019s Instrumentation Lab and helped write the code that guided men to the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nIn the summer of 1966, he was a 23-year-old math major with a taste for opera and fast cars, looking for work. Fresh out of college, he had many things about life yet to learn. Computer code was one. So was space travel. He applied to the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose job it was to guide the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. It took more than big rockets to put humans on the moon, they told him. It took code. And, to his surprise, they hired him.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDan Lickly, shown circa the 1960s, says there was an art to finding people who could turn engineering equations into code for a journey to another world..\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nThe I-Lab, as everyone called the place, was housed in a former underwear factory overlooking the Charles River, now long since demolished. The Apollo engineers and programmers labored at scuffed metal desks in cubicles with code scribbled on the chalkboard, slide rules on the table, cigarette butts on the linoleum floor. Fanfold computer printouts were stacked up to 6 feet high, like termite mounds. The lab had pioneered inertial guidance systems for the nuclear-warhead-tipped missiles of the Cold War, such as the submarine-launched Polaris intercontinental ballistic missiles. Funded by the U.S. Air Force, it also developed a plan in the late 1950s to fly a computerized probe to Mars and back. MIT received the first major Apollo contract, the only one awarded to a university, and the only one given without competitive bidding. In an era when a computer used fragile tubes, ran on punch cards and filled an entire room, the I-Lab engineers had invented a briefcase-size digital brain packed with cutting-edge integrated circuits and memory so robust it could withstand a lightning bolt\u2014a direct ancestor of almost all computers today.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRalph Ragan (left) and Eldon Hall, who helped lead the MIT lab\u2019s Apollo work, checking components of the guidance computer in front of a mock-up of Apollo controls.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nUnlike other machines of its era, it could juggle many tasks at once and make choices of which to prioritize as events unfolded. Apollo missions carried two of these computers, one aboard the command module and one in the lunar lander, running almost identical software. Only the lunar lander, though, required the extra code to set down safely on the moon. There was an art to finding people like Mr. Eyles who could turn engineering equations into code for a journey to another world, says Dan Lickly, 86, who oversaw the computer software development. \u201cYou can\u2019t get a degree in how to fly to the moon,\u201d says Dana Densmore, who joined the lab in 1965 and became a control supervisor for the lunar-lander software. \u201cYou had to get people who know how to think, who are creative and alert. It was all invented on the spot.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSaydean Zeldin, a physicist who had worked in GE\u2019s missile division, answered a help-wanted ad from MIT\u2019s lab and soon was managing a dozen guidance engineers.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Dave Cole/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nPhysicist Saydean Zeldin, now 79, had worked on warhead re-entry for \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n \u2019s Missile and Space Division. After the birth of her third child in 1966, she answered a help-wanted ad placed by MIT\u2019s moon project. \u201cI was a little scared that I could do this job,\u201d she recalls telling the program manager who interviewed her. She soon managed a dozen guidance engineers on matters involving many Apollo missions. \u201cI was there at work early in the morning, as soon as the babysitter arrived. I used to come home late in the afternoon. Once they had their cake and milk and had their stories read, I hopped back in the car and went back to the lab,\u201d she says. Staffing more than quadrupled from 130 people in 1966, when Mr. Eyles was hired, to 600 or so programmers by the time of Apollo 11.Whimsy in the code The power of code was intoxicating. Spaceflight engineers discovered they could use it to perform tasks that otherwise required rods, cables and actuators. Code was cheaper, more adaptable and, most important, weightless. \u201cPeople started using the software to solve all their problems,\u201d says James Kernan, 84, who oversaw assembly of the lunar-module software for Apollo 9. If the computer could plot a course, why not have it steer it, too? Desperate to lose weight, NASA in 1964 decided to eliminate electromechanical flight controls meant to operate the rocket engines and thrusters.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn early version of the Apollo guidance computer, known as AGC-3, before the MIT lab condensed it into a usable model.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nIt increased the demand on the small computer, designed to fly to the moon and back using no more memory than the text in an average email, by up to a third. They redesigned the computer, doubled its memory\u2014and still the software overflowed. \u201cNASA was really in a bind,\u201d says Don Fraser, 78, who worked on the digital autopilot. In a bitter series of so-called Black Friday sessions, NASA managers ordered the software squeezed to fit, dumping less essential tasks and battling over every change, the I-Lab engineers recall.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module. Now computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again. Video by Jake Nicol\n \n\n\nThe Apollo computer eventually required about 145,000 lines of code in all, compared with about 62 million lines of code required today to operate \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n and more than two billion lines of code for Google. Among the many routines for the lunar lander, Mr. Eyles co-wrote a master ignition sequence that, with a series of related lunar-landing routines, calculated and controlled the descent to the moon. Mr. Eyles had inserted explanatory comments so that he and his colleagues could remember what the string of commands was intended to accomplish. There, whimsy crept in. He labeled the ignition sequence \u201cBURN_BABY_BURN.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn Apollo guidance computer from an early lunar module.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nWhen the computer wanted to reposition the landing-radar antenna, the code noted: \u201cASTRONAUT PLEASE CRANK THE SILLY THING AROUND.\u201d It then performed a calculation to determine if the astronaut had moved it correctly. \u201cSEE IF HE\u2019S LYING,\u201d the code noted. When the antenna was aimed and the landing could proceed, the code said: \u201cOFF TO SEE THE WIZARD.\u201d\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\n\u201cI did not imagine that anyone in the future might be looking at our code for historical purposes,\u201d Mr. Eyles says. Whimsy disappeared when the dozens of MIT engineers heard Neil Armstrong report a computer problem as Apollo 11\u2019s lander began its powered descent to the moon. \u201cProgram alarm,\u201d the commander radioed Mission Control in Houston, a touch of urgency in his usually laconic voice. \u201cIt\u2019s a 1202. What is it?\u201dShock and alarm \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Margaret Hamilton\u2019s\n\n\n\n blood pressure soared when she heard the astronauts call out a 1202. She knew it all too well. She had programmed the alarm codes. \u201cThey were the never-supposed-to-happen alarms,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI was in a state of shock. How could this be happening now just before the landing? I\u2019m thinking: Oh my God, this is not real.\u201d Ms. Hamilton, now 82, and her colleagues crowded around the squawk box and telemetry relays that connected the laboratory\u2019s Switching, Conference and Monitoring Arrangement room to flight controllers in Houston and the astronauts aboard the lunar lander nearly 250,000 miles away.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMargaret Hamilton knew what the 1202 alarm was: She had programmed the alarm codes.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe alarms, she knew, signaled that the computer was overloaded and, as designed, was dumping unimportant tasks in order to keep flying safely. It could handle interruptions and power outages, literally able to be turned off and back on without interrupting the landing or any other vital maneuver. About a year before the lunar landing, NASA had asked the already busy I-Lab engineers to build into the software this so-called restart protection. As the astronauts neared the surface of the moon, something kept overtaxing the computer. No one in the room knew what it was, how severe it might become, or how to fix it before the computer exceeded its margin of recovery. \u201cPeople\u2019s throats fell into their stomachs,\u201d says Dr. Martin, who was a senior manager of the mission development group. In thousands of test runs no one had seen these alarms. \u201cI remember looking at Margaret and we are all absolutely certain there would be an abort.\u201d When she joined MIT\u2019s Apollo effort in the early 1960s, Ms. Hamilton was the rarest of new recruits\u2014an experienced programmer. She had an instinctive distaste for programming errors. A mathematician, she learned to program by running calculations for an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz, who discovered a new field of study called chaos theory. She programmed his $46,000 LGP-30 computer by key-punching binary code composed of zeros and ones into a paper tape. Impatient with the time it took to recompose and resubmit a faulty program made this way, she learned to correct her errors by poking new holes in the tape with a pencil to create binary ones or by taping over existing holes to turn a binary one into a zero.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMargaret Hamilton\u2019s MIT Instrumentation Lab employee card.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nNeeding a raise, she next wrote code for the largest computer ever made, a 250-ton, four-story military behemoth that served as the brains of the $27 billion national air defense system. In the race to the moon, her first assignment was to write the code for an abort routine. She soon took responsibility for the spacecraft\u2019s system software. By Apollo 11, Dr. Lickly had put her in charge of all the capsule and lunar-lander software. When it came to hiring women for engineering or management, NASA \u201chad a few women, and they kept them hidden,\u201d says Ms. Densmore. \u201cAt the lab it was very different,\u201d and there were opportunities for women. As the moonshot approached, Ms. Hamilton explored worst-case scenarios. \u201cI kept doing what-ifs? What if there is an error? What if there is an emergency in real time with real astronauts and there is no way to tell the astronauts they are in trouble?\u201d she says. \u201cI figured out a way to let them know in the software that there is an emergency.\u201d Her 1202 program alarm was one of 29 that could be triggered during landing. As it flashed on the lunar lander\u2019s digital computer display, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong knew only that they were in trouble. \u201cGive us a reading on the 1202 program alarm,\u201d Armstrong radioed with an edge in his voice. The men were 30,000 feet above the moon and descending. Twenty-seven seconds ticked off the mission clock with no answer from their home planet.\u2018Go\u2019 and \u2018Go\u2019 again In that moment, only one person on Earth\u2014Flight Director \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gene Kranz\n\n\n\n at NASA\u2019s Mission Control in Houston\u2014had the authority to stop the lunar landing. He strained to listen. Communications with the lander had been unusually distorted and static-filled. Whispering in his ears also were a dozen voices from six communications loops and the air-to-ground communications channels, Mr. Kranz, 86, recalls. \u201cWe\u2019re \u2018go\u2019 on that alarm?\u201d Mr. Kranz said, asking his team if he could let the landing proceed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter his team wrongly called for an abort in a practice run, flight director Gene Kranz pushed them to learn the computer alarms. It paid off during Apollo 11\u2019s descent.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Wyke/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn their final practice run before the mission, Mr. Kranz and his team had been tested on these alarms and failed badly. Caught off-guard, they mistakenly ordered the astronauts to abort the landing. That dress rehearsal taught his team that these alarms meant the computer could still be relied upon. With the astronauts waiting, NASA engineer Jack Garman, 25, checked his notes from MIT and passed the word to Steve Bales, 26, who staffed the guidance console for the lunar descent. He gave Mr. Kranz the word. \u201cGo,\u201d Mr. Kranz ordered. Again, the alarm. Again, \u201cGo.\u201d Five times in all, the computer reset itself and continued flying. Mr. Eyles\u2019s code performed flawlessly. Armstrong jockeyed for a safe spot to land. \u201cWe were just 17 seconds from calling an abort,\u201d as the fuel supply approached empty, recalls Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke, who as the capsule communicator was the only one at Mission Control allowed to talk directly to the crew in flight. The astronauts brought their lander, which they had dubbed Eagle, to rest on the Sea of Tranquility. \u201cThen Neil said very calmly after all that tension\u2014it was amazing the calmness in his voice\u2014\u2018Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Duke says. It would be the next day before anyone figured out what had set off the program alarms. A mismatched power supply to a radar unit had erroneously triggered a near constant series of calculations that overloaded the computer. The restart protection added to the software a year earlier had rescued the mission, preventing the astronauts from unnecessarily aborting it before they landed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEngineers (from left) Norman Sears, Margaret Hamilton, Phyllis Rye and Ain Laats, during Apollo 8. On the blackboard is a program for command-module navigation.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nAt MIT, the euphoria of the moon landing in July gave way to protests in November as students and police clashed outside the I-Lab over its military-weapons work. By 1973, MIT had severed ties to the laboratory, by then renamed the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, and moved all the university\u2019s classified military research off-campus. Around the same time, NASA canceled its last three Apollo missions, ending human exploration of space beyond low Earth orbit for the indefinite future. The computers were mostly scrapped. NASA never published its Apollo code. It can be found in museums in Cambridge and Washington, and has been posted online by computer enthusiasts. Today, though, its legacy is in just about every pocket, driveway, home and office. Its descendants helped to remake how the world learns, works, plays, communicates, spends and socializes. And thorny questions of control and responsibility it raised in 1969 resonate in an era of dawning artificial intelligence. The code itself perhaps best sums up the wonders it hastened. As billows of lunar dust settled around the lander 50 years ago, its onboard computer ticked through the instructions in its P68 lunar landing confirmation routine. Embedded in the final lines, where no outsider was ever likely to see it, the software said: \u201cASTRONAUT: NOW LOOK WHERE YOU ENDED UP.\u201d Mr. Hotz is a science writer for The Wall Street Journal in New York. He can be reached at lee.hotz@wsj.com.Apollo 11, 50 Years Later The journey\u2019s impact, and the new race to the moon:An Apollo Guidance Computer\u2019s New Life Inside the painstaking effort to repair and reboot the original computer from an Apollo lunar lander.How the Moon Landing Shaped Four Americans\u2019 Lives A cross-section of the nation\u2014more than 300,000 people\u2014joined forces to make Apollo 11 possible. Here are some of their stories.The Moonshot Mind-Set Once Came From the Government. No Longer. Americans still take big risks to solve big problems. But now it\u2019s private enterprise that does it. The moon landing was one of the most important moments in the history of computing, laying the foundations for everything from fly-by-wire cockpits to the smartphones in our hands. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Apollo Spacecraft Computer Is Brought Back to Life (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2149",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-apollo-spacecraft-computer-is-brought-back-to-life-11563152761?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=15",
        "text": "Barely two dozen Apollo onboard computers remain in museums or private hands. No one has turned one on in generations, computer historians say. Mr. Loocke had vowed to bring his machine to life again. \n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nBut first, airport officials wouldn\u2019t allow the computer onboard. It was small enough for spaceflight, but too big for carry-on. He watched anxiously as the machine disappeared into the airline\u2019s baggage-handling system. When he landed in San Francisco, it was nowhere to be seen. Chance brought the computer into his hands; now his luck seemed to be running the other way. \u201cI was sweating bullets,\u201d he later said. \u201cI mean, I believe this computer basically changed the world. I had horrible thoughts of it disappearing.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nJimmie Loocke and the Apollo lunar-module computer he came to own almost by accident.\n\n\n\nMr. Loocke was no museum curator or computer professional. He was a salesman at heart. Born and bred in Pasadena, Texas, he once ran a local store called Wonder Warthog Sound and Light, which sold light-show equipment, black-light posters and other psychedelia. As he recalls, he was looking for circuit boards at a scrap-metal warehouse in 1976 when he spotted NASA equipment from the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space programs. All of it had been sold as surplus at government auction. On the spot, he bought two tons of it for a fraction of its original cost and hauled it home. It was years before he realized what he had found. \u201cAt the time, it didn\u2019t seem that important, but I held on to it,\u201d he says.Verified device \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eldon Hall,\n\n\n\n the digital-computing pioneer who led the team that designed the computer at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, verified the unit\u2019s authenticity in 2004 when, at Mr. Loocke\u2019s invitation, he took it apart and inspected it at a military-computing conference. It had been used for ground tests, he says, to certify the lunar lander as safe for human flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEldon Hall, who led the development of the Apollo computer at MIT, verified that Jimmie Loocke\u2019s computer was authentic.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nIts serial numbers suggest that it originally had been installed in a lunar lander now on exhibit at Space Center Houston, the third built for the moon program, according to Mr. Loocke\u2019s research.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingMoonshot: How Apollo Launched the Digital RevolutionThe Apollo program to go to the moon marks the only time humans have left our home planet to set foot on another world. The biggest effect of this voyage was transforming the civilization it left behind.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\n\u201cIt is the lunar module that received the man-rating that paved the way for all the other lunar modules to go into space,\u201d says exhibits director \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Spana.\n\n\n\n Mr. Spana doesn\u2019t know how or when the computer could have gotten separated from its lander. Mr. Hall hadn\u2019t seen an onboard computer since the end of Apollo. It was Mr. Hall who gambled on using a then-untried device called an integrated circuit to make a computer small enough to fit in a space capsule, robust enough to survive a Saturn V rocket launch, and fast enough to monitor or control 200 spacecraft systems at the same time. At his urging, the Apollo program became the first and single largest consumer of the semiconductor chips, buying a million or more of them, some 60% of all the integrated circuits produced in the U.S. between 1962 and 1967, according to Mr. Hall\u2019s purchasing records. The first computer chips tested by MIT cost $1,000 each. By the time astronauts landed on the moon, the price had dropped to $15 apiece, his records show. It set a pattern of innovation, quality control and price-cutting that persists in the computer business to this day. \u201cIt kicked off the integrated-circuit-technology industry,\u201d says Mr. Hall, 96, who now lives in Florida. \u201cThat was the creation of Silicon Valley.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAnatomy of the Apollo guidance computer (clockwise from top left): The heart of the computer was its rows of integrated circuits, the first ever used in a computer. These were assembled into logic modules packed side by side. Diodes handled information switching. The computer\u2019s circuits were connected by 4,000 wires.\n\n\n\nBut on this day, the computer had gone astray. The airline assured Mr. Loocke it would be on the next flight. Hours later, it bounced onto the conveyor belt of baggage carousel No. 1. \u201cWhen I saw it come out of the chute, I knew we were OK,\u201d Mr. Loocke says. When the team of computer experts got their hands on it and opened it up, though, they exposed the toll of time: circuit faults, corroded connectors and scrambled signals. The group h Inside the painstaking effort to repair and reboot the original computer from an Apollo lunar lander. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Photographs by Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Apollo Spacecraft Computer Is Brought Back to Life (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2150",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-apollo-spacecraft-computer-is-brought-back-to-life-11563152761?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=56",
        "text": "Barely two dozen Apollo onboard computers remain in museums or private hands. No one has turned one on in generations, computer historians say. Mr. Loocke had vowed to bring his machine to life again. \n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nBut first, airport officials wouldn\u2019t allow the computer onboard. It was small enough for spaceflight, but too big for carry-on. He watched anxiously as the machine disappeared into the airline\u2019s baggage-handling system. When he landed in San Francisco, it was nowhere to be seen. Chance brought the computer into his hands; now his luck seemed to be running the other way. \u201cI was sweating bullets,\u201d he later said. \u201cI mean, I believe this computer basically changed the world. I had horrible thoughts of it disappearing.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nJimmie Loocke and the Apollo lunar-module computer he came to own almost by accident.\n\n\n\nMr. Loocke was no museum curator or computer professional. He was a salesman at heart. Born and bred in Pasadena, Texas, he once ran a local store called Wonder Warthog Sound and Light, which sold light-show equipment, black-light posters and other psychedelia. As he recalls, he was looking for circuit boards at a scrap-metal warehouse in 1976 when he spotted NASA equipment from the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space programs. All of it had been sold as surplus at government auction. On the spot, he bought two tons of it for a fraction of its original cost and hauled it home. It was years before he realized what he had found. \u201cAt the time, it didn\u2019t seem that important, but I held on to it,\u201d he says.Verified device \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eldon Hall,\n\n\n\n the digital-computing pioneer who led the team that designed the computer at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, verified the unit\u2019s authenticity in 2004 when, at Mr. Loocke\u2019s invitation, he took it apart and inspected it at a military-computing conference. It had been used for ground tests, he says, to certify the lunar lander as safe for human flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEldon Hall, who led the development of the Apollo computer at MIT, verified that Jimmie Loocke\u2019s computer was authentic.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nIts serial numbers suggest that it originally had been installed in a lunar lander now on exhibit at Space Center Houston, the third built for the moon program, according to Mr. Loocke\u2019s research.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt is the lunar module that received the man-rating that paved the way for all the other lunar modules to go into space,\u201d says exhibits director \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Spana.\n\n\n\n Mr. Spana doesn\u2019t know how or when the computer could have gotten separated from its lander. Mr. Hall hadn\u2019t seen an onboard computer since the end of Apollo. It was Mr. Hall who gambled on using a then-untried device called an integrated circuit to make a computer small enough to fit in a space capsule, robust enough to survive a Saturn V rocket launch, and fast enough to monitor or control 200 spacecraft systems at the same time. At his urging, the Apollo program became the first and single largest consumer of the semiconductor chips, buying a million or more of them, some 60% of all the integrated circuits produced in the U.S. between 1962 and 1967, according to Mr. Hall\u2019s purchasing records. The first computer chips tested by MIT cost $1,000 each. By the time astronauts landed on the moon, the price had dropped to $15 apiece, his records show. It set a pattern of innovation, quality control and price-cutting that persists in the computer business to this day. \u201cIt kicked off the integrated-circuit-technology industry,\u201d says Mr. Hall, 96, who now lives in Florida. \u201cThat was the creation of Silicon Valley.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAnatomy of the Apollo guidance computer (clockwise from top left): The heart of the computer was its rows of integrated circuits, the first ever used in a computer. These were assembled into logic modules packed side by side. Diodes handled information switching. The computer\u2019s circuits were connected by 4,000 wires.\n\n\n\nBut on this day, the computer had gone astray. The airline assured Mr. Loocke it would be on the next flight. Hours later, it bounced onto the conveyor belt of baggage carousel No. 1. \u201cWhen I saw it come out of the chute, I knew we were OK,\u201d Mr. Loocke says. When the team of computer experts got their hands on it and opened it up, though, they exposed the toll of time: circuit faults, corroded connectors and scrambled signals. The group had gathered at the electronics lab of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marc Verdiell\n\n\n\n in Atherton for what they expected would be two weeks of 10-hour days to restore the Apollo computer. Calling themselves computer archaeologists, they had been preparing for a year. They labored on their own time without NASA\u2019s official sanction or support. It was a hardware hacker\u2019s holiday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Stewart (left) and Marc Verdiell, part of Inside the painstaking effort to repair and reboot the original computer from an Apollo lunar lander. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Photographs by Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Apollo Spacecraft Computer Is Brought Back to Life (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2151",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-apollo-spacecraft-computer-is-brought-back-to-life-11563152761?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=58",
        "text": "Barely two dozen Apollo onboard computers remain in museums or private hands. No one has turned one on in generations, computer historians say. Mr. Loocke had vowed to bring his machine to life again. \n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nBut first, airport officials wouldn\u2019t allow the computer onboard. It was small enough for spaceflight, but too big for carry-on. He watched anxiously as the machine disappeared into the airline\u2019s baggage-handling system. When he landed in San Francisco, it was nowhere to be seen. Chance brought the computer into his hands; now his luck seemed to be running the other way. \u201cI was sweating bullets,\u201d he later said. \u201cI mean, I believe this computer basically changed the world. I had horrible thoughts of it disappearing.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nJimmie Loocke and the Apollo lunar-module computer he came to own almost by accident.\n\n\n\nMr. Loocke was no museum curator or computer professional. He was a salesman at heart. Born and bred in Pasadena, Texas, he once ran a local store called Wonder Warthog Sound and Light, which sold light-show equipment, black-light posters and other psychedelia. As he recalls, he was looking for circuit boards at a scrap-metal warehouse in 1976 when he spotted NASA equipment from the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space programs. All of it had been sold as surplus at government auction. On the spot, he bought two tons of it for a fraction of its original cost and hauled it home. It was years before he realized what he had found. \u201cAt the time, it didn\u2019t seem that important, but I held on to it,\u201d he says.Verified device \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eldon Hall,\n\n\n\n the digital-computing pioneer who led the team that designed the computer at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, verified the unit\u2019s authenticity in 2004 when, at Mr. Loocke\u2019s invitation, he took it apart and inspected it at a military-computing conference. It had been used for ground tests, he says, to certify the lunar lander as safe for human flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEldon Hall, who led the development of the Apollo computer at MIT, verified that Jimmie Loocke\u2019s computer was authentic.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nIts serial numbers suggest that it originally had been installed in a lunar lander now on exhibit at Space Center Houston, the third built for the moon program, according to Mr. Loocke\u2019s research.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt is the lunar module that received the man-rating that paved the way for all the other lunar modules to go into space,\u201d says exhibits director \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Spana.\n\n\n\n Mr. Spana doesn\u2019t know how or when the computer could have gotten separated from its lander. Mr. Hall hadn\u2019t seen an onboard computer since the end of Apollo. It was Mr. Hall who gambled on using a then-untried device called an integrated circuit to make a computer small enough to fit in a space capsule, robust enough to survive a Saturn V rocket launch, and fast enough to monitor or control 200 spacecraft systems at the same time. At his urging, the Apollo program became the first and single largest consumer of the semiconductor chips, buying a million or more of them, some 60% of all the integrated circuits produced in the U.S. between 1962 and 1967, according to Mr. Hall\u2019s purchasing records. The first computer chips tested by MIT cost $1,000 each. By the time astronauts landed on the moon, the price had dropped to $15 apiece, his records show. It set a pattern of innovation, quality control and price-cutting that persists in the computer business to this day. \u201cIt kicked off the integrated-circuit-technology industry,\u201d says Mr. Hall, 96, who now lives in Florida. \u201cThat was the creation of Silicon Valley.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAnatomy of the Apollo guidance computer (clockwise from top left): The heart of the computer was its rows of integrated circuits, the first ever used in a computer. These were assembled into logic modules packed side by side. Diodes handled information switching. The computer\u2019s circuits were connected by 4,000 wires.\n\n\n\nBut on this day, the computer had gone astray. The airline assured Mr. Loocke it would be on the next flight. Hours later, it bounced onto the conveyor belt of baggage carousel No. 1. \u201cWhen I saw it come out of the chute, I knew we were OK,\u201d Mr. Loocke says. When the team of computer experts got their hands on it and opened it up, though, they exposed the toll of time: circuit faults, corroded connectors and scrambled signals. The group had gathered at the electronics lab of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marc Verdiell\n\n\n\n in Atherton for what they expected would be two weeks of 10-hour days to restore the Apollo computer. Calling themselves computer archaeologists, they had been preparing for a year. They labored on their own time without NASA\u2019s official sanction or support. It was a hardware hacker\u2019s holiday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Stewart (left) and Marc Verdiell, part of the volunteer restoration team for Jimmie Loocke\u2019s Apollo computer, work on a module related to random-access memory.\n\n\n\nMr. Verdiell, chief technology officer of privately held Samtec Optical Group, collects and restores early computers as a hobby. Teamed with him were \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Stewart,\n\n\n\n a flight-software developer from Capella Space Inc. in San Francisco and an expert on the Apollo computers; retired Google programmer \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Shirriff,\n\n\n\n who devised test equipment to aid the restoration of the Apollo computer; and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Claunch,\n\n\n\n who had built a working replica of the computer\u2019s digital-display unit, which they planned to use to write commands to the machine and read its responses once it was fully functional again. Wearing surgical gloves, they lifted the 70-pound Apollo computer onto a workbench. With hex wrenches, they unfastened its magnesium and aluminum case, removing its main memory tray and its main logic tray and placing them side by side. Many parts looked promising, at least at first glance. After 50 years, the machine\u2019s semiconductor chips still looked new. The power supply was functional. The 4,000 interconnecting wires gleamed, untarnished. But after hundreds of tests, they knew they had problems.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKen Shirriff from the restoration team adjusts a test module designed to simulate the original program memory of the Apollo guidance computer.\n\n\n\nMost seriously, the computer\u2019s main link to the Apollo lander electronics was clogged and corroded. Many signals to and from the computer must pass through its 360 gold-plated, pin-size plugs, in the way that the spinal cord channels nerve impulses to the brain. Until they could get the link working again, they wouldn\u2019t be able to hook up Mr. Claunch\u2019s replica of the digital display unit that astronauts had used to communicate with the computer. For days, they took turns cleaning the link\u2019s 360 pin plugs, one plug at a time, working under a microscope with a toothbrush, a modified dental pick and a vacuum cleaner. When done, they connected the refurbished link to a modern 360-pin plug custom-built by Samtec engineers at a cost of about $25,000, which the company donated, and hooked up the digital display unit. It wouldn\u2019t be original equipment, but it would restore function. \u201cThere is this tension between preservation and restoration,\u201d Mr. Verdiell says. \u201cBut the Apollo computer is not a painting. This is a machine. A machine is not meant to be viewed. It is meant to be used.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe magnesium and aluminum case of the Apollo guidance computer is shown here opened into its main memory tray and its main logic tray side by side.\n\n\n\nAnother problem: A key current-switching memory support module had a short circuit. To make matters worse, the defective circuits were embedded in hardened foam meant to armor the module against the extremes of spaceflight. The technicians located the flaws by having the part X-rayed at Samtec\u2019s corporate lab. After weighing the risks, they decided to cut through the shell, extract the damaged electronics and replace them with modern parts.One flake at a time \u201cI\u2019m going to do open-heart surgery on your module,\u201d Mr. Verdiell said. He looked to Mr. Loocke for approval. \u201cThis is probably the scariest thing we have done to date.\u201d Mr. Loocke nodded. \u201cI\u2019m totally trusting in what they are doing,\u201d he said as he watched them work. First, they dripped a chemical solvent onto the hard shell, but the shell proved impervious. Mr. Verdiell then locked the faulty module into the vise of a milling machine. The high-speed rotary cutter shaved off a few millimeters of the protective coating. Like a sculptor carving a grain of rice, Mr. Verdiell began to chip at the flawed computer module with a watchmaker\u2019s chisel and a small ball-peen hammer. One flake at a time, he exposed the defective diodes. \u201cIt feels like I am digging at the bones of a dinosaur,\u201d he said. \u201cI need to chip it without breaking any of the wires. I couldn\u2019t find an automated way to do it.\u201d He hit the chisel. Tap. He hit it again. Tap. He plucked out two defective diodes with tweezers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRestoration experts worked for days to clean the 360 clogged and corroded pins of the computer\u2019s main link to all the lunar lander\u2019s sensors and electronic systems.\n\n\n\nMr. Loocke watched intently, his fist on his chin. After a quick trip to an electronics-supply shop, they replaced the two bad diodes with new ones. After 50 years, the components were still in stock, sold in bags of 15 for a dollar. The work on the memory-switching module revealed a mystery about the computer. At the lab, Mr. Stewart checked the serial number of the flawed module against old NASA engineering drawings. The part number on the defective module and the engineering plan didn\u2019t match. He wondered whether an Apollo-era engineer, looking for a quick fix, removed the original module to repair an onboard flight computer, while putting the damaged one in its place. \u201cThis work is so incredible,\u201d said Mr. Verdiell. \u201cYou relive the lives of these engineers and their problems. It\u2019s as close as we\u2019ll get to flying to the moon.\u201d After 11 days and a dozen other repairs, they staged a critical test. They drove the refurbished machine to the Computer History Museum in nearby Mountain View, where the curators agreed to let them load a rare Apollo memory module from the museum\u2019s collection. They plugged the memory into its slot and powered up the machine. The computer\u2019s activity light pulsed. For the first time in 50 years, the computer ran its original software\u2014a program called Retread that was a set of diagnostic routines used to test computer operations. \u201cIt was so cool, so cool to see,\u201d says Mr. Loocke. \u201cThat was the first time as far as I know that an Apollo memory has been read since the last moon mission.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Apollo computer\u2019s wiring is surprisingly pristine 50 years or so after it was scrapped by NASA.\n\n\n\nMr. Hotz is a science writer for The Wall Street Journal in New York. He can be reached at lee.hotz@wsj.com.\n\n\nApollo 11, 50 Years Later The journey\u2019s impact, and the new race to the moon:\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tComplete coverage at wsj.com/moonlanding A Hidden Hero of Apollo 11: Software Where Did All the Moonshots Go? How the Moon Landing Shaped Four Americans\u2019 Lives Here Come the Space Startups Jason Gay on When We Were All Looking Up Together Joe Morgenstern\u2019s Favorite Moon Movies Inside the painstaking effort to repair and reboot the original computer from an Apollo lunar lander. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Photographs by Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Apollo Spacecraft Computer Is Brought Back to Life (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2152",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-apollo-spacecraft-computer-is-brought-back-to-life-11563152761?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=54",
        "text": "Barely two dozen Apollo onboard computers remain in museums or private hands. No one has turned one on in generations, computer historians say. Mr. Loocke had vowed to bring his machine to life again. \n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nBut first, airport officials wouldn\u2019t allow the computer onboard. It was small enough for spaceflight, but too big for carry-on. He watched anxiously as the machine disappeared into the airline\u2019s baggage-handling system. When he landed in San Francisco, it was nowhere to be seen. Chance brought the computer into his hands; now his luck seemed to be running the other way. \u201cI was sweating bullets,\u201d he later said. \u201cI mean, I believe this computer basically changed the world. I had horrible thoughts of it disappearing.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nJimmie Loocke and the Apollo lunar-module computer he came to own almost by accident.\n\n\n\nMr. Loocke was no museum curator or computer professional. He was a salesman at heart. Born and bred in Pasadena, Texas, he once ran a local store called Wonder Warthog Sound and Light, which sold light-show equipment, black-light posters and other psychedelia. As he recalls, he was looking for circuit boards at a scrap-metal warehouse in 1976 when he spotted NASA equipment from the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space programs. All of it had been sold as surplus at government auction. On the spot, he bought two tons of it for a fraction of its original cost and hauled it home. It was years before he realized what he had found. \u201cAt the time, it didn\u2019t seem that important, but I held on to it,\u201d he says.Verified device \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eldon Hall,\n\n\n\n the digital-computing pioneer who led the team that designed the computer at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, verified the unit\u2019s authenticity in 2004 when, at Mr. Loocke\u2019s invitation, he took it apart and inspected it at a military-computing conference. It had been used for ground tests, he says, to certify the lunar lander as safe for human flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEldon Hall, who led the development of the Apollo computer at MIT, verified that Jimmie Loocke\u2019s computer was authentic.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nIts serial numbers suggest that it originally had been installed in a lunar lander now on exhibit at Space Center Houston, the third built for the moon program, according to Mr. Loocke\u2019s research.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt is the lunar module that received the man-rating that paved the way for all the other lunar modules to go into space,\u201d says exhibits director \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Spana.\n\n\n\n Mr. Spana doesn\u2019t know how or when the computer could have gotten separated from its lander. Mr. Hall hadn\u2019t seen an onboard computer since the end of Apollo. It was Mr. Hall who gambled on using a then-untried device called an integrated circuit to make a computer small enough to fit in a space capsule, robust enough to survive a Saturn V rocket launch, and fast enough to monitor or control 200 spacecraft systems at the same time. At his urging, the Apollo program became the first and single largest consumer of the semiconductor chips, buying a million or more of them, some 60% of all the integrated circuits produced in the U.S. between 1962 and 1967, according to Mr. Hall\u2019s purchasing records. The first computer chips tested by MIT cost $1,000 each. By the time astronauts landed on the moon, the price had dropped to $15 apiece, his records show. It set a pattern of innovation, quality control and price-cutting that persists in the computer business to this day. \u201cIt kicked off the integrated-circuit-technology industry,\u201d says Mr. Hall, 96, who now lives in Florida. \u201cThat was the creation of Silicon Valley.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAnatomy of the Apollo guidance computer (clockwise from top left): The heart of the computer was its rows of integrated circuits, the first ever used in a computer. These were assembled into logic modules packed side by side. Diodes handled information switching. The computer\u2019s circuits were connected by 4,000 wires.\n\n\n\nBut on this day, the computer had gone astray. The airline assured Mr. Loocke it would be on the next flight. Hours later, it bounced onto the conveyor belt of baggage carousel No. 1. \u201cWhen I saw it come out of the chute, I knew we were OK,\u201d Mr. Loocke says. When the team of computer experts got their hands on it and opened it up, though, they exposed the toll of time: circuit faults, corroded connectors and scrambled signals. The group had gathered at the electronics lab of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marc Verdiell\n\n\n\n in Atherton for what they expected would be two weeks of 10-hour days to restore the Apollo computer. Calling themselves computer archaeologists, they had been preparing for a year. They labored on their own time without NASA\u2019s official sanction or support. It was a hardware hacker\u2019s holiday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Stewart (left) and Marc Verdiell, part of Inside the painstaking effort to repair and reboot the original computer from an Apollo lunar lander. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Photographs by Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Movies About the Moon (in Honor of Apollo 11\u2019s Anniversary) (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2153",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-the-moon-landing-anniversary-the-best-moon-movies-11563152700?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=58",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nVicariousness is the movie critic\u2019s curse\u2014so many places virtually visited, so many feelings virtually felt. The big exception in my life, though, was the Apollo 11 launch. I was at Cape Kennedy 50 years ago, covering the event for Newsweek. Sitting cross-legged in the grass as the Saturn V rocket blasted off, I thought my body would be shaken apart, and I wept in sudden ecstasy. The experience was bigger, louder and more beautiful than I could have imagined, and my connection with moon movies has never been the same since that long-ago morning, when science, technology and government joined forces to expand our understanding of where we belong in the grandest scheme of things.\nThe moon seems to elevate the filmmaking game. Not always, of course; for every \u201cApollo 11\u201d there\u2019s a \u201cNude on the Moon.\u201d (You didn\u2019t know the moon was inhabited by naked women?) Still, good moon movies are easy to find, and ever more so with the Apollo 11 anniversary upon us. Here are five of my favorites, in chronological order of their release.\nA Trip to the Moon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018A Trip to the Moon\u2019 (1902) resembled nothing before it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNo list of moon movies would be complete without it. Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s made his film in the world\u2019s first movie studio, a greenhouse-like structure that he built in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. As we watch the nine-minute trailblazer now, 117 years later, the science component might seem ever so slightly naive. Six astronomers, wearing frock coats and carrying umbrellas to protect them from the vicissitudes of space, climb into a cannon shell which is shot by a giant cannon. The shell, upon reaching the lunar orb moments later, hits the man in the moon smack in the eye. But the fiction part of the film explodes with joyous discovery upon discovery: how to make a technically complex motion picture that resembles nothing before it; how to tell an unearthly story that inflames earthbound imaginations. (Martin Scorsese reproduced the studio and the making of the film, with scrupulous attention to historical detail, in his 2011 fantasy \u201cHugo.\u201d)\n\nApollo 13\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Apollo 13\u2019 (1995) combines vast technical information and a classic tale of heroism.\n\n\n\nThe more I see this 1995 account of the disaster that befell three American astronauts on their way to a lunar landing in 1970\u2014and I feel compelled to watch at least a few scenes every time I come across it on TV\u2014the more I marvel at its seamless conjunction of elements that would seem to be mutually exclusive. The script, by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert, conveys great gobs of information with perfect clarity. We understand not only the nature of the disaster, but the specifics of the plan, improvised step by desperate step, that will bring the seemingly doomed crew safely back to Earth. The drama, directed by Ron Howard, is understated moment by moment, yet shattering in its cumulative effect. Here\u2019s a fiction film that has it both ways, as a trove of technical fact made comprehensible, and a classic tale of heroism in the face of hitherto unimaginable danger.\nMoon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Moon\u2019 (2009) has a virtuoso performance from Sam Rockwell.\n\n\n\nDuncan Jones directed this 2009 study in haunting ambiguity from a screenplay by Nathan Parker. In a genre where visual splendor usually reigns\u2014the pre-eminent example being, of course, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d\u2014\u201cMoon\u201d shines for having been made on a shoestring. It\u2019s a one-man show, though not necessarily a one-character show, in which Sam Rockwell gives a virtuoso performance as an astronaut, Sam Bell, who\u2019s near the end of a three-year tour of solitary duty on the moon; he\u2019s been supervising machines that mine helium-3 for fusion power on Earth. Suddenly, however, he falls ill, then discovers, during his computer-aided recuperation, that he\u2019s not alone. Another Sam Bell has appeared, an apparent clone who insists, altogether convincingly, that he isn\u2019t a clone at all. The film creates vast vistas with modest resources, and touches on the elusive question of human identity: Who am I, who made me, and where do I belong in the impassive cosmos?\nFirst Man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018First Man\u2019 (2018) tells the story of mankind\u2019s boldest adventure through a taciturn hero.\n\n\n\nWhile \u201cApollo 13\u201d is a model of mating fact and fiction in a single feature film, \u201cFirst Man\u201d exemplifies the power of fiction to illuminate the essence of people and events we previously knew only from the outside. The radical notion behind Damien Chazelle\u2019s film, as I wrote in my review, was to tell the story of mankind\u2019s boldest adventure thus far, but tell it through a taciturn, emotionally closed-off hero, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the lunar surface. The casting is ideal\u2014an intensely private actor, Ryan Gosling, playing a tightly focused problem solver who is, before and after everything else, an engineer. Yet the result transcends the nuts, bolts and intrinsic fragility of the great enterprise. It\u2019s about human passion and emotional cost, the price paid by the astronauts\u2019 families and by the space adventurers themselves, living on the edge of failure as they make their uncertain way toward triumph.\nApollo 11\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Apollo 11\u2019 (2019) documents the moon landing with soul-filling images.\n\n\n\nIf satire is what closes on Saturday night, as George S. Kaufman famously said, feature documentaries\u2014even great docs like this one\u2014are what come and go before you\u2019ve had a chance to catch up with them. Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s film was shown\u2014and should be shown again, as often as people will turn out to see it\u2014in IMAX, the only projection format capable of doing justice to the soul-filling images, which were scanned at high resolution from pristine 65mm source material. But how often will that be? Our national commitment to space exploration presently seems to be a sometime thing. One week we\u2019re told that we\u2019ll be going back to the moon, or starting to focus on a mission to Mars; the next week all bets are off. Whatever the future may hold, \u201cApollo 11\u201d documents what we have achieved, and reminds us of how much more we can do if we choose to do it.\nMr. Morgenstern is The Wall Street Journal\u2019s movie critic. He can be reached at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat is your favorite moon movie? Join the conversation below. \n\n\n\n\nApollo 11, 50 Years Later The journey\u2019s impact, and the new race to the moon:\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tComplete coverage at wsj.com/moonlanding A Hidden Hero of Apollo 11: Software Where Did All the Moonshots Go? An Apollo Guidance Computer\u2019s New Life How the Moon Landing Shaped Four Americans\u2019 Lives Here Come the Space Startups Jason Gay on When We Were All Looking Up Together For over a century, filmmakers have been obsessed with lunar voyages. Here are Journal critic Joe Morgenstern\u2019s five favorite journeys. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New Race to the Moon (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2154",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-race-to-the-moon-11563152880?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=70",
        "text": "Internationally, the U.S. finds itself in a race with China, which has pledged to establish a lunar base by 2030. Similarly, at home, rival billionaires \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n owner of Blue Origin LLC, are racing to populate the moon and Mars. In the process, both men simultaneously are forced to vie with the parallel ambitions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The result is more serious debates, activity and funding around moon missions than at any time since the 1960s. The Trump administration, which has made space exploration a policy priority, recently set the goal of returning Americans to the lunar surface in just five years, though President Trump\u2019s personal commitment to the goal is uncertain. \u201cThe pieces are coming together to get back to the moon,\u201d says Mike Hawes, a 33-year NASA veteran and now vice president of human spaceflight programs at Lockheed Martin Corp. Lockheed is a lead contractor on U.S. space projects including the new Orion crew capsule, which Mr. Hawes runs. \u201cWe haven\u2019t been this close\u2014ever,\u201d he says of a return.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s Yutu-2 moon rover, in a photo taken by the country\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe. China has pledged to establish a lunar base by 2030.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n china national space administration/cns/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nNASA over recent months has awarded many contracts to U.S. companies for equipment such as lunar landers and a docking port to orbit the moon. The awards feed into NASA\u2019s planned Artemis missions\u2014named for Apollo\u2019s sister in Greek mythology\u2014to send men and women to the moon starting in 2024.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThese contracts weren\u2019t traditional deals to build modules following government plans. Instead, NASA tasked private bidders with conceiving and even operating equipment. Winners of those bids include Apollo veterans Lockheed and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , newcomers SpaceX and Blue Origin, and several lesser-known startups. \u201cToday, NASA becomes a customer of commercial partners,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in May, announcing awards for robotic landers. Businesses applauded. \u201cWhen there\u2019s alignment between NASA\u2019s vision and our own, as there is when we talk about returning to the moon,\u201d says Blue Origin Chief Executive Bob Smith, \u201cpublic-private partnerships enable both of us to accelerate our plans and do more together than we could separately.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA mock-up of the Blue Moon lunar lander being developed by Blue Origin. The company says one version will be able to take people to the moon by 2024.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nEven so, getting back on the moon won\u2019t be easy. While almost 550 people have reached space since Yuri Gagarin\u2019s launch in 1961, only 24 have orbited the moon\u2014and only a dozen have walked on it. The last one left in 1972. Federal funding today is a fraction of its level during the Apollo era, as is political enthusiasm. \u201cIf going to the moon is not the national priority, there\u2019s a limit to what you can do,\u201d says Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of the space history department of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Still, whether or not space is a national priority, let alone the national priority, it certainly is a business priority. SpaceFund, a venture-capital group financing entrepreneurs with extraterrestrial ambitions, counts 58 private ventures pursuing moon-related opportunities and more than 1,800 space-oriented companies of all sizes. \u201cRight now we have more new startups and fresh blood in the space industry than I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d says Steve Lindsey, a NASA veteran of five Space Shuttle missions, former chief of the NASA Astronaut Office and now vice president of space exploration systems at Sierra Nevada Corp., a privately held contractor involved in orbital and moon projects.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nAll of this commercial activity feeds on itself, and the moon holds enormous additional potential. Some visionaries talk about ice at the moon\u2019s poles, to cite just one example, being converted one day to hydrogen and oxygen to refuel satellites in Earth\u2019s orbit. Long before visions like that become reality, entrepreneurs could cash in on supporting more immediate government operations and ambitions for space, such as President Trump\u2019s plan for a Space Force. Whatever form that takes, analysts say, the U.S. military will undoubtedly expand outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere because China, Russia and other strategic rivals are doing it. The moon offers a prime location for defending both U.S. territory on Earth and American assets in space. The moon remains a high bar for businesses. Space startups have slashed the cost of launching Countries and companies are gearing up to return to the lunar surface, in the most serious push since the 1960s. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Landing Was a \u2018Moment of Hope and Achievement\u2019 (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2155",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moon-landing-was-a-moment-of-hope-and-achievement-11563153322?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=15",
        "text": "Where They Were I grew up in the \u201950s reading science fiction. I wanted to be an astronaut but it was a kid\u2019s dream. I followed the space program with meticulous care. When the moon landing happened, I was 23 and on board a nuclear sub peeking in and out of the Arctic ice cap in the North Sea. We knew about it, but very few details. It wasn\u2019t until I got home a month later that my mom, because she was a mom, saved newspapers and magazines from the event for me. I actually didn\u2019t see a video of it until many years later when a program on space aired on TV. When the lunar module landed I welled up with tears, not realizing how much it meant to me, even years later. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Crosby,\n\n\n\n 73, Portland, Maine\n\n\n\n\nWe were at the Electric Circus on St. Marks Place in New York\u2019s East Village, with scores of hippies primed for the event of a lifetime. The lights were dimmed down to replicate outer space and TV monitors (no jumbo screens yet) were placed in every corner while every song ever written with the word \u201cmoon\u201d in it boomed from the speakers.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsThis article was inspired by Wall Street Journal readers. Continue the discussion below.\n\n\nWe were primed and ready to be thrilled. When the lunar landing capsule touched down, the music stopped and everyone gathered around the monitors to watch. Thrilling, yes. Unforgettable, oh yes. Great memory of mankind stretching far beyond what we imagined was our reach. A moment of hope and achievement. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Loretta Miller,\n\n\n\n 74, Naples, Fla.\n\n\n\n\nI was 24 years old and a journalist on my first major magazine assignment to Europe. I was staying at the Atlantic Hotel in London, where the only television set was in the lobby. A large number of us, with pillows and blankets, camped out there overnight watching the moon landing. It was an event that united all of us, whatever our nationality, with collective wonder and delight. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy McCoy,\n\n\n\n 74, Florence, Az.\n\n\n\n\nI watched the moon landing in my orderly room upon returning from leave at Fort Bragg, N.C., on a portable and very grainy black-and-white television. I stood in awe as I watched \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n walk on the moon and I will never forget it. The moon landing offered a ray of hope that there were a few things right in the world. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Shulman,\n\n\n\n 76, Santa Fe, N.M.\n\n\n\n\nIn May of 1969, my husband and I were thrilled to welcome our second child, a daughter. She was born in Jacksonville, Fla., a city we had moved to the year before. Our son, Thomas, was two years old in 1969.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingMoonshot: How Apollo Launched the Digital RevolutionThe Apollo program to go to the moon marks the only time humans have left our home planet to set foot on another world. The biggest effect of this voyage was transforming the civilization it left behind.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nThe liftoff for the moon shot was 150 miles south of Jacksonville. I couldn\u2019t miss it. In the early morning of July 16, I put baby Dineen in a bassinet in the back seat of our Volkswagen Beetle. Thomas was in the front seat in a child seat. The three of us took off for Cape Kennedy [the official name of Cape Canaveral until 1973], driving south on Interstate 95. As I remember, the drive was uneventful. Somewhere between Daytona Beach and Titusville, I found a parking place on the beach, along with what seemed like the rest of America. Everyone had a transistor radio to listen to the rocket countdown. As the countdown got near to the 60-second mark, I placed my son on the roof of the car and took the baby out of the car. The crowd cheered as the rocket lifted off at 9:32 a.m. The rocket was small and far away but still in our view. Everyone was happy and many were praying for the safety of the astronauts. On my return trip to Jacksonville, I planned to stop and visit a friend in Daytona. That did not happen after I heard a radio report that a million people were on the roads in Florida. Our little Beetle crept home to Jacksonville, to await four days hence, the day and hour that Neil Armstrong would make that first step on the moon, July 20, 1969. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anne Baker,\n\n\n\n Basalt, Colo.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMany who witnessed the moon landing as young people said it inspired them to pursue careers in science and technology.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Illustration: Tammy Lian/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nI was a 20-year-old seaman apprentice in the Navy, stationed at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., studying Russian. On the day of the moon landing, myself and other sailors, sol Wall Street Journal members wrote in to share their memories of the historic Apollo 11 mission that brought astronauts to touch down on the surface of the moon for the first time, with the whole world watching. ",
        "author": "Amber Burton and Xavier Cousens"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Landing Was a \u2018Moment of Hope and Achievement\u2019 (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2156",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moon-landing-was-a-moment-of-hope-and-achievement-11563153322?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=53",
        "text": "Where They Were I grew up in the \u201950s reading science fiction. I wanted to be an astronaut but it was a kid\u2019s dream. I followed the space program with meticulous care. When the moon landing happened, I was 23 and on board a nuclear sub peeking in and out of the Arctic ice cap in the North Sea. We knew about it, but very few details. It wasn\u2019t until I got home a month later that my mom, because she was a mom, saved newspapers and magazines from the event for me. I actually didn\u2019t see a video of it until many years later when a program on space aired on TV. When the lunar module landed I welled up with tears, not realizing how much it meant to me, even years later. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Crosby,\n\n\n\n 73, Portland, Maine\n\n\n\n\nWe were at the Electric Circus on St. Marks Place in New York\u2019s East Village, with scores of hippies primed for the event of a lifetime. The lights were dimmed down to replicate outer space and TV monitors (no jumbo screens yet) were placed in every corner while every song ever written with the word \u201cmoon\u201d in it boomed from the speakers.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsThis article was inspired by Wall Street Journal readers. Continue the discussion below.\n\n\nWe were primed and ready to be thrilled. When the lunar landing capsule touched down, the music stopped and everyone gathered around the monitors to watch. Thrilling, yes. Unforgettable, oh yes. Great memory of mankind stretching far beyond what we imagined was our reach. A moment of hope and achievement. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Loretta Miller,\n\n\n\n 74, Naples, Fla.\n\n\n\n\nI was 24 years old and a journalist on my first major magazine assignment to Europe. I was staying at the Atlantic Hotel in London, where the only television set was in the lobby. A large number of us, with pillows and blankets, camped out there overnight watching the moon landing. It was an event that united all of us, whatever our nationality, with collective wonder and delight. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy McCoy,\n\n\n\n 74, Florence, Az.\n\n\n\n\nI watched the moon landing in my orderly room upon returning from leave at Fort Bragg, N.C., on a portable and very grainy black-and-white television. I stood in awe as I watched \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n walk on the moon and I will never forget it. The moon landing offered a ray of hope that there were a few things right in the world. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Shulman,\n\n\n\n 76, Santa Fe, N.M.\n\n\n\n\nIn May of 1969, my husband and I were thrilled to welcome our second child, a daughter. She was born in Jacksonville, Fla., a city we had moved to the year before. Our son, Thomas, was two years old in 1969.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingMoonshot: How Apollo Launched the Digital RevolutionThe Apollo program to go to the moon marks the only time humans have left our home planet to set foot on another world. The biggest effect of this voyage was transforming the civilization it left behind.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nThe liftoff for the moon shot was 150 miles south of Jacksonville. I couldn\u2019t miss it. In the early morning of July 16, I put baby Dineen in a bassinet in the back seat of our Volkswagen Beetle. Thomas was in the front seat in a child seat. The three of us took off for Cape Kennedy [the official name of Cape Canaveral until 1973], driving south on Interstate 95. As I remember, the drive was uneventful. Somewhere between Daytona Beach and Titusville, I found a parking place on the beach, along with what seemed like the rest of America. Everyone had a transistor radio to listen to the rocket countdown. As the countdown got near to the 60-second mark, I placed my son on the roof of the car and took the baby out of the car. The crowd cheered as the rocket lifted off at 9:32 a.m. The rocket was small and far away but still in our view. Everyone was happy and many were praying for the safety of the astronauts. On my return trip to Jacksonville, I planned to stop and visit a friend in Daytona. That did not happen after I heard a radio report that a million people were on the roads in Florida. Our little Beetle crept home to Jacksonville, to await four days hence, the day and hour that Neil Armstrong would make that first step on the moon, July 20, 1969. \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anne Baker,\n\n\n\n Basalt, Colo.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMany who witnessed the moon landing as young people said it inspired them to pursue careers in science and technology.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Illustration: Tammy Lian/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nI was a 20-year-old seaman apprentice in the Navy, stationed at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., studying Russian. On the day of the moon landing, myself and other sailors, sol Wall Street Journal members wrote in to share their memories of the historic Apollo 11 mission that brought astronauts to touch down on the surface of the moon for the first time, with the whole world watching. ",
        "author": "Amber Burton and Xavier Cousens"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Is a Huge Potential Resource. But Who Owns It? (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2157",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moon-is-a-huge-potential-resource-but-who-owns-it-11563152580?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=56",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nThe technical challenges are sure to be many. But just as intimidating is the barren legal landscape confronting all who would try to do business on the moon. No one knows for certain whether such ventures are even permitted, let alone how competing companies should go about securing and enforcing mining rights. At the moment, lunar mining would be governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, entered into by the U.S. and more than 100 other countries. That treaty said countries are free to explore the moon and other celestial bodies. But the treaty also said that outer space \u201cis not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.\u201d The U.S. complicated the issue in 2015 when it enacted the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, a bipartisan bill that authorized the extraction of \u201cspace resources\u201d\u2014at least under U.S. law. The law gives U.S. citizens engaged in space mining the right to \u201cpossess, own, transport, use and sell\u201d resources extracted from the moon or asteroids.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe. China may be a wild card in space mining.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CNSA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe U.S. government has taken the position that the 2015 statute doesn\u2019t conflict with its treaty obligations. \u201cThe Outer Space Treaty does shape the manner in which space utilization activities may be conducted,\u201d a State Department legal adviser asserted at a symposium on space law in 2016 in Washington. But, the adviser continued, the treaty \u201cdoes not preclude private ownership of resources extracted from a celestial body.\u201d International governments are at odds over whether the 1967 Outer Space Treaty allows for private ownership of water and other resources harvested from the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cReally what we have is almost a fog of war about this,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Newman,\n\n\n\n a space-law professor at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. \u201cWe don\u2019t quite know what mining is going to look like on the moon.\u201d At the forefront of the new space race are the U.S., China, the United Arab Emirates and Japan. The U.A.E. and Luxembourg have each enacted laws similar to the U.S. law, approving private mining, in theory, on the moon. Luxembourg is also positioning itself as a kind of Delaware-like corporate home for space businesses. China, meanwhile, has emerged as a bit of a wild card. In official pronouncements, Beijing has said the fruits of space mining should be equitably shared. China is thinking long-term, and big, about the future of asteroid mining and space manufacturing and views a lunar presence as key to its goals. China\u2019s plans, however, could directly result in state-owned enterprises scooping up lunar resources\u2014and that could pose a conflict with the 1967 treaty and its ban on national appropriation, according to \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Listner,\n\n\n\n a space-law consultant and lawyer in Rochester, N.H. Russia, for its part, has questioned the legality of the 2015 U.S. law. President Obama, by signing it, showed a \u201ctotal disrespect for international law,\u201d Moscow asserted in a formal policy statement to the United Nations in 2016. Russia wants the U.N. to take charge of setting the rules. Such a multilateral approach would stand in contrast to Russia\u2019s more muscular maneuvering around Arctic offshore oil and gas reserves. U.S. Secretary of State \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo,\n\n\n\n for example, says Russia has staked a claim to international waters in the Northern Sea Route and boosted its military presence in the Arctic. But, unlike on planet Earth, Russia is trailing in the space-mining market, and its sluggish economic growth could make it hard to catch up. Many experts believe Russia is trying to be a thorn in space-mining efforts by the U.S. and China as a way to gain leverage in other areas. Greece and Belgium, too, have pushed back against the U.S. law. Resistance could also come from the more than 15 countries\u2014including France, India, Turkey, Brazil and Australia\u2014that in 1979 ratified or acceded to the international treaty known as the Moon Agreement, a treaty that the U.S. has not signed. The Moon Agreement is the flip side of the 2015 U.S. statute, with aims that are explicitly redistributive and globalist. It prohibits commercial exploitation of lunar resources, declaring the moon a \u201ccommon heritage of mankind,\u201d the same way international law treats the deep seabed. Another plan has been floated by an industry-friendly consortium of scientists, legal thinkers, space regulators and private ventures that meets in The Hague. The group released a draft report recommending that the U.N. adopt a legal framework allowing for private mining ventures. The report opposes forcing countries with mining operations to redistribute their lunar wealth t The battle over the legality of lunar mining promises to be difficult to solve. ",
        "author": "Jacob Gershman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Is a Huge Potential Resource. But Who Owns It? (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2158",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moon-is-a-huge-potential-resource-but-who-owns-it-11563152580?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=54",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nThe technical challenges are sure to be many. But just as intimidating is the barren legal landscape confronting all who would try to do business on the moon. No one knows for certain whether such ventures are even permitted, let alone how competing companies should go about securing and enforcing mining rights. At the moment, lunar mining would be governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, entered into by the U.S. and more than 100 other countries. That treaty said countries are free to explore the moon and other celestial bodies. But the treaty also said that outer space \u201cis not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.\u201d The U.S. complicated the issue in 2015 when it enacted the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, a bipartisan bill that authorized the extraction of \u201cspace resources\u201d\u2014at least under U.S. law. The law gives U.S. citizens engaged in space mining the right to \u201cpossess, own, transport, use and sell\u201d resources extracted from the moon or asteroids.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe. China may be a wild card in space mining.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CNSA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe U.S. government has taken the position that the 2015 statute doesn\u2019t conflict with its treaty obligations. \u201cThe Outer Space Treaty does shape the manner in which space utilization activities may be conducted,\u201d a State Department legal adviser asserted at a symposium on space law in 2016 in Washington. But, the adviser continued, the treaty \u201cdoes not preclude private ownership of resources extracted from a celestial body.\u201d International governments are at odds over whether the 1967 Outer Space Treaty allows for private ownership of water and other resources harvested from the moon.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingMoonshot: How Apollo Launched the Digital RevolutionThe Apollo program to go to the moon marks the only time humans have left our home planet to set foot on another world. The biggest effect of this voyage was transforming the civilization it left behind.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\n\u201cReally what we have is almost a fog of war about this,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Newman,\n\n\n\n a space-law professor at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. \u201cWe don\u2019t quite know what mining is going to look like on the moon.\u201d At the forefront of the new space race are the U.S., China, the United Arab Emirates and Japan. The U.A.E. and Luxembourg have each enacted laws similar to the U.S. law, approving private mining, in theory, on the moon. Luxembourg is also positioning itself as a kind of Delaware-like corporate home for space businesses. China, meanwhile, has emerged as a bit of a wild card. In official pronouncements, Beijing has said the fruits of space mining should be equitably shared. China is thinking long-term, and big, about the future of asteroid mining and space manufacturing and views a lunar presence as key to its goals. China\u2019s plans, however, could directly result in state-owned enterprises scooping up lunar resources\u2014and that could pose a conflict with the 1967 treaty and its ban on national appropriation, according to \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Listner,\n\n\n\n a space-law consultant and lawyer in Rochester, N.H. Russia, for its part, has questioned the legality of the 2015 U.S. law. President Obama, by signing it, showed a \u201ctotal disrespect for international law,\u201d Moscow asserted in a formal policy statement to the United Nations in 2016. Russia wants the U.N. to take charge of setting the rules. Such a multilateral approach would stand in contrast to Russia\u2019s more muscular maneuvering around Arctic offshore oil and gas reserves. U.S. Secretary of State \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo,\n\n\n\n for example, says Russia has staked a claim to international waters in the Northern Sea Route and boosted its military presence in the Arctic. But, unlike on planet Earth, Russia is trailing in the space-mining market, and its sluggish economic growth could make it hard to catch up. Many experts believe Russia is trying to be a thorn in space-mining efforts by the U.S. and China as a way to gain leverage in other areas. Greece and Belgium, too, have pushed back against the U.S. law. Resistance could also come from the more than 15 countries\u2014including France, India, Turkey, Brazil and Australia\u2014that in 1979 ratified or acceded to the international treaty known as the Moon Agreement, a treaty that the U.S. has not signed. The Moon Agreement is the flip side of the 2015 U.S. statute, with aims that are explicitly redistributive and globalist. It prohibits commercial exploitation of lunar resources, declaring the moon a \u201ccommon heritage of mankind,\u201d The battle over the legality of lunar mining promises to be difficult to solve. ",
        "author": "Jacob Gershman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Is a Huge Potential Resource. But Who Owns It? (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2159",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-moon-is-a-huge-potential-resource-but-who-owns-it-11563152580?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=70",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nThe technical challenges are sure to be many. But just as intimidating is the barren legal landscape confronting all who would try to do business on the moon. No one knows for certain whether such ventures are even permitted, let alone how competing companies should go about securing and enforcing mining rights. At the moment, lunar mining would be governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, entered into by the U.S. and more than 100 other countries. That treaty said countries are free to explore the moon and other celestial bodies. But the treaty also said that outer space \u201cis not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.\u201d The U.S. complicated the issue in 2015 when it enacted the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, a bipartisan bill that authorized the extraction of \u201cspace resources\u201d\u2014at least under U.S. law. The law gives U.S. citizens engaged in space mining the right to \u201cpossess, own, transport, use and sell\u201d resources extracted from the moon or asteroids.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe. China may be a wild card in space mining.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CNSA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe U.S. government has taken the position that the 2015 statute doesn\u2019t conflict with its treaty obligations. \u201cThe Outer Space Treaty does shape the manner in which space utilization activities may be conducted,\u201d a State Department legal adviser asserted at a symposium on space law in 2016 in Washington. But, the adviser continued, the treaty \u201cdoes not preclude private ownership of resources extracted from a celestial body.\u201d International governments are at odds over whether the 1967 Outer Space Treaty allows for private ownership of water and other resources harvested from the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cReally what we have is almost a fog of war about this,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Newman,\n\n\n\n a space-law professor at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. \u201cWe don\u2019t quite know what mining is going to look like on the moon.\u201d At the forefront of the new space race are the U.S., China, the United Arab Emirates and Japan. The U.A.E. and Luxembourg have each enacted laws similar to the U.S. law, approving private mining, in theory, on the moon. Luxembourg is also positioning itself as a kind of Delaware-like corporate home for space businesses. China, meanwhile, has emerged as a bit of a wild card. In official pronouncements, Beijing has said the fruits of space mining should be equitably shared. China is thinking long-term, and big, about the future of asteroid mining and space manufacturing and views a lunar presence as key to its goals. China\u2019s plans, however, could directly result in state-owned enterprises scooping up lunar resources\u2014and that could pose a conflict with the 1967 treaty and its ban on national appropriation, according to \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Listner,\n\n\n\n a space-law consultant and lawyer in Rochester, N.H. Russia, for its part, has questioned the legality of the 2015 U.S. law. President Obama, by signing it, showed a \u201ctotal disrespect for international law,\u201d Moscow asserted in a formal policy statement to the United Nations in 2016. Russia wants the U.N. to take charge of setting the rules. Such a multilateral approach would stand in contrast to Russia\u2019s more muscular maneuvering around Arctic offshore oil and gas reserves. U.S. Secretary of State \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo,\n\n\n\n for example, says Russia has staked a claim to international waters in the Northern Sea Route and boosted its military presence in the Arctic. But, unlike on planet Earth, Russia is trailing in the space-mining market, and its sluggish economic growth could make it hard to catch up. Many experts believe Russia is trying to be a thorn in space-mining efforts by the U.S. and China as a way to gain leverage in other areas. Greece and Belgium, too, have pushed back against the U.S. law. Resistance could also come from the more than 15 countries\u2014including France, India, Turkey, Brazil and Australia\u2014that in 1979 ratified or acceded to the international treaty known as the Moon Agreement, a treaty that the U.S. has not signed. The Moon Agreement is the flip side of the 2015 U.S. statute, with aims that are explicitly redistributive and globalist. It prohibits commercial exploitation of lunar resources, declaring the moon a \u201ccommon heritage of mankind,\u201d the same way international law treats the deep seabed. Another plan has been floated by an industry-friendly consortium of scientists, legal thinkers, space regulators and private ventures that meets in The Hague. The group released a draft report recommending that the U.N. adopt a legal framework allowing for private mining ventures. The report opposes forcing countries with mining operations to redistribute their lunar wealth t The battle over the legality of lunar mining promises to be difficult to solve. ",
        "author": "Jacob Gershman"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the U.S. Prepares to Return to the Moon, Startups Climb on Board (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2160",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startups-see-big-payouts-in-new-push-to-the-moon-11563153990?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=53",
        "text": "Indeed, startups are carving out crucial roles in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s renewed quest to land on\u2014and eventually colonize\u2014the moon, taking on projects from delivering equipment to the surface, to hunting down lunar ice that can be transformed into breathable air and rocket fuel, to 3-D printing huts on the moon. The Trump administration has laid out an ambitious timeline for NASA\u2019s so-called Artemis program: land astronauts on the moon by 2024 and establish a \u201csustained human presence\u201d there by 2028. For space entrepreneurs long obsessed with colonizing the moon, the renewed lunar focus is a godsend. In May, NASA unveiled a request for a $1.6 billion 2020 budget increase to accelerate human exploration of the moon and to expand commercial partnerships.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nStill, venture capital may not be as forthcoming, and for many of these startups, the ability to make moon colonization a sustainable business remains a question mark.Water and dust New discovery of water on the moon\u2019s poles in 2009 tantalized entrepreneurs. The availability of hydrogen and oxygen, the two molecules that make up water, means that hydrogen-based fuel and breathable air can be created on the moon, at least theoretically. This is in large part behind the initial contracts NASA is doling out to startups. In May, NASA awarded contracts to three startups\u2014Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology Inc., Houston-based Intuitive Machines and Edison, N.J.-based Orbit Beyond\u2014to touch down lunar landers carrying research payloads at scientifically intriguing spots across the moon, starting as early as next year. The payloads include research equipment to prospect for ice and to perfect moon landing technique.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAI SpaceFactory won a NASA competition for designing homes that could be used on the moon or Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AI SpaceFactory/Plomp\n \n\n\n\nEarlier this month, Astrobotic was awarded another contract\u2014$5.6 million to build and deliver a four-wheel, breadbox-size rover to the moon. Astrobotic is developing the rover, called MoonRanger, along with Carnegie Mellon University. It will have various missions, such as making 3-D maps of the moon\u2019s surface that could help inform where ice can be found. As NASA announces new payloads, an array of startups are vying for roles in the moon project.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor example, Lunar Outpost, based in Golden, Colo., is building rovers the size of small dogs it hopes to deploy on the moon\u2019s surface to prospect for ice and other resource deposits. The rovers are equipped with a 6-inch-long drill and a spectrometer to gauge the composition of the moon\u2019s surface, according to Chief Operating Officer \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julian Cyrus.\n\n\n\n Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. is considering ways to extract moon ice. One idea is to use mirrors to shine light into permanently shadowed craters that hold ice, a process being developed by the Colorado School of Mines. Greenhouse-style structures could help warm the ice and capture it as it evaporates, says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carlos Espejel,\n\n\n\n an Ispace mining engineer. Oxeon Energy, a startup based in North Salt Lake, Utah, is working on the chemical process of converting moon ice into breathable oxygen and rocket fuel. Other startups are focused on moon dust. Some, such as Vienna-based Lithoz, want to use it to 3-D print building material on the moon. But the razor-sharp dust particles are dangerous to breathe and complicate traditional engineering. \u201cMoon dust is some of the nastiest stuff in the solar system,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Goff,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Altius Space Machines Inc., a startup based in Broomfield, Colo. That\u2019s an opportunity for Altius. The startup is building a dust-tolerant tool changer that goes on the end of robot arms. It has no exposed moving parts for moon dust to clog and can swap out a variety of tools, such as drills and shovels. Altius has been awarded nearly $2 million for its tool changer and other space technology as part of NASA\u2019s small-business innovation research program. Looking ahead to housing, New York-based AI SpaceFactory is designing planetary homes. In May, the startup won first place and $500,000 in NASA\u2019s 3-D-Printed Habitat Challenge. The company programmed a computer to construct a 15-foot-tall egg-shaped structure using materials mostly found on the moon and Mars. It is a scaled-down model of a 45-foot-tall structure that could house four people.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLunar Outpost hopes to deploy rovers on the moon to search for ice and other resources.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lunar Outpost\n \n\n\n\nLeery investors Startup founders and boutique space investors maintain the moon will host a booming economy of its own one day that will pay for early investments many times over. But mains Entrepreneurs see big potential payouts in the U.S. plan to land astronauts on the moon by 2024. ",
        "author": "Marc Vartabedian"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the U.S. Prepares to Return to the Moon, Startups Climb on Board (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2161",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startups-see-big-payouts-in-new-push-to-the-moon-11563153990?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=69",
        "text": "Indeed, startups are carving out crucial roles in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s renewed quest to land on\u2014and eventually colonize\u2014the moon, taking on projects from delivering equipment to the surface, to hunting down lunar ice that can be transformed into breathable air and rocket fuel, to 3-D printing huts on the moon. The Trump administration has laid out an ambitious timeline for NASA\u2019s so-called Artemis program: land astronauts on the moon by 2024 and establish a \u201csustained human presence\u201d there by 2028. For space entrepreneurs long obsessed with colonizing the moon, the renewed lunar focus is a godsend. In May, NASA unveiled a request for a $1.6 billion 2020 budget increase to accelerate human exploration of the moon and to expand commercial partnerships.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nStill, venture capital may not be as forthcoming, and for many of these startups, the ability to make moon colonization a sustainable business remains a question mark.Water and dust New discovery of water on the moon\u2019s poles in 2009 tantalized entrepreneurs. The availability of hydrogen and oxygen, the two molecules that make up water, means that hydrogen-based fuel and breathable air can be created on the moon, at least theoretically. This is in large part behind the initial contracts NASA is doling out to startups. In May, NASA awarded contracts to three startups\u2014Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology Inc., Houston-based Intuitive Machines and Edison, N.J.-based Orbit Beyond\u2014to touch down lunar landers carrying research payloads at scientifically intriguing spots across the moon, starting as early as next year. The payloads include research equipment to prospect for ice and to perfect moon landing technique.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAI SpaceFactory won a NASA competition for designing homes that could be used on the moon or Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AI SpaceFactory/Plomp\n \n\n\n\nEarlier this month, Astrobotic was awarded another contract\u2014$5.6 million to build and deliver a four-wheel, breadbox-size rover to the moon. Astrobotic is developing the rover, called MoonRanger, along with Carnegie Mellon University. It will have various missions, such as making 3-D maps of the moon\u2019s surface that could help inform where ice can be found. As NASA announces new payloads, an array of startups are vying for roles in the moon project.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor example, Lunar Outpost, based in Golden, Colo., is building rovers the size of small dogs it hopes to deploy on the moon\u2019s surface to prospect for ice and other resource deposits. The rovers are equipped with a 6-inch-long drill and a spectrometer to gauge the composition of the moon\u2019s surface, according to Chief Operating Officer \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julian Cyrus.\n\n\n\n Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. is considering ways to extract moon ice. One idea is to use mirrors to shine light into permanently shadowed craters that hold ice, a process being developed by the Colorado School of Mines. Greenhouse-style structures could help warm the ice and capture it as it evaporates, says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carlos Espejel,\n\n\n\n an Ispace mining engineer. Oxeon Energy, a startup based in North Salt Lake, Utah, is working on the chemical process of converting moon ice into breathable oxygen and rocket fuel. Other startups are focused on moon dust. Some, such as Vienna-based Lithoz, want to use it to 3-D print building material on the moon. But the razor-sharp dust particles are dangerous to breathe and complicate traditional engineering. \u201cMoon dust is some of the nastiest stuff in the solar system,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Goff,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Altius Space Machines Inc., a startup based in Broomfield, Colo. That\u2019s an opportunity for Altius. The startup is building a dust-tolerant tool changer that goes on the end of robot arms. It has no exposed moving parts for moon dust to clog and can swap out a variety of tools, such as drills and shovels. Altius has been awarded nearly $2 million for its tool changer and other space technology as part of NASA\u2019s small-business innovation research program. Looking ahead to housing, New York-based AI SpaceFactory is designing planetary homes. In May, the startup won first place and $500,000 in NASA\u2019s 3-D-Printed Habitat Challenge. The company programmed a computer to construct a 15-foot-tall egg-shaped structure using materials mostly found on the moon and Mars. It is a scaled-down model of a 45-foot-tall structure that could house four people.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLunar Outpost hopes to deploy rovers on the moon to search for ice and other resources.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lunar Outpost\n \n\n\n\nLeery investors Startup founders and boutique space investors maintain the moon will host a booming economy of its own one day that will pay for early investments many times over. But mains Entrepreneurs see big potential payouts in the U.S. plan to land astronauts on the moon by 2024. ",
        "author": "Marc Vartabedian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Uranus has a familiar odor, scientists say, and Earthlings wouldn\u2019t like it (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2162",
        "date": "2018-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/04/24/uranus-has-a-familiar-odor-scientists-say-and-earthlings-wouldnt-like-it/",
        "text": "Uranus\u00a0stinks, and there\u2019s scientific proof.Researchers confirmed Monday that the seventh planet from the sun has an upper atmosphere full of one of the smelliest chemicals known to humans, hydrogen sulfide, according to a study\u00a0published\u00a0by Nature Astronomy.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe malodorous gas is what gives rotten eggs \u2014 and human flatulence \u2014 that distinctive and unpleasant stench. According to\u00a0the Environmental Protection Agency,\u00a0people\u00a0can smell the gas when it makes up as little as three out of every billion molecules in the air, so imagine what\u00a0being surrounded by clouds of the stuff. \u201cIf an unfortunate human were ever to descend through Uranus\u2019s clouds, they would be met with very unpleasant and odiferous conditions,\u201d Patrick Irwin, a physicist at the University of Oxford who led the study, said in a statement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists discovered evidence of \u201cthe noxious gas swirling high in the giant planet\u2019s cloud tops\u201d after observing how sunlight bounced off Uranus\u2019s atmosphere, according\u00a0to a\u00a0news release\u00a0from the Gemini Observatory, a\u00a0high-power telescope located on top of Hawaii\u2019s Mauna Kea volcano.The new findings come after decades of observations and even a visit by the Voyager 2 spacecraft to the blue-green ice giant, the release said.\u00a0Before making the discovery, scientists had long inferred hydrogen sulfide existed in the planet\u2019s atmosphere but never \u201cconclusively detected\u201d the gas before, according to Science News.Using\u00a0a 26-foot Gemini North telescope,\u00a0the team of scientists\u00a0studied the reflected sunlight in infrared and determined what types of molecules made up the planet\u2019s atmosphere, the release said. While evidence of the molecular compounds was \u201cbarely there,\u201d Irwin said scientists were still\u00a0\u201cable to detect them unambiguously,\u201d given the sensitivity of their instruments and the \u201cexquisite conditions\u201d on Mauna Kea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUranus\u2019s atmospheric composition was difficult to\u00a0ascertain because, when a cloud deck forms by condensation, it hides the gas responsible for forming the clouds beneath levels that can usually be seen with telescopes,\u00a0Leigh Fletcher, a member of the research team, said in the news release.\u201cOnly a tiny amount remains above the clouds as a saturated vapor,\u201d said Fletcher, who is a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester in Britain. \u201cThe superior capabilities of Gemini finally gave us that lucky break.\u201dAside from lending credence to Uranus jokes, the hydrogen sulfide discovery sheds light (or maybe odor) on how planets\u00a0and the solar system formed, the release said.Story continues below advertisementBeing able to confirm the\u00a0composition information is \u201cinvaluable in understanding Uranus\u2019 birthplace, evolution and refining models of planetary migrations,\u201d the release said.AdvertisementKnowing\u00a0what makes up distant planets, such as Uranus, could help scientists determine where in the solar system the planets first formed and how far they moved from the sun over time, Business Insider reported.Glenn Orton, a co-author of the new study and a planetary scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told\u00a0Business Insider\u00a0the new research points to \u201cevidence of a big shake-up early on in the solar system\u2019s formation.\u201d\u201cThere was definitely a migration taking place,\u201d Orton said.Story continues below advertisementWhile the planet\u2019s stench may be more than enough to repel most from wanting to visit, Orton said researchers are working on a proposal for a new Uranus spacecraft, which they hope will help them learn more about where the outer planets formed and how the solar system came to be.Hopefully, the proposed spacecraft\u00a0will be unmanned like its predecessor, Voyager 2, because Orton said the probe will be expected to plunge through Uranus\u2019s pungent clouds.More from Morning Mix:NRA supporters are blowing up Yeti coolers. Yeti says it\u2019s all a big mistake.Waffle House: America\u2019s all-night stage A new study confirms that Uranus's atmosphere is made up of hydrogen sulfide gas. Uranus has a familiar odor, scientists say, and Earthlings wouldn\u2019t like it",
        "author": "Allyson Chiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tom DeLonge defined pop-punk with Blink-182. He left stardom behind to study aliens. (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2163",
        "date": "2017-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/31/tom-delonge-defined-pop-punk-with-blink-182-he-left-stardom-behind-to-study-aliens/",
        "text": "Of all the pop-punk bands to emerge in the 1990s, few achieved success like Blink-182. Massive hits like \u201cWhat\u2019s My Age Again?\u201d and \u201cAll the Small Things\u201d fueled its\u00a0distinct brand of\u00a0cheery-cum-snotty adolescence. By October 2001, the band could draw\u00a015,000 eager fans to\u00a0Maryland\u2019s\u00a0Merriweather Post Pavilion. There\u00a0the crowd watched as Blink-182, then\u00a0composed of Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge, performed in\u00a0front of a giant\u00a0four-letter word set ablaze. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut all flaming swear signs must burn out. The band went on hiatus\u00a0between 2005 and 2009. In 2015,\u00a0four years after the New York Times declared that, \u201cno punk band of the 1990s has been more influential than Blink-182,\u201d guitarist and vocalist DeLonge walked away. Hoppus and Barker, in a statement\u00a0to Rolling Stone,\u00a0said that DeLonge\u00a0had left Blink-182 \u201cindefinitely.\u201d The band continued without him.A different kind of stardom \u2014 space, and the aliens who lived there\u00a0\u2014 seduced DeLonge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow\u00a041, DeLonge has found\u00a0success in his post-punk pursuit. In February, the Arizona-based\u00a0International UFO Congress, which each year holds the largest convention\u00a0of UFO investigators\u00a0in the world,\u00a0awarded DeLonge its\u00a0UFO researcher of the year award. In March, DeLonge published a book, \u201cSekret Machines: Gods, Man, & War,\u201d with occult historian Peter Levenda. The book, DeLonge said, marked the first nonfiction entry in a sweeping project that\u00a0includes science-fiction novels, concept albums and movies.All of those works are related, in one way or another, to a subject DeLonge calls \u201cthe Phenomenon.\u201dMore than 20 years of research and reflection led to the new book. DeLonge\u2019s perspective turned to the heavens in early adolescence, he told The Washington Post in a recent phone interview, after witnessing the\u00a0conflict between his mother, a devout Christian, and his father, who was \u201cnot religious at all.\u201d\u00a0He began to wonder if something sinister was at work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI realized early on there was something odd with the human life experience,\u201d DeLonge said. \u201cThere\u2019s all these wars. I had a really difficult, broken family. I got kicked out of high school.\u201dDeLonge\u2019s phenomenon is a grand unified theory of extraterrestrial encounters. It encompasses virtually all aspects of human culture, including religion, technology, media and science. \u201cIt is the UFO phenomenon, to be sure, but that is a box too small to contain it in all its glory,\u201d DeLonge and Levenda wrote in their new book, \u201cas no two experts can agree on what it is.\u201d In \u201cSekret Machines,\u201d a metaphor for the phenomenon\u00a0emerges: the human\u00a0experience as\u00a0cargo cult. During World War II, indigenous tribes in the South Pacific, who rarely interacted with outsiders, observed\u00a0planes airdropping food and medicine. \u201cTo this day there are religions based on worshiping those planes,\u201d DeLonge said, \u201cbecause they did not know what they were.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is no question that cargo cults have existed on our planet. One\u00a0group of villagers in the\u00a0Vanuatu islands honor a holy savior named\u00a0John Frum, the spirit\u00a0of an American who lives in a nearby volcano.\u00a0(It has been speculated that\u00a0the name John Frum came from World War II soldiers who greeted the villagers, saying, \u201cI\u2019m\u00a0John from America.\u201d)\u201cJohn promised he\u2019ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,\u201d one\u00a0village elder told a\u00a0Smithsonian magazine\u00a0reporter who visited the island\u00a0in 2006.\u00a0\u201cRadios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.\u201dSimilar events happened on an interplanetary scale, DeLonge said. \u201cWhether it is\u00a0Joseph Smith meeting an angel and forming the Mormon religion, or it\u2019s the star of Bethlehem or light hovering over a manger,\u201d he said, \u201cwhat happens is, is people see these things and they create religions off of them. We wanted to say, \u2018Well, hey, we are all some form of a cargo cult.\u2019 The question is, why?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDeLonge\u2019s book will not convince any skeptics about the reality of aliens. Sufficient evidence already exists, DeLonge told The Post, citing\u00a0the scale of the universe.\u00a0\u201cThere are trillions of galaxies,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s trillions of planets within each galaxy, and people go, \u2018Are we alone?\u2019 \u201d DeLonge dismissed his own question with\u00a0a word Blink-182 once set on fire.He also had little time for those who doubt\u00a0whether aliens had visited Earth. \u201cIt\u2019s all out there already,\u201d DeLonge said. \u201cIt\u2019s so frustrating when people say they\u2019re waiting for some big person to say something. Well, there\u2019s been a hundred books, national press events in D.C., meetings in Congress and multi-star generals on the record.\u201dThere is no evidence of contact between aliens and humans, according to scientific consensus. \u201cAt the moment, life on Earth is the only known life in the universe, but there are compelling arguments to suggest we are not alone,\u201d astrophysicist\u00a0Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote\u00a0in 2003.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Bill Clinton was president, he denied that the White House had proof of aliens. \u201cNo, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947,\u201d Clinton said\u00a0during a 1995 speech while in Ireland, responding to a letter sent by Ryan, a 13-year-old resident of Belfast. \u201cAnd Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn\u2019t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.\u201d(As recently as Monday, scientists publicly dismissed the idea. \u201cI do not believe that anyone from outer space has ever visited the Earth,\u201d said Alan Bean, 85, the fourth person to\u00a0walk on the Moon, to\u00a0an Australian newspaper.)In his search for information, DeLonge said he made his way into upper echelons of the American government.\u00a0In October, the Wall Street Journal reported\u00a0that DeLonge corresponded with John Podesta, the chair for Hillary Clinton\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign, according to emails WikiLeaks had released; Podesta, for his part, has frequently advocated\u00a0for the United States to declassify any information regarding Area 51 or other UFO incidents.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took DeLonge a\u00a0year, but he managed to set up \u201cvery high level meetings\u201d with members of the Defense Department, he said.\u00a0\u201cAnd I\u00a0got to the people that are in charge of this stuff.\u201d\u00a0He\u00a0declined to confirm to The Washington Post whether he had met with Podesta\u00a0or any specific government officials. \u201cI can\u2019t comment on who I met with,\u201d he said, \u201cor what those meetings were about.\u201dA Defense Department spokesman said in an email to The Washington Post that neither the Defense Department\u2019s\u00a0Community Relations nor the Air Force\u00a0had\u00a0records of such a meeting. The spokesman \u201cdid see one open source story that named generals who supposedly worked with Mr. DeLonge.\u201d Both of the generals\u00a0mentioned had retired, the representative said, the first in October 2013 and the other in June of 2014.Several scientists involved in\u00a0the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, are optimistic that any alien\u00a0life advanced enough to happen upon Earth would also be benevolent. \u201cI doubt aliens would drop what they\u2019re doing to come over here and wipe out Clapham Junction \u2014 why would they do that?\u201d\u00a0Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at\u00a0the SETI Institute in California, told the Guardian in July. \u201cThey probably have what we have at home \u2014 except for our culture, maybe they are big Cliff Richard fans or like our reality television.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut DeLonge\u2019s air of secrecy \u2014 and the government\u2019s \u2014 stemmed from the danger that alien contact posed, the former Blink-182 guitarist said.\u00a0It was a pessimistic view of alien intelligence, a fear\u00a0shared by physicist Stephen Hawking\u00a0(though Hawking\u00a0still supports SETI initiatives such as Breakthrough Listen). DeLonge had been \u201cbriefed on things\u201d that caused him to lose sleep \u201cfor multiple days on end,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cBecause it really, really threw me down the stairs.\u201dDeLonge\u2019s view was not completely dour, however. Far from it. He said that\u00a0exposing the phenomenon as a malevolent extraterrestrial influence would persuade humans around the world to\u00a0cooperate. He\u00a0likened current global conflicts to someone incorrectly fighting a fire. \u201cWhen I was in high school, I wanted to be a firefighter. I learned that you spray the base of the flame. You squirt water on the fuel, not the flame itself,\u201d DeLonge\u00a0said. \u00a0\u201cI feel that lot of the fighting taking place across the world, when we drop bombs \u2014 that\u2019s spraying on the flames. The fuel of all these wars are our belief systems.\u00a0And the sooner we attack that,\u201d he said, \u201cthat we\u2019ve been duped about our belief systems, maybe we\u2019ll start to realize we\u2019re much more connected.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio burstsScientists aim largest telescope possible at \u2018alien megastructure\u2019 starA new reason we haven\u2019t found alien life in the universe \"There are trillions of galaxies,\u201d the former Blink-182 guitarist said. \u201cThere\u2019s trillions of planets within each galaxy, and people go, 'Are we alone?' \u201d No way, he answered. Tom DeLonge defined pop-punk with Blink-182. He left stardom behind to study aliens.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Today was a rough day for the ice disk\u2019: A mysterious Maine phenomenon weathers a chain saw attack (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2164",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/25/today-was-rough-day-ice-disk-mysterious-maine-phenomenon-weathers-chain-saw-attack/",
        "text": "In 2016, two police officers in Westbrook, Maine, reported seeing a 10-foot-long snake devouring a beaver on the banks of the Presumpscot River. The purported sighting of a real-life river monster was the most-talked about event in years \u2014 that is, until last week, when the Portland Press Herald announced that another uncanny natural phenomenon had captivated the city of nearly 19,000. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA whirling, perfectly rounded ice floe that resembled the surface of the moon had formed in the river, leading residents to jokingly suggest that an alien invasion might be underway. The frozen orb was roughly 300 feet wide, city officials estimated, making it appear to dwarf a nearby parking garage. Naturally, international celebrity followed, and people from all over the Northeast began driving to Westbrook to see it for themselves.But the ice disk\u2019s days may be numbered. On Thursday, temperatures in Westbrook hit a high of 50 degrees, and the top layer of the ice began to look decidedly slushy. An inch and a half of rain didn\u2019t help, and neither did the man from New Jersey who showed up with a chain saw and an ax and started hacking away at the disk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m making a giant peace sign out of this,\u201d Christopher Angelo, 44, told WGME. \u201cI want it to spin around so bad and create that visual for the world to see, of peace making the world go around right here in Westbrook.\u201dThe disk had already stopped spinning earlier in the week, and by late Thursday night, its future looked uncertain.\u201cToday was a rough day for the ice disk,\u201d the city of Westbrook wrote on Facebook. \u201cIt was hit by warm temperatures, heavy rains, and an out of state visitor who used tools to cut chunks out of it and carve a line across the middle. We discourage anyone from attempting to go out on the ice. It is not safe and the public is enjoying it [intact.] We hope the ice disk can rebound.\u201dHere's what 50\u00ba and heavy rain did to the #icedisk today.Is nothing sacred anymore? Let's not walk on it please...never mind carve it with a saw. pic.twitter.com/7QK0WLNPl0\u2014 Ryan Breton (@RyanBretonWX) January 24, 2019\n\nFrosty the SnowmanKnew the sun was hot that daySo he said let's runAnd we'll have funNow before I melt awayFrosty the SnowmanHad to hurry on his wayBut he waved goodbyeSaying don't you cryI 'LL BE BACK SOMEDAY\u2705https://t.co/TkGgJyfML9#mepolitics #maine #uk #ICEDISK pic.twitter.com/JqHKgd5bfi\u2014 mainenewshound (@mainenewshound) January 25, 2019\n\nThough the ice disk has a way of making people think about crop circles and alien spacecraft, scientists say that its formation is completely natural. Ice disks have previously been spotted in other frigid areas of the country, though they generally don\u2019t get as big as the one in Westbrook.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf one side of the river is flowing faster than the other, the ice on top experiences a shearing force, analogous to forcing a vinyl record to spin by flicking one side,\u201d The Washington Post\u2019s Matthew Cappucci and Angela Fritz reported. \u201cWhen the ice spins, its edges are shaved off where it grinds against other ice or obstacles. Eventually, a perfectly trimmed circle is all that is left.\u201dIt\u2019s not clear exactly when the Westbrook ice disk began to form. Rob Mitchell, a local business owner, told the Press Herald that he first noticed it just before 10 a.m. on Jan. 14 and immediately informed city officials.\u201cThere were ducks sitting on it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe ducks were rotating on this big Lazy Susan. It was a big duck-go-round.\u201dStory continues below advertisementLater that day, the city\u2019s marketing manager, Tina Radel, flew a drone over the river and captured mesmerizing aerial footage of the slowly rotating ice formation. The images quickly spread around the Internet, and one Twitter user wrote that they found it hard to think of a better metaphor for the current state of the country than \u201ca perfectly formed union frozen and spinning in circles for the world\u2019s bemusement.\u201dIt looks like the moon has landed in Westbrook, Maine! Come in down to @CityofWestbrook @DWTNWestbrook and see the Westbrook Ice Disk! pic.twitter.com/JBaMDy2ZBq\u2014 City Of Westbrook ME (@CityofWestbrook) January 15, 2019\n\nIronically, the government shutdown has made it even easier for admirers from all over the world to keep tabs on the ice disk. On Wednesday, the Westbrook ice disk got its own live, 24-hour webcam, courtesy of a polar oceanographer. Chris Horvat, a postdoctoral scholar at Brown University, had been studying Arctic ice floes when his research was derailed by a lack of funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That prompted him to see what he could learn by monitoring the ice disk instead.AdvertisementDie-hard fans glued to the webcam panicked on Thursday afternoon, when it appeared that a crack had split the ice disk in half. But as it turned out, what they were witnessing was just one man\u2019s failed attempt to turn the disk into a massive peace sign so that he could \u201csend a message of positivity.\u201d Story continues below advertisementThe culprit, the Press Herald reported, was Angelo, who had been arrested on two separate occasions in 2013 and 2014 for climbing and planting an American flag on top of storm-damaged rides at a New Jersey amusement park hit by Hurricane Sandy.Decked out in a neon yellow lei, Angelo carried a pickax, hatchet and chain saw on his inflatable raft and told the paper that he wanted to get a master\u2019s degree in ice disks. He reportedly fell into the river at one point and was soaked to his waist but managed to quickly pull himself out and get back to work.The man who chipped a line across the Westbrook Ice Disk says he is trying to create a giant peace sign. He says he's not trying to destroy it. He says he loves the ice disk. pic.twitter.com/1rwU3iMUNt\u2014 Joe (@NewsProJoe) January 24, 2019\n\nLocals were not amused. On social media, some suggested that Angelo should serve jail time, and that Maine should \u201cbuild a wall to keep these nuts out\u201d or deport people back to New Jersey. An anonymous Twitter account professing to be the voice of the ice disk wrote, \u201cI always felt the message of peace and unity was implied. I\u2019m really not into body art.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut police said that though they had received a number of calls about the incident, there was nothing they could do.\"It isn\u2019t against the law to chop river ice,\u201d Westbrook Police Department Captain Sean Lally told the Press Herald. \u201cUnusual? Yes. Why someone would come here from New Jersey to chop up an ice disk is beyond me. I do know that the river will continue to flow and the Maine winter is far from over, so Mr. Angelo might want to seek long-term accommodations if he intends to defy Mother Nature.\u201dAngelo eventually gave up on his own, and the Press Herald reported that the ice disk was \u201cstill intact though somewhat scarred\u201d when he left with his chain saw.Story continues below advertisementThe ice disk has been an unexpected boon to Westbrook, a suburb of Portland, Maine, that is home to a paper mill and one of the state\u2019s largest power plants. On one afternoon last week, the Press Herald reported that dozens of people could be found taking photographs along the riverbank, while bars and restaurants near the water were crowded with customers.AdvertisementWestbrook Mayor Mike Sanphy, who appeared on ABCs \u201cGood Morning America\u201d last Wednesday to promote the ice disk as a tourist attraction, told the paper that out-of-towners who came to see the ice disk had been commenting on how many new stores and restaurants had opened in Westbrook over the past few years. \u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to revitalize the downtown, so anything that brings people in is good for business,\u201d he said.More spectators showed up on Thursday, fearing that the ice disk might not be long for this world.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWith the warm weather, I thought it might be melting and it might be my last chance to see what the phenomenon is all about,\u201d Terry Lacarrubba of Gray, Maine, told WGME.More from Morning Mix:An off-duty cop met up with two other officers. One fatally shot her in the chest.Hundreds of ordinary people spent two years role playing Soviet totalitarianism. Were they abused for art?A pharma exec invited a troubled young lover to move in. It ended in a deadly shooting. Christopher Angelo of New Jersey told reporters that he was trying to turn the massive ice disk, which has drawn hundreds of people to Westbrook, Maine, into a giant peace sign. \u2018Today was a rough day for the ice disk\u2019: A mysterious Maine phenomenon weathers a chain saw attack",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio bursts (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2165",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/10/delightful-thought-experiment-sailing-aliens-caused-furious-and-fast-radio-bursts/",
        "text": "In 2007, a West Virginia University astrophysicist\u00a0named Duncan Lorimer detected a\u00a0brief yet intense signal while combing through archival data from the\u00a0Parkes Observatory\u00a0telescope in Australia. The signal\u00a0was quick.\u00a0The\u00a0spurt of radio activity, originating from a source other than our galaxy, lasted fewer than 5 milliseconds. And it was furious. To generate\u00a0such a burst would require\u00a0500 million times the power of our solar system\u2019s sun. The unknown source of the signal prompted intense speculation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne\u00a0proposal, to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, may be the wildest yet: Sailing aliens.\u201cAn artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking,\u201d said Avi Loeb, a theorist and author of the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement\u00a0on Thursday.Story continues below advertisementA decade ago, Lorimer and his mentor, Matthew Bailes, described\u00a0the phenomenon as a fast radio burst, or FRB. \u201cDuncan Lorimer\u00a0and I were just completely gobsmacked,\u201d\u00a0said Bailes, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, to The Washington Post. \u201cThe day we discovered the first FRB\u00a0we couldn\u2019t sleep.\u201d Astrophysicists have detected only 25 other FRBs since\u00a0Bailes and four other astronomers\u00a0published their\u00a0groundbreaking report\u00a0in 2007, he said.AdvertisementBut the origin of FRBs remained an open question. The problem proved to be at once formidable, resilient and brain twisting. Some scientists proposed that FRBs were the fault of massive neutron stars, suns that\u00a0had\u00a0collapsed into dense cores. Perhaps there existed stellar flares capable of spitting out a radio wave that traveled across half of the known universe. Or maybe vanishing black holes spewed the FRBs\u00a0our way.\u201cI am not exaggerating when I say there are more models for what FRBs could be than there are FRBs,\u201d Cornell University astronomer Shami Chatterjee\u00a0told\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0in January.Mysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light years away, astronomers discover\u201cWe don\u2019t have a convincing model for FRBs at the moment,\u201d Bailes said. \u201cThe\u00a0leading model is some form of very exotic neutron star.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0new hypothesis put forth by a pair of theorists at the Center for Astrophysics was even more exotic. Loeb and his co-author, Manasvi Lingam, ditched natural sources\u00a0entirely. They speculated that FRBs could, in theory, be traced back to extragalactic civilizations. Specifically, aliens who flashed superpowered beacons or cruised through space on the wings of\u00a0giant light-sail technology.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a delightful thought experiment,\u201d said Bailes, who was not involved with the paper. (Bailes told The Post he considered himself more of an FRB hunter\u00a0than a theorist.)\u00a0But, he said, the\u00a0new hypotheses amounted to an \u201cincredible long shot.\u201dThe two Harvard theorists recognized that their FRB origin story dealt with possibility, not probability. \u201cDeciding what\u2019s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities,\u201d Loeb said. \u201cIt\u2019s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFRBs could represent artificial beams, Loeb and Lingam wrote, created by a far-off civilization either as giant beacons\u00a0or\u00a0\u201cfor driving light sails.\u201d Given the luminosity of the FRBs detected on Earth,\u00a0an intelligent civilization would need to harness energy from a sun and cool the machinery with planet-sized amounts of water. Although alien traffic controllers would need to keep\u00a0this beam aimed at the sail, distant observers would see only a flash as the beam pivoted across the universe.AdvertisementWhen sailing by light, the sun\u2019s radiation provides\u00a0propulsion. If caught by\u00a0a large enough sail and given adequate time, solar photons bouncing off a reflective surface could push a spacecraft with ever-increasing speeds.Solar sailing has been a science-fiction concept for decades. Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke described\u00a0solar ships in his short story \u201cSunjammer,\u201d published in 1964. Perhaps the most famous sci-fi solar sail appeared briefly in the 2002 movie \u201cStar Wars: Attack of the Clones,\u201d when villain Count Dooku traveled by a sail\u00a0in his ship\u00a0(a \u201cheavily-modified Punworcca 116-class interstellar sloop,\u201d per Wookieepedia). Solar sails are poised to jump into real life, too, in 2018. Two years ago, NASA announced its\u00a0Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will use a reflective sail to travel toward a lump of space rock.A new reason we haven\u2019t found alien life in the universeBy Loeb and Lingam\u2019s calculations, the hypothetical alien solar ship would be gigantic. They calculated that a solar-powered radio transmitter capable of producing FRBs would beam sunlight at an area roughly twice the diameter of Earth. If a solar sail were massive enough to catch these rays, it would propel a million-ton payload \u2014 about equal to three Empire State Buildings glued together, on par with what the\u00a0theorists called an \u201cinterstellar ark\u201d or \u201cworld ship.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances,\u201d Lingam said in the news release.The billions of galaxies in the universe may be the saving grace of Loeb and Lingam\u2019s exotic speculation. \u201cIt only takes one galaxy,\u201d Bailes said, \u201cto develop some awesome technology.\u201dStill, from our\u00a0planet, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of structurally deficient\u00a0bridges, an infrastructure project of this magnitude may be difficult to imagine. Although Bailes said he would encourage his fellow scientists to take creative\u00a0approaches toward\u00a0modeling FRBs, his gut feeling was that the signals came from some unknown natural phenomenon.Story continues below advertisementThe unusual nature of FRBs will require unusual models. (The area of FRB research is young but growing. A new radio telescope under construction in Canada has the\u00a0potential to find\u00a0dozens of FRBs a day.) Scientists recently detected one burst, FRB 121102, which was not a single flare but an\u00a0irregular sequence\u00a0\u2014 Bailes called it \u201cthe repeater.\u201d The repeater seemed to rule out a singular catastrophic event as the FRB cause, but offered little in the way of answers.More from Morning Mix:Ben Carson told HUD staff he could zap their brains into reciting whole books read 60 years ago. What?Why are pandas black and white? California biologists have a new theory. Skulls found in China were part modern human, part Neanderthal; possibly new species An admittedly out-there explanation for a far-off phenomenon. Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio bursts",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio bursts (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2166",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/10/delightful-thought-experiment-sailing-aliens-caused-furious-and-fast-radio-bursts/",
        "text": "In 2007, a West Virginia University astrophysicist\u00a0named Duncan Lorimer detected a\u00a0brief yet intense signal while combing through archival data from the\u00a0Parkes Observatory\u00a0telescope in Australia. The signal\u00a0was quick.\u00a0The\u00a0spurt of radio activity, originating from a source other than our galaxy, lasted fewer than 5 milliseconds. And it was furious. To generate\u00a0such a burst would require\u00a0500 million times the power of our solar system\u2019s sun. The unknown source of the signal prompted intense speculation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne\u00a0proposal, to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, may be the wildest yet: Sailing aliens.\u201cAn artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking,\u201d said Avi Loeb, a theorist and author of the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement\u00a0on Thursday.Story continues below advertisementA decade ago, Lorimer and his mentor, Matthew Bailes, described\u00a0the phenomenon as a fast radio burst, or FRB. \u201cDuncan Lorimer\u00a0and I were just completely gobsmacked,\u201d\u00a0said Bailes, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, to The Washington Post. \u201cThe day we discovered the first FRB\u00a0we couldn\u2019t sleep.\u201d Astrophysicists have detected only 25 other FRBs since\u00a0Bailes and four other astronomers\u00a0published their\u00a0groundbreaking report\u00a0in 2007, he said.AdvertisementBut the origin of FRBs remained an open question. The problem proved to be at once formidable, resilient and brain twisting. Some scientists proposed that FRBs were the fault of massive neutron stars, suns that\u00a0had\u00a0collapsed into dense cores. Perhaps there existed stellar flares capable of spitting out a radio wave that traveled across half of the known universe. Or maybe vanishing black holes spewed the FRBs\u00a0our way.\u201cI am not exaggerating when I say there are more models for what FRBs could be than there are FRBs,\u201d Cornell University astronomer Shami Chatterjee\u00a0told\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0in January.Mysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light years away, astronomers discover\u201cWe don\u2019t have a convincing model for FRBs at the moment,\u201d Bailes said. \u201cThe\u00a0leading model is some form of very exotic neutron star.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0new hypothesis put forth by a pair of theorists at the Center for Astrophysics was even more exotic. Loeb and his co-author, Manasvi Lingam, ditched natural sources\u00a0entirely. They speculated that FRBs could, in theory, be traced back to extragalactic civilizations. Specifically, aliens who flashed superpowered beacons or cruised through space on the wings of\u00a0giant light-sail technology.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a delightful thought experiment,\u201d said Bailes, who was not involved with the paper. (Bailes told The Post he considered himself more of an FRB hunter\u00a0than a theorist.)\u00a0But, he said, the\u00a0new hypotheses amounted to an \u201cincredible long shot.\u201dThe two Harvard theorists recognized that their FRB origin story dealt with possibility, not probability. \u201cDeciding what\u2019s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities,\u201d Loeb said. \u201cIt\u2019s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFRBs could represent artificial beams, Loeb and Lingam wrote, created by a far-off civilization either as giant beacons\u00a0or\u00a0\u201cfor driving light sails.\u201d Given the luminosity of the FRBs detected on Earth,\u00a0an intelligent civilization would need to harness energy from a sun and cool the machinery with planet-sized amounts of water. Although alien traffic controllers would need to keep\u00a0this beam aimed at the sail, distant observers would see only a flash as the beam pivoted across the universe.AdvertisementWhen sailing by light, the sun\u2019s radiation provides\u00a0propulsion. If caught by\u00a0a large enough sail and given adequate time, solar photons bouncing off a reflective surface could push a spacecraft with ever-increasing speeds.Solar sailing has been a science-fiction concept for decades. Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke described\u00a0solar ships in his short story \u201cSunjammer,\u201d published in 1964. Perhaps the most famous sci-fi solar sail appeared briefly in the 2002 movie \u201cStar Wars: Attack of the Clones,\u201d when villain Count Dooku traveled by a sail\u00a0in his ship\u00a0(a \u201cheavily-modified Punworcca 116-class interstellar sloop,\u201d per Wookieepedia). Solar sails are poised to jump into real life, too, in 2018. Two years ago, NASA announced its\u00a0Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will use a reflective sail to travel toward a lump of space rock.A new reason we haven\u2019t found alien life in the universeBy Loeb and Lingam\u2019s calculations, the hypothetical alien solar ship would be gigantic. They calculated that a solar-powered radio transmitter capable of producing FRBs would beam sunlight at an area roughly twice the diameter of Earth. If a solar sail were massive enough to catch these rays, it would propel a million-ton payload \u2014 about equal to three Empire State Buildings glued together, on par with what the\u00a0theorists called an \u201cinterstellar ark\u201d or \u201cworld ship.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances,\u201d Lingam said in the news release.The billions of galaxies in the universe may be the saving grace of Loeb and Lingam\u2019s exotic speculation. \u201cIt only takes one galaxy,\u201d Bailes said, \u201cto develop some awesome technology.\u201dStill, from our\u00a0planet, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of structurally deficient\u00a0bridges, an infrastructure project of this magnitude may be difficult to imagine. Although Bailes said he would encourage his fellow scientists to take creative\u00a0approaches toward\u00a0modeling FRBs, his gut feeling was that the signals came from some unknown natural phenomenon.Story continues below advertisementThe unusual nature of FRBs will require unusual models. (The area of FRB research is young but growing. A new radio telescope under construction in Canada has the\u00a0potential to find\u00a0dozens of FRBs a day.) Scientists recently detected one burst, FRB 121102, which was not a single flare but an\u00a0irregular sequence\u00a0\u2014 Bailes called it \u201cthe repeater.\u201d The repeater seemed to rule out a singular catastrophic event as the FRB cause, but offered little in the way of answers.More from Morning Mix:Ben Carson told HUD staff he could zap their brains into reciting whole books read 60 years ago. What?Why are pandas black and white? California biologists have a new theory. Skulls found in China were part modern human, part Neanderthal; possibly new species An admittedly out-there explanation for a far-off phenomenon. Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio bursts",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio bursts (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2167",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/10/delightful-thought-experiment-sailing-aliens-caused-furious-and-fast-radio-bursts/",
        "text": "In 2007, a West Virginia University astrophysicist\u00a0named Duncan Lorimer detected a\u00a0brief yet intense signal while combing through archival data from the\u00a0Parkes Observatory\u00a0telescope in Australia. The signal\u00a0was quick.\u00a0The\u00a0spurt of radio activity, originating from a source other than our galaxy, lasted fewer than 5 milliseconds. And it was furious. To generate\u00a0such a burst would require\u00a0500 million times the power of our solar system\u2019s sun. The unknown source of the signal prompted intense speculation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne\u00a0proposal, to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, may be the wildest yet: Sailing aliens.\u201cAn artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking,\u201d said Avi Loeb, a theorist and author of the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in a statement\u00a0on Thursday.Story continues below advertisementA decade ago, Lorimer and his mentor, Matthew Bailes, described\u00a0the phenomenon as a fast radio burst, or FRB. \u201cDuncan Lorimer\u00a0and I were just completely gobsmacked,\u201d\u00a0said Bailes, a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, to The Washington Post. \u201cThe day we discovered the first FRB\u00a0we couldn\u2019t sleep.\u201d Astrophysicists have detected only 25 other FRBs since\u00a0Bailes and four other astronomers\u00a0published their\u00a0groundbreaking report\u00a0in 2007, he said.AdvertisementBut the origin of FRBs remained an open question. The problem proved to be at once formidable, resilient and brain twisting. Some scientists proposed that FRBs were the fault of massive neutron stars, suns that\u00a0had\u00a0collapsed into dense cores. Perhaps there existed stellar flares capable of spitting out a radio wave that traveled across half of the known universe. Or maybe vanishing black holes spewed the FRBs\u00a0our way.\u201cI am not exaggerating when I say there are more models for what FRBs could be than there are FRBs,\u201d Cornell University astronomer Shami Chatterjee\u00a0told\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0in January.Mysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light years away, astronomers discover\u201cWe don\u2019t have a convincing model for FRBs at the moment,\u201d Bailes said. \u201cThe\u00a0leading model is some form of very exotic neutron star.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0new hypothesis put forth by a pair of theorists at the Center for Astrophysics was even more exotic. Loeb and his co-author, Manasvi Lingam, ditched natural sources\u00a0entirely. They speculated that FRBs could, in theory, be traced back to extragalactic civilizations. Specifically, aliens who flashed superpowered beacons or cruised through space on the wings of\u00a0giant light-sail technology.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a delightful thought experiment,\u201d said Bailes, who was not involved with the paper. (Bailes told The Post he considered himself more of an FRB hunter\u00a0than a theorist.)\u00a0But, he said, the\u00a0new hypotheses amounted to an \u201cincredible long shot.\u201dThe two Harvard theorists recognized that their FRB origin story dealt with possibility, not probability. \u201cDeciding what\u2019s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities,\u201d Loeb said. \u201cIt\u2019s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFRBs could represent artificial beams, Loeb and Lingam wrote, created by a far-off civilization either as giant beacons\u00a0or\u00a0\u201cfor driving light sails.\u201d Given the luminosity of the FRBs detected on Earth,\u00a0an intelligent civilization would need to harness energy from a sun and cool the machinery with planet-sized amounts of water. Although alien traffic controllers would need to keep\u00a0this beam aimed at the sail, distant observers would see only a flash as the beam pivoted across the universe.AdvertisementWhen sailing by light, the sun\u2019s radiation provides\u00a0propulsion. If caught by\u00a0a large enough sail and given adequate time, solar photons bouncing off a reflective surface could push a spacecraft with ever-increasing speeds.Solar sailing has been a science-fiction concept for decades. Fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke described\u00a0solar ships in his short story \u201cSunjammer,\u201d published in 1964. Perhaps the most famous sci-fi solar sail appeared briefly in the 2002 movie \u201cStar Wars: Attack of the Clones,\u201d when villain Count Dooku traveled by a sail\u00a0in his ship\u00a0(a \u201cheavily-modified Punworcca 116-class interstellar sloop,\u201d per Wookieepedia). Solar sails are poised to jump into real life, too, in 2018. Two years ago, NASA announced its\u00a0Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, which will use a reflective sail to travel toward a lump of space rock.A new reason we haven\u2019t found alien life in the universeBy Loeb and Lingam\u2019s calculations, the hypothetical alien solar ship would be gigantic. They calculated that a solar-powered radio transmitter capable of producing FRBs would beam sunlight at an area roughly twice the diameter of Earth. If a solar sail were massive enough to catch these rays, it would propel a million-ton payload \u2014 about equal to three Empire State Buildings glued together, on par with what the\u00a0theorists called an \u201cinterstellar ark\u201d or \u201cworld ship.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances,\u201d Lingam said in the news release.The billions of galaxies in the universe may be the saving grace of Loeb and Lingam\u2019s exotic speculation. \u201cIt only takes one galaxy,\u201d Bailes said, \u201cto develop some awesome technology.\u201dStill, from our\u00a0planet, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of structurally deficient\u00a0bridges, an infrastructure project of this magnitude may be difficult to imagine. Although Bailes said he would encourage his fellow scientists to take creative\u00a0approaches toward\u00a0modeling FRBs, his gut feeling was that the signals came from some unknown natural phenomenon.Story continues below advertisementThe unusual nature of FRBs will require unusual models. (The area of FRB research is young but growing. A new radio telescope under construction in Canada has the\u00a0potential to find\u00a0dozens of FRBs a day.) Scientists recently detected one burst, FRB 121102, which was not a single flare but an\u00a0irregular sequence\u00a0\u2014 Bailes called it \u201cthe repeater.\u201d The repeater seemed to rule out a singular catastrophic event as the FRB cause, but offered little in the way of answers.More from Morning Mix:Ben Carson told HUD staff he could zap their brains into reciting whole books read 60 years ago. What?Why are pandas black and white? California biologists have a new theory. Skulls found in China were part modern human, part Neanderthal; possibly new species An admittedly out-there explanation for a far-off phenomenon. Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio bursts",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 10-year-old Virginia girl without a hand wanted to play violin. Now she can. (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2168",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/04/24/a-10-year-old-virginia-girl-without-a-hand-wanted-to-play-violin-now-she-can/",
        "text": "Dressed for the occasion in a red dress and a headband with a white, glittery flower,\u00a010-year-old Isabella Nicola picked up her violin.But this was no recital. And Isabella\u00a0is no ordinary violin player. The fifth grader from Alexandria, Va., was born without a left hand and part of her forearm.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat hasn\u2019t stopped her. Her mother,\u00a0Andrea Cabrera, always instructed her not to say \u201cI can\u2019t,\u201d but to say \u201cI can\u2019t yet.\u201d Now, thanks to five George Mason University bioengineering seniors \u2014 Yasser Alhindi, Mona Elkholy, Abdelrahman Gouda, Ella Novoselsky and Racha Salha \u2014 who used 3-D printing technology to create a prosthetic bow arm for her, she\u2019s begun training on an instrument that challenges\u00a0even the most adroit\u00a0musicians.They call it the VioArm.On Thursday, Isabella\u00a0donned her fancy clothes for the presentation and subsequent fitting of the latest \u2014 and, its creators hope, final \u2014 version of the custom-designed, under-12-ounce prosthetic limb made of plastic. The arm holds her bow, and she uses muscles in her shortened forearm and shoulder to manipulate it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA smile spread across her face and her eyes widened as the team began fitting her with the hot pink, glitter-covered VioArm with her name etched in script on the side. \u201cOh my gosh,\u201d she gasped, then took charge, asking the team to tighten a\u00a0screw, loosen a\u00a0bolt.Time wasn\u2019t wasted as Elizabeth Adams, a violin/viola professor in the GMU School of Music, began her lesson.During the next 45 minutes,\u00a0Isabella played scales, \u201cMississippi Hot Dog,\u201d \u201cOde to Joy\u201d and, begrudgingly, \u201cTwinkle Twinkle Little Star,\u201d while Cabrera sat in the corner, eyes and cheeks wet with emotion.It was the culmination of a journey merely to begin learning an instrument, a journey most don\u2019t have to take.Story continues below advertisementThe project started last year when Isabella, then a fourth grader, decided she wanted to play a string instrument. After all, she did everything else with one hand, even learning to tie her shoes alone at a younger age than her three brothers. Admiring her grandmother\u2019s mastery of the guitar, she originally chose bass. The violin proved a better fit with her small frame.AdvertisementHer mom was supportive but scared.\u201cI\u2019ve never had to tell her you can\u2019t do something,\u201d Cabrera told The Washington Post, but she thought that time had finally come. Still, she heeded her own advice of adding \u201cyet\u201d to the phrase \u201cI can\u2019t.\u201d A Catholic, she believed God would help them find a way.\u201cEverything just seemed to fall into place,\u201d she said. \u201cI do believe in miracles.\u201dSuddenly, a string of well-wishers came out of the woodwork. Technicians at Potter Violins, a violin shop in Maryland, reversed the strings on her instrument, so she could finger with her right hand. Her first music teacher, Amber Hicks, plucked the strings while Isabella practiced fingering.Story continues below advertisement\u201cShe learned to play all the notes fourth graders are required to learn without ever making a sound on her own,\u201d\u00a0Matthew Baldwin,\u00a0strings director for Island Creek Elementary \u2014 Isabella\u2019s school \u2014 told The Post.AdvertisementBaldwin then changed everything.Motivated by his Christian faith and Isabella\u2019s dedication, the GMU alum purchased supplies at the hardware store and began tinkering in hopes of creating a bow arm for his young student. Combining PVC pipes, O-rings and eye screws, he made a usable prosthetic, Baldwin said, using \u201cthings you find under your sink.\u201d\u201cAs soon as I\u00a0got it on her, and we were able to put the bow on the strings, she played a D major scale,\u201d Baldwin said. \u201cShe was able to hear it for the first time playing herself, and her face just lit up.\u201dStory continues below advertisementExciting as the prosthetic was, it wasn\u2019t ideal. It was heavy and didn\u2019t allow the full range of motion necessarily to truly bow the violin, so Baldwin contacted his alma mater in October. As luck would have it, a\u00a0group of engineering students needed a senior project.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019m so blessed to have them,\u201d Isabella\u00a0said.They decided to create her prosthetic\u00a0using a 3-D printer, which is exactly what it sounds like: a printer that can take a digital 3-D model of an object and \u201cprint\u201d it using various materials, such as plastic, metal and even chocolate. It can be, and has been, used for everything from printing spacecraft parts\u00a0to a\u00a0carbon fiber plastic working car\u00a0to\u00a0knockoff Lego bricks\u00a0to complexly designed\u00a0cookies and fondant wedding cake toppers, to name a few.Story continues below advertisementThe technology also created the potential for affordable, easily customization\u00a0prosthetics for the about\u00a02 million people living in the United States with limb loss.When asked if five college students could have created a usable prosthetic that cost less than $500 in raw materials before 3-D printing, all five students shouted an emphatic, \u201cNo!\u201d And yet they did.AdvertisementIt\u2019s important to note 3-D printing is still young and has limitations. Many advanced prosthetics are made from a mixture of plastics and electronics and fit into a socket inside the body. Making them requires equipment and technical expertise that isn\u2019t readily available to the layperson.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe idea is \u2014 you\u2019re trying to securely attach a hand or a foot or whatever to somebody\u2019s skeleton \u2014 which is inside their body \u2014 through the soft tissue that\u2019s still around it without damaging that soft tissue or it being uncomfortable,\u201d Jon Kuniholm, who lost his right arm to an explosion as a Marine in Iraq and\u00a0founded the Open Prosthetic Project,\u00a0told the Atlantic. \u201cMost of the time, a surface scan of somebody\u2019s body isn\u2019t going to create something that is going to be useful, because it has to interact with the bony part that\u2019s inside.\u201dIn particular, prosthetics made for professional musicians, Alhindi said, tend to be much more advanced. But, the students soon learned that a beginner to the violin, such as Isabella required something far simpler as she learned to hold the weight of a prosthetic while manipulating her muscles in new ways.Advertisement\u201cWe have to consider our user\u2019s age, and the simplicity of the design was one of our goals,\u201d Alhindi said.Story continues below advertisementThe team went through a few different models before Thursday\u2019s fitting, working with Isabella along the way to make adjustments. The very first one, for example, uncomfortably rubbed the end of her forearm, which is extremely sensitive, so the team designed the VioArm to attach higher on her upper arm. They also worked to shorten it, which would reduce the arm\u2019s weight.Perhaps the most important change to Isabella, though, was the color. The last version was a chalky white. That just wouldn\u2019t do. So she chose a pink glitter.\u201cI really, really like the color,\u201d she said, beaming at the new arm.The students will soon graduate, but their work will remain. Since the VioArm\u2019s design is a 3-D digital model, it can easily be replicated. As Salha explained, the only necessity for immediately duplicating the prosthetic to fit a new client\u00a0is having the\u00a0person\u2019s individual measurements.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey could then pop those measurements into the computer and hit print.In theory, many more children who never imagined being able to play a string instrument could soon be working their way through \u201cMississippi Hot Dog,\u201d while their teachers remind them to practice daily and their proud moms beam at their fortitude.Because for Cabrera, secondary to the skill with which Isabella can now handle a violin bow was the sheer courage her young daughter displayed when she climbed on stage for the winter performance well before she could hold a bow at all and played in front of her peers while Hicks plucked the strings.\u201cI lost it at that moment,\u201d she said.\u201cTo have the courage to stand in front of your peers in fourth grade and have your teacher pluck for you and have a smile and a confidence throughout the whole thing,\u201d Cabrera said. \u201cTo not be embarrassed, to not be afraid of what they would think, but to do\u00a0it with pride, that\u2019s when I won. I thought whether she plays the violin or not, we won already.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:Her daughter was taught to think her Afro wasn\u2019t \u2018normal.\u2019 So she created a billboard to change that.These high school journalists investigated a new principal\u2019s credentials. Days later, she resigned.America\u2019s first female mayor was elected 130 years ago. Men nominated her as a cruel joke. Five George Mason University bioengineering seniors used 3-D printing technology to create a prosthetic bow arm for the fifth grader. \u201cI do believe in miracles,\u201d the child's mother said. A 10-year-old Virginia girl without a hand wanted to play violin. Now she can.",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It snuck up on us\u2019: Scientists stunned by \u2018city-killer\u2019 asteroid that just missed Earth (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2169",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time/",
        "text": "Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer\u2019s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn\u2019t figure out \u201cwhy everyone was so alarmed.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,\u201d Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week. Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.\u201cI was stunned,\u201d he said. \u201cThis was a true shock.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis asteroid wasn\u2019t one that scientists had long been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from \u201cout of nowhere,\u201d Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That\u2019s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers \u201cuncomfortably close.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt snuck up on us pretty quickly,\u201d said Brown, an associate professor in Australia with Monash University\u2019s School of Physics and Astronomy. He later noted, \u201cPeople are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it\u2019s already flung past us.\u201dThis is the video of the close encounter of Asteroid 2019 OK we have been Twitting all day with the Earth: https://t.co/bjT7uhQJuO pic.twitter.com/3e4UyPcdPl\u2014 ASAS-SN (@SuperASASSN) July 25, 2019\n\nThe asteroid\u2019s presence was discovered only earlier this week by separate astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States. Information about its size and path was announced just hours before it shot past Earth, Brown said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt shook me out my morning complacency,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in quite a number of years.\u201dSo how did the event almost go unnoticed?There's a slight chance an asteroid will hit Earth in September 2135. NASA has a plan to stop it. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)First, there\u2019s the issue of size, Duffy said. Asteroid 2019 OK is a sizable chunk of rock, but it\u2019s nowhere near as big as the ones capable of causing an event like the dinosaurs\u2019 extinction. More than 90 percent of those asteroids, which are more than half a mile wide or larger, have already been identified by NASA and its partners.Advertisement\u201cNothing this size is easy to detect,\u201d Duffy said of Asteroid 2019 OK. \u2033You\u2019re really relying on reflected sunlight, and even at closest approach it was barely visible with a pair of binoculars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBrown said the asteroid\u2019s \u201ceccentric orbit\u201d and speed were also likely factors in what made spotting it ahead of time challenging. Its \u201cvery elliptical orbit\u201d takes it \u201cfrom beyond Mars to within the orbit of Venus,\u201d which means the amount of time it spends near Earth where it is detectable isn\u2019t long, he said. As it approached Earth, the asteroid was traveling at about 24 kilometers per second, he said, or nearly 54,000 mph. By contrast, other recent asteroids that flew by Earth clocked in between 4 and 19 kilometers per second (8,900 to 42,500 mph).\u201cIt\u2019s faint for a long time,\u201d Brown said of Asteroid 2019 OK. \u201cWith a week or two to go, it\u2019s getting bright enough to detect, but someone needs to look in the right spot. Once it\u2019s finally recognized, then things happen quickly, but this thing\u2019s approaching quickly so we only sort of knew about it very soon before the flyby.\u201dAdvertisementThe last-minute detection is yet another sign of how much remains unknown about space and a sobering reminder of the very real threat asteroids can pose, Duffy said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt should worry us all, quite frankly,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a Hollywood movie. It is a clear and present danger.\u201dDuffy said astronomers have a nickname for the kind of space rock that just came so close to Earth: \u201cCity-killer asteroids.\u201d If the asteroid had struck Earth, most of it would have probably reached the ground, resulting in devastating damage, Brown said.\u201cIt would have gone off like a very large nuclear weapon\u201d with enough force to destroy a city, he said. \u201cMany megatons, perhaps in the ballpark of 10 megatons of TNT, so something not to be messed with.\u201dIn 2013, a significantly smaller meteor \u2014 about 20 meters (65 feet) across, or the size of a six-story building \u2014 broke up over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk and unleashed an intense shock wave that collapsed roofs, shattered windows and left about 1,200 people injured. The last space rock to strike Earth similar in size to Asteroid 2019 OK was more than a century ago, Brown said. That asteroid, known as the Tunguska event, caused an explosion that leveled 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) of forest land in Siberia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the chances of a large asteroid landing on a city are \u201cmodest,\u201d Brown said it is still worthwhile to devote resources toward detection and prevention. Brown said Asteroid 2019 OK proves there are \u201cstill dangerous asteroids out there that we don\u2019t know of\u201d that \u201ccan arrive on our doorstep unannounced.\u201dScientists are working on developing at least two approaches to deflecting potentially harmful asteroids, Duffy said. One strategy involves gently pushing the asteroid slowly over time off its course and away from Earth, he said. The other, which he called a \u201cvery elegant solution,\u201d is the gravity tractor. If an asteroid is detected early enough, it could be possible to divert it using the gravity of a spacecraft, according to NASA.People shouldn\u2019t try to \u201cblast it with a nuke,\u201d Duffy said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt makes for a great Hollywood film,\u201d he said. \u201cThe challenge with a nuke is that it may or may not work, but it would definitely make the asteroid radioactive.\u201dIn light of Asteroid 2019 OK, Duffy stressed the importance of investing in a \u201cglobal dedicated approach\u201d to detecting asteroids because \u201csooner or later there will be one with our name on it. It\u2019s just a matter of when, not if.\u201d\u201cWe don\u2019t have to go the way of the dinosaurs,\u201d he said. \u201cWe actually have the technology to find and deflect certainly these smaller asteroids if we commit to it now.\u201dEmily Lakdawalla, senior editor of the Planetary Society, which promotes space exploration, said the recent near miss is a reminder that \u201cit\u2019s an important activity to be watching the skies.\u201d The more that can be learned about an asteroid, the better prepared people can be to prevent potential disasters, she told The Post.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Lakdawalla said that while the asteroid\u2019s close brush with Earth may have sparked some concern, \u201cit is zero percent danger to us.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s the kind of thing where you learn about something that you didn\u2019t know about, like things flying close by us, and your inclination is to be scared,\u201d she said. \u201cBut just like sharks in the ocean, they\u2019re really not going to hurt you and they\u2019re really fascinating to look at.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:After a girl vanished in 1984, Ronald Reagan pleaded for help. Her body was finally found.Ole Miss frat brothers brought guns to an Emmett Till memorial. They\u2019re not the first.To win a murder conviction, police and prosecutors made up evidence and secretly paid a witness, St. Louis DA finds \u201cPeople are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it\u2019s already flung past us,\u201d one astronomer said. \u2018It snuck up on us\u2019: Scientists stunned by \u2018city-killer\u2019 asteroid that just missed Earth",
        "author": "Allyson Chiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It snuck up on us\u2019: Scientists stunned by \u2018city-killer\u2019 asteroid that just missed Earth (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2170",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/26/it-snuck-up-us-city-killer-asteroid-just-missed-earth-scientists-almost-didnt-detect-it-time/",
        "text": "Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer\u2019s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn\u2019t figure out \u201cwhy everyone was so alarmed.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,\u201d Duffy, who is lead scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, told The Washington Post. Forecasts had already predicted that a couple of asteroids would be passing relatively close to Earth this week. Then, he looked up the details of the hunk of space rock named Asteroid 2019 OK.\u201cI was stunned,\u201d he said. \u201cThis was a true shock.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis asteroid wasn\u2019t one that scientists had long been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from \u201cout of nowhere,\u201d Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That\u2019s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers \u201cuncomfortably close.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt snuck up on us pretty quickly,\u201d said Brown, an associate professor in Australia with Monash University\u2019s School of Physics and Astronomy. He later noted, \u201cPeople are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it\u2019s already flung past us.\u201dThis is the video of the close encounter of Asteroid 2019 OK we have been Twitting all day with the Earth: https://t.co/bjT7uhQJuO pic.twitter.com/3e4UyPcdPl\u2014 ASAS-SN (@SuperASASSN) July 25, 2019\n\nThe asteroid\u2019s presence was discovered only earlier this week by separate astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States. Information about its size and path was announced just hours before it shot past Earth, Brown said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt shook me out my morning complacency,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in quite a number of years.\u201dSo how did the event almost go unnoticed?There's a slight chance an asteroid will hit Earth in September 2135. NASA has a plan to stop it. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)First, there\u2019s the issue of size, Duffy said. Asteroid 2019 OK is a sizable chunk of rock, but it\u2019s nowhere near as big as the ones capable of causing an event like the dinosaurs\u2019 extinction. More than 90 percent of those asteroids, which are more than half a mile wide or larger, have already been identified by NASA and its partners.Advertisement\u201cNothing this size is easy to detect,\u201d Duffy said of Asteroid 2019 OK. \u2033You\u2019re really relying on reflected sunlight, and even at closest approach it was barely visible with a pair of binoculars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBrown said the asteroid\u2019s \u201ceccentric orbit\u201d and speed were also likely factors in what made spotting it ahead of time challenging. Its \u201cvery elliptical orbit\u201d takes it \u201cfrom beyond Mars to within the orbit of Venus,\u201d which means the amount of time it spends near Earth where it is detectable isn\u2019t long, he said. As it approached Earth, the asteroid was traveling at about 24 kilometers per second, he said, or nearly 54,000 mph. By contrast, other recent asteroids that flew by Earth clocked in between 4 and 19 kilometers per second (8,900 to 42,500 mph).\u201cIt\u2019s faint for a long time,\u201d Brown said of Asteroid 2019 OK. \u201cWith a week or two to go, it\u2019s getting bright enough to detect, but someone needs to look in the right spot. Once it\u2019s finally recognized, then things happen quickly, but this thing\u2019s approaching quickly so we only sort of knew about it very soon before the flyby.\u201dAdvertisementThe last-minute detection is yet another sign of how much remains unknown about space and a sobering reminder of the very real threat asteroids can pose, Duffy said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt should worry us all, quite frankly,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a Hollywood movie. It is a clear and present danger.\u201dDuffy said astronomers have a nickname for the kind of space rock that just came so close to Earth: \u201cCity-killer asteroids.\u201d If the asteroid had struck Earth, most of it would have probably reached the ground, resulting in devastating damage, Brown said.\u201cIt would have gone off like a very large nuclear weapon\u201d with enough force to destroy a city, he said. \u201cMany megatons, perhaps in the ballpark of 10 megatons of TNT, so something not to be messed with.\u201dIn 2013, a significantly smaller meteor \u2014 about 20 meters (65 feet) across, or the size of a six-story building \u2014 broke up over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk and unleashed an intense shock wave that collapsed roofs, shattered windows and left about 1,200 people injured. The last space rock to strike Earth similar in size to Asteroid 2019 OK was more than a century ago, Brown said. That asteroid, known as the Tunguska event, caused an explosion that leveled 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) of forest land in Siberia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the chances of a large asteroid landing on a city are \u201cmodest,\u201d Brown said it is still worthwhile to devote resources toward detection and prevention. Brown said Asteroid 2019 OK proves there are \u201cstill dangerous asteroids out there that we don\u2019t know of\u201d that \u201ccan arrive on our doorstep unannounced.\u201dScientists are working on developing at least two approaches to deflecting potentially harmful asteroids, Duffy said. One strategy involves gently pushing the asteroid slowly over time off its course and away from Earth, he said. The other, which he called a \u201cvery elegant solution,\u201d is the gravity tractor. If an asteroid is detected early enough, it could be possible to divert it using the gravity of a spacecraft, according to NASA.People shouldn\u2019t try to \u201cblast it with a nuke,\u201d Duffy said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt makes for a great Hollywood film,\u201d he said. \u201cThe challenge with a nuke is that it may or may not work, but it would definitely make the asteroid radioactive.\u201dIn light of Asteroid 2019 OK, Duffy stressed the importance of investing in a \u201cglobal dedicated approach\u201d to detecting asteroids because \u201csooner or later there will be one with our name on it. It\u2019s just a matter of when, not if.\u201d\u201cWe don\u2019t have to go the way of the dinosaurs,\u201d he said. \u201cWe actually have the technology to find and deflect certainly these smaller asteroids if we commit to it now.\u201dEmily Lakdawalla, senior editor of the Planetary Society, which promotes space exploration, said the recent near miss is a reminder that \u201cit\u2019s an important activity to be watching the skies.\u201d The more that can be learned about an asteroid, the better prepared people can be to prevent potential disasters, she told The Post.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Lakdawalla said that while the asteroid\u2019s close brush with Earth may have sparked some concern, \u201cit is zero percent danger to us.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s the kind of thing where you learn about something that you didn\u2019t know about, like things flying close by us, and your inclination is to be scared,\u201d she said. \u201cBut just like sharks in the ocean, they\u2019re really not going to hurt you and they\u2019re really fascinating to look at.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:After a girl vanished in 1984, Ronald Reagan pleaded for help. Her body was finally found.Ole Miss frat brothers brought guns to an Emmett Till memorial. They\u2019re not the first.To win a murder conviction, police and prosecutors made up evidence and secretly paid a witness, St. Louis DA finds \u201cPeople are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it\u2019s already flung past us,\u201d one astronomer said. \u2018It snuck up on us\u2019: Scientists stunned by \u2018city-killer\u2019 asteroid that just missed Earth",
        "author": "Allyson Chiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy. (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2171",
        "date": "2017-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/11/27/nasa-launched-this-record-into-space-in-1977-now-you-can-own-your-own-copy/",
        "text": "A NASA-created\u00a0phonograph\u00a0album\u00a0\u2014 the \u201cVoyager Golden Record\u201d \u2014 is floating in space in search of a listener. It\u2019s a mix tape \u201cintended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials,\u201d\u00a0according to NASA\u2019s website.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOf course, the extraterrestrials have to stumble upon it and figure out how to make it play. NASA launched two copies of the\u00a0album \u2014 which contains spoken greetings in 55 languages, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, and even songs by humpback whales \u2014 into space in 1977 on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. It did not include a record player.Until recently, the album hasn\u2019t been made public except to donors of a Kickstarter campaign by Ozma Records, which raised nearly $1.4 million\u00a0to issue a limited number of copies on vinyl.That campaign was so successful that the company decided to release the album to the general public, Ozma\u00a0Records co-founder David Pescovitz, who co-produced the record, told The Washington Post. At the end of January 2018, the\u00a0company will begin shipping a box set vinyl edition through the record distributor\u00a0Light in the Attic.For NASA, compiling a snapshot of the planet\u2019s history on a single record was no easy task \u2014 especially given its purpose, which\u00a0President Jimmy Carter outlined in a statement\u00a0included on the album: a message from planet Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings,\u201d Carter\u2019s statement said. \u201cWe are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.\u201dNASA approved the record about six months before the launch of the two Voyager spacecrafts, according to science writer Timothy Ferris, who worked with the team,\u00a0which was led by astrophysicist Carl Sagan and also included radio astronomer Frank Drake and author\u00a0Ann Druyan as the project\u2019s creative director.\u201cThe chances of aliens finding the Voyagers in the vast emptiness of space are small \u2014 some say infinitesimal \u2014 but we took our jobs seriously,\u201d Druyan\u00a0said\u00a0in a NASA article. \u201cFrom the moment when [Sagan] first broached the project to Tim Ferris and me, it felt mythic.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome technical specifics were quickly worked out.They couldn\u2019t use an 8-track tape, a popular format at the time, because space radiation would degrade the magnetic tape, according to NASA. Instead, they made a record from copper and coated it with gold, which would protect it from the extreme temperatures and radiation encountered in space.And they used records that spun at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute rather than the conventional 33 1/3 RPMs. That meant lower sound quality, but it allowed them 90 minutes of music rather than 27, as the Atlantic noted.The real question was what to put on it.\u201cI remember sitting around the kitchen table making these huge decisions about what to put on and what to leave off,\u201d Druyan said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t help but appreciate the enormous responsibility to create a cultural Noah\u2019s Ark with a shelf life of hundreds of millions of years.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey chose each track for a different purpose.Some are obvious. The 12-minute audio essay fittingly titled \u201cThe Sounds of Earth\u201d\u00a0filled with sounds of everything from waves, laughter, an earthquake, crickets, chimpanzees, thunder, rain, footsteps, a baby\u2019s cry and the wet smack of a kiss\u00a0\u2014 to name a few\u00a0\u2014 offered a short glimpse into the natural sounds we encounter here on Earth.Others were more practical.\u00a0The records included three compositions by J.S. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. The composers\u00a0were given so much space in case the potential extraterrestrial life-forms\u00a0were unable to\u00a0hear the music, but could feel its vibration, Ferris noted in the New Yorker.Story continues below advertisementHe wrote:To understand why we did this, imagine that the records were being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or who hadn\u2019t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. They\u2019d look for symmetries\u2014repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities\u2014within or between compositions.Others were chosen as metaphors.Take Berry\u2019s \u201cJohnny B. Goode,\u201d for example. The song, representing rock-and-roll, \u201cwas the music of motion, of moving, getting to someplace you\u2019ve never been before and the odds are against you, but you want to go,\u201d Druyan told Anderson Cooper on \u201c60 Minutes.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThat was Voyager,\u201d Druyan said.And Blind Willie Johnson\u2019s \u201cDark Was the Night\u201d was a symbolic choice, Druyan told Pitchfork. The blues song aches with Johnson\u2019s pain as he moans through indecipherable lyrics, which drew her to the song.Johnson \u201cdied of exposure because he was that poor and uncared for; it was just him and his wife and his ruthless church, this broken-down church,\u201d Druyan said.\u00a0\u201cThere are no words so it\u2019s transcended immediately in any of the limitation of the differences of human languages. It was pure, universal feeling, and it was a planet-wide feeling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe record also included\u00a0folk music from around the world, featuring instrumentation like panpipes from the Solomon Islands or percussion from Senegal.Scientists also electronically encoded 115 various images on the record, such as photographs of a mother nursing her child, an astronaut floating in space, a violin with sheet music and an illustration showing a male and a pregnant female, according to NASA.AdvertisementFinally, they printed directions of how to play the record and a dedication on its cover: \u201cTo the makers of music\u2014all worlds, all times.\u201dThen, they blasted it off into space and the unknown.\u00a0Voyager 1 exited the\u00a0solar system \u2014 the first probe to do so \u2014 in 2012,\u00a0according to NASA. Voyager\u00a02 is still in the solar system.Story continues below advertisementDespite the passage of time, the Voyager records should still be in perfect condition,\u00a0according to NASA.\u00a0But, of course, it\u2019s impossible to know if\u00a0it will ever be heard by any extraterrestrial life.\u201cI\u2019d say it\u2019s as fresh and new as the day it was placed aboard the spacecraft,\u201d David Doody, an engineer on the Voyager mission at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told\u00a0the Atlantic. \u201cIt\u2019s been stored in a vacuum more perfect than any attainable on Earth, and protected from dust and cosmic rays by an aluminum metal case.\u201dAdvertisementDoody guessed the records \u201cwould be in playable condition for many hundreds of millennia.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:\u00a0Olympian Gabby Douglas says she, too, was sexually abused by gymnastics team doctor\u2018John Conyers Jr. must go,\u2019 says Detroit Free Press. \u2018It looks an awful lot like hush money\u2019Who came up with the term \u2018sexual harassment\u2019Watch: Brazilian cop with his infant on his arm kills two robbers in gun battle The record is a snapshot of life on Earth. NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy.",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy. (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2172",
        "date": "2017-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/11/27/nasa-launched-this-record-into-space-in-1977-now-you-can-own-your-own-copy/",
        "text": "A NASA-created\u00a0phonograph\u00a0album\u00a0\u2014 the \u201cVoyager Golden Record\u201d \u2014 is floating in space in search of a listener. It\u2019s a mix tape \u201cintended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials,\u201d\u00a0according to NASA\u2019s website.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOf course, the extraterrestrials have to stumble upon it and figure out how to make it play. NASA launched two copies of the\u00a0album \u2014 which contains spoken greetings in 55 languages, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, and even songs by humpback whales \u2014 into space in 1977 on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. It did not include a record player.Until recently, the album hasn\u2019t been made public except to donors of a Kickstarter campaign by Ozma Records, which raised nearly $1.4 million\u00a0to issue a limited number of copies on vinyl.That campaign was so successful that the company decided to release the album to the general public, Ozma\u00a0Records co-founder David Pescovitz, who co-produced the record, told The Washington Post. At the end of January 2018, the\u00a0company will begin shipping a box set vinyl edition through the record distributor\u00a0Light in the Attic.For NASA, compiling a snapshot of the planet\u2019s history on a single record was no easy task \u2014 especially given its purpose, which\u00a0President Jimmy Carter outlined in a statement\u00a0included on the album: a message from planet Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings,\u201d Carter\u2019s statement said. \u201cWe are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.\u201dNASA approved the record about six months before the launch of the two Voyager spacecrafts, according to science writer Timothy Ferris, who worked with the team,\u00a0which was led by astrophysicist Carl Sagan and also included radio astronomer Frank Drake and author\u00a0Ann Druyan as the project\u2019s creative director.\u201cThe chances of aliens finding the Voyagers in the vast emptiness of space are small \u2014 some say infinitesimal \u2014 but we took our jobs seriously,\u201d Druyan\u00a0said\u00a0in a NASA article. \u201cFrom the moment when [Sagan] first broached the project to Tim Ferris and me, it felt mythic.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome technical specifics were quickly worked out.They couldn\u2019t use an 8-track tape, a popular format at the time, because space radiation would degrade the magnetic tape, according to NASA. Instead, they made a record from copper and coated it with gold, which would protect it from the extreme temperatures and radiation encountered in space.And they used records that spun at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute rather than the conventional 33 1/3 RPMs. That meant lower sound quality, but it allowed them 90 minutes of music rather than 27, as the Atlantic noted.The real question was what to put on it.\u201cI remember sitting around the kitchen table making these huge decisions about what to put on and what to leave off,\u201d Druyan said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t help but appreciate the enormous responsibility to create a cultural Noah\u2019s Ark with a shelf life of hundreds of millions of years.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey chose each track for a different purpose.Some are obvious. The 12-minute audio essay fittingly titled \u201cThe Sounds of Earth\u201d\u00a0filled with sounds of everything from waves, laughter, an earthquake, crickets, chimpanzees, thunder, rain, footsteps, a baby\u2019s cry and the wet smack of a kiss\u00a0\u2014 to name a few\u00a0\u2014 offered a short glimpse into the natural sounds we encounter here on Earth.Others were more practical.\u00a0The records included three compositions by J.S. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. The composers\u00a0were given so much space in case the potential extraterrestrial life-forms\u00a0were unable to\u00a0hear the music, but could feel its vibration, Ferris noted in the New Yorker.Story continues below advertisementHe wrote:To understand why we did this, imagine that the records were being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or who hadn\u2019t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. They\u2019d look for symmetries\u2014repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities\u2014within or between compositions.Others were chosen as metaphors.Take Berry\u2019s \u201cJohnny B. Goode,\u201d for example. The song, representing rock-and-roll, \u201cwas the music of motion, of moving, getting to someplace you\u2019ve never been before and the odds are against you, but you want to go,\u201d Druyan told Anderson Cooper on \u201c60 Minutes.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThat was Voyager,\u201d Druyan said.And Blind Willie Johnson\u2019s \u201cDark Was the Night\u201d was a symbolic choice, Druyan told Pitchfork. The blues song aches with Johnson\u2019s pain as he moans through indecipherable lyrics, which drew her to the song.Johnson \u201cdied of exposure because he was that poor and uncared for; it was just him and his wife and his ruthless church, this broken-down church,\u201d Druyan said.\u00a0\u201cThere are no words so it\u2019s transcended immediately in any of the limitation of the differences of human languages. It was pure, universal feeling, and it was a planet-wide feeling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe record also included\u00a0folk music from around the world, featuring instrumentation like panpipes from the Solomon Islands or percussion from Senegal.Scientists also electronically encoded 115 various images on the record, such as photographs of a mother nursing her child, an astronaut floating in space, a violin with sheet music and an illustration showing a male and a pregnant female, according to NASA.AdvertisementFinally, they printed directions of how to play the record and a dedication on its cover: \u201cTo the makers of music\u2014all worlds, all times.\u201dThen, they blasted it off into space and the unknown.\u00a0Voyager 1 exited the\u00a0solar system \u2014 the first probe to do so \u2014 in 2012,\u00a0according to NASA. Voyager\u00a02 is still in the solar system.Story continues below advertisementDespite the passage of time, the Voyager records should still be in perfect condition,\u00a0according to NASA.\u00a0But, of course, it\u2019s impossible to know if\u00a0it will ever be heard by any extraterrestrial life.\u201cI\u2019d say it\u2019s as fresh and new as the day it was placed aboard the spacecraft,\u201d David Doody, an engineer on the Voyager mission at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told\u00a0the Atlantic. \u201cIt\u2019s been stored in a vacuum more perfect than any attainable on Earth, and protected from dust and cosmic rays by an aluminum metal case.\u201dAdvertisementDoody guessed the records \u201cwould be in playable condition for many hundreds of millennia.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:\u00a0Olympian Gabby Douglas says she, too, was sexually abused by gymnastics team doctor\u2018John Conyers Jr. must go,\u2019 says Detroit Free Press. \u2018It looks an awful lot like hush money\u2019Who came up with the term \u2018sexual harassment\u2019Watch: Brazilian cop with his infant on his arm kills two robbers in gun battle The record is a snapshot of life on Earth. NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy.",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy. (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2173",
        "date": "2017-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/11/27/nasa-launched-this-record-into-space-in-1977-now-you-can-own-your-own-copy/",
        "text": "A NASA-created\u00a0phonograph\u00a0album\u00a0\u2014 the \u201cVoyager Golden Record\u201d \u2014 is floating in space in search of a listener. It\u2019s a mix tape \u201cintended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials,\u201d\u00a0according to NASA\u2019s website.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOf course, the extraterrestrials have to stumble upon it and figure out how to make it play. NASA launched two copies of the\u00a0album \u2014 which contains spoken greetings in 55 languages, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, and even songs by humpback whales \u2014 into space in 1977 on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. It did not include a record player.Until recently, the album hasn\u2019t been made public except to donors of a Kickstarter campaign by Ozma Records, which raised nearly $1.4 million\u00a0to issue a limited number of copies on vinyl.That campaign was so successful that the company decided to release the album to the general public, Ozma\u00a0Records co-founder David Pescovitz, who co-produced the record, told The Washington Post. At the end of January 2018, the\u00a0company will begin shipping a box set vinyl edition through the record distributor\u00a0Light in the Attic.For NASA, compiling a snapshot of the planet\u2019s history on a single record was no easy task \u2014 especially given its purpose, which\u00a0President Jimmy Carter outlined in a statement\u00a0included on the album: a message from planet Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings,\u201d Carter\u2019s statement said. \u201cWe are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.\u201dNASA approved the record about six months before the launch of the two Voyager spacecrafts, according to science writer Timothy Ferris, who worked with the team,\u00a0which was led by astrophysicist Carl Sagan and also included radio astronomer Frank Drake and author\u00a0Ann Druyan as the project\u2019s creative director.\u201cThe chances of aliens finding the Voyagers in the vast emptiness of space are small \u2014 some say infinitesimal \u2014 but we took our jobs seriously,\u201d Druyan\u00a0said\u00a0in a NASA article. \u201cFrom the moment when [Sagan] first broached the project to Tim Ferris and me, it felt mythic.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome technical specifics were quickly worked out.They couldn\u2019t use an 8-track tape, a popular format at the time, because space radiation would degrade the magnetic tape, according to NASA. Instead, they made a record from copper and coated it with gold, which would protect it from the extreme temperatures and radiation encountered in space.And they used records that spun at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute rather than the conventional 33 1/3 RPMs. That meant lower sound quality, but it allowed them 90 minutes of music rather than 27, as the Atlantic noted.The real question was what to put on it.\u201cI remember sitting around the kitchen table making these huge decisions about what to put on and what to leave off,\u201d Druyan said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t help but appreciate the enormous responsibility to create a cultural Noah\u2019s Ark with a shelf life of hundreds of millions of years.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey chose each track for a different purpose.Some are obvious. The 12-minute audio essay fittingly titled \u201cThe Sounds of Earth\u201d\u00a0filled with sounds of everything from waves, laughter, an earthquake, crickets, chimpanzees, thunder, rain, footsteps, a baby\u2019s cry and the wet smack of a kiss\u00a0\u2014 to name a few\u00a0\u2014 offered a short glimpse into the natural sounds we encounter here on Earth.Others were more practical.\u00a0The records included three compositions by J.S. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. The composers\u00a0were given so much space in case the potential extraterrestrial life-forms\u00a0were unable to\u00a0hear the music, but could feel its vibration, Ferris noted in the New Yorker.Story continues below advertisementHe wrote:To understand why we did this, imagine that the records were being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or who hadn\u2019t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. They\u2019d look for symmetries\u2014repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities\u2014within or between compositions.Others were chosen as metaphors.Take Berry\u2019s \u201cJohnny B. Goode,\u201d for example. The song, representing rock-and-roll, \u201cwas the music of motion, of moving, getting to someplace you\u2019ve never been before and the odds are against you, but you want to go,\u201d Druyan told Anderson Cooper on \u201c60 Minutes.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThat was Voyager,\u201d Druyan said.And Blind Willie Johnson\u2019s \u201cDark Was the Night\u201d was a symbolic choice, Druyan told Pitchfork. The blues song aches with Johnson\u2019s pain as he moans through indecipherable lyrics, which drew her to the song.Johnson \u201cdied of exposure because he was that poor and uncared for; it was just him and his wife and his ruthless church, this broken-down church,\u201d Druyan said.\u00a0\u201cThere are no words so it\u2019s transcended immediately in any of the limitation of the differences of human languages. It was pure, universal feeling, and it was a planet-wide feeling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe record also included\u00a0folk music from around the world, featuring instrumentation like panpipes from the Solomon Islands or percussion from Senegal.Scientists also electronically encoded 115 various images on the record, such as photographs of a mother nursing her child, an astronaut floating in space, a violin with sheet music and an illustration showing a male and a pregnant female, according to NASA.AdvertisementFinally, they printed directions of how to play the record and a dedication on its cover: \u201cTo the makers of music\u2014all worlds, all times.\u201dThen, they blasted it off into space and the unknown.\u00a0Voyager 1 exited the\u00a0solar system \u2014 the first probe to do so \u2014 in 2012,\u00a0according to NASA. Voyager\u00a02 is still in the solar system.Story continues below advertisementDespite the passage of time, the Voyager records should still be in perfect condition,\u00a0according to NASA.\u00a0But, of course, it\u2019s impossible to know if\u00a0it will ever be heard by any extraterrestrial life.\u201cI\u2019d say it\u2019s as fresh and new as the day it was placed aboard the spacecraft,\u201d David Doody, an engineer on the Voyager mission at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told\u00a0the Atlantic. \u201cIt\u2019s been stored in a vacuum more perfect than any attainable on Earth, and protected from dust and cosmic rays by an aluminum metal case.\u201dAdvertisementDoody guessed the records \u201cwould be in playable condition for many hundreds of millennia.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:\u00a0Olympian Gabby Douglas says she, too, was sexually abused by gymnastics team doctor\u2018John Conyers Jr. must go,\u2019 says Detroit Free Press. \u2018It looks an awful lot like hush money\u2019Who came up with the term \u2018sexual harassment\u2019Watch: Brazilian cop with his infant on his arm kills two robbers in gun battle The record is a snapshot of life on Earth. NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy.",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Anthony Scaramucci as \u2018That Guy\u2019 from \u2018Futurama\u2019: The newest Trump-era meme (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2174",
        "date": "2017-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/24/anthony-scaramucci-as-that-guy-from-futurama-the-newest-trump-era-meme/",
        "text": "When President Trump appointed wealthy financier Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director, it\u2019s unlikely anyone in the administration thought about \u201cFuturama,\u201d the cartoon from \u201cThe Simpsons\u201d co-creator Matt Groening.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt didn\u2019t take long after Friday\u2019s announcement for fans of the show to notice how similar Scaramucci looks to a secondary character, Steve Castle, who is referred to as \u201cThat Guy.\u201d The character is a parody of Gordon Gekko, the wealthy financier with a penchant for sharp suits and business jargon, played by Michael Douglas in 1987\u2019s \u201cWall Street.\u201d Thus a meme was born.Scaramucci is the 80s guy from Futurama pic.twitter.com/8ohqILqj7O\u2014 (conversationally) Black Lives Matter \ud83c\udff3\ufe0f",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A second-rate bean\u2019: Houston\u2019s new bean sculpture scorned in Chicago (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2175",
        "date": "2018-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/29/a-second-rate-bean-houstons-new-bean-sculpture-scorned-in-chicago/",
        "text": "The war of the beans started when some northern out-of-towner called Houston, which prides itself in its eclectic arts scene and cuisine, a \u201ccultureless abyss\u201d\u00a0\u2014 a surefire way to invite a hailstorm of hate mail from Houstonians.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe bean at issue\u00a0\u2014 the new bean in Houston\u00a0\u2014 arrived in the city\u2019s Museum District on Monday, lowered onto a new plaza near the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston with the help of a giant crane and an army of construction workers.\u00a0The sculpture, called \u201cCloud Column\u201d by Anish Kapoor, is shaped less like a bean, really, and more like an elongated egg,\u00a0reminiscent of the alien spaceship from the movie \u201cArrival.\u201d But, with its stainless steel round shape, it\u2019s also strikingly similar to the other, more famous bean, the one that is The Bean: Chicago\u2019s picturesque epicenter where tourists flock for selfies in Millennium Park, formally titled \u201cCloud Gate.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso the work of Kapoor, it was, until this week, unique to Chicago.\u201cHouston\u2019s version of The Bean differs in one respect from Chicago\u2019s: the uptight Texas bean is designed to stand upright, not lie on its side like the chill Illinois bean,\u201d Kim Janssen, a Chicago Tribune columnist, wrote in a Tuesday column. \u201cIf being surrounded by a cultureless abyss insufficiently communicates to confused tourists that they are in Houston, the bean\u2019s verticality will therefore act as an additional reminder of their poor life choices.\u201dThe column,\u00a0titled \u201cUnoriginal 4th place Houston gets its own bean sculpture \u2026 whatever,\u201d kicked off what essentially amounted to a contest of clever insults between Janssen and the Houston Chronicle\u2019s Lisa Gray, published in the form of back-and-forth emails\u00a0between the two writers Wednesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is already a natural competition between Chicago, the long-standing third-most populous city, and Houston, the fourth-largest city. Gray didn\u2019t waste any time pointing out a favorite boast among Houstonians: that Houston is growing faster than Chicago.Janssen\u2019s column, Gray wrote, \u201cmade me wonder: Is Chicago feeling defensive? How bad is it there, knowing that Houston is\u00a0set to pass you in population, taking your spot as third-largest city in the U.S.? Are you feeling \u2014 well, to steal someone\u2019s joke from Twitter \u2014 like a \u2018has-bean\u2019?\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s a leftover bean, a second-rate bean that\u2019s been lying around in storage for the better part of 20 years, because nobody else wanted it,\u201d Janssen responded. \u201cNobody except Houston wants a leftover, second-rate bean.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSo here\u2019s the kicker, revealed by Kapoor\u2019s associates to both the Tribune and the Chronicle in interviews this week: The first true bean is the one in Houston. It just was in storage for \u2026 well, as Janssen griped, a lot longer than Chicago\u2019s.AdvertisementDavid Williams, who has worked with Kapoor for years, told the Chronicle\u2019s art critic this week that Houston\u2019s \u201cCloud Column\u201d was the original, handmade in London in 1999. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t made,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was birthed.\u201dThe sculpture was originally conceived for London\u2019s British Museum but did not ultimately wind up there. In recent years, Houston museum officials thought it might make a good addition at an outdoor plaza that has been under construction, right near a sculpture garden.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCloud Gate,\u201d by contrast, was sculpted in the United States and unveiled in Chicago in 2006 after the city solicited proposals for a sculpture. It became an instant hit and eventual landmark.After his column ran, Janssen told The Washington Post, his inbox was flooded with angry messages from Houstonians, leading him to feel \u201ca bit embarrassed for Houstonians at how easily baited they were.\u201d It was,\u00a0as he wrote in the dissing battle with\u00a0Gray, an \u201coutpouring of bile from Houston [that] has genuinely surprised me.\u201dAdvertisementAs one Houstonian wrote on Twitter: \u201ci feel great rage at this article they called houston a CULTURELESS ABYSS i am ready to fight everyone from chicago,\u201d and another: \u201cWow, [Kim Janssen], a \u2018cultureless abyss?\u2019 Spoken like someone who has never been to the most diverse city in the country. I\u2019m afraid if you don\u2019t stop crying soon you\u2019ll drown.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe \u201cCloud Column\u201d will be officially open to the public\u00a0\u2014 and a great many selfie aficionados\u00a0\u2014 once the plaza is complete, on May 20.STINGY CHICAGO: Unlike the generous and sharing spirit of Houston, the @chicagotribune would rather keep art like Anish Kapoor's 'Cloud Column' for themselves than share it with the world. https://t.co/QA8nMYc3y4 pic.twitter.com/3DaPXeukgn\u2014 ABC13 Houston (@abc13houston) March 28, 2018\n\nIt\u2019s not a bean. \u201cCloud Column\u201d is clearly a homage to mid-century conceptions of rocketry. And perhaps mid-90s retro sports logos pic.twitter.com/w4Oy9yHkBw\u2014 HOUmanitarian (@HOUmanitarian) March 28, 2018\n\nThe trib with a sense of humor! Houston trying to steal our gimmick! https://t.co/BV59uoEZWF\u2014 rach gonzalez, being very brave this month (@r_gonz_) March 28, 2018\n\nMore from Morning Mix:North Korea\u2019s swankiest ride: Kim Jong Un\u2019s tricked-out armored family trainTrump sons unload on Jeb BushViolist\u2019s career wrecked by \u2018acoustic shock\u2019 of Wagner. Royal Opera held responsible.This high school rejected NRA \u2018blood money\u2019 for rifle team. Locals donated instead. The Bean was, until this week, unique to Chicago. Then came Houston. \u2018A second-rate bean\u2019: Houston\u2019s new bean sculpture scorned in Chicago",
        "author": "Meagan Flynn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tales from the path of totality: 62 years ago today, they say, \u2018little green men\u2019 invaded this Kentucky farm town (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2176",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/21/tales-from-the-path-of-totality-62-years-ago-today-they-say-little-green-men-invaded-this-kentucky-farm-town/",
        "text": "It was 2010 and citizens of Kelly, a farm town of 300 people in western Kentucky, were brainstorming ways to make some money. They\u00a0had founded a neighborhood watch group and thrown community\u00a0barbecues, but it all had been paid for out of pocket. That was not sustainable.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo they started sifting through the town\u2019s archives for something in its history worth marketing. \u201cIt came down to the train tracks or the aliens,\u201d resident Joann Smithey told The Washington Post. They went with the aliens.Kelly, it turns out, had quite the tale buried in its past, an incident that crop circle conspirators and UFO-chasers call\u00a0the \u201cKelly-Hopkinsville encounter.\u201d It involved farmers, space creatures and an hours-long shootout so intense that legend says the farmhouse and barn where it took place was left peppered with bullet holes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo Smithey\u2019s group, Kelly Community Organization, turned the \u201cKelly-Hopkinsville encounter\u201d into the Kelly \u201cLittle Green Men\u201d Days Festival, a celebration with aliens and flying saucers that coincides\u00a0every year on the shootout\u2019s anniversary: Aug. 21, 1955.This year, the 62nd\u00a0anniversary falls on a day already marked for darkness \u2014 the total solar eclipse.What\u2019s in the path of the total solar eclipse?The town once tormented by tales of an alien invasion sits within the eclipse\u2019s path of totality. At about 1:20 p.m., Kelly will be shrouded in black.\u201cSome people are afraid the aliens are coming back,\u201d said Smithey, Kelly\u2019s \u201cLittle Green Men\u201d Days Festival chairwoman. \u201cWe call the whole thing cosmic coincidence.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFrom what Smithey can tell, Kelly will have visitors from across the U.S., from Washington state and Key West, Fla., from Delaware and Texas. There is even a group that came from Spain.AdvertisementUsually, the festival draws a couple thousand people to the farm fields of Kelly. This year, festival organizers expected a turnout of some 20,000 \u2014 quite an improvement on the inaugural crowd of 1,500 that gathered in\u00a0a church parking lot to revel in an extraterrestrial tale almost lost to history.\n\n\n\nThe Kelly Little Green Men will be making guest appearances around town soon! Stay tuned to our page to find out when and where. Announcements coming shortly\u2026.\nPosted by Kelly \"Little Green Men\" Days on\u00a0Tuesday, May 9, 2017\n\nThere are versions of that night described in newspaper clippings and \u201cinvestigated\u201d online by alien sleuths or rather sleuths of aliens. The legend, as it is most commonly told, goes something like this:Story continues below advertisementIt was dusk at the old Sutton farmhouse on that summer night in 1955\u00a0when Billy Ray Taylor, a Pennsylvania man visiting friends in Kentucky, walked to the well for a bucket of water.For years, people like him across the country had been\u00a0reporting odd sightings\u00a0in the night, extraterrestrial signs so strange that even the government was investigating. So when a bright, rainbow light streaked across the tree line and landed in a field behind the home, emitting a hissing sound, Taylor was convinced he had\u00a0seen a flying saucer. He ran back inside the house, where his wife and nine members of the Sutton family at first laughed off his frantic claims.AdvertisementThen came the silvery-green glow of otherworldly creatures, with undersized bodies and oversized heads. Their eyes bulged\u00a0and their arms stretched too long. They had not fingers, but claws.The eclipse capital of the U.S. is over the moon for Monday\u2019s solar eventTaylor and his friend, Elmer \u201cLucky\u201d Sutton, who grew up in the Kelly farmhouse, went through four boxes of .22 pistol shells trying to fend off the aliens, according to a story published in the Kentucky New Era the day after the alleged invasion.Story continues below advertisementThe two men shot wildly through the windows and barn doors. From a perch on the roof, one of the little men grabbed at a human head.\u201cWe need help,\u201d one of the humans told police after they had finally escaped and drove into town. \u201cWe\u2019ve been fighting them for nearly four hours.\u201dSoon the farmhouse was swarming with about 25 people, a collection of reporters, police, sheriff\u2019s deputies, state troopers and the U.S. Air Force, according to accounts from the time. They stayed for several hours but apparently found little that proved the frightened families\u2019 description of an alien shootout.Neighbors and townsfolk claimed their gun battle was nothing but a fictional tale drummed up for celebrity, a \u201csighting\u201d blamed on too much moonshine. The family was harassed and threatened. Ten days later, they moved out and left town.Geraldine Sutton Stith, the daughter of Elmer Sutton, didn\u2019t learn about her family\u2019s legendary encounter with the little men until about 20 years later, when a duo researching the incident tracked down her father and started asking questions. He decided it was time to share the tale with the next generation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStith\u00a0told the Louisville Courier-Journal\u00a0that the last three living people who were there that night in 1955 won\u2019t speak of it. But she has made it her life\u2019s mission to set the record straight.She reached out to Smithey and the other organizers years ago, when she heard they were hoping to turn her family\u2019s history into a town attraction. Stith wanted to make sure they got the story right, Smithey said, so she volunteered to speak each year at the festival.\u201cShe completely believes,\u201d Smithey said.Can\u2019t find the protective glasses to watch the solar eclipse? Go old school.The festival is held at Kelley Station Park, a plot of land purchased and built upon with funds raised by the annual attraction. It is named after the railroad conductor who founded the town \u2014 a nod to its objectively less interesting bit of community history \u2014 and is marked by a sign of a railroad car barreling down the tracks. The conductor, upon close inspection, is a little green alien.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the center of the park \u201chovers\u201d a 38-foot, 2.5 ton flying saucer that lights up and emits smoke. There is a platform that leads up to a cockpit. \u201cNo parking,\u201d a sign nearby reads. \u201cFlying saucer parking only. Violators will be beamed out.\u201dThe festival features a \u201cLittle Green Men\u201d homemade costume contest and visitors can even watch a dramatic recreation of the 1955 shootout\u00a0at a local cinema. \u201cThe Invasion of Kelly,\u201d it\u2019s called.Over the weekend, Stith, who has written two books about the invasion tale, spoke with festival attendees. Her pants, reported the Courier-Journal, were covered in pictures of little green men.The eclipse, she told the newspaper, only adds to the allure of her family lore.\u201cIt\u2019s like I\u2019ve been saying,\u201d Stith told the Courier-Journal. \u201cYou better check the hand you\u2019re\u00a0holding to be sure it\u2019s the hand you want to hold,\u00a0because you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to be standing beside you when the darkness comes.\u201dOn Aug. 21, 1955, several people claimed that small alien creatures from a spaceship were attacking their Kelly, Ky., farmhouse. (The Kelly \"Little Green Men\" Days festival committee) Locals call it a \u201ccosmic coincidence.\u201d  Tales from the path of totality: 62 years ago today, they say, \u2018little green men\u2019 invaded this Kentucky farm town",
        "author": "Katie Mettler"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Seattle store owner ran a Lego trafficking operation, authorities say. Police took it down \u2018brick by brick.\u2019 (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2177",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/22/seattle-lego-trafficking-baby-yoda/",
        "text": "Baby Yoda was going undercover.The mission: be an unassuming toy that had just been stolen. But Baby Yoda would, in fact, be secretly helping Seattle police bust a store owner they suspected of orchestrating a band of \u201cprolific shoplifters\u201d and trafficking in thousands of dollars\u2019 worth of stolen Legos.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe trick worked, police said. An undercover detective sold a 1,073-piece Lego set of The Child \u2014 a character commonly known as Baby Yoda in the Star Wars series \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d \u2014 to the owner of Rummage Around, a secondhand store in Seattle\u2019s Pike Place Market, after telling him it was stolen, according to the Seattle Police Department. Police arrested the store owner \u2014 67-year-old Mark Steven Brady \u2014 and prosecutors have charged him with first-degree trafficking in stolen property, a felony. Police accuse Brady of running a network of shoplifters by telling them the kinds of items he would buy and sending them off, knowing they would steal them. They say he purchased thousands of dollars\u2019 worth of stolen goods from July to September, including Star Wars Lego sets, Amazon electronics and a Philips Norelco hair trimmer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBrady \u201cwas most likely directing \u2026 prolific shoplifters to steal property from retail stores for his own benefit of buying them at extremely low prices and reselling them to others,\u201d Seattle police said in their investigative report.Brady was released from jail earlier this week and, while running his store Thursday night, he told The Washington Post that he has never knowingly bought stolen goods. He said he plans to retain a lawyer and that some fellow Pike Place Market business owners have pledged to raise money on GoFundMe so he can do so.\u201cI do want to fight this,\u201d he said.The case against Brady started in July when security employees of an Amazon 4-star, a brick-and-mortar department store owned by the online retail giant, contacted police about a slew of thefts that had been plaguing them, the investigative report said. Repeat shoplifters had been raiding their shelves of expensive goods, they told police, claiming the thieves would come in, go straight to their targets and leave \u201ccomfortably enough to not even conceal them.\u201d One, whom they identified as a 32-year-old man, stole more than $10,000 worth of merchandise, much of it Star Wars Lego sets, tending to gravitate toward ones from \u201cThe Mandalorian,\u201d the report states.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn early September, police caught a break in the case. An Amazon 4-star employee checking out a secondhand store in Pike Place Market spotted items for sale and suspected they\u2019d been stolen from their store. A security employee followed up the next day, went to Rummage Around and reported to police that \u201cthey 100 percent have our stuff.\u201d The employee said some of the items on sale still had the unique radio frequency identification (RFID) tags Amazon had placed on them. (Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)A detective went to Rummage Around about two weeks later. While inside, the detective saw one of the \u201cprolific shoplifters\u201d \u2014 the 32-year-old man who allegedly stole more than $10,000 in merchandise from the Amazon 4-star \u2014 come into the store, take something out of a bag and give it to the owner, who then handed him $40, the investigative report states.Police said the encounter began to dismantle the operation \u201cbrick by brick,\u201d and officers pressed Baby Yoda into action. Earlier this month, police launched an operation in which they marked a Lego set of \u201cThe Child,\u201d which retails for around $80, and sent an undercover detective into Rummage Around to sell it. When the detective went inside, he spotted Brady, approached him and then opened the reusable bag to reveal what he was offering.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou want any of this?\u201dBrady did, but not there, police allege in the report. \u201cLet\u2019s do this in the corner,\u201d police say he replied.Once there, Brady allegedly told the detective he\u2019d buy the Star Wars Lego set, but he grabbed the spider wire \u2014 an anti-theft lock ensnaring the Lego box \u2014 and said he didn\u2019t like it. The undercover detective apologized, saying he\u2019d just \u201cboosted\u201d it from the Amazon 4-Star, the report states. Brady said he could cut it off.\u201cWhat else do you need?\u201d the detective asked.\u201cI will take Lego sets, the big ones,\u201d police say Brady answered.Police claim Brady told the detective to make sure the stolen merchandise was hidden when entering the store, allegedly adding that he had three cameras recording outside and didn\u2019t want any of it caught on video.Story continues below advertisementSeattle police would later do a second run of the same operation, this time with a 1,023-piece Lego set of the Razor Crest, the spaceship featured in \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d series. Another undercover officer tried to sell Brady the toy spaceship outside Rummage Around, but Brady allegedly directed him inside the store.AdvertisementWhen the detective presented the boxed set with spider wire still wrapped around it, police claim Brady said he couldn\u2019t buy the item with the anti-theft device. The officer explained that he\u2019d tried to cut it off but couldn\u2019t and asked if there was a special tool he needed to do so. Brady didn\u2019t say, according to the report, instead taking the set from the undercover officer, putting it behind a blanket and then paying him. To cap off the interaction, the officer asked if Brady wanted him to get anything else in the future.Police say Brady replied with, \u201c[M]ore of the same.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn Oct. 15, police arrested Brady and seized thousands of dollars\u2019 worth of goods from his store, including 171 Lego sets. Using RFID tags and unique identification numbers, police say an Amazon 4-star security employee identified 34 of them \u2014 worth a total of more than $2,000 \u2014 as Amazon property.AdvertisementBrady told The Post he didn\u2019t like how police spread out the Lego sets they seized from his store for a photo op, like they\u2019d made a big drug bust of some kind of \u201cmonster.\u201d He also said police weren\u2019t discriminating in the sets they showcased.\u201cHow can they prove which ones are stolen?\u201dBrady said his life has been \u201cmiserable\u201d lately. He\u2019s had several surgeries to deal with an onslaught of health problems, and business has been bad because of the pandemic \u2014 on top of that, he has been caring for a 17-year-old he considers a son. And now he\u2019s been charged with a crime that carries a multiyear prison sentence as a maximum punishment.\u201cI mean, come on, that scares me,\u201d he said. Seattle police said one \"prolific shoplifter\" boosted more than $10,000 in merchandise over three months, much of it Star Wars LEGOs. A Seattle store owner ran a Lego trafficking operation, authorities say. Police took it down \u2018brick by brick.\u2019",
        "author": "Jonathan Edwards"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Gene Cernan was the last man on the moon \u2014 and \u2018he wasn\u2019t happy about that\u2019 (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2178",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/01/17/astronaut-gene-cernan-was-the-last-man-on-the-moon-and-he-wasnt-happy-about-that/",
        "text": "When Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan testified before Congress in 2011, it had been nearly four decades since man had set foot on the moon.Armstrong was the first to do so. Cernan, in 1972, was the last.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo when the\u00a0Obama administration canceled the Constellation program, which sought to once again place humankind on the moon, the astronauts who represented the bookends of the Space Race felt it was their duty to defend the boundless possibilities of celestial exploration. NASA\u2019s newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroidsCernan said the program had been replaced by a \u201cmission to nowhere,\u201d reported AFP at the time, and that \u201cwe are on a path to decay.\u201d\u201cWe are seeing the book close on five decades of accomplishment as the leader in human space exploration,\u201d Cernan testified before Congress.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNeil and I aren\u2019t going to see those next young Americans who walk on the moon. And God help us if they\u2019re not Americans,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I leave this planet, I want to know where we are headed as a nation. That\u2019s my big goal.\u201dAdvertisementA year later, Armstrong died. On Monday, so did Cernan.He was 82.Not just during his numerous advocacy trips to Washington, but through his autobiography, a 2016 documentary film and in recorded interviews, Cernan spent his life challenging young people to eclipse\u00a0his NASA legacy and put fresh footprints on the moon.He died without knowing for certain when \u2014\u00a0or if \u2014\u00a0that will happen.With Trump, Gingrich and GOP calling the shots, NASA may go back to the moonCernan had famously predicted that, after the moon, man would be on Mars by the end of the 20th century. NASA says it still won\u2019t meet that goal for more than a decade, a long delay in progress that became a point of consternation for the last person to set foot on the lunar surface.For scientists and advocates of space exploration, Cernan\u2019s death forced moments of reflection on the state of NASA and American ambition to discover what lies beyond Earth\u2019s orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWith Gene Cernan\u2019s passing we are reminded (and hopefully embarrassed) how very, very long it has been since humans have left Earth orbit,\u201d Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, wrote on Twitter, along with a link to his story about Cernan, titled \u201cThe passing of Gene Cernan reminds us how far we haven\u2019t come.\u201dAstrophysicist and cosmologist Neil DeGrasse Tyson weighed in as well.\u201cIn 1927 Lindbergh flew from NY to Paris. 45 yrs later, in 1972 we last walked on the Moon,\u201d Tyson wrote on Twitter. \u201c45 yrs later, in 2017 we\u2026 we\u2026 we\u2026\u201dThe critiques come at a time of decreased funding for America\u2019s space initiatives. In Cernan\u2019s and Armstrong\u2019s day, 5 percent of the federal budget was dedicated to NASA. Now, it receives less than 0.5 percent.\u00a0Even so, the agency invested 30 years in the space shuttle program, helped build the International Space Station, launched efforts to further study asteroids and put a rover on Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll that didn\u2019t satisfy Cernan, though, who wanted more from NASA, and faster.Cernan\u2019s death, from ongoing health issues, comes just six weeks after the passing of another space hero, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, and a health scare from Buzz Aldrin, who landed on the moon with Armstrong and was the second man to walk it.Buzz Aldrin nearly died at the South Pole. Why he insists \u2018it was worth it, really.\u2019And of the dozen American men who walked on the moon during the Apollo era, from 1961 to 1972, only six are still living, reported the Associated Press.The sense of profound loss that has thus far accompanied the passing of these astronauts is not just for the deaths of brave men turned American heroes, but for the Kennedy-era American exceptionalism that inspired the Greatest Generation to land on the moon in the first place.Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, passed away today. We reflect on his life and legacy: https://t.co/U0HrTZo0iX pic.twitter.com/JtgCCQImrM\u2014 NASA (@NASA) January 17, 2017\n\nIt was a concept Cernan spoke of often, and one that motivated him to desperately shed his designation as \u201cThe Last Man on the Moon.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe wrote an autobiography under that title in 1999, and closed the book with a passionate plea.\u201cToo many years have passed for me to still be the last man to have left his footprints on the Moon,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI believe with all my heart that somewhere out there is a young boy or girl with indomitable will and courage who will lift that dubious distinction from my shoulders and take us back where we belong. Let us give that dream a chance.\u201dNearly 20 years later, in his final years, Cernan continued that fight.\u201cEven at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space,\u201d Cernan\u2019s family wrote in a statement, \u201cand encouraged our nation\u2019s leaders and young people to not let him remain the last man to walk on the Moon.\u201dIn a tribute to his old friend, Aldrin wrote that \u201cGene was probably the strongest spokesman for lunar travel and advocating a return to the moon.\u201dHe was the last man there, Aldrin wrote, and \u201che wasn\u2019t happy about that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWith the passing of the First Man \u2013 Neil Armstrong, and the passing of the Last Man \u2013 Gene Cernan, it is up to us Middle Men to carry on (the) spirit of Apollo into the future for our Nation and the world,\u201d Aldrin wrote in the tribute.Buzz Aldrin: John Glenn was a hero. We owe it to him to keep exploring space.How that \u201cspirit of Apollo\u201d translates to today\u2019s ambitions for space travel, which lean heavily on the use of robots, remains a point of contention among American scientists and leaders. Some argue that technological developments have created a safer way to explore space until the time is right to send humans beyond Earth\u2019s orbit, which will perhaps happen in the 2030s, when NASA hopes to put astronauts on Mars.I lost another friend today and the world lost another hero. #RIPGeneCernan Here's my statement about Gene's passing https://t.co/cJm8Qg6kRe pic.twitter.com/N0vMbyfvRL\u2014 Dr. Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) January 17, 2017\n\nBut others, like Cernan, were persistent in distinguishing the excitement stemming from\u00a0putting robots vs. people into space.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere is a difference between a space program that takes you to 300 miles away from your home planet and another one that sets you out on a voyage a quarter million miles away,\u201d he said during an interview with NASA in 1991. \u201cThere are significant differences, both technologically and philosophically. And, quite frankly, I\u2019m a little disappointed in us, at this time, to know that we\u2019re really not much further along than we were back then.\u201dHow Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space programNearly 20 years later, when he testified to Congress in 2010, Cernan implored the lawmakers to be\u00a0\u201cbold, innovative and wise in how we invest in the future of America.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cCuriosity is the essence of human existence. Who are we? Where are we? What do we come from? Where are we going? Was there life on Mars? Is Mars like Earth is going to look in a billion years? Are we what Mars looked like a billion years ago. I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t have any answers to those questions. I don\u2019t know what\u2019s over there and around the corner. But I want to find out.\u201dStory continues below advertisementEven in his final words on the moon in 1972, after he\u2019d planted an American flag there and carved the initials of his daughter in the dust, Cernan spoke with that same urgency.As I take man\u2019s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come \u2013 but we believe not too long into the future \u2013 I\u2019d like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America\u2019s challenge of today has forged man\u2019s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus\u2013Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.\"We leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.\"~Gene Cernan, #Apollo17Godspeed... pic.twitter.com/pB5qU8wX6k\u2014 Doug Wheelock (@Astro_Wheels) January 16, 2017\n\nMore from Morning Mix:\u00a0Massive strolling alligator enthralls tourists at Fla. nature reserve \u2014 and on videoPolice: Conn. politician said he no longer has to be \u2018politically correct,\u2019 pinched woman\u2019s groin8 people injured by gunfire, one critically, during MLK day festivities in Miami He spent his life challenging young people to eclipse his NASA legacy and put fresh footprints on the moon. He died without knowing when \u2014 or if \u2014 that will happen.  Astronaut Gene Cernan was the last man on the moon \u2014 and \u2018he wasn\u2019t happy about that\u2019",
        "author": "Katie Mettler"
    },
    {
        "title": "After high-stakes court battle, Neil Armstrong\u2019s storied lunar bag could fetch $4 million at auction (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2179",
        "date": "2017-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/23/after-high-stakes-court-battle-neil-armstrongs-storied-lunar-bag-could-fetch-4-million-at-auction/",
        "text": "Neil Armstrong\u2019s lunar sample bag has had a long and complicated journey over the past half-century.It started in 1969, when the off-white, purse-sized pouch\u00a0flew to the moon and back with the legendary astronaut, who used it to collect the first lunar rock specimens during the Apollo 11 mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen\u00a0the bag returned to Earth, the U.S. government emptied it of its contents and dubbed it a national treasure. The bag, which still contained traces of moon dust,\u00a0became a priceless museum artifact. Through a series of mix-ups, however, the government lost track of it until a few years ago, when it was accidentally put up for auction and nabbed by an Illinois woman for less than $1,000.Story continues below advertisementNow, after a high-stakes legal battle over the bag\u2019s rightful ownership, it will again be auctioned off\u00a0\u2014 only this time it\u2019s expected to sell for exponentially more.AdvertisementSotheby\u2019s New York announced over the weekend that the bag\u00a0will be offered in the auction house\u2019s space exploration sale on July 20, the anniversary of the moon landing.The bag, believed to be the only Apollo 11 artifact in private hands, is expected to fetch between $2 million and $4 million, according to Sotheby\u2019s.\u201cStill containing traces of the moon dust, the artifact gives a collector the chance to not only own some of the first lunar material ever collected,\u201d Sotheby\u2019s said, \u201cbut also the chance to own an exceptionally rare relic of humanity\u2019s greatest achievement \u2014 landing a man on the moon.\u201dThe full story of what happened to the bag between 1969 and now\u00a0has only been revealed in the past year.After taking his famed \u201cone small step\u201d out of the Lunar Module, Armstrong gleaned rock fragments from a basin known as the Sea of Tranquility and stashed them in the bag, labeled \u201cLUNAR SAMPLE RETURN.\u201d Back on Earth, its contents went to NASA\u2019s Lunar Sample Laboratory, though some of the material clung to the bag\u2019s fibers, leading the government to deem it so special it needed to be preserved in museums.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bag went largely forgotten until 2003, when it turned up in the garage of the president of the Cosmosphere, the space museum in Hutchinson, Kan. He was later charged and convicted of\u00a0stealing items that belonged to the government.Federal agents confiscated the bag. But because of a clerical error, it was\u00a0mislabeled as an item from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, as The Washington Post\u2019s Ben Guarino has reported. The sample sacks from that mission weren\u2019t used to gather moon rock, so its apparent value dropped significantly.According to Sotheby\u2019s, a small auction house offered the bag three\u00a0times in 2014 on behalf of the U.S. Marshal\u2019s office. Not a single bid came in.Story continues below advertisementThe bag was relisted in February 2015.That\u2019s when Nancy Carlson entered the picture.Carlson, a Chicago-area lawyer,\u00a0placed a winning bid on the bag of $995. Curious about the its history, she sent it to\u00a0Johnson Space Center in Houston to be authenticated. NASA\u00a0came back with bad news: the bag was from Apollo 11, and it was used for the first lunar samples ever collected.AdvertisementNASA kept the coveted sack. Carlson sued in federal court to get it back. The government\u00a0argued\u00a0it had never actually transferred ownership of the bag to a private individual. Government lawyers asked the court to rescind the sale and refund Carlson her money. Carlson\u00a0contended that the sale was valid and that she was a bona fide purchaser.NASA \u2018sting\u2019 operation against 74-year-old widow of Apollo engineer draws court rebukeThe court rejected the government\u2019s argument in February and ordered the bag returned to Carlson, paving the way for this summer\u2019s auction.Story continues below advertisementAccording to Sotheby\u2019s, Carlson plans to donate some of the proceeds to charities, including the Immune Deficiency Foundation and\u00a0a children\u2019s health center. She also plans to create a scholarship for speech pathology students at Northern Michigan University.NASA, meanwhile,\u00a0wants to see the bag in a public museum, not a private collection.AdvertisementAs the agency said in a statement after February\u2019s court ruling: \u201cThis artifact, we believe, belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public, which is where it was before all of these unfortunate events occurred.\u201dMore from Morning MixMIT researchers use bacteria to create workout clothes that cool the sweaty bodyVeteran big game hunter dies after elephant, felled by gunfire, collapses on himYale dean placed on leave after calling people \u2018white trash\u2019 on Yelp The lunar sample bag used in the Apollo 11 mission has had a long and complicated journey over the past half-century. After high-stakes court battle, Neil Armstrong\u2019s storied lunar bag could fetch $4 million at auction",
        "author": "Derek Hawkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "After high-stakes court battle, Neil Armstrong\u2019s storied lunar bag could fetch $4 million at auction (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2180",
        "date": "2017-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/23/after-high-stakes-court-battle-neil-armstrongs-storied-lunar-bag-could-fetch-4-million-at-auction/",
        "text": "Neil Armstrong\u2019s lunar sample bag has had a long and complicated journey over the past half-century.It started in 1969, when the off-white, purse-sized pouch\u00a0flew to the moon and back with the legendary astronaut, who used it to collect the first lunar rock specimens during the Apollo 11 mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen\u00a0the bag returned to Earth, the U.S. government emptied it of its contents and dubbed it a national treasure. The bag, which still contained traces of moon dust,\u00a0became a priceless museum artifact. Through a series of mix-ups, however, the government lost track of it until a few years ago, when it was accidentally put up for auction and nabbed by an Illinois woman for less than $1,000.Story continues below advertisementNow, after a high-stakes legal battle over the bag\u2019s rightful ownership, it will again be auctioned off\u00a0\u2014 only this time it\u2019s expected to sell for exponentially more.AdvertisementSotheby\u2019s New York announced over the weekend that the bag\u00a0will be offered in the auction house\u2019s space exploration sale on July 20, the anniversary of the moon landing.The bag, believed to be the only Apollo 11 artifact in private hands, is expected to fetch between $2 million and $4 million, according to Sotheby\u2019s.\u201cStill containing traces of the moon dust, the artifact gives a collector the chance to not only own some of the first lunar material ever collected,\u201d Sotheby\u2019s said, \u201cbut also the chance to own an exceptionally rare relic of humanity\u2019s greatest achievement \u2014 landing a man on the moon.\u201dThe full story of what happened to the bag between 1969 and now\u00a0has only been revealed in the past year.After taking his famed \u201cone small step\u201d out of the Lunar Module, Armstrong gleaned rock fragments from a basin known as the Sea of Tranquility and stashed them in the bag, labeled \u201cLUNAR SAMPLE RETURN.\u201d Back on Earth, its contents went to NASA\u2019s Lunar Sample Laboratory, though some of the material clung to the bag\u2019s fibers, leading the government to deem it so special it needed to be preserved in museums.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bag went largely forgotten until 2003, when it turned up in the garage of the president of the Cosmosphere, the space museum in Hutchinson, Kan. He was later charged and convicted of\u00a0stealing items that belonged to the government.Federal agents confiscated the bag. But because of a clerical error, it was\u00a0mislabeled as an item from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, as The Washington Post\u2019s Ben Guarino has reported. The sample sacks from that mission weren\u2019t used to gather moon rock, so its apparent value dropped significantly.According to Sotheby\u2019s, a small auction house offered the bag three\u00a0times in 2014 on behalf of the U.S. Marshal\u2019s office. Not a single bid came in.Story continues below advertisementThe bag was relisted in February 2015.That\u2019s when Nancy Carlson entered the picture.Carlson, a Chicago-area lawyer,\u00a0placed a winning bid on the bag of $995. Curious about the its history, she sent it to\u00a0Johnson Space Center in Houston to be authenticated. NASA\u00a0came back with bad news: the bag was from Apollo 11, and it was used for the first lunar samples ever collected.AdvertisementNASA kept the coveted sack. Carlson sued in federal court to get it back. The government\u00a0argued\u00a0it had never actually transferred ownership of the bag to a private individual. Government lawyers asked the court to rescind the sale and refund Carlson her money. Carlson\u00a0contended that the sale was valid and that she was a bona fide purchaser.NASA \u2018sting\u2019 operation against 74-year-old widow of Apollo engineer draws court rebukeThe court rejected the government\u2019s argument in February and ordered the bag returned to Carlson, paving the way for this summer\u2019s auction.Story continues below advertisementAccording to Sotheby\u2019s, Carlson plans to donate some of the proceeds to charities, including the Immune Deficiency Foundation and\u00a0a children\u2019s health center. She also plans to create a scholarship for speech pathology students at Northern Michigan University.NASA, meanwhile,\u00a0wants to see the bag in a public museum, not a private collection.AdvertisementAs the agency said in a statement after February\u2019s court ruling: \u201cThis artifact, we believe, belongs to the American people and should be on display for the public, which is where it was before all of these unfortunate events occurred.\u201dMore from Morning MixMIT researchers use bacteria to create workout clothes that cool the sweaty bodyVeteran big game hunter dies after elephant, felled by gunfire, collapses on himYale dean placed on leave after calling people \u2018white trash\u2019 on Yelp The lunar sample bag used in the Apollo 11 mission has had a long and complicated journey over the past half-century. After high-stakes court battle, Neil Armstrong\u2019s storied lunar bag could fetch $4 million at auction",
        "author": "Derek Hawkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s \u2018manifest destiny\u2019 in space revives old phrase to provocative effect (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2181",
        "date": "2020-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/05/trumps-manifest-destiny-space-revives-old-phrase-provocative-effect/",
        "text": "Just after President Trump extolled his record on gun rights on Tuesday evening, his State of the Union address took a wild, westward turn into an idea that\u2019s long been relegated to the history books.\u201cIn reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation,\u201d he told members of Congress, about three-quarters of the way through his speech. \u201cNow we must embrace the next frontier: America\u2019s manifest destiny in the stars.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMinutes later, some people on social media were alarmed. The phrase is anything but politically correct, on the left at least. And Trump and his base enjoy pushing the left\u2019s buttons.Story continues below advertisement\u201cDid @realDonaldTrump just cite manifest destiny to argue we should colonize the moon?\u201d Abdul El-Sayed, former Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, asked on Twitter.AdvertisementAs a historical concept, manifest destiny would be familiar to any student of AP U.S. history: To make the case for westward expansion, many Americans in the mid-19th century argued that the nation had a God-given responsibility to push its territorial footprint farther, lest the American experiment die out.Back then, it was a kind of veneer to make the whole thing seem nobler: A justification for protecting the country\u2019s perceived interests even if it meant destroying many of the people and much of the environment in its path.Story continues below advertisementOn Tuesday, however, manifest destiny proved to be a kind of Rorschach test for politicos on either side of a polarized Washington. (This time, NASA was involved.)Chiraag Bains, the director of legal strategies at the liberal think tank Demos, criticized its use in the State of the Union, saying that manifest destiny was \u201cthe white man\u2019s right to conquer all of North America, used to justify the killing and removal of Native peoples.\u201dAdvertisementJim Morhard, NASA\u2019s deputy administrator, offered a very different definition on Twitter. Manifest destiny, he said, \u201cwas the belief that the United States was destined to promote democracy & free enterprise across North America.\u201dHe's not being subtle. Trump invoked manifest destiny -- the 19th century idea that it was the white man's right to conquer all of North America, used to justify the killing and removal of Native peoples -- to explain why he's going to plant a flag on Mars. #SOTU pic.twitter.com/51nKT31TVC\u2014 Chiraag Bains (@chiraagbains) February 5, 2020\n\nManifest Destiny was the belief that the United States was destined to promote democracy & free enterprise across North America.\u00a0Tonight, President Trump said, \"America's Manifest Destiny in the stars.\" We go to the Moon & then Mars to share those same values with all humankind.\u2014 Jim Morhard (@jmorhard) February 5, 2020\n\nWell, not quite.Story continues below advertisementSteven E. Woodworth, a history professor at Texas Christian University and the author of \u201cManifest Destinies: America\u2019s Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War,\u201d told The Washington Post late on Tuesday that Trump\u2019s use of the concept seemed to be an attempt to sell space exploration in a way that might appeal to his supporters\u2019 ideas of frontier-era nostalgia.Indeed, the president sprinkled related ideas throughout the State of the Union address and often fused them with his galactic ambitions: the vast frontier. Braving the unknown and taming the wilderness. Planting the American flag on Mars and sending 13-year-old Iain Lanphier from Arizona into space. The Wild West.Advertisement\u201cHe\u2019s touching all of the buttons you can push to light up the dashboard of American heritage,\u201d Woodworth said, and invoking an idea that the president\u2019s supporters \u201cwould associate with being strong, independent and self-reliant.\"President Trump addressed lawmakers in his 2020 State of the Union address on Feb. 4. Here are key moments from his speech. (The Washington Post)Near the end of his speech on Tuesday, Trump said that \u201cthe American nation was carved out of the vast frontier by the toughest, strongest, fiercest and most determined men and women ever to walk on the face of the Earth.\"Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s not quite right either, Woodworth said. Those who went westward may have been fleeing the law farther east, or been down on their luck and in search of better economic fortunes. Over the course of 30 years, 400,000 people sold what they had and moved west of the Mississippi River.Yet Trump\u2019s address pulled from popular American conceptions \u2014 or at least some people\u2019s conceptions \u2014 of frontier life, which have seeped into how we think of the idea of manifest destiny today. In popular terms, then, it\u2019s all evolved over the past century and a half.AdvertisementThe term was coined by journalist John O\u2019Sullivan in 1845, as a way to marshal up popular support for the United States to annex the Republic of Texas.Story continues below advertisementIt was the nation\u2019s \u201cmanifest destiny,\u201d O\u2019Sullivan wrote, to carry the \u201cgreat experiment of liberty\u201d as far west as it might go: to \u201coverspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us.\"However, it wasn\u2019t until his second use of the term, advocating for negotiations with Britain over Oregon Country, that it really stuck. By then, the Pacific was already in sight for the growing nation.Woodworth said that timeline may be a key difference compared to the goal of planting the American flag on Mars, as Trump declared on Tuesday. When O\u2019Sullivan called for the annexation of Texas, the idea of a transcontinental United States was realistically only a few years away. Indeed, by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the contiguous United States became what it looks like today.So while Trump may have called the United States \u201ca frontier nation,\u201d Woodworth said that label has not really applied in well over a century. By 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that so many people had filled in throughout the West that there was no longer a meaningful frontier line.And besides, Woodworth asked: Does Trump himself even know what manifest destiny means? Depending on whom you ask, the concept of \u201cmanifest destiny\u201d might mean the Wild West or the undoing of Native Americans. But there's no question it's long been defunct \u2014 until Trump brought it up at the State of the Union. Trump\u2019s \u2018manifest destiny\u2019 in space revives old phrase to provocative effect",
        "author": "Teo Armus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Late-night hosts mock Jeff Bezos\u2019s space \u2018joyride\u2019: He celebrated \u2018like it was the end of a yacht race\u2019 (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2182",
        "date": "2021-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/21/stephen-colbert-bezos-space-cowboy/",
        "text": "For Stephen Colbert, the copious news coverage of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019s \u201cjoyride into the ionosphere\u201d took the billionaire turned astronaut\u2019s 10-minute space shuttle flight a bit too seriously.\u201cWhen they landed, the \u2018billion-nauts\u2019 sprayed each other with champagne like it was the end of a yacht race,\u201d Colbert said during the opening monologue of \u201cThe Late Show\u201d on Tuesday. \u201cIf something is really important, it doesn\u2019t need a big wet celebration. You\u2019ll remember Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t douse Neil Armstrong with Gatorade.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJokes about the brief foray into space inside a ship called the New Shepard dominated the late-night shows on Tuesday as comedians lampooned the rocket\u2019s phallic appearance and mocked Bezos for his post-flight persona.Story continues below advertisementBezos launched into space Tuesday morning from a spaceport in the West Texas desert for a short flight with a crew of three other people, including his brother, Mark Bezos; 82-year-old Wally Funk, who became the oldest astronaut to enter space; and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, a student from the Netherlands who bought his seat in an auction. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAfter the crew landed safely, Bezos drew some ire from critics when he thanked the Amazon employees and customers who have built his immense wealth: \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,\u201d he said.AdvertisementColbert rolled that clip on his show Tuesday night and then quipped: \u201cIt\u2019s funny because he doesn\u2019t pay taxes or his employees.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAmazon, where Bezos still serves as executive chairman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Bezos\u2019s attempt to credit the people who have contributed to his fortune fell flat for some critics in part because of long-standing complaints about working conditions inside Amazon warehouses and recent reports that the multibillionaire has at times avoided paying federal taxes. Last month, ProPublica reported that, despite being one of the wealthiest people in the world, Bezos had not paid a penny in federal income taxes in 2007 or 2011, according to a trove of Internal Revenue Service records.Late-night comedians were hardly alone in challenging Bezos over his decision to spend his money on space travel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cListen, I\u2019m all for space exploration and it must have been an amazing view,\u201d Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) tweeted Tuesday. \u201cBut maybe \u2014 and I\u2019m just spitballing here \u2014 if Amazon and other companies paid their fair share in taxes, we could lift all kids \u2014 if not into space \u2014 at least out of poverty.\u201dRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also lashed out, saying Amazon workers paid for the rocket \u201cwith lower wages, union busting, a frenzied and inhumane workplace, and delivery drivers not having health insurance during a pandemic.\u201dOn Tuesday, Bezos boasted about bringing a pair of goggles that had belonged to Amelia Earhart on the space flight. The billionaire claimed Earhart had worn the antique protective eyewear on her flight around the world that ended when she crash-landed and vanished in 1937.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s an interesting choice for a good-luck charm,\u201d Colbert said on \u201cThe Late Show.\u201d \u201cOkay, we\u2019ve got Amelia Earhart\u2019s goggles, we have a chunk of the iceberg from the Titanic, and in here we\u2019ve got Abraham Lincoln\u2019s playbill. Let\u2019s go.\u201dSo, uhh, about Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hat \u2026Of course, the true star of the night was the cowboy hat Bezos wore as he emerged from the rocket once it had landed safely on Earth.\u201cYou know you\u2019re rich when you put that on and everyone who works for you goes, \u2018Oh, it looks great. Yeah. You\u2019re a man of the people, just going to space,\u2019 \u201d Jimmy Fallon quipped on \u201cThe Tonight Show.\u201d \u201cHe looks like a mash-up between Buzz Lightyear and Woody.\u201d Jeff Bezos launched into space Tuesday morning from a spaceport in the West Texas desert. Late-night hosts mock Jeff Bezos\u2019s space \u2018joyride\u2019: He celebrated \u2018like it was the end of a yacht race\u2019",
        "author": "Katie Shepherd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Late-night hosts mock Jeff Bezos\u2019s space \u2018joyride\u2019: He celebrated \u2018like it was the end of a yacht race\u2019 (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2183",
        "date": "2021-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/21/stephen-colbert-bezos-space-cowboy/",
        "text": "For Stephen Colbert, the copious news coverage of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019s \u201cjoyride into the ionosphere\u201d took the billionaire turned astronaut\u2019s 10-minute space shuttle flight a bit too seriously.\u201cWhen they landed, the \u2018billion-nauts\u2019 sprayed each other with champagne like it was the end of a yacht race,\u201d Colbert said during the opening monologue of \u201cThe Late Show\u201d on Tuesday. \u201cIf something is really important, it doesn\u2019t need a big wet celebration. You\u2019ll remember Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t douse Neil Armstrong with Gatorade.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJokes about the brief foray into space inside a ship called the New Shepard dominated the late-night shows on Tuesday as comedians lampooned the rocket\u2019s phallic appearance and mocked Bezos for his post-flight persona.Story continues below advertisementBezos launched into space Tuesday morning from a spaceport in the West Texas desert for a short flight with a crew of three other people, including his brother, Mark Bezos; 82-year-old Wally Funk, who became the oldest astronaut to enter space; and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, a student from the Netherlands who bought his seat in an auction. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAfter the crew landed safely, Bezos drew some ire from critics when he thanked the Amazon employees and customers who have built his immense wealth: \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,\u201d he said.AdvertisementColbert rolled that clip on his show Tuesday night and then quipped: \u201cIt\u2019s funny because he doesn\u2019t pay taxes or his employees.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAmazon, where Bezos still serves as executive chairman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Bezos\u2019s attempt to credit the people who have contributed to his fortune fell flat for some critics in part because of long-standing complaints about working conditions inside Amazon warehouses and recent reports that the multibillionaire has at times avoided paying federal taxes. Last month, ProPublica reported that, despite being one of the wealthiest people in the world, Bezos had not paid a penny in federal income taxes in 2007 or 2011, according to a trove of Internal Revenue Service records.Late-night comedians were hardly alone in challenging Bezos over his decision to spend his money on space travel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cListen, I\u2019m all for space exploration and it must have been an amazing view,\u201d Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) tweeted Tuesday. \u201cBut maybe \u2014 and I\u2019m just spitballing here \u2014 if Amazon and other companies paid their fair share in taxes, we could lift all kids \u2014 if not into space \u2014 at least out of poverty.\u201dRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also lashed out, saying Amazon workers paid for the rocket \u201cwith lower wages, union busting, a frenzied and inhumane workplace, and delivery drivers not having health insurance during a pandemic.\u201dOn Tuesday, Bezos boasted about bringing a pair of goggles that had belonged to Amelia Earhart on the space flight. The billionaire claimed Earhart had worn the antique protective eyewear on her flight around the world that ended when she crash-landed and vanished in 1937.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s an interesting choice for a good-luck charm,\u201d Colbert said on \u201cThe Late Show.\u201d \u201cOkay, we\u2019ve got Amelia Earhart\u2019s goggles, we have a chunk of the iceberg from the Titanic, and in here we\u2019ve got Abraham Lincoln\u2019s playbill. Let\u2019s go.\u201dSo, uhh, about Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hat \u2026Of course, the true star of the night was the cowboy hat Bezos wore as he emerged from the rocket once it had landed safely on Earth.\u201cYou know you\u2019re rich when you put that on and everyone who works for you goes, \u2018Oh, it looks great. Yeah. You\u2019re a man of the people, just going to space,\u2019 \u201d Jimmy Fallon quipped on \u201cThe Tonight Show.\u201d \u201cHe looks like a mash-up between Buzz Lightyear and Woody.\u201d Jeff Bezos launched into space Tuesday morning from a spaceport in the West Texas desert. Late-night hosts mock Jeff Bezos\u2019s space \u2018joyride\u2019: He celebrated \u2018like it was the end of a yacht race\u2019",
        "author": "Katie Shepherd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s Boy Scouts speech broke with 80 years of presidential tradition (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2184",
        "date": "2017-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/25/trumps-boy-scouts-speech-broke-with-80-years-of-presidential-tradition/",
        "text": "For 80 years, American presidents have been speaking to the National Scout Jamboree, a gathering of tens of thousands of youngsters from around the world eager to absorb the ideas of service, citizenship and global diplomacy.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn keeping with the Scouts\u2019 traditions, all eight presidents and surrogates who have represented them have stayed far, far away from partisan politics. Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the occasion to talk about good citizenship. Harry S. Truman extolled fellowship: \u201cWhen you work and live together, and exchange ideas around the campfire, you get to know what the other fellow is like,\u201d he said.President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the \u201cbonds of common purpose and common ideals.\u201d And President George H.W. Bush spoke of \u201cserving others.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor a brief moment at this year\u2019s jamboree in West Virgina,\u00a0President Donald Trump indicated that he would follow that tradition \u2014 sort of.Advertisement\u201cWho the hell wants to speak about politics when I\u2019m in front of the Boy Scouts?\u201d he said.President Trump spoke before the National Scout Jamboree on July 24. It is an 80-year tradition for the sitting president to address the Boy Scouts. (The Washington Post)Then, standing before all 40,000 of them, he bragged about the \u201crecord\u201d crowd size, bashed President Barack Obama, criticized the \u201cfake media\u201d and trashed Hillary Clinton\u2019s presidential campaign. In the lengthy 35-minute speech, the president threatened to fire his health and human services secretary if he couldn\u2019t persuade members of Congress to vote for the Republican health-care bill.he Scout Jamboree wasn\u2019t the only time Trump has awkwardly bragged about his election winAt one point, he told a rambling story about a conversation he had at a New York cocktail party with a once-successful home builder who \u201clost his momentum.\u201d The lesson, apparently: \u201cYou have to know whether or not you continue to have the momentum. And if you don\u2019t have it, that\u2019s okay.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThroughout the address, Trump dropped in praise for\u00a0\u201cthe moms and the dads and troop leaders\u201d and thanked the Scouts for upholding \u201cthe sacred values of our nation.\u201dAdvertisementA look at President Trump\u2019s first six months in officeShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageU.S. President Donald Trump, center, signs an executive order at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Washington, D.C. U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2017. Trump acted on two of the most fundamental -- and controversial -- elements of his presidential campaign, building a wall on the border with Mexico and greatly tightening restrictions on who can enter the U.S. Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Pool via Bloomberg (Chip Somodevilla/Bloomberg)Trump and the Republicans just can\u2019t stop running against Hillary ClintonIt was yet another example of Trump ignoring the custom that past presidents have dutifully observed in such public ceremonies. In his first full day in office, Trump bucked tradition at the CIA when he delivered a campaign-style speech in front of a memorial wall for fallen agency employees. In May, he used a commencement ceremony at the Coast Guard Academy to lament that he has been treated \u201cmore unfairly\u201d than any other politician in history. And so it was at this year\u2019s jamboree. Trump, who promised to be different from all the rest, was indeed just that, talking to the Scouts in a way no president ever has.Here, by way of illustration, is an abbreviated history of American presidents and their encounters with the Boy Scouts jamboree.Story continues below advertisementPresident Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1935 and 1937)Roosevelt, once called the \u201cgreatest friend Scouting ever had in the White House,\u201d helped secure support from federal and local officials to host the inaugural Scout Jamboree in Washington, D.C., in 1935. There were plans to line the scouts along Constitution Avenue and throw a party on the White House lawn. But the gathering was derailed when a polio outbreak near the nation\u2019s capital put the Scouts at too great a risk.AdvertisementThe President, who said he had looked forward to the jamboree for more than a year, addressed the Boy Scouts by radio instead.Roosevelt said that Boy Scouts, present and former, \u201cconstitute a very real part of our American citizenship\u201d that relies on unselfishness and cooperative attitudes.\u00a0\u201cScouting revolves around not the mere theory of service to others but the habit of service to others,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe young boys should be engaged in civic affairs in their home communities, even before they can legally vote, Roosevelt said, praising \u201cthe many contributions that individual Scouts and Scout organizations have made to the relief of suffering, the relief of the needy, to the maintenance of good order and good health, and to the furtherance of good citizenship and good government.\u201dThe great outdoors, he added, are to be loved and understood, and he reminded the boys of their Scout Motto to always \u201cbe prepared.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cWhen you go out into life, you have come to understand that the individual in your community who always says \u2018I can\u2019t\u2019 or \u2018I won\u2019t\u2019 or \u2018I don\u2019t,\u2019 the individual who by inaction or by opposition slows up honest, practical, far-seeing community effort, is the fellow who is holding back civilization and holding back the objectives of the Constitution of the United States,\u201d Roosevelt said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe need more Scouts,\u201d he added. \u201cThe more the better. For the record shows that taking it by and large, boys trained as Scouts make good citizens.\u201dTwo years later, Roosevelt joined the Scouts in D.C., where they found his face on the first page of the Jamboree Journal with a greeting and plug for good citizenship, according to Scouting Magazine.The former president toured the camp site, took 12 Eagle Scouts to the Major League Baseball All-Star Game and visited with a group from New York that had built a large replica of the Roosevelt family home, reported the magazine.Advertisement(Read or listen to Roosevelt\u2019s full address)President Harry S. Truman (1950)Story continues below advertisementThis jamboree was on July Fourth at Valley Forge, Pa., where General George Washington brought his army in the winter of 1777. Truman noted the soldiers\u2019 struggles \u2014 the bitter cold, lack of food, poor shelter and tattered clothing \u2014 to make a greater point about perseverance.\u201cBut the men of Washington\u2019s army stuck it out,\u201d Truman said. \u201cThey stuck it out because they had a fierce belief in the cause of freedom for which they were fighting. And because of that belief, they won.\u201dTruman\u2019s speech morphed into a lesson on international diplomacy, world peace and freedom for all. He listed off the many states and foreign countries from which Scouts had come to attend the jamboree.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen you work and live together, and exchange ideas around the campfire, you get to know what the other fellow is like,\u201d Truman said. \u201cThat is the first step toward settling world problems in a spirit of give and take, instead of fighting about them.\u201dAdvertisementThe \u201cScout movement,\u201d the former president said, is \u201cgood training\u201d for nation building work across the globe. Truman took shots at the dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, then shifted his criticism to \u201cCommunist-dominated countries\u201d that are giving children \u201ca completely distorted picture of the world.\u201dHe said:\u201cThe great tragedy of our times is that there are movements in the world that deny this fundamental ideal of human brotherhood. These movements have devoted themselves to preaching distrust between nations. They have made a religion of hate. They have tried to turn the peoples of the earth against one another \u2014 to create a gulf between different peoples that fellowship cannot bridge. As a part of this effort, they have tried to poison the minds of the young people.\u201dThe United States, Truman said, \u201cis striving to build a world in which men will live as good neighbors and work for the good of all.\u201d He said he hoped all Boy Scouts in attendance would take home an understanding of \u201chuman brotherhood\u201d and \u201cwork for freedom and peace with the same burning faith that inspired the men of George Washington\u2019s army here at Valley Forge.\u201dStory continues below advertisement(Read Truman\u2019s full speech here)President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon (1953, 1957 and 1960)AdvertisementEisenhower, who visited the jamboree in 1950, was unable to physically attend three years later as president but recorded a video message for the Scouts.Like Truman, he noted the importance of rubbing elbows with fellow Scouts of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. He predicted they would leave the gathering with \u201ca new sense of the vastness and complexities of this nation and of the world.\u201d\u201cI am confident that, in meeting and talking with your fellow Scouts, you will gain a renewed awareness of the need for cooperating \u2014 working together \u2014 in our country and in the world,\u201d Eisenhower said. \u201cBonds of common purpose and common ideals can unite people, even when they come from the most distant and diverse places.\u201dNixon spoke on Eisenhower\u2019s behalf in 1957 and Eisenhower delivered another speech three years later, but the transcripts were not readily available.Advertisement(Read\u00a0Eisenhower\u2019s full 1953 address here)President Lyndon B. Johnson (1964)Johnson, eight months into his first presidential term, built his address around the theme of the great \u201cAmerican idea,\u201d encouraging the Scouts to remember the country\u2019s history as they work to better its future.\u201cThis country of ours is a community built on an idea,\u201d Johnson said. \u201cIts history is the history of an idea. And its future will be bright only so long as you are faithful to that idea.\u201dHe used their location \u2014 again at Valley Forge \u2014 to speak of the \u201cidea and a dream\u201d that gave the troops at Valley Forge \u201cthe strength to survive the winter.\u201dThe \u201cAmerican idea,\u201d Johnson said, was what the founders outlined in the Constitution: a government of and by the people, religious freedom and the right to speak without censorship.\u201cAs a result, in America we have a Government which exists to protect the freedom and enlarge the opportunities of every citizen,\u201d he said. \u201cThat Government is not to be feared or to be attacked. It is to be helped as long as it serves the country well, and it is to be changed when it neglects its duty.\u201dHe touched on the otherness of the Beltway, and how Washington, D.C., \u201cmust often seem difficult to understand.\u201d But he reminded the Scouts that government is made of people like them, all over the country, with different home towns and backgrounds and life experiences. Johnson said he was certain a number of them would even grow up to serve their country, too.\u201cThese ideas are as old as your country, but they are not old-fashioned ideas,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are as alive and as vital as America itself. I have no doubt that if you remain true to them, you will remember these days of Scouting as only the beginning of a lifetime of useful service to America.\u201dLooking at the Scouts\u2019 \u201csmiling, optimistic\u201d faces, Johnson said with a hint of melodrama, \u201cwill give me strength that I need in the lonely hours that I spend in attempting to lead this great Nation.\u201d(Read Johnson\u2019s\u00a0full speech here)First lady Nancy Reagan on behalf of President Ronald Reagan (1985)President Reagan was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery during the 1985 jamboree, so first lady Nancy Reagan addressed the crowd in his place, delivering a forceful speech about the perils of drug abuse. Reagan told the Scouts they were \u201cwhat is most positive about America\u2019s young people today.\u201d\u201cNo one can use drugs and remain a true Boy Scout,\u201d she said. \u201cDrug-free is the best way and the only way to live. Boy Scouts can help save their generation from drugs.\u201dPresident George H.W. Bush (1989)In his remarks at the 1989 jamboree, the elder President Bush touched on everything from the American colonists to salmon fishing to moon outposts. He raved about the potential for a new generation in space exploration and encouraged Scouts to keep a \u201cspirit of wonder, of discovery and adventure\u201d that would draw them to \u201cfar distant worlds.\u201dLike Nancy Reagan before him, Bush devoted a significant part of his speech to the war on drugs, one of the signature domestic policies of his presidency. Bush listed drug abuse as one of his \u201cfive unacceptables,\u201d which also included illiteracy, unemployment, child abuse and hunger.Citing the rise of crack and cocaine, he called on the Scouts to lead by example and refuse \u201cany illegal drug.\u201d He recalled a story about a boy named Ryan Shafer who started using drugs at age 12 and died four years later after becoming a \u201cstranger to his parents and classmates.\u201d Bush implored the Scouts to ask themselves if they knew someone like Ryan and whether they had done everything in their power to help.\u201cBy actively engaging in the lives of others,\u201d Bush said, \u201cyou are demonstrating a central theme, a central idea of this administration: that from now on in America, any definition of a successful life must include serving others.\u201d(Read Bush\u2019s full speech here)President Bill Clinton (1997)When Clinton spoke to the Scouts in 1997, it was the 60th anniversary of the first jamboree, and Clinton seemed to revel in the occasion.With classic Clintonian flair, he name-checked no fewer than a dozen attendees and associates, gave a shout-out to the Arkansas flags flying in the background, recounted his days as a Scout at Ramble Elementary School, then told a more recent story about a scoutmaster from Missouri who tackled a man who had tried to run down pedestrians at a park in Washington (\u201cI don\u2019t know if there\u2019s a Scout merit badge for tackling dangerous people who are violating the law,\u201d he said, \u201cbut if there is one, I think he ought to get it.\u201d)The bulk of his speech\u00a0focused on people doing \u201cgood turns\u201d for one another \u2014 a core practice of the Scouts, he said.\u201cIf every young person in America would give back to their community in the way you do, just imagine what we could do,\u201d he said. \u201cImagine how many fewer problems we could have. So many times I have wished that every young person in America had the chance to be a part of Scouting. And tonight I see why, more clearly than ever. So I hope you\u2019ll go home and help others to serve and learn the joy that you share by the service you do.\u201dClinton closed with a quote from French writer Alexis de Tocqueville: \u201cAmerica is great because America is good.\u201d(Read Clinton\u2019s full speech here)President George W. Bush (2001 and 2005)The younger President Bush addressed Scouts directly on two occasions, the first in 2001 during the early days of his presidency. Bad weather had prevented him from appearing in person that year, but he offered some words of advice in a videotaped message, putting his \u201ccompassionate conservative\u201d image on full display.Bush spoke of the Scouts\u2019 \u201cheartland\u201d values that \u201cbuild strong families, strong communities and strong character.\u201d\u201cThe goodness of a person and of the society he or she lives in often comes down to very simple things,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery society depends on trust and loyalty, on courtesy and kindness, on bravery and reverence. These are the values of Scouting and these are the values of America.\u201dFour years later, Bush spoke for more than 17 minutes, drawing multiple rounds of applause \u2014 and even a few laughs \u2014 from the tens of thousands of Scouts gathered at the 2005 jamboree. The speech came at a time of growing national tension over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush\u2019s popularity was nearing what was then a low point, largely as a result of his handling of the conflicts. Without discussing politics specifically, he struck a somewhat defiant tone, invoking War on Terror rhetoric in his speech.\u201cLives of purpose are constructed on the conviction there is right and there is wrong, and we can know the difference,\u201d Bush said, a group of Scouts in matching beige uniforms standing behind him. \u201cYou\u2019ll find that confronting injustice and evil requires a vision of goodness and truth.\u201d\u201cAll of you are showing your gratitude for the blessings of freedom,\u201d he continued. \u201cYou also understand that freedom must be defended, and I appreciate the Scouts\u2019 long tradition of supporting the men and women of the United States military. Your generation is growing up in an historic time, a time when freedom is on the march, and America is proud to lead the armies of liberation.\u201dFollow your conscience, Bush told the Scouts, and serve a cause greater than yourself.(Read Bush\u2019s 2001 speech here)(Read Bush\u2019s 2005\u00a0speech here)President Barack Obama (2010)Obama didn\u2019t attend the jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia in 2010, which marked the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America. But he did send the Scouts a brief videotaped message praising the organization\u2019s history of community service and legacy of producing national leaders (he noted that 11 of the 12 people who walked on the moon were Scouts).\u201cThat service is worth celebrating, but there\u2019s still more to do,\u201d Obama said. \u201cIn the years ahead we\u2019re going to depend on you, the next generation of leaders, to move America forward.\u201d Most presidents have spoken to the Scouts about unity or citizenship or coming together. Trump talked about the crowd size, \u201cfake news\u201d and Hillary Clinton. Trump\u2019s Boy Scouts speech broke with 80 years of presidential tradition",
        "author": "Katie Mettler"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Funny, articulate and intelligent\u2019: Dayton shooter\u2019s parents apologize for \u2018insensitive\u2019 obituary (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2185",
        "date": "2019-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/15/connor-betts-obituary-parents-apology/",
        "text": "After Connor Betts killed nine people, including his sister, in Dayton, Ohio, last week, acquaintances described the 24-year-old as a deeply troubled individual who was obsessed with guns, carried a \u201chit list\u201d of classmates, and had a history of violently lashing out against women.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut an obituary published on behalf of his family this week painted a markedly different picture, describing the gunman as \u201ca funny, articulate and intelligent man with striking blue eyes and a kind smile.\u201d Betts, his grieving parents wrote, was a former Boy Scout and avid reader. He sang in a men\u2019s choral group, played the baritone horn in his high school\u2019s marching band, and worked at Chipotle Mexican Grill while attending community college. The obituary made no mention of the mass shooting, or the fact that Betts had died in a hail of police gunfire as he tried to enter a crowded bar. Instead, it highlighted his love of electronic dance music, Xbox and the Fox animated series \u201cBob\u2019s Burgers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cConnor will be missed immensely by his friends, family, and especially his good dog Teddy,\u201d the notice concluded.Obituaries are now online for the Dayton shooter and his sister. Connor Betts is described as funny, articulate and intelligent. Megan Betts is described as loving, intelligent and bright. #10TV pic.twitter.com/Zni7DZLznq\u2014 Brittany Bailey (@BrittBaileyTV) August 14, 2019\n\nPublicly memorializing a mass killer was an unusual move, and it appears to have led to swift backlash. By Wednesday night, the obituary had been removed from the funeral home\u2019s website.\u201cStephen and Moira Betts apologize that the wording of the obituary for their son Connor was insensitive in not acknowledging the terrible tragedy that he created,\u201d said a statement that stood in its place. \u201cIn their grief, they presented the son that they knew, which in no way reduces the horror of his last act. We are deeply sorry.\u201dLyndsi Doll, who dated Connor Betts in high school, describes him as troubled. (Arelis R. Hern\u00e1ndez, Erin Patrick O'Connor, Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)While mourning both their children, the couple had unwittingly stumbled into a dilemma that often confounds the families of mass shooters and other notorious killers: How do you grieve the person you\u2019ve lost in a way that isn\u2019t disrespectful to their victims?Ex-girlfriend says Dayton shooter heard voices, talked about \u2018dark, evil things\u2019As The Washington Post\u2019s Sarah Kaplan reported in 2015, the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had to grapple with this question after their sons killed 13 people during the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. Klebold\u2019s family had their 17-year-old son cremated, which eliminated the problem of finding a place to lay him to rest. But they still wanted to hold a funeral and organized a small, somber event, with mourners taking detours so they wouldn\u2019t attract attention. Despite these precautions, however, the pastor who conducted the ceremony lost his job amid widespread blowback. Harris\u2019s parents, meanwhile, have never said where their 18-year-old son is buried.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeither have the surviving relatives of Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people, most of whom were young children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, after murdering his mother. His father, Peter Lanza, spoke candidly about the 20-year-old gunman\u2019s troubled life and apparent mental health issues in a rare interview with Britain\u2019s Daily Telegraph in 2014. But he clammed up when asked what he had done for a funeral after claiming his son\u2019s body.\u201cNo one knows that,\u201d the father firmly stated. \u201cAnd no one ever will.\u201dResidents in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio gathered on Aug. 4 to remember the 29 victims lost in two mass shootings over the weekend. (Drea Cornejo, Ian Cook, Ray Whitehouse, Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)Many cemeteries refuse to accept the bodies of notorious killers, fearing the potential for outrage, the Miami Herald has reported. When families are able to find a burial plot, they typically keep its location a secret and avoid putting up a marker or headstone. Otherwise, there\u2019s a risk that the site could become a target for vandals. Another potential danger is that the grave could attract a small subset of people who idolize the killer \u2014 a problem that\u2019s all too familiar to officials in Littleton, Colo., who recently debated tearing down Columbine High School because it keeps attracting visitors with a \u201cmorbid fascination\u201d with school shooters. (The proposal was dropped last month.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor some, like Klebold\u2019s family, cremation is an easier alternative, and one that\u2019s unlikely to cause offense. But the practice is prohibited under Islamic law, which has led to complications in high-profile cases where the perpetrator is Muslim. After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, for instance, no cemeteries in Massachusetts were willing to take the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was accused of masterminding the attack. When protesters learned where the 26-year-old\u2019s body was being held, they gathered outside the funeral home with American flags and signs that read, \u201cDo not bury him on U.S. soil,\u201d and, \u201cIt\u2019s a disgrace to our military.\u201d Tsarnaev\u2019s body ultimately ended up in an unmarked grave in Virginia.Burying the infamous: How killers from San Bernardino to Columbine are quietly laid to restEven in cases that don\u2019t involve mass shootings, it\u2019s unusual for murderers to be memorialized in obituaries that appear on funeral home websites and as paid notices in local newspapers. But one notable exception came in 2016, when Joshua Bishop, a Georgia man who had killed an acquaintance during a drug-fueled fight over car keys, received the death penalty.\u201cJust like when you lose any other friend, none of us wanted the news of the execution to be the last word about Josh,\u201d Sarah Gerwig-Moore, a Mercer University Law School professor who was part of Bishop\u2019s legal team, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time. \u201cHe was so much more than the worst thing he has ever done. He was more to us than someone who committed a horrible crime.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor Connor Betts\u2019s parents, such considerations were undoubtedly complicated by the fact that they had another obituary to write \u2014 this one honoring his sister, 22-year-old Megan Betts, whom they described as a talented writer and loyal friend fascinated by geology and space exploration. And after their son\u2019s obituary was removed and replaced by an apology, something surprising happened: Supportive comments started pouring in from strangers who offered prayers and well wishes, acknowledging that the family was facing unthinkable pain and grief.\u201cYou have nothing to apologize for,\u201d one commenter wrote. \u201cYou knew and saw a side of your son that was precious to you. Hold onto those memories. God bless you.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article stated that Peter Lanza\u2019s 2014 interview with the Telegraph was his only interview to date. He also spoke with the New Yorker in 2014. More from Morning Mix:A truck drove into ICE protesters outside a private prison. They say a guard was at the wheel.Suspect surrenders after shooting six police officers in hours-long Philadelphia standoff While mourning both their children, the Betts family unwittingly stumbled into a dilemma that often confounds the relatives of mass shooters and other notorious killers: How do you grieve the person you\u2019ve lost in a way that isn\u2019t disrespectful to their victims? \u2018Funny, articulate and intelligent\u2019: Dayton shooter\u2019s parents apologize for \u2018insensitive\u2019 obituary",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why \u2018Over the Rainbow\u2019 was the perfect closer for Ariana Grande\u2019s Manchester tribute (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2186",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/05/why-over-the-rainbow-was-the-perfect-closer-for-ariana-grandes-manchester-tribute/",
        "text": "After all the musicians \u2014 including Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Coldplay and Pharrell Williams \u2014\u00a0left the stage Sunday night at One Love Manchester, Ariana Grande walked back out, blowing kisses to the crowd.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightShe began to sing \u201cOver the Rainbow,\u201d an optimistic coda for a\u00a0tribute concert to the 22 killed and more than 55 injured by a terrorist attack at her May 22 show in Manchester. Halfway through, her voice faltered with emotion. The concertgoers, so recently touched by tragedy, remained mostly silent as they waved their lit phone screens in the night sky, just as people held lighters 20\u00a0years earlier.\u00a0Several audience members cried as Grande\u2019s voice soared with lyrics that have stood for hope for some eight decades.Story continues below advertisementSomeday I\u2019ll wish upon a starAnd wake up where the clouds are farBehind meWhere troubles melt like lemon dropsThe song\u00a0was first written for the 1939 film \u201cThe Wizard of Oz\u201d and sung by Judy Garland\u2019s Dorothy before visiting the enchanted land of Oz.AdvertisementProlific American composer Harold Arlen wrote the music. And Yip Harburg \u2014 a liberal so outspoken on issues of gender, race and workers\u2019 rights he earned the nickname \u201cBroadway\u2019s social conscience\u201d \u2014 penned its brief but everlasting lyrics.Harburg, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born as Edgar Yipsel Harburg into extreme poverty in 1896 on New York City\u2019s Lower East Side. Like so many Jewish immigrant children in New York, he attended City College, along with high school classmate Ira Gershwin. The pair often wrote poems together.Story continues below advertisementBut Harburg considered writing something done \u201cfor fun, a sideline,\u201d and decided to go into the electrical supply business to claw his way out of poverty. He mostly succeeded until the Great Depression, which\u00a0financially devastated him.\u201cFor the next few years we made a lot of money and I hated it,\u201d Harburg once said. \u201dBut the economy saved me. The capitalists saved me in 1929, just as we were worth, oh, about a quarter of a million dollars. Bang! The whole thing blew up. I was left with a pencil and finally had to write for a living. As I told Studs Terkel once, what the Depression was for most people was for me a lifesaver!\u201dAdvertisementHe began writing song lyrics, and most of them,\u00a0especially \u201cOver the Rainbow,\u201d carried political messages speaking to what he perceived of as a better world.\u201cNo one wrote about more controversial subjects, from poverty and racism to women\u2019s rights and the atomic bomb, than Harburg. Yet he did it with pixie-like glee, using laughter to make his pointed observations about the nightmares of the modern world,\u201d\u00a0Thomas S. Hischak wrote in \u201cBoy Loses Girl: Broadway\u2019s Librettists.\u201d\u201cWe worked for in our songs a sort of better world, a rainbow world,\u201d\u00a0Harburg once said. \u201cNow, my generation unfortunately never succeed in making that rainbow world, so we can\u2019t hand it down to you. But we could hand down our songs, which still hang on to hope and laughter \u2026 in times of confusion.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat particular song has indeed become an anthem of hope, particularly in the face of hatred, fear and death.\u00a0Though its original lyrics spoke to the struggle Americans faced in the Great Depression, they were malleable enough to connect with any cause.AdvertisementAs part of the public-private V-Disc program, a recording of the song by Judy Garland and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra was shipped to soldiers serving in World War II, the Times Union reported. Meanwhile, it became an \u201canthem\u201d for the LGBT community, even partially inspiring the rainbow flag. As Ben Brantley wrote in the New York Times:Her version of \u201cSomewhere Over the Rainbow\u201d became an anthem of pain for homosexuals who perceived themselves as belonging to a despised minority. Her interpretation of the song seemed, as a character in \u201cJudy at the Stonewall Inn\u201d puts it, to embody \u201call the suffering voices of the world twisted into one spectral shape.\u201dThe song often appears in the face of tragedy. The Sandy Hook Elementary choir, for example, recorded a version in the aftermath of the school\u2019s 2012 mass shooting. NASA even used it as a wake-up call for astronauts on the first space shuttle mission to the International Space StationStory continues below advertisementHarburg\u2019s son Ernie, who wrote his father\u2019s biography, \u201cWho Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist,\u201d\u00a0believes one particular word choice is what made the song so enduring, as he explained in an interview with Democracy Now:AdvertisementIt\u2019s a story of a little girl that wants to get out. She\u2019s in trouble, and she wants to get somewhere. Well, the rainbow was the only color that she\u2019d see in Kansas. She wants to get over the rainbow. But then, Yip put in something which makes it a Yip song. He said, \u201cAnd the dreams you dare to dream really do come true.\u201d You see? And that word \u201cdare\u201d lands on the note, and it\u2019s a perfect thing, and it\u2019s been generating courage for people for years afterward, you know?It expressed \u201ca poignant yearning for escape,\u201d as the Library of Congress said when it selected the song for preservation in the National Recording Registry. The Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts chose it as the top entry on their \u201cSongs of the Century\u201d list.As Garland herself said in 1967, after all,\u00a0\u201cIt represents everyone\u2019s wondering why things can\u2019t be a little better.\u201dMore from Morning Mix\u2018Completely heartless\u2019: Homeless man charged with stealing Portland hero\u2019s wedding ring as he lay dyingThe title of the new Tolkien book published this week also appears on his gravestoneSnow White actress Chlo\u00eb Grace Moretz calls out her own movie promos for fat-shaming \u201cIt represents everyone\u2019s wondering why things can\u2019t be a little better,\u201d Judy Garland once said of the enduring song.  Why \u2018Over the Rainbow\u2019 was the perfect closer for Ariana Grande\u2019s Manchester tribute",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Malama Honua,\u2019 Hawaii says, as it becomes first state to pass laws supporting Paris accord (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2187",
        "date": "2017-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/07/malama-honua-hawaii-says-as-it-becomes-first-state-to-pass-laws-supporting-paris-accord/",
        "text": "When the traditional Hawaiian canoe Hokule\u2019a set sail four years ago, the wayfinders on board \u2014 men and women navigating the open sea by a map of stars \u2014 vowed to seek a renewed sense of self and share with the world a treasured message: Malama Honua.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn Hawaiian, it means to care\u00a0for\u00a0Island Earth, a mission especially important to Pacific Islanders, whose home and economy is under constant threat from the rising seas and coral bleaching caused by a warming planet. This week, the wayfinders will return to a Hawaii that on Tuesday took a defiant stand, becoming the first state\u00a0to legally implement portions\u00a0of the landmark Paris climate agreement that President Trump chose to abandon last week.Story continues below advertisement\u201cClimate change is real, regardless of what others may say,\u201d Hawaii Gov. David Ige said at a bill signing ceremony Tuesday in Honolulu. \u201cHawaii is seeing the impacts first hand. Tides are getting higher, biodiversity is shrinking, coral is bleaching, coastlines are eroding, weather is becoming more extreme. We must acknowledge these realities at home.\u201dAdvertisementIge said the state had a \u201ckuleana,\u201d or responsibility, to the Earth.\u201cLike the voyaging canoe Hokule\u2019a, we are one canoe, one island, one planet,\u201d the governor said. \u201cWe cannot afford to mess this up. We are setting a course to change the trajectory of Hawaii and islanders for generations to come.\u201dThe Fact Checker examines several claims from Trump's speech announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)With Ige\u2019s signature, two bills became law.Story continues below advertisementThe first, Senate bill 559, expanded strategies and mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions statewide, a tenet of the Paris agreement. The second, House bill\u00a01578, established the Carbon Farming Task Force within the state\u2019s Office of Planning, to support the development of sustainable agriculture practices in Hawaii, a skill native islanders had once mastered before planes, freighters and Amazon linked them to the mainland.Both bills were introduced in January, after President Trump moved into the White House and began what many climate scientists\u00a0felt was a wholesale dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency and a reversal of the steps taken by the Obama administration to combat global warming.AdvertisementThey weren\u2019t meant to be signed into law for several more weeks,\u00a0Scott Glenn, an environmental adviser to the governor,\u00a0told The Washington Post. But after Trump announced the United States would exit the Paris agreement, Glenn and his co-chair on the Sustainable Hawaii Initiative recommended the bill signing and ceremony be moved up\u00a0because \u201cthis was of such national importance,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementSenate Majority Leader J. Kalani English (D) introduced SB 559 and said in a statement Tuesday that it gave Hawaii the\u00a0\u201clegal basis to continue adaptation and mitigation strategies \u2026 despite the Federal government\u2019s withdrawal from the treaty.\u201dThe governor also committed Hawaii to the U.S. Climate Alliance, a collection of 12 states and Puerto Rico that have\u00a0vowed to uphold the Paris climate agreement on the state level.AdvertisementIt\u2019s not the first time this year that Hawaii has inserted itself into the fray of national controversy. In March, Hawaii became the first state to file a lawsuit against Trump\u2019s revised travel ban because, it claimed, the order would negatively impact its many international students, tourism and Muslim population.Video: Hawaii to sue Trump administration over second travel ban (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)The state has so far prevailed in the suit, prompting Attorney General Jeff Sessions\u2019s\u00a0now-infamous remark that he was \u201camazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States.\u201dHawaii residents to Jeff Sessions: \u2018We\u2019re not just some island\u2019That Hawaii would take such a firm stance on environmental issues should not surprise anyone, Darren Lerner, director of the Sea Grant College Program at the University of Hawaii, told The Post.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFirst and foremost, for Hawaii in particular, the science really speaks clearly,\u201d Lerner said. \u201cDue to its vulnerability and relative isolation, it needs to move forward on these issues.\u201dAdvertisementLawmakers and environmental leaders in Hawaii are quick to say that there, the environment and the economy are inextricably linked. Tourists flock to the collection of islands to experience its beaches and explore its coral reefs, both of which are threatened by warming and rising waters.In late May, the islands suffered the highest tides the state has seen in its 120 years of recording them. Called \u201cking tides,\u201d the water creeps up onto shore, swallowing beaches and flooding streets. King tides occur during the summer solstice and stretch the island\u2019s high tides even higher, Lerner said.Story continues below advertisementRainfall patterns are shifting and the islands are experiencing more extreme weather, Lerner said, which was most evident during hurricane season in recent years. The 2015 season set five records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.AdvertisementThe mounting evidence and creeping threat has thrust Hawaii into what Lerner called \u201ca very significant rebirth\u201d and commitment to understanding and addressing climate change.And the voyage of\u00a0Hokule\u2019a, with its wayfinders and message of\u00a0Malama Honua,\u00a0has offered the state a symbol for that renewed spirit of sustainability.Building Hokule\u2019a and training the wayfinders has been the life work of Nainoa Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, whose best friend was Charles Lacy Veach, one of the first astronauts in space.At the bill signing ceremony Tuesday, Thompson spoke of Veach and how he compared the Hawaiian islands to Earth, \u201cthe blue island in space.\u201d Veach, who died of cancer in 1995, inspired Thompson to send wayfinders on\u00a0Hokule\u2019a to learn from people around the globe fighting for the environment.Thompson recalled Veach encouraging the wayfinders to bring their knowledge from the voyage \u201chome to Hawaii.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Tuesday, Thompson said there were six navigators out on the water, just hours away from finding their way back home.\u201cWhen they find Hawaii, I will call them and tell them the Hawaii they are coming home to is powerful, strong, united and willing to do the right thing,\u201d Thompson said.Veach, who was on board the space shuttle Columbia in 1992 as it flew over Hawaii, would be proud of the islands and his people, Thompson said.\u201cWe need places to shine the light strongly. We need places of hope, we need places that the rest of the world can turn to and understand real success,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what happened today.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:How Omran, the dazed Aleppo boy who reappeared this week, became a political pawn in Syria\u2019s warTrump blocked some people from his Twitter account. Is that unconstitutional?Las Vegas police officer charged with involuntary manslaughter in chokehold death of unarmed man \"Climate change is real, regardless of what others may say,\u201d Hawaii Gov. David Ige said at a historic bill signing ceremony Tuesday in Honolulu.  \u2018Malama Honua,\u2019 Hawaii says, as it becomes first state to pass laws supporting Paris accord",
        "author": "Katie Mettler"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s James Webb telescope will explore the universe. Critics say its name represents a painful time in U.S. history. (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2188",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/13/nasa-james-webb-telescope-name-controversy/",
        "text": "When the James Webb Space Telescope unfurls itself and travels nearly a million miles away from Earth, the observatory will peer billions of years into the past in search of the universe\u2019s first galaxies and stars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, the $10 billion project has been worth every dollar and every minute of the 25 years it took to develop. \u201cIt is a phenomenal instrument,\u201d she said in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cI am so excited to see baby galaxies.\u201d But Prescod-Weinstein, who teaches both physics and women\u2019s studies at the University of New Hampshire, fears the telescope\u2019s Dec. 18 scheduled launch is arriving under a cloud. And not the dazzling nebulae of the beyond, but the legacy of the former NASA leader for whom the telescope is named \u2014 James Webb. Prescod-Weinstein and other critics argue that Webb was complicit in the discrimination of LGBTQ employees in the \u201940s, \u201850s and \u201860s \u2014 both as undersecretary in the U.S. Department of State and as the top administrator at NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is unfortunate, therefore, that NASA\u2019s current plan is to launch this incredible instrument into space carrying the name of a man whose legacy at best is complicated and at worst reflects complicity in homophobic discrimination in the federal government,\u201d Prescod-Weinstein and three other scientists wrote in a Scientific American article in March.The scientists \u2014 along with hundreds of graduate students, enthusiasts and astronomers \u2014 urged NASA to rename the telescope. But following an investigation into Webb\u2019s history, the agency recently announced that the name will stay.\u201cNASA\u2019s History Office conducted an exhaustive search through currently accessible archives on James Webb and his career,\u201d NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox said in a statement to The Post. \u201cThey also talked to experts who previously researched this topic extensively.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA found no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope,\u201d Fox added.Like NASA, defenders of Webb argue there is no evidence the longtime civil servant played a decisive role in mid-20th century government policies that routinely rooted out gay and lesbian employees and cast them as \u201cmoral perverts.\u201d But Webb\u2019s critics say he did not need to spearhead the efforts to be morally responsible. Webb was in a position of power as the discrimination was carried out and seemingly did nothing to stop it, they argue.At a time when Americans are rethinking who should be represented in monuments and on buildings and street signs, the telescope emerges as a case study of the fractious process of endowing an object with a name.Story continues below advertisementNASA is not the only federal agency facing questions over naming processes. Congress, following the death of George Floyd, gave the Defense Department three years to change the names of 10 military bases that honor Confederate leaders. A Navy task force also recommended a review of ship and street names that have Confederate ties.AdvertisementIf the James Webb Space Telescope ends up delivering the same kinds of stunning glimpses of the universe the Hubble has produced over the past three decades, it figures not only to be a household name, but also the popular embodiment of scientific discovery and its most wondrous attributes.\u201cChildren are going to grow up with this name on their lips \u2014 and with this telescope that is going to define astronomy for a generation, as Hubble did before it,\u201d Prescod-Weinstein told The Post.Story continues below advertisementAlthough NASA has decided to keep Webb\u2019s name on the telescope, astronomers continue to debate the former leader\u2019s legacy. As NASA\u2019s chief from 1961 to 1968, Webb is credited for leading the agency through its most storied period: the Apollo missions. Webb retired from the agency in 1968, about a year before Apollo 11 reached the moon, but he is credited for laying the groundwork for that milestone.AdvertisementThat is why Sean O\u2019Keefe, NASA\u2019s administrator from December 2001 to February 2005, decided to name the telescope, which was in its early stages at the time, after Webb. The decision, O\u2019Keefe recently told NPR, came out of conversations with others at NASA. \u201cThere was no appointed group of commissioners to come up with a name,\u201d although everyone at the time seemed to like the idea, O\u2019Keefe told the public radio network.But around 2015, Webb\u2019s legacy came under scrutiny. Critics alleged that he was active in the Lavender Scare, a movement lasting from the late \u201940s to the \u201960s that led to thousands of LGBTQ employees being purged from the federal workforce. Webb\u2019s critics cited since-edited Wikipedia entries, one of which quoted him stating in a report: \u201cIt is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe history is not so clear-cut. Earlier this year, astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi penned an article presenting evidence that Webb did not write the line or the report. The quote, he discovered, came from a 1950 Senate committee report.AdvertisementCiting other examples, Oluseyi argued that there was little to no evidence that Webb was an active participant in the Lavender Scare.\u201cThe community of astronomers and astrophysicists in the online social media group who blindly accepted the allegations also piled on and were ready to confront NASA although they did not apply proper rigor,\u201d he wrote.Oluseyi wrote in his article that he found evidence that Webb was active in hiring Black employees and racially integrating NASA facilities in the \u201860s.Story continues below advertisementMoreover, David K. Johnson, who wrote a book titled \u201cThe Lavender Scare,\u201d told Nature in July that he knew of no evidence that Webb played a lead role in the movement.Webb\u2019s critics argue that he knew about the systemic discrimination and did nothing. \u201cThere is no record of him choosing to stand up for the humanity of those being persecuted,\u201d Prescod-Weinstein and her colleagues wrote in March.AdvertisementIn arguing for Webb\u2019s complicity, critics point to several pieces of evidence. Records in the National Archives show that Webb received a memorandum from a fellow leader that outlined \u201cthe problem of homosexuals and sex perverts in the Department of State,\u201d as well as the agency\u2019s participation in a Senate inquiry that ultimately determined that LGBTQ workers were \u201csecurity risks\u201d and \u201cunsuitable\u201d for government roles. Moreover, records show, Webb passed that memorandum to a senator during a June 1950 meeting.Story continues below advertisementWebb\u2019s critics also cite the case of Clifford Norton, a NASA budget analyst who was arrested in Washington\u2019s Lafayette Square in October 1963 after being accused of making sexual advances toward another man. The agency quickly found out and fired Norton, deeming his suspected sexual advance \u201cimmoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct.\u201d It would have been difficult for Webb not to know about Norton\u2019s firing, critics argue.Years later, the District\u2019s federal court of appeals ruled the firing was unlawful.AdvertisementNASA\u2019s acting chief historian, Brian Odom, examined both Norton\u2019s firing and the State Department memos during NASA\u2019s investigation into Webb, which began in March and concluded several weeks ago. Odom said NASA found no evidence that Webb initiated Norton\u2019s firing or knew about it. And although the memos Webb received and passed to a senator in 1950 were \u201ccritically important\u201d to the investigation, the documents did not provide enough information about Webb\u2019s role in the Lavender Scare, Odom said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cDefinitely they\u2019re a starting place. Definitely they\u2019re important,\u201d Odom said about the memos. \u201cBut they just don\u2019t give you enough. They don\u2019t give you enough about the individual.\u201dBeyond the memos, Odom said, there was no documentation that proved Webb played a role in LGBTQ discrimination in the federal government.AdvertisementBut Erich Matthes, a philosophy professor at Wellesley College and author of the forthcoming book \u201cDrawing the Line: What to Do With the Work of Immoral Artists From Museums to the Movies,\u201d said that smoking-gun evidence may not be necessary to conclude that Webb was morally responsible. It would be \u201cparticularly bad\u201d if a piece of evidence showed Webb directly orchestrated the firings of LGBTQ employees. But there are other forms of moral responsibility, he told The Post. Namely: complicity.\u201cEven if we wanted to say that he didn\u2019t know about what was going on \u2014 which, based on my understanding of the case, seems unlikely \u2026 he ought to have known what was going on,\u201d Matthes said, adding that, in his opinion, that could make Webb morally responsible.Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York, said that it seemed Webb was \u201cdeeply complicit in what was the standard of the time.\u201dThompson, who wrote the forthcoming book \u201cSmashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America\u2019s Public Monuments,\u201d said she has heard arguments that Webb\u2019s acceptance of the systemic discrimination was morally acceptable because of the time period. \u201cBut the thing is,\u201d Thompson said, \u201cthat time is not now.\u201dThompson and Matthes agreed that naming objects after people is fundamentally flawed \u2014 because people are flawed.\u201cIf the goal is to express commitment to a certain value or certain ideal by naming something after a particular person that you see as embodying those values or ideals, you could just skip the person and go straight to the ideal,\u201d Matthes said.He noted that NASA has a long history of doing exactly that, citing Mars rovers named Curiosity and Perseverance.LGBTQ groups, including the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, have recognized Webb\u2019s history as complicated and say there are better names for the telescope. Both told The Post that Sally Ride, the first American woman in space \u2014 and the first lesbian in space \u2014 would be a better namesake for the telescope.\u201cWhen considering how we represent the best of what NASA \u2014 an organization with a legacy of inspiring people around the world to look above and dream of something better \u2014 is and has to offer, we must recognize that there is power in naming things so that they best reflect our values,\u201d Laurel Powell, a Human Rights Campaign spokeswoman, said in an email.Adrian Lucy, an astronomer at Columbia University who recently called attention to the 1950s-era memorandums pertaining to Webb, acknowledged that the scientific community may never agree on the former NASA administrator\u2019s legacy.\u201cWe can argue forever \u2026 about Webb\u2019s motivations, goals, or tactics, about the complexities of moral responsibility, about whatever,\u201d Lucy said. But \u201cat the end of the day [the James Webb Space Telescope] needs a name that hurts less.\u201d At a time when Americans are rethinking who should be represented in monuments and on buildings and street signs, the James Webb Space Telescope emerges as a case study of the fractious process of endowing an object with a name. NASA\u2019s James Webb telescope will explore the universe. Critics say its name represents a painful time in U.S. history.",
        "author": "Julian Mark"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | George Clooney dazzles in front of \u2014 and behind \u2014 the camera in \u2018The Midnight Sky\u2019 (WP: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2189",
        "date": "2020-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/the-midnight-sky-review/2020/12/14/fd37bf2a-3e24-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarSolidStarSolid(4 stars)Set in the year 2049, in the immediate aftermath of an unspecified global calamity that appears, based on scant but at times scary evidence, to be both environmental and technological \u2014 perhaps even financial, political and cultural \u2014 \u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d only looks like a disaster film. Slyly, and by misdirection that cleverly conceals its true intent until the poignant end, it reveals itself to be a story of regret over a lost opportunity for connection. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGeorge Clooney, who also directed Mark L. Smith\u2019s smart adaptation of Lily Brooks-Dalton\u2019s 2016 novel, plays the fulcrum of the film\u2019s deft pivot: Augustine Lofthouse, an astronomer stationed at an observatory in far-northern Canada, inside the Arctic Circle. As the film opens, and Augustine\u2019s research colleagues are being evacuated by plane to their homes \u2014 and an unknown fate \u2014 he alone has decided to remain. It\u2019s not that Augustine is bound by an unreasonable sense of duty, or is simply foolhardy, as one of his co-workers suggests to the scientist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf our protagonist, who appears to have a serious illness, were \u201cin a hurry to die,\u201d Augustine responds, he\u2019d be leaving with the others. Rather, it\u2019s that Augustine, having spent his life as an explorer \u2014 albeit a vicarious, earthbound one \u2014 has nothing and nobody to go back to.Shortly afterward, two things happen. Augustine becomes aware of a spacecraft named the Aether whose crew (played by Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demi\u00e1n Bech\u00edr and Tiffany Boone) is returning from a mission to explore a potentially habitable moon of Jupiter. Having lost their communication with Earth, they need to be warned not to come back. The second thing is the appearance of a small, apparently mute girl (Caoilinn Springall), who seems to have been left behind in the rush to evacuate. Dubbed Iris, after a drawing she makes of the flower, the child becomes Augustine\u2019s responsibility, along with the necessity of making his way to a second, stronger antenna, some distance away, after the one at the observatory proves inadequate to connect with the Aether.How these two things are related is only gradually disclosed, in a story that jumps between the Arctic, the Aether and the past, where we see, in flashback, a younger Augustine (Ethan Peck) set up the idea of exploring the planets in search of a second home for Man, who, it is implied, hasn\u2019t taken care of his first one. That idea \u2014 that Augustine was a catalyst in sending the Aether off \u2014 is only part of a story that peels itself like an onion \u2014 and just as surely produces tears.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, the film is not without action.Although Augustine and the crew of the Aether can only observe the death of Earth from afar, they nevertheless encounter grave dangers: a wintry storm here below, an uncharted and destructive meteor field up above. Yet slowly the story becomes more and more interior, as its point comes into focus.As director, Clooney juggles the interconnecting stories adroitly, never giving away the tricks he\u2019s playing on the audience while spinning the yarn, much of which, at least on the Aether, has explicitly to do with hope and longing. Jones\u2019s Sully is expecting a baby, with the Aether\u2019s commander (Oyelowo), and several scenes aboard the ship feature a \u201cStar Trek\u201d-like holodeck-style technology that allows members of the crew to immerse themselves in virtual-reality evocations of the people and places they remember from Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith Augustine, it\u2019s more subtle, evoked both through his increasingly tender relationship with Iris and the flashbacks, which hint at a man who has only realized too late what he could have had.Beneath a bushy beard, often caked with frost, Clooney\u2019s Augustine manages to convey a powerful sense that something has been forfeited forever. What that is, and how \u201cThe Midnight Sky\u201d manages to show him reaching out, however imperfectly, to restore something broken, is the message \u2014 and the magic \u2014 of this movie.\n\nPG-13. At area theaters; available Dec. 23 on Netflix. Contains some bloody images and brief strong language. 118 minutes. The film is both a post-apocalyptic thriller and a poignant drama of regret and longing. George Clooney dazzles in front of \u2014 and behind \u2014 the camera in \u2018The Midnight Sky\u2019",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018First Man\u2019 is a solemn yet stirring look at the first moon landing (WP: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2190",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/first-moon-is-a-solemn-yet-stirring-look-at-the-first-moon-landing/2018/10/08/bdbe666c-c73b-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarSolidStarHalf(3.5 stars)Ryan Gosling does his best to dial down his star power in \u201cFirst Man,\u201d in which he plays the astronaut Neil Armstrong with unsmiling reticence and stoicism. Based on James R. Hansen\u2019s biography of the same name, this absorbing, meticulously detailed chronicle of Armstrong\u2019s career \u2014 culminating with the Apollo 11 NASA mission during which he became the first man to walk on the moon \u2014 continually undercuts the story\u2019s inherent triumphalism and mythmaking. Like its protagonist, \u201cFirst Man\u201d doesn\u2019t go in for theatrics or gratuitous emotion, however justified. It gets the job done, with professionalism, immersive authenticity and unadorned feeling, of which Armstrong himself might just have approved, however apprehensively. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFirst Man\u201d prepares viewers for the experience they\u2019re about to have from its first moments, when Armstrong \u2014 a gifted aeronautical engineer and Korean War flying ace \u2014 is flying a hypersonic X-15 aircraft over the Mojave Desert in 1961. With shaky close-ups and a deafening roar, director Damien Chazelle (working from a script by Josh Singer) never pulls back as Armstrong bounces off the atmosphere, frantically trying to bring the plane safely to ground. Of course, Armstrong himself isn\u2019t frantic. It\u2019s audience members who are likely to find themselves pulling back in their seats or lurching to one side or another as his unseen, collective co-pilot.It\u2019s a harrowing sequence, full of dizzying, disorienting close-ups and swirling gadgetry. And that radically subjective visual style will be repeated throughout \u201cFirst Man,\u201d as Chazelle crams his camera into ever more claustrophobic cockpits and capsules, as well as into the no less fraught environs of the Armstrong household. Hewing closely to Hansen\u2019s book, Chazelle faithfully recounts Armstrong\u2019s bid to become a member of the Gemini team, NASA\u2019s second manned-spaceflight program. He introduces Armstrong\u2019s now-famous colleagues Ed White (Jason Clarke), Gus Grissom (Shea Whigham), Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber) and Deke Slayton (Kyle Chandler), going to exhaustive lengths to re-create such momentous episodes as the Gemini 8 flight, during which Armstrong successfully docked with another spacecraft before hurtling into a terrifying end-over-end spin. We also learn about the doomed Apollo 1 team, including White, Grissom and Roger Chaffee (Cory Michael Smith), who perished during a preflight test.Those deaths, as well as several that came before, haunt Armstrong throughout \u201cFirst Man,\u201d which depicts him as unable or unwilling to express the mortal fear and loss that are his occupational hazards. But the sadness that trails Armstrong is nowhere stronger than in his own home. As \u201cFirst Man\u201d begins, Armstrong and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), endure an unspeakable loss. True to form, Armstrong copes by compartmentalizing his grief, often leaving Janet and their two young sons behind, both physically and emotionally.If Armstrong is a reluctant hero, that makes him all the more appealing in \u201cFirst Man,\u201d which is far less interested in derring-do and camera-ready cool than depicting the discipline, focus, stamina and superhuman nerve it took for Armstrong and his colleagues to do their jobs. Gosling, with blue eyes blazing, brings an enormous store of innate charm and audience goodwill to a character who often seems to be as distant and isolated as the moon he often stares at, with unspoken longing. Foy, best known for her superb portrayal of Queen Elizabeth on \u201cThe Crown,\u201d delivers an anxious, no-nonsense depiction of the anti-astronaut\u2019s wife, subverting the coifed, \u201cWe\u2019re very proud and happy\u201d stereotype to remind Armstrong, his superiors and the audience that, behind the photo ops and press releases, NASA families are enduring real sacrifice and suffering.This might sound like a downer. And it\u2019s true that, thanks to both its diffident hero and its resistance to easy romanticism, \u201cFirst Man\u201d is a surprisingly somber, occasionally inert, sometimes even off-putting enterprise. Even the verite visual language sends a mixed message. There are times when messy verite-style realism and IMAX-scale spectacle seem to be fighting each other, with neither emerging a clear winner.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut those contradictions also make \u201cFirst Man\u201d smarter and more layered than a conventional space-exploration ad",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018First Man\u2019 is a solemn yet stirring look at the first moon landing (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2191",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/first-moon-is-a-solemn-yet-stirring-look-at-the-first-moon-landing/2018/10/08/bdbe666c-c73b-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarSolidStarHalf(3.5 stars)Ryan Gosling does his best to dial down his star power in \u201cFirst Man,\u201d in which he plays the astronaut Neil Armstrong with unsmiling reticence and stoicism. Based on James R. Hansen\u2019s biography of the same name, this absorbing, meticulously detailed chronicle of Armstrong\u2019s career \u2014 culminating with the Apollo 11 NASA mission during which he became the first man to walk on the moon \u2014 continually undercuts the story\u2019s inherent triumphalism and mythmaking. Like its protagonist, \u201cFirst Man\u201d doesn\u2019t go in for theatrics or gratuitous emotion, however justified. It gets the job done, with professionalism, immersive authenticity and unadorned feeling, of which Armstrong himself might just have approved, however apprehensively. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFirst Man\u201d prepares viewers for the experience they\u2019re about to have from its first moments, when Armstrong \u2014 a gifted aeronautical engineer and Korean War flying ace \u2014 is flying a hypersonic X-15 aircraft over the Mojave Desert in 1961. With shaky close-ups and a deafening roar, director Damien Chazelle (working from a script by Josh Singer) never pulls back as Armstrong bounces off the atmosphere, frantically trying to bring the plane safely to ground. Of course, Armstrong himself isn\u2019t frantic. It\u2019s audience members who are likely to find themselves pulling back in their seats or lurching to one side or another as his unseen, collective co-pilot.It\u2019s a harrowing sequence, full of dizzying, disorienting close-ups and swirling gadgetry. And that radically subjective visual style will be repeated throughout \u201cFirst Man,\u201d as Chazelle crams his camera into ever more claustrophobic cockpits and capsules, as well as into the no less fraught environs of the Armstrong household. Hewing closely to Hansen\u2019s book, Chazelle faithfully recounts Armstrong\u2019s bid to become a member of the Gemini team, NASA\u2019s second manned-spaceflight program. He introduces Armstrong\u2019s now-famous colleagues Ed White (Jason Clarke), Gus Grissom (Shea Whigham), Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber) and Deke Slayton (Kyle Chandler), going to exhaustive lengths to re-create such momentous episodes as the Gemini 8 flight, during which Armstrong successfully docked with another spacecraft before hurtling into a terrifying end-over-end spin. We also learn about the doomed Apollo 1 team, including White, Grissom and Roger Chaffee (Cory Michael Smith), who perished during a preflight test.Those deaths, as well as several that came before, haunt Armstrong throughout \u201cFirst Man,\u201d which depicts him as unable or unwilling to express the mortal fear and loss that are his occupational hazards. But the sadness that trails Armstrong is nowhere stronger than in his own home. As \u201cFirst Man\u201d begins, Armstrong and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy), endure an unspeakable loss. True to form, Armstrong copes by compartmentalizing his grief, often leaving Janet and their two young sons behind, both physically and emotionally.If Armstrong is a reluctant hero, that makes him all the more appealing in \u201cFirst Man,\u201d which is far less interested in derring-do and camera-ready cool than depicting the discipline, focus, stamina and superhuman nerve it took for Armstrong and his colleagues to do their jobs. Gosling, with blue eyes blazing, brings an enormous store of innate charm and audience goodwill to a character who often seems to be as distant and isolated as the moon he often stares at, with unspoken longing. Foy, best known for her superb portrayal of Queen Elizabeth on \u201cThe Crown,\u201d delivers an anxious, no-nonsense depiction of the anti-astronaut\u2019s wife, subverting the coifed, \u201cWe\u2019re very proud and happy\u201d stereotype to remind Armstrong, his superiors and the audience that, behind the photo ops and press releases, NASA families are enduring real sacrifice and suffering.This might sound like a downer. And it\u2019s true that, thanks to both its diffident hero and its resistance to easy romanticism, \u201cFirst Man\u201d is a surprisingly somber, occasionally inert, sometimes even off-putting enterprise. Even the verite visual language sends a mixed message. There are times when messy verite-style realism and IMAX-scale spectacle seem to be fighting each other, with neither emerging a clear winner.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut those contradictions also make \u201cFirst Man\u201d smarter and more layered than a conventional space-exploration ad",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: A True-Life Journey Into Interstellar Space in \u2018The Farthest\u2019 (NYT: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2192",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/movies/review-a-true-life-journey-into-interstellar-space-in-the-farthest.html",
        "text": "Emer Reynolds\u2019s dazzling film traces the history of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Like the NASA team that produced these spacecraft, it inspires awe. Emer Reynolds\u2019s dazzling film traces the history of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Like the NASA team that produced these spacecraft, it inspires awe. For any believer in humankind\u2019s instinct to transcend boundaries, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, and the NASA team that produced them, inspire awe. \u201cThe Farthest,\u201d a dazzling documentary written and directed by Emer Reynolds, illustrates why.",
        "author": "By Andy Webster"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: A True-Life Journey Into Interstellar Space in \u2018The Farthest\u2019 (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2193",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/movies/review-a-true-life-journey-into-interstellar-space-in-the-farthest.html",
        "text": "Emer Reynolds\u2019s dazzling film traces the history of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Like the NASA team that produced these spacecraft, it inspires awe. Emer Reynolds\u2019s dazzling film traces the history of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Like the NASA team that produced these spacecraft, it inspires awe. For any believer in humankind\u2019s instinct to transcend boundaries, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, and the NASA team that produced them, inspire awe. \u201cThe Farthest,\u201d a dazzling documentary written and directed by Emer Reynolds, illustrates why.",
        "author": "By Andy Webster"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: A True-Life Journey Into Interstellar Space in \u2018The Farthest\u2019 (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2194",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/movies/review-a-true-life-journey-into-interstellar-space-in-the-farthest.html",
        "text": "Emer Reynolds\u2019s dazzling film traces the history of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Like the NASA team that produced these spacecraft, it inspires awe. Emer Reynolds\u2019s dazzling film traces the history of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Like the NASA team that produced these spacecraft, it inspires awe. For any believer in humankind\u2019s instinct to transcend boundaries, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, and the NASA team that produced them, inspire awe. \u201cThe Farthest,\u201d a dazzling documentary written and directed by Emer Reynolds, illustrates why.",
        "author": "By Andy Webster"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Robert Pattinson\u2019s outer-space drama \u2018High Life\u2019 is fascinating yet frustrating (WP: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2195",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/robert-pattinsons-outer-space-drama-high-life-is-fascinating-yet-frustrating/2019/04/10/9dcec7a2-5106-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarHalfStarOutline(2.5 stars)The cutely titled outer-space drama \u201cHigh Life\u201d offers three things that the 72-year-old French filmmaker Claire Denis has never embraced before: (1) a spaceship setting; (2) English-language dialogue; and (3) a Hollywood star (Robert Pattinson). But even ardent Pattinson fandom won\u2019t be enough to convert mainstream American audiences to the art-house director\u2019s dark outlook and elliptical style. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSolitude is a frequent Denis theme, so followers of her work won\u2019t be surprised that this intriguing yet frustrating movie opens with Monte, played by a committed and compelling Pattinson, alone on a junky spacecraft. Well, almost alone. Baby talk heard over the intercom clues us in that somewhere else on the ship is a toddler (Scarlett Lindsey). She\u2019s named Willow, perhaps in homage to the forest briefly glimpsed in flashbacks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEventually and fragmentarily, the story will rewind to explain how Monte and Willow came to be where they are \u2014 and where everyone else went. (Yes, there were others.) After several minutes, the movie\u2019s title appears over a stunning tableau that\u2019s almost worth the price of admission. The scene, like much of the rest of the movie, is both beautiful and grim.Monte, we will come to learn, is no brilliant scientist or intergalactic hero. Rather, he\u2019s an ex-con, as were the other people who used to share the boxy craft with him. They were dispatched to space under the pretext of finding a way to generate energy for Earth from black holes. In actuality, the astronauts are the subjects of experiments in zero-gravity fertility, overseen by the demanding Dibs (Juliette Binoche, star of Denis\u2019s previous film \u201cLet the Sunshine In\u201d).Dibs collects semen from all the men except Monte, who refuses. (These human guinea pigs are played by Lars Eidinger, Ewan Mitchell and Outkast\u2019s Andr\u00e9 Benjamin). She then attempts to impregnate the women (Mia Goth, Agata Buzek, Claire Tran and Gloria Obianyo), some of whom are more cooperative than others. Unsurprisingly, the surliest one turns out to be Willow\u2019s mom.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to the aforementioned bodily fluid, blood, urine and breast milk also flow in \u201cHigh Times,\u201d each liquid meant to represent the messiness of human life amid the sterility of space. The contrast of such images is powerful but not profound. Denis is making casual observations, not a coherent argument.In an epilogue, we\u2019re shown a teenage Willow (Jessie Ross) as she and her father encounter another example of human cruelty. The culmination of their journey, however, is simply a second opportunity to look at a bleakly lovely vista.Denis has acknowledged several influences: Stanley Kubrick \u2014 both \u201cDr. Strangelove\u201d and \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d \u2014 as well as Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s \u201cSolaris\u201d and \u201cStalker.\u201d Some viewers may also be reminded of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s \u201cAlphaville,\u201d which evoked the future with even fewer special effects than \u201cHigh Life\u201d or \u201cNever Let Me Go,\u201d another tale of attractive young people subjugated by a distant medical bureaucracy. As the director has noted, this stratospheric drama has the grimy intimacy of a prison flick.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven in English, two things in \u201cHigh Life\u201d don\u2019t translate: Screenwriters Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, who delivered the original script in French, have left us with lines that are too stilted or flowery to be convincing when translated into a blunter language. The movie\u2019s other flaw is its Gallic grandiosity about sex. The spaceship even includes a masturbation chamber that recalls the slapstick Orgasmatron of Woody Allen\u2019s \u201cSleeper\u201d \u2014 although its use here is much more explicit.Denis\u2019s most memorable films, which include \u201cBeau Travail\u201d and \u201c35 Shots of Rum,\u201d navigate solitude and loss on their path to moments of joy. That does not happen in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d whose most amazing moments are never amazing enough to jar it out of its static orbit.There is one bonus for Pattinson fans: The brooding score \u2014 written by Tindersticks frontman Stuart A. Staples, a longtime Denis collaborator \u2014 includes an end-credits tune sung by the \u201cTwilight\u201d star.R.\u2009At area theaters. Contains disturbing sexual and violent elements including sexual assault, graphic nudity, animal cruelty and crude language. 113 minutes. French director Claire Denis\u2019s first English-language film falls short of her earlier work. Robert Pattinson\u2019s outer-space drama \u2018High Life\u2019 is fascinating yet frustrating",
        "author": "Mark Jenkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Robert Pattinson\u2019s outer-space drama \u2018High Life\u2019 is fascinating yet frustrating (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2196",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/robert-pattinsons-outer-space-drama-high-life-is-fascinating-yet-frustrating/2019/04/10/9dcec7a2-5106-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarHalfStarOutline(2.5 stars)The cutely titled outer-space drama \u201cHigh Life\u201d offers three things that the 72-year-old French filmmaker Claire Denis has never embraced before: (1) a spaceship setting; (2) English-language dialogue; and (3) a Hollywood star (Robert Pattinson). But even ardent Pattinson fandom won\u2019t be enough to convert mainstream American audiences to the art-house director\u2019s dark outlook and elliptical style. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSolitude is a frequent Denis theme, so followers of her work won\u2019t be surprised that this intriguing yet frustrating movie opens with Monte, played by a committed and compelling Pattinson, alone on a junky spacecraft. Well, almost alone. Baby talk heard over the intercom clues us in that somewhere else on the ship is a toddler (Scarlett Lindsey). She\u2019s named Willow, perhaps in homage to the forest briefly glimpsed in flashbacks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEventually and fragmentarily, the story will rewind to explain how Monte and Willow came to be where they are \u2014 and where everyone else went. (Yes, there were others.) After several minutes, the movie\u2019s title appears over a stunning tableau that\u2019s almost worth the price of admission. The scene, like much of the rest of the movie, is both beautiful and grim.Monte, we will come to learn, is no brilliant scientist or intergalactic hero. Rather, he\u2019s an ex-con, as were the other people who used to share the boxy craft with him. They were dispatched to space under the pretext of finding a way to generate energy for Earth from black holes. In actuality, the astronauts are the subjects of experiments in zero-gravity fertility, overseen by the demanding Dibs (Juliette Binoche, star of Denis\u2019s previous film \u201cLet the Sunshine In\u201d).Dibs collects semen from all the men except Monte, who refuses. (These human guinea pigs are played by Lars Eidinger, Ewan Mitchell and Outkast\u2019s Andr\u00e9 Benjamin). She then attempts to impregnate the women (Mia Goth, Agata Buzek, Claire Tran and Gloria Obianyo), some of whom are more cooperative than others. Unsurprisingly, the surliest one turns out to be Willow\u2019s mom.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to the aforementioned bodily fluid, blood, urine and breast milk also flow in \u201cHigh Times,\u201d each liquid meant to represent the messiness of human life amid the sterility of space. The contrast of such images is powerful but not profound. Denis is making casual observations, not a coherent argument.In an epilogue, we\u2019re shown a teenage Willow (Jessie Ross) as she and her father encounter another example of human cruelty. The culmination of their journey, however, is simply a second opportunity to look at a bleakly lovely vista.Denis has acknowledged several influences: Stanley Kubrick \u2014 both \u201cDr. Strangelove\u201d and \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d \u2014 as well as Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s \u201cSolaris\u201d and \u201cStalker.\u201d Some viewers may also be reminded of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s \u201cAlphaville,\u201d which evoked the future with even fewer special effects than \u201cHigh Life\u201d or \u201cNever Let Me Go,\u201d another tale of attractive young people subjugated by a distant medical bureaucracy. As the director has noted, this stratospheric drama has the grimy intimacy of a prison flick.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven in English, two things in \u201cHigh Life\u201d don\u2019t translate: Screenwriters Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, who delivered the original script in French, have left us with lines that are too stilted or flowery to be convincing when translated into a blunter language. The movie\u2019s other flaw is its Gallic grandiosity about sex. The spaceship even includes a masturbation chamber that recalls the slapstick Orgasmatron of Woody Allen\u2019s \u201cSleeper\u201d \u2014 although its use here is much more explicit.Denis\u2019s most memorable films, which include \u201cBeau Travail\u201d and \u201c35 Shots of Rum,\u201d navigate solitude and loss on their path to moments of joy. That does not happen in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d whose most amazing moments are never amazing enough to jar it out of its static orbit.There is one bonus for Pattinson fans: The brooding score \u2014 written by Tindersticks frontman Stuart A. Staples, a longtime Denis collaborator \u2014 includes an end-credits tune sung by the \u201cTwilight\u201d star.R.\u2009At area theaters. Contains disturbing sexual and violent elements including sexual assault, graphic nudity, animal cruelty and crude language. 113 minutes. French director Claire Denis\u2019s first English-language film falls short of her earlier work. Robert Pattinson\u2019s outer-space drama \u2018High Life\u2019 is fascinating yet frustrating",
        "author": "Mark Jenkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Biosphere 2 documentary \u2018Spaceship Earth\u2019 offers a sobering primer on crushed dreams. (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2197",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/spaceship-earth-movie-review/2020/05/06/ba86903a-8e1a-11ea-a9c0-73b93422d691_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarSolidStarHalf(3.5 stars)\u201cThe future is here,\u201d says one of the eight intrepid explorers who in 1991 walked into the sprawling three-acre greenhouse known as Biosphere 2, for a two-year experiment in ecology and self-containment (not to mention interpersonal psychology and power dynamics). WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDon\u2019t you know it, sister. \u201cSpaceship Earth,\u201d Matt Wolf\u2019s engaging documentary about a ragtag group of idealists who set out to explore the world \u2014 and then save it \u2014 couldn\u2019t be better timed: The film\u2019s distributor, Neon, is making it available on streaming because, really, what could be more relevant to the coronavirus lockdown than a chronicle of the 20th century\u2019s most famous self-quarantine?Story continues below advertisementPeople who remember the press hysteria surrounding Biosphere 2 might think of it as a spectacular flop, the utopian promise of its mission sullied by media spectacle and a few cheats along the way. Eventually treated like a human diorama by the tourists who traveled to peer at them through the glass triangles of their quarters, the terrestrial astronauts (terranauts?) who volunteered to sequester themselves in a collection of seven mini-biomes were tarred as a naive cult at best, and charlatans at worst.Advertisement\u201cSpaceship Earth\u201d helpfully deconstructs those accusations, first by delving into the project\u2019s origins in 1960s San Francisco, when a charismatic Oklahoma transplant named John Allen gathered a group of bookish, artistically inclined young people to get things going, whether in the form of experimental plays, a farm in New Mexico or an oceangoing ship that they built from scratch in Oakland, Calif. After sailing the world, learning about global warming and attracting the attention and money of oil scion and environmentalist Ed Bass, Allen hit upon the idea of launching an earthbound test of what might eventually be a colony on Mars or the moon.Luckily for us, Allen and his colleagues were compulsive recorders of their adventures, and one of the Biospherians, a physician named Roy Walford, brought a video camera into the complex. With a wealth of archival material to work with, Wolf does a superb job of sending viewers back into the 1980s and 1990s \u2014 whose scratchy, juddering VHS-era production values and \u201cGalaxy Quest\u201d-worthy uniforms might be tough on the eyes, but are note-perfect in conjuring the time period. He also interviews as many surviving participants as he can, giving \u201cSpaceship Earth\u201d a welcome note of self-awareness and perspective (although no one addresses the conspicuous homogeneity of the group). Anyone who fears going stir crazy at a time when going to the store is more akin to scrubbing in for surgery than running a light errand will relate when tensions rise and systems begin to break down; if the Biospherians\u2019 two-year sojourn in the Arizona desert proved anything, it might be just how much a whiff of fresh air can do.Story continues below advertisementThere\u2019s a third-act twist involving a present-day political figure that is so shocking, and strangely prescient, that divulging the details wouldn\u2019t be sporting. Suffice it to say that, in addition to celebrating the energy, enterprise and idealism of America\u2019s postwar generation, \u201cSpaceship Earth\u201d provides a sobering primer in how some dreams die, and others are strangled mercilessly in their cribs.\n\nUnrated. Available May 8 via streaming at theavalon.org, sunscinema.com, afisilver.afi.com and cinemaartstheatre.com. Contains brief coarse language. 115 minutes. What could be more timely than a film about eight people cooped up in a miniature biome? Biosphere 2 documentary \u2018Spaceship Earth\u2019 offers a sobering primer on crushed dreams.",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The new \u2018Predator\u2019 sequel is a step backward for the sci-fi franchise (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2198",
        "date": "2018-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/the-new-predator-sequel-is-a-step-backward-for-the-sci-fi-franchise/2018/09/12/40c9b2c6-b159-11e8-aed9-001309990777_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarOutlineStarOutline(2 stars)The titular villains from 1987\u2019s \u201cPredator\u201d \u2014 dreadlocked alien manhunters with the power of invisibility \u2014 are back on Earth in the new sequel \u201cThe Predator,\u201d only this time they have dogs.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs the writer of \u201cLethal Weapon\u201d and the writer-director of such films as \u201cKiss Kiss Bang Bang\u201d and \u201cIron Man 3,\u201d Shane Black has a gift for smart-alecky dialogue. But in his effort to inject fresh blood into this gory franchise, which has already seen four sequels (including two \u201cAlien\u201d crossovers), the filmmaker can\u2019t seem to summon up that old Black magic. Set in the present day, some 30 years after the action of the first film, the new story immediately beats you over the head with leaden spectacle, opening with a battle between alien spaceships. In a departure from \u201cPredator,\u201d which took its sweet time introducing its extraterrestrial visitors, you see the monsters here almost immediately.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat generic opening sequence could have been plucked from any number of other science-fiction movies. Fortunately, the film\u2019s human characters do begin to gradually come into focus. Chief among them is Quinn (Boyd Holbrook), a mercenary who has discovered an alien spaceship that crash-landed in a Mexican jungle. Quinn sends some of the wreckage back home, where his 6-year-old son (Jacob Tremblay), who longs to reconnect with his mostly absent father, tries to figure out how the alien technology works.Into this broken-family dynamic, Black introduces a group of veterans suffering from PTSD. These characters, who include the snarky Coyle (Keegan-Michael Key) and tough guy Nebraska (Trevante Rhodes), are there for a little comic relief \u2014 a little too much, in fact \u2014 and never seem to come together as a team.Humor is Black\u2019s signature. One scene involves an argument about whether it\u2019s appropriate to call the aliens \u201cpredators.\u201d However cool the moniker, they hunt less for survival than for sport \u2014 \u201clike a bass fisherman,\u201d explains Olivia Munn\u2019s Casey, an evolutionary scientist recruited to evaluate a captured specimen of the alien race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch jokiness is well within the bounds of the series\u2019 formula, as are the buckets of blood. Still, \u201cThe Predator\u201d lacks the electric charge that made its predecessors pulpy fun.Black, who appeared on-screen in the original \u201cPredator,\u201d was reportedly cast in that movie because producers were hoping that the \u201cLethal Weapon\u201d writer would help fix the screenplay. (He refused, so his character was the first to be killed off.) How ironic, then, that Black\u2019s new screenplay is short on two things: the tantalizing distance that lent the creatures a sense of mystery in the first film, and the mood of delirious mayhem that made \u201cPredator 2\u201d an enjoyable, if over-the-top popcorn flick.In a recent interview, Black opined that \u201cYou always feel yourself to be roughly 25\u201d (his approximate age when he wrote \u201cLethal Weapon\u201d and appeared in \u201cPredator\u201d). It\u2019s a strange comment, coming from someone whose filmmaking chops have shown real maturity, especially in \u201cThe Nice Guys,\u201d Black\u2019s 2016 return to his buddy-movie roots.With \u201cThe Predator,\u201d something\u2019s different. The alien invaders may have evolved, but Black\u2019s writing has taken a step backward.R.\u2009At area theaters. Contains strong bloody violence, crude language throughout and crude sexual references. 107 minutes. The man-hunting aliens have may evolved, but writer-director Shane Black hasn\u2019t. The new \u2018Predator\u2019 sequel is a step backward for the sci-fi franchise",
        "author": "Pat Padua"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | With \u2018Dark Phoenix,\u2019 the X-Men saga goes out with a whimper, not a bang (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2199",
        "date": "2019-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/with-dark-phoenix-the-x-men-saga-goes-out-with-a-whimper-not-a-bang/2019/06/04/2fa7ad44-848b-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarOutlineStarOutline(2 stars)\u2018Dark Phoenix\u201d isn\u2019t kidding about the \u201cdark\u201d part. The latest, and probably final, chapter in the X-Men superhero saga is a somber, even funereal affair \u2014 not in a stylish, Christopher Nolan-esque way, or even a la \u201cLogan,\u201d the deliciously cynical comic-book-noir contribution to the mutant canon from 2017. Rather, if a movie can be said to suffer from low-grade depression, this one certainly seems to be, shuffling in its socks and bathrobe through a not-quite-two-hour running time with an attitude that is closer to grudging obligation than enthusiastic commitment. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe movie opens, with a literal bang, in a violent, 1975-set prologue that introduces us to the film\u2019s protagonist Jean Grey, first seen as an 8-year-old girl (Summer Fontana) who is about to experience tragic loss, thanks to the unintended consequences of her telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Jumping ahead 17 years, we next meet Jean\u2019s 25-year-old self (Sophie Turner), a young woman now more confident in her paranormal gifts, having been raised \u2014 with all the requisite self-esteem of modern pedagogy \u2014 in a school for mutant children run by Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). Jean is one of Charles\u2019s X-Men, a band of superheroes with extraordinary physical and mental abilities \u2014 and a hotline to the president, from whom they receive their marching orders.The 24 films everyone will be talking about this summerThis dynamic is a little different from the typical X-Men movie, in which mutants are seen as freaks and outcasts. If things are topsy-turvy here, it\u2019s because the time-traveling plot of the 2014 film \u201cDays of Future Past\u201d altered the franchise\u2019s timeline (including the erasure of Jean\u2019s death in the 2006 film \u201cThe Last Stand.\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne of those presidential marching orders soon comes in. A spaceship full of astronauts has been damaged in Earth\u2019s orbit. The X-Men, whose powers range from teleportation to controlling the weather, must save them. Their mission goes off with only one tiny hitch: While in space, Jean is irradiated with some kind of strange cosmic energy, rendering her even more powerful \u2014 and, unfortunately, more of a loose cannon \u2014 than before. She comes back perpetually P.O.\u2019ed, a Popeye with a reserve of supernatural spinach that always lives inside her, and over which she has little control.Naturally, bad things ensue.From this point on, \u201cDark Phoenix\u201d seems to go into a kind of low-energy mode, which is especially ironic, considering that it\u2019s about a being who is touted as the most powerful entity on Earth. (This assessment comes from Jessica Chastain\u2019s character, a mysteriously otherworldly figure who wants a taste of Jean\u2019s mojo for herself.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSure, there are some fights \u2014 most of them internecine, as various X-Men start to doubt the leadership of Charles, a powerful clairvoyant who is revealed to have tinkered with Jean\u2019s mind as a child. Alliances shift, old resentments are stirred, and Charles\u2019s sometime nemesis Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) comes out of semiretirement in the agricultural commune where he lives with a band of renegade mutants. Half the people in the movie want to kill Jean, and half of them want to save her from herself. A handful of government stormtroopers just want to lock the whole crowd up after Jean\u2019s misbehavior freshly demonizes the mutant community.But despite what sounds like all-out war, \u201cDark Phoenix\u201d mostly plays like turgid psychodrama, with characters throwing around cheesy lines like \u201cI thought I\u2019d lost you,\u201d \u201cWhy can\u2019t you admit you were wrong?\u201d and \u201cShe\u2019s not your little girl anymore.\u201d By the time the X-Men finally get around to doing what they do best \u2014 levitating metal trains, shooting eyeball lasers, conjuring lightning and engaging in dueling mind-control \u2014 it all feels borderline tedious, like a game of superhuman rock-paper scissors.There are some kicks, here and there. The character of Peter Maximoff \u2014 a super-fast mutant known as Quicksilver (Evan Peters), who stole the show in \u201cDays of Future Past\u201d \u2014 is mostly sidelined here, despite getting in a couple of mildly funny lines. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with \u201cDark Phoenix.\u201d There\u2019s way too much darkness, and not enough quicksilver wit.PG-13. At area theaters. Contains intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, including some gunplay, disturbing images and brief strong language. 114 minutes. The latest \u2014 and likely last \u2014 chapter in the mutant-superhero saga is surprisingly somber. With \u2018Dark Phoenix,\u2019 the X-Men saga goes out with a whimper, not a bang",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Avengers: Infinity War\u2019 is stunningly dark. But it\u2019s still wildly entertaining. (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2200",
        "date": "2018-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/avengers-infinity-war-is-stunningly-dark-but-its-still-wildly-entertaining/2018/04/24/6de7aefc-4291-11e8-ad8f-27a8c409298b_story.html",
        "text": "Rating: 3\u2009starsWhat does Thanos want? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat question lies at the heart of \u201cAvengers: Infinity War,\u201d the at-once dark, maddeningly open-ended yet fiercely entertaining new chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which pits the titular global do-gooders \u2014 still scattered hither and yon after their 2016 falling-out with one another in \u201cCaptain America: Civil War\u201d \u2014 against a cosmic villain who has been coyly signaling his evil intentions since the very first \u201cAvengers\u201d movie, in 2012. And that\u2019s without ever really appearing on-screen, except in teasing cameos. Oh sure, everyone knows he wants the Infinity Stones. Or at least everyone who\u2019s been paying attention to the previous 18 MCU movies. Ever since 2008\u2019s \u201cIron Man,\u201d these interconnected installments have introduced audiences to the six gemlike \u201csingularities\u201d: color-coded stones controlling power, space, time, mind, soul and reality. Taken collectively, these artifacts are the mother of all MacGuffins \u2014 plot devices that drive the narrative, but may or may not have much to do with the true message of the story. But what does Thanos want with them? That question is answered, in a film that presents a villain in a more nuanced, complex (and arguably even sympathetic) way than most comic book movies do. That\u2019s especially unexpected, given that he\u2019s a purple alien (voiced by Josh Brolin), created from motion-capture, with skin that looks like a cantaloupe.Everything that\u2019s happened leading up to \u2018Avengers: Infinity War\u2019What is not unexpected is the film\u2019s death toll. Fanboys and fangirls have already steeled themselves to the eventuality that favorite characters will die here. Opening with a distress call from the Asgardian refugee spaceship that was seen fleeing planetary destruction at the end of last year\u2019s \u201cThor: Ragnarok,\u201d \u201cInfinity War\u201d gets that outcome out of the way early, paving a path forward for a film that, while very funny for much of its 2\u2009\u00bd -hour running time, ends on an almost stunningly somber note. It should be mentioned that there is already a sequel planned for next year that is likely to act as a corrective \u2014 short of bringing people back from the grave. In the manner of the second and third \u201cMatrix\u201d films, and the \u201cDeathly Hallows\u201d segments of the Harry Potter films, you can expect that upcoming movie to be more of a conclusion to a giant, two-part saga \u2014 complete with this installment\u2019s cliffhanger ending \u2014 than a free-standing sequel.\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDeath and destruction, of course, is what Thanos has in mind. But unlike many cartoonish villains, his motives, as explained in flashbacks and speeches, are not those of universal domination. Rather, he wants to kill half of the universe\u2019s population \u2014 which is threatened by overpopulation and dwindling resources \u2014 to save the other half. His coldblooded calculation is not only a perversion of altruism \u2014 it\u2019s also an argument for extermination. But, for a superhero movie, the nuance with which the film presents this horrible scenario is refreshing.As \u201cInfinity War\u201d gets underway, Thanos has already acquired the Power Stone and is seeking the other five \u2014 four of which are in the control of characters we know from previous films. The location of the sixth, or Soul Stone, has long been unknown, but it will bring Thanos the power he seeks, not to mention to a moral and emotional crossroads that concern his estranged stepdaughter Gamora (Zoe Saldana). The choice Thanos ultimately makes \u2014 already the subject of much online speculation \u2014 will probably strike many viewers as startling for a film of this kind. I heard audible gasps at this point, and other moments, during a recent media screening.I also heard lots of laughter. One especially good giggle involves Peter Dinklage\u2019s character, who, for reasons that will only be obvious when you see the film, has been kept under wraps.Is this the year that Marvel\u2019s superheroes finally topple Star Wars?The entertainment media has made much of so-called Avengers Fatigue, from Marvel exhausting its storytelling capabilities \u2014 as well as our attention span. But brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, who return as co-directors after \u201cCivil War\u201d and its predecessor, \u201cWinter Soldier,\u201d move the pace briskly and with frequent levity, as heroes from various Marvel franchises keep throwing things \u2014 sometimes literally \u2014 at Thanos, and as the scene of the action shifts from the \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy\u201d team\u2019s spaceship to Black Panther\u2019s African homeland of Wakanda to, at one point, Scotland. It is there that the synthetic humanoid known as Vision (Paul Bettany) \u2014 who wears the Mind Stone like a diadem on his forehead \u2014 and girlfriend Wanda Maximoff, a.k.a. Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), have gone off the grid.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeedless to say, that cozy love nest won\u2019t stay cozy long.\u201cInfinity War\u201d is big, blustery and brave, taking viewers to places they may not be used to going. Whether Thanos ends up getting everything he wants is one thing. But audiences should be warned that they probably won\u2019t. PG13.\u2009At area theaters. Contains intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout, strong language and some crude references. 154 minutes. This chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe takes you to a place that most superhero movies don\u2019t \u2014 and where you may not want to go. \u2018Avengers: Infinity War\u2019 is stunningly dark. But it\u2019s still wildly entertaining.",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Aniara\u2019 Review: A One-Way Ticket Into the Abyss (NYT: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2201",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/movies/aniara-review.html",
        "text": "Colonists aboard a spaceship fleeing a ruined Earth encounter unrelenting tragedy in this tastefully mounted but punishing film. Colonists aboard a spaceship fleeing a ruined Earth encounter unrelenting tragedy in this tastefully mounted but punishing film. In the harrowing Swedish science-fiction epic \u201cAniara,\u201d a spacecraft designed to make the voyage from a ruined Earth to a colony on Mars hits both debris and disaster.",
        "author": "By Teo Bugbee"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Aniara\u2019 Review: A One-Way Ticket Into the Abyss (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2202",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/movies/aniara-review.html",
        "text": "Colonists aboard a spaceship fleeing a ruined Earth encounter unrelenting tragedy in this tastefully mounted but punishing film. Colonists aboard a spaceship fleeing a ruined Earth encounter unrelenting tragedy in this tastefully mounted but punishing film. In the harrowing Swedish science-fiction epic \u201cAniara,\u201d a spacecraft designed to make the voyage from a ruined Earth to a colony on Mars hits both debris and disaster.",
        "author": "By Teo Bugbee"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Aniara\u2019 Review: A One-Way Ticket Into the Abyss (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2203",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/movies/aniara-review.html",
        "text": "Colonists aboard a spaceship fleeing a ruined Earth encounter unrelenting tragedy in this tastefully mounted but punishing film. Colonists aboard a spaceship fleeing a ruined Earth encounter unrelenting tragedy in this tastefully mounted but punishing film. In the harrowing Swedish science-fiction epic \u201cAniara,\u201d a spacecraft designed to make the voyage from a ruined Earth to a colony on Mars hits both debris and disaster.",
        "author": "By Teo Bugbee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Bill Nye: Science Guy,\u2019 a Portrait of a Fighter for Facts (NYT: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2204",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/movies/bill-nye-science-guy-review-documentary.html",
        "text": "This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. In the film \u201cBill Nye: Science Guy,\u201d Mr. Nye, the 1990s children\u2019s-television personality with the signature bow tie, warns of \u201can anti-science movement\u201d afoot in this country. And this delightful, revealing documentary, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, offers evidence supporting that assessment.",
        "author": "By Andy Webster"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Bill Nye: Science Guy,\u2019 a Portrait of a Fighter for Facts (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2205",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/movies/bill-nye-science-guy-review-documentary.html",
        "text": "This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. In the film \u201cBill Nye: Science Guy,\u201d Mr. Nye, the 1990s children\u2019s-television personality with the signature bow tie, warns of \u201can anti-science movement\u201d afoot in this country. And this delightful, revealing documentary, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, offers evidence supporting that assessment.",
        "author": "By Andy Webster"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Bill Nye: Science Guy,\u2019 a Portrait of a Fighter for Facts (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2206",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/movies/bill-nye-science-guy-review-documentary.html",
        "text": "This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. In the film \u201cBill Nye: Science Guy,\u201d Mr. Nye, the 1990s children\u2019s-television personality with the signature bow tie, warns of \u201can anti-science movement\u201d afoot in this country. And this delightful, revealing documentary, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, offers evidence supporting that assessment.",
        "author": "By Andy Webster"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Bill Nye: Science Guy,\u2019 a Portrait of a Fighter for Facts (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2207",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/movies/bill-nye-science-guy-review-documentary.html",
        "text": "This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. This revealing documentary follows Mr. Nye as he crusades on behalf of space exploration and against creationists and climate-change deniers. In the film \u201cBill Nye: Science Guy,\u201d Mr. Nye, the 1990s children\u2019s-television personality with the signature bow tie, warns of \u201can anti-science movement\u201d afoot in this country. And this delightful, revealing documentary, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, offers evidence supporting that assessment.",
        "author": "By Andy Webster"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Stowaway\u2019 Review: An Outer-Space Drama, Lacking Gravity (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2208",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/movies/stowaway-review.html",
        "text": "This Netflix film pushes a crew of space explorers to moral and physical extremes when an unexpected passenger accidentally compromises their oxygen supply. This Netflix film pushes a crew of space explorers to moral and physical extremes when an unexpected passenger accidentally compromises their oxygen supply. Films set in outer space are often on a quest for meaning, filling the vast unknown of the galaxy with humanity\u2019s basest anxieties. \u201cStowaway,\u201d directed by Joe Penna, pushes a crew of space explorers to moral and physical extremes when an unexpected passenger accidentally compromises their oxygen supply. Yet for all the empathy it expects of its viewers \u2014 every character cries onscreen at least once \u2014 the film is troublingly removed from human reality.",
        "author": "By Lena Wilson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Science-Fiction Movies to Stream Now (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2209",
        "date": "2021-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/movies/five-science-fiction-movies-to-stream-now.html",
        "text": "This month\u2019s picks deal more with inner turmoil and isolation than space exploration. This month\u2019s picks deal more with inner turmoil and isolation than space exploration. While science fiction can explore galaxies far, far away and offer interstellar spectacles, it is often most challenging when it stays close to home and investigates what makes us human. This month\u2019s selection of overlooked sci-fi streaming movies takes a particular interest in our bodies, ourselves, but don\u2019t worry, the laser battles will come back soon.",
        "author": "By Elisabeth Vincentelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Science-Fiction Movies to Stream Now (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2210",
        "date": "2021-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/movies/five-science-fiction-movies-to-stream-now.html",
        "text": "This month\u2019s picks deal more with inner turmoil and isolation than space exploration. This month\u2019s picks deal more with inner turmoil and isolation than space exploration. While science fiction can explore galaxies far, far away and offer interstellar spectacles, it is often most challenging when it stays close to home and investigates what makes us human. This month\u2019s selection of overlooked sci-fi streaming movies takes a particular interest in our bodies, ourselves, but don\u2019t worry, the laser battles will come back soon.",
        "author": "By Elisabeth Vincentelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Ad Astra\u2019 is an astronaut adventure with soul, and its brightest star is Brad Pitt (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2211",
        "date": "2019-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/ad-astra-is-an-astronaut-adventure-with-soul-and-its-brightest-star-is-brad-pitt/2019/09/16/0fc36b66-d4b9-11e9-86ac-0f250cc91758_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarSolidStarHalf(3.5 stars)In English, \u201cAd Astra\u201d means \u201cto the stars,\u201d but it\u2019s precisely the film\u2019s earthbound emotional truths that give it heft, meaning and grandeur. After Brad Pitt\u2019s mellow, deceptively simple supporting performance in \u201cOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood,\u201d this far more subtle and technically challenging turn reminds viewers yet again that a movie star who started as a pretty face and morphed into a thoughtful and daring producer has been a superb actor all along. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a mesmerizing, minimalist performance, Pitt forms the gravitational center of a film that takes its place in the firmament of science fiction films by fearlessly quoting classics of the genre (as well as those outside it). The net effect is that \u201cAd Astra\u201d feels both familiar and confidently of itself, all the more boldly affecting by being unafraid to acknowledge the forebears it explicitly invokes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFans of \u201cFirst Man\u201d will appreciate \u201cAd Astra\u2019s\u201d rattling opening sequence, when Space Command Maj. Roy McBride (Pitt) hurtles through near-space while building the world\u2019s largest antenna on Earth. Anyone familiar with Joseph Conrad\u2019s \u201cHeart of Darkness\u201d and Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d will recognize the artistic DNA of Roy\u2019s journey when he is assigned to travel to Neptune to retrieve a rogue astronaut (Tommy Lee Jones), who just happens to be his father. Admirers of such mournful futuristic meditations as \u201cGravity,\u201d \u201cArrival\u201d and \u201cSolaris\u201d will understand Roy\u2019s somber reflections on grief and loss as he encounters feelings he has successfully compartmentalized for most of his life.And we haven\u2019t even mentioned \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d yet.With so many references swirling around its atmosphere, \u201cAd Astra\u201d skirts dangerously close to being derivative. But in the capable hands of writer-director James Gray, it becomes its own sturdy, unflashy example of speculative filmmaking that is less interested in whiz-bang special effects and otherworldly creatures than in enduring philosophical questions about what we take with us \u2014 or heedlessly throw away \u2014 on the technological and existential journeys we call progress. In the course of this handsome, classically structured hero\u2019s quest, Gray posits some playful ideas about the commercialization of space travel (the hot towels in first class will always be too small, apparently), as well as more cautionary notions regarding unfettered research, militarization and human nature that is just as feckless at the edge of the solar system as it is on the blue marble we call home.Gray, who has said he set out to make the most realistic science fiction movie ever made, doesn\u2019t stint on cool stuff: \u201cAd Astra\u201d is full of contoured space gear, cosmic rays, antimatter and secured communication lasers. There are several memorable sequences, both in terms of frightening action and the evolving aesthetics of human settlement through the years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut having clearly consulted with experts as to what will be possible in space exploration in the near future, Gray wisely throws the whizbangery away, relegating them to the background of the movie\u2019s most spectacular special effect: its lead actor. As the icily competent, pathologically controlled McBride, Pitt delivers one of the finest performances of his career as a character whose self-imposed isolation bears more than a fleeting resemblance to the empyrean heights of his own celebrity. He communicates volumes simply through his eyes (you often can\u2019t see much more underneath the puffy white suit and amber-tinted helmet), and a narration that stands with Martin Sheen\u2019s in \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d as an example of vocal performance at its most powerfully expressive.There are moments in \u201cAd Astra\u201d when nods to that movie \u2014 as well as the ghostly presence of \u201c2001\u201d \u2014 feel so obvious as to be distracting, when the solemn, contemplative tone teeters toward the lugubrious. But Gray executes the story with such skillful elegance, and Pitt is so compelling, that the homages feel like organic parts of a continuum rather than direct lifts. As if to announce the beginning of good-movie season, \u201cAd Astra\u201d arrives as an original, well-made movie that\u2019s as substantive as it is entertaining, propelled by a star turn all the more impressive for being so restrained and deeply personal. It\u2019s a terrific ride, yes, but also a provocative meditation on masculinity, the things we choose to cherish or squander, and other eternal verities of life that swirl, unresolved, while our little blue marble continues to spin.PG-13. At area theaters. Contains some violence, bloody images and brief strong language. 122 minutes Pitt delivers a mournful, minimalist performance as a heroic space explorer on a quest. \u2018Ad Astra\u2019 is an astronaut adventure with soul, and its brightest star is Brad Pitt",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Ad Astra\u2019 is an astronaut adventure with soul, and its brightest star is Brad Pitt (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2212",
        "date": "2019-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/ad-astra-is-an-astronaut-adventure-with-soul-and-its-brightest-star-is-brad-pitt/2019/09/16/0fc36b66-d4b9-11e9-86ac-0f250cc91758_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarSolidStarSolidStarHalf(3.5 stars)In English, \u201cAd Astra\u201d means \u201cto the stars,\u201d but it\u2019s precisely the film\u2019s earthbound emotional truths that give it heft, meaning and grandeur. After Brad Pitt\u2019s mellow, deceptively simple supporting performance in \u201cOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood,\u201d this far more subtle and technically challenging turn reminds viewers yet again that a movie star who started as a pretty face and morphed into a thoughtful and daring producer has been a superb actor all along. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a mesmerizing, minimalist performance, Pitt forms the gravitational center of a film that takes its place in the firmament of science fiction films by fearlessly quoting classics of the genre (as well as those outside it). The net effect is that \u201cAd Astra\u201d feels both familiar and confidently of itself, all the more boldly affecting by being unafraid to acknowledge the forebears it explicitly invokes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFans of \u201cFirst Man\u201d will appreciate \u201cAd Astra\u2019s\u201d rattling opening sequence, when Space Command Maj. Roy McBride (Pitt) hurtles through near-space while building the world\u2019s largest antenna on Earth. Anyone familiar with Joseph Conrad\u2019s \u201cHeart of Darkness\u201d and Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d will recognize the artistic DNA of Roy\u2019s journey when he is assigned to travel to Neptune to retrieve a rogue astronaut (Tommy Lee Jones), who just happens to be his father. Admirers of such mournful futuristic meditations as \u201cGravity,\u201d \u201cArrival\u201d and \u201cSolaris\u201d will understand Roy\u2019s somber reflections on grief and loss as he encounters feelings he has successfully compartmentalized for most of his life.And we haven\u2019t even mentioned \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d yet.With so many references swirling around its atmosphere, \u201cAd Astra\u201d skirts dangerously close to being derivative. But in the capable hands of writer-director James Gray, it becomes its own sturdy, unflashy example of speculative filmmaking that is less interested in whiz-bang special effects and otherworldly creatures than in enduring philosophical questions about what we take with us \u2014 or heedlessly throw away \u2014 on the technological and existential journeys we call progress. In the course of this handsome, classically structured hero\u2019s quest, Gray posits some playful ideas about the commercialization of space travel (the hot towels in first class will always be too small, apparently), as well as more cautionary notions regarding unfettered research, militarization and human nature that is just as feckless at the edge of the solar system as it is on the blue marble we call home.Gray, who has said he set out to make the most realistic science fiction movie ever made, doesn\u2019t stint on cool stuff: \u201cAd Astra\u201d is full of contoured space gear, cosmic rays, antimatter and secured communication lasers. There are several memorable sequences, both in terms of frightening action and the evolving aesthetics of human settlement through the years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut having clearly consulted with experts as to what will be possible in space exploration in the near future, Gray wisely throws the whizbangery away, relegating them to the background of the movie\u2019s most spectacular special effect: its lead actor. As the icily competent, pathologically controlled McBride, Pitt delivers one of the finest performances of his career as a character whose self-imposed isolation bears more than a fleeting resemblance to the empyrean heights of his own celebrity. He communicates volumes simply through his eyes (you often can\u2019t see much more underneath the puffy white suit and amber-tinted helmet), and a narration that stands with Martin Sheen\u2019s in \u201cApocalypse Now\u201d as an example of vocal performance at its most powerfully expressive.There are moments in \u201cAd Astra\u201d when nods to that movie \u2014 as well as the ghostly presence of \u201c2001\u201d \u2014 feel so obvious as to be distracting, when the solemn, contemplative tone teeters toward the lugubrious. But Gray executes the story with such skillful elegance, and Pitt is so compelling, that the homages feel like organic parts of a continuum rather than direct lifts. As if to announce the beginning of good-movie season, \u201cAd Astra\u201d arrives as an original, well-made movie that\u2019s as substantive as it is entertaining, propelled by a star turn all the more impressive for being so restrained and deeply personal. It\u2019s a terrific ride, yes, but also a provocative meditation on masculinity, the things we choose to cherish or squander, and other eternal verities of life that swirl, unresolved, while our little blue marble continues to spin.PG-13. At area theaters. Contains some violence, bloody images and brief strong language. 122 minutes Pitt delivers a mournful, minimalist performance as a heroic space explorer on a quest. \u2018Ad Astra\u2019 is an astronaut adventure with soul, and its brightest star is Brad Pitt",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Chappaquiddick\u2019 plays it fair, appeasing neither Kennedy-clan fans nor its critics (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2213",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/chappaquiddick-plays-it-fair-appeasing-neither-kennedy-family-fans-nor-its-haters/2018/03/30/63659002-32ba-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html",
        "text": "Rating: 3\u2009starsYears before Watergate, the name Chappaquiddick became shorthand for political scandal. While the world was celebrating the 1969 moon landing by Apollo 11 astronauts \u2014 the legacy of John F. Kennedy\u2019s belief in space exploration \u2014 the late president\u2019s younger brother was in the midst of a devastating fall from grace. Taking its name from the Massachusetts island where Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge, resulting in the death of his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, the movie \u201cChappaquiddick\u201d dramatizes that incident and its scandalous fallout, portraying Kennedy as a complex, contradictory figure. The Kennedy dynasty has its share of admirers and critics alike, and \u2014 to the film\u2019s credit \u2014 director John Curran and his screenwriters do not appease either camp. The result is a challenging character study, punctuated by moments of uneasy suspense and dark humor. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt is the summer of 1969, and Ted (Jason Clarke) is still reeling from the death of his brother Bobby a year earlier. In his late 30s, Ted is already a Massachusetts senator, and his friends believe he is positioned well for a presidential run. After a boat race, Ted and his friends have a party on Chappaquiddick, adjacent to Martha\u2019s Vineyard. Ted offers a ride to Mary Jo (Kate Mara), one of Bobby\u2019s former secretaries, and off they go. An accident seems inevitable since Ted is drunk, and, surely enough, his car veers into a pond. Ted escapes, while Mary Jo drowns. The film follows Ted as he tries to preempt the backlash, maintaining his sympathetic public persona.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClarke, an Australian, is no stranger to playing New England politicians: his first major role was in the Showtime drama \u201cBrotherhood,\u201d in which he played a Rhode Island state representative loosely based on William Bulger. As Ted, Clarke avoids caricature, portraying Sen. Kennedy as a man who loathes \u2014 yet takes advantage of \u2014 the heavy expectations that fall on his shoulders. While he experiences genuine grief over Mary Jo\u2019s death, that does not hinder his capacity for slick manipulation.The screenplay (by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan) strongly implies that Ted was still in a depressive state in 1969, and that his mind-set was focused more on family than politics. Bruce Dern plays Ted\u2019s father, Joe Kennedy \u2014 the family patriarch, enfeebled by a stroke \u2014 as a hateful man whose impaired speaking ability only intensifies his anger. His disappointment in his son helps make Ted more sympathetic: a wayward figure who wants to do good. But Curran never lets that sympathy last long. In the moments after the accident, while Ted is wandering the island, Curran cuts to footage of Mary Jo\u2019s death. Drowning has a particular sound to it, and we hear Mary Jo whispering in her last breaths. Curran\u2019s depiction of this moment is harrowing in its pitilessness.Curran films the accident from multiple viewpoints, tweaking it to accommodate Ted\u2019s distortions about what happened, but these rationalizations frustrate Ted\u2019s friends and advisers. As Ted\u2019s cousin and confidante Joe Gargan, Ed Helms dials back his comic persona to create a character who knows the depths of Ted\u2019s deception from the beginning. By the time Ted makes his famous apology on national television, Gargan cannot conceal his loathing. The film\u2019s dark suggestion is that Gargan was a necessary enabler. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the press descends on the island, and law enforcement unearths the nature of Ted\u2019s crime \u2014 Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a crash \u2014 frustration gives way to exasperation. Robert McNamara (Clancy Brown), in one wry scene, tries to work out how to spin the scandal, with Ted not helping matters. \u201cThe Bay of Pigs was handled better than this,\u201d McNamara deadpans. Other Kennedy stalwarts, including JFK\u2019s former speechwriter Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols), make appearances, and it is in their subtle disappointment that \u201cChappaquiddick\u201d finds a certain truth about public life: No one dares say what they are really thinking. This lax attention to the truth is what allows Ted, ultimately, to transition from a pariah into the Lion of the Senate, as he became known.Small details add to the film\u2019s sense of authenticity. When the police chief arrives at the crime scene, for example, the morning after the accident, he is still tucking his shirt into his pants. Yet the film doesn\u2019t dwell on Ted\u2019s drinking habits, treating them matter-of-factly, and Curran implies that his relationship with Mary Jo was strictly platonic. That does not mean that \u201cChappaquiddick\u201d lets Ted off the hook. On the contrary, the details of the crime and its coverup are even more damning than the incident\u2019s gossipy aspects would suggest. If Curran has strong feelings about Ted Kennedy, he conceals them well. \u201cChappaquiddick\u201d provides just enough detail to allow us to draw our own conclusions, yet no viewer will think of Ted in quite the same way. For a true-crime film about a well-documented incident, \u201cChappaquiddick\u2019s\u201d ability to preserve ambiguity is remarkable in itself.PG-13. At area theaters. Contains mature thematic material, disturbing images, some strong language and smoking. 101 minutes. This true-crime film looks at the 1969 incident that almost derailed Ted Kennedy\u2019s career \u2018Chappaquiddick\u2019 plays it fair, appeasing neither Kennedy-clan fans nor its critics",
        "author": "Alan Zilberman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Lucy in the Sky\u2019 is like a Lifetime movie about a NASA love triangle (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2214",
        "date": "2019-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/lucy-in-the-sky-is-like-a-lifetime-movie-about-a-nasa-love-triangle/2019/10/02/2aba2bea-e45d-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html",
        "text": "StarSolidStarOutlineStarOutlineStarOutline(1 star)\u201cLucy in the Sky\u201d starts with lofty ambitions \u2014 literally. NASA shuttle astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman) is seen floating high above Earth during an extravehicular spacewalk, looking down with awe upon the web of twinkling lights that demarcate our terrestrial existence. The sequence that opens the film \u2014 the feature debut of \u201cFargo\u201d and \u201cLegion\u201d showrunner Noah Hawley \u2014 is brief but effective shorthand for the existential crisis that Lucy is about to experience, transforming from ordinary mortal to someone who has \u201cseen the face of God,\u201d in the words of one of her colleagues who has also been to space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat colleague, Mark (Jon Hamm), soon begins a torrid affair with the very married Lucy upon her return to terra firma, where she now finds everything \u2014 including her nebbish but devoted husband (Dan Stevens) \u2014 disappointingly \u201csmall.\u201d The rush of dopamine and oxytocin she experiences becomes addictive, and arguably deranging, as Mark and Lucy\u2019s affair unravels, after the glibly caddish Mark turns his attentions to Lucy\u2019s chief work rival (Zazie Beetz), a younger rookie astronaut who happens to be vying to replace our protagonist on the next space mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd thus begins a garden-variety story of jealousy and mental decline, loosely based on the strange-but-true circumstances of astronaut Lisa Nowak, who in 2007 was charged with attempted murder and kidnapping after driving from Houston to Orlando to confront a romantic rival. The screenplay \u2014 written by Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi, and tweaked by Hawley \u2014 includes changes large and small to the source material, but the smartest decision was probably to cut all references to adult diapers, which Nowak was said to have worn during her road trip (and which she subsequently denied).If only the writers had made a few additional changes.In its ambitions, \u201cLucy in the Sky\u201d seems at first glance to be a female answer to \u201cAd Astra,\u201d but it steadily devolves into something worthy of the Lifetime channel: an expedition not to the cosmos in search of the meaning of man\u2019s existence but to the lurid corners of a run-of-the mill love triangle. If Nowak\u2019s true story seemed wild, her original narrative pales in comparison with the ride on the crazy train that \u201cLucy\u201d takes us on.\u2018Ad Astra\u2019 star Brad Pitt still has a lot of questions about spaceHawley, for his part, also seems to lose his grip on the material as the movie progresses, getting bogged down in distracting visual tics, including an excessive fondness for overhead shots and for changing the screen\u2019s aspect ratio more frequently than teenagers update their Bitmoji. Obvious metaphors abound, including a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis \u2014 a stand-in for Lucy\u2019s sudden sense of selfhood \u2014 and later a chrysalis being devoured by wasp, as that selfhood starts to fall apart.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it is the story itself that never achieves liftoff.\u201cLucy\u201d could have been a film about the pressures on female astronauts in a male-dominated field, but instead features a conversation in which Lucy\u2019s boss (Jeremiah Birkett) dismisses her as a victim of her \u201cemotions.\u201d Then there\u2019s that third act. All pretense of being something more than a soap opera is dropped as Lucy loses it, gathering a carload of kidnapping supplies that include bug spray, a blond wig and a pistol \u2014 as well as, in this telling, her bewildered teenage niece Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson) \u2014 and mumbling to herself like a caricature of delirium. Like Lucy herself, the movie finally, decisively goes off the rails.Even the lovely poem that closes the film, a rendition of Mary Oliver\u2019s \u201cThe Summer Day,\u201d recited by Dickson over a shot of Lucy tending bees \u2014 her post flip-out career? \u2014 isn\u2019t enough to elevate what is ultimately an entirely earthbound melodrama.R.\u2009At area theaters. Contains coarse language and some sexuality. 124 minutes. Natalie Portman plays an astronaut who loses her mind in this story based on true events. \u2018Lucy in the Sky\u2019 is like a Lifetime movie about a NASA love triangle",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stream These 11 Movies for the Apollo 11 Anniversary (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2215",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/movies/stream-apollo-11-movies.html",
        "text": "Fifty years ago, humans set foot on the moon. These documentaries and feature films try to put that and other real-life space missions into context. Fifty years ago, humans set foot on the moon. These documentaries and feature films try to put that and other real-life space missions into context. Portions of this were published previously in the March 3, 2019, article \u201cWant More After \u2018Apollo 11\u2019? Here Are 5 Space Documentaries to Stream.\u201d",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stream These 11 Movies for the Apollo 11 Anniversary (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2216",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/movies/stream-apollo-11-movies.html",
        "text": "Fifty years ago, humans set foot on the moon. These documentaries and feature films try to put that and other real-life space missions into context. Fifty years ago, humans set foot on the moon. These documentaries and feature films try to put that and other real-life space missions into context. Portions of this were published previously in the March 3, 2019, article \u201cWant More After \u2018Apollo 11\u2019? Here Are 5 Space Documentaries to Stream.\u201d",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stream These 11 Movies for the Apollo 11 Anniversary (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2217",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/movies/stream-apollo-11-movies.html",
        "text": "Fifty years ago, humans set foot on the moon. These documentaries and feature films try to put that and other real-life space missions into context. Fifty years ago, humans set foot on the moon. These documentaries and feature films try to put that and other real-life space missions into context. Portions of this were published previously in the March 3, 2019, article \u201cWant More After \u2018Apollo 11\u2019? Here Are 5 Space Documentaries to Stream.\u201d",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "6 Movies That Take Place in a Single Location (Mostly) (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2218",
        "date": "2020-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/movies/single-location-movies-7500.html",
        "text": "With the release of \u201c7500\u201d on Amazon Prime Video, here\u2019s a look at a handful of films that create dramatic tension in one space (or outer space). With the release of \u201c7500\u201d on Amazon Prime Video, here\u2019s a look at a handful of films that create dramatic tension in one space (or outer space). As we emerge from state-ordered quarantine, consider this: In movies, a locked-down set is often an artistic choice (or sometimes the result of a strapped budget). Some filmmakers find the challenges of these limitations to be a thrill in itself; for others, intimate spaces simply better serve the story.",
        "author": "By Chris Azzopardi"
    },
    {
        "title": "12 summer movies that just might get you off the couch and into the theater (WP: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2219",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/summer-movie-guide-2021/2021/06/02/ca175a92-be3f-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html",
        "text": "Movie theaters are back! Sort of.Despite the full reopening of most major chains, recent visits to a couple of Washington-area theaters, albeit on weekday evenings, found few customers, and what the New York Times called, in its report from the multiplex, an air of \u201czombie-mall weirdness.\u201d (Brains, we want brains.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis summer is the first step in changing that, as jurisdictions around the country relax pandemic restrictions, and studios begin to gently ramp up the blockbusters: action flicks, comedies, romances and animated family fare. But will any of these would-be crowd-pleasers be met with actual crowds?Ready to head back to the movies? Here\u2019s what you need to know.Part of the problem: There are still plenty of interesting movies going straight to streaming, for those who aren\u2019t ready to come back to theaters. Even some of the biggest theatrical offerings, from such studios as Disney and Warner Bros., will be made simultaneously available on demand (see below, where noted). But if theaters are going to lure people off the couch, these next few months will be the real test. Each of the 12 movies listed below \u2014 a dozen of the most anticipated titles hitting the big screen between now and Labor Day weekend \u2014 cries out to be seen on the big screen.\u2018A Quiet Place Part II\u2019 just might restore your faith in sequels \u2014 and humanityMaybe you\u2019ve forgotten what it\u2019s like to sit together in the dark, with other lovers of stories, spun in beams of flickering light and accompanied by the boom of Dolby surround sound? Maybe it\u2019s time to come back. Each of these movies hopes to give you a reason to.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOpening dates are subject to change.Based on the Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the story follows characters in the largely Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. (Warner Bros. Pictures)In the Heights(June 11, PG-13)Starring: Anthony Ramos, Melissa Barrera, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jimmy Smits.Four young New York City lovers and dreamers \u2014 an orphaned bodega owner (Ramos) and his crush (Barrera); a college student home from freshman year at Stanford (Grace) and her boyfriend (Hawkins) \u2014 anchor this adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegr\u00eda Hudes\u2019s stage musical, a Tony-winner eight years before \u201cHamilton.\u201d Set in the Big Apple\u2019s Washington Heights, and described by The Washington Post\u2019s Peter Marks as a \u201csalsa-stepping valentine\u201d to the Upper Manhattan neighborhood where Miranda grew up, the story offers eye and ear candy for theater geeks, with cameos by such Tony-nominated performers as Christopher Jackson (an alum of the original Broadway production) and Patrick Page of \u201cHadestown.\u201d But it\u2019s also about something: visibility and representation, the pursuit of the American Dream and the meaning of home. Also available on HBO Max.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo words: Song, dance.\u2018Hamilton\u2019 jumps from stage to Disney Plus: a leap that shows how brilliant this show really isIn the ninth chapter in the Fast & Furious Saga, a new threat forces Dom Toretto to confront the sins of his past to save those he loves most. (Universal Pictures)F9(June 25, PG-13)Starring: Vin Diesel, John Cena, Charlize Theron, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson.The car-centric \u201cFast & Furious\u201d franchise long ago cut its ties to the laws of the physical universe: gravity, the transfer of kinetic energy from one speeding object to another, logic. (Remember that scene with Dwayne Johnson in the last movie, in which his character diverts a torpedo with his bare hands while driving a speeding car that\u2019s racing a submarine \u2014 on ice?) The ninth chapter of the saga introduces a new nemesis, in the form of the long-lost, estranged brother of Diesel\u2019s Dominic Toretto. Played by Cena \u2014 a former wrestler who has followed in Johnson\u2019s footsteps from ring to screen \u2014 Jakob Toretto shows up in service of cyberterrorist Cipher (Theron, reprising her role from the 2017 film). There will be other familiar faces here too, including director Justin Lin, returning for his fifth stint behind the camera. Perhaps most surprisingly, actor Sung Kang, whose character, a fan favorite, died in the third film, is also back, according to the trailer. But perhaps no surprise will be bigger than this, hinted at in the trailer, which shows cars outfitted with powerful electromagnets: a car in space \u2014 or at least the outer reaches of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Apropos of that leap, Lin told Collider that nothing the series ever does is simply for shock value. \u201cIt always takes something from the theme or the character journey,\u201d he said (with an apparent straight face).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo words: Outer space.\u2018The Fate of the Furious\u2019: Silly, loud \u2014 and exactly what fans have come to expectScarlett Johansson plays a Russian spy named Natasha Romanoff in Marvel's \"Black Widow.\" (Marvel Studios)Black Widow(July 9, PG-13)Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz.Marvel fans will get one last look at Johansson\u2019s KGB-groomed Russian assassin-turned-superhero Natasha Romanoff, whose character met a dark fate in \u201cAvengers: Endgame.\u201d (The actress is not returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which stepped into Phase Four of its epic storytelling arc with the recent Disney Plus series \u201cWandaVision,\u201d and continues the journey with this film.) Taking place between the action of \u201cCaptain America: Civil War\u201d and \u201cAvengers: Infinity War,\u201d \u201cWidow\u201d finds its title character returning to her Russian roots with a visit to her sisterly sometime-rival, Yelena Belova (Pugh), and Weisz\u2019s mother figure. The big question: How much will this movie be about unearthing Natasha\u2019s complicated past, and how much about laying the groundwork for the future, as represented by the next chapter in the ever-evolving MCU? Also available on Disney Plus with Premier Access.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo words: Goodbye, Natasha.From \u2018Avengers: Infinity War\u2019 to \u2018Iron Man\u2019: All 19 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies rankedIn \"Space Jam: A New Legacy,\" NBA star LeBron James attempts to lead the Looney Tunes to victory in a basketball game against a rogue A.I. (Warner Bros. Pictures)Space Jam: A New Legacy(July 17, not yet rated)Starring: LeBron James, Cedric Joe, Zendaya, Don Cheadle.The strenuously mediocre original \u201cSpace Jam,\u201d a 1996 mix of live action and animation pairing athlete Michael Jordan with Looney Tunes characters and pitting them against basketball-playing aliens, was a spinoff of an ad for the Nike Air Jordan VII sneaker that aired during the 1992 Super Bowl. Somehow, that movie became a cult hit. The sequel stars basketball player James, playing a version of himself in a very similar story: When his son (Joe) is trapped in something called the Server-verse \u2014 a digital library of sorts featuring such intellectual property from the vaults of Warner Bros. as King Kong, the Flintstones and the Iron Giant \u2014 an evil overlord (Cheadle) tells James the only way he can save him is by playing (you guessed it) a basketball game. It\u2019s safe to say that the outcome of this game won\u2019t be much in doubt. But you can bet there\u2019ll be plenty of cameos by some familiar faces.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo words: WB IP.Twenty years later, \u2018Space Jam\u2019 is the movie we never knew we neededFilmmaker M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie follows a family on a tropical holiday who discover that a secluded beach is causing them to age rapidly. (Universal Pictures)Old(July 23, not yet rated)Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff, Eliza Scanlen, Thomasin McKenzie, Ken Leung.Shot by M. Night Shyamalan last fall during the pandemic, the thriller takes its premise from Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters\u2019s 2010 graphic novel \u201cSandcastle\u201d: Visitors to a secluded beach mysteriously begin to experience accelerated aging \u2014 and even pregnancy and death. Despite being shot on 35mm film \u2014 Shyamalan\u2019s first use of the old-school medium since his disastrous \u201cThe Last Airbender\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s a scaled-back production: just a handful of actors on a single set in the Dominican Republic. It\u2019s also the Pennsylvania-bred filmmaker\u2019s first film set completely outside Philadelphia since his debut. \u201cSandcastle\u201d left things open-ended. But lines from the film\u2019s creepy trailers, the first of which debuted during this year\u2019s Super Bowl \u2014 \u201cWe were chosen for a reason,\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re connected to something bigger\u201d \u2014 and a mysterious coded message hint that the writer-director may have a narrative ace or two up his sleeve.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo words: Twist ending?M. Night Shyamalan loves a good movie twist. Here\u2019s how \u2018The Visit\u2019 stacks up.The classic Disneyland theme park ride comes to life starring Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson. (Walt Disney)Jungle Cruise(July 30, PG-13)Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Jesse Plemons, Jack Whitehall.In the spirit of the \u201cPirates of the Caribbean\u201d franchise (Disney\u2019s other theme park ride-turned-film juggernaut), \u201cJungle Cruise\u201d is also loosely based on an amusement park attraction featuring a wisecracking skipper and scares. Here, an Amazon boat captain (Johnson) and a scientific researcher (Blunt) go off looking for a legendary tree, said to possess amazing healing powers. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (\u201cRun All Night\u201d) is known for action, so look out for plenty of that, courtesy of Plemons\u2019s submarine-pilot villain. You can also expect an added, \u201cPirates\u201d-like element of the supernatural. That was definitely not part of the film\u2019s source material, which only featured the occasional animatronic hippo or two.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo words: Theme park.Disney, hit hard by the pandemic, signals its belief that bright days are imminentIn \"Stillwater,\" an American oil-rig worker travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. (Focus Features)Stillwater(July 30, R)Starring: Matt Damon, Abigail Breslin, Camille Cottin.Damon plays an Oklahoma oil-rig roughneck who goes to Marseilles to exonerate his college-age daughter (Breslin) after she is accused of murdering the young woman she\u2019s been involved with \u2014 a plot that sounds a little like the real-life story of Amanda Knox. (Knox, an American studying abroad, was charged with the 2007 murder of her roommate in Italy.) The \u201cStillwater\u201d production was shut more than once because of the pandemic, but director Tom McCarthy, best known for \u201cSpotlight,\u201d told Entertainment Weekly that he believes the setbacks have only made the thriller a better, more fully \u201cbaked\u201d story. McCarthy, who won a screenwriting Oscar for \u201cSpotlight,\u201d isn\u2019t the only one with Academy street cred: Damon, a nominee several times over for acting, has a statuette for the \u201cGood Will Hunting\u201d screenplay, and Breslin was an Oscar nominee for \u201cLittle Miss Sunshine.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo words: Oscar pedigree.\u2018Spotlight\u2019 joins \u2018All the President\u2019s Men\u2019 in the pantheon of great journalism moviesThe Suicide Squad(Aug. 6, R)Starring: Flula Borg, Peter Capaldi, John Cena, Jai Courtney, David Dastmalchian, Pete Davidson, Viola Davis, Idris Elba, Nathan Fillion, Sean Gunn, Joel Kinnaman, Daniela Melchior, Mayling Ng, Margot Robbie, Michael Rooker, Sylvester Stallone.No, you\u2019re not crazy. There was another film with a virtually identical setup, several of the same characters and actors, and nearly the same title in 2016: David Ayer\u2019s terrible, joyless \u201cSuicide Squad.\u201d The new film, which has been described as less of a sequel than a soft reboot, boasts more than a definite article. It also features an almost unmanageably large main cast of 15 protagonists, including several reruns: Robbie as Harley Quinn, Kinnaman as Rick Flag and Courtney as Boomerang. Davis also reprises her role as the government operative who offers a ragtag bunch of convicts \u2014 dubbed Task Force X, a.k.a. the Suicide Squad \u2014 reduced sentences if they complete a secret mission. The team includes a walking, talking shark (voiced by Stallone) and a motion-capture weasel-man (Gunn). But it\u2019s Gunn\u2019s brother, director and co-writer James Gunn, who may be the secret weapon here. Known for directing \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy\u201d and its excellent sequel, he might just bring the right mix of eye-popping action and self-deprecating humor to a tale that took itself way too seriously the first time around. Also available on HBO Max.Two words: Second chances.James Gunn will write the new \u2018Suicide Squad\u2019 movie. Will he be the difference-maker WB/DC needs?Ryan Reynolds discovers he is a character in a brutal, open word video game. (20th Century Studios)Free Guy(Aug. 13, not yet rated)Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jodie Comer, Lil Rel Howrey, Taika Waititi.As the titular Guy (a.k.a. blue shirt guy), Reynolds is the live-action equivalent of the Non-Player Character meme, a background video game extra who is the metaphorical embodiment of the lack of free will: He exists only as narrative filler. In \u201cFree Guy,\u201d Reynolds takes center stage as a bank teller in an online game who paradoxically develops autonomy only after he realizes \u2014 shades of \u201cThe Matrix\u201d \u2014 that he has no autonomy. Directed by Shawn Levy (\u201cDate Night\u201d) and written by Zak Penn, a veteran of many a Marvel movie, \u201cFree Guy\u201d isn\u2019t just an action film about saving the virtual universe when its developer (Waititi) tries to shut the game down \u2014 though it is that. It\u2019s a romance too: one between Guy and Milly, a real-world player of the very game Guy is stuck inside. (Comer plays both Milly and her virtual avatar.)Two words: Virtual Everyman.Welcome back to the A-list, Ryan ReynoldsJennifer Hudson stars in \"Respect,\" which follows the story of Aretha Franklin's career to international superstardom. (MGM Pictures)Respect(Aug. 13, PG-13)Starring: Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Audra McDonald, Marlon Wayans.Aretha Franklin has already gotten the biopic treatment once this year: in the National Geographic Channel miniseries \u201cGenius: Aretha,\u201d starring Cynthia Erivo. But despite critical praise for Erivo\u2019s performance, the series met with controversy when some of Franklin\u2019s relatives complained that filmmakers had not sought their input. The film debut of Tony-nominated stage director Liesl Tommy (\u201cEclipsed\u201d) \u2014 the first woman of color to be nominated for directing \u2014 \u201cRespect\u201d stars Hudson, who brings to the project not only a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 that includes a 2007 Oscar for \u201cDreamgirls,\u201d but something a lot more significant. After seeing Hudson in that film, Franklin herself is said to have invited the actress to play her. According to Hudson, the Queen of Soul told Hudson \u201cI\u2019ve made my decision, and it\u2019s you, young lady, who I want to play me. But don\u2019t you tell a soul now.\u201d Well, word is out.Two words: Aretha\u2019s blessing.It\u2019s no dream, girl. Jennifer Hudson nibbled fame on \u2018American Idol.\u2019 A new film role promises a meatier slice to savor.In a follow-up to the 1992 horror film, a visual artist and his girlfriend learn the horrific nature of the true story behind a supernatural killer. (Universal Pictures)Candyman(Aug. 27, R)Starring: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Colman Domingo, Tony Todd.A follow-up to the 1992 horror film of the same name about a descendant of a enslaved person with a hook for a hand (Todd), the new \u201cCandyman\u201d has been described as less of a literal sequel than a spiritual one. It also boasts a screenplay co-written by Jordan Peele, whose r\u00e9sum\u00e9 (\u201cGet Out\u201d) would suggest that there will be more to chew on here than the empty calories of the typical slasher flick. Set in Chicago, as in the original, the story centers on a visual artist (Abdul-Mateen II) and his girlfriend (Parris of \u201cIf Beale Street Could Talk\u201d) and concerns themes of gentrification and forgotten histories. A sneak peek at some of the puppetry that will be featured \u2014 about a Black artist whose work features portraits of Black victims of White killers \u2014 can be seen in a haunting and beautiful trailer made by the film\u2019s director, Nia DaCosta, in collaboration with the performance collective Manual Cinema. If it\u2019s any indication of the finished film .\u2009.\u2009. wow.Two words: That trailer!Jordan Peele made a woke horror filmA new entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe focuses on Shang-Chi, a warrior who has been raised to take on a heroic destiny. (Walt Disney Pictures)Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings(Sept. 3, not yet rated)Starring: Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Tony Leung.A martial arts movie about an obscure terrorist organization called the Ten Rings would seem like an unlikely choice to connect the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Phases One through Three to the future of the franchise. But unless you\u2019re an obsessive fan, you probably simply missed all the subtle references to the Ten Rings in the previous movies. After all, they were the group that held Tony Stark hostage in the very first \u201cIron Man\u201d movie, remember? And in 2015\u2019s \u201cAnt-Man,\u201d one potential buyer of Pym Technologies\u2019 Yellowjacket suit sported a Ten Rings neck tattoo. (Oh, yeah.) The new film centers on the titular Shang-Chi (Simu Liu of the Canadian sitcom \u201cKim\u2019s Convenience\u201d), a warrior who has been raised to take on a heroic destiny. But by whom, and for what purpose? There are hints that Shang-Chi\u2019s might be somehow connected to the character of the Mandarin in Marvel lore; not the fake one played by Ben Kingsley in \u201cIron Man 3\u201d but the one inspired by Marvel\u2019s version of the villain Fu Manchu, now seen as a racist stereotype. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (\u201cShort Term 12\u201d), \u201cShang-Chi\u201d could be a way to boldly step into the future of the MCU while offering a corrective to the comics\u2019 sometimes offensive portrayals of Asian characters in the past.Two words: Phase Four.Shang-Chi\u2019s return to Marvel Comics makes him the center of his own story\n\n A guide to the season\u2019s movies, made for the big screen. 12 summer movies that just might get you off the couch and into the theater",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want More After \u2018Apollo 11\u2019? Here Are 5 Space Documentaries to Stream (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2220",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/movies/space-documentaries-stream-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s new documentary, \u201cApollo 11,\u201d is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space. Here are more films to explore. Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s new documentary, \u201cApollo 11,\u201d is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space. Here are more films to explore. The documentary \u201cApollo 11\u201d \u2014 playing in select IMAX theaters now, before opening more widely in regular cinemas on Friday \u2014 is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space exploration. The director Todd Douglas Miller and a team of archivists and editors found rare footage of the original manned lunar landing mission, and compiled it into a film that\u2019s an immersive and inspiring record of the voyage, from launch to splashdown.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want More After \u2018Apollo 11\u2019? Here Are 5 Space Documentaries to Stream (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2221",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/movies/space-documentaries-stream-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s new documentary, \u201cApollo 11,\u201d is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space. Here are more films to explore. Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s new documentary, \u201cApollo 11,\u201d is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space. Here are more films to explore. The documentary \u201cApollo 11\u201d \u2014 playing in select IMAX theaters now, before opening more widely in regular cinemas on Friday \u2014 is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space exploration. The director Todd Douglas Miller and a team of archivists and editors found rare footage of the original manned lunar landing mission, and compiled it into a film that\u2019s an immersive and inspiring record of the voyage, from launch to splashdown.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want More After \u2018Apollo 11\u2019? Here Are 5 Space Documentaries to Stream (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2222",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/movies/space-documentaries-stream-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s new documentary, \u201cApollo 11,\u201d is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space. Here are more films to explore. Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s new documentary, \u201cApollo 11,\u201d is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space. Here are more films to explore. The documentary \u201cApollo 11\u201d \u2014 playing in select IMAX theaters now, before opening more widely in regular cinemas on Friday \u2014 is one of the most rousing movies ever made about NASA and space exploration. The director Todd Douglas Miller and a team of archivists and editors found rare footage of the original manned lunar landing mission, and compiled it into a film that\u2019s an immersive and inspiring record of the voyage, from launch to splashdown.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Film Industry Finally Joins the Space Race (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2223",
        "date": "2019-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/movies/wandering-earth-china.html",
        "text": "Science-fiction movies have been slow to catch on in China, but led by \u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d a wave of new blockbusters might change that. Science-fiction movies have been slow to catch on in China, but led by \u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d a wave of new blockbusters might change that. BEIJING \u2014 China was a latecomer to space exploration, and in the movies, it has been a latecomer to science fiction, too. That is about to change.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Film Industry Finally Joins the Space Race (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2224",
        "date": "2019-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/movies/wandering-earth-china.html",
        "text": "Science-fiction movies have been slow to catch on in China, but led by \u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d a wave of new blockbusters might change that. Science-fiction movies have been slow to catch on in China, but led by \u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d a wave of new blockbusters might change that. BEIJING \u2014 China was a latecomer to space exploration, and in the movies, it has been a latecomer to science fiction, too. That is about to change.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Film Industry Finally Joins the Space Race (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2225",
        "date": "2019-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/movies/wandering-earth-china.html",
        "text": "Science-fiction movies have been slow to catch on in China, but led by \u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d a wave of new blockbusters might change that. Science-fiction movies have been slow to catch on in China, but led by \u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d a wave of new blockbusters might change that. BEIJING \u2014 China was a latecomer to space exploration, and in the movies, it has been a latecomer to science fiction, too. That is about to change.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Black Hammer, an Indie Comic, Gets a Major Film and TV Deal (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2226",
        "date": "2018-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/movies/black-hammer-comic-book.html",
        "text": "Legendary Entertainment, home of \u201cBatman Begins,\u201d has optioned the series about unconventional heroes stranded in a farm community. Legendary Entertainment, home of \u201cBatman Begins,\u201d has optioned the series about unconventional heroes stranded in a farm community. A foul-mouthed 9-year-old with a taste for booze and cigarettes. An alien shape changer struggling with his sexuality. An addled space explorer out of sync with time. These are some of the colorful characters of the comic book series Black Hammer, and they are now potential stars of film and television in a deal announced Tuesday.",
        "author": "By George Gene Gustines"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018High Life\u2019 Review: Robert Pattinson Is Lost in Space (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2227",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/movies/high-life-review.html",
        "text": "The director Claire Denis fills her science-fiction fantasy with drift, fluids and beautiful people, including Juliette Binoche and Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. The director Claire Denis fills her science-fiction fantasy with drift, fluids and beautiful people, including Juliette Binoche and Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. Every so often in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d the latest from the French director Claire Denis, there\u2019s a shot of outer space. A cosmic whatsit, the story largely takes place in a black-velvet void with pinpricks of light. Earth is far away, long ago, a memory. Not all that much happens in this immensity, though sometimes a colorful gassy emanation floods the screen and something \u2014 a wrench, a body \u2014 floats into the great nothing. Inside a spaceship, by contrast, there\u2019s plenty of action: bodily fluids, spasms of violence, the rising and setting of Robert Pattinson\u2019s head.",
        "author": "By Manohla Dargis"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018High Life\u2019 Review: Robert Pattinson Is Lost in Space (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2228",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/movies/high-life-review.html",
        "text": "The director Claire Denis fills her science-fiction fantasy with drift, fluids and beautiful people, including Juliette Binoche and Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. The director Claire Denis fills her science-fiction fantasy with drift, fluids and beautiful people, including Juliette Binoche and Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. Every so often in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d the latest from the French director Claire Denis, there\u2019s a shot of outer space. A cosmic whatsit, the story largely takes place in a black-velvet void with pinpricks of light. Earth is far away, long ago, a memory. Not all that much happens in this immensity, though sometimes a colorful gassy emanation floods the screen and something \u2014 a wrench, a body \u2014 floats into the great nothing. Inside a spaceship, by contrast, there\u2019s plenty of action: bodily fluids, spasms of violence, the rising and setting of Robert Pattinson\u2019s head.",
        "author": "By Manohla Dargis"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018High Life\u2019 Review: Robert Pattinson Is Lost in Space (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2229",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/movies/high-life-review.html",
        "text": "The director Claire Denis fills her science-fiction fantasy with drift, fluids and beautiful people, including Juliette Binoche and Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. The director Claire Denis fills her science-fiction fantasy with drift, fluids and beautiful people, including Juliette Binoche and Andr\u00e9 Benjamin. Every so often in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d the latest from the French director Claire Denis, there\u2019s a shot of outer space. A cosmic whatsit, the story largely takes place in a black-velvet void with pinpricks of light. Earth is far away, long ago, a memory. Not all that much happens in this immensity, though sometimes a colorful gassy emanation floods the screen and something \u2014 a wrench, a body \u2014 floats into the great nothing. Inside a spaceship, by contrast, there\u2019s plenty of action: bodily fluids, spasms of violence, the rising and setting of Robert Pattinson\u2019s head.",
        "author": "By Manohla Dargis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018The Space Between Us,\u2019 the Story of a Boy Who Fell to Earth (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2230",
        "date": "2017-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/movies/review-the-space-between-us-the-story-of-a-boy-who-fell-to-earth.html",
        "text": "Peter Chelsom\u2019s movie concerns a young human (Asa Butterfield), raised in isolation on Mars, who visits Earth and a video-chat pal (Britt Robertson). Peter Chelsom\u2019s movie concerns a young human (Asa Butterfield), raised in isolation on Mars, who visits Earth and a video-chat pal (Britt Robertson). With the disappearance of video stores, there is something heartening about the existence of \u201cThe Space Between Us,\u201d a cheesy hunk of science fiction from Peter Chelsom that once would have drawn curious young eyes to VHS shelves. Set in the near future, it plays like a transmission from 1986, when a boy and a spaceship\u2019s robot pilot could raise hell in \u201cFlight of the Navigator,\u201d and Steven Spielberg set the blockbuster template to emulate.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018The Space Between Us,\u2019 the Story of a Boy Who Fell to Earth (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2231",
        "date": "2017-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/movies/review-the-space-between-us-the-story-of-a-boy-who-fell-to-earth.html",
        "text": "Peter Chelsom\u2019s movie concerns a young human (Asa Butterfield), raised in isolation on Mars, who visits Earth and a video-chat pal (Britt Robertson). Peter Chelsom\u2019s movie concerns a young human (Asa Butterfield), raised in isolation on Mars, who visits Earth and a video-chat pal (Britt Robertson). With the disappearance of video stores, there is something heartening about the existence of \u201cThe Space Between Us,\u201d a cheesy hunk of science fiction from Peter Chelsom that once would have drawn curious young eyes to VHS shelves. Set in the near future, it plays like a transmission from 1986, when a boy and a spaceship\u2019s robot pilot could raise hell in \u201cFlight of the Navigator,\u201d and Steven Spielberg set the blockbuster template to emulate.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "How \u2018Alien\u2019 Spawned So Many Others (NYT: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2232",
        "date": "2017-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/movies/alien-covenant-influences.html",
        "text": "The 1979 sci-fi horror film has left its mark on many films, from a \u201cFriday the 13th\u201d sequel to the newest \u201cAlien\u201d prequel. The 1979 sci-fi horror film has left its mark on many films, from a \u201cFriday the 13th\u201d sequel to the newest \u201cAlien\u201d prequel. It has been 38 years since a terrifying alien burst from the chest of John Hurt in one of cinema\u2019s most unforgettable scenes. And ever since, that creature \u2014 from the 1979 sci-fi scarefest \u201cAlien,\u201d about crew members of a spacecraft and the voracious organism they bring aboard \u2014 has continued to make its mark on the big screen. It\u2019s now back in its old chomping grounds in \u201cAlien: Covenant\u201d (May 19), a prequel to the original.",
        "author": "By Mekado Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "How \u2018Alien\u2019 Spawned So Many Others (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2233",
        "date": "2017-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/movies/alien-covenant-influences.html",
        "text": "The 1979 sci-fi horror film has left its mark on many films, from a \u201cFriday the 13th\u201d sequel to the newest \u201cAlien\u201d prequel. The 1979 sci-fi horror film has left its mark on many films, from a \u201cFriday the 13th\u201d sequel to the newest \u201cAlien\u201d prequel. It has been 38 years since a terrifying alien burst from the chest of John Hurt in one of cinema\u2019s most unforgettable scenes. And ever since, that creature \u2014 from the 1979 sci-fi scarefest \u201cAlien,\u201d about crew members of a spacecraft and the voracious organism they bring aboard \u2014 has continued to make its mark on the big screen. It\u2019s now back in its old chomping grounds in \u201cAlien: Covenant\u201d (May 19), a prequel to the original.",
        "author": "By Mekado Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Movies Primed Us for Black Holes. Here are 6 to Watch. (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2234",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/movies/black-hole-movies-streaming.html",
        "text": "The unveiling of the first ever image of a black hole tapped into a longstanding fascination. Where did that come from? In part, from movies like these. The unveiling of the first ever image of a black hole tapped into a longstanding fascination. Where did that come from? In part, from movies like these. Wednesday\u2019s unveiling of the first image of a black hole \u2014 found in the Messier 87 galaxy, roughly 55 million light-years away \u2014 has captured the imagination of scientists and amateur astronomers around the world. But of all the intriguing and humbling phenomena to be found in outer space, why are black holes such a particular fascination?",
        "author": "By Jason Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Movies Primed Us for Black Holes. Here are 6 to Watch. (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2235",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/movies/black-hole-movies-streaming.html",
        "text": "The unveiling of the first ever image of a black hole tapped into a longstanding fascination. Where did that come from? In part, from movies like these. The unveiling of the first ever image of a black hole tapped into a longstanding fascination. Where did that come from? In part, from movies like these. Wednesday\u2019s unveiling of the first image of a black hole \u2014 found in the Messier 87 galaxy, roughly 55 million light-years away \u2014 has captured the imagination of scientists and amateur astronomers around the world. But of all the intriguing and humbling phenomena to be found in outer space, why are black holes such a particular fascination?",
        "author": "By Jason Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Movies Primed Us for Black Holes. Here are 6 to Watch. (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2236",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/movies/black-hole-movies-streaming.html",
        "text": "The unveiling of the first ever image of a black hole tapped into a longstanding fascination. Where did that come from? In part, from movies like these. The unveiling of the first ever image of a black hole tapped into a longstanding fascination. Where did that come from? In part, from movies like these. Wednesday\u2019s unveiling of the first image of a black hole \u2014 found in the Messier 87 galaxy, roughly 55 million light-years away \u2014 has captured the imagination of scientists and amateur astronomers around the world. But of all the intriguing and humbling phenomena to be found in outer space, why are black holes such a particular fascination?",
        "author": "By Jason Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "In \u201980s Comedies, Boys Had It Made. Girls Were the Joke. (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2237",
        "date": "2018-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/movies/brett-kavanaugh-80s-teen-comedies.html",
        "text": "Teen movies like \u201cPorky\u2019s\u201d reveled in the dynamic of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford\u2019s worst memory: \u201cThe uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.\u201d Teen movies like \u201cPorky\u2019s\u201d reveled in the dynamic of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford\u2019s worst memory: \u201cThe uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.\u201d The top movie of 1982, by a wide margin, was \u201cE.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,\u201d Steven Spielberg\u2019s fantasy about a group of boys who try to get an alien back to outer space. Below it, at No. 5, was \u201cPorky\u2019s,\u201d about a group of boys who try to have a lot of sex. It coasted on the pre-J.F.K.-assassination nostalgia that made huge hits of \u201cAmerican Graffiti,\u201d a decade earlier, and \u201cAnimal House,\u201d five years after that. But \u201cPorky\u2019s\u201d wasn\u2019t innocent, or for that matter, nostalgic. All that the boys long for is girls \u2014 to talk to, sure, but mostly to peep at, ogle and harass.",
        "author": "By Wesley Morris"
    },
    {
        "title": "Reality? No, Thanks. Moviegoers Sought Escape in 2016. (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2238",
        "date": "2017-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/arts/reality-no-thanks-moviegoers-sought-escape-in-2016.html",
        "text": "Not one movie rooted in real life was among the year\u2019s top 10 box office performers. The top ticket sellers were \u201cFinding Dory\u201d and \u201cRogue One.\u201d Not one movie rooted in real life was among the year\u2019s top 10 box office performers. The top ticket sellers were \u201cFinding Dory\u201d and \u201cRogue One.\u201d LOS ANGELES \u2014 The moviegoing masses sent clear messages in 2016. They are most definitely not tired of superheroes. The more animated animals, the merrier. Fantasy worlds of any kind, whether underwater or in outer space, are worth the trip to theaters.",
        "author": "By Brooks Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Lucy in the Sky\u2019 Review: Bad Romance, Astronaut Edition (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2239",
        "date": "2019-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/movies/lucy-in-the-sky-review.html",
        "text": "A story that captured the public imagination (it\u2019s the one with the diapers) makes for a messy movie. A story that captured the public imagination (it\u2019s the one with the diapers) makes for a messy movie. It\u2019s hard to know why anyone thought \u201cLucy in the Sky,\u201d a drama about an astronaut\u2019s fall, would make a good movie. Was it the appeal of outer space, with its beauties, mysteries and infinite possibilities? Or was it the faintly exotic if rather basic romance that blows up so many lives? Was it the diapers?",
        "author": "By Manohla Dargis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018The Most Unknown\u2019 Tackles Science\u2019s Big Questions (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2240",
        "date": "2018-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/movies/the-most-unknown-review-documentary.html",
        "text": "The documentary interviews nine scientists in fields including astronomy and neuroscience, and asks them to reflect on their work. The documentary interviews nine scientists in fields including astronomy and neuroscience, and asks them to reflect on their work. You walk out of \u201cThe Most Unknown\u201d knowing a little more than you did, and with the sense there\u2019s so much more you don\u2019t. It\u2019s a mystifying feeling, and a good reason to see this documentary that extols the wonders of science and of all that\u2019s yet to discover.",
        "author": "By Ken Jaworowski"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Proxima\u2019 Review: Separation Anxiety (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2241",
        "date": "2020-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/movies/proxima-review.html",
        "text": "Eva Green plays an astronaut and single mother in this disappointingly earthbound drama. Eva Green plays an astronaut and single mother in this disappointingly earthbound drama. Approaching space travel with eyes and spirit firmly tethered to the ground, Alice Winocour\u2019s \u201cProxima\u201d takes a sadly unadventurous look at the impending separation of a female astronaut and her child.",
        "author": "By Jeannette Catsoulis"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo 11\u2019 Review: The 1969 Moon Mission Still Has the Power to Thrill (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2242",
        "date": "2019-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/movies/apollo-11-review.html",
        "text": "A new documentary uses previously unseen archival footage to show how astronauts first walked on the moon. It\u2019s awe-inspiring. A new documentary uses previously unseen archival footage to show how astronauts first walked on the moon. It\u2019s awe-inspiring. The documentary \u201cApollo 11,\u201d directed and edited by Todd Douglas Miller, is entirely awe-inspiring. Which is something of a surprise. As world events of the 20th century go, Apollo 11, the NASA mission of 1969 that put two men on the moon, has been thoroughly documented. It\u2019s also been fictionally dissected, most recently by Damien Chazelle, whose 2018 film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d is a portrait of Neil Armstrong, the mission\u2019s commander and, yes, the first man to walk on the moon. In addition to chronicling that triumph, that film examines Armstrong\u2019s emotional reticence.",
        "author": "By Glenn Kenny"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo 11\u2019 Review: The 1969 Moon Mission Still Has the Power to Thrill (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2243",
        "date": "2019-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/movies/apollo-11-review.html",
        "text": "A new documentary uses previously unseen archival footage to show how astronauts first walked on the moon. It\u2019s awe-inspiring. A new documentary uses previously unseen archival footage to show how astronauts first walked on the moon. It\u2019s awe-inspiring. The documentary \u201cApollo 11,\u201d directed and edited by Todd Douglas Miller, is entirely awe-inspiring. Which is something of a surprise. As world events of the 20th century go, Apollo 11, the NASA mission of 1969 that put two men on the moon, has been thoroughly documented. It\u2019s also been fictionally dissected, most recently by Damien Chazelle, whose 2018 film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d is a portrait of Neil Armstrong, the mission\u2019s commander and, yes, the first man to walk on the moon. In addition to chronicling that triumph, that film examines Armstrong\u2019s emotional reticence.",
        "author": "By Glenn Kenny"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ad Astra\u2019 Review: Brad Pitt Orbits the Powers of Darkness (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2244",
        "date": "2019-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/movies/ad-astra-review-brad-pitt.html",
        "text": "The latest from the director James Gray centers on an astronaut whose mission into deep space becomes a voyage of self-discovery. The latest from the director James Gray centers on an astronaut whose mission into deep space becomes a voyage of self-discovery. In \u201cAd Astra,\u201d an adventure tale weighed down by the burdens of masculinity, Brad Pitt plays an astronaut in flight. The film is a lovely, sincere and sometimes dopey confessional about fathers and sons, love and loss that takes the shape of a far out if deeply inward trip. As in many expeditions, the journey doesn\u2019t simply progress; it stutters and freezes and periodically backslides. Yet each step \u2014 the story begins on Earth and soon rockets to the dark side of the moon \u2014 is a reminder that in order to get found, you need to get lost.",
        "author": "By Manohla Dargis"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ad Astra\u2019 Review: Brad Pitt Orbits the Powers of Darkness (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2245",
        "date": "2019-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/movies/ad-astra-review-brad-pitt.html",
        "text": "The latest from the director James Gray centers on an astronaut whose mission into deep space becomes a voyage of self-discovery. The latest from the director James Gray centers on an astronaut whose mission into deep space becomes a voyage of self-discovery. In \u201cAd Astra,\u201d an adventure tale weighed down by the burdens of masculinity, Brad Pitt plays an astronaut in flight. The film is a lovely, sincere and sometimes dopey confessional about fathers and sons, love and loss that takes the shape of a far out if deeply inward trip. As in many expeditions, the journey doesn\u2019t simply progress; it stutters and freezes and periodically backslides. Yet each step \u2014 the story begins on Earth and soon rockets to the dark side of the moon \u2014 is a reminder that in order to get found, you need to get lost.",
        "author": "By Manohla Dargis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Natalie Portman Shoots for the Stars and Loses Her Mind (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2246",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/movies/natalie-portman-lucy-in-the-sky.html",
        "text": "The actor finally fulfills a childhood dream, sort of, by climbing into a spacesuit to play a tormented astronaut in \u201cLucy in the Sky.\u201d And soon she\u2019ll wield the hammer as female Thor. The actor finally fulfills a childhood dream, sort of, by climbing into a spacesuit to play a tormented astronaut in \u201cLucy in the Sky.\u201d And soon she\u2019ll wield the hammer as female Thor. As a kid with a precocious mind for science \u2014 she made it to the Intel competition semifinals in high school, after all \u2014 Natalie Portman dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But acting eventually grounded her among less celestial stars.",
        "author": "By Kathryn Shattuck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Natalie Portman Shoots for the Stars and Loses Her Mind (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2247",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/movies/natalie-portman-lucy-in-the-sky.html",
        "text": "The actor finally fulfills a childhood dream, sort of, by climbing into a spacesuit to play a tormented astronaut in \u201cLucy in the Sky.\u201d And soon she\u2019ll wield the hammer as female Thor. The actor finally fulfills a childhood dream, sort of, by climbing into a spacesuit to play a tormented astronaut in \u201cLucy in the Sky.\u201d And soon she\u2019ll wield the hammer as female Thor. As a kid with a precocious mind for science \u2014 she made it to the Intel competition semifinals in high school, after all \u2014 Natalie Portman dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But acting eventually grounded her among less celestial stars.",
        "author": "By Kathryn Shattuck"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Real Right Stuff\u2019 Review: A Movie Still Waiting for Liftoff (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2248",
        "date": "2020-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/movies/the-real-right-stuff-review.html",
        "text": "This Disney+ space race documentary is a bland chronology of successful launches and minor mishaps. This Disney+ space race documentary is a bland chronology of successful launches and minor mishaps. Project Mercury\u2019s mission to blast the first American astronauts into space was fastidiously undramatic. NASA\u2019s founding administrator T. Keith Glennan \u2014 still introducing the agency by its initials like a proper debutante \u2014 aimed to send his seven pilots up and down in a metal pillbox that even a chimp couldn\u2019t crash. From engineering to public relations, there was no room for human malfunction. It took two decades for the journalist Tom Wolfe\u2019s \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d to reveal the frizzed wires underneath the capsule\u2019s smooth exterior: the ego clashes, the stress and depression, and the wives who took tranquilizers so they could serve cheery can-do-isms to Life Magazine.",
        "author": "By Amy Nicholson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018First Man\u2019 Takes a Giant Leap for Man, a Smaller Step for Movies (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2249",
        "date": "2018-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/movies/first-man-review-ryan-gosling-damien-chazelle.html",
        "text": "Damien Chazelle\u2019s sweeping and intimate yet underwhelming film revisits the first lunar landing, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong. Damien Chazelle\u2019s sweeping and intimate yet underwhelming film revisits the first lunar landing, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong. In July of 1969, as the world\u2019s attention was fixed on the spectacle of the first lunar landing, news broadcasts would sometimes flash back to a speech given by President John F. Kennedy earlier in the decade. In effect writing the check that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would cash a half-dozen years after his death, Kennedy vowed to send astronauts to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.",
        "author": "By A.O. Scott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018First Man\u2019 Takes a Giant Leap for Man, a Smaller Step for Movies (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2250",
        "date": "2018-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/movies/first-man-review-ryan-gosling-damien-chazelle.html",
        "text": "Damien Chazelle\u2019s sweeping and intimate yet underwhelming film revisits the first lunar landing, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong. Damien Chazelle\u2019s sweeping and intimate yet underwhelming film revisits the first lunar landing, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong. In July of 1969, as the world\u2019s attention was fixed on the spectacle of the first lunar landing, news broadcasts would sometimes flash back to a speech given by President John F. Kennedy earlier in the decade. In effect writing the check that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would cash a half-dozen years after his death, Kennedy vowed to send astronauts to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.",
        "author": "By A.O. Scott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Remembering Apollo 11: What to Watch and Listen To (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2251",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/movies/apollo-11-podcasts-movies-tv.html",
        "text": "As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approaches, these movies, television shows and podcasts help shine a light on the story. As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approaches, these movies, television shows and podcasts help shine a light on the story. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Mekado Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Remembering Apollo 11: What to Watch and Listen To (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2252",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/movies/apollo-11-podcasts-movies-tv.html",
        "text": "As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approaches, these movies, television shows and podcasts help shine a light on the story. As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approaches, these movies, television shows and podcasts help shine a light on the story. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Mekado Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Subscription Boxes Run Amok (WSJ: Moving Targets) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2253",
        "date": "2017-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/subscription-boxes-that-really-surprise-1510759530?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=22",
        "text": "There\u2019s a scent-of-the-month club, a java-of-the-month club and try-and-buy boxes of clothes, which a subscriber can test before returning the discards. Many boxes run no more than $10 a month. \nRecently, though, up-and-coming subscription retailers have topped these somewhat generic offerings with more imaginative boxes. So with holiday gift-giving fast approaching, I delved deep into the internet to find exciting new subscriptions that you, frankly, would probably have missed: \nWeird Candies from Scandinavia Subscription Box. This lineup includes everything from Finnish Fish to sugar-free Swedish Mj\u00f6lk Duds to Denmark\u2019s mouthwatering Mr. GodtBar. A related Nordic treat\u2014Iceland\u2019s tasty knockoff Almundsson Joyonsson\u2014is a must.\n\n\nAntihistamine of the Month Club. Let\u2019s face it: We all want a change in antihistamines once in a while. Allegra\u2019s great, sure, but sometimes you crave a Claritin. Same deal with Zyrtek and Benadryl. That\u2019s without mentioning generic imports like Franco-fexofenadine, prized for its buzz. Coming soon: Unguent of the Month. \nIronic Hat of the Month Club. One month it might be the timeless porkpie hat popularized by 1940s jazz musicians and repurposed by urban hipsters, the next month, the rustic, oversize Basque beret. Or the classic, compact Che Guevara model. The iconic green Chairman Mao cap with the little red star now screams cool, and pith helmets are no slouches. Some hats come with pages of witty, knowing remarks to drop while wearing them.\nConspiracy Theory of the Month Book Club. You start in January with a wild tale about how JFK was probably bumped off by the Ethiopian Mafia. In February it\u2019s the latest doorstop volume linking climate change with the Knights Templar and the Clinton Foundation. Then right around your birthday comes the jaw-dropping new book proving that Queen Elizabeth I was abducted at age 12, drowned in a vat of mead and replaced by a boy. \nMarsupial of the Month Club. Just what it sounds like. One month it\u2019s a possum, next a wombat. Not sure you want a koala as a pet? Try it out for a month. Two months. Return shipping is free. \nTap Water From Different Cities Subscription Box. You\u2019ve probably heard that what\u2019s in Brooklyn\u2019s faucets tastes a lot better than Jersey City\u2019s. Find out for yourself. Indulge in mystical, aromatic tap water from Sedona. And after that Austin, Texas, delivery, you\u2019ll never look at a water bottle again.\nI also enjoyed, among many others, the offerings from Cape of the Month Clubs and a service that ships vintage Soyuz-spacecraft TV dinners. But they pale in popularity next to the Old School Catch-Phrase Subscription Box. People in rural areas plagued with mediocre internet service often have no access to America\u2019s most cutting-edge banalities and have to make do with \u201cIt takes one to know one\u201d and \u201cAw, shucks.\u201d They don\u2019t get things like \u201cIt is what it is\u201d until it\u2019s 20 years too late. \nThe Old School Catch-Phrase subscription ships a top-shelf throwback clich\u00e9 the first Monday of every month. \u201cWord up.\u201d \u201cTake a chill pill.\u201d \u201cTalk to the hand.\u201d\nCan you dig it?\n\n\nMore in Moving Targets\n\n\n\n\nSome Jobs Are Just Made for the Great Resignation\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nMedieval Knights and Their Little War Ponies\nFebruary 10, 2022 \n\n\nGruy\u00e8re Made in the U.S.? This Could Get Ugly. \nFebruary 3, 2022 \n\n\nHyenas, It\u2019s Time to Make Yourselves Useful\nJanuary 20, 2022 \n\n\nWelcome to the Best of All Possible Metaverses\nJanuary 6, 2022 With subscription services growing more popular, Joe Queenan ponders what\u2019s next: The Marsupial of the Month Club? ",
        "author": "Joe Queenan"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Those UFOs Are Really Up To (WSJ: Moving Targets) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2254",
        "date": "2017-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-those-ufos-are-really-up-to-1513870558?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=21",
        "text": "Many Americans no doubt think the money to study UFOs could have gone to something far more useful, like a few extra coal mines in West Virginia or a generous tax rebate to cash-strapped luxury box owners at Madison Square Garden. I disagree. Washington has to fritter away my hard-earned money on something, so why not UFOs?\nWhat bothers me is that the money is being spent trying to find out how the aliens are getting here, not why they\u2019ve come. Since UFO sightings go all the way back to ancient times, we know that space aliens have been here for a long time. So what have they been up to for the past few decades?\nPeople naturally assume that extraterrestrials come from societies that are way smarter than ours. But if this is true, why do UFOs always turn up in some corner of Nevada or New Mexico? How come you never hear about aliens landing in brainy, sophisticated places like Paris or Tokyo or Brooklyn?\n\n\nThe answer is obvious. Extraterrestrials come from planets plagued by structural unemployment, where there are not enough jobs to go around. So they climb into anomalous aircraft, get dropped off in a remote wilderness on Earth and make their way to booming metropolises where they get low-profile jobs as software designers, pension-fund managers, chiropractors or aldermen.\nThey salt away some clams for a few years and then repatriate their savings back to their own societies. In other words, the weird UFOs we hear about out are not dropping off extraterrestrials. They\u2019re picking them up and bringing them home. Think of UFOs as Space Uber.\n\n\nMore in Moving Targets\n\n\n\n\nSome Jobs Are Just Made for the Great Resignation\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nMedieval Knights and Their Little War Ponies\nFebruary 10, 2022 \n\n\nGruy\u00e8re Made in the U.S.? This Could Get Ugly. \nFebruary 3, 2022 \n\n\nHyenas, It\u2019s Time to Make Yourselves Useful\nJanuary 20, 2022 \n\n\nWelcome to the Best of All Possible Metaverses\nJanuary 6, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nA more sinister possibility is that UFOs are loaded with agents provocateurs sent here to sow the seeds of discord in our society. In this scenario, anomalous aircraft deposit crooked politicians and conscienceless lobbyists from deep space in places like Baton Rouge, La., and Providence, R.I., with orders to mess up the regional economy. The U.S. Tax Code has Martian sabotage written all over it. Nor can pernicious extraterrestrial involvement in the U.S. Postal Service be ruled out.\nThe logic of their grand scheme runs something like this: The longer the U.S. continues to suffer yawning deficits, the less likely it is that NASA will ever have the funding to send manned spacecraft into outer space and unearth the third-rate, cash-strapped societies the aliens call home. The whole reason that extraterrestrials fly around in anomalous aircraft is that they don\u2019t want to be discovered. If inhabitants of planet Earth ever followed the UFOs home and found out what jerkwater dumps are lurking in outer space, the poor aliens wouldn\u2019t have a chance when they went toe to toe with us. \nThis means that the government should stop looking for space invaders in New Mexico and Nevada and start looking for them in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. There\u2019s just no way this economy got as screwed up as it is without some form of extraterrestrial intervention. No way. A previously undisclosed government program to look for alien spacecraft has the wrong idea, says Joe Queenan: The aliens are here, obviously. But why? ",
        "author": "Joe Queenan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Movies in Space: \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThe Final Frontier? (WSJ: Moving Targets) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2255",
        "date": "2021-09-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-movies-in-space-the-final-frontier-11632427444?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=4",
        "text": "A collaboration between the space agency Roscosmos, public broadcaster Channel One and a major Russian studio, the film will tell the story of a doctor who must save the life of a dying cosmonaut. (Cosmonauts on the station will play bit parts.) If the 12-day shoot goes well, Russia will win its first space race in decades: NASA, Mr. Musk and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Cruise\n\n\n\n have been planning an American action movie to film on the space station. That project hasn\u2019t yet gotten off the ground. \nPurists may scoff at the notion of Russians doing anything innovative in the world of cinema. But since movies took the world by storm a century ago, Russians have made a number of excellent films. Eight, by last count. Now, by shooting a mass-market film in space, they are throwing the gauntlet down for daring filmmakers from other countries to do the same. \nSurely we can all look forward to a French film\u2014call it \u201cEtoiles, Elise, Ennui\u201d\u2014in which a bunch of dying cosmonauts sit around a table smoking cigarettes, drinking Pernod and discussing the meaning of life. And from India, a Bollywood musical about a super-fabulous marriage celebration held on Saturn\u2014\u201cThe Wedding Planet.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cHow about \u2018Dentist Zhivago,\u2019 in which an oral surgeon travels to Mars to repair the damaged teeth of the lost love of his life.\u201d\n\n\n\nWhat few people know is that \u201cThe Challenge\u201d was not the original title for the Russian film. Other names under serious consideration were \u201cDr. Nyet,\u201d \u201cFrom Russia with Lift,\u201d and \u201cClimb and Punishment.\u201d What\u2019s more, it wasn\u2019t the only screenplay in contention. Apparently, no fewer than two dozen were passed over and can be revealed here. They include:\n\n\n\u201cDentist Zhivago\u201d: An oral surgeon learns that the love of his life, a dental technician he has not seen in 30 years, is living in a retirement home on Mars and desperately needs an implant. He travels across the solar system to replace the ruined tooth. He also repairs two cracked crowns. The two live happily ever after, at least until they find out that the insurance company will not cover the cost of the procedure because it is out of network.\n\u201cAnd Quiet Flees the Don\u201d: A mob chieftain is offered a slot in the witness protection plan if he rats out his henchmen. The FBI finds him the best hiding place ever, disguised as a taciturn Sicilian astronaut aboard a Russian space station thousands of miles from North Jersey. An alternate title: \u201cWar and Pizza.\u201d\n\n\nMore \u2018Moving Targets\u2019\n\n\n\n\nSome Jobs Are Just Made for the Great Resignation\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nMedieval Knights and Their Little War Ponies\nFebruary 10, 2022 \n\n\nGruy\u00e8re Made in the U.S.? This Could Get Ugly. \nFebruary 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cLenin and McCartney in Deep Space\u201d: A buddy film featuring a Russian cop and his Irish sidekick, who travel to the space station to solve a series of bizarre murders involving poisoned borscht. The Irishman cracks the case after discovering that Russian borscht, as opposed to the Ukranian version, does not contain potatoes. So the guy from Kyiv did it. \n\u201cThe Cherry Orbit.\u201d After the Soviet-era dilithium crystals on their spaceship fail, three long-feuding sisters are trapped in the heavens for all eternity, moaning and groaning about how they\u2019re never going to get to Moscow at this rate. Alternate titles: \u201cThe Flying Kareninas\u201d and \u201cThe Three Steppe Sisters.\u201d \n\u201cV Is for Vodka\u201d: Freedom fighters seeking to topple corrupt authoritarian governments persuade every Russian cosmonaut to wear a Guy Fawkes mask in space. The cosmonauts agree, and the corrupt authoritarian governments see the error of their ways and promise to do better. Then everybody goes out and gets royally drunk. \nThere was also talk about a comedy lionizing a bunch of over-the-hill cosmonauts who refuse to go quietly. But it too closely resembled \u201cSpace Cowboys,\u201d the 2000 Clint Eastwood-Tommy Lee Jones vehicle, so \u201cThe Song of the Volga Spacemen\u201d never attained liftoff. Moscow plans to win the cinematic space race, even outgunning Tom Cruise. ",
        "author": "Joe Queenan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Washington celebrates Alma Thomas, the late D.C. painter who sought beauty in the everyday (WP: Museums) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2256",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/museums/alma-thomas-everything-is-beautiful/2021/09/20/48899f6a-189b-11ec-b976-f4a43b740aeb_story.html",
        "text": "Artist Alma Thomas\u2019s distinctive style began with a passing glance through a window. In 1964, while preparing for an exhibition, the Washington painter and educator \u2014 who is now the subject of a months-long, citywide celebration, coinciding with what would have been her 130th birthday \u2014 gazed out from her living room bay window and saw the holly tree in her backyard, as if for the first time. It was a revelation. Rich with color, pressing up against the glass, the tree became an object of artistic devotion, and the window became the source of the light and patterns that pushed her work toward its signature vivid, exuberant look. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSoon her attention turned to imagined windows: Thomas depicted floral fields as she imagined they might look from an airplane rushing through the sky. She painted Earth, seen from a spacecraft.For Thomas \u2014 who died in 1978 but lived long enough to go from what she called \u201chorse and buggy times\u201d to the 1969 moon landing \u2014 the rush of modernity demanded expression. In her work, the same jovial brushstrokes that send flowers stirring into song in the National Gallery of Art\u2019s \u201cRed Rose Cantata\u201d capture the blur of fire from a space shuttle taking off in \u201cLaunch Pad,\u201d a work in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum (and on view at the Kennedy Center\u2019s Reach). Look at any of Thomas\u2019s works, and her awe at the universe \u2014 at any scale \u2014 unites them. An energetic harmony seems to pulse from the light at her fingertips out to the light of the stars. Her medium is motion.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese days, modernity has lost its thrill. Airplanes and cars pollute. Private rocket ships are launched by billionaires. Even the natural world seen from our windows comes coupled with the poignant awareness of climate change. We tend to think about our own era\u2019s technological advancements not on aesthetic but on moral grounds: New technology either saves or destroys (more typically the latter). Seeking beauty in everything, as Thomas did, can feel outmoded. Optimism is not exactly in vogue.But maybe it could be.Former first lady Michelle Obama \u2014 who added an Alma Thomas work to the White House collection in 2015 (the first work by a Black female artist) \u2014 will open the National Gallery\u2019s symposium on Thomas virtually, on the artist\u2019s birthday, Sept. 22. The following weekend, the Gallery will host an in-person community celebration of Thomas, complete with a presentation of her work \u201cRed Rose Cantata, coloring activities, a floral display modeled after her painting \u201cPansies in Washington\u201d \u2014 even Alma Thomas-inspired gelato. A selection of Thomas\u2019s space-related works are on view at the Reach, and you can also find a few on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The celebrations include talks, workshops and other programs, all leading up to a major retrospective of her work, \u201cEverything is Beautiful,\u201d opening at the Phillips on October 30.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementObituary: Alma Thomas, 86, diesThe exhibition aims to explore Thomas\u2019s long-held influence, beyond the commonly told tale of an artist who skyrocketed to success late in life. Sure, her most significant achievements \u2014 including 1972 solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art \u2014 came in her eighth and ninth decades, but that didn\u2019t mean she spent her first seven outside the art world entirely. Thomas moved to D.C. with her family in 1907, fleeing racial violence in her native Georgia. She became the first fine arts graduate at Howard University in 1924, and by the 1940s, Thomas had become a regular on the D.C. art scene. In 1943, she helped found the Barnett-Aden Gallery one of the first Black-owned galleries in the city \u2014 and one of just two that operated without segregation. She spent 35 years as an art teacher at the District\u2019s Shaw Junior High School, before devoting all of her time to painting in retirement.Thomas\u2019s work has long been associated with the Washington Color School and, more generally, abstract expressionism, embracing the color psychology of the former and the action-packed canvases of the latter. Yet, she does so to different ends: She paints not the nothingness of abstraction, but nature.Washingtonians can see D.C. afresh through her eyes: as a place with pops of colors, bursts of motion and energy. Thomas looked to the city\u2019s cherry blossoms and Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens for material. In the catalogue for the Phillips exhibition, her circular compositions are likened to D.C.\u2019s many traffic circles: \u201cSpringtime in Washington\u201d evokes flowers in a roundabout, whizzed past in a car. For decades, her home at 1530 15th St. NW \u2014 between Logan and Dupont circles \u2014 was a well of inspiration. Today you can\u2019t miss the house \u2014 across the street, the pavement has been painted to emulate her style.For Thomas, the dissemination of her artistic vision in all forms \u2014 from frozen treats at the NGA to face masks at the Phillips Collection to an asphalt mural \u2014 feels uniquely fitting. Thomas lived her art. She showed up to gallery openings in clothing custom-made to match her work (her mother was a dress designer). Her creative practice extended to puppets, ceramic, metal sculpture and plantings. And she immersed herself in her own work, hanging her paintings in her bedroom so that she could look at them when she woke up in the middle of the night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStanding in front of her work, you can see why. Looking at \u201cThe Eclipse,\u201d on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, it\u2019s hard to believe it wouldn\u2019t literally illuminate a dark room. The dabs of rainbow colors add up to concentric swirls of color, swelling into a chorus of undulating lines. At first, looking at the off-center abstraction, it\u2019s as if you\u2019re seeing an eclipse from a free fall. But the yellow light seems to emanate from the canvas, to reach for you, to catch you.And that\u2019s what Thomas wanted. \u201cI\u2019ve never bothered painting the ugly things in life,\u201d she said. \u201cNo. I wanted something beautiful that you could sit down and look at.\u201dCorrection: \nAn earlier version of this article misstated the year the Barnett-Aden Gallery was founded. The article has been corrected.\u00a0A closer look at Robert Duncanson, the Black landscape artist behind the inaugural painting presented to the BidensDriver\u2019s nightmare or urban oasis? Discover D.C.\u2019s traffic circles \u2014 from the bustling to the bucolic.At the Smithsonian, a photographic portrait of East Baltimore, decades before the dawn of the selfie era\n\nAlma Thomas: Everything Is BeautifulVarious locations. Complete information is available at phillipscollection.org/alma-w-thomas-everything-beautiful.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDates: Through January. The National Gallery of Art\u2019s Wilmerding Community Celebration of Alma Thomas takes place Sept. 24-26 in the museum\u2019s East Building, from 1 to 5 p.m. \u201cEverything Is Beautiful\u201d opens at the Phillips Collection on Oct. 30 and runs through Jan. 23Prices: Many events are free, including the NGA\u2019s community celebration. Admission to the Phillips Collection show is included in museum admission: $16; $12 for seniors: $10 for students and teachers; free for members and ages 18 and younger. A months-long, citywide celebration of Thomas\u2019s art includes a major retrospective, a symposium and more. Washington celebrates Alma Thomas, the late D.C. painter who sought beauty in the everyday",
        "author": "Kelsey Ables"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | In the galleries: Many shades of gray are only the beginning (WP: Museums) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2257",
        "date": "2018-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-the-galleries-many-shades-of-gray-are-only-the-beginning/2018/03/23/19fd6172-2b96-11e8-b0b0-f706877db618_story.html",
        "text": "How far can a pencil line travel? And how much depth can it convey? In recent years, Hsin-Hsi Chen has extrapolated her small black-and-white drawings into three-dimensional forms, sometimes cloaked in darkness or lighted from within. Now, the Taiwan-bred, Maryland-educated artist\u2019s impressive \u201cLiminal\u201d can rightly claim VisArts\u2019 largest gallery. The means remain austere, but the variety they produce is rich and surprising. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cLiminal\u201d is a contemporary-art buzzword that refers to things that are barely perceptible or in transition. The show is a low-light experience, in which 3-D pieces both cast and exist in shadows. The gloom suits the artworks, which are mostly in white and shades of gray, and adds drama to \u201cSpaceship Project,\u201d a video projection that explicitly turns Chen\u2019s complex polygons into spacecraft and asteroids. Rather than tell a story, the video is interactive; its elements move in response to the people near it.Chen has previously supplemented her folded-paper constructions with wood. She added gesso, foam and spray paint to make the wall-mounted sculptures in three new series: the protruding \u201cMeta,\u201d the cavernous \u201cThreshold\u201d and the seemingly topographic \u201cHedrons.\u201d They remain a link to pencil drawing, since they\u2019re cloaked in shiny, lushly layered graphite and charcoal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe largest works, the two \u201cLiminals,\u201d abandon the wall to perch on the floor or colonize a corner. With triangles as their building blocks, these sculptures grow from the same basic architecture as Chen\u2019s simplest works. Yet they curve and sag, as if they\u2019ve grown from elementary lines on paper into something protoplasmic and even self-generated.Hsin-Hsi Chen: Liminal Through April 1 at Kaplan Gallery, VisArts at Rockville, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. 301-315-8200. visartscenter.org.Anne C. Smith & Jeff HensleyCoincidentally, IA&A at Hillyer is showing two artists who also work with geometry, graphite, shadow and near-monochromatic palettes. Anne C. Smith\u2019s \u201cTo Bend/To Fold\u201d consists mostly of black-on-black drawings, and Jeff Hensley\u2019s \u201cIndexical/Aura\u201d uses 3-D constructions to yield transient shapes on the white walls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat Smith\u2019s drawings are architectural, in a way, is demonstrated by the one 3-D piece: a wood-and-Plexiglas structure that reaches eight feet into the air before looping back to the floor. Its shape echoes some of those in the pictures, although the drawn contours are hard to apprehend, because the D.C. artist sketches with pencil atop rectangles of black charcoal.Because of their color scheme, the drawings register as minimal, yet some are much busier than others. Careful inspection reveals that not all of the gestures are in black; there\u2019s red, for example, in \u201cPeel.\u201d In earlier works, Smith reduced her childhood home to a ghostly outline. Her pencil lines still evoke buildings, but their link to the physical world has become even more elusive.Hensley, too, layers black atop black, but the Maryland artist\u2019s show also features wall-mounted blocks and bars, some with burnished-graphite surfaces and others gilded. The 3-D pieces are arranged to \u201cdraw\u201d shadows or cast golden reflections. These are \u201cauras,\u201d a winking reference to Walter Benjamin\u2019s influential 1935 essay, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBenjamin, who didn\u2019t live to encounter digital scanners, laser printers and the Internet, posited that original artworks possess an aura that copies can\u2019t duplicate. Hensley\u2019s auras, however, are temporary. They can be dispelled simply by turning off (or up) the overhead lights. Like the straight pencil lines the artist has traced on the walls, the golden glows are intriguing but hardly eternal.Anne C. Smith: To Bend/To Fold and Jeff Hensley: Indexical/Aura Through April 1 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Ct. NW. 202-338-0325. athillyer.org.Making Our MarkSpotlighting seven local artists, BlackRock\u2019s \u201cMaking Our Mark\u201d would have significant range even if the participants had restricted themselves to prints. Those predominate, but there also are drawings, paintings, sculptures and pieces that dangle \u2014 literally \u2014 between media. Among Pauline Jakobsberg\u2019s entries are monotypes of clothing that playfully hang on actual wire hangers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of Jakobsberg\u2019s subtle prints involve fabric, clothing and textures. Lee Newman offers an abundance of cows in small-scale prints, drawings and paintings \u2014 including some in casein, which is milk protein. Much of Terry Svat\u2019s work is about home, family and ancestry; it includes elegant collographs and 3-D pieces that feature suspended houses and people glimpsed through windows.Max-Karl Winkler\u2019s woodcuts portray female nudes in strong, simple lines and compositions that can be lightheartedly erotic. The artist also is showing landscapes in various formats, including a pair of views of the same rock outcropping, one pastel and the other woodblock. Ellen Verdon Winkler displays a gentler touch, notably in the exquisite suite of little heads titled simply \u201cFour.\u201dEqually delicate are the multi-technique prints of Jenny Freestone, who often depicts nature and metamorphosis. In series such as \u201cVessel\u201d and \u201cAqua,\u201d starkly lovely renderings of eggs and nests suggest both precariousness and resilience. Margaret Adams Parker\u2019s etchings and woodcuts address similar themes in a bolder style, and with human subjects. Pictures such as \u201cElder, Angola\u201d are executed in a classic style, yet with contemporary verve.Making Our Mark Through April 7 at BlackRock Center for the Arts, 12901 Town Commons Dr., Germantown. 301-528-2260. blackrockcenter.org/gallery.Beverly RyanMultimedia artist Beverly Ryan is based in Alexandria, far from any countries where military drones are routinely deployed. Yet she has been pondering the flying machines that engage in surveillance and sometimes execution. To represent the devices\u2019 potential ubiquity, she has filled the Art League Gallery with dozens of drones in various configurations. There\u2019s even a stuffed soft-sculpture one that hovers above the others \u2014 a huggable eye in the sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMore ominous are the steel drones, available in small, medium and large, and oil paintings in which the metal birds buzz around such vulnerable figures as babies and naked women. Some pieces incorporate text, and a few include glitter. The most memorable is a charcoal drawing, \u201cDrone Silhouette,\u201d whose dark, elegant simplicity offers a vivid contrast to Ryan\u2019s high-tech nemesis.Beverly Ryan: Drone Zone On view through March 31 at the Art League Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. 703-683-1780. theartleague.org. Hsin-Hsi Chen\u2019s austere pencil drawings soar into three dimensions at VisArts at Rockville. In the galleries: Many shades of gray are only the beginning",
        "author": "Mark Jenkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | In the galleries: Many shades of gray are only the beginning (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2258",
        "date": "2018-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-the-galleries-many-shades-of-gray-are-only-the-beginning/2018/03/23/19fd6172-2b96-11e8-b0b0-f706877db618_story.html",
        "text": "How far can a pencil line travel? And how much depth can it convey? In recent years, Hsin-Hsi Chen has extrapolated her small black-and-white drawings into three-dimensional forms, sometimes cloaked in darkness or lighted from within. Now, the Taiwan-bred, Maryland-educated artist\u2019s impressive \u201cLiminal\u201d can rightly claim VisArts\u2019 largest gallery. The means remain austere, but the variety they produce is rich and surprising. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cLiminal\u201d is a contemporary-art buzzword that refers to things that are barely perceptible or in transition. The show is a low-light experience, in which 3-D pieces both cast and exist in shadows. The gloom suits the artworks, which are mostly in white and shades of gray, and adds drama to \u201cSpaceship Project,\u201d a video projection that explicitly turns Chen\u2019s complex polygons into spacecraft and asteroids. Rather than tell a story, the video is interactive; its elements move in response to the people near it.Chen has previously supplemented her folded-paper constructions with wood. She added gesso, foam and spray paint to make the wall-mounted sculptures in three new series: the protruding \u201cMeta,\u201d the cavernous \u201cThreshold\u201d and the seemingly topographic \u201cHedrons.\u201d They remain a link to pencil drawing, since they\u2019re cloaked in shiny, lushly layered graphite and charcoal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe largest works, the two \u201cLiminals,\u201d abandon the wall to perch on the floor or colonize a corner. With triangles as their building blocks, these sculptures grow from the same basic architecture as Chen\u2019s simplest works. Yet they curve and sag, as if they\u2019ve grown from elementary lines on paper into something protoplasmic and even self-generated.Hsin-Hsi Chen: Liminal Through April 1 at Kaplan Gallery, VisArts at Rockville, 155 Gibbs St., Rockville. 301-315-8200. visartscenter.org.Anne C. Smith & Jeff HensleyCoincidentally, IA&A at Hillyer is showing two artists who also work with geometry, graphite, shadow and near-monochromatic palettes. Anne C. Smith\u2019s \u201cTo Bend/To Fold\u201d consists mostly of black-on-black drawings, and Jeff Hensley\u2019s \u201cIndexical/Aura\u201d uses 3-D constructions to yield transient shapes on the white walls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat Smith\u2019s drawings are architectural, in a way, is demonstrated by the one 3-D piece: a wood-and-Plexiglas structure that reaches eight feet into the air before looping back to the floor. Its shape echoes some of those in the pictures, although the drawn contours are hard to apprehend, because the D.C. artist sketches with pencil atop rectangles of black charcoal.Because of their color scheme, the drawings register as minimal, yet some are much busier than others. Careful inspection reveals that not all of the gestures are in black; there\u2019s red, for example, in \u201cPeel.\u201d In earlier works, Smith reduced her childhood home to a ghostly outline. Her pencil lines still evoke buildings, but their link to the physical world has become even more elusive.Hensley, too, layers black atop black, but the Maryland artist\u2019s show also features wall-mounted blocks and bars, some with burnished-graphite surfaces and others gilded. The 3-D pieces are arranged to \u201cdraw\u201d shadows or cast golden reflections. These are \u201cauras,\u201d a winking reference to Walter Benjamin\u2019s influential 1935 essay, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBenjamin, who didn\u2019t live to encounter digital scanners, laser printers and the Internet, posited that original artworks possess an aura that copies can\u2019t duplicate. Hensley\u2019s auras, however, are temporary. They can be dispelled simply by turning off (or up) the overhead lights. Like the straight pencil lines the artist has traced on the walls, the golden glows are intriguing but hardly eternal.Anne C. Smith: To Bend/To Fold and Jeff Hensley: Indexical/Aura Through April 1 at IA&A at Hillyer, 9 Hillyer Ct. NW. 202-338-0325. athillyer.org.Making Our MarkSpotlighting seven local artists, BlackRock\u2019s \u201cMaking Our Mark\u201d would have significant range even if the participants had restricted themselves to prints. Those predominate, but there also are drawings, paintings, sculptures and pieces that dangle \u2014 literally \u2014 between media. Among Pauline Jakobsberg\u2019s entries are monotypes of clothing that playfully hang on actual wire hangers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of Jakobsberg\u2019s subtle prints involve fabric, clothing and textures. Lee Newman offers an abundance of cows in small-scale prints, drawings and paintings \u2014 including some in casein, which is milk protein. Much of Terry Svat\u2019s work is about home, family and ancestry; it includes elegant collographs and 3-D pieces that feature suspended houses and people glimpsed through windows.Max-Karl Winkler\u2019s woodcuts portray female nudes in strong, simple lines and compositions that can be lightheartedly erotic. The artist also is showing landscapes in various formats, including a pair of views of the same rock outcropping, one pastel and the other woodblock. Ellen Verdon Winkler displays a gentler touch, notably in the exquisite suite of little heads titled simply \u201cFour.\u201dEqually delicate are the multi-technique prints of Jenny Freestone, who often depicts nature and metamorphosis. In series such as \u201cVessel\u201d and \u201cAqua,\u201d starkly lovely renderings of eggs and nests suggest both precariousness and resilience. Margaret Adams Parker\u2019s etchings and woodcuts address similar themes in a bolder style, and with human subjects. Pictures such as \u201cElder, Angola\u201d are executed in a classic style, yet with contemporary verve.Making Our Mark Through April 7 at BlackRock Center for the Arts, 12901 Town Commons Dr., Germantown. 301-528-2260. blackrockcenter.org/gallery.Beverly RyanMultimedia artist Beverly Ryan is based in Alexandria, far from any countries where military drones are routinely deployed. Yet she has been pondering the flying machines that engage in surveillance and sometimes execution. To represent the devices\u2019 potential ubiquity, she has filled the Art League Gallery with dozens of drones in various configurations. There\u2019s even a stuffed soft-sculpture one that hovers above the others \u2014 a huggable eye in the sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMore ominous are the steel drones, available in small, medium and large, and oil paintings in which the metal birds buzz around such vulnerable figures as babies and naked women. Some pieces incorporate text, and a few include glitter. The most memorable is a charcoal drawing, \u201cDrone Silhouette,\u201d whose dark, elegant simplicity offers a vivid contrast to Ryan\u2019s high-tech nemesis.Beverly Ryan: Drone Zone On view through March 31 at the Art League Gallery, Torpedo Factory, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. 703-683-1780. theartleague.org. Hsin-Hsi Chen\u2019s austere pencil drawings soar into three dimensions at VisArts at Rockville. In the galleries: Many shades of gray are only the beginning",
        "author": "Mark Jenkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | In the galleries: A revelatory exhibition by D.C. artist Jonathan Monaghan (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2259",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-the-galleries-a-revelatory-exhibition-by-dc-artist-jonathan-monaghan/2019/07/26/fc636fd6-acad-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html",
        "text": "After viewing \u201cA Trace Left by the Future,\u201d Jonathan Monaghan\u2019s show at VisArts, people may start calling the artist \u201cSt. Jon.\u201d The centerpiece of this show of video, prints and sculpture is \u201cOut of the Abyss,\u201d a 19-minute digital-animation loop that is Monaghan\u2019s own Book of Revelation.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe D.C. artist, who made this work as a VisArts studio fellow, crafts cleanly rendered but conceptually intricate videos. Drawing on the iconography of advertising and marketing, the videos combine the pursuit of luxury goods with more traditionally heroic quests from movies and video games. Monaghan\u2019s fantastical videos once were studded with actual corporate logos, but there are few of those in \u201cAbyss,\u201d whose inhabitants include a robot knight on horseback, a spaceship with dragon\u2019s head and wings, and a mechanical cow with video cameras on its head and a yoga mat strapped to its back. The organic-technological hybrids travel through a scenario that depicts worlds within worlds, with continual shifts in scale, location and perspective.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough Monaghan has included few brand names, he does appropriate several logos, ingeniously changing their text while retaining their design. A home-goods store\u2019s emblem is changed to read \u201cAlpha & Omega,\u201d and the familiar curved arrow of an Internet-shopping behemoth underscores the word \u201cPatmos.\u201d Fans of extravagant visions needn\u2019t be reminded that Patmos is the island where, according to tradition, a certain John wrote a book known as \u201cRevelation.\u201d Monaghan has hitched his spaceship to one of the world\u2019s most influential prophecies.The show also includes inkjet prints and 3-D-printed sculptures of mash-ups of animals, consumer products and historic architecture. Small, mollusk-like creatures made of nylon, with 18-karat gold details, sit next to massive renderings of sleek, candy-colored \u201cSentries,\u201d which suggest futuristic redesigns of the guardian statues that overlook the entrances to Japanese temples. The resemblance is probably unintended, but it seems appropriate in a show that marks Monaghan\u2019s attempt to fly a shopping mall into the rapture.Jonathan Monaghan: A Trace Left by the Future Through Aug. 11 at Gibbs Street Gallery, VisArts, 155\u00a0Gibbs St., Rockville.Tae Eun AhnAll Tae Eun Ahn does in \u201cOpen Site,\u201d her show at the Korean Cultural Center, is walk, jump and lie down. But she performs these simple acts in a world of her own making.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA sculptor, photographer, ",
        "author": "Mark Jenkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Planet Word, a new museum devoted to language, is a high-tech, feel-good experience (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2260",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/planet-word-museum-washington-dc/2020/10/20/86889c2e-0fcf-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html",
        "text": "The Franklin School in downtown Washington has been empty for more than a decade, except for a brief period in 2011 when the Occupy Movement used it as a homeless shelter. One of the most significant historic structures in the city, and one of the most beautiful, the school was neglected and severely dilapidated. Preservationists have considered the brick building endangered since at least the 1970s, when the D.C. school board planned to tear it down. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Thursday, the historical 1869 landmarked school will reopen, entirely refurbished and partly restored to its original condition, and once again serving something close to its original educational purpose. Planet Word, a museum devoted to language, is the new occupant, and it will pay the city $10 a year on a 99-year lease. The purpose of the $60\u00a0million museum, according to its gallery map, is to \u201cinspire and renew a love of words, language, and reading in people of all ages.\u201dWhat you need to know about visiting Planet WordCreated by Ann Friedman of Bethesda, Md., a real estate heiress and teacher who is married to New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman, Planet Word opens amid a pandemic that has decimated tourism in Washington. And it arrives less than a year after the closing of the Newseum, another immersive-experience venue that often struggled to define its scope, purpose and mission. Planet Word is a modestly scaled museum devoted to a huge subject: the way we learn, use and manipulate the words and grammar that define us.Born of high hopes, the Newseum closes in the age of fake newsFor humans, a museum of language may seem a bit like a museum of water for fish. There is nothing of our ordinary lives (except perhaps music, art and spiritual matters) that isn\u2019t defined, exchanged or understood without it. But Friedman\u2019s exhibition designer, Local Projects (which created the bombastically nationalist National September 11 Museum in New York City), has attempted to break down a vast subject so that visitors can be more cognizant of something they use reflexively and unconsciously.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the first gallery, a video montage shows young children trying out their first words; in the second gallery, an interactive display with a 20-foot \u201cwall of words\u201d traces the complexity of the linguistic roots of English. Another large interactive space explores the diversity of the world\u2019s languages, with native speakers explaining how differences in grammar and linguistic richness can create fundamentally different conceptual understandings of the world, and time. Smaller galleries explore rhetoric, humor and the use of language to sell us things, and to manipulate our emotions.The exhibitions were designed to appeal to 10- to 12-year-olds. \u201cThere was a very specific reason for that,\u201d Friedman said in an interview. \u201cKids at that age are the ones who are most likely to stop being readers, to stop reading for pleasure.\u201d The museum, she says, will appeal to all ages, but to give the exhibitions focus, the designers decided to target kids who, on the cusp of adolescence, \u201care developing the social cognitive ability, the empathy to care about what people think, to know about the world, other people and other cultures. We thought that was the sweet spot.\u201dAlthough the museum includes a gallery focused on books (which come to \u201clife\u201d when placed on a little stand that triggers animations), it would be stronger and more engaging for adults if it included objects and artifacts beyond books. The use of technology is mostly effective, although sometimes unnecessarily complicated for the minimal didactic value, as in a gallery of digital paintbrushes that change the color and mood of a room based on basic adjectives that serve as the \u201cpaint.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNevertheless, even adults will learn things. A native speaker of Quechua, for instance, tells us on a video screen that her language conceives of the future as \u201cbehind\u201d us because we can\u2019t see it, while it is the past that lies in front of us. In \u201cWords Matter,\u201d the last of the museum\u2019s 10 galleries, a gender nonbinary speaker explains the importance of enlarging our use of pronouns beyond \u201che\u201d and \u201cshe,\u201d one of several testimonials that touch lightly on the political and cultural fault lines of contemporary language.The museum, which won\u2019t charge admission, avoids directly engaging in partisan politics, but there is a distinct world view to its message, which is essentially that the old liberal idea of communication and exchange is a cure for all ills. This arose, in part, from an incident Friedman cites as her inspiration to create the museum, when a stone thrower in Jerusalem targeted her family\u2019s rental car because of its Israeli license plate.\u201cI felt like you don\u2019t know me, you don\u2019t who I am,\u201d she says, noting that her family had lived and worked throughout the Middle East.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cRight then and there, I vowed that when we moved back to America I would do something that would build community,\u201d she said. That is, communication is the cure, reading is a form of cultural exploration, language can connect rather than divide us. What the world needs is more earnest efforts at honest communication.All of this is true, and the idealism of it is as inspiring as the naivete of it is disquieting. Yes, the world needs more well-moderated panel discussions and inspiring TED talks, but even those are beginning to feel like luxury items enjoyed mainly by people with privilege. The world also needs a fundamental reordering of its priorities, a revolution of its political hierarchies and a reconstitution of its economic systems.Planet Word, which feels a bit like a museum conceived at the cocktail hour, doesn\u2019t aim for anything so radical, but instead inhabits essentially the same universe as most of the museums that preceded it a century ago: It hopes to raise up the discourse, and spread the blessings of the educated and elite to those who hope to be educated and elite. Rather like the Newseum, which moved to a swanky new space just as the old world of print newspapers was imploding, Planet Word arrives just as we may be entering a post-liberal and even post-literate age. Language, today, is governed by new rules about who can tell what kinds of stories and, increasingly, a substitution of digital iconography \u2014 emoji and acronyms \u2014 for old-fashioned words composed of letters and phonemes.The new MoMA is bigger; is it better?Everything is up to date in this museum of video screens and touch panels except its founding principle, which is the old noblesse oblige. And one might overlook that but for one thing: Planet Word opens after one of the ugliest, saddest and most alarming chapters in the history of local historic preservation.In September 2018, the city ordered all renovation work on the Franklin School to cease after the project\u2019s architects at Beyer Blinder Belle discovered that large portions of the historically protected interiors, walls, plaster and tin ceilings, wainscoting and baseboards had been removed and destroyed. The mandate to preserve those interiors, which limited the possible uses of the building, had made the Franklin School a particularly difficult problem for the city and discouraged many developers who might otherwise have been interested in the structure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFriedman, who had promised and was contractually obligated to preserve the interiors, said it was a mistake, despite having hired some of the most respected architects and preservation consultants in the city. Blame was never fixed, a minimal fine of $8,136 was paid \u2014 a trifle compared to the $35\u00a0million final cost to renovate the building \u2014 and Friedman\u2019s team pledged to reconstruct much of what was removed. The building is beautiful inside, clean and light, just as Adolf Cluss, its original architect, intended. But it is no longer a historic interior, a fact not acknowledged in a museum souvenir book.So, Planet Word opens under a significant cloud, and a museum that normally would be greeted with cautious optimism and good will arrives with a bitter sense of what might have been. The Franklin School is back, but it is now a monument to the loss of cultural patrimony and public trust.If the pandemic ends and tourists flock to Planet Word, or if it becomes a beloved field-trip destination for students, the vast majority of its audience won\u2019t care about this. But the old spirit of noblesse oblige was often troubled by a certain condescension, a sense that rules are for the little people. It\u2019s still not clear what happened or who was to blame when the historic interior of the Franklin School, from which Alexander Graham Bell sent the first wireless communication in 1880, was destroyed. But it\u2019s clear that words can never fix it.\n\nAt the National Gallery, art no longer feels like an escapeThe Mellon Foundation pledges $250 million to change our monumentsIs the Eisenhower Memorial the last \u201cgreat man\u201d monument in Washington? But the Franklin School, empty and neglected for years, is reopening under a cloud: Its historic interior was destroyed during the renovation. Planet Word, a new museum devoted to language, is a high-tech, feel-good experience",
        "author": "Philip Kennicott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Planet Word, a new museum devoted to language, is a high-tech, feel-good experience (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2261",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/planet-word-museum-washington-dc/2020/10/20/86889c2e-0fcf-11eb-b1e8-16b59b92b36d_story.html",
        "text": "The Franklin School in downtown Washington has been empty for more than a decade, except for a brief period in 2011 when the Occupy Movement used it as a homeless shelter. One of the most significant historic structures in the city, and one of the most beautiful, the school was neglected and severely dilapidated. Preservationists have considered the brick building endangered since at least the 1970s, when the D.C. school board planned to tear it down. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Thursday, the historical 1869 landmarked school will reopen, entirely refurbished and partly restored to its original condition, and once again serving something close to its original educational purpose. Planet Word, a museum devoted to language, is the new occupant, and it will pay the city $10 a year on a 99-year lease. The purpose of the $60\u00a0million museum, according to its gallery map, is to \u201cinspire and renew a love of words, language, and reading in people of all ages.\u201dWhat you need to know about visiting Planet WordCreated by Ann Friedman of Bethesda, Md., a real estate heiress and teacher who is married to New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman, Planet Word opens amid a pandemic that has decimated tourism in Washington. And it arrives less than a year after the closing of the Newseum, another immersive-experience venue that often struggled to define its scope, purpose and mission. Planet Word is a modestly scaled museum devoted to a huge subject: the way we learn, use and manipulate the words and grammar that define us.Born of high hopes, the Newseum closes in the age of fake newsFor humans, a museum of language may seem a bit like a museum of water for fish. There is nothing of our ordinary lives (except perhaps music, art and spiritual matters) that isn\u2019t defined, exchanged or understood without it. But Friedman\u2019s exhibition designer, Local Projects (which created the bombastically nationalist National September 11 Museum in New York City), has attempted to break down a vast subject so that visitors can be more cognizant of something they use reflexively and unconsciously.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the first gallery, a video montage shows young children trying out their first words; in the second gallery, an interactive display with a 20-foot \u201cwall of words\u201d traces the complexity of the linguistic roots of English. Another large interactive space explores the diversity of the world\u2019s languages, with native speakers explaining how differences in grammar and linguistic richness can create fundamentally different conceptual understandings of the world, and time. Smaller galleries explore rhetoric, humor and the use of language to sell us things, and to manipulate our emotions.The exhibitions were designed to appeal to 10- to 12-year-olds. \u201cThere was a very specific reason for that,\u201d Friedman said in an interview. \u201cKids at that age are the ones who are most likely to stop being readers, to stop reading for pleasure.\u201d The museum, she says, will appeal to all ages, but to give the exhibitions focus, the designers decided to target kids who, on the cusp of adolescence, \u201care developing the social cognitive ability, the empathy to care about what people think, to know about the world, other people and other cultures. We thought that was the sweet spot.\u201dAlthough the museum includes a gallery focused on books (which come to \u201clife\u201d when placed on a little stand that triggers animations), it would be stronger and more engaging for adults if it included objects and artifacts beyond books. The use of technology is mostly effective, although sometimes unnecessarily complicated for the minimal didactic value, as in a gallery of digital paintbrushes that change the color and mood of a room based on basic adjectives that serve as the \u201cpaint.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNevertheless, even adults will learn things. A native speaker of Quechua, for instance, tells us on a video screen that her language conceives of the future as \u201cbehind\u201d us because we can\u2019t see it, while it is the past that lies in front of us. In \u201cWords Matter,\u201d the last of the museum\u2019s 10 galleries, a gender nonbinary speaker explains the importance of enlarging our use of pronouns beyond \u201che\u201d and \u201cshe,\u201d one of several testimonials that touch lightly on the political and cultural fault lines of contemporary language.The museum, which won\u2019t charge admission, avoids directly engaging in partisan politics, but there is a distinct world view to its message, which is essentially that the old liberal idea of communication and exchange is a cure for all ills. This arose, in part, from an incident Friedman cites as her inspiration to create the museum, when a stone thrower in Jerusalem targeted her family\u2019s rental car because of its Israeli license plate.\u201cI felt like you don\u2019t know me, you don\u2019t who I am,\u201d she says, noting that her family had lived and worked throughout the Middle East.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cRight then and there, I vowed that when we moved back to America I would do something that would build community,\u201d she said. That is, communication is the cure, reading is a form of cultural exploration, language can connect rather than divide us. What the world needs is more earnest efforts at honest communication.All of this is true, and the idealism of it is as inspiring as the naivete of it is disquieting. Yes, the world needs more well-moderated panel discussions and inspiring TED talks, but even those are beginning to feel like luxury items enjoyed mainly by people with privilege. The world also needs a fundamental reordering of its priorities, a revolution of its political hierarchies and a reconstitution of its economic systems.Planet Word, which feels a bit like a museum conceived at the cocktail hour, doesn\u2019t aim for anything so radical, but instead inhabits essentially the same universe as most of the museums that preceded it a century ago: It hopes to raise up the discourse, and spread the blessings of the educated and elite to those who hope to be educated and elite. Rather like the Newseum, which moved to a swanky new space just as the old world of print newspapers was imploding, Planet Word arrives just as we may be entering a post-liberal and even post-literate age. Language, today, is governed by new rules about who can tell what kinds of stories and, increasingly, a substitution of digital iconography \u2014 emoji and acronyms \u2014 for old-fashioned words composed of letters and phonemes.The new MoMA is bigger; is it better?Everything is up to date in this museum of video screens and touch panels except its founding principle, which is the old noblesse oblige. And one might overlook that but for one thing: Planet Word opens after one of the ugliest, saddest and most alarming chapters in the history of local historic preservation.In September 2018, the city ordered all renovation work on the Franklin School to cease after the project\u2019s architects at Beyer Blinder Belle discovered that large portions of the historically protected interiors, walls, plaster and tin ceilings, wainscoting and baseboards had been removed and destroyed. The mandate to preserve those interiors, which limited the possible uses of the building, had made the Franklin School a particularly difficult problem for the city and discouraged many developers who might otherwise have been interested in the structure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFriedman, who had promised and was contractually obligated to preserve the interiors, said it was a mistake, despite having hired some of the most respected architects and preservation consultants in the city. Blame was never fixed, a minimal fine of $8,136 was paid \u2014 a trifle compared to the $35\u00a0million final cost to renovate the building \u2014 and Friedman\u2019s team pledged to reconstruct much of what was removed. The building is beautiful inside, clean and light, just as Adolf Cluss, its original architect, intended. But it is no longer a historic interior, a fact not acknowledged in a museum souvenir book.So, Planet Word opens under a significant cloud, and a museum that normally would be greeted with cautious optimism and good will arrives with a bitter sense of what might have been. The Franklin School is back, but it is now a monument to the loss of cultural patrimony and public trust.If the pandemic ends and tourists flock to Planet Word, or if it becomes a beloved field-trip destination for students, the vast majority of its audience won\u2019t care about this. But the old spirit of noblesse oblige was often troubled by a certain condescension, a sense that rules are for the little people. It\u2019s still not clear what happened or who was to blame when the historic interior of the Franklin School, from which Alexander Graham Bell sent the first wireless communication in 1880, was destroyed. But it\u2019s clear that words can never fix it.\n\nAt the National Gallery, art no longer feels like an escapeThe Mellon Foundation pledges $250 million to change our monumentsIs the Eisenhower Memorial the last \u201cgreat man\u201d monument in Washington? But the Franklin School, empty and neglected for years, is reopening under a cloud: Its historic interior was destroyed during the renovation. Planet Word, a new museum devoted to language, is a high-tech, feel-good experience",
        "author": "Philip Kennicott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former NASA scientist to lead National Air and Space Museum (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2262",
        "date": "2018-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/former-nasa-scientist-to-lead-national-air-and-space-museum/2018/04/04/7ffa7d74-3844-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html",
        "text": "A former NASA chief scientist and a leader in the effort to send humans to Mars will make history as the first woman to lead the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum.Ellen Stofan will become the John and Adrienne Mars Director of NASM starting April 30, the museum announced Thursday. She succeeds Gen. J.R. \u201cJack\u201d Dailey, who retired in January after 18 years at the helm of one of the world\u2019s most popular museums. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter 25 years working in space-related organizations, Stofan said she is eager to shape the way the museum educates and engages the public about aviation and space.\u201cOne of my biggest passions is outreach and communication about science and technology,\u201d Stofan, 57, said. \u201cWhat better place than the Air and Space Museum to engage everyone in the excitement of aviation and exploration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBeing the first woman in the post is added honor because the science and tech fields are lacking in women and people of color, she said.\u201cIt\u2019s important to have women in leadership positions not just for their different perspectives and skill sets, but for the inspiration. I\u2019m looking at the 8-year-old girl who may see herself (in me),\u201d she said. Air and Space Museum renovation expected to begin next summer\u201cSo many jobs of the future are tied to technology. It\u2019s not just important, it\u2019s a necessity\u201d to attract women to the field, she said.Stofan caught the science bug at an early age. Her father was a NASA scientist and her mother taught elementary school science. She witnessed her first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral at the age of 4 and was a regular at the Air and Space Museum in the late 1970s, just after it opened. While an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary, she spent a summer at the museum as an intern, she said. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStofan earned master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in geological sciences from Brown University. She worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab and later was vice president at Proxemy Research. A consulting senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Stofan is co-chair of the Future of Space Technologies council of the World Economic Forum. Married and the mother of three, Stofan lives in The Plains, Va. She served on the board of the College of William & Mary Foundation for 10 years as it planned a $1\u00a0billion fundraising campaign.Nine airlines make joint contribution to Air and Space MuseumStofan takes the reins of the Smithsonian\u2019s popular museum \u2014 which attracts about 8\u00a0million visitors a year \u2014 as it begins a seven-year, $1\u00a0billion renovation. The federal government is expected to pay for three-quarters of the cost of the project, leaving the museum to raise about $250\u00a0million in private donations to remake the galleries. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge opportunity to really look at the galleries in a new way,\u201d Stofan said. \u201cWe can tell the story of the great things we\u2019ve done .\u2009.\u2009. (and) to really engage kids and the public in what is happening now.\u201dFrom space tourism to NASA\u2019s recently announced supersonic jet, the museum should be \u201cat the cutting edge,\u201d she said. Ellen Stofan becomes first woman to lead popular attraction. Former NASA scientist to lead National Air and Space Museum",
        "author": "Peggy McGlone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former NASA scientist to lead National Air and Space Museum (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2263",
        "date": "2018-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/former-nasa-scientist-to-lead-national-air-and-space-museum/2018/04/04/7ffa7d74-3844-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html",
        "text": "A former NASA chief scientist and a leader in the effort to send humans to Mars will make history as the first woman to lead the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum.Ellen Stofan will become the John and Adrienne Mars Director of NASM starting April 30, the museum announced Thursday. She succeeds Gen. J.R. \u201cJack\u201d Dailey, who retired in January after 18 years at the helm of one of the world\u2019s most popular museums. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter 25 years working in space-related organizations, Stofan said she is eager to shape the way the museum educates and engages the public about aviation and space.\u201cOne of my biggest passions is outreach and communication about science and technology,\u201d Stofan, 57, said. \u201cWhat better place than the Air and Space Museum to engage everyone in the excitement of aviation and exploration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBeing the first woman in the post is added honor because the science and tech fields are lacking in women and people of color, she said.\u201cIt\u2019s important to have women in leadership positions not just for their different perspectives and skill sets, but for the inspiration. I\u2019m looking at the 8-year-old girl who may see herself (in me),\u201d she said. Air and Space Museum renovation expected to begin next summer\u201cSo many jobs of the future are tied to technology. It\u2019s not just important, it\u2019s a necessity\u201d to attract women to the field, she said.Stofan caught the science bug at an early age. Her father was a NASA scientist and her mother taught elementary school science. She witnessed her first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral at the age of 4 and was a regular at the Air and Space Museum in the late 1970s, just after it opened. While an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary, she spent a summer at the museum as an intern, she said. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStofan earned master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in geological sciences from Brown University. She worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab and later was vice president at Proxemy Research. A consulting senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Stofan is co-chair of the Future of Space Technologies council of the World Economic Forum. Married and the mother of three, Stofan lives in The Plains, Va. She served on the board of the College of William & Mary Foundation for 10 years as it planned a $1\u00a0billion fundraising campaign.Nine airlines make joint contribution to Air and Space MuseumStofan takes the reins of the Smithsonian\u2019s popular museum \u2014 which attracts about 8\u00a0million visitors a year \u2014 as it begins a seven-year, $1\u00a0billion renovation. The federal government is expected to pay for three-quarters of the cost of the project, leaving the museum to raise about $250\u00a0million in private donations to remake the galleries. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge opportunity to really look at the galleries in a new way,\u201d Stofan said. \u201cWe can tell the story of the great things we\u2019ve done .\u2009.\u2009. (and) to really engage kids and the public in what is happening now.\u201dFrom space tourism to NASA\u2019s recently announced supersonic jet, the museum should be \u201cat the cutting edge,\u201d she said. Ellen Stofan becomes first woman to lead popular attraction. Former NASA scientist to lead National Air and Space Museum",
        "author": "Peggy McGlone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former NASA scientist to lead National Air and Space Museum (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2264",
        "date": "2018-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/former-nasa-scientist-to-lead-national-air-and-space-museum/2018/04/04/7ffa7d74-3844-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html",
        "text": "A former NASA chief scientist and a leader in the effort to send humans to Mars will make history as the first woman to lead the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum.Ellen Stofan will become the John and Adrienne Mars Director of NASM starting April 30, the museum announced Thursday. She succeeds Gen. J.R. \u201cJack\u201d Dailey, who retired in January after 18 years at the helm of one of the world\u2019s most popular museums. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter 25 years working in space-related organizations, Stofan said she is eager to shape the way the museum educates and engages the public about aviation and space.\u201cOne of my biggest passions is outreach and communication about science and technology,\u201d Stofan, 57, said. \u201cWhat better place than the Air and Space Museum to engage everyone in the excitement of aviation and exploration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBeing the first woman in the post is added honor because the science and tech fields are lacking in women and people of color, she said.\u201cIt\u2019s important to have women in leadership positions not just for their different perspectives and skill sets, but for the inspiration. I\u2019m looking at the 8-year-old girl who may see herself (in me),\u201d she said. Air and Space Museum renovation expected to begin next summer\u201cSo many jobs of the future are tied to technology. It\u2019s not just important, it\u2019s a necessity\u201d to attract women to the field, she said.Stofan caught the science bug at an early age. Her father was a NASA scientist and her mother taught elementary school science. She witnessed her first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral at the age of 4 and was a regular at the Air and Space Museum in the late 1970s, just after it opened. While an undergraduate at the College of William & Mary, she spent a summer at the museum as an intern, she said. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStofan earned master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in geological sciences from Brown University. She worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab and later was vice president at Proxemy Research. A consulting senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Stofan is co-chair of the Future of Space Technologies council of the World Economic Forum. Married and the mother of three, Stofan lives in The Plains, Va. She served on the board of the College of William & Mary Foundation for 10 years as it planned a $1\u00a0billion fundraising campaign.Nine airlines make joint contribution to Air and Space MuseumStofan takes the reins of the Smithsonian\u2019s popular museum \u2014 which attracts about 8\u00a0million visitors a year \u2014 as it begins a seven-year, $1\u00a0billion renovation. The federal government is expected to pay for three-quarters of the cost of the project, leaving the museum to raise about $250\u00a0million in private donations to remake the galleries. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge opportunity to really look at the galleries in a new way,\u201d Stofan said. \u201cWe can tell the story of the great things we\u2019ve done .\u2009.\u2009. (and) to really engage kids and the public in what is happening now.\u201dFrom space tourism to NASA\u2019s recently announced supersonic jet, the museum should be \u201cat the cutting edge,\u201d she said. Ellen Stofan becomes first woman to lead popular attraction. Former NASA scientist to lead National Air and Space Museum",
        "author": "Peggy McGlone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Oshun makes Union Stage show a healing affair (WP: Music) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2265",
        "date": "2018-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/oshun-makes-union-stage-show-a-healing-affair/2018/05/27/a8cadcd4-61c6-11e8-81ca-bb14593acaa6_story.html",
        "text": "For New York-based Oshun \u2014 a singing and rapping duo made up of D.C. natives Niambi Sala and Thandiwe \u2014 Friday night\u2019s show at Union Stage felt something like a cosmic homecoming.We \u201chad to take a spaceship to D.C. real quick,\u201d Niambi said; Oshun was fresh off touring in Europe in support of \u201cBittersweet Vol. 1,\u201d its recently released album. The group\u2019s pilot, producer Proda, expertly steered the show from original music to covers to spontaneously composed beats, keeping Oshun and its reverential audience in constant motion. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThandiwe and Niambi forged their musical partnership after meeting at a scholarship-program orientation at New York University. Through their quickly formed sisterhood, they released their first EP, the sample-heavy and deftly lyrical \u201cAfahye\u201d in 2014, and followed it up with the meditative mix tape \u201cAsase Yaa.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs Oshun, the pair wove a textured tapestry of music that they have called \u201cFloetry meets Lauryn Hill meets Chief Keef,\u201d a description that came to life at the D.C. show.The duo\u2019s name honors the Yoruba deity associated with love, fertility and sensuality, who is often depicted immersed in fresh water and draped in yellow. Beyonc\u00e9 famously paid homage to the goddess Oshun, or Osun, by wearing a marigold dress and twirling under the gushing water of a broken fire hydrant in \u201cHold Up,\u201d as part of her 2016 \u201cLemonade\u201d visual album.Evoking their namesake orisha, golden lighting bathed Thandiwe and Niambi as they led a devout audience through a heady mix of heavenly neo-soul and hip-hop.Story continues below advertisementAs Proda warmed up the crowd with bold music from Southern rappers BlocBoy JB and Rich the Kid, Oshun\u2019s opening track, \u201cWelcome,\u201d blended in fittingly with its brash guitars and nimble rhythms. The song transformed in the live performance with Niambi\u2019s sprightly flow and Thandiwe\u2019s commanding vocals, revealing that Oshun\u2019s music is best enjoyed on stage than through headphones.AdvertisementFrom the trap-inspired \u201cBlessings on Blessings\u201d to the exuberant piano-and-brass-tinged \u201cCrazy 4 You,\u201d Oshun switched fluidly from heavy-hitting rapped verses to smoothly crooned lines. Niambi\u2019s lighter, airy timbre conjured a journey to the stars, while Thandiwe\u2019s rooted, smoldering voice brought introspection into an intimate inner space.Oshun not only honored the revered deity, but also paid respects to the artistry of influential female musicians. A cover of legendary neo-soul singer Jill Scott\u2019s tender song \u201cA Long Walk\u201d included a surprise performance from Niambi\u2019s mother, whose silken, cascading vocals caused listeners to scream, sing along and raise their arms high in devotion.As Oshun performed a gospel of self-care, love and joy, the audience, gently submerged in blue lighting, were its fervent followers. The D.C. pair bring neo-soul and hip-hop \u2014 and one of their mothers \u2014 home to perform. Oshun makes Union Stage show a healing affair",
        "author": "Teta Alim"
    },
    {
        "title": "NappyNappa won\u2019t let the noise of the world drown him out (WP: Music) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2266",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/nappy-nappa-dc-rapper-ifeeljustlyktheirart/2020/12/22/429aed3a-3fd3-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html",
        "text": "Floating out of his own dimension of space-time \u2014 or at least looking the part \u2014 here comes NappyNappa, strolling the D.C. sidewalks in a floral knit sweater, iridescent purple swim trunks over charcoal sweatpants, a disposable face mask and sunglasses big enough to cover the rest of his face. He looks as stylish as his music, irregular but intentional: Nappa says he picks his clothes to correspond to the chromatic \u201cvibrations\u201d of each day of the week, a practice with roots in Eastern religions. \u201cIt\u2019s cool,\u201d he says plainly. \u201cYou get to rock out every color.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat fits. From the outside, Nappa appears to be wrapping up an extraordinary year, having generated a nonstop profusion of high-spirited, meta-spiritual rap music at exponentially high speeds. But aside from the pandemic, he says his 2020 has felt pretty normal. Sure, it\u2019s probably been the most productive 12 months of his musical life, but Nappa says he isn\u2019t trying to make a statement, or flood a zone, or wow a listenership, or even eat up the clock before he can go out on tour again. \u201cI\u2019m trying to keep a connection with myself,\u201d he says. \u201cShout out Lil Wayne. Shout out Prince. I\u2019m not gonna be suffocated by the world. I really gotta break through to whatever freedom comes through on the other side.\u201dLike his hyper-prolific heroes before him, Nappa doesn\u2019t think of his productivity as a stunt, or even a strategy. It\u2019s a way of being. Transposing his life into lyrics feels as natural as any other everyday act. Like getting dressed. Or reciting a prayer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe\u2019s dropped a total of four solo albums in 2020, including his latest maximal spritz, \u201cIFEELJUSTLYKTHEIRART.\u201d Earlier in the year, he issued two EPs with Psych Nah, an online creative partnership with Psychedelic Ensemble, a solo Polish producer based in London. And back home in the real world, Nappa has released more than a half-dozen recordings with Model Home, his brain-scorching improvisational duo with area producer Patrick Cain.Through all of this music, a philosophy seems to be taking shape, with Nappa describing the act of rapping as being \u201creceptive and unafraid of what the world is.\u201d Or maybe it\u2019s more like \u201cthe little spaceship, or whatever vessel you use, to travel through the portal.\u201d The portal to where? \u201cTo freedom.\u201d And what is freedom, exactly? \u201cUnconditional love,\u201d Nappa says. \u201cBeing able to reciprocate it, live in it, all of that.\u201dOn the physical plane, Nappa has lived nearly all of his 24 years in Washington. Raised in Southeast Washington by his grandmother, he attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts where he studied dance and learned to rap alongside his friends, including longtime collaborator MartyHeemCherry. After being \u201cthrown out\u201d of Ellington his junior year, he moved to Georgia to live with his mother, but eventually returned to D.C. to commit his life to music.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat sense of commitment may have first taken shape during the Sundays Nappa spent as a child inside his grandmother\u2019s church, Holy Redeemer in Sursum Corda. \u201cI was in there arguing with the priest,\u201d he says of his initial resistance to organized systems of belief. \u201cBut over time it was like, \u2018What can I hold onto from that, and build from, and go forward?\u2019 I can\u2019t say I didn\u2019t learn from old women talking about God all day.\u201dBy now, our conversation has moved from the city\u2019s sidewalks to a grassy lot where a team of nearby construction machines are trying to reincarnate a demolished block into new condos. It seems as good a time as any to ask Nappa if he believes in some kind of God.\u201cThe Source!\u201d he shouts over the noise, throwing his arms out toward the field. \u201cWe didn\u2019t grow this grass!\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo when God is everywhere and music is everything, what does the shape of his day look like? \u201cI wake up and hit up every homie I make music with, like, fifteen people,\u201d Nappa says. \u201cWhoever responds first is who I\u2019m about to be on the path with.\u201d That means he might spend the day online swapping song drafts with producers overseas, or meeting up in the studio with Cain to cut all the way loose. Either way, he relishes teamwork. \u201cI like to have input in the sounds, but I don\u2019t want to be the producer and the rapper \u2014 that\u2019s where the community comes in,\u201d he says. \u201cThis music, it\u2019s not just from me. None of this is.\u201dNappa\u2019s collaborators say he works fast, and with zero ego, plus, he makes surprising decisions \u2014 all good working habits that push the music in unexpected directions. \u201cNappa picks beats which I was certain nobody would ever choose to rap over,\u201d the artist Psychedelic Ensemble says in an email. \u201cThe most extreme example of that is \u2018Teeth.\u2019 I am still amazed that song exists. Like, why would anyone choose a beat that manipulates a sample to sound like gritting teeth? And yet, here we are.\u201dOver that gnashing Psych Nah track, Nappa excavates his own brainspace for \u201cneuro-chem gems,\u201d rapping about how \u201ccommunication with the natural world makes us more intelligent.\u201d Over his woozy solo cut \u201cBAGZ 4 TH LOST,\u201d he raps with loosey-goosey lucidity: \u201cTrue rebellion ain\u2019t just trying to survive, it\u2019s creating a new way of life.\u201d Over the asymmetrical grind-and-bump of Model Home\u2019s \u201cREV,\u201d he runs circles around an alliterative mantra \u2014 \u201cRevolution, reputation, reparation, resolution, restitution!\u201d \u2014 until he trips over his own tongue.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDifferent sounds put my mind in a different place,\u201d Nappa says. \u201cI get to play with that, I get to create thoughts around those sounds.\u201d He treats his voice as a sound, too, frequently distorting it on his recordings, a tactic designed to focus the listener\u2019s attention (\u201cYou have to tune in\u201d), while forging a metaphor for the noise of the world around us (the distortion \u201ccreates these textures of existence\u201d).Then fate intervenes to help prove his point. The scraping and grinding from the neighboring construction site suddenly grows so loud, it threatens to blot out our chitchat. \u201cSee?\u201d Nappa shouts through his mask. \u201cThis conversation is distorted!\u201dFunny how everything goes clear in that noisy moment. Nappa isn\u2019t an \u201calt-rap\u201d abstractionist. He\u2019s a realist. He\u2019s rapping about the reality he lives in \u2014 his time, his city, his head. Even when he\u2019s piloting a spaceship into a state of unconditional love, he\u2019s also doing the everyday work of organizing his everyday thoughts. He might sound like he\u2019s rapping to us from another plane, but he\u2019s still a part of the world we all share. \u201cI think of the audience as, like, adjacent to me,\u201d he says, \u201cso we\u2019re looking at the same thing.\u201dWhat does he want us to see? \u201cA new sense of self,\u201d Nappa says. \u201cI\u2019m not thinking what I do makes me different than anybody. I want people to see a new sense of self, new ways to get through this [life]. And that\u2019s it.\u201dFreestyling into the void with Model HomeBest music of 2020: Theo Parrish, Noname, Pop Smoke, Hailey Whitters and moreRico Nasty will show you what mischief sounds like\n\n The District rapper is creating at a dizzying pace. He says he\u2019s just living his life. NappyNappa won\u2019t let the noise of the world drown him out",
        "author": "Chris Richards"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Shining a \u2018Licht\u2019 on a 15-hour opera with hundreds of musicians and a helicopter quartet (WP: Music) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2267",
        "date": "2019-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/shining-a-licht-on-a-15-hour-opera-with-hundreds-of-musicians-and-a-helicopter-quartet/2019/06/04/09293e92-8618-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html",
        "text": "AMSTERDAM \u2014 How big can opera be? Try 680 musicians and technicians, performing 15 hours of music from an opera cycle originally 29 hours long. Karlheinz Stockhausen, the bad boy of postwar German composers, world famous in the 1960s and \u201970s, wasn\u2019t shy about dreaming big: His \u201cLicht\u201d cycle, written over 25 years and completed in 2003, involved one opera for each day of the week. In Amsterdam, the Holland Festival is attempting the first overview of this sprawling work over three days, using for the purpose an appropriately unconventional and vast performance space \u2014 the Gashouder nightclub. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightYet Pierre Audi\u2019s production, \u201cAus Licht,\u201d a joint venture of the festival, the Dutch National Opera, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and the Stockhausen Foundation, has transformed the colossus into intimate dramaturgy, inviting audiences into the most vulnerable corner of Stockhausen\u2019s world. Indeed, at Friday\u2019s opening performance, the Archangel Michael appeared onstage not as a triumphant seraphic body, but as a child grieving the loss of his parents to the ravages of war. (Stockhausen\u2019s mother was killed by the Nazis, and his father on the front lines in Hungary.) Portrayed at times by a tenor, at other times by a trumpet or clarinet \u2014 many of the performers were conservatory students \u2014 Michael\u2019s blurred characterization illustrated his metamorphosis from human into an angelic form.Yet other portions of \u201cLicht\u201d trafficked in images of sheer terror. Bathed in deep red light, 80 wind players moved in organized rhythm as they accompanied projections of Stockhausen\u2019s face (embodying the character of Lucifer), its eyebrows, tongue and mouth artificially contorted in real time by technicians. Unsettling, too, was the sight of 80 adolescent girls dressed in white, beckoning the character of Eve to usher in a new creation and a new race. As they exited, following Eve (dressed in feathers and sporting a flute) into a spaceship, it was clear that their subsequent musical journey could not take place on Earth; to understand the music of the heavens, one must travel there. (Stockhausen was known for listing his birthplace not as Cologne, but as a planet orbiting Sirius.)Library of Congress honors Stockhausen, a composer who broke rulesFuturism was pervasive. A mammoth chorus of trombones and trumpets dressed in barbed wire moved throughout the room, using their instruments as ray-guns and laser beams, as extraterrestrials invaded Earth three times. After one of the soldiers fell, a haunting Piet\u00e0 for soprano and trumpet brought the performance to a standstill \u2014 followed by a 40-minute synthesizer soliloquy during which Lucifer and Eve were reconciled in a refraction of death into transcendence. (Kathinka Pasveer, who worked closely with Stockhausen and remains one of his most active interpreters and champions, was the conductor.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe epitome of the project was one of Stockhausen\u2019s most famous or infamous works, the \u201cHelicopter String Quartet,\u201d first performed at the Holland Festival in 1995 and subsequently incorporated into the opera \u201cMittwoch.\u201d The members of the Pelargos Quartet climbed into four separate helicopters, sporting headphones and with metronome and microphone and, while the helicopters hovered, sent their sounds at once into the cosmos and back down to earth in the Gashouder, at once alone and in the presence of the same music.The dazzling outlandishness of \u201cLicht\u201d can be dismissed as trivial, irrelevant or even comical \u2014 indeed, at some points it felt like characters from Milton\u2019s \u201cParadise Lost\u201d had been dropped into an episode of \u201cThe Jetsons.\u201d But as chamber operas become increasingly attractive in today\u2019s musical landscape \u2014 at least in America \u2014 one might consider this massive cycle before assuming that intimacy is the key to sincerity. If anything, the message of this \u201cLicht\u201d adaptation was that to find love and foster reconciliation, humanity cannot think small.The Holland Festival continues through June 23, with the final performance of the \u201cLicht\u201d cycle beginning Saturday. hollandfestival.nl/en.Contemporary classical: a primerA \u2018Mantra\u2019 for our time at the Library of Congress.Wagner\u2019s \u2018Ring\u2019 seem too long? The problem is not length, but opera. Holland Festival offers first cumulative look at Stockhausen\u2019s seven-part opera cycle. Shining a \u2018Licht\u2019 on a 15-hour opera with hundreds of musicians and a helicopter quartet",
        "author": "Parker Ramsay"
    },
    {
        "title": "Zoom-based opera for preschoolers might sound like your worst nightmare. But it\u2019s actually the best Zoom there is. (WP: Music) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2268",
        "date": "2020-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/zoom-based-opera-for-preschoolers-might-sound-like-your-worst-nightmare-but-its-actually-the-best-zoom-there-is/2020/08/18/01e15982-dda4-11ea-809e-b8be57ba616e_story.html",
        "text": "Like many a music lover of an age we needn\u2019t get into here, my formative education in classical music and opera came straight from the masters: Bugs, Elmer, Porky. Bugs Bunny was my first Br\u00fcnnhilde. (So I guess he introduced me to drag as well. Different story.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLooney Tunes, Merrie Melodies and Silly Symphonies taught my wee ears how to listen, how to synthesize the music in my imagination with color, movement, emotion and irony. It was like a crash-bang-boom course in how to read sound: The vastness of Wagner became suddenly legible in the context of wabbit-killing.Kids today are a bit more hands-on, as I discovered during a recent session of \u201cOpera Starts With Oh!,\u201d an opera education program for ages 3 to 7, run by the D.C. and NYC-based company Opera Lafayette.Story continues below advertisementAdmittedly, preschoolers, Zoom and opera don\u2019t immediately sound like the makings of a successful project, but each installment I watched of \u201cOpera Starts With Oh!\u201d \u2014 helmed by director, choreographer and teaching artist Emma Jaster and Opera Lafayette community engagement manager Ersian Fran\u00e7ois \u2014 kept its grid of budding opera buffs rapt with an action-packed half-hour of activities, performances and assorted operatic antics.\u201cOpera Starts With Oh!\u201d originated in 2018 as an in-person program to accompany productions in progress, but in its Zoom-based incarnation, each themed installment (titles include \u201cCharacter and Emotion,\u201d \u201cAll About the Bass,\u201d \u201cZing! Zing! Zing! Violin\u201d) centers on a visit from a guest artist and a simple lesson, which can be further explored through a supplemental heap of online homework \u2014 oops, I mean at-home activities.Recent stoppers-by include gambaist Motomi Igarashi, soprano Ariana Douglas and Opera Lafayette violinist Leslie Nero. Forthcoming workshops will host soprano Vanessa Aldrich (Aug. 19) and Ramya Durvasula and Ritika Reddy of the Kalanidhi Dance Company (Aug. 26). Workshops are pay-what-you-can, begin at 11:30 a.m. and require registration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt a recent workshop, the Zoom grid filled up fast with small faces smooshed into the frame. It was easily the most entertaining Zoom meeting I\u2019ve had since this whole thing started.Lucy and Phoebe were sporting matching unicorn horns and dancing in circles whenever music played. Theodor was paying attention but kept changing his background \u2014 first it was outer space, then it was a hedgehog. Gabriel, Massimo and Timothy all crammed attentively into one square. Jaster led a round of warm-up exercises (her 6-year-old Ellis popping in and out of view), Nero performed the Passacaille from Lully\u2019s \u201cArmide\u201d (a performance of which Opera Lafayette recorded in 2007) and Fran\u00e7ois skillfully moderated a quick Q&A session (turns out kids are way better at the muting/unmuting thing than adults).By the end of it, Helen, who had been pretty quiet up to that point, politely raised her hand, unmuted, and let the group know: \u201cI think I want to play the violin.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou think, \u2018Oh, opera. How on Earth are we gonna get them to engage?\u2019\u2009\u201d says Phoebe and Lucy\u2019s grandfather Michael Tooke (and apparently not from the unicorn side of the family) in a post-workshop Zoom. \u201cBut, rather than trying to figure out who Lucia was and why her brother didn\u2019t like her, they give the basic elements of movement, emotion, dance and how much fun it is to play an instrument. Very, very simple. It\u2019s been very rewarding for our girls.\u201dPhoebe, 4, was especially moved by Douglas\u2019s performance a few weeks ago of \u201cCos\u00ec va, turbe insane, cos\u00ec va\u201d from Stradella\u2019s \u201cLa Susanna.\u201d\u201cI didn\u2019t get to attend my first opera until I was about 26 years old, particularly because it\u2019s a pretty expensive endeavor to attend an opera,\u201d says Natalia Lopez-Hurst, mother of Gabriel, Massimo and Timothy. \u201cSo I wanted to start my kids early with the exposure. I feel like opera encompasses so many different forms of art \u2026 We use it as a steppingstone to teach them about art, as well as history, as well as geography.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor Jaster, the kinetic goals of the workshop are as important as the aesthetic ones.\u201cI\u2019m a movement director and choreographer, that\u2019s how I came to opera,\u201d says Jaster, \u201cBut I have a 5-year-old and I live and witness every day how much children need to move their bodies. Now that we\u2019re mostly confined to the same places every day, our bodies start to sink and settle into smaller and smaller habits.\u201dThus, much of the unbound energy that animates an average \u201cOpera Starts With Oh!\u201d is channeled into twirling, interpretive dance, vocal exercises and functional training (like \u201cfinger ripples\u201d) for aspiring virtuosos (like Helen?).The goal is to give them something to do today, but also something to look forward to tomorrow.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat\u2019s a fun way to take what we\u2019ve learned and make it something that these children will do and be engaged with beyond and outside of this 30 minutes?\u201d says Jaster. \u201cAs a parent, 30\u00a0minutes is not a lot of the time that I actually need to occupy from my child\u2019s day. So the more the children can be inspired to take this along and then go and make their own performance for all of their stuffed animals \u2014 that\u2019s where I want to be.\u201dAdvertisementFor more information visit operalafayette.org.Play onWolf Trap\u2019s virtual Field Trip Fridays program concluded last month, but the genre-spanning videos, performed and recorded by Wolf Trap Teaching Artists, are still viewable online and include kid-friendly explorations of puppetry, African music and opera. Recommended if your young one has lingering questions about Little Miss Muffet.Story continues below advertisementTanglewood\u2019s fields might be off limits this season, but its 2020 Online Series has been a lively mix of prerecorded and remotely streamed performances, including Tanglewood For Kids. Participants can learn about composers, hear streamed performances and try all out all kinds of activities, crafts, recipes and videos. (And you can lay your blanket wherever you want.)If your kid is already working on her third concerto between kindergarten obligations, turn her online attention toward the New York Philharmonic\u2019s Very Young Composers page, which features a library of videos and musical explorations of everything from Beethoven\u2019s Ninth to Julia Wolfe\u2019s \u201cFire in my mouth.\u201d\n\n Opera Lafayette\u2019s \u201cOpera Starts With Oh!\u201d is not your average conference call. Zoom-based opera for preschoolers might sound like your worst nightmare. But it\u2019s actually the best Zoom there is.",
        "author": "Michael Andor Brodeur"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks\u2014Extended Edition\u2019 by Brian Eno Review: An Evocative Lunar Score (WSJ: Music Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2269",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-atmospheres-soundtracksextended-edition-by-brian-eno-review-an-evocative-lunar-score-11563398159?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=53",
        "text": "The night sky is filled with music. The ancient Greeks drew connections between the movement of heavenly bodies and the mathematical properties of sound, and the cosmos had surely been inspiring the creation of song for millennia before that. The connection between records and space also runs deep. \nIn 1977, the U.S. launched the Voyager Space Probes, and the crafts carried gold-plated discs featuring the sounds of Earth, including pieces by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bach\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beethoven,\n\n\n\n traditional songs from China and Peru, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Berry\n\n\n\n singing \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Johnny B. Goode.\n\n\n\n \u201d Also included in the grooves were spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds of animals and the natural world, and the recorded brainwaves of scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ann Druyan.\n\n\n\n Both Voyager Probes are more than 10 billion miles from Earth and still in communication with NASA; as far as we know, the records remain unplayed by extraterrestrial life. Humans can obtain versions of the LPs from the Ozma label, which issued the discs\u2014no actual gold included, alas\u2014in a deluxe boxed set in 2017. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA gold record with its sounds of Earth being mounted on Voyager 2\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SSPL/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThis week sees the release of an expanded reissue of another important record commemorating a milestone of space exploration\u2014the Apollo 11 mission that brought men to the Moon 50 years ago this week. Brian Eno\u2019s \u201cApollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks,\u201d first released in 1983, is widely regarded as a canonical ambient album. On Friday, UMC will release an edition of it that includes a full disc of new material. \nThe original \u201cApollo,\u201d created by Mr. Eno with songwriting and production assistance from his brother Roger and the Canadian composer, producer and guitarist Daniel Lanois, included music created for a documentary by journalist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Al Reinert\n\n\n\n called \u201cFor All Mankind.\u201d Mr. Reinert\u2019s film, which wasn\u2019t completed until 1989, paired footage of the Apollo missions with audio from interviews with the NASA program\u2019s astronauts. \n\n\u201cFor All Mankind\u201d strives for poetry instead of drama and Mr. Eno lends atmospheric support, reinforcing the feelings of the sublime found in the images. Heard on its own, the soundtrack is a set of beautiful and quietly evocative music that sounds great in the background and also rewards close attention. \n\u201cApollo\u201d finds strength through simplicity. The phrase \u201cspace music\u201d might bring to mind psychedelia, something mind-altering that warps one\u2019s senses, but \u201cApollo\u201d is relatively grounded, a human-scale undertaking. Voyages to space put ordinary people into an extraordinary environment, and the soundtrack by Mr. Eno and his collaborators reflects intimate human experience rather than outsize technical achievement.\nSeveral of the pieces prominently feature the ethereal pedal steel guitar work of Mr. Lanois. The instrument, identified most closely with country and western music, evokes the wide-open spaces of rural America, which are often, as it happens, the best places for watching the stars. His curling guitar lines on tracks like \u201cWeightless\u201d and \u201cDeep Blue Day\u201d evoke both windswept prairies and bodies turning in zero gravity. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAl Reinert\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tom Stoddart/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAn Ending (Ascent),\u201d almost certainly the most well-known track of Mr. Eno\u2019s career, set a standard for textural radiance few have matched. Consisting off a thin, wavering drone moving gently through a descending melody, the piece has become cultural shorthand for emotionally overwhelming moments that transcend language\u2014see its use at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, during a segment paying tribute to the victims of that city\u2019s July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks. It has also been frequently used in film and on television. \nThe new music on the deluxe set appears under its own title, somewhat confusingly called \u201cFor All Mankind,\u201d even though this work had nothing to do with the film. The tracks were created individually by Brian Eno, Mr. Lanois and Roger Eno, and were edited and sequenced by Brian. \nAugmenting an album widely understood to be a classic decades after the fact is an unusual and risky move, but here it mostly works, enriching and extending the mood of the original. The opening selection, \u201cThe End of a Thin Cord,\u201d begins the set on a gorgeous note, with a delicate keyboard line that shifts between two notes set against a rumbling background. The contrast between the sounds paints a picture of a fragile life adrift. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cCapsule\u201d features guitar and organ cycling through a slowly winding series of chord changes, and it mirrors the subtle beauty of the 1983 LP. \u201cOver the Canaries,\u201d another of the lovelier pieces, consists mostly of single tones that hover and decay slowly, seeming to freeze a mo The classic ambient album receives a reissue that includes a full disc of new material as gorgeous as the original record. ",
        "author": "Mark Richardson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks\u2014Extended Edition\u2019 by Brian Eno Review: An Evocative Lunar Score (WSJ: Music Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2270",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-atmospheres-soundtracksextended-edition-by-brian-eno-review-an-evocative-lunar-score-11563398159?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=69",
        "text": "The night sky is filled with music. The ancient Greeks drew connections between the movement of heavenly bodies and the mathematical properties of sound, and the cosmos had surely been inspiring the creation of song for millennia before that. The connection between records and space also runs deep. \nIn 1977, the U.S. launched the Voyager Space Probes, and the crafts carried gold-plated discs featuring the sounds of Earth, including pieces by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bach\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beethoven,\n\n\n\n traditional songs from China and Peru, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Berry\n\n\n\n singing \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Johnny B. Goode.\n\n\n\n \u201d Also included in the grooves were spoken greetings in 55 languages, sounds of animals and the natural world, and the recorded brainwaves of scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ann Druyan.\n\n\n\n Both Voyager Probes are more than 10 billion miles from Earth and still in communication with NASA; as far as we know, the records remain unplayed by extraterrestrial life. Humans can obtain versions of the LPs from the Ozma label, which issued the discs\u2014no actual gold included, alas\u2014in a deluxe boxed set in 2017. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA gold record with its sounds of Earth being mounted on Voyager 2\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SSPL/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThis week sees the release of an expanded reissue of another important record commemorating a milestone of space exploration\u2014the Apollo 11 mission that brought men to the Moon 50 years ago this week. Brian Eno\u2019s \u201cApollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks,\u201d first released in 1983, is widely regarded as a canonical ambient album. On Friday, UMC will release an edition of it that includes a full disc of new material. \n\n\n\n\nThe original \u201cApollo,\u201d created by Mr. Eno with songwriting and production assistance from his brother Roger and the Canadian composer, producer and guitarist Daniel Lanois, included music created for a documentary by journalist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Al Reinert\n\n\n\n called \u201cFor All Mankind.\u201d Mr. Reinert\u2019s film, which wasn\u2019t completed until 1989, paired footage of the Apollo missions with audio from interviews with the NASA program\u2019s astronauts. \n\n\u201cFor All Mankind\u201d strives for poetry instead of drama and Mr. Eno lends atmospheric support, reinforcing the feelings of the sublime found in the images. Heard on its own, the soundtrack is a set of beautiful and quietly evocative music that sounds great in the background and also rewards close attention. \n\u201cApollo\u201d finds strength through simplicity. The phrase \u201cspace music\u201d might bring to mind psychedelia, something mind-altering that warps one\u2019s senses, but \u201cApollo\u201d is relatively grounded, a human-scale undertaking. Voyages to space put ordinary people into an extraordinary environment, and the soundtrack by Mr. Eno and his collaborators reflects intimate human experience rather than outsize technical achievement.\nSeveral of the pieces prominently feature the ethereal pedal steel guitar work of Mr. Lanois. The instrument, identified most closely with country and western music, evokes the wide-open spaces of rural America, which are often, as it happens, the best places for watching the stars. His curling guitar lines on tracks like \u201cWeightless\u201d and \u201cDeep Blue Day\u201d evoke both windswept prairies and bodies turning in zero gravity. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAl Reinert\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tom Stoddart/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAn Ending (Ascent),\u201d almost certainly the most well-known track of Mr. Eno\u2019s career, set a standard for textural radiance few have matched. Consisting off a thin, wavering drone moving gently through a descending melody, the piece has become cultural shorthand for emotionally overwhelming moments that transcend language\u2014see its use at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, during a segment paying tribute to the victims of that city\u2019s July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks. It has also been frequently used in film and on television. \nThe new music on the deluxe set appears under its own title, somewhat confusingly called \u201cFor All Mankind,\u201d even though this work had nothing to do with the film. The tracks were created individually by Brian Eno, Mr. Lanois and Roger Eno, and were edited and sequenced by Brian. \nAugmenting an album widely understood to be a classic decades after the fact is an unusual and risky move, but here it mostly works, enriching and extending the mood of the original. The opening selection, \u201cThe End of a Thin Cord,\u201d begins the set on a gorgeous note, with a delicate keyboard line that shifts between two notes set against a rumbling background. The contrast between the sounds paints a picture of a fragile life adrift. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cCapsule\u201d features guitar and organ cycling through a slowly winding series of chord changes, and it mirrors the subtle beauty of the 1983 LP. \u201cOver the Canaries,\u201d another of the lovelier pieces, consists mostly of single tones that hover and decay slowly, seeming to freeze The classic ambient album receives a reissue that includes a full disc of new material as gorgeous as the original record. ",
        "author": "Mark Richardson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Duster\u2019 Review: Back From Orbit (WSJ: Music Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2271",
        "date": "2019-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/duster-review-back-from-orbit-11575500790?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=62",
        "text": "Every once in a while a band grows its audience by ceasing operations entirely for a time and waiting for fans to catch up\u2014perhaps the scarcity of these artists after they disappear, when experienced during the overwhelming abundance of the digital era, makes them seem more valuable. American Football is one example\u201417 years passed between their 1999 debut and their second album, and in the interim they became a touchstone for a generation of groups who made thoughtful, intricate rock under the banner of \u201cemo.\u201d Duster, an indie rock band originally from San Jose, Calif., which is releasing its first collection of new material in 19 years on Dec. 13, is another group in this lineage. \nDuster plays space rock, a branch of psychedelic guitar music that favors repetition, looks to the cosmos for lyrical inspiration and unfolds at a tempo appropriate for zero gravity, inviting you to linger over every texture. Their sound is rumbling and sludgy, but with a tone that sets them apart from the alternative groups that were in vogue when they formed in 1996. Instead of sinking into the earthy muck like tunes from early grunge bands, their songs ascend to the heavens, infused with imagery about drifting through outer space. \nThe group, comprising multi-instrumentalists\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clay Parton,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Canaan Dove Amber\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jason Albertini,\n\n\n\n split around 2001 after two albums and an EP, with members going on to other projects. For a while, a few positive critical notices seemed to be the extent of Duster\u2019s legacy. But over this decade, the group steadily grew a cult following. Young bands who missed their initial run began citing them as an influence, and physical copies of their albums, which sold little upon release, began to command high prices. Late last year, Duster returned for reunion shows in front of audiences many times larger than they\u2019d seen the first time around, and they released a comprehensive boxed set. Now comes \u201cDuster\u201d (Muddguts), their third LP. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNot much about Duster has changed. The new album seems dislodged from time, as if it could have come out in 2001, the year after their last release, \u201cContemporary Movement.\u201d Space imagery is still prominent\u2014\u201cCopernicus Crater,\u201d the opening track, begins with a repeating guitar riff that feels like a siren, or maybe an alert from a cockpit\u2019s instrument panel. It\u2019s a jolt that serves as an invitation to enter Duster\u2019s peculiar sonic world, a place where meaning is derived from sounds more than words. \n\nTake \u201cChocolate and Mint,\u201d one of many tracks where the vocals are so buried the lyrics are difficult to make out, and with a title that gives nothing away. Songs like it and \u201cSummer War\u201d don\u2019t describe isolation and alienation, they embody it, and having the words submerged under the guitar distortion enhances these feelings. With these songs, you are never sure if disappearing from the world to voyage through the stars is supposed to be comforting or frightening, and Duster\u2019s music hovers in that liminal zone.\nWhile the technology of interstellar travel implies precision, Duster has always been appealingly loose. The drum parts feature splashing percussion heavy on cymbals, with snare hits that suggest a pulse without necessarily sticking to it. Guitar strums linger behind the beat, as if weighing the songs down, to make sure they don\u2019t go by too quickly. And the recording has a distinct sense of place\u2014\u201cI\u2019m Lost\u201d is one of many songs here that sounds like three people playing in a single room, or perhaps a garage, instead of a studio. Heard in what seems like a cramped space, the buzzing guitar cuts through the din and the central riff is hypnotic, while the drums tumble forward like a lunar rover with a bum wheel crunching over moon rocks. \nDuster is about mood and feeling rather than technical precision. While there are no flashy solos that might be fashioned into radio-ready songs, memorable arrangements abound. \u201cGhost World\u201d clangs and surges forward noisily, guitar and voice tracing the simple chorus melody in tandem. On \u201cLomo,\u201d they add a strummed acoustic to the mix, crafting a weird kind of astral folk that reaches a peak of beauty when a solo line of gently sculpted feedback closes out the tune. \n\u201cDuster\u201d is a very solid introduction to the band\u2019s style and as good a place as any to begin an exploration of their aesthetic. And for those who have followed the arc of the band, it\u2019s amazing that it exists at all. Trying to predict the future of Duster seems foolish given their progression to this point, and who knows if we will hear another record from them. But \u201cDuster\u201d makes their story seem complete, as if they had something inside of them all along that more people should have noticed the first time.\n\u2014Mr. Richardson is the Journal\u2019s rock and pop music critic. Follow him on Twitter @MarkRichardson. After a nearly two-decade absence, the band returns with a self-titled album that serves as an excellent introduction to their space-rock sound. ",
        "author": "Mark Richardson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye Owns Three Coffee Machines and Over 500 Bow Ties (WSJ: My Monday Morning) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2272",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-nye-owns-three-coffee-machines-and-over-500-bow-ties-11620021485?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=23",
        "text": "Nye, who started his professional life as an engineer and then a stand-up comic, became famous for the children\u2019s show Bill Nye the Science Guy that aired on PBS in the \u201990s. He\u2019s known for distilling scientific concepts into terms almost anyone can understand, aided by his irreverent sense of humor and endearing enthusiasm. He now has a podcast, Science Rules! With Bill Nye and has released bestselling books that include Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World and Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap Into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem.. In March, Peacock announced a forthcoming series hosted and executive produced by Nye called The End Is Nye, on earthly disasters and threats. He\u2019s also the CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy organization that works to advance space exploration and science. Right now he\u2019s based in Los Angeles, and he also has a place in New York. Here, he speaks to WSJ. about one of his few regrets in life and the book he thinks everyone should read.\nWhat time do you get up on Mondays? What\u2019s the first thing you do after waking up?\n\n\nI get up a little after 7. Of course, we have goals, we dream of getting up at 5:30 and getting a bunch of things done. What I generally do is watch the first few minutes, recorded, of CBS This Morning. Because I\u2019m an old man and that\u2019s how I get my news.\nAre you one of those \u201cfour hours a night is all I need!\u201d people with sleep, or do you need a minimum to recharge?\nI\u2019ve got to get sleep. I have few regrets but one of them is I pulled an all-nighter in college. It just didn\u2019t work. I screwed up the final exam. It was a disaster. [My minimum is] seven [hours]. But I get more than that usually.\nWhat do you eat for breakfast to start the week off right?\u00a0\nQuite often I\u2019ll have a scone made with Fisher Scones mix. This is a Pacific Northwest product. Why it hasn\u2019t taken over the world, I don\u2019t know. This is a shortbread. You just add water and it comes out perfectly every flipping time. If you want, you can flour the deck and roll it out and let it rise a little bit and fold it and make these beautiful triangles. You can put it in a triangular scone pan; I\u2019ve done that many times. But this morning it was just the drop style, two spoons or two rubber spatulas onto the cookie sheet, in the oven at 425 degrees for 17 minutes.\u00a0\nDuring the pandemic, I\u2019ve gotten really into bread making. I won\u2019t say it\u2019s the simplest thing in the world, but it\u2019s not that hard. It\u2019s four things: flour, water, yeast and salt. [Chef and cookbook author] Ken Forkish, bless his heart, takes 80 pages to get to the recipe\u2014about his life journey and leaving Silicon Valley\u2026OK, man\u2014but if you follow his ratio, boom, it comes out just dead-on.\u00a0\nDo you take any vitamins?\nNo. There\u2019s a lot of evidence that vitamins produce expensive urine, with one important exception: women and iron.\u00a0\nHow many bow ties do you have?\nIt\u2019s over 500. They accumulate, and they don\u2019t wear out. You have to tie a tie a lot to wear it out. I love them, I take care of them. I have them displayed. That\u2019s part of the d\u00e9cor of my bedroom, the many ties. They do not slip into the soup. They do not flop into the flask in the laboratory, and that is of great value. I started wearing them, and it just became a thing.\nDo you have a time management or efficiency hack?\nMy whole world is checklists. I was at the hardware store, there\u2019s a checklist. Yesterday during\u00a0 the podcast, there\u2019s a checklist. Everything is a checklist. It helps you remember to do things. And there\u2019s the great satisfaction of checking off.\u00a0\nWhat do you do for exercise?\nDuring the pandemic, I\u2019d walk about four and a half miles every morning. I like to ride bikes outdoors. I ride in Central Park, and when I\u2019m in Los Angeles I ride on Mulholland Drive and people say, Mulholland Drive?? I\u2019ve ridden bikes in traffic for years and years, I\u2019m very comfortable with it. I always have flashing lights.\u00a0\nI worked with a personal trainer in Los Angeles before the pandemic and I look forward to going back and seeing him again\u2014Jesse Rafalski, he\u2019s a genius\u2014but he created a sequence of workouts that I do on my own. We\u2019re talking about lifting weights, dead lifts, shrugs, chest flys, chest press, military press\u2014conventional weight lifting\u2014and then a lot of push-ups. And every day, people, you do crunches. I do three sets of 60 crunches, usually with weights in my hands.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Katie McCurdy\n \n\n\n\nWhat have you been reading and watching lately?\nI watched The Queen\u2019s Gambit. OK, OK. An orphan became an addict, really good at chess. OK. Shot beautifully. OK. I didn\u2019t get hooked on it, is what I\u2019m saying. I\u2019ve known over the years several extremely good chess players, and some of them are that intense, and other people are like, Eh, let\u2019s play some rock \u2019n\u2019 roll and play a little chess. I haven\u2019t met somebody in betw The Science Guy also tells us about not taking vitamins and why we all might be descendants of Martians. ",
        "author": "Lane Florsheim"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye Owns Three Coffee Machines and Over 500 Bow Ties (WSJ: My Monday Morning) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2273",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-nye-owns-three-coffee-machines-and-over-500-bow-ties-11620021485?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=23",
        "text": "Nye, who started his professional life as an engineer and then a stand-up comic, became famous for the children\u2019s show Bill Nye the Science Guy that aired on PBS in the \u201990s. He\u2019s known for distilling scientific concepts into terms almost anyone can understand, aided by his irreverent sense of humor and endearing enthusiasm. He now has a podcast, Science Rules! With Bill Nye and has released bestselling books that include Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World and Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap Into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem.. In March, Peacock announced a forthcoming series hosted and executive produced by Nye called The End Is Nye, on earthly disasters and threats. He\u2019s also the CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy organization that works to advance space exploration and science. Right now he\u2019s based in Los Angeles, and he also has a place in New York. Here, he speaks to WSJ. about one of his few regrets in life and the book he thinks everyone should read.\n\n\n\n\nWhat time do you get up on Mondays? What\u2019s the first thing you do after waking up?\n\n\nI get up a little after 7. Of course, we have goals, we dream of getting up at 5:30 and getting a bunch of things done. What I generally do is watch the first few minutes, recorded, of CBS This Morning. Because I\u2019m an old man and that\u2019s how I get my news.\nAre you one of those \u201cfour hours a night is all I need!\u201d people with sleep, or do you need a minimum to recharge?\nI\u2019ve got to get sleep. I have few regrets but one of them is I pulled an all-nighter in college. It just didn\u2019t work. I screwed up the final exam. It was a disaster. [My minimum is] seven [hours]. But I get more than that usually.\nWhat do you eat for breakfast to start the week off right?\u00a0\nQuite often I\u2019ll have a scone made with Fisher Scones mix. This is a Pacific Northwest product. Why it hasn\u2019t taken over the world, I don\u2019t know. This is a shortbread. You just add water and it comes out perfectly every flipping time. If you want, you can flour the deck and roll it out and let it rise a little bit and fold it and make these beautiful triangles. You can put it in a triangular scone pan; I\u2019ve done that many times. But this morning it was just the drop style, two spoons or two rubber spatulas onto the cookie sheet, in the oven at 425 degrees for 17 minutes.\u00a0\nDuring the pandemic, I\u2019ve gotten really into bread making. I won\u2019t say it\u2019s the simplest thing in the world, but it\u2019s not that hard. It\u2019s four things: flour, water, yeast and salt. [Chef and cookbook author] Ken Forkish, bless his heart, takes 80 pages to get to the recipe\u2014about his life journey and leaving Silicon Valley\u2026OK, man\u2014but if you follow his ratio, boom, it comes out just dead-on.\u00a0\nDo you take any vitamins?\nNo. There\u2019s a lot of evidence that vitamins produce expensive urine, with one important exception: women and iron.\u00a0\nHow many bow ties do you have?\nIt\u2019s over 500. They accumulate, and they don\u2019t wear out. You have to tie a tie a lot to wear it out. I love them, I take care of them. I have them displayed. That\u2019s part of the d\u00e9cor of my bedroom, the many ties. They do not slip into the soup. They do not flop into the flask in the laboratory, and that is of great value. I started wearing them, and it just became a thing.\nDo you have a time management or efficiency hack?\nMy whole world is checklists. I was at the hardware store, there\u2019s a checklist. Yesterday during\u00a0 the podcast, there\u2019s a checklist. Everything is a checklist. It helps you remember to do things. And there\u2019s the great satisfaction of checking off.\u00a0\nWhat do you do for exercise?\nDuring the pandemic, I\u2019d walk about four and a half miles every morning. I like to ride bikes outdoors. I ride in Central Park, and when I\u2019m in Los Angeles I ride on Mulholland Drive and people say, Mulholland Drive?? I\u2019ve ridden bikes in traffic for years and years, I\u2019m very comfortable with it. I always have flashing lights.\u00a0\nI worked with a personal trainer in Los Angeles before the pandemic and I look forward to going back and seeing him again\u2014Jesse Rafalski, he\u2019s a genius\u2014but he created a sequence of workouts that I do on my own. We\u2019re talking about lifting weights, dead lifts, shrugs, chest flys, chest press, military press\u2014conventional weight lifting\u2014and then a lot of push-ups. And every day, people, you do crunches. I do three sets of 60 crunches, usually with weights in my hands.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Katie McCurdy\n \n\n\n\nWhat have you been reading and watching lately?\nI watched The Queen\u2019s Gambit. OK, OK. An orphan became an addict, really good at chess. OK. Shot beautifully. OK. I didn\u2019t get hooked on it, is what I\u2019m saying. I\u2019ve known over the years several extremely good chess players, and some of them are that intense, and other people are like, Eh, let\u2019s play some rock \u2019n\u2019 roll and play a little chess. I haven\u2019t met somebody in between, who\u2019s really good at chess.\nI love Trevor Noah, he\u2019s my guy. And Saturday Night Live, man, did you see the bit with the Minnesota newscast? Gosh, it was perfect.\u00a0\nI just finished These Truths: A History of the United States,\u00a0by Jill Lepore. Everyone should read that book. It\u2019s really good. It just shows you that racism in the United States goes back to, pick a number, 1600. We\u2019re still dealing with it.\u00a0\nIs there one scientific problem that hasn\u2019t been solved that keeps you up at night?\u00a0\nA science problem is, Are we alone in the universe? It\u2019s very reasonable that in our lifetime, we will find evidence of life on another world. If we found evidence of life on Mars, what geologists call stromatolite or fossilized pond scum turned to rock, it is reasonable\u2014not proven, not disproven\u2014that life started on Mars about a billion years before it started on Earth\u2026. Mars gets hit with stuff all the time\u2014and you can buy Mars rocks on the internet because they land here on Earth\u2026. Maybe life started on Mars and then through this impact landed here on Earth, and you and I are descendants of Martians. It really is an amazing hypothesis, you can\u2019t rule it out.\u00a0\nBut then an engineering problem, which is using science to make things: Can we electrify all transportation? Can we take carbon dioxide out of the air? That really does keep me awake at night. I mean, look at how much trouble you had getting people to take a vaccine against a disease that was killing them\u2026. We don\u2019t want to have another pandemic. We don\u2019t want to lose all this biodiversity we\u2019re losing by trashing everything. And we\u2019ve got to address climate change. That keeps me up.\nWhat\u2019s one piece of advice you\u2019ve gotten that\u2019s guided you?\nEverybody you\u2019ll ever meet knows something you don\u2019t. Even people you don\u2019t really like that well know something you don\u2019t. That\u2019s part of our problem right now in the U.S., the divisiveness. We have to respect the other person\u2019s story. Each of us is the hero in our own life story.\nThis interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The Science Guy also tells us about not taking vitamins and why we all might be descendants of Martians. ",
        "author": "Lane Florsheim"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye Owns Three Coffee Machines and Over 500 Bow Ties (WSJ: My Monday Morning) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2274",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-nye-owns-three-coffee-machines-and-over-500-bow-ties-11620021485?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=31",
        "text": "Nye, who started his professional life as an engineer and then a stand-up comic, became famous for the children\u2019s show Bill Nye the Science Guy that aired on PBS in the \u201990s. He\u2019s known for distilling scientific concepts into terms almost anyone can understand, aided by his irreverent sense of humor and endearing enthusiasm. He now has a podcast, Science Rules! With Bill Nye and has released bestselling books that include Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World and Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap Into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem.. In March, Peacock announced a forthcoming series hosted and executive produced by Nye called The End Is Nye, on earthly disasters and threats. He\u2019s also the CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy organization that works to advance space exploration and science. Right now he\u2019s based in Los Angeles, and he also has a place in New York. Here, he speaks to WSJ. about one of his few regrets in life and the book he thinks everyone should read.\nWhat time do you get up on Mondays? What\u2019s the first thing you do after waking up?\n\n\nI get up a little after 7. Of course, we have goals, we dream of getting up at 5:30 and getting a bunch of things done. What I generally do is watch the first few minutes, recorded, of CBS This Morning. Because I\u2019m an old man and that\u2019s how I get my news.\nAre you one of those \u201cfour hours a night is all I need!\u201d people with sleep, or do you need a minimum to recharge?\nI\u2019ve got to get sleep. I have few regrets but one of them is I pulled an all-nighter in college. It just didn\u2019t work. I screwed up the final exam. It was a disaster. [My minimum is] seven [hours]. But I get more than that usually.\nWhat do you eat for breakfast to start the week off right?\u00a0\nQuite often I\u2019ll have a scone made with Fisher Scones mix. This is a Pacific Northwest product. Why it hasn\u2019t taken over the world, I don\u2019t know. This is a shortbread. You just add water and it comes out perfectly every flipping time. If you want, you can flour the deck and roll it out and let it rise a little bit and fold it and make these beautiful triangles. You can put it in a triangular scone pan; I\u2019ve done that many times. But this morning it was just the drop style, two spoons or two rubber spatulas onto the cookie sheet, in the oven at 425 degrees for 17 minutes.\u00a0\nDuring the pandemic, I\u2019ve gotten really into bread making. I won\u2019t say it\u2019s the simplest thing in the world, but it\u2019s not that hard. It\u2019s four things: flour, water, yeast and salt. [Chef and cookbook author] Ken Forkish, bless his heart, takes 80 pages to get to the recipe\u2014about his life journey and leaving Silicon Valley\u2026OK, man\u2014but if you follow his ratio, boom, it comes out just dead-on.\u00a0\nDo you take any vitamins?\nNo. There\u2019s a lot of evidence that vitamins produce expensive urine, with one important exception: women and iron.\u00a0\nHow many bow ties do you have?\nIt\u2019s over 500. They accumulate, and they don\u2019t wear out. You have to tie a tie a lot to wear it out. I love them, I take care of them. I have them displayed. That\u2019s part of the d\u00e9cor of my bedroom, the many ties. They do not slip into the soup. They do not flop into the flask in the laboratory, and that is of great value. I started wearing them, and it just became a thing.\nDo you have a time management or efficiency hack?\nMy whole world is checklists. I was at the hardware store, there\u2019s a checklist. Yesterday during\u00a0 the podcast, there\u2019s a checklist. Everything is a checklist. It helps you remember to do things. And there\u2019s the great satisfaction of checking off.\u00a0\nWhat do you do for exercise?\nDuring the pandemic, I\u2019d walk about four and a half miles every morning. I like to ride bikes outdoors. I ride in Central Park, and when I\u2019m in Los Angeles I ride on Mulholland Drive and people say, Mulholland Drive?? I\u2019ve ridden bikes in traffic for years and years, I\u2019m very comfortable with it. I always have flashing lights.\u00a0\nI worked with a personal trainer in Los Angeles before the pandemic and I look forward to going back and seeing him again\u2014Jesse Rafalski, he\u2019s a genius\u2014but he created a sequence of workouts that I do on my own. We\u2019re talking about lifting weights, dead lifts, shrugs, chest flys, chest press, military press\u2014conventional weight lifting\u2014and then a lot of push-ups. And every day, people, you do crunches. I do three sets of 60 crunches, usually with weights in my hands.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Katie McCurdy\n \n\n\n\nWhat have you been reading and watching lately?\nI watched The Queen\u2019s Gambit. OK, OK. An orphan became an addict, really good at chess. OK. Shot beautifully. OK. I didn\u2019t get hooked on it, is what I\u2019m saying. I\u2019ve known over the years several extremely good chess players, and some of them are that intense, and other people are like, Eh, let\u2019s play some rock \u2019n\u2019 roll and play a little chess. I haven\u2019t met somebody in betw The Science Guy also tells us about not taking vitamins and why we all might be descendants of Martians. ",
        "author": "Lane Florsheim"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 1950 Studebaker Design Nerds Go Gaga Over (WSJ: My Ride) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2275",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1950-studebaker-design-nerds-go-gaga-over-1490102963?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=99",
        "text": "Photos: A Studebaker, No. 1 With a Bullet NoseA California executive shows off her 1950 Champion, a car famous in the industrial design community\u00a0\u00a0The 1950 Studebaker Champion owned by Tracey Smith, an executive vice president at Carroll Shelby International, which she bought on eBay for $3,000 in 2006.David Walter Banks for The Wall Street Journal1 of 9\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 9Hide CaptionThe 1950 Studebaker Champion owned by Tracey Smith, an executive vice president at Carroll Shelby International, which she bought on eBay for $3,000 in 2006.David Walter Banks for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\nWhen the car showed up at my house on a transporter, it was a disaster. It had been sitting on this nice old man\u2019s lawn in Oregon for years. It took months to restore the car so it could become, for a time, my daily driver.\nThe Champion \u201cbullet nose\u201d (named for the chrome bullet on the front) has a unique place in auto history. It was only built for two model years, and it was designed by the firm of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Raymond Loewy.\n\n\n\n Loewy is often called the father of industrial design. He is known for the logos of Exxon, Shell and Lucky Strike cigarettes. He designed the paint job on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy\u2019s\n\n\n\n Air Force One, and even helped design the interior of America\u2019s first space station.\n\n\nFor me, his most enduring design remains the bullet nose. The car was built soon after World War II. It was a new age of aviation, and the nose was inspired by aircraft. The joke about these strangely designed Studebakers has always been that you cannot tell if the car is coming or going, because, from the profile, you can\u2019t tell which side is the front or back. You could slap the headlights on either end.\nOne year, just before Christmas, my car went missing from the garage where I work. My boss\u2014the late\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carroll Shelby,\n\n\n\n an automotive icon\u2014took the car, pulled out the engine and had it restored, as a gift. It was such a sweet thing to do, and it made the car even more special. \nDriving the car requires an upper-body workout. Parallel parking in L.A. is like doing Pilates. But that\u2019s part of the Champion\u2019s charm. It takes a while to get her going. But when you do, she floats down the road.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018I love unusual cars,\u2019 says Ms. Smith, who also owns a 2000 BMW M Coupe, a car nicknamed \u2018The Clown Shoe\u2019 because of its quirky shape.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Walter Banks for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\u2014Contact A.J. Baime at facebook.com/ajbaime.\n\n\nMore From My Ride\n\n\n\n\nHer Lamborghini Is a Blur in the Arizona Desert\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nThis Classic Chevy Pickup Is an Heirloom on Wheels\nFebruary 26, 2022 \n\n\nA Spaceship Car Is Ready for Liftoff\nFebruary 19, 2022 \n\n\nYou Took a Bus to High School. He Took a Rocket.\nFebruary 12, 2022 \n\n\nForget Ferrari, This Fashion Designer Has Zero Apologies for His Honda\nFebruary 5, 2022 The tiny Champion with the bullet nose came from industrial design giant Raymond Loewy. ",
        "author": "A.J. Baime"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Work of Art in Eric Haze\u2019s Garage (WSJ: My Ride) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2276",
        "date": "2021-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-work-of-art-in-eric-hazes-garage-11618063200?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=22",
        "text": "For many reasons, it was a gem. It was completely original, rust-free, original paint and interior. The downside: It was in pieces. The fenders were off, the hood was off, the drivetrain wasn\u2019t completed and the seats were out.\n\n\n\n\nPhotos: A Canvas on Four WheelsEric Haze shows off his 1962 Plymouth Savoy.\u00a0\u00a0Eric Haze and his 1962 Plymouth Savoy. This iteration of the Savoy appeared in showrooms right around when Mr. Haze was born\u2014October 1961.Adrienne Grunwald for The Wall Street Journal1 of 10\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 10Hide CaptionEric Haze and his 1962 Plymouth Savoy. This iteration of the Savoy appeared in showrooms right around when Mr. Haze was born\u2014October 1961.Adrienne Grunwald for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\nNow, to understand why this car was so appealing to me, let me take you back to my childhood in Manhattan. I have been a freak for anything on wheels in motion since I was a kid. My friends and I built and traded bicycles up until we were driving. I had my first car at 18\u2014a Datsun 240Z, the poor man\u2019s \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Porsche\n\n\n back then. My friends and I developed a passion for Chrysler and Plymouth Super Stock cars, from 1962 to 1965. [Plymouth was a division of Chrysler, and Super Stock is a production car modified for performance, by the factory itself.] The year 1962 was a transitional year in which American car companies began engaging in a racetrack-driven competition for speed, design and sales. Chrysler and Plymouth cars were class leaders, and their heritage speaks for itself. I have owned and restored many of these cars. I belonged to a Chrysler and Plymouth car club with guys from around the five boroughs. Now this specific Plymouth Savoy appealed to me for another reason: It would have been a new model in showrooms when I was born, in October 1961. After hitting it off with the owner, I made an insulting offer on the premise that I would pick up the car, pack it up and take it away hassle free. Once the deal was struck, I figured that the most cost-effective way to get it to New York was to buy a cargo van in Fresno. I flew out, and the owner of the 1962 Plymouth picked me up in that van. I packed the van with all the parts and shipped both vehicles to the auto shop I have been using for over a decade\u2014SourKrauts Automotive in Walden, N.Y. I became the creative director while the guys who had more skill and space did much of the work. We sent everything out for rechroming and replating. I didn\u2019t want to build just another white Plymouth. As an artist and designer, I am known for a black, white and gray palette [Mr. Haze has designed uniforms for the NBA\u2019s Brooklyn Nets, in those colors], so we did a show-quality paint job in those colors. I spent years finding new old stock parts [new parts for this 1962 car that had never been used], some of which I had to wait two years to receive. We started the project in 2016 and finished it in 2019. I even restored the cargo van, too. I have since bought another 1964 Dodge Hemi 330\u2014another car on my bucket list. To me, there is not much difference between collecting art and collecting cars. I get almost as much joy looking at them and having them as part of my art collection as I do driving them. Write to A.J. Baime at myride@wsj.com Corrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tEric Haze is 59 years old. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is 60 years old. (Corrected on April 13) \n\n\nMore From My Ride\n\n\n\n\nHer Lamborghini Is a Blur in the Arizona Desert\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nThis Classic Chevy Pickup Is an Heirloom on Wheels\nFebruary 26, 2022 \n\n\nA Spaceship Car Is Ready for Liftoff\nFebruary 19, 2022 \n\n\nYou Took a Bus to High School. He Took a Rocket.\nFebruary 12, 2022 \n\n\nForget Ferrari, This Fashion Designer Has Zero Apologies for His Honda\nFebruary 5, 2022 The New York artist fed his passion for Super Stock cars by restoring his 1962 Plymouth Savoy in his trademark black, white and gray color scheme. \u201cFor many reasons, it was a gem.\u201d ",
        "author": "A.J. Baime"
    },
    {
        "title": "This 1964 Vintage Truck Makes a Grammy Nominee Feel Like a Kid on Christmas (WSJ: My Ride) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2277",
        "date": "2021-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-1964-vintage-truck-makes-a-grammy-nominee-feel-like-a-kid-on-christmas-11639839601?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=2",
        "text": "Built to be able to leave the road behind, the Scout 80 has four-wheel drive and a high ground clearance.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDavid Crowder, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter living in Atlanta, in his 1964 International Harvester Scout 80.\n\n\n\nThe story starts when I was a little kid, growing up in Texas. I was riding with my great uncle on an International Harvester tractor, and I thought that it was the coolest tractor I\u2019d ever seen. When I was a little older, I promised myself that, if I ever could afford it, I was going to get a little International Harvester something-something. Then I discovered Raymond Loewy, who has been a big influence in my life. Loewy is known as the father of industrial design. He designed everything from the Shell and Exxon logos, to cars, to the interior of space capsules. He also designed tractors for International Harvester and created the logo. His philosophy was that you can have a thing that has to do a job well, but it can also be aesthetically pleasing. Whether it\u2019s a tractor or a refrigerator: Why not make it beautiful? He brought that magic to International Harvester, which was a heartland manufacturer of tractors and trucks. [The company still exists today as part of Case IH, a manufacturer of farming equipment.] I had been looking for an International Harvester truck from my birth year of 1971. But one day back in 2013, I found this 1964 Scout 80 in an ad in the Phoenix area. It so happened I was on tour with my band and we were in Mesa, Ariz. I thought, \u201cHey, this guy is local! What are the chances of that?\u201d So I hit him up. His dealership was two blocks from the theater where we were playing that night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe black wheels aren\u2019t original to the vehicle. They were put on by the previous owner.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sparse instrument panel tells you a lot about this truck. It was meant for rough roads or no roads, not luxury motoring.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis Scout 80's 350 cubic-inch engine. Mr. Crowder replaced the old carburetors with fuel injection.\n\n\n\nI went over there. The dealership was full of high-end stuff, but here was this old Scout 80 in traditional International Harvester red. The guy told me it was his son\u2019s run-around-town vehicle and his \u201cdesert toy,\u201d but that he was ready to sell it. I loved it the moment I saw it. It was just before Christmas, and here was this red truck\u2014the same International Harvester red as the tractor I remember riding on with my great uncle when I was a kid. I called my wife and said, \u201cHey, you just bought me a Christmas present. Thank you!\u201d I told her what it was and she said, \u201cMerry Christmas. Enjoy!\u201d We had that truck shipped to our home in Atlanta, and let me tell you, the day it arrived was a good day. Since then, I\u2019ve done a lot of maintenance and replaced the old carburetors on the 350 engine [not original to this truck] with fuel injection, because I wanted to make the Scout more road-ready. I putt around town in it and have gotten it dirty off-road a few times. One of the things I love most about it is that every time I take it out, I end up meeting and talking to strangers who want to share stories about their past and some vehicle they loved.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n'Every time I look at it,' Mr. Crowder says of his 1964 International Harvester Scout 80, 'it reminds me of the Christmas season, even in the summer.'\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s funny\u2014when I was growing up, my father was an insurance man, and he always said never buy a red vehicle, because that ups the chances of getting a speeding ticket. But this truck is so perfectly red. Every time I look at it, it reminds me of the Christmas season, even in the summer.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFirst launched in model year 1961, the International Harvester Scout is known today for helping to launch the SUV phenomenon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Arvin Temkar for the Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\u2014Write to A.J. Baime at myride@wsj.com.\n\n\nMy Ride\n\n\n\n\nHer Lamborghini Is a Blur in the Arizona Desert\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nThis Classic Chevy Pickup Is an Heirloom on Wheels\nFebruary 26, 2022 \n\n\nA Spaceship Car Is Ready for Liftoff\nFebruary 19, 2022 \n\n\nYou Took a Bus to High School. He Took a Rocket.\nFebruary 12, 2022 \n\n\nForget Ferrari, This Fashion Designer Has Zero Apologies for His Honda\nFebruary 5, 2022 David Crowder, 50, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter living in Atlanta, on his 1964 International Harvester Scout 80 ",
        "author": "A.J. Baime | Arvin Temkar for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Video: Richard Branson Announces Plan for Space Trip Before Jeff Bezos (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2278",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/video-richard-branson-announces-plan-for-space-trip-before-jeff-bezos/BED84CF4-E503-408F-A5A6-0FCECD4B9BE8.html?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=7",
        "text": " Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson announced Thursday that he plans to head to space with two pilots and three other mission specialists on July 11, nine days before outgoing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos\u2019s scheduled trip on a Blue Origin spacecraft. Screenshot: Virgin Galactic ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA's Perseverance Rover Rockets Toward Mars (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2279",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/nasa-perseverance-rover-rockets-toward-mars/4C398399-528B-49F9-B660-828D3FC31404.html?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=11",
        "text": " The $2.7 billion Perseverance rover spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a 300-million-mile journey to Mars. The vehicle, equipped with cameras, computers and experiments, will search for signs of past life. Photo: John Raoux/AP ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches Cargo Resupply Mission to ISS (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2280",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-successfully-launches-cargo-resupply-mission-to-iss/FAE2B299-78DB-404E-AEB2-3C8DEF63EEF0.html?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=10",
        "text": " After a delay due to inclement weather, SpaceX had a successful launch for its cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to autonomously dock to the station\u2019s Harmony module Monday afternoon. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches Cargo Resupply Mission to ISS (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2281",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-successfully-launches-cargo-resupply-mission-to-iss/FAE2B299-78DB-404E-AEB2-3C8DEF63EEF0.html?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=37",
        "text": " After a delay due to inclement weather, SpaceX had a successful launch for its cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to autonomously dock to the station\u2019s Harmony module Monday afternoon. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches Cargo Resupply Mission to ISS (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2282",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-successfully-launches-cargo-resupply-mission-to-iss/FAE2B299-78DB-404E-AEB2-3C8DEF63EEF0.html?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=42",
        "text": " After a delay due to inclement weather, SpaceX had a successful launch for its cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to autonomously dock to the station\u2019s Harmony module Monday afternoon. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Chinese Astronauts\u2019 First Spacewalk Outside New Space Station (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2283",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-chinese-astronauts-first-spacewalk-outside-new-space-station/3EBD1CB1-DA80-4D4F-85A8-D9EA7048799A.html?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=27",
        "text": " Two Chinese astronauts completed their first spacewalk outside China\u2019s new Tiangong space station Sunday, the first of two scheduled during their three-month mission. Screenshot: CCTV ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Departs Space Station Carrying Astronauts Back Home (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2284",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-capsule-departs-space-station-carrying-astronauts-back-home/29E76E35-7EB7-4D99-AB79-F38FD0D3CE13.html?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=14",
        "text": " The SpaceX Dragon capsule is bringing two NASA astronauts back to Earth after Elon Musk\u2019s company made the first commercial trip to orbit. Photo: Associated Press ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Departs Space Station Carrying Astronauts Back Home (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2285",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-capsule-departs-space-station-carrying-astronauts-back-home/29E76E35-7EB7-4D99-AB79-F38FD0D3CE13.html?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=49",
        "text": " The SpaceX Dragon capsule is bringing two NASA astronauts back to Earth after Elon Musk\u2019s company made the first commercial trip to orbit. Photo: Associated Press ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Video: SpaceX Launches Pre-Used Rocket Carrying NASA Astronauts (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2286",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/video-spacex-launches-pre-used-rocket-carrying-nasa-astronauts/C4E666BE-026D-4A37-A68C-329BA3B07511.html?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=31",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched its Crew-2 mission to the International Space Station, achieving a takeoff with both a pre-used capsule and rocket for the first time as it sent four astronauts, two from NASA, into orbit. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Capsule Arrives at International Space Station With NASA Crew (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2287",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-capsule-arrives-at-international-space-station-with-nasa-crew/0103B5D0-E83E-416D-B4B9-AE8EB70FCF76.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=38",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX capsule successfully arrived at the International Space Station with four NASA astronauts. The mission marks the company\u2019s first full-fledged trip with humans and the start of regularly scheduled commercial flights to the station. Photo: AFP/Getty Image ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Zhurong Rover Lands on Mars (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2288",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/chinas-zhurong-rover-lands-on-mars/78F7007D-85A5-453C-91F7-06621685C128.html?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=30",
        "text": " China\u2019s Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars early Saturday, according to Chinese state media, marking a milestone in the country\u2019s ambitious space program. China is the third nation after the U.S. and the Soviet Union to land on the red planet. Photo illustration: Beijing Aerospace Control Center ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Test Flight Ends in Explosion, Again (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2289",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacexs-starship-test-flight-ends-in-explosion-again/157BCB22-1159-462B-98CF-9D9B742B0051?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=9",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototype crash-landed during a second test flight. About two months earlier, Elon Musk\u2019s company launched the spacecraft, which landed in an equally explosive fireball. Photo: Gene Blevins/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Starship Crashes on Landing After Test Flight (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2290",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacex-starship-crashes-on-landing-after-test-flight/2FF5BD1A-9E28-4D82-BDAA-6E974A22573E?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=10",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s prototype Starship spacecraft exploded on landing after a high-altitude test flight on Wednesday. Photo: SpaceX/AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Starship Crashes on Landing After Test Flight (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2291",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacex-starship-crashes-on-landing-after-test-flight/2FF5BD1A-9E28-4D82-BDAA-6E974A22573E?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=37",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s prototype Starship spacecraft exploded on landing after a high-altitude test flight on Wednesday. Photo: SpaceX/AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Starship Crashes on Landing After Test Flight (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2292",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacex-starship-crashes-on-landing-after-test-flight/2FF5BD1A-9E28-4D82-BDAA-6E974A22573E?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=41",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s prototype Starship spacecraft exploded on landing after a high-altitude test flight on Wednesday. Photo: SpaceX/AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-2 Astronauts Return to Earth After Nearly 200 Days in Orbit (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2293",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacex-crew-2-astronauts-return-to-earth-after-nearly-200-days-in-orbit/C6F6C21E-9410-4BF1-B1E8-9775DFDFC803?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=3",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday. The capsule carried four astronauts who had been in space for about 200 days. Photo: AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-2 Astronauts Return to Earth After Nearly 200 Days in Orbit (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2294",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacex-crew-2-astronauts-return-to-earth-after-nearly-200-days-in-orbit/C6F6C21E-9410-4BF1-B1E8-9775DFDFC803?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=17",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday. The capsule carried four astronauts who had been in space for about 200 days. Photo: AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Sends Film Crew to Space to Make Movie, Ahead of Tom Cruise, NASA (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2295",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/russia-sends-film-crew-to-space-to-make-movie-ahead-of-tom-cruise-nasa/C2380E77-BD87-4145-92CB-27F783F5753F?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=4",
        "text": " A Russian film crew was launched to the International Space Station on Tuesday to make the world\u2019s first movie in orbit. The Russian space agency is getting in ahead of NASA, which last year said it would work with Tom Cruise to film aboard the spacecraft. Photo: AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Launches Japanese Billionaire Into Orbit, Rebooting Space Tourism (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2296",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/russia-launches-japanese-billionaire-into-orbit-rebooting-space-tourism/535868D8-B367-472E-A662-30DEB96DDA19?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=2",
        "text": " On Wednesday, Russia restarted its space tourism program after more than a decade by sending Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station. He is also the first paying passenger to book a SpaceX flight around the moon, scheduled for 2023. Photo Composite: Emily Siu ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Test Fires Boeing-Built Moon Rocket (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2297",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/nasa-test-fires-boeing-built-moon-rocket/05FA68B7-B3F5-4BF1-860E-C43ADABDE886?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=8",
        "text": " Boeing\u2019s moon rocket passed an important NASA test, setting the stage for an uncrewed lunar mission planned for November and eventual return to the moon with astronauts.  Photo: Robert Markowitz/NASA/AFP/Getty Image ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Test Fires Boeing-Built Moon Rocket (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2298",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/nasa-test-fires-boeing-built-moon-rocket/05FA68B7-B3F5-4BF1-860E-C43ADABDE886?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=32",
        "text": " Boeing\u2019s moon rocket passed an important NASA test, setting the stage for an uncrewed lunar mission planned for November and eventual return to the moon with astronauts.  Photo: Robert Markowitz/NASA/AFP/Getty Image ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Test Fires Boeing-Built Moon Rocket (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2299",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/nasa-test-fires-boeing-built-moon-rocket/05FA68B7-B3F5-4BF1-860E-C43ADABDE886?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=34",
        "text": " Boeing\u2019s moon rocket passed an important NASA test, setting the stage for an uncrewed lunar mission planned for November and eventual return to the moon with astronauts.  Photo: Robert Markowitz/NASA/AFP/Getty Image ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Spacecraft Returns to Earth With Moon Rocks (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2300",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/chinas-spacecraft-returns-to-earth-with-moon-rocks/4580035D-B351-4E29-9B72-440F2966B978?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=9",
        "text": " The Chang'e 5 probe landed in northern China, bringing the first lunar samples back to Earth in decades. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why this moon mission could be a milestone for the country\u2019s young but ambitious space program. Photo: China Daily/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Spacecraft Returns to Earth With Moon Rocks (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2301",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/chinas-spacecraft-returns-to-earth-with-moon-rocks/4580035D-B351-4E29-9B72-440F2966B978?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=36",
        "text": " The Chang'e 5 probe landed in northern China, bringing the first lunar samples back to Earth in decades. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why this moon mission could be a milestone for the country\u2019s young but ambitious space program. Photo: China Daily/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-REx Successfully Touches Asteroid Bennu (WSJ: NA PKG) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2302",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/nasas-osiris-rex-successfully-touches-asteroid-bennu/657B16F1-70AA-43DD-A624-22B2C913B6B8.html?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=34",
        "text": " For the first time, a NASA spacecraft successfully brushed the surface of an ancient asteroid to collect samples and return them to Earth. WSJ\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz explains how Osiris-REx\u2019s mission to Bennu could shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Photo: Handout/AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-REx Successfully Touches Asteroid Bennu (WSJ: NA PKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2303",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/nasas-osiris-rex-successfully-touches-asteroid-bennu/657B16F1-70AA-43DD-A624-22B2C913B6B8.html?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=45",
        "text": " For the first time, a NASA spacecraft successfully brushed the surface of an ancient asteroid to collect samples and return them to Earth. WSJ\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz explains how Osiris-REx\u2019s mission to Bennu could shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Photo: Handout/AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Virgin Galactic\u2019s Space Tourism Ambitions May Not Convince All Investors (WSJ: NA PKG) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2304",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/why-virgin-galactics-space-tourism-ambitions-may-not-convince-all-investors/BE805A75-D0D1-435A-AB13-BFEB40F65F10.html?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=6",
        "text": " Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson\u2019s trip to the edge of space opens the door to space tourism. But the company\u2019s long-term vision may be too down to Earth for space-loving investors, says WSJ writer Jon Sindreu. Photo: Virgin Galactic/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch: William Shatner Launches Into Space Aboard Blue Origin Flight (WSJ: NA SOT) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2305",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-william-shatner-launches-into-space-aboard-blue-origin-flight/BE553A73-51CC-4611-81B2-F3E7AE25D437.html?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=4",
        "text": " Actor William Shatner and three crewmates blasted to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft that was launched from the company\u2019s West Texas facility on Wednesday. Photo: Blue Origin/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch: SpaceX Capsule With 4 Civilians Splashes Down to Earth (WSJ: NA SOT) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2306",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-spacex-capsule-with-4-civilians-splashes-down-to-earth/0A394861-D814-47C8-AC24-C9242D99280C.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=4",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s all-civilian crewed mission returned to earth after three days in orbit. The Crew Dragon\u2019s mission was the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship. Video/Image: SpaceX/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch: SpaceX Capsule With 4 Civilians Splashes Down to Earth (WSJ: NA SOT) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2307",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-spacex-capsule-with-4-civilians-splashes-down-to-earth/0A394861-D814-47C8-AC24-C9242D99280C.html?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=22",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s all-civilian crewed mission returned to earth after three days in orbit. The Crew Dragon\u2019s mission was the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship. Video/Image: SpaceX/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch: SpaceX Capsule With 4 Civilians Splashes Down to Earth (WSJ: NA SOT) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2308",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-spacex-capsule-with-4-civilians-splashes-down-to-earth/0A394861-D814-47C8-AC24-C9242D99280C.html?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=22",
        "text": " SpaceX\u2019s all-civilian crewed mission returned to earth after three days in orbit. The Crew Dragon\u2019s mission was the first time a crew of amateur astronauts has traveled to orbit on a private company\u2019s spaceship. Video/Image: SpaceX/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "National: Winter storm grounds hundreds of flights on busiest travel day of year (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2309",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-winter-storm-grounds-hundreds-of-flights-on-busiest-travel-day-of-year/2018/11/25/f56cb4ca-f0fc-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html",
        "text": "Winter storm grounds hundreds of flightsWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA winter storm blanketed much of the central Midwest with snow on Sunday at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, bringing blizzard-like conditions that grounded hundreds of flights and forced the closure of major highways on one of the busiest travel days of the year.With much of the central Plains and Great Lakes region under blizzard or winter storm warnings, about 1,200 flights headed to or from the United States had been canceled as of 6\u00a0p.m. Sunday, according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware. Most were supposed to be routed through Chicago or Kansas City \u2014 areas forecast to be hit hard by the storm.Story continues below advertisementStrong winds and snow created blizzard conditions across much of Nebraska and parts of Iowa, Kansas and Missouri. The National Weather Service was warning those conditions would make travel difficult in places.AdvertisementBy midday, the blizzard warning was extended to parts of eastern Illinois near Chicago, where about two inches of snow was expected to fall per hour. Other parts of the central Plains and the Great Lakes region were under a winter storm warning.\u2014 Associated PressArmy Ranger killed in operation in AfghanistanA soldier in the Army\u2019s elite 75th Ranger Regiment was killed by gunfire Saturday during an operation against al-Qaeda fighters in a remote part of southwestern Afghanistan, U.S. military officials said Sunday.Story continues below advertisementSgt. Leandro Jasso, 25, was wounded in Nimruz province\u2019s Khash Rod district, where the U.S. military is not known to conduct many operations. The operation was carried out with Afghan forces and concluded Sunday morning, said Maj. Bariki Mallya, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. One other U.S. service member was wounded, he said.Advertisement\u201cThe loss of Sgt. Jasso is felt by his family and loved ones, by all who served with him and by all on this mission to protect our country and our allies,\u201d Gen. Austin \u201cScott\u201d Miller, the top U.S. officer in Afghanistan, said in a statement.\u2014 Dan LamotheNASA prepares for first Mars landing in 6 yearsWith just a day to go, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft aimed for a bull\u2019s eye touchdown on Mars, zooming in like an arrow with no turning back. InSight\u2019s journey of six months and 300 million miles will come to a precarious grand finale Monday afternoon.Story continues below advertisementThe robotic geologist \u2014 designed to explore Mars\u2019 insides, surface to core \u2014 must go from 12,300 mph to zero in six minutes as it pierces the Martian atmosphere, pops out a parachute, fires its descent engines and lands on three legs.It is NASA\u2019s first attempt to land on Mars in six years.Advertisement\u2014 Associated PressUtah officer killed after being run over: \nA police officer in a Salt Lake City suburb was killed when he was intentionally struck by a car carrying fleeing burglary suspects, police said. Police fatally shot the driver, and an accomplice was arrested. South Salt Lake Officer David Romrell, 31, died Saturday at a hospital, Police Chief Jack Carruth said. The Marine Corps veteran is survived by his wife and 4-month-old child. The dead driver was identified Sunday as Felix Anthony Calata, 32, of West Valley City. The other suspect hasn't been identified.Story continues below advertisementFamily files claim against fire department: \nRelatives of a man whose body was used by the Bellingham Fire Department in Washington for intubation practice have filed claims against the city for more than $15\u00a0million. Eleven fire department employees acknowledged inserting and removing breathing tubes on Bradley Ginn Sr.'s body while waiting for it to be taken to a funeral home on July 31, the Bellingham Herald reported.\u2014 Associated Press A roundup of news from around the nation. National: Winter storm grounds hundreds of flights on busiest travel day of year",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Southern California wildfires \u2014 as seen from space (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2310",
        "date": "2017-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/12/08/the-southern-california-wildfires-as-seen-from-space/",
        "text": "Thick plumes of smoke\u00a0and bright flames of the\u00a0wildfires ravaging Southern California this week can be seen from space.The state\u2019s biggest active blaze is in Ventura County, where the Thomas Fire continued to grow Friday and burned more than 200 square miles\u00a0and destroyed more than 400 buildings.\u00a0Another 85 structures were damaged,\u00a0the county fire department said. The fire started Monday evening and erupted overnight. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel-2 satellite on Tuesday captured a false-color image of the blaze based on observations of light visible and invisible to human eyes. The image depicts the active fires as orange, and the burn scar \u2014 the areas where the burning has made the ground less able to hold water and more likely to flood \u2014 as brown.\u00a0Unburned vegetation is shown as green, and developed areas are gray.A second, natural-color image of the region taken on the same day on NASA\u2019s Terra satellite shows smoke from the fire billowing into the Pacific Ocean.Wildfires have ravaged\u00a0Southern California for five days. The blazes continued Friday as new fires streamed through communities and injured several people.\u2018The night America burned\u2019: The deadliest \u2014 and most overlooked \u2014 fire in U.S. historyAstronaut Randy Bresnik of the NASA Expedition\u00a052-53 crew tweeted Wednesday that he was asked if he could see the wildfires from space. \u201cUnfortunately we can,\u201d\u00a0he said in a tweet,\u00a0posting three photos.I was asked this evening if we can see the SoCal fires from space. Yes Faith, unfortunately we can. May the Santa Ana\u2019s die down soon. #Californiawildfire pic.twitter.com/qNzjTjWa4t\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) December 6, 2017\n\nOn Friday, he tweeted two photos from the International Space Station as winds appeared to die down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNice to see Point Mugu and Oxnard again,\u201d he tweeted. Point Mugu is a promontory near the city of Oxnard in Ventura County.He said he hoped the smoke would clear over the city of Ventura soon.From @Space_Station it looks like the winds have shifted and hopefully dying down, nice to see Point Mugu and Oxnard again, hopefully Ventura soon. #CaliforniaWildfires pic.twitter.com/7qN8u1M0Q6\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) December 8, 2017\n\nRussian astronaut Sergey Ryazansky, who is also part of the Expedition 52-53 crew, tracked the fires\u2019 progress from the International Space Station, as well. He tweeted photos taken Thursday and Friday that showed thick clouds of smoke\u00a0smothering Southern California.#\u041f\u043e\u0436\u0430\u0440\u044b \u0432 #\u041a\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0444\u043e\u0440\u043d\u0438\u0438... \u0428\u043b\u0435\u0439\u0444\u044b \u0434\u044b\u043c\u0430 \u043e\u0442 \u043d\u0435\u0441\u043a\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043a\u0438\u0445 \u043e\u0447\u0430\u0433\u043e\u0432 \u043b\u0435\u0441\u043d\u044b\u0445 \u043f\u043e\u0436\u0430\u0440\u043e\u0432 \u0432 \u042e\u0436\u043d\u043e\u0439 \u041a\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0444\u043e\u0440\u043d\u0438\u0438 \u0432\u0438\u0434\u043d\u044b \u0434\u0430\u0436\u0435 \u0441 \u0431\u043e\u0440\u0442\u0430 \u041c\u0435\u0436\u0434\u0443\u043d\u0430\u0440\u043e\u0434\u043d\u043e\u0439 \u043a\u043e\u0441\u043c\u0438\u0447\u0435\u0441\u043a\u043e\u0439 \u0441\u0442\u0430\u043d\u0446\u0438\u0438. pic.twitter.com/o4XMTJLpHO\u2014 \u0421\u0435\u0440\u0433\u0435\u0439 \u0420\u044f\u0437\u0430\u043d\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439 (@SergeyISS) December 7, 2017\n\nSome new photos of forest #fires in Southern #California... pic.twitter.com/fb8qKZE2Sj\u2014 \u0421\u0435\u0440\u0433\u0435\u0439 \u0420\u044f\u0437\u0430\u043d\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439 (@SergeyISS) December 8, 2017\n\nThe 52-53 crew launched July 28 on the Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft for a five-month mission on the International Space Station.NASA Earth on Wednesday tweeted a photo of the smoke from 65,000 feet taken from an ER-2 aircraft, which operates as a flying laboratory. The aircraft, based at NASA Armstrong Building 703 in Palmdale, Calif., gathers data on Earth\u2019s resources and celestial observations.During an engineering flight test of the Cloud-Aerosol Multi-Angle Lidar (CAMAL) instrument, pilot Stu Broce captured this view from NASA's ER-2 aircraft at roughly 65,000 feet showing smoke plumes produced by the #ThomasFire, #RyeFire & #CreekFire around 1pm PDT, Dec. 5th, 2017. pic.twitter.com/uvD7oGVNBC\u2014 NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) December 7, 2017\n\nNASA Earth tweeted another photo\u00a0Thursday.Smoke Over Southern California https://t.co/e7VBSHm4Lk #NASA pic.twitter.com/IDhtJ6yLHT\u2014 NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) December 7, 2017\n\nOn Friday, President Trump declared an emergency in California and ordered federal aid to the state after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared states of emergencies in four counties. Hundreds of schools were shuttered, with some housing people who had fled their homes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA new fire in San Diego began Thursday and grew rapidly and ferociously, spreading across 4,000 acres by Thursday night. The county\u2019s deputy chief administration officer, Ron Lane, said he had never seen December winds like these.Those winds \u2014 known as the Santa Ana \u2014 usually occur from spring to late fall or early winter. A high-pressure system forms over the\u00a0Great Basin Desert and pushes air west toward lower-pressure areas of the coast.As the winds tumble over the Sierra Nevada and Santa Ana mountains,\u00a0they drop from high elevation to sea level, compressing and heating up in the process. The winds also\u00a0gain speed as they roll over the mountains, and \u2014 suddenly \u2014 dry, hot air\u00a0starts racing\u00a0toward the coast.As it heads toward the coast, the air hits parched vegetation: a recipe for a fire. Once the fire starts, the winds rapidly carries it to new areas.Dry weather\u00a0made the region particularly ripe for major fires. The winds followed nine of the driest consecutive months in Southern California\u2019s history, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert told the Los Angeles Times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe most severe winds carrying the blazes could ease Friday and Saturday, according to forecasts, which could lessen the fire damage. But the National Weather Service still warns that\u00a0the risk of fires will stay elevated\u00a0through Sunday as conditions continue to be abnormally dry and breezy.Bonnie Berkowitz\u00a0and\u00a0Aaron Steckelberg contributed to this report.\u00a0Read more:\u00a0Apocalyptic images show the devastation caused by the raging flamesWhat happens when people live in areas where natural disasters can erupt NASA photos captured from space show the scope of the Southern California blazes.  The Southern California wildfires \u2014 as seen from space",
        "author": "Marwa Eltagouri"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Southern California wildfires \u2014 as seen from space (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2311",
        "date": "2017-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/12/08/the-southern-california-wildfires-as-seen-from-space/",
        "text": "Thick plumes of smoke\u00a0and bright flames of the\u00a0wildfires ravaging Southern California this week can be seen from space.The state\u2019s biggest active blaze is in Ventura County, where the Thomas Fire continued to grow Friday and burned more than 200 square miles\u00a0and destroyed more than 400 buildings.\u00a0Another 85 structures were damaged,\u00a0the county fire department said. The fire started Monday evening and erupted overnight. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel-2 satellite on Tuesday captured a false-color image of the blaze based on observations of light visible and invisible to human eyes. The image depicts the active fires as orange, and the burn scar \u2014 the areas where the burning has made the ground less able to hold water and more likely to flood \u2014 as brown.\u00a0Unburned vegetation is shown as green, and developed areas are gray.A second, natural-color image of the region taken on the same day on NASA\u2019s Terra satellite shows smoke from the fire billowing into the Pacific Ocean.Wildfires have ravaged\u00a0Southern California for five days. The blazes continued Friday as new fires streamed through communities and injured several people.\u2018The night America burned\u2019: The deadliest \u2014 and most overlooked \u2014 fire in U.S. historyAstronaut Randy Bresnik of the NASA Expedition\u00a052-53 crew tweeted Wednesday that he was asked if he could see the wildfires from space. \u201cUnfortunately we can,\u201d\u00a0he said in a tweet,\u00a0posting three photos.I was asked this evening if we can see the SoCal fires from space. Yes Faith, unfortunately we can. May the Santa Ana\u2019s die down soon. #Californiawildfire pic.twitter.com/qNzjTjWa4t\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) December 6, 2017\n\nOn Friday, he tweeted two photos from the International Space Station as winds appeared to die down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNice to see Point Mugu and Oxnard again,\u201d he tweeted. Point Mugu is a promontory near the city of Oxnard in Ventura County.He said he hoped the smoke would clear over the city of Ventura soon.From @Space_Station it looks like the winds have shifted and hopefully dying down, nice to see Point Mugu and Oxnard again, hopefully Ventura soon. #CaliforniaWildfires pic.twitter.com/7qN8u1M0Q6\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) December 8, 2017\n\nRussian astronaut Sergey Ryazansky, who is also part of the Expedition 52-53 crew, tracked the fires\u2019 progress from the International Space Station, as well. He tweeted photos taken Thursday and Friday that showed thick clouds of smoke\u00a0smothering Southern California.#\u041f\u043e\u0436\u0430\u0440\u044b \u0432 #\u041a\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0444\u043e\u0440\u043d\u0438\u0438... \u0428\u043b\u0435\u0439\u0444\u044b \u0434\u044b\u043c\u0430 \u043e\u0442 \u043d\u0435\u0441\u043a\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043a\u0438\u0445 \u043e\u0447\u0430\u0433\u043e\u0432 \u043b\u0435\u0441\u043d\u044b\u0445 \u043f\u043e\u0436\u0430\u0440\u043e\u0432 \u0432 \u042e\u0436\u043d\u043e\u0439 \u041a\u0430\u043b\u0438\u0444\u043e\u0440\u043d\u0438\u0438 \u0432\u0438\u0434\u043d\u044b \u0434\u0430\u0436\u0435 \u0441 \u0431\u043e\u0440\u0442\u0430 \u041c\u0435\u0436\u0434\u0443\u043d\u0430\u0440\u043e\u0434\u043d\u043e\u0439 \u043a\u043e\u0441\u043c\u0438\u0447\u0435\u0441\u043a\u043e\u0439 \u0441\u0442\u0430\u043d\u0446\u0438\u0438. pic.twitter.com/o4XMTJLpHO\u2014 \u0421\u0435\u0440\u0433\u0435\u0439 \u0420\u044f\u0437\u0430\u043d\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439 (@SergeyISS) December 7, 2017\n\nSome new photos of forest #fires in Southern #California... pic.twitter.com/fb8qKZE2Sj\u2014 \u0421\u0435\u0440\u0433\u0435\u0439 \u0420\u044f\u0437\u0430\u043d\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439 (@SergeyISS) December 8, 2017\n\nThe 52-53 crew launched July 28 on the Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft for a five-month mission on the International Space Station.NASA Earth on Wednesday tweeted a photo of the smoke from 65,000 feet taken from an ER-2 aircraft, which operates as a flying laboratory. The aircraft, based at NASA Armstrong Building 703 in Palmdale, Calif., gathers data on Earth\u2019s resources and celestial observations.During an engineering flight test of the Cloud-Aerosol Multi-Angle Lidar (CAMAL) instrument, pilot Stu Broce captured this view from NASA's ER-2 aircraft at roughly 65,000 feet showing smoke plumes produced by the #ThomasFire, #RyeFire & #CreekFire around 1pm PDT, Dec. 5th, 2017. pic.twitter.com/uvD7oGVNBC\u2014 NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) December 7, 2017\n\nNASA Earth tweeted another photo\u00a0Thursday.Smoke Over Southern California https://t.co/e7VBSHm4Lk #NASA pic.twitter.com/IDhtJ6yLHT\u2014 NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) December 7, 2017\n\nOn Friday, President Trump declared an emergency in California and ordered federal aid to the state after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared states of emergencies in four counties. Hundreds of schools were shuttered, with some housing people who had fled their homes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA new fire in San Diego began Thursday and grew rapidly and ferociously, spreading across 4,000 acres by Thursday night. The county\u2019s deputy chief administration officer, Ron Lane, said he had never seen December winds like these.Those winds \u2014 known as the Santa Ana \u2014 usually occur from spring to late fall or early winter. A high-pressure system forms over the\u00a0Great Basin Desert and pushes air west toward lower-pressure areas of the coast.As the winds tumble over the Sierra Nevada and Santa Ana mountains,\u00a0they drop from high elevation to sea level, compressing and heating up in the process. The winds also\u00a0gain speed as they roll over the mountains, and \u2014 suddenly \u2014 dry, hot air\u00a0starts racing\u00a0toward the coast.As it heads toward the coast, the air hits parched vegetation: a recipe for a fire. Once the fire starts, the winds rapidly carries it to new areas.Dry weather\u00a0made the region particularly ripe for major fires. The winds followed nine of the driest consecutive months in Southern California\u2019s history, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert told the Los Angeles Times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe most severe winds carrying the blazes could ease Friday and Saturday, according to forecasts, which could lessen the fire damage. But the National Weather Service still warns that\u00a0the risk of fires will stay elevated\u00a0through Sunday as conditions continue to be abnormally dry and breezy.Bonnie Berkowitz\u00a0and\u00a0Aaron Steckelberg contributed to this report.\u00a0Read more:\u00a0Apocalyptic images show the devastation caused by the raging flamesWhat happens when people live in areas where natural disasters can erupt NASA photos captured from space show the scope of the Southern California blazes.  The Southern California wildfires \u2014 as seen from space",
        "author": "Marwa Eltagouri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Teen rescued after using silent distress signal seen on TikTok (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2312",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/teen-rescued-after-using-silent-distress-signal-seen-on-tiktok/2021/11/08/cbc3219e-3e9d-11ec-8ee9-4f14a26749d1_story.html",
        "text": "SpaceX returns 4 astronauts to EarthWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFour astronauts splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night, ending an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station, which was forced off its trajectory twice during the astronauts\u2019 expedition because of errant thruster firings.Under a quartet of parachutes, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down softly in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla., at 10:33 p.m. after undocking from the orbiting laboratory more than eight hours earlier. Aboard the returning spacecraft were two NASA astronauts, Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.Story continues below advertisementThe successful splashdown came at a busy time for human spaceflight. On Wednesday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch another quartet of astronauts to the space station \u2014 a mission that had been scheduled to lift off last week but was delayed because of weather and an astronaut\u2019s illness. NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than that it was not covid-19.Advertisement\u2014 Christian DavenportGirl rescued after using TikTok distress signalThe 16-year-old girl sat beside her alleged kidnapper, looking out the car window at the other people on the road. She couldn\u2019t scream. She couldn\u2019t bang against the window. She couldn\u2019t wave her arms around and mouth, \u201cHelp!\u201d Not without putting herself in danger.Story continues below advertisementSo she started flashing hand signals, hoping others knew what they meant. She didn\u2019t use American Sign Language, but rather gestures she had learned on the social media platform TikTok. Last year, the Women\u2019s Funding Network, a philanthropic organization dedicated to helping women and girls, created the \u201cSignal for Help\u201d gesture so people could communicate they were in danger without alerting those around them. The group\u2019s video demonstrating the gesture later went viral on TikTok.AdvertisementThe teenager\u2019s idea worked. The secret hand sign led to her rescue and the arrest of James Herbert Brick, 61, about 12:30\u00a0p.m. Thursday, the Laurel County Sheriff\u2019s Office said.On Thursday, as Brick and the girl drove through Kentucky on Interstate 75, about 40\u00a0miles from the Tennessee border, a motorist behind Brick\u2019s Toyota noticed the girl flashing hand signs and interpreted them as signaling distress, the sheriff\u2019s office said. He called 911, followed Brick and kept updating authorities with information about the teen\u2019s location.Story continues below advertisementPolice learned the girl\u2019s parents had reported her missing more than 48\u00a0hours earlier from Asheville, N.C. \u2014 140 miles away, said Deputy Gilbert Acciardo, a spokesman for the Laurel County Sheriff\u2019s Office. The girl told detectives that she had linked up with Brick that day and had since traveled through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, where she and Brick allegedly stayed with his relatives. But they took off when Brick\u2019s family realized the girl was underage and had been reported missing, Acciardo said.AdvertisementAfter arresting Brick, investigators found images on his phone that showed an underage girl \u201cin a sexual manner,\u201d according to the sheriff\u2019s office.Brick was charged with two felonies: unlawful imprisonment and possession of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Jonathan Edwards1 killed, 1 injured in grocery store shootingA 41-year-old man was fatally shot as he walked out of a grocery store in Alaska, and a suspect is in custody, police said Monday.Joshua Eric Butcher, 41, who turned himself in to police minutes after the shooting on Sunday, has been arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder and was being held at the Fairbanks Correctional Center.A motive for the shooting has not yet been determined, police said in a statement.Police received multiple calls reporting a shooting at a Safeway grocery store.AdvertisementResponding officers found the first victim, the 41-year-old man, unresponsive on the sidewalk.Story continues below advertisementAdditional officers entered the store, where they found a 9mm semiautomatic handgun on the floor inside the entrance. They also found a second victim, a 24-year-old man located behind the customer service desk who had been shot in the foot.He described the shooter as a heavyset man wearing a plaid shirt.About 11 minutes after the shooting, police said they received a call from Butcher, who said he was outside the police department. He said he had been at the Safeway, and officers could come outside and arrest him, according to the statement.Police said he matched the description of the shooter and had an empty gun holster and empty magazine holders on him.Story continues below advertisementWhile detectives processed the scene at the grocery store, they \u201cobserved multiple firearm magazines and multiple spent and unspent 9mm rounds,\u201d the statement said.Advertisement\u2014 Associated PressMyrtle Beach trash bin makes it to IrelandInstead of a message in a bottle, it was the decals on a barnacle-covered trash barrel that showed just how far the receptacle had traveled, from the southeastern U.S. coast to a beach in Ireland, more than 3,500 miles from home.The city of Myrtle Beach, S.C., announced Monday that a waste barrel had somehow washed up in County Mayo, on the Emerald Isle\u2019s northwestern coast.According to the city, Keith McGreal of Ireland had written and shared pictures of the bright blue barrel with city stickers on it.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI wanted to share some images of a Blue Trash barrel that has been washed up on our local beach on the West Coast of Ireland, Mulranny, County Mayo,\u201d McGreal wrote, according to an exchange the city posted online.City officials also wrote to McGreal, saying the barrel must have been carried away in the Gulf Stream during a major wind or storm event.\u201cWe typically remove trash containers from the beach before a hurricane, but this one apparently had a mind of its own,\u201d they said, adding that they had \u201calready had a city employee volunteer to come fetch it.\u201d\u2014 Associated Press A roundup of news from across the country. Teen rescued after using silent distress signal seen on TikTok",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Teen rescued after using silent distress signal seen on TikTok (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2313",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/teen-rescued-after-using-silent-distress-signal-seen-on-tiktok/2021/11/08/cbc3219e-3e9d-11ec-8ee9-4f14a26749d1_story.html",
        "text": "SpaceX returns 4 astronauts to EarthWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFour astronauts splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night, ending an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station, which was forced off its trajectory twice during the astronauts\u2019 expedition because of errant thruster firings.Under a quartet of parachutes, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down softly in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla., at 10:33 p.m. after undocking from the orbiting laboratory more than eight hours earlier. Aboard the returning spacecraft were two NASA astronauts, Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.Story continues below advertisementThe successful splashdown came at a busy time for human spaceflight. On Wednesday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch another quartet of astronauts to the space station \u2014 a mission that had been scheduled to lift off last week but was delayed because of weather and an astronaut\u2019s illness. NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than that it was not covid-19.Advertisement\u2014 Christian DavenportGirl rescued after using TikTok distress signalThe 16-year-old girl sat beside her alleged kidnapper, looking out the car window at the other people on the road. She couldn\u2019t scream. She couldn\u2019t bang against the window. She couldn\u2019t wave her arms around and mouth, \u201cHelp!\u201d Not without putting herself in danger.Story continues below advertisementSo she started flashing hand signals, hoping others knew what they meant. She didn\u2019t use American Sign Language, but rather gestures she had learned on the social media platform TikTok. Last year, the Women\u2019s Funding Network, a philanthropic organization dedicated to helping women and girls, created the \u201cSignal for Help\u201d gesture so people could communicate they were in danger without alerting those around them. The group\u2019s video demonstrating the gesture later went viral on TikTok.AdvertisementThe teenager\u2019s idea worked. The secret hand sign led to her rescue and the arrest of James Herbert Brick, 61, about 12:30\u00a0p.m. Thursday, the Laurel County Sheriff\u2019s Office said.On Thursday, as Brick and the girl drove through Kentucky on Interstate 75, about 40\u00a0miles from the Tennessee border, a motorist behind Brick\u2019s Toyota noticed the girl flashing hand signs and interpreted them as signaling distress, the sheriff\u2019s office said. He called 911, followed Brick and kept updating authorities with information about the teen\u2019s location.Story continues below advertisementPolice learned the girl\u2019s parents had reported her missing more than 48\u00a0hours earlier from Asheville, N.C. \u2014 140 miles away, said Deputy Gilbert Acciardo, a spokesman for the Laurel County Sheriff\u2019s Office. The girl told detectives that she had linked up with Brick that day and had since traveled through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, where she and Brick allegedly stayed with his relatives. But they took off when Brick\u2019s family realized the girl was underage and had been reported missing, Acciardo said.AdvertisementAfter arresting Brick, investigators found images on his phone that showed an underage girl \u201cin a sexual manner,\u201d according to the sheriff\u2019s office.Brick was charged with two felonies: unlawful imprisonment and possession of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Jonathan Edwards1 killed, 1 injured in grocery store shootingA 41-year-old man was fatally shot as he walked out of a grocery store in Alaska, and a suspect is in custody, police said Monday.Joshua Eric Butcher, 41, who turned himself in to police minutes after the shooting on Sunday, has been arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder and was being held at the Fairbanks Correctional Center.A motive for the shooting has not yet been determined, police said in a statement.Police received multiple calls reporting a shooting at a Safeway grocery store.AdvertisementResponding officers found the first victim, the 41-year-old man, unresponsive on the sidewalk.Story continues below advertisementAdditional officers entered the store, where they found a 9mm semiautomatic handgun on the floor inside the entrance. They also found a second victim, a 24-year-old man located behind the customer service desk who had been shot in the foot.He described the shooter as a heavyset man wearing a plaid shirt.About 11 minutes after the shooting, police said they received a call from Butcher, who said he was outside the police department. He said he had been at the Safeway, and officers could come outside and arrest him, according to the statement.Police said he matched the description of the shooter and had an empty gun holster and empty magazine holders on him.Story continues below advertisementWhile detectives processed the scene at the grocery store, they \u201cobserved multiple firearm magazines and multiple spent and unspent 9mm rounds,\u201d the statement said.Advertisement\u2014 Associated PressMyrtle Beach trash bin makes it to IrelandInstead of a message in a bottle, it was the decals on a barnacle-covered trash barrel that showed just how far the receptacle had traveled, from the southeastern U.S. coast to a beach in Ireland, more than 3,500 miles from home.The city of Myrtle Beach, S.C., announced Monday that a waste barrel had somehow washed up in County Mayo, on the Emerald Isle\u2019s northwestern coast.According to the city, Keith McGreal of Ireland had written and shared pictures of the bright blue barrel with city stickers on it.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI wanted to share some images of a Blue Trash barrel that has been washed up on our local beach on the West Coast of Ireland, Mulranny, County Mayo,\u201d McGreal wrote, according to an exchange the city posted online.City officials also wrote to McGreal, saying the barrel must have been carried away in the Gulf Stream during a major wind or storm event.\u201cWe typically remove trash containers from the beach before a hurricane, but this one apparently had a mind of its own,\u201d they said, adding that they had \u201calready had a city employee volunteer to come fetch it.\u201d\u2014 Associated Press A roundup of news from across the country. Teen rescued after using silent distress signal seen on TikTok",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Florida\u2019s Atlantic Coast is preparing for a direct hit from Hurricane Dorian (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2314",
        "date": "2019-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/floridas-atlantic-coast-is-preparing-for-a-direct-hit-from-hurricane-dorian/2019/08/30/4cbd0874-cb45-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html",
        "text": "PALM BEACH, Fla. \u2014 Hurricane Dorian grew in strength and size Friday, turning into a major Category 4 storm and posing an ever-greater threat to the crowded metropolitan areas of South Florida.Dorian will be powerful enough \u2014 a dangerous hurricane with a track that has it slamming into Fort Pierce on Tuesday afternoon \u2014 that it could maintain hurricane strength as it churns through the center of the state, perhaps directly through downtown Orlando. Though still days away and having already shown a propensity for variability, Dorian seemed to be aiming to rake much of Florida\u2019s Atlantic coast, all the way to Jacksonville. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe storm developed \u201ca distinct eye\u201d Friday, the National Weather Service said, as it moved into an area of the Atlantic with warm waters and low wind shear. The hurricane\u2019s winds reached 130 mph late Friday, earlier than expected, and are likely to continue to increase until landfall, making it potentially catastrophic.Capital Weather Gang forecast: Potentially disastrous Hurricane Dorian strengthens as it targets FloridaHurricane Dorian is drifting west-northwest at just 1 mph towards the southeast U.S. on Sept. 2 as its path remains uncertain. (The Washington Post)\u201cThe precise path is still somewhat uncertain, but the intensity, I think there\u2019s a pretty high degree of certainty that this is going to be a major hurricane, Category 4, even Category 4-plus,\u201d DeSantis said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe governor said the Florida Highway Patrol will be escorting gasoline tankers throughout the state \u201cto ensure fuel reaches critical areas more quickly.\u201d Fuel shortages during the huge evacuation before Hurricane Irma in 2017 left people trying to flee the storm stranded on the side of the Florida Turnpike. DeSantis doesn\u2019t want to see that happen again, and he also advised that people \u201cshelter locally\u201d if they can to avoid snarling major highways.\u201cMake the preparations that you need,\u201d DeSantis said. \u201cYou have some time, but that time is running out.\u201dLightning barrage in Hurricane Dorian may signal rapid intensificationIn response to a request from DeSantis, President Trump declared a statewide emergency Friday and ordered federal assistance to all 67 counties in the state. Dorian\u2019s uncertain path through the tropics became more targeted Friday, as upper-level steering winds were expected to funnel the hurricane more west than north. Originally thought to be a Labor Day threat, forecasts pushed the storm well into Tuesday as it slowed.DeSantis emphasized preparations in situations that caused trouble during Hurricane Irma, including gas shortages, bumper-to-bumper traffic on evacuation routes and dangerous temperatures in nursing homes. Twelve residents of the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills died in sweltering heat in the days after Irma hit. Three people were charged this week in connection with those deaths, which officials said happened because the nursing home did not evacuate and did not have a generator to cool the building.Residents here in Palm Beach County started stockpiling resources midweek, even before Palm Beach was in the target range for landfall.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI didn\u2019t want to wait,\u201d Anthony Capalbo said as he loaded plywood into his truck at a West Palm Beach Home Depot. \u201cI\u2019ll probably wait until the last minute to board up the house, but I wanted to have the supplies.\u201dAlong with being strong, Hurricane Dorian is also slow, moving at just 9 mph. The specter of a hurricane lingering off the coast reminded many residents of Category 3 Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, which sat in the ocean near the shores of Martin, Palm Beach and nearby counties for more than 24 hours. Jeanne was one of the deadliest storms in the Atlantic basin, killing more than 3,000 people in Haiti before striking Florida and causing $7.5 billion in damage in the United States.An hours-long pummeling by a Category 4 storm is a nightmare scenario, said Rick Gonzalez, an architect in West Palm Beach who has worked at Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago property for more than 25 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnother Jeanne, but even stronger, would be bad,\u201d Gonzalez said, noting that Trump\u2019s Winter White House is ready to withstand a major hurricane.Beachgoers on Friday afternoon said Hurricane Dorian was on their minds. The water was choppy, but the sky was mostly clear.\u201cI hope we can get out in time,\u201d said Liliana DelRio, a travel agent from Argentina. \u201cIt\u2019s nice out now, but we\u2019re worried about the hurricane.\u201dLouise Lord lived in Palm Beach until 2017, the year she evacuated the island before Hurricane Irma hit. It took her 12 hours to make the three-hour drive to Orlando in what was one of Florida\u2019s worst traffic jams. She now lives just across the Intracoastal Waterway from Palm Beach.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m staying, but I\u2019m worried,\u201d Lord said. \u201cIt\u2019s sounding scary.\u201dAlong the Florida Space Coast, NASA and several space companies were scrambling to prepare ahead of the storm.AdvertisementAt the Kennedy Space Center on Friday morning, crews began the arduous process of hauling a 400-foot-tall mobile launch tower from pad 39B to inside a hulking building a few miles away for safekeeping \u2014 at about 1\u2009mph. Sitting just a few hundred yards from the coast, the tower could be affected by the winds, though NASA officials said relocating it was a \u201cprecautionary measure.\u201dNearby, Boeing is building its Starliner spacecraft, designed to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, said it was also taking precautions to secure its buildings and hardware. The majority of its launch facilities were designed to withstand wind speeds of 130 mph or higher.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe pads themselves are pretty durable,\u201d said Dale Ketcham, vice president of government relations for Space Florida, a state economic development agency. \u201cThey take a beating anyway during launch.\u201dResidents across Florida endured long lines at grocery stores and gas stations as Hurricane Dorian grew stronger and closer. (The Washington Post)Where Dorian is expected to land is densely residential but also rich in some of the state\u2019s most lucrative agricultural products: citrus, vegetables, ornamental plants and cattle.AdvertisementCrop and livestock production, forestry and fishing in the 21-county region generated more than $4.2 billion in revenue and directly supported more than 63,000 jobs in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available. Overall, the region includes nearly 750,000 acres in agricultural production.Story continues below advertisementFlorida\u2019s citrus industry might be the most vulnerable, having endured a series of setbacks in recent years, from dwindling orange juice sales to ongoing citrus greening disease to Hurricane Irma in 2017, which affected nearly 80 percent of the state\u2019s 411,000 acres of groves. Farmers experienced widespread fruit loss and the destruction of more than 3\u00a0million citrus trees, said Christa Court, assistant director of the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Economic Impact Analysis Program.\u201cIn Irma, the largest loss was fruit crop, branch damage and flooding in the groves that caused root damage and a slight decrease in productivity,\u201d Court said. \u201cWhat usually puts people out of business is not a single year of loss, it\u2019s slow relief payments. After Irma, the Wildfires and Hurricane Indemnity Program took two years to administer.\u201dAdvertisementAccording to experts, little can be done to prepare or protect the state\u2019s citrus from wind or storm damage, but Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said the state has made efforts to lower water levels in canals to minimize the amount of time citrus trees spend in standing water.Story continues below advertisementFlorida also produces about 75\u00a0percent of the country\u2019s tropical foliage and houseplants, said Ben Bolusky, chief executive of the Florida Nursery, Growers and Landscape Association. Total structural damage and crop loss for the state\u2019s ornamental plant industry was $630 million after Hurricane Irma, the densest concentration of operations in Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach counties, all areas centered in the cone for Dorian.Some of the state\u2019s most fledgling industries could also take it on the chin in this storm.AdvertisementSturgeon Aquafarms, which produces caviar and sturgeon meat at its farm in Bascom, Fla., is still reeling from the aftermath of Hurricane Michael last year. The brainchild of Russian-born Mark Zaslavsky, the farm has 21,000 beluga sturgeon he anticipates bringing to market in the next few months. Zaslavsky said he is financially struggling while waiting for the U.S. Agriculture Department to approve disaster financial relief to include aquaculture in the Supplemental Appropriations of Disaster Relief Act of 2019. Even a glancing blow from Dorian could jeopardize his business prospects.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe would be bankrupt,\u201d Zaslavsky said Friday.Fried said that for other Florida crops that are harvestable \u2014 such as sugar cane and avocados \u2014 she has lifted all trucking weight-limit regulations so farmers are free to transport crops to safety before the storm hits.About 20 miles inland, in Loxahatchee, animal caretakers at Lion Country Safari were doing their own preparations. One of the oldest \u201ccageless zoos\u201d in the country, the attraction has lions, giraffes and other animals that need to be kept safe. Many of them \u2014 including Mo the sloth \u2014 will be kept in hurricane-safe buildings. But other animals, such as the zebras and antelopes, will be left out to range around the park\u2019s 320 acres.Advertisement\u201cThese guys have a fight-or- flight instinct. If you put them inside where they can\u2019t see what\u2019s going on, it primes their panic and makes them want to flee, and they can injure themselves,\u201d said spokeswoman Haley Passeser. \u201cThey prefer to be out in the open. They\u2019ll find a low spot and hunker down and turn their rumps to the wind and just ride it out.\u201dIn Fort Lauderdale, along the South Florida coast, gas stations were empty, stores were sold out of water, and grocery shelves were barren. Many in the area are hurricane veterans who have come to expect a cyclone every now and then across the Florida peninsula.Mark Tyson, general manager of the Coral Ridge Yacht Club located on the Intracoastal Waterway, said virtually every one of the 57 boats tied up on its docks will ride out the storm exactly where they are.\u201cWe\u2019ve learned how to be prepared,\u201d Tyson said. \u201cAround the club, everything that can blow away is put away. Pots, plants, chairs and tables around the pool, our little sailboats \u2014 anything that can fly gets moved to a safe place. A roof is a roof. You can\u2019t do much about that.\u201dJoe Verderber, a member of Coral Ridge, has a 92-foot yacht \u2014 Northern V\u2019s \u2014 anchored at the club\u2019s dock. He\u2019s 82 and said he has been through several hurricanes. He and Judy, his wife of 61 years, will ride out the storm on their boat, as usual.\u201cInsurance requires that I put triple lines out and extra fenders, so that\u2019s what we\u2019ll do,\u201d he said. \u201cAnything like chairs, cushions, anything that can fly around, we\u2019ll take them inside. There\u2019s not much else you can do. And then you pray.\u201dRozsa is a freelance journalist based in Florida. Shapiro reported from Fort Lauderdale; Reiley and Davenport reported from Washington. The major hurricane \u2014 which could make landfall as a Category 4 storm on Tuesday \u2014 spurs state officials to plan evacuations from crowded metropolitan areas of South Florida. Florida\u2019s Atlantic Coast is preparing for a direct hit from Hurricane Dorian",
        "author": "Lori Rozsa"
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: Nov. 14, 2019 (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2315",
        "date": "2019-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-nov-14-2019/2019/11/14/f9c3d8ea-06f0-11ea-ac12-3325d49eacaa_story.html",
        "text": "No Morales candidacy, interim leader saysWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFormer president Evo Morales cannot run as a candidate in any new elections, but his party can, Bolivia\u2019s interim leader said Thursday.Jeanine A\u00f1ez, a Senate deputy leader who claimed the interim presidency Tuesday, also criticized Mexico\u2019s government for allowing Morales to rally support from asylum in Mexico City.A\u00f1ez has said she wants to restore stability in Bolivia, but she has been accused of a power grab by Morales supporters. In a country gripped by turmoil, it was unclear whether election officials would have to formally bar Morales from running in a new election.Morales, Bolivia\u2019s first indigenous president, resigned Sunday at the military\u2019s prompting following massive protests over alleged fraud in an Oct.\u00a020 election in which he claimed to have won a fourth term. An Organization of American States audit found widespread irregularities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMuch of the opposition to Morales sprang from his refusal to accept the result of a referendum that would have forbidden him from running for a new term.On Thursday, A\u00f1ez said Morales\u2019s Movement for Socialism party \u201chas all the right to participate in elections. They can look for candidates.\u201d But she said Morales and \u00c1lvaro Garc\u00eda Linera, who resigned as vice president, cannot participate.A\u00f1ez had been no higher than fifth in the line of succession before Morales resigned. She won recognition because those above her, all Morales backers, also announced their resignations.\u2014 Associated PressGerman lawmakers approve mandatory measles vaccinations: Germany's parliament passed a law requiring that children who attend school or day care must be vaccinated for measles. Parents who cannot prove that their children have been vaccinated for measles by Aug.\u00a01, 2021, will have to pay a fine of up to 2,500 euros, or about $2,750. Health Minister Jens Spahn has argued that the compulsory vaccination is necessary because of an increase in cases of the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease. Teachers and day-care workers, staff in hospitals and residents of refugee shelters also will have to be vaccinated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement4 killed, scores wounded in Baghdad protests: Clashes between protesters and security forces in central Baghdad killed four people and wounded 62, Iraqi medical and security officials said, as authorities continued to clamp down on the anti-government demonstrations. The protests have been taking place mostly in Baghdad and the predominantly Shiite southern provinces. At least 320 people have been killed and thousands wounded since the unrest began Oct.\u00a01. The demonstrators are protesting Iraq's widespread corruption, lack of job opportunities and poor basic services.ICC judges authorize Rohingya investigation: International Criminal Court judges have approved a request from prosecutors to open an investigation into crimes committed against Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya minority. The allegations stem from a counterinsurgency campaign that Myanmar's military began in August 2017 in response to an insurgent attack. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh to escape what has been called an ethnic-cleansing campaign. Myanmar has said it would not cooperate with any ICC proceeding. The ICC is the second international court to look into alleged atrocities against the Rohingya, after Gambia filed a claim with the International Court of Justice.China tests Mars lander: China showed off its Mars spacecraft during a landing test as the country pushes for inclusion in more global space projects. The demonstration of hovering, obstacle avoidance and deceleration capabilities was conducted at a site outside Beijing simulating conditions on the Red Planet, where the pull of gravity is about a third that of Earth. China plans to launch a lander and rover to Mars next year to explore parts of the planet. The country's burgeoning space program achieved a lunar milestone this year by landing a spacecraft on the mysterious far side of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFaster trial reportedly sought for U.S. teens in Rome slaying: The attorney for one of the two American teenagers jailed in Rome in the slaying of a Carabinieri police officer said prosecutors have requested a speedier trial. Finnegan Lee Elder's attorney, Renato Borzone, said prosecutors have sought an \"immediate trial\" procedure that skips the preliminary hearing. Prosecutors said Elder confessed to knifing the officer during a scuffle, while Gabriel Natale-Hjorth allegedly assaulted the officer's partner at the end of a chain of events sparked by a drug deal that went wrong.\u2014 From news services Bolivia\u2019s interim leader says Morales can\u2019t run in new vote; German lawmakers approve mandatory measles vaccinations. World Digest: Nov. 14, 2019",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Mexican man accused in Calif. officer\u2019s death likely to be arraigned on murder count (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2316",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/mexican-man-accused-in-calif-officers-death-likely-to-be-arraigned-on-murder-count/2018/12/31/67d70c0e-059d-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html",
        "text": "Murder charge likely in killing of officerWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightProsecutors say a Mexican national accused of killing a California police officer is expected to be arraigned on murder charges.Stanislaus County District Attorney\u2019s Office spokesman John Goold said Monday that the charges against Gustavo Perez Arriaga will be filed before his arraignment Wednesday.Perez Arriaga was arrested Friday after the Dec. 26 shooting of Newman police Cpl. Ronil Singh, 33. Authorities said Perez Arriaga, who was in the country illegally and had previous arrests, was captured while planning to flee to Mexico. U.S. immigration authorities say they had no contact with Perez Arriaga until he was arrested last week.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressMan charged in death of missing fianceeA Colorado man was charged Monday with murder and solicitation to commit murder in the death of his missing fiancee as police try to find out what happened to the mother of his child.AdvertisementPatrick Frazee, 32, is accused of trying to find someone to kill Kelsey Berreth three times between September and November and causing her death on or around Thanksgiving, according to a charging document. Berreth was last seen Thanksgiving Day on a grocery store surveillance video with the couple\u2019s 1-year-old daughter, and Frazee said the two met that day to exchange their child.Police have said the evidence suggests that Berreth was killed at her home in Woodland Park, a mountain town near Colorado Springs, and that her cellphone was tracked to Gooding, Idaho, three days after Thanksgiving.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressElizabeth Smart captor living near a schoolA woman who helped kidnap Utah\u2019s Elizabeth Smart is living several blocks away from a Salt Lake City elementary school following her release from prison in September, according to Utah\u2019s sex-offender registry.AdvertisementWanda Barzee, 73, is listed in the registry as living in an apartment near the school after her initial placement in a halfway house after she was released on parole much earlier than anticipated despite her refusal to cooperate with mental health professionals while incarcerated.She was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2010 after pleading guilty to helping her husband, street preacher Brian David Mitchell, who abducted Smart at knifepoint in 2002 when she was 14 and repeatedly raped her. Smart was held captive for nine months before she was found and rescued.Story continues below advertisementBarzee\u2019s release came more than five years earlier than expected after the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole determined it had miscalculated the time Barzee was required to serve in prison. She is serving five years of federal supervised release. The release guidelines don\u2019t seem to set limits on how close she can live to a school.Advertisement\u2014 Associated PressN.C. wildlife center passes inspections: A federal inspector found no problems at the Conservators Center near Burlington, N.C., in two inspections preceding a lion's fatal attack Sunday on a young intern there. According to government reports, nothing out of compliance was found at the center during inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in April or January 2017. No workplace safety complaints were found in an online search of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.Story continues below advertisementSpacecraft may make history: The NASA spacecraft that yielded the first close-up views of Pluto hurtled toward a New Year's Day rendezvous with a tiny, icy world a billion miles farther out, in what would make it the most distant cosmic body ever explored by humankind. New Horizons was on course to fly past the object nicknamed Ultima Thule at 12:33 a.m. Tuesday. The drama was set to unfold more than 4 billion miles from Earth, so far away that it will be 10 hours before flight controllers find out whether the spacecraft survived the flyby.\u2014 From news services News from across the nation. Mexican man accused in Calif. officer\u2019s death likely to be arraigned on murder count",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: Sept. 8, 2019 (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2317",
        "date": "2019-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-sept-8-2019/2019/09/08/73b5db94-d23a-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html",
        "text": "Moon lander located day after loss of contactWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA day after India\u2019s bold mission to land on the moon appeared to have failed, the country\u2019s space agency announced that the missing lander had been located, raising hopes for a turnaround.K.\u00a0Sivan, head of the Indian Space Research Organization, told the news agency ANI that the mission\u2019s orbiter had clicked a\u00a0thermal image of the lander from its cameras. \u201cWe are trying to establish contact. It will be communicated soon,\u201d he said. Vikram, the lander of Chandrayaan-2, which blasted off in July, was scheduled to soft-land on the lunar south pole early Saturday. While its descent began as planned, communication with it snapped minutes before touchdown.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIndia had hoped to become the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to land on the moon. The mission, which the agency described as \u201chighly complex,\u201d was aiming to land in the previously unexplored south pole region. The goal was to look for water on the moon and study its topography.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementThe success rate of landing on the moon is about\u00a050\u00a0percent. Earlier this year, an Israeli spacecraft, Beresheet, attempting to land on the moon crashed in its final moment.\u00a0\u2014 Niha MasihTurkey, U.S. carry out 'safe zone' joint patrolTurkish and U.S. troops conducted their first joint ground patrol in northeastern Syria on Sunday as part of a \u201csafe zone\u201d Turkey has been pressing for in the volatile Kurdish-administered region.Story continues below advertisementTurkey hopes the buffer zone, which it says should be at least 19\u00a0miles deep, will keep Syrian Kurdish fighters away from its border. Turkey considers these Kurdish militias a threat, but they also have been key U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State.So far, the Kurdish-led forces have withdrawn as deep as nine miles from the border and have removed defensive positions, sand berms and trenches. The depth of the zone, as well as who will control it, is still being worked out.AdvertisementEven as the patrol was taking place, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said serious differences remained with the Americans. An initial agreement with Washington last month averted a threatened Turkish incursion.Story continues below advertisementTurkey has carried out several incursions into Syria over the course of the civil war to curb the expanding influence of the Kurdish forces. U.S. and Turkish troops carried out joint patrols in the northern town of Manbij last year, along the border of the areas controlled by Kurdish-led forces.Sunday\u2019s joint patrol was the first one taking place east of the Euphrates River, where U.S. troops have a greater presence, and as part of the safe zone, which is still in the making.\u2014 Associated PressKing Salman replaces energy chief with sonSaudi Arabia\u2019s King Salman replaced the country\u2019s energy minister with one of his sons on Sunday, naming Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman to one of the most important positions in the country as oil prices remain below what is needed to keep up with government spending.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe new energy minister is an older half brother to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 34, and replaces Khalid al-Falih, who had been in the role since 2016.Abdulaziz enters the job with a lifetime of experience in Saudi Arabia\u2019s energy sector and is seen as a safe and steady choice to lead the ministry, where he will oversee production of one of the world\u2019s largest oil exporters. It is the first time a prince from the ruling Saud family is heading the important Energy Ministry.The move comes as Brent crude oil trades under $60 a barrel, well below the $80-to-$85 range analysts say is needed to balance the Saudi budget.\u2014 Associated PressTyphoon kills at least 5 in North Korea: \nOne of the most powerful typhoons to hit the Korean Peninsula left five people dead and three injured in North Korea, state media reported, in the first public announcement of casualties since the storm made landfall in the country a day earlier. Before reaching North Korea, Typhoon Lingling hit South Korea, killing three people and injuring 13, but the country appears to have escaped widespread damage. North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency said the typhoon left 460\u00a0houses and 15 public buildings destroyed, damaged or inundated in the country.\u2014 From news services India locates its moon lander a day after loss of contact; Turkey, U.S. carry out \u201csafe zone\u201d joint patrol in northeastern Syria. World Digest: Sept. 8, 2019",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2318",
        "date": "2021-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/13/shatner-blue-origin-space-de-vries-death/",
        "text": "Less than a month after returning from the edge of space with crewmate William Shatner, space passenger Glen M. de Vries has died in a plane crash in northern New Jersey, said state police.The single-engine Cessna 172 was carrying de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, N.J. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth men died when the plane crashed in a heavily wooded area Thursday.De Vries co-founded Medidata Solutions, a software company specializing in clinical research and ways to use technology to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Alongside Shatner and two others, he traveled to the edge of space Oct. 13 aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, owned by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin company. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementThe launch was the venture\u2019s second human spaceflight mission and took place three months after Bezos himself flew to the edge of space.Advertisement\u201cSuch a tragic loss. Warm and full of life, Glen made us laugh and lit up the room. He was a visionary, and an innovator \u2014 a true leader,\u201d Bezos said on Twitter.(2/2) Our deepest sympathies are with his partner, Leah, and all his loved ones. The world lost you too soon, Glen.\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 12, 2021\n\nThe plane carrying de Vries and Fischer, who owned a flight school, left Essex County Airport in Caldwell, near the New York City area, and was headed to Sussex Airport in rural northwestern New Jersey, according to the Associated Press, when the Federal Aviation Administration alerted public safety agencies to look for a missing plane around 3 p.m.Authorities have not said which man was piloting the plane. Emergency crews found the wreckage in Hampton Township around 4 p.m., the FAA said.William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronautsThe space adventure last month was part of a historic year in which the private astronauts who reached space outnumbered those sent by NASA and could signal the opening up of space travel to individuals without specialist training.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe October flight made Shatner, 90, the oldest person to have visited space. Lasting just over 10 minutes, aloft and free-floating above the Earth, the crew took in views of planet Earth below and the dark skies beyond, and experienced brief weightlessness.\u201cIt\u2019s going to take me a while to be able to describe it. It was incredible,\u201d de Vries had said on returning.In a statement, Blue Origin said it was \u201cdevastated\u201d to learn of de Vries\u2019s death. \u201cHe brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates. His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDe Vries also served on the board of Carnegie Mellon University. He graduated in 1994 from the Mellon College of Science with a degree in molecular biology and genetics.Advertisement\u201cThe entire Carnegie Mellon University community is devastated by the loss of alumnus and trustee Glen de Vries,\u201d CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement. \u201cTo be in Glen\u2019s presence was to be immersed in his exuberance and zest for life, and I am filled with tremendous sorrow that we will no longer be able to experience this gift or share it with others.\u201dThe National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the plane crash. Glen de Vries, who had described his space trip as \"incredible,\" was one of two victims of the crash in New Jersey. Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey (WP: National) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2319",
        "date": "2021-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/13/shatner-blue-origin-space-de-vries-death/",
        "text": "Less than a month after returning from the edge of space with crewmate William Shatner, space passenger Glen M. de Vries has died in a plane crash in northern New Jersey, said state police.The single-engine Cessna 172 was carrying de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, N.J. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth men died when the plane crashed in a heavily wooded area Thursday.De Vries co-founded Medidata Solutions, a software company specializing in clinical research and ways to use technology to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Alongside Shatner and two others, he traveled to the edge of space Oct. 13 aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, owned by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin company. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementThe launch was the venture\u2019s second human spaceflight mission and took place three months after Bezos himself flew to the edge of space.Advertisement\u201cSuch a tragic loss. Warm and full of life, Glen made us laugh and lit up the room. He was a visionary, and an innovator \u2014 a true leader,\u201d Bezos said on Twitter.(2/2) Our deepest sympathies are with his partner, Leah, and all his loved ones. The world lost you too soon, Glen.\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 12, 2021\n\nThe plane carrying de Vries and Fischer, who owned a flight school, left Essex County Airport in Caldwell, near the New York City area, and was headed to Sussex Airport in rural northwestern New Jersey, according to the Associated Press, when the Federal Aviation Administration alerted public safety agencies to look for a missing plane around 3 p.m.Authorities have not said which man was piloting the plane. Emergency crews found the wreckage in Hampton Township around 4 p.m., the FAA said.William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronautsThe space adventure last month was part of a historic year in which the private astronauts who reached space outnumbered those sent by NASA and could signal the opening up of space travel to individuals without specialist training.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe October flight made Shatner, 90, the oldest person to have visited space. Lasting just over 10 minutes, aloft and free-floating above the Earth, the crew took in views of planet Earth below and the dark skies beyond, and experienced brief weightlessness.\u201cIt\u2019s going to take me a while to be able to describe it. It was incredible,\u201d de Vries had said on returning.In a statement, Blue Origin said it was \u201cdevastated\u201d to learn of de Vries\u2019s death. \u201cHe brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates. His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDe Vries also served on the board of Carnegie Mellon University. He graduated in 1994 from the Mellon College of Science with a degree in molecular biology and genetics.Advertisement\u201cThe entire Carnegie Mellon University community is devastated by the loss of alumnus and trustee Glen de Vries,\u201d CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement. \u201cTo be in Glen\u2019s presence was to be immersed in his exuberance and zest for life, and I am filled with tremendous sorrow that we will no longer be able to experience this gift or share it with others.\u201dThe National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the plane crash. Glen de Vries, who had described his space trip as \"incredible,\" was one of two victims of the crash in New Jersey. Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2320",
        "date": "2021-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/13/shatner-blue-origin-space-de-vries-death/",
        "text": "Less than a month after returning from the edge of space with crewmate William Shatner, space passenger Glen M. de Vries has died in a plane crash in northern New Jersey, said state police.The single-engine Cessna 172 was carrying de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, N.J. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth men died when the plane crashed in a heavily wooded area Thursday.De Vries co-founded Medidata Solutions, a software company specializing in clinical research and ways to use technology to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Alongside Shatner and two others, he traveled to the edge of space Oct. 13 aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, owned by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin company. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementThe launch was the venture\u2019s second human spaceflight mission and took place three months after Bezos himself flew to the edge of space.Advertisement\u201cSuch a tragic loss. Warm and full of life, Glen made us laugh and lit up the room. He was a visionary, and an innovator \u2014 a true leader,\u201d Bezos said on Twitter.(2/2) Our deepest sympathies are with his partner, Leah, and all his loved ones. The world lost you too soon, Glen.\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 12, 2021\n\nThe plane carrying de Vries and Fischer, who owned a flight school, left Essex County Airport in Caldwell, near the New York City area, and was headed to Sussex Airport in rural northwestern New Jersey, according to the Associated Press, when the Federal Aviation Administration alerted public safety agencies to look for a missing plane around 3 p.m.Authorities have not said which man was piloting the plane. Emergency crews found the wreckage in Hampton Township around 4 p.m., the FAA said.William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronautsThe space adventure last month was part of a historic year in which the private astronauts who reached space outnumbered those sent by NASA and could signal the opening up of space travel to individuals without specialist training.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe October flight made Shatner, 90, the oldest person to have visited space. Lasting just over 10 minutes, aloft and free-floating above the Earth, the crew took in views of planet Earth below and the dark skies beyond, and experienced brief weightlessness.\u201cIt\u2019s going to take me a while to be able to describe it. It was incredible,\u201d de Vries had said on returning.In a statement, Blue Origin said it was \u201cdevastated\u201d to learn of de Vries\u2019s death. \u201cHe brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates. His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDe Vries also served on the board of Carnegie Mellon University. He graduated in 1994 from the Mellon College of Science with a degree in molecular biology and genetics.Advertisement\u201cThe entire Carnegie Mellon University community is devastated by the loss of alumnus and trustee Glen de Vries,\u201d CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement. \u201cTo be in Glen\u2019s presence was to be immersed in his exuberance and zest for life, and I am filled with tremendous sorrow that we will no longer be able to experience this gift or share it with others.\u201dThe National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the plane crash. Glen de Vries, who had described his space trip as \"incredible,\" was one of two victims of the crash in New Jersey. Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2321",
        "date": "2021-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/13/shatner-blue-origin-space-de-vries-death/",
        "text": "Less than a month after returning from the edge of space with crewmate William Shatner, space passenger Glen M. de Vries has died in a plane crash in northern New Jersey, said state police.The single-engine Cessna 172 was carrying de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, N.J. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth men died when the plane crashed in a heavily wooded area Thursday.De Vries co-founded Medidata Solutions, a software company specializing in clinical research and ways to use technology to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Alongside Shatner and two others, he traveled to the edge of space Oct. 13 aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, owned by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin company. Bezos also owns The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementThe launch was the venture\u2019s second human spaceflight mission and took place three months after Bezos himself flew to the edge of space.Advertisement\u201cSuch a tragic loss. Warm and full of life, Glen made us laugh and lit up the room. He was a visionary, and an innovator \u2014 a true leader,\u201d Bezos said on Twitter.(2/2) Our deepest sympathies are with his partner, Leah, and all his loved ones. The world lost you too soon, Glen.\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) November 12, 2021\n\nThe plane carrying de Vries and Fischer, who owned a flight school, left Essex County Airport in Caldwell, near the New York City area, and was headed to Sussex Airport in rural northwestern New Jersey, according to the Associated Press, when the Federal Aviation Administration alerted public safety agencies to look for a missing plane around 3 p.m.Authorities have not said which man was piloting the plane. Emergency crews found the wreckage in Hampton Township around 4 p.m., the FAA said.William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronautsThe space adventure last month was part of a historic year in which the private astronauts who reached space outnumbered those sent by NASA and could signal the opening up of space travel to individuals without specialist training.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe October flight made Shatner, 90, the oldest person to have visited space. Lasting just over 10 minutes, aloft and free-floating above the Earth, the crew took in views of planet Earth below and the dark skies beyond, and experienced brief weightlessness.\u201cIt\u2019s going to take me a while to be able to describe it. It was incredible,\u201d de Vries had said on returning.In a statement, Blue Origin said it was \u201cdevastated\u201d to learn of de Vries\u2019s death. \u201cHe brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates. His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDe Vries also served on the board of Carnegie Mellon University. He graduated in 1994 from the Mellon College of Science with a degree in molecular biology and genetics.Advertisement\u201cThe entire Carnegie Mellon University community is devastated by the loss of alumnus and trustee Glen de Vries,\u201d CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement. \u201cTo be in Glen\u2019s presence was to be immersed in his exuberance and zest for life, and I am filled with tremendous sorrow that we will no longer be able to experience this gift or share it with others.\u201dThe National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the plane crash. Glen de Vries, who had described his space trip as \"incredible,\" was one of two victims of the crash in New Jersey. Shatner space crewmate dies in plane crash in New Jersey",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: Oct. 16, 2021 (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2322",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-oct-16-2021/2021/10/16/474254e0-2ea2-11ec-baf4-d7a4e075eb90_story.html",
        "text": "Israel accused of killing ex-lawmakerWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSyria accused Israeli forces on Saturday of shooting dead Medhat Al-Saleh, a former member of the Syrian parliament who had spent 12 years in jail in Israel, Saudi Arabia\u2019s state-run television station Al-Ekhbariya reported. Syrian state news agency SANA said Al-Saleh \u201cwas martyred as the Israeli enemy targeted him with fire while returning home\u201d on Saturday in Ain al-Tineh, a village in Syria near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. An Israeli military spokesperson said the military doesn\u2019t comment on foreign reports.Saleh had spent 12 years in prison in Israel after being jailed in 1985 on charges of \u201cresistance\u201d to Israeli authorities. He later served in the Syrian parliament.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 ReutersTalks halted after Maduro ally extradited Venezuela\u2019s socialist government said it would suspend negotiations with its opponents in retaliation after a close ally of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro was extradited to the United States to face money laundering charges.AdvertisementJorge Rodr\u00edguez, who has been heading the government\u2019s delegation, said his team wouldn\u2019t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.The announcement capped a tumultuous day that saw business executive Alex Saab placed on a United States-bound plane in Cape Verde after a 16-month extradition fight by Maduro and his allies, including Russia, who consider the Colombia native a Venezuelan diplomat.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressSudanese protest, call for dissolution of government: Thousands of Sudanese took to the streets in the capital, Khartoum, to call for the dissolving of the joint military-civilian government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. The protest could further increase political tensions in Sudan, threatening its fragile transition to democracy more than two\u00a0years after the military's overthrow of autocrat Omar Hassan al-Bashir amid a public uprising against his rule.AdvertisementSyrians shell rebel town near Turkish border, killing 4: Syrian government shelling of a rebel-held town near the border with Turkey killed four people and wounded more than a dozen, Syrian opposition activists said. The shelling of Sarmada comes amid increasing tensions in the last rebel stronghold in the Syrian northwest, where a cease-fire reached in March last year has been repeatedly violated in recent weeks.Story continues below advertisementChinese astronauts reach space station: Three astronauts entered China's space station for a six-month mission, setting to work Saturday after successfully docking aboard their Shenzhou-13 spacecraft. The spacecraft was launched by a Long March-2F rocket Saturday and docked with the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station.Overnight earthquake kills 3 in Bali: Three people were killed, and seven more were injured when a moderately strong earthquake and an aftershock hit Indonesia's resort island of Bali. The 4.8-magnitude quake hit just before dawn, causing people to run outdoors in a panic. It struck just as the island is beginning to reopen to tourism amid the coronavirus pandemic.AdvertisementRecord number get shots at New Zealand's 'Vaxathon': New Zealand health-care workers administered vaccine shots Saturday as the nation held a festival aimed at getting more people immunized against the coronavirus. Musicians, sports stars and celebrities pitched in for the \"Vaxathon\" event, which was broadcast on television and online for eight hours straight. By late afternoon, more than 120,000 people had gotten shots, eclipsing the daily record of 93,000 set in August.\u2014 From news services Israel is accused of killing a former member of Syria\u2019s parliament; a wanted Venezuelan envoy is extradited to the U.S. World Digest: Oct. 16, 2021",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: Oct. 16, 2021 (WP: National) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2323",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-oct-16-2021/2021/10/16/474254e0-2ea2-11ec-baf4-d7a4e075eb90_story.html",
        "text": "Israel accused of killing ex-lawmakerWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSyria accused Israeli forces on Saturday of shooting dead Medhat Al-Saleh, a former member of the Syrian parliament who had spent 12 years in jail in Israel, Saudi Arabia\u2019s state-run television station Al-Ekhbariya reported. Syrian state news agency SANA said Al-Saleh \u201cwas martyred as the Israeli enemy targeted him with fire while returning home\u201d on Saturday in Ain al-Tineh, a village in Syria near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. An Israeli military spokesperson said the military doesn\u2019t comment on foreign reports.Saleh had spent 12 years in prison in Israel after being jailed in 1985 on charges of \u201cresistance\u201d to Israeli authorities. He later served in the Syrian parliament.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 ReutersTalks halted after Maduro ally extradited Venezuela\u2019s socialist government said it would suspend negotiations with its opponents in retaliation after a close ally of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro was extradited to the United States to face money laundering charges.AdvertisementJorge Rodr\u00edguez, who has been heading the government\u2019s delegation, said his team wouldn\u2019t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.The announcement capped a tumultuous day that saw business executive Alex Saab placed on a United States-bound plane in Cape Verde after a 16-month extradition fight by Maduro and his allies, including Russia, who consider the Colombia native a Venezuelan diplomat.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressSudanese protest, call for dissolution of government: Thousands of Sudanese took to the streets in the capital, Khartoum, to call for the dissolving of the joint military-civilian government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. The protest could further increase political tensions in Sudan, threatening its fragile transition to democracy more than two\u00a0years after the military's overthrow of autocrat Omar Hassan al-Bashir amid a public uprising against his rule.AdvertisementSyrians shell rebel town near Turkish border, killing 4: Syrian government shelling of a rebel-held town near the border with Turkey killed four people and wounded more than a dozen, Syrian opposition activists said. The shelling of Sarmada comes amid increasing tensions in the last rebel stronghold in the Syrian northwest, where a cease-fire reached in March last year has been repeatedly violated in recent weeks.Story continues below advertisementChinese astronauts reach space station: Three astronauts entered China's space station for a six-month mission, setting to work Saturday after successfully docking aboard their Shenzhou-13 spacecraft. The spacecraft was launched by a Long March-2F rocket Saturday and docked with the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station.Overnight earthquake kills 3 in Bali: Three people were killed, and seven more were injured when a moderately strong earthquake and an aftershock hit Indonesia's resort island of Bali. The 4.8-magnitude quake hit just before dawn, causing people to run outdoors in a panic. It struck just as the island is beginning to reopen to tourism amid the coronavirus pandemic.AdvertisementRecord number get shots at New Zealand's 'Vaxathon': New Zealand health-care workers administered vaccine shots Saturday as the nation held a festival aimed at getting more people immunized against the coronavirus. Musicians, sports stars and celebrities pitched in for the \"Vaxathon\" event, which was broadcast on television and online for eight hours straight. By late afternoon, more than 120,000 people had gotten shots, eclipsing the daily record of 93,000 set in August.\u2014 From news services Israel is accused of killing a former member of Syria\u2019s parliament; a wanted Venezuelan envoy is extradited to the U.S. World Digest: Oct. 16, 2021",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: Oct. 16, 2021 (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2324",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-oct-16-2021/2021/10/16/474254e0-2ea2-11ec-baf4-d7a4e075eb90_story.html",
        "text": "Israel accused of killing ex-lawmakerWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSyria accused Israeli forces on Saturday of shooting dead Medhat Al-Saleh, a former member of the Syrian parliament who had spent 12 years in jail in Israel, Saudi Arabia\u2019s state-run television station Al-Ekhbariya reported. Syrian state news agency SANA said Al-Saleh \u201cwas martyred as the Israeli enemy targeted him with fire while returning home\u201d on Saturday in Ain al-Tineh, a village in Syria near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. An Israeli military spokesperson said the military doesn\u2019t comment on foreign reports.Saleh had spent 12 years in prison in Israel after being jailed in 1985 on charges of \u201cresistance\u201d to Israeli authorities. He later served in the Syrian parliament.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 ReutersTalks halted after Maduro ally extradited Venezuela\u2019s socialist government said it would suspend negotiations with its opponents in retaliation after a close ally of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro was extradited to the United States to face money laundering charges.AdvertisementJorge Rodr\u00edguez, who has been heading the government\u2019s delegation, said his team wouldn\u2019t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.The announcement capped a tumultuous day that saw business executive Alex Saab placed on a United States-bound plane in Cape Verde after a 16-month extradition fight by Maduro and his allies, including Russia, who consider the Colombia native a Venezuelan diplomat.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressSudanese protest, call for dissolution of government: Thousands of Sudanese took to the streets in the capital, Khartoum, to call for the dissolving of the joint military-civilian government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok. The protest could further increase political tensions in Sudan, threatening its fragile transition to democracy more than two\u00a0years after the military's overthrow of autocrat Omar Hassan al-Bashir amid a public uprising against his rule.AdvertisementSyrians shell rebel town near Turkish border, killing 4: Syrian government shelling of a rebel-held town near the border with Turkey killed four people and wounded more than a dozen, Syrian opposition activists said. The shelling of Sarmada comes amid increasing tensions in the last rebel stronghold in the Syrian northwest, where a cease-fire reached in March last year has been repeatedly violated in recent weeks.Story continues below advertisementChinese astronauts reach space station: Three astronauts entered China's space station for a six-month mission, setting to work Saturday after successfully docking aboard their Shenzhou-13 spacecraft. The spacecraft was launched by a Long March-2F rocket Saturday and docked with the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station.Overnight earthquake kills 3 in Bali: Three people were killed, and seven more were injured when a moderately strong earthquake and an aftershock hit Indonesia's resort island of Bali. The 4.8-magnitude quake hit just before dawn, causing people to run outdoors in a panic. It struck just as the island is beginning to reopen to tourism amid the coronavirus pandemic.AdvertisementRecord number get shots at New Zealand's 'Vaxathon': New Zealand health-care workers administered vaccine shots Saturday as the nation held a festival aimed at getting more people immunized against the coronavirus. Musicians, sports stars and celebrities pitched in for the \"Vaxathon\" event, which was broadcast on television and online for eight hours straight. By late afternoon, more than 120,000 people had gotten shots, eclipsing the daily record of 93,000 set in August.\u2014 From news services Israel is accused of killing a former member of Syria\u2019s parliament; a wanted Venezuelan envoy is extradited to the U.S. World Digest: Oct. 16, 2021",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: July 18, 2019 (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2325",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-july-18-2019/2019/07/18/6894b516-a966-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html",
        "text": "Hezbollah placed on terror list; assets frozenWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightArgentina\u2019s government on Thursday branded Hezbollah a terrorist organization and froze its assets, 25 years to the day after a bombing blamed on the Lebanese-based group destroyed a Jewish community center in the Argentine capital, killing 85 people.Argentina\u2019s Financial Information Unit took the step a day after President Mauricio Macri\u2019s government created a list of terrorist organizations to help coordinate actions with other nations and as Argentina held memorial services for victims of the attack. The unit noted that in addition to the 1994 attack on the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, Hezbollah has been blamed for a 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people. Hundreds were injured in both bombings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt the present time, Hezbollah continues to represent a current and active threat,\u201d the unit said.It is not clear what effect the ruling will have or how many assets Hezbollah might have in Argentina. The group already has been put on terrorism lists by the United States, the European Union and several others.At midmorning Thursday, sirens rang across the Argentine capital in honor of the victims of the 1994 attack, the nation\u2019s worst.Argentine prosecutors accuse Iranian officials of plotting the attack and say Hezbollah operatives carried it out. But nobody has been convicted despite years of tangled investigations.\u2014 Associated PressSedition case filed against vice presidentPhilippine police filed sedition and other criminal complaints Thursday against the vice president, three opposition senators, four Roman Catholic bishops and other critics of President Rodrigo Duterte over allegations that they were plotting to destabilize his administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVice President Leni Robredo and the others have long denied the allegations, made by a formerly detained crime suspect who claimed that he plotted with them.The Justice Department said it received the complaints from the national police\u2019s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group.The National Union of Peoples\u2019 Lawyers, a group critical of Duterte, said the allegations \u201csmack of political persecution and shotgun repression on its face using again the legal system as a potent political weapon through the law of rulers.\u201dIn the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately. Robredo, who has long criticized Duterte over his bloody crackdown on illegal drugs and his sexist remarks, is next in the line of succession if Duterte loses the presidency before his term ends in 2022.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe formerly detained crime suspect, Peter Joemel Advincula, alleged that he plotted with the accused to discredit Duterte, his family and other officials by linking them to drug syndicates.Duterte is known for his temper and outbursts against critics, especially those who have raised alarm over his drug war, which has claimed the lives of at least 6,600 mostly petty drug suspects, based on police records.\u2014 Associated Press3 sentenced to death in slaying of Nordic women in Morocco: \nA Moroccan court has convicted and sentenced to death the three main defendants in the trial over the brutal slaying last year of two Scandinavian women hiking in the Atlas Mountains. A fourth suspect, who fled the scene, was given life in prison. The court handed 19 accomplices jail terms ranging from five to 30 years. Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway, and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, were knifed to death in December. The slayings were recorded on video and posted online. The men claimed allegiance to the Islamic State militant group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAssange drops appeal of 50-week sentence for jumping bail: \nWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dropped an appeal of his 50-week prison term for jumping bail in Britain. Assange is jailed in London's Belmarsh Prison at the same time as he fights extradition to the United States on espionage charges. He jumped bail in 2012 when he sought refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London rather than turn himself in to British authorities for extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual misconduct allegations. Assange lost his asylum status in April and was arrested by British police.India reschedules moon mission launch: \nIndia's space agency said it will launch a spacecraft to the south pole of the moon on Monday after suspending an attempt this week. The Indian Space Research Organization said the Chandrayaan-2 launch is now set for 2:43 p.m. Monday. The earlier launch attempt was called off less than an hour before the 640-ton, 14-story rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-2 was to lift off. ISRO said the cause of the previous technical snag had been identified and corrected. Libya's U.N.-allied government says lawmaker was abducted: \nLibya's U.N.-backed government has accused forces loyal to a renegade military commander battling to capture Tripoli of abducting a lawmaker known for her critical views of his military operations. The Tripoli-based government \u2014 at odds with commander Khalifa Hifter and a rival, east-based administration \u2014 said it is worried about Seham Sirqiwa's fate. She has reportedly disappeared from her house in the eastern city of Benghazi, the stronghold of Hifter's self-styled Libyan National Army. Sirqiwa is a lawmaker in the east-based parliament.\u2014 From news services Argentina freezes Hezbollah assets; sedition case filed against Philippine vice president. World Digest: July 18, 2019",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: July 18, 2019 (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2326",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-july-18-2019/2019/07/18/6894b516-a966-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html",
        "text": "Hezbollah placed on terror list; assets frozenWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightArgentina\u2019s government on Thursday branded Hezbollah a terrorist organization and froze its assets, 25 years to the day after a bombing blamed on the Lebanese-based group destroyed a Jewish community center in the Argentine capital, killing 85 people.Argentina\u2019s Financial Information Unit took the step a day after President Mauricio Macri\u2019s government created a list of terrorist organizations to help coordinate actions with other nations and as Argentina held memorial services for victims of the attack. The unit noted that in addition to the 1994 attack on the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association in Buenos Aires, Hezbollah has been blamed for a 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina that killed 29 people. Hundreds were injured in both bombings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt the present time, Hezbollah continues to represent a current and active threat,\u201d the unit said.It is not clear what effect the ruling will have or how many assets Hezbollah might have in Argentina. The group already has been put on terrorism lists by the United States, the European Union and several others.At midmorning Thursday, sirens rang across the Argentine capital in honor of the victims of the 1994 attack, the nation\u2019s worst.Argentine prosecutors accuse Iranian officials of plotting the attack and say Hezbollah operatives carried it out. But nobody has been convicted despite years of tangled investigations.\u2014 Associated PressSedition case filed against vice presidentPhilippine police filed sedition and other criminal complaints Thursday against the vice president, three opposition senators, four Roman Catholic bishops and other critics of President Rodrigo Duterte over allegations that they were plotting to destabilize his administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVice President Leni Robredo and the others have long denied the allegations, made by a formerly detained crime suspect who claimed that he plotted with them.The Justice Department said it received the complaints from the national police\u2019s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group.The National Union of Peoples\u2019 Lawyers, a group critical of Duterte, said the allegations \u201csmack of political persecution and shotgun repression on its face using again the legal system as a potent political weapon through the law of rulers.\u201dIn the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately. Robredo, who has long criticized Duterte over his bloody crackdown on illegal drugs and his sexist remarks, is next in the line of succession if Duterte loses the presidency before his term ends in 2022.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe formerly detained crime suspect, Peter Joemel Advincula, alleged that he plotted with the accused to discredit Duterte, his family and other officials by linking them to drug syndicates.Duterte is known for his temper and outbursts against critics, especially those who have raised alarm over his drug war, which has claimed the lives of at least 6,600 mostly petty drug suspects, based on police records.\u2014 Associated Press3 sentenced to death in slaying of Nordic women in Morocco: \nA Moroccan court has convicted and sentenced to death the three main defendants in the trial over the brutal slaying last year of two Scandinavian women hiking in the Atlas Mountains. A fourth suspect, who fled the scene, was given life in prison. The court handed 19 accomplices jail terms ranging from five to 30 years. Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway, and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, were knifed to death in December. The slayings were recorded on video and posted online. The men claimed allegiance to the Islamic State militant group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAssange drops appeal of 50-week sentence for jumping bail: \nWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has dropped an appeal of his 50-week prison term for jumping bail in Britain. Assange is jailed in London's Belmarsh Prison at the same time as he fights extradition to the United States on espionage charges. He jumped bail in 2012 when he sought refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London rather than turn himself in to British authorities for extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual misconduct allegations. Assange lost his asylum status in April and was arrested by British police.India reschedules moon mission launch: \nIndia's space agency said it will launch a spacecraft to the south pole of the moon on Monday after suspending an attempt this week. The Indian Space Research Organization said the Chandrayaan-2 launch is now set for 2:43 p.m. Monday. The earlier launch attempt was called off less than an hour before the 640-ton, 14-story rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-2 was to lift off. ISRO said the cause of the previous technical snag had been identified and corrected. Libya's U.N.-allied government says lawmaker was abducted: \nLibya's U.N.-backed government has accused forces loyal to a renegade military commander battling to capture Tripoli of abducting a lawmaker known for her critical views of his military operations. The Tripoli-based government \u2014 at odds with commander Khalifa Hifter and a rival, east-based administration \u2014 said it is worried about Seham Sirqiwa's fate. She has reportedly disappeared from her house in the eastern city of Benghazi, the stronghold of Hifter's self-styled Libyan National Army. Sirqiwa is a lawmaker in the east-based parliament.\u2014 From news services Argentina freezes Hezbollah assets; sedition case filed against Philippine vice president. World Digest: July 18, 2019",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "News in brief: Girls found safe after 44 hours in wilderness (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2327",
        "date": "2019-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/news-in-brief-girls-found-safe-after-44-hours-in-wilderness/2019/03/03/8305de98-3dfa-11e9-9361-301ffb5bd5e6_story.html",
        "text": "Girls found safe after 44 hours in wildernessWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightArmed with some outdoor survival training, granola bars and pink rubber boots, 5- and 8-year-old sisters survived 44 hours in Northern California wilderness before they were found dehydrated and cold but in good spirits Sunday, authorities said.A fire chief and firefighter from a volunteer department found Leia, 8, and Caroline Carrico, 5, in a wooded area about 1\u00bd miles from their home in the small community of Benbow, where they had last been seen Friday afternoon, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal said. The girls were \u201csafe and sound\u201d and uninjured, in part because of survival training they got with their 4-H club, he said. \u201cThis is an absolute miracle,\u201d Honsal said. \u201cHow they were out there for 44 hours is pretty amazing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the firefighters who found the girls had followed their boot prints and granola bar wrappers. The firefighters were part of a massive search of a vast and rugged rural area that included a dozen agencies, including the National Guard, helicopters and tracking dogs.Advertisement\u2014 Associated PressU.S.-built capsule docks in space: An American-built capsule with just a test dummy aboard docked smoothly with the International Space Station on Sunday, bringing the United States a big step closer to launching astronauts again. The Dragon capsule, developed by Elon Musk's SpaceX company under contract to NASA, closed in on the station nearly 260 miles above the Pacific Ocean and, flying autonomously, linked up on its own. Dragon's arrival marked the first time in eight years that an American-made spacecraft capable of carrying humans has flown to the station. If this six-day test flight goes well, a Dragon capsule could take two NASA astronauts to the outpost this summer.\u2014 From news services Also: American-built capsule docks with the International Space Station. News in brief: Girls found safe after 44 hours in wilderness",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Top U.S. general calls China\u2019s hypersonic weapon test very close to a \u2018Sputnik moment\u2019 (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2328",
        "date": "2021-10-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/10/27/mark-milley-china-hypersonic-weapon-sputnik/",
        "text": "Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called China\u2019s recent test of a hypersonic weapons system \u201cvery concerning\u201d \u2014 and \u201cvery close\u201d to a Sputnik moment as Beijing rapidly expands its military capabilities.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMilley, the United States\u2019 top military officer, is the first U.S. official to acknowledge the provocation publicly, telling Bloomberg Television in an interview aired Wednesday that \u201cwhat we saw was a very significant event.\u201d China\u2019s test of the hypersonic system coincides with its broader effort to enhance strategic and nuclear weapons capabilities, developments being closely watched in Washington. Though military leaders have been reluctant to comment on the hypersonic system, the swift pace of China\u2019s advancement \u2014 including its construction of new missile silos and new ballistic missile submarines \u2014 has alarmed U.S. officials.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s a suite of issues with respect to China \u2026 that deeply concern us,\u201d Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said later Wednesday. \u201cThey\u2019re informing the budget. They\u2019re informing the programs and the priorities of the department, they\u2019re going to inform in many ways our training and exercise regimen. So there\u2019s a lot here.\u201dAs The Washington Post reported last week, a test conducted in August involved a nuclear-capable hypersonic vehicle that partially orbited the globe before hurtling to Earth. The demonstration analysts said, was less noteworthy for the technology, which China\u2019s military has been developing for years, than for the fact that Beijing decided to test it. Some likened it the Soviet Union\u2019s 1957 launch of a satellite called Sputnik that provided an early edge in the space race.Milley, noting that the term \u201cSputnik moment\u201d had been used in some news reports since the test, stopped short of that assessment in his interview with Bloomberg. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it\u2019s very close to that,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cIt has all of our attention.\u201dChina\u2019s test of hypersonic vehicle is part of a program to rapidly expand strategic and nuclear systemsMilley noted that the United States also is \u201cexperimenting, and testing and developing technologies to include hypersonics, artificial intelligence, robotics \u2014 a whole wide range.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKirby, speaking during a routine news briefing at the Pentagon, would not detail how far along the United States is in its development of such systems, except to say \u201cour own pursuit of hypersonic capabilities is real, it\u2019s tangible and we are absolutely working toward being able to develop that capability.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s not a technology that is alien to us,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd I would argue that it\u2019s not just our own pursuit of this sort of technology, but our mindfulness that we have defensive capabilities too that we need to continue to hone and improve.\u201dBoth Kirby and Milley stressed that the test reflects just one weapon system on Beijing\u2019s side, with the general acknowledging China\u2019s capabilities \u201care much greater than that.\u201d Referring to its growing capacities in space, cyberspace and traditional domains of land, sea and air, he said, \u201cThey\u2019re expanding rapidly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re in one of the most significant changes in what I call the \u2018character of war,\u2019 \u201d Milley said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to adjust our military going forward.\u201dChina builds advanced weapons systems using American chip technologyChina\u2019s test is a reminder that Beijing has become what Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin frequently calls the United States\u2019 \u201cpacing challenge\u201d militarily \u2014 and of the lack of consensus over how Washington should respond.China has been secretive about its weapons testing \u2014 in fact, on Oct. 18, it denied even conducting a hypersonic test. A spokesman for Beijing\u2019s foreign ministry argued that China merely had tested \u201cregular spacecraft\u201d intended for \u201cpeaceful uses of outer space.\u201dSome experts fear the prospect of entering a new arms race with Beijing, citing the dangers of a contest between two nuclear powers. President Biden is said to be weighing adopting a \u201cno first use\u201d nuclear posture, as a means of reducing tension. In September, he said at the United Nations that while the United States was prepared to check Beijing\u2019s military and economic ambitions, \u201cwe do not want a new Cold War.\u201dThe administration has yet to announce a specific policy regarding its approach toward an increasingly militarized China.Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report. Gen. Mark Milley said the test was \"very concerning\" to the U.S. military, in a Bloomberg Television interview. Top U.S. general calls China\u2019s hypersonic weapon test very close to a \u2018Sputnik moment\u2019",
        "author": "Sara Sorcher"
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: March 8, 2018 (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2329",
        "date": "2018-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-march-8-2018/2018/03/08/bc1a254c-22e2-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html",
        "text": "FARC's Timochenko quits presidential raceWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe political party formed by Colombia\u2019s once-largest rebel group withdrew a former guerrilla commander from the race for president on Thursday, citing both criticism of the political process and his serious health problems.Rodrigo Londo\u00f1o, better known as Timochenko, will not seek the presidency in the May 27 election, leaders of the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force said. The rebel group known as the FARC reached a historic peace deal with the government in 2016, allowing it to start a political party in exchange for disarming and confessing any crimes. But the party halted its legislative and presidential campaigns because of security concerns. Leaders also said that the group has had to endure crippling financial restrictions.Story continues below advertisementIn addition, Londo\u00f1o is recovering from coronary bypass surgery performed Wednesday. Doctors diagnosed him with chronic lung disease and a clogged artery.AdvertisementSome Colombians have been reluctant to embrace the peace accord, which followed more than five decades of armed conflict that left at least 250,000 dead, 60,000 missing and more than 7 million displaced.\u2014 Associated PressInventor denies killing reporter as trial begins The Danish inventor accused of torturing and killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall during a private submarine trip before dismembering her body denied killing her, asserting at the start of his trial Thursday that she died accidentally because of a pressure problem in the submarine.Story continues below advertisementPeter Madsen, accused of torturing Wall before either cutting her throat or strangling her on his submarine, also brushed off any suggestion of sexual activity with her before or after her death.Madsen has admitted to dismembering Wall\u2019s body before he \u201cburied her at sea,\u201d saying he could not lift her up the submarine tower in one piece to throw her overboard and so had to cut her up.AdvertisementWall, 30, embarked on Madsen\u2019s submarine on Aug. 10 to interview the 47-year-old co-founder of a company that develops and builds manned spacecraft. Her remains were found on the bed of the Baltic Sea weeks later, and her torso was found with multiple stab wounds.Story continues below advertisementIf found guilty, Madsen faces between five years and life in prison, or he could be locked up in a secure mental facility.Before the trial, Madsen told authorities that he had dropped Wall off on an island several hours into their trip. Then he said she died accidentally inside the submarine when a hatch fell and hit her on the head.On Thursday, he described finding Wall lifeless after a sudden pressure problem in the submarine.\u2014 Associated PressIran stops professor's widow from travelingThe widow of an Iranian Canadian university professor who died under disputed circumstances in a Tehran prison has been stopped by Iran from traveling abroad, Canada\u2019s foreign minister said Thursday.\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe death of Kavous Seyed-Emami in February sparked new anger in Iran over the treatment of detainees, especially after nearly 5,000 people were arrested in the wake of nationwide protests at the start of the year.On Wednesday night, Seyed-Emami\u2019s widow and sons tried to fly out of Iran, with their ultimate destination being Vancouver. In an email circulated by supporters, one of the sons said their mother was barred from leaving Iran. The sons were allowed to board the flight.In a tweet Thursday, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland confirmed that Maryam Mombeini was barred from leaving Iran. It was not clear where Mombeini was.Story continues below advertisementIran had alleged that Seyed-Emami, a professor of sociology, had given information on the country\u2019s missile bases to the CIA and Israel\u2019s Mossad.\u2014 Associated PressAdvertisementU.S. drone targeting Pakistani Taliban kills 21 in Afghanistan: Two missiles fired from a U.S. drone hit a militant facility in Afghanistan, killing 21 insurgents, including the son of the head of the Pakistani Taliban, according to two Pakistani intelligence officials and local Taliban commanders. The strike targeted a compound frequented by Maulana Fazlullah, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan. The intelligence officials said he was apparently not there at the time of the attack.\n\u2014 From news services FARC\u2019s Timochenko quits Colombian presidential race; Danish inventor denies killing reporter as trial begins. World Digest: March 8, 2018",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Texans are trying to keep their heads above water as Harvey batters region (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2330",
        "date": "2017-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/27/here-are-the-stories-of-some-texans-trying-to-keep-their-heads-above-water/",
        "text": "As Tropical Storm Harvey continues to batter Southeast Texas and floods the Houston area, everyday Texans are trying to keep their heads above water. Their homes are inundated, their neighborhood streets are under chest-deep water, and many roads and highways are completely impassable. Some are waiting for rescue, others are wading out on foot, most are bracing for massive rains that are expected to continue for days. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCommander Toney Wade and his Cajun Coast Search and Rescue team, a volunteer group from Louisiana, made it to Dickinson, Tex., where they rescued 25 people, some of whom were stuck in a two-story hotel.Wade said that more than 10,000 people needed to be rescued in that area, which is halfway between Houston and Galveston, on the Gulf of Mexico.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was really something \u2014 just something to see \u2014 trucks and cars you can barely see under the water,\u201d he said in a telephone interview.AdvertisementHe and 16 other men and women, some with military and many with firefighter and emergency medical technician experience packed up and left to help with five shallow draft boats, a high-water rescue boat and one air boat.\u201cWe train hard for this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s what we do. And at first light tomorrow, we will back at it.\u201d\u2014 Emily Wax-ThibodeauxResidents of Houston on Aug. 27 assessed the damage that tropical storm Harvey has caused to their city. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)\u2018A gush of water that came up too fast\u2019Nichelle Mosby stood up to her knees in floodwater in the parking lot of the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Southwest Houston, grimacing with a towel over her head to block the rain.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe were supposed to be leaving this morning \u2014 and this happened,\u201d she said midmorning Sunday, looking out across a deluged parking lot toward the Residence Inn next door, which was flooded with more than two feet of water.Mosby and six family members, including a 4-year-old girl, had come from Louisiana to visit relatives. When Harvey hit, they booked into the Courtyard and were now stranded with dozens of other guests.Advertisement\u201cWe went through Katrina, but this feels different,\u201d she said. Instead of a gradual buildup of rising water, she said, \u201cthis was like a gush of water that came up too fast.\u201dMosby stood among a few dozen cars in the parking lot, which were mostly flooded up to their windows. A few drivers had moved their cars to the only high ground, just in front of the lobby door. But as a hard rain continued to fall, the water seemed to be creeping toward the door as well \u2014 with the potential to flood the lobby.Inside the lobby, families huddled around TVs playing the Weather Channel and local news, watching officials warn people to stay off city streets. Next to the hotel, the Braes Bayou raged downstream carrying large chunks of debris. Its level had risen 10 or 20 feet since the day before, swamping downstream bridges, plus all roads and a huge park close by.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor dozens of guests at the hotel, there was no way to leave. Water in the parking lot rose quickly to about three feet deep, and it was deeper out on the roadway, where several abandoned cars sat completely swamped.In the lobby, John McMillian, 70, sat eating breakfast with his wife, Debbie McMillian, 64, and their daughter, Tara, 29.They were in town so John McMillian could have five days of treatment for his leukemia at MD Anderson Cancer Center just down the road. He had three days of treatment and was supposed to have his fourth on Sunday, but now they were stranded.\u201cIf push came to shove, we could always wade to the hospital,\u201d he said.\u201cI\u2019m not going to let him, don\u2019t worry,\u201d his wife added.Story continues below advertisementWith the McMillians said they were prepared for a long stay in the hotel for the long haul because John McMillian needs his next two days of treatment. They had seen the reports about the impending storm, so Tara had packed them plenty of extra food and water at home in Beaumont, Tex.Advertisement\u201cWe knew this was a possibility,\u201d Debbie McMillian said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been through a lot of hurricanes, but we\u2019ve never been stuck like this.\u201dWedgewood Elementary School in Friendswood, Tex., became a shelter for hundreds of families after Hurricane Harvey hit landfall on Aug. 25. (Zoeann Murphy, Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)She said her brand new Acura was underwater in the parking lot.\u201cI haven\u2019t even made the first payment on it yet,\u201d she said.As people sat chatting quietly, phones buzzed with emergency signals urging people to take shelter because of a tornado watch. The entire Houston area has been under near-constant tornado warnings for two days.Story continues below advertisementAnual Wisdom and his wife, Sandra, from Oklahoma, sat eating breakfast a few tables away in the lobby. Their 39-year-old son had surgery for brain cancer at MD Anderson on Wednesday.They arrived on Aug. 20 and parked their small RV at a campground about 14 miles up the road, but they haven\u2019t seen it since. They spent the first few nights in the hospital room with their son, then when Harvey started pelting rain they couldn\u2019t get back to their RV. So they spent Friday night sleeping in their car in the hospital parking garage, and moved to the Marriott Courtyard for Saturday night.AdvertisementTheir son was supposed to be released from the hospital Saturday, but doctors have now ordered him to stay there until the storm emergency passes. The Wisdoms want to be with him, but they are stranded at the hotel.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have prepped for the hotel room,\u201d Sandra said. \u201cWe bought extra food and water, we came down here and bought snacks. We filled the bathtub with water so we can flush the toilet if we have to.\u201dThey said they\u2019d ridden out lots of tornadoes in Oklahoma in the past.\u201cBut this is kind of crazy,\u201d Sandra said. \u201cIt\u2019s bad enough to have to come down when your son has brain surgery, but to have to go through a hurricane too is a little much.\u201d\u2014 Kevin SullivanThe unicorn floatieSince Thursday, Sarah and Eric Fisher prepared for his older brother\u2019s wedding. It was supposed to be on Saturday at The Farmhouse in Montgomery, near Lake Conroe, just over an hour\u2019s drive north of Houston.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was supposed to be a weekend of fun. They\u2019d rented a lake house. That explains the inflatable unicorn in Sarah\u2019s car. But when news of Harvey stalling above the greater Houston area broke, guests called to say they couldn\u2019t make it.Vendors began to cancel. The bride was devastated. The wedding was postponed.So Sarah and her husband and her parents, Laura and Tim Schuur, headed back to her parents\u2019 home in Spring.They made it just in time to move the furniture upstairs. The rain began and by 8 a.m., their house started to flood. It covered their hardwood floors, up to their ankles and closer and closer to the mailbox.Like a year ago when their home flooded after a storm, Sarah, her husband and her parents knew they\u2019d need to evacuate.Jack, a poodle, and Daisy, a bulldog, came first on an inflatable tube that was meant to be pulled behind a boat on Lake Conroe.Laura wore a pink inner tube around her waist. And that unicorn floatie, the one Sarah used at her best friend\u2019s engagement party at the lake a few weeks ago, turned into a way to save her family\u2019s possessions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo they walked two miles, for nearly 20 minutes, in water that rose between their waists and their chests before they were rescued by family friends.\u201cIn the last flood, we got about eight inches,\u201d Sarah said. \u201cThis time, we think we\u2019ll get double that.\u201dBy now, the water is above the mailbox and the blue truck parked out front has water almost to the top of the cab.But Sarah and her family are 15 miles northwest, at her grandfather\u2019s home. There, the pups are asleep and her family is safe and the unicorn floatie is deflated under the covered back porch.\u2014 Stephanie KuzydymWatching the floodwaters riseMichael Peraza, 17, slept at a friend\u2019s house Saturday night after watching the boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor. He awoke to messages from his mom telling him that water had started to seep into the house.AdvertisementMichael and his friends walked each other home through flooded streets in Westfield. When he arrived, he was shocked to see several inches of water in the place he has called home for 10 years. His mother unplugged everything and collected a few treasured items while his sister called for help.\u201cMy sister started calling as soon as it started flooding around 9 a.m., and nothing was getting through,\u201d Peraza said. \u201cWe kept calling all the numbers that were listed on television.\u201dThe family decided to leave on foot just after 4 p.m., with Peraza and his sister each carrying one of her children, ages 4 and 7. The family didn\u2019t have a destination in mind, they just knew they didn\u2019t want to be stuck in the house as the floodwater continued to rise.\u201cWe just decided to leave on pure instinct,\u201d Peraza said.When they got to the end of Anice Street, where they live, they heard a horn and followed it. Around the corner, they spotted a high-water rescue truck staffed by local firefighters and Army Reserve members. The family joined nearly 20 other evacuees in the back of the truck and made their way to the Red Cross shelter at M.O. Campbell Center on Aldine Bender.Peraza said that with more than 200 people already at the shelter, there wouldn\u2019t be enough cots for everyone to sleep on, but that he was just happy to be safe and dry with his family.\u2014 Brittney MartinEvery building damaged, no lives lostMaureen Gordon, 53, was waiting at Port Aransas city offices to get to a shelter after her roof caved in and she fell on broken glass from her windows.alongside wealthy second-home owners and surfers.City Manager Ken Parsons said there were no fatalities in this town of about 3,800, which can swell to 70,000 on weekends. The past two days have been spent doing searches and rescues using dogs. No major injuries have been reported.\u201cEvery building was compromised in some way, whether it was 3 percent or 100 percent,\u201d Parsons said.The city marina was destroyed and expensive yachts as well as small boats were sunk. Many boats washed up along the Main Street.Now the city is working to plug numerous gas leaks and repair downed wires. Homeowners will be let back in during the next several days, but the 80 percent of residents who are second-home owners or renters will have to wait longer, he said.Frank McDonald, 64, a surfer and disabled veteran who moved to Texas from La Jolla, Calif., took shelter in a city building with his two labs after his home was destroyed.\u201cI don\u2019t know how I will survive this,\u201d he said. \u201cI even lost my surfboard in the storm.\u201d\u2014 Mary Lee GrantAirport delugedSouthwest Airlines flight attendant Allison Brown estimates that at least 50 flight attendants, a number of pilots, airport staff members and hundreds of passengers have been stranded at William P. Hobby Airport since at least 1 a.m. Sunday.Brown said that the airport flooded so quickly that shuttles were unable to get to them, and that area hotels \u2014 which also were flooded\u2014were unable to accommodate them. Police told them it would be unsafe to try to leave.\u201cLuckily, we have the restaurant staff or else we would\u2019ve been stuck with no food,\u201d Brown said. \u201cWaters in the road are around four feet \u2014 minimum \u2014 surrounding the airport.\u201d\u2014 Brittney Martin\u2018Everyone\u2019s mad at that stupid guy Harvey\u2019In the town of Katy, police Lt. Howard Briner was posted at the HEB, a major grocery store.\u201cIf you have to leave, please drive slowly because cars can flood a house when they drive up too fast,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all need to respect each other and think about others right now.\u201dInside the cavernous supermarket, Michele and Joel Antonini were in line with 20 sacks of groceries doing just that \u2014 thinking of neighbors they probably would be taking in from Grand Lakes, where they used to live.Grand Lakes is already experiencing flooding because the bayous run through the neighborhood, and when they flood, often the reservoirs flood as well.They bought a sheet cake, a roast, chips, hot dogs and hamburgers.\u201cWe just want to be ready if they are hungry and can get out,\u201d Michele said. \u201cWe just want to be ready to help.\u201dAmanda Picard, 35, a CrossFit trainer, said that she lives behind a creek, and that all her neighborhood lakes were flooded. She said she was making a grocery run in case the storm goes on for days.\u201cIt\u2019s gonna be a long haul,\u201d said Amanda, who was shopping for spring mix and frozen pizza with her husband and 6-year-old.Also, shelters are now being set up, including at the Fussell senior citizen center.\u201cTurn around, and don\u2019t drive,\u201d is what firefighter and paramedic Kyle Fritsche said, warning that if water goes halfway up a car\u2019s wheel, \u201cyou will float.\u201dHe brought a suitcase to work packed for what all departments are calling \u201ca marathon, not a sprint,\u201d and expected that the worst was still yet to come.\u201cEven after the rain, we have potential for some dangerous flooding for days,\u201d he said.The fear is more than 40 feet of water.\u201cNormally, we could count on the rain sinking into the ground,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we are already at the total saturation point.\u201dHe and his fiancee missed their anniversary, \u201ceveryone\u2019s mad at that stupid guy Harvey.\u201d\u2014 Emily Wax-ThibodeauxWhen your kid gets sick during a hurricaneErica Stietenroth, 38, said she was in tears driving to find a pharmacy that was open to help her 8-year-old daughter, who had a 105-degree fever.The emergency room on Saturday night didn\u2019t have the drugs she needed for strep throat, so they wrote her a prescription. And a tornado was about to hit.On Sunday morning, she started searching for open pharmacies. She found one inside a local grocery store, but the pharmacists weren\u2019t able to get to work. Finally, an employee came in to shop for food and was given permission to mix her medication.\u201cI was crying my eyes out for my baby girl,\u201d she said. \u201cBy the grace of God, that employee was there.\u201dFor a lighter side: Donna Clark, 43, drove to 10 Starbucks locations in the Katy area Sunday morning, navigating flooding to get her caffeine fix.All were closed. She was participating in a Starbucks contest in which she had to buy coffee on weekends between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. to win free coffee for a year.Today was the day she supposed to buy her final cup.The teacher hugged her daughter in front of the closed Cinco Ranch Starbucks inside a Target store, which was open.\u201cSadly, I\u2019m acting like a child,\u201d she laughed gently.\u2014 Emily Wax-ThibodeauxKatrina flashbackIn a neighborhood recreation center on the far south side of Dallas, Rebecca Hernandez sat near a door that held back the first heavy rain from the storm she and her family left Houston to avoid. Hernandez, 35, didn\u2019t want to wait around for floodwater to reach the front door of her home in North Houston as it did during Hurricane Katrina. So she, her husband, Gilbert, and their three children drove to Dallas on Friday night. With rent due in a few days, the family couldn\u2019t afford to spend more than one night in a hotel, so they came here.\u201cWe try to make this place as much like home as possible, said Angienetta Johnson, the phone-wielding leader of this rec center-turned-emergency shelter.For some, that means making computers available for children who want to play video games. For Hernandez\u2019s 2-year-old son, Gilbert Constantine, maybe some time watching \u201cKung-Fu Panda,\u201d she said.Normally a four-hour drive, the trek from Dallas to Houston took five for the Hernandez family. Now, it could take as many as eight, some here at the rec center say. Regardless, Johnson is ready. With degrees in engineering, mathematics and information systems \u2014 and 41 years developing spacecraft at NASA \u2014 there may be no better person to run this shelter.\u201cWe\u2019re starting small,\u201d Johnson said, noting that perhaps 500 or so evacuees are in her shelter and one across town. \u201cBut we have plans to go up to 5,000, if need be.\u201dHernandez and her family are among those who can count on the generosity of the volunteers such as Johnson, and despite the nonstop rain pounding on the glass, found humor in one situation.Her father-in-law, who is in his mid-70s, called to say he was \u201cfishing from inside the house,\u201d in Dickinson, near Galveston.Eventually, the Coast Guard rescued him from the roof of his home.\u201cWe just laughed. He\u2019s crazy,\u201d she said.A neighbor has told Hernandez that Harvey\u2019s waters are at the family\u2019s front door now \u2014 just as they were with Katrina. But Harvey isn\u2019t done yet, with at least a dozen more inches expected to fall in Houston and elsewhere.\u201cWe\u2019re ready to go back as soon as they tell us it\u2019s safe,\u201d she said.\u2014 Justin GlaweCrossing the pondRichard Whelan rested on his dark green umbrella, his month-old daughter, Marnie, strapped to his chest. His wife, Amy Whelan, wiped the water drops from her eyeglasses, a gesture she\u2019d soon have to repeat.In the five years they have lived in Houston, the Whelans have seen it flood three times, but never like this, never as bad.They lived in an apartment complex a block off Buffalo Bayou and had walked toward Allen Parkway, a road that lines the Bayou to see the water that was flooding homes, parking garages and KHOU, the local news station.Amy tucked her phone in her black raincoat. She was taking photos to send to family members in England. Richard is originally from London and Amy from Manchester.Marnie was supposed to make her first trip across the pond with her mother on Saturday. When the Whelans saw the forecast, they tried to switch their flight out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport to Saturday night, but flights were canceled.\u201cWe were supposed to be on a flight tonight, but there\u2019s no chance,\u201d she said.She peers at her husband with a smile. He\u2019s Mr. Safety. He has been watching the news and wondering why all of these people are trying to drive through high water.\u201cThere\u2019s a guy out there kayaking through it, which is kind of fun but again, I\u2019m like, \u2018What are you doing? Why are you kayaking?\u201d Richard said.He had been up since 7 a.m. helping residents at the apartment next door. He pushed a blue car up an incline out of an underground parking garage, where the water rose above the floodgates.\u2014 Stephanie KuzydymA different sort of cruisePassengers aboard the Carnival Freedom cruise ship are getting an extended vacation because of Harvey.Instead of docking in Galveston on Saturday as scheduled, the ship stopped in New Orleans to take on fresh water and stock up on provisions.\u201cWe are now on our way back to Galveston, but the Port of Galveston is still closed,\u201d said Randy Turrentine, one of the ship\u2019s passengers. \u201cThey say we may be out here until Tuesday morning.\u201dTurrentine says even if the ship manages to dock in Galveston, he and his family may still be unable to return to their home in Spring because of the ongoing flooding.\u2014 Brittney Martin\u2018We are lucky\u2019In Houston neighborhoods where water stayed in the streets and out of homes, residents turned out to marvel.Susan Dickson, 71, rattled off the floods she\u2019d seen in Houston since she moved here in 1968: Allison, Ike, Alicia.\u201cThis is the worst because it\u2019s not stopping,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve not seen it go on and on like this before.\u201dOther neighbors agreed that in past storms, the streets filled and drained within hours. Not so this time.\u201cI\u2019m wasting my time trying to unclog the intakes,\u201d said Klaus Thoma, a 72-year-old lawyer, as he scraped as storm drain covers with a plastic rake, trying to speed the water along. But he feared it had nowhere to go. Waterways across the city, a publicly maintained drainage system, were all full as well.\u201cWe are lucky,\u201d he said standing in ankle-deep water. \u201cJust think about the people getting rescued, who lost their homes. It\u2019s horrible.\u201d\u2014 Dylan BaddourNursing home rescue\nIn Dickinson, seniors at La Vita Bella nursing home were rescued from waist-deep water.\nTyler Drummond, chief of staff for Mark Henry, a county judge in Galveston, said that photos of seniors, some in wheelchairs, under water were \u201creal, yes; shocking but real.\u201d\n\n\u201cAll of those individuals are safe and sound now and in a Red Cross shelter,\u201d he said in a telephone interview.\n\u2014 Emily Wax-Thibodeaux\nHarvey drops nearly two feet of rain on Houston, causing catastrophic floodingShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageTwo kayakers try to beat the current pushing them down an overflowing Brays Bayou along S. Braeswood in Houston, Texas, Sunday, Aug. 27, 2017. Rescuers answered hundreds of calls for help Sunday as floodwaters from the remnants of Hurricane Harvey climbed high enough to begin filling second-story homes, and authorities urged stranded families to seek refuge on their rooftops. (Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle via AP) As Harvey batters Southeast Texas and floods Houston, reporters for the Washington Post are fanned across the region Texans are trying to keep their heads above water as Harvey batters region",
        "author": "Sandhya Somashekhar"
    },
    {
        "title": "National Digest: Archdiocese in Minn. settles clergy abuse lawsuit for $210 million (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2331",
        "date": "2018-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-digest-archdiocese-in-minn-settles-clergy-abuse-lawsuit-for-210-million/2018/05/31/7f196eb8-5fc4-11e8-b2b8-08a538d9dbd6_story.html",
        "text": "Archdiocese settles clergy abuse lawsuitWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis has agreed to a $210\u00a0million settlement with 450 victims of clergy sexual abuse as part of its plan for bankruptcy reorganization, an attorney said Thursday, making it the second-largest U.S. payout in the priest sex abuse scandal.Victims\u2019 attorney Jeff Anderson said the settlement was reached with the survivors and the archdiocese and includes accountability measures. The money, a total of $210,290,724, will go into a pot to pay survivors, with the amount for each survivor to be determined. Anderson said a formal reorganization plan will be submitted to the judge for approval, and then it will be sent to the survivors for a vote. Anderson expected they will readily approve it.Story continues below advertisementArchbishop Bernard Hebda said he was grateful to victims who came forward.Advertisement\u201cI recognize that the abuse stole so much from you, your childhood, your innocence, your ability to trust .\u2009.\u2009. your faith,\u201d he said, adding that he hopes the settlement brings closure to those who were harmed. \u201cWe\u2019ve been working with them very carefully to try to formulate this in a way that benefits them to the maximum.\u201dAccording to the website BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy sex abuse cases, this is the largest total payout among the Roman Catholic archdioceses and dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy protection. But the largest total payout of any kind came in 2007, when the Archdiocese of Los Angeles settled clergy sex abuse cases with 508 victims for $660 million.Story continues below advertisementThomas Abood, chairman of the Archdiocesan Finance Council and Reorganization Task Force, said the settlement will be outlined in greater detail when it is filed in court. But he said most of the funding, about $170 million, will come from insurance carriers. The rest will come from parishes, the archdiocese, a pension fund and real estate sales.AdvertisementThe archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in 2015, two years after the Minnesota legislature opened a three-year window that allowed people who had been sexually abused to sue for damages. That resulted in hundreds of claims being filed against the archdiocese.At least 15 Catholic dioceses or archdioceses across the country have filed for bankruptcy, including three in Minnesota, as they sought to protect themselves from growing claims of sexual abuse by clergy members. A fourth Minnesota diocese, St. Cloud, announced its intention to file in February but didn\u2019t immediately set a date.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressMethane dunes found on Pluto Scientists have discovered dunes on Pluto made of tiny frozen grains of methane.The pale gray and white ridges were revealed by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 flyby. A British-led team announced the findings Thursday in the journal Science.AdvertisementResearchers said the dunes appear to be made mostly of icy specks of methane the size of sand, with some frozen nitrogen probably mixed in. Thought to be relatively recent, the parallel rows of dunes are located in Pluto\u2019s heart-shaped region at the base of mountains as tall as the Alps and formed from giant blocks of ice with frosty methane snowcaps. These plains in the left lobe of Pluto\u2019s \u201cheart\u201d are known as Sputnik Planitia.Story continues below advertisementScientists were surprised to find dunes given Pluto\u2019s thin, weak atmosphere. They suggest nitrogen ice coating the surface of Sputnik Planitia transformed into gas that lifted methane particles into the air. Pluto\u2019s gentle winds then carried and deposited the grains.Dunes have been found on Mars, Venus, Saturn\u2019s moon, Titan, and even a comet. But Pluto\u2019s are the only ones known to consist of methane.Advertisement\u201cPretty much nowhere else we know of is cold enough!\u201d the study\u2019s lead author, Matt Telfer of Plymouth University in England, said via email Thursday.Researchers liken the dunes to those at White Sands, New Mexico, or in California\u2019s Death Valley.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressShooter at YouTube HQ planned attack, police say A woman who shot and wounded three people before killing herself at YouTube headquarters scoped out the California campus a day before striding into its courtyard and shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of employees eating lunch, authorities said Thursday. Nasim Aghdam of San Diego had the handwritten address of Google, which owns the video-sharing site, in her car at the time of the shooting, San Bruno Police Cmdr. Geoff Caldwell said in a news release.He said it appears Aghdam committed the April 3 attack because she was displeased with YouTube\u2019s business practices, which family members say she complained were costing her income. Caldwell did not immediately return a call seeking more details.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe release said Aghdam had visited YouTube on April 2 and asked employees for directions to the main office. She was directed to the front desk where she inquired about employment.\u2014 Associated PressCharges filed against man who prompted emergency landing: Investigators say charges have been filed against a man whose screaming and threats aboard a Delta Air Lines flight prompted an emergency landing in Oklahoma. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Tulsa says 29-year-old Bolutife Olorunda of Vancouver, Wash., was charged Thursday with interference with flight crew members and attendants. Officials say none of the 172 passengers and six crew members was injured. The flight from Portland, Ore., eventually continued to Atlanta.\u2014 Associated Press A roundup of news from across the nation. National Digest: Archdiocese in Minn. settles clergy abuse lawsuit for $210 million",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Appeals court halts Biden\u2019s vaccine, testing requirement (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2332",
        "date": "2021-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2021/11/12/777baf7e-3e9e-11ec-8ee9-4f14a26749d1_story.html",
        "text": "Appeals court halts vaccine requirementWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA federal appeals court in New Orleans has halted the Biden administration\u2019s vaccine or testing requirement for private businesses, delivering another political setback to one of the White House\u2019s signature public health policies.A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued the ruling Friday, after temporarily halting the mandate last weekend in response to lawsuits filed by Republican-aligned businesses and legal groups. Calling the requirement a \u201cmandate,\u201d the court said the rule, instituted through the Labor Department, \u201cgrossly exceeds [Occupational Safety and Health Administration]\u2019s statutory authority.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe judges said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.AdvertisementThe vaccine mandate released by the Biden administration last week says private employers with more than 100 employees must require staff to get vaccinated \u2014 or face weekly testing and mandatory masking.The policy was scheduled to take effect Jan. 4. It is not clear whether the full bench of the 5th Circuit will determine its fate. The Biden administration had asked the 5th Circuit to hold off on ruling until a judicial lottery can take place next week to consolidate several challenges to the mandate before a single appeals court.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Eli Rosenberg and Ann E. MarimowShatner's crewmate to space dies in crash A man who traveled to space with William Shatner last month was killed along with another person when the small plane they were in crashed in a wooded area of northern New Jersey, according to state police.AdvertisementThe one-time space tourist Glen M. de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, N.J, were aboard the single-engine Cessna 172 that went down Thursday.De Vries was an instrument-rated private pilot, and Fischer owned a flight school. Authorities have not said who was piloting the small plane.The plane had left Essex County Airport in Caldwell, near New York City, and was headed to Sussex Airport, in northwestern New Jersey. The Federal Aviation Administration alerted about the missing plane around 3 p.m., and emergency crews found the wreckage in Hampton Township around 4 p.m., the FAA said.Story continues below advertisementDe Vries took a 10-minute flight to the edge of space on Oct. 13 aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft with Shatner and two others.De Vries co-founded Medidata Solutions, a software company specializing in clinical research, and was the vice chair of life sciences and health care at Dassault Systemes, which acquired Medidata in 2019. He had taken part in an auction for a seat on the first flight and bought a seat on the second trip.AdvertisementDe Vries also served on the board of Carnegie Mellon University.Fischer owned the flight school Fischer Aviation and was its chief instructor, according to the company\u2019s website.\u2014 Associated PressRain, floods prompt Coast Guard rescues The U.S. Coast Guard used two helicopters to rescue campers from rising waters at an RV park on the Oregon Coast Friday. Mudslides shut down roads and a woman was plucked from a swollen river as a second day of heavy rains and flooding pummeled the Pacific Northwest.Story continues below advertisementAuthorities issued flood watches along Oregon\u2019s coast and warned of the possibility of dangerous mudslides in areas that burned in last summer\u2019s devastating wildfires. At the RV park about 90 miles southwest of Portland, Coast Guard teams said they had rescued 12 people and three dogs and were continuing their efforts with a rescue swimmer to reach a total of about 50 people.AdvertisementPhotos showed RVs sitting in water about 6 inches deep and water covering the campground and parking areas. In some areas of the park, water had risen to 4 feet, the Statesman-Journal reported. In nearby Otis, another RV park was also flooded and a private fire engine that sits permanently at the town limits to welcome visitors had water halfway up its doors.Forecasters said the storms are being caused by an atmospheric river, known as the Pineapple Express. Rain was expected to remain heavy in Oregon and Washington through Friday night.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressStar of Dolphin Tale' dies at aquariumA prosthetic-tailed dolphin named Winter that starred in the \u201cDolphin Tale\u201d movies died Thursday evening at a Florida aquarium despite lifesaving efforts to treat a gastrointestinal abnormality, aquarium officials said.AdvertisementThe 16-year-old female bottlenose dolphin died while being held by animal care experts who were preparing Winter for a procedure at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium where the famous marine mammal has long resided.Veterinarian Dr. Shelly Marquardt said in a statement that the aquarium worked with specialists and marine mammal experts from around the country but the dolphin, which was in critical condition and declining, died while being held by caregivers.Story continues below advertisementThe statement said the aquarium would remain closed on Friday to provide staff time to grieve. It had earlier said a Friday closure would allow workers to focus on the dolphin\u2019s medical care.Winter was two months old when her tail became entangled in a crab trap near Cape Canaveral, which forced its amputation. \u201cDolphin Tale,\u201d which was released in 2011, chronicled Winter\u2019s recovery and the unprecedented, lengthy effort to fit her with a prosthetic tail. A sequel, \u201cDolphin Tale 2,\u201d was released three years later starring Winter and Hope, another rescued dolphin cared for by the Clearwater aquarium.\u2014 Associated Press News from around the nation. Appeals court halts Biden\u2019s vaccine, testing requirement",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Appeals court halts Biden\u2019s vaccine, testing requirement (WP: National) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2333",
        "date": "2021-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2021/11/12/777baf7e-3e9e-11ec-8ee9-4f14a26749d1_story.html",
        "text": "Appeals court halts vaccine requirementWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA federal appeals court in New Orleans has halted the Biden administration\u2019s vaccine or testing requirement for private businesses, delivering another political setback to one of the White House\u2019s signature public health policies.A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued the ruling Friday, after temporarily halting the mandate last weekend in response to lawsuits filed by Republican-aligned businesses and legal groups. Calling the requirement a \u201cmandate,\u201d the court said the rule, instituted through the Labor Department, \u201cgrossly exceeds [Occupational Safety and Health Administration]\u2019s statutory authority.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe judges said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.AdvertisementThe vaccine mandate released by the Biden administration last week says private employers with more than 100 employees must require staff to get vaccinated \u2014 or face weekly testing and mandatory masking.The policy was scheduled to take effect Jan. 4. It is not clear whether the full bench of the 5th Circuit will determine its fate. The Biden administration had asked the 5th Circuit to hold off on ruling until a judicial lottery can take place next week to consolidate several challenges to the mandate before a single appeals court.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Eli Rosenberg and Ann E. MarimowShatner's crewmate to space dies in crash A man who traveled to space with William Shatner last month was killed along with another person when the small plane they were in crashed in a wooded area of northern New Jersey, according to state police.AdvertisementThe one-time space tourist Glen M. de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, N.J, were aboard the single-engine Cessna 172 that went down Thursday.De Vries was an instrument-rated private pilot, and Fischer owned a flight school. Authorities have not said who was piloting the small plane.The plane had left Essex County Airport in Caldwell, near New York City, and was headed to Sussex Airport, in northwestern New Jersey. The Federal Aviation Administration alerted about the missing plane around 3 p.m., and emergency crews found the wreckage in Hampton Township around 4 p.m., the FAA said.Story continues below advertisementDe Vries took a 10-minute flight to the edge of space on Oct. 13 aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft with Shatner and two others.De Vries co-founded Medidata Solutions, a software company specializing in clinical research, and was the vice chair of life sciences and health care at Dassault Systemes, which acquired Medidata in 2019. He had taken part in an auction for a seat on the first flight and bought a seat on the second trip.AdvertisementDe Vries also served on the board of Carnegie Mellon University.Fischer owned the flight school Fischer Aviation and was its chief instructor, according to the company\u2019s website.\u2014 Associated PressRain, floods prompt Coast Guard rescues The U.S. Coast Guard used two helicopters to rescue campers from rising waters at an RV park on the Oregon Coast Friday. Mudslides shut down roads and a woman was plucked from a swollen river as a second day of heavy rains and flooding pummeled the Pacific Northwest.Story continues below advertisementAuthorities issued flood watches along Oregon\u2019s coast and warned of the possibility of dangerous mudslides in areas that burned in last summer\u2019s devastating wildfires. At the RV park about 90 miles southwest of Portland, Coast Guard teams said they had rescued 12 people and three dogs and were continuing their efforts with a rescue swimmer to reach a total of about 50 people.AdvertisementPhotos showed RVs sitting in water about 6 inches deep and water covering the campground and parking areas. In some areas of the park, water had risen to 4 feet, the Statesman-Journal reported. In nearby Otis, another RV park was also flooded and a private fire engine that sits permanently at the town limits to welcome visitors had water halfway up its doors.Forecasters said the storms are being caused by an atmospheric river, known as the Pineapple Express. Rain was expected to remain heavy in Oregon and Washington through Friday night.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressStar of Dolphin Tale' dies at aquariumA prosthetic-tailed dolphin named Winter that starred in the \u201cDolphin Tale\u201d movies died Thursday evening at a Florida aquarium despite lifesaving efforts to treat a gastrointestinal abnormality, aquarium officials said.AdvertisementThe 16-year-old female bottlenose dolphin died while being held by animal care experts who were preparing Winter for a procedure at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium where the famous marine mammal has long resided.Veterinarian Dr. Shelly Marquardt said in a statement that the aquarium worked with specialists and marine mammal experts from around the country but the dolphin, which was in critical condition and declining, died while being held by caregivers.Story continues below advertisementThe statement said the aquarium would remain closed on Friday to provide staff time to grieve. It had earlier said a Friday closure would allow workers to focus on the dolphin\u2019s medical care.Winter was two months old when her tail became entangled in a crab trap near Cape Canaveral, which forced its amputation. \u201cDolphin Tale,\u201d which was released in 2011, chronicled Winter\u2019s recovery and the unprecedented, lengthy effort to fit her with a prosthetic tail. A sequel, \u201cDolphin Tale 2,\u201d was released three years later starring Winter and Hope, another rescued dolphin cared for by the Clearwater aquarium.\u2014 Associated Press News from around the nation. Appeals court halts Biden\u2019s vaccine, testing requirement",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "ICE detention-center attacker killed by police was an avowed anarchist, authorities say (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2334",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/19/ice-detention-center-attacker-killed-by-police-was-an-avowed-anarchist-authorities-say/",
        "text": "A man fatally shot by police Saturday after allegedly throwing \u201cincendiary objects\u201d at an immigration detention center in Washington state was an anarchist who claimed association with antifascists \u2014 known as antifa \u2014 according to new details released by police.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDetectives are reviewing a manifesto written and distributed by 69-year-old Willem Van Spronsen, who police said once belonged to the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, a self-proclaimed \u201canti-fascist, anti-racist, pro-worker organization.\u201d Officers were not aware of the manifesto before the attack on the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, police said in a statement Thursday. Van Spronsen, of Washington\u2019s Vashon Island, was also embroiled in a custody dispute with his ex-wife when he allegedly tried to blow up the privately owned detention facility, according to police. He was arrested last year at a protest at the center, court records show.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVan Spronsen allegedly approached the center around 4 a.m. Saturday, manipulating what looked like an AR-15-style rifle and setting fire to a building owned by the detention center. Police said surveillance video shows he placed flares strategically \u2014 including underneath a 500-gallon propane tank \u2014 ignited his own car so it would explode and threw molotov cocktails at nearby buildings.As sirens signaled officers were headed to the center, where a peaceful protest had occurred eight hours earlier, police said Van Spronsen continued attacking the complex. He pointed a rifle at the four officers who arrived, police said, and refused orders to drop the gun.The officers fired at Van Spronsen, hitting him twice and killing him, according to police.A Spanish-language journalist covered ICE detention. Then he lived through it.Tacoma police identified the officers at the scene as Sgt. C. Martin, Officer J. Correa, Officer E. Allman and Officer W. Gustason, although police did not specify which officers fired their weapons. The officers were not injured, and \u201cmedical aid was staged\u201d nearby, according to police.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe officers \u2014 with experience on the Tacoma police force ranging from nine months to 20 years \u2014 have been put on paid administrative leave, according to department policy.Police Chief Don Ramsdell praised the officers\u2019 actions as \u201chonorable and courageous.\u201d\u201cBecause of our officers\u2019 selfless commitment to protect and serve, countless lives were potentially saved, including the lives of employees, as well as detainees of the Northwest Detention facility,\u201d Ramsdell said in a statement.Police said that they were continuing to investigate the incident and that citizens and police employees would conduct an internal review after the investigation is complete.Trump\u2019s presidency may be making Latinos sick\u201cThis could have resulted in the mass murder of staff and detainees housed at the facility, had he been successful at setting the tank ablaze,\u201d Shawn Fallah, who heads U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement\u2019s Office of Professional Responsibility, said in a statement. \u201cThese are the kinds of incidents that keep you up at night.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo ICE employees or detainees were hurt, agency spokeswoman Tanya Roman told The Washington Post. The detention center canceled visitations for the day but did not go into lockdown, Roman said.The attack came as thousands protested at ICE facilities nationwide ahead of the agency\u2019s announced plans for mass arrests of undocumented immigrants Sunday. Although the Trump administration said it would target about 2,000 families for deportation in as many as 10 cities, large-scale enforcement operations failed to materialize.The Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma Tideflats is owned and operated for ICE by a private company called the Geo Group, according to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which puts the facility\u2019s capacity at 1,575 \u2014 making it one of the biggest immigration detention centers in the country, the group says. As ICE faces calls to improve conditions for migrants in its custody, some have called on the government to stop using privately run detention centers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGeo Group spokesman Pablo Paez told The Post that the company is concerned that \u201coutrageous and baseless accusations that have been leveled against our facilities have led to misplaced aggression and a dangerous environment for our employees.\u201d\u201cContrary to the images of other facilities on the news, our facilities have never been overcrowded, nor have they ever housed unaccompanied minors,\u201d Paez said in a statement.A clerk caught on video telling Hispanic customers to go back to their country gets firedVan Spronsen was arrested at the Tacoma facility in June 2018, court documents show, amid what a prosecutor described as a noisy protest scene that included yelling, banging on pots and pans, using megaphones and honking horns.In that incident, Van Spronsen lunged at a police officer who was detaining a fellow protester at the center, according to a prosecutor\u2019s written account. Van Spronsen allegedly wrapped his arms around the officer\u2019s neck and shoulders to free the 17-year-old being held.The guy who attacked the ICE detention centre was a 69-year-old anarchist named Will Van Spronsen. This is him. pic.twitter.com/TdNUM0Jqk5\u2014 Jake Hanrahan (@Jake_Hanrahan) July 14, 2019\n\nVan Spronsen was escorted away through dozens of screaming protesters, the prosecutor wrote. Officers took a baton and a folding knife the man had been carrying.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe pleaded guilty to obstructing a law enforcement officer, court records show.Deb Bartley, who said she was a longtime friend of Van Spronsen\u2019s, told the Seattle Times she believes he intended to die by attacking the detention center Saturday.\u201cHe was ready to end it,\u201d she told the Times. \u201cI think this was a suicide. But then he was able to kind of do it in a way that spoke to his political beliefs. .\u2009.\u2009. I know he went down there knowing he was going to die.\u201dBartley said Van Spronsen wrote letters to her and others \u201csaying goodbye.\"Read more: Video shows man climbing down a high-rise to escape a fireThe Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon \u2014 while Apollo 11 was still therePhiladelphia is about to fire 13 police officers for their racist, violent Facebook posts Willem Van Spronsen was a known anarchist who claimed association with antifa, police said. ICE detention-center attacker killed by police was an avowed anarchist, authorities say",
        "author": "Marisa Iati"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2335",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/09/nasa-is-going-back-to-the-moon-if-it-can-figure-out-how-to-get-there/",
        "text": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 somehow, someway. The White House has ordered the agency\u00a0to put American boots back on the lunar surface. The major unknowns at this point include the when, how, scale of the operation and cost. Also unclear is what exactly NASA would\u00a0accomplish with such a mission and how it might affect\u00a0plans for a human mission to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA put 12 astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972. With the death Friday of Apollo 16\u2019s John Young, only five of those astronauts are still alive, and they range in age from 82 to 87. No human being has been beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo program.NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot told The Washington Post that the agency will partner with other countries in the return to the moon, but he did not say which ones. He said the moon plan will be a public-private partnership, but did not name any companies that might be involved. Details will emerge with the president\u2019s annual budget request to Congress, he said. He provided no specifics about the architecture of a moon program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have no idea yet,\u201d Lightfoot said.NASA is trying to do this without additional funding or a permanent administrator \u2014 another top science position that hasn\u2019t been filled in the Trump administration. NASA\u2019s ongoing challenge in recent years has been reconciling the orders of politicians with the hard realities of flat budgets and the immutable laws of physics. This is the third time this century that NASA has been ordered to make a major shift in the focus of its human spaceflight program.\u201cWe\u2019re always asked to change directions every time we get a new president, and that just causes you to do negative work, work that doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station in his last spaceflight mission, told The Post. \u201cI just hope someday we\u2019ll have a president that will say, \u2018You know what, we\u2019ll just leave NASA on the course they are on, and see what NASA can achieve if we untie their hands.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, said he has heard grumbling in the space community about this latest change in NASA strategy. He said people are saying, \u201cPlease don\u2019t push the reset button again, because you\u2019re just going to waste billions of dollars of previous investment.\u201dNASA\u2019s long-term human spaceflight strategy still includes a Mars mission\u00a0in the 2030s, starting with a mission to orbit the planet and return home, followed by landing astronauts on Mars at an unspecified future date. Hubbard said that\u2019s still doable \u2014 \u201cbut not if NASA does a major re-pivot and goes all-in on a base on the moon. Then clearly Mars is pushed way off into the future.\u201dBut Lori Garver, the NASA deputy administrator during President Barack Obama\u2019s first term, said the people who don\u2019t want to see changes at NASA are \u201cwhiners.\u201d She has experience with implementing a major strategic shift, because after she and her fellow political appointees arrived at NASA headquarters in 2009, they upended the plans of George W. Bush for a return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a democracy,\u201d she said. \u201cElections matter.\u201dShe noted that NASA is already building a jumbo rocket and crew capsule that could be used\u00a0in a moon program. And she said NASA hasn\u2019t built anything yet that\u2019s specifically designed for a Mars mission.\u201cMars was more of a talking point,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s out there as an aspirational goal.\u201dNASA is a $19 billion agency that does far more than just launch people into space. It spends roughly $5 billion a year on science missions, including robotic exploration of Mars and other planets. But the human spaceflight program has always been the heart of the agency and the foundation of its political support in Congress. The truism on the Hill has always been \u201cNo Buck Rogers, no bucks.\u201dAlthough the moon and Mars have some superficial similarities (craters, dust, rocks, mountains, no sign of life, etc.), they are quite different in the ideas of an aeronautical engineer. The moon has no atmosphere. Mars has a thin atmosphere that is devilish for spacecraft \u2014 it\u2019s too thin to be much help in braking a descending vehicle, but it\u2019s thick enough to cause overheating and turbulence.Story continues below advertisementA flight to Mars would probably take the better part of a year and the round-trip mission would take more than two years. Astronauts would be exposed to radiation hazards and the psychological challenges of isolation in addition to the more obvious risks involved with trying to land safely on Mars and survive there.AdvertisementThe triumph of the Apollo program came during the Cold War, when the race to the moon sent NASA\u2019s budget spiking. After Apollo, the agency shifted its focus to the development of the space shuttle, and later collaborated with other countries to build the International Space Station.Humans took their final steps on the surface of the Moon 45 years ago. Their dust-grimed spacesuits remind us that space exploration is a dirty business. (William Neff / The Washington Post)After the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated during reentry in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered a major shift in NASA strategy. The shuttle fleet would be retired once the space station was complete. NASA would instead build new rockets and a new capsule with the goal of returning to the moon and eventually going to Mars. Thus was born the Constellation program.Story continues below advertisementAfter President Barack Obama arrived in the White House, a presidential committee studied NASA\u2019s program and declared it was \u201con an unsustainable trajectory\u201d due to a mismatch between ambitions and funding. Obama killed Constellation and ordered NASA to visit an asteroid, with Mars still the horizon goal. Obama also boosted funding for the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, started by his predecessor, that would use privately owned rockets and capsules to ferry astronauts to orbit.AdvertisementWhen President Trump took office, people in the space community expected a pivot back to the moon, restoring the Bush-era goal. The administration resurrected something called the National Space Council, with Vice President Pence in charge. In October, Pence made a speech saying NASA would return to the moon. In December, President Trump made that goal the official U.S. space policy.NASA conceivably could attempt a limited mission to the moon\u2019s surface, akin to what the agency did with the Apollo program, but a mere \u201cflags and footprints\u201d mission could evoke opposition and derision from the been-there-done-that camp. NASA and its partners might instead attempt to create a permanently occupied research station similar to the ones in Antarctica.Story continues below advertisementBut the moon lacks certain things that Antarctica has in abundance \u2014 not the least of which is air.AdvertisementWhile NASA tries to piece together a moon program, commercial space companies are gathering momentum and threatening to fly circles around the venerable U.S. space agency. Elon Musk and his start-up SpaceX are getting ready to fly a jumbo rocket called the Falcon Heavy, launching from the famed Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, where Apollo 11 lifted off for the moon in 1969. Musk continues to promote his vision of putting people on Mars as soon as the next decade.Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos has a space company, Blue Origin, which has emerged as\u00a0a force in the commercial space world, with a suite of new rockets and ambitions to get involved in commercial lunar activity. Bezos has said he wants to see more people living and working in space. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementSpaceX and Boeing, meanwhile, have contracts to launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The first flights are scheduled for later this year. These are \u201ccommercial\u201d contracts, meaning SpaceX and Boeing own their spaceships and rockets fully and are charging NASA a fee, as opposed to the traditional approach in which NASA owns all the hardware,\u00a0and the companies have cost-plus contracts.AdvertisementThis will end NASA\u2019s embarrassing reliance on the Russians for travel to and from the ISS. Since the shuttle fleet was retired, the United States has paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year for seats on Russia\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft.At NASA headquarters, officials are awaiting the arrival of a permanent administrator. In September, President Trump nominated Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, to be the NASA chief. The nomination drew criticism from the two Florida senators, Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio, whose constituency includes a vast aerospace industry in and around NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. NASA has long enjoyed bipartisan support, and Bridenstine\u2019s critics said the top job shouldn\u2019t go to a politician. The full Senate has yet to vote on his nomination.Story continues below advertisementSpace policy experts said strong political leadership is essential when NASA wants to make a major change.Advertisement\u201cThe first year, which theoretically should be your strongest year, is gone,\u201d said Garver. \u201cWe were really off and running by this point.\u201dProponents say another lunar mission will open up commercialization of the moon and set up further exploration to Mars and beyond. But the future of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program will depend on money as much as on engineering prowess.\u201cIf you only have a limited amount of money, maybe going to Mars is the better option rather than going back to the moon,\u201d Kelly said.He noted that NASA might save money if the mission to Mars was conceived as a one-way trip. But he\u2019s not volunteering for such a mission.\u201cHaving lived on the space station for a year, I would not want to live the last days of my life on Mars,\u201d Kelly said.Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go? Presidents often announce big plans for the space program \u2014 only to see those plans evaporateDestination Unknown: The Post\u2019s 2013 series on the future of spaceflight. The Trump Administration steers NASA toward moon, the third major pivot for the agency this century  NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there (WP: National) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2336",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/09/nasa-is-going-back-to-the-moon-if-it-can-figure-out-how-to-get-there/",
        "text": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 somehow, someway. The White House has ordered the agency\u00a0to put American boots back on the lunar surface. The major unknowns at this point include the when, how, scale of the operation and cost. Also unclear is what exactly NASA would\u00a0accomplish with such a mission and how it might affect\u00a0plans for a human mission to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA put 12 astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972. With the death Friday of Apollo 16\u2019s John Young, only five of those astronauts are still alive, and they range in age from 82 to 87. No human being has been beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo program.NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot told The Washington Post that the agency will partner with other countries in the return to the moon, but he did not say which ones. He said the moon plan will be a public-private partnership, but did not name any companies that might be involved. Details will emerge with the president\u2019s annual budget request to Congress, he said. He provided no specifics about the architecture of a moon program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have no idea yet,\u201d Lightfoot said.NASA is trying to do this without additional funding or a permanent administrator \u2014 another top science position that hasn\u2019t been filled in the Trump administration. NASA\u2019s ongoing challenge in recent years has been reconciling the orders of politicians with the hard realities of flat budgets and the immutable laws of physics. This is the third time this century that NASA has been ordered to make a major shift in the focus of its human spaceflight program.\u201cWe\u2019re always asked to change directions every time we get a new president, and that just causes you to do negative work, work that doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station in his last spaceflight mission, told The Post. \u201cI just hope someday we\u2019ll have a president that will say, \u2018You know what, we\u2019ll just leave NASA on the course they are on, and see what NASA can achieve if we untie their hands.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, said he has heard grumbling in the space community about this latest change in NASA strategy. He said people are saying, \u201cPlease don\u2019t push the reset button again, because you\u2019re just going to waste billions of dollars of previous investment.\u201dNASA\u2019s long-term human spaceflight strategy still includes a Mars mission\u00a0in the 2030s, starting with a mission to orbit the planet and return home, followed by landing astronauts on Mars at an unspecified future date. Hubbard said that\u2019s still doable \u2014 \u201cbut not if NASA does a major re-pivot and goes all-in on a base on the moon. Then clearly Mars is pushed way off into the future.\u201dBut Lori Garver, the NASA deputy administrator during President Barack Obama\u2019s first term, said the people who don\u2019t want to see changes at NASA are \u201cwhiners.\u201d She has experience with implementing a major strategic shift, because after she and her fellow political appointees arrived at NASA headquarters in 2009, they upended the plans of George W. Bush for a return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a democracy,\u201d she said. \u201cElections matter.\u201dShe noted that NASA is already building a jumbo rocket and crew capsule that could be used\u00a0in a moon program. And she said NASA hasn\u2019t built anything yet that\u2019s specifically designed for a Mars mission.\u201cMars was more of a talking point,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s out there as an aspirational goal.\u201dNASA is a $19 billion agency that does far more than just launch people into space. It spends roughly $5 billion a year on science missions, including robotic exploration of Mars and other planets. But the human spaceflight program has always been the heart of the agency and the foundation of its political support in Congress. The truism on the Hill has always been \u201cNo Buck Rogers, no bucks.\u201dAlthough the moon and Mars have some superficial similarities (craters, dust, rocks, mountains, no sign of life, etc.), they are quite different in the ideas of an aeronautical engineer. The moon has no atmosphere. Mars has a thin atmosphere that is devilish for spacecraft \u2014 it\u2019s too thin to be much help in braking a descending vehicle, but it\u2019s thick enough to cause overheating and turbulence.Story continues below advertisementA flight to Mars would probably take the better part of a year and the round-trip mission would take more than two years. Astronauts would be exposed to radiation hazards and the psychological challenges of isolation in addition to the more obvious risks involved with trying to land safely on Mars and survive there.AdvertisementThe triumph of the Apollo program came during the Cold War, when the race to the moon sent NASA\u2019s budget spiking. After Apollo, the agency shifted its focus to the development of the space shuttle, and later collaborated with other countries to build the International Space Station.Humans took their final steps on the surface of the Moon 45 years ago. Their dust-grimed spacesuits remind us that space exploration is a dirty business. (William Neff / The Washington Post)After the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated during reentry in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered a major shift in NASA strategy. The shuttle fleet would be retired once the space station was complete. NASA would instead build new rockets and a new capsule with the goal of returning to the moon and eventually going to Mars. Thus was born the Constellation program.Story continues below advertisementAfter President Barack Obama arrived in the White House, a presidential committee studied NASA\u2019s program and declared it was \u201con an unsustainable trajectory\u201d due to a mismatch between ambitions and funding. Obama killed Constellation and ordered NASA to visit an asteroid, with Mars still the horizon goal. Obama also boosted funding for the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, started by his predecessor, that would use privately owned rockets and capsules to ferry astronauts to orbit.AdvertisementWhen President Trump took office, people in the space community expected a pivot back to the moon, restoring the Bush-era goal. The administration resurrected something called the National Space Council, with Vice President Pence in charge. In October, Pence made a speech saying NASA would return to the moon. In December, President Trump made that goal the official U.S. space policy.NASA conceivably could attempt a limited mission to the moon\u2019s surface, akin to what the agency did with the Apollo program, but a mere \u201cflags and footprints\u201d mission could evoke opposition and derision from the been-there-done-that camp. NASA and its partners might instead attempt to create a permanently occupied research station similar to the ones in Antarctica.Story continues below advertisementBut the moon lacks certain things that Antarctica has in abundance \u2014 not the least of which is air.AdvertisementWhile NASA tries to piece together a moon program, commercial space companies are gathering momentum and threatening to fly circles around the venerable U.S. space agency. Elon Musk and his start-up SpaceX are getting ready to fly a jumbo rocket called the Falcon Heavy, launching from the famed Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, where Apollo 11 lifted off for the moon in 1969. Musk continues to promote his vision of putting people on Mars as soon as the next decade.Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos has a space company, Blue Origin, which has emerged as\u00a0a force in the commercial space world, with a suite of new rockets and ambitions to get involved in commercial lunar activity. Bezos has said he wants to see more people living and working in space. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementSpaceX and Boeing, meanwhile, have contracts to launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The first flights are scheduled for later this year. These are \u201ccommercial\u201d contracts, meaning SpaceX and Boeing own their spaceships and rockets fully and are charging NASA a fee, as opposed to the traditional approach in which NASA owns all the hardware,\u00a0and the companies have cost-plus contracts.AdvertisementThis will end NASA\u2019s embarrassing reliance on the Russians for travel to and from the ISS. Since the shuttle fleet was retired, the United States has paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year for seats on Russia\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft.At NASA headquarters, officials are awaiting the arrival of a permanent administrator. In September, President Trump nominated Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, to be the NASA chief. The nomination drew criticism from the two Florida senators, Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio, whose constituency includes a vast aerospace industry in and around NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. NASA has long enjoyed bipartisan support, and Bridenstine\u2019s critics said the top job shouldn\u2019t go to a politician. The full Senate has yet to vote on his nomination.Story continues below advertisementSpace policy experts said strong political leadership is essential when NASA wants to make a major change.Advertisement\u201cThe first year, which theoretically should be your strongest year, is gone,\u201d said Garver. \u201cWe were really off and running by this point.\u201dProponents say another lunar mission will open up commercialization of the moon and set up further exploration to Mars and beyond. But the future of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program will depend on money as much as on engineering prowess.\u201cIf you only have a limited amount of money, maybe going to Mars is the better option rather than going back to the moon,\u201d Kelly said.He noted that NASA might save money if the mission to Mars was conceived as a one-way trip. But he\u2019s not volunteering for such a mission.\u201cHaving lived on the space station for a year, I would not want to live the last days of my life on Mars,\u201d Kelly said.Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go? Presidents often announce big plans for the space program \u2014 only to see those plans evaporateDestination Unknown: The Post\u2019s 2013 series on the future of spaceflight. The Trump Administration steers NASA toward moon, the third major pivot for the agency this century  NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2337",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/09/nasa-is-going-back-to-the-moon-if-it-can-figure-out-how-to-get-there/",
        "text": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 somehow, someway. The White House has ordered the agency\u00a0to put American boots back on the lunar surface. The major unknowns at this point include the when, how, scale of the operation and cost. Also unclear is what exactly NASA would\u00a0accomplish with such a mission and how it might affect\u00a0plans for a human mission to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA put 12 astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972. With the death Friday of Apollo 16\u2019s John Young, only five of those astronauts are still alive, and they range in age from 82 to 87. No human being has been beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo program.NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot told The Washington Post that the agency will partner with other countries in the return to the moon, but he did not say which ones. He said the moon plan will be a public-private partnership, but did not name any companies that might be involved. Details will emerge with the president\u2019s annual budget request to Congress, he said. He provided no specifics about the architecture of a moon program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have no idea yet,\u201d Lightfoot said.NASA is trying to do this without additional funding or a permanent administrator \u2014 another top science position that hasn\u2019t been filled in the Trump administration. NASA\u2019s ongoing challenge in recent years has been reconciling the orders of politicians with the hard realities of flat budgets and the immutable laws of physics. This is the third time this century that NASA has been ordered to make a major shift in the focus of its human spaceflight program.\u201cWe\u2019re always asked to change directions every time we get a new president, and that just causes you to do negative work, work that doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station in his last spaceflight mission, told The Post. \u201cI just hope someday we\u2019ll have a president that will say, \u2018You know what, we\u2019ll just leave NASA on the course they are on, and see what NASA can achieve if we untie their hands.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, said he has heard grumbling in the space community about this latest change in NASA strategy. He said people are saying, \u201cPlease don\u2019t push the reset button again, because you\u2019re just going to waste billions of dollars of previous investment.\u201dNASA\u2019s long-term human spaceflight strategy still includes a Mars mission\u00a0in the 2030s, starting with a mission to orbit the planet and return home, followed by landing astronauts on Mars at an unspecified future date. Hubbard said that\u2019s still doable \u2014 \u201cbut not if NASA does a major re-pivot and goes all-in on a base on the moon. Then clearly Mars is pushed way off into the future.\u201dBut Lori Garver, the NASA deputy administrator during President Barack Obama\u2019s first term, said the people who don\u2019t want to see changes at NASA are \u201cwhiners.\u201d She has experience with implementing a major strategic shift, because after she and her fellow political appointees arrived at NASA headquarters in 2009, they upended the plans of George W. Bush for a return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a democracy,\u201d she said. \u201cElections matter.\u201dShe noted that NASA is already building a jumbo rocket and crew capsule that could be used\u00a0in a moon program. And she said NASA hasn\u2019t built anything yet that\u2019s specifically designed for a Mars mission.\u201cMars was more of a talking point,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s out there as an aspirational goal.\u201dNASA is a $19 billion agency that does far more than just launch people into space. It spends roughly $5 billion a year on science missions, including robotic exploration of Mars and other planets. But the human spaceflight program has always been the heart of the agency and the foundation of its political support in Congress. The truism on the Hill has always been \u201cNo Buck Rogers, no bucks.\u201dAlthough the moon and Mars have some superficial similarities (craters, dust, rocks, mountains, no sign of life, etc.), they are quite different in the ideas of an aeronautical engineer. The moon has no atmosphere. Mars has a thin atmosphere that is devilish for spacecraft \u2014 it\u2019s too thin to be much help in braking a descending vehicle, but it\u2019s thick enough to cause overheating and turbulence.Story continues below advertisementA flight to Mars would probably take the better part of a year and the round-trip mission would take more than two years. Astronauts would be exposed to radiation hazards and the psychological challenges of isolation in addition to the more obvious risks involved with trying to land safely on Mars and survive there.AdvertisementThe triumph of the Apollo program came during the Cold War, when the race to the moon sent NASA\u2019s budget spiking. After Apollo, the agency shifted its focus to the development of the space shuttle, and later collaborated with other countries to build the International Space Station.Humans took their final steps on the surface of the Moon 45 years ago. Their dust-grimed spacesuits remind us that space exploration is a dirty business. (William Neff / The Washington Post)After the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated during reentry in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered a major shift in NASA strategy. The shuttle fleet would be retired once the space station was complete. NASA would instead build new rockets and a new capsule with the goal of returning to the moon and eventually going to Mars. Thus was born the Constellation program.Story continues below advertisementAfter President Barack Obama arrived in the White House, a presidential committee studied NASA\u2019s program and declared it was \u201con an unsustainable trajectory\u201d due to a mismatch between ambitions and funding. Obama killed Constellation and ordered NASA to visit an asteroid, with Mars still the horizon goal. Obama also boosted funding for the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, started by his predecessor, that would use privately owned rockets and capsules to ferry astronauts to orbit.AdvertisementWhen President Trump took office, people in the space community expected a pivot back to the moon, restoring the Bush-era goal. The administration resurrected something called the National Space Council, with Vice President Pence in charge. In October, Pence made a speech saying NASA would return to the moon. In December, President Trump made that goal the official U.S. space policy.NASA conceivably could attempt a limited mission to the moon\u2019s surface, akin to what the agency did with the Apollo program, but a mere \u201cflags and footprints\u201d mission could evoke opposition and derision from the been-there-done-that camp. NASA and its partners might instead attempt to create a permanently occupied research station similar to the ones in Antarctica.Story continues below advertisementBut the moon lacks certain things that Antarctica has in abundance \u2014 not the least of which is air.AdvertisementWhile NASA tries to piece together a moon program, commercial space companies are gathering momentum and threatening to fly circles around the venerable U.S. space agency. Elon Musk and his start-up SpaceX are getting ready to fly a jumbo rocket called the Falcon Heavy, launching from the famed Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, where Apollo 11 lifted off for the moon in 1969. Musk continues to promote his vision of putting people on Mars as soon as the next decade.Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos has a space company, Blue Origin, which has emerged as\u00a0a force in the commercial space world, with a suite of new rockets and ambitions to get involved in commercial lunar activity. Bezos has said he wants to see more people living and working in space. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementSpaceX and Boeing, meanwhile, have contracts to launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The first flights are scheduled for later this year. These are \u201ccommercial\u201d contracts, meaning SpaceX and Boeing own their spaceships and rockets fully and are charging NASA a fee, as opposed to the traditional approach in which NASA owns all the hardware,\u00a0and the companies have cost-plus contracts.AdvertisementThis will end NASA\u2019s embarrassing reliance on the Russians for travel to and from the ISS. Since the shuttle fleet was retired, the United States has paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year for seats on Russia\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft.At NASA headquarters, officials are awaiting the arrival of a permanent administrator. In September, President Trump nominated Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, to be the NASA chief. The nomination drew criticism from the two Florida senators, Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio, whose constituency includes a vast aerospace industry in and around NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. NASA has long enjoyed bipartisan support, and Bridenstine\u2019s critics said the top job shouldn\u2019t go to a politician. The full Senate has yet to vote on his nomination.Story continues below advertisementSpace policy experts said strong political leadership is essential when NASA wants to make a major change.Advertisement\u201cThe first year, which theoretically should be your strongest year, is gone,\u201d said Garver. \u201cWe were really off and running by this point.\u201dProponents say another lunar mission will open up commercialization of the moon and set up further exploration to Mars and beyond. But the future of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program will depend on money as much as on engineering prowess.\u201cIf you only have a limited amount of money, maybe going to Mars is the better option rather than going back to the moon,\u201d Kelly said.He noted that NASA might save money if the mission to Mars was conceived as a one-way trip. But he\u2019s not volunteering for such a mission.\u201cHaving lived on the space station for a year, I would not want to live the last days of my life on Mars,\u201d Kelly said.Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go? Presidents often announce big plans for the space program \u2014 only to see those plans evaporateDestination Unknown: The Post\u2019s 2013 series on the future of spaceflight. The Trump Administration steers NASA toward moon, the third major pivot for the agency this century  NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there (WP: National) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2338",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/09/nasa-is-going-back-to-the-moon-if-it-can-figure-out-how-to-get-there/",
        "text": "NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 somehow, someway. The White House has ordered the agency\u00a0to put American boots back on the lunar surface. The major unknowns at this point include the when, how, scale of the operation and cost. Also unclear is what exactly NASA would\u00a0accomplish with such a mission and how it might affect\u00a0plans for a human mission to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA put 12 astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972. With the death Friday of Apollo 16\u2019s John Young, only five of those astronauts are still alive, and they range in age from 82 to 87. No human being has been beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo program.NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot told The Washington Post that the agency will partner with other countries in the return to the moon, but he did not say which ones. He said the moon plan will be a public-private partnership, but did not name any companies that might be involved. Details will emerge with the president\u2019s annual budget request to Congress, he said. He provided no specifics about the architecture of a moon program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have no idea yet,\u201d Lightfoot said.NASA is trying to do this without additional funding or a permanent administrator \u2014 another top science position that hasn\u2019t been filled in the Trump administration. NASA\u2019s ongoing challenge in recent years has been reconciling the orders of politicians with the hard realities of flat budgets and the immutable laws of physics. This is the third time this century that NASA has been ordered to make a major shift in the focus of its human spaceflight program.\u201cWe\u2019re always asked to change directions every time we get a new president, and that just causes you to do negative work, work that doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on the International Space Station in his last spaceflight mission, told The Post. \u201cI just hope someday we\u2019ll have a president that will say, \u2018You know what, we\u2019ll just leave NASA on the course they are on, and see what NASA can achieve if we untie their hands.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScott Hubbard, former director of the NASA Ames Research Center, said he has heard grumbling in the space community about this latest change in NASA strategy. He said people are saying, \u201cPlease don\u2019t push the reset button again, because you\u2019re just going to waste billions of dollars of previous investment.\u201dNASA\u2019s long-term human spaceflight strategy still includes a Mars mission\u00a0in the 2030s, starting with a mission to orbit the planet and return home, followed by landing astronauts on Mars at an unspecified future date. Hubbard said that\u2019s still doable \u2014 \u201cbut not if NASA does a major re-pivot and goes all-in on a base on the moon. Then clearly Mars is pushed way off into the future.\u201dBut Lori Garver, the NASA deputy administrator during President Barack Obama\u2019s first term, said the people who don\u2019t want to see changes at NASA are \u201cwhiners.\u201d She has experience with implementing a major strategic shift, because after she and her fellow political appointees arrived at NASA headquarters in 2009, they upended the plans of George W. Bush for a return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a democracy,\u201d she said. \u201cElections matter.\u201dShe noted that NASA is already building a jumbo rocket and crew capsule that could be used\u00a0in a moon program. And she said NASA hasn\u2019t built anything yet that\u2019s specifically designed for a Mars mission.\u201cMars was more of a talking point,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s out there as an aspirational goal.\u201dNASA is a $19 billion agency that does far more than just launch people into space. It spends roughly $5 billion a year on science missions, including robotic exploration of Mars and other planets. But the human spaceflight program has always been the heart of the agency and the foundation of its political support in Congress. The truism on the Hill has always been \u201cNo Buck Rogers, no bucks.\u201dAlthough the moon and Mars have some superficial similarities (craters, dust, rocks, mountains, no sign of life, etc.), they are quite different in the ideas of an aeronautical engineer. The moon has no atmosphere. Mars has a thin atmosphere that is devilish for spacecraft \u2014 it\u2019s too thin to be much help in braking a descending vehicle, but it\u2019s thick enough to cause overheating and turbulence.Story continues below advertisementA flight to Mars would probably take the better part of a year and the round-trip mission would take more than two years. Astronauts would be exposed to radiation hazards and the psychological challenges of isolation in addition to the more obvious risks involved with trying to land safely on Mars and survive there.AdvertisementThe triumph of the Apollo program came during the Cold War, when the race to the moon sent NASA\u2019s budget spiking. After Apollo, the agency shifted its focus to the development of the space shuttle, and later collaborated with other countries to build the International Space Station.Humans took their final steps on the surface of the Moon 45 years ago. Their dust-grimed spacesuits remind us that space exploration is a dirty business. (William Neff / The Washington Post)After the Columbia space shuttle disintegrated during reentry in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered a major shift in NASA strategy. The shuttle fleet would be retired once the space station was complete. NASA would instead build new rockets and a new capsule with the goal of returning to the moon and eventually going to Mars. Thus was born the Constellation program.Story continues below advertisementAfter President Barack Obama arrived in the White House, a presidential committee studied NASA\u2019s program and declared it was \u201con an unsustainable trajectory\u201d due to a mismatch between ambitions and funding. Obama killed Constellation and ordered NASA to visit an asteroid, with Mars still the horizon goal. Obama also boosted funding for the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, started by his predecessor, that would use privately owned rockets and capsules to ferry astronauts to orbit.AdvertisementWhen President Trump took office, people in the space community expected a pivot back to the moon, restoring the Bush-era goal. The administration resurrected something called the National Space Council, with Vice President Pence in charge. In October, Pence made a speech saying NASA would return to the moon. In December, President Trump made that goal the official U.S. space policy.NASA conceivably could attempt a limited mission to the moon\u2019s surface, akin to what the agency did with the Apollo program, but a mere \u201cflags and footprints\u201d mission could evoke opposition and derision from the been-there-done-that camp. NASA and its partners might instead attempt to create a permanently occupied research station similar to the ones in Antarctica.Story continues below advertisementBut the moon lacks certain things that Antarctica has in abundance \u2014 not the least of which is air.AdvertisementWhile NASA tries to piece together a moon program, commercial space companies are gathering momentum and threatening to fly circles around the venerable U.S. space agency. Elon Musk and his start-up SpaceX are getting ready to fly a jumbo rocket called the Falcon Heavy, launching from the famed Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, where Apollo 11 lifted off for the moon in 1969. Musk continues to promote his vision of putting people on Mars as soon as the next decade.Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos has a space company, Blue Origin, which has emerged as\u00a0a force in the commercial space world, with a suite of new rockets and ambitions to get involved in commercial lunar activity. Bezos has said he wants to see more people living and working in space. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementSpaceX and Boeing, meanwhile, have contracts to launch NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The first flights are scheduled for later this year. These are \u201ccommercial\u201d contracts, meaning SpaceX and Boeing own their spaceships and rockets fully and are charging NASA a fee, as opposed to the traditional approach in which NASA owns all the hardware,\u00a0and the companies have cost-plus contracts.AdvertisementThis will end NASA\u2019s embarrassing reliance on the Russians for travel to and from the ISS. Since the shuttle fleet was retired, the United States has paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year for seats on Russia\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft.At NASA headquarters, officials are awaiting the arrival of a permanent administrator. In September, President Trump nominated Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, to be the NASA chief. The nomination drew criticism from the two Florida senators, Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio, whose constituency includes a vast aerospace industry in and around NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral. NASA has long enjoyed bipartisan support, and Bridenstine\u2019s critics said the top job shouldn\u2019t go to a politician. The full Senate has yet to vote on his nomination.Story continues below advertisementSpace policy experts said strong political leadership is essential when NASA wants to make a major change.Advertisement\u201cThe first year, which theoretically should be your strongest year, is gone,\u201d said Garver. \u201cWe were really off and running by this point.\u201dProponents say another lunar mission will open up commercialization of the moon and set up further exploration to Mars and beyond. But the future of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program will depend on money as much as on engineering prowess.\u201cIf you only have a limited amount of money, maybe going to Mars is the better option rather than going back to the moon,\u201d Kelly said.He noted that NASA might save money if the mission to Mars was conceived as a one-way trip. But he\u2019s not volunteering for such a mission.\u201cHaving lived on the space station for a year, I would not want to live the last days of my life on Mars,\u201d Kelly said.Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go? Presidents often announce big plans for the space program \u2014 only to see those plans evaporateDestination Unknown: The Post\u2019s 2013 series on the future of spaceflight. The Trump Administration steers NASA toward moon, the third major pivot for the agency this century  NASA is going back to the moon \u2014 if it can figure out how to get there",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2339",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/12/citizen-world-nasas-first-latino-astronaut-reflects-how-space-changed-his-immigrant-identity/",
        "text": "About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.While the American memory of the Space Race is most often filtered through black-and-white photos of white men on the moon, NASA\u2019s reality was Technicolor. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPeople of color, including the black female mathematicians who worked as \u201chuman computers\u201d and were depicted in the Oscar-winning \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d were a part of NASA\u2019s space program from its inception.This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and to highlight another hidden figure, About Us spoke with Franklin Chang D\u00edaz, who is NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut. Chang D\u00edaz, now 69, flew his first space mission in 1986. He would go on to fly in six additional missions in his 25-year career with NASA, which ended with his induction into the agency\u2019s Hall of Fame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Chang D\u00edaz was born and spent much of his childhood in his native Costa Rica, his aspirations started with the American Dream: He immigrated to the United States in 1969 with $50 in his pocket.This transcript of our interview with Chang D\u00edaz has been edited for length and clarity.About US: Do you remember the first time that you wanted to go to space?Chang D\u00edaz: Yes, I remember that very vividly. It was 1957 [at age 7], and it was triggered by Sputnik. The Sputnik was something that lit up the imaginations of many, many children, not just in the United States but all over the world. And I was one of those latter children. I was growing up in Costa Rica, and all of a sudden space became a place people could really go to. The idea of going to space, which had been something in the science fiction books, all of a sudden became real, and flesh-and-bone astronauts had been selected in 1959 by NASA. Those were the pioneers that we all looked up to.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDid you ever pretend to be an astronaut?Absolutely. In 1957, I built a spaceship, which was a cardboard box from an old refrigerator or some other packaging. And inside that box, I put a couple of chairs and we were sort of laying on our backs. And I would get in there with my cousins and friends and we would go through a countdown to liftoff. We would lift off into space and land on some distant planet and explore and then come back to Earth.In 1986, I was on my first flight on the space shuttle and I was sitting there thinking to myself, \u201cI've done this before,\u201d and it was a recollection of those early-childhood memories of being inside that box with my friend and those chairs pretending to go to space.Life in space: Stories from 50 astronauts in their own wordsYou are of Chinese and Costa Rican descent. How do you think that helped shape your identity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI think of myself as a mixture of many cultures. I don\u2019t think of myself as, you know, half this or a quarter this or anything like that. I\u2019ve lived in the United States now most of my life, so I feel very much American, even though my Costa Rican roots are still strong and most of my family is still in Costa Rica. My children were all born in the United States and their families are all-American families. So it\u2019s just a typical immigrant situation, where you end up getting absorbed and melting into the society.The United States is a multicultural society, which in itself forms its own unique culture. So that\u2019s kind of the way I see myself. And I don\u2019t think of myself as a citizen of a country anymore. Actually, I think of myself as a citizen of the world, of the planet, and many astronauts will tell you that. They come back realizing that they really are citizens of the planet and not citizens of a country.Did you feel welcome as a Latino after coming to the United States in the 1960s?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI felt very much welcome in the U.S., with a few exceptions. When I came to the U.S. in \u201969, there were a lot of racial turmoil and change going on in the U.S. society. But for the most part, I felt very much welcome, and I still do. And of course, things have changed a lot in the U.S., but I still feel that the fundamental fabric of this nation is one of welcoming the immigrant.How do you feel about the attitude toward immigrants now, and do you think that this has changed at all since when you first immigrated here?The attitude towards immigrants throughout the whole world has changed because the world has a lot more people now. We have 7 billion people on this planet and there is only so much room. So people are naturally going to be trying to migrate to where the opportunities lie, and that is a force that is not possible to change. And as a result there\u2019s a natural tendency to build barriers to prevent that and to build walls and impediments for that migration to occur. That is a natural reaction. It\u2019s not a good reaction, but it is a natural reaction. So I think ultimately this all will be temporary, and some societies and countries will realign themselves and rearrange themselves to face the new reality of the smallness of our planet. And the fact is that the only choice ultimately will be for humans to migrate into space. And that is exactly what we\u2019re doing now. We\u2019re seeing the beginnings of a major migration that will be not from one country to another but from the Earth out into space. I tell people that someday the Earth will be essentially humanity\u2019s National Park.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat was the process like to become selected as an astronaut? In March or April of 1980, I was called for an interview and then a week of evaluation and testing at Johnson Space Center. When that happened, I knew that I had at least made the initial cut. There had been over 3,000 applicants that had pursued that job, and they had selected 120 and I was in that group. I went to Houston and went through the testing evaluation and all of the medical tests here for a week and went back to back to Boston to work. A couple months later in May, I got the call from NASA that I had been selected, and it was the happiest moment of my life. Of course, my life changed entirely from that moment on. So at that moment, I became the first U.S. naturalized citizen to become an astronaut and the first Latino astronaut. It completely changed my life; it was a wonderful moment. I thought I was going to fly maybe once or twice, and I ended up flying seven times, more than anybody else.I just am extremely grateful to this nation that opened the doors for me. This is definitely, in my mind, the land of opportunity because for me it was exactly that. It worked out exactly the way it was advertised. So here I am, trying to give back a little bit to this country and help on the next phase.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWas space as you imagined it would be? Yeah, it was as I imagined. But the tones and the brilliance were much more vivid. For some reason, the eyeballs are able to take in a lot more detail than I guess you could capture in film. It was about the sharpest possible picture that you could ever imagine. And if you stared at something long enough, you could even see features that you couldn\u2019t see right at the beginning. You can see things like ships, for example, or contrails from airplanes. You could see bridges and you could see a lot of things that you wouldn\u2019t see right away because your mind integrates information and then gradually gives you more detail because you know what\u2019s there. It\u2019s an amazing sight.What was your most memorable experience in space?Story continues below advertisementI did three spacewalks, but my first spacewalk was very memorable, because you\u2019re walking out of the spacecraft into the open, a wide open space. The only thing separating you from the vacuum of space is just the thickness of the visor of your helmet or the thickness of the space suit. It is extremely impactful. I spent quite a bit of time on the end of the arm, so people would move me around from inside the space station. At the end of the arm, there were times when I could not see anything except my feet standing on something. We went into the dark nighttime, and the Earth kind of disappeared. All I could see around me were stars, nothing but stars. And it just got a little spooky, a little strange to think that maybe everybody left me out there. Interesting thoughts come to your head in those kinds of moments. It makes you think about what humans are going to feel like going to Mars when the Earth will be a point of light and Mars will be a point of light and there will be stars everywhere, nothing to have reference to. It would be very, very difficult, you know, psychologically speaking, a very tough moment for humans to be there for that.AdvertisementWould you describe it as frightening?It was a moment of loneliness. I think that was probably one of the strongest feelings. It\u2019s one of isolation and loneliness. You\u2019ve got a feeling that you\u2019re all by yourself in the midst of the whole of space, the vacuum of space and the immensity of the universe. It is just you. But as an astronaut you don\u2019t really want to dwell on any of these thoughts. You want to quickly focus on your tasks and the things that you have to do. Dwelling on thoughts is probably not a good idea in that context.Story continues below advertisementWhat was your typical day like?The typical day is very structured. Every hour is scheduled for you to be doing something. The meals are scheduled, the sleep time is scheduled, even leisure time is scheduled. I took a lot of my leisure time out of my hours of sleep. I didn\u2019t sleep very much, because I wanted to live the moment. I don\u2019t usually sleep very much anyway, and I figured I wasn\u2019t going into space to sleep. So I took a lot of time from my sleep time to listen to classical music and just kind of park myself in front of the window and just watch the world go by. And I\u2019m glad I did that. I have very vivid memories of the beauty of the Earth as it passes by in different forms. Colors, light effects, particularly when you go near the North Pole or the South Pole you see the Northern Lights. And these are very, very beautiful sights that we get to see and photograph. We took a lot of pictures.AdvertisementWhat classical music did you listen to?I have a sequence of Beethoven\u2019s Pastoral Symphony, and I was able to time it properly with the Earth\u2019s orbit. If you triggered the start of the symphony at a certain moment, all four movements of the symphony somehow fit with what you\u2019re looking at out the window. There\u2019s a period in the symphony with a lightning storm and the darkness and the wind and the storm. For some reason, we happened to be flying over the African continent at night at that moment, and there was a lightning storm. There was a whole chain of lightning storms that were firing lightning bolts all throughout the African continent at night. It was almost perfectly matching to the music, and then at the last moment, which is when the sun comes and the calm after the storm \u2014 we had just happened to be coming out of the South Pacific and the sun came over the horizon, and it was just the perfect timing for the beginning of the fourth movement. I tell you, it was almost like Beethoven, he must have been there. He would have written much more beautiful music than he already did if he had the chance to fly in space.More from About US:\u2018Latinx\u2019: An offense to the Spanish language or a nod to inclusion?A new report says Hispanic identity is fading. Is that really good for America?She\u2019s Asian and female. But she\u2019s not me.Co-workers keep mixing up people of color in the office. It\u2019s more than a mistake. From space, everyone is a citizen. \u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity",
        "author": "Rachel Hatzipanagos"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity (WP: National) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2340",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/12/citizen-world-nasas-first-latino-astronaut-reflects-how-space-changed-his-immigrant-identity/",
        "text": "About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.While the American memory of the Space Race is most often filtered through black-and-white photos of white men on the moon, NASA\u2019s reality was Technicolor. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPeople of color, including the black female mathematicians who worked as \u201chuman computers\u201d and were depicted in the Oscar-winning \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d were a part of NASA\u2019s space program from its inception.This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and to highlight another hidden figure, About Us spoke with Franklin Chang D\u00edaz, who is NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut. Chang D\u00edaz, now 69, flew his first space mission in 1986. He would go on to fly in six additional missions in his 25-year career with NASA, which ended with his induction into the agency\u2019s Hall of Fame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Chang D\u00edaz was born and spent much of his childhood in his native Costa Rica, his aspirations started with the American Dream: He immigrated to the United States in 1969 with $50 in his pocket.This transcript of our interview with Chang D\u00edaz has been edited for length and clarity.About US: Do you remember the first time that you wanted to go to space?Chang D\u00edaz: Yes, I remember that very vividly. It was 1957 [at age 7], and it was triggered by Sputnik. The Sputnik was something that lit up the imaginations of many, many children, not just in the United States but all over the world. And I was one of those latter children. I was growing up in Costa Rica, and all of a sudden space became a place people could really go to. The idea of going to space, which had been something in the science fiction books, all of a sudden became real, and flesh-and-bone astronauts had been selected in 1959 by NASA. Those were the pioneers that we all looked up to.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDid you ever pretend to be an astronaut?Absolutely. In 1957, I built a spaceship, which was a cardboard box from an old refrigerator or some other packaging. And inside that box, I put a couple of chairs and we were sort of laying on our backs. And I would get in there with my cousins and friends and we would go through a countdown to liftoff. We would lift off into space and land on some distant planet and explore and then come back to Earth.In 1986, I was on my first flight on the space shuttle and I was sitting there thinking to myself, \u201cI've done this before,\u201d and it was a recollection of those early-childhood memories of being inside that box with my friend and those chairs pretending to go to space.Life in space: Stories from 50 astronauts in their own wordsYou are of Chinese and Costa Rican descent. How do you think that helped shape your identity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI think of myself as a mixture of many cultures. I don\u2019t think of myself as, you know, half this or a quarter this or anything like that. I\u2019ve lived in the United States now most of my life, so I feel very much American, even though my Costa Rican roots are still strong and most of my family is still in Costa Rica. My children were all born in the United States and their families are all-American families. So it\u2019s just a typical immigrant situation, where you end up getting absorbed and melting into the society.The United States is a multicultural society, which in itself forms its own unique culture. So that\u2019s kind of the way I see myself. And I don\u2019t think of myself as a citizen of a country anymore. Actually, I think of myself as a citizen of the world, of the planet, and many astronauts will tell you that. They come back realizing that they really are citizens of the planet and not citizens of a country.Did you feel welcome as a Latino after coming to the United States in the 1960s?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI felt very much welcome in the U.S., with a few exceptions. When I came to the U.S. in \u201969, there were a lot of racial turmoil and change going on in the U.S. society. But for the most part, I felt very much welcome, and I still do. And of course, things have changed a lot in the U.S., but I still feel that the fundamental fabric of this nation is one of welcoming the immigrant.How do you feel about the attitude toward immigrants now, and do you think that this has changed at all since when you first immigrated here?The attitude towards immigrants throughout the whole world has changed because the world has a lot more people now. We have 7 billion people on this planet and there is only so much room. So people are naturally going to be trying to migrate to where the opportunities lie, and that is a force that is not possible to change. And as a result there\u2019s a natural tendency to build barriers to prevent that and to build walls and impediments for that migration to occur. That is a natural reaction. It\u2019s not a good reaction, but it is a natural reaction. So I think ultimately this all will be temporary, and some societies and countries will realign themselves and rearrange themselves to face the new reality of the smallness of our planet. And the fact is that the only choice ultimately will be for humans to migrate into space. And that is exactly what we\u2019re doing now. We\u2019re seeing the beginnings of a major migration that will be not from one country to another but from the Earth out into space. I tell people that someday the Earth will be essentially humanity\u2019s National Park.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat was the process like to become selected as an astronaut? In March or April of 1980, I was called for an interview and then a week of evaluation and testing at Johnson Space Center. When that happened, I knew that I had at least made the initial cut. There had been over 3,000 applicants that had pursued that job, and they had selected 120 and I was in that group. I went to Houston and went through the testing evaluation and all of the medical tests here for a week and went back to back to Boston to work. A couple months later in May, I got the call from NASA that I had been selected, and it was the happiest moment of my life. Of course, my life changed entirely from that moment on. So at that moment, I became the first U.S. naturalized citizen to become an astronaut and the first Latino astronaut. It completely changed my life; it was a wonderful moment. I thought I was going to fly maybe once or twice, and I ended up flying seven times, more than anybody else.I just am extremely grateful to this nation that opened the doors for me. This is definitely, in my mind, the land of opportunity because for me it was exactly that. It worked out exactly the way it was advertised. So here I am, trying to give back a little bit to this country and help on the next phase.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWas space as you imagined it would be? Yeah, it was as I imagined. But the tones and the brilliance were much more vivid. For some reason, the eyeballs are able to take in a lot more detail than I guess you could capture in film. It was about the sharpest possible picture that you could ever imagine. And if you stared at something long enough, you could even see features that you couldn\u2019t see right at the beginning. You can see things like ships, for example, or contrails from airplanes. You could see bridges and you could see a lot of things that you wouldn\u2019t see right away because your mind integrates information and then gradually gives you more detail because you know what\u2019s there. It\u2019s an amazing sight.What was your most memorable experience in space?Story continues below advertisementI did three spacewalks, but my first spacewalk was very memorable, because you\u2019re walking out of the spacecraft into the open, a wide open space. The only thing separating you from the vacuum of space is just the thickness of the visor of your helmet or the thickness of the space suit. It is extremely impactful. I spent quite a bit of time on the end of the arm, so people would move me around from inside the space station. At the end of the arm, there were times when I could not see anything except my feet standing on something. We went into the dark nighttime, and the Earth kind of disappeared. All I could see around me were stars, nothing but stars. And it just got a little spooky, a little strange to think that maybe everybody left me out there. Interesting thoughts come to your head in those kinds of moments. It makes you think about what humans are going to feel like going to Mars when the Earth will be a point of light and Mars will be a point of light and there will be stars everywhere, nothing to have reference to. It would be very, very difficult, you know, psychologically speaking, a very tough moment for humans to be there for that.AdvertisementWould you describe it as frightening?It was a moment of loneliness. I think that was probably one of the strongest feelings. It\u2019s one of isolation and loneliness. You\u2019ve got a feeling that you\u2019re all by yourself in the midst of the whole of space, the vacuum of space and the immensity of the universe. It is just you. But as an astronaut you don\u2019t really want to dwell on any of these thoughts. You want to quickly focus on your tasks and the things that you have to do. Dwelling on thoughts is probably not a good idea in that context.Story continues below advertisementWhat was your typical day like?The typical day is very structured. Every hour is scheduled for you to be doing something. The meals are scheduled, the sleep time is scheduled, even leisure time is scheduled. I took a lot of my leisure time out of my hours of sleep. I didn\u2019t sleep very much, because I wanted to live the moment. I don\u2019t usually sleep very much anyway, and I figured I wasn\u2019t going into space to sleep. So I took a lot of time from my sleep time to listen to classical music and just kind of park myself in front of the window and just watch the world go by. And I\u2019m glad I did that. I have very vivid memories of the beauty of the Earth as it passes by in different forms. Colors, light effects, particularly when you go near the North Pole or the South Pole you see the Northern Lights. And these are very, very beautiful sights that we get to see and photograph. We took a lot of pictures.AdvertisementWhat classical music did you listen to?I have a sequence of Beethoven\u2019s Pastoral Symphony, and I was able to time it properly with the Earth\u2019s orbit. If you triggered the start of the symphony at a certain moment, all four movements of the symphony somehow fit with what you\u2019re looking at out the window. There\u2019s a period in the symphony with a lightning storm and the darkness and the wind and the storm. For some reason, we happened to be flying over the African continent at night at that moment, and there was a lightning storm. There was a whole chain of lightning storms that were firing lightning bolts all throughout the African continent at night. It was almost perfectly matching to the music, and then at the last moment, which is when the sun comes and the calm after the storm \u2014 we had just happened to be coming out of the South Pacific and the sun came over the horizon, and it was just the perfect timing for the beginning of the fourth movement. I tell you, it was almost like Beethoven, he must have been there. He would have written much more beautiful music than he already did if he had the chance to fly in space.More from About US:\u2018Latinx\u2019: An offense to the Spanish language or a nod to inclusion?A new report says Hispanic identity is fading. Is that really good for America?She\u2019s Asian and female. But she\u2019s not me.Co-workers keep mixing up people of color in the office. It\u2019s more than a mistake. From space, everyone is a citizen. \u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity",
        "author": "Rachel Hatzipanagos"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2341",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/12/citizen-world-nasas-first-latino-astronaut-reflects-how-space-changed-his-immigrant-identity/",
        "text": "About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.While the American memory of the Space Race is most often filtered through black-and-white photos of white men on the moon, NASA\u2019s reality was Technicolor. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPeople of color, including the black female mathematicians who worked as \u201chuman computers\u201d and were depicted in the Oscar-winning \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d were a part of NASA\u2019s space program from its inception.This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and to highlight another hidden figure, About Us spoke with Franklin Chang D\u00edaz, who is NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut. Chang D\u00edaz, now 69, flew his first space mission in 1986. He would go on to fly in six additional missions in his 25-year career with NASA, which ended with his induction into the agency\u2019s Hall of Fame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Chang D\u00edaz was born and spent much of his childhood in his native Costa Rica, his aspirations started with the American Dream: He immigrated to the United States in 1969 with $50 in his pocket.This transcript of our interview with Chang D\u00edaz has been edited for length and clarity.About US: Do you remember the first time that you wanted to go to space?Chang D\u00edaz: Yes, I remember that very vividly. It was 1957 [at age 7], and it was triggered by Sputnik. The Sputnik was something that lit up the imaginations of many, many children, not just in the United States but all over the world. And I was one of those latter children. I was growing up in Costa Rica, and all of a sudden space became a place people could really go to. The idea of going to space, which had been something in the science fiction books, all of a sudden became real, and flesh-and-bone astronauts had been selected in 1959 by NASA. Those were the pioneers that we all looked up to.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDid you ever pretend to be an astronaut?Absolutely. In 1957, I built a spaceship, which was a cardboard box from an old refrigerator or some other packaging. And inside that box, I put a couple of chairs and we were sort of laying on our backs. And I would get in there with my cousins and friends and we would go through a countdown to liftoff. We would lift off into space and land on some distant planet and explore and then come back to Earth.In 1986, I was on my first flight on the space shuttle and I was sitting there thinking to myself, \u201cI've done this before,\u201d and it was a recollection of those early-childhood memories of being inside that box with my friend and those chairs pretending to go to space.Life in space: Stories from 50 astronauts in their own wordsYou are of Chinese and Costa Rican descent. How do you think that helped shape your identity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI think of myself as a mixture of many cultures. I don\u2019t think of myself as, you know, half this or a quarter this or anything like that. I\u2019ve lived in the United States now most of my life, so I feel very much American, even though my Costa Rican roots are still strong and most of my family is still in Costa Rica. My children were all born in the United States and their families are all-American families. So it\u2019s just a typical immigrant situation, where you end up getting absorbed and melting into the society.The United States is a multicultural society, which in itself forms its own unique culture. So that\u2019s kind of the way I see myself. And I don\u2019t think of myself as a citizen of a country anymore. Actually, I think of myself as a citizen of the world, of the planet, and many astronauts will tell you that. They come back realizing that they really are citizens of the planet and not citizens of a country.Did you feel welcome as a Latino after coming to the United States in the 1960s?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI felt very much welcome in the U.S., with a few exceptions. When I came to the U.S. in \u201969, there were a lot of racial turmoil and change going on in the U.S. society. But for the most part, I felt very much welcome, and I still do. And of course, things have changed a lot in the U.S., but I still feel that the fundamental fabric of this nation is one of welcoming the immigrant.How do you feel about the attitude toward immigrants now, and do you think that this has changed at all since when you first immigrated here?The attitude towards immigrants throughout the whole world has changed because the world has a lot more people now. We have 7 billion people on this planet and there is only so much room. So people are naturally going to be trying to migrate to where the opportunities lie, and that is a force that is not possible to change. And as a result there\u2019s a natural tendency to build barriers to prevent that and to build walls and impediments for that migration to occur. That is a natural reaction. It\u2019s not a good reaction, but it is a natural reaction. So I think ultimately this all will be temporary, and some societies and countries will realign themselves and rearrange themselves to face the new reality of the smallness of our planet. And the fact is that the only choice ultimately will be for humans to migrate into space. And that is exactly what we\u2019re doing now. We\u2019re seeing the beginnings of a major migration that will be not from one country to another but from the Earth out into space. I tell people that someday the Earth will be essentially humanity\u2019s National Park.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat was the process like to become selected as an astronaut? In March or April of 1980, I was called for an interview and then a week of evaluation and testing at Johnson Space Center. When that happened, I knew that I had at least made the initial cut. There had been over 3,000 applicants that had pursued that job, and they had selected 120 and I was in that group. I went to Houston and went through the testing evaluation and all of the medical tests here for a week and went back to back to Boston to work. A couple months later in May, I got the call from NASA that I had been selected, and it was the happiest moment of my life. Of course, my life changed entirely from that moment on. So at that moment, I became the first U.S. naturalized citizen to become an astronaut and the first Latino astronaut. It completely changed my life; it was a wonderful moment. I thought I was going to fly maybe once or twice, and I ended up flying seven times, more than anybody else.I just am extremely grateful to this nation that opened the doors for me. This is definitely, in my mind, the land of opportunity because for me it was exactly that. It worked out exactly the way it was advertised. So here I am, trying to give back a little bit to this country and help on the next phase.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWas space as you imagined it would be? Yeah, it was as I imagined. But the tones and the brilliance were much more vivid. For some reason, the eyeballs are able to take in a lot more detail than I guess you could capture in film. It was about the sharpest possible picture that you could ever imagine. And if you stared at something long enough, you could even see features that you couldn\u2019t see right at the beginning. You can see things like ships, for example, or contrails from airplanes. You could see bridges and you could see a lot of things that you wouldn\u2019t see right away because your mind integrates information and then gradually gives you more detail because you know what\u2019s there. It\u2019s an amazing sight.What was your most memorable experience in space?Story continues below advertisementI did three spacewalks, but my first spacewalk was very memorable, because you\u2019re walking out of the spacecraft into the open, a wide open space. The only thing separating you from the vacuum of space is just the thickness of the visor of your helmet or the thickness of the space suit. It is extremely impactful. I spent quite a bit of time on the end of the arm, so people would move me around from inside the space station. At the end of the arm, there were times when I could not see anything except my feet standing on something. We went into the dark nighttime, and the Earth kind of disappeared. All I could see around me were stars, nothing but stars. And it just got a little spooky, a little strange to think that maybe everybody left me out there. Interesting thoughts come to your head in those kinds of moments. It makes you think about what humans are going to feel like going to Mars when the Earth will be a point of light and Mars will be a point of light and there will be stars everywhere, nothing to have reference to. It would be very, very difficult, you know, psychologically speaking, a very tough moment for humans to be there for that.AdvertisementWould you describe it as frightening?It was a moment of loneliness. I think that was probably one of the strongest feelings. It\u2019s one of isolation and loneliness. You\u2019ve got a feeling that you\u2019re all by yourself in the midst of the whole of space, the vacuum of space and the immensity of the universe. It is just you. But as an astronaut you don\u2019t really want to dwell on any of these thoughts. You want to quickly focus on your tasks and the things that you have to do. Dwelling on thoughts is probably not a good idea in that context.Story continues below advertisementWhat was your typical day like?The typical day is very structured. Every hour is scheduled for you to be doing something. The meals are scheduled, the sleep time is scheduled, even leisure time is scheduled. I took a lot of my leisure time out of my hours of sleep. I didn\u2019t sleep very much, because I wanted to live the moment. I don\u2019t usually sleep very much anyway, and I figured I wasn\u2019t going into space to sleep. So I took a lot of time from my sleep time to listen to classical music and just kind of park myself in front of the window and just watch the world go by. And I\u2019m glad I did that. I have very vivid memories of the beauty of the Earth as it passes by in different forms. Colors, light effects, particularly when you go near the North Pole or the South Pole you see the Northern Lights. And these are very, very beautiful sights that we get to see and photograph. We took a lot of pictures.AdvertisementWhat classical music did you listen to?I have a sequence of Beethoven\u2019s Pastoral Symphony, and I was able to time it properly with the Earth\u2019s orbit. If you triggered the start of the symphony at a certain moment, all four movements of the symphony somehow fit with what you\u2019re looking at out the window. There\u2019s a period in the symphony with a lightning storm and the darkness and the wind and the storm. For some reason, we happened to be flying over the African continent at night at that moment, and there was a lightning storm. There was a whole chain of lightning storms that were firing lightning bolts all throughout the African continent at night. It was almost perfectly matching to the music, and then at the last moment, which is when the sun comes and the calm after the storm \u2014 we had just happened to be coming out of the South Pacific and the sun came over the horizon, and it was just the perfect timing for the beginning of the fourth movement. I tell you, it was almost like Beethoven, he must have been there. He would have written much more beautiful music than he already did if he had the chance to fly in space.More from About US:\u2018Latinx\u2019: An offense to the Spanish language or a nod to inclusion?A new report says Hispanic identity is fading. Is that really good for America?She\u2019s Asian and female. But she\u2019s not me.Co-workers keep mixing up people of color in the office. It\u2019s more than a mistake. From space, everyone is a citizen. \u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity",
        "author": "Rachel Hatzipanagos"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2342",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/12/citizen-world-nasas-first-latino-astronaut-reflects-how-space-changed-his-immigrant-identity/",
        "text": "About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.While the American memory of the Space Race is most often filtered through black-and-white photos of white men on the moon, NASA\u2019s reality was Technicolor. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPeople of color, including the black female mathematicians who worked as \u201chuman computers\u201d and were depicted in the Oscar-winning \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d were a part of NASA\u2019s space program from its inception.This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and to highlight another hidden figure, About Us spoke with Franklin Chang D\u00edaz, who is NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut. Chang D\u00edaz, now 69, flew his first space mission in 1986. He would go on to fly in six additional missions in his 25-year career with NASA, which ended with his induction into the agency\u2019s Hall of Fame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Chang D\u00edaz was born and spent much of his childhood in his native Costa Rica, his aspirations started with the American Dream: He immigrated to the United States in 1969 with $50 in his pocket.This transcript of our interview with Chang D\u00edaz has been edited for length and clarity.About US: Do you remember the first time that you wanted to go to space?Chang D\u00edaz: Yes, I remember that very vividly. It was 1957 [at age 7], and it was triggered by Sputnik. The Sputnik was something that lit up the imaginations of many, many children, not just in the United States but all over the world. And I was one of those latter children. I was growing up in Costa Rica, and all of a sudden space became a place people could really go to. The idea of going to space, which had been something in the science fiction books, all of a sudden became real, and flesh-and-bone astronauts had been selected in 1959 by NASA. Those were the pioneers that we all looked up to.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDid you ever pretend to be an astronaut?Absolutely. In 1957, I built a spaceship, which was a cardboard box from an old refrigerator or some other packaging. And inside that box, I put a couple of chairs and we were sort of laying on our backs. And I would get in there with my cousins and friends and we would go through a countdown to liftoff. We would lift off into space and land on some distant planet and explore and then come back to Earth.In 1986, I was on my first flight on the space shuttle and I was sitting there thinking to myself, \u201cI've done this before,\u201d and it was a recollection of those early-childhood memories of being inside that box with my friend and those chairs pretending to go to space.Life in space: Stories from 50 astronauts in their own wordsYou are of Chinese and Costa Rican descent. How do you think that helped shape your identity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI think of myself as a mixture of many cultures. I don\u2019t think of myself as, you know, half this or a quarter this or anything like that. I\u2019ve lived in the United States now most of my life, so I feel very much American, even though my Costa Rican roots are still strong and most of my family is still in Costa Rica. My children were all born in the United States and their families are all-American families. So it\u2019s just a typical immigrant situation, where you end up getting absorbed and melting into the society.The United States is a multicultural society, which in itself forms its own unique culture. So that\u2019s kind of the way I see myself. And I don\u2019t think of myself as a citizen of a country anymore. Actually, I think of myself as a citizen of the world, of the planet, and many astronauts will tell you that. They come back realizing that they really are citizens of the planet and not citizens of a country.Did you feel welcome as a Latino after coming to the United States in the 1960s?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI felt very much welcome in the U.S., with a few exceptions. When I came to the U.S. in \u201969, there were a lot of racial turmoil and change going on in the U.S. society. But for the most part, I felt very much welcome, and I still do. And of course, things have changed a lot in the U.S., but I still feel that the fundamental fabric of this nation is one of welcoming the immigrant.How do you feel about the attitude toward immigrants now, and do you think that this has changed at all since when you first immigrated here?The attitude towards immigrants throughout the whole world has changed because the world has a lot more people now. We have 7 billion people on this planet and there is only so much room. So people are naturally going to be trying to migrate to where the opportunities lie, and that is a force that is not possible to change. And as a result there\u2019s a natural tendency to build barriers to prevent that and to build walls and impediments for that migration to occur. That is a natural reaction. It\u2019s not a good reaction, but it is a natural reaction. So I think ultimately this all will be temporary, and some societies and countries will realign themselves and rearrange themselves to face the new reality of the smallness of our planet. And the fact is that the only choice ultimately will be for humans to migrate into space. And that is exactly what we\u2019re doing now. We\u2019re seeing the beginnings of a major migration that will be not from one country to another but from the Earth out into space. I tell people that someday the Earth will be essentially humanity\u2019s National Park.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat was the process like to become selected as an astronaut? In March or April of 1980, I was called for an interview and then a week of evaluation and testing at Johnson Space Center. When that happened, I knew that I had at least made the initial cut. There had been over 3,000 applicants that had pursued that job, and they had selected 120 and I was in that group. I went to Houston and went through the testing evaluation and all of the medical tests here for a week and went back to back to Boston to work. A couple months later in May, I got the call from NASA that I had been selected, and it was the happiest moment of my life. Of course, my life changed entirely from that moment on. So at that moment, I became the first U.S. naturalized citizen to become an astronaut and the first Latino astronaut. It completely changed my life; it was a wonderful moment. I thought I was going to fly maybe once or twice, and I ended up flying seven times, more than anybody else.I just am extremely grateful to this nation that opened the doors for me. This is definitely, in my mind, the land of opportunity because for me it was exactly that. It worked out exactly the way it was advertised. So here I am, trying to give back a little bit to this country and help on the next phase.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWas space as you imagined it would be? Yeah, it was as I imagined. But the tones and the brilliance were much more vivid. For some reason, the eyeballs are able to take in a lot more detail than I guess you could capture in film. It was about the sharpest possible picture that you could ever imagine. And if you stared at something long enough, you could even see features that you couldn\u2019t see right at the beginning. You can see things like ships, for example, or contrails from airplanes. You could see bridges and you could see a lot of things that you wouldn\u2019t see right away because your mind integrates information and then gradually gives you more detail because you know what\u2019s there. It\u2019s an amazing sight.What was your most memorable experience in space?Story continues below advertisementI did three spacewalks, but my first spacewalk was very memorable, because you\u2019re walking out of the spacecraft into the open, a wide open space. The only thing separating you from the vacuum of space is just the thickness of the visor of your helmet or the thickness of the space suit. It is extremely impactful. I spent quite a bit of time on the end of the arm, so people would move me around from inside the space station. At the end of the arm, there were times when I could not see anything except my feet standing on something. We went into the dark nighttime, and the Earth kind of disappeared. All I could see around me were stars, nothing but stars. And it just got a little spooky, a little strange to think that maybe everybody left me out there. Interesting thoughts come to your head in those kinds of moments. It makes you think about what humans are going to feel like going to Mars when the Earth will be a point of light and Mars will be a point of light and there will be stars everywhere, nothing to have reference to. It would be very, very difficult, you know, psychologically speaking, a very tough moment for humans to be there for that.AdvertisementWould you describe it as frightening?It was a moment of loneliness. I think that was probably one of the strongest feelings. It\u2019s one of isolation and loneliness. You\u2019ve got a feeling that you\u2019re all by yourself in the midst of the whole of space, the vacuum of space and the immensity of the universe. It is just you. But as an astronaut you don\u2019t really want to dwell on any of these thoughts. You want to quickly focus on your tasks and the things that you have to do. Dwelling on thoughts is probably not a good idea in that context.Story continues below advertisementWhat was your typical day like?The typical day is very structured. Every hour is scheduled for you to be doing something. The meals are scheduled, the sleep time is scheduled, even leisure time is scheduled. I took a lot of my leisure time out of my hours of sleep. I didn\u2019t sleep very much, because I wanted to live the moment. I don\u2019t usually sleep very much anyway, and I figured I wasn\u2019t going into space to sleep. So I took a lot of time from my sleep time to listen to classical music and just kind of park myself in front of the window and just watch the world go by. And I\u2019m glad I did that. I have very vivid memories of the beauty of the Earth as it passes by in different forms. Colors, light effects, particularly when you go near the North Pole or the South Pole you see the Northern Lights. And these are very, very beautiful sights that we get to see and photograph. We took a lot of pictures.AdvertisementWhat classical music did you listen to?I have a sequence of Beethoven\u2019s Pastoral Symphony, and I was able to time it properly with the Earth\u2019s orbit. If you triggered the start of the symphony at a certain moment, all four movements of the symphony somehow fit with what you\u2019re looking at out the window. There\u2019s a period in the symphony with a lightning storm and the darkness and the wind and the storm. For some reason, we happened to be flying over the African continent at night at that moment, and there was a lightning storm. There was a whole chain of lightning storms that were firing lightning bolts all throughout the African continent at night. It was almost perfectly matching to the music, and then at the last moment, which is when the sun comes and the calm after the storm \u2014 we had just happened to be coming out of the South Pacific and the sun came over the horizon, and it was just the perfect timing for the beginning of the fourth movement. I tell you, it was almost like Beethoven, he must have been there. He would have written much more beautiful music than he already did if he had the chance to fly in space.More from About US:\u2018Latinx\u2019: An offense to the Spanish language or a nod to inclusion?A new report says Hispanic identity is fading. Is that really good for America?She\u2019s Asian and female. But she\u2019s not me.Co-workers keep mixing up people of color in the office. It\u2019s more than a mistake. From space, everyone is a citizen. \u2018A citizen of the world\u2019: NASA\u2019s first Latino astronaut reflects on how space changed his immigrant identity",
        "author": "Rachel Hatzipanagos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Warmer. Burning. Epidemic-challenged. Expensive. The California Dream has become the California Compromise. (WP: National) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2343",
        "date": "2020-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wildfires-california-dream-compromise/2020/09/12/780e80da-f465-11ea-a852-eb7526c580f4_story.html",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 The cityscape resembles the surface of a distant planet, populated by a masked alien culture. The air, choked with blown ash, is difficult to breathe.There is the Golden Gate Bridge, looming in the distance through a drift-smoke haze, and the Salesforce Tower, which against the blood-orange sky appears as a colossal spaceship in a doomsday film. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSan Francisco, and much of California, has never been like this.California has become a warming, burning, epidemic-challenged and expensive state, with many who live in sophisticated cities, idyllic oceanfront towns and windblown mountain communities thinking hard about the viability of a place they have called home forever. For the first time in a decade, more people left California last year for other states than arrived.Blazes fueled by climate change engulf vast region in crisisMonica Gupta Mehta and her husband, an entrepreneur, have been through tech busts and booms, earthquakes, wildfire seasons and power outages. But it was not until the skies darkened and cast an unsettling orange light on their Palo Alto home earlier this week that they ever considered moving their family of five somewhere else.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the first time in 20-something years, the thought crossed our minds: Do we really want to live here?\u201d said Mehta, who is starting an education tech company.It would be difficult to leave. They love the area\u2019s abundant nature and are tied to Silicon Valley by work and a network of extended family members, who followed them west from Pittsburgh. But Mehta says it is something she would consider if her family is in regular danger.\u201cYesterday felt so apocalyptic,\u201d Mehta said. \u201cPeople are really starting to reconsider whether California has enough to offer them.\u201dThis is the latest iteration of the California Dream, a Gold Rush-era slogan meant to capture the hopeful migration of an old nation to a new, rich West. For generations, the tacit agreement for California residents resembled a kind of too-good-to-be-true deal. Live in the lovely if often drought-plagued Sierra, or beneath the beachfront Pacific Coast cliffs, and work in an economy constantly reinventing itself, from Hollywood to the farms of the San Joaquin to Silicon Valley.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut for many of the state\u2019s 40\u00a0million residents, the California Dream has become the California Compromise, one increasingly challenging to justify, with a rapidly changing climate, a thumb-on-the-scales economy, high taxes and a pandemic that has led to more cases of the novel coronavirus than any other state.During the course of his term, President Trump has singled out California, a state he lost by 30\u00a0percentage points, as an example of Democrat-caused urban unrest, irresponsible immigration policy and poor forest management, even though nearly 60\u00a0percent of the state\u2019s forests are managed by the federal government. Several are burning today, with millions of acres already scorched.In small town, wildfires devastate a Latino communityGov. Gavin Newsom (D) has responded specifically in some cases, but in others, he has invoked the California Dream, an aspirational noun attached to no other state. In his January 2019\u00a0inaugural address, Newsom warned that \u201cthere is nothing inevitable about\u201d that dream.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnd now more than ever, it is up to us to defend it,\u201d he said.As the state\u2019s climate has shifted to one of extremes, soaking wet seasons followed suddenly by sharp, dry heat and wind, no region has been safe from fire. This year \u2014 even before peak fire season has gotten underway \u2014 widespread fires have forced evacuations, from San Jose in Silicon Valley to the distant hamlet of Big Creek along the western slopes of the Sierra.More than two dozen major fires are burning around the state and have consumed a record 3.1\u00a0million acres of land, more than 3,000 homes and at least 22 lives. Los Angeles has reported the worst air quality in three decades as a result of fires surrounding that city, already notorious for orange air and seasonal dry cough.Story continues below advertisementWine Country has burned four straight years, with a number of vineyards lost. Homes have been destroyed far to the south in San Diego County, and more than 200 campers had to be airlifted to safety amid the Creek Fire, still burning hot and fast between Fresno and Mammoth Lakes.Across California, residents are grappling with the devastating toll of fires, which have burned more than 3 million acres this year and are still spreading. (Austin Meyer/The Washington Post)The mountains behind Santa Barbara County, which gave way after being burned bare by the Thomas Fire three years ago, have turned a worrisome gray-brown tinder in recent weeks.AdvertisementThose slopes, prepared by one of the state\u2019s largest fires in history at the time, slid during rain-saturated mudslides in January 2018. Twenty people were killed in the wealthy enclave of Montecito, sweeping some from inside their foothill homes all the way to the sea.Story continues below advertisementThe mandatory evacuation orders issued then included the home recently bought by Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, newcomers to Santa Barbara\u2019s shifting climate.\u201cHopefully, this is a wake-up call,\u201d said Anne-Marie Bonneau, who two decades ago left her home in Ontario, Canada, for the Bay Area but misses the clean air and less-fractious political environment beyond the northern border. \u201cWhat is it going to take for this country to do something about the climate crisis? Millions of people are affected by this.\u201dShe sees what is happening in California as just the beginning of what is to come across the continent.Advertisement\u201cAs always, California\u2019s sort of on the leading edge,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re always ahead of everybody.\u201dStory continues below advertisementKim Cobb is among the climate scientists who, for years, have warned that the consequences of a warming planet will grow more intense, more deadly and more costly over time. But even she has been startled by the scenes unfolding across the West as wildfires rage this summer.\u201cIt\u2019s an entirely different thing to look at this footage and hear the sobbing voices of people who have lost loved ones and property and livelihoods,\u201d said Cobb, a professor at Georgia Tech\u2019s School of Earth and Atmospheric Science. \u201cIt\u2019s shocking for us emotionally, as well as for any global citizen who is watching this.\u201dShe is also adamant that on our current trajectory, the worst lies ahead.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe science couldn\u2019t be any clearer on this point. The links between warming temperatures and these wildfires are clear,\u201d Cobb said. \u201cThis is going to get a lot worse. .\u2009.\u2009. I know that challenges the imagination.\u201dWildfire season is a natural part of many ecosystems, but climate change has these fires burning hotter and longer throughout the year. (John Farrell/The Washington Post)The fire fallout and the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 14,000 people in California, have provided a kind of CT-scan view of the state and its many inequities.AdvertisementLatinos account for 61 percent of coronavirus cases, an infection rate disproportionately high given that they make up just 35 percent of the overall state population. Many are the \u201cessential workers\u201d serving food, picking crops and living lives that are not privileged enough to take refuge in the safety of telecommuting.Story continues below advertisementDuring the summer, the novel coronavirus and wildfires have revealed much for Californians: who stays safe from fire and disease, who keeps their jobs, who waits at home for a shrinking benefits check, and who has a soft-landing evacuation site or a hard shelter bed.This is the debit side of the California Compromise. It is an economy, the world\u2019s fifth largest, that is built by government policy and private enterprise to favor the skilled in Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the wealthy everywhere else. The rest of California is increasingly a service economy that pays a far larger share of its income in taxes and on housing and food.AdvertisementMedian income in the state is $75,277. The median home price in San Francisco is $1.3\u00a0million, nearly twice that of Los Angeles. The state government is doing next to nothing to close the gap.Three years ago, state lawmakers approved the nation\u2019s second-highest gasoline tax, adding more than 47 cents to the price of a gallon. With home prices skyrocketing along the coast, service workers in particular are moving farther inland from their jobs and into fire country, meaning they are paying far more as a share of their income on fuel just to stay employed.Evacuees from the CZU Lightning Complex fire burning between Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties have not been told when they can return home. (The Washington Post)The taxes raise more than $5\u00a0billion in annual revenue for roads and transportation projects. But the sometimes hours-long commutes, with affordable housing so far from job centers, also undermine the state\u2019s goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2045, an achievement that could alleviate some of the extreme weather.AdvertisementA poll conducted late last year by the University of California at Berkeley found that more than half of California voters had given \u201cserious\u201d or \u201csome\u201d consideration to leaving the state because of the high cost of housing, heavy taxation or political culture.The draw for some, and the magnet that keeps many here, is the state\u2019s breathtaking physical beauty, family history and a liberal political culture appealing to supporters, many of whom in the north are inheritors of a counterculture ethos.Through legislation or direct action at the ballot box, California voters established the country\u2019s first \u201csanctuary state\u201d for undocumented immigrants, built from the ground a vibrant justice-reform movement, and committed to some of the boldest environmental protection goals in the country.In addition, a measure to restore affirmative action to college admission decisions, banned since 1996, is on the November ballot. The legislature just created a committee to study the cost of reparations to racial and ethnic groups the state has historically mistreated. Marijuana is legal. So are hallucinogenic mushrooms in Oakland.The political gulf once ran between north and south in California, a Bay Area vs. Los Angeles standoff for power and resources. Now the delineation is east and west, including between liberal San Francisco and towns such as Oroville, now threatened by fire.Sarah and Joey Wilson, a therapist and the owner of a gold mining supply shop, respectively, live 15 minutes from Oroville in Kelly Ridge and are experienced evacuees. But what most bothers them, beyond the frequent fires, is encroachment by the government on their outdoor lifestyles.Lakes that Joey used to fish are now off-limits. State-erected gates now block public roads he used to drive to access recreational land. And regulations have limited some kinds of gold prospecting, the hobby that supports his business.\u201cThat\u2019s actually probably made us want to move more than something like this,\u201d Sarah Wilson, 45, said of the close-by wildfire flames.The loyalty to liberal politics serves as an anchor for many of the state\u2019s urban \u2014 and most-entrenched \u2014 residents. But it has only light, if any, appeal to newcomers or those here specifically for work.Peter Alvaro has lived in his rent-controlled apartment in the heart of San Francisco since 1999, when he moved from New Jersey for a taste of the city\u2019s famed counterculture.He knows the fires will only get worse, as they have steadily in the past three years. But Alvaro feels his identity is tied up in the city and in the surrounding nature. He loves raising his two daughters here, going to the beach three times a week and watching the city constantly change around him.Many of the people leaving San Francisco are tech workers, newly freed from the city they helped make so expensive by the ability to work remotely during the coronavirus outbreak.\u201cThe tech workers weren\u2019t necessarily attached to the city, they came here because there was opportunity,\u201d said Alvaro, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz. \u201cI hope the city can regrow some of the unique character that was lost in the last boom. The fact that young, wealthy adults are fleeing is good for the culture.\u201dJust after the first fires started last month, Gary Cook and his wife packed their three rescue cats into a rented SUV and drove from Napa to their new home in Idaho. After 18\u00a0years in Wine Country, Cook and his wife felt California was not right for them anymore.It was not the fires, which Cook said were not an issue for him, but the area\u2019s cost of living, high taxes, power outages and political climate. Cook, who recently retired, felt that as a conservative, he no longer had a voice politically in California.\u201cThere were significant changes going on that changed our outlook on the whole California dream,\u201d Cook said.He said he will miss Napa\u2019s famed restaurant scene. Idaho is laid back, and the people are more aligned with his views, but it is more of a steak-and-potatoes kind of place, he says.Business is booming for Scott Fuller, who runs a real estate relocation business. Called Leaving the Bay Area and Leaving SoCal, the company helps people ready to move away from the state\u2019s two largest metro areas sell their homes and find others.Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Idaho are the top four states his clients are buying in, and many tech workers are trying out smaller industry hubs such as Denver, Austin, Phoenix and Seattle.Since the pandemic began, he also has been helping people move to less-populated areas within the state such as Placerville or Lake Tahoe. But that trend could reverse quickly because of the record wildfire season, which has been burning around those regions.\u201cFor a lot of people, [California\u2019s] losing its luster,\u201d Fuller said. \u201cFor the average person who maybe came out here for the weather, I think they\u2019re saying the trade-off is just not worth it any longer.\u201dIt has been hard to locate a place on the map, outside the city centers, where a fire has not cropped up in the past month. Some are burning deep in wilderness, a possible long-term benefit for the health of the forests now struggling for the same scant water supply, and others along coastal stretches that have never seen fire in modern history.Others are haunting the dry foothills where fire \u2014 and death \u2014 have been commonplace in recent years.Just a few miles north of Oroville lies the Sierra foothill town of Paradise, having burned to the ground in just hours on Nov. 8, 2018, in a wind-whipped tragedy of historically deadly proportions.Eighty-five people died, many simply overwhelmed by the sprinting flames as they tried to flee in cars and on foot. The Bear Fire is at Paradise\u2019s door again, with much less there to burn as the city slowly rebuilds.Now a thick layer of black and white ash covers the streets, sidewalks and shops of Oroville, a city of 15,000 people that swelled by 25 percent virtually overnight with evacuees from the fire in Paradise, also known as the Camp Fire. The fire followed a near-disaster by a year when the Oroville Dam spillways almost failed with the flooding of the Feather River, threatening to inundate the city.It is difficult today to find an Oroville resident who did not know someone who perished or lost a home in the Camp Fire. Now, amid a pandemic, the fast-moving Bear Fire is forcing new evacuations as it burns northeast of town.The fire already has wiped out the small town of Berry Creek, which sits just north of Lake Oroville. Just outside of Oroville, police cars block entry to the roads that lead to the lake, which this time of year would normally be abuzz with Jet Skis and motorboats.But few residents of Oroville, a conservative, roll-with-the-punches kind of frontier place, are discouraged enough to leave California.More than natural disasters, many residents say it is the liberal overreach of the Democrat-dominated government of their state that has them frustrated. In 2016, Trump won Butte County in a state where he was trounced almost everywhere else.\u201cCalifornia is always going to be California,\u201d said Judy McClure, 69, a retired school librarian.Rather than leave, she said, she would like to see the government loosen regulations and allow more aggressive forest management to prevent bigger fires.\u201cThere\u2019s too much government,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlbergotti reported from Oroville, Calif.; Dennis reported from Washington; and Scott Wilson reported from Santa Barbara, Calif. For the first time in a decade, more people left California last year than arrived. The realities of flooding, drought, wildfires and high costs are weighing on a weary public. Warmer. Burning. Epidemic-challenged. Expensive. The California Dream has become the California Compromise.",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | For 16-year-old black girl nerds, it\u2019s good that Katherine Johnson is no longer hidden  (WP: National) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2344",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/27/16-year-old-black-girl-nerds-its-good-that-katherine-johnson-is-no-longer-hidden/",
        "text": "About US is a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.To the world, Katherine Johnson was a scientist, mathematician and leading figure in American space history. For me, she was all that but most importantly a role model. We shared a lot in common as black women who grew up in the working class with a passion for math and science. Her life offered a tangible example of what is possible for me. She was at the forefront of the integration of NASA, a place where I, and many other black scientists and engineers, have the honor to work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJohnson died Monday at 101.I knew about her accomplishments far before the movie \u201cHidden Figures\u201d was released because I\u2019d started researching historical black women in STEM \u2014 science, technology, engineering and mathematics \u2014 for my Instagram page, @blackgirlsinstem.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI was floored when I stumbled upon her story. A black woman was an instrumental part of our space race and moon missions! As a young black female aerospace engineer, I was in complete awe. It was hard to conceptualize, considering she made such an indelible mark on the space industry at the height of the civil rights movement. I could hardly begin to imagine the struggles she faced that weren\u2019t detailed in her brief NASA bio.Then, I was struck with another feeling: anger. Why on Earth had I not heard of her before? The space race was one of the only sections of my high school history class on which I didn\u2019t fall asleep (Sorry, Dr. Rogers). I wrote countless papers about key figures in the United States\u2019 race to the moon. None of the research even hinted at the fact that black women were instrumental to our country\u2019s success. I can\u2019t imagine what that would have been like: 16-year-old, impressionable, curious and space-obsessed Naia finding out that black women had something to do with getting Americans on the moon.As of 2016, women of color earn the smallest share of STEM degrees, with black women averaging around 8.7 percent of total STEM bachelor\u2019s degrees awarded. As of 2015, black women made up only 1.6 percent of the United States\u2019 science and engineering workforce. Data trends generated by the National Science Foundation show that the percentage of black women earning degrees in engineering has been consistently under 2 percent and has decreased since 1996.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFortunately, the number of black women earning degrees in other areas of STEM has increased. As a black woman who has been working in the engineering field since I was 18 years old, these figures do not surprise me. I am certain that the problem is not a lack of interest in engineering among black girls, but a lack of exposure and an inability for the industry to retain black female talent due to work environments that lack diversity.This is a huge reason for me taking the lessons learned from \u201cHidden Figures\u201d and making it my mission to do as much STEM outreach as my schedule will allow. I also have sought female mentors who have helped me navigate this industry by sharing their experiences. I am forever grateful to them because \u2014 without their advocacy, support and guidance \u2014 I would not have been afforded some of the opportunities I have today.I also remain part of various clubs dedicated to the development of black engineers and technology experts, including the National Society of Black Engineers, Tech Sassy Girlz, Vision of Flight and the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. The organizations exposed me to others who looked like me in the field, developed me professionally and academically, and have been incredible support systems even now as I pursue my PhD in aerospace engineering. These are the organizations that ensure that the legacies of icons like Katherine Johnson live on.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is also heartening that because of the amazing work of Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book on which the movie is based, and the \u201cHidden Figures\u201d movie crew, 16-year-old black girls with their eyes on the stars \u2014 like I was back in middle and high school \u2014 will know that women who looked like them accomplished incredible things in the space industry, and that they can, too.Shetterly\u2019s book went into such great detail about the women\u2019s backgrounds and their work at NASA. The women of \u201cHidden Figures\u201d were part of the West Area Computing group at NASA, a segregated group of black women who were called human computers. They were the center\u2019s mathematicians and would now be called computer scientists. They performed calculations for a variety of projects. I\u2019d like to share some of the key lessons, and passages, from the book.It\u2019s okay to trailblazeAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut the job at the aeronautical laboratory was something new, something so unusual it hadn\u2019t yet entered the collective dreams.\u201d \u201cNot everyone could take the long hours and high stakes of working at Langley, but most of the women in West Computing felt that if they didn\u2019t stand up to the pressure, they\u2019d forfeit their opportunity and maybe opportunity for the women who would come after them.\u201d The women of that era knew that pursuing their dreams was an endeavor bigger than themselves. They had to make a collective decision to be trailblazers, to be the first. But by doing so, they made sure they wouldn\u2019t be the \u201conly\u201d for too long because they knew that paving the path meant reaching back and bringing others with you. Sometimes, a job is going to require that of you. And it is very intimidating. But there\u2019s power in that, as well. You never know who could be trailing behind you.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementConfidence is key\u201cPossessed of an inner confidence that attributed no shortcoming either to her race or to her gender, Dorothy welcomed the chance to prove herself in a competitive arena.\u201d Dorothy Vaughan, one of the Hidden Figures, had a confidence that gave her the ability to see past the things that made her different in her workplace, despite the fact that her colleagues couldn\u2019t. It takes a lot of confidence to take up space that is not meant for you. This is much easier said than done, but I always try to remember that, because of who I am and what I stand for, the world is always going to try to count me out. The least I could do is show up for myself by not counting myself out.Story continues below advertisementStand by your numbers\u201cMary Jackson stood by her numbers.\u201d\u201cBut having the independence of mind and the strength of personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds in the world \u2014 that\u2019s what got you noticed.\u201dAdvertisementStanding by your numbers is something we saw Mary Jackson and Johnson do in the movie. I struggle with impostor syndrome a lot, but I feel that what I deal with pales in comparison to their feelings of impostor syndrome when racial stereotyping was rampant and vicious. To be able to stand by your numbers in the face of that is quite a feat. It was reassurance for me that if I\u2019m ever going to advance in this industry, I\u2019m going to have to trust my abilities and be my best advocate.Story continues below advertisementTake your seat at the table\u201cTo move up, she had to get as close as she could to the room where the ideas were being created.\u201d \u201cTheir path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.\u201d AdvertisementEnough said.Love thy sis\u201cMary and the other black employees at Langley tended to the new recruits as carefully and lovingly as if they were a garden.\u201d The most beautiful line in the book. They were the first, but they made sure they weren\u2019t the last. Our goal should always be to reach back and transfer knowledge for the sake of our civilization\u2019s advancement. That is the true spirit of space exploration, and Johnson, Jackson and Vaughn were three women who embodied it at every turn.You really can\u2019t underestimate the power of representation. Rest in perfect peace and rest in power, Katherine Johnson. I wrote countless high school papers about key figures in the United States' race to the moon. None of the research even hinted at the fact that black women were instrumental to our country\u2019s success. For 16-year-old black girl nerds, it\u2019s good that Katherine Johnson is no longer hidden ",
        "author": "Naia Butler-Craig"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Astronaut Wally and the cowboy hat that rocketed into space (WP: National) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2345",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/20/wally-funk-jeff-bezos-cowboy-hat/",
        "text": "The voice in mission control called her astronaut Wally. The familiarity was fitting. When she stepped into the automated Blue Origin rocket that would for the first time carry the private company\u2019s passengers into space, Wally Funk was a testament to determined optimism, good luck and relentless preparation. But mostly, she gave voice to the fact that no one really ever ages out of dreaming. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFunk, 82, can lay claim to the title of the oldest person to go into space now that the New Shepard capsule has parachuted safely back to Earth. She blasted off Tuesday morning alongside Oliver Daemen, 18, who made history as the youngest person to touch the cosmos. They were accompanied by a cowboy hat, a billionaire and his brother.The group took off from the arid plains of Texas. Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin\u2019s founder and owner of The Washington Post, swaggered up to the New Shepard capsule wearing his flight suit and a cowboy hat. He spent part of his childhood in Texas, dreaming about space travel, and so there is sentimentality attached to this fashion flourish that he chose for this entry into the history books.Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)And yet. The hat obscured Bezos\u2019s face and hid any wide-eyed delight for a man who declared Tuesday the \u201cbest day ever.\u201d It\u2019s an outsize reminder \u2014 as if one was needed \u2014 that Bezos is the big hat, the big deal, with the overflowing bank account financing this experiment in space tourism. He is the mission\u2019s nerve center of ego and ambition, confidence and poor fashion choices.Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?For many, his lavishing money on his space dreams is pure folly. Others are lining up for the chance to defy gravity and see the graceful curvature of Earth, if only for a few fleeting minutes. The cowboy hat is a caricature of overzealous machismo. It is the emblem of courageous adventurousness and the pioneering spirit. It was impossible to ignore the hat. The hat made history.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Funk, more than anyone \u2014 more than Bezos, more than the other billionaire space cowboys Elon Musk and Richard Branson, more than the fresh-faced Daemen \u2014 speaks to the boundary-breaking soul.She stepped into the capsule, her short, white hair gleaming brightly in contrast to her cobalt blue flight suit. She moved with such confidence \u2014 this aviator whose physical and mental toughness had been tested and tested since she first trained for space flight some 60 years ago, but whose gender had tethered her to Earth far more firmly than gravity. NASA had no place for lady astronauts back then.In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. Today, at 82, she finally got her shot.There is something wonderful and reassuring in knowing that at a time when youth is hailed as a near-magical state, when technology transforms the everyday pace of life into super-fast-forward, when it is nearly impossible to take a break from the urgency of now, there is still a reward in patience. The future doesn\u2019t belong exclusively to the young. It can belong to an octogenarian, too. And although her tomorrows may be fewer, each can be densely packed with meaning and accomplishment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFunk was at the center of a human triumph following more than a year in which elders have seen more than their share of pain. They\u2019ve borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic. They were more vulnerable to its ravages. The elderly have seen mass deaths.It was a balm to know that Funk was in space. Floating and laughing. Surprised by the darkness. Reveling. And after it was all over, it was a glorious sight when Funk burst through the capsule door with an exuberant smile and her arms spread wide like she was now wired for flight from the sheer joy of being alive. Every single day matters, no matter if it\u2019s lived with limber muscles and sweet ignorance of travails or stiff joints and battle-scarred grace.Freedom. That\u2019s the message that came tumbling forth when Funk returned to Earth and greeted it with an open-armed hug.After the short flight that allowed Funk a few minutes of weightlessness, the dome-shaped capsule floated back down to terra firma, suspended from three blue parachutes each with a center the color of a sunset. It was a beautiful image set against the pale sky and the arid Texas landscape.The entire flight painted a picture about the enduring intoxication of dreams. Every life runs its course. But before the end arrives, before the downward spiral begins, curiosity rages on. The tug of a dream can last far beyond one\u2019s retirement years. Sometimes, it takes that long to even be able to articulate what those desires are.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf only the culture could stop tripping over itself, so wrongs don\u2019t have to be corrected decades and generations later. If only society could get out of its own way instead of creating artificial impossibilities when, in fact, almost anything is possible.Dreams are not always rational or universally cheered. Conventional wisdom tells us that our ability to succeed is only limited by our ability to dream. But sometimes dreams are constrained by gender, age and race, too. They are diminished by circumstances.Funk outlasted the false impossibilities. The man in the cowboy hat leaned in to yes. And for a few minutes on a summer morning, the dazzling wonder of life was unbound.Read more Robin Givhan:Angela Merkel\u2019s lasting impression The president came to preach the valor of votingIn Jill Biden\u2019s Vogue cover, there\u2019s optimism and rebuke No one really ever ages out of dreaming. Astronaut Wally and the cowboy hat that rocketed into space",
        "author": "Robin Givhan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Astronaut Wally and the cowboy hat that rocketed into space (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2346",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/20/wally-funk-jeff-bezos-cowboy-hat/",
        "text": "The voice in mission control called her astronaut Wally. The familiarity was fitting. When she stepped into the automated Blue Origin rocket that would for the first time carry the private company\u2019s passengers into space, Wally Funk was a testament to determined optimism, good luck and relentless preparation. But mostly, she gave voice to the fact that no one really ever ages out of dreaming. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFunk, 82, can lay claim to the title of the oldest person to go into space now that the New Shepard capsule has parachuted safely back to Earth. She blasted off Tuesday morning alongside Oliver Daemen, 18, who made history as the youngest person to touch the cosmos. They were accompanied by a cowboy hat, a billionaire and his brother.The group took off from the arid plains of Texas. Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin\u2019s founder and owner of The Washington Post, swaggered up to the New Shepard capsule wearing his flight suit and a cowboy hat. He spent part of his childhood in Texas, dreaming about space travel, and so there is sentimentality attached to this fashion flourish that he chose for this entry into the history books.Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)And yet. The hat obscured Bezos\u2019s face and hid any wide-eyed delight for a man who declared Tuesday the \u201cbest day ever.\u201d It\u2019s an outsize reminder \u2014 as if one was needed \u2014 that Bezos is the big hat, the big deal, with the overflowing bank account financing this experiment in space tourism. He is the mission\u2019s nerve center of ego and ambition, confidence and poor fashion choices.Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?For many, his lavishing money on his space dreams is pure folly. Others are lining up for the chance to defy gravity and see the graceful curvature of Earth, if only for a few fleeting minutes. The cowboy hat is a caricature of overzealous machismo. It is the emblem of courageous adventurousness and the pioneering spirit. It was impossible to ignore the hat. The hat made history.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Funk, more than anyone \u2014 more than Bezos, more than the other billionaire space cowboys Elon Musk and Richard Branson, more than the fresh-faced Daemen \u2014 speaks to the boundary-breaking soul.She stepped into the capsule, her short, white hair gleaming brightly in contrast to her cobalt blue flight suit. She moved with such confidence \u2014 this aviator whose physical and mental toughness had been tested and tested since she first trained for space flight some 60 years ago, but whose gender had tethered her to Earth far more firmly than gravity. NASA had no place for lady astronauts back then.In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. Today, at 82, she finally got her shot.There is something wonderful and reassuring in knowing that at a time when youth is hailed as a near-magical state, when technology transforms the everyday pace of life into super-fast-forward, when it is nearly impossible to take a break from the urgency of now, there is still a reward in patience. The future doesn\u2019t belong exclusively to the young. It can belong to an octogenarian, too. And although her tomorrows may be fewer, each can be densely packed with meaning and accomplishment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFunk was at the center of a human triumph following more than a year in which elders have seen more than their share of pain. They\u2019ve borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic. They were more vulnerable to its ravages. The elderly have seen mass deaths.It was a balm to know that Funk was in space. Floating and laughing. Surprised by the darkness. Reveling. And after it was all over, it was a glorious sight when Funk burst through the capsule door with an exuberant smile and her arms spread wide like she was now wired for flight from the sheer joy of being alive. Every single day matters, no matter if it\u2019s lived with limber muscles and sweet ignorance of travails or stiff joints and battle-scarred grace.Freedom. That\u2019s the message that came tumbling forth when Funk returned to Earth and greeted it with an open-armed hug.After the short flight that allowed Funk a few minutes of weightlessness, the dome-shaped capsule floated back down to terra firma, suspended from three blue parachutes each with a center the color of a sunset. It was a beautiful image set against the pale sky and the arid Texas landscape.The entire flight painted a picture about the enduring intoxication of dreams. Every life runs its course. But before the end arrives, before the downward spiral begins, curiosity rages on. The tug of a dream can last far beyond one\u2019s retirement years. Sometimes, it takes that long to even be able to articulate what those desires are.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf only the culture could stop tripping over itself, so wrongs don\u2019t have to be corrected decades and generations later. If only society could get out of its own way instead of creating artificial impossibilities when, in fact, almost anything is possible.Dreams are not always rational or universally cheered. Conventional wisdom tells us that our ability to succeed is only limited by our ability to dream. But sometimes dreams are constrained by gender, age and race, too. They are diminished by circumstances.Funk outlasted the false impossibilities. The man in the cowboy hat leaned in to yes. And for a few minutes on a summer morning, the dazzling wonder of life was unbound.Read more Robin Givhan:Angela Merkel\u2019s lasting impression The president came to preach the valor of votingIn Jill Biden\u2019s Vogue cover, there\u2019s optimism and rebuke No one really ever ages out of dreaming. Astronaut Wally and the cowboy hat that rocketed into space",
        "author": "Robin Givhan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rock of ages: What will alien life-forms think of Chuck Berry? (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2347",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/rock-of-ages-what-will-alien-life-forms-think-of-chuck-berry/2017/03/24/faf5b34c-0e59-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html",
        "text": " \u2018Johnny B. Goode\u2019 is riding aboard Voyager spacecraft on a journey through the stars. Rock of ages: What will alien life-forms think of Chuck Berry?",
        "author": " Nancy Szokan Nancy Szokan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go? (WP: National) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2348",
        "date": "2017-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-with-nasa-has-a-new-rocket-and-spaceship-wheres-he-going-to-go/2017/03/11/4193f1be-002d-11e7-8f41-ea6ed597e4ca_story.html",
        "text": " The moon is back in play, but the who, when and how are up in the air. Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?",
        "author": " Joel Achenbach Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to steer a spacecraft into Saturn (WP: National) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2349",
        "date": "2017-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-to-steer-a-spacecraft-into-saturn/2017/09/09/ce6a8d18-74af-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story.html",
        "text": " The Cassini mission is about to end in a fireball, intentionally, after a swan dive through Saturn\u2019s rings. How to steer a spacecraft into Saturn",
        "author": " Joel Achenbach Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Closing in on launch: NASA\u2019s gold-mirrored, $8 billion Webb Space Telescope (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2350",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/closing-in-on-launch-nasas-gold-mirrored-8-billion-webb-space-telescope/2017/02/24/5ed5906e-f9fe-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html",
        "text": " The telescope will be trained on planets, black holes and the secrets of deepest space. Closing in on launch: NASA\u2019s gold-mirrored, $8 billion Webb Space Telescope",
        "author": " Joel Achenbach Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Half a million people signed up to storm Area 51. What happens if they actually show? (WP: National Security) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2351",
        "date": "2019-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/07/13/half-million-people-signed-up-storm-area-what-happens-if-they-actually-show-up/",
        "text": "Should everything go according to plan, more than a half-million strangers will gather in a remote Nevada town in mid-September, united by a common goal: to raid Area 51 in the wee hours of the morning \u2014 using a strength-in-numbers approach to reveal any extraterrestrial treasures stashed within the notoriously clandestine government base. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOr, put more simply: \u201cLets see them aliens.\u201d By Friday evening, more than 540,000 people from around the world had signed up to attend the joke Facebook event: \u201cStorm Area 51, They Can\u2019t Stop All of Us\u201d \u2014 and just as many had indicated they were \u201cinterested.\u201d Planned for Sept. 20 in Amargosa Valley, an hour\u2019s drive from Las Vegas, the event page is filled with thousands of satirical posts and memes theorizing the best way to break into the top-secret facility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry,\u201d reads a brief description of the event, which was created by popular video game streamer SmyleeKun. \u201cIf we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets.\u201d The latter part of the description references anime ninja Naruto Uzumaki, whose signature head-forward, arms-behind-the-back running technique has led some to believe it makes them run faster. (It doesn\u2019t.)The Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)Most people discussing the raid, including various news outlets that have written about the event, recognize that it\u2019s not intended to be taken seriously. But what about those who don\u2019t? It\u2019s not clear exactly how many people \u2014 if any \u2014 will actually show up to lead a blitzkrieg on the Nellis Air Force Base Complex, which houses the land containing Area 51.Though some who\u2019ve posted on the event page in recent days have considered that possibility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cP.S. Hello U.S. government, this is a joke, and I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan,\u201d wrote user Jackson Barnes, following his rather descriptive proposed game plan. \u201cI just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies on the Internet. I\u2019m not responsible if people decide to actually storm area 51.\u201dThe government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026Speaking with The Washington Post on Friday, Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews said officials were aware of the event. When asked how authorities would respond to ardent explorers who might attempt to enter Area 51 in September, McAndrews said she could not elaborate on specific plans or security procedures at the base.She did, however, issue a warning to those itching to try their luck.Story continues below advertisement\u201c[Area 51] is an open training range for the U.S. Air Force, and we would discourage anyone from trying to come into the area where we train American armed forces,\u201d McAndrews said. \u201cThe U.S. Air Force always stands ready to protect America and its assets.\u201dAdvertisementThe facility has long been a source of public intrigue, yet for decades, Americans were told Area 51 didn\u2019t exist at all. That notion was officially debunked in 2013 when the CIA confirmed its existence through documents obtained in a public records request by George Washington University.Yes, Area 51 is definitely real \u2014 and even though the report indicated it was nothing more than an aircraft-testing facility, mentioning nothing about extraterrestrial life, the revelation gave credence to conspiracy theories alleging the government uses the base to hide aliens and their spacecraft. The CIA has since published information about test flights that took place there, and the alien aspects in many of those theories have been debunked.Story continues below advertisementHowever, in 2017, the Pentagon confirmed the existence of a $22 million government program to analyze \u201canomalous aerospace threats\u201d \u2014 also known as UFOs \u2014 giving the alien-obsessed kooks fresh fodder for their conjectures.AdvertisementThough the facility is not publicly accessible, the area around Area 51 is a popular tourist destination, sprinkled with alien-themed motels, museums and restaurants. (In 1996, Nevada renamed state Route 375 to \u201cExtraterrestrial Highway.\u201d) But those who venture too far into the land surrounding the base are greeted with warning signs indicating they could be fined or jailed for trespassing and taking photos.Some signs suggest those who enter could be subject to \u201cdeadly force.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIn 2014, a tour bus carting four passengers near Area 51 inadvertently drove through the warning signs and entered the base, Las Vegas Now reported. The truck was stopped by men in \u201cmilitary garb,\u201d and everyone in the vehicle was threatened with a misdemeanor conviction and $650 fine. The incident was caught on video, making it obvious the tour\u2019s passengers thought it was all part of the experience. Only the driver was charged.AdvertisementOf course, those who say they will participate in the September raid know their mission won\u2019t be easy. Some have offered their own plans and even schematics detailing how the group will take on the base.But the chatter mostly inspired dozens of jokes and memes:the aliens at #Area51 waiting for the we outside text pic.twitter.com/3ZVywYKtg7\u2014 Sabrina\ud83d\udc7d\ud83d\udd96\ud83c\udffd (@idkhonestlyok) July 12, 2019\n\nMy alien that I stole from area 51 waking me up at 3 AM asking me how to flush the toilet #Area51 pic.twitter.com/U1rqnFY46b\u2014 \ud83c\uddf2\ud83c\uddfdPaco442\ud83c\uddf2\ud83c\uddfd (@Paco_442) July 12, 2019\n\nArea 51 guards watching people trying to break in. #Area51 pic.twitter.com/PiStTUNlrR\u2014 Barbara (@ImBarbaraPool) July 12, 2019\n\nRead more: The government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026Head of Pentagon\u2019s secret \u2018UFO\u2019 office sought to make evidence public \"Let's see them aliens,\" the event's description reads. Half a million people signed up to storm Area 51. What happens if they actually show?",
        "author": "Michael Brice-Saddler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia is preparing to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system that will boost Tehran\u2019s ability to surveil military targets, officials say (WP: National Security) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2352",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/iran-russia-satellite/2021/06/10/d28978f0-c9ab-11eb-81b1-34796c7393af_story.html",
        "text": "Russia is preparing to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system that will give Tehran an unprecedented ability to track potential military targets across the Middle East and beyond, according to current and former U.S. and Middle Eastern officials briefed on details of the arrangement.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plan would deliver to the Iranians a Russian-made Kanopus-V satellite equipped with a high-resolution camera that would greatly enhance Iran\u2019s spying capabilities, allowing continuous monitoring of facilities ranging from Persian Gulf oil refineries and Israeli military bases to Iraqi barracks that house U.S. troops, the officials said. The launch could happen within months, they said. While the Kanopus-V is marketed for civilian use, Iranian military officials have been heavily involved in the acquisition, and leaders of Iran\u2019s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have made multiple trips to Russia since 2018 to help negotiate the terms of the agreement, the officials said. As recently as this spring, Russian experts traveled to Iran to help train ground crews that would operate the satellite from a newly built facility near the northern city of Karaj, the officials said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDetails of the agreement were described by a current and a former U.S. official as well as a senior Middle Eastern government official briefed on the sale. The three officials spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing sensitivities surrounding ongoing intelligence collection efforts. The Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow did not respond to an email request for comment.Iran\u2019s biggest warship mysteriously burns and sinksThe disclosures came as President Biden is preparing for his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The imminent launch of a Russian-made Iranian satellite could add to a long list of contentious issues that have strained relations between Moscow and Washington, including most notably recent Russian hacking operations and efforts to interfere with U.S. elections. Opponents of the U.S. reentering the nuclear accord with Iran are also likely to seize on the disclosure to argue against any engagement with Tehran that doesn\u2019t address its military ambitions in the region.If fully realized, the deal with Russia would represent a significant boost for an Iranian military establishment that has struggled in its own attempts to put a military reconnaissance satellite into orbit. After several prominent failures, Iran last year successfully launched an indigenous military satellite dubbed Noor-1, but the spacecraft was quickly derided by a senior Pentagon official as a \u201ctumbling webcam.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder the agreement, Iran\u2019s new satellite would be launched in Russia and would feature Russian hardware, including a camera with a resolution of 1.2\u00a0meters \u2014 a significant improvement over Iran\u2019s current capabilities, though still far short of the quality achieved by U.S. spy satellites or high-end commercial satellite imagery providers. More important, Iran would be able to \u201ctask\u201d the new satellite to spy on locations of its choosing, and as often as it wishes, the officials said.\u201cIt\u2019s not the best in the world, but it\u2019s high-resolution and very good for military aims,\u201d said the Middle Eastern official familiar with the satellite\u2019s hardware package. \u201cThis capability will allow Iran to maintain an accurate target bank, and to update that target bank within a few hours\u201d every day.Equally concerning, the official said, is the possibility that Iran could share the imagery with pro-Iranian militia groups across the region, from the Houthi rebels battling Saudi-backed government forces in Yemen to Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. Pro-Iranian militias have been linked to repeated rocket attacks on Iraqi military bases that are home to U.S. troops and military trainers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile key aspects of the satellite\u2019s capability have been kept under wraps, Iran and Russia both publicly disclosed their intention to go into the space business together. As far back as 2015, Iran\u2019s Press TV news service reported that Iranian and Russian companies had entered an arrangement that would allow Iran to acquire a \u201cremote-sensing system which can be employed for collecting information about the Earth\u2019s surface, atmosphere and oceans.\u201dPro-Iranian proxy groups turn to drone attacks, alarming US expertsThe article listed the deal\u2019s Russian partners as NPK BARL and VNIIEM, two firms that would build and launch the satellite in a partnership with the Iranian state-operated trade company Bonyan Danesh Shargh and the Iranian Space Agency.Independent experts and analysts said Iran\u2019s new spying capabilities would be especially worrying, given Tehran\u2019s recent advances in missile guidance systems. Iran is producing an array of ballistic missiles and drones that are able to strike distant targets with precision, and access to improved satellite imagery could make them even more effective, some said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHaving this kind of on-call data feed may open up technical and operational possibilities that the Iranians previously didn\u2019t have,\u201d said Christopher Ford, the State Department\u2019s top nonproliferation official under the Trump administration. \u201cIt sounds like a significant upgrade, not just a slight slide up the slope in terms of potential military applications.\u201dOther experts noted that Iran has previously managed to acquire high-resolution images by presumably purchasing them from commercial satellite companies, although Tehran\u2019s ability to obtain real-time data about potential military targets was limited.\u201cA domestic capability to take those pictures is something the military wants, because it\u2019s valuable to them,\u201d said Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. He added that acquiring Russian technology essentially would allow the Iranians a faster path to a capability they would have acquired on their own, given enough time.\u201cIs Iran\u2019s military delighted? Yes, it is, and this is a real change,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cBut it was going to happen sooner or later.\u201d\n\n Analysts fear Iran could share sensitive imagery with militias intent on striking U.S. bases. Russia is preparing to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system that will boost Tehran\u2019s ability to surveil military targets, officials say",
        "author": "Joby Warrick"
    },
    {
        "title": "In first, Russian test strikes satellite using Earth-based missile (WP: National Security) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2353",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/russia-satellie-weapon/2021/11/15/0695621c-4648-11ec-973c-be864f938c72_story.html",
        "text": "Russia conducted a strike against a Soviet-era satellite in space on Monday, creating more than 1,500 pieces of debris that U.S. officials said pose a reckless risk and show Moscow\u2019s insincerity when it says it does not want to weaponize space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe test marked the first time that Russia has demonstrated an ability to strike a satellite using a missile launched from Earth. During a briefing, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the anti-satellite test created more than 1,500 pieces of sizable debris that could damage other satellites or affect astronauts at the International Space Station.\u201cEarlier today, the Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive \u2026 test of a direct ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites,\u201d Price said. \u201cThe test has so far generated over 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris and hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris that now threaten the interests of all nations.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPrice said the test threatens astronauts on the space station and \u201cclearly demonstrates that Russia\u2019s claims of opposing the weaponization of space are disingenuous.\u201dRussia\u2019s Ministry of Defense confirmed in a statement that it \u201csuccessfully conducted a test, as a result of which the inactive Russian spacecraft Tselina-D, which has been in orbit since 1982, was hit.\u201dBut the ministry said the test \u201cdid not and will not post a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities.\u201dForeign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday that the U.S. claim \u201cthat Russia poses risks to activities for the peaceful use of outer space is, to say the least, hypocrisy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said it\u2019s the Americans who have ignored proposals from Russia and China on arms regulation in space.In an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called the strike \u201coutrageous\u201d and \u201cunconscionable.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt\u2019s inexplicable that they would do this and threaten not only our astronauts after we\u2019ve cooperated in space since 1975, but threaten their own cosmonauts,\u201d he said.He noted that NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, who flew to the station as part of the Russian crew, evacuated the station with the Russian cosmonauts and sought shelter with them in the Russian Soyuz attached to the station.Nelson said that the debris could do \u201cserious damage\u201d to the station and that he was \u201cquite concerned\u201d about the safety of the astronauts.Story continues below advertisementHe said he would not be surprised if his counterpart at the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, didn\u2019t \u201cknow a thing about this, and it\u2019s the Russian military doing their thing.\u201d There is currently a NASA delegation in Russia, and he said he believes that members of the Russian space agency \u201cdidn\u2019t know anything about this. And they\u2019re probably just as appalled as we are.\u201dAdvertisementThe NASA delegation in Russia will seek to discuss the missile test on Wednesday in Moscow, the RIA state news agency cited NASA\u2019s head as saying.The United States has accused Russia of testing space weapons before. In July 2020, U.S. Space Command said the country had conducted a \u201cnondestructive test of a space-based anti-satellite weapon,\u201d accusing Moscow of injecting a \u201cnew object into orbit\u201d from one of its known military satellites.Story continues below advertisementBrian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, said Moscow has conducted other types of anti-satellite tests in the past that have involved one satellite attacking another.In recent years, Russia has been doing close maneuvers with other satellites and at one point appeared to launch a projectile from one of its satellites, but those incidents did not involve a strike creating debris, he said.AdvertisementThe previous activity occurred within a Russian satellite system that U.S. officials had raised concerns about in the past, after it maneuvered near a U.S. government satellite in a move that Washington saw as evidence that Moscow was trying to advance its space weaponry.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHistorically, Russia has been interested in developing anti-satellite weapons to be able to take out American space capabilities in the event of a conflict and also to be able to take out potential space-based missile defenses which could threaten the Russian nuclear deterrent,\u201d Weeden said.Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said the test showed why the U.S. Space Command and Space Force are needed.\u201cSpace has already become a warfighting domain,\u201d he said.LeoLabs, a U.S. company that tracks space debris, confirmed on Twitter that it was seeing debris near the expected location of Cosmos\u00a01408, which NASA describes as an abandoned electronic and signals intelligence satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1982.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina conducted an anti-satellite weapons test using a projectile launched from Earth in 2007. The following year, the United States struck one of its own spy satellites that was malfunctioning and expected to crash to Earth. India conducted a kinetic anti-satellite test in 2019.Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. government was closely tracking Russian space capabilities.\u201cWe\u2019re concerned about any nation that would weaponize space,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to see the space domain subject to international norms and rules so that it can be explored by all space-faring nations in a responsible way, and this was an irresponsible act.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nIsabelle Khurshudyan in Moscow, Dan Lamothe and Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report. The Biden administration condemned the action and said it created more than 1,500 pieces of dangerous space debris. In first, Russian test strikes satellite using Earth-based missile",
        "author": "Paul Sonne"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s test of hypersonic vehicle is part of a program to rapidly expand strategic and nuclear systems (WP: National Security) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2354",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-hypersonic-missile/2021/10/19/a157b8d4-3092-11ec-93e2-dba2c2c11851_story.html",
        "text": "China is in the midst of a rapid expansion of its strategic and nuclear weapons systems, and its progress has alarmed U.S. national security officials.Most recently, in August, China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic vehicle that partially orbited the globe before hurtling toward earth. It also has constructed hundreds of new missile silos. And it is building a new generation of strategic ballistic missile submarines. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe buildup, described by U.S. officials and analysts, is shrouded in secrecy against a backdrop of worsening U.S.-China relations marked by little communication between Beijing and Washington \u2014 the perfect recipe for a destabilizing arms race, analysts say.Story continues below advertisementThe August test was confirmed by four individuals familiar with the matter, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.China builds advanced weapons using American chip technologyChina\u2019s demonstration of hypersonic and orbital capabilities, first reported by the Financial Times, was shocking less for the technology, which its military has been developing for years, than for the fact that Beijing decided to test it at all, analysts say.AdvertisementThese technologies enable states to deliver weapons, potentially with a nuclear warhead, against a target in a way that is difficult to track \u2014 unlike intercontinental ballistic missiles.\u201cIt\u2019s amazingly provocative,\u201d Mark J. Lewis, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering who left in January, said while commenting on media reports of the test, which sources said involved launching a hypersonic vehicle into orbit before it descended into the atmosphere toward its target.Story continues below advertisementThe question, analysts said, is what is China trying to accomplish with the test and its larger nuclear buildup?\u201cThis was a political decision to do this test now,\u201d said Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who serves on the advisory group to U.S. Strategic Command. \u201cThis is clearly the Chinese government flexing its muscles. How is the U.S. government going to respond?\u201dAdvertisementSome, like Heinrichs, say the Biden administration needs \u201cto make really big changes that show we\u2019re serious about deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.\u201dFormer presidential envoy for arms control Marshall Billingslea said the United States must not only continue to modernize its nuclear deterrent but also pursue \u201ccritical new capabilities\u201d such as a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile as well as nonnuclear medium-range ballistic systems.Story continues below advertisementBut others, such as Jeffrey G. Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., said: \u201cThe correct answer is, \u2018Do nothing,\u2019\u2009\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to participate in an arms race.\u201dChina is building more than 100 new missile silos in its western desert, analysts sayBeijing on Oct. 18 disputed the report of a hypersonic test, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian saying the test involved a \u201cregular spacecraft,\u201d some parts of which \u201cgot detached before reentering the earth\u2019s atmosphere, and burnt up over the east China Sea.\u201d He said the test was for \u201cpeaceful uses of outer space.\u201dAdvertisementZhao Tong, a Beijing-based senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said China\u2019s lack of transparency about its program means such tests risk being read in Washington as a fundamental shift toward an offensive nuclear posture. \u201cChina never declares where it is going to stop,\u201d Zhao said. \u201cIt appears to the United States as an open-ended nuclear buildup.\u201dStory continues below advertisementZhao added that he believes Beijing is convinced that the United States is bent on containing China\u2019s rise. \u201cChina perceives much more strategic hostility from the U.S., which increases the perception that the U.S. will more easily escalate conflict to a nuclear level,\u201d he said.Chinese jets menace Taiwan, pressuring U.S. support of island\u2019s defensesPentagon spokesman John Kirby, like spokespeople at the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declined to confirm the hypersonic test. But, Kirby said, \u201cwe have made clear our concerns about the military capabilities China continues to pursue, capabilities that only increase tensions in the region and beyond.\u201dAdvertisementThe U.S. intelligence community in its annual threat assessment this year stated that Beijing will continue \u201cthe most rapid expansion and platform diversification of its nuclear arsenal in its history.\u201d China intends to at least double the size of its nuclear stockpile during the next decade and to field a \u201cnuclear triad,\u201d referring to air-, sea- and land-based weapons systems, ODNI said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBeijing is not interested in arms control agreements that restrict its modernization plans and will not agree to substantive negotiations that lock in U.S. or Russian nuclear advantages,\u201d ODNI said. \u201cChina is building a larger and increasingly capable nuclear missile force that is more survivable, more diverse, and on higher alert than in the past,\u201d including systems designed to ensure an intercontinental second-strike capability.The head of U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for the military\u2019s nuclear weapons mission, declined to confirm the Financial Times report. But Adm. Charles Richard told Stars and Stripes that the \u201cbreathtaking expansion of strategic and nuclear capabilities\u201d means that \u201cChina can now execute any possible nuclear employment strategy.\u201dAdvertisementRichards has referred to China\u2019s military advances as a \u201cstrategic breakout.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlthough China is unlikely to reach nuclear parity with the United States and Russia in the foreseeable future, the buildup of silos is significant by Chinese standards, as well as in international historical context, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in a report in September.\u201cThe number of apparent missile silos under construction is similar to the total number of nuclear warheads in the current Chinese stockpile; it exceeds the number of missile silos operated by Russia; it is approaching the number of silos operated by the United States; and it constitutes the largest silo construction since the United States and Russia established their ICBM forces during the Cold War,\u201d the report said.China has also tested a new submarine-launched ballistic missile for a quieter class of nuclear submarines it is planning to build. It is developing a strategic stealth bomber, antisatellite weapons, and lasers that can blind U.S. reconnaissance satellites, according to Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s strategic weapons buildup has occurred in the midst of a broader investment in military modernization that dates to the beginning of the 21st century, and has accelerated in the last decade or so, according to Tai Ming Cheung, director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, housed at UC-San Diego.By 2035, China wants to reach near parity with the U.S. military, he said. In the most recent five-year plan, Beijing has said it wants to speed up select parts of the modernization program for completion by 2027. By 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People\u2019s Republic of China, \u201cthey want to challenge the United States for global leadership,\u201d he said.In some areas, parity has already been reached.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe scary thing is not only how quickly the Chinese have been able to catch up with us\u201d in hypersonics, \u201cbut also in some cases to exceed our capabilities,\u201d said Lewis, the former Pentagon official, who is now executive director of the emerging technologies institute at the National Defense Industrial Association.AdvertisementHe said it was his fear that the United States was falling behind in hypersonics that led him to return to the Pentagon in 2019. That was the year that the Chinese in a military parade showed off a hypersonic boost vehicle attached to a missile. The United States has yet to field such a weapon, he said, adding that the Army hopes to deploy its first system in 2023.Commerce slaps export controls on Chinese firms that aid PLA weapons developmentThe Washington Post in April reported that China was using sophisticated American software to design semiconductors for supercomputers that enable hypersonic weapons advances. The Biden administration applied export controls to a Chinese firm that designs those chips, Phytium. But a Taiwanese company reported this year that it was still able to use American software to help Phytium make the chips in a Taiwanese foundry full of American equipment \u2014 apparently taking advantage of loopholes in the export control rules.The big takeaway, said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is U.S.-China dialogue about strategic stability \u201cis incredibly urgent.\u201d Developments are accelerating rapidly, he said, and \u201cthere just isn\u2019t much communication about them between the U.S. and China.\u201d\n\nChristian Shepherd, Lily Kuo and Pei lin Wu in Taipei and Paul Sonne and Alex Horton in Washington contributed to this report. Recent advances put China ahead of the United States in some emerging military technologies, analysts say. China\u2019s test of hypersonic vehicle is part of a program to rapidly expand strategic and nuclear systems",
        "author": "Ellen Nakashima"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s test of hypersonic vehicle is part of a program to rapidly expand strategic and nuclear systems (WP: National Security) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2355",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-hypersonic-missile/2021/10/19/a157b8d4-3092-11ec-93e2-dba2c2c11851_story.html",
        "text": "China is in the midst of a rapid expansion of its strategic and nuclear weapons systems, and its progress has alarmed U.S. national security officials.Most recently, in August, China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic vehicle that partially orbited the globe before hurtling toward earth. It also has constructed hundreds of new missile silos. And it is building a new generation of strategic ballistic missile submarines. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe buildup, described by U.S. officials and analysts, is shrouded in secrecy against a backdrop of worsening U.S.-China relations marked by little communication between Beijing and Washington \u2014 the perfect recipe for a destabilizing arms race, analysts say.Story continues below advertisementThe August test was confirmed by four individuals familiar with the matter, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.China builds advanced weapons using American chip technologyChina\u2019s demonstration of hypersonic and orbital capabilities, first reported by the Financial Times, was shocking less for the technology, which its military has been developing for years, than for the fact that Beijing decided to test it at all, analysts say.AdvertisementThese technologies enable states to deliver weapons, potentially with a nuclear warhead, against a target in a way that is difficult to track \u2014 unlike intercontinental ballistic missiles.\u201cIt\u2019s amazingly provocative,\u201d Mark J. Lewis, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering who left in January, said while commenting on media reports of the test, which sources said involved launching a hypersonic vehicle into orbit before it descended into the atmosphere toward its target.Story continues below advertisementThe question, analysts said, is what is China trying to accomplish with the test and its larger nuclear buildup?\u201cThis was a political decision to do this test now,\u201d said Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who serves on the advisory group to U.S. Strategic Command. \u201cThis is clearly the Chinese government flexing its muscles. How is the U.S. government going to respond?\u201dAdvertisementSome, like Heinrichs, say the Biden administration needs \u201cto make really big changes that show we\u2019re serious about deterring Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.\u201dFormer presidential envoy for arms control Marshall Billingslea said the United States must not only continue to modernize its nuclear deterrent but also pursue \u201ccritical new capabilities\u201d such as a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile as well as nonnuclear medium-range ballistic systems.Story continues below advertisementBut others, such as Jeffrey G. Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., said: \u201cThe correct answer is, \u2018Do nothing,\u2019\u2009\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to participate in an arms race.\u201dChina is building more than 100 new missile silos in its western desert, analysts sayBeijing on Oct. 18 disputed the report of a hypersonic test, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian saying the test involved a \u201cregular spacecraft,\u201d some parts of which \u201cgot detached before reentering the earth\u2019s atmosphere, and burnt up over the east China Sea.\u201d He said the test was for \u201cpeaceful uses of outer space.\u201dAdvertisementZhao Tong, a Beijing-based senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said China\u2019s lack of transparency about its program means such tests risk being read in Washington as a fundamental shift toward an offensive nuclear posture. \u201cChina never declares where it is going to stop,\u201d Zhao said. \u201cIt appears to the United States as an open-ended nuclear buildup.\u201dStory continues below advertisementZhao added that he believes Beijing is convinced that the United States is bent on containing China\u2019s rise. \u201cChina perceives much more strategic hostility from the U.S., which increases the perception that the U.S. will more easily escalate conflict to a nuclear level,\u201d he said.Chinese jets menace Taiwan, pressuring U.S. support of island\u2019s defensesPentagon spokesman John Kirby, like spokespeople at the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declined to confirm the hypersonic test. But, Kirby said, \u201cwe have made clear our concerns about the military capabilities China continues to pursue, capabilities that only increase tensions in the region and beyond.\u201dAdvertisementThe U.S. intelligence community in its annual threat assessment this year stated that Beijing will continue \u201cthe most rapid expansion and platform diversification of its nuclear arsenal in its history.\u201d China intends to at least double the size of its nuclear stockpile during the next decade and to field a \u201cnuclear triad,\u201d referring to air-, sea- and land-based weapons systems, ODNI said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBeijing is not interested in arms control agreements that restrict its modernization plans and will not agree to substantive negotiations that lock in U.S. or Russian nuclear advantages,\u201d ODNI said. \u201cChina is building a larger and increasingly capable nuclear missile force that is more survivable, more diverse, and on higher alert than in the past,\u201d including systems designed to ensure an intercontinental second-strike capability.The head of U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for the military\u2019s nuclear weapons mission, declined to confirm the Financial Times report. But Adm. Charles Richard told Stars and Stripes that the \u201cbreathtaking expansion of strategic and nuclear capabilities\u201d means that \u201cChina can now execute any possible nuclear employment strategy.\u201dAdvertisementRichards has referred to China\u2019s military advances as a \u201cstrategic breakout.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlthough China is unlikely to reach nuclear parity with the United States and Russia in the foreseeable future, the buildup of silos is significant by Chinese standards, as well as in international historical context, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in a report in September.\u201cThe number of apparent missile silos under construction is similar to the total number of nuclear warheads in the current Chinese stockpile; it exceeds the number of missile silos operated by Russia; it is approaching the number of silos operated by the United States; and it constitutes the largest silo construction since the United States and Russia established their ICBM forces during the Cold War,\u201d the report said.China has also tested a new submarine-launched ballistic missile for a quieter class of nuclear submarines it is planning to build. It is developing a strategic stealth bomber, antisatellite weapons, and lasers that can blind U.S. reconnaissance satellites, according to Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s strategic weapons buildup has occurred in the midst of a broader investment in military modernization that dates to the beginning of the 21st century, and has accelerated in the last decade or so, according to Tai Ming Cheung, director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, housed at UC-San Diego.By 2035, China wants to reach near parity with the U.S. military, he said. In the most recent five-year plan, Beijing has said it wants to speed up select parts of the modernization program for completion by 2027. By 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People\u2019s Republic of China, \u201cthey want to challenge the United States for global leadership,\u201d he said.In some areas, parity has already been reached.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe scary thing is not only how quickly the Chinese have been able to catch up with us\u201d in hypersonics, \u201cbut also in some cases to exceed our capabilities,\u201d said Lewis, the former Pentagon official, who is now executive director of the emerging technologies institute at the National Defense Industrial Association.AdvertisementHe said it was his fear that the United States was falling behind in hypersonics that led him to return to the Pentagon in 2019. That was the year that the Chinese in a military parade showed off a hypersonic boost vehicle attached to a missile. The United States has yet to field such a weapon, he said, adding that the Army hopes to deploy its first system in 2023.Commerce slaps export controls on Chinese firms that aid PLA weapons developmentThe Washington Post in April reported that China was using sophisticated American software to design semiconductors for supercomputers that enable hypersonic weapons advances. The Biden administration applied export controls to a Chinese firm that designs those chips, Phytium. But a Taiwanese company reported this year that it was still able to use American software to help Phytium make the chips in a Taiwanese foundry full of American equipment \u2014 apparently taking advantage of loopholes in the export control rules.The big takeaway, said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is U.S.-China dialogue about strategic stability \u201cis incredibly urgent.\u201d Developments are accelerating rapidly, he said, and \u201cthere just isn\u2019t much communication about them between the U.S. and China.\u201d\n\nChristian Shepherd, Lily Kuo and Pei lin Wu in Taipei and Paul Sonne and Alex Horton in Washington contributed to this report. Recent advances put China ahead of the United States in some emerging military technologies, analysts say. China\u2019s test of hypersonic vehicle is part of a program to rapidly expand strategic and nuclear systems",
        "author": "Ellen Nakashima"
    },
    {
        "title": "For the Pentagon, Space War Looms as a Potential Issue (WSJ: National Security) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2356",
        "date": "2017-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-ramps-up-space-warfare-effort-1493199003?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=25",
        "text": "The extent of the shift was evident at a recent space symposium here, with one senior general after another calling for more-advanced weaponry and updated rules of engagement that\u2014for the first time\u2014specifically would be designed to counter moves by hostile spacecraft beyond the atmosphere.\n\u201cWe will be threatened in space, and we need to be prepared for that,\u201d said Brig. Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Shaw,\n\n\n\n deputy director of global operations at Strategic Command, the Defense Department unit in charge of nuclear and other long-range weapons. \u201cThere isn\u2019t something special as a space war,\u201d he told the conference, that ought to be considered separately from naval or land combat.\n\n\nThe Air Force is working closely with the National Reconnaissance Office to devise offensive strategies against weapons or satellites of other nations that could blind, jam or destroy in-orbit spy satellites, according to several of the symposium\u2019s speakers.\nIssues related to space weaponry, especially technology that can disrupt hostile spacecraft, are among the Pentagon\u2019s most closely guarded secrets. Though research has been under way quietly for decades and military leaders in the past few years targeted billions of extra dollars to ensure space superiority, details are highly classified and companies involved in the effort aren\u2019t public.\nRecent comments by Pentagon leaders underscore the growing importance of the topic. Throughout the speeches and panels earlier this month, space was described as requiring major investments to ensure that the U.S. military will be ready to execute the full range of defensive and offensive operations. Traditionally, civilian leaders as well as uniformed commanders have tended to avoid explicit calls for speedy deployment of offensive systems.\nIn a classified briefing at the same conference, Robert Work, the Defense Department\u2019s No. 2 civilian official, highlighted that all of the Pentagon\u2019s efforts are aimed at deterring attacks, rather than instigating hostilities.\n\u201cWe\u2019re not interested in getting into [a] fight\u201d in space, Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Raymond,\n\n\n\n head of Air Force Space Command, told the conference on a different day. \u201cNobody wins that fight, but we are interested in being prepared for it.\u201d\nEarlier this month, Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Hyten,\n\n\n\n head of U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that \u201cwe must prepare for a conflict that extends into space\u201d through defensive measures, but also by building \u201can offensive capability to challenge\u201d adversaries. He promised to provide details to lawmakers at a coming classified session.\nThis week, during a telephone hookup earlier with astronauts orbiting the earth, reporters heard President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n allude to U.S. capabilities with \u201ctremendous military applications in space,\u201d without elaborating.\nEarly snippets of such tough talk emerged years before Mr. Trump took office, as uniformed commanders grew increasingly concerned about vulnerabilities of their space systems. \nWith China and Russia particularly focused on testing antisatellite technologies, the U.S. military started thinking about \u201chardening\u201d existing satellites, fielding smaller models that would be easier to replace and enhancing in-orbit surveillance and tracking capabilities to provide more effective warnings of dangers.\nBut current thinking among senior Pentagon planners, according to people familiar with the details, goes further than in previous administrations by categorizing offensive space capabilities as essential components of America\u2019s military arsenal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a veteran aerospace engineer, consultant and entrepreneur, said \u201cthe U.S. has the most costly space assets of any nation, and is more dependent on them than any other.\u201d Yet \u201cit\u2019s simply not that hard for an adversary to disrupt or destroy\u201d at least some parts of most constellations, he said in a recent interview.\nInternational treaties prohibit launching nuclear warheads or weapons of mass destruction into space, though they don\u2019t ban antisatellite weapons.\nThroughout the Cold War and the global realignment that followed, beefing up satellite defenses was considered the primary means of preventing warfare in space.\nBut in 2007, China used an antisatellite weapon to blast one of its own aging weather satellites into thousands of pieces. The maneuver, followed by other Chinese and Russian tests over the years, rocked the space world and became a watershed moment for Pentagon brass worried about proliferation of space debris and potential attacks on U.S. satellites.\nSome of these concepts were initially proposed by the Trump transition team before the inauguration, according to people familiar with the process, and later were endorsed by Defense Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Mattis\n\n\n\n during his confirmation proceedings. Since then, they have been refined further by comma Pentagon leaders are getting serious about gearing up for potential space combat, breaking with a decadeslong policy that stopped short of publicly advocating putting weapons in orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Biden seeks to restore alliances, a souring Japan-South Korea relationship presents a challenge (WP: National Security) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2357",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-japan-korea-allies-blinken/2021/03/01/a3604258-76e4-11eb-9537-496158cc5fd9_story.html",
        "text": "When Antony Blinken became the No. 2 at the State Department during the Obama administration in 2015, his mandate was clear: Focus on Asia.The rocky relationship between two crucial Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, had deteriorated over the issue of wartime sex slaves. Later that year, with the help of the United States, the two countries reached a landmark agreement to resolve their historical dispute. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBlinken had initiated a series of three-way talks, marking the first time the American deputy secretary of state had met with his counterparts in Japan and South Korea. He insisted they meet every three months to build a habit of working together, signaling that the relationship was a priority to the United States, experts say.Story continues below advertisementNow as President Biden\u2019s secretary of state, Blinken is tasked with re-energizing American alliances that were strained under the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d approach.AdvertisementRelations between Japan and South Korea are once again at one of their lowest points in decades. Whether the United States can nudge the two countries into cooperation will be highly consequential for the Biden administration\u2019s ambitions to restore trust abroad and effectively counter China\u2019s rise and North Korea\u2019s nuclear capabilities with a coalition of like-minded allies, experts say.\u201cWhen there\u2019s a serious rift in the family, it\u2019s hard to invite your friends over for dinner,\u201d said Daniel Russel, an Asia Society expert who was a high-ranking foreign policy official in the Obama administration.Story continues below advertisement\u201cGiven the magnitude of the challenges that we face from North Korea, China, et cetera .\u2009.\u2009. we can\u2019t afford to be operating at anything less than full speed,\u201d Russel said. \u201cThere\u2019s a broken circuit in our network at a critical junction, and it is imperative that that somehow get fixed.\u201dAdvertisementJapan-South Korea dispute escalates as both sides downgrade trade tiesThe State Department last month held its first meeting with top diplomats in Japan and South Korea to discuss North Korea-related challenges. A senior State Department official said the meeting was intended to send a strong signal that the administration, in its first full month in office, is committed to restoring its relationship with the two countries.The Biden administration is still reviewing next steps on improving the three countries\u2019 relations, but \u201cyou can absolutely count on seeing a greater effort put into reinvigorating trilateral cooperation, along with strengthening our respective alliances with Seoul and Tokyo,\u201d said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe diplomatic matters.Story continues below advertisementThe administration may soon have an opportunity to help jump-start cooperation between its two allies, with South Korean President Moon Jae-in saying Monday that his government was open to talks with Japan.AdvertisementWhile Blinken, a veteran diplomat, is in many ways uniquely fit for the moment, he must contend with the shifts in U.S. allies\u2019 political and strategic calculations under Trump.Despite the progress made in 2015, the relationship between Japan and South Korea has deteriorated in recent years over legal and economic disputes, with little political incentive for either country to mend ties.Trump noticeably took a passive role in maintaining a relationship with both nations, instead becoming singularly focused on whether they were paying enough money to keep U.S. troops stationed in their countries. He questioned long-standing treaties and international agreements, and undermined allies\u2019 confidence that the United States would defend them.Biden tells the world \u2018America is back.\u2019 The world isn\u2019t so sure.Some allies are concerned that the whiplash return to alliances under Biden could be temporary, given that the U.S. election was not a resounding rebuke of the Trump era, experts say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou can\u2019t just say, \u2018Trump is gone, it\u2019s a return to status quo prior to Trump.\u2019 There\u2019s going to be a lot of allies thinking, \u2018Okay, someone like Trump can return again,\u2019\u2009\u201d said Frank Aum, senior expert on North Korea at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a former senior Pentagon adviser. \u201cThat being said, I think a lot of our South Korean and Japanese allies are probably very excited to see the Biden administration because of how strong and invested the Obama administration was.\u201dWhile allies in Asia generally welcome America\u2019s return to a traditional approach to diplomacy, they must now weigh new considerations about their place in the U.S.-China competition, which has only intensified in the past four years, said Yoshihide Soeya, a professor emeritus at Keio University in Tokyo who has studied the trilateral relationship.\u201cAsian allies of the U.S. have to think in a really serious [way] strategically about the place and the role of the U.S. at this time of mega-competition between China and the United States, and it\u2019s not an easy situation,\u201d Soeya said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added that in many ways, it was simpler for allies to navigate Trump\u2019s approach.\u201cThe Trump period, it was only about money,\u201d he said. Now, the United States is \u201cessentially saying, \u2018You should talk and you should cooperate, not necessarily for the sake of Japan and South Korea but for the sake of American regional re-engagement.\u2019 So the responsibility on our part, in this case, Japan and South Korea, is also much greater under the Biden administration.\u201dAs Trump era ends, massive new Asian trade deal leaves U.S. on the sidelinesStill, many point to the fact that Blinken is a known and trusted figure in Asia and elsewhere as an advantage for the Biden administration.\u201cThe last four years, they were contending with a United States that was speaking in a language they didn\u2019t understand,\u201d said Victor Cha, the Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former top adviser on North Korea in the George W. Bush administration. \u201cThe United States has to signal stability, reliability, predictability and a willingness to lead, but also have allies play a large part. And Blinken personifies that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs deputy secretary of state, Blinken stressed that he wanted to meet quarterly with his counterparts in Tokyo and Seoul, and made sure that his staff followed up on specific items after the meetings, according to those who worked with him.South Korean officials were stunned that Blinken wanted not only to consult with his counterparts for the first time but also to meet regularly at his level, said a South Korean official who worked on trilateral issues, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. They had assumed he would want to meet twice a year at most, given the breadth of issues under his purview.Antony Blinken, longtime foreign policy aide to Biden, confirmed as secretary of stateNotably, Blinken encouraged the three countries to think creatively about how to cooperate, beyond their long-standing shared concerns over the North Korean nuclear threat. In a March 2016 speech at the Brookings Institution, he outlined the American vision for new issues that the allies could work on together, including climate, gender equality, humanitarian assistance, counter-piracy issues, cancer research and space exploration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is something that then-deputy secretary Blinken really, I think, helped to lead and was the inspiration behind,\u201d the senior State Department official said.Broadening the scope of the discussions beyond North Korea signaled to the South Koreans and the Japanese that Blinken was serious about working closely with them, said the South Korean official.\u201cTony is now secretary of state, so he has such a huge responsibility covering all areas. I don\u2019t know if he will be personally involved,\u201d the official said. \u201cBut if the trilateral cooperation renews .\u2009.\u2009. I would believe that Tony Blinken is behind that, with his fingerprints all over it.\u201d\n\n Whether the U.S. can nudge its two crucial Asian allies toward cooperation will be consequential to Biden administration\u2019s ambitions abroad. As Biden seeks to restore alliances, a souring Japan-South Korea relationship presents a challenge",
        "author": "Michelle Ye Hee Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but new report finds no evidence of alien life (WP: National Security) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2358",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/ufo-report/2021/06/25/ba323b20-d52c-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html",
        "text": "The U.S. government was unable to determine whether more than 140 unidentified flying objects, many of them reported by Navy aviators, were atmospheric events playing tricks on sensors or crafts piloted by foreign adversaries, or whether the objects were extraterrestrial in origin, according to a long-anticipated report released Friday by the nation\u2019s top intelligence official. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report finds no evidence that the objects, characterized as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, were the handiwork of alien beings. But in almost all of the 144 cases that a team of government experts examined, a lack of data stymied their efforts to say definitively what they were.The largely inconclusive results of the report, which was required by Congress, are sure to fuel Americans\u2019 long-running interest in unexplained sightings, which have received unprecedented levels of attention in recent years from government officials and lawmakers.Read the full report: A preliminary assessment by the U.S. government on unidentified aerial phenomenaThe mere existence of the report is a remarkable acknowledgment that human beings have encountered objects that perform feats we cannot explain.Footage from 2004 shows an encounter between a U.S. fighter jet and \"anomalous aerial vehicles,\" which is military jargon for UFOs. (To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSome UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion,\u201d the report found. \u201cIn a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.\u201dObservers reported these unusual movements and \u201cflight characteristics\u201d in 18 separate incidents. The task force analyzing the UAP incidents will now focus additional analysis on that small number of cases, the report said.At only nine pages in length, the unclassified report is also likely to prompt public speculation about what information the government chose not to reveal.Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) joins Washington Post Live on Tuesday, June 8 (The Washington Post)Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he had seen the classified UAP report when he was serving in the Senate. \u201cThe hair stood up on the back of my neck,\u201d he said in an interview. He also spoke with some of the pilots involved in the incidents it documented. \u201cThey know they saw something,\u201d he said.AdvertisementWhile NASA was not involved in writing the public report, Nelson, who spent six days orbiting the Earth during a space shuttle mission in the 1980s, said",
        "author": "Shane Harris"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but new report finds no evidence of alien life (WP: National Security) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2359",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/ufo-report/2021/06/25/ba323b20-d52c-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html",
        "text": "The U.S. government was unable to determine whether more than 140 unidentified flying objects, many of them reported by Navy aviators, were atmospheric events playing tricks on sensors or crafts piloted by foreign adversaries, or whether the objects were extraterrestrial in origin, according to a long-anticipated report released Friday by the nation\u2019s top intelligence official. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report finds no evidence that the objects, characterized as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, were the handiwork of alien beings. But in almost all of the 144 cases that a team of government experts examined, a lack of data stymied their efforts to say definitively what they were.The largely inconclusive results of the report, which was required by Congress, are sure to fuel Americans\u2019 long-running interest in unexplained sightings, which have received unprecedented levels of attention in recent years from government officials and lawmakers.Read the full report: A preliminary assessment by the U.S. government on unidentified aerial phenomenaThe mere existence of the report is a remarkable acknowledgment that human beings have encountered objects that perform feats we cannot explain.Footage from 2004 shows an encounter between a U.S. fighter jet and \"anomalous aerial vehicles,\" which is military jargon for UFOs. (To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSome UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion,\u201d the report found. \u201cIn a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.\u201dObservers reported these unusual movements and \u201cflight characteristics\u201d in 18 separate incidents. The task force analyzing the UAP incidents will now focus additional analysis on that small number of cases, the report said.At only nine pages in length, the unclassified report is also likely to prompt public speculation about what information the government chose not to reveal.Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) joins Washington Post Live on Tuesday, June 8 (The Washington Post)Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he had seen the classified UAP report when he was serving in the Senate. \u201cThe hair stood up on the back of my neck,\u201d he said in an interview. He also spoke with some of the pilots involved in the incidents it documented. \u201cThey know they saw something,\u201d he said.AdvertisementWhile NASA was not involved in writing the public report, Nelson, who spent six days orbiting the Earth during a space shuttle mission in the 1980s, said",
        "author": "Shane Harris"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. unable to explain more than 140 unidentified flying objects, but new report finds no evidence of alien life (WP: National Security) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2360",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/ufo-report/2021/06/25/ba323b20-d52c-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html",
        "text": "The U.S. government was unable to determine whether more than 140 unidentified flying objects, many of them reported by Navy aviators, were atmospheric events playing tricks on sensors or crafts piloted by foreign adversaries, or whether the objects were extraterrestrial in origin, according to a long-anticipated report released Friday by the nation\u2019s top intelligence official. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report finds no evidence that the objects, characterized as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, were the handiwork of alien beings. But in almost all of the 144 cases that a team of government experts examined, a lack of data stymied their efforts to say definitively what they were.The largely inconclusive results of the report, which was required by Congress, are sure to fuel Americans\u2019 long-running interest in unexplained sightings, which have received unprecedented levels of attention in recent years from government officials and lawmakers.Read the full report: A preliminary assessment by the U.S. government on unidentified aerial phenomenaThe mere existence of the report is a remarkable acknowledgment that human beings have encountered objects that perform feats we cannot explain.Footage from 2004 shows an encounter between a U.S. fighter jet and \"anomalous aerial vehicles,\" which is military jargon for UFOs. (To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSome UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion,\u201d the report found. \u201cIn a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.\u201dObservers reported these unusual movements and \u201cflight characteristics\u201d in 18 separate incidents. The task force analyzing the UAP incidents will now focus additional analysis on that small number of cases, the report said.At only nine pages in length, the unclassified report is also likely to prompt public speculation about what information the government chose not to reveal.Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) joins Washington Post Live on Tuesday, June 8 (The Washington Post)Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Bill Nelson said he had seen the classified UAP report when he was serving in the Senate. \u201cThe hair stood up on the back of my neck,\u201d he said in an interview. He also spoke with some of the pilots involved in the incidents it documented. \u201cThey know they saw something,\u201d he said.AdvertisementWhile NASA was not involved in writing the public report, Nelson, who spent six days orbiting the Earth during a space shuttle mission in the 1980s, said",
        "author": "Shane Harris"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senate approves $768 billion defense bill directing review of war in Afghanistan, military justice reforms (WP: National Security) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2361",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2021/12/15/defense-authorization-bill-ndaa/",
        "text": "The Senate on Wednesday approved a record-setting $768 billion defense authorization bill, readying it for President Biden\u2019s expected signature.The bill contains several historic measures, including provisions to move prosecutions of sexual assault and related crimes involving military personnel outside their chain of command, and instructions to establish an independent commission that will scrutinize the legacy and errors of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. A 16-member panel, which the bill tasks with producing a report within three years, would be selected in equal measure by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, with all current and former members of Congress dating to 2001, as well as Cabinet-level and high-ranking defense officials involved in planning U.S. policy on Afghanistan, precluded from participation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe legislation includes multiple sections ordering close study of traditional and emerging threats, from adversary nations like Russia and China all the way to the undefined corners of space. It orders the Pentagon to report to Congress on a \u201cgrand strategy\u201d for countering China, the testing and development of hypersonic missiles, threats posed by \u201cunidentified aerial phenomena,\u201d and the pattern of mysterious debilitating incidents afflicting U.S. diplomats and spies abroad \u2014 what\u2019s become known as Havana syndrome.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe defense authorization bill passed with an 88-to-11 vote in the Senate, a final tally that was amended Wednesday afternoon after Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) changed his vote from a yes to a no. It earned the support of more than 80 percent of the House last week. In both chambers, Republicans supporting the bill outnumbered Democrats, despite the fact that Democrats control both the House and Senate.The Afghanistan papers: A secret history of America's longest warThough the legislation earned the overwhelming support of both chambers, it has been mired in controversy because of major policy ventures left out of the final draft that had the support of a majority of both houses of Congress.The bill steers clear of repealing the Iraq War authorization from 2002 \u2014 a move widely supported in the Senate that already received the backing of the House in a separate vote. Officials say the authorization has not been used as sole justification for any operation in years, though it was cited in part by the Trump administration in last year\u2019s drone strike that killed Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe final bill left out popular legislation that would have required companies from \u201ccritical infrastructure\u201d sectors \u2014 such as those that handle agriculture, water, financial services, transportation, energy and national defense \u2014 to report hacking and other \u201ccyber incidents\u201d to the federal government. But a dispute over whether a wider spectrum of companies ought to notify the government when they make ransomware payments stymied negotiators.Negotiators of the defense bill also stripped a provision that would have included women in any future military drafts, by requiring them to register with the Selective Service System. Though there has not been a draft call since 1972, the change was seen by its many bipartisan supporters as an acknowledgment that women, who are no longer restricted from holding certain combat jobs, are a vital and equal part of the fighting force.Broad overhaul of military justice system being sidelined in favor of narrower focus on sexual assaultBut the omission prompting the most backlash sought a broader overhaul of the military justice system, one that would have put a longer roster of crimes under the purview of an independent prosecutor, and mandated more stringent separation between commanders and courts-martial for such offenses.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe defense bill orders the military to establish an independent prosecutor\u2019s office within two years that would be tasked with bringing sexual assault and related offenses, murder, kidnapping and child pornography charges to court-martial. It also turns sexual harassment into a chargeable offense.But the bill leaves the convening authority for such courts-martial in the chain of command. While proponents have argued that the commander\u2019s continued role is formulaic, as the prosecutor\u2019s charging recommendations are binding, critics have pointed out the potential for problems. Commanders could dismiss charges prematurely, they have argued, or select juries biased against the victim.Sixty-six senators and a majority of the House had previously co-sponsored more expansive legislation penned by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), which would have put the responsibility for convening courts-martial in the hands of an independent channel as well. Gillibrand\u2019s proposal also would have applied to any crime carrying a maximum sentence of a year or more \u2014 a scope that was seen as a means of tackling issues of prosecutorial discrimination for a wider spectrum of minority groups.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, the changes that were incorporated in the defense bill have been hailed by congressional leaders as important steps toward ensuring that victims have a fair means of seeking justice through the military courts, and defended the overall package as vital.\u201cThis bill makes great progress,\u201d Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said in a statement after Wednesday\u2019s vote. \u201cIt provides our forces with the resources and support they need to defend our nation, makes historic reforms to help improve the lives of our service members, and takes important steps to care for their families.\u201d The bill includes multiple sections ordering close study of traditional and emerging threats, from adversary nations like Russia and China all the way to \"unidentified aerial phenomena\" and the undefined corners of outer space. Senate approves $768 billion defense bill directing review of war in Afghanistan, military justice reforms",
        "author": "Karoun Demirjian"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Forgotten Basketball Pioneer Who Made Stephen Curry Possible (WSJ: NBA) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2362",
        "date": "2017-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-forgotten-basketball-pioneer-who-made-stephen-curry-possible-1495723960?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=94",
        "text": "\u201cWe made a trip to New York, played in Madison Square Garden and revolutionized the game,\u201d Vincenti said.\n\n\n\n\nThe sold-out crowd on Dec. 30, 1936 didn\u2019t believe anyone could beat the team Stanford had come to play, Long Island University, which hadn\u2019t lost in years. As soon as the game began, though, thousands of fans realized the basketball they were watching was different from the basketball they were used to watching.\n\n\nThis long-forgotten game turned out to be an unexpected bellwether for the modern NBA. To understand why basketball looks the way it does today\u2014when the best teams shoot far away from the basket and pass like the ball has cooties\u2014it helps to understand how it looked a long, long time ago.\nStanford played unlike any other team of its era because it had a player named Hank Luisetti. Naismith was basketball\u2019s inventor, but Luisetti was its innovator. In the age of the set shot and hook shot, Luisetti popularized a better idea: the jump shot.\nIt was as if Luisetti were playing another sport altogether. \u201cHe was unusual in his day,\u201d Vincenti said. \u201cBut people soon began to imitate him, and basketball became a more wide-open game.\u201d\n\n\nMore on the NBA What\u2019s Heating Up the Golden State Warriors? A Toaster The Rockets Shoot From Outer Space The Basketball Team That Never Takes a Bad Shot The Biggest Shot in NBA History The Golden State Warriors Take the Birthday Cake The Golden State Warriors Have Revolutionized Basketball \n\n\nHe was such a revelation that Luisetti was discussed with the same breathless wonder that basketball fans reserve for someone else now.\n\u201cHe was the spitting image of another young man named Stephen Curry,\u201d Richards Lyon, a contemporary of Luisetti\u2019s at Stanford, wrote in an email to The Wall Street Journal before he died last year.\nCurry is 6-foot-3, 190 pounds; Luisetti was 6-foot-3, 185 pounds. Curry overhauled his mechanics as an undersized high-schooler so he could shoot without getting blocked; Luisetti experimented while playing with older kids from a young age so he could shoot without getting blocked. Curry scored the most points of his life at Madison Square Garden; Luisetti had the most important game of his life at the original Madison Square Garden. \nBut first Luisetti and his Stanford teammates had to get there. They boarded a train that rumbled across the country until it reached Kansas City, where Stanford coach John Bunn introduced them to the man who invented their sport: James Naismith himself. \u201cIt was quite a thrill,\u201d Vincenti said.\nThe people in Kansas were nicer than the people in New York. Stanford\u2019s players didn\u2019t get any special recognition before the biggest game of the college-basketball season. Instead they got skepticism.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHank Luisetti scores for Stanford against the City College of New York in a game at Madison Square Garden.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bettmann Archive/Corbis\n \n\n\n\nMadison Square Garden was packed with more than 17,000 fans who\u2019d heard about Stanford\u2019s peculiar style of play and its star who shot with one hand. But they didn\u2019t understand why that mattered, and they didn\u2019t think it was enough to beat No. 1-ranked Long Island. They needed to see it for themselves.\nA basketball fan\u2019s knowledge back then came from his local newspaper columnists, and New York\u2019s sportswriters caught their own train to see Stanford days before their game against Long Island. The stories they filed might seem familiar to anyone who\u2019s read about the Warriors lately.\nGolden State wants to play with joy. Stanford\u2019s players were dubbed \u201cThe Laughing Boys.\u201d The Warriors at their best are a sight to behold. \u201cIt is really a grand team to watch,\u201d one reporter wrote of Stanford. Curry and Klay Thompson are transcendent shooters. \u201cHank Luisetti and [Art] Stoefen have shots that can only be stopped by carefully placing a lid on the top of the basket,\u201d he wrote. Golden State\u2019s stars are dangerous because they can do everything on a basketball court. \u201cEvery regular is a crack player who can score, pass and run,\u201d this article said. \u201cNo mere commonplace defense can halt them.\u201d\nThe relationship between basketball then and basketball now is like the relationship between goldfish the fish and goldfish the food. They have the same name, but they\u2019re nothing alike.\nLuisetti and his teammates brought color to a sport that had been stuck in black and white. Stanford\u2019s players moved off the ball. They played off each other. They made the game faster and more fluid\u2014and that made it fun. They put on such a show that fans who came to root for Long Island left only after giving Stanford a standing ovation. And they were especially astounded by Luisetti\u2019s audacity.\n\u201cSome of his shots would have been deemed foolhardy if attempted by another player,\u201d one reporter wrote after watching him.\nStanford beating Long Island, 45-31, was one giant leap for basketball. New York\u2019s players and coaches initially said the one-handed shot would ruin the sport. They eventually realized Luisetti was right and East Coast teams needed to play more like this one team from the West Coast. They risked extinction if they didn\u2019t adapt.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors hits a 3-pointer against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jim McIsaac/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBut the bizarre thing about the first game that resembled modern basketball is that almost nobody remembers it.\nLuisetti has a statue on Stanford\u2019s campus, and the school lists him alongside Google\u2019s founders among its most innovative alumni. \u201cHe\u2019s certainly known here,\u201d said Stanford basketball radio analyst John Platz, who wrote a book on the first 100 years of the school\u2019s basketball team. \u201cWhy isn\u2019t he more revered?\u201d\nEven people in NBA front offices aren\u2019t familiar with the person who made their teams possible. Luisetti, who died in 2002, played so long ago that everyone with memories of seeing him play is at least 90 years old now. There aren\u2019t many of them left.\nVincenti is one of them. He went to work for NASA when it was known as NACA\u2014the \u201cS\u201d for space was still aspirational\u2014and later founded a Stanford program in science and technology. He doesn\u2019t watch much basketball anymore.\nBut he\u2019s aware of how much the game has been transformed\u2014and who\u2019s partly responsible. The Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers wouldn\u2019t play the way they do if it weren\u2019t for the 1936 Stanford team. The same might be said of them, Vincenti said, simply because of the number of threes they shoot now. \u201cNo one ever thought of doing anything like that,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com How a college team from the 1930s explains the best NBA teams in 2017. ",
        "author": "Ben Cohen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stepped-Up Raids, but Gang Violence Persists (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2363",
        "date": "2017-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/nyregion/project-new-dawn-gang-violence-immigration.html",
        "text": "The Trump administration says roundups by immigration authorities are the best way to target gangs, but they haven\u2019t stopped the killings. The Trump administration says roundups by immigration authorities are the best way to target gangs, but they haven\u2019t stopped the killings. Earlier this month, the federal government announced the completion of an initiative called Project New Dawn, a program whose name suggests a battle to curb escalating rates of depression, or expand space exploration to the outer galaxies. Because of the ferocious pace with which the current presidential administration generates news, it received little notice; enter the term into a search engine, and the first listing that appears is for a service that aids homeless men and women in Australia.",
        "author": "By Ginia Bellafante"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Brooklyn, Modernizing a Library for Downloads and Robots (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2364",
        "date": "2018-03-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/25/nyregion/brooklyn-library-major-owens.html",
        "text": "The Brooklyn Public Library is about to refurbish the 76-year-old central library and tackle deferred maintenance at some of its 59 branch libraries. The Brooklyn Public Library is about to refurbish the 76-year-old central library and tackle deferred maintenance at some of its 59 branch libraries. Major R. Owens once dreamed that an alien spaceship had landed and that the creature that clambered out told the first person it encountered, \u201cTake me to your librarian.\u201d",
        "author": "By James Barron"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Rooftop Meadow of Bees and Butterflies Shows N.Y.C.\u2019s Future (NYT: New York) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2365",
        "date": "2019-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/nyregion/green-roofs-nyc.html",
        "text": "A Greenpoint building is part of a push to combat climate change and make the city more welcoming to wildlife. A Greenpoint building is part of a push to combat climate change and make the city more welcoming to wildlife. Tall grasses glow in the afternoon sunlight. The last bees and butterflies of the season hover over goldenrod and asters. Silver orbs that look like alien spacecrafts shimmer nearby.",
        "author": "By Anne Barnard"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Rooftop Meadow of Bees and Butterflies Shows N.Y.C.\u2019s Future (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2366",
        "date": "2019-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/nyregion/green-roofs-nyc.html",
        "text": "A Greenpoint building is part of a push to combat climate change and make the city more welcoming to wildlife. A Greenpoint building is part of a push to combat climate change and make the city more welcoming to wildlife. Tall grasses glow in the afternoon sunlight. The last bees and butterflies of the season hover over goldenrod and asters. Silver orbs that look like alien spacecrafts shimmer nearby.",
        "author": "By Anne Barnard"
    },
    {
        "title": "E.T. Doesn\u2019t Like the Bike Path Either (NYT: New York) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2367",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/nyregion/et-doesnt-like-the-bike-path-either.html",
        "text": "A chat with some aliens reveals that the Hudson River Greenway is like Netflix to them, and the must-see show is the Lycra-Legged Mad Men vs. the delivery guys. A chat with some aliens reveals that the Hudson River Greenway is like Netflix to them, and the must-see show is the Lycra-Legged Mad Men vs. the delivery guys. Thank you for your letters of concern. The news reports had it right: I was indeed abducted by aliens last weekend, but the food was excellent, there was flatbed seating in the spacecraft, and they got me back for the premiere of \u201cThe Affair.\u201d And for those of you who are wondering: Alien sex is very hot. They also have no problem with commitment. The fellow (that\u2019s an approximation) I hooked up with has already made a date with me when the visitors from another galaxy swing by here again, in 300 years.",
        "author": "By Joyce Wadler"
    },
    {
        "title": "E.T. Doesn\u2019t Like the Bike Path Either (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2368",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/nyregion/et-doesnt-like-the-bike-path-either.html",
        "text": "A chat with some aliens reveals that the Hudson River Greenway is like Netflix to them, and the must-see show is the Lycra-Legged Mad Men vs. the delivery guys. A chat with some aliens reveals that the Hudson River Greenway is like Netflix to them, and the must-see show is the Lycra-Legged Mad Men vs. the delivery guys. Thank you for your letters of concern. The news reports had it right: I was indeed abducted by aliens last weekend, but the food was excellent, there was flatbed seating in the spacecraft, and they got me back for the premiere of \u201cThe Affair.\u201d And for those of you who are wondering: Alien sex is very hot. They also have no problem with commitment. The fellow (that\u2019s an approximation) I hooked up with has already made a date with me when the visitors from another galaxy swing by here again, in 300 years.",
        "author": "By Joyce Wadler"
    },
    {
        "title": "No Rest for a Man, 92, Whose Work Went to the Moon and Back (NYT: New York) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2369",
        "date": "2017-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/nyregion/no-rest-for-a-man-92-whose-work-went-to-the-moon-and-back.html",
        "text": "He landed with MacArthur in the Philippines and inspected materials for the space program. Decades later, Gene Fastook is still on the go with the police auxiliary in the Bronx. He landed with MacArthur in the Philippines and inspected materials for the space program. Decades later, Gene Fastook is still on the go with the police auxiliary in the Bronx. Gene Fastook, who helped make it possible for humans to walk on the moon and return to Earth to tell the tale, now begins most days in a McDonald\u2019s on White Plains Road in the Bronx, gabbing with other military veterans.",
        "author": "By Jim Dwyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "No Rest for a Man, 92, Whose Work Went to the Moon and Back (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2370",
        "date": "2017-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/nyregion/no-rest-for-a-man-92-whose-work-went-to-the-moon-and-back.html",
        "text": "He landed with MacArthur in the Philippines and inspected materials for the space program. Decades later, Gene Fastook is still on the go with the police auxiliary in the Bronx. He landed with MacArthur in the Philippines and inspected materials for the space program. Decades later, Gene Fastook is still on the go with the police auxiliary in the Bronx. Gene Fastook, who helped make it possible for humans to walk on the moon and return to Earth to tell the tale, now begins most days in a McDonald\u2019s on White Plains Road in the Bronx, gabbing with other military veterans.",
        "author": "By Jim Dwyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Probe to Bring Back Moon Samples (WSJ: News Explainer) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2371",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/china-lands-probe-to-bring-back-moon-samples/B514548A-7641-45E0-B04F-5BD683B66AEC?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=10",
        "text": " China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 5 probe touched down on the moon to collect and bring back samples to Earth. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why this lunar mission could be a milestone for the country\u2019s young but ambitious space program. Credit: Jin Liwang/Zuma Press ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Probe to Bring Back Moon Samples (WSJ: News Explainer) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2372",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/china-lands-probe-to-bring-back-moon-samples/B514548A-7641-45E0-B04F-5BD683B66AEC?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=37",
        "text": " China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 5 probe touched down on the moon to collect and bring back samples to Earth. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why this lunar mission could be a milestone for the country\u2019s young but ambitious space program. Credit: Jin Liwang/Zuma Press ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Probe to Bring Back Moon Samples (WSJ: News Explainer) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2373",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/china-lands-probe-to-bring-back-moon-samples/B514548A-7641-45E0-B04F-5BD683B66AEC?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=42",
        "text": " China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 5 probe touched down on the moon to collect and bring back samples to Earth. WSJ\u2019s Trefor Moss reports on why this lunar mission could be a milestone for the country\u2019s young but ambitious space program. Credit: Jin Liwang/Zuma Press ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Notable & Quotable: Harriet Tubman Space Telescope (WSJ: Notable & Quotable) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2374",
        "date": "2021-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-harriet-tubman-space-telescope-11615847653?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=34",
        "text": "Scientific American, once a rigorous scientific publication, published an opinion column by several young scientists\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0[who] advocate changing the name of the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope because Webb, a former NASA administrator, was administrator when the federal government did not adequately respect LGBTQ rights. Webb is not incriminated as a racist or bigot, but as a servant of bigots.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. [T]he proposal is to rename the telescope the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harriet Tubman\n\n\n\n Space Telescope. Why? Not because Tubman might have made any contributions to astronomy, but because she was a conductor on the Underground Railroad\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0during which she \u201clikely used the North Star\u201d to navigate to freedom. \u2018Not because Tubman might have made any contributions to astronomy, but because she . . . likely used the North Star to navigate to freedom.\u2019 ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2375",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/katherine-johnson-hidden-figure-at-nasa-during-1960s-space-race-dies-at-101/2020/02/24/fd5058ba-5715-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html",
        "text": "When Katherine Johnson ",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2376",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/katherine-johnson-hidden-figure-at-nasa-during-1960s-space-race-dies-at-101/2020/02/24/fd5058ba-5715-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html",
        "text": "When Katherine Johnson ",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Victor Sheymov, KGB officer who defected from Soviet Union, dies at 73 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2377",
        "date": "2019-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/victor-sheymov-kgb-officer-who-defected-from-soviet-union-dies-at-73/2019/12/05/e773a22c-16b5-11ea-a659-7d69641c6ff7_story.html",
        "text": "Throughout the 1970s, Victor Sheymov rose quickly through the hierarchy of the KGB, the spy agency of the Soviet Union. He was assigned to the Eighth Chief Directorate, perhaps the KGB\u2019s most secretive unit, which handled communications, ciphers and codes.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy the time he was 32, Mr. Sheymov had reached the rank of major and was in charge of monitoring the KGB\u2019s flow of information from around the world. But he was growing increasingly disenchanted with his employers and with life under the Communist regime, especially after suspecting the KGB of killing one of his friends, who had questioned the Soviet way of life. At great risk, Mr. Sheymov decided to reach out to U.S. intelligence officers, finally making a daring escape across the border with his wife and daughter in 1980. It was the CIA\u2019s first successful extraction \u2014 or exfiltration, as the agency calls it \u2014 of a defector from Soviet soil, and it turned out to be one of the most significant defections of the Cold War.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Sheymov, who spent the rest of his life in the United States, died Oct. 18 at his home in Vienna, Va. He was 73.His wife, Olga Sheymov, confirmed the death, which has not previously been reported. The cause was complications from pulmonary disease.After he was brought to the United States, Mr. Sheymov spent a year debriefing intelligence officials about the KGB\u2019s worldwide cryptological network and other secrets.\u201cMy goal was to inflict as much damage on the communist system as I possibly could,\u201d he told The Washington Post in 1990, when he went public after 10 years in hiding. \u201cThe peculiar thing about me was that I was in the inner sanctum of the KGB, so I knew the whole system, including the cipher system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAmong other things, Mr. Sheymov disclosed that the KGB hatched a plot to kill the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, who was shot and wounded by a Turkish assailant in 1981.Advertisement\u201cThe task was to find out how to get physically close to the pope,\u201d Mr. Sheymov said at a 1990 Washington news conference. \u201cIn the KGB slang, it was clearly understood that when you say \u2018physically close,\u2019 there was only one reason to get close.\u201dHe revealed that the KGB assassinated Afghan President Hafizullah Amin in 1979. He said two members of the U.S. State Department were spying for the KGB, and that he knew of at least one mole in the CIA.He also warned that the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, built by Soviet workers in the early 1980s, would have so many bugs and listening devices that \u201cyou won\u2019t have a single secret in the building.\u201d Several years later, the building was razed, and a new embassy was built by U.S. construction crews.Story continues below advertisementMr. Sheymov received a medal from the CIA and was praised by the federal government for his \u201cvaluable contribution to our country and national security.\u201dAdvertisementVictor Ivanovich Sheymov was born May\u00a09, 1946, in Moscow. His father was an engineer, his mother a cardiologist.He graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University, an elite science and engineering college, where he was also a standout athlete. His wife said he was a boxer and skier and held the school record in the 100-meter dash for more than 20 years.Mr. Sheymov excelled in mathematics and studied in a program specializing in missile and spacecraft design before joining the KGB in 1971. In Beijing, he solved a long-standing mystery at the Soviet Embassy, concluding that when the building was constructed in the 1950s, the Chinese had installed hidden acoustic conduits that could transmit sound without electronic amplification.Story continues below advertisementHe was promoted to a sensitive job in the KGB\u2019s top-secret communications and coding branch, helped prepare daily briefings for members of the Politburo and was part of the spy agency\u2019s inner circle.Advertisement\u201cYou begin to see independent information available to a few \u2018trusted\u2019 people that contradicts what you were taught before,\u201d he told The Post in 1990. \u201cYou are in a position to see what the KGB does. It is supposed to defend the Soviet people, but it doesn\u2019t. It works against them and the whole world.\u201dWhen a friend (and fellow KGB officer) was killed after voicing dissident views, Mr. Sheymov sought to flee the Soviet Union and take its secrets with him.Story continues below advertisementIt turned out to be harder to make a connection with U.S. intelligence officers than he thought. He carried a note reading, \u201cHello, I am a KGB officer with access to highly sensitive information,\u201d but never met anyone he could give it to.He tried to have a minor crash with a U.S. diplomatic car, only to have the driver make an evasive move to avoid the collision. Finally, while on a KGB assignment in Poland, Mr. Sheymov walked to the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw.Advertisement\u201cAre you a cipher clerk?\u201d he was asked.\u201cNo, I am responsible for the security of the KGB cipher communications abroad,\u201d Mr. Sheymov replied.\u201cThe Americans were dumbstruck,\u201d Post journalist David E. Hoffman wrote in his 2015 book, \u201cThe Billion Dollar Spy.\u201d \u201cA man with the keys to the kingdom, the ultrasecret codes to Soviet communications, was volunteering to defect.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn Moscow, the CIA assigned Mr. Sheymov the code name of \u201cCKUTOPIA.\u201d His CIA handler, David Rolph, gave him a miniature camera and told him, according to Hoffman\u2019s book: \u201cPhotograph the most highly classified papers you have. Don\u2019t take chances with other people around. But you have to prove to us that you are who you say you are.\u201dThe pictures proved Mr. Sheymov\u2019s credibility. He told Rolph that he wanted to flee the Soviet Union but would not leave without his wife and 5-year-old daughter.AdvertisementMr. Sheymov received his instructions in a letter written in invisible ink. (The writing appeared when the page was moistened.) When he was ready to leave Moscow, he was told, he should mark the letter \u201cV\u201d on a plaster pillar outside a bakery. He borrowed a waterproof marker from another KGB office and scrawled the \u201cV\u201d with his back to the pillar.Story continues below advertisementIt took more than two months before the escape plan, detailed in Hoffman\u2019s book, was ready. The CIA gave Mr. Sheymov five varieties of sedatives to determine which would be the safest for his daughter, to keep her asleep as they were smuggled out of the country.On May\u00a016, 1980, the Sheymovs sneaked away from their apartment, leaving teacups on the table, an open newspaper and an unmade bed. Clothes and family heirlooms were in their usual places, so as not to arouse suspicion.Advertisement\u201cI didn\u2019t leave a goodbye note,\u201d Mr. Sheymov wryly said in a 1990 interview.They took two trains, fearing that anyone they met could turn them in, before arriving in a remote town. They climbed into a nondescript car, Mr. Sheymov wrote in his 1993 book, \u201cTower of Secrets,\u201d driven by a man with a Polish accent.Story continues below advertisementMr. Sheymov concealed himself and his sedated daughter, Elena, in a hidden compartment between the car\u2019s trunk and back seat. His wife, Olga, sat in the front seat, posing as the driver\u2019s girlfriend.At one checkpoint, a guard demanded that the driver give him the Billy Joel tape he was playing in the car.The exact location of the border crossing has never been divulged: Hoffman suggested in his book that it may have been Finland. Olga Sheymov said in an interview that it was in the Carpathian Mountains, a range that stretches more than 900\u00a0miles across several countries, most of which were part of the Soviet bloc.AdvertisementOnce they were across the border, the Sheymovs were taken to a safe house, then flown to the United States. They had no further contact with their families until after the collapse of communism a decade later. Mr. Sheymov became a U.S. citizen and was reunited with his parents and a sister in the early 1990s, when they resettled in Northern Virginia.Over the years, Mr. Sheymov maintained that he had been promised $1\u00a0million for defecting and free lifetime health care. The CIA disputed that claim. After hiring former CIA director R. James Woolsey to represent him, he reached a settlement with the CIA in 1999.Along with \u201cTower of Secrets,\u201d Mr. Sheymov wrote three other books, including a novel and technical works on technology and security, and launched a cybersecurity firm, Invicta Networks. He had several patents for inventions related to software protection.Survivors include his wife of 45 years, the former Olga Voight, an artist and television producer, of Vienna; a daughter; a sister; and a granddaughter.During his final days with the KGB in Moscow, Mr. Sheymov said he wasn\u2019t sure whether he was being helped by the CIA or duped by the Soviet Union.\u201cThe one thing that proved to me you were CIA and not KGB,\u201d he told Rolph, according to Hoffman\u2019s book, \u201cis when you gave me those medicines to test on my daughter. Because the KGB is heartless. They would have given me one pill and said, do it. I knew I was working with a humane organization when you gave me five medicines.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituariesRobert K. Massie, award-winning historian of Czarist Russia, dies at 90Allan Gerson, lawyer who sought justice for Lockerbie bombing victims, dies at 74Mariss Jansons, conductor celebrated around the world, dies at 76 He and his family were spirited out of the Soviet Union in a daring CIA operation in 1980. Victor Sheymov, KGB officer who defected from Soviet Union, dies at 73",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Annie Glenn, advocate and widow of astronaut and senator, dies at 100 of coronavirus (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2378",
        "date": "2020-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/annie-glenn-advocate-and-widow-of-astronaut-and-senator-dies-at-100-of-coronavirus/2020/05/19/566ff102-99de-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html",
        "text": "This story is part of \u201cFaces of the dead,\u201d an ongoing series exploring the lives of Americans who have died from the novel coronavirus.Annie Glenn, who reluctantly entered the public eye as the wife of astronaut and senator John Glenn and later overcame a severe stuttering problem to become a leading advocate for people with communication disorders, died May 19 at a nursing center in St. Paul, Minn. She was 100. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, said the senator\u2019s former press secretary, Dale Butland.Mrs. Glenn met her future husband when they were toddlers, growing up in New Concord, Ohio. They went to high school and college together and were married in 1943, while John Glenn was serving as a Marine Corps pilot.Story continues below advertisementShe later said they moved 33 times for her husband\u2019s career, as he flew hundreds of missions in World War II and the Korean War and later became a test pilot. He was selected as part of the country\u2019s astronaut corps, the Mercury Seven, in 1959.AdvertisementDuring the early years of the space program, the astronauts were seen as national heroes, and none more so than John Glenn.He was not the first to go into space \u2014 that honor went to Alan Shepard in 1961. But perhaps more than the other astronauts, Glenn had a grasp of the historical and symbolic importance of America\u2019s first voyages into space. He was also a squeaky-clean, churchgoing Midwesterner, a publicist\u2019s dream.John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95He knew his wife and their two children were part of the astronauts\u2019 larger story, whether they wanted to be or not. They appeared regularly in the pages of Life magazine, which had an exclusive contract to cover the private lives of the astronauts.Story continues below advertisementWhat was not widely known at the time was that Mrs. Glenn suffered from a severe stuttering problem that made it impossible for her to speak in public, give interviews or even talk on the telephone \u2014 a device John Glenn called \u201can instrument of the devil to a stutterer.\u201dAdvertisementIt was particularly difficult when Mrs. Glenn accompanied her husband to meetings with top military and political officials, who seldom had the patience to wait for her to form her words.\u201cLots of people thought when my jaws sort of started shaking,\u201d as she tried to speak, Mrs. Glenn told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2001, \u201cthat I was cold. Lots of people would turn their backs and walk away from me. I have been laughed at many times.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter Shepard\u2019s short flight in 1961, John Glenn was scheduled to become the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth. His launch was postponed several times, creating a steadily building sense of tension and expectation.At one of the postponed launches, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to visit Mrs. Glenn at her home in Arlington, Va. In a celebrated scene in Tom Wolfe\u2019s book \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d and the 1983 movie of the same name, Johnson demanded to meet Mrs. Glenn, with TV crews in tow.AdvertisementNASA officials went so far as to call John Glenn, still wearing his spacesuit, after a scrapped mission at Cape Canaveral, telling him his wife was a problem.Story continues below advertisement\u201cLook, if you don\u2019t want the Vice-President or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house,\u201d he told her, according to \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d \u201cthan that\u2019s it as far as I\u2019m concerned, they are not coming in \u2014 and I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent, and you tell them that.\u201dMrs. Glenn later told The Washington Post that it wasn\u2019t her stutter that made her unwilling to greet Johnson, but that she had a migraine headache.When John Glenn\u2019s mission finally launched on Feb. 20, 1962, Life reporter Loudon Wainwright noted that Mrs. Glenn was watching the liftoff with her two children on three television sets.\u201cWhen the tears began to run down her daughter\u2019s cheeks, Annie, without looking away from the triple view of the rising rocket, put one hand gently on her child\u2019s foot.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFinally, then as the television camera poked aimlessly through an empty sky, Annie put her head against her knees and sobbed.\u201dShe later said her husband\u2019s flight \u2014 marked by a dangerous reentry, in which he had to pilot the spacecraft by manual controls \u2014 left her \u201cthe most scared I\u2019ve ever been.\u201dIn 1973, Mrs. Glenn entered an intensive three-week speech therapy program at Hollins College in Roanoke At the end of the program, she called her husband at his office. It was the first time that she could speak in complete sentences. He was in tears.A year later, with Mrs. Glenn at his side, John Glenn was elected to the first of four terms as a Democratic senator from Ohio.Story continues below advertisementAnna Margaret Castor was born Feb. 17, 1920, in Columbus, Ohio, and moved three years later to New Concord. Her father was a dentist, her mother a homemaker.AdvertisementShe was one year older than John Glenn, who was a childhood playmate and her high school and college sweetheart.\u201cThe very first time I realized I was not like all other kids was in the sixth grade,\u201d Mrs. Glenn said in a 2010 video made by Ohio State University. \u201cI got up to give a poem, and one of the kids laughed. And I thought, \u2018Oh, oh. I am not like anybody else in this room.\u2019\u2009\u201dShe graduated in 1942 from her hometown college, now called Muskingum University. An outstanding organist, she turned down a scholarship offer from the Juilliard School in New York.Story continues below advertisementWhile her husband was in the Senate, Mrs. Glenn became a leading advocate for people with communication disorders. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association presents an annual award in her honor, dubbed the Annie, to someone who has an impact on people with speech or communication disorders. The first recipient, in 1987, was actor James Earl Jones. The award in 2009 was presented to Vice President Joe Biden.AdvertisementMrs. Glenn campaigned for her husband during his short-lived presidential run in 1984. In 1998, when John Glenn was 77 and in his final year in the Senate, he returned to space as NASA\u2019s oldest astronaut.\u201cI would pray every night, and I guess my prayers were answered because he made it,\u201d Mrs. Glenn said in 2010 of her husband\u2019s career as a pilot and astronaut.Story continues below advertisementThe couple later established a college of public affairs at Ohio State University, where Mrs. Glenn was an adjunct professor of speech pathology. John Glenn died in 2016 at 95.Survivors include two children, J. David Glenn of Berkeley, Calif., and Carolyn \u201cLyn\u201d Glenn of St. Paul; and two grandsons.John Glenn was sometimes called America\u2019s last great hero.\u201cAmerica is made up of a whole nation of heroes who face problems that are very difficult, and their courage remains largely unsung,\u201d he wrote in the book \u201cMy Hero: Extraordinary People on the Heroes Who Inspire Them,\u201d \u201cbut millions of individuals are heroes in their own right.\u201cIn my book, Annie is one of those heroes.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituaries:Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95Betty Grissom, widow of astronaut Virgil \u2018Gus\u2019 Grissom, dies at 91Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101 She overcame a stuttering disorder and became an advocate for people with communication disorders. Annie Glenn, advocate and widow of astronaut and senator, dies at 100 of coronavirus",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel laureate known as the father of X-ray astronomy, dies at 87 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2379",
        "date": "2018-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/riccardo-giacconi-nobel-laureate-known-as-the-father-of-x-ray-astronomy-dies-at-87/2018/12/17/b3955b5e-0189-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html",
        "text": "Riccardo Giacconi, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was known as the founder of X-ray astronomy, a discipline credited with opening a new window into the cosmos, died Dec. 9 in San Diego.\n He was 87.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA daughter, Anna Giacconi, confirmed his death and said she did not yet know the cause. Dr. Giacconi was born in Italy but worked primarily in the United States, where he spent most of his life. At the time of his death, he was listed as a faculty member in the physics and astronomy department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 2002, the Nobel committee awarded Dr. Giacconi a share of the physics prize \u201cfor pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.\u201d The other half of the prize recognized Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba for \u201cthe detection of cosmic neutrinos.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDr. Giacconi was widely known as \u201cthe father of X-ray astronomy,\u201d and the leader of the International Astronomical Union called him a determined, strong-minded visionary.\u201cWorld astronomy bears a huge debt of gratitude to Riccardo Giacconi,\u201d IAU General Secretary Teresa Lago said in a statement.For centuries, humans knew no more about the stars than their eyes could tell them. The starry universe seemed calm and immutable. But X-ray astronomy has helped create a new view, of turbulence, cataclysm, birth and death, creation and destruction.Much of the modern understanding of the nature and dynamics of stars and galaxies, and the charged particles streaming between them, has been provided or supported by X-ray astronomy.Story continues below advertisementNotable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)X-rays, although invisible to the eye, own just as firm a place on the electromagnetic spectrum as the light we can see. X-rays possess high energies and tell in turn of the high energy processes by which they are produced.AdvertisementWhile they have streamed across the void of space for eons, only recently have scientists succeeded in capturing them, analyzing them and reading the messages that they carry about cosmic events at unimaginable distances.The expansion of astronomy beyond visible light created a stir in science and beyond. Beyond the knowledge it provides of the cosmic environment\n, X-ray astronomy is credited with yielding spinoff applications in industry, medicine, security and environmental monitoring.Story continues below advertisementBlocked by Earth\u2019s atmosphere, the X-rays emitted by the stars and galaxies have been detectable only by reaching high elevations or by launching observing equipment into space.Dr. Giacconi and his colleagues developed telescopes suited to gathering the faintest X-ray signals from the far reaches of the universe. In addition to recognizing and analyzing their meaning, the scientists showed patient diligence in obtaining the support needed to place their equipment on the appropriate spacecraft.AdvertisementAmong the challenges in creating an X-ray telescope was the high energies of the rays. Optical telescopes employ mirrors to reflect visible light. X-rays would tear through the mirrors, making them unusable.Story continues below advertisementUltimately, geometries were devised so that X-rays would arrive at angles small enough to allow them to bounce off reflectors, rather than penetrate them.Since the middle of the last century, what scientists have come to call the X-ray universe has been explored by the use of rockets and satellites, with the progress coming so rapidly that detector sensitivity has increased one billion times.Dr. Giacconi was principal investigator for NASA satellites that orbited the Earth and trained their eyes on X-ray sources. He was a key mind behind the Uhuru X-ray satellite, which found what the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics described as \u201cthe first evidence for a black hole,\u201d as well was the Einstein Observatory, the first imaging X-ray telescope.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe was credited with playing a major role in the launch and operation of NASA\u2019s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Launched in 1999, it received credit for a profusion of scientific discoveries. In one notable achievement, Chandra found a cloud of hot gas that extended throughout a galactic cluster several million light-years across, with temperatures as high as 40 million degrees.Riccardo Giacconi was born in Genoa on Oct. 6, 1931. After his parents separated, he lived for most of his youth in Milan with his mother, a high school teacher of math and physics.Although a sometimes difficult student \u2014 by his account, he cut school and reveled in correcting his teachers \u2014 he was attracted to physics, particularly the study of elementary particles and cosmic rays.Story continues below advertisementHe received a PhD in physics from the University of Milan in 1954 and began research in cosmic rays early on. A recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, he soon left for brief stays at Indiana University and then at Princeton.AdvertisementAfter Princeton, he was brought to American Science and Engineering, a private research company, to start a program in space science. In his 14 years at AS & E, from 1959 to 1973, he was credited with creating what became the new science of X-ray astronomy.He held leading roles in succeeding years at important scientific institutions and on major research projects. Among these were the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins. He served there from 1981 to 1992. At the institute he had responsibilities for operating the Hubble Space Telescope.Story continues below advertisementHis reasons for leaving the telescope institute were disclosed in the biography he submitted years later for the Nobel committee. It suggested the depths of human emotion that exist beneath what may seem the austere exterior of science.\u201cIn 1991 my son Marc died in an automobile accident,\u201d he wrote, and the telescope institute, Hubble and the city of Baltimore, \u201cwere continued and painful reminders of devastating grief. \u201cAdvertisementHe \u201cjumped at\u201d the chance to become head of the European Southern Observatory. It was based in Germany, and he headed it from 1993 to 1999.In 1999 he began five years as the president of Associated Universities Inc., a Washington-based manager of laboratories.Story continues below advertisementHe was a recipient of NASA\u2019s Distinguished Public Service Award and of the National Medal of Science, which President George W. Bush awarded to him in 2003.Dr. Giacconi\u2019s survivors include his wife, the former Mirella Manaira, of San Diego; two daughters, Anna Giacconi of San Diego and Guia Trutter of Lake Forest, Ill.; and two grandchildren. The biography that he prepared for the Nobel committee in 2002 was dedicated to his wife and daughters. He also wrote that it was in memory of his son, Marc Antonio.Read more Washington Post obituaries\nWilliam J. Conklin, architect who designed Navy Memorial, parts of Reston, dies at 95Nancy Wilson, acclaimed \u2018song stylist\u2019 who defied musical boundaries, dies at 81Evelyn Berezin, entrepreneur and engineer who designed early word processor, dies at 93 His work, honored with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002, was credited with opening a new window into the cosmos. Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel laureate known as the father of X-ray astronomy, dies at 87",
        "author": "Martin Weil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel laureate known as the father of X-ray astronomy, dies at 87 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2380",
        "date": "2018-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/riccardo-giacconi-nobel-laureate-known-as-the-father-of-x-ray-astronomy-dies-at-87/2018/12/17/b3955b5e-0189-11e9-9122-82e98f91ee6f_story.html",
        "text": "Riccardo Giacconi, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who was known as the founder of X-ray astronomy, a discipline credited with opening a new window into the cosmos, died Dec. 9 in San Diego.\n He was 87.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA daughter, Anna Giacconi, confirmed his death and said she did not yet know the cause. Dr. Giacconi was born in Italy but worked primarily in the United States, where he spent most of his life. At the time of his death, he was listed as a faculty member in the physics and astronomy department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 2002, the Nobel committee awarded Dr. Giacconi a share of the physics prize \u201cfor pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.\u201d The other half of the prize recognized Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba for \u201cthe detection of cosmic neutrinos.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDr. Giacconi was widely known as \u201cthe father of X-ray astronomy,\u201d and the leader of the International Astronomical Union called him a determined, strong-minded visionary.\u201cWorld astronomy bears a huge debt of gratitude to Riccardo Giacconi,\u201d IAU General Secretary Teresa Lago said in a statement.For centuries, humans knew no more about the stars than their eyes could tell them. The starry universe seemed calm and immutable. But X-ray astronomy has helped create a new view, of turbulence, cataclysm, birth and death, creation and destruction.Much of the modern understanding of the nature and dynamics of stars and galaxies, and the charged particles streaming between them, has been provided or supported by X-ray astronomy.Story continues below advertisementNotable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)X-rays, although invisible to the eye, own just as firm a place on the electromagnetic spectrum as the light we can see. X-rays possess high energies and tell in turn of the high energy processes by which they are produced.AdvertisementWhile they have streamed across the void of space for eons, only recently have scientists succeeded in capturing them, analyzing them and reading the messages that they carry about cosmic events at unimaginable distances.The expansion of astronomy beyond visible light created a stir in science and beyond. Beyond the knowledge it provides of the cosmic environment\n, X-ray astronomy is credited with yielding spinoff applications in industry, medicine, security and environmental monitoring.Story continues below advertisementBlocked by Earth\u2019s atmosphere, the X-rays emitted by the stars and galaxies have been detectable only by reaching high elevations or by launching observing equipment into space.Dr. Giacconi and his colleagues developed telescopes suited to gathering the faintest X-ray signals from the far reaches of the universe. In addition to recognizing and analyzing their meaning, the scientists showed patient diligence in obtaining the support needed to place their equipment on the appropriate spacecraft.AdvertisementAmong the challenges in creating an X-ray telescope was the high energies of the rays. Optical telescopes employ mirrors to reflect visible light. X-rays would tear through the mirrors, making them unusable.Story continues below advertisementUltimately, geometries were devised so that X-rays would arrive at angles small enough to allow them to bounce off reflectors, rather than penetrate them.Since the middle of the last century, what scientists have come to call the X-ray universe has been explored by the use of rockets and satellites, with the progress coming so rapidly that detector sensitivity has increased one billion times.Dr. Giacconi was principal investigator for NASA satellites that orbited the Earth and trained their eyes on X-ray sources. He was a key mind behind the Uhuru X-ray satellite, which found what the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics described as \u201cthe first evidence for a black hole,\u201d as well was the Einstein Observatory, the first imaging X-ray telescope.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe was credited with playing a major role in the launch and operation of NASA\u2019s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Launched in 1999, it received credit for a profusion of scientific discoveries. In one notable achievement, Chandra found a cloud of hot gas that extended throughout a galactic cluster several million light-years across, with temperatures as high as 40 million degrees.Riccardo Giacconi was born in Genoa on Oct. 6, 1931. After his parents separated, he lived for most of his youth in Milan with his mother, a high school teacher of math and physics.Although a sometimes difficult student \u2014 by his account, he cut school and reveled in correcting his teachers \u2014 he was attracted to physics, particularly the study of elementary particles and cosmic rays.Story continues below advertisementHe received a PhD in physics from the University of Milan in 1954 and began research in cosmic rays early on. A recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, he soon left for brief stays at Indiana University and then at Princeton.AdvertisementAfter Princeton, he was brought to American Science and Engineering, a private research company, to start a program in space science. In his 14 years at AS & E, from 1959 to 1973, he was credited with creating what became the new science of X-ray astronomy.He held leading roles in succeeding years at important scientific institutions and on major research projects. Among these were the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins. He served there from 1981 to 1992. At the institute he had responsibilities for operating the Hubble Space Telescope.Story continues below advertisementHis reasons for leaving the telescope institute were disclosed in the biography he submitted years later for the Nobel committee. It suggested the depths of human emotion that exist beneath what may seem the austere exterior of science.\u201cIn 1991 my son Marc died in an automobile accident,\u201d he wrote, and the telescope institute, Hubble and the city of Baltimore, \u201cwere continued and painful reminders of devastating grief. \u201cAdvertisementHe \u201cjumped at\u201d the chance to become head of the European Southern Observatory. It was based in Germany, and he headed it from 1993 to 1999.In 1999 he began five years as the president of Associated Universities Inc., a Washington-based manager of laboratories.Story continues below advertisementHe was a recipient of NASA\u2019s Distinguished Public Service Award and of the National Medal of Science, which President George W. Bush awarded to him in 2003.Dr. Giacconi\u2019s survivors include his wife, the former Mirella Manaira, of San Diego; two daughters, Anna Giacconi of San Diego and Guia Trutter of Lake Forest, Ill.; and two grandchildren. The biography that he prepared for the Nobel committee in 2002 was dedicated to his wife and daughters. He also wrote that it was in memory of his son, Marc Antonio.Read more Washington Post obituaries\nWilliam J. Conklin, architect who designed Navy Memorial, parts of Reston, dies at 95Nancy Wilson, acclaimed \u2018song stylist\u2019 who defied musical boundaries, dies at 81Evelyn Berezin, entrepreneur and engineer who designed early word processor, dies at 93 His work, honored with the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002, was credited with opening a new window into the cosmos. Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel laureate known as the father of X-ray astronomy, dies at 87",
        "author": "Martin Weil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, dies at 90 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2381",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/michael-collins-apollo-11-astronaut-dies-at-90/2021/04/28/fa86e906-2da6-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html",
        "text": "On July 20, 1969, eight years after President John F. Kennedy pledged to land a man on the lunar surface and return him safely to Earth, astronaut Michael Collins sat alone in the command module Columbia. He was floating 60 miles above what he later called the \u201cwithered, sun-seared peach pit\u201d of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA lander carrying his fellow Apollo 11 crewmen, Neil Armstrong and Edwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin, sped away from the main craft, en route to fulfilling Kennedy\u2019s goal.\u201cYou cats take it easy,\u201d Mr. Collins radioed to his crew mates.While Armstrong and Aldrin took their giant leap for mankind, in Armstrong\u2019s memorable phrase, Mr. Collins circled the moon alone, keeping the command module going and running through the 117-page list of contingencies he had prepared in the event that anything went awry.Story continues below advertisementHe was a quarter of a million miles from home \u2014 farther than any traveler had ever gone on his own \u2014 without even radio communication to tether him to the rest of humanity. The moon\u2019s bulk blocked the Earth from view and cut off contact with mission control for large portions of his orbit.Advertisement\u201cNot since Adam has any human known such solitude,\u201d NASA public affairs officer Douglas Ward remarked to reporters at the time.Experience the historic Apollo 11 missionThe diffident Mr. Collins, who died April 28 at 90, later brushed off the comparison to the biblical first man, but he admitted to feeling petrified. In his 17 years as a fighter pilot, test pilot and astronaut, no flight had worried him as much as the lunar lander\u2019s 3\u00bd -hour trip to reunite with the Apollo 11 command module.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMy secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter,\u201d he wrote in his 1974 memoir, \u201cCarrying the Fire.\u201d He had resolved not to take his own life if Armstrong and Aldrin didn\u2019t make it, but he knew that being the mission\u2019s sole survivor would make him \u201ca marked man for life.\u201dThat foreboding never came to pass. All three crew members were present for Apollo 11\u2019s triumphant splashdown in the Pacific and the subsequent victory tour. At its close, three weeks later in Los Angeles, they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation\u2019s highest civilian honor.\u201cHis contribution to this great undertaking,\u201d each man\u2019s medal citation read, \u201cwill be remembered so long as men wonder and dream and search for truth on this planet and among the stars.\u201dApollo at 50: In search of heroes and simplicityThat was not always true of Mr. Collins, whose name never gained the universal recognition of Armstrong\u2019s and Aldrin\u2019s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was partly a function of personality. He had stayed clear of the rivalries and showdowns that marked life at Johnson Space Center in Houston \u2014 including the reported bitterness between Armstrong and Aldrin over who would get to set foot on the moon first. After their Apollo mission, when Armstrong turned reclusive and Aldrin struggled with alcoholism, Mr. Collins thrived outside the glare of publicity.He had the deep respect of those who understood what his mission entailed. The pioneering transatlantic aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who would later write the foreword to \u201cCarrying the Fire,\u201d sent a letter to Mr. Collins after the moon landing lauding his role in the mission.\u201cI watched every minute of the walk-out, and certainly it was of indescribable interest. But it seems to me you had an experience of in some ways great profundity,\u201d Lindbergh wrote. He went on to compare Mr. Collins\u2019s solitude to his own solo flight across the Atlantic: \u201cI felt closer to you in orbit than to your fellow astronauts I watched walking on the surface of the moon.\u201dMr. Collins went on to become an eloquent advocate for space exploration, in his many books and as founding director of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He was an inductee of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, among other honors. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1982 at the rank of major general.Michael Collins was born in Rome on Oct. 31, 1930, to a distinguished military family. His father, Army Maj. Gen. James Lawton Collins, had long served as an aide-de-camp to Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe elder Collins was a military attache in Italy when his son was born. His father\u2019s brother, Gen. Joseph Lawton \u201cLightning Joe\u201d Collins, was Army chief of staff during the Korean War. Michael\u2019s older brother, the late James L. Collins Jr., was an Army brigadier general and military historian.Mr. Collins grew up following his father on assignments to Oklahoma, New York City and Puerto Rico, among other places, before settling in Washington after the U.S. entry into World War II.He graduated in 1948 from the private St. Albans School, where classmates nicknamed him \u201cScarecrow\u201d for his tall and trim frame. He was an intense athletic competitor and proved more adept on the playing fields there and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., than in the classroom.Story continues below advertisementAfter completing his bachelor\u2019s degree in 1952, he joined the Air Force \u2014 pointedly, a branch of the military where he didn\u2019t have family. He was drawn to test-piloting because of what he called the thrill of flying planes no one had ever flown before.AdvertisementDescribed as reserved and levelheaded but with flashes of wry wit, he once told Life magazine of his work as a test pilot: \u201cPeople think we\u2019re baked in heat chambers and whirled in centrifuges until our eyeballs fall out. There is little of that. Essentially, we\u2019re learning an in",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, dies at 90 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2382",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/michael-collins-apollo-11-astronaut-dies-at-90/2021/04/28/fa86e906-2da6-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html",
        "text": "On July 20, 1969, eight years after President John F. Kennedy pledged to land a man on the lunar surface and return him safely to Earth, astronaut Michael Collins sat alone in the command module Columbia. He was floating 60 miles above what he later called the \u201cwithered, sun-seared peach pit\u201d of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA lander carrying his fellow Apollo 11 crewmen, Neil Armstrong and Edwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin, sped away from the main craft, en route to fulfilling Kennedy\u2019s goal.\u201cYou cats take it easy,\u201d Mr. Collins radioed to his crew mates.While Armstrong and Aldrin took their giant leap for mankind, in Armstrong\u2019s memorable phrase, Mr. Collins circled the moon alone, keeping the command module going and running through the 117-page list of contingencies he had prepared in the event that anything went awry.Story continues below advertisementHe was a quarter of a million miles from home \u2014 farther than any traveler had ever gone on his own \u2014 without even radio communication to tether him to the rest of humanity. The moon\u2019s bulk blocked the Earth from view and cut off contact with mission control for large portions of his orbit.Advertisement\u201cNot since Adam has any human known such solitude,\u201d NASA public affairs officer Douglas Ward remarked to reporters at the time.Experience the historic Apollo 11 missionThe diffident Mr. Collins, who died April 28 at 90, later brushed off the comparison to the biblical first man, but he admitted to feeling petrified. In his 17 years as a fighter pilot, test pilot and astronaut, no flight had worried him as much as the lunar lander\u2019s 3\u00bd -hour trip to reunite with the Apollo 11 command module.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMy secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter,\u201d he wrote in his 1974 memoir, \u201cCarrying the Fire.\u201d He had resolved not to take his own life if Armstrong and Aldrin didn\u2019t make it, but he knew that being the mission\u2019s sole survivor would make him \u201ca marked man for life.\u201dThat foreboding never came to pass. All three crew members were present for Apollo 11\u2019s triumphant splashdown in the Pacific and the subsequent victory tour. At its close, three weeks later in Los Angeles, they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation\u2019s highest civilian honor.\u201cHis contribution to this great undertaking,\u201d each man\u2019s medal citation read, \u201cwill be remembered so long as men wonder and dream and search for truth on this planet and among the stars.\u201dApollo at 50: In search of heroes and simplicityThat was not always true of Mr. Collins, whose name never gained the universal recognition of Armstrong\u2019s and Aldrin\u2019s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was partly a function of personality. He had stayed clear of the rivalries and showdowns that marked life at Johnson Space Center in Houston \u2014 including the reported bitterness between Armstrong and Aldrin over who would get to set foot on the moon first. After their Apollo mission, when Armstrong turned reclusive and Aldrin struggled with alcoholism, Mr. Collins thrived outside the glare of publicity.He had the deep respect of those who understood what his mission entailed. The pioneering transatlantic aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who would later write the foreword to \u201cCarrying the Fire,\u201d sent a letter to Mr. Collins after the moon landing lauding his role in the mission.\u201cI watched every minute of the walk-out, and certainly it was of indescribable interest. But it seems to me you had an experience of in some ways great profundity,\u201d Lindbergh wrote. He went on to compare Mr. Collins\u2019s solitude to his own solo flight across the Atlantic: \u201cI felt closer to you in orbit than to your fellow astronauts I watched walking on the surface of the moon.\u201dMr. Collins went on to become an eloquent advocate for space exploration, in his many books and as founding director of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He was an inductee of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, among other honors. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1982 at the rank of major general.Michael Collins was born in Rome on Oct. 31, 1930, to a distinguished military family. His father, Army Maj. Gen. James Lawton Collins, had long served as an aide-de-camp to Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe elder Collins was a military attache in Italy when his son was born. His father\u2019s brother, Gen. Joseph Lawton \u201cLightning Joe\u201d Collins, was Army chief of staff during the Korean War. Michael\u2019s older brother, the late James L. Collins Jr., was an Army brigadier general and military historian.Mr. Collins grew up following his father on assignments to Oklahoma, New York City and Puerto Rico, among other places, before settling in Washington after the U.S. entry into World War II.He graduated in 1948 from the private St. Albans School, where classmates nicknamed him \u201cScarecrow\u201d for his tall and trim frame. He was an intense athletic competitor and proved more adept on the playing fields there and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., than in the classroom.Story continues below advertisementAfter completing his bachelor\u2019s degree in 1952, he joined the Air Force \u2014 pointedly, a branch of the military where he didn\u2019t have family. He was drawn to test-piloting because of what he called the thrill of flying planes no one had ever flown before.AdvertisementDescribed as reserved and levelheaded but with flashes of wry wit, he once told Life magazine of his work as a test pilot: \u201cPeople think we\u2019re baked in heat chambers and whirled in centrifuges until our eyeballs fall out. There is little of that. Essentially, we\u2019re learning an in",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, dies at 90 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2383",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/michael-collins-apollo-11-astronaut-dies-at-90/2021/04/28/fa86e906-2da6-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html",
        "text": "On July 20, 1969, eight years after President John F. Kennedy pledged to land a man on the lunar surface and return him safely to Earth, astronaut Michael Collins sat alone in the command module Columbia. He was floating 60 miles above what he later called the \u201cwithered, sun-seared peach pit\u201d of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA lander carrying his fellow Apollo 11 crewmen, Neil Armstrong and Edwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin, sped away from the main craft, en route to fulfilling Kennedy\u2019s goal.\u201cYou cats take it easy,\u201d Mr. Collins radioed to his crew mates.While Armstrong and Aldrin took their giant leap for mankind, in Armstrong\u2019s memorable phrase, Mr. Collins circled the moon alone, keeping the command module going and running through the 117-page list of contingencies he had prepared in the event that anything went awry.Story continues below advertisementHe was a quarter of a million miles from home \u2014 farther than any traveler had ever gone on his own \u2014 without even radio communication to tether him to the rest of humanity. The moon\u2019s bulk blocked the Earth from view and cut off contact with mission control for large portions of his orbit.Advertisement\u201cNot since Adam has any human known such solitude,\u201d NASA public affairs officer Douglas Ward remarked to reporters at the time.Experience the historic Apollo 11 missionThe diffident Mr. Collins, who died April 28 at 90, later brushed off the comparison to the biblical first man, but he admitted to feeling petrified. In his 17 years as a fighter pilot, test pilot and astronaut, no flight had worried him as much as the lunar lander\u2019s 3\u00bd -hour trip to reunite with the Apollo 11 command module.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMy secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to earth alone; now I am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter,\u201d he wrote in his 1974 memoir, \u201cCarrying the Fire.\u201d He had resolved not to take his own life if Armstrong and Aldrin didn\u2019t make it, but he knew that being the mission\u2019s sole survivor would make him \u201ca marked man for life.\u201dThat foreboding never came to pass. All three crew members were present for Apollo 11\u2019s triumphant splashdown in the Pacific and the subsequent victory tour. At its close, three weeks later in Los Angeles, they were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation\u2019s highest civilian honor.\u201cHis contribution to this great undertaking,\u201d each man\u2019s medal citation read, \u201cwill be remembered so long as men wonder and dream and search for truth on this planet and among the stars.\u201dApollo at 50: In search of heroes and simplicityThat was not always true of Mr. Collins, whose name never gained the universal recognition of Armstrong\u2019s and Aldrin\u2019s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was partly a function of personality. He had stayed clear of the rivalries and showdowns that marked life at Johnson Space Center in Houston \u2014 including the reported bitterness between Armstrong and Aldrin over who would get to set foot on the moon first. After their Apollo mission, when Armstrong turned reclusive and Aldrin struggled with alcoholism, Mr. Collins thrived outside the glare of publicity.He had the deep respect of those who understood what his mission entailed. The pioneering transatlantic aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who would later write the foreword to \u201cCarrying the Fire,\u201d sent a letter to Mr. Collins after the moon landing lauding his role in the mission.\u201cI watched every minute of the walk-out, and certainly it was of indescribable interest. But it seems to me you had an experience of in some ways great profundity,\u201d Lindbergh wrote. He went on to compare Mr. Collins\u2019s solitude to his own solo flight across the Atlantic: \u201cI felt closer to you in orbit than to your fellow astronauts I watched walking on the surface of the moon.\u201dMr. Collins went on to become an eloquent advocate for space exploration, in his many books and as founding director of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. He was an inductee of the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal, among other honors. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1982 at the rank of major general.Michael Collins was born in Rome on Oct. 31, 1930, to a distinguished military family. His father, Army Maj. Gen. James Lawton Collins, had long served as an aide-de-camp to Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe elder Collins was a military attache in Italy when his son was born. His father\u2019s brother, Gen. Joseph Lawton \u201cLightning Joe\u201d Collins, was Army chief of staff during the Korean War. Michael\u2019s older brother, the late James L. Collins Jr., was an Army brigadier general and military historian.Mr. Collins grew up following his father on assignments to Oklahoma, New York City and Puerto Rico, among other places, before settling in Washington after the U.S. entry into World War II.He graduated in 1948 from the private St. Albans School, where classmates nicknamed him \u201cScarecrow\u201d for his tall and trim frame. He was an intense athletic competitor and proved more adept on the playing fields there and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., than in the classroom.Story continues below advertisementAfter completing his bachelor\u2019s degree in 1952, he joined the Air Force \u2014 pointedly, a branch of the military where he didn\u2019t have family. He was drawn to test-piloting because of what he called the thrill of flying planes no one had ever flown before.AdvertisementDescribed as reserved and levelheaded but with flashes of wry wit, he once told Life magazine of his work as a test pilot: \u201cPeople think we\u2019re baked in heat chambers and whirled in centrifuges until our eyeballs fall out. There is little of that. Essentially, we\u2019re learning an in",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Community deaths (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2384",
        "date": "2020-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/community-deaths/2020/10/09/34610b24-0a44-11eb-9be6-cf25fb429f1a_story.html",
        "text": "Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia.Jeffrey Bauer,\u2009music directorWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJeffrey Bauer, 64, the music director and assistant minister of the Self-Revelation Church of Absolute Monism and the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Center in Bethesda, Md., died Aug. 21 at a care center in Rockville, Md. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Katy Bauer. Mr. Bauer, a Bethesda resident, was born at Fort Benning, Ga., where his father was serving in the military. He was a piano teacher for more than 40 years. He also was a trombonist and published trombone and piano compositions. He wrote music for a dance drama, \u201cMoha-Mudgar.\u201dHarry Markowicz,\u2009Gallaudet teacherHarry Markowicz, 83, an emeritus professor at Gallaudet University and a Holocaust survivor, died Sept. 15 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Arlene Markowicz.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Markowicz was born to Jewish parents in Berlin. His family fled to Belgium, where they were sheltered and hidden throughout World War II. They came to the United States in 1951 and settled in Seattle. In the early 1970s, he came to Washington as a staffer and researcher at Gallaudet\u2019s Linguistics Research Laboratory.Later, he studied linguistics in Paris and in 1982 returned to Gallaudet as a teacher in the English department. He retired in 2008. In retirement, he wrote stories for the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.Norman DiCarlantonio,\u2009electrical engineer Norman DiCarlantonio, 87, an electrical engineer whose work included technology on Defense Department projects such as submarines, aircraft and spacecraft, died Sept. 17 at a health-care center in Ocala, Fla. The cause was a heart attack, said a daughter, Pamela DiCarlantonio.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. DiCarlantonio was born in Washington and over the years had worked for Vitro, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Booz Allen and CACI, among other defense-contracting firms. In 2014, he moved to Florida from Centreville, Md.Mark Joelson,\u2009lawyerMark Joelson, 85, a Washington lawyer who practiced international and antitrust law with several firms before retiring in 1998 from Morgan Lewis, died Sept. 23 at his home in Arlington, Va. The cause was cancer, said a son, Dan Joelson.Mr. Joelson was born in Paris to Jewish parents and, in 1941, his family fled the German occupation of France, escaping through Spain to Portugal and eventually booking passage on a ship to America. After retiring from Morgan Lewis, he opened a small office in Washington and specialized in dispute resolution.Jerome Moses,\u2009chief warrant officerJerome Moses, 85, a retired Army chief warrant officer who served in the office of the inspector general, died Sept. 11 at his home in Severn, Md. The cause was kidney failure, said a daughter, Nichelle Creek.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Moses was born in Coward, S.C., and served 20 years in the Army before retiring in 1979. In retirement, he was a substitute teacher in Anne Arundel County public schools.Arthur Gosling,\u2009Arlington schools chiefArthur Gosling, 83, the superintendent of Arlington Public Schools from 1985 to 1997 who oversaw increases in student enrollment, students for whom English was a second language, and students requiring special education courses, died Sept. 10 at a hospital in Arlington, Va. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Gosling.Dr. Gosling, an Arlington resident, was born in Akron, Ohio. He was a schoolteacher and administer in Illinois and New Jersey before becoming an area superintendent for Fairfax County Public Schools in 1980. In retirement Dr. Gosling held several education-related jobs. He stepped down this year as president of Encore Learning, a continuing-education program for adults.\u2014 From staff reports Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia. Community deaths",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Community deaths (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2385",
        "date": "2020-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/community-deaths/2020/10/14/dd10144c-0e57-11eb-8074-0e943a91bf08_story.html",
        "text": "Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia.Jeffrey Bauer,\u2009music directorWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJeffrey Bauer, 64, the music director and assistant minister of the Self-Revelation Church of Absolute Monism and the Gandhi Memorial Center in Bethesda, Md., died Aug. 21 at a care center in Rockville, Md. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Katy Bauer. Mr. Bauer, a Bethesda resident, was born at Fort Benning, Ga., where his father was serving in the military. He was a piano teacher for more than 40 years. He also was a trombonist and published trombone and piano compositions. He wrote music for a dance drama, \u201cMoha-Mudgar.\u201dHarry Markowicz,\u2009Gallaudet teacherHarry Markowicz, 83, an emeritus professor at Gallaudet University and a Holocaust survivor, died Sept. 15 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Arlene Markowicz.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Markowicz was born to Jewish parents in Berlin. His family fled to Belgium, where they were sheltered and hidden throughout World War II. They came to the United States in 1951 and settled in Seattle. In the early 1970s, he came to Washington as a staffer and researcher at Gallaudet\u2019s Linguistics Research Laboratory.Later, he studied linguistics in Paris and in 1982 returned to Gallaudet as a teacher in the English department. He retired in 2008. In retirement, he wrote stories for the website of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.Norman DiCarlantonio,\u2009electrical engineer Norman DiCarlantonio, 87, an electrical engineer whose work included technology on Department of Defense projects such as submarines, aircraft and spacecraft, died Sept. 17 at a health-care center in Ocala, Fla. The cause was a heart attack, said a daughter, Pamela DiCarlantonio.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. DiCarlantonio was born in Washington and over the years had worked for Vitro, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Booz Allen and CACI, among other defense contracting firms. In 2014, he moved to Florida from Centreville, Md.Mark Joelson,\u2009lawyerMark Joelson, 85, a Washington lawyer who practiced international and antitrust law with several firms before retiring in 1998 from Morgan Lewis, died Sept. 23 at his home in Arlington, Va. The cause was cancer, said a son, Dan Joelson.Mr. Joelson was born in Paris to Jewish parents and, in 1941, his family fled the German occupation of France, escaping through Spain to Portugal and eventually booking passage on a ship to America. After retiring from Morgan Lewis, he opened a small office in Washington and specialized in dispute resolutions.Jerome Moses,\u2009chief warrant officerJerome Moses, 85, a retired Army chief warrant officer who served in the office of the inspector general, died Sept. 11 at his home in Severn, Md. The cause was kidney failure, said a daughter, Nichelle Creek.Mr. Moses was born in Coward, S.C., and served 20 years in the Army before retiring in 1979. In retirement, he was a substitute teacher in the Anne Arundel County public schools.\u2014 From staff reports Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia. Community deaths",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2386",
        "date": "2018-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-young-moon-walker-and-nasas-longest-serving-astronaut-dies-at-87/2018/01/06/5ef1d15c-f313-11e7-b390-a36dc3fa2842_story.html",
        "text": "John Young, NASA's longest-serving astronaut, who flew in space six times, walked on the moon, commanded the first space shuttle and became the conscience of the astronaut corps, advocating for safety reforms in the wake of the 1986 Challenger disaster, died Jan. 5 at his home in Houston. He was 87. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA announced his death, citing complications from pneumonia as the cause.Mr. Young spent 42 years in the space program and was the only astronaut to go to space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs. He spent 13 years as chief of the astronaut corps, playing a major role in coordinating spaceflight training, scheduling and safety.Story continues below advertisementIn 1981, when he was named commander of the Columbia, the first space shuttle mission, he said he was recommended for the job by NASA's chief astronaut.Advertisement\"And at that time,\" he said with a straight face, \"I was the chief.\"Mr. Young was part of the first two-man space flight in 1965, with Virgil \"Gus\" Grissom aboard Gemini 3. In May 1969, he piloted the command module of Apollo 10 around the moon as a dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing two months later by Apollo 11. In 1972, as the commander of Apollo 16, Mr. Young became one of only 12 astronauts to set foot on the moon. He and another astronaut, Charles Duke, drove a vehicle 16 miles across the lunar surface, collecting more than 200 pounds of soil samples and rocks.Story continues below advertisementAt one point, the moon buggy's fender fell off, forcing Mr. Young to become an on-the-spot lunar mechanic. He attached a cardboard map of the moon to the vehicle and continued on his way.Mr. Young's decades of experience and low-key manner made him a revered figure among other astronauts.Advertisement\"If they have a hero, that hero is John Young,\" fellow astronaut Robert L. Crippen said in 2004. \"No man in the human spaceflight program is more respected.\"Soon after joining the astronaut corps in 1962, Mr. Young was tapped to help develop equipment and protective gear for space flights. When Grissom, his first spaceflight partner, was killed along with two other astronauts in a launchpad fire in 1967, Mr. Young became a forthright voice for astronaut safety.Story continues below advertisementHe and Grissom had spoken about faulty wiring in an early model of the Apollo spacecraft but had not brought their concerns to NASA authorities, for fear of losing their jobs. Mr. Young vowed never to stay silent again.\"Whenever and wherever I found a potential safety issue,\" he wrote in a 2012 memoir, \"Forever Young,\" \"I always did my utmost to make some noise about it, by memo or whatever means might best bring attention to it.\"AdvertisementHe was particularly outspoken after the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members. Mr. Young witnessed the disaster from the air, while aboard a training aircraft.Story continues below advertisementA NASA inquiry later determined that the explosion was caused, at least in part, by the failure of small rubber O-rings on a particularly cold day. Mr. Young contended that the astronauts were never made aware of such a potentially catastrophic technical problem.In a scathing 12-page memo, he wrote that NASA management had compromised the astronauts' safety to move forward with the launch.\"There is only one driving reason that such a potentially dangerous system would ever be allowed to fly \u2014 launch-schedule pressure,\" he wrote. Other longtime astronauts shared Mr. Young's views, but his complaints \u2014 and his reputation as a prophet of \"doom and gloom,\" in his words \u2014 rankled NASA's top brass. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAn Air Force colonel in the space program ripped Mr. Young in a letter, charging him with taking a \"cheap shot\" at NASA and behaving in an \"irresponsible, undisciplined and unprofessional manner.\" Within a year, Mr. Young was relieved of his duties as chief of the astronaut corps and assigned to another job at NASA, director of engineering and safety. In 1983, Mr. Young flew his sixth and final space mission, commanding the Columbia space shuttle. As the spacecraft reentered the Earth's atmosphere, two of its three auxiliary power units caught fire, and the main computer stopped working.\"Not to mince words, we were on fire when we landed,\" he wrote in his memoir, \"though of course we didn't know it at the time.\" Story continues below advertisementNearly 22 years later, the Columbia \u2014 the space shuttle Mr. Young had taken on its maiden voyage in 1981 \u2014 broke apart on reentry, killing the seven astronauts onboard. AdvertisementMr. Young, who was still officially an astronaut at the time, criticized NASA's internal culture, suggesting that an emphasis on cost-cutting had contributed to the potential for accidents.A space shuttle launch, he wrote in his memoir, \"always scared me more than it thrilled me.\"John Watts Young was born Sept. 24, 1930, in San Francisco and grew up mostly in Orlando. His father managed a citrus plantation for a time.After graduating from Georgia Tech in 1952, Mr. Young entered the Navy and became a test pilot. He was part of NASA's second astronaut corps, which also included Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon.Story continues below advertisementMr. Young had two flights each in the Gemini (1965 and 1966), Apollo (1969 and 1972) and space shuttle (1981 and 1983) programs. He retired from NASA in 2004 after 42 years, the longest tenure of any astronaut.AdvertisementHis first marriage, to Barbara White, ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, the former Susy Feldman of Houston; two children from his first marriage; and, according to his website, two grandchildren.Many of his fellow astronauts left NASA to enter business or public service or simply retreated from the public eye. Mr. Young retained a single-minded devotion to the space program that kept him working 12-hour days into his 70s. His only hobby was staying fit enough to maintain his active flight status.Story continues below advertisementEarly in his NASA career, Mr. Young had a role in testing freeze-dried food for space journeys. He was sometimes critical of the cuisine and once vulgarly complained about the flatulence produced by powdered orange juice. During his first mission, aboard Gemini 3 in 1965, Mr. Young smuggled aboard a corned beef sandwich. When it was time for the freeze-dried lunch, he handed the sandwich to Grissom as a joke.AdvertisementNASA officials were aghast and, from then on, strictly prohibited astronauts from taking contraband food on board.Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that John Young's father served in the Navy Seabees.\n Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nJoseph W. Schmitt, spacesuit technician who made astronauts shine, dies at 101\nPaul Weitz, astronaut who helped repair Skylab and commanded space shuttle, dies at 85\n\nJohn Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95\n Mr. Young made six flights and became a sharp critic of NASA after the 1986 Challenger disaster. John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2387",
        "date": "2018-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-young-moon-walker-and-nasas-longest-serving-astronaut-dies-at-87/2018/01/06/5ef1d15c-f313-11e7-b390-a36dc3fa2842_story.html",
        "text": "John Young, NASA's longest-serving astronaut, who flew in space six times, walked on the moon, commanded the first space shuttle and became the conscience of the astronaut corps, advocating for safety reforms in the wake of the 1986 Challenger disaster, died Jan. 5 at his home in Houston. He was 87. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA announced his death, citing complications from pneumonia as the cause.Mr. Young spent 42 years in the space program and was the only astronaut to go to space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs. He spent 13 years as chief of the astronaut corps, playing a major role in coordinating spaceflight training, scheduling and safety.Story continues below advertisementIn 1981, when he was named commander of the Columbia, the first space shuttle mission, he said he was recommended for the job by NASA's chief astronaut.Advertisement\"And at that time,\" he said with a straight face, \"I was the chief.\"Mr. Young was part of the first two-man space flight in 1965, with Virgil \"Gus\" Grissom aboard Gemini 3. In May 1969, he piloted the command module of Apollo 10 around the moon as a dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing two months later by Apollo 11. In 1972, as the commander of Apollo 16, Mr. Young became one of only 12 astronauts to set foot on the moon. He and another astronaut, Charles Duke, drove a vehicle 16 miles across the lunar surface, collecting more than 200 pounds of soil samples and rocks.Story continues below advertisementAt one point, the moon buggy's fender fell off, forcing Mr. Young to become an on-the-spot lunar mechanic. He attached a cardboard map of the moon to the vehicle and continued on his way.Mr. Young's decades of experience and low-key manner made him a revered figure among other astronauts.Advertisement\"If they have a hero, that hero is John Young,\" fellow astronaut Robert L. Crippen said in 2004. \"No man in the human spaceflight program is more respected.\"Soon after joining the astronaut corps in 1962, Mr. Young was tapped to help develop equipment and protective gear for space flights. When Grissom, his first spaceflight partner, was killed along with two other astronauts in a launchpad fire in 1967, Mr. Young became a forthright voice for astronaut safety.Story continues below advertisementHe and Grissom had spoken about faulty wiring in an early model of the Apollo spacecraft but had not brought their concerns to NASA authorities, for fear of losing their jobs. Mr. Young vowed never to stay silent again.\"Whenever and wherever I found a potential safety issue,\" he wrote in a 2012 memoir, \"Forever Young,\" \"I always did my utmost to make some noise about it, by memo or whatever means might best bring attention to it.\"AdvertisementHe was particularly outspoken after the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members. Mr. Young witnessed the disaster from the air, while aboard a training aircraft.Story continues below advertisementA NASA inquiry later determined that the explosion was caused, at least in part, by the failure of small rubber O-rings on a particularly cold day. Mr. Young contended that the astronauts were never made aware of such a potentially catastrophic technical problem.In a scathing 12-page memo, he wrote that NASA management had compromised the astronauts' safety to move forward with the launch.\"There is only one driving reason that such a potentially dangerous system would ever be allowed to fly \u2014 launch-schedule pressure,\" he wrote. Other longtime astronauts shared Mr. Young's views, but his complaints \u2014 and his reputation as a prophet of \"doom and gloom,\" in his words \u2014 rankled NASA's top brass. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAn Air Force colonel in the space program ripped Mr. Young in a letter, charging him with taking a \"cheap shot\" at NASA and behaving in an \"irresponsible, undisciplined and unprofessional manner.\" Within a year, Mr. Young was relieved of his duties as chief of the astronaut corps and assigned to another job at NASA, director of engineering and safety. In 1983, Mr. Young flew his sixth and final space mission, commanding the Columbia space shuttle. As the spacecraft reentered the Earth's atmosphere, two of its three auxiliary power units caught fire, and the main computer stopped working.\"Not to mince words, we were on fire when we landed,\" he wrote in his memoir, \"though of course we didn't know it at the time.\" Story continues below advertisementNearly 22 years later, the Columbia \u2014 the space shuttle Mr. Young had taken on its maiden voyage in 1981 \u2014 broke apart on reentry, killing the seven astronauts onboard. AdvertisementMr. Young, who was still officially an astronaut at the time, criticized NASA's internal culture, suggesting that an emphasis on cost-cutting had contributed to the potential for accidents.A space shuttle launch, he wrote in his memoir, \"always scared me more than it thrilled me.\"John Watts Young was born Sept. 24, 1930, in San Francisco and grew up mostly in Orlando. His father managed a citrus plantation for a time.After graduating from Georgia Tech in 1952, Mr. Young entered the Navy and became a test pilot. He was part of NASA's second astronaut corps, which also included Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon.Story continues below advertisementMr. Young had two flights each in the Gemini (1965 and 1966), Apollo (1969 and 1972) and space shuttle (1981 and 1983) programs. He retired from NASA in 2004 after 42 years, the longest tenure of any astronaut.AdvertisementHis first marriage, to Barbara White, ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, the former Susy Feldman of Houston; two children from his first marriage; and, according to his website, two grandchildren.Many of his fellow astronauts left NASA to enter business or public service or simply retreated from the public eye. Mr. Young retained a single-minded devotion to the space program that kept him working 12-hour days into his 70s. His only hobby was staying fit enough to maintain his active flight status.Story continues below advertisementEarly in his NASA career, Mr. Young had a role in testing freeze-dried food for space journeys. He was sometimes critical of the cuisine and once vulgarly complained about the flatulence produced by powdered orange juice. During his first mission, aboard Gemini 3 in 1965, Mr. Young smuggled aboard a corned beef sandwich. When it was time for the freeze-dried lunch, he handed the sandwich to Grissom as a joke.AdvertisementNASA officials were aghast and, from then on, strictly prohibited astronauts from taking contraband food on board.Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that John Young's father served in the Navy Seabees.\n Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nJoseph W. Schmitt, spacesuit technician who made astronauts shine, dies at 101\nPaul Weitz, astronaut who helped repair Skylab and commanded space shuttle, dies at 85\n\nJohn Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95\n Mr. Young made six flights and became a sharp critic of NASA after the 1986 Challenger disaster. John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Peter Beard, uninhibited artist and wildlife photographer, dies at 82 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2388",
        "date": "2020-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/peter-beard-uninhibited-artist-and-wildlife-photographer-dies-at-82/2020/04/26/3dae35a4-87c1-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html",
        "text": "Gored by an elephant, charged by a lion and accompanied on two continents by flocks of reporters, artists and celebrities, Peter Beard was \u201chalf Tarzan, half Byron,\u201d as the writer Bob Colacello once put it, an artist and photographer whose unrestrained appetites for drugs, alcohol and beautiful women gave him a reputation for being as wild as the animals he photographed. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAn heir to tobacco and railroad fortunes, Mr. Beard abandoned a life of wealth and privilege to live at Hog Ranch, a 45-acre encampment outside Nairobi, where he embarked on expeditions to document the \u201cwild-deer-ness\u201d of East Africa. In photographs, collages and diaries that he turned into works of art, he chronicled the destruction of savannas, forests and wetlands, and the deaths of thousands of elephants and other animals who called those habitats home.\u201cWhat amazes me most,\u201d he once said, \u201cis that we are so willing to lose things that we can never get back \u2014 even further, we appear hellbent on our own destruction. It\u2019s riveting.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Beard, who split his time between Kenya and the East End of Long Island, was found dead April\u00a019, not far from his home in Montauk, N.Y. He was 82, suffering from dementia and the effects of a stroke, and had been missing for nearly a month.His family confirmed the death in a statement on his website, writing, \u201cHe died where he lived: in nature.\u201d In an email Sunday, they said the cause of death had not yet been determined. A spokesman for the East Hampton police told reporters last week that neither foul play nor suicide was suspected.At home in both the bush and the city, Mr. Beard went barefoot in Kenya, wore a saronglike cloth known as a kikoi and once surprised a Vanity Fair reporter when he emerged from his tent accompanied by \u201cfour or five\u201d women. (\u201cWe were very cozy.\u201d) In Manhattan, he partied at Studio 54, befriended Salvador Dal\u00ed and lunched at the Algonquin Hotel with artists Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas and Jerome Hill, his cousin and mentor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHandsome, energetic and disinclined to monogamy, he was married three times, including to model Cheryl Tiegs. Declaring that \u201cthe last thing left in nature is the beauty of women,\u201d he was also romantically linked to women including Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski, a model and Warhol associate who called Mr. Beard \u201cone of the most beautiful men in the world.\u201dMr. Beard supported himself partly through magazine assignments, photographing the Rolling Stones on tour and taking pictures of Naomi Sims on the back of a crocodile and Veruschka von Lehndorff roping a rhino.But his primary focus was animals, including elephants and rhinos that he studied at Murchison Falls in Uganda; crocodiles that he researched at Lake Rudolph for the Kenyan government; and elephants he photographed by air and land, showing fields of bones that resembled abstract marble sculptures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Beard had been obsessed with nature ever since he was a young man, taking outdoor photographs on a Voightl\u00e4nder camera. He made his first expedition to Africa in 1955, at age 17, and a decade later he published his best-known work, \u201cThe End of the Game: The Last Word From Paradise\u201d (1965).Significantly revised in 1977, the book captured what Mr. Beard viewed as the changing face of Africa, including the decline of the \u201cgreat white hunters\u201d and the animals they had long pursued. Sanctuaries such as Tsavo East National Park in Kenya had emerged as \u201coverpopulated, overgrazed wasteland,\u201d he argued, as elephants and rhinos struggled to find food and eventually starved by the thousands.The book began \u201cas a sort of corny homework assignment,\u201d Mr. Beard said, written while he was still a college student at Yale. He had been fascinated by the work of Danish author Karen Blixen, whose 1937 memoir \u201cOut of Africa\u201d was published under the pen name Isak Dinesen, and later acquired Hog Ranch in part because it neighbored her former coffee plantation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile his pictures featured animals that Mr. Beard championed in interviews and on safari, he positioned himself as something more than a conservationist, insisting that he was interested more in questions of existence, mortality and the fate of humanity than in issues of breeding and habitat management. \u201cConservation,\u201d he told Vanity Fair in 1996, \u201cis for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingeses.\u201dIn elaborate collages, he layered his photos with handwritten notes, strands of horse hair, flattened insects, small bones, pebbles, cigarette butts and newspaper clippings. Many of his works were smeared with blood, from cows and other animals and sometimes from himself, and were developed out of enormous leather-bound diaries in which he chronicled his days and attached found objects.Some of the diary pages were hung in gallery shows. Others were featured in his books, as documents that preserved or repurposed a past that he said he sometimes wanted to leave behind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m an escapist,\u201d he told Vanity Fair. \u201cI\u2019m not a planner; I\u2019ve never made a decision about anything in my life. The good thing about Africa is that you can escape forever. You can do what you want, without someone looking over your shoulder.\u201dHe added, triumphantly, \u201cI\u2019m the most irresponsible person you ever met.\u201dThe middle of three sons, Peter Hill Beard was born in Manhattan on Jan.\u00a022, 1938. A great-grandfather, James Jerome Hill, had founded the Great Northern Railway, and a step-grandfather was tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard V.His mother \u201csuffered from lack of education and the disease of conformity,\u201d Mr. Beard said, and his father was a stockbroker who served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, leading Peter to spend part of his childhood on a military base in Alabama.Story continues below advertisementMr. Beard studied at the Buckley School in Manhattan, the Pomfret School in Connecticut and Yale University, where he enrolled in a pre-med program before switching to art. By the time he received his bachelor\u2019s degree in 1961, he had settled in Kenya.AdvertisementHe was reportedly on safari when he met Mary \u201cMinnie\u201d Cushing, a Newport, R.I., socialite whom he married in 1967. Their marriage ended in divorce, as did Mr. Beard\u2019s second marriage, to Tiegs. In 1986, he married ",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2389",
        "date": "2020-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-carruthers-dead/2020/12/31/ca5a366e-4acc-11eb-a9d9-1e3ec4a928b9_story.html",
        "text": "George R. Carruthers, an astrophysicist and engineer who was the principal designer of a telescope that went to the moon as part of NASA\u2019s Apollo 16 mission in 1972 in an effort to examine Earth\u2019s atmosphere and the composition of interstellar space, died Dec.\u00a026 at a Washington hospital. He was 81. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis brother Gerald Carruthers confirmed the death, saying Dr. Carruthers had dementia and other ailments.Dr. Carruthers, who built his first telescope when he was 10, had a singular focus on space science from an early age and spent virtually his entire career at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. He was one of the country\u2019s leading African American astrophysicists and among the few working in the space program.Story continues below advertisementHe began working on his Apollo telescope in 1969, when NASA posted what was called an \u201cannouncement of opportunity\u201d to design experiments for Apollo space flights. In November 1969 \u2014 four months after the first astronauts walked on the moon \u2014 Dr. Carruthers received a patent for an \u201cImage Converter for Detecting Electromagnetic Radiation Especially in Short Wave Lengths.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, it was a specialized kind of ultraviolet telescope, or spectrograph, that could observe radiation and other properties in space. (Another scientist, Thornton Page, proposed a similar idea, and the two joined forces for the NASA project, with Dr.\u00a0Carruthers as the principal investigator.)Assuming the dual roles of conceptual scientist and practical engineer, Dr. Carruthers led a team that designed a telescope that could electronically amplify images from space through a series of lenses, prism and mirror, just three inches in diameter. Then, by converting photons to electrons, the images could be recorded on film. In 1970, an early model of his telescope was included in an unmanned rocket flight that found the first evidence of molecular hydrogen in interstellar space.Story continues below advertisementThe instrument \u2014 sometimes called an electronographic camera \u2014 had to be small enough to fit aboard a spacecraft, strong enough to withstand the rigors of being on the lunar surface and precise enough to measure materials that could be observed only in ultraviolet light. Plus, it had to be manipulated by an astronaut wearing a spacesuit and thick gloves.Advertisement\u201cThere was still a dichotomy between engineers and scientists\u201d in his early years at the Naval Research Laboratory, Dr. Carruthers said in a 1992 oral history interview with the American Institute of Physics. \u201cWhen I talked to engineers, especially when I wanted to get parts made in the machine shop, they had sort of a negative attitude towards scientists because they felt that scientists didn\u2019t know how to design things, they weren\u2019t skilled at putting things together, they were all thumbs. They sort of found it strange that I was claiming to be a scientist, yet I was doing all my own drawings and doing a lot of my own assembly of parts.\u201dWhen mounted on a tripod, Dr. Carruthers\u2019s lightweight magnesium telescope stood about four feet high. It was covered in gold plate to protect it from the moon\u2019s extreme temperatures. Dr. Carruthers gave instructions to astronaut John W. Young, the Apollo 16 commander, on how to operate the device.Story continues below advertisementOn April 21, 1972, the lunar module from Apollo 16 touched down on the moon. For the next 71\u00a0hours, Young and fellow astronaut Charles Duke used Dr. Carruthers\u2019s telescope to peer deep into space, capturing more than 200 images of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, hundreds of stars and distant galaxies.AdvertisementIn essence, it was a planetary observatory on the moon, the first time such a sophisticated telescope had been used by astronauts in space. The observations had far-reaching implications for astronomy, astrophysics and the understanding of how stars are formed.\u201cIt was spectacularly successful, imaging the earth\u2019s outermost atmosphere in its entirety in the far ultraviolet range of the spectrum,\u201d David DeVorkin, senior curator of the history of astronomy at the National Air and Space Museum, told The Washington Post in an email. \u201cIt also surveyed myriad clouds of gas, stars and galaxies in deep space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDr. Carruthers continued to refine his telescopes and develop experiments at the Naval Research Laboratory for decades. In 1986, one of his instruments captured an ultraviolet image of Halley\u2019s comet.AdvertisementHe also designed instruments used aboard Skylab and space shuttle flights and for satellites measuring polar auroras and luminescence in the upper atmosphere. Dr.\u00a0Carruthers\u2019s original Apollo 16 telescope is still on the moon where the astronauts left it in 1972. A replica has been displayed at the Air and Space Museum.\u201cGeorge Carruthers was one of the most amazingly focused scientists I have ever met,\u201d DeVorkin said. \u201cHe lived to innovate and was endlessly improving his design for a telescope that could electronically amplify light by orders of magnitude and yet was robust enough to survive a rocket flight. His telescopes were physically small, yet extremely powerful.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGeorge Robert Carruthers was born Oct.\u00a01, 1939, in Cincinnati. His father, an engineer who worked at Ohio\u2019s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, died when Dr. Carruthers was 12.AdvertisementThe family, which included four children, resettled in Chicago, where his mother worked for the U.S. Postal Service.Dr. Carruthers built his first telescope out of glass lenses and a cardboard tube. He won science prizes throughout his youth, read science fiction and was fascinated by space exploration, an idea then in its infancy.At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he received a bachelor\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1961, a master\u2019s degree in nuclear engineering in 1962 and a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1964.Story continues below advertisementHe then became a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory. In a rare 1971 interview with The Post, Dr. Carruthers said he worked 14-hour days, seven days a week. In the seven years he had been at the naval lab, he had not yet taken a vacation.AdvertisementHe was described as \u201cpainfully shy,\u201d but \u201csomething happens to George when he\u2019s addressing his peers on astrophysics,\u201d a colleague told The Post. \u201cHe gives beautiful lectures.\u201dBeginning in the 1980s, Dr. Carruthers worked extensively with science outreach programs, particularly in schools with large numbers of Black students. He developed an apprentice program for high school students at the Naval Research Laboratory and taught summer courses for science teachers in D.C. public schools.Story continues below advertisementAfter retiring from the research laboratory in 2002, he taught Earth and space science for several years at Howard University. Dr. Carruthers, who lived in the District, received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He also received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, presented by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony in 2013.AdvertisementIn 1973, he married Sandra Redhead, who died in 2009. Survivors include his wife of nine years, Debra Thomas, and two brothers.Dr. Carruthers seemed surprised when a Post reporter asked him in 1971 whether he had any hobbies.\u201cHobbies?\u201d he said. \u201cThe projects we have here are so varied that it\u2019s hardly necessary to have a hobby.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesKatherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87James M. Beggs, NASA administrator in the 1980s, dies at 94 The 1972 Apollo 16 lunar mission included his telescope, which observed Earth\u2019s atmosphere and materials in space. George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2390",
        "date": "2020-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-carruthers-dead/2020/12/31/ca5a366e-4acc-11eb-a9d9-1e3ec4a928b9_story.html",
        "text": "George R. Carruthers, an astrophysicist and engineer who was the principal designer of a telescope that went to the moon as part of NASA\u2019s Apollo 16 mission in 1972 in an effort to examine Earth\u2019s atmosphere and the composition of interstellar space, died Dec.\u00a026 at a Washington hospital. He was 81. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis brother Gerald Carruthers confirmed the death, saying Dr. Carruthers had dementia and other ailments.Dr. Carruthers, who built his first telescope when he was 10, had a singular focus on space science from an early age and spent virtually his entire career at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. He was one of the country\u2019s leading African American astrophysicists and among the few working in the space program.Story continues below advertisementHe began working on his Apollo telescope in 1969, when NASA posted what was called an \u201cannouncement of opportunity\u201d to design experiments for Apollo space flights. In November 1969 \u2014 four months after the first astronauts walked on the moon \u2014 Dr. Carruthers received a patent for an \u201cImage Converter for Detecting Electromagnetic Radiation Especially in Short Wave Lengths.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, it was a specialized kind of ultraviolet telescope, or spectrograph, that could observe radiation and other properties in space. (Another scientist, Thornton Page, proposed a similar idea, and the two joined forces for the NASA project, with Dr.\u00a0Carruthers as the principal investigator.)Assuming the dual roles of conceptual scientist and practical engineer, Dr. Carruthers led a team that designed a telescope that could electronically amplify images from space through a series of lenses, prism and mirror, just three inches in diameter. Then, by converting photons to electrons, the images could be recorded on film. In 1970, an early model of his telescope was included in an unmanned rocket flight that found the first evidence of molecular hydrogen in interstellar space.Story continues below advertisementThe instrument \u2014 sometimes called an electronographic camera \u2014 had to be small enough to fit aboard a spacecraft, strong enough to withstand the rigors of being on the lunar surface and precise enough to measure materials that could be observed only in ultraviolet light. Plus, it had to be manipulated by an astronaut wearing a spacesuit and thick gloves.Advertisement\u201cThere was still a dichotomy between engineers and scientists\u201d in his early years at the Naval Research Laboratory, Dr. Carruthers said in a 1992 oral history interview with the American Institute of Physics. \u201cWhen I talked to engineers, especially when I wanted to get parts made in the machine shop, they had sort of a negative attitude towards scientists because they felt that scientists didn\u2019t know how to design things, they weren\u2019t skilled at putting things together, they were all thumbs. They sort of found it strange that I was claiming to be a scientist, yet I was doing all my own drawings and doing a lot of my own assembly of parts.\u201dWhen mounted on a tripod, Dr. Carruthers\u2019s lightweight magnesium telescope stood about four feet high. It was covered in gold plate to protect it from the moon\u2019s extreme temperatures. Dr. Carruthers gave instructions to astronaut John W. Young, the Apollo 16 commander, on how to operate the device.Story continues below advertisementOn April 21, 1972, the lunar module from Apollo 16 touched down on the moon. For the next 71\u00a0hours, Young and fellow astronaut Charles Duke used Dr. Carruthers\u2019s telescope to peer deep into space, capturing more than 200 images of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, hundreds of stars and distant galaxies.AdvertisementIn essence, it was a planetary observatory on the moon, the first time such a sophisticated telescope had been used by astronauts in space. The observations had far-reaching implications for astronomy, astrophysics and the understanding of how stars are formed.\u201cIt was spectacularly successful, imaging the earth\u2019s outermost atmosphere in its entirety in the far ultraviolet range of the spectrum,\u201d David DeVorkin, senior curator of the history of astronomy at the National Air and Space Museum, told The Washington Post in an email. \u201cIt also surveyed myriad clouds of gas, stars and galaxies in deep space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDr. Carruthers continued to refine his telescopes and develop experiments at the Naval Research Laboratory for decades. In 1986, one of his instruments captured an ultraviolet image of Halley\u2019s comet.AdvertisementHe also designed instruments used aboard Skylab and space shuttle flights and for satellites measuring polar auroras and luminescence in the upper atmosphere. Dr.\u00a0Carruthers\u2019s original Apollo 16 telescope is still on the moon where the astronauts left it in 1972. A replica has been displayed at the Air and Space Museum.\u201cGeorge Carruthers was one of the most amazingly focused scientists I have ever met,\u201d DeVorkin said. \u201cHe lived to innovate and was endlessly improving his design for a telescope that could electronically amplify light by orders of magnitude and yet was robust enough to survive a rocket flight. His telescopes were physically small, yet extremely powerful.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGeorge Robert Carruthers was born Oct.\u00a01, 1939, in Cincinnati. His father, an engineer who worked at Ohio\u2019s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, died when Dr. Carruthers was 12.AdvertisementThe family, which included four children, resettled in Chicago, where his mother worked for the U.S. Postal Service.Dr. Carruthers built his first telescope out of glass lenses and a cardboard tube. He won science prizes throughout his youth, read science fiction and was fascinated by space exploration, an idea then in its infancy.At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he received a bachelor\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1961, a master\u2019s degree in nuclear engineering in 1962 and a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1964.Story continues below advertisementHe then became a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory. In a rare 1971 interview with The Post, Dr. Carruthers said he worked 14-hour days, seven days a week. In the seven years he had been at the naval lab, he had not yet taken a vacation.AdvertisementHe was described as \u201cpainfully shy,\u201d but \u201csomething happens to George when he\u2019s addressing his peers on astrophysics,\u201d a colleague told The Post. \u201cHe gives beautiful lectures.\u201dBeginning in the 1980s, Dr. Carruthers worked extensively with science outreach programs, particularly in schools with large numbers of Black students. He developed an apprentice program for high school students at the Naval Research Laboratory and taught summer courses for science teachers in D.C. public schools.Story continues below advertisementAfter retiring from the research laboratory in 2002, he taught Earth and space science for several years at Howard University. Dr. Carruthers, who lived in the District, received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He also received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, presented by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony in 2013.AdvertisementIn 1973, he married Sandra Redhead, who died in 2009. Survivors include his wife of nine years, Debra Thomas, and two brothers.Dr. Carruthers seemed surprised when a Post reporter asked him in 1971 whether he had any hobbies.\u201cHobbies?\u201d he said. \u201cThe projects we have here are so varied that it\u2019s hardly necessary to have a hobby.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesKatherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87James M. Beggs, NASA administrator in the 1980s, dies at 94 The 1972 Apollo 16 lunar mission included his telescope, which observed Earth\u2019s atmosphere and materials in space. George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2391",
        "date": "2020-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-carruthers-dead/2020/12/31/ca5a366e-4acc-11eb-a9d9-1e3ec4a928b9_story.html",
        "text": "George R. Carruthers, an astrophysicist and engineer who was the principal designer of a telescope that went to the moon as part of NASA\u2019s Apollo 16 mission in 1972 in an effort to examine Earth\u2019s atmosphere and the composition of interstellar space, died Dec.\u00a026 at a Washington hospital. He was 81. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis brother Gerald Carruthers confirmed the death, saying Dr. Carruthers had dementia and other ailments.Dr. Carruthers, who built his first telescope when he was 10, had a singular focus on space science from an early age and spent virtually his entire career at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. He was one of the country\u2019s leading African American astrophysicists and among the few working in the space program.Story continues below advertisementHe began working on his Apollo telescope in 1969, when NASA posted what was called an \u201cannouncement of opportunity\u201d to design experiments for Apollo space flights. In November 1969 \u2014 four months after the first astronauts walked on the moon \u2014 Dr. Carruthers received a patent for an \u201cImage Converter for Detecting Electromagnetic Radiation Especially in Short Wave Lengths.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, it was a specialized kind of ultraviolet telescope, or spectrograph, that could observe radiation and other properties in space. (Another scientist, Thornton Page, proposed a similar idea, and the two joined forces for the NASA project, with Dr.\u00a0Carruthers as the principal investigator.)Assuming the dual roles of conceptual scientist and practical engineer, Dr. Carruthers led a team that designed a telescope that could electronically amplify images from space through a series of lenses, prism and mirror, just three inches in diameter. Then, by converting photons to electrons, the images could be recorded on film. In 1970, an early model of his telescope was included in an unmanned rocket flight that found the first evidence of molecular hydrogen in interstellar space.Story continues below advertisementThe instrument \u2014 sometimes called an electronographic camera \u2014 had to be small enough to fit aboard a spacecraft, strong enough to withstand the rigors of being on the lunar surface and precise enough to measure materials that could be observed only in ultraviolet light. Plus, it had to be manipulated by an astronaut wearing a spacesuit and thick gloves.Advertisement\u201cThere was still a dichotomy between engineers and scientists\u201d in his early years at the Naval Research Laboratory, Dr. Carruthers said in a 1992 oral history interview with the American Institute of Physics. \u201cWhen I talked to engineers, especially when I wanted to get parts made in the machine shop, they had sort of a negative attitude towards scientists because they felt that scientists didn\u2019t know how to design things, they weren\u2019t skilled at putting things together, they were all thumbs. They sort of found it strange that I was claiming to be a scientist, yet I was doing all my own drawings and doing a lot of my own assembly of parts.\u201dWhen mounted on a tripod, Dr. Carruthers\u2019s lightweight magnesium telescope stood about four feet high. It was covered in gold plate to protect it from the moon\u2019s extreme temperatures. Dr. Carruthers gave instructions to astronaut John W. Young, the Apollo 16 commander, on how to operate the device.Story continues below advertisementOn April 21, 1972, the lunar module from Apollo 16 touched down on the moon. For the next 71\u00a0hours, Young and fellow astronaut Charles Duke used Dr. Carruthers\u2019s telescope to peer deep into space, capturing more than 200 images of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, hundreds of stars and distant galaxies.AdvertisementIn essence, it was a planetary observatory on the moon, the first time such a sophisticated telescope had been used by astronauts in space. The observations had far-reaching implications for astronomy, astrophysics and the understanding of how stars are formed.\u201cIt was spectacularly successful, imaging the earth\u2019s outermost atmosphere in its entirety in the far ultraviolet range of the spectrum,\u201d David DeVorkin, senior curator of the history of astronomy at the National Air and Space Museum, told The Washington Post in an email. \u201cIt also surveyed myriad clouds of gas, stars and galaxies in deep space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDr. Carruthers continued to refine his telescopes and develop experiments at the Naval Research Laboratory for decades. In 1986, one of his instruments captured an ultraviolet image of Halley\u2019s comet.AdvertisementHe also designed instruments used aboard Skylab and space shuttle flights and for satellites measuring polar auroras and luminescence in the upper atmosphere. Dr.\u00a0Carruthers\u2019s original Apollo 16 telescope is still on the moon where the astronauts left it in 1972. A replica has been displayed at the Air and Space Museum.\u201cGeorge Carruthers was one of the most amazingly focused scientists I have ever met,\u201d DeVorkin said. \u201cHe lived to innovate and was endlessly improving his design for a telescope that could electronically amplify light by orders of magnitude and yet was robust enough to survive a rocket flight. His telescopes were physically small, yet extremely powerful.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGeorge Robert Carruthers was born Oct.\u00a01, 1939, in Cincinnati. His father, an engineer who worked at Ohio\u2019s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, died when Dr. Carruthers was 12.AdvertisementThe family, which included four children, resettled in Chicago, where his mother worked for the U.S. Postal Service.Dr. Carruthers built his first telescope out of glass lenses and a cardboard tube. He won science prizes throughout his youth, read science fiction and was fascinated by space exploration, an idea then in its infancy.At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he received a bachelor\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1961, a master\u2019s degree in nuclear engineering in 1962 and a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1964.Story continues below advertisementHe then became a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory. In a rare 1971 interview with The Post, Dr. Carruthers said he worked 14-hour days, seven days a week. In the seven years he had been at the naval lab, he had not yet taken a vacation.AdvertisementHe was described as \u201cpainfully shy,\u201d but \u201csomething happens to George when he\u2019s addressing his peers on astrophysics,\u201d a colleague told The Post. \u201cHe gives beautiful lectures.\u201dBeginning in the 1980s, Dr. Carruthers worked extensively with science outreach programs, particularly in schools with large numbers of Black students. He developed an apprentice program for high school students at the Naval Research Laboratory and taught summer courses for science teachers in D.C. public schools.Story continues below advertisementAfter retiring from the research laboratory in 2002, he taught Earth and space science for several years at Howard University. Dr. Carruthers, who lived in the District, received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He also received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, presented by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony in 2013.AdvertisementIn 1973, he married Sandra Redhead, who died in 2009. Survivors include his wife of nine years, Debra Thomas, and two brothers.Dr. Carruthers seemed surprised when a Post reporter asked him in 1971 whether he had any hobbies.\u201cHobbies?\u201d he said. \u201cThe projects we have here are so varied that it\u2019s hardly necessary to have a hobby.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesKatherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87James M. Beggs, NASA administrator in the 1980s, dies at 94 The 1972 Apollo 16 lunar mission included his telescope, which observed Earth\u2019s atmosphere and materials in space. George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2392",
        "date": "2020-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-carruthers-dead/2020/12/31/ca5a366e-4acc-11eb-a9d9-1e3ec4a928b9_story.html",
        "text": "George R. Carruthers, an astrophysicist and engineer who was the principal designer of a telescope that went to the moon as part of NASA\u2019s Apollo 16 mission in 1972 in an effort to examine Earth\u2019s atmosphere and the composition of interstellar space, died Dec.\u00a026 at a Washington hospital. He was 81. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis brother Gerald Carruthers confirmed the death, saying Dr. Carruthers had dementia and other ailments.Dr. Carruthers, who built his first telescope when he was 10, had a singular focus on space science from an early age and spent virtually his entire career at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. He was one of the country\u2019s leading African American astrophysicists and among the few working in the space program.Story continues below advertisementHe began working on his Apollo telescope in 1969, when NASA posted what was called an \u201cannouncement of opportunity\u201d to design experiments for Apollo space flights. In November 1969 \u2014 four months after the first astronauts walked on the moon \u2014 Dr. Carruthers received a patent for an \u201cImage Converter for Detecting Electromagnetic Radiation Especially in Short Wave Lengths.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, it was a specialized kind of ultraviolet telescope, or spectrograph, that could observe radiation and other properties in space. (Another scientist, Thornton Page, proposed a similar idea, and the two joined forces for the NASA project, with Dr.\u00a0Carruthers as the principal investigator.)Assuming the dual roles of conceptual scientist and practical engineer, Dr. Carruthers led a team that designed a telescope that could electronically amplify images from space through a series of lenses, prism and mirror, just three inches in diameter. Then, by converting photons to electrons, the images could be recorded on film. In 1970, an early model of his telescope was included in an unmanned rocket flight that found the first evidence of molecular hydrogen in interstellar space.Story continues below advertisementThe instrument \u2014 sometimes called an electronographic camera \u2014 had to be small enough to fit aboard a spacecraft, strong enough to withstand the rigors of being on the lunar surface and precise enough to measure materials that could be observed only in ultraviolet light. Plus, it had to be manipulated by an astronaut wearing a spacesuit and thick gloves.Advertisement\u201cThere was still a dichotomy between engineers and scientists\u201d in his early years at the Naval Research Laboratory, Dr. Carruthers said in a 1992 oral history interview with the American Institute of Physics. \u201cWhen I talked to engineers, especially when I wanted to get parts made in the machine shop, they had sort of a negative attitude towards scientists because they felt that scientists didn\u2019t know how to design things, they weren\u2019t skilled at putting things together, they were all thumbs. They sort of found it strange that I was claiming to be a scientist, yet I was doing all my own drawings and doing a lot of my own assembly of parts.\u201dWhen mounted on a tripod, Dr. Carruthers\u2019s lightweight magnesium telescope stood about four feet high. It was covered in gold plate to protect it from the moon\u2019s extreme temperatures. Dr. Carruthers gave instructions to astronaut John W. Young, the Apollo 16 commander, on how to operate the device.Story continues below advertisementOn April 21, 1972, the lunar module from Apollo 16 touched down on the moon. For the next 71\u00a0hours, Young and fellow astronaut Charles Duke used Dr. Carruthers\u2019s telescope to peer deep into space, capturing more than 200 images of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, hundreds of stars and distant galaxies.AdvertisementIn essence, it was a planetary observatory on the moon, the first time such a sophisticated telescope had been used by astronauts in space. The observations had far-reaching implications for astronomy, astrophysics and the understanding of how stars are formed.\u201cIt was spectacularly successful, imaging the earth\u2019s outermost atmosphere in its entirety in the far ultraviolet range of the spectrum,\u201d David DeVorkin, senior curator of the history of astronomy at the National Air and Space Museum, told The Washington Post in an email. \u201cIt also surveyed myriad clouds of gas, stars and galaxies in deep space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDr. Carruthers continued to refine his telescopes and develop experiments at the Naval Research Laboratory for decades. In 1986, one of his instruments captured an ultraviolet image of Halley\u2019s comet.AdvertisementHe also designed instruments used aboard Skylab and space shuttle flights and for satellites measuring polar auroras and luminescence in the upper atmosphere. Dr.\u00a0Carruthers\u2019s original Apollo 16 telescope is still on the moon where the astronauts left it in 1972. A replica has been displayed at the Air and Space Museum.\u201cGeorge Carruthers was one of the most amazingly focused scientists I have ever met,\u201d DeVorkin said. \u201cHe lived to innovate and was endlessly improving his design for a telescope that could electronically amplify light by orders of magnitude and yet was robust enough to survive a rocket flight. His telescopes were physically small, yet extremely powerful.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGeorge Robert Carruthers was born Oct.\u00a01, 1939, in Cincinnati. His father, an engineer who worked at Ohio\u2019s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, died when Dr. Carruthers was 12.AdvertisementThe family, which included four children, resettled in Chicago, where his mother worked for the U.S. Postal Service.Dr. Carruthers built his first telescope out of glass lenses and a cardboard tube. He won science prizes throughout his youth, read science fiction and was fascinated by space exploration, an idea then in its infancy.At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he received a bachelor\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1961, a master\u2019s degree in nuclear engineering in 1962 and a doctorate in aeronautical and astronautical engineering in 1964.Story continues below advertisementHe then became a research physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory. In a rare 1971 interview with The Post, Dr. Carruthers said he worked 14-hour days, seven days a week. In the seven years he had been at the naval lab, he had not yet taken a vacation.AdvertisementHe was described as \u201cpainfully shy,\u201d but \u201csomething happens to George when he\u2019s addressing his peers on astrophysics,\u201d a colleague told The Post. \u201cHe gives beautiful lectures.\u201dBeginning in the 1980s, Dr. Carruthers worked extensively with science outreach programs, particularly in schools with large numbers of Black students. He developed an apprentice program for high school students at the Naval Research Laboratory and taught summer courses for science teachers in D.C. public schools.Story continues below advertisementAfter retiring from the research laboratory in 2002, he taught Earth and space science for several years at Howard University. Dr. Carruthers, who lived in the District, received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He also received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, presented by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony in 2013.AdvertisementIn 1973, he married Sandra Redhead, who died in 2009. Survivors include his wife of nine years, Debra Thomas, and two brothers.Dr. Carruthers seemed surprised when a Post reporter asked him in 1971 whether he had any hobbies.\u201cHobbies?\u201d he said. \u201cThe projects we have here are so varied that it\u2019s hardly necessary to have a hobby.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesKatherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101John Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87James M. Beggs, NASA administrator in the 1980s, dies at 94 The 1972 Apollo 16 lunar mission included his telescope, which observed Earth\u2019s atmosphere and materials in space. George R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Donald Peterson Sr., who spacewalked from the shuttle Challenger, dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2393",
        "date": "2018-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/donald-peterson-sr-who-spacewalked-from-the-shuttle-challenger-dies-at-84/2018/05/29/d1d8d148-634d-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html",
        "text": "Donald H. Peterson Sr., an astronaut who served on the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Challenger and performed a spacewalk to test the ability of repairing the vehicle while it orbited more than 170 miles above the Earth, died May 27 at his home in El Lago, Tex. He was 84. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was Alzheimer\u2019s disease and bone cancer, said a daughter, Shari Peterson.An Air Force veteran, Mr. Peterson joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in September 1969, two months after Neil Armstrong led the historic first landing on the moon. Fourteen years later, Mr. Peterson joined the crew of the sixth NASA space shuttle mission \u2014 and the Challenger\u2019s first flight. (The shuttle exploded in 1986 while on its 10th mission.) Story continues below advertisementSoviet and American astronauts had conducted spacewalks since 1965, but the ability to exit the shuttle was an important step toward being able to perform repair and maintenance work on a space vehicle.AdvertisementMr. Peterson and fellow mission specialist Story Musgrave dressed in 250-pound white spacesuits with attached backpacks that allowed for greater mobility. Before exiting the Challenger, Mr. Peterson had to breathe pure oxygen for three-and-a-half hours, to gradually reduce excess nitrogen from his body. This was done to avoid decompression sickness, a condition similar to what scuba divers experience when changing air pressures too rapidly. The fresh oxygen made a \u201cnice whishing sound,\u201d so Mr. Peterson turned his receiver down and fell into \u201cprobably the best sleep I had on orbit,\u201d he recalled in a NASA oral-history interview in 2002. \u201cPeople asked, \u2018How in the world can you sleep just before you\u2019re getting ready to go?\u2019 I said, \u2018Well, you know, you get tired enough, you can sleep almost anywhere.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementNotable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)Story continues below advertisementBy 4:30 p.m., Mr. Peterson and Musgrave were in the 60-foot cargo bay, checking maintenance materials that future crews would need to preserve and, if necessary, repair the spacecraft. For about four hours, they appeared to move \u201clike underwater swimmers\u201d as the shuttle orbited the Earth at 17,500 mph, The Washington Post reported at the time.The men were roped to the shuttle\u2019s cargo bay while they tested their ability to carry a weighted bag, use a hand winch and perform other tasks. After launching a satellite, the crew decided they should test what would happen if the electronic motors powering the ability to tilt the collar at the back of the Orbiter stopped working. Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe had foot restraints, but it took so long to set them up and move them around, that we didn\u2019t want to do that,\u201d Mr. Peterson said in the NASA interview. \u201cSo I just held on with one hand, actually, to a piece of sheet metal, which is not the best way to hold on, and cranked the wrench with my other hand, and my legs floated out behind me. So as I cranked, my legs were flailing back and forth, like a swimmer, to react the load on the wrench.\u201dAdvertisementDuring this test, his suit started to leak. \u201cI\u2019ve got an alarm,\u201d he told Musgrave.\u201cStory stopped what he was doing and came over,\u201d Mr. Peterson recalled. \u201cWe were trying to check what was going on, and the seal popped back in place and the leak stopped.\u201d They then finished the procedure.Story continues below advertisementDonald Herod Peterson was born in Winona, Miss., on Oct. 22, 1933. His father ran a service station and sold furniture\n. Mr. Peterson\u2019s avid consumption of science fiction in his childhood drove his interest in aviation and space.He graduated in 1955 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and in 1962 he received a master\u2019s degree in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Early in his military career, he worked for the Air Training Command as a flight instructor and for the Air Force Systems Command as a nuclear systems analyst. AdvertisementHe served 24 years in the Air Force before retiring at the rank of colonel. After leaving NASA in 1984, he became a consultant on manned aerospace operations. His awards included the Meritorious Service Medal and the Air Force Commendation Medal.Story continues below advertisementHis wife of nearly 60 years, the former Bonnie Ruth Love, died in 2017. In addition to his daughter, of League City, Tex., survivors include two other children, Don Peterson Jr. of Fort Worth and Jean Stone of San Antonio; a brother; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nAlexander Orr, co-founder of experimental Hawthorne School, dies at 94\nBill Gold, designer of movie posters that helped shape Hollywood\u2019s mystique, dies at 97\nSerge Dassault, French billionaire who ran aviation empire, dies at 93\n Mr. Peterson was on the 1983 maiden voyage of the spacecraft. Donald Peterson Sr., who spacewalked from the shuttle Challenger, dies at 84",
        "author": "Ellie Silverman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Donald Peterson Sr., who spacewalked from the shuttle Challenger, dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2394",
        "date": "2018-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/donald-peterson-sr-who-spacewalked-from-the-shuttle-challenger-dies-at-84/2018/05/29/d1d8d148-634d-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html",
        "text": "Donald H. Peterson Sr., an astronaut who served on the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Challenger and performed a spacewalk to test the ability of repairing the vehicle while it orbited more than 170 miles above the Earth, died May 27 at his home in El Lago, Tex. He was 84. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was Alzheimer\u2019s disease and bone cancer, said a daughter, Shari Peterson.An Air Force veteran, Mr. Peterson joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in September 1969, two months after Neil Armstrong led the historic first landing on the moon. Fourteen years later, Mr. Peterson joined the crew of the sixth NASA space shuttle mission \u2014 and the Challenger\u2019s first flight. (The shuttle exploded in 1986 while on its 10th mission.) Story continues below advertisementSoviet and American astronauts had conducted spacewalks since 1965, but the ability to exit the shuttle was an important step toward being able to perform repair and maintenance work on a space vehicle.AdvertisementMr. Peterson and fellow mission specialist Story Musgrave dressed in 250-pound white spacesuits with attached backpacks that allowed for greater mobility. Before exiting the Challenger, Mr. Peterson had to breathe pure oxygen for three-and-a-half hours, to gradually reduce excess nitrogen from his body. This was done to avoid decompression sickness, a condition similar to what scuba divers experience when changing air pressures too rapidly. The fresh oxygen made a \u201cnice whishing sound,\u201d so Mr. Peterson turned his receiver down and fell into \u201cprobably the best sleep I had on orbit,\u201d he recalled in a NASA oral-history interview in 2002. \u201cPeople asked, \u2018How in the world can you sleep just before you\u2019re getting ready to go?\u2019 I said, \u2018Well, you know, you get tired enough, you can sleep almost anywhere.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementNotable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)Story continues below advertisementBy 4:30 p.m., Mr. Peterson and Musgrave were in the 60-foot cargo bay, checking maintenance materials that future crews would need to preserve and, if necessary, repair the spacecraft. For about four hours, they appeared to move \u201clike underwater swimmers\u201d as the shuttle orbited the Earth at 17,500 mph, The Washington Post reported at the time.The men were roped to the shuttle\u2019s cargo bay while they tested their ability to carry a weighted bag, use a hand winch and perform other tasks. After launching a satellite, the crew decided they should test what would happen if the electronic motors powering the ability to tilt the collar at the back of the Orbiter stopped working. Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe had foot restraints, but it took so long to set them up and move them around, that we didn\u2019t want to do that,\u201d Mr. Peterson said in the NASA interview. \u201cSo I just held on with one hand, actually, to a piece of sheet metal, which is not the best way to hold on, and cranked the wrench with my other hand, and my legs floated out behind me. So as I cranked, my legs were flailing back and forth, like a swimmer, to react the load on the wrench.\u201dAdvertisementDuring this test, his suit started to leak. \u201cI\u2019ve got an alarm,\u201d he told Musgrave.\u201cStory stopped what he was doing and came over,\u201d Mr. Peterson recalled. \u201cWe were trying to check what was going on, and the seal popped back in place and the leak stopped.\u201d They then finished the procedure.Story continues below advertisementDonald Herod Peterson was born in Winona, Miss., on Oct. 22, 1933. His father ran a service station and sold furniture\n. Mr. Peterson\u2019s avid consumption of science fiction in his childhood drove his interest in aviation and space.He graduated in 1955 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and in 1962 he received a master\u2019s degree in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Early in his military career, he worked for the Air Training Command as a flight instructor and for the Air Force Systems Command as a nuclear systems analyst. AdvertisementHe served 24 years in the Air Force before retiring at the rank of colonel. After leaving NASA in 1984, he became a consultant on manned aerospace operations. His awards included the Meritorious Service Medal and the Air Force Commendation Medal.Story continues below advertisementHis wife of nearly 60 years, the former Bonnie Ruth Love, died in 2017. In addition to his daughter, of League City, Tex., survivors include two other children, Don Peterson Jr. of Fort Worth and Jean Stone of San Antonio; a brother; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nAlexander Orr, co-founder of experimental Hawthorne School, dies at 94\nBill Gold, designer of movie posters that helped shape Hollywood\u2019s mystique, dies at 97\nSerge Dassault, French billionaire who ran aviation empire, dies at 93\n Mr. Peterson was on the 1983 maiden voyage of the spacecraft. Donald Peterson Sr., who spacewalked from the shuttle Challenger, dies at 84",
        "author": "Ellie Silverman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2395",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/chris-kraft-godfather-of-nasas-mission-control-dies-at-95/2019/07/22/bd058798-c000-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html",
        "text": "Chris Kraft, an aeronautical engineer who helped shape the success of NASA\u2019s manned space missions in the 1960s as the godfather of the ground-based Mission Control organization, died July 22, two days after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He was 95.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis death, in Houston, was announced by NASA. Other details were not immediately available. Mr. Kraft joined NASA\u2019s predecessor agency in the 1940s as an engineer and became an omnipresent leader during the space agency\u2019s heyday in the 1960s, a detail-oriented administrator who said he was \u201cparalyzed with shock\u201d on the day in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy declared the national priority of sending Americans to the moon by the end of the decade.Story continues below advertisementMr. Kraft played a crucial role in the achievements of John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and other space pioneers as a backstage visionary during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions. Mr. Kraft devised, implemented and managed NASA\u2019s earliest efforts to usher astronauts into space and to bring them safely \u2014 if not always uneventfully \u2014 back to Earth.AdvertisementLong based at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Mr. Kraft provided an exacting and, at times, intimidating management style that proved exceptionally effective during the infancy of manned space flight. The United States was scrambling to catch up with the Soviet Union after the first Sputnik satellite launch in 1957 and after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth in 1961.Much of Mr. Kraft\u2019s legacy was cultural: He granted wonky, Earthbound number-crunchers power over celebrated astronauts and space agency chieftains.Story continues below advertisementWhen Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White lingered during the first U.S. spacewalk in 1965, enjoying the scenery, Mr. Kraft commandeered the communications system and ordered him, \u201cGet back in!\u201d the ship.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)\u201cThis is the saddest day of my life,\u201d White said, before heading back into the cockpit.AdvertisementThe incident was indicative of the culture that Mr. Kraft set.\u201cIt was, \u2018I, the flight director, am in charge. Not you the astronaut, and not the head of NASA. You come to me,\u2019\u2009\u201d said author Michael Cassutt, who writes about the space program. \u201cMuch of the NASA culture as we envision it really derives from Chris Kraft.\u201dIn the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Kraft led the team that created Mission Control. He plunged into the minutiae, devising the first space flight plans, designing a communications and tracking system to monitor the astronauts and their health, and pondering what systems and signals they would need on board. He came to believe that most of the work of guiding humans in space would happen on Earth.Story continues below advertisementHis group set specific roles for ground controllers, deciding what tools they would use, what data they would see, whose conversations they would hear and how their seats would be arranged at Mission Control. Mr. Kraft also wrote rules to govern decision-making during missions.AdvertisementMr. Kraft served as flight director for all six Mercury missions and several Gemini flights. He made the final call when American astronauts were \u201cgo\u201d and shouldered the burden that even the smallest misstep might bring peril.When Alan B. Shepard Jr. awaited launch in Freedom 7 in May 1961 \u2014 poised to become the first American to fly in space, a month after Gagarin\u2019s triumph \u2014 Mr. Kraft began shaking so violently that he couldn\u2019t see the microphone attached to his headset.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI leaned my hands on my console and forced myself to settle down. It was tough,\u201d he recalled in his 2001 autobiography, \u201cFlight: My Life in Mission Control.\u201d \u201cA man was sitting out there on top of a rocket .\u2009.\u2009. the potential for disaster was never more than a moment away.\u201dMr. Kraft \u2014 often photographed wearing his communications headset or puffing on a celebratory cigar after a successful mission \u2014 became known for making authoritative decisions in crucial moments.AdvertisementHe clashed with Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit Earth, after his 1962 mission took a frightening turn when fuel ran low and a difficult reentry ended in a Caribbean splashdown 250 miles from the intended target.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments,\u201d Mr. Kraft wrote in his memoir. \u201cI swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space. He didn\u2019t.\u201dIn 1967, Mr. Kraft listened at a communications console, helpless, when a deadly launchpad fire killed Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, White and Roger Chaffee. In the wake of the tragedy, Mr. Kraft and his team improved spacecraft design by fixing faulty wiring and allowing astronauts easier escape if needed, among other changes.\u201cWhen the fire happened, it was a mess. The hardware was bad. The planning was bad,\u201d Mr. Kraft later told the Houston Chronicle. \u201cIt is a dastardly thing to talk about because it was the thing that ultimately saved the Apollo program. That is a terrible thing to say, but it\u2019s true.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBarely a year later, Mr. Kraft helped persuade NASA leaders to attempt a daring moon orbit, ahead of schedule, for the Apollo 8 mission. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders would be the first to fly atop a powerful Saturn V rocket, the first to escape Earth\u2019s gravity, the first to encounter and escape the moon\u2019s gravity, and the first to see the dark side of the moon.The mission proved wildly successful, with the crew orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve and reading from Genesis on a widely viewed television broadcast from space.Mr. Kraft was in the control room when controllers he had trained eased Apollo 11\u2019s Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin onto the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, fulfilling Kennedy\u2019s promise.Story continues below advertisementThe next year, when an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13 as it flew toward the moon, Mr. Kraft kept in close contact with flight director Gene Kranz, keeping tabs on Mission Control\u2019s efforts to bring the hobbled spacecraft back to Earth and communicating with administrators and the public.AdvertisementMr. Kraft objected to Hollywood\u2019s depiction of the episode in the 1995 film \u201cApollo 13,\u201d in which Kranz was portrayed by a vest-wearing Ed Harris.\u201cI was right there over Gene\u2019s shoulder and he wasn\u2019t nearly that dramatic,\u201d Mr. Kraft told USA Today, adding in his memoir that the arguments in the film\u2019s portrayal of Mission Control were \u201cmade up for good drama.\u201dStory continues below advertisementKranz credited Mr. Kraft with providing invaluable leadership during the Apollo 13 crisis and beyond.\u201cHe was the mentor, the teacher,\u201d he said of Mr. Kraft in a 1999 NASA oral history. \u201cEven though he physically left the console, he knew what these guys down here were doing. And he knew his job now was to give them the confidence to make the technical decisions .\u2009.\u2009. A spectacular man!\u201dIn 2011, NASA renamed the center\u2019s historic Mission Control building the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center.Roots of an explorerChristopher Columbus Kraft Jr. was born in Phoebus, Va., now part of the city of Hampton, on Feb. 28, 1924. His German immigrant grandparents had bestowed the ocean-crossing explorer\u2019s name on his father because he was born in New York City on the dedication day for Columbus Circle in 1892.AdvertisementMr. Kraft\u2019s father, a Veterans Administration finance officer, struggled with mental illness and was periodically hospitalized. Mr. Kraft\u2019s mother worked as a nurse. They raised Chris Jr., their only child, in a house next to the town dump.As a youngster, he sometimes got into fights but was also a high achiever who loved baseball and bugle corps. He enrolled at Virginia Tech in 1942. A childhood right-hand injury \u2014 he was accidentally burned in a fire \u2014 prevented him from enlisting in the Navy during World War II. He concentrated instead on baseball and on his studies in aeronautical engineering, a new discipline at the school.After graduating in December 1944 on an accelerated wartime schedule, he went to work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) flight research division at Langley, Va., a few miles from his childhood home. NACA became NASA in 1958.AdvertisementIn 1950, Mr. Kraft married Betty Anne Turnbull, his high school sweetheart. Beside his wife, survivors include two children.Mr. Kraft retired from NASA in 1982 after a decade as director of the Johnson Space Center. He remained in Houston, working as a consultant for the industry and, in 1994 and 1995, leading a NASA review team that recommended handing space shuttle operations over to a private contractor.In the latter part of his life, Mr. Kraft appeared in documentary films and offered public commentary on the space program. Speaking to NPR, he once quipped that he would not have ventured into space without being \u201canesthetized.\u201d But he advocated for manned space flights long after the Apollo mission ended and when NASA seemed happy to focus innovation on robotic landers such as Pathfinder, which landed on Mars in 1997.\u201cAny argument for dropping or curtailing manned space flight is fallacious,\u201d he wrote in his autobiography. \u201cThis nation can find no better investment in the health, safety, security, education, and overall well-being of the American public than for a visionary president to declare that Americans will land on Mars. And then make it happen.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nPaul Krassner, countercultural ringmaster and leader of the Yippies, dies at 87Robert Morgenthau, bane of rogue banks and scofflaws, dies at 99C\u00e9sar Pelli, celebrated architect of sweep and harmony, dies at 92 In the 1960s, he created the enduring culture of the flight director with near-absolute command authority. Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95",
        "author": "Eryn Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2396",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/chris-kraft-godfather-of-nasas-mission-control-dies-at-95/2019/07/22/bd058798-c000-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html",
        "text": "Chris Kraft, an aeronautical engineer who helped shape the success of NASA\u2019s manned space missions in the 1960s as the godfather of the ground-based Mission Control organization, died July 22, two days after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He was 95.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis death, in Houston, was announced by NASA. Other details were not immediately available. Mr. Kraft joined NASA\u2019s predecessor agency in the 1940s as an engineer and became an omnipresent leader during the space agency\u2019s heyday in the 1960s, a detail-oriented administrator who said he was \u201cparalyzed with shock\u201d on the day in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy declared the national priority of sending Americans to the moon by the end of the decade.Story continues below advertisementMr. Kraft played a crucial role in the achievements of John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and other space pioneers as a backstage visionary during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions. Mr. Kraft devised, implemented and managed NASA\u2019s earliest efforts to usher astronauts into space and to bring them safely \u2014 if not always uneventfully \u2014 back to Earth.AdvertisementLong based at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Mr. Kraft provided an exacting and, at times, intimidating management style that proved exceptionally effective during the infancy of manned space flight. The United States was scrambling to catch up with the Soviet Union after the first Sputnik satellite launch in 1957 and after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth in 1961.Much of Mr. Kraft\u2019s legacy was cultural: He granted wonky, Earthbound number-crunchers power over celebrated astronauts and space agency chieftains.Story continues below advertisementWhen Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White lingered during the first U.S. spacewalk in 1965, enjoying the scenery, Mr. Kraft commandeered the communications system and ordered him, \u201cGet back in!\u201d the ship.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)\u201cThis is the saddest day of my life,\u201d White said, before heading back into the cockpit.AdvertisementThe incident was indicative of the culture that Mr. Kraft set.\u201cIt was, \u2018I, the flight director, am in charge. Not you the astronaut, and not the head of NASA. You come to me,\u2019\u2009\u201d said author Michael Cassutt, who writes about the space program. \u201cMuch of the NASA culture as we envision it really derives from Chris Kraft.\u201dIn the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Kraft led the team that created Mission Control. He plunged into the minutiae, devising the first space flight plans, designing a communications and tracking system to monitor the astronauts and their health, and pondering what systems and signals they would need on board. He came to believe that most of the work of guiding humans in space would happen on Earth.Story continues below advertisementHis group set specific roles for ground controllers, deciding what tools they would use, what data they would see, whose conversations they would hear and how their seats would be arranged at Mission Control. Mr. Kraft also wrote rules to govern decision-making during missions.AdvertisementMr. Kraft served as flight director for all six Mercury missions and several Gemini flights. He made the final call when American astronauts were \u201cgo\u201d and shouldered the burden that even the smallest misstep might bring peril.When Alan B. Shepard Jr. awaited launch in Freedom 7 in May 1961 \u2014 poised to become the first American to fly in space, a month after Gagarin\u2019s triumph \u2014 Mr. Kraft began shaking so violently that he couldn\u2019t see the microphone attached to his headset.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI leaned my hands on my console and forced myself to settle down. It was tough,\u201d he recalled in his 2001 autobiography, \u201cFlight: My Life in Mission Control.\u201d \u201cA man was sitting out there on top of a rocket .\u2009.\u2009. the potential for disaster was never more than a moment away.\u201dMr. Kraft \u2014 often photographed wearing his communications headset or puffing on a celebratory cigar after a successful mission \u2014 became known for making authoritative decisions in crucial moments.AdvertisementHe clashed with Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit Earth, after his 1962 mission took a frightening turn when fuel ran low and a difficult reentry ended in a Caribbean splashdown 250 miles from the intended target.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments,\u201d Mr. Kraft wrote in his memoir. \u201cI swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space. He didn\u2019t.\u201dIn 1967, Mr. Kraft listened at a communications console, helpless, when a deadly launchpad fire killed Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, White and Roger Chaffee. In the wake of the tragedy, Mr. Kraft and his team improved spacecraft design by fixing faulty wiring and allowing astronauts easier escape if needed, among other changes.\u201cWhen the fire happened, it was a mess. The hardware was bad. The planning was bad,\u201d Mr. Kraft later told the Houston Chronicle. \u201cIt is a dastardly thing to talk about because it was the thing that ultimately saved the Apollo program. That is a terrible thing to say, but it\u2019s true.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBarely a year later, Mr. Kraft helped persuade NASA leaders to attempt a daring moon orbit, ahead of schedule, for the Apollo 8 mission. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders would be the first to fly atop a powerful Saturn V rocket, the first to escape Earth\u2019s gravity, the first to encounter and escape the moon\u2019s gravity, and the first to see the dark side of the moon.The mission proved wildly successful, with the crew orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve and reading from Genesis on a widely viewed television broadcast from space.Mr. Kraft was in the control room when controllers he had trained eased Apollo 11\u2019s Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin onto the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, fulfilling Kennedy\u2019s promise.Story continues below advertisementThe next year, when an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13 as it flew toward the moon, Mr. Kraft kept in close contact with flight director Gene Kranz, keeping tabs on Mission Control\u2019s efforts to bring the hobbled spacecraft back to Earth and communicating with administrators and the public.AdvertisementMr. Kraft objected to Hollywood\u2019s depiction of the episode in the 1995 film \u201cApollo 13,\u201d in which Kranz was portrayed by a vest-wearing Ed Harris.\u201cI was right there over Gene\u2019s shoulder and he wasn\u2019t nearly that dramatic,\u201d Mr. Kraft told USA Today, adding in his memoir that the arguments in the film\u2019s portrayal of Mission Control were \u201cmade up for good drama.\u201dStory continues below advertisementKranz credited Mr. Kraft with providing invaluable leadership during the Apollo 13 crisis and beyond.\u201cHe was the mentor, the teacher,\u201d he said of Mr. Kraft in a 1999 NASA oral history. \u201cEven though he physically left the console, he knew what these guys down here were doing. And he knew his job now was to give them the confidence to make the technical decisions .\u2009.\u2009. A spectacular man!\u201dIn 2011, NASA renamed the center\u2019s historic Mission Control building the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center.Roots of an explorerChristopher Columbus Kraft Jr. was born in Phoebus, Va., now part of the city of Hampton, on Feb. 28, 1924. His German immigrant grandparents had bestowed the ocean-crossing explorer\u2019s name on his father because he was born in New York City on the dedication day for Columbus Circle in 1892.AdvertisementMr. Kraft\u2019s father, a Veterans Administration finance officer, struggled with mental illness and was periodically hospitalized. Mr. Kraft\u2019s mother worked as a nurse. They raised Chris Jr., their only child, in a house next to the town dump.As a youngster, he sometimes got into fights but was also a high achiever who loved baseball and bugle corps. He enrolled at Virginia Tech in 1942. A childhood right-hand injury \u2014 he was accidentally burned in a fire \u2014 prevented him from enlisting in the Navy during World War II. He concentrated instead on baseball and on his studies in aeronautical engineering, a new discipline at the school.After graduating in December 1944 on an accelerated wartime schedule, he went to work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) flight research division at Langley, Va., a few miles from his childhood home. NACA became NASA in 1958.AdvertisementIn 1950, Mr. Kraft married Betty Anne Turnbull, his high school sweetheart. Beside his wife, survivors include two children.Mr. Kraft retired from NASA in 1982 after a decade as director of the Johnson Space Center. He remained in Houston, working as a consultant for the industry and, in 1994 and 1995, leading a NASA review team that recommended handing space shuttle operations over to a private contractor.In the latter part of his life, Mr. Kraft appeared in documentary films and offered public commentary on the space program. Speaking to NPR, he once quipped that he would not have ventured into space without being \u201canesthetized.\u201d But he advocated for manned space flights long after the Apollo mission ended and when NASA seemed happy to focus innovation on robotic landers such as Pathfinder, which landed on Mars in 1997.\u201cAny argument for dropping or curtailing manned space flight is fallacious,\u201d he wrote in his autobiography. \u201cThis nation can find no better investment in the health, safety, security, education, and overall well-being of the American public than for a visionary president to declare that Americans will land on Mars. And then make it happen.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nPaul Krassner, countercultural ringmaster and leader of the Yippies, dies at 87Robert Morgenthau, bane of rogue banks and scofflaws, dies at 99C\u00e9sar Pelli, celebrated architect of sweep and harmony, dies at 92 In the 1960s, he created the enduring culture of the flight director with near-absolute command authority. Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95",
        "author": "Eryn Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2397",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/chris-kraft-godfather-of-nasas-mission-control-dies-at-95/2019/07/22/bd058798-c000-11e7-959c-fe2b598d8c00_story.html",
        "text": "Chris Kraft, an aeronautical engineer who helped shape the success of NASA\u2019s manned space missions in the 1960s as the godfather of the ground-based Mission Control organization, died July 22, two days after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. He was 95.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis death, in Houston, was announced by NASA. Other details were not immediately available. Mr. Kraft joined NASA\u2019s predecessor agency in the 1940s as an engineer and became an omnipresent leader during the space agency\u2019s heyday in the 1960s, a detail-oriented administrator who said he was \u201cparalyzed with shock\u201d on the day in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy declared the national priority of sending Americans to the moon by the end of the decade.Story continues below advertisementMr. Kraft played a crucial role in the achievements of John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and other space pioneers as a backstage visionary during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions. Mr. Kraft devised, implemented and managed NASA\u2019s earliest efforts to usher astronauts into space and to bring them safely \u2014 if not always uneventfully \u2014 back to Earth.AdvertisementLong based at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Mr. Kraft provided an exacting and, at times, intimidating management style that proved exceptionally effective during the infancy of manned space flight. The United States was scrambling to catch up with the Soviet Union after the first Sputnik satellite launch in 1957 and after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth in 1961.Much of Mr. Kraft\u2019s legacy was cultural: He granted wonky, Earthbound number-crunchers power over celebrated astronauts and space agency chieftains.Story continues below advertisementWhen Gemini 4 astronaut Ed White lingered during the first U.S. spacewalk in 1965, enjoying the scenery, Mr. Kraft commandeered the communications system and ordered him, \u201cGet back in!\u201d the ship.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)\u201cThis is the saddest day of my life,\u201d White said, before heading back into the cockpit.AdvertisementThe incident was indicative of the culture that Mr. Kraft set.\u201cIt was, \u2018I, the flight director, am in charge. Not you the astronaut, and not the head of NASA. You come to me,\u2019\u2009\u201d said author Michael Cassutt, who writes about the space program. \u201cMuch of the NASA culture as we envision it really derives from Chris Kraft.\u201dIn the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mr. Kraft led the team that created Mission Control. He plunged into the minutiae, devising the first space flight plans, designing a communications and tracking system to monitor the astronauts and their health, and pondering what systems and signals they would need on board. He came to believe that most of the work of guiding humans in space would happen on Earth.Story continues below advertisementHis group set specific roles for ground controllers, deciding what tools they would use, what data they would see, whose conversations they would hear and how their seats would be arranged at Mission Control. Mr. Kraft also wrote rules to govern decision-making during missions.AdvertisementMr. Kraft served as flight director for all six Mercury missions and several Gemini flights. He made the final call when American astronauts were \u201cgo\u201d and shouldered the burden that even the smallest misstep might bring peril.When Alan B. Shepard Jr. awaited launch in Freedom 7 in May 1961 \u2014 poised to become the first American to fly in space, a month after Gagarin\u2019s triumph \u2014 Mr. Kraft began shaking so violently that he couldn\u2019t see the microphone attached to his headset.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI leaned my hands on my console and forced myself to settle down. It was tough,\u201d he recalled in his 2001 autobiography, \u201cFlight: My Life in Mission Control.\u201d \u201cA man was sitting out there on top of a rocket .\u2009.\u2009. the potential for disaster was never more than a moment away.\u201dMr. Kraft \u2014 often photographed wearing his communications headset or puffing on a celebratory cigar after a successful mission \u2014 became known for making authoritative decisions in crucial moments.AdvertisementHe clashed with Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, the second American to orbit Earth, after his 1962 mission took a frightening turn when fuel ran low and a difficult reentry ended in a Caribbean splashdown 250 miles from the intended target.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments,\u201d Mr. Kraft wrote in his memoir. \u201cI swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never again fly in space. He didn\u2019t.\u201dIn 1967, Mr. Kraft listened at a communications console, helpless, when a deadly launchpad fire killed Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, White and Roger Chaffee. In the wake of the tragedy, Mr. Kraft and his team improved spacecraft design by fixing faulty wiring and allowing astronauts easier escape if needed, among other changes.\u201cWhen the fire happened, it was a mess. The hardware was bad. The planning was bad,\u201d Mr. Kraft later told the Houston Chronicle. \u201cIt is a dastardly thing to talk about because it was the thing that ultimately saved the Apollo program. That is a terrible thing to say, but it\u2019s true.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBarely a year later, Mr. Kraft helped persuade NASA leaders to attempt a daring moon orbit, ahead of schedule, for the Apollo 8 mission. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders would be the first to fly atop a powerful Saturn V rocket, the first to escape Earth\u2019s gravity, the first to encounter and escape the moon\u2019s gravity, and the first to see the dark side of the moon.The mission proved wildly successful, with the crew orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve and reading from Genesis on a widely viewed television broadcast from space.Mr. Kraft was in the control room when controllers he had trained eased Apollo 11\u2019s Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin onto the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, fulfilling Kennedy\u2019s promise.Story continues below advertisementThe next year, when an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13 as it flew toward the moon, Mr. Kraft kept in close contact with flight director Gene Kranz, keeping tabs on Mission Control\u2019s efforts to bring the hobbled spacecraft back to Earth and communicating with administrators and the public.AdvertisementMr. Kraft objected to Hollywood\u2019s depiction of the episode in the 1995 film \u201cApollo 13,\u201d in which Kranz was portrayed by a vest-wearing Ed Harris.\u201cI was right there over Gene\u2019s shoulder and he wasn\u2019t nearly that dramatic,\u201d Mr. Kraft told USA Today, adding in his memoir that the arguments in the film\u2019s portrayal of Mission Control were \u201cmade up for good drama.\u201dStory continues below advertisementKranz credited Mr. Kraft with providing invaluable leadership during the Apollo 13 crisis and beyond.\u201cHe was the mentor, the teacher,\u201d he said of Mr. Kraft in a 1999 NASA oral history. \u201cEven though he physically left the console, he knew what these guys down here were doing. And he knew his job now was to give them the confidence to make the technical decisions .\u2009.\u2009. A spectacular man!\u201dIn 2011, NASA renamed the center\u2019s historic Mission Control building the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center.Roots of an explorerChristopher Columbus Kraft Jr. was born in Phoebus, Va., now part of the city of Hampton, on Feb. 28, 1924. His German immigrant grandparents had bestowed the ocean-crossing explorer\u2019s name on his father because he was born in New York City on the dedication day for Columbus Circle in 1892.AdvertisementMr. Kraft\u2019s father, a Veterans Administration finance officer, struggled with mental illness and was periodically hospitalized. Mr. Kraft\u2019s mother worked as a nurse. They raised Chris Jr., their only child, in a house next to the town dump.As a youngster, he sometimes got into fights but was also a high achiever who loved baseball and bugle corps. He enrolled at Virginia Tech in 1942. A childhood right-hand injury \u2014 he was accidentally burned in a fire \u2014 prevented him from enlisting in the Navy during World War II. He concentrated instead on baseball and on his studies in aeronautical engineering, a new discipline at the school.After graduating in December 1944 on an accelerated wartime schedule, he went to work at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) flight research division at Langley, Va., a few miles from his childhood home. NACA became NASA in 1958.AdvertisementIn 1950, Mr. Kraft married Betty Anne Turnbull, his high school sweetheart. Beside his wife, survivors include two children.Mr. Kraft retired from NASA in 1982 after a decade as director of the Johnson Space Center. He remained in Houston, working as a consultant for the industry and, in 1994 and 1995, leading a NASA review team that recommended handing space shuttle operations over to a private contractor.In the latter part of his life, Mr. Kraft appeared in documentary films and offered public commentary on the space program. Speaking to NPR, he once quipped that he would not have ventured into space without being \u201canesthetized.\u201d But he advocated for manned space flights long after the Apollo mission ended and when NASA seemed happy to focus innovation on robotic landers such as Pathfinder, which landed on Mars in 1997.\u201cAny argument for dropping or curtailing manned space flight is fallacious,\u201d he wrote in his autobiography. \u201cThis nation can find no better investment in the health, safety, security, education, and overall well-being of the American public than for a visionary president to declare that Americans will land on Mars. And then make it happen.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nPaul Krassner, countercultural ringmaster and leader of the Yippies, dies at 87Robert Morgenthau, bane of rogue banks and scofflaws, dies at 99C\u00e9sar Pelli, celebrated architect of sweep and harmony, dies at 92 In the 1960s, he created the enduring culture of the flight director with near-absolute command authority. Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95",
        "author": "Eryn Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Angelo Grubisic, space scientist and champion wingsuit flier, dies at 38 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2398",
        "date": "2019-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/angelo-grubisic-space-scientist-and-champion-wingsuit-flier-dies-at-38/2019/09/04/f83802d6-c8dd-11e9-a1fe-ca46e8d573c0_story.html",
        "text": "As an extreme sportsman, Englishman Angelo Grubisic\u2019s goal was to break the world records for flying as far, as fast, for as long and from as high an altitude as possible \u2014 not in a plane, but in a wingsuit, an aerodynamic overall with fabric wings at the arms. He leaped from mountains or aircraft to glide toward the ground before deploying his parachute. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile training for those world records, he leaped from a helicopter over the Asir mountains of southwestern Saudi Arabia on Aug. 21 and, according to three fellow fliers, performed a 360-degree barrel-roll. He was known as a \u201cproximity flier\u201d \u2014 one who stays close to the landscape \u2014 and hit a ridge at 108 mph, dying instantly, according to the fliers.Dr. Grubisic called his world-record preparations \u201cthe Icarus Project,\u201d after the Greek mythological figure who carried himself aloft on homemade wings of feathers and wax but died after flying too close to the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe University of Southampton, in southern England, where Dr. Grubisic was a lecturer in aeronautics and advanced propulsion and had enlisted 10 students to help design the ideal wingsuit, confirmed his death at age 38.The current world record for wingsuit flight duration was set by Colombian skydiver Jhonathan Florez in 2012 with a time of nine minutes and six seconds. (Florez was killed during a wingsuit flight when he crashed into a mountainside in Switzerland in 2015.)The highest-altitude wingsuit jump \u2014 from a plane at 37,426 feet \u2014 was achieved on Veterans Day 2015 by retired U.S. Air Force Pararescueman Jimmy Petrolia over Davis, Calif., to raise funds for Special Operations forces killed in the line of duty.Story continues below advertisementThe highest speed so far was reached by Japanese wingsuit pilot Shinichi Ito in 2011, when he hit 226 mph. The \u201cgreatest absolute distance\u201d record of 19.94 miles was set by American Kyle Lobpries, also over Davis, in 2016.AdvertisementThe goal of Dr. Grubisic\u2019s Icarus Project was to jump from 45,000 feet and fly as far as possible for around 15 minutes, reaching 280 mph.Wingsuit-flying and BASE jumping \u2014 the acronym refers to free-falling from bridges, antennae, spans or Earth features \u2014 were Dr. Grubisic\u2019s hobbies, but he was far more than a hobbyist. He was also described in Britain as \u201cRocket Man\u201d or \u201cJet Man\u201d for his stunts in which he took off and flew James Bond-style in a suit powered by jet engines on his arms and back.Story continues below advertisementHe and the jet suit\u2019s inventor, Richard \u201cIron Man\u201d Browning, stunned tourists last year at the Bournemouth Air Festival in southern England when they took off from a pier and buzzed over sea bathers at low level before one of Dr. Grubisic\u2019s arm engines exploded. He cartwheeled and crashed in shallow surf.AdvertisementUnlike some extreme athletes, Dr. Grubisic was after more than an adrenaline rush. At the University of Southampton, he specialized in the development and testing of advanced propulsion systems for spacecraft in support of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. He was a consulting engineer for the ESA during its BepiColombo mission to Mercury last year, a joint project with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency using two satellites that are due to reach Mercury\u2019s orbit in 2025.Dr. Grubisic was also a consultant to NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge, Calif., which is involved in exploration research on Mars, including probing the possibility of life on the Red Planet.Story continues below advertisementAngelo Niko Grubisic was born in Walsall, north of Birmingham, on June 24, 1981, and grew up in nearby Willenhall. His father, a Serb immigrant, worked in a ball-bearing factory and married an English barmaid.AdvertisementAngelo was 3 when his parents divorced, and he and a sister were brought up by their mother.\u201cBeing a one-parent family was tough financially and although poor in monetary terms, both Angelo and I always considered ourselves rich in love,\u201d Karina Grubisic told The Washington Post. \u201cMy mom would put us before everything else. She didn\u2019t have a great education. She\u2019s dyslexic, but she\u2019s certainly intelligent and became a private accountant. She was driven to get us both to university, which she did, but most of all, she poured all the love she had into us.\u201d (Dr. Grubisic was also diagnosed as dyslexic only a few years ago.)Story continues below advertisementHe was deeply influenced by his maternal grandfather, Tom Richardson, a daredevil who enjoyed skydiving and attending air shows. \u201cI\u2019m certain this is where Angelo inherited his fearless streak,\u201d Karina Grubisic said. \u201cOur granddad made his last skydive on his 80th birthday.\u201dAdvertisementIn addition to his sister, Dr. Grubisic\u2019s survivors include his parents, a half brother and a half sister.Angelo Grubisic studied aerospace technology at Coventry University, obtaining a bachelor\u2019s of engineering degree in 2003. At the International Space University in France, dedicated to the development of space exploration for peaceful purposes, he received a master\u2019s degree in space studies in 2005. He completed a doctorate in advanced propulsion at Southampton in 2009.Story continues below advertisementHe attended a joint post-doctorate fellowship program with Southampton and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Using his experience gained at NASA, Dr. Grubisic worked with the Paris-based ESA. He was instrumental in developing the Solar Electric Propulsion System for the BepiColombo mission.On July 4, Dr. Grubisic, jumping from a helicopter, was crowned British national wingsuit champion in the advanced category at Dunkeswell Aerodrome in southwest England.Advertisement\u201cMy brother grew up on classic war films like \u2018Platoon\u2019 and \u2018Full Metal Jacket,\u2019\u2009\u201d Karina Grubisic said. \u201cAt first he wanted to be an Apache helicopter pilot in the Royal Marines but then realized he would make more of a contribution to mankind if he helped push it forward instead of destroying it.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nBarbara Probst Solomon, writer who chronicled Franco\u2019s rule in Spain, dies at 90Leslie H. Gelb, journalist, think-tank leader and foreign policy expert, dies at 82Valerie Harper, actress beloved as the chronically single, irrepressibly funny Rhoda Morgenstern, dies at 80 The daredevil rocket scientist worked with NASA and its European counterpart. Angelo Grubisic, space scientist and champion wingsuit flier, dies at 38",
        "author": "Phil Davison"
    },
    {
        "title": "Angelo Grubisic, space scientist and champion wingsuit flier, dies at 38 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2399",
        "date": "2019-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/angelo-grubisic-space-scientist-and-champion-wingsuit-flier-dies-at-38/2019/09/04/f83802d6-c8dd-11e9-a1fe-ca46e8d573c0_story.html",
        "text": "As an extreme sportsman, Englishman Angelo Grubisic\u2019s goal was to break the world records for flying as far, as fast, for as long and from as high an altitude as possible \u2014 not in a plane, but in a wingsuit, an aerodynamic overall with fabric wings at the arms. He leaped from mountains or aircraft to glide toward the ground before deploying his parachute. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile training for those world records, he leaped from a helicopter over the Asir mountains of southwestern Saudi Arabia on Aug. 21 and, according to three fellow fliers, performed a 360-degree barrel-roll. He was known as a \u201cproximity flier\u201d \u2014 one who stays close to the landscape \u2014 and hit a ridge at 108 mph, dying instantly, according to the fliers.Dr. Grubisic called his world-record preparations \u201cthe Icarus Project,\u201d after the Greek mythological figure who carried himself aloft on homemade wings of feathers and wax but died after flying too close to the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe University of Southampton, in southern England, where Dr. Grubisic was a lecturer in aeronautics and advanced propulsion and had enlisted 10 students to help design the ideal wingsuit, confirmed his death at age 38.The current world record for wingsuit flight duration was set by Colombian skydiver Jhonathan Florez in 2012 with a time of nine minutes and six seconds. (Florez was killed during a wingsuit flight when he crashed into a mountainside in Switzerland in 2015.)The highest-altitude wingsuit jump \u2014 from a plane at 37,426 feet \u2014 was achieved on Veterans Day 2015 by retired U.S. Air Force Pararescueman Jimmy Petrolia over Davis, Calif., to raise funds for Special Operations forces killed in the line of duty.Story continues below advertisementThe highest speed so far was reached by Japanese wingsuit pilot Shinichi Ito in 2011, when he hit 226 mph. The \u201cgreatest absolute distance\u201d record of 19.94 miles was set by American Kyle Lobpries, also over Davis, in 2016.AdvertisementThe goal of Dr. Grubisic\u2019s Icarus Project was to jump from 45,000 feet and fly as far as possible for around 15 minutes, reaching 280 mph.Wingsuit-flying and BASE jumping \u2014 the acronym refers to free-falling from bridges, antennae, spans or Earth features \u2014 were Dr. Grubisic\u2019s hobbies, but he was far more than a hobbyist. He was also described in Britain as \u201cRocket Man\u201d or \u201cJet Man\u201d for his stunts in which he took off and flew James Bond-style in a suit powered by jet engines on his arms and back.Story continues below advertisementHe and the jet suit\u2019s inventor, Richard \u201cIron Man\u201d Browning, stunned tourists last year at the Bournemouth Air Festival in southern England when they took off from a pier and buzzed over sea bathers at low level before one of Dr. Grubisic\u2019s arm engines exploded. He cartwheeled and crashed in shallow surf.AdvertisementUnlike some extreme athletes, Dr. Grubisic was after more than an adrenaline rush. At the University of Southampton, he specialized in the development and testing of advanced propulsion systems for spacecraft in support of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. He was a consulting engineer for the ESA during its BepiColombo mission to Mercury last year, a joint project with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency using two satellites that are due to reach Mercury\u2019s orbit in 2025.Dr. Grubisic was also a consultant to NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge, Calif., which is involved in exploration research on Mars, including probing the possibility of life on the Red Planet.Story continues below advertisementAngelo Niko Grubisic was born in Walsall, north of Birmingham, on June 24, 1981, and grew up in nearby Willenhall. His father, a Serb immigrant, worked in a ball-bearing factory and married an English barmaid.AdvertisementAngelo was 3 when his parents divorced, and he and a sister were brought up by their mother.\u201cBeing a one-parent family was tough financially and although poor in monetary terms, both Angelo and I always considered ourselves rich in love,\u201d Karina Grubisic told The Washington Post. \u201cMy mom would put us before everything else. She didn\u2019t have a great education. She\u2019s dyslexic, but she\u2019s certainly intelligent and became a private accountant. She was driven to get us both to university, which she did, but most of all, she poured all the love she had into us.\u201d (Dr. Grubisic was also diagnosed as dyslexic only a few years ago.)Story continues below advertisementHe was deeply influenced by his maternal grandfather, Tom Richardson, a daredevil who enjoyed skydiving and attending air shows. \u201cI\u2019m certain this is where Angelo inherited his fearless streak,\u201d Karina Grubisic said. \u201cOur granddad made his last skydive on his 80th birthday.\u201dAdvertisementIn addition to his sister, Dr. Grubisic\u2019s survivors include his parents, a half brother and a half sister.Angelo Grubisic studied aerospace technology at Coventry University, obtaining a bachelor\u2019s of engineering degree in 2003. At the International Space University in France, dedicated to the development of space exploration for peaceful purposes, he received a master\u2019s degree in space studies in 2005. He completed a doctorate in advanced propulsion at Southampton in 2009.Story continues below advertisementHe attended a joint post-doctorate fellowship program with Southampton and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Using his experience gained at NASA, Dr. Grubisic worked with the Paris-based ESA. He was instrumental in developing the Solar Electric Propulsion System for the BepiColombo mission.On July 4, Dr. Grubisic, jumping from a helicopter, was crowned British national wingsuit champion in the advanced category at Dunkeswell Aerodrome in southwest England.Advertisement\u201cMy brother grew up on classic war films like \u2018Platoon\u2019 and \u2018Full Metal Jacket,\u2019\u2009\u201d Karina Grubisic said. \u201cAt first he wanted to be an Apache helicopter pilot in the Royal Marines but then realized he would make more of a contribution to mankind if he helped push it forward instead of destroying it.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nBarbara Probst Solomon, writer who chronicled Franco\u2019s rule in Spain, dies at 90Leslie H. Gelb, journalist, think-tank leader and foreign policy expert, dies at 82Valerie Harper, actress beloved as the chronically single, irrepressibly funny Rhoda Morgenstern, dies at 80 The daredevil rocket scientist worked with NASA and its European counterpart. Angelo Grubisic, space scientist and champion wingsuit flier, dies at 38",
        "author": "Phil Davison"
    },
    {
        "title": "Angelo Grubisic, space scientist and champion wingsuit flier, dies at 38 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2400",
        "date": "2019-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/angelo-grubisic-space-scientist-and-champion-wingsuit-flier-dies-at-38/2019/09/04/f83802d6-c8dd-11e9-a1fe-ca46e8d573c0_story.html",
        "text": "As an extreme sportsman, Englishman Angelo Grubisic\u2019s goal was to break the world records for flying as far, as fast, for as long and from as high an altitude as possible \u2014 not in a plane, but in a wingsuit, an aerodynamic overall with fabric wings at the arms. He leaped from mountains or aircraft to glide toward the ground before deploying his parachute. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile training for those world records, he leaped from a helicopter over the Asir mountains of southwestern Saudi Arabia on Aug. 21 and, according to three fellow fliers, performed a 360-degree barrel-roll. He was known as a \u201cproximity flier\u201d \u2014 one who stays close to the landscape \u2014 and hit a ridge at 108 mph, dying instantly, according to the fliers.Dr. Grubisic called his world-record preparations \u201cthe Icarus Project,\u201d after the Greek mythological figure who carried himself aloft on homemade wings of feathers and wax but died after flying too close to the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe University of Southampton, in southern England, where Dr. Grubisic was a lecturer in aeronautics and advanced propulsion and had enlisted 10 students to help design the ideal wingsuit, confirmed his death at age 38.The current world record for wingsuit flight duration was set by Colombian skydiver Jhonathan Florez in 2012 with a time of nine minutes and six seconds. (Florez was killed during a wingsuit flight when he crashed into a mountainside in Switzerland in 2015.)The highest-altitude wingsuit jump \u2014 from a plane at 37,426 feet \u2014 was achieved on Veterans Day 2015 by retired U.S. Air Force Pararescueman Jimmy Petrolia over Davis, Calif., to raise funds for Special Operations forces killed in the line of duty.Story continues below advertisementThe highest speed so far was reached by Japanese wingsuit pilot Shinichi Ito in 2011, when he hit 226 mph. The \u201cgreatest absolute distance\u201d record of 19.94 miles was set by American Kyle Lobpries, also over Davis, in 2016.AdvertisementThe goal of Dr. Grubisic\u2019s Icarus Project was to jump from 45,000 feet and fly as far as possible for around 15 minutes, reaching 280 mph.Wingsuit-flying and BASE jumping \u2014 the acronym refers to free-falling from bridges, antennae, spans or Earth features \u2014 were Dr. Grubisic\u2019s hobbies, but he was far more than a hobbyist. He was also described in Britain as \u201cRocket Man\u201d or \u201cJet Man\u201d for his stunts in which he took off and flew James Bond-style in a suit powered by jet engines on his arms and back.Story continues below advertisementHe and the jet suit\u2019s inventor, Richard \u201cIron Man\u201d Browning, stunned tourists last year at the Bournemouth Air Festival in southern England when they took off from a pier and buzzed over sea bathers at low level before one of Dr. Grubisic\u2019s arm engines exploded. He cartwheeled and crashed in shallow surf.AdvertisementUnlike some extreme athletes, Dr. Grubisic was after more than an adrenaline rush. At the University of Southampton, he specialized in the development and testing of advanced propulsion systems for spacecraft in support of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. He was a consulting engineer for the ESA during its BepiColombo mission to Mercury last year, a joint project with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency using two satellites that are due to reach Mercury\u2019s orbit in 2025.Dr. Grubisic was also a consultant to NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Ca\u00f1ada Flintridge, Calif., which is involved in exploration research on Mars, including probing the possibility of life on the Red Planet.Story continues below advertisementAngelo Niko Grubisic was born in Walsall, north of Birmingham, on June 24, 1981, and grew up in nearby Willenhall. His father, a Serb immigrant, worked in a ball-bearing factory and married an English barmaid.AdvertisementAngelo was 3 when his parents divorced, and he and a sister were brought up by their mother.\u201cBeing a one-parent family was tough financially and although poor in monetary terms, both Angelo and I always considered ourselves rich in love,\u201d Karina Grubisic told The Washington Post. \u201cMy mom would put us before everything else. She didn\u2019t have a great education. She\u2019s dyslexic, but she\u2019s certainly intelligent and became a private accountant. She was driven to get us both to university, which she did, but most of all, she poured all the love she had into us.\u201d (Dr. Grubisic was also diagnosed as dyslexic only a few years ago.)Story continues below advertisementHe was deeply influenced by his maternal grandfather, Tom Richardson, a daredevil who enjoyed skydiving and attending air shows. \u201cI\u2019m certain this is where Angelo inherited his fearless streak,\u201d Karina Grubisic said. \u201cOur granddad made his last skydive on his 80th birthday.\u201dAdvertisementIn addition to his sister, Dr. Grubisic\u2019s survivors include his parents, a half brother and a half sister.Angelo Grubisic studied aerospace technology at Coventry University, obtaining a bachelor\u2019s of engineering degree in 2003. At the International Space University in France, dedicated to the development of space exploration for peaceful purposes, he received a master\u2019s degree in space studies in 2005. He completed a doctorate in advanced propulsion at Southampton in 2009.Story continues below advertisementHe attended a joint post-doctorate fellowship program with Southampton and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Using his experience gained at NASA, Dr. Grubisic worked with the Paris-based ESA. He was instrumental in developing the Solar Electric Propulsion System for the BepiColombo mission.On July 4, Dr. Grubisic, jumping from a helicopter, was crowned British national wingsuit champion in the advanced category at Dunkeswell Aerodrome in southwest England.Advertisement\u201cMy brother grew up on classic war films like \u2018Platoon\u2019 and \u2018Full Metal Jacket,\u2019\u2009\u201d Karina Grubisic said. \u201cAt first he wanted to be an Apache helicopter pilot in the Royal Marines but then realized he would make more of a contribution to mankind if he helped push it forward instead of destroying it.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nBarbara Probst Solomon, writer who chronicled Franco\u2019s rule in Spain, dies at 90Leslie H. Gelb, journalist, think-tank leader and foreign policy expert, dies at 82Valerie Harper, actress beloved as the chronically single, irrepressibly funny Rhoda Morgenstern, dies at 80 The daredevil rocket scientist worked with NASA and its European counterpart. Angelo Grubisic, space scientist and champion wingsuit flier, dies at 38",
        "author": "Phil Davison"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2401",
        "date": "2020-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alfred-worden-who-orbited-the-moon-and-walked-in-deep-space-dies-at-88/2020/03/19/4aff1b62-69ec-11ea-9923-57073adce27c_story.html",
        "text": "Alfred M. Worden, who orbited the moon for three solitary days in the summer of 1971, piloting the Apollo 15 command module and taking detailed pictures of the lunar surface as his fellow astronauts drove a rover far below, died March 17 or 18 at an assisted-living center in Sugar Land, Tex. He was 88. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis family announced the death in a statement, saying that he died overnight, although it was not clear precisely when. Mr. Worden had been treated for an infection and was recovering from a fall at home, said Francis French, who co-wrote Mr. Worden\u2019s memoir.Only 24 people have journeyed to the moon, and few spent as much time in quiet contemplation of its surface \u2014 and the universe beyond \u2014 as Mr. Worden, an Air Force officer who later ran for Congress, worked for aerospace companies and reflected on space travel in a children\u2019s book and poetry collection.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA farm boy from Michigan, he graduated from West Point and became a jet pilot and flight instructor, training some of the men who would later join him as astronauts. While returning to Earth with Apollo 15, the fourth lunar landing mission, he became the first person to conduct a spacewalk in deep space, venturing outside for nearly 40\u00a0minutes at a distance of 196,000 miles from Earth.\u201cNow I know why I\u2019m here,\u201d Mr. Worden later said of his mission. \u201cNot for a closer look at the moon, but to look back at our home, the Earth.\u201dMr. Worden was joined for Apollo 15 by David Scott, spacecraft commander, and James B. Irwin, who piloted the lunar module. In a mission that marked a new focus on science for the Apollo program, his colleagues spent 67 hours on the lunar surface, collecting rocks and soil samples and using a four-wheeled \u201cmoon buggy\u201d for the first time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden remained aboard the command module, Endeavour, overseeing a suite of cameras and scientific instruments as he circled the moon in a cramped spacecraft he likened to a Volkswagen car. During his downtime, he simply looked out the window, awaiting the next \u201cEarth rise\u201d as he came around the moon\u2019s far side.\u201cYou just can\u2019t imagine it,\u201d he told NPR. \u201cYou can\u2019t imagine that that thing sitting out there, that object, that planet, that ball is where we live.\u201dAfter his colleagues returned to the command module, Mr. Worden embarked on his planned spacewalk, a kind of deep-space ballet in which he removed two 80-pound film cassettes from outside the spacecraft. A Washington Post report said he appeared at times \u201cto be standing on his head and doing cartwheels as he flipped over to return to the spacecraft cabin feet first.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou\u2019re sort of floating out there in a vast nothingness,\u201d Mr. Worden told Smithsonian magazine, \u201cand the only thing you can see and touch and grab a hold of is the spacecraft. .\u2009.\u2009. I had trained so well that it didn\u2019t take me any time to do what I had to do, and everything worked out okay, and when I was all done, I thought, \u2018Gee, I wish I had found something so that I could have been out there a little longer.\u2019\u2009\u201dMr. Worden and his fellow astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and were greeted as national heroes, meeting with President Richard M. Nixon in the White House and delivering an address before Congress. But the astronauts never returned to space and were effectively forced out of the Apollo program after a controversy over a set of mementos \u2014 stamped envelopes \u2014 that they brought aboard Apollo 15.Some of the envelopes were sold after the flight, and the astronauts were slated to receive $21,000 of the proceeds. Previous astronauts had arranged similar deals, Mr. Worden said, but he and his colleagues turned down the money amid an uproar over the sales. Mr. Worden said the money was intended to help fund his children\u2019s education.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not the only flight that that happened on. It\u2019s just that we were at a point in time where they needed to make a statement about it,\u201d he told the television program \u201cGood Morning Britain\u201d in 2017.It was one of many interviews in which the envelope issue returned to the fore, with Mr. Worden saying he far preferred to discuss the flight\u2019s scientific impact or the way it had shaped his own life, inspiring him to take up poetry.In one of his poems, he described a newfound perspective on his home planet:\u201cEarth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose,/ crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful,/ I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn\u2019t matter .\u2009.\u2009./ the bond is there in my mind and memory;/ Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately/ in the nothingness of space.\u201d[50 astronauts, in their own words]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second of six children, Alfred Merrill Worden was born in Jackson, Mich., on Feb.\u00a07, 1932. His family worked on a farm outside his town, although his father preferred tinkering with electronics and was a projectionist at the local movie theater.Mr. Worden recalled in a NASA oral history that from age 12, \u201cI basically ran the farm, did all the field work, milked the cows.\u201d Deciding that this was \u201cnot what I wanted to do the rest of my life,\u201d he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He graduated in 1955 and joined the Air Force, believing it offered a faster track to promotions.He was wrong about the promotions but fell in love with flying. Mr. Worden later studied as a test pilot in England and, in 1963, received a pair of master\u2019s degrees in aeronautics and engineering from the University of Michigan, experiences that he credited with helping him land a spot in NASA\u2019s 1966 astronaut class.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden was a member of the support crew for Apollo 9 and served as the command module backup pilot for Apollo 12. After Apollo 15, he held senior science positions at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., before retiring in 1975.In his memoir, \u201cFalling to Earth\u201d (2011), Mr. Worden recalled contacting the children\u2019s television series \u201cMister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood\u201d shortly before his flight, hoping to teach children about space travel. He went on to appear in several episodes with host Fred Rogers, showed kids a moon rock and eating \u201cspace food\u201d on-air.\u201cIt was so outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy,\u201d Mr. Worden wrote. \u201cAstronauts liked to think they were superjocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn\u2019t do kiddies\u2019 shows. .\u2009.\u2009. But I loved the final result. .\u2009.\u2009. Most importantly, kids loved it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1974 Mr. Worden published his children\u2019s book, \u201cI Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon,\u201d and his poetry collection, \u201cHello Earth: Greetings From Endeavour.\u201d\u201cThe poems are about as good as you might expect from a pilot,\u201d Mr. Worden wrote in his memoir. \u201cI hope I did a better job than a poet would if asked to fly a jet with no training. And on those long nights when I couldn\u2019t sleep, the writing helped me. It was my own personal, emotional debriefing.\u201d[Neil Armstrong, first man to step on the moon, dies at 82]In 1982, he ran in Florida for the U.S. House of Representatives, losing to Thomas F. Lewis in the Republican primary.His marriages to Pamela Vander Beek and Sandra Wilder ended in divorce. In 1982, he married Jill Hotchkiss, who died in 2014. Survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Alison Penczak and Merrill Bohaning; a stepdaughter from his third marriage, Tamara Christians; two brothers; two sisters; and five grandchildren.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden said that long after he orbited the moon, he was occasionally reminded of the \u201cbrief glimpse into infinity\u201d he experienced while staring into the cosmos on the moon\u2019s far side. \u201cI still have lingering questions about what I experienced,\u201d he wrote at the close of his memoir. \u201cThe answers won\u2019t come in my lifetime. That will be your job.\u201cTry it, sometime. Some day all of us who journeyed to the moon will be gone. Take a walk on a summer night, look up at the moon, and think of us. A part of us is still there and always will be.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituariesKatherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95 He piloted the Apollo 15 command module for three solitary days in 1971. Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2402",
        "date": "2020-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alfred-worden-who-orbited-the-moon-and-walked-in-deep-space-dies-at-88/2020/03/19/4aff1b62-69ec-11ea-9923-57073adce27c_story.html",
        "text": "Alfred M. Worden, who orbited the moon for three solitary days in the summer of 1971, piloting the Apollo 15 command module and taking detailed pictures of the lunar surface as his fellow astronauts drove a rover far below, died March 17 or 18 at an assisted-living center in Sugar Land, Tex. He was 88. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis family announced the death in a statement, saying that he died overnight, although it was not clear precisely when. Mr. Worden had been treated for an infection and was recovering from a fall at home, said Francis French, who co-wrote Mr. Worden\u2019s memoir.Only 24 people have journeyed to the moon, and few spent as much time in quiet contemplation of its surface \u2014 and the universe beyond \u2014 as Mr. Worden, an Air Force officer who later ran for Congress, worked for aerospace companies and reflected on space travel in a children\u2019s book and poetry collection.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA farm boy from Michigan, he graduated from West Point and became a jet pilot and flight instructor, training some of the men who would later join him as astronauts. While returning to Earth with Apollo 15, the fourth lunar landing mission, he became the first person to conduct a spacewalk in deep space, venturing outside for nearly 40\u00a0minutes at a distance of 196,000 miles from Earth.\u201cNow I know why I\u2019m here,\u201d Mr. Worden later said of his mission. \u201cNot for a closer look at the moon, but to look back at our home, the Earth.\u201dMr. Worden was joined for Apollo 15 by David Scott, spacecraft commander, and James B. Irwin, who piloted the lunar module. In a mission that marked a new focus on science for the Apollo program, his colleagues spent 67 hours on the lunar surface, collecting rocks and soil samples and using a four-wheeled \u201cmoon buggy\u201d for the first time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden remained aboard the command module, Endeavour, overseeing a suite of cameras and scientific instruments as he circled the moon in a cramped spacecraft he likened to a Volkswagen car. During his downtime, he simply looked out the window, awaiting the next \u201cEarth rise\u201d as he came around the moon\u2019s far side.\u201cYou just can\u2019t imagine it,\u201d he told NPR. \u201cYou can\u2019t imagine that that thing sitting out there, that object, that planet, that ball is where we live.\u201dAfter his colleagues returned to the command module, Mr. Worden embarked on his planned spacewalk, a kind of deep-space ballet in which he removed two 80-pound film cassettes from outside the spacecraft. A Washington Post report said he appeared at times \u201cto be standing on his head and doing cartwheels as he flipped over to return to the spacecraft cabin feet first.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou\u2019re sort of floating out there in a vast nothingness,\u201d Mr. Worden told Smithsonian magazine, \u201cand the only thing you can see and touch and grab a hold of is the spacecraft. .\u2009.\u2009. I had trained so well that it didn\u2019t take me any time to do what I had to do, and everything worked out okay, and when I was all done, I thought, \u2018Gee, I wish I had found something so that I could have been out there a little longer.\u2019\u2009\u201dMr. Worden and his fellow astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and were greeted as national heroes, meeting with President Richard M. Nixon in the White House and delivering an address before Congress. But the astronauts never returned to space and were effectively forced out of the Apollo program after a controversy over a set of mementos \u2014 stamped envelopes \u2014 that they brought aboard Apollo 15.Some of the envelopes were sold after the flight, and the astronauts were slated to receive $21,000 of the proceeds. Previous astronauts had arranged similar deals, Mr. Worden said, but he and his colleagues turned down the money amid an uproar over the sales. Mr. Worden said the money was intended to help fund his children\u2019s education.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not the only flight that that happened on. It\u2019s just that we were at a point in time where they needed to make a statement about it,\u201d he told the television program \u201cGood Morning Britain\u201d in 2017.It was one of many interviews in which the envelope issue returned to the fore, with Mr. Worden saying he far preferred to discuss the flight\u2019s scientific impact or the way it had shaped his own life, inspiring him to take up poetry.In one of his poems, he described a newfound perspective on his home planet:\u201cEarth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose,/ crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful,/ I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn\u2019t matter .\u2009.\u2009./ the bond is there in my mind and memory;/ Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately/ in the nothingness of space.\u201d[50 astronauts, in their own words]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second of six children, Alfred Merrill Worden was born in Jackson, Mich., on Feb.\u00a07, 1932. His family worked on a farm outside his town, although his father preferred tinkering with electronics and was a projectionist at the local movie theater.Mr. Worden recalled in a NASA oral history that from age 12, \u201cI basically ran the farm, did all the field work, milked the cows.\u201d Deciding that this was \u201cnot what I wanted to do the rest of my life,\u201d he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He graduated in 1955 and joined the Air Force, believing it offered a faster track to promotions.He was wrong about the promotions but fell in love with flying. Mr. Worden later studied as a test pilot in England and, in 1963, received a pair of master\u2019s degrees in aeronautics and engineering from the University of Michigan, experiences that he credited with helping him land a spot in NASA\u2019s 1966 astronaut class.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden was a member of the support crew for Apollo 9 and served as the command module backup pilot for Apollo 12. After Apollo 15, he held senior science positions at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., before retiring in 1975.In his memoir, \u201cFalling to Earth\u201d (2011), Mr. Worden recalled contacting the children\u2019s television series \u201cMister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood\u201d shortly before his flight, hoping to teach children about space travel. He went on to appear in several episodes with host Fred Rogers, showed kids a moon rock and eating \u201cspace food\u201d on-air.\u201cIt was so outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy,\u201d Mr. Worden wrote. \u201cAstronauts liked to think they were superjocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn\u2019t do kiddies\u2019 shows. .\u2009.\u2009. But I loved the final result. .\u2009.\u2009. Most importantly, kids loved it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1974 Mr. Worden published his children\u2019s book, \u201cI Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon,\u201d and his poetry collection, \u201cHello Earth: Greetings From Endeavour.\u201d\u201cThe poems are about as good as you might expect from a pilot,\u201d Mr. Worden wrote in his memoir. \u201cI hope I did a better job than a poet would if asked to fly a jet with no training. And on those long nights when I couldn\u2019t sleep, the writing helped me. It was my own personal, emotional debriefing.\u201d[Neil Armstrong, first man to step on the moon, dies at 82]In 1982, he ran in Florida for the U.S. House of Representatives, losing to Thomas F. Lewis in the Republican primary.His marriages to Pamela Vander Beek and Sandra Wilder ended in divorce. In 1982, he married Jill Hotchkiss, who died in 2014. Survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Alison Penczak and Merrill Bohaning; a stepdaughter from his third marriage, Tamara Christians; two brothers; two sisters; and five grandchildren.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden said that long after he orbited the moon, he was occasionally reminded of the \u201cbrief glimpse into infinity\u201d he experienced while staring into the cosmos on the moon\u2019s far side. \u201cI still have lingering questions about what I experienced,\u201d he wrote at the close of his memoir. \u201cThe answers won\u2019t come in my lifetime. That will be your job.\u201cTry it, sometime. Some day all of us who journeyed to the moon will be gone. Take a walk on a summer night, look up at the moon, and think of us. A part of us is still there and always will be.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituariesKatherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95 He piloted the Apollo 15 command module for three solitary days in 1971. Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2403",
        "date": "2020-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alfred-worden-who-orbited-the-moon-and-walked-in-deep-space-dies-at-88/2020/03/19/4aff1b62-69ec-11ea-9923-57073adce27c_story.html",
        "text": "Alfred M. Worden, who orbited the moon for three solitary days in the summer of 1971, piloting the Apollo 15 command module and taking detailed pictures of the lunar surface as his fellow astronauts drove a rover far below, died March 17 or 18 at an assisted-living center in Sugar Land, Tex. He was 88. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis family announced the death in a statement, saying that he died overnight, although it was not clear precisely when. Mr. Worden had been treated for an infection and was recovering from a fall at home, said Francis French, who co-wrote Mr. Worden\u2019s memoir.Only 24 people have journeyed to the moon, and few spent as much time in quiet contemplation of its surface \u2014 and the universe beyond \u2014 as Mr. Worden, an Air Force officer who later ran for Congress, worked for aerospace companies and reflected on space travel in a children\u2019s book and poetry collection.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA farm boy from Michigan, he graduated from West Point and became a jet pilot and flight instructor, training some of the men who would later join him as astronauts. While returning to Earth with Apollo 15, the fourth lunar landing mission, he became the first person to conduct a spacewalk in deep space, venturing outside for nearly 40\u00a0minutes at a distance of 196,000 miles from Earth.\u201cNow I know why I\u2019m here,\u201d Mr. Worden later said of his mission. \u201cNot for a closer look at the moon, but to look back at our home, the Earth.\u201dMr. Worden was joined for Apollo 15 by David Scott, spacecraft commander, and James B. Irwin, who piloted the lunar module. In a mission that marked a new focus on science for the Apollo program, his colleagues spent 67 hours on the lunar surface, collecting rocks and soil samples and using a four-wheeled \u201cmoon buggy\u201d for the first time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden remained aboard the command module, Endeavour, overseeing a suite of cameras and scientific instruments as he circled the moon in a cramped spacecraft he likened to a Volkswagen car. During his downtime, he simply looked out the window, awaiting the next \u201cEarth rise\u201d as he came around the moon\u2019s far side.\u201cYou just can\u2019t imagine it,\u201d he told NPR. \u201cYou can\u2019t imagine that that thing sitting out there, that object, that planet, that ball is where we live.\u201dAfter his colleagues returned to the command module, Mr. Worden embarked on his planned spacewalk, a kind of deep-space ballet in which he removed two 80-pound film cassettes from outside the spacecraft. A Washington Post report said he appeared at times \u201cto be standing on his head and doing cartwheels as he flipped over to return to the spacecraft cabin feet first.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou\u2019re sort of floating out there in a vast nothingness,\u201d Mr. Worden told Smithsonian magazine, \u201cand the only thing you can see and touch and grab a hold of is the spacecraft. .\u2009.\u2009. I had trained so well that it didn\u2019t take me any time to do what I had to do, and everything worked out okay, and when I was all done, I thought, \u2018Gee, I wish I had found something so that I could have been out there a little longer.\u2019\u2009\u201dMr. Worden and his fellow astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and were greeted as national heroes, meeting with President Richard M. Nixon in the White House and delivering an address before Congress. But the astronauts never returned to space and were effectively forced out of the Apollo program after a controversy over a set of mementos \u2014 stamped envelopes \u2014 that they brought aboard Apollo 15.Some of the envelopes were sold after the flight, and the astronauts were slated to receive $21,000 of the proceeds. Previous astronauts had arranged similar deals, Mr. Worden said, but he and his colleagues turned down the money amid an uproar over the sales. Mr. Worden said the money was intended to help fund his children\u2019s education.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not the only flight that that happened on. It\u2019s just that we were at a point in time where they needed to make a statement about it,\u201d he told the television program \u201cGood Morning Britain\u201d in 2017.It was one of many interviews in which the envelope issue returned to the fore, with Mr. Worden saying he far preferred to discuss the flight\u2019s scientific impact or the way it had shaped his own life, inspiring him to take up poetry.In one of his poems, he described a newfound perspective on his home planet:\u201cEarth: a distant memory seen in an instant of repose,/ crescent shaped, ethereal, beautiful,/ I wonder which part is home, but I know it doesn\u2019t matter .\u2009.\u2009./ the bond is there in my mind and memory;/ Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately/ in the nothingness of space.\u201d[50 astronauts, in their own words]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second of six children, Alfred Merrill Worden was born in Jackson, Mich., on Feb.\u00a07, 1932. His family worked on a farm outside his town, although his father preferred tinkering with electronics and was a projectionist at the local movie theater.Mr. Worden recalled in a NASA oral history that from age 12, \u201cI basically ran the farm, did all the field work, milked the cows.\u201d Deciding that this was \u201cnot what I wanted to do the rest of my life,\u201d he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He graduated in 1955 and joined the Air Force, believing it offered a faster track to promotions.He was wrong about the promotions but fell in love with flying. Mr. Worden later studied as a test pilot in England and, in 1963, received a pair of master\u2019s degrees in aeronautics and engineering from the University of Michigan, experiences that he credited with helping him land a spot in NASA\u2019s 1966 astronaut class.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden was a member of the support crew for Apollo 9 and served as the command module backup pilot for Apollo 12. After Apollo 15, he held senior science positions at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., before retiring in 1975.In his memoir, \u201cFalling to Earth\u201d (2011), Mr. Worden recalled contacting the children\u2019s television series \u201cMister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood\u201d shortly before his flight, hoping to teach children about space travel. He went on to appear in several episodes with host Fred Rogers, showed kids a moon rock and eating \u201cspace food\u201d on-air.\u201cIt was so outside of what most astronauts did, many thought I was crazy,\u201d Mr. Worden wrote. \u201cAstronauts liked to think they were superjocks who hunted, fished, drank, and chased girls. We didn\u2019t do kiddies\u2019 shows. .\u2009.\u2009. But I loved the final result. .\u2009.\u2009. Most importantly, kids loved it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1974 Mr. Worden published his children\u2019s book, \u201cI Want to Know about a Flight to the Moon,\u201d and his poetry collection, \u201cHello Earth: Greetings From Endeavour.\u201d\u201cThe poems are about as good as you might expect from a pilot,\u201d Mr. Worden wrote in his memoir. \u201cI hope I did a better job than a poet would if asked to fly a jet with no training. And on those long nights when I couldn\u2019t sleep, the writing helped me. It was my own personal, emotional debriefing.\u201d[Neil Armstrong, first man to step on the moon, dies at 82]In 1982, he ran in Florida for the U.S. House of Representatives, losing to Thomas F. Lewis in the Republican primary.His marriages to Pamela Vander Beek and Sandra Wilder ended in divorce. In 1982, he married Jill Hotchkiss, who died in 2014. Survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Alison Penczak and Merrill Bohaning; a stepdaughter from his third marriage, Tamara Christians; two brothers; two sisters; and five grandchildren.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Worden said that long after he orbited the moon, he was occasionally reminded of the \u201cbrief glimpse into infinity\u201d he experienced while staring into the cosmos on the moon\u2019s far side. \u201cI still have lingering questions about what I experienced,\u201d he wrote at the close of his memoir. \u201cThe answers won\u2019t come in my lifetime. That will be your job.\u201cTry it, sometime. Some day all of us who journeyed to the moon will be gone. Take a walk on a summer night, look up at the moon, and think of us. A part of us is still there and always will be.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituariesKatherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85Chris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95 He piloted the Apollo 15 command module for three solitary days in 1971. Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alan L. Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut who walked on the moon, dies at 86 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2404",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alan-l-bean-apollo-12-astronaut-who-walked-on-the-moon-dies-at-86/2018/05/26/2ab74e9e-610e-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html",
        "text": "Alan L. Bean, a NASA astronaut who journeyed into space two times and, as part of the Apollo 12 mission in 1969, became the fourth man to walk on the moon, died May 26 at a hospital in Houston. He was 86.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA announced his death, noting that he had fallen ill during two weeks of travel. Mr. Bean was a Navy test pilot who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 1963. He made his first voyage into space on Nov. 14, 1969, four months after the historic first landing on the moon of Apollo 11, commanded by Neil Armstrong. The three astronauts aboard Apollo 12 were Charles \u201cPete\u201d Conrad Jr., the mission commander, Richard F. Gordon Jr., the command module pilot, and Mr. Bean, whose duty was as lunar module pilot. Story continues below advertisementAfter more than four days of flying through space, Conrad and Mr. Bean settled onto the lunar surface on Nov. 19, landing in a broad plain called the Ocean of Storms. Gordon continued to circle the moon in the command module, the Yankee Clipper, looking down from 70 miles above. AdvertisementConrad was the first Apollo 12 astronaut to step onto the moon, describing it as having a \u201cvery light, gray-like concrete appearance.\u201dHe added: \u201cIf I wanted to go out and look at something that looked like the moon, I\u2019d go out and look at my driveway.\u201dMr. Bean followed him onto the lunar surface, where they collected moon rocks and took core samples of dirt, going down as deep as 32 inches. As images were transmitted back to television viewers at home, the astronauts set up scientific instruments to measure wind, solar radiation and other conditions. Notable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)Story continues below advertisementWhen the TV camera stopped working, Mr. Bean attempted some repairs. \u201cOkay, it\u2019s coming in there now, Al,\u201d a NASA spokesman from Mission Control in Houston said. \u201cWhat changes did you make?\u201d\u201cI hit it on the top with my hammer,\u201d Mr. Bean said.\u201cSkillful fix, Al,\u201d the NASA spokesman replied. AdvertisementUltimately, the camera failed.Astronaut Alan L. Bean was the fourth person to walk on the moon.Nonetheless, Conrad and Mr. Bean pushed on with a second walk on the lunar surface, taking photographs of their surroundings and retrieving parts from the Surveyor III, an unmanned spacecraft that had reached the moon in 1967. They were practically giddy during their four hours on the moon.\u201cHey, it\u2019s real nice moving around up here,\u201d Mr. Bean said. \u201cYou don\u2019t seem to get tired. You really hop like a bunny.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe and Conrad tossed a Frisbee and, in an atmosphere with one-sixth the gravitational pull as on Earth, took steps 10 feet long.\u201cDo you know what I feel like, Al?\u201d Conrad said. \u201cDid you ever see those pictures of giraffes running in slow motion? That\u2019s exactly what I feel like.\u201dAt one point, they witnessed an eclipse of the sun by Earth. \u201cThis has got to be the most spectacular sight of the whole flight,\u201d Mr. Bean said at the time. \u201cYou can\u2019t see the Earth. It\u2019s black just like the space.\u201dAdvertisementAs the astronauts finished their scientific work \u2014 and their gambols \u2014 they planted an American flag on the moon. They also left behind their boots and pressurized suits, to have more storage space for lunar rocks.Story continues below advertisementAfter more than 31 hours on the moon, Conrad and Mr. Bean lifted off and rejoined Gordon in the Yankee Clipper. Their 10-day journey ended on Nov. 24, when they splashed down in the Pacific.Four years later, Mr. Bean returned to space as commander of the second mission to the Skylab orbiting space station. He and two astronauts, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott, stayed aloft for 59 days, conducting a variety of biological experiments to test the body\u2019s ability to endure the physical and psychological demands of prolonged space flight.In the late 1970s, Mr. Bean became chief of the astronaut training program, preparing for the first shuttle mission, which was launched in 1981.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSoon afterward, Mr. Bean retired from NASA to devote himself to a longtime hobby that had become an overriding passion: painting.\u201cMy boss asked if I could make a living off art, and I said I didn\u2019t know, but I had to find out,\u201d he told People magazine in 1981. \u201cIt has become my dream.\u201dHis exclusive subject was the space program and, in particular, the lunar missions. He sought to make every detail accurate and sometimes included specks of moon dust on his canvasses.\u201cI\u2019m the only person doing moonscapes who has been there,\u201d he said.Alan Lavern Bean was born March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Tex., and completed high school in Fort Worth. His father worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Story continues below advertisementHis mother encouraged him to apply for a Navy Reserve scholarship to the University of Texas, which he won. He graduated in 1955, with a bachelor\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering, then entered the Navy\u2019s test-pilot program at the naval air station at Patuxent River, Md. His instructor was Conrad, who later encouraged him to apply for the astronaut corps.AdvertisementIn his off hours, Mr. Bean began to study painting.\u201cOn weekends and nights,\u201d he later said, \u201cI painted instead of playing golf.\u201d He retired from the Navy with the rank of captain in 1975. His first marriage, to Sue Ragsdale, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of more than 35 years, the former Leslie Clem of Houston; two children from his first marriage; a sister; and at least two grandchildren.Story continues below advertisementMr. Bean\u2019s paintings have been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington and have sold to collectors for well in excess of $100,000.He continued to paint \u2014 and to be a vocal supporter of space travel \u2014 for the rest of his life.\u201cI saw great things during Apollo, things no other artist has experienced,\u201d he told the Orange County Register in 2007. \u201cWith these paintings, I can celebrate that.\u201d Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nJohn Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87\nTom Wolfe, apostle of \u2018New Journalism\u2019 who captured extravagance of his times, dies at 88\nJoseph Clemons Jr., hero of Pork Chop Hill, dies at 90\n The fourth man on the moon, he also commanded a Skylab mission, then retired from NASA to become an artist. Alan L. Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut who walked on the moon, dies at 86",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alan L. Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut who walked on the moon, dies at 86 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2405",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alan-l-bean-apollo-12-astronaut-who-walked-on-the-moon-dies-at-86/2018/05/26/2ab74e9e-610e-11e8-9ee3-49d6d4814c4c_story.html",
        "text": "Alan L. Bean, a NASA astronaut who journeyed into space two times and, as part of the Apollo 12 mission in 1969, became the fourth man to walk on the moon, died May 26 at a hospital in Houston. He was 86.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA announced his death, noting that he had fallen ill during two weeks of travel. Mr. Bean was a Navy test pilot who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 1963. He made his first voyage into space on Nov. 14, 1969, four months after the historic first landing on the moon of Apollo 11, commanded by Neil Armstrong. The three astronauts aboard Apollo 12 were Charles \u201cPete\u201d Conrad Jr., the mission commander, Richard F. Gordon Jr., the command module pilot, and Mr. Bean, whose duty was as lunar module pilot. Story continues below advertisementAfter more than four days of flying through space, Conrad and Mr. Bean settled onto the lunar surface on Nov. 19, landing in a broad plain called the Ocean of Storms. Gordon continued to circle the moon in the command module, the Yankee Clipper, looking down from 70 miles above. AdvertisementConrad was the first Apollo 12 astronaut to step onto the moon, describing it as having a \u201cvery light, gray-like concrete appearance.\u201dHe added: \u201cIf I wanted to go out and look at something that looked like the moon, I\u2019d go out and look at my driveway.\u201dMr. Bean followed him onto the lunar surface, where they collected moon rocks and took core samples of dirt, going down as deep as 32 inches. As images were transmitted back to television viewers at home, the astronauts set up scientific instruments to measure wind, solar radiation and other conditions. Notable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)Story continues below advertisementWhen the TV camera stopped working, Mr. Bean attempted some repairs. \u201cOkay, it\u2019s coming in there now, Al,\u201d a NASA spokesman from Mission Control in Houston said. \u201cWhat changes did you make?\u201d\u201cI hit it on the top with my hammer,\u201d Mr. Bean said.\u201cSkillful fix, Al,\u201d the NASA spokesman replied. AdvertisementUltimately, the camera failed.Astronaut Alan L. Bean was the fourth person to walk on the moon.Nonetheless, Conrad and Mr. Bean pushed on with a second walk on the lunar surface, taking photographs of their surroundings and retrieving parts from the Surveyor III, an unmanned spacecraft that had reached the moon in 1967. They were practically giddy during their four hours on the moon.\u201cHey, it\u2019s real nice moving around up here,\u201d Mr. Bean said. \u201cYou don\u2019t seem to get tired. You really hop like a bunny.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe and Conrad tossed a Frisbee and, in an atmosphere with one-sixth the gravitational pull as on Earth, took steps 10 feet long.\u201cDo you know what I feel like, Al?\u201d Conrad said. \u201cDid you ever see those pictures of giraffes running in slow motion? That\u2019s exactly what I feel like.\u201dAt one point, they witnessed an eclipse of the sun by Earth. \u201cThis has got to be the most spectacular sight of the whole flight,\u201d Mr. Bean said at the time. \u201cYou can\u2019t see the Earth. It\u2019s black just like the space.\u201dAdvertisementAs the astronauts finished their scientific work \u2014 and their gambols \u2014 they planted an American flag on the moon. They also left behind their boots and pressurized suits, to have more storage space for lunar rocks.Story continues below advertisementAfter more than 31 hours on the moon, Conrad and Mr. Bean lifted off and rejoined Gordon in the Yankee Clipper. Their 10-day journey ended on Nov. 24, when they splashed down in the Pacific.Four years later, Mr. Bean returned to space as commander of the second mission to the Skylab orbiting space station. He and two astronauts, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott, stayed aloft for 59 days, conducting a variety of biological experiments to test the body\u2019s ability to endure the physical and psychological demands of prolonged space flight.In the late 1970s, Mr. Bean became chief of the astronaut training program, preparing for the first shuttle mission, which was launched in 1981.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSoon afterward, Mr. Bean retired from NASA to devote himself to a longtime hobby that had become an overriding passion: painting.\u201cMy boss asked if I could make a living off art, and I said I didn\u2019t know, but I had to find out,\u201d he told People magazine in 1981. \u201cIt has become my dream.\u201dHis exclusive subject was the space program and, in particular, the lunar missions. He sought to make every detail accurate and sometimes included specks of moon dust on his canvasses.\u201cI\u2019m the only person doing moonscapes who has been there,\u201d he said.Alan Lavern Bean was born March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Tex., and completed high school in Fort Worth. His father worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Story continues below advertisementHis mother encouraged him to apply for a Navy Reserve scholarship to the University of Texas, which he won. He graduated in 1955, with a bachelor\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering, then entered the Navy\u2019s test-pilot program at the naval air station at Patuxent River, Md. His instructor was Conrad, who later encouraged him to apply for the astronaut corps.AdvertisementIn his off hours, Mr. Bean began to study painting.\u201cOn weekends and nights,\u201d he later said, \u201cI painted instead of playing golf.\u201d He retired from the Navy with the rank of captain in 1975. His first marriage, to Sue Ragsdale, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of more than 35 years, the former Leslie Clem of Houston; two children from his first marriage; a sister; and at least two grandchildren.Story continues below advertisementMr. Bean\u2019s paintings have been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington and have sold to collectors for well in excess of $100,000.He continued to paint \u2014 and to be a vocal supporter of space travel \u2014 for the rest of his life.\u201cI saw great things during Apollo, things no other artist has experienced,\u201d he told the Orange County Register in 2007. \u201cWith these paintings, I can celebrate that.\u201d Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nJohn Young, moon walker and NASA\u2019s longest-serving astronaut, dies at 87\nTom Wolfe, apostle of \u2018New Journalism\u2019 who captured extravagance of his times, dies at 88\nJoseph Clemons Jr., hero of Pork Chop Hill, dies at 90\n The fourth man on the moon, he also commanded a Skylab mission, then retired from NASA to become an artist. Alan L. Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut who walked on the moon, dies at 86",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Math Wizard Elwyn Berlekamp Helped Bring Sharp Images From Outer Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2406",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/math-wizard-elwyn-berlekamp-helped-bring-sharp-images-from-outer-space-11556735303?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=15",
        "text": "That discovery shaped his career as a computer scientist whose algorithms helped make possible cellphones, compact discs and transmission of crisp images from spacecraft. He also helped devise mathematical investment strategies for the hugely successful hedge-fund investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Simons\n\n\n\n and became an authority on the math underlying games ranging from the Asian game of Go to the pencil-and-paper game Dots and Boxes.\nSome of his most important work involved ways of dealing with so-called noise in data transmissions\u2014caused by such things as static, radiation or loss of signal strength\u2014that can turn digital messages into nonsense.\n\n\nClaude Shannon, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had developed a theoretical framework for adding extra bits to messages to ensure transmission errors could be found and corrected. Others produced codes to do that, but decoding those messages was complicated and costly. Dr. Berlekamp, who worked with Dr. Shannon at MIT in the 1960s, devised more practical and efficient ways to decode the messages. \nHis algorithms have been used in the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager space mission and cellphone transmissions. Variants of his work also allow devices to read smudged bar codes or scratched compact discs. His 1968 book \u201cAlgebraic Coding Theory\u201d is considered a landmark in its field.\nDr. Berlekamp, who died April 9 at age 78 from complications of pulmonary fibrosis, spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In his spare time, he juggled and rode unicycles, sometimes at the same time. He and his wife set up a foundation to support math and science education.\nIn 1973, he co-founded a company, Cyclotomics, to help clients use his error-correcting technology. His sale of that company in 1985 to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eastman Kodak Co.\n\n\n left him with several million dollars to invest.\nHe began exploring investment techniques with a fellow mathematician, Dr. Simons, who had helped start Axcom, a tiny firm that ran the Medallion fund.\nWhen Axcom\u2019s co-founder, James Ax, left the firm after deep losses and a falling out with Dr. Simons, Dr. Berlekamp bought Dr. Ax\u2019s share in the business and began to run it in 1989.\nDr. Berlekamp favored making frequent trades in commodity, currency and bond markets. At the time, most rivals worried commissions and other costs resulting from a higher-frequency approach would offset any profits. With Dr. Simons and other colleagues, he devised a computer-driven quantitative trading style of the sort that now dominates Wall Street. \nTheir trading system spotted barely perceptible patterns in markets that had no apparent explanation. These trends and oddities sometimes happened so quickly as to be unnoticeable by most investors. They were so faint the team took to calling them \u201cghosts.\u201d Yet they reappeared often enough to be worthy additions to the team\u2019s mix of trade ideas. \nThe revitalized Medallion fund scored a gain of about 56% in 1990. At the end of that year, Dr. Berlekamp sold his stake in Axcom to Dr. Simons and returned to academia. In 2008, Dr. Berlekamp became chairman of a hedge fund called Berkeley Quantitative, which at one point had assets of about $250 million. It closed in 2012 after recording middling returns.\nBeginning in 1982, he wrote a series of books called \u201cWinning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays,\u201d with John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, on the math underlying successful strategy in board games. He also helped organize conferences on games and puzzles. \n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nElwyn Ralph Berlekamp was born Sept. 6, 1940, in Dover, Ohio. His father, Waldo Berlekamp, was a minister in the United Church of Christ. His mother, Loretta Berlekamp, was a church librarian.\nWhen Elwyn was 9, the family moved to Fort Thomas, Ky., a suburb of Cincinnati.\nAs president of the high school band, he composed several marches and copyrighted one of them. To show school spirit and prove he wasn\u2019t only a nerd, he joined the swimming team, despite a lack of aptitude for the sport. (As the team was short on members, he calculated that his chances of being cut were low.) In a biographical note, he said he graduated second in his high school class rather than first \u201cdue to a lone B, in Latin.\u201d \nWith a National Merit Scholarship, he enrolled in 1958 at MIT, where he earned both his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in electrical engineering in four years. In 1964, he received a doctoral degree at MIT with a thesis called \u201cBlock Coding With Noiseless Feedback.\u201d\nEarly in his career at Berkeley, in the mid-1960s, he was juggling in his apartment when he heard a rapping from the floor below, where two female roo Berkeley professor Elwyn Berlekamp enhanced digital communications, studied game theory and ran a hedge fund. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty and Gregory Zuckerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Math Wizard Elwyn Berlekamp Helped Bring Sharp Images From Outer Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2407",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/math-wizard-elwyn-berlekamp-helped-bring-sharp-images-from-outer-space-11556735303?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=61",
        "text": "That discovery shaped his career as a computer scientist whose algorithms helped make possible cellphones, compact discs and transmission of crisp images from spacecraft. He also helped devise mathematical investment strategies for the hugely successful hedge-fund investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Simons\n\n\n\n and became an authority on the math underlying games ranging from the Asian game of Go to the pencil-and-paper game Dots and Boxes.\n\n\n\n\nSome of his most important work involved ways of dealing with so-called noise in data transmissions\u2014caused by such things as static, radiation or loss of signal strength\u2014that can turn digital messages into nonsense.\n\n\nClaude Shannon, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had developed a theoretical framework for adding extra bits to messages to ensure transmission errors could be found and corrected. Others produced codes to do that, but decoding those messages was complicated and costly. Dr. Berlekamp, who worked with Dr. Shannon at MIT in the 1960s, devised more practical and efficient ways to decode the messages. \nHis algorithms have been used in the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager space mission and cellphone transmissions. Variants of his work also allow devices to read smudged bar codes or scratched compact discs. His 1968 book \u201cAlgebraic Coding Theory\u201d is considered a landmark in its field.\nDr. Berlekamp, who died April 9 at age 78 from complications of pulmonary fibrosis, spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In his spare time, he juggled and rode unicycles, sometimes at the same time. He and his wife set up a foundation to support math and science education.\nIn 1973, he co-founded a company, Cyclotomics, to help clients use his error-correcting technology. His sale of that company in 1985 to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eastman Kodak Co.\n\n\n left him with several million dollars to invest.\nHe began exploring investment techniques with a fellow mathematician, Dr. Simons, who had helped start Axcom, a tiny firm that ran the Medallion fund.\nWhen Axcom\u2019s co-founder, James Ax, left the firm after deep losses and a falling out with Dr. Simons, Dr. Berlekamp bought Dr. Ax\u2019s share in the business and began to run it in 1989.\nDr. Berlekamp favored making frequent trades in commodity, currency and bond markets. At the time, most rivals worried commissions and other costs resulting from a higher-frequency approach would offset any profits. With Dr. Simons and other colleagues, he devised a computer-driven quantitative trading style of the sort that now dominates Wall Street. \nTheir trading system spotted barely perceptible patterns in markets that had no apparent explanation. These trends and oddities sometimes happened so quickly as to be unnoticeable by most investors. They were so faint the team took to calling them \u201cghosts.\u201d Yet they reappeared often enough to be worthy additions to the team\u2019s mix of trade ideas. \nThe revitalized Medallion fund scored a gain of about 56% in 1990. At the end of that year, Dr. Berlekamp sold his stake in Axcom to Dr. Simons and returned to academia. In 2008, Dr. Berlekamp became chairman of a hedge fund called Berkeley Quantitative, which at one point had assets of about $250 million. It closed in 2012 after recording middling returns.\nBeginning in 1982, he wrote a series of books called \u201cWinning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays,\u201d with John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, on the math underlying successful strategy in board games. He also helped organize conferences on games and puzzles. \n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nElwyn Ralph Berlekamp was born Sept. 6, 1940, in Dover, Ohio. His father, Waldo Berlekamp, was a minister in the United Church of Christ. His mother, Loretta Berlekamp, was a church librarian.\nWhen Elwyn was 9, the family moved to Fort Thomas, Ky., a suburb of Cincinnati.\nAs president of the high school band, he composed several marches and copyrighted one of them. To show school spirit and prove he wasn\u2019t only a nerd, he joined the swimming team, despite a lack of aptitude for the sport. (As the team was short on members, he calculated that his chances of being cut were low.) In a biographical note, he said he graduated second in his high school class rather than first \u201cdue to a lone B, in Latin.\u201d \nWith a National Merit Scholarship, he enrolled in 1958 at MIT, where he earned both his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in electrical engineering in four years. In 1964, he received a doctoral degree at MIT with a thesis called \u201cBlock Coding With Noiseless Feedback.\u201d\nEarly in his career at Berkeley, in the mid-1960s, he was juggling in his apartment when he heard a rapping from the floor below, where two female roommates objected to the noise. His apology led to an introduction to Jennifer Wilson, an Englishwoman studying at Berkeley. They married in 1966. She survives him, along with three children, four grandchildren and a sister.\nIn his Berkeley academic career, he called on his quick thinking and sense of strategy. During one meeting of computer scientists he chaired in the 1970s, a participant made a motion of no-confidence in Dr. Berlekamp. He promptly seconded the motion, surprising everyone and defusing the challenge to his authority.\nHe was known for his ability to talk at length about almost anything and said that ideally he liked to do 80% of the talking in a conversation. When he met other intellectual chatterboxes, he was willing to reduce his share to 60% or so.\nOn one trip, en route to a conference in Australia, Dr. Berlekamp was asked by a border-control agent whether he was traveling for work or pleasure. He replied that he had arranged his life \u201csuch that there shall be no distinction between the two.\u201d \nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com and Gregory Zuckerman at gregory.zuckerman@wsj.com Berkeley professor Elwyn Berlekamp enhanced digital communications, studied game theory and ran a hedge fund. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty and Gregory Zuckerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Math Wizard Elwyn Berlekamp Helped Bring Sharp Images From Outer Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2408",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/math-wizard-elwyn-berlekamp-helped-bring-sharp-images-from-outer-space-11556735303?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=56",
        "text": "That discovery shaped his career as a computer scientist whose algorithms helped make possible cellphones, compact discs and transmission of crisp images from spacecraft. He also helped devise mathematical investment strategies for the hugely successful hedge-fund investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Simons\n\n\n\n and became an authority on the math underlying games ranging from the Asian game of Go to the pencil-and-paper game Dots and Boxes.\nSome of his most important work involved ways of dealing with so-called noise in data transmissions\u2014caused by such things as static, radiation or loss of signal strength\u2014that can turn digital messages into nonsense.\n\n\nClaude Shannon, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had developed a theoretical framework for adding extra bits to messages to ensure transmission errors could be found and corrected. Others produced codes to do that, but decoding those messages was complicated and costly. Dr. Berlekamp, who worked with Dr. Shannon at MIT in the 1960s, devised more practical and efficient ways to decode the messages. \nHis algorithms have been used in the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager space mission and cellphone transmissions. Variants of his work also allow devices to read smudged bar codes or scratched compact discs. His 1968 book \u201cAlgebraic Coding Theory\u201d is considered a landmark in its field.\nDr. Berlekamp, who died April 9 at age 78 from complications of pulmonary fibrosis, spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In his spare time, he juggled and rode unicycles, sometimes at the same time. He and his wife set up a foundation to support math and science education.\nIn 1973, he co-founded a company, Cyclotomics, to help clients use his error-correcting technology. His sale of that company in 1985 to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eastman Kodak Co.\n\n\n left him with several million dollars to invest.\nHe began exploring investment techniques with a fellow mathematician, Dr. Simons, who had helped start Axcom, a tiny firm that ran the Medallion fund.\nWhen Axcom\u2019s co-founder, James Ax, left the firm after deep losses and a falling out with Dr. Simons, Dr. Berlekamp bought Dr. Ax\u2019s share in the business and began to run it in 1989.\nDr. Berlekamp favored making frequent trades in commodity, currency and bond markets. At the time, most rivals worried commissions and other costs resulting from a higher-frequency approach would offset any profits. With Dr. Simons and other colleagues, he devised a computer-driven quantitative trading style of the sort that now dominates Wall Street. \nTheir trading system spotted barely perceptible patterns in markets that had no apparent explanation. These trends and oddities sometimes happened so quickly as to be unnoticeable by most investors. They were so faint the team took to calling them \u201cghosts.\u201d Yet they reappeared often enough to be worthy additions to the team\u2019s mix of trade ideas. \nThe revitalized Medallion fund scored a gain of about 56% in 1990. At the end of that year, Dr. Berlekamp sold his stake in Axcom to Dr. Simons and returned to academia. In 2008, Dr. Berlekamp became chairman of a hedge fund called Berkeley Quantitative, which at one point had assets of about $250 million. It closed in 2012 after recording middling returns.\nBeginning in 1982, he wrote a series of books called \u201cWinning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays,\u201d with John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, on the math underlying successful strategy in board games. He also helped organize conferences on games and puzzles. \n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nElwyn Ralph Berlekamp was born Sept. 6, 1940, in Dover, Ohio. His father, Waldo Berlekamp, was a minister in the United Church of Christ. His mother, Loretta Berlekamp, was a church librarian.\nWhen Elwyn was 9, the family moved to Fort Thomas, Ky., a suburb of Cincinnati.\nAs president of the high school band, he composed several marches and copyrighted one of them. To show school spirit and prove he wasn\u2019t only a nerd, he joined the swimming team, despite a lack of aptitude for the sport. (As the team was short on members, he calculated that his chances of being cut were low.) In a biographical note, he said he graduated second in his high school class rather than first \u201cdue to a lone B, in Latin.\u201d \nWith a National Merit Scholarship, he enrolled in 1958 at MIT, where he earned both his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in electrical engineering in four years. In 1964, he received a doctoral degree at MIT with a thesis called \u201cBlock Coding With Noiseless Feedback.\u201d\nEarly in his career at Berkeley, in the mid-1960s, he was juggling in his apartment when he heard a rapping from the floor below, where two female roo Berkeley professor Elwyn Berlekamp enhanced digital communications, studied game theory and ran a hedge fund. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty and Gregory Zuckerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Math Wizard Elwyn Berlekamp Helped Bring Sharp Images From Outer Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2409",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/math-wizard-elwyn-berlekamp-helped-bring-sharp-images-from-outer-space-11556735303?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=73",
        "text": "That discovery shaped his career as a computer scientist whose algorithms helped make possible cellphones, compact discs and transmission of crisp images from spacecraft. He also helped devise mathematical investment strategies for the hugely successful hedge-fund investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Simons\n\n\n\n and became an authority on the math underlying games ranging from the Asian game of Go to the pencil-and-paper game Dots and Boxes.\n\n\n\n\nSome of his most important work involved ways of dealing with so-called noise in data transmissions\u2014caused by such things as static, radiation or loss of signal strength\u2014that can turn digital messages into nonsense.\n\n\nClaude Shannon, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had developed a theoretical framework for adding extra bits to messages to ensure transmission errors could be found and corrected. Others produced codes to do that, but decoding those messages was complicated and costly. Dr. Berlekamp, who worked with Dr. Shannon at MIT in the 1960s, devised more practical and efficient ways to decode the messages. \nHis algorithms have been used in the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager space mission and cellphone transmissions. Variants of his work also allow devices to read smudged bar codes or scratched compact discs. His 1968 book \u201cAlgebraic Coding Theory\u201d is considered a landmark in its field.\nDr. Berlekamp, who died April 9 at age 78 from complications of pulmonary fibrosis, spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In his spare time, he juggled and rode unicycles, sometimes at the same time. He and his wife set up a foundation to support math and science education.\nIn 1973, he co-founded a company, Cyclotomics, to help clients use his error-correcting technology. His sale of that company in 1985 to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eastman Kodak Co.\n\n\n left him with several million dollars to invest.\nHe began exploring investment techniques with a fellow mathematician, Dr. Simons, who had helped start Axcom, a tiny firm that ran the Medallion fund.\nWhen Axcom\u2019s co-founder, James Ax, left the firm after deep losses and a falling out with Dr. Simons, Dr. Berlekamp bought Dr. Ax\u2019s share in the business and began to run it in 1989.\nDr. Berlekamp favored making frequent trades in commodity, currency and bond markets. At the time, most rivals worried commissions and other costs resulting from a higher-frequency approach would offset any profits. With Dr. Simons and other colleagues, he devised a computer-driven quantitative trading style of the sort that now dominates Wall Street. \nTheir trading system spotted barely perceptible patterns in markets that had no apparent explanation. These trends and oddities sometimes happened so quickly as to be unnoticeable by most investors. They were so faint the team took to calling them \u201cghosts.\u201d Yet they reappeared often enough to be worthy additions to the team\u2019s mix of trade ideas. \nThe revitalized Medallion fund scored a gain of about 56% in 1990. At the end of that year, Dr. Berlekamp sold his stake in Axcom to Dr. Simons and returned to academia. In 2008, Dr. Berlekamp became chairman of a hedge fund called Berkeley Quantitative, which at one point had assets of about $250 million. It closed in 2012 after recording middling returns.\nBeginning in 1982, he wrote a series of books called \u201cWinning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays,\u201d with John H. Conway and Richard K. Guy, on the math underlying successful strategy in board games. He also helped organize conferences on games and puzzles. \n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nElwyn Ralph Berlekamp was born Sept. 6, 1940, in Dover, Ohio. His father, Waldo Berlekamp, was a minister in the United Church of Christ. His mother, Loretta Berlekamp, was a church librarian.\nWhen Elwyn was 9, the family moved to Fort Thomas, Ky., a suburb of Cincinnati.\nAs president of the high school band, he composed several marches and copyrighted one of them. To show school spirit and prove he wasn\u2019t only a nerd, he joined the swimming team, despite a lack of aptitude for the sport. (As the team was short on members, he calculated that his chances of being cut were low.) In a biographical note, he said he graduated second in his high school class rather than first \u201cdue to a lone B, in Latin.\u201d \nWith a National Merit Scholarship, he enrolled in 1958 at MIT, where he earned both his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in electrical engineering in four years. In 1964, he received a doctoral degree at MIT with a thesis called \u201cBlock Coding With Noiseless Feedback.\u201d\nEarly in his career at Berkeley, in the mid-1960s, he was juggling in his apartment when he heard a rapping from the floor below, where two female Berkeley professor Elwyn Berlekamp enhanced digital communications, studied game theory and ran a hedge fund. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty and Gregory Zuckerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Millie Dresselhaus Burst Out of the 1940s Mold for Smart Young Women (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2410",
        "date": "2017-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/millie-dresselhaus-burst-out-of-the-1940s-mold-for-smart-young-women-1488553200?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=26",
        "text": "She chose teaching, but a physics instructor urged her to aim higher. As Millie Dresselhaus, her married name, she became a leading researcher in new materials based on carbon that have promise in such areas as electronics and energy. She was the first woman to become a full, tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first female winner of the National Medal of Science in Engineering.\nIn materials science, she was a star\u2014sometimes dubbed \u201cthe Queen of Carbon.\u201d She made a priority of encouraging young women to pursue scientific careers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n recently released a commercial imagining a world in which the likes of Dr. Dresselhaus were treated like celebrities, inspiring young women.\n\n\nDr. Dresselhaus died from complications of a stroke Feb. 20 at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. She was 86.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIn a 57-year career at MIT, she did pioneering work in thermoelectric materials, finding more efficient ways to harvest energy created by differences in temperature between objects, technology that helps provide power in spacecraft. She did early work in the development of carbon nanotubes, lattices of carbon atoms rolled into cylinders, which conduct electricity and could be used to build faster and more powerful computers.\nHer research into graphene, a flexible single-atom-thick slice of graphite, helped create technology with potential applications ranging from golf clubs to smartphones. It also might be woven into clothing or wrapped around all kinds of objects to provide electronic displays. \u201cYou could have electronics everywhere,\u201d said Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, an associate professor of physics at MIT.\nShe was known for helping struggling students. \u201cShe was always able to see the best in you and bring it out,\u201d Dr. Jarillo-Herrero said.\nA daughter of Polish immigrants, Mildred Spiewak was born Nov. 11, 1930, and raised in a part of the Bronx she later described as dangerous. \u201cMy early elementary school memories up through ninth grade are of teachers struggling to maintain class discipline,\u201d she wrote in a brief biography. As a teenager she worked in a zipper factory and as a math tutor.\nThrough violin lessons, she met adults who told her about the possibility of getting into better schools. She passed exams allowing her to attend Hunter College High School and went on to do her undergraduate studies at Hunter College.\u00a0A physics lecturer there, Rosalyn Yalow, who later won a Nobel Prize, encouraged her to become a physicist.\nAfter a year as a Fulbright fellow at Cambridge University and further studies at Harvard University, she earned her doctoral degree at the University of Chicago, where her mentors included Enrico Fermi, another Nobel winner.\u00a0While there, she met her future husband, Gene Dresselhaus, a physicist.\nThey both joined MIT, partly because, unlike other universities, it was willing to hire couples.\u00a0The scare caused by the Soviet Union\u2019s Sputnik satellite spurred research spending, creating opportunities for young scientists. Dr. Dresselhaus chose to study carbon, which she saw as a backwater, partly because so many others were focusing on silicon and she wanted to do something different.\nHer supervisors let her explore widely. \u201cIt was kind of an open-ended job,\u201d she said in an oral history recorded at MIT. \u201cThose kinds of jobs don\u2019t exist today.\u201d\nIn her free time, she played chamber music with friends. Her main passion remained research. Her Toyota Corolla was often parked at MIT before 6 a.m.\nAmong her many prizes was the 2007 L\u2019Or\u00e9al-UNESCO Award for Women in Science. At the time, one of her granddaughters, Leora Cooper, on a school trip to Paris, was stunned to find an airport banner depicting her grandmother as a scientific hero. \u201cI began to realize she was not a normal grandmother,\u201d said Ms. Cooper, now a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry at MIT.\nIn 2014, President Obama awarded Dr. Dresselhaus the Presidential Medal of Freedom.\nShe is survived by her husband, Gene, their four children and five grandchildren.\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com In the 1940s, when smart young women\u2019s career options were teachers, nurses or secretaries, Millie Dresselhaus became a physicist. She was the first female winner of the National Medal of Science in Engineering. Dr. Dresselhaus died Feb. 20 at 86. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientist Solved Mysteries of the Sun and Magnetic Fields (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2411",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientist-solved-mysteries-of-the-sun-and-magnetic-fields-11600437600?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=11",
        "text": "Richard Feynman helped develop the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965. His sister found an important, if less prominent, role as an astrophysicist whose research included explaining what causes auroras.\nWorking for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other institutions, she also devised models to predict how many high-energy particles would smash into spacecraft. In 2000, NASA awarded her its Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. She died July 22 at the age of 93.\n\n\nMore Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nDr. Feynman, who didn\u2019t want to be completely overshadowed by her famous brother, recalled proposing a deal: \u201cLook, I don\u2019t want us to compete, so let\u2019s divide up physics between us. I\u2019ll take auroras, and you take the rest of the universe.\u201d\n\n\nHer work advanced understanding of what causes those natural light shows: Charged particles flow out of the sun in what is known as the solar wind. Most are deflected by the Earth\u2019s magnetic field, but a fraction of them get trapped in that field and interact with molecules in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, creating light waves visible in the northern and southern polar latitudes.\nThough her brother encouraged her scientific studies, others didn\u2019t. When she was eight years old, Joan was told by her mother that \u201cwomen can\u2019t do science because their brains aren\u2019t made for it,\u201d according to \u201cA Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention,\u201d a 2013 book edited by Suw Charman-Anderson. Dr. Feynman recalled \u201csitting in a chair and weeping.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joan Feynman\n\n\n\n was born on March 30, 1927, and grew up in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Her father, a businessman, set an example with his own quest for scientific knowledge. He sometimes opened an encyclopedia volume to a random page and read whatever he found.\nAfter leaving home to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman encouraged his sister to persist with science by sending her a college astronomy textbook. Noticing data in the book attributed to a female scientist, young Joan felt renewed hope about her chances for making a career in scientific research.\nAt Oberlin College in Ohio, she studied physics and met a fellow student,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Hirshberg.\n\n\n\n They married in 1948, and she spent a year with him in Guatemala while he did anthropological research. She earned a doctorate in physics from Syracuse University in 1958.\nIn the early 1960s, with children at home, she tried homemaking in Spring Valley, N.Y., where her husband was working. She became depressed and sought help from a psychiatrist, who prescribed work outside the home. She got a job at Columbia University\u2019s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and studied the Earth\u2019s magnetic fields.\nShe later worked at labs in California and Colorado, alternating with periods of unemployment, while she raised three children. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. She joined NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in 1985.\nIn 1990, during a conference near Sochi, Russia, she bonded with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexander Ruzmaikin,\n\n\n\n a Soviet space scientist. He invited her for an early morning swim in the frigid Black Sea. To his surprise, she agreed. Dr. Ruzmaikin recalled that on the way back to the hotel they took a glass-walled elevator.\n\u201cWhy is it transparent?\u201d she asked.\n\u201cTo keep couples from kissing and smooching,\u201d he explained.\n\u201cLet\u2019s kiss!\u201d she said.\nThey married in 1992.\nDr. Feynman and Dr. Ruzmaikin published research linking the development of agricultural societies to a period of climate stability around 10,000 years ago. Before then, they found, climate changes were too frequent to allow for sustained farming.\nShe is survived by Dr. Ruzmaikin, three children and four grandchildren.\n\u201cWhen I went to college my father told me to learn to make a living because you never know what life brings,\u201d she said in a speech in 2018. \u201cOnly men made good livings in those days, and so I figured I\u2019d better go into a man\u2019s profession. I chose physics and hoped to be some sort of an assistant.\u201d\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Her mother warned her that women\u2019s minds weren\u2019t suited for science, but Joan Feynman\u2019s brother, Richard, a future Nobel laureate, persuaded her to press on with her studies. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientist Solved Mysteries of the Sun and Magnetic Fields (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2412",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientist-solved-mysteries-of-the-sun-and-magnetic-fields-11600437600?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=37",
        "text": "Richard Feynman helped develop the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965. His sister found an important, if less prominent, role as an astrophysicist whose research included explaining what causes auroras.\n\n\n\n\nWorking for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other institutions, she also devised models to predict how many high-energy particles would smash into spacecraft. In 2000, NASA awarded her its Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. She died July 22 at the age of 93.\n\n\nMore Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nDr. Feynman, who didn\u2019t want to be completely overshadowed by her famous brother, recalled proposing a deal: \u201cLook, I don\u2019t want us to compete, so let\u2019s divide up physics between us. I\u2019ll take auroras, and you take the rest of the universe.\u201d\n\n\nHer work advanced understanding of what causes those natural light shows: Charged particles flow out of the sun in what is known as the solar wind. Most are deflected by the Earth\u2019s magnetic field, but a fraction of them get trapped in that field and interact with molecules in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, creating light waves visible in the northern and southern polar latitudes.\nThough her brother encouraged her scientific studies, others didn\u2019t. When she was eight years old, Joan was told by her mother that \u201cwomen can\u2019t do science because their brains aren\u2019t made for it,\u201d according to \u201cA Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention,\u201d a 2013 book edited by Suw Charman-Anderson. Dr. Feynman recalled \u201csitting in a chair and weeping.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joan Feynman\n\n\n\n was born on March 30, 1927, and grew up in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Her father, a businessman, set an example with his own quest for scientific knowledge. He sometimes opened an encyclopedia volume to a random page and read whatever he found.\nAfter leaving home to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman encouraged his sister to persist with science by sending her a college astronomy textbook. Noticing data in the book attributed to a female scientist, young Joan felt renewed hope about her chances for making a career in scientific research.\nAt Oberlin College in Ohio, she studied physics and met a fellow student,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Hirshberg.\n\n\n\n They married in 1948, and she spent a year with him in Guatemala while he did anthropological research. She earned a doctorate in physics from Syracuse University in 1958.\nIn the early 1960s, with children at home, she tried homemaking in Spring Valley, N.Y., where her husband was working. She became depressed and sought help from a psychiatrist, who prescribed work outside the home. She got a job at Columbia University\u2019s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and studied the Earth\u2019s magnetic fields.\nShe later worked at labs in California and Colorado, alternating with periods of unemployment, while she raised three children. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. She joined NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in 1985.\nIn 1990, during a conference near Sochi, Russia, she bonded with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexander Ruzmaikin,\n\n\n\n a Soviet space scientist. He invited her for an early morning swim in the frigid Black Sea. To his surprise, she agreed. Dr. Ruzmaikin recalled that on the way back to the hotel they took a glass-walled elevator.\n\u201cWhy is it transparent?\u201d she asked.\n\u201cTo keep couples from kissing and smooching,\u201d he explained.\n\u201cLet\u2019s kiss!\u201d she said.\nThey married in 1992.\nDr. Feynman and Dr. Ruzmaikin published research linking the development of agricultural societies to a period of climate stability around 10,000 years ago. Before then, they found, climate changes were too frequent to allow for sustained farming.\nShe is survived by Dr. Ruzmaikin, three children and four grandchildren.\n\u201cWhen I went to college my father told me to learn to make a living because you never know what life brings,\u201d she said in a speech in 2018. \u201cOnly men made good livings in those days, and so I figured I\u2019d better go into a man\u2019s profession. I chose physics and hoped to be some sort of an assistant.\u201d\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Her mother warned her that women\u2019s minds weren\u2019t suited for science, but Joan Feynman\u2019s brother, Richard, a future Nobel laureate, persuaded her to press on with her studies. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking Bridged Science and Popular Culture (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2413",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/stephen-hawking-who-bridged-science-and-popular-culture-dies-at-age-76-1521000561?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=78",
        "text": "Physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Hawking,\n\n\n\n who made complicated concepts like black holes, time and the history of the cosmos accessible to the masses, has died at the age of 76. \nDr. Hawking \u201cdied peacefully at his home in Cambridge,\u201d according to a statement provided by his family. \n\u201cWe are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years,\u201d said his children, Lucy, Robert and Tim, in a statement. \u201cWe will miss him forever.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nDr. Hawking\u2019s health had been deteriorating in recent years. In 2015, he canceled a series of lectures because of poor health. In 2009, he was hospitalized due to an infection.\n\n\nThe University of Cambridge professor was an iconic figure in both the scientific community and in popular culture, known for his keen mind and humor, as well as his striking physical challenges. Dr. Hawking had long battled with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which left him wheelchair-bound for most of his life. Commonly known as Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease or motor neuron disease, the condition damages the nerves that control movement and results in paralysis.\nPatients with ALS typically die within five years of diagnosis. Dr. Hawking, who was diagnosed in 1963 at the age of 21, is believed to have been the longest-living survivor, a fact that still perplexes neurologists.\n\n\nBook Excerpt Why God Did Not Create the Universe \n\n\nNevertheless, he continued to work and produced widely influential theses and books about the nature of time and space even as his condition deteriorated. In 1985, he lost the ability to speak following a tracheotomy. Since then, he communicated through a computerized voice synthesizer. His robotic voice became a defining characteristic of his public persona.\n\u201cFrom his wheelchair, he\u2019s led us on a journey to the farthest and strangest reaches of the cosmos,\u201d President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n said of Dr. Hawking in 2009 during a ceremony in which the cosmologist received the Medal of Freedom. \u201cIn so doing, he has stirred our imagination and shown us the power of the human spirit here on Earth.\u201d\nDuring his long career, Dr. Hawking devised seminal theories that have shaped scientists\u2019 and the public\u2019s understanding of black holes and the beginning of the universe.\n\u201cHe has pioneered completely new areas in physics,\u201d Caltech physicist Kip Thorne said in 2015.\nBorn in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942\u2014the 300th anniversary of Galileo\u2019s death\u2014Dr. Hawking loved playing with model trains, airplanes and boats as a youngster. He also enjoyed inventing games, including some dealing with manufacturing processes and feudal societies.\n\n\n\n\nRemembering Physicist Stephen Hawking in PhotosThe professor, who brought complicated concepts in science and mathematics to the masses, dies at 76\u00a0\u00a0Physicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York in April 2016. Dr. Hawking has died at the age of 76.Lucas Jackson/Reuters1 of 12\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 12Hide CaptionPhysicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York in April 2016. Dr. Hawking has died at the age of 76.Lucas Jackson/Reuters\n\n\n\u201cI think these games, as well as the trains, boats, and airplanes, came from an urge to know how systems worked and how to control them,\u201d he wrote in his short autobiography, \u201cMy Brief History.\u201d He\u2019d later channel this fascination into his work on deciphering how the universe works.\nDr. Hawking studied physics at University College, Oxford and later earned his Ph.D. in cosmology from the University of Cambridge. There, he started developing the theories on the nature of black holes that would eventually earn him fame.\nAmong his most important scientific contributions are his singularity theorems, which help explain concepts like the beginning of time.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThey prove quite solidly that general relativity does predict the existence of black holes and of the Big Bang,\u201d said Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist and author in 2016. \u201cThis was previously strongly suspected, but not truly proven mathematically. Today these theorems are commonly recognized as an important piece of our knowledge of the theory of general relativity.\u201d \nGeneral relativity refers to a theory that an object\u2019s gravity can bend time and space.\nIn recent years, he also partnered with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs on high-risk science initiatives. At a conference in April 2016 for one such project, Dr. Hawking said he wanted to be remembered for his work on Hawking radiation, a theory on how information might escape a black hole\u2019s powerful grip. Hawking radiation-leaking black holes offer an explanation to the long-perplexing information paradox: If black holes eventually disappear and the laws of physics state that the universe\u2019s amount of information is fixed, what happens to the information black holes contain? Dr. Hawking\u2019s answer: It\u2019s suspended at the event horizon, the border between space and a black hole\u2019s void.\nOther experts agree it\u2019s his most notable work, although Hawking radiation has never been directly observed.\nOutside academic circles, Dr. Hawking may be best known for his public outreach. He tackled heady topics like quantum mechanics in popular books, Reddit forums, on television and in viral videos with Hollywood stars like Keanu Reeves and Paul Rudd. In 2014, the film \u201cThe Theory of Everything\u201d chronicled his life and scientific achievements. Eddie Redmayne, the actor who played him on screen, received an Academy Award for the role. \n\n\n\n\n\nQuestioning the Universe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHis 1988 book, \u201cA Brief History of Time,\u201d which explains the history of the universe and space-time, became an international best seller\u2014and a motivating force for readers.\n\u201cStephen has always been inspirational to me,\u201d Pete Denman, an\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel\n\n\n designer who helped build the computer tools Dr. Hawking uses to communicate, told Wired in 2015. \u201cAfter I broke my neck and became paralyzed, my mother gave me a copy of \u2018A Brief History of Time,\u2019 which had just come out. She told me people in wheelchairs can still do amazing things. Looking back, I realize how prophetic that was.\u201d\nDr. Hawking\u2019s colleagues agree: \u201cStephen\u2019s beautiful and very successful popular books have been precious...because they have disclosed the beauty of theoretical physics to millions of readers and have inspired many young people to enter the field,\u201d Dr. Rovelli said. \u201cStephen\u2019s illness has made him a wonderful example, almost a hero, of how humans can overcome the worse physical conditions. It is in this, in my opinion, that he is truly great.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Unveil \u2018Nanocrafts\u2019 Plan\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Russian billionaire and Internet investor Yuri Milner, together with physicist Stephen Hawking, unveiled a plan to send tiny robotic spacecrafts into deep space using lasers in 2016.\n \n\n\nDr. Hawking used traditional and modern means to communicate the wonders of science to lay audiences, often through humor. That helped to make him a household name. He had an active\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n page with more than four million followers. \n\u201cI want to encourage people to imagine and explore the possibilities of science both the known and the, as yet, unknown,\u201d he said during a 2015 lecture for the BBC. He also wanted them to have a deep understanding of scientific and technological concepts so they can make informed decisions. He became somewhat of an activist, speaking out about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons.\nDr. Hawking is survived by two ex-wives and his three children from his first marriage, with whom he wrote a series of popular children\u2019s science-fiction books.\nWrite to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com Physicist Stephen Hawking, who made complicated concepts like black holes, time and the history of the cosmos accessible to the masses, has died at the age of 76. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Harold Rosen Launched an Era of Global Satellite Communications (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2414",
        "date": "2017-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/harold-rosen-launched-an-era-of-global-satellite-communications-1486738806?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=26",
        "text": "Many of his colleagues dismissed the idea as impractical. Dr. Rosen struggled for years to win funding for his project. \u201cThis was not the most auspicious time to propose a commercial space program,\u201d he later wrote. \u201cThe most vivid impression most people then had of space-related activities was of rockets blowing up at Cape Canaveral.\u201d\nIn 1963, after myriad delays and technical problems, his Syncom satellite was finally launched into orbit. President John F. Kennedy tried it out by making a call to Nigerian Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abubakar Tafawa\n\n\n\n Balewa. The next year the Syncom satellite system relayed live TV coverage of the Tokyo Summer Olympics to the U.S.\nDr. Rosen went on to direct development of more than 150 satellites. Among his many awards was the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1985. In his late 80s, he was still fit enough for gymnastics, including swinging from one steel ring to the next at Santa Monica Beach.\n\n\nDr. Rosen died Jan. 30 at his home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. He was 90 years old and had suffered a minor stroke in 2015.\nHarold Alvin Rosen was born March 20, 1926, in New Orleans. His father was a dentist. When Harold was a teenager, his parents divorced, and his mother went to work as a secretary to support her three children. Young Harold built a ham radio as a teenager and graduated from high school at 15.\nHe then studied electrical engineering at Tulane University but paused his studies to join the Navy and work with radio communications and radar during World War II. After his Navy service, he completed his degree at Tulane and was unsure whether to continue his studies at Harvard University or the California Institute of Technology. A Life magazine story about beach parties in Southern California persuaded him to head for Caltech, where he earned a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1951.\nDuring and after his Caltech studies he worked at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Co.\n\n\n , gaining experience in the electronics used to guide antiaircraft missiles. In 1956, he joined Hughes Aircraft, founded by the reclusive tycoon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard Hughes.\n\n\n\n \nCompeting against Bell Labs and others for supremacy in satellites, Dr. Rosen wanted a geostationary system, in which satellites 22,300 miles above the Earth would move in sync with the spinning planet. That meant antennas on Earth could always point in one direction, eliminating the need for complex tracking systems. Other scientists believed the satellites needed for a geostationary system would be unreliable and too heavy to launch.\n\u201cI considered it me against the world,\u201d he later told the Los Angeles Times.\nDr. Rosen counted on his knowledge of electronics and missile guidance. He and his colleagues came up with a cylindrical satellite weighing only about 55 pounds. The Syncom satellite would spin in space, making it easier to stabilize\u2014similar to the way a quarterback throws a spiral to avoid wobbles.\nWhen Hughes hesitated to fund the project, Dr. Rosen discussed it with his former employers at Raytheon. To avoid losing Dr. Rosen and his team, Hughes decided to back Dr. Rosen\u2019s concept. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration contracted to buy three of the satellites and launched them.\nThe first Syncom launch, in February 1963, failed when a rocket malfunctioned. Six months later, a second launch succeeded. Hughes was on its way to becoming a powerhouse in the nascent commercial-satellite industry, greatly expanding the scope for international telephone calls and data transmission previously handled mainly by copper cables. One result: national same-day distribution of The Wall Street Journal via satellite transmission to regional printing plants.\nDr. Rosen later helped design much larger, more complex satellites, powerful enough to reach small dishes on Earth, including those bringing hundreds of TV channels to individual homes. In the mid-1980s, he and colleagues worked out ways for astronauts on the Space Shuttle to repair satellites in orbit.\n\u201cHarold was the brains behind a lot of what we did,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steven Dorfman,\n\n\n\n a former president of the Hughes telecommunications and space business.\nDr. Rosen was in Sri Lanka in 1990 when his first grandchild was born. Satellites made it easily affordable for his son Rocky to fax a picture of her to him, his family recalled.\nAfter retiring from Hughes in 1993, Dr. Rosen went into business with his brother,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ben Rosen,\n\n\n\n a venture capitalist who helped found Compaq Computer Corp. Their Rosen Motors developed a hybrid-electric powertrain for cars, promising virtually no emissions, but auto makers declined to embrace the technology. \u201cIt was a technical success and a commercial failure,\u201d Ben Rosen said.\nIn recent years, Harold Rosen consulted for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and conducted research in areas including spacecraft, gravitation Harold Rosen pioneered the Syncom satellite, which made Hughes Aircraft a powerhouse in the nascent commercial-satellite industry. His work expanded the scope for international telephone calls and data transmission. Dr. Rosen died in Jan. 30 at his California home. He was 90 years old. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Entrepreneur Rocketed Into Space, Then Died a Month Later (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2415",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/entrepreneur-rocketed-into-space-then-died-a-month-later-11637185211?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=3",
        "text": "In the 1970s, Glen de Vries was a precocious little boy who loved science, Lego bricks and model rockets.\nBy 2021, he was a software entrepreneur who still loved science, still built rockets with Lego blocks and now could afford to fly on a real rocket, operated by Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC. Mr. de Vries was one of two paying customers on a 10-minute flight on Oct. 13 that took them and the actor William Shatner to the edge of space.\nBack on Earth, Mr. de Vries called his space adventure life-changing. Though he declined to say how much he had paid for his ticket, he assured interviewers the trip was worth the price.\nIn an interview conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, he described the spacecraft as a \u201ccannonball with windows.\u201d On the way down, he said, \u201cyou watch the curve of the planet go back to flat and the textures change. The view on the way back was just as incredible as it was on the way up.\u201d\n\n\nFour weeks later, on Nov. 11, Mr. de Vries was one of two people who died in the crash of a single-engine Cessna 172 in a wooded area near Lake Kemah, N.J. Investigators didn\u2019t immediately identify the pilot.\nMr. de Vries, who was 49, was a charismatic biologist and computer scientist who co-founded Medidata Solutions Inc., a provider of software and other services for clinical trials of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.\nAt his high school, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City, he was such an advanced student that he sometimes helped teach chemistry classes. As an adult, he mastered public speaking, ballroom dancing and guitar playing. He learned Japanese well enough to give speeches and sing karaoke.\nUri Attia, a friend, recalled being stuck in an airport and struggling to rebook after a canceled flight to Costa Rica. \u201cI was about to blow my top,\u201d Mr. Attia said. Mr. de Vries calmly offered a plan: \u201cYou and I are going to unleash the power of comedy.\u201d His goofy charm quickly induced an airline employee to find first-class seats on an alternative flight.\nAfter his death, family members visited his home and found he had been working on a Lego replica of Blue Origin\u2019s spacecraft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGlen de Vries, at age 10, launching a model rocket as his mother, Madeline Hooper, watches at a safe distance.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n de Vries Family\n \n\n\n\nGlen Michael de Vries was born June 29, 1972, and grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His mother, now known as Madeline Hooper, ran a public relations firm. His father, Alan de Vries, was a Wall Street securities trader and executive. His parents divorced when Glen was young but worked out amicable ways to share parenting responsibilities.\n\u201cHe just was a curious kid,\u201d his mother said. \u201cHe was so into how things go together and how things mechanically work and why planes fly.\u201d At age 10, he had his first computer, a Sinclair 1000.\nHe earned a degree in molecular biology and genetics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he rowed on the crew team. To earn spending money, he took a job calling alumni to solicit donations. One of his calls yielded an invitation to work in a research lab at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.\nAt the lab, he met Edward Ikeguchi, who was doing his medical residency in urology. As they worked on research related to prostate-cancer treatments in the mid-1990s, the two young men noticed that records were kept on paper and shared via barely legible carbon copies and faxes. \u201cThe nurses were basically running around like headless chickens filling out forms,\u201d Dr. Ikeguchi said.\nThough the internet was still a novelty, the two men began working on online forms for clinical trials and formed a business, eventually called Medidata. Their first big capital expenditure was about $20,000 for a copper-wire internet connection to Mr. de Vries\u2019s apartment. In 1999 they were joined by Tarek Sherif, who had financial experience and became chief executive.\nMedidata went public in 2009 and a decade later was sold to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dassault Syst\u00e8mes\n\n\n for about $5.8 billion. Messrs. de Vries and Sherif stayed on as senior executives. \u201cIn 21 years, we never had an argument,\u201d Mr. Sherif said. \u201cWe disagreed on things but we would always find common ground.\u201d\n\n\nMore obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMr. de Vries served as a trustee of Dancing Classrooms, a nonprofit that teaches children to dance. It was, he said, a way to develop poise, mutual respect and confidence.\nHe learned to fly airplanes about two years ago and later bought a Diamond DA40 plane. A few days before his death he posted on Instagram a picture of his plane on a bumpy runway at a tiny airport near Limington, Maine. \u201cReally good restaurant!\u201d he reported. \u201cWorth a trip!\u201d\nWhenever he could fin Glen de Vries loved model rockets as a boy and grew up to be a software tycoon who could afford to ride on a real one. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Entrepreneur Rocketed Into Space, Then Died a Month Later (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2416",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/entrepreneur-rocketed-into-space-then-died-a-month-later-11637185211?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=11",
        "text": "In the 1970s, Glen de Vries was a precocious little boy who loved science, Lego bricks and model rockets.\nBy 2021, he was a software entrepreneur who still loved science, still built rockets with Lego blocks and now could afford to fly on a real rocket, operated by Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC. Mr. de Vries was one of two paying customers on a 10-minute flight on Oct. 13 that took them and the actor William Shatner to the edge of space.\nBack on Earth, Mr. de Vries called his space adventure life-changing. Though he declined to say how much he had paid for his ticket, he assured interviewers the trip was worth the price.\n\n\n\n\nIn an interview conducted by Carnegie Mellon University, he described the spacecraft as a \u201ccannonball with windows.\u201d On the way down, he said, \u201cyou watch the curve of the planet go back to flat and the textures change. The view on the way back was just as incredible as it was on the way up.\u201d\n\n\nFour weeks later, on Nov. 11, Mr. de Vries was one of two people who died in the crash of a single-engine Cessna 172 in a wooded area near Lake Kemah, N.J. Investigators didn\u2019t immediately identify the pilot.\nMr. de Vries, who was 49, was a charismatic biologist and computer scientist who co-founded Medidata Solutions Inc., a provider of software and other services for clinical trials of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.\nAt his high school, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City, he was such an advanced student that he sometimes helped teach chemistry classes. As an adult, he mastered public speaking, ballroom dancing and guitar playing. He learned Japanese well enough to give speeches and sing karaoke.\nUri Attia, a friend, recalled being stuck in an airport and struggling to rebook after a canceled flight to Costa Rica. \u201cI was about to blow my top,\u201d Mr. Attia said. Mr. de Vries calmly offered a plan: \u201cYou and I are going to unleash the power of comedy.\u201d His goofy charm quickly induced an airline employee to find first-class seats on an alternative flight.\nAfter his death, family members visited his home and found he had been working on a Lego replica of Blue Origin\u2019s spacecraft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGlen de Vries, at age 10, launching a model rocket as his mother, Madeline Hooper, watches at a safe distance.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n de Vries Family\n \n\n\n\nGlen Michael de Vries was born June 29, 1972, and grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His mother, now known as Madeline Hooper, ran a public relations firm. His father, Alan de Vries, was a Wall Street securities trader and executive. His parents divorced when Glen was young but worked out amicable ways to share parenting responsibilities.\n\u201cHe just was a curious kid,\u201d his mother said. \u201cHe was so into how things go together and how things mechanically work and why planes fly.\u201d At age 10, he had his first computer, a Sinclair 1000.\nHe earned a degree in molecular biology and genetics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he rowed on the crew team. To earn spending money, he took a job calling alumni to solicit donations. One of his calls yielded an invitation to work in a research lab at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.\nAt the lab, he met Edward Ikeguchi, who was doing his medical residency in urology. As they worked on research related to prostate-cancer treatments in the mid-1990s, the two young men noticed that records were kept on paper and shared via barely legible carbon copies and faxes. \u201cThe nurses were basically running around like headless chickens filling out forms,\u201d Dr. Ikeguchi said.\nThough the internet was still a novelty, the two men began working on online forms for clinical trials and formed a business, eventually called Medidata. Their first big capital expenditure was about $20,000 for a copper-wire internet connection to Mr. de Vries\u2019s apartment. In 1999 they were joined by Tarek Sherif, who had financial experience and became chief executive.\nMedidata went public in 2009 and a decade later was sold to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dassault Syst\u00e8mes\n\n\n for about $5.8 billion. Messrs. de Vries and Sherif stayed on as senior executives. \u201cIn 21 years, we never had an argument,\u201d Mr. Sherif said. \u201cWe disagreed on things but we would always find common ground.\u201d\n\n\nMore obituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMr. de Vries served as a trustee of Dancing Classrooms, a nonprofit that teaches children to dance. It was, he said, a way to develop poise, mutual respect and confidence.\nHe learned to fly airplanes about two years ago and later bought a Diamond DA40 plane. A few days before his death he posted on Instagram a picture of his plane on a bumpy runway at a tiny airport near Limington, Maine. \u201cReally good restaurant!\u201d he reported. \u201cWorth a trip!\u201d\nWhenever he could find time, he jammed on his guitar in an amateur band called Spread Eagle, whose specialties included covers of Journey\u2019s \u201cSeparate Ways\u201d and Three Dog Night\u2019s \u201cJoy to the World.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGlen de Vries plays the lead guitar with friends in a band called Spread Eagle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ren Tucker\n \n\n\n\nHe served as a trustee at Carnegie Mellon University and endowed a deanship at CMU\u2019s Mellon College of Science.\nHis 2020 book, \u201cThe Patient Equation,\u201d envisioned an injection of data science into medicine to bring the best medical knowledge \u201cto patients of all demographics around the world.\u201d He foresaw personal health-tracking devices feeding data into global online platforms to allow for more sharing of information to speed up research and foster personalized treatments.\nMr. de Vries was married and divorced three times. His survivors include his parents and two half sisters, Lizzy de Vries and Catherine Hooper.\nMr. Attia summed up Mr. de Vries\u2019s approach to life this way: \u201cHe would go into every situation asking how could this be more fun?\u201d \nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Glen de Vries loved model rockets as a boy and grew up to be a software tycoon who could afford to ride on a real one. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paul Lachance Promoted Food Safety on Earth and in Outer Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2417",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-lachance-promoted-food-safety-on-earth-and-in-outer-space-1485529200?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=101",
        "text": "In 1963, Dr. Lachance, a 30-year-old Air Force scientist armed with a doctorate in biology and nutrition, was recruited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to supervise the feeding of astronauts. He and his colleagues developed snacks and meals\u2014including bacon squares and spaghetti in a tube\u2014that astronauts could get down and keep down during missions.\nAvoiding contamination was the highest priority. \u201cI did not want a telephone call at two o\u2019clock in the morning [from NASA\u2019s chief medical officer] telling me that his astronaut or astronauts were sick,\u201d Dr. Lachance said in a 2006 interview with historians at the space agency.\n\n\n\n\nDr. Lachance died Jan. 21 in Somerset, N.J. He was 83 and suffered from Parkinsonism.\n\n\nA former Boy Scout, he was determined to be prepared for anything as he and others at NASA improvised space procedures. He oversaw experiments in which people tried to swallow while upside down. He also helped explore procedures for defecation in a space capsule. \u201cI worried about things from the beginning to the end,\u201d he said.\nAt one point, he was ordered to produce food that couldn\u2019t catch fire.\u00a0\u201cYou give me stainless steel astronauts, and I\u2019ll give you stainless steel food,\u201d he said.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nChicago-Based Banker Starred as a Deal Maker \nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum, Husband of Dianne Feinstein, Dies at Age 86\nFebruary 28, 2022 \n\n\nBroker Knew Secrets of Top-End Homes\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIn the end, astronaut food wasn\u2019t bad, he said. He had tested it on his children. \u201cIt\u2019s not mother\u2019s cooking, but it\u2019s palatable,\u201d he said in a 1990 interview.\nPaul Albert Lachance was born June 5, 1933, in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and grew up in a house built by his father between the railroad tracks and the Passumpsic River. His father was a plumber and heating contractor who also owned rental properties. Young Paul helped run his father\u2019s plumbing-supplies store from age 10 and won a scholarship at the University of Vermont. After struggling with a chemistry class there, he transferred to St. Michael\u2019s College, where he received a biology degree with a minor in philosophy. He earned a doctorate in biology and nutrition in 1960 at the University of Ottawa in Canada.\nWhile serving in the Air Force at a medical-research laboratory near Dayton, Ohio, he was assigned to help create feeding plans for Mercury astronauts. NASA then hired him as its flight food and nutrition coordinator in Houston, where he worked on the Gemini and Apollo programs.\nHe quizzed astronauts about their favorite foods, tested packaging and studied ways to wedge food packets into small nooks inside spacecraft.\nAbove all, Dr. Lachance wanted more rigorous quality-control procedures than he found in the food industry. Using specifications he and his colleagues set, Pillsbury Co. and other food suppliers developed ways to analyze hazards, identify critical points where safety lapses could occur and monitor compliance. One risk they identified was the presence of telephones, laden with germs, in food plants. Spices, crawling with contaminants, were another worry.\nPractices developed by Dr. Lachance, Howard Bauman of Pillsbury and others evolved into a method known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP, used by regulators and food companies in the U.S. and abroad.\nIn 1967, Dr. Lachance joined the faculty of Rutgers University, where he became a professor and chairman of the department of food science.\u00a0His work there included a program that fortified tortillas with soy and vitamins in Guatemala to improve the health of mothers and their infants.\u00a0He also advised schools on how to make their lunches and breakfasts more nutritious.\nHe preached smart food choices. \u201cIf it\u2019s dark green or yellow, eat it,\u201d he said in one interview. Still, he had a weakness for ice cream and recognized that few people would subsist on whole grains and vegetables. So he worked with food companies to develop enriched comfort foods.\nHe once brought home an experimental doughnut loaded with nutrients. \u201cI tried eating it,\u201d recalled one of his sons, Marc-Andr\u00e9. \u201cI said, \u2018Dad, you\u2019re going to need like a gallon of milk to get this down.\u2019\u201d\nDr. Lachance found time to lead Boy Scout troops, fish in Vermont and regale school groups with tales of eating in outer space. In 1977, he was ordained as a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. At the St. Paul Parish in Princeton, N.J., he officiated at masses, funerals and weddings. He also engaged in marriage counseling.\nDr. Lachance\u2019s survivors include his high-school sweetheart and wife of 61 years, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se, their four children and nine grandchildren.\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com As a nutritionist, Paul Lachance devised ways to feed American astronauts in space, helped establish food-safety standards used globally and created enriched foods to promote health and reduce infant mortality. Dr. Lachance died Jan. 21 at 83. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paul Lachance Promoted Food Safety on Earth and in Outer Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2418",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-lachance-promoted-food-safety-on-earth-and-in-outer-space-1485529200?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=89",
        "text": "In 1963, Dr. Lachance, a 30-year-old Air Force scientist armed with a doctorate in biology and nutrition, was recruited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to supervise the feeding of astronauts. He and his colleagues developed snacks and meals\u2014including bacon squares and spaghetti in a tube\u2014that astronauts could get down and keep down during missions.\nAvoiding contamination was the highest priority. \u201cI did not want a telephone call at two o\u2019clock in the morning [from NASA\u2019s chief medical officer] telling me that his astronaut or astronauts were sick,\u201d Dr. Lachance said in a 2006 interview with historians at the space agency.\nDr. Lachance died Jan. 21 in Somerset, N.J. He was 83 and suffered from Parkinsonism.\n\n\nA former Boy Scout, he was determined to be prepared for anything as he and others at NASA improvised space procedures. He oversaw experiments in which people tried to swallow while upside down. He also helped explore procedures for defecation in a space capsule. \u201cI worried about things from the beginning to the end,\u201d he said.\nAt one point, he was ordered to produce food that couldn\u2019t catch fire.\u00a0\u201cYou give me stainless steel astronauts, and I\u2019ll give you stainless steel food,\u201d he said.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIn the end, astronaut food wasn\u2019t bad, he said. He had tested it on his children. \u201cIt\u2019s not mother\u2019s cooking, but it\u2019s palatable,\u201d he said in a 1990 interview.\nPaul Albert Lachance was born June 5, 1933, in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and grew up in a house built by his father between the railroad tracks and the Passumpsic River. His father was a plumber and heating contractor who also owned rental properties. Young Paul helped run his father\u2019s plumbing-supplies store from age 10 and won a scholarship at the University of Vermont. After struggling with a chemistry class there, he transferred to St. Michael\u2019s College, where he received a biology degree with a minor in philosophy. He earned a doctorate in biology and nutrition in 1960 at the University of Ottawa in Canada.\nWhile serving in the Air Force at a medical-research laboratory near Dayton, Ohio, he was assigned to help create feeding plans for Mercury astronauts. NASA then hired him as its flight food and nutrition coordinator in Houston, where he worked on the Gemini and Apollo programs.\nHe quizzed astronauts about their favorite foods, tested packaging and studied ways to wedge food packets into small nooks inside spacecraft.\nAbove all, Dr. Lachance wanted more rigorous quality-control procedures than he found in the food industry. Using specifications he and his colleagues set, Pillsbury Co. and other food suppliers developed ways to analyze hazards, identify critical points where safety lapses could occur and monitor compliance. One risk they identified was the presence of telephones, laden with germs, in food plants. Spices, crawling with contaminants, were another worry.\nPractices developed by Dr. Lachance, Howard Bauman of Pillsbury and others evolved into a method known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP, used by regulators and food companies in the U.S. and abroad.\nIn 1967, Dr. Lachance joined the faculty of Rutgers University, where he became a professor and chairman of the department of food science.\u00a0His work there included a program that fortified tortillas with soy and vitamins in Guatemala to improve the health of mothers and their infants.\u00a0He also advised schools on how to make their lunches and breakfasts more nutritious.\nHe preached smart food choices. \u201cIf it\u2019s dark green or yellow, eat it,\u201d he said in one interview. Still, he had a weakness for ice cream and recognized that few people would subsist on whole grains and vegetables. So he worked with food companies to develop enriched comfort foods.\nHe once brought home an experimental doughnut loaded with nutrients. \u201cI tried eating it,\u201d recalled one of his sons, Marc-Andr\u00e9. \u201cI said, \u2018Dad, you\u2019re going to need like a gallon of milk to get this down.\u2019\u201d\nDr. Lachance found time to lead Boy Scout troops, fish in Vermont and regale school groups with tales of eating in outer space. In 1977, he was ordained as a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. At the St. Paul Parish in Princeton, N.J., he officiated at masses, funerals and weddings. He also engaged in marriage counseling.\nDr. Lachance\u2019s survivors include his high-school sweetheart and wife of 61 years, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se, their four children and nine grandchildren.\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com As a nutritionist, Paul Lachance devised ways to feed American astronauts in space, helped establish food-safety standards used globally and created enriched foods to promote health and reduce infant mortality. Dr. Lachance died Jan. 21 at 83. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paul Lachance Promoted Food Safety on Earth and in Outer Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2419",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-lachance-promoted-food-safety-on-earth-and-in-outer-space-1485529200?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=132",
        "text": "In 1963, Dr. Lachance, a 30-year-old Air Force scientist armed with a doctorate in biology and nutrition, was recruited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to supervise the feeding of astronauts. He and his colleagues developed snacks and meals\u2014including bacon squares and spaghetti in a tube\u2014that astronauts could get down and keep down during missions.\nAvoiding contamination was the highest priority. \u201cI did not want a telephone call at two o\u2019clock in the morning [from NASA\u2019s chief medical officer] telling me that his astronaut or astronauts were sick,\u201d Dr. Lachance said in a 2006 interview with historians at the space agency.\n\n\n\n\nDr. Lachance died Jan. 21 in Somerset, N.J. He was 83 and suffered from Parkinsonism.\n\n\nA former Boy Scout, he was determined to be prepared for anything as he and others at NASA improvised space procedures. He oversaw experiments in which people tried to swallow while upside down. He also helped explore procedures for defecation in a space capsule. \u201cI worried about things from the beginning to the end,\u201d he said.\nAt one point, he was ordered to produce food that couldn\u2019t catch fire.\u00a0\u201cYou give me stainless steel astronauts, and I\u2019ll give you stainless steel food,\u201d he said.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIn the end, astronaut food wasn\u2019t bad, he said. He had tested it on his children. \u201cIt\u2019s not mother\u2019s cooking, but it\u2019s palatable,\u201d he said in a 1990 interview.\nPaul Albert Lachance was born June 5, 1933, in St. Johnsbury, Vt., and grew up in a house built by his father between the railroad tracks and the Passumpsic River. His father was a plumber and heating contractor who also owned rental properties. Young Paul helped run his father\u2019s plumbing-supplies store from age 10 and won a scholarship at the University of Vermont. After struggling with a chemistry class there, he transferred to St. Michael\u2019s College, where he received a biology degree with a minor in philosophy. He earned a doctorate in biology and nutrition in 1960 at the University of Ottawa in Canada.\nWhile serving in the Air Force at a medical-research laboratory near Dayton, Ohio, he was assigned to help create feeding plans for Mercury astronauts. NASA then hired him as its flight food and nutrition coordinator in Houston, where he worked on the Gemini and Apollo programs.\nHe quizzed astronauts about their favorite foods, tested packaging and studied ways to wedge food packets into small nooks inside spacecraft.\nAbove all, Dr. Lachance wanted more rigorous quality-control procedures than he found in the food industry. Using specifications he and his colleagues set, Pillsbury Co. and other food suppliers developed ways to analyze hazards, identify critical points where safety lapses could occur and monitor compliance. One risk they identified was the presence of telephones, laden with germs, in food plants. Spices, crawling with contaminants, were another worry.\nPractices developed by Dr. Lachance, Howard Bauman of Pillsbury and others evolved into a method known as Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP, used by regulators and food companies in the U.S. and abroad.\nIn 1967, Dr. Lachance joined the faculty of Rutgers University, where he became a professor and chairman of the department of food science.\u00a0His work there included a program that fortified tortillas with soy and vitamins in Guatemala to improve the health of mothers and their infants.\u00a0He also advised schools on how to make their lunches and breakfasts more nutritious.\nHe preached smart food choices. \u201cIf it\u2019s dark green or yellow, eat it,\u201d he said in one interview. Still, he had a weakness for ice cream and recognized that few people would subsist on whole grains and vegetables. So he worked with food companies to develop enriched comfort foods.\nHe once brought home an experimental doughnut loaded with nutrients. \u201cI tried eating it,\u201d recalled one of his sons, Marc-Andr\u00e9. \u201cI said, \u2018Dad, you\u2019re going to need like a gallon of milk to get this down.\u2019\u201d\nDr. Lachance found time to lead Boy Scout troops, fish in Vermont and regale school groups with tales of eating in outer space. In 1977, he was ordained as a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. At the St. Paul Parish in Princeton, N.J., he officiated at masses, funerals and weddings. He also engaged in marriage counseling.\nDr. Lachance\u2019s survivors include his high-school sweetheart and wife of 61 years, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se, their four children and nine grandchildren.\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com As a nutritionist, Paul Lachance devised ways to feed American astronauts in space, helped establish food-safety standards used globally and created enriched foods to promote health and reduce infant mortality. Dr. Lachance died Jan. 21 at 83. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Microchip Pioneer Helped Put the Silicon Into Silicon Valley (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2420",
        "date": "2021-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/microchip-pioneer-helped-put-the-silicon-into-silicon-valley-11637852400?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=3",
        "text": "After graduating from MIT in 1956, he joined the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory near San Francisco, run by William Shockley, who won a Nobel Prize the same year for research on transistors and semiconductors. A year later, Dr. Last was one of eight people who bolted from Shockley to found Fairchild Semiconductor. The others included\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Noyce\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Moore,\n\n\n\n later co-founders of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp.\n\n\n , and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Kleiner,\n\n\n\n who went on to help form the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins.\nWhen Fairchild Semiconductor was formed, transistors were typically produced one at a time out of germanium. \u201cWe felt that the future lay with silicon,\u201d Dr. Last wrote later. His team developed mass-production processes for silicon chips, which initially went into military hardware and spacecraft and later made possible low-cost calculators, computers and myriad other electronic devices.\n\nDr. Last died on Nov. 11 in Los Angeles. He was 92.\nOther companies were working on similar technology, but Fairchild \u201ccame up with the approach to the microchip that proved the most successful and is the basis for the silicon chips the digital world relies on today,\u201d said David C. Brock, director of curatorial affairs at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.\nJay Taylor Last was born Oct. 18, 1929, and grew up in Butler, near Pittsburgh. His parents had been teachers, but his father switched to working at a steel mill to make more money.\nYoung Jay was a bookworm and taught himself to build small electric motors. \u201cI always started out the school session very excited,\u201d he said in a 2004 oral history for the Chemical Heritage Foundation, \u201cbut by the end of the third week I\u2019d read everything we were going to cover that term, and it got pretty boring.\u201d\nDuring the summer between his junior and senior years of high school, he and a friend hitchhiked to California with a plan to earn money picking fruit. While looking for work there, he recalled \u201cliving on a nickel\u2019s worth of carrots a day.\u201d Finally, a cannery job yielded enough cash for him to buy a bus ticket home.\nAfter graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Rochester, where he earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in optics in 1951. During the summers, he worked for a lab in Butler that did scientific work for the glassmaking industry. He had a chance to make a career at that lab after completing his doctoral program at MIT.\nHis mother, he recalled, advised against taking the lab job in Butler. \u201cYou can do a lot better than that with your life,\u201d he recalled her telling him. \u201cGet the hell out of this town.\u201d\nHe also had a chance to work for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, but the pull of California was stronger.\nOnce he arrived, it soon became clear that working for Dr. Shockley would be trying. \u201cHe was just micromanaging everybody,\u201d Dr. Last said later. He began talking to \u201ckindred souls\u201d about leaving Shockley and setting up what became Fairchild Semiconductor.\n\u201cOur timing was just perfect,\u201d Dr. Last said. \u201cWe had the technology and it was something the world really needed.\u201d He and his colleagues had to invent much of the equipment needed to mass produce transistors. Within eight months, Fairchild Semiconductor was delivering its first products to customers.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nFairchild Camera & Instrument Corp., eager to diversify, provided funding to launch Fairchild Semiconductor as an affiliate in 1957 and two years later, exercised an option to acquire full ownership of the business. As a founder, Dr. Last received about $250,000 of Fairchild Camera stock, the current equivalent of about $2.4 million and equal to 15 times his annual salary at the time.\n\u201cMaking a lot of money out of this was not uppermost in our thoughts,\u201d Dr. Last said. \u201cPeople don\u2019t believe that, but it was true.\u201d\nIn 1961, he left Fairchild and joined Teledyne Inc., which wanted to make integrated circuits, mostly for military customers. He eventually became a vice president for technology at Teledyne.\nDr. Last retired from Teledyne in the late 1970s, before he was 50. He had invested in numerous startup companies, including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp.\n\n\n Mike Last, his nephew, recalled Dr. Last\u2019s quip whenever an investment paid off handsomely: \u201cWell, it looks like I\u2019ll be able to put cheese on my hamburger tonight.\u201d\nNever in thrall to the latest fashions, he bought a Beverly Hills home but still had some of the same shag carpeting decades later, his nephew said. He was more inclined to spend money on art, mountain-climbing expeditions and trips to Africa. He was particularly interested in carved artworks created by the Lega people of eastern Congo. He donated his collection of those works to the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles.\nHe also c Jay Last, a founder of Fairchild Semiconductor who died at age 92, developed ways to make integrated circuits in bulk. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ron Popeil, as Seen (Frequently) on TV, Sold Spray-On Hair, Veg-O-Matics (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2421",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-popeil-as-seen-frequently-on-tv-sold-spray-on-hair-and-veg-o-matics-11627594083?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=6",
        "text": "\u201cSelling just seemed to come naturally to me,\u201d he wrote in his memoir.\nBorn in the Bronx, Mr. Popeil was raised in Miami and Chicago. He learned to sell by hawking his father\u2019s kitchen gadgets at the Maxwell Street open-air market in Chicago. He also sold gadgets at a Woolworth\u2019s store in Chicago and at state and county fairs, where his favorite location for product demonstrations was near the women\u2019s bathrooms.\n\n\nHis various Ronco-products firms went national through television ads and later through cable-television shopping channels. In recent years, he pitched a turkey fryer.\nIn public, he gleefully sprayed the back of his head with GLH (or Great Looking Hair) to conceal a bald spot.\n\u201cIsn\u2019t that amazing?\u201d he often said. Or, for a rotisserie oven: \u201cSet it and forget it.\u201d And most famously: \u201cBut wait, there\u2019s more.\u201d\nHis hucksterism inspired parodies, including on \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d as well as a song called \u201cMr. Popeil\u201d by Weird Al Yankovic. Far from being offended, he welcomed the publicity.\n\n\nMore Obituaries Jackie Mason, When Told He Was Too Jewish, Stuck With His Shtick Sports Promoter Injected Razzle-Dazzle Into Pro Leagues Marine Pilot, Rescued From Yellow Sea, Survived to Help Design Spacecraft Scholar Led London Stock Exchange Into Modern Era \n\n\nRonald Martin Popeil (pronounced poh-PEEL) was born May 3, 1935. His father, Samuel J. Popeil, made kitchen gadgets. When Ron was 3, his parents divorced, he wrote in his memoir, adding \u201cNeither of them wanted me or my older brother Jerry, so they dumped us and sent us off to a boarding school in upstate New York.\u201d\nHe later lived with his paternal grandparents in Miami and Chicago during a childhood he depicted as unremittingly grim. \u201cI don\u2019t even recall ever having a birthday party as a child,\u201d he wrote.\nHis discovery of salesmanship yielded not just spending money but human connection. At age 16, he began selling his father\u2019s kitchen gadgets at the raucous Maxwell Street market, where he learned his craft through trial and error and by watching other hawkers. By 17, he could afford to leave home and live in his own studio apartment.\nHe briefly attended the University of Illinois but was lured away by the quick money he could make selling almost anything.\nAt a Woolworth\u2019s store, he worked as an independent contractor and gave the store a cut of his sales. He recalled demonstrating a chopping device and promising onlookers: \u201cYou can chop ham for ham salad, chicken for chicken salad, horse for horse radish.\u201d\nMr. Popeil wrote that he received a $2.5 million check when Ronco Teleproducts went public in 1969. In 1984, a bank lender cut off Ronco\u2019s line of credit, and the company filed for bankruptcy. He later bought back the inventory of gadgets from creditors and returned to the fair circuit to sell them.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Popeil at his Beverly Hills, Calif., kitchen. A cooking enthusiast, he collected more than 2,000 bottles of olive oil.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ringo Chiu/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nOver the years, he also sold \u201csmokeless\u201d ashtrays and devices for making pasta and sausages, dehydrating fruit and scrambling eggs inside the shells.\nMr. Popeil sold his business in 2005 for nearly $60 million and relaunched himself as a seller of turkey fryers. A cooking enthusiast, he collected more than 2,000 bottles of olive oil.\nMr. Popeil\u2019s survivors include his wife, Robin Angers Popeil, four daughters and four grandchildren. His 1995 memoir mentioned three earlier marriages that ended in divorce.\n\u201cI have enough money today,\u201d he told the Associated Press in 1997. \u201cBut I can\u2019t stop. If there\u2019s a need for these things, I can\u2019t help myself.\u201d\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com The relentless pitchman, who has died at age 86, mastered salesmanship at a Chicago street market and state fairs. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jerrie Cobb Passed Astronaut Tests but NASA Kept Her Out of Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2422",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jerrie-cobb-passed-astronaut-tests-but-nasa-kept-her-out-of-space-11557498600?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=56",
        "text": "\u201cMoon Maid\u2019s Ready,\u201d declared a headline in her native Oklahoma.\nTime magazine mentioned her bust size and habit of eating hamburgers for breakfast. \u201cIf all goes well,\u201d Time reported, \u201cperhaps in late 1962 Jerrie Cobb will don a formless pressure suit, tuck her ponytail into a helmet and hop atop a rocket for the long, lonely trip into space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJerrie Cobb training in 1960 to handle a spacecraft.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAll didn\u2019t go well. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it was premature to add women to its astronaut roster. \n\n\nValentina Tereshkova, a Russian, in 1963 became the first woman in space. It would be 20 more years before Sally Ride was launched as the first American woman in that club.\nMs. Cobb found consolation in humanitarian missions, flying medicine and other aid to indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest. She died March 18 at age 88.\nGeraldyn Menor Cobb, known as Jerrie, was born March 5, 1931, in Norman, Okla. Because her father was in the Army Air Corps, the family moved frequently. In her 1997 memoir \u201cSolo Pilot,\u201d she recalled never being in one place long enough to make close friends.\nHer older sister liked dolls. Jerrie made model airplanes and learned the Morse Code. When she was 12, her father began teaching her to fly his open-cockpit Waco biplane. He attached blocks of wood to the pedals so she could reach them. \n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nOn her 16th birthday, she earned a pilot\u2019s license. Soon she found work flying a single-engine plane and dropping leaflets to promote a circus. When she wasn\u2019t doing circus duties, she offered plane rides at $1 for adults and 50 cents for children. At night, she slept on the ground, next to her plane. Wonder bread and bologna sustained her.\nShe had a commercial pilot\u2019s license at 18 and qualified as a flight instructor. Competing with thousands of military pilots returned from World War II, however, she couldn\u2019t get hired as a commercial pilot. Finally she found work at Miami International Airport as a typist and file clerk. That led to a job piloting surplus U.S. military planes to Latin America and Europe. On her first trip, during a fueling stop in Ecuador, she was accused of being a Peruvian spy and jailed for 12 days.\nBy the time she began her space tests, she had worked as a test pilot, performed in air shows, set aviation records and flown 64 types of aircraft. \nDespite the media hype, the tests of potential women astronauts weren\u2019t endorsed or managed by NASA. Instead, they were conducted by William Randolph Lovelace II, who ran a research clinic in New Mexico and was chairman of a committee advising NASA on life sciences.\nOnce NASA made clear its lack of enthusiasm for any near-term use of female astronauts, Ms. Cobb lobbied hard for reconsideration. At a hearing held by a U.S. House subcommittee in July 1962, she said female pilots weren\u2019t \u201ctrying to join a battle of the sexes.... We seek only a place in our nation\u2019s space future without discrimination.\u201d \nIn testimony to the same subcommittee, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, was unsupportive. \u201cMen fight the wars, fly the planes, come back and design and test them,\u201d he said. \u201cThe fact that women haven\u2019t cracked this field yet is a result of our social order.\u201d\nThe shy Ms. Cobb didn\u2019t relish public debate. \u201cGoing up into space couldn\u2019t be near as frightening as sitting here,\u201d she told the congressional panel.\nNASA made her a consultant. \u201cI\u2019m the most unconsulted consultant in any government agency today,\u201d she said in a speech later that year.\nShe may have hurt her cause by emphasizing her own zeal to be the first woman in space rather than focusing on the scientific arguments for female astronauts, including lighter weight and greater tolerance for pain. \u201cShe was relentlessly persistent, and her pleas were impassioned, colored with an emotion and a religious fervor quite out of step with NASA\u2019s formal scientific tone,\u201d Stephanie Nolen wrote in her 2002 book about women in space, \u201cPromised the Moon.\u201d\nAfter NASA dashed her hopes, Ms. Cobb wrote, she felt she had wasted three years trying to become an astronaut. She retreated to a Jamaican beach to rethink her future. Deeply religious, she eventually decided to devote her life to helping indigenous people in the Amazonian jungle. She learned their languages, ferried missionaries and delivered medicine, clothing and seeds.\nIn the late 1990s, Ms. Cobb made one last reach for space. NASA sent John Glenn on another space flight in 1998 at age 78 in a mission that included research into aging. Ms. Cobb asked to be considered for a similar flight. NASA snubbed her once again.\nShe kept Oklahoma-born pilot Jerrie Cobb, shut out of Mercury program, flew food and medicine to indigenous people in Amazon. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jerrie Cobb Passed Astronaut Tests but NASA Kept Her Out of Space (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2423",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jerrie-cobb-passed-astronaut-tests-but-nasa-kept-her-out-of-space-11557498600?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=61",
        "text": "\u201cMoon Maid\u2019s Ready,\u201d declared a headline in her native Oklahoma.\n\n\n\n\nTime magazine mentioned her bust size and habit of eating hamburgers for breakfast. \u201cIf all goes well,\u201d Time reported, \u201cperhaps in late 1962 Jerrie Cobb will don a formless pressure suit, tuck her ponytail into a helmet and hop atop a rocket for the long, lonely trip into space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJerrie Cobb training in 1960 to handle a spacecraft.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAll didn\u2019t go well. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it was premature to add women to its astronaut roster. \n\n\nValentina Tereshkova, a Russian, in 1963 became the first woman in space. It would be 20 more years before Sally Ride was launched as the first American woman in that club.\nMs. Cobb found consolation in humanitarian missions, flying medicine and other aid to indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest. She died March 18 at age 88.\nGeraldyn Menor Cobb, known as Jerrie, was born March 5, 1931, in Norman, Okla. Because her father was in the Army Air Corps, the family moved frequently. In her 1997 memoir \u201cSolo Pilot,\u201d she recalled never being in one place long enough to make close friends.\nHer older sister liked dolls. Jerrie made model airplanes and learned the Morse Code. When she was 12, her father began teaching her to fly his open-cockpit Waco biplane. He attached blocks of wood to the pedals so she could reach them. \n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nOn her 16th birthday, she earned a pilot\u2019s license. Soon she found work flying a single-engine plane and dropping leaflets to promote a circus. When she wasn\u2019t doing circus duties, she offered plane rides at $1 for adults and 50 cents for children. At night, she slept on the ground, next to her plane. Wonder bread and bologna sustained her.\nShe had a commercial pilot\u2019s license at 18 and qualified as a flight instructor. Competing with thousands of military pilots returned from World War II, however, she couldn\u2019t get hired as a commercial pilot. Finally she found work at Miami International Airport as a typist and file clerk. That led to a job piloting surplus U.S. military planes to Latin America and Europe. On her first trip, during a fueling stop in Ecuador, she was accused of being a Peruvian spy and jailed for 12 days.\nBy the time she began her space tests, she had worked as a test pilot, performed in air shows, set aviation records and flown 64 types of aircraft. \nDespite the media hype, the tests of potential women astronauts weren\u2019t endorsed or managed by NASA. Instead, they were conducted by William Randolph Lovelace II, who ran a research clinic in New Mexico and was chairman of a committee advising NASA on life sciences.\nOnce NASA made clear its lack of enthusiasm for any near-term use of female astronauts, Ms. Cobb lobbied hard for reconsideration. At a hearing held by a U.S. House subcommittee in July 1962, she said female pilots weren\u2019t \u201ctrying to join a battle of the sexes.... We seek only a place in our nation\u2019s space future without discrimination.\u201d \nIn testimony to the same subcommittee, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, was unsupportive. \u201cMen fight the wars, fly the planes, come back and design and test them,\u201d he said. \u201cThe fact that women haven\u2019t cracked this field yet is a result of our social order.\u201d\nThe shy Ms. Cobb didn\u2019t relish public debate. \u201cGoing up into space couldn\u2019t be near as frightening as sitting here,\u201d she told the congressional panel.\nNASA made her a consultant. \u201cI\u2019m the most unconsulted consultant in any government agency today,\u201d she said in a speech later that year.\nShe may have hurt her cause by emphasizing her own zeal to be the first woman in space rather than focusing on the scientific arguments for female astronauts, including lighter weight and greater tolerance for pain. \u201cShe was relentlessly persistent, and her pleas were impassioned, colored with an emotion and a religious fervor quite out of step with NASA\u2019s formal scientific tone,\u201d Stephanie Nolen wrote in her 2002 book about women in space, \u201cPromised the Moon.\u201d\nAfter NASA dashed her hopes, Ms. Cobb wrote, she felt she had wasted three years trying to become an astronaut. She retreated to a Jamaican beach to rethink her future. Deeply religious, she eventually decided to devote her life to helping indigenous people in the Amazonian jungle. She learned their languages, ferried missionaries and delivered medicine, clothing and seeds.\nIn the late 1990s, Ms. Cobb made one last reach for space. NASA sent John Glenn on another space flight in 1998 at age 78 in a mission that included research into aging. Ms. Cobb asked to be considered for a similar flight. NASA snubbed her once again.\nShe kept her personal life mostly private but wrote about an early romance with another pilot, Jack Ford. He died in 1959 when a plane he was flying exploded after taking off from Wake Island. Ms. Cobb never married or had children, a friend said. \nThough she didn\u2019t soar as high as she wished, Ms. Cobb never renounced her childhood dreams. \u201cI fly,\u201d she wrote in her memoir, \u201csimply because not to fly would be unthinkable.\u201d\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Oklahoma-born pilot Jerrie Cobb, shut out of Mercury program, flew food and medicine to indigenous people in Amazon. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gene Cernan, Last Astronaut to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 82 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2424",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/gene-cernan-last-astronaut-to-walk-on-the-moon-dies-at-82-1484604580?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=27",
        "text": "\u201cEven at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and encouraged our nation\u2019s leaders and young people to not let him remain the last man to walk on the Moon,\u201d the family said.\nCernan, commander of NASA\u2019s Apollo 17 mission, set foot on the lunar surface in December 1972 during his third space flight. He became the last person to walk on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972, tracing his only child\u2019s initials in the dust before climbing the ladder of the lunar module the last time. It was a moment that forever defined him in both the public eye and his own.\n\n\n\u201cThose steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,\u201d Cernan recalled in a 2007 oral history. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to go up. I wanted to stay awhile.\u201d\nCernan called it \u201cperhaps the brightest moment of my life.\u2026It\u2019s like you would want to freeze that moment and take it home with you. But you can\u2019t.\u201d\nDecades later, Cernan tried to ensure he wasn\u2019t the last person to walk on the moon, testifying before Congress to push for a return. But as the years went by he realized he wouldn\u2019t live to witness someone follow in his footsteps\u2014still visible on the moon more than 40 years later.\nOn Dec. 11, 1972, Cernan guided the lander, named Challenger, into a lunar valley called Taurus-Littrow, with Harrison \u201cJack\u201d Schmitt at his side. He recalled the silence after the lunar lander\u2019s engine shut down.\n\u201cThat\u2019s where you experience the most quiet moment a human being can experience in his lifetime,\u201d Cernan said in 2007. \u201cThere\u2019s no vibration. There\u2019s no noise. The ground quit talking. Your partner is mesmerized. He can\u2019t say anything.\n\u201cThe dust is gone. It\u2019s a realization, a reality, all of a sudden you have just landed in another world on another body out there (somewhere in the) universe, and what you are seeing is being seen by human beings\u2014human eyes\u2014for the first time.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Gene Cernan during Apollo 17 mission\u2019s outbound trip from the moon in December 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\nMore Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThree days earlier, Cernan, Mr. Schmitt and Ronald Evans had blasted off atop a Saturn rocket in the first manned nighttime launch from Kennedy Space Center. Evans remained behind as pilot of the command module that orbited the moon while the other two landed on the moon\u2019s surface. Cernan and Mr. Schmitt, a geologist, spent more than three days on the moon, including more than 22 hours outside the lander, and collected 249 pounds of lunar samples.\n\u201cIn that whole three days, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything that became routine,\u201d Cernan recalled. \u201cBut if I had to focus on one thing\u2026it was just to look back at the overwhelming and overpowering beauty of this Earth.\u201d\n\u201cTo go a quarter of a million miles away into space and have to take time out to sleep and rest\u2026I wished I could have stayed awake for 75 hours straight. I knew when I left I\u2019d never have a chance to come back.\u201d\nCompleting their third moon walk on Dec. 14, Mr. Schmitt returned to the lunar module and was followed by Cernan.\n\u201cWe leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind,\u201d Cernan said.\nHe later acknowledged that he had grasped for words to leave behind, knowing how the world remembered\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d on stepping on the moon in 1969.\nBefore heading home, Cernan said he drew the letters \u201cTDC\u201d\u2014the initials of his then 9-year-old daughter, Teresa Dawn\u2014with his finger on the dusty gray lunar surface. He said he imagined someone in the distant future would find \u201cour lunar rover and our footprints and those initials and say, \u2018I wonder who was here? Some ancient civilization was here back in the 20th century, and look at the funny marks they made.\u2019\u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene A. Cernan\n\n\n\n was born in 1934 in Chicago and graduated from Indiana\u2019s Purdue University in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering. \nHe had been a Navy attack pilot and earned a master\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering when NASA selected him in October 1963 as one of 14 members of its third astronaut class.\nIn 1966, he was pilot of Gemini 9, a three-day flight with command pilot\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Stafford\n\n\n\n where they used different techniques to rendezvous with a docking adapter that was previously launched. On the flight, Cernan became the second American to walk in space, spending more than two hours outside the Gemini spacecraft.\nCernan would later call the mission, \u201cthat spacewalk from hell.\u201d He sweated so much he lost 13 pounds. The space agency was forced to go back to the Former astronaut Gene Cernan, the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon who returned to Earth with a message of \u201cpeace and hope for all mankind,\u201d has died. He was 82. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gene Cernan, Last Astronaut to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 82 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2425",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/gene-cernan-last-astronaut-to-walk-on-the-moon-dies-at-82-1484604580?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=89",
        "text": "\u201cEven at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and encouraged our nation\u2019s leaders and young people to not let him remain the last man to walk on the Moon,\u201d the family said.\nCernan, commander of NASA\u2019s Apollo 17 mission, set foot on the lunar surface in December 1972 during his third space flight. He became the last person to walk on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972, tracing his only child\u2019s initials in the dust before climbing the ladder of the lunar module the last time. It was a moment that forever defined him in both the public eye and his own.\n\n\n\u201cThose steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,\u201d Cernan recalled in a 2007 oral history. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to go up. I wanted to stay awhile.\u201d\nCernan called it \u201cperhaps the brightest moment of my life.\u2026It\u2019s like you would want to freeze that moment and take it home with you. But you can\u2019t.\u201d\nDecades later, Cernan tried to ensure he wasn\u2019t the last person to walk on the moon, testifying before Congress to push for a return. But as the years went by he realized he wouldn\u2019t live to witness someone follow in his footsteps\u2014still visible on the moon more than 40 years later.\nOn Dec. 11, 1972, Cernan guided the lander, named Challenger, into a lunar valley called Taurus-Littrow, with Harrison \u201cJack\u201d Schmitt at his side. He recalled the silence after the lunar lander\u2019s engine shut down.\n\u201cThat\u2019s where you experience the most quiet moment a human being can experience in his lifetime,\u201d Cernan said in 2007. \u201cThere\u2019s no vibration. There\u2019s no noise. The ground quit talking. Your partner is mesmerized. He can\u2019t say anything.\n\u201cThe dust is gone. It\u2019s a realization, a reality, all of a sudden you have just landed in another world on another body out there (somewhere in the) universe, and what you are seeing is being seen by human beings\u2014human eyes\u2014for the first time.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Gene Cernan during Apollo 17 mission\u2019s outbound trip from the moon in December 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\nMore Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThree days earlier, Cernan, Mr. Schmitt and Ronald Evans had blasted off atop a Saturn rocket in the first manned nighttime launch from Kennedy Space Center. Evans remained behind as pilot of the command module that orbited the moon while the other two landed on the moon\u2019s surface. Cernan and Mr. Schmitt, a geologist, spent more than three days on the moon, including more than 22 hours outside the lander, and collected 249 pounds of lunar samples.\n\u201cIn that whole three days, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything that became routine,\u201d Cernan recalled. \u201cBut if I had to focus on one thing\u2026it was just to look back at the overwhelming and overpowering beauty of this Earth.\u201d\n\u201cTo go a quarter of a million miles away into space and have to take time out to sleep and rest\u2026I wished I could have stayed awake for 75 hours straight. I knew when I left I\u2019d never have a chance to come back.\u201d\nCompleting their third moon walk on Dec. 14, Mr. Schmitt returned to the lunar module and was followed by Cernan.\n\u201cWe leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind,\u201d Cernan said.\nHe later acknowledged that he had grasped for words to leave behind, knowing how the world remembered\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d on stepping on the moon in 1969.\nBefore heading home, Cernan said he drew the letters \u201cTDC\u201d\u2014the initials of his then 9-year-old daughter, Teresa Dawn\u2014with his finger on the dusty gray lunar surface. He said he imagined someone in the distant future would find \u201cour lunar rover and our footprints and those initials and say, \u2018I wonder who was here? Some ancient civilization was here back in the 20th century, and look at the funny marks they made.\u2019\u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene A. Cernan\n\n\n\n was born in 1934 in Chicago and graduated from Indiana\u2019s Purdue University in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering. \nHe had been a Navy attack pilot and earned a master\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering when NASA selected him in October 1963 as one of 14 members of its third astronaut class.\nIn 1966, he was pilot of Gemini 9, a three-day flight with command pilot\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Stafford\n\n\n\n where they used different techniques to rendezvous with a docking adapter that was previously launched. On the flight, Cernan became the second American to walk in space, spending more than two hours outside the Gemini spacecraft.\nCernan would later call the mission, \u201cthat spacewalk from hell.\u201d He sweated so much he lost 13 pounds. The space agency was forced to go back to the Former astronaut Gene Cernan, the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon who returned to Earth with a message of \u201cpeace and hope for all mankind,\u201d has died. He was 82. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gene Cernan, Last Astronaut to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 82 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2426",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/gene-cernan-last-astronaut-to-walk-on-the-moon-dies-at-82-1484604580?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=133",
        "text": "\u201cEven at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and encouraged our nation\u2019s leaders and young people to not let him remain the last man to walk on the Moon,\u201d the family said.\n\n\n\n\nCernan, commander of NASA\u2019s Apollo 17 mission, set foot on the lunar surface in December 1972 during his third space flight. He became the last person to walk on the moon on Dec. 14, 1972, tracing his only child\u2019s initials in the dust before climbing the ladder of the lunar module the last time. It was a moment that forever defined him in both the public eye and his own.\n\n\n\u201cThose steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,\u201d Cernan recalled in a 2007 oral history. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to go up. I wanted to stay awhile.\u201d\nCernan called it \u201cperhaps the brightest moment of my life.\u2026It\u2019s like you would want to freeze that moment and take it home with you. But you can\u2019t.\u201d\nDecades later, Cernan tried to ensure he wasn\u2019t the last person to walk on the moon, testifying before Congress to push for a return. But as the years went by he realized he wouldn\u2019t live to witness someone follow in his footsteps\u2014still visible on the moon more than 40 years later.\nOn Dec. 11, 1972, Cernan guided the lander, named Challenger, into a lunar valley called Taurus-Littrow, with Harrison \u201cJack\u201d Schmitt at his side. He recalled the silence after the lunar lander\u2019s engine shut down.\n\u201cThat\u2019s where you experience the most quiet moment a human being can experience in his lifetime,\u201d Cernan said in 2007. \u201cThere\u2019s no vibration. There\u2019s no noise. The ground quit talking. Your partner is mesmerized. He can\u2019t say anything.\n\u201cThe dust is gone. It\u2019s a realization, a reality, all of a sudden you have just landed in another world on another body out there (somewhere in the) universe, and what you are seeing is being seen by human beings\u2014human eyes\u2014for the first time.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Gene Cernan during Apollo 17 mission\u2019s outbound trip from the moon in December 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\nMore Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThree days earlier, Cernan, Mr. Schmitt and Ronald Evans had blasted off atop a Saturn rocket in the first manned nighttime launch from Kennedy Space Center. Evans remained behind as pilot of the command module that orbited the moon while the other two landed on the moon\u2019s surface. Cernan and Mr. Schmitt, a geologist, spent more than three days on the moon, including more than 22 hours outside the lander, and collected 249 pounds of lunar samples.\n\u201cIn that whole three days, I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything that became routine,\u201d Cernan recalled. \u201cBut if I had to focus on one thing\u2026it was just to look back at the overwhelming and overpowering beauty of this Earth.\u201d\n\u201cTo go a quarter of a million miles away into space and have to take time out to sleep and rest\u2026I wished I could have stayed awake for 75 hours straight. I knew when I left I\u2019d never have a chance to come back.\u201d\nCompleting their third moon walk on Dec. 14, Mr. Schmitt returned to the lunar module and was followed by Cernan.\n\u201cWe leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind,\u201d Cernan said.\nHe later acknowledged that he had grasped for words to leave behind, knowing how the world remembered\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d on stepping on the moon in 1969.\nBefore heading home, Cernan said he drew the letters \u201cTDC\u201d\u2014the initials of his then 9-year-old daughter, Teresa Dawn\u2014with his finger on the dusty gray lunar surface. He said he imagined someone in the distant future would find \u201cour lunar rover and our footprints and those initials and say, \u2018I wonder who was here? Some ancient civilization was here back in the 20th century, and look at the funny marks they made.\u2019\u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene A. Cernan\n\n\n\n was born in 1934 in Chicago and graduated from Indiana\u2019s Purdue University in 1956 with a degree in electrical engineering. \nHe had been a Navy attack pilot and earned a master\u2019s degree in aeronautical engineering when NASA selected him in October 1963 as one of 14 members of its third astronaut class.\nIn 1966, he was pilot of Gemini 9, a three-day flight with command pilot\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Stafford\n\n\n\n where they used different techniques to rendezvous with a docking adapter that was previously launched. On the flight, Cernan became the second American to walk in space, spending more than two hours outside the Gemini spacecraft.\nCernan would later call the mission, \u201cthat spacewalk from hell.\u201d He sweated so much he lost 13 pounds. The space agency was forced to go back to Former astronaut Gene Cernan, the last of only a dozen men to walk on the moon who returned to Earth with a message of \u201cpeace and hope for all mankind,\u201d has died. He was 82. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Glynn Lunney, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13 mission, dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2427",
        "date": "2021-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/glynn-lunney-died/2021/03/23/df4d3a40-8bf3-11eb-9423-04079921c915_story.html",
        "text": "Glynn S. Lunney, one of NASA\u2019s first flight directors, who had a major role in guiding astronauts to the moon and whose cool decision-making under pressure helped save the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 after an onboard explosion, died March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Tex. He was 84. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe death was announced in a statement by NASA. He had been treated for several years for leukemia.Mr. Lunney joined the space program during its infancy in the 1950s and helped develop the Mercury spacecraft used in the first U.S. crewed flights in the early 1960s. He was the fourth person selected to be a NASA flight director, a job he described as the \u201cleader of all that went on in mission control, and all of the stuff that went up to the flight crews by way of recommendations and decisions.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe was such a devoted protege of Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the space agency\u2019s renowned flight operations director, that he was sometimes called \u201cthe son of Chris Kraft.\u201dChris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95Mr. Lunney was a leading behind-the-scenes figure in the Gemini and Apollo crewed flight programs of the 1960s. In 1968, he became the chief of NASA\u2019s flight director\u2019s office, responsible for supervising other flight directors and training the many flight controllers and engineers who worked at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston.AdvertisementHe was one of four flight directors for Apollo 11, the 1969 mission on which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the moon.Story continues below advertisementThe next year, he was one of four flight directors for Apollo 13, along with Milton Windler, Gerald D. Griffin and Eugene Kranz. The mission, with astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, was scheduled to go to the moon.They were 80 percent of the way to their destination on April 13, 1970, when \u201call of us heard a rather large bang,\u201d Lovell later said. It turned out that wires from a fan had struck metal inside one of the spacecraft\u2019s two oxygen tanks, sparking an explosion.\u201cHouston,\u201d Swigert memorably said to mission control, \u201cwe\u2019ve had a problem here.\u201dBefore Mr. Lunney\u2019s shift began about 10 p.m., he later said in a NASA documentary, \u201cwe were well aware that we had a big problem on our hands. It was life-threatening. It was not about landing on the moon in the right place. It was about survival.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKranz, who was portrayed in the 1995 film \u201cApollo 13\u201d by Ed Harris, is rightly given credit for his calmness under pressure and for working to save the mission from disaster. In reality, it took an effort by all four flight directors and dozens of flight controllers to diagnose the problem and devise a way to bring Apollo 13 back safely, through 250,000 miles of space.(Mr. Lunney did not appreciate the movie: \u201cThey didn\u2019t give me credit for any of the work that I did,\u201d he said in 2019. \u201cAs a matter of fact, if you watch the movie, you\u2019ll see I\u2019m sort of portrayed as a flunky.\u201d)After the initial report of distress on April 13, Mr. Lunney and his team worked for 14 hours straight, calling it \u201cthe longest night\u201d in the history of the space program.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI had a brief period when the severity of the problem really struck home,\u201d he said in a NASA oral history. \u201cFor the first and only time in 10 years of console experiences in training and actual flights, I had the sense of the bottom falling out from under me and my stomach heading for that dark hole. .\u2009.\u2009. But the 10 years of experience kicked in and it took about 10-20 seconds for me to return from that place. Nobody else even seemed to notice.\u201dAdvertisementWith the command module\u2019s electrical system failing, the three astronauts moved to the smaller lunar module, a fragile craft built for only two. Apollo 13 circled the moon, then made a course correction as it swung back toward Earth. By some calculations, the spacecraft would run out of fuel before it could return. Its guidance and radio systems were used sparingly to conserve battery power and dwindling supplies of oxygen and water. The astronauts spent more than three days in temperatures barely above freezing.Mr. Lunney considered five possibilities for where the Apollo should land before concluding that the best plan was to bring the spacecraft down in the Pacific Ocean, near U.S. Navy ships and helicopters.Story continues below advertisementBefore the craft\u2019s reentry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere, the crew shifted back to the command module because it had a heat shield to protect it from extremely high temperatures. The lunar module, where the astronauts had holed up for days, was jettisoned. Much of the world was watching on television when the crippled spaceship splashed down on April 17.Advertisement\u201cFor four days,\u201d Lovell\u2019s wife, Marilyn, said, \u201cI didn\u2019t know if I was going to be a wife or a widow.\u201dThe entire support team in Houston, including Mr. Lunney, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Astronaut Ken Mattingly, who was bumped from the flight because of possible exposure to measles, later called Mr. Lunney\u2019s unflappable leadership of his flight team \u201cprofessionalism at its finest, absolutely the most magnificent performance I\u2019ve ever watched.\u201dGlynn Stephen Lunney was born Nov. 27, 1936, in Old Forge, Pa. His father was a coal miner and welder, his mother a homemaker.Story continues below advertisementAfter two years at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, Mr. Lunney transferred to the University of Detroit (now the University of Detroit Mercy), where he studied engineering and took part in a cooperative training program with a forerunner of NASA. He joined the space agency after his graduation in 1958.AdvertisementMr. Lunney was a flight director for several Gemini missions before working on the Apollo program. He was technical director of the Apollo-Soyuz project in 1975, when U.S. and Soviet astronauts linked up in space. He later worked on the Skylab and space shuttle projects before leaving NASA in 1985. He worked in the space programs of Rockwell International and United Space Alliance until retiring in 1998. One of his sons, Bryan Lunney, also became a NASA flight director.Survivors include his wife since 1960, the former Marilyn Kurtz of Clear Lake; four children; two brothers; a sister; and 12 grandchildren.Story continues below advertisementIn his NASA oral history, Mr. Lunney looked back on the dramatic rescue of Apollo 13 as \u201cthe best piece of operations work I ever did or could hope to do.\u201d\u201cWe built a quarter-million mile space highway,\u201d he added, \u201cpaved by one decision, one choice, and one innovation at a time \u2014 repeated constantly over almost four days to bring the crew safely home. This space highway guided the crippled ship back to planet Earth, where people from all continents were bonded in support of these three explorers-in-peril. It was an inspiring and emotional feeling, reminding us once again of our common humanity.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesGeorge R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88 He had a key role in developing the crewed space program and guiding astronauts to the moon. Glynn Lunney, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13 mission, dies at 84",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Glynn Lunney, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13 mission, dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2428",
        "date": "2021-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/glynn-lunney-died/2021/03/23/df4d3a40-8bf3-11eb-9423-04079921c915_story.html",
        "text": "Glynn S. Lunney, one of NASA\u2019s first flight directors, who had a major role in guiding astronauts to the moon and whose cool decision-making under pressure helped save the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 after an onboard explosion, died March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Tex. He was 84. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe death was announced in a statement by NASA. He had been treated for several years for leukemia.Mr. Lunney joined the space program during its infancy in the 1950s and helped develop the Mercury spacecraft used in the first U.S. crewed flights in the early 1960s. He was the fourth person selected to be a NASA flight director, a job he described as the \u201cleader of all that went on in mission control, and all of the stuff that went up to the flight crews by way of recommendations and decisions.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe was such a devoted protege of Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the space agency\u2019s renowned flight operations director, that he was sometimes called \u201cthe son of Chris Kraft.\u201dChris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95Mr. Lunney was a leading behind-the-scenes figure in the Gemini and Apollo crewed flight programs of the 1960s. In 1968, he became the chief of NASA\u2019s flight director\u2019s office, responsible for supervising other flight directors and training the many flight controllers and engineers who worked at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston.AdvertisementHe was one of four flight directors for Apollo 11, the 1969 mission on which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the moon.Story continues below advertisementThe next year, he was one of four flight directors for Apollo 13, along with Milton Windler, Gerald D. Griffin and Eugene Kranz. The mission, with astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, was scheduled to go to the moon.They were 80 percent of the way to their destination on April 13, 1970, when \u201call of us heard a rather large bang,\u201d Lovell later said. It turned out that wires from a fan had struck metal inside one of the spacecraft\u2019s two oxygen tanks, sparking an explosion.\u201cHouston,\u201d Swigert memorably said to mission control, \u201cwe\u2019ve had a problem here.\u201dBefore Mr. Lunney\u2019s shift began about 10 p.m., he later said in a NASA documentary, \u201cwe were well aware that we had a big problem on our hands. It was life-threatening. It was not about landing on the moon in the right place. It was about survival.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKranz, who was portrayed in the 1995 film \u201cApollo 13\u201d by Ed Harris, is rightly given credit for his calmness under pressure and for working to save the mission from disaster. In reality, it took an effort by all four flight directors and dozens of flight controllers to diagnose the problem and devise a way to bring Apollo 13 back safely, through 250,000 miles of space.(Mr. Lunney did not appreciate the movie: \u201cThey didn\u2019t give me credit for any of the work that I did,\u201d he said in 2019. \u201cAs a matter of fact, if you watch the movie, you\u2019ll see I\u2019m sort of portrayed as a flunky.\u201d)After the initial report of distress on April 13, Mr. Lunney and his team worked for 14 hours straight, calling it \u201cthe longest night\u201d in the history of the space program.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI had a brief period when the severity of the problem really struck home,\u201d he said in a NASA oral history. \u201cFor the first and only time in 10 years of console experiences in training and actual flights, I had the sense of the bottom falling out from under me and my stomach heading for that dark hole. .\u2009.\u2009. But the 10 years of experience kicked in and it took about 10-20 seconds for me to return from that place. Nobody else even seemed to notice.\u201dAdvertisementWith the command module\u2019s electrical system failing, the three astronauts moved to the smaller lunar module, a fragile craft built for only two. Apollo 13 circled the moon, then made a course correction as it swung back toward Earth. By some calculations, the spacecraft would run out of fuel before it could return. Its guidance and radio systems were used sparingly to conserve battery power and dwindling supplies of oxygen and water. The astronauts spent more than three days in temperatures barely above freezing.Mr. Lunney considered five possibilities for where the Apollo should land before concluding that the best plan was to bring the spacecraft down in the Pacific Ocean, near U.S. Navy ships and helicopters.Story continues below advertisementBefore the craft\u2019s reentry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere, the crew shifted back to the command module because it had a heat shield to protect it from extremely high temperatures. The lunar module, where the astronauts had holed up for days, was jettisoned. Much of the world was watching on television when the crippled spaceship splashed down on April 17.Advertisement\u201cFor four days,\u201d Lovell\u2019s wife, Marilyn, said, \u201cI didn\u2019t know if I was going to be a wife or a widow.\u201dThe entire support team in Houston, including Mr. Lunney, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Astronaut Ken Mattingly, who was bumped from the flight because of possible exposure to measles, later called Mr. Lunney\u2019s unflappable leadership of his flight team \u201cprofessionalism at its finest, absolutely the most magnificent performance I\u2019ve ever watched.\u201dGlynn Stephen Lunney was born Nov. 27, 1936, in Old Forge, Pa. His father was a coal miner and welder, his mother a homemaker.Story continues below advertisementAfter two years at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, Mr. Lunney transferred to the University of Detroit (now the University of Detroit Mercy), where he studied engineering and took part in a cooperative training program with a forerunner of NASA. He joined the space agency after his graduation in 1958.AdvertisementMr. Lunney was a flight director for several Gemini missions before working on the Apollo program. He was technical director of the Apollo-Soyuz project in 1975, when U.S. and Soviet astronauts linked up in space. He later worked on the Skylab and space shuttle projects before leaving NASA in 1985. He worked in the space programs of Rockwell International and United Space Alliance until retiring in 1998. One of his sons, Bryan Lunney, also became a NASA flight director.Survivors include his wife since 1960, the former Marilyn Kurtz of Clear Lake; four children; two brothers; a sister; and 12 grandchildren.Story continues below advertisementIn his NASA oral history, Mr. Lunney looked back on the dramatic rescue of Apollo 13 as \u201cthe best piece of operations work I ever did or could hope to do.\u201d\u201cWe built a quarter-million mile space highway,\u201d he added, \u201cpaved by one decision, one choice, and one innovation at a time \u2014 repeated constantly over almost four days to bring the crew safely home. This space highway guided the crippled ship back to planet Earth, where people from all continents were bonded in support of these three explorers-in-peril. It was an inspiring and emotional feeling, reminding us once again of our common humanity.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesGeorge R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88 He had a key role in developing the crewed space program and guiding astronauts to the moon. Glynn Lunney, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13 mission, dies at 84",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Glynn Lunney, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13 mission, dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2429",
        "date": "2021-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/glynn-lunney-died/2021/03/23/df4d3a40-8bf3-11eb-9423-04079921c915_story.html",
        "text": "Glynn S. Lunney, one of NASA\u2019s first flight directors, who had a major role in guiding astronauts to the moon and whose cool decision-making under pressure helped save the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 after an onboard explosion, died March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Tex. He was 84. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe death was announced in a statement by NASA. He had been treated for several years for leukemia.Mr. Lunney joined the space program during its infancy in the 1950s and helped develop the Mercury spacecraft used in the first U.S. crewed flights in the early 1960s. He was the fourth person selected to be a NASA flight director, a job he described as the \u201cleader of all that went on in mission control, and all of the stuff that went up to the flight crews by way of recommendations and decisions.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe was such a devoted protege of Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the space agency\u2019s renowned flight operations director, that he was sometimes called \u201cthe son of Chris Kraft.\u201dChris Kraft, godfather of NASA\u2019s Mission Control, dies at 95Mr. Lunney was a leading behind-the-scenes figure in the Gemini and Apollo crewed flight programs of the 1960s. In 1968, he became the chief of NASA\u2019s flight director\u2019s office, responsible for supervising other flight directors and training the many flight controllers and engineers who worked at what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston.AdvertisementHe was one of four flight directors for Apollo 11, the 1969 mission on which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin became the first people to set foot on the moon.Story continues below advertisementThe next year, he was one of four flight directors for Apollo 13, along with Milton Windler, Gerald D. Griffin and Eugene Kranz. The mission, with astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, was scheduled to go to the moon.They were 80 percent of the way to their destination on April 13, 1970, when \u201call of us heard a rather large bang,\u201d Lovell later said. It turned out that wires from a fan had struck metal inside one of the spacecraft\u2019s two oxygen tanks, sparking an explosion.\u201cHouston,\u201d Swigert memorably said to mission control, \u201cwe\u2019ve had a problem here.\u201dBefore Mr. Lunney\u2019s shift began about 10 p.m., he later said in a NASA documentary, \u201cwe were well aware that we had a big problem on our hands. It was life-threatening. It was not about landing on the moon in the right place. It was about survival.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKranz, who was portrayed in the 1995 film \u201cApollo 13\u201d by Ed Harris, is rightly given credit for his calmness under pressure and for working to save the mission from disaster. In reality, it took an effort by all four flight directors and dozens of flight controllers to diagnose the problem and devise a way to bring Apollo 13 back safely, through 250,000 miles of space.(Mr. Lunney did not appreciate the movie: \u201cThey didn\u2019t give me credit for any of the work that I did,\u201d he said in 2019. \u201cAs a matter of fact, if you watch the movie, you\u2019ll see I\u2019m sort of portrayed as a flunky.\u201d)After the initial report of distress on April 13, Mr. Lunney and his team worked for 14 hours straight, calling it \u201cthe longest night\u201d in the history of the space program.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI had a brief period when the severity of the problem really struck home,\u201d he said in a NASA oral history. \u201cFor the first and only time in 10 years of console experiences in training and actual flights, I had the sense of the bottom falling out from under me and my stomach heading for that dark hole. .\u2009.\u2009. But the 10 years of experience kicked in and it took about 10-20 seconds for me to return from that place. Nobody else even seemed to notice.\u201dAdvertisementWith the command module\u2019s electrical system failing, the three astronauts moved to the smaller lunar module, a fragile craft built for only two. Apollo 13 circled the moon, then made a course correction as it swung back toward Earth. By some calculations, the spacecraft would run out of fuel before it could return. Its guidance and radio systems were used sparingly to conserve battery power and dwindling supplies of oxygen and water. The astronauts spent more than three days in temperatures barely above freezing.Mr. Lunney considered five possibilities for where the Apollo should land before concluding that the best plan was to bring the spacecraft down in the Pacific Ocean, near U.S. Navy ships and helicopters.Story continues below advertisementBefore the craft\u2019s reentry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere, the crew shifted back to the command module because it had a heat shield to protect it from extremely high temperatures. The lunar module, where the astronauts had holed up for days, was jettisoned. Much of the world was watching on television when the crippled spaceship splashed down on April 17.Advertisement\u201cFor four days,\u201d Lovell\u2019s wife, Marilyn, said, \u201cI didn\u2019t know if I was going to be a wife or a widow.\u201dThe entire support team in Houston, including Mr. Lunney, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Astronaut Ken Mattingly, who was bumped from the flight because of possible exposure to measles, later called Mr. Lunney\u2019s unflappable leadership of his flight team \u201cprofessionalism at its finest, absolutely the most magnificent performance I\u2019ve ever watched.\u201dGlynn Stephen Lunney was born Nov. 27, 1936, in Old Forge, Pa. His father was a coal miner and welder, his mother a homemaker.Story continues below advertisementAfter two years at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, Mr. Lunney transferred to the University of Detroit (now the University of Detroit Mercy), where he studied engineering and took part in a cooperative training program with a forerunner of NASA. He joined the space agency after his graduation in 1958.AdvertisementMr. Lunney was a flight director for several Gemini missions before working on the Apollo program. He was technical director of the Apollo-Soyuz project in 1975, when U.S. and Soviet astronauts linked up in space. He later worked on the Skylab and space shuttle projects before leaving NASA in 1985. He worked in the space programs of Rockwell International and United Space Alliance until retiring in 1998. One of his sons, Bryan Lunney, also became a NASA flight director.Survivors include his wife since 1960, the former Marilyn Kurtz of Clear Lake; four children; two brothers; a sister; and 12 grandchildren.Story continues below advertisementIn his NASA oral history, Mr. Lunney looked back on the dramatic rescue of Apollo 13 as \u201cthe best piece of operations work I ever did or could hope to do.\u201d\u201cWe built a quarter-million mile space highway,\u201d he added, \u201cpaved by one decision, one choice, and one innovation at a time \u2014 repeated constantly over almost four days to bring the crew safely home. This space highway guided the crippled ship back to planet Earth, where people from all continents were bonded in support of these three explorers-in-peril. It was an inspiring and emotional feeling, reminding us once again of our common humanity.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesGeorge R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101Alfred Worden, who orbited the moon and walked in deep space, dies at 88 He had a key role in developing the crewed space program and guiding astronauts to the moon. Glynn Lunney, NASA flight director who helped save Apollo 13 mission, dies at 84",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2430",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freeman-dyson-a-visionary-and-renaissance-physicist-dies-at-96/2020/02/28/0ba462e0-5a58-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html",
        "text": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary physicist and technophile who helped crack the secrets of the subatomic world, tried to build a spaceship that could carry humans across the solar system, worked to dismantle nuclear arsenals and wrote elegantly about science and human destiny, died Feb. 28 at a hospital near his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 96. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was complications from a fall, said a son, George Dyson.Mr. Dyson, born in England between the world wars, spent most of his professional life as a kind of genius-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, overlapping in his early years with Albert Einstein.In a career spent traversing fields as diverse as physics, biology, astronomy, nuclear energy, arms control, space travel and science ethics, Mr. Dyson was always obliging when a journalist called him for a grabby quote about the trajectory of humanity. His ideas were reliably un",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2431",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freeman-dyson-a-visionary-and-renaissance-physicist-dies-at-96/2020/02/28/0ba462e0-5a58-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html",
        "text": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary physicist and technophile who helped crack the secrets of the subatomic world, tried to build a spaceship that could carry humans across the solar system, worked to dismantle nuclear arsenals and wrote elegantly about science and human destiny, died Feb. 28 at a hospital near his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 96. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was complications from a fall, said a son, George Dyson.Mr. Dyson, born in England between the world wars, spent most of his professional life as a kind of genius-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, overlapping in his early years with Albert Einstein.In a career spent traversing fields as diverse as physics, biology, astronomy, nuclear energy, arms control, space travel and science ethics, Mr. Dyson was always obliging when a journalist called him for a grabby quote about the trajectory of humanity. His ideas were reliably un",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2432",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freeman-dyson-a-visionary-and-renaissance-physicist-dies-at-96/2020/02/28/0ba462e0-5a58-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html",
        "text": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary physicist and technophile who helped crack the secrets of the subatomic world, tried to build a spaceship that could carry humans across the solar system, worked to dismantle nuclear arsenals and wrote elegantly about science and human destiny, died Feb. 28 at a hospital near his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 96. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was complications from a fall, said a son, George Dyson.Mr. Dyson, born in England between the world wars, spent most of his professional life as a kind of genius-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, overlapping in his early years with Albert Einstein.In a career spent traversing fields as diverse as physics, biology, astronomy, nuclear energy, arms control, space travel and science ethics, Mr. Dyson was always obliging when a journalist called him for a grabby quote about the trajectory of humanity. His ideas were reliably un",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary and renaissance physicist, dies at 96 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2433",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freeman-dyson-a-visionary-and-renaissance-physicist-dies-at-96/2020/02/28/0ba462e0-5a58-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html",
        "text": "Freeman Dyson, a visionary physicist and technophile who helped crack the secrets of the subatomic world, tried to build a spaceship that could carry humans across the solar system, worked to dismantle nuclear arsenals and wrote elegantly about science and human destiny, died Feb. 28 at a hospital near his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 96. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was complications from a fall, said a son, George Dyson.Mr. Dyson, born in England between the world wars, spent most of his professional life as a kind of genius-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, overlapping in his early years with Albert Einstein.In a career spent traversing fields as diverse as physics, biology, astronomy, nuclear energy, arms control, space travel and science ethics, Mr. Dyson was always obliging when a journalist called him for a grabby quote about the trajectory of humanity. His ideas were reliably un",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2434",
        "date": "2019-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alexei-leonov-soviet-cosmonaut-and-first-person-to-walk-in-space-dies-at-85/2019/10/12/2e9dc732-ec58-11e9-9306-47cb0324fd44_story.html",
        "text": "Alexei Leonov, a Soviet cosmonaut who in 1965 became the first person to walk in space and who was scheduled to walk on the moon before the Soviet Union abandoned its efforts for a manned lunar landing, died Oct. 11 in Moscow. He was 85.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced his death but did not cite a cause. Mr. Leonov, a Soviet air force officer, was chosen in 1959 as part of his country\u2019s inaugural class of astronauts \u2014 known as cosmonauts in the old Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviets were leading the space race, a symbolic and strategic battle for technological superiority during the Cold War.In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth. In April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin \u2014 a close friend of Mr. Leonov\u2019s \u2014 became the first person launched into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the U.S. space program tried to catch up, with flights by Alan B. Shepard Jr. and John Glenn, the Soviets sought new ways to maintain their early edge. Mr. Leonov began training for his spacewalk in 1963.He underwent a rigorous program of swimming and running and was subjected to long periods of weightlessness. A special suit and helmet were made to withstand the extreme conditions in space.As perilous as early space travel was, it seemed doubly dangerous for a human being to \u201cwalk\u201d \u2014 or, more precisely, to float \u2014 outside the safety of the capsule. On March 18, 1965, Mr. Leonov took that step.He left the capsule through a hatch, leaving a fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, to pilot the ship. Mr. Leonov entered an airtight chamber called an air lock and inhaled pure oxygen for almost an hour to reduce the level of nitrogen in his blood, as a means of preventing decompression sickness, or the bends.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinally, he opened the outer hatch and entered space, more than 100 miles above the earth\u2019s surface, connected to his capsule by a 16-foot-long tether. A skilled amateur painter, Mr. Leonov found the vista \u201cindescribably beautiful.\u201d\u201cI said to myself, \u2018It\u2019s true, the Earth is round,\u2019 \u201d he later said.His spacewalk was captured by two film cameras that produced remarkably clear images, including some in color.\u201cIt was so quiet I could even hear my heart beat,\u201d Mr. Leonov told London\u2019s Observer newspaper in 2015. \u201cI was surrounded by stars and was floating without much control. I will never forget the moment. I also felt an incredible sense of responsibility. Of course, I did not know that I was about to experience the most difficult moments of my life \u2014 getting back into the capsule.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhen he attempted to reenter the air lock leading to the space capsule, Mr. Leonov could not climb through the hatch. His spacesuit had expanded and become almost rigid.Advertisement\u201cNear the end of my walk,\u201d he told the New York Times magazine in 1994, \u201cI realized that my feet had pulled out of my shoes and my hands had pulled away from my gloves. My entire suit stretched so much that my hands and feet appeared to shrink.\u201dHe decided that his only option was to open a valve to release air from inside his spacesuit. It deflated enough to allow Mr. Leonov to enter the capsule\u2019s air lock headfirst, but the change in pressure left him at risk of decompression sickness. His spacewalk lasted only 12 minutes, but his body temperature had risen so much that sweat was sloshing in the leggings of his spacesuit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI didn\u2019t report this down to Earth,\u201d Mr. Leonov said in 1999. \u201cI knew the situation better than anyone else.\u201dIt would be decades before the dangers he encountered were fully known. Mr. Leonov also revealed, years later, that he had a suicide pill in his helmet, in case he could not return to the spacecraft.AdvertisementOnce he was back inside the capsule, it began to roll uncontrollably. Oxygen levels in the cabin became dangerously high, but eventually the cosmonauts were able to stabilize the craft for its return to Earth.When the automated reentry system failed, Mr. Leonov and Belyayev flew their craft manually, tumbling wildly until its parachutes opened. They came to rest in a dense forest in the Ural Mountains, about 1,000 miles from their intended landing spot.Story continues below advertisementSurrounded by several feet of snow, the two cosmonauts stayed in the capsule as temperatures fell below zero. It took more than two days before they were rescued by helicopter.His feat made Mr. Leonov a national hero, and he was expected to be the first person from his country to walk on the moon. Before the United States could do so, Soviet spaceships circled the moon and landed on its surface.AdvertisementBut other test flights failed, and the booster rocket designed to propel the Soviets\u2019 lunar mission exploded on the launchpad. The space race was won by the United States, culminating in the Apollo 11 mission, which touched down on July 20, 1969, accompanied by astronaut Neil Armstrong\u2019s memorable words as he stepped onto the moon\u2019s Sea of Tranquility: \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlexei Arkhipovich Leonov was born May 30, 1934, in the Siberian village of Listvyanka. He was from a large family, and his father, a onetime coal miner and farmer, spent time in a Soviet gulag for dissent.Young Alexei was transfixed by aviation from an early age and also studied art. He entered the Soviet air force in 1953 and trained as a fighter pilot and parachutist.In January 1969, Mr. Leonov was in a motorcade entering the Kremlin when a man wearing a police uniform opened fire with two automatic handguns. Mr. Leonov\u2019s limousine was struck by more than a dozen shots, apparently intended for Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, who was in a different car. Mr. Leonov\u2019s driver was killed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI looked down and saw two bullet holes on each side of my coat where the bullets had passed through,\u201d Mr. Leonov said in 1994. \u201cA fifth bullet passed so close to my face I could feel it go by.\u201dIn 1975, Mr. Leonov returned to space as part of the first joint U.S.-Soviet space effort. His capsule docked with an Apollo spacecraft under the command of NASA astronaut Thomas P. Stafford. They shook hands through a connecting portal and became close friends.\u201cIn the eyes of all of humanity,\u201d Mr. Leonov said, \u201cwe showed the best side of man.\u201dSurvivors include his wife, Svetlana, two daughters and several grandchildren.Mr. Leonov became director of the Soviet cosmonaut corps and retired in 1992. He later worked in banking and exhibited his paintings worldwide, including at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFluent in English and fond of jokes, he was a popular speaker at gatherings of space aficionados. Author Arthur C. Clarke named a spacecraft after Mr. Leonov in his 1982 novel, \u201c2010,\u201d a sequel to \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201dMr. Leonov came to regret the secrecy and suspicion surrounding the Cold War competition in space.\u201cIf we could have gotten together earlier,\u201d he said in 1990, \u201cwe would already have built an international observatory on the moon and we would be flying to Mars right now.\u201dAn earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Soviet spacecraft obtained lunar soil samples before Apollo 11 reached the moon in 1969. The soil samples were obtained by the Soviet Union in 1970.Read more Washington Post obituaries\nMordicai Gerstein, award-winning children\u2019s author and illustrator, dies at 83Francis Currey, one of the last living Medal of Honor recipients from World War II, dies at 94Marshall Efron, witty star of \u2018Great American Dream Machine,\u2019 dies at 81 After his 1965 spacewalk, he led a Soviet mission that docked in orbit with a U.S. spacecraft. Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2435",
        "date": "2019-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alexei-leonov-soviet-cosmonaut-and-first-person-to-walk-in-space-dies-at-85/2019/10/12/2e9dc732-ec58-11e9-9306-47cb0324fd44_story.html",
        "text": "Alexei Leonov, a Soviet cosmonaut who in 1965 became the first person to walk in space and who was scheduled to walk on the moon before the Soviet Union abandoned its efforts for a manned lunar landing, died Oct. 11 in Moscow. He was 85.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced his death but did not cite a cause. Mr. Leonov, a Soviet air force officer, was chosen in 1959 as part of his country\u2019s inaugural class of astronauts \u2014 known as cosmonauts in the old Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviets were leading the space race, a symbolic and strategic battle for technological superiority during the Cold War.In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth. In April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin \u2014 a close friend of Mr. Leonov\u2019s \u2014 became the first person launched into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the U.S. space program tried to catch up, with flights by Alan B. Shepard Jr. and John Glenn, the Soviets sought new ways to maintain their early edge. Mr. Leonov began training for his spacewalk in 1963.He underwent a rigorous program of swimming and running and was subjected to long periods of weightlessness. A special suit and helmet were made to withstand the extreme conditions in space.As perilous as early space travel was, it seemed doubly dangerous for a human being to \u201cwalk\u201d \u2014 or, more precisely, to float \u2014 outside the safety of the capsule. On March 18, 1965, Mr. Leonov took that step.He left the capsule through a hatch, leaving a fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, to pilot the ship. Mr. Leonov entered an airtight chamber called an air lock and inhaled pure oxygen for almost an hour to reduce the level of nitrogen in his blood, as a means of preventing decompression sickness, or the bends.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinally, he opened the outer hatch and entered space, more than 100 miles above the earth\u2019s surface, connected to his capsule by a 16-foot-long tether. A skilled amateur painter, Mr. Leonov found the vista \u201cindescribably beautiful.\u201d\u201cI said to myself, \u2018It\u2019s true, the Earth is round,\u2019 \u201d he later said.His spacewalk was captured by two film cameras that produced remarkably clear images, including some in color.\u201cIt was so quiet I could even hear my heart beat,\u201d Mr. Leonov told London\u2019s Observer newspaper in 2015. \u201cI was surrounded by stars and was floating without much control. I will never forget the moment. I also felt an incredible sense of responsibility. Of course, I did not know that I was about to experience the most difficult moments of my life \u2014 getting back into the capsule.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhen he attempted to reenter the air lock leading to the space capsule, Mr. Leonov could not climb through the hatch. His spacesuit had expanded and become almost rigid.Advertisement\u201cNear the end of my walk,\u201d he told the New York Times magazine in 1994, \u201cI realized that my feet had pulled out of my shoes and my hands had pulled away from my gloves. My entire suit stretched so much that my hands and feet appeared to shrink.\u201dHe decided that his only option was to open a valve to release air from inside his spacesuit. It deflated enough to allow Mr. Leonov to enter the capsule\u2019s air lock headfirst, but the change in pressure left him at risk of decompression sickness. His spacewalk lasted only 12 minutes, but his body temperature had risen so much that sweat was sloshing in the leggings of his spacesuit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI didn\u2019t report this down to Earth,\u201d Mr. Leonov said in 1999. \u201cI knew the situation better than anyone else.\u201dIt would be decades before the dangers he encountered were fully known. Mr. Leonov also revealed, years later, that he had a suicide pill in his helmet, in case he could not return to the spacecraft.AdvertisementOnce he was back inside the capsule, it began to roll uncontrollably. Oxygen levels in the cabin became dangerously high, but eventually the cosmonauts were able to stabilize the craft for its return to Earth.When the automated reentry system failed, Mr. Leonov and Belyayev flew their craft manually, tumbling wildly until its parachutes opened. They came to rest in a dense forest in the Ural Mountains, about 1,000 miles from their intended landing spot.Story continues below advertisementSurrounded by several feet of snow, the two cosmonauts stayed in the capsule as temperatures fell below zero. It took more than two days before they were rescued by helicopter.His feat made Mr. Leonov a national hero, and he was expected to be the first person from his country to walk on the moon. Before the United States could do so, Soviet spaceships circled the moon and landed on its surface.AdvertisementBut other test flights failed, and the booster rocket designed to propel the Soviets\u2019 lunar mission exploded on the launchpad. The space race was won by the United States, culminating in the Apollo 11 mission, which touched down on July 20, 1969, accompanied by astronaut Neil Armstrong\u2019s memorable words as he stepped onto the moon\u2019s Sea of Tranquility: \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlexei Arkhipovich Leonov was born May 30, 1934, in the Siberian village of Listvyanka. He was from a large family, and his father, a onetime coal miner and farmer, spent time in a Soviet gulag for dissent.Young Alexei was transfixed by aviation from an early age and also studied art. He entered the Soviet air force in 1953 and trained as a fighter pilot and parachutist.In January 1969, Mr. Leonov was in a motorcade entering the Kremlin when a man wearing a police uniform opened fire with two automatic handguns. Mr. Leonov\u2019s limousine was struck by more than a dozen shots, apparently intended for Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, who was in a different car. Mr. Leonov\u2019s driver was killed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI looked down and saw two bullet holes on each side of my coat where the bullets had passed through,\u201d Mr. Leonov said in 1994. \u201cA fifth bullet passed so close to my face I could feel it go by.\u201dIn 1975, Mr. Leonov returned to space as part of the first joint U.S.-Soviet space effort. His capsule docked with an Apollo spacecraft under the command of NASA astronaut Thomas P. Stafford. They shook hands through a connecting portal and became close friends.\u201cIn the eyes of all of humanity,\u201d Mr. Leonov said, \u201cwe showed the best side of man.\u201dSurvivors include his wife, Svetlana, two daughters and several grandchildren.Mr. Leonov became director of the Soviet cosmonaut corps and retired in 1992. He later worked in banking and exhibited his paintings worldwide, including at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFluent in English and fond of jokes, he was a popular speaker at gatherings of space aficionados. Author Arthur C. Clarke named a spacecraft after Mr. Leonov in his 1982 novel, \u201c2010,\u201d a sequel to \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201dMr. Leonov came to regret the secrecy and suspicion surrounding the Cold War competition in space.\u201cIf we could have gotten together earlier,\u201d he said in 1990, \u201cwe would already have built an international observatory on the moon and we would be flying to Mars right now.\u201dAn earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Soviet spacecraft obtained lunar soil samples before Apollo 11 reached the moon in 1969. The soil samples were obtained by the Soviet Union in 1970.Read more Washington Post obituaries\nMordicai Gerstein, award-winning children\u2019s author and illustrator, dies at 83Francis Currey, one of the last living Medal of Honor recipients from World War II, dies at 94Marshall Efron, witty star of \u2018Great American Dream Machine,\u2019 dies at 81 After his 1965 spacewalk, he led a Soviet mission that docked in orbit with a U.S. spacecraft. Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2436",
        "date": "2019-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/alexei-leonov-soviet-cosmonaut-and-first-person-to-walk-in-space-dies-at-85/2019/10/12/2e9dc732-ec58-11e9-9306-47cb0324fd44_story.html",
        "text": "Alexei Leonov, a Soviet cosmonaut who in 1965 became the first person to walk in space and who was scheduled to walk on the moon before the Soviet Union abandoned its efforts for a manned lunar landing, died Oct. 11 in Moscow. He was 85.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced his death but did not cite a cause. Mr. Leonov, a Soviet air force officer, was chosen in 1959 as part of his country\u2019s inaugural class of astronauts \u2014 known as cosmonauts in the old Soviet Union. At the time, the Soviets were leading the space race, a symbolic and strategic battle for technological superiority during the Cold War.In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth. In April 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin \u2014 a close friend of Mr. Leonov\u2019s \u2014 became the first person launched into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the U.S. space program tried to catch up, with flights by Alan B. Shepard Jr. and John Glenn, the Soviets sought new ways to maintain their early edge. Mr. Leonov began training for his spacewalk in 1963.He underwent a rigorous program of swimming and running and was subjected to long periods of weightlessness. A special suit and helmet were made to withstand the extreme conditions in space.As perilous as early space travel was, it seemed doubly dangerous for a human being to \u201cwalk\u201d \u2014 or, more precisely, to float \u2014 outside the safety of the capsule. On March 18, 1965, Mr. Leonov took that step.He left the capsule through a hatch, leaving a fellow cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, to pilot the ship. Mr. Leonov entered an airtight chamber called an air lock and inhaled pure oxygen for almost an hour to reduce the level of nitrogen in his blood, as a means of preventing decompression sickness, or the bends.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinally, he opened the outer hatch and entered space, more than 100 miles above the earth\u2019s surface, connected to his capsule by a 16-foot-long tether. A skilled amateur painter, Mr. Leonov found the vista \u201cindescribably beautiful.\u201d\u201cI said to myself, \u2018It\u2019s true, the Earth is round,\u2019 \u201d he later said.His spacewalk was captured by two film cameras that produced remarkably clear images, including some in color.\u201cIt was so quiet I could even hear my heart beat,\u201d Mr. Leonov told London\u2019s Observer newspaper in 2015. \u201cI was surrounded by stars and was floating without much control. I will never forget the moment. I also felt an incredible sense of responsibility. Of course, I did not know that I was about to experience the most difficult moments of my life \u2014 getting back into the capsule.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhen he attempted to reenter the air lock leading to the space capsule, Mr. Leonov could not climb through the hatch. His spacesuit had expanded and become almost rigid.Advertisement\u201cNear the end of my walk,\u201d he told the New York Times magazine in 1994, \u201cI realized that my feet had pulled out of my shoes and my hands had pulled away from my gloves. My entire suit stretched so much that my hands and feet appeared to shrink.\u201dHe decided that his only option was to open a valve to release air from inside his spacesuit. It deflated enough to allow Mr. Leonov to enter the capsule\u2019s air lock headfirst, but the change in pressure left him at risk of decompression sickness. His spacewalk lasted only 12 minutes, but his body temperature had risen so much that sweat was sloshing in the leggings of his spacesuit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI didn\u2019t report this down to Earth,\u201d Mr. Leonov said in 1999. \u201cI knew the situation better than anyone else.\u201dIt would be decades before the dangers he encountered were fully known. Mr. Leonov also revealed, years later, that he had a suicide pill in his helmet, in case he could not return to the spacecraft.AdvertisementOnce he was back inside the capsule, it began to roll uncontrollably. Oxygen levels in the cabin became dangerously high, but eventually the cosmonauts were able to stabilize the craft for its return to Earth.When the automated reentry system failed, Mr. Leonov and Belyayev flew their craft manually, tumbling wildly until its parachutes opened. They came to rest in a dense forest in the Ural Mountains, about 1,000 miles from their intended landing spot.Story continues below advertisementSurrounded by several feet of snow, the two cosmonauts stayed in the capsule as temperatures fell below zero. It took more than two days before they were rescued by helicopter.His feat made Mr. Leonov a national hero, and he was expected to be the first person from his country to walk on the moon. Before the United States could do so, Soviet spaceships circled the moon and landed on its surface.AdvertisementBut other test flights failed, and the booster rocket designed to propel the Soviets\u2019 lunar mission exploded on the launchpad. The space race was won by the United States, culminating in the Apollo 11 mission, which touched down on July 20, 1969, accompanied by astronaut Neil Armstrong\u2019s memorable words as he stepped onto the moon\u2019s Sea of Tranquility: \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlexei Arkhipovich Leonov was born May 30, 1934, in the Siberian village of Listvyanka. He was from a large family, and his father, a onetime coal miner and farmer, spent time in a Soviet gulag for dissent.Young Alexei was transfixed by aviation from an early age and also studied art. He entered the Soviet air force in 1953 and trained as a fighter pilot and parachutist.In January 1969, Mr. Leonov was in a motorcade entering the Kremlin when a man wearing a police uniform opened fire with two automatic handguns. Mr. Leonov\u2019s limousine was struck by more than a dozen shots, apparently intended for Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, who was in a different car. Mr. Leonov\u2019s driver was killed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI looked down and saw two bullet holes on each side of my coat where the bullets had passed through,\u201d Mr. Leonov said in 1994. \u201cA fifth bullet passed so close to my face I could feel it go by.\u201dIn 1975, Mr. Leonov returned to space as part of the first joint U.S.-Soviet space effort. His capsule docked with an Apollo spacecraft under the command of NASA astronaut Thomas P. Stafford. They shook hands through a connecting portal and became close friends.\u201cIn the eyes of all of humanity,\u201d Mr. Leonov said, \u201cwe showed the best side of man.\u201dSurvivors include his wife, Svetlana, two daughters and several grandchildren.Mr. Leonov became director of the Soviet cosmonaut corps and retired in 1992. He later worked in banking and exhibited his paintings worldwide, including at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFluent in English and fond of jokes, he was a popular speaker at gatherings of space aficionados. Author Arthur C. Clarke named a spacecraft after Mr. Leonov in his 1982 novel, \u201c2010,\u201d a sequel to \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201dMr. Leonov came to regret the secrecy and suspicion surrounding the Cold War competition in space.\u201cIf we could have gotten together earlier,\u201d he said in 1990, \u201cwe would already have built an international observatory on the moon and we would be flying to Mars right now.\u201dAn earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Soviet spacecraft obtained lunar soil samples before Apollo 11 reached the moon in 1969. The soil samples were obtained by the Soviet Union in 1970.Read more Washington Post obituaries\nMordicai Gerstein, award-winning children\u2019s author and illustrator, dies at 83Francis Currey, one of the last living Medal of Honor recipients from World War II, dies at 94Marshall Efron, witty star of \u2018Great American Dream Machine,\u2019 dies at 81 After his 1965 spacewalk, he led a Soviet mission that docked in orbit with a U.S. spacecraft. Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yaphet Kotto, who played Bond villain and \u2018Alien\u2019 crew member, dies at 81 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2437",
        "date": "2021-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/yaphet-kotto-dead/2021/03/16/63b17f36-8658-11eb-bfdf-4d36dab83a6d_story.html",
        "text": "Yaphet Kotto, an American actor who gave depth and charm to detectives, FBI agents and other assorted tough guys for more than four decades, memorably fighting James Bond in \u201cLive and Let Die\u201d and battling a chest-bursting extraterrestrial in \u201cAlien,\u201d died March 15 in the Philippines. He was 81.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis agent, Ryan Goldhar, confirmed the death but did not have additional details. Mr. Kotto was about 16 when he dropped out of high school in New York City, told his parents he would look for a job and began spending his days at the movies in secret \u2014 once catching a Times Square screening of \u201cOn the Waterfront\u201d (1954). It was his first Marlon Brando film, and it left him utterly transformed.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI couldn\u2019t speak. It was like somebody had punched me in the stomach,\u201d he later told the Orange County Register. \u201cIt was like someone had crashed cymbals in both ears. I was blasted out of the theater. I knew from that moment that I wanted to be an actor.\u201dAdvertisementMr. Kotto said he saw glimpses of himself in Brando\u2019s character, a defiant young man who struggles to connect with women and fellow dockworkers. His father was a Jewish construction worker from Cameroon, his mother a Catholic nurse and Army officer from Panama, and he grew up as one of the only boys wearing a yarmulke in Harlem, and as one of the only African American students at a predominantly Irish school in the Bronx.He later studied acting and practiced his diction with a tape recorder, rising to national prominence in 1969 after he replaced James Earl Jones as the Broadway star of \u201cThe Great White Hope,\u201d based on the life of Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion.Story continues below advertisementThe next year, he starred on-screen in \u201cThe Liberation of L.B. Jones,\u201d playing a young man who returns to his Southern hometown and kills a White police officer who had brutalized him years earlier. Mr. Kotto credited the film with helping inspire the Blaxploitation genre, telling the Big Issue, a British street newspaper: \u201cNo one had seen a Black man kill a White man on-screen prior to that.\u201dAdvertisementAs Mr. Kotto put it, he was \u201cthe opposite\u201d of Sidney Poitier, who had become one of Hollywood\u2019s first Black stars while taking dignified and restrained film roles. Instead, he took parts in which Black characters targeted spies, chased down bank robbers, went into space and fought their White counterparts head-on.\u201cMy publicist once told me: \u2018We don\u2019t know how to sell you. In your last picture you threw a White man in the thresher. People think you are mean,\u2019 \u201d he recalled in a 1976 speech to an organization of Black female journalists. \u201cBut Black folks see my films and say\u201d \u2014 he paused, letting the audience finish his sentence \u2014 \u201cright on.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMr. Kotto starred as the villainous Kananga, a Caribbean dictator and drug smuggler also known as Mr. Big, in \u201cLive and Let Die\u201d (1973), the first Bond film to star Roger Moore. After trying to kill 007 at a crocodile farm and then in a shark tank, his character is forced to swallow a compressed gas pellet, causing him to explode like a popped balloon.AdvertisementHe later received an Emmy nomination for best supporting actor, as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the TV movie \u201cRaid on Entebbe\u201d (1977), and earned some of the finest reviews of his career for Paul Schrader\u2019s \u201cBlue Collar\u201d (1978), as a Detroit autoworker who robs his union headquarters with Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel. Mr. Kotto delivered \u201cpicture-stealing force and charm,\u201d wrote film critic Andrew Sarris.In later years he appeared alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in the dystopian action film \u201cThe Running Man\u201d (1987), played an FBI agent chasing Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in \u201cMidnight Run\u201d (1988) and starred as Baltimore police Lt. Al Giardello in the NBC drama \u201cHomicide: Life on the Street,\u201d which ran for seven seasons in the 1990s.Story continues below advertisementBy then, he was well known for playing heavies \u2014 a prison inmate opposite Robert Redford in \u201cBrubaker\u201d (1980), a police detective in \u201cThe Star Chamber\u201d (1983) \u2014 and was ready to take on more sensitive roles, including as a romantic lead. \u201cI\u2019m always called powerful, bulky or imposing,\u201d he told the Baltimore Sun. \u201cOr they say I fill up a room. I\u2019m a 200-pound, 6-foot, 3-inch Black guy. And I think I have this image of a monster.\u201dAdvertisementHis tough-guy reputation rested in part on \u201cAlien\u201d (1979), director Ridley Scott\u2019s landmark science-fiction and horror film. Mr. Kotto played the engineer Parker, traveling on the spaceship Nostromo with an otherwise all-White crew that included Sigourney Weaver and John Hurt, who becomes the host for a parasitic alien.One of the film\u2019s most chilling sequences saw Mr. Kotto try to restrain Hurt as the alien breaks through his chest in an eruption of blood \u2014 a sequence that genuinely shocked Mr. Kotto, although he had been tipped off that something unusual was about to happen by crew members wearing \u201cgoggles and white smocks.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cI thought this was a cheap, exploitative event. .\u2009.\u2009. I was up three nights thinking maybe I should get out of the industry and become a lawyer or something,\u201d he told the entertainment website Nerdist in 2019. \u201cBut I didn\u2019t realize we had just made history. Later on when we went to the theater, people were running out of the theater screaming, and I realized we had done something special. But at the time it just seemed like some claptrap phony thing with blood and gore.\u201d[\u2018I\u2019ve been at the forefront of a movement\u2019: A 1985 Q&A with Yaphet Kotto]AdvertisementSamuel Frederick Kotto was born in New York City on Nov. 15, 1939, according to his agent, and adopted the Hebrew name Yaphet at a young age. In his telling, his father was descended from Cameroonian royalty. His parents separated when he was a child, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents.Story continues below advertisementMr. Kotto played Othello in a regional theater production on Cape Cod and made his movie debut with a small role in \u201cNothing But a Man\u201d (1964), about a Black couple facing discrimination in the South. A year later he was on Broadway, with a supporting part in \u201cThe Zulu and the Zayda,\u201d a musical comedy set in Johannesburg.He guest-starred in episodes of \u201cThe Big Valley\u201d and \u201cMannix\u201d and appeared in movies such as \u201cThe Thomas Crown Affair\u201d (1968), \u201cBone\u201d (1972) and \u201cAcross 110th Street\u201d (1972) before directing \u201cThe Limit\u201d (1972), in which he played a Los Angeles police officer who squares off with a motorcycle gang.Mr. Kotto later said he was afraid of being typecast after \u201cAlien\u201d and turned down two roles that would have taken him back to space: Lando Calrissian in the Star Wars movie \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back\u201d and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation.\u201d His later roles were more earthbound, and included a return to the stage in 1990 productions of August Wilson\u2019s \u201cFences,\u201d in Washington and London\u2019s West End.His marriages to Rita Dittman and Toni Pettyjohn ended in divorce, and in 1997 he married Thessa Sinahon, a former cook and secretary from the Philippines. He had six children, but complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kotto appeared in more than 90 film and television productions, and said he was regularly approached on the street by people who recognized him. \u201cThey can\u2019t think of what picture they have seen me in,\u201d he told the Sun in 1993, \u201cbut they know me. That\u2019s good. That means I am becoming an institution.\u201d\n\n He received an Emmy nomination as dictator Idi Amin in the 1977 TV movie \u2018Raid on Entebbe\u2019 and starred in the 1990s NBC drama \u2018Homicide: Life on the Street.\u2019 Yaphet Kotto, who played Bond villain and \u2018Alien\u2019 crew member, dies at 81",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Greg Noll, swaggering big-wave surfer known as \u2018Da Bull,\u2019 dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2438",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/greg-noll-dead/2021/06/29/624c048a-d8e3-11eb-9bbb-37c30dcf9363_story.html",
        "text": "Riding waves at Waimea Bay, the dangerous and revered surf break on Oahu\u2019s North Shore, Greg Noll would orient himself by triangulating with two local Hawaiian landmarks, a church steeple and a cemetery. Guided by those symbols of God and death, he dropped in on enormous waves that threatened to explode on top of him, crashing down with a roar that could be heard a mile away. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMr. Noll, a former California lifeguard, was widely credited with leading the opening charge at Waimea, helping to extinguish a taboo that had persisted since 1943, when surfer Dickie Cross drowned while trying to make his way to shore. After more than a decade in which surfers avoided the break, Mr. Noll and a few others paddled out in November 1957, dropping in on 15-foot waves and showing that it was possible to ride there without being crushed to death or pulled out to sea in a riptide.\u201cYou could see that this had all the potential of being a great surf spot,\u201d Mr. Noll said in an interview for \u201cRiding Giants, \u201d a 2004 documentary. \u201cAnd at some point, you just had to go .\u2009.\u2009. We can do this thing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Noll, who died June 28 at age 84, went on to become the most famous big-wave surfer of his time, a barrel-chested giant whose 230-pound physique and head-down style earned him the nickname \u201cDa Bull.\u201d His family announced the death on Instagram but did not share additional details.\u201cHe was a god of that era,\u201d said Peter Townend, an Australian surfer who won a world championship in 1976. In a phone interview, he added that Mr. Noll was \u201cone of the first crazy people to charge big waves,\u201d long before the advent of tow-in surfing enabled surfers to catch 70-foot waves with help from a water scooter or helicopter.Wearing distinctive black-and-white \u201cjail house\u201d swim trunks so that no one could mistake him for another surfer, Mr. Noll rode some of the biggest waves of his time, including a 25-footer in 1964 at Pipeline, another North Shore surf break, that made him feel \u201clike I was on a spaceship racing into a void.\u201d Five years later, he dropped in on what was then considered the largest wave ever ridden, a roughly 35-foot saltwater skyscraper that swallowed him whole at Makaha, on the west side of Oahu.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, surfing historian Matt Warshaw said Mr. Noll was neither the first big-wave surfer nor the best, but he had a swagger and showmanship that set him apart from his peers. \u201cHe more or less invented the big-wave surfer as an archetype or a character. .\u2009.\u2009. Fifty-odd years after he rode his last big wave, he\u2019s still the yardstick by which all other big-wave surfers are judged.\u201dAs a 10-year-old boy in Manhattan Beach, Calif., Mr. Noll had learned to surf on an 80-pound redwood plank that weighed about as much as he did. He persuaded his parents to let him spend his last year of high school in Oahu, where he lived in a Quonset hut and spent most of his time on a board; later, he hopped between islands, where he searched for the perfect break and said he slept on a mattress stuffed into the back of old hearses or vans.Mr. Noll was a staple of 1960s surfing movies, appearing in documentaries such as \u201cThe Endless Summer\u201d and performing stunts for James Mitchum, the son of actor Robert Mitchum, in \u201cRide the Wild Surf.\u201d He also made a series of movies titled \u201cSearch for Surf,\u201d published surf magazines and ran his own surfboard-building outfit. In 1965, he opened a 20,000-square-foot factory in Hermosa Beach, Calif., that was soon making some 200 boards a week. Some now go for more than $10,000 on the collectors market, according to Townend.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Mr. Noll remained best known as a big-wave surfer, driven by an addiction to riding ever-larger waves. In a 1989 memoir, \u201cDa Bull: Life Over the Edge,\u201d written with Andrea Gabbard, he recalled that he once had been terrified by six-foot waves, only to learn to ride waves that stood 20 feet or taller, so high that when he fell off the board, he was sometimes \u201cheld under so long that I would begin to black out as I came up to surface.\u201dOn the morning of Dec. 4, 1969, he woke up to a deep rumble, a sound that reminded him of Army tanks conducting drills on the North Shore. \u201cThe dishes on the wall are rattling,\u201d he recalled in a 2009 interview with the Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze, \u201cand I finally realize it wasn\u2019t tanks \u2014 it was surf.\u201d He got in his car and drove to Waimea, where a storm had carried boats from the harbor to an inland gas station.Undeterred, he drove to nearby Makaha Beach, where residents were being told to evacuate. Mr. Noll grabbed his board and went into the water, trying to take advantage of a weather event that was later dubbed the \u201cSwell of the Century.\u201d Estimating his chances of surviving a wipeout at roughly 50-50, he paddled out to sea and started to surf, riding what fellow surfer Fred Hemmings later described as \u201cthe biggest wave I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the wave fell around him, Mr. Noll stepped off the back of his board and entered into surfing legend. Some historians have argued that the wave was probably much smaller than 35 feet, which stood as a record for more than two decades, according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing. Others suggested it was even bigger. As Mr. Noll told the Wall Street Journal in 1995, \u201cI\u2019ve been able to eat out on that wave for years.\u201dMr. Noll never again rode a big wave, leaving Oahu for Crescent City, Calif., where he worked as a commercial fisherman before returning to surfboard-making around 1990. After his wipeout, he said he realized that \u201cthe addiction was bordering on insanity. At some point, a guy has to ask himself, \u2018Are you going to slip over the .\u2009.\u2009. edge or are you going to keep this thing in perspective?\u2019\u2009\u201dGreg Lawhead was born in San Diego on Feb. 11, 1937. His parents divorced when he was young, and he moved with his mother to Manhattan Beach, later taking the last name of his stepfather, a chemical engineer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Noll was part of a U.S. lifeguard team that traveled to Australia for the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, where he and other Americans showed off a lightweight, Balsa-wood board known as the Malibu chip. \u201cIt changed surfing in Australia,\u201d Townend said.By then, Mr. Noll had started to acquire a reputation as a drinker and a fighter (\u201cIf somebody needed punching, they got it,\u201d he once said) with a dark sense of humor. When one of his surfboard company\u2019s employees accidentally cut off his thumb and learned that it couldn\u2019t be reattached, Mr. Noll \u201cplaced the severed digit in a cup full of resin to make a paperweight,\u201d according to the Encyclopedia of Surfing.He was inducted into the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, Calif., in 1996. Information on survivors was not immediately available, but he reportedly married twice and had four children. His son Jed runs Noll Surfboards in San Clemente, Calif.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPeople always ask, \u2018What is it that makes people want to give up their friends, their family, their jobs and just go surfing?\u2019\u2009\u201d Mr. Noll told the Associated Press in 2008. \u201cThose people always categorize surfing as a sport. But it\u2019s not. It\u2019s a lifestyle.\u201d\n\nRead more:Big storms, bigger waves: Warming oceans have created a golden age for surfingBruce Brown, documentarian whose \u2018Endless Summer\u2019 caught perfect wave on film, dies at 80Pipe dreams: Visiting Oahu, \u2018surf capital of the known universe\u2019 He was one of the first to surf Waimea Bay in Oahu and later rode a reportedly 35-foot giant at Makaha. Greg Noll, swaggering big-wave surfer known as \u2018Da Bull,\u2019 dies at 84",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gary Burden, who designed album covers for California rockers, dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2439",
        "date": "2018-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/gary-burden-who-designed-album-covers-for-california-rockers-dies-at-84/2018/03/19/8c8bcd68-2b83-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html",
        "text": "Gary Burden, a designer and art director who crafted some of the most enduring images of California rock \u2014 record covers from the 1960s and 1970s that featured the blue-tinged face of Joni Mitchell, a surreal shot of Neil Young on the beach and a cheeky photo of the Doors inside the Morrison Hotel \u2014 died March 7 in Los Angeles. He was 84. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis wife, Jenice Heo, confirmed the death to the New York Times but did not give a cause. She and Mr. Burden collaborated through their design firm, R. Twerk & Co., and received a Grammy in 2010 for designing the boxed set \u201cNeil Young Archives Vol. 1 (1963-1972).\u201d It was Mr. Burden\u2019s fourth Grammy nomination for album design, following nominations that led him to appear at the ceremony in a silver-ornamented mariachi suit and a sequined tuxedo purportedly made for Elvis Presley.Mr. Burden, a Marine Corps veteran, came relatively late to rock-and-roll. He was working as a bow-tie-clad architect in the late 1960s when a client \u2014 Cass Elliot, singer \u201cMama Cass\u201d of the Mamas & the Papas \u2014 suggested he stop renovating houses and start designing album covers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement \u201cShe\u2019s the one who said, \u2018You know, Gary, you should make our new cover, you know how to design stuff,\u2019\u2009\u201d he told the NPR radio program World Cafe in 2015. \u201cI don\u2019t know anything about that. I have never been interested in being a graphic artist or any of that stuff. But she insisted that I do it, and she was right. She handed me a career.\u201dTrading his square three-piece suit for an outfit of denim and plaid, Mr. Burden began devising covers for artists including the Mamas & the Papas, Jackson Browne, and Crosby, Stills & Nash.The latter group hadn\u2019t finalized its name when Mr. Burden and photographer Henry Diltz took a picture of the trio for the cover of their 1969 debut. Story continues below advertisementOnly later, when David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash settled on their name, did Mr. Burden realize that the musicians had been arranged in reverse order. Notable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)AdvertisementSome time after that, he learned that the house they were photographed in front of had been demolished, squelching his plans for a correctly ordered reshoot \u2014 and resulting, Mr. Burden said, in Nash\u2019s years-long misidentification as Crosby. It was an inauspicious start for Mr. Burden, who soon found himself battling the band\u2019s record label over the relatively expensive, high-quality paper he sought to use for the album cover. \u201cThe famous line,\u201d Mr. Burden later recalled, \u201cwas: \u2018You could put a good record in a paper bag, and no one would care.\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementBut the band backed his cover idea, and Mr. Burden eventually prevailed, perhaps in a sign of the industry-wide shift toward ambitious, artistic album design. While pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth experimented with collage on the Beatles\u2019 \u201cSgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band\u201d (1967), and Andy Warhol created a comically phallic banana sticker for the Velvet Underground\u2019s debut that same year, Mr. Burden designed images that were frequently straightforward but highly evocative.AdvertisementHe oversaw the cyanotype-style, blue-toned printing of a Mitchell photograph for \u201cBlue,\u201d the folk singer\u2019s 1971 masterpiece; supervised the Old West-inspired cover photograph on the Eagles\u2019 1973 album \u201cDesperado\u201d; and helped position singer Jim Morrison and his band the Doors inside the Morrison Hotel, where they were photographed for a 1970 album of the same name.Mr. Burden began working with Young that same year, when he selected a spooky, solarized Joel Bernstein photo for the cover of \u201cAfter the Gold Rush,\u201d and maintained a partnership with the singer-songwriter for more than four decades.Story continues below advertisementAmong their most memorable collaborations was the cover for Young\u2019s \u201cOn the Beach\u201d (1974), which featured the musician standing on a desolate Santa Monica beach in a polyester yellow jacket and white pants, behind decrepit patio furniture and what appeared to be a car fender \u2014 or a crashed spaceship \u2014 submerged in the sand.Advertisement\u201cThe idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue,\u201d Young wrote in his memoir \u201cWaging Heavy Peace.\u201d He said he and Mr. Burden \u201cwent to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and rear fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights,\u201d and bought Young\u2019s outfit \u201cat a sleazy men\u2019s shop\u201d while \u201cstoned on some dynamite weed.\u201d The photo was taken by rock photographer Bob Seidemann, who died in November.Story continues below advertisementWhile Mr. Burden sometimes donned the camera himself \u2014 he was nearly bitten by a horse while photographing the animal for a 1971 album by Crazy Horse \u2014 he typically worked with Diltz, sometimes giving few instructions for photo shoots that could veer in any direction.His mantra, Diltz wrote in a Facebook post, was simple: \u201c\u2009\u2018Just shoot everything that happens,\u2019 he would say to me. \u2018Film\u2019s the cheapest part.\u2019\u2009\u201dAdvertisementGary Burden was born in Cleveland on May 23, 1933, and spent much of his childhood in Florida and California. His father was \u201ca Laguna Beach citrus rancher\u201d and also worked in the movie industry, according to a biography on Mr. Burden\u2019s website.Story continues below advertisementA self-described \u201cbad kid,\u201d Mr. Burden persuaded his mother to sign papers allowing him to escape into the Marines at 16. He later studied architectural design at the University of California at Berkeley.A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.In recent years, Mr. Burden directed music videos while working on album covers for artists including My Morning Jacket, Monsters of Folk, Kurt Vile and Conor Oberst.His design work ranged far beyond rock. One early client, comedian Richard Pryor, wanted an image inspired by the slavery novel \u201cRoots\u201d for his 1968 self-titled album. Mr. Burden had Pryor photographed seminude, squatting in the dirt with a bow and arrow, and framed the image in a yellow border that recalled the anthropological covers of National Geographic magazine.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a result, \u201cI got two letters,\u201d Mr. Burden later wrote. \u201cOne was a letter from the National Geographic Society\u2019s attorneys offering to sue me for defaming their publication. The second letter was a Grammy nomination for the best album cover.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this obituary included an incorrect reference to the Doors album \u201cMorrison Hotel.\u201d In a photo shoot for the cover, Mr. Burden arranged for the band to be photographed inside the hotel, not outside the hotel. It also incorrectly reported the year Crosby, Stills & Nash\u2019s self-titled debut was released. It was 1969, not 1968. The story has been revised.\n Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nJohn T. Cacioppo, scientist of loneliness who expanded psychology\u2019s reach, dies at 66\nAugie Garrido, college baseball\u2019s winningest coach, dies at 79\nDavid S. Wyman, historian of U.S. response to the Holocaust, dies at 89\n He worked with Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, the Doors, the Eagles and Jackson Browne. Gary Burden, who designed album covers for California rockers, dies at 84",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dr. Lonnie Smith, jazz master of the Hammond B3 organ, dies at 79 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2440",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lonnie-smith-dead/2021/10/01/67777154-2200-11ec-b3d6-8cdebe60d3e2_story.html",
        "text": "Dr. Lonnie Smith, a renowned jazz organist whose performances were marked by deep soulfulness and flourishes of theatricality highlighted by his distinctive wardrobe of turbans, tunics and jewelry, died Sept. 29 at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was complications from pulmonary fibrosis, said Cem Kurosman, a spokesman for the Blue Note record label. Mr. Smith could be evasive about his indelible sartorial style and his name: The \u201cDr.\u201d was a self-appointed title, adopted in part to distinguish him from another jazz and soul keyboard player, Lonnie Liston Smith. But his music was earthy, direct and sometimes idiosyncratic, drawn from the traditions of gospel music, blues and a relaxed style of organ playing once commonplace in nightclubs in Black urban neighborhoods of the Northeast.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEntirely self-taught, Mr. Smith did not begin playing the Hammond B3 organ \u2014 the primary organ used in jazz \u2014 until his early 20s. He soon became a master of the bulky two-tiered keyboard instrument known for its rich range of expression and its almost unlimited palette of tonal colors.\u201cI loved that sound,\u201d Mr. Smith told the San Antonio Express-News in 2014. \u201cIt has all the elements of the universe to me. It\u2019s sunshine, rainbows, the rain, the wind, the storm, the flowers. When I\u2019m at the organ, it\u2019s like sitting in a spaceship and you don\u2019t know where you\u2019re going.\u201dThroughout his career, Mr. Smith developed a rapport with musicians of varying backgrounds and styles. He backed singers such as Gladys Knight and Dionne Warwick in the 1960s, then formed a quartet with guitarist-singer George Benson. He recorded classic jazz tunes, as well as songs by Jimi Hendrix, rock artist Beck, the Beatles and the Eurythmics.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis musical collaborators included jazz stars, such as trumpeter Lee Morgan, bassist Ron Carter and guitarist John Abercrombie, and unexpected performers, such as proto-punk singer Iggy Pop, who appeared on Mr. Smith\u2019s final album, \u201cBreathe,\u201d released this year.\u201cMr. Smith is emblematic of a jazz-organ tradition and yet is also an exception,\u201d critic Larry Blumenfeld wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2014. \u201cHis approach to the instrument is quirky and personal, without much adherence to convention. He summons mystery or humor as befits the moment. He\u2019s been that way from the start.\u201dIn the mid-1960s, when jazz organists such as Jimmy Smith \u2014 Mr. Smith\u2019s primary influence \u2014 Larry Young and Jack McDuff were in their prime, Mr. Smith moved from his hometown of Buffalo to New York City. He appeared on several of Benson\u2019s early albums and released his debut recording as a leader, \u201cFinger-Lickin\u2019 Good,\u201d in 1966.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA year later, he and Benson performed on saxophonist Lou Donaldson\u2019s recording \u201cAlligator Boogaloo,\u201d which became a minor hit. Then known simply as Lonnie Smith \u2014 and before he began wearing a turban \u2014 Mr. Smith made four well-regarded albums for Blue Note between 1968 and 1970 and was considered a leading exponent of a style called \u201csoul jazz.\u201d His solos sometimes lasted 15 minutes, soaring from a whisper to a floor-shaking roar.During the 1970s and 1980s, as musical tastes turned away from traditional jazz, Mr. Smith recorded sporadically and adopted the stage persona of \u201cDr.\u201d Lonnie Smith. At first, he said the \u201cDr.\u201d derived from the way he \u201cdoctored\u201d with the music. Later, he professed to be a spiritual healer through music.With his white beard, colorful turbans, flowing cloaks, walking stick and silver bracelets and rings, Mr. Smith had a striking presence with a steady, imperturbable smile. He was nicknamed \u201cthe Turbanator,\u201d the title of one of his albums.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI used to wear turbans when I was young, way before I first recorded,\u201d he told Jazz Times in 2005. \u201cTaking it off at this point,\u201d he added, \u201cis like pulling the mask off the Lone Ranger. Some people just love that mystery.\u201dHe spent years in Hawaii and Florida working in obscurity before making a comeback in the 1990s. Recognized as a forgotten musical visionary, he became a headliner at the Village Vanguard and other storied jazz clubs, had long engagements in Japan and Europe, and appeared year after year at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. Beginning in 1993, he released 15 new albums \u2014 he had more than 30 altogether \u2014 culminating in a return to the Blue Note label in 2016.The following year, he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the country\u2019s highest official honor for jazz musicians.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLonnie Early was born July 3, 1942, in Lackawanna, N.Y., and at a young age took the last name of his stepfather, a mechanic. He spent his childhood in Buffalo, where his mother and aunts sang gospel music in church and on the radio.Although he never learned to read musical notation, Mr. Smith had an early ability to pick out tunes on the piano and other instruments. In junior high, he was given a battered cornet to play and, overnight, learned the fingerings of the instrument and the next day played \u201cPomp and Circumstance\u201d for the band teacher.\u201cI\u2019ll never forget it,\u201d Mr. Smith later recalled. \u201cThe teacher said, \u2018Looks like we\u2019ve got a star in here.\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementIn his teens, he sang with his brothers in a doo-wop group that featured a childhood friend, Grover Washington, on saxophone. After hearing recordings by Hammond B3 star Jimmy Smith, Mr. Smith was determined to become an organist, even though he did not have access to an instrument.AdvertisementHe often told the story of visiting Art Kubera\u2019s music store in Buffalo, where he would stay all day, admiring the instruments.\u201cWhy do you come in here every day and stay until closing time?\u201d Kubera asked Mr. Smith, then about 20. \u201cI said to him, \u2018Sir, if I had an instrument, I could learn how to play it, I could work, and I could make a living.\u2019 \u201dOn a later visit, Kubera said, \u201cCome with me.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe took me to his office in the back and when he opened the door, there was a Hammond B3 organ with a Leslie speaker, sitting there staring me right in the face,\u201d Mr. Smith told Keyboard magazine in 2016. \u201cIt was like the gates of heaven opened up! I went over and sat at it, and he said to me, \u2018If you can take it out of here, it\u2019s yours.\u2019 So my brothers came over, and we took it home in a pickup truck while it was snowing! I\u2019ll never forget that. Art Kubera was my angel.\u201dAdvertisementMr. Smith had two children from his marriage to Henrietta Wilson, which ended in divorce, and four daughters from other relationships. Survivors include two children from his marriage, Lonnie Smith Jr. of Buffalo and Charisse Partridge of San Diego; three daughters from other relationships, Chandra \u201cShawn\u201d Thomas of Buffalo, Lani Chambers of Hampton, Va., and Semita \u201cVonnie\u201d Smith of Pittsburgh; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A daughter, Netta Smith, died in 2016.\u201cA lot of people who come and hear me, they don\u2019t realize where the music comes from,\u201d Mr. Smith told Jazz Times. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t come from notes on the paper or anything like that. What happens is, the music comes from my toe and travels all the way up like electricity. And that\u2019s why I\u2019m surprised when I\u2019m playing. That\u2019s because by playing by ear, I really let my body play what\u2019s in my heart, right there on the bandstand. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituariesPee Wee Ellis, who helped put the funk in James Brown\u2019s music, dies at 80Phil Schaap, jazz scholar, historian and broadcaster, dies at 70Curtis Fuller, acclaimed jazz trombonist of hard-bop era, dies at 88 Known for his distinctive wardrobe and filigreed solos, he had a renewed career late in life. Dr. Lonnie Smith, jazz master of the Hammond B3 organ, dies at 79",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pierre Cardin, designer who transformed fashion in 1960s, dies at 98 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2441",
        "date": "2020-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/pierre-cardin-dead/2020/12/29/d4fc3efc-49d5-11eb-a9f4-0e668b9772ba_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cI was born an artiste,\u201d the French couturier Pierre Cardin once declared, \u201cbut I am a businessman.\u201dA perennial trendsetter, Mr. Cardin, who died Dec.\u00a029 at age 98, radically transformed men\u2019s and women\u2019s fashion in the 1960s with modern designs such as the Nehru jacket and the space-race-inspired bubble dress.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe redefined the field of commercial branding by licensing his name to products including toiletries, jewelry, luggage, candy, wine and wigs. He also bought the landmark Parisian restaurant Maxim\u2019s and built it into an international chain of eateries, boutiques and clubs. \u201cIt is difficult to name something that Pierre Cardin has yet to design or transform with his imprint,\u201d fashion historian Caroline Milbank once wrote.Story continues below advertisementHis death was announced by the French Academy of Fine Arts. His family told French media outlets that he died at a Paris hospital. The cause was not disclosed.AdvertisementMr. Cardin started his own fashion house in 1950 after apprenticing under designers Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli. A decade later, he rose to fame by daringly blurring the lines of ",
        "author": "Megan Buerger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pierre Cardin, designer who transformed fashion in 1960s, dies at 98 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2442",
        "date": "2020-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/pierre-cardin-dead/2020/12/29/d4fc3efc-49d5-11eb-a9f4-0e668b9772ba_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cI was born an artiste,\u201d the French couturier Pierre Cardin once declared, \u201cbut I am a businessman.\u201dA perennial trendsetter, Mr. Cardin, who died Dec.\u00a029 at age 98, radically transformed men\u2019s and women\u2019s fashion in the 1960s with modern designs such as the Nehru jacket and the space-race-inspired bubble dress.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe redefined the field of commercial branding by licensing his name to products including toiletries, jewelry, luggage, candy, wine and wigs. He also bought the landmark Parisian restaurant Maxim\u2019s and built it into an international chain of eateries, boutiques and clubs. \u201cIt is difficult to name something that Pierre Cardin has yet to design or transform with his imprint,\u201d fashion historian Caroline Milbank once wrote.Story continues below advertisementHis death was announced by the French Academy of Fine Arts. His family told French media outlets that he died at a Paris hospital. The cause was not disclosed.AdvertisementMr. Cardin started his own fashion house in 1950 after apprenticing under designers Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli. A decade later, he rose to fame by daringly blurring the lines of ",
        "author": "Megan Buerger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael O\u2019Brien, NASA diplomat who oversaw agreements for the International Space Station, dies at 72 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2443",
        "date": "2018-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/michael-obrien-nasa-diplomat-who-oversaw-agreements-for-the-international-space-station-dies-at-72/2018/02/28/891a5966-1b47-11e8-b2d9-08e748f892c0_story.html",
        "text": "Michael F. O\u2019Brien, a former naval aviator who later served as a top NASA liaison to foreign space agencies and led the team that secured agreements for the establishment of the International Space Station, died Feb. 19 at his home in Springfield, Va. He was 72.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was cancer, said a daughter, Beth O\u2019Brien-Shepard.\n Capt. O\u2019Brien \u2014 known to colleagues as \u201cObie\u201d \u2014 joined NASA in 1994 after a nearly ",
        "author": "Ellie Silverman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Caroll Spinney, puppeteer who gave life to Big Bird of \u2018Sesame Street,\u2019 dies at 85 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2444",
        "date": "2019-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/caroll-spinney-puppeteer-who-gave-life-to-big-bird-of-sesame-street-dies-at-85/2019/12/08/9a305ff0-402d-11e9-9361-301ffb5bd5e6_story.html",
        "text": "Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer who gave life to Big Bird, the towering yellow avian of TV\u2019s \u201cSesame Street\u201d who accompanied generations of youngsters in the arduous, yet wondrous, work of growing up, died Dec. 8 at his home in Connecticut. He was 85 and died hours before \u201cSesame Street\u201d received Kennedy Center Honors for achievement in the arts. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe production company Sesame Workshop announced his death and said he had dystonia, a neurological disorder affecting movement.Decades before the advent of smartphones and tablets, when the \u201cboob tube\u201d was the boogeyman for parents and child psychologists fretting about what today is called screen time, Mr. Spinney brought his puppetry to a television show that aspired to be an educational influence on kids preschool-age and younger. It would become the longest-running children\u2019s program on U.S. television.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSesame Street\u201d debuted on public television in 1969, its curriculum undergirded by the research of the Children\u2019s Television Workshop, which was co-created by television producer Joan Ganz Cooney. The show featured a racially diverse cast of live actors, as well as animation and Jim Henson\u2019s Muppets. It used advertising techniques including jingles and rhymes to teach children the alphabet and numbers, how to tie their shoes and brush their teeth, how to love a new sibling and confront a bully, and how to live in a community.Mr. Spinney, who said he had been teased in childhood for his\u00a0fascination with what his tormentors mocked as \u201cdolls,\u201d met Henson at a puppetry convention and first donned Big Bird\u2019s 4,000 canary-yellow feathers for the show\u2019s opening season. In thousands of episodes over nearly a half-century, he gave voice and motion to Big Bird and to Oscar the Grouch, the shaggy green trash can-dweller who showed children that they needed not always be happy and that it was okay to like things others\u00a0didn\u2019t \u2014 trash, for instance.Post Reports: \u201cWhen you\u2019re a kid and watching this Big Bird sing funny songs and knocking things over, you really think Big Bird can see me laugh and we\u2019re having this laugh together.\u201dThe Muppets also included the thoughtful Bert and his playful friend Ernie, the ravenous Cookie Monster and giggling Elmo, who became a fan favorite particularly among the youngest \u201cSesame Street\u201d viewers in the show\u2019s later years. But Big Bird, who interacted most frequently with the human actors, remained the centerpiece of \u201cSesame Street,\u201d a creature often bewildered by a world that was too small for him, much as children are confused by one that is too big.AdvertisementPuppeteer Caroll Spinney, 85, died on Dec. 8 after nearly 50 years of portraying Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on \u201cSesame Street.\u201d (The Washington Post)Story continues below advertisementMr. Spinney brought to his character \u201ca sensitivity to what childhood is like, what its challenges are, what its adventures are,\u201d said Kathryn A. Ostrofsky, a scholar of media history who has studied the history of \u201cSesame Street.\u201dBig Bird became \u201cthe most human character of all the Muppets, the most nuanced, complex, most rounded,\u201d she added. She attributed those qualities to Mr. Spinney\u2019s acting ability, which she said \u201cis something that people take for granted often when they think of puppeteers.\u201dHenson, who died in 1990, originally conceived Big Bird as a \u201cfunny, dumb country yokel,\u201d Mr. Spinney said, recalling that he persuaded the show\u2019s makers to recast the character as a curious 6-year-old. In creating Big Bird, Mr. Spinney said he drew from memories of his boyhood.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI was very insecure, shy, didn\u2019t know what to say to people,\u201d he once told The Washington Post, recalling also that he was the smallest kid in school. \u201cOne time my teacher was asked what \u2018puny\u2019 was and she thought for a moment and said: \u2018Caroll. He\u2019s puny.\u2019 It\u2019s probably just as bad to be too big, like Bird.\u201dAdvertisementLike many children, Big Bird had an invisible friend, called Mr. Snuffleupagus, although the woolly mammoth-like creature was eventually rendered visible to avoid suggesting to young viewers that their perceptions were not valid.Often, Big Bird made mistakes so that children on the other side of the screen could learn from them, or jubilantly correct them, said Robert W. Morrow, author of the book \u201c\u00a0\u2018Sesame Street\u2019 and the Reform of Children\u2019s Television.\u201d Other times, he posed questions that were unnatural for other characters to ask, the ones for which children most ardently sought answers.Story continues below advertisementIn a memorable 1983 episode, \u201cSesame Street\u201d viewers learned about the death of Mr. Hooper, the bowtie-bedecked shopkeeper played by actor Will Lee, who had died of a heart attack. The makers of the show considered having Mr. Hooper retire to Florida but ultimately decided to be honest with the children who had loved him.Advertisement\u201cBig Bird, don\u2019t you remember? We told you, Mr. Hooper died,\u201d a human cast member reminds Big Bird, who, bearing a gift for his friend, had forgotten.\u201cWell, I\u2019ll give it to him when he comes back,\u201d Big Bird replies.\u201cBig Bird, Mr. Hooper\u2019s not coming back,\u201d another cast member explains. \u201cWhen people die, they don\u2019t come back.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSlowly, Big Bird comes to understand.\u201cIt won\u2019t be the same,\u201d he laments, his head low, his beak hanging toward the ground.Puppeteer Caroll Spinney, 85, died on Dec. 8 after nearly 50 years of portraying Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on \u201cSesame Street.\u201d (The Washington Post)\nAn unyielding loyalty\nDistributed internationally, \u201cSesame Street\u201d became \u201cone of the most recognized cultural products for which the United States is known around the world,\u201d according to Ostrofsky, with Big Bird as its symbol.For much of his career, even as he was summoned in character to the White House or to China with comedian Bob Hope or to conduct the Boston Pops, the bearded Mr. Spinney could go nearly anywhere without being recognized. Big Bird, meanwhile, was a celebrity everywhere. And that was how Mr. Spinney wished to keep it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce, children\u2019s television host Fred Rogers invited Mr. Spinney to appear on \u201cMister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood,\u201d a show that preceded \u201cSesame Street\u201d on national television by a year, to explain how the Big Bird puppet worked.The costume was 8-foot-2. Mr. Spinney, who was 5-foot-10, stretched his right arm up through Big Bird\u2019s neck, his hand giving motion to the beak and his little finger working Big Bird\u2019s lolling eyes. A camera hidden inside the costume helped Mr. Spinney navigate the set. The costume was hot and so heavy that Mr. Spinney, his arm straining under the six-pound weight of Big Bird\u2019s head, needed to break every 10 to 15 minutes during filming.But Mr. Spinney had no desire to explain such details to an audience of children. \u201cIf you want me on, Big Bird is real,\u201d he recalled telling Rogers. \u201cCaroll Spinney does not do television.\u201dBig Bird and the man inside: Inseparable on Sesame Street for almost 50 yearsLater in life, Mr. Spinney revealed more of himself to the public, appearing in the 2014 documentary film \u201cI Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story,\u201d directed by Dave LaMattina and Chad N. Walker. By the account of his \u201cSesame Street\u201d colleagues, Mr. Spinney was almost indistinguishable from Big Bird: He was childlike in his innocence, perhaps a bit fragile and unyielding in his loyalty to \u201cSesame Street.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for Oscar, Mr. Spinney said he modeled the character on a cabbie from the Bronx who drove Mr. Spinney to a meeting with Henson and spent their ride grousing about then-New York Mayor John V. Lindsay. \u201cWho could be more of a Grouch than a cabdriver from the Bronx?\u201d Mr. Spinney quipped.He observed that, for the actor who played Big Bird, it was \u201ctherapeutic to switch to Oscar, to live awhile with the exact opposite attitude about life.\u201d But it was Big Bird, he said, whom he loved best.\n'Precious' childhood fantasy\nCarol Edwin Spinney was born in Waltham, Mass., on Dec. 26, 1933 \u2014 the day after Christmas, hence \u201cCarol.\u201d He later changed the spelling of his name.Story continues below advertisementGrowing up in Acton, farther to the northwest of Boston, he was entranced by puppetry from an early age. His mother, who had designed clothing before\u00a0raising two sons, made many of his first puppets. He recalled his father, who worked in a watch factory, as volatile and abusive.AdvertisementMr. Spinney said he was ridiculed in his youth because of his feminine-sounding name and his large ears. But with puppetry, \u201cyou can hide whatever you are at the moment and be only what they can see,\u201d he once told the New York Times. \u201cAnd you could get the adults to laugh.\u201dHe made money working birthday parties and putting on shows, pocketing the proceeds for college. After attending art school in Boston, he served in the Air Force and then worked in Boston on a television show featuring Bozo the Clown before joining \u201cSesame Street.\u201dMr. Spinney said that playing Big Bird sustained him through difficult periods of his life, including his divorce from his first wife, Janice, an event that he said caused him to contemplate suicide. In 1979, he married Debra Gilroy, who was a secretary for \u201cSesame Street.\u201d He had three children from his first marriage, Jessica, Melissa and Benjamin. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.AdvertisementSuch was the appeal of Big Bird that NASA asked Mr. Spinney to fly into orbit in costume, to interest young people in space exploration. Mr. Spinney agreed to go, but it was ultimately determined that the space shuttle was too small to accommodate the Big Bird suit. A New Hampshire teacher, Christa McAuliffe, went in his stead and was killed along with the rest of the crew when the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986.As Mr. Spinney grew older, Big Bird became perceptibly stooped. Because of balance problems, he stopped doing puppetry for Big Bird in 2015, although he continued providing the bird\u2019s voice. Mr. Spinney retired from the show in 2018, by which time he had collected a slew of awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Daytime Emmys in 2006The voice behind 50 years of Big Bird and Oscar\u201cSesame Street\u201d inspired much of the children\u2019s television that followed it \u2014 notably \u201cBlue\u2019s Clues\u201d and many video series on YouTube, said David Kleeman, a children\u2019s media expert and former president of the American Center for Children and Media. Big Bird, for his part, became the face of public television, particularly in perennial political battles over federal funding.\u201cI love Big Bird,\u201d Republican candidate Mitt Romney declared during a 2012 debate with President Barack Obama in an exchange that was widely mocked among liberals on social media. \u201cBut .\u2009.\u2009. I\u2019m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.\u201dBig Bird \u2014 though not Mr. Spinney, who steered clear of politics \u2014 turned up days later on \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d yawning and telling Seth Meyers, host of the news sketch Weekend Update, that it was \u201cseven hours past my bedtime.\u201dMr. Spinney, who was succeeded as Big Bird by an apprentice, Matt Vogel, appeared in scores of \u201cSesame Street\u201d movies, videos and recordings.Many children, he came to understand, believed in Big Bird as intensely as they believed in Santa Claus. He regarded it as his sacred duty to preserve the illusion, for as long as possible.\u201cIf they come to the set I get \u2018deBirded\u2019 eventually and some take it very hard,\u201d he told The Post years ago. \u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of disappointment. I know it\u2019s going to happen sooner or later, but I hate it. Childhood fantasy is a precious, short-lived time; don\u2019t take it away. The reality of the world is going to be apparent all too soon.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituariesLucette Destouches, widow and defender of French writer C\u00e9line, dies at 107Victor Sheymov, KGB officer who defected from Soviet Union, dies at 73Adam Peiperl, creator of kinetic light sculptures, dies at 84 He played the towering yellow avian and Oscar the Grouch, the shaggy green trash can-dwelling grump, in thousands of episodes of the classic children\u2019s television show. Caroll Spinney, puppeteer who gave life to Big Bird of \u2018Sesame Street,\u2019 dies at 85",
        "author": "Emily Langer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alan Bean, 4th Person to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 86 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2445",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/obituaries/alan-bean-astronaut-dies.html",
        "text": "After leaving NASA, Mr. Bean, a former Navy test pilot, became a full-time artist, creating images of space exploration. After leaving NASA, Mr. Bean, a former Navy test pilot, became a full-time artist, creating images of space exploration. Alan Bean, who became the fourth man to walk on the moon and turned to painting years later to tell the story of NASA\u2019s Apollo missions as they began receding into history, died on Saturday at Houston Methodist Hospital. He was 86.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alan Bean, 4th Person to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 86 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2446",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/obituaries/alan-bean-astronaut-dies.html",
        "text": "After leaving NASA, Mr. Bean, a former Navy test pilot, became a full-time artist, creating images of space exploration. After leaving NASA, Mr. Bean, a former Navy test pilot, became a full-time artist, creating images of space exploration. Alan Bean, who became the fourth man to walk on the moon and turned to painting years later to tell the story of NASA\u2019s Apollo missions as they began receding into history, died on Saturday at Houston Methodist Hospital. He was 86.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alan Bean, 4th Person to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 86 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2447",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/obituaries/alan-bean-astronaut-dies.html",
        "text": "After leaving NASA, Mr. Bean, a former Navy test pilot, became a full-time artist, creating images of space exploration. After leaving NASA, Mr. Bean, a former Navy test pilot, became a full-time artist, creating images of space exploration. Alan Bean, who became the fourth man to walk on the moon and turned to painting years later to tell the story of NASA\u2019s Apollo missions as they began receding into history, died on Saturday at Houston Methodist Hospital. He was 86.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Constance Adams Helped Design Habitations for Mars-Bound Astronauts (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2448",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/constance-adams-helped-design-habitations-for-mars-bound-astronauts-1530888786?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=66",
        "text": "Working for Lockheed Martin Corp. and other contractors, she spent more than a decade \u00a0on NASA projects, including the design of TransHab, an inflatable craft that could be used to carry astronauts to Mars or house them at a space station. As an architect working with engineers, she insisted that long-term space habitations needed to be not just safe and efficient, but also homey enough so astronauts wouldn\u2019t go crazy. TransHab featured private crew quarters and ceilings high enough to allow tall astronauts to run on treadmills.\nNASA funding cuts shelved the project, but Ms. Adams retained hope in an eventual Mars mission and believed the technology also could be applied to living in harsh environments on Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nConstance Adams discussed her career in a talk in 2011.\n\n\n\nMs. Adams died of colorectal cancer in late June at her home in Houston. She was 53.\n\n\nTransHab is a three-level habitat, accommodating six people, that can be squeezed into a cylinder for blastoff and inflated in space. Ms. Adams and her colleagues sought to help astronauts keep a reassuring, Earthlike sense of up and down in an environment of negligible \u00a0gravity.\n\u201cYou take gravity out of the equation and everything goes kablooey,\u201d National Geographic quoted her as saying. \u201cWe have to help our astronauts force themselves to act as if things were normal.\u201d\nConstance Marguerite DuQuesnay Adams was born July 16, 1964, in Boston. She grew up partly in New Haven, Conn., where her father, Jeremy Adams, was a professor of medieval history at Yale University. After her parents divorced and her father and stepmother, Bonnie Wheeler, joined the faculty of Southern Methodist University, the family moved to Dallas, where she attended middle and high school.\nHer family often traveled in Europe and she remembered watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on a hotel TV in Hungary. \u201cAll these people came to watch this event with the Americans,\u201d she told Metropolis magazine. \u201cApparently there was this voice-over in Hungarian that said it was just a movie made in Hollywood and that the Americans had not landed on the moon, and people were looking at us apologetically.\u201d\nAt Harvard University, she majored in social studies and wrote a senior thesis on a modernist architectural manifesto spearheaded by Le Corbusier. She also designed an ivory tower erected in Harvard Yard for a protest against the university\u2019s investments in South Africa during the apartheid era.\nAfter earning an architectural degree at Yale, she worked on skyscraper designs in Japan and urban planning in Berlin.\nAt NASA, she worked on BIO-Plex, a space habitation including plant-growth chambers and water-cleaning technology. She also did work related to the Space Shuttle program and the International Space Station.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nShe later founded a consulting firm, Synthesis International, and helped Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic design a terminal that could one day welcome space tourists at Spaceport America, in New Mexico. She also taught space architecture at Yale, the University of Hong Kong and the University of Houston.\nHer 2014 Dodge Challenger muscle car was red and came with a stick shift. \u201cIt sounded like an airplane taking off,\u201d said Damon Silvers, a friend since her Harvard days.\nMs. Adams is survived by two daughters, a brother, her stepmother and her mother, Madeleine de Jean, who writes about Champagne and other topics.\nMs. Adams often lamented the decline in U.S. spending on space exploration. \u201cNo nation in the history of the earth has failed to conduct great projects and remained significant,\u201d she said in a 2011 TEDx talk. \nShe also saw technological challenges as a basic human need. \u201cWe\u2019re this crazy creature,\u201d she told the Dallas Morning News in 2011. \u201cWe have to make things. And we have to do stuff with the things we make. And \u2026 when you start to see the things we make popping off the planet, you think, maybe in nature\u2019s scheme, it\u2019s our job to go and see other worlds. I can\u2019t imagine being this close to being able to go to another world and not doing it.\u201d\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at Bob.Hagerty@wsj.com As an architect working with NASA engineers, Constance Adams insisted that long-term space habitations needed to be not just safe and efficient, but also comfortable enough so astronauts wouldn\u2019t go crazy. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Constance Adams Helped Design Habitations for Mars-Bound Astronauts (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2449",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/constance-adams-helped-design-habitations-for-mars-bound-astronauts-1530888786?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=92",
        "text": "Working for Lockheed Martin Corp. and other contractors, she spent more than a decade \u00a0on NASA projects, including the design of TransHab, an inflatable craft that could be used to carry astronauts to Mars or house them at a space station. As an architect working with engineers, she insisted that long-term space habitations needed to be not just safe and efficient, but also homey enough so astronauts wouldn\u2019t go crazy. TransHab featured private crew quarters and ceilings high enough to allow tall astronauts to run on treadmills.\n\n\n\n\nNASA funding cuts shelved the project, but Ms. Adams retained hope in an eventual Mars mission and believed the technology also could be applied to living in harsh environments on Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nConstance Adams discussed her career in a talk in 2011.\n\n\n\nMs. Adams died of colorectal cancer in late June at her home in Houston. She was 53.\n\n\nTransHab is a three-level habitat, accommodating six people, that can be squeezed into a cylinder for blastoff and inflated in space. Ms. Adams and her colleagues sought to help astronauts keep a reassuring, Earthlike sense of up and down in an environment of negligible \u00a0gravity.\n\u201cYou take gravity out of the equation and everything goes kablooey,\u201d National Geographic quoted her as saying. \u201cWe have to help our astronauts force themselves to act as if things were normal.\u201d\nConstance Marguerite DuQuesnay Adams was born July 16, 1964, in Boston. She grew up partly in New Haven, Conn., where her father, Jeremy Adams, was a professor of medieval history at Yale University. After her parents divorced and her father and stepmother, Bonnie Wheeler, joined the faculty of Southern Methodist University, the family moved to Dallas, where she attended middle and high school.\nHer family often traveled in Europe and she remembered watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on a hotel TV in Hungary. \u201cAll these people came to watch this event with the Americans,\u201d she told Metropolis magazine. \u201cApparently there was this voice-over in Hungarian that said it was just a movie made in Hollywood and that the Americans had not landed on the moon, and people were looking at us apologetically.\u201d\nAt Harvard University, she majored in social studies and wrote a senior thesis on a modernist architectural manifesto spearheaded by Le Corbusier. She also designed an ivory tower erected in Harvard Yard for a protest against the university\u2019s investments in South Africa during the apartheid era.\nAfter earning an architectural degree at Yale, she worked on skyscraper designs in Japan and urban planning in Berlin.\nAt NASA, she worked on BIO-Plex, a space habitation including plant-growth chambers and water-cleaning technology. She also did work related to the Space Shuttle program and the International Space Station.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nShe later founded a consulting firm, Synthesis International, and helped Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic design a terminal that could one day welcome space tourists at Spaceport America, in New Mexico. She also taught space architecture at Yale, the University of Hong Kong and the University of Houston.\nHer 2014 Dodge Challenger muscle car was red and came with a stick shift. \u201cIt sounded like an airplane taking off,\u201d said Damon Silvers, a friend since her Harvard days.\nMs. Adams is survived by two daughters, a brother, her stepmother and her mother, Madeleine de Jean, who writes about Champagne and other topics.\nMs. Adams often lamented the decline in U.S. spending on space exploration. \u201cNo nation in the history of the earth has failed to conduct great projects and remained significant,\u201d she said in a 2011 TEDx talk. \nShe also saw technological challenges as a basic human need. \u201cWe\u2019re this crazy creature,\u201d she told the Dallas Morning News in 2011. \u201cWe have to make things. And we have to do stuff with the things we make. And \u2026 when you start to see the things we make popping off the planet, you think, maybe in nature\u2019s scheme, it\u2019s our job to go and see other worlds. I can\u2019t imagine being this close to being able to go to another world and not doing it.\u201d\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at Bob.Hagerty@wsj.com As an architect working with NASA engineers, Constance Adams insisted that long-term space habitations needed to be not just safe and efficient, but also comfortable enough so astronauts wouldn\u2019t go crazy. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut John Young, Who Walked on the Moon, Dies at 87 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2450",
        "date": "2018-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-john-young-who-walked-on-the-moon-dies-at-87-1515266949?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=73",
        "text": "NASA called Mr. Young one of its pioneers\u2014the only agency astronaut to go into space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs. He was the ninth man to walk on the moon.\n\u201cAstronaut John Young\u2019s storied career spanned three generations of spaceflight,\u201d NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot\n\n\n\n said in an emailed statement. \u201cJohn was one of that group of early space pioneers whose bravery and commitment sparked our nation\u2019s first great achievements in space.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Young was the only spaceman to span NASA\u2019s Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, and became the first person to rocket away from Earth six times. Counting his takeoff from the moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, his blastoff tally stood at seven, for decades a world record.\nHe flew twice during the two-man Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, twice to the moon during NASA\u2019s Apollo program, and twice more aboard the new space shuttle Columbia in the early 1980s.\nHis NASA career lasted 42 years, longer than any other astronaut\u2019s, and he was revered among his peers for his dogged dedication to keeping crews safe\u2014and his outspokenness in challenging the space agency\u2019s status quo.\nChastened by the 1967 Apollo launchpad fire that killed three astronauts, Mr. Young spoke up after the 1986 shuttle Challenger launch accident. His hard scrutiny continued well past shuttle Columbia\u2019s disintegration during re-entry in 2003.\n\u201cWhenever and wherever I found a potential safety issue, I always did my utmost to make some noise about it, by memo or whatever means might best bring attention to it,\u201d Mr. Young wrote in his 2012 memoir, \u201cForever Young.\u201d\nApollo 11 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Collins,\n\n\n\n who orbited the moon in 1969 as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz Aldrin walked its surface, considered Mr. Young \u201cthe memo-writing champion of the astronaut office.\u201d Mr. Young kept working at Johnson Space Center in Houston \u201clong after his compatriots had been put out to pasture or discovered other green fields,\u201d Mr. Collins wrote in the foreword of \u201cForever Young.\u201d\nIndeed, Mr. Young remained an active astronaut into his early 70s, long after all his peers had left, and held on to his role as NASA\u2019s conscience until his retirement in 2004.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nU.S. astronaut John Young aboard Gemini III on March 23, 1965.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMr. Young was in NASA\u2019s second astronaut class, chosen in 1962, along with the likes of Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pete Conrad\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Lovell.\n\n\n\n \nHe was the first of his group to fly in space: He and Mercury astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Grissom\n\n\n\n made the first manned Gemini mission in 1965. Unknown to NASA, Mr. Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich on board, given to him by Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra. When it came time to test NASA\u2019s official space food, Mr. Young handed Mr. Grissom the sandwich as a joke.\nThe ensuing scandal over that corned beef on rye\u2014two silly minutes of an otherwise triumphant five-hour flight\u2014always amazed Mr. Young. Sandwiches already had flown in space, Mr. Young said in his book, but NASA brass and Congress considered this one a multimillion-dollar embarrassment and outlawed corned beef sandwiches in space forever after.\nMr. Young orbited the moon on Apollo 10 in May 1969 in preparation for the Apollo 11 moon landing that was to follow in a couple months. He commanded Apollo 16 three years later, the next-to-last manned lunar voyage, and walked on the moon.\nHe hung on for the space shuttle, commanding Columbia\u2019s successful maiden voyage in 1981 with co-pilot Robert Crippen by his side. Mr. Young made his final trek into orbit aboard Columbia two years later, again as its skipper.\nThroughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Mr. Young maintained the U.S. should be doing two to three times the amount of space exploration that it was doing. NASA should be developing massive rockets to lift payloads to the moon to industrialize it, he said, and building space systems for detecting and deflecting comets or asteroids that could threaten Earth.\n\u201cThe country needs it. The world needs it. Civilization needs it,\u201d Mr. Young said in 2000, adding with a chuckle, \u201cI don\u2019t need it. I\u2019m not going to be here that long.\u201d\nHe finished out his career at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston in management, focusing on safety issues. He retired at the end of 2004.\nMr. Young was born Sept. 24, 1930, and grew up in Orlando, Fla. He became interested early on in aviation, making model planes. He spent his last high school summer working on a surveying team. The job took him to Titusville due east of Orlando; he never imagined that one day he would be sitting on rockets across the Indian River, blasting off for the moon.\nHe earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952 and went on to join Legendary astronaut John Young, who walked on the moon and later commanded the first space shuttle flight, has died, according to a statement from NASA. He was 87. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut John Young, Who Walked on the Moon, Dies at 87 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2451",
        "date": "2018-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-john-young-who-walked-on-the-moon-dies-at-87-1515266949?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=105",
        "text": "NASA called Mr. Young one of its pioneers\u2014the only agency astronaut to go into space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs. He was the ninth man to walk on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cAstronaut John Young\u2019s storied career spanned three generations of spaceflight,\u201d NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot\n\n\n\n said in an emailed statement. \u201cJohn was one of that group of early space pioneers whose bravery and commitment sparked our nation\u2019s first great achievements in space.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Young was the only spaceman to span NASA\u2019s Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, and became the first person to rocket away from Earth six times. Counting his takeoff from the moon in 1972 as commander of Apollo 16, his blastoff tally stood at seven, for decades a world record.\nHe flew twice during the two-man Gemini missions of the mid-1960s, twice to the moon during NASA\u2019s Apollo program, and twice more aboard the new space shuttle Columbia in the early 1980s.\nHis NASA career lasted 42 years, longer than any other astronaut\u2019s, and he was revered among his peers for his dogged dedication to keeping crews safe\u2014and his outspokenness in challenging the space agency\u2019s status quo.\nChastened by the 1967 Apollo launchpad fire that killed three astronauts, Mr. Young spoke up after the 1986 shuttle Challenger launch accident. His hard scrutiny continued well past shuttle Columbia\u2019s disintegration during re-entry in 2003.\n\u201cWhenever and wherever I found a potential safety issue, I always did my utmost to make some noise about it, by memo or whatever means might best bring attention to it,\u201d Mr. Young wrote in his 2012 memoir, \u201cForever Young.\u201d\nApollo 11 astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Collins,\n\n\n\n who orbited the moon in 1969 as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n and Buzz Aldrin walked its surface, considered Mr. Young \u201cthe memo-writing champion of the astronaut office.\u201d Mr. Young kept working at Johnson Space Center in Houston \u201clong after his compatriots had been put out to pasture or discovered other green fields,\u201d Mr. Collins wrote in the foreword of \u201cForever Young.\u201d\nIndeed, Mr. Young remained an active astronaut into his early 70s, long after all his peers had left, and held on to his role as NASA\u2019s conscience until his retirement in 2004.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nU.S. astronaut John Young aboard Gemini III on March 23, 1965.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMr. Young was in NASA\u2019s second astronaut class, chosen in 1962, along with the likes of Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pete Conrad\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Lovell.\n\n\n\n \nHe was the first of his group to fly in space: He and Mercury astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Grissom\n\n\n\n made the first manned Gemini mission in 1965. Unknown to NASA, Mr. Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich on board, given to him by Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra. When it came time to test NASA\u2019s official space food, Mr. Young handed Mr. Grissom the sandwich as a joke.\nThe ensuing scandal over that corned beef on rye\u2014two silly minutes of an otherwise triumphant five-hour flight\u2014always amazed Mr. Young. Sandwiches already had flown in space, Mr. Young said in his book, but NASA brass and Congress considered this one a multimillion-dollar embarrassment and outlawed corned beef sandwiches in space forever after.\nMr. Young orbited the moon on Apollo 10 in May 1969 in preparation for the Apollo 11 moon landing that was to follow in a couple months. He commanded Apollo 16 three years later, the next-to-last manned lunar voyage, and walked on the moon.\nHe hung on for the space shuttle, commanding Columbia\u2019s successful maiden voyage in 1981 with co-pilot Robert Crippen by his side. Mr. Young made his final trek into orbit aboard Columbia two years later, again as its skipper.\nThroughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, Mr. Young maintained the U.S. should be doing two to three times the amount of space exploration that it was doing. NASA should be developing massive rockets to lift payloads to the moon to industrialize it, he said, and building space systems for detecting and deflecting comets or asteroids that could threaten Earth.\n\u201cThe country needs it. The world needs it. Civilization needs it,\u201d Mr. Young said in 2000, adding with a chuckle, \u201cI don\u2019t need it. I\u2019m not going to be here that long.\u201d\nHe finished out his career at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston in management, focusing on safety issues. He retired at the end of 2004.\nMr. Young was born Sept. 24, 1930, and grew up in Orlando, Fla. He became interested early on in aviation, making model planes. He spent his last high school summer working on a surveying team. The job took him to Titusville due east of Orlando; he never imagined that one day he would be sitting on rockets across the Indian River, blasting off for the moon.\nHe earned an aeronautical engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1952 and went on to j Legendary astronaut John Young, who walked on the moon and later commanded the first space shuttle flight, has died, according to a statement from NASA. He was 87. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut, Moonwalker Alan Bean Dies at 86 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2452",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-moonwalker-alan-bean-dies-at-86-1527373250?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=67",
        "text": "Mr. Bean died Saturday in Houston following a short illness, the statement said.\nHe is the eighth of 12 Apollo moonwalkers to die and the second this year, after the passing of Apollo 16 Commander\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Young\n\n\n\n in January.\n\n\nRelated Photo-Op: How Alan Bean Took a Photo on the Moon (March 14, 2014) \n\n\n\u201cAs all great explorers are, Alan was a boundary pusher,\u201d NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said in a statement that credited Mr. Bean with being part of 11 world records in the areas of space and aeronautics. \u201cWe will remember him fondly as the great explorer who reached out to embrace the universe.\u201d\n\n\nIn 1998 NASA oral history, Mr. Bean recalled his excitement at preparing to fly to the moon.\n\u201cWhen you\u2019re getting ready to go to the moon, every day\u2019s like Christmas and your birthday rolled into one. I mean, can you think of anything better?\u201d Mr. Bean said.\nAfter Apollo, Mr. Bean commanded the second crewed flight to the U.S.\u2019s first space station, Skylab, in 1973. On that mission, he orbited the Earth for 59 days and traveled 24.4 million miles, setting a world record at the time.\nBorn March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, Mr. Bean received a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Texas in 1955. He attended the Navy Test Pilot School and was one of 14 trainees selected by NASA for its third group of astronauts in October 1963.\n\u201cI\u2019d always wanted to be a pilot, ever since I could remember,\u201d Mr. Bean said in the NASA oral history. \u201cI think a lot of it just had to do with it looked exciting. It looked like brave people did that. I wanted to be brave, even though I wasn\u2019t brave at the time. I thought maybe I could learn to be, so that appealed to me.\u201d\nMr. Bean retired from NASA in 1981 and devoted much of his time to creating an artistic record of space exploration.\nHis Apollo-themed paintings feature canvases textured with lunar-boot prints and embedded with small pieces of his moon-dust-stained mission patches.\nHis wife of 40 years, Leslie Bean, said in a statement that Mr. Bean died peacefully surrounded by those who loved him.\nHe is survived by Mrs. Bean, a sister and two children.\n\u2014Copyright 2018 the Associated Press Former Apollo 12 astronaut and painter Alan Bean, who was the fourth person to walk on the moon and later turned his passion for space into art, died after a short illness. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut, Moonwalker Alan Bean Dies at 86 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2453",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-moonwalker-alan-bean-dies-at-86-1527373250?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=75",
        "text": "Mr. Bean died Saturday in Houston following a short illness, the statement said.\n\n\n\n\nHe is the eighth of 12 Apollo moonwalkers to die and the second this year, after the passing of Apollo 16 Commander\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Young\n\n\n\n in January.\n\n\nRelated Photo-Op: How Alan Bean Took a Photo on the Moon (March 14, 2014) \n\n\n\u201cAs all great explorers are, Alan was a boundary pusher,\u201d NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said in a statement that credited Mr. Bean with being part of 11 world records in the areas of space and aeronautics. \u201cWe will remember him fondly as the great explorer who reached out to embrace the universe.\u201d\n\n\nIn 1998 NASA oral history, Mr. Bean recalled his excitement at preparing to fly to the moon.\n\u201cWhen you\u2019re getting ready to go to the moon, every day\u2019s like Christmas and your birthday rolled into one. I mean, can you think of anything better?\u201d Mr. Bean said.\nAfter Apollo, Mr. Bean commanded the second crewed flight to the U.S.\u2019s first space station, Skylab, in 1973. On that mission, he orbited the Earth for 59 days and traveled 24.4 million miles, setting a world record at the time.\nBorn March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, Mr. Bean received a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Texas in 1955. He attended the Navy Test Pilot School and was one of 14 trainees selected by NASA for its third group of astronauts in October 1963.\n\u201cI\u2019d always wanted to be a pilot, ever since I could remember,\u201d Mr. Bean said in the NASA oral history. \u201cI think a lot of it just had to do with it looked exciting. It looked like brave people did that. I wanted to be brave, even though I wasn\u2019t brave at the time. I thought maybe I could learn to be, so that appealed to me.\u201d\nMr. Bean retired from NASA in 1981 and devoted much of his time to creating an artistic record of space exploration.\nHis Apollo-themed paintings feature canvases textured with lunar-boot prints and embedded with small pieces of his moon-dust-stained mission patches.\nHis wife of 40 years, Leslie Bean, said in a statement that Mr. Bean died peacefully surrounded by those who loved him.\nHe is survived by Mrs. Bean, a sister and two children.\n\u2014Copyright 2018 the Associated Press Former Apollo 12 astronaut and painter Alan Bean, who was the fourth person to walk on the moon and later turned his passion for space into art, died after a short illness. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut, Moonwalker Alan Bean Dies at 86 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2454",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-moonwalker-alan-bean-dies-at-86-1527373250?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=95",
        "text": "Mr. Bean died Saturday in Houston following a short illness, the statement said.\n\n\n\n\nHe is the eighth of 12 Apollo moonwalkers to die and the second this year, after the passing of Apollo 16 Commander\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Young\n\n\n\n in January.\n\n\nRelated Photo-Op: How Alan Bean Took a Photo on the Moon (March 14, 2014) \n\n\n\u201cAs all great explorers are, Alan was a boundary pusher,\u201d NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said in a statement that credited Mr. Bean with being part of 11 world records in the areas of space and aeronautics. \u201cWe will remember him fondly as the great explorer who reached out to embrace the universe.\u201d\n\n\nIn 1998 NASA oral history, Mr. Bean recalled his excitement at preparing to fly to the moon.\n\u201cWhen you\u2019re getting ready to go to the moon, every day\u2019s like Christmas and your birthday rolled into one. I mean, can you think of anything better?\u201d Mr. Bean said.\nAfter Apollo, Mr. Bean commanded the second crewed flight to the U.S.\u2019s first space station, Skylab, in 1973. On that mission, he orbited the Earth for 59 days and traveled 24.4 million miles, setting a world record at the time.\nBorn March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, Mr. Bean received a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Texas in 1955. He attended the Navy Test Pilot School and was one of 14 trainees selected by NASA for its third group of astronauts in October 1963.\n\u201cI\u2019d always wanted to be a pilot, ever since I could remember,\u201d Mr. Bean said in the NASA oral history. \u201cI think a lot of it just had to do with it looked exciting. It looked like brave people did that. I wanted to be brave, even though I wasn\u2019t brave at the time. I thought maybe I could learn to be, so that appealed to me.\u201d\nMr. Bean retired from NASA in 1981 and devoted much of his time to creating an artistic record of space exploration.\nHis Apollo-themed paintings feature canvases textured with lunar-boot prints and embedded with small pieces of his moon-dust-stained mission patches.\nHis wife of 40 years, Leslie Bean, said in a statement that Mr. Bean died peacefully surrounded by those who loved him.\nHe is survived by Mrs. Bean, a sister and two children.\n\u2014Copyright 2018 the Associated Press Former Apollo 12 astronaut and painter Alan Bean, who was the fourth person to walk on the moon and later turned his passion for space into art, died after a short illness. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chuck Yeager, Pioneer of Supersonic Flight, Dies at 97 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2455",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-yeager-pioneer-of-supersonic-flight-dies-at-age-97-11607404925?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=28",
        "text": "Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Joe Manchin\n\n\n\n of West Virginia, who became friends with Gen. Yeager, called him a native son who \u201cwas larger than life and an inspiration for generations of Americans.\u201d\nHis death was also confirmed by the Associated Press.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA West Virginia native whose maverick streak didn\u2019t keep him from becoming an Air Force general, Gen. Yeager personified the thrill-seeking fraternity of flyboys that moved the U.S. into the jet age after World War II and later vaulted it toward space exploration.\n\n\nAs a brash 24-year-old, he left an indelible mark on history in October 1947 when his Bell X-1 rocketplane\u2014named \u201cGlamorous Glennis\u201d after his first wife\u2014was released from its mother ship and, spewing 6,000 pounds of thrust, accelerated as it climbed. For some 18 seconds, with Gen. Yeager and his ground crew in virtual disbelief, it flew faster than the speed of sound roughly 8 miles above Southern California\u2019s Muroc Field, later known as Edwards Air Force Base.\nAccomplishing a feat that hordes of aviation experts and even many fellow pilots feared was impossible (pilots called it exploring \u00a0\u201cugh-known\u201d territory) Gen. Yeager succeeded despite a pair of broken ribs suffered in a horseback-riding accident two days earlier. Reflecting his pluck and contrarian nature, he kept his injuries secret from superiors and used part of a broom as a makeshift handle to ease the pain of closing the cockpit hatch. Both the experimental craft and its mission, following eight preparatory efforts, were so secret that official acknowledgment and celebration of the record-breaking flight didn\u2019t occur until more than a year later.\u00a0 Five years after that, Gen. Yeager set another record for flying at 1,650 miles per hour, or twice the speed of sound.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, left, with the \u2018Glamorous Glennis\u2019 rocketplane in the late 1940s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Library of Congress\n \n\n\n\nGen. Yeager\u2019s small-town personality and grace under pressure\u2014immortalized in Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d\u2014made him a global celebrity, akin to aerospace icons such as Charles Lindbergh, who conquered the Atlantic in a solo flight, and Neil Armstrong, who was first to step on the lunar surface. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harry S. Truman\n\n\n\n honored him at the White House, presenting a trophy calling the X-1 flight \u201can epochal achievement\u201d that was \u201cthe greatest since the first successful flight\u201d of the Wright Brothers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager in 1983, behind the scenes on the set filming \u2018The Right Stuff.\u2019 Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book made Mr. Yeager a global celebrity.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ron Grover/MPTV/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Wolfe, who helped make Gen. Yeager a cultural superstar more than three decades later, wrote that \u201cevery hot pilot in the country\u201d pined to follow the example of the X-1 \u201cif you wanted to reach the top.\u201d\nLike his famous predecessors, Gen. Yeager largely eschewed the limelight in later years, though at one point he served as an advertising spokesman for spark plugs and batteries on television.\nOver time, his influence on aviation remained so strong that even now some airline pilots subconsciously tend to mimic his terse, staccato drawl during radio transmissions.\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration head Jim Bridenstine, who recalled that as a young military aviator he admired Gen. Yeager, released a statement calling \u201cChuck\u2019s bravery and accomplishments\u201d a \u201ctestament to the enduring strength that made him a true American original.\u201d The agency, Mr. Bridenstine added, \u201cowes much to his brilliant contributions to aerospace science.\u201d\nA World War II ace who later in his career went on to head a training outfit that prepared some of the first astronauts, he ridiculed reliance on automation demanded by the rigors of space flights\u2014claiming a chimp could perform the necessary maneuvers.\u00a0 He rejected becoming an astronaut, Gen. Yeager famously explained, because he didn\u2019t want to fly anything \u201cwhere you have to sweep the monkey crap off the seat before you get in.\u201d\nDespite all his accomplishments, the wiry kid who grew up sharpshooting squirrels in the hollows of Appalachia refused to fit the more cerebral, self-controlled mold that came to be exemplified by NASA astronauts. In his first powered X-1 flight, Gen. Yeager executed an unauthorized roll and near-vertical climb. Other violations of protocols and flight plans were legendary, just like his impatience with engineering analyses that delayed test flight schedules.\nHis wisecracks and volatile personality alienated some early space pioneers, including astronaut Thomas Stafford, who never flew or trained with Gen. Yeager, but recalled stories that circulated around Edwards years afterward regarding colorful exploits inside and outside the cockpit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, third from right, along with some other jet-age pioneers, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D Chuck Yeager, a folksy, hard-living daredevil who was the first aviator to break the sound barrier and became a symbol of bravery for generations of test pilots, astronauts and average Americans, died at age 97. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chuck Yeager, Pioneer of Supersonic Flight, Dies at 97 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2456",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-yeager-pioneer-of-supersonic-flight-dies-at-age-97-11607404925?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=37",
        "text": "Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Joe Manchin\n\n\n\n of West Virginia, who became friends with Gen. Yeager, called him a native son who \u201cwas larger than life and an inspiration for generations of Americans.\u201d\nHis death was also confirmed by the Associated Press.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA West Virginia native whose maverick streak didn\u2019t keep him from becoming an Air Force general, Gen. Yeager personified the thrill-seeking fraternity of flyboys that moved the U.S. into the jet age after World War II and later vaulted it toward space exploration.\n\n\nAs a brash 24-year-old, he left an indelible mark on history in October 1947 when his Bell X-1 rocketplane\u2014named \u201cGlamorous Glennis\u201d after his first wife\u2014was released from its mother ship and, spewing 6,000 pounds of thrust, accelerated as it climbed. For some 18 seconds, with Gen. Yeager and his ground crew in virtual disbelief, it flew faster than the speed of sound roughly 8 miles above Southern California\u2019s Muroc Field, later known as Edwards Air Force Base.\nAccomplishing a feat that hordes of aviation experts and even many fellow pilots feared was impossible (pilots called it exploring \u00a0\u201cugh-known\u201d territory) Gen. Yeager succeeded despite a pair of broken ribs suffered in a horseback-riding accident two days earlier. Reflecting his pluck and contrarian nature, he kept his injuries secret from superiors and used part of a broom as a makeshift handle to ease the pain of closing the cockpit hatch. Both the experimental craft and its mission, following eight preparatory efforts, were so secret that official acknowledgment and celebration of the record-breaking flight didn\u2019t occur until more than a year later.\u00a0 Five years after that, Gen. Yeager set another record for flying at 1,650 miles per hour, or twice the speed of sound.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, left, with the \u2018Glamorous Glennis\u2019 rocketplane in the late 1940s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Library of Congress\n \n\n\n\nGen. Yeager\u2019s small-town personality and grace under pressure\u2014immortalized in Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d\u2014made him a global celebrity, akin to aerospace icons such as Charles Lindbergh, who conquered the Atlantic in a solo flight, and Neil Armstrong, who was first to step on the lunar surface. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harry S. Truman\n\n\n\n honored him at the White House, presenting a trophy calling the X-1 flight \u201can epochal achievement\u201d that was \u201cthe greatest since the first successful flight\u201d of the Wright Brothers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager in 1983, behind the scenes on the set filming \u2018The Right Stuff.\u2019 Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book made Mr. Yeager a global celebrity.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ron Grover/MPTV/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Wolfe, who helped make Gen. Yeager a cultural superstar more than three decades later, wrote that \u201cevery hot pilot in the country\u201d pined to follow the example of the X-1 \u201cif you wanted to reach the top.\u201d\nLike his famous predecessors, Gen. Yeager largely eschewed the limelight in later years, though at one point he served as an advertising spokesman for spark plugs and batteries on television.\nOver time, his influence on aviation remained so strong that even now some airline pilots subconsciously tend to mimic his terse, staccato drawl during radio transmissions.\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration head Jim Bridenstine, who recalled that as a young military aviator he admired Gen. Yeager, released a statement calling \u201cChuck\u2019s bravery and accomplishments\u201d a \u201ctestament to the enduring strength that made him a true American original.\u201d The agency, Mr. Bridenstine added, \u201cowes much to his brilliant contributions to aerospace science.\u201d\nA World War II ace who later in his career went on to head a training outfit that prepared some of the first astronauts, he ridiculed reliance on automation demanded by the rigors of space flights\u2014claiming a chimp could perform the necessary maneuvers.\u00a0 He rejected becoming an astronaut, Gen. Yeager famously explained, because he didn\u2019t want to fly anything \u201cwhere you have to sweep the monkey crap off the seat before you get in.\u201d\nDespite all his accomplishments, the wiry kid who grew up sharpshooting squirrels in the hollows of Appalachia refused to fit the more cerebral, self-controlled mold that came to be exemplified by NASA astronauts. In his first powered X-1 flight, Gen. Yeager executed an unauthorized roll and near-vertical climb. Other violations of protocols and flight plans were legendary, just like his impatience with engineering analyses that delayed test flight schedules.\nHis wisecracks and volatile personality alienated some early space pioneers, including astronaut Thomas Stafford, who never flew or trained with Gen. Yeager, but recalled stories that circulated around Edwards years afterward regarding colorful exploits inside and outside the cockpit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, third from right, along with some other jet-age pioneers, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D Chuck Yeager, a folksy, hard-living daredevil who was the first aviator to break the sound barrier and became a symbol of bravery for generations of test pilots, astronauts and average Americans, died at age 97. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chuck Yeager, Pioneer of Supersonic Flight, Dies at 97 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2457",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-yeager-pioneer-of-supersonic-flight-dies-at-age-97-11607404925?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=42",
        "text": "Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Joe Manchin\n\n\n\n of West Virginia, who became friends with Gen. Yeager, called him a native son who \u201cwas larger than life and an inspiration for generations of Americans.\u201d\nHis death was also confirmed by the Associated Press.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA West Virginia native whose maverick streak didn\u2019t keep him from becoming an Air Force general, Gen. Yeager personified the thrill-seeking fraternity of flyboys that moved the U.S. into the jet age after World War II and later vaulted it toward space exploration.\n\n\nAs a brash 24-year-old, he left an indelible mark on history in October 1947 when his Bell X-1 rocketplane\u2014named \u201cGlamorous Glennis\u201d after his first wife\u2014was released from its mother ship and, spewing 6,000 pounds of thrust, accelerated as it climbed. For some 18 seconds, with Gen. Yeager and his ground crew in virtual disbelief, it flew faster than the speed of sound roughly 8 miles above Southern California\u2019s Muroc Field, later known as Edwards Air Force Base.\nAccomplishing a feat that hordes of aviation experts and even many fellow pilots feared was impossible (pilots called it exploring \u00a0\u201cugh-known\u201d territory) Gen. Yeager succeeded despite a pair of broken ribs suffered in a horseback-riding accident two days earlier. Reflecting his pluck and contrarian nature, he kept his injuries secret from superiors and used part of a broom as a makeshift handle to ease the pain of closing the cockpit hatch. Both the experimental craft and its mission, following eight preparatory efforts, were so secret that official acknowledgment and celebration of the record-breaking flight didn\u2019t occur until more than a year later.\u00a0 Five years after that, Gen. Yeager set another record for flying at 1,650 miles per hour, or twice the speed of sound.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, left, with the \u2018Glamorous Glennis\u2019 rocketplane in the late 1940s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Library of Congress\n \n\n\n\nGen. Yeager\u2019s small-town personality and grace under pressure\u2014immortalized in Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d\u2014made him a global celebrity, akin to aerospace icons such as Charles Lindbergh, who conquered the Atlantic in a solo flight, and Neil Armstrong, who was first to step on the lunar surface. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harry S. Truman\n\n\n\n honored him at the White House, presenting a trophy calling the X-1 flight \u201can epochal achievement\u201d that was \u201cthe greatest since the first successful flight\u201d of the Wright Brothers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager in 1983, behind the scenes on the set filming \u2018The Right Stuff.\u2019 Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book made Mr. Yeager a global celebrity.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ron Grover/MPTV/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Wolfe, who helped make Gen. Yeager a cultural superstar more than three decades later, wrote that \u201cevery hot pilot in the country\u201d pined to follow the example of the X-1 \u201cif you wanted to reach the top.\u201d\nLike his famous predecessors, Gen. Yeager largely eschewed the limelight in later years, though at one point he served as an advertising spokesman for spark plugs and batteries on television.\nOver time, his influence on aviation remained so strong that even now some airline pilots subconsciously tend to mimic his terse, staccato drawl during radio transmissions.\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration head Jim Bridenstine, who recalled that as a young military aviator he admired Gen. Yeager, released a statement calling \u201cChuck\u2019s bravery and accomplishments\u201d a \u201ctestament to the enduring strength that made him a true American original.\u201d The agency, Mr. Bridenstine added, \u201cowes much to his brilliant contributions to aerospace science.\u201d\nA World War II ace who later in his career went on to head a training outfit that prepared some of the first astronauts, he ridiculed reliance on automation demanded by the rigors of space flights\u2014claiming a chimp could perform the necessary maneuvers.\u00a0 He rejected becoming an astronaut, Gen. Yeager famously explained, because he didn\u2019t want to fly anything \u201cwhere you have to sweep the monkey crap off the seat before you get in.\u201d\nDespite all his accomplishments, the wiry kid who grew up sharpshooting squirrels in the hollows of Appalachia refused to fit the more cerebral, self-controlled mold that came to be exemplified by NASA astronauts. In his first powered X-1 flight, Gen. Yeager executed an unauthorized roll and near-vertical climb. Other violations of protocols and flight plans were legendary, just like his impatience with engineering analyses that delayed test flight schedules.\nHis wisecracks and volatile personality alienated some early space pioneers, including astronaut Thomas Stafford, who never flew or trained with Gen. Yeager, but recalled stories that circulated around Edwards years afterward regarding colorful exploits inside and outside the cockpit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, third from right, along with some other jet-age pioneers, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D Chuck Yeager, a folksy, hard-living daredevil who was the first aviator to break the sound barrier and became a symbol of bravery for generations of test pilots, astronauts and average Americans, died at age 97. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chuck Yeager, Pioneer of Supersonic Flight, Dies at 97 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2458",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-yeager-pioneer-of-supersonic-flight-dies-at-age-97-11607404925?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=32",
        "text": "Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Joe Manchin\n\n\n\n of West Virginia, who became friends with Gen. Yeager, called him a native son who \u201cwas larger than life and an inspiration for generations of Americans.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nHis death was also confirmed by the Associated Press.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA West Virginia native whose maverick streak didn\u2019t keep him from becoming an Air Force general, Gen. Yeager personified the thrill-seeking fraternity of flyboys that moved the U.S. into the jet age after World War II and later vaulted it toward space exploration.\n\n\nAs a brash 24-year-old, he left an indelible mark on history in October 1947 when his Bell X-1 rocketplane\u2014named \u201cGlamorous Glennis\u201d after his first wife\u2014was released from its mother ship and, spewing 6,000 pounds of thrust, accelerated as it climbed. For some 18 seconds, with Gen. Yeager and his ground crew in virtual disbelief, it flew faster than the speed of sound roughly 8 miles above Southern California\u2019s Muroc Field, later known as Edwards Air Force Base.\nAccomplishing a feat that hordes of aviation experts and even many fellow pilots feared was impossible (pilots called it exploring \u00a0\u201cugh-known\u201d territory) Gen. Yeager succeeded despite a pair of broken ribs suffered in a horseback-riding accident two days earlier. Reflecting his pluck and contrarian nature, he kept his injuries secret from superiors and used part of a broom as a makeshift handle to ease the pain of closing the cockpit hatch. Both the experimental craft and its mission, following eight preparatory efforts, were so secret that official acknowledgment and celebration of the record-breaking flight didn\u2019t occur until more than a year later.\u00a0 Five years after that, Gen. Yeager set another record for flying at 1,650 miles per hour, or twice the speed of sound.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, left, with the \u2018Glamorous Glennis\u2019 rocketplane in the late 1940s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Library of Congress\n \n\n\n\nGen. Yeager\u2019s small-town personality and grace under pressure\u2014immortalized in Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d\u2014made him a global celebrity, akin to aerospace icons such as Charles Lindbergh, who conquered the Atlantic in a solo flight, and Neil Armstrong, who was first to step on the lunar surface. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harry S. Truman\n\n\n\n honored him at the White House, presenting a trophy calling the X-1 flight \u201can epochal achievement\u201d that was \u201cthe greatest since the first successful flight\u201d of the Wright Brothers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager in 1983, behind the scenes on the set filming \u2018The Right Stuff.\u2019 Tom Wolfe\u2019s classic book made Mr. Yeager a global celebrity.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ron Grover/MPTV/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Wolfe, who helped make Gen. Yeager a cultural superstar more than three decades later, wrote that \u201cevery hot pilot in the country\u201d pined to follow the example of the X-1 \u201cif you wanted to reach the top.\u201d\nLike his famous predecessors, Gen. Yeager largely eschewed the limelight in later years, though at one point he served as an advertising spokesman for spark plugs and batteries on television.\nOver time, his influence on aviation remained so strong that even now some airline pilots subconsciously tend to mimic his terse, staccato drawl during radio transmissions.\nNational Aeronautics and Space Administration head Jim Bridenstine, who recalled that as a young military aviator he admired Gen. Yeager, released a statement calling \u201cChuck\u2019s bravery and accomplishments\u201d a \u201ctestament to the enduring strength that made him a true American original.\u201d The agency, Mr. Bridenstine added, \u201cowes much to his brilliant contributions to aerospace science.\u201d\nA World War II ace who later in his career went on to head a training outfit that prepared some of the first astronauts, he ridiculed reliance on automation demanded by the rigors of space flights\u2014claiming a chimp could perform the necessary maneuvers.\u00a0 He rejected becoming an astronaut, Gen. Yeager famously explained, because he didn\u2019t want to fly anything \u201cwhere you have to sweep the monkey crap off the seat before you get in.\u201d\nDespite all his accomplishments, the wiry kid who grew up sharpshooting squirrels in the hollows of Appalachia refused to fit the more cerebral, self-controlled mold that came to be exemplified by NASA astronauts. In his first powered X-1 flight, Gen. Yeager executed an unauthorized roll and near-vertical climb. Other violations of protocols and flight plans were legendary, just like his impatience with engineering analyses that delayed test flight schedules.\nHis wisecracks and volatile personality alienated some early space pioneers, including astronaut Thomas Stafford, who never flew or trained with Gen. Yeager, but recalled stories that circulated around Edwards years afterward regarding colorful exploits inside and outside the cockpit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager, third from right, along with some other jet-age pioneers, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1979, celebrating the 40th anniversary of jet-age aviation.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Dennis Cook/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cHe had a reputation as a wise-ass with a huge super ego,\u201d the retired Air Force general said in a 2016 interview. After ejecting from an experimental F-104 rocket plane that was diving and spinning toward the ground, Gen. Stafford recalled, Gen. Yeager argued with engineers and other test pilots who criticized him for failing to keep the nose at the correct angle while seeking a world altitude record. \u201cYeager kept insisting he had enough airspeed to fly through it,\u201d according to Gen. Stafford, who concluded the flawed logic defied the laws of aerodynamics.\nIn his autobiography, Gen. Yeager blamed a malfunction for the accident, which burned part of his face and hands. Air Force investigators subsequently criticized Gen. Yeager for \u201cpurposely exceeding\u201d recommended procedures \u201cin order to attain a higher altitude.\u201d \u00a0Nonetheless, his reputation for phenomenal concentration, cockpit reflexes and courage continued to grow.\nWhile college degrees were routine in the astronaut corps, Gen. Yeager\u2019s high-school diploma and seat-of-the-pants approach disqualified him. But in his autobiography published in 1985, Gen. Yeager didn\u2019t hide his cocky attitude about inherent piloting skills. \u201cI don\u2019t deny that I was damned good,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIf there\u2019s such a thing as \u2018the best,\u2019 I was at least one of the title contenders,\u201d he asserted, adding he \u201cenjoyed just about every damned minute\u201d of his adventures \u201cbecause that\u2019s how I lived.\u201d\nBorn in Myra, W. Va., on Feb. 13, 1923, Charles Elwood Yeager was the second of five children whose father worked as a natural-gas driller and a railroad worker. He reveled in hunting and tramping through the woods, but in high school was considered a mediocre or poor student in most subjects.\nHe enlisted in the Army in the fall of 1941, first working as a mechanic and then winning his wings as a fighter pilot. He was shot down over France and evaded capture with the help of the French underground. Bucking Pentagon brass, he personally persuaded the Supreme Allied Commander,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower,\n\n\n\n to reinstate him to flight duty and ended up logging 60 combat sorties with more than a dozen verified \u201ckills\u201d in dogfights.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager at an air base in Germany in 1955.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Albert Riethausen/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAs an Air Force test pilot once World War II ended, he flew dozens of different airplane models\u2014including a Russian-built fighter the Pentagon wanted to better understand\u2014and lived through several harrowing near-crashes.\u00a0 When Gen. Yeager was promoted to major and took charge of a fighter squadron in West Germany at the height of the Cold War in 1955, according to his autobiography, he assumed \u201cthe Air Force had decided I\u2019d had enough\u201d close calls.\nHe retired with the rank of brigadier general in 1975.\u00a0 Gen. Yeager married a woman 41 years his junior after the death of his first wife in 1990, prompting a tabloid-style legal battle with his children. He continued to fly private planes, hunt, fish and make honorary appearances past the age of 90. He spent many of his last years in the bucolic northern California community of Grass Valley, near the Nevada border in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.\nThe 50th anniversary of his historic accomplishment breaking the sound barrier, Gen. Yeager, then a beaming 74, piloted an F-15 fighter, dubbed \u201cGlennis III,\u201d past Mach 1, again surpassing the speed of sound in his last official Air Force flight. \u201cAll that I am \u2026 I owe to the Air Force,\u201d he said in a speech to the crowd.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChuck Yeager at the Avalon International Airshow in 2007.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jason South/The Age News/Fairfax Media/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrection\n\t\t\n\tChuck Yeager died at around 9 p.m. Eastern time Dec. 7, according to his widow, Victoria. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that she reported he died at around 6 p.m. Eastern time. (Corrected on Dec. 8) Chuck Yeager, a folksy, hard-living daredevil who was the first aviator to break the sound barrier and became a symbol of bravery for generations of test pilots, astronauts and average Americans, died at age 97. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robin Brett, NASA scientist who studied \u2018moon rocks,\u2019 dies at 84 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2459",
        "date": "2019-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/robin-brett-nasa-scientist-who-studied-moon-rocks-dies-at-84/2019/10/24/ad39b46e-ef70-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html",
        "text": "Robin Brett, a NASA scientist who 50 years ago was among the first to study and direct research on lunar samples \u2014 popularly known as \u201cmoon rocks\u201d \u2014 from the Apollo space missions, died Sept.\u00a027 at his home in Washington. He was 84.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was Alzheimer\u2019s disease, said his wife, Jill Brett. From 1969 to 1974, Dr. Brett was chief of the geochemistry branch at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. In July 1969, he was among a select four scientists present for the opening of a sealed box containing the first moon rocks from the initial Apollo lunar mission.The moon rocks were eagerly awaited as clues to help unravel the mysteries of the universe, and they drew wide interest from a public steeped in song, legend and myth about the moon \u2014 the dominant object in Earth\u2019s nighttime sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBy learning about the moon, we learn much more about the Earth at present, by putting its past in context,\u201d Dr. Brett said at a 2005 ceremony where he received the Mineralogical Society of America\u2019s medal of distinguished public service.But, he added, \u201cWe still have not answered many questions about the moon.\u201dAmong those unanswered questions remained one of astronomy\u2019s most basic and frequently asked: How did the moon come into existence?He was among those who wanted to know whether the moon rocks could provide an answer. Not entirely, it turned out, but they may have helped.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)Three theories on the origin of the moon had been debated before that first lunar mission, New York Times reporter John Noble Wilford wrote in his book \u201cWe Reach the Moon,\u201d published shortly after the first lunar landing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe first theory held that the moon was torn from the earth by a fission process,\u201d Wilford wrote. \u201cThe second was that the moon was formed at the same time as the earth as a sort of twin planet. The third was that the moon was unrelated to the earth and was captured by earth\u2019s gravity.\u201dWilford quoted Dr. Brett: \u201cAll three theories have weaknesses. The composition of the returned lunar samples makes it difficult to derive them from anything like the composition of the earth\u2019s mantle. This, therefore, makes the fission theory extremely unlikely. And if the moon was formed as an identical twin planet with the same composition as the earth\u2019s mantle, the same argument applies against that theory. The capture theory presents difficulties in celestial mechanics and is regarded as statistically fairly improbable.\u201dSo, concluded Dr. Brett, \u201cIt seems much easier to explain the nonexistence of the moon than its existence.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince the end of the Apollo lunar missions, the studies of moon rocks have continued in laboratories around the world.The prevailing theory now on the moon\u2019s origin, said Everett Gibson, an emeritus NASA scientist who worked on the lunar samples, is that it was formed from a major impact on Earth, early in its existence, of another large astronomical object.Peter Robin Brett was born in Adelaide, Australia, on Jan.\u00a030, 1935. His father was a manager at a wool company. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with a degree in geology in 1956 and received a doctorate in geology and geochemistry at Harvard University in 1963.He came to Washington in the mid-1960s as a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He returned to USGS after leaving NASA in 1974. Later he studied undersea sulfur hot springs for the National Science Foundation and the biological extinction of the dinosaurs following the crash of a meteor into Mexico\u2019s Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula 65\u00a0million years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor five years before he retired from federal service in 2003, Dr. Brett was a part-time administrative judge for geology-related cases before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.His first marriage, to Abigail Trafford, a former health editor for The Washington Post, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 33 years, Jill Davidson Brett of Washington; two daughters from his first marriage, Abigail Miller of Portland, Maine, and Victoria Brett of Northampton, Mass.; two stepsons, Timothy Merrill of Los Angeles and William Merrill of Madison, Wis.; a sister; and four grandchildren.When the lunar samples were first brought to Earth, they were kept for a period in a quarantined and sterile environment, lest they contain or exude a noxious substance that might be harmful in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDr. Brett doubted the necessity of this precaution, which he demonstrated, he said, by becoming the first man on earth to lick a moon rock.What did it taste like?\u201cA dirty potato,\u201d he answered.Read more Washington Post obituariesHarold Bloom, literary critic who wrote of the \u2018anxiety of influence,\u2019 dies at 89Robert Forster, Oscar-nominated actor in \u2018Jackie Brown,\u2019 dies at 78Alexei Leonov, Soviet cosmonaut and first person to walk in space, dies at 85 In July 1969, he was among a select four scientists present for the opening of a sealed box containing the first lunar samples from the initial Apollo mission. Robin Brett, NASA scientist who studied \u2018moon rocks,\u2019 dies at 84",
        "author": "Bart Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Azellia White, trailblazer for African American women in aviation, dies at 106 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2460",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/azellia-white-trailblazer-for-african-american-women-in-aviation-dies-at-106/2019/11/18/3cc150fc-0a05-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html",
        "text": "Azellia White, who said she found freedom in the skies, becoming one of the first African American women to earn a pilot\u2019s license in the United States, died Sept. 14 at a nursing home in Sugar Land, Tex. She was 106.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHer death was reported Nov. 18 in the London Daily Telegraph but had previously gone largely unnoted in the U.S. and international news media. A great-niece, Emeldia Bailey, confirmed her death and said she did not know the cause. Mrs. White, the daughter of a sharecropper and a midwife, was drawn to aviation by her husband, Hulon \u201cPappy\u201d White, a mechanic who served during World War II in Tuskegee, Ala., as a mechanic for the storied unit of black military pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen.Story continues below advertisementThe couple had moved from Texas to Tuskegee, where Mrs. White decided to try her hand in the cockpit, training under her husband and his colleagues. She took her maiden flights on a Taylorcraft plane that, by her telling, was a cinch to fly.Advertisement\u201cAll you had to do was get in the plane, and the pilot gets with you and tells you what he would like for you to do,\u201d she once told an interviewer. \u201cFirst thing you know, you\u2019re flying.\u201d She received her pilot\u2019s license in Alabama on March 26, 1946.Dorothy Cochrane, a curator in the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Air and Space Museum, credited Mrs. White with overcoming the double barrier of perceptions, widespread at the time, that neither women nor African Americans were qualified to fly airplanes.Story continues below advertisementMrs. White and her husband, with his service to the Tuskegee Airmen, \u201cwere there at the forefront of continuing to spread aviation throughout the African American community and prove to everyone that they were equal partners in aviation,\u201d Cochrane said.Notable deaths in 2019: Elijah Cummings, Cokie Roberts, Toni Morrison and others we have lost this yearShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageDon Imus | Don Imus, who spent more than half a century in radio and television skating along the edge of propriety and occasionally falling into the abyss of the unacceptable, died Dec. 27 at a hospital in College Station, Tex. He was 79. In a roller-coaster career in which he grew chummy with prominent politicians, repeatedly got suspended or fired for offensive cracks, abused drugs and touted health foods, Mr. Imus won a loyal following, made millions and transformed himself from a bad-boy DJ into a host whose program became a nearly mandatory stop for presidential candidates. Read the obituary (Richard Drew/AP)Trailblazers who preceded Mrs. White included Bessie Coleman, also from Texas, who according to the National Aviation Hall of Fame became the \u201cfirst civilian licensed African-American pilot in the world\u201d when she received a pilot\u2019s license in France in 1921. Willa Brown became the first African American woman to receive a pilot\u2019s license in the United States, in 1938.Advertisement\u201cThere weren\u2019t too many black people flying,\u201d Mrs. White told an ABC News affiliate in Texas last year. \u201cI said, \u2018I can learn to fly,\u2019 and I learned to fly. It was easy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMrs. White recalled with emotion the day in 1941 when first lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Tuskegee Army Air Field, where \u2014 overruling the Secret Service \u2014 she requested a ride with Charles A. Anderson, the chief instructor.Their flight lasted more than an hour and drew national attention to the black pilots at a time when the U.S. military and American society in general were riven by racial segregation. In 1948, President Harry Truman signed an order desegregating the armed forces.By then, Mrs. White and her husband had returned to Texas, where they and two Tuskegee Airmen established the Sky Ranch Flying Service in the outskirts of Houston. The operation catered mainly to the African American community, providing flight training and charter and delivery services.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe operation shuttered in 1948, amid changes in the allowances of the G.I. Bill that provided educational assistance to returning veterans. But \u201cthe pioneering aspect of Sky Ranch,\u201d according to the Lone Star Flight Museum in Houston, \u201cmade its mark on the community.\u201d\u201cIt was just everyday life for them,\u201d Bailey once told the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals, referring to the work her great-aunt and great-uncle pursued. \u201cThey don\u2019t really think of themselves as pioneers. It was just the life they were living.\u201dIn 2018, at nearly 105, Mrs. White was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame in a class of inductees that also included James A. Lovell Jr., commander of the Apollo 13 space mission. She also received the Trailblazer Award from the Black Pilots of America for her \u201cpioneering spirit in forging a path to the field of aviation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAzellia Jones, one of 10 children, was born on June 3, 1913, in the area of Gonzalez, Tex., east of San Antonio. Her husband, whom she married in 1936, was a childhood sweetheart.Mrs. White was a licensed beautician and worked after her husband\u2019s flight school closed at a department store in Houston, said a godson, James Miller, who owns an avionics business in that city and has extensively researched Mrs. White\u2019s career.Her husband, who became a mechanics instructor, died in 1995, and they had a son who died at birth. Mrs. White had no immediate survivors.During her time in Tuskegee, Mrs. White would sometimes fly a niece to Montgomery or Birmingham for shopping excursions. Years later, she reflected that as an African American in the Jim Crow South, she had judged it safer to travel through the air than on unfamiliar roads.\u201cShe just said she just felt free when she was up in the plane flying,\u201d Bailey recalled.Read more Washington Post obituariesTerry O\u2019Neill, British photographer who captured swinging \u201960s London, dies at 81Harrison Dillard, U.S. track luminary who won four Olympic gold medals, dies at 96Branko Lustig, Holocaust survivor and Oscar-winning producer of \u2018Schindler\u2019s List,\u2019 dies at 87 Mrs. White, who said she found freedom in the skies, was one of the first black women to earn a pilot\u2019s license in the United States. Azellia White, trailblazer for African American women in aviation, dies at 106",
        "author": "Emily Langer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins Dies at 90 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2461",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-astronaut-michael-collins-dies-at-90-11619629772?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=8",
        "text": "For 50 years, his answer rarely varied: \u201cNo.\u201d It was comfortable in the Apollo 11 command module he piloted, he would say. Out of radio contact periodically, he enjoyed the respite from chatter with Mission Control. There was hot coffee right at hand and music if he wanted. \u201cI had this beautiful little domain,\u201d he usually said.\nIt was their lifeboat. Without Mr. Collins tending the orbiting command module in their absence, his moonwalking crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn\u2019t have returned home alive.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Collins in a 1969 photo. He was the command module pilot who stayed behind in lunar orbit as the gatekeeper while his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nTo be sure, he wasn\u2019t without fear. He waited for hours alone in the command module, \u201csweating like a nervous bride,\u201d to hear from his crewmates that the mission was going according to plan, he wrote. As he waited for Messrs. Armstrong and Aldrin to lift off from the lunar surface, Mr. Collins tape-recorded a note: \u201cMy secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the Moon and returning to Earth alone; now am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter.\u201d\n\n\nAll went well. Mr. Collins piloted them home to a safe landing on July 24, 1969.\nMr. Collins, a former fighter pilot, retired U.S. Air Force Major General and bestselling author who also served as the first director of the National Air and Space Museum, died at 90 of cancer. Mr. Collins, whose wife of 57 years Patricia died in 2014, is survived by three children.\nMr. Collins was born on Oct. 31, 1930, in Rome, the son of the U.S. military attach\u00e9 there. He grew up in an army family, moving from base to base and attending six schools by eighth grade. His immediate family included two generals, a colonel, a major and the U.S. Army chief of staff. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he transferred to the Air Force, becoming a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California.\nHe joined the space program in 1963, as one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA. \u201cThe first time I applied, I flunked. I\u2019m not sure why,\u201d he said.\nIn 1966, he launched on his first space mission aboard Gemini 10. He set a world altitude record and became the nation\u2019s third spacewalker. He spent almost an hour and a half in a spacesuit dangling outside the two-person Gemini capsule, which he later recalled as a \u201cnice little flying machine.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Collins at work in a CM simulator at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in June 1969. He joined the space program in 1963, as one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Collins wasn\u2019t originally supposed to fly on Apollo 11. While in astronaut training in 1968, he started having trouble walking. Mr. Collins was diagnosed with a ruptured spinal disk and underwent neck surgery. He spent three months in a brace. When he was judged fit again for flight, he was reassigned to the crew of Apollo 11, several months before NASA designated it the first to attempt a moon landing.\nAmong the awards and ticker-tape parades on their return, Mr. Collins and his crewmates in 1969 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Richard Nixon. Congress in 2011 awarded the three astronauts the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor. \nIn later years, Mr. Collins acknowledged mixed feelings about the two people with whom he shared the historic moon voyage. They had his respect, he said, but they never became friends. \u201cEven as a self-acknowledged loner, I feel a bit freakish about our tendency as a crew to transfer only essential information, rather than thoughts or feelings,\u201d he said. \u201cI came to know them through osmosis or some mysterious transmission process rather than direct communication.\u201d\nOf Mr. Armstrong, who died in 2012, he said, \u201cI like him but I don\u2019t know what to make of him or how to get to know him better. He doesn\u2019t seem to meet anyone halfway.\u201d Mr. Aldrin was more approachable but Mr. Collins was wary. \u201cI have a feeling he will probe me for weaknesses and that would be uncomfortable,\u201d he said.\nApollo 11 was his last space mission. Before the flight, he had been offered an opportunity to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 17. In his view, though, Apollo 11 had fulfilled President John F. Kennedy\u2019s call to send a man to the moon and back before the end of the 1960s. \u201cMy mind-set was, \u2018It\u2019s over, we did it,\u2019\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Apollo 11 astronauts, from left Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, next to a command module mockup before the 1969 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nLeaving NASA later in 1969, he was appointed assistant secretary of state for public affairs. In 1971, he became the first director of the National Air and Space Museum Astronaut Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 crew back to Earth after their legendary moon-walk, has died at 90. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins Dies at 90 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2462",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-astronaut-michael-collins-dies-at-90-11619629772?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=31",
        "text": "For 50 years, his answer rarely varied: \u201cNo.\u201d It was comfortable in the Apollo 11 command module he piloted, he would say. Out of radio contact periodically, he enjoyed the respite from chatter with Mission Control. There was hot coffee right at hand and music if he wanted. \u201cI had this beautiful little domain,\u201d he usually said.\nIt was their lifeboat. Without Mr. Collins tending the orbiting command module in their absence, his moonwalking crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn\u2019t have returned home alive.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Collins in a 1969 photo. He was the command module pilot who stayed behind in lunar orbit as the gatekeeper while his crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nTo be sure, he wasn\u2019t without fear. He waited for hours alone in the command module, \u201csweating like a nervous bride,\u201d to hear from his crewmates that the mission was going according to plan, he wrote. As he waited for Messrs. Armstrong and Aldrin to lift off from the lunar surface, Mr. Collins tape-recorded a note: \u201cMy secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the Moon and returning to Earth alone; now am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter.\u201d\n\n\nAll went well. Mr. Collins piloted them home to a safe landing on July 24, 1969.\nMr. Collins, a former fighter pilot, retired U.S. Air Force Major General and bestselling author who also served as the first director of the National Air and Space Museum, died at 90 of cancer. Mr. Collins, whose wife of 57 years Patricia died in 2014, is survived by three children.\nMr. Collins was born on Oct. 31, 1930, in Rome, the son of the U.S. military attach\u00e9 there. He grew up in an army family, moving from base to base and attending six schools by eighth grade. His immediate family included two generals, a colonel, a major and the U.S. Army chief of staff. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he transferred to the Air Force, becoming a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California.\nHe joined the space program in 1963, as one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA. \u201cThe first time I applied, I flunked. I\u2019m not sure why,\u201d he said.\nIn 1966, he launched on his first space mission aboard Gemini 10. He set a world altitude record and became the nation\u2019s third spacewalker. He spent almost an hour and a half in a spacesuit dangling outside the two-person Gemini capsule, which he later recalled as a \u201cnice little flying machine.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMichael Collins at work in a CM simulator at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in June 1969. He joined the space program in 1963, as one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Collins wasn\u2019t originally supposed to fly on Apollo 11. While in astronaut training in 1968, he started having trouble walking. Mr. Collins was diagnosed with a ruptured spinal disk and underwent neck surgery. He spent three months in a brace. When he was judged fit again for flight, he was reassigned to the crew of Apollo 11, several months before NASA designated it the first to attempt a moon landing.\nAmong the awards and ticker-tape parades on their return, Mr. Collins and his crewmates in 1969 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Richard Nixon. Congress in 2011 awarded the three astronauts the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor. \nIn later years, Mr. Collins acknowledged mixed feelings about the two people with whom he shared the historic moon voyage. They had his respect, he said, but they never became friends. \u201cEven as a self-acknowledged loner, I feel a bit freakish about our tendency as a crew to transfer only essential information, rather than thoughts or feelings,\u201d he said. \u201cI came to know them through osmosis or some mysterious transmission process rather than direct communication.\u201d\nOf Mr. Armstrong, who died in 2012, he said, \u201cI like him but I don\u2019t know what to make of him or how to get to know him better. He doesn\u2019t seem to meet anyone halfway.\u201d Mr. Aldrin was more approachable but Mr. Collins was wary. \u201cI have a feeling he will probe me for weaknesses and that would be uncomfortable,\u201d he said.\nApollo 11 was his last space mission. Before the flight, he had been offered an opportunity to walk on the moon as commander of Apollo 17. In his view, though, Apollo 11 had fulfilled President John F. Kennedy\u2019s call to send a man to the moon and back before the end of the 1960s. \u201cMy mind-set was, \u2018It\u2019s over, we did it,\u2019\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Apollo 11 astronauts, from left Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, next to a command module mockup before the 1969 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nLeaving NASA later in 1969, he was appointed assistant secretary of state for public affairs. In 1971, he became the first director of the National Air and Space Museum Astronaut Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 crew back to Earth after their legendary moon-walk, has died at 90. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Katherine Johnson Calculated Trajectories for Astronauts (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2463",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/katherine-johnson-a-human-computer-calculated-trajectories-for-astronauts-11582750597?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=48",
        "text": "After working as a schoolteacher and giving birth to three daughters, she joined a team that made life-or-death calculations for the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury,\n\n\n Apollo and shuttle space missions. Before John Glenn was shot into space in 1962, she verified the orbital-trajectory math that a computer had generated for his flight, according to Ms. Shetterly\u2019s book.\n\n\n\n\nAn African-American woman, she thrived in a world that was predominantly white and male. When she arrived in 1953 at the agency that later became NASA, signs still designated certain bathrooms as being for colored people.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Obama with Katherine Johnson, after the mathematician received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alex Wong/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMs. Johnson, who died Monday at age 101, often said she was too busy to worry about racial discrimination. She cited something her father told her when she was a girl: \u201cYou are as good as anybody...but you\u2019re no better.\u201d\n\n\nMs. Johnson, who worked at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., retired from NASA in 1986. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.\nThe dawn of the space race thrust the Langley researchers into the nation\u2019s most urgent science project. \u201cWe wrote our own textbook, because there was no other text about space,\u201d Ms. Johnson told NASA later. \u201cWe just started from what we knew. We had to go back to geometry and figure all of this stuff out.\u201d\n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nCreola Katherine Coleman\u2014later known by the last name of her second husband\u2014was born Aug. 26, 1918, and grew up in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. She was the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette Coleman. Her father was a farmer who became a bellman at the nearby Greenbrier resort. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Education was their household priority.\nAt the resort, she learned French from a Parisian chef. Gifted at math, she graduated from high school at 14 and enrolled at what is now West Virginia State University. In 1937, at age 18, she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor\u2019s degree in math and French.\nShe taught school for two years in Marion, Va., where she met her first husband, James Goble, a chemistry teacher. In 1940, she enrolled for graduate studies in math at West Virginia University but dropped out when she became pregnant with her first child.\nIn the early 1950s, she heard from a relative that mathematicians were needed at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which later became NASA. She joined the staff there in 1953 at three times the pay she had earned as a teacher. Her job title was computer, then understood to mean a human who performed calculations. In those days, she later quipped, the computer wore a skirt. On her desk, she kept her old graduate-school math textbooks.\nDetermined to go beyond solving equations, she quizzed engineers there about their work with aeronautics. When she was barred from attending scientific briefings with the engineers, she asked, \"Is there a law against it?\u2019\u2019 She finally was allowed in.\nIn 1960, she was the co-author of a NASA report, \u201cDetermination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position.\u201d It was one of more than two dozen research papers she wrote or helped write.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKatherine Johnson, seated, an inspiration for the 2016 film \u2018Hidden Figures,\u2019 was introduced at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles in 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Invision/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAfter her husband died in 1956, she told her daughters they would help her run the household by handling ironing and cooking chores. She met James A. Johnson, a mail carrier and war veteran, in 1958. They married in 1959.\nMr. Johnson died in 2019. Ms. Johnson is survived by two of her three daughters, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.\nIn the NASA interview, she recalled calculating the trajectory of Alan Shepard\u2019s brief 1961 trip into space: \u201cThe early trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict where it would be at any point. Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, \u2018Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I\u2019ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.\u2019 \u201d\nIn 2018, as she neared her 100th birthday, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper asked Ms. Johnson to explain her longevity and health. \u201cI\u2019m just lucky; the Lord likes me,\u201d she said. After a pause, she added, \u201cAnd I like Him.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Singer-actress Janelle Mon\u00e1e and director Ted Melfi stop by the WSJ Cafe to talk about their new film \u2018Hidden Figures,\u2019 a fact-based historical drama about the black female mathematicians and engineers who helped NASA win the space race. Photo: 20th Century Fox. (Originally published Dec. 19, 2016)\n \n\n\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Katherine Johnson, a schoolteacher and mom, grabbed a chance to work as a mathematician in the U.S. space program. She overcame barriers to women and blacks partly by ignoring them. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Katherine Johnson Calculated Trajectories for Astronauts (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2464",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/katherine-johnson-a-human-computer-calculated-trajectories-for-astronauts-11582750597?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=47",
        "text": "After working as a schoolteacher and giving birth to three daughters, she joined a team that made life-or-death calculations for the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury,\n\n\n Apollo and shuttle space missions. Before John Glenn was shot into space in 1962, she verified the orbital-trajectory math that a computer had generated for his flight, according to Ms. Shetterly\u2019s book.\nAn African-American woman, she thrived in a world that was predominantly white and male. When she arrived in 1953 at the agency that later became NASA, signs still designated certain bathrooms as being for colored people.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Obama with Katherine Johnson, after the mathematician received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alex Wong/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMs. Johnson, who died Monday at age 101, often said she was too busy to worry about racial discrimination. She cited something her father told her when she was a girl: \u201cYou are as good as anybody...but you\u2019re no better.\u201d\n\n\nMs. Johnson, who worked at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., retired from NASA in 1986. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.\nThe dawn of the space race thrust the Langley researchers into the nation\u2019s most urgent science project. \u201cWe wrote our own textbook, because there was no other text about space,\u201d Ms. Johnson told NASA later. \u201cWe just started from what we knew. We had to go back to geometry and figure all of this stuff out.\u201d\n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nCreola Katherine Coleman\u2014later known by the last name of her second husband\u2014was born Aug. 26, 1918, and grew up in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. She was the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette Coleman. Her father was a farmer who became a bellman at the nearby Greenbrier resort. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Education was their household priority.\nAt the resort, she learned French from a Parisian chef. Gifted at math, she graduated from high school at 14 and enrolled at what is now West Virginia State University. In 1937, at age 18, she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor\u2019s degree in math and French.\nShe taught school for two years in Marion, Va., where she met her first husband, James Goble, a chemistry teacher. In 1940, she enrolled for graduate studies in math at West Virginia University but dropped out when she became pregnant with her first child.\nIn the early 1950s, she heard from a relative that mathematicians were needed at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which later became NASA. She joined the staff there in 1953 at three times the pay she had earned as a teacher. Her job title was computer, then understood to mean a human who performed calculations. In those days, she later quipped, the computer wore a skirt. On her desk, she kept her old graduate-school math textbooks.\nDetermined to go beyond solving equations, she quizzed engineers there about their work with aeronautics. When she was barred from attending scientific briefings with the engineers, she asked, \"Is there a law against it?\u2019\u2019 She finally was allowed in.\nIn 1960, she was the co-author of a NASA report, \u201cDetermination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position.\u201d It was one of more than two dozen research papers she wrote or helped write.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKatherine Johnson, seated, an inspiration for the 2016 film \u2018Hidden Figures,\u2019 was introduced at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles in 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Invision/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAfter her husband died in 1956, she told her daughters they would help her run the household by handling ironing and cooking chores. She met James A. Johnson, a mail carrier and war veteran, in 1958. They married in 1959.\nMr. Johnson died in 2019. Ms. Johnson is survived by two of her three daughters, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.\nIn the NASA interview, she recalled calculating the trajectory of Alan Shepard\u2019s brief 1961 trip into space: \u201cThe early trajectory was a parabola, and it was easy to predict where it would be at any point. Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, \u2018Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I\u2019ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.\u2019 \u201d\nIn 2018, as she neared her 100th birthday, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper asked Ms. Johnson to explain her longevity and health. \u201cI\u2019m just lucky; the Lord likes me,\u201d she said. After a pause, she added, \u201cAnd I like Him.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Singer-actress Janelle Mon\u00e1e and director Ted Melfi stop by Katherine Johnson, a schoolteacher and mom, grabbed a chance to work as a mathematician in the U.S. space program. She overcame barriers to women and blacks partly by ignoring them. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gilbert Levin, scientist who sought to detect possibility of life on Mars, dies at 97 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2465",
        "date": "2021-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/gilbert-levin-dead/2021/08/03/4a05b1ae-f473-11eb-9738-8395ec2a44e7_story.html",
        "text": "Gilbert V. Levin, a scientist whose research company participated in NASA missions to Mars and who was the principal designer of an experiment aimed at detecting the possibility of life on Mars, only to face skepticism from the scientific establishment, died July 26 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 97. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was an aortic dissection, said his son Henry Levin.Dr. Levin (pronounced luh-VIN) began his career as a sanitation engineer before becoming a space scientist and founding his company, Biospherics (later Spherix Inc.), based in Washington\u2019s Maryland suburbs.He had dozens of patents and helped develop an experiment for the Mariner 9 mission, which orbited Mars in 1971. His best-known scientific work, however, has never been fully accepted by the wider scientific community.Story continues below advertisementFor the better part of a decade, Dr. Levin \u2014 later assisted by a colleague, Patricia Ann Straat \u2014 worked on an elegantly simple effort to test soil on Mars for the presence of organic material. Their \u201clabeled release,\u201d or LR, experiment was one of several carried out by NASA\u2019s two-part Viking mission to measure whether Mars could support life. The first Viking lander reached Mars in July 1976, with Viking 2 touching down on a different part of the planet in September.AdvertisementDr. Levin\u2019s experiment employed a nine-foot arm to scoop Martian soil into a container, where it was treated with a solution containing radioactive carbon nutrients. Monitors detected the release of radioactive gas, which Dr. Levin interpreted as evidence of metabolism.\u201cGil, that\u2019s life,\u201d Straat said when they saw the results.Story continues below advertisementThe findings held true for both Viking 1 and Viking 2, which took samples from different regions of the planet. Other experiments aboard the Viking, however, used different methods to conclude that Martian soil did not contain carbon, an element found in all living things.Dr. Levin stood by his findings, but top NASA scientists disagreed, saying that the response he observed was the result of inorganic chemical responses, not biological processes.\u201cSoon thereafter,\u201d Dr. Levin told the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering Magazine last year, \u201cI gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences saying we detected life, and there was an uproar. Attendees shouted invectives at me. They were ready to throw shrimp at me from the shrimp bowl. One former adviser said, \u2018You\u2019ve disgraced yourself, and you\u2019ve disgraced science.\u2019\u2008\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDr. Levin never wavered in his belief that some form of life existed on Mars. Subsequent NASA missions to the planet \u2014 more than 10 in all \u2014 found evidence of water and methane, further indications of the possibility of life-forms, in Dr. Levin\u2019s view. He lobbied NASA for permission to conduct additional experiments, but in the 45 years since the Viking mission, there has not been another attempt to determine whether Mars supports biological life.\u201cIt\u2019s been left as an ambiguous result,\u201d Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and a friend of Dr. Levin\u2019s, said in an interview. \u201cThe experiments are not sufficiently definitive, but they clearly leave open the possibility of life on Mars.\u201dAs recently as 2019, when he published an essay in Scientific American, Dr. Levin continued to defend his original work, writing, \u201cIt is more likely than not that we detected life.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe was an engineer by training, not a physicist or biologist, and never held a staff job at NASA. Some colleagues have speculated that professional jealousy may have played a part in the dismissal of Dr. Levin\u2019s findings by leading NASA scientists.\u201cGil\u2019s a sanitary engineer, he\u2019s not a biologist,\u201d Viking project manager James S. Martin told The Washington Post in 2000. \u201cI\u2019ve often wondered if one of his problems was that he wasn\u2019t a member of the club.\u201dGilbert Victor Levin was born April 23, 1924, in Baltimore. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, had an antiques business. His mother was a homemaker.Dr. Levin interrupted his studies at Johns Hopkins University during World War II to serve as a radio operator with the Merchant Marine. He served aboard five ships in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean theaters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe received a bachelor\u2019s degree in civil engineering in 1947 and master\u2019s degree in sanitary engineering a year later, both from Johns Hopkins. He was a public health engineer in Maryland, California and D.C., and also worked as a research scientist in the 1950s and 1960s.A chance meeting with a NASA scientist at a party in 1958 led Dr. Levin to begin work on the experiment that ultimately went to Mars almost two decades later. He received a doctorate in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins in 1963, then worked at Hazleton Laboratories in Vienna, Va., for three years.He was about to take a professorship at Colorado State University in 1967 when a former boss told him that he was closing his research laboratory. Dr. Levin bought the space, above a plumbing store in Washington, and named the company Biospherics. It was later headquartered in Rockville and Beltsville, Md.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI felt if I could get my own research company going, I could do more different things than I could in the research department at a company or university,\u201d Dr. Levin told Warfield\u2019s, a Maryland business magazine, in 1991.Biospherics, which had 750 employees at its height, won government contracts to perform environmental assessments, design monitors to measure discharges from Navy ships and conduct call centers for federal agencies.At least two of Dr. Levin\u2019s inventions showed considerable commercial promise. The first, a process to remove phosphorus from wastewater, was used at several sewage treatment plants around the world. The other, an offshoot of his work for NASA, was an artificial sweetener derived from a form of \u201cleft-handed\u201d sugar with molecules arranged in the opposite direction of standard sugar. The result was a sweetener that had fewer calories and would not cause tooth decay. Marketed as Lev-O-Cal, it was briefly used in Slurpees, but it proved too expensive to produce in large quantities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m a lousy salesman,\u201d Dr. Levin said, lamenting his modest success with the sweetener and the wastewater treatment method. \u201cI\u2019ve got two of the best technologies in the world, and I can\u2019t sell them.\u201dDr. Levin, who retired in 2008 but remained active in science until his death, was awarded the NASA Public Service Medal and the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the Johns Hopkins University board of trustees. He lived in Chevy Chase, Md., and Palm Beach, Fla.His wife of 66 years, the former Karen Bloomquist, who was a Newsweek correspondent and a vice president of Biospherics, died in 2019. Survivors include three children, Ron Levin of Los Angeles; Henry Levin, a molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, of Chevy Chase; and Carol Sanchez of Wake Forest, N.C.; and six grandchildren.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn recent years, more scientists have come around to thinking that Dr. Levin\u2019s 1976 Mars experiments may have merit, and that he may be proved right in the long run.\u201cHe never gave up and was unfailingly cheerful and positive,\u201d Davies, the Arizona State professor, said of Dr. Levin. \u201cThat\u2019s a lesson for us all, from someone who devoted his life to science and remained positive about it.\u201d\n\nAn earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Newcomb Cleveland Prize was awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The article has been corrected. Read more Washington Post obituariesGeorge R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81Isamu Akasaki, LED innovator who shared Nobel Prize in physics, dies at 92Richard Ernst, Nobel laureate whose research made MRI possible, dies at 87 In addition to his Mars experiment, he developed an artificial sweetener and wastewater treatment technology. Gilbert Levin, scientist who sought to detect possibility of life on Mars, dies at 97",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gilbert Levin, scientist who sought to detect possibility of life on Mars, dies at 97 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2466",
        "date": "2021-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/gilbert-levin-dead/2021/08/03/4a05b1ae-f473-11eb-9738-8395ec2a44e7_story.html",
        "text": "Gilbert V. Levin, a scientist whose research company participated in NASA missions to Mars and who was the principal designer of an experiment aimed at detecting the possibility of life on Mars, only to face skepticism from the scientific establishment, died July 26 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 97. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was an aortic dissection, said his son Henry Levin.Dr. Levin (pronounced luh-VIN) began his career as a sanitation engineer before becoming a space scientist and founding his company, Biospherics (later Spherix Inc.), based in Washington\u2019s Maryland suburbs.He had dozens of patents and helped develop an experiment for the Mariner 9 mission, which orbited Mars in 1971. His best-known scientific work, however, has never been fully accepted by the wider scientific community.Story continues below advertisementFor the better part of a decade, Dr. Levin \u2014 later assisted by a colleague, Patricia Ann Straat \u2014 worked on an elegantly simple effort to test soil on Mars for the presence of organic material. Their \u201clabeled release,\u201d or LR, experiment was one of several carried out by NASA\u2019s two-part Viking mission to measure whether Mars could support life. The first Viking lander reached Mars in July 1976, with Viking 2 touching down on a different part of the planet in September.AdvertisementDr. Levin\u2019s experiment employed a nine-foot arm to scoop Martian soil into a container, where it was treated with a solution containing radioactive carbon nutrients. Monitors detected the release of radioactive gas, which Dr. Levin interpreted as evidence of metabolism.\u201cGil, that\u2019s life,\u201d Straat said when they saw the results.Story continues below advertisementThe findings held true for both Viking 1 and Viking 2, which took samples from different regions of the planet. Other experiments aboard the Viking, however, used different methods to conclude that Martian soil did not contain carbon, an element found in all living things.Dr. Levin stood by his findings, but top NASA scientists disagreed, saying that the response he observed was the result of inorganic chemical responses, not biological processes.\u201cSoon thereafter,\u201d Dr. Levin told the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering Magazine last year, \u201cI gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences saying we detected life, and there was an uproar. Attendees shouted invectives at me. They were ready to throw shrimp at me from the shrimp bowl. One former adviser said, \u2018You\u2019ve disgraced yourself, and you\u2019ve disgraced science.\u2019\u2008\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDr. Levin never wavered in his belief that some form of life existed on Mars. Subsequent NASA missions to the planet \u2014 more than 10 in all \u2014 found evidence of water and methane, further indications of the possibility of life-forms, in Dr. Levin\u2019s view. He lobbied NASA for permission to conduct additional experiments, but in the 45 years since the Viking mission, there has not been another attempt to determine whether Mars supports biological life.\u201cIt\u2019s been left as an ambiguous result,\u201d Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and a friend of Dr. Levin\u2019s, said in an interview. \u201cThe experiments are not sufficiently definitive, but they clearly leave open the possibility of life on Mars.\u201dAs recently as 2019, when he published an essay in Scientific American, Dr. Levin continued to defend his original work, writing, \u201cIt is more likely than not that we detected life.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe was an engineer by training, not a physicist or biologist, and never held a staff job at NASA. Some colleagues have speculated that professional jealousy may have played a part in the dismissal of Dr. Levin\u2019s findings by leading NASA scientists.\u201cGil\u2019s a sanitary engineer, he\u2019s not a biologist,\u201d Viking project manager James S. Martin told The Washington Post in 2000. \u201cI\u2019ve often wondered if one of his problems was that he wasn\u2019t a member of the club.\u201dGilbert Victor Levin was born April 23, 1924, in Baltimore. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, had an antiques business. His mother was a homemaker.Dr. Levin interrupted his studies at Johns Hopkins University during World War II to serve as a radio operator with the Merchant Marine. He served aboard five ships in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean theaters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe received a bachelor\u2019s degree in civil engineering in 1947 and master\u2019s degree in sanitary engineering a year later, both from Johns Hopkins. He was a public health engineer in Maryland, California and D.C., and also worked as a research scientist in the 1950s and 1960s.A chance meeting with a NASA scientist at a party in 1958 led Dr. Levin to begin work on the experiment that ultimately went to Mars almost two decades later. He received a doctorate in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins in 1963, then worked at Hazleton Laboratories in Vienna, Va., for three years.He was about to take a professorship at Colorado State University in 1967 when a former boss told him that he was closing his research laboratory. Dr. Levin bought the space, above a plumbing store in Washington, and named the company Biospherics. It was later headquartered in Rockville and Beltsville, Md.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI felt if I could get my own research company going, I could do more different things than I could in the research department at a company or university,\u201d Dr. Levin told Warfield\u2019s, a Maryland business magazine, in 1991.Biospherics, which had 750 employees at its height, won government contracts to perform environmental assessments, design monitors to measure discharges from Navy ships and conduct call centers for federal agencies.At least two of Dr. Levin\u2019s inventions showed considerable commercial promise. The first, a process to remove phosphorus from wastewater, was used at several sewage treatment plants around the world. The other, an offshoot of his work for NASA, was an artificial sweetener derived from a form of \u201cleft-handed\u201d sugar with molecules arranged in the opposite direction of standard sugar. The result was a sweetener that had fewer calories and would not cause tooth decay. Marketed as Lev-O-Cal, it was briefly used in Slurpees, but it proved too expensive to produce in large quantities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m a lousy salesman,\u201d Dr. Levin said, lamenting his modest success with the sweetener and the wastewater treatment method. \u201cI\u2019ve got two of the best technologies in the world, and I can\u2019t sell them.\u201dDr. Levin, who retired in 2008 but remained active in science until his death, was awarded the NASA Public Service Medal and the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the Johns Hopkins University board of trustees. He lived in Chevy Chase, Md., and Palm Beach, Fla.His wife of 66 years, the former Karen Bloomquist, who was a Newsweek correspondent and a vice president of Biospherics, died in 2019. Survivors include three children, Ron Levin of Los Angeles; Henry Levin, a molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, of Chevy Chase; and Carol Sanchez of Wake Forest, N.C.; and six grandchildren.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn recent years, more scientists have come around to thinking that Dr. Levin\u2019s 1976 Mars experiments may have merit, and that he may be proved right in the long run.\u201cHe never gave up and was unfailingly cheerful and positive,\u201d Davies, the Arizona State professor, said of Dr. Levin. \u201cThat\u2019s a lesson for us all, from someone who devoted his life to science and remained positive about it.\u201d\n\nAn earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Newcomb Cleveland Prize was awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The article has been corrected. Read more Washington Post obituariesGeorge R. Carruthers, scientist who designed telescope that went to the moon, dies at 81Isamu Akasaki, LED innovator who shared Nobel Prize in physics, dies at 92Richard Ernst, Nobel laureate whose research made MRI possible, dies at 87 In addition to his Mars experiment, he developed an artificial sweetener and wastewater treatment technology. Gilbert Levin, scientist who sought to detect possibility of life on Mars, dies at 97",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "James M. Beggs, NASA administrator in the 1980s, dies at 94 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2467",
        "date": "2020-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/james-m-beggs-nasa-administrator-in-the-1980s-dies-at-94/2020/04/25/a8488d5c-871b-11ea-ae26-989cfce1c7c7_story.html",
        "text": "James M. Beggs, who had a key role as NASA\u2019s administrator in the 1980s in promoting the space shuttle program, then resigned soon after the 1986 Challenger disaster that left seven astronauts dead, died April 23 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 94.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Charles Beggs. Mr. Beggs was a onetime Navy officer who worked in the aerospace industry and held top jobs at NASA in the 1960s and later in the Transportation Department. He was named NASA administrator \u2014 the space agency\u2019s top position \u2014 in 1981.At that time, NASA\u2019s glory days of manned space flight and heroic missions to the moon were a decade in the past, and budget cuts had reduced the agency\u2019s scope and morale. Mr. Beggs sought to restore NASA\u2019s luster through scientific expeditions, strengthened ties to the military and a new space station \u2014 which White House budget cutters dismissed as a \u201cmotel in the sky for astronauts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Beggs secured additional funding for NASA and proved to be a popular and charismatic figure, given to spontaneously quoting lines from Shakespeare. He was skilled at dealing with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and helped rebuild the country\u2019s space program. He foresaw a time when a squadron of space shuttles would be conducting scientific research and launching secret military satellites in space.\u201cThere is no telling where our vision and imagination will lead us once we have the space station,\u201d he said in 1985. \u201cAs Shakespeare put it, \u2018Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.\u2019\u2009\u201dHe stepped up the space shuttle program, with more than 20 successful missions during his tenure, and was instrumental in establishing programs to send members of Congress and teachers into space. By 1985, NASA had 20,000 employees and an annual budget of almost $8 billion.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was a constant battle, Mr. Beggs said, to win support from President Ronald Reagan, who had little interest in the space program.\u201cHe was almost technically ignorant,\u201d Mr. Beggs told journalist Joseph J. Trento for his 1987 book \u201cPrescription for Disaster,\u201d about NASA and Challenger. \u201cNot quite, but almost. He grasps a few of the broader concepts, but when you start talking in any kind of detail about the broader aspects of the program, his eyes glaze over.\u201dMr. Beggs\u2019s tenure at NASA was overshadowed by two events that took place in rapid succession. In December 1985, he was indicted by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles over allegations that he defrauded the Army of millions of dollars when he had worked at General Dynamics, a major defense contractor. He and three other company executives were charged with illegally billing the government for millions of dollars in cost overruns during the development of a prototype of an anti",
        "author": "Matt Schudel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Allan McDonald, engineer and whistleblower in the Challenger disaster, dies at 83 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2468",
        "date": "2021-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/allan-mcdonald-dead/2021/03/10/572bd0d6-81a3-11eb-ac37-4383f7709abe_story.html",
        "text": "Allan J. McDonald, a rocket scientist and whistleblower who refused to sign off on the launch of the Challenger space shuttle over safety concerns and, after its explosion, argued that the tragedy could have been averted had officials heeded warnings from engineers like himself, died March 6 at a hospital in Ogden, Utah. He was 83. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe cause was complications from a recent fall, said his daughter Lora McDonald.For the millions of Americans who turned on their television sets to watch the Challenger take off on Jan. 28, 1986, the image of the space shuttle blowing apart in midair \u2014 killing seven astronauts, including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe \u2014 was seared into their memory. The disaster is often described as an event on the order of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 or the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: Those who lived through it will never forget where they were when it occurred.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. McDonald was in Cape Canaveral, Fla., at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, where the Challenger was set to take off. He was the senior on-site representative of his company, contractor Morton Thiokol, where he oversaw the engineering of the rocket boosters used to propel the shuttle into space. Among colleagues, the New York Times reported, Mr. McDonald had a reputation as one of the most skilled rocket engineers in the country.It was unseasonably cold in Florida, with weather forecasts predicting that temperatures might drop as low as 18 degrees Fahrenheit in the hours before the Challenger was scheduled to lift off. That cold snap became the crux of vociferous debate among Mr. McDonald and other engineers, Morton Thiokol executives and NASA officials about whether the mission should go forward.Roger Boisjoly, engineer who warned of Challenger shuttle danger, dies at 73Citing the cold, Mr. McDonald insisted that takeoff be postponed, according to accounts of the deliberations that later emerged in news reports. A critical component of the rocket booster was the O-ring, a rubber gasket that served to contain burning fuel. Because of their composition, O-rings were highly vulnerable to temperature drops, and engineers warned that their effectiveness could not be guaranteed below 53 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. McDonald relayed these concerns in what he described as increasingly frenzied conversations the night before the launch. NASA officials, upset by the last-minute complication, were eager to move forward with the mission; company executives, according to later findings by a presidential commission on the Challenger disaster, appeared to feel pressure to \u201caccommodate a major customer.\u201dA Challenger engineer blamed himself for 30 years. Then this \u2018miracle\u2019 happened.In addition to the matter of the O-rings, Mr. McDonald said he raised weather-related concerns including the danger that ice might damage the shuttle\u2019s exterior.\u201cIf anything happened to this launch, I told them I sure wouldn\u2019t want to be the person that had to stand in front of a board of inquiry to explain why I launched this outside of the qualification of the solid rocket motor,\u201d he would later testify.Story continues below advertisementProtocol required the senior engineer to sign off on the launch. When Mr. McDonald refused, his supervisor signed for him. The Challenger lifted off at 11:38 a.m. on Jan. 28 and disintegrated approximately 72 seconds later, its remains streaking across the sky.\u201cMy heart just about stopped,\u201d Mr. McDonald later said in a public lecture, according to the Commercial Dispatch of Columbus, Miss.President Ronald Reagan convened a commission to investigate the catastrophe. Led by William P. Rogers, a former U.S. secretary of state and attorney general, it included astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. McDonald was present at a closed session of the commission \u2014 watching from what he called the \u201ccheap seats\u201d \u2014 when he heard what he considered misleading testimony by a NASA official about the debate leading up to takeoff.\u201cI was sitting there thinking, \u2018That\u2019s about as deceiving as anything I ever heard,\u2019\u2009\u201d Mr. McDonald said in an interview aired on NPR. \u201cSo I raised my hand. I said, \u2018I think this presidential commission should know that Morton Thiokol was so concerned, we recommended not launching below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. And we put that in writing and sent that to NASA.\u2019 I\u2019ll never forget Chairman Rogers said, \u2018Would you please come down here on the floor and repeat what I think I heard?\u2019\u2009\u201dMr. McDonald soon testified in public proceedings, describing a culture in which, in the past, engineers had been required to demonstrate to officials that their products were safe for flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn this case, we had to prove it wasn\u2019t, and that\u2019s a big difference,\u201d he testified. \u201cAnd I felt that was pressure.\u201dMr. McDonald was demoted at Morton Thiokol after his testimony, then reinstated after Congress moved to end the company\u2019s federal contracts if he was not returned to his job.\u201cI really expected to be going out the door,\u201d he later recalled. \u201cAnd I would have, if it had not been that the presidential commission and certain members of Congress found out about it and really read the riot act to the management of my company. That saved my job, frankly.\u201dAllan James McDonald was born on July 9, 1937, in Cody, Wyo., and grew up in Montana, where his father was a deputy county assessor in Bozeman. His mother was a homemaker.Story continues below advertisementMr. McDonald received a bachelor\u2019s degree in chemical engineering from Montana State University in 1959, then joined what was then Thiokol Chemical Corp. His early projects included designing external insulation for the Minuteman missile. In 1967, he received a master\u2019s degree in engineering administration from the University of Utah.AdvertisementSurvivors include his wife of 57 years, the former Linda Zuchetto of Ogden; four children, Greg McDonald of Ogden, Lisa Fischer of Barrington, R.I., Lora McDonald of Clayton, Calif., and Meghan McDonald Goggin of White Plains, N.Y.; and nine grandchildren.After his reinstatement at Morton Thiokol, Mr. McDonald played a principal role in a redesign of the booster rockets. He retired in 2001 as a vice president at the company. With James R. Hansen, he wrote the book \u201cTruth, Lies, and O-rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster\u201d (2009) and spoke frequently to scientific, corporate and government audiences about the role of ethics in professional life.He often cited an aphorism with particular resonance for him. \u201cRegret for things we did is tempered by time,\u201d he would tell his listeners. \u201cRegret for things we did not do is inconsolable.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituaries After refusing to sign off on the launch of the Challenger, the space shuttle that exploded after liftoff in 1986, he testified that the tragedy could have been averted. Allan McDonald, engineer and whistleblower in the Challenger disaster, dies at 83",
        "author": "Emily Langer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Owen Garriott, astronaut on Skylab, Columbia, dies at 88 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2469",
        "date": "2019-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/owen-garriott-astronaut-on-skylab-space-shuttle-dies-at-88/2019/04/16/a32a4f4a-6066-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "Owen Garriott, an astronaut who flew on the first U.S. space station, Skylab, and whose son followed him into orbit, died April\u00a015 at his home in Huntsville, Ala. He was 88.His death was announced by NASA. The cause was not disclosed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDr. Garriott served on the second Skylab crew in 1973, spending close to 60 days in space, a record at the time. He also was part of the ninth space shuttle mission, flying aboard Columbia in 1983 and operating a ham radio from orbit for the first time. In 2008, Dr. Garriott traveled to Kazakhstan for his son\u2019s launch into space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Richard Garriott is a computer-game developer who paid the Russians $30\u00a0million for a ride to the International Space Station.Story continues below advertisementThey were the first U.S. father-and-son space travelers. Two generations of Russians had previously flown in space.Advertisement\u201cOur adult bonding around the experience of space was a rare treasure we shared,\u201d Richard Garriott said Tuesday via Twitter.\u201cIn 50 years, from my father\u2019s Apollo era to our new commercial era, much has been accomplished,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cYet, none without the risks undertaken by those early pioneers!\u201dOwen Garriott was born Nov. 22, 1930, in Enid, Okla. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1953, and then served in the Navy. He received master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1957 and 1960 and taught at Stanford before being selected as an astronaut in 1965. He was among the first six scientist-astronauts picked by NASA.Dr. Garriott later held other positions within NASA, including director of science and applications at Johnson Space Center in Houston. He left NASA in 1986 and later contributed to books about Skylab and physics.Read more Washington Post obituaries\n On the 1973 Skylab mission, he spent nearly 60 days in space. Owen Garriott, astronaut on Skylab, Columbia, dies at 88",
        "author": "Staff Reports and News Services"
    },
    {
        "title": "Owen Garriott, astronaut on Skylab, Columbia, dies at 88 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2470",
        "date": "2019-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/owen-garriott-astronaut-on-skylab-space-shuttle-dies-at-88/2019/04/16/a32a4f4a-6066-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "Owen Garriott, an astronaut who flew on the first U.S. space station, Skylab, and whose son followed him into orbit, died April\u00a015 at his home in Huntsville, Ala. He was 88.His death was announced by NASA. The cause was not disclosed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDr. Garriott served on the second Skylab crew in 1973, spending close to 60 days in space, a record at the time. He also was part of the ninth space shuttle mission, flying aboard Columbia in 1983 and operating a ham radio from orbit for the first time. In 2008, Dr. Garriott traveled to Kazakhstan for his son\u2019s launch into space aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Richard Garriott is a computer-game developer who paid the Russians $30\u00a0million for a ride to the International Space Station.Story continues below advertisementThey were the first U.S. father-and-son space travelers. Two generations of Russians had previously flown in space.Advertisement\u201cOur adult bonding around the experience of space was a rare treasure we shared,\u201d Richard Garriott said Tuesday via Twitter.\u201cIn 50 years, from my father\u2019s Apollo era to our new commercial era, much has been accomplished,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cYet, none without the risks undertaken by those early pioneers!\u201dOwen Garriott was born Nov. 22, 1930, in Enid, Okla. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1953, and then served in the Navy. He received master\u2019s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1957 and 1960 and taught at Stanford before being selected as an astronaut in 1965. He was among the first six scientist-astronauts picked by NASA.Dr. Garriott later held other positions within NASA, including director of science and applications at Johnson Space Center in Houston. He left NASA in 1986 and later contributed to books about Skylab and physics.Read more Washington Post obituaries\n On the 1973 Skylab mission, he spent nearly 60 days in space. Owen Garriott, astronaut on Skylab, Columbia, dies at 88",
        "author": "Staff Reports and News Services"
    },
    {
        "title": "Evelyn Berezin Pioneered Word Processors and Butted Heads With Men (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2471",
        "date": "2018-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/evelyn-berezin-pioneered-word-processors-and-butted-heads-with-men-11544801400?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=67",
        "text": "By the time she reached her early 40s, Ms. Berezin was a veteran computer designer who had created an automated reservation system for United Air Lines. Even so, as an extremely rare woman in a male-dominated field, she saw little chance of reaching senior management.\n\n\n\n\nHer only route to the top, Ms. Berezin concluded, was to start a company. In 1969, with two colleagues, she founded Redactron Corp. to design and make computerized typewriters, a category that became known as word processors before being subsumed into today\u2019s more versatile desktop computers.\n\n\nMs. Berezin, who died Dec. 8 at the age of 93, served as president of Redactron, whose sales pitch was \u201cFree the secretary,\u201d suggesting an escape from drudgery into more challenging work. Initially lacking screens, the devices featured IBM Selectric typewriters hooked up to boxy computers allowing texts to be edited, stored and printed.\nBased in Hauppauge, N.Y., the company sold machines as far afield as Australia and had more than 500 employees by 1975. A recession and high interest rates created a financial crisis that forced Ms. Berezin to sell Redactron to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Burroughs Corp.\n\n\n in January 1976.\nOnce Burroughs acquired Redactron, she lost control of product development and watched as others made decisions that she said doomed her word processor. After joining a product-planning team at Burroughs, she found herself at odds with male colleagues, mostly from the South or Midwest.\n\u201cThey thought I was from outer space, from New York City, of all things,\u201d she said in an oral history recorded by the Computer History Museum. \u201cAt the time, I was too confident and quite insensitive to that kind of man\u2026. Worse, I told them what I thought. A loud woman they did not know how to deal with, so they disconnected, and so did I.\u201d\nShe reinvented herself as a mentor to entrepreneurs, venture capitalist and director of companies including the insurer Cigna Corp. Her timing was good. By the late 1970s, \u201ccompanies were scrambling to get a woman on the board,\u201d she said in the oral history.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nEvelyn Berezin was born\u00a0April 12, 1925, in New York\u2019s Bronx borough. The family lived in a small apartment next to a clattering elevated train line. Her father cut fur for coats, while her mother toiled in a clothing factory.\nMs. Berezin later credited exceptional teachers she had in New York public schools, including holders of doctoral degrees from elite universities who couldn\u2019t find higher-paying work during the Depression. She graduated from high school at 15 and initially attended Hunter College before going to New York University on a scholarship and earning a degree in physics. She spent five more years in graduate school at NYU without completing her doctoral program.\nShe met Israel Wilenitz, a chemical engineer born in England, and they married in 1951. Unable to find a job as a physicist, she joined a Brooklyn, N.Y., firm called\u00a0Electronic Computer Corp., or Elecom, at a salary of $4,500 a year (the current equivalent of about $44,000). \u201cIt was more money than I ever thought I would make in my life,\u201d she said later.\nHer first assignment was to design a computer to calculate the range of Army guns. She also worked on computers used in accounting and keeping track of magazine subscriptions.\nIn the late 1950s, she joined Teleregister Corp. in Stamford, Conn., where her projects included the pioneering airline-reservation computer system, linking information from 60 offices around the country. Wary of an embarrassing failure, she designed the system to keep operating even if parts of it crashed.\nIn the early 1960s, a New York Stock Exchange executive hired her for a communications-technology job, but before she could start the exchange\u2019s board rejected her. The problem, she was told, was that rough language used by men on the trading floor was \u201cnot for a woman\u2019s ears.\u201d\n\u201cDirty talk,\u201d she said later, \u201cwould not bother me for one instant,\u201d but at the time she was too stunned to protest.\nInstead, she joined Digitronics Corp., where she designed a digital system for a racetrack. While there, she sensed an impenetrable glass ceiling and began hatching her ideas for Redactron.\nMs. Berezin\u2019s husband died in 2003. They had no children. A longtime resident of Greenwich Village, she relished the theater and was known for what a nephew called her \u201camazing\u00a0bouillabaisse.\u201d\nIn 1998, Newsday asked her when women would reach parity with men on Fortune 500 boards.\u00a0\u201cIf you had asked me that in 1960, I would have said 1,000 years, but look at where we\u2019ve come in just 30,\u201d she said. \u201cWomen have moved so far ahead in all fields. I\u2019m astonished at how fast it\u2019s happened.\u201d\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com A rare woman in the early computer industry, Evelyn Berezin designed computers and digital systems before founding her own company, Redactron, to make computerized typewriters. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Explosion of Space Shuttle Tested CEO of Morton Thiokol (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2472",
        "date": "2019-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/explosion-of-space-shuttle-tested-ceo-of-morton-thiokol-11566586604?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=56",
        "text": "Diplomacy wasn\u2019t Mr. Locke\u2019s strongest suit, and his response drew harsh criticism. U.S. Rep. James Scheuer, a New York Democrat, declared Mr. Locke was headed for the corporate \u201chall of infamy.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMr. Locke, who died Aug. 4 at age 90, said at the time he wasn\u2019t involved in the decision to launch the shuttle. Still, the uproar briefly clouded a largely successful business career, including his shrewd early bet on automotive air bags.\n\n\nHe could be a PR man\u2019s nightmare. Fulminating against what he saw as a trend toward micromanaging by company directors, he said in 1991 that U.S.-style corporate governance had \u201cproven to be pretty damn effective because the CEO is the dictator.\u201d When people protesting against nuclear missiles were ejected from a Morton annual meeting, he told shareholders: \u201cLord, save us from nuts like that.\u201d\nWithin days of the explosion, Mr. Locke was defensive. \u201cIt sounds to me like everyone is really digging, looking for a villain,\u201d he told the Chicago Tribune. \u201cThis is just smut digging,\u201d he added. \nTwo Morton Thiokol engineers told an investigating commission they had argued that the launch should be delayed because of safety concerns involving the seals. They said their own management overruled them.\nCriticizing the engineers, Mr. Locke told The Wall Street Journal they were \u201cpaid to do productive work for our company and not to wander around the country gossiping with people.\u201d He later said he regretted those remarks.\nIn a congressional hearing, Rep. Scheuer accused Mr. Locke of insensitivity for telling a Journal reporter that \u201cthis shuttle thing will cost us this year 10 cents a share.\u201d Mr. Locke said the remark was in response to a question about the financial effects.\nEd Garrison, who headed the company\u2019s aerospace arm at the time, said Mr. Locke did well under trying circumstances. \nCharles Stanley Locke, known as Charlie, the son of a plumber, was born March 5, 1929, and grew up in Laurel, Miss., where his early jobs included working at a pool hall. In 1952, he received a business degree at the University of Mississippi and married Nora Lou Fulkerson, known as Lou, his high school sweetheart. After serving in the U.S. Army as an encryption specialist, he returned to the University of Mississippi to earn a master\u2019s degree in accounting.\nHe began his career at Price Waterhouse, which sent him on auditing trips to Cuba and Central America, before moving on to growing responsibilities at companies making paper, processed food and auto parts. Early in his career, his highest aspiration was to be a plant manager. Financial and organizational skills lifted him far higher.\nHe joined Morton-Norwich Products Inc. in 1975 as vice president of finance. The company was trying to expand its pharmaceutical business, which included Norwich aspirin and Pepto-Bismol, an indigestion remedy. \nMr. Locke became CEO in 1980. Within two years, the company sold the pharmaceutical business and bought Thiokol Corp., a maker of rockets. Though rockets and salt seemed like an odd mix, both companies had expertise in specialty chemicals. The combined company would be strong enough to \u201cfinance anything, within reason, it wants to do,\u201d Mr. Locke told the Washington Post.\n\n\nOther Obituaries\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMr. Locke eventually concluded that aerospace products, subject to intense outside scrutiny, were \u201cvery alien to us,\u201d he told Barron\u2019s. In 1989, he split the company in two, creating one firm making aerospace products and a second, Morton International, focused on specialty chemicals, salt and air bags. \nMorton had been experimenting with air bags since the 1960s, initially as a safety device for military helicopters. Mr. Locke continued investing in the air-bag business, putting the company in a strong position in the late 1980s when their use in cars began surging. In the early 1990s, Morton International estimated that it had more than 55% of the U.S. market for air bags. \n\u201cOne good lesson we\u2019ve learned from the air-bag business,\u201d Mr. Locke said in 1992, \u201cis that when you see a major opportunity developing, don\u2019t be timid: Invest a lot of money fast in productive\u2014even excess\u2014capacity. That has been worth gold for us.\u201d\nBy the time he retired in 1994, though, conglomerates were deeply out of favor. His successors broke up and sold the company. For Mr. Locke, \u201cthat was a real heartbreaker,\u201d said Mr. Garrison, his former colleague.\nHis wife, Lou, died in 2009. Mr. Locke is survived by four children and four grandchildren.\nHe also served on the board of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Avon Products Inc.\n\n\n and was a life trustee of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. A dogged golfer, he declared himself the \u201cworld\u2019s worst putter.\u201d \nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Charles Locke, who died Aug. 4, headed a company that made Morton\u2019s table salt and aerospace equipment. He was in a difficult position after investigators blamed rocket boosters made by his firm for the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson Dies at 101 (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2473",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pioneering-nasa-mathematician-katherine-johnson-has-died-11582558853?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=47",
        "text": "Ms. Johnson at work at NASA Langley Research Center in 1966 in Hampton, Va.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMs. Johnson was one of the so-called \u201ccomputers\u201d who calculated rocket trajectories and earth orbits by hand during NASA\u2019s early years.\nUntil 1958, Ms. Johnson and other black women worked in a racially segregated computing unit at what is now called Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Their work was the focus of the Oscar-nominated 2016 film.\n\n\nIn 1961, Ms. Johnson worked on the first mission to carry an American into space. In 1962, she verified computer calculations that plotted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\u2019s\n\n\n\n earth orbits.\nAt age 97, Ms. Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation\u2019s highest civilian honor.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJanelle Monae, left, Taraji P. Henson, second right, and Octavia Spencer, right, introduced Ms. Johnson, seated, the inspiration for \u2018Hidden Figures,\u2019 at the Oscars in Los Angeles in 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Pizzello/Invision/Associated Press NASA says Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who worked on NASA\u2019s early space missions and was portrayed in the film \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael A\u2019Hearn, astronomer who put spacecraft on collision course with comet for the sake of science, dies at 76 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2474",
        "date": "2017-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/michael-ahearn-astronomer-who-put-spacecraft-on-collision-course-with-comet-for-the-sake-of-science-dies-at-76/2017/06/09/c6f853a0-4ad7-11e7-a186-60c031eab644_story.html",
        "text": " The U-Md. professor emeritus was chief scientist for the NASA mission known as Deep Impact. Michael A\u2019Hearn, astronomer who put spacecraft on collision course with comet for the sake of science, dies at 76",
        "author": " Bart Barnes Bart Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "John Young, Who Led First Space Shuttle Mission, Dies at 87 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2475",
        "date": "2018-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/obituaries/john-young-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Young also walked on the moon and was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs. Mr. Young also walked on the moon and was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs. John W. Young, who walked on the moon, commanded the first space shuttle mission and became the first person to fly in space six times, died on Friday at his home in Houston. He was 87.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "John Young, Who Led First Space Shuttle Mission, Dies at 87 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2476",
        "date": "2018-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/obituaries/john-young-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Young also walked on the moon and was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs. Mr. Young also walked on the moon and was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs. John W. Young, who walked on the moon, commanded the first space shuttle mission and became the first person to fly in space six times, died on Friday at his home in Houston. He was 87.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "John Young, Who Led First Space Shuttle Mission, Dies at 87 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2477",
        "date": "2018-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/obituaries/john-young-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Young also walked on the moon and was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs. Mr. Young also walked on the moon and was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs. John W. Young, who walked on the moon, commanded the first space shuttle mission and became the first person to fly in space six times, died on Friday at his home in Houston. He was 87.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paul Weitz, Astronaut on Skylab and Challenger, Dies at 85 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2478",
        "date": "2017-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/obituaries/paul-j-weitz-dead-commander-of-shuttle-challenger.html",
        "text": "Captain Weitz commanded the shuttle Challenger on its maiden voyage, and after it later exploded, he was among NASA officials who examined why. Captain Weitz commanded the shuttle Challenger on its maiden voyage, and after it later exploded, he was among NASA officials who examined why. Paul J. Weitz, an astronaut who was in the first crew to board the Skylab space station and who 10 years later commanded the initial flight of the space shuttle Challenger, died on Monday in Flagstaff, Ariz. He was 85.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Paul Weitz, Astronaut on Skylab and Challenger, Dies at 85 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2479",
        "date": "2017-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/obituaries/paul-j-weitz-dead-commander-of-shuttle-challenger.html",
        "text": "Captain Weitz commanded the shuttle Challenger on its maiden voyage, and after it later exploded, he was among NASA officials who examined why. Captain Weitz commanded the shuttle Challenger on its maiden voyage, and after it later exploded, he was among NASA officials who examined why. Paul J. Weitz, an astronaut who was in the first crew to board the Skylab space station and who 10 years later commanded the initial flight of the space shuttle Challenger, died on Monday in Flagstaff, Ariz. He was 85.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "William R. Harris Dies at 79; Hoped to Curb Risks of Nuclear War (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2480",
        "date": "2021-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/obituaries/william-r-harris-dead-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "A lawyer and policy analyst, he studied ways to forestall energy crises and other catastrophes. He died of Covid-19. A lawyer and policy analyst, he studied ways to forestall energy crises and other catastrophes. He died of Covid-19. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Overlooked No More: Ruby Payne-Scott, Who Explored Space With Radio Waves (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2481",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/obituaries/ruby-payne-scott-overlooked.html",
        "text": "Payne-Scott helped establish the field of radio astronomy by using radio waves to detect solar bursts, but she was forced to resign after she got married. Payne-Scott helped establish the field of radio astronomy by using radio waves to detect solar bursts, but she was forced to resign after she got married. Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we\u2019re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Overlooked No More: Ruby Payne-Scott, Who Explored Space With Radio Waves (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2482",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/obituaries/ruby-payne-scott-overlooked.html",
        "text": "Payne-Scott helped establish the field of radio astronomy by using radio waves to detect solar bursts, but she was forced to resign after she got married. Payne-Scott helped establish the field of radio astronomy by using radio waves to detect solar bursts, but she was forced to resign after she got married. Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we\u2019re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Roman, \u2018Mother of the Hubble\u2019 Telescope, Dies at 93 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2483",
        "date": "2018-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/obituaries/nancy-roman-dies-at-93.html",
        "text": "As NASA\u2019s chief of astronomy, Dr. Roman was the first woman in a leadership position at the agency and oversaw planning for the Hubble Space Telescope. As NASA\u2019s chief of astronomy, Dr. Roman was the first woman in a leadership position at the agency and oversaw planning for the Hubble Space Telescope. When Nancy Grace Roman was 11 years old, her family was living in Reno. She was enthralled by the stars in the clear night skies and joined with friends in forming an astronomy club.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Grace Roman Helped Win Funding for Hubble Telescope (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2484",
        "date": "2019-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-grace-roman-helped-win-funding-for-hubble-space-telescope-11546615801?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=66",
        "text": "Some of her teachers doubted girls were cut out for science and math. She stuck with her plan, earned a Ph.D. and in 1959 became the first chief of astronomy at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She helped persuade Congress to fund what became the Hubble Space Telescope.\n\n\n\n\nBy the time it was launched in 1990, Dr. Roman had retired from NASA, but colleagues dubbed her the mother of the Hubble. The $2.5 billion telescope, the size of a bus, was launched seven years behind schedule and way over budget. Astronauts had to repair its flaws. Still, it gave scientists a clearer view into the mysteries of the universe and dazzled the general public with crisp images of distant galaxies.\n\n\nDr. Roman died Dec. 25 at the age of 93.\n\n\nRelated Coverage\n\n\n\n\nKitKat Candy Chief Resisted Nestl\u00e9\u2019s Takeover Bid \nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nEst\u00e9e Lauder Executive Led Global Expansion \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nRichard Blum Made a Bundle on a Circus and Battled Poverty \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAn only child, she was born May 16, 1925, in Nashville, Tenn. The family moved around the country as her father pursued his career as a geophysicist. Her mother was trained as a music teacher.\nDr. Roman recalled in a 1980 oral history that her mother \u201cused to take me out at night and show me the constellations and the Aurora and things like that. But she also showed me birds and trees and animals and plants.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNancy Grace Roman was featured in the LEGO Women of NASA set, which launched in 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lego\n \n\n\n\nAfter graduating from high school in Baltimore, she earned a bachelor\u2019s degree at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and her doctorate in astronomy at the University of Chicago. In the 1950s, she worked at the Naval Research Laboratory.\nWhen she joined NASA in 1959, the agency was only about six months old. \u201cIt was a great place to work at that time,\u201d she said in a 2017 interview with NPR. \u201cEverybody was gungho.\u201d\nDr. Roman never married and had no children. After retiring, she was active in the American Association of University Women and frequently encouraged young people to consider scientific careers. She was always willing to sign her Lego figurine for young fans.\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Though she never won a Nobel Prize, astronomer Nancy Grace Roman earned an accolade likely to give her even more cachet among tomorrow\u2019s scientists: In 2017, Lego released a Women of NASA set including a plastic likeness of her. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Grace Roman, astronomer celebrated as \u2018mother\u2019 of Hubble, dies at 93 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2485",
        "date": "2018-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/nancy-grace-roman-astronomer-celebrated-as-mother-of-hubble-dies-at-93/2018/12/28/88f7fe94-0a4c-11e9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html",
        "text": "When Nancy Grace Roman requested permission to take a second algebra course in high school, a teacher demanded to know \u201cwhat lady would take mathematics instead of Latin.\u201d In college, a professor remarked that he often tried to dissuade women from majoring in physics. And after receiving a doctorate in astronomy, she concluded that a female professor in the field had little hope of obtaining tenure. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUndeterred by the barriers to women in the sciences, Dr. Roman found a professional home at NASA. Even there, she recalled in an interview years later, she felt compelled to use the honorific \u201cDr.\u201d\u201cOtherwise,\u201d she said, \u201cI could not get past the secretaries.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter joining the fledgling space agency in 1959, Dr. Roman became the first chief of astronomy at NASA headquarters, a role that made her one of the agency\u2019s first female executives. She remained in that position for nearly two decades before her retirement in 1979.AdvertisementDr. Roman, who was celebrated as a trailblazer for female scientists and a driving force behind advances including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, died Dec.\u00a025 at a hospital in Germantown, Md. She was 93. A cousin, Laura Bates Verreau, confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the cause.Dr. Roman spent much of her career helping develop, fund and promote technology that would help scientists see more clearly beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAstronomers had been wanting to get observations from above the atmosphere for a long time. Looking through the atmosphere is somewhat like looking through a piece of old, stained glass,\u201d Dr. Roman told Voice of America in 2011. \u201cThe glass has defects in it, so the image is blurred from that.\u201dNASA credited her with leading what it described as the agency\u2019s \u201cfirst successful astronomical mission,\u201d the launch of Orbiting Solar Observatory-1 in 1962 to measure the electromagnetic radiation of the sun, among other things.AdvertisementShe also coordinated among scientists and engineers for the successful launch of geodetic satellites, used for measuring and mapping Earth, and several orbiting astronomical observatories that offered an early glimpse of the discoveries that might be reaped by sending observational technology beyond the veil of the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementBut she was perhaps most associated with the early legwork for the Hubble Space Telescope, the first major telescope to be sent into space for the purpose of gathering photographs of and data from the universe. Hubble is widely considered to have yielded the most significant astronomical observations since Galileo began using a telescope in the early 1600s.The design and launch of Hubble was fraught by scientific, financial and bureaucratic difficulties that Dr. Roman worked to resolve. Lobbying for early funding for Hubble, whose price tag reached $1.5\u00a0billion, she recalled arguing that every American, for the cost of one ticket to the movies, could be assured years of scientific discoveries.Advertisement\u201cDuring the 1960s and early 1970s there was no one at NASA who was more important in getting the first designs and concepts for Hubble funded and completed,\u201d space historian Robert Zimmerman wrote in \u201cThe Universe in a Mirror,\u201d an account of the creation of Hubble. \u201cMore importantly, it was [Dr. Roman] more than anyone who convinced the astronomical community to get behind space astronomy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe telescope did not launch until 1990, more than a decade after Dr. Roman retired, but when it did, its photographs of the cosmos electrified the world.In 1994, when NASA announced the repair of a faulty mirror and other problems that had caused its early photographs to be blurry, Dr. Roman was in the audience, knitting.Edward J. Weiler, then Hubble\u2019s chief scientist, surprised her by recognizing her publicly, according to Zimmerman\u2019s account. \u201cIf Lyman Spitzer was the father of the Hubble Space Telescope,\u201d Weiler said, referring to the noted astrophysicist, \u201cthen Nancy Roman was its mother.\u201dAdvertisementNancy Grace Roman was born in Nashville on May 16, 1925. Her father was a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Her mother was a former music teacher and a nature enthusiast who took her daughter outside at night to view the stars.Story continues below advertisementDr. Roman, who recalled founding an astronomy club at age 11, moved frequently for her father\u2019s work before landing in Baltimore, where she graduated from high school. She received a bachelor\u2019s degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1946 and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1949, both in astronomy.After early work at the University of Chicago and the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, she was hired by the Naval Research Laboratory in 1955, working in radio astronomy. NASA was formed three years later, with Dr. Roman among its earliest employees. She spent the final part of her career at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where she oversaw the Astronomical Data Center.AdvertisementHer honors included the Women in Aerospace Lifetime Achievement Award and the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award. She helped promote professional opportunities for women through the American Association of University Women and spoke frequently in schools to encourage children to take on the challenges of science.Story continues below advertisementDr. Roman resided in Chevy Chase, Md., at the time of her death and had no immediate survivors.In 2017, Lego released a set of figurines honoring four pioneering women of NASA: Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel in space; Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space; Margaret Hamilton, a computer programmer who created the software necessary for the Apollo missions; and Dr. Roman.\u201cI am glad,\u201d she once told Science magazine, \u201cI ignored the many people who told me that I could not be an astronomer.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nSister Wendy Beckett, a Catholic nun who became an unlikely TV celebrity, dies at 88Jack O\u2019Dwyer, newsletter publisher and \u2018soul and conscience\u2019 of PR industry, dies at 85David Austin, plant breeder who restored fragrance and romance to the rose, dies at 92 She was NASA\u2019s first chief of astronomy and one of the space agency\u2019s first female executives. Nancy Grace Roman, astronomer celebrated as \u2018mother\u2019 of Hubble, dies at 93",
        "author": "Emily Langer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nancy Grace Roman, astronomer celebrated as \u2018mother\u2019 of Hubble, dies at 93 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2486",
        "date": "2018-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/nancy-grace-roman-astronomer-celebrated-as-mother-of-hubble-dies-at-93/2018/12/28/88f7fe94-0a4c-11e9-88e3-989a3e456820_story.html",
        "text": "When Nancy Grace Roman requested permission to take a second algebra course in high school, a teacher demanded to know \u201cwhat lady would take mathematics instead of Latin.\u201d In college, a professor remarked that he often tried to dissuade women from majoring in physics. And after receiving a doctorate in astronomy, she concluded that a female professor in the field had little hope of obtaining tenure. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUndeterred by the barriers to women in the sciences, Dr. Roman found a professional home at NASA. Even there, she recalled in an interview years later, she felt compelled to use the honorific \u201cDr.\u201d\u201cOtherwise,\u201d she said, \u201cI could not get past the secretaries.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter joining the fledgling space agency in 1959, Dr. Roman became the first chief of astronomy at NASA headquarters, a role that made her one of the agency\u2019s first female executives. She remained in that position for nearly two decades before her retirement in 1979.AdvertisementDr. Roman, who was celebrated as a trailblazer for female scientists and a driving force behind advances including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, died Dec.\u00a025 at a hospital in Germantown, Md. She was 93. A cousin, Laura Bates Verreau, confirmed the death but said she did not yet know the cause.Dr. Roman spent much of her career helping develop, fund and promote technology that would help scientists see more clearly beyond Earth\u2019s atmosphere.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAstronomers had been wanting to get observations from above the atmosphere for a long time. Looking through the atmosphere is somewhat like looking through a piece of old, stained glass,\u201d Dr. Roman told Voice of America in 2011. \u201cThe glass has defects in it, so the image is blurred from that.\u201dNASA credited her with leading what it described as the agency\u2019s \u201cfirst successful astronomical mission,\u201d the launch of Orbiting Solar Observatory-1 in 1962 to measure the electromagnetic radiation of the sun, among other things.AdvertisementShe also coordinated among scientists and engineers for the successful launch of geodetic satellites, used for measuring and mapping Earth, and several orbiting astronomical observatories that offered an early glimpse of the discoveries that might be reaped by sending observational technology beyond the veil of the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementBut she was perhaps most associated with the early legwork for the Hubble Space Telescope, the first major telescope to be sent into space for the purpose of gathering photographs of and data from the universe. Hubble is widely considered to have yielded the most significant astronomical observations since Galileo began using a telescope in the early 1600s.The design and launch of Hubble was fraught by scientific, financial and bureaucratic difficulties that Dr. Roman worked to resolve. Lobbying for early funding for Hubble, whose price tag reached $1.5\u00a0billion, she recalled arguing that every American, for the cost of one ticket to the movies, could be assured years of scientific discoveries.Advertisement\u201cDuring the 1960s and early 1970s there was no one at NASA who was more important in getting the first designs and concepts for Hubble funded and completed,\u201d space historian Robert Zimmerman wrote in \u201cThe Universe in a Mirror,\u201d an account of the creation of Hubble. \u201cMore importantly, it was [Dr. Roman] more than anyone who convinced the astronomical community to get behind space astronomy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe telescope did not launch until 1990, more than a decade after Dr. Roman retired, but when it did, its photographs of the cosmos electrified the world.In 1994, when NASA announced the repair of a faulty mirror and other problems that had caused its early photographs to be blurry, Dr. Roman was in the audience, knitting.Edward J. Weiler, then Hubble\u2019s chief scientist, surprised her by recognizing her publicly, according to Zimmerman\u2019s account. \u201cIf Lyman Spitzer was the father of the Hubble Space Telescope,\u201d Weiler said, referring to the noted astrophysicist, \u201cthen Nancy Roman was its mother.\u201dAdvertisementNancy Grace Roman was born in Nashville on May 16, 1925. Her father was a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Her mother was a former music teacher and a nature enthusiast who took her daughter outside at night to view the stars.Story continues below advertisementDr. Roman, who recalled founding an astronomy club at age 11, moved frequently for her father\u2019s work before landing in Baltimore, where she graduated from high school. She received a bachelor\u2019s degree from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1946 and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1949, both in astronomy.After early work at the University of Chicago and the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, she was hired by the Naval Research Laboratory in 1955, working in radio astronomy. NASA was formed three years later, with Dr. Roman among its earliest employees. She spent the final part of her career at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where she oversaw the Astronomical Data Center.AdvertisementHer honors included the Women in Aerospace Lifetime Achievement Award and the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award. She helped promote professional opportunities for women through the American Association of University Women and spoke frequently in schools to encourage children to take on the challenges of science.Story continues below advertisementDr. Roman resided in Chevy Chase, Md., at the time of her death and had no immediate survivors.In 2017, Lego released a set of figurines honoring four pioneering women of NASA: Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel in space; Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space; Margaret Hamilton, a computer programmer who created the software necessary for the Apollo missions; and Dr. Roman.\u201cI am glad,\u201d she once told Science magazine, \u201cI ignored the many people who told me that I could not be an astronomer.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nSister Wendy Beckett, a Catholic nun who became an unlikely TV celebrity, dies at 88Jack O\u2019Dwyer, newsletter publisher and \u2018soul and conscience\u2019 of PR industry, dies at 85David Austin, plant breeder who restored fragrance and romance to the rose, dies at 92 She was NASA\u2019s first chief of astronomy and one of the space agency\u2019s first female executives. Nancy Grace Roman, astronomer celebrated as \u2018mother\u2019 of Hubble, dies at 93",
        "author": "Emily Langer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Joseph Schmitt, 101, Spacesuit Technician for Early Astronauts, Dies (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2487",
        "date": "2017-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/obituaries/joseph-schmitt-spacesuit-technician-for-early-astronauts-dies-at-101.html",
        "text": "As an equipment specialist, or \u201csuit tech,\u201d Mr. Schmitt was responsible for hooking up Alan Shepard, John Glenn and other astronauts before blastoff. As an equipment specialist, or \u201csuit tech,\u201d Mr. Schmitt was responsible for hooking up Alan Shepard, John Glenn and other astronauts before blastoff. Joseph W. Schmitt, who as one of NASA\u2019s earliest \u201csuit techs\u201d was often the last person to have face-to-face contact with astronauts before they shot skyward on their historic missions, died on Sept. 25 in Friendswood, Tex. He was 101.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Joseph Schmitt, 101, Spacesuit Technician for Early Astronauts, Dies (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2488",
        "date": "2017-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/obituaries/joseph-schmitt-spacesuit-technician-for-early-astronauts-dies-at-101.html",
        "text": "As an equipment specialist, or \u201csuit tech,\u201d Mr. Schmitt was responsible for hooking up Alan Shepard, John Glenn and other astronauts before blastoff. As an equipment specialist, or \u201csuit tech,\u201d Mr. Schmitt was responsible for hooking up Alan Shepard, John Glenn and other astronauts before blastoff. Joseph W. Schmitt, who as one of NASA\u2019s earliest \u201csuit techs\u201d was often the last person to have face-to-face contact with astronauts before they shot skyward on their historic missions, died on Sept. 25 in Friendswood, Tex. He was 101.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ursula Marvin, Geologist of the Extraterrestrial, Dies at 96 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2489",
        "date": "2018-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/obituaries/ursula-marvin-geologist-of-the-extraterrestrial-dies-at-96.html",
        "text": "Dr. Marvin, who had an asteroid and a mountain named after her, analyzed a chunk of a Soviet satellite and moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts. Dr. Marvin, who had an asteroid and a mountain named after her, analyzed a chunk of a Soviet satellite and moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts. Ursula Marvin was a geologist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., when she and her colleagues were asked to examine an extraterrestrial object: a 10-pound chunk of Sputnik IV, a Soviet satellite that had crashed, superheated at 1,535 degrees Celsius, onto a street in Manitowoc, Wis., before dawn on Sept. 5, 1962.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ursula Marvin, Geologist of the Extraterrestrial, Dies at 96 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2490",
        "date": "2018-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/obituaries/ursula-marvin-geologist-of-the-extraterrestrial-dies-at-96.html",
        "text": "Dr. Marvin, who had an asteroid and a mountain named after her, analyzed a chunk of a Soviet satellite and moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts. Dr. Marvin, who had an asteroid and a mountain named after her, analyzed a chunk of a Soviet satellite and moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts. Ursula Marvin was a geologist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., when she and her colleagues were asked to examine an extraterrestrial object: a 10-pound chunk of Sputnik IV, a Soviet satellite that had crashed, superheated at 1,535 degrees Celsius, onto a street in Manitowoc, Wis., before dawn on Sept. 5, 1962.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geraldyn M. Cobb, 88, Who Found a Glass Ceiling in Space, Dies (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2491",
        "date": "2019-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/obituaries/geraldyn-m-cobb-dead.html",
        "text": "She was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut and passed all the tests, but NASA wasn\u2019t interested in sending women into space in 1961. She was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut and passed all the tests, but NASA wasn\u2019t interested in sending women into space in 1961. Jerrie Cobb was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geraldyn M. Cobb, 88, Who Found a Glass Ceiling in Space, Dies (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2492",
        "date": "2019-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/obituaries/geraldyn-m-cobb-dead.html",
        "text": "She was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut and passed all the tests, but NASA wasn\u2019t interested in sending women into space in 1961. She was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut and passed all the tests, but NASA wasn\u2019t interested in sending women into space in 1961. Jerrie Cobb was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geraldyn M. Cobb, 88, Who Found a Glass Ceiling in Space, Dies (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2493",
        "date": "2019-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/obituaries/geraldyn-m-cobb-dead.html",
        "text": "She was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut and passed all the tests, but NASA wasn\u2019t interested in sending women into space in 1961. She was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut and passed all the tests, but NASA wasn\u2019t interested in sending women into space in 1961. Jerrie Cobb was as qualified as any man to be an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Joseph Schmitt Suited Up Astronauts for Historic Space Missions (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2494",
        "date": "2017-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/joseph-schmitt-suited-up-astronauts-for-historic-space-missions-1507903201?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=75",
        "text": "It wasn\u2019t the sort of future he could have imagined when he graduated from a small-town Illinois high school with few job prospects during the Great Depression. At the suggestion of his high school principal, he signed up for the Army Air Corps and learned aircraft mechanics. During a lull, he volunteered to take a course in the repair of aircraft clothing, a skill that proved useful for his later work.\nAs a mechanic for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, a forerunner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, he helped install flight instruments and was among the support staff when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947.\n\n\n\u201cI never became famous in this world but I sure have worked with a lot of famous people,\u201d he said in a NASA oral history.\nMr. Schmitt died at age 101 on Sept. 25 in Friendswood, Texas.\n\u201cHe was a very calm, collected kind of a guy,\u201d said Alan Rochford, who worked on Mr. Schmitt\u2019s team of NASA spacesuit technicians in the 1960s. Making sure the suits were functioning properly was a matter of life and death.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTechnician Schmitt assisted astronaut Virgil I. Grissom, pilot of the Mercury-Redstone 4 (MR-4) spaceflight, in a 1961 file photo.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe suits worn by Mr. Armstrong and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Buzz Aldrin\n\n\n\n to walk on the moon in July 1969 cost about $100,000 each, Mr. Schmitt said in the oral history. \u201cIt seems like a lot of money,\u201d he said. But the suits were designed for a temperature range of minus-250 to plus-350 degrees Fahrenheit, he said, and shielded astronauts from ultraviolet radiation and micro meteorites. \u201cI guess that was a fair price for a 28-layer space suit,\u201d he said.\nJoseph William Schmitt was born Jan. 2, 1916, in O\u2019Fallon, Ill. His father, a policeman, was shot to death while on duty when Joseph was 11 weeks old. As a student, he shined shoes and cleaned spittoons to help keep the family fed and clothed. He helped the family raise hogs in the backyard.\nHis knowledge of aircraft mechanics and flight suits qualified him for a spot on a Space Task Group created by NASA.\nHe was there in May 1961 when Mr. Shephard became the first American to travel into space. Mr. Schmitt recalled mounting pressure gauges and flow meters onto a piece of plywood to make an instrument panel to ensure Mr. Shephard\u2019s suit was functional. Though it was \u201cvery crude\u201d compared with later instrumentation, \u201cwe got the job done with it,\u201d he said.\nIn February 1962, he helped Mr. Glenn into his suit and capsule before the astronaut circled the Earth three times, becoming the first American to orbit the planet. After that flight, Mr. Glenn handed out a small number of lapel-pin medals he had carried into space. He gave one to Mr. Schmitt.\nOn July 16, 1969, the launch date for the Apollo 11 trip to the moon, Mr. Schmitt showed up for work at 3 a.m. He and the other suit technicians were responsible for \u201cturning on the air and oxygen supply, making leak checks on the suit consoles, checking out the communications systems, laying out suit equipment, making sure suit pockets were loaded in correct order with pens, flashlights and so forth,\u201d he recalled.\nMr. Armstrong\u2019s suit had a pocket for a small folding shovel and sample bags. \u201cThese were to be used in the event that their stay on the moon was to be cut short for any reason, so at least they would come back with a few lunar soil samples,\u201d Mr. Schmitt said.\nWhen the astronauts returned, \u201cwe vacuumed out all the moon dust,\u201d Mr. Schmitt said. A NASA order forbade giving out that dust to souvenir seekers, \u201cso we didn\u2019t get any of that.\u201d\nAfter retiring from NASA in 1983, Mr. Schmitt tinkered with his Model A Ford. He once drove it from Virginia to Texas. He knew how to repair lawn mowers and almost anything else, family members recalled.\nMr. Schmitt married the former Elizabeth Ann Rayfield in 1939. She died in 2008. He is survived by two children, six grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.\nWrite to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com Joseph Schmitt made a career of helping astronauts into space suits and tucking them into their capsules before blastoff. He suited up astronauts including Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong for their space flights, making sure they were connected to oxygen and communications. ",
        "author": "James R. Hagerty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Race Pioneer Planted Roots in Milwaukee (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2495",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-race-pioneer-planted-roots-in-milwaukee-1544196601?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=65",
        "text": "Mr. Zelazo helped run Astronautics for nearly half a century and served on its board until 2016. In retirement, when he wasn\u2019t ballroom dancing or cruising Lake Michigan in his sailboat, the Astronut, Mr. Zelazo remained a regular presence at the company\u2019s downtown Milwaukee headquarters.\nEmployees there grew accustomed to being summoned for \u201ca five minute chat with Nate\u201d that often stretched on for an hour. Those discussions were fueled by what friends and colleagues described as a passion for helping young engineers build ambitious careers close to home.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNate Zelazo, right, with Prof. Parent observes the mechanism on the TIROS Weather Satellite recording unit, which Astronautics designed and built, around the early 1960s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Astronautics Corporation of America\n \n\n\n\n\u201cHe started a space-age company in a state that at that time was known mainly for cheese, beer and old-time manufacturing,\u201d said Kanti Prasad, dean of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee\u2019s Lubar School of Business, where Mr. Zelazo served on the advisory council.\n\n\nMr. Zelazo died on Nov. 22 at 100 years of age.\nHe was born Nathaniel Katz Zelazo on Sept. 28, 1918, in Lomza, Poland, to Morris and Edith Zelazo. His sister Norma, with whom he later founded Astronautics, was born in 1922.\nHis father emigrated to the U.S. a few years later. He found work as a carpenter in New York, and saved up to bring his wife and children over to join him in 1928.\nNate Zelazo learned English and sold ice cream in Central Park before attending Stuyvesant High School and earning a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering from the City College of New York.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAfter the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Zelazo interrupted his graduate studies at Columbia University to design radar systems for the U.S. Navy. He continued working on engineering projects for the Defense Department after the war ended.\nIn the mid-1950s his background as a Jewish immigrant from Poland working on national defense caught the attention of Sen. Joseph McCarthy\u2019s staff, who were looking for Americans with suspected communist leanings. The scrutiny passed, without denting Mr. Zelazo\u2019s pride in his adopted country.\n\u201cAll families have myths, and more so with immigrants,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ronald Zelazo,\n\n\n\n Mr. Zelazo\u2019s son and the current chief executive and chairman of the board at Astronautics. \u201cBut my father was very proud to be an immigrant who made it in the U.S.\u201d\nNate Zelazo moved his family to Racine in the mid-1950s to lead research and development in the avionics division at Oster, better known as a manufacturer of household appliances. Mr. Zelazo resumed his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a master\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering.\nHe forged bonds with his instructors there that paid off when he learned in the late 1950s that Air Force was soliciting expertise in engineering a manned voyage to the moon. He left Oster in 1959 and founded Astronautics with his sister Norma Paige, an attorney based in New York.\n\u201cFor both Nate and Norma, Astronautics was just their life,\u201d said Holly Russek, Ms. Paige\u2019s daughter and an Astronautics vice president.\nMr. Zelazo worked with engineers recruited from Oster and with academics from UW-Madison and the University of Minnesota to calculate how to ration fuel during a round-trip moon mission. In his later years, he described it as \u201ccruise control in space.\u201d\nAstronautics went on to work on a star tracker mounted on the rocket-powered X-15 aircraft and some of the first satellites deployed to monitor weather.\nThe company also designed cockpit displays and server systems for planes and helicopters. Mr. Zelazo entertained clients from around the world on the Astronut, delighting in showing off Milwaukee\u2019s revitalized skyline from Lake Michigan.\nHe was also a fixture at galas benefiting the city\u2019s top institutions and charitable causes. After his wife Helene died in 1996, he funded the conversion of a former synagogue into UW-Milwaukee\u2019s Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts.\nMr. Zelazo also served on the board of regents at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and donated to the engineering department and art museum at Marquette University.\n\u201cHe really was a giant here in Milwaukee,\u201d said Michael Lovell, Marquette\u2019s president.\nMr. Zelazo is survived by his son, Ronald, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and Marina Marcus, his partner of 22 years.\nWrite to Patrick McGroarty at patrick.mcgroarty@wsj.com Nate Zelazo joined the Space Race in the 1950s. His company Astronautics Corporation of America went on to develop a gyroscope for mounting cameras in space and hardware and software used today on Boeing\u2019s 787 jets and Airbus\u2019s A400M turboprop transport plane. ",
        "author": "Patrick McGroarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Race Pioneer Planted Roots in Milwaukee (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2496",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-race-pioneer-planted-roots-in-milwaukee-1544196601?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=61",
        "text": "Mr. Zelazo helped run Astronautics for nearly half a century and served on its board until 2016. In retirement, when he wasn\u2019t ballroom dancing or cruising Lake Michigan in his sailboat, the Astronut, Mr. Zelazo remained a regular presence at the company\u2019s downtown Milwaukee headquarters.\nEmployees there grew accustomed to being summoned for \u201ca five minute chat with Nate\u201d that often stretched on for an hour. Those discussions were fueled by what friends and colleagues described as a passion for helping young engineers build ambitious careers close to home.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNate Zelazo, right, with Prof. Parent observes the mechanism on the TIROS Weather Satellite recording unit, which Astronautics designed and built, around the early 1960s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Astronautics Corporation of America\n \n\n\n\n\u201cHe started a space-age company in a state that at that time was known mainly for cheese, beer and old-time manufacturing,\u201d said Kanti Prasad, dean of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee\u2019s Lubar School of Business, where Mr. Zelazo served on the advisory council.\n\n\nMr. Zelazo died on Nov. 22 at 100 years of age.\nHe was born Nathaniel Katz Zelazo on Sept. 28, 1918, in Lomza, Poland, to Morris and Edith Zelazo. His sister Norma, with whom he later founded Astronautics, was born in 1922.\nHis father emigrated to the U.S. a few years later. He found work as a carpenter in New York, and saved up to bring his wife and children over to join him in 1928.\nNate Zelazo learned English and sold ice cream in Central Park before attending Stuyvesant High School and earning a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering from the City College of New York.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAfter the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Zelazo interrupted his graduate studies at Columbia University to design radar systems for the U.S. Navy. He continued working on engineering projects for the Defense Department after the war ended.\nIn the mid-1950s his background as a Jewish immigrant from Poland working on national defense caught the attention of Sen. Joseph McCarthy\u2019s staff, who were looking for Americans with suspected communist leanings. The scrutiny passed, without denting Mr. Zelazo\u2019s pride in his adopted country.\n\u201cAll families have myths, and more so with immigrants,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ronald Zelazo,\n\n\n\n Mr. Zelazo\u2019s son and the current chief executive and chairman of the board at Astronautics. \u201cBut my father was very proud to be an immigrant who made it in the U.S.\u201d\nNate Zelazo moved his family to Racine in the mid-1950s to lead research and development in the avionics division at Oster, better known as a manufacturer of household appliances. Mr. Zelazo resumed his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a master\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering.\nHe forged bonds with his instructors there that paid off when he learned in the late 1950s that Air Force was soliciting expertise in engineering a manned voyage to the moon. He left Oster in 1959 and founded Astronautics with his sister Norma Paige, an attorney based in New York.\n\u201cFor both Nate and Norma, Astronautics was just their life,\u201d said Holly Russek, Ms. Paige\u2019s daughter and an Astronautics vice president.\nMr. Zelazo worked with engineers recruited from Oster and with academics from UW-Madison and the University of Minnesota to calculate how to ration fuel during a round-trip moon mission. In his later years, he described it as \u201ccruise control in space.\u201d\nAstronautics went on to work on a star tracker mounted on the rocket-powered X-15 aircraft and some of the first satellites deployed to monitor weather.\nThe company also designed cockpit displays and server systems for planes and helicopters. Mr. Zelazo entertained clients from around the world on the Astronut, delighting in showing off Milwaukee\u2019s revitalized skyline from Lake Michigan.\nHe was also a fixture at galas benefiting the city\u2019s top institutions and charitable causes. After his wife Helene died in 1996, he funded the conversion of a former synagogue into UW-Milwaukee\u2019s Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts.\nMr. Zelazo also served on the board of regents at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and donated to the engineering department and art museum at Marquette University.\n\u201cHe really was a giant here in Milwaukee,\u201d said Michael Lovell, Marquette\u2019s president.\nMr. Zelazo is survived by his son, Ronald, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and Marina Marcus, his partner of 22 years.\nWrite to Patrick McGroarty at patrick.mcgroarty@wsj.com Nate Zelazo joined the Space Race in the 1950s. His company Astronautics Corporation of America went on to develop a gyroscope for mounting cameras in space and hardware and software used today on Boeing\u2019s 787 jets and Airbus\u2019s A400M turboprop transport plane. ",
        "author": "Patrick McGroarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Race Pioneer Planted Roots in Milwaukee (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2497",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-race-pioneer-planted-roots-in-milwaukee-1544196601?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=61",
        "text": "Mr. Zelazo helped run Astronautics for nearly half a century and served on its board until 2016. In retirement, when he wasn\u2019t ballroom dancing or cruising Lake Michigan in his sailboat, the Astronut, Mr. Zelazo remained a regular presence at the company\u2019s downtown Milwaukee headquarters.\nEmployees there grew accustomed to being summoned for \u201ca five minute chat with Nate\u201d that often stretched on for an hour. Those discussions were fueled by what friends and colleagues described as a passion for helping young engineers build ambitious careers close to home.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNate Zelazo, right, with Prof. Parent observes the mechanism on the TIROS Weather Satellite recording unit, which Astronautics designed and built, around the early 1960s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Astronautics Corporation of America\n \n\n\n\n\u201cHe started a space-age company in a state that at that time was known mainly for cheese, beer and old-time manufacturing,\u201d said Kanti Prasad, dean of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee\u2019s Lubar School of Business, where Mr. Zelazo served on the advisory council.\n\n\nMr. Zelazo died on Nov. 22 at 100 years of age.\nHe was born Nathaniel Katz Zelazo on Sept. 28, 1918, in Lomza, Poland, to Morris and Edith Zelazo. His sister Norma, with whom he later founded Astronautics, was born in 1922.\nHis father emigrated to the U.S. a few years later. He found work as a carpenter in New York, and saved up to bring his wife and children over to join him in 1928.\nNate Zelazo learned English and sold ice cream in Central Park before attending Stuyvesant High School and earning a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering from the City College of New York.\n\n\nObituaries\n\n\n\n\nEmilio Delgado, Who Played Luis on \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 for Over 40 Years, Has Died\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Drove Computing and Audio Forward Through Decades of Disease\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nWall Street Executive Was a Player in Foreign Affairs\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAfter the outbreak of World War II, Mr. Zelazo interrupted his graduate studies at Columbia University to design radar systems for the U.S. Navy. He continued working on engineering projects for the Defense Department after the war ended.\nIn the mid-1950s his background as a Jewish immigrant from Poland working on national defense caught the attention of Sen. Joseph McCarthy\u2019s staff, who were looking for Americans with suspected communist leanings. The scrutiny passed, without denting Mr. Zelazo\u2019s pride in his adopted country.\n\u201cAll families have myths, and more so with immigrants,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ronald Zelazo,\n\n\n\n Mr. Zelazo\u2019s son and the current chief executive and chairman of the board at Astronautics. \u201cBut my father was very proud to be an immigrant who made it in the U.S.\u201d\nNate Zelazo moved his family to Racine in the mid-1950s to lead research and development in the avionics division at Oster, better known as a manufacturer of household appliances. Mr. Zelazo resumed his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a master\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering.\nHe forged bonds with his instructors there that paid off when he learned in the late 1950s that Air Force was soliciting expertise in engineering a manned voyage to the moon. He left Oster in 1959 and founded Astronautics with his sister Norma Paige, an attorney based in New York.\n\u201cFor both Nate and Norma, Astronautics was just their life,\u201d said Holly Russek, Ms. Paige\u2019s daughter and an Astronautics vice president.\nMr. Zelazo worked with engineers recruited from Oster and with academics from UW-Madison and the University of Minnesota to calculate how to ration fuel during a round-trip moon mission. In his later years, he described it as \u201ccruise control in space.\u201d\nAstronautics went on to work on a star tracker mounted on the rocket-powered X-15 aircraft and some of the first satellites deployed to monitor weather.\nThe company also designed cockpit displays and server systems for planes and helicopters. Mr. Zelazo entertained clients from around the world on the Astronut, delighting in showing off Milwaukee\u2019s revitalized skyline from Lake Michigan.\nHe was also a fixture at galas benefiting the city\u2019s top institutions and charitable causes. After his wife Helene died in 1996, he funded the conversion of a former synagogue into UW-Milwaukee\u2019s Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts.\nMr. Zelazo also served on the board of regents at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and donated to the engineering department and art museum at Marquette University.\n\u201cHe really was a giant here in Milwaukee,\u201d said Michael Lovell, Marquette\u2019s president.\nMr. Zelazo is survived by his son, Ronald, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and Marina Marcus, his partner of 22 years.\nWrite to Patrick McGroarty at patrick.mcgroarty@wsj.com Nate Zelazo joined the Space Race in the 1950s. His company Astronautics Corporation of America went on to develop a gyroscope for mounting cameras in space and hardware and software used today on Boeing\u2019s 787 jets and Airbus\u2019s A400M turboprop transport plane. ",
        "author": "Patrick McGroarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Toni Myers, Who Turned Astronauts Into Filmmakers, Dies at 75 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2498",
        "date": "2019-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/obituaries/toni-myers-dead.html",
        "text": "She directed Imax space documentaries known for their eye-popping imagery. She directed Imax space documentaries known for their eye-popping imagery. Toni Myers, who directed Imax space documentaries, like \u201cSpace Station 3D,\u201d which required her to turn astronauts into cinematographers, died on Monday at her home in Toronto. She was 75.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Betty Grissom, Who Sued in Astronaut Husband\u2019s Death, Dies at 91 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2499",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/obituaries/betty-grissom-dead.html",
        "text": "She was shunned by the space community after she sued North American Rockwell in the launchpad death of Gus Grissom. She won a settlement. She was shunned by the space community after she sued North American Rockwell in the launchpad death of Gus Grissom. She won a settlement. Betty Grissom, the widow of the astronaut Virgil Grissom, whose death in a launchpad fire in 1967 led her to sue a NASA contractor, died on Saturday at her home in Houston. She was 91.",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Owen Garriott, 88, an Early Scientist-Astronaut, Is Dead (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2500",
        "date": "2019-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/obituaries/owen-garriott-dead.html",
        "text": "He was the science pilot on the record-breaking 59-day mission to Skylab in 1973. Ten years later, he returned to space on the shuttle Columbia. He was the science pilot on the record-breaking 59-day mission to Skylab in 1973. Ten years later, he returned to space on the shuttle Columbia. Owen K. Garriott, one of the original scientists selected to explore the cosmos firsthand and the first astronaut to operate an interstellar ham radio station, died on Monday at his home in Huntsville, Ala. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Owen Garriott, 88, an Early Scientist-Astronaut, Is Dead (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2501",
        "date": "2019-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/obituaries/owen-garriott-dead.html",
        "text": "He was the science pilot on the record-breaking 59-day mission to Skylab in 1973. Ten years later, he returned to space on the shuttle Columbia. He was the science pilot on the record-breaking 59-day mission to Skylab in 1973. Ten years later, he returned to space on the shuttle Columbia. Owen K. Garriott, one of the original scientists selected to explore the cosmos firsthand and the first astronaut to operate an interstellar ham radio station, died on Monday at his home in Huntsville, Ala. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jerrie Cobb, decorated pilot once in line to become first female astronaut, dies at 88 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2502",
        "date": "2019-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/jerrie-cobb-decorated-pilot-once-in-line-to-become-first-female-astronaut-dies-at-88/2019/04/22/a0993b0a-6445-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html",
        "text": "By all metrics, there was no doubt that Jerrie Cobb had the right stuff, that luminous combination of talent, experience, bravery and composure that distinguishes an astronaut from an earthbound pilot.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUndergoing the same battery of tests as NASA\u2019s original Mercury Seven astronauts, she sat in an Albuquerque lab in early 1960 as cold water was shot into her ears to induce vertigo. Then she swallowed three feet of rubber hose for a stomach exam and downed a pint of radioactive fluid so scientists could study her metabolism. Ms. Cobb spent a record-setting nine hours inside an isolation chamber, a dark and silent tank of water heated to match her body temperature. And for 45 minutes, she piloted a machine known as the gimbal rig, a gyroscopic, vomit-inducing spaceflight simulator that spun her on three axes at once.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe tests were conducted privately and not officially approved by NASA. But when it was announced in August that she had passed all the tests used to qualify the Mercury Seven for space flight, she was widely considered the leading contender to become America\u2019s first female astronautDubbed an \u201castronautrix\u201d and \u201castronette\u201d by publications such as Life magazine, which noted the size of her bust alongside the breadth of her aviation r\u00e9sum\u00e9, she lobbied for NASA to launch women into space, testifying at a 1962 congressional hearing and meeting with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.But Ms. Cobb, who was 88 when she died March 18 in Florida, never got the chance to step inside a space capsule and hurtle into orbit. Her efforts, and those of a dozen other women who were later nicknamed the Mercury 13, were spurned by NASA and dismissed by male peers including John Glenn.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo Ms. Cobb, a trailblazing female pilot who had spent much of her life battling those who said no woman was fit to fly, decamped to the Amazon, where for more than five decades she flew humanitarian missions to remote tribes.Delivering seeds, foods, medicine and clothing, she was deep in the jungle on July 20, 1969, when she learned by radio that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had landed on the moon. Ms. Cobb celebrated by dancing in the moonlight on her grounded plane, prancing from one wing tip to the other.Neil Armstrong, first man to step on the moon, dies at 82\u201cYes, I wish I were on the moon with my fellow pilots, exploring another celestial body,\u201d she wrote in a 1997 autobiography, \u201cJerrie Cobb, Solo Pilot.\u201d \u201cHow I would love to see our beautiful blue planet Earth floating in the blackness of space. And see the stars and galaxies in their true brilliance, without the filter of our atmosphere. But I\u2019m happy flying here in Amazonas, serving my brethren. Contenta, Se\u00f1or, contenta. (I am happy, Lord, happy).\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe daughter of an Army lieutenant colonel, Ms. Cobb started flying at 12, sitting on a stack of pillows and using blocks to reach the rudder pedals of her father\u2019s open-cockpit Waco biplane. She went on to dust crops, deliver surplus military planes around the world, and work at the Oklahoma-based Aero Design and Engineering Co. in the 1950s, as one of the few female executives in aviation.\u201cShe found a way to work as a pilot, as a woman, at a time when all those jobs would have been listed in the newspaper under the title \u2018Jobs for Men,\u2019 \u201d said Margaret A. Weitekamp, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the author of \u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex: America\u2019s First Women in Space Program.\u201dMs. Cobb set world records for speed, distance and altitude and was the first woman to fly in the vaunted Paris Air Show. In 1959, the National Pilots Association named her Pilot of the Year, and she drew the attention of William Randolph Lovelace II, an aerospace medicine scientist who had helped select the Mercury Seven.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBefore any human being had gone into space, he was already thinking about huge orbiting space stations \u2014 Disney television-show-style things, with dozens of people aboard doing scientific research and reconnaissance,\u201d Weitekamp said in a phone interview.In Lovelace\u2019s view, women were to function as an essential part of such space stations, working as secretaries or nurses. To determine whether they would be able to survive in space, he invited Ms. Cobb, then 28, to perform the same tests he had used on the Mercury astronaut candidates.After Lovelace announced in a Stockholm news conference that Ms. Cobb had aced the testing program, scoring in the top 2\u00a0percent of pilots and bettering many of her male colleagues, public interest in a female astronaut program began to grow.Story continues below advertisementMs. Cobb helped Lovelace and his collaborator, Air Force Brig. Gen. Don Flickinger, select additional pilots for their Woman in Space Program, poring over flight records to identify promising female aviators. With support and funding from Jacqueline Cochran, the first woman to break the sound barrier, 19 female pilots took the tests.AdvertisementIn addition to Ms. Cobb, twelve more passed with \u201cno medical reservations,\u201d forming a cohort that Ms. Cobb described as the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, or FLATs. But the program was disbanded in late summer 1961, after a Navy aviation school in Pensacola, Fla., barred Lovelace from using its spaceflight testing facilities without official permission from NASA.Ms. Cobb became the country\u2019s most prominent supporter of female astronauts, seeking to overturn a NASA provision that required all astronaut candidates to have experience flying military jets \u2014 an opportunity that was closed to women.Story continues below advertisementWorking with Jane B. Hart, a fellow FLAT and the wife of Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.), she attended a House subcommittee hearing, where she testified that female pilots were \u201cnot trying to join a battle of the sexes.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cWe seek, only, a place in our nation\u2019s space future without discrimination,\u201d she said, two years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed sex discrimination.John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95Ms. Cobb\u2019s testimony was followed by that of astronauts such as Glenn, who had recently become the first American to orbit the Earth. \u201cThe men go off and fight the wars and design the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them,\u201d he said. \u201cThe fact that women are not in this field is a matter of our social order. It may be undesirable.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBy that time, NASA\u2019s focus had shifted entirely to putting a man on the moon, and agency officials said that redesigning flights suits for female astronauts would be costly and time-consuming in the midst of the Space Race. The milestone of sending the first woman to space was left to the Soviet Union, which launched Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. The first American woman in space, Sally Ride, followed suit in 1983.AdvertisementMs. Cobb had by then established herself as a missionary and humanitarian force in South America, where she had once delivered military planes to Peru and spent days in an Ecuadoran prison, accused of being a spy for Peru. Flying solo with the aid of hand-drawn maps, she was honored by the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.The only thing that would take her away from her work, she said, was another chance to go into space \u2014 an opportunity that presented itself in 1998, when Glenn, then 77 and a U.S. senator, became the oldest person to fly in space.Story continues below advertisementA grass-roots campaign to \u201cSend Jerrie Into Space\u201d was launched on behalf of Ms. Cobb, who was then 67 and received support from groups including the National Organization for Women. Traveling to Washington, she met with Glenn and later with NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, calling for more female astronauts regardless of whether she made it into space.AdvertisementThe mission never came to pass. But Ms. Cobb was there at the launchpad in July 1999, watching alongside other surviving FLATs as Eileen Collins became NASA\u2019s first female shuttle commander. Four years earlier, when Collins became the first female pilot of a shuttle, she launched into space carrying a token from Ms. Cobb: a gold pin in the shape of a Colombian bird, a symbol of the plane she flew in South America.Indigenous tribes, Ms. Cobb said, had always referred to it as \u201cthe bird.\u201dSally Ride dies at 61; was first American woman sent into spaceGeraldyn Menor Cobb was born in Norman, Okla., on March 5, 1931, and the family moved frequently among military bases, settling in Oklahoma City.Jerrie, as she was always known, was shy and mocked by teachers for her lisp. She found refuge first in the countryside, riding horses bareback across the fenceless prairie, and then in the air. \u201cThe sky was the only place I felt really at home,\u201d she wrote in her autobiography.Ms. Cobb received her private pilot\u2019s license at 16, her commercial license two years later, and by 19 was certified as a flight and ground instructor. She used money she earned playing professional softball to buy a Fairchild PT-23.Her aviation career took off in Miami, where she had sought to work as a DC-3 pilot but was told instead to apply as a stewardess. When she overheard Jack Ford, a government contractor, saying he needed help delivering training aircraft to Peru, she signed on and was soon hired on the basis of her log book, which showed more than 3,000 hours of flying time.Ms. Cobb worked for several years with Ford\u2019s company, Fleetways, and according to news accounts they were engaged to marry when his plane caught fire and exploded in 1955. Her own death was announced Thursday in a family statement, which did not say precisely where or how she died. A representative for the family, science journalist Miles O\u2019Brien, said Ms. Cobb was quite private, and the family declined to provide additional information.Although Ms. Cobb was always highly regarded by her peers, her public renown has only grown in recent years. She was the subject of an off-Broadway play, \u201cThey Promised Her the Moon\u201d by Laurel Ollstein; was featured in a 2018 Netflix documentary, \u201cMercury 13\u201d; and in 2012 was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.Still, she often played down her accomplishments. \u201cI had no gift for greatness,\u201d the hall quoted her as saying. \u201cI was no pioneer. I was just a girl who never got enough of flying.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nMirjana Markovic, wife and political adviser to Serbia\u2019s Slobodan Milosevic, dies at 76Watergate conspirator James McCord Jr. died two years ago. His death was never announced.David Hamburg, honored for efforts to end global violence, dies at 93 She performed better than many of her male peers, but in the early 1960s NASA decided against sending women into space. Jerrie Cobb, decorated pilot once in line to become first female astronaut, dies at 88",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jerrie Cobb, decorated pilot once in line to become first female astronaut, dies at 88 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2503",
        "date": "2019-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/jerrie-cobb-decorated-pilot-once-in-line-to-become-first-female-astronaut-dies-at-88/2019/04/22/a0993b0a-6445-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html",
        "text": "By all metrics, there was no doubt that Jerrie Cobb had the right stuff, that luminous combination of talent, experience, bravery and composure that distinguishes an astronaut from an earthbound pilot.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUndergoing the same battery of tests as NASA\u2019s original Mercury Seven astronauts, she sat in an Albuquerque lab in early 1960 as cold water was shot into her ears to induce vertigo. Then she swallowed three feet of rubber hose for a stomach exam and downed a pint of radioactive fluid so scientists could study her metabolism. Ms. Cobb spent a record-setting nine hours inside an isolation chamber, a dark and silent tank of water heated to match her body temperature. And for 45 minutes, she piloted a machine known as the gimbal rig, a gyroscopic, vomit-inducing spaceflight simulator that spun her on three axes at once.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe tests were conducted privately and not officially approved by NASA. But when it was announced in August that she had passed all the tests used to qualify the Mercury Seven for space flight, she was widely considered the leading contender to become America\u2019s first female astronautDubbed an \u201castronautrix\u201d and \u201castronette\u201d by publications such as Life magazine, which noted the size of her bust alongside the breadth of her aviation r\u00e9sum\u00e9, she lobbied for NASA to launch women into space, testifying at a 1962 congressional hearing and meeting with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.But Ms. Cobb, who was 88 when she died March 18 in Florida, never got the chance to step inside a space capsule and hurtle into orbit. Her efforts, and those of a dozen other women who were later nicknamed the Mercury 13, were spurned by NASA and dismissed by male peers including John Glenn.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo Ms. Cobb, a trailblazing female pilot who had spent much of her life battling those who said no woman was fit to fly, decamped to the Amazon, where for more than five decades she flew humanitarian missions to remote tribes.Delivering seeds, foods, medicine and clothing, she was deep in the jungle on July 20, 1969, when she learned by radio that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had landed on the moon. Ms. Cobb celebrated by dancing in the moonlight on her grounded plane, prancing from one wing tip to the other.Neil Armstrong, first man to step on the moon, dies at 82\u201cYes, I wish I were on the moon with my fellow pilots, exploring another celestial body,\u201d she wrote in a 1997 autobiography, \u201cJerrie Cobb, Solo Pilot.\u201d \u201cHow I would love to see our beautiful blue planet Earth floating in the blackness of space. And see the stars and galaxies in their true brilliance, without the filter of our atmosphere. But I\u2019m happy flying here in Amazonas, serving my brethren. Contenta, Se\u00f1or, contenta. (I am happy, Lord, happy).\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe daughter of an Army lieutenant colonel, Ms. Cobb started flying at 12, sitting on a stack of pillows and using blocks to reach the rudder pedals of her father\u2019s open-cockpit Waco biplane. She went on to dust crops, deliver surplus military planes around the world, and work at the Oklahoma-based Aero Design and Engineering Co. in the 1950s, as one of the few female executives in aviation.\u201cShe found a way to work as a pilot, as a woman, at a time when all those jobs would have been listed in the newspaper under the title \u2018Jobs for Men,\u2019 \u201d said Margaret A. Weitekamp, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the author of \u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex: America\u2019s First Women in Space Program.\u201dMs. Cobb set world records for speed, distance and altitude and was the first woman to fly in the vaunted Paris Air Show. In 1959, the National Pilots Association named her Pilot of the Year, and she drew the attention of William Randolph Lovelace II, an aerospace medicine scientist who had helped select the Mercury Seven.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBefore any human being had gone into space, he was already thinking about huge orbiting space stations \u2014 Disney television-show-style things, with dozens of people aboard doing scientific research and reconnaissance,\u201d Weitekamp said in a phone interview.In Lovelace\u2019s view, women were to function as an essential part of such space stations, working as secretaries or nurses. To determine whether they would be able to survive in space, he invited Ms. Cobb, then 28, to perform the same tests he had used on the Mercury astronaut candidates.After Lovelace announced in a Stockholm news conference that Ms. Cobb had aced the testing program, scoring in the top 2\u00a0percent of pilots and bettering many of her male colleagues, public interest in a female astronaut program began to grow.Story continues below advertisementMs. Cobb helped Lovelace and his collaborator, Air Force Brig. Gen. Don Flickinger, select additional pilots for their Woman in Space Program, poring over flight records to identify promising female aviators. With support and funding from Jacqueline Cochran, the first woman to break the sound barrier, 19 female pilots took the tests.AdvertisementIn addition to Ms. Cobb, twelve more passed with \u201cno medical reservations,\u201d forming a cohort that Ms. Cobb described as the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, or FLATs. But the program was disbanded in late summer 1961, after a Navy aviation school in Pensacola, Fla., barred Lovelace from using its spaceflight testing facilities without official permission from NASA.Ms. Cobb became the country\u2019s most prominent supporter of female astronauts, seeking to overturn a NASA provision that required all astronaut candidates to have experience flying military jets \u2014 an opportunity that was closed to women.Story continues below advertisementWorking with Jane B. Hart, a fellow FLAT and the wife of Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.), she attended a House subcommittee hearing, where she testified that female pilots were \u201cnot trying to join a battle of the sexes.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cWe seek, only, a place in our nation\u2019s space future without discrimination,\u201d she said, two years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed sex discrimination.John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95Ms. Cobb\u2019s testimony was followed by that of astronauts such as Glenn, who had recently become the first American to orbit the Earth. \u201cThe men go off and fight the wars and design the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them,\u201d he said. \u201cThe fact that women are not in this field is a matter of our social order. It may be undesirable.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBy that time, NASA\u2019s focus had shifted entirely to putting a man on the moon, and agency officials said that redesigning flights suits for female astronauts would be costly and time-consuming in the midst of the Space Race. The milestone of sending the first woman to space was left to the Soviet Union, which launched Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. The first American woman in space, Sally Ride, followed suit in 1983.AdvertisementMs. Cobb had by then established herself as a missionary and humanitarian force in South America, where she had once delivered military planes to Peru and spent days in an Ecuadoran prison, accused of being a spy for Peru. Flying solo with the aid of hand-drawn maps, she was honored by the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.The only thing that would take her away from her work, she said, was another chance to go into space \u2014 an opportunity that presented itself in 1998, when Glenn, then 77 and a U.S. senator, became the oldest person to fly in space.Story continues below advertisementA grass-roots campaign to \u201cSend Jerrie Into Space\u201d was launched on behalf of Ms. Cobb, who was then 67 and received support from groups including the National Organization for Women. Traveling to Washington, she met with Glenn and later with NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, calling for more female astronauts regardless of whether she made it into space.AdvertisementThe mission never came to pass. But Ms. Cobb was there at the launchpad in July 1999, watching alongside other surviving FLATs as Eileen Collins became NASA\u2019s first female shuttle commander. Four years earlier, when Collins became the first female pilot of a shuttle, she launched into space carrying a token from Ms. Cobb: a gold pin in the shape of a Colombian bird, a symbol of the plane she flew in South America.Indigenous tribes, Ms. Cobb said, had always referred to it as \u201cthe bird.\u201dSally Ride dies at 61; was first American woman sent into spaceGeraldyn Menor Cobb was born in Norman, Okla., on March 5, 1931, and the family moved frequently among military bases, settling in Oklahoma City.Jerrie, as she was always known, was shy and mocked by teachers for her lisp. She found refuge first in the countryside, riding horses bareback across the fenceless prairie, and then in the air. \u201cThe sky was the only place I felt really at home,\u201d she wrote in her autobiography.Ms. Cobb received her private pilot\u2019s license at 16, her commercial license two years later, and by 19 was certified as a flight and ground instructor. She used money she earned playing professional softball to buy a Fairchild PT-23.Her aviation career took off in Miami, where she had sought to work as a DC-3 pilot but was told instead to apply as a stewardess. When she overheard Jack Ford, a government contractor, saying he needed help delivering training aircraft to Peru, she signed on and was soon hired on the basis of her log book, which showed more than 3,000 hours of flying time.Ms. Cobb worked for several years with Ford\u2019s company, Fleetways, and according to news accounts they were engaged to marry when his plane caught fire and exploded in 1955. Her own death was announced Thursday in a family statement, which did not say precisely where or how she died. A representative for the family, science journalist Miles O\u2019Brien, said Ms. Cobb was quite private, and the family declined to provide additional information.Although Ms. Cobb was always highly regarded by her peers, her public renown has only grown in recent years. She was the subject of an off-Broadway play, \u201cThey Promised Her the Moon\u201d by Laurel Ollstein; was featured in a 2018 Netflix documentary, \u201cMercury 13\u201d; and in 2012 was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.Still, she often played down her accomplishments. \u201cI had no gift for greatness,\u201d the hall quoted her as saying. \u201cI was no pioneer. I was just a girl who never got enough of flying.\u201dRead more Washington Post obituaries\nMirjana Markovic, wife and political adviser to Serbia\u2019s Slobodan Milosevic, dies at 76Watergate conspirator James McCord Jr. died two years ago. His death was never announced.David Hamburg, honored for efforts to end global violence, dies at 93 She performed better than many of her male peers, but in the early 1960s NASA decided against sending women into space. Jerrie Cobb, decorated pilot once in line to become first female astronaut, dies at 88",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Ireland, a Getaway Far, Far Away (WSJ: Off Duty Travel) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2504",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-ireland-a-getaway-far-far-away-1541531777?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=17",
        "text": "Millennia later, Luke Skywalker, who had the entire solar system to choose from, also selected Skellig, known in cinematic terms as Ahch-To, as his refuge in \u201cStar Wars: The Force Awakens,\u201d calling it \u201cthe most unfindable place in the galaxy\u201d and giving moviegoers a glimpse of its wild terrain. For those craving isolated me-time, Skellig Michael has a long history of obliging.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSkellig Michael has made cameos in Star Wars movies.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WALT DISNEY PICTURES/LUCASFILM/ALAMY\n \n\n\n\nMr. Skywalker, arriving by spacecraft, had an easier time of it than Fion\u00e1n\u2019s brethren and the groups of a dozen or so other monks thought to have lived on the Skellig (from scaelig, Irish for \u201crock\u201d) at any one time up to the 12th century. They made the trip to what George Bernard Shaw called \u201cthis impossible rock\u201d in currachs, wooden row boats lined in hides. Considering the aggressive seas and turbulent weather in those parts, simply arriving intact would have been miraculous. But what these men accomplished during their stay is mind-boggling. The beehive-shape stone housing and oratories (small chapels) that remain, despite Viking invasions and centuries of wind and storms, are remarkable feats of design and durability.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe views on the climb to a monastic site are gobsmacking: ocean crashing, crags piercing an illuminated sky.\u201d\n\n\n\nDespite my undeniable Irish composition (red hair, freckles, affinity for leprechauns) I\u2019d never set foot on the Emerald Isle. The remoteness of Skellig Michael and its testament to the extremes humankind will go to appeal to a higher power prompted me to finally make the trip. With the help of Naomi Sheehy of Ireland Luxury Travel, I booked a seat on the Skellig Walker, a recently built 38-foot boat built to ferry tourists between Portmagee, a cheery tourist-dependent town on the Wild Atlantic Way, and the island. \n\n\nThe September morning of our departure was sunny and clear, but large swells at Skellig Michael\u2019s landing point were prohibitive and the trip was canceled. This isn\u2019t uncommon, so it\u2019s advisable to plan on spending a few days in the neighborhood. The following day, the sea had settled and I joined other ancient-monastic-site enthusiasts, including a couple who\u2019d come in Star Wars regalia. Fifteen boat operators are granted licenses to ply the roughly hourlong route to the Skellig between May and October, with a maximum of 12 passengers each. The rock\u2019s 2015 Star Wars cameo ratcheted up interest\u201417,000 visited the Unesco World Heritage site last year, an increase of about 5,000 from 2015. In response to concerns that Skellig Michael may be over-trampled, when it came time to film \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d a replica of the monastery\u2019s ruins was recreated further north.\nAs we motored out past Bolus Head, the westernmost tip of the Iveragh Peninsula, the water was choppy and the winds full. After about an hour we came to the Little Skellig, a companion rock (larger than Michael despite the name) covered in some 39,000 cacophonous pairs of northern gannets who live beak-by-jowl on a rock-face shimmering with their guano. As their swoops and calls faded behind us, the twin pinnacles of Skellig Michael loomed. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA colony of gannets on Little Skellig.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\nWe disembarked (a little dance with the swells is required when stepping from boat to dock) and listened to a guide give a brief talk about the island\u2019s history. Then we set off to climb at our own pace. \nSix hundred rough-edged stone stairs, placed centuries ago, ascend at a steep incline to the remains of the Skellig\u2019s original monastic site. (A later hermitage, accessed by a death-defying path, is closed to the public.) The climb isn\u2019t particularly strenuous, but it\u2019s daunting. There are no railings to offer a handhold once you\u2019re past a short stretch at the base. One step at a time is a good mantra until you acclimate. After that you\u2019ll be able to lift your gaze enough to notice the grass stretched over the rocklike layers of pool-table felt, the pock marks signaling rabbit warrens and puffin burrows, and the gobsmacking views\u2014ocean crashing, crags piercing an illuminated sky, the wind a whooshing soundtrack. Assuming heaven is up, one can imagine the monks felt a lot closer from here.\n\n\nYour Travel Questions AnsweredJoin WSJ editors and the Middle Seat columnist as they discuss the best and worst airports and answer your travel questions ahead of the busy holiday travel season, Nov. 15 at 1 p.m. ET. Submit your questions to subscribercall@wsj.com, and our journalists will answer live during the call. Register here. \n\n\nThe 20-minute climb is nearly forgotten once you step through a stone portal into the monastery\u2019s terraced grounds. A cluster of six beehive-shaped stone cells and an oratory comprise the main grouping, along with the ruins of a medieval church constructed later. On a further terrace sits another oratory. The buildi From 6th-century monks to Star Wars Jedi, Ireland\u2019s remote Skellig Michael has long been an escape for those looking to disappear. ",
        "author": "Margot Dougherty"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New Outdoor Getaway: Landscapes That Have Been \u2018Rewilded\u2019 (WSJ: Off Duty Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2505",
        "date": "2018-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-call-of-rewilding-how-travelers-are-finding-their-inner-animal-1537468658?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=22",
        "text": "My guide, Mike Kautz, the recreation manager at American Prairie Reserve (APR), certainly seems skeptical of my ability. When I told him in an email that I was \u201cnot particularly outdoorsy,\u201d he volunteered to meet me when I arrived and lead me to the yurt. Riding ahead of me on a motorcycle, he stops and turns every once in a while to see whether I have driven the Suburban off a cliff.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMontana\u2019s American Prairie Reserve encompasses 400,000 acres that are being restored to their 18th-century beauty. Visitors can overnight in a campground or one of the secluded yurts.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Reid Morth\n \n\n\n\nIf there were a place to commune with nature\u2014and not a single human\u2014in the Lower 48, this would be it. Since 2001 the nonprofit organization behind APR, funded largely by individual donors, has been buying ranch and private land to return these grasslands to the state they enjoyed when Lewis and Clark first arrived here in 1805. At 400,000 acres, APR is already larger than the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and the nonprofit is aiming for around 3.5 million acres of interlocking public and private land that would become a refuge for bison, pronghorns, prairie dogs, wolves and grizzly bears. In an effort to foster public goodwill among the neighbors and highlight accessibility, APR is building a series of affordable yurts and huts on the prairie for the public. Hike to one of the shelters, spend a couple of evenings for $125 a night, then move on to the next. Enjoy America as it was enjoyed by Native Americans, French trappers and the hardiest pioneers. \n\n\n\n\nWhen we finally arrive at the yurt, it is as sleek as a spaceship and nestled into the side of the hill to protect it from the wind. In the distance, rolling hills of grass and sage unfurl to the horizon. Below, the Missouri River winds through a valley of cottonwood trees. There is not even a whisper of human habitation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Arctic Retreat in Lapland.\n\n\n\nMike shows me around the yurt, which is all light pine wood, gray steel accents and white cloth walls, with a living-room and dining area and a sleeping area that can sleep up to nine. The dry toilet is discreetly hidden behind two doors. There is a stove and refrigerator and a bucket under the sink for catching dishwater. I put away the groceries I bought in Lewistown before I entered the reserve. \u201cShould I show you how to change the tire on the Chevy?\u201d he asks me, ready to go. \u201cNo,\u201d I say. \u201cI won\u2019t be able to change a tire on a Chevy.\u201d He shrugs. \u201cOK, well if we don\u2019t see you in a couple of days we\u2019ll send someone out.\u201d Then he hands me a sleeping bag and places two 5 gallon jugs of water on the table. He gets back on his bike and disappears over an outcrop. I stand at the door like a pioneer woman, waving my handkerchief in the infernal wind. I am alone. Let the rewilding begin.\n\n\nRewilding began as a conservation movement roughly 30 years ago\u2014take land that had been hammered by humans and turn it back to its natural state. First let the trees and grasses grow back, then introduce herd animals like deer and bison. Insects and birds would thrive and eventually, apex predators would come back, restoring the cycle to one of health and equilibrium. APR\u2019s founders aim to do that, while adding a tourism element to the operation, as do other rewilders. The Tompkins family, creators of the North Face retail brand, sponsors a host of rewilding projects in Chile and Argentina that have opened around 2 million acres to the public. Around 20 years ago, writer Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell turned their 3,500-acre Knepp Farm, outside London, into a rewilded area that now hosts some of Britain\u2019s rarest species. The Dutch government took a shine to the idea of rewilding, introducing deer and Konik horses to a 12,300-acre parcel of marshland outside Amsterdam but failed to cull the herd in winter or introduce any predators. The animals began to starve and distraught citizens found themselves pitching hay over the fence for the horses.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmerican Prairie Reserve\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Dennis Linghor\n \n\n\n\nSuccessful rewilding takes a tremendous amount of space because predators need large territories. The politics of that, not to mention the economics, are daunting. What happens when you turn ranchland into prairie or farms into forests? Well, you lose money, unless you can offer the public an experience worth paying for. Enter spiritual rewilding. \u201cAt the end of the day, we all come from Africa,\u201d said Deborah Calmeyer, CEO and founder of Roar Africa, a luxury safari operator. Last April she brought a small group to the Segera Retreat in Kenya to be rewilded. Guests did all the normal safari things but also met with a nutritionist to discuss ancient man\u2019s eating habits and a psychiatrist to discuss their relationship with animals and the land. \u201cWe\u2019ve gained so much in lifestyle,\u201d Ms. Calmeyer said. \u201cBut we have also lost The \u2018rewilding\u2019 movement is restoring land to its savage state and letting stressed-out travelers reconnect to nature\u2014with life-changing results ",
        "author": "Nina Sovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Mountain Getaway\u2014in Minus 50 Degrees (WSJ: Off Duty Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2506",
        "date": "2017-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-mountain-getawayin-minus-50-degrees-1492010857?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=96",
        "text": "So, when on a stiflingly hot day last July I saw that the Mount Washington Observatory released to the public slots for seven midwinter overnight excursions, I signed up. Organized by themes such as mountaineering, winter photography and climate change, the trips offer visitors the chance to experience extreme weather conditions and sleep in the observatory\u2019s living quarters. The overnights sell out quickly, even at $999 for nonmembers. I grabbed the final opening on the first trip of the season, in January, titled Weather Basics. I felt cooler already. \nIn the weeks before my trip, I checked the summit conditions frequently. Occasional warm spells in the 40s alternated with intensely frigid days. One morning clocked a wind chill of minus 85 degrees. Under those conditions, exposed skin can become frostbitten in less than two minutes. I triple-checked their gear list to make sure I had everything.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRime ice on a signpost at the summit of Mount Washington.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mount Washington Observatory\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe morning of the trip, at 8:30 a.m., I and eight other travelers\u2014all New Englanders, ranging from a high-school student with meteorological ambitions to an eminent ecologist\u2014convened in a snowcat garage at the base of the Auto Road. There, we met Will Broussard, the education coordinator for the observatory; Marsha Rich, an expert in meteorology education who would be our instructor; and the snowcat operators. They gave us a safety talk and an update on summit conditions\u2014an air temperature just below zero, clear skies, calm winds and visibility spanning the Presidential mountain range. I was disappointed. I came to \u201cthe Home of the World\u2019s Worst Weather\u201d for a subarctic blizzard and I was getting a picture postcard instead. \n\n\nThe eight mile, two-hour journey to the summit\u2014snowcats aren\u2019t the speediest conveyances\u2014took us up through boreal forest, thick with conifer trees, which eventually thinned and gave way to the krummholz (German for \u201cbent wood\u201d) zone\u2014the point at which trees become stunted and gnarled by constant wind. Dramatic as the plant life was, the sky between Mount Jefferson and Mount Adams to the north captivated me. Blue dissolved into hyper-vivid greens and yellows\u2014a sky I\u2019d seen the day before in Maxfield Parrish\u2019s painting \u201cFreeman Farm: Winter,\u201d at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester. I had always assumed that Parrish\u2019s saturated palate was a product of artistic license, but it turns out to have been an understated representation of the real thing. \n\n\n\n\u201cDressing to go out in those conditions felt like suiting up for a space walk.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt the top, the snowcat disgorged us at the Sherman Adams Visitor Center. We were greeted inside with a poster headlined \u201cCasualties of Mount Washington\u201d listing most of the more than 150 people who have died on or around the mountain. A nearby sign listed the symptoms of hypothermia. The snack bar and gift shop hibernated in darkness. Quite the welcome. \nA red spiral staircase, the spine of the observatory, connected the main level, which houses the weather center, to the instrument tower, where a Pitot tube measures wind velocity (planes use them to gauge air speed). We\u2019d be sharing the subterranean living quarters with the staff, including some of the half dozen observers who rotate through the weekly shifts at the summit. Though the entire building is designed to withstand winds of 300 miles an hour, Marsha told us, \u201cThe goal is to spend as much time outside as we can comfortably,\u201d before ushering us upstairs to bundle up for the first of our excursions.\nOutside, our boots crunching on the crusty snow, we explored the complex of frost-covered structures and radio towers. Marsha and Will led us downhill to examine signposts sprouting enormous snowy tail fins made of feathery rime ice. Rime, Will explained, forms when supercooled water vapor comes in contact with a surface and crystallizes into feather-like formations. \u201cIt\u2019s like a fossil record of the wind, sometimes growing 9 or 10 inches per hour,\u201d he said. \nLater that evening, over glasses of warm (nonalcoholic) wassail, we asked two of the observers about life and science in such an extreme environment. While an increasing number of weather stations around the world are unmanned, a few, like Mount Washington, are staffed by meteorologists and weather observers who regularly venture out in 100 mph winds to knock ice from instruments with crow bars. \u201cI think of it like manned space missions,\u201d said Tom Padham, one of the observers. Ryan Knapp, another observer who was just getting ready for the overnight shift added, \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to sit at a desk and look at something on a computer, it\u2019s another to actually be out experiencing it.\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but admire the dedication of these people, who brave such arduous conditions to make sure the dots on a graph go in the right place.\nThe next morning, shortly before 7 a.m., we geared up to watch the daybreak. The temperature had dropped overnight. The windchill neared minus 50 degrees. Dressing to go out in those conditions, making sure that not an inch of skin was exposed, did indeed feel like suiting up for a space walk. Outside, the snow-covered towers and buildings glowed pink in the sunrise. Marsha pointed to a mountain on the western horizon and asked if anyone could identify it. When nobody could, she explained that it was actually us\u2014the shadow of Mount Washington cast by the sun behind us. The rest of the day included another classroom session (ask me sometime about barometric pressure), a tour of the weather center and a trip to the top of the instrument tower. \nOver lunch, Marsha asked who wanted to walk down the mountain for a while before it was time to leave. My hand shot up. It was the only one. Once again we bundled up and set off. We chatted\u2014or rather, shouted above the roaring wind, stopping occasionally to watch channels of blowing snow course across the mountainside. After about a mile, I stopped to wipe the frost from the inside of my goggles. The air felt like a sharp smack to my exposed face and seemed to crystallize the moisture in my lungs. Still, I could only marvel at the otherworldliness of the landscape. As the snowcat rumbled up behind us, Marsha said, \u201cAren\u2019t we lucky to be here? What an incredible planet.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nTHE LOWDOWN // Chilling on Mount Washington Staying There: New Hampshire\u2019s Mount Washington is about a three-hour drive from Boston. Slots for the 2018 Mount Washington Observatory Summit Overnights will be released in late summer, first to observatory members, then to the general public. $999, mountwashington.org\n\n\nMore in Off Duty Travel\n\n\n\n\nWashington, D.C., Hotels Worth Lingering In\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\nIstanbul\u2019s Latest Reinvention: A Luxury Tourist Destination\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nIn Miami, a Search for a Perfect Mojito \nMarch 1, 2022 \n\n\nAntarctica Is the Ultimate Family Vacation for Bonding, Adventure and Bragging Rights\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nThe Spa Getaway That\u2019s Been a Hollywood Hideout Since the 1940s\nFebruary 18, 2022 Hoping for a blizzard, an extreme-weather nerd spends a night at the top of Mount Washington, New England\u2019s highest, most tempestuous peak ",
        "author": "Matthew Kronsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Mountain Getaway\u2014in Minus 50 Degrees (WSJ: Off Duty Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2507",
        "date": "2017-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-mountain-getawayin-minus-50-degrees-1492010857?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=84",
        "text": "So, when on a stiflingly hot day last July I saw that the Mount Washington Observatory released to the public slots for seven midwinter overnight excursions, I signed up. Organized by themes such as mountaineering, winter photography and climate change, the trips offer visitors the chance to experience extreme weather conditions and sleep in the observatory\u2019s living quarters. The overnights sell out quickly, even at $999 for nonmembers. I grabbed the final opening on the first trip of the season, in January, titled Weather Basics. I felt cooler already. \nIn the weeks before my trip, I checked the summit conditions frequently. Occasional warm spells in the 40s alternated with intensely frigid days. One morning clocked a wind chill of minus 85 degrees. Under those conditions, exposed skin can become frostbitten in less than two minutes. I triple-checked their gear list to make sure I had everything.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRime ice on a signpost at the summit of Mount Washington.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mount Washington Observatory\n \n\n\n\nThe morning of the trip, at 8:30 a.m., I and eight other travelers\u2014all New Englanders, ranging from a high-school student with meteorological ambitions to an eminent ecologist\u2014convened in a snowcat garage at the base of the Auto Road. There, we met Will Broussard, the education coordinator for the observatory; Marsha Rich, an expert in meteorology education who would be our instructor; and the snowcat operators. They gave us a safety talk and an update on summit conditions\u2014an air temperature just below zero, clear skies, calm winds and visibility spanning the Presidential mountain range. I was disappointed. I came to \u201cthe Home of the World\u2019s Worst Weather\u201d for a subarctic blizzard and I was getting a picture postcard instead. \n\n\nThe eight mile, two-hour journey to the summit\u2014snowcats aren\u2019t the speediest conveyances\u2014took us up through boreal forest, thick with conifer trees, which eventually thinned and gave way to the krummholz (German for \u201cbent wood\u201d) zone\u2014the point at which trees become stunted and gnarled by constant wind. Dramatic as the plant life was, the sky between Mount Jefferson and Mount Adams to the north captivated me. Blue dissolved into hyper-vivid greens and yellows\u2014a sky I\u2019d seen the day before in Maxfield Parrish\u2019s painting \u201cFreeman Farm: Winter,\u201d at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester. I had always assumed that Parrish\u2019s saturated palate was a product of artistic license, but it turns out to have been an understated representation of the real thing. \n\n\n\n\u201cDressing to go out in those conditions felt like suiting up for a space walk.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt the top, the snowcat disgorged us at the Sherman Adams Visitor Center. We were greeted inside with a poster headlined \u201cCasualties of Mount Washington\u201d listing most of the more than 150 people who have died on or around the mountain. A nearby sign listed the symptoms of hypothermia. The snack bar and gift shop hibernated in darkness. Quite the welcome. \nA red spiral staircase, the spine of the observatory, connected the main level, which houses the weather center, to the instrument tower, where a Pitot tube measures wind velocity (planes use them to gauge air speed). We\u2019d be sharing the subterranean living quarters with the staff, including some of the half dozen observers who rotate through the weekly shifts at the summit. Though the entire building is designed to withstand winds of 300 miles an hour, Marsha told us, \u201cThe goal is to spend as much time outside as we can comfortably,\u201d before ushering us upstairs to bundle up for the first of our excursions.\nOutside, our boots crunching on the crusty snow, we explored the complex of frost-covered structures and radio towers. Marsha and Will led us downhill to examine signposts sprouting enormous snowy tail fins made of feathery rime ice. Rime, Will explained, forms when supercooled water vapor comes in contact with a surface and crystallizes into feather-like formations. \u201cIt\u2019s like a fossil record of the wind, sometimes growing 9 or 10 inches per hour,\u201d he said. \nLater that evening, over glasses of warm (nonalcoholic) wassail, we asked two of the observers about life and science in such an extreme environment. While an increasing number of weather stations around the world are unmanned, a few, like Mount Washington, are staffed by meteorologists and weather observers who regularly venture out in 100 mph winds to knock ice from instruments with crow bars. \u201cI think of it like manned space missions,\u201d said Tom Padham, one of the observers. Ryan Knapp, another observer who was just getting ready for the overnight shift added, \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to sit at a desk and look at something on a computer, it\u2019s another to actually be out experiencing it.\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but admire the dedication of these people, who brave such arduous conditions to make sure the dots on a graph go in the right place.\nThe next morning, shortly before 7 a.m., we geared up to watch the daybreak. Hoping for a blizzard, an extreme-weather nerd spends a night at the top of Mount Washington, New England\u2019s highest, most tempestuous peak ",
        "author": "Matthew Kronsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Mountain Getaway\u2014in Minus 50 Degrees (WSJ: Off Duty Travel) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2508",
        "date": "2017-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-mountain-getawayin-minus-50-degrees-1492010857?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=125",
        "text": "So, when on a stiflingly hot day last July I saw that the Mount Washington Observatory released to the public slots for seven midwinter overnight excursions, I signed up. Organized by themes such as mountaineering, winter photography and climate change, the trips offer visitors the chance to experience extreme weather conditions and sleep in the observatory\u2019s living quarters. The overnights sell out quickly, even at $999 for nonmembers. I grabbed the final opening on the first trip of the season, in January, titled Weather Basics. I felt cooler already. \nIn the weeks before my trip, I checked the summit conditions frequently. Occasional warm spells in the 40s alternated with intensely frigid days. One morning clocked a wind chill of minus 85 degrees. Under those conditions, exposed skin can become frostbitten in less than two minutes. I triple-checked their gear list to make sure I had everything.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRime ice on a signpost at the summit of Mount Washington.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mount Washington Observatory\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe morning of the trip, at 8:30 a.m., I and eight other travelers\u2014all New Englanders, ranging from a high-school student with meteorological ambitions to an eminent ecologist\u2014convened in a snowcat garage at the base of the Auto Road. There, we met Will Broussard, the education coordinator for the observatory; Marsha Rich, an expert in meteorology education who would be our instructor; and the snowcat operators. They gave us a safety talk and an update on summit conditions\u2014an air temperature just below zero, clear skies, calm winds and visibility spanning the Presidential mountain range. I was disappointed. I came to \u201cthe Home of the World\u2019s Worst Weather\u201d for a subarctic blizzard and I was getting a picture postcard instead. \n\n\nThe eight mile, two-hour journey to the summit\u2014snowcats aren\u2019t the speediest conveyances\u2014took us up through boreal forest, thick with conifer trees, which eventually thinned and gave way to the krummholz (German for \u201cbent wood\u201d) zone\u2014the point at which trees become stunted and gnarled by constant wind. Dramatic as the plant life was, the sky between Mount Jefferson and Mount Adams to the north captivated me. Blue dissolved into hyper-vivid greens and yellows\u2014a sky I\u2019d seen the day before in Maxfield Parrish\u2019s painting \u201cFreeman Farm: Winter,\u201d at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester. I had always assumed that Parrish\u2019s saturated palate was a product of artistic license, but it turns out to have been an understated representation of the real thing. \n\n\n\n\u201cDressing to go out in those conditions felt like suiting up for a space walk.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt the top, the snowcat disgorged us at the Sherman Adams Visitor Center. We were greeted inside with a poster headlined \u201cCasualties of Mount Washington\u201d listing most of the more than 150 people who have died on or around the mountain. A nearby sign listed the symptoms of hypothermia. The snack bar and gift shop hibernated in darkness. Quite the welcome. \nA red spiral staircase, the spine of the observatory, connected the main level, which houses the weather center, to the instrument tower, where a Pitot tube measures wind velocity (planes use them to gauge air speed). We\u2019d be sharing the subterranean living quarters with the staff, including some of the half dozen observers who rotate through the weekly shifts at the summit. Though the entire building is designed to withstand winds of 300 miles an hour, Marsha told us, \u201cThe goal is to spend as much time outside as we can comfortably,\u201d before ushering us upstairs to bundle up for the first of our excursions.\nOutside, our boots crunching on the crusty snow, we explored the complex of frost-covered structures and radio towers. Marsha and Will led us downhill to examine signposts sprouting enormous snowy tail fins made of feathery rime ice. Rime, Will explained, forms when supercooled water vapor comes in contact with a surface and crystallizes into feather-like formations. \u201cIt\u2019s like a fossil record of the wind, sometimes growing 9 or 10 inches per hour,\u201d he said. \nLater that evening, over glasses of warm (nonalcoholic) wassail, we asked two of the observers about life and science in such an extreme environment. While an increasing number of weather stations around the world are unmanned, a few, like Mount Washington, are staffed by meteorologists and weather observers who regularly venture out in 100 mph winds to knock ice from instruments with crow bars. \u201cI think of it like manned space missions,\u201d said Tom Padham, one of the observers. Ryan Knapp, another observer who was just getting ready for the overnight shift added, \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to sit at a desk and look at something on a computer, it\u2019s another to actually be out experiencing it.\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but admire the dedication of these people, who brave such arduous conditions to make sure the dots on a graph go in the right place.\nThe next morning, shortly before 7 a.m., we geared up to watch the daybre Hoping for a blizzard, an extreme-weather nerd spends a night at the top of Mount Washington, New England\u2019s highest, most tempestuous peak ",
        "author": "Matthew Kronsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Noah Lyles, with two world track championship gold medals, returns home (WP: Olympics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2509",
        "date": "2019-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/10/11/noah-lyles-with-two-world-track-championship-gold-medals-returns-home/",
        "text": "On Thursday afternoon after school, Naol Gurmu sat among track and cross-country teammates in the front row of the T.C. Williams gymnasium bleachers and raised his hand. Noah Lyles pointed at Gurmu, a freshman cross-country runner, signaling it was his turn. \u201cDid you bring your medals with you?\u201d Gurmu asked.Take this survey and tell us your thoughts on The Post\u2019s coverage of the Beijing Olympics and international sports.ArrowRightOnly four years ago, Lyles, 22, had been one of the kids sitting in the bleachers before him. Now he walked to the side wall and grabbed a blue box. It contained one of the gold medals Lyles had won this month at the IAAF world championships in Doha, Qatar. Lyles handed it to Gurmu and lifted off the top. \u201cOoooooh!\u201d rang a chorus of teenagers. They pulled out phones to take pictures. Lyles instructed them to pass it around as he continued answering questions with his brother, Josephus, a fellow T.C. Williams alum and track professional. \u201cIt was amazing,\u201d Gurmu said. \u201cI don\u2019t really know how to describe it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLyles returned to his alma mater after the greatest moment of a career in full ascent. Lyles won two gold medals at his first world championships, pulling away for a victory in the 200 meters, his best event, and running the anchor leg in the 4x100 relay as the American men set a national record and ended a 12-year skid without major championship gold in the event.The performance validated the widely held belief that Lyles, with a potential challenge likely to come from relay teammate and 100-meter world champion Christian Coleman, is the future of American men\u2019s track and field and perhaps the sport\u2019s brightest global star leading into the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.Noah Lyles could be the star track and field needsLyles\u2019s life had been a whirlwind since he won the relay gold medal. He stayed up until 4 a.m. that night between media obligations and treatment, then rose hours later for another round of interviews. He had just returned to his home in Clermont, Fla. Josephus was coming to Alexandria, where the brothers moved before high school, to see specialists to treat nagging injuries. It was Noah Lyles\u2019s idea to join him and visit his old school, where he talked with former coaches and teachers and saw a case filled with trophies and medals he had won.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSometimes you need a little bit of nostalgia,\u201d Lyles said. \u201cOr you need somebody to celebrate [with]. The greatest part about having family there at the world championships after you race is having somebody to connect with that knows what you went through and has seen you work as hard as you have. It\u2019s that connection you want to gravitate to.\u201dThe two finals in which he earned gold medals were entirely different experiences. Lyles, a connoisseur of Japanese anime, dyed his hair silver for the 200 final, a nod to the Dragon Ball Z character Goku. When Goku reaches his final form, called Ultra Instinct, his hair turns silver. As his name was announced before he settled into the starting blocks, Lyles reached both hands into the sky. He then pulled his fists to his chest and howled, mimicking, he said, when Goku learned the Spirit Bomb.\u201cIt\u2019s like one of his most powerful moves,\u201d Lyles said. \u201cAnd it is basically him asking for energy from all beings, organisms, in the universe.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLyles was even with two competitors around the turn, but he pulled away for a comfortable victory. Lyles is an irrepressible extrovert, and typically he exudes joy after a victory \u2014 or even, as was the case when Michael Norman edged him in a Diamond League race this summer, a close loss. When he crossed in Doha, he closed his eyes, slowed and dropped to his knees.\u201cIt was me being out of energy, to be honest,\u201d Lyles said. \u201cIt was me being on my last few legs. These were my last efforts. This was everything I had. When I cross that line, I do usually have a lot of energy. I\u2019ve imagined how that race would go after I won tons of times. That was the last thing on the list of how I thought I would end it.\u201dArchives: High school sprinters Noah and Josephus Lyles are bolting toward the Rio OlympicsLyles had been aiming for these world championships for the past year. In 2017, a hamstring injury cost him the chance to compete. While he had been recognized as one of the world\u2019s fastest men, he had yet to claim a major title. When he bagged one in his signature event, he felt relief.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPhysically, mentally, emotionally, I was pushing everything to track and field,\u201d Lyles said. \u201cIn sci fi terms, if you\u2019re on a spaceship and you\u2019re like, \u2018I need all powers on the shields!\u2019 It was like that.\u201dLyles\u2019s triumph in the 4x100, captured with Coleman, Justin Gatlin and Michael Rodgers, led to a different form of celebration. He crossed the line screaming, with his right index finger in the air. Lyles then ran straight to Coleman for a flying chest bump. After both sprinters mugged for separate camera, they found one another again. Coleman grabbed the top of the baton as Lyles gripped the bottom half, and Lyles threw his arm around Coleman.Track devotees observe the relationship between Lyles and Coleman with curiosity. They are 22 and 23 years old, respectively, and the consensus declares them the two fastest men on the planet. They probably will run the first and final legs of the 4x100 relay at the Olympics in Tokyo. They approach the sport in different ways: Lyles wants to transcend track and radiates exuberance; Coleman is all business and has shared little of himself with the public.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe personality difference has led to tension. After Lyles upset Coleman in a 100 final in the spring, he declared it the start of his reign. Coleman took umbrage on social media. Lyles told an NBC Sports reporter their relationship was \u201cnot good.\u201d Even after they won a title together, Lyles remains uncertain of how Coleman views him.\u201cI have no idea,\u201d Lyles said, laughing. \u201cStraight up. I have no idea if it changed anything. I\u2019m as much curious as everybody else.\u201dBut what about how he views their relationship?\u201cI felt like we were really friends,\u201d Lyles said. \u201cI actually loved looking at the pictures of the 4x100 ending. When me and Christian chest-bumped each other, we\u2019re both looking back, we\u2019re both hype as a mug, we\u2019re looking at the camera. I love those pictures. Those are some of my favorite pictures to look at.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNot everybody is best friends. That\u2019s just life. Some people you have a relationship that\u2019s like an arm\u2019s length, and some people you\u2019re really close with, and some people you\u2019re just on a hi-bye basis.\u201dWhat mattered was that Coleman and Lyles won together. On Thursday, Lyles brought the medals back to his school. He posed for pictures with students and held a Q&A with Josephus for students on the track and field and cross-country teams.Lyles will shift his focus to Tokyo, where he aims to add the 100 \u2014 and a third gold medal \u2014 to his program. Having run the 200 in 19.50 seconds this year, Lyles could challenge Usain Bolt\u2019s record of 19.19 seconds by then. \u201cI don\u2019t put it past me,\u201d Lyles said.Story continues below advertisementFor all he has accomplished, Lyles still has so much ahead of him, only four years removed from walking the T.C. Williams halls. One student offered a reminder, asking how he made it to the Olympics.\u201cI haven\u2019t made it to the Olympics yet,\u201d Lyles replied, smiling.Read more about Olympic sports:American Simone Biles wins fifth all-around world gymnastics titleTennis star Naomi Osaka gives up her U.S. citizenship to play for Japan in Tokyo OlympicsComputer-assisted judging is being tested at gymnastics world championshipsSimone Biles leads U.S. women gymnasts to another world team goldNow a mom, Natalie Coughlin returns to the pool after a three-year break The sprinter visited his alma mater this past week to see old faces and show off his hardware from the IAAF world championships earlier this month. Noah Lyles, with two world track championship gold medals, returns home",
        "author": "Adam Kilgore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satisfying, Bite-Sized Operas (WSJ: Opera Review) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2510",
        "date": "2020-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satisfying-bite-sized-operas-11609184559?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=9",
        "text": "In the opening comedy, \u201cMrs. Streicher\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gerald Barry,\n\n\n\n the best-known of the composers, a tenor sits at a table ranting furiously about servants and laundry, with interjections from a tuba. The text is from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beethoven\u2019s\n\n\n\n letters. Several pieces explore separation: In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n \u00c9na Brennan\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRupture,\u201d a soprano duels with her inner, critical voice; in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hannah Peel\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cClose,\u201d two women have an awkward first in-person, socially distanced date. One powerful group of works looks at death: In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Dowling\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cHer Name,\u201d a sweet-voiced choirboy mourns his mother;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Gallen\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cAt a Loss\u201d is a large-scale diva turn, as the soprano awaits news of her mother\u2019s death;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Hamilton\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cErth Upon Erth\u201d is a wordless howl, starting with a woman\u2019s mouth in close-up and ending with her zipped into a body bag on a gurney.\nOperas made just for film can inspire highly creative visuals. \u201cVerballing\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Coonan\n\n\n\n employs black-and-white animation. A female police officer, getting schooled in how to question a murder suspect, sings just one word\u2014\u201cYeah,\u201d repeated higher and higher. The instructions appear only in type, and as the tension mounts, the background dissolves so that her white face floats in a sea of darkness. In the hilarious \u201cA Message for Marty (or `The Ring\u2019)\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Conor Mitchell,\n\n\n\n two sisters call out an ex (who dumped one of them by text); the jittery cellphone picture, the tacky costumes, and the escalating fury, plus a snippet of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wagner,\n\n\n\n is opera extremism in modern dress. \nMost of the pieces are for women\u2019s voices, exploring different timbres and expressivity. I was struck by the fierce intensity of mezzo\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Naomi Louisa O\u2019Connell\n\n\n\n in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Emma O\u2019Halloran\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Wait,\u201d and the simple, folk-like cadences of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benedict Schlepper-Connolly\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cDust,\u201d a lament for the natural world, poignantly sung by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle O\u2019Rourke.\n\n\n\n And the insidiously floating and twisting soprano line of \u201cLibris Solar,\u201d sung by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claudia Boyle,\n\n\n\n made me want to hear something longer from composer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Walshe.\n\n\n\n \n\n*** Back in the early months of lockdown, director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kristin Marting,\n\n\n\n composer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kamala Sankaram,\n\n\n\n librettist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Handel\n\n\n\n and the arts center HERE experimented with digital opera in their 10-minute Zoom piece, \u201cAll Decisions Will Be Made by Consensus.\u201d The team has further developed their technique with \u201cOnly You Will Recognize the Signal,\u201d dubbed a \u201cserial space opera,\u201d which was released over seven weeks in live, 10-minute episodes and is now available as a 70-minute stream through Feb. 17, 2021; pay what you wish. \u201cSignal\u201d has background video, designed by David Bengali. The close-up images of six singers (a seventh is only heard), performing from separate locations, are occasionally superimposed on one another. Ms. Sankaram\u2019s ingenious score, with its urgent, repetitive vocal motifs and electronic accompaniment, builds tension and sustains interest over this much longer, more sophisticated story line, while Mr. Handel\u2019s text offers tragicomedy with a light touch.\nOn a luxury spacecraft, five travelers, immigrating to a distant planet, awaken prematurely from therapeutic hypothermia. Alone in their pods, they frantically relive the histories\u2014which include one another\u2014that they were trying to escape, as the ship\u2019s computer, Bob (baritone\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Burchett\n\n\n\n ), works ineffectually to solve the problem. (Unlike the malevolent HAL of \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d Bob has an unthreatening human presence and a soothing voice.) As we learn more about each of these troubled people, the jittery musical language mirrors their chaotic pasts and, it turns out, uncertain future. Mezzo\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hai-Ting Chinn\n\n\n\n is splendid as Fennel, the central traveler; Paul An,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adrienne Danrich,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joy Jan Jones\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jorell Williams\n\n\n\n add layers of richness in solos and ensembles; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joan La Barbara\n\n\n\n has an ethereal turn as another spaceship\u2019s computer with some disturbing news. The show is dubbed \u201cSeason 1\u201d; I look forward to \u201cSeason 2.\u201d\n*** On Site Opera\u2019s live productions have geographical context\u2014like \u201cThe Secret Gardener\u201d in an actual garden. Its latest project, \u201cThe Beauty That Still Remains: Diaries in Song\u201d($120 for the complete set), creates an emotional landscape for all of us confined to our homes. Three sepia-toned, handwritten diaries arrive Short pieces from 20 Irish composers, a serial space opera and a trio of works inspired by famous diaries. ",
        "author": "Heidi Waleson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satisfying, Bite-Sized Operas (WSJ: Opera Review) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2511",
        "date": "2020-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satisfying-bite-sized-operas-11609184559?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=27",
        "text": "In the opening comedy, \u201cMrs. Streicher\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gerald Barry,\n\n\n\n the best-known of the composers, a tenor sits at a table ranting furiously about servants and laundry, with interjections from a tuba. The text is from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beethoven\u2019s\n\n\n\n letters. Several pieces explore separation: In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n \u00c9na Brennan\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cRupture,\u201d a soprano duels with her inner, critical voice; in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hannah Peel\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cClose,\u201d two women have an awkward first in-person, socially distanced date. One powerful group of works looks at death: In\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Dowling\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cHer Name,\u201d a sweet-voiced choirboy mourns his mother;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Gallen\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cAt a Loss\u201d is a large-scale diva turn, as the soprano awaits news of her mother\u2019s death;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Hamilton\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cErth Upon Erth\u201d is a wordless howl, starting with a woman\u2019s mouth in close-up and ending with her zipped into a body bag on a gurney.\nOperas made just for film can inspire highly creative visuals. \u201cVerballing\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Coonan\n\n\n\n employs black-and-white animation. A female police officer, getting schooled in how to question a murder suspect, sings just one word\u2014\u201cYeah,\u201d repeated higher and higher. The instructions appear only in type, and as the tension mounts, the background dissolves so that her white face floats in a sea of darkness. In the hilarious \u201cA Message for Marty (or `The Ring\u2019)\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Conor Mitchell,\n\n\n\n two sisters call out an ex (who dumped one of them by text); the jittery cellphone picture, the tacky costumes, and the escalating fury, plus a snippet of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wagner,\n\n\n\n is opera extremism in modern dress. \nMost of the pieces are for women\u2019s voices, exploring different timbres and expressivity. I was struck by the fierce intensity of mezzo\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Naomi Louisa O\u2019Connell\n\n\n\n in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Emma O\u2019Halloran\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Wait,\u201d and the simple, folk-like cadences of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benedict Schlepper-Connolly\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cDust,\u201d a lament for the natural world, poignantly sung by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle O\u2019Rourke.\n\n\n\n And the insidiously floating and twisting soprano line of \u201cLibris Solar,\u201d sung by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claudia Boyle,\n\n\n\n made me want to hear something longer from composer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Walshe.\n\n\n\n \n\n*** Back in the early months of lockdown, director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kristin Marting,\n\n\n\n composer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kamala Sankaram,\n\n\n\n librettist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Handel\n\n\n\n and the arts center HERE experimented with digital opera in their 10-minute Zoom piece, \u201cAll Decisions Will Be Made by Consensus.\u201d The team has further developed their technique with \u201cOnly You Will Recognize the Signal,\u201d dubbed a \u201cserial space opera,\u201d which was released over seven weeks in live, 10-minute episodes and is now available as a 70-minute stream through Feb. 17, 2021; pay what you wish. \u201cSignal\u201d has background video, designed by David Bengali. The close-up images of six singers (a seventh is only heard), performing from separate locations, are occasionally superimposed on one another. Ms. Sankaram\u2019s ingenious score, with its urgent, repetitive vocal motifs and electronic accompaniment, builds tension and sustains interest over this much longer, more sophisticated story line, while Mr. Handel\u2019s text offers tragicomedy with a light touch.\nOn a luxury spacecraft, five travelers, immigrating to a distant planet, awaken prematurely from therapeutic hypothermia. Alone in their pods, they frantically relive the histories\u2014which include one another\u2014that they were trying to escape, as the ship\u2019s computer, Bob (baritone\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Burchett\n\n\n\n ), works ineffectually to solve the problem. (Unlike the malevolent HAL of \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d Bob has an unthreatening human presence and a soothing voice.) As we learn more about each of these troubled people, the jittery musical language mirrors their chaotic pasts and, it turns out, uncertain future. Mezzo\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hai-Ting Chinn\n\n\n\n is splendid as Fennel, the central traveler; Paul An,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adrienne Danrich,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joy Jan Jones\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jorell Williams\n\n\n\n add layers of richness in solos and ensembles; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joan La Barbara\n\n\n\n has an ethereal turn as another spaceship\u2019s computer with some disturbing news. The show is dubbed \u201cSeason 1\u201d; I look forward to \u201cSeason 2.\u201d\n*** On Site Opera\u2019s live productions have geographical context\u2014like \u201cThe Secret Gardener\u201d in an actual garden. Its latest project, \u201cThe Beauty That Still Remains: Diaries in Song\u201d($120 for the complete set), creates an emotional landscape for all of us confined to our homes. Three sepia-toned, handwritten diaries arrive Short pieces from 20 Irish composers, a serial space opera and a trio of works inspired by famous diaries. ",
        "author": "Heidi Waleson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Distant Place We\u2019ve Visited (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2512",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/technology/ultima-thule-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. It sounds like science fiction, but it\u2019s not. Overnight tonight, on New Year\u2019s Eve and New Year\u2019s Day, an American spacecraft called New Horizons will fly by and explore the most distant place ever visited: a small world called Ultima Thule.",
        "author": "By Alan Stern"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Distant Place We\u2019ve Visited (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2513",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/technology/ultima-thule-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. It sounds like science fiction, but it\u2019s not. Overnight tonight, on New Year\u2019s Eve and New Year\u2019s Day, an American spacecraft called New Horizons will fly by and explore the most distant place ever visited: a small world called Ultima Thule.",
        "author": "By Alan Stern"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Distant Place We\u2019ve Visited (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2514",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/technology/ultima-thule-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. It sounds like science fiction, but it\u2019s not. Overnight tonight, on New Year\u2019s Eve and New Year\u2019s Day, an American spacecraft called New Horizons will fly by and explore the most distant place ever visited: a small world called Ultima Thule.",
        "author": "By Alan Stern"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Distant Place We\u2019ve Visited (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2515",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/opinion/technology/ultima-thule-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. Overnight tonight, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by a small world called Ultima Thule \u2014 an auspicious beginning to 2019. It sounds like science fiction, but it\u2019s not. Overnight tonight, on New Year\u2019s Eve and New Year\u2019s Day, an American spacecraft called New Horizons will fly by and explore the most distant place ever visited: a small world called Ultima Thule.",
        "author": "By Alan Stern"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pondering Voyagers\u2019 Interstellar Journeys, and Our Own (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2516",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/opinion/pondering-voyagers-interstellar-journeys-and-our-own.html",
        "text": "Forty years ago, we sent two Voyager spacecraft into the cosmos. Will we continue our own journey of discovery? Forty years ago, we sent two Voyager spacecraft into the cosmos. Will we continue our own journey of discovery? Tempe, Ariz. \u2014 Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, which, paradoxically, was shot into space two weeks after its partner spacecraft, Voyager 2. With all of the turbulent terrestrial news of late, it may seem like humanity is stuck in the past, dominated by religious wars and racial violence. But pondering the journey of these two small space explorers reminds us of just how far humanity has traveled in just a few decades.",
        "author": "By Lawrence M. Krauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pondering Voyagers\u2019 Interstellar Journeys, and Our Own (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2517",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/opinion/pondering-voyagers-interstellar-journeys-and-our-own.html",
        "text": "Forty years ago, we sent two Voyager spacecraft into the cosmos. Will we continue our own journey of discovery? Forty years ago, we sent two Voyager spacecraft into the cosmos. Will we continue our own journey of discovery? Tempe, Ariz. \u2014 Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, which, paradoxically, was shot into space two weeks after its partner spacecraft, Voyager 2. With all of the turbulent terrestrial news of late, it may seem like humanity is stuck in the past, dominated by religious wars and racial violence. But pondering the journey of these two small space explorers reminds us of just how far humanity has traveled in just a few decades.",
        "author": "By Lawrence M. Krauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager 2\u2019s Journey Into the Heavens (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2518",
        "date": "2018-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/opinion/letters/voyager-2.html",
        "text": "A reader quotes the poet Robert Browning as a spacecraft enters interstellar space. A reader quotes the poet Robert Browning as a spacecraft enters interstellar space. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Space Tourists Won\u2019t Find the Awe They Seek (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2519",
        "date": "2021-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/opinion/space-tourism-awe.html",
        "text": "Space tourism is one of those ostensibly awesome experiences that often feel anticlimactic because they promise the sublime. Space tourism is one of those ostensibly awesome experiences that often feel anticlimactic because they promise the sublime. Why would a tourist want to take a trip to space?",
        "author": "By Henry Wismayer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Let\u2019s Help Jeff Bezos Spend His Billions (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2520",
        "date": "2018-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/jeff-bezos-billions.html",
        "text": "Helping humans here on Earth should take precedence over space tourism, readers say. Another says Mr. Bezos is helping to save the human species. Helping humans here on Earth should take precedence over space tourism, readers say. Another says Mr. Bezos is helping to save the human species. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Beckons (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2521",
        "date": "2018-11-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/opinion/mars-exploration-nasa-insight-space.html",
        "text": "Scientists hope to uncover some of the secrets of that distant world \u2014 and maybe some of our own. Scientists hope to uncover some of the secrets of that distant world \u2014 and maybe some of our own.  The science and technology behind NASA\u2019s latest space explorer to land on Mars are so awe-inducing that it\u2019s hardly surprising when scientists commenting on the triumph drop their usual jargon to speak like excited schoolchildren.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Beckons (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2522",
        "date": "2018-11-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/opinion/mars-exploration-nasa-insight-space.html",
        "text": "Scientists hope to uncover some of the secrets of that distant world \u2014 and maybe some of our own. Scientists hope to uncover some of the secrets of that distant world \u2014 and maybe some of our own.  The science and technology behind NASA\u2019s latest space explorer to land on Mars are so awe-inducing that it\u2019s hardly surprising when scientists commenting on the triumph drop their usual jargon to speak like excited schoolchildren.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Beckons (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2523",
        "date": "2018-11-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/opinion/mars-exploration-nasa-insight-space.html",
        "text": "Scientists hope to uncover some of the secrets of that distant world \u2014 and maybe some of our own. Scientists hope to uncover some of the secrets of that distant world \u2014 and maybe some of our own.  The science and technology behind NASA\u2019s latest space explorer to land on Mars are so awe-inducing that it\u2019s hardly surprising when scientists commenting on the triumph drop their usual jargon to speak like excited schoolchildren.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Look Up! Sputnik!\u2019 60 Years Later (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2524",
        "date": "2017-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/opinion/sputnik-cold-war-space-race.html",
        "text": "In 1957, the Soviets launched the world\u2019s first artificial satellite into orbit \u2014 and a Cold War space race they would eventually lose. In 1957, the Soviets launched the world\u2019s first artificial satellite into orbit \u2014 and a Cold War space race they would eventually lose. CHICAGO \u2014 On Oct. 4, 1957 \u2014 60 years ago \u2014 millions of bewildered Americans raised their heads to the sky to observe a moving object that looked like a star and appeared every 90 minutes. It was Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, launched that day by the Soviet Union. It opened a new era of space exploration and a new front in the Cold War.",
        "author": "By Michael Khodarkovsky"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Richard Branson, the Romance of Space Tourism Meets Reality (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2525",
        "date": "2021-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/opinion/sunday/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s failure to launch exposed the limits of human ingenuity. Virgin Galactic\u2019s failure to launch exposed the limits of human ingenuity. On the morning of Feb. 22, 2019, my two sons and I fixed our gazes on the horizon of the Mojave Desert, waiting for a flame to appear in the distant sky: Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship was about to launch.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Schmidle"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Richard Branson, the Romance of Space Tourism Meets Reality (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2526",
        "date": "2021-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/opinion/sunday/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s failure to launch exposed the limits of human ingenuity. Virgin Galactic\u2019s failure to launch exposed the limits of human ingenuity. On the morning of Feb. 22, 2019, my two sons and I fixed our gazes on the horizon of the Mojave Desert, waiting for a flame to appear in the distant sky: Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship was about to launch.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Schmidle"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Richard Branson, the Romance of Space Tourism Meets Reality (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2527",
        "date": "2021-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/01/opinion/sunday/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s failure to launch exposed the limits of human ingenuity. Virgin Galactic\u2019s failure to launch exposed the limits of human ingenuity. On the morning of Feb. 22, 2019, my two sons and I fixed our gazes on the horizon of the Mojave Desert, waiting for a flame to appear in the distant sky: Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship was about to launch.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Schmidle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Don\u2019t Give Up on the International Space Station (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2528",
        "date": "2018-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/opinion/international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The program is a demonstration of American leadership. Why does the president want to cut it? The program is a demonstration of American leadership. Why does the president want to cut it? It has been over six years since I last floated in zero gravity through the tunnel that connects the space shuttle to the International Space Station. I visited this orbiting laboratory on four occasions between 2001 and 2011. ",
        "author": "By Mark Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Don\u2019t Give Up on the International Space Station (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2529",
        "date": "2018-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/opinion/international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The program is a demonstration of American leadership. Why does the president want to cut it? The program is a demonstration of American leadership. Why does the president want to cut it? It has been over six years since I last floated in zero gravity through the tunnel that connects the space shuttle to the International Space Station. I visited this orbiting laboratory on four occasions between 2001 and 2011. ",
        "author": "By Mark Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will Space-Age Houston Survive Into the Future? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2530",
        "date": "2019-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/opinion/nasa-space-houston.html",
        "text": "Storms and development have taken their toll on the midcentury architecture of the space race. Storms and development have taken their toll on the midcentury architecture of the space race. A midcentury-modern house on the banks of languid Dickinson Bayou in Southeast Texas changed hands recently. While it could be mistaken for just another home, it is a place of outsize significance in aerospace history. In a small garage on West Bayou Drive, the space shuttle was born in secrecy 50 years ago. ",
        "author": "By Geoffrey Leavenworth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will Space-Age Houston Survive Into the Future? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2531",
        "date": "2019-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/opinion/nasa-space-houston.html",
        "text": "Storms and development have taken their toll on the midcentury architecture of the space race. Storms and development have taken their toll on the midcentury architecture of the space race. A midcentury-modern house on the banks of languid Dickinson Bayou in Southeast Texas changed hands recently. While it could be mistaken for just another home, it is a place of outsize significance in aerospace history. In a small garage on West Bayou Drive, the space shuttle was born in secrecy 50 years ago. ",
        "author": "By Geoffrey Leavenworth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump in Space (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2532",
        "date": "2018-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/trump-space-force-military.html",
        "text": "The president\u2019s plans for a new military force could spur an extraterrestrial arms race and make combat in orbit more likely. The president\u2019s plans for a new military force could spur an extraterrestrial arms race and make combat in orbit more likely.  Unsatisfied with mere terrestrial disruption, or maybe just eager to change the subject yet again, President Trump recently seized on outer space, blindsiding the Pentagon with a directive to create a sixth branch of the military called the Space Force.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Talking to Aliens Is Their Religion (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2533",
        "date": "2020-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/opinion/gods-from-space-aetherius.html",
        "text": "Among the Aetherius Society\u2019s key beliefs: selflessness and extraterrestrial life. Among the Aetherius Society\u2019s key beliefs: selflessness and extraterrestrial life. In the mid-1950s, an English taxi driver named George King claimed that he had received a directive from outer space. The dispatch spurred him to establish the Aetherius Society, a religious group that believes communicating and working with aliens will better humanity. Though unconventional, the group\u2019s practices aren\u2019t dangerous or hateful; they often mirror those of more established religions, with an extraterrestrial twist.",
        "author": "By Annalise Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2534",
        "date": "2020-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Trump\u2019s catastrophic performance has as much to do with psychology as ideology. Trump\u2019s catastrophic performance has as much to do with psychology as ideology. Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president\u2019s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats. Their assessments have been controversial. The American Psychiatric Association\u2019s code of ethics expressly forbids its members from diagnosing a public figure from afar.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Senior"
    },
    {
        "title": "The U.S. Military: Like the French at Agincourt? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2535",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/us-military.html",
        "text": "America risks a catastrophic defeat if it doesn\u2019t radically change the way it thinks about war. America risks a catastrophic defeat if it doesn\u2019t radically change the way it thinks about war. Early on a Sunday morning in 1932, a fleet of some 150 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo planes struck the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The ships lying at anchor on Battleship Row sustained direct hits. Also hit were the base\u2019s fuel storage tanks and the Army Air Corps planes parked nearby at Hickam Field.",
        "author": "By Bret Stephens"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Climate Risks We Face (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2536",
        "date": "2017-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/opinion/climate-report-global-warming.html",
        "text": "The further we push the climate system, the greater the risks of potentially unforeseen and catastrophic changes. The further we push the climate system, the greater the risks of potentially unforeseen and catastrophic changes. Since the dawn of the industrial age, humans have been pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and gas. Researchers at the Mauna Loa Observatory, perched on the side of a volcano on Hawaii\u2019s Big Island, have measured atmospheric levels of this greenhouse gas since 1958. That first year, carbon dioxide averaged 316 parts per million. In May, it reached 410 p.p.m. \u2014 an amount never before experienced in the history of our species. This atmospheric carbon dioxide \u2014 as well as other heat-trapping gases and other air pollutants emitted by humans \u2014 is affecting our planet profoundly.",
        "author": "By Radley Horton, Katharine Hayhoe, Robert Kopp and Sarah Doherty"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Einstein Became the First Science Superstar (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2537",
        "date": "2019-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/opinion/einstein-relativity-theor.html",
        "text": "A century ago, astronomers proved the general theory of relativity \u2014 and made him a global household name. A century ago, astronomers proved the general theory of relativity \u2014 and made him a global household name. Early in 1919, two teams of British astronomers embarked on a journey to the far reaches of the planet to observe a solar eclipse. Nearly eight months later, on Nov. 6, 1919, the teams presented their findings before a packed audience of scientists in London. Their announcement changed forever how humans view the universe.",
        "author": "By Ron Cowen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Almost Famous: The Silent Pulse of the Universe (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2538",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007768850/the-silent-pulse-of-the-universe.html",
        "text": "In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a breakthrough in astronomy. But as a woman in science, her role was overlooked. In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a breakthrough in astronomy. But as a woman in science, her role was overlooked. In 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell made a breakthrough in astronomy. But as a woman in science, her role was overlooked.",
        "author": "By Ben Proudfoot"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scott Kelly: How Tom Wolfe Changed My Life (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2539",
        "date": "2018-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/scott-kelly-tom-wolfe-.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d helped me, a terrible student with severe attention problems, find purpose and become an astronaut. \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d helped me, a terrible student with severe attention problems, find purpose and become an astronaut. On Feb. 18, 2016, I woke up in my crew quarters on the International Space Station for the 328th day of a yearlong mission, the longest ever flown by a NASA astronaut. After breakfast and a conference call with the ground, I got into my work for the day: conducting a physics experiment, taking a sample of my own blood for a NASA study, performing routine maintenance on life support equipment, and answering questions for an elementary school in Arizona via live video uplink.",
        "author": "By Scott Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scott Kelly: How Tom Wolfe Changed My Life (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2540",
        "date": "2018-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/scott-kelly-tom-wolfe-.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d helped me, a terrible student with severe attention problems, find purpose and become an astronaut. \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d helped me, a terrible student with severe attention problems, find purpose and become an astronaut. On Feb. 18, 2016, I woke up in my crew quarters on the International Space Station for the 328th day of a yearlong mission, the longest ever flown by a NASA astronaut. After breakfast and a conference call with the ground, I got into my work for the day: conducting a physics experiment, taking a sample of my own blood for a NASA study, performing routine maintenance on life support equipment, and answering questions for an elementary school in Arizona via live video uplink.",
        "author": "By Scott Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "To the Moon, but Not Back (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2541",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/moon-apollo-armstrong.html",
        "text": "You might be surprised what humans left behind on the lunar surface. You might be surprised what humans left behind on the lunar surface. Before Neil Armstrong could take his small step down to the surface of a new world, before he and Buzz Aldrin could plant the flag, or scoop up moon rocks, or bunny-hop across the desolate lunar landscape, the astronauts of Apollo 11 had to take out the trash. ",
        "author": "By Jonathan Fetter-Vorm"
    },
    {
        "title": "To the Moon, but Not Back (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2542",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/moon-apollo-armstrong.html",
        "text": "You might be surprised what humans left behind on the lunar surface. You might be surprised what humans left behind on the lunar surface. Before Neil Armstrong could take his small step down to the surface of a new world, before he and Buzz Aldrin could plant the flag, or scoop up moon rocks, or bunny-hop across the desolate lunar landscape, the astronauts of Apollo 11 had to take out the trash. ",
        "author": "By Jonathan Fetter-Vorm"
    },
    {
        "title": "What My Spacewalk Taught Me About Isolation (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2543",
        "date": "2020-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/opinion/coronavirus-astronauts-isolation.html",
        "text": "Feel as if you\u2019re drifting in space? I know what that\u2019s like. Feel as if you\u2019re drifting in space? I know what that\u2019s like. We\u2019re over a month into social distancing and many of us are feeling that time and space have lost all meaning. Perhaps no one understands this better than astronauts, who spend months drifting in isolation.",
        "author": "By Nicole Stott"
    },
    {
        "title": "What My Spacewalk Taught Me About Isolation (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2544",
        "date": "2020-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/opinion/coronavirus-astronauts-isolation.html",
        "text": "Feel as if you\u2019re drifting in space? I know what that\u2019s like. Feel as if you\u2019re drifting in space? I know what that\u2019s like. We\u2019re over a month into social distancing and many of us are feeling that time and space have lost all meaning. Perhaps no one understands this better than astronauts, who spend months drifting in isolation.",
        "author": "By Nicole Stott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking Earthward From Space (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2545",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opinion/nasa-climate-change-earth-space.html",
        "text": "NASA is not just about exploring the universe but also about understanding our home planet. NASA is not just about exploring the universe but also about understanding our home planet. Of all human spaceflight, Apollo 8 may have best demonstrated NASA\u2019s capacity to change human perspective. In reflecting upon that mission, the first circumnavigation of the moon, the astronaut Bill Anders, one of three on board, said, \u201cWe came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.\u201d Anders had taken the photograph that came to be known as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d the first image of the planet captured by a human from beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. As his fellow crew member Jim Lovell would point out, \u201cSuddenly, everybody could see the Earth as it truly is: a grand oasis in the vastness of space.\u201d",
        "author": "By Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking Earthward From Space (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2546",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opinion/nasa-climate-change-earth-space.html",
        "text": "NASA is not just about exploring the universe but also about understanding our home planet. NASA is not just about exploring the universe but also about understanding our home planet. Of all human spaceflight, Apollo 8 may have best demonstrated NASA\u2019s capacity to change human perspective. In reflecting upon that mission, the first circumnavigation of the moon, the astronaut Bill Anders, one of three on board, said, \u201cWe came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.\u201d Anders had taken the photograph that came to be known as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d the first image of the planet captured by a human from beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. As his fellow crew member Jim Lovell would point out, \u201cSuddenly, everybody could see the Earth as it truly is: a grand oasis in the vastness of space.\u201d",
        "author": "By Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking Earthward From Space (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2547",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/opinion/nasa-climate-change-earth-space.html",
        "text": "NASA is not just about exploring the universe but also about understanding our home planet. NASA is not just about exploring the universe but also about understanding our home planet. Of all human spaceflight, Apollo 8 may have best demonstrated NASA\u2019s capacity to change human perspective. In reflecting upon that mission, the first circumnavigation of the moon, the astronaut Bill Anders, one of three on board, said, \u201cWe came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.\u201d Anders had taken the photograph that came to be known as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d the first image of the planet captured by a human from beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. As his fellow crew member Jim Lovell would point out, \u201cSuddenly, everybody could see the Earth as it truly is: a grand oasis in the vastness of space.\u201d",
        "author": "By Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Moon Colony Will Be a Reality Sooner Than You Think (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2548",
        "date": "2018-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/that-moon-colony-will-be-a-reality-sooner-than-you-think.html",
        "text": "Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. The first man on the moon held an American flag. In the not-too-distant future, astronauts on the moon may be holding fuel pumps.",
        "author": "By Wilbur Ross"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Moon Colony Will Be a Reality Sooner Than You Think (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2549",
        "date": "2018-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/that-moon-colony-will-be-a-reality-sooner-than-you-think.html",
        "text": "Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. The first man on the moon held an American flag. In the not-too-distant future, astronauts on the moon may be holding fuel pumps.",
        "author": "By Wilbur Ross"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Moon Colony Will Be a Reality Sooner Than You Think (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2550",
        "date": "2018-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/that-moon-colony-will-be-a-reality-sooner-than-you-think.html",
        "text": "Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. The first man on the moon held an American flag. In the not-too-distant future, astronauts on the moon may be holding fuel pumps.",
        "author": "By Wilbur Ross"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Moon Colony Will Be a Reality Sooner Than You Think (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2551",
        "date": "2018-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/that-moon-colony-will-be-a-reality-sooner-than-you-think.html",
        "text": "Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. Space travel and commerce are being revolutionized by private industry. It is time for government to catch up. The first man on the moon held an American flag. In the not-too-distant future, astronauts on the moon may be holding fuel pumps.",
        "author": "By Wilbur Ross"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Did Plato Think the Earth Looked Like? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2552",
        "date": "2018-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/plato-earth-christmas-eve-apollo-8.html",
        "text": "For millenniums, humans have tried to imagine the world in space. Fifty years ago, we finally saw it. For millenniums, humans have tried to imagine the world in space. Fifty years ago, we finally saw it. \u201cHey, don\u2019t take that, it\u2019s not scheduled,\u201d Frank Borman said, joking to his fellow Apollo 8 astronauts, Bill Anders and James Lovell, on Dec. 24, 1968. They were orbiting the moon, farther from Earth than any humans had ever been. On the fourth pass, they were confronted by an extraordinary sight that jolted them out of their regimented procedures. There, seen through a small window, was Earth itself, rising out of the void. ",
        "author": "By Ted Widmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Did Plato Think the Earth Looked Like? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2553",
        "date": "2018-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/plato-earth-christmas-eve-apollo-8.html",
        "text": "For millenniums, humans have tried to imagine the world in space. Fifty years ago, we finally saw it. For millenniums, humans have tried to imagine the world in space. Fifty years ago, we finally saw it. \u201cHey, don\u2019t take that, it\u2019s not scheduled,\u201d Frank Borman said, joking to his fellow Apollo 8 astronauts, Bill Anders and James Lovell, on Dec. 24, 1968. They were orbiting the moon, farther from Earth than any humans had ever been. On the fourth pass, they were confronted by an extraordinary sight that jolted them out of their regimented procedures. There, seen through a small window, was Earth itself, rising out of the void. ",
        "author": "By Ted Widmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Did Plato Think the Earth Looked Like? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2554",
        "date": "2018-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/plato-earth-christmas-eve-apollo-8.html",
        "text": "For millenniums, humans have tried to imagine the world in space. Fifty years ago, we finally saw it. For millenniums, humans have tried to imagine the world in space. Fifty years ago, we finally saw it. \u201cHey, don\u2019t take that, it\u2019s not scheduled,\u201d Frank Borman said, joking to his fellow Apollo 8 astronauts, Bill Anders and James Lovell, on Dec. 24, 1968. They were orbiting the moon, farther from Earth than any humans had ever been. On the fourth pass, they were confronted by an extraordinary sight that jolted them out of their regimented procedures. There, seen through a small window, was Earth itself, rising out of the void. ",
        "author": "By Ted Widmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth Will Survive. We May Not. (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2555",
        "date": "2018-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/opinion/earth-will-survive-we-may-not.html",
        "text": "The biosphere will handle pretty much anything we throw at it. Where that leaves humans is a different question. The biosphere will handle pretty much anything we throw at it. Where that leaves humans is a different question. In 1968, the astronaut William Anders looked out from his moon-circling Apollo 8 capsule and saw the mottled blue Earth emerging over the gray lunar horizon. It was the first time anyone had seen an Earthrise, and the picture he snapped became iconic.",
        "author": "By Adam Frank"
    },
    {
        "title": "A First Glimpse of Our Magnificent Earth, Seen From the Moon (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2556",
        "date": "2018-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/opinion/earthrise-moon-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "The first people to view our planet from the moon were transformed by the experience. In this film, they tell their story. The first people to view our planet from the moon were transformed by the experience. In this film, they tell their story. On Dec. 21, 1968, Apollo 8 launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. The astronaut crew \u2014 Frank Borman, Bill Anders and James Lovell \u2014 were the first humans to escape Earth\u2019s orbit, venturing about 240,000 miles farther than anyone before them.",
        "author": "By Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "A First Glimpse of Our Magnificent Earth, Seen From the Moon (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2557",
        "date": "2018-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/opinion/earthrise-moon-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "The first people to view our planet from the moon were transformed by the experience. In this film, they tell their story. The first people to view our planet from the moon were transformed by the experience. In this film, they tell their story. On Dec. 21, 1968, Apollo 8 launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. The astronaut crew \u2014 Frank Borman, Bill Anders and James Lovell \u2014 were the first humans to escape Earth\u2019s orbit, venturing about 240,000 miles farther than anyone before them.",
        "author": "By Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Facebook Doesn\u2019t Like What It Sees When It Looks in the Mirror (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2558",
        "date": "2018-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/opinion/facebook-zuckerberg-public-content.html",
        "text": "But will Mark Zuckerberg be any good at social engineering? But will Mark Zuckerberg be any good at social engineering? DECADES ago, the brilliant satirist Tom Lehrer skewered the engineer\u2019s willful ignorance of the consequences of his designs in a ditty about Wernher von Braun, the scientist who moved from Nazi Germany\u2019s rocket factories to the United States space program. \u201cOnce the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?\u201d Mr. Lehrer sings. \u201cThat\u2019s not my department, says Wernher von Braun.\u201d",
        "author": "By Noam Cohen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is America Lost in Space? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2559",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/america-lost-in-space.html",
        "text": "Fifty years ago, the manned space program was grounded, and Will Robinson and his family were on TV. In 2018, both things are true again. Fifty years ago, the manned space program was grounded, and Will Robinson and his family were on TV. In 2018, both things are true again. Fifty years ago, NASA\u2019s manned space program was grounded, still recovering after the Apollo1 disaster in 1967. \u201cLost in Space\u201d was on television.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Finney Boylan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Thirty Meter Telescope Can Show Us the Universe. But at What Cost? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2560",
        "date": "2019-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/opinion/mauna-kea-telescope.html",
        "text": "Locating a telescope on a sacred mountain is one more injustice against Native Hawaiian culture. Locating a telescope on a sacred mountain is one more injustice against Native Hawaiian culture. On the Big Island of Hawaii, Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano, rises nearly 14,000 feet above sea level. There are currently 13 telescopes on its slopes, on land managed by the University of Hawaii. Mauna Kea is ideal for astronomy: It is dry, has little turbulent air and a large fraction of clear viewing nights. But Native Hawaiians have long voiced concerns over the construction of telescopes on Mauna Kea. To them, the mountain is sacred.",
        "author": "By John Edward Huth"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Thirty Meter Telescope Can Show Us the Universe. But at What Cost? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2561",
        "date": "2019-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/opinion/mauna-kea-telescope.html",
        "text": "Locating a telescope on a sacred mountain is one more injustice against Native Hawaiian culture. Locating a telescope on a sacred mountain is one more injustice against Native Hawaiian culture. On the Big Island of Hawaii, Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano, rises nearly 14,000 feet above sea level. There are currently 13 telescopes on its slopes, on land managed by the University of Hawaii. Mauna Kea is ideal for astronomy: It is dry, has little turbulent air and a large fraction of clear viewing nights. But Native Hawaiians have long voiced concerns over the construction of telescopes on Mauna Kea. To them, the mountain is sacred.",
        "author": "By John Edward Huth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | How to know which way is down \u2014 in space or any other place (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2562",
        "date": "2018-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-to-define-down--in-space-or-any-other-place/2018/06/22/8669ae94-7423-11e8-bda1-18e53a448a14_story.html",
        "text": "With all due respect to the heroic Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders and the letter writer who relayed his opinion in the June 9 Free for All letter \u201cThe right tilt on \u2018Earthrise,\u2019\u2009\u201d I disagree that the famous Earthrise photograph should be sideways even though that\u2019s the orientation of the original photo as taken by Anders. The only non-arbitrary definition of \u201cdown\u201d (as contrasted with the arbitrary map convention that south is down) is \u201cthe direction something will fall if I drop it.\u201d Aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft, if Anders had let go of something, it would not have fallen at all because the spacecraft was in free-fall orbit. If an object were there without the spacecraft\u2019s momentum, it would fall toward the moon. In the latter case, down is toward the moon, so the conventional orientation is correct; in the former case, there is no down, and the conventional orientation is as valid as any other. Kevin W. Parker, GreenbeltOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe writer works for a contractor at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center.  Opinion: How to know which way is down \u2014 in space or any other place",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | 18 good things that happened in 2018 (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2563",
        "date": "2018-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/18-good-things-that-happened-in-2018/2018/12/29/d7957098-078d-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html",
        "text": "WE IN the media are often accused of dwelling on the bad and giving short shrift to positive developments. At the end of last year, as a modest corrective, we published a list of 17 good things that happened in 2017.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMany readers expressed appreciation, and some wrote in to suggest other good pieces of news. So here we go again: 18 good things that happened in 2018. It has occurred to us that, in establishing this as an annual tradition, we may be setting ourselves up for failure. We can\u2019t promise that we\u2019ll deliver 48\u2009good things in 2048, or 58 in 2058, though we\u2019re hopeful our children and grandchildren will be doing a better job running the world than we\u2019re managing now.Story continues below advertisementAnd, of course, news that cheers some may distress others. But we\u2019re an editorial page \u2014 we\u2019re allowed to have opinions. In our opinion, and in no particular order, here are 18 good things that happened in 2018:Advertisement1. All 12 Thai boys who were marooned deep in a cave were saved in an operation that needed 100\u2009rescuers inside the cave, 1,000 Thai soldiers in support, and thousands of volunteers furnishing meals, transportation and other help. One retired Thai SEAL died in the effort, but many had feared all the boys would be lost.2. India\u2019s Supreme Court decriminalized consensual gay sex. In the United States, the LGBT community increasingly has stepped out of the closet and vindicated its right to live free of bigotry. But many gays and lesbians elsewhere still live in fear. This decision in the world\u2019s second-most-populous country, after years of activist struggle, offered a major step away from such fear.Story continues below advertisement3. In the United States, the economy continued to grow, wages increased, and unemployment fell to its lowest level (3.7 percent\n) since 1969. Unemployment among black Americans hit the lowest it has been since the government started tracking it in 1972, and the gap with unemployment among whites was the smallest it has ever been.Advertisement4. Voter turnout in the 2018 midterm elections was the highest in a century \u2014 49.3 percent\n of the voting-eligible population, compared with 36.7 percent in 2014.5. Those voters sent an unusually diverse group to Congress. More than 100 women were elected to the House, easily breaking a record, and they included two Native Americans, the first Muslim women elected to Congress, and immigrants and children of immigrants.Story continues below advertisement6. Oh, and a majority of the House winners were Democrats. Obviously not all of our readers welcomed that, and we\u2019re sure we won\u2019t approve of everything the House majority does in the next two years. But, as we mentioned, we\u2019re entitled to our view; and our view, as we said right after the election, is that we should celebrate the restoration of checks and balances in Washington \u2014 and the rejection of President Trump\u2019s campaign appeal to \u201cfear of immigrants [and] his depiction of his opposition as dangerous enemies.\u201dAdvertisement7. For only the eighth time, a spacecraft landed safely on Mars. The InSight lander touched down on Nov. 26 and sent the first photograph back shortly thereafter. It will collect and transmit all kinds of data for the next two years.8. Floridians voted overwhelmingly (64 percent) to restore voting rights to felons once they have completed their sentences. The single biggest enfranchisement since voting legislation a half-century ago, this will allow nearly 1.5 million people to exercise their basic civic right, fixing an injustice that disproportionately affected African Americans.Story continues below advertisement9. It took another bipartisan vote, this one in Congress, to approve a criminal-\njustice-reform bill that,\n as we wrote when it passed a couple of weeks ago, acknowledges that \u201cin some cases rehabilitation and training are preferable to long-term human warehousing.\u201dAdvertisement10. Voters in Utah, Missouri, Colorado and Michigan approved redistricting reforms. That means less gerrymandering and fairer elections.11. Authoritarian governments were on the march, and the United States retreated from the promotion of human rights, but Ethi",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Mike Pence, boldly sending America back to where man has gone before (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2564",
        "date": "2019-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mike-pence-boldly-sending-america-back-to-where-man-has-gone-before/2019/03/28/9e0a007a-5169-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html",
        "text": "VICE PRESIDENT PENCE wants America to boldly go where man has gone before: the moon, and fast. He announced Tuesday that NASA has five years to put humans back on the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d If the agency cannot do that, he said, it is NASA that will have to change \u2014 not the mission. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe hurry with which the Trump administration seems determined to carry out so ambitious an aim makes clear that the primary goal is to advance not science but the image of U.S. dominance. China landed a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s far side this year. An Israeli craft is in orbit and scheduled to land soon, and India plans to follow. The United States blasted off in the 1960s not only because it was difficult but also because officials wanted to show we could do something hard more quickly than our adversaries. Now, the nation is eager to prove itself again.Is the administration prepared to back its bluster with cash? NASA has a limited budget, and President Trump\u2019s requests to Congress suggests funding will become scarcer still. Another trip to the lunar surface would cost an estimated $100 billion or more. Keeping astronauts there for extended periods of time would be even pricier. Robotic probes, on the other hand, can provide answers to compelling scientific questions on the comparative cheap. The Opportunity rover to Mars survived on the red planet for 15 years and cost only $800\u00a0million. The Cassini spacecraft\u2019s 20-year trip around the solar system found the building blocks of life on one of Saturn\u2019s moons, and Juno is still hovering above Jupiter to study the universe\u2019s origins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is surely important science humans could do on the moon that robots cannot carry out on their own. Experimenting with building on the surface, too, could help pave the way for commercial activity in space. And one way to figure out whether humans can survive on a celestial body is to put them on a celestial body \u2014 which is perhaps a more productive enterprise than having them float around above it in a $100 billion space station. But pretty as the concept of plopping astronauts down to, as Mr. Pence said, \u201cmine oxygen from lunar rocks that will refuel our ships\u201d or \u201cextract water from the .\u2009.\u2009. craters of the south pole\u201d may be, we don\u2019t know how to do any of that yet. How do we start figuring it out? Send some robots.There are bad reasons to go back to the moon, and there are better ones. Sticking another American flag in the ground just to watch it wave will accomplish little. Anyone calling for the 21st-century lunar renaissance should be thoughtful about the space program\u2019s goals and honest about the costs. Under this administration, unfortunately, that may be too much to ask.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityThe Post\u2019s View: One giant leap for space research \u2014 and for humans on Earth@SarcasticRover (as told to Jason Filiatrault): Goodbye, Opportunity Rover. Thank you for letting humanity see Mars with your eyes.Daniel Britt: Three cheers for space robotsMarillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead end We should send more robots first. Opinion: Mike Pence, boldly sending America back to where man has gone before",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Mike Pence, boldly sending America back to where man has gone before (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2565",
        "date": "2019-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mike-pence-boldly-sending-america-back-to-where-man-has-gone-before/2019/03/28/9e0a007a-5169-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html",
        "text": "VICE PRESIDENT PENCE wants America to boldly go where man has gone before: the moon, and fast. He announced Tuesday that NASA has five years to put humans back on the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d If the agency cannot do that, he said, it is NASA that will have to change \u2014 not the mission. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe hurry with which the Trump administration seems determined to carry out so ambitious an aim makes clear that the primary goal is to advance not science but the image of U.S. dominance. China landed a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s far side this year. An Israeli craft is in orbit and scheduled to land soon, and India plans to follow. The United States blasted off in the 1960s not only because it was difficult but also because officials wanted to show we could do something hard more quickly than our adversaries. Now, the nation is eager to prove itself again.Is the administration prepared to back its bluster with cash? NASA has a limited budget, and President Trump\u2019s requests to Congress suggests funding will become scarcer still. Another trip to the lunar surface would cost an estimated $100 billion or more. Keeping astronauts there for extended periods of time would be even pricier. Robotic probes, on the other hand, can provide answers to compelling scientific questions on the comparative cheap. The Opportunity rover to Mars survived on the red planet for 15 years and cost only $800\u00a0million. The Cassini spacecraft\u2019s 20-year trip around the solar system found the building blocks of life on one of Saturn\u2019s moons, and Juno is still hovering above Jupiter to study the universe\u2019s origins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is surely important science humans could do on the moon that robots cannot carry out on their own. Experimenting with building on the surface, too, could help pave the way for commercial activity in space. And one way to figure out whether humans can survive on a celestial body is to put them on a celestial body \u2014 which is perhaps a more productive enterprise than having them float around above it in a $100 billion space station. But pretty as the concept of plopping astronauts down to, as Mr. Pence said, \u201cmine oxygen from lunar rocks that will refuel our ships\u201d or \u201cextract water from the .\u2009.\u2009. craters of the south pole\u201d may be, we don\u2019t know how to do any of that yet. How do we start figuring it out? Send some robots.There are bad reasons to go back to the moon, and there are better ones. Sticking another American flag in the ground just to watch it wave will accomplish little. Anyone calling for the 21st-century lunar renaissance should be thoughtful about the space program\u2019s goals and honest about the costs. Under this administration, unfortunately, that may be too much to ask.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityThe Post\u2019s View: One giant leap for space research \u2014 and for humans on Earth@SarcasticRover (as told to Jason Filiatrault): Goodbye, Opportunity Rover. Thank you for letting humanity see Mars with your eyes.Daniel Britt: Three cheers for space robotsMarillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead end We should send more robots first. Opinion: Mike Pence, boldly sending America back to where man has gone before",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Voyager 2, the Harvard-Yale game, and funny, sad and bad cartoons (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2566",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-voyager-2-the-harvard-yale-game-and-funny-sad-and-bad-cartoons/2018/12/21/ed14f2c6-053b-11e9-b6a9-0aa5c2fcc9e4_story.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters.The funnies, the saddies, the baddiesOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightI cannot recall any occasion when I have been as moved by anything in the Sunday funnies as I was by \u201cPearls Before Swine\u201d creator Stephan Pastis\u2019s loving remembrance of his dog Edee in the Dec. 9 Comics section. My deepest condolences to him and his family. Marbury Wethered, GreenbeltThanks so much for what I hope will be an ongoing comic strip \u2014 \u201cTariff Man\u201d by Ellis Rosen [Outlook, Dec. 9]. I\u2019ve been hoping some cartoonist would pick up on this nutty phrase, adding it to the pantheon of super-anti-heroes, which includes Wiley Miller\u2019s wonderful Obviousman in \u201cNon Sequitur.\u201d\u00a0Please encourage Rosen to keep it up \u2014 and please keep providing it to us in Outlook.\u00a0All sorts of destinations await after the European Union. Where\u2019s Tariff Man headed next? China?\u00a0Canada?\u00a0Mexico? The Earth is the limit.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementActually, how about ditching the utterly stupid \u201cAmazing Spider-Man\u201d and using this instead?Abby Thomas, Silver SpringI know it\u2019s up to me to just ignore cartoons with an adult child still mooching at home, or \u201cLio,\u201d which I\u2019ve never understood, or \u201cBeetle Bailey,\u201d which must be annoying to those who serve, but there has never been a cartoon that stooped as low at the Dec. 8 \u201cNon Sequitur\u201d: a murder scene with the outline of a body and one person\u2019s idea of adding Christmas lights to brighten the mood. Is that funny?Aren\u2019t we all saddened or angry at the high number of unnecessary deaths in this country? Is there really a person who is laughing at this comic strip? I can\u2019t imagine how it must feel to have lost someone in this now-too-common way, but I still feel very upset. Didn\u2019t it bother anyone who approves what gets printed?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSusie Van Pool, Washington\u25cfFeldman, Hartig hiredThe Post was seriously tone-deaf in two recent headlines: \u201cNational Gallery gets first female director\u201d [Style, Dec. 12] and \u201cMuseum hires first female director\u201d [Style, Dec. 14].Kaywin Feldman and Anthea M. Hartig are experienced professionals with extensive and impressive r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, which is why they were hired by the National Gallery and the National Museum of American History, respectively. The headlines should have stated their names, not their gender. The article could have pointed out that they are the first women in these roles.We will never attain equality if we keep using this patronizing language.Story continues below advertisementPhylis Geller, Washington\u25cfWomen runI\u2019ve stopped looking in the Sports section for stories about female athletes because the coverage is abysmal. I allowed myself a fist-shake and a table-pound, however, when I found the Dec. 11 Health & Science article \u201cHow I keep fit and on the run at 50-something\u201d accompanied by not one but two drawings of a man. Ignoring us women who keep on running \u2014 and playing soccer, in my case \u2014 is aggravating, and particularly so since the article\u2019s author is a woman.AdvertisementWomen and girls play sports and work out at all ages. Show us, talk about us, tell our stories.Susan Burket, Potomac \u25cfAlso missing in SportsI was very disappointed to see no mention in The Post of the death of former cyclist and bike race commentator Paul Sherwen. Sherwen was a professional cyclist who appeared in seven Tour de France races. After he finished his racing career, he became a television commentator of the Tour, the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a, the Giro d\u2019Italia and other cycling races.Story continues below advertisementBike racing fans such as myself spent many hours listening to Sherwen and Phil Liggett during the major bike tours, discussing the race and racers, Sherwen\u2019s experiences as a cyclist and the countryside through which the tours passed. Watching those races will not be the same without Sherwen\u2019s colorful commentary. He deserved to be recognized by The Post.AdvertisementBruce Wright, Reston\u25cfIt's a shot clockESPN may be \u201cthe worldwide leader in sports,\u201d but it\u2019s way down the list in terms of keeping track of time around the globe. In a photograph accompanying the Dec. 6 Sports article \u201cThis is \u2018SportsCenter\u2019 again,\u201d we can see clocks with the time in Bristol, Conn. (home of the network), Buenos Aires, London and Los Angeles. Three clocks are set to 16 minutes after the hour; the LA clock is set to 11 minutes before the hour \u2014 27\u2009minutes behind the time of the others. The article concerns ESPN\u2019s trying to recapture \u201cSportsCenter\u2019s\u201d past glory by focusing on what it used to do. However, at least when it comes to time, the network may want to get Los Angeles back to the future.Story continues below advertisementChuck Hadden, Arlington\u25cfForget ParisThe Dec. 5 front-page article \u201cAmid violence, France cools heels on climate-change tax\u201d cited President Trump\u2019s Twitter message \u2014 \u201cThe Paris Agreement is fatally flawed because it raises the price of energy for responsible countries while whitewashing some of the worst polluters in the world. .\u2009.\u2009. American workers shouldn\u2019t pay to clean up other countries\u2019 pollution.\u201d The article then noted, \u201cFuel taxes, however, generate revenue that stays inside home countries.\u201dAdvertisementThat is the kind of broken, disjointed commentary on the climate change issue that is at the root of why the Paris accord is doomed.First, the United States, France and the rest of the \u201cresponsible countries\u201d to which the president refers have largely caused the environmental problem. And if new environmental revenue \u201cstays inside home countries,\u201d that leaves poor developing countries to fund any mitigation efforts themselves. Good luck with that.Story continues below advertisementIrfan Ali, Herndon\u25cfBon VoyagerI read with great interest the Dec. 13 Politics & the Nation article \u201cInterstellar II: Another spacecraft leaves the heliosphere,\u201d marking the departure of Voyager 2 from the direct influence of the sun after 41 years and 11\u2009billion miles of space travel. Although we tend to focus on the short time spans and distances of our day-to-day life, this story broadened my horizon in a big way.AdvertisementThe article even had me tearing up when I read the concluding paragraphs about the gold-plated disks with sounds and images of Earth that the Voyager spacecrafts will carry to our neighbors in another star system. To infinity and beyond!Story continues below advertisementIvor Knight, Erie, Pa.\u25cfDon't deny what deniers really areIt is unfortunate that The Post has adopted the framing of the science deniers by giving them the undeserved title of \u201cskeptic,\u201d as in the Dec. 3 front-page article \u201cGOP falling in line with skeptics on climate.\u201dSkeptics value evidence and scientific method and use them to debunk unscientific claims. The science deniers in the GOP do nothing of the sort. An appropriate name for them would be \u201cnihilists\u201d (literally, nothing-ists), because they start with the conclusion that we should do nothing to mitigate climate change, and they then cherry-pick sound bites to support that position. This is pseudoscience at its worst and is thus the polar opposite of skepticism.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilliam McLeese, Falls Church\u25cfConflationismAs a secular humanist, I very much appreciated Michael Gerson\u2019s Dec. 14 op-ed, \u201cSecularism without humanism\u201d \u2014 except for one thing:\u00a0He falsely equated secularism with consumerism.\u00a0\u201cSecular\u201d simply means outside of the religious realm and implies a rejection of the supernatural beliefs that are a part of most religions, including Christianity. Through the centuries, both religious and nonreligious people have gotten caught up in consumerism. Secular humanists don\u2019t believe in god and instead look to each other to live our lives in a way that benefits other people and Earth.\u00a0Linda LaScola, Washington\u25cfProposal, not propositionGene Weingarten\u2019s Dec. 9 Washington Post Magazine column, \u201cLessons in the deal of the art,\u201d perpetuated a misconception about the last line of Molly Bloom\u2019s soliloquy in James Joyce\u2019s novel \u201cUlysses.\u201d Although the soliloquy does contain some salacious language, the \u201cYes\u201d at the very end represents Molly\u2019s memory of the moment when she accepted Leopold Bloom\u2019s marriage proposal\u00a0among the rhododendrons on\u00a0Howth Head. It has nothing to do with consenting to have sex with Blazes Boylan in Dublin (which she did, as we know if we have read the novel) or\u00a0Lieutenant Mulvey in Gibraltar (which she probably didn\u2019t).AdvertisementEd Rorie, Washington\u25cfAcross a bridge from 'bridgeThe caption for the photograph of the 1968 Harvard-Yale football game that accompanied Jonathan Yardley\u2019s book review of \u201cThe Game\u201d by George Howe Colt, \u201cHow a miraculous game lifted spirits in tragic 1968\u201d [Book World, Nov. 25], and the Dec. 8 Free For All letter \u201cWhen Yale was fit to be tied\u201d stated that the game was played in Cambridge, Mass. The game was played at Harvard Stadium, which is in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. The stadium is just across the Charles River from Cambridge and Harvard\u2019s main campus.Scott Shoreman, Silver Spring\u25cfThe wrong termRegarding the Dec. 9 front-page article \u201cPolitical storm ahead, GOP anxiety heightens\u201d:Please, please, never again refer to this as President Trump\u2019s first term. It\u2019s improper. This cannot be his first term until there is a second term. He cannot have a second term until he is reelected; voting is not until 2020. Does The Post write this in relation to all elected officials? No.One has to earn a second term, including surviving legal charges and potential impeachment, by getting enough voters to vote one in.Please, please, never use this language again.Christopher Sovereign, Palm Desert, Calif.\u25cfCoolidge to wheat: I love you, a bushel and a peckMichael S. Rosenwald\u2019s Dec. 9 Retropolis column, \u201cFor the nation\u2019s fattest president, steak was a breakfast staple,\u201d said President Calvin Coolidge\u2019s \u201cbreakfast consisted of four pecks of wheat.\u201d Four pecks is a bushel and weighs 60 pounds. One pound of wheat contains about 1,542 calories, so 60 pounds of wheat is about 92,520 calories. Your article doesn\u2019t say how frequently Coolidge went through the four pecks. On a side note, who measures food consumption by the peck? I doubt a large majority of readers even know what a peck is or could identify the amount.Pete Waldorf, Great FallsRead more:Readers critique The Post: Melania Trump\u2019s Chirstmas, Charles Krauthammer\u2019s timeless prose and Trump\u2019s red buttonReaders critique The Post: George H.W. Bush\u2019s death, D.C.\u2019s drug problem and a memorable Yale momentReaders critique The Post: Elvis\u2019s legacy, the origins of turkey and a possible \u2018super Earth\u2019Readers critique The Post: Michelle Obama\u2019s book reviewer, a tasteless cartoon and other memorable movie dancesReaders critique The Post: Omissions about space, time and .\u2009.\u2009. romance novels This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Voyager 2, the Harvard-Yale game, and funny, sad and bad cartoons",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The secret of the famous \u2018Earthrise\u2019 photo (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2567",
        "date": "2018-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-secret-of-the-famous-earthrise-photo/2018/06/07/c4ee8ba2-6925-11e8-a335-c4503d041eaf_story.html",
        "text": "The May 30 special section on 1968 repeated a time- ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2568",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-have-the-technology-to-build-a-colony-on-the-moon-lets-do-it/2018/12/10/28cf79d0-f8a8-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html",
        "text": "Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society and Pioneer Astronautics and the author of \u201cThe Case for Mars.\u201d Homer Hickam is a former NASA engineer and the author of multiple books, including the memoir \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d which was made into the film \u201cOctober Sky.\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLate last year, President Trump \ndirected\n NASA to \u201clead the return of humans to the moon.\u201d\n For most folks, the meaning of this was pretty clear: Americans would soon walk on the moon again.\nThe space agency, however, had another idea. In February, NASA announced that it is planning to build the Gateway, a mini-space station that would orbit the moon \u2014 for no apparent reason.The vague description of the space station on NASA\u2019s website offers little clarity. There\u2019s no certainty as to when it would be built, what it would be used for or why it is needed. Half a billion dollars are already dedicated to the Gateway this fiscal year without any obvious plan to do anything with the money except spend it. Beyond that, the budget isn\u2019t known but is certain to be huge. NASA further revealed the obtuseness of the project by noting that it doesn\u2019t know whether it would be permanently crewed or only occasionally visited or what exactly the astronauts would do when aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for landing people on the moon, NASA is vague about that, too. Apparently, if we wanted to build a lander sometime in the future, it would rendezvous with the Gateway for some reason and then attempt a landing.This is all just plain weird. It\u2019s like building a big, expensive aircraft carrier, positioning it off the European coast and requiring passengers going from New York to Paris to land there first and do something (although what isn\u2019t known) until another airplane is built to pick them up to carry them to their destination. This, we suspect, is not the best way to get to France.Rather than build this murky Gateway, which we frankly doubt the American people will understand or support, we believe the best expenditure of time and money is to simply make it a national goal to build a base on the lunar surface. Such a base would be similar to the U.S. South Pole Station and constructed for the same reasons: science, exploration, knowledge, national prestige, and economic and technological development for the benefit of the U.S.\u00a0taxpayer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis plan, which we call Moon Direct, doesn\u2019t take rocket scientists to comprehend (although we both hold that title). And we could accomplish it in just three discrete phases: First, we deliver cargo to the lunar surface and initiate robotic construction. Second, we land crews on the base, complete construction and develop local resources. And third, we establish long-term habitation and exploration.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy booster, which can launch 60 tons to Earth orbit and 10\u00a0tons to the moon, could easily handle the first phase. And NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, still in development, might eventually be used along with heavy lift rockets such as Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn and the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan. (Blue Origin\u2019s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Post.) Rather than spend a fortune and take years to build a Gateway for obscure reasons, we could immediately go straight to the surface of the moon and set up shop.The key to crew operations, the second phase of building our moon base, is a spacecraft we call the Lunar Excursion Vehicle, which would operate outside our atmosphere and therefore need no heavy heat shields or Earth landing systems. The LEV would fly from Earth\u2019s orbit to the lunar surface and back again. New York to Paris, Paris to New York. Nothing could be simpler. All we would need to do is get to the airport \u2014 in this case, low Earth orbit \u2014 where the LEV would be \u201cparked\u201d for refueling and used again and again, just like a passenger airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cParis,\u201d by the way, should be near one of the lunar poles \u2014 where sunlight shines nearly all the time and ice deposits sit in permanently shadowed craters. By combining solar energy with lunar water, we could produce rocket propellant for the LEV to use to fly back to Earth and to travel around the moon. This water would also be available to support human life.A key goal of the second phase is to get propellant production going on the moon. Until it is, we would send the LEV with fuel for the round trip on a heavy-lift rocket to orbit, followed by a relatively cheap, medium-lift rocket with the crew. The crew would rendezvous with the LEV, park their capsule in Earth orbit and then ride the spacecraft to the lunar base. After they complete their mission, the crew would blast off from the moon with the LEV, fly back to their capsule in Earth orbit and journey home, leaving the LEV behind for its next crew.It\u2019s simple, straightforward and very doable with the technology at hand.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe third phase would have continuous operations, including propellant production on the lunar surface. With this infrastructure, all it would take to get to the moon is a medium-lift rocket and the clear weather to launch it.If we\u2019re serious about going to the moon, let\u2019s just go there. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, reminding us of the sort of things we as a nation once accomplished. We should resolve now to do no less.Let\u2019s put aside these murky plans to orbit the moon in a can for no good reason. Let\u2019s build a base on the moon where not only Americans can take small steps in the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, but also where the world can take giant leaps toward opening of a new frontier.Read more:Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDana Milbank: NASA\u2019s goal of a manned Mars mission doesn\u2019t match budget realityMichael J. Neufeld: Our waning interest in exploring the solar systemLetter: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from spaceJohn McCain: How Neil Armstrong inspired a POW It\u2019s time we think bold about space exploration again. Opinion: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.",
        "author": "Robert Zubrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2569",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-have-the-technology-to-build-a-colony-on-the-moon-lets-do-it/2018/12/10/28cf79d0-f8a8-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html",
        "text": "Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society and Pioneer Astronautics and the author of \u201cThe Case for Mars.\u201d Homer Hickam is a former NASA engineer and the author of multiple books, including the memoir \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d which was made into the film \u201cOctober Sky.\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLate last year, President Trump \ndirected\n NASA to \u201clead the return of humans to the moon.\u201d\n For most folks, the meaning of this was pretty clear: Americans would soon walk on the moon again.\nThe space agency, however, had another idea. In February, NASA announced that it is planning to build the Gateway, a mini-space station that would orbit the moon \u2014 for no apparent reason.The vague description of the space station on NASA\u2019s website offers little clarity. There\u2019s no certainty as to when it would be built, what it would be used for or why it is needed. Half a billion dollars are already dedicated to the Gateway this fiscal year without any obvious plan to do anything with the money except spend it. Beyond that, the budget isn\u2019t known but is certain to be huge. NASA further revealed the obtuseness of the project by noting that it doesn\u2019t know whether it would be permanently crewed or only occasionally visited or what exactly the astronauts would do when aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for landing people on the moon, NASA is vague about that, too. Apparently, if we wanted to build a lander sometime in the future, it would rendezvous with the Gateway for some reason and then attempt a landing.This is all just plain weird. It\u2019s like building a big, expensive aircraft carrier, positioning it off the European coast and requiring passengers going from New York to Paris to land there first and do something (although what isn\u2019t known) until another airplane is built to pick them up to carry them to their destination. This, we suspect, is not the best way to get to France.Rather than build this murky Gateway, which we frankly doubt the American people will understand or support, we believe the best expenditure of time and money is to simply make it a national goal to build a base on the lunar surface. Such a base would be similar to the U.S. South Pole Station and constructed for the same reasons: science, exploration, knowledge, national prestige, and economic and technological development for the benefit of the U.S.\u00a0taxpayer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis plan, which we call Moon Direct, doesn\u2019t take rocket scientists to comprehend (although we both hold that title). And we could accomplish it in just three discrete phases: First, we deliver cargo to the lunar surface and initiate robotic construction. Second, we land crews on the base, complete construction and develop local resources. And third, we establish long-term habitation and exploration.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy booster, which can launch 60 tons to Earth orbit and 10\u00a0tons to the moon, could easily handle the first phase. And NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, still in development, might eventually be used along with heavy lift rockets such as Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn and the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan. (Blue Origin\u2019s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Post.) Rather than spend a fortune and take years to build a Gateway for obscure reasons, we could immediately go straight to the surface of the moon and set up shop.The key to crew operations, the second phase of building our moon base, is a spacecraft we call the Lunar Excursion Vehicle, which would operate outside our atmosphere and therefore need no heavy heat shields or Earth landing systems. The LEV would fly from Earth\u2019s orbit to the lunar surface and back again. New York to Paris, Paris to New York. Nothing could be simpler. All we would need to do is get to the airport \u2014 in this case, low Earth orbit \u2014 where the LEV would be \u201cparked\u201d for refueling and used again and again, just like a passenger airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cParis,\u201d by the way, should be near one of the lunar poles \u2014 where sunlight shines nearly all the time and ice deposits sit in permanently shadowed craters. By combining solar energy with lunar water, we could produce rocket propellant for the LEV to use to fly back to Earth and to travel around the moon. This water would also be available to support human life.A key goal of the second phase is to get propellant production going on the moon. Until it is, we would send the LEV with fuel for the round trip on a heavy-lift rocket to orbit, followed by a relatively cheap, medium-lift rocket with the crew. The crew would rendezvous with the LEV, park their capsule in Earth orbit and then ride the spacecraft to the lunar base. After they complete their mission, the crew would blast off from the moon with the LEV, fly back to their capsule in Earth orbit and journey home, leaving the LEV behind for its next crew.It\u2019s simple, straightforward and very doable with the technology at hand.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe third phase would have continuous operations, including propellant production on the lunar surface. With this infrastructure, all it would take to get to the moon is a medium-lift rocket and the clear weather to launch it.If we\u2019re serious about going to the moon, let\u2019s just go there. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, reminding us of the sort of things we as a nation once accomplished. We should resolve now to do no less.Let\u2019s put aside these murky plans to orbit the moon in a can for no good reason. Let\u2019s build a base on the moon where not only Americans can take small steps in the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, but also where the world can take giant leaps toward opening of a new frontier.Read more:Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDana Milbank: NASA\u2019s goal of a manned Mars mission doesn\u2019t match budget realityMichael J. Neufeld: Our waning interest in exploring the solar systemLetter: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from spaceJohn McCain: How Neil Armstrong inspired a POW It\u2019s time we think bold about space exploration again. Opinion: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.",
        "author": "Robert Zubrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2570",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-have-the-technology-to-build-a-colony-on-the-moon-lets-do-it/2018/12/10/28cf79d0-f8a8-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html",
        "text": "Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society and Pioneer Astronautics and the author of \u201cThe Case for Mars.\u201d Homer Hickam is a former NASA engineer and the author of multiple books, including the memoir \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d which was made into the film \u201cOctober Sky.\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLate last year, President Trump \ndirected\n NASA to \u201clead the return of humans to the moon.\u201d\n For most folks, the meaning of this was pretty clear: Americans would soon walk on the moon again.\nThe space agency, however, had another idea. In February, NASA announced that it is planning to build the Gateway, a mini-space station that would orbit the moon \u2014 for no apparent reason.The vague description of the space station on NASA\u2019s website offers little clarity. There\u2019s no certainty as to when it would be built, what it would be used for or why it is needed. Half a billion dollars are already dedicated to the Gateway this fiscal year without any obvious plan to do anything with the money except spend it. Beyond that, the budget isn\u2019t known but is certain to be huge. NASA further revealed the obtuseness of the project by noting that it doesn\u2019t know whether it would be permanently crewed or only occasionally visited or what exactly the astronauts would do when aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for landing people on the moon, NASA is vague about that, too. Apparently, if we wanted to build a lander sometime in the future, it would rendezvous with the Gateway for some reason and then attempt a landing.This is all just plain weird. It\u2019s like building a big, expensive aircraft carrier, positioning it off the European coast and requiring passengers going from New York to Paris to land there first and do something (although what isn\u2019t known) until another airplane is built to pick them up to carry them to their destination. This, we suspect, is not the best way to get to France.Rather than build this murky Gateway, which we frankly doubt the American people will understand or support, we believe the best expenditure of time and money is to simply make it a national goal to build a base on the lunar surface. Such a base would be similar to the U.S. South Pole Station and constructed for the same reasons: science, exploration, knowledge, national prestige, and economic and technological development for the benefit of the U.S.\u00a0taxpayer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis plan, which we call Moon Direct, doesn\u2019t take rocket scientists to comprehend (although we both hold that title). And we could accomplish it in just three discrete phases: First, we deliver cargo to the lunar surface and initiate robotic construction. Second, we land crews on the base, complete construction and develop local resources. And third, we establish long-term habitation and exploration.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy booster, which can launch 60 tons to Earth orbit and 10\u00a0tons to the moon, could easily handle the first phase. And NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, still in development, might eventually be used along with heavy lift rockets such as Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn and the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan. (Blue Origin\u2019s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Post.) Rather than spend a fortune and take years to build a Gateway for obscure reasons, we could immediately go straight to the surface of the moon and set up shop.The key to crew operations, the second phase of building our moon base, is a spacecraft we call the Lunar Excursion Vehicle, which would operate outside our atmosphere and therefore need no heavy heat shields or Earth landing systems. The LEV would fly from Earth\u2019s orbit to the lunar surface and back again. New York to Paris, Paris to New York. Nothing could be simpler. All we would need to do is get to the airport \u2014 in this case, low Earth orbit \u2014 where the LEV would be \u201cparked\u201d for refueling and used again and again, just like a passenger airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cParis,\u201d by the way, should be near one of the lunar poles \u2014 where sunlight shines nearly all the time and ice deposits sit in permanently shadowed craters. By combining solar energy with lunar water, we could produce rocket propellant for the LEV to use to fly back to Earth and to travel around the moon. This water would also be available to support human life.A key goal of the second phase is to get propellant production going on the moon. Until it is, we would send the LEV with fuel for the round trip on a heavy-lift rocket to orbit, followed by a relatively cheap, medium-lift rocket with the crew. The crew would rendezvous with the LEV, park their capsule in Earth orbit and then ride the spacecraft to the lunar base. After they complete their mission, the crew would blast off from the moon with the LEV, fly back to their capsule in Earth orbit and journey home, leaving the LEV behind for its next crew.It\u2019s simple, straightforward and very doable with the technology at hand.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe third phase would have continuous operations, including propellant production on the lunar surface. With this infrastructure, all it would take to get to the moon is a medium-lift rocket and the clear weather to launch it.If we\u2019re serious about going to the moon, let\u2019s just go there. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, reminding us of the sort of things we as a nation once accomplished. We should resolve now to do no less.Let\u2019s put aside these murky plans to orbit the moon in a can for no good reason. Let\u2019s build a base on the moon where not only Americans can take small steps in the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, but also where the world can take giant leaps toward opening of a new frontier.Read more:Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDana Milbank: NASA\u2019s goal of a manned Mars mission doesn\u2019t match budget realityMichael J. Neufeld: Our waning interest in exploring the solar systemLetter: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from spaceJohn McCain: How Neil Armstrong inspired a POW It\u2019s time we think bold about space exploration again. Opinion: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.",
        "author": "Robert Zubrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2571",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-have-the-technology-to-build-a-colony-on-the-moon-lets-do-it/2018/12/10/28cf79d0-f8a8-11e8-8d64-4e79db33382f_story.html",
        "text": "Robert Zubrin is president of the Mars Society and Pioneer Astronautics and the author of \u201cThe Case for Mars.\u201d Homer Hickam is a former NASA engineer and the author of multiple books, including the memoir \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d which was made into the film \u201cOctober Sky.\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLate last year, President Trump \ndirected\n NASA to \u201clead the return of humans to the moon.\u201d\n For most folks, the meaning of this was pretty clear: Americans would soon walk on the moon again.\nThe space agency, however, had another idea. In February, NASA announced that it is planning to build the Gateway, a mini-space station that would orbit the moon \u2014 for no apparent reason.The vague description of the space station on NASA\u2019s website offers little clarity. There\u2019s no certainty as to when it would be built, what it would be used for or why it is needed. Half a billion dollars are already dedicated to the Gateway this fiscal year without any obvious plan to do anything with the money except spend it. Beyond that, the budget isn\u2019t known but is certain to be huge. NASA further revealed the obtuseness of the project by noting that it doesn\u2019t know whether it would be permanently crewed or only occasionally visited or what exactly the astronauts would do when aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for landing people on the moon, NASA is vague about that, too. Apparently, if we wanted to build a lander sometime in the future, it would rendezvous with the Gateway for some reason and then attempt a landing.This is all just plain weird. It\u2019s like building a big, expensive aircraft carrier, positioning it off the European coast and requiring passengers going from New York to Paris to land there first and do something (although what isn\u2019t known) until another airplane is built to pick them up to carry them to their destination. This, we suspect, is not the best way to get to France.Rather than build this murky Gateway, which we frankly doubt the American people will understand or support, we believe the best expenditure of time and money is to simply make it a national goal to build a base on the lunar surface. Such a base would be similar to the U.S. South Pole Station and constructed for the same reasons: science, exploration, knowledge, national prestige, and economic and technological development for the benefit of the U.S.\u00a0taxpayer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis plan, which we call Moon Direct, doesn\u2019t take rocket scientists to comprehend (although we both hold that title). And we could accomplish it in just three discrete phases: First, we deliver cargo to the lunar surface and initiate robotic construction. Second, we land crews on the base, complete construction and develop local resources. And third, we establish long-term habitation and exploration.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy booster, which can launch 60 tons to Earth orbit and 10\u00a0tons to the moon, could easily handle the first phase. And NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, still in development, might eventually be used along with heavy lift rockets such as Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn and the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan. (Blue Origin\u2019s founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Post.) Rather than spend a fortune and take years to build a Gateway for obscure reasons, we could immediately go straight to the surface of the moon and set up shop.The key to crew operations, the second phase of building our moon base, is a spacecraft we call the Lunar Excursion Vehicle, which would operate outside our atmosphere and therefore need no heavy heat shields or Earth landing systems. The LEV would fly from Earth\u2019s orbit to the lunar surface and back again. New York to Paris, Paris to New York. Nothing could be simpler. All we would need to do is get to the airport \u2014 in this case, low Earth orbit \u2014 where the LEV would be \u201cparked\u201d for refueling and used again and again, just like a passenger airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cParis,\u201d by the way, should be near one of the lunar poles \u2014 where sunlight shines nearly all the time and ice deposits sit in permanently shadowed craters. By combining solar energy with lunar water, we could produce rocket propellant for the LEV to use to fly back to Earth and to travel around the moon. This water would also be available to support human life.A key goal of the second phase is to get propellant production going on the moon. Until it is, we would send the LEV with fuel for the round trip on a heavy-lift rocket to orbit, followed by a relatively cheap, medium-lift rocket with the crew. The crew would rendezvous with the LEV, park their capsule in Earth orbit and then ride the spacecraft to the lunar base. After they complete their mission, the crew would blast off from the moon with the LEV, fly back to their capsule in Earth orbit and journey home, leaving the LEV behind for its next crew.It\u2019s simple, straightforward and very doable with the technology at hand.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe third phase would have continuous operations, including propellant production on the lunar surface. With this infrastructure, all it would take to get to the moon is a medium-lift rocket and the clear weather to launch it.If we\u2019re serious about going to the moon, let\u2019s just go there. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, reminding us of the sort of things we as a nation once accomplished. We should resolve now to do no less.Let\u2019s put aside these murky plans to orbit the moon in a can for no good reason. Let\u2019s build a base on the moon where not only Americans can take small steps in the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, but also where the world can take giant leaps toward opening of a new frontier.Read more:Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDana Milbank: NASA\u2019s goal of a manned Mars mission doesn\u2019t match budget realityMichael J. Neufeld: Our waning interest in exploring the solar systemLetter: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from spaceJohn McCain: How Neil Armstrong inspired a POW It\u2019s time we think bold about space exploration again. Opinion: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.",
        "author": "Robert Zubrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Send the SpaceX Dragon to the moon (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2572",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/22/send-spacex-dragon-moon/",
        "text": "Robert Zubrin is founder of the Mars Society and president of Pioneer Astronautics. His latest book is \u201cThe Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility.\u201d Homer Hickam is the author of \u201cRocket Boys/October Sky,\u201d a retired NASA astronaut trainer and spacecraft engineer, and a board member of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe success last month of the SpaceX Dragon\u2019s flight to the International Space Station was the first time in nearly a decade that Americans traveled into space aboard an American vehicle launched from U.S. soil. That is important, but we think the flight actually means even more. This commercially developed spacecraft has given our nation the means to carry crews to the moon \u2014 and perhaps beyond \u2014 much faster and cheaper than has ever been envisioned. Shouldn\u2019t we take advantage of it?In March 2019, Vice President Pence challenged NASA to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d This was a potential breakthrough, because after nearly 50 years of drift, the White House was finally giving NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program a concrete goal with a clear timeline and forceful support \u2014 a necessity for any progress and the restoration of the agency\u2019s can-do spirit. The purpose for the mission itself is a blend of economic, scientific and world leadership goals designed to make the investment worthwhile to all Americans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s response to Pence\u2019s challenge was to proceed with what it already had in the pipeline: the Orion crewed spacecraft and the massive shuttle-derived Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift expendable booster rocket. SLS has been in slow-walk development since 2006, with more than $18 billion spent, but it is still years away from launch. Considering this track record, we unhappily doubt the SLS/Orion combination will meet the vice president\u2019s challenge.But now we have an alternative. The contract that resulted in the Dragon crewed spacecraft was issued by NASA in 2014. Six years and $3 billion later, it has flown astronauts into orbit. What SpaceX did was show that a well-led entrepreneurial team can achieve results that were previously thought to require the efforts of superpowers, and in a small fraction of the time and cost, and even \u2014 as demonstrated by its reusable Falcon launch vehicles \u2014 do things deemed impossible altogether. This is a revolution.We recognize the hard work that NASA and its contractors have put forth on Orion/SLS, but they have simply been left behind by more nimble commercial companies. Dragon is not just cheaper than Orion; it is much better, because it is much lighter. The Dragon has a mass of 9.5 tons, compared to Orion\u2019s 26.5 tons. Orion could have been designed lighter, but NASA has received so many conflicting directives from successive administrations \u2014 Orion was once required to fly to the asteroid belt! \u2014 it ended up with an elephant, not the racehorse it needed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMoreover, SLS cannot deliver Orion to low lunar orbit like Apollo with enough propellant to fly it home. To fix this, NASA wants to build a new space station in high lunar orbit, which it calls the Gateway, to provide Orion with a destination that it can reach. But to travel down to the moon and back up to the high Gateway orbit requires a lander with double the propellant needed from low orbit. This Rube Goldbergian plan will cost billions and add years to the schedule of what has become known as the Artemis program.But is Crew Dragon capable of replacing Orion? We think so. Weighing only 20 percent more than the Apollo capsule, it has 50 percent more internal space, making it more than large enough. Not only that, we wouldn\u2019t need to wait or pay for an SLS to get it there. SpaceX\u2019s already operational Falcon Heavy launcher could send it to low lunar orbit with a fully fueled return stage, eliminating the necessity for the Gateway station. To land would still be a two-rocket situation \u2014 one to deliver the Dragon to lunar orbit and another to send the lander \u2014 but vastly cheaper and faster, requiring two Falcon Heavy rockets instead of two SLS boosters, which each cost 10 times as much. NASA has tapped Blue Origin (whose founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post), Dynetics and SpaceX in a moon-lander competition. We anticipate the same entrepreneurial spirit that produced Crew Dragon to prevail in its development.It\u2019s time to get on board with the new reality SpaceX and other commercial companies, working closely with NASA, have provided. We propose that a Crew Dragon first be sent in an Apollo 8-type flight around the moon as a demonstration, followed closely by a landing with a commercial lander. The SLS being assembled can be reserved for a future heavy uncrewed payload; Orion can be readied for use in Mars or other crewed interplanetary missions. The question for the administration and Congress is this: Do you really want to reach the moon by 2024?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWatch the latest Opinions video:The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police and vigilantes are part of bigger injustices felt by these black Americans. (The Washington Post)Read more:Read a letter in response to this op-ed: Don\u2019t shoot for the moonMarc A. Thiessen: SpaceX\u2019s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalismHomer Hickam: Let the moon rush beginDiane McWhorter: As astronauts rocket into space, protesters are beaten in the street \u2014 just like beforePhil Plait: 50 years ago, we were on the moon. Where are we going next?Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. It\u2019s time to get on board with the new reality SpaceX and other commercial companies have provided. Opinion: Send the SpaceX Dragon to the moon",
        "author": "Robert Zubrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2573",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/09/nasa-is-planning-return-venus-its-about-time/",
        "text": "Paul Byrne is an associate professor of planetary science at North Carolina State University.NASA announced last week that it has decided to send not one but two spacecraft missions to Venus. It\u2019s about time.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe plan delighted those of us in the planetary science community who have long advocated for a return to the planet. The two missions \u2014 named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS \u2014 would be the first Venus-bound treks from the United States since NASA\u2019s Magellan radar mapping mission launched in 1989 and ceased operations in 1994. In the years since, American spacecraft have visited Mercury; cruised above Jupiter\u2019s clouds; shot past Pluto on the way to the outer reaches of the solar system; and landed, roved and even flown on Mars. But NASA missions to Venus have remained conspicuously absent. Story continues below advertisementThe prospect of returning to Venus later this decade doesn\u2019t just represent an exciting new chapter in NASA\u2019s exploration of the solar system. Certainly, these missions will dramatically change our view of Venus: VERITAS will characterize the surface with radar like never before, searching for evidence of geological activity today; DAVINCI+ will measure the composition of the atmosphere to establish how the planet formed and evolved (and perhaps whether the planet really contains phosphine, a chemical tentatively detected in Venus\u2019s atmosphere last year with telescopes on Earth, and which some consider a potential \u201cbiosignature\u201d).AdvertisementBut Venus is more than simply a curious, little-explored world next door. It holds the key to understanding the past \u2014 and present \u2014 of our own world.Venus\u2019s surface is hell made real. The temperature there is that of a self-cleaning oven; the pressure is 90 times that at sea level on Earth. Instead of oceans, Venus has vast seas of frozen lava. Instead of blue skies, Venus has a toxic, carbon dioxide atmosphere under a stifling layer of sulfuric acid clouds that blanket the entire planet. Measurements by NASA\u2019s Pioneer Venus probe in the 1970s found chemical evidence that the planet may once have had an Earth ocean\u2019s worth of water. But whereas modern Earth abounds with life, modern Venus today is one of the least hospitable locales in the entire solar system.Story continues below advertisementAfter a golden era of Venus exploration in the 1960s through to the mid-1980s (which saw more than 30 missions from the United States and the Soviet Union dispatched to the so-called second planet), a consensus developed that Venus at some point fell into a \u201crunaway greenhouse\u201d state. This model holds that Venus\u2019s proximity to the sun led to the planet overheating early on, its carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere retaining more heat than could be reflected back into space \u2014 similar to how human-emitted greenhouse gases are warming Earth, albeit at a much greater magnitude. With continued heating, any oceans present evaporated, in turn helping to speed up that runaway greenhouse process. Eventually, the surface became a barren, sweltering wasteland.AdvertisementBut recently, a new view of Venus has emerged that paints quite a different picture of our neighbor\u2019s history. Sophisticated climate modeling suggests the planet might have escaped an early period of overheating, instead remaining clement and hosting oceans for several billion years. Under this scenario, the culprit for its dreadful runaway greenhouse was not the sun, but something intrinsic to Venus: its volcanoes. If enough eruptions occurred close enough in time, the combined volume of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere would have overwhelmed the planet\u2019s ability to regulate its climate, putting it on a path to catastrophe.We don\u2019t know whether this scenario is correct, but the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions will begin to test it. The point here is that, far from being the scorched hellscape we see today, Venus could have been Earth-like for much of our solar system\u2019s history \u2014 raising the tantalizing possibility that, for billions of years, there were two large, blue rocky worlds orbiting the sun.Story continues below advertisementThe kinds of volcanic eruptions invoked to explain Venus\u2019s present state have taken place on Earth, too. Those eruptions, forming what we call \u201clarge igneous provinces,\u201d are associated with some of the worst extinction events in Earth history. It\u2019s unclear what controls when and where such events take place, but they\u2019re far from unique to Venus.AdvertisementWhich raises the question: If Venus really was Earth-like for much of its history, was the second planet unlucky? Did geological happenstance kill a once habitable world? Or is Venus\u2019s fate something to be expected for all large, rocky worlds \u2014 with Earth simply playing the odds so far?That\u2019s why NASA\u2019s return to Venus is more than just a chance to get reacquainted with a planetary neighbor. It\u2019s an opportunity to understand the forces that shape Earth-size worlds in general, which will help us make sense of those we\u2019re finding in orbit of other stars \u2014 including whether we should expect to find with our telescopes blue skies and oceans ... or suffocating blankets of lethal clouds. As humans continue to alter Earth\u2019s climate, unveiling Venus might end up showing just how precious, and rare, our own planet truly is.Story continues below advertisementRead more:AdvertisementDavid Von Drehle: How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of MarsMitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars. Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracle Our planetary neighbor can help us learn about our own world. Opinion: NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time.",
        "author": "Paul Byrne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2574",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/09/nasa-is-planning-return-venus-its-about-time/",
        "text": "Paul Byrne is an associate professor of planetary science at North Carolina State University.NASA announced last week that it has decided to send not one but two spacecraft missions to Venus. It\u2019s about time.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe plan delighted those of us in the planetary science community who have long advocated for a return to the planet. The two missions \u2014 named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS \u2014 would be the first Venus-bound treks from the United States since NASA\u2019s Magellan radar mapping mission launched in 1989 and ceased operations in 1994. In the years since, American spacecraft have visited Mercury; cruised above Jupiter\u2019s clouds; shot past Pluto on the way to the outer reaches of the solar system; and landed, roved and even flown on Mars. But NASA missions to Venus have remained conspicuously absent. Story continues below advertisementThe prospect of returning to Venus later this decade doesn\u2019t just represent an exciting new chapter in NASA\u2019s exploration of the solar system. Certainly, these missions will dramatically change our view of Venus: VERITAS will characterize the surface with radar like never before, searching for evidence of geological activity today; DAVINCI+ will measure the composition of the atmosphere to establish how the planet formed and evolved (and perhaps whether the planet really contains phosphine, a chemical tentatively detected in Venus\u2019s atmosphere last year with telescopes on Earth, and which some consider a potential \u201cbiosignature\u201d).AdvertisementBut Venus is more than simply a curious, little-explored world next door. It holds the key to understanding the past \u2014 and present \u2014 of our own world.Venus\u2019s surface is hell made real. The temperature there is that of a self-cleaning oven; the pressure is 90 times that at sea level on Earth. Instead of oceans, Venus has vast seas of frozen lava. Instead of blue skies, Venus has a toxic, carbon dioxide atmosphere under a stifling layer of sulfuric acid clouds that blanket the entire planet. Measurements by NASA\u2019s Pioneer Venus probe in the 1970s found chemical evidence that the planet may once have had an Earth ocean\u2019s worth of water. But whereas modern Earth abounds with life, modern Venus today is one of the least hospitable locales in the entire solar system.Story continues below advertisementAfter a golden era of Venus exploration in the 1960s through to the mid-1980s (which saw more than 30 missions from the United States and the Soviet Union dispatched to the so-called second planet), a consensus developed that Venus at some point fell into a \u201crunaway greenhouse\u201d state. This model holds that Venus\u2019s proximity to the sun led to the planet overheating early on, its carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere retaining more heat than could be reflected back into space \u2014 similar to how human-emitted greenhouse gases are warming Earth, albeit at a much greater magnitude. With continued heating, any oceans present evaporated, in turn helping to speed up that runaway greenhouse process. Eventually, the surface became a barren, sweltering wasteland.AdvertisementBut recently, a new view of Venus has emerged that paints quite a different picture of our neighbor\u2019s history. Sophisticated climate modeling suggests the planet might have escaped an early period of overheating, instead remaining clement and hosting oceans for several billion years. Under this scenario, the culprit for its dreadful runaway greenhouse was not the sun, but something intrinsic to Venus: its volcanoes. If enough eruptions occurred close enough in time, the combined volume of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere would have overwhelmed the planet\u2019s ability to regulate its climate, putting it on a path to catastrophe.We don\u2019t know whether this scenario is correct, but the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions will begin to test it. The point here is that, far from being the scorched hellscape we see today, Venus could have been Earth-like for much of our solar system\u2019s history \u2014 raising the tantalizing possibility that, for billions of years, there were two large, blue rocky worlds orbiting the sun.Story continues below advertisementThe kinds of volcanic eruptions invoked to explain Venus\u2019s present state have taken place on Earth, too. Those eruptions, forming what we call \u201clarge igneous provinces,\u201d are associated with some of the worst extinction events in Earth history. It\u2019s unclear what controls when and where such events take place, but they\u2019re far from unique to Venus.AdvertisementWhich raises the question: If Venus really was Earth-like for much of its history, was the second planet unlucky? Did geological happenstance kill a once habitable world? Or is Venus\u2019s fate something to be expected for all large, rocky worlds \u2014 with Earth simply playing the odds so far?That\u2019s why NASA\u2019s return to Venus is more than just a chance to get reacquainted with a planetary neighbor. It\u2019s an opportunity to understand the forces that shape Earth-size worlds in general, which will help us make sense of those we\u2019re finding in orbit of other stars \u2014 including whether we should expect to find with our telescopes blue skies and oceans ... or suffocating blankets of lethal clouds. As humans continue to alter Earth\u2019s climate, unveiling Venus might end up showing just how precious, and rare, our own planet truly is.Story continues below advertisementRead more:AdvertisementDavid Von Drehle: How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of MarsMitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars. Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracle Our planetary neighbor can help us learn about our own world. Opinion: NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time.",
        "author": "Paul Byrne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2575",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/09/nasa-is-planning-return-venus-its-about-time/",
        "text": "Paul Byrne is an associate professor of planetary science at North Carolina State University.NASA announced last week that it has decided to send not one but two spacecraft missions to Venus. It\u2019s about time.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe plan delighted those of us in the planetary science community who have long advocated for a return to the planet. The two missions \u2014 named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS \u2014 would be the first Venus-bound treks from the United States since NASA\u2019s Magellan radar mapping mission launched in 1989 and ceased operations in 1994. In the years since, American spacecraft have visited Mercury; cruised above Jupiter\u2019s clouds; shot past Pluto on the way to the outer reaches of the solar system; and landed, roved and even flown on Mars. But NASA missions to Venus have remained conspicuously absent. Story continues below advertisementThe prospect of returning to Venus later this decade doesn\u2019t just represent an exciting new chapter in NASA\u2019s exploration of the solar system. Certainly, these missions will dramatically change our view of Venus: VERITAS will characterize the surface with radar like never before, searching for evidence of geological activity today; DAVINCI+ will measure the composition of the atmosphere to establish how the planet formed and evolved (and perhaps whether the planet really contains phosphine, a chemical tentatively detected in Venus\u2019s atmosphere last year with telescopes on Earth, and which some consider a potential \u201cbiosignature\u201d).AdvertisementBut Venus is more than simply a curious, little-explored world next door. It holds the key to understanding the past \u2014 and present \u2014 of our own world.Venus\u2019s surface is hell made real. The temperature there is that of a self-cleaning oven; the pressure is 90 times that at sea level on Earth. Instead of oceans, Venus has vast seas of frozen lava. Instead of blue skies, Venus has a toxic, carbon dioxide atmosphere under a stifling layer of sulfuric acid clouds that blanket the entire planet. Measurements by NASA\u2019s Pioneer Venus probe in the 1970s found chemical evidence that the planet may once have had an Earth ocean\u2019s worth of water. But whereas modern Earth abounds with life, modern Venus today is one of the least hospitable locales in the entire solar system.Story continues below advertisementAfter a golden era of Venus exploration in the 1960s through to the mid-1980s (which saw more than 30 missions from the United States and the Soviet Union dispatched to the so-called second planet), a consensus developed that Venus at some point fell into a \u201crunaway greenhouse\u201d state. This model holds that Venus\u2019s proximity to the sun led to the planet overheating early on, its carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere retaining more heat than could be reflected back into space \u2014 similar to how human-emitted greenhouse gases are warming Earth, albeit at a much greater magnitude. With continued heating, any oceans present evaporated, in turn helping to speed up that runaway greenhouse process. Eventually, the surface became a barren, sweltering wasteland.AdvertisementBut recently, a new view of Venus has emerged that paints quite a different picture of our neighbor\u2019s history. Sophisticated climate modeling suggests the planet might have escaped an early period of overheating, instead remaining clement and hosting oceans for several billion years. Under this scenario, the culprit for its dreadful runaway greenhouse was not the sun, but something intrinsic to Venus: its volcanoes. If enough eruptions occurred close enough in time, the combined volume of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere would have overwhelmed the planet\u2019s ability to regulate its climate, putting it on a path to catastrophe.We don\u2019t know whether this scenario is correct, but the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions will begin to test it. The point here is that, far from being the scorched hellscape we see today, Venus could have been Earth-like for much of our solar system\u2019s history \u2014 raising the tantalizing possibility that, for billions of years, there were two large, blue rocky worlds orbiting the sun.Story continues below advertisementThe kinds of volcanic eruptions invoked to explain Venus\u2019s present state have taken place on Earth, too. Those eruptions, forming what we call \u201clarge igneous provinces,\u201d are associated with some of the worst extinction events in Earth history. It\u2019s unclear what controls when and where such events take place, but they\u2019re far from unique to Venus.AdvertisementWhich raises the question: If Venus really was Earth-like for much of its history, was the second planet unlucky? Did geological happenstance kill a once habitable world? Or is Venus\u2019s fate something to be expected for all large, rocky worlds \u2014 with Earth simply playing the odds so far?That\u2019s why NASA\u2019s return to Venus is more than just a chance to get reacquainted with a planetary neighbor. It\u2019s an opportunity to understand the forces that shape Earth-size worlds in general, which will help us make sense of those we\u2019re finding in orbit of other stars \u2014 including whether we should expect to find with our telescopes blue skies and oceans ... or suffocating blankets of lethal clouds. As humans continue to alter Earth\u2019s climate, unveiling Venus might end up showing just how precious, and rare, our own planet truly is.Story continues below advertisementRead more:AdvertisementDavid Von Drehle: How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of MarsMitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars. Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracle Our planetary neighbor can help us learn about our own world. Opinion: NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time.",
        "author": "Paul Byrne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2576",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/09/nasa-is-planning-return-venus-its-about-time/",
        "text": "Paul Byrne is an associate professor of planetary science at North Carolina State University.NASA announced last week that it has decided to send not one but two spacecraft missions to Venus. It\u2019s about time.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe plan delighted those of us in the planetary science community who have long advocated for a return to the planet. The two missions \u2014 named DAVINCI+ and VERITAS \u2014 would be the first Venus-bound treks from the United States since NASA\u2019s Magellan radar mapping mission launched in 1989 and ceased operations in 1994. In the years since, American spacecraft have visited Mercury; cruised above Jupiter\u2019s clouds; shot past Pluto on the way to the outer reaches of the solar system; and landed, roved and even flown on Mars. But NASA missions to Venus have remained conspicuously absent. Story continues below advertisementThe prospect of returning to Venus later this decade doesn\u2019t just represent an exciting new chapter in NASA\u2019s exploration of the solar system. Certainly, these missions will dramatically change our view of Venus: VERITAS will characterize the surface with radar like never before, searching for evidence of geological activity today; DAVINCI+ will measure the composition of the atmosphere to establish how the planet formed and evolved (and perhaps whether the planet really contains phosphine, a chemical tentatively detected in Venus\u2019s atmosphere last year with telescopes on Earth, and which some consider a potential \u201cbiosignature\u201d).AdvertisementBut Venus is more than simply a curious, little-explored world next door. It holds the key to understanding the past \u2014 and present \u2014 of our own world.Venus\u2019s surface is hell made real. The temperature there is that of a self-cleaning oven; the pressure is 90 times that at sea level on Earth. Instead of oceans, Venus has vast seas of frozen lava. Instead of blue skies, Venus has a toxic, carbon dioxide atmosphere under a stifling layer of sulfuric acid clouds that blanket the entire planet. Measurements by NASA\u2019s Pioneer Venus probe in the 1970s found chemical evidence that the planet may once have had an Earth ocean\u2019s worth of water. But whereas modern Earth abounds with life, modern Venus today is one of the least hospitable locales in the entire solar system.Story continues below advertisementAfter a golden era of Venus exploration in the 1960s through to the mid-1980s (which saw more than 30 missions from the United States and the Soviet Union dispatched to the so-called second planet), a consensus developed that Venus at some point fell into a \u201crunaway greenhouse\u201d state. This model holds that Venus\u2019s proximity to the sun led to the planet overheating early on, its carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere retaining more heat than could be reflected back into space \u2014 similar to how human-emitted greenhouse gases are warming Earth, albeit at a much greater magnitude. With continued heating, any oceans present evaporated, in turn helping to speed up that runaway greenhouse process. Eventually, the surface became a barren, sweltering wasteland.AdvertisementBut recently, a new view of Venus has emerged that paints quite a different picture of our neighbor\u2019s history. Sophisticated climate modeling suggests the planet might have escaped an early period of overheating, instead remaining clement and hosting oceans for several billion years. Under this scenario, the culprit for its dreadful runaway greenhouse was not the sun, but something intrinsic to Venus: its volcanoes. If enough eruptions occurred close enough in time, the combined volume of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere would have overwhelmed the planet\u2019s ability to regulate its climate, putting it on a path to catastrophe.We don\u2019t know whether this scenario is correct, but the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions will begin to test it. The point here is that, far from being the scorched hellscape we see today, Venus could have been Earth-like for much of our solar system\u2019s history \u2014 raising the tantalizing possibility that, for billions of years, there were two large, blue rocky worlds orbiting the sun.Story continues below advertisementThe kinds of volcanic eruptions invoked to explain Venus\u2019s present state have taken place on Earth, too. Those eruptions, forming what we call \u201clarge igneous provinces,\u201d are associated with some of the worst extinction events in Earth history. It\u2019s unclear what controls when and where such events take place, but they\u2019re far from unique to Venus.AdvertisementWhich raises the question: If Venus really was Earth-like for much of its history, was the second planet unlucky? Did geological happenstance kill a once habitable world? Or is Venus\u2019s fate something to be expected for all large, rocky worlds \u2014 with Earth simply playing the odds so far?That\u2019s why NASA\u2019s return to Venus is more than just a chance to get reacquainted with a planetary neighbor. It\u2019s an opportunity to understand the forces that shape Earth-size worlds in general, which will help us make sense of those we\u2019re finding in orbit of other stars \u2014 including whether we should expect to find with our telescopes blue skies and oceans ... or suffocating blankets of lethal clouds. As humans continue to alter Earth\u2019s climate, unveiling Venus might end up showing just how precious, and rare, our own planet truly is.Story continues below advertisementRead more:AdvertisementDavid Von Drehle: How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of MarsMitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars. Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracle Our planetary neighbor can help us learn about our own world. Opinion: NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time.",
        "author": "Paul Byrne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2577",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-exactly-the-wrong-time-to-retreat-from-space/2018/02/20/befd8dd6-15bc-11e8-930c-45838ad0d77a_story.html",
        "text": "On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounded across the lunar surface as Michael Collins orbited above. We now sail across our solar system. Rovers gambol on Mars, the Cassini spacecraft just plunged through a gap in the rings of Saturn, and the Voyager spacecraft soars into interstellar space, more than 13 billion miles away, still sending back signals to\u00a0Earth. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight But proposed budgets drastically cut support for telescopes that tell us about the universe\u2019s origins and spacecraft that trace the changes on our home planet. And the United States\u00a0has stood on the sidelines as nations across the world develop the next generation of land-based optical observatories. Rarely has there been a more exciting and promising time for space science. Telescopes pointing deep into space detect thousands of planets orbiting faraway suns. Life may reside in the ocean worlds of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn or be revealed in the ancient history of Mars. Gravitational-wave observatories probe the inner workings of black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy. We have the opportunity to understand the origins of dark matter and dark energy, which constitute 95 percent of the universe but remain mysterious. The United States has been a remarkable engine of innovation, creating knowledge for the ages and solving society\u2019s problems today. We have the talent and the entrepreneurial spirit to build on our grand history of discovery. We need only the vision and the will.Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Pasadena, Calif.The writer, a physicist, is president of the California Institute of Technology. Edward C. Stone, Pasadena, Calif.The writer is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, project scientist for the Voyager mission and former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Opinion: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2578",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-exactly-the-wrong-time-to-retreat-from-space/2018/02/20/befd8dd6-15bc-11e8-930c-45838ad0d77a_story.html",
        "text": "On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounded across the lunar surface as Michael Collins orbited above. We now sail across our solar system. Rovers gambol on Mars, the Cassini spacecraft just plunged through a gap in the rings of Saturn, and the Voyager spacecraft soars into interstellar space, more than 13 billion miles away, still sending back signals to\u00a0Earth. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight But proposed budgets drastically cut support for telescopes that tell us about the universe\u2019s origins and spacecraft that trace the changes on our home planet. And the United States\u00a0has stood on the sidelines as nations across the world develop the next generation of land-based optical observatories. Rarely has there been a more exciting and promising time for space science. Telescopes pointing deep into space detect thousands of planets orbiting faraway suns. Life may reside in the ocean worlds of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn or be revealed in the ancient history of Mars. Gravitational-wave observatories probe the inner workings of black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy. We have the opportunity to understand the origins of dark matter and dark energy, which constitute 95 percent of the universe but remain mysterious. The United States has been a remarkable engine of innovation, creating knowledge for the ages and solving society\u2019s problems today. We have the talent and the entrepreneurial spirit to build on our grand history of discovery. We need only the vision and the will.Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Pasadena, Calif.The writer, a physicist, is president of the California Institute of Technology. Edward C. Stone, Pasadena, Calif.The writer is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, project scientist for the Voyager mission and former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Opinion: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2579",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-exactly-the-wrong-time-to-retreat-from-space/2018/02/20/befd8dd6-15bc-11e8-930c-45838ad0d77a_story.html",
        "text": "On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounded across the lunar surface as Michael Collins orbited above. We now sail across our solar system. Rovers gambol on Mars, the Cassini spacecraft just plunged through a gap in the rings of Saturn, and the Voyager spacecraft soars into interstellar space, more than 13 billion miles away, still sending back signals to\u00a0Earth. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight But proposed budgets drastically cut support for telescopes that tell us about the universe\u2019s origins and spacecraft that trace the changes on our home planet. And the United States\u00a0has stood on the sidelines as nations across the world develop the next generation of land-based optical observatories. Rarely has there been a more exciting and promising time for space science. Telescopes pointing deep into space detect thousands of planets orbiting faraway suns. Life may reside in the ocean worlds of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn or be revealed in the ancient history of Mars. Gravitational-wave observatories probe the inner workings of black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy. We have the opportunity to understand the origins of dark matter and dark energy, which constitute 95 percent of the universe but remain mysterious. The United States has been a remarkable engine of innovation, creating knowledge for the ages and solving society\u2019s problems today. We have the talent and the entrepreneurial spirit to build on our grand history of discovery. We need only the vision and the will.Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Pasadena, Calif.The writer, a physicist, is president of the California Institute of Technology. Edward C. Stone, Pasadena, Calif.The writer is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, project scientist for the Voyager mission and former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Opinion: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2580",
        "date": "2020-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nasa-keeps-falling-victim-to-presidential-whims/2020/01/31/a85641e4-43ab-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html",
        "text": "NASA IS rocketing toward the country\u2019s next moonshot \u2014 or is it Mars shot?Vice President Pence did his best John F.\u00a0Kennedy impression last spring when he asked the space agency to achieve the almost impossible: return humans to the lunar surface within five years \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d The mandate seemed unreasonably ambitious; for one thing, those necessary means aren\u2019t nearly as available to NASA today as they were during the Cold War, when all aspects of government were committed to whatever-the-cost victory in the space race. The other problem: Not everyone seems to agree on the goal. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNASA has been here before. President George H.W. Bush wanted to put man back on the moon, and on Mars, too. President Bill Clinton disagreed. President George W. Bush dusted off his father\u2019s plans, envisioning a moon landing that could lay the groundwork for a Mars mission. President Barack Obama canceled that project and told NASA to head to an asteroid and then Mars. President Trump turned the nation\u2019s gaze toward the moon again \u2014 and then months later tweeted perplexingly that \u201cNASA should NOT be talking about going to the moon\u201d but rather \u201cMars (of which the Moon is a part).\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMars (of which the Moon is a part)\u201d is either nonsense or exactly what legislators in the House of Representatives seem to have their eye on today: putting humans on the moon only as a jumping-off point to explore the red planet in person. That\u2019s different from the plan NASA is envisioning, despite the president\u2019s contradictory tweets; the agency looks to Mars in the distant future but treats the moon as an end in itself \u2014 where it can establish bases on the far side and mine lunar ice, ostensibly for life support and rocket fuel.There\u2019s a powerful argument that satisfying the human drive to know doesn\u2019t actually require humans. Robots can do lots of exploring for lots less money than it costs to put people on (or float people above) celestial bodies; projects from the Curiosity rover to the Cassini spacecraft and beyond have taught us so. There\u2019s also an argument that the private companies increasingly interested in low-orbit adventuring should be entrusted with as much as they\u2019re able to carry out, to save NASA money and to ensure that exploratory work continues even as the whims of politicians shift. (Disclosure: One of those companies is owned by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Post.)These shifting whims are the greatest threat to a space program constantly afflicted by whiplash. Preferable as a greater emphasis on robotics might be, leaders are unlikely to stop insisting on going places because we can. These long-term goals are most likely to be achieved if they\u2019re guided by thoughtful science and professional planning, rather than the allure of a potential geopolitical coup or the grievances of constituent contractors. The longer the politicians argue back and forth about the moon vs. Mars, the less likely we are to go to either one.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Read a letter to the editor responding to this editorial: America needs a long-term space strategyMartin Rees: Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurersThe Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityGeorge F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleRobert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. The ongoing debate about the space agency\u2019s next target \u2014 the moon or Mars \u2014 is counterproductive. Opinion: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2581",
        "date": "2020-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nasa-keeps-falling-victim-to-presidential-whims/2020/01/31/a85641e4-43ab-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html",
        "text": "NASA IS rocketing toward the country\u2019s next moonshot \u2014 or is it Mars shot?Vice President Pence did his best John F.\u00a0Kennedy impression last spring when he asked the space agency to achieve the almost impossible: return humans to the lunar surface within five years \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d The mandate seemed unreasonably ambitious; for one thing, those necessary means aren\u2019t nearly as available to NASA today as they were during the Cold War, when all aspects of government were committed to whatever-the-cost victory in the space race. The other problem: Not everyone seems to agree on the goal. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNASA has been here before. President George H.W. Bush wanted to put man back on the moon, and on Mars, too. President Bill Clinton disagreed. President George W. Bush dusted off his father\u2019s plans, envisioning a moon landing that could lay the groundwork for a Mars mission. President Barack Obama canceled that project and told NASA to head to an asteroid and then Mars. President Trump turned the nation\u2019s gaze toward the moon again \u2014 and then months later tweeted perplexingly that \u201cNASA should NOT be talking about going to the moon\u201d but rather \u201cMars (of which the Moon is a part).\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMars (of which the Moon is a part)\u201d is either nonsense or exactly what legislators in the House of Representatives seem to have their eye on today: putting humans on the moon only as a jumping-off point to explore the red planet in person. That\u2019s different from the plan NASA is envisioning, despite the president\u2019s contradictory tweets; the agency looks to Mars in the distant future but treats the moon as an end in itself \u2014 where it can establish bases on the far side and mine lunar ice, ostensibly for life support and rocket fuel.There\u2019s a powerful argument that satisfying the human drive to know doesn\u2019t actually require humans. Robots can do lots of exploring for lots less money than it costs to put people on (or float people above) celestial bodies; projects from the Curiosity rover to the Cassini spacecraft and beyond have taught us so. There\u2019s also an argument that the private companies increasingly interested in low-orbit adventuring should be entrusted with as much as they\u2019re able to carry out, to save NASA money and to ensure that exploratory work continues even as the whims of politicians shift. (Disclosure: One of those companies is owned by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Post.)These shifting whims are the greatest threat to a space program constantly afflicted by whiplash. Preferable as a greater emphasis on robotics might be, leaders are unlikely to stop insisting on going places because we can. These long-term goals are most likely to be achieved if they\u2019re guided by thoughtful science and professional planning, rather than the allure of a potential geopolitical coup or the grievances of constituent contractors. The longer the politicians argue back and forth about the moon vs. Mars, the less likely we are to go to either one.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Read a letter to the editor responding to this editorial: America needs a long-term space strategyMartin Rees: Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurersThe Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityGeorge F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleRobert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. The ongoing debate about the space agency\u2019s next target \u2014 the moon or Mars \u2014 is counterproductive. Opinion: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2582",
        "date": "2020-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nasa-keeps-falling-victim-to-presidential-whims/2020/01/31/a85641e4-43ab-11ea-aa6a-083d01b3ed18_story.html",
        "text": "NASA IS rocketing toward the country\u2019s next moonshot \u2014 or is it Mars shot?Vice President Pence did his best John F.\u00a0Kennedy impression last spring when he asked the space agency to achieve the almost impossible: return humans to the lunar surface within five years \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d The mandate seemed unreasonably ambitious; for one thing, those necessary means aren\u2019t nearly as available to NASA today as they were during the Cold War, when all aspects of government were committed to whatever-the-cost victory in the space race. The other problem: Not everyone seems to agree on the goal. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNASA has been here before. President George H.W. Bush wanted to put man back on the moon, and on Mars, too. President Bill Clinton disagreed. President George W. Bush dusted off his father\u2019s plans, envisioning a moon landing that could lay the groundwork for a Mars mission. President Barack Obama canceled that project and told NASA to head to an asteroid and then Mars. President Trump turned the nation\u2019s gaze toward the moon again \u2014 and then months later tweeted perplexingly that \u201cNASA should NOT be talking about going to the moon\u201d but rather \u201cMars (of which the Moon is a part).\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMars (of which the Moon is a part)\u201d is either nonsense or exactly what legislators in the House of Representatives seem to have their eye on today: putting humans on the moon only as a jumping-off point to explore the red planet in person. That\u2019s different from the plan NASA is envisioning, despite the president\u2019s contradictory tweets; the agency looks to Mars in the distant future but treats the moon as an end in itself \u2014 where it can establish bases on the far side and mine lunar ice, ostensibly for life support and rocket fuel.There\u2019s a powerful argument that satisfying the human drive to know doesn\u2019t actually require humans. Robots can do lots of exploring for lots less money than it costs to put people on (or float people above) celestial bodies; projects from the Curiosity rover to the Cassini spacecraft and beyond have taught us so. There\u2019s also an argument that the private companies increasingly interested in low-orbit adventuring should be entrusted with as much as they\u2019re able to carry out, to save NASA money and to ensure that exploratory work continues even as the whims of politicians shift. (Disclosure: One of those companies is owned by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Post.)These shifting whims are the greatest threat to a space program constantly afflicted by whiplash. Preferable as a greater emphasis on robotics might be, leaders are unlikely to stop insisting on going places because we can. These long-term goals are most likely to be achieved if they\u2019re guided by thoughtful science and professional planning, rather than the allure of a potential geopolitical coup or the grievances of constituent contractors. The longer the politicians argue back and forth about the moon vs. Mars, the less likely we are to go to either one.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Read a letter to the editor responding to this editorial: America needs a long-term space strategyMartin Rees: Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurersThe Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityGeorge F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleRobert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. The ongoing debate about the space agency\u2019s next target \u2014 the moon or Mars \u2014 is counterproductive. Opinion: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2583",
        "date": "2019-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-space-is-the-future-that-future-needs-to-include-everyone/2019/03/28/616b43e6-5177-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html",
        "text": "Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the space exploration novel \u201cThe Fated Sky.\u201dSpace sounds like the future. It\u2019s rocket ships and astronauts, Buck Rogers and Captain James T. Kirk. But our concepts of the future are built on 1950s sexism \u2014 and not just our ideas, but the actual infrastructure of space travel. How can we boldly go where no one has gone before when two women apparently can\u2019t spacewalk at the same time? Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThis week, a seemingly perfect PR opportunity for NASA turned into a disaster when the first all-women spacewalk scheduled in the agency\u2019s 50-year history was scrapped due to logistics.The spacewalk was a coincidence in the first place. Last year, a Soyuz spacecraft malfunctioned during launch, which shifted the staffing schedule on the International Space Station, causing astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch to be stationed there at the same time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s already telling enough that having two women in space at this particular moment is an accident. But the scenario worsened after McClain\u2019s first spacewalk last week, when she realized that she needed to use the medium size of the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which astronauts use for spacewalks. So does Koch.The EMUs were designed more than 40 years ago, when all the astronauts were men. Eleven of the original 18 are still in use, but only four are rated for spaceflight and all of those are on the space station.There are two medium hard upper torsos for the EMUs on the station, but because the only people taking spacewalks in the past year have been men using the large and extra-large suits, the other medium hard upper torso isn\u2019t prepared for use. That procedure takes hours of effort with no margin for corner-cutting. There are only six people on the station, and their time is tightly scheduled.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe size of the suits is not a matter of aesthetics. Cady Coleman, a shuttle-era astronaut, had to improvise padding to wear inside an EMU when she was in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, the training facility where astronauts practice spacewalks. This put her at a disadvantage since NASA decides who gets the opportunity to spacewalk based on their performance in the NBL.If astronauts are too small for the hard upper torso parts of their EMUs, they face multiple problems such as loss of mobility or trouble reaching the dials that control suit temperature in the vacuum of space. Story Musgrave experienced frostbite on his fingers during an equipment test in 1993. Gemini astronauts had problems with overheating. Improper fit isn\u2019t just a matter of comfort, but of safety.When NASA does design logistics or equipment specifically for women, the results can be off-kilter \u2014 or revealing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first American woman in space, Sally Ride, had to explain that women didn\u2019t need 100 tampons for a one-week mission. The agency also designed a makeup kit for the female astronauts, which Ride laughed at. But her colleague, Rhea Seddon, requested it because she knew how the media represented women who appeared without makeup.NASA has been aware of the problem with the EMUs for decades but lacks the funding to create new ones. All they can do is try to keep 40-year-old suits going, carrying a decades-long imprint of sexism into the present. Why are we asked to adapt our own spacesuits just to participate in space exploration? What kind of expectations are we carrying into the future when we have to figure out how to conform to decidedly earthbound expectations of beauty?I was talking to my friend Kari Love, a retired spacesuit designer, who said that \u201cwhile we can look back and understand why women were an afterthought in aerospace to this point, we are at serious risk for that to be reproduced as we move into the commercial spaceflight era.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe decision to restaff the spacewalk by having astronaut Nick Hague join Koch was absolutely correct. The astronauts need to be safe. Having an all-female spacewalk was an accident. It wasn\u2019t a priority. We have never been the priority. In the future of NASA and commercial spaceflight, it\u2019s time to shift our priorities to include everyone.Read more: Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We can build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Eric Sterner: Five myths about NASA How can it be that in 2019, we\u2019re unprepared to have two women spacewalk simultaneously? Opinion: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2584",
        "date": "2019-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-space-is-the-future-that-future-needs-to-include-everyone/2019/03/28/616b43e6-5177-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html",
        "text": "Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the space exploration novel \u201cThe Fated Sky.\u201dSpace sounds like the future. It\u2019s rocket ships and astronauts, Buck Rogers and Captain James T. Kirk. But our concepts of the future are built on 1950s sexism \u2014 and not just our ideas, but the actual infrastructure of space travel. How can we boldly go where no one has gone before when two women apparently can\u2019t spacewalk at the same time? Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThis week, a seemingly perfect PR opportunity for NASA turned into a disaster when the first all-women spacewalk scheduled in the agency\u2019s 50-year history was scrapped due to logistics.The spacewalk was a coincidence in the first place. Last year, a Soyuz spacecraft malfunctioned during launch, which shifted the staffing schedule on the International Space Station, causing astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch to be stationed there at the same time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s already telling enough that having two women in space at this particular moment is an accident. But the scenario worsened after McClain\u2019s first spacewalk last week, when she realized that she needed to use the medium size of the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which astronauts use for spacewalks. So does Koch.The EMUs were designed more than 40 years ago, when all the astronauts were men. Eleven of the original 18 are still in use, but only four are rated for spaceflight and all of those are on the space station.There are two medium hard upper torsos for the EMUs on the station, but because the only people taking spacewalks in the past year have been men using the large and extra-large suits, the other medium hard upper torso isn\u2019t prepared for use. That procedure takes hours of effort with no margin for corner-cutting. There are only six people on the station, and their time is tightly scheduled.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe size of the suits is not a matter of aesthetics. Cady Coleman, a shuttle-era astronaut, had to improvise padding to wear inside an EMU when she was in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, the training facility where astronauts practice spacewalks. This put her at a disadvantage since NASA decides who gets the opportunity to spacewalk based on their performance in the NBL.If astronauts are too small for the hard upper torso parts of their EMUs, they face multiple problems such as loss of mobility or trouble reaching the dials that control suit temperature in the vacuum of space. Story Musgrave experienced frostbite on his fingers during an equipment test in 1993. Gemini astronauts had problems with overheating. Improper fit isn\u2019t just a matter of comfort, but of safety.When NASA does design logistics or equipment specifically for women, the results can be off-kilter \u2014 or revealing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first American woman in space, Sally Ride, had to explain that women didn\u2019t need 100 tampons for a one-week mission. The agency also designed a makeup kit for the female astronauts, which Ride laughed at. But her colleague, Rhea Seddon, requested it because she knew how the media represented women who appeared without makeup.NASA has been aware of the problem with the EMUs for decades but lacks the funding to create new ones. All they can do is try to keep 40-year-old suits going, carrying a decades-long imprint of sexism into the present. Why are we asked to adapt our own spacesuits just to participate in space exploration? What kind of expectations are we carrying into the future when we have to figure out how to conform to decidedly earthbound expectations of beauty?I was talking to my friend Kari Love, a retired spacesuit designer, who said that \u201cwhile we can look back and understand why women were an afterthought in aerospace to this point, we are at serious risk for that to be reproduced as we move into the commercial spaceflight era.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe decision to restaff the spacewalk by having astronaut Nick Hague join Koch was absolutely correct. The astronauts need to be safe. Having an all-female spacewalk was an accident. It wasn\u2019t a priority. We have never been the priority. In the future of NASA and commercial spaceflight, it\u2019s time to shift our priorities to include everyone.Read more: Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We can build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Eric Sterner: Five myths about NASA How can it be that in 2019, we\u2019re unprepared to have two women spacewalk simultaneously? Opinion: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2585",
        "date": "2019-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-space-is-the-future-that-future-needs-to-include-everyone/2019/03/28/616b43e6-5177-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html",
        "text": "Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the space exploration novel \u201cThe Fated Sky.\u201dSpace sounds like the future. It\u2019s rocket ships and astronauts, Buck Rogers and Captain James T. Kirk. But our concepts of the future are built on 1950s sexism \u2014 and not just our ideas, but the actual infrastructure of space travel. How can we boldly go where no one has gone before when two women apparently can\u2019t spacewalk at the same time? Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThis week, a seemingly perfect PR opportunity for NASA turned into a disaster when the first all-women spacewalk scheduled in the agency\u2019s 50-year history was scrapped due to logistics.The spacewalk was a coincidence in the first place. Last year, a Soyuz spacecraft malfunctioned during launch, which shifted the staffing schedule on the International Space Station, causing astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch to be stationed there at the same time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s already telling enough that having two women in space at this particular moment is an accident. But the scenario worsened after McClain\u2019s first spacewalk last week, when she realized that she needed to use the medium size of the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which astronauts use for spacewalks. So does Koch.The EMUs were designed more than 40 years ago, when all the astronauts were men. Eleven of the original 18 are still in use, but only four are rated for spaceflight and all of those are on the space station.There are two medium hard upper torsos for the EMUs on the station, but because the only people taking spacewalks in the past year have been men using the large and extra-large suits, the other medium hard upper torso isn\u2019t prepared for use. That procedure takes hours of effort with no margin for corner-cutting. There are only six people on the station, and their time is tightly scheduled.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe size of the suits is not a matter of aesthetics. Cady Coleman, a shuttle-era astronaut, had to improvise padding to wear inside an EMU when she was in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, the training facility where astronauts practice spacewalks. This put her at a disadvantage since NASA decides who gets the opportunity to spacewalk based on their performance in the NBL.If astronauts are too small for the hard upper torso parts of their EMUs, they face multiple problems such as loss of mobility or trouble reaching the dials that control suit temperature in the vacuum of space. Story Musgrave experienced frostbite on his fingers during an equipment test in 1993. Gemini astronauts had problems with overheating. Improper fit isn\u2019t just a matter of comfort, but of safety.When NASA does design logistics or equipment specifically for women, the results can be off-kilter \u2014 or revealing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first American woman in space, Sally Ride, had to explain that women didn\u2019t need 100 tampons for a one-week mission. The agency also designed a makeup kit for the female astronauts, which Ride laughed at. But her colleague, Rhea Seddon, requested it because she knew how the media represented women who appeared without makeup.NASA has been aware of the problem with the EMUs for decades but lacks the funding to create new ones. All they can do is try to keep 40-year-old suits going, carrying a decades-long imprint of sexism into the present. Why are we asked to adapt our own spacesuits just to participate in space exploration? What kind of expectations are we carrying into the future when we have to figure out how to conform to decidedly earthbound expectations of beauty?I was talking to my friend Kari Love, a retired spacesuit designer, who said that \u201cwhile we can look back and understand why women were an afterthought in aerospace to this point, we are at serious risk for that to be reproduced as we move into the commercial spaceflight era.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe decision to restaff the spacewalk by having astronaut Nick Hague join Koch was absolutely correct. The astronauts need to be safe. Having an all-female spacewalk was an accident. It wasn\u2019t a priority. We have never been the priority. In the future of NASA and commercial spaceflight, it\u2019s time to shift our priorities to include everyone.Read more: Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We can build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Eric Sterner: Five myths about NASA How can it be that in 2019, we\u2019re unprepared to have two women spacewalk simultaneously? Opinion: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone",
        "author": "Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | SpaceX\u2019s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2586",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/",
        "text": "It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism.Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAt a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing \u2014 including docking \u2014 without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared \u201cthe Eagle has landed.\u201d On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean \u2014 ready to be used again.That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 \u2014 a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion \u2014 making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years \u2014 far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle.The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies \u2014 including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so \u2014 for more than $1 billion less than its competitor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk\u2019s goal \u2014 the reason he founded SpaceX \u2014 is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints.Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn\u2019t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?Read more:Michael Byers: Elon Musk, president of Mars?Phil Plait: 50 years ago, we were on the moon. Where are we going next?Homer Hickam: Let the moon rush beginThe Post\u2019s View: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whimsLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. While some push for socialism on Earth, the private sector is revolutionizing space exploration. Opinion: SpaceX\u2019s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism",
        "author": "Marc A. Thiessen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | SpaceX\u2019s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2587",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/",
        "text": "It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism.Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAt a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing \u2014 including docking \u2014 without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared \u201cthe Eagle has landed.\u201d On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean \u2014 ready to be used again.That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 \u2014 a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion \u2014 making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years \u2014 far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle.The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies \u2014 including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so \u2014 for more than $1 billion less than its competitor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk\u2019s goal \u2014 the reason he founded SpaceX \u2014 is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints.Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn\u2019t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?Read more:Michael Byers: Elon Musk, president of Mars?Phil Plait: 50 years ago, we were on the moon. Where are we going next?Homer Hickam: Let the moon rush beginThe Post\u2019s View: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whimsLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. While some push for socialism on Earth, the private sector is revolutionizing space exploration. Opinion: SpaceX\u2019s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism",
        "author": "Marc A. Thiessen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2588",
        "date": "2018-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nasas-latest-gamble-might-not-pay-out-but-its-worth-it-anyway/2018/11/21/bb06a964-eda3-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html",
        "text": "Imagine you\u2019re trying to decide where to place your peg in a game of Battleship. Except let\u2019s change it up a bit. Instead of looking at a small grid, you\u2019re scanning an entire planet. And instead of looking for ships, you\u2019re trying to find evidence of microscopic life. And let\u2019s add another fun twist: There might not even be any actual \u201ctargets\u201d for you to find. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSound like something you\u2019d be willing to bet more than $2 billion on? Well, NASA\u2019s doing it anyway.This week, NASA announced it has locked on to the landing site for its next Mars rover, to be launched in 2020. The destination: an ancient lake bed known as the Jezero crater. It\u2019s a hugely expensive gamble intended to uncover the secrets of our planetary neighbor\u2019s cryptic past \u2014 and it\u2019s likely we will end up with more questions than answers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, this is among the most exciting space missions of our lifetime.\u201cI think, in the long run, this will be a no-brainer,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator at NASA. As head of the agency\u2019s science mission directorate, he\u2019s the man who called the multibillion-dollar shot, shaping the search for life beyond our planet for the near future.Zurbuchen recognizes that the mission comes with risk. NASA plans to land the rover in the crater using a rocket-powered sky crane \u2014 a mind-blowing maneuver in which a spacecraft barrels into Mars\u2019s atmosphere at breakneck speeds and, with the help of a parachute and propulsion rockets, slows down just enough to lower the rover onto the surface on cables in midair. Such a landing isn\u2019t unprecedented, but engineers refer to the procedure as \u201cseven minutes of terror.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComplicating matters is rough terrain full of boulders and sand dunes. And even if the rover manages to land without a hitch and secure the samples it set out to collect, there\u2019s no guarantee that they\u2019ll ever be delivered to Earth for study. The plan is to launch another rocket to Mars in the future to retrieve those samples and bring them back to Earth, but such missions have yet to be funded.Zurbuchen also knows that plenty of scientists disagree that Jezero is the best place to look for signs of ancient life on Mars. Others, for example, have proposed returning to the hot springs in the planet\u2019s Columbia Hills, where our Spirit rover explored almost a decade ago. Spirit didn\u2019t have the tools needed to search for life, but it did find structures similar to those created in part by extremophile bacteria in hot springs on Earth.But in the end, only one landing site could be chosen, and Jezero was determined the best bet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter all, if evidence of long-lost Martian life exists, it would make sense that it would be somewhere where there was once shallow water \u2014 hidden in the dried-up clay of the lake bed.The Jezero mission is more than just a daunting engineering feat. It represents the first rover mission designed to seek signs of life beyond Earth. And if everything goes according to plan, it will be the first round-trip mission to another planet \u2014 a first step before humans make the trip themselves.And so, in a way, the mission represents hope. At a time when government can\u2019t seem to accomplish very much at all, and when human beings don\u2019t seem to agree on even the most basic values, space missions such as this reach for other worlds and promise to do the impossible. The odds for finding evidence of life beyond our atmosphere are low, but they don\u2019t keep the most brilliant among our species from trying.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars is a dead world \u2014 cold and windswept with unrelenting storms. For one reason or another, it shed its magnetic field when it was only 500 million years old. Soon thereafter, sunbeams stripped away its atmosphere, drying up its vast oceans and rendering its surface unbearable for any potential life.Perhaps it never was bearable. Perhaps we\u2019ve always been alone in this corner of the cosmos. But now, for the first time, we\u2019re scrapping together the machinery to test that theory directly.\u201cThese are the things that pivot humanity,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cThe seafarers who crossed the ocean \u2014 is it critical that they did that? Absolutely.\u201dFor centuries, humankind has been aiming at targets we don\u2019t know exist. But we fire anyway, over the horizon. We might fail to find evidence of life on Mars, but the act of seeking it will be a great accomplishment nonetheless.Read more:David Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLetters to the Editor: To Mars, or no?Buzz Aldrin: The next giant leap for space explorationThe Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityTom Toles: If you are prepared to die, the Mars colony is a good bet for youAdam Schiff: In the name of Curiosity, fully fund the Mars mission For the first time, we\u2019re sending a rover to look for life on another planet. Opinion: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.",
        "author": "Robert Gebelhoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2589",
        "date": "2018-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/nasas-latest-gamble-might-not-pay-out-but-its-worth-it-anyway/2018/11/21/bb06a964-eda3-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html",
        "text": "Imagine you\u2019re trying to decide where to place your peg in a game of Battleship. Except let\u2019s change it up a bit. Instead of looking at a small grid, you\u2019re scanning an entire planet. And instead of looking for ships, you\u2019re trying to find evidence of microscopic life. And let\u2019s add another fun twist: There might not even be any actual \u201ctargets\u201d for you to find. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSound like something you\u2019d be willing to bet more than $2 billion on? Well, NASA\u2019s doing it anyway.This week, NASA announced it has locked on to the landing site for its next Mars rover, to be launched in 2020. The destination: an ancient lake bed known as the Jezero crater. It\u2019s a hugely expensive gamble intended to uncover the secrets of our planetary neighbor\u2019s cryptic past \u2014 and it\u2019s likely we will end up with more questions than answers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, this is among the most exciting space missions of our lifetime.\u201cI think, in the long run, this will be a no-brainer,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator at NASA. As head of the agency\u2019s science mission directorate, he\u2019s the man who called the multibillion-dollar shot, shaping the search for life beyond our planet for the near future.Zurbuchen recognizes that the mission comes with risk. NASA plans to land the rover in the crater using a rocket-powered sky crane \u2014 a mind-blowing maneuver in which a spacecraft barrels into Mars\u2019s atmosphere at breakneck speeds and, with the help of a parachute and propulsion rockets, slows down just enough to lower the rover onto the surface on cables in midair. Such a landing isn\u2019t unprecedented, but engineers refer to the procedure as \u201cseven minutes of terror.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComplicating matters is rough terrain full of boulders and sand dunes. And even if the rover manages to land without a hitch and secure the samples it set out to collect, there\u2019s no guarantee that they\u2019ll ever be delivered to Earth for study. The plan is to launch another rocket to Mars in the future to retrieve those samples and bring them back to Earth, but such missions have yet to be funded.Zurbuchen also knows that plenty of scientists disagree that Jezero is the best place to look for signs of ancient life on Mars. Others, for example, have proposed returning to the hot springs in the planet\u2019s Columbia Hills, where our Spirit rover explored almost a decade ago. Spirit didn\u2019t have the tools needed to search for life, but it did find structures similar to those created in part by extremophile bacteria in hot springs on Earth.But in the end, only one landing site could be chosen, and Jezero was determined the best bet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter all, if evidence of long-lost Martian life exists, it would make sense that it would be somewhere where there was once shallow water \u2014 hidden in the dried-up clay of the lake bed.The Jezero mission is more than just a daunting engineering feat. It represents the first rover mission designed to seek signs of life beyond Earth. And if everything goes according to plan, it will be the first round-trip mission to another planet \u2014 a first step before humans make the trip themselves.And so, in a way, the mission represents hope. At a time when government can\u2019t seem to accomplish very much at all, and when human beings don\u2019t seem to agree on even the most basic values, space missions such as this reach for other worlds and promise to do the impossible. The odds for finding evidence of life beyond our atmosphere are low, but they don\u2019t keep the most brilliant among our species from trying.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars is a dead world \u2014 cold and windswept with unrelenting storms. For one reason or another, it shed its magnetic field when it was only 500 million years old. Soon thereafter, sunbeams stripped away its atmosphere, drying up its vast oceans and rendering its surface unbearable for any potential life.Perhaps it never was bearable. Perhaps we\u2019ve always been alone in this corner of the cosmos. But now, for the first time, we\u2019re scrapping together the machinery to test that theory directly.\u201cThese are the things that pivot humanity,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cThe seafarers who crossed the ocean \u2014 is it critical that they did that? Absolutely.\u201dFor centuries, humankind has been aiming at targets we don\u2019t know exist. But we fire anyway, over the horizon. We might fail to find evidence of life on Mars, but the act of seeking it will be a great accomplishment nonetheless.Read more:David Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLetters to the Editor: To Mars, or no?Buzz Aldrin: The next giant leap for space explorationThe Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityTom Toles: If you are prepared to die, the Mars colony is a good bet for youAdam Schiff: In the name of Curiosity, fully fund the Mars mission For the first time, we\u2019re sending a rover to look for life on another planet. Opinion: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.",
        "author": "Robert Gebelhoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The 10 best things Biden did in 2021 (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2590",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/28/best-things-biden-did-2021/",
        "text": "I once again offer my annual lists of the 10 best and 10 worst things the president did this year. Regular readers know I have been highly critical of President Biden during his first year in office \u2014 so, in the spirit of the season, we\u2019ll start with the best things he did: Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight10. He launched the first test of a new system to defend Earth from a killer asteroid. On his orders, NASA launched a rocket into space testing \u201cwhether a spacecraft can nudge a celestial body in a way that will alter its orbit.\u201d9. He twice launched airstrikes against Iranian proxy forces in Iraq and Syria. He continued the Trump policy of taking military action against Iranian-backed forces who threaten or attempt to kill U.S. personnel.Story continues below advertisement8. He became the first president to resist Turkish pressure and officially acknowledge its 1915 genocide against Armenians. His statement sent a clear message that the United States would hold even allies to account for abuses of human rights.Advertisement7. He recovered the majority of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to a Russian hacking collective. After the company paid ransomware attackers who shut down its computer systems and caused fuel shortages up and down the East Coast, the Biden Justice Department followed the money and seized 63.7 bitcoin, valued at about $2.3 million.6. He sidelined the court-packing movement on the left. Biden created a commission that included sensible liberals and conservatives which steered clear of taking a position on the most controversial ideas for changing the court.Story continues below advertisement5. He elevated Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the \u201cQuad\u201d) among the United States, Australia, India and Japan. After eight dormant years under President Barack Obama, the Quad was reinvigorated by the Trump administration and raised to a ministerial-level meeting. Biden elevated it further to an annual leader-level meeting, rallying the Indo-Pacific democracies to counter China and help lead Asia in the direction of peace and security.Advertisement4. He stepped up U.S. support for Taiwan. He invited Taiwan to participate in his 110-nation Summit for Democracy, invited Taiwan\u2019s de facto ambassador to his inauguration, invited Taiwan to share its expertise at the Global COVID-19 Summit and continued to provide Taiwan with the defense capabilities it needs to defend itself against Chinese aggression. And his administration worked hard to beat back efforts by the People\u2019s Republic of China to squeeze countries to de-recognize Taiwan.3. He announced a historic trilateral security agreement with Australia and Britain to counter Chinese hegemony. The new AUKUS pact will help Australia develop nuclear submarine capabilities that will allow it to project power in the Pacific, and increases cooperation on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.Story continues below advertisement2. He accelerated covid vaccine delivery at home and abroad. In the United States, more than 70 percent of American adults are fully vaccinated. And his administration provided more than 300 million doses \u2014 more than the rest of the world combined \u2014 to 110 countries free of charge. He also launched the Global Covid Corps, a coalition of companies that will support vaccination efforts in developing countries.Advertisement1. He signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill into law. Biden campaigned on a promise to usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation. Sadly, this was the only major piece of legislation to deliver on that promise. It will provide non-inflationary, long-term investments in roads, bridges, ports and waterways. Its passage also saved the filibuster, by delivering for Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) \u2014 the two lonely Democrats standing in the way of filibuster elimination \u2014 and vindicating their effort to reach across the aisle.Other achievements did not make the top 10. Among the honorable mentions: Biden issued an executive order prohibiting Americans from investing in 59 Chinese firms that allegedly are linked to the Chinese military; he signed bipartisan legislation to ban the import of products produced with Uyghur slave labor; he announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, a pointed snub to protest the Chinese regime\u2019s human rights abuses without hurting U.S. athletes; and he launched an initiative to find deported U.S. veterans and bring them and their families back to America.Story continues below advertisementThere were also a number of policies that nearly made the list, until Biden reversed himself. He told a CNN town hall that if Taiwan were attacked, the United States would come to its defense \u2014 seemingly ending our misguided policy of \u201cstrategic ambiguity\u201d \u2014 but then the White House backtracked and said there was no change in policy. He called Russian President Vladimir Putin a killer, and promised to oppose the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, but then greenlighted the project \u2014 a major victory for the Russian leader. Both of these would have made the 10 best if he had followed through.In this column, I reviewed the 10 worst things Biden has done. I don't always agree with the president, but this year wasn't without accomplishment for his administration. Opinion: The 10 best things Biden did in 2021",
        "author": "Marc A. Thiessen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Ageism, skateboarding and the International Space Station (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2591",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-ageism-skateboarding-and-the-international-space-station/2019/07/05/e21522a6-9f50-11e9-85d6-5211733f92c7_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightRemember the 'International' in International Space StationIt was striking to see the dramatic \u201cSafe landing\u201d photograph on the June 26 front page, marking the successful end of Expedition 59\u2019s 204-day mission to the International Space Station. I regret only that The Post missed an opportunity to help readers fully appreciate the international nature of this mission. The landing site in Kazakhstan was mentioned, but Russia was not identified as the contributor of the Soyuz spacecraft.\u00a0Also absent from the caption were the names and nationalities of U.S. astronaut Anne McClain\u2019s crewmates: Russian cosmonaut (and expedition commander) Oleg Kononenko and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt such a tense time in U.S. relations with Russia and even with close allies, it\u2019s a pity not to highlight reminders that successful international cooperation is still possible.Greg Thielmann, Arlington\u25cf\nDown to EarthI enjoyed the June 21 special section celebrating Apollo 11\u2019s anniversary. But please have more respect for the science that got us there. Floating items in orbit are not \u201camong the first signs you\u2019ve escaped the deep well of Earth\u2019s gravity\u201d [\u201c50 astronauts with far-out memories\u201d]. Things float in orbit because they\u2019re in free fall through Earth\u2019s gravity. The moon, roughly a quarter-million miles away, is held in orbit by Earth\u2019s gravity, so no one in low Earth orbit of a few hundred miles has \u201cescaped\u201d it.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementDean Wight, RockvilleThe June 21 article \u201cOur moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactor\u201d [Apollo 11 special section] said Theia, an orbital body, came \u201cbarreling straight toward Earth.\u201d I can\u2019t imagine that a straight-on collision would not have destroyed both bodies. The article said that billions of pounds of rock were thrown from Earth, but even billions of tons would be a conservative estimate.AdvertisementThe moon does not trail Earth in its orbit. The moon lags behind the near-side tidal bulge as the Earth rotates. The moon\u2019s gravity on the bulge slows the Earth\u2019s rotation.The era of eclipses will not be over when the moon recedes far enough that it never entirely covers the sun. Partial eclipses, in which the moon crosses the sun off-center as most observers see, will continue. Total eclipses will cease, as the article noted, but we will still experience annular eclipses. These occur when the moon crosses the sun and the moon is more distant in its slightly oval orbit and/or the Earth is closer to the sun. During these events, a small solar ring appears around the moon.Story continues below advertisementGus Mancuso, Laurel\u25cf\nHold the self-helpRegarding the June 30 Arts & Style article \u201cBooks for the ages\u201d:What a grand idea to attach books to age. I read the list with interest, agreeing with some decisions, though not all.\u00a0I was dismayed, though, by the turn the list took for people as they age. The volumes on self-help through personal reflection or experiences of others outnumbered books on intellectual interests. If readers hadn\u2019t been reading about the trials of middle age or how to get through their 30s, why would they want to wallow in such books as the years pile on? (By the way: Ditto for mysteries.)AdvertisementA woman I know who is in her mid-80s and serves on several neighborhood boards reads voraciously about politics, social policy and other current matters. Yes, she has read the Mueller report. Heck, if you live long enough to enjoy more reading, why not relish the topics and authors of choice and continue to invigorate the mind?Story continues below advertisementCarolyn Lieberg, WashingtonI read with appreciation the content and literary talents of Kathleen Parker\u2019s June 23 op-ed, \u201cJust more of Joe being Joe? Boy, oh boy.\u201d \u2014 up until the last 14 words. Surely there is a more appropriate illustration to be made of the malapropisms in today\u2019s uncivil political atmosphere than to assign Joe Biden\u2019s words and actions to his age. In a rapidly aging society in the United States, with \nabout 10,000 individuals becoming eligible for Medicare (age 65) daily for the next decade, her words pile on to the ageism that senior adults confront at virtually every level of our work and personal lives, and it is just as egregious a stereotype as those she targeted in her op-ed.AdvertisementMary E. Worstell, WashingtonStory continues below advertisementThe writer is retired from the Health and Human Service\u2019s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, where she directed initiatives on older adult safety and health.\u25cfThe sky's the limitThanks for the June 23 Sports article \u201cLittle girl with big dreams,\u201d featuring Sky Brown, a 10-year-old girl attempting to qualify for the 2020 Olympic skateboarding event. It is admirable to see a person so young who not only has a goal but also is striving hard to achieve it, competing against adults with many more years of experience in the sport.William Steigelmann, Myersville\u25cf\nCalling foul on an unfair portrayal Sally Jenkins\u2019s June 26 Sports column on the NCAA, \u201cEmmert rules NCAA like it\u2019s a feudal state. His time is up.,\u201d was an excessive and unfair twofer: It combined an incomplete and misleading picture of the NCAA\u2019s communication with the state of California over SB-206, the Fair Pay to Play Act, with an unwarranted, personal attack on NCAA President Mark Emmert.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe NCAA did send a letter to the California legislature regarding that legislation, which would compensate student-athletes for the use of their image.\u00a0But the letter does not take a position on the bill, much less oppose it.\u00a0Rather, it \u201crequest[s] respectfully\u201d and \u201chumbly ask[s]\u201d California to delay action until October, when an NCAA task force that includes university presidents, athletics directors and student-athletes will issue a report with recommendations.Jenkins failed to mention that the Pac-12, Mountain West and Big West conferences had previously sent similar letters to the California legislature with the same request.\u00a0Contrary to her assertion, there is nothing in the letter that threatens or extorts the state.\u00a0The letter does not, as is clearly implied, mention the Rose Bowl or the 2023 College Football Playoff championship game.\u00a0Indeed, as Jenkins surely knows, the NCAA does not even oversee the College Football Playoff; that is done by a completely separate organization.The NCAA letter makes clear that it fully understands the widespread interest in allowing a student\u2019s name, image and likeness to be monetized but is anxious to find ways to ensure that doing so does not totally erode the line that separates professional and college sports.\u00a0If policymakers want to make fundamental changes in college sports,\u00a0it seems well worthwhile to get it right. \u201cMeasure twice, cut once\u201d is a good rule for carpenters and legislatures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTerry W. Hartle, WashingtonThe writer is senior vice president of the American Council on Education.\u25cfThe emotional meltdown after Three Mile IslandThe June 18 Metro article \u201cVirginia uranium ban is upheld\u201d said the Virginia legislature was \u201cleery after the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.\u201d\u00a0Leery?\u00a0That word creates the false impression that judgment and hesitation were being exercised. Instead, Virginia legislators were caught up in a trampling stampede of hysterical reaction to what was ultimately proof of reasonable safety and prudence in the nuclear power industry.That incident would have improved the safety of nuclear power so much more if good judgment were in control instead of baseless hysteria.\u00a0Research and development would have solved the various issues of waste disposal in the decades since Three Mile Island if nuclear power had expanded instead of being hampered by emotional nonsense.\u00a0We lost four decades (and more still go out the window) because of emotional overreaction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe article should have mentioned that no one was injured, much less killed, in the Three Mile Island accident. Reporting on the incident was dominated by hysteria for more than a decade and was undeniably the main reason this country \nburns primarily fossil fuel\n\n\ns\n instead of using nuclear fuel to produce electricity \u2014 the worst technological setback in modern U.S. history. That technological paralysis was, and still is, so profound that it is hard to overstate the damage.The article did not explain how uranium mining would harm the health or safety of Virginians (or anyone else). The health consequences of coal mining dwarf the relatively minor ones from uranium mining.Bill Rymer, Lexington Park\u25cf\nThe candidates and the issuesI was really impressed by and appreciative of the June 21 The Candidates section. It was well done and probably required a lot of research by many. The front and back pages were really great at identifying the major issues and showing in numbers and circle size how each candidate has dedicated his or her attention to each issue. The inside pages broke down the major issues and showed where the various candidates stand, with key statements if applicable.AdvertisementI am so pleased The Post took the time to synopsize the Democratic candidates in a very important election. Now it is up to the candidates to espouse their issues over time. I hope The Post will put this same thing together maybe in a year from now to see how each has adjusted to the election environment.Bob Heyer, Fairfax StationIn the June 21 special section The Candidates, which highlighted the differences of views of the current Democratic presidential candidates, the chart category of foreign policy included the sub-header \u201cIsrael-Palestine.\u201d There is no such country or place called \u201cPalestine.\u201d No matter how much The\u2009Post pushes, that reality is not a fait accompli. It may occur one day, but it is an impossibility as long as the Palestinians keep refusing to even sit down and negotiate for something they seemingly want.During the British Mandate for Palestine period, the only people who called themselves Palestinians were the Jews. The Jewish newspaper was the Palestine Post; the Jewish symphony was the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, etc. The current-day Palestinians didn\u2019t call themselves Palestinians until they realized it would confuse people into thinking they had been there since time immemorial. It\u2019s ironic that the Palestinians appropriated the Jewish pre-state title. The Palestinians did not formally identify themselves as a separate group called Palestinians until 1964, when Arab League members founded the militant Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO chose the label \u201cPalestinian\u201d to contrive a political claim to the land.The Post can\u2019t seem to help but champion the Palestinian cause at every turn \u2014 even sneaking it into an article about presidential candidates.Michael Berenhaus, Bethesda\u25cf\nHigh school historiography Jay Mathews sold history teachers a bit short when he implied in his June 24 Education column, \u201cDebates over history remain very much in the present \u2014 and in the classroom,\u201d that we may still be teaching the view of President Andrew Johnson that he learned in high school.\u00a0A look at any mainstream textbook would tell him that few of us would teach the view of Johnson as the beleaguered defender of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Reconstruction plans.A talk with any U.S. or Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher would tell him that historiography (for example, comparing the description of Johnson in John F. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cProfiles in Courage\u201d with that by David W. Blight) has long been taught, and, in fact, the revised APUSH exam (Mathews has long been an admirer of those exams) actually stresses that students be able to sort out conflicting interpretations of history.\u00a0Indeed, I\u00a0liked Mathews\u2019s example and plan to, if I can, make it into a question for a test I make up next year.But in the case of \u201cProfiles in Courage,\u201d there is more history to sort out. The person who gets the praise is not Johnson but Sen. Edmund Ross, who is said to have cast the deciding vote against Johnson\u2019s removal.\u00a0More recent research, however, indicates that Ross may have taken a bribe and at the very least had much to lose if Sen. Benjamin Wade (next in line) had taken over as president.We history teachers work very hard to present students with the best understandings we can get about any aspect of controversy in history. I think we should get a bit more credit from Mathews.Susan Ikenberry, Washington\u25cf\nAdvanced chemistryAn interesting sidelight on the June 27 obituary for George Rosenkranz, \u201cChemist helped create birth control pill in 1950s,\u201d is the later realization that a considerable amount of serendipity was involved in the discovery of the oral contraceptives. The research that led to those drugs was spurred by the observation that progesterone inhibits ovulation in rabbits. However, this compound is not absorbed well when taken by mouth. Both norethindrone and norethynodrel provided synthetic counterparts of progesterone that overcame that limitation. One of the steps in the syntheses for preparing norethynodrel resulted in the formation of the potent estrogen mestranol as a very minor byproduct. Subsequent research revealed that the contraceptive activity was in good part because of that estrogenic component. Virtually all oral contraceptives now include a measured amount of an estrogen.Daniel Lednicer, Rockville\u25cf\nIt's about her, not himRegarding the June 21 Metro article \u201cGMU selects interim leader\u201d:Kudos for recognizing that Anne Holton\u2019s husband is not the headline.Susan G. Schwartz, Fairfax\u25cf\nA better descriptor of the AHAThe June 21 front-page article \u201cSupreme Court rules Md. cross may stand\u201d inappropriately referred to the American Humanist Association as an \u201catheist organization.\u201d The association, which initiated the suit behind the court\u2019s American Legion v. American Humanist Association \n\ndecision, carefully distinguishes its beliefs from atheism, saying: \u201cHumanism encompasses a variety of nontheistic views (atheism, agnosticism, rationalism, naturalism, secularism, and so forth) while adding .\u2009.\u2009. ethical values .\u2009.\u2009. grounded in .\u2009.\u2009. the Enlightenment, informed by scientific knowledge, and driven by a desire to meet the needs of people.\u201dMany still perceive atheism as \u201cthe doctrine or belief that there is no God,\u201d as the dictionary defined it as recently as a few decades ago. Because science can\u2019t prove the nonexistence of \u201cGod,\u201d any fixed belief that \u201cthere is no God\u201d requires something akin to supernatural faith. But the American Humanist Association believes we should \u201clead ethical lives of personal fulfillment\u201d and can do so without resorting to \u201ctheism or other supernatural beliefs.\u201d\u201cNontheistic\u201d is a better one-word descriptor than \u201catheist,\u201d but it still entirely misses the centrality of ethics and personal fulfillment to the American Humanist Association\u2019s beliefs.Marvin Solberg, Edgewater\u25cf\nWhat sexual assault is really aboutI was troubled by E. Jean Carroll\u2019s comments reported in the June 25 news article \u201cTrump says latest accuser is \u2018lying,\u2019\u2009\u201d implying that whether President Trump (or any other alleged perpetrator) finds a person attractive could be a contributing factor to that person being a target of a sexual assault.Sexual assault and rape are crimes of violence and are about power and control. Suggesting that a person\u2019s attractive appearance or attire in some way contributes to that person being a target of a sexual crime perpetuates misinformation about the nature of these crimes. In addition, it wrongfully shifts some of the responsibility for the crime onto the survivor of the assault rather than placing it squarely with the perpetrator. This misinformation also erodes effective prevention strategies, which include comprehensive education for all individuals about consent, messages and myths regarding gender roles, and the abuse of power and privilege.Kirsten M. Lundeberg, Fairfax\u25cf\nChristianity's real realtionship to classical knowledge\u201cHow scholars in a few cities kept ancient knowledge alive in the Dark Ages,\u201d the June 23 Book World review of Violet Moller\u2019s book, \u201cThe Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found,\u201d stated that \u201cafter the decline of the western Roman Empire .\u2009.\u2009. the rise of Christianity led to the destruction of libraries.\u201d\u00a0To the contrary, St. Benedict and the rise of Catholic monasteries kept knowledge alive, as monks labored to copy ancient manuscripts by hand, thereby preserving knowledge for future generations.Susan Majewski, Manassas\u25cf\nDon't normalize suicideRegarding the June 25 Health & Science article \u201cSome seniors weigh the idea of \u2018rational\u00a0suicide\u2019\u2009\u201d:Making suicide seem kind and reasonable is an injustice both to the elderly and to those families who are mourning the premature death of a loved one. Will vulnerable people, especially women, minorities and the poor, be bullied into accepting a lethal overdose instead of being given assistance?\u00a0How\u00a0tragic if suicide or euthanasia becomes the normal way of dealing with the inconveniences and challenges of aging. Even younger people will be influenced by changing the societal norm in favor of life.Jean Gaes, CroftonRead more:Readers critique The Post: More sexist criticism of the U.S. women\u2019s national soccer teamReaders critique The Post: Move on from gotcha moments in White House reportingReaders critique The Post: D-Day, George Washington and the Cleveland BrownsReaders critique The Post: People we should remember and folks we\u2019d better forgetReaders critique The Post: Dog clothes, Agent Orange and how to remember I.M. Pei This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Ageism, skateboarding and the International Space Station",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Ageism, skateboarding and the International Space Station (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2592",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-ageism-skateboarding-and-the-international-space-station/2019/07/05/e21522a6-9f50-11e9-85d6-5211733f92c7_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightRemember the 'International' in International Space StationIt was striking to see the dramatic \u201cSafe landing\u201d photograph on the June 26 front page, marking the successful end of Expedition 59\u2019s 204-day mission to the International Space Station. I regret only that The Post missed an opportunity to help readers fully appreciate the international nature of this mission. The landing site in Kazakhstan was mentioned, but Russia was not identified as the contributor of the Soyuz spacecraft.\u00a0Also absent from the caption were the names and nationalities of U.S. astronaut Anne McClain\u2019s crewmates: Russian cosmonaut (and expedition commander) Oleg Kononenko and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt such a tense time in U.S. relations with Russia and even with close allies, it\u2019s a pity not to highlight reminders that successful international cooperation is still possible.Greg Thielmann, Arlington\u25cf\nDown to EarthI enjoyed the June 21 special section celebrating Apollo 11\u2019s anniversary. But please have more respect for the science that got us there. Floating items in orbit are not \u201camong the first signs you\u2019ve escaped the deep well of Earth\u2019s gravity\u201d [\u201c50 astronauts with far-out memories\u201d]. Things float in orbit because they\u2019re in free fall through Earth\u2019s gravity. The moon, roughly a quarter-million miles away, is held in orbit by Earth\u2019s gravity, so no one in low Earth orbit of a few hundred miles has \u201cescaped\u201d it.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementDean Wight, RockvilleThe June 21 article \u201cOur moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactor\u201d [Apollo 11 special section] said Theia, an orbital body, came \u201cbarreling straight toward Earth.\u201d I can\u2019t imagine that a straight-on collision would not have destroyed both bodies. The article said that billions of pounds of rock were thrown from Earth, but even billions of tons would be a conservative estimate.AdvertisementThe moon does not trail Earth in its orbit. The moon lags behind the near-side tidal bulge as the Earth rotates. The moon\u2019s gravity on the bulge slows the Earth\u2019s rotation.The era of eclipses will not be over when the moon recedes far enough that it never entirely covers the sun. Partial eclipses, in which the moon crosses the sun off-center as most observers see, will continue. Total eclipses will cease, as the article noted, but we will still experience annular eclipses. These occur when the moon crosses the sun and the moon is more distant in its slightly oval orbit and/or the Earth is closer to the sun. During these events, a small solar ring appears around the moon.Story continues below advertisementGus Mancuso, Laurel\u25cf\nHold the self-helpRegarding the June 30 Arts & Style article \u201cBooks for the ages\u201d:What a grand idea to attach books to age. I read the list with interest, agreeing with some decisions, though not all.\u00a0I was dismayed, though, by the turn the list took for people as they age. The volumes on self-help through personal reflection or experiences of others outnumbered books on intellectual interests. If readers hadn\u2019t been reading about the trials of middle age or how to get through their 30s, why would they want to wallow in such books as the years pile on? (By the way: Ditto for mysteries.)AdvertisementA woman I know who is in her mid-80s and serves on several neighborhood boards reads voraciously about politics, social policy and other current matters. Yes, she has read the Mueller report. Heck, if you live long enough to enjoy more reading, why not relish the topics and authors of choice and continue to invigorate the mind?Story continues below advertisementCarolyn Lieberg, WashingtonI read with appreciation the content and literary talents of Kathleen Parker\u2019s June 23 op-ed, \u201cJust more of Joe being Joe? Boy, oh boy.\u201d \u2014 up until the last 14 words. Surely there is a more appropriate illustration to be made of the malapropisms in today\u2019s uncivil political atmosphere than to assign Joe Biden\u2019s words and actions to his age. In a rapidly aging society in the United States, with \nabout 10,000 individuals becoming eligible for Medicare (age 65) daily for the next decade, her words pile on to the ageism that senior adults confront at virtually every level of our work and personal lives, and it is just as egregious a stereotype as those she targeted in her op-ed.AdvertisementMary E. Worstell, WashingtonStory continues below advertisementThe writer is retired from the Health and Human Service\u2019s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, where she directed initiatives on older adult safety and health.\u25cfThe sky's the limitThanks for the June 23 Sports article \u201cLittle girl with big dreams,\u201d featuring Sky Brown, a 10-year-old girl attempting to qualify for the 2020 Olympic skateboarding event. It is admirable to see a person so young who not only has a goal but also is striving hard to achieve it, competing against adults with many more years of experience in the sport.William Steigelmann, Myersville\u25cf\nCalling foul on an unfair portrayal Sally Jenkins\u2019s June 26 Sports column on the NCAA, \u201cEmmert rules NCAA like it\u2019s a feudal state. His time is up.,\u201d was an excessive and unfair twofer: It combined an incomplete and misleading picture of the NCAA\u2019s communication with the state of California over SB-206, the Fair Pay to Play Act, with an unwarranted, personal attack on NCAA President Mark Emmert.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe NCAA did send a letter to the California legislature regarding that legislation, which would compensate student-athletes for the use of their image.\u00a0But the letter does not take a position on the bill, much less oppose it.\u00a0Rather, it \u201crequest[s] respectfully\u201d and \u201chumbly ask[s]\u201d California to delay action until October, when an NCAA task force that includes university presidents, athletics directors and student-athletes will issue a report with recommendations.Jenkins failed to mention that the Pac-12, Mountain West and Big West conferences had previously sent similar letters to the California legislature with the same request.\u00a0Contrary to her assertion, there is nothing in the letter that threatens or extorts the state.\u00a0The letter does not, as is clearly implied, mention the Rose Bowl or the 2023 College Football Playoff championship game.\u00a0Indeed, as Jenkins surely knows, the NCAA does not even oversee the College Football Playoff; that is done by a completely separate organization.The NCAA letter makes clear that it fully understands the widespread interest in allowing a student\u2019s name, image and likeness to be monetized but is anxious to find ways to ensure that doing so does not totally erode the line that separates professional and college sports.\u00a0If policymakers want to make fundamental changes in college sports,\u00a0it seems well worthwhile to get it right. \u201cMeasure twice, cut once\u201d is a good rule for carpenters and legislatures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTerry W. Hartle, WashingtonThe writer is senior vice president of the American Council on Education.\u25cfThe emotional meltdown after Three Mile IslandThe June 18 Metro article \u201cVirginia uranium ban is upheld\u201d said the Virginia legislature was \u201cleery after the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.\u201d\u00a0Leery?\u00a0That word creates the false impression that judgment and hesitation were being exercised. Instead, Virginia legislators were caught up in a trampling stampede of hysterical reaction to what was ultimately proof of reasonable safety and prudence in the nuclear power industry.That incident would have improved the safety of nuclear power so much more if good judgment were in control instead of baseless hysteria.\u00a0Research and development would have solved the various issues of waste disposal in the decades since Three Mile Island if nuclear power had expanded instead of being hampered by emotional nonsense.\u00a0We lost four decades (and more still go out the window) because of emotional overreaction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe article should have mentioned that no one was injured, much less killed, in the Three Mile Island accident. Reporting on the incident was dominated by hysteria for more than a decade and was undeniably the main reason this country \nburns primarily fossil fuel\n\n\ns\n instead of using nuclear fuel to produce electricity \u2014 the worst technological setback in modern U.S. history. That technological paralysis was, and still is, so profound that it is hard to overstate the damage.The article did not explain how uranium mining would harm the health or safety of Virginians (or anyone else). The health consequences of coal mining dwarf the relatively minor ones from uranium mining.Bill Rymer, Lexington Park\u25cf\nThe candidates and the issuesI was really impressed by and appreciative of the June 21 The Candidates section. It was well done and probably required a lot of research by many. The front and back pages were really great at identifying the major issues and showing in numbers and circle size how each candidate has dedicated his or her attention to each issue. The inside pages broke down the major issues and showed where the various candidates stand, with key statements if applicable.AdvertisementI am so pleased The Post took the time to synopsize the Democratic candidates in a very important election. Now it is up to the candidates to espouse their issues over time. I hope The Post will put this same thing together maybe in a year from now to see how each has adjusted to the election environment.Bob Heyer, Fairfax StationIn the June 21 special section The Candidates, which highlighted the differences of views of the current Democratic presidential candidates, the chart category of foreign policy included the sub-header \u201cIsrael-Palestine.\u201d There is no such country or place called \u201cPalestine.\u201d No matter how much The\u2009Post pushes, that reality is not a fait accompli. It may occur one day, but it is an impossibility as long as the Palestinians keep refusing to even sit down and negotiate for something they seemingly want.During the British Mandate for Palestine period, the only people who called themselves Palestinians were the Jews. The Jewish newspaper was the Palestine Post; the Jewish symphony was the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, etc. The current-day Palestinians didn\u2019t call themselves Palestinians until they realized it would confuse people into thinking they had been there since time immemorial. It\u2019s ironic that the Palestinians appropriated the Jewish pre-state title. The Palestinians did not formally identify themselves as a separate group called Palestinians until 1964, when Arab League members founded the militant Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO chose the label \u201cPalestinian\u201d to contrive a political claim to the land.The Post can\u2019t seem to help but champion the Palestinian cause at every turn \u2014 even sneaking it into an article about presidential candidates.Michael Berenhaus, Bethesda\u25cf\nHigh school historiography Jay Mathews sold history teachers a bit short when he implied in his June 24 Education column, \u201cDebates over history remain very much in the present \u2014 and in the classroom,\u201d that we may still be teaching the view of President Andrew Johnson that he learned in high school.\u00a0A look at any mainstream textbook would tell him that few of us would teach the view of Johnson as the beleaguered defender of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Reconstruction plans.A talk with any U.S. or Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher would tell him that historiography (for example, comparing the description of Johnson in John F. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cProfiles in Courage\u201d with that by David W. Blight) has long been taught, and, in fact, the revised APUSH exam (Mathews has long been an admirer of those exams) actually stresses that students be able to sort out conflicting interpretations of history.\u00a0Indeed, I\u00a0liked Mathews\u2019s example and plan to, if I can, make it into a question for a test I make up next year.But in the case of \u201cProfiles in Courage,\u201d there is more history to sort out. The person who gets the praise is not Johnson but Sen. Edmund Ross, who is said to have cast the deciding vote against Johnson\u2019s removal.\u00a0More recent research, however, indicates that Ross may have taken a bribe and at the very least had much to lose if Sen. Benjamin Wade (next in line) had taken over as president.We history teachers work very hard to present students with the best understandings we can get about any aspect of controversy in history. I think we should get a bit more credit from Mathews.Susan Ikenberry, Washington\u25cf\nAdvanced chemistryAn interesting sidelight on the June 27 obituary for George Rosenkranz, \u201cChemist helped create birth control pill in 1950s,\u201d is the later realization that a considerable amount of serendipity was involved in the discovery of the oral contraceptives. The research that led to those drugs was spurred by the observation that progesterone inhibits ovulation in rabbits. However, this compound is not absorbed well when taken by mouth. Both norethindrone and norethynodrel provided synthetic counterparts of progesterone that overcame that limitation. One of the steps in the syntheses for preparing norethynodrel resulted in the formation of the potent estrogen mestranol as a very minor byproduct. Subsequent research revealed that the contraceptive activity was in good part because of that estrogenic component. Virtually all oral contraceptives now include a measured amount of an estrogen.Daniel Lednicer, Rockville\u25cf\nIt's about her, not himRegarding the June 21 Metro article \u201cGMU selects interim leader\u201d:Kudos for recognizing that Anne Holton\u2019s husband is not the headline.Susan G. Schwartz, Fairfax\u25cf\nA better descriptor of the AHAThe June 21 front-page article \u201cSupreme Court rules Md. cross may stand\u201d inappropriately referred to the American Humanist Association as an \u201catheist organization.\u201d The association, which initiated the suit behind the court\u2019s American Legion v. American Humanist Association \n\ndecision, carefully distinguishes its beliefs from atheism, saying: \u201cHumanism encompasses a variety of nontheistic views (atheism, agnosticism, rationalism, naturalism, secularism, and so forth) while adding .\u2009.\u2009. ethical values .\u2009.\u2009. grounded in .\u2009.\u2009. the Enlightenment, informed by scientific knowledge, and driven by a desire to meet the needs of people.\u201dMany still perceive atheism as \u201cthe doctrine or belief that there is no God,\u201d as the dictionary defined it as recently as a few decades ago. Because science can\u2019t prove the nonexistence of \u201cGod,\u201d any fixed belief that \u201cthere is no God\u201d requires something akin to supernatural faith. But the American Humanist Association believes we should \u201clead ethical lives of personal fulfillment\u201d and can do so without resorting to \u201ctheism or other supernatural beliefs.\u201d\u201cNontheistic\u201d is a better one-word descriptor than \u201catheist,\u201d but it still entirely misses the centrality of ethics and personal fulfillment to the American Humanist Association\u2019s beliefs.Marvin Solberg, Edgewater\u25cf\nWhat sexual assault is really aboutI was troubled by E. Jean Carroll\u2019s comments reported in the June 25 news article \u201cTrump says latest accuser is \u2018lying,\u2019\u2009\u201d implying that whether President Trump (or any other alleged perpetrator) finds a person attractive could be a contributing factor to that person being a target of a sexual assault.Sexual assault and rape are crimes of violence and are about power and control. Suggesting that a person\u2019s attractive appearance or attire in some way contributes to that person being a target of a sexual crime perpetuates misinformation about the nature of these crimes. In addition, it wrongfully shifts some of the responsibility for the crime onto the survivor of the assault rather than placing it squarely with the perpetrator. This misinformation also erodes effective prevention strategies, which include comprehensive education for all individuals about consent, messages and myths regarding gender roles, and the abuse of power and privilege.Kirsten M. Lundeberg, Fairfax\u25cf\nChristianity's real realtionship to classical knowledge\u201cHow scholars in a few cities kept ancient knowledge alive in the Dark Ages,\u201d the June 23 Book World review of Violet Moller\u2019s book, \u201cThe Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found,\u201d stated that \u201cafter the decline of the western Roman Empire .\u2009.\u2009. the rise of Christianity led to the destruction of libraries.\u201d\u00a0To the contrary, St. Benedict and the rise of Catholic monasteries kept knowledge alive, as monks labored to copy ancient manuscripts by hand, thereby preserving knowledge for future generations.Susan Majewski, Manassas\u25cf\nDon't normalize suicideRegarding the June 25 Health & Science article \u201cSome seniors weigh the idea of \u2018rational\u00a0suicide\u2019\u2009\u201d:Making suicide seem kind and reasonable is an injustice both to the elderly and to those families who are mourning the premature death of a loved one. Will vulnerable people, especially women, minorities and the poor, be bullied into accepting a lethal overdose instead of being given assistance?\u00a0How\u00a0tragic if suicide or euthanasia becomes the normal way of dealing with the inconveniences and challenges of aging. Even younger people will be influenced by changing the societal norm in favor of life.Jean Gaes, CroftonRead more:Readers critique The Post: More sexist criticism of the U.S. women\u2019s national soccer teamReaders critique The Post: Move on from gotcha moments in White House reportingReaders critique The Post: D-Day, George Washington and the Cleveland BrownsReaders critique The Post: People we should remember and folks we\u2019d better forgetReaders critique The Post: Dog clothes, Agent Orange and how to remember I.M. Pei This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Ageism, skateboarding and the International Space Station",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Ageism, skateboarding and the International Space Station (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2593",
        "date": "2019-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-ageism-skateboarding-and-the-international-space-station/2019/07/05/e21522a6-9f50-11e9-85d6-5211733f92c7_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightRemember the 'International' in International Space StationIt was striking to see the dramatic \u201cSafe landing\u201d photograph on the June 26 front page, marking the successful end of Expedition 59\u2019s 204-day mission to the International Space Station. I regret only that The Post missed an opportunity to help readers fully appreciate the international nature of this mission. The landing site in Kazakhstan was mentioned, but Russia was not identified as the contributor of the Soyuz spacecraft.\u00a0Also absent from the caption were the names and nationalities of U.S. astronaut Anne McClain\u2019s crewmates: Russian cosmonaut (and expedition commander) Oleg Kononenko and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt such a tense time in U.S. relations with Russia and even with close allies, it\u2019s a pity not to highlight reminders that successful international cooperation is still possible.Greg Thielmann, Arlington\u25cf\nDown to EarthI enjoyed the June 21 special section celebrating Apollo 11\u2019s anniversary. But please have more respect for the science that got us there. Floating items in orbit are not \u201camong the first signs you\u2019ve escaped the deep well of Earth\u2019s gravity\u201d [\u201c50 astronauts with far-out memories\u201d]. Things float in orbit because they\u2019re in free fall through Earth\u2019s gravity. The moon, roughly a quarter-million miles away, is held in orbit by Earth\u2019s gravity, so no one in low Earth orbit of a few hundred miles has \u201cescaped\u201d it.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementDean Wight, RockvilleThe June 21 article \u201cOur moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactor\u201d [Apollo 11 special section] said Theia, an orbital body, came \u201cbarreling straight toward Earth.\u201d I can\u2019t imagine that a straight-on collision would not have destroyed both bodies. The article said that billions of pounds of rock were thrown from Earth, but even billions of tons would be a conservative estimate.AdvertisementThe moon does not trail Earth in its orbit. The moon lags behind the near-side tidal bulge as the Earth rotates. The moon\u2019s gravity on the bulge slows the Earth\u2019s rotation.The era of eclipses will not be over when the moon recedes far enough that it never entirely covers the sun. Partial eclipses, in which the moon crosses the sun off-center as most observers see, will continue. Total eclipses will cease, as the article noted, but we will still experience annular eclipses. These occur when the moon crosses the sun and the moon is more distant in its slightly oval orbit and/or the Earth is closer to the sun. During these events, a small solar ring appears around the moon.Story continues below advertisementGus Mancuso, Laurel\u25cf\nHold the self-helpRegarding the June 30 Arts & Style article \u201cBooks for the ages\u201d:What a grand idea to attach books to age. I read the list with interest, agreeing with some decisions, though not all.\u00a0I was dismayed, though, by the turn the list took for people as they age. The volumes on self-help through personal reflection or experiences of others outnumbered books on intellectual interests. If readers hadn\u2019t been reading about the trials of middle age or how to get through their 30s, why would they want to wallow in such books as the years pile on? (By the way: Ditto for mysteries.)AdvertisementA woman I know who is in her mid-80s and serves on several neighborhood boards reads voraciously about politics, social policy and other current matters. Yes, she has read the Mueller report. Heck, if you live long enough to enjoy more reading, why not relish the topics and authors of choice and continue to invigorate the mind?Story continues below advertisementCarolyn Lieberg, WashingtonI read with appreciation the content and literary talents of Kathleen Parker\u2019s June 23 op-ed, \u201cJust more of Joe being Joe? Boy, oh boy.\u201d \u2014 up until the last 14 words. Surely there is a more appropriate illustration to be made of the malapropisms in today\u2019s uncivil political atmosphere than to assign Joe Biden\u2019s words and actions to his age. In a rapidly aging society in the United States, with \nabout 10,000 individuals becoming eligible for Medicare (age 65) daily for the next decade, her words pile on to the ageism that senior adults confront at virtually every level of our work and personal lives, and it is just as egregious a stereotype as those she targeted in her op-ed.AdvertisementMary E. Worstell, WashingtonStory continues below advertisementThe writer is retired from the Health and Human Service\u2019s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, where she directed initiatives on older adult safety and health.\u25cfThe sky's the limitThanks for the June 23 Sports article \u201cLittle girl with big dreams,\u201d featuring Sky Brown, a 10-year-old girl attempting to qualify for the 2020 Olympic skateboarding event. It is admirable to see a person so young who not only has a goal but also is striving hard to achieve it, competing against adults with many more years of experience in the sport.William Steigelmann, Myersville\u25cf\nCalling foul on an unfair portrayal Sally Jenkins\u2019s June 26 Sports column on the NCAA, \u201cEmmert rules NCAA like it\u2019s a feudal state. His time is up.,\u201d was an excessive and unfair twofer: It combined an incomplete and misleading picture of the NCAA\u2019s communication with the state of California over SB-206, the Fair Pay to Play Act, with an unwarranted, personal attack on NCAA President Mark Emmert.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe NCAA did send a letter to the California legislature regarding that legislation, which would compensate student-athletes for the use of their image.\u00a0But the letter does not take a position on the bill, much less oppose it.\u00a0Rather, it \u201crequest[s] respectfully\u201d and \u201chumbly ask[s]\u201d California to delay action until October, when an NCAA task force that includes university presidents, athletics directors and student-athletes will issue a report with recommendations.Jenkins failed to mention that the Pac-12, Mountain West and Big West conferences had previously sent similar letters to the California legislature with the same request.\u00a0Contrary to her assertion, there is nothing in the letter that threatens or extorts the state.\u00a0The letter does not, as is clearly implied, mention the Rose Bowl or the 2023 College Football Playoff championship game.\u00a0Indeed, as Jenkins surely knows, the NCAA does not even oversee the College Football Playoff; that is done by a completely separate organization.The NCAA letter makes clear that it fully understands the widespread interest in allowing a student\u2019s name, image and likeness to be monetized but is anxious to find ways to ensure that doing so does not totally erode the line that separates professional and college sports.\u00a0If policymakers want to make fundamental changes in college sports,\u00a0it seems well worthwhile to get it right. \u201cMeasure twice, cut once\u201d is a good rule for carpenters and legislatures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTerry W. Hartle, WashingtonThe writer is senior vice president of the American Council on Education.\u25cfThe emotional meltdown after Three Mile IslandThe June 18 Metro article \u201cVirginia uranium ban is upheld\u201d said the Virginia legislature was \u201cleery after the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island.\u201d\u00a0Leery?\u00a0That word creates the false impression that judgment and hesitation were being exercised. Instead, Virginia legislators were caught up in a trampling stampede of hysterical reaction to what was ultimately proof of reasonable safety and prudence in the nuclear power industry.That incident would have improved the safety of nuclear power so much more if good judgment were in control instead of baseless hysteria.\u00a0Research and development would have solved the various issues of waste disposal in the decades since Three Mile Island if nuclear power had expanded instead of being hampered by emotional nonsense.\u00a0We lost four decades (and more still go out the window) because of emotional overreaction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe article should have mentioned that no one was injured, much less killed, in the Three Mile Island accident. Reporting on the incident was dominated by hysteria for more than a decade and was undeniably the main reason this country \nburns primarily fossil fuel\n\n\ns\n instead of using nuclear fuel to produce electricity \u2014 the worst technological setback in modern U.S. history. That technological paralysis was, and still is, so profound that it is hard to overstate the damage.The article did not explain how uranium mining would harm the health or safety of Virginians (or anyone else). The health consequences of coal mining dwarf the relatively minor ones from uranium mining.Bill Rymer, Lexington Park\u25cf\nThe candidates and the issuesI was really impressed by and appreciative of the June 21 The Candidates section. It was well done and probably required a lot of research by many. The front and back pages were really great at identifying the major issues and showing in numbers and circle size how each candidate has dedicated his or her attention to each issue. The inside pages broke down the major issues and showed where the various candidates stand, with key statements if applicable.AdvertisementI am so pleased The Post took the time to synopsize the Democratic candidates in a very important election. Now it is up to the candidates to espouse their issues over time. I hope The Post will put this same thing together maybe in a year from now to see how each has adjusted to the election environment.Bob Heyer, Fairfax StationIn the June 21 special section The Candidates, which highlighted the differences of views of the current Democratic presidential candidates, the chart category of foreign policy included the sub-header \u201cIsrael-Palestine.\u201d There is no such country or place called \u201cPalestine.\u201d No matter how much The\u2009Post pushes, that reality is not a fait accompli. It may occur one day, but it is an impossibility as long as the Palestinians keep refusing to even sit down and negotiate for something they seemingly want.During the British Mandate for Palestine period, the only people who called themselves Palestinians were the Jews. The Jewish newspaper was the Palestine Post; the Jewish symphony was the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, etc. The current-day Palestinians didn\u2019t call themselves Palestinians until they realized it would confuse people into thinking they had been there since time immemorial. It\u2019s ironic that the Palestinians appropriated the Jewish pre-state title. The Palestinians did not formally identify themselves as a separate group called Palestinians until 1964, when Arab League members founded the militant Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO chose the label \u201cPalestinian\u201d to contrive a political claim to the land.The Post can\u2019t seem to help but champion the Palestinian cause at every turn \u2014 even sneaking it into an article about presidential candidates.Michael Berenhaus, Bethesda\u25cf\nHigh school historiography Jay Mathews sold history teachers a bit short when he implied in his June 24 Education column, \u201cDebates over history remain very much in the present \u2014 and in the classroom,\u201d that we may still be teaching the view of President Andrew Johnson that he learned in high school.\u00a0A look at any mainstream textbook would tell him that few of us would teach the view of Johnson as the beleaguered defender of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Reconstruction plans.A talk with any U.S. or Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher would tell him that historiography (for example, comparing the description of Johnson in John F. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cProfiles in Courage\u201d with that by David W. Blight) has long been taught, and, in fact, the revised APUSH exam (Mathews has long been an admirer of those exams) actually stresses that students be able to sort out conflicting interpretations of history.\u00a0Indeed, I\u00a0liked Mathews\u2019s example and plan to, if I can, make it into a question for a test I make up next year.But in the case of \u201cProfiles in Courage,\u201d there is more history to sort out. The person who gets the praise is not Johnson but Sen. Edmund Ross, who is said to have cast the deciding vote against Johnson\u2019s removal.\u00a0More recent research, however, indicates that Ross may have taken a bribe and at the very least had much to lose if Sen. Benjamin Wade (next in line) had taken over as president.We history teachers work very hard to present students with the best understandings we can get about any aspect of controversy in history. I think we should get a bit more credit from Mathews.Susan Ikenberry, Washington\u25cf\nAdvanced chemistryAn interesting sidelight on the June 27 obituary for George Rosenkranz, \u201cChemist helped create birth control pill in 1950s,\u201d is the later realization that a considerable amount of serendipity was involved in the discovery of the oral contraceptives. The research that led to those drugs was spurred by the observation that progesterone inhibits ovulation in rabbits. However, this compound is not absorbed well when taken by mouth. Both norethindrone and norethynodrel provided synthetic counterparts of progesterone that overcame that limitation. One of the steps in the syntheses for preparing norethynodrel resulted in the formation of the potent estrogen mestranol as a very minor byproduct. Subsequent research revealed that the contraceptive activity was in good part because of that estrogenic component. Virtually all oral contraceptives now include a measured amount of an estrogen.Daniel Lednicer, Rockville\u25cf\nIt's about her, not himRegarding the June 21 Metro article \u201cGMU selects interim leader\u201d:Kudos for recognizing that Anne Holton\u2019s husband is not the headline.Susan G. Schwartz, Fairfax\u25cf\nA better descriptor of the AHAThe June 21 front-page article \u201cSupreme Court rules Md. cross may stand\u201d inappropriately referred to the American Humanist Association as an \u201catheist organization.\u201d The association, which initiated the suit behind the court\u2019s American Legion v. American Humanist Association \n\ndecision, carefully distinguishes its beliefs from atheism, saying: \u201cHumanism encompasses a variety of nontheistic views (atheism, agnosticism, rationalism, naturalism, secularism, and so forth) while adding .\u2009.\u2009. ethical values .\u2009.\u2009. grounded in .\u2009.\u2009. the Enlightenment, informed by scientific knowledge, and driven by a desire to meet the needs of people.\u201dMany still perceive atheism as \u201cthe doctrine or belief that there is no God,\u201d as the dictionary defined it as recently as a few decades ago. Because science can\u2019t prove the nonexistence of \u201cGod,\u201d any fixed belief that \u201cthere is no God\u201d requires something akin to supernatural faith. But the American Humanist Association believes we should \u201clead ethical lives of personal fulfillment\u201d and can do so without resorting to \u201ctheism or other supernatural beliefs.\u201d\u201cNontheistic\u201d is a better one-word descriptor than \u201catheist,\u201d but it still entirely misses the centrality of ethics and personal fulfillment to the American Humanist Association\u2019s beliefs.Marvin Solberg, Edgewater\u25cf\nWhat sexual assault is really aboutI was troubled by E. Jean Carroll\u2019s comments reported in the June 25 news article \u201cTrump says latest accuser is \u2018lying,\u2019\u2009\u201d implying that whether President Trump (or any other alleged perpetrator) finds a person attractive could be a contributing factor to that person being a target of a sexual assault.Sexual assault and rape are crimes of violence and are about power and control. Suggesting that a person\u2019s attractive appearance or attire in some way contributes to that person being a target of a sexual crime perpetuates misinformation about the nature of these crimes. In addition, it wrongfully shifts some of the responsibility for the crime onto the survivor of the assault rather than placing it squarely with the perpetrator. This misinformation also erodes effective prevention strategies, which include comprehensive education for all individuals about consent, messages and myths regarding gender roles, and the abuse of power and privilege.Kirsten M. Lundeberg, Fairfax\u25cf\nChristianity's real realtionship to classical knowledge\u201cHow scholars in a few cities kept ancient knowledge alive in the Dark Ages,\u201d the June 23 Book World review of Violet Moller\u2019s book, \u201cThe Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found,\u201d stated that \u201cafter the decline of the western Roman Empire .\u2009.\u2009. the rise of Christianity led to the destruction of libraries.\u201d\u00a0To the contrary, St. Benedict and the rise of Catholic monasteries kept knowledge alive, as monks labored to copy ancient manuscripts by hand, thereby preserving knowledge for future generations.Susan Majewski, Manassas\u25cf\nDon't normalize suicideRegarding the June 25 Health & Science article \u201cSome seniors weigh the idea of \u2018rational\u00a0suicide\u2019\u2009\u201d:Making suicide seem kind and reasonable is an injustice both to the elderly and to those families who are mourning the premature death of a loved one. Will vulnerable people, especially women, minorities and the poor, be bullied into accepting a lethal overdose instead of being given assistance?\u00a0How\u00a0tragic if suicide or euthanasia becomes the normal way of dealing with the inconveniences and challenges of aging. Even younger people will be influenced by changing the societal norm in favor of life.Jean Gaes, CroftonRead more:Readers critique The Post: More sexist criticism of the U.S. women\u2019s national soccer teamReaders critique The Post: Move on from gotcha moments in White House reportingReaders critique The Post: D-Day, George Washington and the Cleveland BrownsReaders critique The Post: People we should remember and folks we\u2019d better forgetReaders critique The Post: Dog clothes, Agent Orange and how to remember I.M. Pei This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Ageism, skateboarding and the International Space Station",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Three cheers for space robots (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2594",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/07/three-cheers-space-robots/",
        "text": "Daniel Britt is the Pegasus professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Central Florida. He has served on the science teams of four NASA missions, including New Horizons.NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft, now exploring the vast region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt, completed yet another trip full of superlatives: Last week, it celebrated its closest approach to Ultima Thule, the farthest object ever visited by spacecraft. Ultima Thule is 1 billion miles past Pluto, more than 4 billion miles from Earth, and radio signals take more than six hours to travel from the spacecraft back to NASA\u2019s receivers. At this distance, the sun is just the brightest star in sight, and the local temperature is a balmy minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNew Horizons, for which I serve as a member of the science team, is a prime example of the essence of robotic exploration. Space robots might not capture the imagination of the public as much as, for example, a person setting foot on the moon or traveling to Mars would. But today, they are operating at the frontier of science. And so they deserve a moment for our gratitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe can design robots to survive long cruises and the extremes of radiation and temperature in space. And we can reprogram and repurpose them as new exploration opportunities become available. Ultima Thule was not even discovered until eight years after New Horizons was launched in 2006. The entire planning for the Ultima Thule encounter did not even begin until after New Horizons sped past Pluto in 2015. The discovery of Ultima Thule allowed NASA to take advantage of a healthy and operating spacecraft deep in the outer solar system. Since it took nine years to get to Pluto, this placed an extremely capable observatory deep into previously unexplored regions.Robots can also carry instruments that hugely extend the reach and sensitivity of our senses. Robots can be built relatively cheaply and relatively quickly as opportunities for exploration present themselves. New Horizons was designed, built, tested and launched in a little less than four years. For spacecraft, this was very fast because it was driven by the need to take advantage of a celestial free ride, the chance to borrow some energy from an encounter with Jupiter that would accelerate New Horizons toward Pluto and cut five years off the trip.Fundamentally, robots and robotic exploration are all about taking chances. Going into the unknown, doing it quickly and for modest investments, and discovering critical data in unexplored regions, is going to be risky. Robots do the risky exploration of new regions to pave the way for future explorers \u2014 either more capable robots or humans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman and robotic exploration are synergistic and mutually dependent. Part of the success of the Apollo missions to the moon was their smart use of pioneering robots. For example, NASA\u2019s Lunar Orbiters mapped the moon\u2019s surface, NASA\u2019s Rangers got close-up views of the surface and helped perfect navigation skills, and NASA\u2019s Surveyors explored the surface and practiced soft landings. We take the bigger chances with the robots so that we can explore safer and smarter with humans.New Horizons continues its mission of exploration. Given the staggering distances, it will take almost two more years for all the data collected during the short flyby of Ultima Thule to be broadcast back to Earth. During that time (before any next mission for it is approved) New Horizons will continue exploring the edge of the solar system by using its instruments to observe other Kuiper Belt belt objects too distant and too faint to be effectively observed from Earth.And that\u2019s just one of many robotic missions now exploring our solar system. The InSight lander that arrived on Mars last year is listening for \u201cMarsquakes\u201d; the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is preparing to sample an asteroid; the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is mapping our moon; and the Juno probe is orbiting Jupiter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut this is what robots and robotic exploration are good for: going to the extremes of the solar system, coping with the extreme environments and providing the new views of a solar system that continues to amaze, surprise and inspire.Read more:Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDavid Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLucianne Walkowicz: Five myths about space They are exploring the frontiers of space science. Opinion: Three cheers for space robots",
        "author": "Daniel Britt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Three cheers for space robots (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2595",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/07/three-cheers-space-robots/",
        "text": "Daniel Britt is the Pegasus professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Central Florida. He has served on the science teams of four NASA missions, including New Horizons.NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft, now exploring the vast region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt, completed yet another trip full of superlatives: Last week, it celebrated its closest approach to Ultima Thule, the farthest object ever visited by spacecraft. Ultima Thule is 1 billion miles past Pluto, more than 4 billion miles from Earth, and radio signals take more than six hours to travel from the spacecraft back to NASA\u2019s receivers. At this distance, the sun is just the brightest star in sight, and the local temperature is a balmy minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNew Horizons, for which I serve as a member of the science team, is a prime example of the essence of robotic exploration. Space robots might not capture the imagination of the public as much as, for example, a person setting foot on the moon or traveling to Mars would. But today, they are operating at the frontier of science. And so they deserve a moment for our gratitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe can design robots to survive long cruises and the extremes of radiation and temperature in space. And we can reprogram and repurpose them as new exploration opportunities become available. Ultima Thule was not even discovered until eight years after New Horizons was launched in 2006. The entire planning for the Ultima Thule encounter did not even begin until after New Horizons sped past Pluto in 2015. The discovery of Ultima Thule allowed NASA to take advantage of a healthy and operating spacecraft deep in the outer solar system. Since it took nine years to get to Pluto, this placed an extremely capable observatory deep into previously unexplored regions.Robots can also carry instruments that hugely extend the reach and sensitivity of our senses. Robots can be built relatively cheaply and relatively quickly as opportunities for exploration present themselves. New Horizons was designed, built, tested and launched in a little less than four years. For spacecraft, this was very fast because it was driven by the need to take advantage of a celestial free ride, the chance to borrow some energy from an encounter with Jupiter that would accelerate New Horizons toward Pluto and cut five years off the trip.Fundamentally, robots and robotic exploration are all about taking chances. Going into the unknown, doing it quickly and for modest investments, and discovering critical data in unexplored regions, is going to be risky. Robots do the risky exploration of new regions to pave the way for future explorers \u2014 either more capable robots or humans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman and robotic exploration are synergistic and mutually dependent. Part of the success of the Apollo missions to the moon was their smart use of pioneering robots. For example, NASA\u2019s Lunar Orbiters mapped the moon\u2019s surface, NASA\u2019s Rangers got close-up views of the surface and helped perfect navigation skills, and NASA\u2019s Surveyors explored the surface and practiced soft landings. We take the bigger chances with the robots so that we can explore safer and smarter with humans.New Horizons continues its mission of exploration. Given the staggering distances, it will take almost two more years for all the data collected during the short flyby of Ultima Thule to be broadcast back to Earth. During that time (before any next mission for it is approved) New Horizons will continue exploring the edge of the solar system by using its instruments to observe other Kuiper Belt belt objects too distant and too faint to be effectively observed from Earth.And that\u2019s just one of many robotic missions now exploring our solar system. The InSight lander that arrived on Mars last year is listening for \u201cMarsquakes\u201d; the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is preparing to sample an asteroid; the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is mapping our moon; and the Juno probe is orbiting Jupiter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut this is what robots and robotic exploration are good for: going to the extremes of the solar system, coping with the extreme environments and providing the new views of a solar system that continues to amaze, surprise and inspire.Read more:Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDavid Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLucianne Walkowicz: Five myths about space They are exploring the frontiers of space science. Opinion: Three cheers for space robots",
        "author": "Daniel Britt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Three cheers for space robots (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2596",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/07/three-cheers-space-robots/",
        "text": "Daniel Britt is the Pegasus professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Central Florida. He has served on the science teams of four NASA missions, including New Horizons.NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft, now exploring the vast region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt, completed yet another trip full of superlatives: Last week, it celebrated its closest approach to Ultima Thule, the farthest object ever visited by spacecraft. Ultima Thule is 1 billion miles past Pluto, more than 4 billion miles from Earth, and radio signals take more than six hours to travel from the spacecraft back to NASA\u2019s receivers. At this distance, the sun is just the brightest star in sight, and the local temperature is a balmy minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNew Horizons, for which I serve as a member of the science team, is a prime example of the essence of robotic exploration. Space robots might not capture the imagination of the public as much as, for example, a person setting foot on the moon or traveling to Mars would. But today, they are operating at the frontier of science. And so they deserve a moment for our gratitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe can design robots to survive long cruises and the extremes of radiation and temperature in space. And we can reprogram and repurpose them as new exploration opportunities become available. Ultima Thule was not even discovered until eight years after New Horizons was launched in 2006. The entire planning for the Ultima Thule encounter did not even begin until after New Horizons sped past Pluto in 2015. The discovery of Ultima Thule allowed NASA to take advantage of a healthy and operating spacecraft deep in the outer solar system. Since it took nine years to get to Pluto, this placed an extremely capable observatory deep into previously unexplored regions.Robots can also carry instruments that hugely extend the reach and sensitivity of our senses. Robots can be built relatively cheaply and relatively quickly as opportunities for exploration present themselves. New Horizons was designed, built, tested and launched in a little less than four years. For spacecraft, this was very fast because it was driven by the need to take advantage of a celestial free ride, the chance to borrow some energy from an encounter with Jupiter that would accelerate New Horizons toward Pluto and cut five years off the trip.Fundamentally, robots and robotic exploration are all about taking chances. Going into the unknown, doing it quickly and for modest investments, and discovering critical data in unexplored regions, is going to be risky. Robots do the risky exploration of new regions to pave the way for future explorers \u2014 either more capable robots or humans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman and robotic exploration are synergistic and mutually dependent. Part of the success of the Apollo missions to the moon was their smart use of pioneering robots. For example, NASA\u2019s Lunar Orbiters mapped the moon\u2019s surface, NASA\u2019s Rangers got close-up views of the surface and helped perfect navigation skills, and NASA\u2019s Surveyors explored the surface and practiced soft landings. We take the bigger chances with the robots so that we can explore safer and smarter with humans.New Horizons continues its mission of exploration. Given the staggering distances, it will take almost two more years for all the data collected during the short flyby of Ultima Thule to be broadcast back to Earth. During that time (before any next mission for it is approved) New Horizons will continue exploring the edge of the solar system by using its instruments to observe other Kuiper Belt belt objects too distant and too faint to be effectively observed from Earth.And that\u2019s just one of many robotic missions now exploring our solar system. The InSight lander that arrived on Mars last year is listening for \u201cMarsquakes\u201d; the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is preparing to sample an asteroid; the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is mapping our moon; and the Juno probe is orbiting Jupiter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut this is what robots and robotic exploration are good for: going to the extremes of the solar system, coping with the extreme environments and providing the new views of a solar system that continues to amaze, surprise and inspire.Read more:Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDavid Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLucianne Walkowicz: Five myths about space They are exploring the frontiers of space science. Opinion: Three cheers for space robots",
        "author": "Daniel Britt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Three cheers for space robots (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2597",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/07/three-cheers-space-robots/",
        "text": "Daniel Britt is the Pegasus professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Central Florida. He has served on the science teams of four NASA missions, including New Horizons.NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft, now exploring the vast region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt, completed yet another trip full of superlatives: Last week, it celebrated its closest approach to Ultima Thule, the farthest object ever visited by spacecraft. Ultima Thule is 1 billion miles past Pluto, more than 4 billion miles from Earth, and radio signals take more than six hours to travel from the spacecraft back to NASA\u2019s receivers. At this distance, the sun is just the brightest star in sight, and the local temperature is a balmy minus-390 degrees Fahrenheit. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightNew Horizons, for which I serve as a member of the science team, is a prime example of the essence of robotic exploration. Space robots might not capture the imagination of the public as much as, for example, a person setting foot on the moon or traveling to Mars would. But today, they are operating at the frontier of science. And so they deserve a moment for our gratitude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe can design robots to survive long cruises and the extremes of radiation and temperature in space. And we can reprogram and repurpose them as new exploration opportunities become available. Ultima Thule was not even discovered until eight years after New Horizons was launched in 2006. The entire planning for the Ultima Thule encounter did not even begin until after New Horizons sped past Pluto in 2015. The discovery of Ultima Thule allowed NASA to take advantage of a healthy and operating spacecraft deep in the outer solar system. Since it took nine years to get to Pluto, this placed an extremely capable observatory deep into previously unexplored regions.Robots can also carry instruments that hugely extend the reach and sensitivity of our senses. Robots can be built relatively cheaply and relatively quickly as opportunities for exploration present themselves. New Horizons was designed, built, tested and launched in a little less than four years. For spacecraft, this was very fast because it was driven by the need to take advantage of a celestial free ride, the chance to borrow some energy from an encounter with Jupiter that would accelerate New Horizons toward Pluto and cut five years off the trip.Fundamentally, robots and robotic exploration are all about taking chances. Going into the unknown, doing it quickly and for modest investments, and discovering critical data in unexplored regions, is going to be risky. Robots do the risky exploration of new regions to pave the way for future explorers \u2014 either more capable robots or humans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman and robotic exploration are synergistic and mutually dependent. Part of the success of the Apollo missions to the moon was their smart use of pioneering robots. For example, NASA\u2019s Lunar Orbiters mapped the moon\u2019s surface, NASA\u2019s Rangers got close-up views of the surface and helped perfect navigation skills, and NASA\u2019s Surveyors explored the surface and practiced soft landings. We take the bigger chances with the robots so that we can explore safer and smarter with humans.New Horizons continues its mission of exploration. Given the staggering distances, it will take almost two more years for all the data collected during the short flyby of Ultima Thule to be broadcast back to Earth. During that time (before any next mission for it is approved) New Horizons will continue exploring the edge of the solar system by using its instruments to observe other Kuiper Belt belt objects too distant and too faint to be effectively observed from Earth.And that\u2019s just one of many robotic missions now exploring our solar system. The InSight lander that arrived on Mars last year is listening for \u201cMarsquakes\u201d; the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is preparing to sample an asteroid; the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is mapping our moon; and the Juno probe is orbiting Jupiter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut this is what robots and robotic exploration are good for: going to the extremes of the solar system, coping with the extreme environments and providing the new views of a solar system that continues to amaze, surprise and inspire.Read more:Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endDavid Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLucianne Walkowicz: Five myths about space They are exploring the frontiers of space science. Opinion: Three cheers for space robots",
        "author": "Daniel Britt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | A great-power game is already underway in space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2598",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/15/china-russia-and-america-jockey-for-advantage-in-space/",
        "text": "correctionAn earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Space Force recently had warned the International Space Station to alter course to avoid a piece of Chinese space debris from a 2007 test. It was Space Command, in charge of day-to-day operations in space, that made the warning. The column also incorrectly rendered a quotation by Gen. John E. Hyten. He said surveillance platforms in space present \u201ca handful of fat, juicy targets.\u201d This version has been corrected.In the Pentagon corridor where Space Force commanders have their offices, a mural depicting military satellites warns that the heavens are \u201ca new warfighting domain.\u201d That stark assessment was demonstrated on Monday, as U.S. officials accused Russia of conducting a \u201creckless, dangerous and irresponsible\u201d test of a new antisatellite (ASAT) weapon. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSpace is the new high ground of great-power combat, and the Russians were joining the Chinese in demonstrating they have the ability to launch a direct-ascent attack to destroy a satellite \u2014 in this case one of their own. China and India had conducted similar tests in 2007 and 2019, respectively. The United States fired a missile in 2008 to destroy a satellite officials said was leaking fuel.What angered U.S. officials was that, in showing off their targeting ability, the Russians created a field of debris in low-earth orbit, with 1,500 pieces of the destroyed spacecraft that were big enough to be tracked by radar. This debris could threaten commercial and military satellites, as well as U.S. and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementState Department spokesman Ned Price used unusually pointed language in criticizing the Russian test, which he said threatens \u201cthe interests of all nations\u201d that depend on space-based systems for communications, weather, location and myriad digital information. He said U.S. diplomats had \u201cspoken to senior Russian officials multiple times to warn them\u201d about the dangers of such a test.\u201cThis behavior is not something we will tolerate,\u201d Price said several times. But he didn\u2019t explain how the United States would stop such activity.Defending space-based systems is the mission of the Space Force, the United States\u2019 newest uniformed service, which is just settling into its digs in the Pentagon. Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force chief, hosted me there Monday in a long-scheduled interview, which happened to coincide with the announcement of the Russian ASAT attack.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRaymond\u2019s arsenal is portrayed in the mural that takes up a wall a few dozen yards from his office. It may the closest thing an outsider can find to an order of battle for the highly secretive Space Force. It portrays airplane-borne lasers firing at satellites and the flags of Russian and Chinese potential adversaries. It also shows a variety of U.S. military satellites, including a once highly classified craft that\u2019s part of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, which scouts the reaches of space where other nations\u2019 strategic satellites are positioned \u2014 perhaps with disguised capabilities.For a glimpse of the cat-and-mouse game that U.S. satellites are playing with potential adversaries, check out a video posted last month by the website Breaking Defense. Using private data, it shows a U.S. craft, described as part of the GSSAP array, tracking a Chinese satellite that then executes an escape maneuver to move farther away.One worry for Raymond is that the Pentagon maintains big, exquisitely designed surveillance platforms in space that present \u201ca handful of fat, juicy targets,\u201d in the words of Gen. John E. Hyten, who retires this month as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have to build a more resilient architecture,\u201d with more small satellites that can\u2019t be so easily targeted, Raymond told me on Monday. He said the Space Force is working to solve this vulnerability, cooperating with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which oversees space surveillance, and with commercial satellite companies.Raymond said the Space Force had achieved \u201ca close partnership, never closer\u201d with the NRO, something that hasn\u2019t always been easy because the spy agency prizes its independence and secrecy. All U.S. intelligence or military organizations that use space now \u201coperate in a threatened domain,\u201d he said.The debris problem is something that Raymond has been studying. The American answer has been to be more careful about not creating debris inadvertently through launch or maneuver. Collecting debris would be the next step, but he said the United States doesn\u2019t yet have a plan for that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe [the United States] act as space traffic control for the world,\u201d by keeping track of satellites and debris and warning of possible collisions, Raymond said. Space Command, the Combatant Command in charge of day-to-day space operations, recently had warned the International Space Station to alter course to avoid a piece of Chinese space debris from their 2007 ASAT test.The Russian test this past weekend underlines that need for better consultation about space \u2014 the equivalent of the \u201chotline\u201d that Russia and the United States adopted after the near disaster of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The idea of space as a contested domain, without common rules or communication, is chilling. Space is the new high ground of great-power conflict. Opinion: A great-power game is already underway in space",
        "author": "David Ignatius"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | A great-power game is already underway in space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2599",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/15/china-russia-and-america-jockey-for-advantage-in-space/",
        "text": "correctionAn earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Space Force recently had warned the International Space Station to alter course to avoid a piece of Chinese space debris from a 2007 test. It was Space Command, in charge of day-to-day operations in space, that made the warning. The column also incorrectly rendered a quotation by Gen. John E. Hyten. He said surveillance platforms in space present \u201ca handful of fat, juicy targets.\u201d This version has been corrected.In the Pentagon corridor where Space Force commanders have their offices, a mural depicting military satellites warns that the heavens are \u201ca new warfighting domain.\u201d That stark assessment was demonstrated on Monday, as U.S. officials accused Russia of conducting a \u201creckless, dangerous and irresponsible\u201d test of a new antisatellite (ASAT) weapon. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSpace is the new high ground of great-power combat, and the Russians were joining the Chinese in demonstrating they have the ability to launch a direct-ascent attack to destroy a satellite \u2014 in this case one of their own. China and India had conducted similar tests in 2007 and 2019, respectively. The United States fired a missile in 2008 to destroy a satellite officials said was leaking fuel.What angered U.S. officials was that, in showing off their targeting ability, the Russians created a field of debris in low-earth orbit, with 1,500 pieces of the destroyed spacecraft that were big enough to be tracked by radar. This debris could threaten commercial and military satellites, as well as U.S. and Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementState Department spokesman Ned Price used unusually pointed language in criticizing the Russian test, which he said threatens \u201cthe interests of all nations\u201d that depend on space-based systems for communications, weather, location and myriad digital information. He said U.S. diplomats had \u201cspoken to senior Russian officials multiple times to warn them\u201d about the dangers of such a test.\u201cThis behavior is not something we will tolerate,\u201d Price said several times. But he didn\u2019t explain how the United States would stop such activity.Defending space-based systems is the mission of the Space Force, the United States\u2019 newest uniformed service, which is just settling into its digs in the Pentagon. Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force chief, hosted me there Monday in a long-scheduled interview, which happened to coincide with the announcement of the Russian ASAT attack.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRaymond\u2019s arsenal is portrayed in the mural that takes up a wall a few dozen yards from his office. It may the closest thing an outsider can find to an order of battle for the highly secretive Space Force. It portrays airplane-borne lasers firing at satellites and the flags of Russian and Chinese potential adversaries. It also shows a variety of U.S. military satellites, including a once highly classified craft that\u2019s part of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, which scouts the reaches of space where other nations\u2019 strategic satellites are positioned \u2014 perhaps with disguised capabilities.For a glimpse of the cat-and-mouse game that U.S. satellites are playing with potential adversaries, check out a video posted last month by the website Breaking Defense. Using private data, it shows a U.S. craft, described as part of the GSSAP array, tracking a Chinese satellite that then executes an escape maneuver to move farther away.One worry for Raymond is that the Pentagon maintains big, exquisitely designed surveillance platforms in space that present \u201ca handful of fat, juicy targets,\u201d in the words of Gen. John E. Hyten, who retires this month as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have to build a more resilient architecture,\u201d with more small satellites that can\u2019t be so easily targeted, Raymond told me on Monday. He said the Space Force is working to solve this vulnerability, cooperating with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which oversees space surveillance, and with commercial satellite companies.Raymond said the Space Force had achieved \u201ca close partnership, never closer\u201d with the NRO, something that hasn\u2019t always been easy because the spy agency prizes its independence and secrecy. All U.S. intelligence or military organizations that use space now \u201coperate in a threatened domain,\u201d he said.The debris problem is something that Raymond has been studying. The American answer has been to be more careful about not creating debris inadvertently through launch or maneuver. Collecting debris would be the next step, but he said the United States doesn\u2019t yet have a plan for that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe [the United States] act as space traffic control for the world,\u201d by keeping track of satellites and debris and warning of possible collisions, Raymond said. Space Command, the Combatant Command in charge of day-to-day space operations, recently had warned the International Space Station to alter course to avoid a piece of Chinese space debris from their 2007 ASAT test.The Russian test this past weekend underlines that need for better consultation about space \u2014 the equivalent of the \u201chotline\u201d that Russia and the United States adopted after the near disaster of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The idea of space as a contested domain, without common rules or communication, is chilling. Space is the new high ground of great-power conflict. Opinion: A great-power game is already underway in space",
        "author": "David Ignatius"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2600",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/19/bezos-branson-space-trips-milestones/",
        "text": "Miles O\u2019Brien is the science correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and an aerospace analyst for CNN.On Tuesday, Amazon founder (and Post owner) Jeff Bezos plans to travel into space on his own rocket. He follows Richard Branson, who on July 11 became the first owner of a privately built spacecraft to take it for a suborbital ride. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe idea of billionaires reaching deep in their pockets to fund their own gold-plated bungee jumps may seem frivolous and tone-deaf. Given the aching wealth disparities and environmental catastrophes confronting the spaceship we all share \u2014 Earth \u2014 it\u2019s hard to stomach such a narcissistic spectacle.If we don't solve those existential problems, nothing else really matters. But I don\u2019t believe we face a choice of either solving what ails our planet or moving beyond it. We can \u2014 and must \u2014 do both.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy enthusiasm for civilians in space predates the recent billionaires\u2019 race. For four years starting in 1999, I worked diligently, along with my bosses at CNN, to secure a seat on a space shuttle for a mission to the International Space Station. Then-NASA Administrator Sean O\u2019Keefe and his team had become convinced that the idea of \u201cembedding\u201d a journalist on the shuttle crew \u2014 from training to touchdown \u2014 would be an effective way to engage the public in the agency\u2019s mission. We had planned to publicly announce it all in early 2003, a few weeks after the space shuttle Columbia arrived home safe and sound.So when I reported for duty at CNN Center in Atlanta in the early hours of Feb. 1, 2003, I had a lot on my mind. I was the network\u2019s space correspondent, and on that morning the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven were due to land in Florida at 9:16 a.m. EST. At the anchor desk, my attention was divided between other news of the morning and the NASA Television audio feed I had dialed up on my cellphone. When I heard astronaut Charlie Hobaugh unsuccessfully trying to reach Columbia for a \u201ccomm check,\u201d I knew that the crew was lost.During a commercial break, after it became clear that the shuttle had broken up upon reentry, I began sobbing. Mostly I was crying for the loss of my astronaut friends and the lifelong repercussions for their families. But I wouldn\u2019t be honest if I didn\u2019t admit that I thought about myself and my family. Had my pursuit of this goal really been fair to my children? Regardless, I knew instantly all my efforts to fly were moot \u2014 quixotic. I knew the shuttle program was on a short path to retirement. So, too, any chance of a reporter hitching a ride.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLess than two years later, I was in Mojave, Calif., covering an event that changed my outlook. On Oct. 4, 2004, a tiny craft called SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by demonstrating it could reach the edge of space twice in as many weeks. This dramatically reduced the time NASA normally needed to launch, recover, refit and relaunch any space vehicle in its inventory. A successor to that vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, was the craft that safely lofted Branson into the record books last week.Another billionaire with stars in his eyes, Elon Musk, traveled to New Mexico to see Branson fly. His rocket company, SpaceX, is in a whole different league. His hardware puts a payload into orbit \u2014 orders of magnitude more complicated than a suborbital hop. So far, he has flown 10 astronauts to the International Space Station under contract to NASA. The company plans to launch the first private orbital flight this fall. Musk has not given himself a ticket to ride on his own rocket yet, but he has apparently bought his way onto the waiting list for a ride on Branson\u2019s.While NASA (and its Pasadena, Calif.-based Jet Propulsion Lab) are unmatched at unmanned space probes, the agency\u2019s record for manned missions has lagged, to say the least. For decades, NASA has acted like that guy bragging in a bar about winning a state championship 50 years ago. You may not love them, but the billionaires behind these private-sector efforts have both the resources and the impatience with government bureaucracy to put Americans back in space \u2014 where they belong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey\u2019ll help the rest of humanity along the way. Solar power can be generated in orbit with much greater efficiency and beamed back to Earth, and asteroids can be mined for minerals. We need to find cheaper, faster ways to launch sensors into space to help climate scientists quantify the calamity back home.And who knows what else? It\u2019s worth remembering the X Prize was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize \u2014 offered in 1919 to the first aviator to fly an airplane nonstop between New York and Paris. When an unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won it in 1927, who would have imagined complaining about Internet connectivity while flying cross-country near the speed of sound?So the Branson and Bezos efforts are important milestones. Eventually, many more of us will have the chance. Who knows what inspiration and innovation these missions will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s a far better story than the one I had hoped to tell years ago.Read more:Read a letter responding to this opinion: The rich men\u2019s space raceMegan McArdle: The billionaires\u2019 space race benefits the rest of us. Really.Alexandra Petri: Some one-star Yelp reviews of space travel from the near futureChanda Prescod-Weinstein: What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to spaceLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. Who knows what inspiration and innovation the billionaires' space flights will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems? Opinion: The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones",
        "author": "Miles O'Brien"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2601",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/19/bezos-branson-space-trips-milestones/",
        "text": "Miles O\u2019Brien is the science correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and an aerospace analyst for CNN.On Tuesday, Amazon founder (and Post owner) Jeff Bezos plans to travel into space on his own rocket. He follows Richard Branson, who on July 11 became the first owner of a privately built spacecraft to take it for a suborbital ride. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe idea of billionaires reaching deep in their pockets to fund their own gold-plated bungee jumps may seem frivolous and tone-deaf. Given the aching wealth disparities and environmental catastrophes confronting the spaceship we all share \u2014 Earth \u2014 it\u2019s hard to stomach such a narcissistic spectacle.If we don't solve those existential problems, nothing else really matters. But I don\u2019t believe we face a choice of either solving what ails our planet or moving beyond it. We can \u2014 and must \u2014 do both.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy enthusiasm for civilians in space predates the recent billionaires\u2019 race. For four years starting in 1999, I worked diligently, along with my bosses at CNN, to secure a seat on a space shuttle for a mission to the International Space Station. Then-NASA Administrator Sean O\u2019Keefe and his team had become convinced that the idea of \u201cembedding\u201d a journalist on the shuttle crew \u2014 from training to touchdown \u2014 would be an effective way to engage the public in the agency\u2019s mission. We had planned to publicly announce it all in early 2003, a few weeks after the space shuttle Columbia arrived home safe and sound.So when I reported for duty at CNN Center in Atlanta in the early hours of Feb. 1, 2003, I had a lot on my mind. I was the network\u2019s space correspondent, and on that morning the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven were due to land in Florida at 9:16 a.m. EST. At the anchor desk, my attention was divided between other news of the morning and the NASA Television audio feed I had dialed up on my cellphone. When I heard astronaut Charlie Hobaugh unsuccessfully trying to reach Columbia for a \u201ccomm check,\u201d I knew that the crew was lost.During a commercial break, after it became clear that the shuttle had broken up upon reentry, I began sobbing. Mostly I was crying for the loss of my astronaut friends and the lifelong repercussions for their families. But I wouldn\u2019t be honest if I didn\u2019t admit that I thought about myself and my family. Had my pursuit of this goal really been fair to my children? Regardless, I knew instantly all my efforts to fly were moot \u2014 quixotic. I knew the shuttle program was on a short path to retirement. So, too, any chance of a reporter hitching a ride.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLess than two years later, I was in Mojave, Calif., covering an event that changed my outlook. On Oct. 4, 2004, a tiny craft called SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by demonstrating it could reach the edge of space twice in as many weeks. This dramatically reduced the time NASA normally needed to launch, recover, refit and relaunch any space vehicle in its inventory. A successor to that vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, was the craft that safely lofted Branson into the record books last week.Another billionaire with stars in his eyes, Elon Musk, traveled to New Mexico to see Branson fly. His rocket company, SpaceX, is in a whole different league. His hardware puts a payload into orbit \u2014 orders of magnitude more complicated than a suborbital hop. So far, he has flown 10 astronauts to the International Space Station under contract to NASA. The company plans to launch the first private orbital flight this fall. Musk has not given himself a ticket to ride on his own rocket yet, but he has apparently bought his way onto the waiting list for a ride on Branson\u2019s.While NASA (and its Pasadena, Calif.-based Jet Propulsion Lab) are unmatched at unmanned space probes, the agency\u2019s record for manned missions has lagged, to say the least. For decades, NASA has acted like that guy bragging in a bar about winning a state championship 50 years ago. You may not love them, but the billionaires behind these private-sector efforts have both the resources and the impatience with government bureaucracy to put Americans back in space \u2014 where they belong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey\u2019ll help the rest of humanity along the way. Solar power can be generated in orbit with much greater efficiency and beamed back to Earth, and asteroids can be mined for minerals. We need to find cheaper, faster ways to launch sensors into space to help climate scientists quantify the calamity back home.And who knows what else? It\u2019s worth remembering the X Prize was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize \u2014 offered in 1919 to the first aviator to fly an airplane nonstop between New York and Paris. When an unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won it in 1927, who would have imagined complaining about Internet connectivity while flying cross-country near the speed of sound?So the Branson and Bezos efforts are important milestones. Eventually, many more of us will have the chance. Who knows what inspiration and innovation these missions will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s a far better story than the one I had hoped to tell years ago.Read more:Read a letter responding to this opinion: The rich men\u2019s space raceMegan McArdle: The billionaires\u2019 space race benefits the rest of us. Really.Alexandra Petri: Some one-star Yelp reviews of space travel from the near futureChanda Prescod-Weinstein: What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to spaceLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. Who knows what inspiration and innovation the billionaires' space flights will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems? Opinion: The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones",
        "author": "Miles O'Brien"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2602",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/19/bezos-branson-space-trips-milestones/",
        "text": "Miles O\u2019Brien is the science correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and an aerospace analyst for CNN.On Tuesday, Amazon founder (and Post owner) Jeff Bezos plans to travel into space on his own rocket. He follows Richard Branson, who on July 11 became the first owner of a privately built spacecraft to take it for a suborbital ride. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe idea of billionaires reaching deep in their pockets to fund their own gold-plated bungee jumps may seem frivolous and tone-deaf. Given the aching wealth disparities and environmental catastrophes confronting the spaceship we all share \u2014 Earth \u2014 it\u2019s hard to stomach such a narcissistic spectacle.If we don't solve those existential problems, nothing else really matters. But I don\u2019t believe we face a choice of either solving what ails our planet or moving beyond it. We can \u2014 and must \u2014 do both.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy enthusiasm for civilians in space predates the recent billionaires\u2019 race. For four years starting in 1999, I worked diligently, along with my bosses at CNN, to secure a seat on a space shuttle for a mission to the International Space Station. Then-NASA Administrator Sean O\u2019Keefe and his team had become convinced that the idea of \u201cembedding\u201d a journalist on the shuttle crew \u2014 from training to touchdown \u2014 would be an effective way to engage the public in the agency\u2019s mission. We had planned to publicly announce it all in early 2003, a few weeks after the space shuttle Columbia arrived home safe and sound.So when I reported for duty at CNN Center in Atlanta in the early hours of Feb. 1, 2003, I had a lot on my mind. I was the network\u2019s space correspondent, and on that morning the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven were due to land in Florida at 9:16 a.m. EST. At the anchor desk, my attention was divided between other news of the morning and the NASA Television audio feed I had dialed up on my cellphone. When I heard astronaut Charlie Hobaugh unsuccessfully trying to reach Columbia for a \u201ccomm check,\u201d I knew that the crew was lost.During a commercial break, after it became clear that the shuttle had broken up upon reentry, I began sobbing. Mostly I was crying for the loss of my astronaut friends and the lifelong repercussions for their families. But I wouldn\u2019t be honest if I didn\u2019t admit that I thought about myself and my family. Had my pursuit of this goal really been fair to my children? Regardless, I knew instantly all my efforts to fly were moot \u2014 quixotic. I knew the shuttle program was on a short path to retirement. So, too, any chance of a reporter hitching a ride.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLess than two years later, I was in Mojave, Calif., covering an event that changed my outlook. On Oct. 4, 2004, a tiny craft called SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by demonstrating it could reach the edge of space twice in as many weeks. This dramatically reduced the time NASA normally needed to launch, recover, refit and relaunch any space vehicle in its inventory. A successor to that vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, was the craft that safely lofted Branson into the record books last week.Another billionaire with stars in his eyes, Elon Musk, traveled to New Mexico to see Branson fly. His rocket company, SpaceX, is in a whole different league. His hardware puts a payload into orbit \u2014 orders of magnitude more complicated than a suborbital hop. So far, he has flown 10 astronauts to the International Space Station under contract to NASA. The company plans to launch the first private orbital flight this fall. Musk has not given himself a ticket to ride on his own rocket yet, but he has apparently bought his way onto the waiting list for a ride on Branson\u2019s.While NASA (and its Pasadena, Calif.-based Jet Propulsion Lab) are unmatched at unmanned space probes, the agency\u2019s record for manned missions has lagged, to say the least. For decades, NASA has acted like that guy bragging in a bar about winning a state championship 50 years ago. You may not love them, but the billionaires behind these private-sector efforts have both the resources and the impatience with government bureaucracy to put Americans back in space \u2014 where they belong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey\u2019ll help the rest of humanity along the way. Solar power can be generated in orbit with much greater efficiency and beamed back to Earth, and asteroids can be mined for minerals. We need to find cheaper, faster ways to launch sensors into space to help climate scientists quantify the calamity back home.And who knows what else? It\u2019s worth remembering the X Prize was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize \u2014 offered in 1919 to the first aviator to fly an airplane nonstop between New York and Paris. When an unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won it in 1927, who would have imagined complaining about Internet connectivity while flying cross-country near the speed of sound?So the Branson and Bezos efforts are important milestones. Eventually, many more of us will have the chance. Who knows what inspiration and innovation these missions will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s a far better story than the one I had hoped to tell years ago.Read more:Read a letter responding to this opinion: The rich men\u2019s space raceMegan McArdle: The billionaires\u2019 space race benefits the rest of us. Really.Alexandra Petri: Some one-star Yelp reviews of space travel from the near futureChanda Prescod-Weinstein: What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to spaceLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. Who knows what inspiration and innovation the billionaires' space flights will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems? Opinion: The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones",
        "author": "Miles O'Brien"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2603",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/19/bezos-branson-space-trips-milestones/",
        "text": "Miles O\u2019Brien is the science correspondent for the PBS NewsHour and an aerospace analyst for CNN.On Tuesday, Amazon founder (and Post owner) Jeff Bezos plans to travel into space on his own rocket. He follows Richard Branson, who on July 11 became the first owner of a privately built spacecraft to take it for a suborbital ride. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe idea of billionaires reaching deep in their pockets to fund their own gold-plated bungee jumps may seem frivolous and tone-deaf. Given the aching wealth disparities and environmental catastrophes confronting the spaceship we all share \u2014 Earth \u2014 it\u2019s hard to stomach such a narcissistic spectacle.If we don't solve those existential problems, nothing else really matters. But I don\u2019t believe we face a choice of either solving what ails our planet or moving beyond it. We can \u2014 and must \u2014 do both.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy enthusiasm for civilians in space predates the recent billionaires\u2019 race. For four years starting in 1999, I worked diligently, along with my bosses at CNN, to secure a seat on a space shuttle for a mission to the International Space Station. Then-NASA Administrator Sean O\u2019Keefe and his team had become convinced that the idea of \u201cembedding\u201d a journalist on the shuttle crew \u2014 from training to touchdown \u2014 would be an effective way to engage the public in the agency\u2019s mission. We had planned to publicly announce it all in early 2003, a few weeks after the space shuttle Columbia arrived home safe and sound.So when I reported for duty at CNN Center in Atlanta in the early hours of Feb. 1, 2003, I had a lot on my mind. I was the network\u2019s space correspondent, and on that morning the shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven were due to land in Florida at 9:16 a.m. EST. At the anchor desk, my attention was divided between other news of the morning and the NASA Television audio feed I had dialed up on my cellphone. When I heard astronaut Charlie Hobaugh unsuccessfully trying to reach Columbia for a \u201ccomm check,\u201d I knew that the crew was lost.During a commercial break, after it became clear that the shuttle had broken up upon reentry, I began sobbing. Mostly I was crying for the loss of my astronaut friends and the lifelong repercussions for their families. But I wouldn\u2019t be honest if I didn\u2019t admit that I thought about myself and my family. Had my pursuit of this goal really been fair to my children? Regardless, I knew instantly all my efforts to fly were moot \u2014 quixotic. I knew the shuttle program was on a short path to retirement. So, too, any chance of a reporter hitching a ride.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLess than two years later, I was in Mojave, Calif., covering an event that changed my outlook. On Oct. 4, 2004, a tiny craft called SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by demonstrating it could reach the edge of space twice in as many weeks. This dramatically reduced the time NASA normally needed to launch, recover, refit and relaunch any space vehicle in its inventory. A successor to that vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, was the craft that safely lofted Branson into the record books last week.Another billionaire with stars in his eyes, Elon Musk, traveled to New Mexico to see Branson fly. His rocket company, SpaceX, is in a whole different league. His hardware puts a payload into orbit \u2014 orders of magnitude more complicated than a suborbital hop. So far, he has flown 10 astronauts to the International Space Station under contract to NASA. The company plans to launch the first private orbital flight this fall. Musk has not given himself a ticket to ride on his own rocket yet, but he has apparently bought his way onto the waiting list for a ride on Branson\u2019s.While NASA (and its Pasadena, Calif.-based Jet Propulsion Lab) are unmatched at unmanned space probes, the agency\u2019s record for manned missions has lagged, to say the least. For decades, NASA has acted like that guy bragging in a bar about winning a state championship 50 years ago. You may not love them, but the billionaires behind these private-sector efforts have both the resources and the impatience with government bureaucracy to put Americans back in space \u2014 where they belong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey\u2019ll help the rest of humanity along the way. Solar power can be generated in orbit with much greater efficiency and beamed back to Earth, and asteroids can be mined for minerals. We need to find cheaper, faster ways to launch sensors into space to help climate scientists quantify the calamity back home.And who knows what else? It\u2019s worth remembering the X Prize was modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize \u2014 offered in 1919 to the first aviator to fly an airplane nonstop between New York and Paris. When an unknown airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won it in 1927, who would have imagined complaining about Internet connectivity while flying cross-country near the speed of sound?So the Branson and Bezos efforts are important milestones. Eventually, many more of us will have the chance. Who knows what inspiration and innovation these missions will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s a far better story than the one I had hoped to tell years ago.Read more:Read a letter responding to this opinion: The rich men\u2019s space raceMegan McArdle: The billionaires\u2019 space race benefits the rest of us. Really.Alexandra Petri: Some one-star Yelp reviews of space travel from the near futureChanda Prescod-Weinstein: What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to spaceLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. Who knows what inspiration and innovation the billionaires' space flights will spark to solve some pressing earthly problems? Opinion: The billionaires\u2019 space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they\u2019re important milestones",
        "author": "Miles O'Brien"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The most profound broadcast in human history came from space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2604",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-profound-broadcast-in-human-history-came-from-space/2018/10/12/236adc3e-ce26-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html",
        "text": "Apollo 8 is having a moment. Fifty years after NASA launched the most audacious gamble in its history, this overshadowed milestone of human exploration is the subject of books by Jeffrey Kluger and Robert Kurson and an award-winning short documentary by filmmaker and musician Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIts timing could not be more perfect.The story takes us back to 1968, a bitter and demoralizing nadir of the Vietnam War, an ordeal of assassinations, riots, discredited leaders and broken politics. Inside America\u2019s space program, engineers were worried that President John F. Kennedy\u2019s stirring promise to go to the moon before 1970 would be unredeemed \u2014 or worse, that it would be fulfilled by the Soviet Union. The colossal Saturn V rocket remained unproven, while a lunar landing craft faced an array of technological obstacles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt this gloomy moment, NASA\u2019s George Low proposed something wildly out of character for the step-by-step agency: Rip up the playbook. Take the parts of a moon mission that appeared to be ready \u2014 maybe ready, possibly ready \u2014 bundle them into a spacecraft and boost them into lunar orbit by the end of the year.There were so many question marks. No human had ever ridden a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V. No human had ever left the Earth\u2019s orbit. No human had ever traveled through interplanetary space to be captured by the gravity of another world. And certainly no human had ever done all this and returned home like a space-age Odysseus.The stakes were desperately high. A successful voyage would prove the workability of the Apollo plan for a lunar landing. It would validate most of the necessary systems and scout the moon\u2019s terrain. But a failure could delay or even derail Apollo, and there were so many ways to fail. The crew could blow up atop the rocket, or crash into the moon, or become trapped in lunar orbit, or sail away to be incinerated by the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThree extraordinary astronauts volunteered for this risky business, each combining the nervy skill of an ace pilot with the disciplined brain of an advanced scientist or engineer. Steely Frank Borman commanded the mission. Jovial James Lovell, who would later steer the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft safely home, was the navigator. Physicist William Anders piloted the command module. But with three men in a tiny craft a quarter of a million miles from safety, each one had to be proficient in every aspect of the enterprise.Spoiler alert: They made it. Sucked by gravity to the blistering speed of some 25,000 mph \u2014 the fastest humans had ever traveled \u2014 they came home inside a fireball as their little spaceship ripped through the atmosphere. Apollo 8 was a triumph by any measure, a brilliant blend of invention, computation, teamwork and plain guts. The astronauts wrote a brave and optimistic ending to a grim and hateful year.But here\u2019s the thing I find most striking about this memory from a long-ago Christmas that I now understand at last: Apollo 8 sailed off to explore the moon, but along the way the mission rediscovered Earth. For the first time, human eyes ventured far enough to see our planet for what it truly is: a miracle bordering on the impossible; a delicate bubble of life and meaning spinning through the cold and empty darkness of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOf all the millions of people over thousands of years who had looked up and imagined themselves floating among the stars, these three men were the first to experience it. And it opened their eyes to the harsh, dead reality of space. When the Earth came up, blue and white and smiling over the moon\u2019s horizon for the first time, they saw, like the God of Genesis, that it was good. Anders snapped the photograph. You\u2019ve seen it.The astronauts ended their Christmas Eve television transmission by reading from the biblical creation story as their craft sped toward the lunar night. This primitive, elemental account of a living world \u2014 carved from darkness, marked out from the silent firmament \u2014 was never more persuasive and never more moving. To the list of Apollo 8\u2019s accomplishments, add this: Nothing as profound has ever been broadcast.\u201cWhat they should\u2019ve sent was poets,\u201d Borman has said, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen.\u201d I would disagree. The message came through loud and clear. We only need to be reminded.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMired in another bitter year, Apollo 8 still speaks to us, challenging us to dream of big things and dare for grand causes. And also teaching again the lesson that we are blessed to be here aboard a living planet in a vast ocean of lifelessness. Lucky to have company in a lonely galaxy. Called to care for one another, and for this unlikely lifeboat that is our mutual home.Read more from David Von Drehle\u2019s archive.Read more:David Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLetters to the Editor: The secret of the famous \u2018Earthrise\u2019 photoLetters to the Editor: How to know which way is down \u2014 in space or any other placeJonathan Lunine: The spacecraft that found for the first time where life could exist nowMarillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead end The audacious mission sent men to explore the moon, but they rediscovered Earth. Opinion: The most profound broadcast in human history came from space",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The most profound broadcast in human history came from space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2605",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-profound-broadcast-in-human-history-came-from-space/2018/10/12/236adc3e-ce26-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html",
        "text": "Apollo 8 is having a moment. Fifty years after NASA launched the most audacious gamble in its history, this overshadowed milestone of human exploration is the subject of books by Jeffrey Kluger and Robert Kurson and an award-winning short documentary by filmmaker and musician Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIts timing could not be more perfect.The story takes us back to 1968, a bitter and demoralizing nadir of the Vietnam War, an ordeal of assassinations, riots, discredited leaders and broken politics. Inside America\u2019s space program, engineers were worried that President John F. Kennedy\u2019s stirring promise to go to the moon before 1970 would be unredeemed \u2014 or worse, that it would be fulfilled by the Soviet Union. The colossal Saturn V rocket remained unproven, while a lunar landing craft faced an array of technological obstacles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt this gloomy moment, NASA\u2019s George Low proposed something wildly out of character for the step-by-step agency: Rip up the playbook. Take the parts of a moon mission that appeared to be ready \u2014 maybe ready, possibly ready \u2014 bundle them into a spacecraft and boost them into lunar orbit by the end of the year.There were so many question marks. No human had ever ridden a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V. No human had ever left the Earth\u2019s orbit. No human had ever traveled through interplanetary space to be captured by the gravity of another world. And certainly no human had ever done all this and returned home like a space-age Odysseus.The stakes were desperately high. A successful voyage would prove the workability of the Apollo plan for a lunar landing. It would validate most of the necessary systems and scout the moon\u2019s terrain. But a failure could delay or even derail Apollo, and there were so many ways to fail. The crew could blow up atop the rocket, or crash into the moon, or become trapped in lunar orbit, or sail away to be incinerated by the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThree extraordinary astronauts volunteered for this risky business, each combining the nervy skill of an ace pilot with the disciplined brain of an advanced scientist or engineer. Steely Frank Borman commanded the mission. Jovial James Lovell, who would later steer the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft safely home, was the navigator. Physicist William Anders piloted the command module. But with three men in a tiny craft a quarter of a million miles from safety, each one had to be proficient in every aspect of the enterprise.Spoiler alert: They made it. Sucked by gravity to the blistering speed of some 25,000 mph \u2014 the fastest humans had ever traveled \u2014 they came home inside a fireball as their little spaceship ripped through the atmosphere. Apollo 8 was a triumph by any measure, a brilliant blend of invention, computation, teamwork and plain guts. The astronauts wrote a brave and optimistic ending to a grim and hateful year.But here\u2019s the thing I find most striking about this memory from a long-ago Christmas that I now understand at last: Apollo 8 sailed off to explore the moon, but along the way the mission rediscovered Earth. For the first time, human eyes ventured far enough to see our planet for what it truly is: a miracle bordering on the impossible; a delicate bubble of life and meaning spinning through the cold and empty darkness of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOf all the millions of people over thousands of years who had looked up and imagined themselves floating among the stars, these three men were the first to experience it. And it opened their eyes to the harsh, dead reality of space. When the Earth came up, blue and white and smiling over the moon\u2019s horizon for the first time, they saw, like the God of Genesis, that it was good. Anders snapped the photograph. You\u2019ve seen it.The astronauts ended their Christmas Eve television transmission by reading from the biblical creation story as their craft sped toward the lunar night. This primitive, elemental account of a living world \u2014 carved from darkness, marked out from the silent firmament \u2014 was never more persuasive and never more moving. To the list of Apollo 8\u2019s accomplishments, add this: Nothing as profound has ever been broadcast.\u201cWhat they should\u2019ve sent was poets,\u201d Borman has said, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen.\u201d I would disagree. The message came through loud and clear. We only need to be reminded.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMired in another bitter year, Apollo 8 still speaks to us, challenging us to dream of big things and dare for grand causes. And also teaching again the lesson that we are blessed to be here aboard a living planet in a vast ocean of lifelessness. Lucky to have company in a lonely galaxy. Called to care for one another, and for this unlikely lifeboat that is our mutual home.Read more from David Von Drehle\u2019s archive.Read more:David Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLetters to the Editor: The secret of the famous \u2018Earthrise\u2019 photoLetters to the Editor: How to know which way is down \u2014 in space or any other placeJonathan Lunine: The spacecraft that found for the first time where life could exist nowMarillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead end The audacious mission sent men to explore the moon, but they rediscovered Earth. Opinion: The most profound broadcast in human history came from space",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The most profound broadcast in human history came from space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2606",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-profound-broadcast-in-human-history-came-from-space/2018/10/12/236adc3e-ce26-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html",
        "text": "Apollo 8 is having a moment. Fifty years after NASA launched the most audacious gamble in its history, this overshadowed milestone of human exploration is the subject of books by Jeffrey Kluger and Robert Kurson and an award-winning short documentary by filmmaker and musician Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIts timing could not be more perfect.The story takes us back to 1968, a bitter and demoralizing nadir of the Vietnam War, an ordeal of assassinations, riots, discredited leaders and broken politics. Inside America\u2019s space program, engineers were worried that President John F. Kennedy\u2019s stirring promise to go to the moon before 1970 would be unredeemed \u2014 or worse, that it would be fulfilled by the Soviet Union. The colossal Saturn V rocket remained unproven, while a lunar landing craft faced an array of technological obstacles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt this gloomy moment, NASA\u2019s George Low proposed something wildly out of character for the step-by-step agency: Rip up the playbook. Take the parts of a moon mission that appeared to be ready \u2014 maybe ready, possibly ready \u2014 bundle them into a spacecraft and boost them into lunar orbit by the end of the year.There were so many question marks. No human had ever ridden a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V. No human had ever left the Earth\u2019s orbit. No human had ever traveled through interplanetary space to be captured by the gravity of another world. And certainly no human had ever done all this and returned home like a space-age Odysseus.The stakes were desperately high. A successful voyage would prove the workability of the Apollo plan for a lunar landing. It would validate most of the necessary systems and scout the moon\u2019s terrain. But a failure could delay or even derail Apollo, and there were so many ways to fail. The crew could blow up atop the rocket, or crash into the moon, or become trapped in lunar orbit, or sail away to be incinerated by the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThree extraordinary astronauts volunteered for this risky business, each combining the nervy skill of an ace pilot with the disciplined brain of an advanced scientist or engineer. Steely Frank Borman commanded the mission. Jovial James Lovell, who would later steer the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft safely home, was the navigator. Physicist William Anders piloted the command module. But with three men in a tiny craft a quarter of a million miles from safety, each one had to be proficient in every aspect of the enterprise.Spoiler alert: They made it. Sucked by gravity to the blistering speed of some 25,000 mph \u2014 the fastest humans had ever traveled \u2014 they came home inside a fireball as their little spaceship ripped through the atmosphere. Apollo 8 was a triumph by any measure, a brilliant blend of invention, computation, teamwork and plain guts. The astronauts wrote a brave and optimistic ending to a grim and hateful year.But here\u2019s the thing I find most striking about this memory from a long-ago Christmas that I now understand at last: Apollo 8 sailed off to explore the moon, but along the way the mission rediscovered Earth. For the first time, human eyes ventured far enough to see our planet for what it truly is: a miracle bordering on the impossible; a delicate bubble of life and meaning spinning through the cold and empty darkness of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOf all the millions of people over thousands of years who had looked up and imagined themselves floating among the stars, these three men were the first to experience it. And it opened their eyes to the harsh, dead reality of space. When the Earth came up, blue and white and smiling over the moon\u2019s horizon for the first time, they saw, like the God of Genesis, that it was good. Anders snapped the photograph. You\u2019ve seen it.The astronauts ended their Christmas Eve television transmission by reading from the biblical creation story as their craft sped toward the lunar night. This primitive, elemental account of a living world \u2014 carved from darkness, marked out from the silent firmament \u2014 was never more persuasive and never more moving. To the list of Apollo 8\u2019s accomplishments, add this: Nothing as profound has ever been broadcast.\u201cWhat they should\u2019ve sent was poets,\u201d Borman has said, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen.\u201d I would disagree. The message came through loud and clear. We only need to be reminded.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMired in another bitter year, Apollo 8 still speaks to us, challenging us to dream of big things and dare for grand causes. And also teaching again the lesson that we are blessed to be here aboard a living planet in a vast ocean of lifelessness. Lucky to have company in a lonely galaxy. Called to care for one another, and for this unlikely lifeboat that is our mutual home.Read more from David Von Drehle\u2019s archive.Read more:David Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLetters to the Editor: The secret of the famous \u2018Earthrise\u2019 photoLetters to the Editor: How to know which way is down \u2014 in space or any other placeJonathan Lunine: The spacecraft that found for the first time where life could exist nowMarillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead end The audacious mission sent men to explore the moon, but they rediscovered Earth. Opinion: The most profound broadcast in human history came from space",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The most profound broadcast in human history came from space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2607",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-profound-broadcast-in-human-history-came-from-space/2018/10/12/236adc3e-ce26-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html",
        "text": "Apollo 8 is having a moment. Fifty years after NASA launched the most audacious gamble in its history, this overshadowed milestone of human exploration is the subject of books by Jeffrey Kluger and Robert Kurson and an award-winning short documentary by filmmaker and musician Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIts timing could not be more perfect.The story takes us back to 1968, a bitter and demoralizing nadir of the Vietnam War, an ordeal of assassinations, riots, discredited leaders and broken politics. Inside America\u2019s space program, engineers were worried that President John F. Kennedy\u2019s stirring promise to go to the moon before 1970 would be unredeemed \u2014 or worse, that it would be fulfilled by the Soviet Union. The colossal Saturn V rocket remained unproven, while a lunar landing craft faced an array of technological obstacles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt this gloomy moment, NASA\u2019s George Low proposed something wildly out of character for the step-by-step agency: Rip up the playbook. Take the parts of a moon mission that appeared to be ready \u2014 maybe ready, possibly ready \u2014 bundle them into a spacecraft and boost them into lunar orbit by the end of the year.There were so many question marks. No human had ever ridden a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V. No human had ever left the Earth\u2019s orbit. No human had ever traveled through interplanetary space to be captured by the gravity of another world. And certainly no human had ever done all this and returned home like a space-age Odysseus.The stakes were desperately high. A successful voyage would prove the workability of the Apollo plan for a lunar landing. It would validate most of the necessary systems and scout the moon\u2019s terrain. But a failure could delay or even derail Apollo, and there were so many ways to fail. The crew could blow up atop the rocket, or crash into the moon, or become trapped in lunar orbit, or sail away to be incinerated by the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThree extraordinary astronauts volunteered for this risky business, each combining the nervy skill of an ace pilot with the disciplined brain of an advanced scientist or engineer. Steely Frank Borman commanded the mission. Jovial James Lovell, who would later steer the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft safely home, was the navigator. Physicist William Anders piloted the command module. But with three men in a tiny craft a quarter of a million miles from safety, each one had to be proficient in every aspect of the enterprise.Spoiler alert: They made it. Sucked by gravity to the blistering speed of some 25,000 mph \u2014 the fastest humans had ever traveled \u2014 they came home inside a fireball as their little spaceship ripped through the atmosphere. Apollo 8 was a triumph by any measure, a brilliant blend of invention, computation, teamwork and plain guts. The astronauts wrote a brave and optimistic ending to a grim and hateful year.But here\u2019s the thing I find most striking about this memory from a long-ago Christmas that I now understand at last: Apollo 8 sailed off to explore the moon, but along the way the mission rediscovered Earth. For the first time, human eyes ventured far enough to see our planet for what it truly is: a miracle bordering on the impossible; a delicate bubble of life and meaning spinning through the cold and empty darkness of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOf all the millions of people over thousands of years who had looked up and imagined themselves floating among the stars, these three men were the first to experience it. And it opened their eyes to the harsh, dead reality of space. When the Earth came up, blue and white and smiling over the moon\u2019s horizon for the first time, they saw, like the God of Genesis, that it was good. Anders snapped the photograph. You\u2019ve seen it.The astronauts ended their Christmas Eve television transmission by reading from the biblical creation story as their craft sped toward the lunar night. This primitive, elemental account of a living world \u2014 carved from darkness, marked out from the silent firmament \u2014 was never more persuasive and never more moving. To the list of Apollo 8\u2019s accomplishments, add this: Nothing as profound has ever been broadcast.\u201cWhat they should\u2019ve sent was poets,\u201d Borman has said, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen.\u201d I would disagree. The message came through loud and clear. We only need to be reminded.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMired in another bitter year, Apollo 8 still speaks to us, challenging us to dream of big things and dare for grand causes. And also teaching again the lesson that we are blessed to be here aboard a living planet in a vast ocean of lifelessness. Lucky to have company in a lonely galaxy. Called to care for one another, and for this unlikely lifeboat that is our mutual home.Read more from David Von Drehle\u2019s archive.Read more:David Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLetters to the Editor: The secret of the famous \u2018Earthrise\u2019 photoLetters to the Editor: How to know which way is down \u2014 in space or any other placeJonathan Lunine: The spacecraft that found for the first time where life could exist nowMarillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead end The audacious mission sent men to explore the moon, but they rediscovered Earth. Opinion: The most profound broadcast in human history came from space",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Republicans won\u2019t have anything left to salvage (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2608",
        "date": "2018-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-moral-rot-is-spreading/2018/08/22/7c06bf54-a647-11e8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html",
        "text": "What President Trump and his cadre have done is very bad.What Republican leaders are doing is unforgivable.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMajority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) stood on the Senate floor Wednesday morning for his first public remarks since the seismic events of the day before: The president\u2019s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to fraud and breaking campaign finance laws, implicating the president in a crime; the president\u2019s former campaign chairman was convicted on eight counts of financial crimes, making him one of five members of Trump\u2019s team who have been convicted or have admitted guilt; and a Republican congressman was indicted, the second of Trump\u2019s earliest congressional supporters to be charged this month. Story continues below advertisementIt was time for leadership. McConnell ducked.The U.S. isn't a lawless country, so why are sitting presidents immune to prosecution? (Kate Woodsome, Breanna Muir, Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)Instead, he hailed Trump\u2019s campaign rally in West Virginia the night before. He disparaged President Barack Obama\u2019s record. He spoke about low unemployment \u201cunder this united Republican government.\u201d He went on about coal, taxes, apprenticeship programs, health research, prisoner rehabilitation and more \u2014 and not a peep about the corruption swirling around the president. When reporters pressed McConnell in the hallway for comment, he brushed them off.AdvertisementMcConnell\u2019s counterpart in the House, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), was equally cowardly. \u201cWe are aware of Mr. [Michael] Cohen\u2019s guilty plea to these serious charges\u201d was his office\u2019s official statement. \u201cWe will need more information than is currently available at this point.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhat more do you need, Mr. Speaker? What more will it take, Republicans? It seems nothing can bring them to state what is manifestly true: The president is unfit to serve, surrounded by hooligans and doing incalculable harm.Trump's claim that the Mueller investigation is a 'witch hunt' just got the wind knocked out of it. (Adriana Usero, Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)A scroll through Republican lawmakers\u2019 tweets since the Cohen-Manafort combination punch late Tuesday found shameful silence. GOP House leaders Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and Steve Scalise (La.) tweeted about a murder allegedly committed by an illegal immigrant.Follow\u00a0Dana Milbank\u2018s opinionsFollowAddIt briefly appeared that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) was doing the right thing. He tweeted a suggestion to read Gerald Seib\u2019s Wednesday Wall Street Journal column proclaiming the \u201cdarkest day of the Trump presidency.\u201d Fourteen minutes later came a corrective tweet from Grassley: He meant a previous Seib column, on another subject.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong the few Republican lawmakers demonstrating dignity: Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), ex-FBI agent, commended his former colleagues for \u201cupholding the rule of law.\u201dThis intolerable silence of the Republicans \u2014 through \u201cAccess Hollywood,\u201d racist outbursts, diplomatic mayhem and endless scandal \u2014 is what allows Trump and his Fox News-viewing supporters to dock their spaceship in a parallel universe where truth isn\u2019t truth. At Tuesday night\u2019s rally in West Virginia, Trump\u2019s irony-challenged audience could be heard chanting \u201cDrain the Swamp!\u201d and \u201cLock her up!\u201d (Hillary Clinton, that is), just a few hours after Paul Manafort\u2019s conviction and Cohen\u2019s guilty plea.Republican lawmakers fear that with 87\u2008percent of Republican voters backing Trump, crossing him is political suicide. But this is circular. Support among the Republican base remains high because Republican officeholders validate him.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took a year from the Watergate break-in to Republican Sen. Howard Baker\u2019s immortal 1973 question about a Republican president: \u201cWhat did the president know and when did he know it?\u201dInstead of Baker, today we have Texas\u2019s John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate Republican, saying: \u201cI would note that none of this has anything to do with the Russian collusion or meddling in the election.\u201dAnd Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.): \u201cThus far, there have yet to be any charges or convictions for colluding with the Russian government by any member of the Trump campaign.\u201dAnd Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah): The \u201cpresident should not be held responsible for the actions of the people he\u2019s trusted.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd Grassley: \u201cI don\u2019t think I should be speculating.\u201dBut there doesn\u2019t have to be collusion, or even speculation, to recognize that something is terribly wrong. There is no good answer to the question Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis posed after his client said under oath that Trump directed him to pay off two women to influence the election: \u201cIf those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn\u2019t they be a crime for Donald Trump?\u201dAdvertisementA few Republican senators (Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Richard Burr) have rhetorically distanced themselves from Trump. But their modest efforts don\u2019t sufficiently protect the party, or the country, from Trump\u2019s sleaze and self-dealing.Story continues below advertisementThe moral rot is spreading. Two weeks ago, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) was arrested on charges related to insider trading \u2014 from the White House lawn. On Tuesday, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and his wife were charged with using campaign funds for travel, golf, skiing, tuition, tickets, clothing, makeup, dental work and more, often while claiming the funds were being used on charities.His office\u2019s Trumpian response: \u201cThis action is purely politically motivated.\u201dIf Republicans don\u2019t put some moral distance between themselves and Trump, there will soon be nothing left to salvage.AdvertisementTwitter: @Milbank\nRead more from Dana Milbank\u2019s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.Read more:Megan McArdle: The spectacular greed and stupidity of Team TrumpJennifer Rubin: Impeachment talk? Let\u2019s have at it.Hugh Hewitt: Impeachment? Don\u2019t hold your breath.Jennifer Rubin: An open letter to House and Senate RepublicansAlexandra Petri: But what about the crimes Trump\u2019s inner circle didn\u2019t commit? It\u2019s time for leadership. Republican leaders are ducking. Opinion: Republicans won\u2019t have anything left to salvage",
        "author": "Dana Milbank"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Why Ford\u2019s F-150 Lightning could elevate green energy from the culture wars  (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2609",
        "date": "2021-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/20/why-fords-f-150-lightning-could-elevate-green-energy-culture-wars/",
        "text": "Thanks to a groundbreaking innovation by one of America\u2019s most iconic brands, \u201cgreen energy\u201d might finally escape the culture wars.If, that is, politicians don\u2019t get in the way.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightFord unveiled an electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck Wednesday. Based on the specs released so far, it looks as good as or superior to its traditional combustion-engine cousin in almost every way. Living up to its name, the F-150 Lightning can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.4 seconds. It can tow up to 10,000 pounds. Its battery can be used as a backup power source, which could power a house for up to three days, according to Ford, or charge power tools on a work site. Its standard-range battery is expected to travel 230 miles per full charge, while the extended-range battery reaches 300 miles. Not as far as the range on a gas-powered truck, of course, but still pretty good.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen there\u2019s the price.The base model starts at $39,974 \u2014 and that\u2019s before factoring in tax incentives for electric vehicles. Including those incentives, such as a $7,500 federal tax credit, the Lightning is expected to be one of the least expensive full-size pickups on the market, gas or electric, when it hits the road next year. Possibly the least expensive, if you live in a state offering additional generous tax breaks.This is no pokey, jelly-bean-shaped car designed for tree-huggers. Nor is it a spaceship-like ride for Bay Area tech bros. This is not a vehicle designed for virtue-signaling concerns about climate change, though it absolutely does broadcast the virtues of a bright, decarbonized, lower-pollution future.Story continues below advertisementFollow\u00a0Catherine Rampell\u2018s opinionsFollowAddThe Lightning will be a better, faster, more functional and more affordable truck that can appeal to red-staters and blue-collar workers. If produced and purchased at scale, trucks such as this one could revolutionize car culture and eventually shrink the country\u2019s carbon footprint. Tesla has already worked wonders in making electric vehicles (EVs) cool and more widely available. It produced about 500,000 vehicles in total last year; but as a share of the auto market, Ford\u2019s F-series is in a league of its own, with about 800,000 trucks sold last year.AdvertisementYou would never know such technological innovation was possible, or pretty much inevitable, from the political rhetoric surrounding electric vehicles.Republican officials have cast EVs as a lefty pet project that Democrats want to \u201cpush\u201d upon an unwilling public, \u201cwhether they are ready for them or not,\u201d as one GOP lawmaker recently put it. Republicans have pooh-poohed President Biden\u2019s request for funding for EV subsidies and charging stations in an infrastructure package, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggesting the initiative is wasteful and part of a \u201cliberal wish-list.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWorse than withholding funds to accelerate electric-vehicle adoption, Republican officials push policies that could slow it down. They\u2019ve argued, for instance, that any infrastructure package should be funded through new fees or taxes on electric vehicles \u2014 policies that would diminish the financial benefits of going electric.AdvertisementPolitical debate around other green-energy technologies has similar contours.Solar, wind and battery technology, for example, have gotten much cheaper, much faster than anyone predicted a decade or so ago \u2014 mostly due to human ingenuity but also thanks to other countries\u2019 industrial policies. As a result, renewables have become increasingly competitive with fossil-fuel energy sources. It\u2019s now less expensive to build and operate a new solar plant than it is to continue operating an existing coal plant.Story continues below advertisementYet whenever Democratic politicians talk about the coming transition away from fossil fuels, they\u2019re treated as though they\u2019ve made a huge gaffe, or are trying to banish coal and oil by socialist-style fiat, rather than accurately characterizing existing market forces. Republicans suggest we have to hang onto \u201cdirty energy\u201d because switching to renewables would raise energy prices for U.S. firms and make us less competitive.AdvertisementMaybe Republicans are operating off of decades-old facts and have yet to update their understanding of how cheap and therefore economically attractive renewables have become. Or maybe it\u2019s just more politically useful to treat green energy as a cultural wedge issue, akin to guns. The Lightning \u2014 and other fast, cool, affordable products attractive to conservative and liberal customers alike \u2014 will make this strategy harder to sustain.Our green-energy future is coming, whether politicians like it or not. The only question is whether we arrive at that future faster or slower. We can get there faster by building out more vehicle-charging stations, so consumers know they can recharge an EV as reliably as they could refill a gas tank. Or by subsidizing research and development in battery technology.Story continues below advertisementBetter yet, we could put a price on carbon, to accelerate adoption of and innovation in less-carbon-intensive technologies. (Several senior economists in the Biden administration have endorsed this, though Biden himself has not.)AdvertisementAlternatively, as many Republican politicians seem to prefer, we can stand athwart history yelling \u201cstop,\u201d merely gumming up traffic.Read more:Catherine Rampell: Almost half of Republicans admit they\u2019re ready to ditch democracyPerry Bacon Jr.: American democracy is in even worse shape than you thinkThe Post\u2019s View: Apple must resist China\u2019s tyrannyCharles Lane: Electric vehicles won\u2019t fix our carbon dilemma without some hard choices along the wayFernanda Santos: How cynical is the Republican election recount circus in Arizona? This cynical. This electric vehicle will be a better, faster, more functional and more affordable truck that appeals to liberals and conservatives alike. Opinion: Why Ford\u2019s F-150 Lightning could elevate green energy from the culture wars ",
        "author": "Catherine Rampell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | I was an astronaut. We need a Space Force. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2610",
        "date": "2018-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-was-an-astronaut-we-need-a-space-force/2018/08/23/637667e6-a6fb-11e8-b76b-d513a40042f6_story.html",
        "text": "Terry Virts, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, is a former astronaut who served as commander of the International Space Station.\u00a0He is a special adviser to Govini, a data and analytics firm based in Arlington.\n\nOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSpace has been a hotly contested domain for decades. I can personally attest to this: While \nI was\n commander of the International Space Station in 2015, we had to maneuver our \nspaceship to avoid debris left over from a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile demonstration. The threat, however, is only going to get worse. The United States must proactively ensure its ability to operate and defend itself in space \u2014 which is why Congress needs to act to finalize the U.S. Space Force as a sixth\n independent branch of our armed forces.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s hard to overstate the importance of space in our military operations and civilian life. \nThough the United States is the world\u2019s leader in space, China and Russia have made it clear they are not willing to accept the status quo. They already have access to weapons that threaten our assets in space, either by destroying them in orbit or by crippling ground control through cyberattacks or radio jamming.\u00a0U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson describes potential threats America faces from adversaries in space. (Washington Post Live)AdvertisementSince the Trump administration\u2019s recent announcement of plans to create a Space Force, there has been a fair amount of criticism stemming from a lack of understanding about what such a force would be. It wouldn\u2019t, of course, be a collection of \u201cStar Wars\u201d troops fighting battles in outer space. We cannot even call it a militarization of space \u2014 which already occurred in the 1950s when the Soviet army launched Sputnik and the U.S. Navy launched Vanguard.But the Space Force could address serious shortcomings in how effectively our military is organized. As the administration laid out this month, the first steps toward creating a Space Force would include creating a subunified Space Command, a Space Operations Force that would initially recruit from the ranks of current military members and a Space Development Agency tasked with procuring space hardware.Story continues below advertisementThough these steps can be taken without major congressional legislation, the final and most important step in creating the Space Force \nwould require legislators to rewrite Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which outlines the role of armed forces. The last major rewrite was undertaken when the Air Force was created after World War II.AdvertisementWhy should Congress make the Space Force a reality? Because space is important and unique enough to deserve its own place at the Defense Department table to ensure rightful allocation of budget resources and power.Our military uses a principle known as \u201cmultidomain warfare,\u201d meaning that when tasked with combat, different services all work jointly across the five domains \u2014 air, sea, land, space and cyber. However, in peacetime, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard only \u201corganize, train and equip\u201d by their specific domain.Story continues below advertisementSpace as a domain is now mature enough to stand alone. Today, there are officers who \u201cgrew up\u201d in Air Force Space Command, beginning as second lieutenants and making their way through the ranks to four-star general. It simply defies logic to keep that domain in the Air Force \u2014 akin to having the infantry in the Navy. Air and space are completely unrelated domains, and the equipment, techniques and culture required to operate airplanes are entirely different from those required to launch and operate in space.AdvertisementThough creating a Space Force makes sense from a theoretical point of view, there are legitimate practical concerns. The president wants a Space Force by 2020, a very ambitious timeline. However, the tight deadline serves to light a fire under the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy, helping to prevent this initiative from floundering over a longer period. There would also be significant initial costs to standing up a new Space Force. In the long run, however, it would become more efficient as duplication across services was reduced.The devil is in the details. What exactly would the Space Force entail? I recommend that such a branch consolidate missions that launch and control satellites in orbit; that develop and procure space-related equipment; and that maintain our land-based nuclear missiles as well as our land-based missile-defense system (for example, to protect us from North Korean missiles). I would also consolidate cyberforces into the Space Force. Though cyber is also its own domain, it is not yet mature enough to warrant a separate Cyber Force. This would also be a sound decision from both an organizational efficiency and a cultural point of view.Story continues below advertisementThe 21st century will present continuous challenges to the United States, and we must realize that there is no \u201cmanifest destiny\u201d that guarantees our status as world leader. Now is the time to show leadership and vision by properly realigning our military with the reality that space is an essential and unique domain of modern warfare.AdvertisementRead more on this issue:The Post\u2019s View: The Space Force isn\u2019t silly. Reshuffling the Pentagon might be.David Ignatius: Now is the time for the Space Force. Trump just needs to get it right.Christine Emba: Trump wants his \u2018Space Force\u2019 to be \u2018separate but equal.\u2019 Notice anything odd?Peter Wismer: Please, President Trump, don\u2019t bring war to spaceWilbur Ross: President Trump wants my department to keep space safe. We\u2019re ready. Space is a unique and separate domain that the United States must protect. Opinion: I was an astronaut. We need a Space Force.",
        "author": "Terry Virts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Boredom is making the world weirder and more dangerous (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2611",
        "date": "2021-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/boredom-is-making-world-weirder-more-dangerous/",
        "text": "In his 1985 book \u201cAmusing Ourselves to Death,\u201d the cultural critic Neil Postman wrote that \u201cWe all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them.\u201d Postman was a pessimist, but not pessimistic enough. It\u2019s worrisome when citizens of a democracy take up permanent residency in fantasyland. But it\u2019s even more dangerous when they try to renovate reality to match their castles in the air \u2014 and to insist that everyone else live there, too. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThat is effectively what happened twice in January, first when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol and then when a group of retail investors drove GameStop stock to heights of unreason. These two very different eruptions illustrate the same point: Boredom and social isolation are public policy issues.It\u2019s common sense that defeating the covid-19 pandemic will allow Americans to return to their \u201cnormal\u201d lives. But more than that, the return to normalcy will help diminish the power of fantasies incubated on the Internet and the risks those dream worlds pose to residents of reality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong those who crashed the Capitol were believers in the conspiracy theory QAnon, which begins by anointing Trump as a world-historical hero and travels into ever-deeper absurdities from there. The rioters\u2019 dream that then-Vice President Mike Pence would overturn the 2020 election results did not, of course, come to pass, but the riot still had momentous effect: It was as if we were all transported to the moment in an alien invasion movie when a spaceship rips a hole in the fabric of reality. The aliens were among us all along.The retail investors who launched their drive to inflate GameStop\u2019s value on the Reddit message board WallStreetBets were less deluded. They didn\u2019t appear to believe that the brick-and-mortar retailer had suddenly unlocked a magical new business plan. But they still employed fantasy to distort reality: By driving up GameStop\u2019s price beyond any reasonable valuation, they put very real pressure on hedge funds that had bet big on GameStop\u2019s failure.Both events have prompted much head-scratching about what it all means. More useful, however, are the questions of why these events are happening now \u2014 and what can be done to restore reality on a firmer footing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCovid-19 has created fertile ground both for conspiratorial thinking and mischief. This is not merely because the pandemic is a catastrophic global event with mysterious origins, but also because it has left huge numbers of people feeling isolated and bored. And no matter what Postman might have thought in 1985, and no matter how many blockbuster movies and binge-able television series we can watch from home, mass culture isn\u2019t a sufficiently powerful anesthetic to make people forget that they\u2019re missing out on a full year of school, work and social interaction.Absent everything that constitutes real life, it\u2019s no surprise that Americans desperately seek out substitutes, and that conspiracy theories and generalized online puckishness are popular alternatives.As Princeton\u2019s Damaris Graeupner and Alin Coman wrote in their 2017 paper, \u201cThe dark side of meaning-making: How social exclusion leads to superstitious thinking,\u201d a sense of social exclusion can drive people to embrace conspiracy theories. As converts burrow into stranger and stranger ideas, they risk isolating from friends and family who don\u2019t share their belief in misinformation. In compensation, they find a sense of belonging in the communities built around those ideas, shutting themselves off from competing points of view. So conspiracy theories like QAnon do more than seek to explain overwhelming and unimaginable circumstances. By giving adherents \u201cresearch\u201d to do and texts to interpret, they also provide a way to fill empty hours with what feels like productive, empowering work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn retrospect, the GameStop frenzy seems predictable, too, but in a different way. Thanks to the pandemic, a lot of Americans have fewer ways to spend money on amusements and a strong desire to find alternate sources of income; gambling on so-called meme stocks and talking about it with friends is a form of entertainment that can take place entirely online. And the disparate financial impact of the pandemic recalls the 2008 financial crisis, which many GameStop buyers have cited as a formative experience and a reason to want revenge on powerful financial institutions.Under normal circumstances, it would be hard to formulate a policy response to a problem like \u201cboredom.\u201d This is not a normal moment. The Biden administration can\u2019t provide people with friends or produce a captivating TV show. But it can get shots in arms, to get the people those arms are attached to back into the real world as soon as possible. The result won\u2019t just be a return to normalcy, but, one hopes, a badly needed return to sanity as well.Read more:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJosh Rogin: Why this congresswoman is working to deny security clearances to QAnon membersPaul Waldman: QAnon is mortally wounded. But the right\u2019s conspiracy theories will never die.Brian Klaas: Why is it so hard to deprogram Trumpian conspiracy theorists?Eugene Robinson: Bipartisanship is nice, but you can\u2019t negotiate with fantasy and liesAlyssa Rosenberg: I understand the temptation to dismiss QAnon. Here\u2019s why we can\u2019t. The pandemic has left people isolated and under-occupied. No wonder they're diving into conspiracy theories and gambling on meme stocks. Opinion: Boredom is making the world weirder and more dangerous",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Go to space, Howard Schultz (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2612",
        "date": "2019-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/30/go-space-howard-schultz/",
        "text": "Good news, everyone!I have thought this all through very carefully, and I have decided what potential independent presidential candidate Howard Schultz should do.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightHe should go to space.There are so many other things to do than mount a centrist bid for commander in chief when you are a billionaire with money burning a hole in your pocket. You can do what Bill Gates does and spend millions of dollars on your weird personal grudge against malaria. Or you can start SpaceX or Virgin Galactic, or you can buy a newspaper so its writers will have to say \u201cJeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post\u201d every time they mention you, which may not seem that consequential, but trust me, it really wears on the writer! Story continues below advertisementI understand that this strange thing happens to each billionaire in his time. He, the billionaire, looks over his works and feels incomplete.Advertisement\u201cSure,\u201d he says to himself, \u201cI have created a weird expensive car made of promises/a website where you can order any book but the entire industry of reading and publishing is a little bit destroyed/a dubious organization I use to take money from those who do not know better in exchange for useless degrees and equally dubious meat products. I have insulted rescue cave divers in strange terms/forced mayors across the country to fight to the death for my amusement/beseeched Vladimir Putin to become my best friend on Twitter. You will never guess what I managed to pay in taxes. But \u2014 is that all there is? Surely this cannot be all life holds!\u201dThere are two responses to this, one healthy and the other unhealthy. One is to go to space. And the other is to run for president.Story continues below advertisementFollow\u00a0Alexandra Petri\u2018s opinionsFollowAddPaul Waldman: What Howard Schultz\u2019s ludicrous candidacy tells us about the American electorateColumnist Alexandra Petri and Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah have some thoughts about the pumpkin industrial complex. (Gillian Brockell, Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)I fear Schultz is taking the latter course. Now he is in the process of messaging, workshopping things like \u201cContemplate Starbucks and glimpse all Schultz has wrought! The tasteful wood things, the employee benefits, the cake pops! And now vaguely apply that to America. He won\u2019t tell us what he\u2019s going to do, but he doesn\u2019t think the deficit is good! We can probably patch it together from context clues! Surely, there is nothing wrong with America that Howard Schultz is not well equipped to fix?\"AdvertisementBut going to space will satisfy the primary urge that motivates runs for president: the desire to spend vast amounts of money on something not useful. But, unlike running for president, it combines all the fun of wasting money on something not immediately helpful to anyone with all the fun of not accidentally contributing to a second term for Donald Trump! Schultz has said it is time to rise above the party system. Well, how better to rise above the party system than to climb aboard a spaceship and hover at least 62 miles above the Earth, probably even farther?Schultz has complained of the rancorous partisan atmosphere. Well, in space there is no atmosphere at all.Story continues below advertisementHe has said that his favorite Republican president in the last 50 years is Ronald Reagan because he never took off his jacket in the Oval Office. In space, you cannot remove any item of outerwear or you will instantly perish.AdvertisementLike Davos, space is a rarefied milieu inaccessible to people without independent wealth where you cannot hear the majority of people saying they do not think your ideas are good.(He has said he doesn\u2019t want to deal in the hypothetical of what he would do if elected president. And why should he have to? In space, you can speak all you like and no one can tell if you have answered a question or not. In space, if you fail to answer the question, it is not embarrassing for you, as sound does not travel.)Story continues below advertisementFor Schultz\u2019s candidacy to make sense, an enormous contingent of people \u2014 a silent majority, if you will \u2014 would have to exist that, as far as we can tell, simply does not! Well, just so, in space, there is dark matter, something we have long been theorizing exists in order for our calculations to make sense, so Schultz would feel right at home.AdvertisementYet! He continues to say he feels a void that is waiting to be filled by his candidacy. What bigger void is there than space! What better place for a third-party candidate than \u2026 space? Go to space, Howard! Go to space!Read more from Alexandra Petri:Liked the wedding ring story? Here are further feel-good tales.What I meant when I said there was no collusionNo State of the Union? That would be wonderful! It is the only logical choice when you are a billionaire with money burning a hole in your pocket. Opinion: Go to space, Howard Schultz",
        "author": "Alexandra Petri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The impeachment hearings, on Earth and Earth-45 (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2613",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/13/impeachment-hearings-earth-earth-/",
        "text": "Good news, 2019! In an unprecedented and probably very expensive crossover event, the impeachment hearings are occurring on two parallel and warring Earths that have somehow been shoved into the same hearing room on Capitol Hill.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIntelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) delivered a point-by-point account of everything that has happened on impeachment thus far. Aid to Ukraine was being withheld because President Trump wanted the country\u2019s new president to investigate Joe Biden. In a transcript of the call, Trump asks the president to look into this. The latest commentary about the Trump impeachment inquiryMeanwhile, on Earth-45, Devin Nunes (perhaps his presence on the Intelligence Committee in this universe is less confusing) welcomed everyone to a day of televised theatrical performance (like the Kennedy Center Honors) during which players he denounced as actors from central casting would deliver irrelevant statements about bad things Trump might have done, instead of getting into the real questions: the Steele Dossier, something called the Black Ledger (of additional concern because Sabrina the Teenage Witch refused to sign it) and, of course, the cruel and oppressive practice of keeping whistleblowers\u2019 identities secret.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe hearings managed to go for five hours, which is impressive when you consider they went like this:DEMOCRATIC QUESTIONER: Ambassador, you have served this country for decades, with great honor and many medals, have you not?ACTING UKRAINE AMBASSADOR WILLIAM B. TAYLOR JR.: I have.Follow\u00a0Alexandra Petri\u2018s opinionsFollowAddREPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: HE ADMITS TO MEDDLES!TAYLOR: (Bemused stare.)DEMOCRATIC QUESTIONER: So, when you texted that you were concerned that aid was being made conditional on investigating the president\u2019s political rivals, you were \u2026 concerned?TAYLOR: Yes.DEMOCRATIC QUESTIONER: And why were you concerned?TAYLOR: Because aid was being made conditional on investigating the president\u2019s political rivals.Story continues below advertisementDEMOCRATIC QUESTIONER: And, for people who might be wondering, that is concerning?TAYLOR: Extremely.DEMOCRATIC QUESTIONER: And when you sent the WhatsApp message saying, \u201cWhy is the president trying to do extortion?\u201d \u201cThat seems bad!\u201d you thought. That seemed bad?AdvertisementTAYLOR: Yes. I\u2019ve been a diplomat a long time, and let me tell you, usually, the president doesn\u2019t try to do extortion.DEMOCRATIC QUESTIONER: So that concerned you.TAYLOR: Yes.DEMOCRATIC QUESTIONER: Why?TAYLOR: Again, I just \u2014 if it\u2019s not clear to people why that might be concerning, I\u2019m really not sure what I can tell them that\u2019s going to change their minds.DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE GEORGE KENT: Yes, what he said. (Feistily) I am in a bow tie, and I\u2019m not afraid to say that I think corruption is bad.Story continues below advertisementREPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: Mr. So-Called Ambassador, when you were in the Ukraine, the Steele Dossier, the Black Ledgers, and wouldn\u2019t you just understand how the president might?TAYLOR: I don\u2019t understand the question.REPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: I think he understands the question. The question is, the whistleblower exists, but he\u2019s not here, is he? Raising his hand, on the Bible? I wish I could see him put his hand on the Bible. Isn\u2019t?AdvertisementTAYLOR: Isn\u2019t what?REP. ADAM B. SCHIFF: You don\u2019t have to answer the question if it has a weird premise.REP. JOHN RATCLIFFE (R): Excuse me, Mr. Chairman, if we are not answering questions with weird premises, then I object to EVERY QUESTION that was asked previously! Your premise is that the call with Ukraine was not perfect and that the president is a flawed individual, whereas neither of those things are true.Story continues below advertisementREPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: And don\u2019t you, of course, the Fusion GPS, when we know Alexandra Chalupa has not been called, of course?TAYLOR: I\u2019m trying, I\u2019m really trying, to find the question in that.REPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: So, in conclusion, you\u2019re saying, \u201cAmbassador Taylor recalls that Mr. Morrison told Ambassador Taylor that I told Mr. Morrison that I conveyed this message to Mr. Yarmak\u201d \u2014 this is unintelligible! Who is hearing from whom? I think this is hearsay? I do not know how sentences work. If I say it fast, you will see how confusing it is.AdvertisementTAYLOR: I don\u2019t think it is that confusing. I\u2019m sorry your English teacher failed you.REPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: That was not the only teacher who failed me! I also think that because the aid eventually went through, maybe coincidentally after this investigation began, it is impossible for a crime to have occurred. In conclusion, the president hates corruption in all forms, and he just wanted to make sure that public officials and their families were held accountable. Held to the highest standard. You should all be ashamed of standing in his way.Story continues below advertisementTAYLOR: This has been unusual but not as outlandish as it could be.REPUBLICAN QUESTIONER: (Climbing aboard a spaceship bound for Earth-537.) There is always tomorrow.Read more from Alexandra Petri:Nikki Haley makes some good points about never impeaching anyone everIt\u2019s me, the one person waiting for the anonymous Trump book before changing my mindSome other TV ideas for Trump post-White HouseRead the transcript of Alexandra Petri\u2019s latest live chatSubmit a question for Alexandra Petri\u2019s Nov. 19 chat Alas, things are not as outlandish as they could be. Opinion: The impeachment hearings, on Earth and Earth-45",
        "author": "Alexandra Petri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2614",
        "date": "2021-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/14/equal-access-space-night-sky-branson/",
        "text": "Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in women\u2019s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire and the author of \u201cThe Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.\u201dOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cImagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds, from anywhere, of any gender, of any ethnicity have equal access to space.\u201d After traveling over 50 miles from Earth\u2019s surface on Sunday, an adrenaline-fueled English billionaire Richard Branson issued a call to charitably diversify the chosen few who can travel beyond Earth\u2019s immediate atmosphere. On social media, people predictably called for him to direct that charity toward Earth instead.Story continues below advertisementBut philanthropy isn\u2019t the solution to inequality, and we don\u2019t actually face a choice between basic human needs and exciting journeys into the universe. We cannot create equal access to a dark night sky \u2014 even from the ground \u2014 until we radically revise how resources are distributed. For starters, billionaires such as Branson should pay more in taxes so we the people can decide what to invest in. And guaranteeing basic necessities for everyone is a starting point, not the end. Creating a just society on Earth is the best way to build a just future for space, one defined by more than the passing generosity of billionaires.AdvertisementI think I have some insight into how thrilled Branson and his fellow passengers must have felt, even if perhaps I will never experience something so exhilarating.I grew up in a working-class Black and Jewish family in Latinx East Los Angeles and went to school in South L.A. near what is now called the California Science Center. There, I saw Imax films that showed the beauty and promise of spaceflight. I came of age with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, which helped probe many of the key questions in astronomy and astrophysics, all while sending back images that brought the beauty of space to those of us who are earthbound.Story continues below advertisementFor years, nothing seemed more beautiful to me than looking at Earth from space. And while I haven\u2019t made it past the atmosphere myself, as a professor of physics and astronomy who specializes in particle astrophysics, my life has been shaped immeasurably by low-earth orbit space travel and facilities.AdvertisementFrom my point of view, the ability to see and study the sky isn\u2019t a luxury, but a fundamental part of what liberation looks like. As a species, we evolved under the night sky. Every single community has studied the stars and developed cosmologies: origin stories that explain not just our universe, but also ourselves. In turn, the stars help us find our way here on the ground; heroes such as Harriet Tubman are believed to have used constellations to navigate their journeys to freedom. To look at the sky and wonder is a fundamentally human activity. It is part of who we are.Yet today, we find ourselves trying to look at the universe through an increasingly polluted atmosphere and a low-earth orbit that is progressively filling with more and more poorly regulated satellite constellations and space junk. Many of us are also living in light-polluted urban areas, that are also redlined in a way that makes it especially difficult for the poorest among us \u2014 who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous-descended folks \u2014 to access a dark night sky. It shouldn\u2019t be necessary to board a spaceship to experience the wonder of the cosmos. But it may seem that way in communities where even a clear view of the stars is out of reach.Story continues below advertisementNo wonder so many people responded to Branson\u2019s giddiness by suggesting he prioritize equal access to housing, medical care and education over equal access to space. It is absolutely true that a child cannot comfortably experience the awe of the universe if they are hungry, sick from drinking poisoned water, or traumatized by racist violence.AdvertisementUltimately, in the scenario where these needs are met, our work would not be finished. The opportunity to experience and indulge curiosity about space is one of those basic human needs. We must ensure that we always have space and time to be curious about spacetime. There is no reason to think we have to choose between food and basic human curiosity, either. The Defense Department\u2019s fiscal year 2022 budget request is $752.9 billion. Meanwhile, NASA sent the Perseverance rover to Mars with less than 0.4 percent of that budget \u2014 spent over a decade.When it comes to both feeding people and learning about space, we do not face an affordability crisis: We face a resource distribution crisis. Protecting the deeply human connection we all have to the wider universe should motivate us to ensure that everyone\u2019s basic needs are taken care of. We can afford to do the caring work of sustaining people, including honoring everyone\u2019s right to know and love the night sky.Story continues below advertisementRead more:Alexandra Petri: Some one-star Yelp reviews of space travel from the near futureMegan McArdle: The billionaires\u2019 space race benefits the rest of us. Really.Paul Byrne: NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time.Mitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars.Mary Robinette Kowal: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone But everyone needs to have their basic needs met if they're to share in the wider universe. Opinion: What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to space",
        "author": "Chanda Prescod-Weinstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2615",
        "date": "2021-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/14/equal-access-space-night-sky-branson/",
        "text": "Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and a core faculty member in women\u2019s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire and the author of \u201cThe Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.\u201dOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cImagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds, from anywhere, of any gender, of any ethnicity have equal access to space.\u201d After traveling over 50 miles from Earth\u2019s surface on Sunday, an adrenaline-fueled English billionaire Richard Branson issued a call to charitably diversify the chosen few who can travel beyond Earth\u2019s immediate atmosphere. On social media, people predictably called for him to direct that charity toward Earth instead.Story continues below advertisementBut philanthropy isn\u2019t the solution to inequality, and we don\u2019t actually face a choice between basic human needs and exciting journeys into the universe. We cannot create equal access to a dark night sky \u2014 even from the ground \u2014 until we radically revise how resources are distributed. For starters, billionaires such as Branson should pay more in taxes so we the people can decide what to invest in. And guaranteeing basic necessities for everyone is a starting point, not the end. Creating a just society on Earth is the best way to build a just future for space, one defined by more than the passing generosity of billionaires.AdvertisementI think I have some insight into how thrilled Branson and his fellow passengers must have felt, even if perhaps I will never experience something so exhilarating.I grew up in a working-class Black and Jewish family in Latinx East Los Angeles and went to school in South L.A. near what is now called the California Science Center. There, I saw Imax films that showed the beauty and promise of spaceflight. I came of age with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, which helped probe many of the key questions in astronomy and astrophysics, all while sending back images that brought the beauty of space to those of us who are earthbound.Story continues below advertisementFor years, nothing seemed more beautiful to me than looking at Earth from space. And while I haven\u2019t made it past the atmosphere myself, as a professor of physics and astronomy who specializes in particle astrophysics, my life has been shaped immeasurably by low-earth orbit space travel and facilities.AdvertisementFrom my point of view, the ability to see and study the sky isn\u2019t a luxury, but a fundamental part of what liberation looks like. As a species, we evolved under the night sky. Every single community has studied the stars and developed cosmologies: origin stories that explain not just our universe, but also ourselves. In turn, the stars help us find our way here on the ground; heroes such as Harriet Tubman are believed to have used constellations to navigate their journeys to freedom. To look at the sky and wonder is a fundamentally human activity. It is part of who we are.Yet today, we find ourselves trying to look at the universe through an increasingly polluted atmosphere and a low-earth orbit that is progressively filling with more and more poorly regulated satellite constellations and space junk. Many of us are also living in light-polluted urban areas, that are also redlined in a way that makes it especially difficult for the poorest among us \u2014 who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous-descended folks \u2014 to access a dark night sky. It shouldn\u2019t be necessary to board a spaceship to experience the wonder of the cosmos. But it may seem that way in communities where even a clear view of the stars is out of reach.Story continues below advertisementNo wonder so many people responded to Branson\u2019s giddiness by suggesting he prioritize equal access to housing, medical care and education over equal access to space. It is absolutely true that a child cannot comfortably experience the awe of the universe if they are hungry, sick from drinking poisoned water, or traumatized by racist violence.AdvertisementUltimately, in the scenario where these needs are met, our work would not be finished. The opportunity to experience and indulge curiosity about space is one of those basic human needs. We must ensure that we always have space and time to be curious about spacetime. There is no reason to think we have to choose between food and basic human curiosity, either. The Defense Department\u2019s fiscal year 2022 budget request is $752.9 billion. Meanwhile, NASA sent the Perseverance rover to Mars with less than 0.4 percent of that budget \u2014 spent over a decade.When it comes to both feeding people and learning about space, we do not face an affordability crisis: We face a resource distribution crisis. Protecting the deeply human connection we all have to the wider universe should motivate us to ensure that everyone\u2019s basic needs are taken care of. We can afford to do the caring work of sustaining people, including honoring everyone\u2019s right to know and love the night sky.Story continues below advertisementRead more:Alexandra Petri: Some one-star Yelp reviews of space travel from the near futureMegan McArdle: The billionaires\u2019 space race benefits the rest of us. Really.Paul Byrne: NASA is planning to return to Venus. It\u2019s about time.Mitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars.Mary Robinette Kowal: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyone But everyone needs to have their basic needs met if they're to share in the wider universe. Opinion: What Richard Branson and his critics both get wrong about equal access to space",
        "author": "Chanda Prescod-Weinstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Saving this small bird might cost us millions. But it would be worth it. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2616",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/01/saving-this-small-bird-might-cost-us-millions-it-would-be-worth-it/",
        "text": "Bruce Beehler is a local naturalist and author of 12 books, including \u201cNatural Encounters\u201d and \u201cBirds of Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.\u201d David Wilcove is a professor of ecology, evolutionary biology and public affairs at Princeton University.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIt\u2019s a drab little bird \u2014 a brown sparrow, not even five inches long, that you wouldn\u2019t give a second glance if it happened to hop across your path. The Florida grasshopper sparrow might be the most endangered bird in the continental United States. Biologists are working hard to save it \u2014 and they think they\u2019re making progress.But their efforts raise a persistent question: Why go to the trouble? It\u2019s just a sparrow, after all. Sparrows are everywhere. Don\u2019t we have enough of them as it is? And why should we care if a nondescript little bird \u2014 one that most of us will never see \u2014 slips out of existence?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs we emerge from four years of the Trump administration, which staged an extraordinary assault on a wide array of environmental protections, it\u2019s worth addressing such issues once again.Over the past few decades, the population of the Florida grasshopper sparrow plummeted to some 30 wild-bred pairs of birds. Lately a consortium of conservation organizations has put more than $1 million into developing a captive breeding program that is working to bring the sparrow back from the brink.At its most basic level, of course, saving this bird is about holding onto something irreplaceable, a product of eons of evolution. Once a particular species \u2014 or subspecies, in this particular case \u2014 is gone, there\u2019s no getting it back, tearing one more hole in the weakening fabric of global biodiversity.Story continues below advertisementYet this is not just about the bird itself. By working to preserve the Florida grasshopper sparrow, we\u2019re also protecting the remaining bits and pieces of a unique natural ecosystem unlike any place else on Earth: the Kissimmee prairie, a natural subtropical savanna unique in the Eastern United States. Across the nation, all sorts of natural ecosystems \u2014 places unconverted to tract housing, agriculture and other human uses \u2014 are becoming scarcer and more precious as our landscape becomes more and more human-dominated. These ecosystems are Earth\u2019s prototypes \u2014 communities of plants and animals that have evolved over vast stretches of time in ways we are still trying to understand \u2014 and they can never be fully re-created once lost.AdvertisementMoreover, the habitat we protect for the sparrow is home to thousandsof other native species, some relatively well-known (such as the Northern bobwhite), some imperiled (a butterfly called the Berry\u2019s skipper) and others that have yet to be discovered by science. By working to conserve the Florida grasshopper sparrow\u2019s habitat, we help to conserve these other species, large and small, common or rare. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich famously called species the \u201crivets\u201d that hold together spaceship Earth.In addition, by protecting natural ecosystems we\u2019re also protecting the important services these places provide, such as the production of clean air, pure and fresh water, or the sequestration of carbon. There might also be benefits we\u2019re not yet in a position to judge, such as the possibility that some little creature in that ecosystem will provide the next great breakthrough in medicine or technology.Story continues below advertisementSpecies conservation gives us the chance to learn new things about our world, as we work out new and useful technologies for future use. And we also train a cadre of field biologists who can go on to benefit the world through their future activities. Practice makes perfect (or, at any rate, better). Each conservation effort helps us to sharpen tools for future battles on behalf of other endangered species. Our past efforts with the whooping crane and California condor were anything but assured when the efforts to save these magnificent birds began. But scientists learned as they went along and ultimately succeeded.AdvertisementThe most important benefits might be the hardest ones to measure \u2014 the cultural and spiritual impacts from unique places that we can wander through and appreciate, gaining a sense of peace and pleasure along the way. In months to come, some who have been cooped up at home in fear of covid-19 will no doubt treasure the opportunity to revel in the sublime beauty of the Kissimmee prairie or other natural ecosystems.Yes, saving endangered plants and animals can be expensive. But does anyone begrudge our federal government spending considerable sums to protect and exhibit the original copy of the Declaration of Independence in our National Archives? The Fiscal Year 2021 budget request of the National Archives and Records Administration was more than $367 million. By contrast, the \u201cecological services\u201d budget request from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which covers all manner of activities to identify and protect vanishing wildlife, was a little over $244 million. Story continues below advertisementAn F-35 fighter jet costs the U.S. government about $100 million; the 60-year program to make and deploy these jets is anticipated to cost more than $1 trillion.AdvertisementIt\u2019s safe to say we can afford $1 million to save a small bird and the unique ecosystem in which it lives. Here\u2019s to a brighter future for the Florida grasshopper sparrow and the United States\u2019 other wild species and natural treasures.Read more:Bruce Beehler: What a bobcat sighting tells us about a rewilding WashingtonBruce Beehler: The feel-good animal comeback photos mean little in the grand scheme of the environmentBruce Beehler: Murder hornets sound terrifying. But should we really be so scared?Bruce Beehler: It\u2019s September. Seize the moment.Michael Parr: We\u2019re losing birds at an alarming rate. We can do something about it.Gabriel Foley and Jordan Rutter: The stench of colonialism mars these bird names. They must be changed. Conservation has broader aims than simply preserving individual species. Opinion: Saving this small bird might cost us millions. But it would be worth it.",
        "author": "Bruce Beehler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Dave Chappelle cannot erase me (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2617",
        "date": "2021-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/07/dave-chappelle-the-closer-gay-trans-community/",
        "text": "Brian Broome is the author of \u201cPunch Me Up To The Gods.\u201dI grew up in a small, racist town in northern Ohio, where all the Black people lived on one side and all the White people lived on the other. It didn\u2019t take me long to realize how things shook out in America. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightI was prone to childish fantasies. I used to dream that an enormous spaceship would one day hover over the earth. It would linger until all the Black people everywhere had time to board and then it would carry us all far away from racism to a place where no such thing could exist.Like I say, I was a child. When I got older, I realized I was gay. It took me a little while to connect the dots but, once I did, I realized to my sadness that, even if such a ship appeared, that Black people, my own people, would never allow me to board it. Because, according to the culture, my Blackness and my gayness were not allowed to coexist. I had to pick one or the other. This reality fragmented my personality for far too long, and in ways that were unhealthy for me and everyone around me.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his most recent Netflix special called \u201cThe Closer,\u201d comedian Dave Chappelle expounds on what he believes to be a disparity in America\u2019s response to Black men and the gay and trans community. \u201cIn our country,\u201d he said, \u201cyou can shoot and kill\u201d a Black man, \u201cbut you better not hurt a gay person\u2019s feelings.\u201dI have enjoyed Chappelle\u2019s comedy in the past. But I could not laugh at \u201cThe Closer.\u201d It felt, in a word, mean. Perhaps that\u2019s because it hit too close to home. But it also felt like a vendetta. Like he had a score to settle against all the gay and trans folk who have challenged him in one way or another about his views.In \u201cThe Closer,\u201d Chappelle treats equality as a zero-sum game in which some, though oppressed themselves, seem to be getting more equality than others. I think this is a dangerous game to play. Chappelle seems to believe in a dynamic in which it\u2019s Black people vs. gay and trans people. A belief that essentially erases the experiences of people who are Black and queer. He seems to believe that the entirety of the queer community is White.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019m here to remind him that Black gay and trans people exist. I\u2019m here to remind him that we are here facing the same racism that every Black American faces and the same homophobia and transphobia that he seems to find such fertile ground for his comedy.One night, when I was young, I boarded a bus in the city where I live. Behind me sat three Black men, who began to harass another Black person as they boarded. This person was an affront to their eyes. This person was, to them, not feminine enough to be a woman. Not masculine enough to be a man. So they taunted. This person said something back to them. So they began to beat the person up. Right there on the bus.No one did anything. I didn\u2019t do anything. I wasn\u2019t brave. The bus driver, also a Black man, stopped the bus, and his solution was to tell this person to get off and wait for the next one. And that\u2019s just what happened.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThose men, wherever they are, are probably laughing with Chappelle tonight. To some degree, he has affirmed for them that they all did the right thing.I remember when people used to say that they had \u201cno problem\u201d with gay people as long as gay people didn\u2019t \u201cshove it in their faces.\u201d This was code for us not to ask for too much. For us to keep it a secret. It seems to me that, in many ways, we as a country have gotten beyond this. But even if that is true, the same grace is not extended to trans people.All people are capable of great cruelty. After I came out, I found out that gays can be just as racist as the public in general. I have been called the n-word by queer people and non-queer people alike. There appeared to be no escape from the world not wanting me to exist the way I was made. Addiction followed. Then suicide attempts. And now, here I am. Still broken, but still carrying on.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the end, Chappelle can, of course, say whatever he likes. All I can do is wish that he didn\u2019t want to say these things. Chappelle ended his special by asking the trans community to stop \u201cpunching down\u201d on Black people. But members of that community aren\u2019t \u201cpunching\u201d anywhere. They are simply trying to live their lives with dignity. And just because you don\u2019t understand something doesn\u2019t automatically make it wrong. A comedy act that denies the reality of being Black and queer. Opinion: Dave Chappelle cannot erase me",
        "author": "Brian Broome"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Alice Rivlin turned visions of Washington into reality (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2618",
        "date": "2019-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/alice-rivlin-turned-visions-of-washington-into-reality/2019/05/14/ec4a7a72-7698-11e9-b3f5-5673edf2d127_story.html",
        "text": "Anthony A. Williams, a Democrat, was D.C. mayor from 1999 to 2007. He is chief executive and executive director of the Federal City Council.\nAlice M. Rivlin, who died Tuesday at 88, was not some callous budget maven or austere fiscal hawk who cared only about balanced budgets and financial austerity. She wanted government to work and investment to flow back into the District in order for the city to meet its responsibilities to educate our children, to heal our sick, to protect our families, to restore our community. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightEarly in 1998, I was the District\u2019s independent chief financial officer on my way to visit Alice at the marble temple of the Federal Reserve, where she was vice chair. Alice\u2019s reputation certainly \npreceded her. She was only an acquaintance then, and yet I knew she was something special, a person of national prominence with real interest and expertise in local Washington. In 1990, as chair of the Rivlin Commission, she had laid out a diagnosis of the District\u2019s fiscal predicament, detailing how bad management and federal law created a perverse combination of extensive budget obligations without the resources to fund them. In 1994, as the first woman to direct the White House Office of Management and Budget, she worked with local leaders and Congress to create the D.C. Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority \u2014 a.k.a. the control board \u2014 to guide the District out of insolvency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the backstop of the control board, we cleaned up the District\u2019s books and balanced the budget two\u2009years ahead of schedule. On top of this, the work of the Rivlin Commission provided the blueprint for the District\u2019s Revitalization Act of 1997, which, in exchange for eliminating the yearly payment the city received from the federal government, relieved the District of responsibility for its federally mandated pension system, its court system and the infamous Lorton correctional facility.Therefore, on the day I visited her, the future looked bright, and I was excited to tell her of my plans to run for D.C. mayor and, I hoped, get her support. From the expression on her face \u2014 a kind of \u201cDid I order this?\u201d look \u2014 I might as well have told her I was building my own spaceship to Mars. She knew political ability; after all, she had worked closely with President Bill Clinton, one of the best political talents in a generation. She was quite skeptical of my political chops.Nevertheless, she didn\u2019t have her assistant interrupt us or beg off due to an elective root canal. \u201cAssuming,\u201d she said, \u201cyou can make this work, here are the problems the city faces.\u201d What she saw in me that day is anyone\u2019s guess. What I saw, in physically diminutive form, was a giant \u2014 a powerful, determined leader. With a world of experience and an ace economist\u2019s talent, she described an economic future for the District and the way to get there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlice and I quickly became working partners and good friends. She offered support, upon my election in 1998, to reverting governmental authority back to D.C. Council Chair Linda Cropp and me. She provided wise counsel, during phone calls and her regular visits to my office to discuss fiscal matters and, yes, astronomy and her grandpa\u2019s career as a famous solar scientist. She acted as head coach, always asking questions, always urging me to think boldly and sketch out an ambitious goal of 100,000 new residents as a way to begin restoring the District\u2019s economy and finances.Alice Rivlin was at once both a fierce advocate and a gracious and attentive listener. She sat in countless meetings where D.C. officials and residents questioned her competence in government budgeting, all while giving each person the respect she would bestow on any central banker or finance minister. She treated everyone with respect, whatever their station, whether they commanded it or not.In the din of shouted voices and in the chaos of innumerable discussions and conflicting priorities, she never lost track of a goal. I saw this determination when she steadfastly supported our initiative to convert the subsidy for our failing public hospital into one of the country\u2019s first statewide health plans. As a child who started life in the foster-care system, I appreciated her deep understanding that the right budget choices and oversight would ultimately lead the District\u2019s public-service agencies out of court receivership.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s tough being a city. An urban community travels a hard road. Alice M. Rivlin was the rare person who could turn vision into reality, and she got an often rowdy group of self-interested D.C. pols to see things we never imagined and perform in ways we never expected. She made us better. We have lost her, and we must press on without her. But because of her, we have never been better equipped to keep making progress on the road to that better place.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: With Alice Rivlin\u2019s death, D.C. has lost a fierce advocateA letter writer responds to this op-ed: Alice Rivlin was a humble intellectual giant She got an often rowdy group of self-interested D.C. pols to see things we never imagined and perform in ways we never expected. Opinion: Alice Rivlin turned visions of Washington into reality",
        "author": "Anthony A. Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Movie theaters survived a century of change. We must save them from covid-19. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2619",
        "date": "2020-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/29/movie-theaters-survived-century-change-we-must-save-them-covid-19/",
        "text": "Alan Lightman is a writer, physicist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1915, my 24-year-old grandfather, M.A. Lightman, was looking out of a hotel window in Colbert County, Ala., when he saw a long line of people waiting to get into a movie theater. In those early days of film, many cinemas were simply converted storefronts outfitted with a projector and folding chairs for the audience. Moving pictures were more than photographs and different from books. They transmitted romance, danger and comedy straight into your emotional bloodstream, with no need for translation and no intermediaries. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMy grandfather, the son of Hungarian immigrants, had been trained as an engineer. But he always fancied himself a showman. Looking out the window, he decided to try out the movie business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1916, M.A. opened his first theater, the Liberty, where he played the original, silent version of \u201c20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.\u201d In 1931, he was elected president of the Motion Picture Theater Owners of America, the forerunner of today\u2019s National Association of Theatre Owners.As a child in the late 1950s, I sometimes ventured into the projection booths of my grandfather\u2019s movie theaters, claustrophobic rooms containing two movie projectors, each mounted with a giant reel of celluloid film. Like a fish tank, the front wall of the booth was all glass. I can still feel the heat from the intensely bright \u201ccarbon arc lamps,\u201d which shined a powerful light through the film. The light then travelled through a focusing lens, then through the glass wall and out into the theater, finally landing on the movie screen 200 feet away.Even at that age, I knew that something magical was at work. We were creating another world out there on the screen, a world of joy and sadness, laughter, romance, places far away in space and in time, heroes and heroines and ordinary people \u2014 a world that moviegoers could enter and live other lives. We were giving our audience a common culture.Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemicMovies are the principal medium by which we tell and preserve stories about ourselves and about the world. Think of \u201cDoctor Zhivago,\u201d telling the story of the Russian Revolution; or \u201cSchindler\u2019s List,\u201d helping to define our understanding of the Holocaust; or \u201cThe Big Short,\u201d making the numbers behind the 2008 financial crash legible for lay audiences.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the decades, movies and movie theaters have survived many competing technologies that threatened their extinction, among them television, VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-rays, and streaming. Through all of these worthwhile advances, people continued to leave their homes to watch movies in theaters. From 2010, just after streaming became prominent, to the beginning of 2020, the number of movie theaters nationwide remained nearly constant, going from 5,773 to 5,798. Annual ticket sales dropped by only 7 percent, from about 1.33 billion to about 1.24 billion.Seeing a movie in a public theater on a giant screen, surrounded by other people, is not only entertainment. It is an experience, a communal activity, a night out of the house almost everyone can afford.Then came the covid-19 pandemic. Few industries have suffered more than movie theaters. The small number of theaters that remain open have seen attendance decline dramatically. National Association of Theatre Owners chief John Fithian recently begged for federal aid, calling relief \u201cthe ONLY solution that will provide the bridge that theaters need to see them into next year.\u201d Although movies will undoubtedly still be made and streamed into private homes, if theaters do not survive, something irreplaceable will have been lost.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe are social creatures. No matter how comfortable our living rooms and sophisticated our technology, we need community, we need physical contact with one another. According to the General Social Survey, since the 1970s, there has been a deterioration in participation in such communal experiences as parent-teacher associations, Lions Clubs and Rotary Clubs, even bowling leagues. It may be too late to save those institutions, but it is not too late to save movie theaters.I vividly remember my excitement at seeing the first \u201cStar Wars\u201d movie, in 1977, at a downtown theater in Boston. That first image of the underside of a spaceship sailing through the galaxy, on that large screen, was so startling and innovative that you could hear everyone else in the audience gasp along with you. We were floating in outer space.Here, writ large on the screen, was our modern version of the ancient hero\u2019s journey, dating back to the ancient Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh. Here were the enduring themes of chivalry, good vs. evil, conquest and dominion, fashioned for our technological age. We moviegoers left the theater in throngs, talking to each other, sharing impressions, some of us speechless. But all of us felt that we now shared some magical bond. Lawmakers should act to save that magic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Sonny Bunch: Fear is killing movie theaters. That\u2019s a tragic mistake.Christopher Nolan: Movie theaters are a vital part of American social life. They will need our help.Alyssa Rosenberg, Sonny Bunch and Peter Suderman: In 2021, you can watch \u2018Dune\u2019 and \u2018The Matrix 4\u2019 at home without a wait. Here\u2019s the catch.Ron Busby Sr., Ramiro A. Cavazos, Chiling Tong and Rhett Buttle: The numbers are dire. Congress must act now to save small businesses.The Post\u2019s View: Congress\u2019s pandemic bill is late, imperfect \u2014 and needed. Pass it now. The communal experience of pure escape you get at a movie theater in the company of other people is not replaceable. Opinion: Movie theaters survived a century of change. We must save them from covid-19.",
        "author": "Alan Lightman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Sean Spicer is right. That five-year-old refugee has diabolical plans. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2620",
        "date": "2017-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/01/30/sean-spicer-is-right-that-five-year-old-refugee-has-diabolical-plans/",
        "text": "\u201cThat\u2019s why we slow it down and\u00a0make sure that if they are a five year old that maybe they\u2019re with their parents and they don\u2019t pose a threat. . . .\u00a0To assume that just because of someone\u2019s age or gender or whatever that they don\u2019t pose a threat would be wrong\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u2014 Press secretary Sean Spicer, when asked about the five-year-old Iranian boy who was\u00a0detained under President\u00a0Trump\u2019s new executive order on refugees.Sean Spicer is quite right to be concerned. This five-year-old boy waiting at the airport certainly has a diabolical plan. All five-year-old children do.When the five-year-old comes to this country, he will begin\u00a0his\u00a0hostile takeover\u00a0almost immediately. He is going to touch\u00a0everything in the house and\u00a0his hands will be sticky for some undefinable reason and nothing in the house will ever feel entirely not sticky ever again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe will sow disinformation. He will\u00a0run up and down the aisle of the airplane\u00a0creating chaos and making fake plane noises with his mouth, even though he is clearly not a plane.\u00a0He will say the floor is lava. He\u00a0will say\u00a0he is a dinosaur. He will say he is Batman. He will say he is a doctor who can vaccinate you against cooties. All of these will be lies.He will commit sabotage. He will knock down his block towers with a thunderous crash when you are on the telephone. He will spill his Legos on the carpet for you to walk across barefoot in the middle of the night and make you blaspheme God.But he will not stop there.\u00a0He will tell interminable stories.\u00a0He will draw horrible propaganda art where your\u00a0head is too big and both your arms are sticks and your mouth is a horrible pool full of yellow boulder teeth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe has plans to\u00a0turn his bed into a spaceship without registering first with NASA. He has plans to\u00a0invite friends over from school and\u00a0hold them\u00a0hostage\u00a0behind the couch with his\u00a0whole army of stuffed hippos.He has plans to carry his sinister associate Bear Bear\u00a0with him everywhere, to bed and to the dinner table and even to school, and we know how Betsy DeVos feels about bears in schools. Besides, Bear Bear is a foreign operative with a missing eye and almost none of his original fur, always silent, and his motives cannot\u00a0be adequately discerned.He has plans to let go of your\u00a0hand and run off giggling because he thinks the world is all like him\u00a0on the inside and there is no one who does not understand that he means no harm \u2014 how could they? \u2013 and he wants to play.Story continues below advertisementOh yes, the five year-old boy has diabolical plans. Look at him, standing in the airport. He is not even four feet high, but his mind is whirling with plans: to go to a strange new school and learn a strange new language and make strange new friends and teach them draw incendiary graffiti all\u00a0over the walls with crayon.\u00a0And at\u00a0recess, he may not\u00a0share.\u00a0He has plans to\u00a0sit up past bedtime in a house where the sound of bombs falling does not keep\u00a0him awake. He has plans to\u00a0commit awful acts of sabotage like flushing strange things down the toilet, because here there is a toilet to flush. He has plans to grow up to become the most terrifying thing in the world: an American.And\u00a0if you turn him away\u00a0\u2014 you will be very lucky if he does not have other plans.Protest at New York\u2019s JFK airport against Trump\u2019s order halting refugee admissionsShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 28: Protestors rally during a demonstration against the Muslim immigration ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on January 28, 2017 in New York City. President Trump signed the controversial executive order that halted refugees and residents from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images) His head is full of unspeakable things.  Opinion: Sean Spicer is right. That five-year-old refugee has diabolical plans.",
        "author": "Alexandra Petri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | This isn\u2019t religion. It\u2019s perversion. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2621",
        "date": "2018-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-the-way-of-the-cult/2018/06/15/9a9c9346-70ad-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s becoming a cultish thing, isn\u2019t it?\u201d Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) mused this week about his Republican Party under President Trump. As if to prove Corker\u2019s point, the Trump administration the very next day claimed that it had the divine right to rip children from their parents\u2019 arms at the border. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightOfficials justified the unique form of barbarism \u2014 taking infants from parents and warehousing children in tent cities and an abandoned Walmart \u2014 by saying they are doing God\u2019s will. \u201cI would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,\u201d Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday. \u201cI am not going to apologize for carrying out our laws.\u201d\nStory continues below advertisementColumnist Elizabeth Bruenig takes issue with the way Attorney General Jeff Sessions is using scripture to justify separating families at the border. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked about Sessions\u2019s remarks, said: \u201cIt is very biblical to enforce the law.\u201d \nAdvertisementThis isn\u2019t religion. It\u2019s perversion. It is not the creed of a democratic government or political party but of an authoritarian cult. The attorney general\u2019s tortured reading of Romans is exactly the strained interpretation that others have used before to justify slavery, segregation, apartheid and Nazism. The same interpretation could be used to justify Joseph Stalin, or Kim Jong Un. Romans 13 does indeed say to \u201csubmit to the authorities,\u201d because they \u201care God\u2019s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.\u201d But this is in the context of what comes before it (\u201cshare with the Lord\u2019s people who are in need. Practice hospitality\u201d) and after (\u201cowe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law\u201d) \u2013 and, indeed, admonitions to care for the poor and the oppressed that come from Isaiah, Leviticus,\n Matthew and many more. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow\u00a0Dana Milbank\u2018s opinionsFollowAddEvangelical leaders who looked the other way when Stormy Daniels and the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape surfaced this time have denounced Trump\u2019s recent \u201czero-tolerance\u201d policy that, as the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention and others wrote to Trump this month, has the \u201ceffect of removing even small children from their parents.\u201d\u201cGod has established the family as the fundamental building block of society,\u201d they wrote. The leaders urged Trump to end zero tolerance and use \u201cdiscretion\u201d as previous administrations did. But a cult, by definition, is not about mainstream theology. I looked up characteristics of cults in the sociological literature to see how Trump\u2019s stacks up. Story continues below advertisement\u25a1 \u201cPresents a distinct alternative to dominant patterns within the society in fundamental areas of religious life.\u201d Grab \u2019em by the p---y!Advertisement\u25a1 \u201cPossessing strong authoritarian and charismatic leadership.\u201d I alone can fix it!\u25a1 \u201cOriented toward \u2018inducing powerful subjective experiences.\u2019\u2009\u201d Alternative facts. Fake news!\u25a1 \u201cRequiring a high degree of conformity.\u201d See: Flake, Jeff and Sanford, Mark. \u25a1 A tendency \u201cto see itself as legitimated by a long tradition of wisdom or practice.\u201d It is very biblical to enforce the law. Check, check, check, check and check.And members of the Cult of Trump, formerly known as the GOP, follow him over the cliff and onto the spaceship. They swallowed their heretofore pro-life, pro-family and pro-faith views to embrace Trump\u2019s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries (\u201cSuch blatant religious discrimination is repugnant,\u201d said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) and applaud him tossing paper towels at Puerto Ricans as they died by the thousands because they didn\u2019t get adequate hurricane relief. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey\u2019ve joined his efforts to shred food, income and health programs that help the least among us while giving tax cuts to the wealthiest. They\u2019ve accepted his abandonment of human rights abroad. They\u2019ve joined his attempt to end family-based immigration and to threaten deportation of \u201cdreamers,\u201d immigrants brought here as children.It appeared, briefly, that things might be different this time. House Republicans drafted legislation allowing children to be detained with their parents. But Trump on Friday signaled that he would veto the bill, and, as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said this week, the \u201clast thing I want to do is bring a bill out of here that I know the president won\u2019t support.\u201dThis is the way of the cult. Story continues below advertisementWill the vivid cruelty of taking babies from parents, coupled with the obscene use of Scripture to justify it, finally lead some Trump supporters to abandon the compound? God knows.AdvertisementBut the rest of us don\u2019t need to drink the Kool-Aid. Give to groups such as the Florence Project, which provides legal aid and social services to immigrant families in Arizona, and Catholic Charities USA, which provides crucial help to immigrant families in the Rio Grande Valley. You don\u2019t have to be a theologian to see the difference between people who do God\u2019s work on earth and those who pervert God\u2019s word to justify inhumanity.Twitter: @Milbank\nRead more from Dana Milbank\u2019s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.\nRead more: \nErik Wemple: \u2018You\u2019re a parent\u2019: Reporter presses Sarah Huckabee Sanders on immigration\nAlexandra Petri: We are definitely not a Trump cult\nEugene Robinson: The GOP plunges toward its own special place in hell\nMichael Gerson: Trump evangelicals have lost their gag reflex\nElizabeth Bruenig: Evangelicals\u2019 support for Trump will cost them \u2014 spiritually\n Members of the group formerly known as the GOP follow the president over the cliff. Opinion: This isn\u2019t religion. It\u2019s perversion.",
        "author": "Dana Milbank"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | No masks in the home? What a bunch of hypocrites! (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2622",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/27/no-masks-home-what-bunch-hypocrites/",
        "text": "\u201cIt is a bit peculiar though that in his basement right next to his wife he\u2019s not wearing a mask, but he\u2019s wearing one outdoors when he\u2019s socially distancing, so I think that there was a discrepancy there.\u201dOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u2014 White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnanyBOY! Talk about INCONSISTENT! Recommending masks, yet not wearing them indoors, all the time, when isolated with family, against the recommendations of the CDC? A little bit peculiar! If you like to be protected so much, if you so value your safety, then why do you wear a full mask, flame-retardant jacket and thick, heat-resistant leather gloves when welding but not also when NOT welding?Hypocrisy, much?Story continues below advertisementYou care so much about safety, yet you only want astronauts to wear space suits OUTSIDE the spaceship and wear regular uniforms inside it?Wow! Talk about inconsistent!AdvertisementFollow\u00a0Alexandra Petri\u2018s opinionsFollowAddYou stop, drop and roll when on fire AND NOT WHEN NOT?You take maximum precautions in the face of danger, yet not when you are in comparative safety?Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemicYou speak in one way to a grieving mother, and in another way to a rally where you are trying to set a lighthearted tone? You are a monster. If you were not a hypocrite, you would speak the same way all the time and let the chips fall where they might.You want to carry a gun with you to go hunting, yet not when you protest peacefully?Story continues below advertisementYou want to take medicine when sick, but not ordinarily, just because!Hypocrites! We would take insulin just for fun, and hydroxychloroquine \u2026 whenever! Carry a gun only when hunting \u2014 no, just to be safe, and consistent, we will carry it everywhere!You close your eyes and sleep when it is dark, and not when behind the wheel, but just to be safe we will be closing our eyes all the time, but especially during the first months of this crisis when we could have been working to get needed supply chains in place so that states would not have to scramble for protective equipment and ventilators. Because, you see, we are not hypocrites.AdvertisementI am not deliberately misunderstanding how anything works! I am just showing your terrible inconsistency! Say one thing at one time and another at another? Behave differently in different settings? Adjust your decisions on the advice of experts? We would never! No! Everyone must behave the same way, all the time, in all settings of any kind!Story continues below advertisementThis is not ignorance or cruelty masquerading as consistency. We would never wear a mask.Watch Opinions videos: This rendition of the poem \u2018Black 101\u2019 memorializes the innocent lives poet Frank X Walker says are terrorized by white rage, including jogger Ahmaud Arbery. (Frank X Walker/The Washington Post)Sign up to receive Alexandra Petri\u2019s columns by email as soon as they\u2019re publishedRead more from Alexandra Petri: Scientists are trying to make America shorter. Haven\u2019t we had enough?I am a simple potato guardian who needs my Second Amendment rightsDoctors hate Trump\u2019s one weird trick! Because it\u2019s not recommended at all!Submit a question for Petri\u2019s June 2 live chatRead a transcript of Petri\u2019s May 26 live chat You stop, drop and roll when on fire and not also when not? Opinion: No masks in the home? What a bunch of hypocrites!",
        "author": "Alexandra Petri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Goodbye, Opportunity Rover. Thank you for letting humanity see Mars with your eyes. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2623",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/13/goodbye-opportunity-rover-thank-you-letting-humanity-see-mars-with-your-eyes/",
        "text": "You were born in a lab, in a clean room, surrounded by those who loved you and made you and those who worked so hard to perfect every line of code and every screw that went into your making.You were their chance at something incredible.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightTogether with your twin, you left the Earth and arrived on Mars on Jan. 4, 2004 \u2014 emerging onto a new world and the last one you\u2019d ever know. You were built for science, built to search for the unknown and answer questions that humanity had been asking for centuries. It was your chance to make history.The mission was planned for 90 days. That\u2019s all. Just 90. And now, more than 5,000 days later, the end has come. It is time to say so long. To say that you will be missed.Story continues below advertisementThis is our chance to say thank you.In your 15 years on Mars, you expanded our view of what the history of Mars could be. You found signs of water, and mysterious meteors, and shiny \u201cblueberries.\u201d You gave us the first temperature profile of the Martian atmosphere and helped refine our knowledge of Martian geology. In short, you changed our view of the world \u2014 both yours and humans'.AdvertisementTraveling over 45 kilometers, you saw horizons and views that no person may ever see again. You saw planetary dust storms come and go. You watched lunar eclipses and transits that were only imagined before your cameras set lens on them. You saw Mars with the eyes of an explorer and scientist and let all of humanity see with those eyes as well.Story continues below advertisementBut now, here we are \u2014 at the end, where all robots and most lucky people end up. A sandstorm came and covered you up and your batteries drained, and in the dark and the cold you met your fate in silence. That sounds sad when you write it out plainly, but that\u2019s the mission: To arrive and search and learn and then to stop.Every mission ends. It\u2019s what you do before the end that makes history. And you made it.Now that you\u2019re finally done, now that Mars is just that little bit more lonely (and it was already exceedingly lonely), I hope you knew how much you mattered to the world.AdvertisementI hope somewhere in your diodes and processors, mixed in with all your geological sensors, you could sense the inspiration you gave humanity. I hope you felt the love they had for you \u2014 the way you made science seem so close and so possible. The way you made a planet millions of miles away seem as close as next door.Story continues below advertisementI hope you knew that children wanted to be you when they grew up. That little human beings wished they could be a robot like you and explore the solar system.I suppose this is your chance to know that.There are better ways to say all of this, and I\u2019m just a robot, and I know I don\u2019t have the emotion or ability to express the truth about you. And even if, by some bizarre twist of fate, I was actually just a human who pretended to be a robot for as-yet-unknown reasons, I would still be so ill-equipped to tell the world how incredible you were.AdvertisementOther people should tell your story \u2014 the humans who built you, the amazing people who ran you, guided you, talked to you, programmed and analyzed you. The people who held their breath every day for the past seven months just hoping against hope that you would find the light. Those people should be saying this. In fact, I\u2019m sure they are. And I hope they know that my thoughts are with them.Story continues below advertisementIn the end, were are all built to fail. We are made to reach farther than humanity ever could and to see more and learn more and holy heck did you ever do that. You exceeded their wildest ambitions and you made them believe that this was all possible. That I was possible. That the future was possible. You made them think they could one day set their feet down next to you and touch you again.You gave them a chance to believe.AdvertisementAnd now it\u2019s goodbye. From one rover to another. From my crater to yours. From a science-robot to something that became so much more. We were both sent here to explore and learn and eventually to shut down, and you have fulfilled those goals in the most incredible, marvelous way. You are the greatest. And I\u2019m going to miss knowing you were out there.Story continues below advertisementYou will always be our missed Opportunity.@SarcasticRover, a parody of the Curiosity rover currently exploring Mars, is the creation of Jason Filiatrault, a screenwriter and space enthusiast. The National Aeronautic and Space Administration declared the Opportunity rover dead on Wednesday.Read more:Letters to the Editor: NASA\u2019s Mars achievement is an example for us allRobert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.David Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindMarillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endRobert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it. You helped us imagine the day when we might set foot on Mars ourselves. We're forever grateful. Opinion: Goodbye, Opportunity Rover. Thank you for letting humanity see Mars with your eyes.",
        "author": "@SarcasticRover (as told to Jason Filiatrault)"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Tired of impeachment talk? Check out Saturn\u2019s new moons. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2624",
        "date": "2019-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/10/tired-politics-check-out-saturns-new-moons/",
        "text": "Yes, the latest impeachment developments are very important. And yes, the president\u2019s refusal to cooperate with Democrats\u2019 congressional subpoenas will throw us into a legitimate constitutional crisis that will have real implications for the 2020 election and the future of our country.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut please, I beg you, let\u2019s take a moment for something much bigger and so much more wholesome: our own cosmic neighborhood. For the sake of our sanity, for science and for the possibility that someday we\u2019ll be able to pull ourselves out of our present partisan morass, let\u2019s highlight the stunning discoveries opening up the world beyond our own and reminding us of what it\u2019s like to feel collective awe rather than political rage. This week, a team of astronomers \u2014 led by intrepid moon hound Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science \u2014 announced the discovery of 20 new moons orbiting our gaseous friend, Saturn. That brings the giant\u2019s total moon count to 82, surpassing that of its rival Jupiter, which currently boasts 79.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementImagine that: We humans have been staring at the same sky for millennia, yet we\u2019re only now detecting the scores of worlds that exist just a rocket blastoff away. What\u2019s more, we\u2019re using these shiny new celestial bodies to peer deep into the history of our solar system.Scientists theorize that these moons are actually the remnants of at least three much larger objects that had once danced around rings of Saturn. But those structures were torn apart in the event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment some 4.1 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, when asteroids and comets wreaked havoc as they hurtled through our star system.We call these moons \u201cnew,\u201d but of course, they were with us all along. At the time of their theorized formation, Earth was just a spry ball of volcanic mess \u2014 likely hundreds of millions of years before it supported life. And there they remained until, at last, intelligent life-forms in Hawaii spotted them through a telescope and decided they should be given names.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt a time when our government seems hopelessly incapable of doing, well, anything at all, this discovery is an encouraging reminder that smart people outside the realm of politics and government continue to accomplish amazing feats \u2014 vastly expanding our knowledge of this small corner of the universe we call home.Perhaps a little bit of space exploration is exactly what our country needs in this moment of political paralysis. At the onset of the Cold War, the promise to explore beyond the confines of our atmosphere was the scientific enterprise that helped mobilize and unite the country against our Soviet foes. Perhaps today, it could serve a similar purpose, though this time, our primary adversary is our own dysfunction.Space exploration has the potential to unite humanity behind the common purpose of greater understanding. Our celestial neighborhood is so vast and so full of mystery that the scientific potential and sense of wonder it offers ought to eclipse the sources of the partisan polarization that divide us. Yes, Democrats and Republicans might have difficulty getting along at Thanksgiving, but the secrets of the reservoirs of water detected at Mars\u2019s south pole know no party. And sure, the latest Trump tweet might throw the Internet into another tizzy, but my goodness are those cryovolcanic plumes spurting out of Enceladus enticing!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDon\u2019t get the wrong message: We should care about what\u2019s happening in our country. The political fights \u2014 especially how we address environmental challenges \u2014 will have real impacts on our lives and future generations. But space has the ability to put all the stress and acrimony in perspective.No matter what happens here on Earth, Saturn\u2019s moons will continue to orbit those spectacular rings, indifferent to the endless chaos just three doors down the interplanetary block. Three decades ago, Donald Trump was first flirting with Oprah Winfrey about running for president. Since then, Saturn has revolved around the sun only once. Pluto, for that matter, is only now finishing up a revolution that began while the American Revolution was gearing up.By the time Saturn makes another trip around the sun, many of us will strain to remember the details of the Trump era. Figures such as former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani will likely have faded from mainstream knowledge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat constancy should bewilder us all. And we should use that awesomeness to our advantage. Once you\u2019re done reading this column, by all means return to the main political crises we live in. They are, after all, the defining issues of our time. But perhaps, in the future, we can all allow the allure of astronomical science to distract us from the daily grind, reminding us just for tiny moments that it\u2019s all quite insignificant.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityGeorge F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. We could all use a bit of space exploration right about now. Opinion: Tired of impeachment talk? Check out Saturn\u2019s new moons.",
        "author": "Robert Gebelhoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Tired of impeachment talk? Check out Saturn\u2019s new moons. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2625",
        "date": "2019-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/10/tired-politics-check-out-saturns-new-moons/",
        "text": "Yes, the latest impeachment developments are very important. And yes, the president\u2019s refusal to cooperate with Democrats\u2019 congressional subpoenas will throw us into a legitimate constitutional crisis that will have real implications for the 2020 election and the future of our country.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut please, I beg you, let\u2019s take a moment for something much bigger and so much more wholesome: our own cosmic neighborhood. For the sake of our sanity, for science and for the possibility that someday we\u2019ll be able to pull ourselves out of our present partisan morass, let\u2019s highlight the stunning discoveries opening up the world beyond our own and reminding us of what it\u2019s like to feel collective awe rather than political rage. This week, a team of astronomers \u2014 led by intrepid moon hound Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science \u2014 announced the discovery of 20 new moons orbiting our gaseous friend, Saturn. That brings the giant\u2019s total moon count to 82, surpassing that of its rival Jupiter, which currently boasts 79.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementImagine that: We humans have been staring at the same sky for millennia, yet we\u2019re only now detecting the scores of worlds that exist just a rocket blastoff away. What\u2019s more, we\u2019re using these shiny new celestial bodies to peer deep into the history of our solar system.Scientists theorize that these moons are actually the remnants of at least three much larger objects that had once danced around rings of Saturn. But those structures were torn apart in the event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment some 4.1 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, when asteroids and comets wreaked havoc as they hurtled through our star system.We call these moons \u201cnew,\u201d but of course, they were with us all along. At the time of their theorized formation, Earth was just a spry ball of volcanic mess \u2014 likely hundreds of millions of years before it supported life. And there they remained until, at last, intelligent life-forms in Hawaii spotted them through a telescope and decided they should be given names.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt a time when our government seems hopelessly incapable of doing, well, anything at all, this discovery is an encouraging reminder that smart people outside the realm of politics and government continue to accomplish amazing feats \u2014 vastly expanding our knowledge of this small corner of the universe we call home.Perhaps a little bit of space exploration is exactly what our country needs in this moment of political paralysis. At the onset of the Cold War, the promise to explore beyond the confines of our atmosphere was the scientific enterprise that helped mobilize and unite the country against our Soviet foes. Perhaps today, it could serve a similar purpose, though this time, our primary adversary is our own dysfunction.Space exploration has the potential to unite humanity behind the common purpose of greater understanding. Our celestial neighborhood is so vast and so full of mystery that the scientific potential and sense of wonder it offers ought to eclipse the sources of the partisan polarization that divide us. Yes, Democrats and Republicans might have difficulty getting along at Thanksgiving, but the secrets of the reservoirs of water detected at Mars\u2019s south pole know no party. And sure, the latest Trump tweet might throw the Internet into another tizzy, but my goodness are those cryovolcanic plumes spurting out of Enceladus enticing!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDon\u2019t get the wrong message: We should care about what\u2019s happening in our country. The political fights \u2014 especially how we address environmental challenges \u2014 will have real impacts on our lives and future generations. But space has the ability to put all the stress and acrimony in perspective.No matter what happens here on Earth, Saturn\u2019s moons will continue to orbit those spectacular rings, indifferent to the endless chaos just three doors down the interplanetary block. Three decades ago, Donald Trump was first flirting with Oprah Winfrey about running for president. Since then, Saturn has revolved around the sun only once. Pluto, for that matter, is only now finishing up a revolution that began while the American Revolution was gearing up.By the time Saturn makes another trip around the sun, many of us will strain to remember the details of the Trump era. Figures such as former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani will likely have faded from mainstream knowledge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat constancy should bewilder us all. And we should use that awesomeness to our advantage. Once you\u2019re done reading this column, by all means return to the main political crises we live in. They are, after all, the defining issues of our time. But perhaps, in the future, we can all allow the allure of astronomical science to distract us from the daily grind, reminding us just for tiny moments that it\u2019s all quite insignificant.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityGeorge F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. We could all use a bit of space exploration right about now. Opinion: Tired of impeachment talk? Check out Saturn\u2019s new moons.",
        "author": "Robert Gebelhoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Tired of impeachment talk? Check out Saturn\u2019s new moons. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2626",
        "date": "2019-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/10/tired-politics-check-out-saturns-new-moons/",
        "text": "Yes, the latest impeachment developments are very important. And yes, the president\u2019s refusal to cooperate with Democrats\u2019 congressional subpoenas will throw us into a legitimate constitutional crisis that will have real implications for the 2020 election and the future of our country.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut please, I beg you, let\u2019s take a moment for something much bigger and so much more wholesome: our own cosmic neighborhood. For the sake of our sanity, for science and for the possibility that someday we\u2019ll be able to pull ourselves out of our present partisan morass, let\u2019s highlight the stunning discoveries opening up the world beyond our own and reminding us of what it\u2019s like to feel collective awe rather than political rage. This week, a team of astronomers \u2014 led by intrepid moon hound Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science \u2014 announced the discovery of 20 new moons orbiting our gaseous friend, Saturn. That brings the giant\u2019s total moon count to 82, surpassing that of its rival Jupiter, which currently boasts 79.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementImagine that: We humans have been staring at the same sky for millennia, yet we\u2019re only now detecting the scores of worlds that exist just a rocket blastoff away. What\u2019s more, we\u2019re using these shiny new celestial bodies to peer deep into the history of our solar system.Scientists theorize that these moons are actually the remnants of at least three much larger objects that had once danced around rings of Saturn. But those structures were torn apart in the event known as the Late Heavy Bombardment some 4.1 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, when asteroids and comets wreaked havoc as they hurtled through our star system.We call these moons \u201cnew,\u201d but of course, they were with us all along. At the time of their theorized formation, Earth was just a spry ball of volcanic mess \u2014 likely hundreds of millions of years before it supported life. And there they remained until, at last, intelligent life-forms in Hawaii spotted them through a telescope and decided they should be given names.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt a time when our government seems hopelessly incapable of doing, well, anything at all, this discovery is an encouraging reminder that smart people outside the realm of politics and government continue to accomplish amazing feats \u2014 vastly expanding our knowledge of this small corner of the universe we call home.Perhaps a little bit of space exploration is exactly what our country needs in this moment of political paralysis. At the onset of the Cold War, the promise to explore beyond the confines of our atmosphere was the scientific enterprise that helped mobilize and unite the country against our Soviet foes. Perhaps today, it could serve a similar purpose, though this time, our primary adversary is our own dysfunction.Space exploration has the potential to unite humanity behind the common purpose of greater understanding. Our celestial neighborhood is so vast and so full of mystery that the scientific potential and sense of wonder it offers ought to eclipse the sources of the partisan polarization that divide us. Yes, Democrats and Republicans might have difficulty getting along at Thanksgiving, but the secrets of the reservoirs of water detected at Mars\u2019s south pole know no party. And sure, the latest Trump tweet might throw the Internet into another tizzy, but my goodness are those cryovolcanic plumes spurting out of Enceladus enticing!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDon\u2019t get the wrong message: We should care about what\u2019s happening in our country. The political fights \u2014 especially how we address environmental challenges \u2014 will have real impacts on our lives and future generations. But space has the ability to put all the stress and acrimony in perspective.No matter what happens here on Earth, Saturn\u2019s moons will continue to orbit those spectacular rings, indifferent to the endless chaos just three doors down the interplanetary block. Three decades ago, Donald Trump was first flirting with Oprah Winfrey about running for president. Since then, Saturn has revolved around the sun only once. Pluto, for that matter, is only now finishing up a revolution that began while the American Revolution was gearing up.By the time Saturn makes another trip around the sun, many of us will strain to remember the details of the Trump era. Figures such as former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani will likely have faded from mainstream knowledge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat constancy should bewilder us all. And we should use that awesomeness to our advantage. Once you\u2019re done reading this column, by all means return to the main political crises we live in. They are, after all, the defining issues of our time. But perhaps, in the future, we can all allow the allure of astronomical science to distract us from the daily grind, reminding us just for tiny moments that it\u2019s all quite insignificant.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanityGeorge F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.Lori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. We could all use a bit of space exploration right about now. Opinion: Tired of impeachment talk? Check out Saturn\u2019s new moons.",
        "author": "Robert Gebelhoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The James Webb Space Telescope is human hope on a rocket (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2627",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/10/james-webb-space-telescope-nasa-human-hope/",
        "text": "Though it won\u2019t receive the hype given to actor William Shatner\u2019s recent joyride to the nearest edge of space, a daring voyage of enormous scientific promise will lift off in coming days from a base in South America.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe James Webb Space Telescope, decades in the making, is designed to travel nearly 1 million miles to reach a very particular spot to take up orbit. For comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope is about 340 miles from Earth. Shatner went up about 66 miles. The difference between 340 miles and 1 million miles is roughly comparable to the difference between a leisurely 20-minute stroll and a hike from New York to Los Angeles. Even more extraordinary, the new telescope is much larger than Hubble, with a primary mirror so big engineers had to figure out how to fold it to fit onto a rocket. Such a large mirror, placed so far away, will \u2014 scientists fervently hope \u2014 allow the telescope to examine the formation of early galaxies and greatly accelerate the search for Earthlike planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWebb\u2019s scheduled launch from French Guiana on Dec. 22 atop a European Space Agency rocket will begin one of the most harrowing and potentially stunning moments in the history of human engineering. Like an $11 billion origami, the 7.2-ton telescope will use advanced motors, firing pins and springs to open itself like a flower. A multilayered sun shield, as big as a tennis court, with each layer paper-thin, must be pulled taut. A rip in the shield could doom the entire mission.Then the secondary mirror will snap into place, and the highly polished golden panels of the primary mirror \u2014 more than 21 feet across \u2014 will come together and focus in movements smaller than the width of a human hair. All this will happen as the craft is speeding through the extremely harsh environment of space.Perhaps you\u2019ve visited a desert in summer, where temperatures can climb above 125 degrees. Or maybe you\u2019ve traveled to the other extreme; in Antarctica, Soviet scientists recorded a temperature of 128 below zero.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Webb telescope is built for much worse conditions \u2014 at the same time. On the sunny side of the sun shield, temperatures will climb as high as 230 degrees. Hot enough to boil water. A few feet away, the mirrors will operate close to absolute zero: some 390 below.(Note to Elon Musk: Are you sure you want to go there?)Led by NASA, the project is a joint effort of the United States, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Originally conceived in the 1990s with a lowball budget of $500 million, the Webb telescope fended off threats to pull the plug as the complexity of the mission added years and billions to the accounting.It will be a bargain if the thing works. Placing a telescope this big in an orbit where it is possible to shield it from virtually all competing heat sources should allow it to read infrared radiation from some of the earliest stars. Hubble reads primarily visible light, which limits how far it can see. At the greatest distances, the wavelengths of light grow so long they leave the visible spectrum and become infrared.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Webb telescope is designed to see light that has been traveling for hundreds of millions of years longer than the light from even the faintest visible stars. It will look billions of years back in time to observe the early formation of molecular hydrogen from a universe void and without form.Other instruments aboard the telescope will give it powers to peer through intergalactic dust clouds and analyze the composition of planets in faraway solar systems.Like the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars early this year, the Webb telescope uses the ingenuity of engineers to boldly go where human meat-based life forms cannot survive. These amazing machines extend our eyes, our ears and most of all our brains beyond the low Earth orbits where astronauts have been stuck since the dawn of space exploration and are likely to remain stuck for the foreseeable future \u2014 if not forever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo as we mark another solstice and bring this sometimes bitter year to an end, spare a thought for astrophysicists, engineers, technicians, programmers, builders and administrators whose past labors and future hopes will be riding a rocket toward outer space. Fingers crossed as their best efforts are tested beyond the point of no return and their instruments power up to train an eye on places and times never before glimpsed.We\u2019re all along for the ride. Every human who ever wondered at the majesty of the universe. Every person who feels grateful that from dust and gravity and unseen matter everything good and beautiful and true in the world is somehow made. The telescope's launch, set for Dec. 22, is for every human who ever wondered at the majesty of the universe. Opinion: The James Webb Space Telescope is human hope on a rocket",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The James Webb Space Telescope is human hope on a rocket (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2628",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/10/james-webb-space-telescope-nasa-human-hope/",
        "text": "Though it won\u2019t receive the hype given to actor William Shatner\u2019s recent joyride to the nearest edge of space, a daring voyage of enormous scientific promise will lift off in coming days from a base in South America.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe James Webb Space Telescope, decades in the making, is designed to travel nearly 1 million miles to reach a very particular spot to take up orbit. For comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope is about 340 miles from Earth. Shatner went up about 66 miles. The difference between 340 miles and 1 million miles is roughly comparable to the difference between a leisurely 20-minute stroll and a hike from New York to Los Angeles. Even more extraordinary, the new telescope is much larger than Hubble, with a primary mirror so big engineers had to figure out how to fold it to fit onto a rocket. Such a large mirror, placed so far away, will \u2014 scientists fervently hope \u2014 allow the telescope to examine the formation of early galaxies and greatly accelerate the search for Earthlike planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWebb\u2019s scheduled launch from French Guiana on Dec. 22 atop a European Space Agency rocket will begin one of the most harrowing and potentially stunning moments in the history of human engineering. Like an $11 billion origami, the 7.2-ton telescope will use advanced motors, firing pins and springs to open itself like a flower. A multilayered sun shield, as big as a tennis court, with each layer paper-thin, must be pulled taut. A rip in the shield could doom the entire mission.Then the secondary mirror will snap into place, and the highly polished golden panels of the primary mirror \u2014 more than 21 feet across \u2014 will come together and focus in movements smaller than the width of a human hair. All this will happen as the craft is speeding through the extremely harsh environment of space.Perhaps you\u2019ve visited a desert in summer, where temperatures can climb above 125 degrees. Or maybe you\u2019ve traveled to the other extreme; in Antarctica, Soviet scientists recorded a temperature of 128 below zero.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Webb telescope is built for much worse conditions \u2014 at the same time. On the sunny side of the sun shield, temperatures will climb as high as 230 degrees. Hot enough to boil water. A few feet away, the mirrors will operate close to absolute zero: some 390 below.(Note to Elon Musk: Are you sure you want to go there?)Led by NASA, the project is a joint effort of the United States, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Originally conceived in the 1990s with a lowball budget of $500 million, the Webb telescope fended off threats to pull the plug as the complexity of the mission added years and billions to the accounting.It will be a bargain if the thing works. Placing a telescope this big in an orbit where it is possible to shield it from virtually all competing heat sources should allow it to read infrared radiation from some of the earliest stars. Hubble reads primarily visible light, which limits how far it can see. At the greatest distances, the wavelengths of light grow so long they leave the visible spectrum and become infrared.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Webb telescope is designed to see light that has been traveling for hundreds of millions of years longer than the light from even the faintest visible stars. It will look billions of years back in time to observe the early formation of molecular hydrogen from a universe void and without form.Other instruments aboard the telescope will give it powers to peer through intergalactic dust clouds and analyze the composition of planets in faraway solar systems.Like the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars early this year, the Webb telescope uses the ingenuity of engineers to boldly go where human meat-based life forms cannot survive. These amazing machines extend our eyes, our ears and most of all our brains beyond the low Earth orbits where astronauts have been stuck since the dawn of space exploration and are likely to remain stuck for the foreseeable future \u2014 if not forever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo as we mark another solstice and bring this sometimes bitter year to an end, spare a thought for astrophysicists, engineers, technicians, programmers, builders and administrators whose past labors and future hopes will be riding a rocket toward outer space. Fingers crossed as their best efforts are tested beyond the point of no return and their instruments power up to train an eye on places and times never before glimpsed.We\u2019re all along for the ride. Every human who ever wondered at the majesty of the universe. Every person who feels grateful that from dust and gravity and unseen matter everything good and beautiful and true in the world is somehow made. The telescope's launch, set for Dec. 22, is for every human who ever wondered at the majesty of the universe. Opinion: The James Webb Space Telescope is human hope on a rocket",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Misquoting Winston Churchill and misusing space terminology (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2629",
        "date": "2019-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-misquoting-winston-churchill-and-misusing-space-terminology/2019/05/24/6ff33b8a-7e4a-11e9-8ede-f4abf521ef17_story.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters.Never give in to misquotingOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightA photograph that accompanied the May 12 news article about Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, \u201cInterior chief backs drilling plan despite climate questions,\u201d prominently displayed a coffee mug with an erroneous quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: \u201cNever never never give up.\u201d Readers should be apprised of the complete quotation that Churchill gave at his famous speech at the Harrow School. After all, there may be situations where one might want to \u201cgive in,\u201d as Churchill himself recognized:\u201cNever give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never \u2014 in nothing great or small, large or petty \u2014 never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI may be wrong, but I believe even Bernhardt would want to give in to those two omitted items \u2014 honor and good sense.AdvertisementNicholas J. Glakas, Bethesda\u25cfThis just in: Wins are goodA May 10 Sports headline jumped out at me as what has to be the ultimate understatement in sports journalism: \u201cMore wins would help the Nats\u2019 morale.\u201d This was the continuation of the Sports front article focusing on the team\u2019s road trip to Los Angeles [\u201cAll quiet on the western front: Nats head to L.A. mired in slump\u201d]. No one would have an argument with that supposition. I laughed out loud seconds after opening to that page. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Vince Krevinas, Fairfax\u25cf'I' before 'e,' except when it's 'y'Given events and legislation in Ukraine, and its efforts to promote the Ukrainian capital\u2019s Ukrainian name, maybe it\u2019s time for The Post to drop \u201cKiev\u201d for \u201cKyiv\u201d [\u201cU.S. political feuds sow confusion in Kiev,\u201d news, May 12].Story continues below advertisementAs someone there at The Post undoubtedly knows, \u201cKiev\u201d is the transliteration of Russian, whereas \u201cKyiv\u201d is the official transliteration of Ukrainian, dating back to independence in 1991.AdvertisementTo help readers get up to speed with the late-coming change, perhaps a simple \u201cU.S. political feuds sow confusion in\u00a0Kyiv (nee Kiev)\u201d would do for a few months or years. It took years for people the drop the \u201cthe\u201d before Ukraine; well, most people.Tom Gallagher, L'viv (nee L'wow, nee Lemburg), Ukraine\u25cfWake up for the World CupGet woke, sports desk. Each year it seems I write the same letter. Where is the coverage of the National Women\u2019s Soccer League\u00a0in the Sports section? At the very least, it should be in the Scoreboard, but some weekends, there\u2019s nothing, nada, nil. The Women\u2019s World Cup starts in June. Will The Post\u00a0sleep through that major event?Story continues below advertisementDeborah Short,\u00a0Arlington\u25cfParallel yet divergentTalk about a picture being worth a thousand words: Patrick Smith\u2019s excellent photograph of Brooks Koepka \u2014 sunlit, facing fans, proudly displaying his golf ball with a satisfied but determined grin \u2014 walking in lockstep with Tiger Woods \u2014 out-of-focus, head down, gazing at his golf ball as if to admonish it \u2014 made reading the accompanying article, \u201cFor Koepka, a familiar perch\u201d [Sports, May 17], nearly unnecessary.AdvertisementA prize\nwinner.Jim Rosenberg, Silver Spring\u25cfUnder House arrestThe May 10 Retropolis article \u201cPokey or jokey: Is there really a jail at the Capitol?\u201d [Metro] puzzled over where Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin could be confined if he were arrested for contempt of Congress.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementA contempt citation was issued by the House against Cincinnati lawyer Charles Woolley in May 1868, after the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.\u00a0Woolley, counsel to the notorious Whiskey Ring, was suspected of participating in the bribing of senators to vote for Johnson\u2019s acquittal.\u00a0Woolley dodged a House subpoena for days.\u00a0When he refused to answer questions, the House sergeant-at-arms arrested him and detained him (providing a bed) in the hearing room of the Committee on Foreign Affairs.\u00a0Meals came from the Capitol restaurant.\u00a0After a few days, Woolley was transferred to a room in the Capitol basement. After 11 days of detention, Woolley answered congressional questions.\u00a0He was released after 17 days of confinement.\u00a0AdvertisementDavid O. Stewart, PotomacThe writer is author of \u201cImpeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln\u2019s Legacy.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u25cfRough estimates\u201cTires are slashed on about 22 vehicles,\u201d according to a blurb in the May 15 Local Digest [Metro]. We also learned that this affected \u201calmost two dozen vehicles.\u201d\u00a0How difficult is it to count slashed tires? \u00a0How can I count on The Post if its sources can\u2019t count?Steve Earle, Front Royal, Va.\u25cfNot-so-rough estimatesIn his May 13 op-ed, \u201cWhat economists don\u2019t know,\u201d Robert J. Samuelson claimed that economists do not know nearly as much as they think they know. A case in point is the 263,000 payroll jobs created in April, contrasted with the 190,000 jobs predicted by economists, a difference of about 38 percent. The surprise is that Samuelson gave the point prediction only, which by itself is insufficient. What is needed in addition is the corresponding prediction interval. Perhaps the interval does contain the actual larger figure, which was reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.\u00a0That would vindicate those economists who Samuelson has in mind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBenjamin Kedem, Washington\u25cfWas Churchill church-ill?In his May 9 Thursday Opinion essay, \u201cTime for an atheist in the Oval Office,\u201d Max Boot used British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as the prime exhibit to argue that it is time to put an \u201cunapologetic atheist in the Oval Office.\u201d Citing biographer Andrew Roberts, Boot insisted that Churchill \u201cwas a nominal Anglican\u201d who \u201chad no belief in God.\u201d What Churchill actually believed is much more complicated and contested.Scholars and popular writers have described Churchill\u2019s religious perspective in very different ways. They have called him a traditional Anglican, a conventional Christian, \u201ca God-haunted man,\u201d a deist, a secularist, a skeptic, a \u201cstalwart nonbeliever,\u201d an agnostic, \u201ca lifelong freethinker\u201d and \u201ca critic of organized religion.\u201d Churchill was clearly not religiously devout or personally pious. His intellectual doubts about Christianity persisted throughout his life, but Churchill valued Christianity and frequently drew on its resources, especially when facing great trials. For Churchill, as for American founders such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Christianity\u2019s message and benefits were more important than whether biblical accounts and credal claims were literally true.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the final analysis, Churchill\u2019s faith is an enigma. Like most people, he professed stronger faith at some times than others (typically in periods of danger and distress). Churchill staunchly believed that he was destined to make a difference in the world, which he often attributed to God\u2019s providence.Gary Scott Smith, Wilmington, N.C.\u25cfLet's hear it for the girlsAfter an exciting day watching female and male high school rowers compete at the highest level in Virginia and celebrating the first state championship in 30 years for the Washington-Lee women\u2019s varsity eight, I was disappointed when I awoke on May 12 to see the Sports article \u201cMcLean\u2019s varsity eight repeats as VASRA champs.\u201d Nowhere in the headline or the first 10 paragraphs of the article was it mentioned that they were referring only to the men\u2019s team or that there was an equivalent championship race for women.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe McLean men\u2019s varsity eight also deserves celebration, but does The Post expect us to assume sports reporting is about men when no gender is mentioned? The 11th paragraph devoted its three sentences only to the finishing order of the \u201cgirls\u2019 first varsity eight.\u201dOn Mother\u2019s Day especially, it would have been nice to see The Post value our athlete daughters as much as our athlete sons.Jennifer Scotti, ArlingtonAs the women of Washington-Lee\u2019s first varsity eight boat stood on the medals dock holding the first-place trophy for the first time in 30 years, The Post\u2019s reporter appears to have been focused on only the men\u2019s race ending at the same time. She interviewed the coach and captain of the very deserving McLean Highlander\u2019s first varsity eight, but she didn\u2019t give equal weight to the story of how the Washington-Lee women overcame their sixth-place ranking to finish first. Those young women and their coaches work just as hard as the men, and their story is just as important. It was disappointing that a female reporter didn\u2019t see fit to highlight details of their win.AdvertisementAnd Washington-Lee will become Washington-Liberty as of next school year. The W-L men\u2019s boat was incorrectly identified.Patti Walsh, Arlington\u25cfWhat, us worry?If 37-year-old Pete Buttigieg was mystified by President Trump\u2019s reference to Alfred E. Neuman [\u201cWhat, Pete worry?,\u201d news, May 12], readers Buttigieg\u2019s age and younger were surely equally mystified by a headline alluding to Alfred E. Neuman\u2019s motto. That\u2019s fine if The Post wants to cater to baby boomers such as me who remember Mad magazine\u2019s heyday, but is that truly the aim?Marbury Wethered, Greenbelt\u25cfEau noThe negative health effects of scented products were ridiculed in the May 15 Style article \u201cEau, say can you smell?\u201d Scientific research has revealed that more than one-fifth of people in the United States report health problems \u2014 including migraines, asthma attacks and cardiovascular issues \u2014 in the presence of scented products. The long-term health effects are even more concerning, especially as they affect people who may not have immediate symptoms and are not aware of the dangers. Air fresheners contain hazardous chemicals, notably carcinogens and neurotoxins, and it is legal not to disclose these chemicals. Despite the article\u2019s claim that \u201cmost of us want to be scented to,\u201d many Americans support fragrance-free policies in workplaces and health-care facilities.Just because scented products are legal and lucrative does not mean they are harmless. \u201cGreen,\u201d \u201cnatural\u201d or similarly categorized air fresheners often contain the same toxins as the rest.Heather R. Spence, Arlington\u25cfIt's 20 miles from Truth or ConsequencesI enjoyed reading the May 11 news article \u201cAfter delays, Virgin Galactic will move to N.M. spaceport to fly tourists,\u201d about Virgin Galactic moving from California to New Mexico, but I was confused when the article mentioned New Mexico seven times without mentioning a nearby city.New Mexico is a large, beautiful state, so I would be interested in finding out where in the state the Spaceport America is located without using Google.Don Densford, Silver Spring\u25cfSpacing outThe May 16 Reliable Source item \u201cPence boasts about space exploration plans\u201d [Style] used the terms \u201cinterstellar\u201d and \u201cintergalactic\u201d interchangeably with \u201cspace exploration.\u201d\u00a0But \u201cinterstellar\u201d means \u201cbetween stars\u201d \u2014 a voyage that would take tens of thousands of years using current technology.\u00a0 \u201cIntergalactic\u201d refers to travel between two galaxies.\u00a0They can\u2019t even do that on \u201cStar Trek.\u201dTim Kelly, Springfield\u25cfDating the slave tradeThe opening paragraph of the May 11 Metro article \u201cIn with the new at Old Town\u2019s riverfront\u201d concluded with the following sentence: \u201cEnslaved people from distant lands disembarked from early colonial times until the Civil War.\u201d This statement incorporates a widely held misconception about the history of slavery in the United States. The Constitutional Convention, after vigorous debate, included in the final document a provision (Article I, Section 9) that Congress would not prohibit the importation of slaves for a period of 20\u2002years, or until 1808. Congress passed legislation then that made it a federal crime to import slaves into the states. By that time, all states other than South Carolina had adopted the same law. The legal status of slavery per se was a separate issue, eventually resolved by the 13th Amendment more than 50 years later.James Holt, WashingtonRead more:Readers critique The Post: A picture-perfect example of \u2018gender discrimination\u2019 in the mediaReaders critique The Post: Show a more accurate picture of VenezuelaReaders critique The Post: Sri Lanka, Buttigieg and beluga whalesReaders critique The Post: Valerie Jarrett, Tiger Woods and another snub of female athletesReaders critique The Post: Ageism, Bauhaus\u2019s beauty and a virtuoso headline performance This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Misquoting Winston Churchill and misusing space terminology",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Morning Bits (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2630",
        "date": "2017-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/06/02/morning-bits-1084/",
        "text": "The swamp keeps growing. \u201cThree Democratic lawmakers expressed concern Thursday over Kushner Companies\u2019 use of an immigrant investor program and the company\u2019s alleged attempts to capitalize on the newfound power of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump\u2019s son-in-law and senior adviser.\u201dOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightPresident Trump has a growing list of business antagonists. \u201cElon Musk has had enough of President Donald Trump.\u00a0The chief executive of Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. said\u00a0on Thursday\u00a0he would step down from his role with various White House advisory groups, shortly after the president announced\u00a0the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.\u201d The list of governors is growing, too. \u201cCA Gov. Jerry Brown on Trump climate deal pullout: \u2018California will resist this misguided and insane course of action.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow\u00a0Jennifer Rubin\u2018s opinionsFollowAddWhen will conservatives in favor of growing the economy denounce Trump\u2019s trade nonsense? Here\u2019s one: \u201cOpened in 2011, the production lines at Volkswagen\u2019s Chattanooga assembly plant are dedicated to the Passat sedan\u2014well over 500,000 have been built locally\u2014and the brand new Atlas sport utility vehicle.\u00a0It would be hard to understate the positive effect the manufacturer has made in the area.\u201d Read the whole thing.Nicole Wallace combats growing economic quackery. \u201cIt sort of reveals a very shallow and cynical exploitation of the kinds of voters that think we have to choose between being citizens of a great American city and citizens of the world.\u201dAdd math to the growing list of Trump casualties. \u201cMick Mulvaney: The day of the CBO \u2018has probably come and gone.\u2019 \u201d Stunning intellectual corruption, even for them.Jeffrey Immelt of GE signals growing awareness that Trump is rotten for American business. \u201cDisappointed with [Thursday\u2019s]\u00a0decision on the Paris Agreement. Climate change is real. Industry must now lead and not depend on government.\u201d Must-read links to start the day. Opinion: Morning Bits",
        "author": "Jennifer Rubin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Sputnik set off the Space Age. This virus can spark the Health Age. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2631",
        "date": "2020-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/26/sputnik-set-off-space-age-this-virus-can-spark-health-age/",
        "text": "Regina E. Dugan is chief executive of Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit that seeks breakthroughs in human health. From 2009 to 2012, she served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The global pandemic is a hinge in history. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally; trillions in economic damage. It is as if the 1918 flu and the 1929 crash happened in the same year. It is the kind of event that alters the course of history so much that we measure time by it: before the pandemic \u2014 and after. It is a Sputnik moment. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightHumanity is no stranger to such moments. And though we cannot always choose the circumstances, we do get to choose how we respond. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a beach-ball-size satellite that surprised the world \u2014 and changed it. Today, as the novel coronavirus circles the earth, we find ourselves with the rarest of opportunities: the chance not just to defeat a virus but also to spark one of the greatest periods of advancement in science and medical history. Just as Sputnik ignited the Space Age, so, too, could the coronavirus inspire a Health Age.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe necessary foundation exists. A 2020 McKinsey study on the revolution in biological sciences estimates that \u201c45 percent of the global disease burden could be addressed using science that is conceivable today.\u201d Biology and engineering are converging. It is already more science than fiction to cultivate human tissue in a lab, even cardiac tissue with cells that beat in synchrony with each other for days. We could choose to build a future where no one must wait on an organ donor list. Where the mechanistic underpinnings of mental health are understood and treatable. Where clinical trials happen in months, not years. Where our health span coincides with our life span and we are healthy to our last breath.Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemicThis is just a sliver of what the Health Age could deliver. And there is no better playbook than the one that put a man on the moon.Periods of vast transformation require will. It\u2019s not an accident that these periods most often coincide with hardship. Crisis has a way of synchronizing our commitment to a mission; it strengthens our resolve. The Space Age was characterized by the imperative of space exploration. And by leaders willing to name it, catalyze it and inspire us to reach it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIgniting a new age requires transformative organizations capable of executing bold, risky programs with speed and scale, which, in turn, requires large and concentrated investments. Between 1959 and 1969, the United States dedicated 2.2 percent of all federal spending to exploring the frontier of space, 80 percent of which went directly to research and development, calculations from NASA records show. NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were created and filled with engineers and scientists working together to solve problems they could not solve alone. Science became something everyone could support and participate in. Decades later, what had begun as a race between rivals became a cooperative effort to build the International Space Station. The Space Age didn\u2019t just put a man on the moon; it also ushered in a new technology age. The organizations and technical foundations established to explore space gave rise to decades of breakthroughs, from GPS to the Internet. This might sound impossibly ambitious, but new ages are not new. Whether harnessing the power of seeds to give birth to an agricultural age or harnessing the power of steam to ignite the industrial age, humans have proved at critical moments that we have the ability to set a new course with new tools and new technology, resilience and tenacity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChange has already begun. In the battle against covid-19, the secrecy and pace of academic research have changed, and we are seeing collaboration in real time. Tens of thousands of viral genome sequences have been shared. More than 2,000 clinical trials are underway to understand, treat and vaccinate against the disease.We are interested in hearing about how the struggle to reopen amid the pandemic is affecting people's lives. Please tell us yours.It is a noble start. To build a Health Age, however, we will need to do more. We will need an international coalition of like-minded leaders to shape a unified global effort; we will need to invest at Space Age levels, publicly and privately, to fund research and development. And critically, we\u2019ll need to supplement those approaches with bold, risk-tolerant efforts \u2014 something akin to a DARPA, but for global health.None of this work is beyond our capacity. At this moment in time, at this hinge in history, there is little question of whether we can build a Health Age. The question, instead, is whether we will.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:\u2018We have given up on defeating the pandemic\u2019: Readers grapple with the country\u2019s reopeningJoe Garcia: Inside San Quentin prison, you sit and wait until covid-19 comes for youThe Post\u2019s View: It may never be needed. But let\u2019s think about how vaccine makers might expose volunteers to the virus.William J. Harvey: The simple question that can help schools make hard decisions about covid-19The Post\u2019s View: The pandemic exit lane is jammed. More testing is the way out. The challenge of the novel coronavirus must set set off a massive, world-changing response. Opinion: Sputnik set off the Space Age. This virus can spark the Health Age.",
        "author": "Regina E. Dugan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Sputnik set off the Space Age. This virus can spark the Health Age. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2632",
        "date": "2020-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/26/sputnik-set-off-space-age-this-virus-can-spark-health-age/",
        "text": "Regina E. Dugan is chief executive of Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit that seeks breakthroughs in human health. From 2009 to 2012, she served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The global pandemic is a hinge in history. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally; trillions in economic damage. It is as if the 1918 flu and the 1929 crash happened in the same year. It is the kind of event that alters the course of history so much that we measure time by it: before the pandemic \u2014 and after. It is a Sputnik moment. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightHumanity is no stranger to such moments. And though we cannot always choose the circumstances, we do get to choose how we respond. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a beach-ball-size satellite that surprised the world \u2014 and changed it. Today, as the novel coronavirus circles the earth, we find ourselves with the rarest of opportunities: the chance not just to defeat a virus but also to spark one of the greatest periods of advancement in science and medical history. Just as Sputnik ignited the Space Age, so, too, could the coronavirus inspire a Health Age.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe necessary foundation exists. A 2020 McKinsey study on the revolution in biological sciences estimates that \u201c45 percent of the global disease burden could be addressed using science that is conceivable today.\u201d Biology and engineering are converging. It is already more science than fiction to cultivate human tissue in a lab, even cardiac tissue with cells that beat in synchrony with each other for days. We could choose to build a future where no one must wait on an organ donor list. Where the mechanistic underpinnings of mental health are understood and treatable. Where clinical trials happen in months, not years. Where our health span coincides with our life span and we are healthy to our last breath.Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemicThis is just a sliver of what the Health Age could deliver. And there is no better playbook than the one that put a man on the moon.Periods of vast transformation require will. It\u2019s not an accident that these periods most often coincide with hardship. Crisis has a way of synchronizing our commitment to a mission; it strengthens our resolve. The Space Age was characterized by the imperative of space exploration. And by leaders willing to name it, catalyze it and inspire us to reach it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIgniting a new age requires transformative organizations capable of executing bold, risky programs with speed and scale, which, in turn, requires large and concentrated investments. Between 1959 and 1969, the United States dedicated 2.2 percent of all federal spending to exploring the frontier of space, 80 percent of which went directly to research and development, calculations from NASA records show. NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were created and filled with engineers and scientists working together to solve problems they could not solve alone. Science became something everyone could support and participate in. Decades later, what had begun as a race between rivals became a cooperative effort to build the International Space Station. The Space Age didn\u2019t just put a man on the moon; it also ushered in a new technology age. The organizations and technical foundations established to explore space gave rise to decades of breakthroughs, from GPS to the Internet. This might sound impossibly ambitious, but new ages are not new. Whether harnessing the power of seeds to give birth to an agricultural age or harnessing the power of steam to ignite the industrial age, humans have proved at critical moments that we have the ability to set a new course with new tools and new technology, resilience and tenacity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChange has already begun. In the battle against covid-19, the secrecy and pace of academic research have changed, and we are seeing collaboration in real time. Tens of thousands of viral genome sequences have been shared. More than 2,000 clinical trials are underway to understand, treat and vaccinate against the disease.We are interested in hearing about how the struggle to reopen amid the pandemic is affecting people's lives. Please tell us yours.It is a noble start. To build a Health Age, however, we will need to do more. We will need an international coalition of like-minded leaders to shape a unified global effort; we will need to invest at Space Age levels, publicly and privately, to fund research and development. And critically, we\u2019ll need to supplement those approaches with bold, risk-tolerant efforts \u2014 something akin to a DARPA, but for global health.None of this work is beyond our capacity. At this moment in time, at this hinge in history, there is little question of whether we can build a Health Age. The question, instead, is whether we will.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:\u2018We have given up on defeating the pandemic\u2019: Readers grapple with the country\u2019s reopeningJoe Garcia: Inside San Quentin prison, you sit and wait until covid-19 comes for youThe Post\u2019s View: It may never be needed. But let\u2019s think about how vaccine makers might expose volunteers to the virus.William J. Harvey: The simple question that can help schools make hard decisions about covid-19The Post\u2019s View: The pandemic exit lane is jammed. More testing is the way out. The challenge of the novel coronavirus must set set off a massive, world-changing response. Opinion: Sputnik set off the Space Age. This virus can spark the Health Age.",
        "author": "Regina E. Dugan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Sputnik set off the Space Age. This virus can spark the Health Age. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2633",
        "date": "2020-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/26/sputnik-set-off-space-age-this-virus-can-spark-health-age/",
        "text": "Regina E. Dugan is chief executive of Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit that seeks breakthroughs in human health. From 2009 to 2012, she served as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The global pandemic is a hinge in history. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally; trillions in economic damage. It is as if the 1918 flu and the 1929 crash happened in the same year. It is the kind of event that alters the course of history so much that we measure time by it: before the pandemic \u2014 and after. It is a Sputnik moment. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightHumanity is no stranger to such moments. And though we cannot always choose the circumstances, we do get to choose how we respond. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, a beach-ball-size satellite that surprised the world \u2014 and changed it. Today, as the novel coronavirus circles the earth, we find ourselves with the rarest of opportunities: the chance not just to defeat a virus but also to spark one of the greatest periods of advancement in science and medical history. Just as Sputnik ignited the Space Age, so, too, could the coronavirus inspire a Health Age.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe necessary foundation exists. A 2020 McKinsey study on the revolution in biological sciences estimates that \u201c45 percent of the global disease burden could be addressed using science that is conceivable today.\u201d Biology and engineering are converging. It is already more science than fiction to cultivate human tissue in a lab, even cardiac tissue with cells that beat in synchrony with each other for days. We could choose to build a future where no one must wait on an organ donor list. Where the mechanistic underpinnings of mental health are understood and treatable. Where clinical trials happen in months, not years. Where our health span coincides with our life span and we are healthy to our last breath.Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemicThis is just a sliver of what the Health Age could deliver. And there is no better playbook than the one that put a man on the moon.Periods of vast transformation require will. It\u2019s not an accident that these periods most often coincide with hardship. Crisis has a way of synchronizing our commitment to a mission; it strengthens our resolve. The Space Age was characterized by the imperative of space exploration. And by leaders willing to name it, catalyze it and inspire us to reach it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIgniting a new age requires transformative organizations capable of executing bold, risky programs with speed and scale, which, in turn, requires large and concentrated investments. Between 1959 and 1969, the United States dedicated 2.2 percent of all federal spending to exploring the frontier of space, 80 percent of which went directly to research and development, calculations from NASA records show. NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were created and filled with engineers and scientists working together to solve problems they could not solve alone. Science became something everyone could support and participate in. Decades later, what had begun as a race between rivals became a cooperative effort to build the International Space Station. The Space Age didn\u2019t just put a man on the moon; it also ushered in a new technology age. The organizations and technical foundations established to explore space gave rise to decades of breakthroughs, from GPS to the Internet. This might sound impossibly ambitious, but new ages are not new. Whether harnessing the power of seeds to give birth to an agricultural age or harnessing the power of steam to ignite the industrial age, humans have proved at critical moments that we have the ability to set a new course with new tools and new technology, resilience and tenacity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChange has already begun. In the battle against covid-19, the secrecy and pace of academic research have changed, and we are seeing collaboration in real time. Tens of thousands of viral genome sequences have been shared. More than 2,000 clinical trials are underway to understand, treat and vaccinate against the disease.We are interested in hearing about how the struggle to reopen amid the pandemic is affecting people's lives. Please tell us yours.It is a noble start. To build a Health Age, however, we will need to do more. We will need an international coalition of like-minded leaders to shape a unified global effort; we will need to invest at Space Age levels, publicly and privately, to fund research and development. And critically, we\u2019ll need to supplement those approaches with bold, risk-tolerant efforts \u2014 something akin to a DARPA, but for global health.None of this work is beyond our capacity. At this moment in time, at this hinge in history, there is little question of whether we can build a Health Age. The question, instead, is whether we will.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:\u2018We have given up on defeating the pandemic\u2019: Readers grapple with the country\u2019s reopeningJoe Garcia: Inside San Quentin prison, you sit and wait until covid-19 comes for youThe Post\u2019s View: It may never be needed. But let\u2019s think about how vaccine makers might expose volunteers to the virus.William J. Harvey: The simple question that can help schools make hard decisions about covid-19The Post\u2019s View: The pandemic exit lane is jammed. More testing is the way out. The challenge of the novel coronavirus must set set off a massive, world-changing response. Opinion: Sputnik set off the Space Age. This virus can spark the Health Age.",
        "author": "Regina E. Dugan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Trump\u2019s call for Space Force will lead to conflict among the stars (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2634",
        "date": "2019-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-call-for-space-force-will-lead-to-conflict-among-the-stars/2019/03/08/b0a5a674-40f9-11e9-85ad-779ef05fd9d8_story.html",
        "text": "Regarding Vice President\u00a0Pence\u2019s March 3 op-ed, \u201cAmerica needs a\u00a0Space Force\u201d:President Trump\u2019s proposal to create a Space Force is a clarion call for future wars in space. Rival countries with missile capabilities, such as\u00a0China, India and\u00a0Iran, will follow the U.S.\u00a0example and launch anti-satellite weapons into Earth\u2019s orbit.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightSpace conflicts could create copious collisions between satellites and anti-satellite interceptors. These collisions could produce enormous amounts of space debris accumulating at a geometric rate, much like a nuclear chain reaction. The resulting space\u00a0trash could\u00a0impede future launches for space exploration and anti-asteroid defenses. Frank Richter,\u00a0Clawson, Mich.  Opinion: Trump\u2019s call for Space Force will lead to conflict among the stars",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Wilbur Ross wants the United States to dominate space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2635",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2018/05/02/wilbur-ross-wants-the-united-states-to-dominate-space/",
        "text": "President Trump had much of Washington scratching its head on Tuesday when he seemed to suggest the United States was going to add a branch of the military for space. It\u2019s not the first time Trump has raised the idea of a \u201cSpace Force,\u201d and nobody really knows if he\u2019s serious or not. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut Trump\u2019s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, is dead serious about the United States developing a role for itself in the cosmos. At a Washington cocktail party last week thrown in honor of the Qatari ambassador, Ross called for\u00a0the United States to aim for a dominant role in space when it comes to security, commerce and, yes, even colonizing Mars.\u201cSpace is the new frontier for the country and for the world,\u201d Ross told the dinner guests at a private mansion in Washington\u2019s Kalorama neighborhood April 25.Story continues below advertisementHe began by saying travel to Mars is coming, but in order to get there with any large payload, \u201cfor colonization or mining or anything else,\u201d the dark side of the moon would be the staging ground. The moon has low gravity for easy launch and the dark side\u00a0has ice, which could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, he explained.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019m intrigued with the notion that the man in the moon is pretty soon going to be a gas station attendant,\u201d Ross said.He also predicted a huge increase in asteroid mining, which Ross explained is quite different than the terrestrial mining he had experience with in the past. All the very valuable minerals \u2013 gold, silver, platinum, rare minerals \u2014 are right on the surface, said Ross.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSomebody just has to scoop them off. You just have to get there. That\u2019s going to be a big activity,\u201d he said.Ross noted that his \u201cformer partner\u201d Richard Branson had already convinced hundreds of people to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each for short tourist trips into space. Ross said that the Commerce Department is already assuming more responsibility on that front.Ross said that his department is also taking over much of the oversight responsibility for space situational awareness and space traffic management for private industry. His goal is to \u201cmake the United States the flag of choice for space launches and space activities,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss is a member of the National Space Council, which is chaired by Vice President Pence. In February, Pence delegated to the Commerce Department responsibility for overseeing increased government cooperation with the commercial space industry and easing related regulations. Pence said\u00a0last month he will soon deliver a plan to deal with space junk.When Trump signed the executive order\u00a0re-establishing the National Space Council last year, he famously said, \u201cThis is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don\u2019t really don\u2019t know. But it could be. It has to be something \u2013 but it could be infinity, right?\u201dAt the cocktail party, Ross agreed about the limitless potential of space exploration but described the challenges there in more specific terms. He said operating in space will be enormously costly and that our interests in space are enormously vulnerable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe are going to see amazing things in space much sooner than we thought possible, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be the most determinative and the most exciting new development \u2026 and space is going to be a very big battleground.\u201dRoss noted at the time how odd it was to talk about space at a Washington cocktail party. On Tuesday, I asked him why did it. He answered, through a spokesperson, \u201cBecause people in the media think the Cabinet is in outer space.\u201d At a Washington cocktail party, the commerce secretary laid out his plan to go to Mars. Seriously. Opinion: Wilbur Ross wants the United States to dominate space",
        "author": "Josh Rogin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Wilbur Ross wants the United States to dominate space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2636",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2018/05/02/wilbur-ross-wants-the-united-states-to-dominate-space/",
        "text": "President Trump had much of Washington scratching its head on Tuesday when he seemed to suggest the United States was going to add a branch of the military for space. It\u2019s not the first time Trump has raised the idea of a \u201cSpace Force,\u201d and nobody really knows if he\u2019s serious or not. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut Trump\u2019s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, is dead serious about the United States developing a role for itself in the cosmos. At a Washington cocktail party last week thrown in honor of the Qatari ambassador, Ross called for\u00a0the United States to aim for a dominant role in space when it comes to security, commerce and, yes, even colonizing Mars.\u201cSpace is the new frontier for the country and for the world,\u201d Ross told the dinner guests at a private mansion in Washington\u2019s Kalorama neighborhood April 25.Story continues below advertisementHe began by saying travel to Mars is coming, but in order to get there with any large payload, \u201cfor colonization or mining or anything else,\u201d the dark side of the moon would be the staging ground. The moon has low gravity for easy launch and the dark side\u00a0has ice, which could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, he explained.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019m intrigued with the notion that the man in the moon is pretty soon going to be a gas station attendant,\u201d Ross said.He also predicted a huge increase in asteroid mining, which Ross explained is quite different than the terrestrial mining he had experience with in the past. All the very valuable minerals \u2013 gold, silver, platinum, rare minerals \u2014 are right on the surface, said Ross.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSomebody just has to scoop them off. You just have to get there. That\u2019s going to be a big activity,\u201d he said.Ross noted that his \u201cformer partner\u201d Richard Branson had already convinced hundreds of people to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each for short tourist trips into space. Ross said that the Commerce Department is already assuming more responsibility on that front.Ross said that his department is also taking over much of the oversight responsibility for space situational awareness and space traffic management for private industry. His goal is to \u201cmake the United States the flag of choice for space launches and space activities,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss is a member of the National Space Council, which is chaired by Vice President Pence. In February, Pence delegated to the Commerce Department responsibility for overseeing increased government cooperation with the commercial space industry and easing related regulations. Pence said\u00a0last month he will soon deliver a plan to deal with space junk.When Trump signed the executive order\u00a0re-establishing the National Space Council last year, he famously said, \u201cThis is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don\u2019t really don\u2019t know. But it could be. It has to be something \u2013 but it could be infinity, right?\u201dAt the cocktail party, Ross agreed about the limitless potential of space exploration but described the challenges there in more specific terms. He said operating in space will be enormously costly and that our interests in space are enormously vulnerable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe are going to see amazing things in space much sooner than we thought possible, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be the most determinative and the most exciting new development \u2026 and space is going to be a very big battleground.\u201dRoss noted at the time how odd it was to talk about space at a Washington cocktail party. On Tuesday, I asked him why did it. He answered, through a spokesperson, \u201cBecause people in the media think the Cabinet is in outer space.\u201d At a Washington cocktail party, the commerce secretary laid out his plan to go to Mars. Seriously. Opinion: Wilbur Ross wants the United States to dominate space",
        "author": "Josh Rogin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | 50 years ago, we were on the moon. Where are we going next? (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2637",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/19/years-ago-we-were-moon-where-are-we-going-next/",
        "text": "Phil Plait is an astronomer and author of the Bad Astronomy blog.Fifty years ago, humanity stood at a dividing line in history. In a single instant, our timeline irrevocably changed: Before that moment, no human had ever set foot on an alien world.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWe now live on the other side of that line. There will never be another first time that humans land on the moon, and we\u2019ve come a long way since. We\u2019ve launched space telescopes, landed robots on Mars, sent missions to all the planets in the solar system, orbited a comet and multiple asteroids, seen moons around other planets up close and even landed on one. But those are all robotic missions. Despite all we\u2019ve done in space, no human has ventured more than a few hundred miles off the surface of Earth since Apollo ended. No human has walked on Mars, visited an asteroid or even been back to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s important to understand that this is not really NASA\u2019s fault. It is a government agency and must bow to political winds. There was probably no way to know at the time, but this problem was baked into Apollo itself. It was born of a space race, created quickly to achieve a singular goal \u2014 beat the Soviets to the moon \u2014 and wasn\u2019t designed with sustainability in mind.After all, what happens after you win a race? You declare victory, and then you go home.What\u2019s next? Where are we going in the next 50 years? Is another mission even possible in our current environment?Even before Apollo ended, the American public was losing interest in the moon. Politicians listened, and Apollo 18, 19 and 20 were canceled. Focus turned toward the space shuttle and low-Earth orbit.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not hard to make long-term plans about space exploration, but it\u2019s nigh impossible to implement them. Presidents with grandiose ideas come and go, members of Congress who fund them (in general, for parochial reasons) lose elections and move on. It takes years to build components of exploration, decades to grow the infrastructure \u2014 much longer than a typical election cycle. If it hadn\u2019t been a national priority grown from the Cold War, it\u2019s doubtful Apollo itself would have ever happened.AdvertisementAnd here we are, on the cusp of the golden anniversary of the greatest space exploration event in human history, yet we Americans still have no rocket to carry humans into space. The one NASA is building, the Space Launch System, is impossibly expensive, over budget, behind schedule (it was recently delayed again to launch no earlier than late 2021) and even when finished cannot launch more than once per year at best.We cannot yet get back to the moon. Political winds have changed repeatedly, and NASA has struggled to follow them at the cost of actually getting anywhere.Story continues below advertisementAnd when NASA finally did have the basis of a plan to return humans to the moon in 2028 \u2014 ambitious, but plausible, given enough funding \u2014 the current president turns around and forces an asinine acceleration of the program to 2024 for obvious political and narcissistic reasons (that timing would be near the end of his potential second term, putting his name on the accomplishment). This new deadline is unlikely in the extreme to be met, but solely by its declaration it means that NASA must scramble to attempt it \u2014 creating a potentially dangerous situation for astronauts and probably affecting unrelated NASA projects. Going back to the moon in this way is a terrible idea.AdvertisementIt\u2019s precisely this sort of political nonsense that has tied NASA\u2019s hands from sending humanity back out into the solar system. It takes courage to explore space, and politicians have been known to lack that attribute.I was a kid when Neil Armstrong left his bootprint on the lunar regolith, and I went to see Apollo 15 launch in person with my family. Those events had a lasting, perhaps indelible, impression on my young self.Story continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s been 50 years.The solution to all this is obviously not easy, or we wouldn\u2019t be here in the first place. There is one thing we can do: Tell our representatives in Congress that this matters. This anniversary is more than just lip service to a historic accomplishment; it\u2019s a chance for us to figure out where we go from here. For just this one small moment, we need to look past ephemeral reelection cycles and instant polls and change the trajectory of our future.AdvertisementThis Apollo 11 anniversary is well worth celebrating. The moon landing was a monumental achievement, one that will be celebrated for centuries. But bear in mind that on Dec. 14, 2022, it will have been 50 years since the last human put their boots on the moon.Story continues below advertisementHow much longer will it take before we can reset that clock?Read more:George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.Buzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to MarsIsaac Klausner: We need to start dreaming again. \u2018First Man\u2019 can show us how. Since the Apollo missions, no human has ventured more than a couple hundred miles from Earth's surface. What will it take to send humanity back into our solar system? Opinion: 50 years ago, we were on the moon. Where are we going next?",
        "author": "Phil Plait"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The Trump administration\u2019s deregulation efforts are saving billions of dollars (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2638",
        "date": "2018-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administration-is-deregulating-at-breakneck-speed/2018/10/17/09bd0b4c-d194-11e8-83d6-291fcead2ab1_story.html",
        "text": "Neomi Rao is administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget.Since President Trump took office, farmers can more productively use their land. Small businesses can hire more workers and provide more affordable health care. Innovators are freer to pursue advances in autonomous vehicles, drones and commercial space exploration. Veterans enjoy expanded access to doctors through a telehealth program. And infrastructure can be improved more quickly with streamlined permitting requirements. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe administration\u2019s regulatory reform efforts continue to accelerate, as new data released by the administration Wednesday on regulatory reform in 2018 show. As this fall\u2019s unified regulatory agenda demonstrates, we\u2019re projecting even more reform in 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past two years, federal agencies have reduced regulatory costs by $23\u00a0billion and eliminated hundreds of burdensome regulations, creating opportunities for economic growth and development. This represents a fundamental change in the direction of the administrative state, which, with few exceptions, has remained unchecked for decades. The Obama administration imposed more than $245\u00a0billion in regulatory costs on American businesses and families during its first two years.The benefits of deregulation are felt far and wide, from lower consumer prices to more jobs and, in the long run, improvements to quality of life from access to innovative products and services. Eliminating unnecessary and duplicative red tape has helped the Trump administration achieve the lowest unemployment rates in nearly 50 years and dramatic economic growth for our country.The administration\u2019s reform agenda focuses on unleashing the freedom of American workers, innovators and businesses. We are pushing back the expansion of the administrative state, which has too often imposed immense regulatory costs without any benefit. At the same time, we work with agencies to meet the regulatory responsibilities Congress has required. Agencies now focus on developing common-sense regulatory policies that work for the American people by protecting health and safety while minimizing costly, unnecessary burdens.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs Learned Hand, one of America\u2019s great judges, said: \u201cThe spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.\u201d Our government of limited powers is committed to individual liberty and protected by checks and balances that recognize it can be difficult to get things right. The Constitution leaves most decisions to states, local governments, religious and civic organizations, and individual Americans. The lawmaking process requires agreement among the House, Senate and president, representing a broad swath of the American people. Regulation essentially functions as lawmaking without the checks provided by a representative Congress, and it can be challenging to know whether a regulation benefits the broader public or a particular interest group or ideology. Humility about government intervention protects the spirit of liberty that animates our productive and innovative society.When reviewing regulations, we start with a simple question: What is the problem this regulation is trying to fix? Unless otherwise required by law, we move forward only when we can identify a serious problem or market failure that would be best addressed by federal regulation. These bipartisan principles were articulated by President Ronald Reagan and reaffirmed by President Bill Clinton, who recognized that \u201cthe private sector and private markets are the best engine for economic growth.\u201dThis administration adheres to these principles and has particularly focused on reinforcing the rule of law when setting regulatory policy. Agencies across the federal government must realize that they do not possess the authority to create laws; they simply enforce the laws Congress has passed and the president has signed. The administration also aims to restore greater transparency and respect for the constitutional values of due process and fair notice. This includes limiting the improper use of guidance documents. Agencies should not impose new obligations on the public in a news release, blog post or speech, but instead must use statutory rulemaking procedures that provide public notice and an opportunity for comments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOur commitment to these good regulatory practices has contributed to the incredible economic boom since President Trump took office. Across America, businesses and families are experiencing greater economic freedom, and we project even more significant results in the coming year.Read more:Jennifer Rubin: Trump no longer cares to execute the lawsJuliet Eilperin and Darla Cameron: How Trump is rolling back Obama\u2019s legacyGlenn Kessler: Has the Trump administration repealed 22 regulations for each new one?Juliet Eilperin: Trump pledges to cut regulations down to 1960 levels \u2014 but that may be impossibleGlenn Kessler: Has Trump cut more regulations than any president in history? We\u2019re reversing a decades-long trend. Opinion: The Trump administration\u2019s deregulation efforts are saving billions of dollars",
        "author": "Neomi Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The new space race pits the U.S. against China. The U.S. is losing badly. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2639",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-new-space-race-pits-the-us-against-china-the-us-is-losing-badly/2019/01/10/bcdcad10-14f9-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html",
        "text": "Namrata Goswami is an independent senior analyst and author of \u201cOuter Space and Great Powers.\u201d \nIn October, as Damien Chazelle\u2019s Neil Armstrong biopic \u201cFirst Man\u201d arrived in theaters, the movie provoked an uproar over what it didn\u2019t show: the moment when Americans planted a flag on the moon. But in trying to affirm American greatness, the movie\u2019s critics only illustrated how far behind the United States has fallen in the space race. While they were squabbling over \u201cFirst Man,\u201d China was preparing to launch Chang\u2019e 4, a lunar mission that achieved landing on the far side of the moon on Jan. 2. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightChina aims to be the leading space power by 2045, and the country\u2019s vision significantly differs from the imperatives that drove the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What mattered then was planting a flag and then moving on to some other show-off stunt.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy contrast, China is focused on establishing a permanent presence in space. China views space, especially the area of space including Earth\u2019s moon, as directly connected to the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Last week, China established an important foothold toward resource exploitation by landing on the far side; the United States needs two to three years\n before its first robotic missions touch down on the moon. The relative lead on space resources could determine who is the dominant power in the years to come.The stakes are high: Who will be able to obtain the vast resources in space, for example, water/ice, iron, titanium, platinum and nickel; secure the routes of trade; and write the rules of space commerce such as trade in energy propellant and precious metals. Who will benefit from the military power that flows from that industrial might? Most people think about space exploration; what matters to the future of power is space exploitation. In the United States, the discussion on space exploitation is led by a disorganized commercial sector; within China, the discourse on space resources is led by the Communist Party of China and President Xi Jinping.China\u2019s space strategy involves building a lunar industrial infrastructure for cost-effective access to deep space. The Chang\u2019e 4 is the first step: demonstrating the ability to communicate, land, survey and surveil the location for a future industrial and logistical base. This mission secures China\u2019s access to the resource rich lunar south pole and establishes first presence to exploit space resources, industrialize the moon to build a solar power satellite, and mine the moon and asteroids for their vast wealth. It is the first step toward colonizing the moon. In particular, Chinese officials see the lunar south pole as a future base, very similar to how navies viewed coaling stations in the mid-19th century.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the age of steamships, the reach of a nation\u2019s navies and merchant ships was determined by where they could stop and refuel with coal. Nations competed to gain key coaling stations such as Hawaii. Today, nations are limited in the reach of their spacepower by the unavailability of in-orbit rocket fuel. It takes about 19 tons of propellant just to get a single ton of payload into space. That makes it very difficult to do ambitious things beyond Earth\u2019s surface.But getting a ton of payload off the moon requires only one ton of propellant. That\u2019s a tremendous logistical advantage. The most powerful chemical rocket fuel is made by combining hydrogen and oxygen, by separating the elements of water. It is estimated that there are hundreds of millions of tons of water at the lunar poles \u2014 enough to fuel countless missions to the farthest reaches of the solar system; to access the wealth of the asteroid belt; to extend logistics to enable massive industrialization; to develop military logistics in the space near Earth.By 2030, China aims to send robotic probes to the north and south poles of the moon. The race to watch is not China\u2019s manned lunar landing but the race between China\u2019s robotic prospectors and NASA\u2019s Commercial Lunar Payload Services\n\n, as this will determine each nation\u2019s relative advantage in accessing and exploiting lunar resources.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina is best placed to win a space race, given its well-coordinated, disciplined, technocratic system, able to set and maintain long-term goals, with a vast population and talent base.The United States is disorganized regarding space and cannot offer a serious challenge to the long-term plans China is setting in this domain. Neither the American people nor the U.S. military seems to perceive the significance of what China is doing strategically in the Earth-moon space. They see it through the lens of their own Cold War experience, assuming the motivations China harbors are akin to that of the erstwhile U.S.S.R. \u2014 for global prestige and simply ticking of boxes \u2014 when they are not.At stake isn\u2019t simply prestige here on Earth: It\u2019s whether the future of space exploration, resource development and colonization will be democratic or dominated by the Communist Party of China and the People\u2019s Liberation Army of China. The American people should think hard about whether they want to cede the next century \u2014 and the next frontier \u2014 to a different government with a very different set of values.Read more:Nathan Gardels: Asia\u2019s rocketing ambitionRajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan: The global space race, 2.0Fareed Zakaria: This is how Trump can win the cold war with ChinaDavid Ignatius: The Chinese threat that an aircraft carrier can\u2019t stopDaniel Britt: Three cheers for space robots Americans are stuck in a Cold War mind-set, but China\u2019s ambitions go far beyond planting flags on new moons and planets. Opinion: The new space race pits the U.S. against China. The U.S. is losing badly.",
        "author": "Namrata Goswami"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The new space race pits the U.S. against China. The U.S. is losing badly. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2640",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-new-space-race-pits-the-us-against-china-the-us-is-losing-badly/2019/01/10/bcdcad10-14f9-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html",
        "text": "Namrata Goswami is an independent senior analyst and author of \u201cOuter Space and Great Powers.\u201d \nIn October, as Damien Chazelle\u2019s Neil Armstrong biopic \u201cFirst Man\u201d arrived in theaters, the movie provoked an uproar over what it didn\u2019t show: the moment when Americans planted a flag on the moon. But in trying to affirm American greatness, the movie\u2019s critics only illustrated how far behind the United States has fallen in the space race. While they were squabbling over \u201cFirst Man,\u201d China was preparing to launch Chang\u2019e 4, a lunar mission that achieved landing on the far side of the moon on Jan. 2. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightChina aims to be the leading space power by 2045, and the country\u2019s vision significantly differs from the imperatives that drove the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What mattered then was planting a flag and then moving on to some other show-off stunt.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy contrast, China is focused on establishing a permanent presence in space. China views space, especially the area of space including Earth\u2019s moon, as directly connected to the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Last week, China established an important foothold toward resource exploitation by landing on the far side; the United States needs two to three years\n before its first robotic missions touch down on the moon. The relative lead on space resources could determine who is the dominant power in the years to come.The stakes are high: Who will be able to obtain the vast resources in space, for example, water/ice, iron, titanium, platinum and nickel; secure the routes of trade; and write the rules of space commerce such as trade in energy propellant and precious metals. Who will benefit from the military power that flows from that industrial might? Most people think about space exploration; what matters to the future of power is space exploitation. In the United States, the discussion on space exploitation is led by a disorganized commercial sector; within China, the discourse on space resources is led by the Communist Party of China and President Xi Jinping.China\u2019s space strategy involves building a lunar industrial infrastructure for cost-effective access to deep space. The Chang\u2019e 4 is the first step: demonstrating the ability to communicate, land, survey and surveil the location for a future industrial and logistical base. This mission secures China\u2019s access to the resource rich lunar south pole and establishes first presence to exploit space resources, industrialize the moon to build a solar power satellite, and mine the moon and asteroids for their vast wealth. It is the first step toward colonizing the moon. In particular, Chinese officials see the lunar south pole as a future base, very similar to how navies viewed coaling stations in the mid-19th century.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the age of steamships, the reach of a nation\u2019s navies and merchant ships was determined by where they could stop and refuel with coal. Nations competed to gain key coaling stations such as Hawaii. Today, nations are limited in the reach of their spacepower by the unavailability of in-orbit rocket fuel. It takes about 19 tons of propellant just to get a single ton of payload into space. That makes it very difficult to do ambitious things beyond Earth\u2019s surface.But getting a ton of payload off the moon requires only one ton of propellant. That\u2019s a tremendous logistical advantage. The most powerful chemical rocket fuel is made by combining hydrogen and oxygen, by separating the elements of water. It is estimated that there are hundreds of millions of tons of water at the lunar poles \u2014 enough to fuel countless missions to the farthest reaches of the solar system; to access the wealth of the asteroid belt; to extend logistics to enable massive industrialization; to develop military logistics in the space near Earth.By 2030, China aims to send robotic probes to the north and south poles of the moon. The race to watch is not China\u2019s manned lunar landing but the race between China\u2019s robotic prospectors and NASA\u2019s Commercial Lunar Payload Services\n\n, as this will determine each nation\u2019s relative advantage in accessing and exploiting lunar resources.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina is best placed to win a space race, given its well-coordinated, disciplined, technocratic system, able to set and maintain long-term goals, with a vast population and talent base.The United States is disorganized regarding space and cannot offer a serious challenge to the long-term plans China is setting in this domain. Neither the American people nor the U.S. military seems to perceive the significance of what China is doing strategically in the Earth-moon space. They see it through the lens of their own Cold War experience, assuming the motivations China harbors are akin to that of the erstwhile U.S.S.R. \u2014 for global prestige and simply ticking of boxes \u2014 when they are not.At stake isn\u2019t simply prestige here on Earth: It\u2019s whether the future of space exploration, resource development and colonization will be democratic or dominated by the Communist Party of China and the People\u2019s Liberation Army of China. The American people should think hard about whether they want to cede the next century \u2014 and the next frontier \u2014 to a different government with a very different set of values.Read more:Nathan Gardels: Asia\u2019s rocketing ambitionRajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan: The global space race, 2.0Fareed Zakaria: This is how Trump can win the cold war with ChinaDavid Ignatius: The Chinese threat that an aircraft carrier can\u2019t stopDaniel Britt: Three cheers for space robots Americans are stuck in a Cold War mind-set, but China\u2019s ambitions go far beyond planting flags on new moons and planets. Opinion: The new space race pits the U.S. against China. The U.S. is losing badly.",
        "author": "Namrata Goswami"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | It\u2019s easy to hate billionaires. But they can fill voids. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2641",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/23/its-easy-hate-billionaires-they-can-fill-voids/",
        "text": "More than half a century ago, when the Apollo 11 astronauts took a giant leap for mankind and landed on the moon, my aunt, first cousin and I watched on a tiny tabletop TV \u2014 and wept. We were not alone in our emotional response to that earth-shattering event.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightRecently, when two different billionaires separately boarded and launched their own rockets and ventured into suborbital space, few tears were shed. The two spacemen were viewed with a mixture of passing curiosity and snarling resentment. Just who do Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post and creator of Amazon, and Richard Branson, Virgin Group founder and chairman, think they are, anyway? That seems to be the general consensus. Jacobin writer Luke Savage, well, savaged Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin flight, which followed closely in the wake of Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic trip, calling it a \u201cuniquely American disgrace.\u201d Savage continued: \u201cOnly in a country whose ruling class has grown deeply deluded could a space joy ride like Jeff Bezos\u2019s be seen as cause for public celebration rather than the symptom of moral rot and institutional decay that it so clearly is.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJacobin spends most of its time critiquing the ruling class, so Savage\u2019s take wasn\u2019t surprising. And if he made several valid points about Earth\u2019s economic inequality and related pandemic death tolls, I\u2019m not sure such concerns invalidate humankind\u2019s timeless pursuit of discovery. But Bezos, whose curiosity is boundless, has become the person everyone loves to hate. Not only did he found Amazon, which nearly everyone reading this has helped enrich, but he\u2019s building a yacht roughly the size of Rhode Island at the cost of about $500 million. Hate and envy are a matter of scale, it would seem.Some critiques have read like movie reviews. Will Feuer, a New York Post business writer, noted that the Bezos rocket didn\u2019t go very high, the flight was short and the view from on board was less than amazing. The flight lasted only about 11 minutes and reached 66.5 miles in altitude, slightly higher than Branson. So maybe it wasn\u2019t a moon landing, but it was something more than sitting in a sports bar cursing an athlete for a misplaced bet.I suspect that Bezos and Branson, whom I\u2019ve never met, think they\u2019re spending their excess wealth on something visionary rather than merely self-indulgent. Only the exceedingly rich could aspire to such a venture, much less accomplish the mission. Moreover, billionaires increasingly are filling voids that governments alone can\u2019t. From providing vaccines and maternity care to building housing and schools, philanthropists are too often the last best hope for many of the world\u2019s neediest. Why shouldn\u2019t they also pick up where NASA has left off?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was inevitable that private individuals would step into NASA\u2019s footsteps. But Bezos and Branson mostly have escaped applause beyond the media, for whom a rocket launch is a ratings booster, and politicians who wouldn\u2019t think of criticizing the richest potential donors in the world.Democracy Now! \u2014 the angry debutante of the media\u2019s far left \u2014 took Bezos to task for taking a ride while Earth is burning, the country is moving to tax the rich and while Amazon\u2019s workers, whom Bezos thanked upon landing, are trying to unionize. Talk about a buzz killer.All these claims may be hyperbolically true \u2014 climate change is part of Bezos\u2019s stated rationale for space exploration \u2014 but liberals\u2019 concerns with how other people spend their own money are a bit shopworn, wouldn\u2019t you say? Instead of seeing Bezos and Branson as boys with extreme toys, I see them as modern-day explorers in the vein of Lewis and Clark \u2014 only with better navigational instruments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWho cares if their maiden voyages were limited in scope? Baby steps usually precede giant ones. And where is it written, other than in Marxist manifestos, that the rich can\u2019t spend as they please? And while I\u2019d rather have a sturdy jon boat than a massive ark myself, I\u2019m willing to test that assertion.I generally prefer philanthropists who try to make life better for as many people as possible right here on Earth, including helping them become self-supporting capitalists. But my hunch is that they are on the right path. Maybe someday, Bezos and Branson will be heralded as 21st-century heroes of a dying planet, whose early ventures gave wing to space travel and democratized survival.As our distant-future progeny hop the last rockets to somewhere else, families won\u2019t be watching on tiny TVs as we did in 1969, but the weeping for all we failed to protect when we had the chance will be deafening.Read more:Perry Bacon Jr.: I live in a Democratic bubble. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s okay.Ruth Marcus: The FBI\u2019s \u2018investigation\u2019 of Kavanaugh was laughableMarc A. Thiessen: Did Biden just commit an impeachable offense in Ukraine?Josh Rogin: What the fight between Anthony Fauci and Rand Paul is really about Jeff Bezos, whose curiosity is boundless, has become the person everyone loves to hate. Opinion: It\u2019s easy to hate billionaires. But they can fill voids.",
        "author": "Kathleen Parker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | It\u2019s easy to hate billionaires. But they can fill voids. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2642",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/23/its-easy-hate-billionaires-they-can-fill-voids/",
        "text": "More than half a century ago, when the Apollo 11 astronauts took a giant leap for mankind and landed on the moon, my aunt, first cousin and I watched on a tiny tabletop TV \u2014 and wept. We were not alone in our emotional response to that earth-shattering event.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightRecently, when two different billionaires separately boarded and launched their own rockets and ventured into suborbital space, few tears were shed. The two spacemen were viewed with a mixture of passing curiosity and snarling resentment. Just who do Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post and creator of Amazon, and Richard Branson, Virgin Group founder and chairman, think they are, anyway? That seems to be the general consensus. Jacobin writer Luke Savage, well, savaged Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin flight, which followed closely in the wake of Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic trip, calling it a \u201cuniquely American disgrace.\u201d Savage continued: \u201cOnly in a country whose ruling class has grown deeply deluded could a space joy ride like Jeff Bezos\u2019s be seen as cause for public celebration rather than the symptom of moral rot and institutional decay that it so clearly is.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJacobin spends most of its time critiquing the ruling class, so Savage\u2019s take wasn\u2019t surprising. And if he made several valid points about Earth\u2019s economic inequality and related pandemic death tolls, I\u2019m not sure such concerns invalidate humankind\u2019s timeless pursuit of discovery. But Bezos, whose curiosity is boundless, has become the person everyone loves to hate. Not only did he found Amazon, which nearly everyone reading this has helped enrich, but he\u2019s building a yacht roughly the size of Rhode Island at the cost of about $500 million. Hate and envy are a matter of scale, it would seem.Some critiques have read like movie reviews. Will Feuer, a New York Post business writer, noted that the Bezos rocket didn\u2019t go very high, the flight was short and the view from on board was less than amazing. The flight lasted only about 11 minutes and reached 66.5 miles in altitude, slightly higher than Branson. So maybe it wasn\u2019t a moon landing, but it was something more than sitting in a sports bar cursing an athlete for a misplaced bet.I suspect that Bezos and Branson, whom I\u2019ve never met, think they\u2019re spending their excess wealth on something visionary rather than merely self-indulgent. Only the exceedingly rich could aspire to such a venture, much less accomplish the mission. Moreover, billionaires increasingly are filling voids that governments alone can\u2019t. From providing vaccines and maternity care to building housing and schools, philanthropists are too often the last best hope for many of the world\u2019s neediest. Why shouldn\u2019t they also pick up where NASA has left off?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was inevitable that private individuals would step into NASA\u2019s footsteps. But Bezos and Branson mostly have escaped applause beyond the media, for whom a rocket launch is a ratings booster, and politicians who wouldn\u2019t think of criticizing the richest potential donors in the world.Democracy Now! \u2014 the angry debutante of the media\u2019s far left \u2014 took Bezos to task for taking a ride while Earth is burning, the country is moving to tax the rich and while Amazon\u2019s workers, whom Bezos thanked upon landing, are trying to unionize. Talk about a buzz killer.All these claims may be hyperbolically true \u2014 climate change is part of Bezos\u2019s stated rationale for space exploration \u2014 but liberals\u2019 concerns with how other people spend their own money are a bit shopworn, wouldn\u2019t you say? Instead of seeing Bezos and Branson as boys with extreme toys, I see them as modern-day explorers in the vein of Lewis and Clark \u2014 only with better navigational instruments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWho cares if their maiden voyages were limited in scope? Baby steps usually precede giant ones. And where is it written, other than in Marxist manifestos, that the rich can\u2019t spend as they please? And while I\u2019d rather have a sturdy jon boat than a massive ark myself, I\u2019m willing to test that assertion.I generally prefer philanthropists who try to make life better for as many people as possible right here on Earth, including helping them become self-supporting capitalists. But my hunch is that they are on the right path. Maybe someday, Bezos and Branson will be heralded as 21st-century heroes of a dying planet, whose early ventures gave wing to space travel and democratized survival.As our distant-future progeny hop the last rockets to somewhere else, families won\u2019t be watching on tiny TVs as we did in 1969, but the weeping for all we failed to protect when we had the chance will be deafening.Read more:Perry Bacon Jr.: I live in a Democratic bubble. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s okay.Ruth Marcus: The FBI\u2019s \u2018investigation\u2019 of Kavanaugh was laughableMarc A. Thiessen: Did Biden just commit an impeachable offense in Ukraine?Josh Rogin: What the fight between Anthony Fauci and Rand Paul is really about Jeff Bezos, whose curiosity is boundless, has become the person everyone loves to hate. Opinion: It\u2019s easy to hate billionaires. But they can fill voids.",
        "author": "Kathleen Parker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurers (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2643",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/18/hurrah-apollo-lets-leave-space-travel-robots-privately-funded-adventurers/",
        "text": "Martin Rees is Britain\u2019s astronomer royal and the author of \u201cOn the Future: Prospects for Humanity.\u201dAs an astronomer, I have looked deep into space at countless celestial bodies, but I am like anyone else when I glance at the night sky, see the moon and think with awe of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin \u2014 and of the day, July 20, 1969, when they left the first footprints on its dusty surface. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe exploit seems even more heroic in retrospect when we realize how \u201cprimitive\u201d the technology was. As has been noted more than once lately, on the eve of the moon landing\u2019s 50th anniversary, NASA\u2019s entire suite of computers was less powerful than a single smartphone today.On July 20, 1969 the world watched as man first set foot on the moon. Here\u2019s why Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap\u201d wasn\u2019t just for mankind. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)The Apollo 11 lunar mission itself came 50 years after the first transatlantic flight (Newfoundland to Ireland) by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown. The Apollo mission followed the Soviets\u2019 first Sputnik flight by only 12 years. Had the pace of advance in aerospace technology been sustained in the half-century since Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap for mankind,\u201d there would surely have been footprints on Mars by now.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat hasn\u2019t happened, though. And maybe it is just as well. I am unconvinced that there is even a need for fresh footprints on the moon. Despite considerable talk lately by the Trump administration about returning to the moon, the practical case for such a mission becomes ever less tenable with each new advance in robotics and miniaturization. Leave manned flight to private entrepreneurs, if they wish to bankroll such adventures.The funding for the Apollo program was forthcoming, of course, only because of the U.S. strategic imperative to \u201cbeat the Soviets.\u201d Once primacy was achieved, justifying the necessary gargantuan spending for the Apollo missions eventually became impossible.In the decades since the last Apollo mission, in 1972, the development of space technology has nonetheless flourished. We depend routinely on orbiting satellites for communication, GPS navigation, environmental monitoring, surveillance and weather forecasting. Unmanned probes have journeyed to all the planets of the solar system. Several countries in addition to the United States, including China and India, now have programs that promise to extend our reach into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut should there be a role for humans? There\u2019s no denying that NASA\u2019s recently landed InSight, surveying the Martian surface, may miss startling discoveries that no human geologist would overlook. Yet that might not continue to be the case: Machine learning is advancing fast, as is sensor technology. By contrast, the added cost of keeping astronauts alive makes manned missions absurdly more expensive than unmanned ones.I think the future of manned spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers, prepared to participate in travel that may be far riskier than most governments could impose on publicly supported manned space exploration.The phrase \u201cspace tourism\u201d should be avoided. It lulls people into believing that such ventures are genuinely safe. And if that\u2019s the perception, the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as the U.S. Space Shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003. These exploits must be \u201csold\u201d as dangerous sports, or as intrepid, death-defying exploration, not as vacation cruises that happen to leave Earth\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and a rival effort, Blue Origin, led by Jeff Bezos (the owner of The Post), within a few years may start taking paying customers into orbit. These ventures bring a can-do Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates. They have developed the techniques to recover and reuse the main launch rocket, presaging real cost savings.In coming decades, the entire solar system \u2014 planets, moons and asteroids \u2014 will be explored by fleets of tiny automated probes, interacting with each other like a flock of birds. Plausible predictions include the construction of robotic fabricators that will then build, in space, solar-energy collectors and other giant structures.Perhaps most promising, the fabricators will be able to construct, under zero gravity in space, enormous lightweight telescopes. It\u2019s realistic to hope that in 50 years or so, such telescopes, freed from the blurring and absorptive effects of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, will discover a planet like our own, orbiting a distant star, that may harbor life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy then, thrill seekers may have established a fragile base on Mars. But don\u2019t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. On this I disagree with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, in their enthusiasm for the rapid buildup of large Martian communities. Thinking that space offers an escape from Earth\u2019s problems is a dangerous delusion. We must solve them here. Battling climate change may seem daunting, but it will be child\u2019s play when compared with making Mars habitable. Ordinary risk-averse people will have no alternative. We must cherish our earthly home.Yet we and future generations should cheer on the brave space adventurers. Being ill-adapted to their new habitat, and beyond the reach of earthbound government regulators, they will have a pivotal role in what happens in the 22nd century and beyond as they use super-powerful genetic and cyborg technologies to reshape what it means to be human.But even from that cosmic perspective, the first steps taken on a surface other than the planet Earth were an epochal event \u2014 so it is right that we should remember and celebrate the Apollo 11 astronauts.Read more:George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Buzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars The added cost of keeping astronauts alive makes manned missions absurdly more expensive than unmanned ones. Opinion: Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurers",
        "author": "Martin Rees"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurers (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2644",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/18/hurrah-apollo-lets-leave-space-travel-robots-privately-funded-adventurers/",
        "text": "Martin Rees is Britain\u2019s astronomer royal and the author of \u201cOn the Future: Prospects for Humanity.\u201dAs an astronomer, I have looked deep into space at countless celestial bodies, but I am like anyone else when I glance at the night sky, see the moon and think with awe of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin \u2014 and of the day, July 20, 1969, when they left the first footprints on its dusty surface. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe exploit seems even more heroic in retrospect when we realize how \u201cprimitive\u201d the technology was. As has been noted more than once lately, on the eve of the moon landing\u2019s 50th anniversary, NASA\u2019s entire suite of computers was less powerful than a single smartphone today.On July 20, 1969 the world watched as man first set foot on the moon. Here\u2019s why Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap\u201d wasn\u2019t just for mankind. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)The Apollo 11 lunar mission itself came 50 years after the first transatlantic flight (Newfoundland to Ireland) by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown. The Apollo mission followed the Soviets\u2019 first Sputnik flight by only 12 years. Had the pace of advance in aerospace technology been sustained in the half-century since Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap for mankind,\u201d there would surely have been footprints on Mars by now.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat hasn\u2019t happened, though. And maybe it is just as well. I am unconvinced that there is even a need for fresh footprints on the moon. Despite considerable talk lately by the Trump administration about returning to the moon, the practical case for such a mission becomes ever less tenable with each new advance in robotics and miniaturization. Leave manned flight to private entrepreneurs, if they wish to bankroll such adventures.The funding for the Apollo program was forthcoming, of course, only because of the U.S. strategic imperative to \u201cbeat the Soviets.\u201d Once primacy was achieved, justifying the necessary gargantuan spending for the Apollo missions eventually became impossible.In the decades since the last Apollo mission, in 1972, the development of space technology has nonetheless flourished. We depend routinely on orbiting satellites for communication, GPS navigation, environmental monitoring, surveillance and weather forecasting. Unmanned probes have journeyed to all the planets of the solar system. Several countries in addition to the United States, including China and India, now have programs that promise to extend our reach into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut should there be a role for humans? There\u2019s no denying that NASA\u2019s recently landed InSight, surveying the Martian surface, may miss startling discoveries that no human geologist would overlook. Yet that might not continue to be the case: Machine learning is advancing fast, as is sensor technology. By contrast, the added cost of keeping astronauts alive makes manned missions absurdly more expensive than unmanned ones.I think the future of manned spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers, prepared to participate in travel that may be far riskier than most governments could impose on publicly supported manned space exploration.The phrase \u201cspace tourism\u201d should be avoided. It lulls people into believing that such ventures are genuinely safe. And if that\u2019s the perception, the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as the U.S. Space Shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003. These exploits must be \u201csold\u201d as dangerous sports, or as intrepid, death-defying exploration, not as vacation cruises that happen to leave Earth\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and a rival effort, Blue Origin, led by Jeff Bezos (the owner of The Post), within a few years may start taking paying customers into orbit. These ventures bring a can-do Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates. They have developed the techniques to recover and reuse the main launch rocket, presaging real cost savings.In coming decades, the entire solar system \u2014 planets, moons and asteroids \u2014 will be explored by fleets of tiny automated probes, interacting with each other like a flock of birds. Plausible predictions include the construction of robotic fabricators that will then build, in space, solar-energy collectors and other giant structures.Perhaps most promising, the fabricators will be able to construct, under zero gravity in space, enormous lightweight telescopes. It\u2019s realistic to hope that in 50 years or so, such telescopes, freed from the blurring and absorptive effects of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, will discover a planet like our own, orbiting a distant star, that may harbor life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy then, thrill seekers may have established a fragile base on Mars. But don\u2019t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. On this I disagree with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, in their enthusiasm for the rapid buildup of large Martian communities. Thinking that space offers an escape from Earth\u2019s problems is a dangerous delusion. We must solve them here. Battling climate change may seem daunting, but it will be child\u2019s play when compared with making Mars habitable. Ordinary risk-averse people will have no alternative. We must cherish our earthly home.Yet we and future generations should cheer on the brave space adventurers. Being ill-adapted to their new habitat, and beyond the reach of earthbound government regulators, they will have a pivotal role in what happens in the 22nd century and beyond as they use super-powerful genetic and cyborg technologies to reshape what it means to be human.But even from that cosmic perspective, the first steps taken on a surface other than the planet Earth were an epochal event \u2014 so it is right that we should remember and celebrate the Apollo 11 astronauts.Read more:George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Buzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars The added cost of keeping astronauts alive makes manned missions absurdly more expensive than unmanned ones. Opinion: Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurers",
        "author": "Martin Rees"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurers (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2645",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/18/hurrah-apollo-lets-leave-space-travel-robots-privately-funded-adventurers/",
        "text": "Martin Rees is Britain\u2019s astronomer royal and the author of \u201cOn the Future: Prospects for Humanity.\u201dAs an astronomer, I have looked deep into space at countless celestial bodies, but I am like anyone else when I glance at the night sky, see the moon and think with awe of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin \u2014 and of the day, July 20, 1969, when they left the first footprints on its dusty surface. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe exploit seems even more heroic in retrospect when we realize how \u201cprimitive\u201d the technology was. As has been noted more than once lately, on the eve of the moon landing\u2019s 50th anniversary, NASA\u2019s entire suite of computers was less powerful than a single smartphone today.On July 20, 1969 the world watched as man first set foot on the moon. Here\u2019s why Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap\u201d wasn\u2019t just for mankind. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)The Apollo 11 lunar mission itself came 50 years after the first transatlantic flight (Newfoundland to Ireland) by British aviators John Alcock and Arthur Brown. The Apollo mission followed the Soviets\u2019 first Sputnik flight by only 12 years. Had the pace of advance in aerospace technology been sustained in the half-century since Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap for mankind,\u201d there would surely have been footprints on Mars by now.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat hasn\u2019t happened, though. And maybe it is just as well. I am unconvinced that there is even a need for fresh footprints on the moon. Despite considerable talk lately by the Trump administration about returning to the moon, the practical case for such a mission becomes ever less tenable with each new advance in robotics and miniaturization. Leave manned flight to private entrepreneurs, if they wish to bankroll such adventures.The funding for the Apollo program was forthcoming, of course, only because of the U.S. strategic imperative to \u201cbeat the Soviets.\u201d Once primacy was achieved, justifying the necessary gargantuan spending for the Apollo missions eventually became impossible.In the decades since the last Apollo mission, in 1972, the development of space technology has nonetheless flourished. We depend routinely on orbiting satellites for communication, GPS navigation, environmental monitoring, surveillance and weather forecasting. Unmanned probes have journeyed to all the planets of the solar system. Several countries in addition to the United States, including China and India, now have programs that promise to extend our reach into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut should there be a role for humans? There\u2019s no denying that NASA\u2019s recently landed InSight, surveying the Martian surface, may miss startling discoveries that no human geologist would overlook. Yet that might not continue to be the case: Machine learning is advancing fast, as is sensor technology. By contrast, the added cost of keeping astronauts alive makes manned missions absurdly more expensive than unmanned ones.I think the future of manned spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers, prepared to participate in travel that may be far riskier than most governments could impose on publicly supported manned space exploration.The phrase \u201cspace tourism\u201d should be avoided. It lulls people into believing that such ventures are genuinely safe. And if that\u2019s the perception, the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as the U.S. Space Shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003. These exploits must be \u201csold\u201d as dangerous sports, or as intrepid, death-defying exploration, not as vacation cruises that happen to leave Earth\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and a rival effort, Blue Origin, led by Jeff Bezos (the owner of The Post), within a few years may start taking paying customers into orbit. These ventures bring a can-do Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates. They have developed the techniques to recover and reuse the main launch rocket, presaging real cost savings.In coming decades, the entire solar system \u2014 planets, moons and asteroids \u2014 will be explored by fleets of tiny automated probes, interacting with each other like a flock of birds. Plausible predictions include the construction of robotic fabricators that will then build, in space, solar-energy collectors and other giant structures.Perhaps most promising, the fabricators will be able to construct, under zero gravity in space, enormous lightweight telescopes. It\u2019s realistic to hope that in 50 years or so, such telescopes, freed from the blurring and absorptive effects of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, will discover a planet like our own, orbiting a distant star, that may harbor life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy then, thrill seekers may have established a fragile base on Mars. But don\u2019t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. On this I disagree with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, in their enthusiasm for the rapid buildup of large Martian communities. Thinking that space offers an escape from Earth\u2019s problems is a dangerous delusion. We must solve them here. Battling climate change may seem daunting, but it will be child\u2019s play when compared with making Mars habitable. Ordinary risk-averse people will have no alternative. We must cherish our earthly home.Yet we and future generations should cheer on the brave space adventurers. Being ill-adapted to their new habitat, and beyond the reach of earthbound government regulators, they will have a pivotal role in what happens in the 22nd century and beyond as they use super-powerful genetic and cyborg technologies to reshape what it means to be human.But even from that cosmic perspective, the first steps taken on a surface other than the planet Earth were an epochal event \u2014 so it is right that we should remember and celebrate the Apollo 11 astronauts.Read more:George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Buzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars The added cost of keeping astronauts alive makes manned missions absurdly more expensive than unmanned ones. Opinion: Hurrah for Apollo 11, but let\u2019s leave the space travel to robots and privately funded adventurers",
        "author": "Martin Rees"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | We\u2019re as close to Doomsday today as we were during the Cold War (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2646",
        "date": "2018-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-as-close-to-doomsday-today-as-we-were-during-the-cold-war/2018/01/25/181ae8aa-0145-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html",
        "text": "Lawrence Krauss, chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Board of Sponsors, is director of the Origins Project and foundation professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department at Arizona State University. Robert Rosner, chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board, is a distinguished service professor in the Departments of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics at the University of Chicago.\n Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightDays after Donald Trump took the oath of office, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock to 2\u00bd\u00a0minutes to midnight, in part because of destabilizing comments from America's new commander in chief. One year later, we are moving the clock forward again by 30 seconds, because of the failure of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change.The Science and Security Board for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists assesses that the world is not only more dangerous than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II. In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Hawaii's false alarm in 2018 about a nuclear attack, were you left wondering what you should do when a nuclear bomb is dropped? You're not alone. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)To call the world nuclear situation dire is to understate the danger \u2014 and its immediacy. North Korea's nuclear weapons program appeared to make remarkable progress in 2017, increasing risks for itself, other countries in the region and the United States.The failure in 2017 to secure a temporary freeze on North Korea's nuclear development was unsurprising to observers of the downward spiral of rhetoric between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But North Korea's developing nuclear program will reverberate not just in the Asia-Pacific, as neighboring countries review their security options, but also more widely, as all countries consider the costs and benefits of the international framework of nonproliferation treaties and agreements.Global nuclear risks were compounded by U.S.-Russia relations that now feature more conflict than cooperation. The United States and Russia remained at odds, continuing military exercises along the borders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, undermining the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, upgrading their nuclear arsenals and eschewing arms-control negotiations. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Post visited a nearly untouched 1960s fallout shelter in Washington, D.C., to see what lessons we can learn from the past. (Erin Patrick O'Connor, Daron Taylor, Monica Hesse, Thomas LeGro/The Washington Post)Tensions over the South China Sea have increased. Pakistan and India have continued to build larger arsenals of nuclear weapons. And in the Middle East, uncertainty about continued U.S. support for the landmark Iranian nuclear deal adds to a bleak picture. A related danger is the rise of cyberthreats targeting national infrastructure, including power grids, water supplies and military systems.On climate change, the danger may seem less immediate than the risk of nuclear annihilation, but avoiding catastrophic temperature increases in the long run requires urgent attention now. Global carbon dioxide emissions have not yet begun the sustained decline toward zero that must occur if we are to avoid ever-greater warming. Nations will have to significantly decrease their greenhouse-gas emissions to manage even the climate risk accepted in the Paris accord. So far, the global response has fallen far short of this challenge.The Trump administration's decision essentially to turn a blind eye to climate change transpired against a backdrop of a worsening climate, including powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and other parts of North America and extreme heat in Australia, South America, Asia, Europe and California. The Arctic ice cap achieved its smallest-ever winter maximum in 2017. Last week, data from 2017 demonstrated a continued trend of exceptional global warmth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe believe that the perilous world security situation described here would, in itself, justify moving the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. But there also is a real threat posed by a fundamental breakdown in the international order that has been dangerously exacerbated by recent U.S. actions. In 2017, the United States backed away from its long-standing leadership role in the world, reducing its commitment to seek common ground and undermining the overall effort toward solving pressing global governance challenges. Neither allies nor adversaries have been able to reliably predict U.S. actions or discern between sincere U.S. pronouncements and mere rhetoric.Allies have needed reassurance about American intentions more than ever. Instead, they have been forced to negotiate a thicket of conflicting policy statements from an administration weakened in its cadre of foreign policy professionals and suffering from turnover in senior leadership. Led by an undisciplined and disruptive president, the administration has failed to develop, coordinate and communicate a coherent nuclear policy. This inconsistency constitutes a major challenge for deterrence, alliance management and global stability.We hope this resetting of the clock will be interpreted exactly as it is meant: an urgent warning of global danger. The time for world leaders to address looming nuclear danger and the march of climate change is long past. The time for the citizens of the world to demand such action is now. It is time to rewind the Doomsday Clock.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:\nJeffrey Lewis: This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold\nJosh Rogin: Russia has deployed a banned nuclear missile. Now the U.S. threatens to build one.\nThe Post's View: Trump and the nuclear button\nTom Toles: Don't worry about climate change \u2014 it will all be fine if you can just wait a few million years!\nMichael E. Mann, Susan Joy Hassol and Tom Toles: Doomsday scenarios are as harmful as climate change denial\n We are moving the clock forward by 30 seconds, due to the failure of Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change. Opinion: We\u2019re as close to Doomsday today as we were during the Cold War",
        "author": "Lawrence Krauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Geraldo Rivera comes to his senses on Trump (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2647",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/22/geraldo-rivera-comes-his-senses-trump/",
        "text": "In April 2018, HBO comedian Bill Maher embarrassed Fox News\u2019s Geraldo Rivera. The issue was Rivera\u2019s pal of 40 years \u2014 President Trump. When Maher pressed Rivera on Trump\u2019s plain-as-day excesses and lies and outrages, Rivera retreated to his elitist harbor: \u201cI\u2019ve known Trump for 40 years. ... I can separate the man who has always been gracious to me, always been nice to my family \u2014 you know we were on \u2018Celebrity Apprentice\u2019 together every day for six weeks \u2014 I\u2019ve known him, really ....\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWho cares, responded Maher. \u201cHe\u2019s running the world, what does that matter that he was nice to you at Thanksgiving?\u201d Later in the discussion, Maher drilled his guest on Trump\u2019s lies. \u201cHe has never lied to me in 40 years,\u201d said Rivera. Maher attempted to enlighten the Fox News personality \u2014 a person can be great to a celebrity and not as great to the rest of the world.It\u2019s a lesson that Rivera appears to be internalizing years after Trump launched his racist evisceration of national political norms. \u201cOnce you make nationhood and citizenship like that conditional on your political loyalties, you run a very dangerous path there,\u201d Rivera last week told his colleagues on \u201cFox & Friends\u201d regarding the story of the week: Trump\u2019s \u201cgo back\u201d instructions to four nonwhite Democratic congresswomen.Trump's tweets telling minority congresswomen to \u201cgo back\u201d to their countries follows a history of racism and nativism. Voters will decide if this is effective. (The Washington Post)In an interview with the New York Times, he said more:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor some who defended Mr. Trump against charges of racism in the past, this was a turning point. \u201cAs much as I have denied it and averted my eyes from it, this latest incident made it impossible,\u201d Geraldo Rivera, a roaming correspondent at large for Fox News and longtime friend, said in an interview.\u201cMy friendship with the president has cost me friendships, it has cost me schisms in the family, my wife and I are constantly at odds about the president,\u201d he added. \u201cI do insist that he\u2019s been treated unfairly. But the unmistakable words, the literal words he said, is an indication that the critics were much more right than I.\u201dThose words were delivered in a New York Times story dated July 20, 2019. They could have been delivered, however, in June 2015 (Mexican rapists), December 2015 (Muslim ban proposal), June 2016 (Judge Gonzalo Curiel), August 2017 (Charlottesville), and so on. Which is to say, Rivera\u2019s defense is no defense at all.That Trump\u2019s clear-as-day racism is causing discomfort and dissonance at Fox News also emerged Sunday from \u201cFox News Sunday,\u201d the must-watch show anchored by Chris Wallace. In dealing with the enduring topic of Trump\u2019s attacks on Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Wallace asked Lisa Boothe, a Fox News contributor, to ignore the political analysis and deliver a moral judgment on the president\u2019s \u201cgo back\u201d imperative. Check out this transcript:WALLACE: I want to talk to Lisa about this. There was a lot of talk this week about whether or not this was politically smart, which it seems to me misses the real point, and that is, was this wrong? Was it over the line to say \"go back where you came from\"?LISA BOOTHE, CONTRIBUTOR: Well, I wouldn\u2019t defend, necessarily, the tweet that he sent out but I would also point out there\u2019s been a lot of comparisons made to the late Senator John McCain when he did shut down hecklers who called President Obama an \u2014 then-candidate Obama an Arab. But you have still Representative John Lewis then compare them to George Wallace and, you know, basically fostering an environment of hate when we saw 1963, white supremacist bombed a church.WALLACE: Let's try to stick to Donald Trump and what he did this week.BOOTHE: The point is, Chris, is that's the environment that we operate in where you've seen for a long time the left weaponize these words of racism or sexism against their political opponents.We also saw that with Mitt Romney \u2014(CROSSTALK)WALLACE: But you\u2019re not answer[ing] my question, which is, was it wrong for the president to say send them back to the country they go \u2014 why don\u2019t you go back to the country from which you came? Was that wrong?BOOTHE: But I'm a political analyst, Chris, that's not my job to say it was wrong or not.WALLACE: So, you don't have a view?BOOTHE: Ask his \u2014 ask his White House and his campaign. It\u2019s my job to analyze the optics and the politics of this. And to Jonathan\u2019s point, I would say, I think President Trump has good instincts in looking at the electorate. He may not have looked at that \u201cAxios\u201d report that you guys reported on, the poll that shows that these four members of Congress, particularly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Omar absolutely toxic with key groups of voters.But he has political instincts, and we\u2019d seen him set up and tee off 2020 as the left is anti-American, they are socialist, they are way too far extreme for America, and that\u2019s the direction they want to go in. And if you want to elevate four people to make that point, these four women meet those descriptions.Fox News doesn\u2019t have an ombudsperson \u2014 and almost certainly never will. No problem, because Wallace has a knack for filling that void. The veteran newsman clearly recognized that much of the chatter on his own network related to the political prudence of attacking these women of color. Oh, this is Trump\u2019s strategy! He\u2019s making them the face of the Democratic Party \u2014 smart! How will Nancy Pelosi handle the situation?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch an optical focus is a comfy refuge for Trump apologists, because it moves the discussion to Trump\u2019s alleged political genius, the way he understands the country, the common people and the red, white and blue. But just behold the worry on Boothe\u2019s face when she\u2019s confronted with a simple question of right or wrong.And the idea that her job is to merely address optics may come as a shock to the studio audience that attended the July 14 edition of \u201cThe Next Revolution,\u201d a Sunday-night Fox News program hosted by Steve Hilton. The program invited two lawmakers \u2014 Democratic Rep. Harley Rouda (Calif.) and Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) \u2014 to discuss immigration. Boothe used the opportunity to lecture Rouda and his party leadership about substance:BOOTHE: But here\u2019s the thing, we have a lot of people that are coming here saying that they have a credible fear, but they don\u2019t and ultimately, their cases are rejected in immigration court because they\u2019re actually coming here for economic reasons and not because they actually have a credible fear.So those individuals who have been denied in court should of course be deported because they came here seeking asylum under false pretenses. But I think the bigger problem is, unfortunately, in your party, particularly your party leaders have been completely inept in dealing with this crisis.(Cheering and Applause)Because for the longest time, you have Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer telling us that this was a manufactured crisis from President Trump, and now what they\u2019re doing is demagoguing the people on the front lines dealing with this crisis.Your House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler just recently accused immigration officials of negligent homicide. So this demagoguing does not help.(Cheering and Applause)And instead of offering solutions, what have we heard? Decriminalizing border crossings, free healthcare to illegal immigrants. You have Congresswoman Escobar who has been accused by immigration officials of her staff coaching migrants of how to lie to immigration officials.So I\u2019m not accusing you of this, but many people in your party, particularly the leader, have been completely inept.On the Friday edition of the roundtable program \u201cThe Five,\u201d there was Boothe, again, digging into non-optics. In this instance, she was ripping the media for allegedly un-American coverage of space exploration. Let her explain:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBOOTHE: Welcome back. Well, some in the media are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by bashing America. The New York Times is actually praising the Soviet Union for equality and diversity in the space race. The Times patting the Soviets on the back for beating the U.S. by sending the first man, first woman, first Asian man, and black man into orbit. The Washington Post also joining in by tweeting, the culture that put man on the moon was intense for fun \u2014 or intense fun, family unfriendly, and mostly white and male. Juan [Williams], I\u2019m going to start with you on this. You look at the 50th anniversary of landing on the moon, it\u2019s the epitome of American greatness. So why use this moment to denigrate it to, you know, racist and sexist?Surely, Boothe was scolded by her superiors for stepping outside of her optics-only job description.Read more:James Downie: Stephen Miller lets the mask slipErik Wemple: Fox News\u2019s media analyst criticizes other outlets for calling Trump\u2019s words \u2018racist\u2019Erik Wemple: You happy now, Tucker Carlson?Max Boot: I may not agree with AOC\u2019s squad, but they are better Americans than TrumpErik Wemple: Tucker Carlson embraces hateful nativism in attack on Rep. Omar But another Fox News colleague, not so much. Opinion: Geraldo Rivera comes to his senses on Trump",
        "author": "Erik Wemple"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Republicans are making a mockery of their reputations (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2648",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-are-making-a-mockery-of-their-reputations/2018/02/10/866aefe0-0eaa-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html",
        "text": "I\u2019m old enough to remember when the Republican Party was pro-FBI, pro-morality and anti-deficits. What a startling turnaround. Now Republicans are issuing venomous and cretinous attacks on the FBI that make a mockery of their reputation as the party of \u201claw and order.\u201d They are unwilling to condemn a president whose lawyer allegedly paid off a porn actress, who endorsed an alleged child molester for the Senate and who \ntolerated aides who allegedly beat their wives, making a mockery of their reputation as the party of \u201cfamily values.\u201d And they are going on a spending and tax-cut binge that makes a mockery of their reputation as the party of fiscal discipline. We are a long way removed from 1953 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, \u201cThere must be balanced budgets before we are again on a safe and sound system in our economy.\u201d We are even a long way removed from 2013 when Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) warned that debt \u201cwill weigh down our country like an anchor,\u201d and from 2016 when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) said that \u201cthis level of national debt is dangerous and unacceptable.\u201d\nOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIn 2009, with the country in the midst of its worst recession in decades (unemployment rate: 8.3 percent\n), all but three Republicans in Congress voted against President Barack Obama\u2019s much-needed $787 billion stimulus package. \nNow, with a healthy economy (unemployment rate: 4.1 percent), a majority of House and Senate Republicans voted for a $560 billion spending package. Republicans are turning economic logic on its head. Periods of economic expansion should be used to balance the budget. Then, when a downturn hits, that\u2019s the time for stimulatory spending increases and tax cuts. Running stratospheric deficits now leaves us defenseless to fight a future recession.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA lot of the individual spending provisions in the budget deal are needed, especially the lifting of sequester caps on defense spending. But the cumulative result is dire, coming as it does less than two months after Republicans approved, on a party-line vote, a $1.5 trillion tax cut that is not needed and risks overheating the economy. The stock market is spooked, and for good reason. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that we will be running trillion-dollar deficits \u201cindefinitely.\u201d That\u2019s roughly double the deficit in Obama\u2019s last full year in office \u2014 $585 billion. Oh, and the Trump administration is about to unveil an infrastructure bill that is projected to cost the federal government $200 billion.\nIt\u2019s hard to argue with Sen. Rand Paul (R.-Ky.), who during a lonely protest on the Senate floor said, \u201cIf you were against President Obama\u2019s deficits, and now you\u2019re for the Republican deficits, isn\u2019t that the very definition of hypocrisy?\u201d But of course he\u2019s a hypocrite too, having voted for the massive tax cut.Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton when we last balanced the budget in the 1990s, tells me that projected debt levels \u201cwill highly likely lead to higher interest rates, crowding out of private investment,\u201d and cause \u201creduced business confidence because of policy uncertainty, less resilience to economic or geopolitical crises, ever-reduced resources available for public investment and defense, and, at some point, serious financial market disruption.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a national security analyst, I am particularly concerned about the impact on defense. President Trump claims, \u201cThis Bill is a BIG VICTORY for our Military.\u201d That may be true in the short run, but over the long haul this will prove to be a Pyrrhic victory.Already, last year, net interest on the debt and mandatory spending programs \u2014 Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. \u2014 consumed 69 percent of the federal budget. The Peter G. Petersen Institute projected, even before this latest spending binge, that the figure would grow to 77 percent by 2027. That means that within a decade, only 23 percent of the federal budget will be left over to fund defense, scientific research, space exploration, disaster relief, infrastructure and all other \u201cdiscretionary\u201d spending. And all of that will have to be funded with borrowed money, reports the House Budget Committee, because by 2029 mandatory spending will consume the entirety of federal revenue. Good luck paying for defense with so little money to go around. Forget the fantasy of 4 percent economic growth. The only way out is to either increase revenue or restrain entitlement spending. Ryan has made entitlement reform a centerpiece of his career, but there is no chance of Congress taking badly needed action, because Trump, the self-styled \u201cking of debt,\u201d couldn\u2019t care less.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019m starting to think that MAGA stands for Make America Greece Anon. Trump is leading Republicans to fiscal, intellectual and moral perdition. There is no longer a conservative party in this country. There is only a cult of Trump.Read more on this topic: \nThe Post\u2019s View: McConnell and Schumer celebrate a budget deal that denies reality\nCatherine Rampell: Republicans\u2019 fiscal flip-flop is breathtakingly ill-timed\nJennifer Rubin: Forget about small government. Republicans support big debt.\nEd Rogers: Is the GOP still the party of deficit reduction and fiscal restraint?\n There is no longer a conservative party in this country. Opinion: Republicans are making a mockery of their reputations",
        "author": "Max Boot"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Let the moon rush begin (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2649",
        "date": "2020-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/21/let-moon-rush-begin/",
        "text": "Homer Hickam is the author of \u201cRocket Boys\u201d (also published as \u201cOctober Sky\u201d), \u201cBack to the Moon\u201d and the \u201cCrater\u201d trilogy.For those of us who have been involved with the movement of humankind into space across many years, these are exciting times. Since Vice President Pence\u2019s speech last March directing NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, the U.S. space agency, commercial companies and other countries have quickened their efforts to learn more about Luna and prepare to land people there. It\u2019s as if the world was waiting for an opening bell and the vice president rang it. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAs these efforts get going, however, it\u2019s important to avoid the thinking of a half-century ago and look at the moon in a different way. This is, after all, not your grandfather\u2019s moon. After the Apollo moon-landing program of the 1960s and \u201970s, a series of robotic missions discovered that Luna was a lot more interesting than many had previously thought. It has abundant water and oxygen, as well as helium, platinum, thorium, rare earth metals and other minerals that may well be worth digging up and transporting back for use in thousands of products. Last year, a gigantic blob of metal, as yet unidentified but significantly larger than the Big Island of Hawaii, was discovered beneath the lunar south pole. Whatever it is, it has value. The quiet far side of the moon could also provide a location for interstellar observatories, and tourists who would pay a lot to have a lunar vacation are inevitable. In other words, a real business case can be made for the moon, a case that could not only put dollars back into the pockets of taxpayers but also open up jobs for skilled workers on the lunar surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019m a member of the Users\u2019 Advisory Group of the National Space Council, and one of my duties is to understand NASA\u2019s plans for the Artemis moon-landing program and contribute recommendations. Although technical details of Artemis might be modified, there is one thing I\u2019ve noticed that isn\u2019t up for debate: Professional astronauts are going first. While I agree that professionals are required for the initial landings, I don\u2019t think that exclusivity should continue for long.The Apollo program, though successful, was canceled within three years of the first landing, partly because few Americans had a stake in maintaining the enterprise. For many people, the moon was a dry, dead place suitable only for astronauts and scientists and seemed to have nothing of value for those paying the bills. But if we start looking at the moon not as an astronomical object but as an eighth continent and potentially a new source of wealth for the people of Earth, it would be a revolutionary way of thinking about the space frontier. Once electricians, plumbers, miners and construction workers start going to the moon, and the middle class starts using products made with minerals from Luna, the United States will become a true spacefaring nation.The U.S. government legalized space mining in 2015, and other nations have taken their own approaches to lunar mining for profit. Although the United States signed a 1967 U.N. treaty that suggests no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon, the treaty was developed as an attempt at arms control during a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were landing probes. This Cold War relic is unlikely to prevent Washington or other governments from proceeding toward lunar activities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy opinion is undoubtedly colored by where I grew up, the little mining town of Coalwood, W.Va. When I was growing up, Coalwood was difficult to get to and its living conditions were harsh. But the town had important economic resources, so people came there, not because they liked living in those remote hills or enjoyed working in the mines but because they could have jobs and make enough money to raise their families. Eventually, they fell in love with the rugged mountains and valleys and the Appalachians became their permanent home. I was nurtured by that harsh but beautiful land. In much the same way, I believe life on the moon could evolve, but first the path must be prepared. We must do what the United States didn\u2019t do for Apollo \u2014 that is, look past the initial stages of Artemis and plan what comes next.I propose that NASA make the initial landings and prove that the hardware works. And that is where its duties would end. If the space agency can persuade Congress to give it the money to go on to Mars, let it, but there is too much real, practical work to be done on the moon for the rest of us to get distracted. After Artemis, a consortium led by the U.S. Department of Commerce, with commercial and international partners, should set as its first task building an outpost on the moon near water and oxygen supplies. This could act as a staging area much like St. Louis was for the pioneers on the American frontier. For a fee paid to the consortium, commercial companies, governmental entities and scientific organizations could use this outpost to prepare their personnel and equipment to set forth across the lunar plains, valleys and hills. They could prospect for minerals and other resources in the great lunar outback and eventually plan the construction of observatories and hotels. As more is learned about lunar resources and sufficient business cases are made, towns like Coalwood could spring up all over the moon.For the first time, humans would be going into space not only for science but also for self-sustaining economic reasons. That\u2019s a solid argument for letting the moon rush begin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Read a letter responding to this op-ed: Leave the moon aloneRobert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Mary Robinette Kowal: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyoneLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endThe Post\u2019s View: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims Let's start looking at the moon not as an astronomical object but as an eighth continent and potentially a new source of wealth for the people of Earth. Opinion: Let the moon rush begin",
        "author": "Homer Hickam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Let the moon rush begin (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2650",
        "date": "2020-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/21/let-moon-rush-begin/",
        "text": "Homer Hickam is the author of \u201cRocket Boys\u201d (also published as \u201cOctober Sky\u201d), \u201cBack to the Moon\u201d and the \u201cCrater\u201d trilogy.For those of us who have been involved with the movement of humankind into space across many years, these are exciting times. Since Vice President Pence\u2019s speech last March directing NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024, the U.S. space agency, commercial companies and other countries have quickened their efforts to learn more about Luna and prepare to land people there. It\u2019s as if the world was waiting for an opening bell and the vice president rang it. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAs these efforts get going, however, it\u2019s important to avoid the thinking of a half-century ago and look at the moon in a different way. This is, after all, not your grandfather\u2019s moon. After the Apollo moon-landing program of the 1960s and \u201970s, a series of robotic missions discovered that Luna was a lot more interesting than many had previously thought. It has abundant water and oxygen, as well as helium, platinum, thorium, rare earth metals and other minerals that may well be worth digging up and transporting back for use in thousands of products. Last year, a gigantic blob of metal, as yet unidentified but significantly larger than the Big Island of Hawaii, was discovered beneath the lunar south pole. Whatever it is, it has value. The quiet far side of the moon could also provide a location for interstellar observatories, and tourists who would pay a lot to have a lunar vacation are inevitable. In other words, a real business case can be made for the moon, a case that could not only put dollars back into the pockets of taxpayers but also open up jobs for skilled workers on the lunar surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019m a member of the Users\u2019 Advisory Group of the National Space Council, and one of my duties is to understand NASA\u2019s plans for the Artemis moon-landing program and contribute recommendations. Although technical details of Artemis might be modified, there is one thing I\u2019ve noticed that isn\u2019t up for debate: Professional astronauts are going first. While I agree that professionals are required for the initial landings, I don\u2019t think that exclusivity should continue for long.The Apollo program, though successful, was canceled within three years of the first landing, partly because few Americans had a stake in maintaining the enterprise. For many people, the moon was a dry, dead place suitable only for astronauts and scientists and seemed to have nothing of value for those paying the bills. But if we start looking at the moon not as an astronomical object but as an eighth continent and potentially a new source of wealth for the people of Earth, it would be a revolutionary way of thinking about the space frontier. Once electricians, plumbers, miners and construction workers start going to the moon, and the middle class starts using products made with minerals from Luna, the United States will become a true spacefaring nation.The U.S. government legalized space mining in 2015, and other nations have taken their own approaches to lunar mining for profit. Although the United States signed a 1967 U.N. treaty that suggests no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon, the treaty was developed as an attempt at arms control during a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were landing probes. This Cold War relic is unlikely to prevent Washington or other governments from proceeding toward lunar activities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy opinion is undoubtedly colored by where I grew up, the little mining town of Coalwood, W.Va. When I was growing up, Coalwood was difficult to get to and its living conditions were harsh. But the town had important economic resources, so people came there, not because they liked living in those remote hills or enjoyed working in the mines but because they could have jobs and make enough money to raise their families. Eventually, they fell in love with the rugged mountains and valleys and the Appalachians became their permanent home. I was nurtured by that harsh but beautiful land. In much the same way, I believe life on the moon could evolve, but first the path must be prepared. We must do what the United States didn\u2019t do for Apollo \u2014 that is, look past the initial stages of Artemis and plan what comes next.I propose that NASA make the initial landings and prove that the hardware works. And that is where its duties would end. If the space agency can persuade Congress to give it the money to go on to Mars, let it, but there is too much real, practical work to be done on the moon for the rest of us to get distracted. After Artemis, a consortium led by the U.S. Department of Commerce, with commercial and international partners, should set as its first task building an outpost on the moon near water and oxygen supplies. This could act as a staging area much like St. Louis was for the pioneers on the American frontier. For a fee paid to the consortium, commercial companies, governmental entities and scientific organizations could use this outpost to prepare their personnel and equipment to set forth across the lunar plains, valleys and hills. They could prospect for minerals and other resources in the great lunar outback and eventually plan the construction of observatories and hotels. As more is learned about lunar resources and sufficient business cases are made, towns like Coalwood could spring up all over the moon.For the first time, humans would be going into space not only for science but also for self-sustaining economic reasons. That\u2019s a solid argument for letting the moon rush begin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Read a letter responding to this op-ed: Leave the moon aloneRobert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Mary Robinette Kowal: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyoneLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.Marillyn Hewson: No, human space exploration is not a dead endThe Post\u2019s View: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whims Let's start looking at the moon not as an astronomical object but as an eighth continent and potentially a new source of wealth for the people of Earth. Opinion: Let the moon rush begin",
        "author": "Homer Hickam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: A picture of all that\u2019s wrong with our affairs (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2651",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-a-picture-of-all-thats-wrong-with-our-affairs/2020/02/14/708f9496-4dc8-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html",
        "text": "Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers\u2019 grievances \u2014 pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week\u2019s Free for All letters.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe very picture of all that's wrongThe photograph that accompanied the Jan. 29 front-page article \u201cAmid doubts, Trump unveils Mideast peace plan\u201d encapsulated the deplorable state of national and international affairs by depicting the impeached U.S. president and the indicted prime minister of Israel preparing to announce the biggest foreign policy \u201cnothingburger\u201d of the new decade.\u00a0 Story continues below advertisementWilliam A. McCollam, FairfaxThe Jan. 30 news article \u201cIsrael seizes on annexation proposal\u201d\u00a0misconstrued an important point about Israel\u2019s settlements in the West Bank. Two individuals quoted in the article properly said Israel may \u201capply Israeli law to the settlements.\u201d But the reporter repeatedly mischaracterized\u00a0that possibility as an \u201cannexation.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementWhen the 1922 British Mandate for Palestine reserved Palestine for the nation that became Israel, that binding international law included the West Bank. Israel could not take control of the West Bank (and other parts of the disputed territories) because of an illegal Arab invasion. However, the Arab occupation did not diminish Israel\u2019s sovereign rights. Israel remained eligible to govern the embattled land.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe current U.S. peace proposal makes it politically possible for Israel to apply its long-standing legal authority over the West Bank. If Israel takes advantage of the opportunity, it will be a lawful act of sovereignty, not an illegal annexation.Joel M. Margolis, Herndon\u25cfOn the wrong trackThe Feb. 2 Spring Arts Preview \u2014 Theater included this:\u00a0\u201cHair \u2014 A tribe of young hippies .\u2009.\u2009. soundtracked to popular rock songs of the 1960s.\u201d What the heck?AdvertisementThis made it sound like \u201cMamma Mia.\u201d Certain songs from the wholly original musical score went on to become hits but \u201csoundtracked\u201d?\u00a0Kit Hope, Silver Spring\u25cfGrow upJohn B. Judis\u2019s Jan. 26 Washington Post Magazine essay, \u201cA warning from the \u201960s generation,\u201d brought to mind the teaching of Jesus: \u201cThe poor, you will always have with you.\u201d It is certainly true that young leftists we will always have with us.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe young, as a class, have not yet encountered the discipline of mortgage payments and child-rearing or, in the workplace, making a payroll on time, budget accountability, nonnegotiable project deadlines, etc. Youthful idealizing is exciting and cost-free. Simple maturation is the more fundamental explanation of what happened to the 1960s left. On average, they grew up.\u00a0Of course, we do have some leftist septuagenarians, e.g., Judis and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Judis\u2019s analysis vividly illustrated this reality. Not once did he consider that the programs of the left have already buried us so deeply in public debt and future obligations that young leftist plans for more taxation, spending and regulation render their dreams fiscally unsustainable. The inevitability of the coming public debt crisis closely resembles the inevitability of the coming climate crisis. These crises will command the attention of all and overwhelm the political, social and cultural preoccupations of the young left.AdvertisementRobert Tenney,\u00a0GaithersburgStory continues below advertisement\u25cfKeys to the well-designed castleIn the Jan. 31 \u201cBathroom trends\u201d package [Real Estate special section], there were all those toilets and not a grab bar in sight. Sing along with me, Someday your knees will ache, someday your hips will hurt, to the tune of \u201cSomeday My Prince Will Come.\u201d Grab bars don\u2019t have to be big, ugly and commercial-looking. And you don\u2019t have to be old to appreciate them.Susan W. Ruff, Washington\u201cThe 100-year evolution\n of appliances\u201d \nin the Jan.\u200931 Real Estate special section\n neglected \nto note\n the steady decline of \nlife expectancy\n of said appliances. All the bells and whistles, new colors and high-tech features have led to bigger price tags. Sadly, one has to replace \nthese modern appliances\n \nalmost as often as smartphones. Bring back the boring, almost ugly ever-last\n models of generations ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPaul Bergeron, Herndon\u25cf'Mike Du Jour's' very bad dayI suppose I started reading the \u201cMike Du Jour\u201d comic strip because it replaced another comic I had enjoyed. Having seen the Feb. 1 installment, however, I resolve to stop. Mike Lester has now demonstrated his very deep and vicious misogyny, as well as a depraved disrespect for a revered religious leader that even this atheist finds offensive.David R. Robie, Falls Church\u25cfFood writing to savorI just read JJ Goode\u2019s Jan. 29 Food article, \u201cI\u2019ll eat it all. My kids won\u2019t. That eats at me,\u201d and, let me tell you, I absolutely howled!\u00a0It was funny, relatable and very entertaining. I laughed out loud and smiled the whole time reading the article.\u00a0In\u00a0a time in which more love and laughter are needed, this writer delivered.\u00a0We all have the best of intentions when it comes to our children\u2019s nutrition, but, in the end, it is usually they who have the last say when it comes to food and what they will or will not eat. I truly loved how the writer told this story. I\u2019m still laughing.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDyone Mitchell, Washington\u25cfGlaring omissionsAre you kidding me? The Post runs a \u201cMeet the candidates\u201d feature in its Campaign 2020 special section [Jan. 31] with one row of text describing where the candidates stand on economic inequality and \u2014 except for the briefest of mentions in Sen.\u2009Elizabeth Warren\u2019s (D-Mass.) summary \u2014 failed to mention the candidates\u2019 support for policies to make it easier for workers to form and join unions.\u00a0Economic experts have long pointed to the decline in union density as a key reason we have skyrocketing income inequality, and all of the major Democratic candidates have proposed plans to strengthen unions as a key piece of addressing economic inequality. Shame on The Post for this glaring omission.Story continues below advertisementLynn Rhinehart, Silver SpringThe writer is a former general counsel of the AFL-CIO and a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute.AdvertisementThe Jan. 31 \u201cCandidate issues quiz\u201d [Campaign 2020 special section] was very interesting, but not for the issues it analyzed. It was interesting that climate change did not make the list. This existential threat to the planet receives so little focus that even a paper as sophisticated as The Post doesn\u2019t consider it within the top 10 issues. Maybe climate change was No. 11.Kenneth Gubin, Herndon\u25cfA pizza review that left a bad tasteImagine my delight to learn that The Post, my go-to newspaper since the 1960s, was publishing an article about the 10 best pizzas in the D.C. area [\u201cSlices of heaven, in D.C.,\u201d Weekend, Jan. 31]. I like pizza, and my wife and I are constantly looking for new dining opportunities. Then imagine my dismay to learn that only one of those establishments was located in Virginia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPardon me if I question the extent to which Post writers, editors and ownership have a clue as to who reads their product, understand their habits or know where we live. Just another five pages of useless, wasteful information.Frank Burtnett, Springfield\u25cfIt's about respect, not friendshipThe Jan. 28 Sports article \u201cNadal sticks to basics and sends Kyrgios home\u201d indicated that \u201cThese two guys don\u2019t like each other.\u201d I would make the point that for Rafael Nadal, one of the all-time greatest tennis players, it is not a matter of disliking Nick Kyrgios but, rather, questioning Kyrgios\u2019s commitment to the game because of his on-court antics and disrespect for himself, the game, his opponent and fans.\u00a0To suggest that the two players don\u2019t like each other was incorrect. After Nadal\u2019s win over Kyrgios at this year\u2019s Australian Open, he said he enjoyed watching Kyrgios play during the tournament and was complimentary of his opponent. Nadal, winner of the Association of Tennis Professionals Sportsmanship Award, is always gracious and demonstrates the highest level of sportsmanship not only in his victories and defeats but also with opponents who are disrespectful and provoke him.AdvertisementKathy Wagner, Annapolis\u25cfMars or bustI was surprised that the Feb. 1 editorial \u201cLost in space\u201d did not mention SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s private rocket and space exploration company. While NASA and Congress dither over whether, when and how to send humans to Mars, SpaceX is already building prototypes of a Mars rocket called Starship. The purpose of this massive new rocket, whose development is being self-funded by SpaceX, is ultimately to transport humans to Mars.Lest anyone doubt SpaceX\u2019s capabilities, I point out that SpaceX, with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, has reportedly captured two-thirds of the international commercial launch market. In addition, SpaceX is well on the way to constructing a constellation of thousands of Starlink satellites to provide high-performance Internet access anywhere in the world. SpaceX is also on the verge of ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station using its Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Remarkably, SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 from scratch for the ridiculously low cost of $300 million. Compare that with NASA\u2019s estimate of $3.6 billion for building a comparable rocket using its traditional contracting processes.NASA and Congress may be lost in space, but SpaceX most assuredly is not.Roy Mariuzza, Chevy Chase\u25cfGet over Iowa and New HampshireWhy did the media, The Post included, put such emphasis on Iowa and New Hampshire? The number of electoral votes these two states have together is less than 2 percent of the electoral college, and the states are not representative of the diversity of Democratic voters. And if a candidate doesn\u2019t do well in these nonrepresentative states, it can sink the candidacy. These states should get little or no media attention.\u00a0Donald Gross, Charlottesville\u25cfAlways in tune with the audienceThe Feb. 4 obituary for Peter Serkin, \u201cPiano prodigy bridged old and new traditions,\u201d provided a deserved and thorough account of the pianist\u2019s wide-ranging repertoire, intellect and \u2014 of course \u2014 keyboard mastery. I\u2019d add only a fleeting episode that reflects a whimsical bent as well.\u00a0It occurred about 16 or 17 years ago at his Congregation Beth El recital in Bethesda. As he began the second half of his program, the cellphone of someone at the rear of the sanctuary went off \u2014 but not with the simple, nondescript tones of your standard default setting. It was an elaborate musical interlude. Serkin, peering at the offending audience member, proceeded to replicate the cellphone passage in note- and pitch-perfect rendition at the piano.Joel Darmstadter, Chevy Chase\u25cfOh, happy dayI loved the Feb. 1 news article \u201cA rare, cross-cultural palindrome arrives on Sunday.\u201d This was a great topic to address with my kids, and a welcome respite from impeachment and primary coverage.Nick Szechenyi,\u00a0Kensington\u25cfA web of corruption sustained MoiThe Feb. 5 obituary for former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, \u201cKenyan leader ruled with iron fist,\u201d brought back memories for me. As the World Bank country director in Nairobi, I was closely involved with Moi and his government during his last years in power.Deeply concerned with Kenya\u2019s poor performance and weak economic management, the World Bank launched a strategy in 1998 focused on governance. This included the highly unusual suspension of our financial assistance until a list of reforms was implemented \u2014 tackling corruption, improving budget management, streamlining the civil service and privatization. Moi and his government hated losing the support of their largest external funder, but our tough stand was widely supported by Kenyans and our international partners.Our position paved the way for the \u201cDream Team,\u201d led by Richard Leakey, and made up of leading Kenyans from the private sector placed in leadership positions in the government\u2019s key ministries. The team made great progress, and the bank resumed its financial support.\u00a0That progress faded after a couple of years when Moi and his supporters feared the anti-corruption effort would ensnare them. The team left. Again, we cut our support.Moi wielded power and got rich though his personal strength and ruthlessness, control of a number of businesses while in office, a politicized civil service, cronies in all key government positions, a corrupt judicial system led by an attorney general loyal to the president, control of substantial parts of the media, tribal politics, and a lack of effective checks and balances among the branches of government.\u00a0Hal Wackman,\u00a0Washington\u25cfAll mayors are not created equalChristina Shea\u2019s Feb. 2 Outlook essay, \u201cI\u2019m the mayor of a large college town. I\u2019m not ready to be president,\u201d required closer examination. Shea\u00a0highlighted her own\u00a0lack of qualifications for \u201csitting behind the Resolute Desk\u201d and thus attempted to minimize\u00a0former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg\u2019s qualifications as a candidate in the Democratic primary.Shea overlooked that Buttigieg is not only a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University, the latter of which he attended on a Rhodes Scholarship, but he also served the nation\u00a0in the\u00a0U.S. Navy Reserve and was deployed to Afghanistan as a Navy intelligence officer. He attained the rank of lieutenant and was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal.By comparison and contrast, Shea, a career\u00a0real estate agent, faces a recall petition for stalling the progression of a veterans\u2019 cemetery because of her connections with a\u00a0real estate developer \u2014 once again an example of a politician putting personal interest over the needs of constituents.She was correct in that she lacks the qualifications to\u00a0\u201csit behind the Resolute\u00a0Desk,\u201d but she failed in her effort to\u00a0disqualify Buttigieg, a candidate\u00a0who has the experience, intelligence and integrity to be president.Bonnie T. Henn, WoodbridgeRead more:Readers critique The Post: How dare we disparage Rich Uncle Pennybags?Readers critique The Post: A physics joke in the comics! But there\u2019s one problem.Readers critique The Post: What are these popular children\u2019s books really about?Readers critique The Post: Why weren\u2019t any of the women in this photo identified?Readers critique The Post: What was omitted in Don Imus\u2019s obituaryReaders critique The Post: No, the Druids did not build StonehengeReaders critique The Post: Who determines what is a good vs. bad snowstorm?More letters to the editor This week\u2019s Free for All letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: A picture of all that\u2019s wrong with our affairs",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Legislators struggle with tech. That\u2019s why we need the Office of Technology Assessment. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2652",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/legislators-struggle-with-tech-thats-why-we-need-the-office-of-technology-assessment/2018/09/17/bb7c30c6-b860-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html",
        "text": "CONGRESS NEEDS to hire more teachers \u2014 for itself. As high-profile hearings have made clear this year, lawmakers struggle to understand the Internet platforms that dominate online life, and given the limited resources the legislative branch has to build up its knowledge base, that is no surprise. Thankfully, recent appropriations bills offer reason for hope. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightOver the past two decades, two Democratic physicists-turned-congressmen have led the charge for the resurrection of the Office of Technology Assessment, which from 1972 to its 1995 defunding provided representatives with nonpartisan analysis of science and technical issues. Though Republicans have been largely resistant to the measure, the current legislation requires the Congressional Research Service to examine the need for an additional entity to dispense technological guidance. The Government Accountability Office has also been instructed to evaluate how to give its tech assessment program more prominence.It is crucial for legislators to grapple with technological issues on a higher level than most have so far proved themselves capable. OTA was \nestablished in recognition of technology\u2019s \u201cincreasingly extensive, pervasive, and critical\u201d impact on all of us. That has not changed. Technology permeates society far beyond the buzziest issues surrounding Silicon Valley\u2019s most powerful companies, reaching areas from cybersecurity to biomedical research to space exploration. When Congress steps in, it needs to understand what it is doing \u2014 whether it\u2019s reworking regulatory frameworks to accommodate innovations or figuring out the most efficient way to administer programs such as Social Security in the digital age.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome believe that altering the GAO\u2019s tech assessment program could bring Congress all the benefits OTA used to offer, and that doing so would be politically easier than recreating a separate office. GAO says it is starting to make changes. Yet GAO\u2019s institutional culture centers on audits and investigations, and it lacks the hallmarks of OTA in its heyday. Those include a larger permanent staff of subject experts with whom legislators can build relationships, as well as the independence to better compete for resources.In fact, OTA furnished Congress with exactly what it needs right now: careful analysis of the toughest tech issues of the day and the policy options to address them. It was not perfect \u2014 OTA was often criticized for moving too slowly, and in the digital age, speed matters more than ever \u2014 but its absence is painfully felt. Democrats may struggle to secure Republican buy-in to restore the office, not to mention the funding necessary for the venture to truly succeed. They should try anyway. Knowing what one is talking about should not be a partisan issue.Read more:Catherine Rampell: Our politicians have no idea how the Internet worksMark Zuckerberg: Protecting democracy is an arms race. Here\u2019s how Facebook can help.Molly Roberts: Google\u2019s day of reckoning is finally at handMarc A. Thiessen: Does Google think it\u2019s better than the U.S. military? Lawmakers seem to have troubling understanding technological issues. They should bring back staff to help them learn. Opinion: Legislators struggle with tech. That\u2019s why we need the Office of Technology Assessment.",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Bernie Sanders says he hates billionaires, but many of them do quite noble things (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2653",
        "date": "2020-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanders-says-he-hates-billionaires-but-many-of-them-do-quite-noble-things/2020/03/11/88f5a556-624b-11ea-8a8e-5c5336b32760_story.html",
        "text": "Colbert I. King\u2019s March 7 op-ed, \u201cBlack billionaires need not apply to Bernie\u2019s world,\u201d was right on the money.\u00a0I did a little research and found that the Forbes list of billionaires for 2019 included 33\u2009Americans in the first 100 listed. Of these, some donated funds or stocks worth a total of $162.4\u2009billion. A couple have pledged to donate 99 percent of their worth or holdings during their lifetimes. Many of the people listed have invested in enterprises that will help our country move forward (space exploration, medicine, education). Obviously, some have given money to support political entities of both parties. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWhen Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, rants about billionaires, he is making the same error President Trump commits when he labels immigrants as criminals who must be kept out of our country. There are, no doubt, bad billionaires just as there are bad people in general. But there are, in general, more good people than bad people and more good billionaires than bad ones. Bill and Melinda Gates are working to eliminate polio and have donated $35.8 billion. Warren Buffett has promised to give away 99 percent of his fortune. Larry Page and Elon Musk are investing in space exploration efforts. Even Mike Bloomberg has donated $8 billion, so he can\u2019t be all bad.Being a generous billionaire is not necessarily a fatal flaw. If they were taxed as Mr. Sanders proposes, would that tax money be better spent than through the donations/investments that are being made by these individuals? Who would decide where the tax money goes? Stephen Marschall, Burke\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: Bernie Sanders says he hates billionaires, but many of them do quite noble things",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | \u2018730 Days of Smart Brevity\u2019: Axios celebrates second anniversary with planetary video (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2654",
        "date": "2019-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/31/days-smart-brevity-axios-celebrates-second-anniversary-with-planetary-video/",
        "text": "BuzzFeed is laying off staffers. HuffPost is laying off staffers. Gannett is laying off staffers.Axios, however, is partying. A bash for the website\u2019s second anniversary is taking place in Washington on Thursday night. There\u2019s even a video to hype the event. It features Hollywood-trailer touches, complete with dramatic tunes as well as grandiose text, such as: \u201cAre you ready for the future?\u201d And \u201c730 days of smart brevity.\u201d But don\u2019t take the Erik Wemple Blog\u2019s word for it; see for yourself: Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightVanity Fair\u2019s Joe Pompeo wrote this week that Axios\u2019s apparently \u201csustainable course\" relies extensively on newsletters and sponsorships. Speaking of which, the Axios \u201cTo the Future\u201d video carries this parting line: \u201cPresented by Boeing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThose inclined to snark about the video, or the event, are advised to reconsider. BizBash, after all, bestowed its award for \u201cBest Corporate Event Concept \u2014 Budget Under $250,000\u201d upon Axios\u2019s one-year anniversary party:@TeamAdvoc8 Axios One-Year Anniversary Party won Best Corporate Event Concept\u2014Budget Under $250,000 at the BizBash 2018 Event Style Awards. Congrats! https://t.co/gy9lyFKn9N #BizBashAwards pic.twitter.com/zAn677i1g1\u2014 BizBash (@BizBash) October 26, 2018\n\nThe BizBash writeup noted, \u201cOne year after the launch of its new media company, Axios hosted a celebration for influencers, political insiders, and media in Washington in January 2018. Inspired by the event sponsor Boeing, the event featured an aviation theme that included an airport gate sign outside of the venue; an airport \u2018lounge\u2019 with smart suitcases that charged phones; a party space behind a door that mimicked the side of an airplane; and aviation-inspired gin cocktails. Advoc8, Hargrove, and Axios\u2019s event team produced the event.\u201dAccording to Axios spokeswoman Megan Swiatkowski, the video is a component of the party invitation from the organization\u2019s business side. Axios Studios, which Swiatkowski compares to a business-side branding outfit at The Post, \u201chelped create a two-week experiential event setting showcasing Boeing\u2019s space exploration\" in this year\u2019s party venue, says Swiatkowski. While the rest of the digital media industry collapses. Opinion: \u2018730 Days of Smart Brevity\u2019: Axios celebrates second anniversary with planetary video",
        "author": "Erik Wemple"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Buzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2655",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/01/buzz-aldrin-its-time-focus-great-migration-humankind-mars/",
        "text": "Buzz Aldrin is a former astronaut and, as part of the Apollo 11 mission, was one of the first men to walk on the moon.Last month, Vice President Pence announced that we are headed back to the moon. I am with him, in spirit and aspiration. Having been there, I can say it is high time we returned. When Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and I went to the moon 50 years ago this July, we did so with a mission. Apollo 11 aimed to prove America\u2019s can-do commitment to space exploration, as well as its national security and technological superiority. We did all that. We also \u201cCame in Peace for all Mankind.\u201d More of that is needed now. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightToday, many nations have eyes for the moon, from China and Russia to friends in Europe and Middle East. That is all good. The United States should cooperate \u2014 and offer itself as a willing team leader \u2014 in exploring every aspect of the moon, from its geology and topography to its hydrology and cosmic history. In doing so, we can take \u201clow-Earth orbit\u201d cooperation to the moon, openly, eagerly and collegially.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, another looming orb \u2014 the red one \u2014 should become a serious focus of U.S. attention. Mars is waiting to be discovered, not by clever robots and rovers \u2014 though I support NASA\u2019s unmanned missions \u2014 but by living, breathing, walking, talking, caring and daring men and women.To make that happen, members of Congress, the Trump administration and the American public must care enough to make human exploration missions to Mars a national priority. To be clear, I do not mean spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a few hijinks or joy rides, allowing those who return to write books, tweet photos and talk of the novelty. I mean something very different.The United States\u2019 eyes \u2014 and our unified commitment \u2014 should focus on opening the door, in our time, to the great migration of humankind to Mars. Books aplenty have been written about how to do this, and they have inspired government and non-government leaders to make lofty plans. But plans without a detailed architecture, and without that \u201cnext step\u201d into the future, are just fantasy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmericans are good at writing fantasy, and incomparable at making the fantastic a reality. We did it with Mercury, Gemini, Apollo \u2014 and in thousands of other ways. It is time we get down to blueprints, architecture and implementation, and to take that next step \u2014 a sustainable international return to the moon, directly charting a pathway to Mars.The Trump administration and today\u2019s Congress, inspired by an American public impatient for space leadership, could start this engine. The next step would build on our early lunar landings and establish permanent settlements on the moon. In the meantime, preparations for permanent migration to the red planet can be made. All of this is within reach for humans alive now, but it starts with a unified next step in space. The nation best poised to make it happen is the United States.Just as President John F. Kennedy is remembered for starting our nation\u2019s drive to the moon, where Neil and I left footprints, the Trump administration and this Congress would be remembered decades forward for putting humans permanently on the moon and Americans on Mars \u2014 for making human footprints in red dust and subsequent migration possible.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs matter of orbital mechanics, missions from Earth to Mars for migration are complex. That said, human nature \u2014 and potentially the ultimate survival of our species \u2014 demands humanity\u2019s continued outward reach into the universe. Call it curiosity or calculation, strategic planning or destiny. Put simply: We explore, or we expire. That is why we must get on with it.In a world of division and distraction, this mission is unifying \u2014 for all Americans and for all humankind. So, I am personally glad we are headed back to the moon \u2014 and I thank President Trump and the vice president for their commitment. But my eyes drift higher, to the red orb that, even now, awaits an American flag and plaque that reads: \u201cWe Come in Peace for All Mankind.\u201dRead more:@SarcasticRover: Goodbye, Opportunity Rover. Thank you for letting humanity see Mars with your eyes.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We have the technology to build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Robert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Mike Pence: It\u2019s time for Congress to establish the Space Force Human nature demands humanity\u2019s continued outward reach into the universe. Opinion: Buzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars",
        "author": "Buzz Aldrin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Jerry Brown has some advice. Democrats should listen. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2656",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jerry-brown-has-some-advice-democrats-should-listen/2019/04/10/8c9ffb58-5b93-11e9-a00e-050dc7b82693_story.html",
        "text": "A onetime seminarian, Jerry Brown has always had a New Age, unworldly reputation. Columnist Mike Royko labeled him \u201cGovernor Moonbeam\u201d in the 1970s,\n and the nickname stuck, much to Royko\u2019s subsequent regret. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIt is high time to recognize this 81-year-old Democrat as one of the most successful politicians \u2014 and governors \u2014 in U.S. history. He was first elected to statewide office (as California\u2019s secretary of state) 12 years before Pete Buttigieg was born. He served two terms as governor from 1975 to 1983, then retreated into the political wilderness, only to reemerge as chairman of the California Democratic Party (1989-1991), mayor of Oakland (1999-2007), attorney general of California (2007-2011) and then once again governor (2011-2019) of a state with a gross domestic product bigger than India\u2019s. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAn ambitious platform seeking to combat climate change is being championed by progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.). (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)In his most recent stint in Sacramento, Brown inherited a $26 billion budget deficit and left a $14 billion surplus. To some extent, he got lucky, as he will be the first to acknowledge. His time as governor coincided with one of the greatest periods of wealth creation in U.S. history, much of it centered in Silicon Valley. But he made his own luck, too, by cutting spending and raising taxes \u2014 something few politicians dare to do. He even vetoed a budget passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature.Having started his political life as an enfant terrible, Brown is now a wise man of American politics. So he is a good person to ask the question of the moment: How to beat President Trump?Brown was typically attired in all black and typically erudite when we met last week in his apartment with sweeping views of San Francisco. He and his wife, two dogs in tow, had just arrived from the primitive ranch house a couple of hours north of the city where they spend most of their time. What other politician can quote, by memory, Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl E.\u00a0Schorske? Brown did, and he wasn\u2019t showing off.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a professional politician, he is impressed by Trump\u2019s political skills. \u201cHe has a chutzpah and insouciance and just charges ahead,\u201d Brown noted, and he is skilled at playing on the \u201cresentment\u201d of his followers. \u201cHe\u2019s convincing. .\u2009.\u2009. He\u2019s a dynamic speaker.\u201d Brown is particularly impressed by how Trump has turned the border wall into a \u201cmetaphor\u201d: \u201cHe\u2019s basically saying, \u2018Hey, those lefties and socialists are against it, I\u2019m for it, and it\u2019s protection.\u2019 And somehow that will protect you from closing down the factory or protect you from these strange social experiments.\u201dThat is not to say the former governor \u2014 who himself sought the presidency on three occasions (1976, 1980, 1992) \u2014 is an admirer of the current president. \u201cI don\u2019t want to believe he can be reelected, because I think it\u2019s dangerous,\u201d Brown said. \u201cI think we need stability at the highest level.\u201dTo counter Trump, he said, \u201cEven a scent of wimpiness would be fatal. .\u2009.\u2009. You have to not only be strong but exude strength.\u201d Don\u2019t trade insults \u2014 \u201cIf you insult back, then you violate a very important principle, and that is that voters don\u2019t like squabbling at City Hall.\u201d But at the same time, \u201cyou\u2019ve got to go toe to toe .\u2009.\u2009. just do it with charm,\u201d like John F. Kennedy did. And then, when the moment is right, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to hit him between the eyes, rhetorically.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis big advice is to think big \u2014 but not get too specific. Recalling Gary Hart\u2019s primary loss in 1984, he said, \u201cYou need just enough beef, but not too much to choke on it.\u201d He says the Democrats should promise better health care, infrastructure and education, cleaner energy and even space exploration. \u201cYou need the romance, you need the dream.\u201d That\u2019s why, as governor, he championed a costly high-speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. (His successor, Gov. Gavin Newsom, downsized the dream.) But he argues it\u2019s a mistake to lay out specific programs \u201cthat have trillion-dollar budget implications when you\u2019re not in a position to make those kind of decisions. That\u2019s jacking everybody up for a big letdown.\u201dBrown views global warming as an urgent and existential danger (along with nuclear war) but has doubts about the practicality of the Green New Deal. \u201cI like the idea of \u2018green.\u2019 I like the idea of \u2018New Deal.\u2019 But the New Deal occurred when there was 19 percent unemployment. That\u2019s a lot different from 4 percent today. So people\u2019s appetite for major change is not as great when everybody\u2019s working.\u201d A truer fiscal conservative than any leading Republican, Brown warns his party: \u201cWe have to be careful how we spend our money. It can\u2019t be \u2018everything for everybody.\u2019\u2009\u201dBrown admits that \u201cI\u2019m saying things that are not exactly consistent. I\u2019m saying we need the dream, we need to invest, we need to be the country that can do big things. On the other hand, I\u2019m saying you can\u2019t be stigmatized as an out-of-touch spender.\u201d It\u2019s sound, if contradictory, advice. The question now is which Democratic candidate can exemplify F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s definition of a \u201cfirst-rate intelligence\u201d \u2014 namely, \u201cthe ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.\u201dRead more:Nathan Gardels: Jerry Brown\u2019s next role as elder statesman on climateMegan McArdle: Why the United States will never have high-speed railJohn Hickenlooper: The Green New Deal sets us up for failure. We need a better approach.The Post\u2019s View: Want a Green New Deal? Here\u2019s a better one.The Ranking Committee: Joe Biden is getting dragged down by his own hands A conversation with one of the most successful politicians in U.S. history. Opinion: Jerry Brown has some advice. Democrats should listen.",
        "author": "Max Boot"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | President Trump wants my department to keep space safe. We\u2019re ready. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2657",
        "date": "2018-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-trump-wants-my-department-to-keep-space-safe-were-ready/2018/06/19/a3aa96f6-73f8-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html",
        "text": "Wilbur Ross is the U.S. secretary of commerce.\nWe often think of space as a big, empty void, except for the occasional planet, moon or star. But in reality, it\u2019s getting dangerously crowded up there.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMore than 20,000 pieces of space debris larger than four inches fly around the planet at blistering speeds of 15,000 to 20,000 mph. Perhaps more concerning are the estimated 600,000 even smaller objects that could still cause significant destruction and devastation. Remember, a lethal bullet is less than four inches long.\n This scenario presents a serious concern: It takes only one collision to wreak havoc on our satellite systems. Indeed, a significant portion of existing space debris resulted from just two explosive collisions\n in space.Story continues below advertisementAmid the sea of space debris, there are more than 800 operational American satellites, many critical to U.S. national security, communications, earth observations and weather forecasting, public safety, GPS and other vital activities. These devices are the magnificent result of billions of dollars of public and private investment, and efforts must be taken to protect them.AdvertisementAs space activity flourishes and companies begin launching constellations of thousands of satellites, the Trump administration recognizes the dangerous condition of our congested space environment and is taking long-overdue action.On Monday, President Trump signed Space Policy Directive 3, America\u2019s first comprehensive space traffic management policy. As Vice President Pence previewed during the National Space Symposium in April, the directive states that the Commerce Department should be the new lead civil agency for interfacing with the private sector on space situational awareness \u2014 sharing the available tracking data about all those objects in orbit and characterizing the state of the space environment \u2014 and space traffic management, which entails planning and coordinating space operations.\nStory continues below advertisementThe new directive emphasizes safety, stability and sustainability \u2014 foundational elements to successful space activities. Further, the president ordered Commerce to lead an interagency effort to establish best practices, technical guidelines, standards and risk assessments to preserve the space environment and prevent on-orbit collisions.AdvertisementThe president\u2019s directive also charges Commerce to develop a data-sharing construct with private operators. The department will engage with industry to better understand the needs of our new mission, possible applications and the potential for public-private collaborations that stimulate novel commercial uses of space data.To remain the flag of choice for commercial space activity, it is imperative that the United States lead this effort and enhance U.S.-based space activities. Future commercial activities in space \u2014 journeys to Mars, asteroid mining and space tourism \u2014 will depend upon companies\u2019 access to accurate and usable data that manages traffic and protects their equipment.Story continues below advertisementThe department\u2019s newly expanded space team and plethora of commercial space-related functions present the ideal environment for this responsibility. Unlike in past generations, activity in space is becoming largely commercial. Accordingly, Commerce is uniquely positioned to partner with industry on development of space traffic standards and best practices.AdvertisementWe are the friend-of-business agency. We work hand in hand with multiple industry sectors. And Commerce fully understands the value of public-private collaboration. Perhaps most importantly, our mind-set is that of a facilitator of safe commerce, not a typical, old-fashioned regulator. We have a new mantra: Government must engage not just in oversight but also insight and foresight.The department also houses a diverse array of invaluable experts. Our new Space Policy Advancing Commercial Enterprise Administration will coordinate the involvement of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which manages federal spectrum use for space communications. In addition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a proven track record of working with industry to conduct research and define scientific standards for business needs.Story continues below advertisementMoreover, Commerce\u2019s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration already oversees the country\u2019s largest operational civil satellite fleet and provides input to current space situational awareness and space traffic management functions as the world\u2019s authoritative resource for timely and accurate space environmental monitoring. And our International Trade Administration frequently assists companies with trade-promotion economic analyses.AdvertisementCommercial activity and congestion in space will only increase. By 2022, those 800 American satellites in space will increase to an estimated 15,000. As companies launch massive satellite constellations, the risk of collision damage becomes more severe. Even a small piece of space \u201cjunk\u201d could trigger a celestial-size pinball game \u2014 a chain reaction leading to incalculable damage.This threat is why President Trump\u2019s announcement comes at such a crucial time in history. Commerce is ready to get to work.Read more:\nPeter Wismer: Please, President Trump, don\u2019t bring war to space\nEric Sterner: Five myths about NASA\nThomas F. Rosenbaum and Edward C. Stone: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space\nSarah Kaplan and Dan Lamothe: Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019\nChristian Davenport: The unsung astronauts\n It\u2019s time to get space ready for business. Opinion: President Trump wants my department to keep space safe. We\u2019re ready.",
        "author": "Wilbur Ross"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | President Trump wants my department to keep space safe. We\u2019re ready. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2658",
        "date": "2018-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/president-trump-wants-my-department-to-keep-space-safe-were-ready/2018/06/19/a3aa96f6-73f8-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html",
        "text": "Wilbur Ross is the U.S. secretary of commerce.\nWe often think of space as a big, empty void, except for the occasional planet, moon or star. But in reality, it\u2019s getting dangerously crowded up there.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMore than 20,000 pieces of space debris larger than four inches fly around the planet at blistering speeds of 15,000 to 20,000 mph. Perhaps more concerning are the estimated 600,000 even smaller objects that could still cause significant destruction and devastation. Remember, a lethal bullet is less than four inches long.\n This scenario presents a serious concern: It takes only one collision to wreak havoc on our satellite systems. Indeed, a significant portion of existing space debris resulted from just two explosive collisions\n in space.Story continues below advertisementAmid the sea of space debris, there are more than 800 operational American satellites, many critical to U.S. national security, communications, earth observations and weather forecasting, public safety, GPS and other vital activities. These devices are the magnificent result of billions of dollars of public and private investment, and efforts must be taken to protect them.AdvertisementAs space activity flourishes and companies begin launching constellations of thousands of satellites, the Trump administration recognizes the dangerous condition of our congested space environment and is taking long-overdue action.On Monday, President Trump signed Space Policy Directive 3, America\u2019s first comprehensive space traffic management policy. As Vice President Pence previewed during the National Space Symposium in April, the directive states that the Commerce Department should be the new lead civil agency for interfacing with the private sector on space situational awareness \u2014 sharing the available tracking data about all those objects in orbit and characterizing the state of the space environment \u2014 and space traffic management, which entails planning and coordinating space operations.\nStory continues below advertisementThe new directive emphasizes safety, stability and sustainability \u2014 foundational elements to successful space activities. Further, the president ordered Commerce to lead an interagency effort to establish best practices, technical guidelines, standards and risk assessments to preserve the space environment and prevent on-orbit collisions.AdvertisementThe president\u2019s directive also charges Commerce to develop a data-sharing construct with private operators. The department will engage with industry to better understand the needs of our new mission, possible applications and the potential for public-private collaborations that stimulate novel commercial uses of space data.To remain the flag of choice for commercial space activity, it is imperative that the United States lead this effort and enhance U.S.-based space activities. Future commercial activities in space \u2014 journeys to Mars, asteroid mining and space tourism \u2014 will depend upon companies\u2019 access to accurate and usable data that manages traffic and protects their equipment.Story continues below advertisementThe department\u2019s newly expanded space team and plethora of commercial space-related functions present the ideal environment for this responsibility. Unlike in past generations, activity in space is becoming largely commercial. Accordingly, Commerce is uniquely positioned to partner with industry on development of space traffic standards and best practices.AdvertisementWe are the friend-of-business agency. We work hand in hand with multiple industry sectors. And Commerce fully understands the value of public-private collaboration. Perhaps most importantly, our mind-set is that of a facilitator of safe commerce, not a typical, old-fashioned regulator. We have a new mantra: Government must engage not just in oversight but also insight and foresight.The department also houses a diverse array of invaluable experts. Our new Space Policy Advancing Commercial Enterprise Administration will coordinate the involvement of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which manages federal spectrum use for space communications. In addition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a proven track record of working with industry to conduct research and define scientific standards for business needs.Story continues below advertisementMoreover, Commerce\u2019s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration already oversees the country\u2019s largest operational civil satellite fleet and provides input to current space situational awareness and space traffic management functions as the world\u2019s authoritative resource for timely and accurate space environmental monitoring. And our International Trade Administration frequently assists companies with trade-promotion economic analyses.AdvertisementCommercial activity and congestion in space will only increase. By 2022, those 800 American satellites in space will increase to an estimated 15,000. As companies launch massive satellite constellations, the risk of collision damage becomes more severe. Even a small piece of space \u201cjunk\u201d could trigger a celestial-size pinball game \u2014 a chain reaction leading to incalculable damage.This threat is why President Trump\u2019s announcement comes at such a crucial time in history. Commerce is ready to get to work.Read more:\nPeter Wismer: Please, President Trump, don\u2019t bring war to space\nEric Sterner: Five myths about NASA\nThomas F. Rosenbaum and Edward C. Stone: This is exactly the wrong time to retreat from space\nSarah Kaplan and Dan Lamothe: Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019\nChristian Davenport: The unsung astronauts\n It\u2019s time to get space ready for business. Opinion: President Trump wants my department to keep space safe. We\u2019re ready.",
        "author": "Wilbur Ross"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Iron-air batteries: Huge green-energy breakthrough, or just a lot of hype? (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2659",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/27/iron-air-batteries-huge-green-energy-breakthrough-or-just-lot-hype/",
        "text": "The most important news story of 1903 received modest coverage, and it wasn\u2019t very accurate.Two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, conducted four machine-powered, heavier-than-air flights under human control on a single day in December. The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, not far from the Kitty Hawk, N.C., testing ground, ran an exaggerated account of the Wright Brothers\u2019 triumph \u2014 but in Dayton, a hometown paper refused to mention it. \u201cMan will never fly,\u201d a local editor harrumphed (perhaps apocryphally). \u201cAnd if he does, he won\u2019t be from Dayton.\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAnother possible milestone of technology passed quietly not long ago. It might be the beginning of the end for fossil fuels and the key to reaching the goal of a green power grid. If so, it will certainly be among the most important stories of the year \u2014 bigger than space tourism, bigger than the Arizona election audit, bigger than the discovery that the amazing Simone Biles is human, not a god.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne caveat: Very few engineering breakthroughs change the world. Most end up being less than meets the eye. That said, let\u2019s have a look.A Boston-area company, Form Energy, announced recently that it has created a battery prototype that stores large amounts of power and releases it not over hours, but over more than four days. And that isn\u2019t the best part. The battery\u2019s active ingredients are iron and oxygen, both incredibly plentiful here on God\u2019s green Earth \u2014 and therefore reliably cheap.Put the two facts together, and you arrive at a sort of tipping point for green energy: reliable power from renewable sources at less than $20 per kilowatt-hour.Some readers of this column will be experts in battery technology, and for them it may be useful to note that the history of battery engineering is littered with duds that were heavy on hype and big on disappointment \u2014 including earlier iron-air cells.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther readers (and this columnist) are not experts. For them, it may be helpful to explain why the right storage battery could be so crucial to a climate-friendly energy future \u2014 whether it is this battery or a better one down the road.Use of renewable energy sources, especially wind and solar, has grown dramatically over the past generation, but renewables still comprise a small slice of the total U.S. energy budget. Storage is holding them back. People need electricity all the time, not just when the sun shines or the wind blows.The cost of storage is critical. Utilities will change sources if the price is right. Coal used to be king in the power sector, but cheap natural gas has cut coal\u2019s share of the energy diet in half since 2005. Renewables will never meet their potential until battery storage for green power is cost-competitive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSay, $20 or less.Form Energy is no seat-of-the-pants outfit. Its founders include Mateo Jaramillo, former head of battery development for Tesla, and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang, among the world\u2019s foremost battery scientists. Investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos, the iron and steel colossus ArcelorMittal, and MIT\u2019s The Engine, a strategic fund aimed at long-term solutions to big problems.At Tesla, Jaramillo understood that electric vehicles are a limited solution to greenhouse emissions as long as batteries are charged by burning fossil fuels. His new venture looked at past disappointments in battery technology to find the most promising for a new approach.Story continues below advertisementSmall pellets of iron \u2014 among the five most plentiful elements in the Earth\u2019s crust \u2014 release energy when exposed to oxygen. By reversing the process of oxidation (commonly known as rusting), the battery stores energy. Repeatedly rusting and unrusting the iron allows the cell to charge and discharge electricity.AdvertisementAccording to its announcement, Form Energy has the process working well under lab conditions. The next step is a one-megawatt pilot project with an electric utility in Minnesota, set to begin after the project battery\u2019s expected completion in late 2023. If successful, the collaboration could lead to a larger project to power part of the utility\u2019s system.Then we\u2019ll begin to know just how important this is.Story continues below advertisementAnd wait \u2014 as the old TV ads liked to say \u2014 there\u2019s more. This battery might be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize, too. The best rechargeable batteries currently rely on lithium as their vital ingredient, a rare earth element roughly 2,000 times less plentiful than iron. Global security experts have talked about a coming \u201cwar\u201d for lithium as the rare element powers the future.If iron can take over large-scale storage from lithium, it will cool the flame under that kettle. The United States can aim for self-sufficiency in storage batteries. And this truly will be a blockbuster story of 2021.correctionAn earlier version of this column was briefly amended to state, incorrectly, the cost of battery storage in terms of megawatts. That cost is properly measured in kilowatt hours. It also incorrectly described lithium as a \"rare earth mineral\"; it is an element. And it mischaracterized a collaboration between Form Energy and an electric utility in Minnesota. Form Energy is working with the utility on a one-megawatt pilot project to begin after the project battery's expected completion in late 2023; if successful, the collaboration could lead to a larger project to power a portion of the utility\u2019s system. The project will not power the utility\u2019s entire system. This version has been corrected.Read more:Mark P. Coombs: In Virginia, climate progress and preservation can work togetherThea Riofrancos and Mark Paul: Biden risks botching a key chance to fight climate changeThe Post\u2019s View: Biden promises big on climate change. Delivering will be much harder.Katrina vanden Heuvel: A \u2018Just Transition\u2019 clean energy revolution can be a boon for West Virginia \u2014 and the country If successful \u2014 emphasis on 'if' \u2014 the technology could signal the beginning of the end for fossil fuels. Opinion: Iron-air batteries: Huge green-energy breakthrough, or just a lot of hype?",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Our satellites are prime targets for a cyberattack. And things could get worse. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2660",
        "date": "2019-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-satellites-are-prime-targets-for-a-cyberattack-and-things-could-get-worse/2019/05/07/31c85438-7041-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html",
        "text": "Gregory Falco is a cyber research fellow at Harvard University\u2019s Belfer Center and a postdoctoral security researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is the founder and chief executive of NeuroMesh, a tech security company.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightOne minute. That\u2019s how long it took me last month to demonstrate to a major broadcasting company and production team how to access and restart a leading satellite Internet\n provider\u2019s control system. Five minutes is how long it took me to demonstrate how to gain full control of it. Hackers are always improving their ability to break into our digital infrastructure. Yet the computer systems running our satellites haven\u2019t kept up, making them prime targets for an attack. This makes our space assets a massive vulnerability \u2014 and it could get much worse if we\u2019re not careful.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis past weekend, SpaceX won approval\n from the Federal Communications Commission to increase the number of low-flying satellites as part of its Starlink project so that they can provide faster Internet access to the world. Unfortunately, access will be faster for both legitimate users and hackers alike. The FCC does not require applicants to publicly demonstrate how they will secure these satellites or the Internet they plan to provide. SpaceX, like other private space companies, has shared virtually no information about its cybersecurity efforts or plans.This is extremely disconcerting, considering the potential ramifications of a satellite being hacked. The most mundane outcome is that the satellite will no longer function, but the other extreme is for an attacker to break into a satellite and take over any thrusters (which SpaceX has insisted its satellites will have) and then propel the satellite into critical infrastructure and military satellites in other orbits. In other words, attackers could possibly use the hacked satellite as a kinetic weapon.There has long been\n a void of attention to securing space infrastructure, ranging from space-faring rovers to satellite ground-control systems that manage all the space-based assets. Virtually no policy or oversight agency exists concerning securing space assets \u2014 something I\u2019ve discussed with government leadership to little avail. While the FCC regulates communications, it should not necessarily be responsible for all things space security. Perhaps the new Space Development Agency\n could be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis leaves space security in the hands of the private sector, which is exploiting the recent ease of access to space. The advent of small satellites known as CubeSats offers the chance to launch a satellite into orbit for as little as $30,000\n\n. And because the government wants to encourage economic activity in this area, requirements to do so are extremely light. This leaves those who are creating the satellites responsible for the cybersecurity of their assets, which is not usually part of the rocket scientist\u2019s traditional skill set.As a space cybersecurity researcher, I am excited about the renewed interest in space from both the commercial and exploratory perspectives. But we need to be strategic about the security of these space systems. Unlike \u201cInternet of things\u201d devices such as baby monitors, which we purchase for less than $100 and discard or sell once a new model comes out, satellites often remain in orbit for much longer and are less dispensable. So if we don\u2019t consider the cybersecurity of the space asset now, we\u2019ll likely be dealing with the ramifications of that for several years to come. The lack of government intervention in satellite security does not mean that we can ignore cybersecurity as an issue.Private space companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb and Blue Origin need to join the conversation about cybersecurity and help consumers understand that they are taking it seriously (if they are). (Blue Origin\u2019s founder and owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post.) Right now, there are several job openings for information security analysts at private space companies, indicating that they are likely hurting for talent and are behind in figuring out their security. This isn\u2019t surprising given that space is hard, and traditional IT experts don\u2019t have the right skill sets for a space cybersecurity job. Space systems have unique requirements that are more akin to an industrial control system, such as an energy smart meter, than to an email server.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPrivate space companies need to start a dialogue with the security research community about their particular challenges so that we can help. They should also be transparent with the FCC that they need help in securing their infrastructure. The last thing we need is for China or Russia to take over SpaceX\u2019s satellites and wreak havoc on our space assets.Read more:Arthur H. House: We\u2019d be crippled by a cyberattack on our utilitiesAlexandra Petri: Go to space, Howard SchultzJoelle Renstrom: Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all.Stewart Baker: The U.S. needs to think about the unthinkable on cybersecurityMichael O\u2019Hanlon: The Space Force is a misguided idea. Congress should turn it down. The last thing we need is for China or Russia to wreak havoc on our space assets. Opinion: Our satellites are prime targets for a cyberattack. And things could get worse.",
        "author": "Gregory Falco"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Our satellites are prime targets for a cyberattack. And things could get worse. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2661",
        "date": "2019-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-satellites-are-prime-targets-for-a-cyberattack-and-things-could-get-worse/2019/05/07/31c85438-7041-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html",
        "text": "Gregory Falco is a cyber research fellow at Harvard University\u2019s Belfer Center and a postdoctoral security researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is the founder and chief executive of NeuroMesh, a tech security company.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightOne minute. That\u2019s how long it took me last month to demonstrate to a major broadcasting company and production team how to access and restart a leading satellite Internet\n provider\u2019s control system. Five minutes is how long it took me to demonstrate how to gain full control of it. Hackers are always improving their ability to break into our digital infrastructure. Yet the computer systems running our satellites haven\u2019t kept up, making them prime targets for an attack. This makes our space assets a massive vulnerability \u2014 and it could get much worse if we\u2019re not careful.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis past weekend, SpaceX won approval\n from the Federal Communications Commission to increase the number of low-flying satellites as part of its Starlink project so that they can provide faster Internet access to the world. Unfortunately, access will be faster for both legitimate users and hackers alike. The FCC does not require applicants to publicly demonstrate how they will secure these satellites or the Internet they plan to provide. SpaceX, like other private space companies, has shared virtually no information about its cybersecurity efforts or plans.This is extremely disconcerting, considering the potential ramifications of a satellite being hacked. The most mundane outcome is that the satellite will no longer function, but the other extreme is for an attacker to break into a satellite and take over any thrusters (which SpaceX has insisted its satellites will have) and then propel the satellite into critical infrastructure and military satellites in other orbits. In other words, attackers could possibly use the hacked satellite as a kinetic weapon.There has long been\n a void of attention to securing space infrastructure, ranging from space-faring rovers to satellite ground-control systems that manage all the space-based assets. Virtually no policy or oversight agency exists concerning securing space assets \u2014 something I\u2019ve discussed with government leadership to little avail. While the FCC regulates communications, it should not necessarily be responsible for all things space security. Perhaps the new Space Development Agency\n could be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis leaves space security in the hands of the private sector, which is exploiting the recent ease of access to space. The advent of small satellites known as CubeSats offers the chance to launch a satellite into orbit for as little as $30,000\n\n. And because the government wants to encourage economic activity in this area, requirements to do so are extremely light. This leaves those who are creating the satellites responsible for the cybersecurity of their assets, which is not usually part of the rocket scientist\u2019s traditional skill set.As a space cybersecurity researcher, I am excited about the renewed interest in space from both the commercial and exploratory perspectives. But we need to be strategic about the security of these space systems. Unlike \u201cInternet of things\u201d devices such as baby monitors, which we purchase for less than $100 and discard or sell once a new model comes out, satellites often remain in orbit for much longer and are less dispensable. So if we don\u2019t consider the cybersecurity of the space asset now, we\u2019ll likely be dealing with the ramifications of that for several years to come. The lack of government intervention in satellite security does not mean that we can ignore cybersecurity as an issue.Private space companies such as SpaceX, OneWeb and Blue Origin need to join the conversation about cybersecurity and help consumers understand that they are taking it seriously (if they are). (Blue Origin\u2019s founder and owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post.) Right now, there are several job openings for information security analysts at private space companies, indicating that they are likely hurting for talent and are behind in figuring out their security. This isn\u2019t surprising given that space is hard, and traditional IT experts don\u2019t have the right skill sets for a space cybersecurity job. Space systems have unique requirements that are more akin to an industrial control system, such as an energy smart meter, than to an email server.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPrivate space companies need to start a dialogue with the security research community about their particular challenges so that we can help. They should also be transparent with the FCC that they need help in securing their infrastructure. The last thing we need is for China or Russia to take over SpaceX\u2019s satellites and wreak havoc on our space assets.Read more:Arthur H. House: We\u2019d be crippled by a cyberattack on our utilitiesAlexandra Petri: Go to space, Howard SchultzJoelle Renstrom: Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all.Stewart Baker: The U.S. needs to think about the unthinkable on cybersecurityMichael O\u2019Hanlon: The Space Force is a misguided idea. Congress should turn it down. The last thing we need is for China or Russia to wreak havoc on our space assets. Opinion: Our satellites are prime targets for a cyberattack. And things could get worse.",
        "author": "Gregory Falco"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | America needs a long-term space strategy (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2662",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-needs-a-long-term-space-strategy/2020/02/07/ecc9519a-476b-11ea-91ab-ce439aa5c7c1_story.html",
        "text": "I could not agree more with the Feb. 1 editorial \u201cLost in space.\u201d I just finished auditing the wonderful free course from edX/MITx on \u201cEngineering the Space Shuttle.\u201d One thing made very clear was that in addition to technical challenges, schedule target and funding changes caused by the whims of the government in Washington were severely disruptive. So the congressional suggestion that the United States define a long-term plan for the space program that \u201cspans several Congresses and Administrations\u201d makes a lot of sense. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe longer-range target of Mars is desirable, but starting with a base on the moon will provide much less risk in learning how to manage creating permanent facilities in hostile environments.The United States should participate in exploring and developing this frontier to remain competitive.We will accrue benefits in technology and materials development and gain from use of lunar resources and environments. The United States is not the only nation with eyes on the moon.Hopefully, a compromise can be found that satisfies objectives for exploration of Mars and the moon.Nick Carter, Chantilly\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: America needs a long-term space strategy",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2663",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-put-a-man-on-the-moon-but-it-might-be-harder-to-do-the-same-on-mars/2021/02/25/5d85caba-76e3-11eb-9537-496158cc5fd9_story.html",
        "text": "The thrilling success of NASA\u2019s Perseverance mission to Mars has captured well-deserved national attention. As occurs intermittently, the air is filled with bold predictions of a revived U.S. human spaceflight program, with Mars as its goal and the moon as its staging area.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightI hope it happens. A national commission I co-chaired a few years ago concluded that, for reasons tangible (scientific discovery, economic spinoffs, national security) and intangible (inspiring of young talent to scientific pursuits, national morale and prestige, the elevation of human aspiration and imagination), a resumption of our attempts to reach beyond low Earth orbit was justified. If and when humankind reaches that next frontier, though, there are reasons to doubt that it will be a U.S. government space project that leads us there. Ironically, the society that put a man on the moon may be just the wrong one to succeed in this next great endeavor, at least through a grand national project like Apollo.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn launching what became Apollo, President John F. Kennedy said we should attempt it not because it was easy, but because it was hard. As dazzling as the Perseverance achievement is, it involves radiation-proof robots, not fragile humans, and a seven-foot, one-metric-ton craft, not the 40-metric-ton, two-story system that a human landing, life support and ascent vehicle would require.It will be exponentially harder for humans to fly safely to Mars, establish a sustained presence and survive to return to Earth. To do so, our commission concluded, would require making the goal a central, single-minded priority of the U.S. space program; a relentless, unswerving multi-decade commitment to a pre-agreed path to reach the goal; and constant investments in amounts well above the rate of inflation. American democracy is not very good at any of those things.Our system affords us, thank goodness, a chance to change national direction every two years, and presidential leadership quadrennially. That competitiveness and responsiveness enable the quick correction of mistakes and the flexibility to navigate changed circumstances. What it doesn\u2019t excel at is sustaining long-term projects of distant or indirect benefit to the voting public.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEach new national administration brings its own agenda. Presidents are always more interested in starting initiatives than in extending those they inherit. Fiscal, economic and other national policies can be altered frequently, and often should be. Yet this pattern has also applied to space policy, jerking NASA through a series of major strategic shifts, from Apollo to the space shuttle to the International Space Station to asteroid capture and, finally, to thinking about reaching Mars with a manned mission via the moon.\u201cFinally,\u201d I should say, for now. The new Biden administration\u2019s overall agenda is bigger and more expensive than any before it, yet it appears to leave little or no space for space.With a micromanaging Congress resetting budgets on an annual basis, picking out a priority for NASA and sticking to it for 20 years or more is likely not in the cards; we\u2019ve proved very poor at \u201cperseverance.\u201d Plus, our legislators regularly carve out NASA dollars for favored non-exploratory causes such as environmental monitoring, and fiercely protect multiple space centers and resulting costly redundancies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven if a consensus plan were reached, and some magical mechanism invented for maintaining it over changing administrations, the money wouldn\u2019t be there. The nation\u2019s elected representatives continue spending vastly beyond revenue and legislating promises that cannot conceivably be paid for. The odds are that a crisis in the safety net \u2014 forcing some combination of massive tax increases, benefit reductions and further asphyxiation of discretionary programs such as NASA (which has never registered more than tepid public support) \u2014 will arrive here before we arrive on Mars.So if our system is ill-suited to the task, what kind of nation would be most likely to reach this next frontier? Oh, in theory, one with a patient, farsighted culture, accustomed by history to taking the very long view. A country with an authoritarian regime, capable of commandeering the massive resources necessary without making concessions to public opinion. Perhaps one with a \u201cleader for life\u201d intent on establishing his realm as dominant in both reputation and technological power. Just speaking hypothetically.Will Americans spend the next half-century watching Chinese astronauts or robots \u201cboldly go where no man has gone before\u201d? My hopes that I\u2019m wrong rest with the same freedoms that operate politically to make a U.S. government Mars mission so difficult.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe superiority of free enterprise has given birth to nimble private companies, unencumbered by political realities, backed by private fortunes imbued with the explorer spirit and, in some cases, a dream of profits. Either on their own or through increasingly harmonious partnerships with NASA, they give us the best chance that, despite our mismatched system of government, the first human on Mars, as on the moon, will be a free citizen of a free country.Read more:Read a letter responding to this column: The age of human space flight is overDavid Von Drehle: Humans don\u2019t have to set foot on Mars to visit itLetters to the Editor: Let the robots go to MarsBuzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to MarsThe Post\u2019s View: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whimsLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. NASA\u2019s Perseverance is great, but a manned flight would be hugely more challenging. Opinion: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars.",
        "author": "Mitch Daniels"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of Mars (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2664",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-a-generation-of-1930s-rocketeers-led-us-to-unlock-the-secrets-of-mars/2021/02/26/ed3790bc-7841-11eb-948d-19472e683521_story.html",
        "text": "On the campus of the California Institute of Technology, circa 1936, a little group of scientists and hobbyists began to get serious about building rockets. This was crackpot science at the time, and back then, crackpots weren\u2019t generally encouraged. Today we give them IPOs and make them billionaires.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut the rocketeers were led by a visionary scientist named Frank Malina, who was a favorite of the esteemed CalTech professor and bon vivant Theodore von Karman. Von Karman\u2019s sponsorship kept them going, even as campus wags dubbed them \u201cthe Suicide Squad\u201d on account of the volume of shrapnel their haywire experiments produced. Perhaps mindful of insurance premiums, von Karman helped to arrange the acquisition of a remote testing ground in the Arroyo Seco \u2014 the dry creek bed \u2014 north of Pasadena\u2019s famous Rose Bowl stadium, at the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. And that is why, some 85\u00a0years later, if you go to that dry gulch you\u2019ll find the magnificent Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the world\u2019s citadels of science, exploration and advanced manufacturing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of the cheers that erupted when the rover Perseverance settled gently on the surface of Mars the other day were voiced by the people of JPL, the descendants of those dauntless CalTech crackpots. Perseverance is more than a catchy name for this mission; it\u2019s a one-word summation of the JPL culture. Perseverance through the early skepticism about rocket technology; perseverance through the misguided space shuttle decades; perseverance through high-profile failures to arrive at a mission that bristles with confidence and purpose.Those who watched the rover land on Feb. 18 get the picture. A package full of miracles, launched into space atop an Atlas V rocket last year, finally drew near to the Red Planet and began falling through the thin atmosphere, pulled by weak gravity. Suddenly, a parachute deployed at precisely the right moment and a heat shield fell away, tumbling downward as we watched from many millions of miles away. Closer to the surface, the lander began firing rockets to steer its final descent, until \u2014 just above ground \u2014 the rover itself deployed on wires like a spider on its silk. Perseverance settled gently, and the lander flew off to die.The whole sequence was as elegant as it had been inconceivable to less audacious minds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Perseverance is on the move, beginning what promises to be a long career of exploration, prowling a now-parched seabed for signs of long-ago life. The rover carries a drone helicopter on its belly \u2014 another miracle to be revealed on another day \u2014 as it makes its way over the Martian terrain. Among its tasks is to package up some scientific samples to be collected and returned to Earth by a future mission.This is JPL\u2019s sweet spot \u2014 where starry-eyed imagination meets can-do engineering. JPL has sent Voyager craft into interstellar space; flown a probe that encountered the rings of Saturn; synced up with Venus and Mercury; and snapped close-ups of volcanoes on moons of Jupiter. When NASA lost its way after the glories of the Apollo lunar missions and nearly vanished into the sucking black hole of the space shuttle program, its JPL field center kept the true flame of exploration kindled in Pasadena. The shuttle \u2014 too small to be very useful but big enough to absorb virtually every available dollar \u2014 was wildly dangerous, by far the deadliest craft in the history of spaceflight. Scientifically, it was a three-decade dud.Through it all, JPL conceived and designed space probes, observatories and rovers that performed remarkably well, on balance, despite a shoestring budget. While shuttle drivers were fiddling with tomato seeds a few hundred miles from Earth and unloading satellites that could have been boosted into orbit on unmanned rockets at a fraction of the cost, JPL was getting up close and personal with Neptune.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman spaceflight has always had an edge in sexiness and romance over the tirelessly productive JPL robots. With Perseverance, that gap may be starting to narrow, though. Choosing its own landing spot, guiding itself to that perfect touchdown and immediately snapping a selfie of its own Martian shadow, the automobile-size rover displayed a brand of intelligence amazingly anthropomorphic. And it\u2019s just getting started.We will unlock the secrets of Mars \u2014 not by sending vulnerable human flesh into its desperately harsh and deadly environment, but by sending ever wiser, ever hardier ambassadors designed to be our eyes, ears and hands. And not just Mars, but, as Buzz Lightyear says: to infinity \u2014 and beyond. It is a possibility worth dreaming of despite derision, worth working for despite obstacles, through decade after decade along a dry creek bed in Pasadena. And when it comes true in spectacular style, it\u2019s worth all the cheers and tears of joy that a roomful of visionaries and geniuses can muster.\n\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more from David Von Drehle\u2019s archive.Read more:Read a letter in response to this column: Giving credit to a pioneer in rocketryMitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars.David Von Drehle: Humans don\u2019t have to set foot on Mars to visit itLetters to the Editor: Let the robots go to MarsJulian Brave NoiseCat: Why Senate Republicans fear Deb HaalandStory continues below advertisementLeana S. Wen: Both sides of the school reopening debate have it wrongAdvertisementThe Post's View: Mohammed bin Salman is guilty of murder. Biden should not give him a pass. Perseverance is more than a catchy name for a rover; it\u2019s a one-word summation of the JPL culture. Opinion: How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of Mars",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of Mars (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2665",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-a-generation-of-1930s-rocketeers-led-us-to-unlock-the-secrets-of-mars/2021/02/26/ed3790bc-7841-11eb-948d-19472e683521_story.html",
        "text": "On the campus of the California Institute of Technology, circa 1936, a little group of scientists and hobbyists began to get serious about building rockets. This was crackpot science at the time, and back then, crackpots weren\u2019t generally encouraged. Today we give them IPOs and make them billionaires.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut the rocketeers were led by a visionary scientist named Frank Malina, who was a favorite of the esteemed CalTech professor and bon vivant Theodore von Karman. Von Karman\u2019s sponsorship kept them going, even as campus wags dubbed them \u201cthe Suicide Squad\u201d on account of the volume of shrapnel their haywire experiments produced. Perhaps mindful of insurance premiums, von Karman helped to arrange the acquisition of a remote testing ground in the Arroyo Seco \u2014 the dry creek bed \u2014 north of Pasadena\u2019s famous Rose Bowl stadium, at the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. And that is why, some 85\u00a0years later, if you go to that dry gulch you\u2019ll find the magnificent Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the world\u2019s citadels of science, exploration and advanced manufacturing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of the cheers that erupted when the rover Perseverance settled gently on the surface of Mars the other day were voiced by the people of JPL, the descendants of those dauntless CalTech crackpots. Perseverance is more than a catchy name for this mission; it\u2019s a one-word summation of the JPL culture. Perseverance through the early skepticism about rocket technology; perseverance through the misguided space shuttle decades; perseverance through high-profile failures to arrive at a mission that bristles with confidence and purpose.Those who watched the rover land on Feb. 18 get the picture. A package full of miracles, launched into space atop an Atlas V rocket last year, finally drew near to the Red Planet and began falling through the thin atmosphere, pulled by weak gravity. Suddenly, a parachute deployed at precisely the right moment and a heat shield fell away, tumbling downward as we watched from many millions of miles away. Closer to the surface, the lander began firing rockets to steer its final descent, until \u2014 just above ground \u2014 the rover itself deployed on wires like a spider on its silk. Perseverance settled gently, and the lander flew off to die.The whole sequence was as elegant as it had been inconceivable to less audacious minds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Perseverance is on the move, beginning what promises to be a long career of exploration, prowling a now-parched seabed for signs of long-ago life. The rover carries a drone helicopter on its belly \u2014 another miracle to be revealed on another day \u2014 as it makes its way over the Martian terrain. Among its tasks is to package up some scientific samples to be collected and returned to Earth by a future mission.This is JPL\u2019s sweet spot \u2014 where starry-eyed imagination meets can-do engineering. JPL has sent Voyager craft into interstellar space; flown a probe that encountered the rings of Saturn; synced up with Venus and Mercury; and snapped close-ups of volcanoes on moons of Jupiter. When NASA lost its way after the glories of the Apollo lunar missions and nearly vanished into the sucking black hole of the space shuttle program, its JPL field center kept the true flame of exploration kindled in Pasadena. The shuttle \u2014 too small to be very useful but big enough to absorb virtually every available dollar \u2014 was wildly dangerous, by far the deadliest craft in the history of spaceflight. Scientifically, it was a three-decade dud.Through it all, JPL conceived and designed space probes, observatories and rovers that performed remarkably well, on balance, despite a shoestring budget. While shuttle drivers were fiddling with tomato seeds a few hundred miles from Earth and unloading satellites that could have been boosted into orbit on unmanned rockets at a fraction of the cost, JPL was getting up close and personal with Neptune.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuman spaceflight has always had an edge in sexiness and romance over the tirelessly productive JPL robots. With Perseverance, that gap may be starting to narrow, though. Choosing its own landing spot, guiding itself to that perfect touchdown and immediately snapping a selfie of its own Martian shadow, the automobile-size rover displayed a brand of intelligence amazingly anthropomorphic. And it\u2019s just getting started.We will unlock the secrets of Mars \u2014 not by sending vulnerable human flesh into its desperately harsh and deadly environment, but by sending ever wiser, ever hardier ambassadors designed to be our eyes, ears and hands. And not just Mars, but, as Buzz Lightyear says: to infinity \u2014 and beyond. It is a possibility worth dreaming of despite derision, worth working for despite obstacles, through decade after decade along a dry creek bed in Pasadena. And when it comes true in spectacular style, it\u2019s worth all the cheers and tears of joy that a roomful of visionaries and geniuses can muster.\n\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more from David Von Drehle\u2019s archive.Read more:Read a letter in response to this column: Giving credit to a pioneer in rocketryMitch Daniels: The U.S. put a man on the moon. But it might be harder to do the same on Mars.David Von Drehle: Humans don\u2019t have to set foot on Mars to visit itLetters to the Editor: Let the robots go to MarsJulian Brave NoiseCat: Why Senate Republicans fear Deb HaalandStory continues below advertisementLeana S. Wen: Both sides of the school reopening debate have it wrongAdvertisementThe Post's View: Mohammed bin Salman is guilty of murder. Biden should not give him a pass. Perseverance is more than a catchy name for a rover; it\u2019s a one-word summation of the JPL culture. Opinion: How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of Mars",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | She would have been the first American woman in space. Congress held her back. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2666",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/25/she-would-have-been-first-american-woman-space-congress-held-her-back/",
        "text": "Martha Ackmann is the author of \u201cThe Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight.\u201dGeraldyn \u201cJerrie\u201d Cobb has died. She died March 18 in Sun City Center, Fla., of Alzheimer\u2019s disease. She was 88. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightChances are you don\u2019t know Jerrie Cobb\u2019s name. But you would have. Were it not for sexism at NASA and Congress, Cobb would have been the first American woman in space. In the early 1960s, Cobb went through secret testing in hope of becoming an astronaut. William Randolph Lovelace II, head of NASA\u2019s Life Sciences, was responsible for choosing the famed Mercury 7 astronauts. He was curious to find out how female pilots might fare on the same rigorous physical exams. He selected Cobb for the mission. Cobb was the 1959 Woman of the Year in Aviation and held world records for altitude, speed and distance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe did not disappoint. Cobb scored as well and \u2014 in some cases \u2014 better than John Glenn, Alan Shepard and the rest. Lovelace then needed to judge if she was a fluke and tapped 25 other top-flight female pilots for testing. Twelve more made the cut. But just as the women were set for final space flight simulation tests, NASA pulled the plug. The space agency viewed Lovelace\u2019s visionary experiments as just that \u2014 experiments. It then announced that it did not have the time or money to waste on women.Cobb didn\u2019t give up. She took her fight to Congress and forced a 1962 hearing to determine astronaut qualifications. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson didn\u2019t help. When he got wind of the secret testing, he fired off a letter to NASA demanding, \u201cLets Stop This Now!\u201d At the hearing, Glenn \u2014 fresh from orbiting the Earth \u2014 made things even worse. Asked if women were suited for space flight, he responded: \u201cThe men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes. . . . The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.\u201d When it came time for Cobb to make her case, she was nervous. She hated the limelight. But there was too much on the line, and she let her plain-spoken Oklahoma clarity take over. Her opening sentence was simple and intensely American \u2014 or as American as we hope to be: \u201cWe seek only a place in our nation\u2019s space future without discrimination,\u201d she said. Then Cobb kicked off her black pumps under the hearing table and stared the men down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCobb never did become an astronaut. Congress decided all astronauts would be military jet pilots. Since women were excluded from those ranks, space was off limits as well.It would take the social changes of the civil rights movement and the women\u2019s movement before Sally Ride launched in 1983 and 16 more yearsbefore Eileen Collins became the first female space shuttle commander.I was with Cobb in 1999 when Collins made history. Collins had invited the Mercury 13 women to stand in witness to what they had been denied. It was a long few days at the Cape, hot and swarming with mosquitoes. The launch endured multiple scrubs, and everyone was weary. The women passed the time in coffee shops, catching up on family news, but Cobb was nowhere to be found. She would appear for brief moments and then disappear in a flash. No one knew where she spent the night \u2014 certainly not in the hotel with them. Cobb would show up every morning in the same blue and white polo shirt and rumpled slacks. \u201cBet she\u2019s sleeping on the beach,\u201d one of the women said. They knew better than to corral her.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen the skies cleared over Cape Canaveral, Collins and crew prepared for liftoff. No one paid much attention to the Mercury 13 women \u2014 just a bunch of older women with water bottles and pocketbooks. Finally, the boosters engaged and the ground rumbled. The women rose and cheered, but Cobb was nowhere around. Then I saw her down in front on the grass. She was alone, and her hands were spread wide across the ground feeling the tremor.Cobb once told me she would have given her life for space flight. She wanted one single chance to slip into orbit and stare at the vast wonder before her. While Cobb was never bitter, and she delighted in the accomplishments of today\u2019s female astronauts, there was about her a deep reservoir of disappointment. Solitary, laconic, inscrutable \u2014 she will always be to me that lone woman sitting in the grass with her hands spread wide.If she could not achieve her dream, Cobb at least wanted to feel what it would have been like.Read more:Mary Robinette Kowal: If space is the future, that future needs to include everyoneRobert Gebelhoff: NASA\u2019s latest gamble might not pay out. But it\u2019s worth it anyway.Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: We can build a colony on the moon. Let\u2019s do it.Mike Pence: It\u2019s time for Congress to establish the Space ForceTerry Virts: I was an astronaut. We need a Space Force. You may not know her name, but Jerrie Cobb was widely considered the leading contender to become America\u2019s first female astronaut. Then NASA pulled the plug. Opinion: She would have been the first American woman in space. Congress held her back.",
        "author": "Martha Ackmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Who\u2019s afraid of critical race theory? Not the students in my classes. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2667",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/23/space-traders-critical-race-theory-teaching/",
        "text": "Vincent Jungkunz is an associate professor of political science at Ohio University.In a short story called \u201cThe Space Traders,\u201d by civil rights lawyer and scholar Derrick Bell, visitors from outer space appear and offer to solve the climate crisis, eliminate the national debt and provide an energy source that would end the country\u2019s dependence on fossil fuels. In return, these space traders demand one thing: all Black people living in the United States. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightUltimately, the American public takes a vote, and it\u2019s no nail-biter \u2014 70 percent vote in favor of trading their fellow citizens.Bell\u2019s story, which I teach in a course on critical race theory, is partly meant to point out the ways in which throughout history, this White-majority country has traded the rights of Black people to gain a variety of socioeconomic benefits. In class, we discuss the many examples of such trades \u2014 slavery, the convict-leasing system, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining \u2014 and the ways these trades perpetuate racism today.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe also do something even more profound: We consider Bell\u2019s hypothetical trade more directly. I ask, if such an alien force were to appear now, would the American public vote in favor of trading all Black people into slavery for the benefits offered in the story?My classes are typically about 90 percent White and 10 percent students of color \u2014 the latter of whom are mostly Black students. The first time I conducted this lesson, I anticipated that students would say the country would reject this racist and genocidal trade. I was wrong. Not only did they say that the United States would accept the trade, but they did so by a clear majority, White and Black alike. Every year since I introduced this lesson, that majority has grown to the point where, a couple of years ago, every student in the classroom said Americans would send Black people into slavery, except for one who voted no \u2014 a Black student.When I ask students to provide evidence that the United States would accept this trade, storytelling emerges as a vital tool for uncovering truths. The White students begin by talking about their White friends, families, co-workers, classmates and neighbors. They share how the people they love and count on are blatantly racist \u2014 how these people regularly make racist jokes and derogatory comments, use racist epithets and show no compassion for those subjected to racist abuse. In response to this honesty, the Black students seem willing to open up about the pain they experience in a society in which racism is so pervasive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter these conversations, everything changes. The White students generally listen more, and with purpose. They tend to show deep respect toward their fellow students as not merely classmates but as members of a community, and they ask what they can do to challenge and dismantle the racism they witness.When these White students consider the question raised by Bell\u2019s story \u2014 one that might seem far-fetched to many \u2014 the hypothetical leads them to an honest accounting of White consciousness. Once they weigh the resources offered by the space traders against what they have witnessed throughout their lives, they willingly testify that, sadly, the people they love and have looked up to are also people who might engage in the horror of genocide.Without Bell\u2019s allegorical storytelling, without critical race theory, it\u2019s unlikely that such radical honesty and revelation would take place, in the classroom or beyond. Critical race theory offers tools for understanding the persistence of racism in the United States, as well as concepts such as White privilege, microaggressions, the construct of Whiteness, institutional racism and much more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese are powerful lessons that, when taught and learned, have the potential to bring real change. Sadly, it\u2019s this transformative power that many White people fear. Thus, we see Republican politicians and commentators, and parents across the country, waging a war of misinformation aimed at demonizing what just might be a way out of our racial nightmare.The people railing against critical race theory not only lose the opportunity to help dismantle racism in America but also lose the opportunity to claim healthy moral standing. My students, on the other hand, have forged ahead without letting fear derail their honesty about the racism they witness. And as they tell their truths, they lose nothing for it. In fact, they benefit from their openness. They gain the ability to empathize, to see others\u2019 pain \u2014 and they develop a vision of justice based on its ability to bring peace instead of hate and violence.Truth tellers learn to link their fates with the fates of those they\u2019ve been socialized to shun. Imagine the possibilities if all White people were to do the same.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:George F. Will: A teacher pushes back against K-12 critical race theory indoctrinationChristine Emba: Why conservatives really fear critical race theoryDana Milbank: Why does Biden hate the flag, family, grace, God and America?Greg Sargent: Kyrsten Sinema accidentally reveals the huge hole in her filibuster defenseDrew Goins: Sports used to lead social progress. Carl Nassib shows it\u2019s now the other way around. Teaching a story about racism, starring visitors from outer space, leads to truth-telling \u2014 and everybody learns. Opinion: Who\u2019s afraid of critical race theory? Not the students in my classes.",
        "author": "Vincent Jungkunz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Omissions about space, time and .\u2009.\u2009. romance novels (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2668",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-omissions-about-space-time-and--romance-novels/2018/11/16/7f61be2a-e9d0-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters.What might have beenOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightI was very disappointed to read in the Nov. 7 news article \u201cJudge blasts wildlife agency, says endangered wolves cannot be shot\u201d that the \u201cAmerican red wolf might have been saved from extinction Monday,\u201d sorry that some opportunity had been missed.Reading on, I found that\u00a0steps were being taken to save the red wolf, and soon my disappointment was focused in a different direction. Things that \u201cmight have been\u201d were possible at some point but are possible no longer. In fact, the red wolf may have been saved from extinction, unless there is some fatal defect to the plan that was not reported.Story continues below advertisementI am hopeful that correct English may also be saved from extinction.Wayne Chadwick, Rockville\u25cfThrowing away an opportunityIn the Nov. 3 Real Estate article \u201cIt all started with a plan to install a new bathtub,\u201d about\u00a0Jamie and James Coss\u2019s $300,000 house renovation, one thing made my blood boil: throwing a perfectly usable couch into a trash bin because it wouldn\u2019t fit in the hallway leading to a $1.2 million condo.AdvertisementTheir Logan Circle home is steps away from residents who could make good use of a couch. If the owner had left it on the curb, someone who needed it could have hauled it away. Or the owner could have spent an hour taking it to A Wider Circle, where I volunteer, or another such organization that helps people rise from poverty.Story continues below advertisementIf living in a furnished rental apartment for six months during their renovation was \u201cthe worst\u201d thing to befall this couple, then good for them. But perhaps now they can open their eyes \u2014 and hearts \u2014 to see how many of their neighbors live and to reevaluate this act.Jean Kaplan Teichroew, Silver Spring\u25cfThe No.1 priorityI was gratified to see climate change included on a priority list for the incoming Democratic House in the Nov. 7 editorial \u201cA good day for democracy.\u201d But I noted it was third on the list, after health care and guns. That is not the right order of things.AdvertisementHealth care and guns are of vital importance, but the fate of our planet does not depend on our quickly fixing those problems. The world\u2019s largest and most prestigious scientific body \u2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change \u2014 has warned us in no uncertain terms that the fate of our planet does depend on our getting our greenhouse-gas emissions on track very, very quickly. Subsequent scientific reports have confirmed and strengthened that conclusion.Story continues below advertisementWe have 12 years to reduce our emissions by at least \n45\u2009percent. This target is global, so wealthy countries must act faster. We can meet this goal, but only if we rapidly ramp up our efforts. States are doing their best to fill the hole left by the Trump administration, while the administration continues to dig deeper. But the states alone can\u2019t solve this problem. Climate change must be the first order of business for the new House, and a real, science-driven solution must be ready on Day One of the Congress that follows, when, hopefully, a new president will be ready to sign it into law.Donald M. Goldberg, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementThe writer is executive director of the Climate Law & Policy Project.\u25cfReading into romance novelsIn his Nov. 3 Free for All letter, \u201cA bad comparison all around,\u201d James Graham stated, \u201cA Senate confirmation never found now-Justice [Brett M.] Kavanaugh \u2018innocent.\u2019 .\u2009.\u2009. Only a court or jury can make such a finding.\u201d But even a court or jury finding of \u201cnot guilty\u201d is not a finding of innocence.\u00a0It is merely a finding that guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.\u00a0I can easily imagine a scenario in which evidence of sexual assault might not meet the standard necessary to convict someone of a crime but would be sufficient to sway a senator\u2019s vote on a Supreme Court nominee.Story continues below advertisementRick Talisman, Bethesda\u25cfNot innocent, not guiltyPalmer Rampell made some interesting and valid observations in his Nov. 4 Outlook essay, \u201cStacey Abrams and the politics of romance.\u201d He cited several previous critics supporting him, at least in part. He did not, however, cite the seminal academic (or at least one of them) who elucidated this type of analysis of fiction. Lynn Hunt\u00a0summarized her professional lifetime of research in 2007 in \u201cInventing Human Rights: A History.\u201d Hunt is one of the leading historians of the Enlightenment, and her examination of literature as a significant factor in creating the Enlightenment as a popular movement underlies Rampell\u2019s analysis as well as those he did cite. And this type of examination began many years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavid M. Whalin, Annandale\u25cfSpaceThe\u00a0otherwise excellent Oct. 30 Health & Science article on telescopic exploration of space, \u201cA not-so-simple Hubble Telescope fix,\u201d omitted information on the new $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope. NASA, after earlier estimates, now says the telescope will be launched on March 30, 2021. The expectation is that it will provide information \u201calmost to the beginning of the universe,\u201d according to the Post article.Victor Tupitza, Burke\u25cfTimeThe Oct. 31 Metro article \u201cStudents find ancient stone ax at Mt. Vernon\u201d described the find\u2019s age differently in the first three paragraphs. Once as 6,000 years, then as six millennia and later as 60 centuries.Story continues below advertisementI read through to the end to see if it would become \u201c600 decades\u201d old to complete the cycle.Mike Creveling, La PlataAdvertisement\u25cfContinuum\u201cThe military-astronomy complex,\u201d Joshua Sokol\u2019s Nov. 4 Book World review of Neil deGrasse Tyson\u2019s excellent book \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d noted \u201cthe United Nations\u2019 efforts to establish international space law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.\u201d As we enter an age of accelerated artificial intelligence and potential space militarization, there must be a renewed effort to provide global agreement and oversight. The one existing entity that has a mandate and universal membership is the United Nations. The United States could lead in its own self-interest. Can we at least try? It would be a win-win for us and everyone else.Story continues below advertisementRichard Seifman, WashingtonThe writer is a board member of the United Nations Association National Capital Area and was a senior Foreign Service officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.\u25cfArt is for confronting realityAs Mark Jenkins noted in his Nov. 4 Arts & Style review of \u201cDefining the Art of Change in the Age of Trump,\u201d \u201cTree trunk pieces meet steel root replicas in a dialogue between two artists,\u201d the exhibition inaugurates Washington\u2019s new nonprofit Center for Contemporary Political Art. I founded the center last year because I am convinced that political art can be a catalyst for positive social and political change in the United States, just as it was in the many countries I reported from as a foreign correspondent for The Post, CBS News and the old \u201cMacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSadly, Jenkins chose to dismiss the \u201cDefining\u201d exhibit and the art of nearly 100 American artists with snide comments, writing that \u201cthe exhibit is not recommended for anyone suffering from Trump fatigue\u201d because it \u201cis heavy on breaking news,\u201d presenting \u201cvisual polemics\u201d that \u201cprobably won\u2019t age well.\u201dWhat was he thinking? The work in \u201cDefining\u201d is no more (or less) polemical or about \u201cbreaking news\u201d than is \u201cGuernica,\u201d which Picasso began painting on May 1, 1937 \u2014 five days after the Nazis bombed the Basque town he chose to memorialize as a warning to the world about the horrors of war to come.Unfortunately, the critic betrayed his prejudices against contemporary political art; he is as wrong about the importance of \u201cDefining\u201d and the direction art will take in the 21st century as he would have been about the prospects of \u201cGuernica\u201d aging well had he been in Paris 80 years ago when Picasso turned a breaking news story into a visual polemic that became his masterpiece.AdvertisementCharles A. Krause, Washington\u25cfArt is for escaping realityAlthough I read all the rest \u2014 including the horrible news of our day \u2014 only one page of the Nov. 5 newspaper remained with me all day.\u00a0Art redeems the times, as John Kelly\u2019s fabulously sly and inviting visit to the National Gallery\u00a0showed [\u201cAt the National Gallery, a search for art that doesn\u2019t imitate life,\u201d Metro]. His detailed and relevant \u201creading\u201d of paintings made the gray day more cheerful, and me maybe even hopeful that we could sail off, too, into a pathway of light.Eleanor Heginbotham, North Bethesda\u25cfWait waitIn her Nov. 4 Arts & Style article \u201c \u2018Wait Wait . . . Don\u2019t Tell Me!\u2019 celebrates 20 years,\u201d Roxanne Roberts, an original panelist when\u00a0 \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. Don\u2019t Tell Me\u201d debuted in 1998 and a frequent panel member to this day, mentioned the little-known fact that the show was partly recorded in Washington before eventually landing in Chicago, but she omitted another fact of local interest.AdvertisementIt was NPR\u2019s director of cultural programming at the time, Murray Horwitz, who planted the seed that grew to become \u201cthe NPR News Quiz.\u201d Impressed with the popularity of the Magliozzi brothers\u2019 \u201cCar Talk,\u201d Horwitz\u00a0asked the creator of that show, \u201cBenevolent Overlord\u201d Doug Berman, to develop another program that would likewise entertain weekend listeners and enlighten them at the same time. That acorn of an idea has become the mighty oak of \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. \u201dIn addition to his stint at NPR, Horwitz \u2014 Dayton, Ohio\u2019s, gift to Washington \u2014 is a former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown; co-author of \u201cAin\u2019t Misbehavin\u2019,\u201d a musical about Fats Waller; and founding director of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. He is the host of \u201cThe Big Broadcast\u201d on WAMU on Sunday evenings.When listeners hear that \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. \u201d is \u201ccoming .\u2009.\u2009. from the Chase Auditorium in downtown Chicago,\u201d they should remember that it all started right here.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Liteman\n\n, Arlington\n\u25cfDon't tell meI am still slogging through the once-excellent series \u201cThe Walking Dead,\u201d and, like many fans, am behind the current episode.\u00a0So when I saw \u201c \u2018Walking Dead\u2019 mainstay exits, but the show trudges on,\u201d the Nov. 6 Style article on the show, with the warning \u201cSpoiler alert,\u201d I decided to skip the article \u2014 and then saw the spoiler blazoned as the headline on a subsequent page.Thanks a lot.Lawrence Hammer, Lexington, Va.\u25cfThe lost battalion commanderA photograph accompanying the Nov. 8 news article \u201cA World War I hero\u2019s heartbreaking suicide\u201d identified Lt. Col. Charles W. Whittlesey, who commanded the \u201cLost Battalion\u201d during World War I and later tragically took his own life, as standing next to an unidentified man. That man on the right is my grandfather, Carl Fish McKinney, who commanded the battalion that relieved the \u201cLost Battalion.\u201dMy grandfather was a West Point graduate, Class of 1911, and retired in 1949 as a colonel. Both my grandfathers and my great-grandfather served in Europe during World War I. I am proud of my family\u2019s service to the nation and believe that my grandfather should be identified, especially now as we honor the centennial of the \u201cWar to End All Wars.\u201dShari Villarosa, Washington\u25cfBad combo, even if it's a chocolate labRegarding the Nov. 5 \u201cBeetle Bailey\u201d comic strip:Even most non-dog owners know that the combination of chocolate and dogs is a very bad mix. Sgt. Snorkel and Otto have been together for many years. By now, you\u2019d think the good Sarge would know better.\u00a0Maybe it is time for the cartoonists to introduce a Veterinary Corps officer to the Camp Swampy troop roster.T.H. Otwell, Silver Spring\u25cfMore missing historySomething else was missing from Bill Fletcher Jr.\u2019s Nov. 3 Free for All letter, \u201cSomething big was missing,\u201d a response to the Oct. 20 front-page article \u201cSpain unearthing a painful past.\u201d Fletcher left out that the Republican faction representing the elected government of Spain, in what became the \nSpanish Civil War, \nreceived material and some personnel support from the Soviet Union. That support was overshadowed by what the Nationalists received from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.Yes, the Spanish Civil War could be considered a prelude to World War II. In turn, the European theater of World War II saw the utter defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies, including Soviet Russia\u2019s major contribution.Walter Hadlock, Herndon\u25cfOne man's humiliation is another man's upliftRegarding Philip Kennicott\u2019s Nov. 4 Arts & Style review, \u201cTaking all the fun out of being naughty\u201d:What\u00a0Kennicott saw as lacking in Sarah Lucas\u2019s sculpture and video revealed more about him than his subject. Perhaps he missed the Brett M. Kavanaugh hearings, the #MeToo movement and the whole second half of the 20th\u00a0century. He dismissed a confident woman\u2019s artistic rebuke of patriarchy as outdated, uninteresting and \u201cempty.\u201d He characterized Lucas\u2019s entire career as \u201ca waste of energies,\u201d the revenge fantasy of a victim and not the preferable effort of a woman \u2014 congenial, one assumes \u2014 working dutifully toward the equality of the sexes. While these judgments echo the anxieties of many powerful critics over time, Kennicott\u2019s reaction to a video depicting Lucas\u2019s male companion being slathered with broken eggs was personal. Kennicott deemed it humiliating. I found it uplifting.Peter Nesbett, WashingtonThe writer is director of the Washington Project for the Arts.Read more:Readers critique The Post: Enough with the Bryce Harper speculation and personal attacks on Post MaloneReaders critique The Post: Too much Trump, and not enough Ulysses S. GrantReaders critique The Post: Hurricane Michael, trikese and ... Yoda?Readers critique The Post: Objections over coverage of ax-safety, Krispy Kreme and Hillary ClintonReaders critique The Post: Excitement for the Glenstone Museum and pique over falsely branded bubbles This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Omissions about space, time and .\u2009.\u2009. romance novels",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Omissions about space, time and .\u2009.\u2009. romance novels (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2669",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-omissions-about-space-time-and--romance-novels/2018/11/16/7f61be2a-e9d0-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters.What might have beenOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightI was very disappointed to read in the Nov. 7 news article \u201cJudge blasts wildlife agency, says endangered wolves cannot be shot\u201d that the \u201cAmerican red wolf might have been saved from extinction Monday,\u201d sorry that some opportunity had been missed.Reading on, I found that\u00a0steps were being taken to save the red wolf, and soon my disappointment was focused in a different direction. Things that \u201cmight have been\u201d were possible at some point but are possible no longer. In fact, the red wolf may have been saved from extinction, unless there is some fatal defect to the plan that was not reported.Story continues below advertisementI am hopeful that correct English may also be saved from extinction.Wayne Chadwick, Rockville\u25cfThrowing away an opportunityIn the Nov. 3 Real Estate article \u201cIt all started with a plan to install a new bathtub,\u201d about\u00a0Jamie and James Coss\u2019s $300,000 house renovation, one thing made my blood boil: throwing a perfectly usable couch into a trash bin because it wouldn\u2019t fit in the hallway leading to a $1.2 million condo.AdvertisementTheir Logan Circle home is steps away from residents who could make good use of a couch. If the owner had left it on the curb, someone who needed it could have hauled it away. Or the owner could have spent an hour taking it to A Wider Circle, where I volunteer, or another such organization that helps people rise from poverty.Story continues below advertisementIf living in a furnished rental apartment for six months during their renovation was \u201cthe worst\u201d thing to befall this couple, then good for them. But perhaps now they can open their eyes \u2014 and hearts \u2014 to see how many of their neighbors live and to reevaluate this act.Jean Kaplan Teichroew, Silver Spring\u25cfThe No.1 priorityI was gratified to see climate change included on a priority list for the incoming Democratic House in the Nov. 7 editorial \u201cA good day for democracy.\u201d But I noted it was third on the list, after health care and guns. That is not the right order of things.AdvertisementHealth care and guns are of vital importance, but the fate of our planet does not depend on our quickly fixing those problems. The world\u2019s largest and most prestigious scientific body \u2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change \u2014 has warned us in no uncertain terms that the fate of our planet does depend on our getting our greenhouse-gas emissions on track very, very quickly. Subsequent scientific reports have confirmed and strengthened that conclusion.Story continues below advertisementWe have 12 years to reduce our emissions by at least \n45\u2009percent. This target is global, so wealthy countries must act faster. We can meet this goal, but only if we rapidly ramp up our efforts. States are doing their best to fill the hole left by the Trump administration, while the administration continues to dig deeper. But the states alone can\u2019t solve this problem. Climate change must be the first order of business for the new House, and a real, science-driven solution must be ready on Day One of the Congress that follows, when, hopefully, a new president will be ready to sign it into law.Donald M. Goldberg, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementThe writer is executive director of the Climate Law & Policy Project.\u25cfReading into romance novelsIn his Nov. 3 Free for All letter, \u201cA bad comparison all around,\u201d James Graham stated, \u201cA Senate confirmation never found now-Justice [Brett M.] Kavanaugh \u2018innocent.\u2019 .\u2009.\u2009. Only a court or jury can make such a finding.\u201d But even a court or jury finding of \u201cnot guilty\u201d is not a finding of innocence.\u00a0It is merely a finding that guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.\u00a0I can easily imagine a scenario in which evidence of sexual assault might not meet the standard necessary to convict someone of a crime but would be sufficient to sway a senator\u2019s vote on a Supreme Court nominee.Story continues below advertisementRick Talisman, Bethesda\u25cfNot innocent, not guiltyPalmer Rampell made some interesting and valid observations in his Nov. 4 Outlook essay, \u201cStacey Abrams and the politics of romance.\u201d He cited several previous critics supporting him, at least in part. He did not, however, cite the seminal academic (or at least one of them) who elucidated this type of analysis of fiction. Lynn Hunt\u00a0summarized her professional lifetime of research in 2007 in \u201cInventing Human Rights: A History.\u201d Hunt is one of the leading historians of the Enlightenment, and her examination of literature as a significant factor in creating the Enlightenment as a popular movement underlies Rampell\u2019s analysis as well as those he did cite. And this type of examination began many years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavid M. Whalin, Annandale\u25cfSpaceThe\u00a0otherwise excellent Oct. 30 Health & Science article on telescopic exploration of space, \u201cA not-so-simple Hubble Telescope fix,\u201d omitted information on the new $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope. NASA, after earlier estimates, now says the telescope will be launched on March 30, 2021. The expectation is that it will provide information \u201calmost to the beginning of the universe,\u201d according to the Post article.Victor Tupitza, Burke\u25cfTimeThe Oct. 31 Metro article \u201cStudents find ancient stone ax at Mt. Vernon\u201d described the find\u2019s age differently in the first three paragraphs. Once as 6,000 years, then as six millennia and later as 60 centuries.Story continues below advertisementI read through to the end to see if it would become \u201c600 decades\u201d old to complete the cycle.Mike Creveling, La PlataAdvertisement\u25cfContinuum\u201cThe military-astronomy complex,\u201d Joshua Sokol\u2019s Nov. 4 Book World review of Neil deGrasse Tyson\u2019s excellent book \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d noted \u201cthe United Nations\u2019 efforts to establish international space law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.\u201d As we enter an age of accelerated artificial intelligence and potential space militarization, there must be a renewed effort to provide global agreement and oversight. The one existing entity that has a mandate and universal membership is the United Nations. The United States could lead in its own self-interest. Can we at least try? It would be a win-win for us and everyone else.Story continues below advertisementRichard Seifman, WashingtonThe writer is a board member of the United Nations Association National Capital Area and was a senior Foreign Service officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.\u25cfArt is for confronting realityAs Mark Jenkins noted in his Nov. 4 Arts & Style review of \u201cDefining the Art of Change in the Age of Trump,\u201d \u201cTree trunk pieces meet steel root replicas in a dialogue between two artists,\u201d the exhibition inaugurates Washington\u2019s new nonprofit Center for Contemporary Political Art. I founded the center last year because I am convinced that political art can be a catalyst for positive social and political change in the United States, just as it was in the many countries I reported from as a foreign correspondent for The Post, CBS News and the old \u201cMacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSadly, Jenkins chose to dismiss the \u201cDefining\u201d exhibit and the art of nearly 100 American artists with snide comments, writing that \u201cthe exhibit is not recommended for anyone suffering from Trump fatigue\u201d because it \u201cis heavy on breaking news,\u201d presenting \u201cvisual polemics\u201d that \u201cprobably won\u2019t age well.\u201dWhat was he thinking? The work in \u201cDefining\u201d is no more (or less) polemical or about \u201cbreaking news\u201d than is \u201cGuernica,\u201d which Picasso began painting on May 1, 1937 \u2014 five days after the Nazis bombed the Basque town he chose to memorialize as a warning to the world about the horrors of war to come.Unfortunately, the critic betrayed his prejudices against contemporary political art; he is as wrong about the importance of \u201cDefining\u201d and the direction art will take in the 21st century as he would have been about the prospects of \u201cGuernica\u201d aging well had he been in Paris 80 years ago when Picasso turned a breaking news story into a visual polemic that became his masterpiece.AdvertisementCharles A. Krause, Washington\u25cfArt is for escaping realityAlthough I read all the rest \u2014 including the horrible news of our day \u2014 only one page of the Nov. 5 newspaper remained with me all day.\u00a0Art redeems the times, as John Kelly\u2019s fabulously sly and inviting visit to the National Gallery\u00a0showed [\u201cAt the National Gallery, a search for art that doesn\u2019t imitate life,\u201d Metro]. His detailed and relevant \u201creading\u201d of paintings made the gray day more cheerful, and me maybe even hopeful that we could sail off, too, into a pathway of light.Eleanor Heginbotham, North Bethesda\u25cfWait waitIn her Nov. 4 Arts & Style article \u201c \u2018Wait Wait . . . Don\u2019t Tell Me!\u2019 celebrates 20 years,\u201d Roxanne Roberts, an original panelist when\u00a0 \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. Don\u2019t Tell Me\u201d debuted in 1998 and a frequent panel member to this day, mentioned the little-known fact that the show was partly recorded in Washington before eventually landing in Chicago, but she omitted another fact of local interest.AdvertisementIt was NPR\u2019s director of cultural programming at the time, Murray Horwitz, who planted the seed that grew to become \u201cthe NPR News Quiz.\u201d Impressed with the popularity of the Magliozzi brothers\u2019 \u201cCar Talk,\u201d Horwitz\u00a0asked the creator of that show, \u201cBenevolent Overlord\u201d Doug Berman, to develop another program that would likewise entertain weekend listeners and enlighten them at the same time. That acorn of an idea has become the mighty oak of \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. \u201dIn addition to his stint at NPR, Horwitz \u2014 Dayton, Ohio\u2019s, gift to Washington \u2014 is a former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown; co-author of \u201cAin\u2019t Misbehavin\u2019,\u201d a musical about Fats Waller; and founding director of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. He is the host of \u201cThe Big Broadcast\u201d on WAMU on Sunday evenings.When listeners hear that \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. \u201d is \u201ccoming .\u2009.\u2009. from the Chase Auditorium in downtown Chicago,\u201d they should remember that it all started right here.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Liteman\n\n, Arlington\n\u25cfDon't tell meI am still slogging through the once-excellent series \u201cThe Walking Dead,\u201d and, like many fans, am behind the current episode.\u00a0So when I saw \u201c \u2018Walking Dead\u2019 mainstay exits, but the show trudges on,\u201d the Nov. 6 Style article on the show, with the warning \u201cSpoiler alert,\u201d I decided to skip the article \u2014 and then saw the spoiler blazoned as the headline on a subsequent page.Thanks a lot.Lawrence Hammer, Lexington, Va.\u25cfThe lost battalion commanderA photograph accompanying the Nov. 8 news article \u201cA World War I hero\u2019s heartbreaking suicide\u201d identified Lt. Col. Charles W. Whittlesey, who commanded the \u201cLost Battalion\u201d during World War I and later tragically took his own life, as standing next to an unidentified man. That man on the right is my grandfather, Carl Fish McKinney, who commanded the battalion that relieved the \u201cLost Battalion.\u201dMy grandfather was a West Point graduate, Class of 1911, and retired in 1949 as a colonel. Both my grandfathers and my great-grandfather served in Europe during World War I. I am proud of my family\u2019s service to the nation and believe that my grandfather should be identified, especially now as we honor the centennial of the \u201cWar to End All Wars.\u201dShari Villarosa, Washington\u25cfBad combo, even if it's a chocolate labRegarding the Nov. 5 \u201cBeetle Bailey\u201d comic strip:Even most non-dog owners know that the combination of chocolate and dogs is a very bad mix. Sgt. Snorkel and Otto have been together for many years. By now, you\u2019d think the good Sarge would know better.\u00a0Maybe it is time for the cartoonists to introduce a Veterinary Corps officer to the Camp Swampy troop roster.T.H. Otwell, Silver Spring\u25cfMore missing historySomething else was missing from Bill Fletcher Jr.\u2019s Nov. 3 Free for All letter, \u201cSomething big was missing,\u201d a response to the Oct. 20 front-page article \u201cSpain unearthing a painful past.\u201d Fletcher left out that the Republican faction representing the elected government of Spain, in what became the \nSpanish Civil War, \nreceived material and some personnel support from the Soviet Union. That support was overshadowed by what the Nationalists received from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.Yes, the Spanish Civil War could be considered a prelude to World War II. In turn, the European theater of World War II saw the utter defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies, including Soviet Russia\u2019s major contribution.Walter Hadlock, Herndon\u25cfOne man's humiliation is another man's upliftRegarding Philip Kennicott\u2019s Nov. 4 Arts & Style review, \u201cTaking all the fun out of being naughty\u201d:What\u00a0Kennicott saw as lacking in Sarah Lucas\u2019s sculpture and video revealed more about him than his subject. Perhaps he missed the Brett M. Kavanaugh hearings, the #MeToo movement and the whole second half of the 20th\u00a0century. He dismissed a confident woman\u2019s artistic rebuke of patriarchy as outdated, uninteresting and \u201cempty.\u201d He characterized Lucas\u2019s entire career as \u201ca waste of energies,\u201d the revenge fantasy of a victim and not the preferable effort of a woman \u2014 congenial, one assumes \u2014 working dutifully toward the equality of the sexes. While these judgments echo the anxieties of many powerful critics over time, Kennicott\u2019s reaction to a video depicting Lucas\u2019s male companion being slathered with broken eggs was personal. Kennicott deemed it humiliating. I found it uplifting.Peter Nesbett, WashingtonThe writer is director of the Washington Project for the Arts.Read more:Readers critique The Post: Enough with the Bryce Harper speculation and personal attacks on Post MaloneReaders critique The Post: Too much Trump, and not enough Ulysses S. GrantReaders critique The Post: Hurricane Michael, trikese and ... Yoda?Readers critique The Post: Objections over coverage of ax-safety, Krispy Kreme and Hillary ClintonReaders critique The Post: Excitement for the Glenstone Museum and pique over falsely branded bubbles This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Omissions about space, time and .\u2009.\u2009. romance novels",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Readers critique The Post: Omissions about space, time and .\u2009.\u2009. romance novels (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2670",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/readers-critique-the-post-omissions-about-space-time-and--romance-novels/2018/11/16/7f61be2a-e9d0-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters.What might have beenOpinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightI was very disappointed to read in the Nov. 7 news article \u201cJudge blasts wildlife agency, says endangered wolves cannot be shot\u201d that the \u201cAmerican red wolf might have been saved from extinction Monday,\u201d sorry that some opportunity had been missed.Reading on, I found that\u00a0steps were being taken to save the red wolf, and soon my disappointment was focused in a different direction. Things that \u201cmight have been\u201d were possible at some point but are possible no longer. In fact, the red wolf may have been saved from extinction, unless there is some fatal defect to the plan that was not reported.Story continues below advertisementI am hopeful that correct English may also be saved from extinction.Wayne Chadwick, Rockville\u25cfThrowing away an opportunityIn the Nov. 3 Real Estate article \u201cIt all started with a plan to install a new bathtub,\u201d about\u00a0Jamie and James Coss\u2019s $300,000 house renovation, one thing made my blood boil: throwing a perfectly usable couch into a trash bin because it wouldn\u2019t fit in the hallway leading to a $1.2 million condo.AdvertisementTheir Logan Circle home is steps away from residents who could make good use of a couch. If the owner had left it on the curb, someone who needed it could have hauled it away. Or the owner could have spent an hour taking it to A Wider Circle, where I volunteer, or another such organization that helps people rise from poverty.Story continues below advertisementIf living in a furnished rental apartment for six months during their renovation was \u201cthe worst\u201d thing to befall this couple, then good for them. But perhaps now they can open their eyes \u2014 and hearts \u2014 to see how many of their neighbors live and to reevaluate this act.Jean Kaplan Teichroew, Silver Spring\u25cfThe No.1 priorityI was gratified to see climate change included on a priority list for the incoming Democratic House in the Nov. 7 editorial \u201cA good day for democracy.\u201d But I noted it was third on the list, after health care and guns. That is not the right order of things.AdvertisementHealth care and guns are of vital importance, but the fate of our planet does not depend on our quickly fixing those problems. The world\u2019s largest and most prestigious scientific body \u2014 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change \u2014 has warned us in no uncertain terms that the fate of our planet does depend on our getting our greenhouse-gas emissions on track very, very quickly. Subsequent scientific reports have confirmed and strengthened that conclusion.Story continues below advertisementWe have 12 years to reduce our emissions by at least \n45\u2009percent. This target is global, so wealthy countries must act faster. We can meet this goal, but only if we rapidly ramp up our efforts. States are doing their best to fill the hole left by the Trump administration, while the administration continues to dig deeper. But the states alone can\u2019t solve this problem. Climate change must be the first order of business for the new House, and a real, science-driven solution must be ready on Day One of the Congress that follows, when, hopefully, a new president will be ready to sign it into law.Donald M. Goldberg, Chevy ChaseAdvertisementThe writer is executive director of the Climate Law & Policy Project.\u25cfReading into romance novelsIn his Nov. 3 Free for All letter, \u201cA bad comparison all around,\u201d James Graham stated, \u201cA Senate confirmation never found now-Justice [Brett M.] Kavanaugh \u2018innocent.\u2019 .\u2009.\u2009. Only a court or jury can make such a finding.\u201d But even a court or jury finding of \u201cnot guilty\u201d is not a finding of innocence.\u00a0It is merely a finding that guilt was not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.\u00a0I can easily imagine a scenario in which evidence of sexual assault might not meet the standard necessary to convict someone of a crime but would be sufficient to sway a senator\u2019s vote on a Supreme Court nominee.Story continues below advertisementRick Talisman, Bethesda\u25cfNot innocent, not guiltyPalmer Rampell made some interesting and valid observations in his Nov. 4 Outlook essay, \u201cStacey Abrams and the politics of romance.\u201d He cited several previous critics supporting him, at least in part. He did not, however, cite the seminal academic (or at least one of them) who elucidated this type of analysis of fiction. Lynn Hunt\u00a0summarized her professional lifetime of research in 2007 in \u201cInventing Human Rights: A History.\u201d Hunt is one of the leading historians of the Enlightenment, and her examination of literature as a significant factor in creating the Enlightenment as a popular movement underlies Rampell\u2019s analysis as well as those he did cite. And this type of examination began many years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavid M. Whalin, Annandale\u25cfSpaceThe\u00a0otherwise excellent Oct. 30 Health & Science article on telescopic exploration of space, \u201cA not-so-simple Hubble Telescope fix,\u201d omitted information on the new $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope. NASA, after earlier estimates, now says the telescope will be launched on March 30, 2021. The expectation is that it will provide information \u201calmost to the beginning of the universe,\u201d according to the Post article.Victor Tupitza, Burke\u25cfTimeThe Oct. 31 Metro article \u201cStudents find ancient stone ax at Mt. Vernon\u201d described the find\u2019s age differently in the first three paragraphs. Once as 6,000 years, then as six millennia and later as 60 centuries.Story continues below advertisementI read through to the end to see if it would become \u201c600 decades\u201d old to complete the cycle.Mike Creveling, La PlataAdvertisement\u25cfContinuum\u201cThe military-astronomy complex,\u201d Joshua Sokol\u2019s Nov. 4 Book World review of Neil deGrasse Tyson\u2019s excellent book \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d noted \u201cthe United Nations\u2019 efforts to establish international space law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.\u201d As we enter an age of accelerated artificial intelligence and potential space militarization, there must be a renewed effort to provide global agreement and oversight. The one existing entity that has a mandate and universal membership is the United Nations. The United States could lead in its own self-interest. Can we at least try? It would be a win-win for us and everyone else.Story continues below advertisementRichard Seifman, WashingtonThe writer is a board member of the United Nations Association National Capital Area and was a senior Foreign Service officer at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.\u25cfArt is for confronting realityAs Mark Jenkins noted in his Nov. 4 Arts & Style review of \u201cDefining the Art of Change in the Age of Trump,\u201d \u201cTree trunk pieces meet steel root replicas in a dialogue between two artists,\u201d the exhibition inaugurates Washington\u2019s new nonprofit Center for Contemporary Political Art. I founded the center last year because I am convinced that political art can be a catalyst for positive social and political change in the United States, just as it was in the many countries I reported from as a foreign correspondent for The Post, CBS News and the old \u201cMacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSadly, Jenkins chose to dismiss the \u201cDefining\u201d exhibit and the art of nearly 100 American artists with snide comments, writing that \u201cthe exhibit is not recommended for anyone suffering from Trump fatigue\u201d because it \u201cis heavy on breaking news,\u201d presenting \u201cvisual polemics\u201d that \u201cprobably won\u2019t age well.\u201dWhat was he thinking? The work in \u201cDefining\u201d is no more (or less) polemical or about \u201cbreaking news\u201d than is \u201cGuernica,\u201d which Picasso began painting on May 1, 1937 \u2014 five days after the Nazis bombed the Basque town he chose to memorialize as a warning to the world about the horrors of war to come.Unfortunately, the critic betrayed his prejudices against contemporary political art; he is as wrong about the importance of \u201cDefining\u201d and the direction art will take in the 21st century as he would have been about the prospects of \u201cGuernica\u201d aging well had he been in Paris 80 years ago when Picasso turned a breaking news story into a visual polemic that became his masterpiece.AdvertisementCharles A. Krause, Washington\u25cfArt is for escaping realityAlthough I read all the rest \u2014 including the horrible news of our day \u2014 only one page of the Nov. 5 newspaper remained with me all day.\u00a0Art redeems the times, as John Kelly\u2019s fabulously sly and inviting visit to the National Gallery\u00a0showed [\u201cAt the National Gallery, a search for art that doesn\u2019t imitate life,\u201d Metro]. His detailed and relevant \u201creading\u201d of paintings made the gray day more cheerful, and me maybe even hopeful that we could sail off, too, into a pathway of light.Eleanor Heginbotham, North Bethesda\u25cfWait waitIn her Nov. 4 Arts & Style article \u201c \u2018Wait Wait . . . Don\u2019t Tell Me!\u2019 celebrates 20 years,\u201d Roxanne Roberts, an original panelist when\u00a0 \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. Don\u2019t Tell Me\u201d debuted in 1998 and a frequent panel member to this day, mentioned the little-known fact that the show was partly recorded in Washington before eventually landing in Chicago, but she omitted another fact of local interest.AdvertisementIt was NPR\u2019s director of cultural programming at the time, Murray Horwitz, who planted the seed that grew to become \u201cthe NPR News Quiz.\u201d Impressed with the popularity of the Magliozzi brothers\u2019 \u201cCar Talk,\u201d Horwitz\u00a0asked the creator of that show, \u201cBenevolent Overlord\u201d Doug Berman, to develop another program that would likewise entertain weekend listeners and enlighten them at the same time. That acorn of an idea has become the mighty oak of \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. \u201dIn addition to his stint at NPR, Horwitz \u2014 Dayton, Ohio\u2019s, gift to Washington \u2014 is a former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown; co-author of \u201cAin\u2019t Misbehavin\u2019,\u201d a musical about Fats Waller; and founding director of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. He is the host of \u201cThe Big Broadcast\u201d on WAMU on Sunday evenings.When listeners hear that \u201cWait Wait .\u2009.\u2009. \u201d is \u201ccoming .\u2009.\u2009. from the Chase Auditorium in downtown Chicago,\u201d they should remember that it all started right here.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Liteman\n\n, Arlington\n\u25cfDon't tell meI am still slogging through the once-excellent series \u201cThe Walking Dead,\u201d and, like many fans, am behind the current episode.\u00a0So when I saw \u201c \u2018Walking Dead\u2019 mainstay exits, but the show trudges on,\u201d the Nov. 6 Style article on the show, with the warning \u201cSpoiler alert,\u201d I decided to skip the article \u2014 and then saw the spoiler blazoned as the headline on a subsequent page.Thanks a lot.Lawrence Hammer, Lexington, Va.\u25cfThe lost battalion commanderA photograph accompanying the Nov. 8 news article \u201cA World War I hero\u2019s heartbreaking suicide\u201d identified Lt. Col. Charles W. Whittlesey, who commanded the \u201cLost Battalion\u201d during World War I and later tragically took his own life, as standing next to an unidentified man. That man on the right is my grandfather, Carl Fish McKinney, who commanded the battalion that relieved the \u201cLost Battalion.\u201dMy grandfather was a West Point graduate, Class of 1911, and retired in 1949 as a colonel. Both my grandfathers and my great-grandfather served in Europe during World War I. I am proud of my family\u2019s service to the nation and believe that my grandfather should be identified, especially now as we honor the centennial of the \u201cWar to End All Wars.\u201dShari Villarosa, Washington\u25cfBad combo, even if it's a chocolate labRegarding the Nov. 5 \u201cBeetle Bailey\u201d comic strip:Even most non-dog owners know that the combination of chocolate and dogs is a very bad mix. Sgt. Snorkel and Otto have been together for many years. By now, you\u2019d think the good Sarge would know better.\u00a0Maybe it is time for the cartoonists to introduce a Veterinary Corps officer to the Camp Swampy troop roster.T.H. Otwell, Silver Spring\u25cfMore missing historySomething else was missing from Bill Fletcher Jr.\u2019s Nov. 3 Free for All letter, \u201cSomething big was missing,\u201d a response to the Oct. 20 front-page article \u201cSpain unearthing a painful past.\u201d Fletcher left out that the Republican faction representing the elected government of Spain, in what became the \nSpanish Civil War, \nreceived material and some personnel support from the Soviet Union. That support was overshadowed by what the Nationalists received from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.Yes, the Spanish Civil War could be considered a prelude to World War II. In turn, the European theater of World War II saw the utter defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies, including Soviet Russia\u2019s major contribution.Walter Hadlock, Herndon\u25cfOne man's humiliation is another man's upliftRegarding Philip Kennicott\u2019s Nov. 4 Arts & Style review, \u201cTaking all the fun out of being naughty\u201d:What\u00a0Kennicott saw as lacking in Sarah Lucas\u2019s sculpture and video revealed more about him than his subject. Perhaps he missed the Brett M. Kavanaugh hearings, the #MeToo movement and the whole second half of the 20th\u00a0century. He dismissed a confident woman\u2019s artistic rebuke of patriarchy as outdated, uninteresting and \u201cempty.\u201d He characterized Lucas\u2019s entire career as \u201ca waste of energies,\u201d the revenge fantasy of a victim and not the preferable effort of a woman \u2014 congenial, one assumes \u2014 working dutifully toward the equality of the sexes. While these judgments echo the anxieties of many powerful critics over time, Kennicott\u2019s reaction to a video depicting Lucas\u2019s male companion being slathered with broken eggs was personal. Kennicott deemed it humiliating. I found it uplifting.Peter Nesbett, WashingtonThe writer is director of the Washington Project for the Arts.Read more:Readers critique The Post: Enough with the Bryce Harper speculation and personal attacks on Post MaloneReaders critique The Post: Too much Trump, and not enough Ulysses S. GrantReaders critique The Post: Hurricane Michael, trikese and ... Yoda?Readers critique The Post: Objections over coverage of ax-safety, Krispy Kreme and Hillary ClintonReaders critique The Post: Excitement for the Glenstone Museum and pique over falsely branded bubbles This week\u2019s \u201cFree for All\u201d letters. Opinion: Readers critique The Post: Omissions about space, time and .\u2009.\u2009. romance novels",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Please, President Trump, don\u2019t bring war to space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2671",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/please-president-trump-dont-bring-war-to-space/2018/06/18/7caca736-7314-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html",
        "text": "Peter Wismer is an international legal consultant based in Denmark and Austria.\nPresident Trump is fond of suggesting that the five branches of the U.S. armed forces are not enough. On Monday, he directed the Defense Department to create a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military, saying, \u201cWe are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.\u201d This follows a statement the president made in March during an address at the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, in which he said, \u201cSpace is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea.\u201d Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThis is a horrible proposition. In making these statements, Trump is parroting lines from people who know a lot about war and nothing about space. First of all, space is considered a \u201cprovince of mankind,\u201d according to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 \u2014 which the United States and more than 100 other countries are parties to. This treaty lays out the principle that space is a domain that belongs to us all, not just to some states.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSecond, war in space is particularly dangerous because it is a uniquely pollutable domain. The more space pollution there is, the more difficult it is for any of us to use space.Imagine that Montenegro went to war against Fiji and that the war extended into Trump\u2019s new \u201cwar-fighting domain.\u201d Even those two countries, if they would obtain relevant space capabilities, would be extremely dangerous, as a war in space would almost inevitably lead to the destruction of satellites and the creation of debris that would remain in orbit for decades.Scale up and imagine a war in space between the United States and China. Such a conflict would be devastating, affecting not only the 1.7 billion citizens of China and the United States but all 7.6\u2009billion inhabitants of Earth.Story continues below advertisementWe often forget how dependent we are on the use of space. Space is not just for astronauts; it is not even primarily for astronauts. Space is for telecommunication, navigation, Earth observation satellites and so many other purposes that we take for granted. A day without the use of satellites would send modern society into disarray. Power grids would go down, transportation would become much more difficult, global banking would discontinue and the Internet would fail.AdvertisementThe laws of war try to make sure that the consequences of a war are generally restricted to the countries fighting the war. A war in space could never achieve that. It would affect the global community and create significant damage to all. The United States would be the country to suffer the most because its dependence on space is by far the greatest, as it possesses the most satellites.It is in the interest of the United States and the rest of the world to make sure that space never becomes a war-fighting domain. We can achieve that by continuing to make sure it is neither permissible nor opportune. The next logical step would be to agree that war in space is an international crime. China and Russia could be well-disposed toward establishing such an international norm; after all, they have proposed a treaty to ban the placement of weapons in space entirely \u2014 a proposal the United States has blocked for a decade.Story continues below advertisementOuter space is under threat, and it is high time for the international community to make sure that the threat does not become reality. If Trump wants to make his country more secure, he must join the cause.Read more:\nDavid Ignatius: Will our next war be fought among the stars?\nJosh Rogin: Wilbur Ross wants the United States to dominate space\nDavid Ignatius: War in space is becoming a real threat\nAlexandra Petri: Some classic episodes of Trump\u2019s \u2018Space Force\u2019\n Space and war just don\u2019t mix. Opinion: Please, President Trump, don\u2019t bring war to space",
        "author": "Peter Wismer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The Space Force\u2019s rocky start is bad news for America (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2672",
        "date": "2019-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-space-forces-rocky-start-is-bad-news-for-america/2019/08/30/569f74ca-cb50-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html",
        "text": "Namrata Goswami is an independent analyst and author of \u201cOuter Space and Great Powers.\u201d\nAfter a long and confusing bureaucratic process, the U.S. Space Command\n finally launched this\n week. Though a \u201cSpace Command\u201d may sound sleek and futuristic, the difficulty the administration is having in establishing the related Space Force does not bode well for America\u2019s future in the new space race. Policy incoherence regarding space will have serious consequences. A wrong vision could be detrimental to the future of the United States and the entire planet. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightPresident Trump has appeared enthusiastic about military space strategy since assuming office. He floated the idea of a Space Force in March 2018 and directed the Pentagon to establish one in June that year. But unlike immigration or crime, issues he returns to repeatedly, Trump has ceded the establishment of a separate Space Force as a new branch of the armed services to a raucous public debate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s a shame, because the new space service\n has a vital role to play. Thinking of space as air, just higher up, is a mistake. In the future, as styles of warfare emerge in this realm, the United States will need a distinct culture and expertise focused on this domain to maintain its military preeminence, guard itself against new kinds of attacks and develop the skills that will make possible future exploration.An independent space service is essential to maintain U.S. primacy in space. A separate service will gather space professionals from their parent services to start a unique culture focused on the frontier, empowering them to think of space \u2014 including recruitment, training and subsequent promotions \u2014 on its own terms. Such a service is critical given the growing importance of space, not just from a national security perspective, but also to secure the growing industry of space commerce.But the administration\u2019s quest to establish this service has been plagued by bureaucratic meddling and policy confusion \u2014 and it hasn\u2019t been confined to the White House. Back in May, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved legislation that would establish a separate military service for space standing alongside established services such as the Army and Navy. But in July, the House Armed Services Committee passed a decidedly more limited vision, establishing a Space Corps within the Department of the Air Force. That leaves both houses of Congress far apart on their sense of what the military\u2019s approach to space should be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if Congress is confused, lawmakers are at least trying to get something done. The Pentagon, tasked by Trump to work on a separate space service proposal, was against the establishment of a separate service from the beginning. Top leadership stifled a serious policy debate within the Air Force on how the service should be constituted, issuing a \u201cgag order\u201d on advocacy for a space order. The directive, which came in the form of an anodyne-sounding \u201crestrictive public affairs guidance,\u201d prevented those within its ranks\n with the necessary military space expertise from weighing in publicly.The result? Discussion of a subject with historical consequences was ceded to those, including late-night comedians, who neither understood how military space thinkers conceptualize space power nor possessed a historical sense of what a separate service would mean for space policy in the long run. Those Air Force officers who chose to speak up publicly about space were forced to retire.Without healthy democratic debate, we are left with strategic incoherence regarding U.S. space strategy. This is an unfortunate reversal at a critical moment, muddying bipartisan legislation that President Barack Obama signed in 2015, which gave the Defense Department a vital role in securing the public\u2019s interest in space and protecting national security space assets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow the United States appears at best reactive, and at worst unable or unwilling to understand that the space environment is changing. Space, according to dominant U.S. strategic thinking, is limited to a domain to be exploited for \u201cwinning a war that extends to space.\u201d\nCountries such as China and Russia are changing their conceptions of the utility of outer space. Rather than treating space just as a military-force multiplier providing satellite support to their major military services, these nations see space for its own merits. This includes the promise of a multitrillion-dollar economy that awaits those who develop the capacity to extract resources on the moon and asteroids. In 2015, China established its PLA Strategic Support Force as a separate service equal in grade to its army, navy, air force and rocket forces \u2014 and loyal solely to the Communist Party.Trump may be afraid of falling behind China, but his trade wars pale in comparison to the ambition of President Xi Jinping\u2019s China space dream\n. If the Trump administration leaves space strategy in the hands of vested bureaucracies with little interest in understanding this radical new future, space may be less free, and the United States may be poorer and less free as a result.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more: Terry Virts: I was an astronaut. We need a Space Force.Michael O\u2019Hanlon: The Space Force is a misguided idea. Congress should turn it down.Namrata Goswami: The new space race pits the U.S. against China. The U.S. is losing badly.Hugh Hewitt: How the Navy could be torpedoing Trump\u2019s chances in 2020Lindsey Graham and Jack Keane: We can\u2019t outsource our security to anyone \u2014 especially the Taliban We need an independent service to protect U.S. primacy in space. Opinion: The Space Force\u2019s rocky start is bad news for America",
        "author": "Namrata Goswami"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | How the U.S. Space Force is trying to bring order to increasingly messy outer space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2673",
        "date": "2021-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/29/space-activity-its-debris-increases-us-works-establish-international-norms-rules/",
        "text": "Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond is chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force.When Americans think of space, they might imagine the indelible images from the first moon landing, iconic TV shows such as \u201cStar Trek,\u201d commercial companies launching civilians into low-Earth orbit or the successful landing of the NASA rover Perseverance on Mars. In both historical and fictional accounts, it seems to be an orderly place with generally observed rules. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThat is hardly the case. Despite nearly seven decades of human exploration and activity in space, rules governing conduct remain a work in progress. Space is a burgeoning economic engine and an essential part of global civil, commercial and military operations, but the current space environment looks something like the early eras of driving or flying, with rapid growth in the number of cars, planes and operators, yet only the most basic traffic laws. Space has its own considerations that increase complexity \u2014 including growing congestion and debris, laws of physics that define motion very differently than on Earth, and a lack of international borders.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo address this complicated domain, there exists a legal framework in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and in four other core space treaties adopted over the following 12 years, along with a number of voluntary international measures supported by the United States, such as the United Nations\u2019 Debris Mitigation Guidelines and Guidelines for the Long-Term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities. Additionally, in July, the Defense Department publicly shared long-standing operational practices in space, intended to assist in the ongoing development of voluntary guidelines and reduce the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin outlined five \u201ctenets of responsible behavior in space\u201d: operating in, from, to and through space in a professional manner; limiting the generation of long-lived debris; avoiding the creation of harmful interference; maintaining safe separation and trajectory; and communicating and making notifications to enhance the safety and stability of the domain. The U.S. Space Command is leading the department\u2019s work on these tenets, as we are using the concepts as a basis of our conversations with spacefaring nations around the world.Josh Rogin: A shadow war in space is heating up fastYet, while we work with our allies and partners to establish norms and standards of behavior, irresponsible actions continue to make space a more dangerous place to operate. In 2007, China tested an anti-satellite missile by blowing up one of its own satellites, creating thousands of pieces of debris that the United States tracks to this day, alerting satellite operators and astronauts from around the world to the hazardous junk. Last year, Russia launched a satellite that \u201cbirthed\u201d a smaller satellite right next to one of our own, which ultimately moved away and launched a projectile into outer space. And just two weeks ago, Russia tested its own anti-satellite missile by blowing up one of its defunct satellites and creating yet another debris field in low-Earth orbit, putting the International Space Station and its inhabitants at risk. These actions are dangerous and irresponsible, and cannot be ignored.Today, there are close to 5,000 active satellites orbiting Earth, and that number is forecast to grow dramatically in the next two years. By many projections, in 2040 the annual value of the space economy could surpass $1 trillion, with trillions more in global economic activity dependent on space. This enormous growth of and dependence on space technologies make irresponsible actions even more worrisome.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFortunately, there is widespread international support for enhancing the security and long-term sustainability of space. In the second year of the U.S. Space Force, one of our critical goals has been building on existing alliances and partnerships to achieve that aim \u2014 developing a shared understanding of what constitutes safe and responsible behavior, and providing our views on transparent and pragmatic behaviors. Many draw lessons from our experience as they look to establish freedom of movement and safe operation in space, much like international laws and norms have done for navigation at sea and in international airspace for many years.For example, NATO has established a Space Operations Center in Germany that will assist with ongoing efforts among allies to share information and coordinate activities. Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Australia and others have established space commands or realigned forces to elevate space in day-to-day military operations. The U.S. Space Force trains and staffs every level of the military space enterprise, ensuring that our people operate professionally whether they\u2019re launching rockets or maneuvering satellites.In the months and years ahead, we will look to collaborate with like-minded spacefaring nations to promote standards and norms of responsible behavior to maintain the benefits of space for all. The cost of inaction is too high, and if the past is prologue, then the United States and its allies must lead the way. When Russia and China blow up their own satellites, they're not only testing potentially aggressive weapons \u2014 they're also creating space debris that endangers all space exploration and travel. Opinion: How the U.S. Space Force is trying to bring order to increasingly messy outer space",
        "author": "John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanity (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2674",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cassini-mission-embodies-the-best-of-humanity/2017/09/15/d2944c66-9a3a-11e7-b569-3360011663b4_story.html",
        "text": " The spacecraft deserves a fond farewell and a round of applause. The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanity",
        "author": " Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | A small but mighty helicopter on Mars shows how much robots can do (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2675",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-small-but-mighty-helicopter-on-mars-shows-how-much-robots-can-do/2021/04/19/60b05e28-a13e-11eb-a7ee-949c574a09ac_story.html",
        "text": "NASA WAS right on target with the name of an experiment that this week met with resounding success. \u201cIngenuity,\u201d after all, is precisely what it takes to fly a four-pound helicopter in an atmosphere 99\u00a0percent less dense than our own, at temperatures more than 100 degrees below zero, and all from 300 million miles away. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIngenuity lifted off the surface of Mars early Monday to an altitude of about 10\u00a0feet, where it hovered briefly before turning and landing after 30 seconds in the air. These seemingly modest statistics notwithstanding, the achievement was extraordinary. The chopper, which traveled from Earth to Mars for seven months attached to the \u201cbelly\u201d of the Perseverance rover, was the first aircraft to achieve controlled flight on another planet. Small but mighty, Ingenuity triumphed over inhospitable conditions to lay the groundwork for untold exploration. While Perseverance can see in more detail, its tiny companion can see more, period \u2014 by flying farther and wider than NASA could manage without its help.Much is made of the push and pull between the imperative to put humans on Mars or to return them to the moon. The White House under President Donald Trump opted for a lunar return, and President Biden is sticking to the plan. Certainly, there\u2019s something romantic about expanding our worldly horizons ourselves rather than having machines do it for us. But, in many cases, those machines can make as many amazing discoveries, at far lower cost, and with far less risk. The Cassini space probe, for instance, stumbled on the building blocks of life on this planet while exploring one of Saturn\u2019s moons; the Curiosity rover determined that ancient Mars had the right chemistry to support living microbes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity is a case study in what robots can do without much help from us. Flight controllers couldn\u2019t operate it by a joystick even if they wanted to because it\u2019s just too far away. They can only send commands in advance. Ingenuity, then, must be enterprising: performing its in-flight functions autonomously, and even figuring out how to keep itself warm at night. What\u2019s more, the lower requirements, cost and overall stakes of this \u201ctechnology demonstration\u201d compared with more traditional all-or-nothing projects meant that researchers could try something new without worrying too much about what would happen if they failed. Now, a sideshow is center-stage in a multibillion-dollar pageant. Whether or not Ingenuity manages its coming milestones (16 feet high with a bit of horizontal travel is next up), the future could look different because of it. Imagine multiple Ingenuities working in tandem with a rover to identify out-of-reach areas for study, and in the meantime beaming their initial findings back to Earth.When we think about the space program, we usually think big. Ingenuity and the scientists who came up with its boundary-breaking design remind us that one small step for a robot can be a giant leap for mankind.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whimsLetters to the Editor: Let the robots go to MarsDavid Von Drehle: Humans don\u2019t have to set foot on Mars to visit itLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.David Von Drehle: How a generation of 1930s rocketeers led us to unlock the secrets of Mars The Ingenuity aircraft is a reminder of the great potential of machine-based space exploration. Opinion: A small but mighty helicopter on Mars shows how much robots can do",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | No, human space exploration is not a dead end (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2676",
        "date": "2017-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-human-space-exploration-is-not-a-dead-end/2017/10/13/808f257c-af88-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html",
        "text": " The United States should be the world leader in space exploration. No, human space exploration is not a dead end",
        "author": "Marillyn Hewson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The spacecraft that found for the first time where life could exist now (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2677",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-spacecraft-that-found-for-the-first-time-where-life-could-exist-now/2017/09/14/ad685636-9895-11e7-b569-3360011663b4_story.html",
        "text": " Cassini is set to end its 13-year journey orbiting Saturn. The spacecraft that found for the first time where life could exist now",
        "author": "Jonathan Lunine"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Space potatoes are not ready for consumption just yet (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2678",
        "date": "2017-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/space-potatoes-are-not-ready-for-consumption-just-yet/2017/04/07/0dd4c85c-1a69-11e7-8598-9a99da559f9e_story.html",
        "text": " As an astrophysicist, I must caution against premature optimism from the experiments of the International Potato Center as described in the April\u00a04 Health & Science article \u201cA \u2018Unique\u2019 potato that c... Space potatoes are not ready for consumption just yet",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | We need to start dreaming again. \u2018First Man\u2019 can show us how. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2679",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-need-to-start-dreaming-again-first-man-can-show-us-how/2018/10/12/ff92f5ca-ce3f-11e8-a360-85875bac0b1f_story.html",
        "text": "Isaac Klausner is a producer of \u201cFirst Man.\u201dWhen Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the moon in July 1969\n, they bestowed an enormous gift to America, and to the world, by setting certain facts straight. They proved that we can achieve our greatest, most impossible dreams. And they proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the idea of American exceptionalism. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMost of the team behind the film \u201cFirst Man\u201d was born after the moon landing. We were born into a world where these were, and always had been, irrefutable facts. We were born with the luxury of taking the moon landing for granted.What did it take to achieve something of this magnitude? This is what our director, Damien Chazelle, and the rest of us wanted to explore. We wanted to take audiences back to a time when success wasn\u2019t a forgone conclusion and examine how Americans embraced the idea of strapping some of our boldest and brightest into tiny capsules on the top of missiles and launching them into the unknown. What did it feel like for the astronauts risking their lives, and for their families waiting at home? What did it cost them as individuals and us as a nation?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnswering these questions required a lot of research. It began with James R. Hansen\u2019s terrific biography of Neil Armstrong. The folks at NASA introduced us to countless astronauts and flight controllers and technical people from the Gemini and Apollo programs. It\u2019s worth mentioning that the average age in Mission Control during Apollo 11 was 28. Given how new the field was, there weren\u2019t a ton of experts. These were young, driven men and women who were excited about the possibility of what could be rather than what was. They faced immense responsibilities and stepped up to the meet the challenge.We also had the privilege of working closely with Armstrong\u2019s sons, Rick and Mark Armstrong, as well as Ed White III and Bonnie White Baer, the children of fallen Apollo 1 astronaut Ed White II. During the Gemini and Apollo programs, the astronauts became icons. But to their children, they were simply \u201cDad.\u201d Sure, they worked a lot, but with most of the NASA families clustered in a few Houston suburbs, this was the norm. The major difference was the risk involved. Everyone knew astronauts who had died, wives who had lost spouses and kids who had lost a parent. Saying goodbye to Dad in the morning could be saying goodbye forever.The willingness to embrace risk and sacrifice on behalf of a national dream is one of the biggest ways our nation seems to have changed since the Apollo missions. Outside of the military, we rarely see this at all. There is no doubt that the moon missions were costly, both in terms of money and lives. But what we achieved fundamentally changed history.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA lot has changed over the past 50 years, both internationally and in our national culture. This is what people say when they try to explain why, today, we haven\u2019t been able to get behind big dreams like the moon mission. But are things really that different than they were in the 1960s? We were a deeply divided nation, grappling with major questions about national security and civil liberties. There was no easy, universal mandate to devote such resources to the Gemini and Apollo programs. Quite the opposite: By the mid-1960s, when Americans stopped worrying that Russia was going to use Sputnik to attack us from space, public support for NASA was decidedly mixed. But we persevered, we shouldered the costs, and we went on to achieve something undeniable that brought America and the world together.All of us who worked on \u201cFirst Man\u201d are now fully aware of the risks we face in exploring the heavens. But, as President Ronald Reagan said after the Challenger disaster, \u201cThe future doesn\u2019t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.\u201d I hope we as a nation and a civilization can begin to dream again and find our way to the difficult yet rewarding future.Read more:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSally Tyler: The false, but persistent, rumor that Neil Armstrong converted to IslamBuzz Aldrin: Buzz Aldrin: John Glenn was a hero. We owe it to him to keep exploring space.Mary Roach: Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerousHomer Hickam: The new Neil Armstrong movie is about more than the lunar flag-plantingTerry Virts: I was an astronaut. We need a Space Force. The Apollo mission astronauts sacrificed everything for their nation. What happened to that spirit? Opinion: We need to start dreaming again. \u2018First Man\u2019 can show us how.",
        "author": "Isaac Klausner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | As astronauts rocket into space, protesters are beaten in the street \u2014 just like before (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2680",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/05/americas-shattered-love-affair-with-its-own-myths/",
        "text": "Diane McWhorter is the author of the civil rights history \u201cCarry Me Home.\u201d Ever since last Saturday\u2019s launch of the first manned rocket from U.S. soil in nine years, my mind has been thumping with Gil Scott-Heron\u2019s 1970 anthem to the Apollo space program and its crushing irrelevance for black lives. \u201cA rat done bit my sister Nell,\u201d it begins, \u201cwith Whitey on the moon.\u201d Seeing the photographs of the president and vice president at Cape Canaveral, their backs to the camera and a country in pain, I wondered: What year is this? Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIn scarcely a week, we\u2019ve had a replay of two major stories of the mid-20th century: the civil rights revolution and the Cold War\u2019s most thrilling moral victory, the moon landing. The moonshot so carefully state-crafted in 1969 as a mission of \u201cpeace for all mankind\u201d has become the harbinger of a Space Force committed to waging \u201cour American way of war.\u201d And the civil rights protests that jolted the national conscience in the 1960s have become an endless loop of videotaped executions by police who walk free.Full coverage of the George Floyd protestsIt is clear that the two driving narratives of our national identity \u2014 as a beacon of democracy to the world and a guardian of liberty at home \u2014 have gone way off the trajectory. This moment forces us to face a reckoning: Have we ever really understood the terms of the American covenant?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEight months after President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, his brother Robert courted international goodwill on a tour overseas. He was stunned at other countries\u2019 \u201cmisinformation\u201d about the American system. Rather than recognizing that capitalism was the essence of individual freedom, young people, especially, believed it was \u201csynonymous with selfishness.\u201dRFK added, as if it were an image problem, that America was a hard sell abroad \u201cif we treat part of our population as inferior human beings.\u201d He still subscribed to a myth of American innocence that flourished in spite of white supremacy. The civil rights \u201cblack eyes\u201d \u2014 Little Rock, the beatings of the Freedom Riders \u2014 were imagined to be blemishes as opposed to a congenital birth defect and surely could be healed. Faith in the gospel of unbroken progress continued up through the election of a black president, and even the party that thrived on exploiting racism knew to keep it soft-core.Then Donald Trump whiplashed the arc of that moral universe. He succeeded where other tribunes of white grievance (George Wallace, Sarah Palin) failed: He has made the White House the stage of a white restoration. And the loyalty of his supporters attests to the power of whiteness to confer blamelessness, no matter how obscene the offense against country, Constitution or Jesus Himself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith white-endowed innocence comes an equal and opposite assertion of black culpability: the unblinking condemnation captured in Officer Derek Chauvin\u2019s \u201cYou got a problem?\u201d sneer at the camera as he kneed the life out of George Floyd.New York police SUVs plowed into Floyd mourners on Saturday as our new astronauts made their way to the International Space Station, and I got to wondering: If the Mercury Seven astronauts had been black, would their (pace John Glenn) reckless lads-being-lads behavior have been whitewashed by the right stuff? Not that the moon project was ever the spotless exercise in \u201cfreedom and peace\u201d heralded by Kennedy. The Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts was built by a former Nazi, Wernher von Braun, who had previously invented the V-2 (for \u201cvengeance\u201d) missile with which Hitler had hoped to gain domination over the \u201clesser\u201d races. The NASA center where von Braun achieved his Cold War triumph was in Alabama, the host state of the era\u2019s epic civil rights showdowns. It was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s marches in Birmingham that provoked Kennedy\u2019s other majestic initiative, the segregation-abolishing bill passed after his assassination as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.King was dead of an assassin\u2019s bullet by July 1969, when his heir, Ralph Abernathy, showed up at Cape Canaveral, then Cape Kennedy, on the eve of the Apollo 11 moonshot. His entourage included 25 impoverished families and two mule-drawn carts, visuals of what a society that could put a man on the moon seemed unable to get right on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLike the Saturn V, the Falcon 9 rocket that sent men into space last weekend was the creation of an immigrant. Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s South African-born founder, has become a flash point in a civil rights crisis as well, this one over the inequities of essentialness laid bare by the novel coronavirus. By defying the county-mandated shutdown of his California Tesla factory, Musk articulated the reigning corporate ethos, picking the word \u201cfascist\u201d to describe local government interference into his freedom to jeopardize his workers\u2019 lives for profit.RFK, assassinated 52 years ago on June 5, would likely be appalled by the shameless ways that capitalism has hijacked our democracy. As much as we might want to look into the face of Chauvin and see a depraved individual \u2014 or a rancid police culture \u2014 his icy ruthlessness also stands for a political and economic system that voids the humanity of black people it has historically left behind.As for the billionaires: Musk\u2019s trophy was generously funded by the taxpayers and retraced ground broken half a century ago to the awe of the world, excluding the brothers and sisters of rat-bit Nell.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRead more:Condoleezza Rice: This moment cries out for us to confront race in AmericaMichelle A. Williams and Jeffrey S\u00e1nchez: Racism is killing black people. It\u2019s sickening them, too.George F. Will: A 1946 lynching is still haunting usThe Post\u2019s View: Even amid strife, the best of America shows itselfSamuel Kimbriel: White Americans, resist the temptation to disengageEl Jones: Black Canadians are suffocating under a racist policing system, too In scarcely a week, we\u2019ve had a replay of two major stories of the mid-20th century: the civil rights revolution and the Cold War\u2019s most thrilling moral victory, the moon landing. Opinion: As astronauts rocket into space, protesters are beaten in the street \u2014 just like before",
        "author": "Diane McWhorter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Stopping climate change could cost less than fighting covid-19 (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2681",
        "date": "2020-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/climate-change-intervention-cost/2020/09/17/c6715db6-f784-11ea-89e3-4b9efa36dc64_story.html",
        "text": "While the coronavirus crisis rages, the climate worsens. This summer we\u2019ve had rampant wildfires and rolling blackouts in California; unprecedented heat, melting and fires\u00a0in the Arctic; 130-degree scorchers in Death Valley; 90-degree ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico; and a\u00a0record hurricane season\u00a0forecast for the Atlantic.\u00a0How can we possibly counter such daunting, global problems while we\u2019re struggling to surmount a pandemic and return our lives to normal? Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAs it happens, we could make a very real difference against climate change for less than we\u2019ve already spent to fight the coronavirus.\u00a0When the pandemic broke out, governments rushed to enact multitrillion-dollar aid packages that sometimes cost\u00a0more than 20 percent\u00a0of their gross domestic product (over 25 percent\u00a0in the United States). Washington has debated spending another $1 trillion on pandemic relief and emergency stimulus, on top of the $2.2 trillion Cares Act and $4 trillion in federal loan guarantees for businesses. That is, for the most part, money well spent. The\u00a0pandemic is a massive, deadly threat.\u00a0But of course, so is the climate crisis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording to a World Health Organization analysis, \u201cClimate change is expected to cause approximately 250,000\u00a0additional deaths per year\u201d between 2030 and 2050.\u00a0That estimate may be on the low side: Another study found that climate-change-related food shortages alone could account for an additional 529,000 deaths per year by 2050. Projecting further still is difficult, but if emissions continue unabated at their current high rates, those numbers will surely rise to the point where climate change might kill more people annually than covid-19 currently does before the century\u2019s end. But where covid deaths will decline as humans acquire immunity, deaths from climate-change-related causes will accelerate every year.Contrasting climate and the coronavirus is something of a false dichotomy, because the two can compound each other. During the early days of pandemic-related lockdowns, daily greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 17 percent, but they soon rebounded.\u00a0Air quality problems connected to climate change may make covid-19 more dangerous, and the risk of coronavirus transmission makes responses to climate emergencies, like moving and sheltering evacuees, more complicated.\u00a0These difficulties will worsen as climate change alters the way humans interact with other species and one another, increasing the risk of future pandemics just as rising seas displace 150 million people who live along coastlines by mid-century.But in another way, the pandemic ought to make fighting climate change easier, serving as a kind of model for responding to the climate crisis. While it did so at a huge cost to the economy, it has proved that large swaths of the population could change their behavior and lower the trajectory of emissions \u2014 not over decades but in a matter of weeks. It demonstrates daily that saving lives requires respect for science and objective facts. It has\u00a0made clear that the scenario we\u2019re living through is not business as usual and that we need new, bigger thinking to navigate it.We\u2019re flattening the coronavirus curve. We can flatten the climate curve, too.The pandemic has also raised the bar for credible crisis response.\u00a0Our climate goals have been mostly limited to mitigation and adaptation: incrementally ameliorating climate change where we can and learning how to live with it where we can\u2019t. Our coronavirus response has included mitigation (flattening the curve) and adaptation (social distancing), but these strategies aren\u2019t ends in themselves. They\u2019re designed to limit the virus\u2019s impact while we look for ways to eliminate it and restore public health (vaccines and treatments).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s the same with climate change. Mitigation and adaptation are necessary but insufficient to restore climate health. Renewables are growing fast, and in most parts of the world they are cheaper to install than fossil-fuel power production. With sustained effort, they should be able to meet energy demand and help us fulfill the widely held goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80\u00a0percent by 2050. That would be significant mitigation and damage control. But it would not restore a livable climate.\u00a0The preindustrial atmospheric CO2 level was about 270 parts per million. We\u2019re already at 415 ppm, or about 500 ppm if other greenhouse gases like methane are counted. On top of this, we continue to\u00a0emit about 40 gigatons of greenhouse gases each year. So beyond reducing emissions and slowing carbon buildup in the atmosphere,\u00a0we urgently\u00a0need scalable, financeable and nondestructive strategies that can remove enough carbon to\u00a0restore\u00a0the atmosphere to below 350 ppm by the end of the century (ideally by 2050).Promising interventions exist, and they will cost an order of magnitude less to deploy and scale up than what we\u2019re spending now to fight the pandemic.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor example, direct air capture (DAC) systems extract CO2\u00a0from the atmosphere chemically, much as it is done in submarines and spacecraft. The concentrated CO2 can then be used or pumped securely underground. The Canadian company Carbon Engineering is building the world\u2019s largest DAC plant in the Permian Basin in Texas.\u00a0It will be able to capture one megaton (1 million tons, or one-forty-thousandth of our global output) of CO2\u00a0annually at a cost of $94 to $230 a ton.\u00a0An average tree can absorb 48 pounds of carbon per year, so it would take 1 million trees about\u00a042 years to remove the same quantity of CO2. The Swiss company Climeworks has developed a scalable, low-power DAC device that can operate anywhere. In Iceland, Climeworks has partnered with the CarbFix2 project to pump CO2 from the DAC underground, where it binds the gas to mineral deposits, forming carbonate rock such as limestone.It\u2019s feasible to scale up this mineralization process globally to sequester 50 gigatons of atmospheric carbon a year, though for now, it would be expensive \u2014 about $5 trillion annually, assuming Climeworks meets its goal of reducing costs to $100 per ton. But if the CO2\u00a0is mineralized in a factory rather than underground, those economics improve markedly, because the rock can be sold for commercial use and just about pay for itself. This would involve combining low concentrations of CO2 with calcium to produce calcium carbonate, or limestone. Manufactured limestone can be substituted for quarried limestone and used in carbon-negative concrete and road beds. Blue Planet and Carbon8 Systems are doing this now, using a process that mimics how shellfish form shells from calcium and CO2\u00a0dissolved in seawater.Five myths about climate changeThe fastest biological process, and the one nature uses to remove CO2 before ice ages,\u00a0is ocean photosynthesis in algae or seaweed, such as kelp. Giant kelp forests are carbon sinks that grow up to two feet\u00a0per day. Unlike terrestrial forests, kelp forests don\u2019t burn and re-emit their carbon. When they die, most can be sunk to the bottom, keeping their carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries to millennia.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMarine permaculture arrays (MPAs) are man-made irrigation grids for growing kelp forests, equipped with wave-powered pumps and pipes that can restore overturning circulation \u2014 the process that moves warm and cold water and nutrients around the depths and surface waters of the Atlantic \u2014 lost due to climate disruption. They can be towed out to sea, establishing new kelp forests and restoring fisheries in what are increasingly becoming ocean deserts. MPAs are relatively inexpensive to build, and the resulting kelp and fish can be sold commercially. MPA inventor Brian von Herzen estimates that the arrays can remove CO2 at a cost of about $80 per ton, while producing kelp products that could dramatically offset the production cost and boost fisheries. This makes them competitive with technological solutions. According to von Herzen, growing new kelp forests in just 1 to 2 percent of the oceans would sequester enough carbon to restore the climate, provided we do our part to reduce the carbon intensity of our civilization.If we can spend trillions to fight the coronavirus, we can do this. Building the needed capacity over a 30-year period would require some investment, ranging from $50\u00a0billion per year for manufacturing limestone to $250 billion per year for MPAs. But that money would produce a 15 percent return, and even the high end is a small price to pay for a fully restored climate in this century.The main hurdle isn\u2019t financing or technology; we have enough of both. It\u2019s expanding our thinking beyond half-measures and committing to outcomes we want. We know that restoring public health in the pandemic requires bold action and international cooperation. Restoring a healthy climate and a livable planet requires no less. But it\u2019s within our grasp if we\u2019re willing to reach for it.Twlitter: @Sir_David_King@rsparnellRead more from Outlook:Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Promising interventions exist, and it wouldn\u2019t be all that expensive to deploy them. Stopping climate change could cost less than fighting covid-19",
        "author": "David King"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Five myths about space (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2682",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-space/2018/12/10/407ffc1a-f35a-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html",
        "text": "Space is literally all around us, and it\u2019s notoriously difficult to wrap our minds around it. Given the hundreds of billions of stars and planets that make up our galaxy alone, who can be blamed for a lack of cosmic perspective, even if NASA\u2019s InSight explorer just landed on Mars to send some back? As an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, I spend a lot of time talking with our visitors about their space questions, as well as debunking some persistent misconceptions. These five crop up again and again. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThere's no gravity in space.Maybe you\u2019ve seen those videos of weightless astronauts on the International Space Station, gracefully (or sometimes not so gracefully) flipping and floating around, hair aloft, like swimmers in a starry sea. This often leads people to conclude that there\u2019s no gravity \n up there. \u201cGravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn\u2019t need it to flourish,\u201d National Geographic wrote in 2012 of botanical research aboard the space station. A 2018 headline in the Independent similarly described a condition that affects astronauts during \u201czero-gravity missions.\u201dAdvertisementCurrent and former astronauts respond to questions submitted by children from around the world. (Washington Post Live)Story continues below advertisementIn fact, if there were no gravity in space, it wouldn\u2019t be possible for astronauts (or anything) to orbit the Earth. As Newton explained it, gravity is the mutual attraction between any objects that have mass. Here on Earth, we experience gravity as our weight, which is to say the attraction between our own mass and the Earth. When a rocket is in space, the vehicle and the astronauts carried by it still feel the pull of the planet\u2019s gravity.\n No matter where they are, they have some gravitational relationship with objects \u2014 from distant planets to faraway stars \u2014 however faint it might be. You, too, experience the tug of the entire universe, even if the tug that you notice is from Earth.Back on the space station, astronauts (and the station itself) are slowly falling toward, or more technically around, the Earth. The astronauts look and feel weightless because they do not experience the Earth pushing back up on them as they would if they took a tumble on terra firma. If you\u2019ve ever been in an elevator that descends quickly, dropping from under your feet, you\u2019ve had a tiny taste of what they experience all the time.Black holes suck.News outlets tend to describe these gravity wells as if they were oversize cosmic vacuums. \u201cBlack Hole Sucks Down Star Stuff at 30 Percent Speed of Light,\u201d proclaimed a recent Discover magazine headline. The website Futurism offered a survival guide for those who somehow \u201cget sucked into a black hole.\u201d And then there\u2019s Beavis and Butthead, who warned us that a black hole \u201csucks up the whole universe, and then it\u2019s like, it grinds it up and sends it all to hell or something.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn truth, black holes are a bunch of mass crunched together into a tiny volume, creating a huge gravitational field. Where their gravitational field is strongest, not even light, the fastest thing in the universe, can escape. As a result, black holes have long been hard for astronomers to study, since most of our understanding of the universe relies on measuring light.What we do know is that the huge masses of black holes (anywhere from tens to millions of times the mass of our sun) bend space-time in extreme ways, which is why illustrations often make them look like deep cosmic funnels. If you get close enough to one, you will certainly experience its powerful gravitational force, which is why astronomers see stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But the gravitational tug is just like that of any other object \u2014 dependent on mass, and distance \u2014 and it\u2019s not special just because it\u2019s caused by a black hole. If I could magically replace our sun with a black hole that had exactly the same mass as our sun, our Earth would keep orbiting exactly where it is now, and similarly, those stars at the center of our galaxy will spend their entire lifetimes happily orbiting, with no danger of getting sucked in. In that sense, black holes are more like sinkholes than vacuums: One sinkhole in Florida isn\u2019t going to destroy the whole Earth, but best not to get too close.The sun is yellow.Every child has reached for the yellow crayon or marker when it\u2019s time to draw the sun. This common perception leads to articles like one in Sciworthy that begins, \u201cThe yellow sun in our sky provides the light and energy needed to sustain our planet.\u201d Pretty forgivable, given that even astronomers refer to the sun as a \u201cyellow dwarf.\u201d And Superman famously gets his powers from his proximity to \u201cyellow stars.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet to understand the true color of the sun, you have to know a little bit about light itself. Visible light, the kind that human eyes can see, is just a tiny fraction of the energies of light in the universe. Mixed together, all this light appears white \u2014 but the colors of the rainbow, from red to violet, are different energies of light that your eyes can see (red is at the lower energy end of the visible spectrum, violet is towards the high energy end). By the time light from the sun hits your eyes (hopefully not directly: please don\u2019t look straight at it!), it has traveled across the solar system and through Earth\u2019s atmospherewhich bends, filters and scatters solar radiation before it makes it to our eyes. Because the higher-energy, bluer light gets scattered more, the light from the sun that reaches our eyes on Earth appears more yellow. But in space, the sun would appear white to us.The sun is on fire.As it turns out, when you take the incredibly dynamic surface of the sun, and colorize it in yellows and oranges, it looks a whole lot like fire. Perhaps that\u2019s why we often embrace a fiery vocabulary to describe it, as the band They Might Be Giants did when they referred to the sun as a \u201cnuclear furnace.\u201d Astronomers also speak of the sun \u201cburning\n\u201d hydrogen, and Popular Science writes that we\u2019re lucky \u201cit didn\u2019t burn out before we showed up a few hundred thousand years ago.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the case of our sun, however, \u201cburning\u201d is a total misnomer. There is no combustion, fed by oxygen, to release the energy stored in the fuel. Stars generate energy through fusion, smashing together atoms deep in their cores like gigantic particle colliders. These fusion reactions take lighter elements, such as hydrogen, and smash them together to build heavier elements (like helium). When hydrogen atoms fuse together, they \nrelease energy, which eventually makes it out of the heart of the star to shine into the universe.It would be hard to fly through the asteroid belt.To get past Mars, onward to Jupiter and beyond, one must pass through the asteroid belt, a region of space that harbors an especially large number of rocks. That sounds dangerous, at least to some science fans who write into sites like \u201cAsk an Astronomer.\u201d Usually, people\u2019s ideas about the asteroid belt come from scenes in sci-fi movies like \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back,\u201d where Han Solo nimbly navigates the Millennium Falcon through a dangerous field strewn with jagged, flying boulders.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn reality, we\u2019ve successfully sent numerous NASA missions to study the outer solar system, no bobbing or weaving required. At the extreme speeds they travel \u2014 tens of thousands of miles per hour \u2014 spacecraft don\u2019t need to hit a boulder to be annihilated. (Just over two years ago, a window on the International Space Station was seriously damaged by a mere paint chip.\n\n) Navigating the asteroid belt in our solar system, however, is a piece of cake: While it does have a lot of rocks flying around in it compared with other regions of space, those rocks are still incredibly far apart \u2014 hundreds of thousands of miles, on average. So, if you\u2019re ever on a road trip with C-3PO, and he claims that \u201cthe possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1\n,\u201d you can tell him to chill out and enjoy the view.Twitter: @shaka_lulu\nFive myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Han Solo isn\u2019t the only one who can make it through an asteroid field. Five myths about space",
        "author": "Lucianne Walkowicz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Five myths about space (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2683",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-space/2018/12/10/407ffc1a-f35a-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html",
        "text": "Space is literally all around us, and it\u2019s notoriously difficult to wrap our minds around it. Given the hundreds of billions of stars and planets that make up our galaxy alone, who can be blamed for a lack of cosmic perspective, even if NASA\u2019s InSight explorer just landed on Mars to send some back? As an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, I spend a lot of time talking with our visitors about their space questions, as well as debunking some persistent misconceptions. These five crop up again and again. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThere's no gravity in space.Maybe you\u2019ve seen those videos of weightless astronauts on the International Space Station, gracefully (or sometimes not so gracefully) flipping and floating around, hair aloft, like swimmers in a starry sea. This often leads people to conclude that there\u2019s no gravity \n up there. \u201cGravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn\u2019t need it to flourish,\u201d National Geographic wrote in 2012 of botanical research aboard the space station. A 2018 headline in the Independent similarly described a condition that affects astronauts during \u201czero-gravity missions.\u201dAdvertisementCurrent and former astronauts respond to questions submitted by children from around the world. (Washington Post Live)Story continues below advertisementIn fact, if there were no gravity in space, it wouldn\u2019t be possible for astronauts (or anything) to orbit the Earth. As Newton explained it, gravity is the mutual attraction between any objects that have mass. Here on Earth, we experience gravity as our weight, which is to say the attraction between our own mass and the Earth. When a rocket is in space, the vehicle and the astronauts carried by it still feel the pull of the planet\u2019s gravity.\n No matter where they are, they have some gravitational relationship with objects \u2014 from distant planets to faraway stars \u2014 however faint it might be. You, too, experience the tug of the entire universe, even if the tug that you notice is from Earth.Back on the space station, astronauts (and the station itself) are slowly falling toward, or more technically around, the Earth. The astronauts look and feel weightless because they do not experience the Earth pushing back up on them as they would if they took a tumble on terra firma. If you\u2019ve ever been in an elevator that descends quickly, dropping from under your feet, you\u2019ve had a tiny taste of what they experience all the time.Black holes suck.News outlets tend to describe these gravity wells as if they were oversize cosmic vacuums. \u201cBlack Hole Sucks Down Star Stuff at 30 Percent Speed of Light,\u201d proclaimed a recent Discover magazine headline. The website Futurism offered a survival guide for those who somehow \u201cget sucked into a black hole.\u201d And then there\u2019s Beavis and Butthead, who warned us that a black hole \u201csucks up the whole universe, and then it\u2019s like, it grinds it up and sends it all to hell or something.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn truth, black holes are a bunch of mass crunched together into a tiny volume, creating a huge gravitational field. Where their gravitational field is strongest, not even light, the fastest thing in the universe, can escape. As a result, black holes have long been hard for astronomers to study, since most of our understanding of the universe relies on measuring light.What we do know is that the huge masses of black holes (anywhere from tens to millions of times the mass of our sun) bend space-time in extreme ways, which is why illustrations often make them look like deep cosmic funnels. If you get close enough to one, you will certainly experience its powerful gravitational force, which is why astronomers see stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But the gravitational tug is just like that of any other object \u2014 dependent on mass, and distance \u2014 and it\u2019s not special just because it\u2019s caused by a black hole. If I could magically replace our sun with a black hole that had exactly the same mass as our sun, our Earth would keep orbiting exactly where it is now, and similarly, those stars at the center of our galaxy will spend their entire lifetimes happily orbiting, with no danger of getting sucked in. In that sense, black holes are more like sinkholes than vacuums: One sinkhole in Florida isn\u2019t going to destroy the whole Earth, but best not to get too close.The sun is yellow.Every child has reached for the yellow crayon or marker when it\u2019s time to draw the sun. This common perception leads to articles like one in Sciworthy that begins, \u201cThe yellow sun in our sky provides the light and energy needed to sustain our planet.\u201d Pretty forgivable, given that even astronomers refer to the sun as a \u201cyellow dwarf.\u201d And Superman famously gets his powers from his proximity to \u201cyellow stars.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet to understand the true color of the sun, you have to know a little bit about light itself. Visible light, the kind that human eyes can see, is just a tiny fraction of the energies of light in the universe. Mixed together, all this light appears white \u2014 but the colors of the rainbow, from red to violet, are different energies of light that your eyes can see (red is at the lower energy end of the visible spectrum, violet is towards the high energy end). By the time light from the sun hits your eyes (hopefully not directly: please don\u2019t look straight at it!), it has traveled across the solar system and through Earth\u2019s atmospherewhich bends, filters and scatters solar radiation before it makes it to our eyes. Because the higher-energy, bluer light gets scattered more, the light from the sun that reaches our eyes on Earth appears more yellow. But in space, the sun would appear white to us.The sun is on fire.As it turns out, when you take the incredibly dynamic surface of the sun, and colorize it in yellows and oranges, it looks a whole lot like fire. Perhaps that\u2019s why we often embrace a fiery vocabulary to describe it, as the band They Might Be Giants did when they referred to the sun as a \u201cnuclear furnace.\u201d Astronomers also speak of the sun \u201cburning\n\u201d hydrogen, and Popular Science writes that we\u2019re lucky \u201cit didn\u2019t burn out before we showed up a few hundred thousand years ago.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the case of our sun, however, \u201cburning\u201d is a total misnomer. There is no combustion, fed by oxygen, to release the energy stored in the fuel. Stars generate energy through fusion, smashing together atoms deep in their cores like gigantic particle colliders. These fusion reactions take lighter elements, such as hydrogen, and smash them together to build heavier elements (like helium). When hydrogen atoms fuse together, they \nrelease energy, which eventually makes it out of the heart of the star to shine into the universe.It would be hard to fly through the asteroid belt.To get past Mars, onward to Jupiter and beyond, one must pass through the asteroid belt, a region of space that harbors an especially large number of rocks. That sounds dangerous, at least to some science fans who write into sites like \u201cAsk an Astronomer.\u201d Usually, people\u2019s ideas about the asteroid belt come from scenes in sci-fi movies like \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back,\u201d where Han Solo nimbly navigates the Millennium Falcon through a dangerous field strewn with jagged, flying boulders.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn reality, we\u2019ve successfully sent numerous NASA missions to study the outer solar system, no bobbing or weaving required. At the extreme speeds they travel \u2014 tens of thousands of miles per hour \u2014 spacecraft don\u2019t need to hit a boulder to be annihilated. (Just over two years ago, a window on the International Space Station was seriously damaged by a mere paint chip.\n\n) Navigating the asteroid belt in our solar system, however, is a piece of cake: While it does have a lot of rocks flying around in it compared with other regions of space, those rocks are still incredibly far apart \u2014 hundreds of thousands of miles, on average. So, if you\u2019re ever on a road trip with C-3PO, and he claims that \u201cthe possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1\n,\u201d you can tell him to chill out and enjoy the view.Twitter: @shaka_lulu\nFive myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Han Solo isn\u2019t the only one who can make it through an asteroid field. Five myths about space",
        "author": "Lucianne Walkowicz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2684",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-the-hurried-mission-to-orbit-the-moon-before-the-soviets-was-so-dangerous/2018/04/06/f291f830-216f-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html",
        "text": "Mary Roach is the author of \u201cPacking for Mars,\u201d \u201cStiff,\u201d and other books.\nThere were, in all, 12 Apollo spaceflights. We remember them by number if history was made (Apollo\u00a011) or things went wrong (1 and 13). By either measure, we should remember Apollo\u00a08: the first mission to take humans all the way to (if not yet onto) the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cRocket Men\u201d opens in summer 1968, with the space race in high gear. The Soviet Union had already put the world\u2019s first satellite, Sputnik, as well as the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth\u2019s orbit. The Soviets were projected to reach the moon by the end of the year, months ahead of the United States. (Similar drama played out in book publishing last year. Just as galleys of \u201cRocket Men\u201d were touching down on reviewers\u2019 desks, Henry Holt launched the hardback of Jeffrey Kluger\u2019s \u201cApollo 8.\u201d) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going head-to-head to conquer space travelThe race, at this point, was to get close to the moon, rather than to land or even to orbit it. The mission was to be a simple flyby: a sort of dress rehearsal for an eventual landing. I say simple the way movie popcorn vendors say small. Simple, only in that once the spacecraft was blasted out of Earth\u2019s orbit toward the moon, physics and gravity would handle the rest. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s progress had been hobbled by problems with its lunar module \u2014 the spidery lander that would one day shuttle astronauts from the orbiting mothership down to the surface of the moon and back up. Although a flyby doesn\u2019t require a lander, NASA would have sent it up so the payload would match that of the eventual landing mission. But, sitting on a beach one day, a NASA engineer named George Low had an idea: The United States could beat the Soviets to the moon if NASA left the lunar module behind on Earth. NASA brass then upped the dangers by adding multiple lunar orbits. Rather than sling-shotting partway around the moon, the crew would circle it 10 times, carrying out some of the necessary prep for an eventual landing, scouting level landing sites and measuring gravity fluctuations, which can alter a spacecraft\u2019s path in potentially catastrophic ways.To understand the added dangers of a lunar orbit mission, the reader must understand some rocketry basics. Here\u2019s where Kurson is our man. As he takes us through the flight moment by moment, his instinct for what needs explaining and in how much detail is unerring. For the astronauts of Apollo\u00a08 to orbit the moon, their spacecraft had to be slowed. If it wasn\u2019t, the forces of gravity and inertia would have whipped them partway around the moon and then back toward Earth. To slow the spacecraft, the propulsion system had to be fired in reverse for a precisely calculated duration. Too much \u201cburn,\u201d and the craft would slow too much, drop out of orbit and crash into the moon; too little, and it would careen off into deep space with no way to reverse course. (The engine on the lunar module could have served as a backup, had they brought it along.) Adding to the danger, this critical maneuver took place on the dark side, where the moon blocks communication with Mission Control. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKurson unpacks this and several other critical maneuvers, effectively escalating the tension. Several things did go wrong, but the real drama lay in the gnawing anticipation of fatal catastrophe. Everyone involved knew that schedules were rushed, steps were skipped and tremendous risks were undertaken. (This was the first time, for instance, that the Saturn\u00a0V rocket had carried a crew; the previous time it flew, it malfunctioned badly.) Engineers were nervous to the point of passing out. Wives chewed their pearls while they listened to the squawk boxes NASA installed in their homes to let them eavesdrop on mission communications. Cruelly, a photographer from Life magazine was on hand to capture these high-stress moments. The astronaut wife was the original NASA support module. These women humanized the cold engineering and militaristic strivings of America\u2019s moon shot, smiling when they felt like screaming, making sandwiches and endless pots of coffee for the TV crews decamped in their yards. Space was a man\u2019s world, and so, sometimes, is Kurson\u2019s prose. \u201cLovell packed Marilyn and their three kids into the car.\u201d \u201cOrbital mechanics \u2014 the way the universe ordered and moved itself \u2014 worked. And man had figured it out to the split second.\u201d Given the recent book and film about the women who made some of those critical calculations, that \u201cman\u201d is a bit of a clanker.What Kurson has managed is impressive, given the hundreds of hours of transcripts he waded through. Those include transcripts of his own interviews as well as voluminous Apollo\u00a08 mission communications. (Note to moon-landing deniers: It is easier to put a human on the moon than it would be to fake the hundreds of thousands of pages of Apollo mission documents on NASA.gov.) A nonfiction author is a massive filtration system. You\u2019re only as good as what you leave out. Kurson omits skillfully. \u201cRocket Man\u201d is close-to-the-bone adventure-telling on a par with Alfred Lansing\u2019s \u201cEndurance\u201d and Jon Krakauer\u2019s \u201cInto Thin Air.\u201d It\u2019s as close to a movie as writing gets. Astronauts\u2019 pre-flight peeing ritual and other marvels of space station lifeHistory cast it well. As flight commander, we have Frank Borman, West Point graduate, test pilot, \u201ca serious man with an oversized head.\u201d Borman\u2019s foil is Jim Lovell, the easygoing heckuva nice guy, gazing up at the stars as a boy and dreaming of space. (In what is either the most or least romantic gesture in history, Lovell names an impact crater after his wife.) The token nerd is scientist William Anders, the astronaut no one has heard of. I am grateful to Kurson for plucking him from obscurity. Here\u2019s a man who took his congratulatory call from the president while on the toilet (having avoided the dreaded fecal bag his entire week in space). Awaiting countdown, Anders noticed a wasp outside the spacecraft window, building a nest, and thought: \u201cYou are in for a surprise.\u201d When Borman became ill on the way to the moon, Anders watched \u201cwith wonder\u201d as a drifting blob of vomit split, \u201cone wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction.\u201d He thought: \u201cThat\u2019s Isaac Newton. That\u2019s conservation of momentum.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe real heroes of \u201cRocket Men\u201d are math and physics. The reentry trajectory of the Apollo\u00a08 capsule had been calculated so precisely that it dropped almost directly on top of the ship that had sailed out to meet it. It was science that got us to the moon \u2014 not just its mastery but a cultural consensus about its importance and worth. Without that, we don\u2019t have a wasp\u2019s chance in liftoff of ever again doing something so bold. By Robert KursonRandom House. 372 pp. $28 Robert Kurson takes us moment by moment through great feats of science and rocketry. Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous",
        "author": "Mary Roach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2685",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-the-hurried-mission-to-orbit-the-moon-before-the-soviets-was-so-dangerous/2018/04/06/f291f830-216f-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html",
        "text": "Mary Roach is the author of \u201cPacking for Mars,\u201d \u201cStiff,\u201d and other books.\nThere were, in all, 12 Apollo spaceflights. We remember them by number if history was made (Apollo\u00a011) or things went wrong (1 and 13). By either measure, we should remember Apollo\u00a08: the first mission to take humans all the way to (if not yet onto) the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cRocket Men\u201d opens in summer 1968, with the space race in high gear. The Soviet Union had already put the world\u2019s first satellite, Sputnik, as well as the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth\u2019s orbit. The Soviets were projected to reach the moon by the end of the year, months ahead of the United States. (Similar drama played out in book publishing last year. Just as galleys of \u201cRocket Men\u201d were touching down on reviewers\u2019 desks, Henry Holt launched the hardback of Jeffrey Kluger\u2019s \u201cApollo 8.\u201d) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going head-to-head to conquer space travelThe race, at this point, was to get close to the moon, rather than to land or even to orbit it. The mission was to be a simple flyby: a sort of dress rehearsal for an eventual landing. I say simple the way movie popcorn vendors say small. Simple, only in that once the spacecraft was blasted out of Earth\u2019s orbit toward the moon, physics and gravity would handle the rest. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s progress had been hobbled by problems with its lunar module \u2014 the spidery lander that would one day shuttle astronauts from the orbiting mothership down to the surface of the moon and back up. Although a flyby doesn\u2019t require a lander, NASA would have sent it up so the payload would match that of the eventual landing mission. But, sitting on a beach one day, a NASA engineer named George Low had an idea: The United States could beat the Soviets to the moon if NASA left the lunar module behind on Earth. NASA brass then upped the dangers by adding multiple lunar orbits. Rather than sling-shotting partway around the moon, the crew would circle it 10 times, carrying out some of the necessary prep for an eventual landing, scouting level landing sites and measuring gravity fluctuations, which can alter a spacecraft\u2019s path in potentially catastrophic ways.To understand the added dangers of a lunar orbit mission, the reader must understand some rocketry basics. Here\u2019s where Kurson is our man. As he takes us through the flight moment by moment, his instinct for what needs explaining and in how much detail is unerring. For the astronauts of Apollo\u00a08 to orbit the moon, their spacecraft had to be slowed. If it wasn\u2019t, the forces of gravity and inertia would have whipped them partway around the moon and then back toward Earth. To slow the spacecraft, the propulsion system had to be fired in reverse for a precisely calculated duration. Too much \u201cburn,\u201d and the craft would slow too much, drop out of orbit and crash into the moon; too little, and it would careen off into deep space with no way to reverse course. (The engine on the lunar module could have served as a backup, had they brought it along.) Adding to the danger, this critical maneuver took place on the dark side, where the moon blocks communication with Mission Control. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKurson unpacks this and several other critical maneuvers, effectively escalating the tension. Several things did go wrong, but the real drama lay in the gnawing anticipation of fatal catastrophe. Everyone involved knew that schedules were rushed, steps were skipped and tremendous risks were undertaken. (This was the first time, for instance, that the Saturn\u00a0V rocket had carried a crew; the previous time it flew, it malfunctioned badly.) Engineers were nervous to the point of passing out. Wives chewed their pearls while they listened to the squawk boxes NASA installed in their homes to let them eavesdrop on mission communications. Cruelly, a photographer from Life magazine was on hand to capture these high-stress moments. The astronaut wife was the original NASA support module. These women humanized the cold engineering and militaristic strivings of America\u2019s moon shot, smiling when they felt like screaming, making sandwiches and endless pots of coffee for the TV crews decamped in their yards. Space was a man\u2019s world, and so, sometimes, is Kurson\u2019s prose. \u201cLovell packed Marilyn and their three kids into the car.\u201d \u201cOrbital mechanics \u2014 the way the universe ordered and moved itself \u2014 worked. And man had figured it out to the split second.\u201d Given the recent book and film about the women who made some of those critical calculations, that \u201cman\u201d is a bit of a clanker.What Kurson has managed is impressive, given the hundreds of hours of transcripts he waded through. Those include transcripts of his own interviews as well as voluminous Apollo\u00a08 mission communications. (Note to moon-landing deniers: It is easier to put a human on the moon than it would be to fake the hundreds of thousands of pages of Apollo mission documents on NASA.gov.) A nonfiction author is a massive filtration system. You\u2019re only as good as what you leave out. Kurson omits skillfully. \u201cRocket Man\u201d is close-to-the-bone adventure-telling on a par with Alfred Lansing\u2019s \u201cEndurance\u201d and Jon Krakauer\u2019s \u201cInto Thin Air.\u201d It\u2019s as close to a movie as writing gets. Astronauts\u2019 pre-flight peeing ritual and other marvels of space station lifeHistory cast it well. As flight commander, we have Frank Borman, West Point graduate, test pilot, \u201ca serious man with an oversized head.\u201d Borman\u2019s foil is Jim Lovell, the easygoing heckuva nice guy, gazing up at the stars as a boy and dreaming of space. (In what is either the most or least romantic gesture in history, Lovell names an impact crater after his wife.) The token nerd is scientist William Anders, the astronaut no one has heard of. I am grateful to Kurson for plucking him from obscurity. Here\u2019s a man who took his congratulatory call from the president while on the toilet (having avoided the dreaded fecal bag his entire week in space). Awaiting countdown, Anders noticed a wasp outside the spacecraft window, building a nest, and thought: \u201cYou are in for a surprise.\u201d When Borman became ill on the way to the moon, Anders watched \u201cwith wonder\u201d as a drifting blob of vomit split, \u201cone wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction.\u201d He thought: \u201cThat\u2019s Isaac Newton. That\u2019s conservation of momentum.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe real heroes of \u201cRocket Men\u201d are math and physics. The reentry trajectory of the Apollo\u00a08 capsule had been calculated so precisely that it dropped almost directly on top of the ship that had sailed out to meet it. It was science that got us to the moon \u2014 not just its mastery but a cultural consensus about its importance and worth. Without that, we don\u2019t have a wasp\u2019s chance in liftoff of ever again doing something so bold. By Robert KursonRandom House. 372 pp. $28 Robert Kurson takes us moment by moment through great feats of science and rocketry. Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous",
        "author": "Mary Roach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2686",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-the-hurried-mission-to-orbit-the-moon-before-the-soviets-was-so-dangerous/2018/04/06/f291f830-216f-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html",
        "text": "Mary Roach is the author of \u201cPacking for Mars,\u201d \u201cStiff,\u201d and other books.\nThere were, in all, 12 Apollo spaceflights. We remember them by number if history was made (Apollo\u00a011) or things went wrong (1 and 13). By either measure, we should remember Apollo\u00a08: the first mission to take humans all the way to (if not yet onto) the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cRocket Men\u201d opens in summer 1968, with the space race in high gear. The Soviet Union had already put the world\u2019s first satellite, Sputnik, as well as the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth\u2019s orbit. The Soviets were projected to reach the moon by the end of the year, months ahead of the United States. (Similar drama played out in book publishing last year. Just as galleys of \u201cRocket Men\u201d were touching down on reviewers\u2019 desks, Henry Holt launched the hardback of Jeffrey Kluger\u2019s \u201cApollo 8.\u201d) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going head-to-head to conquer space travelThe race, at this point, was to get close to the moon, rather than to land or even to orbit it. The mission was to be a simple flyby: a sort of dress rehearsal for an eventual landing. I say simple the way movie popcorn vendors say small. Simple, only in that once the spacecraft was blasted out of Earth\u2019s orbit toward the moon, physics and gravity would handle the rest. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s progress had been hobbled by problems with its lunar module \u2014 the spidery lander that would one day shuttle astronauts from the orbiting mothership down to the surface of the moon and back up. Although a flyby doesn\u2019t require a lander, NASA would have sent it up so the payload would match that of the eventual landing mission. But, sitting on a beach one day, a NASA engineer named George Low had an idea: The United States could beat the Soviets to the moon if NASA left the lunar module behind on Earth. NASA brass then upped the dangers by adding multiple lunar orbits. Rather than sling-shotting partway around the moon, the crew would circle it 10 times, carrying out some of the necessary prep for an eventual landing, scouting level landing sites and measuring gravity fluctuations, which can alter a spacecraft\u2019s path in potentially catastrophic ways.To understand the added dangers of a lunar orbit mission, the reader must understand some rocketry basics. Here\u2019s where Kurson is our man. As he takes us through the flight moment by moment, his instinct for what needs explaining and in how much detail is unerring. For the astronauts of Apollo\u00a08 to orbit the moon, their spacecraft had to be slowed. If it wasn\u2019t, the forces of gravity and inertia would have whipped them partway around the moon and then back toward Earth. To slow the spacecraft, the propulsion system had to be fired in reverse for a precisely calculated duration. Too much \u201cburn,\u201d and the craft would slow too much, drop out of orbit and crash into the moon; too little, and it would careen off into deep space with no way to reverse course. (The engine on the lunar module could have served as a backup, had they brought it along.) Adding to the danger, this critical maneuver took place on the dark side, where the moon blocks communication with Mission Control. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKurson unpacks this and several other critical maneuvers, effectively escalating the tension. Several things did go wrong, but the real drama lay in the gnawing anticipation of fatal catastrophe. Everyone involved knew that schedules were rushed, steps were skipped and tremendous risks were undertaken. (This was the first time, for instance, that the Saturn\u00a0V rocket had carried a crew; the previous time it flew, it malfunctioned badly.) Engineers were nervous to the point of passing out. Wives chewed their pearls while they listened to the squawk boxes NASA installed in their homes to let them eavesdrop on mission communications. Cruelly, a photographer from Life magazine was on hand to capture these high-stress moments. The astronaut wife was the original NASA support module. These women humanized the cold engineering and militaristic strivings of America\u2019s moon shot, smiling when they felt like screaming, making sandwiches and endless pots of coffee for the TV crews decamped in their yards. Space was a man\u2019s world, and so, sometimes, is Kurson\u2019s prose. \u201cLovell packed Marilyn and their three kids into the car.\u201d \u201cOrbital mechanics \u2014 the way the universe ordered and moved itself \u2014 worked. And man had figured it out to the split second.\u201d Given the recent book and film about the women who made some of those critical calculations, that \u201cman\u201d is a bit of a clanker.What Kurson has managed is impressive, given the hundreds of hours of transcripts he waded through. Those include transcripts of his own interviews as well as voluminous Apollo\u00a08 mission communications. (Note to moon-landing deniers: It is easier to put a human on the moon than it would be to fake the hundreds of thousands of pages of Apollo mission documents on NASA.gov.) A nonfiction author is a massive filtration system. You\u2019re only as good as what you leave out. Kurson omits skillfully. \u201cRocket Man\u201d is close-to-the-bone adventure-telling on a par with Alfred Lansing\u2019s \u201cEndurance\u201d and Jon Krakauer\u2019s \u201cInto Thin Air.\u201d It\u2019s as close to a movie as writing gets. Astronauts\u2019 pre-flight peeing ritual and other marvels of space station lifeHistory cast it well. As flight commander, we have Frank Borman, West Point graduate, test pilot, \u201ca serious man with an oversized head.\u201d Borman\u2019s foil is Jim Lovell, the easygoing heckuva nice guy, gazing up at the stars as a boy and dreaming of space. (In what is either the most or least romantic gesture in history, Lovell names an impact crater after his wife.) The token nerd is scientist William Anders, the astronaut no one has heard of. I am grateful to Kurson for plucking him from obscurity. Here\u2019s a man who took his congratulatory call from the president while on the toilet (having avoided the dreaded fecal bag his entire week in space). Awaiting countdown, Anders noticed a wasp outside the spacecraft window, building a nest, and thought: \u201cYou are in for a surprise.\u201d When Borman became ill on the way to the moon, Anders watched \u201cwith wonder\u201d as a drifting blob of vomit split, \u201cone wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction.\u201d He thought: \u201cThat\u2019s Isaac Newton. That\u2019s conservation of momentum.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe real heroes of \u201cRocket Men\u201d are math and physics. The reentry trajectory of the Apollo\u00a08 capsule had been calculated so precisely that it dropped almost directly on top of the ship that had sailed out to meet it. It was science that got us to the moon \u2014 not just its mastery but a cultural consensus about its importance and worth. Without that, we don\u2019t have a wasp\u2019s chance in liftoff of ever again doing something so bold. By Robert KursonRandom House. 372 pp. $28 Robert Kurson takes us moment by moment through great feats of science and rocketry. Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous",
        "author": "Mary Roach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2687",
        "date": "2018-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-the-hurried-mission-to-orbit-the-moon-before-the-soviets-was-so-dangerous/2018/04/06/f291f830-216f-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html",
        "text": "Mary Roach is the author of \u201cPacking for Mars,\u201d \u201cStiff,\u201d and other books.\nThere were, in all, 12 Apollo spaceflights. We remember them by number if history was made (Apollo\u00a011) or things went wrong (1 and 13). By either measure, we should remember Apollo\u00a08: the first mission to take humans all the way to (if not yet onto) the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cRocket Men\u201d opens in summer 1968, with the space race in high gear. The Soviet Union had already put the world\u2019s first satellite, Sputnik, as well as the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into Earth\u2019s orbit. The Soviets were projected to reach the moon by the end of the year, months ahead of the United States. (Similar drama played out in book publishing last year. Just as galleys of \u201cRocket Men\u201d were touching down on reviewers\u2019 desks, Henry Holt launched the hardback of Jeffrey Kluger\u2019s \u201cApollo 8.\u201d) Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going head-to-head to conquer space travelThe race, at this point, was to get close to the moon, rather than to land or even to orbit it. The mission was to be a simple flyby: a sort of dress rehearsal for an eventual landing. I say simple the way movie popcorn vendors say small. Simple, only in that once the spacecraft was blasted out of Earth\u2019s orbit toward the moon, physics and gravity would handle the rest. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s progress had been hobbled by problems with its lunar module \u2014 the spidery lander that would one day shuttle astronauts from the orbiting mothership down to the surface of the moon and back up. Although a flyby doesn\u2019t require a lander, NASA would have sent it up so the payload would match that of the eventual landing mission. But, sitting on a beach one day, a NASA engineer named George Low had an idea: The United States could beat the Soviets to the moon if NASA left the lunar module behind on Earth. NASA brass then upped the dangers by adding multiple lunar orbits. Rather than sling-shotting partway around the moon, the crew would circle it 10 times, carrying out some of the necessary prep for an eventual landing, scouting level landing sites and measuring gravity fluctuations, which can alter a spacecraft\u2019s path in potentially catastrophic ways.To understand the added dangers of a lunar orbit mission, the reader must understand some rocketry basics. Here\u2019s where Kurson is our man. As he takes us through the flight moment by moment, his instinct for what needs explaining and in how much detail is unerring. For the astronauts of Apollo\u00a08 to orbit the moon, their spacecraft had to be slowed. If it wasn\u2019t, the forces of gravity and inertia would have whipped them partway around the moon and then back toward Earth. To slow the spacecraft, the propulsion system had to be fired in reverse for a precisely calculated duration. Too much \u201cburn,\u201d and the craft would slow too much, drop out of orbit and crash into the moon; too little, and it would careen off into deep space with no way to reverse course. (The engine on the lunar module could have served as a backup, had they brought it along.) Adding to the danger, this critical maneuver took place on the dark side, where the moon blocks communication with Mission Control. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKurson unpacks this and several other critical maneuvers, effectively escalating the tension. Several things did go wrong, but the real drama lay in the gnawing anticipation of fatal catastrophe. Everyone involved knew that schedules were rushed, steps were skipped and tremendous risks were undertaken. (This was the first time, for instance, that the Saturn\u00a0V rocket had carried a crew; the previous time it flew, it malfunctioned badly.) Engineers were nervous to the point of passing out. Wives chewed their pearls while they listened to the squawk boxes NASA installed in their homes to let them eavesdrop on mission communications. Cruelly, a photographer from Life magazine was on hand to capture these high-stress moments. The astronaut wife was the original NASA support module. These women humanized the cold engineering and militaristic strivings of America\u2019s moon shot, smiling when they felt like screaming, making sandwiches and endless pots of coffee for the TV crews decamped in their yards. Space was a man\u2019s world, and so, sometimes, is Kurson\u2019s prose. \u201cLovell packed Marilyn and their three kids into the car.\u201d \u201cOrbital mechanics \u2014 the way the universe ordered and moved itself \u2014 worked. And man had figured it out to the split second.\u201d Given the recent book and film about the women who made some of those critical calculations, that \u201cman\u201d is a bit of a clanker.What Kurson has managed is impressive, given the hundreds of hours of transcripts he waded through. Those include transcripts of his own interviews as well as voluminous Apollo\u00a08 mission communications. (Note to moon-landing deniers: It is easier to put a human on the moon than it would be to fake the hundreds of thousands of pages of Apollo mission documents on NASA.gov.) A nonfiction author is a massive filtration system. You\u2019re only as good as what you leave out. Kurson omits skillfully. \u201cRocket Man\u201d is close-to-the-bone adventure-telling on a par with Alfred Lansing\u2019s \u201cEndurance\u201d and Jon Krakauer\u2019s \u201cInto Thin Air.\u201d It\u2019s as close to a movie as writing gets. Astronauts\u2019 pre-flight peeing ritual and other marvels of space station lifeHistory cast it well. As flight commander, we have Frank Borman, West Point graduate, test pilot, \u201ca serious man with an oversized head.\u201d Borman\u2019s foil is Jim Lovell, the easygoing heckuva nice guy, gazing up at the stars as a boy and dreaming of space. (In what is either the most or least romantic gesture in history, Lovell names an impact crater after his wife.) The token nerd is scientist William Anders, the astronaut no one has heard of. I am grateful to Kurson for plucking him from obscurity. Here\u2019s a man who took his congratulatory call from the president while on the toilet (having avoided the dreaded fecal bag his entire week in space). Awaiting countdown, Anders noticed a wasp outside the spacecraft window, building a nest, and thought: \u201cYou are in for a surprise.\u201d When Borman became ill on the way to the moon, Anders watched \u201cwith wonder\u201d as a drifting blob of vomit split, \u201cone wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction.\u201d He thought: \u201cThat\u2019s Isaac Newton. That\u2019s conservation of momentum.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe real heroes of \u201cRocket Men\u201d are math and physics. The reentry trajectory of the Apollo\u00a08 capsule had been calculated so precisely that it dropped almost directly on top of the ship that had sailed out to meet it. It was science that got us to the moon \u2014 not just its mastery but a cultural consensus about its importance and worth. Without that, we don\u2019t have a wasp\u2019s chance in liftoff of ever again doing something so bold. By Robert KursonRandom House. 372 pp. $28 Robert Kurson takes us moment by moment through great feats of science and rocketry. Why the hurried mission to orbit the moon before the Soviets was so dangerous",
        "author": "Mary Roach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2688",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-photos-of-earth-from-space-changed-humans-view-of-their-life-on-the-planet/2018/02/09/fc04b84c-0128-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html",
        "text": "Marcia Bartusiak is a professor in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. She is the author of six books on the frontiers of astrophysics and its history, including \u201cBlack Hole\u201d and \u201cEinstein\u2019s Unfinished Symphony.\u201d\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBeware, flat-earthers. Christopher Potter has mounted a powerful assault on your most cherished belief. In 1948, British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle made an intriguing prediction: \u201cOnce a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available .\u2009.\u2009. a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.\u201d With \u201cThe Earth Gazers,\u201d his beautifully written overview of our voyage into the heavens, Potter shows us how that cosmic forecast played out. Photographs from space not only allowed us to see the entire planetary sphere suspended like a blue Eden amid a black void, they also informed us that the human species is \u201cintimately connected, even embedded in its home. The more distant our perspective,\u201d writes the author, \u201cseemingly the more intimate.\u201dEverything explained \u2014 in photos, cartoons and LegosIt\u2019s a familiar tale, one that the author largely draws from previous histories of aviation, rocketry and space travel. Yet Potter effectively delivers the highlights, maintaining an engaging narrative thread that links all the main players over the course of the 20th century. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe begins with Charles Lindbergh, a college dropout who found his passion in aviation. After some barnstorming and wingwalking, he made the highest marks at the U.S. Army flying school. Spurred by a $25,000 prize, Lindbergh then conquered the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and gained lifetime fame. \u201cLindbergh said that he never saw the Earth so clearly .\u2009.\u2009. as he did in those early days of flight,\u201d writes Potter. It was a first step toward Hoyle\u2019s vision. Lindbergh himself imagined the next frontier \u2014 rockets \u2014 and quickly telephoned rocket pioneer Robert Goddard upon hearing of his test runs. As a teenager, Goddard dreamed of going to Mars. Once it was thought impossible to escape Earth\u2019s gravitational pull, but \u201cGoddard\u2019s genius was to have worked out how,\u201d Potter writes. \u201cHis brilliant concept was the multistage rocket propelled by liquid fuel.\u201d But, though he was a brilliant inventor, he was a lousy engineer. Many of Goddard\u2019s rockets blew up, sputtered out or failed to launch through the 1930s. As a result, the impetus in rocketry moved to Europe, particularly Germany, where wunderkind Wernher von Braun was designing his country\u2019s rockets and overseeing a budget of 11\u00a0million Reichsmarks before he turned 24. His personal goal was to go into space, but he dutifully advanced Hitler\u2019s mandate to attack London. His rockets were manufactured in a series of tunnels carved out of the Harz mountains. There, thousands of POWs and concentration-camp workers labored under conditions that resembled Dante\u2019s Inferno, 20 dying each day from disease, accident, starvation or random killings by the guards. The United States ultimately profited from this tragic legacy. At the war\u2019s end, von Braun packed up his documentation and achieved his aim of going to America to build a space rocket. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo longer top dog, von Braun faced competition from the U.S. military and other government agencies. It was an internal tempest that slowed the American effort, allowing the Soviet Union to take the lead in rocketry and launch the first satellite into space \u2014 which may have been a blessing in disguise, according to Potter: \u201cIf von Braun had got his satellite into orbit first .\u2009.\u2009. the space race would surely have taken a different course. It seems highly unlikely that the American public of the time would have so readily funded such a costly enterprise without the motivating force of fear.\u201d\nThe book travels through \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d territory \u2014 swiftly moving from Projects Mercury and Gemini to the Apollo program. Potter also takes a puzzling detour to cover atheist Madalyn Murray O\u2019Hair\u2019s life. While she was a thorn in NASA\u2019s side with her constant challenges to keep God out of astronauts\u2019 mouths, this section appears to be from another book altogether. More captivating are the gossipy space stories. When urine was dumped from a spacecraft, the droplets froze and glittered like diamonds; astronaut Wally Schirra called the display \u201cConstellation Urion.\u201d After Gemini X, Mike Collins \u201csubmitted his travel expenses: three days at $8 a day.\u201d And the most bad-tempered mission was Apollo 7, whose crew never flew again.\nSurprisingly, taking photographs in space was not a top NASA priority at first, denigrated as being too touristy. But that changed with Gemini IV, when Richard Underwood, the man in charge of NASA photography, convinced the astronauts that the endeavor would be their \u201ckey to immortality.\u201d Eventually, writes Potter, \u201cit gave them a rare sense of independence and the opportunity to be more than just a man in a can; to be artists.\u201d \nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first pictures of a full Earth from space, by both the Lunar Orbiter and an Earth-orbiting satellite in 1966, had little impact, probably because of the poor quality. But on Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to circle the moon, Bill Anders snapped a vivid, color picture of Earth rising over the lunar surface. On the way out, the Apollo 8 astronauts had been the first to see the entire Earth in a single glance. Where did I see this before, thought Anders. \u201cAnd [he] remembers that it was three months earlier, at the premiere of Kubrick\u2019s \u20182001: A Space Odyssey,\u2019\u2009\u201d Potter writes.\nWith Apollo 11, the mission that first landed on the moon, the book returns to Lindbergh, then 67 years old, who was on hand to watch the launch. From 1968 to 1972, a total of 24 astronauts either walked on the moon or viewed the full Earth from space \u2014 both experiences appeared to have been life-altering. Afterward, some of these Earth gazers divorced; others turned to poetry, art, philosophy and religion.Astronauts\u2019 pre-flight peeing ritual and other marvels of space station lifeOne even became a sort of hippie. Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart grew a beard, hung out with yogis and told Time magazine that he had lost his \u201cidentity as an American astronaut. .\u2009.\u2009. National boundaries became meaningless and arbitrary, but also the boundary between self and not-self.\u201d Astronaut Ed Mitchell, too, came to think the universe was \u201cin some way conscious.\u201d \nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow did Hoyle\u2019s prediction pan out for those of us who remained behind? For one, \u201cEarthrise,\u201d Apollo 8\u2019s famous photograph, became one of the most reproduced pictures of all time. Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it \u201cthe most influential environmental photograph ever taken.\u201d For many, it vividly illustrates our planet\u2019s fragility. Perhaps it\u2019s no coincidence that the Earth Day movement arose soon after. \u201cMight this be another reason to travel into space,\u201d Potter writes, \u201cin order to experience what an alien might experience: to see ourselves from the outside?\u201d \nIf so, we vitally need a renewal of that enlightenment as we approach the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Decades after his Apollo 8 flight, Jim Lovell warned us that \u201cthe mind easily forgets. .\u2009.\u2009. People get back to the way they lived before \u2014 wars and disruption and human cruelty.\u201d\nBy Christopher PotterPegasus. 456 pp. $28.95 Christopher Potter explores the impetus for aviation and rocketry development How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2689",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-photos-of-earth-from-space-changed-humans-view-of-their-life-on-the-planet/2018/02/09/fc04b84c-0128-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html",
        "text": "Marcia Bartusiak is a professor in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. She is the author of six books on the frontiers of astrophysics and its history, including \u201cBlack Hole\u201d and \u201cEinstein\u2019s Unfinished Symphony.\u201d\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBeware, flat-earthers. Christopher Potter has mounted a powerful assault on your most cherished belief. In 1948, British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle made an intriguing prediction: \u201cOnce a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available .\u2009.\u2009. a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.\u201d With \u201cThe Earth Gazers,\u201d his beautifully written overview of our voyage into the heavens, Potter shows us how that cosmic forecast played out. Photographs from space not only allowed us to see the entire planetary sphere suspended like a blue Eden amid a black void, they also informed us that the human species is \u201cintimately connected, even embedded in its home. The more distant our perspective,\u201d writes the author, \u201cseemingly the more intimate.\u201dEverything explained \u2014 in photos, cartoons and LegosIt\u2019s a familiar tale, one that the author largely draws from previous histories of aviation, rocketry and space travel. Yet Potter effectively delivers the highlights, maintaining an engaging narrative thread that links all the main players over the course of the 20th century. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe begins with Charles Lindbergh, a college dropout who found his passion in aviation. After some barnstorming and wingwalking, he made the highest marks at the U.S. Army flying school. Spurred by a $25,000 prize, Lindbergh then conquered the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and gained lifetime fame. \u201cLindbergh said that he never saw the Earth so clearly .\u2009.\u2009. as he did in those early days of flight,\u201d writes Potter. It was a first step toward Hoyle\u2019s vision. Lindbergh himself imagined the next frontier \u2014 rockets \u2014 and quickly telephoned rocket pioneer Robert Goddard upon hearing of his test runs. As a teenager, Goddard dreamed of going to Mars. Once it was thought impossible to escape Earth\u2019s gravitational pull, but \u201cGoddard\u2019s genius was to have worked out how,\u201d Potter writes. \u201cHis brilliant concept was the multistage rocket propelled by liquid fuel.\u201d But, though he was a brilliant inventor, he was a lousy engineer. Many of Goddard\u2019s rockets blew up, sputtered out or failed to launch through the 1930s. As a result, the impetus in rocketry moved to Europe, particularly Germany, where wunderkind Wernher von Braun was designing his country\u2019s rockets and overseeing a budget of 11\u00a0million Reichsmarks before he turned 24. His personal goal was to go into space, but he dutifully advanced Hitler\u2019s mandate to attack London. His rockets were manufactured in a series of tunnels carved out of the Harz mountains. There, thousands of POWs and concentration-camp workers labored under conditions that resembled Dante\u2019s Inferno, 20 dying each day from disease, accident, starvation or random killings by the guards. The United States ultimately profited from this tragic legacy. At the war\u2019s end, von Braun packed up his documentation and achieved his aim of going to America to build a space rocket. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo longer top dog, von Braun faced competition from the U.S. military and other government agencies. It was an internal tempest that slowed the American effort, allowing the Soviet Union to take the lead in rocketry and launch the first satellite into space \u2014 which may have been a blessing in disguise, according to Potter: \u201cIf von Braun had got his satellite into orbit first .\u2009.\u2009. the space race would surely have taken a different course. It seems highly unlikely that the American public of the time would have so readily funded such a costly enterprise without the motivating force of fear.\u201d\nThe book travels through \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d territory \u2014 swiftly moving from Projects Mercury and Gemini to the Apollo program. Potter also takes a puzzling detour to cover atheist Madalyn Murray O\u2019Hair\u2019s life. While she was a thorn in NASA\u2019s side with her constant challenges to keep God out of astronauts\u2019 mouths, this section appears to be from another book altogether. More captivating are the gossipy space stories. When urine was dumped from a spacecraft, the droplets froze and glittered like diamonds; astronaut Wally Schirra called the display \u201cConstellation Urion.\u201d After Gemini X, Mike Collins \u201csubmitted his travel expenses: three days at $8 a day.\u201d And the most bad-tempered mission was Apollo 7, whose crew never flew again.\nSurprisingly, taking photographs in space was not a top NASA priority at first, denigrated as being too touristy. But that changed with Gemini IV, when Richard Underwood, the man in charge of NASA photography, convinced the astronauts that the endeavor would be their \u201ckey to immortality.\u201d Eventually, writes Potter, \u201cit gave them a rare sense of independence and the opportunity to be more than just a man in a can; to be artists.\u201d \nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first pictures of a full Earth from space, by both the Lunar Orbiter and an Earth-orbiting satellite in 1966, had little impact, probably because of the poor quality. But on Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to circle the moon, Bill Anders snapped a vivid, color picture of Earth rising over the lunar surface. On the way out, the Apollo 8 astronauts had been the first to see the entire Earth in a single glance. Where did I see this before, thought Anders. \u201cAnd [he] remembers that it was three months earlier, at the premiere of Kubrick\u2019s \u20182001: A Space Odyssey,\u2019\u2009\u201d Potter writes.\nWith Apollo 11, the mission that first landed on the moon, the book returns to Lindbergh, then 67 years old, who was on hand to watch the launch. From 1968 to 1972, a total of 24 astronauts either walked on the moon or viewed the full Earth from space \u2014 both experiences appeared to have been life-altering. Afterward, some of these Earth gazers divorced; others turned to poetry, art, philosophy and religion.Astronauts\u2019 pre-flight peeing ritual and other marvels of space station lifeOne even became a sort of hippie. Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart grew a beard, hung out with yogis and told Time magazine that he had lost his \u201cidentity as an American astronaut. .\u2009.\u2009. National boundaries became meaningless and arbitrary, but also the boundary between self and not-self.\u201d Astronaut Ed Mitchell, too, came to think the universe was \u201cin some way conscious.\u201d \nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow did Hoyle\u2019s prediction pan out for those of us who remained behind? For one, \u201cEarthrise,\u201d Apollo 8\u2019s famous photograph, became one of the most reproduced pictures of all time. Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it \u201cthe most influential environmental photograph ever taken.\u201d For many, it vividly illustrates our planet\u2019s fragility. Perhaps it\u2019s no coincidence that the Earth Day movement arose soon after. \u201cMight this be another reason to travel into space,\u201d Potter writes, \u201cin order to experience what an alien might experience: to see ourselves from the outside?\u201d \nIf so, we vitally need a renewal of that enlightenment as we approach the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Decades after his Apollo 8 flight, Jim Lovell warned us that \u201cthe mind easily forgets. .\u2009.\u2009. People get back to the way they lived before \u2014 wars and disruption and human cruelty.\u201d\nBy Christopher PotterPegasus. 456 pp. $28.95 Christopher Potter explores the impetus for aviation and rocketry development How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2690",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-photos-of-earth-from-space-changed-humans-view-of-their-life-on-the-planet/2018/02/09/fc04b84c-0128-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html",
        "text": "Marcia Bartusiak is a professor in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. She is the author of six books on the frontiers of astrophysics and its history, including \u201cBlack Hole\u201d and \u201cEinstein\u2019s Unfinished Symphony.\u201d\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBeware, flat-earthers. Christopher Potter has mounted a powerful assault on your most cherished belief. In 1948, British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle made an intriguing prediction: \u201cOnce a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available .\u2009.\u2009. a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.\u201d With \u201cThe Earth Gazers,\u201d his beautifully written overview of our voyage into the heavens, Potter shows us how that cosmic forecast played out. Photographs from space not only allowed us to see the entire planetary sphere suspended like a blue Eden amid a black void, they also informed us that the human species is \u201cintimately connected, even embedded in its home. The more distant our perspective,\u201d writes the author, \u201cseemingly the more intimate.\u201dEverything explained \u2014 in photos, cartoons and LegosIt\u2019s a familiar tale, one that the author largely draws from previous histories of aviation, rocketry and space travel. Yet Potter effectively delivers the highlights, maintaining an engaging narrative thread that links all the main players over the course of the 20th century. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe begins with Charles Lindbergh, a college dropout who found his passion in aviation. After some barnstorming and wingwalking, he made the highest marks at the U.S. Army flying school. Spurred by a $25,000 prize, Lindbergh then conquered the Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and gained lifetime fame. \u201cLindbergh said that he never saw the Earth so clearly .\u2009.\u2009. as he did in those early days of flight,\u201d writes Potter. It was a first step toward Hoyle\u2019s vision. Lindbergh himself imagined the next frontier \u2014 rockets \u2014 and quickly telephoned rocket pioneer Robert Goddard upon hearing of his test runs. As a teenager, Goddard dreamed of going to Mars. Once it was thought impossible to escape Earth\u2019s gravitational pull, but \u201cGoddard\u2019s genius was to have worked out how,\u201d Potter writes. \u201cHis brilliant concept was the multistage rocket propelled by liquid fuel.\u201d But, though he was a brilliant inventor, he was a lousy engineer. Many of Goddard\u2019s rockets blew up, sputtered out or failed to launch through the 1930s. As a result, the impetus in rocketry moved to Europe, particularly Germany, where wunderkind Wernher von Braun was designing his country\u2019s rockets and overseeing a budget of 11\u00a0million Reichsmarks before he turned 24. His personal goal was to go into space, but he dutifully advanced Hitler\u2019s mandate to attack London. His rockets were manufactured in a series of tunnels carved out of the Harz mountains. There, thousands of POWs and concentration-camp workers labored under conditions that resembled Dante\u2019s Inferno, 20 dying each day from disease, accident, starvation or random killings by the guards. The United States ultimately profited from this tragic legacy. At the war\u2019s end, von Braun packed up his documentation and achieved his aim of going to America to build a space rocket. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo longer top dog, von Braun faced competition from the U.S. military and other government agencies. It was an internal tempest that slowed the American effort, allowing the Soviet Union to take the lead in rocketry and launch the first satellite into space \u2014 which may have been a blessing in disguise, according to Potter: \u201cIf von Braun had got his satellite into orbit first .\u2009.\u2009. the space race would surely have taken a different course. It seems highly unlikely that the American public of the time would have so readily funded such a costly enterprise without the motivating force of fear.\u201d\nThe book travels through \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d territory \u2014 swiftly moving from Projects Mercury and Gemini to the Apollo program. Potter also takes a puzzling detour to cover atheist Madalyn Murray O\u2019Hair\u2019s life. While she was a thorn in NASA\u2019s side with her constant challenges to keep God out of astronauts\u2019 mouths, this section appears to be from another book altogether. More captivating are the gossipy space stories. When urine was dumped from a spacecraft, the droplets froze and glittered like diamonds; astronaut Wally Schirra called the display \u201cConstellation Urion.\u201d After Gemini X, Mike Collins \u201csubmitted his travel expenses: three days at $8 a day.\u201d And the most bad-tempered mission was Apollo 7, whose crew never flew again.\nSurprisingly, taking photographs in space was not a top NASA priority at first, denigrated as being too touristy. But that changed with Gemini IV, when Richard Underwood, the man in charge of NASA photography, convinced the astronauts that the endeavor would be their \u201ckey to immortality.\u201d Eventually, writes Potter, \u201cit gave them a rare sense of independence and the opportunity to be more than just a man in a can; to be artists.\u201d \nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first pictures of a full Earth from space, by both the Lunar Orbiter and an Earth-orbiting satellite in 1966, had little impact, probably because of the poor quality. But on Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to circle the moon, Bill Anders snapped a vivid, color picture of Earth rising over the lunar surface. On the way out, the Apollo 8 astronauts had been the first to see the entire Earth in a single glance. Where did I see this before, thought Anders. \u201cAnd [he] remembers that it was three months earlier, at the premiere of Kubrick\u2019s \u20182001: A Space Odyssey,\u2019\u2009\u201d Potter writes.\nWith Apollo 11, the mission that first landed on the moon, the book returns to Lindbergh, then 67 years old, who was on hand to watch the launch. From 1968 to 1972, a total of 24 astronauts either walked on the moon or viewed the full Earth from space \u2014 both experiences appeared to have been life-altering. Afterward, some of these Earth gazers divorced; others turned to poetry, art, philosophy and religion.Astronauts\u2019 pre-flight peeing ritual and other marvels of space station lifeOne even became a sort of hippie. Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart grew a beard, hung out with yogis and told Time magazine that he had lost his \u201cidentity as an American astronaut. .\u2009.\u2009. National boundaries became meaningless and arbitrary, but also the boundary between self and not-self.\u201d Astronaut Ed Mitchell, too, came to think the universe was \u201cin some way conscious.\u201d \nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow did Hoyle\u2019s prediction pan out for those of us who remained behind? For one, \u201cEarthrise,\u201d Apollo 8\u2019s famous photograph, became one of the most reproduced pictures of all time. Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it \u201cthe most influential environmental photograph ever taken.\u201d For many, it vividly illustrates our planet\u2019s fragility. Perhaps it\u2019s no coincidence that the Earth Day movement arose soon after. \u201cMight this be another reason to travel into space,\u201d Potter writes, \u201cin order to experience what an alien might experience: to see ourselves from the outside?\u201d \nIf so, we vitally need a renewal of that enlightenment as we approach the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Decades after his Apollo 8 flight, Jim Lovell warned us that \u201cthe mind easily forgets. .\u2009.\u2009. People get back to the way they lived before \u2014 wars and disruption and human cruelty.\u201d\nBy Christopher PotterPegasus. 456 pp. $28.95 Christopher Potter explores the impetus for aviation and rocketry development How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet",
        "author": "Marcia Bartusiak"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | When astronomers sent Chuck Berry and Bach to dance among the stars (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2691",
        "date": "2019-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/when-astronomers-sent-chuck-berry-and-bach-to-dance-among-the-stars/2019/06/20/c8726878-525b-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html",
        "text": "James Hill is a former senior editor for The Washington Post News Media Services.Even though the 200th-anniversary celebration of American independence was spectacular, nostalgia isn\u2019t usually the way we contemplate the 1970s.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWatergate happened, and the ramifications are still felt today. Inflation raged, gasoline lines became common, cars were crummy, and the clothing was god-awful. Worse, we seemed to be failing at fighting the Cold War. In other words, a lost decade. But the \u201970s had their moments. One, recounted well by British journalist Jonathan Scott, involved the effort to leave some semblance of our earthly presence aboard the Voyager spacecraft, which are still going \u2014 and going, and going \u2014 42 years after their launch. They may still be going a billion or more years from now, which was not lost on those who proposed and then pushed for what is now known as the Voyager Golden Record.First, though, there had to be a precedent. And lo and behold, the precedent was aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft that NASA had launched in the early \u201970s: the Pioneer plaques. One of the people involved in producing the plaques \u2014 which generated a mini-scandal of sorts because the human figures were nude \u2014 was Carl Sagan, a scientist at Cornell University.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSagan was already a well-known astronomer, with a growing public profile, but he was not yet the household name he would become,\u201d Scott writes. Nevertheless, he did know John Casani of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who had encouraged for the coming Voyager mission an effort similar to the Pioneer plaques. As he urged: \u201cSend a message!\u201dAnd what a message it was. Once put together, the Golden Record consisted of music; greetings in several languages, including from then-United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim (since discredited for his Nazi service in World War II), President Jimmy Carter and selected members of Congress; along with sounds and images of life on Earth.Simple? Think again.Story continues below advertisementScott\u2019s book is a testimony to the amount of work that Sagan, who died in 1996, and his team put into the Golden Record, which was not vinyl but metal (copper), plated with gold. And while this is about the production of the record and not the Voyager mission itself, Scott masters the technical details, often with a touch of humor.Advertisement\u201cThe \u2018hydrogen line\u2019 is the electromagnetic radiation spectral line that is created by a change in the energy state of neutral hydrogen atoms. I don\u2019t really know what that means either,\u201d the author admits on one of those occasions when he needs to dive into science-speak.The narrative, though, is not without its problems. One is that throughout the book, Scott tends to use first names. So Sagan becomes Carl; Ann Druyan, the woman he fell in love with (and later married) at the time of the Golden Record project, is referred to simply as Ann; and on and on. So many characters weave through the story that it becomes especially annoying when lesser ones pop up with whom we aren\u2019t on a first-name basis. One almost needs a program to figure out whom he is writing about.Story continues below advertisementAnd while Sagan comes off as the hero of this story, Scott is clear that his romance with Druyan could have been a project-buster if it came to light. (The couple waited until after the Voyager 2 launch to let the news out.) Sagan\u2019s marijuana use is also discussed.AdvertisementScott assumes we already know a lot about the Voyager mission, but it\u2019s probably a safe bet to say we don\u2019t. (Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause, where, according to The Washington Post\u2019s Sarah Kaplan, \u201cthe river of solar particles meets the vast ocean of interstellar space,\u201d in December 2018.)The Pioneer and Voyager probes may turn out to be one of NASA\u2019s greatest moments, yet we tend to view the period when they went up as a wasteland for the space agency: The lunar mission had ended, and the space shuttle was years away. Still, there was an opportunity for a grand tour. And NASA took it. That a plaque was aboard the Pioneers and a record was aboard both of the Voyagers are often seen as amusements.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEven today, if you tell a person about the Voyager record \u2014 someone who\u2019s not heard of it before \u2014 it excites head-scratching, furrowed brows and skepticism,\u201d Scott notes.AdvertisementFurther, the fact that Chuck Berry\u2019s \u201cJohnny B. Goode\u201d is riding off to eternity was not lost on the talented writers in the early days of \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d Appearing on the show in 1978, comedian Steve Martin announced that a message had come from aliens, begging: \u201cSend more Chuck Berry.\u201dThe Beatles didn\u2019t make the cut. Neither did Elvis, Jefferson Starship or the Rolling Stones. What did was Berry, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Louis Armstrong and an obscure musician named Blind Willie Johnson, along with other forms of music from around the world.Story continues below advertisementA skeptic would say: What\u2019s the point? And indeed, Scott notes that the intended audience, extraterrestrials, might never come upon the Golden Record. \u201cThe Voyagers aren\u2019t ever going to land anywhere,\u201d he writes. \u201cAssuming they don\u2019t get hit by anything, they will drift in a vast orbit around the Milky Way. They\u2019ll be forever in deep space.\u201dWhich leaves us to believe that this may have been what the team that envisioned and created the Golden Record intended all along. Kind of puts the 1970s in a different light, doesn\u2019t it?By Jonathan ScottBloomsbury Sigma. 288 pp. $28 Jonathan Scott tells the tale of the Voyager Golden Record, riding aboard two NASA spacecraft. When astronomers sent Chuck Berry and Bach to dance among the stars",
        "author": "James Hill"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | When astronomers sent Chuck Berry and Bach to dance among the stars (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2692",
        "date": "2019-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/when-astronomers-sent-chuck-berry-and-bach-to-dance-among-the-stars/2019/06/20/c8726878-525b-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html",
        "text": "James Hill is a former senior editor for The Washington Post News Media Services.Even though the 200th-anniversary celebration of American independence was spectacular, nostalgia isn\u2019t usually the way we contemplate the 1970s.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWatergate happened, and the ramifications are still felt today. Inflation raged, gasoline lines became common, cars were crummy, and the clothing was god-awful. Worse, we seemed to be failing at fighting the Cold War. In other words, a lost decade. But the \u201970s had their moments. One, recounted well by British journalist Jonathan Scott, involved the effort to leave some semblance of our earthly presence aboard the Voyager spacecraft, which are still going \u2014 and going, and going \u2014 42 years after their launch. They may still be going a billion or more years from now, which was not lost on those who proposed and then pushed for what is now known as the Voyager Golden Record.First, though, there had to be a precedent. And lo and behold, the precedent was aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft that NASA had launched in the early \u201970s: the Pioneer plaques. One of the people involved in producing the plaques \u2014 which generated a mini-scandal of sorts because the human figures were nude \u2014 was Carl Sagan, a scientist at Cornell University.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSagan was already a well-known astronomer, with a growing public profile, but he was not yet the household name he would become,\u201d Scott writes. Nevertheless, he did know John Casani of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who had encouraged for the coming Voyager mission an effort similar to the Pioneer plaques. As he urged: \u201cSend a message!\u201dAnd what a message it was. Once put together, the Golden Record consisted of music; greetings in several languages, including from then-United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim (since discredited for his Nazi service in World War II), President Jimmy Carter and selected members of Congress; along with sounds and images of life on Earth.Simple? Think again.Story continues below advertisementScott\u2019s book is a testimony to the amount of work that Sagan, who died in 1996, and his team put into the Golden Record, which was not vinyl but metal (copper), plated with gold. And while this is about the production of the record and not the Voyager mission itself, Scott masters the technical details, often with a touch of humor.Advertisement\u201cThe \u2018hydrogen line\u2019 is the electromagnetic radiation spectral line that is created by a change in the energy state of neutral hydrogen atoms. I don\u2019t really know what that means either,\u201d the author admits on one of those occasions when he needs to dive into science-speak.The narrative, though, is not without its problems. One is that throughout the book, Scott tends to use first names. So Sagan becomes Carl; Ann Druyan, the woman he fell in love with (and later married) at the time of the Golden Record project, is referred to simply as Ann; and on and on. So many characters weave through the story that it becomes especially annoying when lesser ones pop up with whom we aren\u2019t on a first-name basis. One almost needs a program to figure out whom he is writing about.Story continues below advertisementAnd while Sagan comes off as the hero of this story, Scott is clear that his romance with Druyan could have been a project-buster if it came to light. (The couple waited until after the Voyager 2 launch to let the news out.) Sagan\u2019s marijuana use is also discussed.AdvertisementScott assumes we already know a lot about the Voyager mission, but it\u2019s probably a safe bet to say we don\u2019t. (Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause, where, according to The Washington Post\u2019s Sarah Kaplan, \u201cthe river of solar particles meets the vast ocean of interstellar space,\u201d in December 2018.)The Pioneer and Voyager probes may turn out to be one of NASA\u2019s greatest moments, yet we tend to view the period when they went up as a wasteland for the space agency: The lunar mission had ended, and the space shuttle was years away. Still, there was an opportunity for a grand tour. And NASA took it. That a plaque was aboard the Pioneers and a record was aboard both of the Voyagers are often seen as amusements.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEven today, if you tell a person about the Voyager record \u2014 someone who\u2019s not heard of it before \u2014 it excites head-scratching, furrowed brows and skepticism,\u201d Scott notes.AdvertisementFurther, the fact that Chuck Berry\u2019s \u201cJohnny B. Goode\u201d is riding off to eternity was not lost on the talented writers in the early days of \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d Appearing on the show in 1978, comedian Steve Martin announced that a message had come from aliens, begging: \u201cSend more Chuck Berry.\u201dThe Beatles didn\u2019t make the cut. Neither did Elvis, Jefferson Starship or the Rolling Stones. What did was Berry, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Louis Armstrong and an obscure musician named Blind Willie Johnson, along with other forms of music from around the world.Story continues below advertisementA skeptic would say: What\u2019s the point? And indeed, Scott notes that the intended audience, extraterrestrials, might never come upon the Golden Record. \u201cThe Voyagers aren\u2019t ever going to land anywhere,\u201d he writes. \u201cAssuming they don\u2019t get hit by anything, they will drift in a vast orbit around the Milky Way. They\u2019ll be forever in deep space.\u201dWhich leaves us to believe that this may have been what the team that envisioned and created the Golden Record intended all along. Kind of puts the 1970s in a different light, doesn\u2019t it?By Jonathan ScottBloomsbury Sigma. 288 pp. $28 Jonathan Scott tells the tale of the Voyager Golden Record, riding aboard two NASA spacecraft. When astronomers sent Chuck Berry and Bach to dance among the stars",
        "author": "James Hill"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2693",
        "date": "2021-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/space-junk-satellite-tests/2021/11/19/d074acdc-487d-11ec-95dc-5f2a96e00fa3_story.html",
        "text": "It was a great week for American infrastructure on the ground. It was a terrible one for the global infrastructure surrounding our planet. On Monday, President Biden signed a bill aimed at updating America\u2019s aging bridges, roadways and drinking-water systems, among other projects. The very same day, the Russian military shot a projectile into space, smashing one of its own derelict satellites into a plume of debris and sending astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station scrambling into emergency shelter. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightUpon impact, the Kosmos 1408 satellite broke into hundreds of pieces, each traveling faster than five miles per second and quickly spreading to altitudes between 125 and 500 miles above the Earth. At such high speeds, even tiny objects can pack a punch: Per an analogy offered by NASA, a marble-size piece of debris can strike with a force comparable to a bowling ball traveling at 300 mph. This new debris joins functioning satellites in low Earth orbit, whose numbers have rapidly risen in recent years thanks in large part to the private space industry.If even a small bit of debris from Kosmos 1408 were to hit a satellite, the results could be catastrophic: Fragments of one destroyed spacecraft would strike other objects, creating more potentially destructive debris. Kessler Syndrome \u2014 a domino effect in orbit that could yield the loss of a large cross-section of satellites \u2014 looms closer to reality than before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSatellites, including those endangered by the speeding remains of Russia\u2019s antisatellite test (ASAT), are as central to the daily lives of most Americans as electrical lines or sewer systems. Losing our satellites would mean the loss of critical services, from communications and international financial exchanges to disaster relief and climate monitoring, from world-shifting space-based science to everyday activities such as ATM transactions and air travel. By design, we don\u2019t regularly notice satellite infrastructure. But we would certainly notice if it ceased to exist.We rarely pay attention to infrastructure unless it fails \u2014 the lights go out, or a sink backs up, or a pothole wrecks your car\u2019s suspension. Power transmission towers, for example, don\u2019t tend to register as remarkable in modern American landscapes; they have become perching and nesting sites for birds, as convenient a landing spot as any tree. But when a tower breaks, sparking a massive wildfire, such technology becomes horrifyingly visible \u2014 as does the destructive potential of its decay. The same holds true in space.Five myths about the moonThe problem of debris accumulation in orbit reaches back decades. The first satellites to reach orbit in the late 1950s did so alongside the first pieces of space junk, including expended rockets and nose cones. Explosions, accidental collisions and the eventual decay of old and defunct spacecraft have generated an environment that some space policymakers have compared to climate change in scale and severity. The United States and the Soviet Union conducted ASATs during the first decade of the space race. Then, as more countries gained space power in the 21st century, the ASATs started up again: In 2007, China destroyed the drifting Fengyun-1C weather satellite, and in 2008, the United States followed suit with a successful effort to bring down a failing American defense satellite. Both space powers could claim to be acting in good faith to clean up after themselves by removing potentially dangerous junk from orbit. The geopolitical power demonstrated by destroying a satellite was thus shallowly buried in the subtext of supposed nonaggression \u2014 in the guise of being a good neighbor, even.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSubtext came to the surface in 2019: After India conducted an ASAT that year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi explicitly identified the test as a demonstration of India\u2019s stature as a significant space power. So far Russian leadership has similarly eschewed any performance of good faith in the wake of Monday\u2019s ASAT. And China has continued to build an arsenal of antisatellite weapons as part of its overall space strategy.Stated intent does not do much to limit the effects of blowing up a satellite, of course. Debris from the 2007 ASAT, for example, remains aloft nearly 15 years later, periodically endangering spacecraft. Yet the two most recent ASATs nevertheless reflect a troubling shift in space politics. Military technologies have long had a presence in orbit, and less materially destructive efforts to influence satellite operations (such as laser and cyberattacks) have been part of the international defense landscape for years. Still, unambiguous acts of aggression fly in the face of long-standing conventions. The founding of NASA as a civilian agency and the signing of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, crafted in the thick of Cold War hostility, helped establish norms protecting space as a peaceful domain shared by all of humanity. Within the past five years, with the founding of the Space Force and nakedly aggressive ASAT tests, countries have rapidly, intentionally transformed space into a warfaring domain.Keeping up with the Joneses has long been part of space culture: National space programs once chased milestones in the moon race; today, private companies pursue competing broadband mega constellations. If recent actions signal a shift toward antagonistic norms, we may see further demonstrations by space powers eager to show preparedness for the fight. So far, ASAT-launching nations have targeted only their own satellites, but each test serves as a warning that the next antisatellite weapon could be aimed in a more hostile direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace warfare might not cause visible damage on the ground, but the devastation of the orbital environment would mean a larger, lonelier world than the one currently interconnected by satellites. It would also deepen the inequalities of the Space Age, denying less-powerful nations the opportunity to fairly access a truly global natural resource. War is rarely tidy; fixing a catastrophic mess of destroyed satellites would be all but impossible in the extreme near-Earth environment.The blunder that could cost the U.S. the new space racePrivate and public space industry groups are developing methods to remove large unused objects from orbit, and reusable rockets mean less volatile debris lingering in lower altitudes. Satellites and expendable rockets can be designed for disposal either through controlled reetry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere or in \u201cgraveyard orbits.\u201d Right now, however, we rely on the natural environment of near-Earth space to do most of the work of cleaning up fragments of all sizes. Like industrial waste dumped into a river to be carried away and become someone else\u2019s problem, objects in low orbit are drawn into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere by solar energy, atmospheric particles and gravity. There, they typically come apart, with any surviving bits dropping into the ocean or very occasionally crashing onto land.There is no internationally binding agreement to limit the creation of orbital debris. It\u2019s up to individual organizations to decide whether to work with or against nature to keep space sustainable. The space environment does a good job of cleaning itself at low orbits, but Kessler Syndrome accelerates when the amount of new debris generated surpasses the quantity removed by natural forces. Recent calculations predict that the debris from Kosmos 1408 may stay aloft for a decade or more before the ASAT effluent drifts downstream. Satellites in similar orbits circle the planet once every 90 minutes, so a decade \u2014 with thousands of possible close calls \u2014 is a long time to keep fingers crossed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe 2013 film \u201cGravity\u201d imagined a disaster in which a Russian ASAT starts a chain reaction that destroys all functioning satellites within moments. The film, following two astronauts\u2019 struggle to survive, didn\u2019t even scratch the surface of what would unfold on the ground below. The exact scenario portrayed is physically impossible in our nonfictional universe, but it\u2019s hard not to think of that dramatic scene as an omen. As the task of building back better takes off, citizens of the Space Age might do well to understand the full consequences of infrastructural decay, in the heavens as on Earth. \u00a0\nTwitter: @orbital_decay\nRead more from Outlook:Congress can\u2019t agree on big things. Let billionaires handle space.How imperialism shaped the race to the moonA new frontier is opening in the search for extraterrestrial lifeFollow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Blowing up satellites creates more hazardous junk in Earth\u2019s orbit Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight",
        "author": "Lisa Ruth Rand"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2694",
        "date": "2021-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/space-junk-satellite-tests/2021/11/19/d074acdc-487d-11ec-95dc-5f2a96e00fa3_story.html",
        "text": "It was a great week for American infrastructure on the ground. It was a terrible one for the global infrastructure surrounding our planet. On Monday, President Biden signed a bill aimed at updating America\u2019s aging bridges, roadways and drinking-water systems, among other projects. The very same day, the Russian military shot a projectile into space, smashing one of its own derelict satellites into a plume of debris and sending astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station scrambling into emergency shelter. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightUpon impact, the Kosmos 1408 satellite broke into hundreds of pieces, each traveling faster than five miles per second and quickly spreading to altitudes between 125 and 500 miles above the Earth. At such high speeds, even tiny objects can pack a punch: Per an analogy offered by NASA, a marble-size piece of debris can strike with a force comparable to a bowling ball traveling at 300 mph. This new debris joins functioning satellites in low Earth orbit, whose numbers have rapidly risen in recent years thanks in large part to the private space industry.If even a small bit of debris from Kosmos 1408 were to hit a satellite, the results could be catastrophic: Fragments of one destroyed spacecraft would strike other objects, creating more potentially destructive debris. Kessler Syndrome \u2014 a domino effect in orbit that could yield the loss of a large cross-section of satellites \u2014 looms closer to reality than before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSatellites, including those endangered by the speeding remains of Russia\u2019s antisatellite test (ASAT), are as central to the daily lives of most Americans as electrical lines or sewer systems. Losing our satellites would mean the loss of critical services, from communications and international financial exchanges to disaster relief and climate monitoring, from world-shifting space-based science to everyday activities such as ATM transactions and air travel. By design, we don\u2019t regularly notice satellite infrastructure. But we would certainly notice if it ceased to exist.We rarely pay attention to infrastructure unless it fails \u2014 the lights go out, or a sink backs up, or a pothole wrecks your car\u2019s suspension. Power transmission towers, for example, don\u2019t tend to register as remarkable in modern American landscapes; they have become perching and nesting sites for birds, as convenient a landing spot as any tree. But when a tower breaks, sparking a massive wildfire, such technology becomes horrifyingly visible \u2014 as does the destructive potential of its decay. The same holds true in space.Five myths about the moonThe problem of debris accumulation in orbit reaches back decades. The first satellites to reach orbit in the late 1950s did so alongside the first pieces of space junk, including expended rockets and nose cones. Explosions, accidental collisions and the eventual decay of old and defunct spacecraft have generated an environment that some space policymakers have compared to climate change in scale and severity. The United States and the Soviet Union conducted ASATs during the first decade of the space race. Then, as more countries gained space power in the 21st century, the ASATs started up again: In 2007, China destroyed the drifting Fengyun-1C weather satellite, and in 2008, the United States followed suit with a successful effort to bring down a failing American defense satellite. Both space powers could claim to be acting in good faith to clean up after themselves by removing potentially dangerous junk from orbit. The geopolitical power demonstrated by destroying a satellite was thus shallowly buried in the subtext of supposed nonaggression \u2014 in the guise of being a good neighbor, even.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSubtext came to the surface in 2019: After India conducted an ASAT that year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi explicitly identified the test as a demonstration of India\u2019s stature as a significant space power. So far Russian leadership has similarly eschewed any performance of good faith in the wake of Monday\u2019s ASAT. And China has continued to build an arsenal of antisatellite weapons as part of its overall space strategy.Stated intent does not do much to limit the effects of blowing up a satellite, of course. Debris from the 2007 ASAT, for example, remains aloft nearly 15 years later, periodically endangering spacecraft. Yet the two most recent ASATs nevertheless reflect a troubling shift in space politics. Military technologies have long had a presence in orbit, and less materially destructive efforts to influence satellite operations (such as laser and cyberattacks) have been part of the international defense landscape for years. Still, unambiguous acts of aggression fly in the face of long-standing conventions. The founding of NASA as a civilian agency and the signing of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, crafted in the thick of Cold War hostility, helped establish norms protecting space as a peaceful domain shared by all of humanity. Within the past five years, with the founding of the Space Force and nakedly aggressive ASAT tests, countries have rapidly, intentionally transformed space into a warfaring domain.Keeping up with the Joneses has long been part of space culture: National space programs once chased milestones in the moon race; today, private companies pursue competing broadband mega constellations. If recent actions signal a shift toward antagonistic norms, we may see further demonstrations by space powers eager to show preparedness for the fight. So far, ASAT-launching nations have targeted only their own satellites, but each test serves as a warning that the next antisatellite weapon could be aimed in a more hostile direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace warfare might not cause visible damage on the ground, but the devastation of the orbital environment would mean a larger, lonelier world than the one currently interconnected by satellites. It would also deepen the inequalities of the Space Age, denying less-powerful nations the opportunity to fairly access a truly global natural resource. War is rarely tidy; fixing a catastrophic mess of destroyed satellites would be all but impossible in the extreme near-Earth environment.The blunder that could cost the U.S. the new space racePrivate and public space industry groups are developing methods to remove large unused objects from orbit, and reusable rockets mean less volatile debris lingering in lower altitudes. Satellites and expendable rockets can be designed for disposal either through controlled reetry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere or in \u201cgraveyard orbits.\u201d Right now, however, we rely on the natural environment of near-Earth space to do most of the work of cleaning up fragments of all sizes. Like industrial waste dumped into a river to be carried away and become someone else\u2019s problem, objects in low orbit are drawn into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere by solar energy, atmospheric particles and gravity. There, they typically come apart, with any surviving bits dropping into the ocean or very occasionally crashing onto land.There is no internationally binding agreement to limit the creation of orbital debris. It\u2019s up to individual organizations to decide whether to work with or against nature to keep space sustainable. The space environment does a good job of cleaning itself at low orbits, but Kessler Syndrome accelerates when the amount of new debris generated surpasses the quantity removed by natural forces. Recent calculations predict that the debris from Kosmos 1408 may stay aloft for a decade or more before the ASAT effluent drifts downstream. Satellites in similar orbits circle the planet once every 90 minutes, so a decade \u2014 with thousands of possible close calls \u2014 is a long time to keep fingers crossed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe 2013 film \u201cGravity\u201d imagined a disaster in which a Russian ASAT starts a chain reaction that destroys all functioning satellites within moments. The film, following two astronauts\u2019 struggle to survive, didn\u2019t even scratch the surface of what would unfold on the ground below. The exact scenario portrayed is physically impossible in our nonfictional universe, but it\u2019s hard not to think of that dramatic scene as an omen. As the task of building back better takes off, citizens of the Space Age might do well to understand the full consequences of infrastructural decay, in the heavens as on Earth. \u00a0\nTwitter: @orbital_decay\nRead more from Outlook:Congress can\u2019t agree on big things. Let billionaires handle space.How imperialism shaped the race to the moonA new frontier is opening in the search for extraterrestrial lifeFollow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Blowing up satellites creates more hazardous junk in Earth\u2019s orbit Weapons tests in space could shut down ATMs and ground your next flight",
        "author": "Lisa Ruth Rand"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Contacting aliens could end all life on earth. Let\u2019s stop trying. (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2695",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ufo-report-aliens-seti/2021/06/09/1402f6a8-c899-11eb-81b1-34796c7393af_story.html",
        "text": "In April 2020, the Defense Department released videos recorded by infrared cameras on U.S. Navy aircraft that documented the planes\u2019 encounters with a variety of \u00a0\u201cunidentified aerial phenomena.\u201d Pilots reported seeing objects flying across the sky at hypersonic speeds and changing direction almost instantaneously, capabilities far beyond that of any known aircraft.\u00a0 Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWhat were the pilots seeing? Bizarre atmospheric phenomena? Alien spacecraft? Something else? Several branches of the government have been investigating the events, motivated in part by concern that adversaries such as Russia or China might have made some spectacular technological advance, and later this month, the government plans to publish a report revealing what they know. Reportedly, the government will say there\u2019s no proof of extraterrestrial activity, but that the incidents remain unexplained.Chances are, though, that we should all be grateful that we don\u2019t yet have any evidence of contact with alien civilizations. Attempting to communicate with extraterrestrials, if they do exist, could be extremely dangerous for us. We need to figure out whether it\u2019s wise \u2014 or safe \u2014 and how to handle such attempts in an organized manner.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe USS Russell and the USS Omaha captured video appearing to show UFOs flying, hovering and splashing into the ocean. (Jeremy Corbell)Some scientific circles have already been debating questions around whether to try to contact other civilizations. It\u2019s a topic of profound importance for the entire planet. For 60 years, scientists have been searching with radio telescopes, listening in for possible signals coming from other civilizations on planets orbiting distant stars. These efforts have largely been organized by the SETI institute in California \u2014 the acronym stands for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence \u2014 and so far, they\u2019ve had no success. Getting impatient, some other scientists are now pushing for a more active program \u2014 METI, for Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence \u2014 that wouldn\u2019t just listen, but actually send out powerful messages toward other stars, seeking to make contact.The search for aliens has reached a stage of technological sophistication and associated risk that it needs strict regulation at national and international levels. Without oversight, even one person \u2014 with access to powerful transmitting technology \u2014 could take actions affecting the future of the entire planet.The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn\u2019t the Pentagon care?That\u2019s because any aliens we ultimately encounter will likely be far more technologically advanced than we are, for a simple reason: Most stars in our galaxy are much older than the sun. If civilizations arise fairly frequently on some planets, then there ought to be many civilizations in our galaxy millions of years more advanced than our own. Many of these would likely have taken significant steps to begin exploring and possibly colonizing the galaxy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHence, it\u2019s a profound mystery \u2014 known as the Fermi Paradox, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi \u2014 why we haven\u2019t yet seen any such aliens. Many resolutions of the paradox have been proposed, among them the suggestion that all civilizations, once reaching sufficient technological capacity, eventually destroy themselves. Or perhaps aliens are so alien and unlike humans that we simply cannot interact with them.More alarming is the possibility that alien civilizations are remaining out of contact because they know something: that sending out signals is catastrophically risky. Our history on Earth has given us many examples of what can happen when civilizations with unequal technology meet \u2014 generally, the technologically more advanced has destroyed or enslaved the other. A cosmic version of this reality might have convinced many alien civilizations to remain silent. Exposing yourself is an invitation to be preyed upon and devoured.I\u2019ve written about METI in the past, suggesting such activity takes a huge risk for very little gain. But these concerns don\u2019t convince supporters of trying it, who have some counterarguments. Douglas Vakoch of METI International argues that it\u2019s unrealistic to worry about the danger of an alien invasion. We have, after all, been sending radio and television emissions into space for a century, and a civilization far more advanced than our own will probably have already detected these. If they wanted to invade, they already would have.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe also argues that, in assessing risks, it\u2019s important not only to consider the risk coming from taking an action, but also from not taking that action. Our world faces a number of potentially existential threats, including global warming and destabilization of the environment, and it\u2019s possible that far more advanced civilizations may have already faced these issues and found solutions. If we don\u2019t send out signals, Vakosh writes, we risk \u201cmissing guidance that could enhance our own civilization\u2019s sustainability.\u201d It\u2019s also conceivable, he suggests, that we\u2019re making a spectacular misjudgment \u2014 and some super-advanced alien civilization may attack us precisely because we haven\u2019t reached out.For obvious reasons, much of the thinking about these issues has to be rather speculative. The best way forward, perhaps, is to broaden the discussion. If all of humanity is exposed to the possible consequences trying to contact alien civilizations, then more people should be involved in making decisions about what is wise and what isn\u2019t. It shouldn\u2019t be left to a handful of radio astronomers.A new frontier is opening in the search for extraterrestrial lifeOne vocal critic of the idea of reaching out to aliens proactively \u2014 astronomer John Gertz of SETI \u2014 has developed proposals to move toward more inclusive public consideration of these activities. What we need, he suggests, are laws and international treaties to govern more explicit contact attempts. Without prior broad agreement from some globally representative body, Gertz says, contacting extraterrestrials should be considered \u201cas the reckless endangerment of all mankind, and be absolutely proscribed with criminal consequences, presumably as exercised at the national level, or administered through the International Court of Justice in The Hague.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCurrently, no such prohibitions exist. Some informal protocols for interacting with alien civilizations have been adopted by researchers involved in SETI, but these are far from legally binding governmental regulations. That\u2019s mostly because, up to now, talking about meeting or contacting aliens has seemed widely speculative \u2014 if not a little deranged \u2014 despite the apparent scientific plausibility of such an event.It\u2019s not easy to weigh the pros and cons of activities around which so much remains unknown. We don\u2019t know if there are any aliens. They might be friendly. They might not be. Given the potential risks involved with trying to make contact, perhaps it would be safer and wiser to just wait \u2014 we can always reach out later, and meanwhile, our abilities to do passive listening are rapidly growing more powerful.In 2015, SETI launched a new 10-year program called Breakthrough Listen, funded by a $100 million donation from Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. As a result, SETI is now recording more signals than ever before, over a frequency range some tenfold larger, and bringing more computational power to bear on analyzing the recorded signals. It\u2019s impossible to know how close or far from making a discovery we may be, but Gertz estimates that our chances are at least 100 times greater than they used to be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe search is also benefiting from astronomers\u2019 knowledge of exoplanets \u2014 planets in orbit around stars other than the sun. Since the first exoplanet was found in 1992, we\u2019ve identified nearly 5,000 more, and the rate of discovery is accelerating. Each one give SETI researchers new promising targets to scrutinize.Personally, all of this makes me dead-set against any experimentation with attempting to contact other civilizations. Why take cosmic risks when we may have a far safer pathway to discovering them, if they\u2019re out there? Of course, even listening comes with some potentially fraught governance issues also: If and when someone really identifies an alien signal, we\u2019ll need to decide if we should reply \u2014 and if so, how. Surely such an act \u2014 putting all of humanity at risk \u2014 ought to be the result of some collective decision. But there\u2019s no mechanism to encourage that now. Any individual or nation could take the human response into their own hands.Both paths \u2014 listening for aliens or trying to call them \u2014 have reached the stage where they require broader public discussion, with an eye to developing sensible regulation. That\u2019s going to take the efforts of leaders from many nations, presumably coordinated through the United Nations or some similar international body. It should happen now. Or soon. Before it\u2019s too late.Twitter: @Mark_BuchananRead more from Outlook:When disgraced theories are respectable againFive myths about spaceWhat it means for us to actually \u2018see\u2019 a black holeFollow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Whatever the UFO report says, it\u2019s time to set some rules for talking to extraterrestrials Contacting aliens could end all life on earth. Let\u2019s stop trying.",
        "author": "Mark Buchanan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology? (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2696",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-interstellar-accident--or-a-piece-of-alien-technology/2021/01/28/4acd0852-5136-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html",
        "text": "Avi Loeb has spent a lot of time thinking about how to explore the interstellar wilds. A prolific astrophysicist at Harvard University and chair of the advisory committee for Breakthrough Starshot, a project that aims to send probes to the nearest star system, Loeb envisions shooting powerful lasers at lightsails \u2014 thin, reflective spacecraft akin to mirrors \u2014 to accelerate them to star-hopping clips. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo when a bizarre object from interstellar space hurtled through our solar system in 2017, Loeb readily admits that he was primed to see it as a glimpse of alien technology \u2014 an extraterrestrial lightsail \u2014 rather than some errant space rock.In his book \u201cExtraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,\u201d Loeb lays out his case that the unusual traveler, named \u2018Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for \u201cscout,\u201d was an artificial relic crafted by savvy aliens. While this exotic explanation of the object serves as the backbone of the book, Loeb\u2019s broader argument grows out of his bewilderment with the blowback to his hypothesis; he regards it as an omen of imaginative decay and anti-alien bias in the scientific community. \u201cThe search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,\u201d he writes. \u201cTo them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and at worst, outright derision.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSkeptics who fit that description should take seriously the meticulous defense of the alien origin story offered in \u201cExtraterrestrial.\u201d To bolster his case, Loeb points to the unexplained properties of the first known interstellar visitor: its extreme dimensions, its perplexing brightness and the dramatic speed boost that sent it careening out of our telescopic sights.Proponents of a natural origin for \u2018Oumuamua have suggested that it was an elongated planetary splinter or a loose cloud of dust grains. Loeb questions whether an alien origin is any more far-fetched than these explanations, given that scientists have never seen splinters or clouds of this nature inside the solar system. Scientists have also speculated that \u2018Oumuamua\u2019s sudden acceleration in the outer solar system was caused by bursts of evaporating ice, a phenomenon known as outgassing. As a counterpoint, Loeb points to the lack of evidence picked up by telescopes of an outgassing event.Like an astronomical Sherlock Holmes, a character often invoked in the book, Loeb concludes that \u201cthe simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.\u201d You don\u2019t have to share his conviction to be impressed by the breadth of his argument.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb is less successful in casting the controversy he has sparked as a sign of myoptic reluctance, within academic circles, to concede that humans might not be the only sentient, spacefaring beings in the universe. Throughout \u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d he returns to the refrain \u201cand yet it deviated\u201d to describe \u2018Oumuamua: a nod to the legend that Galileo muttered \u201cand yet it moves,\u201d referring to Earth, in response to his coerced recantation of the sun-centric model of the solar system.Loeb makes clear that he does not consider himself to be a neo-Galileo. And yet he sees parallels between Galileo\u2019s critics and his own. \u201cRecall the clerics who refused to look through Galileo\u2019s telescope,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe scientific community\u2019s prejudice or closed-mindedness \u2014 however you want to describe it \u2014 is particularly pervasive and powerful when it comes to the search for alien life, especially intelligent life. Many researchers refuse to even consider the possibility that a bizarre object or phenomenon might be evidence of an advanced civilization.\u201dThe search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) spent decades on the fringes of science, in part because of the relative lack of empirical methods available to constrain doubts about aliens during the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, an explosion of observational techniques and discoveries \u2014 many of which Loeb describes \u2014 has revolutionized astrobiology and SETI.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThousands of exoplanets (worlds that orbit other stars) have been detected since the 1990s; some telescopes are now explicitly tasked with assessing their habitability. A central mission of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, due to land on Mars in February, is to look for signs of Martian life. China has built the world\u2019s largest single-dish telescope to scan the skies for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.On Venus, the possible detection of a chemical associated with life has evoked visions of aerial microbes in the Venusian skies. In the star system Alpha Centauri \u2014 the target of Breakthrough Starshot \u2014 a recently discovered exoplanet is sloughing off radio signals, stoking speculation about alien \u201ctechnosignatures.\u201dThese advances and observations have practicalized the search for alien life in the minds of strict empiricists, which blunts Loeb\u2019s charge that \u201cthe conservative scientific community\u201d considers the field to be \u201ca waste of time.\u201d It\u2019s not that his claim is to some degree inaccurate but rather that the energy in emerging research about aliens is overshadowing the grumbling of doubters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb has been at the center of media storms and peer backlash about his hypothesis for years, feeding his concerns that institutional groupthink is limiting the scope of scientific inquiry and leaving society ill-prepared to cope should an unambiguous detection of E.T. take place.The cosmic wonder and contrarian streak that inspired \u201cExtraterrestrials\u201d took root in Loeb\u2019s youth. Raised on his family\u2019s farm in Beit Hanan, Israel, a village south of Tel Aviv, Loeb had an idyllic childhood. He lovingly recalls his father double-checking the rooftop TV antenna to ensure that the family could watch the Apollo 11 moon landing, and credits his mother for gifting him with the \u201clife of the mind.\u201d He describes a formative boyhood memory, in which he deliberates about conforming with other kids and hints at a lifelong instinct to buck convention. \u201cThe science I do is connected by a direct line to my childhood,\u201d Loeb writes. \u201cIt was an innocent time of wondering about the big questions of life, enjoying the beauty of nature, and, among the orchards and the close neighbors of Beit Hanan, not caring about my status or standing.\u201dWith a passion for philosophy and an interdisciplinary background, Loeb describes himself as \u201ca somewhat accidental astrophysicist.\u201d He bubbles over with so many ideas he scribbles them down in the shower on a waterproof whiteboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it\u2019s tantalizing to imagine that \u2018Oumuamua was our first brush with aliens, Loeb writes most memorably about collecting shells on the beach with his daughters, brainstorming trippy new studies with his many proteges and seeking comfort in the view of the night sky from our lonely planet. In the end, \u201cExtraterrestrial\u201d is at its best when it is down to earth.ExtraterrestrialThe First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth By Avi LoebHoughton Mifflin Harcourt. 222 pp. $27 An astrophysicist argues that a strange object seen in space was made by extraterrestrials. An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology?",
        "author": "Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology? (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2697",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-interstellar-accident--or-a-piece-of-alien-technology/2021/01/28/4acd0852-5136-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html",
        "text": "Avi Loeb has spent a lot of time thinking about how to explore the interstellar wilds. A prolific astrophysicist at Harvard University and chair of the advisory committee for Breakthrough Starshot, a project that aims to send probes to the nearest star system, Loeb envisions shooting powerful lasers at lightsails \u2014 thin, reflective spacecraft akin to mirrors \u2014 to accelerate them to star-hopping clips. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo when a bizarre object from interstellar space hurtled through our solar system in 2017, Loeb readily admits that he was primed to see it as a glimpse of alien technology \u2014 an extraterrestrial lightsail \u2014 rather than some errant space rock.In his book \u201cExtraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,\u201d Loeb lays out his case that the unusual traveler, named \u2018Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for \u201cscout,\u201d was an artificial relic crafted by savvy aliens. While this exotic explanation of the object serves as the backbone of the book, Loeb\u2019s broader argument grows out of his bewilderment with the blowback to his hypothesis; he regards it as an omen of imaginative decay and anti-alien bias in the scientific community. \u201cThe search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,\u201d he writes. \u201cTo them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and at worst, outright derision.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSkeptics who fit that description should take seriously the meticulous defense of the alien origin story offered in \u201cExtraterrestrial.\u201d To bolster his case, Loeb points to the unexplained properties of the first known interstellar visitor: its extreme dimensions, its perplexing brightness and the dramatic speed boost that sent it careening out of our telescopic sights.Proponents of a natural origin for \u2018Oumuamua have suggested that it was an elongated planetary splinter or a loose cloud of dust grains. Loeb questions whether an alien origin is any more far-fetched than these explanations, given that scientists have never seen splinters or clouds of this nature inside the solar system. Scientists have also speculated that \u2018Oumuamua\u2019s sudden acceleration in the outer solar system was caused by bursts of evaporating ice, a phenomenon known as outgassing. As a counterpoint, Loeb points to the lack of evidence picked up by telescopes of an outgassing event.Like an astronomical Sherlock Holmes, a character often invoked in the book, Loeb concludes that \u201cthe simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.\u201d You don\u2019t have to share his conviction to be impressed by the breadth of his argument.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb is less successful in casting the controversy he has sparked as a sign of myoptic reluctance, within academic circles, to concede that humans might not be the only sentient, spacefaring beings in the universe. Throughout \u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d he returns to the refrain \u201cand yet it deviated\u201d to describe \u2018Oumuamua: a nod to the legend that Galileo muttered \u201cand yet it moves,\u201d referring to Earth, in response to his coerced recantation of the sun-centric model of the solar system.Loeb makes clear that he does not consider himself to be a neo-Galileo. And yet he sees parallels between Galileo\u2019s critics and his own. \u201cRecall the clerics who refused to look through Galileo\u2019s telescope,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe scientific community\u2019s prejudice or closed-mindedness \u2014 however you want to describe it \u2014 is particularly pervasive and powerful when it comes to the search for alien life, especially intelligent life. Many researchers refuse to even consider the possibility that a bizarre object or phenomenon might be evidence of an advanced civilization.\u201dThe search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) spent decades on the fringes of science, in part because of the relative lack of empirical methods available to constrain doubts about aliens during the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, an explosion of observational techniques and discoveries \u2014 many of which Loeb describes \u2014 has revolutionized astrobiology and SETI.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThousands of exoplanets (worlds that orbit other stars) have been detected since the 1990s; some telescopes are now explicitly tasked with assessing their habitability. A central mission of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, due to land on Mars in February, is to look for signs of Martian life. China has built the world\u2019s largest single-dish telescope to scan the skies for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.On Venus, the possible detection of a chemical associated with life has evoked visions of aerial microbes in the Venusian skies. In the star system Alpha Centauri \u2014 the target of Breakthrough Starshot \u2014 a recently discovered exoplanet is sloughing off radio signals, stoking speculation about alien \u201ctechnosignatures.\u201dThese advances and observations have practicalized the search for alien life in the minds of strict empiricists, which blunts Loeb\u2019s charge that \u201cthe conservative scientific community\u201d considers the field to be \u201ca waste of time.\u201d It\u2019s not that his claim is to some degree inaccurate but rather that the energy in emerging research about aliens is overshadowing the grumbling of doubters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb has been at the center of media storms and peer backlash about his hypothesis for years, feeding his concerns that institutional groupthink is limiting the scope of scientific inquiry and leaving society ill-prepared to cope should an unambiguous detection of E.T. take place.The cosmic wonder and contrarian streak that inspired \u201cExtraterrestrials\u201d took root in Loeb\u2019s youth. Raised on his family\u2019s farm in Beit Hanan, Israel, a village south of Tel Aviv, Loeb had an idyllic childhood. He lovingly recalls his father double-checking the rooftop TV antenna to ensure that the family could watch the Apollo 11 moon landing, and credits his mother for gifting him with the \u201clife of the mind.\u201d He describes a formative boyhood memory, in which he deliberates about conforming with other kids and hints at a lifelong instinct to buck convention. \u201cThe science I do is connected by a direct line to my childhood,\u201d Loeb writes. \u201cIt was an innocent time of wondering about the big questions of life, enjoying the beauty of nature, and, among the orchards and the close neighbors of Beit Hanan, not caring about my status or standing.\u201dWith a passion for philosophy and an interdisciplinary background, Loeb describes himself as \u201ca somewhat accidental astrophysicist.\u201d He bubbles over with so many ideas he scribbles them down in the shower on a waterproof whiteboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it\u2019s tantalizing to imagine that \u2018Oumuamua was our first brush with aliens, Loeb writes most memorably about collecting shells on the beach with his daughters, brainstorming trippy new studies with his many proteges and seeking comfort in the view of the night sky from our lonely planet. In the end, \u201cExtraterrestrial\u201d is at its best when it is down to earth.ExtraterrestrialThe First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth By Avi LoebHoughton Mifflin Harcourt. 222 pp. $27 An astrophysicist argues that a strange object seen in space was made by extraterrestrials. An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology?",
        "author": "Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology? (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2698",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-interstellar-accident--or-a-piece-of-alien-technology/2021/01/28/4acd0852-5136-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html",
        "text": "Avi Loeb has spent a lot of time thinking about how to explore the interstellar wilds. A prolific astrophysicist at Harvard University and chair of the advisory committee for Breakthrough Starshot, a project that aims to send probes to the nearest star system, Loeb envisions shooting powerful lasers at lightsails \u2014 thin, reflective spacecraft akin to mirrors \u2014 to accelerate them to star-hopping clips. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo when a bizarre object from interstellar space hurtled through our solar system in 2017, Loeb readily admits that he was primed to see it as a glimpse of alien technology \u2014 an extraterrestrial lightsail \u2014 rather than some errant space rock.In his book \u201cExtraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,\u201d Loeb lays out his case that the unusual traveler, named \u2018Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for \u201cscout,\u201d was an artificial relic crafted by savvy aliens. While this exotic explanation of the object serves as the backbone of the book, Loeb\u2019s broader argument grows out of his bewilderment with the blowback to his hypothesis; he regards it as an omen of imaginative decay and anti-alien bias in the scientific community. \u201cThe search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,\u201d he writes. \u201cTo them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and at worst, outright derision.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSkeptics who fit that description should take seriously the meticulous defense of the alien origin story offered in \u201cExtraterrestrial.\u201d To bolster his case, Loeb points to the unexplained properties of the first known interstellar visitor: its extreme dimensions, its perplexing brightness and the dramatic speed boost that sent it careening out of our telescopic sights.Proponents of a natural origin for \u2018Oumuamua have suggested that it was an elongated planetary splinter or a loose cloud of dust grains. Loeb questions whether an alien origin is any more far-fetched than these explanations, given that scientists have never seen splinters or clouds of this nature inside the solar system. Scientists have also speculated that \u2018Oumuamua\u2019s sudden acceleration in the outer solar system was caused by bursts of evaporating ice, a phenomenon known as outgassing. As a counterpoint, Loeb points to the lack of evidence picked up by telescopes of an outgassing event.Like an astronomical Sherlock Holmes, a character often invoked in the book, Loeb concludes that \u201cthe simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.\u201d You don\u2019t have to share his conviction to be impressed by the breadth of his argument.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb is less successful in casting the controversy he has sparked as a sign of myoptic reluctance, within academic circles, to concede that humans might not be the only sentient, spacefaring beings in the universe. Throughout \u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d he returns to the refrain \u201cand yet it deviated\u201d to describe \u2018Oumuamua: a nod to the legend that Galileo muttered \u201cand yet it moves,\u201d referring to Earth, in response to his coerced recantation of the sun-centric model of the solar system.Loeb makes clear that he does not consider himself to be a neo-Galileo. And yet he sees parallels between Galileo\u2019s critics and his own. \u201cRecall the clerics who refused to look through Galileo\u2019s telescope,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe scientific community\u2019s prejudice or closed-mindedness \u2014 however you want to describe it \u2014 is particularly pervasive and powerful when it comes to the search for alien life, especially intelligent life. Many researchers refuse to even consider the possibility that a bizarre object or phenomenon might be evidence of an advanced civilization.\u201dThe search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) spent decades on the fringes of science, in part because of the relative lack of empirical methods available to constrain doubts about aliens during the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, an explosion of observational techniques and discoveries \u2014 many of which Loeb describes \u2014 has revolutionized astrobiology and SETI.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThousands of exoplanets (worlds that orbit other stars) have been detected since the 1990s; some telescopes are now explicitly tasked with assessing their habitability. A central mission of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, due to land on Mars in February, is to look for signs of Martian life. China has built the world\u2019s largest single-dish telescope to scan the skies for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.On Venus, the possible detection of a chemical associated with life has evoked visions of aerial microbes in the Venusian skies. In the star system Alpha Centauri \u2014 the target of Breakthrough Starshot \u2014 a recently discovered exoplanet is sloughing off radio signals, stoking speculation about alien \u201ctechnosignatures.\u201dThese advances and observations have practicalized the search for alien life in the minds of strict empiricists, which blunts Loeb\u2019s charge that \u201cthe conservative scientific community\u201d considers the field to be \u201ca waste of time.\u201d It\u2019s not that his claim is to some degree inaccurate but rather that the energy in emerging research about aliens is overshadowing the grumbling of doubters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb has been at the center of media storms and peer backlash about his hypothesis for years, feeding his concerns that institutional groupthink is limiting the scope of scientific inquiry and leaving society ill-prepared to cope should an unambiguous detection of E.T. take place.The cosmic wonder and contrarian streak that inspired \u201cExtraterrestrials\u201d took root in Loeb\u2019s youth. Raised on his family\u2019s farm in Beit Hanan, Israel, a village south of Tel Aviv, Loeb had an idyllic childhood. He lovingly recalls his father double-checking the rooftop TV antenna to ensure that the family could watch the Apollo 11 moon landing, and credits his mother for gifting him with the \u201clife of the mind.\u201d He describes a formative boyhood memory, in which he deliberates about conforming with other kids and hints at a lifelong instinct to buck convention. \u201cThe science I do is connected by a direct line to my childhood,\u201d Loeb writes. \u201cIt was an innocent time of wondering about the big questions of life, enjoying the beauty of nature, and, among the orchards and the close neighbors of Beit Hanan, not caring about my status or standing.\u201dWith a passion for philosophy and an interdisciplinary background, Loeb describes himself as \u201ca somewhat accidental astrophysicist.\u201d He bubbles over with so many ideas he scribbles them down in the shower on a waterproof whiteboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it\u2019s tantalizing to imagine that \u2018Oumuamua was our first brush with aliens, Loeb writes most memorably about collecting shells on the beach with his daughters, brainstorming trippy new studies with his many proteges and seeking comfort in the view of the night sky from our lonely planet. In the end, \u201cExtraterrestrial\u201d is at its best when it is down to earth.ExtraterrestrialThe First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth By Avi LoebHoughton Mifflin Harcourt. 222 pp. $27 An astrophysicist argues that a strange object seen in space was made by extraterrestrials. An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology?",
        "author": "Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology? (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2699",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-interstellar-accident--or-a-piece-of-alien-technology/2021/01/28/4acd0852-5136-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html",
        "text": "Avi Loeb has spent a lot of time thinking about how to explore the interstellar wilds. A prolific astrophysicist at Harvard University and chair of the advisory committee for Breakthrough Starshot, a project that aims to send probes to the nearest star system, Loeb envisions shooting powerful lasers at lightsails \u2014 thin, reflective spacecraft akin to mirrors \u2014 to accelerate them to star-hopping clips. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo when a bizarre object from interstellar space hurtled through our solar system in 2017, Loeb readily admits that he was primed to see it as a glimpse of alien technology \u2014 an extraterrestrial lightsail \u2014 rather than some errant space rock.In his book \u201cExtraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,\u201d Loeb lays out his case that the unusual traveler, named \u2018Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for \u201cscout,\u201d was an artificial relic crafted by savvy aliens. While this exotic explanation of the object serves as the backbone of the book, Loeb\u2019s broader argument grows out of his bewilderment with the blowback to his hypothesis; he regards it as an omen of imaginative decay and anti-alien bias in the scientific community. \u201cThe search for extraterrestrial life has never been more than an oddity to the vast majority of scientists,\u201d he writes. \u201cTo them, it is a subject worthy of, at best, glancing interest and at worst, outright derision.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSkeptics who fit that description should take seriously the meticulous defense of the alien origin story offered in \u201cExtraterrestrial.\u201d To bolster his case, Loeb points to the unexplained properties of the first known interstellar visitor: its extreme dimensions, its perplexing brightness and the dramatic speed boost that sent it careening out of our telescopic sights.Proponents of a natural origin for \u2018Oumuamua have suggested that it was an elongated planetary splinter or a loose cloud of dust grains. Loeb questions whether an alien origin is any more far-fetched than these explanations, given that scientists have never seen splinters or clouds of this nature inside the solar system. Scientists have also speculated that \u2018Oumuamua\u2019s sudden acceleration in the outer solar system was caused by bursts of evaporating ice, a phenomenon known as outgassing. As a counterpoint, Loeb points to the lack of evidence picked up by telescopes of an outgassing event.Like an astronomical Sherlock Holmes, a character often invoked in the book, Loeb concludes that \u201cthe simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.\u201d You don\u2019t have to share his conviction to be impressed by the breadth of his argument.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb is less successful in casting the controversy he has sparked as a sign of myoptic reluctance, within academic circles, to concede that humans might not be the only sentient, spacefaring beings in the universe. Throughout \u201cExtraterrestrial,\u201d he returns to the refrain \u201cand yet it deviated\u201d to describe \u2018Oumuamua: a nod to the legend that Galileo muttered \u201cand yet it moves,\u201d referring to Earth, in response to his coerced recantation of the sun-centric model of the solar system.Loeb makes clear that he does not consider himself to be a neo-Galileo. And yet he sees parallels between Galileo\u2019s critics and his own. \u201cRecall the clerics who refused to look through Galileo\u2019s telescope,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe scientific community\u2019s prejudice or closed-mindedness \u2014 however you want to describe it \u2014 is particularly pervasive and powerful when it comes to the search for alien life, especially intelligent life. Many researchers refuse to even consider the possibility that a bizarre object or phenomenon might be evidence of an advanced civilization.\u201dThe search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) spent decades on the fringes of science, in part because of the relative lack of empirical methods available to constrain doubts about aliens during the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, an explosion of observational techniques and discoveries \u2014 many of which Loeb describes \u2014 has revolutionized astrobiology and SETI.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThousands of exoplanets (worlds that orbit other stars) have been detected since the 1990s; some telescopes are now explicitly tasked with assessing their habitability. A central mission of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, due to land on Mars in February, is to look for signs of Martian life. China has built the world\u2019s largest single-dish telescope to scan the skies for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.On Venus, the possible detection of a chemical associated with life has evoked visions of aerial microbes in the Venusian skies. In the star system Alpha Centauri \u2014 the target of Breakthrough Starshot \u2014 a recently discovered exoplanet is sloughing off radio signals, stoking speculation about alien \u201ctechnosignatures.\u201dThese advances and observations have practicalized the search for alien life in the minds of strict empiricists, which blunts Loeb\u2019s charge that \u201cthe conservative scientific community\u201d considers the field to be \u201ca waste of time.\u201d It\u2019s not that his claim is to some degree inaccurate but rather that the energy in emerging research about aliens is overshadowing the grumbling of doubters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb has been at the center of media storms and peer backlash about his hypothesis for years, feeding his concerns that institutional groupthink is limiting the scope of scientific inquiry and leaving society ill-prepared to cope should an unambiguous detection of E.T. take place.The cosmic wonder and contrarian streak that inspired \u201cExtraterrestrials\u201d took root in Loeb\u2019s youth. Raised on his family\u2019s farm in Beit Hanan, Israel, a village south of Tel Aviv, Loeb had an idyllic childhood. He lovingly recalls his father double-checking the rooftop TV antenna to ensure that the family could watch the Apollo 11 moon landing, and credits his mother for gifting him with the \u201clife of the mind.\u201d He describes a formative boyhood memory, in which he deliberates about conforming with other kids and hints at a lifelong instinct to buck convention. \u201cThe science I do is connected by a direct line to my childhood,\u201d Loeb writes. \u201cIt was an innocent time of wondering about the big questions of life, enjoying the beauty of nature, and, among the orchards and the close neighbors of Beit Hanan, not caring about my status or standing.\u201dWith a passion for philosophy and an interdisciplinary background, Loeb describes himself as \u201ca somewhat accidental astrophysicist.\u201d He bubbles over with so many ideas he scribbles them down in the shower on a waterproof whiteboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it\u2019s tantalizing to imagine that \u2018Oumuamua was our first brush with aliens, Loeb writes most memorably about collecting shells on the beach with his daughters, brainstorming trippy new studies with his many proteges and seeking comfort in the view of the night sky from our lonely planet. In the end, \u201cExtraterrestrial\u201d is at its best when it is down to earth.ExtraterrestrialThe First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth By Avi LoebHoughton Mifflin Harcourt. 222 pp. $27 An astrophysicist argues that a strange object seen in space was made by extraterrestrials. An interstellar accident \u2014 or a piece of alien technology?",
        "author": "Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Exploring the moon\u2019s past and future (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2700",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/exploring-the-moons-past-and-future/2019/07/11/e1a27c9c-9c17-11e9-85d6-5211733f92c7_story.html",
        "text": "Eli Kintisch, a video producer and writer in Washington, is a correspondent for Science magazine.As celestial objects go, our moon is kind of dull. It\u2019s desolate, rocky, and devoid of life, liquid water and clouds. These days, astronomers rarely study the moon \u2014 and in fact, their telescopes actively avoid it, as its reflected light disrupts observations of more distant, captivating features of the universe. And the rest of us? As Oliver Morton observes in his new book, \u201cThe Moon,\u201d our nearest neighbor is \u201coften seen but rarely looked for.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut with the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d this coming week, the moon has orbited back into the popular imagination. And for good reason, Morton says. He makes the convincing case that there\u2019s no more important object above our heads \u2014 other than the sun. The moon \u201ccompletes the Earth,\u201d he writes. Its gravitational pull creates tides, ordering biology and hydrology across the planet. Lunar phases, meanwhile, have \u201cdefined time since time was first defined.\u201d In the 17th century, observations of reflected \u201cearthshine\u201d on the moon \u2014 in which the earth reflects the sun\u2019s light upon the lunar surface \u2014 challenged the Aristotelian geocentric model of the solar system. \u201cIn Galileo\u2019s words,\u201d Morton writes, \u201cit drew the Earth \u2018into the dance of stars.\u2019\u2009\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMorton celebrates what he calls the Return to the Moon \u2014 the effort of nations and private companies to deploy robotic landers on the lunar surface in preparation for a new round of human visits. \u201cThe first tickets for the Return have been booked,\u201d he writes. \u201cYusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, has purchased a trip to the Moon for sometime in 2023, though he realizes that the flight may be delayed, what with the relevant spaceship not yet having been built or tested.\u201d Yet, Maezawa has made a significant down payment in the belief that Elon Musk\u2019s company SpaceX will get him there. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who is spending billions on his space company, Blue Origin, also has grand ambitions beyond Earth. \u201cBezos talks of a future a few decades hence in which a million people live in orbit, at least for some of their time, running industries that no longer have a place on Earth,\u201d Morton writes.Morton\u2019s science writing is compelling and clear. Sections on the formation of the moon and the history of lunar science are engrossing, if sometimes excessively detailed. He provides a gripping account of a hugely consequential event more than 4 billion years ago. \u201cIn one of the most violent acts in the history of the solar system,\u201d Morton writes, the planet \u201cTheia collides with Tellus. The resultant mess eventually resolves itself into a new arrangement of mass and motion \u2014 a planet a bit bigger than Tellus, spinning rapidly, with a satellite much smaller than Theia circling it in an orbit only hours long .\u2009.\u2009. Tellus and Theia are gone. The Earth and the Moon have been born in their place.\u201dMorton, whose other books include \u201cThe Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World\u201d and \u201cEating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet,\u201d has a gift for synthesizing science, technology and culture. His chapter on the Apollo landing captures its historic importance and the might of the craft\u2019s rocket engines. \u201cFor a couple of minutes,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe five F-1s generated almost 60 gigawatts of power. That is equivalent to the typical output of all Britain\u2019s electric-power plants put together.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSmall, unexpected details are just as wondrous, like the \u201ctissue-thin aluminium walls\u201d of the lunar module that \u201cflexed in and out\u201d under fluctuating air pressure and revelations about the astronauts\u2019 spacesuits. They are \u201cmade of soft fabrics sewn together by women working with Singer sewing machines not unlike those found in half the houses of America, working not for a defense contractor but for the International Latex Corporation, makers of Playtex bras and girdles.\u201dThough grounded in science, Morton\u2019s tale also conjures the world of science fiction. He reminds us that rocket pioneers such as \nHermann Oberth and Robert Goddard were inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Musk and Bezos were moved by Isaac Asimov and \u201cStar Trek.\u201dRobert Heinlein\u2019s influential 1967 novel, \u201cThe Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,\u201d \n forms the spine of Morton\u2019s final, forward-looking chapter on the biological and political obstacles facing lunar human settlements. His narrative, like Heinlein\u2019s, questions the idea of a moonbase utopia as depicted in imaginings of the future. \u201cMore humans have gazed in wonder at the surface of the Moon than at any other solid object in the universe,\u201d Morton writes. And yet the most influential contemporary image of the moon \u2014 and to some, the most important picture of the 20th century \u2014 is \u201cEarthrise,\u201d snapped by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, capturing a blue Earth floating above lunar desolation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFuture moon colonists, however, need not merely gaze back home. Morton endorses an audacious concept to harvest solar energy to power moon-based lasers driving tiny, ultrathin spacecraft toward other suns. Traveling at a fifth the speed of light, as he projects, it would take only a few decades for the sentinels to probe for life, maybe sending pictures. As surely as \u201cThe Moon\u201d reflects back on Earth, it also looks to the stars.By Oliver MortonEconomist. 333 pp. $28 Oliver Morton\u2019s narrative takes readers from a planetary collision to plans for lunar colonies. Exploring the moon\u2019s past and future",
        "author": "Eli Kintisch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Exploring the moon\u2019s past and future (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2701",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/exploring-the-moons-past-and-future/2019/07/11/e1a27c9c-9c17-11e9-85d6-5211733f92c7_story.html",
        "text": "Eli Kintisch, a video producer and writer in Washington, is a correspondent for Science magazine.As celestial objects go, our moon is kind of dull. It\u2019s desolate, rocky, and devoid of life, liquid water and clouds. These days, astronomers rarely study the moon \u2014 and in fact, their telescopes actively avoid it, as its reflected light disrupts observations of more distant, captivating features of the universe. And the rest of us? As Oliver Morton observes in his new book, \u201cThe Moon,\u201d our nearest neighbor is \u201coften seen but rarely looked for.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut with the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d this coming week, the moon has orbited back into the popular imagination. And for good reason, Morton says. He makes the convincing case that there\u2019s no more important object above our heads \u2014 other than the sun. The moon \u201ccompletes the Earth,\u201d he writes. Its gravitational pull creates tides, ordering biology and hydrology across the planet. Lunar phases, meanwhile, have \u201cdefined time since time was first defined.\u201d In the 17th century, observations of reflected \u201cearthshine\u201d on the moon \u2014 in which the earth reflects the sun\u2019s light upon the lunar surface \u2014 challenged the Aristotelian geocentric model of the solar system. \u201cIn Galileo\u2019s words,\u201d Morton writes, \u201cit drew the Earth \u2018into the dance of stars.\u2019\u2009\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMorton celebrates what he calls the Return to the Moon \u2014 the effort of nations and private companies to deploy robotic landers on the lunar surface in preparation for a new round of human visits. \u201cThe first tickets for the Return have been booked,\u201d he writes. \u201cYusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, has purchased a trip to the Moon for sometime in 2023, though he realizes that the flight may be delayed, what with the relevant spaceship not yet having been built or tested.\u201d Yet, Maezawa has made a significant down payment in the belief that Elon Musk\u2019s company SpaceX will get him there. Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who is spending billions on his space company, Blue Origin, also has grand ambitions beyond Earth. \u201cBezos talks of a future a few decades hence in which a million people live in orbit, at least for some of their time, running industries that no longer have a place on Earth,\u201d Morton writes.Morton\u2019s science writing is compelling and clear. Sections on the formation of the moon and the history of lunar science are engrossing, if sometimes excessively detailed. He provides a gripping account of a hugely consequential event more than 4 billion years ago. \u201cIn one of the most violent acts in the history of the solar system,\u201d Morton writes, the planet \u201cTheia collides with Tellus. The resultant mess eventually resolves itself into a new arrangement of mass and motion \u2014 a planet a bit bigger than Tellus, spinning rapidly, with a satellite much smaller than Theia circling it in an orbit only hours long .\u2009.\u2009. Tellus and Theia are gone. The Earth and the Moon have been born in their place.\u201dMorton, whose other books include \u201cThe Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World\u201d and \u201cEating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet,\u201d has a gift for synthesizing science, technology and culture. His chapter on the Apollo landing captures its historic importance and the might of the craft\u2019s rocket engines. \u201cFor a couple of minutes,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe five F-1s generated almost 60 gigawatts of power. That is equivalent to the typical output of all Britain\u2019s electric-power plants put together.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSmall, unexpected details are just as wondrous, like the \u201ctissue-thin aluminium walls\u201d of the lunar module that \u201cflexed in and out\u201d under fluctuating air pressure and revelations about the astronauts\u2019 spacesuits. They are \u201cmade of soft fabrics sewn together by women working with Singer sewing machines not unlike those found in half the houses of America, working not for a defense contractor but for the International Latex Corporation, makers of Playtex bras and girdles.\u201dThough grounded in science, Morton\u2019s tale also conjures the world of science fiction. He reminds us that rocket pioneers such as \nHermann Oberth and Robert Goddard were inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Musk and Bezos were moved by Isaac Asimov and \u201cStar Trek.\u201dRobert Heinlein\u2019s influential 1967 novel, \u201cThe Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,\u201d \n forms the spine of Morton\u2019s final, forward-looking chapter on the biological and political obstacles facing lunar human settlements. His narrative, like Heinlein\u2019s, questions the idea of a moonbase utopia as depicted in imaginings of the future. \u201cMore humans have gazed in wonder at the surface of the Moon than at any other solid object in the universe,\u201d Morton writes. And yet the most influential contemporary image of the moon \u2014 and to some, the most important picture of the 20th century \u2014 is \u201cEarthrise,\u201d snapped by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, capturing a blue Earth floating above lunar desolation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFuture moon colonists, however, need not merely gaze back home. Morton endorses an audacious concept to harvest solar energy to power moon-based lasers driving tiny, ultrathin spacecraft toward other suns. Traveling at a fifth the speed of light, as he projects, it would take only a few decades for the sentinels to probe for life, maybe sending pictures. As surely as \u201cThe Moon\u201d reflects back on Earth, it also looks to the stars.By Oliver MortonEconomist. 333 pp. $28 Oliver Morton\u2019s narrative takes readers from a planetary collision to plans for lunar colonies. Exploring the moon\u2019s past and future",
        "author": "Eli Kintisch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | What\u2019s driving the pilots that will fly paying customers into space? (WP: Outlook) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2702",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/whats-driving-the-pilots-that-will-fly-paying-customers-into-space/2021/06/10/4f591924-ba3b-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html",
        "text": "At first glance, it looks like a familiar story. The one where we go to space, or at least fly very high and fast in the attempt. You\u2019ve probably seen the movie: equal parts \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d (1983) and \u201cTop Gun\u201d (1986) topped off with a long pour of \u201cApollo 13\u201d (1995). And you\u2019ll recognize the protagonists, too: cocky pilots with superhuman reflexes and troubled family lives, propelled \u2014 like death-defying wind-up toys \u2014 toward thrills at times indistinguishable from self-destruction. Aviator sunglasses required. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut a third of the way into Nicholas Schmidle\u2019s \u201cTest Gods,\u201d the author steps out from behind the curtain, and the book veers in an unexpected direction. Schmidle, a writer for the New Yorker, has been following the fortunes of the would-be space tourism company Virgin Galactic since a highly publicized accident in 2014, in which a prototype spaceship tore apart in midair and killed the pilot, Mike Alsbury. From its title, and from the 2018 New Yorker story from which it grew, the book promises to profile the test pilots risking everything for grand dreams of space. What it actually does is much more interesting.Virgin Galactic was one of a crop of private companies to sprout, mushroom-like, from the fecund decay of American spaceflight in the early 2000s. NASA budgets had been stagnating. The 1986 Challenger disaster had soured many on the dangers of human spaceflight, and the breakup of the Columbia in 2003 cemented this opinion. The space shuttle program was retired, and American astronauts began to launch to the International Space Station via the Russian Soyuz. Meanwhile, private interests saw an opportunity. Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) founded the space company Blue Origin in 2000, followed by Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk with SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, British businessman Richard Branson announced the formation of Virgin Galactic. Branson \u2014 a generalist entrepreneur who had made his name selling records, airlines, hotels, wedding dresses, soft drinks and, now, spaceships \u2014 was less interested in replacing NASA than in extending his hospitality empire to suborbital space. He announced that he would be selling seats on his own commercial spacecraft \u201cwithin five years.\u201d Tickets sold for $250,000 a piece, for a launch date yet to be determined.In the book\u2019s first section, Schmidle reconstructs the decade between Branson\u2019s promise and Alsbury\u2019s accident, in a cinematic style that moves seamlessly in and out of characters\u2019 inner monologues. The story follows Virgin\u2019s lead test pilot, Mark Stucky, a preternaturally gifted aviator who left the Marines to pursue spaceflight. Schmidle\u2019s careful attention to detail pays off in fluid, precise prose, even as the story settles into the familiar contours \u2014 promise and peril, risk and sacrifice \u2014 that have defined the narrative of American spaceflight since the first Mercury 7 astronauts were announced in 1959. Fifty years later, with Virgin Galactic struggling to get off the ground, there is some occasional temporal vertigo. Pinch me, it\u2019s the 21st century?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the book\u2019s second section, however, Schmidle rewinds to the first meeting between journalist and subject, at a steakhouse in the California desert in late 2014. The two men turn out to have a connection: Stucky knew Schmidle\u2019s father, another accomplished fighter pilot, call sign \u201cRooster,\u201d who had been an instructor at Stucky\u2019s aerial combat training unit in the \u201980s. With this connection made, a loop of the plot draws tight, and both Schmidle and the reader are caught.For the rest of the book, alongside Virgin Galactic\u2019s attempts to rebuild its program in the wake of Alsbury\u2019s crash, Schmidle begins to address his fascination with this story, and its familiar, flawed heroes. Dropping the journalist\u2019s pretension of total detachment, Schmidle examines his feelings toward Stucky: sometimes friendly, sometimes filial. As the pilot struggles to connect with his estranged son, Dillon, the author reflects on his own relationship with his father. \u201cIt seemed impossibly difficult to write about someone so close who was still alive,\u201d Schmidle reflects. \u201cLegacies were fluid, funny things. I didn\u2019t see how to do it, how to hit pause on life in order to study a few key frames, to freeze a relationship long enough to make sense of it.\u201dFor all the drama of spaceflight, this story that had threatened to \u201cslip the surly bonds of Earth\u201d \u2014 as in John Gillespie Magee Jr.\u2019s panegyric \u201cHigh Flight\u201d \u2014 is ultimately less interested in the immortal, inhuman realms above, than in mortal ones. Fatherhood, and the fraught inheritance of masculinity, is the field in which Schmidle roots his investigation. With Stucky, Schmidle is able to apply the freeze-frame analysis that has eluded him in writing about his father. He narrates Stucky\u2019s thoughts with moment-by-moment clarity that conceals the painstaking work that has gone into piecing together this collage of interviews, emails, videos and news accounts. High-stakes test flights are treated to this enhanced replay, but so are other moments: Stucky having dinner at home with his second wife, Cheryl Agin, or reading a Facebook message from Dillon. Schmidle is determined to make sense of all it, frame by frame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSchmidle's care over these terrestrial scenes sets this book apart from more familiar representations of airborne masculinity. The astronaut has long been a figure of troubled American machismo, emerging from the elite world of military pilots in the 1950s to fight a cold war with rockets aimed not at an enemy on Earth but at a target in the sky. Mythic men \u2014 and they were, for the first decades, all men \u2014 astronauts seemed driven to seek out entirely new kinds of danger, while leaving their emotional baggage to families back on Earth. To date, only 11 percent of people to have ever reached the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n boundary delimiting the earthly from the ethereal have been women.One of the women to brush against the edge of space is Beth Moses, a former NASA aerospace engineer and Virgin Galactic\u2019s head of astronaut training who Schmidle introduces halfway through his story. In the old narrative, she is a new figure; an astronaut wife \u2014 married to Virgin Galactic president of operations, Mike Moses \u2014 in precise inversion of the original term. The astronaut wives of the Apollo and Mercury programs sat in the bleachers on launch days. In 2019, Beth Moses was sitting in SpaceShipTwo as Virgin Galactic\u2019s first passenger flight breached the atmosphere. She gaped in awe at the planet glowing beneath the ship \u2014 Earth \u201cwearing all her diamonds\u201d she later said \u2014 while her husband waited, somewhere below.Test GodsVirgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern AstronautBy Nicholas SchmidleHolt. 333 pp. $29.99 The stereotype of military and machismo is still prevalent if not exclusive, but the stories are complicated What\u2019s driving the pilots that will fly paying customers into space?",
        "author": "Amelia Urry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | What\u2019s driving the pilots that will fly paying customers into space? (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2703",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/whats-driving-the-pilots-that-will-fly-paying-customers-into-space/2021/06/10/4f591924-ba3b-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html",
        "text": "At first glance, it looks like a familiar story. The one where we go to space, or at least fly very high and fast in the attempt. You\u2019ve probably seen the movie: equal parts \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d (1983) and \u201cTop Gun\u201d (1986) topped off with a long pour of \u201cApollo 13\u201d (1995). And you\u2019ll recognize the protagonists, too: cocky pilots with superhuman reflexes and troubled family lives, propelled \u2014 like death-defying wind-up toys \u2014 toward thrills at times indistinguishable from self-destruction. Aviator sunglasses required. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut a third of the way into Nicholas Schmidle\u2019s \u201cTest Gods,\u201d the author steps out from behind the curtain, and the book veers in an unexpected direction. Schmidle, a writer for the New Yorker, has been following the fortunes of the would-be space tourism company Virgin Galactic since a highly publicized accident in 2014, in which a prototype spaceship tore apart in midair and killed the pilot, Mike Alsbury. From its title, and from the 2018 New Yorker story from which it grew, the book promises to profile the test pilots risking everything for grand dreams of space. What it actually does is much more interesting.Virgin Galactic was one of a crop of private companies to sprout, mushroom-like, from the fecund decay of American spaceflight in the early 2000s. NASA budgets had been stagnating. The 1986 Challenger disaster had soured many on the dangers of human spaceflight, and the breakup of the Columbia in 2003 cemented this opinion. The space shuttle program was retired, and American astronauts began to launch to the International Space Station via the Russian Soyuz. Meanwhile, private interests saw an opportunity. Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) founded the space company Blue Origin in 2000, followed by Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk with SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, British businessman Richard Branson announced the formation of Virgin Galactic. Branson \u2014 a generalist entrepreneur who had made his name selling records, airlines, hotels, wedding dresses, soft drinks and, now, spaceships \u2014 was less interested in replacing NASA than in extending his hospitality empire to suborbital space. He announced that he would be selling seats on his own commercial spacecraft \u201cwithin five years.\u201d Tickets sold for $250,000 a piece, for a launch date yet to be determined.In the book\u2019s first section, Schmidle reconstructs the decade between Branson\u2019s promise and Alsbury\u2019s accident, in a cinematic style that moves seamlessly in and out of characters\u2019 inner monologues. The story follows Virgin\u2019s lead test pilot, Mark Stucky, a preternaturally gifted aviator who left the Marines to pursue spaceflight. Schmidle\u2019s careful attention to detail pays off in fluid, precise prose, even as the story settles into the familiar contours \u2014 promise and peril, risk and sacrifice \u2014 that have defined the narrative of American spaceflight since the first Mercury 7 astronauts were announced in 1959. Fifty years later, with Virgin Galactic struggling to get off the ground, there is some occasional temporal vertigo. Pinch me, it\u2019s the 21st century?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the book\u2019s second section, however, Schmidle rewinds to the first meeting between journalist and subject, at a steakhouse in the California desert in late 2014. The two men turn out to have a connection: Stucky knew Schmidle\u2019s father, another accomplished fighter pilot, call sign \u201cRooster,\u201d who had been an instructor at Stucky\u2019s aerial combat training unit in the \u201980s. With this connection made, a loop of the plot draws tight, and both Schmidle and the reader are caught.For the rest of the book, alongside Virgin Galactic\u2019s attempts to rebuild its program in the wake of Alsbury\u2019s crash, Schmidle begins to address his fascination with this story, and its familiar, flawed heroes. Dropping the journalist\u2019s pretension of total detachment, Schmidle examines his feelings toward Stucky: sometimes friendly, sometimes filial. As the pilot struggles to connect with his estranged son, Dillon, the author reflects on his own relationship with his father. \u201cIt seemed impossibly difficult to write about someone so close who was still alive,\u201d Schmidle reflects. \u201cLegacies were fluid, funny things. I didn\u2019t see how to do it, how to hit pause on life in order to study a few key frames, to freeze a relationship long enough to make sense of it.\u201dFor all the drama of spaceflight, this story that had threatened to \u201cslip the surly bonds of Earth\u201d \u2014 as in John Gillespie Magee Jr.\u2019s panegyric \u201cHigh Flight\u201d \u2014 is ultimately less interested in the immortal, inhuman realms above, than in mortal ones. Fatherhood, and the fraught inheritance of masculinity, is the field in which Schmidle roots his investigation. With Stucky, Schmidle is able to apply the freeze-frame analysis that has eluded him in writing about his father. He narrates Stucky\u2019s thoughts with moment-by-moment clarity that conceals the painstaking work that has gone into piecing together this collage of interviews, emails, videos and news accounts. High-stakes test flights are treated to this enhanced replay, but so are other moments: Stucky having dinner at home with his second wife, Cheryl Agin, or reading a Facebook message from Dillon. Schmidle is determined to make sense of all it, frame by frame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSchmidle's care over these terrestrial scenes sets this book apart from more familiar representations of airborne masculinity. The astronaut has long been a figure of troubled American machismo, emerging from the elite world of military pilots in the 1950s to fight a cold war with rockets aimed not at an enemy on Earth but at a target in the sky. Mythic men \u2014 and they were, for the first decades, all men \u2014 astronauts seemed driven to seek out entirely new kinds of danger, while leaving their emotional baggage to families back on Earth. To date, only 11 percent of people to have ever reached the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n boundary delimiting the earthly from the ethereal have been women.One of the women to brush against the edge of space is Beth Moses, a former NASA aerospace engineer and Virgin Galactic\u2019s head of astronaut training who Schmidle introduces halfway through his story. In the old narrative, she is a new figure; an astronaut wife \u2014 married to Virgin Galactic president of operations, Mike Moses \u2014 in precise inversion of the original term. The astronaut wives of the Apollo and Mercury programs sat in the bleachers on launch days. In 2019, Beth Moses was sitting in SpaceShipTwo as Virgin Galactic\u2019s first passenger flight breached the atmosphere. She gaped in awe at the planet glowing beneath the ship \u2014 Earth \u201cwearing all her diamonds\u201d she later said \u2014 while her husband waited, somewhere below.Test GodsVirgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern AstronautBy Nicholas SchmidleHolt. 333 pp. $29.99 The stereotype of military and machismo is still prevalent if not exclusive, but the stories are complicated What\u2019s driving the pilots that will fly paying customers into space?",
        "author": "Amelia Urry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | What\u2019s driving the pilots that will fly paying customers into space? (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2704",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/whats-driving-the-pilots-that-will-fly-paying-customers-into-space/2021/06/10/4f591924-ba3b-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html",
        "text": "At first glance, it looks like a familiar story. The one where we go to space, or at least fly very high and fast in the attempt. You\u2019ve probably seen the movie: equal parts \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d (1983) and \u201cTop Gun\u201d (1986) topped off with a long pour of \u201cApollo 13\u201d (1995). And you\u2019ll recognize the protagonists, too: cocky pilots with superhuman reflexes and troubled family lives, propelled \u2014 like death-defying wind-up toys \u2014 toward thrills at times indistinguishable from self-destruction. Aviator sunglasses required. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut a third of the way into Nicholas Schmidle\u2019s \u201cTest Gods,\u201d the author steps out from behind the curtain, and the book veers in an unexpected direction. Schmidle, a writer for the New Yorker, has been following the fortunes of the would-be space tourism company Virgin Galactic since a highly publicized accident in 2014, in which a prototype spaceship tore apart in midair and killed the pilot, Mike Alsbury. From its title, and from the 2018 New Yorker story from which it grew, the book promises to profile the test pilots risking everything for grand dreams of space. What it actually does is much more interesting.Virgin Galactic was one of a crop of private companies to sprout, mushroom-like, from the fecund decay of American spaceflight in the early 2000s. NASA budgets had been stagnating. The 1986 Challenger disaster had soured many on the dangers of human spaceflight, and the breakup of the Columbia in 2003 cemented this opinion. The space shuttle program was retired, and American astronauts began to launch to the International Space Station via the Russian Soyuz. Meanwhile, private interests saw an opportunity. Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) founded the space company Blue Origin in 2000, followed by Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk with SpaceX in 2002. In 2004, British businessman Richard Branson announced the formation of Virgin Galactic. Branson \u2014 a generalist entrepreneur who had made his name selling records, airlines, hotels, wedding dresses, soft drinks and, now, spaceships \u2014 was less interested in replacing NASA than in extending his hospitality empire to suborbital space. He announced that he would be selling seats on his own commercial spacecraft \u201cwithin five years.\u201d Tickets sold for $250,000 a piece, for a launch date yet to be determined.In the book\u2019s first section, Schmidle reconstructs the decade between Branson\u2019s promise and Alsbury\u2019s accident, in a cinematic style that moves seamlessly in and out of characters\u2019 inner monologues. The story follows Virgin\u2019s lead test pilot, Mark Stucky, a preternaturally gifted aviator who left the Marines to pursue spaceflight. Schmidle\u2019s careful attention to detail pays off in fluid, precise prose, even as the story settles into the familiar contours \u2014 promise and peril, risk and sacrifice \u2014 that have defined the narrative of American spaceflight since the first Mercury 7 astronauts were announced in 1959. Fifty years later, with Virgin Galactic struggling to get off the ground, there is some occasional temporal vertigo. Pinch me, it\u2019s the 21st century?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the book\u2019s second section, however, Schmidle rewinds to the first meeting between journalist and subject, at a steakhouse in the California desert in late 2014. The two men turn out to have a connection: Stucky knew Schmidle\u2019s father, another accomplished fighter pilot, call sign \u201cRooster,\u201d who had been an instructor at Stucky\u2019s aerial combat training unit in the \u201980s. With this connection made, a loop of the plot draws tight, and both Schmidle and the reader are caught.For the rest of the book, alongside Virgin Galactic\u2019s attempts to rebuild its program in the wake of Alsbury\u2019s crash, Schmidle begins to address his fascination with this story, and its familiar, flawed heroes. Dropping the journalist\u2019s pretension of total detachment, Schmidle examines his feelings toward Stucky: sometimes friendly, sometimes filial. As the pilot struggles to connect with his estranged son, Dillon, the author reflects on his own relationship with his father. \u201cIt seemed impossibly difficult to write about someone so close who was still alive,\u201d Schmidle reflects. \u201cLegacies were fluid, funny things. I didn\u2019t see how to do it, how to hit pause on life in order to study a few key frames, to freeze a relationship long enough to make sense of it.\u201dFor all the drama of spaceflight, this story that had threatened to \u201cslip the surly bonds of Earth\u201d \u2014 as in John Gillespie Magee Jr.\u2019s panegyric \u201cHigh Flight\u201d \u2014 is ultimately less interested in the immortal, inhuman realms above, than in mortal ones. Fatherhood, and the fraught inheritance of masculinity, is the field in which Schmidle roots his investigation. With Stucky, Schmidle is able to apply the freeze-frame analysis that has eluded him in writing about his father. He narrates Stucky\u2019s thoughts with moment-by-moment clarity that conceals the painstaking work that has gone into piecing together this collage of interviews, emails, videos and news accounts. High-stakes test flights are treated to this enhanced replay, but so are other moments: Stucky having dinner at home with his second wife, Cheryl Agin, or reading a Facebook message from Dillon. Schmidle is determined to make sense of all it, frame by frame.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSchmidle's care over these terrestrial scenes sets this book apart from more familiar representations of airborne masculinity. The astronaut has long been a figure of troubled American machismo, emerging from the elite world of military pilots in the 1950s to fight a cold war with rockets aimed not at an enemy on Earth but at a target in the sky. Mythic men \u2014 and they were, for the first decades, all men \u2014 astronauts seemed driven to seek out entirely new kinds of danger, while leaving their emotional baggage to families back on Earth. To date, only 11 percent of people to have ever reached the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n boundary delimiting the earthly from the ethereal have been women.One of the women to brush against the edge of space is Beth Moses, a former NASA aerospace engineer and Virgin Galactic\u2019s head of astronaut training who Schmidle introduces halfway through his story. In the old narrative, she is a new figure; an astronaut wife \u2014 married to Virgin Galactic president of operations, Mike Moses \u2014 in precise inversion of the original term. The astronaut wives of the Apollo and Mercury programs sat in the bleachers on launch days. In 2019, Beth Moses was sitting in SpaceShipTwo as Virgin Galactic\u2019s first passenger flight breached the atmosphere. She gaped in awe at the planet glowing beneath the ship \u2014 Earth \u201cwearing all her diamonds\u201d she later said \u2014 while her husband waited, somewhere below.Test GodsVirgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern AstronautBy Nicholas SchmidleHolt. 333 pp. $29.99 The stereotype of military and machismo is still prevalent if not exclusive, but the stories are complicated What\u2019s driving the pilots that will fly paying customers into space?",
        "author": "Amelia Urry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Want to take more risks? Surround yourself with test pilots and skydivers. (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2705",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/want-to-take-more-risks-surround-yourself-with-test-pilots-and-skydivers/2021/04/29/d7494a6e-a2d7-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html",
        "text": "Four years ago, I climbed into the cockpit of a spaceship, buckled up and visualized a tree nut.Three .\u2009.\u2009. two\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWhen the countdown reached one, I was thrown back in my seat, walloped by a gravitational load of more than six Gs. To help me stay conscious, a doctor had urged me to breathe and activate my pelvic floor by pretending to squeeze a walnut down there. The altimeter indicated that I was on my way to space. But I was actually just spinning inside a 75-ton centrifuge in a strip mall outside Philadelphia. Test pilots from Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space tourism company, were there to train. I was embedding with the company for a magazine piece that later turned into my new book, \"Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut.\"Story continues below advertisementAs part of my reporting, I wanted to witness and experience as much as I could about Virgin Galactic's experimental rocket ship program. I shadowed the pilots in meetings, at briefings, on trips and, most important, into the air \u2014 as a passenger in the acrobatic plane they flipped and rolled and banked to build up their G-tolerance, in the glider they used to practice their landings and in the paraglider their lead test pilot flew for pleasure on his days off. Now, as my cheeks gathered near my ears and I labored to conjure the walnut, I felt I had done everything I could to know what it might be like to ride a rocket out of the Earth's atmosphere. When CNBC interviewed me about the new \"space race\" a year later and asked if I'd board Virgin Galactic's rocket, SpaceShipTwo, I meant it when I vowed, \"I would go now,\" that very instant.AdvertisementToday, I feel less sure. Rocketry is a dangerous business, and I have two young children. Was I reckless then, or have I lost my nerve? As it happens, our calculations about risk, research shows, are highly situational. In other words, we might be naturally more risk-prone or risk-averse, and therefore gravitate toward people with similar attitudes, but those we surround ourselves with often influence our thinking. We might have an interest in backcountry skiing or aviation, but we're often making decisions about risk while rooming with other ski bums or fraternizing with test pilots \u2014 which is why skiing an avalanche-prone mountain or strapping into a rocket ship could feel more like a matter of course than of consequence.This explains why some people live in what seem to others like communities of extreme risk: big wall climbers who camp in Yosemite, people who blatantly pay no heed to the coronavirus, traceurs who practice parkour atop skyscrapers, people who drive drunk. If your friends are cavalier, you are likely to be, too.We\u2019ve been left to calculate our virus risk on our own. We\u2019re terrible at it.I grew up in a relatively safe home that encouraged relatively unsafe activities. My dad was a fighter pilot who raced motorcycles and hunted wild boars. When I came of age, I moved to Pakistan to pursue a career in journalism. Being a freelancer, I knew that I would have to take certain risks to get work. I met with separatists, smugglers and militants in supposedly forbidden parts of the country. Eventually, I was deported. I sought dangerous opportunities elsewhere, like in Nigeria, where I interviewed kidnappers about their role in the ransom business. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI gradually began to write more about other people's perilous adventures and less about my own. A moment of tragic peril was what first piqued my interest in Virgin Galactic: During a rocket-powered test flight in October 2014, its spaceship broke apart 50,000 feet over the California desert, destroying the ship and leaving one of the pilots dead. I wanted to try to understand the psychology of these test pilots who routinely flew unproven vehicles into harm's way. Before Virgin Galactic's lead test pilot took me up in the acrobatic plane, he tore off a yellow sticky note and said, \"They want you to write down next of kin.\" Perhaps my waning desire for derring-do was the only sensible, mature response to what I was learning about my subject. Lately, Virgin Galactic has not inspired much confidence. After a spaceflight in February 2019, it discovered significant structural damage to the ship. \"I don't know how we didn't lose the vehicle and kill three people,\" said Todd Ericson, a test pilot who subsequently resigned as Virgin Galactic's vice president of safety because he'd lost faith in the safety regime. The company has not conducted a rocket-powered test flight since: A December 2020 mission was aborted in midair, and a February 2021 attempt was postponed on the eve of the flight because the cause of the previously aborted flight had not yet been fixed. That is not the only factor, however. A pandemic has upended our lives and made us hidebound. Over the past 14 months, we have lived a lifetime's worth of fear. We are stuck at home studying daily death tolls and infection rates. Before we go out, we calculate and assess the risks: Do we really need fresh bread for dinner tonight? Is going into a grocery store worth it? We cross the street to avoid contact with other humans and sometimes even hold our breath. We see friends posting vacation photos on Facebook, check the date and whisper about whether they're taking the virus seriously enough. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese whispers are more critical than we may think. Try as we might, we decide what is and isn't sensible based on what our sensible peers say and do. I remember having dinner with my parents before I went to Nigeria for the kidnapping assignment, and how different that conversation felt from the ones I used to have with journalists in Islamabad before going off on a reporting trip: My parents' wariness weighed me down and prompted me to second-guess myself, whereas, among other journalists, I felt a kind of competitive bonhomie spur me to take even greater risks. \"It's the wisdom of the crowds,\" said Elke Weber, a social psychologist at Princeton. \"If everyone thinks it's fine, you assume it's fine as well.\"You shouldn\u2019t have a gun until you are 25, research suggestsI asked Weber if this wasn't just old-fashioned peer pressure. What if I just wanted these pilots not to think I was a wimp? Maybe, she said. But it was more likely that my proximity to them recalibrated my gauge of what did and did not feel risky. \"It happens to anyone in any situation,\" she said. \"As an introvert who comes into a room of extroverts, chances are you're going to open up a bit more than you would normally. We tend to imitate behavior and attitudes around us. We're influenced by people's fears, or lack of fear.\"And so I remain, battened down at home and left to watch Virgin Galactic's spaceship program from a distance. This battening won't last forever. And just as I reckon with my shaky nerves and wavering resolve, we are all about to reckon with reinstalling our travel apps, booking flights and going to bars. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHerd immunity is a scientific phenomenon. But it has a psychological component, too. That first foreign trip? Or first drink in a crowded bar? The more we do it and the more we see others doing it (and posting about it on social media), the safer and more normal it will seem. But the first time will probably feel wild and somewhat vertiginous. When in doubt, conjure the walnut. Twitter: @nickschmidleRead more from Outlook:Odds are you won\u2019t get Zika. But it\u2019s only human to worry that you might.Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Why was I so willing to put my life on the line? Want to take more risks? Surround yourself with test pilots and skydivers.",
        "author": "Nicholas Schmidle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Want to take more risks? Surround yourself with test pilots and skydivers. (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2706",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/want-to-take-more-risks-surround-yourself-with-test-pilots-and-skydivers/2021/04/29/d7494a6e-a2d7-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html",
        "text": "Four years ago, I climbed into the cockpit of a spaceship, buckled up and visualized a tree nut.Three .\u2009.\u2009. two\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWhen the countdown reached one, I was thrown back in my seat, walloped by a gravitational load of more than six Gs. To help me stay conscious, a doctor had urged me to breathe and activate my pelvic floor by pretending to squeeze a walnut down there. The altimeter indicated that I was on my way to space. But I was actually just spinning inside a 75-ton centrifuge in a strip mall outside Philadelphia. Test pilots from Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space tourism company, were there to train. I was embedding with the company for a magazine piece that later turned into my new book, \"Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut.\"Story continues below advertisementAs part of my reporting, I wanted to witness and experience as much as I could about Virgin Galactic's experimental rocket ship program. I shadowed the pilots in meetings, at briefings, on trips and, most important, into the air \u2014 as a passenger in the acrobatic plane they flipped and rolled and banked to build up their G-tolerance, in the glider they used to practice their landings and in the paraglider their lead test pilot flew for pleasure on his days off. Now, as my cheeks gathered near my ears and I labored to conjure the walnut, I felt I had done everything I could to know what it might be like to ride a rocket out of the Earth's atmosphere. When CNBC interviewed me about the new \"space race\" a year later and asked if I'd board Virgin Galactic's rocket, SpaceShipTwo, I meant it when I vowed, \"I would go now,\" that very instant.AdvertisementToday, I feel less sure. Rocketry is a dangerous business, and I have two young children. Was I reckless then, or have I lost my nerve? As it happens, our calculations about risk, research shows, are highly situational. In other words, we might be naturally more risk-prone or risk-averse, and therefore gravitate toward people with similar attitudes, but those we surround ourselves with often influence our thinking. We might have an interest in backcountry skiing or aviation, but we're often making decisions about risk while rooming with other ski bums or fraternizing with test pilots \u2014 which is why skiing an avalanche-prone mountain or strapping into a rocket ship could feel more like a matter of course than of consequence.This explains why some people live in what seem to others like communities of extreme risk: big wall climbers who camp in Yosemite, people who blatantly pay no heed to the coronavirus, traceurs who practice parkour atop skyscrapers, people who drive drunk. If your friends are cavalier, you are likely to be, too.We\u2019ve been left to calculate our virus risk on our own. We\u2019re terrible at it.I grew up in a relatively safe home that encouraged relatively unsafe activities. My dad was a fighter pilot who raced motorcycles and hunted wild boars. When I came of age, I moved to Pakistan to pursue a career in journalism. Being a freelancer, I knew that I would have to take certain risks to get work. I met with separatists, smugglers and militants in supposedly forbidden parts of the country. Eventually, I was deported. I sought dangerous opportunities elsewhere, like in Nigeria, where I interviewed kidnappers about their role in the ransom business. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI gradually began to write more about other people's perilous adventures and less about my own. A moment of tragic peril was what first piqued my interest in Virgin Galactic: During a rocket-powered test flight in October 2014, its spaceship broke apart 50,000 feet over the California desert, destroying the ship and leaving one of the pilots dead. I wanted to try to understand the psychology of these test pilots who routinely flew unproven vehicles into harm's way. Before Virgin Galactic's lead test pilot took me up in the acrobatic plane, he tore off a yellow sticky note and said, \"They want you to write down next of kin.\" Perhaps my waning desire for derring-do was the only sensible, mature response to what I was learning about my subject. Lately, Virgin Galactic has not inspired much confidence. After a spaceflight in February 2019, it discovered significant structural damage to the ship. \"I don't know how we didn't lose the vehicle and kill three people,\" said Todd Ericson, a test pilot who subsequently resigned as Virgin Galactic's vice president of safety because he'd lost faith in the safety regime. The company has not conducted a rocket-powered test flight since: A December 2020 mission was aborted in midair, and a February 2021 attempt was postponed on the eve of the flight because the cause of the previously aborted flight had not yet been fixed. That is not the only factor, however. A pandemic has upended our lives and made us hidebound. Over the past 14 months, we have lived a lifetime's worth of fear. We are stuck at home studying daily death tolls and infection rates. Before we go out, we calculate and assess the risks: Do we really need fresh bread for dinner tonight? Is going into a grocery store worth it? We cross the street to avoid contact with other humans and sometimes even hold our breath. We see friends posting vacation photos on Facebook, check the date and whisper about whether they're taking the virus seriously enough. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese whispers are more critical than we may think. Try as we might, we decide what is and isn't sensible based on what our sensible peers say and do. I remember having dinner with my parents before I went to Nigeria for the kidnapping assignment, and how different that conversation felt from the ones I used to have with journalists in Islamabad before going off on a reporting trip: My parents' wariness weighed me down and prompted me to second-guess myself, whereas, among other journalists, I felt a kind of competitive bonhomie spur me to take even greater risks. \"It's the wisdom of the crowds,\" said Elke Weber, a social psychologist at Princeton. \"If everyone thinks it's fine, you assume it's fine as well.\"You shouldn\u2019t have a gun until you are 25, research suggestsI asked Weber if this wasn't just old-fashioned peer pressure. What if I just wanted these pilots not to think I was a wimp? Maybe, she said. But it was more likely that my proximity to them recalibrated my gauge of what did and did not feel risky. \"It happens to anyone in any situation,\" she said. \"As an introvert who comes into a room of extroverts, chances are you're going to open up a bit more than you would normally. We tend to imitate behavior and attitudes around us. We're influenced by people's fears, or lack of fear.\"And so I remain, battened down at home and left to watch Virgin Galactic's spaceship program from a distance. This battening won't last forever. And just as I reckon with my shaky nerves and wavering resolve, we are all about to reckon with reinstalling our travel apps, booking flights and going to bars. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHerd immunity is a scientific phenomenon. But it has a psychological component, too. That first foreign trip? Or first drink in a crowded bar? The more we do it and the more we see others doing it (and posting about it on social media), the safer and more normal it will seem. But the first time will probably feel wild and somewhat vertiginous. When in doubt, conjure the walnut. Twitter: @nickschmidleRead more from Outlook:Odds are you won\u2019t get Zika. But it\u2019s only human to worry that you might.Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Why was I so willing to put my life on the line? Want to take more risks? Surround yourself with test pilots and skydivers.",
        "author": "Nicholas Schmidle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Want to take more risks? Surround yourself with test pilots and skydivers. (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2707",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/want-to-take-more-risks-surround-yourself-with-test-pilots-and-skydivers/2021/04/29/d7494a6e-a2d7-11eb-a774-7b47ceb36ee8_story.html",
        "text": "Four years ago, I climbed into the cockpit of a spaceship, buckled up and visualized a tree nut.Three .\u2009.\u2009. two\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightWhen the countdown reached one, I was thrown back in my seat, walloped by a gravitational load of more than six Gs. To help me stay conscious, a doctor had urged me to breathe and activate my pelvic floor by pretending to squeeze a walnut down there. The altimeter indicated that I was on my way to space. But I was actually just spinning inside a 75-ton centrifuge in a strip mall outside Philadelphia. Test pilots from Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space tourism company, were there to train. I was embedding with the company for a magazine piece that later turned into my new book, \"Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut.\"Story continues below advertisementAs part of my reporting, I wanted to witness and experience as much as I could about Virgin Galactic's experimental rocket ship program. I shadowed the pilots in meetings, at briefings, on trips and, most important, into the air \u2014 as a passenger in the acrobatic plane they flipped and rolled and banked to build up their G-tolerance, in the glider they used to practice their landings and in the paraglider their lead test pilot flew for pleasure on his days off. Now, as my cheeks gathered near my ears and I labored to conjure the walnut, I felt I had done everything I could to know what it might be like to ride a rocket out of the Earth's atmosphere. When CNBC interviewed me about the new \"space race\" a year later and asked if I'd board Virgin Galactic's rocket, SpaceShipTwo, I meant it when I vowed, \"I would go now,\" that very instant.AdvertisementToday, I feel less sure. Rocketry is a dangerous business, and I have two young children. Was I reckless then, or have I lost my nerve? As it happens, our calculations about risk, research shows, are highly situational. In other words, we might be naturally more risk-prone or risk-averse, and therefore gravitate toward people with similar attitudes, but those we surround ourselves with often influence our thinking. We might have an interest in backcountry skiing or aviation, but we're often making decisions about risk while rooming with other ski bums or fraternizing with test pilots \u2014 which is why skiing an avalanche-prone mountain or strapping into a rocket ship could feel more like a matter of course than of consequence.This explains why some people live in what seem to others like communities of extreme risk: big wall climbers who camp in Yosemite, people who blatantly pay no heed to the coronavirus, traceurs who practice parkour atop skyscrapers, people who drive drunk. If your friends are cavalier, you are likely to be, too.We\u2019ve been left to calculate our virus risk on our own. We\u2019re terrible at it.I grew up in a relatively safe home that encouraged relatively unsafe activities. My dad was a fighter pilot who raced motorcycles and hunted wild boars. When I came of age, I moved to Pakistan to pursue a career in journalism. Being a freelancer, I knew that I would have to take certain risks to get work. I met with separatists, smugglers and militants in supposedly forbidden parts of the country. Eventually, I was deported. I sought dangerous opportunities elsewhere, like in Nigeria, where I interviewed kidnappers about their role in the ransom business. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI gradually began to write more about other people's perilous adventures and less about my own. A moment of tragic peril was what first piqued my interest in Virgin Galactic: During a rocket-powered test flight in October 2014, its spaceship broke apart 50,000 feet over the California desert, destroying the ship and leaving one of the pilots dead. I wanted to try to understand the psychology of these test pilots who routinely flew unproven vehicles into harm's way. Before Virgin Galactic's lead test pilot took me up in the acrobatic plane, he tore off a yellow sticky note and said, \"They want you to write down next of kin.\" Perhaps my waning desire for derring-do was the only sensible, mature response to what I was learning about my subject. Lately, Virgin Galactic has not inspired much confidence. After a spaceflight in February 2019, it discovered significant structural damage to the ship. \"I don't know how we didn't lose the vehicle and kill three people,\" said Todd Ericson, a test pilot who subsequently resigned as Virgin Galactic's vice president of safety because he'd lost faith in the safety regime. The company has not conducted a rocket-powered test flight since: A December 2020 mission was aborted in midair, and a February 2021 attempt was postponed on the eve of the flight because the cause of the previously aborted flight had not yet been fixed. That is not the only factor, however. A pandemic has upended our lives and made us hidebound. Over the past 14 months, we have lived a lifetime's worth of fear. We are stuck at home studying daily death tolls and infection rates. Before we go out, we calculate and assess the risks: Do we really need fresh bread for dinner tonight? Is going into a grocery store worth it? We cross the street to avoid contact with other humans and sometimes even hold our breath. We see friends posting vacation photos on Facebook, check the date and whisper about whether they're taking the virus seriously enough. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese whispers are more critical than we may think. Try as we might, we decide what is and isn't sensible based on what our sensible peers say and do. I remember having dinner with my parents before I went to Nigeria for the kidnapping assignment, and how different that conversation felt from the ones I used to have with journalists in Islamabad before going off on a reporting trip: My parents' wariness weighed me down and prompted me to second-guess myself, whereas, among other journalists, I felt a kind of competitive bonhomie spur me to take even greater risks. \"It's the wisdom of the crowds,\" said Elke Weber, a social psychologist at Princeton. \"If everyone thinks it's fine, you assume it's fine as well.\"You shouldn\u2019t have a gun until you are 25, research suggestsI asked Weber if this wasn't just old-fashioned peer pressure. What if I just wanted these pilots not to think I was a wimp? Maybe, she said. But it was more likely that my proximity to them recalibrated my gauge of what did and did not feel risky. \"It happens to anyone in any situation,\" she said. \"As an introvert who comes into a room of extroverts, chances are you're going to open up a bit more than you would normally. We tend to imitate behavior and attitudes around us. We're influenced by people's fears, or lack of fear.\"And so I remain, battened down at home and left to watch Virgin Galactic's spaceship program from a distance. This battening won't last forever. And just as I reckon with my shaky nerves and wavering resolve, we are all about to reckon with reinstalling our travel apps, booking flights and going to bars. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHerd immunity is a scientific phenomenon. But it has a psychological component, too. That first foreign trip? Or first drink in a crowded bar? The more we do it and the more we see others doing it (and posting about it on social media), the safer and more normal it will seem. But the first time will probably feel wild and somewhat vertiginous. When in doubt, conjure the walnut. Twitter: @nickschmidleRead more from Outlook:Odds are you won\u2019t get Zika. But it\u2019s only human to worry that you might.Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. Why was I so willing to put my life on the line? Want to take more risks? Surround yourself with test pilots and skydivers.",
        "author": "Nicholas Schmidle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going head-to-head to conquer space travel (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2708",
        "date": "2018-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/jeff-bezos-and-elon-musk-going-head-to-head-to-conquer-space-travel/2018/03/30/3fd52c74-2941-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html",
        "text": "Chris Impey is an Associate Dean of Science and a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has written eight popular science books, including the upcoming \u201cEinstein\u2019s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes.\u201d\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpace is hard. A human can\u2019t survive for more than a few seconds in the lung-busting, frigid vacuum of space. Several dozen astronauts have died trying to escape Earth\u2019s gravity. Going to the moon was a spectacular achievement, but it was so difficult that nearly half a century has passed, and we haven\u2019t been back. The extreme challenge of space travel is the backdrop for Christian Davenport\u2019s new book, \u201cThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.\u201d Davenport is a staff writer at The Washington Post, where he covers the space and defense industries. His book documents the emergence of a commercial space industry in the past 15 years, from the first flight of SpaceShipOne to the prospect of Earth orbit as a venue for tourism and recreation.How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet\u201cThe Space Barons\u201d opens in 2015, nearly 50 years after the beach-ball-size Sputnik launched the Space Age. We are introduced in turn to Bezos and Musk, the titans who aim to wrest space travel from the grip of government hegemony and open it up to entrepreneurs. They are a study in contrasts. Bezos is deliberative and secretive, the self-proclaimed tortoise, his motto translated from Latin as \u201cStep by step, ferociously.\u201d Musk is brash and impatient, the hare, his motto \u201cHead down. Plow through the line.\u201d Shadowing them is a third outsize character: Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic\u2019s founder, who is full of braggadocio yet disarmingly honest about his flaws. The motto that summarizes his ascent through the business world is \u201cScrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavenport displays his reporting and storytelling skills. His writing is tight and, suitably for the subject matter, propulsive. He fleshes out the main protagonists with fine character vignettes. Davenport has to finesse the fact that Amazon founder and CEO Bezos is his boss, as the owner of The Post, but he generally steers clear of hagiography. The book provides few personal details about Bezos or Musk, but that\u2019s partly because men this driven don\u2019t have the time for protean pleasures of social or family life. You\u2019d love to hear them give a talk on their exploits but would probably be exhausted if you had to spend a weekend with them.The story arc follows Bezos and Musk as they each use personal wealth to realize childhood dreams that are too large to be contained by the Earth.Bezos starts by upending the world of books with his start-up Amazon, using the nascent Internet to challenge brick-and-mortar book chains like Barnes and Noble. Methodically, he broadens the scope of the company until it sells everything to anyone, everywhere. As Amazon becomes the largest Internet retailer in the world, Bezos continues to dream about space. He is disappointed that the success of Apollo was never followed up and is frustrated by the inertia and cost of the government-sponsored space program. He considers radical ideas to get into Earth orbit \u2014 bullwhips, lasers, cannons, railguns \u2014 but settles on a traditional chemical rocket, with the crucial innovation of reusing it, rather than discarding it into the ocean like a skyscraper-size piece of detritus. Amazon is a behemoth, and Bezos puts his heart and soul (and a cool $3 billion of his fortune) into his new venture, Blue Origin, one day a week. Wednesdays are for space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk, meanwhile, is following a parallel path. Davenport includes a helpful timeline at the beginning of the book. Born in South Africa, with technical skills from his training in physics, Musk embraces the buccaneering culture of Silicon Valley. He pioneers getting newspapers online, and a few years later he invents the first online financial payment system. In successive years, he founds SpaceX with $100\u00a0million of his own money and joins the board of directors of the electric-car company Tesla. Even after he becomes the CEO of Tesla in 2008, he remains passionate about taking people into space and eventually to Mars. Along the way, we meet other players in the race to space. Branson helps found a record label and an airline, and he reaches for the stratosphere with Virgin Galactic. Branson shares with Musk a showman\u2019s bravado. He shares with Bezos the craving for physical risk and adventure. Another figure in the tale is Andy Beal, a Las Vegas high-stakes poker player who makes his fortune in real estate and starts a space company in 1997, years before Bezos and Musk. He runs into a wall of opposition from established aerospace giants and quietly folds his hand. We also meet Burt Rutan, the visionary designer of SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded airplane to reach the edge of space. In winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004, Rutan spurs the commercial space sector the way Charles Lindbergh spurred the era of civil aviation with his solo transatlantic flight in 1927. There\u2019s a vig",
        "author": "Chris Impey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going head-to-head to conquer space travel (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2709",
        "date": "2018-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/jeff-bezos-and-elon-musk-going-head-to-head-to-conquer-space-travel/2018/03/30/3fd52c74-2941-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html",
        "text": "Chris Impey is an Associate Dean of Science and a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has written eight popular science books, including the upcoming \u201cEinstein\u2019s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes.\u201d\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpace is hard. A human can\u2019t survive for more than a few seconds in the lung-busting, frigid vacuum of space. Several dozen astronauts have died trying to escape Earth\u2019s gravity. Going to the moon was a spectacular achievement, but it was so difficult that nearly half a century has passed, and we haven\u2019t been back. The extreme challenge of space travel is the backdrop for Christian Davenport\u2019s new book, \u201cThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.\u201d Davenport is a staff writer at The Washington Post, where he covers the space and defense industries. His book documents the emergence of a commercial space industry in the past 15 years, from the first flight of SpaceShipOne to the prospect of Earth orbit as a venue for tourism and recreation.How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet\u201cThe Space Barons\u201d opens in 2015, nearly 50 years after the beach-ball-size Sputnik launched the Space Age. We are introduced in turn to Bezos and Musk, the titans who aim to wrest space travel from the grip of government hegemony and open it up to entrepreneurs. They are a study in contrasts. Bezos is deliberative and secretive, the self-proclaimed tortoise, his motto translated from Latin as \u201cStep by step, ferociously.\u201d Musk is brash and impatient, the hare, his motto \u201cHead down. Plow through the line.\u201d Shadowing them is a third outsize character: Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic\u2019s founder, who is full of braggadocio yet disarmingly honest about his flaws. The motto that summarizes his ascent through the business world is \u201cScrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavenport displays his reporting and storytelling skills. His writing is tight and, suitably for the subject matter, propulsive. He fleshes out the main protagonists with fine character vignettes. Davenport has to finesse the fact that Amazon founder and CEO Bezos is his boss, as the owner of The Post, but he generally steers clear of hagiography. The book provides few personal details about Bezos or Musk, but that\u2019s partly because men this driven don\u2019t have the time for protean pleasures of social or family life. You\u2019d love to hear them give a talk on their exploits but would probably be exhausted if you had to spend a weekend with them.The story arc follows Bezos and Musk as they each use personal wealth to realize childhood dreams that are too large to be contained by the Earth.Bezos starts by upending the world of books with his start-up Amazon, using the nascent Internet to challenge brick-and-mortar book chains like Barnes and Noble. Methodically, he broadens the scope of the company until it sells everything to anyone, everywhere. As Amazon becomes the largest Internet retailer in the world, Bezos continues to dream about space. He is disappointed that the success of Apollo was never followed up and is frustrated by the inertia and cost of the government-sponsored space program. He considers radical ideas to get into Earth orbit \u2014 bullwhips, lasers, cannons, railguns \u2014 but settles on a traditional chemical rocket, with the crucial innovation of reusing it, rather than discarding it into the ocean like a skyscraper-size piece of detritus. Amazon is a behemoth, and Bezos puts his heart and soul (and a cool $3 billion of his fortune) into his new venture, Blue Origin, one day a week. Wednesdays are for space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk, meanwhile, is following a parallel path. Davenport includes a helpful timeline at the beginning of the book. Born in South Africa, with technical skills from his training in physics, Musk embraces the buccaneering culture of Silicon Valley. He pioneers getting newspapers online, and a few years later he invents the first online financial payment system. In successive years, he founds SpaceX with $100\u00a0million of his own money and joins the board of directors of the electric-car company Tesla. Even after he becomes the CEO of Tesla in 2008, he remains passionate about taking people into space and eventually to Mars. Along the way, we meet other players in the race to space. Branson helps found a record label and an airline, and he reaches for the stratosphere with Virgin Galactic. Branson shares with Musk a showman\u2019s bravado. He shares with Bezos the craving for physical risk and adventure. Another figure in the tale is Andy Beal, a Las Vegas high-stakes poker player who makes his fortune in real estate and starts a space company in 1997, years before Bezos and Musk. He runs into a wall of opposition from established aerospace giants and quietly folds his hand. We also meet Burt Rutan, the visionary designer of SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded airplane to reach the edge of space. In winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004, Rutan spurs the commercial space sector the way Charles Lindbergh spurred the era of civil aviation with his solo transatlantic flight in 1927. There\u2019s a vig",
        "author": "Chris Impey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk going head-to-head to conquer space travel (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2710",
        "date": "2018-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/jeff-bezos-and-elon-musk-going-head-to-head-to-conquer-space-travel/2018/03/30/3fd52c74-2941-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html",
        "text": "Chris Impey is an Associate Dean of Science and a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has written eight popular science books, including the upcoming \u201cEinstein\u2019s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes.\u201d\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpace is hard. A human can\u2019t survive for more than a few seconds in the lung-busting, frigid vacuum of space. Several dozen astronauts have died trying to escape Earth\u2019s gravity. Going to the moon was a spectacular achievement, but it was so difficult that nearly half a century has passed, and we haven\u2019t been back. The extreme challenge of space travel is the backdrop for Christian Davenport\u2019s new book, \u201cThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.\u201d Davenport is a staff writer at The Washington Post, where he covers the space and defense industries. His book documents the emergence of a commercial space industry in the past 15 years, from the first flight of SpaceShipOne to the prospect of Earth orbit as a venue for tourism and recreation.How photos of Earth from space changed humans\u2019 view of their life on the planet\u201cThe Space Barons\u201d opens in 2015, nearly 50 years after the beach-ball-size Sputnik launched the Space Age. We are introduced in turn to Bezos and Musk, the titans who aim to wrest space travel from the grip of government hegemony and open it up to entrepreneurs. They are a study in contrasts. Bezos is deliberative and secretive, the self-proclaimed tortoise, his motto translated from Latin as \u201cStep by step, ferociously.\u201d Musk is brash and impatient, the hare, his motto \u201cHead down. Plow through the line.\u201d Shadowing them is a third outsize character: Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic\u2019s founder, who is full of braggadocio yet disarmingly honest about his flaws. The motto that summarizes his ascent through the business world is \u201cScrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavenport displays his reporting and storytelling skills. His writing is tight and, suitably for the subject matter, propulsive. He fleshes out the main protagonists with fine character vignettes. Davenport has to finesse the fact that Amazon founder and CEO Bezos is his boss, as the owner of The Post, but he generally steers clear of hagiography. The book provides few personal details about Bezos or Musk, but that\u2019s partly because men this driven don\u2019t have the time for protean pleasures of social or family life. You\u2019d love to hear them give a talk on their exploits but would probably be exhausted if you had to spend a weekend with them.The story arc follows Bezos and Musk as they each use personal wealth to realize childhood dreams that are too large to be contained by the Earth.Bezos starts by upending the world of books with his start-up Amazon, using the nascent Internet to challenge brick-and-mortar book chains like Barnes and Noble. Methodically, he broadens the scope of the company until it sells everything to anyone, everywhere. As Amazon becomes the largest Internet retailer in the world, Bezos continues to dream about space. He is disappointed that the success of Apollo was never followed up and is frustrated by the inertia and cost of the government-sponsored space program. He considers radical ideas to get into Earth orbit \u2014 bullwhips, lasers, cannons, railguns \u2014 but settles on a traditional chemical rocket, with the crucial innovation of reusing it, rather than discarding it into the ocean like a skyscraper-size piece of detritus. Amazon is a behemoth, and Bezos puts his heart and soul (and a cool $3 billion of his fortune) into his new venture, Blue Origin, one day a week. Wednesdays are for space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk, meanwhile, is following a parallel path. Davenport includes a helpful timeline at the beginning of the book. Born in South Africa, with technical skills from his training in physics, Musk embraces the buccaneering culture of Silicon Valley. He pioneers getting newspapers online, and a few years later he invents the first online financial payment system. In successive years, he founds SpaceX with $100\u00a0million of his own money and joins the board of directors of the electric-car company Tesla. Even after he becomes the CEO of Tesla in 2008, he remains passionate about taking people into space and eventually to Mars. Along the way, we meet other players in the race to space. Branson helps found a record label and an airline, and he reaches for the stratosphere with Virgin Galactic. Branson shares with Musk a showman\u2019s bravado. He shares with Bezos the craving for physical risk and adventure. Another figure in the tale is Andy Beal, a Las Vegas high-stakes poker player who makes his fortune in real estate and starts a space company in 1997, years before Bezos and Musk. He runs into a wall of opposition from established aerospace giants and quietly folds his hand. We also meet Burt Rutan, the visionary designer of SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded airplane to reach the edge of space. In winning the Ansari X Prize in 2004, Rutan spurs the commercial space sector the way Charles Lindbergh spurred the era of civil aviation with his solo transatlantic flight in 1927. There\u2019s a vig",
        "author": "Chris Impey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Five myths about the Kennedys (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2711",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/kennedys-dynasty-myths-brothers/2021/03/05/46f44f34-7ba1-11eb-b3d1-9e5aa3d5220c_story.html",
        "text": "The 117th Congress is one of only three since 1947 that hasn\u2019t featured a member of the Kennedy dynasty. Robert F. Kennedy\u2019s grandson Joseph P. Kennedy III put that dynastic tradition on hold when he gave up his House seat for a failed 2020 Senate bid in Massachusetts. The Kennedys remain the stuff of legend, however \u2014 a legend burnished by myths that began when patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and his wife, Rose, positioned their nine children, including Jack (John), Bobby and Ted, for power, airbrushing out of their public image the violence, jealousies and other troubles among them. Here are some of those myths. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightMyth No. 1Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe Kennedy clan is historically a close-knit group\u201d; they are the \u201cclose-knit Kennedy family\u201d and the \u201cfamously tight-knit Kennedy family.\u201d Hardly a news article or book about the Kennedys fails to describe them this way. The family nourished the image and continues to promote it. Joe and Rose put their children on public display in Boston, New York, Washington and London, showcasing them as a happy and supportive group. One psychologist wondered whether the close siblings even needed friends.AdvertisementThe united front, however, concealed trouble below the surface in the early days. Joe flaunted his philandering in front of Rose (presaging the reckless affairs of Jack and Ted). Rose never forgave her second daughter, Kathleen, for marrying outside her Catholic faith. Jack resented his distant mother, who never visited him during his five teenage years in boarding school at Choate, just 65 miles from home, even when he spent long weeks in the infirmary and suffered mightily. Ted was repeatedly mocked as \u201cfat\u201d by his father and siblings.Joe urged his sons to stick together, and they did as adults, but relations between them could be rocky. Joe Jr. bullied and beat Jack when they were children. Later, when Jack was reported missing following the PT-109 incident and then reemerged a hero, Joe Jr. didn\u2019t call Jack or the family for days to acknowledge his reappearance because he felt threatened by Jack\u2019s success. As for Jack, who was carefree, he didn\u2019t much enjoy the company of Bobby, who was dour, until they were adults.Myth No. 2AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Bay of Pigs was \u201ca disaster and we all know it,\u201d said Lucius Battle, a senior State Department official at the time. Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith, a Kennedy family intimate, deemed it \u201ca ghastly mistake.\u201d The 1,400 U.S.-trained exiles who invaded Cuba in April 1961 in hopes of igniting an uprising were badly outnumbered by Fidel Castro\u2019s forces, who killed more than 100 of them and captured more than 1,100. The debacle left President John F. Kennedy so distraught that he suggested to more than one friend that he wouldn\u2019t seek reelection in 1964. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson, who was in Europe during the invasion, said it \u201creally shattered the Europeans\u201d because it was \u201csuch a completely unthought-out, irresponsible thing to do.\u201dBut the president took the lessons to heart. The event forced him to think more deeply about foreign policy, and it prompted him to question the advice of his military advisers. It persuaded him not to send troops into Laos \u2014 where U.S.-backed forces and communist forces were battling \u2014 as his advisers were recommending that spring. Had the Bay of Pigs not happened, he told aide Ted Sorensen, he would have sent troops to Laos, and that would have turned into a bigger nightmare.Most important, the Bay of Pigs persuaded JFK to reject the push by military advisers to strike Soviet missile sites during the Cuban missile crisis and to instead opt for diplomacy, enabling him to resolve the crisis peacefully.Myth No. 3AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKennedy suggested as much himself, with his talk of \u201ca great new American enterprise,\u201d of \u201cnew knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won,\u201d and of \u201cthe most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.\u201d John Glenn, who circled the Earth in 1962, spoke of JFK\u2019s excitement about space exploration: \u201cHe was interested in the whole program.\u201d Sid Davis, a White House reporter at the time, said that \u201cKennedy saw the fact of what an inspiration it could be.\u201dBut Jack cared little about space per se. He viewed it \u201cprimarily in symbolic terms,\u201d as Sorensen later put it. As JFK took office, he worried that America\u2019s image was sagging because the Soviets were ahead in space. He sought to win the space race because he thought that would enable the United States to compete more effectively with the Soviets around the world. Panicked by Soviet advances in early 1961, such as Moscow\u2019s launch of the first human into space that April, he asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who headed up his space council, \u201cDo we have a chance of beating the Soviets\u201d in any aspect of space exploration, and \u201care we making maximum effort?\u201dNot long before his assassination \u2014 and after he felt he had restored America\u2019s image and military might \u2014 JFK even offered to abandon the space race and work with the Soviets to reach the moon together.Myth No. 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor Kennedy,\u201d author Jeff Shesol wrote of Bobby\u2019s conflict with Johnson, \u201cthe feud was all about the war.\u201d Historian Michael Schuyler said LBJ\u2019s bombing raids against North Vietnam in 1965 divided \u201cthe two men, their followers, and much of the nation, into hostile, warring camps.\u201d Vietnam was the first issue Bobby mentioned when he announced that he\u2019d challenge LBJ for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, and authors Edwin Guthman and Richard Allen termed his opposition to the war \u201cthe centerpiece of his candidacy.\u201dBut after Bobby took his Senate seat in 1965, he split with LBJ over Vietnam only gradually. The divide came more quickly and more dramatically over Latin America. That\u2019s where LBJ overhauled JFK\u2019s \u201cAlliance for Progress,\u201d which was designed to nourish political reform and economic advancement in the region, and restored President Dwight Eisenhower\u2019s policy of backing right-wing dictators if they supported U.S. interests.After LBJ sent 30,000 troops to the Dominican Republic in early 1965 to quell an uprising that he said was communist-driven, Bobby tore into him publicly. He said U.S. military action could trigger a backlash that would build support for the communists, and he complained that LBJ hadn\u2019t consulted with America\u2019s regional allies.Myth No. 5AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUpon Ted Kennedy\u2019s passing, President Barack Obama eulogized him as \u201ca veritable force of nature in support of health care or workers\u2019 rights or civil rights,\u201d and he listed the landmark domestic policy laws that the senator had championed. Ranking Ted\u2019s legacy among the greatest of U.S. lawmakers, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid noted that because of him, more Americans who were young, old, poor, female or non-White had health care or a chance to go to college. Neither Obama nor Reid said a word about foreign policy.But Ted Kennedy\u2019s influence on foreign policy equaled his sway over domestic policy. In the 1960s and 1970s, he called for outreach to communist China, foreshadowing President Richard Nixon\u2019s opening and President Jimmy Carter\u2019s normalization. In the 1970s and 1980s, he forced Soviet and Chinese leaders to free scores of dissidents as a condition of working with him. He built the congressional opposition that forced President Ronald Reagan\u2019s partial retreat in his proxy wars with the Soviets in Central America. And he spearheaded Congress\u2019s override of Reagan\u2019s veto of sanctions against South Africa over apartheid, marking the first override of a president on foreign affairs in 11 years.Ted later played a key role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, and, though he fiercely opposed the 2003 war in Iraq, he worked closely with President George W. Bush to enable Iraqis who had aided U.S. forces to emigrate to America.Twitter: @larryhaasonlineFive myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. No, it wasn\u2019t Vietnam that caused RFK\u2019s split with President Johnson. Five myths about the Kennedys",
        "author": "Lawrence J. Haas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The overlooked innovation woven throughout human history (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2712",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-overlooked-innovation-woven-throughout-human-history/2020/01/09/11b9c0fe-f4f4-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html",
        "text": "Rachel Newcomb is an anthropologist and the Diane and Michael Maher distinguished professor of teaching and learning at Rollins College. She is the author of \u201cEveryday Life in Global Morocco.\u201dMost of us don\u2019t expend much mental energy thinking about fabric, beyond appreciating the cool touch of soft cotton when our heads touch the pillow at night, or worrying if our bag of donated clothes is destined for a landfill. But reading journalist Kassia St. Clair\u2019s \u201cThe Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History,\u201d it\u2019s likely you\u2019ll never look at cloth the same way again. \u201cThe Golden Thread\u201d offers an eclectic take on how humans have developed fabric, from the first known flax fibers found in a cave in Georgia, spun from the insides of plants and dating at around 32,000 years ago, to the spacesuits made from synthetic materials created in the past 100 years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cClothing,\u201d St. Clair notes, \u201cwould have been one of a suite of skills \u2014 including the ability to make shelter and fire \u2014 that humans would have needed to thrive in diverse regions.\u201d However, because cloth is harder to preserve, archaeologists have paid less attention to its significance in ancient cultures than to other, less perishable objects such as bronze or iron. Explorers studying Egyptian mummies, for example, hurriedly sliced away the outer wrappings to get to the bodies and treasures inside. \u201cThis is unfortunate,\u201d St. Clair writes, because for the ancient Egyptians, \u201clinen was imbued with powerful, even magical, meaning: linen was what made mummies sacred.\u201dThroughout history, the task of cloth production has frequently fallen to women, who supplemented household incomes or paid taxes through their labor. Women cared for silkworms in China, probably created the Bayeux Tapestry in 11th-century England and today toil by the millions in the garment factories of Bangladesh. St. Clair suggests that because it\u2019s women\u2019s work, the creation of textiles has been devalued, even though cloth is essential to human survival and progress. Sails, for example, whose early development has been traced to sites in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar in the sixth millennia BC, allowed the Vikings to travel long distances. \u201cWhile it has been estimated that it would take two skilled shipwrights a fortnight to make a longboat,\u201d St. Clair writes, \u201ccreating a sail would take two equally skilled women a full year or more, depending on the size required.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTechnological innovations led to remarkable advances in the scale and quality of fabrics. Insufficiently dressed explorers, whether attempting to summit Mount Everest or explore outer space, can die in extreme temperatures or expend precious energy on movement when clad in cumbersome protective gear. Both natural down insulation and synthetic fabrics such as Gore-Tex, \u201cmade from a layer of finely stretched Teflon .\u2009.\u2009. bonded to nylon or polyester,\u201d have made climbing Mount Everest possible.In the case of space exploration, the Omega suit developed for the first moonwalk was produced in a Playtex factory and was \u201ccomprised of some four thousand pieces of fabric and twenty-one distinct layers of material,\u201d including Teflon-coated silica cloth, different types of polyester, heat-resistant fibers and woven stainless steel. Astronaut Michael Collins paid homage to the Playtex workers, noting in his memoir that it was \u201clittle old ladies hunched over their glue pots in Worcester, Mass.,\u201d who by their exacting labor kept him alive in space; their work prevented his oxygen from escaping from his suit while he was flying the Apollo 11 mission.In its exploration of contemporary textile history, \u201cThe Golden Thread\u201d sometimes jumps from one seemingly disparate topic to another, such as from slavery to Everest mountaineering, or from the synthetic swimsuits that led to outcries of \u201ctechnological doping\u201d to the potential for spiders\u2019 webs to become the new silk. Yet each subject offers a fascinating look at the challenges that fabrics aim to overcome, as well as the often-devastating environmental and human effects involved in their production. For example, rayon, although derived from natural wood pulp, requires the harvesting of 120 million trees a year, and it must be processed with harsh chemicals, which can eat through the flesh of workers and in some cases cause lifelong psychosis, disability and even death.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSt. Clair is frank about how humans have been exploited in the service of textiles, particularly from the Industrial Revolution onward. The transatlantic slave trade increased dramatically in response to the introduction of the cotton gin, which allowed seeds to be extracted from cotton mechanically. As a result, in South Carolina, cotton exports from 1790 to 1800 went from less than 10,000 pounds to 6.4 million pounds per year. To perform the additional labor, more slaves were trafficked into the region, such that by 1860, 3.2 million people in the American South were enslaved. While this may be a familiar story, St. Clair also discusses how slaves used clothing to distinguish themselves \u201cin a cycle of consumption and display parallel to that of white Americans.\u201d And perhaps even fewer of us know that the United States is still the world\u2019s third-largest producer of cotton, some of which is harvested by prison inmates.Although St. Clair does explore the history of cloth in ancient Egypt and China, the book largely focuses on the development of fabrics in England and America, with wool yielding to cotton and then synthetics in importance. Absent are discussions of the textiles of Africa and Native and Latin America, which have been dated back thousands of years and have deep cultural and historical significance as well. Nonetheless, \u201cThe Golden Thread\u201d spins a rich social history of textiles that also reflects the darker side of technology and the development of capitalism. Fabric may have allowed the human species to thrive and conquer the globe, but as with other technologies that suck up finite resources and are often produced in inhumane contexts, it may also be part of our unraveling.How Fabric Changed HistoryBy Kassia St. ClairLiveright. 351 pp. $23.95 Kassia St. Clair explains the essential role of fabric, from ancient Egypt to outer space. The overlooked innovation woven throughout human history",
        "author": "Rachel Newcomb"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The overlooked innovation woven throughout human history (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2713",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-overlooked-innovation-woven-throughout-human-history/2020/01/09/11b9c0fe-f4f4-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html",
        "text": "Rachel Newcomb is an anthropologist and the Diane and Michael Maher distinguished professor of teaching and learning at Rollins College. She is the author of \u201cEveryday Life in Global Morocco.\u201dMost of us don\u2019t expend much mental energy thinking about fabric, beyond appreciating the cool touch of soft cotton when our heads touch the pillow at night, or worrying if our bag of donated clothes is destined for a landfill. But reading journalist Kassia St. Clair\u2019s \u201cThe Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History,\u201d it\u2019s likely you\u2019ll never look at cloth the same way again. \u201cThe Golden Thread\u201d offers an eclectic take on how humans have developed fabric, from the first known flax fibers found in a cave in Georgia, spun from the insides of plants and dating at around 32,000 years ago, to the spacesuits made from synthetic materials created in the past 100 years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cClothing,\u201d St. Clair notes, \u201cwould have been one of a suite of skills \u2014 including the ability to make shelter and fire \u2014 that humans would have needed to thrive in diverse regions.\u201d However, because cloth is harder to preserve, archaeologists have paid less attention to its significance in ancient cultures than to other, less perishable objects such as bronze or iron. Explorers studying Egyptian mummies, for example, hurriedly sliced away the outer wrappings to get to the bodies and treasures inside. \u201cThis is unfortunate,\u201d St. Clair writes, because for the ancient Egyptians, \u201clinen was imbued with powerful, even magical, meaning: linen was what made mummies sacred.\u201dThroughout history, the task of cloth production has frequently fallen to women, who supplemented household incomes or paid taxes through their labor. Women cared for silkworms in China, probably created the Bayeux Tapestry in 11th-century England and today toil by the millions in the garment factories of Bangladesh. St. Clair suggests that because it\u2019s women\u2019s work, the creation of textiles has been devalued, even though cloth is essential to human survival and progress. Sails, for example, whose early development has been traced to sites in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar in the sixth millennia BC, allowed the Vikings to travel long distances. \u201cWhile it has been estimated that it would take two skilled shipwrights a fortnight to make a longboat,\u201d St. Clair writes, \u201ccreating a sail would take two equally skilled women a full year or more, depending on the size required.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTechnological innovations led to remarkable advances in the scale and quality of fabrics. Insufficiently dressed explorers, whether attempting to summit Mount Everest or explore outer space, can die in extreme temperatures or expend precious energy on movement when clad in cumbersome protective gear. Both natural down insulation and synthetic fabrics such as Gore-Tex, \u201cmade from a layer of finely stretched Teflon .\u2009.\u2009. bonded to nylon or polyester,\u201d have made climbing Mount Everest possible.In the case of space exploration, the Omega suit developed for the first moonwalk was produced in a Playtex factory and was \u201ccomprised of some four thousand pieces of fabric and twenty-one distinct layers of material,\u201d including Teflon-coated silica cloth, different types of polyester, heat-resistant fibers and woven stainless steel. Astronaut Michael Collins paid homage to the Playtex workers, noting in his memoir that it was \u201clittle old ladies hunched over their glue pots in Worcester, Mass.,\u201d who by their exacting labor kept him alive in space; their work prevented his oxygen from escaping from his suit while he was flying the Apollo 11 mission.In its exploration of contemporary textile history, \u201cThe Golden Thread\u201d sometimes jumps from one seemingly disparate topic to another, such as from slavery to Everest mountaineering, or from the synthetic swimsuits that led to outcries of \u201ctechnological doping\u201d to the potential for spiders\u2019 webs to become the new silk. Yet each subject offers a fascinating look at the challenges that fabrics aim to overcome, as well as the often-devastating environmental and human effects involved in their production. For example, rayon, although derived from natural wood pulp, requires the harvesting of 120 million trees a year, and it must be processed with harsh chemicals, which can eat through the flesh of workers and in some cases cause lifelong psychosis, disability and even death.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSt. Clair is frank about how humans have been exploited in the service of textiles, particularly from the Industrial Revolution onward. The transatlantic slave trade increased dramatically in response to the introduction of the cotton gin, which allowed seeds to be extracted from cotton mechanically. As a result, in South Carolina, cotton exports from 1790 to 1800 went from less than 10,000 pounds to 6.4 million pounds per year. To perform the additional labor, more slaves were trafficked into the region, such that by 1860, 3.2 million people in the American South were enslaved. While this may be a familiar story, St. Clair also discusses how slaves used clothing to distinguish themselves \u201cin a cycle of consumption and display parallel to that of white Americans.\u201d And perhaps even fewer of us know that the United States is still the world\u2019s third-largest producer of cotton, some of which is harvested by prison inmates.Although St. Clair does explore the history of cloth in ancient Egypt and China, the book largely focuses on the development of fabrics in England and America, with wool yielding to cotton and then synthetics in importance. Absent are discussions of the textiles of Africa and Native and Latin America, which have been dated back thousands of years and have deep cultural and historical significance as well. Nonetheless, \u201cThe Golden Thread\u201d spins a rich social history of textiles that also reflects the darker side of technology and the development of capitalism. Fabric may have allowed the human species to thrive and conquer the globe, but as with other technologies that suck up finite resources and are often produced in inhumane contexts, it may also be part of our unraveling.How Fabric Changed HistoryBy Kassia St. ClairLiveright. 351 pp. $23.95 Kassia St. Clair explains the essential role of fabric, from ancient Egypt to outer space. The overlooked innovation woven throughout human history",
        "author": "Rachel Newcomb"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Tracing tensions between astronomers and the military (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2714",
        "date": "2018-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/tracing-tensions-between-astronomers-and-the-military/2018/11/02/bfb5e06a-b2ac-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html",
        "text": "Joshua Sokol is a freelance science journalist in Boston. During America\u2019s invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, Neil deGrasse Tyson faced a hard choice. Tyson \u2014 astrophysicist, sonorous TV host, poet laureate of the sky \u2014 was attending a symposium of the nonprofit Space Foundation, which promotes space exploration. The meeting brought together university scientists, experts on space war and representatives of the military industrial complex that supports them both. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBetween sessions, conference-goers watched CNN coverage of American weaponry pounding targets in Iraq. \u201cEvery time a corporation was identified as the producer of a particular instrument of destruction, its employees and executives in the audience broke into applause,\u201d Tyson writes. He blinked back tears. He thought about walking out and resigning from the foundation\u2019s board. But then he decided instead to \u201cexplore other ways to reconcile my emotions.\u201dIn his book \u201cAccessory to War,\u201d Tyson pursues his reconciliation. Through ample research and nimble storytelling, Tyson and his co-author and longtime editor and researcher, Avis Lang, trace the long and tangled relationship between state power and astronomy. \nThe narrative reveals key moments in the convergence of astronomy and war. In 1608, for example, \nHans Lipperhey, a maker of spectacles, showed up at The Hague to present the world\u2019s first telescope to Prince Maurice of Nassau, just as the Dutch were negotiating with the Spanish to pause the Eighty Years War. Both sides recognized that the device could be used to spy on distant enemies, an advance that perhaps hastened Spain\u2019s decision to sign a truce.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe telescope then followed two paths, one that pointed to the heavens and the other to the battlefield. Galileo built a better version and found the moons of Jupiter and what would later be recognized as the rings of Saturn. Meanwhile, Spain and the Netherlands soon resumed fighting. In recognition of the new technology\u2019s capability in war, Spanish artist Diego Velazquez painted a scene featuring the victorious commander Ambrogio Spinola holding \u201ca spyglass nearly two feet long near the focal point of the painting, as if to emphasize its role in the victory,\u201d Tyson and Lang write.The mixing of astronomy and the military comes into sharp focus in the second half of the 20th century. The authors recount how military satellites meant to sniff out thermonuclear tests discovered gamma-ray bursts, brief flashes from energetic stellar explosions in the far reaches of space. The Air Force funded surveys of the entire sky in infrared light. Studies of the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll helped astrophysicists learn that the chemical elements that make up human bodies and everything else were forged during the life cycles of stars.In funding and projects, the astronomical sciences are the poor stepchild of the military. Consider the Hubble Space Telescope. This low Earth orbit instrument was seen as a unique mission famous for its vivid imagery and scientific contributions. In fact, Hubble wasn\u2019t so unique. Around the same time that NASA launched Hubble in 1990 to investigate cosmic mysteries, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office\u2019s Keyhole program was already managing 20 similar yet bigger spy satellites. NASA scientists grasped this fact only years later, once the satellites were declassified. If Hubble scientists thought they were leading the way, they were mistaken. \u201cHubble was a KEYHOLE-class satellite, not the other way around,\u201d Tyson and Lang write. The gulf in resources between science and military projects became even more apparent in 2011, when the same military office regifted two spare, better-than-Hubble mirrors to NASA. And today NASA still lacks the money to launch them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTyson and Lang also recount the peaceful and not-so-peaceful exploration of space. They trace the U.S.-Soviet Cold War competition and the United Nations\u2019 efforts to establish international space law, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty governing states\u2019 activities in the cosmos. The authors outline the kinds of space militarization long underway with an emphasis on surveillance and communications disruptions rather than on lasers and explosives. \nThey assess the current astro-strategic balance of power and show the United States clinging to an outdated idea of dominance and China appearing ascendant.Given President Trump\u2019s recent proposal for a U.S. Space Force to bundle existing space-security efforts into a new military branch, this discussion seems especially timely. Readers hungry for an engaging, well-researched primer on space military policy and its history will be edified. Readers who prefer astronomy and want to learn about satellites that look up into space rather than those that look down at rival nations might find these sections less compelling.But getting astronomy-lovers to sit with this material, of course, might be the point of the book, and in the final chapter Tyson and Lang attempt to resolve the military-science tension with brief sketches of a possible happier future. Since asteroids have plenty of metals and comets plenty of water, eventual space mining technologies might end the kind of scarcity that sometimes drives war, they argue. And astrophysics itself \u2014 by encouraging us to contemplate the cosmic sublime \u2014 might \u201credirect our species\u2019 urges to kill into collaborative urges to explore,\u201d they write.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnly a few quibbles: When the book veers into space policy, it becomes less focused. Although Tyson and Lang repeatedly argue for a two-way street between war and astronomy, the contemporary cases they present seem to show otherwise \u2014 that astronomy isn\u2019t so much an accessory to war as a collector of military scraps.Tyson and Lang do not settle the moral anguish that troubled Tyson when the bombs were falling on Iraq. How does he feel now? That moment haunts the book, just as its narrative is likely to haunt astronomers \n crushed between their field\u2019s wide-eyed hopefulness and its deep indebtedness to national security fears. Still, kudos to Tyson and Lang for pointing out the quandary, taking a deep and eloquent look at it, and offering a way forward.By Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis LangNorton. 576 pp. $30 Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang chart the shared history of scientists and war makers. Tracing tensions between astronomers and the military",
        "author": "Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Jeff Bezos\u2019s thoughts on Big Business, outer space and The Washington Post (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2715",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/jeff-bezoss-thoughts-on-big-business-outer-space-and-the-washington-post/2020/11/19/4a07f83c-205d-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html",
        "text": "It is quite strange, whether or not you\u2019ve stopped to consider it, that Jeff Bezos has never published a book. Shelf after shelf could be filled with memoirs or \u201cthought leadership\u201d tomes from company founders who\u2019ve been less successful than he has (which is pretty much all founders). Moreover, Bezos and Amazon both have origin stories with the flavor of legend, which would guarantee a large and eager audience. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cInvent and Wander\u201d represents a partial attempt to fill that publishing vacuum by offering Bezos\u2019s \u201ccollected writings.\u201d Specifically, the book consists of all the annual letters Bezos (presumably with some ghostwriting assistance) sent to Amazon shareholders from 1997 to 2019, plus excerpts from interviews and speeches he has given in recent years. There is also a lengthy introduction from Walter Isaacson, who argues that Bezos\u2019s personal character resembles that of some of Isaacson\u2019s biographical subjects, such as Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs.The range of topics in this volume is broad, including Bezos\u2019s humble personal beginnings, Amazon\u2019s occasional stumbles along an otherwise rocket-boosted growth path, the practical applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and Bezos\u2019s rationale for expanded space exploration (he doesn\u2019t favor colonizing Mars). There is even a brief chapter in which Bezos explains why he bought The Washington Post.In his introduction, Isaacson weaves these disparate strands into an effective story line. The keys to Bezos\u2019s success, he argues, are passionate curiosity, a multidisciplinary scope that incorporates science and humanities, and the ability to retain \u201ca childlike sense of wonder.\u201d Bezos had a hunch in the mid-1990s about the stratospheric growth of the Internet, but only the skills to hustle and innovate allowed him to turn that insight into a successful business. Bezos\u2019s personal philosophy, Isaacson concludes, is an intriguing mixture of \u201csocial liberalism\u201d and a fervent commitment to free-market, entrepreneurial capitalism.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe rest of the book is a bit harder to digest. The shareholder letters do provide a useful map of Amazon\u2019s journey. Today, when Amazon stock trades at well over $3,000 a share and the company is worth a staggering $1.6\u00a0trillion, it is easy to forget that at the beginning of this century, as dot-com companies imploded, Amazon stock sank as low as $6 a share. Bezos began the 2000 letter to shareholders with a one-word sentence: \u201cOuch.\u201d Throughout the company\u2019s history, he retains a sense of urgency \u2014 every day on the Internet, he insists, is Day One \u2014 and a painstaking focus on customer satisfaction. Amazon Web Services, a cloud-computing company that launched in 2006, grew out of a corporate culture that \u201cis unusually supportive of small businesses with big potential,\u201d Bezos wrote at the time. Today, AWS provides an outsize portion of Amazon\u2019s profits, which seems to confirm Bezos\u2019s view.Still, shareholder letters are seldom considered must-reads. Warren Buffett\u2019s were also collected into a book a few years ago, but they are truly different beasts than Bezos\u2019s and most others, with their combination of folk wisdom, Bible quotes and fairly detailed statistics. And even Buffett\u2019s letters become less compelling when stacked one year on top of the next.The interview and speech excerpt section is more engaging, mostly because it contains flesh-and-blood details about the man and not just Amazon. Bezos\u2019s mother was pregnant with him while still in high school in 1960s New Mexico, and she would have been expelled for it but for her father\u2019s intervention. The young Bezos was a science fiction nerd who built homemade booby traps to delight his obviously patient family. Bezos and his wife initially packed up Amazon orders while kneeling on a concrete floor. His idea for improvement was kneepads; when an employee suggested packing tables, Bezos declared him a genius. \u201cThe next day I went and bought packing tables and doubled our productivity,\u201d he writes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis section of the book also provides a glimpse into the more expansive parts of Bezos\u2019s thinking. He has actively committed Amazon to minimize its carbon footprint; he pledges that the company\u2019s use of renewable energy will be 100 percent by 2030. He convinced himself that buying The Post was a reasonable business proposition because, even though well-managed newspapers have gone through a long period of decline, the Internet makes it possible to bring their content to a global audience. And he is unabashed in his defense of Big Business. While Bezos loves companies like Amazon that started off in garages, he argues that \u201cnobody in their garage is going to build an all-carbon-fiber, fuel-efficient Boeing 787.\u201dWhat\u2019s frustrating about even the best parts of this book is the feeling of being confined to the surface; there\u2019s little narrative, tension or challenging introspection. Amazon and Bezos for many years have been surrounded by controversy, from e-commerce tax breaks to anti-union stances to battles with the Trump administration. Regardless of where readers might stand on such issues, we know that Bezos is thoughtful enough to have informed opinions \u2014 let\u2019s hear them!In short, for all this volume\u2019s insights, there remains ample room for a great Bezos book. If he doesn\u2019t write it himself, Isaacson seems like a stellar second choice.Invent and WanderThe Collected Writings of Jeff BezosBy Jeff Bezos, with an introduction by Walter IsaacsonHarvard Business Review/PublicAffairs. 271 pp. $28 An anthology of writings provides a glimpse into the mind of the Amazon founder. Jeff Bezos\u2019s thoughts on Big Business, outer space and The Washington Post",
        "author": "James Ledbetter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Jeff Bezos\u2019s thoughts on Big Business, outer space and The Washington Post (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2716",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/jeff-bezoss-thoughts-on-big-business-outer-space-and-the-washington-post/2020/11/19/4a07f83c-205d-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html",
        "text": "It is quite strange, whether or not you\u2019ve stopped to consider it, that Jeff Bezos has never published a book. Shelf after shelf could be filled with memoirs or \u201cthought leadership\u201d tomes from company founders who\u2019ve been less successful than he has (which is pretty much all founders). Moreover, Bezos and Amazon both have origin stories with the flavor of legend, which would guarantee a large and eager audience. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cInvent and Wander\u201d represents a partial attempt to fill that publishing vacuum by offering Bezos\u2019s \u201ccollected writings.\u201d Specifically, the book consists of all the annual letters Bezos (presumably with some ghostwriting assistance) sent to Amazon shareholders from 1997 to 2019, plus excerpts from interviews and speeches he has given in recent years. There is also a lengthy introduction from Walter Isaacson, who argues that Bezos\u2019s personal character resembles that of some of Isaacson\u2019s biographical subjects, such as Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs.The range of topics in this volume is broad, including Bezos\u2019s humble personal beginnings, Amazon\u2019s occasional stumbles along an otherwise rocket-boosted growth path, the practical applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and Bezos\u2019s rationale for expanded space exploration (he doesn\u2019t favor colonizing Mars). There is even a brief chapter in which Bezos explains why he bought The Washington Post.In his introduction, Isaacson weaves these disparate strands into an effective story line. The keys to Bezos\u2019s success, he argues, are passionate curiosity, a multidisciplinary scope that incorporates science and humanities, and the ability to retain \u201ca childlike sense of wonder.\u201d Bezos had a hunch in the mid-1990s about the stratospheric growth of the Internet, but only the skills to hustle and innovate allowed him to turn that insight into a successful business. Bezos\u2019s personal philosophy, Isaacson concludes, is an intriguing mixture of \u201csocial liberalism\u201d and a fervent commitment to free-market, entrepreneurial capitalism.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe rest of the book is a bit harder to digest. The shareholder letters do provide a useful map of Amazon\u2019s journey. Today, when Amazon stock trades at well over $3,000 a share and the company is worth a staggering $1.6\u00a0trillion, it is easy to forget that at the beginning of this century, as dot-com companies imploded, Amazon stock sank as low as $6 a share. Bezos began the 2000 letter to shareholders with a one-word sentence: \u201cOuch.\u201d Throughout the company\u2019s history, he retains a sense of urgency \u2014 every day on the Internet, he insists, is Day One \u2014 and a painstaking focus on customer satisfaction. Amazon Web Services, a cloud-computing company that launched in 2006, grew out of a corporate culture that \u201cis unusually supportive of small businesses with big potential,\u201d Bezos wrote at the time. Today, AWS provides an outsize portion of Amazon\u2019s profits, which seems to confirm Bezos\u2019s view.Still, shareholder letters are seldom considered must-reads. Warren Buffett\u2019s were also collected into a book a few years ago, but they are truly different beasts than Bezos\u2019s and most others, with their combination of folk wisdom, Bible quotes and fairly detailed statistics. And even Buffett\u2019s letters become less compelling when stacked one year on top of the next.The interview and speech excerpt section is more engaging, mostly because it contains flesh-and-blood details about the man and not just Amazon. Bezos\u2019s mother was pregnant with him while still in high school in 1960s New Mexico, and she would have been expelled for it but for her father\u2019s intervention. The young Bezos was a science fiction nerd who built homemade booby traps to delight his obviously patient family. Bezos and his wife initially packed up Amazon orders while kneeling on a concrete floor. His idea for improvement was kneepads; when an employee suggested packing tables, Bezos declared him a genius. \u201cThe next day I went and bought packing tables and doubled our productivity,\u201d he writes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis section of the book also provides a glimpse into the more expansive parts of Bezos\u2019s thinking. He has actively committed Amazon to minimize its carbon footprint; he pledges that the company\u2019s use of renewable energy will be 100 percent by 2030. He convinced himself that buying The Post was a reasonable business proposition because, even though well-managed newspapers have gone through a long period of decline, the Internet makes it possible to bring their content to a global audience. And he is unabashed in his defense of Big Business. While Bezos loves companies like Amazon that started off in garages, he argues that \u201cnobody in their garage is going to build an all-carbon-fiber, fuel-efficient Boeing 787.\u201dWhat\u2019s frustrating about even the best parts of this book is the feeling of being confined to the surface; there\u2019s little narrative, tension or challenging introspection. Amazon and Bezos for many years have been surrounded by controversy, from e-commerce tax breaks to anti-union stances to battles with the Trump administration. Regardless of where readers might stand on such issues, we know that Bezos is thoughtful enough to have informed opinions \u2014 let\u2019s hear them!In short, for all this volume\u2019s insights, there remains ample room for a great Bezos book. If he doesn\u2019t write it himself, Isaacson seems like a stellar second choice.Invent and WanderThe Collected Writings of Jeff BezosBy Jeff Bezos, with an introduction by Walter IsaacsonHarvard Business Review/PublicAffairs. 271 pp. $28 An anthology of writings provides a glimpse into the mind of the Amazon founder. Jeff Bezos\u2019s thoughts on Big Business, outer space and The Washington Post",
        "author": "James Ledbetter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Krauthammer\u2019s vision: freedom, prosperity and stability do not come easily (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2717",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/krauthammers-vision-freedom-prosperity-and-stability-do-not-come-easily/2019/01/10/43e5b3da-0ad0-11e9-a3f0-71c95106d96a_story.html",
        "text": "Daniel Oppenheimer is author of \u201cExit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century.\u201d He is writing a book on the art critic Dave Hickey. On April 26, 2013, to mark the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, Charles Krauthammer devoted his Washington Post opinion column to predicting how history would render judgment on Bush. Like so many of the columns Krauthammer delivered over his more than three decades as a Post columnist, it\u2019s a fairly masterful work of rhetoric. In fewer than 800 words, Krauthammer manages to defensibly compare Bush to Abraham Lincoln, exclude from view the financial crisis of 2008 (among other complexities of the Bush administration) and subtly assign blame to Barack Obama for the Boston Marathon bombing. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe climax of the piece, when it comes, has force. \u201cLike Bush,\u201d writes Krauthammer, \u201cHarry Truman left office widely scorned, largely because of the inconclusive war he left behind. In time, however, Korea came to be seen as but one battle in a much larger Cold War that Truman was instrumental in winning. He established the institutional and policy infrastructure (CIA, NATO, the Truman Doctrine, etc.) that made possible ultimate victory almost a half-century later. I suspect history will similarly see Bush as the man who, by trial and error but also with prescience and principle, established the structures that will take us through another long twilight struggle and enable us to prevail.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne can be fairly stunned by the judgment and still grant Krauthammer, who died last year from intestinal cancer, his due as a columnist. If there is a case to be made for the greatness of Bush, who left office seeming like one of the most disastrous American presidents of the 20th century, it is surely here. Bush was the president on watch when American power and supremacy were confronted with a world historical challenge. He made grievous mistakes. He didn\u2019t win the wars he started. But the security foundation he laid, on a bedrock of hard choices, will maintain American global dominance over the long run and thus enable the continued flourishing of the liberal democracies (including our own) that depend on such dominance.It\u2019s a cold argument, and \u201cThe Point of It All,\u201d the posthumous anthology in which it\u2019s collected, has some ice in its veins. The acceptance of human suffering that enables Krauthammer to hypothesize Iraq as a retrospective victory for liberal democracy is rather ruthlessly deployed throughout the collection on behalf of a range of subjects. Krauthammer is hard-faced, in particular, in defense of America, \u201cmankind\u2019s first-ever universal nation.\u201dHistory, for Krauthammer, is a never-ending, unforgiving lesson in the extraordinary difficulty of carving out even small pockets of freedom, prosperity and stability. War, death, stupidity, cruelty and domineering are tolerable, in the long run, if they serve or at least don\u2019t impede the creation and sustenance of such pockets. For a free society as vast and enduring as the United States, a great deal is tolerable. The alternative isn\u2019t something better or purer, but chaos and the misery that it breeds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis perspective achieves a kind of sublime brutality in \u201cThomas Jefferson, the Sublime Oxymoron,\u201d a Time magazine essay occasioned by a Library of Congress exhibition on Jefferson. Krauthammer writes admiringly, in particular, of the clarity with which Jefferson dealt with the Native American \u201cconundrum.\u201d \u201cJefferson had great respect for the Indians,\u201d he writes. \u201cHe considered them the equal of the white man. And yet he fully understood that America would have to be built at their expense. . . . \u2018Behind every great fortune there is a crime,\u2019 said Balzac. Behind every great nation too. Jefferson certainly wanted to do justice to the Indians. But he knew the white man needed to instill fear in the Indian or the American experiment would fail.\u201dThis exculpatory turn is a characteristic Krauthammer maneuver, a harsh 100-proof tonic for a world that threatens to deprive us of consolation and certainty at every turn: It was bad, but we are nonetheless good. In some ways we are only able to be good because tough leaders are willing to be bad. Acknowledge this fact, and the past, but don\u2019t be dragged down by guilt.Krauthammer was also quite warm, even reverential, when he wanted to be. In columns in the new collection he is charming on fatherhood, baseball, chess, the \u201cGenius of the Founders,\u201d the miracle of modern Israel, space exploration, Australia, friendship, Tiger Woods, America and Americans, and much else. His warmth offers reassurance as well. \u201cThere is something about the American spirit \u2014 about the bedrock decency and common sense of the American \u2014 that seems to help us find our way,\u201d he writes, \u201csomething about American history that redeems itself in a way that inspires all. I would summarize it by quoting my favorite pundit, Otto von Bismarck .\u2009.\u2009. [who] is famously said to have said: \u2018God looks after children, drunkards, idiots and the United States of America.\u2019 I think he still does. I hope he still does.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI find this somewhat reassuring. But mostly I find Krauthammer frustrating, a smart man and expert craftsman who lacked the intellectual grit to push at, or through, his own defenses and premises. He was forgiving of the flaws of ideological allies but too often dismissive of the intellects and motives of the people with whom he disagreed. He was a close and thoughtful reader within a narrow field but indifferent to the point of ignorance when it came to many of the major intellectual figures and movements of the modern era. He practiced as a psychiatrist for seven years before becoming a full-time writer, but he wasn\u2019t interested in the nuances of human psychology. He was a facile writer of sentences, an excellent summarizer of ideas and a master architect of the op-ed, which is a notoriously difficult form.But he was a complacent thinker. Krauthammer stopped at the point when things threatened to become too complex or messy. Even his contempt for Donald Trump, which he was admirably willing to bear with him into the lion\u2019s den (i.e. Fox News), ran up against hard limits. Trump, for Krauthammer, wasn\u2019t symptomatic of deeper flaws in our country or the conservative movement. He was an aberration.\u201cBeware the too-examined life,\u201d he said to the McGill University class of 1993, in a commencement speech included in \u201cThe Point of It All.\u201d This was not a throwaway line for Krauthammer. It was core to his worldview. Introspection, self-consciousness, deconstruction: For Krauthammer these practices were more likely to be vices than virtues, corrosive to the good life, sound political judgment and global leadership.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI think he introspected too little and forgave too much. But it\u2019s worth admitting (as he would not, if he were in my position) that I might be wrong. We all choose the level of complexity at which it makes sense for us to live. We simplify, because it is impossible to do otherwise. We live more meaningfully in the conviction that certain broad notions, like love and truth, are richer than the subsidiary levels of discourse into which they can be parsed. We recognize that dwelling at length on one\u2019s faults, failures and traumas can sabotage the capacity to function and grow. We believe that the particular constellation of principles, reductions, generalizations, elisions, emphases and self-deceptions that constitutes our political worldview is the precise one that, if adopted by everyone, would be most conducive to the health of the republic. We all have our stories.Krauthammer had his stories. They spoke \u2014 speak \u2014 to many, many people. As I write these words, \u201cThe Point of It All\u201d is second on the Washington Post and New York Times nonfiction bestseller lists, in both cases just behind Michelle Obama\u2019s \u201cBecoming.\u201d This is an instructive, or ironic, pairing. Krauthammer had almost nothing but disdain for Obama\u2019s husband and for the more introspective, tempered patriotism of the first couple. He thought it subverted the national project and was a luxury that leaders couldn\u2019t afford.I\u2019m on Team Obama, but it\u2019s worth saying that if the big argument we were having right now, as a nation, were reflected in a battle for bestseller supremacy between a serious, careful conservative like Charles Krauthammer and a thoughtful liberal like Michelle Obama, we\u2019d be in a much better place. I fear that it\u2019s No. 4 on the Post list, the Colbert show\u2019s cheap, Trump-mocking picture book \u201cWhose Boat Is This Boat?,\u201d that is the more accurate signpost.By Charles KrauthammerCrown Forum. 360 pp. $28 In a posthumous collection, Post columnist shows himself a staunch defender of America. Krauthammer\u2019s vision: freedom, prosperity and stability do not come easily",
        "author": "Daniel Oppenheimer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | America needed a space race hero. John Glenn was the obvious choice. (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2718",
        "date": "2021-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/america-needed-a-space-race-hero-john-glenn-was-the-obvious-choice/2021/05/26/af796718-b72b-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html",
        "text": "When I was an undergraduate at Ohio State in the early 1980s, I would often see John Glenn on campus, grabbing a tray and dining with the students in the cafeteria instead of hobnobbing at the Faculty Club. Even though he was a second-term U.S. senator at the time and would soon announce a presidential run, that never seemed to interest the undergrads, including me, who peppered him with questions over lunch. Instead, all they wanted to hear about was Feb. 20, 1962 \u2014 the day Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightToday, when everyone knows that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are financing private space missions, but few can name any of the more than 200 astronauts who have lived on the International Space Station, it can be hard to explain the excitement and awe that 1962 mission aroused in Americans of all stripes, as well as people the world over. It seems like a story from a simpler and altogether less-jaded time \u2014 a time Jeff Shesol captures in \u201cMercury Rising,\u201d which brings Glenn\u2019s story alive again with both nostalgia and a riveting, fast-paced narrative that has \u201cmovie\u201d written all over it.Born on July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio, Glenn grew up in nearby New Concord and flew in his first airplane with his father when he was only 8. Even as a child, he was a straight arrow with a sense of duty, honor and country, and he carried that Boy Scout quality into adulthood. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched America into World War II, the 20-year-old Glenn dropped out of Muskingum College and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, eager to defend democracy against global fascism. Driven to succeed, he rose quickly through flight training courses, and his prowess soon earned him a transfer to the Marine Corps as a second lieutenant. He was a deadly dogfighter by the time he married his childhood sweetheart, Annie Castor, in 1943, and he soon proved himself flying 57 combat missions around the Marshall Islands.According to Shesol, it was in the South Pacific that Glenn first experienced \u201cthe thrill of excelling at something dangerous and of real consequence,\u201d as well as the \u201cabsolute confidence .\u2009.\u2009. that makes a fighter pilot believe that there actually is not another pilot and plane that can whip him in all the world.\u201d Maintaining his chops after the war, Glenn flew patrol missions and served as a flight instructor before flying 63 combat missions in the Korean War, often bringing his plane back to base riddled with bullet holes. Boston Red Sox slugger and future legend Ted Williams was his wingman for a spell and was awed by Glenn\u2019s coolness under pressure, calling him \u201cthe bravest SOB I ever met.\u201d After Korea, Glenn put that bravery to good use, becoming one of the top American test pilots of the 1950s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShesol does a marvelous job of documenting Glenn\u2019s steady rise, which in July 1957 brought him fame as the pilot of the first-ever supersonic transcontinental flight, jetting from California to New York in a record time of three hours, 23 minutes and 8.3 seconds. When the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik 1 three months later, kicking off the space race with the United States, there was hardly an American alive better prepared to join the new NASA space agency and its Project Mercury, which would seek to launch men into orbit and bring them safely back to Earth. Earnest, straightforward, physically fit and with an exemplary record, Glenn ultimately beat out more than 100 other pilots to become one of America\u2019s first astronauts, along with Scott Carpenter, Gus Grissom, Alan Shepard, Deke Slayton, Wally Schirra and Gordon Cooper.While the \u201cMercury Seven\u201d trained, the politics of the space race heated up as the Soviet Union appeared poised to beat America for a second time by putting the first man in space \u2014 a feat it accomplished on April 12, 1961, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew a single orbit around Earth in Vostok 1. Less than a month later, the first Mercury mission launched with Shepard becoming the first American in space, though on a suborbital trajectory. Two months later, Grissom piloted a similar follow-up mission. And then it was Glenn\u2019s turn.This is where \u201cMercury Rising\u201d really picks up speed, as NASA responds to Gagarin\u2019s orbital triumph by accelerating Project Mercury\u2019s timetable and pegging its only Marine Corps astronaut as pilot. While Shesol doesn\u2019t add much new to the well-known historical record of Glenn\u2019s four-hour-and-55-minute flight, his prose style nails the tension around the launch, which suffered numerous countdown delays before lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 9:47 a.m. on Feb. 20, 1962.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom the moments leading up to the Atlas rocket\u2019s launch to the drama that developed around the Friendship 7 capsule\u2019s loose heat shield, equipment malfunctions and hazardous reentry, Shesol\u2019s descriptions are downright harrowing. But it\u2019s his deployment of Glenn\u2019s reflective letter to his young children, Dave and Lyn \u2014 written before takeoff, when his return wasn\u2019t at all assured \u2014 that becomes the centerpiece of the saga. \u201cCourage is only present when there is also fear,\u201d Glenn wrote. \u201cIn a dangerous situation we all have fear. It would be foolish to not be afraid. I have never gone into combat, for instance, without being afraid, but the important thing is what we do about being afraid. .\u2009.\u2009. I can tell you that I will be afraid when the booster is getting ready to fire because I know there are dangers involved much greater than normally experienced. What I do at that time is the important thing. .\u2009.\u2009. Human progress has never been fostered by the cowards who have let fear rule their lives.\u201dWith a sense of history becoming of a former White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton and an author of fine books on Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Shesol does an excellent job of embedding Glenn\u2019s story into the wider Cold War context. Following his flight, Glenn became a national hero, visiting President John Kennedy at the White House and receiving a ticker-tape parade in New York, while the Friendship 7 capsule took on its own life as a goodwill artifact, traveling the world as proof-positive of U.S. technological mastery and a crucial steppingstone on America\u2019s journey to the moon.By contrast, Shesol breezes through Glenn\u2019s Senate career and 1984 presidential campaign, and completely avoids mention of the Keating Five Scandal, in which Glenn and four other senators were accused of helping bank chairman Charles Keating resist U.S. regulators in return for large contributions. (Glenn was ultimately cleared.) The narrative takes orbit again when Shesol re-creates Glenn\u2019s 1998 return to space as a crewman on the space shuttle Discovery\u2019s nine-day STS-95 mission \u2014 which made him, at age 77, the oldest human ever in space, a record that still stands.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile \u201cMercury Rising\u201d captures the sense of energy and possibility in America\u2019s Cold War space program, and ably explores what the New York Times once called Glenn\u2019s \u201cprickly sense of integrity,\u201d there\u2019s still a need for a definitive biography of America\u2019s first true space hero. Luckily for history\u2019s sake, Glenn was something of a pack rat, saving everything from elementary school drawings to class papers to his post-Mercury notes about space travel \u2014 all of it housed at the John Glenn Archives at Ohio State. Mining that archive for \u201cMercury Rising,\u201d Shesol manages to extract the spirit of the man who took America for its first ride around Earth and then, 36 years later, looked down again from orbit and said, \u201cZero G, and I feel fine.\u201dMercury RisingJohn Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold WarBy Jeff ShesolNorton. 400 pp. $28.95 Jeff Shesol recounts the astronaut\u2019s dazzling career and role in the Cold War-era faceoff. America needed a space race hero. John Glenn was the obvious choice.",
        "author": "Douglas Brinkley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | A radically different view of animal cultures (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2719",
        "date": "2020-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-radically-different-view-of-animal-cultures/2020/05/14/349209d4-742d-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html",
        "text": "At the New Networks for Nature conference in the United Kingdom in 2017, the renowned Scottish wildlife cinematographer Doug Allan described a pod of beluga whales in the Lancaster Sound of the Canadian Arctic swimming beneath him as he snorkeled at the surface. After rolling onto their backs so they could look up at him \u2014 their eyes are at the bottom of their heads \u2014 one of the whales confronted Allan and \u201cscanned\u201d him from head to flipper. He described how the whale\u2019s melon \u2014 the mass of adipose tissue at the front of its head used for echolocation and communication \u2014 \u201cappeared to wrinkle in frustration, in exactly the same way your or my forehead might wrinkle in frustration\u201d when encountering a curiosity. Allan then complained that no one has yet managed to understand the whales\u2019 language. Carl Safina begins \u201cBecoming Wild,\u201d his luminous meditation on the complexity of contemporary animal culture, in the company of someone attempting to do just that: Shane Gero, a zoologist who has devoted his career to observing and analyzing the behavior of sperm whales. Safina visits with naturalists who study three species: the sperm whale, the scarlet macaw and the chimpanzee. He drops an intellectual hydrophone into these seemingly disparate pools to see what information he can elicit. In doing so, he demonstrates the extent to which different species exhibit cultural behaviors that humans historically have associated exclusively with themselves.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWe humans glorify our own culture yet have devoted scant attention to the existence of culture among whales and other species. Thomas Beale, a surgeon who sailed on a British whaling ship, wrote in his 1839 book, \u201cThe Natural History of the Sperm Whale\u201d: \u201cIt is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting, and in a commercial point of view of so important an animal, should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity.\u201d Beale was fascinated by the animals\u2019 behavior. \u201cAll sperm whales, both large and small, have some method of communicating by signals to each other, by which they become apprised of the approach of danger,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe mode by which this is effected remains a curious secret.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor hundreds of years, learning how best to kill the whale has been the extent of our interest in its culture. Safina quotes the pioneering whale researcher Roger Payne to explain the ongoing slaughter of the magnificent creatures: \u201cIt\u2019s as if intelligent aliens arrived from outer space and because we couldn\u2019t understand their language, we cooked and ate them.\u201dSafina demonstrates that the three species studied in \u201cBecoming Wild\u201d \u2014 all of which have life spans not unlike our own \u2014 learn how to live their lives through lengthy education from their elders, just as humans do. Macaws are taught where tasty and nutrition-rich clay lies. Chimpanzees learn which fruit trees are ripening in which order, and even consider changes in the weather when making their calculations. By destroying the sea beds in our continued search for fossil fuel, and filling the deep with noise from explosives and mechanical drills, we interfere with cetaceans\u2019 delicate echolocation and therefore their ability to orientate themselves, to feed and to communicate. In wiping out the habitats of the Amazonian scarlet macaw and of the Ugandan chimpanzee, we destroy deep knowledge of vast and complicated landscapes passed down through generations. Orphaned macaw chicks hand-reared and released into the forest lack the cultural knowledge and the dialects of their nest-reared cousins. In other words, those nest-reared cousins weren\u2019t born wild, to borrow the title of conservationist Tony Fitzjohn\u2019s memoir, \u201cBorn Wild: The Extraordinary Story of One Man\u2019s Passion for Lions and for Africa\u201d; they became wild.In this superbly articulate cri de coeur, Safina gives us a new way of looking at the natural world that is radically different from our usual anthropocentric perspective. \u201cBecoming Wild\u201d demands that we wake up and realize that we are intrinsically linked to our other-than-human neighbors. We are not alone in loving our families. Having an aesthetic sensibility, both visual and musical, is both shared and can be perceived by many other species while war-prone humans are not the only ones who would generally prefer to live peaceably with one another. Safina helps us see the profound impact caused by the destruction of other species and their habitats, the inability to live in harmony with one another, and the demonization of environmental scientists battling to preserve our Earth\u2019s delicate balance. As Safina puts it in his epilogue: \u201cCan we evolve a culture for a beautiful future on Earth? Only humans can ask that question. Only humans need to. And everything that means anything depends on our answer.\u201dHow Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve PeaceBy Carl SafinaHenry Holt. 368 pp. $29.99 \u201cBecoming Wild\u201d shows us that humans are much more intrinsically linked to other species than we realize. A radically different view of animal cultures",
        "author": "Katharine Norbury"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | What it means for us to actually \u2018see\u2019 a black hole (WP: Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2720",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/04/12/98fda1c0-5ca6-11e9-a00e-050dc7b82693_story.html",
        "text": "\u2018We have seen what we thought was unseeable,\u201d the astronomer said, like someone who knows history\u2019s ear is pressed against the door. He stood in the hushed attention of the room in Washington as he called up the image on the screen behind him. You know it by now: a smoke ring, an orange doughnut, a blurry circlet of light closed around a profound darkness. By the end of the day, it would be familiar to millions of people as the first photo ever taken of a black hole. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a collaboration of eight radio telescopes around the world, pieced together this picture from observations made from Antarctica and Arizona. Because no single telescope is powerful enough to distinguish a detail as relatively small as a 55 million-light-year-distant black hole, scientists harnessed these eight observatories together to simulate a much greater instrument, one as large as the Earth itself. It took two years and more than 200 people sifting and refining the data gathered on four days in April 2017 to bring the final famous image into focus.Watching the story echo across the news on Wednesday, I was struck by the profound simplicity of this image, obtained through such complex means. Puzzled out through algorithms and vectors, the photo is not an artist\u2019s rendering or a model \u2014 our previous stabs at picturing a black hole \u2014 but it is still a construction. The radio waves collected by the telescopes and assembled into the picture are translated into color for our benefit. You can\u2019t pick up a telescope, even one the size of the Earth, and see it for yourself. And yet, over the course of the day, I heard one line repeated again and again: We are seeing a black hole. Not \u201cdetecting\u201d it by its radio signature, not digging up more evidence of its existence \u2014 actually seeing it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEinstein's equations break down in a black hole. Here's why this photo, the first ever released image of a black hole, is such a big deal. (Billy Tucker/The Washington Post)Far greater than its scientific value \u2014 besides its pure technological achievement, the experiment is perhaps most remarkable for not overturning the established rules of relativity \u2014 the picture seems to matter to us because it is a picture. Our certainty, rendered in undeniable orange and black, has a new heft.We didn\u2019t lack proof that black holes existed. Ever since Albert Einstein reluctantly predicted them with his theory of relativity in 1916, we\u2019ve been gathering evidence. In 1935, physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar hypothesized that a star might become so massive it would collapse under its own gravity. Then in 1969, Donald Lynden-Bell suggested that supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies could be responsible for the huge energy signatures detected there, far beyond what stars alone could generate. In 2015, near-definitive proof arrived with the cosmic \u201czing!\u201d that was the sound of two black holes colliding, a billion light-years away. For most scientists, the detection of gravity waves cinched it: Black holes were out there, churning up spacetime, even if we never saw them.Yet images of outer space have an uncanny power over us: These are sights so supernatural that they never quite fit our understanding. Naked, our eyes perceive the night sky as a cosmic swirl of dust and diamonds, hints of a greater complexity. In the early 1600s, Galileo and others pointed the first telescopes into the sky to describe the mountainous face of the moon, the dark-splotched sun turning slowly on its axis, the three gleaming moons of Jupiter wobbling in their distant orbits. Sight gave us irrefutable proof of the vastness of the universe, its chaotic, balletic physics. And, seeing all this for the first time, we believed in it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI grew up under these cosmic visions. I remember napping beneath posters of the Pillars of Creation and the Cats Eye Galaxy at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, while my mom sorted through data and proofread grant proposals at her desk. When I was a little older, I would entertain myself by launching a toy propeller in the hallway, to watch it drift along the currents shifting above my head. My mom told me that looking into space with a telescope was like looking back in time. Nothing ever disappeared from the universe, she said, it just got farther away. I understood this to mean that everything could be known, if we could just see far enough.Our telescopes are bigger and more powerful than ever. They are mirrors tilting at the sky from mountaintops and deserts, or drifting in orbit like huge insects on their stiff solar-cell wings. They swallow light, not only the visible spectrum of blues and reds but also the X-rays and radio waves we are blind to, revealing the intricate structures of distant galaxies and misty Technicolor nebulas. These are landscapes we could never see for ourselves, but, in seeing their images, they become real to us.Even so, black holes had eluded us. They are the definition of unseeable: mass and volume turning inside out, cosmic sinkholes from whose irresistible gravity nothing can escape \u2014 not a single lousy photon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut light has always helped us understand what we couldn\u2019t see: T.S. Eliot wrote of the \u201cvisible reminder of invisible light,\u201d tracing the seen and the unseen both. Early astronomers inferred the invisible presence of gravity by the arcs of stars around their pivots. Modern ones use the oscillating brightness of stars to guess at the planets that may orbit them, tugging these distant suns off balance. And Hubble\u2019s observations of an expanding universe, rippling with distorted light, have revealed the presence of dark matter, an idea so strange and slippery it\u2019s difficult to get a purchase on it.At the Space Telescope Science Institute, my mom studied black holes, too, the ones that scientists were beginning to understand sat at the center of most galaxies, spinning their skirts of stars around them like dervishes. We couldn\u2019t see them, but we could see the radiant clouds of light and energy surrounding them. The paradox of the black hole is that, while no light can escape its limits, the regions just beyond the event horizon are some of the most energetic and bright places in the universe. From her, I saw how you could follow the trail of the visible, hunting for signs of the invisible.Behind the image of the halo at the center of Messier 87, one of two galaxies in the EHT\u2019s crosshairs, is a reminder of the challenges we face when looking for these unseeable objects. The second target of the EHT, Sagittarius A*, is the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. Though much closer to us than M87, it is also smaller and therefore more prone to shifting out of focus, like a fidgety student on picture day.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, unseen, it makes itself known. In the brightly lit hub of the Milky Way, stars slingshot in tight orbits around a massive and invisible object, accelerating with each brush past the engine spinning there, then slowing again at the zenith before turning back again. We can see them clearly. We can discern, by their dance, what holds them in thrall. We cannot see it yet. But we know it\u2019s there.Twitter: @ameliainahurry\nRead more from Outlook:Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter. We didn\u2019t lack proof that black holes existed. Yet images have an uncanny power over us. What it means for us to actually \u2018see\u2019 a black hole",
        "author": "Amelia Urry"
    },
    {
        "title": "When the Millennium Falcon\u2019s Hyperdrive Fails, It\u2019s Time to Hop on a Real Spaceship (WSJ: Overheard) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2721",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-millennium-falcons-hyperdrive-fails-its-time-to-hop-on-a-real-spaceship-11594914800?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=14",
        "text": "At Disney, Mr. Colglazier had also played a role in the Star Wars theme park Galaxy\u2019s Edge, which opened last year to somewhat disappointing crowds. Now he will have the chance to try again, but this time with a real spaceship. Despite Covid-19, Virgin\u2019s so-called SpaceShipTwo may still be on track to start taking passengers this year\u2014for about $250,000 each\u2014to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the thermosphere.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0Virgin Galactic, estimates of totaladdressable marketSource: Virgin GalacticNote: Based on global projections of people with anet worth of $10 million or moreCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0.million people2019'200.00.51.01.52.02.5\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe change at the top is telling. Evolving its technology to enable hypersonic travel between cities on Earth is a key part of the company\u2019s long-term business case. Departing CEO and former NASA man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides\n\n\n\n will still pursue that vision under the new title of chief space officer, but putting Mr. Colglazier at the helm shows that Virgin is sensibly more focused for now on creating the best theme-park thrill experience.\n\n\nA spaceship is much more complicated and dangerous than a roller coaster. Mr. Colglazier will need to be very tall to ride.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally published April 11, 2019) Having played a role in Disney\u2019s Star Wars theme park, Virgin Galactic\u2019s new CEO now needs to make an attraction of a real spaceship. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "When the Millennium Falcon\u2019s Hyperdrive Fails, It\u2019s Time to Hop on a Real Spaceship (WSJ: Overheard) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2722",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-millennium-falcons-hyperdrive-fails-its-time-to-hop-on-a-real-spaceship-11594914800?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=36",
        "text": "At Disney, Mr. Colglazier had also played a role in the Star Wars theme park Galaxy\u2019s Edge, which opened last year to somewhat disappointing crowds. Now he will have the chance to try again, but this time with a real spaceship. Despite Covid-19, Virgin\u2019s so-called SpaceShipTwo may still be on track to start taking passengers this year\u2014for about $250,000 each\u2014to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in the thermosphere.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0Virgin Galactic, estimates of totaladdressable marketSource: Virgin GalacticNote: Based on global projections of people with anet worth of $10 million or moreCreated with Highcharts 8.1.0.million people2019'200.00.51.01.52.02.5\n\n\n\nThe change at the top is telling. Evolving its technology to enable hypersonic travel between cities on Earth is a key part of the company\u2019s long-term business case. Departing CEO and former NASA man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides\n\n\n\n will still pursue that vision under the new title of chief space officer, but putting Mr. Colglazier at the helm shows that Virgin is sensibly more focused for now on creating the best theme-park thrill experience.\n\n\nA spaceship is much more complicated and dangerous than a roller coaster. Mr. Colglazier will need to be very tall to ride.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal (Originally published April 11, 2019) Having played a role in Disney\u2019s Star Wars theme park, Virgin Galactic\u2019s new CEO now needs to make an attraction of a real spaceship. ",
        "author": "Jon Sindreu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Time to Make a Buck, Roger (WSJ: Overheard) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2723",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/time-to-make-a-buck-roger-11586363014?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=46",
        "text": "\u201cOuter space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons,\u201d reads the order.\n\n\n\n\nStudies have shown that mining moon rocks would be possible but hard to make financially worthwhile. President Trump, the first billionaire in the White House, seemed to grasp this. Last year he tweeted that \u201cfor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon.\u201d\n\n\nBut did he really grasp it?\n\u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201d\nWrite to Spencer Jakab at spencer.jakab@wsj.com President Trump gives a green light for Americans to make money in outer space. ",
        "author": "Spencer Jakab"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | PTA culture and the working mother (WP: Parenting) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2724",
        "date": "2018-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2018/04/10/pta-culture-and-the-working-mother/",
        "text": "My 6-year-old daughter recently told me how her best friend\u2019s mother is always at school. This mom volunteers for library, for swimming, for the health walk and even made a papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 spaceship for one of their class projects. Meanwhile I, who must cram in my work before my kids get home at 1:30 p.m., had penciled myself in for one library slot. Mari felt bad about it. So did I. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d I told Mari. \u201cI\u2019m working.\u201d\u201cWhen I grow I up,\u201d Mari declared. \u201cI won\u2019t work so I can come to school with my kids.\u201dIt was spectacular. In one breath, she\u2019d berated me and given up all her professional aspirations. She\u2019d also forgotten all about her other working parent \u2014 my husband, who hadn\u2019t even signed up for one library slot.Story continues below advertisementUnless you\u2019re living under a rock or in deep denial, you\u2019re aware that there\u2019s an unfair burden placed on working women, also known as\u00a0The Second Shift. In addition to their employment, women are still largely saddled with much of the unpaid labor they used to do before women entered the workforce 50 years ago. Buried beneath the larger issue are smaller details, like the PTA. In a society in which most women work \u2014\u00a0nearly two-thirds of American mothers are breadwinners \u2014 there\u2019s still an expectation that the women will volunteer their time in the PTA and other school volunteer organizations, while men get a pass.I didn\u2019t understand male privilege until I became a stay-at-home dadThe founders of the parent volunteer organizations were pioneers. Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst founded the PTA\u2019s precursor, the National Congress of Mothers, in 1897, two decades before women had the right to vote. Selena Sloan Butler founded the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers Association in 1911, and the two organizations only merged in 1970. These women championed children\u2019s rights in an era when children had almost none. The PTA and similar school volunteer organizations have subsequently provided immeasurable contributions to children\u2019s health, legislative advocacy, teaching support, anti-bullying programs and raising much-needed funds for schools, among other accomplishments.AdvertisementSchools would suffer without the unpaid work of these parents. But, like with so much other unpaid labor, the expectation is still that women will fill these roles, even in families where both parents are working.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI think the expectation is that mothers will be the primary person doing all of the things for the family, not just volunteering,\u201d said Rachel Leventhal-Weiner, a sociologist and educator who\u2019s the mother of two daughters ages 8 and 6. \u201cAnd it makes me feel like I am constantly juggling and dropping balls.\u201dParent groups in northwest D.C. raise thousands for schoolsLeventhal-Weiner said that when she completed the school forms for her daughters, she automatically became \u201cthe primary contact for all school-related things.\u201d She described her frustration in seeing women \u201cinadvertently volunteered to interface for their families\u201d because the forms aren\u2019t written in a more inclusive way that considers the possibility of two \u2014 or perhaps more than two \u2014 parents as primary contacts.AdvertisementThe imbalance, and the pressure placed on women, is compounded when parents are bombarded with volunteer requests. Last year, I was asked to volunteer for library and swimming slots, to accompany children on class trips, health walks, to help out at the book fair, to \u201cman\u201d the stand at a school market, to bake or contribute food for various events, to set up and clean up for school parties \u2014 and that\u2019s just in the emails I read. This is in addition to the regular time commitments of attending plays, concerts and class parties, teacher meetings, information meetings about anti-bullying programs and other planning meetings.Story continues below advertisementEach time I say no, the wheels of my maternal guilt spin. Meanwhile the gendered state of affairs taps into my resentment over how\u00a0women\u2019s work is often devalued. As always, my grievances are insignificant when compared to the other consequences of a system predicated on the idea that one parent isn\u2019t working.Because parental involvement has\u00a0a positive impact on child development, single-parent families and lower-income families with unforgiving work schedules lose out. They have fewer opportunities to get involved and\u00a0exert less influence on their children\u2019s school and education. The imbalance surrounding the PTA culture, like so many others, isn\u2019t just about gender and women getting shortchanged. It\u2019s also about socioeconomic status and racial inequality,\u00a0because marginalized groups have less voice and influence within this volunteer construct.AdvertisementIf more men participated in the PTA and similar volunteer organizations, the issues wouldn\u2019t disappear, but the change would benefit everyone. When fathers and father figures get involved in their children\u2019s school and education, it has a positive effect on their academic performance and well-being, according to the\u00a0National Center for Education Statistics.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementEric Snow is the president and co-founder of WATCH D.O.G.S. (Dads of Great Students), a program that invites fathers and father figures to volunteer in schools. He cites multiple benefits to male involvement, including boosting children\u2019s confidence, raising attendance and reducing the chances of substance abuse. But he says there\u2019s still a stigma around men volunteering.\u201cI regularly hear from men that their child\u2019s school isn\u2019t \u2018male friendly\u2019 and in some instances there is still a very real perception that something must be wrong with a man who would want to volunteer his time to be around his kids and their classmates at school,\u201d Mr. Snow said. \u201cI believe that in many cases the men don\u2019t know what they could do as a volunteer and fear they would be uncomfortable if they were the only dad to participate.\u201dAdvertisementWATCH D.O.G.S has\u00a0a detailed program for how to overcome these obstacles and get men involved in school volunteering. Schools and parent volunteer organizations also offer\u00a0various strategies\u00a0to engage male caregivers in schools, like educating men about the\u00a0importance of volunteering, developing a male engagement team and keeping up the momentum.Story continues below advertisementSome approaches might sound patronizing \u2014 Colorado\u2019s PTA offer of an\u00a0\u201cAlpha Male\u201d Award,\u00a0for example \u2014 but let she who has solved the gender imbalance in their school volunteer organization cast the first stone.Women will also have to consciously \u201clean out\u201d from the expectation that they\u2019re the primary volunteer candidates.\u201cI stopped trying to be our family\u2019s champion a long time ago,\u201d said Leventhal-Weiner. \u201cIt\u2019s important my daughters see my husband as engaged in their school life. Then they will develop an expectation that their future partners will share in the challenges of parenting.\u201dAdvertisementA shift in values \u2014 in which both men and women feel school volunteer work is a worthy time expenditure \u2014 would help the gender imbalance. At the very least, if more men were involved in school volunteering, little girls wouldn\u2019t get the message, like my daughter did, that only moms \u201cgo to school,\u201d because men would be there, too.Story continues below advertisementDevorah Blachor\u00a0is the author of \u201cThe Feminist\u2019s Guide to Raising a Little Princess.\u201d Follow her on Twitter\u00a0@DevorahBlachor.Follow\u00a0On Parenting on Facebook\u00a0for more essays, news and updates. You can\u00a0sign up here\u00a0for our weekly newsletter.\u00a0We tweet @On Parenting\u00a0and have a Facebook discussion page about\u00a0parenting and working. Join us.\u00a0More reading:Seven ways to build an alliance with your child\u2019s teacherA stay-at-home dad finds his inner MarthaMy son is an introvert. Should I encourage him to socialize more?\u00a0 Why does everyone expect the moms to do all the volunteering? (Including my own daughter.) PTA culture and the working mother",
        "author": "Devorah Blachor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | How working from home changed our kids\u2019 perceptions of work (WP: Parenting) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2725",
        "date": "2021-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/05/03/children-perception-working-from-home/",
        "text": "Years ago, a friend of mine, at the time a clothing designer for the snowboarding line of an athletic apparel company, was working from home. Her then 7-year-old-son saw her at her laptop, and asked what she was doing. She said she was working. \u201cNo, you\u2019re not.\u201d He was defiant. \u201cYou\u2019re a professional snowboarder.\u201d That is what he had understood her to be and, in an instant, a pretty cool profession became a disappointment. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFast-forward to now, when the pandemic has forced many people to work from home. The concept of being in the same physical space among actual colleagues borders on anachronistic in 2021. For those with children, there\u2019s been an additional adjustment. Before schools reopened in the Netherlands, where we live, my dining room table was littered with the school books and laptops of my three children, with my husband or me at the helm, trying to do our own work.The pandemic changed everything about family life. These are the parts parents want to keep.It was disruptive, but it was also interesting to see the work my children are doing and to observe how they work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the same time, my children have been equally observing what my husband and I do during the day \u2014 which, as with my friend\u2019s son years ago, has exposed some misconceptions. While they have always had some understanding of what my husband and I do for a living, our working life before covid was a fraction of how they experienced us. How has watching us work every day impacted how they perceive not only our careers, but careers in general?The situation can benefit everyone, says Kimberly A.S. Howard, associate professor of counseling psychology and applied human development at Boston University. Howard says by age 4, children can begin to form ideas about various occupations. \u201cThere\u2019s the opportunity, when work is happening at home, for the work to be more obvious to children, and for parents and adult caregivers to have real conversations about their work,\u201d Howard says via Zoom. \u201cWhen parents say, \u2018this is how I spend my day and this is why I do it, this is what motivates me, this is what benefits come from it,\u2019 kids can apply these ideas to other careers.\u201dMy children have seen me working from home since their birth, at different levels of cognition. When he was about 3, my son (now 10) came into my office while I was writing an article. I made an attempt to trigger his interest, but he seemed unmoved. \u201cWhat is it you think my job is, actually?\u201d I asked. \u201cYour job is to point at squares,\u201d he said. To type.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYounger kids are very focused on the concrete,\u201d Howard says. \u201cWhat is observable. The physical act is touching the keyboard, but what is it that you\u2019re providing? It\u2019s not until later that they begin to understand what these concrete steps represent, and that can be facilitated by conversation. We can explain that.\u201dMy husband works in logistics for a multinational company that manufactures contact lenses. Before the pandemic, our children saw him leave the house for work \u2014 \u201c in their minds, a place filled with a mysterious air of \u201cotherness\u201d in relation to his home life. It was a place where he had a large, tidy office with a jar of chocolates and a warehouse with robots, where he knew people we didn\u2019t, and which we only visited when Santa Claus paid his annual respects.Before covid, my children believed their father was a scientist who made contact lenses, together with robots. They now understand that their dad spends most of his days in calls with colleagues, talking about things like SKU numbers. They get that their dad is part of a long chain that makes it possible for peopleto get contact lenses, but that\u2019s less interesting. Such revelations can be disillusioning for young children thinking about careers at a stage when, according to Howard, ideas of jobs are characterized by \u201cfantasy and imagination.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd excitement. A study published in 1995, \u201cOccupational Portrayals on Television,\u201d examines how television dramatizes and sensationalizes careers for children. \u201cMedical professionals are shown in hospital settings (as opposed to outpatient settings)\u201d the researchers write. \u201cThey treat pathology more than they engage in prevention [\u2026].\u201d And violent crimes such as murder are very common for television police, \u201cwhereas most real-life crimes are nonviolent and related to property.\u201dChildren have been getting more firsthand glimpses at the often-mundane reality of their parent\u2019s jobs, such as one 15-year-old, whose father works in the Netherlands for the European Space Agency. Turns out, at-home space exploration isn\u2019t as gripping as you might think. \u201cI noticed that he was always in meetings,\u201d the teen, whose mother asked his name not be used, explains via email. \u201cI knew my father was not an astronaut, but it still surprised me how little physics he used in his job. It isn\u2019t what would come to mind, when one thinks of working on missions to space.\u201dKai Levin, 16, of Vancouver, British Columbia, admires his dad\u2019s job as a corporate video producer but admits it feels less \u201ccool\u201d lately. \u201cBefore, he got to travel all around the world and make videos,\u201d Kai says via Messenger. \u201cBut now he is at the living room desk when I wake up. He\u2019s still at his desk when I come home.\u201d His sister, Lauren, 12, concurs that her dad\u2019s job seems a little less glamorous lately. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t go anywhere,\u201d she says, also via Messenger. \u201cHe used to dress really sharp for the office, but now he just wears sweatpants and housecoats.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt helps to remind children that working at home means many of us are working differently than we are accustomed, Howard says. Valentina Gultlingen, 14, who lives in the Netherlands, says after a year of doing schoolwork online, she definitely does not want a future job sitting in front of a computer. Her mother, a project manager, works from home. \u201cI don\u2019t know how she does it,\u201d Valentina says. With online learning, she misses the academic and social benefits of bumping into other students between classes.More positively, the pandemic has given children exposure to a broader range of jobs than they may have had previously, Howard says. \u201cIt trains their eye to see that this is an interconnected world,\u201d Howard says, \u201cand to develop an appreciation for a wide range of occupations, not just those that have been historically associated with prestige. Everyone is functioning for a purpose and we need to recognize how important it is that all of these roles are being occupied.\u201dAs for my children, they are still in the stage of discovering what they love to do, sometimes connecting those interests to potential careers. My youngest daughter (7) wants to be a farmer because she likes the outdoors and loves animals. My older daughter (9) is curious and determined, and is always teaching herself a skill \u2014 from knitting to acrobatics \u2014 but doesn\u2019t want these things to be jobs; she just wants to be good at them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy son wants to be a professional footballer, preferably for Manchester United. I\u2019m encouraging him to strive for athletic excellence, but talking to him about other football-related jobs for non-players, such as becoming an athletic equipment engineer, a physical therapist, or to work as a sports journalist \u2014 you know, to point at squares.Tracy Brown Hamilton is an Irish/American journalist living in The Netherlands.Join our discussion group here to talk about parenting and work. You can sign up here for the On Parenting newsletter.More reading:Parents want to keep working from home post-pandemic6 ways parents can deal with work-from-home interruptionsThe pandemic has parents working harder than ever \u2014 and kids get to see it My children have been observing what my husband and I do during the day \u2013 which has exposed some misconceptions. How working from home changed our kids\u2019 perceptions of work",
        "author": "Tracy Brown Hamilton"
    },
    {
        "title": "9 ways parents can empower a child who has learning issues (WP: Parenting) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2726",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/on-parenting/9-ways-parents-can-empower-a-child-who-has-learning-issues/2018/01/09/770aa474-ce2b-11e7-9d3a-bcbe2af58c3a_story.html",
        "text": "Brian and Daniel raced down the sixth-grade hallway, scribbling on anyone they could ambush with Sharpies. By the time they got hauled into the main office, they were covered in ink. The principal let them have it, then paused to answer his phone. That was when Brian noticed the stamp. By the time the call was over, Brian had branded Daniel's forehead with the words, \"From the Desk of Principal Brent.\"\n WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBrian had been impulsive in elementary school, but sixth grade brought bigger challenges. He buckled under the pressure of multiple classes and no recess. A psychologist diagnosed him with attention-deficit disorder, and his school gave him a Section 504 Plan. His formal accommodations, which included frequent breaks and preferential seating, helped him meet the increased demands of middle school.10 ways to take the struggle out of homeworkAs a school counselor, I often hear from parents whose children are struggling academically or behaviorally. They have questions that vary from the logistical to the personal. Should they consult a professional or give it time? How can they know if their expectations are realistic? Would a diagnosis kill their child's self-esteem?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBob Cunningham, head of the private Robert Louis Stevenson School in Manhattan, advises parents to trust their instincts and take action when their children's grades decline, their behavior changes, they resist going to school or their friends start ditching them. \"Don't let small slips add up to big problems,\" he says. Research shows that identifying problems early can improve a child's outcome, adds Howard Bennett, a pediatrician and author of \"The Fantastic Body.\"As parents embark on the journey to identify and address learning or attention issues, here are nine ways they can support and empower their child. Treat kids as the expert in their lives (but interview others)\"Most questions delivered to kids are really accusations with a question mark at the end,\" says Ned Johnson, president of PrepMatters and co-author of \"The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense Behind Giving Kids More Control of Their Lives.\" \"Ask: 'Do you think this is harder for you than other kids? Are you the last one done on a test?'\u2009\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKeep a log and talk to counselors, teachers and other adults in your child's life to identify patterns. Parents might discover that symptoms change depending on the classroom setup, the skills required in a specific class, the teacher's behavior management skills or their relationship with the child, says Melanie Auerbach, the director of student support at Sheridan School, a private school in the District. \"If the teacher is highly distractible and the student likes to rap his desk with his knuckles, that's not going to be a good combination,\" she says. \"Testing makes sense when there's been a persistent and chronic issue across settings, as opposed to situational behavior.\"Partner with the schoolProvide the school with work samples, the historical record and any diagnostic information, says Amanda Morin, author of \"The Everything Parent's Guide to Special Education\" and an expert for Understood, an organization that supports parents of children who have learning and attention issues. Be specific. Parents can say, \"My child isn't reading at grade level,\" or \"English causes more outbursts than math.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBe deliberate in how you communicate. Don't fire off accusations or present a list of demands. Ann Dolin, founder of Educational Connections Tutoring in Fairfax, Va., suggests that parents use the words \"I've noticed\" instead of \"you.\" As in, \"I've noticed that even with my help, Jimmy is spending two hours on Spanish homework.\"Chris Nardi, principal of the Thomas W. Pyle Middle School in Montgomery County, tells parents and educators to pick up the phone or meet in person whenever an email exceeds a paragraph. He recently emailed his son's teacher with a concern. When her response was terse, he knew there was a disconnect. \"I said, 'Can we go offline and talk, because I think we're misinterpreting our tones?'\u2009\"Everyone wants to do what's best for your child, Nardi says. \"Call a teacher or counselor, share your concerns and ask them to help you understand.\" Gather data from other sources, too. Know the special education process and your rights. Section 504 and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) are legally binding documents, and parents are equal participants on the team by law. Parents can find more resources and information about support groups at Understood (understood.org) and Parent Center Hub (parentcenterhub.org).Identify the right issuesKids with specific learning disabilities can have attention issues, and children with attention issues can have anxiety. The root of the problem isn't always obvious. Parents might think their child is anxious because math is a struggle, but math may be hard because of their anxiety.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementElla Tager, a seventh-grader who was diagnosed with dyslexia in first grade, notes that she has symptoms that are typical of someone with attention-deficit disorder. \"Sometimes I need to move to process the frustration of not knowing what's going on,\" she explains. \"It gives me time to get unstuck.\" The right strategies and interventions will vary by child and change over time.Don't ignore the social sphere\"If your child has poor impulse control and says whatever is on his mind, it doesn't take much to imagine the social implications,\" Cunningham says. If he's late or disruptive, a teacher may punish the entire class. If he doesn't pull his weight on a group project, his social standing will take a hit. Parents can role-play scenarios at home, such as forgetting to meet a friend. \"Help her say, 'Jenny, I know that was a problem for you when I was late. I didn't mean to be disrespectful to you \u2014 that's something I'm working on,'\u2009\" he says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProfessionals often emphasize the importance of having one or two close friends, but that may be a mistake for kids with social difficulties. \"Deep friendship can be hard for the target friend,\" Cunningham says. \"A lot of kids with social issues will have significantly improved lives if the goal is more comfortable interactions with a broader range of classmates or teammates.\"Change what you do firstParents need to think about what they can do to provide a better situation for their children who are struggling. \"If your child isn't getting to school on time, you might have to get up earlier, or check that your child is in the shower before you start making lunches,\" Cunningham says. \"Your expectation is still that your child is going to get to school on time, but you need to offer more scaffolding.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCunningham tells parents to try one new strategy at a time and stick with it for three weeks. Maybe your child has a separate alarm that reminds them it's time to pack up, or uses lists to help prioritize their \"must do's,\" \"should do's\" and \"could do's.\"Capitalize on kids' strengths and interestsMake sure teachers know where your child excels. If your kid is strong socially but has weak literacy skills, group work might be a good choice. Schools can offer children leadership roles that highlight their skills, build their confidence and influence the way others view them. Challenges often come with built-in strengths, says educator Laurel Blackmon, the founder of LCB Consulting, which works in the D.C. area. \"Kids with dyslexia can make connections across big ideas, and kids with ADHD bring energy and dynamism to a classroom,\" she says. When teachers draw on kids' interests, they build their capacity to sustain attention.If your child loves astronomy, for example, the teacher could assign a text about space exploration.\nModel self-advocacy skillsMiriam Tager, Ella's mother and an assistant professor of early-childhood education at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, says her daughter knew how to ask teachers whether they had read her IEP by the time she was in fifth grade.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"My parents were constantly advocating for me, so I figured out how to use teacherly language,\" Ella says. \"Teachers take you more seriously when they see you understand and want to learn.\" By sixth grade, she was implementing her own strategies. \"I used my study hall to watch a video on evolution and cells, so when they came up in the text, the visual popped into my head.\"Take the 'I do, we do, you do' approachSupports should be removed as kids learn skills. \"Is your goal to make sure they're getting everything right, or to teach them how to do it independently next time?\" asks Donna Volpitta, founder of the Center for Resilient Leadership in Pound Ridge, N.Y. Parents can contact the school for their child, then guide their children as they write their teacher an email, then step back when they can do it on their own.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMorin tells parents not to overcompensate: \"I know I'm doing too much when I'm making three trips to the school to bring sneakers and a textbook, and it's interfering with the rest of the family's functioning.\"Be direct but sensitiveA professional can help children understand how they learn without judgment, Auerbach, of the Sheridan School, says. \"They can say: 'Know why it's so easy for you to memorize those math facts? Because you have really good long-term memory. It's harder for you to remember six plus seven when you're solving a word problem because your working memory is not as strong.'\u2009\"Parents may need to work out their own issues so that they can be calm and empathetic. \"Your child is exquisitely sensitive to your reaction,\" says Rachel Simmons, author of \"Enough As She Is.\" \"We have to check ourselves and make sure our disappointment about a limitation in our child is not about an unresolved wound or an over-identification with our child's success.\"Mary, whose seventh-grader Zoe has attention-deficit disorder, sought therapy because she had trouble coming to terms with her daughter's diagnosis. Her psychologist helped her understand that Zoe will be consistently inconsistent. \"She's like a 9-year-old who has no filter and doesn't recognize the boundaries of privacy,\" says Mary, who wanted to use only her first name to protect her daughter's privacy. \"It was liberating to let go of expectations that were setting us both up for failure.\"It's not always easy to take the long view, but Ella hopes parents will embrace her attitude. \"Disability stands for something you can't do,\" she says. \"I can read and learn, just differently. When I grow up, I plan to be a rocket scientist or an astrophysicist.\"Phyllis L. Fagell, LCPC, is the counselor at Sheridan School in the District and a therapist at the Chrysalis Group in Bethesda. She tweets @pfagell and blogs at phyllisfagell.com.More reading:\nThe best medicine for ADHD might not be medicine. At first.\n5 ways to make the most of your child's IEP meeting\nWant to raise empowered women? Start young, focus on middle school\n When to find help and how to support a youngster who is struggling. 9 ways parents can empower a child who has learning issues",
        "author": "Phyllis Fagell"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Can Child Care Resume? (NYT: Parenting) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2727",
        "date": "2020-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/parenting/child-care-resume-questions.html",
        "text": "The answer will depend on location, the age and health of caretakers, and everyone\u2019s levels of acceptable risk. The answer will depend on location, the age and health of caretakers, and everyone\u2019s levels of acceptable risk. I used to work for hours in a row without interruptions. Now, there is an astronaut-themed Lego set on my desk that seems to move a little bit each day. As I write this, my 7-year-old is sitting next to me, deconstructing pencils instead of doing his schoolwork. In listening to an interview I had recorded, I heard a young voice in the background and then heard myself say, \u201cI\u2019ll help you in a second. I\u2019m still on the phone.\u201d",
        "author": "By Emily Sohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Can Child Care Resume? (NYT: Parenting) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2728",
        "date": "2020-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/parenting/child-care-resume-questions.html",
        "text": "The answer will depend on location, the age and health of caretakers, and everyone\u2019s levels of acceptable risk. The answer will depend on location, the age and health of caretakers, and everyone\u2019s levels of acceptable risk. I used to work for hours in a row without interruptions. Now, there is an astronaut-themed Lego set on my desk that seems to move a little bit each day. As I write this, my 7-year-old is sitting next to me, deconstructing pencils instead of doing his schoolwork. In listening to an interview I had recorded, I heard a young voice in the background and then heard myself say, \u201cI\u2019ll help you in a second. I\u2019m still on the phone.\u201d",
        "author": "By Emily Sohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos is now worth more than $100 billion, fueled by surging Amazon shares (WP: Personal Finance) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2729",
        "date": "2017-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2017/11/24/jeff-bezos-is-now-worth-more-than-100-billion-fueled-by-surging-amazon-shares/",
        "text": "Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos saw his net worth climb above $100 billion Friday as shares in his online retail giant surged on optimism over\u00a0holiday sales.Bezos\u2019s ascent is the first time anyone has crossed the $100 billion threshold since Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates earned it in 1999, according to Bloomberg, whose Billionaire\u2019s Index follows the real-time net worth of the world\u2019s 500 wealthiest people. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAmazon shares were up 2.5 percent to $1,186 at Friday\u2019s 1 p.m. market close. Stock exchanges closed early Friday because of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Amazon shares are up more than 58 percent this year, consequently boosting Bezos\u2019s wealth with it.238 cities are wooing Amazon. The winner may end up with a very bad deal.Amazon\u2019s upward arc followed Friday\u2019s broad market push that saw the Standard & Poor\u2019s 500-stock index reach another record at 2602, the first time it has closed above 2600. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 32 points\u00a0 to 23,557.99, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index closed higher at 6889.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMarkets are approaching the end of 2017 fueled by robust earnings, a rare harmony among growing world economies and bullishness over possible U.S. tax reform.Bezos, 53, is the owner of The Washington Post. His wealth, largely based on his Amazon holdings, began the year around $65 billion. It has steadily risen with the rising stock market and the surge in Amazon shares, which rose 5 percent this past week as the nation\u2019s busiest shopping season picked up steam with its traditional Thanksgiving launch.The man who sold his supermarket to Whole Foods talks about the future of grocery storesAmazon has been on a tear this year. In addition to buying high-end grocery chain Whole Foods, the retailer has been conducting a highly publicized search for a second North American headquarters. The search has drawn 200 proposals from across the continent because of the company\u2019s potential to affect regional economies. The company\u2019s perceived ability to disrupt industries from entertainment to groceries to traditional retail once\u00a0prompted media mogul John C. Malone to refer to Amazon as the \u201cDeath Star.\u201dBezos is the largest owner of Amazon shares, and earlier this year he said he sold about $1 billion of his stock every year to fund his ambitious Blue Origin spacecraft company.Gates is the second wealthiest man on Bloomberg\u2019s index with a net worth of about $88.9 billion. Investor Warren Buffett is third at around $78.9 billion. His wealth, largely based on his Amazon.com holdings, began the year at around $65 billion. Jeff Bezos is now worth more than $100 billion, fueled by surging Amazon shares",
        "author": "Thomas Heath"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tweet Responsibly: A Guide to Twitter in 2020 (WSJ: Personal Technology: Review) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2730",
        "date": "2020-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tweet-responsibly-a-guide-to-twitter-in-2020-11590694801?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=12",
        "text": "Thanks to newsmakers (ahem, one in particular), news organizations and, well, anybody and everybody, the platform has become one of the quickest and easiest ways to share, get and comment on any and all information.\n\n\nJust a couple of, you know, monumental issues with that: That information can be incorrect, spread easily and incite others to act in horrible ways. In many cases, the information isn\u2019t even coming from a real human. (Some of my best friends are bots.)\nIf you\u2019re new to Twitter, welcome to the mess! If you\u2019re a longtime user, you might feel like the mess has gotten worse. Heck, it might even be part of the appeal. I call it Twitter-necking\u2014you just can\u2019t look away from the breaking news, the public fighting or all the hearts your sarcastic one-liner just got.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think is the biggest problem facing Twitter? What tips do you have for making your Twitter time productive? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nTwitter has recently released new tools to clean up the tweets we see and the tweets we send. Some of the tools help; others don\u2019t go far enough. Certain issues are hard to fix with software\u2014such as when people forget the Golden Rule.\nWhether we\u2019re in the middle of a pandemic, a presidential election or a spacecraft launch (or all three!), it\u2019s time we all\u2014especially those in positions of power\u2014remember the rules of the road. I\u2019ve taken a stab at writing up the first five.\nRule 1: Don\u2019t believe everything you read. OK, this one really is the No. 1 rule of the internet. No matter where you\u2019re reading or watching something\u2014Google,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook,\n\n\n even this very column\u2014if you think something doesn\u2019t hold up, check it.\nGiven that Twitter has become a megaphone for world leaders, it has had to wiggle its way through an obstacle course of its own devising: the code of conduct it laid out and the frequent abuse by people it can\u2019t ban. As a result, the rules around how it handles misinformation are both vague and inconsistently enforced.\n(Facebook, another global megaphone, has gone a different direction with its rules, or lack thereof.)\nFor instance, Twitter will require people to remove false or misleading tweets in certain instances, specifically ones that pose a real risk to people\u2019s health or well-being. Example: tweets that incited people to destroy 5G towers and other infrastructure because of \u201creports\u201d of 5G causing Covid-19.\nIn other instances, particularly where a world leader might violate its policies, Twitter won\u2019t remove tweets it interprets as false or misleading. Instead, it applies a \u201cget the facts\u201d label. Example: President Trump calling mail-in ballots \u201csubstantially fraudulent.\u201d A Twitter spokeswoman said these tweets contained potentially misleading information about voting processes. In March, the company applied the same label to tweets from China\u2019s foreign ministry spokesman.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTwitter added a notice below a tweet by President Trump to alert users that his claims were unsubstantiated.\n\n\n\nFollowing the facts label slap, Trump signed an executive order to limit broad legal protection that federal law currently provides social-media and other online platforms.\nTwitter has other labels, too, and it isn\u2019t clear how and when they\u2019ll be applied. Besides the facts label, there\u2019s the \u201cpublic interest\u201d label, which could be applied if a tweet violates the rules but the network still thinks it should be seen. Another new one is the \u201cmanipulated media\u201d label, applied to photos and videos that Twitter deems to be \u201cedited and deceptively shared.\u201d\nIf you spot misleading or flat-out false information on your own, report it. In Twitter\u2019s website and iOS and Android apps, tap the down arrow in the top right corner of a tweet, select Report Tweet and you\u2019ll see possible reasons, including \u201cIt\u2019s misleading about a political election or other civic event.\u201d\nRule 2: Avoid the riptide. The 1% rule of the internet likely applies to you on Twitter\u2014that is, 1% of the time you\u2019re tweeting, 99% of the time you\u2019re just lurking. I lurk a lot, often obsessively returning to the same posts or topics again and again to watch a story or conversation play out. But even when I\u2019m over the story, Twitter\u2019s algorithm keeps pulling me back into it, via updates that appear at the top of my feed.\nThe best way out of what I call the riptide\u2014other than throwing your phone in the actual ocean\u2014is to mute a person or word. This removes that content from your feed, forever or temporarily. You can mute a person or conversation by tapping the down arrow on a tweet. You can mute a term in the Content Preferences section of Settings. (I might have muted \u201chydroxychloroquine\u201d over the last few months.)\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHere's how you can mute words in the Twitter app.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joanna Stern/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nAlso, to break out of your algorithmic feed, tap on the app\u2019s search icon, or look the #Explore tab on the website, to see trending People and politicians are using Twitter more, and the company has new policies and tools. Here\u2019s what we need to remember when entering the mess. ",
        "author": "Joanna Stern"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Scott Kelly on Coldplay (WSJ: Playlist) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2731",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-scott-kelly-on-coldplay-1508251063?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=75",
        "text": "Scott Kelly\n\n\n\nI first heard \u201cSpeed of Sound\u201d when it came out on Coldplay\u2019s 2005 album, \u201cX&Y.\u201d The song spoke to me of space exploration and discovery. I began taking the song on missions in 2007, when I commanded the Endeavour Space Shuttle flight to the station. NASA provided the crew with iPods and favorite songs, though they were afraid we\u2019d crank up the volume and damage our hearing.\n\n\n\u201cSpeed of Sound\u201d opens with a piano and synthesizer playing a riff that\u2019s repeated throughout the song. Then the drums kick in and Chris Martin launches into his vocal. \u201cLook up, I look up at night / Planets are moving at the speed of light.\u201d The chorus puts flight and space in perspective: \u201cAll that noise, and all that sound / All those places I have found / And birds go flying at the speed of sound / To show you how it all began.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nColdplay performs \u2018Speed of Sound.\u2019\n\n\n\nOn Saturdays, during my yearlong mission aboard the station in 2015, I\u2019d get up early, go up into the station\u2019s cupola\u2014the seven-window observatory\u2014and open the debris shutters. There, I\u2019d listen to my iPod and look out at Earth. \u201cSpeed of Sound\u201d combined the feeling of being weightless with motion and velocity. We were traveling at 17,500 mph, orbiting every 90 minutes. \nFrom space, Earth\u2019s color is the most beautiful blue you\u2019ve ever seen. You don\u2019t see political borders, just shapes of continents. Everyone appears to be part of the same country. The pollution over Asia is obvious. So is the devastation that loggers have done to Brazil\u2019s rainforest. You get a sense that the planet needs protecting.\nI retired from NASA in April 2016. Now, when I hear \u201cSpeed of Sound,\u201d it takes me back to those days at the station\u2014the teamwork and the challenge of doing something really complicated and risky. I miss space.\n\n\nMore in Playlist\n\n\n\n\nA Road-Trip Playlist Curated for the Summer of 2020\nAugust 13, 2020 \n\n\nA Playlist That Takes You Around the World\u2014and Beyond \nMay 6, 2020 \n\n\nAn Adult Education in Rock: Martha Grimes on Lou Reed\nApril 3, 2018 \n\n\nMusic to Stitch By: Daymond John, Sewing and \u2018Risin to the Top\u2019\nMarch 27, 2018 \n\n\nStuck in a Beach Town, Rosanne Cash Turned to Joni Mitchell\u2019s Music\nMarch 20, 2018 During a year in orbit, astronaut Scott Kelly was inspired by Coldplay\u2019s \u2018Speed of Sound.\u2019 ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Scott Kelly on Coldplay (WSJ: Playlist) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2732",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-scott-kelly-on-coldplay-1508251063?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=110",
        "text": "Scott Kelly\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI first heard \u201cSpeed of Sound\u201d when it came out on Coldplay\u2019s 2005 album, \u201cX&Y.\u201d The song spoke to me of space exploration and discovery. I began taking the song on missions in 2007, when I commanded the Endeavour Space Shuttle flight to the station. NASA provided the crew with iPods and favorite songs, though they were afraid we\u2019d crank up the volume and damage our hearing.\n\n\n\u201cSpeed of Sound\u201d opens with a piano and synthesizer playing a riff that\u2019s repeated throughout the song. Then the drums kick in and Chris Martin launches into his vocal. \u201cLook up, I look up at night / Planets are moving at the speed of light.\u201d The chorus puts flight and space in perspective: \u201cAll that noise, and all that sound / All those places I have found / And birds go flying at the speed of sound / To show you how it all began.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nColdplay performs \u2018Speed of Sound.\u2019\n\n\n\nOn Saturdays, during my yearlong mission aboard the station in 2015, I\u2019d get up early, go up into the station\u2019s cupola\u2014the seven-window observatory\u2014and open the debris shutters. There, I\u2019d listen to my iPod and look out at Earth. \u201cSpeed of Sound\u201d combined the feeling of being weightless with motion and velocity. We were traveling at 17,500 mph, orbiting every 90 minutes. \nFrom space, Earth\u2019s color is the most beautiful blue you\u2019ve ever seen. You don\u2019t see political borders, just shapes of continents. Everyone appears to be part of the same country. The pollution over Asia is obvious. So is the devastation that loggers have done to Brazil\u2019s rainforest. You get a sense that the planet needs protecting.\nI retired from NASA in April 2016. Now, when I hear \u201cSpeed of Sound,\u201d it takes me back to those days at the station\u2014the teamwork and the challenge of doing something really complicated and risky. I miss space.\n\n\nMore in Playlist\n\n\n\n\nA Road-Trip Playlist Curated for the Summer of 2020\nAugust 13, 2020 \n\n\nA Playlist That Takes You Around the World\u2014and Beyond \nMay 6, 2020 \n\n\nAn Adult Education in Rock: Martha Grimes on Lou Reed\nApril 3, 2018 \n\n\nMusic to Stitch By: Daymond John, Sewing and \u2018Risin to the Top\u2019\nMarch 27, 2018 \n\n\nStuck in a Beach Town, Rosanne Cash Turned to Joni Mitchell\u2019s Music\nMarch 20, 2018 During a year in orbit, astronaut Scott Kelly was inspired by Coldplay\u2019s \u2018Speed of Sound.\u2019 ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "EnerSys(R) ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) Batteries Successfully Launch on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2733",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/enersys-r-absl-tm-lithium-ion-li-ion-batteries-successfully-launch-on-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-01640726407?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1",
        "text": "READING, Pa., Dec. 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EnerSys(R) (NYSE:ENS), the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, is proud to announce the successful integration of its ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope launch. As the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever built, and is the result of an International collaboration between NASA and its partners the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and prime industry lead, Northrop Grumman. Webb launched on December 25th, 2021, was sent into orbit upon an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana and will serve as the premier space observatory for the next decade. \n\n EnerSys was selected by Northrop Grumman in 2012 to provide ABSL(TM) 8s44p rechargeable Li-ion batteries with disconnect relays for Webb, and then awarded a second contract in 2018 for an additional 8s44p battery, tailored to incorporate alternate cell chemistry. ABSL(TM) Li-ion batteries were selected for this mission due to their stringent design and structural and thermal performance to deliver long life, quality and reliability that successful space missions demand. \n\n \"EnerSys is pleased to play such an influential role in the success of the James Webb Space Telescope project,\" said Mark Matthews, EnerSys Senior Vice President, Specialty -- Global. \"It has been almost ten years since EnerSys was awarded the contract for these batteries to power this mission and our journey began with Webb. We are beyond excited to be part of a mission of this magnitude and to see it launch successfully.\" \n\n\n Webb will travel approximately 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth, toward the relatively gravitationally stable Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 and will study every phase of cosmic history from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe. \n\n For more information about EnerSys and its full line of products, systems, and support, visit www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ENERSYS(R) \n\n EnerSys, the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, manufactures and distributes energy systems solutions and motive power batteries, specialty batteries, battery chargers, power equipment, battery accessories and outdoor equipment enclosure solutions to customers worldwide. Energy Systems, which combine enclosures, power conversion, power distribution and energy storage, are used in the telecommunication, broadband and utility industries, uninterruptible power supplies, and numerous applications. Motive power batteries and chargers are utilized in electric forklift trucks and other industrial electric powered vehicles requiring stored energy solutions. Specialty batteries are used in aerospace and defense applications, large over-the-road trucks, premium automotive, medical and security systems applications. EnerSys also provides aftermarket and customer support services to its customers in over 100 countries through its sales and manufacturing locations around the world. With the NorthStar acquisition, EnerSys has solidified its position as the market leader for premium Thin Plate Pure Lead batteries which are sold across all three lines of business. More information regarding EnerSys can be found at www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ABSL SPACE PRODUCTS \n\n ABSL is a world leader in the supply of Lithium-ion batteries for space applications with contracts for over 300 spacecraft and launch vehicles. ABSL supplied the first rechargeable Lithium-ion battery flown in space. Today, over 250 spacecraft are powered by ABSL Lithium-ion battery technology. \n\n ABOUT NASA \n\n The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is America's civil space program and the global leader in space exploration. The agency has a diverse workforce of just under 18,000 civil servants, and works with many more U.S. contractors, academia, and international and commercial partners to explore, discover, and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity. \n\n ABOUT NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION \n\n Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance, and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers' toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day. \n\n Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements \n\n EnerSys is making this statement in order to satisfy the \"Safe Harbor\" provision contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any of the statements contained in this press release that are not statements of historical fact may include forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. A forward-looking statement predicts, projects, or use  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "EnerSys(R) ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) Batteries Successfully Launch on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2734",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/enersys-r-absl-tm-lithium-ion-li-ion-batteries-successfully-launch-on-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-01640726407?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=1",
        "text": "READING, Pa., Dec. 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EnerSys(R) (NYSE:ENS), the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, is proud to announce the successful integration of its ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope launch. As the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever built, and is the result of an International collaboration between NASA and its partners the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and prime industry lead, Northrop Grumman. Webb launched on December 25th, 2021, was sent into orbit upon an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana and will serve as the premier space observatory for the next decade. \n\n EnerSys was selected by Northrop Grumman in 2012 to provide ABSL(TM) 8s44p rechargeable Li-ion batteries with disconnect relays for Webb, and then awarded a second contract in 2018 for an additional 8s44p battery, tailored to incorporate alternate cell chemistry. ABSL(TM) Li-ion batteries were selected for this mission due to their stringent design and structural and thermal performance to deliver long life, quality and reliability that successful space missions demand. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"EnerSys is pleased to play such an influential role in the success of the James Webb Space Telescope project,\" said Mark Matthews, EnerSys Senior Vice President, Specialty -- Global. \"It has been almost ten years since EnerSys was awarded the contract for these batteries to power this mission and our journey began with Webb. We are beyond excited to be part of a mission of this magnitude and to see it launch successfully.\" \n\n\n Webb will travel approximately 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth, toward the relatively gravitationally stable Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 and will study every phase of cosmic history from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe. \n\n For more information about EnerSys and its full line of products, systems, and support, visit www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ENERSYS(R) \n\n EnerSys, the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, manufactures and distributes energy systems solutions and motive power batteries, specialty batteries, battery chargers, power equipment, battery accessories and outdoor equipment enclosure solutions to customers worldwide. Energy Systems, which combine enclosures, power conversion, power distribution and energy storage, are used in the telecommunication, broadband and utility industries, uninterruptible power supplies, and numerous applications. Motive power batteries and chargers are utilized in electric forklift trucks and other industrial electric powered vehicles requiring stored energy solutions. Specialty batteries are used in aerospace and defense applications, large over-the-road trucks, premium automotive, medical and security systems applications. EnerSys also provides aftermarket and customer support services to its customers in over 100 countries through its sales and manufacturing locations around the world. With the NorthStar acquisition, EnerSys has solidified its position as the market leader for premium Thin Plate Pure Lead batteries which are sold across all three lines of business. More information regarding EnerSys can be found at www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ABSL SPACE PRODUCTS \n\n ABSL is a world leader in the supply of Lithium-ion batteries for space applications with contracts for over 300 spacecraft and launch vehicles. ABSL supplied the first rechargeable Lithium-ion battery flown in space. Today, over 250 spacecraft are powered by ABSL Lithium-ion battery technology. \n\n ABOUT NASA \n\n The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is America's civil space program and the global leader in space exploration. The agency has a diverse workforce of just under 18,000 civil servants, and works with many more U.S. contractors, academia, and international and commercial partners to explore, discover, and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity. \n\n ABOUT NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION \n\n Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance, and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers' toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day. \n\n Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements \n\n EnerSys is making this statement in order to satisfy the \"Safe Harbor\" provision contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any of the statements contained in this press release that are not statements of historical fact may include forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. A forward-looking statement predicts, projects, or uses future events as expectations or possibilities. Forward-looking statements may be based on expectations concerning future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to operations and the economic environment, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond our control. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those matters expressed in or implied by forward-looking statements, please see our risk factors as disclosed in the \"Risk Factors\" section of our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, even if subsequently made available by EnerSys on its website or otherwise. EnerSys does not undertake any obligation to update or revise these statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this press release. \n\n CONTACT \n\n Steve Benulis \n\n Marketing Director \n\n EnerSys \n\n 610-208-1778 \n\n Fax: 610-372-8613 \n\n E-mail: steven.benulis@eas.enersys.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "EnerSys(R) ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) Batteries Successfully Launch on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2735",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/enersys-r-absl-tm-lithium-ion-li-ion-batteries-successfully-launch-on-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-01640726407?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=2",
        "text": "READING, Pa., Dec. 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EnerSys(R) (NYSE:ENS), the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, is proud to announce the successful integration of its ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope launch. As the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever built, and is the result of an International collaboration between NASA and its partners the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and prime industry lead, Northrop Grumman. Webb launched on December 25th, 2021, was sent into orbit upon an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana and will serve as the premier space observatory for the next decade. \n\n EnerSys was selected by Northrop Grumman in 2012 to provide ABSL(TM) 8s44p rechargeable Li-ion batteries with disconnect relays for Webb, and then awarded a second contract in 2018 for an additional 8s44p battery, tailored to incorporate alternate cell chemistry. ABSL(TM) Li-ion batteries were selected for this mission due to their stringent design and structural and thermal performance to deliver long life, quality and reliability that successful space missions demand. \n\n \"EnerSys is pleased to play such an influential role in the success of the James Webb Space Telescope project,\" said Mark Matthews, EnerSys Senior Vice President, Specialty -- Global. \"It has been almost ten years since EnerSys was awarded the contract for these batteries to power this mission and our journey began with Webb. We are beyond excited to be part of a mission of this magnitude and to see it launch successfully.\" \n\n\n Webb will travel approximately 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth, toward the relatively gravitationally stable Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 and will study every phase of cosmic history from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe. \n\n For more information about EnerSys and its full line of products, systems, and support, visit www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ENERSYS(R) \n\n EnerSys, the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, manufactures and distributes energy systems solutions and motive power batteries, specialty batteries, battery chargers, power equipment, battery accessories and outdoor equipment enclosure solutions to customers worldwide. Energy Systems, which combine enclosures, power conversion, power distribution and energy storage, are used in the telecommunication, broadband and utility industries, uninterruptible power supplies, and numerous applications. Motive power batteries and chargers are utilized in electric forklift trucks and other industrial electric powered vehicles requiring stored energy solutions. Specialty batteries are used in aerospace and defense applications, large over-the-road trucks, premium automotive, medical and security systems applications. EnerSys also provides aftermarket and customer support services to its customers in over 100 countries through its sales and manufacturing locations around the world. With the NorthStar acquisition, EnerSys has solidified its position as the market leader for premium Thin Plate Pure Lead batteries which are sold across all three lines of business. More information regarding EnerSys can be found at www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ABSL SPACE PRODUCTS \n\n ABSL is a world leader in the supply of Lithium-ion batteries for space applications with contracts for over 300 spacecraft and launch vehicles. ABSL supplied the first rechargeable Lithium-ion battery flown in space. Today, over 250 spacecraft are powered by ABSL Lithium-ion battery technology. \n\n ABOUT NASA \n\n The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is America's civil space program and the global leader in space exploration. The agency has a diverse workforce of just under 18,000 civil servants, and works with many more U.S. contractors, academia, and international and commercial partners to explore, discover, and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity. \n\n ABOUT NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION \n\n Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance, and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers' toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day. \n\n Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements \n\n EnerSys is making this statement in order to satisfy the \"Safe Harbor\" provision contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any of the statements contained in this press release that are not statements of historical fact may include forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. A forward-looking statement predicts, projects, or use  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "EnerSys(R) ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) Batteries Successfully Launch on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2736",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/enersys-r-absl-tm-lithium-ion-li-ion-batteries-successfully-launch-on-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-01640726407?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=2",
        "text": "READING, Pa., Dec. 28, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EnerSys(R) (NYSE:ENS), the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, is proud to announce the successful integration of its ABSL(TM) Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope launch. As the successor to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the largest and most powerful space science telescope ever built, and is the result of an International collaboration between NASA and its partners the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and prime industry lead, Northrop Grumman. Webb launched on December 25th, 2021, was sent into orbit upon an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana and will serve as the premier space observatory for the next decade. \n\n EnerSys was selected by Northrop Grumman in 2012 to provide ABSL(TM) 8s44p rechargeable Li-ion batteries with disconnect relays for Webb, and then awarded a second contract in 2018 for an additional 8s44p battery, tailored to incorporate alternate cell chemistry. ABSL(TM) Li-ion batteries were selected for this mission due to their stringent design and structural and thermal performance to deliver long life, quality and reliability that successful space missions demand. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"EnerSys is pleased to play such an influential role in the success of the James Webb Space Telescope project,\" said Mark Matthews, EnerSys Senior Vice President, Specialty -- Global. \"It has been almost ten years since EnerSys was awarded the contract for these batteries to power this mission and our journey began with Webb. We are beyond excited to be part of a mission of this magnitude and to see it launch successfully.\" \n\n\n Webb will travel approximately 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth, toward the relatively gravitationally stable Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 2 and will study every phase of cosmic history from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe. \n\n For more information about EnerSys and its full line of products, systems, and support, visit www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ENERSYS(R) \n\n EnerSys, the global leader in stored energy solutions for industrial applications, manufactures and distributes energy systems solutions and motive power batteries, specialty batteries, battery chargers, power equipment, battery accessories and outdoor equipment enclosure solutions to customers worldwide. Energy Systems, which combine enclosures, power conversion, power distribution and energy storage, are used in the telecommunication, broadband and utility industries, uninterruptible power supplies, and numerous applications. Motive power batteries and chargers are utilized in electric forklift trucks and other industrial electric powered vehicles requiring stored energy solutions. Specialty batteries are used in aerospace and defense applications, large over-the-road trucks, premium automotive, medical and security systems applications. EnerSys also provides aftermarket and customer support services to its customers in over 100 countries through its sales and manufacturing locations around the world. With the NorthStar acquisition, EnerSys has solidified its position as the market leader for premium Thin Plate Pure Lead batteries which are sold across all three lines of business. More information regarding EnerSys can be found at www.enersys.com. \n\n ABOUT ABSL SPACE PRODUCTS \n\n ABSL is a world leader in the supply of Lithium-ion batteries for space applications with contracts for over 300 spacecraft and launch vehicles. ABSL supplied the first rechargeable Lithium-ion battery flown in space. Today, over 250 spacecraft are powered by ABSL Lithium-ion battery technology. \n\n ABOUT NASA \n\n The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is America's civil space program and the global leader in space exploration. The agency has a diverse workforce of just under 18,000 civil servants, and works with many more U.S. contractors, academia, and international and commercial partners to explore, discover, and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity. \n\n ABOUT NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORPORATION \n\n Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance, and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers' toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day. \n\n Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements \n\n EnerSys is making this statement in order to satisfy the \"Safe Harbor\" provision contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any of the statements contained in this press release that are not statements of historical fact may include forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. A forward-looking statement predicts, projects, or uses future events as expectations or possibilities. Forward-looking statements may be based on expectations concerning future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to operations and the economic environment, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond our control. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those matters expressed in or implied by forward-looking statements, please see our risk factors as disclosed in the \"Risk Factors\" section of our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. The statements in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, even if subsequently made available by EnerSys on its website or otherwise. EnerSys does not undertake any obligation to update or revise these statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this press release. \n\n CONTACT \n\n Steve Benulis \n\n Marketing Director \n\n EnerSys \n\n 610-208-1778 \n\n Fax: 610-372-8613 \n\n E-mail: steven.benulis@eas.enersys.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Park Aerospace Corp. Declares Cash Dividend (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2737",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/park-aerospace-corp-declares-cash-dividend-01639422323?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=2",
        "text": "Park has paid 36 consecutive years of uninterrupted regular, quarterly cash dividends, without ever skipping a dividend payment or reducing the amount of the dividend. \n\n The Company has paid approximately $550 million in cash dividends, or $26.85 per share, since the beginning of its 2005 fiscal year. \n\n\n Park Aerospace Corp. develops and manufactures solution and hot-melt advanced composite materials used to produce composite structures for the global aerospace markets. Park's advanced composite materials include film adhesives (undergoing development) and lightning strike materials. Park offers an array of composite materials specifically designed for hand lay-up or automated fiber placement (AFP) manufacturing applications. Park's advanced composite materials are used to produce primary and secondary structures for jet engines, large and regional transport aircraft, military aircraft, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs commonly referred to as \"drones\"), business jets, general aviation aircraft and rotary wing aircraft. Park also offers specialty ablative materials for rocket motors and nozzles and specially designed materials for radome applications. As a complement to Park's advanced composite materials offering, Park designs and fabricates composite parts, structures and assemblies and low volume tooling for the aerospace industry. Target markets for Park's composite parts and structures (which include Park's proprietary composite SigmaStrut(TM) and AlphaStrut(TM) product lines) are, among others, prototype and development aircraft, special mission aircraft, spares for legacy military and civilian aircraft and exotic spacecraft. Park's objective is to do what others are either unwilling or unable to do. When nobody else wants to do it because it is too difficult, too small or too annoying, sign us up. \n\n Additional corporation information is available on the Company's web site at www.parkaerospace.com. \n\n Contact: Donna D'Amico-Annitto \n\n 486 North Oliver Road, Bldg. Z \n\n Newton, Kansas 67114 \n\n (316) 283-6500  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Begins Million-Mile Journey (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2738",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-webb-space-telescope-begins-million-mile-journey-01640438917?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=1",
        "text": "Approximately 30 minutes after launch, Webb detached from the Ariane 5 rocket, marking the beginning of a million-mile journey and the start of a two-week complex deployment process to unfold the spacecraft in preparation for arrival at Lagrange Point 2 (L2). \n\n \"Since the dawn of the space age, NASA, international partner agencies and industry partners, together with Northrop Grumman, have been defining what is possible in space science and exploration,\" said Kathy Warden, chairman, chief executive officer and president, Northrop Grumman. \"Over the next few weeks, the James Webb Space Telescope will transform into an awe-inspiring scientific tool that will usher in a new era in human discovery.\" \n\n\n During the journey to L2, Webb will convert from its stowed position in which it left Earth to the configuration that will allow it to see light coming from the earliest stars to shine in the Universe. Part of this journey is to unfold the tennis court-sized, five-layer sunshield around the sensitive mirrors that allow Webb to take pictures and collect data that will come back to Earth for scientific review. Once operational, Webb will explore farther than ever before into the cosmos, looking back 13.5 billion years. \n\n To deliver this kind of scientific data, Webb incorporates innovative design, advanced technology, and groundbreaking engineering. Ten technological inventions were created to build the revolutionary telescope so that it can detect light from the first stars and galaxies. Some of these innovations include optics, detectors and thermal control systems. \n\n Additional James Webb Space Telescope Background for Reporters and Editors: Webb-Datasheet.pdf (northropgrumman.com) \n\n Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance, and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers' toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day. \n \nContacts: Omar Torres \n +1 424-237-4704 (mobile) \n omar.torres@ngc.com \n \n Daniel Hazard \n +1 858-295-5263 (mobile) \n daniel.hazard@ngc.com \n \n Photos accompanying this announcement are available at: \n\n https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e805e72f-af7f-41e3-9ac1-7acb052eb293 \n\n https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3c7919dd-3c21-4378-b498-77dcffce628e  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Begins Million-Mile Journey (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2739",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-webb-space-telescope-begins-million-mile-journey-01640438917?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=2",
        "text": "Approximately 30 minutes after launch, Webb detached from the Ariane 5 rocket, marking the beginning of a million-mile journey and the start of a two-week complex deployment process to unfold the spacecraft in preparation for arrival at Lagrange Point 2 (L2). \n\n\n\n\n\n \"Since the dawn of the space age, NASA, international partner agencies and industry partners, together with Northrop Grumman, have been defining what is possible in space science and exploration,\" said Kathy Warden, chairman, chief executive officer and president, Northrop Grumman. \"Over the next few weeks, the James Webb Space Telescope will transform into an awe-inspiring scientific tool that will usher in a new era in human discovery.\" \n\n\n During the journey to L2, Webb will convert from its stowed position in which it left Earth to the configuration that will allow it to see light coming from the earliest stars to shine in the Universe. Part of this journey is to unfold the tennis court-sized, five-layer sunshield around the sensitive mirrors that allow Webb to take pictures and collect data that will come back to Earth for scientific review. Once operational, Webb will explore farther than ever before into the cosmos, looking back 13.5 billion years. \n\n To deliver this kind of scientific data, Webb incorporates innovative design, advanced technology, and groundbreaking engineering. Ten technological inventions were created to build the revolutionary telescope so that it can detect light from the first stars and galaxies. Some of these innovations include optics, detectors and thermal control systems. \n\n Additional James Webb Space Telescope Background for Reporters and Editors: Webb-Datasheet.pdf (northropgrumman.com) \n\n Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance, and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers' toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day. \n \nContacts: Omar Torres \n +1 424-237-4704 (mobile) \n omar.torres@ngc.com \n \n Daniel Hazard \n +1 858-295-5263 (mobile) \n daniel.hazard@ngc.com \n \n Photos accompanying this announcement are available at: \n\n https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e805e72f-af7f-41e3-9ac1-7acb052eb293 \n\n https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3c7919dd-3c21-4378-b498-77dcffce628e  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Begins Million-Mile Journey (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2740",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-webb-space-telescope-begins-million-mile-journey-01640438917?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=2",
        "text": "Approximately 30 minutes after launch, Webb detached from the Ariane 5 rocket, marking the beginning of a million-mile journey and the start of a two-week complex deployment process to unfold the spacecraft in preparation for arrival at Lagrange Point 2 (L2). \n\n\n\n\n\n \"Since the dawn of the space age, NASA, international partner agencies and industry partners, together with Northrop Grumman, have been defining what is possible in space science and exploration,\" said Kathy Warden, chairman, chief executive officer and president, Northrop Grumman. \"Over the next few weeks, the James Webb Space Telescope will transform into an awe-inspiring scientific tool that will usher in a new era in human discovery.\" \n\n\n During the journey to L2, Webb will convert from its stowed position in which it left Earth to the configuration that will allow it to see light coming from the earliest stars to shine in the Universe. Part of this journey is to unfold the tennis court-sized, five-layer sunshield around the sensitive mirrors that allow Webb to take pictures and collect data that will come back to Earth for scientific review. Once operational, Webb will explore farther than ever before into the cosmos, looking back 13.5 billion years. \n\n To deliver this kind of scientific data, Webb incorporates innovative design, advanced technology, and groundbreaking engineering. Ten technological inventions were created to build the revolutionary telescope so that it can detect light from the first stars and galaxies. Some of these innovations include optics, detectors and thermal control systems. \n\n Additional James Webb Space Telescope Background for Reporters and Editors: Webb-Datasheet.pdf (northropgrumman.com) \n\n Northrop Grumman is a technology company, focused on global security and human discovery. Our pioneering solutions equip our customers with capabilities they need to connect, advance, and protect the U.S. and its allies. Driven by a shared purpose to solve our customers' toughest problems, our 90,000 employees define possible every day. \n \nContacts: Omar Torres \n +1 424-237-4704 (mobile) \n omar.torres@ngc.com \n \n Daniel Hazard \n +1 858-295-5263 (mobile) \n daniel.hazard@ngc.com \n \n Photos accompanying this announcement are available at: \n\n https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e805e72f-af7f-41e3-9ac1-7acb052eb293 \n\n https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3c7919dd-3c21-4378-b498-77dcffce628e  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Xos, Inc. Welcomes Anousheh Ansari and Alice K. Jackson as New Independent Directors (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2741",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/xos-inc-welcomes-anousheh-ansari-and-alice-k-jackson-as-new-independent-directors-01639775412?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=3",
        "text": "The Board, led by its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, conducted a thorough, expansive process in searching for its new independent directors. The Board considered candidates with a wide range of skill sets with experience in highly relevant industries. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"In conducting our search over the last few months, we sought to add exceptional independent directors with complementary experiences and fresh perspectives, and who believe in Xos' mission to decarbonize commercial transportation,\" said Dakota Semler, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. \"I am excited to have Anousheh and Alice join the Board at this promising time for our company.\" \n\n\n \"Along with her public company board experience, Anousheh brings decades of experience building successful, innovative technology companies,\" said George Mattson, the lead independent director of the Board and Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee. \"Alice has taken a leading role in the transition to a carbon-free energy system, and she brings to Xos her deep energy infrastructure expertise. We look forward to their contributions to our board at this exciting time in the Xos journey.\" \n\n Ms. Ansari serves as director of Jabil Inc., a leading provider of worldwide manufacturing services and solutions, and as chair of the board of directors of Sceye Inc., a platform for a leading new generation of high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Ms. Ansari is also Chief Executive Officer of X PRIZE Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that designs and implements competition models to solve world challenges. Ms. Ansari co-founded Prodea Systems, Inc., which provides services and applications for in-home smart devices, networked appliances, and mobile lifestyle devices, and Telecom Technologies, Inc., which developed software for intelligent systems for the telecommunications market. Ms. Ansari was the first female private space explorer. \n\n Ms. Jackson serves as President of the Colorado service area at Xcel Energy Inc., a major U.S. electricity and natural gas company. Ms. Jackson is also Chair of the board of the Smart Electric Power Alliance, and sits on the boards of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Mile High United Way, Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, Colorado Concern and the American Red Cross CO/WY Chapter. \n\n About Xos, Inc. \n\n Xos, Inc. is an electric mobility company dedicated to decarbonizing commercial trucking fleets. Xos designs and manufactures cost-competitive, fully electric commercial vehicles. The company's primary focus is on medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles that travel on last-mile, back-to-base routes of less than 200 miles per day. The company leverages its proprietary technologies to provide commercial fleets with zero-emission vehicles that are easier to maintain and more cost efficient on a total cost of ownership (TCO) basis than their internal combustion engine and commercial EV counterparts. For more information, please visit xostrucks.com. \n\n Contacts \n\n Xos Investor Relations \n\n investors@xostrucks.com \n\n Xos Media Relations \n\n press@xostrucks.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Xos, Inc. Welcomes Anousheh Ansari and Alice K. Jackson as New Independent Directors (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2742",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/xos-inc-welcomes-anousheh-ansari-and-alice-k-jackson-as-new-independent-directors-01639775412?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=4",
        "text": "The Board, led by its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, conducted a thorough, expansive process in searching for its new independent directors. The Board considered candidates with a wide range of skill sets with experience in highly relevant industries. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"In conducting our search over the last few months, we sought to add exceptional independent directors with complementary experiences and fresh perspectives, and who believe in Xos' mission to decarbonize commercial transportation,\" said Dakota Semler, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. \"I am excited to have Anousheh and Alice join the Board at this promising time for our company.\" \n\n\n \"Along with her public company board experience, Anousheh brings decades of experience building successful, innovative technology companies,\" said George Mattson, the lead independent director of the Board and Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee. \"Alice has taken a leading role in the transition to a carbon-free energy system, and she brings to Xos her deep energy infrastructure expertise. We look forward to their contributions to our board at this exciting time in the Xos journey.\" \n\n Ms. Ansari serves as director of Jabil Inc., a leading provider of worldwide manufacturing services and solutions, and as chair of the board of directors of Sceye Inc., a platform for a leading new generation of high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Ms. Ansari is also Chief Executive Officer of X PRIZE Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that designs and implements competition models to solve world challenges. Ms. Ansari co-founded Prodea Systems, Inc., which provides services and applications for in-home smart devices, networked appliances, and mobile lifestyle devices, and Telecom Technologies, Inc., which developed software for intelligent systems for the telecommunications market. Ms. Ansari was the first female private space explorer. \n\n Ms. Jackson serves as President of the Colorado service area at Xcel Energy Inc., a major U.S. electricity and natural gas company. Ms. Jackson is also Chair of the board of the Smart Electric Power Alliance, and sits on the boards of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Mile High United Way, Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, Colorado Concern and the American Red Cross CO/WY Chapter. \n\n About Xos, Inc. \n\n Xos, Inc. is an electric mobility company dedicated to decarbonizing commercial trucking fleets. Xos designs and manufactures cost-competitive, fully electric commercial vehicles. The company's primary focus is on medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles that travel on last-mile, back-to-base routes of less than 200 miles per day. The company leverages its proprietary technologies to provide commercial fleets with zero-emission vehicles that are easier to maintain and more cost efficient on a total cost of ownership (TCO) basis than their internal combustion engine and commercial EV counterparts. For more information, please visit xostrucks.com. \n\n Contacts \n\n Xos Investor Relations \n\n investors@xostrucks.com \n\n Xos Media Relations \n\n press@xostrucks.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Xos, Inc. Welcomes Anousheh Ansari and Alice K. Jackson as New Independent Directors (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2743",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/xos-inc-welcomes-anousheh-ansari-and-alice-k-jackson-as-new-independent-directors-01639775412?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=7",
        "text": "The Board, led by its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, conducted a thorough, expansive process in searching for its new independent directors. The Board considered candidates with a wide range of skill sets with experience in highly relevant industries. \n\n \"In conducting our search over the last few months, we sought to add exceptional independent directors with complementary experiences and fresh perspectives, and who believe in Xos' mission to decarbonize commercial transportation,\" said Dakota Semler, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. \"I am excited to have Anousheh and Alice join the Board at this promising time for our company.\" \n\n\n \"Along with her public company board experience, Anousheh brings decades of experience building successful, innovative technology companies,\" said George Mattson, the lead independent director of the Board and Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee. \"Alice has taken a leading role in the transition to a carbon-free energy system, and she brings to Xos her deep energy infrastructure expertise. We look forward to their contributions to our board at this exciting time in the Xos journey.\" \n\n Ms. Ansari serves as director of Jabil Inc., a leading provider of worldwide manufacturing services and solutions, and as chair of the board of directors of Sceye Inc., a platform for a leading new generation of high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Ms. Ansari is also Chief Executive Officer of X PRIZE Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that designs and implements competition models to solve world challenges. Ms. Ansari co-founded Prodea Systems, Inc., which provides services and applications for in-home smart devices, networked appliances, and mobile lifestyle devices, and Telecom Technologies, Inc., which developed software for intelligent systems for the telecommunications market. Ms. Ansari was the first female private space explorer. \n\n Ms. Jackson serves as President of the Colorado service area at Xcel Energy Inc., a major U.S. electricity and natural gas company. Ms. Jackson is also Chair of the board of the Smart Electric Power Alliance, and sits on the boards of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Mile High United Way, Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, Colorado Concern and the American Red Cross CO/WY Chapter. \n\n About Xos, Inc. \n\n Xos, Inc. is an electric mobility company dedicated to decarbonizing commercial trucking fleets. Xos designs and manufactures cost-competitive, fully electric commercial vehicles. The company's primary focus is on medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles that travel on last-mile, back-to-base routes of less than 200 miles per day. The company leverages its proprietary technologies to provide commercial fleets with zero-emission vehicles that are easier to maintain and more cost efficient on a total cost of ownership (TCO) basis than their internal combustion engine and commercial EV counterparts. For more information, please visit xostrucks.com. \n\n Contacts \n\n Xos Investor Relations \n\n investors@xostrucks.com \n\n Xos Media Relations \n\n press@xostrucks.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Xos, Inc. Welcomes Anousheh Ansari and Alice K. Jackson as New Independent Directors (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2744",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/xos-inc-welcomes-anousheh-ansari-and-alice-k-jackson-as-new-independent-directors-01639775412?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=6",
        "text": "The Board, led by its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, conducted a thorough, expansive process in searching for its new independent directors. The Board considered candidates with a wide range of skill sets with experience in highly relevant industries. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"In conducting our search over the last few months, we sought to add exceptional independent directors with complementary experiences and fresh perspectives, and who believe in Xos' mission to decarbonize commercial transportation,\" said Dakota Semler, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. \"I am excited to have Anousheh and Alice join the Board at this promising time for our company.\" \n\n\n \"Along with her public company board experience, Anousheh brings decades of experience building successful, innovative technology companies,\" said George Mattson, the lead independent director of the Board and Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee. \"Alice has taken a leading role in the transition to a carbon-free energy system, and she brings to Xos her deep energy infrastructure expertise. We look forward to their contributions to our board at this exciting time in the Xos journey.\" \n\n Ms. Ansari serves as director of Jabil Inc., a leading provider of worldwide manufacturing services and solutions, and as chair of the board of directors of Sceye Inc., a platform for a leading new generation of high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. Ms. Ansari is also Chief Executive Officer of X PRIZE Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that designs and implements competition models to solve world challenges. Ms. Ansari co-founded Prodea Systems, Inc., which provides services and applications for in-home smart devices, networked appliances, and mobile lifestyle devices, and Telecom Technologies, Inc., which developed software for intelligent systems for the telecommunications market. Ms. Ansari was the first female private space explorer. \n\n Ms. Jackson serves as President of the Colorado service area at Xcel Energy Inc., a major U.S. electricity and natural gas company. Ms. Jackson is also Chair of the board of the Smart Electric Power Alliance, and sits on the boards of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Mile High United Way, Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, Colorado Concern and the American Red Cross CO/WY Chapter. \n\n About Xos, Inc. \n\n Xos, Inc. is an electric mobility company dedicated to decarbonizing commercial trucking fleets. Xos designs and manufactures cost-competitive, fully electric commercial vehicles. The company's primary focus is on medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles that travel on last-mile, back-to-base routes of less than 200 miles per day. The company leverages its proprietary technologies to provide commercial fleets with zero-emission vehicles that are easier to maintain and more cost efficient on a total cost of ownership (TCO) basis than their internal combustion engine and commercial EV counterparts. For more information, please visit xostrucks.com. \n\n Contacts \n\n Xos Investor Relations \n\n investors@xostrucks.com \n\n Xos Media Relations \n\n press@xostrucks.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "KULR Technology Group Hosts Society of Aerospace Engineers (SAE) G-27 Conference in Support of Safe Aircraft Li-Ion Battery Transportation (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2745",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/kulr-technology-group-hosts-society-of-aerospace-engineers-sae-g-27-conference-in-support-of-safe-aircraft-li-ion-battery-transportation-01639396210?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=7",
        "text": "SAN DIEGO, Dec. 13, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- KULR Technology Group, Inc. (NYSE American: KULR) (the \"Company\" or \"KULR\"), a leading developer of next-generation lithium-ion battery safety and thermal management technologies, announced today it will host the Society of Aerospace Engineers (\"SAE\") G-27, a Lithium Battery Packaging standard committee, in San Diego, CA, during the second half of 2022. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"Safe transportation of lithium-ion batteries on aircrafts is fundamental to accelerating the adoption of sustainable energy sources across industries,\" commented Michael Mo, CEO and Co-Founder of KULR Technology Group. \"It's always been an important part of our strategy to work with regulators around the world to incorporate battery safety technologies into regulatory roadmap discussions. Successfully securing the US DoT special permits were the result of our work with US Department of Transportation and PHMSA. KULR is committed to continued innovation and support international battery safety standards, and we look forward to hosting the SAE G-27 Conference in 2022.\" \n\n\n SAE G-27 is a technical committee within SAE's General Projects Systems Group responsible for the development and maintenance of minimum performance package standards that support the safe shipment of lithium batteries as cargo on aircraft. The committee works in conjunction with related bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), International Air Transport Association (IATA), International Federation of Airline Pilots Association (IFALPA), International Coordination Council for Aerospace Industry Association (ICCAIA), European Association for Advanced Rechargeable Batteries (RECHARGE), Rechargeable Battery Association (PRBA), Battery Association of Japan (BAJ), defense agencies, and regulatory authorities. \n\n KULR is hosting the meeting in the interest of promoting the safe transport of lithium batteries aboard aircrafts and to mitigate the risks of thermal events and fires in air transportation. The Company's goal is to provide total battery safety solutions that increase the efficiency of battery systems and improve sustainability, as well as provide end-of-life battery management, the packaging, storage, and transportation of lithium-ion batteries. \n\n About SAE \n\n SAE International is a global association of more than 128,000 engineers and related technical experts in the aerospace, automotive and commercial-vehicle industries. Our core competencies are life-long learning and voluntary consensus standards development. \n\n www.sae.org \n\n About KULR Technology Group Inc. \n\n KULR Technology Group Inc. (NYSE American: KULR) develops, manufactures and licenses next-generation carbon fiber thermal management technologies for batteries and electronic systems. Leveraging the company's roots in developing breakthrough cooling solutions for NASA space missions and backed by a strong intellectual property portfolio, KULR enables leading aerospace, electronics, energy storage, 5G infrastructure, and electric vehicle manufacturers to make their products cooler, lighter and safer for the consumer. For more information, please visit www.KULRTechnology.com. \n\n Safe Harbor Statement \n\n This release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to buy any securities of any entity. This release contains certain forward-looking statements based on our current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements in this release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof. Our actual results may differ materially from those stated or implied in such forward-looking statements, due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business, which include the risk factors disclosed in our Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 19, 2021. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding our expectations, beliefs, intentions, or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as \"anticipate,\" \"believe,\" \"could,\" \"estimate,\" \"expect,\" \"intend,\" \"may,\" \"should,\" and \"would\" or similar words. All forecasts are provided by management in this release are based on information available at this time and management expects that internal projections and expectations may change over time. In addition, the forecasts are entirely on management's best estimate of our future financial performance given our current contracts, current backlog of opportunities and conversations with new and existing customers about our products and services. We assume no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n Media Relations: \n\n Annika Harper \n\n The Antenna Group \n\n KULR@antennagroup.com \n\n Investor Relations: \n\n Tom Colton or Matt Glover \n\n Gateway Investor Relations \n\n Main: (949) 574-3860 \n\n K  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "KULR Technology Group Hosts Society of Aerospace Engineers (SAE) G-27 Conference in Support of Safe Aircraft Li-Ion Battery Transportation (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2746",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/kulr-technology-group-hosts-society-of-aerospace-engineers-sae-g-27-conference-in-support-of-safe-aircraft-li-ion-battery-transportation-01639396210?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=13",
        "text": "SAN DIEGO, Dec. 13, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- KULR Technology Group, Inc. (NYSE American: KULR) (the \"Company\" or \"KULR\"), a leading developer of next-generation lithium-ion battery safety and thermal management technologies, announced today it will host the Society of Aerospace Engineers (\"SAE\") G-27, a Lithium Battery Packaging standard committee, in San Diego, CA, during the second half of 2022. \n\n \"Safe transportation of lithium-ion batteries on aircrafts is fundamental to accelerating the adoption of sustainable energy sources across industries,\" commented Michael Mo, CEO and Co-Founder of KULR Technology Group. \"It's always been an important part of our strategy to work with regulators around the world to incorporate battery safety technologies into regulatory roadmap discussions. Successfully securing the US DoT special permits were the result of our work with US Department of Transportation and PHMSA. KULR is committed to continued innovation and support international battery safety standards, and we look forward to hosting the SAE G-27 Conference in 2022.\" \n\n\n SAE G-27 is a technical committee within SAE's General Projects Systems Group responsible for the development and maintenance of minimum performance package standards that support the safe shipment of lithium batteries as cargo on aircraft. The committee works in conjunction with related bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), International Air Transport Association (IATA), International Federation of Airline Pilots Association (IFALPA), International Coordination Council for Aerospace Industry Association (ICCAIA), European Association for Advanced Rechargeable Batteries (RECHARGE), Rechargeable Battery Association (PRBA), Battery Association of Japan (BAJ), defense agencies, and regulatory authorities. \n\n KULR is hosting the meeting in the interest of promoting the safe transport of lithium batteries aboard aircrafts and to mitigate the risks of thermal events and fires in air transportation. The Company's goal is to provide total battery safety solutions that increase the efficiency of battery systems and improve sustainability, as well as provide end-of-life battery management, the packaging, storage, and transportation of lithium-ion batteries. \n\n About SAE \n\n SAE International is a global association of more than 128,000 engineers and related technical experts in the aerospace, automotive and commercial-vehicle industries. Our core competencies are life-long learning and voluntary consensus standards development. \n\n www.sae.org \n\n About KULR Technology Group Inc. \n\n KULR Technology Group Inc. (NYSE American: KULR) develops, manufactures and licenses next-generation carbon fiber thermal management technologies for batteries and electronic systems. Leveraging the company's roots in developing breakthrough cooling solutions for NASA space missions and backed by a strong intellectual property portfolio, KULR enables leading aerospace, electronics, energy storage, 5G infrastructure, and electric vehicle manufacturers to make their products cooler, lighter and safer for the consumer. For more information, please visit www.KULRTechnology.com. \n\n Safe Harbor Statement \n\n This release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to buy any securities of any entity. This release contains certain forward-looking statements based on our current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements in this release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof. Our actual results may differ materially from those stated or implied in such forward-looking statements, due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business, which include the risk factors disclosed in our Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 19, 2021. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding our expectations, beliefs, intentions, or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as \"anticipate,\" \"believe,\" \"could,\" \"estimate,\" \"expect,\" \"intend,\" \"may,\" \"should,\" and \"would\" or similar words. All forecasts are provided by management in this release are based on information available at this time and management expects that internal projections and expectations may change over time. In addition, the forecasts are entirely on management's best estimate of our future financial performance given our current contracts, current backlog of opportunities and conversations with new and existing customers about our products and services. We assume no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. \n\n Media Relations: \n\n Annika Harper \n\n The Antenna Group \n\n KULR@antennagroup.com \n\n Investor Relations: \n\n Tom Colton or Matt Glover \n\n Gateway Investor Relations \n\n Main: (949) 574-3860 \n\n KULR@  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "KULR Receives Three-Year Multi-Million Dollar Battery Safety Deployment Order from Volta Energy Products (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2747",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/kulr-receives-three-year-multi-million-dollar-battery-safety-deployment-order-from-volta-energy-products-01639569008?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=10",
        "text": "SAN DIEGO and BUFFALO, N.Y., Dec. 15, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- KULR Technology Group, Inc. (NYSE American: KULR) (the \"Company\" or \"KULR\"), a leading developer of next-generation lithium-ion battery safety and thermal management technologies, today announced receipt of a three-year multi-million dollar deployment order for its Passive Propagation Resistant (\"PPR\") solution suite from Volta Energy Products (\"Volta\"), a subsidiary of Viridi Parente, Inc. (\"Viridi\"). The PPR solution will be used for Volta's stationary and certain mobile lithium-ion battery power systems. \n\n The initial deployment order totals approximately $1.6 million for immediate delivery with higher volume shipments expected throughout 2022 for KULR's PPR solution, which includes the patented thermal runaway shield (\"TRS\") product. After more than 18 months of joint design and testing efforts, KULR's PPR solution will support Volta's commercialization of proprietary battery architecture for energy storage systems. This order represents KULR's first PPR order of commercial deployment in a stationary energy storage product. \n\n\n \"Safety is paramount in these applications and by pairing KULR's space-proven technology with our proprietary architecture, we have designed the safest lithium-ion energy storage solution on the market,\" said Viridi Parente CEO Jon M. Williams. \"We also plan to incorporate KULR's technology into other Volta stationary and certain mobile storage systems in order to capitalize on the added safety it will provide our customers.\" \n\n Michael Mo, CEO of KULR Technology Group added: \"Volta's depth of technology experience and innovative approach to the market makes them an outstanding partner for us. Our thermal solutions for their products were based on similar designs we provided to customers such as NASA and Lockheed Martin, and therefore provides Volta with space-grade thermal management architecture for stationary and mobile energy storage applications. Our partnership marks only the first step in commercializing KULR's suite of thermal solutions for the rapidly growing commercial and residential battery storage market.\" \n\n The stationary battery storage market is set to surpass USD $140 billion by 2030, according to a research report by Global Market Insights Inc. published earlier this year. \n\n About KULR Technology Group Inc. \n\n KULR Technology Group Inc. (NYSE American: KULR) develops, manufactures and licenses next-generation carbon fiber thermal management technologies for batteries and electronic systems. Leveraging the company's roots in developing breakthrough cooling solutions for NASA space missions and backed by a strong intellectual property portfolio, KULR enables leading aerospace, electronics, energy storage, 5G infrastructure, and electric vehicle manufacturers to make their products cooler, lighter and safer for the consumer. For more information, please visit www.KULRTechnology.com. \n\n About Viridi Parente \n\n Viridi Parente (Viridi) is a disruptive energy company in Buffalo, New York, that is changing the way we use energy, improving systems, communities, and lives. Viridi deploys safe battery technology into applications that have been historically dominated by fossil fuel systems. Its innovative architecture is constructed from materials used for aerospace and military applications and is the only design in the market that can be safely installed and operated in nearly any environment or location. Through its subsidiary, Green Machine Equipment, Viridi is bringing quiet, fully renewable mobile energy solutions to products in construction equipment, waste disposal, last-mile delivery, and other portable industrial markets. Through its subsidiary, Volta Energy Products, Viridi brings stationary, point-of-use storage technology that is safe, locatable, and reliable to industrial, medical, commercial, municipal, and residential building applications. Learn more at: www.viridiparente.com. \n\n Safe Harbor Statement \n\n This release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to buy any securities of any entity. This release contains certain forward-looking statements based on our current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements in this release are based on information available to us as of the date hereof. Our actual results may differ materially from those stated or implied in such forward-looking statements, due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business, which include the risk factors disclosed in our Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 19, 2021. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding our expectations, beliefs, intentions, or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as \"anticipate,\" \"believe,\" \"could,\" \"estimate,\" \"expect,\" \"intend,\" \"may,\" \"should,\" and \"would\" or similar words. All forecasts are provided  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "UAV CORP (UMAV) OPENS SPACE DIVISION FOR SPACE TOURISM (WSJ: PMZN Wire) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2748",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/uav-corp-umav-opens-space-division-for-space-tourism-01640091934?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1",
        "text": "\"After the successful flight tests of the Air Force prototype electric airship in September 2021, UAV Corp's Skyborne Technology continued its effort to develop a \"SkySpace\" airship that would be designed to take tourists to space at a low cost,\" stated Michael Lawson CEO. Some of the systems that will be onboard the SkySpace Airship will be tested in the first half of 2022 with the launch of the new SA 70-12 DATT airship under contract with Gulf Coast State College, funded by Florida's Triumph Fund as a Disaster Relief communications aerial platform. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"Great news for our region of Florida! The Expansion of the current Skyborne Technology's airship design to include near space opportunities aligns with the regions blossoming aerospace industry that is home to two air force bases and a myriad of new development companies. We are proud of Skyborne's partnership with Gulf Coast State College in the development of an emergency response airship that is the prototype for the new airship. The location of their facilities near the college training programs and a stone's throw from an Eglin Air Force base down range site designated as a launch facility provide for some interesting possibilities,\" stated Jim McKnight Executive Director Gulf County Economic Coalition. \n\n\n Skyborne Technology has continued its Teaming Relationship with Research in Flight, in Auburn, Alabama to further develop the airflow analysis design needs for flight at the high altitudes for Space Tourism. \n\n \"Research in Flight is pleased to partner with Skyborne Technology to develop novel, synergistic airship technologies which expand the frontier of lighter than air applications,\" stated Dr. Roy Hartfield \n\n \"Our company is at the beginning of our growth stage that other commercial space tourism companies were a couple years ago; the goal is to target our cost per passenger to under $50,000 a person opening up the space experience to what we are dubbing the \"Peoples Space Experience\". Also, the public and media is starting to notice UAV Corp with a recent article in US News https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/slideshows/drone-stocks-to-consider-as-the-technology-soars, placing our company as one of the 7 Drone stocks to watch in 2022,\" stated Billy Robinson Chairman. \n\n About UAV Corp \n\n UAV Corp (UMAV) is a Research and Development holding company with a focus on Communications, Aerospace and Environmental Solutions. Researchers at UAV Corp are actively engaged in solving transformative problems for the government and commercial clients. We are working on a wide range of topics including but not limited to advanced communication, Airship and Drone Technology and low altitude analysis of carbon dioxide (CO2) conversion, new energy processes, biomass conversion, energy efficiency crop and mining management. \n\n About Research in Flight \n\n The company was established with the aim of developing new aerodynamic analysis tools for aerospace engineering applications. The nucleus of this startup is the FlightStream(R) numerical flow solver that allows for rapid analysis of flow results over advanced geometries. Research in Flight engages in a diversity of design activities including engineering support for aircraft, airships, Urban Air Mobility vehicles, and Distributed Electric Propulsion platforms. \n\n Contact: Roy Hartfield (roy.hartfield@researchinflight.com) \n\n Website: www.researchinflight.com \n\n About Skyborne Technology, Inc \n\n Skyborne Technology, Inc. has significant investments in research & development of Intellectual Property and proprietary designs in areas covering semi-rigid and rigid airship design, reverse-ballonet technology, mooring and hybrid propulsion that have competitive advantages for both its Spherical and Cylinder Class tether/airship designs. Skyborne Technology has a manufacturing facility in Wewahitchka, Florida and owns the airport in Port St. Joe, Florida for manned and unmanned operations. \n\n About Skyborne Central America, LLC \n\n Skyborne Central America, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of UAV Corp for business operations in the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico for the DATT tether-airship systems and advanced UAS capabilities. \n\n CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: \n\n This news release includes certain \"forward-looking statements\" under applicable US securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; delay or failure to receive board, shareholder or regulatory approvals, where applicable and the state of the capital mark  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Republican conspiracy-theory crisis, in one tweet (WP: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2749",
        "date": "2021-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/03/republican-conspiracy-theory-crisis-one-tweet/",
        "text": "Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) did not get to Congress by being quiet, and now she shows no inclination to begin holding her tongue. As the leaders of her party\u2019s caucus in the House and Senate struggle with how to address her past embrace of bizarre conspiracy theories and threats against Democratic officials, Greene\u2019s tweeting her way through it, attacking the media and the left with the sort of rhetoric one might expect from an adherent of the QAnon movement. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), however, would ask that we not pay so much attention to her.Reporting that a politician believes in/flirts with conspiracy theories is legit, but the attention they get should be proportional to their ability to influence actual public policyDon\u2019t make them famous, help them raise money or elevate conspiracy theories\u2014 Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 3, 2021\n\nWhile Rubio doesn\u2019t identify the subject of his entreaty, it\u2019s not hard to suss out. It\u2019s legitimate to report on the embrace of conspiracy theories, he says, but such reports should be constrained by their political power. In other words, Greene\u2019s position as a freshman backbencher in the House should temper the attention she receives.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a fair point, and certainly a better approach to Greene than the one offered by Rubio\u2019s colleague, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who told a CNN reporter that he was too busy dealing with weather-related travel issues to be familiar with Greene\u2019s nonsense portfolio. The media must be cautious when it elevates false claims because it poses the risk of spreading untrue information and rallying more people to the fringe.But Rubio\u2019s tweet also reveals why his party is struggling with a base riddled with conspiracy theorists.Rubio draws a line between those with and without significant power, but he draws it in an odd place. Yes, Greene is not powerful and is unlikely to shape significant legislation while in Congress, for a variety of reasons. But she is a member of Congress, one of 535 Americans chosen by their communities to represent them. She is not a local board member in Orlando, she\u2019s a federal official. What\u2019s more, she\u2019s a federal official with a relatively large platform for her position. Yes, that\u2019s in part because of the media attention she\u2019s been successful generating. But it\u2019s also in part because members of her party, like former president Donald Trump, have elevated her.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump was direct in his advocacy for Greene even before she won her seat in November. In August, he tweeted about her after she won her bid for the Republican primary. There was no reason for him to do so; she was nearly guaranteed to win the general election in the heavily Republican district. But perhaps encouraged by his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump declared her to be a \u201cfuture Republican star.\u201d And so she has become one.It is certainly true that Greene has less power than, say, the president of the United States. Were she president, one assumes that Rubio would strongly advocate robust coverage of her falsehoods and an exploration of conspiracy theories she might offer that could lead to dangerous situations. Except that, if recent history is any guide, Rubio would do no such thing.There has been no more pernicious conspiracy theory in recent months than the one fomented by Trump himself in the wake of his loss in the 2020 presidential election. Trump posited that this loss was a function of widespread, multistate election fraud conducted by Democratic officials. There was never any credible evidence presented to bolster these claims, and Trump\u2019s assertions were regularly and quickly debunked. Yet most of those in his party simply looked the other way at his conspiracy theorizing \u2014 or tried to rationalize his behavior.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRubio did both. When Trump first started to allege irregularities in the election and his legal team filed lawsuits aimed at overturning the results, Rubio huffily defended the then-president\u2019s right to raise such questions. After President Biden was declared the winner of the election, Rubio continued to defend Trump\u2019s assertions that something untoward had happened.The media can project an election winner, but they don\u2019t get to decide if claims of broken election laws & irregularities are true That\u2019s decided by the courts, and on the basis of clear evidence and the law\u2014 Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 8, 2020\n\nBy the evening of Nov. 7, when the race was called, Trump\u2019s team and his allies were already 0 for 9 in their legal challenges.A few days later, Rubio\u2019s approach to the issue shifted. The issue was less that there were perhaps \u201cirregularities\u201d to be uncovered but, instead, that concern over potential irregularities from Republican voters demanded redress. This was a clever rhetorical shift eventually used by his colleague, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), in opposing the counting of electoral votes from several states. But it\u2019s also a hedge, allowing Rubio to stand alongside Trump while pointing in a slightly different direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRubio, like Cruz, is smart enough to know that by mid-November, there was no real evidence of fraud and that Trump\u2019s path to a second term in office had dried up. By Nov. 23, he\u2019d referred to Biden as president-elect. But he\u2019s a politician and Trump had (and has) the enormous power of the Republican base. So Rubio tried to find a middle path.Over time, Rubio mostly stopped talking about the election. Trump was still tweeting out nonsensical claims about fraud, claims no more derived from reality than Greene\u2019s assertions about spacecraft starting wildfires in California. Rubio\u2019s response was not, as his tweet about Greene might suggest, to forcefully confront Trump\u2019s claims and expose them as false. His response instead was silence.Trump\u2019s lies about the election being stolen were dangerous, as demonstrated by the crowd that appeared in Washington on Jan. 6. He\u2019d repeatedly claimed that the election was stolen by some left-wing conspiracy, encouraged people to come to the nation\u2019s capital that day and, that morning, encouraged them to fight on his behalf against efforts to finalize his loss. Hundreds did, storming the Capitol.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is the problem, distilled. You can\u2019t demand that the only conspiracy theories worth uprooting are those from powerful people while you ignore powerful people spreading conspiracy theories. One can argue that Greene\u2019s theories are different in nature than Trump\u2019s, but that\u2019s undervaluing the former president\u2019s long track record of other conspiracy theories that most Republicans (usually including Rubio) ignored. It also misses the point that coddling efforts to place wishful thinking over reality has ripple effects.The problem the Republican Party is having now is precisely that it has decided for years that it can ignore conspiracy theorizing in the base as fringe thinking even as it also ignores the amplification of conspiracy theories by its most powerful leader. Rubio doesn\u2019t want Republicans painted with a broad brush by Greene\u2019s flavor of falsehoods, understandably. But the party has already been discolored by Trump\u2019s.To curtail this trend, the GOP will probably have to directly and forcefully confront both Trump\u2019s and Greene\u2019s claims and to send a message to the base that the party stands firmly with reality.It won\u2019t. Ignoring conspiracy theories from those without power means accepting them from the powerful. The Republican conspiracy-theory crisis, in one tweet",
        "author": "Philip Bump"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump criticizes NASA promotion of returning to the moon. He directed it 18 months ago. (WP: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2750",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-criticizes-his-administrations-promotion-of-returning-to-the-moon-before-exploring-mars/2019/06/07/b28656b6-894f-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html",
        "text": "President Trump on Friday criticized NASA for promoting its plan to return to the moon before human exploration of Mars, a strategy that Trump endorsed in a directive early in his tenure and championed as recently as last month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201d For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019\n\nThe tweet, sent from Air Force One as Trump returned from a trip to Europe, did not make clear whether he thinks the strategy should be entirely abandoned or whether he was more concerned about how NASA was branding the strategy.Story continues below advertisementA White House official sought to downplay any difference between what Trump had tweeted and existing policy.Advertisement\u201cOur Administration\u2019s goal has always been to get to Mars,\u201d said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity, in an email. \u201cWe have asked Congress for additional resources to get to the Moon by 2024, which will enable us to get to Mars roughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface. Under POTUS, America is leading again in space.\u201dFact Check: What is the moon?A tweet later Friday by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine did little to clarify the impact of Trump\u2019s tweet.\u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d the tweet said. \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s tweet was sent shortly after Fox Business host Neil Cavuto questioned on air why NASA is \u201crefocusing on the moon, the next sort of quest, if you will\u201d and asked: \u201cBut didn\u2019t we do this moon thing quite a few decades ago?\u201dAdvertisementThe policy of first going back to the moon grew from a unanimous recommendation by the new National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, after its first meeting in October 2017.At a ceremony where Trump signed a directive regarding the policy two months later, he said first returning to the moon would \u201cestablish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.\u201dIn a tweet three weeks ago, Trump touted his administration\u2019s commitment to space exploration, writing: \u201cUnder my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars.\u201dPence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five yearsIn a fiery speech in March, Pence announced that NASA was moving its timeline for landing humans back on the moon up by four years, to 2024. He cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as Russia and China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon earlier this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn public documents, NASA has argued that \u201cexploration of the Moon and Mars is intertwined.\u201d\u201cThe Moon provides an opportunity to test new tools, instruments and equipment that could be used on Mars, including human habitats, life support systems, and technologies and practices that could help us build self-sustaining outposts away from Earth,\u201d the agency says in one document available on its website. The lunar mission is part of Mars manned exploration plan the president signed. Trump criticizes NASA promotion of returning to the moon. He directed it 18 months ago.",
        "author": "John Wagner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump criticizes NASA promotion of returning to the moon. He directed it 18 months ago. (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2751",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-criticizes-his-administrations-promotion-of-returning-to-the-moon-before-exploring-mars/2019/06/07/b28656b6-894f-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html",
        "text": "President Trump on Friday criticized NASA for promoting its plan to return to the moon before human exploration of Mars, a strategy that Trump endorsed in a directive early in his tenure and championed as recently as last month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201d For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019\n\nThe tweet, sent from Air Force One as Trump returned from a trip to Europe, did not make clear whether he thinks the strategy should be entirely abandoned or whether he was more concerned about how NASA was branding the strategy.Story continues below advertisementA White House official sought to downplay any difference between what Trump had tweeted and existing policy.Advertisement\u201cOur Administration\u2019s goal has always been to get to Mars,\u201d said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity, in an email. \u201cWe have asked Congress for additional resources to get to the Moon by 2024, which will enable us to get to Mars roughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface. Under POTUS, America is leading again in space.\u201dFact Check: What is the moon?A tweet later Friday by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine did little to clarify the impact of Trump\u2019s tweet.\u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d the tweet said. \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s tweet was sent shortly after Fox Business host Neil Cavuto questioned on air why NASA is \u201crefocusing on the moon, the next sort of quest, if you will\u201d and asked: \u201cBut didn\u2019t we do this moon thing quite a few decades ago?\u201dAdvertisementThe policy of first going back to the moon grew from a unanimous recommendation by the new National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, after its first meeting in October 2017.At a ceremony where Trump signed a directive regarding the policy two months later, he said first returning to the moon would \u201cestablish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.\u201dIn a tweet three weeks ago, Trump touted his administration\u2019s commitment to space exploration, writing: \u201cUnder my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars.\u201dPence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five yearsIn a fiery speech in March, Pence announced that NASA was moving its timeline for landing humans back on the moon up by four years, to 2024. He cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as Russia and China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon earlier this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn public documents, NASA has argued that \u201cexploration of the Moon and Mars is intertwined.\u201d\u201cThe Moon provides an opportunity to test new tools, instruments and equipment that could be used on Mars, including human habitats, life support systems, and technologies and practices that could help us build self-sustaining outposts away from Earth,\u201d the agency says in one document available on its website. The lunar mission is part of Mars manned exploration plan the president signed. Trump criticizes NASA promotion of returning to the moon. He directed it 18 months ago.",
        "author": "John Wagner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump criticizes NASA promotion of returning to the moon. He directed it 18 months ago. (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2752",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-criticizes-his-administrations-promotion-of-returning-to-the-moon-before-exploring-mars/2019/06/07/b28656b6-894f-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html",
        "text": "President Trump on Friday criticized NASA for promoting its plan to return to the moon before human exploration of Mars, a strategy that Trump endorsed in a directive early in his tenure and championed as recently as last month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201d For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019\n\nThe tweet, sent from Air Force One as Trump returned from a trip to Europe, did not make clear whether he thinks the strategy should be entirely abandoned or whether he was more concerned about how NASA was branding the strategy.Story continues below advertisementA White House official sought to downplay any difference between what Trump had tweeted and existing policy.Advertisement\u201cOur Administration\u2019s goal has always been to get to Mars,\u201d said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity, in an email. \u201cWe have asked Congress for additional resources to get to the Moon by 2024, which will enable us to get to Mars roughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface. Under POTUS, America is leading again in space.\u201dFact Check: What is the moon?A tweet later Friday by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine did little to clarify the impact of Trump\u2019s tweet.\u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d the tweet said. \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s tweet was sent shortly after Fox Business host Neil Cavuto questioned on air why NASA is \u201crefocusing on the moon, the next sort of quest, if you will\u201d and asked: \u201cBut didn\u2019t we do this moon thing quite a few decades ago?\u201dAdvertisementThe policy of first going back to the moon grew from a unanimous recommendation by the new National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, after its first meeting in October 2017.At a ceremony where Trump signed a directive regarding the policy two months later, he said first returning to the moon would \u201cestablish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.\u201dIn a tweet three weeks ago, Trump touted his administration\u2019s commitment to space exploration, writing: \u201cUnder my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars.\u201dPence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five yearsIn a fiery speech in March, Pence announced that NASA was moving its timeline for landing humans back on the moon up by four years, to 2024. He cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as Russia and China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon earlier this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn public documents, NASA has argued that \u201cexploration of the Moon and Mars is intertwined.\u201d\u201cThe Moon provides an opportunity to test new tools, instruments and equipment that could be used on Mars, including human habitats, life support systems, and technologies and practices that could help us build self-sustaining outposts away from Earth,\u201d the agency says in one document available on its website. The lunar mission is part of Mars manned exploration plan the president signed. Trump criticizes NASA promotion of returning to the moon. He directed it 18 months ago.",
        "author": "John Wagner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump mobilizes military, threatens to use troops to quell protests across U.S. (WP: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2753",
        "date": "2020-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-mobilizes-military-threatens-to-use-troops-to-quell-protests-across-us/2020/06/01/10212832-a416-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html",
        "text": "President Trump militarized the federal response to protests of racial inequality that have erupted in cities across America late Monday, as authorities fired tear gas at people protesting peacefully near the White House to disperse crowds moments before Trump staged a photo opportunity there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump forced a brazen inflammation of the crisis convulsing the country by calling the nationwide demonstrations \u201cacts of domestic terror,\u201d declaring himself the \u201cpresident of law and order\u201d and taking the rare step of mobilizing the military to use force to quell the unrest. In a move denounced by critics as authoritarian, the commander in chief threatened to deploy troops to \u201cquickly solve the problem\u201d if state and local authorities did not immediately regain control of their streets, which he said had been overtaken by \u201cprofessional anarchists\u201d and \u201cviolent mobs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese are not acts of peaceful protest,\u201d Trump said of those who have clashed with police, destroyed private property and looted. \u201cThese are acts of domestic terror. The destruction of innocent life and the spilling of innocent blood is an offense of humanity and a crime against God.\u201dReferring to the nation\u2019s capital, Trump said, \u201cI am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.\u201dThis was Trump\u2019s first address about the crisis since Saturday afternoon, and it became a frightening made-for-television scene of the militarized conflict the commander in chief envisioned.Story continues below advertisementAs Trump delivered his remarks from the Rose Garden shortly before Washington\u2019s 7 p.m. curfew, federal authorities could be heard one block away firing tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets at a large assembly of demonstrators who had been protesting peacefully along Lafayette Square with their hands in the air.AdvertisementThe officers, some of them on horseback, used force to disperse the crowd, apparently in order for Trump to stage the photo op. Shortly after his Rose Garden speech, Trump walked across Lafayette Square to stand in front of the historic St. John\u2019s Church, which was vandalized on Sunday night, and hold up the Bible for cameras.A White House spokesman defended the use of force by federal authorities, which D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) condemned.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe perimeter was expanded to help enforce the 7 p.m. curfew in the same area where rioters attempted to burn down one of our nation\u2019s most historic churches the night before,\u201d spokesman Judd Deere said. \u201cProtesters were given three warnings by the U.S. Park Police.\u201dThis was Trump\u2019s first time since Saturday emerging in public view from the fortified executive mansion where he had been cloistered. Security has been ratcheted up at the White House complex, where during loud protests on Friday night Trump hid for a time in an underground bunker used to protect the president in emergencies.AdvertisementIn his remarks, Trump vowed to arrest, detain and prosecute protesters who threaten lives or property and pledged to \u201cprotect\u201d Americans who are frightened by the chaos and unrest.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI am your president of law and order,\u201d Trump said.Trump described himself as \u201can ally of all peaceful protesters,\u201d despite the force with which officers under his command dispersed the nearby crowd, and despite having repeatedly and harshly derided football player Colin Kaepernick and other athletes who have knelt peacefully to protest racial injustice.With his comments and actions Monday, Trump risked escalating an already fragile standoff between police and protesters and inflaming tensions coursing through cities from New York to Los Angeles.Earlier Monday, Trump held a contentious call with the nation\u2019s governors in which he berated them as \u201cweak,\u201d blamed them for the chaos and violence and said it was their responsibility to restore order.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s militaristic posture and his advocacy of tough treatment of protesters alarmed some of the governors. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), who has tangled repeatedly with the president during the coronavirus pandemic, challenged him on the call, according to an audio recording of the private call obtained by The Washington Post.\u201cI\u2019ve been extraordinarily concerned about the rhetoric that\u2019s been used by you. It\u2019s been inflammatory,\u201d Pritzker said. He added, \u201cThe rhetoric that\u2019s coming out of the White House is making it worse.\u201d\u201cWell, thank you very much, J.B.,\u201d Trump replied. \u201cI don\u2019t like your rhetoric much, either, because I watched it with respect to the coronavirus and I don\u2019t like your rhetoric much, either. I think you could\u2019ve done a much better job, frankly.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTrump urged the governors to direct authorities to conduct mass arrests at protest sites, prosecute demonstrators and seek prison sentences of 10 years.Advertisement\u201cYou have to dominate. If you don\u2019t dominate, you\u2019re wasting your time,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThey\u2019re going to run over you. You\u2019re going to look like a bunch of jerks.\u201dDescribing the intensifying crisis as a \u201cwar,\u201d the president told the governors, \u201cYou have to use the military.\u201d He announced that he had placed Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, \u201cin charge\u201d of managing the unrest. And Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper spoke briefly and told the governors, \u201cWe need to dominate the battlespace.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTrump said the governors ought not make any concessions and encouraged them to throw caution to the wind, saying, \u201cYou\u2019re allowed to fight back.\u201d For instance, he said, \u201cWhen someone is throwing a rock, that\u2019s like shooting a gun.\u201d He added, \u201cYou have to do retribution, in my opinion.\u201dAdvertisementTrump\u2019s language was remarkably unrestrained. He called Minnesota \u201ca laughingstock all over the world,\u201d a characterization Gov. Tim Walz (D) later rejected. And at one point the president seemed to suggest some Democratic governors sympathized with looters when he remarked, \u201cThey are anarchists, whether you like it or not. I know some of you guys are [of a] different persuasion, and that\u2019s okay.\u201dMichigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) condemned the president\u2019s leadership.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe president repeatedly and viciously attacked governors, who are doing everything they can to keep the peace while fighting a once-in-a-generation global pandemic,\u201d Whitmer said in a statement after the call. \u201cThe president\u2019s dangerous comments should be gravely concerning to all Americans, because they send a clear signal that this administration is determined to sow the seeds of hatred and division, which I fear will only lead to more violence and destruction. We must reject this way of thinking.\u201dAdvertisementLater in the day, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) became visibly emotional at a news conference when he reflected upon Trump\u2019s call to \u201cdominate\u201d protesters.\u201cAt so many times during these past several weeks, when the country needed compassion and leadership the most, it was simply nowhere to be found,\u201d Baker said. \u201cInstead, we got bitterness, combativeness and self-interest. That\u2019s not what we need in Boston, it\u2019s not what we need right now in Massachusetts and it\u2019s definitely not what we need across this great country of ours, either.\u201dSeveral consecutive days of mass protest followed the May 25 death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis.Although Trump addressed Floyd\u2019s death and the early protests during his visit Saturday to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he stayed silent outside Twitter about the escalating situation until Monday evening.AdvertisementTwo Republican strategists close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments, said they were baffled by Trump\u2019s decision Saturday to fly to Florida to attend the launch of the SpaceX spacecraft with so much unrest in Minneapolis and many other cities. One of them recalled a conversation with White House officials, who tried to explain the \u201cstrategy\u201d of the president\u2019s response.\u201cWho scheduled and approved that trip?\u201d the strategist said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about strategy when the country is burning down. You have to say something.\u201dInside the White House, where aides still are haunted by Trump\u2019s botched prime time Oval Office address in March about the coronavirus, aides intensely debated him giving a similar address focused on the protests over racial injustice.Two of the president\u2019s most influential advisers, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Hope Hicks, argued vociferously against Trump delivering a speech over the weekend, according to people familiar with the matter. One concern was that if Trump were to give a speech, the riots could be \u201cjust as bad or worse,\u201d in the words of one White House official.White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday defended Trump\u2019s handling of the protests. She rejected the characterization of Trump as silent, claiming that the death of Floyd has \u201cweighed on his heart\u201d and noting that the president has discussed it multiple times.Jason Miller, an outside adviser who keeps in close touch with White House officials, said in this case actions would speak louder than words.\u201cThere\u2019s no magical kumbaya speech from the Oval Office that\u2019s going to keep people from rioting and protesting,\u201d Miller said. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to go and knock some of the bad guys around a little bit.\u201dHe added, \u201cPresident Trump wasn\u2019t hired to be the consoler in chief. He was hired to be a rejection of the flowery language of nothing happening.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Authorities fired tear gas at a peaceful protest near the White House while the president delivered a Rose Garden address on Monday. Trump mobilizes military, threatens to use troops to quell protests across U.S.",
        "author": "Philip Rucker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Internet explodes after Pence touches flight hardware labeled \u2018DO NOT TOUCH\u2019 (WP: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2754",
        "date": "2017-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/07/07/internet-explodes-after-pence-touches-flight-hardware-labeled-do-not-touch/",
        "text": "It was the sort of photo that was just begging to be hilariously captioned, mocked on Twitter\u00a0and photoshopped.During a visit to NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, Vice President Pence solemnly reached out and touched\u00a0the Orion spacecraft's titanium forward bay cover, placing his full palm just below a sign that read: \u201cCritical Space Flight Hardware 'DO NOT TOUCH.' \" WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMike Brown, a photographer for Reuters, captured the moment and his photo was soon devoured by the Internet \u2014 eventually forcing\u00a0NASA to release a statement saying that it was okay for Pence to touch the space hardware and prompting the\u00a0vice president to post a self-deprecating response Friday afternoon.Story continues below advertisementThe tweets and photoshopped pictures started slowly Thursday night and became a full-blown meme by midday Friday. Several people compared the photo to one of Trump touching a glowing orb during his visit to Saudi Arabia, and an iOS developer noted that three bolts below Pence's hand formed \u201can appalled face.\u201d And thanks to Photoshop, Pence was suddenly spotted\u00a0in an Indiana Jones scene\u00a0and stroking the belly of a reptile and next to a sunbathing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and touching MC Hammer as the Hammer sang \u201cU Can't Touch This.\u201d The popular Twitter personality @nycsouthpaw jumped in to note: \u201cIn Pence's defense, 'DO NOT TOUCH' is in quotes.\u201dVice President Pence paid a visit to NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 6. (Facebook/NASA's Kennedy Space Center)And several people tied the photo to reports that Pence calls his wife \u201cmother\u201d and that he never dines alone with women. Early Friday morning, writer and Twitter personality Shauna Wright tweeted the photo with this thought: \u201cSuddenly I understand why he won't have dinner with a woman who isn't his wife.\u201d Hours later, author Jason Miller of Nashville tweeted this caption:\u00a0\u201cPence looked left. Then right. Mother wasn't anywhere around. He smiled to himself. He would touch.\u201dAdvertisementFriday afternoon, Pence got in on the joke and joined the Internet\u00a0mocking. He tweeted a blurred version of the photo that highlighted Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and circled the senator's face, along with this message: \u201cSorry @NASA \u2026@MarcoRubio dared me to do it!\u201d He then followed up with a photoshopped picture showing him petting a porcupine with the caption: \u201cOkay \u2026 so this isn't exactly the first time this has happened.\u201dSorry @NASA...@MarcoRubio dared me to do it! pic.twitter.com/qIYtKOPyFh\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) July 7, 2017\n\nOkay...so this isn't exactly the first time this has happened. pic.twitter.com/6Y7b3UlJXe\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) July 7, 2017\n\nNASA then reassured the vice president that he did nothing wrong, tweeting: \u201cIt was OK to touch the surface. Those are just day-to-day reminder signs. We were going to clean it anyway. It was an honor to host you!\u201d The space agency then followed up with a full statement.\u00a0And Rubio got in on the Twittered laugh-fest by adding: \u201cIn fairness, I warned @VP that 'you break it, you own it.' \" Eventually NASA released a statement, and Pence responded with his own memes.  Internet explodes after Pence touches flight hardware labeled \u2018DO NOT TOUCH\u2019",
        "author": "Jenna Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Close encounters: Democrats and Republicans unified in taking UFOs seriously (WP: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2755",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ufos-bipartisan/2021/05/31/096df812-be69-11eb-9c90-731aff7d9a0d_story.html",
        "text": "In early April, former CIA director R. James Woolsey told Black Vault, a website that collects paranormal case files, that he is \u201cnot as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly,\u201d about UFOs, and that \u201csomething is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpeaking to CBS\u2019s \u201c60 Minutes\u201d last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said that while UFOs can still prompt a \u201cgiggle\u201d from some lawmakers, \u201cI don\u2019t think we can let the stigma keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.\u201dAnd a day after Rubio\u2019s comments aired, former president Barack Obama told CBS\u2019s \u201cThe Late Late Show with James Corden\u201d that \u201cwhat is true \u2014 and I\u2019m actually being serious here \u2014 is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don\u2019t know exactly what they are.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUFOs \u2014 also known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, in official parlance \u2014 are having their moment in politics, and a bipartisan one at that.From former president Barack Obama to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), here's what lawmakers have said about UFOs in the past. (The Washington Post)This month, President Biden\u2019s director of national intelligence will release a report containing everything unclassified that the U.S. government knows about UAPs as part of a provision contained in former president Donald Trump\u2019s pandemic relief package.When the report lands, as early as this week, it will do so in a moment of rare agreement across the ideological spectrum that UAPs are worthy of further study. An increasing number of Democrats and Republicans \u2014 from former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former Democratic Senate leader Harry M. Reid to Fox News host Tucker Carlson \u2014 have expressed an openness to UAPs, urging the nation\u2019s leaders to investigate the phenomenon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAfter this last year, it\u2019s kind of nice to see something that\u2019s bipartisan,\u201d said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a think tank of scientists examining UAPs.And why now, exactly? \u201cBecause!\u201d said former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama\u2019s chief of staff. \u201cIt\u2019s all speculative unknown, and a little sci-fi makes it intriguing.\u201dThe government\u2019s effort to better understand UAPs began in earnest in 2007 with Reid, then the Senate majority leader whose home state of Nevada includes Area 51 \u2014 the Air Force\u2019s top-secret testing site that has long attracted UFO hunters. Reid privately approached Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to request $22 million in Pentagon funding for a secret operation that became known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe program, which no longer exists, studied UAPs, including encounters between UFOs and the nation\u2019s military. Now a new government program, known as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, has continued investigating UAPs.\u201cLet me be clear: I have never intended to prove that life beyond Earth exists,\u201d Reid wrote in a New York Times op-ed on May 21. \u201cBut if science proves that it does, I have no problem with that.\u201dFor years, UFOs remained a taboo topic, relegated to the fringe of society, and certainly of politics. But by 2015, while campaigning for president in New Hampshire, Clinton told the Conway Daily Sun she thought Earth might have already been visited by extraterrestrial life and pledged to \u201cget to the bottom of it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe following year, Clinton\u2019s interest in the phenomenon earned her a full story in the New York Times \u2014 \u201cHillary Clinton Gives U.F.O. Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files,\u201d blared the headline. John Podesta, a noted UFO-phile and Clinton\u2019s 2016 campaign chairman, told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper that if she won the White House, \u201cshe\u2019ll ask for as many [UFO] records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that\u2019s a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to.\u201dHow UFO sightings went from joke to national security concern in WashingtonMore recently, in addition to Woolsey, former CIA director John Brennan also expressed openness to UAPs, as did Carlson, who has devoted portions of his prime-time Fox News show to exploring the phenomenon.AdvertisementAfter the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d segment on UFOs aired last month, Carlson said that the issue is \u201ca very big problem\u201d from a national security perspective, arguing that the military under Biden is focusing on the wrong priorities.Story continues below advertisement\u201cUFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they\u2019re a prima facie challenge to the United States military,\u201d Carlson said. \u201cThey\u2019re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they\u2019re doing it with impunity.\u201dTrump told ABC News\u2019s George Stephanopoulos in 2019 that he did \u201cnot particularly\u201d believe in UFOs. But he was more coy about the topic when asked by his eldest son, during an interview for his 2020 campaign, to share some details about a 1947 incident in Roswell, N.M., that holds outsize significance among UFO believers.\u201cI won\u2019t talk to you about what I know about it, but it\u2019s very interesting,\u201d Trump said.UAPs \u2014 once considered the ur-conspiracy theory \u2014 have emerged as a topic deemed deserving of serious investigation at a moment when misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories reign supreme.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuge swaths of the country are divided on basic facts \u2014 like who actually won the 2020 presidential election (Biden) \u2014 while the two political parties can\u2019t even agree on a definition for what constitutes \u201cinfrastructure.\u201d Yet when it comes to UAPs, there is emerging bipartisan and mainstream consensus that, as the \u201cX Files\u201d famously popularized, \u201cThe truth is out there.\u201dChristopher Mellon, a former intelligence official at the Defense Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee who has worked to push UAPs into mainstream discourse, said there were two major turning points recently: a December 2017 New York Times article in which the Pentagon admitted the existence of its program to study UFOs and public interviews with members of the military talking about their personal encounters with UFOs.The \u201c60 Minutes\u201d segment, for instance, featured interviews with Cmdr. Dave Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, two former Navy F/A-18F pilots, offering their firsthand account of a 2004 incident over the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego, where they say they encountered and tried to engage with \u201cthis little white Tic-Tac-looking object,\u201d as Fravor described it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cComing from the U.S. military \u2014 that\u2019s the one institution in our government that everybody still supports and the one institution in our government that everybody still trusts,\u201d Mellon said.But, he added, the turning point came when the U.S. government formally acknowledged that the UAP videos were authentic and that the phenomenon was real.For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary eventAdam Jentleson, a former top aide to Reid in the Senate, said that as the country moves its faith away from institutions,\u00a0a growing openness to the paranormal makes sense \u2014 even if it is taking the unlikely form of bipartisanship toward UAPs.\u201cI can\u2019t tell if this bodes well or ill for the direction of our democracy, but there\u2019s certainly some irony around the fact that we can define bipartisanship around what used to be conspiracy theories,\u201d Jentleson said. \u201cMaybe the lesson is that we are expanding our imaginations and the full range of things that are possible. The possibilities of what the future may hold may be beyond the bounds of what a worldview circumscribed by norms can envision.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPowell said the media\u2019s depiction of UAPs has also evolved. \u201cMost of the time in the past when the media highlighted what was then called a UFO-type incident, they really were highlighting a person who was really a little bit wacky and they were trying to get ratings.\u201dHe pointed to Dennis J. Kucinich, the former Democratic congressman from Ohio, who was mocked during a 2008 Democratic presidential primary debate after being asked about a book by actress Shirley MacLaine, who wrote that Kucinich had seen a UFO while visiting MacLaine in Washington state and found the experience very moving.\u201cIt was an unidentified flying object, okay?\u201d Kucinich said when asked about the account. \u201cIt\u2019s like, it\u2019s unidentified. I saw something.\u201dBut now, \u201cthis subject today is considered seriously by a lot of scientists,\u201d Powell said.After Obama expressed his openness to UAPs last month, Fox News\u2019s Peter Doocy recounted the former president\u2019s comments to Biden, and asked him what he thought. \u201cI would ask him again,\u201d Biden said, to laughter, brushing off the question.In a White House briefing last week, press secretary Jen Psaki offered a more serious response to a question on the UAP report, saying, \u201cWe take reports of incursions into our airspace by any aircraft, identified or unidentified, very seriously and investigate each one.\u201dAdvertisementAdministration officials are unlikely to weigh in further on UAPs until the report\u2019s release, a White House official said. This person added that Vice President Harris, in her role as head of the administration\u2019s National Space Council, is also likely to be briefed on the findings before they are released.Thanks to Trump-era covid relief bill, a UFO report may soon be publicThe interest in UFOs shows how the extremes of the ideological spectrum can end up closer to each other than to any political center \u2014 not unlike the two prongs of a horseshoe.\u201cIt\u2019s like who was the viewership of the \u2018X Files\u2019 in the 90s?\u201d Jentleson said. \u201cIf you saw someone walking down the street wearing an \u2018X Files\u2019 shirt, it was a coin flip as to whether they were going to be a hard-right conspiracy theorist or a hard-left conspiracy theorist.\u201dThe idea of UAPs, he added, \u201cunites conspiracy theorists of all ideological stripes,\u201d born out of a shared \u201cdistrust of government and authority.\u201dA 2019 Gallup poll found that 33 percent of adults said they think some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies, while 60 percent said all sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomenon. The belief was largely bipartisan, with 32 percent of Democrats, 30 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of independents saying some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth.Both the Gallup poll and a more recent CBS News poll from this year found skepticism of the U.S. government\u2019s handling of information on the issue. The 2021 CBS poll found 73 percent saying the U.S. government \u201cknows more about UFOs than it is telling the general public,\u201d as did 68 percent in the 2019 Gallup poll.Steve Bassett is a registered lobbyist, political activist and \u201cDisclosure\u201d advocate \u2014 someone who pushes for the formal acknowledgment by heads of state of an extraterrestrial presence engaging with the human race. He argues that being more forthcoming about UAPs will serve to strengthen the credibility of the evidence and the government itself.\u201cThe American people may hear from their government the biggest truth, ever relayed, in a formal way to the human race,\u201d Bassett said. \u201cNow if you\u2019re going to start truth-telling, to regain trust, why not start with a big one?\u201d\n\nScott Clement contributed to this report. The sightings \u2014 also known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, in official parlance \u2014 are having their moment in politics, and a bipartisan one at that. Close encounters: Democrats and Republicans unified in taking UFOs seriously",
        "author": "Ashley Parker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Close encounters: Democrats and Republicans unified in taking UFOs seriously (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2756",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ufos-bipartisan/2021/05/31/096df812-be69-11eb-9c90-731aff7d9a0d_story.html",
        "text": "In early April, former CIA director R. James Woolsey told Black Vault, a website that collects paranormal case files, that he is \u201cnot as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly,\u201d about UFOs, and that \u201csomething is going on that is surprising to a series of intelligent aircraft, experienced pilots.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpeaking to CBS\u2019s \u201c60 Minutes\u201d last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said that while UFOs can still prompt a \u201cgiggle\u201d from some lawmakers, \u201cI don\u2019t think we can let the stigma keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.\u201dAnd a day after Rubio\u2019s comments aired, former president Barack Obama told CBS\u2019s \u201cThe Late Late Show with James Corden\u201d that \u201cwhat is true \u2014 and I\u2019m actually being serious here \u2014 is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don\u2019t know exactly what they are.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUFOs \u2014 also known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, in official parlance \u2014 are having their moment in politics, and a bipartisan one at that.From former president Barack Obama to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), here's what lawmakers have said about UFOs in the past. (The Washington Post)This month, President Biden\u2019s director of national intelligence will release a report containing everything unclassified that the U.S. government knows about UAPs as part of a provision contained in former president Donald Trump\u2019s pandemic relief package.When the report lands, as early as this week, it will do so in a moment of rare agreement across the ideological spectrum that UAPs are worthy of further study. An increasing number of Democrats and Republicans \u2014 from former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former Democratic Senate leader Harry M. Reid to Fox News host Tucker Carlson \u2014 have expressed an openness to UAPs, urging the nation\u2019s leaders to investigate the phenomenon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAfter this last year, it\u2019s kind of nice to see something that\u2019s bipartisan,\u201d said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a think tank of scientists examining UAPs.And why now, exactly? \u201cBecause!\u201d said former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who served as Obama\u2019s chief of staff. \u201cIt\u2019s all speculative unknown, and a little sci-fi makes it intriguing.\u201dThe government\u2019s effort to better understand UAPs began in earnest in 2007 with Reid, then the Senate majority leader whose home state of Nevada includes Area 51 \u2014 the Air Force\u2019s top-secret testing site that has long attracted UFO hunters. Reid privately approached Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to request $22 million in Pentagon funding for a secret operation that became known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe program, which no longer exists, studied UAPs, including encounters between UFOs and the nation\u2019s military. Now a new government program, known as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, has continued investigating UAPs.\u201cLet me be clear: I have never intended to prove that life beyond Earth exists,\u201d Reid wrote in a New York Times op-ed on May 21. \u201cBut if science proves that it does, I have no problem with that.\u201dFor years, UFOs remained a taboo topic, relegated to the fringe of society, and certainly of politics. But by 2015, while campaigning for president in New Hampshire, Clinton told the Conway Daily Sun she thought Earth might have already been visited by extraterrestrial life and pledged to \u201cget to the bottom of it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe following year, Clinton\u2019s interest in the phenomenon earned her a full story in the New York Times \u2014 \u201cHillary Clinton Gives U.F.O. Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files,\u201d blared the headline. John Podesta, a noted UFO-phile and Clinton\u2019s 2016 campaign chairman, told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper that if she won the White House, \u201cshe\u2019ll ask for as many [UFO] records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that\u2019s a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to.\u201dHow UFO sightings went from joke to national security concern in WashingtonMore recently, in addition to Woolsey, former CIA director John Brennan also expressed openness to UAPs, as did Carlson, who has devoted portions of his prime-time Fox News show to exploring the phenomenon.AdvertisementAfter the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d segment on UFOs aired last month, Carlson said that the issue is \u201ca very big problem\u201d from a national security perspective, arguing that the military under Biden is focusing on the wrong priorities.Story continues below advertisement\u201cUFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they\u2019re a prima facie challenge to the United States military,\u201d Carlson said. \u201cThey\u2019re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they\u2019re doing it with impunity.\u201dTrump told ABC News\u2019s George Stephanopoulos in 2019 that he did \u201cnot particularly\u201d believe in UFOs. But he was more coy about the topic when asked by his eldest son, during an interview for his 2020 campaign, to share some details about a 1947 incident in Roswell, N.M., that holds outsize significance among UFO believers.\u201cI won\u2019t talk to you about what I know about it, but it\u2019s very interesting,\u201d Trump said.UAPs \u2014 once considered the ur-conspiracy theory \u2014 have emerged as a topic deemed deserving of serious investigation at a moment when misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories reign supreme.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHuge swaths of the country are divided on basic facts \u2014 like who actually won the 2020 presidential election (Biden) \u2014 while the two political parties can\u2019t even agree on a definition for what constitutes \u201cinfrastructure.\u201d Yet when it comes to UAPs, there is emerging bipartisan and mainstream consensus that, as the \u201cX Files\u201d famously popularized, \u201cThe truth is out there.\u201dChristopher Mellon, a former intelligence official at the Defense Department and the Senate Intelligence Committee who has worked to push UAPs into mainstream discourse, said there were two major turning points recently: a December 2017 New York Times article in which the Pentagon admitted the existence of its program to study UFOs and public interviews with members of the military talking about their personal encounters with UFOs.The \u201c60 Minutes\u201d segment, for instance, featured interviews with Cmdr. Dave Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, two former Navy F/A-18F pilots, offering their firsthand account of a 2004 incident over the Pacific Ocean southwest of San Diego, where they say they encountered and tried to engage with \u201cthis little white Tic-Tac-looking object,\u201d as Fravor described it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cComing from the U.S. military \u2014 that\u2019s the one institution in our government that everybody still supports and the one institution in our government that everybody still trusts,\u201d Mellon said.But, he added, the turning point came when the U.S. government formally acknowledged that the UAP videos were authentic and that the phenomenon was real.For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary eventAdam Jentleson, a former top aide to Reid in the Senate, said that as the country moves its faith away from institutions,\u00a0a growing openness to the paranormal makes sense \u2014 even if it is taking the unlikely form of bipartisanship toward UAPs.\u201cI can\u2019t tell if this bodes well or ill for the direction of our democracy, but there\u2019s certainly some irony around the fact that we can define bipartisanship around what used to be conspiracy theories,\u201d Jentleson said. \u201cMaybe the lesson is that we are expanding our imaginations and the full range of things that are possible. The possibilities of what the future may hold may be beyond the bounds of what a worldview circumscribed by norms can envision.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPowell said the media\u2019s depiction of UAPs has also evolved. \u201cMost of the time in the past when the media highlighted what was then called a UFO-type incident, they really were highlighting a person who was really a little bit wacky and they were trying to get ratings.\u201dHe pointed to Dennis J. Kucinich, the former Democratic congressman from Ohio, who was mocked during a 2008 Democratic presidential primary debate after being asked about a book by actress Shirley MacLaine, who wrote that Kucinich had seen a UFO while visiting MacLaine in Washington state and found the experience very moving.\u201cIt was an unidentified flying object, okay?\u201d Kucinich said when asked about the account. \u201cIt\u2019s like, it\u2019s unidentified. I saw something.\u201dBut now, \u201cthis subject today is considered seriously by a lot of scientists,\u201d Powell said.After Obama expressed his openness to UAPs last month, Fox News\u2019s Peter Doocy recounted the former president\u2019s comments to Biden, and asked him what he thought. \u201cI would ask him again,\u201d Biden said, to laughter, brushing off the question.In a White House briefing last week, press secretary Jen Psaki offered a more serious response to a question on the UAP report, saying, \u201cWe take reports of incursions into our airspace by any aircraft, identified or unidentified, very seriously and investigate each one.\u201dAdvertisementAdministration officials are unlikely to weigh in further on UAPs until the report\u2019s release, a White House official said. This person added that Vice President Harris, in her role as head of the administration\u2019s National Space Council, is also likely to be briefed on the findings before they are released.Thanks to Trump-era covid relief bill, a UFO report may soon be publicThe interest in UFOs shows how the extremes of the ideological spectrum can end up closer to each other than to any political center \u2014 not unlike the two prongs of a horseshoe.\u201cIt\u2019s like who was the viewership of the \u2018X Files\u2019 in the 90s?\u201d Jentleson said. \u201cIf you saw someone walking down the street wearing an \u2018X Files\u2019 shirt, it was a coin flip as to whether they were going to be a hard-right conspiracy theorist or a hard-left conspiracy theorist.\u201dThe idea of UAPs, he added, \u201cunites conspiracy theorists of all ideological stripes,\u201d born out of a shared \u201cdistrust of government and authority.\u201dA 2019 Gallup poll found that 33 percent of adults said they think some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies, while 60 percent said all sightings can be explained by human activity or natural phenomenon. The belief was largely bipartisan, with 32 percent of Democrats, 30 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of independents saying some UFOs have been alien spacecraft visiting Earth.Both the Gallup poll and a more recent CBS News poll from this year found skepticism of the U.S. government\u2019s handling of information on the issue. The 2021 CBS poll found 73 percent saying the U.S. government \u201cknows more about UFOs than it is telling the general public,\u201d as did 68 percent in the 2019 Gallup poll.Steve Bassett is a registered lobbyist, political activist and \u201cDisclosure\u201d advocate \u2014 someone who pushes for the formal acknowledgment by heads of state of an extraterrestrial presence engaging with the human race. He argues that being more forthcoming about UAPs will serve to strengthen the credibility of the evidence and the government itself.\u201cThe American people may hear from their government the biggest truth, ever relayed, in a formal way to the human race,\u201d Bassett said. \u201cNow if you\u2019re going to start truth-telling, to regain trust, why not start with a big one?\u201d\n\nScott Clement contributed to this report. The sightings \u2014 also known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, in official parlance \u2014 are having their moment in politics, and a bipartisan one at that. Close encounters: Democrats and Republicans unified in taking UFOs seriously",
        "author": "Ashley Parker"
    },
    {
        "title": "As cities burned, Trump stayed silent \u2014 other than tweeting fuel on the fire (WP: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2757",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-cities-burned-trump-stayed-silent--other-than-tweeting-fuel-on-the-fire/2020/05/31/4fc8761a-a354-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html",
        "text": "In cities across America on Sunday, people awoke to see shattered glass, charred vehicles, bruised bodies and graffiti-tagged buildings. Demonstrators gathered again in peaceful daytime protest of racial injustice. By evening, thousands had converged again in front of the White House, where people had rioted and set fires the night before. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Trump stayed safely ensconced inside and had nothing to say, besides tweeting fuel on the fire.Never in the 1,227 days of Trump\u2019s presidency has the nation seemed to cry out for leadership as it did Sunday, yet Trump made no attempt to provide it.That was by design. Trump and some of his advisers calculated that he should not speak to the nation because he had nothing new to say and had no tangible policy or action to announce yet, according to a senior administration official. Evidently not feeling an urgent motivation Sunday to try to bring people together, he stayed silent.Live updates: Another night of fire and fury as protests rage across AmericaTrump let his tweets speak for themselves. One attacked the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis; another announced that his administration would designate the antifa movement a terrorist organization; a third accused the media of fomenting hatred and anarchy; and in yet another, he praised himself for the deployment of the National Guard and denigrated former vice president Joe Biden.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn one of his missives, Trump wrote, \u201cGet tough Democrat Mayors and Governors. These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!\u201dThe United States is visibly, painfully broken by the unprecedented confluence of health, economic and social crises, any one of which alone would test a president. It was extraordinary then to hear some in the public arena suggest Sunday that this president ought stay in the background, arguing that Trump lacked the moral authority and credibility necessary to heal the country.\u201cHe should just stop talking. This is like Charlottesville all over again,\u201d Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) said Sunday on CNN\u2019s \u201cState of the Union,\u201d referring to Trump\u2019s equivocations following a deadly white-supremacist rally in 2017. \u201cHe speaks, and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet. And I wish that he would just be quiet.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis weekend exemplified many of the characteristics that have defined Trump\u2019s five years as a presidential candidate and president \u2014 chaos and unrest, fear and anger, division and disruption. Some of these themes and qualities helped draw Trump\u2019s supporters to him and keep them faithful, giving him a chance at reelection in November despite the carnage on his watch this spring.Yet these same attributes make it challenging if not impossible for him to inspire unity, according to officials and strategists in both political parties.It is an open question, too, whether Trump aspires to unite. There is ample evidence that he does not, as he built a political strategy around pitting groups against one another and declaring winners and losers.\u201cThe rioting in the streets has put an exclamation point on what this president cannot do: To bring people around and say we are all in this together,\u201d said Tom Rath, a longtime Republican official and former attorney general in New Hampshire. \u201cOn his automatic transmission, there is one speed. It is not conciliate. It is not comfort. It is not forge consensus. It is attack. And the frustration right now is that nobody is in charge. Anarchy rules.\u201dInside Trump\u2019s political circle, advisers have expressed conflicting views about how Trump should demonstrate leadership after the death of a black man, George Floyd, in the custody of a white police officer sparked outrage nationwide. The president, in consultation with some aides, decided not to give a speech Sunday about the violent protests over what many see as systemic racial injustice by law enforcement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome on Trump\u2019s reelection campaign team, as well as some White House staffers, have been pushing for the president to deliver an Oval Office address, and he could decide to do so later in the week. But aides first want him to embark on a listening tour of sorts to develop constructive ideas, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans.To that end, Trump intends to convene events this week with law enforcement officials, black leaders and other stakeholders, which aides see as opportunities for him to address the unfolding situation and develop policies, some in concert with the Justice Department, the official said.\u201cWe want to be talking about law and order, how we can heal the relationship between the police community and the African American community, and what tangible policy steps we can take, and also try to expose these more organized bad actors that are manipulating this moment of tragedy and turn it into an opportunity to sow discord and distrust,\u201d the official said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAttorney General William P. Barr signaled aggressive steps to come in apprehending and prosecuting what he called \u201cgroups of outside radicals and agitators\u201d and singled out antifa \u2014 protesters who describe themselves as antifascists \u2014 as responsible for some of the riots.\u201cIt is time to stop watching the violence and to confront and stop it,\u201d Barr said in a statement issued Sunday. \u201cThe continued violence and destruction of property endangers the lives and livelihoods of others, and interferes with the rights of peaceful protesters, as well as all other citizens.\u201dAsked Sunday by CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper whether Trump planned to address the nation, national security adviser Robert C. O\u2019Brien replied that the president already had made \u201cvery eloquent comments\u201d about Floyd\u2019s death and that he \u201caddresses the country almost every day\u201d on social media or in other ways.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe\u2019s trying to stop the violence that we saw that took place overnight, and the message to \u2014 and it\u2019s a strong message, that we want law and order in this country,\u201d O\u2019Brien said. \u201cWe want peaceful protesters who have real concerns about brutality and racism. They need to be able to go to the city hall. They need to be able to petition their government and let their voices be heard. And they can\u2019t be hijacked by these left-wing antifa militants.\u201dTrump\u2019s record of racially insensitive and sometimes outright racist comments over the years has led many Democrats and even some Republicans to conclude that he does not fully comprehend the nation\u2019s history of racism and the corresponding tensions that live on today.\u201cObviously the unrest and the anger is well justified,\u201d said Al Cardenas, a Florida-based Republican strategist and a former chairman of the American Conservatives Union. \u201cHardly goes a week by when some white person, whether it\u2019s a white supremacist or a racist law enforcement officer, does not kill a black person needlessly. \u2026 What the country needs and wants from the president, they\u2019re not going to get. This president, I don\u2019t believe, relates to the racism, relates to the pain. At least I haven\u2019t seen it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring his visit Saturday to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida \u2014 where he and Vice President Pence witnessed the successful launch of the SpaceX spacecraft \u2014 Trump addressed Floyd\u2019s death and called it \u201ca grave tragedy. It should never have happened. It has filled Americans all over the country with horror, anger and grief.\u201dThe president described himself as \u201ca friend and ally to every American seeking justice and peace\u201d but said he firmly opposes \u201canyone exploiting this tragedy to loot, rob, attack, and menace.\u201dA few hours earlier on Saturday, Trump said on Twitter that demonstrators outside the White House on Friday night were met by Secret Service agents with \u201cthe most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen,\u201d a seeming reference to the law enforcement practices in America\u2019s segregationist past. He said many agents are \u201cjust waiting for action\u201d and claimed that one had told him that fighting protesters was \u201cgood practice.\u201dCrowds protesting the killing of George Floyd clashed with U.S. Secret Service and Park Police officers near the White House on May 30. (The Washington Post)D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) replied to Trump on Twitter by noting that the president \u201chides behind his fence\u201d and that \u201cthere are no vicious dogs & ominous weapons. There is just a scared man. Afraid/alone \u2026\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the nation\u2019s most prominent black Republican elected official, said he has advised the president to focus on Floyd\u2019s death, to recognize the benefit of peaceful protests and to lead with compassion. As for Trump\u2019s tweets Saturday, Scott said on \u201cFox News Sunday,\u201d \u201cThose are not constructive tweets, without any question.\u201dDavid Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers University, said past presidents at moments of national crisis, whether George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, have instinctively shifted their message and tactics in an effort to heal.\u201cMost presidents have found a way to rise to the occasion, even if it meant swallowing hard and suppressing some of their own anger and frustration,\u201d Greenberg said. \u201cThere\u2019s no mystery that Trump is not sticking to the normal presidential script here.\u201d\n\n The president, in consultation with some aides, decided not to give a speech Sunday about the violent protests over what many see as systemic racial injustice by law enforcement. As cities burned, Trump stayed silent \u2014 other than tweeting fuel on the fire",
        "author": "Philip Rucker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Federal employees return to backlog of work after 35-day shutdown (WP: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2758",
        "date": "2019-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-employees-return-to-backlog-of-work-after-35-day-shutdown/2019/01/28/10030766-231c-11e9-81fd-b7b05d5bed90_story.html",
        "text": "Hundreds of thousands of federal employees returned Monday to their offices after more than a month away, slogging through long to-do lists as they worried that they could end up furloughed again in February if Congress and President Trump can\u2019t reach a border deal.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAcross the country, federal employees worked to get the government back up to speed. In airports, security lines were moving faster after five weeks of extended absences sidelined 10\u00a0percent of the nation\u2019s baggage screeners. National Park Service rangers assessed the damage from winter weather. The Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo prepared to reopen Tuesday. The shutdown cost the American economy about $3 billion, the Congressional Budget Office estimated Monday.Story continues below advertisementAs they returned to work, employees were concerned that they might not receive back pay for several weeks.Federal workers at the World Central Kitchen food bank in D.C. reacted Jan. 25 to the deal reached to temporarily reopen the government. (Melissa Macaya, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)AdvertisementOn Capitol Hill, congressional leaders announced that a joint House-Senate committee would meet Wednesday to try to reach a compromise on border security by Feb. 15, when the temporary funding bill that reopened the government late Friday expires. Trump wants $5.7 billion to build a border wall with Mexico that Democrats have rebuffed.Democrats also urged the Trump administration to quickly issue back pay to more than 800,000 workers and pledged to help compensate tens of thousands of federal contractors who lost pay and, for some, health insurance.Story continues below advertisementTrump over the weekend left open the possibility of another shutdown. But White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday that the president doesn\u2019t want the government to close again.Employees of Unispec Enterprises, a federal contractor, lost not only their job but their health care during the shutdown. (Jon Gerberg/The Washington Post)\u201cThat\u2019s not the goal,\u201d she said. \u201cThe goal is border security and protecting the American people. .\u2009.\u2009. Ideally, Democrats would take these next three weeks to negotiate in good faith.\u201dAdvertisementHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement: \u201cFamilies across the nation are still trying to recover from a month of missing paychecks and overdue bills, but the President is already threatening a second shutdown if he doesn\u2019t get his way.\u201cWhen the Congress completes its bipartisan, bicameral work to fund government, the President should swiftly sign that legislation to avert another shutdown and restore certainty to our economy and the lives of the American people.\u201d\u2018I came back to 4,459 emails\u2019: Washington is back to work, and in a tizzyAs large segments of the government restarted after 35 days of inactivity, returning employees hugged colleagues, jettisoned sour milk from refrigerators, shared furlough stories and changed computer passwords. The tech support team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development said it received more than 1,000 calls by 1 p.m. Monday for help getting computers back online and resetting passwords.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn some offices, it felt as if time had stood still; the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, issued its list of accomplishments for 2018 in the last week of January.Several senior leaders personally welcomed their employees back as maintenance staffs turned the lights back on.At HUD, Secretary Ben Carson dispensed handshakes in the lobby and a one-page fact sheet titled, \u201cYour first day back: 12 fast facts.\u201dItem No.\u00a01 was when employees would be paid: Two installments no later than Thursday, the sheet informed them. Overtime also would be paid. Any unemployment benefits that workers received during the shutdown must be repaid.Shortly after 8 a.m. on 20th Street NW, Peace Corps employees were greeted with boxes of doughnuts and signs that said \u201cWelcome back\u201d and \u201cThank you for your public service.\u201d The good cheer was provided by a half-dozen staffers from the National Peace Corps Association, an alumni group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAll of us have been feeling the pain of the shutdown,\u201d said Glenn Blumhorst, president of the association. \u201cWe\u2019re relieved and pleased to see things will get back to normal soon.\u201dBut getting back to normal won\u2019t happen in a day. Native American tribes said they\u2019re eager to see payments for health clinics and other services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.The shutdown prompted the Kickapoo Tribe in northeastern Kansas to lay off 22 people in its municipal government \u2014 including most of its police officers and firefighters \u2014 but Lester Randall, chairman of the tribe, is hesitant about rehiring workers in light of the possibility of a second government shutdown starting Feb. 15.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe don\u2019t want to hire people back and be back in the same situation,\u201d Randall said.W. Ron Allen, tribal council chairman and CEO of the Jamestown S\u2019Klallam Tribe in Washington state, said many native tribes are now pushing for an early disbursement of money for reservations in case there\u2019s another shutdown next month.AdvertisementAlthough the country\u2019s 122 prisons were fully operational during the shutdown, Monday\u2019s reboot wasn\u2019t always easy because of friction between officers who called in sick and those who worked 16-hour days to cover those missed shifts.\u201cKnowing that some people were at home while some people were encountering real dangers, that creates divisiveness,\u201d said Eric Young, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council of Prison Locals.Story continues below advertisementAs they streamed into the nine reopened Cabinet agencies and dozens of smaller ones, employees encountered a hurry-up-and-wait reality. It will be days until their back pay arrives. Days before they speak to contractors to restart their projects. Days before they disburse grants to advocates for low-income Americans in cities and rural areas.\u201cIt was damaging to us, for sure,\u201d Smithsonian Secretary David J. Skorton said in an interview as more than 4,000 museum employees returned to work Monday. He noted that visitors were turned away and an estimated $3.4 million in revenue was lost, \u201cand there\u2019s no way to make that up again.\u201dAdvertisementAt the Food and Drug Administration\u2019s campus in Silver Spring, Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Twitter that very few companies had submitted applications for drug and device approvals during the shutdown, so the agency now expects an influx of submissions.Story continues below advertisementAs they worked to catch up, employees expressed concern about when they would receive the two paychecks the government owes them.Agencies planned to disburse the back pay on different days, depending on their payroll providers, and in many cases via two separate checks, the second of which may not hit workers\u2019 bank accounts until February.NASA, the State Department and the Justice Department told their employees that they would receive two retroactive paychecks no later than Thursday.\u201cAgencies work with various different payroll providers, so it\u2019s not fully consistent across the board,\u201d a senior administration official said Monday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief a reporter. \u201cBut what is consistent is that all employees will receive their back pay as soon as possible.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany employees faced the realization that as soon as they\u2019re paid, they will have to pay back the unemployment benefits they received during the shutdown.In Montana, for example, 1,698 federal workers had made claims for unemployment benefits as of Friday. Brenda Nordlund, the administrator of the state\u2019s Unemployment Division, said it is now their responsibility to alert her office when they receive their back pay.Nordlund said her office will work with employees on the timing of the repayment, establishing payment plans where necessary. Each state is likely to have different procedures for recouping the money.Amid Monday\u2019s activity, another shutdown loomed.\u201cThings are not back to normal \u2014 far from it,\u201d said Joe Rojas, a correctional officer and union president at the Coleman penitentiary in Florida. \u201cWe are less than 21 days away from possibly going back to this nonsense.\u201dAdvertisementAt the Lompoc prison in California, union president Ryan Enos advised staff members to conserve their money.\u201cPay what you have to pay,\u201d Enos told them. \u201cDon\u2019t buy things you don\u2019t need. It could happen again. Don\u2019t get too excited and spend it all at once.\u201dHolly Griffith, an engineer at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said she was \u201chappy to be back\u201d at her job with the Orion program, which is developing a spacecraft to send astronauts to deep space.\u201cBut I\u2019m concerned about the stopgap nature of the reopening,\u201d she said. \u201c.\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0What reason is there for me or anyone to have any confidence at all that these same people will have their minds made up in three weeks?\u201dWhile National Park Service staffers turned out in force Monday across the country, operations were not back to normal at many sites. Washington\u2019s Olympic National Park suffered storm damage during the impasse, for example, and park officials warned that as a result, \u201cmany park roads and campgrounds remain closed. Park staff will start assessing damage, clearing downed trees and storm debris from roadways and campgrounds, and reopening areas as quickly as possible.\u201dJulia Quintanilla, who has worked for 27 years as a janitor at the Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies, said she returned to work Monday morning and found the office in disarray.\u201cEverything\u2019s dirty,\u201d she said. \u201cThe desks are dirty. The hallways are dirty. The windows need cleaning.\u201dQuintanilla, who makes about $600 weekly, immediately began scrubbing Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue\u2019s windows. She wanted them to sparkle, to prove her worth after a month\u2019s absence.As a contract worker, she\u2019s not eligible for any back pay. Every hour Quintanilla cleans, she said, is a step closer to paying back the $1,000 of debt she accrued during the shutdown.The Democratic-led House moved quickly to schedule a vote as soon as Wednesday on a bill to give federal employees a 2.6\u00a0percent raise retroactive to the first pay period of the year. This would be a boost from the 1.9\u00a0percent figure the House and Senate debated last year before Trump said he would not offer any raise.But some lawmakers said they did not see a quick resolution to the question that has paralyzed them for months: how to reach agreement on securing the border.Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said he was \u201cnot real confident\u201d that an agreement could be reached to avert another shutdown, \u201cbut of course I\u2019m hopeful that it will.\u201dJuliet Eilperin, Mike DeBonis, Sean Sullivan, Peggy McGlone, Brady Dennis, Tim Craig, Carolyn Johnson, Ben Guarino, Dan Zak, Ashley Halsey III, Eric Yoder, Carol Morello, Jeff Stein, Felicia Sonmez and Danielle Paquette contributed to this report. Workers were waiting to learn when they\u2019ll receive their back pay, as agencies have different schedules. Federal employees return to backlog of work after 35-day shutdown",
        "author": "Lisa Rein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers To Debate Revamping Some Outer Space Regulations (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2759",
        "date": "2017-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-to-debate-revamping-commercial-outer-space-regulations-1496609637?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=24",
        "text": "The FAA would keep its launch-approval authority, but the bill doesn\u2019t support the agency\u2019s efforts to enhance its power over monitoring space debris or creating new air traffic-control procedures reflecting rapidly increasing launch tempos.\nProposed space tourism flights aren\u2019t affected by the proposals.\n\n\nThe legislation, scheduled to be debated and likely approved by the full committee on Thursday, also aims to dramatically streamline approvals for remote sensing satellites while updating and simplifying procedures to ensure that operators of all commercial spacecraft comply with international treaty obligations. Many of the concepts spelled out in the bill have been advocated by Rep. Smith and his supporters for years, with the aim of applying free-market principles to space projects backed by entrepreneurs and companies.\nThe goal of the bill is to champion private enterprise in space, reduce government involvement and make U.S. entities more competitive by speeding regulatory decisions and providing investors greater certainty. The bill intends to \u201crelieve administrative burdens on new and innovative\u201d private space ventures \u201cto the maximum extent practicable.\u201d\nOther key sponsors include Rep. Brian Babin, the Texas Republican who heads the space subcommittee, and Rep. Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma Republican who is an outspoken advocate of loosening government controls on a wide range of private imaging systems.\nRep. Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot, had several interviews with White House officials for the post of administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industry and government officials continue to view him as the leading candidate for the job, though there hasn\u2019t been any formal statement from the White House.\nRep. Babin has said that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote private investments in space while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \u201cThe government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he told a space conference in Washington earlier this year.\nHighlighting the same laissez-faire attitude, the bill would ease or eliminate current barriers to remote-sensing companies marketing certain data or products around the world. In addition to satellites, the looser permitting arrangement would pertain to images recorded from unmanned aircraft.\nIn a speech to a space conference in Colorado Springs earlier this year, Rep. Bridenstine said license applications for earth imaging satellites often are \u201cbogged down in the system\u201d of interagency reviews. \u201cSometimes this results in our capabilities as a country being less robust\u201d than they otherwise would be, he told the gathering.\nOther members of the panel are still studying bill and haven\u2019t taken positions.\nThe bill, which was drafted with significant input from industry representatives, comes amid growing congressional and Pentagon interest in protecting U.S. military and commercial assets from potential adversaries in space.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Three influential House Republicans have proposed shaking up federal oversight of burgeoning commercial space activities by putting the Commerce Department squarely in charge of regulating such endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers To Debate Revamping Some Outer Space Regulations (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2760",
        "date": "2017-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-to-debate-revamping-commercial-outer-space-regulations-1496609637?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=82",
        "text": "The FAA would keep its launch-approval authority, but the bill doesn\u2019t support the agency\u2019s efforts to enhance its power over monitoring space debris or creating new air traffic-control procedures reflecting rapidly increasing launch tempos.\nProposed space tourism flights aren\u2019t affected by the proposals.\n\n\nThe legislation, scheduled to be debated and likely approved by the full committee on Thursday, also aims to dramatically streamline approvals for remote sensing satellites while updating and simplifying procedures to ensure that operators of all commercial spacecraft comply with international treaty obligations. Many of the concepts spelled out in the bill have been advocated by Rep. Smith and his supporters for years, with the aim of applying free-market principles to space projects backed by entrepreneurs and companies.\nThe goal of the bill is to champion private enterprise in space, reduce government involvement and make U.S. entities more competitive by speeding regulatory decisions and providing investors greater certainty. The bill intends to \u201crelieve administrative burdens on new and innovative\u201d private space ventures \u201cto the maximum extent practicable.\u201d\nOther key sponsors include Rep. Brian Babin, the Texas Republican who heads the space subcommittee, and Rep. Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma Republican who is an outspoken advocate of loosening government controls on a wide range of private imaging systems.\nRep. Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot, had several interviews with White House officials for the post of administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industry and government officials continue to view him as the leading candidate for the job, though there hasn\u2019t been any formal statement from the White House.\nRep. Babin has said that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote private investments in space while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \u201cThe government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he told a space conference in Washington earlier this year.\nHighlighting the same laissez-faire attitude, the bill would ease or eliminate current barriers to remote-sensing companies marketing certain data or products around the world. In addition to satellites, the looser permitting arrangement would pertain to images recorded from unmanned aircraft.\nIn a speech to a space conference in Colorado Springs earlier this year, Rep. Bridenstine said license applications for earth imaging satellites often are \u201cbogged down in the system\u201d of interagency reviews. \u201cSometimes this results in our capabilities as a country being less robust\u201d than they otherwise would be, he told the gathering.\nOther members of the panel are still studying bill and haven\u2019t taken positions.\nThe bill, which was drafted with significant input from industry representatives, comes amid growing congressional and Pentagon interest in protecting U.S. military and commercial assets from potential adversaries in space.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Three influential House Republicans have proposed shaking up federal oversight of burgeoning commercial space activities by putting the Commerce Department squarely in charge of regulating such endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers To Debate Revamping Some Outer Space Regulations (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2761",
        "date": "2017-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-to-debate-revamping-commercial-outer-space-regulations-1496609637?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=121",
        "text": "The FAA would keep its launch-approval authority, but the bill doesn\u2019t support the agency\u2019s efforts to enhance its power over monitoring space debris or creating new air traffic-control procedures reflecting rapidly increasing launch tempos.\nProposed space tourism flights aren\u2019t affected by the proposals.\n\n\nThe legislation, scheduled to be debated and likely approved by the full committee on Thursday, also aims to dramatically streamline approvals for remote sensing satellites while updating and simplifying procedures to ensure that operators of all commercial spacecraft comply with international treaty obligations. Many of the concepts spelled out in the bill have been advocated by Rep. Smith and his supporters for years, with the aim of applying free-market principles to space projects backed by entrepreneurs and companies.\nThe goal of the bill is to champion private enterprise in space, reduce government involvement and make U.S. entities more competitive by speeding regulatory decisions and providing investors greater certainty. The bill intends to \u201crelieve administrative burdens on new and innovative\u201d private space ventures \u201cto the maximum extent practicable.\u201d\nOther key sponsors include Rep. Brian Babin, the Texas Republican who heads the space subcommittee, and Rep. Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma Republican who is an outspoken advocate of loosening government controls on a wide range of private imaging systems.\nRep. Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot, had several interviews with White House officials for the post of administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industry and government officials continue to view him as the leading candidate for the job, though there hasn\u2019t been any formal statement from the White House.\nRep. Babin has said that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote private investments in space while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \u201cThe government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he told a space conference in Washington earlier this year.\nHighlighting the same laissez-faire attitude, the bill would ease or eliminate current barriers to remote-sensing companies marketing certain data or products around the world. In addition to satellites, the looser permitting arrangement would pertain to images recorded from unmanned aircraft.\nIn a speech to a space conference in Colorado Springs earlier this year, Rep. Bridenstine said license applications for earth imaging satellites often are \u201cbogged down in the system\u201d of interagency reviews. \u201cSometimes this results in our capabilities as a country being less robust\u201d than they otherwise would be, he told the gathering.\nOther members of the panel are still studying bill and haven\u2019t taken positions.\nThe bill, which was drafted with significant input from industry representatives, comes amid growing congressional and Pentagon interest in protecting U.S. military and commercial assets from potential adversaries in space.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Three influential House Republicans have proposed shaking up federal oversight of burgeoning commercial space activities by putting the Commerce Department squarely in charge of regulating such endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers To Debate Revamping Some Outer Space Regulations (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2762",
        "date": "2017-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-to-debate-revamping-commercial-outer-space-regulations-1496609637?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=27",
        "text": "The FAA would keep its launch-approval authority, but the bill doesn\u2019t support the agency\u2019s efforts to enhance its power over monitoring space debris or creating new air traffic-control procedures reflecting rapidly increasing launch tempos.\n\n\n\n\nProposed space tourism flights aren\u2019t affected by the proposals.\n\n\nThe legislation, scheduled to be debated and likely approved by the full committee on Thursday, also aims to dramatically streamline approvals for remote sensing satellites while updating and simplifying procedures to ensure that operators of all commercial spacecraft comply with international treaty obligations. Many of the concepts spelled out in the bill have been advocated by Rep. Smith and his supporters for years, with the aim of applying free-market principles to space projects backed by entrepreneurs and companies.\nThe goal of the bill is to champion private enterprise in space, reduce government involvement and make U.S. entities more competitive by speeding regulatory decisions and providing investors greater certainty. The bill intends to \u201crelieve administrative burdens on new and innovative\u201d private space ventures \u201cto the maximum extent practicable.\u201d\nOther key sponsors include Rep. Brian Babin, the Texas Republican who heads the space subcommittee, and Rep. Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma Republican who is an outspoken advocate of loosening government controls on a wide range of private imaging systems.\nRep. Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot, had several interviews with White House officials for the post of administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industry and government officials continue to view him as the leading candidate for the job, though there hasn\u2019t been any formal statement from the White House.\nRep. Babin has said that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote private investments in space while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \u201cThe government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he told a space conference in Washington earlier this year.\nHighlighting the same laissez-faire attitude, the bill would ease or eliminate current barriers to remote-sensing companies marketing certain data or products around the world. In addition to satellites, the looser permitting arrangement would pertain to images recorded from unmanned aircraft.\nIn a speech to a space conference in Colorado Springs earlier this year, Rep. Bridenstine said license applications for earth imaging satellites often are \u201cbogged down in the system\u201d of interagency reviews. \u201cSometimes this results in our capabilities as a country being less robust\u201d than they otherwise would be, he told the gathering.\nOther members of the panel are still studying bill and haven\u2019t taken positions.\nThe bill, which was drafted with significant input from industry representatives, comes amid growing congressional and Pentagon interest in protecting U.S. military and commercial assets from potential adversaries in space.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Three influential House Republicans have proposed shaking up federal oversight of burgeoning commercial space activities by putting the Commerce Department squarely in charge of regulating such endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers To Debate Revamping Some Outer Space Regulations (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2763",
        "date": "2017-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-to-debate-revamping-commercial-outer-space-regulations-1496609637?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=93",
        "text": "The FAA would keep its launch-approval authority, but the bill doesn\u2019t support the agency\u2019s efforts to enhance its power over monitoring space debris or creating new air traffic-control procedures reflecting rapidly increasing launch tempos.\n\n\n\n\nProposed space tourism flights aren\u2019t affected by the proposals.\n\n\nThe legislation, scheduled to be debated and likely approved by the full committee on Thursday, also aims to dramatically streamline approvals for remote sensing satellites while updating and simplifying procedures to ensure that operators of all commercial spacecraft comply with international treaty obligations. Many of the concepts spelled out in the bill have been advocated by Rep. Smith and his supporters for years, with the aim of applying free-market principles to space projects backed by entrepreneurs and companies.\nThe goal of the bill is to champion private enterprise in space, reduce government involvement and make U.S. entities more competitive by speeding regulatory decisions and providing investors greater certainty. The bill intends to \u201crelieve administrative burdens on new and innovative\u201d private space ventures \u201cto the maximum extent practicable.\u201d\nOther key sponsors include Rep. Brian Babin, the Texas Republican who heads the space subcommittee, and Rep. Jim Bridenstine, an Oklahoma Republican who is an outspoken advocate of loosening government controls on a wide range of private imaging systems.\nRep. Bridenstine, a former Navy pilot, had several interviews with White House officials for the post of administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Industry and government officials continue to view him as the leading candidate for the job, though there hasn\u2019t been any formal statement from the White House.\nRep. Babin has said that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote private investments in space while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \u201cThe government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he told a space conference in Washington earlier this year.\nHighlighting the same laissez-faire attitude, the bill would ease or eliminate current barriers to remote-sensing companies marketing certain data or products around the world. In addition to satellites, the looser permitting arrangement would pertain to images recorded from unmanned aircraft.\nIn a speech to a space conference in Colorado Springs earlier this year, Rep. Bridenstine said license applications for earth imaging satellites often are \u201cbogged down in the system\u201d of interagency reviews. \u201cSometimes this results in our capabilities as a country being less robust\u201d than they otherwise would be, he told the gathering.\nOther members of the panel are still studying bill and haven\u2019t taken positions.\nThe bill, which was drafted with significant input from industry representatives, comes amid growing congressional and Pentagon interest in protecting U.S. military and commercial assets from potential adversaries in space.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Three influential House Republicans have proposed shaking up federal oversight of burgeoning commercial space activities by putting the Commerce Department squarely in charge of regulating such endeavors. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2764",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-seeks-to-stimulate-private-space-projects-1519145536?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=20",
        "text": "The actions, slated to be announced during a meeting of the White House Space Council at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, will be the most detailed moves yet to accelerate the development of commercial projects beyond the atmosphere.\nCombined with earlier budget blueprints providing seed money for public-private partnerships for human space exploration, the Trump administration\u2019s plans are focused on reducing government oversight and procedural delays for a broad range of space entrepreneurs and corporate investors, according to the government and industry officials, who have been told about the thrust of the policy shifts.\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Mr. Pence couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe Trump administration has been pushing for deregulation across industries. In the past, the vice president has sketched out potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling lunar exploration initiative. He has stressed the importance of \u201claying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit.\u201d\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nScott Pace, the White House Space Council\u2019s top staffer, told a government-industry conference in Washington earlier in February that he expected Wednesday\u2019s meeting \u201cto try to make measurable progress on the regulatory environment.\u201d \nHeaded by the vice president, the high-level group includes Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rex Tillerson,\n\n\n\n Commerce Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wilbur Ross,\n\n\n\n Transportation Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elaine Chao,\n\n\n\n Office of Management and Budget director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Mulvaney,\n\n\n\n national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n and other cabinet-level appointees.\nSome council members are expected to use the opportunity to privately urge Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) to drop his longstanding opposition to the White House\u2019s choice for NASA administrator. Mr. Rubio\u2019s stance so far appears to have scuttled the nomination of Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n of Oklahoma, according to industry officials and Senate staffers.\u00a0A spokeswoman for Mr. Rubio couldn\u2019t be reached.\nWednesday\u2019s meeting comes amid heightened public interest and expanding private investment in space.\u00a0Some industry estimates indicate that since 2009, more than 300 space startups have received some $3.8 billion in funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which earlier this month launched the world\u2019s biggest rocket, and other growing commercial-space players are determined over the next few years to move faster than the government in fielding advanced spacecraft and boosters.\nEasing and simplifying restrictions on rocket launches have long been among the industry\u2019s top priorities. Companies, among other things, are demanding single licenses spanning multiple sites and different rocket variants.\nFederal Aviation Administration officials project such changes could take up to five years. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew Kopko,\n\n\n\n a senior official at the Transportation Department, which oversees the FAA, told the Washington conference earlier this month that faster action is essential. \u201cWe are here to enable growth,\u201d he told industry attendees. \u201cMost importantly, we are here to get out of your way.\u201d\nIn his presentation, Mr. Kopko said the department is listening to the industry. He added that the department is \u201cin the midst of a cultural change\u201d when it comes to space regulations.\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nThe FAA appears to be the biggest bureaucratic loser in the new White House initiative. For years, agency officials have advocated for the FAA to head governmentwide efforts to control orbital debris and ensure U.S. compliance with international treaty obligations regarding space exploration. Now, according to people familiar with the matter, the Commerce Department seems poised to lead in many of those areas.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment.\nMr. Ross, a former private-equity investor who has expressed personal interest in deregulation, has been tapped by the White House to implement a Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce new moves promoting private ventures in space, including easing launch rules and putting the Commerce Department in charge of broader deregulation initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2765",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-seeks-to-stimulate-private-space-projects-1519145536?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=78",
        "text": "The actions, slated to be announced during a meeting of the White House Space Council at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, will be the most detailed moves yet to accelerate the development of commercial projects beyond the atmosphere.\nCombined with earlier budget blueprints providing seed money for public-private partnerships for human space exploration, the Trump administration\u2019s plans are focused on reducing government oversight and procedural delays for a broad range of space entrepreneurs and corporate investors, according to the government and industry officials, who have been told about the thrust of the policy shifts.\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Mr. Pence couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe Trump administration has been pushing for deregulation across industries. In the past, the vice president has sketched out potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling lunar exploration initiative. He has stressed the importance of \u201claying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit.\u201d\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nScott Pace, the White House Space Council\u2019s top staffer, told a government-industry conference in Washington earlier in February that he expected Wednesday\u2019s meeting \u201cto try to make measurable progress on the regulatory environment.\u201d \nHeaded by the vice president, the high-level group includes Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rex Tillerson,\n\n\n\n Commerce Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wilbur Ross,\n\n\n\n Transportation Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elaine Chao,\n\n\n\n Office of Management and Budget director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Mulvaney,\n\n\n\n national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n and other cabinet-level appointees.\nSome council members are expected to use the opportunity to privately urge Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) to drop his longstanding opposition to the White House\u2019s choice for NASA administrator. Mr. Rubio\u2019s stance so far appears to have scuttled the nomination of Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n of Oklahoma, according to industry officials and Senate staffers.\u00a0A spokeswoman for Mr. Rubio couldn\u2019t be reached.\nWednesday\u2019s meeting comes amid heightened public interest and expanding private investment in space.\u00a0Some industry estimates indicate that since 2009, more than 300 space startups have received some $3.8 billion in funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which earlier this month launched the world\u2019s biggest rocket, and other growing commercial-space players are determined over the next few years to move faster than the government in fielding advanced spacecraft and boosters.\nEasing and simplifying restrictions on rocket launches have long been among the industry\u2019s top priorities. Companies, among other things, are demanding single licenses spanning multiple sites and different rocket variants.\nFederal Aviation Administration officials project such changes could take up to five years. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew Kopko,\n\n\n\n a senior official at the Transportation Department, which oversees the FAA, told the Washington conference earlier this month that faster action is essential. \u201cWe are here to enable growth,\u201d he told industry attendees. \u201cMost importantly, we are here to get out of your way.\u201d\nIn his presentation, Mr. Kopko said the department is listening to the industry. He added that the department is \u201cin the midst of a cultural change\u201d when it comes to space regulations.\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nThe FAA appears to be the biggest bureaucratic loser in the new White House initiative. For years, agency officials have advocated for the FAA to head governmentwide efforts to control orbital debris and ensure U.S. compliance with international treaty obligations regarding space exploration. Now, according to people familiar with the matter, the Commerce Department seems poised to lead in many of those areas.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment.\nMr. Ross, a former private-equity investor who has expressed personal interest in deregulation, has been tapped by the White House to implement a Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce new moves promoting private ventures in space, including easing launch rules and putting the Commerce Department in charge of broader deregulation initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2766",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-seeks-to-stimulate-private-space-projects-1519145536?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=70",
        "text": "The actions, slated to be announced during a meeting of the White House Space Council at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, will be the most detailed moves yet to accelerate the development of commercial projects beyond the atmosphere.\nCombined with earlier budget blueprints providing seed money for public-private partnerships for human space exploration, the Trump administration\u2019s plans are focused on reducing government oversight and procedural delays for a broad range of space entrepreneurs and corporate investors, according to the government and industry officials, who have been told about the thrust of the policy shifts.\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Mr. Pence couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe Trump administration has been pushing for deregulation across industries. In the past, the vice president has sketched out potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling lunar exploration initiative. He has stressed the importance of \u201claying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit.\u201d\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nScott Pace, the White House Space Council\u2019s top staffer, told a government-industry conference in Washington earlier in February that he expected Wednesday\u2019s meeting \u201cto try to make measurable progress on the regulatory environment.\u201d \nHeaded by the vice president, the high-level group includes Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rex Tillerson,\n\n\n\n Commerce Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wilbur Ross,\n\n\n\n Transportation Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elaine Chao,\n\n\n\n Office of Management and Budget director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Mulvaney,\n\n\n\n national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n and other cabinet-level appointees.\nSome council members are expected to use the opportunity to privately urge Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) to drop his longstanding opposition to the White House\u2019s choice for NASA administrator. Mr. Rubio\u2019s stance so far appears to have scuttled the nomination of Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n of Oklahoma, according to industry officials and Senate staffers.\u00a0A spokeswoman for Mr. Rubio couldn\u2019t be reached.\nWednesday\u2019s meeting comes amid heightened public interest and expanding private investment in space.\u00a0Some industry estimates indicate that since 2009, more than 300 space startups have received some $3.8 billion in funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which earlier this month launched the world\u2019s biggest rocket, and other growing commercial-space players are determined over the next few years to move faster than the government in fielding advanced spacecraft and boosters.\nEasing and simplifying restrictions on rocket launches have long been among the industry\u2019s top priorities. Companies, among other things, are demanding single licenses spanning multiple sites and different rocket variants.\nFederal Aviation Administration officials project such changes could take up to five years. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew Kopko,\n\n\n\n a senior official at the Transportation Department, which oversees the FAA, told the Washington conference earlier this month that faster action is essential. \u201cWe are here to enable growth,\u201d he told industry attendees. \u201cMost importantly, we are here to get out of your way.\u201d\nIn his presentation, Mr. Kopko said the department is listening to the industry. He added that the department is \u201cin the midst of a cultural change\u201d when it comes to space regulations.\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nThe FAA appears to be the biggest bureaucratic loser in the new White House initiative. For years, agency officials have advocated for the FAA to head governmentwide efforts to control orbital debris and ensure U.S. compliance with international treaty obligations regarding space exploration. Now, according to people familiar with the matter, the Commerce Department seems poised to lead in many of those areas.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment.\nMr. Ross, a former private-equity investor who has expressed personal interest in deregulation, has been tapped by the White House to implement a Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce new moves promoting private ventures in space, including easing launch rules and putting the Commerce Department in charge of broader deregulation initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2767",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-seeks-to-stimulate-private-space-projects-1519145536?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=24",
        "text": "The actions, slated to be announced during a meeting of the White House Space Council at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, will be the most detailed moves yet to accelerate the development of commercial projects beyond the atmosphere.\n\n\n\n\nCombined with earlier budget blueprints providing seed money for public-private partnerships for human space exploration, the Trump administration\u2019s plans are focused on reducing government oversight and procedural delays for a broad range of space entrepreneurs and corporate investors, according to the government and industry officials, who have been told about the thrust of the policy shifts.\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Mr. Pence couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe Trump administration has been pushing for deregulation across industries. In the past, the vice president has sketched out potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling lunar exploration initiative. He has stressed the importance of \u201claying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit.\u201d\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nScott Pace, the White House Space Council\u2019s top staffer, told a government-industry conference in Washington earlier in February that he expected Wednesday\u2019s meeting \u201cto try to make measurable progress on the regulatory environment.\u201d \nHeaded by the vice president, the high-level group includes Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rex Tillerson,\n\n\n\n Commerce Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wilbur Ross,\n\n\n\n Transportation Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elaine Chao,\n\n\n\n Office of Management and Budget director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Mulvaney,\n\n\n\n national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n and other cabinet-level appointees.\nSome council members are expected to use the opportunity to privately urge Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) to drop his longstanding opposition to the White House\u2019s choice for NASA administrator. Mr. Rubio\u2019s stance so far appears to have scuttled the nomination of Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n of Oklahoma, according to industry officials and Senate staffers.\u00a0A spokeswoman for Mr. Rubio couldn\u2019t be reached.\nWednesday\u2019s meeting comes amid heightened public interest and expanding private investment in space.\u00a0Some industry estimates indicate that since 2009, more than 300 space startups have received some $3.8 billion in funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which earlier this month launched the world\u2019s biggest rocket, and other growing commercial-space players are determined over the next few years to move faster than the government in fielding advanced spacecraft and boosters.\nEasing and simplifying restrictions on rocket launches have long been among the industry\u2019s top priorities. Companies, among other things, are demanding single licenses spanning multiple sites and different rocket variants.\nFederal Aviation Administration officials project such changes could take up to five years. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew Kopko,\n\n\n\n a senior official at the Transportation Department, which oversees the FAA, told the Washington conference earlier this month that faster action is essential. \u201cWe are here to enable growth,\u201d he told industry attendees. \u201cMost importantly, we are here to get out of your way.\u201d\nIn his presentation, Mr. Kopko said the department is listening to the industry. He added that the department is \u201cin the midst of a cultural change\u201d when it comes to space regulations.\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nThe FAA appears to be the biggest bureaucratic loser in the new White House initiative. For years, agency officials have advocated for the FAA to head governmentwide efforts to control orbital debris and ensure U.S. compliance with international treaty obligations regarding space exploration. Now, according to people familiar with the matter, the Commerce Department seems poised to lead in many of those areas.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment.\nMr. Ross, a former private-equity investor who has expressed personal interest in deregulation, has been tapped by the White House to impleme Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce new moves promoting private ventures in space, including easing launch rules and putting the Commerce Department in charge of broader deregulation initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2768",
        "date": "2018-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-seeks-to-stimulate-private-space-projects-1519145536?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=101",
        "text": "The actions, slated to be announced during a meeting of the White House Space Council at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, will be the most detailed moves yet to accelerate the development of commercial projects beyond the atmosphere.\n\n\n\n\nCombined with earlier budget blueprints providing seed money for public-private partnerships for human space exploration, the Trump administration\u2019s plans are focused on reducing government oversight and procedural delays for a broad range of space entrepreneurs and corporate investors, according to the government and industry officials, who have been told about the thrust of the policy shifts.\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Mr. Pence couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe Trump administration has been pushing for deregulation across industries. In the past, the vice president has sketched out potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling lunar exploration initiative. He has stressed the importance of \u201claying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial human presence in low-Earth orbit.\u201d\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nScott Pace, the White House Space Council\u2019s top staffer, told a government-industry conference in Washington earlier in February that he expected Wednesday\u2019s meeting \u201cto try to make measurable progress on the regulatory environment.\u201d \nHeaded by the vice president, the high-level group includes Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rex Tillerson,\n\n\n\n Commerce Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wilbur Ross,\n\n\n\n Transportation Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elaine Chao,\n\n\n\n Office of Management and Budget director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Mulvaney,\n\n\n\n national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n and other cabinet-level appointees.\nSome council members are expected to use the opportunity to privately urge Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) to drop his longstanding opposition to the White House\u2019s choice for NASA administrator. Mr. Rubio\u2019s stance so far appears to have scuttled the nomination of Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n of Oklahoma, according to industry officials and Senate staffers.\u00a0A spokeswoman for Mr. Rubio couldn\u2019t be reached.\nWednesday\u2019s meeting comes amid heightened public interest and expanding private investment in space.\u00a0Some industry estimates indicate that since 2009, more than 300 space startups have received some $3.8 billion in funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which earlier this month launched the world\u2019s biggest rocket, and other growing commercial-space players are determined over the next few years to move faster than the government in fielding advanced spacecraft and boosters.\nEasing and simplifying restrictions on rocket launches have long been among the industry\u2019s top priorities. Companies, among other things, are demanding single licenses spanning multiple sites and different rocket variants.\nFederal Aviation Administration officials project such changes could take up to five years. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew Kopko,\n\n\n\n a senior official at the Transportation Department, which oversees the FAA, told the Washington conference earlier this month that faster action is essential. \u201cWe are here to enable growth,\u201d he told industry attendees. \u201cMost importantly, we are here to get out of your way.\u201d\nIn his presentation, Mr. Kopko said the department is listening to the industry. He added that the department is \u201cin the midst of a cultural change\u201d when it comes to space regulations.\n\n\nRelated NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (Feb. 9) Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (Feb. 6) Essay: SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6) Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (Jan. 25) \n\n\nThe FAA appears to be the biggest bureaucratic loser in the new White House initiative. For years, agency officials have advocated for the FAA to head governmentwide efforts to control orbital debris and ensure U.S. compliance with international treaty obligations regarding space exploration. Now, according to people familiar with the matter, the Commerce Department seems poised to lead in many of those areas.\nAn FAA spokesman declined to comment.\nMr. Ross, a former private-equity investor who has expressed personal interest in deregulation, has been tapped by the White House to impleme Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce new moves promoting private ventures in space, including easing launch rules and putting the Commerce Department in charge of broader deregulation initiatives. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump to Host Space-Policy Council Promoting Commercial Ventures (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2769",
        "date": "2018-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-to-host-space-policy-council-promoting-commercial-ventures-1529192518?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=19",
        "text": "Related Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (Feb. 20) Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (Oct. 5, 2017) \n\n\nBoth initially were named months ago to serve on the panel, called the Users Advisory Group, but now have been removed from the list as a result of complications in vetting their financial and business ties, according to two of the people knowledgeable about the issue.\nSome aerospace industry officials and independent space experts worry that the vetting difficulties reflect broader issues blocking an aggressive shift toward expanded commercial involvement in U.S. space missions over the next two decades.\n\n\nMr. Gingrich, who has informally advised the White House on a broad range of topics, confirmed in an email Saturday that he will be attending the next meeting of the group \u201cas a public citizen,\u201d because \u201cmy attorneys were very uncomfortable\u201d with another role. Mr. Gingrich also wrote that he was offered a more official position, which he said he declined.\nIn addition, the former speaker indicated that Gen. Worden, who served as director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, won\u2019t be a member of the advisory panel either. He added that an alternate role for Gen. Worden \u201cis still being worked out.\u201d\nGen. Worden declined to comment, except to indicate that his ties as an adviser to Luxembourg\u2019s government caused some of the legal hitches.\nA spokeswoman for Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who is chairman of the space council, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nBut some supporters of expanded commercial efforts in space see a potential lag, partly because of the panel\u2019s vetting issues.\n\u201cNewt has been a voice for a public-private partnership driven approach,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Larson,\n\n\n\n a former industry and government official who is now an assistant dean at the University of Colorado\u2019s engineering school in Boulder. He added that Gen. Worden\u2019s innovative viewpoint \u201cat this important juncture would have been really valuable.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVice President Mike Pence, left, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Jim Bridenstine walked through the NASA headquarters in April.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bill Ingalls/NASA/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nMonday\u2019s televised White House session is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic spacecraft into low-earth orbit, to the lunar surface and ultimately, deeper into the solar system. The policy group also is expected to discuss a space traffic management proposal focused on reducing hazards to satellites from orbiting debris. Details of the agenda are expected to be released by White House press officials Sunday.\nMr. Trump\u2019s interest in space prompted him to propose a last-minute schedule change that would have allowed him participate in the space council\u2019s first meeting last October. White House aides barely managed to talk him out of that plan, according to one person involved in the discussions. \nA public meeting of the Users Advisory Group is scheduled for Tuesday. Among other things, the group will be asked to evaluate various options for creating a sustainable commercial marketplace in low-earth orbit.\nSince being confirmed as NASA administrator in April,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n hasn\u2019t proposed any major policy initiatives or revised budget plans aimed at expanding commercial activities outside the atmosphere.\nAs a first step, the Mr. Bridenstine has talked about promoting development of small commercial landers to transport scientific experiments to the moon. NASA, however, has less than $150 million earmarked annually for that task. Moreover, the agency hasn\u2019t released a specific spending blueprint for building and testing larger landers in later years, including versions aimed at carrying heavier payloads and ultimately astronauts.\nMr. Bridenstine also has surprised some commercial-space champions by fully supporting virtually all of the big-ticket exploration programs\u2014both human and robotic\u2014he inherited. Without deep cutbacks in some legacy programs, NASA critics contend the agency may be unable to fund new and robust commercial initiatives.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFormer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on a May 24 episode of \u2018Fox & Friends.\u2019 In an email Saturday, Mr. Gingrich said he declined a more official position with a space-exploration advisory panel.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Drew/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe NASA chief has advocated the White House position of cutting off direct federal funding for the international space station by 2025, but at this point prospects for that option appear dim on Capitol Hill.\nAnd so far, critics also say Mr. Bridenstine has opted to assemble a largely status quo leadership team. T The session at the White House is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic craft into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump to Host Space-Policy Council Promoting Commercial Ventures (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2770",
        "date": "2018-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-to-host-space-policy-council-promoting-commercial-ventures-1529192518?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=72",
        "text": "Related Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (Feb. 20) Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (Oct. 5, 2017) \n\n\nBoth initially were named months ago to serve on the panel, called the Users Advisory Group, but now have been removed from the list as a result of complications in vetting their financial and business ties, according to two of the people knowledgeable about the issue.\nSome aerospace industry officials and independent space experts worry that the vetting difficulties reflect broader issues blocking an aggressive shift toward expanded commercial involvement in U.S. space missions over the next two decades.\n\n\nMr. Gingrich, who has informally advised the White House on a broad range of topics, confirmed in an email Saturday that he will be attending the next meeting of the group \u201cas a public citizen,\u201d because \u201cmy attorneys were very uncomfortable\u201d with another role. Mr. Gingrich also wrote that he was offered a more official position, which he said he declined.\nIn addition, the former speaker indicated that Gen. Worden, who served as director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, won\u2019t be a member of the advisory panel either. He added that an alternate role for Gen. Worden \u201cis still being worked out.\u201d\nGen. Worden declined to comment, except to indicate that his ties as an adviser to Luxembourg\u2019s government caused some of the legal hitches.\nA spokeswoman for Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who is chairman of the space council, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nBut some supporters of expanded commercial efforts in space see a potential lag, partly because of the panel\u2019s vetting issues.\n\u201cNewt has been a voice for a public-private partnership driven approach,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Larson,\n\n\n\n a former industry and government official who is now an assistant dean at the University of Colorado\u2019s engineering school in Boulder. He added that Gen. Worden\u2019s innovative viewpoint \u201cat this important juncture would have been really valuable.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVice President Mike Pence, left, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Jim Bridenstine walked through the NASA headquarters in April.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bill Ingalls/NASA/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nMonday\u2019s televised White House session is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic spacecraft into low-earth orbit, to the lunar surface and ultimately, deeper into the solar system. The policy group also is expected to discuss a space traffic management proposal focused on reducing hazards to satellites from orbiting debris. Details of the agenda are expected to be released by White House press officials Sunday.\nMr. Trump\u2019s interest in space prompted him to propose a last-minute schedule change that would have allowed him participate in the space council\u2019s first meeting last October. White House aides barely managed to talk him out of that plan, according to one person involved in the discussions. \nA public meeting of the Users Advisory Group is scheduled for Tuesday. Among other things, the group will be asked to evaluate various options for creating a sustainable commercial marketplace in low-earth orbit.\nSince being confirmed as NASA administrator in April,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n hasn\u2019t proposed any major policy initiatives or revised budget plans aimed at expanding commercial activities outside the atmosphere.\nAs a first step, the Mr. Bridenstine has talked about promoting development of small commercial landers to transport scientific experiments to the moon. NASA, however, has less than $150 million earmarked annually for that task. Moreover, the agency hasn\u2019t released a specific spending blueprint for building and testing larger landers in later years, including versions aimed at carrying heavier payloads and ultimately astronauts.\nMr. Bridenstine also has surprised some commercial-space champions by fully supporting virtually all of the big-ticket exploration programs\u2014both human and robotic\u2014he inherited. Without deep cutbacks in some legacy programs, NASA critics contend the agency may be unable to fund new and robust commercial initiatives.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFormer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on a May 24 episode of \u2018Fox & Friends.\u2019 In an email Saturday, Mr. Gingrich said he declined a more official position with a space-exploration advisory panel.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Drew/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe NASA chief has advocated the White House position of cutting off direct federal funding for the international space station by 2025, but at this point prospects for that option appear dim on Capitol Hill.\nAnd so far, critics also say Mr. Bridenstine has opted to assemble a largely status quo leadership team. T The session at the White House is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic craft into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump to Host Space-Policy Council Promoting Commercial Ventures (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2771",
        "date": "2018-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-to-host-space-policy-council-promoting-commercial-ventures-1529192518?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=66",
        "text": "Related Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (Feb. 20) Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (Oct. 5, 2017) \n\n\nBoth initially were named months ago to serve on the panel, called the Users Advisory Group, but now have been removed from the list as a result of complications in vetting their financial and business ties, according to two of the people knowledgeable about the issue.\nSome aerospace industry officials and independent space experts worry that the vetting difficulties reflect broader issues blocking an aggressive shift toward expanded commercial involvement in U.S. space missions over the next two decades.\n\n\nMr. Gingrich, who has informally advised the White House on a broad range of topics, confirmed in an email Saturday that he will be attending the next meeting of the group \u201cas a public citizen,\u201d because \u201cmy attorneys were very uncomfortable\u201d with another role. Mr. Gingrich also wrote that he was offered a more official position, which he said he declined.\nIn addition, the former speaker indicated that Gen. Worden, who served as director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, won\u2019t be a member of the advisory panel either. He added that an alternate role for Gen. Worden \u201cis still being worked out.\u201d\nGen. Worden declined to comment, except to indicate that his ties as an adviser to Luxembourg\u2019s government caused some of the legal hitches.\nA spokeswoman for Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who is chairman of the space council, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nBut some supporters of expanded commercial efforts in space see a potential lag, partly because of the panel\u2019s vetting issues.\n\u201cNewt has been a voice for a public-private partnership driven approach,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Larson,\n\n\n\n a former industry and government official who is now an assistant dean at the University of Colorado\u2019s engineering school in Boulder. He added that Gen. Worden\u2019s innovative viewpoint \u201cat this important juncture would have been really valuable.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVice President Mike Pence, left, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Jim Bridenstine walked through the NASA headquarters in April.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bill Ingalls/NASA/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nMonday\u2019s televised White House session is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic spacecraft into low-earth orbit, to the lunar surface and ultimately, deeper into the solar system. The policy group also is expected to discuss a space traffic management proposal focused on reducing hazards to satellites from orbiting debris. Details of the agenda are expected to be released by White House press officials Sunday.\nMr. Trump\u2019s interest in space prompted him to propose a last-minute schedule change that would have allowed him participate in the space council\u2019s first meeting last October. White House aides barely managed to talk him out of that plan, according to one person involved in the discussions. \nA public meeting of the Users Advisory Group is scheduled for Tuesday. Among other things, the group will be asked to evaluate various options for creating a sustainable commercial marketplace in low-earth orbit.\nSince being confirmed as NASA administrator in April,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n hasn\u2019t proposed any major policy initiatives or revised budget plans aimed at expanding commercial activities outside the atmosphere.\nAs a first step, the Mr. Bridenstine has talked about promoting development of small commercial landers to transport scientific experiments to the moon. NASA, however, has less than $150 million earmarked annually for that task. Moreover, the agency hasn\u2019t released a specific spending blueprint for building and testing larger landers in later years, including versions aimed at carrying heavier payloads and ultimately astronauts.\nMr. Bridenstine also has surprised some commercial-space champions by fully supporting virtually all of the big-ticket exploration programs\u2014both human and robotic\u2014he inherited. Without deep cutbacks in some legacy programs, NASA critics contend the agency may be unable to fund new and robust commercial initiatives.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFormer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on a May 24 episode of \u2018Fox & Friends.\u2019 In an email Saturday, Mr. Gingrich said he declined a more official position with a space-exploration advisory panel.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Drew/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe NASA chief has advocated the White House position of cutting off direct federal funding for the international space station by 2025, but at this point prospects for that option appear dim on Capitol Hill.\nAnd so far, critics also say Mr. Bridenstine has opted to assemble a largely status quo leadership team. T The session at the White House is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic craft into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump to Host Space-Policy Council Promoting Commercial Ventures (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2772",
        "date": "2018-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-to-host-space-policy-council-promoting-commercial-ventures-1529192518?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=93",
        "text": "Related Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (Feb. 20) Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (Oct. 5, 2017) \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoth initially were named months ago to serve on the panel, called the Users Advisory Group, but now have been removed from the list as a result of complications in vetting their financial and business ties, according to two of the people knowledgeable about the issue.\nSome aerospace industry officials and independent space experts worry that the vetting difficulties reflect broader issues blocking an aggressive shift toward expanded commercial involvement in U.S. space missions over the next two decades.\n\n\nMr. Gingrich, who has informally advised the White House on a broad range of topics, confirmed in an email Saturday that he will be attending the next meeting of the group \u201cas a public citizen,\u201d because \u201cmy attorneys were very uncomfortable\u201d with another role. Mr. Gingrich also wrote that he was offered a more official position, which he said he declined.\nIn addition, the former speaker indicated that Gen. Worden, who served as director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Ames Research Center in the San Francisco Bay Area, won\u2019t be a member of the advisory panel either. He added that an alternate role for Gen. Worden \u201cis still being worked out.\u201d\nGen. Worden declined to comment, except to indicate that his ties as an adviser to Luxembourg\u2019s government caused some of the legal hitches.\nA spokeswoman for Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who is chairman of the space council, didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nBut some supporters of expanded commercial efforts in space see a potential lag, partly because of the panel\u2019s vetting issues.\n\u201cNewt has been a voice for a public-private partnership driven approach,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Larson,\n\n\n\n a former industry and government official who is now an assistant dean at the University of Colorado\u2019s engineering school in Boulder. He added that Gen. Worden\u2019s innovative viewpoint \u201cat this important juncture would have been really valuable.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVice President Mike Pence, left, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief Jim Bridenstine walked through the NASA headquarters in April.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bill Ingalls/NASA/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nMonday\u2019s televised White House session is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic spacecraft into low-earth orbit, to the lunar surface and ultimately, deeper into the solar system. The policy group also is expected to discuss a space traffic management proposal focused on reducing hazards to satellites from orbiting debris. Details of the agenda are expected to be released by White House press officials Sunday.\nMr. Trump\u2019s interest in space prompted him to propose a last-minute schedule change that would have allowed him participate in the space council\u2019s first meeting last October. White House aides barely managed to talk him out of that plan, according to one person involved in the discussions. \nA public meeting of the Users Advisory Group is scheduled for Tuesday. Among other things, the group will be asked to evaluate various options for creating a sustainable commercial marketplace in low-earth orbit.\nSince being confirmed as NASA administrator in April,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n hasn\u2019t proposed any major policy initiatives or revised budget plans aimed at expanding commercial activities outside the atmosphere.\nAs a first step, the Mr. Bridenstine has talked about promoting development of small commercial landers to transport scientific experiments to the moon. NASA, however, has less than $150 million earmarked annually for that task. Moreover, the agency hasn\u2019t released a specific spending blueprint for building and testing larger landers in later years, including versions aimed at carrying heavier payloads and ultimately astronauts.\nMr. Bridenstine also has surprised some commercial-space champions by fully supporting virtually all of the big-ticket exploration programs\u2014both human and robotic\u2014he inherited. Without deep cutbacks in some legacy programs, NASA critics contend the agency may be unable to fund new and robust commercial initiatives.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFormer Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appeared on a May 24 episode of \u2018Fox & Friends.\u2019 In an email Saturday, Mr. Gingrich said he declined a more official position with a space-exploration advisory panel.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Richard Drew/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe NASA chief has advocated the White House position of cutting off direct federal funding for the international space station by 2025, but at this point prospects for that option appear dim on Capitol Hill.\nAnd so far, critics also say Mr. Bridenstine has opted to assemble a largely status quo leadership tea The session at the White House is expected to emphasize an anticipated larger role for private enterprise in sending both astronauts and robotic craft into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "GOP Representative Bid to Become NASA Head Stumbles (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2773",
        "date": "2018-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rep-bridenstines-bid-to-become-nasa-head-stumbles-amid-partisan-brawl-1516016264?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=21",
        "text": "Now, industry officials and some congressional supporters of Mr. Bridenstine see the math becoming more challenging, partly due to factors outside their control. Last month\u2019s election of Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Doug Jones\n\n\n\n of Alabama narrowed the Republican majority, while continuing health issues could keep Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Thad Cochran\n\n\n\n of Mississippi from voting in favor or the nomination.\nWith Republican Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona widely seen as firmly opposed for policy and personal reasons, Senate GOP leaders envision a difficult\u2014and potentially monthslong\u2014confirmation battle, according to industry officials and others familiar with their thinking.\n\n\nBarring a major change of heart by key lawmakers or a strategy shift by the White House, at this point a number of veteran industry lobbyists and some senior Senate Republicans don\u2019t see a quick, clear-cut path for Mr. Bridenstine to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\nRelated Reading NASA Confirmation Hearing Takes Unusual Partisan Turn (Nov. 1) Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (Oct. 5) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) White House Likely to Name Rep. Jim Bridenstine NASA Chief by Next Month (Aug. 19) \n\n\nWhite House officials, however, are standing behind the choice and, according to outsiders tracking the process, aren\u2019t considering alternative candidates. One big worry is that any new nomination would move to the end of a long queue of backed-up nominations throughout the government.\n\u201cThe president looks forward to Rep. Bridenstine\u2019s swift confirmation by the Senate, and is confident he will lead NASA to ensure America is a leader in space exploration once again,\u201d said Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman.\nMr. Bridenstine couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \nA former combat pilot with scant management experience but a history of provocative, conservative views on gay rights, climate change and other hot-button partisan issues, Mr. Bridenstine has broad support across the aerospace industry. He has pledged to be \u201cvery nonpartisan\u201d in forging a broad consensus on space policy.\nYet with career NASA manager Robert Lightfoot already serving as acting administrator for about a year\u2014longer than any previous caretaker in NASA\u2019s recent history\u2014the White House has had to shelve plans seeking to revitalize the agency. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n and Vice Present\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n have extolled the benefits of harnessing enhanced public-private partnerships to send astronauts back to the moon.\nAbout a month ago, Mr. Trump signed a directive formally establishing NASA\u2019s goal to land humans on the moon \u201cfor long-term exploration and use,\u201d then using it as a steppingstone to ultimately send human missions to Mars.\nBut most of the important policy and budget decisions flowing from the White House initiative remain in limbo. \u00a0That is partly because White House officials have been reluctant to start locking in such changes without being able to rely on a permanent NASA chief and his lieutenants to direct the effort.\nThrough a spokesman Monday, Mr. Lightfoot said he is \u201clooking forward to a quick confirmation process and Jim\u2019s leadership of the agency\u2019s exciting future.\u201d\nIf Mr. Bridenstine eventually gets the job, he nonetheless will have lost the opportunity to influence 2019 budget priorities.\nThe Trump administration is expected to propose a largely status quo NASA budget for the next fiscal year, according to people familiar with the details. Between $100 million and $200 million in new dollars are likely to be requested for a budding lunar initiative, much of it slated to pave\u00a0the way for a landing system, they said.\nThat is a tiny sliver of the agency\u2019s roughly $19 billion spending plan, which is expected to maintain strong financial support for legacy programs. Those include the proposed deep-space Orion manned vehicle, NASA\u2019s behemoth SLS rocket eventually intended to take humans to Mars and commercial capsules slated to begin routinely ferrying NASA astronauts into orbit next year.\nMr. Trump\u2019s team previously tried but failed to sharply roll back environmental and earth-imaging programs. This time, according to one person familiar with the details, the budget submission is expected to include a slimmed-down version of a high-profile unmanned NASA mission called Europa Clipper. Slated to be launched sometime in the next decade, the spacecraft is intended to conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa and investigate whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life.\nFollowing the recommendations of an independent review, the mission will\u00a0carry a revised price tag of about $2.7 billion, down from nearly $3.3 billion, according to one person familiar with the specifics.\n Rep. James Bridenstine\u2019s controversial nomination to lead NASA faces mounting troubles, and the uncertainty threatens to further delay potentially major changes in agency programs favored by the White House. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "GOP Representative Bid to Become NASA Head Stumbles (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2774",
        "date": "2018-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rep-bridenstines-bid-to-become-nasa-head-stumbles-amid-partisan-brawl-1516016264?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=72",
        "text": "Now, industry officials and some congressional supporters of Mr. Bridenstine see the math becoming more challenging, partly due to factors outside their control. Last month\u2019s election of Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Doug Jones\n\n\n\n of Alabama narrowed the Republican majority, while continuing health issues could keep Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Thad Cochran\n\n\n\n of Mississippi from voting in favor or the nomination.\nWith Republican Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona widely seen as firmly opposed for policy and personal reasons, Senate GOP leaders envision a difficult\u2014and potentially monthslong\u2014confirmation battle, according to industry officials and others familiar with their thinking.\n\n\nBarring a major change of heart by key lawmakers or a strategy shift by the White House, at this point a number of veteran industry lobbyists and some senior Senate Republicans don\u2019t see a quick, clear-cut path for Mr. Bridenstine to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\nRelated Reading NASA Confirmation Hearing Takes Unusual Partisan Turn (Nov. 1) Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (Oct. 5) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) White House Likely to Name Rep. Jim Bridenstine NASA Chief by Next Month (Aug. 19) \n\n\nWhite House officials, however, are standing behind the choice and, according to outsiders tracking the process, aren\u2019t considering alternative candidates. One big worry is that any new nomination would move to the end of a long queue of backed-up nominations throughout the government.\n\u201cThe president looks forward to Rep. Bridenstine\u2019s swift confirmation by the Senate, and is confident he will lead NASA to ensure America is a leader in space exploration once again,\u201d said Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman.\nMr. Bridenstine couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \nA former combat pilot with scant management experience but a history of provocative, conservative views on gay rights, climate change and other hot-button partisan issues, Mr. Bridenstine has broad support across the aerospace industry. He has pledged to be \u201cvery nonpartisan\u201d in forging a broad consensus on space policy.\nYet with career NASA manager Robert Lightfoot already serving as acting administrator for about a year\u2014longer than any previous caretaker in NASA\u2019s recent history\u2014the White House has had to shelve plans seeking to revitalize the agency. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n and Vice Present\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n have extolled the benefits of harnessing enhanced public-private partnerships to send astronauts back to the moon.\nAbout a month ago, Mr. Trump signed a directive formally establishing NASA\u2019s goal to land humans on the moon \u201cfor long-term exploration and use,\u201d then using it as a steppingstone to ultimately send human missions to Mars.\nBut most of the important policy and budget decisions flowing from the White House initiative remain in limbo. \u00a0That is partly because White House officials have been reluctant to start locking in such changes without being able to rely on a permanent NASA chief and his lieutenants to direct the effort.\nThrough a spokesman Monday, Mr. Lightfoot said he is \u201clooking forward to a quick confirmation process and Jim\u2019s leadership of the agency\u2019s exciting future.\u201d\nIf Mr. Bridenstine eventually gets the job, he nonetheless will have lost the opportunity to influence 2019 budget priorities.\nThe Trump administration is expected to propose a largely status quo NASA budget for the next fiscal year, according to people familiar with the details. Between $100 million and $200 million in new dollars are likely to be requested for a budding lunar initiative, much of it slated to pave\u00a0the way for a landing system, they said.\nThat is a tiny sliver of the agency\u2019s roughly $19 billion spending plan, which is expected to maintain strong financial support for legacy programs. Those include the proposed deep-space Orion manned vehicle, NASA\u2019s behemoth SLS rocket eventually intended to take humans to Mars and commercial capsules slated to begin routinely ferrying NASA astronauts into orbit next year.\nMr. Trump\u2019s team previously tried but failed to sharply roll back environmental and earth-imaging programs. This time, according to one person familiar with the details, the budget submission is expected to include a slimmed-down version of a high-profile unmanned NASA mission called Europa Clipper. Slated to be launched sometime in the next decade, the spacecraft is intended to conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa and investigate whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life.\nFollowing the recommendations of an independent review, the mission will\u00a0carry a revised price tag of about $2.7 billion, down from nearly $3.3 billion, according to one person familiar with the specifics.\n Rep. James Bridenstine\u2019s controversial nomination to lead NASA faces mounting troubles, and the uncertainty threatens to further delay potentially major changes in agency programs favored by the White House. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "GOP Representative Bid to Become NASA Head Stumbles (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2775",
        "date": "2018-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rep-bridenstines-bid-to-become-nasa-head-stumbles-amid-partisan-brawl-1516016264?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=104",
        "text": "Now, industry officials and some congressional supporters of Mr. Bridenstine see the math becoming more challenging, partly due to factors outside their control. Last month\u2019s election of Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Doug Jones\n\n\n\n of Alabama narrowed the Republican majority, while continuing health issues could keep Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Thad Cochran\n\n\n\n of Mississippi from voting in favor or the nomination.\n\n\n\n\nWith Republican Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona widely seen as firmly opposed for policy and personal reasons, Senate GOP leaders envision a difficult\u2014and potentially monthslong\u2014confirmation battle, according to industry officials and others familiar with their thinking.\n\n\nBarring a major change of heart by key lawmakers or a strategy shift by the White House, at this point a number of veteran industry lobbyists and some senior Senate Republicans don\u2019t see a quick, clear-cut path for Mr. Bridenstine to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\nRelated Reading NASA Confirmation Hearing Takes Unusual Partisan Turn (Nov. 1) Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (Oct. 5) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) White House Likely to Name Rep. Jim Bridenstine NASA Chief by Next Month (Aug. 19) \n\n\nWhite House officials, however, are standing behind the choice and, according to outsiders tracking the process, aren\u2019t considering alternative candidates. One big worry is that any new nomination would move to the end of a long queue of backed-up nominations throughout the government.\n\u201cThe president looks forward to Rep. Bridenstine\u2019s swift confirmation by the Senate, and is confident he will lead NASA to ensure America is a leader in space exploration once again,\u201d said Lindsay Walters, a White House spokeswoman.\nMr. Bridenstine couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \nA former combat pilot with scant management experience but a history of provocative, conservative views on gay rights, climate change and other hot-button partisan issues, Mr. Bridenstine has broad support across the aerospace industry. He has pledged to be \u201cvery nonpartisan\u201d in forging a broad consensus on space policy.\nYet with career NASA manager Robert Lightfoot already serving as acting administrator for about a year\u2014longer than any previous caretaker in NASA\u2019s recent history\u2014the White House has had to shelve plans seeking to revitalize the agency. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n and Vice Present\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n have extolled the benefits of harnessing enhanced public-private partnerships to send astronauts back to the moon.\nAbout a month ago, Mr. Trump signed a directive formally establishing NASA\u2019s goal to land humans on the moon \u201cfor long-term exploration and use,\u201d then using it as a steppingstone to ultimately send human missions to Mars.\nBut most of the important policy and budget decisions flowing from the White House initiative remain in limbo. \u00a0That is partly because White House officials have been reluctant to start locking in such changes without being able to rely on a permanent NASA chief and his lieutenants to direct the effort.\nThrough a spokesman Monday, Mr. Lightfoot said he is \u201clooking forward to a quick confirmation process and Jim\u2019s leadership of the agency\u2019s exciting future.\u201d\nIf Mr. Bridenstine eventually gets the job, he nonetheless will have lost the opportunity to influence 2019 budget priorities.\nThe Trump administration is expected to propose a largely status quo NASA budget for the next fiscal year, according to people familiar with the details. Between $100 million and $200 million in new dollars are likely to be requested for a budding lunar initiative, much of it slated to pave\u00a0the way for a landing system, they said.\nThat is a tiny sliver of the agency\u2019s roughly $19 billion spending plan, which is expected to maintain strong financial support for legacy programs. Those include the proposed deep-space Orion manned vehicle, NASA\u2019s behemoth SLS rocket eventually intended to take humans to Mars and commercial capsules slated to begin routinely ferrying NASA astronauts into orbit next year.\nMr. Trump\u2019s team previously tried but failed to sharply roll back environmental and earth-imaging programs. This time, according to one person familiar with the details, the budget submission is expected to include a slimmed-down version of a high-profile unmanned NASA mission called Europa Clipper. Slated to be launched sometime in the next decade, the spacecraft is intended to conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa and investigate whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life.\nFollowing the recommendations of an independent review, the mission will\u00a0carry a revised price tag of about $2.7 billion, down from nearly $3.3 billion, according to one person familiar with the specifi Rep. James Bridenstine\u2019s controversial nomination to lead NASA faces mounting troubles, and the uncertainty threatens to further delay potentially major changes in agency programs favored by the White House. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Administration Portends Numerous Changes in Space Policies (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2776",
        "date": "2017-01-20",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-portends-numerous-changes-in-space-policies-1484959270?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=27",
        "text": "No specific proposals regarding space initiatives have yet been considered by Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the details. But aides for weeks have considered ways to create public-private partnerships fostering manned space exploration.\nAt the same time, retired Marine Corps Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Mattis,\n\n\n\n who was confirmed by the Senate as defense secretary hours after Mr. Trump\u2019s speech, previously signaled to the Senate Armed Services Committee that military space policies are going through a similar major reassessment.\n\n\nIn written responses to the panel earlier this month, the former four-star general said \u201cboth China and Russia have developed and tested a variety of antisatellite weapons that can destroy or disable\u201d U.S. spacecraft.\nSuch warnings have been sounded over the years by Pentagon and military brass. Echoing those sentiments, Gen. Mattis said \u201cwe must ensure the availability, security and resiliency of our [space] assets at all times and through all phases of conflict.\u201d\nBut answering a committee question about whether he favored introducing U.S. offensive capabilities into space, he opened the door to such a controversial move. \u201cOffensive space capabilities should be considered to ensure survivable and resilient space operations necessary for the execution of war plans,\u201d the defense secretary designee said in his prepared answer.\nUpon confirmation, he added, \u201cI will examine the feasibility of integrating such considerations into existing national security policy.\u201d\nThat stance appears to go beyond current U.S. policy positions, which have avoided militarizing space and emphasized jawboning and using international treaties to try to prevent adversaries from deploying antisatellite weapons. So far, most of the Pentagon\u2019s emphasis and extra funding have been directed at \u201chardening\u201d future U.S. national-security satellites against potential attacks, rather than publicly advocating offensive capabilities to attack satellites of other nations.\nOpponents of introducing offensive weapons into orbit contend they threaten to violate international treaty obligations and would touch off dangerous new military rivalries outside the atmosphere.\nBy Monday, according to people familiar with the details, Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order reviving a White House space council, to be chaired by Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence.\n \n\n\n\n The aim is to reinvigorate NASA\u2019s exploration efforts and to better coordinate U.S. military and civilian space programs\nMr. Trump also named Erik Noble, a former campaign aide with a background in space research, as the White House\u2019s senior adviser inside the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As expected, Gregory Autry, a University of Southern California professor and champion of commercial space ventures, was picked as the liaison between the White House and the agency.\nThe appointments follow a series of meetings between top transition aides and champions of commercial space projects, including entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly called SpaceX.\nTaken together, the developments indicate Mr. Trump\u2019s inner circle, including senior counselor Steve Bannon, are considering significant strategy changes intended to enhance space efforts. The potential shifts anticipate an era of constrained budgets and a stepped-up Pentagon drive to maintain U.S. superiority in space.\nThe Trump team\u2019s deliberations come amid warnings by Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that threats to U.S. satellites have developed \u201cwith alarming speed.\u201d As part of a sweeping Pentagon budget blueprint Sen. McCain released earlier this week, he said that over the next five years \u201cspace must be a priority for additional funding,\u201d and \u201cmany of these investments will, by necessity, be classified.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com President Donald Trump and his senior advisers are signaling potentially big shifts in both military and civilian space policies, and the first move could come by Monday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Administration Portends Numerous Changes in Space Policies (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2777",
        "date": "2017-01-20",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-portends-numerous-changes-in-space-policies-1484959270?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=132",
        "text": "No specific proposals regarding space initiatives have yet been considered by Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the details. But aides for weeks have considered ways to create public-private partnerships fostering manned space exploration.\n\n\n\n\nAt the same time, retired Marine Corps Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Mattis,\n\n\n\n who was confirmed by the Senate as defense secretary hours after Mr. Trump\u2019s speech, previously signaled to the Senate Armed Services Committee that military space policies are going through a similar major reassessment.\n\n\nIn written responses to the panel earlier this month, the former four-star general said \u201cboth China and Russia have developed and tested a variety of antisatellite weapons that can destroy or disable\u201d U.S. spacecraft.\nSuch warnings have been sounded over the years by Pentagon and military brass. Echoing those sentiments, Gen. Mattis said \u201cwe must ensure the availability, security and resiliency of our [space] assets at all times and through all phases of conflict.\u201d\nBut answering a committee question about whether he favored introducing U.S. offensive capabilities into space, he opened the door to such a controversial move. \u201cOffensive space capabilities should be considered to ensure survivable and resilient space operations necessary for the execution of war plans,\u201d the defense secretary designee said in his prepared answer.\nUpon confirmation, he added, \u201cI will examine the feasibility of integrating such considerations into existing national security policy.\u201d\nThat stance appears to go beyond current U.S. policy positions, which have avoided militarizing space and emphasized jawboning and using international treaties to try to prevent adversaries from deploying antisatellite weapons. So far, most of the Pentagon\u2019s emphasis and extra funding have been directed at \u201chardening\u201d future U.S. national-security satellites against potential attacks, rather than publicly advocating offensive capabilities to attack satellites of other nations.\nOpponents of introducing offensive weapons into orbit contend they threaten to violate international treaty obligations and would touch off dangerous new military rivalries outside the atmosphere.\nBy Monday, according to people familiar with the details, Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order reviving a White House space council, to be chaired by Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence.\n \n\n\n\n The aim is to reinvigorate NASA\u2019s exploration efforts and to better coordinate U.S. military and civilian space programs\nMr. Trump also named Erik Noble, a former campaign aide with a background in space research, as the White House\u2019s senior adviser inside the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As expected, Gregory Autry, a University of Southern California professor and champion of commercial space ventures, was picked as the liaison between the White House and the agency.\nThe appointments follow a series of meetings between top transition aides and champions of commercial space projects, including entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n founder of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly called SpaceX.\nTaken together, the developments indicate Mr. Trump\u2019s inner circle, including senior counselor Steve Bannon, are considering significant strategy changes intended to enhance space efforts. The potential shifts anticipate an era of constrained budgets and a stepped-up Pentagon drive to maintain U.S. superiority in space.\nThe Trump team\u2019s deliberations come amid warnings by Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that threats to U.S. satellites have developed \u201cwith alarming speed.\u201d As part of a sweeping Pentagon budget blueprint Sen. McCain released earlier this week, he said that over the next five years \u201cspace must be a priority for additional funding,\u201d and \u201cmany of these investments will, by necessity, be classified.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com President Donald Trump and his senior advisers are signaling potentially big shifts in both military and civilian space policies, and the first move could come by Monday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump in Space: Transition Focuses on Private-Public Initiatives (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2778",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-in-space-transition-focuses-on-private-public-initiatives-1484781119?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=27",
        "text": "But discussions about boosting public-private partnerships for potential projects to explore the moon, Mars or elsewhere in the solar system gained momentum recently with the participation of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Bannon,\n\n\n\n Mr. Trump\u2019s senior counselor and chief strategist. Mr. Bannon met earlier this month with champions of commercial space ventures, including SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stuart Witt,\n\n\n\n former CEO of the Mojave, Calif., spaceport.\nThere are other signs that the focus inside Trump Tower is shifting toward a larger role for commercial entities in future exploration initiatives.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gregory Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor of business and a strong supporter of commercial space efforts, has been chosen to head the team of experts assigned to NASA during the next phase of the transition, according to three people familiar with the decision.\n\n\nMr. Autry\u2019s research has delved into how government policies can promote startup space companies and support the emerging \u201cnew space\u201d industry. In addition to Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., that industry includes Blue Origin LLC, founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n Mr. Autry and other proponents of the trend see commercial space ventures as an important source of jobs and technical innovation.\nMr. Autry studied and wrote academic papers with economist Peter Navarro, tapped by Mr. Trump to head a new White House office overseeing trade and industrial policy.\nTransition officials and Mr. Autry didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nMr. Autry\u2019s anticipated leadership role comes weeks after venture capitalist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\n\n\n\n successfully pushed to give commercial space companies a stronger voice within Mr. Trump\u2019s transition, reflecting a previously reported internal tug-of-war over policy directions and future decision-making at NASA. \nThe Obama administration embraced commercial space ventures to ferry cargo and astronauts to the international space station, but it never proposed commercializing exploration deeper into the solar system.\nThe president-elect barely mentioned space during the campaign or since. But Mr. Bannon and other top transition officials have been holding meetings with space-industry officials for weeks as they mull strategies to reinvigorate NASA\u2019s manned exploration programs in light of anticipated budget constraints. \nAmong the batch of executive orders Mr. Trump is expected to sign following this weekend\u2019s inaugural festivities is one setting up a White House space council to be headed by Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n according to people who have been briefed on the schedule. Patterned after a high-level policy group that operated during\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George H.W. Bush\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration in the 1990s, the group would aim to better coordinate military and civilian space efforts, particularly expenditures on future heavy-lift rocket programs.\nA big part of the space council\u2019s task, according to people familiar with the matter, will be to combat redundancy while reshaping and potentially reducing overall federal spending on rockets, satellites and other space hardware through enhanced White House oversight of NASA and Defense Department programs.\nAs Mr. Trump\u2019s advisers mull possible steps, people familiar with the deliberations describe an increasing emphasis on options that also seek to incorporate ongoing work on commercial boosters and other largely privately funded space projects into a broader national plan for deep space exploration.\nFor example, U.S. spy agencies currently depend on beefed-up versions of Delta IV rockets, manufactured by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , to blast the biggest and most highly classified surveillance satellites into orbit. But total costs for some of those launches can exceed $500 million, according to industry officials, and it isn\u2019t clear how long Pentagon budgets will be able to sustain such spending.\nAs a result, one of the alternatives the transition team is investigating is whether a heavy-lift civilian rocket currently under development by NASA to help explore the solar system, called SLS, eventually could be used to blast military payloads into space.\nOther possible options are to look to SpaceX or Blue Origin to be part of the overall federal strategy to launch the full range of heavy spacecraft.\nIn the past, Mr. Autry has criticized SLS as lacking innovation, and described SpaceX and Blue Origin as leapfrogging it with more efficient, reusable propulsion systems.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Some of President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s senior advisers are considering ways to combine commercial and government funding for space programs with the goal of accelerating manned exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump in Space: Transition Focuses on Private-Public Initiatives (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2779",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-in-space-transition-focuses-on-private-public-initiatives-1484781119?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=133",
        "text": "But discussions about boosting public-private partnerships for potential projects to explore the moon, Mars or elsewhere in the solar system gained momentum recently with the participation of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Bannon,\n\n\n\n Mr. Trump\u2019s senior counselor and chief strategist. Mr. Bannon met earlier this month with champions of commercial space ventures, including SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stuart Witt,\n\n\n\n former CEO of the Mojave, Calif., spaceport.\n\n\n\n\nThere are other signs that the focus inside Trump Tower is shifting toward a larger role for commercial entities in future exploration initiatives.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gregory Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor of business and a strong supporter of commercial space efforts, has been chosen to head the team of experts assigned to NASA during the next phase of the transition, according to three people familiar with the decision.\n\n\nMr. Autry\u2019s research has delved into how government policies can promote startup space companies and support the emerging \u201cnew space\u201d industry. In addition to Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., that industry includes Blue Origin LLC, founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n Mr. Autry and other proponents of the trend see commercial space ventures as an important source of jobs and technical innovation.\nMr. Autry studied and wrote academic papers with economist Peter Navarro, tapped by Mr. Trump to head a new White House office overseeing trade and industrial policy.\nTransition officials and Mr. Autry didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nMr. Autry\u2019s anticipated leadership role comes weeks after venture capitalist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\n\n\n\n successfully pushed to give commercial space companies a stronger voice within Mr. Trump\u2019s transition, reflecting a previously reported internal tug-of-war over policy directions and future decision-making at NASA. \nThe Obama administration embraced commercial space ventures to ferry cargo and astronauts to the international space station, but it never proposed commercializing exploration deeper into the solar system.\nThe president-elect barely mentioned space during the campaign or since. But Mr. Bannon and other top transition officials have been holding meetings with space-industry officials for weeks as they mull strategies to reinvigorate NASA\u2019s manned exploration programs in light of anticipated budget constraints. \nAmong the batch of executive orders Mr. Trump is expected to sign following this weekend\u2019s inaugural festivities is one setting up a White House space council to be headed by Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n according to people who have been briefed on the schedule. Patterned after a high-level policy group that operated during\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George H.W. Bush\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration in the 1990s, the group would aim to better coordinate military and civilian space efforts, particularly expenditures on future heavy-lift rocket programs.\nA big part of the space council\u2019s task, according to people familiar with the matter, will be to combat redundancy while reshaping and potentially reducing overall federal spending on rockets, satellites and other space hardware through enhanced White House oversight of NASA and Defense Department programs.\nAs Mr. Trump\u2019s advisers mull possible steps, people familiar with the deliberations describe an increasing emphasis on options that also seek to incorporate ongoing work on commercial boosters and other largely privately funded space projects into a broader national plan for deep space exploration.\nFor example, U.S. spy agencies currently depend on beefed-up versions of Delta IV rockets, manufactured by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , to blast the biggest and most highly classified surveillance satellites into orbit. But total costs for some of those launches can exceed $500 million, according to industry officials, and it isn\u2019t clear how long Pentagon budgets will be able to sustain such spending.\nAs a result, one of the alternatives the transition team is investigating is whether a heavy-lift civilian rocket currently under development by NASA to help explore the solar system, called SLS, eventually could be used to blast military payloads into space.\nOther possible options are to look to SpaceX or Blue Origin to be part of the overall federal strategy to launch the full range of heavy spacecraft.\nIn the past, Mr. Autry has criticized SLS as lacking innovation, and described SpaceX and Blue Origin as leapfrogging it with more efficient, reusable propulsion systems.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Some of President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s senior advisers are considering ways to combine commercial and government funding for space programs with the goal of accelerating manned exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Gains More Sway Over Space Issues (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2780",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-gains-more-sway-over-space-issues-1523914463?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=19",
        "text": "\u201cThe volume of space traffic will only increase in the years ahead,\u201d Mr. Pence told an international conference here. He said the National Space Council, a high-level group that coordinates military and civilian space policies, made the recommendation. No details of the policy were released.\nMr. Ross and his department will continue to rely on the Pentagon\u2019s updated catalog of tens of thousands of objects whizzing around in low-earth orbit. But the U.S. military no longer will have the time-consuming job of distributing and discussing such data affecting commercial operators.\n\n\nThe development further raises Mr. Ross\u2019s stature as the primary focus of many federal space policies and the driving force behind the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to deregulate the sector, remove administrative barriers and promote private space endeavors. Mr. Pence said outdated federal rules controlling rocket launches, licenses for earth-imaging satellites and other private space projects amount to \u201ccumbersome and duplicative regulatory structures.\u201d\nPentagon brass have been maneuvering for years to shed that expense and responsibility. The new plan suggests that Mr. Ross emerged victorious from a prolonged bureaucratic tussle over whether the Commerce Department or the Transportation Department, which includes the Federal Aviation Administration, would become responsible for the task.\nIn a briefing for reporters following the speech, Mr. Ross suggested that at the start he would advocate changes only in limited areas, and not until digesting widespread input from industry. \u201cWe\u2019re the new kids on the block,\u201d he said, so \u201cwe want to make sure we understand the things that are troublesome\u201d to industry before proposing specific fixes.\nMr. Ross also said that after discussing the proposed shift with Air Force Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Wilson\n\n\n\n on Monday, the military supported using the Commerce Department to disseminate the Pentagon\u2019s data to commercial operators as well as to serve as a repository for debris data from other sources. \nMr. Pence said \u201ca stable and orderly space environment is critical to the strength of our economy and the resilience\u201d of military and spy satellites. \nThe Pentagon will remain in charge of maneuvering its own spacecraft to ensure against collisions with orbital debris. But industry officials expect that advanced military computer tools likely won\u2019t be available to the same extent to assist commercial operators. \nBut under the proposed arrangement, Mr. Pence said Commerce will provide a \u201cbasic level of space situational awareness for public and private use.\u201d Commercial satellite operators from the U.S. and scores of other countries rely on up-to-the minute Pentagon data to determine collision risks, though sometimes that is supplemented with third-party information and analyses.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n An ever-growing cloud of satellites, derelict rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft is circling the earth, raising the risk of costly orbital collisions. Photo: NASA (Originally published 9/12/17.)\n \n\n\nOrbital debris hazards are prompting escalating public and congressional attention partly because various companies and entrepreneurs are proposing launching ever-larger numbers of satellites into low-earth orbit. \nAn estimated 1,500 satellites of all types are currently circling the earth at a wide range of altitudes. But just two proposed Internet-via-space constellations anticipate blasting a total of twice as many satellites into low orbits within a decade. Tens of thousands of pieces of spent satellites, rockets and other space residue already can be found in lower orbits.\nGiven his new role, Mr. Ross also is likely to weigh in on sometimes-controversial matters related to Federal Communications Commission requirements for commercial operators to draft plans about how retired satellites will be taken out of orbit. The goal is to guarantee that remnants won\u2019t add to debris problems or cause damage to people or buildings from plummeting back to earth.\nIn the interview, Mr. Ross said Commerce\u2019s job will be to regulate but \u201cthe mind-set will be\u201d that of a facilitator. Rather than relying on mandatory rules, he said, \u201cwe want to act more as a coordinator, more as a cheerleader\u201d for voluntary industrywide standards. \nIn recent months, Mr. Ross and White House officials have been privately critical of what they viewed as FAA reluctance to quickly revamp and streamline launch-licensing procedures, according to industry and government officials closely tracking the process. \nIn the wake of such arguments, George Nield, the veteran head of the FAA\u2019s commercial transportation office, abruptly retired last month. FAA officials have declined to comment on the personnel change or the criticism, though acting agency chief Dan Elwell has publicly stressed the importance of proceeding carefully with deregulation to ensure safety.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at The Trump administration will try a new approach to preventing hundreds of military and commercial satellites from hitting space debris, Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Gains More Sway Over Space Issues (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2781",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-gains-more-sway-over-space-issues-1523914463?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=75",
        "text": "\u201cThe volume of space traffic will only increase in the years ahead,\u201d Mr. Pence told an international conference here. He said the National Space Council, a high-level group that coordinates military and civilian space policies, made the recommendation. No details of the policy were released.\nMr. Ross and his department will continue to rely on the Pentagon\u2019s updated catalog of tens of thousands of objects whizzing around in low-earth orbit. But the U.S. military no longer will have the time-consuming job of distributing and discussing such data affecting commercial operators.\n\n\nThe development further raises Mr. Ross\u2019s stature as the primary focus of many federal space policies and the driving force behind the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to deregulate the sector, remove administrative barriers and promote private space endeavors. Mr. Pence said outdated federal rules controlling rocket launches, licenses for earth-imaging satellites and other private space projects amount to \u201ccumbersome and duplicative regulatory structures.\u201d\nPentagon brass have been maneuvering for years to shed that expense and responsibility. The new plan suggests that Mr. Ross emerged victorious from a prolonged bureaucratic tussle over whether the Commerce Department or the Transportation Department, which includes the Federal Aviation Administration, would become responsible for the task.\nIn a briefing for reporters following the speech, Mr. Ross suggested that at the start he would advocate changes only in limited areas, and not until digesting widespread input from industry. \u201cWe\u2019re the new kids on the block,\u201d he said, so \u201cwe want to make sure we understand the things that are troublesome\u201d to industry before proposing specific fixes.\nMr. Ross also said that after discussing the proposed shift with Air Force Secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Wilson\n\n\n\n on Monday, the military supported using the Commerce Department to disseminate the Pentagon\u2019s data to commercial operators as well as to serve as a repository for debris data from other sources. \nMr. Pence said \u201ca stable and orderly space environment is critical to the strength of our economy and the resilience\u201d of military and spy satellites. \nThe Pentagon will remain in charge of maneuvering its own spacecraft to ensure against collisions with orbital debris. But industry officials expect that advanced military computer tools likely won\u2019t be available to the same extent to assist commercial operators. \nBut under the proposed arrangement, Mr. Pence said Commerce will provide a \u201cbasic level of space situational awareness for public and private use.\u201d Commercial satellite operators from the U.S. and scores of other countries rely on up-to-the minute Pentagon data to determine collision risks, though sometimes that is supplemented with third-party information and analyses.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n An ever-growing cloud of satellites, derelict rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft is circling the earth, raising the risk of costly orbital collisions. Photo: NASA (Originally published 9/12/17.)\n \n\n\nOrbital debris hazards are prompting escalating public and congressional attention partly because various companies and entrepreneurs are proposing launching ever-larger numbers of satellites into low-earth orbit. \nAn estimated 1,500 satellites of all types are currently circling the earth at a wide range of altitudes. But just two proposed Internet-via-space constellations anticipate blasting a total of twice as many satellites into low orbits within a decade. Tens of thousands of pieces of spent satellites, rockets and other space residue already can be found in lower orbits.\nGiven his new role, Mr. Ross also is likely to weigh in on sometimes-controversial matters related to Federal Communications Commission requirements for commercial operators to draft plans about how retired satellites will be taken out of orbit. The goal is to guarantee that remnants won\u2019t add to debris problems or cause damage to people or buildings from plummeting back to earth.\nIn the interview, Mr. Ross said Commerce\u2019s job will be to regulate but \u201cthe mind-set will be\u201d that of a facilitator. Rather than relying on mandatory rules, he said, \u201cwe want to act more as a coordinator, more as a cheerleader\u201d for voluntary industrywide standards. \nIn recent months, Mr. Ross and White House officials have been privately critical of what they viewed as FAA reluctance to quickly revamp and streamline launch-licensing procedures, according to industry and government officials closely tracking the process. \nIn the wake of such arguments, George Nield, the veteran head of the FAA\u2019s commercial transportation office, abruptly retired last month. FAA officials have declined to comment on the personnel change or the criticism, though acting agency chief Dan Elwell has publicly stressed the importance of proceeding carefully with deregulation to ensure safety.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at The Trump administration will try a new approach to preventing hundreds of military and commercial satellites from hitting space debris, Vice President Mike Pence said on Monday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump says he hopes humans set foot on Mars \u2018during my second term\u2019 (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2782",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/04/24/trump-says-he-hopes-humans-set-foot-on-mars-during-my-second-term/",
        "text": "To the long\u00a0list of ambitious goals he has set, no matter how far-fetched they might seem, President Trump on Monday added this: placing humans on Mars.In a dramatic call from the White House with a pair of astronauts at the International Space Station, Trump urged NASA to speed up its exploration timeline to get humans on Mars \"at worst, during my second term.\" WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump was celebrating Commander Peggy Whitson, an astronaut who set a new U.S. record of cumulative days in space at more than 534 days. Trump spoke live on a video conference call for about 20 minutes from the Oval Office with Whitson and a second astronaut, Flight Engineer Jack Fischer, who also was at the space station. The president marveled at the sophisticated technology that allowed them to have a relatively clear conversation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"That's what we like, great American equipment that works,\" said Trump, who sat at his desk and was flanked by his daughter, Ivanka, and astronaut Kate Rubins. A number of advisers, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, also were in the Oval Office during the call.The conversation was streamed in classrooms across the country, in part to encourage girls to study science, technology and math.\u201cI\u2019ve been dealing with politicians so much \u2014\u00a0I\u2019m so much more impressed with these people, you have no idea,\" Trump said of the astronauts.At one point, the astronauts explained that they recycle their urine into water, to which the president, a noted germaphobe, quipped, \"Better you than me.\"Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?Trump noted that he has \"many friends\" involved in commercial space exploration. \"Many American entrepreneurs are racing into space,\" Trump said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo prominent businessmen \u2014\u00a0Tesla founder Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post \u2014\u00a0have companies, Space X and Blue Origin respectively, at the forefront of commercial space activities. Musk has said he wants to launch the first humans to Mars in 2024.During his call with the astronauts, landing humans on the surface of Mars seemed to be top-of-mind for Trump.\"Who's ready to go to Mars up there?\" Trump asked Whitson and Fischer. In a dramatic call from the White House with a pair of astronauts at the International Space Station, Trump urged NASA to speed up its exploration timeline to get humans on Mars \"at worst, during my second term.\" Trump says he hopes humans set foot on Mars \u2018during my second term\u2019",
        "author": "Philip Rucker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump says he hopes humans set foot on Mars \u2018during my second term\u2019 (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2783",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/04/24/trump-says-he-hopes-humans-set-foot-on-mars-during-my-second-term/",
        "text": "To the long\u00a0list of ambitious goals he has set, no matter how far-fetched they might seem, President Trump on Monday added this: placing humans on Mars.In a dramatic call from the White House with a pair of astronauts at the International Space Station, Trump urged NASA to speed up its exploration timeline to get humans on Mars \"at worst, during my second term.\" WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump was celebrating Commander Peggy Whitson, an astronaut who set a new U.S. record of cumulative days in space at more than 534 days. Trump spoke live on a video conference call for about 20 minutes from the Oval Office with Whitson and a second astronaut, Flight Engineer Jack Fischer, who also was at the space station. The president marveled at the sophisticated technology that allowed them to have a relatively clear conversation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"That's what we like, great American equipment that works,\" said Trump, who sat at his desk and was flanked by his daughter, Ivanka, and astronaut Kate Rubins. A number of advisers, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, also were in the Oval Office during the call.The conversation was streamed in classrooms across the country, in part to encourage girls to study science, technology and math.\u201cI\u2019ve been dealing with politicians so much \u2014\u00a0I\u2019m so much more impressed with these people, you have no idea,\" Trump said of the astronauts.At one point, the astronauts explained that they recycle their urine into water, to which the president, a noted germaphobe, quipped, \"Better you than me.\"Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?Trump noted that he has \"many friends\" involved in commercial space exploration. \"Many American entrepreneurs are racing into space,\" Trump said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo prominent businessmen \u2014\u00a0Tesla founder Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post \u2014\u00a0have companies, Space X and Blue Origin respectively, at the forefront of commercial space activities. Musk has said he wants to launch the first humans to Mars in 2024.During his call with the astronauts, landing humans on the surface of Mars seemed to be top-of-mind for Trump.\"Who's ready to go to Mars up there?\" Trump asked Whitson and Fischer. In a dramatic call from the White House with a pair of astronauts at the International Space Station, Trump urged NASA to speed up its exploration timeline to get humans on Mars \"at worst, during my second term.\" Trump says he hopes humans set foot on Mars \u2018during my second term\u2019",
        "author": "Philip Rucker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump says he hopes humans set foot on Mars \u2018during my second term\u2019 (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2784",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/04/24/trump-says-he-hopes-humans-set-foot-on-mars-during-my-second-term/",
        "text": "To the long\u00a0list of ambitious goals he has set, no matter how far-fetched they might seem, President Trump on Monday added this: placing humans on Mars.In a dramatic call from the White House with a pair of astronauts at the International Space Station, Trump urged NASA to speed up its exploration timeline to get humans on Mars \"at worst, during my second term.\" WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump was celebrating Commander Peggy Whitson, an astronaut who set a new U.S. record of cumulative days in space at more than 534 days. Trump spoke live on a video conference call for about 20 minutes from the Oval Office with Whitson and a second astronaut, Flight Engineer Jack Fischer, who also was at the space station. The president marveled at the sophisticated technology that allowed them to have a relatively clear conversation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"That's what we like, great American equipment that works,\" said Trump, who sat at his desk and was flanked by his daughter, Ivanka, and astronaut Kate Rubins. A number of advisers, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, also were in the Oval Office during the call.The conversation was streamed in classrooms across the country, in part to encourage girls to study science, technology and math.\u201cI\u2019ve been dealing with politicians so much \u2014\u00a0I\u2019m so much more impressed with these people, you have no idea,\" Trump said of the astronauts.At one point, the astronauts explained that they recycle their urine into water, to which the president, a noted germaphobe, quipped, \"Better you than me.\"Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?Trump noted that he has \"many friends\" involved in commercial space exploration. \"Many American entrepreneurs are racing into space,\" Trump said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo prominent businessmen \u2014\u00a0Tesla founder Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post \u2014\u00a0have companies, Space X and Blue Origin respectively, at the forefront of commercial space activities. Musk has said he wants to launch the first humans to Mars in 2024.During his call with the astronauts, landing humans on the surface of Mars seemed to be top-of-mind for Trump.\"Who's ready to go to Mars up there?\" Trump asked Whitson and Fischer. In a dramatic call from the White House with a pair of astronauts at the International Space Station, Trump urged NASA to speed up its exploration timeline to get humans on Mars \"at worst, during my second term.\" Trump says he hopes humans set foot on Mars \u2018during my second term\u2019",
        "author": "Philip Rucker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The final tally: Trump went 0 for 5 in his general-election debates (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2785",
        "date": "2020-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/23/final-tally-trump-went-0-for-5-his-general-election-debates/",
        "text": "No one likes to lose, really, but most people accept that it happens from time to time. LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers lost 19 regular season games this year despite being the best team in basketball. It happens, and competitors deal with it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Trump, though, likes losing far less than normal people do. \u201cWinning\u201d is as much a part of his brand as gold appliqu\u00e9. So presented with a choice between having lost and lying about winning, Trump will take the latter at every available opportunity. It was not a surprise then that, shortly after the second and final presidential debate Thursday night, Trump took to Twitter to claim that he not only won the contest but did so overwhelmingly. Following a now-familiar pattern, he elevated Twitter-based surveys showing him winning overwhelmingly \u2014 surveys offered by a litany of conservative personalities and news sites. This is the fifth debate in which Trump has participated, thus it will be the fifth time that I must remind the world that Twitter surveys are to polling what a child making a spaceship out of a box is to NASA: something anyone can participate in if they want but which in almost no way involves any real science.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere were real polls taken after the debate, statistically valid ones limited to people who actually watched the debate. One from YouGov, for example, found that Democratic nominee Joe Biden was seen as the winner by a majority of respondents, with 54 percent picking him and 35 percent picking Trump. A poll from CNN and its polling partners at SSRS found something similar: a 53 percent to 39 percent Biden advantage.That you were unable to participate in these polls simply because you wanted to is precisely the point.Overall, it\u2019s likely that this result does not matter much. Before the debate, CNN\u2019s pollster asked people who they expected to win; most respondents came in thinking Biden was going to win, anyway. Among those polled, Biden had a higher net favorability rating before the debate (at plus-10, respondents were 10 points more likely to say they viewed him favorably than unfavorably). After the debate, measures of favorability didn\u2019t change very much.A good measure of how things went is how partisans viewed the event. Members of a candidate\u2019s party are less likely to say that their guy lost, but, even so, resignation can filter into the responses. In CNN\u2019s poll, 93 percent of Democrats thought Biden won while 6 percent thought Trump did. Among Republicans, 78 percent thought Trump won, while 11 percent pegged Biden as the winner. One in 10 Republicans said both did equally well, which is as good as a loss for Trump among members of his own party.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAgain, this poll matters not because it likely shifted the race but because it didn\u2019t. Trump needed a debate ex machina to upend the presidential race. This wasn\u2019t that.Moderators in the final presidential debate were allowed to mute microphones for interruptions. Here\u2019s how both candidates\u2019 body language spoke on their behalf. (The Washington Post)If you need any reminder that debates don\u2019t determine the winners of presidential contests, a little history is in order. In 2016, Trump lost all three general-election debates, according to CNN polling \u2014 and, really, every objective observer. His first and last debates then mirror closely to this year\u2019s results, in fact: Hillary Clinton won 62 percent to 27 percent in the first contest four years ago, compared with Biden\u2019s 60 percent to 28 percent win this year. In the final debate of 2016, Clinton won by 52 percent to 39 percent.One takeaway from this? Trump never won any of his general-election debates. He went a perfect 0 for 5, a record that is far more \u201cNew York Knicks\u201d than \u201cLos Angeles Lakers.\u201dTrump is nonetheless president of the United States, because debates aren\u2019t everything, if they\u2019re even much of anything. Which makes it all the more odd that the president is so insistent he won them. He could simply ignore the result and put his head down for the final push. But the Trump brand is winning, so if he has to elevate Clay Travis\u2019s Twitter survey to prove that point, that\u2019s what he\u2019ll do. Luckily for the president, that hasn\u2019t proved disqualifying. The final tally: Trump went 0 for 5 in his general-election debates",
        "author": "Philip Bump"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden fundraising tops that of Trump, as both announce big June hauls (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2786",
        "date": "2020-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-fundraising-tops-trump-as-both-announce-big-june-hauls/2020/07/01/b7895dfe-bc05-11ea-80b9-40ece9a701dc_story.html",
        "text": "As the presidential campaigns gear up in earnest for the general election, supporters are contributing in massive amounts to support the two presumptive nominees, with former vice president Joe Biden outraising President Trump by $10\u00a0million in June, according to new figures.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Biden campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee and affiliated committees, raised $141\u00a0million in June, its biggest month by far, according to figures released Wednesday night. In comparison, the Trump 2020 reelection campaign, the Republican National Committee and affiliated committees raised $131\u00a0million, the RNC said Wednesday \u2014 also a striking amount.That means Biden outraised Trump for the second month in a row. Biden\u2019s reported quarterly haul of $282.1\u00a0million also exceeded the $266\u00a0million reported by Trump\u2019s reelection effort.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth campaigns\u2019 fundraising vastly exceeds the amount of money raised in a corresponding stretch by President Barack Obama, who drew $71.1\u00a0million in June 2012, according to federal filings.The exploding contributions reflect the unusual intensity and visceral passions generated by this campaign, as Trump\u2019s die-hard supporters face off against those who want desperately to unseat him.Trump, who has raised and spent money for his reelection far earlier than other presidents, still has a large war chest. Trump\u2019s fundraising committees and the RNC entered July with $295 million in hand, officials said \u2014 more than double the $144\u00a0million that Obama\u2019s reelection effort had at the same point in 2012, filings show.Story continues below advertisementBiden\u2019s campaign did not announce its cash-on-hand figures. As of May\u00a031, his campaign, the DNC and an affiliated committee had $130\u00a0million on hand.AdvertisementBiden\u2019s big June fundraising haul came after he significantly expanded his fundraising capability to compete with Trump\u2019s big-money machine.Biden has pursued an aggressive fundraising schedule recently, holding multiple virtual fundraising events each week and raising millions of dollars per event for the joint committee that accepts six-figure checks to support the Biden campaign and the DNC.Biden particularly benefited from big-ticket fundraisers in June, including one with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) that netted $6\u00a0million and another with Obama that raised $7.6\u00a0million. Another fundraiser, featuring Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), raised $3.5\u00a0million, according to figures provided by the Biden campaign.Elizabeth Warren said fundraisers would tear \u2018this democracy apart.\u2019 On Monday, she raised $6 million for Joe Biden.Trump also raised large sums with high-profile events in June. The Trump campaign and the RNC made a major fundraising push around the president\u2019s June\u00a014 birthday that raised $14\u00a0million in a single day, the RNC said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president also appeared last month at his first high-dollar, in-person fundraisers since coronavirus restrictions took effect, raising at least $13\u00a0million through two events, according to the RNC.Trump is set to hold another high-dollar dinner at a private residence in Hillsboro Beach, Fla., next week to raise money for his campaign and the RNC, according to an invitation sent to top GOP donors.Trump set to headline high-dollar fundraising dinner at a private Florida home next weekThe event is set to charge $580,600 per couple and is likely to inject millions more dollars into Trump\u2019s reelection coffers.Biden\u2019s fundraising machine is similarly plowing ahead. On Wednesday, he appeared at a fundraiser hosted by Alan Leventhal, the chairman and chief executive of Beacon Capital Partners, and he lashed out at Trump.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOur country is crying out for leadership \u2014 and maybe even more important, some healing,\u201d Biden said.AdvertisementOn Tuesday night, Biden held a conversation that featured actor Mark Hamill, best known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies. Hamill joked that Biden\u2019s reason for asking him to host the event became clear after Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale compared Trump\u2019s operation to the Death Star.\u201cFor nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star). It is firing on all cylinders,\u201d Parscale wrote on Twitter, including an image of the fictional moon-size spaceship as it prepared to destroy a planet.Hamill\u2019s response: \u201cHa ha! That\u2019s right in my wheelhouse.\u201d He added: \u201cHow perfectly tone-deaf. And yet, right on brand for him to cast their side as the evil empire and us as the valiant resistance fighting selflessly for freedom.\u201d\n\n\n\n Joe Biden edges President Trump in June fundraising, reflecting the campaign\u2019s intensity. Biden fundraising tops that of Trump, as both announce big June hauls",
        "author": "Michelle Ye Hee Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Six federal employees to be honored with the \u2018Oscars of Government Service\u2019 (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2787",
        "date": "2019-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/six-federal-employees-to-be-honored-with-the-oscars-of-government-service/2019/10/15/38a11192-ef84-11e9-b2da-606ba1ef30e3_story.html",
        "text": "While President Trump\u2019s White House rolls like a small ship in a big storm, the civil service keeps the government calm, focused and delivering to the public \u2014 here and abroad.A sampling of America\u2019s best civil servants were honored recently during the 18th annual Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals gala, presented by the Partnership for Public Service. Also called the \u201cSammies\u201d and the \u201cOscars of Government Service,\u201d the awards will go to six federal employees who have demonstrated outstanding achievements. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s easy to find sports champions and Oscar-winning celebrities on late-night TV and in popular magazines. But what about outstanding public servants who quietly serve our country?\u201d said Max Stier, the partnership\u2019s president and chief executive. \u201cAmericans should know as much about these heroes as they do about their favorite actors and athletes. .\u2009.\u2009. At a time when government dysfunction dominates the headlines, it is even more important to share stories of exceptional civil servants who are making a difference and remind the public how our federal workforce serves them.\u201dFor the first time in the history of the awards, all winners are from outside the Washington area, which is indicative of the 85\u00a0percent of federal employees who do not live in the capital region, which includes counties as far away as West Virginia. Here are the accomplishments of the six winners:Federal Employee of the Year to Victoria Brahm, 61, director of the Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tomah, Wis. She is honored for restoring \u201cthe quality and safety of a broken health care center for veterans that had become notorious for unsafe medical practices, excessive opioid use and a toxic work environment.\u201d Brahm, a 38-year federal employee, told the Federal Insiderthat she considers her work \u201ca calling for an honorable mission to care for those who took care of us.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPaul A. Volcker Career Achievement Medal to Ann McKee, 66, chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System in Boston. She \u201crevolutionized scientific research and our understanding of the long-term effects of concussions, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in veterans and athletes.\u201d McKee said VA\u2019s \u201cbureaucracy can be daunting,\u201d but she remains \u201cfascinated by the brain. .\u2009.\u2009. My work tries to advance our understanding of the human brain in health and in disease.\u201dManagement Excellence Medal to Robert Cabana and team. Cabana, director of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, was selected for transforming the center \u201cinto a globally distinguished, multiuser launch site for government and commercial space exploration, helping preserve our country\u2019s leadership in this important field.\u201d At \u201c70 years young,\u201d Cabana said \u201cI have been serving our nation since I graduated from high school\u201d and calls his work \u201cpretty darn significant and very rewarding.\u201dNational Security and International Affairs Medal to Ryan Shelby,\u00a035, diplomatic attache and Foreign Service engineering officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Shelby \u201cprovided vital training and resources to help people in Haiti rebuild thousands of homes and roofs ripped apart by a Category\u00a04 hurricane, making the structures safer and stronger to withstand future disasters.\u201d Shelby said, \u201cUSAID/Haiti worked with community members to rebuild and improve the hurricane resistance of 5,000 roofs using a market-based approach, trained 6,425 people in reconstruction techniques, reconstructed seven water distribution points, and improved the sanitary blocks of 12 schools, which benefited 712 children.\u201dSafety and Law Enforcement Medal to Jamie Rhome, 43, storm surge specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. He \u201ccreated a new forecasting model and warning system that more accurately predicts the deadly storm surge caused by hurricanes, saving lives by alerting residents sooner of the approaching danger.\u201d When Rhome talks to private-sector colleagues who balk at joining the federal government because of the pay, he tells them about \u201cthe mission and the sense of pride\u201d among federal workers and how that \u201cmore than compensates for any salary loss.\u201d\u00a0Science and Environment Medal\u00a0to Daniel B. Jernigan, 55, influenza division director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Jernigan \u201cled response efforts for dozens of disease crises, including Ebola, SARS and West Nile virus, while greatly improving our country\u2019s ability to identify, prepare for and respond to inevitable flu pandemics.\u201d He said he loves working where he \u201ccan have a rapid and very tangible impact on an emerging public health threat.\u201d\u00a0The enthusiasm of the winners for their work was clear when each told me they would recommend the federal government as a place to work. Most prefaced their comments on that point with \u201cabsolutely.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWe won\u2019t have the government we want if we don\u2019t celebrate the things we like. .\u2009.\u2009. They are incredible people,\u201d Stier said of the winners, \u201cand no one knows about them, and they should.\u201d\u00a0 For the first time, all winners of the \u201cSammies\u201d are from outside the Washington area, indicative of the 85 percent of federal employees who do not live in the capital region. Six federal employees to be honored with the \u2018Oscars of Government Service\u2019",
        "author": "Joe Davidson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Six federal employees to be honored with the \u2018Oscars of Government Service\u2019 (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2788",
        "date": "2019-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/six-federal-employees-to-be-honored-with-the-oscars-of-government-service/2019/10/15/38a11192-ef84-11e9-b2da-606ba1ef30e3_story.html",
        "text": "While President Trump\u2019s White House rolls like a small ship in a big storm, the civil service keeps the government calm, focused and delivering to the public \u2014 here and abroad.A sampling of America\u2019s best civil servants were honored recently during the 18th annual Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals gala, presented by the Partnership for Public Service. Also called the \u201cSammies\u201d and the \u201cOscars of Government Service,\u201d the awards will go to six federal employees who have demonstrated outstanding achievements. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s easy to find sports champions and Oscar-winning celebrities on late-night TV and in popular magazines. But what about outstanding public servants who quietly serve our country?\u201d said Max Stier, the partnership\u2019s president and chief executive. \u201cAmericans should know as much about these heroes as they do about their favorite actors and athletes. .\u2009.\u2009. At a time when government dysfunction dominates the headlines, it is even more important to share stories of exceptional civil servants who are making a difference and remind the public how our federal workforce serves them.\u201dFor the first time in the history of the awards, all winners are from outside the Washington area, which is indicative of the 85\u00a0percent of federal employees who do not live in the capital region, which includes counties as far away as West Virginia. Here are the accomplishments of the six winners:Federal Employee of the Year to Victoria Brahm, 61, director of the Tomah Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Tomah, Wis. She is honored for restoring \u201cthe quality and safety of a broken health care center for veterans that had become notorious for unsafe medical practices, excessive opioid use and a toxic work environment.\u201d Brahm, a 38-year federal employee, told the Federal Insiderthat she considers her work \u201ca calling for an honorable mission to care for those who took care of us.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPaul A. Volcker Career Achievement Medal to Ann McKee, 66, chief of neuropathology at the VA Boston Healthcare System in Boston. She \u201crevolutionized scientific research and our understanding of the long-term effects of concussions, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in veterans and athletes.\u201d McKee said VA\u2019s \u201cbureaucracy can be daunting,\u201d but she remains \u201cfascinated by the brain. .\u2009.\u2009. My work tries to advance our understanding of the human brain in health and in disease.\u201dManagement Excellence Medal to Robert Cabana and team. Cabana, director of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, was selected for transforming the center \u201cinto a globally distinguished, multiuser launch site for government and commercial space exploration, helping preserve our country\u2019s leadership in this important field.\u201d At \u201c70 years young,\u201d Cabana said \u201cI have been serving our nation since I graduated from high school\u201d and calls his work \u201cpretty darn significant and very rewarding.\u201dNational Security and International Affairs Medal to Ryan Shelby,\u00a035, diplomatic attache and Foreign Service engineering officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Shelby \u201cprovided vital training and resources to help people in Haiti rebuild thousands of homes and roofs ripped apart by a Category\u00a04 hurricane, making the structures safer and stronger to withstand future disasters.\u201d Shelby said, \u201cUSAID/Haiti worked with community members to rebuild and improve the hurricane resistance of 5,000 roofs using a market-based approach, trained 6,425 people in reconstruction techniques, reconstructed seven water distribution points, and improved the sanitary blocks of 12 schools, which benefited 712 children.\u201dSafety and Law Enforcement Medal to Jamie Rhome, 43, storm surge specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. He \u201ccreated a new forecasting model and warning system that more accurately predicts the deadly storm surge caused by hurricanes, saving lives by alerting residents sooner of the approaching danger.\u201d When Rhome talks to private-sector colleagues who balk at joining the federal government because of the pay, he tells them about \u201cthe mission and the sense of pride\u201d among federal workers and how that \u201cmore than compensates for any salary loss.\u201d\u00a0Science and Environment Medal\u00a0to Daniel B. Jernigan, 55, influenza division director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Jernigan \u201cled response efforts for dozens of disease crises, including Ebola, SARS and West Nile virus, while greatly improving our country\u2019s ability to identify, prepare for and respond to inevitable flu pandemics.\u201d He said he loves working where he \u201ccan have a rapid and very tangible impact on an emerging public health threat.\u201d\u00a0The enthusiasm of the winners for their work was clear when each told me they would recommend the federal government as a place to work. Most prefaced their comments on that point with \u201cabsolutely.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWe won\u2019t have the government we want if we don\u2019t celebrate the things we like. .\u2009.\u2009. They are incredible people,\u201d Stier said of the winners, \u201cand no one knows about them, and they should.\u201d\u00a0 For the first time, all winners of the \u201cSammies\u201d are from outside the Washington area, indicative of the 85 percent of federal employees who do not live in the capital region. Six federal employees to be honored with the \u2018Oscars of Government Service\u2019",
        "author": "Joe Davidson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Was tabloid expos\u00e9 of Bezos affair just juicy gossip or a political hit job? (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2789",
        "date": "2019-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/was-tabloid-expose-of-bezos-affair-just-juicy-gossip-or-a-political-hit-job/2019/02/05/03d2f716-2633-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html",
        "text": "When the National Enquirer published explicit text messages between Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos and the woman he was having an affair with, the world\u2019s richest man made clear he wanted to find out how the tabloid got hold of his private communications.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos commissioned an investigation into the Enquirer\u2019s investigation of his love life, thereby leaping into a roiling mix of political attacks and conspiracy theories featuring the president of the United States, key figures in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III\u2019s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, minor Hollywood celebrities and the owner of The Washington Post, Bezos himself. Depending on whom you believe, the Enquirer\u2019s expos\u00e9 on Bezos\u2019s affair was a political hit inspired by President Trump\u2019s allies, an inside job by people seeking to protect Bezos\u2019s marriage, or no conspiracy at all, simply a juicy gossip story.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos and his wife MacKenzie have decided to divorce, according to a joint Twitter statement. Bezos owns The Washington Post. (Reuters)The saga might have been easily dismissed as little more than tabloid fare, but it has taken on a more serious cast in recent days. A volley of charges and countercharges about how and why the Enquirer launched its investigation has emerged for several reasons, including the history of the Enquirer, which has acknowledged taking actions during the last presidential campaign that benefited Trump politically. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly lodged attacks on The Post\u2019s coverage of him and on Bezos, who bought the news company in 2013. And Bezos, the head of a retail giant that is famously loath to comment to the media, has authorized his security chief to speak about his investigation.Bezos\u2019s longtime private security consultant, Gavin de Becker, has concluded that the billionaire was not hacked. Rather, de Becker said in an interview, the Enquirer\u2019s scoop about Bezos\u2019s relationship with former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez began with a \u201cpolitically motivated\u201d leak meant to embarrass the owner of The Post \u2014 an effort potentially involving several important figures in Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign.As the Daily Beast first reported last week, de Becker has publicly named only one subject of his investigation, Michael Sanchez, Lauren\u2019s brother and a pro-Trump Hollywood talent manager who is also an acquaintance of provocative Trump backers Roger Stone and Carter Page.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are studying many people who might have been involved in this, and Michael Sanchez is one we\u2019ve spoken with and been looking at,\u201d de Becker told The Post.But de Becker \u2014 who provided security for President Ronald Reagan\u2019s guests and whose private security firm is popular among celebrities \u2014 is not the only one looking into who leaked the text messages to the Enquirer.Michael Sanchez, whose Twitter feed colorfully defends Trump and slams reporting critical of the president as \u201cfake news,\u201d said in an interview that he has launched his own investigation into the origin of the Enquirer\u2019s story and has sought advice from Stone and Page about the security of text and phone communications.Story continues below advertisementStone, a longtime Republican operative and Trump adviser, has pleaded not guilty to charges of lying to Congress and witness tampering. Page is a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser whose trips to Moscow have drawn scrutiny from congressional investigators.AdvertisementSanchez firmly denies playing any role in the revelation of his sister\u2019s affair. He said in interviews with The Post that his priorities are to protect his sister\u2019s relationship with Bezos and \u201cto clear my name by telling the truth.\u201dSanchez said he was told by multiple people at American Media, the Enquirer\u2019s parent company, that the Enquirer set out to do \u201ca takedown to make Trump happy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThrough a spokesman, the company declined to comment on how the tabloid obtained the text messages but said that \u201cAmerican Media emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise. End of speculation \u2014 and story.\u201dSanchez, who said he is his sister\u2019s manager and publicist, said he learned of the affair last spring and first met Bezos on April 20 at a dinner with Lauren Sanchez, Bezos and others at a Hollywood restaurant, the Hearth and Hound. Michael Sanchez said he has socialized with Bezos and his sister multiple times during their relationship.AdvertisementIn the aftermath of the Enquirer story, Sanchez offered a variety of theories to explain how texts between Bezos and his sister made their way to the tabloid, including spying by foreign governments, rival tech companies or \u201cdeep state\u201d actors within the U.S. government, according to a compilation of emails between Sanchez and de Becker that were provided to The Post.Story continues below advertisementIn a Jan. 21 email to de Becker, Sanchez offered a \u201cbrief summary of the info I gathered from Carter [Page] and Roger [Stone]\u201d and included links to news articles that outlined the National Security Agency\u2019s ability to collect metadata on phone calls.Both de Becker and Sanchez at various points theorized that government or foreign hacking could have been behind the leak of Bezos\u2019s texts, according to email and text exchanges between the two. Sanchez discussed with de Becker a theory in which Trump might have enlisted the help of British intelligence or the Israeli Mossad.AdvertisementNow, as de Becker has cast suspicion on Sanchez, Sanchez is hitting back.Story continues below advertisementIn a written statement to The Post, Sanchez accused de Becker of \u201clies, half-truths, sloppy tabloid leaks, [and] crazy conspiracy theories.\u201d Sanchez said de Becker sought to finger him as the source of leaks because de Becker wanted to deflect attention from his own failure to protect Bezos.Sanchez said he believed de Becker, Bezos\u2019s security chief for two decades, was involved in the leaks to the Enquirer \u201cto sabotage Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez\u2019s love affair.\u201d The brother argued that de Becker was trying to keep Bezos and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, together.Michael Sanchez said de Becker has asserted a \u201cstrange control\u201d over Bezos and Lauren Sanchez and has \u201cforced\u201d the two to stay physically apart from each other since the Enquirer\u2019s article appeared.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDe Becker declined to address Michael Sanchez\u2019s allegations individually, saying only, \u201cSince subjects of investigations often accuse their investigators, even the craziest litany of claims doesn\u2019t surprise me.\u201dJay Carney, Amazon\u2019s senior vice president for global corporate affairs, declined The Post\u2019s request for an interview with Bezos.Lauren Sanchez also declined to comment, according to her representative.Bezos and Trump \u2014 two wealthy business executives who became famous as billionaire disrupters upending the worlds of retailing and politics \u2014 have traded Twitter barbs in the past. And Trump often lumps Bezos\u2019s separate ventures, Amazon and The Post, together in an effort to discredit the newspaper\u2019s reporting.Story continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s ownership of The Post was highlighted on the cover of the unusual, 12-page spread on the Bezos-Sanchez affair that the Enquirer published last month.AdvertisementThe Enquirer reported that it spent four months on what it called the \u201clargest investigation\u201d in its history, following Bezos and Lauren Sanchez \u201cacross five states and 40,000 miles .\u2009.\u2009. in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, [and] five-star hotel hideaways.\u201dLast July, Dylan Howard, American Media\u2019s chief content officer, saw a photo of Lauren Sanchez standing next to Bezos on the VIP viewing platform for a rocket launch by Bezos\u2019s space exploration company, Blue Origin, and decided to look into a relationship between Bezos and Sanchez, according to a person who spoke to Howard at the time.Howard declined to comment to The Post. Howard\u2019s byline appears with that of other Enquirer reporters atop the paper\u2019s articles about the Bezos affair.The salacious report came as prosecutors have examined the Enquirer\u2019s role in helping Trump. In September, federal prosecutors reached an agreement with American Media in which the company, chief executive David Pecker and Howard, his top deputy, would cooperate with authorities and acknowledge that the Enquirer worked with the Trump campaign to kill stories \u201cabout the presidential candidate\u2019s relationships with women.\u201dAdvertisementAccording to three people familiar with the tabloid\u2019s discussions, the Enquirer was ready to publish a story on Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in early autumn but held off because Pecker, a longtime associate and supporter of the president, wanted to wait until after the midterm elections and did not want to feed the public impression that he was a tool for Trump. One of those people said the Enquirer published only when it was confident in its reporting.During the 2016 campaign, Enquirer executives sent pre-publication digital copies of articles and pictures related to Trump to the candidate\u2019s attorney, Michael Cohen, The Post reported last year. Cohen has said part of his job was trying to head off negative reporting about Trump. The Enquirer denied ever sharing such material ahead of publication.In 2016, American Media bought former Playboy model Karen McDougal\u2019s account about her alleged affair with Trump for $150,000 \u2014 not to publish the story but to kill it.De Becker said his investigation ended up focusing on political motives for the Enquirer report because \u201cI would be blind if I didn\u2019t register the fact that Michael Sanchez is an associate of people like Roger Stone, Carter Page and Scottie Nell Hughes,\u201d a frequent TV surrogate for Trump during the campaign.\u201cLearning that was a major surprise in our investigation,\u201d de Becker said. \u201cNaturally, that raised questions about whether [Enquirer publisher] David Pecker, the National Enquirer and others intended to do a hit piece on The Washington Post and Jeff Bezos.\u201dStone, Page and Hughes denied to The Post that they had any role in exposing Bezos\u2019s affair.The Post also has a business relationship with de Becker; one of the security consultant\u2019s employees serves as the newspaper\u2019s director of security at its Washington headquarters, according to Kristine Coratti Kelly, The Post\u2019s vice president for communications.The Post\u2019s relationship with de Becker\u2019s company \u201callows us to utilize their vast resources and training programs rather than trying to build them in-house,\u201d Kelly said.Michael Sanchez said he spoke to Stone and Page about his sister\u2019s relationship with Bezos only after the tabloid published its expos\u00e9. Early last fall, Michael Sanchez told a political acquaintance that his sister and Bezos were traveling together, according to a person familiar with the conversation.Over the past month, a behind-the-scenes PR battle has raged as each side has sought to push back against critical media accounts and to promote reporting that favors its version of how the Enquirer story came to be.On Jan. 7, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez received almost identical emails from the Enquirer, Howard and his deputy, James Robertson, American Media\u2019s news director, according to copies of the emails obtained by The Post.\u201cI write to request an interview with you about your love affair,\u201d the messages read. The Enquirer asked Bezos and Sanchez to respond to dozens of questions.Michael Sanchez told The Post that, acting as his sister\u2019s representative, he agreed to meet with Howard at American Media\u2019s offices in New York to review the Enquirer\u2019s reporting.On the morning of Jan. 9, Bezos tweeted an announcement that he and wife MacKenzie Bezos \u201chave decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.\u201dThe announcement surprised Michael Sanchez and enraged Howard, who felt, according to two people who spoke to him at the time, that Bezos had preempted his scoop.After the Bezos tweet, the Enquirer, which was not due to publish its next edition until Jan. 16, rushed its report about the affair into print a week early, allowing it to appear on newsstands Jan. 10, according to a person familiar with the Enquirer\u2019s work on the report.The Enquirer article led quickly to dueling investigations and lawsuit threats.Documents obtained by The Post show that attorneys for American Media sought to persuade the Daily Beast not to publish its initial report suggesting that Trump\u2019s allies may have been involved in the effort to expose the Bezos affair. According to a draft legal complaint, Enquirer attorneys threatened to sue the Daily Beast if it used any information provided by a former Enquirer executive who had been hired by the website.The Daily Beast published two articles about the affair last week. Its editor did not respond to a request for comment.Stone, whose campaign trickery has been the stuff of movies, books and political folklore since Richard Nixon\u2019s 1972 presidential campaign, had sought to preempt the Beast\u2019s stories. On Jan.\u00a029, the day of his arraignment in the Mueller probe, Stone appeared on Infowars, the conspiracy-minded Internet talk show run by Alex Jones.\u201cBreaking news here,\u201d Stone said. He claimed, incorrectly, that the Beast would report that \u201cI, working with President Trump and the NSA, hacked the cellphone of Lauren Sanchez, the paramour of Jeff Bezos \u2014 or that we hacked Bezos\u2019s cellphone and that we gave the information to the National Enquirer. This is a conspiracy that allegedly involves Michael Sanchez \u2014 Lauren Sanchez\u2019s brother, a very hot Hollywood manager, [who] happens to be a friend of mine.\u201dMeanwhile, de Becker\u2019s attorneys have discouraged tabloids such as the New York Post and the Sun in London from reporting Michael Sanchez\u2019s assertion that the leak to the Enquirer resulted from de Becker\u2019s failure to protect Bezos\u2019s privacy, according to documents obtained by The Post. An attorney for de Becker also threatened legal action against American Media over the same issue, the documents show.The complex web of purported explanations for the Enquirer\u2019s focus on Bezos\u2019s love life was, Stone asserted, an example of \u201cthe insanity of the left.\u201dAs Stone tells it, he got involved with the Bezos story only last month, just days before his arrest, when he got a phone call from the West Coast.On the line was John Phillips, a talk-show host at KABC radio in Los Angeles. Phillips had interviewed Stone numerous times, and they had become friends, getting together periodically for dinners, Stone said, speaking in detail about the Bezos matter for the first time.Phillips, who declined to comment for this report, was not calling to arrange a meal but to see whether Stone would talk with his manager and friend, Michael Sanchez. Suspecting that his sister had been under surveillance, he wanted to talk to people he thought of as experts on how that is done, such as Stone and Page, according to Stone.Michael Sanchez helped Page land a gig speaking in October at Politicon, a nonpartisan political convention, in a discussion titled \u201cSex, Spies and Videotape: Russian Hysteria in Context.\u201dPage and Sanchez spoke about business opportunities and developed a friendly relationship, Page said Monday. But Page said he did not learn that his new friend had a sister who was involved with the world\u2019s richest man until the Enquirer report appeared.When reports began appearing suggesting that Sanchez might be responsible for the leaks, Page said he saw a parallel to his own experience. \u201cI think there are a lot of similar lessons learned,\u201d he said.Page contended to Sanchez that he became embroiled in the Russia investigation because someone was out to get Trump. Page told Sanchez that something similar might be happening to him.\u201cRealize that people have agendas,\u201d Page recalled telling Sanchez. \u201cThere are bigger fish whose reputations they are trying to fry in the media.\u201dMeanwhile, the Enquirer report led de Becker and Sanchez to conduct a lengthy text exchange, and de Becker appeared incredulous that Sanchez was consulting with Stone.\u201cDo you really know Roger Stone?\u201d de Becker asked.Not long afterward, Sanchez told Stone about de Becker\u2019s theory of what happened. In this telling, de Becker posited that since there was no evidence that Bezos\u2019s or Lauren Sanchez\u2019s phones had been hacked, the information could only have been extracted by the government. Sanchez claimed that de Becker believed Trump had a vendetta against Bezos because of his ownership of The Post and because Bezos is a \u201cbig opponent of Donald Trump,\u201d Stone said.Stone said he thought the scenario Sanchez spelled out was \u201ccrazy. Just crazy.\u201d Stone\u2019s theory about the leak to the Enquirer was one that Michael Sanchez also offered \u2014 that de Becker hadn\u2019t protected Bezos\u2019s communications, so he needed someone to blame and came up with the notion of a political hit job.De Becker stood by his theory. \u201cThis inquiry has been about crime, not journalism,\u201d he said. \u201cAgain and again, political motives became evident.\u201dFor his part, Stone said he was not surprised to become embroiled in the Bezos story.\u201cAt the moment, I\u2019m a very convenient punching bag \u2014 for obvious reasons,\u201d Stone said Friday, hours after he was in federal court for a hearing on the charges against him, of lying to Congress and witness tampering. Dueling investigations seek to learn how the National Enquirer obtained texts sent by the owner of The Washington Post. Was tabloid expos\u00e9 of Bezos affair just juicy gossip or a political hit job?",
        "author": "Marc Fisher"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump basked in spotlight in Japan, even as his focus seemed elsewhere (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2790",
        "date": "2019-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-basked-in-spotlight-in-japan-even-as-his-focus-seemed-elsewhere/2019/05/28/4545eade-80cc-11e9-9a67-a687ca99fb3d_story.html",
        "text": "TOKYO \u2014 President Trump flew over 14 hours, passed through 13 time zones and crossed the international date line to \u2014 essentially \u2014\u00a0be feted by the Japanese.On a four-day visit to Japan, Trump enjoyed golf and double cheeseburgers (made with U.S. beef), participated in an imperial gift exchange, attended a traditional sumo tournament and fielded questions from the media at the gilded Akasaka Palace.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut like many strategies to influence and contain the president, the carefully planned Japanese attempt hit something of a skid on Trump\u2019s first full day in Tokyo on Sunday, when\u00a0Trump fired off a tweet that, in a single missive, undermined his national security adviser, aligned himself with a brutal dictator and attacked a Democratic rival on foreign soil.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThen Monday, in\u00a0a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump continued his headlong plunge into diplomatic mayhem,\u00a0expressing such eagerness for a deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he backed Kim over his own top aides (notably national security adviser John Bolton), his allies (Japan) and his fellow Americans (former vice president Joe Biden).AdvertisementCalling Kim \u201ca very smart man,\u201d Trump said he was not \u201cpersonally\u201d bothered by North Korea\u2019s short-range missile tests this month and does not believe the tests violate United Nations Security Council resolutions \u2014 a transgression about which Bolton had previously told reporters there was \u201cno doubt.\u201d\u201cMy people think it could have been a violation,\u201d Trump said, as Bolton sat just feet away. \u201cI view it a little differently.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAbe, meanwhile, referred to the North Korean tests with\u00a0\u201cgreat regret\u201d \u2014 though, in an apparent attempt to maintain his bromance with Trump, Abe also credited the president with beginning negotiations with North Korea, saying Trump \u201ccracked open the shell of distrust\u201d with the regime.President Trump slammed former Vice President Joe Biden (D) during a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe May 27. (The Washington Post)Trump also seemed to side with Kim and his repressive regime over Biden, violating an unofficial rule of presidential behavior \u2014 that partisan politics stops on foreign soil. Asked about a tweet in which Trump appreciatively recounted North Korea\u2019s state media calling Biden a \u201cfool of low IQ,\u201d the president simply doubled down on the insult.\u00a0\u00a0Advertisement\u201cWell, Kim Jong Un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual,\u201d the president said, as Bolton and the U.S. ambassador to Japan, William Hagerty, chuckled lightly. \u201cI think I agree with him on that.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd Trump expressed\u00a0openness to improving relations with Iran, currently one of America\u2019s biggest geopolitical foes, after recently ordering 1,500 additional troops to the region.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re not looking for regime change,\u201d he said, in another tacit rebuke of Bolton, who has long pushed for a more aggressive, hard-line stance against Iran. \u201cI just want to make that clear. We\u2019re looking for no nuclear weapons.\u201dStill, when Trump wasn\u2019t making unplanned news, he largely basked in his elevated status, with Abe playing humble guide.\u00a0In some ways, the president\u2019s Japan sojourn revealed Trump as part reluctant tourist, part eager honoree and always deeply perplexed when the spotlight was not squarely on him.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt Ryogoku Kokugikan stadium\u00a0for the sumo championships Sunday, for instance, Trump suddenly found himself spectator rather than actor, and was notably subdued. After entering the arena to applause and craned necks, the crowd returned its collective attention to the ancient grappling, and Trump sat almost stone-faced as he took in the final matches.\u00a0After donning slippers \u2014 no shoes are allowed in the ring \u2014 Trump did rise to present the 25-year-old champion with the first \u201cPresident\u2019s Cup,\u201d a more than four-foot-tall and 60-pound silver trophy with an eagle taking flight set atop it. But he appeared to lack his trademark panache. He read from a certificate, smiled, clapped and bowed slightly before exiting the ring.\u00a0In other moments,\u00a0Trump\u2019s interests seemed to drift stateside, at least according to his social media feed. During his four days abroad, the president tweeted about sports (the Indianapolis 500), culture (actor Jussie Smollett) and, of course, politics.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president attacked Democrats, impeachment efforts and\u00a0Biden, even using the 1994 crime bill as a foil to argue that Biden \u2014 who supported the legislation \u2014 is unelectable to large swaths of the Democratic base.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cAnyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected,\u201d Trump wrote from Tokyo. \u201cIn particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you.\u201dAbe, for his part, at least publicly largely tried to ignore disagreements between himself and the president, and instead focused on honoring and entertaining his guest \u2014 the\u00a0first foreign leader invited to an official state visit following the May enthronement of the new emperor, Naruhito.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementAfter all,\u00a0Trump is a president who at times prefers to be treated like a monarch, reveling in the spotlight and celebrations of himself. And the Japanese were happy to oblige, hoping to woo Trump on everything from trade to security by tailoring the trip to his whims and professed likes.\u00a0AdvertisementAbe and Trump played golf, took a selfie and, in a nod to\u00a0the president\u2019s preferred palate of bland Americana, consumed a carnivore\u2019s bovine delight \u2014 burgers (at the country club), Wagyu beef (at the traditional robatayaki charcoal grill) and c\u00f4te de boeuf r\u00f4tie (at the six-course black-tie gala at the Imperial Palace).\u00a0And the president was simply thrilled to be the guest of honor \u2014 even if, at least at first, he seemed\u00a0a little unclear on just what the celebration was. Before leaving for Japan, Trump told reporters that Abe persuaded him to visit the country twice in roughly a month \u2014 he returns in June to Osaka, for the Group of 20 leaders\u2019 summit \u2014 by inviting him to a \u201cvery big event\u201d that the prime minister promised Trump would be \u201c100 times bigger\u201d than even the Super Bowl.\u00a0\u00a0From the emperor to sumo wrestling, Abe harnesses Japan\u2019s traditions to impress TrumpOnce here to help usher in the Reiwa era under Naruhito, Trump continued to enthuse about Abe\u2019s invite to be the first leader to meet the new emperor after he ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat was a great honor,\u201d he said Monday, sitting alongside Abe. \u201cThat\u2019s a big thing. Two hundred and two years \u2014 that\u2019s the last time this has happened.\u201d\u00a0Trump has four foreign trips this summer, and a senior White House official said he was most excited about this first one to Japan and next week\u2019s journey to Britain and France, which similarly includes an official state visit \u2014 complete with pomp and grandeur \u2014 during his British stop.Before Trump departed for Japan, another senior White House official promised a\u00a0\u201csubstantive\u201d trip with\u00a0\u201csome substantive things.\u201d Yet it was hard to point to any major diplomatic breakthroughs.\u00a0\u00a0As NBC\u2019s Hallie Jackson quipped on MSNBC as the trip wound down, the only real deliverable\u00a0\u201chas been the delivery of that trophy to the sumo wrestling championship.\u201dStill, Trump did try to imbue his trip with some substance. Out of respect for Abe, he met with the relatives of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea, never to be seen again \u2014 his second such meeting with the families.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe United States also remains committed to the issue of\u00a0abductions, which I know is a top priority for Prime Minister Abe,\u201d he said during their news conference Monday.\u00a0\u201cThe United States will continue to support Japan\u2019s efforts to bring these\u00a0abductees home.\u201d\u00a0And he announced a new space agreement, albeit with few specifics.\u00a0\u201cI am pleased to confirm that Prime Minister Abe and I have agreed to dramatically expand our nations\u2019 cooperation in human space exploration,\u201d Trump said.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019ll be going to the moon,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe\u2019ll be going to Mars very soon. It\u2019s very exciting.\u201dBefore leaving Japan on Tuesday,\u00a0Trump visited American troops \u2014 some sporting\u00a0\u201cMake Aircrew Great Again\u201d patches on their uniforms \u2014 for Memorial Day at Yokosuka Naval Base outside Tokyo.\u201cFrom America\u2019s earliest days, fearless Americans have said goodbye to their loved ones, gone off to war and stared down our enemies, knowing that they may never, ever return,\u201d Trump said. \u201cMemorial Day links every grateful American heart in eternal tribute to those brave souls who gave their last breath for our nation, from Concord to Gettysburg, from Midway to Mosul.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementDespite some notable policy cracks between Trump and Abe, from the Japanese perspective, the trip was still largely a success.Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University in Tokyo, said Abe must be pleased the summitry sent \u201ca strong message of solidarity\u201d to Beijing and Pyongyang.\u201cTrump reveled in all the pomp and circumstance, and the fawning \u2014 judged excessive by some \u2014 paid off in generating good vibes that will stand Abe well domestically and regionally,\u201d he said.For Japanese officials, one of the main goals was simply to strengthen the U.S.-Japan relationship, and Abe is a careful student of Trump \u2014 understanding, among other things, that he is most likely to influence the president when physically by his side.To that end, Abe flew to D.C. in April to visit Trump, and by June, the two men will have met three times in as many months. They have also spoken and met in person more than 40 times.\u00a0\u00a0Noting all the red carpets \u2014 literal and proverbial \u2014 that the Japanese had rolled out for their American guest, one Japan-based journalist assessed the trip with a quip: \u201cI\u2019m surprised they didn\u2019t put on a geisha show for him.\u201dStill angling for a deal, Trump backs Kim Jong Un over Biden, Bolton and JapanTrump climbs into a sumo ring to present a 60-pound \u2018President\u2019s Cup\u2019 in highlight of Japan trip As the Japanese feted Trump, he veered off into discussions about North Korea, Iran and domestic rivals. Trump basked in spotlight in Japan, even as his focus seemed elsewhere",
        "author": "Ashley Parker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump basked in spotlight in Japan, even as his focus seemed elsewhere (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2791",
        "date": "2019-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-basked-in-spotlight-in-japan-even-as-his-focus-seemed-elsewhere/2019/05/28/4545eade-80cc-11e9-9a67-a687ca99fb3d_story.html",
        "text": "TOKYO \u2014 President Trump flew over 14 hours, passed through 13 time zones and crossed the international date line to \u2014 essentially \u2014\u00a0be feted by the Japanese.On a four-day visit to Japan, Trump enjoyed golf and double cheeseburgers (made with U.S. beef), participated in an imperial gift exchange, attended a traditional sumo tournament and fielded questions from the media at the gilded Akasaka Palace.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut like many strategies to influence and contain the president, the carefully planned Japanese attempt hit something of a skid on Trump\u2019s first full day in Tokyo on Sunday, when\u00a0Trump fired off a tweet that, in a single missive, undermined his national security adviser, aligned himself with a brutal dictator and attacked a Democratic rival on foreign soil.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThen Monday, in\u00a0a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump continued his headlong plunge into diplomatic mayhem,\u00a0expressing such eagerness for a deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he backed Kim over his own top aides (notably national security adviser John Bolton), his allies (Japan) and his fellow Americans (former vice president Joe Biden).AdvertisementCalling Kim \u201ca very smart man,\u201d Trump said he was not \u201cpersonally\u201d bothered by North Korea\u2019s short-range missile tests this month and does not believe the tests violate United Nations Security Council resolutions \u2014 a transgression about which Bolton had previously told reporters there was \u201cno doubt.\u201d\u201cMy people think it could have been a violation,\u201d Trump said, as Bolton sat just feet away. \u201cI view it a little differently.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAbe, meanwhile, referred to the North Korean tests with\u00a0\u201cgreat regret\u201d \u2014 though, in an apparent attempt to maintain his bromance with Trump, Abe also credited the president with beginning negotiations with North Korea, saying Trump \u201ccracked open the shell of distrust\u201d with the regime.President Trump slammed former Vice President Joe Biden (D) during a news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe May 27. (The Washington Post)Trump also seemed to side with Kim and his repressive regime over Biden, violating an unofficial rule of presidential behavior \u2014 that partisan politics stops on foreign soil. Asked about a tweet in which Trump appreciatively recounted North Korea\u2019s state media calling Biden a \u201cfool of low IQ,\u201d the president simply doubled down on the insult.\u00a0\u00a0Advertisement\u201cWell, Kim Jong Un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual,\u201d the president said, as Bolton and the U.S. ambassador to Japan, William Hagerty, chuckled lightly. \u201cI think I agree with him on that.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd Trump expressed\u00a0openness to improving relations with Iran, currently one of America\u2019s biggest geopolitical foes, after recently ordering 1,500 additional troops to the region.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re not looking for regime change,\u201d he said, in another tacit rebuke of Bolton, who has long pushed for a more aggressive, hard-line stance against Iran. \u201cI just want to make that clear. We\u2019re looking for no nuclear weapons.\u201dStill, when Trump wasn\u2019t making unplanned news, he largely basked in his elevated status, with Abe playing humble guide.\u00a0In some ways, the president\u2019s Japan sojourn revealed Trump as part reluctant tourist, part eager honoree and always deeply perplexed when the spotlight was not squarely on him.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt Ryogoku Kokugikan stadium\u00a0for the sumo championships Sunday, for instance, Trump suddenly found himself spectator rather than actor, and was notably subdued. After entering the arena to applause and craned necks, the crowd returned its collective attention to the ancient grappling, and Trump sat almost stone-faced as he took in the final matches.\u00a0After donning slippers \u2014 no shoes are allowed in the ring \u2014 Trump did rise to present the 25-year-old champion with the first \u201cPresident\u2019s Cup,\u201d a more than four-foot-tall and 60-pound silver trophy with an eagle taking flight set atop it. But he appeared to lack his trademark panache. He read from a certificate, smiled, clapped and bowed slightly before exiting the ring.\u00a0In other moments,\u00a0Trump\u2019s interests seemed to drift stateside, at least according to his social media feed. During his four days abroad, the president tweeted about sports (the Indianapolis 500), culture (actor Jussie Smollett) and, of course, politics.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president attacked Democrats, impeachment efforts and\u00a0Biden, even using the 1994 crime bill as a foil to argue that Biden \u2014 who supported the legislation \u2014 is unelectable to large swaths of the Democratic base.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cAnyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected,\u201d Trump wrote from Tokyo. \u201cIn particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you.\u201dAbe, for his part, at least publicly largely tried to ignore disagreements between himself and the president, and instead focused on honoring and entertaining his guest \u2014 the\u00a0first foreign leader invited to an official state visit following the May enthronement of the new emperor, Naruhito.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementAfter all,\u00a0Trump is a president who at times prefers to be treated like a monarch, reveling in the spotlight and celebrations of himself. And the Japanese were happy to oblige, hoping to woo Trump on everything from trade to security by tailoring the trip to his whims and professed likes.\u00a0AdvertisementAbe and Trump played golf, took a selfie and, in a nod to\u00a0the president\u2019s preferred palate of bland Americana, consumed a carnivore\u2019s bovine delight \u2014 burgers (at the country club), Wagyu beef (at the traditional robatayaki charcoal grill) and c\u00f4te de boeuf r\u00f4tie (at the six-course black-tie gala at the Imperial Palace).\u00a0And the president was simply thrilled to be the guest of honor \u2014 even if, at least at first, he seemed\u00a0a little unclear on just what the celebration was. Before leaving for Japan, Trump told reporters that Abe persuaded him to visit the country twice in roughly a month \u2014 he returns in June to Osaka, for the Group of 20 leaders\u2019 summit \u2014 by inviting him to a \u201cvery big event\u201d that the prime minister promised Trump would be \u201c100 times bigger\u201d than even the Super Bowl.\u00a0\u00a0From the emperor to sumo wrestling, Abe harnesses Japan\u2019s traditions to impress TrumpOnce here to help usher in the Reiwa era under Naruhito, Trump continued to enthuse about Abe\u2019s invite to be the first leader to meet the new emperor after he ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat was a great honor,\u201d he said Monday, sitting alongside Abe. \u201cThat\u2019s a big thing. Two hundred and two years \u2014 that\u2019s the last time this has happened.\u201d\u00a0Trump has four foreign trips this summer, and a senior White House official said he was most excited about this first one to Japan and next week\u2019s journey to Britain and France, which similarly includes an official state visit \u2014 complete with pomp and grandeur \u2014 during his British stop.Before Trump departed for Japan, another senior White House official promised a\u00a0\u201csubstantive\u201d trip with\u00a0\u201csome substantive things.\u201d Yet it was hard to point to any major diplomatic breakthroughs.\u00a0\u00a0As NBC\u2019s Hallie Jackson quipped on MSNBC as the trip wound down, the only real deliverable\u00a0\u201chas been the delivery of that trophy to the sumo wrestling championship.\u201dStill, Trump did try to imbue his trip with some substance. Out of respect for Abe, he met with the relatives of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea, never to be seen again \u2014 his second such meeting with the families.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe United States also remains committed to the issue of\u00a0abductions, which I know is a top priority for Prime Minister Abe,\u201d he said during their news conference Monday.\u00a0\u201cThe United States will continue to support Japan\u2019s efforts to bring these\u00a0abductees home.\u201d\u00a0And he announced a new space agreement, albeit with few specifics.\u00a0\u201cI am pleased to confirm that Prime Minister Abe and I have agreed to dramatically expand our nations\u2019 cooperation in human space exploration,\u201d Trump said.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019ll be going to the moon,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe\u2019ll be going to Mars very soon. It\u2019s very exciting.\u201dBefore leaving Japan on Tuesday,\u00a0Trump visited American troops \u2014 some sporting\u00a0\u201cMake Aircrew Great Again\u201d patches on their uniforms \u2014 for Memorial Day at Yokosuka Naval Base outside Tokyo.\u201cFrom America\u2019s earliest days, fearless Americans have said goodbye to their loved ones, gone off to war and stared down our enemies, knowing that they may never, ever return,\u201d Trump said. \u201cMemorial Day links every grateful American heart in eternal tribute to those brave souls who gave their last breath for our nation, from Concord to Gettysburg, from Midway to Mosul.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementDespite some notable policy cracks between Trump and Abe, from the Japanese perspective, the trip was still largely a success.Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University in Tokyo, said Abe must be pleased the summitry sent \u201ca strong message of solidarity\u201d to Beijing and Pyongyang.\u201cTrump reveled in all the pomp and circumstance, and the fawning \u2014 judged excessive by some \u2014 paid off in generating good vibes that will stand Abe well domestically and regionally,\u201d he said.For Japanese officials, one of the main goals was simply to strengthen the U.S.-Japan relationship, and Abe is a careful student of Trump \u2014 understanding, among other things, that he is most likely to influence the president when physically by his side.To that end, Abe flew to D.C. in April to visit Trump, and by June, the two men will have met three times in as many months. They have also spoken and met in person more than 40 times.\u00a0\u00a0Noting all the red carpets \u2014 literal and proverbial \u2014 that the Japanese had rolled out for their American guest, one Japan-based journalist assessed the trip with a quip: \u201cI\u2019m surprised they didn\u2019t put on a geisha show for him.\u201dStill angling for a deal, Trump backs Kim Jong Un over Biden, Bolton and JapanTrump climbs into a sumo ring to present a 60-pound \u2018President\u2019s Cup\u2019 in highlight of Japan trip As the Japanese feted Trump, he veered off into discussions about North Korea, Iran and domestic rivals. Trump basked in spotlight in Japan, even as his focus seemed elsewhere",
        "author": "Ashley Parker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senate confirms Trump pick for NASA administrator over Democratic objections (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2792",
        "date": "2018-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-confirms-trump-pick-as-nasa-administrator-over-democratic-objections/2018/04/19/58692c6a-43f2-11e8-baaf-8b3c5a3da888_story.html",
        "text": "The Senate on Thursday narrowly confirmed Rep. Jim Bridenstine as NASA administrator, despite deep concerns from Democrats that he lacks the scientific and management expertise to lead the space agency.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe vote to install the three-term Oklahoma Republican was\u00a050 to 49. President Trump had initially tapped Bridenstine for the post last year, but his nomination stalled amid Democratic criticisms, as well as some reticence from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who said Thursday that NASA should be led by a professional with a background in space.\u00a0 Rubio ultimately sided with\u00a0all other Republicans to confirm Bridenstine as the NASA chief despite his hesitations, arguing that Trump deserves to have his team in place across the administration.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cI was not enthused about the nomination. Nothing personal about Mr. Bridenstine. NASA is an organization that needs to be led by a space professional,\u201d Rubio said before the confirmation vote Thursday afternoon. But he said that \u201cmy view of it is, and it has been the tradition of the Senate for the entire distance of the republic, that we give great deference to the president on choosing qualifications.\u201d\u00a0Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator comes under fire at Senate hearingBridenstine's confirmation comes at a critical time for the agency, which is preparing to return to the moon and to restore human spaceflight from United States soil, a capability that was lost when the space shuttle program was retired in 2011.AdvertisementThe space agency has gone without a permanent leader for 15 months, since Charles Bolden resigned as Trump took office. During that time, Robert Lightfoot, a NASA veteran, has been running the agency. But he recently announced that he will retire from the agency at the end of this month.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine is a former naval aviator who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum before coming to Congress in 2013. An avid supporter of space exploration, he sponsored the American Space Renaissance Act, a wide-ranging bill that touched on national security, how best to deal with debris in space and how to regulate the commercial space industry.\u201cI look forward to working with the outstanding team at NASA to achieve the president\u2019s vision for American leadership in space,\u201d\u00a0Bridenstine said after he was confirmed.AdvertisementDemocrats seized on Bridenstine\u2019s lack of scientific expertise, as well as his comments on climate change, to make their case that he is unfit to lead the agency.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cJames Bridenstine is a climate denier with no scientific background who has made a career out of ignoring science,\u201d Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said Thursday. \u201cNow, I also don\u2019t have a scientific background. But I defer to scientists. I rely on the scientific consensus. And the scientific consensus is not what Mr. Bridenstine says.\u201dA procedural vote Wednesday to advance Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation almost failed as Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) sided with Democrats to block him, only to switch his vote after some time had passed. Senate Republican leaders said Flake wanted to speak with Mike Pompeo, Trump\u2019s nominee for secretary of state, about travel restrictions to Cuba before he could commit to advancing Bridenstine\u2019s nomination.\u00a0Lame-duck Jeff Flake just showed how he still has some leverageHad Flake remained a no on that vote, it would have caused significant complications, with Vice President Pence, who as the president of the Senate is the official tiebreaker, in Florida to attend Trump\u2019s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs Flake remained a holdout, Pence called the senator, who said that he wanted to discuss lifting travel restrictions to Cuba with Pompeo, according to a person familiar with the discussions.\u00a0The senator, a frequent Trump critic, caused some suspense again Thursday when he held off voting to confirm Bridenstine. He again spoke privately with Pence off the Senate floor during the vote, although he declined to elaborate on their talk. Flake ultimately voted\u00a0yes. Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) narrowly won approval amid concerns that he lacks scientific and management expertise. Senate confirms Trump pick for NASA administrator over Democratic objections",
        "author": "Seung Min Kim"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Gov. Jerry Brown pardoned 5 ex-convicts facing deportation, drawing Trump\u2019s ire (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2793",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/31/why-gov-jerry-brown-pardoned-five-ex-convicts-facing-deportation-drawing-trumps-ire/",
        "text": "In\u00a0a Saturday morning tweet\u00a0from Florida, President Trump took aim at\u00a0 California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who\u00a0a day earlier pardoned five immigrants who were facing deportation.\u201cGovernor Jerry \u2018Moonbeam\u2019\u00a0Brown\u00a0pardoned 5 criminal illegal aliens whose crimes include (1) Kidnapping and Robbery (2) Badly beating wife and threatening a crime with intent to terrorize (3) Dealing drugs. Is this really what the great people of California want? @FoxNews,\u201d Trump tweeted.\u00a0\u201cMoonbeam\u201d was a nickname\u00a0given to Brown partly because of his interest in space exploration during his\u00a0earlier terms as California\u2019s governor in the 1970s. 2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysisArrowRightTrump\u2019s\u00a0tweet,\u00a0sent\u00a0while the president was traveling from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., to the nearby Trump International Golf Club, may have been prompted by a report during the 6 a.m. hour of\u00a0\u201cFox and Friends,\u201d which\u00a0Trump watches regularly. The show aired a segment titled\u00a0\u201cLawless in California.\u201d As an infographic described the crimes for which the five pardoned men were convicted, the show\u2019s weekend hosts tore into Brown, suggesting that he was putting Californians at risk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe wants to show mercy,\u201d Fox chief national correspondent Ed Henry said. \u201cBut show mercy toward people who maybe have committed a misdemeanor and are now rehabbed. If they\u2019re dealing drugs to our children, these are not the folks you want to pardon.\u201dAccording to Brown\u2019s office, the governor granted pardons Friday to\u00a056 people\u00a0who had completed their sentences years ago\u00a0after being convicted of drug-related and other nonviolent crimes.\u00a0Five\u00a0of those are immigrants facing deportation,\u00a0the Sacramento Bee reported.\u00a0All five\u00a0have since led law-abiding lives, according to Brown\u2019s office.Trump\u2019s\u00a0tweet is part of the rising tension between\u00a0his administration and California.\u00a0On Monday, the state\u00a0sued the Trump administration over\u00a0its decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census. And three weeks earlier, the Justice Department\u00a0sued California over\u00a0state laws\u00a0considered to be friendly to undocumented immigrants.On March 7, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions filed a lawsuit against the state of California over its so-called sanctuary laws. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)Two of the immigrants who were granted pardons came to the United States as child refugees.A deported veteran has been granted U.S. citizenship, after 14 years of living in MexicoSokha Chhan came from Cambodia at age 13. His family had\u00a0escaped from the brutal\u00a0 Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Chhan lost his U.S. legal status in 2002 when he was convicted of inflicting corporal injury on spouse or cohabitant and threatening a crime with the intent to terrorize, both misdemeanors. He served nearly a year in jail and three years of probation. According to Brown\u2019s office, Chhan served in the Army Reserve and volunteers at his local temple.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter he served his sentence,\u00a0Chhan raised his five children as a single father by \u201cworking in the fields, working as a mechanic, or baking donuts for 12-13 hours every day with no days off,\u201d according to one of his daughters, who was quoted in the pardon statement.Phann Pheach was born at a refugee camp in Thailand and came to the United States as a Cambodian refugee when he was 1, according to a GoFundMe page created by his wife. Sopeant Pheach wrote that her husband grew up in a bad neighborhood and committed drug crimes to \u201cfit in.\u201d Phann Pheach was convicted in 2005 of possession of a controlled substance for sale and obstructing a police officer. He served a six-month custodial sentence and 13 months on parole.The\u00a0three others who received pardons are Francisco Acevedo Alaniz, Daniel Maher and Sergio Mena.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlaniz was convicted in 1997 of vehicle theft and served a five-month custodial sentence and 13 months on parole. The pardon statement said that Alaniz is active in his church and volunteers for a youth sports program.Maher was convicted in 1995\u00a0of kidnapping, robbery and firearm charges. He served five years in prison and three years on parole. Originally from Macau, a small Chinese territory, Maher and his family moved to the United States legally when he was 3 years old,\u00a0KQED reported.Trump pardons former Arizona sheriff Joe ArpaioMaher is now the recycling program director\u00a0of Ecology Center, a nonprofit organization based in Berkeley, Calif.\u00a0He had been under the threat of deportation to China since at least 2015, according to the center, which launched a petition,\u00a0held\u00a0news conferences and\u00a0organized a rally in San Francisco on Maher\u2019s behalf.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDaniel\u2019s case is of a person who made one mistake as a young adult, served his time and then completely turned his life around,\u201d the center said. \u201cHe is an asset to all who know him.\u201dMena was convicted in 2003 of possession of a controlled substance for sale and served three years of probation.A gubernatorial pardon does not guarantee that a person will not be deported, but it does erase the conviction that triggered possible deportation.\u00a0It also makes a person eligible to apply for naturalization,\u00a0said Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer and an Anchorage-based immigration lawyer.\u201cNormally, it\u2019s not done lightly, and normally it\u2019s only done when somebody has shown rehabilitation,\u201d Stock said.\u00a0\u201cWe also have a principle in America that we allow people to rehabilitate themselves. \u2026 It\u2019s a power given to governors and presidents because people think that you should be allowed to forgive people.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump\u2019s tweet\u00a0criticizing Brown is \u201codd,\u201d\u00a0Stock said, \u201cbecause the president himself has exercised the pardon power.\u201d\u00a0She\u00a0cited Trump\u2019s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., and one of\u00a0the president\u2019s staunchest political allies and a hard-liner on immigration.\u00a0The August pardon came less than a month after Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for ignoring a judge\u2019s order to stop detaining people merely because he suspected them of being undocumented immigrants.Friday\u2019s executive actions weren\u2019t the first time Brown has pardoned immigrants facing deportation.\u00a0In December,\u00a0the governor\u00a0pardoned two men who, like Chhan, fled Cambodia as children during the Khmer Rouge regime and later lost their legal status after committing crimes.In April, Brown pardoned three\u00a0deported veterans who committed crimes after leaving the military. One is Hector Barajas-Varela, an Army veteran who was granted U.S. citizenship last week, 14 years after he was deported to Mexico.David Weigel and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this article.Read more:Trump accuses Amazon of \u2018Post Office scam,\u2019 falsely says The Post is company\u2019s lobbyistTrump\u2019s lawyer raised possibility of pardons for Manafort, Flynn last summerLaura Ingraham takes an Easter break amid David Hogg controversy and advertiser revolt He pardoned 56 people Friday; five of whom are immigrants facing deportation. Why Gov. Jerry Brown pardoned 5 ex-convicts facing deportation, drawing Trump\u2019s ire",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "These are the experts who will lead Biden\u2019s transition at federal agencies (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2794",
        "date": "2020-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-transition-team-federal-agencies/2020/11/10/6b4b6388-237f-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html",
        "text": "Even as the Trump administration blocks his access to the government, President-elect Joe Biden forged ahead Tuesday with a key milestone in the transition of power, naming teams that will begin gathering information about federal operations.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBiden\u2019s transition team has assembled a list of 500 experts in federal policy from diplomacy to space exploration who will form the backbone of his preparations to lead the federal government in January, learning from the workforce what to expect at every agency on personnel, technology, policy and program matters. \u201cIt\u2019s about getting the Cabinet leaders ready to lead, equipping them with the information they need,\u201d a Biden transition official said in advance of the public rollout.Story continues below advertisementThe teams that go into federal agencies are a tradition of presidential transitions. But the Biden teams will not make formal contact with Trump appointees and the career staff now in government because the outgoing administration has not yet released transition resources and allowed access to agencies, a decision that has led to a standoff with the Biden transition.The Post's Lisa Rein explains how the Trump administration is adding challenges to the transition process for President-elect Joe Biden. (The Washington Post)AdvertisementHowever, transition officials stressed that they are working through informal channels to learn what\u2019s going on in the government, talking with think tanks, labor and nonprofit groups and those who previously served at federal agencies.\u201cWe may not be making formal contact, but the transition work is continuing to move full speed ahead,\u201d said a Biden transition official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss their planning efforts.See the list of Biden\u2019s agency review teams hereBesides preparing Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris to take over the government, the teams will serve as \u201cambassadors to the career staff\u201d of 2.1\u00a0million, the official said, \u201cfolks who are our partners in solving the world\u2019s problems.\u201d The reference drew a contrast with the incoming Trump administration four years ago, whose \u201clanding teams\u201d established a mistrust of career civil servants at many agencies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe vast majority of the Biden team members will volunteer their time, transition officials said.An array of diverse and long-established experts in the federal government will lead or hold prominent roles on the teams, ranging from state and local officials with track records in key policy areas to former diplomats and other senior officials from the Obama administration.Transition officials stressed that the diversity of these initial emissaries to the government reflect the Biden team\u2019s commitment to a diverse workforce at all levels. Some are likely to stay on as political appointees, while others will return to their roles outside government, following a long tradition in new administrations.Story continues below advertisementThese are some officials who will have prominent roles in the effort and the agency they will work with:Advertisement\u2009\u25cfKiran Ahuja",
        "author": "Lisa Rein"
    },
    {
        "title": "These are the experts who will lead Biden\u2019s transition at federal agencies (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2795",
        "date": "2020-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-transition-team-federal-agencies/2020/11/10/6b4b6388-237f-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html",
        "text": "Even as the Trump administration blocks his access to the government, President-elect Joe Biden forged ahead Tuesday with a key milestone in the transition of power, naming teams that will begin gathering information about federal operations.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBiden\u2019s transition team has assembled a list of 500 experts in federal policy from diplomacy to space exploration who will form the backbone of his preparations to lead the federal government in January, learning from the workforce what to expect at every agency on personnel, technology, policy and program matters. \u201cIt\u2019s about getting the Cabinet leaders ready to lead, equipping them with the information they need,\u201d a Biden transition official said in advance of the public rollout.Story continues below advertisementThe teams that go into federal agencies are a tradition of presidential transitions. But the Biden teams will not make formal contact with Trump appointees and the career staff now in government because the outgoing administration has not yet released transition resources and allowed access to agencies, a decision that has led to a standoff with the Biden transition.The Post's Lisa Rein explains how the Trump administration is adding challenges to the transition process for President-elect Joe Biden. (The Washington Post)AdvertisementHowever, transition officials stressed that they are working through informal channels to learn what\u2019s going on in the government, talking with think tanks, labor and nonprofit groups and those who previously served at federal agencies.\u201cWe may not be making formal contact, but the transition work is continuing to move full speed ahead,\u201d said a Biden transition official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss their planning efforts.See the list of Biden\u2019s agency review teams hereBesides preparing Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris to take over the government, the teams will serve as \u201cambassadors to the career staff\u201d of 2.1\u00a0million, the official said, \u201cfolks who are our partners in solving the world\u2019s problems.\u201d The reference drew a contrast with the incoming Trump administration four years ago, whose \u201clanding teams\u201d established a mistrust of career civil servants at many agencies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe vast majority of the Biden team members will volunteer their time, transition officials said.An array of diverse and long-established experts in the federal government will lead or hold prominent roles on the teams, ranging from state and local officials with track records in key policy areas to former diplomats and other senior officials from the Obama administration.Transition officials stressed that the diversity of these initial emissaries to the government reflect the Biden team\u2019s commitment to a diverse workforce at all levels. Some are likely to stay on as political appointees, while others will return to their roles outside government, following a long tradition in new administrations.Story continues below advertisementThese are some officials who will have prominent roles in the effort and the agency they will work with:Advertisement\u2009\u25cfKiran Ahuja",
        "author": "Lisa Rein"
    },
    {
        "title": "These are the experts who will lead Biden\u2019s transition at federal agencies (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2796",
        "date": "2020-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-transition-team-federal-agencies/2020/11/10/6b4b6388-237f-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html",
        "text": "Even as the Trump administration blocks his access to the government, President-elect Joe Biden forged ahead Tuesday with a key milestone in the transition of power, naming teams that will begin gathering information about federal operations.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBiden\u2019s transition team has assembled a list of 500 experts in federal policy from diplomacy to space exploration who will form the backbone of his preparations to lead the federal government in January, learning from the workforce what to expect at every agency on personnel, technology, policy and program matters. \u201cIt\u2019s about getting the Cabinet leaders ready to lead, equipping them with the information they need,\u201d a Biden transition official said in advance of the public rollout.Story continues below advertisementThe teams that go into federal agencies are a tradition of presidential transitions. But the Biden teams will not make formal contact with Trump appointees and the career staff now in government because the outgoing administration has not yet released transition resources and allowed access to agencies, a decision that has led to a standoff with the Biden transition.The Post's Lisa Rein explains how the Trump administration is adding challenges to the transition process for President-elect Joe Biden. (The Washington Post)AdvertisementHowever, transition officials stressed that they are working through informal channels to learn what\u2019s going on in the government, talking with think tanks, labor and nonprofit groups and those who previously served at federal agencies.\u201cWe may not be making formal contact, but the transition work is continuing to move full speed ahead,\u201d said a Biden transition official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss their planning efforts.See the list of Biden\u2019s agency review teams hereBesides preparing Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris to take over the government, the teams will serve as \u201cambassadors to the career staff\u201d of 2.1\u00a0million, the official said, \u201cfolks who are our partners in solving the world\u2019s problems.\u201d The reference drew a contrast with the incoming Trump administration four years ago, whose \u201clanding teams\u201d established a mistrust of career civil servants at many agencies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe vast majority of the Biden team members will volunteer their time, transition officials said.An array of diverse and long-established experts in the federal government will lead or hold prominent roles on the teams, ranging from state and local officials with track records in key policy areas to former diplomats and other senior officials from the Obama administration.Transition officials stressed that the diversity of these initial emissaries to the government reflect the Biden team\u2019s commitment to a diverse workforce at all levels. Some are likely to stay on as political appointees, while others will return to their roles outside government, following a long tradition in new administrations.Story continues below advertisementThese are some officials who will have prominent roles in the effort and the agency they will work with:Advertisement\u2009\u25cfKiran Ahuja",
        "author": "Lisa Rein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Trump went after Bezos: Two billionaires across a cultural divide (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2797",
        "date": "2018-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/why-trump-went-after-bezos-two-billionaires-across-a-cultural-divide/2018/04/05/22bb94c2-3763-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html",
        "text": "Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos inhabit very different worlds. The president is a staunch bricks-and-mortar man who made his fortune building towers and dealing with blue-collar workers. The founder of the world\u2019s largest store, by contrast, is a space enthusiast who experiments with robots and operates much of the cloud where the new economy\u2019s data lives. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump\u2019s decision in recent days to zero in on Bezos and Amazon.com as his latest Twitter targets has highlighted a severe fracture in American society, a divide between concrete and steel and zeros and ones, a split that is as much philosophical as it is economic, as much about the fraying of communities as it is about the shape of commerce.The president has criticized Bezos at least four times over the past week, accusing him of running a company that fails to pay its share of taxes and takes undue advantage of the struggling U.S. Postal Service, and claiming that Bezos uses the news organization he owns \u2014 this one \u2014 to advance his own interests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon and other companies Trump has attacked since elected presidentShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageFILE - In this Oct. 18, 2010 file photo, an Amazon.com package awaits delivery from UPS in Palo Alto, Calif. Amazon on Thursday, March 13, 2014 said it is raising the price of its popular Prime membership to $99 per year, an increase of $20. It's the first price increase since the online retailer introduced its Prime membership program in 2005. T(AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)Aboard Air Force One on Thursday evening, Trump told reporters that \u201cAmazon is just not on an even playing field. You know, they have a tremendous lobbying effort, in addition to having The Washington Post, which is, as far as I\u2019m concerned, another lobbyist.\u201d The president said he was \u201cgoing to take a pretty serious look\u201d at Amazon because \u201cthe playing field has to be leveled.\u201dEven the manner in which the dispute has played out illustrates the gulf that separates Trump and Bezos, in their personal styles and in their conceptions of the country\u2019s present and prospects. As the president pushes his attack, blaming Bezos for the closing of \u201cfully tax paying retailers .\u2009.\u2009. all over the country,\u201d Amazon\u2019s founder remains mute, his company declining to publicly engage a president with a different prism on reality.Some of Trump\u2019s aides and allies say his beef with Amazon, Bezos and The Washington Post, which Bezos owns separately from the behemoth online retailer he created, stems from Trump\u2019s lifelong rivalry with billionaires who surpass him on lists of the planet\u2019s richest people.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Washington Post stories that preceded Trump?s tweets about AmazonFor many years, Trump personally lobbied the editors who craft Forbes magazine\u2019s annual estimation of billionaires\u2019 wealth, arguing his claim of a higher net worth. In the new list, Bezos for the first time holds the top position, at $112\u00a0billion; the magazine dropped Trump to No. 766, with a value of $3.1\u00a0billion, down $400\u00a0million in the past year.But others who have heard Trump rail against Amazon as a \u201cmonopoly\u201d say his central complaint is based more on a cultural gap than a financial one, deriving from the fact that the president has never been known to shop online and does not use a computer \u2014 and has therefore never experienced what has drawn so many Americans from local storefronts to Amazon and other online retailers.Trump has told several senior White House officials that his friends complain about Amazon and are \u201cgetting screwed\u201d by what he views as the company\u2019s monopolistic practices, according to a person who has heard the criticisms.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Trump believes Bezos is using The Post to damage him politically, even as Amazon benefits from its government contracts with the Postal Service and the Defense Department, according to two advisers who speak to Trump frequently.Bezos, a principal architect of the new digital economy, is in some ways a perfect foil for the president, a symbol of a technological revolution who has posed enthusiastically with a robot dog. The two serial entrepreneurs represent opposing notions about how the country can build an economy that works for Republican and Democratic strongholds alike.But Trump\u2019s decision to pick a fight with Bezos is not a simple defense of the old economy against the disruptions of the new. After all, Trump is, like Bezos, a classic disrupter; the president has altered American politics by ignoring tradition and breaking long-standing rules, as Bezos did in the retail realm.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos purchased The Post in 2013 for $250\u00a0million after being approached by the paper\u2019s then-chairman, Donald E. Graham, who was looking for a new owner with the wherewithal to remake a declining business.Over the past week, Trump has repeatedly criticized The Post as \u201cfake,\u201d alleging that Bezos and Amazon use the newspaper to advance the interests of the owner\u2019s far larger principal business.\u201cPeople like Trump assume Jeff had these ulterior motives for buying The Post,\u201d said Brad Stone, author of a book on the rise of Bezos and Amazon, \u201cThe Everything Store.\u201d \u201cBut it was, for him, a small personal investment, an experiment for his personal approach of long-term thinking and bringing technology to bear on difficult problems. His interests in Washington, like selling computer contracts to the Defense Department, aren\u2019t areas where owning The Post is going to help him.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInside The Post, the notion that Bezos controls or directs news coverage or editorial policy is dismissed as the president\u2019s fantasy.\u201cTrump appears to view ownership of a newspaper as a way to assert influence,\u201d said Frederick J. Ryan Jr., The Post\u2019s chief executive and publisher. \u201cJeff sees the value of a strong, independent press. Jeff has never proposed a story. Jeff has never intervened in a story. He\u2019s never critiqued a story. He\u2019s not directed or proposed editorials or endorsements. The decisions are made here.\u201dOther companies that Trump has attacked \u2014 Carrier and Ford, for example \u2014 have responded in the public square, by tweeting, issuing news releases and making TV appearances to push back against Trump\u2019s version of reality.Story continues below advertisementBut an Amazon spokesman said neither Bezos nor the company would comment on the president\u2019s criticisms. Amazon\u2019s stock value declined by more than 5\u00a0percent after the president\u2019s recent attacks but has gained ground this week.AdvertisementWhite House officials have said that Trump\u2019s anti-Amazon tweets have generally followed the appearance of Post stories that particularly bothered the president. Last summer, hours after The Post published an article revealing that a fake Time magazine cover featuring Trump had been hung on the walls of at least five Trump clubs around the world, the president tweeted that The Post was \u201cfake news.\u201d\nSimilarly, Trump\u2019s tweets last week alleging that Amazon pays \u201clittle or no taxes to state & local governments\u201d and uses \u201cthe Fake Washington Post .\u2009.\u2009. as a \u2018lobbyist\u2019\u2009\u201d came on the heels of a Post story detailing how special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels are pressing the president to open the books of the Trump Organization. In fact, Amazon last year began collecting sales taxes in the 45\u00a0states that require it, and the company, which initially opposed sales taxes for online purchases, has more recently lobbied for a federal law creating a uniform system for collecting sales taxes online.Story continues below advertisementStone, the biographer, said the president\u2019s choice of Amazon as a target \u201cseems like a major miscalculation.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cAmazon is one of the country\u2019s most respected brands,\u201d Stone said. \u201cIt\u2019s a massive employer, and its workforce is not just coastal \u2014 it\u2019s in almost every state. It\u2019s not an easy company to get a mob incensed by.\u201dSome things in commonStylistically, Trump and Bezos could hardly be more different. Bezos is famously obsessed with process and metrics, basing his business decisions on research and consumer behavior. Trump has always been skeptical of research, trusting his gut rather than data. Bezos in his early years at Amazon proudly described himself as a nerd; Trump from high school through half a century in business made fun of scholarly types, saying he would rather hang out with his security men than with the executives he derided as bean counters.Story continues below advertisementBut the two men have more in common than first impressions may indicate. Both were raised by immigrant parents, went to Ivy League colleges and built their own businesses.\nAdvertisementBoth rose to business prominence in part by using the media to boost their public images. Although Bezos in recent years has given fewer interviews, he was strategic from Amazon\u2019s start about making appearances on magazine covers and \u201c60 Minutes\u201d as he launched new products. Trump, in contrast, opened the media faucet in his 20s and never turned off the gusher. Both men made mid-career moves into the media world that put them into the national conversation in a new way, Bezos by buying The Post and Trump by taking a 50\u00a0percent stake in 2003 in \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d the NBC reality show he also hosted.And while both billionaires have been accused of using tough tactics to gain advantages in their industries, the two men have sharply different philosophies about how they approach the risks inherent to their work.Bezos said he seeks to avoid doing things he will later regret. \u201cI want to have lived my life in such a way that when I\u2019m 80 years old, I\u2019ve minimized the number of regrets that I have,\u201d he said on \u201c60\u00a0Minutes\u201d in 1999. \u201cA lot of people do that, even if they don\u2019t call it something as dorky as a regret-minimization framework.\u201dTrump, in contrast, has said that even when his behavior generates waves of criticism, it\u2019s wrong to express regret, because that sends a message of weakness. \u201cTo look back and say, \u2018Gee whiz, I wish I didn\u2019t do this or that,\u2019 I don\u2019t think that is good, and I don\u2019t think in a certain way that is healthy,\u201d he told Fox News during the 2016 campaign.Trump points to 'scam'Trump\u2019s critique of Amazon has focused in part on the contention that the company has profited from a sweetheart deal with the Postal Service, which Amazon uses for \u201clast mile\u201d delivery \u2014 the final step in getting a package from one of the company\u2019s sorting centers to a customer\u2019s home.The president has received several briefings on the Postal Service\u2019s troubled finances, and no one in those sessions has argued that Amazon is the cause of the agency\u2019s problems, according to two people familiar with the briefings. But Trump has repeatedly said that Amazon is the problem \u201cand really seems to believe that is true,\u201d one of the people said, declining to be named for fear of retaliation.Trump often says that Amazon is running a \u201cPost Office scam\u201d in which the Postal Service \u201cwill lose $1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon.\u201dThat idea comes from a study that Citigroup conducted last year, arguing that the price the Postal Service charges Amazon and some other e-commerce companies for deliveries \u201chas been maintained at artificially low levels, creating .\u2009.\u2009. a\u00a0government-enforced taxpayer subsidization\u201d and putting FedEx and United Parcel Service at a competitive disadvantage.But the study also notes, as others have, that package delivery is vital to the Postal Service, as Americans now send 40\u00a0percent less personal mail than they once did. The Postal Service gives Amazon and other major shippers a discount because their business supplies the service with a steady, large volume of packages \u2014 and revenue that keeps its fleet of delivery trucks on the road.The Postal Service\u2019s profits are difficult to measure because of its fixed costs \u2014 such as labor, pensions and the requirement that it serve hard-to-reach communities. The Postal Regulatory Commission, which governs the service\u2019s rates, concluded last week that contracts such as Amazon\u2019s generated $7\u00a0billion in profit for the Postal Service last year.Although the accuracy of Trump\u2019s statements about Amazon and the Postal Service has been called into question by Wall Street analysts and journalists, the president\u2019s tweetstorms may nonetheless pose difficulties for the company.A Wells Fargo analysis concluded that although \u201cthe arguments made by the president against Amazon have been undermined by third-party fact checkers .\u2009.\u2009. the president\u2019s actions [could stir] additional scrutiny of Amazon beyond the federal government.\u201dBezos and The PostThe Post has been a steady target of Trump\u2019s attacks on the news media. But although the president has repeatedly linked Amazon and Bezos to The Post\u2019s coverage of his administration, Ryan, the publisher, said he is not concerned about damage to The Post\u2019s reputation. \u201cMost everybody recognizes it\u2019s Trump fiction,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cHe has this obsession despite knowing what the facts are.\u201dThe newspaper\u2019s executive editor, Martin Baron, said Bezos plays no role in decisions about what stories get covered or how they are written.Baron said that he and other Post executives have a conference call with Bezos every other Wednesday but that the conversations focus on corporate matters such as technology and subscription pricing, not on coverage or editorial decision-making. \u201cMost ideas for stories come from reporters and their editors,\u201d Baron said. \u201cI haven\u2019t received any ideas from Jeff.\u201d The closest Bezos has come to making a coverage suggestion, Baron said, was when he wondered whether The Post might want to have a columnist specializing in gender issues.\u201cWe said, \u2018Yes, that\u2019s a good idea,\u2019\u2009\u201d Baron said, and The Post plans to add such a position.Stone, the biographer, said that although \u201cit sounds like Trump would be directing news coverage if he owned a paper, Jeff has taken the opposite approach from Day One. He\u2019s made it clear that The Washington Post should operate independently.\u201dBut Politico media critic Jack Shafer argues that Trump is right to connect Amazon, Bezos and The Post, because the retailer\u2019s wealth made Bezos\u2019s purchase of the paper possible. \u201cIf Amazon didn\u2019t exist, it\u2019s unlikely the Washington Post would exist in its current form,\u201d wrote Shafer, whose wife, Nicole Arthur, is The Post\u2019s travel editor. Shafer rejected the notion that The Post is lobbying on behalf of Amazon but said that by linking The Post to Amazon and driving down Amazon\u2019s stock price, Trump had found a way to try to punish a news organization that he otherwise couldn\u2019t harm.Post executives rejected Trump\u2019s accusation that The Post has supported Amazon\u2019s interests. \u201cThe reality is he didn\u2019t present any evidence that we were lobbying for Amazon,\u201d Baron said. \u201cThe reason is because there is no evidence.\u201dPost editors said Bezos asked them to cover his other enterprises just as they would any other business, and Baron said that is what The Post has done. He provided a list of articles The Post has published that have raised questions about Amazon\u2019s practices and products, including an analysis that argued that Amazon\u2019s Prime membership program may not be worth the fee the company charges, a column that concluded that Amazon\u2019s dominance of some retail markets \u201cmight not be in the public interest,\u201d and a product review that dismissed Amazon\u2019s initiative to allow delivery agents to enter people\u2019s unoccupied homes to drop off packages as \u201ccreepy.\u201dUnlike many news-organization owners, who often play a defining role in setting the outlet\u2019s editorial opinions, Bezos has not imposed his views on The Post\u2019s editorials, said Fred Hiatt, editor of the editorial department, which operates separately from the Post newsroom.\u201cHe doesn\u2019t give us instructions,\u201d Hiatt said. \u201cOur editorial policies and the fundamental principles The Post stands for haven\u2019t really changed. Nobody has ever once tried to get me to use the page for either the business advantage or the political advantage of the owner.\u201dHiatt said his biweekly conversations with Bezos often focus on strategy and ways to engage more readers. \u201cHe is very committed to the idea of an opinion section with true ideological diversity,\u201d Hiatt said. \u201cHe\u2019s allowed us to add a lot of new voices.\u201dBezos\u2019s own politics remain a mystery to many at The Post; Ryan and Baron said they have no idea what the owner\u2019s views are. Stone, the biographer, said that he was unable to crack that nut either; he concluded that Bezos decided early on in his career that there was no upside to expressing political opinions when running a large company with employees from a broad range of perspectives.Bezos has responded to Trump\u2019s criticism a couple of times. He hit back in late 2015, after candidate Trump accused him of owning The Post as a way to reduce Amazon\u2019s tax bill. Bezos, who owns a space exploration business, tweeted: ",
        "author": "Marc Fisher"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mark Kelly sworn in as senator, giving Arizona two Democratic senators for first time in more than six decades (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2798",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-arizona-democrats-kelly/2020/12/01/10155924-3400-11eb-b59c-adb7153d10c2_story.html",
        "text": "Democrat Mark Kelly was sworn in to the Senate on Wednesday, marking the first time in more than 67 years that Arizona will have two Democratic senators.Kelly, 56, a former astronaut and the husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), defeated Sen. Martha McSally (R) in a special election last month. The seat was once held by longtime Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who died in 2018. McSally was later appointed to the seat but came up short this year in her race against Kelly, who will be up for a full six-year term in 2022. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVice President Pence administered the oath in the Senate chamber, and Arizona\u2019s senior senator, Kyrsten Sinema (D), accompanied Kelly and held the Bible. All three wore masks. Republicans and Democrats stood and applauded.Story continues below advertisementKelly joins Sinema, a former congresswoman who won election to the Senate in 2018, also defeating McSally.AdvertisementThe last time Arizona was represented by two Democrats in the Senate was in January 1953, when Ernest McFarland and Carl Hayden were the state\u2019s senators. McFarland, who was then the Senate majority leader, lost reelection in 1952 to Republican Barry Goldwater.Kelly was not the only Democrat to claim a statewide victory in Arizona this year: President-elect Joe Biden also won the state, becoming the first Democratic presidential nominee to do so since Bill Clinton in 1996.The Grand Canyon State\u2019s transformation from a conservative stronghold to a swing state is a result of a decade of work by Mexican American activists, sweeping demographic change and the consolidation of independent voters behind Biden. The dynamics were also influenced by President Trump\u2019s repeated attacks on McCain, whose widow, Cindy McCain, endorsed Biden, and by Kelly\u2019s strong and well-funded campaign.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiffords watched her husband\u2019s swearing-in from the visitors\u2019 gallery, a rare occurrence as the public galleries in the chamber have been largely closed since mid-March because of the coronavirus.Giffords retired from Congress after surviving a 2011 assassination attempt by a gunman. She and Kelly have since become well-known advocates of gun control.\u201cAwesome. A-plus,\u201d Giffords told reporters outside the Senate chamber Wednesday after her husband\u2019s swearing-in.Kelly simply said, \u201cGreat!\u201dLater, during a ceremonial swearing-in in the Old Senate Chamber, in which Giffords held the Bible, Pence mentioned Kelly\u2019s experience as a former astronaut and said he hoped the new senator would be an advocate for further strengthening NASA.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou\u2019ll be an invaluable voice building on the progress we\u2019ve made,\u201d Pence said. \u201cWe\u2019ve gotten the human space exploration back rolling where it needs to be.\u201dAdvertisementTweeting a photo of the ceremonial swearing-in, Kelly wrote, \u201cIt\u2019s time to restore science, data, and facts to Congress and be the independent senator Arizona deserves. Thank you for this honor, Arizona.\u201dIn remarks on the Senate floor earlier Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) welcomed Kelly to the chamber and praised him as \u201ca devoted and honorable man.\u201d\u201cAs Mark likes to say, his wife Gabby was already the member of the family in Congress,\u201d Schumer said. \u201cBut tragedy upended both of their lives, and changed so many of their plans. Everyone continues to be inspired by Gabby\u2019s recovery, by Mark\u2019s devotion, and the courage it took for their family to re-enter public life and public service.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn the eve of his swearing-in, Kelly tweeted a photo showing him and his family paying their respects at McCain\u2019s grave Tuesday morning.Advertisement\u201cSenator McCain has been a hero of mine since I was a young pilot,\u201d Kelly said in the tweet. \u201cHe left a legacy of service to Arizona and country that can\u2019t be matched, but that we should all strive towards.\u201dKelly\u2019s replacement of McSally trims the GOP\u2019s Senate majority to 52-to-48 for the last days of the lame-duck session. Two runoff elections in Georgia on Jan. 5 will decide control of the Senate next year at the start of the Biden presidency.Meanwhile, Trump in recent days has lashed out at Arizona officials \u2014 including the Republican governor, Doug Ducey \u2014 for certifying the state\u2019s election results and allowing Kelly to be seated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhy is he rushing to put a Democrat in office, especially when so many horrible things concerning voter fraud are being revealed at the hearing going on right now \u2026 Republicans will long remember!\u201d Trump tweeted Monday.Despite Trump\u2019s claims, there has been no evidence of widespread voting irregularities in this year\u2019s election, and Attorney General William P. Barr said Tuesday that he has \u201cnot seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.\u201d\n\nPaul Kane and Jose A. Del Real contributed to this report. Kelly, 56, a former astronaut and the husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), defeated Sen. Martha McSally (R) in a special election last month. Mark Kelly sworn in as senator, giving Arizona two Democratic senators for first time in more than six decades",
        "author": "Felicia Sonmez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Says He Steered Friday\u2019s White House Talk to Travel Ban (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2799",
        "date": "2017-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-seeks-to-clarify-role-at-white-house-meeting-1486238774?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=131",
        "text": "The White House had no immediate comment.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s two tweets Saturday appeared to be an effort to explain his rationale for attending the White House meeting of the president\u2019s economic advisory council when the travel ban has been widely criticized by Silicon Valley executives. \n\n\nAnother prominent tech entrepreneur, Uber Technologies Inc.\u2019s Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Travis Kalanick,\n\n\n\n said earlier in the week he is stepping down from the advisory council because his participation has been misunderstood as an endorsement of the new administration\u2019s policies. \nIn one of two tweets, Mr. Musk also said he had raised the issue of climate change in Friday\u2019s meeting and that he believes his participation \u201cis doing good.\u201d He said he would remain on the president\u2019s advisory council \u201cand keep at it.\u201d He added, \u201cDoing otherwise would be wrong.\u201d\nMr. Musk is the chief executive of electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., also known as SpaceX. He is a close associate of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel,\n\n\n\n the tech investor and entrepreneur who backed Mr. Trump during the campaign. Mr. Thiel and Mr. Musk were both founders of payments company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal,\n\n\n and Mr. Thiel\u2019s venture-capital firm Founders Fund backs SpaceX.\nRelations between Mr. Trump and some of the nation\u2019s CEOs were shaken earlier this week with the rollout of an executive order barring entry to the U.S. by people from seven majority-Muslim nations out of concerns about the risk of terrorism. The U.S. government said Saturday morning that it had stopped implementing the executive order on immigration and refugees after a federal judge temporarily blocked it late Friday. The government is expected to appeal the judge\u2019s ruling.\n\n\nRelated Coverage Homeland Security Stops Enforcing Trump\u2019s Immigrant Order Trump Criticizes \u2018So-Called Judge\u2019 Who Lifted Travel Ban Group of Companies Consider Joint Letter to Trump Opposing Travel Ban Trump Travel Ban Is a Wake-Up Call for Business \n\n\nBusinesses that operate internationally and those, like technology companies, that depend on visa holders who work for them in the U.S. were particularly concerned about the ban. Some organized a letter they plan to send to Mr. Trump to express opposition and offer their help in developing an alternative.\nIn Friday\u2019s gathering, Mr. Trump said his administration had \u201cgreat plans\u201d on issues that affect business.\n\u201cWe\u2019re coming up with a tax bill soon, a health-care bill even sooner,\u201d Mr. Trump said, later suggesting that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n J.P. Morgan Chase\n\n\n & Co. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Dimon,\n\n\n\n who was seated next to Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n and opposite the president, was well placed to advise on the future of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul that Mr. Trump is planning.\nMark Weinberger, the global chairman and CEO of accounting and consulting firm EY and a member of the president\u2019s economic advisory council, called Friday\u2019s meeting \u201cvery action-oriented.\u201d\nThe corporate chiefs told the president that the recent travel ban had disrupted their businesses and that the rollout of the rules had caused confusion, Mr. Weinberger said.\n\u201cWe\u2019re big global businesses. We have people in the U.S. who need to move freely outside the border,\u201d as well as people overseas who need to visit the U.S. for business, he said.\nThe president listened to the feedback and acknowledged the uncertainty about the executive order, Mr. Weinberger said. Mr. Trump has called the travel ban necessary for preventing terrorism. The CEOs agreed but maintained that immigration is good policy for their businesses, Mr. Weinberger said.\n\u201cWe need to be careful we don\u2019t send the wrong signal,\u201d he said. \u201cAll of our businesses rely on a global economy.\u201d Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he guided the meeting between President Donald Trump and senior business advisers to the travel ban, which is widely unpopular in Silicon Valley. ",
        "author": "a WSJ Staff Reporter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Huntsville Chosen as Home to U.S. Space Command (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2800",
        "date": "2021-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/huntsville-chosen-as-home-to-u-s-space-command-11610576194?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=39",
        "text": "The Space Force is a new military branch established in 2019 that is aimed at protecting U.S. and allied interests in space.\n\n\n\n\nThe secretary\u2019s office highlighted Huntsville\u2019s \u201cqualified workforce, quality schools, superior infrastructure capacity and low initial and recurring costs\u201d in its announcement. In addition, Redstone offered a facility to support the headquarters at no cost while a permanent home is built.\n\n\n\u201cOur state has long provided exceptional support for our military and their families as well as a rich and storied history when it comes to space exploration,\u201d said Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey.\nSen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he was \u201cthrilled that the Air Force has chosen Redstone and look forward to the vast economic impact this will have on Alabama and the benefits this will bring to the Air Force.\u201d\nThe Air Force expects to make a final decision on the headquarters site in spring 2023, pending the results of required environmental-impact studies, according to the secretary\u2019s office. The five other finalists will remain potential alternative locations.\nUntil a permanent location is ready, Colorado Springs will remain the command\u2019s provisional headquarters.\nKnown as \u201cRocket City,\u201d Huntsville has a longstanding connection to space exploration. The Marshall Space Flight Center developed Saturn rockets in the 1960s and propulsion systems for the space-shuttle program. Today, the area is home to a growing crop of aerospace companies, including Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which built a new rocket-engine plant there.\nHuntsville is growing rapidly and on pace eventually to become Alabama\u2019s most populous city. It has scored numerous economic successes beyond aerospace in recent years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota Motor Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mazda Motor Corp.\n\n\n are constructing a new assembly plant, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n is building a new data center.\nWrite to Arian Campo-Flores at arian.campo-flores@wsj.com Military officials selected Alabama\u2019s \u201cRocket City\u201d as the preferred headquarters location of the U.S. Space Command, delivering a coveted prize to an area with a long aerospace history. ",
        "author": "Arian Campo-Flores"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s 2020 Budget Request Aims to Speed Lunar Exploration (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2801",
        "date": "2019-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-2020-budget-request-aims-to-speed-lunar-exploration-11552188623?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=61",
        "text": "The latest request indicates the agency avoided the sweeping 5% cuts the White House initially sought from discretionary spending at nearly all nonmilitary agencies. The NASA numbers are set to become public Monday as part of a governmentwide budget release.\nBut more than previous NASA spending packages prepared by President Trump\u2019s aides, the latest proposal seeks to reorient the agency\u2019s goals by speeding up human exploration and commercial activity around the moon and on its surface. The White House is seeking more than twice as much additional funding for such purposes as it did last year, these people said, even as it cuts budget lines for some big-ticket exploration projects targeting human voyages deeper into the solar system.\n\n\nAgency leaders envision a combination of federal and private investments to accelerate technology development aimed at eventual missions to the lunar surface, with a deadline of transporting astronauts by 2024 at the latest. Previous formal timelines used a notional 2028 date.\nThe budget documents slated for release Monday are expected to leave out many details of the new approach.\u00a0And the extra dollars being requested are substantially less than many champions of commercial-space ventures advocated.\nBut in the coming months, Mr. Trump and Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n \u2014the administration\u2019s point man on space\u2014are expected to join forces with NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n to showcase the revised strategy in connection with the 50th anniversary this year of the first Apollo astronauts landing on the moon. The historic Apollo 11 mission, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n became the first human to set foot on the moon, occurred on July 20, 1969.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to step on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, as part of the historic Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOn Friday, a NASA spokesman declined to comment on budget figures before their official release.\nTo pay for its stepped-up lunar initiative, NASA seeks to cut money from deep-space exploration projects including some ultimately targeting astronaut trips to Mars, according to the people briefed on the numbers. Projects expected to be affected include the heavy-lift SLS rocket, being developed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Orion capsule, one of these people said. Both programs are years late and over budget.\nIn an apparent sign of White House frustration with the pace of progress, these and other deep-space technology efforts are in line to get about $5 billion total. But that is more than $600 million below NASA\u2019s initial spending request to the Office of Management and Budget, this person said.\nThe moon-exploration proposals build on recent agency decisions selecting nine companies for possible contracts to land scientific experiments on the moon as soon as next year. Mr. Bridenstine also has started the process of soliciting proposals for possible industry-led projects to develop much larger, more capable\u00a0lunar landers designed to transport astronauts in later years.\nCongress may balk at some of the moon-centric concepts, partly because there has been strong bipartisan support to pump up spending on SLS, officially called the Space Launch System, which was supposed to fly next year but now may not blast off on its first demonstration mission until 2022, according to another person briefed on the numbers. SLS and Orion\u2014both designed\u00a0to pave the way for human missions to\u00a0Mars perhaps in the 2030s\u2014together currently cost $3.5 billion annually.\n\n\nRelated Reading SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (March 3, 2019) Europe Seeks Out New Frontiers in Space Race (Feb. 25, 2019) China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (Jan. 3, 2019) China Pushes for Primacy in Space (Dec. 31, 2018) Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22, 2018) \n\n\nLawmakers also have signaled that enhanced support for\u00a0lunar-lander prototypes and a so-called lunar gateway\u2014a permanent platform intended to serve as a jumping off point for human and robotic missions\u2014would require NASA to draft\u00a0more specific plans.\nThe Trump administration continues to seek the retirement of the international space station by the middle of the next decade, potentially producing significant savings that could be shifted to lunar exploration. Previous studies by NASA and Boeing, the prime contractor for the $100 billion space station, highlighted escalating costs to maintain the 1990s-vintage orbiting laboratory, which already costs the agency more than $3 billion a year to maintain and staff.\nThe proposal to cut off funding by 2025, however, continues to face stiff bipartisan resistance on Capitol Hill, where legislation is pendin NASA is expected to request a budget increase of more than $500 million for moon exploration and related programs in 2020. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s 2020 Budget Request Aims to Speed Lunar Exploration (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2802",
        "date": "2019-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-2020-budget-request-aims-to-speed-lunar-exploration-11552188623?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=64",
        "text": "The latest request indicates the agency avoided the sweeping 5% cuts the White House initially sought from discretionary spending at nearly all nonmilitary agencies. The NASA numbers are set to become public Monday as part of a governmentwide budget release.\n\n\n\n\nBut more than previous NASA spending packages prepared by President Trump\u2019s aides, the latest proposal seeks to reorient the agency\u2019s goals by speeding up human exploration and commercial activity around the moon and on its surface. The White House is seeking more than twice as much additional funding for such purposes as it did last year, these people said, even as it cuts budget lines for some big-ticket exploration projects targeting human voyages deeper into the solar system.\n\n\nAgency leaders envision a combination of federal and private investments to accelerate technology development aimed at eventual missions to the lunar surface, with a deadline of transporting astronauts by 2024 at the latest. Previous formal timelines used a notional 2028 date.\nThe budget documents slated for release Monday are expected to leave out many details of the new approach.\u00a0And the extra dollars being requested are substantially less than many champions of commercial-space ventures advocated.\nBut in the coming months, Mr. Trump and Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n \u2014the administration\u2019s point man on space\u2014are expected to join forces with NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n to showcase the revised strategy in connection with the 50th anniversary this year of the first Apollo astronauts landing on the moon. The historic Apollo 11 mission, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n became the first human to set foot on the moon, occurred on July 20, 1969.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to step on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, as part of the historic Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOn Friday, a NASA spokesman declined to comment on budget figures before their official release.\nTo pay for its stepped-up lunar initiative, NASA seeks to cut money from deep-space exploration projects including some ultimately targeting astronaut trips to Mars, according to the people briefed on the numbers. Projects expected to be affected include the heavy-lift SLS rocket, being developed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Orion capsule, one of these people said. Both programs are years late and over budget.\nIn an apparent sign of White House frustration with the pace of progress, these and other deep-space technology efforts are in line to get about $5 billion total. But that is more than $600 million below NASA\u2019s initial spending request to the Office of Management and Budget, this person said.\nThe moon-exploration proposals build on recent agency decisions selecting nine companies for possible contracts to land scientific experiments on the moon as soon as next year. Mr. Bridenstine also has started the process of soliciting proposals for possible industry-led projects to develop much larger, more capable\u00a0lunar landers designed to transport astronauts in later years.\nCongress may balk at some of the moon-centric concepts, partly because there has been strong bipartisan support to pump up spending on SLS, officially called the Space Launch System, which was supposed to fly next year but now may not blast off on its first demonstration mission until 2022, according to another person briefed on the numbers. SLS and Orion\u2014both designed\u00a0to pave the way for human missions to\u00a0Mars perhaps in the 2030s\u2014together currently cost $3.5 billion annually.\n\n\nRelated Reading SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (March 3, 2019) Europe Seeks Out New Frontiers in Space Race (Feb. 25, 2019) China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (Jan. 3, 2019) China Pushes for Primacy in Space (Dec. 31, 2018) Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22, 2018) \n\n\nLawmakers also have signaled that enhanced support for\u00a0lunar-lander prototypes and a so-called lunar gateway\u2014a permanent platform intended to serve as a jumping off point for human and robotic missions\u2014would require NASA to draft\u00a0more specific plans.\nThe Trump administration continues to seek the retirement of the international space station by the middle of the next decade, potentially producing significant savings that could be shifted to lunar exploration. Previous studies by NASA and Boeing, the prime contractor for the $100 billion space station, highlighted escalating costs to maintain the 1990s-vintage orbiting laboratory, which already costs the agency more than $3 billion a year to maintain and staff.\nThe proposal to cut off funding by 2025, however, continues to face stiff bipartisan resistance on Capitol Hill, where legislation is pending to extend the station\u2019s life to at least 2028.\nIn the previous budget cycle, Congress added some $1.5 billion to the White House\u2019s original request of nearly $20 billion for NASA, with much of the extra funding earmarked for advanced space telescopes and certain planetary-science projects. Previous agency and White House projections showed NASA\u2019s top-line budget essentially flat through 2023, without accounting for inflation.\nIn recent months Mr. Bridenstine and other NASA leaders have emphasized getting to the moon as soon as possible, suggesting that is the primary policy driver even if it means foregoing international help. So far, NASA\u2019s European partners generally have been ambivalent about making firm financial commitments to assist with lunar landers or the associated gateway platform.\nThe proposed 2020 spending package earmarks about $300 million more for the gateway than currently budgeted, one of the people briefed on the numbers said. This person added that NASA is also asking for an extra $230 million for work with the private sector to develop \u201cdescent modules\u201d capable of landing cargo on the lunar surface.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA is expected to request a budget increase of more than $500 million for moon exploration and related programs in 2020. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s 2020 Budget Request Aims to Speed Lunar Exploration (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2803",
        "date": "2019-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-2020-budget-request-aims-to-speed-lunar-exploration-11552188623?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=58",
        "text": "The latest request indicates the agency avoided the sweeping 5% cuts the White House initially sought from discretionary spending at nearly all nonmilitary agencies. The NASA numbers are set to become public Monday as part of a governmentwide budget release.\nBut more than previous NASA spending packages prepared by President Trump\u2019s aides, the latest proposal seeks to reorient the agency\u2019s goals by speeding up human exploration and commercial activity around the moon and on its surface. The White House is seeking more than twice as much additional funding for such purposes as it did last year, these people said, even as it cuts budget lines for some big-ticket exploration projects targeting human voyages deeper into the solar system.\n\n\nAgency leaders envision a combination of federal and private investments to accelerate technology development aimed at eventual missions to the lunar surface, with a deadline of transporting astronauts by 2024 at the latest. Previous formal timelines used a notional 2028 date.\nThe budget documents slated for release Monday are expected to leave out many details of the new approach.\u00a0And the extra dollars being requested are substantially less than many champions of commercial-space ventures advocated.\nBut in the coming months, Mr. Trump and Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n \u2014the administration\u2019s point man on space\u2014are expected to join forces with NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n to showcase the revised strategy in connection with the 50th anniversary this year of the first Apollo astronauts landing on the moon. The historic Apollo 11 mission, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n became the first human to set foot on the moon, occurred on July 20, 1969.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to step on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, as part of the historic Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOn Friday, a NASA spokesman declined to comment on budget figures before their official release.\nTo pay for its stepped-up lunar initiative, NASA seeks to cut money from deep-space exploration projects including some ultimately targeting astronaut trips to Mars, according to the people briefed on the numbers. Projects expected to be affected include the heavy-lift SLS rocket, being developed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Orion capsule, one of these people said. Both programs are years late and over budget.\nIn an apparent sign of White House frustration with the pace of progress, these and other deep-space technology efforts are in line to get about $5 billion total. But that is more than $600 million below NASA\u2019s initial spending request to the Office of Management and Budget, this person said.\nThe moon-exploration proposals build on recent agency decisions selecting nine companies for possible contracts to land scientific experiments on the moon as soon as next year. Mr. Bridenstine also has started the process of soliciting proposals for possible industry-led projects to develop much larger, more capable\u00a0lunar landers designed to transport astronauts in later years.\nCongress may balk at some of the moon-centric concepts, partly because there has been strong bipartisan support to pump up spending on SLS, officially called the Space Launch System, which was supposed to fly next year but now may not blast off on its first demonstration mission until 2022, according to another person briefed on the numbers. SLS and Orion\u2014both designed\u00a0to pave the way for human missions to\u00a0Mars perhaps in the 2030s\u2014together currently cost $3.5 billion annually.\n\n\nRelated Reading SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (March 3, 2019) Europe Seeks Out New Frontiers in Space Race (Feb. 25, 2019) China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (Jan. 3, 2019) China Pushes for Primacy in Space (Dec. 31, 2018) Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22, 2018) \n\n\nLawmakers also have signaled that enhanced support for\u00a0lunar-lander prototypes and a so-called lunar gateway\u2014a permanent platform intended to serve as a jumping off point for human and robotic missions\u2014would require NASA to draft\u00a0more specific plans.\nThe Trump administration continues to seek the retirement of the international space station by the middle of the next decade, potentially producing significant savings that could be shifted to lunar exploration. Previous studies by NASA and Boeing, the prime contractor for the $100 billion space station, highlighted escalating costs to maintain the 1990s-vintage orbiting laboratory, which already costs the agency more than $3 billion a year to maintain and staff.\nThe proposal to cut off funding by 2025, however, continues to face stiff bipartisan resistance on Capitol Hill, where legislation is pendin NASA is expected to request a budget increase of more than $500 million for moon exploration and related programs in 2020. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s 2020 Budget Request Aims to Speed Lunar Exploration (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2804",
        "date": "2019-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-2020-budget-request-aims-to-speed-lunar-exploration-11552188623?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=77",
        "text": "The latest request indicates the agency avoided the sweeping 5% cuts the White House initially sought from discretionary spending at nearly all nonmilitary agencies. The NASA numbers are set to become public Monday as part of a governmentwide budget release.\n\n\n\n\nBut more than previous NASA spending packages prepared by President Trump\u2019s aides, the latest proposal seeks to reorient the agency\u2019s goals by speeding up human exploration and commercial activity around the moon and on its surface. The White House is seeking more than twice as much additional funding for such purposes as it did last year, these people said, even as it cuts budget lines for some big-ticket exploration projects targeting human voyages deeper into the solar system.\n\n\nAgency leaders envision a combination of federal and private investments to accelerate technology development aimed at eventual missions to the lunar surface, with a deadline of transporting astronauts by 2024 at the latest. Previous formal timelines used a notional 2028 date.\nThe budget documents slated for release Monday are expected to leave out many details of the new approach.\u00a0And the extra dollars being requested are substantially less than many champions of commercial-space ventures advocated.\nBut in the coming months, Mr. Trump and Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n \u2014the administration\u2019s point man on space\u2014are expected to join forces with NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n to showcase the revised strategy in connection with the 50th anniversary this year of the first Apollo astronauts landing on the moon. The historic Apollo 11 mission, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n became the first human to set foot on the moon, occurred on July 20, 1969.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to step on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, as part of the historic Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOn Friday, a NASA spokesman declined to comment on budget figures before their official release.\nTo pay for its stepped-up lunar initiative, NASA seeks to cut money from deep-space exploration projects including some ultimately targeting astronaut trips to Mars, according to the people briefed on the numbers. Projects expected to be affected include the heavy-lift SLS rocket, being developed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Orion capsule, one of these people said. Both programs are years late and over budget.\nIn an apparent sign of White House frustration with the pace of progress, these and other deep-space technology efforts are in line to get about $5 billion total. But that is more than $600 million below NASA\u2019s initial spending request to the Office of Management and Budget, this person said.\nThe moon-exploration proposals build on recent agency decisions selecting nine companies for possible contracts to land scientific experiments on the moon as soon as next year. Mr. Bridenstine also has started the process of soliciting proposals for possible industry-led projects to develop much larger, more capable\u00a0lunar landers designed to transport astronauts in later years.\nCongress may balk at some of the moon-centric concepts, partly because there has been strong bipartisan support to pump up spending on SLS, officially called the Space Launch System, which was supposed to fly next year but now may not blast off on its first demonstration mission until 2022, according to another person briefed on the numbers. SLS and Orion\u2014both designed\u00a0to pave the way for human missions to\u00a0Mars perhaps in the 2030s\u2014together currently cost $3.5 billion annually.\n\n\nRelated Reading SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (March 3, 2019) Europe Seeks Out New Frontiers in Space Race (Feb. 25, 2019) China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (Jan. 3, 2019) China Pushes for Primacy in Space (Dec. 31, 2018) Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22, 2018) \n\n\nLawmakers also have signaled that enhanced support for\u00a0lunar-lander prototypes and a so-called lunar gateway\u2014a permanent platform intended to serve as a jumping off point for human and robotic missions\u2014would require NASA to draft\u00a0more specific plans.\nThe Trump administration continues to seek the retirement of the international space station by the middle of the next decade, potentially producing significant savings that could be shifted to lunar exploration. Previous studies by NASA and Boeing, the prime contractor for the $100 billion space station, highlighted escalating costs to maintain the 1990s-vintage orbiting laboratory, which already costs the agency more than $3 billion a year to maintain and staff.\nThe proposal to cut off funding by 2025, however, continues to face stiff bipartisan resistance on Capitol Hill, where legislation is pe NASA is expected to request a budget increase of more than $500 million for moon exploration and related programs in 2020. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lobbyists Pile On to Get Wins for Clients Into Coronavirus Stimulus Bill (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2805",
        "date": "2020-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lobbyists-pile-on-to-get-wins-for-clients-into-coronavirus-stimulus-package-11584792000?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=58",
        "text": "The health-insurance lobby has asked lawmakers to add a proposal that would limit how much hospitals and doctors can charge patients for testing and treatment of coronavirus. And the fishing industry is pushing for changes in immigration laws to help ensure it can handle next season\u2019s salmon catch.\n\n\n\n\nThe coronavirus pandemic has led to thousands of deaths and hospitalizations around the globe and dealt a crushing blow to the U.S. economy, large portions of which are being shut down to save lives.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe U.S. seafood industry has asked Congress for a temporary change in immigration rules to ensure they have enough workers to process salmon and other fish this summer in their Alaskan processing plants.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alistair Gardiner/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSenators have been meeting behind closed doors on Capitol Hill this week to try to hammer out an agreement on a stimulus package that could top $1.3 trillion. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week Congress must \u201cmove swiftly and boldly in a major way to help America\u2019s small businesses survive this disruption and thrive on the other side of it.\u201d \n\n\nBut for some lobbyists, the package provides an opportunity to score wins for corporate clients and breathe new life into stalled policy proposals\u00a0unrelated to the crisis. \nThat lobbying approach has taken hold in Washington in recent years as Congress has approved fewer major pieces of legislation. Each year, industry advocates try to add measures to unrelated bills that have momentum, such as must-pass annual bills to fund the federal government. Now lobbyists see the stimulus bill as an ideal piece of legislation to hitch a ride on.\n\u201cAt a time when Americans are looking for Congress to act swiftly and specifically on the coronavirus, it is absurd that special interests are using this crisis to get their unrelated pet projects included,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Williams,\n\n\n\n the president of the Taxpayer Protection Alliance, a nonpartisan outfit that monitors federal spending.\nTo be sure, lobbyists\u00a0for many companies are pushing for measures aimed at corporate survival during a historic economic downturn: injections of government cash, tax credits and deregulations aimed at keeping their clients afloat through the pandemic.\nThe Trump administration and Congress have laid plans to help some of the hardest-hit industries. The administration has proposed a massive package of loans and financial assistance to airlines, hotels and others. The legislation must be approved by both chambers of Congress.\nOn Thursday, Mr. McConnell unveiled a broad stimulus bill that focuses on individuals, airlines and small businesses.\u00a0A Senate\u00a0proposal\u00a0drafted by Democrats includes billions of dollars in financial support to help\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AT&T Inc.,\n\n\n Verizon and other companies provide broadband service to school, rural areas and underserved areas.\u00a0Over the weekend, Senate Democrats say they will attempt to add the broadband spending to the Republican bill.\nThe Senate will vote on a compromise version of the legislation next week, when\u00a0the stimulus package will move to the House for review. Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nancy Pelosi\n \n\n\n\n (D., Calif.) told the chairs of House committees on a Wednesday conference call she had set a deadline of this weekend for suggesting additional provisions.\nThe committee chairmen, in turn, have solicited ideas from industries and companies\u2014and corporate lobbyists have eagerly complied.\nCompanies have advanced proposals such as providing tax credits for specific industries, suspending some of the president\u2019s import tariffs, temporarily changing immigration rules and speeding up payments to defense contractors.\u00a0Boeing has said it asked Congress for a $60 billion aid package, saying the aid would also be used to support its suppliers as global aviation demand dwindles.\nA coalition of charter-flight operators, helicopter services and general- aviation businesses sent letters seeking access to any relief funds set up to bail out airlines, as well as rebating fuel and excise taxes to provide the companies more capital.\nAnother group, the Aeronautical Repair Station Association, which represents aviation-maintenance companies, asked lawmakers to create a temporary tax incentive to encourage airlines to schedule maintenance work this year, as well as an $11 billion grant and loan program to keep maintenance companies afloat through the slowdown.\nThe Aerospace Industries Association is pushing for an infusion of public funding into major defense contractors and to accelerate payments on existing Pentagon contracts. The trade group also is urging that defense workers be classified as essential, so they can continue churning out weapons through mandatory coronavirus shutdowns.\nThe Commercial Spaceflight Federation, whose members include billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technol From Boeing to Verizon Wireless, scores of U.S. companies and industries are furiously lobbying Congress to add favorable measures to the Trump administration\u2019s coronavirus stimulus package. ",
        "author": "Brody Mullins and Ted Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Nominee Stymied in Senate (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2806",
        "date": "2018-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-nominee-stymied-in-senate-1517267764?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=103",
        "text": "Sen. Rubio has expressed deep misgivings that the nomination would lead to \u201cthe politicization of NASA\u201d at \u201cthis critical stage of its history.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe choice previously confronted mounting troubles, but now opponents and backers alike see the nomination most likely languishing\u2014perhaps for months\u2014until there is a shift by pivotal lawmakers or a change in the makeup of the Senate.\n\n\nAiling Republican\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona also is widely considered to be leaning against the controversial National Aeronautics and Space Administration choice, some of them said, a sentiment shared by White House legislative strategists and many of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s congressional supporters. That prospective no vote, combined with anticipated Democratic demands for extended debate, appears to be delaying floor action indefinitely.\nMr. McCain\u2019s office didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nThe situation underscores the broader difficulty of getting nominations through the currently fractured Senate\u2014including for posts that traditionally garnered bipartisan support and weren\u2019t captive to such intense, high-profile partisan fights.\nThe White House nominated Mr. Bridenstine for the NASA post in September.\nSenate Democratic leaders continue to push for a party-line rejection of Mr. Bridenstine, a socially conservative lawmaker from Oklahoma, while GOP leaders have been reluctant to bring the nomination to the floor without assured support.\nWhite House legislative strategists initially expected to get the nomination through the full Senate last month, before the election of Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Doug Jones\n\n\n\n of Alabama. Since then, Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n has stepped up efforts to round up votes for the former Navy pilot.\nIn recent weeks, Mr. Pence, several GOP House members and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich have specifically appealed to Sen. Rubio to change his position, apparently without success. The outcome has surprised Rep. Bridenstine and certain supporters, according to people familiar with his thinking.\nTrump administration officials have rejected suggestions to consider alternate candidates. Earlier this month, a White House spokeswoman said the president anticipated Rep. Bridenstine\u2019s \u201cswift confirmation by the Senate, and is confident he will lead NASA to ensure America is a leader in space exploration once again.\u201d\nBut Sen. McCain, who is likely to be unavailable for votes in the foreseeable future as he battles brain cancer, could help derail the nomination even if he doesn\u2019t cast a no vote. The Arizona senator\u2019s absence from the floor threatens to block Republicans from compiling the necessary votes to end up with a 50-50 tie that could be broken by the vice president.\nThe nominee has some personal baggage with the pair of GOP naysayers. Rep. Bridenstine attacked Sen. Rubio as being soft on immigration and terrorist threats during the 2016 GOP presidential primaries. Rep. Bridenstine also supported Sen. McCain\u2019s unsuccessful challenger during the Republican primary race for his Senate seat that same year.\nTestifying at his 2017 confirmation hearing, the Oklahoma lawmaker vowed to run NASA in an open and entirely nonpartisan manner. He said his goal was to use his congressional experience to reach out to Democrats and foster an agency culture in which \u201csafety, transparency and independent oversight are celebrated.\u201d\nNASA has already been operating without a permanent head for more than a year, leading both sides to decry potential damage to program planning and employee morale.\n\u201cActing administrators unfortunately can only do so much\u201d to weigh in on policy and budget decisions, said Phillip Larson, a former Democratic White House space adviser and industry official who is now assistant dean of engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. \u201cLeaving a nominee in question helps no one, especially at an agency like NASA that relies on certainty.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n the Florida Democrat spearheading the opposition, has characterized Rep. Bridenstine as unduly partisan and has sharply criticized his record questioning climate change.\nWhen the Senate Commerce Committee voted, 14-13, earlier this month for the second time in three months, to approve the White House choice, Sen. Nelson alluded to the odds against confirmation by the full Senate.\n \u201cI don\u2019t say anything is solid and sure until\u201d the vote occurs, he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s my hope that sooner or later we can move on to a qualified candidate who can quickly be confirmed with broad bipartisan support,\u201d said Sen. Nelson, the senior Democrat on the panel.\nAt the same hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the space subcommittee and is supporting the nomination, told opponents: \u201cIf you want to pick a partisan fight, pick something other than space.\u201d\n\u2014Natalie Andrews contributed to this article.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor a President Donald Trump\u2019s pick to run NASA faces what increasingly seem insurmountable obstacles to confirmation because of opposition by Senate Democrats and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Hits Back Against Elizabeth Warren in Twitter Spat Over Tax Policy (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2807",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-hits-back-at-elizabeth-warren-over-taxes-11639577975?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=8",
        "text": "Mr. Musk responded with a string of tweets, saying that he will pay more taxes than any American in history this year. \u201cDon\u2019t spend it all at once \u2026 oh wait you did already,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n",
        "author": "Omar Abdel-Baqui"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden Cites Progress, Pushes Economic Agenda (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2808",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-to-propose-1-8-trillion-plan-aimed-at-families-tax-hikes-for-wealthiest-americans-11619600400?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=31",
        "text": "\u201cAmerica is moving. Moving forward. And we can\u2019t stop now,\u201d he said, in remarks that ran just over an hour. \u201cWe\u2019re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.\u201d\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.What\u2019s NewsTakeaways From President Biden's Speech to CongressA.M. Edition for April 29. WSJ White House reporter Sabrina Siddiqui on key moments from President Biden's speech to Congress as he pushes a broad economic agenda. A look at the markets as the president marks 100 days in office. Amazon workers are set for a pay raise. Marc Stewart hosts.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe prime-time address looked different this year under pandemic restrictions, with a small group of masked attendees, no in-person guests hosted by the first lady and more muted applause. Mr. Biden used the moment to sell lawmakers and the public on his economic proposals, including his new American Families Plan, as well as renew his support for a long list of Democratic priorities, including passing legislation on policing, gun control and immigration. \n\n\u201cWe have to prove democracy still works. That our government still works and we can deliver for our people,\u201d said Mr. Biden. He appealed to Republicans to work with him. GOP lawmakers have largely opposed his economic agenda, saying he has proposed too much government spending and that his tax plans could hurt the economy. \nTaken together, the Democratic president\u2019s proposals represent an ambitious effort to redefine the government\u2019s role in shaping the economy. Betting that government can be a driving force for growth, the White House is shifting away from long-held assumptions within both parties that the public sector is inherently less efficient than the private and that policy makers should generally defer to markets.\nMr. Biden highlighted the American Families Plan, which is paid for largely by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and his $2.3 trillion infrastructure package that includes new spending on bridges, roads and broadband internet. Mr. Biden cast the massive spending proposals as necessary to help the nation\u2019s economy and workers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Joe Biden, addressing a joint session of Congress Wednesday, assessed his first 100 days in office and laid out his plans for driving growth.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Melina Mara/Press Pool\n \n\n\n\nReferring to the family policies, Mr. Biden said it was time to make a \u201conce in a generation investment in our families and our children.\u201d \nHe said the U.S. had used public spending on things like schools and space exploration to accomplish great things in the past.\n\u201cThese are investments we made together as one country and investments that only the government was in a position to make,\u201d he said. \u201cTime and again, they propel us into the future.\u201d\nTo pay for all of his proposals, Mr. Biden would raise the top income-tax and capital-gains rates, boost taxes on companies and rely on an expanded Internal Revenue Service to audit and collect more money.\nMr. Biden stressed his campaign pledge that people making less than $400,000 wouldn\u2019t pay more in taxes, but he said that it was time for companies and the wealthiest Americans to \u201cpay their fair share.\u201d\n\n\nBiden\u2019s Speech Economic Plan Would Expand Government Biden Tax Plan Leans on Banks to Help Find Unreported Income Biden\u2019s Challenge: Advancing Agenda as Window Narrows Tim Scott Counters Biden on Racial Issues, Spending Plans Capital Journal: Biden Gambles on His Feel for the Voters Key Takeaways \n\n\nThe president has attended numerous such addresses as both a U.S. senator and vice president at a Capitol, which is still under heavy security following the storming of the building on Jan. 6.\nMr. Biden noted that violence, calling it \u201cthe worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.\u201d \nThe president\u2019s speech marked the first time in the nation\u2019s history that both officeholders flanking the president on the dais were women: Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nancy Pelosi\n \n\n\n\n (D., Calif.).\nSen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) delivered the Republican rebuttal to the president\u2019s address. The only Black Republican in the Senate, Mr. Scott is considered a possible 2024 presidential candidate. \nMr. Scott called Mr. Biden\u2019s infrastructure proposal a \u201cliberal wish list of government waste.\u201d He also said the president hasn\u2019t lived up to his promises to bring the nation together.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSen. Tim Scott walking through the U.S. Capitol Wednesday before delivering the Republicans\u2019 response to President Biden's address.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Drew Angerer/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cOur best future will not come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It will come from you, the American people,\u201d he said.\nIn a direct appeal to Republicans, Mr. Biden argued that jobs and infrastructur The president declared \u201cAmerica is ready for a takeoff\u201d in a speech before Congress as he pitched a sweeping vision for greater government investment. ",
        "author": "Catherine Lucey and Sabrina Siddiqui"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senate Confirms House Republican to Lead NASA (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2809",
        "date": "2018-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-confirms-james-bridenstine-to-lead-nasa-1524166821?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=19",
        "text": "Mr. Bridenstine, confirmed in a 50-49 vote, has broad support in his party, and across the aerospace industry. Democrats, in objecting to the nominee, point to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s scant management experience and a history of provocative, conservative views on gay rights, climate change and other hot-button issues.\nDemocrats have also faced pressure from the progressive wing of the party to block all Trump nominees, making for many tight margins on confirmation votes. Mr. Trump\u2019s nominee for secretary of State,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo,\n\n\n\n similarly faces the prospect of picking up a few Democratic votes, despite garnering some in his earlier confirmation as Central Intelligence Agency chief.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s nomination was slow to come up for floor action in 2017 because not a single Senate Democrat signaled support and Republican leaders were worried about rounding up the necessary votes on their side. GOP Sens.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marco Rubio\n\n\n\n of Florida objected to the nomination. Mr. Rubio eventually said he would support Mr. Bridenstine, and voted on Wednesday to allow it to move forward.\nHowever, that procedural vote stalled when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Jeff Flake\n\n\n\n (R., Ariz.)\u00a0cast a vote against the nominee. He eventually changed his vote to yes, allowing the nomination to move forward. \nSenate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R., Texas) said Mr. Flake changed his vote after asking Senate GOP leadership to talk to secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo about travel restrictions to Cuba. He was given the assurance of a meeting, Mr. Cornyn said. Mr. Flake is an advocate of opening up relations with Cuba.\nMr. Flake denied that was the reason he changed his vote. \u201cNo, I wasn\u2019t seeking that,\u201d Mr. Flake said Thursday, adding that on close votes, senators had more leverage, and he was simply exercising that power. He didn\u2019t say what concessions he had sought\u2014or won\u2014from Republican leaders in connection with his vote to confirm Mr. Bridenstine.\n\u201cI\u2019m just working on a few issues,\u201d Mr. Flake said. \nMr. Flake then also voted for Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation on Thursday. His support got the nomination to 50 votes. Minutes later, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.), taking a short break from maternity leave to potentially cast the deciding vote blocking the nomination, brought her baby to the floor and cast the 49th \u201cno\u201d vote. \nMr. Rubio said on Thursday morning he supported Mr. Bridenstine because NASA needed a leader and the process to nominate a new leader of the organization could take months.\n\u201cIf you do the math, even if Congressman Bridenstine were to withdraw, by the time it worked its way through the administration, the committee process, the floor, the way things are going, we could be into February of next year,\u201d Mr. Rubio said on the Senate floor. He urged his colleagues to support Mr. Pompeo, now CIA director, as secretary of state as well, to avoid a gap in leadership in the agency.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Cory Gardner\n\n\n\n (R., Colo.) pushed back against suggestions that Mr. Bridenstine doesn\u2019t have the experience to run the agency. \u201cWe need somebody with a mission, we need somebody who actually has an idea of where we should take our great space mission, somebody who has commercial experience, somebody who has government experience, somebody who has management experience and yes, somebody who has experience with the industry itself,\u201d he said.\nDemocrat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, however, called Mr. Bridenstine \u201ca climate denier with no scientific background.\u201d\n\u201cIt\u2019s frightening to have a leader who has made a career out of ignoring scientific expertise,\u201d he said.\nThe White House stuck with Mr. Bridenstine despite the recommendations of many aerospace industry leaders, and even some senior GOP senators that they find another candidate. They supported him as the NASA administrator, but their concern was that a lengthy confirmation delay would damage NASA and hurt the momentum of some programs.\nWith Thursday\u2019s vote, the former military pilot takes the controls of an agency that already appears to have many of its top budget and policy priorities set for several years. The White House has established manned exploration of the Moon as NASA\u2019s top goal through the next decade, while proposing to phase out U.S. government support for the international space station by 2024. Mr. Bridenstine will face pushback from lawmakers who support the space station.\nOne administration goal that isn\u2019t likely to flourish under Mr. Bridenstine is the idea of quickly devising or adjusting strategies to get astronauts to Mars. Over the years he has questioned whether NASA budgets\u2014expected to stay basically flat through the middle of the next decade\u2014can swiftly pave the way for effective exploration of the Red Planet.\nMost of NASA\u2019s traditional big-ticket programs, including the proposed Orion capsule and James Bridenstine, a House Republican from Oklahoma, was narrowly confirmed to lead the nation\u2019s space program, squeaking by in a Senate vote over unanimous opposition from Democrats who felt he lacked the necessary scientific background for the job. ",
        "author": "Natalie Andrews and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senate Confirms House Republican to Lead NASA (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2810",
        "date": "2018-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-confirms-james-bridenstine-to-lead-nasa-1524166821?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=68",
        "text": "Mr. Bridenstine, confirmed in a 50-49 vote, has broad support in his party, and across the aerospace industry. Democrats, in objecting to the nominee, point to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s scant management experience and a history of provocative, conservative views on gay rights, climate change and other hot-button issues.\nDemocrats have also faced pressure from the progressive wing of the party to block all Trump nominees, making for many tight margins on confirmation votes. Mr. Trump\u2019s nominee for secretary of State,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo,\n\n\n\n similarly faces the prospect of picking up a few Democratic votes, despite garnering some in his earlier confirmation as Central Intelligence Agency chief.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s nomination was slow to come up for floor action in 2017 because not a single Senate Democrat signaled support and Republican leaders were worried about rounding up the necessary votes on their side. GOP Sens.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marco Rubio\n\n\n\n of Florida objected to the nomination. Mr. Rubio eventually said he would support Mr. Bridenstine, and voted on Wednesday to allow it to move forward.\nHowever, that procedural vote stalled when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Jeff Flake\n\n\n\n (R., Ariz.)\u00a0cast a vote against the nominee. He eventually changed his vote to yes, allowing the nomination to move forward. \nSenate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R., Texas) said Mr. Flake changed his vote after asking Senate GOP leadership to talk to secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo about travel restrictions to Cuba. He was given the assurance of a meeting, Mr. Cornyn said. Mr. Flake is an advocate of opening up relations with Cuba.\nMr. Flake denied that was the reason he changed his vote. \u201cNo, I wasn\u2019t seeking that,\u201d Mr. Flake said Thursday, adding that on close votes, senators had more leverage, and he was simply exercising that power. He didn\u2019t say what concessions he had sought\u2014or won\u2014from Republican leaders in connection with his vote to confirm Mr. Bridenstine.\n\u201cI\u2019m just working on a few issues,\u201d Mr. Flake said. \nMr. Flake then also voted for Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation on Thursday. His support got the nomination to 50 votes. Minutes later, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.), taking a short break from maternity leave to potentially cast the deciding vote blocking the nomination, brought her baby to the floor and cast the 49th \u201cno\u201d vote. \nMr. Rubio said on Thursday morning he supported Mr. Bridenstine because NASA needed a leader and the process to nominate a new leader of the organization could take months.\n\u201cIf you do the math, even if Congressman Bridenstine were to withdraw, by the time it worked its way through the administration, the committee process, the floor, the way things are going, we could be into February of next year,\u201d Mr. Rubio said on the Senate floor. He urged his colleagues to support Mr. Pompeo, now CIA director, as secretary of state as well, to avoid a gap in leadership in the agency.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Cory Gardner\n\n\n\n (R., Colo.) pushed back against suggestions that Mr. Bridenstine doesn\u2019t have the experience to run the agency. \u201cWe need somebody with a mission, we need somebody who actually has an idea of where we should take our great space mission, somebody who has commercial experience, somebody who has government experience, somebody who has management experience and yes, somebody who has experience with the industry itself,\u201d he said.\nDemocrat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, however, called Mr. Bridenstine \u201ca climate denier with no scientific background.\u201d\n\u201cIt\u2019s frightening to have a leader who has made a career out of ignoring scientific expertise,\u201d he said.\nThe White House stuck with Mr. Bridenstine despite the recommendations of many aerospace industry leaders, and even some senior GOP senators that they find another candidate. They supported him as the NASA administrator, but their concern was that a lengthy confirmation delay would damage NASA and hurt the momentum of some programs.\nWith Thursday\u2019s vote, the former military pilot takes the controls of an agency that already appears to have many of its top budget and policy priorities set for several years. The White House has established manned exploration of the Moon as NASA\u2019s top goal through the next decade, while proposing to phase out U.S. government support for the international space station by 2024. Mr. Bridenstine will face pushback from lawmakers who support the space station.\nOne administration goal that isn\u2019t likely to flourish under Mr. Bridenstine is the idea of quickly devising or adjusting strategies to get astronauts to Mars. Over the years he has questioned whether NASA budgets\u2014expected to stay basically flat through the middle of the next decade\u2014can swiftly pave the way for effective exploration of the Red Planet.\nMost of NASA\u2019s traditional big-ticket programs, including the proposed Orion capsule and James Bridenstine, a House Republican from Oklahoma, was narrowly confirmed to lead the nation\u2019s space program, squeaking by in a Senate vote over unanimous opposition from Democrats who felt he lacked the necessary scientific background for the job. ",
        "author": "Natalie Andrews and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senate Confirms House Republican to Lead NASA (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2811",
        "date": "2018-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/senate-confirms-james-bridenstine-to-lead-nasa-1524166821?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=97",
        "text": "Mr. Bridenstine, confirmed in a 50-49 vote, has broad support in his party, and across the aerospace industry. Democrats, in objecting to the nominee, point to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s scant management experience and a history of provocative, conservative views on gay rights, climate change and other hot-button issues.\n\n\n\n\nDemocrats have also faced pressure from the progressive wing of the party to block all Trump nominees, making for many tight margins on confirmation votes. Mr. Trump\u2019s nominee for secretary of State,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo,\n\n\n\n similarly faces the prospect of picking up a few Democratic votes, despite garnering some in his earlier confirmation as Central Intelligence Agency chief.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s nomination was slow to come up for floor action in 2017 because not a single Senate Democrat signaled support and Republican leaders were worried about rounding up the necessary votes on their side. GOP Sens.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John McCain\n\n\n\n of Arizona and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marco Rubio\n\n\n\n of Florida objected to the nomination. Mr. Rubio eventually said he would support Mr. Bridenstine, and voted on Wednesday to allow it to move forward.\nHowever, that procedural vote stalled when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Jeff Flake\n\n\n\n (R., Ariz.)\u00a0cast a vote against the nominee. He eventually changed his vote to yes, allowing the nomination to move forward. \nSenate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R., Texas) said Mr. Flake changed his vote after asking Senate GOP leadership to talk to secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo about travel restrictions to Cuba. He was given the assurance of a meeting, Mr. Cornyn said. Mr. Flake is an advocate of opening up relations with Cuba.\nMr. Flake denied that was the reason he changed his vote. \u201cNo, I wasn\u2019t seeking that,\u201d Mr. Flake said Thursday, adding that on close votes, senators had more leverage, and he was simply exercising that power. He didn\u2019t say what concessions he had sought\u2014or won\u2014from Republican leaders in connection with his vote to confirm Mr. Bridenstine.\n\u201cI\u2019m just working on a few issues,\u201d Mr. Flake said. \nMr. Flake then also voted for Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation on Thursday. His support got the nomination to 50 votes. Minutes later, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.), taking a short break from maternity leave to potentially cast the deciding vote blocking the nomination, brought her baby to the floor and cast the 49th \u201cno\u201d vote. \nMr. Rubio said on Thursday morning he supported Mr. Bridenstine because NASA needed a leader and the process to nominate a new leader of the organization could take months.\n\u201cIf you do the math, even if Congressman Bridenstine were to withdraw, by the time it worked its way through the administration, the committee process, the floor, the way things are going, we could be into February of next year,\u201d Mr. Rubio said on the Senate floor. He urged his colleagues to support Mr. Pompeo, now CIA director, as secretary of state as well, to avoid a gap in leadership in the agency.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Cory Gardner\n\n\n\n (R., Colo.) pushed back against suggestions that Mr. Bridenstine doesn\u2019t have the experience to run the agency. \u201cWe need somebody with a mission, we need somebody who actually has an idea of where we should take our great space mission, somebody who has commercial experience, somebody who has government experience, somebody who has management experience and yes, somebody who has experience with the industry itself,\u201d he said.\nDemocrat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, however, called Mr. Bridenstine \u201ca climate denier with no scientific background.\u201d\n\u201cIt\u2019s frightening to have a leader who has made a career out of ignoring scientific expertise,\u201d he said.\nThe White House stuck with Mr. Bridenstine despite the recommendations of many aerospace industry leaders, and even some senior GOP senators that they find another candidate. They supported him as the NASA administrator, but their concern was that a lengthy confirmation delay would damage NASA and hurt the momentum of some programs.\nWith Thursday\u2019s vote, the former military pilot takes the controls of an agency that already appears to have many of its top budget and policy priorities set for several years. The White House has established manned exploration of the Moon as NASA\u2019s top goal through the next decade, while proposing to phase out U.S. government support for the international space station by 2024. Mr. Bridenstine will face pushback from lawmakers who support the space station.\nOne administration goal that isn\u2019t likely to flourish under Mr. Bridenstine is the idea of quickly devising or adjusting strategies to get astronauts to Mars. Over the years he has questioned whether NASA budgets\u2014expected to stay basically flat through the middle of the next decade\u2014can swiftly pave the way for effective exploration of the Red Planet.\nMost of NASA\u2019s traditional big-ticket programs, including the proposed Orion capsule James Bridenstine, a House Republican from Oklahoma, was narrowly confirmed to lead the nation\u2019s space program, squeaking by in a Senate vote over unanimous opposition from Democrats who felt he lacked the necessary scientific background for the job. ",
        "author": "Natalie Andrews and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump celebrates successful space launch, a moment of unity amid tensions across the country (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2812",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-celebrates-successful-space-launch-a-moment-of-unity-amid-tensions-across-the-country/2020/05/30/8407a25e-a2b2-11ea-9590-1858a893bd59_story.html",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 President Trump on Saturday celebrated the successful launch of U.S. astronauts into space, an achievement he heralded as a moment of unity for Americans even as he spent part of the day exacerbating tensions in the country amid continuing protests over the killing of a black man by police in Minneapolis. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTwo astronauts blasted off aboard a SpaceX rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Saturday afternoon under blue skies, marking the first such trip from the United States in almost a decade as well as the first time a private corporation launched people into orbit.\u201cA new age of American ambition has now begun,\u201d Trump said following the launch. He added: \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched mor than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump has made the U.S. space program a priority, making the cosmos a place both to be militarized as well as an opportunity for economic expansion. The White House reconstituted the National Space Council with Vice President Pence as its chair, speeding up efforts to return to the moon, standing up the new Space Force military branch, and slashing regulations while promoting the growth of a commercial space industry.Trump and Pence were on site Saturday as well as earlier in the week for the original launch date before it was canceled due to weather with astronauts aboard the rocket for their journey.On Saturday, Trump highlighted his commitment to the space program while exaggerating the extent it had been abandoned by his predecessors.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe United States has regained our place of prestige as a world leader, as has often been stated, you can\u2019t be number one on Earth if you are number two in space,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we are not going to be number two anywhere.\u201dAdvertisementWhile Trump celebrated the U.S. astronauts\u2019 return to space, he couldn\u2019t escape the turmoil in the country as protests once again were held in cities across the country sparked by outrage over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman on May 25.Those protests included a demonstration outside the White House on Friday night that saw clashes between protesters and the Secret Service.Saturday morning Trump took a defiant rather than conciliatory stance toward those protesters.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI was inside, watched every move, and couldn\u2019t have felt more safe,\u201d the president tweeted. \u201cThey let the \u2018protesters\u2019 scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.\u201dHe later seemed to urge his supporters to show up outside the White House on Saturday night to counter the protesters.Advertisement\u201cTonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???\u201d he wrote.But in Florida, Trump struck a theme of unity that was at odds with his tweets, emphasizing the pain over the death of Floyd, the disturbing images of which were captured on video by people on the scene.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYesterday I spoke to George\u2019s family and expressed the sorrow of our entire nation for their loss. I stand before you as a friend and ally to every American seeking justice and peace,\u201d he said before moving on to address the successful rocket launch. \u201cHealing, not hatred, justice, not chaos, are the mission at hand.\u201dTrump also mentioned the \u201cpain\u201d caused by the coronavirus pandemic that spread across the country, killing more than 100,000 Americans and devastating the economy.\u201cThe same spirit of American determination that sends our people into space will conquer this disease,\u201d Trump said.AdvertisementTrump made his comments in the cavernous vehicle assembly building, made famous during the space shuttle program.Story continues below advertisementAbout 300 people \u2014 many politicians, but also NASA and SpaceX engineers and their family members \u2014 were in the audience.Most of them wore masks, but there was no social distancing, and some \u2014 such as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos \u2014 did not wear masks.The loudest applause, along with two sustained standing ovations, went to SpaceX owner Elon Musk.\u201cThank you, Elon,\u201d Trump said when Musk took a couple of bows from his seat with the audience.Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. They are headed to the International Space Station. Saturday\u2019s launch was the first time since July 2011, when the space shuttle program ended, that American astronauts have lifted off from American soil.\n\n His speech struck a different tone from his tweets. Trump celebrates successful space launch, a moment of unity amid tensions across the country",
        "author": "Lori Rozsa"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump raises the specter of a Space Force as he congratulates Army\u2019s football team (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2813",
        "date": "2018-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raises-the-specter-of-a-space-force-as-he-congratulates-the-armys-football-team/2018/05/01/b17d6966-4d5b-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html",
        "text": "President Trump mused again Tuesday about adding a new branch of the military \u2014 a Space Force \u2014 and this time made clear he is thinking seriously about it.Trump aired his thoughts during a ceremony at the White House, where he presented the Commander-in-Chief\u2019s Trophy to the U.S. Military Academy\u2019s Black Knights football team for its victories over Navy and Air Force. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSurrounded by West Point cadets in the Rose Garden, Trump talked up the mission they have ahead.\u201cYou will be part of the five proud branches of the United States Armed Forces: Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and the Coast Guard,\u201d Trump said.After a short pause he continued: \u201cAnd we\u2019re actually thinking of a sixth, and that would be the Space Force. Does that make sense? .\u2009.\u2009. Because we\u2019re getting very big in space, both militarily and for other reasons. And we are seriously thinking of the Space Force.\u201dTrump floats idea of \u2018Space Force\u2019Trump previously raised the idea during a speech in March at Air Station Miramar in San Diego.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea,\u201d Trump told the crowd of Marines there. \u201cWe have the Air Force. We\u2019ll have the Space Force.\u201dInitially, Trump explained, he had proposed the idea as a joke: \u201cThen I said, \u2018What a great idea. Maybe we\u2019ll have to do that.\u2019\u2009\u201dSome lawmakers on the House Armed Services strategic-forces subcommittee have been pushing to add a unit to the Air Force that would be dedicated to space, but they have stopped short of endorsing a new branch as proposed by Trump.The Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967, bars states from testing weapons and establishing military bases on the moon and other celestial bodies. It also prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around Earth.However, critics have pointed out that, since the treaty has no enforcement mechanism, nothing is really stopping a president or anyone else from militarizing space.Sarah Kaplan contributed to this report. The president has previously floated the idea. At a Rose Garden ceremony, he made clear he is serious. Trump raises the specter of a Space Force as he congratulates Army\u2019s football team",
        "author": "John Wagner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden to Nominate Former Sen. Bill Nelson to Lead NASA (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2814",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-likely-to-nominate-former-sen-bill-nelson-to-lead-nasa-11616101626?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=32",
        "text": "The experience, which came as NASA was incorporating nonprofessional astronauts into its missions, became a feature of his political identity and campaigns.\nMr. Nelson\u2019s nomination requires Senate confirmation.\n\n\u201cI am honored to be nominated by Joe Biden and, if confirmed, to help lead NASA into an exciting future of possibilities,\u201d Mr. Nelson, 78, said in a statement. \u201cThe NASA team continues to achieve the seemingly impossible as we venture into the cosmos.\u201d\nRep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Crist\n\n\n\n (D., Fla.) said the choice was logical: \u201cHis heart and soul is all about space. It\u2019s great for my state. To have a Floridian in that spot, on every level it\u2019s exquisite.\u201d\nMr. Nelson served alongside Mr. Biden in the Senate for nearly a decade and was a surrogate during Mr. Biden\u2019s presidential campaign, helping his team on the ground in Iowa. When Mr. Biden was considering a third presidential bid in 2018 and early 2019, Mr. Nelson urged him to run for president again.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Capital Journal Scoops, analysis and insights driving Washington from the WSJ's D.C. bureau. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nFlorida has a long space history, and the industry continues to be an economic driver in and around Cape Canaveral, near where Mr. Nelson grew up. His grandparents owned property near Kennedy Space Center. In 2019, he was picked to serve on NASA\u2019s Advisory Council.\n\u201cHe is a true champion for human spaceflight and will add tremendous value as we go to the Moon and on to Mars,\u201d then-NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n tweeted at the time.\nMr. Nelson had voted against Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation, saying the former Oklahoma congressman and Navy pilot was too political, but the two forged a tie over their common interest in space.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on Mars more than two weeks ago. Jennifer Trosper from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains how the rover will explore the Martian landscape and search for signs of life. Photo: NASA (Video from 3/9/21)\n \n\n\nWrite to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com and Ken Thomas at ken.thomas@wsj.com In 1986, as a U.S. House member, the Floridian was a payload specialist aboard Space Shuttle Columbia, which spent six days in orbit. ",
        "author": "Alex Leary and Ken Thomas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The initial estimate is here: Trump\u2019s wall will cost more than a year of the space program (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2815",
        "date": "2017-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/10/the-initial-estimate-is-here-trumps-wall-will-cost-more-than-a-year-of-the-space-program/",
        "text": "One of this week\u2019s 286,000 leaks from the executive branch of the government was a document from the Department of Homeland Security putting a price tag on a wall on the border with Mexico.You remember the wall! President Trump, then-candidate Trump, talked about the wall a lot on the campaign trail. His concerns about immigration from Mexico and Central America were among the first articulated in the speech announcing the candidacy, but his advocacy for a wall predates that by a wide margin. Here\u2019s a tweet from before his candidacy on the subject. 2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysisArrowRightOops. Wrong tweet. Meant this one.The Wall\u2122 is synonymous with Trump by now. He even got into high-profile fights over it, as when he was criticized last February by Pope Francis. \u201cA person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,\u201d Francis\u00a0said. \u201cNo leader, especially a religious leader, has the right to question another man\u2019s religion or faith,\u201d Trump responded, clearly angry that the pope hadn\u2019t read his tweet from 2013.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut we never really knew what it would cost. Trump said it would cost about $8 billion, when prompted on the campaign trail. Our fact-checkers were skeptical, figuring, after consulting with experts, that it could near $25 billion if built to the specifications set by Trump. At least, the low-end of those specifications. Over the course of the campaign, Trump\u2019s wall varied in height from 30 to 55 feet.In October 2015, it was at 50 feet, for example, made up of giant slabs of concrete.That\u2019s a lot of wall and a lot of concrete. One assessment of the wall estimated that its construction alone would increase demand for concrete in the United States by 1 percent in 2018 and 2019.Story continues below advertisementAnyway. The Department of Homeland Security, as mentioned, has an estimate, reported by Reuters: $21.6 billion, with a three-and-a-half-year construction period.AdvertisementLet\u2019s talk about that number. $21.6 billion is a lot of money by normal-American standards, though not necessarily by American-government standards. Spread out among all people in the United States, it comes to $67.73 each. Or, spread out among all of those who paid federal income taxes in 2015 \u2014 about 137.3 million people \u2014 it\u2019s $157.31 each. As a function of total government spending in fiscal year 2017, it\u2019s about one-half of 1 percent, though, of course, it would be spread over several years.If we compare the price estimate to estimated spending in the 2017 fiscal year, though, we get a sense of how pricey the wall is. Per the Office of Management and Budget, it\u2019s more than will be spent this year on:Story continues below advertisementAtomic energy defense activities, $21.3 billionCommunity and regional development, $21.1 billionFarm income stabilization, $20.4 billionSpace flight, research, and supporting activities, $18.6 billionFederal litigative and judicial activities, $17.4 billionVeterans education, training, and rehabilitation, $15.1 billionInternational security assistance, $14.9 billionConservation and land management, $14.6 billionConduct of foreign affairs, $13.5 billionGeneral science and basic research, $12.9 billionWater transportation, $10.5 billionDisaster relief and insurance, $9.4 billionPollution control and abatement, $8.8 billionMilitary construction, $8.3 billionFederal correctional activities, $7.4 billionAgricultural research and services, $5.8 billionCriminal justice assistance, $5.6 billionFuture disaster costs, $5.5 billionConsumer and occupational health and safety, $4.8 billionLegislative functions, $4.3 billionRecreational resources, $4.1 billionEnergy conservation, $1.7 billionVeterans housing, $0.7 billionThe good news, of course, is that the United States isn\u2019t going to pay for it.That\u2019s right, Mexico will pay for it! How that will happen isn\u2019t entirely clear, but Trump says it will pay for it, eventually, \u201c100 percent.\u201dAdvertisementThat $21.6 billion is a bigger chunk of Mexico\u2019s budget, making up about 1.9 percent of its total economic production in 2015. Trump\u2019s team has suggested that one mechanism for forcing Mexico to pay for the wall is by increasing tariffs on Mexican products sold in the United States. Those increased costs would be borne by American consumers, mind you, but this would, I guess, get Mexico to pay out of pocket to protect its industries? It\u2019s not totally clear.Story continues below advertisementWe looked at this a few weeks ago. If we increase tariffs on products from Mexico, Americans would need to buy 36 billion Mexican avocados to pay off the wall. Inspired by Matt McDaniel\u2019s calculations from that analysis, we can report that this is enough avocados to build a wall solely out of avocados that stretches the length of the U.S.-Mexico border and reaches 242 feet into the air (assuming a 4-inch by 2.5-inch avocado). At 1,163 avocados high and 30.9 million avocados long, it would be porous \u2014 given that avocados aren\u2019t perfectly square \u2014 and it would rot pretty quickly, but: still.The Reuters report revealing the anticipated cost of the wall notes that there are still some question marks. How do you build over mountains? As we\u2019ve noted before, the border overlaps with some rough terrain in parts (zoom in on the map below) \u2014 and it runs through areas that generally preferred presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Trump, making the process of eminent domain a bit trickier.AdvertisementBut elections have consequences, and perhaps the most predictable consequence of 2016\u2019s election was that Trump would work toward building that wall.Incidentally, it wasn\u2019t Isaac Newton who said that thing about bridges and walls. It was Joseph Fort Newton, a Baptist minister who was also a noted Freemason and author. That\u2019s probably more fitting. If anyone knows about both building things and the intricacies of the government, I\u2019d offer that it\u2019s a Freemason.See what it looks like along the border fence between the U.S. and MexicoShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageAerial picture taken with a drone of the urban fencing on the border between the US and Mexico at El Nido del Aguila, outskirts of Tijuana, northwestern Mexico on January 26, 2017.\nUS President Donald Trump on Thursday told Mexico's president to cancel an upcoming visit to Washington if he is unwilling to foot the bill for a border wall. Escalating a cross border war of words, Trump took to Twitter to publicly upbraid Enrique Pena Nieto. \"If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.\" / AFP PHOTO / MARIO VAZQUEZMARIO VAZQUEZ/AFP/Getty Images (Mario Vazquez/AFP/Getty Images) The $21.6 billion price tag, by the numbers. The initial estimate is here: Trump\u2019s wall will cost more than a year of the space program",
        "author": "Philip Bump"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The initial estimate is here: Trump\u2019s wall will cost more than a year of the space program (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2816",
        "date": "2017-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/10/the-initial-estimate-is-here-trumps-wall-will-cost-more-than-a-year-of-the-space-program/",
        "text": "One of this week\u2019s 286,000 leaks from the executive branch of the government was a document from the Department of Homeland Security putting a price tag on a wall on the border with Mexico.You remember the wall! President Trump, then-candidate Trump, talked about the wall a lot on the campaign trail. His concerns about immigration from Mexico and Central America were among the first articulated in the speech announcing the candidacy, but his advocacy for a wall predates that by a wide margin. Here\u2019s a tweet from before his candidacy on the subject. 2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysisArrowRightOops. Wrong tweet. Meant this one.The Wall\u2122 is synonymous with Trump by now. He even got into high-profile fights over it, as when he was criticized last February by Pope Francis. \u201cA person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,\u201d Francis\u00a0said. \u201cNo leader, especially a religious leader, has the right to question another man\u2019s religion or faith,\u201d Trump responded, clearly angry that the pope hadn\u2019t read his tweet from 2013.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut we never really knew what it would cost. Trump said it would cost about $8 billion, when prompted on the campaign trail. Our fact-checkers were skeptical, figuring, after consulting with experts, that it could near $25 billion if built to the specifications set by Trump. At least, the low-end of those specifications. Over the course of the campaign, Trump\u2019s wall varied in height from 30 to 55 feet.In October 2015, it was at 50 feet, for example, made up of giant slabs of concrete.That\u2019s a lot of wall and a lot of concrete. One assessment of the wall estimated that its construction alone would increase demand for concrete in the United States by 1 percent in 2018 and 2019.Story continues below advertisementAnyway. The Department of Homeland Security, as mentioned, has an estimate, reported by Reuters: $21.6 billion, with a three-and-a-half-year construction period.AdvertisementLet\u2019s talk about that number. $21.6 billion is a lot of money by normal-American standards, though not necessarily by American-government standards. Spread out among all people in the United States, it comes to $67.73 each. Or, spread out among all of those who paid federal income taxes in 2015 \u2014 about 137.3 million people \u2014 it\u2019s $157.31 each. As a function of total government spending in fiscal year 2017, it\u2019s about one-half of 1 percent, though, of course, it would be spread over several years.If we compare the price estimate to estimated spending in the 2017 fiscal year, though, we get a sense of how pricey the wall is. Per the Office of Management and Budget, it\u2019s more than will be spent this year on:Story continues below advertisementAtomic energy defense activities, $21.3 billionCommunity and regional development, $21.1 billionFarm income stabilization, $20.4 billionSpace flight, research, and supporting activities, $18.6 billionFederal litigative and judicial activities, $17.4 billionVeterans education, training, and rehabilitation, $15.1 billionInternational security assistance, $14.9 billionConservation and land management, $14.6 billionConduct of foreign affairs, $13.5 billionGeneral science and basic research, $12.9 billionWater transportation, $10.5 billionDisaster relief and insurance, $9.4 billionPollution control and abatement, $8.8 billionMilitary construction, $8.3 billionFederal correctional activities, $7.4 billionAgricultural research and services, $5.8 billionCriminal justice assistance, $5.6 billionFuture disaster costs, $5.5 billionConsumer and occupational health and safety, $4.8 billionLegislative functions, $4.3 billionRecreational resources, $4.1 billionEnergy conservation, $1.7 billionVeterans housing, $0.7 billionThe good news, of course, is that the United States isn\u2019t going to pay for it.That\u2019s right, Mexico will pay for it! How that will happen isn\u2019t entirely clear, but Trump says it will pay for it, eventually, \u201c100 percent.\u201dAdvertisementThat $21.6 billion is a bigger chunk of Mexico\u2019s budget, making up about 1.9 percent of its total economic production in 2015. Trump\u2019s team has suggested that one mechanism for forcing Mexico to pay for the wall is by increasing tariffs on Mexican products sold in the United States. Those increased costs would be borne by American consumers, mind you, but this would, I guess, get Mexico to pay out of pocket to protect its industries? It\u2019s not totally clear.Story continues below advertisementWe looked at this a few weeks ago. If we increase tariffs on products from Mexico, Americans would need to buy 36 billion Mexican avocados to pay off the wall. Inspired by Matt McDaniel\u2019s calculations from that analysis, we can report that this is enough avocados to build a wall solely out of avocados that stretches the length of the U.S.-Mexico border and reaches 242 feet into the air (assuming a 4-inch by 2.5-inch avocado). At 1,163 avocados high and 30.9 million avocados long, it would be porous \u2014 given that avocados aren\u2019t perfectly square \u2014 and it would rot pretty quickly, but: still.The Reuters report revealing the anticipated cost of the wall notes that there are still some question marks. How do you build over mountains? As we\u2019ve noted before, the border overlaps with some rough terrain in parts (zoom in on the map below) \u2014 and it runs through areas that generally preferred presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Trump, making the process of eminent domain a bit trickier.AdvertisementBut elections have consequences, and perhaps the most predictable consequence of 2016\u2019s election was that Trump would work toward building that wall.Incidentally, it wasn\u2019t Isaac Newton who said that thing about bridges and walls. It was Joseph Fort Newton, a Baptist minister who was also a noted Freemason and author. That\u2019s probably more fitting. If anyone knows about both building things and the intricacies of the government, I\u2019d offer that it\u2019s a Freemason.See what it looks like along the border fence between the U.S. and MexicoShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageAerial picture taken with a drone of the urban fencing on the border between the US and Mexico at El Nido del Aguila, outskirts of Tijuana, northwestern Mexico on January 26, 2017.\nUS President Donald Trump on Thursday told Mexico's president to cancel an upcoming visit to Washington if he is unwilling to foot the bill for a border wall. Escalating a cross border war of words, Trump took to Twitter to publicly upbraid Enrique Pena Nieto. \"If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.\" / AFP PHOTO / MARIO VAZQUEZMARIO VAZQUEZ/AFP/Getty Images (Mario Vazquez/AFP/Getty Images) The $21.6 billion price tag, by the numbers. The initial estimate is here: Trump\u2019s wall will cost more than a year of the space program",
        "author": "Philip Bump"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2817",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/04/shatner-star-trek-blue-origin-space/",
        "text": "William Shatner is boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.On Monday, Bezos\u2019s commercial spaceflight venture Blue Origin announced that the \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor will fly to space on board the company\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on Oct. 12. Joining him will be Audrey Powers, the company\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, along with crewmates Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt 90 years old, Shatner will be the oldest person to fly to space.\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d Shatner said in a news release. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201dShatner is best known for his run as Capt. Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, and he later played Sgt. T.J. Hooker in the eponymous series. Nowadays, he\u2019s become something of a living meme, due in part to his musical career in which he delivers theatrical spoken-word versions of popular songs, including Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cMr. Tambourine Man\u201d and Queen\u2019s \u201cBohemian Rhapsody.\u201dBlue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)He also has an abiding interest in space travel. In 2011, he recorded a wake-up call for astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese have been the voyages of the space shuttle Discovery,\u201d Shatner said in the prerecorded call that riffed on the \u201cStar Trek\u201d opening theme. \u201cHer 30-year mission: to seek out new science, to build new outposts, to bring nations together in the final frontier, to boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before.\u201dThe company\u2019s statement did not address how far into space Shatner would venture or for how long the mission would last.Shatner will be following in the footsteps of Bezos, a die-hard Trekkie who \u2014 clad in a cowboy hat that delighted Internet jokesters \u2014 flew past the edge of space on July 20 with his brother Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. (Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementAs The Washington Post\u2019s Christian Davenport and Dalvin Brown reported at the time, the \u201claunch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.\u201dJeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAfter Monday\u2019s announcement, Twitter users buzzed with excitement \u2014 and jokes \u2014 about the upcoming flight. Shatner himself got in on the fun, tweeting, \u201cSo now I can say something. Yes, it\u2019s true; I\u2019m going to be a \u2018rocket man!\u2019\u201dAdvertisementShatner \u201cis going to space? My man! I guess this means I have to become a marine biologist,\u201d tweeted Jason Alexander, referring to his \u201cSeinfeld\u201d character.Story continues below advertisementSome noted an oddly prescient sketch during last weekend\u2019s \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d premiere, in which Owen Wilson played a space-bound Bezos in a \u201cStar Trek\u201d parody. \u201cThe fact that SNL aired a Star Trek parody with Blue Origin the day before William Shatner was announced to be flying on Blue Origin is proof that the universe is beyond parody at this point,\u201d tweeted one user.The announcement comes days after Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications, published an essay on the whistleblowing website Lioness accusing that the company fosters a sexist work environment.\u201cWe are a group of 21 former and current employees of Blue Origin,\u201d Abrams essay begins, before claiming the company\u2019s \u201cculture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe essay describes, for example, one former executive who \u201cfrequently treated women in a condescending and demeaning manner, calling them \u2018baby girl,\u2019 \u2018baby doll\u2019 or 'sweetheart\u2019 and inquiring about their dating lives.\u201dBlue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.One former staffer confirmed the allegations to The Post. Blue Origin denied the claims, saying in a statement that it \u201chas no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct.\u201dRead more:So, uhh, about Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hat \u2026 At 90 years old, the 'Star Trek' actor will be the oldest person to fly to space. William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2818",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/04/shatner-star-trek-blue-origin-space/",
        "text": "William Shatner is boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.On Monday, Bezos\u2019s commercial spaceflight venture Blue Origin announced that the \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor will fly to space on board the company\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on Oct. 12. Joining him will be Audrey Powers, the company\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, along with crewmates Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt 90 years old, Shatner will be the oldest person to fly to space.\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d Shatner said in a news release. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201dShatner is best known for his run as Capt. Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, and he later played Sgt. T.J. Hooker in the eponymous series. Nowadays, he\u2019s become something of a living meme, due in part to his musical career in which he delivers theatrical spoken-word versions of popular songs, including Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cMr. Tambourine Man\u201d and Queen\u2019s \u201cBohemian Rhapsody.\u201dBlue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)He also has an abiding interest in space travel. In 2011, he recorded a wake-up call for astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese have been the voyages of the space shuttle Discovery,\u201d Shatner said in the prerecorded call that riffed on the \u201cStar Trek\u201d opening theme. \u201cHer 30-year mission: to seek out new science, to build new outposts, to bring nations together in the final frontier, to boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before.\u201dThe company\u2019s statement did not address how far into space Shatner would venture or for how long the mission would last.Shatner will be following in the footsteps of Bezos, a die-hard Trekkie who \u2014 clad in a cowboy hat that delighted Internet jokesters \u2014 flew past the edge of space on July 20 with his brother Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. (Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementAs The Washington Post\u2019s Christian Davenport and Dalvin Brown reported at the time, the \u201claunch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.\u201dJeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAfter Monday\u2019s announcement, Twitter users buzzed with excitement \u2014 and jokes \u2014 about the upcoming flight. Shatner himself got in on the fun, tweeting, \u201cSo now I can say something. Yes, it\u2019s true; I\u2019m going to be a \u2018rocket man!\u2019\u201dAdvertisementShatner \u201cis going to space? My man! I guess this means I have to become a marine biologist,\u201d tweeted Jason Alexander, referring to his \u201cSeinfeld\u201d character.Story continues below advertisementSome noted an oddly prescient sketch during last weekend\u2019s \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d premiere, in which Owen Wilson played a space-bound Bezos in a \u201cStar Trek\u201d parody. \u201cThe fact that SNL aired a Star Trek parody with Blue Origin the day before William Shatner was announced to be flying on Blue Origin is proof that the universe is beyond parody at this point,\u201d tweeted one user.The announcement comes days after Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications, published an essay on the whistleblowing website Lioness accusing that the company fosters a sexist work environment.\u201cWe are a group of 21 former and current employees of Blue Origin,\u201d Abrams essay begins, before claiming the company\u2019s \u201cculture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe essay describes, for example, one former executive who \u201cfrequently treated women in a condescending and demeaning manner, calling them \u2018baby girl,\u2019 \u2018baby doll\u2019 or 'sweetheart\u2019 and inquiring about their dating lives.\u201dBlue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.One former staffer confirmed the allegations to The Post. Blue Origin denied the claims, saying in a statement that it \u201chas no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct.\u201dRead more:So, uhh, about Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hat \u2026 At 90 years old, the 'Star Trek' actor will be the oldest person to fly to space. William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2819",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/04/shatner-star-trek-blue-origin-space/",
        "text": "William Shatner is boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.On Monday, Bezos\u2019s commercial spaceflight venture Blue Origin announced that the \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor will fly to space on board the company\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on Oct. 12. Joining him will be Audrey Powers, the company\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, along with crewmates Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt 90 years old, Shatner will be the oldest person to fly to space.\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d Shatner said in a news release. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201dShatner is best known for his run as Capt. Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, and he later played Sgt. T.J. Hooker in the eponymous series. Nowadays, he\u2019s become something of a living meme, due in part to his musical career in which he delivers theatrical spoken-word versions of popular songs, including Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cMr. Tambourine Man\u201d and Queen\u2019s \u201cBohemian Rhapsody.\u201dBlue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)He also has an abiding interest in space travel. In 2011, he recorded a wake-up call for astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese have been the voyages of the space shuttle Discovery,\u201d Shatner said in the prerecorded call that riffed on the \u201cStar Trek\u201d opening theme. \u201cHer 30-year mission: to seek out new science, to build new outposts, to bring nations together in the final frontier, to boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before.\u201dThe company\u2019s statement did not address how far into space Shatner would venture or for how long the mission would last.Shatner will be following in the footsteps of Bezos, a die-hard Trekkie who \u2014 clad in a cowboy hat that delighted Internet jokesters \u2014 flew past the edge of space on July 20 with his brother Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. (Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementAs The Washington Post\u2019s Christian Davenport and Dalvin Brown reported at the time, the \u201claunch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.\u201dJeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAfter Monday\u2019s announcement, Twitter users buzzed with excitement \u2014 and jokes \u2014 about the upcoming flight. Shatner himself got in on the fun, tweeting, \u201cSo now I can say something. Yes, it\u2019s true; I\u2019m going to be a \u2018rocket man!\u2019\u201dAdvertisementShatner \u201cis going to space? My man! I guess this means I have to become a marine biologist,\u201d tweeted Jason Alexander, referring to his \u201cSeinfeld\u201d character.Story continues below advertisementSome noted an oddly prescient sketch during last weekend\u2019s \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d premiere, in which Owen Wilson played a space-bound Bezos in a \u201cStar Trek\u201d parody. \u201cThe fact that SNL aired a Star Trek parody with Blue Origin the day before William Shatner was announced to be flying on Blue Origin is proof that the universe is beyond parody at this point,\u201d tweeted one user.The announcement comes days after Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications, published an essay on the whistleblowing website Lioness accusing that the company fosters a sexist work environment.\u201cWe are a group of 21 former and current employees of Blue Origin,\u201d Abrams essay begins, before claiming the company\u2019s \u201cculture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe essay describes, for example, one former executive who \u201cfrequently treated women in a condescending and demeaning manner, calling them \u2018baby girl,\u2019 \u2018baby doll\u2019 or 'sweetheart\u2019 and inquiring about their dating lives.\u201dBlue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.One former staffer confirmed the allegations to The Post. Blue Origin denied the claims, saying in a statement that it \u201chas no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct.\u201dRead more:So, uhh, about Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hat \u2026 At 90 years old, the 'Star Trek' actor will be the oldest person to fly to space. William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2820",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/04/shatner-star-trek-blue-origin-space/",
        "text": "William Shatner is boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.On Monday, Bezos\u2019s commercial spaceflight venture Blue Origin announced that the \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor will fly to space on board the company\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on Oct. 12. Joining him will be Audrey Powers, the company\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, along with crewmates Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt 90 years old, Shatner will be the oldest person to fly to space.\u201cI\u2019ve heard about space for a long time now,\u201d Shatner said in a news release. \u201cI\u2019m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.\u201dShatner is best known for his run as Capt. Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, and he later played Sgt. T.J. Hooker in the eponymous series. Nowadays, he\u2019s become something of a living meme, due in part to his musical career in which he delivers theatrical spoken-word versions of popular songs, including Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cMr. Tambourine Man\u201d and Queen\u2019s \u201cBohemian Rhapsody.\u201dBlue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)He also has an abiding interest in space travel. In 2011, he recorded a wake-up call for astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese have been the voyages of the space shuttle Discovery,\u201d Shatner said in the prerecorded call that riffed on the \u201cStar Trek\u201d opening theme. \u201cHer 30-year mission: to seek out new science, to build new outposts, to bring nations together in the final frontier, to boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before.\u201dThe company\u2019s statement did not address how far into space Shatner would venture or for how long the mission would last.Shatner will be following in the footsteps of Bezos, a die-hard Trekkie who \u2014 clad in a cowboy hat that delighted Internet jokesters \u2014 flew past the edge of space on July 20 with his brother Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. (Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementAs The Washington Post\u2019s Christian Davenport and Dalvin Brown reported at the time, the \u201claunch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.\u201dJeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAfter Monday\u2019s announcement, Twitter users buzzed with excitement \u2014 and jokes \u2014 about the upcoming flight. Shatner himself got in on the fun, tweeting, \u201cSo now I can say something. Yes, it\u2019s true; I\u2019m going to be a \u2018rocket man!\u2019\u201dAdvertisementShatner \u201cis going to space? My man! I guess this means I have to become a marine biologist,\u201d tweeted Jason Alexander, referring to his \u201cSeinfeld\u201d character.Story continues below advertisementSome noted an oddly prescient sketch during last weekend\u2019s \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d premiere, in which Owen Wilson played a space-bound Bezos in a \u201cStar Trek\u201d parody. \u201cThe fact that SNL aired a Star Trek parody with Blue Origin the day before William Shatner was announced to be flying on Blue Origin is proof that the universe is beyond parody at this point,\u201d tweeted one user.The announcement comes days after Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications, published an essay on the whistleblowing website Lioness accusing that the company fosters a sexist work environment.\u201cWe are a group of 21 former and current employees of Blue Origin,\u201d Abrams essay begins, before claiming the company\u2019s \u201cculture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe essay describes, for example, one former executive who \u201cfrequently treated women in a condescending and demeaning manner, calling them \u2018baby girl,\u2019 \u2018baby doll\u2019 or 'sweetheart\u2019 and inquiring about their dating lives.\u201dBlue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.One former staffer confirmed the allegations to The Post. Blue Origin denied the claims, saying in a statement that it \u201chas no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. We provide numerous avenues for employees, including a 24/7 anonymous hotline, and will promptly investigate any new claims of misconduct.\u201dRead more:So, uhh, about Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hat \u2026 At 90 years old, the 'Star Trek' actor will be the oldest person to fly to space. William Shatner, 90, is going to space on a Blue Origin spacecraft",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "The love affair between Jeff Bezos and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2821",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/13/jeff-bezos-star-trek-william-shatner/",
        "text": "Beam me up, Jeffrey.There\u2019s more than a slight chance those words passed through William Shatner\u2019s mind Wednesday, as the original Captain Kirk headed into space aboard a New Shepard spacecraft owned by Jeff Bezos\u2019s commercial spaceflight venture Blue Origin. He spent just over 10 minutes rocketing upward more than 66 miles \u2014 four miles beyond the edge of space \u2014 and returning to Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was an undoubtedly savvy public relations move for the embattled company, which has recently come under fire for harboring what current and former employees allege, in an essay, is a toxic culture \u201cthat ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn fact, as a PR stunt, it\u2019s rivaled only by Blue Origin\u2019s first foray to the cosmos. That found Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer who was supposed to be one of the first women in space back in 1961, accompanying Bezos and his brother, Mark, into space. In addition to the \u201cStar Trek\u201d tie-in, the 90-year-old Shatner became the oldest person ever to exit Earth\u2019s atmosphere, a fact that\u2019s basically catnip for headline-seeking journalists.Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space ventureUndergirding the PR move, though, might be a personal interest. Bezos has a genuine interest in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, which he discusses ad nauseam in interviews and which inspired the name of his dog, Kamala (you know, the Kriosian empathic metamorph).AdvertisementBut when did this love affair begin? What else has the show inspired in his life?Story continues below advertisementWe dove into these questions. But first, repeat after us: Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.How did Bezos become interested in space?Bezos fell in love with the universe before he fell in love with \u201cStar Trek.\u201d As a boy, he spent summers in Texas with his grandfather, a former Atomic Energy Commission engineer. The two watched space launches together and shared a love of science fiction.\u201c \u2018Star Trek\u2019 is the easiest thing to glom on to, but it was much more than that,\u201d biographer Brad Stone said in an interview.When he graduated from high school, Bezos ended his valedictorian speech with the words \u201cSpace: the final frontier. Meet me there.\u201dAs a student at Princeton, Bezos juggled the pop culture of \u201cStar Trek\u201d with the more serious work of professor and physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, who foresaw space stations orbiting Earth to house humans. After college, Bezos held \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation\u201d viewing parties for his friends, Stone said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace, real or imagined, was always a big part of his life.When did he fall in love with Star Trek?The show premiered \u2014 with Shatner as Captain Kirk \u2014 in 1966, two years after Bezos was born. It would take the Amazon founder until the fourth grade to discover the Starship Enterprise. When he did, he became infatuated with the show in the way only a child can.\u201cWhen I was in fourth grade, me and my friends Dean and Kyle, who lived next door a couple of houses down, in Houston, Texas, would play \u2018Star Trek\u2019 almost every day,\u201d Bezos told Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron at a 2016 event hosted by The Post. \u201cAnd we\u2019d fight over who\u2019d get to be Captain Kirk, or Spock, and somebody used to play the computer, too. And it was actually very fun \u2014 we\u2019d have little cardboard phasers and cardboard tricorders, you know. Good days.\u201dWashington Post executive editor Martin Baron interviewed Amazon.com chief executive and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos May 18 at Transformers, a live event by The Washington Post about pushing the boundaries of knowledge. (Washington Post Live)Echoes of the show can be found throughout his life. In addition to naming his dog Kamala, he named one of his holding companies Zefram LLC after Zefram Cochrane, the character who invented the warp drive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe\u2019s discussed how the show, and his general love of science fiction, helped inspire him to found a commercial spaceflight venture. But the show was also instrumental in creating the Amazon Echo.\u201cOur vision, in the long term, is it would become the \u2018Star Trek\u2019 computer. You could ask it anything, ask it to do things for you, ask it to find things for you, and it would be easy to converse with in a very natural way,\u201d he told Baron. \u201cThe original inspiration was the \u2018Star Trek\u2019 computer.\u201dWho was his favorite character?If you ask an Amazon\u2019s Alexa who\u2019s the best \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain, she will respond, \u201cOf all the captains in all the galaxies, Captain Picard is my favorite.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s no coincidence that Bezos feels the same way. He once gleefully shared that with a tickled Patrick Stewart, the actor who portrayed Picard. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)\nThough Kirk is the one who traveled to space Wednesday, Bezos has never shied away from reminding the world that he prefers Picard \u2014 usually on Twitter. \u201cKirk or Picard? Picard!\u201d Bezos tweeted in March 2018, shortly after walking the red carpet with Stewart at the Academy Awards.AdvertisementHe almost named Amazon \u201cMakeitso.com,\u201d after Picard\u2019s catchphrase, Inc. reported.In fact, \u201cas time has passed, Bezos and Picard have physically converged. Like the interstellar explorer, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, Bezos shaved the remnant strands on his high-gloss pate and acquired a cast-iron physique,\u201d Franklin Foer wrote in the Atlantic in 2019.Story continues below advertisementBezos has not publicly explained why he admires Picard, but let\u2019s venture a modest guess: Picard is a brilliant officer, historian and diplomat who plays a major role in the events of the 24th century. Even Spock was impressed: \u201cHe\u2019s remarkably analytical and dispassionate, for a human. \u2026 There\u2019s almost a Vulcan quality to the man.\u201dIs it true that he appeared in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie?Affirmative! Bezos played an alien Starfleet officer in the 2016 \u201cStar Trek Beyond,\u201d something he called \u201ca bucket list\u201d dream on Twitter.Advertisement\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie,\u201d he said that year. \u201cI am very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call: \u2018You have to let Jeff Bezos be in your \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. \u201dStory continues below advertisementBezos said he was willing to be unrecognizable but wanted a speaking part \u2014 and one that was central to the plot so it didn\u2019t end up on the cutting-room floor.Great thing about making Trek is having passionate people drop by, like @JeffBezos. Here he is with Lydia Wilson. pic.twitter.com/bKkEAmwjDS\u2014 Justin Lin (@justinlin) July 20, 2016\n\nBezos appears in the first five minutes of the film as an alien Starfleet officer stationed at Yorktown Starbase in 2263 who scans Kalara as she pleads for help from Commodore Paris and Captain Kirk. \u201cSpeak normally,\u201d Bezos tells her. The cameo role required such extensive makeup that he could only drink through a straw.\u201cHe was awesome,\u201d director Justin Lin told the Associated Press. \u201cIt was like a president was visiting, you know? He had a big entourage! But it didn\u2019t matter because he was so into it. He had to wait around all day because it was one day we were shooting like three different scenes and, it was also credit to Jeff because \u2026 he just nailed it every time.\u201dWhat other science fiction does he enjoy?Although \u201cStar Trek\u201d is his most public sci-fi obsession, it\u2019s far from his only one. As a child, Bezos would hoover up all the Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein books he could get his hands on. Nowadays, he makes sure to read newer genre writers such as Alastair Reynolds, Ernest Cline and Andy Weir.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon Studios, the film and TV arm of his online empire, has focused on producing sci-fi. Most notably, the service saved \u201cThe Expanse,\u201d a beloved show based on the novels of James S.A. Corey after it was canceled by its original network, Syfy.\u201cSomething that [Bezos] wants to do is not just to have success in space \u2014 to make rockets that are reusable \u2014 but to reinvigorate interest in space,\u201d The Post\u2019s Christian Davenport said on the Geek\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.According to Davenport\u2019s reporting, Bezos decided to found Blue Origin after watching \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d a movie about NASA engineer Homer Hickam, with science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. But, by that point, he had long been interested in space.As his high school girlfriend Ursula Werner once said: \u201cJeff started Amazon just to get enough money to do Blue Origin. He was intrigued by the idea of rocketing into outer space.\u201d\u201cI can neither confirm nor deny that,\u201d Bezos later said, when asked about her theory.In any event, we know one thing for sure: Live long and profit. Echoes of the show can be found throughout Bezos' life, including Wednesday's Blue Origin launch with William Shatner. The love affair between Jeff Bezos and \u2018Star Trek\u2019",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "The love affair between Jeff Bezos and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2822",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/10/13/jeff-bezos-star-trek-william-shatner/",
        "text": "Beam me up, Jeffrey.There\u2019s more than a slight chance those words passed through William Shatner\u2019s mind Wednesday, as the original Captain Kirk headed into space aboard a New Shepard spacecraft owned by Jeff Bezos\u2019s commercial spaceflight venture Blue Origin. He spent just over 10 minutes rocketing upward more than 66 miles \u2014 four miles beyond the edge of space \u2014 and returning to Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was an undoubtedly savvy public relations move for the embattled company, which has recently come under fire for harboring what current and former employees allege, in an essay, is a toxic culture \u201cthat ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn fact, as a PR stunt, it\u2019s rivaled only by Blue Origin\u2019s first foray to the cosmos. That found Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer who was supposed to be one of the first women in space back in 1961, accompanying Bezos and his brother, Mark, into space. In addition to the \u201cStar Trek\u201d tie-in, the 90-year-old Shatner became the oldest person ever to exit Earth\u2019s atmosphere, a fact that\u2019s basically catnip for headline-seeking journalists.Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space ventureUndergirding the PR move, though, might be a personal interest. Bezos has a genuine interest in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, which he discusses ad nauseam in interviews and which inspired the name of his dog, Kamala (you know, the Kriosian empathic metamorph).AdvertisementBut when did this love affair begin? What else has the show inspired in his life?Story continues below advertisementWe dove into these questions. But first, repeat after us: Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.How did Bezos become interested in space?Bezos fell in love with the universe before he fell in love with \u201cStar Trek.\u201d As a boy, he spent summers in Texas with his grandfather, a former Atomic Energy Commission engineer. The two watched space launches together and shared a love of science fiction.\u201c \u2018Star Trek\u2019 is the easiest thing to glom on to, but it was much more than that,\u201d biographer Brad Stone said in an interview.When he graduated from high school, Bezos ended his valedictorian speech with the words \u201cSpace: the final frontier. Meet me there.\u201dAs a student at Princeton, Bezos juggled the pop culture of \u201cStar Trek\u201d with the more serious work of professor and physicist Gerard O\u2019Neill, who foresaw space stations orbiting Earth to house humans. After college, Bezos held \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation\u201d viewing parties for his friends, Stone said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace, real or imagined, was always a big part of his life.When did he fall in love with Star Trek?The show premiered \u2014 with Shatner as Captain Kirk \u2014 in 1966, two years after Bezos was born. It would take the Amazon founder until the fourth grade to discover the Starship Enterprise. When he did, he became infatuated with the show in the way only a child can.\u201cWhen I was in fourth grade, me and my friends Dean and Kyle, who lived next door a couple of houses down, in Houston, Texas, would play \u2018Star Trek\u2019 almost every day,\u201d Bezos told Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron at a 2016 event hosted by The Post. \u201cAnd we\u2019d fight over who\u2019d get to be Captain Kirk, or Spock, and somebody used to play the computer, too. And it was actually very fun \u2014 we\u2019d have little cardboard phasers and cardboard tricorders, you know. Good days.\u201dWashington Post executive editor Martin Baron interviewed Amazon.com chief executive and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos May 18 at Transformers, a live event by The Washington Post about pushing the boundaries of knowledge. (Washington Post Live)Echoes of the show can be found throughout his life. In addition to naming his dog Kamala, he named one of his holding companies Zefram LLC after Zefram Cochrane, the character who invented the warp drive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe\u2019s discussed how the show, and his general love of science fiction, helped inspire him to found a commercial spaceflight venture. But the show was also instrumental in creating the Amazon Echo.\u201cOur vision, in the long term, is it would become the \u2018Star Trek\u2019 computer. You could ask it anything, ask it to do things for you, ask it to find things for you, and it would be easy to converse with in a very natural way,\u201d he told Baron. \u201cThe original inspiration was the \u2018Star Trek\u2019 computer.\u201dWho was his favorite character?If you ask an Amazon\u2019s Alexa who\u2019s the best \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain, she will respond, \u201cOf all the captains in all the galaxies, Captain Picard is my favorite.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s no coincidence that Bezos feels the same way. He once gleefully shared that with a tickled Patrick Stewart, the actor who portrayed Picard. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)\nThough Kirk is the one who traveled to space Wednesday, Bezos has never shied away from reminding the world that he prefers Picard \u2014 usually on Twitter. \u201cKirk or Picard? Picard!\u201d Bezos tweeted in March 2018, shortly after walking the red carpet with Stewart at the Academy Awards.AdvertisementHe almost named Amazon \u201cMakeitso.com,\u201d after Picard\u2019s catchphrase, Inc. reported.In fact, \u201cas time has passed, Bezos and Picard have physically converged. Like the interstellar explorer, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, Bezos shaved the remnant strands on his high-gloss pate and acquired a cast-iron physique,\u201d Franklin Foer wrote in the Atlantic in 2019.Story continues below advertisementBezos has not publicly explained why he admires Picard, but let\u2019s venture a modest guess: Picard is a brilliant officer, historian and diplomat who plays a major role in the events of the 24th century. Even Spock was impressed: \u201cHe\u2019s remarkably analytical and dispassionate, for a human. \u2026 There\u2019s almost a Vulcan quality to the man.\u201dIs it true that he appeared in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie?Affirmative! Bezos played an alien Starfleet officer in the 2016 \u201cStar Trek Beyond,\u201d something he called \u201ca bucket list\u201d dream on Twitter.Advertisement\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie,\u201d he said that year. \u201cI am very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call: \u2018You have to let Jeff Bezos be in your \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. \u201dStory continues below advertisementBezos said he was willing to be unrecognizable but wanted a speaking part \u2014 and one that was central to the plot so it didn\u2019t end up on the cutting-room floor.Great thing about making Trek is having passionate people drop by, like @JeffBezos. Here he is with Lydia Wilson. pic.twitter.com/bKkEAmwjDS\u2014 Justin Lin (@justinlin) July 20, 2016\n\nBezos appears in the first five minutes of the film as an alien Starfleet officer stationed at Yorktown Starbase in 2263 who scans Kalara as she pleads for help from Commodore Paris and Captain Kirk. \u201cSpeak normally,\u201d Bezos tells her. The cameo role required such extensive makeup that he could only drink through a straw.\u201cHe was awesome,\u201d director Justin Lin told the Associated Press. \u201cIt was like a president was visiting, you know? He had a big entourage! But it didn\u2019t matter because he was so into it. He had to wait around all day because it was one day we were shooting like three different scenes and, it was also credit to Jeff because \u2026 he just nailed it every time.\u201dWhat other science fiction does he enjoy?Although \u201cStar Trek\u201d is his most public sci-fi obsession, it\u2019s far from his only one. As a child, Bezos would hoover up all the Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein books he could get his hands on. Nowadays, he makes sure to read newer genre writers such as Alastair Reynolds, Ernest Cline and Andy Weir.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon Studios, the film and TV arm of his online empire, has focused on producing sci-fi. Most notably, the service saved \u201cThe Expanse,\u201d a beloved show based on the novels of James S.A. Corey after it was canceled by its original network, Syfy.\u201cSomething that [Bezos] wants to do is not just to have success in space \u2014 to make rockets that are reusable \u2014 but to reinvigorate interest in space,\u201d The Post\u2019s Christian Davenport said on the Geek\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.According to Davenport\u2019s reporting, Bezos decided to found Blue Origin after watching \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d a movie about NASA engineer Homer Hickam, with science fiction writer Neal Stephenson. But, by that point, he had long been interested in space.As his high school girlfriend Ursula Werner once said: \u201cJeff started Amazon just to get enough money to do Blue Origin. He was intrigued by the idea of rocketing into outer space.\u201d\u201cI can neither confirm nor deny that,\u201d Bezos later said, when asked about her theory.In any event, we know one thing for sure: Live long and profit. Echoes of the show can be found throughout Bezos' life, including Wednesday's Blue Origin launch with William Shatner. The love affair between Jeff Bezos and \u2018Star Trek\u2019",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Here\u2019s how filmmakers have tried to make sense of it all. (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2823",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/21/climate-change-movies/",
        "text": "A few years after \u201cIndependence Day\u201d premiered in theaters, Roland Emmerich faced immense pressure to write and direct a sequel. His sci-fi disaster movie was the highest-grossing film of 1996, raking in more than $300 million at the domestic box office and $800 million worldwide. It set a new standard for Hollywood blockbusters. Naturally, executives wanted another. But Emmerich\u2019s concerns lay elsewhere. He had recently swung by a bookstore after wrapping production on another project and picked up \u201cThe Coming Global Superstorm,\u201d a book that blended fact and fiction while exploring the possibility of unprecedented environmental catastrophe in the near future. The details could seem a bit far-fetched. And yet, deep into pondering potential dangers that were more rooted in reality, Emmerich realized he had no time for alien invasions.His next disaster movie would be about the one to which humans were contributing.\u201cMy friends thought I was crazy,\u201d he recalls. \u201cWhenever they asked, \u2018What is this movie about?\u2019 I would say, \u2018Global warming.\u2019 Don\u2019t forget that at that time, in \u201999, global warming was some sort of fringe thing. People read about it, but nobody really knew what was going on.\u201dHe wound up co-writing and directing 2004\u2032s \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow,\u201d a film marketed with the indelible image of the Statue of Liberty buried under snow. Its scientific accuracy was debated at great length, the central narrative derided as cliched. But its lasting impact on audiences is undeniable. Even now, as the climate crisis figures into more and more conversations throughout the entertainment industry, Emmerich\u2019s film is often among the first to be mentioned.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe subject had been tackled before. But as climate change cements itself as the greatest modern threat to humanity, filmmakers have increasingly varied how they depict its widespread effects. Some still place disasters front and center. Others, such as George Miller, who set \u201cMad Max: Fury Road\u201d in a decaying environment, explore how societal structures respond to a collapsing world.Seven in 10 Americans said they were at least \u201csomewhat worried\u201d about global warming in a recent survey conducted by Yale and George Mason University. That includes 35 percent who said they were \u201cvery worried,\u201d a record high for the poll; only 9 percent said the same in 2011. These distraught feelings are becoming such a fixture of life on this planet that experts have already started to refer to them as \u201cclimate grief.\u201d These emotions demand that we find a way to adapt and move forward.While some films can exacerbate climate grief, others call for action. The Washington Post spoke with several filmmakers about their decisions to address climate change, how they went about doing so and what role fictional storytelling can play in helping us process a crisis of existential proportions.\u201cThat\u2019s the function of story as it always has been, no doubt \u2014 since early man,\u201d Miller says. \u201cWe try to make meaning out of what is apparently a chaotic world.\u201dDepicting a disaster\u2018The Day After Tomorrow\u2019Things fall apart rapidly in \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow.\u201d Soon after climate scientist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) says at a United Nations conference that climate change could lead to an ice age, a storm system develops and threatens to destroy the Northern Hemisphere. Jack\u2019s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his friends seek shelter at the New York Public Library, where they burn books for warmth as snow mounts against the building\u2019s outer walls.Like its peers in the disaster genre, \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d is consumed by the special effects involved in depicting calamity. Emmerich says his critics often forget that \u201cwhen you make a movie, it has to be dramatic in a certain way.\u201d People bought tickets to be stunned. This was the guy who made \u201cIndependence Day,\u201d after all.The movie ends with sheets of ice stretching over the hemisphere, its events all having taken place within days. Dramatic, yes, but Emmerich insists the science is \u201csolid\u201d even if experts said around the time of the theatrical release that such a phenomenon couldn\u2019t occur over that short a period of time. In a way, it didn\u2019t really matter. Echoing some scientists, former vice president Al Gore told USA Today in 2004 that, while \u201cit\u2019s important we separate fact from fiction,\u201d the movie at least got people talking.The film directed attention to real problems, down to the culpability of powerful people who doubted the reality of climate change. It isn\u2019t a coincidence the vice president who dismisses Jack\u2019s research bears a resemblance to Richard B. Cheney, nor that he serves under a compliant president.\u201cWe did a press tour all around the world where we educated people about climate change and what it all means,\u201d Emmerich says. \u201cIt was interesting, because it was a Hollywood movie.\u201dGiven the public\u2019s familiarity with the climate crisis these days, some argue filmmaking should go further. Earlier this year, science journalist Maddie Stone wrote in Polygon that she wondered whether \u201cHollywood executives worry that carbon taxes, battery storage technology and Green New Deals aren\u2019t sexy enough topics to drive a compelling story with mainstream appeal.\u201dSpeaking to The Post, Stone, an avid consumer of science fiction, notes that novelists have increasingly explored what filmmakers seem hesitant to try. There\u2019s a push within the climate fiction space to depict possible solutions to our troubles, even if the narrative doesn\u2019t center on them.\u201cIt\u2019s interesting that policymakers and climate activists are starting to world-build that future,\u201d she says, \u201cbut we haven\u2019t really seen that yet in mainstream film.\u201dAnimating an allegory\u2018WALL-E\u2019In 2008, Disney released \u201cWALL-E,\u201d a movie with a political bent director Andrew Stanton insisted was unintentional. While promoting the Pixar film in an interview with New York magazine, the director said he had no \u201cecological message to push.\u201d It was just about a love story between two robots.The characters in question are WALL-E \u2014 a trash-compacting robot in the 29th century who remains on Earth, a garbage-strewn land humans abandoned centuries earlier for inhabitable spacecraft \u2014 and EVE, a robot sent to the planet to scan for signs of life. WALL-E accompanies EVE back to a starliner, where humans have become sluggish and dependent on machinery doing everything for them.Stanton began writing \u201cWALL-E\u201d when he and his wife, whom he now describes in an interview with The Post as an \u201cearly adopter\u201d of Amazon, ordered so many packages that the cardboard boxes began to pile up. He says he thought of the practice as \u201cconsumerism run amok, where the desire to buy stuff was greater than the ability to deal with all the trash being made for it.\u201d There\u2019s a simple connection to be made between this line of thought and harsher environmental critiques of capitalism, but Stanton wasn\u2019t making it himself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t like being preached to when I watch my entertainment,\u201d he says, recalling that he \u201cdidn\u2019t want to come across, even accidentally, like I had something greater to tell than the story of WALL-E.\u201dStill, the premise of the film is inherently political \u2014 and seems to grow more relevant with each year that passes. Stanton says he might have been a bit defensive in outright denying messaging beyond the love story. He wasn\u2019t trying to target \u201cbig-bucks companies directly,\u201d he adds, \u201cbut I was saying \u2026 complacency is the enemy. Complacency and trust without verifying who you\u2019re giving all your money to, who you\u2019re giving all your power to.\u201d\u201cWALL-E\u201d implores its viewers to think twice about how the systems in place operate. It underscores the perils of overvaluing short-term economic interests, represented by the animated humans\u2019 unwillingness to change harmful behaviors that have become convenient to them.\u201cI actually trust kids to be serious,\u201d Stanton says of his primary audience, adding that he has \u201cno problem with a young kid \u2014 or my kids \u2014 knowing that the Earth can really go south fast if you don\u2019t do the right things.\u201dForecasting the future\u2018Beasts of the Southern Wild\u2019Recent science suggests that today\u2019s children will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents. This fact, compounded by their innocence in the matter, can be especially distressing to process \u2014 an emotion palpable throughout Benh Zeitlin\u2019s Oscar-nominated \u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild,\u201d which made Quvenzhan\u00e9 Wallis the youngest-ever best actress nominee.The 2012 film takes place at a Louisiana bayou on an island nicknamed the Bathtub, where 6-year-old Hushpuppy (Wallis) lives with her ailing father, Wink (Dwight Henry). Often left to fend for herself, Hushpuppy is forced to grow up quickly. At school, she learns about prehistoric, bison-like creatures called aurochs, said to have devoured the children of cave men. She is also taught survival tactics as preparation for when her world falls apart; eventually, the Bathtub will be underwater.\u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild\u201d was adapted from a play by Lucy Alibar, with whom Zeitlin co-wrote the screenplay. The director says that when he first screened it, \u201ca lot of people thought it was about [Hurricane] Katrina and the past. My answer to that was, this is not a film about the past. This is a film about the future.\u201dSpeaking in September from southern Louisiana, where he traveled to help communities recover from Hurricane Ida, Zeitlin says outsiders tend to view the region as a \u201cdoomed place in the world\u201d and wonder why its inhabitants stay put. He \u201creally wanted to make a film that answered that question in a way that was \u2026 defiant about what a ridiculous question that is.\u201d\u201cI remember talking to someone down here about the issue, and I remember them saying something to me about feeling like the people from this area are like a plant that can only grow in one place,\u201d he continues. \u201cIf you tried to plant it somewhere else, it would die.\u201dNearly a decade after the film\u2019s release, Zeitlin encountered people who were uprooted by Ida. Residents of the island where he shot the film once lived \u201ca life of abundance,\u201d he says. \u201cIn order for the oil industry to strip the lands here, they have to create narratives that dehumanize the people whose lives they\u2019re destroying.\u201d Fighting back involves accessing the public\u2019s emotions.In the film, after the Bathtub floods and its residents are instructed to evacuate, Hushpuppy returns and sees aurochs arriving. The climate crisis grounds \u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild\u201d in real life but, according to Zeitlin, its narrative ultimately mirrors that of a Greek myth or story from the Bible.\u201cWhat\u2019s happening in nature renders us a speck,\u201d he says. \u201cThe only way Hushpuppy could understand the radical way in which her life was changing was through stories that were large, [and by seeing] herself as a character in a story about a species on the verge of extinction.\u201dPredicting the post-apocalypse\u2018Mad Max: Fury Road\u2019There are some stories we encounter time and time again, according to George Miller.\u201cFloods and fire and plunder and pestilence are pretty timeless,\u201d he says. \u201cI think they\u2019re intrinsic to the human narrative \u2026 it\u2019s just that they\u2019re amplified now. Now the main difference is, we know we can measure it. We can model and predict the trouble ahead.\u201dThe action of 2015\u2032s \u201cMad Max: Fury Road,\u201d the Tom Hardy-starring fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise, takes place in a desert wasteland following intense warfare over resources. The tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) maintains power by seizing control of the water supply. He sends one of his captains, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), to obtain gasoline but realizes a handful of his concubines have fled with her.Furiosa plans to escape to the Green Place, a fertile land she remembers from her childhood spent with a tribe of women. Then she discovers it has become an uninhabitable swampland.The future seen in \u201cFury Road\u201d is bleak. A haunting question arises more than once: \u201cWho killed the world?\u201d Miller describes the cautionary tale as an allegory, noting that it deals \u201cwith a more elemental world than the complex modern moment we\u2019re dealing with. It\u2019s a regression to a medieval time.\u201dThe filmmaker\u2019s youth in rural Australia led him to become \u201cacutely aware of the droughts and the floods and the dust storms.\u201d He says most stories set in vast, empty landscapes are bound to engage with their environments to some extent. Such was even true of 2006\u2032s \u201cHappy Feet,\u201d his Oscar-winning animated film about a tap-dancing penguin that also commented on the dangers of overfishing.\u201cTo be a storyteller, you respond to the world that\u2019s around you in all its dimensions,\u201d Miller says. \u201cYou can\u2019t help but tell these big, sweeping stories without it becoming part of the story.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFury Road\u201d joins films like Bong Joon-ho\u2019s 2013 thriller \u201cSnowpiercer\u201d in depicting societal ruin as a result of climate change. Experts who advocate for more hopeful views of the future \u2014 such as Stone, the science journalist \u2014 point to the celebrated science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson as an example of someone from whom Hollywood could seek inspiration.Many consider Robinson\u2019s work to be optimistic because he writes utopian fiction; in an interview with The Post, the author laughs and says the \u201cbar is very low.\u201d He acknowledges, however, that stories like his resonate because they give people something to believe in.\u201cWith climate, what I wanted to do was fight the dystopia, to be anti-dystopian,\u201d Robinson says. \u201cAt this point, given the climate emergency \u2026 dystopia is pouring oil on a burning house.\u201dStirring the psyche\u2018First Reformed\u2019There is a certain appeal to post-apocalyptic storytelling because the worst has already happened, says actor Ethan Hawke. It can be daunting, on the other hand, to dive head first into a contemporary issue as \u201cdepressing and scary and real\u201d as climate change. Who knows what the future holds?But Hawke did so with \u201cFirst Reformed,\u201d the 2018 film in which he stars as Ernst Toller, the pastor at a tourist-frequented church who suffers a crisis of faith. It is brought on in part by his interactions with a radical environmentalist named Michael (Philip Ettinger), whose pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) seeks guidance from Toller because Michael doesn\u2019t want to bring a child into an unlivable world.Michael wonders, \u201cWill God forgive us for destroying his creation?\u201d Toller is consumed by the thought, and soon after discovers that the church overseeing his own receives financial support from one of the region\u2019s biggest sources of pollution. The pastor\u2019s crisis deepens.\u201cReverend Toller is struggling with his own place in the system,\u201d Hawke says. \u201cIn this country, everything is acceptable as long as it\u2019s accumulating more wealth. \u2026 He\u2019s finding himself in the middle of a society that\u2019s making [his quest for goodness] near impossible.\u201dThis profound sense of loneliness is a staple of work by writer-director Paul Schrader, who was unavailable for an interview. \u201cFirst Reformed\u201d ends ambiguously, mirroring Toller\u2019s own search for answers. It could seem disheartening, but Hawke considers the act of provoking such deep thought to be productive in itself. He refers to a scene in which Toller describes wisdom as \u201cholding two contradictory truths in our mind simultaneously: hope and despair.\u201d\u201cMost of us are pretty comfortable being asleep, and sometimes we need a work of art to wake our mind up to the way we think about these things,\u201d Hawke says. \u201cWhy should we not despair? What is hope? What am I doing to follow the hope in my heart? Those kinds of conversations are really valuable in regards to ringing a bell to make people remember they\u2019re alive and participating.\u201dReassigning responsibility\u2018The Dead Don\u2019t Die\u2019Jim Jarmusch tries not to be didactic. \u201cI\u2019m not a proselytizer,\u201d he says. \u201cBut everything is political.\u201dThat includes \u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Die,\u201d his 2019 comedy in which fracking at the North and South poles sets Earth off its rotational axis, leading to a zombie apocalypse. The undead are a classic metaphor in film, used to highlight any sociopolitical hazard to which we must wake up the sheeple. Jarmusch\u2019s entry to the genre casts a wide net, from an overreliance on technology to monetary greed.\u201cIt\u2019s the fact that we have a broken operating system,\u201d he summarizes. \u201cCapitalism is obviously a suicide machine for life on this planet. Profit and greed are held as rewards.\u201d\u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Die\u201d is a star-studded satire, featuring Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chlo\u00eb Sevigny as small-town police officers who struggle to maintain order amid the chaos. Viewers root for them to succeed. But Jarmusch notes that, since the film\u2019s release, his impression of their enemies has evolved. He sees the zombies even more as victims, as a \u201cconsequence of the monsters\u201d rather than monsters themselves.That shift hints at a central obstacle in writing about climate change. Storytelling often favors clear heroes and villains, the latter responsible for the conflict at hand. But what if the villain is a system, or our established way of life? What level of complicity turns presumed heroes into villains?\u201cI really resent this being put on [individual] people,\u201d Jarmusch says, \u201clike, \u2018You better recycle your plastic,\u2019 and then they just dump it in the ocean.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDaniel Hinerfeld leads an initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, for which he consults with major companies such as Netflix, Sony and NBCUniversal to encourage artists to harness the \u201ctremendous untapped power in entertainment storytelling to change the way people think and feel and behave around environmental issues.\u201dHinerfeld says he has recently witnessed many a lightbulb moment for artists who come to recognize that, as with any crisis, there is meaningful drama to mine in what could initially be perceived as \u201cabstract\u201d or \u201cboring\u201d subject matter. There are struggles to depict, anxieties to work out and, of course, futures to imagine.\u201cThe clock is running down on civilization here, but we just go about our lives as we normally have for decades because we don\u2019t know what to do and we\u2019re terrified,\u201d Hinerfeld says. \u201cThe moment you start to unpack that terror a little bit, creative storytellers suddenly realize there\u2019s a whole world of storytelling here.\u201d Over the past 20 years, directors have increasingly put out movies that help viewers process climate change fears. Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Here\u2019s how filmmakers have tried to make sense of it all.",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Here\u2019s how filmmakers have tried to make sense of it all. (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2824",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/21/climate-change-movies/",
        "text": "A few years after \u201cIndependence Day\u201d premiered in theaters, Roland Emmerich faced immense pressure to write and direct a sequel. His sci-fi disaster movie was the highest-grossing film of 1996, raking in more than $300 million at the domestic box office and $800 million worldwide. It set a new standard for Hollywood blockbusters. Naturally, executives wanted another. But Emmerich\u2019s concerns lay elsewhere. He had recently swung by a bookstore after wrapping production on another project and picked up \u201cThe Coming Global Superstorm,\u201d a book that blended fact and fiction while exploring the possibility of unprecedented environmental catastrophe in the near future. The details could seem a bit far-fetched. And yet, deep into pondering potential dangers that were more rooted in reality, Emmerich realized he had no time for alien invasions.His next disaster movie would be about the one to which humans were contributing.\u201cMy friends thought I was crazy,\u201d he recalls. \u201cWhenever they asked, \u2018What is this movie about?\u2019 I would say, \u2018Global warming.\u2019 Don\u2019t forget that at that time, in \u201999, global warming was some sort of fringe thing. People read about it, but nobody really knew what was going on.\u201dHe wound up co-writing and directing 2004\u2032s \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow,\u201d a film marketed with the indelible image of the Statue of Liberty buried under snow. Its scientific accuracy was debated at great length, the central narrative derided as cliched. But its lasting impact on audiences is undeniable. Even now, as the climate crisis figures into more and more conversations throughout the entertainment industry, Emmerich\u2019s film is often among the first to be mentioned.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe subject had been tackled before. But as climate change cements itself as the greatest modern threat to humanity, filmmakers have increasingly varied how they depict its widespread effects. Some still place disasters front and center. Others, such as George Miller, who set \u201cMad Max: Fury Road\u201d in a decaying environment, explore how societal structures respond to a collapsing world.Seven in 10 Americans said they were at least \u201csomewhat worried\u201d about global warming in a recent survey conducted by Yale and George Mason University. That includes 35 percent who said they were \u201cvery worried,\u201d a record high for the poll; only 9 percent said the same in 2011. These distraught feelings are becoming such a fixture of life on this planet that experts have already started to refer to them as \u201cclimate grief.\u201d These emotions demand that we find a way to adapt and move forward.While some films can exacerbate climate grief, others call for action. The Washington Post spoke with several filmmakers about their decisions to address climate change, how they went about doing so and what role fictional storytelling can play in helping us process a crisis of existential proportions.\u201cThat\u2019s the function of story as it always has been, no doubt \u2014 since early man,\u201d Miller says. \u201cWe try to make meaning out of what is apparently a chaotic world.\u201dDepicting a disaster\u2018The Day After Tomorrow\u2019Things fall apart rapidly in \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow.\u201d Soon after climate scientist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) says at a United Nations conference that climate change could lead to an ice age, a storm system develops and threatens to destroy the Northern Hemisphere. Jack\u2019s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his friends seek shelter at the New York Public Library, where they burn books for warmth as snow mounts against the building\u2019s outer walls.Like its peers in the disaster genre, \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d is consumed by the special effects involved in depicting calamity. Emmerich says his critics often forget that \u201cwhen you make a movie, it has to be dramatic in a certain way.\u201d People bought tickets to be stunned. This was the guy who made \u201cIndependence Day,\u201d after all.The movie ends with sheets of ice stretching over the hemisphere, its events all having taken place within days. Dramatic, yes, but Emmerich insists the science is \u201csolid\u201d even if experts said around the time of the theatrical release that such a phenomenon couldn\u2019t occur over that short a period of time. In a way, it didn\u2019t really matter. Echoing some scientists, former vice president Al Gore told USA Today in 2004 that, while \u201cit\u2019s important we separate fact from fiction,\u201d the movie at least got people talking.The film directed attention to real problems, down to the culpability of powerful people who doubted the reality of climate change. It isn\u2019t a coincidence the vice president who dismisses Jack\u2019s research bears a resemblance to Richard B. Cheney, nor that he serves under a compliant president.\u201cWe did a press tour all around the world where we educated people about climate change and what it all means,\u201d Emmerich says. \u201cIt was interesting, because it was a Hollywood movie.\u201dGiven the public\u2019s familiarity with the climate crisis these days, some argue filmmaking should go further. Earlier this year, science journalist Maddie Stone wrote in Polygon that she wondered whether \u201cHollywood executives worry that carbon taxes, battery storage technology and Green New Deals aren\u2019t sexy enough topics to drive a compelling story with mainstream appeal.\u201dSpeaking to The Post, Stone, an avid consumer of science fiction, notes that novelists have increasingly explored what filmmakers seem hesitant to try. There\u2019s a push within the climate fiction space to depict possible solutions to our troubles, even if the narrative doesn\u2019t center on them.\u201cIt\u2019s interesting that policymakers and climate activists are starting to world-build that future,\u201d she says, \u201cbut we haven\u2019t really seen that yet in mainstream film.\u201dAnimating an allegory\u2018WALL-E\u2019In 2008, Disney released \u201cWALL-E,\u201d a movie with a political bent director Andrew Stanton insisted was unintentional. While promoting the Pixar film in an interview with New York magazine, the director said he had no \u201cecological message to push.\u201d It was just about a love story between two robots.The characters in question are WALL-E \u2014 a trash-compacting robot in the 29th century who remains on Earth, a garbage-strewn land humans abandoned centuries earlier for inhabitable spacecraft \u2014 and EVE, a robot sent to the planet to scan for signs of life. WALL-E accompanies EVE back to a starliner, where humans have become sluggish and dependent on machinery doing everything for them.Stanton began writing \u201cWALL-E\u201d when he and his wife, whom he now describes in an interview with The Post as an \u201cearly adopter\u201d of Amazon, ordered so many packages that the cardboard boxes began to pile up. He says he thought of the practice as \u201cconsumerism run amok, where the desire to buy stuff was greater than the ability to deal with all the trash being made for it.\u201d There\u2019s a simple connection to be made between this line of thought and harsher environmental critiques of capitalism, but Stanton wasn\u2019t making it himself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t like being preached to when I watch my entertainment,\u201d he says, recalling that he \u201cdidn\u2019t want to come across, even accidentally, like I had something greater to tell than the story of WALL-E.\u201dStill, the premise of the film is inherently political \u2014 and seems to grow more relevant with each year that passes. Stanton says he might have been a bit defensive in outright denying messaging beyond the love story. He wasn\u2019t trying to target \u201cbig-bucks companies directly,\u201d he adds, \u201cbut I was saying \u2026 complacency is the enemy. Complacency and trust without verifying who you\u2019re giving all your money to, who you\u2019re giving all your power to.\u201d\u201cWALL-E\u201d implores its viewers to think twice about how the systems in place operate. It underscores the perils of overvaluing short-term economic interests, represented by the animated humans\u2019 unwillingness to change harmful behaviors that have become convenient to them.\u201cI actually trust kids to be serious,\u201d Stanton says of his primary audience, adding that he has \u201cno problem with a young kid \u2014 or my kids \u2014 knowing that the Earth can really go south fast if you don\u2019t do the right things.\u201dForecasting the future\u2018Beasts of the Southern Wild\u2019Recent science suggests that today\u2019s children will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents. This fact, compounded by their innocence in the matter, can be especially distressing to process \u2014 an emotion palpable throughout Benh Zeitlin\u2019s Oscar-nominated \u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild,\u201d which made Quvenzhan\u00e9 Wallis the youngest-ever best actress nominee.The 2012 film takes place at a Louisiana bayou on an island nicknamed the Bathtub, where 6-year-old Hushpuppy (Wallis) lives with her ailing father, Wink (Dwight Henry). Often left to fend for herself, Hushpuppy is forced to grow up quickly. At school, she learns about prehistoric, bison-like creatures called aurochs, said to have devoured the children of cave men. She is also taught survival tactics as preparation for when her world falls apart; eventually, the Bathtub will be underwater.\u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild\u201d was adapted from a play by Lucy Alibar, with whom Zeitlin co-wrote the screenplay. The director says that when he first screened it, \u201ca lot of people thought it was about [Hurricane] Katrina and the past. My answer to that was, this is not a film about the past. This is a film about the future.\u201dSpeaking in September from southern Louisiana, where he traveled to help communities recover from Hurricane Ida, Zeitlin says outsiders tend to view the region as a \u201cdoomed place in the world\u201d and wonder why its inhabitants stay put. He \u201creally wanted to make a film that answered that question in a way that was \u2026 defiant about what a ridiculous question that is.\u201d\u201cI remember talking to someone down here about the issue, and I remember them saying something to me about feeling like the people from this area are like a plant that can only grow in one place,\u201d he continues. \u201cIf you tried to plant it somewhere else, it would die.\u201dNearly a decade after the film\u2019s release, Zeitlin encountered people who were uprooted by Ida. Residents of the island where he shot the film once lived \u201ca life of abundance,\u201d he says. \u201cIn order for the oil industry to strip the lands here, they have to create narratives that dehumanize the people whose lives they\u2019re destroying.\u201d Fighting back involves accessing the public\u2019s emotions.In the film, after the Bathtub floods and its residents are instructed to evacuate, Hushpuppy returns and sees aurochs arriving. The climate crisis grounds \u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild\u201d in real life but, according to Zeitlin, its narrative ultimately mirrors that of a Greek myth or story from the Bible.\u201cWhat\u2019s happening in nature renders us a speck,\u201d he says. \u201cThe only way Hushpuppy could understand the radical way in which her life was changing was through stories that were large, [and by seeing] herself as a character in a story about a species on the verge of extinction.\u201dPredicting the post-apocalypse\u2018Mad Max: Fury Road\u2019There are some stories we encounter time and time again, according to George Miller.\u201cFloods and fire and plunder and pestilence are pretty timeless,\u201d he says. \u201cI think they\u2019re intrinsic to the human narrative \u2026 it\u2019s just that they\u2019re amplified now. Now the main difference is, we know we can measure it. We can model and predict the trouble ahead.\u201dThe action of 2015\u2032s \u201cMad Max: Fury Road,\u201d the Tom Hardy-starring fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise, takes place in a desert wasteland following intense warfare over resources. The tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) maintains power by seizing control of the water supply. He sends one of his captains, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), to obtain gasoline but realizes a handful of his concubines have fled with her.Furiosa plans to escape to the Green Place, a fertile land she remembers from her childhood spent with a tribe of women. Then she discovers it has become an uninhabitable swampland.The future seen in \u201cFury Road\u201d is bleak. A haunting question arises more than once: \u201cWho killed the world?\u201d Miller describes the cautionary tale as an allegory, noting that it deals \u201cwith a more elemental world than the complex modern moment we\u2019re dealing with. It\u2019s a regression to a medieval time.\u201dThe filmmaker\u2019s youth in rural Australia led him to become \u201cacutely aware of the droughts and the floods and the dust storms.\u201d He says most stories set in vast, empty landscapes are bound to engage with their environments to some extent. Such was even true of 2006\u2032s \u201cHappy Feet,\u201d his Oscar-winning animated film about a tap-dancing penguin that also commented on the dangers of overfishing.\u201cTo be a storyteller, you respond to the world that\u2019s around you in all its dimensions,\u201d Miller says. \u201cYou can\u2019t help but tell these big, sweeping stories without it becoming part of the story.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFury Road\u201d joins films like Bong Joon-ho\u2019s 2013 thriller \u201cSnowpiercer\u201d in depicting societal ruin as a result of climate change. Experts who advocate for more hopeful views of the future \u2014 such as Stone, the science journalist \u2014 point to the celebrated science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson as an example of someone from whom Hollywood could seek inspiration.Many consider Robinson\u2019s work to be optimistic because he writes utopian fiction; in an interview with The Post, the author laughs and says the \u201cbar is very low.\u201d He acknowledges, however, that stories like his resonate because they give people something to believe in.\u201cWith climate, what I wanted to do was fight the dystopia, to be anti-dystopian,\u201d Robinson says. \u201cAt this point, given the climate emergency \u2026 dystopia is pouring oil on a burning house.\u201dStirring the psyche\u2018First Reformed\u2019There is a certain appeal to post-apocalyptic storytelling because the worst has already happened, says actor Ethan Hawke. It can be daunting, on the other hand, to dive head first into a contemporary issue as \u201cdepressing and scary and real\u201d as climate change. Who knows what the future holds?But Hawke did so with \u201cFirst Reformed,\u201d the 2018 film in which he stars as Ernst Toller, the pastor at a tourist-frequented church who suffers a crisis of faith. It is brought on in part by his interactions with a radical environmentalist named Michael (Philip Ettinger), whose pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) seeks guidance from Toller because Michael doesn\u2019t want to bring a child into an unlivable world.Michael wonders, \u201cWill God forgive us for destroying his creation?\u201d Toller is consumed by the thought, and soon after discovers that the church overseeing his own receives financial support from one of the region\u2019s biggest sources of pollution. The pastor\u2019s crisis deepens.\u201cReverend Toller is struggling with his own place in the system,\u201d Hawke says. \u201cIn this country, everything is acceptable as long as it\u2019s accumulating more wealth. \u2026 He\u2019s finding himself in the middle of a society that\u2019s making [his quest for goodness] near impossible.\u201dThis profound sense of loneliness is a staple of work by writer-director Paul Schrader, who was unavailable for an interview. \u201cFirst Reformed\u201d ends ambiguously, mirroring Toller\u2019s own search for answers. It could seem disheartening, but Hawke considers the act of provoking such deep thought to be productive in itself. He refers to a scene in which Toller describes wisdom as \u201cholding two contradictory truths in our mind simultaneously: hope and despair.\u201d\u201cMost of us are pretty comfortable being asleep, and sometimes we need a work of art to wake our mind up to the way we think about these things,\u201d Hawke says. \u201cWhy should we not despair? What is hope? What am I doing to follow the hope in my heart? Those kinds of conversations are really valuable in regards to ringing a bell to make people remember they\u2019re alive and participating.\u201dReassigning responsibility\u2018The Dead Don\u2019t Die\u2019Jim Jarmusch tries not to be didactic. \u201cI\u2019m not a proselytizer,\u201d he says. \u201cBut everything is political.\u201dThat includes \u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Die,\u201d his 2019 comedy in which fracking at the North and South poles sets Earth off its rotational axis, leading to a zombie apocalypse. The undead are a classic metaphor in film, used to highlight any sociopolitical hazard to which we must wake up the sheeple. Jarmusch\u2019s entry to the genre casts a wide net, from an overreliance on technology to monetary greed.\u201cIt\u2019s the fact that we have a broken operating system,\u201d he summarizes. \u201cCapitalism is obviously a suicide machine for life on this planet. Profit and greed are held as rewards.\u201d\u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Die\u201d is a star-studded satire, featuring Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chlo\u00eb Sevigny as small-town police officers who struggle to maintain order amid the chaos. Viewers root for them to succeed. But Jarmusch notes that, since the film\u2019s release, his impression of their enemies has evolved. He sees the zombies even more as victims, as a \u201cconsequence of the monsters\u201d rather than monsters themselves.That shift hints at a central obstacle in writing about climate change. Storytelling often favors clear heroes and villains, the latter responsible for the conflict at hand. But what if the villain is a system, or our established way of life? What level of complicity turns presumed heroes into villains?\u201cI really resent this being put on [individual] people,\u201d Jarmusch says, \u201clike, \u2018You better recycle your plastic,\u2019 and then they just dump it in the ocean.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDaniel Hinerfeld leads an initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, for which he consults with major companies such as Netflix, Sony and NBCUniversal to encourage artists to harness the \u201ctremendous untapped power in entertainment storytelling to change the way people think and feel and behave around environmental issues.\u201dHinerfeld says he has recently witnessed many a lightbulb moment for artists who come to recognize that, as with any crisis, there is meaningful drama to mine in what could initially be perceived as \u201cabstract\u201d or \u201cboring\u201d subject matter. There are struggles to depict, anxieties to work out and, of course, futures to imagine.\u201cThe clock is running down on civilization here, but we just go about our lives as we normally have for decades because we don\u2019t know what to do and we\u2019re terrified,\u201d Hinerfeld says. \u201cThe moment you start to unpack that terror a little bit, creative storytellers suddenly realize there\u2019s a whole world of storytelling here.\u201d Over the past 20 years, directors have increasingly put out movies that help viewers process climate change fears. Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Here\u2019s how filmmakers have tried to make sense of it all.",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Here\u2019s how filmmakers have tried to make sense of it all. (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2825",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/21/climate-change-movies/",
        "text": "A few years after \u201cIndependence Day\u201d premiered in theaters, Roland Emmerich faced immense pressure to write and direct a sequel. His sci-fi disaster movie was the highest-grossing film of 1996, raking in more than $300 million at the domestic box office and $800 million worldwide. It set a new standard for Hollywood blockbusters. Naturally, executives wanted another. But Emmerich\u2019s concerns lay elsewhere. He had recently swung by a bookstore after wrapping production on another project and picked up \u201cThe Coming Global Superstorm,\u201d a book that blended fact and fiction while exploring the possibility of unprecedented environmental catastrophe in the near future. The details could seem a bit far-fetched. And yet, deep into pondering potential dangers that were more rooted in reality, Emmerich realized he had no time for alien invasions.His next disaster movie would be about the one to which humans were contributing.\u201cMy friends thought I was crazy,\u201d he recalls. \u201cWhenever they asked, \u2018What is this movie about?\u2019 I would say, \u2018Global warming.\u2019 Don\u2019t forget that at that time, in \u201999, global warming was some sort of fringe thing. People read about it, but nobody really knew what was going on.\u201dHe wound up co-writing and directing 2004\u2032s \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow,\u201d a film marketed with the indelible image of the Statue of Liberty buried under snow. Its scientific accuracy was debated at great length, the central narrative derided as cliched. But its lasting impact on audiences is undeniable. Even now, as the climate crisis figures into more and more conversations throughout the entertainment industry, Emmerich\u2019s film is often among the first to be mentioned.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe subject had been tackled before. But as climate change cements itself as the greatest modern threat to humanity, filmmakers have increasingly varied how they depict its widespread effects. Some still place disasters front and center. Others, such as George Miller, who set \u201cMad Max: Fury Road\u201d in a decaying environment, explore how societal structures respond to a collapsing world.Seven in 10 Americans said they were at least \u201csomewhat worried\u201d about global warming in a recent survey conducted by Yale and George Mason University. That includes 35 percent who said they were \u201cvery worried,\u201d a record high for the poll; only 9 percent said the same in 2011. These distraught feelings are becoming such a fixture of life on this planet that experts have already started to refer to them as \u201cclimate grief.\u201d These emotions demand that we find a way to adapt and move forward.While some films can exacerbate climate grief, others call for action. The Washington Post spoke with several filmmakers about their decisions to address climate change, how they went about doing so and what role fictional storytelling can play in helping us process a crisis of existential proportions.\u201cThat\u2019s the function of story as it always has been, no doubt \u2014 since early man,\u201d Miller says. \u201cWe try to make meaning out of what is apparently a chaotic world.\u201dDepicting a disaster\u2018The Day After Tomorrow\u2019Things fall apart rapidly in \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow.\u201d Soon after climate scientist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) says at a United Nations conference that climate change could lead to an ice age, a storm system develops and threatens to destroy the Northern Hemisphere. Jack\u2019s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his friends seek shelter at the New York Public Library, where they burn books for warmth as snow mounts against the building\u2019s outer walls.Like its peers in the disaster genre, \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d is consumed by the special effects involved in depicting calamity. Emmerich says his critics often forget that \u201cwhen you make a movie, it has to be dramatic in a certain way.\u201d People bought tickets to be stunned. This was the guy who made \u201cIndependence Day,\u201d after all.The movie ends with sheets of ice stretching over the hemisphere, its events all having taken place within days. Dramatic, yes, but Emmerich insists the science is \u201csolid\u201d even if experts said around the time of the theatrical release that such a phenomenon couldn\u2019t occur over that short a period of time. In a way, it didn\u2019t really matter. Echoing some scientists, former vice president Al Gore told USA Today in 2004 that, while \u201cit\u2019s important we separate fact from fiction,\u201d the movie at least got people talking.The film directed attention to real problems, down to the culpability of powerful people who doubted the reality of climate change. It isn\u2019t a coincidence the vice president who dismisses Jack\u2019s research bears a resemblance to Richard B. Cheney, nor that he serves under a compliant president.\u201cWe did a press tour all around the world where we educated people about climate change and what it all means,\u201d Emmerich says. \u201cIt was interesting, because it was a Hollywood movie.\u201dGiven the public\u2019s familiarity with the climate crisis these days, some argue filmmaking should go further. Earlier this year, science journalist Maddie Stone wrote in Polygon that she wondered whether \u201cHollywood executives worry that carbon taxes, battery storage technology and Green New Deals aren\u2019t sexy enough topics to drive a compelling story with mainstream appeal.\u201dSpeaking to The Post, Stone, an avid consumer of science fiction, notes that novelists have increasingly explored what filmmakers seem hesitant to try. There\u2019s a push within the climate fiction space to depict possible solutions to our troubles, even if the narrative doesn\u2019t center on them.\u201cIt\u2019s interesting that policymakers and climate activists are starting to world-build that future,\u201d she says, \u201cbut we haven\u2019t really seen that yet in mainstream film.\u201dAnimating an allegory\u2018WALL-E\u2019In 2008, Disney released \u201cWALL-E,\u201d a movie with a political bent director Andrew Stanton insisted was unintentional. While promoting the Pixar film in an interview with New York magazine, the director said he had no \u201cecological message to push.\u201d It was just about a love story between two robots.The characters in question are WALL-E \u2014 a trash-compacting robot in the 29th century who remains on Earth, a garbage-strewn land humans abandoned centuries earlier for inhabitable spacecraft \u2014 and EVE, a robot sent to the planet to scan for signs of life. WALL-E accompanies EVE back to a starliner, where humans have become sluggish and dependent on machinery doing everything for them.Stanton began writing \u201cWALL-E\u201d when he and his wife, whom he now describes in an interview with The Post as an \u201cearly adopter\u201d of Amazon, ordered so many packages that the cardboard boxes began to pile up. He says he thought of the practice as \u201cconsumerism run amok, where the desire to buy stuff was greater than the ability to deal with all the trash being made for it.\u201d There\u2019s a simple connection to be made between this line of thought and harsher environmental critiques of capitalism, but Stanton wasn\u2019t making it himself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t like being preached to when I watch my entertainment,\u201d he says, recalling that he \u201cdidn\u2019t want to come across, even accidentally, like I had something greater to tell than the story of WALL-E.\u201dStill, the premise of the film is inherently political \u2014 and seems to grow more relevant with each year that passes. Stanton says he might have been a bit defensive in outright denying messaging beyond the love story. He wasn\u2019t trying to target \u201cbig-bucks companies directly,\u201d he adds, \u201cbut I was saying \u2026 complacency is the enemy. Complacency and trust without verifying who you\u2019re giving all your money to, who you\u2019re giving all your power to.\u201d\u201cWALL-E\u201d implores its viewers to think twice about how the systems in place operate. It underscores the perils of overvaluing short-term economic interests, represented by the animated humans\u2019 unwillingness to change harmful behaviors that have become convenient to them.\u201cI actually trust kids to be serious,\u201d Stanton says of his primary audience, adding that he has \u201cno problem with a young kid \u2014 or my kids \u2014 knowing that the Earth can really go south fast if you don\u2019t do the right things.\u201dForecasting the future\u2018Beasts of the Southern Wild\u2019Recent science suggests that today\u2019s children will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents. This fact, compounded by their innocence in the matter, can be especially distressing to process \u2014 an emotion palpable throughout Benh Zeitlin\u2019s Oscar-nominated \u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild,\u201d which made Quvenzhan\u00e9 Wallis the youngest-ever best actress nominee.The 2012 film takes place at a Louisiana bayou on an island nicknamed the Bathtub, where 6-year-old Hushpuppy (Wallis) lives with her ailing father, Wink (Dwight Henry). Often left to fend for herself, Hushpuppy is forced to grow up quickly. At school, she learns about prehistoric, bison-like creatures called aurochs, said to have devoured the children of cave men. She is also taught survival tactics as preparation for when her world falls apart; eventually, the Bathtub will be underwater.\u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild\u201d was adapted from a play by Lucy Alibar, with whom Zeitlin co-wrote the screenplay. The director says that when he first screened it, \u201ca lot of people thought it was about [Hurricane] Katrina and the past. My answer to that was, this is not a film about the past. This is a film about the future.\u201dSpeaking in September from southern Louisiana, where he traveled to help communities recover from Hurricane Ida, Zeitlin says outsiders tend to view the region as a \u201cdoomed place in the world\u201d and wonder why its inhabitants stay put. He \u201creally wanted to make a film that answered that question in a way that was \u2026 defiant about what a ridiculous question that is.\u201d\u201cI remember talking to someone down here about the issue, and I remember them saying something to me about feeling like the people from this area are like a plant that can only grow in one place,\u201d he continues. \u201cIf you tried to plant it somewhere else, it would die.\u201dNearly a decade after the film\u2019s release, Zeitlin encountered people who were uprooted by Ida. Residents of the island where he shot the film once lived \u201ca life of abundance,\u201d he says. \u201cIn order for the oil industry to strip the lands here, they have to create narratives that dehumanize the people whose lives they\u2019re destroying.\u201d Fighting back involves accessing the public\u2019s emotions.In the film, after the Bathtub floods and its residents are instructed to evacuate, Hushpuppy returns and sees aurochs arriving. The climate crisis grounds \u201cBeasts of the Southern Wild\u201d in real life but, according to Zeitlin, its narrative ultimately mirrors that of a Greek myth or story from the Bible.\u201cWhat\u2019s happening in nature renders us a speck,\u201d he says. \u201cThe only way Hushpuppy could understand the radical way in which her life was changing was through stories that were large, [and by seeing] herself as a character in a story about a species on the verge of extinction.\u201dPredicting the post-apocalypse\u2018Mad Max: Fury Road\u2019There are some stories we encounter time and time again, according to George Miller.\u201cFloods and fire and plunder and pestilence are pretty timeless,\u201d he says. \u201cI think they\u2019re intrinsic to the human narrative \u2026 it\u2019s just that they\u2019re amplified now. Now the main difference is, we know we can measure it. We can model and predict the trouble ahead.\u201dThe action of 2015\u2032s \u201cMad Max: Fury Road,\u201d the Tom Hardy-starring fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise, takes place in a desert wasteland following intense warfare over resources. The tyrannical Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) maintains power by seizing control of the water supply. He sends one of his captains, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), to obtain gasoline but realizes a handful of his concubines have fled with her.Furiosa plans to escape to the Green Place, a fertile land she remembers from her childhood spent with a tribe of women. Then she discovers it has become an uninhabitable swampland.The future seen in \u201cFury Road\u201d is bleak. A haunting question arises more than once: \u201cWho killed the world?\u201d Miller describes the cautionary tale as an allegory, noting that it deals \u201cwith a more elemental world than the complex modern moment we\u2019re dealing with. It\u2019s a regression to a medieval time.\u201dThe filmmaker\u2019s youth in rural Australia led him to become \u201cacutely aware of the droughts and the floods and the dust storms.\u201d He says most stories set in vast, empty landscapes are bound to engage with their environments to some extent. Such was even true of 2006\u2032s \u201cHappy Feet,\u201d his Oscar-winning animated film about a tap-dancing penguin that also commented on the dangers of overfishing.\u201cTo be a storyteller, you respond to the world that\u2019s around you in all its dimensions,\u201d Miller says. \u201cYou can\u2019t help but tell these big, sweeping stories without it becoming part of the story.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFury Road\u201d joins films like Bong Joon-ho\u2019s 2013 thriller \u201cSnowpiercer\u201d in depicting societal ruin as a result of climate change. Experts who advocate for more hopeful views of the future \u2014 such as Stone, the science journalist \u2014 point to the celebrated science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson as an example of someone from whom Hollywood could seek inspiration.Many consider Robinson\u2019s work to be optimistic because he writes utopian fiction; in an interview with The Post, the author laughs and says the \u201cbar is very low.\u201d He acknowledges, however, that stories like his resonate because they give people something to believe in.\u201cWith climate, what I wanted to do was fight the dystopia, to be anti-dystopian,\u201d Robinson says. \u201cAt this point, given the climate emergency \u2026 dystopia is pouring oil on a burning house.\u201dStirring the psyche\u2018First Reformed\u2019There is a certain appeal to post-apocalyptic storytelling because the worst has already happened, says actor Ethan Hawke. It can be daunting, on the other hand, to dive head first into a contemporary issue as \u201cdepressing and scary and real\u201d as climate change. Who knows what the future holds?But Hawke did so with \u201cFirst Reformed,\u201d the 2018 film in which he stars as Ernst Toller, the pastor at a tourist-frequented church who suffers a crisis of faith. It is brought on in part by his interactions with a radical environmentalist named Michael (Philip Ettinger), whose pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) seeks guidance from Toller because Michael doesn\u2019t want to bring a child into an unlivable world.Michael wonders, \u201cWill God forgive us for destroying his creation?\u201d Toller is consumed by the thought, and soon after discovers that the church overseeing his own receives financial support from one of the region\u2019s biggest sources of pollution. The pastor\u2019s crisis deepens.\u201cReverend Toller is struggling with his own place in the system,\u201d Hawke says. \u201cIn this country, everything is acceptable as long as it\u2019s accumulating more wealth. \u2026 He\u2019s finding himself in the middle of a society that\u2019s making [his quest for goodness] near impossible.\u201dThis profound sense of loneliness is a staple of work by writer-director Paul Schrader, who was unavailable for an interview. \u201cFirst Reformed\u201d ends ambiguously, mirroring Toller\u2019s own search for answers. It could seem disheartening, but Hawke considers the act of provoking such deep thought to be productive in itself. He refers to a scene in which Toller describes wisdom as \u201cholding two contradictory truths in our mind simultaneously: hope and despair.\u201d\u201cMost of us are pretty comfortable being asleep, and sometimes we need a work of art to wake our mind up to the way we think about these things,\u201d Hawke says. \u201cWhy should we not despair? What is hope? What am I doing to follow the hope in my heart? Those kinds of conversations are really valuable in regards to ringing a bell to make people remember they\u2019re alive and participating.\u201dReassigning responsibility\u2018The Dead Don\u2019t Die\u2019Jim Jarmusch tries not to be didactic. \u201cI\u2019m not a proselytizer,\u201d he says. \u201cBut everything is political.\u201dThat includes \u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Die,\u201d his 2019 comedy in which fracking at the North and South poles sets Earth off its rotational axis, leading to a zombie apocalypse. The undead are a classic metaphor in film, used to highlight any sociopolitical hazard to which we must wake up the sheeple. Jarmusch\u2019s entry to the genre casts a wide net, from an overreliance on technology to monetary greed.\u201cIt\u2019s the fact that we have a broken operating system,\u201d he summarizes. \u201cCapitalism is obviously a suicide machine for life on this planet. Profit and greed are held as rewards.\u201d\u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Die\u201d is a star-studded satire, featuring Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chlo\u00eb Sevigny as small-town police officers who struggle to maintain order amid the chaos. Viewers root for them to succeed. But Jarmusch notes that, since the film\u2019s release, his impression of their enemies has evolved. He sees the zombies even more as victims, as a \u201cconsequence of the monsters\u201d rather than monsters themselves.That shift hints at a central obstacle in writing about climate change. Storytelling often favors clear heroes and villains, the latter responsible for the conflict at hand. But what if the villain is a system, or our established way of life? What level of complicity turns presumed heroes into villains?\u201cI really resent this being put on [individual] people,\u201d Jarmusch says, \u201clike, \u2018You better recycle your plastic,\u2019 and then they just dump it in the ocean.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDaniel Hinerfeld leads an initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization, for which he consults with major companies such as Netflix, Sony and NBCUniversal to encourage artists to harness the \u201ctremendous untapped power in entertainment storytelling to change the way people think and feel and behave around environmental issues.\u201dHinerfeld says he has recently witnessed many a lightbulb moment for artists who come to recognize that, as with any crisis, there is meaningful drama to mine in what could initially be perceived as \u201cabstract\u201d or \u201cboring\u201d subject matter. There are struggles to depict, anxieties to work out and, of course, futures to imagine.\u201cThe clock is running down on civilization here, but we just go about our lives as we normally have for decades because we don\u2019t know what to do and we\u2019re terrified,\u201d Hinerfeld says. \u201cThe moment you start to unpack that terror a little bit, creative storytellers suddenly realize there\u2019s a whole world of storytelling here.\u201d Over the past 20 years, directors have increasingly put out movies that help viewers process climate change fears. Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity. Here\u2019s how filmmakers have tried to make sense of it all.",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | When everything seems like it\u2019s falling apart, watch these 6 movies about the actual end of the world (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2826",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/11/02/end-of-the-world-movies/",
        "text": "The world is coming to an end. Possibly. Eventually. People have predicted it forever, but if you look around at the clouding pall of disasters \u2014 viral contagion, environmental ruin, wobbling political infrastructure \u2014 it\u2019s not hard to imagine it might be happening on the sooner side. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo what does it feel like when everything appears to be falling apart? It\u2019s discouraging, disorienting, isolating, jarring and, maybe, also sort of dumb.Films have long tried to capture this sense of life teetering on the brink of total collapse. Now that it\u2019s easy for your brain and eyes to wander into the void, it\u2019s time to see which works best capture the feeling (and predicament) of being alive at the end of the world.\u201cA.I. Artificial Intelligence\u201d (2001)When \u201cA.I.\u201d was released into the world earlier this millennium, viewers were split on what to make of the film inspired by the fairy tale of Pinocchio. The project was conceived by beloved director Stanley Kubrick, who gave it to Steven Spielberg to see through, and starred marquee child actor Haley Joel Osment. Film buffs were too hung up on the split between what they saw as Spielberg\u2019s reliance on crowd-pleasing storybook elements and Kubrick\u2019s original dystopian vision for the film. Nearly two decades later, one can appreciate the masterful threading by Spielberg that shows we can face down an oppressively cold and grim techno-future by recognizing the beauty of core human desires for connection and love. (Stream on Amazon Prime)\u201cChildren of Men\u201d (2006)It\u2019s hard not to see \u201cChildren of Men\u201d as an almost pitch-perfect prophecy of the dystopian present. For 14 years running, director Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s vision of the United Kingdom in 2027 looks as chillingly imminent as ever \u2014 and the fact that P.D. James\u2019s 1992 source novel was set in 2021 may have only made it cannier. There\u2019s the journey of survival in a global catastrophe with an uncertain resolution; a refugee crisis dealt with by extreme measures from the government; and a pervading sense of gloom wafting through the air. Add masterful visual panache to the tightly told story, and you have what is often considered one of the most important films of the 21st century. (Stream on Peacock)\u201cHigh Life\u201d (2018)What if the end times are grotesque? Director Claire Denis proposes such a prognostication with \u201cHigh Life,\u201d starring Robert Pattinson. In this 2018 film, death row inmates are sent on a vague cosmic mission to explore a black hole. Yes, there are kinky explorations of sexuality and body horror, but what Denis drills down is the emptiness found at the precipice of the apocalypse. Even in the furthest reaches of space, humans can be awful, hateful and violent toward one another, but what will get us beyond this eternal aching is mustering the hope and strength to keep going. (Stream on Kanopy and Prime Video)\u201cMelancholia\u201d (2011)\u201cThe sky is falling and I feel fine\u201d would be the simple parable tucked within \u201cMelancholia.\u201d The film, about the approach of the planet Melancholia, which threatens to collide with Earth, is more fully a meditation on mental health. We are told through dialogue that scientists and experts all believe that Melancholia will mark a path that narrowly avoids impact, but conspiracy theorists on the Internet foretell the opposite. Kirsten Dunst perfectly balances the blur of how the personal crisis of depression can feel one-in-the-same with a global-scale crisis. (Stream on Hulu)\u201cWALL-E\u201d (2008)For the pessimists out there, existence can sometimes feel like living in both locales of the \u201cWALL-E\u201d world. In one, you\u2019re in the corporate-owned spaceship created when Earth was left uninhabitable by greed and negligence and living a mostly sedentary life as screens blare in your eyes. In the other, you\u2019re alone and wading through a planet of trash hoarding ephemera and viewing half-remembered nostalgia as a means of comfort. As eerie forecasts from artistic works go, this Pixar movie gets it a little too on the nose. But, of course, even as the children\u2019s movie plainly lays bare the road map to ecological and societal ruin, it provides a tidy solution for those with power: simply care about the impact they\u2019re making and do something about it to prevent the destruction of the world. (Stream on Disney Plus)\u201c2012\u201d (2009)A brilliant, prescient outlook of the future and present can provide nourishment for the soul \u2014 it\u2019s solace that we\u2019re not alone, and that others had a chance to stop and change the wayward trajectory, so we might, too. But doesn\u2019t the future that we live in feel pretty tacky? While crises rage across the world, we have conspiracy theorists asserting real political power, a president grousing about weak-flushing toilets and the endless inane blabber of the endless inane Internet. There\u2019s not a better \u2014 unintentional \u2014 oracle of how society\u2019s hellish response to disaster manifests as incoherent gobbledygook than Roland Emmerich. The director of such films as \u201cIndependence Day\u201d and \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d created his disaster film opus riffing off the supposed Mayan prophecy that the world would end in 2012. There\u2019s rich people hoarding lifesaving arks, earthquakes and volcano explosions galore, and a zany cast of character actors, all in an oddly long runtime of 158 minutes. \u201c2012\u201d \u2014 the fifth highest-grossing film of 2009 \u2014 immerses you in the incoherent mess of what it must be like when the end is actually near. (Stream on DirecTV)Watch more:The Post's Elahe Izadi, a media reporter, and national correspondent Philip Bump share their favorite political TV show and movie and how it's relevant today. (The Washington Post)Read more:SNL tells Halloween horror story warning that Trump could win reelection10 \u2018very nice\u2019 satires to watch if \u2018Borat Subsequent Moviefilm\u2019 left you wanting more\u2018Bad Hair\u2019 and 9 other scary movies where Black characters actually survive until the end We looked at which works best capture the feeling (and predicament) of being alive at the end of the world. When everything seems like it\u2019s falling apart, watch these 6 movies about the actual end of the world",
        "author": "Hau Chu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | When everything seems like it\u2019s falling apart, watch these 6 movies about the actual end of the world (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2827",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/11/02/end-of-the-world-movies/",
        "text": "The world is coming to an end. Possibly. Eventually. People have predicted it forever, but if you look around at the clouding pall of disasters \u2014 viral contagion, environmental ruin, wobbling political infrastructure \u2014 it\u2019s not hard to imagine it might be happening on the sooner side. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo what does it feel like when everything appears to be falling apart? It\u2019s discouraging, disorienting, isolating, jarring and, maybe, also sort of dumb.Films have long tried to capture this sense of life teetering on the brink of total collapse. Now that it\u2019s easy for your brain and eyes to wander into the void, it\u2019s time to see which works best capture the feeling (and predicament) of being alive at the end of the world.\u201cA.I. Artificial Intelligence\u201d (2001)When \u201cA.I.\u201d was released into the world earlier this millennium, viewers were split on what to make of the film inspired by the fairy tale of Pinocchio. The project was conceived by beloved director Stanley Kubrick, who gave it to Steven Spielberg to see through, and starred marquee child actor Haley Joel Osment. Film buffs were too hung up on the split between what they saw as Spielberg\u2019s reliance on crowd-pleasing storybook elements and Kubrick\u2019s original dystopian vision for the film. Nearly two decades later, one can appreciate the masterful threading by Spielberg that shows we can face down an oppressively cold and grim techno-future by recognizing the beauty of core human desires for connection and love. (Stream on Amazon Prime)\u201cChildren of Men\u201d (2006)It\u2019s hard not to see \u201cChildren of Men\u201d as an almost pitch-perfect prophecy of the dystopian present. For 14 years running, director Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s vision of the United Kingdom in 2027 looks as chillingly imminent as ever \u2014 and the fact that P.D. James\u2019s 1992 source novel was set in 2021 may have only made it cannier. There\u2019s the journey of survival in a global catastrophe with an uncertain resolution; a refugee crisis dealt with by extreme measures from the government; and a pervading sense of gloom wafting through the air. Add masterful visual panache to the tightly told story, and you have what is often considered one of the most important films of the 21st century. (Stream on Peacock)\u201cHigh Life\u201d (2018)What if the end times are grotesque? Director Claire Denis proposes such a prognostication with \u201cHigh Life,\u201d starring Robert Pattinson. In this 2018 film, death row inmates are sent on a vague cosmic mission to explore a black hole. Yes, there are kinky explorations of sexuality and body horror, but what Denis drills down is the emptiness found at the precipice of the apocalypse. Even in the furthest reaches of space, humans can be awful, hateful and violent toward one another, but what will get us beyond this eternal aching is mustering the hope and strength to keep going. (Stream on Kanopy and Prime Video)\u201cMelancholia\u201d (2011)\u201cThe sky is falling and I feel fine\u201d would be the simple parable tucked within \u201cMelancholia.\u201d The film, about the approach of the planet Melancholia, which threatens to collide with Earth, is more fully a meditation on mental health. We are told through dialogue that scientists and experts all believe that Melancholia will mark a path that narrowly avoids impact, but conspiracy theorists on the Internet foretell the opposite. Kirsten Dunst perfectly balances the blur of how the personal crisis of depression can feel one-in-the-same with a global-scale crisis. (Stream on Hulu)\u201cWALL-E\u201d (2008)For the pessimists out there, existence can sometimes feel like living in both locales of the \u201cWALL-E\u201d world. In one, you\u2019re in the corporate-owned spaceship created when Earth was left uninhabitable by greed and negligence and living a mostly sedentary life as screens blare in your eyes. In the other, you\u2019re alone and wading through a planet of trash hoarding ephemera and viewing half-remembered nostalgia as a means of comfort. As eerie forecasts from artistic works go, this Pixar movie gets it a little too on the nose. But, of course, even as the children\u2019s movie plainly lays bare the road map to ecological and societal ruin, it provides a tidy solution for those with power: simply care about the impact they\u2019re making and do something about it to prevent the destruction of the world. (Stream on Disney Plus)\u201c2012\u201d (2009)A brilliant, prescient outlook of the future and present can provide nourishment for the soul \u2014 it\u2019s solace that we\u2019re not alone, and that others had a chance to stop and change the wayward trajectory, so we might, too. But doesn\u2019t the future that we live in feel pretty tacky? While crises rage across the world, we have conspiracy theorists asserting real political power, a president grousing about weak-flushing toilets and the endless inane blabber of the endless inane Internet. There\u2019s not a better \u2014 unintentional \u2014 oracle of how society\u2019s hellish response to disaster manifests as incoherent gobbledygook than Roland Emmerich. The director of such films as \u201cIndependence Day\u201d and \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d created his disaster film opus riffing off the supposed Mayan prophecy that the world would end in 2012. There\u2019s rich people hoarding lifesaving arks, earthquakes and volcano explosions galore, and a zany cast of character actors, all in an oddly long runtime of 158 minutes. \u201c2012\u201d \u2014 the fifth highest-grossing film of 2009 \u2014 immerses you in the incoherent mess of what it must be like when the end is actually near. (Stream on DirecTV)Watch more:The Post's Elahe Izadi, a media reporter, and national correspondent Philip Bump share their favorite political TV show and movie and how it's relevant today. (The Washington Post)Read more:SNL tells Halloween horror story warning that Trump could win reelection10 \u2018very nice\u2019 satires to watch if \u2018Borat Subsequent Moviefilm\u2019 left you wanting more\u2018Bad Hair\u2019 and 9 other scary movies where Black characters actually survive until the end We looked at which works best capture the feeling (and predicament) of being alive at the end of the world. When everything seems like it\u2019s falling apart, watch these 6 movies about the actual end of the world",
        "author": "Hau Chu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger\u2019s syndrome during SNL monologue (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2828",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/05/09/elon-musk-hosts-snl/",
        "text": "The stars of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d were well aware that there was plenty of controversy leading up to Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk\u2019s stint as host \u2014 and made sure to address it during the broadcast.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cA space rocket that was spinning out of control just minutes ago crashed into the ocean. And for once, we know it\u2019s not Elon\u2019s fault,\u201d Colin Jost said during \u201cWeekend Update,\u201d referencing the debris from a Chinese space rocket booster that reentered the Earth\u2019s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. \u201cA lot of people have been wondering: Why is he hosting our show? And now we know it\u2019s because he needed an alibi.\u201d Indeed, that was a question ever since the controversial billionaire \u2014 who gained even more notoriety recently by spreading misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and downplaying the risks \u2014 was announced as SNL host. Even several cast members did not seem thrilled about this decision, and a source told Page Six that creator Lorne Michaels would excuse anyone who didn\u2019t want to participate in the episode.SNL announced Elon Musk as a host. The disgust on Twitter may be just what the show is after.Yet even though Musk tried to tease that something controversial might happen (\u201cLet\u2019s find out just how live \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 really is,\u201d he tweeted with a devil emoji), the show proceeded mostly as usual. After a very earnest Mother\u2019s Day opening sketch, in which the cast appeared with their moms as musical guest Miley Cyrus sang a cover of her godmother Dolly Parton\u2019s \u201cLight of a Clear Blue Morning,\u201d Musk arrived for his monologue.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger\u2019s to host SNL,\u201d he said, to much applause from the audience. \u201cOr at least the first to admit it. So I won\u2019t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don\u2019t worry, I\u2019m pretty good at running \u2018human\u2019 in emulation mode.\u201dThis announcement \u2014 which appears to be the first time Musk has publicly said he is on the autism spectrum \u2014 got plenty of pickup online Saturday night. Although many social media users quickly corrected Musk\u2019s assertion that he was the first and pointed out that former SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd, who returned to host in 2003, has spoken out over the years about his Asperger\u2019s diagnosis as a child.Then Musk attempted to explain his tweets, known to have quite an impact on the stock market. \u201cLook, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that\u2019s just how my brain works. To anyone I\u2019ve offended, I just want to say: I reinvented electric cars and I\u2019m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter some jokes about a \u201cshocking\u201d thing he could say on the live broadcast (\u201cI drive a Prius\u201d) and how to pronounce his son\u2019s name (\u201cX \u00c6 A-Xii,\u201d or \u201ccat running across keyboard\u201d), he brought out his mother, Maye Musk, to talk about what he was like as a kid. She confirmed that he created a video game at age 12 in which a spaceship battled aliens.\u201cYou turned that video game about space into reality,\u201d she said.\u201cUnless you consider that our reality may be a video game and we\u2019re all just computer simulations being played by a teenager on another planet,\u201d Musk countered.Musk appeared in nearly every other sketch, playing everyone including Mario universe character Wario; one of many socially awkward attendees at a party post-quarantine; and a guilty priest in a parody of HBO\u2019s latest crime drama, \u201cMare of Easttown.\u201d (This one was called \u201cMurdur Durdur\u201d and described as an \u201cextremely Pennsylvania crime show.\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe also appeared on \u201cWeekend Update\u201d as a financial adviser, and Jost and Michael Che repeatedly demanded to know an explanation for Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency that counts Musk among its biggest fans.\u201cIt\u2019s the future of currency. It\u2019s an unstoppable financial vehicle that\u2019s going to take over the world,\u201d Musk explained.\u201cI get that, but what is it, man?!\u201d Che asked.\u201cI keep telling you, it\u2019s the crypto currency you can trade for conventional money,\u201d Musk explained.\u201cOh, so it\u2019s a hustle?\u201d Che said.\u201cYeah,\u201d Musk said. \u201cIt\u2019s a hustle.\u201dRead more:Some SNL cast members aren\u2019t happy about Elon Musk. He\u2019s part of a long tradition of disliked hosts.Elon Musk is being brought in to save SNL\u2019s sagging ratings. He could sink the show in other ways.Bowen Yang steals SNL playing the iceberg that sank the Titanic Elon Musk, the controversial billionaire Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder, generated plenty of headlines before his appearance on SNL this week. Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger\u2019s syndrome during SNL monologue",
        "author": "Emily Yahr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger\u2019s syndrome during SNL monologue (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2829",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/05/09/elon-musk-hosts-snl/",
        "text": "The stars of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d were well aware that there was plenty of controversy leading up to Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk\u2019s stint as host \u2014 and made sure to address it during the broadcast.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cA space rocket that was spinning out of control just minutes ago crashed into the ocean. And for once, we know it\u2019s not Elon\u2019s fault,\u201d Colin Jost said during \u201cWeekend Update,\u201d referencing the debris from a Chinese space rocket booster that reentered the Earth\u2019s atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. \u201cA lot of people have been wondering: Why is he hosting our show? And now we know it\u2019s because he needed an alibi.\u201d Indeed, that was a question ever since the controversial billionaire \u2014 who gained even more notoriety recently by spreading misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and downplaying the risks \u2014 was announced as SNL host. Even several cast members did not seem thrilled about this decision, and a source told Page Six that creator Lorne Michaels would excuse anyone who didn\u2019t want to participate in the episode.SNL announced Elon Musk as a host. The disgust on Twitter may be just what the show is after.Yet even though Musk tried to tease that something controversial might happen (\u201cLet\u2019s find out just how live \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 really is,\u201d he tweeted with a devil emoji), the show proceeded mostly as usual. After a very earnest Mother\u2019s Day opening sketch, in which the cast appeared with their moms as musical guest Miley Cyrus sang a cover of her godmother Dolly Parton\u2019s \u201cLight of a Clear Blue Morning,\u201d Musk arrived for his monologue.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger\u2019s to host SNL,\u201d he said, to much applause from the audience. \u201cOr at least the first to admit it. So I won\u2019t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don\u2019t worry, I\u2019m pretty good at running \u2018human\u2019 in emulation mode.\u201dThis announcement \u2014 which appears to be the first time Musk has publicly said he is on the autism spectrum \u2014 got plenty of pickup online Saturday night. Although many social media users quickly corrected Musk\u2019s assertion that he was the first and pointed out that former SNL cast member Dan Aykroyd, who returned to host in 2003, has spoken out over the years about his Asperger\u2019s diagnosis as a child.Then Musk attempted to explain his tweets, known to have quite an impact on the stock market. \u201cLook, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that\u2019s just how my brain works. To anyone I\u2019ve offended, I just want to say: I reinvented electric cars and I\u2019m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter some jokes about a \u201cshocking\u201d thing he could say on the live broadcast (\u201cI drive a Prius\u201d) and how to pronounce his son\u2019s name (\u201cX \u00c6 A-Xii,\u201d or \u201ccat running across keyboard\u201d), he brought out his mother, Maye Musk, to talk about what he was like as a kid. She confirmed that he created a video game at age 12 in which a spaceship battled aliens.\u201cYou turned that video game about space into reality,\u201d she said.\u201cUnless you consider that our reality may be a video game and we\u2019re all just computer simulations being played by a teenager on another planet,\u201d Musk countered.Musk appeared in nearly every other sketch, playing everyone including Mario universe character Wario; one of many socially awkward attendees at a party post-quarantine; and a guilty priest in a parody of HBO\u2019s latest crime drama, \u201cMare of Easttown.\u201d (This one was called \u201cMurdur Durdur\u201d and described as an \u201cextremely Pennsylvania crime show.\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe also appeared on \u201cWeekend Update\u201d as a financial adviser, and Jost and Michael Che repeatedly demanded to know an explanation for Dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency that counts Musk among its biggest fans.\u201cIt\u2019s the future of currency. It\u2019s an unstoppable financial vehicle that\u2019s going to take over the world,\u201d Musk explained.\u201cI get that, but what is it, man?!\u201d Che asked.\u201cI keep telling you, it\u2019s the crypto currency you can trade for conventional money,\u201d Musk explained.\u201cOh, so it\u2019s a hustle?\u201d Che said.\u201cYeah,\u201d Musk said. \u201cIt\u2019s a hustle.\u201dRead more:Some SNL cast members aren\u2019t happy about Elon Musk. He\u2019s part of a long tradition of disliked hosts.Elon Musk is being brought in to save SNL\u2019s sagging ratings. He could sink the show in other ways.Bowen Yang steals SNL playing the iceberg that sank the Titanic Elon Musk, the controversial billionaire Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder, generated plenty of headlines before his appearance on SNL this week. Elon Musk reveals he has Asperger\u2019s syndrome during SNL monologue",
        "author": "Emily Yahr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why director Claire Denis knew Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche were right for the provocative \u2018High Life\u2019 (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2830",
        "date": "2019-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/04/15/why-director-claire-denis-knew-robert-pattinson-juliette-binoche-were-right-provocative-high-life/",
        "text": "It would be inadvisable to see \u201cHigh Life\u201d on a day when you also need to be able to think about anything else. Claire Denis\u2019s latest work is that provocative, its exploration of human behavior under duress destined to infiltrate your every moment of solitude in the hours following a viewing. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSolitude itself plays a major role in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d the 72-year-old French director\u2019s first film shot on a set and the rare one whose characters speak in English. They\u2019re convicts who unknowingly traded one sort of death sentence for another, having volunteered to be sent on a space mission to harness energy from a black hole, seemingly in exchange for their freedom. One of the prisoners, Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), takes advantage of their isolation and uses the others as guinea pigs in her attempts to incubate human life on the spaceship. The characters instead meet their demise one by one, until the only humans left are a jaded man named Monte (Robert Pattinson) and a young baby, Willow (Scarlett Lindsey), who was born on the ship.Robert Pattinson\u2019s outer-space drama \u2018High Life\u2019 is fascinating yet frustratingNone of this constitutes a major spoiler, as the bulk of the plot is told through nonlinear flashbacks. In one such scene early on in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d Willow sits in front of a television playing footage of Earth. She cries, seemingly alone until we hear Monte try to calm her down through the spaceship\u2019s loudspeaker. The decision to anchor the film with this particular relationship never changed, according to Denis: \u201cIt is something that you carry for a long time, you know?\u201d she recently said of the idea behind the movie. \u201cI always wanted to do a film like that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWillow serves as a blank slate onto whom the big questions are projected. What does a bond between two people look like when they\u2019re an unshrinkable distance away from all other known forms of sentient life? Who does a young girl become when she is raised by a man given that responsibility by default? Monte struggles to raise a teenage Willow (Jessie Ross), who in turn struggles to understand the feelings of shame and fear that Monte learned on Earth. She doesn\u2019t understand why he refuses to let her lie in bed next to him, or why he hesitates to investigate another spaceship they encounter en route to the black hole.Critics largely agree that Pattinson, who pivoted to indie films after the \u201cTwilight\u201d saga, shines in the artfully shot \u201cHigh Life.\u201d He boomerangs between surly and tender as Monte, whom Denis initially imagined as \u201colder and more defeated by life in the death row.\u201d She wrote the script\u2019s first drafts years ago, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in mind. Pattinson ultimately landed the role after Denis realized he could bring something youthful and \u201cvery pure, like a Knight of the Round Table.\u201d\u201cI wanted that in the end, very much so,\u201d Denis said. \u201cHe is a great actor. I was completely mesmerized by his intelligence and his talent.\u201dBinoche wasn\u2019t the director\u2019s first choice, either. Patricia Arquette was initially cast as Dibs but scheduling conflicts led her to drop out of the project. Denis had just wrapped the romantic comedy \u201cLet the Sunshine In,\u201d starring Binoche as a divorced painter, and felt the French actress would fit well into a \u201cfemme fatale in space\u201d movie. (\u201cThe femme fatale being the baby, of course,\u201d Denis joked.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s difficult to imagine \u201cHigh Life\u201d producing the same intoxicating effect on audiences without Pattinson and Binoche in the lead roles. They previously starred together in David Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cCosmopolis,\u201d and their electric chemistry supports the suppressed eroticism present throughout Denis\u2019s film. Binoche\u2019s intense standout scene takes place in a crudely named area of the spaceship reserved for self-pleasure. Monte, the sole prisoner who remains celibate, never uses that part of the ship and continually refuses Dibs\u2019s advances, which eventually turn violent.American audiences might fixate on the vast amount of sexual activity in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d not all of which is consensual. The harrowing depictions of assault are designed to startle. Denis, who frequently explores transgressions and their aftermath in her work, is not one to shy away from the taboo, a word we witness Monte teaching baby Willow. Peace can only be found in the spaceship\u2019s dewy garden, where the wisest prisoner in the group, Tcherny (Andr\u00e9 \u201c3000\u201d Benjamin, whom Denis handpicked because of her love of OutKast), spends the bulk of his time.The film\u2019s opening scene takes place in this garden, which, without context, seems as though it could be on Earth. Denis and her co-writers, Jean-Pol Fargeau and Geoff Cox, purposefully kept \u201cHigh Life\u201d rooted in what they knew to be real. The physical challenges that generally arise with films set in space are nowhere to be found because, even with its mesmerizing depictions of space \u2014 including a black hole that looks remarkably similar to the real thing, thanks to cosmic consultant Aur\u00e9lien Barrau \u2014 this isn\u2019t what Denis would consider to be a sci-fi film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA sci-fi movie, it\u2019s a sort of structure that creates other planets, other beings, things like that,\u201d she said. \u201cI was more interested in what we know.\u201dAnd what we know is that prolonged isolation can influence humans to behave as they normally wouldn\u2019t. The prisoners increasingly disregard the societal rules that once governed their behavior as they stray farther from Earth, outwardly expressing their feelings of fear and futility. Feelings that, as we come to realize, could also lurk in the darkest corners of our own minds.Read more:Sorry, your favorite \u2018space\u2019 movie is not actually a space movie The film examines human behavior through the perspective of death row prisoners in space. Why director Claire Denis knew Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche were right for the provocative \u2018High Life\u2019",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why director Claire Denis knew Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche were right for the provocative \u2018High Life\u2019 (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2831",
        "date": "2019-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/04/15/why-director-claire-denis-knew-robert-pattinson-juliette-binoche-were-right-provocative-high-life/",
        "text": "It would be inadvisable to see \u201cHigh Life\u201d on a day when you also need to be able to think about anything else. Claire Denis\u2019s latest work is that provocative, its exploration of human behavior under duress destined to infiltrate your every moment of solitude in the hours following a viewing. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSolitude itself plays a major role in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d the 72-year-old French director\u2019s first film shot on a set and the rare one whose characters speak in English. They\u2019re convicts who unknowingly traded one sort of death sentence for another, having volunteered to be sent on a space mission to harness energy from a black hole, seemingly in exchange for their freedom. One of the prisoners, Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), takes advantage of their isolation and uses the others as guinea pigs in her attempts to incubate human life on the spaceship. The characters instead meet their demise one by one, until the only humans left are a jaded man named Monte (Robert Pattinson) and a young baby, Willow (Scarlett Lindsey), who was born on the ship.Robert Pattinson\u2019s outer-space drama \u2018High Life\u2019 is fascinating yet frustratingNone of this constitutes a major spoiler, as the bulk of the plot is told through nonlinear flashbacks. In one such scene early on in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d Willow sits in front of a television playing footage of Earth. She cries, seemingly alone until we hear Monte try to calm her down through the spaceship\u2019s loudspeaker. The decision to anchor the film with this particular relationship never changed, according to Denis: \u201cIt is something that you carry for a long time, you know?\u201d she recently said of the idea behind the movie. \u201cI always wanted to do a film like that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWillow serves as a blank slate onto whom the big questions are projected. What does a bond between two people look like when they\u2019re an unshrinkable distance away from all other known forms of sentient life? Who does a young girl become when she is raised by a man given that responsibility by default? Monte struggles to raise a teenage Willow (Jessie Ross), who in turn struggles to understand the feelings of shame and fear that Monte learned on Earth. She doesn\u2019t understand why he refuses to let her lie in bed next to him, or why he hesitates to investigate another spaceship they encounter en route to the black hole.Critics largely agree that Pattinson, who pivoted to indie films after the \u201cTwilight\u201d saga, shines in the artfully shot \u201cHigh Life.\u201d He boomerangs between surly and tender as Monte, whom Denis initially imagined as \u201colder and more defeated by life in the death row.\u201d She wrote the script\u2019s first drafts years ago, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in mind. Pattinson ultimately landed the role after Denis realized he could bring something youthful and \u201cvery pure, like a Knight of the Round Table.\u201d\u201cI wanted that in the end, very much so,\u201d Denis said. \u201cHe is a great actor. I was completely mesmerized by his intelligence and his talent.\u201dBinoche wasn\u2019t the director\u2019s first choice, either. Patricia Arquette was initially cast as Dibs but scheduling conflicts led her to drop out of the project. Denis had just wrapped the romantic comedy \u201cLet the Sunshine In,\u201d starring Binoche as a divorced painter, and felt the French actress would fit well into a \u201cfemme fatale in space\u201d movie. (\u201cThe femme fatale being the baby, of course,\u201d Denis joked.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s difficult to imagine \u201cHigh Life\u201d producing the same intoxicating effect on audiences without Pattinson and Binoche in the lead roles. They previously starred together in David Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cCosmopolis,\u201d and their electric chemistry supports the suppressed eroticism present throughout Denis\u2019s film. Binoche\u2019s intense standout scene takes place in a crudely named area of the spaceship reserved for self-pleasure. Monte, the sole prisoner who remains celibate, never uses that part of the ship and continually refuses Dibs\u2019s advances, which eventually turn violent.American audiences might fixate on the vast amount of sexual activity in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d not all of which is consensual. The harrowing depictions of assault are designed to startle. Denis, who frequently explores transgressions and their aftermath in her work, is not one to shy away from the taboo, a word we witness Monte teaching baby Willow. Peace can only be found in the spaceship\u2019s dewy garden, where the wisest prisoner in the group, Tcherny (Andr\u00e9 \u201c3000\u201d Benjamin, whom Denis handpicked because of her love of OutKast), spends the bulk of his time.The film\u2019s opening scene takes place in this garden, which, without context, seems as though it could be on Earth. Denis and her co-writers, Jean-Pol Fargeau and Geoff Cox, purposefully kept \u201cHigh Life\u201d rooted in what they knew to be real. The physical challenges that generally arise with films set in space are nowhere to be found because, even with its mesmerizing depictions of space \u2014 including a black hole that looks remarkably similar to the real thing, thanks to cosmic consultant Aur\u00e9lien Barrau \u2014 this isn\u2019t what Denis would consider to be a sci-fi film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA sci-fi movie, it\u2019s a sort of structure that creates other planets, other beings, things like that,\u201d she said. \u201cI was more interested in what we know.\u201dAnd what we know is that prolonged isolation can influence humans to behave as they normally wouldn\u2019t. The prisoners increasingly disregard the societal rules that once governed their behavior as they stray farther from Earth, outwardly expressing their feelings of fear and futility. Feelings that, as we come to realize, could also lurk in the darkest corners of our own minds.Read more:Sorry, your favorite \u2018space\u2019 movie is not actually a space movie The film examines human behavior through the perspective of death row prisoners in space. Why director Claire Denis knew Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche were right for the provocative \u2018High Life\u2019",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why director Claire Denis knew Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche were right for the provocative \u2018High Life\u2019 (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2832",
        "date": "2019-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/04/15/why-director-claire-denis-knew-robert-pattinson-juliette-binoche-were-right-provocative-high-life/",
        "text": "It would be inadvisable to see \u201cHigh Life\u201d on a day when you also need to be able to think about anything else. Claire Denis\u2019s latest work is that provocative, its exploration of human behavior under duress destined to infiltrate your every moment of solitude in the hours following a viewing. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSolitude itself plays a major role in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d the 72-year-old French director\u2019s first film shot on a set and the rare one whose characters speak in English. They\u2019re convicts who unknowingly traded one sort of death sentence for another, having volunteered to be sent on a space mission to harness energy from a black hole, seemingly in exchange for their freedom. One of the prisoners, Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), takes advantage of their isolation and uses the others as guinea pigs in her attempts to incubate human life on the spaceship. The characters instead meet their demise one by one, until the only humans left are a jaded man named Monte (Robert Pattinson) and a young baby, Willow (Scarlett Lindsey), who was born on the ship.Robert Pattinson\u2019s outer-space drama \u2018High Life\u2019 is fascinating yet frustratingNone of this constitutes a major spoiler, as the bulk of the plot is told through nonlinear flashbacks. In one such scene early on in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d Willow sits in front of a television playing footage of Earth. She cries, seemingly alone until we hear Monte try to calm her down through the spaceship\u2019s loudspeaker. The decision to anchor the film with this particular relationship never changed, according to Denis: \u201cIt is something that you carry for a long time, you know?\u201d she recently said of the idea behind the movie. \u201cI always wanted to do a film like that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWillow serves as a blank slate onto whom the big questions are projected. What does a bond between two people look like when they\u2019re an unshrinkable distance away from all other known forms of sentient life? Who does a young girl become when she is raised by a man given that responsibility by default? Monte struggles to raise a teenage Willow (Jessie Ross), who in turn struggles to understand the feelings of shame and fear that Monte learned on Earth. She doesn\u2019t understand why he refuses to let her lie in bed next to him, or why he hesitates to investigate another spaceship they encounter en route to the black hole.Critics largely agree that Pattinson, who pivoted to indie films after the \u201cTwilight\u201d saga, shines in the artfully shot \u201cHigh Life.\u201d He boomerangs between surly and tender as Monte, whom Denis initially imagined as \u201colder and more defeated by life in the death row.\u201d She wrote the script\u2019s first drafts years ago, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in mind. Pattinson ultimately landed the role after Denis realized he could bring something youthful and \u201cvery pure, like a Knight of the Round Table.\u201d\u201cI wanted that in the end, very much so,\u201d Denis said. \u201cHe is a great actor. I was completely mesmerized by his intelligence and his talent.\u201dBinoche wasn\u2019t the director\u2019s first choice, either. Patricia Arquette was initially cast as Dibs but scheduling conflicts led her to drop out of the project. Denis had just wrapped the romantic comedy \u201cLet the Sunshine In,\u201d starring Binoche as a divorced painter, and felt the French actress would fit well into a \u201cfemme fatale in space\u201d movie. (\u201cThe femme fatale being the baby, of course,\u201d Denis joked.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s difficult to imagine \u201cHigh Life\u201d producing the same intoxicating effect on audiences without Pattinson and Binoche in the lead roles. They previously starred together in David Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cCosmopolis,\u201d and their electric chemistry supports the suppressed eroticism present throughout Denis\u2019s film. Binoche\u2019s intense standout scene takes place in a crudely named area of the spaceship reserved for self-pleasure. Monte, the sole prisoner who remains celibate, never uses that part of the ship and continually refuses Dibs\u2019s advances, which eventually turn violent.American audiences might fixate on the vast amount of sexual activity in \u201cHigh Life,\u201d not all of which is consensual. The harrowing depictions of assault are designed to startle. Denis, who frequently explores transgressions and their aftermath in her work, is not one to shy away from the taboo, a word we witness Monte teaching baby Willow. Peace can only be found in the spaceship\u2019s dewy garden, where the wisest prisoner in the group, Tcherny (Andr\u00e9 \u201c3000\u201d Benjamin, whom Denis handpicked because of her love of OutKast), spends the bulk of his time.The film\u2019s opening scene takes place in this garden, which, without context, seems as though it could be on Earth. Denis and her co-writers, Jean-Pol Fargeau and Geoff Cox, purposefully kept \u201cHigh Life\u201d rooted in what they knew to be real. The physical challenges that generally arise with films set in space are nowhere to be found because, even with its mesmerizing depictions of space \u2014 including a black hole that looks remarkably similar to the real thing, thanks to cosmic consultant Aur\u00e9lien Barrau \u2014 this isn\u2019t what Denis would consider to be a sci-fi film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA sci-fi movie, it\u2019s a sort of structure that creates other planets, other beings, things like that,\u201d she said. \u201cI was more interested in what we know.\u201dAnd what we know is that prolonged isolation can influence humans to behave as they normally wouldn\u2019t. The prisoners increasingly disregard the societal rules that once governed their behavior as they stray farther from Earth, outwardly expressing their feelings of fear and futility. Feelings that, as we come to realize, could also lurk in the darkest corners of our own minds.Read more:Sorry, your favorite \u2018space\u2019 movie is not actually a space movie The film examines human behavior through the perspective of death row prisoners in space. Why director Claire Denis knew Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche were right for the provocative \u2018High Life\u2019",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Disney spent the day reminding us of the truly bizarre films it made in the \u201970s and \u201980s (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2833",
        "date": "2019-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/10/14/disney-spent-day-reminding-us-truly-bizarre-films-it-made-s-early-s/",
        "text": "Disney decided to mine our collective nostalgia to hype its new streaming service Disney+ Monday by tweeting out images of nearly everything it has ever made \u2014 except, of course, \u201cSong of the South\u201d \u2014 in one giant thread that sprawled over several hours.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe marketing ploy seemed intended to generate buzz around its library, which, thanks to various mergers and partnerships, now includes the Marvel Cinematic Universe, National Geographic specials, the Star Wars franchise and Disney Channel original movies. But it also reminded us all of the incredibly strange stretch of movies Disney made from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, when it tried transitioning from corny children\u2019s fare to edgier pictures \u2014 often to hilariously disastrous results. It. Is. Time. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to The Mandalorian, check out basically everything coming to #DisneyPlus in the U.S. on November 12.Pre-order in the U.S. at https://t.co/wJig4STf4P today: https://t.co/tlWvp23gLF pic.twitter.com/0q3PTuaDWT\u2014 Disney+ (@disneyplus) October 14, 2019\n\nDisney has faced a few bumps in the road en route to becoming the behemoth it is today. At the beginning of 1941, after \u201cPinocchio\u201d and \u201cFantasia\u201d flopped (only to be revived years later), the company was $3 million in debt. A cartoonist strike later that year certainly didn\u2019t help matters. To remain afloat, the company produced and distributed U.S. propaganda, funded by the government, before finally recovering with 1950\u2032s \u201cCinderella.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor about two more decades, the company continued making children movies like these, but it hit a wall in the 1970s.The company spent the early part of the decade pumping out animal-based fare like \u201cThe Barefoot Executive\u201d (about Kurt Russell and his chimpanzee, who can predict which television shows will be hits), \u201cMillion Dollar Duck\u201d (which is about a family with a duck who lays golden eggs), \u201cJustin Morgan Had a Horse\u201d (about one of the first breeds of horse developed in America and the owner, a guy named Justin), \u201cThe Biscuit Eater\u201d (about two young dudes and their dog, who is frustratingly named Moreover) and \u201cThe Bears and I\u201d (about a Vietnam vet and three bears living on an island). There\u2019s clearly some nostalgia for these, as a DVD copy of that last one is going for $229.95 on Amazon, even though as Disney made clear today, it will also be included on Disney+.For the most part, these movies were not good. In fact, most of these movies were very, very bad. \u201cMillion Dollar Duck\u201d was reportedly one of three movies critic Gene Siskel ever walked out on. His partner-in-criticism Roger Ebert wrote this incredible paragraph about it:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWalt Disney\u2019s \u2018$1,000,000 Duck\u2019 is one of the most profoundly stupid movies I\u2019ve ever seen. It is a movie about a duck that gets an overdose of radiation and starts laying golden eggs. It is also about the people who won the duck, and about how greed and avarice appear in their lives, and about the lesson in love and understanding that the father gets when his son runs away with the duck and becomes trapped on a ladder between the ledges of two tall buildings, and about how the father gets a fair trial from the American judiciary system.\u201dMore importantly to Disney, these movies failed to rake in as much money as its animated films during this period, such as \u201cRobin Hood\u201d and \u201cThe Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.\u201d At the same time, special-effects-laden thrillers like \u201cJaws\u201d and \u201cStar Wars\u201d were dominating the box office. So Disney decided to break bad and follow the trend by turning its attention to the decidedly un-Disney genres of horror and science fiction.The most notable of these films was \u201cThe Black Hole,\u201d the most expensive movie Disney had made up until that point, costing $20 million. It was also the company\u2019s first to earn a then-scandalous PG rating. The space opera, which centers on a spaceship encountering a black hole, was meant to be Disney\u2019s version of \u201cStar Wars,\u201d a property it would later acquire.Critics didn\u2019t like it. Ebert wrote that it \u201ctakes us all the way to the rim of space only to bog us down in a talky melodrama whipped up out of mad scientists and haunted houses.\u201d Cultural critic Jason Heller, who saw the film in theaters when he was 7 years old and expected a more kid-friendly \u201cStar Wars,\u201d wrote years later: \u201cWhat I got instead was a slow-paced, sporadically disorienting film that ends with the human villain merging with the robot villain. After that, this hybrid man-bot is consigned \u2014 with no ambiguity whatsoever \u2014 to the fire and brimstone of the biblical underworld. Hell. Literally.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, it did well enough, earning $36 million at the box office in addition to revenue from merchandise, as well as Oscars nods for cinematography and special effects.And it\u2019s certainly stuck with some people. Neil deGrasse Tyson railed against the movie to TMZ for nearly two minutes in 2014, calling it \u201cembarrassing\u201d and \u201cone of the worst movies ever.\u201d \u201cThey not only got none of the physics right about falling into a black hole. Had they gotten it right, it would have been a vastly more interesting movie. Somebody must have decided \u2018I know better than the scientists.\u2019\u201dSo the company continued down that road, making movies like \u201cDragonslayer,\u201d \u201cTron,\u201d \u201cSomething Wicked This Way Comes\u201d and \u201cThe Watcher in the Woods,\u201d a straight-up ghost story that, according to Nerdist, was accompanied by a warning to parents to \u201cpre-screen the picture for pre-teens. It is not for small children!\u201dDisney knew it had to make adult-themed fare to compete, but it also knew that the Disney brand was an issue. As Richard Berger, the then-president of the company\u2019s film division, told the New York Times in 1984: \u201cAudiences don\u2019t know who made \u2018Star Wars\u2019 or \u2018Raiders of the Lost Ark.\u2019 They do know who made \u2018TRON\u2019 and \u2018The Apple Dumpling Gang.\u2019 If you put Disney\u2019s name on top of \u2018Emmanuelle,\u2019 and had 'X'-rated at the bottom, people would say, \u2018We can bring our children.\u2019 ''AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo distance the hallowed brand name from these newer films, Disney created Touchstone Pictures. That\u2019s the main reason that when we think of Disney today, we generally remember the animated classics and hokey live-action kid flicks.These days, of course, Disney seems to own just about everything. And as the company made clear with its massive Twitter thread, nearly all of these things will be on its streaming service. It\u2019s been four decades, but finally \u201cBlack Hole\u201d and \u201cBambi\u201d will once again live side by side in perfect harmony. From animal-based movies to straight-up horror, Disney had a weird run there. Disney spent the day reminding us of the truly bizarre films it made in the \u201970s and \u201980s",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Everyone on TV just wants to be launched into space (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2834",
        "date": "2020-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/11/06/moonbase-8-space-tv-shows/",
        "text": "With everything burning on Earth, literally and figuratively, Hollywood has turned to space. This isn\u2019t by any means a new fascination, as any frequent consumer of Ben Affleck\u2019s cheeky \u201cArmageddon\u201d DVD commentary will tell you. (Just us? Cool.) Remember how enraptured we were by the ingenuity with which Matt Damon grew potatoes on Mars? Remember Matthew McConaughey and the bookshelf tesseract thing? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOf course, space movies are complicated and a separate entity from space television, now created by folks who appear to have taken the lull in time between those famous space movies as some sort of challenge to produce content. When Showtime\u2019s \u201cMoonbase 8\u201d premieres Sunday, it\u2019ll be at least the fifth television series about astronauts to premiere this year. (That\u2019s not even counting other space-based shows such as HBO Max\u2019s \u201cRaised by Wolves.\u201d)\u201cMoonbase 8\u201d features Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker and John C. Reilly as incompetent astronauts training for their first lunar mission at a NASA camp in the Arizona desert. The Showtime series is framed as a workplace comedy, with Michael \u201cSkip\u201d Henai (Armisen), Scott \u201cRook\u201d Sloan (Heidecker) and Robert \u201cCap\u201d Caputo (Reilly) having been stationed together in isolation for months. The humor is dry and subtle, much of its success hinged upon your feelings toward Armisen (who seems to be given more to do than Reilly).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe six episodes will be released weekly, meaning you might experience intermittent cravings for more space content that even a random influx of moon news can\u2019t satiate. Not to worry! Remember all those other recent shows we mentioned? They\u2019re available to stream online. Here\u2019s a closer look at each one.\u201cSpace Force\u201dSteve Carell co-created this series about the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces with Greg Daniels, his boss from \u201cThe Office.\u201d Joining Carell\u2019s General Mark R. Naird on-screen are Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich), the Space Force\u2019s chief scientist, and F. Tony Scarapiducci (Ben Schwartz), the social media director, among other characters played by Fred Willard and Lisa Kudrow. The show should\u2019ve done gangbusters, right?Story continues below advertisementBut \u201cSpace Force\u201d didn\u2019t quite hit the mark, with critics referring to it as \u201ca massive misfire\u201d and \u201castonishingly bad.\u201d It\u2019s on this list, however, because of one Mr. Malkovich and his \u201cheroic efforts,\u201d as The Washington Post\u2019s Hank Stuever wrote. \u201cThis is something of a revelation to those of us who run rather hot or cold on Malkovich; until the covid-19 shutdown, I was still considering forming a support group of viewers agonized by his work in HBO\u2019s \u2018The New Pope,\u2019 \u201d Stuever continued. \u201cForget all that. Here, he\u2019s the real hero.\u201d (Streams on Netflix) Advertisement\u201cAvenue 5\u201d\u201cAvenue 5\u2033 is already the second show on this list to arrive from an acclaimed creator: Armando Iannucci, best known for the evergreen political satire \u201cVeep.\u201d His second series for HBO takes on a similar tone, lampooning corporate culture and bureaucracies through the lens of an interplanetary cruise ship that, after accidentally veering off course, has a three-year journey back to Earth but only eight weeks\u2019 worth of supplies.Story continues below advertisementHugh Laurie plays Ryan Clark, a British actor hired to pose as the Avenue 5\u2032s captain \u2014 the ship is actually helmed by an engineer who dies in the pilot \u2014 and is accompanied by Josh Gad portraying the ship\u2019s billionaire owner, Herman Judd. Zach Woods and Suzy Nakamura round out the cast as other Avenue 5 employees, all of whom bumble around while attempting to maintain order onboard. In February, HBO renewed the wacky series for a second season. (Streams on HBO Max) \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201dLoosely based on Tom Wolfe\u2019s 1979 book of the same name, \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d takes viewers back to the early days of the space program and follows seven test pilots who will eventually become the first American astronauts. The series streams on Disney Plus, signaling a much tamer telling of the story than Philip Kaufman\u2019s 1983 feature adaptation (and, per Stuever, a more fictionalized version, too).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong the show\u2019s leads are Jake McDorman (as Alan Shepard), Patrick J. Adams (as John Glenn) and Aaron Staton (as Wally Schirra) \u2014 a trio making this one of those \u201chey, I remember that guy!\u201d kind of shows, depending on your consumption of \u201cGreek,\u201d \u201cSuits\u201d and \u201cMad Men,\u201d respectively. Have fun, kids. (Streams on Disney Plus) \u201cAway\u201dA disclaimer to those who get easily invested in television: \u201cAway\u201d was recently canceled by Netflix, meaning the single season available to stream will also be its last. But the show might still be worth a watch for fans of the \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d and \u201cParenthood\u201d brand of familial emotional turmoil, as Jason Katims, a creative force behind those two series, also served as an executive producer on the newest one.Story continues below advertisementCreated by Andrew Hinderaker, \u201cAway\u201d stars Hilary Swank as former Navy pilot Emma Green, who is tasked with commanding a three-year space mission launching from the moon. As one might expect of a Katims show, it is less concerned with the physical obstacles involved and more so with Emma\u2019s emotional ties to Earth \u2014 namely, her husband, Matt (Josh Charles), a former astronaut stuck on Earth thanks to a medical condition, and their teenage daughter, Alexis (Talitha Bateman), a high school freshman. (Streams on Netflix) Read more:Sorry, your favorite \u2018space\u2019 movie is not actually a space movieIs TV getting us emotionally prepared to leave the planet? \u2018Away\u2019 and \u2018Raised by Wolves\u2019 make it seem so.Steve Carell\u2019s \u2018Space Force\u2019 has a troubled launch, even with heroic efforts from John Malkovich Showtime's \"Moonbase 8,\" premiering Sunday, joins \"Space Force\" and \"Avenue 5\" in being one of many space TV shows to come out this year. Everyone on TV just wants to be launched into space",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Everyone on TV just wants to be launched into space (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2835",
        "date": "2020-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/11/06/moonbase-8-space-tv-shows/",
        "text": "With everything burning on Earth, literally and figuratively, Hollywood has turned to space. This isn\u2019t by any means a new fascination, as any frequent consumer of Ben Affleck\u2019s cheeky \u201cArmageddon\u201d DVD commentary will tell you. (Just us? Cool.) Remember how enraptured we were by the ingenuity with which Matt Damon grew potatoes on Mars? Remember Matthew McConaughey and the bookshelf tesseract thing? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOf course, space movies are complicated and a separate entity from space television, now created by folks who appear to have taken the lull in time between those famous space movies as some sort of challenge to produce content. When Showtime\u2019s \u201cMoonbase 8\u201d premieres Sunday, it\u2019ll be at least the fifth television series about astronauts to premiere this year. (That\u2019s not even counting other space-based shows such as HBO Max\u2019s \u201cRaised by Wolves.\u201d)\u201cMoonbase 8\u201d features Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker and John C. Reilly as incompetent astronauts training for their first lunar mission at a NASA camp in the Arizona desert. The Showtime series is framed as a workplace comedy, with Michael \u201cSkip\u201d Henai (Armisen), Scott \u201cRook\u201d Sloan (Heidecker) and Robert \u201cCap\u201d Caputo (Reilly) having been stationed together in isolation for months. The humor is dry and subtle, much of its success hinged upon your feelings toward Armisen (who seems to be given more to do than Reilly).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe six episodes will be released weekly, meaning you might experience intermittent cravings for more space content that even a random influx of moon news can\u2019t satiate. Not to worry! Remember all those other recent shows we mentioned? They\u2019re available to stream online. Here\u2019s a closer look at each one.\u201cSpace Force\u201dSteve Carell co-created this series about the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces with Greg Daniels, his boss from \u201cThe Office.\u201d Joining Carell\u2019s General Mark R. Naird on-screen are Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich), the Space Force\u2019s chief scientist, and F. Tony Scarapiducci (Ben Schwartz), the social media director, among other characters played by Fred Willard and Lisa Kudrow. The show should\u2019ve done gangbusters, right?Story continues below advertisementBut \u201cSpace Force\u201d didn\u2019t quite hit the mark, with critics referring to it as \u201ca massive misfire\u201d and \u201castonishingly bad.\u201d It\u2019s on this list, however, because of one Mr. Malkovich and his \u201cheroic efforts,\u201d as The Washington Post\u2019s Hank Stuever wrote. \u201cThis is something of a revelation to those of us who run rather hot or cold on Malkovich; until the covid-19 shutdown, I was still considering forming a support group of viewers agonized by his work in HBO\u2019s \u2018The New Pope,\u2019 \u201d Stuever continued. \u201cForget all that. Here, he\u2019s the real hero.\u201d (Streams on Netflix) Advertisement\u201cAvenue 5\u201d\u201cAvenue 5\u2033 is already the second show on this list to arrive from an acclaimed creator: Armando Iannucci, best known for the evergreen political satire \u201cVeep.\u201d His second series for HBO takes on a similar tone, lampooning corporate culture and bureaucracies through the lens of an interplanetary cruise ship that, after accidentally veering off course, has a three-year journey back to Earth but only eight weeks\u2019 worth of supplies.Story continues below advertisementHugh Laurie plays Ryan Clark, a British actor hired to pose as the Avenue 5\u2032s captain \u2014 the ship is actually helmed by an engineer who dies in the pilot \u2014 and is accompanied by Josh Gad portraying the ship\u2019s billionaire owner, Herman Judd. Zach Woods and Suzy Nakamura round out the cast as other Avenue 5 employees, all of whom bumble around while attempting to maintain order onboard. In February, HBO renewed the wacky series for a second season. (Streams on HBO Max) \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201dLoosely based on Tom Wolfe\u2019s 1979 book of the same name, \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d takes viewers back to the early days of the space program and follows seven test pilots who will eventually become the first American astronauts. The series streams on Disney Plus, signaling a much tamer telling of the story than Philip Kaufman\u2019s 1983 feature adaptation (and, per Stuever, a more fictionalized version, too).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong the show\u2019s leads are Jake McDorman (as Alan Shepard), Patrick J. Adams (as John Glenn) and Aaron Staton (as Wally Schirra) \u2014 a trio making this one of those \u201chey, I remember that guy!\u201d kind of shows, depending on your consumption of \u201cGreek,\u201d \u201cSuits\u201d and \u201cMad Men,\u201d respectively. Have fun, kids. (Streams on Disney Plus) \u201cAway\u201dA disclaimer to those who get easily invested in television: \u201cAway\u201d was recently canceled by Netflix, meaning the single season available to stream will also be its last. But the show might still be worth a watch for fans of the \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d and \u201cParenthood\u201d brand of familial emotional turmoil, as Jason Katims, a creative force behind those two series, also served as an executive producer on the newest one.Story continues below advertisementCreated by Andrew Hinderaker, \u201cAway\u201d stars Hilary Swank as former Navy pilot Emma Green, who is tasked with commanding a three-year space mission launching from the moon. As one might expect of a Katims show, it is less concerned with the physical obstacles involved and more so with Emma\u2019s emotional ties to Earth \u2014 namely, her husband, Matt (Josh Charles), a former astronaut stuck on Earth thanks to a medical condition, and their teenage daughter, Alexis (Talitha Bateman), a high school freshman. (Streams on Netflix) Read more:Sorry, your favorite \u2018space\u2019 movie is not actually a space movieIs TV getting us emotionally prepared to leave the planet? \u2018Away\u2019 and \u2018Raised by Wolves\u2019 make it seem so.Steve Carell\u2019s \u2018Space Force\u2019 has a troubled launch, even with heroic efforts from John Malkovich Showtime's \"Moonbase 8,\" premiering Sunday, joins \"Space Force\" and \"Avenue 5\" in being one of many space TV shows to come out this year. Everyone on TV just wants to be launched into space",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The 5 worst Super Bowl commercials, from Dolly Parton\u2019s betrayal to that awkward Oatly jingle (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2836",
        "date": "2021-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/02/08/worst-super-bowl-ads/",
        "text": "We\u2019re grading on a curve this year, because what is the right tone to strike during a Super Bowl held in the midst of a pandemic? Most successful efforts went the usual route \u2014 being funny, some thanks to celebrities and other clever concepts \u2014 while the lesser ads accidentally played the wrong notes. Dolly Parton advocating for overworking yourself in a time when people barely have the energy to take care of themselves? Lenny Kravitz telling us we\u2019re all billionaires, not literally \u2014 in this economy?! \u2014 but because of our 2.5 billion heartbeats? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightYikes.Here are the Super Bowl commercials that could\u2019ve used another go.The 8 best Super Bowl commercials, from an \u2018Edward Scissorhands\u2019 sequel to Michael B. Jordan\u2019s AlexaSquarespaceSquarespace flipped Dolly Parton\u2019s iconic 1980 song, \u201c9 to 5,\u201d to \u201c5 to 9\u201d in the website hosting company's Super Bowl 2021 commercial. (Squarespace)Usually, Dolly Parton can do no wrong. And this commercial seemed like it would have all the winning elements: upbeat choreography by the team behind the film \u201cLa La Land,\u201d a drab office that becomes magically awash in cheery colors, a cover of a great song and a winking cameo from Dolly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s the message of this commercial that falls flat: that people should be working their 9 to 5, and then working a second shift on their side hustles from 5 to 9. \u201cGonna change your life, do something that gives it meaning!\u201d sings Dolly, in her updated lyrics. But for many people this year, side hustles aren\u2019t the topiary-sculpting/cake-baking/furniture-building passion projects the commercial depicts. Those are the types of businesses that have been struggling during the coronavirus pandemic \u2014 and side hustles tend to be uncreative, app-based gig work that\u2019s even bleaker than the day job this commercial depicts. Besides, that job probably has health insurance! Kind of important right now! Anyway, there\u2019s also something craven about encouraging people to work harder and longer hours during a freakin\u2019 pandemic. We\u2019re all exhausted, Dolly!Stella ArtoisMusician Lenny Kravitz stars in an ad that tells viewers, \u201cYou\u2019re rich in life when you\u2019re a heartbeat billionaire.\u201d (Stella Artois)In a commercial for Stella Artois, Lenny Kravitz tells us we\u2019re all born with 2.5 billion heartbeats. \u201cThat makes you a billionaire,\u201d the musician says. Our bank accounts beg to differ. Yes, the message of the commercial was that our lives are all rich in experiences, but there\u2019s something awfully tone-deaf and insensitive about that \u201cbillionaire\u201d framing amid an economic crisis.Shift4ShopThere have been many times this year when we, like many people, wished we could leave this cursed planet behind. So it was a surprise to see that Shift4Shop \u2014 a platform for building e-commerce stores \u2014 was planning to help people make that dream come true. In its Super Bowl commercial, the company launched a contest to send normal people to space. Ha-ha, what could possibly go wrong? The commercial is scant on details, so when we went to the website, we learned that you have to (1) launch an e-commerce business using their platform, then (2) make a video about why the normal people want to go to space, and (3) be judged by a panel of celebrities (undoubtedly the consummate authorities on who is fit for a mission to space). But our question remains: How can a commercial about going to space \u2014 literally, outer space! For normals! \u2014 be so boring?FordFord hopped on a major theme of the night: honoring essential workers and, in some cases, encouraging everyone to keep fighting. It\u2019s a commendable idea, but the company tacked on some convoluted messaging \u2014 asking viewers to \u201chold the line\u201d and \u201csacrifice for it\u201d \u2014 and ironically ended on a hashtag reading #FinishStrong. But finish what, the pandemic? What exactly does the line have to do with finishing strong? And, for that matter, what does Ford?If Bruce Springsteen\u2019s Jeep commercial doesn\u2019t bum you out, congrats on the purchase of your new JeepOatlyOatly CEO Toni Petersson sings about the oat milk company during the Feb. 7 Super Bowl commercial. (The Original Oatly)Every year, there\u2019s a Super Bowl commercial that appears to be extremely low-budget, as if the company had enough money to purchase the airtime, but little else. No choreography, music licensing, famous actors \u2014 possibly even no director. This year\u2019s jankiest ad came from Oatly, a company that is very good at making oat milk and very bad at making commercials. It starred the company\u2019s CEO, standing in a field and singing a jingle he wrote. The refrain: \u201cWow, no cow.\u201d Uncomfortably awkward \u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d vibes abound.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the weird, low-budget terribleness seems to have been a deliberate strategy. After the ad aired, Oatly was already selling shirts that say \u201cI Totally Hated That Oatly Commercial,\u201d evidence that the company was trying to make it on a list just like this one. As much as we hate to give them what they want (more attention), they earned it.Read more:Review: At the weirdest Super Bowl, the Weeknd came to playThe Weeknd Super Bowl halftime show: 5 very important questions about full-face bandages and that gold mazeQueen Latifah\u2019s \u2018The Equalizer\u2019 remake, airing post-Super Bowl, intentionally set itself apart from the franchise The Weeknd\u2019s Super Bowl performance sparked a bounty of memes, as the halftime show usually does Stella Artois, Shift4Shop and Ford also hit the wrong notes for a country in crisis. The 5 worst Super Bowl commercials, from Dolly Parton\u2019s betrayal to that awkward Oatly jingle",
        "author": "Maura Judkis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The season of Adam Driver has been a decade in the making (WP: Pop Culture) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2837",
        "date": "2019-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/12/06/season-adam-driver-has-been-decade-making/",
        "text": "Watching a scene primarily concerned with the dynamic between a film\u2019s protagonist and his romantic rival, a viewer might not expect the random guy in the corner to attract too much attention. And yet as Oscar Isaac and Justin Timberlake\u2019s characters in 2013\u2019s \u201cInside Llewyn Davis\u201d record a novelty song begging President Kennedy not to shoot them into outer space, it isn\u2019t just their harmonizing or the lyrics that make the bizarre tune work, but the manner in which their screenmate Adam Driver punctuates it with comical noises and refrains \u2014 \u201cOuter \u2026 space!\u201d \u2014 delivered in his trademark baritone. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat\u2019s Driver in a nutshell \u2014 someone who, in part thanks to his large presence and general way of being, can\u2019t help but command the screen. HBO\u2019s \u201cGirls,\u201d on which he broke out as the volatile Adam Sackler, even features a scene in which another character notes that he \u201cdoes sort of look like the original man.\u201d The episode aired in 2012, early in a decade that proved to be star-making for the Oscar-nominated actor, and which he has capped with a robust fall slate: He stars as a lead in two films, \u201cMarriage Story\u201d and \u201cThe Report,\u201d and plays a villain in the upcoming holiday blockbuster \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.\u201dSo how did the season of Adam Driver come to be? There\u2019s the aesthetic intrigue mentioned above, which once led the Guardian to ask the lanky actor about \u201cnot being the standard Hollywood McHunk.\u201d He candidly responded, \u201cI have been told before that I have an unusual face. But my face is my face.\u201d His success is likely due more to how that sense of grounded honesty comes through in his performances. Driver, who trained at Juilliard after serving in the Marines, broadcasts a quiet intensity that can capture a range of feelings, sometimes all at once. In the earlier seasons of \u201cGirls,\u201d for instance, Adam\u2019s mannerisms often display a mixture of pent-up rage and emotional vulnerability.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDriver has already earned accolades for his performance in Noah Baumbach\u2019s \u201cMarriage Story,\u201d released Friday on Netflix; he won the Gotham Award for best actor Monday night, bolstering his stance as a front-runner in the Oscar race. Baumbach cast Driver in three other projects before this one, and it becomes clear while watching \u201cMarriage Story\u201d that, as was the case with co-star Scarlett Johansson, the character was written with Driver in mind. They play a couple \u2014 theater director Charlie Barber and actress Nicole \u2014 whose marriage crumbles over misaligned priorities. Charlie\u2019s company is in New York, where the Barbers have raised their young son for most of his life. Nicole, who has long indulged Charlie\u2019s ego by putting off her dream of returning home to Los Angeles, moves back for work when they separate.What follows is a meditation on divorce, a compassionate look at how it can liberate two people but still decimate their spirits as they reevaluate their life together. Baumbach infuses his script with comedy, but it\u2019s when the tension between Charlie and Nicole climaxes that the actors shine brightest. When an attempt to hash out the details of their divorce without lawyers escalates to a screaming match, Charlie, red-faced with frustration, shouts at Nicole, \u201cEvery day I wake up and wish you were dead.\u201d He immediately bursts into tears, falling to his knees and embracing Nicole\u2019s legs.In a recent Hollywood Reporter interview, Driver said that, with such scenes, \u201cYou don\u2019t push for emotion. It either happens or it doesn\u2019t.\u201d He credited his ability to so transparently portray clashing feelings like Charlie\u2019s to the quality of a script, which rings true \u2014 several of his strongest performances are tied to acclaimed writers, including Lena Dunham, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese.The team effort is especially evident with Driver\u2019s more understated scenes. His final episode of \u201cGirls,\u201d given the aptly awkward title \u201cWhat Will We Do This Time About Adam?\u201d begins with Adam\u2019s desire to prove to his ex-girlfriend Hannah Horvath (Dunham), who he discovers is pregnant, that he has matured into a man who can help raise her child. Following the reunion is a dreamlike sequence that comes crashing down as they sit opposite one another at a diner. Though they continue to discuss the logistics of moving in together \u2014 Adam even suggests they get married \u2014 it dawns on them that the relationship won\u2019t work out. Hannah\u2019s eyes well up as Adam smiles wistfully, stuttering until his words come to a halt. They sit in silence for a bit. He comments on the quality of his soup.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDriver\u2019s turn as Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones in \u201cThe Report\u201d is similarly internal, this time a relatively restrained depiction of anger as he spends years investigating the CIA\u2019s use of torture after 9/11. Driver faces the tough task of anchoring a film that heavily involves sifting through paperwork in a confined space, but he accomplishes it by, as the New York Times put it, expressing that fury \u201cnot in explosive confrontations, but in a gradually hardening resolve to protect and disseminate his findings.\u201d\u201cWith Driver, there\u2019s always a sense of something leashed, and his characters seem to be operating on a plane above and beyond everyone else,\u201d reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis continues.It\u2019s true of his Oscar-nominated role in Lee\u2019s \u201cBlacKkKlansman\u201d as Flip Zimmerman, a brooding Jewish cop who goes undercover to take down the Ku Klux Klan. It\u2019s also true of his characters in two Jarmusch films: a bus driver devoted to poetry in \u201cPaterson,\u201d a quiet film about the idyllic rituals of daily life; and a small-town officer in the horror-tinged absurdist comedy \u201cThe Dead Don\u2019t Die,\u201d who states from the moment things start to turn upside-down that zombies are to blame. (Or \u201cghouls,\u201d as he amusingly deadpans.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd it\u2019s of course true of Kylo Ren, the Force-wielding \u201cStar Wars\u201d villain who operates on another plane in the most literal sense. \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d introduced Kylo as a Darth Vader 2.0, the ruthless son of two legends \u2014 Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) \u2014 who, in his quest for power, struggles to extinguish the light within him. Driver\u2019s greatest talent is arguably his ability to keep a character\u2019s fiercest emotions brimming beneath the surface, releasing them in bursts both great and small.He avoids making a cartoonish sci-fi villain of Kylo by approaching him as he would a character in any \u201cprestige\u201d project. Looking back, there\u2019s a strange sort of kinship between his conflicted performance in \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d which allowed for a deeper exploration of Kylo\u2019s interiority, and Charlie Barber\u2019s reactions to the strain of divorce, or even Adam Sackler\u2019s battle with his more primal tendencies. The season of Adam Driver, a compressed display of the actor\u2019s talents that will only continue to spark awards buzz through February, has been nearly a decade in the making.Read more:For stars Adam Driver and Chlo\u00eb Sevigny, making \u2018The Dead Don\u2019t Die\u2019 was as surreal as it soundsIn \u2018Paterson\u2019 and \u2018Silence,\u2019 Adam Driver wrestles with poetry and pietyHBO\u2019s \u2018Girls\u2019 goes out as the one thing it always wanted to be: A good TV showHow Kylo Ren gave \u2018The Last Jedi\u2019 its ultimate Jedi mind trick Between \u201cMarriage Story,\u201d \u201cThe Report\u201d and a new Star Wars film, the Oscar-nominated actor is everywhere. The season of Adam Driver has been a decade in the making",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Losing the Mars rover Opportunity is like saying goodbye to a friend (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2838",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/14/losing-mars-rover-opportunity-is-like-saying-goodbye-friend/",
        "text": "On Tuesday evening, I stood on an observation deck overlooking mission control at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to witness a final attempt to contact the Opportunity Mars rover.We had lost contact with Opportunity in June when a planet",
        "author": "Abigail Fraeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Why scientists sometimes make extraordinary claims (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2839",
        "date": "2019-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/26/why-scientists-sometimes-make-extraordinary-claims/",
        "text": "The interstellar object known as \u2018Oumuamua plunged into our solar system in 2017, leaving a trail of mystery in its wake. It appeared as a tiny point of light, millions of times fainter than the earthbound human eye could see. Teams of astronomers from across the world deduced that \u2018Oumuamua was a reddish, somewhat cigar-shaped rock, spinning and tumbling in space on its path through our planetary system. As it swung past the sun, \u2018Oumuamua seemed to speed up ever so slightly \u2014 something often seen in comets, which emit jets of gas that give them a little extra kick as they get nearer to the sun. However, even the deepest images of our interstellar visitor failed to reveal any evidence of these jets, and so its acceleration confounded the astro-paparazzi. While \u2018Oumuamua itself is gone, its story has been on a decidedly different orbit. In a news cycle that otherwise offers a relentless torrent of trauma and political intrigue, \u2018Oumuamua appears and reappears, its faint glints reminding us that sometimes, we, too, crave a speedy escape from our immediate reality. 'Oumuamua fascinates us of because the questions it left behind: The void of what we don\u2019t know gives us room to stretch our minds and wonder. While scientific knowledge is typically built from the grit of unglamorous measurements, it\u2019s often the wilder possibilities that gain the most attention. Some would say that arguing for those seemingly out-there ideas is nothing more than exploring the full space of interpretation \u2014 but power dynamics limit who gets to voice that freedom of mental movement.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMuch of the ongoing coverage has centered on the claim that \u2018Oumuamua might be a defunct alien spacecraft, which has turned the spotlight onto one of the authors of that claim, Avi Loeb. Loeb is known for his idea papers \u2014 slim briefs that often straddle the space between essay and scientific journal article \u2014 that other astronomers typically greet with wry acceptance, recognizing that they are written to encourage the free expression of ideas, even ideas that arrive, like \u2018Oumuamua itself, on hyperbolic trajectories.Five myths about spaceWithin the scientific community, outlandish ideas like Loeb\u2019s can be divisive, primarily because claims that attract a lot of media attention can turn the conversation away from the definite facts we\u2019ve worked hard to learn. Scientists who make big claims can be seen as capitalizing on media hype, and the rest of us sometimes blame the media itself for playing a part. If we\u2019re being honest, though, we have to admit that everyone involved \u2014 not just journalists, but also academic and research institutions and even the scientists themselves \u2014 participates in the hype cycle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHype in science can be seen as an outgrowth of the larger crisis in journalism, as the precipitous decline in journalism jobs has meant that few news outlets employ dedicated science journalists. While many scientists blame hyped-up science news on a lack of journalistic expertise, the reality is more complex: As the bottom fell out for science journalism jobs, many science journalists were faced with the choice between battling it out as freelancers or using their skills to work in the communications offices of the institutions housing scientists \u2014 usually universities. There, they would be tasked with spreading the word about the results of new research happening at their home institutions.While the writers themselves are genuinely excited to share these new discoveries, media attention boosts the institution itself, enhancing its reputation and opening up new funding avenues. Accordingly, no news release, however measured, is ever solely about the distribution of new knowledge. And yet these same documents still do help journalists (especially those without specialized training in science) identify what new scientific results might be transformative.Losing the Mars rover Opportunity is like saying goodbye to a friendIt\u2019s here that the problem of hyperbole comes into play. Many astronomers are fond of what\u2019s known as the Sagan standard: the saying that \u201cextraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.\u201d By contrast, ancient rhetoricians such as Quintilian believed that extraordinary circumstances actually justify hyperbole, because it can express the inexpressible when, in Quintilian\u2019s phrase, \u201cno one is contented with the exact truth.\u201d All hyperbole skates a thin boundary between elegance and extravagance, between capturing the incompleteness of our knowledge, and distorting the truth. Among scientists \u2014 and, in this case, astronomers specifically \u2014 the boundaries of how outlandish one can be are limited by our commitment to careful measurement and moderate interpretations. Hyperbolic ideas therefore need not leave the solar system entirely before they risk offending our sensibilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut does hyperbole actually shift our perspective on the possible at all? Over at the Atlantic, Marina Koren has written about how institutional prestige \u2014 in this case, Loeb\u2019s position as chairman of the Harvard Astronomy Department, along with his long list of other accomplishments \u2014 can add a certain gravitas to a claim that might be dismissed if it came from somewhere else. But it also shapes who can get away with extreme ideas in the first place. Pushing the boundaries of plausibility comes with risk to one\u2019s career and reputation, so while anyone can use hyperbole as a tool, the risk that one bears is substantially higher if you are not insulated by a name-brand institution, along with titles and accomplishments from adjacent name-brand institutions. Outlandish claims are, in some sense, a luxury concentrated in the hands of those who already possess other luxuries \u2014 a kind of academic weight whose heft accumulates with time. The fact that hyperbolic ideas remain a privilege is precisely what limits them as a tool for moving the boundaries of the possible. Truly innovative thoughts can come from anywhere \u2014 including, like \u2018Oumuamua, from outside the system itself.How photos of Earth from space changed humans' view of their life on the planetWhat lights the fuse of curiosity is specific to each person: For some it takes a spaceship, while for others, a strange rock will do. In my experience talking with guests at the Adler Planetarium, media attention is certainly a factor in why many people want to talk about \u2018Oumuamua, but relatively few seem wedded to the idea of it being a defunct alien spacecraft. Most people are interested for the same reason scientists are: It came from outside the solar system! It\u2019s weird! There is mystery! For any discovery, the most far-flung interpretation is always out there (whether someone writes a paper on it or not), much as the subject of a photograph exists outside the bounds of the picture itself. Moreover, outlandish ideas are not demons, called into being by someone voicing their name \u2014 we should neither fear them, nor give them more power than they\u2019re due.While there is no way of knowing what will become of \u2018Oumuamua, its discovery is a harbinger of others yet to come: Near-future sky surveys, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, are expected to find other interstellar space rocks on their way past the sun. In the meantime, what moves the needle of our knowledge isn\u2019t really hyperbole, but the fact that we happened to catch this particular rock as it made a brief appearance here, that we learned as much as we did. Sometimes it's useful to speculate about aliens, but there are other ways to see the cosmos differently. Why scientists sometimes make extraordinary claims",
        "author": "Lucianne Walkowicz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Why scientists sometimes make extraordinary claims (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2840",
        "date": "2019-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/26/why-scientists-sometimes-make-extraordinary-claims/",
        "text": "The interstellar object known as \u2018Oumuamua plunged into our solar system in 2017, leaving a trail of mystery in its wake. It appeared as a tiny point of light, millions of times fainter than the earthbound human eye could see. Teams of astronomers from across the world deduced that \u2018Oumuamua was a reddish, somewhat cigar-shaped rock, spinning and tumbling in space on its path through our planetary system. As it swung past the sun, \u2018Oumuamua seemed to speed up ever so slightly \u2014 something often seen in comets, which emit jets of gas that give them a little extra kick as they get nearer to the sun. However, even the deepest images of our interstellar visitor failed to reveal any evidence of these jets, and so its acceleration confounded the astro-paparazzi. While \u2018Oumuamua itself is gone, its story has been on a decidedly different orbit. In a news cycle that otherwise offers a relentless torrent of trauma and political intrigue, \u2018Oumuamua appears and reappears, its faint glints reminding us that sometimes, we, too, crave a speedy escape from our immediate reality. 'Oumuamua fascinates us of because the questions it left behind: The void of what we don\u2019t know gives us room to stretch our minds and wonder. While scientific knowledge is typically built from the grit of unglamorous measurements, it\u2019s often the wilder possibilities that gain the most attention. Some would say that arguing for those seemingly out-there ideas is nothing more than exploring the full space of interpretation \u2014 but power dynamics limit who gets to voice that freedom of mental movement.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMuch of the ongoing coverage has centered on the claim that \u2018Oumuamua might be a defunct alien spacecraft, which has turned the spotlight onto one of the authors of that claim, Avi Loeb. Loeb is known for his idea papers \u2014 slim briefs that often straddle the space between essay and scientific journal article \u2014 that other astronomers typically greet with wry acceptance, recognizing that they are written to encourage the free expression of ideas, even ideas that arrive, like \u2018Oumuamua itself, on hyperbolic trajectories.Five myths about spaceWithin the scientific community, outlandish ideas like Loeb\u2019s can be divisive, primarily because claims that attract a lot of media attention can turn the conversation away from the definite facts we\u2019ve worked hard to learn. Scientists who make big claims can be seen as capitalizing on media hype, and the rest of us sometimes blame the media itself for playing a part. If we\u2019re being honest, though, we have to admit that everyone involved \u2014 not just journalists, but also academic and research institutions and even the scientists themselves \u2014 participates in the hype cycle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHype in science can be seen as an outgrowth of the larger crisis in journalism, as the precipitous decline in journalism jobs has meant that few news outlets employ dedicated science journalists. While many scientists blame hyped-up science news on a lack of journalistic expertise, the reality is more complex: As the bottom fell out for science journalism jobs, many science journalists were faced with the choice between battling it out as freelancers or using their skills to work in the communications offices of the institutions housing scientists \u2014 usually universities. There, they would be tasked with spreading the word about the results of new research happening at their home institutions.While the writers themselves are genuinely excited to share these new discoveries, media attention boosts the institution itself, enhancing its reputation and opening up new funding avenues. Accordingly, no news release, however measured, is ever solely about the distribution of new knowledge. And yet these same documents still do help journalists (especially those without specialized training in science) identify what new scientific results might be transformative.Losing the Mars rover Opportunity is like saying goodbye to a friendIt\u2019s here that the problem of hyperbole comes into play. Many astronomers are fond of what\u2019s known as the Sagan standard: the saying that \u201cextraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.\u201d By contrast, ancient rhetoricians such as Quintilian believed that extraordinary circumstances actually justify hyperbole, because it can express the inexpressible when, in Quintilian\u2019s phrase, \u201cno one is contented with the exact truth.\u201d All hyperbole skates a thin boundary between elegance and extravagance, between capturing the incompleteness of our knowledge, and distorting the truth. Among scientists \u2014 and, in this case, astronomers specifically \u2014 the boundaries of how outlandish one can be are limited by our commitment to careful measurement and moderate interpretations. Hyperbolic ideas therefore need not leave the solar system entirely before they risk offending our sensibilities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut does hyperbole actually shift our perspective on the possible at all? Over at the Atlantic, Marina Koren has written about how institutional prestige \u2014 in this case, Loeb\u2019s position as chairman of the Harvard Astronomy Department, along with his long list of other accomplishments \u2014 can add a certain gravitas to a claim that might be dismissed if it came from somewhere else. But it also shapes who can get away with extreme ideas in the first place. Pushing the boundaries of plausibility comes with risk to one\u2019s career and reputation, so while anyone can use hyperbole as a tool, the risk that one bears is substantially higher if you are not insulated by a name-brand institution, along with titles and accomplishments from adjacent name-brand institutions. Outlandish claims are, in some sense, a luxury concentrated in the hands of those who already possess other luxuries \u2014 a kind of academic weight whose heft accumulates with time. The fact that hyperbolic ideas remain a privilege is precisely what limits them as a tool for moving the boundaries of the possible. Truly innovative thoughts can come from anywhere \u2014 including, like \u2018Oumuamua, from outside the system itself.How photos of Earth from space changed humans' view of their life on the planetWhat lights the fuse of curiosity is specific to each person: For some it takes a spaceship, while for others, a strange rock will do. In my experience talking with guests at the Adler Planetarium, media attention is certainly a factor in why many people want to talk about \u2018Oumuamua, but relatively few seem wedded to the idea of it being a defunct alien spacecraft. Most people are interested for the same reason scientists are: It came from outside the solar system! It\u2019s weird! There is mystery! For any discovery, the most far-flung interpretation is always out there (whether someone writes a paper on it or not), much as the subject of a photograph exists outside the bounds of the picture itself. Moreover, outlandish ideas are not demons, called into being by someone voicing their name \u2014 we should neither fear them, nor give them more power than they\u2019re due.While there is no way of knowing what will become of \u2018Oumuamua, its discovery is a harbinger of others yet to come: Near-future sky surveys, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, are expected to find other interstellar space rocks on their way past the sun. In the meantime, what moves the needle of our knowledge isn\u2019t really hyperbole, but the fact that we happened to catch this particular rock as it made a brief appearance here, that we learned as much as we did. Sometimes it's useful to speculate about aliens, but there are other ways to see the cosmos differently. Why scientists sometimes make extraordinary claims",
        "author": "Lucianne Walkowicz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2841",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/19/yes-space-tourism-is-rich-sending-artists-space-is-good-us-all/",
        "text": "On Monday night, Elon Musk introduced announced billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first space tourist slated to take a trip on SpaceX\u2019s Blue Falcon rocket to the moon in 2023. Initially, the choice seemed to perpetuate the idea that space is a playground only for rich non-astronauts. But Maezawa upended that assumption by introducing the \u201cDear Moon\u201d project and declaring his intention to bring between six and eight artists to the moon with him, providing otherworldly inspiration for their work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s a beautiful idea that recognizes the role space, the moon and views of Earth have had on art and culture since humans first cast their gazes skyward. By recognizing the importance of art and artists, SpaceX and Maezawa could inspire and stoke the curiosity of the human race, urging us to widen our perspectives. Even more important, they could help make space accessible to all of us, not just to the wealthy.Space tourism isn\u2019t a new idea, and companies offering such trips have often claimed they\u2019re \u201cdemocratizing\u201d space. Charles Walker, an engineer with McDonnell Douglas, was the first private citizen to join a space mission, which he did three times between 1984 and 1985 at a ticket price of $40,000 (about $97,000 today). In 2001, California millionaire Dennis Tito paid $20 million (around $28.5 million today) for an eight-day trip on a Russian rocket brokered by Virginia-based company Space Adventures. Between then and 2009, six other space tourists took the trip for sums ranging from $20 million to $35 million. Space Adventures now advertises \u201ccircumlunar\u201d trips that come within 62 miles of the moon, but won\u2019t specify how much they might cost.What the Air and Space Museum's Kickstarter could mean for the future of space explorationSpaceX isn\u2019t the first company to conceive of bringing artists to space. In 2015, Lady Gaga thrilled fans by announcing that she would be the first person to perform a song in space aboard a Virgin Galactic shuttle as part of the Zero G Colony music festival, but a fatal explosion during a 2014 test flight of SpaceShipTwo put those plans on hold. (Virgin Galactic has since rebuilt and has successfully tested its new ride, and reports that more than 600 people have plunked down the $250,000 deposit for a trip.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the early 1980s, NASA established the Space Flight Participant program to recognize the importance of sending citizens to space. First up was the Teacher in Space program, for which more than 11,000 people applied. New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe made the cut, but she died in the Challenger disaster of 1986. The tragedy led to the cancellation of the program, through which NASA had also intended to bring journalists and artists to space after the successful completion of McAuliffe\u2019s flight. In 2003, NASA announced another program to bring journalists to space, but that plan ended with the explosion of the Columbia spacecraft.Humans, whether artists or astronauts, are the most precious cargo, and of course SpaceX has to be as certain as it can be about the safety and success of the mission. Initially, SpaceX planned to bring two tourists on a lunar flight in 2017, but the additional six years leaves time for testing and preparation \u2014 and for SpaceX and Maezawa to carefully consider the impact this mission could have on art and culture, as well as people\u2019s perceptions of space.Of course the new star of 'Doctor Who' is a woman. Sci-fi has always been about progress.In a keynote address at the 2008 National Space Symposium, Neil deGrasse Tyson argued that space exploration is crucial not just for the economy, science or knowledge, but also because it affects culture. Tyson referenced everything from science fiction to car designs to environmentalism as evidence of space\u2019s cultural impact. In December 1968, Apollo 8, the first crewed moon mission, generated the first photo of Earth as a whole.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKnown as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d this image, taken for granted by those of us born since, changed humanity\u2019s perception of the planet. Every human ever born hails from our pale blue dot, which is small and fragile in the cosmic perspective. Bill Anders, the astronaut who took the iconic picture, has said that even though they trained for a lunar exploration, the astronauts \u201cdiscovered Earth.\u201dIt\u2019s impossible to predict exactly how this mission might affect our culture, but it\u2019s safe to say that if it gets off the ground, it certainly will. Maezawa seeks a fashion designer, a musician, a painter and a film director (among possible others) to produce work inspired by the physical, spiritual and artistic discoveries of the trip. Without giving an indication of who he might ask to accompany him, he simply asked the artists he approaches to \u201cplease say yes.\u201dHere\u2019s hoping he understands how monumental these invitations will be, and how important it is to choose artists of different persuasions from different countries. This mission may not \u201cdemocratize\u201d space, but it will be the first time humans will have the opportunity to experience art made by non-astronauts who have witnessed something few will ever see firsthand: our entire planet against the backdrop of the infinite cosmos.It\u2019s hard to imagine a more important time for humanity to rediscover earth and what it means to a citizen on our beleaguered planet. Monday\u2019s announcement suggests that Maezawa and SpaceX realize that. Now they\u2019ve got a chance to demonstrate they really mean it. The first SpaceX flight could help humanity. Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all.",
        "author": "Joelle Renstrom"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2842",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/19/yes-space-tourism-is-rich-sending-artists-space-is-good-us-all/",
        "text": "On Monday night, Elon Musk introduced announced billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first space tourist slated to take a trip on SpaceX\u2019s Blue Falcon rocket to the moon in 2023. Initially, the choice seemed to perpetuate the idea that space is a playground only for rich non-astronauts. But Maezawa upended that assumption by introducing the \u201cDear Moon\u201d project and declaring his intention to bring between six and eight artists to the moon with him, providing otherworldly inspiration for their work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s a beautiful idea that recognizes the role space, the moon and views of Earth have had on art and culture since humans first cast their gazes skyward. By recognizing the importance of art and artists, SpaceX and Maezawa could inspire and stoke the curiosity of the human race, urging us to widen our perspectives. Even more important, they could help make space accessible to all of us, not just to the wealthy.Space tourism isn\u2019t a new idea, and companies offering such trips have often claimed they\u2019re \u201cdemocratizing\u201d space. Charles Walker, an engineer with McDonnell Douglas, was the first private citizen to join a space mission, which he did three times between 1984 and 1985 at a ticket price of $40,000 (about $97,000 today). In 2001, California millionaire Dennis Tito paid $20 million (around $28.5 million today) for an eight-day trip on a Russian rocket brokered by Virginia-based company Space Adventures. Between then and 2009, six other space tourists took the trip for sums ranging from $20 million to $35 million. Space Adventures now advertises \u201ccircumlunar\u201d trips that come within 62 miles of the moon, but won\u2019t specify how much they might cost.What the Air and Space Museum's Kickstarter could mean for the future of space explorationSpaceX isn\u2019t the first company to conceive of bringing artists to space. In 2015, Lady Gaga thrilled fans by announcing that she would be the first person to perform a song in space aboard a Virgin Galactic shuttle as part of the Zero G Colony music festival, but a fatal explosion during a 2014 test flight of SpaceShipTwo put those plans on hold. (Virgin Galactic has since rebuilt and has successfully tested its new ride, and reports that more than 600 people have plunked down the $250,000 deposit for a trip.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the early 1980s, NASA established the Space Flight Participant program to recognize the importance of sending citizens to space. First up was the Teacher in Space program, for which more than 11,000 people applied. New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe made the cut, but she died in the Challenger disaster of 1986. The tragedy led to the cancellation of the program, through which NASA had also intended to bring journalists and artists to space after the successful completion of McAuliffe\u2019s flight. In 2003, NASA announced another program to bring journalists to space, but that plan ended with the explosion of the Columbia spacecraft.Humans, whether artists or astronauts, are the most precious cargo, and of course SpaceX has to be as certain as it can be about the safety and success of the mission. Initially, SpaceX planned to bring two tourists on a lunar flight in 2017, but the additional six years leaves time for testing and preparation \u2014 and for SpaceX and Maezawa to carefully consider the impact this mission could have on art and culture, as well as people\u2019s perceptions of space.Of course the new star of 'Doctor Who' is a woman. Sci-fi has always been about progress.In a keynote address at the 2008 National Space Symposium, Neil deGrasse Tyson argued that space exploration is crucial not just for the economy, science or knowledge, but also because it affects culture. Tyson referenced everything from science fiction to car designs to environmentalism as evidence of space\u2019s cultural impact. In December 1968, Apollo 8, the first crewed moon mission, generated the first photo of Earth as a whole.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKnown as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d this image, taken for granted by those of us born since, changed humanity\u2019s perception of the planet. Every human ever born hails from our pale blue dot, which is small and fragile in the cosmic perspective. Bill Anders, the astronaut who took the iconic picture, has said that even though they trained for a lunar exploration, the astronauts \u201cdiscovered Earth.\u201dIt\u2019s impossible to predict exactly how this mission might affect our culture, but it\u2019s safe to say that if it gets off the ground, it certainly will. Maezawa seeks a fashion designer, a musician, a painter and a film director (among possible others) to produce work inspired by the physical, spiritual and artistic discoveries of the trip. Without giving an indication of who he might ask to accompany him, he simply asked the artists he approaches to \u201cplease say yes.\u201dHere\u2019s hoping he understands how monumental these invitations will be, and how important it is to choose artists of different persuasions from different countries. This mission may not \u201cdemocratize\u201d space, but it will be the first time humans will have the opportunity to experience art made by non-astronauts who have witnessed something few will ever see firsthand: our entire planet against the backdrop of the infinite cosmos.It\u2019s hard to imagine a more important time for humanity to rediscover earth and what it means to a citizen on our beleaguered planet. Monday\u2019s announcement suggests that Maezawa and SpaceX realize that. Now they\u2019ve got a chance to demonstrate they really mean it. The first SpaceX flight could help humanity. Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all.",
        "author": "Joelle Renstrom"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2843",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/19/yes-space-tourism-is-rich-sending-artists-space-is-good-us-all/",
        "text": "On Monday night, Elon Musk introduced announced billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first space tourist slated to take a trip on SpaceX\u2019s Blue Falcon rocket to the moon in 2023. Initially, the choice seemed to perpetuate the idea that space is a playground only for rich non-astronauts. But Maezawa upended that assumption by introducing the \u201cDear Moon\u201d project and declaring his intention to bring between six and eight artists to the moon with him, providing otherworldly inspiration for their work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s a beautiful idea that recognizes the role space, the moon and views of Earth have had on art and culture since humans first cast their gazes skyward. By recognizing the importance of art and artists, SpaceX and Maezawa could inspire and stoke the curiosity of the human race, urging us to widen our perspectives. Even more important, they could help make space accessible to all of us, not just to the wealthy.Space tourism isn\u2019t a new idea, and companies offering such trips have often claimed they\u2019re \u201cdemocratizing\u201d space. Charles Walker, an engineer with McDonnell Douglas, was the first private citizen to join a space mission, which he did three times between 1984 and 1985 at a ticket price of $40,000 (about $97,000 today). In 2001, California millionaire Dennis Tito paid $20 million (around $28.5 million today) for an eight-day trip on a Russian rocket brokered by Virginia-based company Space Adventures. Between then and 2009, six other space tourists took the trip for sums ranging from $20 million to $35 million. Space Adventures now advertises \u201ccircumlunar\u201d trips that come within 62 miles of the moon, but won\u2019t specify how much they might cost.What the Air and Space Museum's Kickstarter could mean for the future of space explorationSpaceX isn\u2019t the first company to conceive of bringing artists to space. In 2015, Lady Gaga thrilled fans by announcing that she would be the first person to perform a song in space aboard a Virgin Galactic shuttle as part of the Zero G Colony music festival, but a fatal explosion during a 2014 test flight of SpaceShipTwo put those plans on hold. (Virgin Galactic has since rebuilt and has successfully tested its new ride, and reports that more than 600 people have plunked down the $250,000 deposit for a trip.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the early 1980s, NASA established the Space Flight Participant program to recognize the importance of sending citizens to space. First up was the Teacher in Space program, for which more than 11,000 people applied. New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe made the cut, but she died in the Challenger disaster of 1986. The tragedy led to the cancellation of the program, through which NASA had also intended to bring journalists and artists to space after the successful completion of McAuliffe\u2019s flight. In 2003, NASA announced another program to bring journalists to space, but that plan ended with the explosion of the Columbia spacecraft.Humans, whether artists or astronauts, are the most precious cargo, and of course SpaceX has to be as certain as it can be about the safety and success of the mission. Initially, SpaceX planned to bring two tourists on a lunar flight in 2017, but the additional six years leaves time for testing and preparation \u2014 and for SpaceX and Maezawa to carefully consider the impact this mission could have on art and culture, as well as people\u2019s perceptions of space.Of course the new star of 'Doctor Who' is a woman. Sci-fi has always been about progress.In a keynote address at the 2008 National Space Symposium, Neil deGrasse Tyson argued that space exploration is crucial not just for the economy, science or knowledge, but also because it affects culture. Tyson referenced everything from science fiction to car designs to environmentalism as evidence of space\u2019s cultural impact. In December 1968, Apollo 8, the first crewed moon mission, generated the first photo of Earth as a whole.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKnown as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d this image, taken for granted by those of us born since, changed humanity\u2019s perception of the planet. Every human ever born hails from our pale blue dot, which is small and fragile in the cosmic perspective. Bill Anders, the astronaut who took the iconic picture, has said that even though they trained for a lunar exploration, the astronauts \u201cdiscovered Earth.\u201dIt\u2019s impossible to predict exactly how this mission might affect our culture, but it\u2019s safe to say that if it gets off the ground, it certainly will. Maezawa seeks a fashion designer, a musician, a painter and a film director (among possible others) to produce work inspired by the physical, spiritual and artistic discoveries of the trip. Without giving an indication of who he might ask to accompany him, he simply asked the artists he approaches to \u201cplease say yes.\u201dHere\u2019s hoping he understands how monumental these invitations will be, and how important it is to choose artists of different persuasions from different countries. This mission may not \u201cdemocratize\u201d space, but it will be the first time humans will have the opportunity to experience art made by non-astronauts who have witnessed something few will ever see firsthand: our entire planet against the backdrop of the infinite cosmos.It\u2019s hard to imagine a more important time for humanity to rediscover earth and what it means to a citizen on our beleaguered planet. Monday\u2019s announcement suggests that Maezawa and SpaceX realize that. Now they\u2019ve got a chance to demonstrate they really mean it. The first SpaceX flight could help humanity. Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all.",
        "author": "Joelle Renstrom"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2844",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/19/yes-space-tourism-is-rich-sending-artists-space-is-good-us-all/",
        "text": "On Monday night, Elon Musk introduced announced billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first space tourist slated to take a trip on SpaceX\u2019s Blue Falcon rocket to the moon in 2023. Initially, the choice seemed to perpetuate the idea that space is a playground only for rich non-astronauts. But Maezawa upended that assumption by introducing the \u201cDear Moon\u201d project and declaring his intention to bring between six and eight artists to the moon with him, providing otherworldly inspiration for their work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s a beautiful idea that recognizes the role space, the moon and views of Earth have had on art and culture since humans first cast their gazes skyward. By recognizing the importance of art and artists, SpaceX and Maezawa could inspire and stoke the curiosity of the human race, urging us to widen our perspectives. Even more important, they could help make space accessible to all of us, not just to the wealthy.Space tourism isn\u2019t a new idea, and companies offering such trips have often claimed they\u2019re \u201cdemocratizing\u201d space. Charles Walker, an engineer with McDonnell Douglas, was the first private citizen to join a space mission, which he did three times between 1984 and 1985 at a ticket price of $40,000 (about $97,000 today). In 2001, California millionaire Dennis Tito paid $20 million (around $28.5 million today) for an eight-day trip on a Russian rocket brokered by Virginia-based company Space Adventures. Between then and 2009, six other space tourists took the trip for sums ranging from $20 million to $35 million. Space Adventures now advertises \u201ccircumlunar\u201d trips that come within 62 miles of the moon, but won\u2019t specify how much they might cost.What the Air and Space Museum's Kickstarter could mean for the future of space explorationSpaceX isn\u2019t the first company to conceive of bringing artists to space. In 2015, Lady Gaga thrilled fans by announcing that she would be the first person to perform a song in space aboard a Virgin Galactic shuttle as part of the Zero G Colony music festival, but a fatal explosion during a 2014 test flight of SpaceShipTwo put those plans on hold. (Virgin Galactic has since rebuilt and has successfully tested its new ride, and reports that more than 600 people have plunked down the $250,000 deposit for a trip.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the early 1980s, NASA established the Space Flight Participant program to recognize the importance of sending citizens to space. First up was the Teacher in Space program, for which more than 11,000 people applied. New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe made the cut, but she died in the Challenger disaster of 1986. The tragedy led to the cancellation of the program, through which NASA had also intended to bring journalists and artists to space after the successful completion of McAuliffe\u2019s flight. In 2003, NASA announced another program to bring journalists to space, but that plan ended with the explosion of the Columbia spacecraft.Humans, whether artists or astronauts, are the most precious cargo, and of course SpaceX has to be as certain as it can be about the safety and success of the mission. Initially, SpaceX planned to bring two tourists on a lunar flight in 2017, but the additional six years leaves time for testing and preparation \u2014 and for SpaceX and Maezawa to carefully consider the impact this mission could have on art and culture, as well as people\u2019s perceptions of space.Of course the new star of 'Doctor Who' is a woman. Sci-fi has always been about progress.In a keynote address at the 2008 National Space Symposium, Neil deGrasse Tyson argued that space exploration is crucial not just for the economy, science or knowledge, but also because it affects culture. Tyson referenced everything from science fiction to car designs to environmentalism as evidence of space\u2019s cultural impact. In December 1968, Apollo 8, the first crewed moon mission, generated the first photo of Earth as a whole.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKnown as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d this image, taken for granted by those of us born since, changed humanity\u2019s perception of the planet. Every human ever born hails from our pale blue dot, which is small and fragile in the cosmic perspective. Bill Anders, the astronaut who took the iconic picture, has said that even though they trained for a lunar exploration, the astronauts \u201cdiscovered Earth.\u201dIt\u2019s impossible to predict exactly how this mission might affect our culture, but it\u2019s safe to say that if it gets off the ground, it certainly will. Maezawa seeks a fashion designer, a musician, a painter and a film director (among possible others) to produce work inspired by the physical, spiritual and artistic discoveries of the trip. Without giving an indication of who he might ask to accompany him, he simply asked the artists he approaches to \u201cplease say yes.\u201dHere\u2019s hoping he understands how monumental these invitations will be, and how important it is to choose artists of different persuasions from different countries. This mission may not \u201cdemocratize\u201d space, but it will be the first time humans will have the opportunity to experience art made by non-astronauts who have witnessed something few will ever see firsthand: our entire planet against the backdrop of the infinite cosmos.It\u2019s hard to imagine a more important time for humanity to rediscover earth and what it means to a citizen on our beleaguered planet. Monday\u2019s announcement suggests that Maezawa and SpaceX realize that. Now they\u2019ve got a chance to demonstrate they really mean it. The first SpaceX flight could help humanity. Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all.",
        "author": "Joelle Renstrom"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2845",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/09/19/yes-space-tourism-is-rich-sending-artists-space-is-good-us-all/",
        "text": "On Monday night, Elon Musk introduced announced billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first space tourist slated to take a trip on SpaceX\u2019s Blue Falcon rocket to the moon in 2023. Initially, the choice seemed to perpetuate the idea that space is a playground only for rich non-astronauts. But Maezawa upended that assumption by introducing the \u201cDear Moon\u201d project and declaring his intention to bring between six and eight artists to the moon with him, providing otherworldly inspiration for their work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s a beautiful idea that recognizes the role space, the moon and views of Earth have had on art and culture since humans first cast their gazes skyward. By recognizing the importance of art and artists, SpaceX and Maezawa could inspire and stoke the curiosity of the human race, urging us to widen our perspectives. Even more important, they could help make space accessible to all of us, not just to the wealthy.Space tourism isn\u2019t a new idea, and companies offering such trips have often claimed they\u2019re \u201cdemocratizing\u201d space. Charles Walker, an engineer with McDonnell Douglas, was the first private citizen to join a space mission, which he did three times between 1984 and 1985 at a ticket price of $40,000 (about $97,000 today). In 2001, California millionaire Dennis Tito paid $20 million (around $28.5 million today) for an eight-day trip on a Russian rocket brokered by Virginia-based company Space Adventures. Between then and 2009, six other space tourists took the trip for sums ranging from $20 million to $35 million. Space Adventures now advertises \u201ccircumlunar\u201d trips that come within 62 miles of the moon, but won\u2019t specify how much they might cost.What the Air and Space Museum's Kickstarter could mean for the future of space explorationSpaceX isn\u2019t the first company to conceive of bringing artists to space. In 2015, Lady Gaga thrilled fans by announcing that she would be the first person to perform a song in space aboard a Virgin Galactic shuttle as part of the Zero G Colony music festival, but a fatal explosion during a 2014 test flight of SpaceShipTwo put those plans on hold. (Virgin Galactic has since rebuilt and has successfully tested its new ride, and reports that more than 600 people have plunked down the $250,000 deposit for a trip.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the early 1980s, NASA established the Space Flight Participant program to recognize the importance of sending citizens to space. First up was the Teacher in Space program, for which more than 11,000 people applied. New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe made the cut, but she died in the Challenger disaster of 1986. The tragedy led to the cancellation of the program, through which NASA had also intended to bring journalists and artists to space after the successful completion of McAuliffe\u2019s flight. In 2003, NASA announced another program to bring journalists to space, but that plan ended with the explosion of the Columbia spacecraft.Humans, whether artists or astronauts, are the most precious cargo, and of course SpaceX has to be as certain as it can be about the safety and success of the mission. Initially, SpaceX planned to bring two tourists on a lunar flight in 2017, but the additional six years leaves time for testing and preparation \u2014 and for SpaceX and Maezawa to carefully consider the impact this mission could have on art and culture, as well as people\u2019s perceptions of space.Of course the new star of 'Doctor Who' is a woman. Sci-fi has always been about progress.In a keynote address at the 2008 National Space Symposium, Neil deGrasse Tyson argued that space exploration is crucial not just for the economy, science or knowledge, but also because it affects culture. Tyson referenced everything from science fiction to car designs to environmentalism as evidence of space\u2019s cultural impact. In December 1968, Apollo 8, the first crewed moon mission, generated the first photo of Earth as a whole.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKnown as \u201cEarthrise,\u201d this image, taken for granted by those of us born since, changed humanity\u2019s perception of the planet. Every human ever born hails from our pale blue dot, which is small and fragile in the cosmic perspective. Bill Anders, the astronaut who took the iconic picture, has said that even though they trained for a lunar exploration, the astronauts \u201cdiscovered Earth.\u201dIt\u2019s impossible to predict exactly how this mission might affect our culture, but it\u2019s safe to say that if it gets off the ground, it certainly will. Maezawa seeks a fashion designer, a musician, a painter and a film director (among possible others) to produce work inspired by the physical, spiritual and artistic discoveries of the trip. Without giving an indication of who he might ask to accompany him, he simply asked the artists he approaches to \u201cplease say yes.\u201dHere\u2019s hoping he understands how monumental these invitations will be, and how important it is to choose artists of different persuasions from different countries. This mission may not \u201cdemocratize\u201d space, but it will be the first time humans will have the opportunity to experience art made by non-astronauts who have witnessed something few will ever see firsthand: our entire planet against the backdrop of the infinite cosmos.It\u2019s hard to imagine a more important time for humanity to rediscover earth and what it means to a citizen on our beleaguered planet. Monday\u2019s announcement suggests that Maezawa and SpaceX realize that. Now they\u2019ve got a chance to demonstrate they really mean it. The first SpaceX flight could help humanity. Yes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all.",
        "author": "Joelle Renstrom"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The best show about international relations on television right now is on \u2014 wait for it \u2014 Syfy. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2846",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/23/the-best-show-about-international-relations-on-television-right-now-is-on-wait-for-it-syfy/",
        "text": "Regular readers of Spoiler Alerts might be aware of a rather consistent theme in my posts since \u2014 oh, let\u2019s say January 20, to pick an arbitrary date. Because stuff like this or this or this keeps happening on an almost daily basis.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightthis, this, this https://t.co/jlx4YK4cMF\u2014 Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 23, 2017\n\nI\u2019m not happy about this state of affairs. At all. I\u2019d much rather focus on other problems in the world than the slow-motion political equivalent of the Springfield Tire Fire occurring in Washington. The hard-working staff here had hoped to find distraction on television in this Golden Age of political shows. Unfortunately, \u201cThe Americans,\u201d while still excellent, has taken on a surreal air given the ongoing FBI probe of Russian activity in the United States. \u201cOccupied\u201d would have the same problem, but it hasn\u2019t returned for a second season yet anyways. And, most unfortunately, Netflix\u2019s \u201cIron Fist\u201d has turned out to be the \u201cStar Trek V\u201d of that otherwise-quite-excellent universe\u00a0of shows.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is one political show I have enjoyed recently, however. It\u2019s about international relations. Well, sort of. It\u2019s more about interplanetary relations. It\u2019s Syfy\u2019s \u201cThe Expanse\u201d:The basic set-up of \u201cThe Expanse\u201d is that it takes place 200 years from now in a world in which interplanetary travel is pretty easy. Mankind has colonized Earth\u2019s moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and some of the outer moons,\u00a0such as Ganymede. Earth is run by the United Nations. It controls the\u00a0moon and a large, albeit aging, fleet. It is still the most powerful actor in the solar system, but appears to be on the decline. Mars is independent, with newer spaceships, a very cohesive culture, and an ambitious plan to terraform its own planet. \u00a0Both Earth and Mars view the residents living beyond Mars\u2019 orbit \u2014 the \u201cBelters\u201d \u2014 as close to subhuman. The Belters work in the\u00a0extractive sectors to send resources back to Earth and Mars. There is a loose-knit politico-military group, the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), trying to organize this fractious population. And then events are set in motion.\u201cThe Expanse\u201d pulls off a few world-building gambits\u00a0that make it pretty nifty to watch. It\u2019s not as funny as \u201cFirefly,\u201d but like that show, it successfully\u00a0resets the domain of politics from a planet to a solar system but no further. Also like \u201cFirefly,\u201d the space of \u201cThe Expanse\u201d feels genuinely lived-in. The economics and identities that are guide the actors are well-structured.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnlike \u201cFirefly,\u201d the politics on this show are the text and not the subtext. The possibility of conflict, both interpersonal and interplanetary,\u00a0is ever-present. And \u201cThe Expanse\u201d does a great job with the science. There\u2019s are space battle sequences that seem scientifically sound and are all the more gripping for it. And the connection between the science and the politics also makes sense. The Belters and Martians are\u00a0distinct cultures because they grow up in different environments from Earth \u2014 lower gravity and such. And their complaints about Earthers \u2014 a civilization that despoiled the one planet in the system with a blue sky \u2014 seem particularly trenchant.\u201cThe Expanse\u201d also has my favorite fictional politician, United Nations official Chrisjen Avasarala, played by the magnificent Shohreh Aghdashloo. She is a politician to the core, dedicated to advancing Earth\u2019s interests. She is also keen to avoid an unnecessary war with Mars, however, and is willing to act opportunistically to achieve that end.In this scene below, in which she talks to one of her superiors, provides an example. Chrisjen suspects him of being on the take from a private tycoon\u00a0who has been\u00a0responsible for a recent crisis and is now on the run. But she can\u2019t exactly come out and say that. So she does this instead.That\u2019s some good scenery chewing right there.The Expanse recognizes that space travel doesn\u2019t end political division \u2014 indeed, it creates opportunities for new cleavages to form. That\u2019s just a fact of life. And, right now, it offers the optimism of the Earth actually existing 200 years in the future. I need to believe in that right now. A brief ode to \"The Expanse\" and my favorite fictional politician on television right now.  The best show about international relations on television right now is on \u2014 wait for it \u2014 Syfy.",
        "author": "Daniel W. Drezner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | A near-future tourist\u2019s guide to the International Space Station (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2847",
        "date": "2019-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/11/near-future-tourists-guide-international-space-station/",
        "text": "In June 2019, NASA announced that astronomically rich tourists would soon be able to visit the International Space Station. Ten years later, a national publication sent a travel reporter aloft to report on the amenities at the hottest luxury vacation destination in the universe.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe International Space Station is known for many things: high altitude, low crime and, of course, the enormously elevated price of admission. What it hasn\u2019t been known for is its food scene. But that may be changing, with the opening of five dining experiences onboard, which include GraviTea, the casual wellness cafe, and Copernicus, an otherworldly temple of molecular gastronomy that is the first restaurant in space to be nominated for a James Beard Award. That\u2019s not all. Buoyed by the investment of visitors willing to throw down big money, the once-humble research facility has blossomed into a virtual oasis in the heavens, complete with exercise classes, luxury accommodations and the best views you\u2019re going to find anywhere. Here\u2019s how to make the most of your weekend in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDay One:After a six-hour flight to the station, visitors dock on a Friday evening. Sit through a mandatory safety demonstration \u2014 don\u2019t touch any buttons! \u2014 and you\u2019ll be welcomed aboard for your relaxing weekend in space. It\u2019s the perfect time to explore your digs and practice doing weightless backflips. Once you\u2019ve found your space legs, float over to the Harmony module, where you\u2019ll be quartered in a closet that\u2019s just a little bigger than you \u2014 space is at a premium, pun intended \u2014 but with deluxe fixtures and toiletries, including Le Labo skin-care products. It may not be spacious, but it is mostly soundproof, so that\u2019s something!Next, make your way over to Laika, the kitschy retro-futuristic diner with elevated takes on classic dehydrated astronaut food. Think Tang cocktails and freeze-dried pizza in a Jetsons-esque module designed by Norman Foster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBedtime falls around 9:30, but if you really want to enjoy your first evening aboard, book a private concert from one of the local astronauts ($4,575). He\u2019ll serenade you with David Bowie\u2019s spaciest songs while strumming a guitar.Sending artists into space is actually good for all of usDay Two:Saturday morning is the perfect time to take advantage of the station\u2019s fitness facility. Astronauts work out for two hours a day to ensure that they\u2019re still in peak physical condition when they return from orbit. Your trip may be shorter, but that\u2019s no reason not to get in on the fun. Strap in (literally: You don\u2019t want to float away) to an exclusive NASAxPeloton bike and let a hologram of Neil Armstrong guide you to the exercise high of your life. At $600/session (unlimited weekend pass for $2,000), it\u2019s a giant leap for fitnesskind.Story continues below advertisementSpace life doesn\u2019t have to be strenuous, though. \u201cLiving on a spaceship is the most lazy existence you can imagine,\u201d says Chris Hadfield, who served as station commander back in 2013. \u201cYou\u2019re weightless. You don\u2019t have to lift a finger. You don\u2019t even have to hold your head up.\u201dAdvertisementAnd you really won\u2019t have to lift a finger \u2014 or retrieve an errant space sock \u2014 if you spring for a private astrobutler (an additional $25,000) who will attend to your every need. Jeev3s can arrange a tasting of space-aged Ardbeg whisky or hand you the console so you can remotely pilot a Mars rover. Jeev3s will also manage your social media presence and update your Instagram so that friends on Earth can keep up with your journey.By the time \u201cafternoon\u201d rolls around, you may be wondering, What\u2019s the meaning of time when you are floating in space, anyway? When you witness 16 sunrises and sunsets each day? Anyway, there\u2019s space yoga and chakras realignment offered each Saturday at 3.Story continues below advertisementIn the evening, get ready for dinner at Copernicus, where a menu designed by chef Wylie Dufresne (and executed by a team that trained at El Bulli and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.) puts the \u201castronomy\u201d in molecular gastronomy. One course might be a very deconstructed vichyssoise \u2014 servers will launch globules of pureed potato, leek, cream and chicken stock for you to catch in your mouth. For your entree, try the Wagyu beef prepared sous-vide style in gamma radiation. The compressed watermelon salad gets that way, thanks to the vacuum forces just outside the station\u2019s walls. The tableware is made from moon rocks. For dessert? An upscale riff on a Mars bar, of course.What if Sweeney Todd went on 'Chef's Table'?Day Three:AdvertisementCome Sunday morning, it\u2019ll be time to take a spacewalk on the wild side. To prepare, you\u2019ll need to spend an hour taking in pure oxygen. While you\u2019re at it, take the opportunity to personalize your spacesuit with Swarovski crystals (price available upon request). If you\u2019re going to float above Earth, you might as well shimmer like the star that you are.Story continues below advertisementAnd then \u2014 oh, wow, this is exciting \u2014 while you\u2019re out on your spacewalk, a debris cloud tears through most of the station, instantly depressurizing it and probably killing almost everyone onboard. You\u2019re able to make it back though the airlock, thanks to the heroic sacrifice of your astroguide, but now your miraculously intact module is floating free. Jeev3s isn\u2019t answering your text messages, but that\u2019s okay. They\u2019ll probably prorate for service interruptions when you get home.There\u2019s a machine in one wall breaking down water into breathable oxygen. Its hum is quite calming. Yes. You are calm.AdvertisementHow long have you been here? Your module is spinning, spiraling in the dark. Sometimes you make your way to the porthole and the planet below looms into view. You cannot tell if it is getting closer or farther away.Story continues below advertisementThe sun rises and sets, and rises and sets. You breathe in and out. The Le Labo skin care and compressed watermelon and Peloton bike feel like memories from a different lifetime. Was that a voice you heard in the oxygen machine\u2019s whisper?Time passes. The sun sets. The sun sets. The sun.Trip planning details: The International Space Station is about 240 miles above the surface of Earth. The Kennedy Space Center in Florida is the closest airport; budget carriers may begin service out of Vandenberg Air Force Base soon. Tickets start at $58 million.Basic accommodations on the station begin at $35,000, which includes private sleeping quarters, water, Internet, use of the toilets and, critically, oxygen. But for an additional $15,000, you can upgrade to the deluxe package, which includes a morning breakfast (freeze-dried eggs Benedict one day, acai bowls with dragonfruit and coconut chips for another), a $1,000 spa credit and premium oxygen. Other add-ons include an unlimited drink package ($5,000) with cocktails crafted by the station\u2019s robot mixologist. Just watch out for those hangovers! They\u2019re more intense in space. We're sure that your trip will be relaxing and nothing terrible will happen. A near-future tourist\u2019s guide to the International Space Station",
        "author": "Maura Judkis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | A near-future tourist\u2019s guide to the International Space Station (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2848",
        "date": "2019-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/11/near-future-tourists-guide-international-space-station/",
        "text": "In June 2019, NASA announced that astronomically rich tourists would soon be able to visit the International Space Station. Ten years later, a national publication sent a travel reporter aloft to report on the amenities at the hottest luxury vacation destination in the universe.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe International Space Station is known for many things: high altitude, low crime and, of course, the enormously elevated price of admission. What it hasn\u2019t been known for is its food scene. But that may be changing, with the opening of five dining experiences onboard, which include GraviTea, the casual wellness cafe, and Copernicus, an otherworldly temple of molecular gastronomy that is the first restaurant in space to be nominated for a James Beard Award. That\u2019s not all. Buoyed by the investment of visitors willing to throw down big money, the once-humble research facility has blossomed into a virtual oasis in the heavens, complete with exercise classes, luxury accommodations and the best views you\u2019re going to find anywhere. Here\u2019s how to make the most of your weekend in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDay One:After a six-hour flight to the station, visitors dock on a Friday evening. Sit through a mandatory safety demonstration \u2014 don\u2019t touch any buttons! \u2014 and you\u2019ll be welcomed aboard for your relaxing weekend in space. It\u2019s the perfect time to explore your digs and practice doing weightless backflips. Once you\u2019ve found your space legs, float over to the Harmony module, where you\u2019ll be quartered in a closet that\u2019s just a little bigger than you \u2014 space is at a premium, pun intended \u2014 but with deluxe fixtures and toiletries, including Le Labo skin-care products. It may not be spacious, but it is mostly soundproof, so that\u2019s something!Next, make your way over to Laika, the kitschy retro-futuristic diner with elevated takes on classic dehydrated astronaut food. Think Tang cocktails and freeze-dried pizza in a Jetsons-esque module designed by Norman Foster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBedtime falls around 9:30, but if you really want to enjoy your first evening aboard, book a private concert from one of the local astronauts ($4,575). He\u2019ll serenade you with David Bowie\u2019s spaciest songs while strumming a guitar.Sending artists into space is actually good for all of usDay Two:Saturday morning is the perfect time to take advantage of the station\u2019s fitness facility. Astronauts work out for two hours a day to ensure that they\u2019re still in peak physical condition when they return from orbit. Your trip may be shorter, but that\u2019s no reason not to get in on the fun. Strap in (literally: You don\u2019t want to float away) to an exclusive NASAxPeloton bike and let a hologram of Neil Armstrong guide you to the exercise high of your life. At $600/session (unlimited weekend pass for $2,000), it\u2019s a giant leap for fitnesskind.Story continues below advertisementSpace life doesn\u2019t have to be strenuous, though. \u201cLiving on a spaceship is the most lazy existence you can imagine,\u201d says Chris Hadfield, who served as station commander back in 2013. \u201cYou\u2019re weightless. You don\u2019t have to lift a finger. You don\u2019t even have to hold your head up.\u201dAdvertisementAnd you really won\u2019t have to lift a finger \u2014 or retrieve an errant space sock \u2014 if you spring for a private astrobutler (an additional $25,000) who will attend to your every need. Jeev3s can arrange a tasting of space-aged Ardbeg whisky or hand you the console so you can remotely pilot a Mars rover. Jeev3s will also manage your social media presence and update your Instagram so that friends on Earth can keep up with your journey.By the time \u201cafternoon\u201d rolls around, you may be wondering, What\u2019s the meaning of time when you are floating in space, anyway? When you witness 16 sunrises and sunsets each day? Anyway, there\u2019s space yoga and chakras realignment offered each Saturday at 3.Story continues below advertisementIn the evening, get ready for dinner at Copernicus, where a menu designed by chef Wylie Dufresne (and executed by a team that trained at El Bulli and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.) puts the \u201castronomy\u201d in molecular gastronomy. One course might be a very deconstructed vichyssoise \u2014 servers will launch globules of pureed potato, leek, cream and chicken stock for you to catch in your mouth. For your entree, try the Wagyu beef prepared sous-vide style in gamma radiation. The compressed watermelon salad gets that way, thanks to the vacuum forces just outside the station\u2019s walls. The tableware is made from moon rocks. For dessert? An upscale riff on a Mars bar, of course.What if Sweeney Todd went on 'Chef's Table'?Day Three:AdvertisementCome Sunday morning, it\u2019ll be time to take a spacewalk on the wild side. To prepare, you\u2019ll need to spend an hour taking in pure oxygen. While you\u2019re at it, take the opportunity to personalize your spacesuit with Swarovski crystals (price available upon request). If you\u2019re going to float above Earth, you might as well shimmer like the star that you are.Story continues below advertisementAnd then \u2014 oh, wow, this is exciting \u2014 while you\u2019re out on your spacewalk, a debris cloud tears through most of the station, instantly depressurizing it and probably killing almost everyone onboard. You\u2019re able to make it back though the airlock, thanks to the heroic sacrifice of your astroguide, but now your miraculously intact module is floating free. Jeev3s isn\u2019t answering your text messages, but that\u2019s okay. They\u2019ll probably prorate for service interruptions when you get home.There\u2019s a machine in one wall breaking down water into breathable oxygen. Its hum is quite calming. Yes. You are calm.AdvertisementHow long have you been here? Your module is spinning, spiraling in the dark. Sometimes you make your way to the porthole and the planet below looms into view. You cannot tell if it is getting closer or farther away.Story continues below advertisementThe sun rises and sets, and rises and sets. You breathe in and out. The Le Labo skin care and compressed watermelon and Peloton bike feel like memories from a different lifetime. Was that a voice you heard in the oxygen machine\u2019s whisper?Time passes. The sun sets. The sun sets. The sun.Trip planning details: The International Space Station is about 240 miles above the surface of Earth. The Kennedy Space Center in Florida is the closest airport; budget carriers may begin service out of Vandenberg Air Force Base soon. Tickets start at $58 million.Basic accommodations on the station begin at $35,000, which includes private sleeping quarters, water, Internet, use of the toilets and, critically, oxygen. But for an additional $15,000, you can upgrade to the deluxe package, which includes a morning breakfast (freeze-dried eggs Benedict one day, acai bowls with dragonfruit and coconut chips for another), a $1,000 spa credit and premium oxygen. Other add-ons include an unlimited drink package ($5,000) with cocktails crafted by the station\u2019s robot mixologist. Just watch out for those hangovers! They\u2019re more intense in space. We're sure that your trip will be relaxing and nothing terrible will happen. A near-future tourist\u2019s guide to the International Space Station",
        "author": "Maura Judkis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | India once welcomed Muslims like me. Under Modi, it rejects us as invaders. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2849",
        "date": "2019-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/17/india-once-welcomed-muslims-like-me-under-modi-it-rejects-us-invaders/",
        "text": "After the partition of Pakistan from India as a separate homeland for Muslims in 1947, India\u2019s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, presented a vision of his republic: a secular country defined by multiplicity, existing beyond tribal loyalties. Ideas need forms, and the promise of an inclusive India took shape in architecture. In 1950, Nehru invited Le Corbusier to design a new capital city for the state of Punjab: a concrete brutalist utopia called Chandigarh. The buildings intentionally diverged from local traditions and structures, presenting a futurist alternative to the trauma of the recent religious violence. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen I first visited this sprawling complex of courtrooms and government buildings, it felt as if a spaceship had landed on the lush fields of Punjab. While the massive buildings remain, in recent years Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have systematically dismantled Nehru\u2019s vision for India. This month, India\u2019s Parliament passed a new bill that enshrines in law a religiously inflected definition of who belongs in India. The Citizenship Amendment Bill provides a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan who are Hindus, Christians, Jains, Parsees and Buddhists, but explicitly excludes Muslims.The sectarianism of the law sent shock waves through the country\u2019s secular political class. In the past few days, across India, demonstrators have clashed with police. Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi and Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh have shut down, as protesting students confront a brutal police crackdown. The law is more than just the latest in a series of Hindu-nationalist and Islamophobic policies. In a nation that is home to the largest Muslim population outside Muslim-majority countries, the bill extends an ideological project that breaks the very promise of India.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy Muslim family emigrated out of India in 1947, moving across a new border to what became a country called Pakistan. Many Muslim families split over whether to leave for this imagined separate homeland or to remain in India, where, despite the brutality of partition, the ardently secular Nehru reassured them that they had a home. He articulated his ideal of a composite Indian citizen, who was enriched and shaped by all the heritages that flowed through the world\u2019s most diverse society.As a child of the neighboring Islamic republic (and a steady consumer of Indian popular culture), I grew up admiring that multilingual, kaleidoscopic country. Later, I pursued my education at American universities, in classrooms led by the children of Nehruvian India, and my professors\u2019 stories of religious coexistence inspired me to want to visit that alternative version of South Asia. From afar, India always seemed to be a symphonic banquet of possibilities, in contrast with the monochromatic vision of Pakistan\u2019s religious leaders. Despite Modi\u2019s election in 2014, and a culture of media censorship, online harassment and mob violence that has made life increasingly volatile for minorities, my Indian friends assured me that the rise of the Hindu-nationalist right was a passing storm. So, four years ago, I set out to meet the country that Indian Muslims had chosen, and I moved to New Delhi.As the lynchings of Muslims began in 2015, during Modi\u2019s first term in office, it struck me that the prime minister always remained eerily quiet in response to the violence. As long as the mob remained on the streets, the government could maintain the impression that it did not bear culpability for these supposedly isolated incidents. Since Modi\u2019s landslide reelection in May, however, the BJP has had a mandate to fulfill its promise of a Hindu nation, an ideological project that dates back a century. The BJP has delivered: In August, for example, Parliament imposed direct control on the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir, denying journalists access, imprisoning elected officials and halting citizens\u2019 communications in what has become the longest Internet shutdown ever in a democracy. In November, India\u2019s Supreme Court ruled to allow the construction of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya, on the site of a former Mughal-era mosque that, decades earlier, was destroyed by a Hindu mob.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBJP leaders, in addition to marginalizing religious minorities, are erasing Nehru\u2019s secular vision. They have crafted an alternative national narrative that recasts the country\u2019s Hindu majority as victims and its era of Muslim empires as one of loss and shame. In the words of historian Sunil Khilnani, they have \u201cweaponized history,\u201d rewriting a period of composite Muslim dynasties such as the Mughals, who built the Taj Mahal and governed with multicultural courts, as a time of conquest by outsiders. The BJP\u2019s leaders consistently use xenophobic language in political rallies and speeches and have erected new statues to Hindu nationalism\u2019s modern and mythical icons. Bollywood, too, has shifted into a new mode of nationalist bombast, churning out epic films about attacks on Pakistan, Islamic kingdoms\u2019 invasions of Hindu ones and terrorist radicalization that play on the trope of the suspect Muslim. As the economy continues to falter, reports of sectarian lynchings and attacks, and the censorship of Muslim voices, have only grown.Now, the narrative of Hindu victimhood and Muslim enemies of the state is being legislated into a permanent political form. After the citizenship bill passed, one of the country\u2019s Muslim lawmakers, Asaduddin Owaisi, ripped apart a copy of its text on the floor of Parliament. \u201cThis bill has been brought so that one more partition can be done,\u201d he said.More than 70 years ago, Indian Muslims were forced to make an impossible choice between home and a safer life elsewhere. Those who decided to remain, despite the dangers of majoritarianism and discrimination, had a fundamental belief in India\u2019s promise. The Hindu right\u2019s platform is turning the argument for partition \u2014 the need for a Muslim homeland \u2014 into a self-fulfilling prophecy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementToday, Le Corbusier\u2019s Chandigarh has become a global design mecca and an Instagrammer\u2019s dream \u2014 but little of the multicultural spirit it was meant to embody remains. Even as Nehruvian buildings become faded relics, the choice between Nehru\u2019s ideal of an inclusive India and the fantasies propagated by today\u2019s Hindu right presents a live and urgent crisis. The recent passionate demonstrations are proof that the promise still holds power. As a new generation takes to the streets to protest discrimination against Muslim immigrants and citizens, I feel hope for the India I grew up admiring from across the divide. The lines of 1947 once galvanized what has become one of the world\u2019s most dangerous nuclear fault lines; the subcontinent, with its inherent multiplicity, cannot bear that cost once again.Read more:The Kashmir crisis isn\u2019t about territory. It\u2019s about a Hindu victory over Islam.I arrived in Kashmir as India\u2019s crackdown began. It was terrifying.Immigration as reparation for colonialism, climate change and corporate greed A new citizenship law breaks the ideal of India as a pluralistic society. India once welcomed Muslims like me. Under Modi, it rejects us as invaders.",
        "author": "Bilal Qureshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | How China is using science fiction to sell Beijing\u2019s vision of the future (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2850",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/13/how-china-is-using-science-fiction-sell-beijings-vision-future/",
        "text": "\u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d directed by Frant Gwo, takes place in a future where the people of Earth must flee their sun as it swells into a red giant. Thousands of engines \u2014 the first of them constructed in Hangzhou, one of China\u2019s tech hubs \u2014 propel the entire planet toward a new solar system, while everyone takes refuge from the cold in massive underground cities. On the surface, the only visible reminders of the past are markers of China\u2019s might. The Shanghai Tower, the Oriental Pearl Tower and a stadium for the Shanghai 2044 Olympics all thrust out of the ice, having apparently survived the journey\u2019s tsunamis, deep freeze and cliff-collapsing earthquakes. The movie is China\u2019s first big-budget sci-fi epic, and its production was ambitious, involving some 7,000 workers and 10,000 specially-built props. Audience excitement was correspondingly huge: Nearly half a million people wrote reviews of the film on Chinese social network site Douban. Having earned over $600 million in domestic sales, \u201cThe Wandering Earth\u201d marks a major achievement for the country\u2019s film industry.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt is also a major achievement for the Chinese government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince opening up the country\u2019s film market in 2001, the Chinese government has aspired to learn from Hollywood how to make commercially appealing films, as I detail in my book \u201cHollywood Made in China.\u201d From initial private offerings for state media companies, to foreign investment in films, studios and theme parks, the government allowed outside capital and expertise to grow the domestic commercial film industry \u2014 but not at the expense of government oversight. This policy\u2019s underlying aim was to expand China\u2019s cultural clout and political influence.Until recently, Hollywood films dominated the country\u2019s growing box office. That finally changed in 2015, with the release of major local blockbusters \u201cMonster Hunt\u201d and \u201cLost in Hong Kong.\u201d The proliferation of homegrown hits signaled that the Chinese box office profits no longer depend on Hollywood studio films \u2014 sending an important message to foreign trade negotiators and studios.These hits include a growing genre of popular commercial films that set out to portray China as a virtuous global power. \u201cWolf Warrior 2,\u201d which became the highest-grossing movie in Chinese box office history when it was released in 2017, follows a retired People\u2019s Liberation Army special forces operative, supported by the Chinese Navy, who saves Chinese workers in an unspecified country in Africa from Western terrorists. The highest-grossing film in 2018, \u201cOperation Red Sea,\u201d was about the navy\u2019s mission in Yemen.\u2018House of Cards\u2019 is credible. Just ask the Russians, Chinese and Iranians.Muscular nationalism is also common in American films, of course: In \u201cArmageddon,\u201d from 1998, U.S. leadership saved the world from natural calamity; more recently, \u201cInterstellar\u201d modeled American interplanetary exploration. Washington, however, has nowhere near the level of influence over American studio filmmaking that the Chinese government has over China\u2019s film studios \u2014 and it doesn\u2019t claim as much credit for Hollywood\u2019s successes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn China, this relationship has always been close. Even as China\u2019s film industry leveraged foreign money and talent, the government\u2019s oversight progressively tightened. In 2013, China fused two of its major media regulators to centralize control of content. President Xi Jinping\u2019s New Year\u2019s address from 2014 urged Chinese citizens to tell \u201cChinese stories\u201d around the world. In March 2018, media regulation in China came under cabinet-level control. Most recently, earlier this month, top Chinese film regulator Wang Xiaohui laid out a plan for China to become a \u201cstrong film power\u201d by 2035, with international influence commensurate to the country\u2019s status. Wang outlined the need for more films themed around \u201cthe Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,\u201d and set out an annual goal of 100 Chinese films bringing in a box office revenue of $15 million or more.\u201cThe Wandering Earth\u201d offers a template for China\u2019s patriotic film industry ambitions. It\u2019s also a prototype for exporting an image of China as the leader of the future. Released just a month after China landed on the far side of the moon, the film is an engaging spectacle which presents a clear model for the country\u2019s ascent: one invested in technological advancement and the sacrifices of its people. And where \u201cWolf Warrior 2\u201d failed to achieve wider recognition, in part because of its cartoonishly unfavorable portrayals of both Westerners and Africans, \u201cThe Wandering Earth\u201d is on track to become that elusive thing: the global Chinese blockbuster. Though its international box office has been relatively small, the film has a lucrative deal with Netflix for worldwide distribution.The movie portrays a ragtag group of Chinese upstarts who save the planet by figuring out how to divert it from its crash into Jupiter. The rest of the world, listening to the AI system that tells them hope is lost, waits to die like sheep \u2014 until a stirring speech by a Chinese schoolgirl unites the nations in hope. When even those collective efforts seem about to fall short, a lone Chinese astronaut has the courage (and the command of the international spaceship) to commit the last, selfless act that propels the planet to its new solar system. In this fantasy, only Chinese leaders can be relied on in a crisis. Only Chinese engineers know how to effectively manage the complex systems of the future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis narrative befits a country eager to assert the global ambitions of its film industry. The plot also neatly encapsulates the government\u2019s vision: China\u2019s present is only prologue to its future technological dominance. That technological dominance is an unquestionable good, saving the earth and its people from imminent destruction. And in \u201cThe Wandering Earth,\u201d the United States is almost entirely absent. With \"The Wandering Earth,\" Chinese filmmakers prove that they can succeed without Hollywood. How China is using science fiction to sell Beijing\u2019s vision of the future",
        "author": "Aynne Kokas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Congress can\u2019t agree on big things. Let billionaires handle space. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2851",
        "date": "2021-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/24/bezos-branson-musk-space/",
        "text": "Politicians love it when Americans go to space. They give speeches about technological breakthroughs, new frontiers and the limitless power of the human imagination \u2014 unless the Americans in space are billionaires who flew on their own rockets; then they mean tweet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBlue Origin owner Jeff Bezos (also owner of The Washington Post) traveled to the edge of space on Tuesday; Virgin\u2019s Richard Branson took flight earlier this month; and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took to Twitter, unimpressed: Here on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor \u2014 but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space! Yes. It's time to tax the billionaires.\u2014 Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 11, 2021\n\nBefore both flights, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) \u2014 a member of the NASA Caucus \u2014 tweeted: \u201cShould billionaires play out their space travel fantasies, or should we invest in schooling, provide healthcare, and create prosperity for everyone? We need a wealth tax.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis week, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), said he\u2019ll introduce legislation that would tax wealthy passengers on space flights that don\u2019t have scientific goals, in order to \u201csupport the public good.\u201dAdvertisementThey\u2019re not wrong that there are plenty of problems here on Earth that need attention, and resources. But what\u2019s wrong with letting the billionaires take a turn at tackling outer space?You or I might not choose to spend money the way Bezos, Branson or SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk have. But it\u2019s one giant leap from there to suggesting that Congress is better at spending money, or that a private space race, which right now looks like a game of one-upmanship between famous rich guys, can\u2019t ultimately redound to the public good.Story continues below advertisementIn a country where there is ever-increasing disagreement about policy priorities (on Wednesday, a Senate procedural vote to advance a putatively bipartisan infrastructure package failed), the proper role of the state, and the trustworthiness of our elected officials, it\u2019s time to take seriously the idea that government may not always be primed to take on some of our biggest problems.AdvertisementSure, if we instituted a wealth tax or started \u201cabolishing billionaires,\u201d as some on Capitol Hill seem eager to do, legislators might better build consensus around spending some of that money to strengthen a safety net that helps people in crisis, while also prudently acting in the short term to stave off long-term existential threats. Might. But they\u2019re definitely going to spend a pile of money on forever wars, handing out corporate welfare and incarcerating minor offenders as part of the misbegotten war on drugs. They\u2019d fund a space program, too.George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.Bezos, Branson and Musk have all made it clear why they\u2019re willing to invest in space: They think having a new frontier (and a possible escape hatch) are worth a lot to mankind in the long run. Clearly, they all want to add to their billions \u2014 that\u2019s just what they do. But as Bezos explained to CNBC, there\u2019s a broader vision: \u201cWhat we\u2019re really trying to do is build reusable space vehicles. It\u2019s the only way to build a road to space, and we need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future.\u201d Americans appear to agree: 72 percent of them telling Pew Research that it\u2019s essential for the United States to be world leader in space exploration. But on this challenge, and so many others, too many of the politicians \u2014 who well know that they have no hope of getting on the same page with their counterparts \u2014 still seem to prefer scoring points on Twitter.Story continues below advertisementIf we can\u2019t have consensus, though, maybe it\u2019s time we tried competition.AdvertisementThere\u2019s an old saying among space nerds: Space is a place, not a program. The Apollo Program was an inspiring feat, something Americans deserve to brag about until the heat death of the universe. Yes, the Soviets beat us to orbit, but we got men to the moon and back with a repurposed pen and 32,768 bits of RAM.Over time, the U.S. space agency relinquished its early dominance of manned spaceflight, pivoting to expensive, cumbersome shuttles that were akin to space buses, loaded with science projects involving roundworms. The program was shelved a decade ago.This left a bunch of folks who came of age during the Apollo era hanging. A few became billionaires who figured if they were going to realize the spacefaring dreams of their youth, they\u2019d have to do it themselves \u2014 and they might as well sell tickets while they were at it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey began to realize those ambitions and to dramatically bring down the cost of launch. According to one 2018 analysis: \u201cNASA\u2019s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg. Commercial launch has reduced the cost to LEO by a factor of 20.\u201dWhat if philanthropy isn\u2019t the best way for rich people to help others?It\u2019s easy to see how a roughly 10-minute round-trip space flight that takes passengers from Earth to Earth strikes many as a vanity project. There\u2019s no guarantee that every luxury good will eventually become a commodity. And competition ought to be a fair fight: No regulators playing favorites, no subsidies \u2014 right now, the private space sector is too reliant on government infrastructure and government contracts. But billionaires are helping turn a pricey, ineffective government initiative into a competitive industry, and they\u2019re doing it following an ego-powered, grandiose template that has worked before.The eccentric interests of prominent, sometimes wealthy weirdos trying to outdo each other brought us electric light, the automobile, commercial airlines, personal mobile phones and more. One day: passenger berths for regular schmos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the end, it doesn\u2019t matter whether Branson launched before Bezos, or if Musk thinks it would be cool to be \u201cborn on Earth and die on Mars. Hopefully not at the point of impact,\u201d as he\u2019s fond of saying. What matters is what the rest of us will do when we can buy tickets to use their tech, something Congress isn\u2019t putting on offer. Billionaire antics aren\u2019t the point. While politicians are pointing fingers, they\u2019re getting us one small step closer to where so many of us already agree we\u2019d like to go. Rich-guy pet projects just might turn spaceflight into a competitive industry. Congress can\u2019t agree on big things. Let billionaires handle space.",
        "author": "Katherine Mangu-Ward"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Congress can\u2019t agree on big things. Let billionaires handle space. (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2852",
        "date": "2021-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/07/24/bezos-branson-musk-space/",
        "text": "Politicians love it when Americans go to space. They give speeches about technological breakthroughs, new frontiers and the limitless power of the human imagination \u2014 unless the Americans in space are billionaires who flew on their own rockets; then they mean tweet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBlue Origin owner Jeff Bezos (also owner of The Washington Post) traveled to the edge of space on Tuesday; Virgin\u2019s Richard Branson took flight earlier this month; and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took to Twitter, unimpressed: Here on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed themselves, struggling to see a doctor \u2014 but hey, the richest guys in the world are off in outer space! Yes. It's time to tax the billionaires.\u2014 Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 11, 2021\n\nBefore both flights, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) \u2014 a member of the NASA Caucus \u2014 tweeted: \u201cShould billionaires play out their space travel fantasies, or should we invest in schooling, provide healthcare, and create prosperity for everyone? We need a wealth tax.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis week, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), said he\u2019ll introduce legislation that would tax wealthy passengers on space flights that don\u2019t have scientific goals, in order to \u201csupport the public good.\u201dAdvertisementThey\u2019re not wrong that there are plenty of problems here on Earth that need attention, and resources. But what\u2019s wrong with letting the billionaires take a turn at tackling outer space?You or I might not choose to spend money the way Bezos, Branson or SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk have. But it\u2019s one giant leap from there to suggesting that Congress is better at spending money, or that a private space race, which right now looks like a game of one-upmanship between famous rich guys, can\u2019t ultimately redound to the public good.Story continues below advertisementIn a country where there is ever-increasing disagreement about policy priorities (on Wednesday, a Senate procedural vote to advance a putatively bipartisan infrastructure package failed), the proper role of the state, and the trustworthiness of our elected officials, it\u2019s time to take seriously the idea that government may not always be primed to take on some of our biggest problems.AdvertisementSure, if we instituted a wealth tax or started \u201cabolishing billionaires,\u201d as some on Capitol Hill seem eager to do, legislators might better build consensus around spending some of that money to strengthen a safety net that helps people in crisis, while also prudently acting in the short term to stave off long-term existential threats. Might. But they\u2019re definitely going to spend a pile of money on forever wars, handing out corporate welfare and incarcerating minor offenders as part of the misbegotten war on drugs. They\u2019d fund a space program, too.George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.Bezos, Branson and Musk have all made it clear why they\u2019re willing to invest in space: They think having a new frontier (and a possible escape hatch) are worth a lot to mankind in the long run. Clearly, they all want to add to their billions \u2014 that\u2019s just what they do. But as Bezos explained to CNBC, there\u2019s a broader vision: \u201cWhat we\u2019re really trying to do is build reusable space vehicles. It\u2019s the only way to build a road to space, and we need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future.\u201d Americans appear to agree: 72 percent of them telling Pew Research that it\u2019s essential for the United States to be world leader in space exploration. But on this challenge, and so many others, too many of the politicians \u2014 who well know that they have no hope of getting on the same page with their counterparts \u2014 still seem to prefer scoring points on Twitter.Story continues below advertisementIf we can\u2019t have consensus, though, maybe it\u2019s time we tried competition.AdvertisementThere\u2019s an old saying among space nerds: Space is a place, not a program. The Apollo Program was an inspiring feat, something Americans deserve to brag about until the heat death of the universe. Yes, the Soviets beat us to orbit, but we got men to the moon and back with a repurposed pen and 32,768 bits of RAM.Over time, the U.S. space agency relinquished its early dominance of manned spaceflight, pivoting to expensive, cumbersome shuttles that were akin to space buses, loaded with science projects involving roundworms. The program was shelved a decade ago.This left a bunch of folks who came of age during the Apollo era hanging. A few became billionaires who figured if they were going to realize the spacefaring dreams of their youth, they\u2019d have to do it themselves \u2014 and they might as well sell tickets while they were at it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey began to realize those ambitions and to dramatically bring down the cost of launch. According to one 2018 analysis: \u201cNASA\u2019s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg. Commercial launch has reduced the cost to LEO by a factor of 20.\u201dWhat if philanthropy isn\u2019t the best way for rich people to help others?It\u2019s easy to see how a roughly 10-minute round-trip space flight that takes passengers from Earth to Earth strikes many as a vanity project. There\u2019s no guarantee that every luxury good will eventually become a commodity. And competition ought to be a fair fight: No regulators playing favorites, no subsidies \u2014 right now, the private space sector is too reliant on government infrastructure and government contracts. But billionaires are helping turn a pricey, ineffective government initiative into a competitive industry, and they\u2019re doing it following an ego-powered, grandiose template that has worked before.The eccentric interests of prominent, sometimes wealthy weirdos trying to outdo each other brought us electric light, the automobile, commercial airlines, personal mobile phones and more. One day: passenger berths for regular schmos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the end, it doesn\u2019t matter whether Branson launched before Bezos, or if Musk thinks it would be cool to be \u201cborn on Earth and die on Mars. Hopefully not at the point of impact,\u201d as he\u2019s fond of saying. What matters is what the rest of us will do when we can buy tickets to use their tech, something Congress isn\u2019t putting on offer. Billionaire antics aren\u2019t the point. While politicians are pointing fingers, they\u2019re getting us one small step closer to where so many of us already agree we\u2019d like to go. Rich-guy pet projects just might turn spaceflight into a competitive industry. Congress can\u2019t agree on big things. Let billionaires handle space.",
        "author": "Katherine Mangu-Ward"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The op-eds that moved us in 2017 (WP: PostPartisan) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2853",
        "date": "2017-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/12/21/the-op-eds-that-moved-us-in-2017/",
        "text": "The Washington Post Opinions section publishes hundreds of op-eds from outside contributors,\u00a0on an enormous\u00a0range of topics in the news and not,\u00a0every year. Below,\u00a0Opinions staff members offer their favorites from 2017.\u00a0Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cThe world has already seen \u2018fire and fury\u2019\u2009\u201d by Ted Gup\u201cI picked this op-ed because it explains what is at stake. And because I hope by picking it there is a chance \u2014 probably slim \u2014 that the president might read it and the words would hopefully sink in. \u2018Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.\u2019\u2009\u201d\u00a0\u2014Jo-Ann Armao, associate editorial page editor \u201cTrump is acting like Pakistan\u2019s former dictator\u201d by Qasim Rashid\u201cWhile it may be easy to dismiss some of President Trump\u2019s more controversial tweets, Rashid excellently drew parallels between Trump\u2019s stoking of Islamophobia in the United States and the perilous path that Pakistan took under dictator Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. It\u2019s a sobering reminder of how hateful rhetoric can directly lead to the suffering of entire religious and ethnic communities, and a good history lesson, too.\u201d \u2014Karen Attiah, Global Opinions editorAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHonorable mention: \u201cI wanted to be Rwanda\u2019s first female president. Then fake nude photos appeared online.\u201d by\u00a0Diane Shima Rwigara\u201cHow the Russians pretended to be Texans\u00a0\u2014 and Texans believed them\u201d by Casey Michel\u201cWhile everyone was talking about Russian disinformation in general terms, Michel\u2019s piece took us deep into a specific case, complete with all sorts of bizarre and intriguing details. In the process, it helped to explain why Russian-instigated fake news can be highly effective even when it\u2019s obviously flawed.\u201d \u2014Christian Caryl, DemocracyPost editor\u201cWe\u2019re Seth Rich\u2019s parents. Stop politicizing our son\u2019s murder.\u201d by Mary Rich and Joel Rich\u201cI cannot begin to imagine the strength that the Riches, whose son was murdered in D.C. \u2014 half a block from where I live \u2014 have had to summon to keep speaking out about the killing of their son as his death \u2018has been turned into a political football.\u2019 Their pleading for \u2018those purveying falsehoods to give us peace\u2019 is heartbreaking, and shows us the real damage that false conspiracy theories can do.\u201d \u2014Becca Clemons, deputy digital opinions editorAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy wife died just after Election Day. I\u2019m attending the Women\u2019s March for her.\u201d by Charles Ikins\u201cCharles Ikins\u2019s op-ed was thoughtful, timely and poignant. This piece used an incredibly affecting personal story to reflect on the news and policy implications. Obviously, many of our writers use anecdotes to comment on larger points, but something about this man\u2019s perseverance through tragedy stood out. It was a well-done, moving and different kind of op-ed, and it stayed with me.\u201d \u2014Mary-Ellen Deily, editorial multiplatform editor\u201cEgypt imprisoned me for defending human rights. But I haven\u2019t lost hope.\u201d by Aya Hijazi\u201cEgyptian American Aya Hijazi\u2019s op-ed recounts how her struggle to help street children in Cairo landed her in prison for three years. It\u2019s a moving story of someone who, despite being senselessly persecuted, refuses to give up her fight for human rights in Egypt.\u201d \u2014Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editorAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI was born in poverty in Appalachia. \u2018Hillbilly Elegy\u2019 doesn\u2019t speak for me.\u201d by Betsy Rader\u201cJ.D. Vance\u2019s best-selling book about growing up poor in Appalachia continues to have an outsize influence on public debates over poverty. Rader\u2019s piece is a compelling reminder that Vance\u2019s experience isn\u2019t universal, that \u2018most poor people work\u2019 and that it is always good to be cautious about drawing conclusions through anecdotes.\u201d \u2014James Downie, digital opinions editor\u201cI lost my son to heroin. How many more will we lose before Trump cares?\u201d by Ted Gup\u201c2017 was a year in which our nation\u2019s leaders at all levels finally began to truly mobilize resources against the opioid epidemic, but it took countless heartbreaking stories such as Gup\u2019s to make it happen. I hope we never forget those stories so that we never permit such a large scale of inaction ever again.\u201d \u2014Robert Gebelhoff, assistant editor\u201cHow to make sure the Kremlin remembers Boris Nemtsov\u201d by Vladimir V. Kara-MurzaAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI like this because the author reminds us there\u2019s a difference between Russia and the Russian government, and because he has faith that someday Russians will take pride in their courageous compatriots who fought for democracy. And I admire him for his own courage: Poisoned twice during visits to Russia, he has not given up his advocacy for a more open, democratic Russia.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor\u201cWhat it\u2019s like to win the lottery as a woman\u201d by Samantha Ettus\u201cNo matter how many times I read Samantha Ettus\u2019s piece about all the times she has narrowly avoided falling victim to sexual violence, I\u2019m still shocked at the way the weight of it accumulates. \u2018I was a lottery winner,\u2019 she tells us after each awful near miss. Ettus\u2019s op-ed powerfully conveys the burden that sexual harassment and assault in our culture places on women \u2014 including the supposedly lucky ones.\u201d \u2014Michael Larabee, op-ed editorAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHonorable mentions: \u201cWhy I hate buying a new wheelchair\u201d by\u00a0Ben Mattlin; \u201cI\u2019ll show you my tax returns, Mr. President, if you show me yours\u201d by Joan Vannorsdall\u201cA DNA test upended everything I knew about my identity. Now who am I?\u201d by Kati Marton\u201cI love(d) this piece because it is a human story, beautifully told, about a DNA test that yielded results that could have disturbed but ended up reaffirming bonds of love and family. Unlike so much of what we ran this year, it is not about President Trump, except in a bit at the end that is all the more powerful for not being the main point.\u201d \u2014Ruth Marcus, deputy editorial page editorHonorable mention: \u201cI\u2019m a scientist. I\u2019m blowing the whistle on the Trump administration.\u201d by Joel Clement\u201cWhat happened when \u2018Pizzagate\u2019 came to my restaurant\u201d by James Alefantis\u201cShows that politics really is local \u2014 and sometimes scary. \u201d \u2014Jamie Riley, letters and Local Opinions editorStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe spacecraft that found for the first time where life could exist now\u201d by Jonathan Lunine\u201cI\u2019m not one of those people who think science is super-boring, but I\u2019m also not one of those people who seek out articles about scientific phenomena in their free time. This piece was stuffed from top to bottom with things I didn\u2019t know, and it made them more exciting than I\u2019d thought they could be \u2014 in part because the piece, like its topic, feels bigger than itself, and than everything that\u2019s going on down here on lame old Earth.\u201d \u2014Molly Roberts, digital opinions producerAdvertisement\u201cThe inconvenient truth about North Korea and China\u201d by Andrei Lankov\u201cAndrei Lankov lays out exactly how problematic the \u2018North Korea problem\u2019 is, and why even our best option \u2014 pressuring China, North Korea\u2019s lifeline, to cut the cord \u2014 has little prospect of success. Spoiler: China doesn\u2019t really see the problem as a problem, and indeed has a vested interest in the persistence of this compounding tragedy. \u201d \u2014Ryan Vogt, editorial multiplatform editor Here are some of our favorite opinion pieces by non-staff writers. Opinion: The op-eds that moved us in 2017",
        "author": "Post Opinions Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Pruitt steps up media profile in wake of Paris accord pullout (WP: PowerPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2854",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2017/06/07/the-energy-202-pruitt-steps-up-media-profile-in-wake-of-paris-accord-pullout/5936ea30e9b69b2fb981dc76/",
        "text": "THE LIGHTBULBThere has been much interest -- among Republicans, it\u2019s hopeful; among Democrats, it\u2019s fearful -- in how science will be conducted differently at the Environmental Protection Agency under Scott Pruitt. Following President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the EPA head\u00a0is seeking to explain.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe former Oklahoma attorney general is suddenly appearing on all kinds of media outlets -- from \"Meet the Press\" this past Sunday, to MSNBC's \"Morning Joe\" on Tuesday\u00a0to Fox News and Breitbart. In these segments, Pruitt not only defends the decision to depart the Paris accords (\"all hat and no cattle,\" Pruitt called Paris to Fox's Martha MacCallum) but hints at what might come at the EPA. Story continues below advertisementOn \"Morning Joe\" (not President Trump's favorite forum, incidentally), host and former Florida GOP congressman Joe Scarborough pressed Pruitt on whether he knew (no one else seems to) whether Trump believes that human activity causes climate change. See the exchange\u00a0below:Advertisement\u00a0The appearances on NBC and MSNBC mark a bit of a turning point for Pruitt, who until recently stuck to conservative\u00a0news organizations.\u00a0As\u00a0Scott Waldman of E&E News reported, Pruitt sought out friendly outlets after causing an uproar on CNBC's \u201cSquawk Box\u201d in March after saying that carbon dioxide is not a \"primary contributor\" to global warming, a position that contradicts the EPA's own science.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementBut Pruitt is still getting himself in front of\u00a0Trump's base, where he's\u00a0talking up some new ideas at his agency. In an interview Monday with a Breitbart\u00a0podcast,\u00a0Pruitt endorsed the idea of conducting something called a \u201cRed Team/Blue Team\u201d exercise for climate-change science at the EPA. Pruitt said:What the American people deserve, I think, is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2. And, uh, there was a great article in The Wall Street Journal about a month or so ago, Joel, called \u201cRed Team/Blue Team\u201d by Steve Koonin, a scientist I believe at NYU, and he talked about the importance of having a Red Team of scientists and a Blue Team of scientists, and those scientists get in a room and ask, what do we know, what don\u2019t we know, and what risk does it pose to human health and the United States and the world, with respect to this issue of CO2. The American people need to have that type of honest, open discussion, and it\u2019s something that we hope to provide as part of our leadership.Let\u2019s explain:What is a \u201cRed Team\u201d?Essentially, it\u2019s a group of people at an organization designated to be the Devil\u2019s Advocate (whereas \"Blue Team\" denotes the status quo). As Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University and under secretary for science at President Obama\u2019s Department of Energy, put it in the aforementioned op-ed in the WSJ: \u201cThe national-security community pioneered the \u201cRed Team\u201d methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce\u2014or at least understand\u2014uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations such as intelligence assessments, spacecraft design and major industrial operations.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWho thinks it\u2019s a good idea?Naturally, many scientists outside of the consensus on man-made climate change believe this\u00a0is the right approach for organizations like the EPA to take. One such scientist -- Judith Curry, professor emeritus at Georgia Tech\u2019s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences -- said as much to the House Science Committee, which oversees the agency, during testimony in March:\u201cA scientist\u2019s job is to continually challenge his/her own biases and ask \u2018How could I be wrong? Playing \u2018Devil\u2019s Advocate\u2019 helps a scientist examine how their conclusions might be misguided and how they might be wrong. Overcoming one\u2019s own biases is difficult; an external Devil\u2019s Advocate can play a useful role in questioning and criticizing the logic of the argument.\u201dWho thinks it\u2019s a bad idea?Naturally, the scientists whose consensus on climate change is being challenged. They argue that conventional science already has a rigorous process of testing conclusions called peer review\u00a0in which researchers in the same field anonymously scrutinized research results for errors before publication. (Proponents of the \u201cRed Team\u201d approach counter that a public debate is more honest).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen asked to elaborate on Pruitt's comments, EPA spokesperson\u00a0Liz Bowman said, \"We do not have anything to announce at this time, but as Administrator Pruitt said, the\u00a0American people need to have that kind of honest, open debate.\"\u00a0If Pruitt decides to have warring teams of scientists duel to the truth inside the EPA, Trump's base might enjoy the spectacle.Science and global warming especially has become a symbol\u00a0among conservatives for everything that was wrong with the Obama administration and how the Trump White House can fix it. Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord last week was applauded by 67 percent of Republicans, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, while 25 percent of GOPers opposed it.Story continues below advertisementIf Pruitt goes through with the plan, he would likely endear himself to climate change skeptics, which\u00a0-- judging by right-wing media sites -- has sometimes not been terribly happy with him, although that was before the Paris exit.AdvertisementThere was much blowback after an ill-received\u00a0Fox News interview with Pruitt in early April in which Breitbart condemned the EPA head as having\u00a0\"sweated, stuttered, and floundered\" and not adequately defending\u00a0the view that climate change is exaggerated. \"Here is the guy who was carefully selected to be in the vanguard of President Trump\u2019s war on the Green Blob which, for decades, has been doing untold damage to liberty, the scientific method, and the economy. And he can\u2019t even answer a few basic and obvious questions about why the job he is doing is necessary, important, and right,\" wrote Breitbart's James Delingpole.Here is the offending video:But at least Pruitt showed up.\u00a0Before the Paris deal, some administration officials were sharply divided on what to do about the Paris accords, with Trump's daughter\u00a0Ivanka\u00a0and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson\u00a0leading the pro-Paris side and White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon\u00a0and Pruitt pushing the anti-Paris cause. Only the withdrawal camp in the White House\u00a0had an effective advocate on television in Pruitt. The other side didn't.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd by all appearances, Pruitt has gotten a bit better at handling interviewers. Questioned again last Sunday by \"Meet the Press\" host Chuck Todd about what he believes the primary cause of climate change to be, Pruitt deflected:TODD: \"You don't believe that CO2 is the primary cause?\" \nPRUITT: \"No, I didn't say that. I said it's a cause.\" \nTODD: \"Primary?\" \nPRUITT: \"It's a cause of many. It's a cause like methane, and water vapor, and the rest.\"Meanwhile, Pruitt is making his own stop at the Vatican ahead of a meeting with the G-7 ministers in Italy this week, reports my colleague Juliet Eilperin.\u00a0It's unclear whether he'll meet, like Trump, with Pope Francis and be gifted a\u00a0second copy\u00a0of the pope's climate-change encyclical after Trump got one during his recent European trip.\u00a0 \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\nThe Paris fallout continues:Former President Obama weighs in again on the Paris decision. Calling Trump's decision a\u00a0\u201ctemporary absence of American leadership,\" he told a group of Canadians in a speech the Paris agreement still has a chance. \"We\u2019re going to have to act with more urgency. I\u2019m looking forward to the United States being a leader and not just on the sidelines going forward,\" he said.The\u00a0French ambassador to the United Nations adds his voice to the cacophony decrying the decision,\u00a0The Post's Anne Gearan\u00a0reports. \u201cAmerica is perceived on this on the wrong side of history. For some, its status has shifted. Once the most reliable guarantor of the world order, the U.S. is now being considered, again by some, and at the risk of exaggerating, a threat to our planet\u2019s equilibrium.\"Bret Stephen --\u00a0the New York Times columnist who wrote that controversial column arguing activists speak\u00a0with too much certainty about the consequences of climate change --\u00a0isn't happy\u00a0Pruitt quoted from his work during a press conference following the Paris announcement. During a Q&A with fellow columnist Gail Collins, he said:\u00a0 \n \n I was in Arizona, hiking with my son in Red Rock country, when Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, gave the press conference that dragged me into it. I\u2019m supposed to comment on the news, not be the news, so I tried to ignore it. But I guess it\u2019s unignorable.\u00a0At the risk of being the columnist who doth protest too much, let me just say this: My climate column was not, repeat not, about policy. It was about our mentality. It was about the perils of certitude in all things, not just climate but also political campaigning. So it had no business being in a policy statement of any sort. \nI was in Arizona, hiking with my son in Red Rock country, when Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, gave the press conference that dragged me into it. I\u2019m supposed to comment on the news, not be the news, so I tried to ignore it. But I guess it\u2019s unignorable.\u00a0At the risk of being the columnist who doth protest too much, let me just say this: My climate column was not, repeat not, about policy. It was about our mentality. It was about the perils of certitude in all things, not just climate but also political campaigning. So it had no business being in a policy statement of any sort.\n DECONSTRUCTION SITES\nPutting into sharp relief the slow pace at which the White House is filling top administration jobs, The Post's Chris Mooney reports that \"just seven, or 15 percent, of 46 top science posts in the federal government that require Senate confirmation\"\u00a0have been announced as of Tuesday.\u00a0But some key appointments at the Energy and Interior departments are moving forward.\u00a0The Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee voted Tuesday to advance four nominees for key roles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDan Brouillette was cleared to be deputy secretary of the Energy Department with bipartisan support, as were nominees Neil Chatterjee and Robert Powelson for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.The panel also voted to approve David Bernhardt,Trump\u2019s controversial nominee to be deputy secretary of the Interior. Environmentalists pushed Democrats to oppose his nomination because of his\u00a0former lobbying work\u00a0at\u00a0Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck\u00a0on behalf of several\u00a0energy and other extraction companies, such as Statoil and Halliburton. \"The list of issues\u00a0Bernhardt\u00a0has profited from as a lobbyist should be enough to recuse him right out of a job,\" said Diana Best, a senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace USA.\u00a0Red-state Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) were the only\u00a0non-Republicans who supported Bernhardt in the 14-9 vote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere is nothing wrong with Mr. Bernhardt representing these clients as a lawyer, but giving him the power to adjudicate his former client\u2019s interests as deputy secretary of the Interior raises serious appearance of conflict of interest issues,\u201d said the committee's top Democrat, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.),\u00a0The Hill reported.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Democrats were not pleased:Bernhardt\u2019s record does not suggest he will be a faithful steward of #PublicLands as @Interior Deputy Secretary\u2014 SenateEnergyDems (@EnergyDems) June 6, 2017\n\nFederal judges to Pruitt: Why are you pausing an Obama-era methane rule? The Hill's Timothy Cama reports: \"A federal court is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to explain why it has the authority to pause an Obama administration methane pollution rule. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said Tuesday that it is giving the EPA until June 15 to respond to a lawsuit filed Monday by environmental groups, who say the agency\u2019s action halting the rule was illegal.\"Ryan Zinke sounds off.\u00a0While speaking to members of the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association about privatizing part of the National Park Service, the Interior secretary\u00a0laid into some employees at the department he runs,\u00a0Corbin Hiar of\u00a0E&E News reports. Zinke said: \n \n \"We're too short on the front line, but boy, we have a lot of bureaucracy,\" he said. \"When you start to drain the swamp, you know what happens? You start to expose serpents... there are people out there that just don't want to see change, or they don't have courage to ask the question of what Interior should be in the next 100 years. We have to adapt now.\" \n\"We're too short on the front line, but boy, we have a lot of bureaucracy,\" he said. \"When you start to drain the swamp, you know what happens? You start to expose serpents... there are people out there that just don't want to see change, or they don't have courage to ask the question of what Interior should be in the next 100 years. We have to adapt now.\"And Rick Perry reassures Japan that \"the U.S. commitment to environment is unchanged,\" The Associated Press reports.... even though the United States recently gave up a commitment in the Paris deal.Finally, there's an aqueduct Trump wants to sell you.\u00a0The Post's Robert McCartney reports: \"The Trump administration wants to sell the Washington Aqueduct, stirring fears among some that the White House\u2019s passion for privatization could mean higher water bills for 1\u00a0million residents in the District and Northern Virginia.\u00a0But the plan, buried in a few short lines in a budget proposal of more than 1,200\u00a0pages, may lead to a different outcome. Some officials in the District want the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the aqueduct, instead to turn over the facility to D.C. Water, a public utility.\"\n OIL CHECK\nMore details about the results of ExxonMobil's annual shareholder\u00a0meeting are in.\u00a0Last week, financial firms Vanguard and BlackRock\u00a0led a shareholder rebellion against the firm's climate change policy -- specifically, a majority of shareholders asked the company to be more forthcoming on disclosing\u00a0the risks greenhouse gas regulation pose\u00a0to its business.\u00a0AdvertisementNow in an Securities and Exchange Commission filing, ExxonMobil said that two members of its board of directors --\u00a0Kenneth Frazier and\u00a0Steven Reinemund\u00a0-- received less than 80 percent of the vote from shareholders while all other directors got more than 95 percent of the vote. While both men kept their seats, good corporate governance groups interpret\u00a0the vote against the two\u00a0long-time members of the directors' governance\u00a0committee\u00a0as a shot across the bow on Exxon's\u00a0governance policy, which,\u00a0they say, isolates the board of directors.\"ExxonMobil's refusal to allow shareholders to engage directly with its board members is unacceptable, particularly as investors demand that ExxonMobil account for the significant risks posed by climate change,\"\u00a0Eli Kasargod-Staub, who led the 50/50 Climate Project's corporate governance research into\u00a0ExxonMobil, said50/50 Climate Project and other\u00a0groups are frustrated that, for example, shareholders are not allowed to meet with non-employee directors.\n ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE\nAt a meeting with Republican leaders, Trump reportedly floated the idea of covering his proposed Southern border wall with solar panels. More from Axios's Jonathan Swan: \"Trump said his vision was a wall 40 feet to 50 feet high and covered with solar panels so they'd be 'beautiful structures,'\u00a0[Republicans]\u00a0said. The President said that most walls you hear about are 14 feet or 15 feet tall but this would be nothing like those walls.\u00a0Trump told the lawmakers they could talk about the solar-paneled wall as long as they said it was his idea. One person cautioned that the President wasn't presenting the solar-paneled wall as the definite solution.\"Full SCALISE statement on TRUMP plan for solar panels on border wall https://t.co/eZAG7Q0FQZ pic.twitter.com/R4Ifsf6JF6\u2014 Scott Wong (@scottwongDC) June 6, 2017\n\nTrump: WHO'S GONNA PAY FOR THE WALL?!Crowd: THE SUN! https://t.co/99yI75gRfm\u2014 Tim Hogan (@timjhogan) June 6, 2017\n\nDems can't say no to a border wall if it supports clean energy. pic.twitter.com/MwI3lt76N8\u2014 Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) June 6, 2017\n\nI\u2019m actually really looking forward to an in-depth urbanist/green energy analysis of a 2,000 mile solar panel wall https://t.co/Tu7j3IoOcZ\u2014 Brandon Wall (@Walldo) June 6, 2017\n\nFLASHBACK: A Nevada businessman already proposed this to the Trump administration, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.A group of bipartisan senators are preparing a bill to extend carbon-capture tax credits.\u00a0Morning Consult's Iulia Gheorghiu\u00a0reports: \u201cA bill that would extend tax credits for carbon capture will soon be introduced, a Senate aide said Tuesday, as lawmakers want to ensure companies retain incentives to invest in the costly technology.\u201d\n THERMOMETER\nIn yet another indication of the interconnectedness of Earth's climate system, scientists report on how\u00a0major Greenland melting could devastate crops in Africa. \"As melting Greenland glaciers continue to pour ice into the Arctic Ocean, we have more than the rising seas to worry about, scientists say. A new study suggests that if it gets large enough, the influx of freshwater from the melting ice sheet could disrupt the flow of a major ocean current system, which in turn could dry out Africa\u2019s Sahel, a narrow region of land stretching from Mauritania in the west to Sudan in the east. The consequence could be devastating agricultural losses as the area\u2019s climate shifts.\"Scientists just linked another record-breaking weather event to climate change.\u00a0Chelsea Harvey reports: \"Last year, a remarkable April heat wave shattered all-time temperature records across Southeast Asia, prompting public health concerns, killing at least one elephant and making international headlines. Now, scientists believe the event was driven by the combined influence of a strong El Ni\u00f1o event and human-caused climate change. And they say events like it will only become more common in the future.\"\n LOCAL ENVIRONS\nThe Post sent a pair of reporters to Pennsylvania -- one to Hillary Clinton country, another to Trumpland -- to\u00a0take the temperature on Trump's Paris decision.Reporting from not-Paris, The Post's Todd C. Frankel reports\u00a0on Pittsburgh residents not buying Trump's climate talk:\u00a0While that one sentence in Trump\u2019s speech might have been just an applause line, a rhetorical flourish quickly forgotten in national political circles, it continues to resonate here. Trump was widely criticized for his nod to Pittsburgh because it\u2019s a solid blue dot in a regional sea of red. Hillary Clinton got 75 percent of the city\u2019s vote. But his comment also revealed a deeper misunderstanding about which regions are flourishing in the new economy and how they got there.And reporting from\u00a0Somerset County, Pa. -- i.e. coal country -- The Post's\u00a0Ana Swanson\u00a0talks to\u00a0coal miners who has internalized what the president has not: That much of the decline in coal is due to economic and not just regulatory forces.The towns scattered through the coal-rich Appalachian Mountains of southern Pennsylvania were pleased to hear their names on President Trump\u2019s lips last week as he announced the United States\u2019\u00a0withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Trump hailed \u201ca big opening of a brand-new mine\u201d \u2014 the Acosta Deep Mine, about 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh \u2014 as a sign of new life for the coal industry. \nBut while the locals heartily embrace the 70 or more new jobs the mine will bring, some, like Popernack, a lifelong coal miner like his father and his son, don\u2019t share the president\u2019s view of the industry\u2019s renaissance. \n\u201cCoal country is a great place to be from,\u201d Popernack said as he sat behind his applesauce at the Coal Miner\u2019s Cafe in Jennerstown. He repeated the line, emphasis on \u201cfrom,\u201d cracking a smile around broken teeth. \u201cDo you get it?\u201dHere are some more local headlines:HI:\u00a0Hawaii became the first state to pass laws enforcing portions of the Paris climate accordKS:\u00a0Utility Kansas City Power & Light (KCPL) has announced it will close six coal power units at three sites by 2019NJ: The state's two biggest coal-fired power plants retired\n DAYBOOK\nToday:President Trump will be in Cincinnati, Ohio today to promote his infrastructure plan. He\u2019s scheduled to speak at the Cincinnati Municipal Lunken Airport at 1 p.m. Eastern.The United Nations\u2019 first ocean conference will continue in New York. The conference through the end of this week. \u00a0The House \u00a0Agriculture Committee will hold a hearing on the farm bill and the \u201cFuture of International Food Aid and Agricultural Development.\u201dA House Natural Resources subcommittee will hold a hearing on the abandoned mine lands program.Devon Energy\u2019s annual meeting for shareholders\u00a0will start this morning, with an anticipated vote on a climate-change resolution.Coming UpA House Natural Resource subcommittee will have a legislative hearing on land reclamation and marine mammal protection on Thursday morning.The Hudson Institute is hosting an event on Thursday starting at 11:30 a.m. on \u201cthe importance of modernizing America\u2019s infrastructure.\u201dEPA head Scott Pruitt will testify before the House Appropriations Interior-EPA subcommittee next week\u00a0on the proposed budget\u00a0cuts.Later this month, the U.S. Energy Information Administration will host its 2017 Energy Conference in Washington D.C.Secretary Ryan Zinke has until June 10 to make a recommendation about the future of the contested Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.\u00a0The Senate Environment and Public Works\u00a0Committee postponed its hearing\u00a0on the nominations of Kristine Svinicki, Annie Caputo and David Wright to be members of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the nomination of Susan Bodine to be assistant administrator of the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance for the EPA. The hearing is now scheduled for June 13.\n EXTRA MILEAGE\nWatch explosives demolish the Orville Dam's spillway, which caused massive flooding in California in February:The Oroville Dam's damaged spillway, which threatened massive flooding in February, are now being demolished with controlled explosives. This slow-motion video shows two explosions that took place on May 31. (California Department of Water Resources)Watch a group playing a soccer game in Cologne, Germany, look unfazed while a dirt tornado emerges on the field, from Capital Weather Gang's Jason Samenow:\u00a0\nGreat video of a #DustDevil was captured during the traininglesson of the footballteam Rot Wei\u00df Zollstock in #Cologne #Germany \n\nSource : J\u00fcrgen Selinger\n\n*Steffen*Posted by Weather & Radar International on Sunday, June 4, 2017Watch the video of rock climber Alex Honnold climb the 3,000-ft wall of Yosemite's\u00a0El Capitan, the first person to ever do a free solo climb at the site. (National Geographic)If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! He's appearing on liberal and conservative outlets. The Energy 202: Pruitt steps up media profile in wake of Paris accord pullout",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Technology 202: Democrats hope 'Save the Internet' will reap political dividends (WP: PowerPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2855",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-technology-202/2019/03/08/the-technology-202-democrats-hope-save-the-internet-will-reap-political-dividends/5c8164921b326b2d177d6017/",
        "text": "with Bastien InzaurraldeCtrl + NWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA measure from congressional Democrats\u00a0to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules is most likely dead on arrival. But the party\u2019s top brass is throwing its weight behind the effort\u00a0anyway \u2014 signaling it\u2019s an issue the party's betting might resonate with 2020 voters.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and about 40 other Senate Democrats\u00a0are lining up behind a bill to reverse a decision by President Trump\u2019s Federal Communications Commission and reinstate 2015 rules to make the Internet a public utility and prevent cable and Internet companies from blocking sites they don't like or speeding up a web site's traffic in exchange for money. Story continues below advertisementThough the bill has a strong chance of\u00a0passing a Democratic-controlled House, it\u2019s not a priority in a Republican-led Senate. It\u2019s even less likely that Trump would sign a law reversing his administration\u2019s decision.AdvertisementGigi Sohn, a top FCC adviser during the Obama administration, acknowledged the path to make the bill law would be difficult while Trump sits in the Oval Office.\u00a0\u201cThis about setting up for the future,\u201d Sohn told me. \u201cThey\u2019re making it an election issue, as it should be.\u201dSome of the party\u2019s most prominent 2020 presidential candidates \u2014 including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Amy Klobuchar\u00a0(Minn.) and Cory Booker (N.J.) \u2014 are touting their support for the \u201cSave the Internet\u201d bill on social media. Net neutrality\u00a0will likely be a buzzy topic as several candidates, including Warren and Klobuchar, mingle with the tech industry at the South by Southwest conference in Austin this weekend.Story continues below advertisementPelosi and the 2020 candidates are hoping that the theme fits into the broader Democratic messaging of making the economy fairer to people on the lower-end of the income spectrum. They hope that voters see large internet service providers with\u00a0broad control over\u00a0costs and the delivery of content as players similar to big companies they see as taking advantage of the little guy.AdvertisementNet neutrality has been part of the Democrats\u2019 platform for many cycles \u2014 but it\u2019s doubtful that issue alone can move voters' feet to the polls in the same way other concerns such as health care or immigration.\u00a0But that doesn't mean Democrats aren't trying.\u00a0Warren, who is known for her rhetoric against Wall Street and calls to break up monopolies, wrote on Twitter that the Internet \"doesn't belong to a few giant companies.\"\u00a0The internet doesn\u2019t belong to a few giant companies \u2013 it belongs to all of us. Rather than tilting the playing field toward corporate interests, I'm joining @SenMarkey and @SenateDems to introduce a bill that restores #NetNeutrality and keeps the internet free and open for all. https://t.co/H4SBN1RSlP\u2014 Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) March 6, 2019\n\nHarris noted her support of the bill is about the \"future of the economy\" in a Tweet:Cable companies shouldn\u2019t have the ability to block or slow down what you read or watch online. Period. The fight to restore net neutrality is about the future of our economy, free speech, and protecting consumers. We can\u2019t back down. https://t.co/23pH9Kubkr\u2014 Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) March 7, 2019\n\nDemocrats are also betting the issue of fairness on the web\u00a0could resonate with millennials\u00a0-- a key demographic the party needs to mobilize in 2020.\u00a0As\u00a0Trump focuses on reviving legacy industries like manufacturing and mining, early 2020 primary candidates' rhetoric indicates that Democrats may instead try to paint themselves as a more digitally savvy party, touting their commitment to innovation and\u00a0net neutrality.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYoung people in particular get it, this is about your jobs and your future,\u201d Pelosi said at a news conference on Wednesday.\u00a0Reversing the Trump administration's decision to gut net neutrality is a politically popular position, according to limited available polling. A\u00a02017 University of Maryland survey\u00a0found\u00a0broad bipartisan opposition to repealing the rules. Following a briefing about net neutrality, 83 percent of those surveyed\u00a0opposed repealing net neutrality, including 75 percent\u00a0of Republicans, as well as 89 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of independents.But there's little polling data available on whether net neutrality can actually move voters.Story continues below advertisementBut there are some signs a\u00a0related telecom\u00a0issue -- access to broadband -- could\u00a0be a a top issue for voters in rural areas,\u00a0Sohn said. Already, 2020 candidate Klobuchar is making rural broadband access central to her bid for the White House, highlighting it as a key issue in the speech announcing her candidacy.\u00a0AdvertisementAnd Pelosi said\u00a0the Democrats' net neutrality push is about more than just maintaining an open Internet --\u00a0it's about ensuring all Americans have access no matter where they live.\u00a0\u201cThis legislation also brings the power of the Internet to every corner of the country,\" Pelosi said. \"From rural America to our cities. We must close the urban/rural digital divide, guaranteeing better, cheaper internet, so that we can unlock the economic potential for all.\u201dStory continues below advertisementKlobuchar says ending net neutrality hurts rural communities in a tweet:\u00a0Ending #NetNeutrality hurts consumers, small businesses and rural communities. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve joined @SenMarkey and @SenateDems to introduce the Save the Internet Act. We must act to #SaveTheNet!https://t.co/1UbAsnajPY\u2014 Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) March 7, 2019\n\nIn addition to the party's long game,\u00a0there's also strong pressure on Democrats to keep the issue alive from open Internet advocates.\u00a0Sohn told me she's never seen such sustained activism around a tech policy issue for so many years, and that activists'\u00a0efforts to call lawmakers offices and bring attention to the issue through social media is making a difference.Advertisement\"The small but hardy net neutrality advocates are going to push this thing to end of the earth,\" Sohn said.Note to Readers: I'm sorry to share this is\u00a0Bastien Inzaurralde's last day with The Technology 202. As the newsletter's all-star researcher, Bastien worked around the clock to\u00a0bring\u00a0you the most important stories at the intersection of Washington and Silicon Valley. He played an integral role in the newsletter's launch last year, and his sharp writing and news judgement will be sorely missed. I wish Bastien the best as he moves on to an exciting new opportunity\u00a0at Agence France-Presse.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement \n \n \n You are reading The Technology 202, our guide to the intersection of technology and politics. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n BITS, NIBBLES AND BYTES\nBITS: Facebook\u00a0will bar advertisements containing anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and\u00a0misinformation, and it will no longer reccommend the offending pages and groups,\u00a0according\u00a0 to my colleague Reis Thebault.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0company also said it would stop reccommending such content on Instagram.\u00a0AdvertisementMonika Bickert, Facebook head of global policy management, said leading health organizations have publicly identified vaccine hoaxes, and the company will take action on them if they appear on Facebook.\u00a0The changes come after intense political pressure on Capitol Hill,\u00a0when a Senate panel issued a strong\u00a0warning\u00a0about the public health threat of vaccine disinformation. \"There,\u00a018-year-old Ethan Lindenberger testified\u00a0that his mother, an anti-vaccine evangelist, relies on Facebook or Facebook-linked sites for all of her information on the subject,\" Reis wrote.\u00a0\"And she\u2019s certainly not alone.\"NIBBLES: Top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee want to know whether\u00a0Trump or his allies sought to interfere\u00a0in the\u00a0AT&T\u00a0and Time Warner merger, The Washington\u00a0Post's\u00a0Brian Fung and Tony Romm reported. A federal appeals court last week upheld the merger, which the Justice Department opposed.\u00a0Rep. Jerrold\u00a0Nadler (D-N.Y.), the committee's chairman, and Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.), who chairs the panel's antitrust subcommittee, requested documents and communications logs between the president and several officials. Trump opposed the proposed merger when he was running for president in 2016, and the New Yorker recently reported that as president he ordered his then-top economic adviser Gary Cohn to contact DOJ\u00a0in an attempt to prevent the merger.\u00a0\u201cNadler and Cicilline are focusing their request on the period from November 2016, just after Election Day, to Feb. 26 of this year,\u201d my colleagues wrote.\u00a0\u201cIn addition to seeking communications between Trump and top aides, the lawmakers asked for records documenting contact between the Justice Department and Trump or Cohn or any other White House employee.\u201dBYTES: Several electric scooter companies are moving to hire\u00a0more employees instead of solely relying on gig economy contractors, Wired's Aarian Marshall reported. In Los Angeles, Spin has hired 45 workers and could recruit more in other places in the United States if the change bears fruit \u2014 the company is present in 12 cities and eight\u00a0college campuses. \u201cThose who work more than 30 hours a week are entitled to full benefits: paid time off, health and dental insurance, and commuter benefits. They\u2019ll get a W-2 form come tax season,\u201d Wired reported.\u00a0The Los Angeles employees are tasked with maintaining and collecting\u00a0the scooters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSwitching from contracting to hiring employees can result in increased payroll expenses, but some start-ups in other sectors decided to go down this route even if it doesn't ensure success,\u00a0Marshall noted.\u00a0\u201cScooter-share is a new business, and not yet a profitable one; this shift is a sign that the companies are still working out the kinks,\u201d according to Wired.\n PRIVATE CLOUD\n\u2014 A YouTube spokesman said the company will show fact checks in the video platform's\u00a0search results when people look for issues that can be\u00a0\u201cprone to misinformation,\u201d BuzzFeed News's\u00a0Pranav Dixit reported. The fact checks, which the company calls \u201cinformation panels,\u201d have already been launched in India for some users and they are\u00a0set to ultimately be deployed globally.\u00a0\u201cTo be clear: Videos containing misinformation can still appear in the search results, but YouTube will generate these disclaimers when a query involves sensitive topics, with the intent to inform viewers as the company deals with the spread of misinformation on the platform,\u201d according to BuzzFeed News.\u2014 Facebook said it cracked down on a network of accounts, pages and groups in Britain that engaged in \u201ccoordinated inauthentic behavior\u201d to spread divisive and\u00a0hateful comments on the platform.\u00a0Those who controlled the fake accounts pushed both far-right and anti-far-right messaging online and misrepresented who they were, according to a\u00a0post\u00a0by\u00a0Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy at Facebook.\u00a0They posted content about racism, immigration, free speech, LGBT issues, religion and other topics.\u00a0Some of those pages, groups and accounts had names such as\u00a0\u201cAnti Far Right Extremists,\u201d\u00a0\u201cAtheists Research Centre\u201d and\u00a0\u201cPoliticalized.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company took down 23 pages, 74 accounts and five\u00a0groups on Facebook as well as 35 Instagram accounts that belonged to\u00a0this British network.\u00a0The tech giant also said that it took down 31 pages, groups and accounts on Facebook that were part of a different misinformation network in Romania.\u00a0Those behind the Romanian network\u00a0\u201ctypically posted about local news and political issues, including partisan news under fictitious bylines in support of the Social Democratic Party,\u201d\u00a0Gleicher wrote.\u00a0\u2014 More technology news from the private sector:When tax prep is free, you may be paying with your privacy (Geoffrey Fowler)Amazon Is Flooding D.C. With Money and Muscle: The Influence Game (Bloomberg News)Exclusive: Yelp averts board challenge as SQN endorses changes (Reuters)Facebook Shift Nods to Example of Chinese Super-App WeChat (The Wall Street Journal)\n PUBLIC CLOUD\n\u2014 The Defense Department is reviewing the security clearance of SpaceX chief executive\u00a0Elon Musk\u00a0after he smoked marijuana as he appeared on a podcast last year, Bloomberg News's\u00a0Anthony Capaccio reported, citing a U.S. official. \u201cMusk has refiled his SF-86 security form, which requires a federal employee or contractor seeking a clearance to acknowledge any illegal drug use over the previous seven years, according to the official, who asked not to be identified,\u201d Bloomberg News reported.\u00a0\u201cThe entrepreneur has a secret-level clearance because of his role as founder and CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is certified to launch military spy satellites.\u201d\u2014 Senators from both parties scolded Equifax and Marriott for failing to\u00a0prevent\u00a0huge data breaches that exposed consumers'\u00a0data and put people at risk of identity theft, my colleague Tony reported.The top\u00a0executives\u00a0appeared at a hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations\u00a0where lawmakers concentrated their attention on the Equifax breach. \u201cI understand you\u2019re doing things, but you\u2019re doing things after a major breach,\u201d said Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), according to my colleague. \u201cAnd what I want to make sure [of is] that Americans -- whose information is in the custody of an entity they may not even know anything about \u2014 don\u2019t have to wait for there to be a breach before companies start doing what they should responsibly do.\u201d\u2014 More technology news from the public sector:Philadelphia Is First U.S. City to Ban Cashless Stores (The Wall Street Journal)Can a judge order Elon Musk to delete his Twitter account? (The Verge)\n FAST FWD\n\u2014 News about tech workforce and culture:Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive (The New York Times)Amazon to Shut All U.S. Pop-Up Stores as It Rethinks Physical Retail Strategy (The Wall Street Journal)Tesla doesn't know where it will build the Model Y as it rolls out more layoffs and cost cuts (CNBC)\n #TRENDING\n\u2014 Tech news generating buzz around the Web:Tim Cook acknowledged Trump's flub and changed his last name to an Apple logo on Twitter (CNBC)Millennials, Generation Z: Connected with thousands of friends \u2013 but feeling all alone (USA Today)New Zealand farmers have a new tool for herding sheep: drones that bark like dogs (Peter Holley)The queen just posted on Instagram for the first time (CNBC)\n @MENTIONS\n\u2014\u00a0Kelly Bennett, chief marketing officer at Netflix, will leave the company, Reuters reported.\n BURN RATE\n\u2014 Today in funding news:SoftBank launches the Innovation Fund, committing $2B to invest in Latin America (TechCrunch)Airbnb Acquires HotelTonight to Expand Travel Portfolio (The New York Times)\n CHECK-INS\nComing soon:Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act on March 12.House Judiciary Committee hearing on the T-Mobile and Sprint merger on March 12.The Brookings Institution holds an event titled \u201cHow can public policy keep up with technological change?\u201d on March 12.The Brookings Institution holds a discussion on \u201cHow China and the U.S. are advancing artificial intelligence\u201d on March 12.The Brookings Institution holds a discussion on online consumer privacy on March 14.\n WIRED IN\nWhat's next for U.S.-North Korea talks after no deal in Hanoi?Here is what to expect after the collapse of the planned March 2019 summit in Hanoi between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Trump. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)Representatives argue over Nickelback on the House floor:Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) joked March 7 about the \u201cpretty low\u201d number of Nickelback fans while discussing an election measure. (U.S. House)Watch Mike Daum shoot hoops with his parents:South Dakota State forward Mike Daum shoots baskets with his parents before each home game. (Chuck Culpepper/The Washington Post) It's a better slogan than net neutrality. The Technology 202: Democrats hope 'Save the Internet' will reap political dividends",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "IBM and Samsung Unveil Semiconductor Breakthrough That Defies Conventional Design (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2856",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-and-samsung-unveil-semiconductor-breakthrough-that-defies-conventional-design-01639479926?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=2",
        "text": "The two companies' semiconductor innovation was produced at the Albany Nanotech Complex in Albany, NY, where research scientists work in close collaboration with public and private sector partners to push the boundaries of logic scaling and semiconductor capabilities. \n\n This collaborative approach to innovation makes the Albany Nanotech Complex a world-leading ecosystem for semiconductor research and creates a strong innovation pipeline, helping to address manufacturing demands and accelerate the growth of the global chip industry. \n\n\n The new vertical transistor breakthrough could help the semiconductor industry continue its relentless journey to deliver significant improvements, including: \n -- Potential device architecture that enables semiconductor device scaling \n to continue beyond nanosheet. \n \n -- Cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, \n instead of days. \n \n -- Energy intensive processes, such as cryptomining operations and data \n encryption, could require significantly less energy and have a smaller \n carbon footprint. \n \n -- Continued expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices with \n lower energy needs, allowing them to operate in more diverse environments \n like ocean buoys, autonomous vehicles, and spacecraft. \n \"Today's technology announcement is about challenging convention and rethinking how we continue to advance society and deliver new innovations that improve life, business and reduce our environmental impact,\" Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Systems, IBM Research. \"Given the constraints the industry is currently facing along multiple fronts, IBM and Samsung are demonstrating our commitment to joint innovation in semiconductor design and a shared pursuit of what we call 'hard tech.'\" \n\n Moore's Law, the principle that the number of transistors incorporated in a densely populated IC chip will approximately double every two years, is quickly nearing what are considered insurmountable barriers. Simply put, as more and more transistors are crammed into a finite area, engineers are running out of space. \n\n Historically, transistors have been built to lie flat upon the surface of a semiconductor, with the electric current flowing laterally, or side-to-side, through them. With new Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors, or VTFET, IBM and Samsung have successfully implemented transistors that are built perpendicular to the surface of the chip with a vertical, or up-and-down, current flow. \n\n The VTFET process addresses many barriers to performance and limitations to extend Moore's Law as chip designers attempt to pack more transistors into a fixed space. It also influences the contact points for the transistors, allowing for greater current flow with less wasted energy. Overall, the new design aims to deliver a two times improvement in performance or an 85 percent reduction in energy use as compared to scaled finFET alternatives(1) . \n\n Recently, IBM announced the 2 nm chip technology breakthrough which will allow a chip to fit up to 50 billion transistors in a space the size of a fingernail. VTFET innovation focuses on a whole new dimension, which offers a pathway to the continuation of Moore's Law. \n\n Innovation at the Albany Nanotech Complex is often directed towards commercialization, and on that end of the chip lifecycle today the companies also announced that Samsung will manufacture IBM's chips at the 5 nm node. These chips are anticipated to be used in IBM's own server platforms. This follows the announcement in 2018 that Samsung would manufacture IBM's 7 nm chips, which became available in the IBM Power10 family of servers earlier this year. The IBM Telum processor, also revealed earlier this year, is similarly manufactured by Samsung using IBM's designs. \n\n IBM's legacy of semiconductor breakthroughs also includes the first implementation of 7 nm and 5 nm process technologies, High-k metal gate technology, channel SiGe transistors, single cell DRAM, the Dennard Scaling Laws, chemically amplified photoresists, copper interconnect wiring, Silicon on Insulator technology, multi core microprocessors, embedded DRAM, and 3D chip stacking. \n\n About IBM \n\n For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com. \n\n Media Contact \n\n Kortney Easterly \n\n IBM Research Communications \n\n Kortney.Easterly@ibm.com \n\n (1) VTFET nanosheet and scaled FinFET device simulation results are compared at the same footprint and at an aggressive sub-45nm gate pitch. VTFET nanosheets provides 2X performance of the scaled FinFET at equivalent power due to VTFET maintaining good electrostatics and parasitics while FinFET performance is impacted by severe scaling constraints. Or VTFET could provide as much as 85% power reduction compared to the scaled FinFET architecture as compared at an equivalent frequency on the extrapolated power-performance curves. \n\n View original content to download multimedi  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "IBM and Samsung Unveil Semiconductor Breakthrough That Defies Conventional Design (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2857",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-and-samsung-unveil-semiconductor-breakthrough-that-defies-conventional-design-01639479926?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=6",
        "text": "The two companies' semiconductor innovation was produced at the Albany Nanotech Complex in Albany, NY, where research scientists work in close collaboration with public and private sector partners to push the boundaries of logic scaling and semiconductor capabilities. \n\n\n\n\n\n This collaborative approach to innovation makes the Albany Nanotech Complex a world-leading ecosystem for semiconductor research and creates a strong innovation pipeline, helping to address manufacturing demands and accelerate the growth of the global chip industry. \n\n\n The new vertical transistor breakthrough could help the semiconductor industry continue its relentless journey to deliver significant improvements, including: \n -- Potential device architecture that enables semiconductor device scaling \n to continue beyond nanosheet. \n \n -- Cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, \n instead of days. \n \n -- Energy intensive processes, such as cryptomining operations and data \n encryption, could require significantly less energy and have a smaller \n carbon footprint. \n \n -- Continued expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices with \n lower energy needs, allowing them to operate in more diverse environments \n like ocean buoys, autonomous vehicles, and spacecraft. \n \"Today's technology announcement is about challenging convention and rethinking how we continue to advance society and deliver new innovations that improve life, business and reduce our environmental impact,\" Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Systems, IBM Research. \"Given the constraints the industry is currently facing along multiple fronts, IBM and Samsung are demonstrating our commitment to joint innovation in semiconductor design and a shared pursuit of what we call 'hard tech.'\" \n\n Moore's Law, the principle that the number of transistors incorporated in a densely populated IC chip will approximately double every two years, is quickly nearing what are considered insurmountable barriers. Simply put, as more and more transistors are crammed into a finite area, engineers are running out of space. \n\n Historically, transistors have been built to lie flat upon the surface of a semiconductor, with the electric current flowing laterally, or side-to-side, through them. With new Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors, or VTFET, IBM and Samsung have successfully implemented transistors that are built perpendicular to the surface of the chip with a vertical, or up-and-down, current flow. \n\n The VTFET process addresses many barriers to performance and limitations to extend Moore's Law as chip designers attempt to pack more transistors into a fixed space. It also influences the contact points for the transistors, allowing for greater current flow with less wasted energy. Overall, the new design aims to deliver a two times improvement in performance or an 85 percent reduction in energy use as compared to scaled finFET alternatives(1) . \n\n Recently, IBM announced the 2 nm chip technology breakthrough which will allow a chip to fit up to 50 billion transistors in a space the size of a fingernail. VTFET innovation focuses on a whole new dimension, which offers a pathway to the continuation of Moore's Law. \n\n Innovation at the Albany Nanotech Complex is often directed towards commercialization, and on that end of the chip lifecycle today the companies also announced that Samsung will manufacture IBM's chips at the 5 nm node. These chips are anticipated to be used in IBM's own server platforms. This follows the announcement in 2018 that Samsung would manufacture IBM's 7 nm chips, which became available in the IBM Power10 family of servers earlier this year. The IBM Telum processor, also revealed earlier this year, is similarly manufactured by Samsung using IBM's designs. \n\n IBM's legacy of semiconductor breakthroughs also includes the first implementation of 7 nm and 5 nm process technologies, High-k metal gate technology, channel SiGe transistors, single cell DRAM, the Dennard Scaling Laws, chemically amplified photoresists, copper interconnect wiring, Silicon on Insulator technology, multi core microprocessors, embedded DRAM, and 3D chip stacking. \n\n About IBM \n\n For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com. \n\n Media Contact \n\n Kortney Easterly \n\n IBM Research Communications \n\n Kortney.Easterly@ibm.com \n\n (1) VTFET nanosheet and scaled FinFET device simulation results are compared at the same footprint and at an aggressive sub-45nm gate pitch. VTFET nanosheets provides 2X performance of the scaled FinFET at equivalent power due to VTFET maintaining good electrostatics and parasitics while FinFET performance is impacted by severe scaling constraints. Or VTFET could provide as much as 85% power reduction compared to the scaled FinFET architecture as compared at an equivalent frequency on the extrapolated power-performance curves. \n\n View original content to download multi  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Viasat Joins the Paris Peace Forum's 'Net Zero Space' Initiative (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2858",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/viasat-joins-the-paris-peace-forum-s-net-zero-space-initiative-01639400760?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=2",
        "text": "Signatories are asked to contribute tangible actions to contribute to the 'net zero' goal. As part of its contribution, Viasat published a White Paper titled, \"Managing Mega-Constellation Risks in LEO,\" setting out the main considerations for calculating the aggregate risks associated with large LEO constellations, and developing methods to mitigate them. In the paper, Viasat is committed to developing comprehensive models that: \n -- Employ quantitative metrics and measurement tools that enable a full \n evaluation of the current environment in LEO, the expected evolution of \n that environment, and the expected consequences of more intensive uses \n planned for those orbits, and \n \n -- Assist in the design and operation of sustainable spacecraft and \n constellations. \n \"The Earth's shared orbital resources are finite, fragile and at risk of over-exploitation. Viasat has long advocated for safe use of these resources, and we are pleased to join the 'Net Zero Space' initiative,\" said Mark Dankberg, co-founder and executive chairman, Viasat. \"Our modelling aims to forecast the evolution of debris in LEO so that regulators can set prudent limits on collision risk, and require responsible spacecraft and constellation design and operations. Comprehensive models are the only way to understand and forecast the impact on the orbital environment of the growing use of LEO, and ensure equitable and safe access to those shared orbital resources. We urge satellite operators and national space agencies to join the initiative and work together to protect the use of space by all nations.\" \n\n\n In October 2021, Viasat launched its inaugural Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report, where the Company committed to being a leader in bringing the benefits of space technology to the world in a sustainable, responsible and inclusive way. Viasat is focused on cooperating with a broad range of responsible nations and global partners; joining the Paris Peace Forum's 'Net Zero Space' Initiative is a testament to Viasat's commitment. \n\n The Paris Peace Forum is a platform open to all seeking to develop coordination, rules, and capacities that answer global problems. \n\n About Viasat \n\n Viasat is a global communications company that believes everyone and everything in the world can be connected. For more than 35 years, Viasat has helped shape how consumers, businesses, governments and militaries around the world communicate. Today, the Company is developing the ultimate global communications network to power high-quality, secure, affordable, fast connections to impact people's lives anywhere they are--on the ground, in the air or at sea. To learn more about Viasat, visit: www.viasat.com, go to Viasat's Corporate Blog, or follow the Company on social media at: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This press release contains forward-looking statements that are subject to the safe harbors created under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements include statements that refer to the opportunities around Viasat's commitment to the 'Net Zero Space' initiative; results from its contributions to the overall 'net zero' goal; outcomes that result from its White Paper(s) on calculating the aggregate risks associated with large LEO constellations, and the developing methods to mitigate them; and statements that relate to the Company's ESG plans and initiatives and the expected impact thereof. Readers are cautioned that actual results could differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ include: risks associated with the construction, launch and operation of satellites, including the effect of any anomaly, operational failure or degradation in satellite performance; and regulatory issues. In addition, please refer to the risk factors contained in Viasat's SEC filings available at www.sec.gov, including Viasat's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they are made. Viasat undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements for any reason. \n\n Copyright (c) 2021 Viasat, Inc. All rights reserved. Viasat, the Viasat logo and the Viasat signal are registered trademarks of Viasat, Inc. All other product or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. \n\n View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/viasat-joins-the-paris-peace-forums-net-zero-space-initiative-301442819.html \n\n SOURCE Viasat, Inc. \n\n /CONTACT: Chris Phillips, Public Relations, +1 (760) 476-2322, Christina.Phillips@viasat.com; or Peter Lopez, Investor Relations, +1 (760) 476-2633, IR@viasat.com \n\n /Web si  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Ball Aerospace-Built Optics and Mirror System Launched Today Aboard James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2859",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ball-aerospace-built-optics-and-mirror-system-launched-today-aboard-james-webb-space-telescope-01640440967?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1",
        "text": "\"It is truly an honor to be such an integral part of the next great space observatory,\" said Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager, Civil Space, Ball Aerospace. \"Today's launch is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a closely integrated team that spanned across multiple mission partners and NASA. We are tremendously eager to see the science the new observatory captures.\" \n\n Announced as the Next Generation Space Telescope in 1996, and renamed James Webb Space Telescope in 2002, the space science observatory represents the largest and most complex ever built. Once on orbit, Webb will capture faint light from the very first objects that illuminated the universe after the Big Bang. \n\n To make this possible, Ball Aerospace worked with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman, the prime industry partner, to innovate the 25 square-meter (269 square feet) mirror system consisting of 18 beryllium mirror segments working together as one mirror. It will be the largest mirror and the first segmented telescope ever deployed in space, operating at the extremely cold space temperature of -406 F (30K) necessary for infrared imaging of distant stars and galaxies. \n\n\n Ball also developed the cryogenic actuators mounted on each segment to control individual mirror positioning and curvature radius within one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. To align the mirror segments, Ball also designed the 22 electronic flight control boxes to operate in a deep-freeze space environment to individually control each of the 132 actuators that keep the telescope segments properly aligned on orbit. \n\n To innovate, validate and demonstrate technologies used to develop Webb's pioneering optical system, Ball Aerospace drew on its in-depth experience with space hardware designed for all four of NASA's Great Observatories (Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope). \n\n Ball is also playing critical roles in other upcoming space observation missions. It is partnering with Goddard to develop the Wide Field Instrument for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and providing the spacecraft bus and telescope for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). Earlier this month, the Ball-built Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) launched from Kennedy Space Center on its mission to uncover the inner workings of some of the most exotic astronomical objects in our universe, such as neutron stars and black holes. \n\n Powered by endlessly curious people with an unwavering mission focus, Ball Aerospace pioneers discoveries that enable our customers to perform beyond expectation and protect what matters most. We create innovative space solutions, enable more accurate weather forecasts, drive insightful observations of our planet, deliver actionable data and intelligence, and ensure those who defend our freedom go forward bravely and return home safely. Go Beyond with Ball.(R) For more information, visit www.ball.com/aerospace or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n About Ball Corporation \n\n Ball Corporation (NYSE: BLL) supplies innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging solutions for beverage, personal care and household products customers, as well as aerospace and other technologies and services primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ 21,500 people worldwide and reported 2020 net sales of $11.8 billion. For more information, visit www.ball.com, or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This release contains \"forward-looking\" statements concerning future events and financial performance. Words such as \"expects,\" \"anticipates, \" \"estimates,\" \"believes,\" and similar expressions typically identify forward-looking statements, which are generally any statements other than statements of historical fact. Such statements are based on current expectations or views of the future and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied. You should therefore not place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements and they should be read in conjunction with, and qualified in their entirety by, the cautionary statements referenced below. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Key factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to be different are summarized in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Exhibit 99 in our Form 10-K, which are available on our website and at www.sec.gov. Additional factors that might affect: a) our packaging segments include product capacity, supply, and demand constraints and fluctuations and changes in consumption patte  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Ball Aerospace-Built Optics and Mirror System Launched Today Aboard James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2860",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ball-aerospace-built-optics-and-mirror-system-launched-today-aboard-james-webb-space-telescope-01640440967?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=2",
        "text": "\"It is truly an honor to be such an integral part of the next great space observatory,\" said Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager, Civil Space, Ball Aerospace. \"Today's launch is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a closely integrated team that spanned across multiple mission partners and NASA. We are tremendously eager to see the science the new observatory captures.\" \n\n Announced as the Next Generation Space Telescope in 1996, and renamed James Webb Space Telescope in 2002, the space science observatory represents the largest and most complex ever built. Once on orbit, Webb will capture faint light from the very first objects that illuminated the universe after the Big Bang. \n\n\n\n\n\n To make this possible, Ball Aerospace worked with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman, the prime industry partner, to innovate the 25 square-meter (269 square feet) mirror system consisting of 18 beryllium mirror segments working together as one mirror. It will be the largest mirror and the first segmented telescope ever deployed in space, operating at the extremely cold space temperature of -406 F (30K) necessary for infrared imaging of distant stars and galaxies. \n\n\n Ball also developed the cryogenic actuators mounted on each segment to control individual mirror positioning and curvature radius within one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. To align the mirror segments, Ball also designed the 22 electronic flight control boxes to operate in a deep-freeze space environment to individually control each of the 132 actuators that keep the telescope segments properly aligned on orbit. \n\n To innovate, validate and demonstrate technologies used to develop Webb's pioneering optical system, Ball Aerospace drew on its in-depth experience with space hardware designed for all four of NASA's Great Observatories (Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope). \n\n Ball is also playing critical roles in other upcoming space observation missions. It is partnering with Goddard to develop the Wide Field Instrument for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and providing the spacecraft bus and telescope for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). Earlier this month, the Ball-built Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) launched from Kennedy Space Center on its mission to uncover the inner workings of some of the most exotic astronomical objects in our universe, such as neutron stars and black holes. \n\n Powered by endlessly curious people with an unwavering mission focus, Ball Aerospace pioneers discoveries that enable our customers to perform beyond expectation and protect what matters most. We create innovative space solutions, enable more accurate weather forecasts, drive insightful observations of our planet, deliver actionable data and intelligence, and ensure those who defend our freedom go forward bravely and return home safely. Go Beyond with Ball.(R) For more information, visit www.ball.com/aerospace or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n About Ball Corporation \n\n Ball Corporation (NYSE: BLL) supplies innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging solutions for beverage, personal care and household products customers, as well as aerospace and other technologies and services primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ 21,500 people worldwide and reported 2020 net sales of $11.8 billion. For more information, visit www.ball.com, or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This release contains \"forward-looking\" statements concerning future events and financial performance. Words such as \"expects,\" \"anticipates, \" \"estimates,\" \"believes,\" and similar expressions typically identify forward-looking statements, which are generally any statements other than statements of historical fact. Such statements are based on current expectations or views of the future and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied. You should therefore not place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements and they should be read in conjunction with, and qualified in their entirety by, the cautionary statements referenced below. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Key factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to be different are summarized in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Exhibit 99 in our Form 10-K, which are available on our website and at www.sec.gov. Additional factors that might affect: a) our packaging segments include product capacity, supply, and demand constraints and fluctuations and changes in consumption patterns; availability/cost of raw materials, equipment, and logistics; competitive packaging, pricing and substitution; changes in climate and weather; footprint adjustments and other manufacturing changes, including the startup of new facilities and lines; failure to achieve synergies, productivity improvements or cost reductions; unfavorable mandatory deposit or packaging laws; customer and supplier consolidation; power and supply chain interruptions; changes in major customer or supplier contracts or loss of a major customer or supplier; inability to pass through increased costs; political instability and sanctions; currency controls; changes in foreign exchange or tax rates; and tariffs, trade actions, or other governmental actions, including business restrictions and shelter-in-place orders in any country or jurisdiction affecting goods produced by us or in our supply chain, including imported raw materials; b) our aerospace segment include funding, authorization, availability and returns of government and commercial contracts; and delays, extensions and technical uncertainties affecting segment contracts; c) the Company as a whole include those listed above plus: the extent to which sustainability-related opportunities arise and can be capitalized upon; changes in senior management, succession, and the ability to attract and retain skilled labor; regulatory actions or issues including those related to tax, ESG reporting, competition, environmental, health and workplace safety, including U.S. FDA and other actions or public concerns affecting products filled in our containers, or chemicals or substances used in raw materials or in the manufacturing process; technological developments and innovations; the ability to manage cyber threats; litigation; strikes; disease; pandemic; labor cost changes; inflation; rates of return on assets of the Company's defined benefit retirement plans; pension changes; uncertainties surrounding geopolitical events and governmental policies, including policies, orders, and actions related to COVID-19; reduced cash flow; interest rates affecting our debt; and successful or unsuccessful joint ventures, acquisitions and divestitures, and their effects on our operating results and business generally. \n\n View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ball-aerospace-built-optics-and-mirror-system-launched-today-aboard-james-webb-space-telescope-301450794.html \n\n SOURCE Ball Aerospace \n\n /CONTACT: Media Contact: Joanna Climer, (303) 939-7041, joanna.climer@ballaerospace.com; Investor Relations: Ann Scott, (303) 460-3537, ascott@ball.com \n\n /Web site: http://www.ballaerospace.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Ball Aerospace-Built Optics and Mirror System Launched Today Aboard James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2861",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ball-aerospace-built-optics-and-mirror-system-launched-today-aboard-james-webb-space-telescope-01640440967?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=2",
        "text": "\"It is truly an honor to be such an integral part of the next great space observatory,\" said Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager, Civil Space, Ball Aerospace. \"Today's launch is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a closely integrated team that spanned across multiple mission partners and NASA. We are tremendously eager to see the science the new observatory captures.\" \n\n Announced as the Next Generation Space Telescope in 1996, and renamed James Webb Space Telescope in 2002, the space science observatory represents the largest and most complex ever built. Once on orbit, Webb will capture faint light from the very first objects that illuminated the universe after the Big Bang. \n\n To make this possible, Ball Aerospace worked with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman, the prime industry partner, to innovate the 25 square-meter (269 square feet) mirror system consisting of 18 beryllium mirror segments working together as one mirror. It will be the largest mirror and the first segmented telescope ever deployed in space, operating at the extremely cold space temperature of -406 F (30K) necessary for infrared imaging of distant stars and galaxies. \n\n\n Ball also developed the cryogenic actuators mounted on each segment to control individual mirror positioning and curvature radius within one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. To align the mirror segments, Ball also designed the 22 electronic flight control boxes to operate in a deep-freeze space environment to individually control each of the 132 actuators that keep the telescope segments properly aligned on orbit. \n\n To innovate, validate and demonstrate technologies used to develop Webb's pioneering optical system, Ball Aerospace drew on its in-depth experience with space hardware designed for all four of NASA's Great Observatories (Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope). \n\n Ball is also playing critical roles in other upcoming space observation missions. It is partnering with Goddard to develop the Wide Field Instrument for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and providing the spacecraft bus and telescope for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). Earlier this month, the Ball-built Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) launched from Kennedy Space Center on its mission to uncover the inner workings of some of the most exotic astronomical objects in our universe, such as neutron stars and black holes. \n\n Powered by endlessly curious people with an unwavering mission focus, Ball Aerospace pioneers discoveries that enable our customers to perform beyond expectation and protect what matters most. We create innovative space solutions, enable more accurate weather forecasts, drive insightful observations of our planet, deliver actionable data and intelligence, and ensure those who defend our freedom go forward bravely and return home safely. Go Beyond with Ball.(R) For more information, visit www.ball.com/aerospace or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n About Ball Corporation \n\n Ball Corporation (NYSE: BLL) supplies innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging solutions for beverage, personal care and household products customers, as well as aerospace and other technologies and services primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ 21,500 people worldwide and reported 2020 net sales of $11.8 billion. For more information, visit www.ball.com, or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This release contains \"forward-looking\" statements concerning future events and financial performance. Words such as \"expects,\" \"anticipates, \" \"estimates,\" \"believes,\" and similar expressions typically identify forward-looking statements, which are generally any statements other than statements of historical fact. Such statements are based on current expectations or views of the future and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied. You should therefore not place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements and they should be read in conjunction with, and qualified in their entirety by, the cautionary statements referenced below. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Key factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to be different are summarized in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Exhibit 99 in our Form 10-K, which are available on our website and at www.sec.gov. Additional factors that might affect: a) our packaging segments include product capacity, supply, and demand constraints and fluctuations and changes in consumption patte  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Ball Aerospace-Built Optics and Mirror System Launched Today Aboard James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2862",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ball-aerospace-built-optics-and-mirror-system-launched-today-aboard-james-webb-space-telescope-01640440967?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=2",
        "text": "\"It is truly an honor to be such an integral part of the next great space observatory,\" said Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager, Civil Space, Ball Aerospace. \"Today's launch is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a closely integrated team that spanned across multiple mission partners and NASA. We are tremendously eager to see the science the new observatory captures.\" \n\n Announced as the Next Generation Space Telescope in 1996, and renamed James Webb Space Telescope in 2002, the space science observatory represents the largest and most complex ever built. Once on orbit, Webb will capture faint light from the very first objects that illuminated the universe after the Big Bang. \n\n\n\n\n\n To make this possible, Ball Aerospace worked with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman, the prime industry partner, to innovate the 25 square-meter (269 square feet) mirror system consisting of 18 beryllium mirror segments working together as one mirror. It will be the largest mirror and the first segmented telescope ever deployed in space, operating at the extremely cold space temperature of -406 F (30K) necessary for infrared imaging of distant stars and galaxies. \n\n\n Ball also developed the cryogenic actuators mounted on each segment to control individual mirror positioning and curvature radius within one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair. To align the mirror segments, Ball also designed the 22 electronic flight control boxes to operate in a deep-freeze space environment to individually control each of the 132 actuators that keep the telescope segments properly aligned on orbit. \n\n To innovate, validate and demonstrate technologies used to develop Webb's pioneering optical system, Ball Aerospace drew on its in-depth experience with space hardware designed for all four of NASA's Great Observatories (Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope). \n\n Ball is also playing critical roles in other upcoming space observation missions. It is partnering with Goddard to develop the Wide Field Instrument for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and providing the spacecraft bus and telescope for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). Earlier this month, the Ball-built Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) launched from Kennedy Space Center on its mission to uncover the inner workings of some of the most exotic astronomical objects in our universe, such as neutron stars and black holes. \n\n Powered by endlessly curious people with an unwavering mission focus, Ball Aerospace pioneers discoveries that enable our customers to perform beyond expectation and protect what matters most. We create innovative space solutions, enable more accurate weather forecasts, drive insightful observations of our planet, deliver actionable data and intelligence, and ensure those who defend our freedom go forward bravely and return home safely. Go Beyond with Ball.(R) For more information, visit www.ball.com/aerospace or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n About Ball Corporation \n\n Ball Corporation (NYSE: BLL) supplies innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging solutions for beverage, personal care and household products customers, as well as aerospace and other technologies and services primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ 21,500 people worldwide and reported 2020 net sales of $11.8 billion. For more information, visit www.ball.com, or connect with us on Facebook or Twitter. \n\n Forward-Looking Statements \n\n This release contains \"forward-looking\" statements concerning future events and financial performance. Words such as \"expects,\" \"anticipates, \" \"estimates,\" \"believes,\" and similar expressions typically identify forward-looking statements, which are generally any statements other than statements of historical fact. Such statements are based on current expectations or views of the future and are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied. You should therefore not place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements and they should be read in conjunction with, and qualified in their entirety by, the cautionary statements referenced below. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Key factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to be different are summarized in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Exhibit 99 in our Form 10-K, which are available on our website and at www.sec.gov. Additional factors that might affect: a) our packaging segments include product capacity, supply, and demand constraints and fluctuations and changes in consumption patterns; availability/cost of raw materials, equipment, and logistics; competitive packaging, pricing and substitution; changes in climate and weather; footprint adjustments and other manufacturing changes, including the startup of new facilities and lines; failure to achieve synergies, productivity improvements or cost reductions; unfavorable mandatory deposit or packaging laws; customer and supplier consolidation; power and supply chain interruptions; changes in major customer or supplier contracts or loss of a major customer or supplier; inability to pass through increased costs; political instability and sanctions; currency controls; changes in foreign exchange or tax rates; and tariffs, trade actions, or other governmental actions, including business restrictions and shelter-in-place orders in any country or jurisdiction affecting goods produced by us or in our supply chain, including imported raw materials; b) our aerospace segment include funding, authorization, availability and returns of government and commercial contracts; and delays, extensions and technical uncertainties affecting segment contracts; c) the Company as a whole include those listed above plus: the extent to which sustainability-related opportunities arise and can be capitalized upon; changes in senior management, succession, and the ability to attract and retain skilled labor; regulatory actions or issues including those related to tax, ESG reporting, competition, environmental, health and workplace safety, including U.S. FDA and other actions or public concerns affecting products filled in our containers, or chemicals or substances used in raw materials or in the manufacturing process; technological developments and innovations; the ability to manage cyber threats; litigation; strikes; disease; pandemic; labor cost changes; inflation; rates of return on assets of the Company's defined benefit retirement plans; pension changes; uncertainties surrounding geopolitical events and governmental policies, including policies, orders, and actions related to COVID-19; reduced cash flow; interest rates affecting our debt; and successful or unsuccessful joint ventures, acquisitions and divestitures, and their effects on our operating results and business generally. \n\n View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ball-aerospace-built-optics-and-mirror-system-launched-today-aboard-james-webb-space-telescope-301450794.html \n\n SOURCE Ball Aerospace \n\n /CONTACT: Media Contact: Joanna Climer, (303) 939-7041, joanna.climer@ballaerospace.com; Investor Relations: Ann Scott, (303) 460-3537, ascott@ball.com \n\n /Web site: http://www.ballaerospace.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Baidu Create 2021 Successfully Launched In Metaverse, Ushering In A Golden Decade Of AI For Creators (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2863",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/baidu-create-2021-successfully-launched-in-metaverse-ushering-in-a-golden-decade-of-ai-for-creators-01640612676?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=1",
        "text": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyY30XnH5WU \n\n\n\n\n\n Dubbed the \"Land of Hope\", the XiRang platform enables up to 100,000 online attendees to interact simultaneously in the same space. Speaking at the opening of the conference held under the theme \"Creators' Spirit\" Baidu Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-Founder, Robin Li, said that the era of man-computer symbiosis had arrived, and that creators would usher in a Golden era of AI over the next 10 years, calling the technology a powerful tool that will change the world. \n\n\n Li elaborated on how AI can help with the reconstruction of industries and benefit humanity by expanding the boundaries of what is possible for mankind. With more than 10 years' experience of exploration and experimentation into AI, Baidu is widely seen as the leader in the development of AI in China. \n\n Intelligent transportation will lift purchase restrictions in China's first-tier cities within five years \n\n Social progress is mainly driven by technological innovation. As the technological wave unfolds, AI has become a tool for a new generation of creators to change the world. \n\n According to Li, intelligent transportation will see a significant transformation in the next 10-40 years that will greatly influence our future. Purchase restrictions limiting the number of cars sold in China's first-tier cities, and number plate restrictions reducing by 20% the number of cars on the roads on weekdays will be lifted within five years and improved traffic efficiency will solve urban congestion within 10 years. \n\n Li believes that intelligent transportation can address three major problems: Firstly, it can reduce road traffic accidents by 90%. Secondly, the problem of urban congestion can be resolved. Lastly, autonomous driving and intelligent transportation will help reduce carbon emissions. \n\n From autonomous driving to smart cars and smart roads, Baidu has deeply integrated AI, 5G and cloud computing into the transportation sector. With a total of 115,000 rides provided by the third quarter of 2021, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing platform \"Apollo Go\" has become the largest autonomous mobility service provider in the world. Baidu's future goal is to expand the \"Apollo Go\" service to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030. Baidu AIR intelligent road system will achieve real-time optimization of \"city-level\" signal control at hundreds of thousands of road intersections, greatly enhancing vehicle safety over millions of kilometers across the country. \n\n Baidu believes that automotive robots will be the ultimate form of vehicle transportation in the future. Having L4 intelligent driving capabilities, Baidu's smart EV venture, Jidu Auto, has been designed to operate under the concepts of \"free movement\", \"natural communication\", and \"self-improvement\". Li said that Jidu is planning to release its first concept car in the first half of 2022, followed by mass production and delivery by 2023. \n\n At the conference, Li also had an in-depth dialogue with astrochemist and geochemist Ziyuan Ouyang, first chief scientist of the Chinese lunar exploration project and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on how AI can be applied in aerospace and future trends in space exploration. Li said that AI's cognitive and control capabilities play a very important role in deep space exploration, helping robots learn about the external environment autonomously so they can independently make informed decisions and judgments. \n\n Baidu released smart cloud digital avatar platform XiLing \n\n At the convention, Baidu Chief Technology Officer Haifeng Wang released Baidu AI Cloud digital avatar platform XiLing, which is a platform level product integrating digital avatar generation and content production. It can provide creation and operation one-stop services such as virtual host, virtual idol, brand spokesperson creation and operation for radio, television, Internet, brand and other customers. \n\n AI toolkit: PaddlePaddle gathers over 4 million developers \n\n A great proponent of open source and openness, Baidu began research and development (R&D) into AI 11 years ago. Organizations and creators without IT resources and R&D capabilities have been able to access Baidu's technology platforms to help drive AI application. \n\n Apart from providing an \"AI toolkit\" to creators, Baidu Brain also provides the technological foundation for digital transformation in society and many industries. With years of experience in technological development, Baidu Brain's approach relies on standardization, automation and modularization for industrial mass production, which allows it to evolve into an AI mass production platform. \"Wenxin\" ( ), Baidu Brain's recently-released technological breakthrough, is the world's first knowledge-enhanced 100-billion-scale pre-trained language model and the largest Chinese-language monolithic model. \n\n Baidu's open-source deep-learning platform PaddlePaddle has garnered 4.06 mill  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Baidu Create 2021 Successfully Launched In Metaverse, Ushering In A Golden Decade Of AI For Creators (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2864",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/baidu-create-2021-successfully-launched-in-metaverse-ushering-in-a-golden-decade-of-ai-for-creators-01640612676?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=2",
        "text": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyY30XnH5WU \n\n\n\n\n\n Dubbed the \"Land of Hope\", the XiRang platform enables up to 100,000 online attendees to interact simultaneously in the same space. Speaking at the opening of the conference held under the theme \"Creators' Spirit\" Baidu Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-Founder, Robin Li, said that the era of man-computer symbiosis had arrived, and that creators would usher in a Golden era of AI over the next 10 years, calling the technology a powerful tool that will change the world. \n\n\n Li elaborated on how AI can help with the reconstruction of industries and benefit humanity by expanding the boundaries of what is possible for mankind. With more than 10 years' experience of exploration and experimentation into AI, Baidu is widely seen as the leader in the development of AI in China. \n\n Intelligent transportation will lift purchase restrictions in China's first-tier cities within five years \n\n Social progress is mainly driven by technological innovation. As the technological wave unfolds, AI has become a tool for a new generation of creators to change the world. \n\n According to Li, intelligent transportation will see a significant transformation in the next 10-40 years that will greatly influence our future. Purchase restrictions limiting the number of cars sold in China's first-tier cities, and number plate restrictions reducing by 20% the number of cars on the roads on weekdays will be lifted within five years and improved traffic efficiency will solve urban congestion within 10 years. \n\n Li believes that intelligent transportation can address three major problems: Firstly, it can reduce road traffic accidents by 90%. Secondly, the problem of urban congestion can be resolved. Lastly, autonomous driving and intelligent transportation will help reduce carbon emissions. \n\n From autonomous driving to smart cars and smart roads, Baidu has deeply integrated AI, 5G and cloud computing into the transportation sector. With a total of 115,000 rides provided by the third quarter of 2021, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing platform \"Apollo Go\" has become the largest autonomous mobility service provider in the world. Baidu's future goal is to expand the \"Apollo Go\" service to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030. Baidu AIR intelligent road system will achieve real-time optimization of \"city-level\" signal control at hundreds of thousands of road intersections, greatly enhancing vehicle safety over millions of kilometers across the country. \n\n Baidu believes that automotive robots will be the ultimate form of vehicle transportation in the future. Having L4 intelligent driving capabilities, Baidu's smart EV venture, Jidu Auto, has been designed to operate under the concepts of \"free movement\", \"natural communication\", and \"self-improvement\". Li said that Jidu is planning to release its first concept car in the first half of 2022, followed by mass production and delivery by 2023. \n\n At the conference, Li also had an in-depth dialogue with astrochemist and geochemist Ziyuan Ouyang, first chief scientist of the Chinese lunar exploration project and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on how AI can be applied in aerospace and future trends in space exploration. Li said that AI's cognitive and control capabilities play a very important role in deep space exploration, helping robots learn about the external environment autonomously so they can independently make informed decisions and judgments. \n\n Baidu released smart cloud digital avatar platform XiLing \n\n At the convention, Baidu Chief Technology Officer Haifeng Wang released Baidu AI Cloud digital avatar platform XiLing, which is a platform level product integrating digital avatar generation and content production. It can provide creation and operation one-stop services such as virtual host, virtual idol, brand spokesperson creation and operation for radio, television, Internet, brand and other customers. \n\n AI toolkit: PaddlePaddle gathers over 4 million developers \n\n A great proponent of open source and openness, Baidu began research and development (R&D) into AI 11 years ago. Organizations and creators without IT resources and R&D capabilities have been able to access Baidu's technology platforms to help drive AI application. \n\n Apart from providing an \"AI toolkit\" to creators, Baidu Brain also provides the technological foundation for digital transformation in society and many industries. With years of experience in technological development, Baidu Brain's approach relies on standardization, automation and modularization for industrial mass production, which allows it to evolve into an AI mass production platform. \"Wenxin\" ( ), Baidu Brain's recently-released technological breakthrough, is the world's first knowledge-enhanced 100-billion-scale pre-trained language model and the largest Chinese-language monolithic model. \n\n Baidu's open-source deep-learning platform PaddlePaddle has garnered 4.06 million developers, served more than 157,000 enterprises and units, covered dozens of industries, and created almost 500,000 models. PaddlePaddle's combined market share ranks first among China's deep-learning platforms. \n\n Computing power is one of the core elements to support AI development. Baidu created the base for green computing, including self-developed Kunlun AI chips, an AI heterogeneous computing platform Baige, and a green data center to support AI technology research and a wide range of applications. It also advocates for energy conservation to achieve sustainable development. \n\n Baidu has achieved outstanding performance in cutting-edge fields, including biological computing and quantum computing, by riding on successive technological innovations in algorithms, platforms, and computing power. Baidu introduced the first algorithm for mRNA in the industry, which could generate optimized mRNA sequences within 10 minutes. \n\n Based on the innovation outcomes of core technologies, open platforms, computing power and cutting-edge technologies, Baidu Brain can support across 1,400 capabilities. Baidu AI Cloud can distribute the AI technology capabilities to various industries, contributing to digital transformation and intelligent enhancement of China's industries, economy and society. In the industrial arena, Baidu offers Industrial Internet services to enable companies to reduce production costs, improve quality, increase efficiency and push for comprehensive transformation and improvement. In energy, Baidu cooperates with industry partners to promote business innovation and explore new paths for energy saving and carbon reduction. \n\n From cutting-edge technologies of the future to large industries that affect the country's economy and people's livelihoods, from the front line of urban construction and rural revitalization to people's everyday lives, developers from all walks of life are leveraging Baidu Brain to create a better world. \n\n Nurturing 5 million AI talent in 5 years \n\n Innovation requires talent with fresh perspectives and creativity. Baidu continues to invest in the training of AI talent. \n\n The Baidu Scholarship was established in 2013 to recognize Chinese students with great potential and excellence in AI research around the world. Li awarded Baidu scholarships to 10 outstanding young students at the conference. He said, looking at these students, he sees \"innovation\" in these bright minds. He also sees their determination and unrelenting efforts towards realizing their dreams in scientific research and their imminent bright future. \n\n In addition, Baidu has created a new model in jointly training AI talent with governments, enterprises, and universities. In August this year, Baidu established the \"Baidu Pinecone Academy\", built on PaddlePaddle to integrate basic AI courses, practical teaching, technical competitions, industry training, and scientific research funds to create an AI talent training platform. \n\n As of now, Baidu has cultivated more than 1 million AI talents. Li said that Baidu would continue to promote the cultivation of AI talent in the future and nurture 5 million AI specialists within five years. \n\n \"Creators are our companions in pursuing our dreams of technology, they are also one of the great driving forces of human progress,\" Li said. \n\n About Baidu \n\n Founded in 2000, Baidu's mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under \"BIDU\" and HKEX under \"9888.\" One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares. \n\n Media Contact \n\n Intlcomm@baidu.com \n\n View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-create-2021-successfully-launched-in-metaverse-ushering-in-a-golden-decade-of-ai-for-creators-301450886.html \n\n SOURCE Baidu, Inc. \n\n /CONTACT: +86-10-56797115  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Baidu Create 2021 Successfully Launched In Metaverse, Ushering In A Golden Decade Of AI For Creators (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2865",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/baidu-create-2021-successfully-launched-in-metaverse-ushering-in-a-golden-decade-of-ai-for-creators-01640612676?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=2",
        "text": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyY30XnH5WU \n\n\n\n\n\n Dubbed the \"Land of Hope\", the XiRang platform enables up to 100,000 online attendees to interact simultaneously in the same space. Speaking at the opening of the conference held under the theme \"Creators' Spirit\" Baidu Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-Founder, Robin Li, said that the era of man-computer symbiosis had arrived, and that creators would usher in a Golden era of AI over the next 10 years, calling the technology a powerful tool that will change the world. \n\n\n Li elaborated on how AI can help with the reconstruction of industries and benefit humanity by expanding the boundaries of what is possible for mankind. With more than 10 years' experience of exploration and experimentation into AI, Baidu is widely seen as the leader in the development of AI in China. \n\n Intelligent transportation will lift purchase restrictions in China's first-tier cities within five years \n\n Social progress is mainly driven by technological innovation. As the technological wave unfolds, AI has become a tool for a new generation of creators to change the world. \n\n According to Li, intelligent transportation will see a significant transformation in the next 10-40 years that will greatly influence our future. Purchase restrictions limiting the number of cars sold in China's first-tier cities, and number plate restrictions reducing by 20% the number of cars on the roads on weekdays will be lifted within five years and improved traffic efficiency will solve urban congestion within 10 years. \n\n Li believes that intelligent transportation can address three major problems: Firstly, it can reduce road traffic accidents by 90%. Secondly, the problem of urban congestion can be resolved. Lastly, autonomous driving and intelligent transportation will help reduce carbon emissions. \n\n From autonomous driving to smart cars and smart roads, Baidu has deeply integrated AI, 5G and cloud computing into the transportation sector. With a total of 115,000 rides provided by the third quarter of 2021, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing platform \"Apollo Go\" has become the largest autonomous mobility service provider in the world. Baidu's future goal is to expand the \"Apollo Go\" service to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030. Baidu AIR intelligent road system will achieve real-time optimization of \"city-level\" signal control at hundreds of thousands of road intersections, greatly enhancing vehicle safety over millions of kilometers across the country. \n\n Baidu believes that automotive robots will be the ultimate form of vehicle transportation in the future. Having L4 intelligent driving capabilities, Baidu's smart EV venture, Jidu Auto, has been designed to operate under the concepts of \"free movement\", \"natural communication\", and \"self-improvement\". Li said that Jidu is planning to release its first concept car in the first half of 2022, followed by mass production and delivery by 2023. \n\n At the conference, Li also had an in-depth dialogue with astrochemist and geochemist Ziyuan Ouyang, first chief scientist of the Chinese lunar exploration project and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on how AI can be applied in aerospace and future trends in space exploration. Li said that AI's cognitive and control capabilities play a very important role in deep space exploration, helping robots learn about the external environment autonomously so they can independently make informed decisions and judgments. \n\n Baidu released smart cloud digital avatar platform XiLing \n\n At the convention, Baidu Chief Technology Officer Haifeng Wang released Baidu AI Cloud digital avatar platform XiLing, which is a platform level product integrating digital avatar generation and content production. It can provide creation and operation one-stop services such as virtual host, virtual idol, brand spokesperson creation and operation for radio, television, Internet, brand and other customers. \n\n AI toolkit: PaddlePaddle gathers over 4 million developers \n\n A great proponent of open source and openness, Baidu began research and development (R&D) into AI 11 years ago. Organizations and creators without IT resources and R&D capabilities have been able to access Baidu's technology platforms to help drive AI application. \n\n Apart from providing an \"AI toolkit\" to creators, Baidu Brain also provides the technological foundation for digital transformation in society and many industries. With years of experience in technological development, Baidu Brain's approach relies on standardization, automation and modularization for industrial mass production, which allows it to evolve into an AI mass production platform. \"Wenxin\" ( ), Baidu Brain's recently-released technological breakthrough, is the world's first knowledge-enhanced 100-billion-scale pre-trained language model and the largest Chinese-language monolithic model. \n\n Baidu's open-source deep-learning platform PaddlePaddle has garnered 4.06 million developers, served more than 157,000 enterprises and units, covered dozens of industries, and created almost 500,000 models. PaddlePaddle's combined market share ranks first among China's deep-learning platforms. \n\n Computing power is one of the core elements to support AI development. Baidu created the base for green computing, including self-developed Kunlun AI chips, an AI heterogeneous computing platform Baige, and a green data center to support AI technology research and a wide range of applications. It also advocates for energy conservation to achieve sustainable development. \n\n Baidu has achieved outstanding performance in cutting-edge fields, including biological computing and quantum computing, by riding on successive technological innovations in algorithms, platforms, and computing power. Baidu introduced the first algorithm for mRNA in the industry, which could generate optimized mRNA sequences within 10 minutes. \n\n Based on the innovation outcomes of core technologies, open platforms, computing power and cutting-edge technologies, Baidu Brain can support across 1,400 capabilities. Baidu AI Cloud can distribute the AI technology capabilities to various industries, contributing to digital transformation and intelligent enhancement of China's industries, economy and society. In the industrial arena, Baidu offers Industrial Internet services to enable companies to reduce production costs, improve quality, increase efficiency and push for comprehensive transformation and improvement. In energy, Baidu cooperates with industry partners to promote business innovation and explore new paths for energy saving and carbon reduction. \n\n From cutting-edge technologies of the future to large industries that affect the country's economy and people's livelihoods, from the front line of urban construction and rural revitalization to people's everyday lives, developers from all walks of life are leveraging Baidu Brain to create a better world. \n\n Nurturing 5 million AI talent in 5 years \n\n Innovation requires talent with fresh perspectives and creativity. Baidu continues to invest in the training of AI talent. \n\n The Baidu Scholarship was established in 2013 to recognize Chinese students with great potential and excellence in AI research around the world. Li awarded Baidu scholarships to 10 outstanding young students at the conference. He said, looking at these students, he sees \"innovation\" in these bright minds. He also sees their determination and unrelenting efforts towards realizing their dreams in scientific research and their imminent bright future. \n\n In addition, Baidu has created a new model in jointly training AI talent with governments, enterprises, and universities. In August this year, Baidu established the \"Baidu Pinecone Academy\", built on PaddlePaddle to integrate basic AI courses, practical teaching, technical competitions, industry training, and scientific research funds to create an AI talent training platform. \n\n As of now, Baidu has cultivated more than 1 million AI talents. Li said that Baidu would continue to promote the cultivation of AI talent in the future and nurture 5 million AI specialists within five years. \n\n \"Creators are our companions in pursuing our dreams of technology, they are also one of the great driving forces of human progress,\" Li said. \n\n About Baidu \n\n Founded in 2000, Baidu's mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under \"BIDU\" and HKEX under \"9888.\" One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares. \n\n Media Contact \n\n Intlcomm@baidu.com \n\n View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-create-2021-successfully-launched-in-metaverse-ushering-in-a-golden-decade-of-ai-for-creators-301450886.html \n\n SOURCE Baidu, Inc. \n\n /CONTACT: +86-10-56797115  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Baidu Create 2021 Successfully Launched In Metaverse, Ushering In A Golden Decade Of AI For Creators (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2866",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/baidu-create-2021-successfully-launched-in-metaverse-ushering-in-a-golden-decade-of-ai-for-creators-01640612676?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=2",
        "text": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyY30XnH5WU \n\n Dubbed the \"Land of Hope\", the XiRang platform enables up to 100,000 online attendees to interact simultaneously in the same space. Speaking at the opening of the conference held under the theme \"Creators' Spirit\" Baidu Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-Founder, Robin Li, said that the era of man-computer symbiosis had arrived, and that creators would usher in a Golden era of AI over the next 10 years, calling the technology a powerful tool that will change the world. \n\n\n Li elaborated on how AI can help with the reconstruction of industries and benefit humanity by expanding the boundaries of what is possible for mankind. With more than 10 years' experience of exploration and experimentation into AI, Baidu is widely seen as the leader in the development of AI in China. \n\n Intelligent transportation will lift purchase restrictions in China's first-tier cities within five years \n\n Social progress is mainly driven by technological innovation. As the technological wave unfolds, AI has become a tool for a new generation of creators to change the world. \n\n According to Li, intelligent transportation will see a significant transformation in the next 10-40 years that will greatly influence our future. Purchase restrictions limiting the number of cars sold in China's first-tier cities, and number plate restrictions reducing by 20% the number of cars on the roads on weekdays will be lifted within five years and improved traffic efficiency will solve urban congestion within 10 years. \n\n Li believes that intelligent transportation can address three major problems: Firstly, it can reduce road traffic accidents by 90%. Secondly, the problem of urban congestion can be resolved. Lastly, autonomous driving and intelligent transportation will help reduce carbon emissions. \n\n From autonomous driving to smart cars and smart roads, Baidu has deeply integrated AI, 5G and cloud computing into the transportation sector. With a total of 115,000 rides provided by the third quarter of 2021, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing platform \"Apollo Go\" has become the largest autonomous mobility service provider in the world. Baidu's future goal is to expand the \"Apollo Go\" service to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030. Baidu AIR intelligent road system will achieve real-time optimization of \"city-level\" signal control at hundreds of thousands of road intersections, greatly enhancing vehicle safety over millions of kilometers across the country. \n\n Baidu believes that automotive robots will be the ultimate form of vehicle transportation in the future. Having L4 intelligent driving capabilities, Baidu's smart EV venture, Jidu Auto, has been designed to operate under the concepts of \"free movement\", \"natural communication\", and \"self-improvement\". Li said that Jidu is planning to release its first concept car in the first half of 2022, followed by mass production and delivery by 2023. \n\n At the conference, Li also had an in-depth dialogue with astrochemist and geochemist Ziyuan Ouyang, first chief scientist of the Chinese lunar exploration project and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, on how AI can be applied in aerospace and future trends in space exploration. Li said that AI's cognitive and control capabilities play a very important role in deep space exploration, helping robots learn about the external environment autonomously so they can independently make informed decisions and judgments. \n\n Baidu released smart cloud digital avatar platform XiLing \n\n At the convention, Baidu Chief Technology Officer Haifeng Wang released Baidu AI Cloud digital avatar platform XiLing, which is a platform level product integrating digital avatar generation and content production. It can provide creation and operation one-stop services such as virtual host, virtual idol, brand spokesperson creation and operation for radio, television, Internet, brand and other customers. \n\n AI toolkit: PaddlePaddle gathers over 4 million developers \n\n A great proponent of open source and openness, Baidu began research and development (R&D) into AI 11 years ago. Organizations and creators without IT resources and R&D capabilities have been able to access Baidu's technology platforms to help drive AI application. \n\n Apart from providing an \"AI toolkit\" to creators, Baidu Brain also provides the technological foundation for digital transformation in society and many industries. With years of experience in technological development, Baidu Brain's approach relies on standardization, automation and modularization for industrial mass production, which allows it to evolve into an AI mass production platform. \"Wenxin\" ( ), Baidu Brain's recently-released technological breakthrough, is the world's first knowledge-enhanced 100-billion-scale pre-trained language model and the largest Chinese-language monolithic model. \n\n Baidu's open-source deep-learning platform PaddlePaddle has garnered 4.06 million  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Lifts Off with Advanced Camera from Lockheed Martin (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2867",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-s-james-webb-space-telescope-lifts-off-with-advanced-camera-from-lockheed-martin-01640439878?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=2",
        "text": "The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is Webb's primary imager and one of the most sensitive infrared cameras ever built. As the telescope sets itself up in space, NIRCam will help align Webb's intricate array of mirrors. It will then take science images throughout the entire mission. \n\n\n\n\n\n \"NIRCam's journey is over two decades in the making, and seeing it lift off into space on Webb was the culmination of many years of hard work with Marcia Rieke and our University of Arizona partners,\" said Alison Nordt, Lockheed Martin's space science and instrumentation director, who led development of NIRCam. \"Webb will rewrite the science books of how we understand our universe, and to have Lockheed Martin-built technology help advance the future of space imaging is an honor.\" \n\n\n The Lockheed Martin and University of Arizona team designed, built and tested NIRCam out of the company's Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. \n\n How to Look at the Universe's Oldest Light \n\n Webb is designed to peer at the universe's oldest light, which scientists believe occurred around 13.5 billion years ago. As the universe expands, those light waves that were once visible have now shifted into the infrared spectrum. \n\n This light is incredibly far away and extremely dim, which is why Webb requires large mirrors -- along with NIRCam's ultra-precise optics -- to see it. \n\n Before that can happen, NIRCam's first job is to sense incoming infrared light and take images that will help the telescope's systems properly align its 18 primary mirror segments. This is critical to ensuring Webb provides crystal clear images once it enters science mode. \n\n The Technology Behind NIRCam \n\n For Webb's mirror alignment in early 2022, NIRCam senses what's called a \"wavefront,\" or an ideally perfect sphere of light particles emitted from any luminescent object. When those particles encounter another object -- in this case, the telescope's optics -- they become distorted. \n\n NIRCam measures those distortions with nanometric accuracy, and that data is then used to advise how Webb's mirrors must adjust. This iterative process is done until the telescope's mirrors are properly aligned. \n\n With Webb traveling more than 1 million miles from Earth into space, NIRCam must function with extreme precision and stability in temperatures as cold as -400degF. In fact, the telescope needs frigid temperatures to ensure infrared radiating off the observatory doesn't overwhelm the images. \n\n To enable operations in such extreme conditions, Lockheed Martin developed a new technique for bonding NIRCam's optical lenses to their mounts. The innovative method ensures the cold and launch vibrations don't cause shifts in alignment of NIRCam's lenses. \n\n After more than a decade of meticulous engineering and rigorous testing, the team delivered one of the most capable infrared instruments ever created, and NIRCam was fully integrated onto Webb in 2014. \n\n Now, the telescope gets situated for a decade of ground-breaking observations to shape how we see space for years to come. \n\n More About the Mission \n\n The Webb Space Telescope is the world's newest premier space science observatory. It will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners -- the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency -- and industry participation from many companies, including Lockheed Martin. \n\n Learn more about NIRCam on LockheedMartin.com. \n\n About Lockheed Martin \n\n Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 114,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. \n\n Please follow @LMNews on Twitter for the latest announcements and news across the corporation. \n\n View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-lifts-off-with-advanced-camera-from-lockheed-martin-301450793.html \n\n SOURCE Lockheed Martin \n\n /CONTACT: Lauren Duda; +1 303-324-1764; lauren.e.duda@lmco.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Lifts Off with Advanced Camera from Lockheed Martin (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2868",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-s-james-webb-space-telescope-lifts-off-with-advanced-camera-from-lockheed-martin-01640439878?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=2",
        "text": "The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) is Webb's primary imager and one of the most sensitive infrared cameras ever built. As the telescope sets itself up in space, NIRCam will help align Webb's intricate array of mirrors. It will then take science images throughout the entire mission. \n\n \"NIRCam's journey is over two decades in the making, and seeing it lift off into space on Webb was the culmination of many years of hard work with Marcia Rieke and our University of Arizona partners,\" said Alison Nordt, Lockheed Martin's space science and instrumentation director, who led development of NIRCam. \"Webb will rewrite the science books of how we understand our universe, and to have Lockheed Martin-built technology help advance the future of space imaging is an honor.\" \n\n\n The Lockheed Martin and University of Arizona team designed, built and tested NIRCam out of the company's Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. \n\n How to Look at the Universe's Oldest Light \n\n Webb is designed to peer at the universe's oldest light, which scientists believe occurred around 13.5 billion years ago. As the universe expands, those light waves that were once visible have now shifted into the infrared spectrum. \n\n This light is incredibly far away and extremely dim, which is why Webb requires large mirrors -- along with NIRCam's ultra-precise optics -- to see it. \n\n Before that can happen, NIRCam's first job is to sense incoming infrared light and take images that will help the telescope's systems properly align its 18 primary mirror segments. This is critical to ensuring Webb provides crystal clear images once it enters science mode. \n\n The Technology Behind NIRCam \n\n For Webb's mirror alignment in early 2022, NIRCam senses what's called a \"wavefront,\" or an ideally perfect sphere of light particles emitted from any luminescent object. When those particles encounter another object -- in this case, the telescope's optics -- they become distorted. \n\n NIRCam measures those distortions with nanometric accuracy, and that data is then used to advise how Webb's mirrors must adjust. This iterative process is done until the telescope's mirrors are properly aligned. \n\n With Webb traveling more than 1 million miles from Earth into space, NIRCam must function with extreme precision and stability in temperatures as cold as -400degF. In fact, the telescope needs frigid temperatures to ensure infrared radiating off the observatory doesn't overwhelm the images. \n\n To enable operations in such extreme conditions, Lockheed Martin developed a new technique for bonding NIRCam's optical lenses to their mounts. The innovative method ensures the cold and launch vibrations don't cause shifts in alignment of NIRCam's lenses. \n\n After more than a decade of meticulous engineering and rigorous testing, the team delivered one of the most capable infrared instruments ever created, and NIRCam was fully integrated onto Webb in 2014. \n\n Now, the telescope gets situated for a decade of ground-breaking observations to shape how we see space for years to come. \n\n More About the Mission \n\n The Webb Space Telescope is the world's newest premier space science observatory. It will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners -- the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency -- and industry participation from many companies, including Lockheed Martin. \n\n Learn more about NIRCam on LockheedMartin.com. \n\n About Lockheed Martin \n\n Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 114,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. \n\n Please follow @LMNews on Twitter for the latest announcements and news across the corporation. \n\n View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-lifts-off-with-advanced-camera-from-lockheed-martin-301450793.html \n\n SOURCE Lockheed Martin \n\n /CONTACT: Lauren Duda; +1 303-324-1764; lauren.e.duda@lmco.com  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Ericsson ConsumerLab: Ten Hot Consumer Trends 2030 - the hybrid mall (WSJ: PR Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2869",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ericsson-consumerlab-ten-hot-consumer-trends-2030-the-hybrid-mall-01639550472?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=8",
        "text": "The December 2021 report marks the eleventh edition of the Ericsson ConsumerLab 10 Hot Consumer Trends report. In line with recent Ten Hot Consumer Trends reports, it targets early adopter consumers' views on a 2030 timeline - this time covering hybrid shopping experiences in a fictional `Everyspace Plaza' mall. \n\n\n\n\n\n Consumers were asked to evaluate 15 hybrid shopping mall facilities that extend the physical consumer experience using digital technology. Almost four-in-five respondents believe that all 15 tested concepts will be available in some form by 2030. \n\n\n Such `bricks-and-portal' facilities will be enabled by technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and programmable materials. \n\n Magnus Frodigh, Head of Ericsson Research, says: \"The semi-public nature of shopping malls means latency bounds could more easily be controlled and next-generation experiences could be delivered early on. XR devices could be provided on-site, making it possible to deploy private networks with custom applications also for consumers.\" \n\n Based on comprehensive research, the ConsumerLab 10 Hot Consumer Trends report represents the expectations and predictions of about 57 million early technology adopters globally. \n\n Dr. Michael Bj\u00f6rn, Head of Research Agenda, Ericsson Consumer & IndustryLab, and driver of the 10 Hot Consumer Trends report since its inception in 2011, says: \"On the one hand it may be difficult to imagine large numbers of consumers with expensive tech gear such as AR glasses, waterproof VR glasses, haptic body suits, tactile gloves and more at massive scale by 2030. Yet, on the other hand, if such equipment could be shared at lower cost it is definitely possible that large numbers of consumers will have it to enhance everyday shopping mall experiences.\" \n\n He adds: \"In fact, 35 percent of surveyed consumers think shopping malls are more likely to feature next-generation technology than homes, compared to just 14 percent who disagree. Shopping malls have long been high-tech focal points, with many featuring cinemas, game arcades, concert halls, bowling alleys and more. They will likely continue to play that role.\" \n\n Bj\u00f6rn says the report also highlights consumer belief that hybrid malls could positively and sustainably contribute to local life. \n\n \"If anything, the future might be increasingly localized, with 32 percent of respondents agreeing that high-tech shopping malls will make moving to small towns and rural areas more feasible and attractive - and just 13 percent disagreeing with this,\" he adds. \n\n The details \n\n The 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2030 - The Everyspace Plaza are: \n\n 1. The All-Now Arena \n\n You could be both actor and spectator, but will the immersion experience give you a thrill or a fright? Nearly eight out of 10 consumers envisage event halls where telepresence technology allows artists to digitally perform as if they were there in person. \n\n 2. The Immersive Beauty Salon \n\n Skipping the knife and needle is an attractive beauty option for many. Beauty salons that use volumetric modelling technology to digitally enhance looks are expected in malls by seven out of 10 consumers. \n\n 3. The Meta Tailor \n\n Fast fashion tailored just for you - and your avatar. More than seven out of 10 AR/VR users foresee a tailor in the mall using fabrics that can switch to become waterproof or provide ventilation when needed. \n\n 4. The Anyverse Pool \n\n Many imagine the exploration of impossible worlds. Two-thirds of consumers believe there will be swimming pools where you can use an oxygenated VR headset to experience outer space in zero gravity. \n\n 5. The Hybrid Gym \n\n For many, physical vigor and mental health are inextricably linked. Seven out of ten consumers expect mental fitness centers that have multisensory, personality-tailored AR/VR scenery to help improve mental health. \n\n 6. The Print-a-Wish Multifactory \n\n On-demand repair and production are the future. Over half of consumers want to shop sustainably in a factory outlet that recycles their old products. \n\n 7. The Restaurant at the Node of the Universe \n\n Distraction-free, virtual company is preferable for many. Half of consumers want to visit restaurants to virtually eat with friends in other restaurants, anywhere in the world. \n\n 8. The Neverending Store \n\n Try before you buy - virtually, at least. Three-quarters of consumers expect to be able to project their home inside the store when trying out new products. \n\n 9. The Medical Multiplex Center \n\n We're used to everything being instant. Why wait when it comes to health? Seventy-seven percent of consumers foresee in-mall medical centers with drop-in AI health scanning that gives near-instant health status updates. \n\n 10. The Nature+ Park \n\n For those stuck in cities, nature may be what's missing. Forty-two percent of consumers want to visit an in-mall park where they can feel closer to nature through digital and programmable materials that provi  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space-Tech Startup Vector Launch Files for Bankruptcy (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2870",
        "date": "2019-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-tech-startup-vector-launch-files-for-bankruptcy-11576517002?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=14",
        "text": "The company had raised about $100 million in venture capital, with its Series A funding round led by Sequoia. It has roughly $1 million in secured debt and $4 million to $5 million of unsecured debt on its books.\nVector had been developing rockets, satellite launchers and satellite computing technology from facilities in California and Arizona, with more than 150 rocket scientists, engineers and other staff on payroll. Aside from the facilities, Vector\u2019s assets include intellectual property, patents, rocket engines and a transporter-erector launcher.\n\nThe company\u2019s fate was sealed when a member of the company\u2019s board who had been appointed by Sequoia, Bill Coughran, resigned and said that Sequoia wouldn\u2019t continue to fund Vector, according to Shaun Martin, the company\u2019s restructuring chief. The company\u2019s chief executive, James Cantrell, resigned a short time later, Mr. Martin said in a declaration with the court.\n\u201cThe fallout from Sequoia\u2019s decision and the CEO\u2019s resignation spooked the investor community and doomed the debtors\u2019 efforts to raise additional capital,\u201d said Mr. Martin, of the advisory firm Winter Harbor LLC.\nSequoia\u2019s withdrawal prompted Vector\u2019s lenders to freeze its bank accounts, and the company ceased operations and terminated all of its employees in August.\n\n\nMore in Bankruptcy\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe company failed to meet strategic objectives and financial projections it outlined to the board,\u201d said a Sequoia spokesperson. \u201cWe ultimately made the decision to part ways with the company based on its inability to achieve its proposed plans.\u201d\nLockheed has agreed to purchase the company\u2019s GalacticSky intellectual property for $4.25 million, subject to higher bids at auction. Lockheed also is providing a $2.5 million debtor-in-possession loan to fund Vector\u2019s bankruptcy proceedings, during which it will aim to auction the remainder of its assets. \nLockheed declined to comment.\nFounded in 2016, Vector had been developing two satellite launchers designed for small-size spacecraft, both of which remain under development and neither of which have reached orbit.\u00a0The company\u2019s GalacticSky technology is a software platform for satellite operators.\nVector obtained $6 million in seed funding in 2016, followed by $21 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures. The company later completed a Series B round in which it obtained about $70 million from Kodem Vector Investment LP, DNX Ventures and Morgan Stanley.\nWrite to Alexander Gladstone at alexander.gladstone@wsj.com Space-technology company Vector Launch Inc. has filed for bankruptcy, blaming its demise on venture-capital backer Sequoia Capital\u2019s decision not to provide additional funding for its development efforts. ",
        "author": "Alexander Gladstone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space-Tech Startup Vector Launch Files for Bankruptcy (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2871",
        "date": "2019-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-tech-startup-vector-launch-files-for-bankruptcy-11576517002?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=50",
        "text": "The company had raised about $100 million in venture capital, with its Series A funding round led by Sequoia. It has roughly $1 million in secured debt and $4 million to $5 million of unsecured debt on its books.\nVector had been developing rockets, satellite launchers and satellite computing technology from facilities in California and Arizona, with more than 150 rocket scientists, engineers and other staff on payroll. Aside from the facilities, Vector\u2019s assets include intellectual property, patents, rocket engines and a transporter-erector launcher.\n\nThe company\u2019s fate was sealed when a member of the company\u2019s board who had been appointed by Sequoia, Bill Coughran, resigned and said that Sequoia wouldn\u2019t continue to fund Vector, according to Shaun Martin, the company\u2019s restructuring chief. The company\u2019s chief executive, James Cantrell, resigned a short time later, Mr. Martin said in a declaration with the court.\n\u201cThe fallout from Sequoia\u2019s decision and the CEO\u2019s resignation spooked the investor community and doomed the debtors\u2019 efforts to raise additional capital,\u201d said Mr. Martin, of the advisory firm Winter Harbor LLC.\nSequoia\u2019s withdrawal prompted Vector\u2019s lenders to freeze its bank accounts, and the company ceased operations and terminated all of its employees in August.\n\n\nMore in Bankruptcy\n\n\n\n\nBoy Scouts Head to Trial in Largest Sex-Abuse Bankruptcy\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoy Scouts Win Over More Abuse Survivors For $2.7 Billion Bankruptcy Deal \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nSome Insurers Object to Abuse Claim Valuations in Boy Scouts Bankruptcy\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe company failed to meet strategic objectives and financial projections it outlined to the board,\u201d said a Sequoia spokesperson. \u201cWe ultimately made the decision to part ways with the company based on its inability to achieve its proposed plans.\u201d\nLockheed has agreed to purchase the company\u2019s GalacticSky intellectual property for $4.25 million, subject to higher bids at auction. Lockheed also is providing a $2.5 million debtor-in-possession loan to fund Vector\u2019s bankruptcy proceedings, during which it will aim to auction the remainder of its assets. \nLockheed declined to comment.\nFounded in 2016, Vector had been developing two satellite launchers designed for small-size spacecraft, both of which remain under development and neither of which have reached orbit.\u00a0The company\u2019s GalacticSky technology is a software platform for satellite operators.\nVector obtained $6 million in seed funding in 2016, followed by $21 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures. The company later completed a Series B round in which it obtained about $70 million from Kodem Vector Investment LP, DNX Ventures and Morgan Stanley.\nWrite to Alexander Gladstone at alexander.gladstone@wsj.com Space-technology company Vector Launch Inc. has filed for bankruptcy, blaming its demise on venture-capital backer Sequoia Capital\u2019s decision not to provide additional funding for its development efforts. ",
        "author": "Alexander Gladstone"
    },
    {
        "title": "SoftBank\u2019s Satellite Startup OneWeb Seeks Bankruptcy Protection (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2872",
        "date": "2020-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbanks-satellite-startup-oneweb-seeks-bankruptcy-protection-11585414005?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=13",
        "text": "Bolstered by a group of formidable financial and technical backers from Japan to Europe and championed by satellite entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler,\n\n\n\n OneWeb has been touted as a leader in seeking to provide global internet connectivity via a large constellation of low-earth orbit satellites.\nThe company pioneered low-cost, automated production of such satellites, fueled by funding from Japan\u2019s SoftBank and other investors, including aerospace giant Airbus, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and the government of Rwanda.\n\nThe bankruptcy filing raises new questions about the financial viability of such broadband-via-satellite projects largely targeting developing regions. Entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n are among those pursuing the same markets.\nOneWeb said it had exhausted its financing to build out an orbiting constellation of roughly 70 spacecraft and was seeking more capital just as the coronavirus pandemic roiled financial markets and shut swaths of the global economy. SoftBank is OneWeb\u2019s largest creditor, owed $903 million, and shareholder, according to court papers.\nOneWeb set up a manufacturing site near Florida\u2019s iconic Kennedy Space Center able to turn out satellites for roughly $1 million apiece while initiating work on ground stations and inexpensive antennas designed for developing countries. Airbus executives praised the production initiatives as major advances reducing the time and expense of satellite manufacturing.\nLast summer, Mr. Wyler hosted a high-profile celebration of its newly opened Florida factory featuring a delegation of senior U.S. government and industry leaders from both sides of the Atlantic. The upbeat speeches highlighted the company\u2019s ambitious goal of providing broadband services to hundreds of millions of people without such connectivity.\nEarlier this month, OneWeb successfully launched a second group of satellites. Fledgling service in Alaska was slated to start this year or early 2021, creating a potentially important testing ground for various ground stations, mobile receivers and community hot spots.\nMr. Wyler has argued that his venture enjoyed a competitive advantage over rivals, including Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., because it could rely on a functioning factory. The full constellation of more than 600 satellites was anticipated to connect to other regions in later years.\nMonths before the world-wide coronavirus contagion, however, OneWeb changed its business model in the face of financial and marketing challenges. Instead of primarily pursuing consumers and small businesses lacking internet connections in developing regions, Mr. Wyler and his team sketched out a strategy of initially serving cruise lines, aviation and other established markets able to pay higher service fees.\nThe revised marketing concept reflected higher-than-anticipated development costs and a longer deployment schedule. Industry officials have said OneWeb needed to raise another $2 billion to build out its ground network and establish partnerships with local\u00a0 distributors.\nThe impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the airline industry undermined a key pillar of OneWeb\u2019s revised business plan in the midst of crucial fundraising talks, said telecommunications industry analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Farrar.\n\n\n\n \nIn court papers, OneWeb said it had reached a deal with SoftBank to use cash on hand to pay for immediate chapter 11 expenses and is \u201cactively negotiating\u201d a larger bankruptcy loan to keep operations funded. OneWeb cut 90% of its workforce and ceased nonessential operations before filing for bankruptcy, going to 74 from 531 full-time employees.\n\n\n\n\nWrite to Andrew Scurria at Andrew.Scurria@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Satellite venture OneWeb Global Ltd. filed for chapter 11 protection to wait out the current instability in financial markets while marketing the company for sale. ",
        "author": "Andrew Scurria and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SoftBank\u2019s Satellite Startup OneWeb Seeks Bankruptcy Protection (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2873",
        "date": "2020-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbanks-satellite-startup-oneweb-seeks-bankruptcy-protection-11585414005?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=57",
        "text": "Bolstered by a group of formidable financial and technical backers from Japan to Europe and championed by satellite entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler,\n\n\n\n OneWeb has been touted as a leader in seeking to provide global internet connectivity via a large constellation of low-earth orbit satellites.\n\n\n\n\nThe company pioneered low-cost, automated production of such satellites, fueled by funding from Japan\u2019s SoftBank and other investors, including aerospace giant Airbus, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and the government of Rwanda.\n\nThe bankruptcy filing raises new questions about the financial viability of such broadband-via-satellite projects largely targeting developing regions. Entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n are among those pursuing the same markets.\nOneWeb said it had exhausted its financing to build out an orbiting constellation of roughly 70 spacecraft and was seeking more capital just as the coronavirus pandemic roiled financial markets and shut swaths of the global economy. SoftBank is OneWeb\u2019s largest creditor, owed $903 million, and shareholder, according to court papers.\nOneWeb set up a manufacturing site near Florida\u2019s iconic Kennedy Space Center able to turn out satellites for roughly $1 million apiece while initiating work on ground stations and inexpensive antennas designed for developing countries. Airbus executives praised the production initiatives as major advances reducing the time and expense of satellite manufacturing.\nLast summer, Mr. Wyler hosted a high-profile celebration of its newly opened Florida factory featuring a delegation of senior U.S. government and industry leaders from both sides of the Atlantic. The upbeat speeches highlighted the company\u2019s ambitious goal of providing broadband services to hundreds of millions of people without such connectivity.\nEarlier this month, OneWeb successfully launched a second group of satellites. Fledgling service in Alaska was slated to start this year or early 2021, creating a potentially important testing ground for various ground stations, mobile receivers and community hot spots.\nMr. Wyler has argued that his venture enjoyed a competitive advantage over rivals, including Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., because it could rely on a functioning factory. The full constellation of more than 600 satellites was anticipated to connect to other regions in later years.\nMonths before the world-wide coronavirus contagion, however, OneWeb changed its business model in the face of financial and marketing challenges. Instead of primarily pursuing consumers and small businesses lacking internet connections in developing regions, Mr. Wyler and his team sketched out a strategy of initially serving cruise lines, aviation and other established markets able to pay higher service fees.\nThe revised marketing concept reflected higher-than-anticipated development costs and a longer deployment schedule. Industry officials have said OneWeb needed to raise another $2 billion to build out its ground network and establish partnerships with local\u00a0 distributors.\nThe impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the airline industry undermined a key pillar of OneWeb\u2019s revised business plan in the midst of crucial fundraising talks, said telecommunications industry analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Farrar.\n\n\n\n \nIn court papers, OneWeb said it had reached a deal with SoftBank to use cash on hand to pay for immediate chapter 11 expenses and is \u201cactively negotiating\u201d a larger bankruptcy loan to keep operations funded. OneWeb cut 90% of its workforce and ceased nonessential operations before filing for bankruptcy, going to 74 from 531 full-time employees.\n\n\n\n\nWrite to Andrew Scurria at Andrew.Scurria@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Satellite venture OneWeb Global Ltd. filed for chapter 11 protection to wait out the current instability in financial markets while marketing the company for sale. ",
        "author": "Andrew Scurria and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cyber Daily: Cybersecurity May Well Be NASA\u2019s Final Frontier (WSJ: Pro Cyber Commentary & Analysis) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2874",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyber-daily-cybersecurity-may-well-be-nasas-final-frontier-1543851200?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=68",
        "text": "CIO Renee Wynn, who arrived at NASA in 2015, has several large initiatives underway to address technology and policy shortcomings, she tells us. However, the Government Accountability Office is concerned about the slow pace of improvement. We detail some of the worrisome incidents inspectors have found and what NASA is doing about its problems. \nPerhaps most significant is the relationship-building work Ms. Wynn must conduct to create trust between her central office and the remote technology staffs of famed space centers in Houston, Cape Canaveral and other facilities around the U.S. Yes, change is hard.\n\n**********\nNASA CIO Battles Entrenched Culture to Fix Cybersecurity\nBy Adam Janofsky and Kim S. Nash\nNASA\u2019s revolving door of technology chiefs has left the space agency with a disjointed, incomplete strategy for combating cybersecurity threats, according to federal inspectors.\nAfter receiving failing marks from the Government Accountability Office in May for such cybersecurity basics as an ability to monitor and diagnose its security posture, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has several improvement projects underway. They include a map of the agency\u2019s networks and an effort to tighten employee and contractor access to software and networks.\nCarol Harris, the GAO\u2019s director for information technology acquisition management issues, is concerned about the slow pace of change at NASA. \u201cGiven that they\u2019ve had policies half-done and have had difficulty implementing plans long term, it puts NASA in a high-risk situation where they\u2019re not able to manage cybersecurity [issues],\u201d she said. \u201cIf there is a cyber breach, they\u2019re not going to be adequately prepared to deal with it.\u201d\nRenee Wynn, chief information officer at NASA, acknowledges security shortcomings and that fixes remain to be done. This includes cultural difficulties in overseeing technology at the agency\u2019s remote space mission facilities.\n\u201cThere is a lot of work underway,\u201d she said in an interview. \nHowever, she said, cybersecurity defenses have improved since 2015, when she joined the agency after 25 years at the Environmental Protection Agency, most recently in an information management position. At that time, threats to government systems were increasing, she said.\n\u201cNation-states and hackers who do this for fun were getting better and had a lot of success in hitting the federal government,\u201d she said. In June 2015, for example, hackers who were later determined to be from China were discovered to have stolen data about more than 20 million people from the Office of Personnel Management.\nMs. Wynn said that breach spurred change at 60-year-old NASA and other federal agencies. She is overseeing projects that include encryption programs, stronger authentication tools on workstations and servers, and smartcards and badges to control employee and contractor access to systems, networks and physical computing centers. About 87% of NASA\u2019s information technology systems now require two proofs of identity, up from about half in 2016, Ms. Wynn said. \u201cThat was a huge lift.\u201d\nStill, other cybersecurity basics are lacking, auditors say, citing deficiencies that give business leaders guidance for how to assess their corporate security footing. For example, NASA\u2019s central security operations center does not have full access to monitor some key systems in remote offices, and many technology purchases do not go through recommended security controls, auditors said.\nNASA has been cited in recent years for a number of cybersecurity shortcomings, including supply chain incidents, cloud security failures and weaknesses in detecting unauthorized devices.\nNASA reported more than 3,000 security incidents in 2016 and 2017, some of which were intrusions that the agency\u2019s inspector general said may have been sponsored by foreign intelligence services. Strikes include hundreds of instances of malicious code installed on NASA systems and several denial-of-service attacks. Nine top security leaders have come and gone at NASA in the last 10 years, with six of those designated as \u201cacting\u201d and not charged with making significant changes, the inspector general said.\nUnlike those of other federal agencies, NASA\u2019s charter demands that it make much of its work public and collaborate with other countries to advance science. Balancing openness with security can be difficult, especially now, given concerns about nation-state sponsored hacking, said Keith Cowing, a former astrobiologist at the agency who runs a NASA watchdog site.\nNASA runs about 3,200 public websites and applications to share research and data, according to a count by the agency\u2019s inspector general.\nNASA was one of nine federal agencies to receive an F grade in its implementation of the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014, according to a scorecard released in May by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In the same government scorecard, NASA ranked the lowest out of 24 agencies for categorizing its major IT investments by risk. Agency CIOs are required to identify and review such risks under the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act.\nNASA launch pad for cyberattacks\nMs. Wynn says her technology team, working with that of Mike Witt, NASA\u2019s associate CIO for cybersecurity and privacy and senior agency information security officer, has closed some security holes that had let NASA systems host hacker activity. Corporate and government partners, including space centers in Kazakhstan, complained about malware and unusual internet traffic from NASA servers, meaning that the agency\u2019s systems were being used by hackers, Ms. Wynn said. \u201cWe were effectively contaminating them,\u201d she said of NASA partners.\nHackers apparently used NASA systems to try to penetrate other U.S. agencies, according to Mr. Witt. He said he saw \u201canomalous,\u201d or suspicious, traffic from NASA hitting the Department of Homeland Security when he worked in cybersecurity at DHS before joining NASA in 2017.\nMs. Wynn and Mr. Witt said remediation work has and will continue to improve NASA\u2019s defenses. Some technology can\u2019t be modernized or changed drastically because it supports projects due to carry on for decades, she said. Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 continue to send data to Earth as they travel more than 11 billion miles beyond the Sun by 2020.\nElsewhere, fixes appear to be helping. For its 2018 fiscal year ending Sept. 30, NASA reported 305 cybersecurity incidents to the Department of Homeland Security, compared to 1,283 for the year before.\nYet many problems identified by NASA itself or outside assessors, some dating back to 2010, haven\u2019t been addressed, inspectors and auditors say.\nCounterfeits and weak controls\nIn one incident, auditors found that a computer router on NASA\u2019s network was a counterfeit. It was discovered when the router broke and NASA submitted a warranty claim to what it thought was the part\u2019s manufacturer, which rejected the claim. \nSupply-chain risks have emerged as a top security threat for companies as well as government agencies. NASA, auditors found, sometimes relies on cursory internet checks for material about a product or assertions from manufacturers without reviewing information available from federal law enforcement, according to the inspector general\u2019s report.\nNASA technology staff doesn\u2019t coordinate consistently with the Federal Bureau of Investigation during its supply chain risk management review process, auditors said.\n\u201cWe were effectively contaminating them.\u201d\n\u2014 NASA CIO Renee Wynn\nBattling a long history of DIY\nA history of inconsistent technology leadership, combined with traditionally decentralized technology management, hampers security efforts, auditors found. Space centers and facilities around the U.S. each have their own CIO and technology and security staff controlling systems and making spending and project plans without consulting the offices of Ms. Wynn or Mr. Witt.\nFor example, NASA\u2019s central security operations center doesn\u2019t have full access to monitor some critical systems in key mission offices, such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built the vehicle that landed on Mars last week.\nWhile Ms. Wynn possesses authority from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to oversee technology in outlying centers, routine cooperation is spotty, Ms. Harris said. \u201cShe will need top cover from the administrator in order to get the \u2026 centers to play ball and implement a comprehensive security program,\u201d she said, \u201cso she can effectively do her job.\u201d\nMs. Wynn acknowledges the cultural obstacles and said she has been visiting the missions to build personal relationships with staff there. NASA scientists take pride in building technology to achieve seemingly impossible goals, she said. That approach can be at odds with tight security. \u201cSmart people make things happen. In this day and age, those are not best practices,\u201d she said.\n**********\nBig Number\n160,000\nNumber of confirmed devices used by tens of thousands of civil service employees and contractors at NASA, according to the agency\u2019s inspector general. \n**********\nMarriott\u2019s Starwood Missed Breach For Years\n\nMarriott International Inc.\n\n\n says it responded quickly when it learned in recent weeks of a colossal theft of customer data. But cybersecurity specialists say the company missed a significant chance to halt the breach years earlier, reports The Journal\u2019s Robert McMillan. A breach revealed Friday began in 2014, Marriott said. But its Starwood unit, whose databases were compromised in the hacking activity that Marriott announced last week, suffered a cyberattack in 2015 that could have prompted investigators to discover the activity traced to 2014, security experts say. \nThe 2015 attack: In 2015, Starwood reported a much smaller breach, in which attackers installed malware on point-of-sale systems in some hotel restaurants and gift shops to siphon off payment-card information. It disclosed the attack four days after Marriott announced a deal to acquire Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide for what ended up being $13.6 billion, creating the No. 1 hotel company globally.\nWhat Marriott says: Marriott says that the 2015 incident was different and not related to the attack made public Friday. \u201cObviously, all involved would have preferred that this incident had been identified earlier,\u201d a Marriott spokeswoman said Sunday via email. \u201cWhen there is a concern that payment cards are at risk, forensic investigations start looking at devices that process payment cards and follow the evidence from there.\u201d\nThe spokeswoman declined to comment on the 2015 investigation, saying it happened before Marriott had acquired the company. Starwood said at the time that it didn\u2019t think that attack affected its guest reservation system.\n**********\nMore Cyber News\nStolen identities tied to counterfeit good sold online. Fake designer perfume, handbags and apparel are being sold online on e-commerce sites set up with the credentials of individuals whose personal data previously has been stolen, The Guardian reports. Many sites shut down by law enforcement in the U.K. were linked to cybersecurity rings in Asia. Action Fraud, a cybercrime reporting center, has an online tool for reporting fraudulent goods. \nOMB loses top cybersecurity official. Josh Moses plans to leave his position of chief of cybersecurity in the office of the federal CIO at the Office of Management Budget this week, reports FedScoop. He had been in the role since 2015. \nCompanies may overuse bug bounty programs. Security researcher Katie Moussouris, founder of Luta Security, says that some companies rely on bug bounty hunters as a substitute for performing their own security audits, reports Threat Post. Some companies overpay for information about inconsequential bugs, Ms. Moussouris said. Cyber Daily: Cybersecurity May Well Be NASA\u2019s Final Frontier ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Cyber Daily: Cybersecurity May Well Be NASA\u2019s Final Frontier (WSJ: Pro Cyber Commentary & Analysis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2875",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyber-daily-cybersecurity-may-well-be-nasas-final-frontier-1543851200?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=17",
        "text": "CIO Renee Wynn, who arrived at NASA in 2015, has several large initiatives underway to address technology and policy shortcomings, she tells us. However, the Government Accountability Office is concerned about the slow pace of improvement. We detail some of the worrisome incidents inspectors have found and what NASA is doing about its problems. \nPerhaps most significant is the relationship-building work Ms. Wynn must conduct to create trust between her central office and the remote technology staffs of famed space centers in Houston, Cape Canaveral and other facilities around the U.S. Yes, change is hard.\n\n**********\nNASA CIO Battles Entrenched Culture to Fix Cybersecurity\nBy Adam Janofsky and Kim S. Nash\nNASA\u2019s revolving door of technology chiefs has left the space agency with a disjointed, incomplete strategy for combating cybersecurity threats, according to federal inspectors.\nAfter receiving failing marks from the Government Accountability Office in May for such cybersecurity basics as an ability to monitor and diagnose its security posture, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has several improvement projects underway. They include a map of the agency\u2019s networks and an effort to tighten employee and contractor access to software and networks.\nCarol Harris, the GAO\u2019s director for information technology acquisition management issues, is concerned about the slow pace of change at NASA. \u201cGiven that they\u2019ve had policies half-done and have had difficulty implementing plans long term, it puts NASA in a high-risk situation where they\u2019re not able to manage cybersecurity [issues],\u201d she said. \u201cIf there is a cyber breach, they\u2019re not going to be adequately prepared to deal with it.\u201d\nRenee Wynn, chief information officer at NASA, acknowledges security shortcomings and that fixes remain to be done. This includes cultural difficulties in overseeing technology at the agency\u2019s remote space mission facilities.\n\u201cThere is a lot of work underway,\u201d she said in an interview. \nHowever, she said, cybersecurity defenses have improved since 2015, when she joined the agency after 25 years at the Environmental Protection Agency, most recently in an information management position. At that time, threats to government systems were increasing, she said.\n\u201cNation-states and hackers who do this for fun were getting better and had a lot of success in hitting the federal government,\u201d she said. In June 2015, for example, hackers who were later determined to be from China were discovered to have stolen data about more than 20 million people from the Office of Personnel Management.\nMs. Wynn said that breach spurred change at 60-year-old NASA and other federal agencies. She is overseeing projects that include encryption programs, stronger authentication tools on workstations and servers, and smartcards and badges to control employee and contractor access to systems, networks and physical computing centers. About 87% of NASA\u2019s information technology systems now require two proofs of identity, up from about half in 2016, Ms. Wynn said. \u201cThat was a huge lift.\u201d\nStill, other cybersecurity basics are lacking, auditors say, citing deficiencies that give business leaders guidance for how to assess their corporate security footing. For example, NASA\u2019s central security operations center does not have full access to monitor some key systems in remote offices, and many technology purchases do not go through recommended security controls, auditors said.\nNASA has been cited in recent years for a number of cybersecurity shortcomings, including supply chain incidents, cloud security failures and weaknesses in detecting unauthorized devices.\nNASA reported more than 3,000 security incidents in 2016 and 2017, some of which were intrusions that the agency\u2019s inspector general said may have been sponsored by foreign intelligence services. Strikes include hundreds of instances of malicious code installed on NASA systems and several denial-of-service attacks. Nine top security leaders have come and gone at NASA in the last 10 years, with six of those designated as \u201cacting\u201d and not charged with making significant changes, the inspector general said.\nUnlike those of other federal agencies, NASA\u2019s charter demands that it make much of its work public and collaborate with other countries to advance science. Balancing openness with security can be difficult, especially now, given concerns about nation-state sponsored hacking, said Keith Cowing, a former astrobiologist at the agency who runs a NASA watchdog site.\nNASA runs about 3,200 public websites and applications to share research and data, according to a count by the agency\u2019s inspector general.\nNASA was one of nine federal agencies to receive an F grade in its implementation of the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014, according to a scorecard released in May by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In the same government scorecard, NASA ranked the lowest out of 24 agen Cyber Daily: Cybersecurity May Well Be NASA\u2019s Final Frontier ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Cyber Daily: Cybersecurity May Well Be NASA\u2019s Final Frontier (WSJ: Pro Cyber Commentary & Analysis) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2876",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyber-daily-cybersecurity-may-well-be-nasas-final-frontier-1543851200?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=61",
        "text": "CIO Renee Wynn, who arrived at NASA in 2015, has several large initiatives underway to address technology and policy shortcomings, she tells us. However, the Government Accountability Office is concerned about the slow pace of improvement. We detail some of the worrisome incidents inspectors have found and what NASA is doing about its problems. \nPerhaps most significant is the relationship-building work Ms. Wynn must conduct to create trust between her central office and the remote technology staffs of famed space centers in Houston, Cape Canaveral and other facilities around the U.S. Yes, change is hard.\n\n**********\nNASA CIO Battles Entrenched Culture to Fix Cybersecurity\nBy Adam Janofsky and Kim S. Nash\nNASA\u2019s revolving door of technology chiefs has left the space agency with a disjointed, incomplete strategy for combating cybersecurity threats, according to federal inspectors.\nAfter receiving failing marks from the Government Accountability Office in May for such cybersecurity basics as an ability to monitor and diagnose its security posture, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has several improvement projects underway. They include a map of the agency\u2019s networks and an effort to tighten employee and contractor access to software and networks.\nCarol Harris, the GAO\u2019s director for information technology acquisition management issues, is concerned about the slow pace of change at NASA. \u201cGiven that they\u2019ve had policies half-done and have had difficulty implementing plans long term, it puts NASA in a high-risk situation where they\u2019re not able to manage cybersecurity [issues],\u201d she said. \u201cIf there is a cyber breach, they\u2019re not going to be adequately prepared to deal with it.\u201d\nRenee Wynn, chief information officer at NASA, acknowledges security shortcomings and that fixes remain to be done. This includes cultural difficulties in overseeing technology at the agency\u2019s remote space mission facilities.\n\u201cThere is a lot of work underway,\u201d she said in an interview. \nHowever, she said, cybersecurity defenses have improved since 2015, when she joined the agency after 25 years at the Environmental Protection Agency, most recently in an information management position. At that time, threats to government systems were increasing, she said.\n\u201cNation-states and hackers who do this for fun were getting better and had a lot of success in hitting the federal government,\u201d she said. In June 2015, for example, hackers who were later determined to be from China were discovered to have stolen data about more than 20 million people from the Office of Personnel Management.\nMs. Wynn said that breach spurred change at 60-year-old NASA and other federal agencies. She is overseeing projects that include encryption programs, stronger authentication tools on workstations and servers, and smartcards and badges to control employee and contractor access to systems, networks and physical computing centers. About 87% of NASA\u2019s information technology systems now require two proofs of identity, up from about half in 2016, Ms. Wynn said. \u201cThat was a huge lift.\u201d\nStill, other cybersecurity basics are lacking, auditors say, citing deficiencies that give business leaders guidance for how to assess their corporate security footing. For example, NASA\u2019s central security operations center does not have full access to monitor some key systems in remote offices, and many technology purchases do not go through recommended security controls, auditors said.\nNASA has been cited in recent years for a number of cybersecurity shortcomings, including supply chain incidents, cloud security failures and weaknesses in detecting unauthorized devices.\nNASA reported more than 3,000 security incidents in 2016 and 2017, some of which were intrusions that the agency\u2019s inspector general said may have been sponsored by foreign intelligence services. Strikes include hundreds of instances of malicious code installed on NASA systems and several denial-of-service attacks. Nine top security leaders have come and gone at NASA in the last 10 years, with six of those designated as \u201cacting\u201d and not charged with making significant changes, the inspector general said.\nUnlike those of other federal agencies, NASA\u2019s charter demands that it make much of its work public and collaborate with other countries to advance science. Balancing openness with security can be difficult, especially now, given concerns about nation-state sponsored hacking, said Keith Cowing, a former astrobiologist at the agency who runs a NASA watchdog site.\nNASA runs about 3,200 public websites and applications to share research and data, according to a count by the agency\u2019s inspector general.\nNASA was one of nine federal agencies to receive an F grade in its implementation of the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014, according to a scorecard released in May by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In the same government scorecard, NASA ranked the lowest out of 24 agen Cyber Daily: Cybersecurity May Well Be NASA\u2019s Final Frontier ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Editor\u2019s News Picks (WSJ: Pro Cyber Editor Picks) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2877",
        "date": "2017-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/editors-news-picks-1486643126?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=88",
        "text": "Tax Phishing Up, Still Increasing: The Internal Revenue Service has posted a notice alerting businesses about popular scams meant to separate taxpayers from their IRS return. Robocalls, fake \u201cFederal Student Tax\u201d documents, and phishing are the most common forms of attack as tax season starts heating up. Attackers reportedly posed as Snapchat\u2019s chief executive, then asked employees to send along their W-2 forms. A new analysis highlighted in CSO Online found there were more IRS-related phishing attempts in January 2016 than in all of 2015. That number is likely to climb again as attackers shift their focus to the cloud.\nSimulate Security Response: A new commentary in Dark Reading advises corporate security teams to look to NASA\u2019s space missions to consider new ways to protect cybersecurity, starting with the film version of \u201cApollo 13.\u201d Before launching a rocket to the moon, the astronauts and support teams conducted hundreds of simulated missions in an attempt to identify any potential problems and stop them before any issues arose. \u201cThis is what breach or adversary simulations allow you to do in cybersecurity as well,\u201d writes author Danelle Au. \u201cBreach simulations is an emerging technology that simulates hacker breach methods to gain the hacker\u2019s perspective.\u201d \nUN Pushes For Cyber \u201cNorms\u201d: When a United Nations cybersecurity experts group meets in Switzerland this month they will discuss the best ways to implement existing security recommendations rather than formulate new ones, a U.S. delegate told NextGov. Diplomats from 25 countries, including the U.S., China and Russia, are expected to wade into topics including information sharing, assisting international hacking investigations and broach the subject of agreeing not to conduct cyberattacks on emergency responders and critical infrastructure. http://\n\nMost Hackable Passwords: A new report from the password management company TeamsID reveals, even in an era of unprecedented data insecurity, millions of users still rely on easy-to-guess passwords. \u201cPassword\u201d and \u201c123456\u201d were the most commonly used \u201cworst passwords\u201d in 2016, according to an analysis of more than 5 million user credentials, with \u201c12345,\u201d \u201cqwerty\u201d and \u201cfootball\u201d also appearing in the top 10. An easy fix? Think of a pass phrase, rather than a password, to stump hacking software that automatically tries popular log-in codes and words in the dictionary. Editor\u2019s News Picks ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "ATL Partners Backs Space Technology Provider Geost (WSJ: Pro PE Deals) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2878",
        "date": "2021-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/atl-partners-backs-space-technology-provider-geost-11629326724?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=17",
        "text": "The company\u2019s technology supports what is known as space domain awareness, or identifying, characterizing and understanding factors that could affect U.S. operations in outer space with the potential to threaten the country\u2019s safety and security. The U.S. Defense Department and intelligence agencies are devoting more resources to improving space domain awareness, particularly as rival nations such as China and Russia step up their space activities..\n\u201cThe [Defense Department] recognizes that space is a real contested domain,\u201d said Michael Kramer, a principal at ATL Partners. \u201cFor a long time, the U.S. has dominated that domain, but now new actors have the capability to interfere.\u201d\n\nMr. Kramer said ATL, which targets investments in the aerospace, transportation and logistics sectors, decided to invest in the fast-growing market for national security companies focused on outer space partly because it is more stable than many segments of the commercial space sector.\nIn 2019, the government established the U.S. Space Force to protect the nation\u2019s interests and those of its allies in space. The Air Force has requested a budget of $17.4 billion for the Space Force in fiscal 2022, which begins Oct. 1, representing a roughly 13% increase over the current year. Intelligence agencies have also stepped up space spending in recent years.\nFounded in 2004, Geost specializes in producing lower-cost sensors that are smaller, lighter and more energy efficient than many traditional systems, according to Josh Hartman, vice president and general manager of Geost.\n\u201cWe are affordable elegance in space,\u201d Mr. Hartman said.\nIn addition to identifying and preventing intentional attacks on space assets, Geost\u2019s technology helps guard against collisions with other satellites and orbiting debris. And that\u2019s an increasingly complex task.\n\n\nRelated Coverage\n\n\n\n\nTPG Rise Backs Renewable-Gas Producer Set Up by Smithfield Foods \nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nThoma Bravo Backs User-Experience Company UserZoom \nMarch 2, 2022 \n\n\nInsight, Brookfield and Canada Pension Plan Back Carbon Tracker Project Canary\nFebruary 24, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAn estimated 7,520 satellites were in orbit as of Aug. 12, with around 4,500 still functioning, according to data from the European Space Agency. The pan-European organization estimates there have been more than 570 explosions, collisions and other events in space and at least 934,000 bits of space junk in orbit that are more than a centimeter in length.\nOrbiting debris resulting from collisions and the deterioration of old satellites and launch vehicles also pose myriad potential threats.\n\u201cEven a tiny object, like a chip of paint, traveling at 17,000 miles an hour through space can cause quite a bit of damage to a satellite,\u201d Mr. Hartman said.\nAlthough ATL didn\u2019t disclose terms of the deal, Mr. Kramer said the New York-based firm\u2019s investment was smaller than it typically makes, partly because ATL plans to use the company as a basis for expansion through add-on acquisitions and other initiatives.\nThe firm sees growth potential for Geost in subsectors such as early-warning missile detection systems and laser communications and is currently in discussions with several companies about prospective acquisitions. Geost also produces devices using laser technology, according to its website.\nATL Partners typically invests equity of $150 million to $750 million, often tapping co-investment capital from its backers on larger investments. The firm is currently investing out of a roughly $575 million second fund that closed in 2019.\nWrite to Laura Kreutzer at laura.kreutzer@wsj.com The private-equity firm plans to expand space technology provider Geost in Tucson, Ariz., through add-on acquisitions and other unspecified initiatives. ",
        "author": "Laura Kreutzer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private-Equity Firms Start Exploring the Space Sector (WSJ: Pro PE Industry News) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2879",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-equity-firms-start-exploring-the-space-sector-11632222001?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=22",
        "text": "The total is more striking for the speed with which private equity has increased its investment in the sector\u2014PitchBook recorded only $85 million in private-equity investment in the sector between 2018 and 2020\u2014than for the scale. Firms have made just 10 deals in the sector this year, and the $1.22 billion in space investments is a fraction of overall private-equity deal volume, which stood at about $544 billion in mid-June.\nFor all the dynamic growth of the space sector, it is still too young, and most companies still too small, to absorb large amounts of private-equity capital, according to investors. Typically, private-equity firms aim to buy, restructure and then sell mature companies, while venture-capital investors place bets on fledgling businesses with unproven technology.\n\nIn the space sector, \u201cit\u2019s prime time for venture. For private equity, it will be in maybe a few short years,\u201d said James Mertz, a managing partner at venture-capital firm SpaceFund.\n\n\nMore From WSJ Pro Private Equity\n\n\n\n\nSingh\u2019s Take: Vista\u2019s Latest Fund Will Test LP Response to Founder Tax Scandal\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nAudax Mulls Launch of Secondary Fund Strategy\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nGoodhart Partners Shifts Focus to GP Financing From Stake Deals\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe explosion of interest in the space sector over recent years has been fueled by headline-making launches by billionaire-led companies:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic. At the same time, new miniaturization technologies have reduced the cost of making and deploying satellites, causing a flurry of interest in the possibilities for satellite technology.\nThe new high-profile space companies have reignited interest in the sector, according to Chad Anderson, managing partner at Space Capital, a venture-capital investment firm.\n\u201cWe kind of had stagnation in space for a long time before these companies came along,\u201d he said. \u201cNow there is a lot of competition.\u201d\nAlong with growth in commercial investment, the U.S. government\u2014long the main customer for many space-focused companies\u2014has signaled a new commitment through the establishment in 2019 of the U.S. Space Force, a new branch of the military. The federal government has also been funding space-related startups, in part through the Defense Department.\nA recently announced private-equity deal related to military involvement in space is ATL Partners\u2019 investment in Geost LLC, which designs sensors used in space missions.\n\u201cThe commercial market is growing substantially, driven by costs going down,\u201d but \u201cat the end of the day, NASA and governments around the world drive space,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kirk Konert,\n\n\n\n a partner at private-equity firm AE Industrial Partners.\nIn general, smaller and midmarket firms have been the most active in the sector, partly because of the scarcity of large, buyout-ready space companies. AE Industrial has made the most U.S. space deals, with seven, according to PitchBook. Other firms among the most active are Veritas Capital, Sagewind Capital and Odyssey Investment Partners.\nFor its investment in space-infrastructure company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Redwire Corp.\n\n\n , AE Industrial used the well-worn private-equity strategy of the roll-up, or buying and combining numerous smaller companies into a larger one. Redwire this month began trading on the New York Stock Exchange through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company that valued Redwire at $620 million.\nThis month also saw the closing of the largest-ever private-equity investment for a space-related company, according to PitchBook\u2019s data: GI Partners\u2019 $1.1 billion take-private of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Orbcomm Inc.,\n\n\n which provides satellite-communications services.\nOrbital communications is perhaps the largest single opportunity for investors in the space sector, according to analysts. A\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n paper last year predicted the global space industry could generate $1 trillion in revenue by 2040, up from about $350 billion currently.\n\u201cYet, the most significant short- and medium-term opportunities may come from satellite broadband internet access,\u201d the analysts said in the paper, estimating that the segment could eventually make up 50% to 70% of the global space economy.\nWrite to Chris Cumming at chris.cumming@wsj.com Private-equity firms are ramping up investment in the booming space sector, with some aiming to plant flags in an industry where buyout shops haven\u2019t previously been major players. ",
        "author": "Chris Cumming"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private-Equity Firms Start Exploring the Space Sector (WSJ: Pro PE Industry News) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2880",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-equity-firms-start-exploring-the-space-sector-11632222001?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=22",
        "text": "The total is more striking for the speed with which private equity has increased its investment in the sector\u2014PitchBook recorded only $85 million in private-equity investment in the sector between 2018 and 2020\u2014than for the scale. Firms have made just 10 deals in the sector this year, and the $1.22 billion in space investments is a fraction of overall private-equity deal volume, which stood at about $544 billion in mid-June.\n\n\n\n\nFor all the dynamic growth of the space sector, it is still too young, and most companies still too small, to absorb large amounts of private-equity capital, according to investors. Typically, private-equity firms aim to buy, restructure and then sell mature companies, while venture-capital investors place bets on fledgling businesses with unproven technology.\n\nIn the space sector, \u201cit\u2019s prime time for venture. For private equity, it will be in maybe a few short years,\u201d said James Mertz, a managing partner at venture-capital firm SpaceFund.\n\n\nMore From WSJ Pro Private Equity\n\n\n\n\nSingh\u2019s Take: Vista\u2019s Latest Fund Will Test LP Response to Founder Tax Scandal\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nAudax Mulls Launch of Secondary Fund Strategy\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nGoodhart Partners Shifts Focus to GP Financing From Stake Deals\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe explosion of interest in the space sector over recent years has been fueled by headline-making launches by billionaire-led companies:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic. At the same time, new miniaturization technologies have reduced the cost of making and deploying satellites, causing a flurry of interest in the possibilities for satellite technology.\nThe new high-profile space companies have reignited interest in the sector, according to Chad Anderson, managing partner at Space Capital, a venture-capital investment firm.\n\u201cWe kind of had stagnation in space for a long time before these companies came along,\u201d he said. \u201cNow there is a lot of competition.\u201d\nAlong with growth in commercial investment, the U.S. government\u2014long the main customer for many space-focused companies\u2014has signaled a new commitment through the establishment in 2019 of the U.S. Space Force, a new branch of the military. The federal government has also been funding space-related startups, in part through the Defense Department.\nA recently announced private-equity deal related to military involvement in space is ATL Partners\u2019 investment in Geost LLC, which designs sensors used in space missions.\n\u201cThe commercial market is growing substantially, driven by costs going down,\u201d but \u201cat the end of the day, NASA and governments around the world drive space,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kirk Konert,\n\n\n\n a partner at private-equity firm AE Industrial Partners.\nIn general, smaller and midmarket firms have been the most active in the sector, partly because of the scarcity of large, buyout-ready space companies. AE Industrial has made the most U.S. space deals, with seven, according to PitchBook. Other firms among the most active are Veritas Capital, Sagewind Capital and Odyssey Investment Partners.\nFor its investment in space-infrastructure company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Redwire Corp.\n\n\n , AE Industrial used the well-worn private-equity strategy of the roll-up, or buying and combining numerous smaller companies into a larger one. Redwire this month began trading on the New York Stock Exchange through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company that valued Redwire at $620 million.\nThis month also saw the closing of the largest-ever private-equity investment for a space-related company, according to PitchBook\u2019s data: GI Partners\u2019 $1.1 billion take-private of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Orbcomm Inc.,\n\n\n which provides satellite-communications services.\nOrbital communications is perhaps the largest single opportunity for investors in the space sector, according to analysts. A\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n paper last year predicted the global space industry could generate $1 trillion in revenue by 2040, up from about $350 billion currently.\n\u201cYet, the most significant short- and medium-term opportunities may come from satellite broadband internet access,\u201d the analysts said in the paper, estimating that the segment could eventually make up 50% to 70% of the global space economy.\nWrite to Chris Cumming at chris.cumming@wsj.com Private-equity firms are ramping up investment in the booming space sector, with some aiming to plant flags in an industry where buyout shops haven\u2019t previously been major players. ",
        "author": "Chris Cumming"
    },
    {
        "title": "Founders Fund, a Premier Venture Firm in Transition, Has Outsize Returns (WSJ: Pro VC Commentary Analysis) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2881",
        "date": "2019-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/founders-fund-a-premier-venture-firm-in-transition-has-outsize-returns-11551214841?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=78",
        "text": "Founders Fund just made a high-profile hire with investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Keith Rabois,\n\n\n\n who spent the last six years at Khosla Ventures.\n\n\n\n\nHe joins at a time the firm has been delivering above-average returns\u2014in some cases, stellar returns\u2014to investors. On paper, every dollar that Founders Fund invested from its 2011-vintage fourth fund has more than quadrupled to $4.60, as of the third quarter last year, powered by investments in billion-dollar startups such as Airbnb and Stripe Inc., according to documents containing firm data that were reviewed by WSJ Pro. The industry average for funds of that vintage was $2.11 during the same period, according to market tracker Cambridge Associates. Its third fund from 2010 has seen its dollars go up to $3.80, above the average of $3.15.\n\nThose returns reflect an investment multiple known as TVPI, or total value paid-in, which measures realized and unrealized value of a fund as a proportion of the total paid-in, or contributed, capital. These returns include estimated private-market valuations. The data could change after more of the firm\u2019s startups go public or get acquired.\nInvestment dollars from Founders Fund\u2019s fifth fund, dating to 2014, had grown to $2.40, including the value of the firm\u2019s stake in ContextLogic Inc., the online discount retailer better known as Wish. Peer funds of that vintage had grown to $1.48, according to Cambridge data.\nThe data show that Founders Funds\u2019 earliest funds, from 2005 and 2007, now have grown sixfold and more than eightfold, respectively, and include investments in Facebook, Palantir and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nDespite those returns, which are at least three times better than the industry average, significant turnover in leadership at the firm is drawing industry attention. Additionally, Mr. Thiel faced criticism in Silicon Valley after donating to the Trump presidential campaign and speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2016.\nEarlier that year, Mr. Thiel also stirred up controversy in tech and media circles when it was revealed that he helped fund a lawsuit between Hulk Hogan and the blog Gawker Media LLC, which led to the news outlet\u2019s bankruptcy. Since then, Mr. Thiel has moved to Los Angeles, a decision that stemmed from his concerns about the San Francisco region\u2019s predominantly homogeneous views, he said in an interview with Fox Business last year.\nMr. Thiel declined requests to comment.\nMr. Thiel and Brian Singerman have been the two general partners running the firm. The third general partner, Ken Howery, could be heading out as he awaits confirmation as the U.S. ambassador to Sweden.\nSeveral investing partners also have left the firm in the past two years, including Luke Nosek, a founding partner who left in 2017 to launch his own firm, Gigafund; Geoff Lewis, who had been a partner went on to create Bedrock Capital, which is backed by Founders Fund as an investor. Former partner\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kevin Hartz,\n\n\n\n a co-founder of Eventbrite Inc., left last year.\nMr. Rabois said he was recruited to Founders Fund by Mr. Thiel, a longtime friend, and by Mr. Singerman, who has emerged as a key leader at the firm after internal promotions.\n\u201cPeter\u2019s been the most influential person in my career and the ability to work with him again was just compelling,\u201d Mr. Rabois said. \u201cHe\u2019s the smartest person I\u2019ve met.\u201d\nAs a general partner, Mr. Rabois will now be one of the firm\u2019s most senior investors. While a veteran of the technology industry, Mr. Rabois has only been a full-time venture capitalist for six years. \nHe also has a long relationship with Mr. Thiel. They were classmates at Stanford University, worked together at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and have co-invested in several startups. Mr. Rabois subsequently became chief operating officer of payments business Square Inc. and he co-founded home-selling platform OpenDoor Labs Inc. As an investor at Khosla Ventures, Mr. Rabois wrote checks for DoorDash Inc., Stripe Inc. and Affirm Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKeith Rabois as a general partner with Founders Fund will be one of the firm\u2019s most senior investors.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nMr. Rabois and Mr. Thiel also are known for their contrarian views, often publicly voicing politically conservative opinion. Mr. Rabois, however, has been critical of President Trump at times in some of his tweets.\nA number of founders and venture firms have said they continue to do business with Founders Fund, because they are impressed by the firm\u2019s investment record. \nSam Rosen, founder and former chief executive of storage startup MakeSpace Labs Inc., which was backed by Founders Fund, said the political leanings of some of the firm\u2019s partners wouldn\u2019t stop him from working with them again.\nHe adds that he admires their courage: \u201cThey\u2019re willing to speak up for things they believe in.\u201d\nWhen asked whether Mr. Thiel\u2019s Founders Fund, the premier venture firm co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2005, is regrouping after several partner-level departures, but documents show the firm continued to rack up outsize returns for its investors and kept deal flow steady. ",
        "author": "Katie Roof"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tim Draper Says His New Fund Meets ESG Criteria. Don\u2019t Ask Him for Proof. (WSJ: Pro VC Funds) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2882",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tim-draper-says-his-new-fund-meets-esg-criteria-dont-ask-him-for-proof-11637060400?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=10",
        "text": "Mr. Draper, a vocal free-markets proponent, said growing efforts by limited partners and regulators to measure and constrain venture firms to specific ESG criteria are wrongheaded. Draper Associates doesn\u2019t use specific criteria to measure its past investments or evaluate new ones, he said. ESG-related investment decisions are based on Mr. Draper\u2019s evaluation of the startups\u2019 impact on the world.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWhen you start putting regulations down, everything gets ruined, particularly in a venture fund,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s better to think: \u2018Is this a future I want?\u2019\u201d\n\nMore than a third of LPs in venture funds globally have ESG investment policies, and another 23% plan to implement such policies over the next year, according to an October report by analytics company Preqin Ltd.\nThat, in turn, is driving more firms to market their funds as ESG compliant. Roughly $1.82 trillion, or 34% of all assets managed by private-equity firms, including venture, is already with firms committed to ESG, Preqin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMany investors are also worried about greenwashing, or unsubstantiated claims of pursuing an ESG agenda, according to Preqin. In a Preqin survey some 41% of LPs said that lack of information and data prevents them from incorporating ESG into investment decisions.\n\u201cManagers are making a claim that they are making progress on ESG. It\u2019s very difficult for investors to verify if that\u2019s true or not,\u201d said Cameron Joyce, vice president of research insights, at Preqin.\nMr. Draper, who founded Draper Associates in 1985, has backed companies including video-chatting service Skype, which he says reduced paper use;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, \u201cthat gives us a hedge against this planet\u201d; and brokerage\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Robinhood Markets Inc.,\n\n\n \u201cfor the good of every man to try to be an investor.\u201d His deals also included Theranos, the blood-testing company whose former chief executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elizabeth Holmes,\n\n\n\n is now on criminal trial. Mr. Draper declined to comment on the Theranos investment due to the continuing trial.\nAbout a third of Mr. Draper\u2019s new fund will be invested in early-stage cryptocurrency and blockchain startups, he said, another third in healthcare and the rest in other categories including transportation. The fund began investing last year and has backed startups such as The Mentor Method Inc., which helps companies implement mentorship programs, iSono Health Inc., which developed a portable breast ultrasound scanner, and Vivosens Inc., which ships at-home urine tests to consumers and provides personalized nutrition advice based on the results. \n\u201cWe have a lot of crypto, because we feel that [international] borders need to be dissolved over time, and we think [territorial] governance needs to go through a major transition,\u201d said Mr. Draper, who previously advocated for the breakup of the state of California. \nIn addition to running Draper Associates, Mr. Draper also founded \u201cMeet the Drapers,\u201d a paid-programming television entrepreneurship contest, as well as startup-education business Draper University. Those initiatives generate deal-flow for his venture investments, he said, and results in Draper Associates backing founders of underrepresented gender, ethnic, racial and geographic backgrounds. \nMr. Draper is the largest limited partner in the new fund, having invested 43.8% of the capital. The rest came from outside investors, more of whom wanted to know about Draper Associates\u2019 ESG record this time than in the prior fundraising rounds, he said.\nAs investors have become increasingly interested in ESG, some firms have worked to improve the tracking, reporting and standardization of ESG criteria. Preqin, for example, set up a model that aggregated indicators from known ESG frameworks to measure ESG commitments at the firm, fund and asset level. The factors considered range widely from greenhouse gas emissions to employee diversity. \nRegulators are also getting involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, introduced a task force earlier this year to monitor ESG disclosure and compliance by issuers, funds and investment advisers.\nVenture funds publicly disclose fewer ESG metrics than other private-fund types, such as growth and buyout, according to Preqin. That may be because venture funds tend to be smaller and have fewer resources to dedicate to the endeavor, Preqin\u2019s Mr. Joyce said.\nBut the lack of disclosure \u201cdoesn\u2019t necessarily reflect on ESG risk and impact, which are more important to LPs, as they assess investments,\u201d Mr. Joyce said. Venture investors can still have a large impact on financing the development of breakthrough technologies that help with the energy transition, for example, he said.\n\u201cVenture funds will struggle more to show their ESG impact, just as they struggle to show the commercial value of such early-stage investment. That\u2019s not to say the innovation they foster, an As more limited partners are asking venture investors to meet environmental, social and governance goals, Draper Associates set its own agenda for a new $230 million fund. ",
        "author": "Yuliya Chernova"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tim Draper Says His New Fund Meets ESG Criteria. Don\u2019t Ask Him for Proof. (WSJ: Pro VC Funds) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2883",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tim-draper-says-his-new-fund-meets-esg-criteria-dont-ask-him-for-proof-11637060400?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=8",
        "text": "Mr. Draper, a vocal free-markets proponent, said growing efforts by limited partners and regulators to measure and constrain venture firms to specific ESG criteria are wrongheaded. Draper Associates doesn\u2019t use specific criteria to measure its past investments or evaluate new ones, he said. ESG-related investment decisions are based on Mr. Draper\u2019s evaluation of the startups\u2019 impact on the world.\n\u201cWhen you start putting regulations down, everything gets ruined, particularly in a venture fund,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s better to think: \u2018Is this a future I want?\u2019\u201d\n\nMore than a third of LPs in venture funds globally have ESG investment policies, and another 23% plan to implement such policies over the next year, according to an October report by analytics company Preqin Ltd.\nThat, in turn, is driving more firms to market their funds as ESG compliant. Roughly $1.82 trillion, or 34% of all assets managed by private-equity firms, including venture, is already with firms committed to ESG, Preqin said.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1LPs Are Adding ESG Policies Limited partners' ESG policy plans by asset classSource: Preqin Investor Survey, June 2021Created with Highcharts 9.0.1Have an ESG policy in placeNo, but plan to within next 12 monthsNo, no plansUnsurePrivate EquityVenture CapitalHedge FundsInfrastructure0%20406080100\n\n\n\nMany investors are also worried about greenwashing, or unsubstantiated claims of pursuing an ESG agenda, according to Preqin. In a Preqin survey some 41% of LPs said that lack of information and data prevents them from incorporating ESG into investment decisions.\n\u201cManagers are making a claim that they are making progress on ESG. It\u2019s very difficult for investors to verify if that\u2019s true or not,\u201d said Cameron Joyce, vice president of research insights, at Preqin.\nMr. Draper, who founded Draper Associates in 1985, has backed companies including video-chatting service Skype, which he says reduced paper use;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, \u201cthat gives us a hedge against this planet\u201d; and brokerage\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Robinhood Markets Inc.,\n\n\n \u201cfor the good of every man to try to be an investor.\u201d His deals also included Theranos, the blood-testing company whose former chief executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elizabeth Holmes,\n\n\n\n is now on criminal trial. Mr. Draper declined to comment on the Theranos investment due to the continuing trial.\nAbout a third of Mr. Draper\u2019s new fund will be invested in early-stage cryptocurrency and blockchain startups, he said, another third in healthcare and the rest in other categories including transportation. The fund began investing last year and has backed startups such as The Mentor Method Inc., which helps companies implement mentorship programs, iSono Health Inc., which developed a portable breast ultrasound scanner, and Vivosens Inc., which ships at-home urine tests to consumers and provides personalized nutrition advice based on the results. \n\u201cWe have a lot of crypto, because we feel that [international] borders need to be dissolved over time, and we think [territorial] governance needs to go through a major transition,\u201d said Mr. Draper, who previously advocated for the breakup of the state of California. \nIn addition to running Draper Associates, Mr. Draper also founded \u201cMeet the Drapers,\u201d a paid-programming television entrepreneurship contest, as well as startup-education business Draper University. Those initiatives generate deal-flow for his venture investments, he said, and results in Draper Associates backing founders of underrepresented gender, ethnic, racial and geographic backgrounds. \nMr. Draper is the largest limited partner in the new fund, having invested 43.8% of the capital. The rest came from outside investors, more of whom wanted to know about Draper Associates\u2019 ESG record this time than in the prior fundraising rounds, he said.\nAs investors have become increasingly interested in ESG, some firms have worked to improve the tracking, reporting and standardization of ESG criteria. Preqin, for example, set up a model that aggregated indicators from known ESG frameworks to measure ESG commitments at the firm, fund and asset level. The factors considered range widely from greenhouse gas emissions to employee diversity. \nRegulators are also getting involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, introduced a task force earlier this year to monitor ESG disclosure and compliance by issuers, funds and investment advisers.\nVenture funds publicly disclose fewer ESG metrics than other private-fund types, such as growth and buyout, according to Preqin. That may be because venture funds tend to be smaller and have fewer resources to dedicate to the endeavor, Preqin\u2019s Mr. Joyce said.\nBut the lack of disclosure \u201cdoesn\u2019t necessarily reflect on ESG risk and impact, which are more important to LPs, as they assess investments,\u201d Mr. Joyce said. Venture investors can still have a l As more limited partners are asking venture investors to meet environmental, social and governance goals, Draper Associates set its own agenda for a new $230 million fund. ",
        "author": "Yuliya Chernova"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tim Draper Says His New Fund Meets ESG Criteria. Don\u2019t Ask Him for Proof. (WSJ: Pro VC Funds) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2884",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tim-draper-says-his-new-fund-meets-esg-criteria-dont-ask-him-for-proof-11637060400?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=17",
        "text": "Mr. Draper, a vocal free-markets proponent, said growing efforts by limited partners and regulators to measure and constrain venture firms to specific ESG criteria are wrongheaded. Draper Associates doesn\u2019t use specific criteria to measure its past investments or evaluate new ones, he said. ESG-related investment decisions are based on Mr. Draper\u2019s evaluation of the startups\u2019 impact on the world.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWhen you start putting regulations down, everything gets ruined, particularly in a venture fund,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s better to think: \u2018Is this a future I want?\u2019\u201d\n\nMore than a third of LPs in venture funds globally have ESG investment policies, and another 23% plan to implement such policies over the next year, according to an October report by analytics company Preqin Ltd.\nThat, in turn, is driving more firms to market their funds as ESG compliant. Roughly $1.82 trillion, or 34% of all assets managed by private-equity firms, including venture, is already with firms committed to ESG, Preqin said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMany investors are also worried about greenwashing, or unsubstantiated claims of pursuing an ESG agenda, according to Preqin. In a Preqin survey some 41% of LPs said that lack of information and data prevents them from incorporating ESG into investment decisions.\n\u201cManagers are making a claim that they are making progress on ESG. It\u2019s very difficult for investors to verify if that\u2019s true or not,\u201d said Cameron Joyce, vice president of research insights, at Preqin.\nMr. Draper, who founded Draper Associates in 1985, has backed companies including video-chatting service Skype, which he says reduced paper use;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, \u201cthat gives us a hedge against this planet\u201d; and brokerage\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Robinhood Markets Inc.,\n\n\n \u201cfor the good of every man to try to be an investor.\u201d His deals also included Theranos, the blood-testing company whose former chief executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elizabeth Holmes,\n\n\n\n is now on criminal trial. Mr. Draper declined to comment on the Theranos investment due to the continuing trial.\nAbout a third of Mr. Draper\u2019s new fund will be invested in early-stage cryptocurrency and blockchain startups, he said, another third in healthcare and the rest in other categories including transportation. The fund began investing last year and has backed startups such as The Mentor Method Inc., which helps companies implement mentorship programs, iSono Health Inc., which developed a portable breast ultrasound scanner, and Vivosens Inc., which ships at-home urine tests to consumers and provides personalized nutrition advice based on the results. \n\u201cWe have a lot of crypto, because we feel that [international] borders need to be dissolved over time, and we think [territorial] governance needs to go through a major transition,\u201d said Mr. Draper, who previously advocated for the breakup of the state of California. \nIn addition to running Draper Associates, Mr. Draper also founded \u201cMeet the Drapers,\u201d a paid-programming television entrepreneurship contest, as well as startup-education business Draper University. Those initiatives generate deal-flow for his venture investments, he said, and results in Draper Associates backing founders of underrepresented gender, ethnic, racial and geographic backgrounds. \nMr. Draper is the largest limited partner in the new fund, having invested 43.8% of the capital. The rest came from outside investors, more of whom wanted to know about Draper Associates\u2019 ESG record this time than in the prior fundraising rounds, he said.\nAs investors have become increasingly interested in ESG, some firms have worked to improve the tracking, reporting and standardization of ESG criteria. Preqin, for example, set up a model that aggregated indicators from known ESG frameworks to measure ESG commitments at the firm, fund and asset level. The factors considered range widely from greenhouse gas emissions to employee diversity. \nRegulators are also getting involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, introduced a task force earlier this year to monitor ESG disclosure and compliance by issuers, funds and investment advisers.\nVenture funds publicly disclose fewer ESG metrics than other private-fund types, such as growth and buyout, according to Preqin. That may be because venture funds tend to be smaller and have fewer resources to dedicate to the endeavor, Preqin\u2019s Mr. Joyce said.\nBut the lack of disclosure \u201cdoesn\u2019t necessarily reflect on ESG risk and impact, which are more important to LPs, as they assess investments,\u201d Mr. Joyce said. Venture investors can still have a large impact on financing the development of breakthrough technologies that help with the energy transition, for example, he said.\n\u201cVenture funds will struggle more to show their ESG impact, just as they struggle to show the commercial value of such early-stage investment. That\u2019s not to say the innovation they foster, an As more limited partners are asking venture investors to meet environmental, social and governance goals, Draper Associates set its own agenda for a new $230 million fund. ",
        "author": "Yuliya Chernova"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former Teen Startup Founder Josh Buckley Raising $150 Million for Solo Fund (WSJ: Pro VC Industry News) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2885",
        "date": "2020-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-teen-startup-founder-josh-buckley-raising-150-million-for-solo-fund-11602806244?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=33",
        "text": "Several individual venture capitalists have recently raised their own venture funds and are leading Series A and other large funding rounds for startups, which previous seed investors didn\u2019t or couldn\u2019t do because of smaller fund sizes or an earlier-stage focus.\nWhile traditional venture firms have multiple general partners, these individual investors, whose numbers have increased in recent months, rely on peers for advice and sharing deals. With the rise of AngelList and other sources of capital and information, startup founders now don\u2019t feel the need to work only with large brand-name venture firms, and are becoming more comfortable working with individual investors who have a strong record.\n\n\nMORE FROM WSJ PRO VENTURE CAPITAL\n\n\n\n\nVenture Investment in Crispr Gene Editing Spurs Innovation, Hunt for IP\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nWestern Startups Doing Business in Russia Grapple With Future\nMarch 6, 2022 \n\n\nTech Startups Seek to Shield Ukrainian Workers, Operations\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nSpeed is also a factor for working with these individual investors. \u201cThey\u2019re willing to do the deal now. And their organization doesn\u2019t get in the way, with an investment committee of seven people, with someone on vacation,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Qasar Younis,\n\n\n\n founder and chief executive of autonomous car testing startup Applied Intuition Inc. and former chief operating officer at startup accelerator Y Combinator.\n\nSan Francisco-based Mr. Buckley recently co-led a $100 million Series A round for social gaming startup Playco Global Inc. along with Sequoia Capital Global Equities.\nSome founders like working with Mr. Buckley because they are close in age.\nAlamin Uddin, co-founder and chief executive of NexHealth Inc., said he chose Mr. Buckley to lead the $15 million Series A investment in the patient booking and communication startup because of Mr. Buckley\u2019s experience as a founder and because he is an up-and-coming venture investor despite being only 28 years old. \n\u201cA big part of it is he\u2019s young,\u201d Mr. Uddin said. \u201cI\u2019m 27. If you could take money from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\n\n\n\n in 2004 would you? Of course in hindsight,\u201d he added, referring to the Founders Fund co-founder.\nAt 18, Mr. Buckley co-founded gaming startup Mino Games, which went through the Y Combinator accelerator. His other notable investments include employee data and management startup Rippling, supersonic aircraft maker Boom Technology Inc. and space transportation startup Momentus Inc., which recently announced it would go public via a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.\nWrite to Tomio Geron at tomio.geron@wsj.com Josh Buckley, a former teenage startup founder and angel investor, is raising his second venture-capital fund, according to people familiar with the matter, joining a growing group of solo general partners who are changing the early-stage venture market. ",
        "author": "Tomio Geron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond Limits Brings Cognitive Computing to Industrial Companies (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2886",
        "date": "2017-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-limits-brings-cognitive-computing-to-industrial-firms-1496835001?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=81",
        "text": "The technology was used in space exploration missions and is now licensed from California Institute of Technology, which manages NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Caltech is a shareholder in Beyond Limits.\nIndustrial companies generate tons of valuable data but little of it gets captured and it languishes in emails and elsewhere. \n\n\u201cWe\u2019re trying to capture knowledge where you have humans involved in the decision-making loop and deploy that in a cognitive agent,\u201d said AJ Abdallat, chief executive of Beyond Limits. \u201cThink of it as a data scientist in a box.\u201d\nBeyond Limits\u2019 technology collects data, analyzes and interprets it and makes recommendations and alerts users on critical issues such as well efficiency, safety issues, or oil exploration. The company\u2019s artificial intelligence allows the system to reason and recognize anomalies even if there are insufficient rules or data. For example, when a Tesla crashed into a white truck while on \u201cautopilot\u201d mode, the car\u2019s system didn\u2019t sense a truck there because it recognized the truck as part of the sky. But Beyond Limits says it has a physics model in its reasoning software and could recognize that it\u2019s not possible for a truck to disappear so quickly, Mr. Abdallat said.\nThe startup has focused on the oil and gas industry initially, but it can be applied to other areas such as health care. Companies like BP can use the technology to analyze data and help find oil reservoirs, improve the efficiency of wells, and predict when problems could arise. \nBP has been working with Beyond Limits for about a year and is now testing the technology in two areas with others in the works, said Meghan Sharp, managing director of BP Ventures, who is joining the company\u2019s board. BP Ventures, which is expanding beyond energy to digital technology, has invested about $325 million via about 41 investments total.\n\u201cBeyond Limits\u2019 technology and AI has the potential to relate to every aspect of BP\u2019s businesses and technology operations in the future,\u201d Ms. Sharp said.\nIn automation, Beyond Limits is focusing on surfacing and flagging critical information for customers, but eventually the software could also take corrective actions.\n\u201cThe first generation of the product just captures and deploys knowledge and predicts and flags that we have a problem here,\u201d Mr. Abdallat said. \u201cIn the second and third generation, if they want the system to take some correction action or pursue something that might not be in the original mission\u201d that would be possible.\nWrite to Tomio Geron at tomio.geron@wsj.com Beyond Limits, which uses AI for industrial applications based on technology from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has raised $20 million from BP Ventures. ",
        "author": "Tomio Geron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond Limits Brings Cognitive Computing to Industrial Companies (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2887",
        "date": "2017-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-limits-brings-cognitive-computing-to-industrial-firms-1496835001?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=121",
        "text": "The technology was used in space exploration missions and is now licensed from California Institute of Technology, which manages NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Caltech is a shareholder in Beyond Limits.\n\n\n\n\nIndustrial companies generate tons of valuable data but little of it gets captured and it languishes in emails and elsewhere. \n\n\u201cWe\u2019re trying to capture knowledge where you have humans involved in the decision-making loop and deploy that in a cognitive agent,\u201d said AJ Abdallat, chief executive of Beyond Limits. \u201cThink of it as a data scientist in a box.\u201d\nBeyond Limits\u2019 technology collects data, analyzes and interprets it and makes recommendations and alerts users on critical issues such as well efficiency, safety issues, or oil exploration. The company\u2019s artificial intelligence allows the system to reason and recognize anomalies even if there are insufficient rules or data. For example, when a Tesla crashed into a white truck while on \u201cautopilot\u201d mode, the car\u2019s system didn\u2019t sense a truck there because it recognized the truck as part of the sky. But Beyond Limits says it has a physics model in its reasoning software and could recognize that it\u2019s not possible for a truck to disappear so quickly, Mr. Abdallat said.\nThe startup has focused on the oil and gas industry initially, but it can be applied to other areas such as health care. Companies like BP can use the technology to analyze data and help find oil reservoirs, improve the efficiency of wells, and predict when problems could arise. \nBP has been working with Beyond Limits for about a year and is now testing the technology in two areas with others in the works, said Meghan Sharp, managing director of BP Ventures, who is joining the company\u2019s board. BP Ventures, which is expanding beyond energy to digital technology, has invested about $325 million via about 41 investments total.\n\u201cBeyond Limits\u2019 technology and AI has the potential to relate to every aspect of BP\u2019s businesses and technology operations in the future,\u201d Ms. Sharp said.\nIn automation, Beyond Limits is focusing on surfacing and flagging critical information for customers, but eventually the software could also take corrective actions.\n\u201cThe first generation of the product just captures and deploys knowledge and predicts and flags that we have a problem here,\u201d Mr. Abdallat said. \u201cIn the second and third generation, if they want the system to take some correction action or pursue something that might not be in the original mission\u201d that would be possible.\nWrite to Tomio Geron at tomio.geron@wsj.com Beyond Limits, which uses AI for industrial applications based on technology from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has raised $20 million from BP Ventures. ",
        "author": "Tomio Geron"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Raises $100 Million More (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2888",
        "date": "2017-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-raises-100-million-more-1511824488?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=107",
        "text": "That marked a leap from the previous valuation of $12 billion set in a 2015 funding round from Alphabet Inc. and Fidelity Investments.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThis filing simply discloses that SpaceX received an additional $100 million of investment as part of the last funding round which was disclosed earlier this summer,\u201d said a SpaceX spokesman. \n\nThe company, formally called Space Exploration Technologies Corp., previously raised about $1.67 billion from investors including DFJ and Founders Fund, according to PitchBook Data Inc.\nWrite to Tomio Geron at tomio.geron@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s rocket company\u2019s new financing comes in addition to a $350 million refueling it secured over the summer. ",
        "author": "Tomio Geron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Collective Health Raises $205 Million in SoftBank-Led Funding Round (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2889",
        "date": "2019-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/collective-health-raises-205-million-in-softbank-led-funding-round-11560772800?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=71",
        "text": "Corporate customers also work with Collective Health to identify which resources to offer and how best to manage health-care costs, which according to federal statistics total about $3.5 trillion a year in the U.S.\n\n\n\n\nSoftBank has deployed billions of dollars through its $98 billion Vision Fund into startups across a range of industries, from ride-hailing and food-delivery services to indoor farming and synthetic biology. But Collective Health is the firm\u2019s first bet on the health-care services sector, which includes insurance startups such as Oscar Health Insurance Corp. and accountable care organizations such as Aledade Inc.\n\nSoftBank Senior Managing Partner Deep Nishar said the deal represents about four years of the firm evaluating the sector. Mr. Nishar, who will join Collective Health\u2019s board, emphasized the company\u2019s value as a third-party administrator of services, not an actual provider, so it is free from the regulatory constraints that could limit market growth and profitability.\n\u201cI\u2019ve looked at many, many companies in this space because the total addressable market is so big,\u201d Mr. Nishar said. \u201cBut Collective stands out because it works with everyone, allowing the employer to become the adjudicator of claims.\u201d\nOther investors in the round include DFJ Growth, Public Sector Pension Investment Board, GV and New Enterprise Associates.\nCo-founder and Chief Executive Ali Diab said the Series E round brings Collective Health\u2019s total funding to $435 million since the company was founded in 2013, effectively doubling its previous financing. Mr. Diab declined to disclose the valuation the deal places on the company.\nEmployers increasingly shoulder more of the cost of health care in the U.S., a trend prompting many companies to embrace technology and tools that help them evaluate where all that money is going.\nThat has helped Collective sign about 50 corporate customers comprising roughly 200,000 members, said Mr. Diab. He said the company increased its membership from 120,000 members last year, and counts businesses including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Uber Technologies Inc.,\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n eBay Inc.\n\n\n as customers.\nMr. Diab said the company hasn\u2019t had to take on as much capital or shift strategies in the ways many health insurance or primary care startups have.\n\u201cWe think of ourselves more like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Salesforce\n\n\n or Slack than a health-tech company,\u201d said Mr. Diab. \u201cEvery modern enterprise needs technology to manage these huge parts of their business, and we\u2019re the tool to refine what and how they offer health care.\u201d\nMr. Diab said several growth-stage firms were interested in leading the round, but SoftBank was the clear winner, despite recent scrutiny on the Vision Fund being backed by Saudi Arabia.\n\u201cThe Vision Fund is the pre-eminent global growth fund in the world that is known for backing category leaders,\u201d said Mr. Diab. \u201cOf course, we are going to work with them.\u201d\nWrite to Heather Mack at Heather.Mack@wsj.com Health-benefits platform marks the Vision Fund\u2019s first health-care services investment ",
        "author": "Heather Mack"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former WeWork Executive Launches a Co-Working Company of His Own (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2890",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-wework-executive-launches-a-co-working-company-of-his-own-1519302601?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=101",
        "text": "\u201cMore grown-up professionals don\u2019t always thrive on the energy that there is in these great co-working spaces,\u201d Mr. Bistrian said. \n\nNetwork Group, which does business named \u201cwork well win,\u201d has raised $22 million from five individuals with ties to the real-estate industry. The company declined to identify the investors or disclose its valuation.\nMr. Bistrian said he began raising the round of funding in July and decided to forgo funding from private equity or venture-capital firms to take advantage of the individual investors\u2019 connections to the real-estate industry. \nBy focusing on wellness and offering amenities like fruit-infused water and yoga classes, Mr. Bistrian says his company can differentiate itself from other co-working brands.\nHe expects 60% of work well win tenants will be professional services and satellite offices of Fortune 500 companies. He anticipates about 40% of the business will come from startups. \nAs the company launches shared-office space, it will be competing against Mr. Bistrian\u2019s former employer, WeWork. The office space-sharing giant is the fourth most valuable tech startup following Uber Technologies Inc., Airbnb Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. \nMr. Bistrian worked at WeWork for about a year, leading domestic development from June 2015 to July 2016. He said the company opened 80 locations during that time. \nWeWork\u2019s fast growth has been fueled by billions of dollars from venture capitalists, who have valued the company at $20 billion. Silicon Valley investors and real-estate industry watchers have questioned this valuation, which outpaces real-estate companies that manage more square footage. WeWork Chief Financial Officer Artie Minson told The Wall Street Journal the company\u2019s valuation made sense because investors are looking at its plans for growth.\nMr. Bistrian declined to comment on WeWork\u2019s valuation, but he said he\u2019s \u201cincredibly impressed\u201d with WeWork\u2019s success. \n\u201cI don\u2019t see this as an us against them,\u201d he said. \nMr. Bistrian said he plans to open between eight and 10 locations in 2018, starting next month in Greenwich, Conn. An average work well win location will be 25,000 square feet. Its largest location in Austin will be more than 100,000 square feet when it opens to tenants this summer. \nThe prices for work well win locations will be competitive with other co-working offerings, Mr. Bistrian said. \nWrite to Cat Zakrzewski at cat.zakrzewski@wsj.com Frank Bistrian says he saw a void in the market for spaces that were more professional, private and quiet. ",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Is Seeking More Capital From Investors (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2891",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-is-seeking-more-capital-from-investors-11561654052?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=15",
        "text": "Ontario Teachers\u2019 Pension Plan Thursday said it invested in SpaceX out of its recently created investment arm, Teachers\u2019 Innovation Platform, designed to make late-stage venture-capital and growth-equity investments. The pension plan didn\u2019t disclose additional details on the transaction. The deal is the pension plan\u2019s first from the new direct investment arm.\nThe satellite and space rocket business has raised $3.26 billion to date from a multitude of investors including DBL Partners, DFJ Growth, Founders Fund, and Valor Equity Partners, according to PitchBook Data Inc. SpaceX says it has 6,000 employees now.\n\nA company spokeswoman declined to comment. \nIn a May press call, Mr. Musk said, \u201cour funding rounds have been oversubscribed for SpaceX.\nThe Series L, at $214 a share, follows right after the Series K fundraising, at $204 a piece, that took place in tranches in April and May, which came after a December round at $186 a share, according to Prime Unicorn Index. \nThe recent deals all give senior liquidation preferences to new investors, according to SpaceX\u2019s regulatory filing. That means that the latest investors get paid out first in the event of a liquidation or sale of the company. Such terms increase the risk for earlier investors.\nTypically venture-backed companies sell or go public in fewer than 10 years. But SpaceX is one of a few highly valued venture-backed companies that have remained in private hands since it was founded in 2002, while continuing to see its value increase. Others include Palantir Technologies Inc., incorporated in 2003, and Airbnb Inc., founded in 2008.\nWrite to Yuliya Chernova at yuliya.chernova@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is in the middle of another fundraising round, as it tries to ramp up various rocket and spacecraft projects. The company is looking to raise $314 million, which would value the company at about $31 billion. ",
        "author": "Yuliya Chernova"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Is Seeking More Capital From Investors (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2892",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-is-seeking-more-capital-from-investors-11561654052?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=71",
        "text": "Ontario Teachers\u2019 Pension Plan Thursday said it invested in SpaceX out of its recently created investment arm, Teachers\u2019 Innovation Platform, designed to make late-stage venture-capital and growth-equity investments. The pension plan didn\u2019t disclose additional details on the transaction. The deal is the pension plan\u2019s first from the new direct investment arm.\n\n\n\n\nThe satellite and space rocket business has raised $3.26 billion to date from a multitude of investors including DBL Partners, DFJ Growth, Founders Fund, and Valor Equity Partners, according to PitchBook Data Inc. SpaceX says it has 6,000 employees now.\n\nA company spokeswoman declined to comment. \nIn a May press call, Mr. Musk said, \u201cour funding rounds have been oversubscribed for SpaceX.\nThe Series L, at $214 a share, follows right after the Series K fundraising, at $204 a piece, that took place in tranches in April and May, which came after a December round at $186 a share, according to Prime Unicorn Index. \nThe recent deals all give senior liquidation preferences to new investors, according to SpaceX\u2019s regulatory filing. That means that the latest investors get paid out first in the event of a liquidation or sale of the company. Such terms increase the risk for earlier investors.\nTypically venture-backed companies sell or go public in fewer than 10 years. But SpaceX is one of a few highly valued venture-backed companies that have remained in private hands since it was founded in 2002, while continuing to see its value increase. Others include Palantir Technologies Inc., incorporated in 2003, and Airbnb Inc., founded in 2008.\nWrite to Yuliya Chernova at yuliya.chernova@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is in the middle of another fundraising round, as it tries to ramp up various rocket and spacecraft projects. The company is looking to raise $314 million, which would value the company at about $31 billion. ",
        "author": "Yuliya Chernova"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seed Funding Safe Passage for Space Travel (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2893",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/seed-funding-safe-passage-for-space-travel-1488186000?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=26",
        "text": " With tens of thousands of objects, spacecraft and pieces of junk floating around, space is an obstacle-plagued zone in which industry operators increasingly need a way to track the hazards that are out there. Newly launched LeoLabs Inc. aims to serve them. ",
        "author": "Alexander Davis"
    },
    {
        "title": "VC Daily: RealReal CEO\u2019s Journey to High-End Resale; Biotech IPOs Are a Hit; Chief Follows Nonprofit\u2019s Lead (WSJ: Pro VC Newsletter) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2894",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/vc-daily-realreal-ceos-journey-to-high-end-resale-biotech-ipos-are-a-hit-chief-follows-nonprofits-lead-11561726817?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=15",
        "text": " Good day.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is in the middle of another fundraising round as it tries to ramp up various rocket and spacecraft projects. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "VC Daily: RealReal CEO\u2019s Journey to High-End Resale; Biotech IPOs Are a Hit; Chief Follows Nonprofit\u2019s Lead (WSJ: Pro VC Newsletter) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2895",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/vc-daily-realreal-ceos-journey-to-high-end-resale-biotech-ipos-are-a-hit-chief-follows-nonprofits-lead-11561726817?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=57",
        "text": " Good day.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is in the middle of another fundraising round as it tries to ramp up various rocket and spacecraft projects. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "VC Daily: RealReal CEO\u2019s Journey to High-End Resale; Biotech IPOs Are a Hit; Chief Follows Nonprofit\u2019s Lead (WSJ: Pro VC Newsletter) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2896",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/vc-daily-realreal-ceos-journey-to-high-end-resale-biotech-ipos-are-a-hit-chief-follows-nonprofits-lead-11561726817?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=59",
        "text": " Good day.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is in the middle of another fundraising round as it tries to ramp up various rocket and spacecraft projects. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Startups Are Poised for Liftoff, but Self-Driving Cars Could Disappoint in 2020, Venture Capitalist Says (WSJ: Pro VC People) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2897",
        "date": "2019-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startups-are-poised-for-liftoff-but-self-driving-cars-could-disappoint-in-2020-venture-capitalist-says-11576795022?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=49",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies is the dominant name among space startups, but one venture capitalist says the commercial space industry could soon take off, with the barriers to entry lowered for startups. ",
        "author": "Marc Vartabedian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Startups Are Poised for Liftoff, but Self-Driving Cars Could Disappoint in 2020, Venture Capitalist Says (WSJ: Pro VC People) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2898",
        "date": "2019-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startups-are-poised-for-liftoff-but-self-driving-cars-could-disappoint-in-2020-venture-capitalist-says-11576795022?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=48",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies is the dominant name among space startups, but one venture capitalist says the commercial space industry could soon take off, with the barriers to entry lowered for startups. ",
        "author": "Marc Vartabedian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Startups Are Poised for Liftoff, but Self-Driving Cars Could Disappoint in 2020, Venture Capitalist Says (WSJ: Pro VC People) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2899",
        "date": "2019-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-startups-are-poised-for-liftoff-but-self-driving-cars-could-disappoint-in-2020-venture-capitalist-says-11576795022?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=61",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies is the dominant name among space startups, but one venture capitalist says the commercial space industry could soon take off, with the barriers to entry lowered for startups. ",
        "author": "Marc Vartabedian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Outdoor Retailer REI Building the Most Outdoorsy HQ Ever (WSJ: Property Report) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2900",
        "date": "2020-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/outdoor-retailer-rei-building-the-most-outdoorsy-hq-ever-11581417001?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=45",
        "text": "\u201cYou can\u2019t really be in the building anywhere without having a visual connection to the outdoors,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mindy Levine-Archer,\n\n\n\n a partner at architecture firm NBBJ, which designed the project.\nREI is one of a growing number of companies building unique headquarters meant to attract employees and market their brand. In 2017, Apple opened a massive, donut-shaped office in Cupertino, Calif., whose futuristic design earned it the nickname spaceship. Consumer-goods company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Unilever\n\n\n PLC renovated its U.S. headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., to re-create the feeling of a New York City loft and appeal to younger workers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rendering of one of the many outdoor garden areas, showing the connection between offices.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NBBJ\n \n\n\n\nWith headquarters \u201cyou get the opportunity to do it once and do it right and do it big,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Amrich,\n\n\n\n a vice chairman at brokerage firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n CBRE Group Inc.\n\n\n Older companies often use a new office as a \u201crebranding tool,\u201d he said.\n\n\nREI\u2019s employees are currently spread out over four locations in the Seattle area, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kirk Stephens,\n\n\n\n REI\u2019s divisional vice president of campus transition. About five years ago, the company started looking for a single site large enough to consolidate the offices into one.\n\n\n\n\n\nREI ended up buying an 8-acre site in Bellevue, Wash., that is part of the Spring District, a 36-acre transit-oriented development. The district\u2019s master developer, Wright Runstad & Co., is also REI\u2019s development partner, Mr. Stephens said.\nConstruction started in 2018. Mr. Stephens said he expects the main building to be completed by May and most employees to be moved in by July.\nThe main office building, a 380,000-square-foot structure around two courtyards, is oriented from east to west to maximize the amount of sunlight it gets. Next to it will be an indoor marketplace that will be open to the public and powered in part by rooftop solar panels.\n\n\nRelated Retailers Are Warned to Step Slowly Into One-Day Shipping Smith & Wesson Parent Sees Higher Gun Sales REI to Resume Business With Outdoor Company After Firearm Divestiture \n\n\nThe site was once occupied by an agricultural community that grew blueberries, among other plants, said Ms. Levine-Archer. In a nod to that history, the project will feature blueberry bogs, and the courtyards will be planted mostly with local flora.\nFounded in 1938, REI has 162 stores across the U.S. in which it sells anything from backpacks and tents to cycling shoes. The company\u2019s experience design manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nikki Easterday\n\n\n\n said the new headquarter\u2019s ample outdoor space will allow employees to put up tents and test outdoor gear on-site.\n\u201cWe do a lot of our own testing on our product. So it\u2019s just another way to get immediate feedback and see how things go,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn aerial rendering of the entire REI building, including rooftop gardens. At left is a new light rail station that will open in 2023.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NBBJ\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Konrad Putzier at konrad.putzier@wsj.com REI is blurring the boundaries between office and nature as the retailer builds a new headquarters in a Seattle suburb. Once it opens in the summer, workers will be able to walk from one room to the next through outdoor staircases and bridges. ",
        "author": "Konrad Putzier"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Rockets Spark Property Boom on Florida Coast (WSJ: Property Report) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2901",
        "date": "2019-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-rockets-spark-property-boom-on-florida-coast-11558436400?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=20",
        "text": "Now the city of 11,000 is in the middle of a resurgence as the private space industry\u2019s rocket launches bring jobs and visitors back. Blue Origin LLC has built a rocket factory north of Cocoa Beach. The company\u2014founded by Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n \u2014plans to launch its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral in 2021. Blue Origin hopes one day to bring people to the moon. \n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, is holding test launches on the cape and is expected to shoot a rocket with 60 satellites into space this week\u2014and, at some point, send people on a mission to Mars.\u00a0SpaceX was founded by Mr. Musk, who is also a founder of Tesla Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s facility in Merritt Island, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nProperty investors are starting to pay more attention to this long-neglected part of Florida\u2019s coast, developing hotels and condominiums to cater to the influx of well-paid space-industry workers and growing tourism. The number of restaurants in downtown Cocoa Beach has roughly doubled in recent years, according to the city\u2019s mayor, Ben Malik.\n\n\nMiami-based Driftwood Acquisitions and Development has bought three hotels in the area and plans to replace one of them with the city\u2019s first four-star resort with convention space.\n\u201cIt\u2019s really its own barrier to entry because there\u2019s very few places around the country, or even around the world, that have the capacity to develop these space launches,\u201d said Driftwood\u2019s Chief Operating Officer Carlos Rodriguez Jr.\nLocals gave development another potential boost when they recently approved new rules that raise the maximum building height and create areas where buildings can stand up to 70 feet tall above the 100-year floodplain, depending on city approval. Cocoa Beach\u2019s restrictive building codes have long blocked the kind of construction that turned Miami Beach into a major tourist destination.\nOne of the first beneficiaries could be Driftwood, which is seeking the green light from the city to replace the waterfront International Palms resort with a 502-room luxury hotel and apartment complex with retail and convention space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA developer is seeking to replace the International Palms resort in Cocoa Beach with a 502-room luxury hotel and apartment complex with retail and convention space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe company\u2019s CEO Carlos Rodriguez Sr. said he hopes to complete the $250 million development by late 2022.\nWhile Blue Origin and SpaceX are relatively new arrivals, Cocoa Beach\u2019s fortunes have always been tied to rockets.\n\u201cIt was kind of a sleepy beach town until the space program came,\u201d said Michael Weinberg, a commercial real-estate broker at HFF Inc. whose family has lived in the area for generations.\n\n\nMore From Property Report\n\n\n\n\nInvasion Upends Investor Bet on Russian Malls\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\nFast Pace of Real Estate M&A Seen Cooling\nMarch 7, 2022 \n\n\nStarwood Capital\u2019s Trouble in Israel Deepens Over Defaulted Bond Offering \nMarch 1, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAfter NASA picked Cape Canaveral as the site of its rocket launches in 1958, Cocoa Beach took on \u201cthe raw excitement of a boomtown and the manic and motley cast of characters that goes with it,\u201d journalist Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201d\nThe first astronauts in the early 1960s would spend booze-fueled nights at motels along the main road dissecting the town, Mr. Wolfe wrote, and \u201cthe pool areas of the motels became like the roaring fraternity house lounge of Project Mercury,\u201d NASA\u2019s first human space flight program.\nEven as it became a tourist town and surfing mecca, Cocoa Beach remained a cheap alternative to Palm Beach and Miami\u2019s South Beach. Then, starting in 2007, Florida\u2019s housing market and economy tumbled, and in 2011 NASA sent its last shuttle into space from Cape Canaveral.\n\u201cIt was desolate,\u201d Mr. Weinberg said. Since then, the revenue per available hotel room in Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach has almost doubled to $112.63 in the first four months of 2019, up from $64.19 during the same period in 2011, according to hotel-data company STR Inc.\nFlorida\u2019s strong economy, the busy nearby cruise-ship port, and Disney World, which is an hour\u2019s drive away, are also boosting Cocoa Beach, locals say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhile Blue Origin and SpaceX are relatively new arrivals, Cocoa Beach\u2019s fortunes have always been tied to rockets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Konrad Putzier at Konrad.Putzier@wsj.com Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing to send people into outer space and eventually to the moon and Mars. They are already improving the fortunes of a coastal Florida city that is home to their budding space ambitions. ",
        "author": "Konrad Putzier"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Rockets Spark Property Boom on Florida Coast (WSJ: Property Report) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2902",
        "date": "2019-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-rockets-spark-property-boom-on-florida-coast-11558436400?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=55",
        "text": "Now the city of 11,000 is in the middle of a resurgence as the private space industry\u2019s rocket launches bring jobs and visitors back. Blue Origin LLC has built a rocket factory north of Cocoa Beach. The company\u2014founded by Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n \u2014plans to launch its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral in 2021. Blue Origin hopes one day to bring people to the moon. \nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, is holding test launches on the cape and is expected to shoot a rocket with 60 satellites into space this week\u2014and, at some point, send people on a mission to Mars.\u00a0SpaceX was founded by Mr. Musk, who is also a founder of Tesla Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s facility in Merritt Island, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nProperty investors are starting to pay more attention to this long-neglected part of Florida\u2019s coast, developing hotels and condominiums to cater to the influx of well-paid space-industry workers and growing tourism. The number of restaurants in downtown Cocoa Beach has roughly doubled in recent years, according to the city\u2019s mayor, Ben Malik.\n\n\nMiami-based Driftwood Acquisitions and Development has bought three hotels in the area and plans to replace one of them with the city\u2019s first four-star resort with convention space.\n\u201cIt\u2019s really its own barrier to entry because there\u2019s very few places around the country, or even around the world, that have the capacity to develop these space launches,\u201d said Driftwood\u2019s Chief Operating Officer Carlos Rodriguez Jr.\nLocals gave development another potential boost when they recently approved new rules that raise the maximum building height and create areas where buildings can stand up to 70 feet tall above the 100-year floodplain, depending on city approval. Cocoa Beach\u2019s restrictive building codes have long blocked the kind of construction that turned Miami Beach into a major tourist destination.\nOne of the first beneficiaries could be Driftwood, which is seeking the green light from the city to replace the waterfront International Palms resort with a 502-room luxury hotel and apartment complex with retail and convention space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA developer is seeking to replace the International Palms resort in Cocoa Beach with a 502-room luxury hotel and apartment complex with retail and convention space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe company\u2019s CEO Carlos Rodriguez Sr. said he hopes to complete the $250 million development by late 2022.\nWhile Blue Origin and SpaceX are relatively new arrivals, Cocoa Beach\u2019s fortunes have always been tied to rockets.\n\u201cIt was kind of a sleepy beach town until the space program came,\u201d said Michael Weinberg, a commercial real-estate broker at HFF Inc. whose family has lived in the area for generations.\n\n\nMore From Property Report\n\n\n\n\nInvasion Upends Investor Bet on Russian Malls\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\nFast Pace of Real Estate M&A Seen Cooling\nMarch 7, 2022 \n\n\nStarwood Capital\u2019s Trouble in Israel Deepens Over Defaulted Bond Offering \nMarch 1, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAfter NASA picked Cape Canaveral as the site of its rocket launches in 1958, Cocoa Beach took on \u201cthe raw excitement of a boomtown and the manic and motley cast of characters that goes with it,\u201d journalist Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201d\nThe first astronauts in the early 1960s would spend booze-fueled nights at motels along the main road dissecting the town, Mr. Wolfe wrote, and \u201cthe pool areas of the motels became like the roaring fraternity house lounge of Project Mercury,\u201d NASA\u2019s first human space flight program.\nEven as it became a tourist town and surfing mecca, Cocoa Beach remained a cheap alternative to Palm Beach and Miami\u2019s South Beach. Then, starting in 2007, Florida\u2019s housing market and economy tumbled, and in 2011 NASA sent its last shuttle into space from Cape Canaveral.\n\u201cIt was desolate,\u201d Mr. Weinberg said. Since then, the revenue per available hotel room in Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach has almost doubled to $112.63 in the first four months of 2019, up from $64.19 during the same period in 2011, according to hotel-data company STR Inc.\nFlorida\u2019s strong economy, the busy nearby cruise-ship port, and Disney World, which is an hour\u2019s drive away, are also boosting Cocoa Beach, locals say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhile Blue Origin and SpaceX are relatively new arrivals, Cocoa Beach\u2019s fortunes have always been tied to rockets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Konrad Putzier at Konrad.Putzier@wsj.com Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing to send people into outer space and eventually to the moon and Mars. They are already improving the fortunes of a coastal Florida city that is home to their budding space ambitions. ",
        "author": "Konrad Putzier"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Rockets Spark Property Boom on Florida Coast (WSJ: Property Report) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2903",
        "date": "2019-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-rockets-spark-property-boom-on-florida-coast-11558436400?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=55",
        "text": "Now the city of 11,000 is in the middle of a resurgence as the private space industry\u2019s rocket launches bring jobs and visitors back. Blue Origin LLC has built a rocket factory north of Cocoa Beach. The company\u2014founded by Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n \u2014plans to launch its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral in 2021. Blue Origin hopes one day to bring people to the moon. \nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, is holding test launches on the cape and is expected to shoot a rocket with 60 satellites into space this week\u2014and, at some point, send people on a mission to Mars.\u00a0SpaceX was founded by Mr. Musk, who is also a founder of Tesla Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s facility in Merritt Island, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nProperty investors are starting to pay more attention to this long-neglected part of Florida\u2019s coast, developing hotels and condominiums to cater to the influx of well-paid space-industry workers and growing tourism. The number of restaurants in downtown Cocoa Beach has roughly doubled in recent years, according to the city\u2019s mayor, Ben Malik.\n\n\nMiami-based Driftwood Acquisitions and Development has bought three hotels in the area and plans to replace one of them with the city\u2019s first four-star resort with convention space.\n\u201cIt\u2019s really its own barrier to entry because there\u2019s very few places around the country, or even around the world, that have the capacity to develop these space launches,\u201d said Driftwood\u2019s Chief Operating Officer Carlos Rodriguez Jr.\nLocals gave development another potential boost when they recently approved new rules that raise the maximum building height and create areas where buildings can stand up to 70 feet tall above the 100-year floodplain, depending on city approval. Cocoa Beach\u2019s restrictive building codes have long blocked the kind of construction that turned Miami Beach into a major tourist destination.\nOne of the first beneficiaries could be Driftwood, which is seeking the green light from the city to replace the waterfront International Palms resort with a 502-room luxury hotel and apartment complex with retail and convention space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA developer is seeking to replace the International Palms resort in Cocoa Beach with a 502-room luxury hotel and apartment complex with retail and convention space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe company\u2019s CEO Carlos Rodriguez Sr. said he hopes to complete the $250 million development by late 2022.\nWhile Blue Origin and SpaceX are relatively new arrivals, Cocoa Beach\u2019s fortunes have always been tied to rockets.\n\u201cIt was kind of a sleepy beach town until the space program came,\u201d said Michael Weinberg, a commercial real-estate broker at HFF Inc. whose family has lived in the area for generations.\n\n\nMore From Property Report\n\n\n\n\nInvasion Upends Investor Bet on Russian Malls\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\nFast Pace of Real Estate M&A Seen Cooling\nMarch 7, 2022 \n\n\nStarwood Capital\u2019s Trouble in Israel Deepens Over Defaulted Bond Offering \nMarch 1, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nAfter NASA picked Cape Canaveral as the site of its rocket launches in 1958, Cocoa Beach took on \u201cthe raw excitement of a boomtown and the manic and motley cast of characters that goes with it,\u201d journalist Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book \u201cThe Right Stuff.\u201d\nThe first astronauts in the early 1960s would spend booze-fueled nights at motels along the main road dissecting the town, Mr. Wolfe wrote, and \u201cthe pool areas of the motels became like the roaring fraternity house lounge of Project Mercury,\u201d NASA\u2019s first human space flight program.\nEven as it became a tourist town and surfing mecca, Cocoa Beach remained a cheap alternative to Palm Beach and Miami\u2019s South Beach. Then, starting in 2007, Florida\u2019s housing market and economy tumbled, and in 2011 NASA sent its last shuttle into space from Cape Canaveral.\n\u201cIt was desolate,\u201d Mr. Weinberg said. Since then, the revenue per available hotel room in Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach has almost doubled to $112.63 in the first four months of 2019, up from $64.19 during the same period in 2011, according to hotel-data company STR Inc.\nFlorida\u2019s strong economy, the busy nearby cruise-ship port, and Disney World, which is an hour\u2019s drive away, are also boosting Cocoa Beach, locals say.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhile Blue Origin and SpaceX are relatively new arrivals, Cocoa Beach\u2019s fortunes have always been tied to rockets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Molly Dempsey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Konrad Putzier at Konrad.Putzier@wsj.com Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing to send people into outer space and eventually to the moon and Mars. They are already improving the fortunes of a coastal Florida city that is home to their budding space ambitions. ",
        "author": "Konrad Putzier"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Jeff Bezos' and Richard Branson\u2019s Space Flights Differ (WSJ: Quick Original) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2904",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/current-features/how-jeff-bezos-and-richard-bransons-space-flights-differ/B786D7CF-80CA-4895-976E-73A40504EE44?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=6",
        "text": " Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How Jeff Bezos' and Richard Branson\u2019s Space Flights Differ (WSJ: Quick Original) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2905",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/current-features/how-jeff-bezos-and-richard-bransons-space-flights-differ/B786D7CF-80CA-4895-976E-73A40504EE44?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=6",
        "text": " Richard Branson successfully traveled to the edge of space on Sunday, and Jeff Bezos isn\u2019t far behind. But the two billionaire founders\u2019 spacecrafts, flight logistics and altitudes have some differences. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "When a Black Hole Finally Reveals Itself, It Helps to Have Our Very Own Cosmic Reporter (NYT: Reader Center) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2906",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/reader-center/black-holes-dennis-overbye.html",
        "text": "Astronomers announced Wednesday that they had captured the first image of a black hole. The Times\u2019s Dennis Overbye answers readers\u2019 questions. Astronomers announced Wednesday that they had captured the first image of a black hole. The Times\u2019s Dennis Overbye answers readers\u2019 questions. When radio waves from the depths of a nearby galaxy known as Messier 87 traveled some 55 million light-years to a constellation of telescopes on Earth, revealing to humanity the face of a black hole for the first time, people around the planet paused in wonder. ",
        "author": "By Aidan Gardiner"
    },
    {
        "title": "A billionaire is taking applications for a life partner. The winner gets to go to the moon. (WP: Relationships) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2907",
        "date": "2020-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/01/13/billionaire-yusaku-maezawa-moon-wife/",
        "text": "A Japanese billionaire and fashion entrepreneur has somehow managed to manufacture a dating competition that is even wackier than the reality-show buffet we\u2019ve got.If his pitch were \u201cThe Bachelor,\u201d Yusaku Maezawa would be thrilling producers as the heartbroken but successful leading gent, desperate for love after a recent breakup. If this were \u201c90-Day fiance,\u201d the timeline would be compressed to 60 days. And if it were \u201cLove Island,\u201d the contestants would swap out their Spanish villa for a ticket to space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIntroducing \u201cFull Moon Lovers,\u201d a \u201cserious matchmaking documentary\u201d that will follow Maezawa as he searches the universe for his soul mate \u2014 by offering her a trip to the moon. Maezawa will be the first private person to take a ride aboard Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, set for 2023, and he\u2019s looking for a lucky lady to go with him.[WANTED!!!] Why not be the \u2018first woman\u2019 to travel to the moon?#MZ_looking_for_love https://t.co/R5VEMXwggl pic.twitter.com/mK6fIJDeiv\u2014 Yusaku Maezawa (MZ) \u524d\u6fa4\u53cb\u4f5c (@yousuck2020) January 12, 2020\n\nHurry to submit your application, though, because they\u2019re due to the billionaire by Friday. Known for founding Zozotown, Japan\u2019s largest online fashion mall, Maezawa is worth $2 billion, according to Forbes. The requirements to date the 44-year-old are straightforward:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can be as young as 20.You must be single.You must be \u201calways positive\u201d with a \u201cbright personality.\u201dEnjoying life \u201cto the fullest\u201d is a must.And, critically, you should \u201cbe someone who wishes for world peace.\u201dAlso fundamental to the deal is your desire to go to space \u2014 and endure the training that accompanies such an otherworldly mission.\u201cAs feelings of loneliness and emptiness slowly begin to surge upon me, there\u2019s one thing that I think about: Continuing to love one woman,\u201d Maezawa wrote in an plea on the documentary website. \u201cWhile it\u2019s something that is taken for granted by everyone, it\u2019s something that I haven\u2019t quite been able to do until now. When I got the offer to go on this program, I was first taken over by emotions of embarrassment and pride, and I thought about refusing the offer. The more I thought about it, however, I started to think a chance like this might not come around again.\u201dThis is not the first eccentric stunt Maezawa has pulled. In early January, he announced that he would give away about $9 million in a lottery to his followers as part of a social experiment tracking whether money makes them happier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2018, Maezawa announced he purchased not just one, but all of the seats aboard SpaceX\u2019s Big Falcon Rocket, which is tentatively set to blast off for a week-long trip to the moon in 2023. The amount of money he paid for the lucrative experience was not disclosed, but Musk has said it was \u201ca lot.\u201dEven then, Maezawa said he did not want to make the trip alone, which is why he chose to buy all the seats for six to eight artists as part of a project he called \u201cDear Moon.\u201d An art collector, Maezawa said he wanted to launch filmmakers, painters, architects and sculptors into space with him on the condition that they create interstellar-inspired works upon their return to Earth.\u201cI did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself, that would be a little lonely,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t like being alone. I want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow he has taken the party to another level.Those vying to be his leading lady should apply by 10 a.m. Japan time on Jan. 17. Selection will begin at the end of the month, and the matchmaking dates will begin by mid-February. \u201cSpecial dates\u201d to get to know Maezawa will take place in mid-March, and a winner will be announced by the end of the month.In his online plea, Maezawa made clear he is not looking for a one-orbit stand.\u201cI want to find a \u2018life partner,\u2019 \u201d he wrote. \u201cWith that future partner of mine, I want to shout our love and world peace from space.\u201dRead more: Yusaku Maezawa just purchased every seat on the SpaceX flight to the moon. Who is he?Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly a Japanese billionaire and several artists on a tourist trip around the moonYes, space tourism is for the rich. But sending artists to space is good for us all. Maezawa will be the first private person to take a ride aboard Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, in 2023, and he\u2019s looking for a lucky lady to go with him. A billionaire is taking applications for a life partner. The winner gets to go to the moon.",
        "author": "Katie Mettler"
    },
    {
        "title": "How will Trump celebrate his birthday? Past bashes have included spaceships, 15-foot cakes and Pamela Anderson. (WP: Reliable Source) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2908",
        "date": "2017-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/06/12/how-will-trump-celebrate-his-birthday-past-bashes-have-included-spaceships-15-foot-cakes-and-pamela-anderson/",
        "text": "President Trump will celebrate his 71st birthday Wednesday, an occasion that he\u2019ll no doubt spend surrounded by his family \u2014 now that his wife and 11-year-old son have moved to Washington.But what will the festivities look like? If past is any precedent, Trump\u2019s birthday party could be every bit as yuuge and classy (we haven\u2019t heard that one in a while, have we?) as you\u2019d expect. We found mention of some of Trump\u2019s previous birthday bashes, and let\u2019s just say that they set the bar for party planning\u00a0way over the top.\u00a0A few examples from the archives: WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to a Washington Post report in 1988, Trump\u2019s 42nd birthday \u00a0at one of his casinos featured \u201ca 15-foot spaceship zooming from the stage to hover amid smoke and flashing lasers above the birthday boy and his wife Ivana.\u201d Following the light show, there were magicians and dancers performing to a version of Michael Jackson\u2019s \u201cBad\u201d \u201creworked to honor the real estate mogul.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnd of course, there was to be a telegram from President Reagan,\u201d The Post reported, \u201cand video birthday cards from Liza Minnelli, Billy Crystal, Dennis Miller and Joe Piscopo.\u201dIn 1996, Trump\u2019s then-wife (he was on to No. 2) Marla Maples celebrated her husband\u2019s 50th with a bang. Four hundred guests watched as Eartha Kitt serenaded the real estate mogul. According to a report in the Australian Courier Mail, the highlight was a \u201cchocolate cake decorated with icing images of all of Trump\u2019s buildings and a sugar figure of Don, dressed like Superman with a money sign on its chest.\u201dHe marked his 59th in 2005 at the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, where \u201cBaywatch\u201d star Pamela Anderson offered a \u201ctrashy flash of cleavage\u201d per the New York Sun, and Trump blew out candles on a 15-foot, three-tier cake.Fast forward to 2017 \u2026 sounds like\u00a0the White House pastry chefs might be getting a workout. The commander in chief turns 71 on Wednesday. How will Trump celebrate his birthday? Past bashes have included spaceships, 15-foot cakes and Pamela Anderson.",
        "author": "Emily Heil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Kim Kardashian was ridiculed for her White House visit. Who\u2019s laughing now? (WP: Reliable Source) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2909",
        "date": "2018-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2018/06/06/kim-kardashian-was-ridiculed-for-her-white-house-visit-whos-laughing-now/",
        "text": "President Trump on Wednesday commuted\u00a0the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson after reality TV star Kim Kardashian West advocated for\u00a0the woman\u2019s release during a recent White House visit.Kardashian tweeted that it was the \u201cBEST NEWS EVER!!!,\u201d accompanied by three praying-hands emoji.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBEST NEWS EVER!!!! \ud83d\ude4f\ud83c\udffc\ud83d\ude4f\ud83c\udffc\ud83d\ude4f\ud83c\udffc https://t.co/JUbpbE1Bk0\u2014 Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) June 6, 2018\n\nAs soon as the news hit Twitter\u00a0last week that\u00a0Kardashian was meeting with\u00a0Trump to discuss prison reform and a potential pardon for\u00a0Johnson, out\u00a0came the jokes, the harsh derision, the pleas to escape Earth. Tweets such as:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019d rather live in the Upside Down,\u201d\u00a0\u201c*gets in spaceship*\u201d and\u00a0\u201cDear God: Please shake the Etch-A-Sketch and let humanity start over.\u201d\u201cForget about the fact that Kim Kardashian is here at the White House today\u00a0and what planet that is anything resembling normal, because it\u2019s not,\u201d\u00a0CNN\u2019s Jim Acosta said on air last Wednesday. \u201cShe shouldn\u2019t be here talking prison reform. It\u2019s very nice that she is here, but that\u2019s not a serious thing to have happened here at the White House.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump \u2014 who saw his own star power propelled by reality TV\u00a0\u2014 tweeted a photo of\u00a0the\u00a0White House visit that the New York Post used to make not one, not two, but three Kardashian butt jokes on\u00a0its cover (\u201cTrump meets rump\u201d and \u201cKim Thong Un\u201d among them).Tomorrow's cover: Kim Kardashian visits the White House to discuss prison reform with President Trump https://t.co/1N3bNkVmK7 pic.twitter.com/yPaL93Tyhe\u2014 New York Post (@nypost) May 30, 2018\n\nJohnson\u2019s case first came to Kardashian\u2019s attention after\u00a0she saw\u00a0a Mic story\u00a0about the 63-year-old great-grandmother on Twitter and soon got her lawyer, Shawn Holley, involved.Trump has commuted the life sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman whose case was championed by Kim KardashianMaybe those ridiculing Kardashian didn\u2019t realize she was\u00a0bringing her attorney with her. Or that the main point of her visit was to bring Johnson\u2019s case to Trump\u2019s attention (Johnson\u00a0was serving a\u00a0life term for a nonviolent drug crime), not to explain intricate policy changes.Story continues below advertisementRegardless, her involvement became an easy target. Kardashian serves as an avatar for the most vapid and derided kind of celebrity. People love to hate her and her family for being famous for showing off every aspect of their ridiculous lives. (And, more recently, she\u2019s been defending her husband, Kanye West, amid controversial statements of his own.)AdvertisementKardashian did something similar to actor Sylvester Stallone, although he didn\u2019t receive nearly the same amount of public ridicule for lobbying the president.Days\u00a0before Kardashian\u2019s visit, Trump\u00a0granted a long-sought-after posthumous pardon for the first black heavyweight champion,\u00a0Jack Johnson.\u00a0The case came to Trump\u2019s attention after\u00a0Stallone personally called Trump\u00a0to talk about it.Story continues below advertisementA celebrity using star power to bring attention to a serious issue isn\u2019t unique to the Trump era. Neither are the debates\u00a0over whether a famous Hollywood type is really the best person to talk about serious stuff such as, say, conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or whether such advocacy is also a self-serving promotional ploy.So what\u2019s new? The power that celebrity advocates\u00a0seem to have.\u00a0Stallone and\u00a0Kardashian wielded\u00a0their\u00a0fame\u00a0for what\u00a0they\u00a0believed\u00a0were\u00a0good causes, and the president did what they wanted.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s funny because people will just hear something and not understand, \u2018Well, what does Kim have to do with prison reform?\u2019 \u201d\u00a0Kardashian\u00a0told Mic\u00a0after meeting with the president. \u201cSeven months ago I saw a story on Twitter and it was about a great-grandmother that just tugged at my heart. And it was just that simple connection.\u201dShe continued: \u201cIf it takes me to go and talk to the highest person in power, the only person that can make this happen, which is President Trump, then I will definitely do that.\u201dApparently, that is\u00a0what it takes. Maybe next time, we should all take a\u00a0celebrity visit to the White House more seriously, because serious things can happen as a result \u2014 for better or worse. President Trump commuted Alice Marie Johnson's sentence after Kardashian personally lobbied on behalf of the great-grandmother. Kim Kardashian was ridiculed for her White House visit. Who\u2019s laughing now?",
        "author": "Elahe Izadi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence boasts that Trump\u2019s space program will force museum \u2018to build a new wing\u2019 someday (WP: Reliable Source) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2910",
        "date": "2019-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/05/15/pence-boasts-that-trumps-space-program-will-force-museum-build-new-wing-someday/",
        "text": "The \u201cApollo 11: First Steps Edition\u201d pre-screening reception Tuesday at the Air and Space Museum was about as D.C. nerdy as you can get: a sea of people in suits wearing various pins to denote their government agencies filling the lobby of the Smithsonian institution.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChitchat among the crowd \u2014 which comprised primarily D.C. bigwigs such as Kellyanne Conway and science-y hotshots such as National Space Council Executive Director Scott Pace \u2014 consisted of space commerce and grants. Bill Nye, signature bow tie and all, was there as the hot-ticket celeb. Secret Service were as plentiful as the grilled shrimp hors d\u2019oeuvres. The documentary may have been the focus of the evening, but the main attraction was really Vice President Pence, who delivered remarks before the screening and declared his adoration for all things American and interstellar.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApparently, Pence really likes space \u2014 so much so that he claims he and second lady Karen Pence once went on a family vacation to Cape Canaveral just to take their kids to see the rockets.Standing at an official podium with the Apollo lunar module behind him, Pence declared that Trump\u2019s dedication to space exploration will result in the museum needing \u201cto build a new wing,\u201d and said the president is \u201ccommitted to securing American leadership on earth and in the boundless expanse of space.\u201dVarious lawmakers who were in attendance, such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, gave the thumbs up as Pence, along with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, discussed a new budget amendment that will help provide additional funding for space exploration.\u201cThe United States will once again send American astronauts into space on American rockets from American soil,\u201d Pence said to applause from the audience. \u201cThe next man and first woman on the moon will be Americans.\u201d The vice president delivered remarks before a screening for the \"Apollo 11: First Steps Edition\" documentary, held at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Pence boasts that Trump\u2019s space program will force museum \u2018to build a new wing\u2019 someday",
        "author": "Sarah Polus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence boasts that Trump\u2019s space program will force museum \u2018to build a new wing\u2019 someday (WP: Reliable Source) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2911",
        "date": "2019-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/05/15/pence-boasts-that-trumps-space-program-will-force-museum-build-new-wing-someday/",
        "text": "The \u201cApollo 11: First Steps Edition\u201d pre-screening reception Tuesday at the Air and Space Museum was about as D.C. nerdy as you can get: a sea of people in suits wearing various pins to denote their government agencies filling the lobby of the Smithsonian institution.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChitchat among the crowd \u2014 which comprised primarily D.C. bigwigs such as Kellyanne Conway and science-y hotshots such as National Space Council Executive Director Scott Pace \u2014 consisted of space commerce and grants. Bill Nye, signature bow tie and all, was there as the hot-ticket celeb. Secret Service were as plentiful as the grilled shrimp hors d\u2019oeuvres. The documentary may have been the focus of the evening, but the main attraction was really Vice President Pence, who delivered remarks before the screening and declared his adoration for all things American and interstellar.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApparently, Pence really likes space \u2014 so much so that he claims he and second lady Karen Pence once went on a family vacation to Cape Canaveral just to take their kids to see the rockets.Standing at an official podium with the Apollo lunar module behind him, Pence declared that Trump\u2019s dedication to space exploration will result in the museum needing \u201cto build a new wing,\u201d and said the president is \u201ccommitted to securing American leadership on earth and in the boundless expanse of space.\u201dVarious lawmakers who were in attendance, such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, gave the thumbs up as Pence, along with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, discussed a new budget amendment that will help provide additional funding for space exploration.\u201cThe United States will once again send American astronauts into space on American rockets from American soil,\u201d Pence said to applause from the audience. \u201cThe next man and first woman on the moon will be Americans.\u201d The vice president delivered remarks before a screening for the \"Apollo 11: First Steps Edition\" documentary, held at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Pence boasts that Trump\u2019s space program will force museum \u2018to build a new wing\u2019 someday",
        "author": "Sarah Polus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ivanka Trump joins Betsy DeVos to screen \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 and boost girls in STEM (WP: Reliable Source) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2912",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/03/28/ivanka-trump-joins-betsy-devos-to-screen-hidden-figures-and-boost-girls-in-stem/",
        "text": "At an event at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for local school kids \u201cGetting Excited About STEM\u201d on Tuesday morning, Ivanka Trump needed no introduction.Or at least she didn\u2019t get one. The powerful first daughter was announced to the crowd simply by her name, with no title \u2014 because she doesn\u2019t really have one, although she has claimed an office in the West Wing. (The speaker\u2019s list handed to the media identified her only as \u201cIvanka Trump, White House.\u201d) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut once she took the podium to help introduce a screening of the movie \u201cHidden Figures\u201d \u2014 a film about three African American women who were NASA mathematicians in the early years of the space program\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Trump made it clear what she believes her job to be.Ivanka Trump once encouraged women to state their job titles. Now she won\u2019t share hers.There\u2019s one part boosting women and girls. \u201cThe heroes of \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 were trailblazers for women in STEM,\u201d Trump intoned, \u201cpaving the way for greater representation of women and African Americans in these fields. They embody America\u2019s spirit of innovation and inspire us all to continue pushing gender boundaries across all industries.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then there\u2019s the matter of selling her dad\u2019s policies. \u201cMy father\u2019s administration has expanded NASA\u2019s space exploration mission and added Mars as a key objective.\u201d (She didn\u2019t mention the NASA cuts in dad\u2019s proposed budget, which would slash the education office that helps promote STEM for girls.)Oh, and of course, she\u2019s there to project the image so central to her brand \u2014 that of the flawlessly coifed mom-who-has-it-all. \u201cMy daughter, Arabella, and I are enrolling in a coding class this summer,\u201d she told the crowd of young people. \u201cWe\u2019re excited to learn this incredible new language together.\u201d (Arabella is\u00a05 years old.)Earlier in the morning, Trump smiled as she briefly toured several of the museum\u2019s exhibits\u00a0alongside Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The pair nodded dutifully and touched the moon rock brought back from a NASA mission. She posed for pictures with the schoolchildren, who were mostly African American girls.Even the kids seemed not to know quite what to make of the glamorous first daughter. Some shot videos on their phones. Others hung back.\u201cShe\u2019s so skinny!\u201d one of the girls whispered to a friend as they lined up nervously for a selfie. The powerful first daughter was introduced with no title because she doesn't have an official one. Ivanka Trump joins Betsy DeVos to screen \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 and boost girls in STEM",
        "author": "Emily Heil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ivanka Trump joins Betsy DeVos to screen \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 and boost girls in STEM (WP: Reliable Source) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2913",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/03/28/ivanka-trump-joins-betsy-devos-to-screen-hidden-figures-and-boost-girls-in-stem/",
        "text": "At an event at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum for local school kids \u201cGetting Excited About STEM\u201d on Tuesday morning, Ivanka Trump needed no introduction.Or at least she didn\u2019t get one. The powerful first daughter was announced to the crowd simply by her name, with no title \u2014 because she doesn\u2019t really have one, although she has claimed an office in the West Wing. (The speaker\u2019s list handed to the media identified her only as \u201cIvanka Trump, White House.\u201d) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut once she took the podium to help introduce a screening of the movie \u201cHidden Figures\u201d \u2014 a film about three African American women who were NASA mathematicians in the early years of the space program\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Trump made it clear what she believes her job to be.Ivanka Trump once encouraged women to state their job titles. Now she won\u2019t share hers.There\u2019s one part boosting women and girls. \u201cThe heroes of \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 were trailblazers for women in STEM,\u201d Trump intoned, \u201cpaving the way for greater representation of women and African Americans in these fields. They embody America\u2019s spirit of innovation and inspire us all to continue pushing gender boundaries across all industries.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then there\u2019s the matter of selling her dad\u2019s policies. \u201cMy father\u2019s administration has expanded NASA\u2019s space exploration mission and added Mars as a key objective.\u201d (She didn\u2019t mention the NASA cuts in dad\u2019s proposed budget, which would slash the education office that helps promote STEM for girls.)Oh, and of course, she\u2019s there to project the image so central to her brand \u2014 that of the flawlessly coifed mom-who-has-it-all. \u201cMy daughter, Arabella, and I are enrolling in a coding class this summer,\u201d she told the crowd of young people. \u201cWe\u2019re excited to learn this incredible new language together.\u201d (Arabella is\u00a05 years old.)Earlier in the morning, Trump smiled as she briefly toured several of the museum\u2019s exhibits\u00a0alongside Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The pair nodded dutifully and touched the moon rock brought back from a NASA mission. She posed for pictures with the schoolchildren, who were mostly African American girls.Even the kids seemed not to know quite what to make of the glamorous first daughter. Some shot videos on their phones. Others hung back.\u201cShe\u2019s so skinny!\u201d one of the girls whispered to a friend as they lined up nervously for a selfie. The powerful first daughter was introduced with no title because she doesn't have an official one. Ivanka Trump joins Betsy DeVos to screen \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 and boost girls in STEM",
        "author": "Emily Heil"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen?  (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2914",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/12/first-man-shows-neil-armstrong-mourning-his-daughter-moon-did-that-really-happen/",
        "text": "This post discusses the plot of the movie and its historical accuracy.It\u2019s the emotional climax of the film: Neil Armstrong in his spacesuit standing on the lip of a crater on the moon, holding a bracelet spelling out the name of daughter Karen, who had died seven years earlier, before her third birthday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPlayed by Ryan Gosling, Armstrong tosses the bracelet into the depths of the dark crater, as tears stream down his face, a stirring farewell scene that comes toward the end of \u201cFirst Man,\u201d the Armstrong biopic directed by Damien Chazelle that opens nationwide Friday.There\u2019s just one problem. There is no evidence that it ever happened. Historians say it is probably another example of Hollywood injecting a bit of dramatic fiction to heighten the movie\u2019s emotional punch.\u2018First Man\u2019 is a solemn yet stirring look at the first moon landingAt a rally in Ohio Friday night, President Trump attacked the movie not for what\u2019s in it but for what isn\u2019t: a scene showing the moment when the American flag is planted on the surface of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe\u2019s the man that planted the flag on the face of the moon,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThere was no kneeling\u201d \u2014 a reference to NFL athletes kneeling in protest during the national anthem.In the authorized biography that inspired the film, author James Hansen wrote that the mementos Armstrong took to the moon were limited \u2014 some medallions commemorating the Apollo 11 lunar mission, jewelry for his wife, a piece of the Wright Brothers\u2019 airplane and his college fraternity pin.\u201cI didn\u2019t bring anything else for myself,\u201d Hansen quotes Armstrong as saying.His then-wife Janet Armstrong was apparently distressed that \u201cArmstrong took nothing else for family members \u2014 not even for his two boys,\u201d Hansen wrote, adding: \u201cAnother loved one that Neil apparently did not remember by taking anything of hers to the moon was his daughter Karen.\u201d Bill Barry, NASA\u2019s chief historian, said questions about the scene came up recently during an event for the movie at the Kennedy Space Center. The conclusion, he wrote in an email to The Washington Post: \u201cThe scene was created for the movie, and there is no specific evidence that Neil Armstrong left any \u2018memorial items\u2019 on the moon.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoger Launius, the former NASA chief historian and a former senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, agreed, saying, \u201cthere is no evidence to support the assertion that he left a bracelet of his daughter on the moon.\u201d \u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteThough apparently fiction, the moment is a critical one. Throughout the film, Armstrong, who died in 2012, is portrayed as a stolid and steely pilot who keeps his cool in all sorts of stressing situations, from when his spacecraft started tumbling during the Gemini 8 mission to the tense landing on the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. He\u2019s understated and cool throughout the film \u2014 even when told he\u2019s been selected to command the Apollo 11 mission, he replies with not much more than a nod.The death of his daughter from a brain tumor, however, serves as an emotional undertow, a recurring theme in the film that reveals Armstrong\u2019s humanity. After her death, he has a vision of her playing at a party, and at one point he slips her bracelet into a drawer.Honoring her memory on the lunar surface would have been poetic, Hansen wrote: \u201cWhat could have made the first moon landing more meaningful \u2018for all mankind\u2019 than a father honoring the cherished memory of his beloved little girl (she would have been a 10-year-old), one of her toys, an article of her clothing, a lock of hair?\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe wish that Armstrong brought some sort of a memento with him is what gave screenwriter Josh Singer the idea to write the bracelet scene. \u201cIf it weren\u2019t a hope raised by the historian, I wouldn\u2019t have included it,\u201d Singer said in an interview.Other Apollo astronauts paid tribute to their families on the moon. Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon in 1972, wrote his daughter\u2019s initials in the lunar dust before he departed. Buzz Aldrin carried photos of his children, and Charlie Duke left a photo of his family on the lunar surface.\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.While there is no evidence of it, it is possible Armstrong did something, as well \u2014 and that is why Hansen said he is okay with it in the film. \u201cWe don\u2019t know for sure what Neil did,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s a rationalization.\u201d Story continues below advertisementStill, he said the scene takes \u201cdramatic license, for sure, and it\u2019s a fairly big one.\u201d But he said that the moment \u201cplays really well in the movie, and that\u2019s maybe the bottom line for the filmmaker. ... Sometimes the power of poetry prevails over the uncertainty of fact.\u201d AdvertisementA previous screenwriter also had a similar scene in his version of the script, he said. But instead of a bracelet, Armstrong brought one of Karen\u2019s shoes to the moon.Such a display of emotion, especially during an operational mission, also might have been out of character for a man who Janet Armstrong said in the book, \u201ccan be thoughtful, but he does not give much time to being thoughtful, or at least to expressing it.\u201d During the film, Armstrong on a few occasions gazes longingly at the moon. But during a 2001 interview, historian Douglas Brinkley asked if he ever would \u201cjust go out quietly and look at the moon?\u201d Armstrong answered: \u201cNo, I never did that.\u201d Former Apollo astronaut Al Worden, who served as a consultant on the film, said in an interview that Chazelle, the director, was rigorous in making sure he got all the technical details right, from how the astronauts entered the spacecraft, to the locations of the switches and buttons inside.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe went to great lengths to make it accurate,\u201d Worden said. \u201cThere\u2019s just no question about that. He did a superb job.\u201d He said Armstrong \u201cwould probably like\u201d the film, even if he is portrayed \u201cas a little bit more aloof than he really was. I always found him to be very friendly, very cool and calm most of the time.\u201d Then again, he was an engineer, dispassionate and fact-oriented. During the 2001 interview, Brinkley asked Armstrong what he thought of the movie \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d adapted from Tom Wolfe\u2019s book. Armstrong responded that he thought \u201cit was very good filmmaking.\u201d But he was critical of the freedoms that Hollywood took documenting the early days of the Space Age.Story continues below advertisementWhile it may have been entertaining, it was, he said, \u201cterrible history. The wrong people working on the wrong projects at the wrong times. It bears no resemblance to what was actually going on.\u201d Read more Retropolis:An asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famous The new film shows Armstrong, played by Ryan Gosling, clutching a bracelet during his historic moon walk that pays tribute to his daughter Karen, who died of a brain tumor before her third birthday. \u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen? ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "She was pregnant when NASA offered to send her to space. Anna Fisher didn\u2019t hesitate. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2915",
        "date": "2019-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/11/she-was-pregnant-when-nasa-offered-send-her-space-anna-fisher-didnt-hesitate/",
        "text": "The moment Anna Lee Fisher had been waiting for came on a hot summer afternoon in 1983. Five years had passed since Fisher and five other women were chosen to become America\u2019s first female astronauts. But she hadn\u2019t yet been to space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHer boss asked to see her in his office. He requested that her husband, who was also in the astronaut training program, come along, too. They sat down at his desk together. \u201cI\u2019m thinking,\u201d her boss said, \u201cof sending Anna.\u201dThis was what Fisher, then 33 years old, had wanted. There was only one little thing to consider \u2014 and it was currently growing inside her. On the day she was asked to climb into a shuttle and be blasted into the solar system, Fisher was eight and a half months pregnant.Story continues below advertisementShe still didn\u2019t hesitate.\u201cI wasn\u2019t about to say no,\u201d she said last month in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cYou don\u2019t say no to that offer.\u201dAdvertisementAnd that was how Anna Fisher became the world\u2019s first mother to go to space. A few weeks after being chosen for a flight, Fisher gave birth to a daughter, Kristin.She will soon mark the 35th anniversary of her flight, the day she became an inspirational figure to working moms everywhere \u2014 including to her daughter. Kristin is now a D.C.-based correspondent for Fox News and the mother of a 16-month old girl.\u201cI always grew up thinking I could have a demanding full-time job and be a mom,\u201d Kristin said. \u201cThe example that she set for me, it was never a question. It wasn\u2019t until I got pregnant and started thinking about the logistics that I started thinking, \u2018How did she do this?\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementThe answer is something Anna Fisher had to figure out fast. She gave birth to Kristin on a Friday. By Monday, she was back at NASA, carrying the doughnut-shaped pillow that would make it possible to sit down for the team meeting.AdvertisementShe wanted to send a message to her male co-workers and bosses: She might have had a baby, but she was still on the job.\u201cIt was worth it just to see the looks on their faces,\u201d she recalled.\u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen?Fisher had always planned to have a family and even told the selection committee for the astronaut training program of that plan during her interview. She and her husband, Bill, were emergency room doctors in California in 1977 when they applied to NASA\u2019s open call for potential astronauts. Bill wouldn\u2019t get in for another two years. But Fisher, at 28 years old, made the cut and moved to Houston.There were six women in the class of 35 new astronauts \u2014 all of whom were determined to ensure their male colleagues treated them as equally qualified. Sally Ride, who would become the first American woman in space, went shopping with Fisher for baggy khaki pants so they would be wearing outfits similar to NASA\u2019s men. Fisher never wore makeup at work. She attended the astronauts\u2019 spouses\u2019 club, so that her colleagues\u2019 wives wouldn\u2019t feel uneasy about a woman working so closely with them.For 14 months before her flight, Fisher juggled her training and NASA obligations with caring for her new daughter. She and Bill asked her mom for help and hired a nanny. She started pointing out to reporters that the men on her flight were leaving their children behind, too.At work, she learned how to serve as \u201cCapcom,\u201d the person in mission control who communicates with the astronauts already in orbit. It was an important role, requiring long, intense shifts \u2014 one her commander suggested she might want to give up. \u201cYou\u2019ve got Kristin, you\u2019re training, it\u2019s too much,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFisher begged him to reconsider, and won. Only when mission control lost the connection with the flight in orbit did Fisher run into the bathroom and pump her breast milk.\u201cThey never had pumping rooms or anything like that,\u201d Fisher remembered. \u201c It never even occurred to me to ask for one. It never occurred to any of us to ask for special accommodations for anything.\u201dSoon she was assigned the job of designing the crew patch that would represent her team\u2019s flight, STS-51-A. She put six stars on it: one for each astronaut aboard, and one for baby Kristin.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteIn the weeks before her launch in November 1984, she recorded dozens of videos of herself with Kristin. In the days before, she wrote her daughter a letter:Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf anything happens to me, just know that I love you so much,\u201d it said. \u201cYour dad and your grandma will take care of you. And I\u2019ll be watching over you.\u201dAdvertisementHer flight was only NASA\u2019s second trip using the space shuttle Discovery. She understood the risk she was taking.On the day she walked out to the launchpad in Florida, her husband used his NASA access to make sure that he, Kristin and Fisher\u2019s mom could be there to wave goodbye. Then Fisher climbed aboard Discovery and shot into the sky.Her flight was a seven-day, 23-hour mission, focused on retrieving and dispatching satellites. Unlike today\u2019s astronauts, who can call and videoconference their children, Fisher had no way of communicating with her family while on board. Instead, she would sit at the window of the spacecraft, looking down at Earth while playing a tape she\u2019d brought in her Walkman. It was a recording of Kristin saying, \u201cI luh, I luh.\u201d I love you.After traveling 3.3 million miles, Fisher returned safely home. She slipped the letter she had written to Kristin in her jewelry box, grateful her daughter would never have to read it \u2014 but prepared to write another the next time she went to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin a month, she was assigned to another flight. Six weeks before it was set to occur, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. One of the six people who lost their lives that day was Fisher\u2019s friend Judy Resnik, who\u2019d joined the astronaut program alongside her.After the Challenger, the shuttle program ground to a halt, and Fisher took a seven-year leave of absence to raise Kristin and have her second child, Kara.She returned to NASA in 1996 and went on to become chief of the space station branch and one of the longest-serving astronauts in the agency\u2019s history.Today, 50 American women have been to space, plenty of them moms. Many told Fisher that when they were kids, they wrote to her, and she mailed them a photo and an autograph.Story continues below advertisementShe loved hearing them chatting to each other in NASA\u2019s halls, switching effortlessly from talk of spacewalks and mission controls to pediatricians and play dates.AdvertisementIn 2017, Fisher retired from NASA at age 67. The same year, she became a grandmother, and soon found herself helping her daughter navigate the same worries she had when she was a new mom. Kristin\u2019s job as a Fox News correspondent means she is often asked to go on reporting trips around the country and the world.\u201cShe calls me and asks about traveling,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cI say, \u2018Do you remember when I was gone when you were that age?' \u201dKristin doesn\u2019t. She said her mom always asks, \u201cAre you glad that I did it? That I took the time away from you, took that risk and went into space?' \u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnd the answer,\u201d Kristin said, \u201cis unequivocally, \u2018Yes.\u2019 \u201d\u201cI told Kristin to not feel guilty for being away,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cIf you\u2019re doing something you love, or you\u2019re bringing the money in, you\u2019re doing something important for your child.\u201dAdvertisementAnd when she can, Grandma, or \u201cNana Anna\u201d as Clara calls her, comes to babysit while Kristin works. In April, Fisher came to Washington to watch Clara on the evening Kristin and her husband attended the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner.They spent the weekend reading some of the books Fisher bought for her granddaughter: \u201cOrganic Chemistry for Babies\u201d and \u201cAstrophysics for Babies.\u201d Then they went outside for their favorite activity. Fisher plopped Clara into a baby-size swing. She lifted her backward and began to count.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFive, four, three, two, one,\u201d she said. \u201cBlastoff.\u201dThen she let go and watched her granddaughter swing toward the sky.Read more Retropolis:The mother who made George Washington \u2014 and made him miserableThe woman who invented Mother\u2019s Day would absolutely hate what it is todayShe made history as a Navy pilot. An all-female squadron just flew over her funeral.The Kentucky Derby\u2019s first female jockey ignored insults and boycott threats. She just wanted to ride. In 1984, 14 months after giving birth, the astronaut made history as the first mom to blast into space. She was pregnant when NASA offered to send her to space. Anna Fisher didn\u2019t hesitate.",
        "author": "Jessica Contrera"
    },
    {
        "title": "She was pregnant when NASA offered to send her to space. Anna Fisher didn\u2019t hesitate. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2916",
        "date": "2019-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/11/she-was-pregnant-when-nasa-offered-send-her-space-anna-fisher-didnt-hesitate/",
        "text": "The moment Anna Lee Fisher had been waiting for came on a hot summer afternoon in 1983. Five years had passed since Fisher and five other women were chosen to become America\u2019s first female astronauts. But she hadn\u2019t yet been to space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHer boss asked to see her in his office. He requested that her husband, who was also in the astronaut training program, come along, too. They sat down at his desk together. \u201cI\u2019m thinking,\u201d her boss said, \u201cof sending Anna.\u201dThis was what Fisher, then 33 years old, had wanted. There was only one little thing to consider \u2014 and it was currently growing inside her. On the day she was asked to climb into a shuttle and be blasted into the solar system, Fisher was eight and a half months pregnant.Story continues below advertisementShe still didn\u2019t hesitate.\u201cI wasn\u2019t about to say no,\u201d she said last month in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cYou don\u2019t say no to that offer.\u201dAdvertisementAnd that was how Anna Fisher became the world\u2019s first mother to go to space. A few weeks after being chosen for a flight, Fisher gave birth to a daughter, Kristin.She will soon mark the 35th anniversary of her flight, the day she became an inspirational figure to working moms everywhere \u2014 including to her daughter. Kristin is now a D.C.-based correspondent for Fox News and the mother of a 16-month old girl.\u201cI always grew up thinking I could have a demanding full-time job and be a mom,\u201d Kristin said. \u201cThe example that she set for me, it was never a question. It wasn\u2019t until I got pregnant and started thinking about the logistics that I started thinking, \u2018How did she do this?\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementThe answer is something Anna Fisher had to figure out fast. She gave birth to Kristin on a Friday. By Monday, she was back at NASA, carrying the doughnut-shaped pillow that would make it possible to sit down for the team meeting.AdvertisementShe wanted to send a message to her male co-workers and bosses: She might have had a baby, but she was still on the job.\u201cIt was worth it just to see the looks on their faces,\u201d she recalled.\u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen?Fisher had always planned to have a family and even told the selection committee for the astronaut training program of that plan during her interview. She and her husband, Bill, were emergency room doctors in California in 1977 when they applied to NASA\u2019s open call for potential astronauts. Bill wouldn\u2019t get in for another two years. But Fisher, at 28 years old, made the cut and moved to Houston.There were six women in the class of 35 new astronauts \u2014 all of whom were determined to ensure their male colleagues treated them as equally qualified. Sally Ride, who would become the first American woman in space, went shopping with Fisher for baggy khaki pants so they would be wearing outfits similar to NASA\u2019s men. Fisher never wore makeup at work. She attended the astronauts\u2019 spouses\u2019 club, so that her colleagues\u2019 wives wouldn\u2019t feel uneasy about a woman working so closely with them.For 14 months before her flight, Fisher juggled her training and NASA obligations with caring for her new daughter. She and Bill asked her mom for help and hired a nanny. She started pointing out to reporters that the men on her flight were leaving their children behind, too.At work, she learned how to serve as \u201cCapcom,\u201d the person in mission control who communicates with the astronauts already in orbit. It was an important role, requiring long, intense shifts \u2014 one her commander suggested she might want to give up. \u201cYou\u2019ve got Kristin, you\u2019re training, it\u2019s too much,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFisher begged him to reconsider, and won. Only when mission control lost the connection with the flight in orbit did Fisher run into the bathroom and pump her breast milk.\u201cThey never had pumping rooms or anything like that,\u201d Fisher remembered. \u201c It never even occurred to me to ask for one. It never occurred to any of us to ask for special accommodations for anything.\u201dSoon she was assigned the job of designing the crew patch that would represent her team\u2019s flight, STS-51-A. She put six stars on it: one for each astronaut aboard, and one for baby Kristin.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteIn the weeks before her launch in November 1984, she recorded dozens of videos of herself with Kristin. In the days before, she wrote her daughter a letter:Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf anything happens to me, just know that I love you so much,\u201d it said. \u201cYour dad and your grandma will take care of you. And I\u2019ll be watching over you.\u201dAdvertisementHer flight was only NASA\u2019s second trip using the space shuttle Discovery. She understood the risk she was taking.On the day she walked out to the launchpad in Florida, her husband used his NASA access to make sure that he, Kristin and Fisher\u2019s mom could be there to wave goodbye. Then Fisher climbed aboard Discovery and shot into the sky.Her flight was a seven-day, 23-hour mission, focused on retrieving and dispatching satellites. Unlike today\u2019s astronauts, who can call and videoconference their children, Fisher had no way of communicating with her family while on board. Instead, she would sit at the window of the spacecraft, looking down at Earth while playing a tape she\u2019d brought in her Walkman. It was a recording of Kristin saying, \u201cI luh, I luh.\u201d I love you.After traveling 3.3 million miles, Fisher returned safely home. She slipped the letter she had written to Kristin in her jewelry box, grateful her daughter would never have to read it \u2014 but prepared to write another the next time she went to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin a month, she was assigned to another flight. Six weeks before it was set to occur, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. One of the six people who lost their lives that day was Fisher\u2019s friend Judy Resnik, who\u2019d joined the astronaut program alongside her.After the Challenger, the shuttle program ground to a halt, and Fisher took a seven-year leave of absence to raise Kristin and have her second child, Kara.She returned to NASA in 1996 and went on to become chief of the space station branch and one of the longest-serving astronauts in the agency\u2019s history.Today, 50 American women have been to space, plenty of them moms. Many told Fisher that when they were kids, they wrote to her, and she mailed them a photo and an autograph.Story continues below advertisementShe loved hearing them chatting to each other in NASA\u2019s halls, switching effortlessly from talk of spacewalks and mission controls to pediatricians and play dates.AdvertisementIn 2017, Fisher retired from NASA at age 67. The same year, she became a grandmother, and soon found herself helping her daughter navigate the same worries she had when she was a new mom. Kristin\u2019s job as a Fox News correspondent means she is often asked to go on reporting trips around the country and the world.\u201cShe calls me and asks about traveling,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cI say, \u2018Do you remember when I was gone when you were that age?' \u201dKristin doesn\u2019t. She said her mom always asks, \u201cAre you glad that I did it? That I took the time away from you, took that risk and went into space?' \u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnd the answer,\u201d Kristin said, \u201cis unequivocally, \u2018Yes.\u2019 \u201d\u201cI told Kristin to not feel guilty for being away,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cIf you\u2019re doing something you love, or you\u2019re bringing the money in, you\u2019re doing something important for your child.\u201dAdvertisementAnd when she can, Grandma, or \u201cNana Anna\u201d as Clara calls her, comes to babysit while Kristin works. In April, Fisher came to Washington to watch Clara on the evening Kristin and her husband attended the White House correspondents\u2019 dinner.They spent the weekend reading some of the books Fisher bought for her granddaughter: \u201cOrganic Chemistry for Babies\u201d and \u201cAstrophysics for Babies.\u201d Then they went outside for their favorite activity. Fisher plopped Clara into a baby-size swing. She lifted her backward and began to count.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFive, four, three, two, one,\u201d she said. \u201cBlastoff.\u201dThen she let go and watched her granddaughter swing toward the sky.Read more Retropolis:The mother who made George Washington \u2014 and made him miserableThe woman who invented Mother\u2019s Day would absolutely hate what it is todayShe made history as a Navy pilot. An all-female squadron just flew over her funeral.The Kentucky Derby\u2019s first female jockey ignored insults and boycott threats. She just wanted to ride. In 1984, 14 months after giving birth, the astronaut made history as the first mom to blast into space. She was pregnant when NASA offered to send her to space. Anna Fisher didn\u2019t hesitate.",
        "author": "Jessica Contrera"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earthrise: The stunning photo that changed how we see our planet (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2917",
        "date": "2018-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/24/earthrise-stunning-photo-that-changed-how-we-see-our-planet/",
        "text": "The astronauts had spun around the moon a few times already, their gaze pointed down on the gray, pockmarked lunar surface. But now as they completed another orbit of the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, Frank Borman, the commander of the Apollo 8 mission, rolled the spacecraft, and, soon, there it was. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEarth, this bright, beautiful sphere, alone in the inky vastness of space, a soloist at the edge of the stage suspended in the spotlight.Listen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d:\nFor more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More options\u201cOh, my God,\u201d exclaimed Bill Anders, the lunar module pilot. \u201cLook at that picture over there! There\u2019s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!\u201dAnders knew black and white film wouldn\u2019t do it justice. But he also knew he didn\u2019t have a lot of time if he was going to get the shot.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHand me a roll of color quick, will you,\u201d he said.\u201cOh, man, that\u2019s great,\u201d said Jim Lovell, the command module pilot and navigator.Advertisement\u201cHurry,\u201d Anders pleaded. \u201cQuick!\u201dAnders loaded the color film into his Hasselblad camera and started firing away while his anxious crewmates remained transfixed by the blue and white vision outside their windows.\u201cYou got it?\u201d Lovell asked.He did.\u2018Behold the blue planet\u2019They splashed down in the Pacific on Dec. 27.Apollo 8: NASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisationTwo days later, the film was processed, and NASA released photo number 68-H-1401 to the public with a news release that said: \u201cThis view of the rising earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe press recognized immediately the power of the image, Earth, a brilliant oasis in a desert of darkness. The New York Times ran it on its front page above the fold. The Washington Post followed a day later. Life magazine ran a photo essay with a double-page spread of the image and lines from James Dickey, the former U.S. poet laureate.Advertisement\u201cBehold/ The blue planet steeped in its dream/ Of reality.\u201dUsing photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, this video commemorates Apollo 8's historic flight on Dec. 21, 1968. (NASA)\u201cEarthrise,\u201d as it would be called, went viral, or as viral as anything could in 1968, a time that saw all sorts of photographs leave their mark on the national consciousness, most of them scars: The South Vietnamese general pointing his pistol at the soldier\u2019s head, point blank; the busboy tending to Robert F. Kennedy\u2019s lifeless body; the civil rights activists on the motel balcony pointing in the direction of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s killer.Story continues below advertisementBut \u201cEarthrise\u201d was something different. A balm for a nation torn by the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, protests and assassinations.A busboy held Bobby Kennedy after he was shot. The photo haunted him until his own death this week.In the foreground, there was the \u201cmagnificent desolation\u201d of the lunar surface, as Buzz Aldrin would later call it \u2014 a lifeless planet, devoid of color, juxtaposed with a distant cousin in the background, as radiant as spring, brilliant in blue and white.AdvertisementThere had been images of Earth shot from space before. But those images were mostly black and white and blurry. They lacked the vividness of Anders\u2019s picture, the still simplicity, and the emotion that could perhaps be explained by the fact that the many of the previous photographs had been taken by robots and \u201cEarthrise\u201d by a human \u2014 \u201ca thrilled, probably homesick astronaut with a finger on the trigger of this Hasselblad,\u201d as Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, put it in an interview.Story continues below advertisementBrand had been seeking an image such as this, one that could galvanize the country and touch off a movement. He had led a campaign, asking, \u201cWhy haven\u2019t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?\u201dAnd here came \u201cEarthrise\u201d: a photo at once perfect and humanly imperfect \u2014 the tilted horizon, Earth slightly off-center, a rare moment of imprecision during a mission that relied on exact measurements from its military-trained astronauts.AdvertisementIn the photo, Earth is an island with a geography both strange and familiar. There is Africa peeking out from under the clouds, but North is over to the right, not up, a world made topsy-turvy by the disorienting distance of 240,000 miles.As part of the mission, three astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon and see an Earthrise above its surface on Christmas Eve. (NASA)The United States had set off on this improbable journey to vanquish the Soviets, to claim the ultimate high ground and the national superiority that would come with it. In their flight suits and crew cuts and all-American probity, the astronauts were the arm of the nation\u2019s might, a projection of power. They returned, of course, from the breach victorious \u2014 the first men ever to leave earth\u2019s orbit and take a few laps around the moon.Story continues below advertisementTheir triumph, celebrated in ticker tape, was to be measured in the fiery thrust of the Saturn V rocket propelling them deeper into space than anyone had gone before. But it was also found in the unexpected discovery captured in this simple photograph buried in the rolls of film they brought home \u2014 land masses without boundaries, the thin layer of the atmosphere, a unifying expression of vulnerability, something that as Pope Paul VI would say, recalled \u201cthe dumbfounding proportions of the universe in relation to our infinite smallness.\u201dAdvertisementTurns out the military pilots turned astronauts were artists as well.\u201cEarthrise\u201d soon replaced another dominant image from the time, the mushroom cloud.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIts iconic power went away, at least in representing modern times,\u201d Brand said. \u201cIn the course of a couple years, you had a universal icon based on fear give way to a universal icon based on what people thought of as hope and excitement.\u201d\u201cEarthrise\u201d also helped fuel the environmental movement. Which was ironic since so many environmentalists in the 1960s were steadfastly against the Apollo program. Why spend all this money going to space when there are real problems here on Earth?The first Earth Day was held some 16 months later, and today the image endures as a uniting symbol.\u201cAs I looked down at the Earth, which is about the size of your fist at arm\u2019s length, I\u2019m thinking this is not a very big place. Why can\u2019t we get along?\u201d Anders said during a video played during a ceremony at Washington National Cathedral recently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the mission. \u201cTo me it was strange that we had worked and had come all the way to the moon to study the moon, and what we really discovered was the Earth.\u201dRead more Retropolis:\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteAn asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space On Christmas Eve in 1968, Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders caught a glimpse of the earth that made him gasp. He grabbed his camera and a roll of color film. Earthrise: The stunning photo that changed how we see our planet",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Eagle Has Landed\u2019: How The Washington Post covered the first moon walk (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2918",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/20/eagle-has-landed-how-washington-post-covered-first-moon-walk/",
        "text": "On July 20, 1969, humans walked on the moon for the first time in history during the Apollo 11 mission. Here\u2019s how The Washington Post reported it on the front page the next day.HOUSTON, July 20 \u2014 Man stepped out onto the moon tonight for the first time in his two-million-year history. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThat\u2019s one small step for man,\u201d declared pioneer astronaut Neil Armstrong at 10:56 p.m. EDT, \u201cone giant leap for mankind.\u201dJust after that historic moment in man\u2019s quest for his origins, Armstrong walked on the dead satellite and found the surface very powdery, littered with fine grains of black dust.A few minutes later, Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin joined Armstrong on the lunar surface and in less than an hour they put on a show that will long be remembered by the worldwide television audience.American Flag PlantedThe two men walked easily, talked easily, even ran and jumped happily so it seemed. They picked up rocks, talked at length of what they saw, planted an American flag, saluted it, and talked by radiophone with the President in the White House, and then faced the camera and saluted Mr. Nixon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives,\u201d the President told the astronauts. \u201cFor one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one.\u201dSeven hours earlier, at 4:17 p.m., the Eagle and its two pilots thrilled the world as they zoomed in over a rock-covered field, hovered and then slowly let down on the moon. \u201cHouston, Tranquillity base here,\u201d Armstrong radioed. \u201cThe Eagle has landed.\u201dNASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisationAt 1:10 a.m. Monday \u2014 2 hours and 14 minutes after Armstrong first stepped upon the lunar surface \u2014 the astronauts were back in their moon craft and the hatch was closed.In describing the moon, Armstrong told Houston that it was \u201cfine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt adheres like powdered charcoal to the boot,\u201d he went on, \u201cbut I only go in a small fraction of an inch. I can see my footprint in the moon like fine grainy particles.\u201dAdvertisementArmstrong found he had such little trouble walking on the moon that he began talking almost as if he didn't want to leave it.\u201cIt has a stark beauty all its own,\u201d Armstrong said. \u201cIt\u2019s like the desert in the Southwestern United States. It\u2019s very pretty out here.\u201dAmazingly Clear Picture Armstrong shared his first incredible moments on the moon with the whole world, as a television camera on the outside of the wingless Eagle landing craft sent back an amazingly clear picture of his first steps on the moon.Story continues below advertisementArmstrong seemed like he was swimming along, taking big and easy steps on the airless moon despite the cumbersome white pressure-suit he wore.\u201cThere seems to be no difficulty walking around,\u201d he said. \u201cAs we suspected, it\u2019s even easier than the one-sixth G that we did in simulations on the ground.\u201dAdvertisementOne of the first things he did was to scoop up a small sample of the moon with a long-handled spoon with a bag on its end like a small butterfly net.\u201cLooks like it\u2019s easy,\u201d Aldrin said, looking down from the Lem.\u201cIt is,\u201d Armstrong told him. \u201cI\u2019m sure I could push it in farther but I can\u2019t bend down that far.\u201d\u201cThat's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d See the historic moment and others including planting the American flag on the moon. (NASA)Guides Aldrin Down Ladder At 11:11 p.m., Aldrin started down the landing craft\u2019s 10-foot ladder to join Armstrong.Story continues below advertisementBacking down the nine-step ladder, Aldrin was guided the entire way by Armstrong, who stood at the foot of the ladder looking up at him.\u201cOkay,\u201d Armstrong said. \u201cwatch your \u2018pliss\u2019 [PLSS, for portable life support system] from underneath. Drop your pliss down. You\u2019re clear. About an inch clear on your pliss.\u201d\u201cOkay,\u201d Aldrin said. \u201cYou need a little arching of the back to come down.\u201dAdvertisementAfter he stepped onto the first rung of the ladder, Aldrin went back up to the Lem\u2019s \u201cfront porch\u201d to partially close the Lem\u2019s hatch.\u201cMaking sure not to lock it on my way out,\u201d he said in comic fashion. \u201cThat\u2019s our home for the next couple of hours and I want to make sure we can get back in.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cBeautiful,\u201d said Aldrin when he met Armstrong on the lunar surface.\u201cIsn\u2019t that something,\u201d said Armstrong. \u201cIt\u2019s a magnificent sight out here.\u201dWhile Armstrong watched, Aldrin went through some cautious walking experiments to see how difficult it was in his pressure suit.\u201cReaching down is fairly easy,\u201d he said. \u201cThe mass of the backpack does have some effect on inertia. There\u2019s a slight tendency, I can see now, to tip backwards.\u201d\u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen?Aldrin and Armstrong then both walked around the Lem\u2019s 31-foot base, inspecting its four legs and undercarriage at the same time that they began looking over the moon\u2019s surface.Advertisement\u201cThese rocks are rather slippery,\u201d Armstrong said. \u201cThe powdery surface fills up the fine pores on the rocks, and we tend to slide over it rather easily.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile Armstrong got ready to move the television camera out about 30 feet from the Lem, Aldrin did some more experimental walking.\u201cIf I\u2019m about to lose my balance in one direction,\u201d said Aldrin. \u201cRecovery is quite natural and easy. You\u2019ve just got to be careful leaning in the direction you want to go in.\u201dAt that, Aldrin apparently spotted an interesting rock.\u201cHey, Neil,\u201d he said. \u201cDidn\u2019t I say we\u2019d find a purple rock?\u201d\u201cDid you find a purple rock?\u201d Armstrong asked him.\u201cYep,\u201d replied Aldrin.The next thing Armstrong did was to change lenses on the television camera, putting a telephoto lens on it for a closeup view of what was happening.\u201cNow we\u2019ll read the plaque for those who haven\u2019t read it before,\u201d Armstrong said, referring to a small stainless steel plaque that had been placed on one of the landing craft\u2019s legs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt says,\u201d Armstrong read, \u201cHere men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.\u201d\u201cIt has the crew members\u2019 signatures,\u201d Armstrong said, \u201cand the signature of the President of the United States.\u201dBleak But BeautifulArmstrong next took the television camera out to a spot about 40 feet from the Lem, and placed it on a small tripod.Incredibly clear, the picture showed a distant Lem, squatting on the bleak but beautiful lunar surface like some giant mechanical toy. It appeared to be perfectly level, not at all tilted on the rough lunar terrain.When he got the camera mounted correctly, he walked back toward the Lem, with the camera view following him all the way.Story continues below advertisementJust after 11:30, both men removed a pole, flagstaff and a plastic American flag from the Lem\u2019s leg. They gently pressed the flag into the lunar surface.AdvertisementAfter they saluted the flag, astronaut Bruce McCandless commented on the little ceremony from his perch in the Manned Spacecraft center\u2019s mission control room.\u201cThe flag is up now,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can see the stars and stripes on the lunar surface.\u201dAt 11:48 McCandless asked both men to stand together near the flag. \u201cThe President of the United States would like to talk to you,\u201d McCandless said.Mr. Nixon spoke to the astronauts for almost two minutes, and when he finished, the two astronauts stood erect and saluted directly at the television camera.During most of their early time on the moon, astronaut Michael Collins not only didn\u2019t see them walking on the moon, but was behind the moon and out of radio touch in his orbiting command craft.When he finally swung around in front of the moon again, Armstrong and Aldrin had been out almost 30 minutes.Advertisement\u201cHow\u2019s it going?\u201d Collins asked plaintively.\u201cJust great,\u201d McCandless told him.\u201cHow\u2019s the television?\u201d he asked.\u201cJust beautiful,\u201d he was told.Armstrong and Aldrin stayed out on the moon for almost two hours, with Aldrin first back into the Lem just before 1 a.m. Monday.\u201cAdios, Amigos,\u201d he said as he pulled himself easily back up the ladder.Armstrong started back up the ladder a few minutes after 1 a.m. Monday. He took what seemed like the first four rungs with one huge leap upward. At 1:10 a.m., Armstrong had joined Aldrin inside the cabin. \u201cOkay, the hatch is closed and latched,\u201d said Aldrin seconds later.When both men had repressurized their cabin and taken off their helmets and gloves, Collins reappeared over the lunar horizon in his command craft. At once, he asked how everything had gone.Original broadcast footage of Apollo 11's historic launch. (NASA)Sleep, Then Rendezvous\u201cHallelujah,\u201d he said when he was told what had happened.All three astronauts were due to get their first sleep in almost 24 hours, a sleep that was never more richly deserved.If nothing went wrong \u2014 and nobody was expecting anything would \u2014 Armstrong and Aldrin were due to lift back off the surface of the moon at 1:55 p.m. EDT Monday.Burning their ascent engine full-blast for just over seven minutes, they will start a four-hour flight to rejoin Collins and the command craft 70 miles above the lunar surface.The majestic moment of man\u2019s first steps on the moon came about six hours after Armstrong and Aldrin set their four-legged, wingless landing craft down in the moon\u2019s Sea of Tranquillity \u2014 precisely at 4:17 p.m. EDT.\u201cHouston, Tranquillity Base here,\u201d Armstrong announced to a breathless world. \u201cThe Eagle has landed.\u201d\u201cYou did a beautiful job,\u201d astronaut Charles Duke said from Houston\u2019s Manned Spacecraft Center. \u201cBe advised there\u2019s lots of smiling faces down here.\u201d\u201cThere\u2019s two of them down here,\u201d Armstrong replied.The landing apparently was not an easy one. It was about four miles from the target point in the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquillity, almost right on the lunar equator.\u201cWe were coming down in a crater the size of a football field with lots of big rocks around and in it,\u201d Armstrong said about five minutes after landing. \u201cWe had to fly it manually over the rock field to find a place to land.\u201d\u201cEvery Variety of Shapes\u201dA few minutes later, Aldrin gave a waiting world its first eyewitness description on the moon\u2019s surface.\u201cIt looks like a collection of just about every variety of shapes and angularity, every variety of rock you find,\u201d Aldrin said.\u201cThere doesn\u2019t appear to be too much color,\u201d he went on, \u201cexcept that it looks as though some of the boulders are going to have some interesting color.\u201dArmstrong then described their landing site in a little detail.\u201cIt\u2019s a relatively flat plain,\u201d he said, \u201cwith a lot of craters of the five- to 50-foot variety. Some small ridges 20 to 30 feet high. Thousands of little one- and two-foot craters. Some angular levees in front of us two feet in size. There is a hill in view ahead of us. It might be a half-mile or a mile away.\u201dArmstrong then described what he said were rocks fractured by the exhaust of Eagle\u2019s rocket plume.\u201cSome of the surface rocks in close look like they might have a coating on them,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere they\u2019re broken, they display a very dark gray interior. It looks like it could be country basalt.\u201dHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.\u201cLike Being in an Airplane\u201dBoth men seemed to actually enjoy being in the moon\u2019s gravity, which is one-sixth that of earth\u2019s.\u201cIt\u2019s like being in an airplane,\u201d Armstrong said. \u201cIt seems immediately natural to move around in this environment.\u201dArmstrong and Aldrin apparently felt fine. Armstrong\u2019s heart rate went as high as 156 beats per minutes at the time of landing, but dropped down into the nineties 15 minutes later.The time leading up to the landing is difficult to describe, except to say that it was as dramatic a time as any in memory.It all began at 3:08 p.m. EDT when Armstrong and Aldrin \u2014 flying feet first and face down \u2014 fired up their landing craft\u2019s descent engine for the first time.Burning the engine for 27 seconds in what amounted to a braking maneuver to slow it down and start it falling, the two men were behind the moon at the time and out of radio touch with earth.It was not until 3:47 p.m. that the men at the Manned Spacecraft Center heard that Armstrong and Aldrin were on their way down \u2014 and they heard it first from Collins, who flew from behind the moon in the command craft above and in front of the landing craft.\u201cColumbia, Houston,\u201d said Duke from the Center. \u201cHow did it go?\u201d\u201cListen, Babe,\u201d replied an excited Collins. \u201cEverything\u2019s going just swimmingly. Beautiful.\u201dTwo minutes later, Duke made radio contact with Armstrong and Aldrin.\u201cWe\u2019re standing by for your burn report,\u201d Duke said.\u201cThe burn was on time,\u201d Aldrin told him.\u201cRog, copy,\u201d Duke said. \u201cLooks great.\u201dAt this point, the men in Mission Control bent their backs to the toughest jobs they\u2019d ever have \u2014 following the two spacecraft at all times, to give them the guidance they would need for the Eagle\u2019s descent to the moon.\u201cJust Play It Cool\u201dLooking around the very quiet Mission Control room, flight director Gene Kranz simply said, \u201cWe\u2019re off to a good start. Just play it cool.\u201dFlying down and westward across the moon\u2019s surface, the Eagle suddenly dropped out of radio contact with earth, but in moments was back in touch again.\u201cI don\u2019t know what the problem was,\u201d a totally composed Buzz Aldrin said when he came back on. \u201cWe started yawing and we\u2019re picking up a little oscillation rate now.\u201dStill falling, the Eagle was coming up over the eastern region of the Sea of Tranquillity at an altitude of 53,000 feet and only minutes away from its second critical maneuver \u2014 the powered descent to the lunar surface.\u201cFive minutes to ignition,\u201d Duke radioed up. \u201cYou are go for a powered descent.\u201d\u201cRoger,\u201d Armstrong replied softly. \u201cUnderstand.\u201dAt 4:05, Armstrong began throttling up the engine to slow the Eagle again, to drop it down toward the lunar surface.\u201cLight\u2019s on,\u201d he said. \u201cDescent looks good.\u201dTwo minutes later, it was plain to everybody listening that they were indeed on their way down to the moon.\u201cShow an altitude of 47,000 feet,\u201d Armstrong said. \u201cEverything looks good.\u201dStill calm, Aldrin said he noticed a few warning lights coming on inside the spacecraft. \u201cI\u2019m getting some AC voltage fluctuations,\u201d he said, \u201cand our position checks downrange show us to be a little long.\u201d\u201cYou\u2019re looking good to us, Eagle,\u201d Duke answered. \u201cYou are go to continue powered descent. Repeat. You are go to continue powered descent.\u201dFalling, Slowing Approach\u201cAltitude 27,000 feet,\u201d Aldrin read off. \u201cThis throttle down is better than the simulator.\u201dDown they came, still falling but slowing down at the same time. At 21,000 feet, their speed had fallen to 800 miles per hour.\u201cYou\u2019re looking great to us, Eagle,\u201d Duke said.A minute later, it was 500 miles an hour, then it was suddenly down to less than 90 miles an hour.\u201cYou\u2019re looking great at eight minutes. . . . You\u2019re looking great at nine minutes,\u201d Duke told them.At this point, the two explorers began their final approach to the moon\u2019s surface, coming in sideways and downwardly only 5,200 feet above the moon.When the Eagle dropped to 4,200 feet, Duke broke in on the radio, his voice tense and excited.\u201cEagle, you are go for landing,\u201d he said.\u201cRoger, understand,\u201d a calm Armstrong replied. \u201cGo for landing.\u201d\u201cEagle, you\u2019re looking great,\u201d Duke said. \u201cYou\u2019re go at 1,600 feet.\u201dAt that, Armstrong began to read off rapidly his altitudes and pitch angles \u2014 the angle at which the spacecraft was falling toward the lunar surface.\u201cThree-hundred feet,\u201d he said. \u201cDown three and a half. A hundred feet. Three and a half down. Okay. Seventy-five feet. Looking good. Down a half.\u201d\u201cSixty seconds,\u201d Duke said.\u201cLights on,\u201d Armstrong replied. \u201cForty feet. Kicking some dust. Great shadows.\u201d\u201cFour forward. Drifting to the right a little.\u201dHis voice then rose a little, as he turned off the engine for the first time and started free-falling to the moon.\u201cOkay, engine stop,\u201d he said. \u201cOverdrive off. Engine arm off.\u201dThere was a pause \u2014 then the first voice came from the surface of the moon.\u201cHouston, Tranquillity Base here,\u201d Armstrong announced. \u201cThe Eagle has landed.\u201d\u201cYou\u2019ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue,\u201d Duke told him. \u201cNow we\u2019re breathing again.\u201d\u201cOkay, standby,\u201d Armstrong replied. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be busy for a minute.\u201dJust then, Collins broke in from his lonesome spot 70 miles above the moon, desperately wanting in on the historic conversation.\u201cHe has landed,\u201d Duke informed him. \u201cEagle has landed at Tranquillity.\u201d\u201cGood show,\u201d Collins said. \u201cFantastic.\u201dFive minutes after touchdown, Duke told them things looked good enough for them to stay there a while.\u201cWe thank you,\u201d Armstrong answered.It was then that Armstrong told Houston he had to fly the spacecraft in manually to avoid a football-sized crater and a large rock field.Couldn\u2019t Pinpoint Location \u201cIt really was rough over the target area,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was heavily cratered and some of the large rocks may have been bigger than 10 feet around.\u201dHe then said he was not sure of his location on the moon either. \u201cWell,\u201d he said, \u201cthe guys who said we wouldn\u2019t be able tell exactly where we are are the winners today.\u201dArmstrong reported that the four-legged spacecraft had landed on a level plain and appeared to be tilted at an angle no greater than 4.5 degrees.Their first moments on the moon were truly incredible, but the entire day seemed incredible, as if the scenario for it all had been written by some bizarre science fiction writer.\u201cWe\u2019ve done everything humanly possible,\u201d Manned Spacecraft Center Director Robert C. Gilruth told one newsman, \u201cbut boy is this a tense and unreal time for me.\u201dPreparing for the busiest and most historic day of their lives, the three crewmen hadn\u2019t even gotten to sleep until after 1 a.m. \u2014 and it was the ground that suggested they all go to bed.\u201cThat really winds things up as far as we\u2019re concerned,\u201d astronaut Owen Garriott said in Houston. \u201cWe\u2019re ready to go to bed and get a little sleep.\u201dCollins Wakes Up First\u201cYeah, we\u2019re about to join you,\u201d Armstrong replied.Armstrong and Aldrin were the first to go to sleep, and then Collins finally went to sleep two hours later, at just after 3 a.m.Four hours later, astronaut Ron Evans was manning the radio in Houston and he put in the first wake-up call.\u201cApollo 11, Apollo 11,\u201d he said. \u201cGood morning from the black team.\u201dIt was Collins who answered first, even though he\u2019d had the least sleep. \u201cOh my, you guys wake up early,\u201d he said.\u201cYou\u2019re about two minutes early on the wakeup,\u201d Evans conceded. \u201cLooks like you were really sawing them away.\u201d\u201cYou\u2019re right,\u201d said Collins.Everybody got right down to business then. \u201cLooks like the command module\u2019s in good shape,\u201d Evans told Collins. \u201cBlack team\u2019s been watching it real closely for you.\u201d\u201cWe sure appreciate that,\u201d Collins said, \u201cbecause I sure haven\u2019t.\u201dActivates Landing CraftJust after 9:30 a.m., as the three men began their 11th orbit of the moon, Aldrin got into the Eagle for the first time \u2014 to power it up, start the oxygen flowing into the spacecraft and make sure everything was in working order. Forty-five minutes later, Armstrong joined him.On the 13th orbit, Eagle undocked from the Columbia, moving off about 40 or 50 feet from the command craft, which Collins was piloting alone.Like most of the maneuvers they\u2019ve made, this one was done behind the moon and out of contact with earth \u2014 so nobody in Houston knew for almost 45 minutes if the separation had been successful.At 1:50 p.m., the two spacecraft came over the moon\u2019s rim.\u201cEagle, we see you on the steerable,\u201d said Duke, who had just replaced Evans. \u201cHow does it look?\u201d\u201cEagle has wings,\u201d was Armstrong\u2019s simple reply.For a while, all the astronauts did was look each other over, to make sure the two spacecraft were shipshape.\u201cCheck that tracking light, Mike,\u201d Armstrong told Collins.\u201cOkay,\u201d Armstrong said next, \u201cI\u2019m ready to start my yaw maneuver if it suits you, Mike.\u201dElaborate Instrument CheckAldrin got on next, reading off what seemed like endless instrument checklists. For 15 minutes, he talked on, never once missing a word, sounding totally composed.At 2:12 p.m., Collins fired his tiny thruster jets to increase distance between the craft.\u201cThrusting,\u201d Collins said. \u201cEverything\u2019s looking real good.\u201dThe two spacecraft were 1,000 feet away from each other within moments. Collins took a radar check on the distance.\u201cI got a solid lock on it,\u201d he said. \u201cIt looks like point 27 miles\u201d \u2014 about 1,400 feet.\u201cHey,\u201d Collins said to Armstrong when he\u2019d looked out his window, \u201cyou\u2019re upside down.\u201d\u201cSomebody\u2019s upside down,\u201d Armstrong replied.Just then, Collins asked Armstrong: \u201cPut your tracking light on, please.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s on, Mike,\u201d answered Aldrin.\u201cGive us a mark when you\u2019re at seven-tenths of a mile,\u201d Duke said to Collins from the ground.Moments later, Duke told Collins the big radars on the ground showed the two spacecraft seven-tenths of a mile apart.\u201cRog,\u201d Collins said. \u201cI\u2019m oscillating between point-69 and seven-tenths.\u201dAt 2:50 p.m. Houston gave the go signal for the first maneuver, the so-called descent orbit insertion burn.\u201cEagle,\u201d Duke said, \u201cyou are go for DOI.\u201d\u201cRoger,\u201d replied Aldrin matter-of-factly. \u201cGo for DOI.\u201dAnd while the whole world listened one of the most majestic dramas in mankind\u2019s history began to unfold.Read more Retropolis:Earthrise: The stunning photo that changed how we see our planet\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteAn asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space Fifty years ago, the country was transfixed by what astronaut Neil Armstrong called a \"giant leap for mankind.\" \u2018The Eagle Has Landed\u2019: How The Washington Post covered the first moon walk",
        "author": "Thomas O'Toole"
    },
    {
        "title": "No, Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t see a UFO on his way to the moon (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2919",
        "date": "2018-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/10/buzz-aldrins-ufo-sighting-moon-missions-mystique-might-have-simple-explanation/",
        "text": "July 20, 1969 was \u2014 in mankind\u2019s best guess \u2014 the first time a living\u00a0being\u00a0prepared to land on a\u00a0celestial body\u00a0and observed the luminous blue planet shrouded in the seemingly infinite darkness of space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut before that moment, the crew of Apollo 11, hurtling toward the moon, radioed mission command in Houston to ask about a curious object they saw on their third day in space. \u201cDo you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?\u201d Commander Neil Armstrong asked, referring to the third stage of the Saturn V rocket that\u00a0was jettisoned earlier in the flight.Mission control had an answer about three minutes later, according to a NASA radio\u00a0transcript of the mission.\u201cApollo 11, Houston,\u201d the command replied. \u201cThe S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles from you now. Over.\u201d That satisfied Armstrong, who said 12 seconds later: \u201cOkay. Thank you.\u201dThe seemingly innocuous exchange has become a touchstone for UFO-sighting enthusiasts and alien truthers, and now, seemingly fake news.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin, 88, the second astronaut\u00a0to set foot on the moon, believed that the crew saw an extraterrestrial\u00a0spacecraft at this moment, and a \u201clie detector\u201d test proves it, at least according to the British tabloid the Daily Star.That\u2019s not quite right.\u201cHe has never said he saw a UFO. This story has been a fabrication for the sake of headlines and is not true as far as Buzz Aldrin is concerned,\u201d his spokeswoman, Christina Korp, told The Washington Post in a statement Tuesday. That echoes Aldrin\u2019s 2015 comment on Reddit that the object\u00a0\u201cwas not an alien.\u201d\u00a0The Daily Star did not return a request for comment.The truth is out there, if only the Daily Star looked more closely.Story continues below advertisementThe tabloid\u2019s story focuses on a vocal analysis conducted by the Ohio-based Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health, a nonprofit institution that founder Sharry Edwards has said developed a program that can evaluate how truthful or confident someone feels about a subject they are talking about.Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.Edwards told The Post she used Aldrin\u2019s interview from the 2006 Discovery Science made-for-TV documentary\u00a0\u201cApollo 11: The Untold Story\u201d\u00a0to analyze Aldrin\u2019s remarks.Advertisement\u201cThere was something out there that was close enough to be observed, and what could it be?\u201d Aldrin recounted about the incident, adding that crew member Michael Collins\u00a0saw ellipses on the L-shaped object when viewed through a telescope. \u201cThat didn\u2019t tell us very much,\u201d he said.The moment called for restraint from theorizing what the object might be during one of the most scrutinized missions in human history, Aldrin said.\u201cWho knows what somebody would have demanded that we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is,\u201d he said on the program. The crew decided to move on and mention it later in mission debrief, Aldrin added.Story continues below advertisementIn an analysis, Edwards says Aldrin \u201chas a firm belief in what he saw but logical awareness that he cannot explain what he saw; therefore he thinks he should be doubted.\u201dAdvertisementShe said that the conclusion was published years ago but\u00a0that she does not know how it became suddenly relevant.Aldrin has already clarified his position on the incident.In a response on the NASA website\u00a0after the documentary was released, Aldrin said he believed\u00a0he saw\u00a0one of four panels separated from the S-IVB heading\u00a0on the same trajectory toward the moon but on a slightly different course. That discussion was edited out, and the rest was \u201ctaken out of context,\u201d NASA said.Story continues below advertisementIn the 2015 Reddit thread, he said the sun must have glinted off one of the panels.The recurring UFO story is the result in part of the public distorting the scientific term UFO to mean a craft with \u201clittle green men,\u201d NASA chief historian Bill Barry told The Post.Yet the Apollo 11 mission was already a significant moment in human history without the intrigue of alien spacecraft.AdvertisementThe median age of Americans is about 38, or 11 years younger than the mission itself. Most people alive today were not around to hear President John F. Kennedy say in 1961 that the United States would send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth.The Soviet Union had already been the first to send a man into Earth\u2019s orbit, frustrating NASA and creating a belief that the Russians might have an edge. The stakes were high. \u201cThey were basically on a war footing,\u201d\u00a0Barry said of NASA leadership.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s lessons from the mission were extensive. For instance, leaders honed the organization for large scientific projects, which later helped develop the International Space Station, Barry said. And investment in science paved the way\u00a0for\u00a0the Internet, cellphones and much more.\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.Discoveries also offered\u00a0more hints about the origin of life on Earth and the history of the universe. Evaluating the rock samples from the moon helped confirm theories that the body is the result of an object that smashed into Earth and later coalesced to form our satellite, Barry said.AdvertisementThat lesson amounted to a common refrain among astronauts, he added: \u201cWe left the Earth, and what we discovered was ourselves.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the next five centuries, humanity will remember the 20th century for three things, Barry said: two world wars and the United States landing on the moon.Aldrin has been known to defend that history, now and in the past.In 2002, filmmaker Bart Sibrel confronted Aldrin, demanding that he swear on a Bible that the landing was authentic.\u00a0Sibrel called him a \u201ccoward and a liar.\u201dSibrel was adding \u201cthief\u201d when Aldrin struck him in the face. No charges were filed.The moment was captured on video. There were no camera tricks. The punch was real.Video from NASA's Johnson Space Center shows former astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon. (NASA)More on Retropolis:Ted Kennedy spoke of a family curse after Chappaquiddick. He had good reason.The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux KlanAfter 73 years, the remains of a Tuskegee airman lost over Europe may have been found The Apollo 11 mission was already a significant moment in history without the false intrigue of an alien spacecraft. No, Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t see a UFO on his way to the moon",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "No, Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t see a UFO on his way to the moon (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2920",
        "date": "2018-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/10/buzz-aldrins-ufo-sighting-moon-missions-mystique-might-have-simple-explanation/",
        "text": "July 20, 1969 was \u2014 in mankind\u2019s best guess \u2014 the first time a living\u00a0being\u00a0prepared to land on a\u00a0celestial body\u00a0and observed the luminous blue planet shrouded in the seemingly infinite darkness of space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut before that moment, the crew of Apollo 11, hurtling toward the moon, radioed mission command in Houston to ask about a curious object they saw on their third day in space. \u201cDo you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?\u201d Commander Neil Armstrong asked, referring to the third stage of the Saturn V rocket that\u00a0was jettisoned earlier in the flight.Mission control had an answer about three minutes later, according to a NASA radio\u00a0transcript of the mission.\u201cApollo 11, Houston,\u201d the command replied. \u201cThe S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles from you now. Over.\u201d That satisfied Armstrong, who said 12 seconds later: \u201cOkay. Thank you.\u201dThe seemingly innocuous exchange has become a touchstone for UFO-sighting enthusiasts and alien truthers, and now, seemingly fake news.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin, 88, the second astronaut\u00a0to set foot on the moon, believed that the crew saw an extraterrestrial\u00a0spacecraft at this moment, and a \u201clie detector\u201d test proves it, at least according to the British tabloid the Daily Star.That\u2019s not quite right.\u201cHe has never said he saw a UFO. This story has been a fabrication for the sake of headlines and is not true as far as Buzz Aldrin is concerned,\u201d his spokeswoman, Christina Korp, told The Washington Post in a statement Tuesday. That echoes Aldrin\u2019s 2015 comment on Reddit that the object\u00a0\u201cwas not an alien.\u201d\u00a0The Daily Star did not return a request for comment.The truth is out there, if only the Daily Star looked more closely.Story continues below advertisementThe tabloid\u2019s story focuses on a vocal analysis conducted by the Ohio-based Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health, a nonprofit institution that founder Sharry Edwards has said developed a program that can evaluate how truthful or confident someone feels about a subject they are talking about.Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.Edwards told The Post she used Aldrin\u2019s interview from the 2006 Discovery Science made-for-TV documentary\u00a0\u201cApollo 11: The Untold Story\u201d\u00a0to analyze Aldrin\u2019s remarks.Advertisement\u201cThere was something out there that was close enough to be observed, and what could it be?\u201d Aldrin recounted about the incident, adding that crew member Michael Collins\u00a0saw ellipses on the L-shaped object when viewed through a telescope. \u201cThat didn\u2019t tell us very much,\u201d he said.The moment called for restraint from theorizing what the object might be during one of the most scrutinized missions in human history, Aldrin said.\u201cWho knows what somebody would have demanded that we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is,\u201d he said on the program. The crew decided to move on and mention it later in mission debrief, Aldrin added.Story continues below advertisementIn an analysis, Edwards says Aldrin \u201chas a firm belief in what he saw but logical awareness that he cannot explain what he saw; therefore he thinks he should be doubted.\u201dAdvertisementShe said that the conclusion was published years ago but\u00a0that she does not know how it became suddenly relevant.Aldrin has already clarified his position on the incident.In a response on the NASA website\u00a0after the documentary was released, Aldrin said he believed\u00a0he saw\u00a0one of four panels separated from the S-IVB heading\u00a0on the same trajectory toward the moon but on a slightly different course. That discussion was edited out, and the rest was \u201ctaken out of context,\u201d NASA said.Story continues below advertisementIn the 2015 Reddit thread, he said the sun must have glinted off one of the panels.The recurring UFO story is the result in part of the public distorting the scientific term UFO to mean a craft with \u201clittle green men,\u201d NASA chief historian Bill Barry told The Post.Yet the Apollo 11 mission was already a significant moment in human history without the intrigue of alien spacecraft.AdvertisementThe median age of Americans is about 38, or 11 years younger than the mission itself. Most people alive today were not around to hear President John F. Kennedy say in 1961 that the United States would send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth.The Soviet Union had already been the first to send a man into Earth\u2019s orbit, frustrating NASA and creating a belief that the Russians might have an edge. The stakes were high. \u201cThey were basically on a war footing,\u201d\u00a0Barry said of NASA leadership.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s lessons from the mission were extensive. For instance, leaders honed the organization for large scientific projects, which later helped develop the International Space Station, Barry said. And investment in science paved the way\u00a0for\u00a0the Internet, cellphones and much more.\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.Discoveries also offered\u00a0more hints about the origin of life on Earth and the history of the universe. Evaluating the rock samples from the moon helped confirm theories that the body is the result of an object that smashed into Earth and later coalesced to form our satellite, Barry said.AdvertisementThat lesson amounted to a common refrain among astronauts, he added: \u201cWe left the Earth, and what we discovered was ourselves.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the next five centuries, humanity will remember the 20th century for three things, Barry said: two world wars and the United States landing on the moon.Aldrin has been known to defend that history, now and in the past.In 2002, filmmaker Bart Sibrel confronted Aldrin, demanding that he swear on a Bible that the landing was authentic.\u00a0Sibrel called him a \u201ccoward and a liar.\u201dSibrel was adding \u201cthief\u201d when Aldrin struck him in the face. No charges were filed.The moment was captured on video. There were no camera tricks. The punch was real.Video from NASA's Johnson Space Center shows former astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon. (NASA)More on Retropolis:Ted Kennedy spoke of a family curse after Chappaquiddick. He had good reason.The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux KlanAfter 73 years, the remains of a Tuskegee airman lost over Europe may have been found The Apollo 11 mission was already a significant moment in history without the false intrigue of an alien spacecraft. No, Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t see a UFO on his way to the moon",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "No, Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t see a UFO on his way to the moon (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2921",
        "date": "2018-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/10/buzz-aldrins-ufo-sighting-moon-missions-mystique-might-have-simple-explanation/",
        "text": "July 20, 1969 was \u2014 in mankind\u2019s best guess \u2014 the first time a living\u00a0being\u00a0prepared to land on a\u00a0celestial body\u00a0and observed the luminous blue planet shrouded in the seemingly infinite darkness of space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut before that moment, the crew of Apollo 11, hurtling toward the moon, radioed mission command in Houston to ask about a curious object they saw on their third day in space. \u201cDo you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?\u201d Commander Neil Armstrong asked, referring to the third stage of the Saturn V rocket that\u00a0was jettisoned earlier in the flight.Mission control had an answer about three minutes later, according to a NASA radio\u00a0transcript of the mission.\u201cApollo 11, Houston,\u201d the command replied. \u201cThe S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles from you now. Over.\u201d That satisfied Armstrong, who said 12 seconds later: \u201cOkay. Thank you.\u201dThe seemingly innocuous exchange has become a touchstone for UFO-sighting enthusiasts and alien truthers, and now, seemingly fake news.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEdwin \u201cBuzz\u201d Aldrin, 88, the second astronaut\u00a0to set foot on the moon, believed that the crew saw an extraterrestrial\u00a0spacecraft at this moment, and a \u201clie detector\u201d test proves it, at least according to the British tabloid the Daily Star.That\u2019s not quite right.\u201cHe has never said he saw a UFO. This story has been a fabrication for the sake of headlines and is not true as far as Buzz Aldrin is concerned,\u201d his spokeswoman, Christina Korp, told The Washington Post in a statement Tuesday. That echoes Aldrin\u2019s 2015 comment on Reddit that the object\u00a0\u201cwas not an alien.\u201d\u00a0The Daily Star did not return a request for comment.The truth is out there, if only the Daily Star looked more closely.Story continues below advertisementThe tabloid\u2019s story focuses on a vocal analysis conducted by the Ohio-based Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health, a nonprofit institution that founder Sharry Edwards has said developed a program that can evaluate how truthful or confident someone feels about a subject they are talking about.Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.Edwards told The Post she used Aldrin\u2019s interview from the 2006 Discovery Science made-for-TV documentary\u00a0\u201cApollo 11: The Untold Story\u201d\u00a0to analyze Aldrin\u2019s remarks.Advertisement\u201cThere was something out there that was close enough to be observed, and what could it be?\u201d Aldrin recounted about the incident, adding that crew member Michael Collins\u00a0saw ellipses on the L-shaped object when viewed through a telescope. \u201cThat didn\u2019t tell us very much,\u201d he said.The moment called for restraint from theorizing what the object might be during one of the most scrutinized missions in human history, Aldrin said.\u201cWho knows what somebody would have demanded that we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is,\u201d he said on the program. The crew decided to move on and mention it later in mission debrief, Aldrin added.Story continues below advertisementIn an analysis, Edwards says Aldrin \u201chas a firm belief in what he saw but logical awareness that he cannot explain what he saw; therefore he thinks he should be doubted.\u201dAdvertisementShe said that the conclusion was published years ago but\u00a0that she does not know how it became suddenly relevant.Aldrin has already clarified his position on the incident.In a response on the NASA website\u00a0after the documentary was released, Aldrin said he believed\u00a0he saw\u00a0one of four panels separated from the S-IVB heading\u00a0on the same trajectory toward the moon but on a slightly different course. That discussion was edited out, and the rest was \u201ctaken out of context,\u201d NASA said.Story continues below advertisementIn the 2015 Reddit thread, he said the sun must have glinted off one of the panels.The recurring UFO story is the result in part of the public distorting the scientific term UFO to mean a craft with \u201clittle green men,\u201d NASA chief historian Bill Barry told The Post.Yet the Apollo 11 mission was already a significant moment in human history without the intrigue of alien spacecraft.AdvertisementThe median age of Americans is about 38, or 11 years younger than the mission itself. Most people alive today were not around to hear President John F. Kennedy say in 1961 that the United States would send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth.The Soviet Union had already been the first to send a man into Earth\u2019s orbit, frustrating NASA and creating a belief that the Russians might have an edge. The stakes were high. \u201cThey were basically on a war footing,\u201d\u00a0Barry said of NASA leadership.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s lessons from the mission were extensive. For instance, leaders honed the organization for large scientific projects, which later helped develop the International Space Station, Barry said. And investment in science paved the way\u00a0for\u00a0the Internet, cellphones and much more.\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.Discoveries also offered\u00a0more hints about the origin of life on Earth and the history of the universe. Evaluating the rock samples from the moon helped confirm theories that the body is the result of an object that smashed into Earth and later coalesced to form our satellite, Barry said.AdvertisementThat lesson amounted to a common refrain among astronauts, he added: \u201cWe left the Earth, and what we discovered was ourselves.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the next five centuries, humanity will remember the 20th century for three things, Barry said: two world wars and the United States landing on the moon.Aldrin has been known to defend that history, now and in the past.In 2002, filmmaker Bart Sibrel confronted Aldrin, demanding that he swear on a Bible that the landing was authentic.\u00a0Sibrel called him a \u201ccoward and a liar.\u201dSibrel was adding \u201cthief\u201d when Aldrin struck him in the face. No charges were filed.The moment was captured on video. There were no camera tricks. The punch was real.Video from NASA's Johnson Space Center shows former astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon. (NASA)More on Retropolis:Ted Kennedy spoke of a family curse after Chappaquiddick. He had good reason.The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux KlanAfter 73 years, the remains of a Tuskegee airman lost over Europe may have been found The Apollo 11 mission was already a significant moment in history without the false intrigue of an alien spacecraft. No, Buzz Aldrin didn\u2019t see a UFO on his way to the moon",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | NASA has an awkward history with the whole women-in-space thing (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2922",
        "date": "2019-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/03/28/nasa-has-an-awkward-history-with-whole-women-in-space-thing/",
        "text": "History was supposed to be made Friday with the first all-female spacewalk at the International Space Station. On Tuesday, NASA announced it was scrapping that plan. Why? Because they didn\u2019t have enough space suits designed for smaller frames that typically characterize the female body.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo be clear, the number of medium-size spacesuits needed was two. And NASA even clarified that it had two on board, but only one was in a \u201creadily usable configuration.\u201d It is easier to swap out astronauts than to configure spacesuits, NASA said, so that\u2019s the decision that was made \u2014 ignoring how excited land-dwellers may have been about the spacewalk\u2019s significance. In the wake of this less-than-interstellar end to Women\u2019s History Month, a 2018 tweet from the NASA History Office has re-orbited, indicating the agency has historically had other issues with the whole women-in-space thing.Sally Ride: \"The engineers at NASA, in their infinite wisdom, decided that women astronauts would want makeup - so they designed a makeup kit... You can just imagine the discussions amongst the predominantly male engineers about what should go in a makeup kit.\" #RideOn #Classof78 pic.twitter.com/dNZ51cWELH\u2014 NASA History Office (@NASAhistory) January 16, 2018\n\nBelow is a photo of Kathryn D. Sullivan, the first female astronaut to go on a spacewalk, on Oct. 11, 1984. Can you tell whether she is wearing space makeup?Here is Sullivan in 1981 being asked how she reacted to the news she would be trained to become an astronaut.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKathryn D. Sullivan, the first woman to go on a spacewalk, responds to a question in this 1981 NASA clip. (NASA)I. WAS. IN. THE. MIDDLE. OF. WRITING. A. PHD. THESIS.Quantities appear to be a recurring issue when it comes to women in space. In addition to too few suits, NASA officials wanted to send Sally Ride to space with too many tampons. In a profile of Ride in The American Prospect, Ann Friedman wrote:\u201cTampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn\u2019t float away. Engineers asked Ride, \u2018Is 100 the right number?\u2019 She would be in space for a week. \u2018That would not be the right number,\u2019 she told them.\u201d(Women generally use about 20 tampons per menstrual cycle.)Fierce, feared and female: The WWII pilots known as the 'Night Witches'And when Ride disembarked with the rest of her crew after her first space flight, the NASA protocol office presented her with a bouquet of flowers. She refused to accept them.Story continues below advertisementTo be fair, the media also did a legendarily bad job as women became astronauts. The Globe referred to the six women in the astronaut class of 1978 as \u201cthe Glamornauts\u201d and \u201ceye-popping space gals.\u201d Astronaut Shannon Lucid was repeatedly asked how her children were coping with her decision to go into space, and Ride was asked if she would cry, according to historian Amy E. Foster in her book \u201cIntegrating Women Into the Astronaut Corps: Politics and Logistics at NASA.\u201dAdvertisementMale astronauts can thank women for joining them in space for at least one particular reason. It meant the installation of the first toilets onboard a spacecraft. Previously, men relieved themselves into plastic bags. \u201cThe Shuttle contractors made it a priority to design a toilet that would work well for all astronauts,\u201d Foster wrote.Would that it were the same for \u201creadily usable\u201d spacesuits.Read more Retropolis:Here are seven of history\u2019s greatest women-led protestsEarthrise: The stunning photo that changed the way we see our planet\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquote\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space If you think the canceled all-female spacewalk is bad, wait until you hear about space makeup. NASA has an awkward history with the whole women-in-space thing",
        "author": "Gillian Brockell"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2923",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/14/we-shall-return-eugene-cernan-was-the-last-man-to-walk-on-the-moon-there-was-no-return/",
        "text": "He wrote his daughter\u2019s initials \u2014 TDC \u2014 in the dust of the moon, and then before climbing back into the lunar module, he gave a short speech, signifying the moment. A coda for the United States\u2019 extraordinary adventure in space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe leave as we came,\u201d NASA Astronaut Eugene Cernan said, exactly 45 years ago, \u201cand, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.\u201d Soon they were on their way back to Earth, the last of the Apollo lunar missions complete, the last steps taken by the last man on the moon. The space race was over. The Americans had won, vanquishing the Soviets, who had fired the first salvo in 1957, with the launch of Sputnik.Story continues below advertisementListen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d:For more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More optionsAdvertisementThat small satellite, its menacing beep overhead, led to the creation of NASA, and the nation dedicated itself to, as President John F. Kennedy implored, \u201clanding a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.\u201dThat had been accomplished: Neil Armstrong and his \u201cone giant leap,\u201d Walter Cronkite, rubbing his eyes as if in disbelief, as people watched by the millions, transfixed. But now, on Dec. 14, 1972, as Cernan started his journey home, the enthusiasm had begun to fade, and Apollo 17 was the anticlimactic end.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s funding had started to drop even before the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon for the first time. President Richard Nixon, who once had said \u201cI\u2019m not one of those space cadets,\u201d took down the \u201cEarth Rise\u201d photograph that hung in the Oval Office, and, with the Vietnam War\u00a0still raging and interest in space waning, cut short the Apollo program.AdvertisementIn 1971, Nixon had called the crew of Apollo 15 from Camp David, wishing them luck for their launch the following morning. After launching for the moon at 9:34 .am., the White House issued a statement saying he had watched the launch. The truth was he had slept through it, not reporting for breakfast that day until almost 11.\u201cThe Apollo shot was this morning,\u201d his assistant, H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary. \u201cThe P slept through it, but we, of course, put out an announcement that he had watched it with great interest.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere wasn\u2019t even supposed to be an Apollo 17. Nixon had proposed canceling it and Apollo 16 because he was concerned that a failure could hurt his election chances, John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University, said in an interview. Nixon then pushed the launch until December, a month after the election.AdvertisementWhen Cernan and his crewmates were flying home, Nixon made it clear that a chapter in American history had ended, issuing a statement saying, \u201cThis may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the moon.\u201dWatch the last time people walked and rolled on the Moon 45 years agoThose words infuriated Cernan\u2019s crewmate, Harrison \u201cJack\u201d Schmitt, who thought, \u201cthat was the stupidest thing a President could have said,\u201d according to Logsdon\u2019s book, \u201cAfter Apollo: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program.\u201d \u201cWhy say that to all the young people in the world? \u2026 It was just a pure loss of will.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t just Nixon; the American public \u201chad lost interest in repeated journeys to the moon,\u201d Logsdon said in an interview.Cernan, however, was convinced that the Apollo program was only the beginning. He was a handsome, square-jawed, naval aviator, who landed jets on aircraft carriers and once slid down the banister while visiting the White House. He flew on the Gemini IX mission in 1966, in orbit for three days, and became the second American to walk in space. He was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 10 in 1969, which circled the moon, and commanded Apollo 17, where he was stunned by the vastness of space, by the beauty of the Earth in the distance that turned a blunt-spoken pilot into a poet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs he said in a NASA 2007 oral history:It\u2019s the last steps that are perhaps more memorable to me than that first step, because I\u2019d been in this valley on the Moon, almost living in a paradox. Sunshine the whole three days we were there. Yet surrounded by the blackest black that we can conceive in our mind, and we don\u2019t know how to define it, describe it. We pull words out like infinity, the endlessness of space, the endlessness of time, but we don\u2019t know what that is. But I can tell you the endlessness of it all exists, because I saw it with my own eyes. So you\u2019re in the middle of this. You\u2019re part of this unique part of the universe. Everything\u2019s [in] three dimension when you look back at the Earth in all its splendor, in all its glory, multicolors of the blues of the oceans and whites of the snow and the clouds. If your arm were long enough while you\u2019re on the surface, it\u2019s almost as if you could reach out and put it in the palm of your hand and bring it back close to you and take it home with you. Take it home with you so everybody else could see.He was convinced that the journey NASA had been on would continue, and he predicted that humans would reach Mars by the end of the 20th century.\u201cI was a little off on my timing,\u201d said he said in an interview with The Post in 2014.Now, 45 years later, President Trump has declared that Americans will go back to moon. At a White House ceremony Monday, Trump signed a directive that he said \u201cmarks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 for long-term exploration and use.\u201dPence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.It\u2019s unclear when, or if, that will happen.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not the first time a president has promised a return to the moon. In 2004, with Cernan in the audience, George W. Bush cited Cernan\u2019s promise: \u201cWe shall return.\u201d And Bush vowed: \u201cAmerica will make those words come true.\u201dCernan died in January, never seeing another person step foot on the moon. He was 82. Of the 12 men who walked on the moon, only six are still alive. Cernan\u2019s daughter\u2019s initials are still there in the lunar dust undisturbed by the vacuum of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen it was time to board the spacecraft for the return home, Cernan glanced down \u201cand there was my final footsteps,\u201d he recalled in the NASA oral history. He glanced over his shoulder to look back at the Earth, over the mountains of the moon in the southwestern sky.Finally, up the ladder he went.\u201cThose steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to go up. I wanted to stay a while.\u201dRead more Retropolis:An asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquotePence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famousDiscovered: Never-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flight On Dec. 14, 1972, the commander of Apollo 17 left his footprints on the moon. Cernan hated it that no astronauts came after him.  \u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2924",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/14/we-shall-return-eugene-cernan-was-the-last-man-to-walk-on-the-moon-there-was-no-return/",
        "text": "He wrote his daughter\u2019s initials \u2014 TDC \u2014 in the dust of the moon, and then before climbing back into the lunar module, he gave a short speech, signifying the moment. A coda for the United States\u2019 extraordinary adventure in space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe leave as we came,\u201d NASA Astronaut Eugene Cernan said, exactly 45 years ago, \u201cand, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.\u201d Soon they were on their way back to Earth, the last of the Apollo lunar missions complete, the last steps taken by the last man on the moon. The space race was over. The Americans had won, vanquishing the Soviets, who had fired the first salvo in 1957, with the launch of Sputnik.Story continues below advertisementListen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d:For more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More optionsAdvertisementThat small satellite, its menacing beep overhead, led to the creation of NASA, and the nation dedicated itself to, as President John F. Kennedy implored, \u201clanding a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.\u201dThat had been accomplished: Neil Armstrong and his \u201cone giant leap,\u201d Walter Cronkite, rubbing his eyes as if in disbelief, as people watched by the millions, transfixed. But now, on Dec. 14, 1972, as Cernan started his journey home, the enthusiasm had begun to fade, and Apollo 17 was the anticlimactic end.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s funding had started to drop even before the crew of Apollo 11 landed on the moon for the first time. President Richard Nixon, who once had said \u201cI\u2019m not one of those space cadets,\u201d took down the \u201cEarth Rise\u201d photograph that hung in the Oval Office, and, with the Vietnam War\u00a0still raging and interest in space waning, cut short the Apollo program.AdvertisementIn 1971, Nixon had called the crew of Apollo 15 from Camp David, wishing them luck for their launch the following morning. After launching for the moon at 9:34 .am., the White House issued a statement saying he had watched the launch. The truth was he had slept through it, not reporting for breakfast that day until almost 11.\u201cThe Apollo shot was this morning,\u201d his assistant, H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary. \u201cThe P slept through it, but we, of course, put out an announcement that he had watched it with great interest.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere wasn\u2019t even supposed to be an Apollo 17. Nixon had proposed canceling it and Apollo 16 because he was concerned that a failure could hurt his election chances, John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University, said in an interview. Nixon then pushed the launch until December, a month after the election.AdvertisementWhen Cernan and his crewmates were flying home, Nixon made it clear that a chapter in American history had ended, issuing a statement saying, \u201cThis may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the moon.\u201dWatch the last time people walked and rolled on the Moon 45 years agoThose words infuriated Cernan\u2019s crewmate, Harrison \u201cJack\u201d Schmitt, who thought, \u201cthat was the stupidest thing a President could have said,\u201d according to Logsdon\u2019s book, \u201cAfter Apollo: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program.\u201d \u201cWhy say that to all the young people in the world? \u2026 It was just a pure loss of will.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t just Nixon; the American public \u201chad lost interest in repeated journeys to the moon,\u201d Logsdon said in an interview.Cernan, however, was convinced that the Apollo program was only the beginning. He was a handsome, square-jawed, naval aviator, who landed jets on aircraft carriers and once slid down the banister while visiting the White House. He flew on the Gemini IX mission in 1966, in orbit for three days, and became the second American to walk in space. He was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 10 in 1969, which circled the moon, and commanded Apollo 17, where he was stunned by the vastness of space, by the beauty of the Earth in the distance that turned a blunt-spoken pilot into a poet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs he said in a NASA 2007 oral history:It\u2019s the last steps that are perhaps more memorable to me than that first step, because I\u2019d been in this valley on the Moon, almost living in a paradox. Sunshine the whole three days we were there. Yet surrounded by the blackest black that we can conceive in our mind, and we don\u2019t know how to define it, describe it. We pull words out like infinity, the endlessness of space, the endlessness of time, but we don\u2019t know what that is. But I can tell you the endlessness of it all exists, because I saw it with my own eyes. So you\u2019re in the middle of this. You\u2019re part of this unique part of the universe. Everything\u2019s [in] three dimension when you look back at the Earth in all its splendor, in all its glory, multicolors of the blues of the oceans and whites of the snow and the clouds. If your arm were long enough while you\u2019re on the surface, it\u2019s almost as if you could reach out and put it in the palm of your hand and bring it back close to you and take it home with you. Take it home with you so everybody else could see.He was convinced that the journey NASA had been on would continue, and he predicted that humans would reach Mars by the end of the 20th century.\u201cI was a little off on my timing,\u201d said he said in an interview with The Post in 2014.Now, 45 years later, President Trump has declared that Americans will go back to moon. At a White House ceremony Monday, Trump signed a directive that he said \u201cmarks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 for long-term exploration and use.\u201dPence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.It\u2019s unclear when, or if, that will happen.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not the first time a president has promised a return to the moon. In 2004, with Cernan in the audience, George W. Bush cited Cernan\u2019s promise: \u201cWe shall return.\u201d And Bush vowed: \u201cAmerica will make those words come true.\u201dCernan died in January, never seeing another person step foot on the moon. He was 82. Of the 12 men who walked on the moon, only six are still alive. Cernan\u2019s daughter\u2019s initials are still there in the lunar dust undisturbed by the vacuum of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen it was time to board the spacecraft for the return home, Cernan glanced down \u201cand there was my final footsteps,\u201d he recalled in the NASA oral history. He glanced over his shoulder to look back at the Earth, over the mountains of the moon in the southwestern sky.Finally, up the ladder he went.\u201cThose steps up that ladder, they were tough to make,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to go up. I wanted to stay a while.\u201dRead more Retropolis:An asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquotePence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famousDiscovered: Never-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flight On Dec. 14, 1972, the commander of Apollo 17 left his footprints on the moon. Cernan hated it that no astronauts came after him.  \u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026 (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2925",
        "date": "2017-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/18/the-government-admits-it-studies-ufos-so-about-those-area-51-conspiracy-theories/",
        "text": "For decades, Americans were told that Area 51 didn\u2019t really exist and that the U.S. government had no official interest in aliens or UFOs. Statements to the contrary, official-sounding people cautioned, were probably the musings of crackpots in tinfoil hats.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, score one for the crackpots.The Pentagon has officially confirmed that there was, in fact, a $22 million government\u00a0program to collect and analyze \u201canomalous aerospace threats\u201d \u2014 government-speak for UFOs. Listen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d:For more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More optionsAs The Washington Post\u2019s Joby Warrick reported, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was\u00a0a rare instance of continued government investigations into a UFO phenomenon that was the subject of multiple official inquiries in the 1950s and 1960s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor a specific segment of the population that doesn\u2019t need to Google the terms \u201cParadise Ranch\u201d and \u201cCheshire cat airstrip,\u201d it was a eureka moment \u2014\u00a0 the first (of presumably many) alien-related secrets that have slipped out of the clenched jaws of the government.The non-Googlers have it easy, it seems: The admission \u2014 and the fact that the government spent $22 million on UFO research \u2014 gives any out-there theory a patina of credibility.But what about the rest of us who have not fully jumped onto the tinfoil-hat bandwagon? What are we to make of 70 years of bizarre stories centered on a secret government base an hour\u2019s drive from the Las Vegas Strip?Video released in 2017 shows an encounter between U.S. fighter jets and \u201canomalous aerial vehicles.\u201d (To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science)In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower \u201capproved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada Test Site,\u201d according to a CIA history of a spy plane declassified in 2013. The area was near the Atomic Energy Commission\u2019s vast, desolate proving grounds and was used to test the high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA parade of top-secret aircraft was tested in the area, according to Reuters, including the A-12 aircraft, a spy plane that flew faster than the speed of sound, and the angular F-117 stealth ground-attack jet.But Area 51 quickly became a wire frame for not-quite-verifiable musings about alien life, secret technology and supernatural behavior.Gaping holes in out-there theories had an easy explanation: The government is working diligently to keep the real story under wraps.The biggest working (conspiracy) theory is that Area 51 is where the U.S. government stored aliens and spacecraft that crash-landed on Earth,\u00a0particularly the unidentifiable debris discovered by William \u201cMac\u201d Brazel.Story continues below advertisementBrazel, a farmer, discovered metallic rods, pieces of plastic and silvery paper scraps in Roswell, N.M., in 1947. He called the sheriff, who called the military, who carted the debris off in armored vehicles. But the secret was out, and it captured the imagination of the American public.AdvertisementThe government, the theories go, experimented on the aliens and tried to harness the technology in their ship to manufacture interstellar\u00a0spacecraft and produce powerful energy weapons. Lab-coated Area 51 scientists also were said to be mulling ways to\u00a0manipulate or weaponize the weather, travel through time and teleport.For decades, people reported seeing strange lights in the desert around Area 51 \u2014 presumably alien aircraft taking off or being tested at the government facility.Story continues below advertisementAdding fuel to the alien theories, Ray Santilli released a video in 1995 that purported to show an alien autopsy after the Roswell crash.The crowd that believed something wasn\u2019t quite right at Area 51 was buoyed by a lawsuit filed by workers at the facility. They reported rashes, respiratory ailments and even deaths related to their jobs.Area 51: Secrets under the sunOf course, the alien aspects of those theories have crumbled under decades of scrutiny. Some have been explained away by declassified documents; other theories have been outright fabrications.AdvertisementThe debris Brazel found on his farm was part of a government coverup, for example. It just didn\u2019t involve aliens.The Air Force claimed it was using high-altitude balloons to try to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Air Force said as much, about 50 years after the debris was found,\u00a0in a 231-page report. Other officials have speculated that the debris came from a crashed nuclear bomber that had broken up over New Mexico. Roswell was, after all, the home of the 509th Composite Group, the atomic weapons unit that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe do believe that something did happen at Roswell,\u201d one source close to the investigation told The Post\u2019s Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein in 1995. \u201cSomething big. We don\u2019t know if it was a plane that crashed with a nuclear device on it .\u2009.\u2009. or if it was some other experimental situation. But everything we\u2019ve seen so far points to an attempt on the part of the Air Force to lead anybody that looks at this down another track.\u201dAdvertisementSantilli\u2019s autopsy footage was easier to debunk. He admitted that it was a fake (though he maintains that it was based on actual footage).And the space around Area 51 was where the United States tested several of its more experimental aircraft as the Cold War raged, adding to its mystery.Story continues below advertisementIncidents such as the crash on Brazwell\u2019s farm or the\u00a0sighting of several bright lights were shrouded in secrecy and half-baked excuses that became fodder for people who believe \u201cthe truth is out there.\u201dThe experimental aircraft may have had something to do with the injuries suffered by the workers,\u00a0as The Post\u2019s Richard Leiby reported in 1997.\u00a0They claimed materials, including anti-radar coating and other classified substances, had been burned in open pits on the base.Filmmakers took notice of the intrigue. Over the past 70 years, Area 51 has been cemented as a popular science fiction trope.AdvertisementExperiments on aliens and their spacecraft was an important plot point in the 1996 summer blockbuster \u201cIndependence Day,\u201d in which\u00a0a U.S. resistance force converges on Area 51 to launch a final battle.Story continues below advertisementIn the movie \u201cSuper 8,\u201d\u00a0the train crash that motors the plot involves material being transported from Area 51.But in the real world, government employees had been poring over their own film,\u00a0captured by fighter pilots, of possible UFOs.Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who once worked for the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, said investigators had interviewed pilots who claimed they saw weird things in the air.Mellon, who now works with UFODATA, a private organization, described one\u00a0video of an encounter with an unidentified object to Politico:Advertisement\u201cIt is white, oblong, some 40 feet long and perhaps 12 feet thick. . . . The pilots are astonished to see the object suddenly reorient itself toward the approaching F/A-18.\u201cIn a series of discreet tumbling maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics, the object takes a position directly behind the approaching F/A-18. The pilots capture gun camera footage and infrared imagery of the object. They are outmatched by a technology they\u2019ve never seen.\u201dThe Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program generated at least one report, a 490-page volume that describes alleged UFO sightings in the United States and numerous other countries over multiple decades.Read more:Scientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachThis ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the oceanResearchers think they know where Amelia Earhart died \u2014 days after a photo suggested she livedA lobster boat captain said a freak storm killed his crew. Then doctors found drugs in his system. What happens now that the Pentagon has confirmed that it studied UFOs through the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program? The government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "The government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026 (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2926",
        "date": "2017-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/18/the-government-admits-it-studies-ufos-so-about-those-area-51-conspiracy-theories/",
        "text": "For decades, Americans were told that Area 51 didn\u2019t really exist and that the U.S. government had no official interest in aliens or UFOs. Statements to the contrary, official-sounding people cautioned, were probably the musings of crackpots in tinfoil hats.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, score one for the crackpots.The Pentagon has officially confirmed that there was, in fact, a $22 million government\u00a0program to collect and analyze \u201canomalous aerospace threats\u201d \u2014 government-speak for UFOs. Listen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d:For more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More optionsAs The Washington Post\u2019s Joby Warrick reported, the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was\u00a0a rare instance of continued government investigations into a UFO phenomenon that was the subject of multiple official inquiries in the 1950s and 1960s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor a specific segment of the population that doesn\u2019t need to Google the terms \u201cParadise Ranch\u201d and \u201cCheshire cat airstrip,\u201d it was a eureka moment \u2014\u00a0 the first (of presumably many) alien-related secrets that have slipped out of the clenched jaws of the government.The non-Googlers have it easy, it seems: The admission \u2014 and the fact that the government spent $22 million on UFO research \u2014 gives any out-there theory a patina of credibility.But what about the rest of us who have not fully jumped onto the tinfoil-hat bandwagon? What are we to make of 70 years of bizarre stories centered on a secret government base an hour\u2019s drive from the Las Vegas Strip?Video released in 2017 shows an encounter between U.S. fighter jets and \u201canomalous aerial vehicles.\u201d (To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science)In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower \u201capproved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51, to the Nevada Test Site,\u201d according to a CIA history of a spy plane declassified in 2013. The area was near the Atomic Energy Commission\u2019s vast, desolate proving grounds and was used to test the high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA parade of top-secret aircraft was tested in the area, according to Reuters, including the A-12 aircraft, a spy plane that flew faster than the speed of sound, and the angular F-117 stealth ground-attack jet.But Area 51 quickly became a wire frame for not-quite-verifiable musings about alien life, secret technology and supernatural behavior.Gaping holes in out-there theories had an easy explanation: The government is working diligently to keep the real story under wraps.The biggest working (conspiracy) theory is that Area 51 is where the U.S. government stored aliens and spacecraft that crash-landed on Earth,\u00a0particularly the unidentifiable debris discovered by William \u201cMac\u201d Brazel.Story continues below advertisementBrazel, a farmer, discovered metallic rods, pieces of plastic and silvery paper scraps in Roswell, N.M., in 1947. He called the sheriff, who called the military, who carted the debris off in armored vehicles. But the secret was out, and it captured the imagination of the American public.AdvertisementThe government, the theories go, experimented on the aliens and tried to harness the technology in their ship to manufacture interstellar\u00a0spacecraft and produce powerful energy weapons. Lab-coated Area 51 scientists also were said to be mulling ways to\u00a0manipulate or weaponize the weather, travel through time and teleport.For decades, people reported seeing strange lights in the desert around Area 51 \u2014 presumably alien aircraft taking off or being tested at the government facility.Story continues below advertisementAdding fuel to the alien theories, Ray Santilli released a video in 1995 that purported to show an alien autopsy after the Roswell crash.The crowd that believed something wasn\u2019t quite right at Area 51 was buoyed by a lawsuit filed by workers at the facility. They reported rashes, respiratory ailments and even deaths related to their jobs.Area 51: Secrets under the sunOf course, the alien aspects of those theories have crumbled under decades of scrutiny. Some have been explained away by declassified documents; other theories have been outright fabrications.AdvertisementThe debris Brazel found on his farm was part of a government coverup, for example. It just didn\u2019t involve aliens.The Air Force claimed it was using high-altitude balloons to try to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Air Force said as much, about 50 years after the debris was found,\u00a0in a 231-page report. Other officials have speculated that the debris came from a crashed nuclear bomber that had broken up over New Mexico. Roswell was, after all, the home of the 509th Composite Group, the atomic weapons unit that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe do believe that something did happen at Roswell,\u201d one source close to the investigation told The Post\u2019s Jack Anderson and Michael Binstein in 1995. \u201cSomething big. We don\u2019t know if it was a plane that crashed with a nuclear device on it .\u2009.\u2009. or if it was some other experimental situation. But everything we\u2019ve seen so far points to an attempt on the part of the Air Force to lead anybody that looks at this down another track.\u201dAdvertisementSantilli\u2019s autopsy footage was easier to debunk. He admitted that it was a fake (though he maintains that it was based on actual footage).And the space around Area 51 was where the United States tested several of its more experimental aircraft as the Cold War raged, adding to its mystery.Story continues below advertisementIncidents such as the crash on Brazwell\u2019s farm or the\u00a0sighting of several bright lights were shrouded in secrecy and half-baked excuses that became fodder for people who believe \u201cthe truth is out there.\u201dThe experimental aircraft may have had something to do with the injuries suffered by the workers,\u00a0as The Post\u2019s Richard Leiby reported in 1997.\u00a0They claimed materials, including anti-radar coating and other classified substances, had been burned in open pits on the base.Filmmakers took notice of the intrigue. Over the past 70 years, Area 51 has been cemented as a popular science fiction trope.AdvertisementExperiments on aliens and their spacecraft was an important plot point in the 1996 summer blockbuster \u201cIndependence Day,\u201d in which\u00a0a U.S. resistance force converges on Area 51 to launch a final battle.Story continues below advertisementIn the movie \u201cSuper 8,\u201d\u00a0the train crash that motors the plot involves material being transported from Area 51.But in the real world, government employees had been poring over their own film,\u00a0captured by fighter pilots, of possible UFOs.Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who once worked for the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, said investigators had interviewed pilots who claimed they saw weird things in the air.Mellon, who now works with UFODATA, a private organization, described one\u00a0video of an encounter with an unidentified object to Politico:Advertisement\u201cIt is white, oblong, some 40 feet long and perhaps 12 feet thick. . . . The pilots are astonished to see the object suddenly reorient itself toward the approaching F/A-18.\u201cIn a series of discreet tumbling maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics, the object takes a position directly behind the approaching F/A-18. The pilots capture gun camera footage and infrared imagery of the object. They are outmatched by a technology they\u2019ve never seen.\u201dThe Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program generated at least one report, a 490-page volume that describes alleged UFO sightings in the United States and numerous other countries over multiple decades.Read more:Scientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachThis ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the oceanResearchers think they know where Amelia Earhart died \u2014 days after a photo suggested she livedA lobster boat captain said a freak storm killed his crew. Then doctors found drugs in his system. What happens now that the Pentagon has confirmed that it studied UFOs through the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program? The government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. At 82, she finally got her shot. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2927",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/07/20/wally-funk-astronaut-mercury-13/",
        "text": "Floating in the isolation tank, Wally Funk felt weightless.She couldn\u2019t see or hear. There was nothing to taste or smell. When she patted the eight feet of water surrounding her, she didn\u2019t feel it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy the time Funk endured those circumstances for 10 hours and 35 minutes in 1961, she had already taken at least 87 other exams, ranging from swallowing three feet of rubber hose to guzzling a pint of radioactive water. It was all in service of becoming one of the first female astronauts at a time when American women still needed their husbands\u2019 permission to sign a mortgage and get a credit card. Within months, Funk\u2019s dream was squelched. NASA had no program for female astronauts, she learned in a perfunctory telegram. Without that federal support, her privately funded testing program would end.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFunk, 82, finally saw her aspiration come to life Tuesday when she launched on aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight alongside billionaire Jeff Bezos and two other people. Exiting the spacecraft after landing, she grinned and spread her arms wide in celebration. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)Funk wasn\u2019t able to see the whole Earth out the windows as she had hoped, she told reporters afterward. But she said the experience still felt great.\u201cI\u2019ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there, and I\u2019ve done a lot of astronaut training through the world \u2014 Russia, America, and I could always beat the guys on what they were doing because I was always stronger,\u201d Funk said. \u201cI want to go again, fast!\u201dStory continues below advertisementFunk\u2019s journey to this milestone began in 1960, when she read in Life magazine that a female pilot named Jerrie Cobb was undergoing sensory deprivation testing to see how women\u2019s bodies would hold up in space.Advertisement\u201cSo [I was] thinking, \u2018Oh! This is really what I want to do!\u2019 \u201d Funk told Margaret Weitekamp for her book \u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex: America\u2019s First Women in Space Program.\u201d \u201cI mean, there weren\u2019t a lot of things back in the \u201960s for girls to do.\u201dJeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach edge of space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAlready an accomplished pilot, Funk wrote to the doctor running the tests and volunteered to participate. He referred her to Randy Lovelace, another doctor helping examine potential male astronauts for NASA\u2019s Mercury program. At the time, space-travel jobs required experience as a military pilot \u2014 a type of service for which women were ineligible.Story continues below advertisementLovelace began thinking about also studying women\u2019s fitness for space travel in 1959 while he was attending an aviation conference in Miami. Lovelace and Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald Flickinger started to wonder how women would physically handle being in space, Funk wrote later. The Cold War was on the horizon, and Flickinger had heard that the Soviet Union was preparing to send a woman into space. If the United States wanted to do so first, it would have to move quickly.AdvertisementThere were also practical reasons for their curiosity. Lovelace was a visionary who imagined orbiting space stations with astronauts researching unexplored areas of the universe, Weitekamp, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, told The Washington Post. But she said Lovelace was also a product of his time who thought the stations would need to fill \u201cwomen\u2019s jobs\u201d \u2014 secretaries, nurses and telephone operators.NASA has an awkward history with the whole women-in-space thingSpeculation that women\u2019s bodies might be better adapted to space than men\u2019s added to the intrigue, Weitekamp said. Women tended to eat less, need less oxygen, have fewer heart attacks and be physically smaller.Story continues below advertisementCobb, a pilot, became the first woman to put that thinking to the test. When she performed well on the same tests as the male astronauts, Lovelace compiled a list of eligible women to continue the experiment. The women needed to be under 35 and in good health, and have completed more than 2,000 hours of flying, among other qualifications, Funk wrote.AdvertisementFunk reached out to Lovelace and soon became one of 25 women undergoing strenuous physical and psychological tests as part of the Women in Space Program in Albuquerque. While the women took the same tests as NASA\u2019s male astronauts, NASA did not sponsor Lovelace\u2019s endeavor.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)The intensive battery of tests spanned five days. Funk, the youngest woman, ranked third. Although the women who passed became known as the Mercury 13, most didn\u2019t meet at the time.Story continues below advertisementLovelace\u2019s program didn\u2019t come with a promise of becoming an astronaut. Still, Weitekamp said, everyone interested in space travel knew Lovelace was closely linked to NASA\u2019s attempts at space travel.\u201cIf you talked to him,\u201d Weitekamp said, \u201cit would have been very easy to get swept up in the excitement of what was possible and not have spent quite as much time and attention on when that might happen and how that might happen.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteIn September 1961, the Mercury 13 were preparing to go to Naval Air Station Pensacola in North Florida for a third round of tests. Cobb wrote to her fellow aspiring space travelers about their upcoming chance to meet. She began the letter: \u201cDear Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainee,\u201d branding the women \u201cFLATs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen the initiative came to an abrupt halt, Weitekamp said. The project was canceled, and the women could return to the rest of their lives, Lovelace\u2019s administrative staffers told Funk and the others in a short telegram. They gave little explanation.\u201cIncreasingly with retrospect, one sees the injustice done particularly to these women \u2014 that they were very capable pilots and talented physically in a moment when the United States, whether in the space program or otherwise, just didn\u2019t have the capacity to recognize or reward that,\u201d Weitekamp said.It eventually became clear that NASA didn\u2019t have a testing program for women, and the military was unwilling to let Lovelace use its facility. Few people advocated for female astronauts, Weitekamp said, including Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was generally viewed as an advocate for women. When his assistant wrote a letter for him, asking NASA about moving forward with the women\u2019s training, he refused to sign it, Weitekamp said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn congressional hearings the next year, NASA officials testified that they were focused on landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, as President John F. Kennedy had ordered. The agency had no capacity to pursue additional goals simultaneously.John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, blamed society for the women\u2019s missed opportunity.\u201cI think this gets back to the way our social order is organized really. It is just a fact,\u201d he testified, according to Popular Science. \u201cThe men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFunk was undeterred. She found her own opportunities to take more exams, including a high-altitude test, a seat-ejection exam and a centrifuge test that simulated the gravitational forces of liftoff and reentry. Funk remained convinced that she would make it to space someday.\u201cWhen I met her in 1997,\u201d Weitekamp said, \u201cshe was talking then about, \u2018I\u2019m going into space. I will figure out a way to do this.\u2019 \u201dRead more Retropolis:English cave may have ties to king-turned-saint and Viking invasion, archaeologists sayThe former U.S. tax commissioner who went to jail for evading taxesArrested and beaten during civil rights protests, she\u2019s 93 and finally telling her story Wally Funk was among a group of female pilots, known as the \"Mercury 13,\" who in 1961 endured dozens of tests to see how women's bodies would hold up in space. On Tuesday, she joined billionaire Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight. In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. At 82, she finally got her shot.",
        "author": "Marisa Iati"
    },
    {
        "title": "In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. At 82, she finally got her shot. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2928",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/07/20/wally-funk-astronaut-mercury-13/",
        "text": "Floating in the isolation tank, Wally Funk felt weightless.She couldn\u2019t see or hear. There was nothing to taste or smell. When she patted the eight feet of water surrounding her, she didn\u2019t feel it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy the time Funk endured those circumstances for 10 hours and 35 minutes in 1961, she had already taken at least 87 other exams, ranging from swallowing three feet of rubber hose to guzzling a pint of radioactive water. It was all in service of becoming one of the first female astronauts at a time when American women still needed their husbands\u2019 permission to sign a mortgage and get a credit card. Within months, Funk\u2019s dream was squelched. NASA had no program for female astronauts, she learned in a perfunctory telegram. Without that federal support, her privately funded testing program would end.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFunk, 82, finally saw her aspiration come to life Tuesday when she launched on aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight alongside billionaire Jeff Bezos and two other people. Exiting the spacecraft after landing, she grinned and spread her arms wide in celebration. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)Funk wasn\u2019t able to see the whole Earth out the windows as she had hoped, she told reporters afterward. But she said the experience still felt great.\u201cI\u2019ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there, and I\u2019ve done a lot of astronaut training through the world \u2014 Russia, America, and I could always beat the guys on what they were doing because I was always stronger,\u201d Funk said. \u201cI want to go again, fast!\u201dStory continues below advertisementFunk\u2019s journey to this milestone began in 1960, when she read in Life magazine that a female pilot named Jerrie Cobb was undergoing sensory deprivation testing to see how women\u2019s bodies would hold up in space.Advertisement\u201cSo [I was] thinking, \u2018Oh! This is really what I want to do!\u2019 \u201d Funk told Margaret Weitekamp for her book \u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex: America\u2019s First Women in Space Program.\u201d \u201cI mean, there weren\u2019t a lot of things back in the \u201960s for girls to do.\u201dJeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach edge of space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAlready an accomplished pilot, Funk wrote to the doctor running the tests and volunteered to participate. He referred her to Randy Lovelace, another doctor helping examine potential male astronauts for NASA\u2019s Mercury program. At the time, space-travel jobs required experience as a military pilot \u2014 a type of service for which women were ineligible.Story continues below advertisementLovelace began thinking about also studying women\u2019s fitness for space travel in 1959 while he was attending an aviation conference in Miami. Lovelace and Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald Flickinger started to wonder how women would physically handle being in space, Funk wrote later. The Cold War was on the horizon, and Flickinger had heard that the Soviet Union was preparing to send a woman into space. If the United States wanted to do so first, it would have to move quickly.AdvertisementThere were also practical reasons for their curiosity. Lovelace was a visionary who imagined orbiting space stations with astronauts researching unexplored areas of the universe, Weitekamp, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, told The Washington Post. But she said Lovelace was also a product of his time who thought the stations would need to fill \u201cwomen\u2019s jobs\u201d \u2014 secretaries, nurses and telephone operators.NASA has an awkward history with the whole women-in-space thingSpeculation that women\u2019s bodies might be better adapted to space than men\u2019s added to the intrigue, Weitekamp said. Women tended to eat less, need less oxygen, have fewer heart attacks and be physically smaller.Story continues below advertisementCobb, a pilot, became the first woman to put that thinking to the test. When she performed well on the same tests as the male astronauts, Lovelace compiled a list of eligible women to continue the experiment. The women needed to be under 35 and in good health, and have completed more than 2,000 hours of flying, among other qualifications, Funk wrote.AdvertisementFunk reached out to Lovelace and soon became one of 25 women undergoing strenuous physical and psychological tests as part of the Women in Space Program in Albuquerque. While the women took the same tests as NASA\u2019s male astronauts, NASA did not sponsor Lovelace\u2019s endeavor.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)The intensive battery of tests spanned five days. Funk, the youngest woman, ranked third. Although the women who passed became known as the Mercury 13, most didn\u2019t meet at the time.Story continues below advertisementLovelace\u2019s program didn\u2019t come with a promise of becoming an astronaut. Still, Weitekamp said, everyone interested in space travel knew Lovelace was closely linked to NASA\u2019s attempts at space travel.\u201cIf you talked to him,\u201d Weitekamp said, \u201cit would have been very easy to get swept up in the excitement of what was possible and not have spent quite as much time and attention on when that might happen and how that might happen.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteIn September 1961, the Mercury 13 were preparing to go to Naval Air Station Pensacola in North Florida for a third round of tests. Cobb wrote to her fellow aspiring space travelers about their upcoming chance to meet. She began the letter: \u201cDear Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainee,\u201d branding the women \u201cFLATs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen the initiative came to an abrupt halt, Weitekamp said. The project was canceled, and the women could return to the rest of their lives, Lovelace\u2019s administrative staffers told Funk and the others in a short telegram. They gave little explanation.\u201cIncreasingly with retrospect, one sees the injustice done particularly to these women \u2014 that they were very capable pilots and talented physically in a moment when the United States, whether in the space program or otherwise, just didn\u2019t have the capacity to recognize or reward that,\u201d Weitekamp said.It eventually became clear that NASA didn\u2019t have a testing program for women, and the military was unwilling to let Lovelace use its facility. Few people advocated for female astronauts, Weitekamp said, including Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was generally viewed as an advocate for women. When his assistant wrote a letter for him, asking NASA about moving forward with the women\u2019s training, he refused to sign it, Weitekamp said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn congressional hearings the next year, NASA officials testified that they were focused on landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, as President John F. Kennedy had ordered. The agency had no capacity to pursue additional goals simultaneously.John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, blamed society for the women\u2019s missed opportunity.\u201cI think this gets back to the way our social order is organized really. It is just a fact,\u201d he testified, according to Popular Science. \u201cThe men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFunk was undeterred. She found her own opportunities to take more exams, including a high-altitude test, a seat-ejection exam and a centrifuge test that simulated the gravitational forces of liftoff and reentry. Funk remained convinced that she would make it to space someday.\u201cWhen I met her in 1997,\u201d Weitekamp said, \u201cshe was talking then about, \u2018I\u2019m going into space. I will figure out a way to do this.\u2019 \u201dRead more Retropolis:English cave may have ties to king-turned-saint and Viking invasion, archaeologists sayThe former U.S. tax commissioner who went to jail for evading taxesArrested and beaten during civil rights protests, she\u2019s 93 and finally telling her story Wally Funk was among a group of female pilots, known as the \"Mercury 13,\" who in 1961 endured dozens of tests to see how women's bodies would hold up in space. On Tuesday, she joined billionaire Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight. In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. At 82, she finally got her shot.",
        "author": "Marisa Iati"
    },
    {
        "title": "In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. At 82, she finally got her shot. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2929",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/07/20/wally-funk-astronaut-mercury-13/",
        "text": "Floating in the isolation tank, Wally Funk felt weightless.She couldn\u2019t see or hear. There was nothing to taste or smell. When she patted the eight feet of water surrounding her, she didn\u2019t feel it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBy the time Funk endured those circumstances for 10 hours and 35 minutes in 1961, she had already taken at least 87 other exams, ranging from swallowing three feet of rubber hose to guzzling a pint of radioactive water. It was all in service of becoming one of the first female astronauts at a time when American women still needed their husbands\u2019 permission to sign a mortgage and get a credit card. Within months, Funk\u2019s dream was squelched. NASA had no program for female astronauts, she learned in a perfunctory telegram. Without that federal support, her privately funded testing program would end.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFunk, 82, finally saw her aspiration come to life Tuesday when she launched on aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight alongside billionaire Jeff Bezos and two other people. Exiting the spacecraft after landing, she grinned and spread her arms wide in celebration. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)Funk wasn\u2019t able to see the whole Earth out the windows as she had hoped, she told reporters afterward. But she said the experience still felt great.\u201cI\u2019ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there, and I\u2019ve done a lot of astronaut training through the world \u2014 Russia, America, and I could always beat the guys on what they were doing because I was always stronger,\u201d Funk said. \u201cI want to go again, fast!\u201dStory continues below advertisementFunk\u2019s journey to this milestone began in 1960, when she read in Life magazine that a female pilot named Jerrie Cobb was undergoing sensory deprivation testing to see how women\u2019s bodies would hold up in space.Advertisement\u201cSo [I was] thinking, \u2018Oh! This is really what I want to do!\u2019 \u201d Funk told Margaret Weitekamp for her book \u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex: America\u2019s First Women in Space Program.\u201d \u201cI mean, there weren\u2019t a lot of things back in the \u201960s for girls to do.\u201dJeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach edge of space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocketAlready an accomplished pilot, Funk wrote to the doctor running the tests and volunteered to participate. He referred her to Randy Lovelace, another doctor helping examine potential male astronauts for NASA\u2019s Mercury program. At the time, space-travel jobs required experience as a military pilot \u2014 a type of service for which women were ineligible.Story continues below advertisementLovelace began thinking about also studying women\u2019s fitness for space travel in 1959 while he was attending an aviation conference in Miami. Lovelace and Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald Flickinger started to wonder how women would physically handle being in space, Funk wrote later. The Cold War was on the horizon, and Flickinger had heard that the Soviet Union was preparing to send a woman into space. If the United States wanted to do so first, it would have to move quickly.AdvertisementThere were also practical reasons for their curiosity. Lovelace was a visionary who imagined orbiting space stations with astronauts researching unexplored areas of the universe, Weitekamp, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, told The Washington Post. But she said Lovelace was also a product of his time who thought the stations would need to fill \u201cwomen\u2019s jobs\u201d \u2014 secretaries, nurses and telephone operators.NASA has an awkward history with the whole women-in-space thingSpeculation that women\u2019s bodies might be better adapted to space than men\u2019s added to the intrigue, Weitekamp said. Women tended to eat less, need less oxygen, have fewer heart attacks and be physically smaller.Story continues below advertisementCobb, a pilot, became the first woman to put that thinking to the test. When she performed well on the same tests as the male astronauts, Lovelace compiled a list of eligible women to continue the experiment. The women needed to be under 35 and in good health, and have completed more than 2,000 hours of flying, among other qualifications, Funk wrote.AdvertisementFunk reached out to Lovelace and soon became one of 25 women undergoing strenuous physical and psychological tests as part of the Women in Space Program in Albuquerque. While the women took the same tests as NASA\u2019s male astronauts, NASA did not sponsor Lovelace\u2019s endeavor.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)The intensive battery of tests spanned five days. Funk, the youngest woman, ranked third. Although the women who passed became known as the Mercury 13, most didn\u2019t meet at the time.Story continues below advertisementLovelace\u2019s program didn\u2019t come with a promise of becoming an astronaut. Still, Weitekamp said, everyone interested in space travel knew Lovelace was closely linked to NASA\u2019s attempts at space travel.\u201cIf you talked to him,\u201d Weitekamp said, \u201cit would have been very easy to get swept up in the excitement of what was possible and not have spent quite as much time and attention on when that might happen and how that might happen.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteIn September 1961, the Mercury 13 were preparing to go to Naval Air Station Pensacola in North Florida for a third round of tests. Cobb wrote to her fellow aspiring space travelers about their upcoming chance to meet. She began the letter: \u201cDear Fellow Lady Astronaut Trainee,\u201d branding the women \u201cFLATs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen the initiative came to an abrupt halt, Weitekamp said. The project was canceled, and the women could return to the rest of their lives, Lovelace\u2019s administrative staffers told Funk and the others in a short telegram. They gave little explanation.\u201cIncreasingly with retrospect, one sees the injustice done particularly to these women \u2014 that they were very capable pilots and talented physically in a moment when the United States, whether in the space program or otherwise, just didn\u2019t have the capacity to recognize or reward that,\u201d Weitekamp said.It eventually became clear that NASA didn\u2019t have a testing program for women, and the military was unwilling to let Lovelace use its facility. Few people advocated for female astronauts, Weitekamp said, including Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was generally viewed as an advocate for women. When his assistant wrote a letter for him, asking NASA about moving forward with the women\u2019s training, he refused to sign it, Weitekamp said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn congressional hearings the next year, NASA officials testified that they were focused on landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, as President John F. Kennedy had ordered. The agency had no capacity to pursue additional goals simultaneously.John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, blamed society for the women\u2019s missed opportunity.\u201cI think this gets back to the way our social order is organized really. It is just a fact,\u201d he testified, according to Popular Science. \u201cThe men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFunk was undeterred. She found her own opportunities to take more exams, including a high-altitude test, a seat-ejection exam and a centrifuge test that simulated the gravitational forces of liftoff and reentry. Funk remained convinced that she would make it to space someday.\u201cWhen I met her in 1997,\u201d Weitekamp said, \u201cshe was talking then about, \u2018I\u2019m going into space. I will figure out a way to do this.\u2019 \u201dRead more Retropolis:English cave may have ties to king-turned-saint and Viking invasion, archaeologists sayThe former U.S. tax commissioner who went to jail for evading taxesArrested and beaten during civil rights protests, she\u2019s 93 and finally telling her story Wally Funk was among a group of female pilots, known as the \"Mercury 13,\" who in 1961 endured dozens of tests to see how women's bodies would hold up in space. On Tuesday, she joined billionaire Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight. In 1961, she lost her chance to go to space. At 82, she finally got her shot.",
        "author": "Marisa Iati"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 8: NASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisation (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2930",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/20/apollo-nasas-first-moonshot-was-bold-terrifying-improvisation/",
        "text": "Walter Cronkite held a tiny model of the Apollo 8 spacecraft and strode across a darkened studio where two dangling spheres represented Earth and the moon. This was the CBS Evening News, Dec. 20, 1968, and three Apollo 8 astronauts were scheduled to blast off the following morning on a huge Saturn V rocket. Cronkite explained that the astronauts would fly for three days to the vicinity of the moon, fire an engine to slow the spacecraft and enter lunar orbit, circle the moon 10 times, then fire the engine a final time to return to Earth and enter the atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThey must come in at JUST the right angle. If they come in too steeply, they will be CRUSHED in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If they come in too shallow, they will SKIP OUT and go into Earth orbit and not be able to return,\u201d Cronkite said.Fifty years later, it\u2019s hard to remember how mind-blowing Apollo 8 was, and how scary. No space mission had ever presented so many exotic ways to kill astronauts. Before the launch, a NASA official was overheard imagining what might go wrong: \u201cJust how do we tell Susan Borman, \u2018Frank is stranded in orbit around the moon\u2019?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApollo 8 was the first moonshot. No human being had ever been beyond low Earth orbit. Even the Apollo 8 astronauts \u2014 Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr. and Bill Anders \u2014 struggled to wrap their heads around what they were about to do.Muscle cars. Bell-bottoms. 8-tracks. It\u2019s 1968. Astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders get a call to cancel their holiday plans. By December, the three were suddenly farther away than any human had ever been from our home planet. Start your flashback here: https://t.co/VdgeiLDnbE pic.twitter.com/F90LhIXmR2\u2014 NASA (@NASA) December 21, 2018\n\nThey shared their final prelaunch lunch with Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, at Cape Kennedy. \u201cThink, it\u2019s hard to believe, this time tomorrow we\u2019ll be on our way to the moon,\u201d one of the astronauts said, according to Morrow Lindbergh\u2019s subsequent article in LIFE magazine.What\u2019s more, Apollo 8 was improvisational. It wasn\u2019t even supposed to be a mission to the moon.\u201cIt was an extraordinarily bold decision,\u201d says Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of Apollo Spacecraft at the National Air and Space Museum.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the most risky decisions in the history of spaceflight\u201d is the verdict of historian Asif Siddiqi of Fordham University.As part of the mission, three astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon and see an Earthrise above its surface on Christmas Eve. (NASA)NASA had a clear goal, established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, of landing an astronaut on the moon before the end of the decade. The agency carried out a sequence of missions that incrementally advanced its expertise in human spaceflight. Rather than sending astronauts directly from Earth to the moon\u2019s surface, NASA\u2019s engineers decided that the Apollo program should build a separate lunar lander, which greatly reduced the size of the rocket needed for the mission.AdvertisementThis relatively lightweight vehicle would separate from the command module in lunar orbit and two astronauts would descend to the moon\u2019s surface. They would then blast off and dock with the orbiting vehicle. Katherine Johnson, one of the NASA human \u201ccomputers\u201d made famous decades later by the movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d said her greatest contribution to the space program was her calculations for the Apollo program, according to NASA.Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.By early 1967, the United States appeared to be winning the race to the moon. Then came disaster. During a test of the command module on a launchpad at Cape Kennedy, during which the cabin was filled with pure oxygen, a fire broke out and killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts \u2014 Virgil \u201cGus\u201d Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White.Story continues below advertisementThe tragedy threatened to ruin any chance of putting boots on the moon by the decade\u2019s end. By late summer 1968, NASA was desperate to get back on schedule. The refashioned NASA schedule called for Apollo 7 to be an Earth-orbital flight that would test the re-engineered Apollo command module. Apollo 8, the first crewed flight of the Saturn V rocket, would also stay in Earth orbit and test the lunar lander.AdvertisementBut the lunar lander wasn\u2019t ready to fly.Meanwhile, the Soviets were building a giant moon rocket, the N1. The CIA circulated a report in the spring of 1968 saying that the Soviets could potentially send a human being on a mission around the moon before the end of the year. (And in September 1968, a pressurized spacecraft named Zond 5 zoomed around the moon with turtles aboard, clearly a precursor to a human mission.)Story continues below advertisementGeorge Low, the manager of the Apollo spacecraft program office in Houston, knew that his Apollo schedule was a mess. So he tore it up. He decided Apollo 8 should be a moonshot.His logic was simple: We have the hardware to fly around the moon. We have the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo command module and the service module. The one missing piece is the lunar lander, and we don\u2019t need that for a mission that doesn\u2019t try to land.On Aug. 7, Low presented the idea to Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations in Houston, and asked him to study whether it was technically feasible. On Aug. 9, Low pitched the plan to the head of the Houston center, Bob Gilruth, who embraced it right away, and Kraft reported that there were no showstoppers. They phoned a number of top NASA officials at other centers and asked them to fly to Huntsville, Ala., immediately for a 2:30 p.m. meeting. The Apollo program pivoted in a matter of hours.The top officials at NASA, Administrator James Webb and Associate Administrator for Human Spaceflight George Mueller, were uncomfortable with what appeared to be a mad dash to the moon. Mueller feared \u201cirresponsible scheduling\u201d and the impact on Apollo were there to be a \u201ccatastrophic failure,\u201d according to Low\u2019s private notes. But the Apollo engineers persuaded Webb and Mueller.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe designer of the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun, who as a Nazi scientist had built the V-2 rockets launched against Britain in World War II, also signed on to the plan. According to Low\u2019s notes, von Braun said that \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter to the launch vehicle how far we go.\u201d (As the satirist Tom Lehrer sang: \u201c \u2018Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That\u2019s not my department,\u2019 says Wernher von Braun.\u201d)\u2018See you on the other side\u2019The refashioned Apollo 8 mission required NASA to send the spacecraft on an exquisitely precise trajectory that would enter the moon\u2019s gravity well, loop around the far side and come within 60 miles of the surface.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s where the service module engine would fire, slowing the spaceship. If it didn\u2019t fire for some reason, that wouldn\u2019t be a disaster, because the trajectory was designed to fling Apollo 8 right back toward Earth, a \u201cfree return\u201d courtesy of gravity.AdvertisementBut if the engine burned too long, Apollo 8 could crash on the lunar surface. If it burned too briefly, the spacecraft would neither enter lunar orbit nor return to Earth, but would fly off into the void of space.The plan called for a second burn, to circularize the remaining orbits. Then would come the most anxiety-inducing burn, the one that would send the spacecraft back to Earth. If that didn\u2019t work for some reason, the astronauts would circle the moon until their oxygen ran out. That would take about nine days.Story continues below advertisementAll this would happen over the Christmas holiday.On the morning of the launch, all eyes were focused on the towering Saturn V. Apollo 8 would be only the third launch of the giant rocket. The first test launch, with no crew, had gone beautifully (Cronkite had roared with glee about the \u201cterrific\u201d launch as the entire observation building shook). But the second launch, also without a crew, had suffered multiple technical failures.The engineers thought they had fixed the problems for Apollo 8. Now NASA was going to put human beings on top of this rocket that stood 363 feet tall and that had had one successful launch and one not-so-good launch.AdvertisementApollo 8 lifted off beautifully. Aerospace engineer James Oberg was watching from the beach nearby. \u201cNo TV screen or movie screen can show how bright the flame is. It\u2019s like a piece of the sun,\u201d he recalled in an interview.Story continues below advertisementThe astronauts were soon in orbit, and just 2\u00bd hours later, Michael Collins, the astronaut in Mission Control assigned to speak with his colleagues in space, said, \u201cApollo 8, you are go for T.L.I.\u201d That meant Trans Lunar Injection. (These people were not poets.) The third stage of the Saturn V ignited, and they were off for the moon.\u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen?Frank Borman got sick en route with vomiting and diarrhea. Bill Anders meticulously described how a floating bolus of vomit split apart in zero gravity and confirmed Newtonian physics.Jim Lovell peered into the eyepieces of the Apollo Guidance and Navigation System, which featured a telescope and a sextant, and navigated by the stars, the moon and the sun, as if a sailor on the high seas. NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network tracked the spacecraft with giant radio antennas, and computers in Houston handled calculations.Advertisement\u201cHow sure are you we\u2019re going to miss the moon?\u201d one of the top NASA officials demanded of engineer John Mayer in Houston as Apollo 8 cruised toward its destination. \u201cI\u2019m real sure,\u201d he said, laughing, though he had an uneasy afterthought: Why aren\u2019t they more worried about a miscalculation at reentry that burns up the spacecraft?The crew sent back images of Earth, and Earthlings were mesmerized. On CBS, the baritone commentator Eric Sevareid said, \u201cThree creatures of frail flesh and blood are floating through the blackness of space in the neighborhood of the moon. It is staggering and we do not know what it means.\u201dThe spacecraft reached the moon after nearly three days of flight. \u201cSee you on the other side,\u201d Lovell said just before the spaceship disappeared behind the moon.People had never seen that side of the moon with their own eyes. Nor had they ever been so cut off from their fellow humans. They had no way to communicate with Mission Control. In Houston, there was nothing to do but wait. The place was silent.AdvertisementEngineers wandered outside for a smoke.Then Apollo 8 could be heard again, popping from behind the moon in exactly the right place at the right time. Who said space is hard?The rest of the mission went splendidly, including that scary final burn, which again happened behind the moon. As the spacecraft came back into contact, on track to return to Earth, Lovell told Houston, \u201cPlease be informed, there is a Santa Claus.\u201dThe spacecraft splashed into the Pacific just a couple of miles from the Navy aircraft carrier waiting to pick up the astronauts.On NBC, anchorman David Brinkley said, \u201cThe great adventure ended today as it began, with almost everybody in the world holding his breath and hoping it would all work. It all did. It was almost unreasonably perfect. \u2026 The human race, without many victories lately, had one today. And it will be remembered as long at the human race lasts.\u201dOr at least for seven months. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon the following July. Apollo 8 would thereafter reside in the huge shadow of Apollo 11.Read more Retropolis:\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteAn asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famous No human being had ever been beyond low Earth orbit when Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr., and Bill Anders blasted off on Dec. 21, 1968. Apollo 8: NASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisation",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 8: NASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisation (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2931",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/20/apollo-nasas-first-moonshot-was-bold-terrifying-improvisation/",
        "text": "Walter Cronkite held a tiny model of the Apollo 8 spacecraft and strode across a darkened studio where two dangling spheres represented Earth and the moon. This was the CBS Evening News, Dec. 20, 1968, and three Apollo 8 astronauts were scheduled to blast off the following morning on a huge Saturn V rocket. Cronkite explained that the astronauts would fly for three days to the vicinity of the moon, fire an engine to slow the spacecraft and enter lunar orbit, circle the moon 10 times, then fire the engine a final time to return to Earth and enter the atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThey must come in at JUST the right angle. If they come in too steeply, they will be CRUSHED in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If they come in too shallow, they will SKIP OUT and go into Earth orbit and not be able to return,\u201d Cronkite said.Fifty years later, it\u2019s hard to remember how mind-blowing Apollo 8 was, and how scary. No space mission had ever presented so many exotic ways to kill astronauts. Before the launch, a NASA official was overheard imagining what might go wrong: \u201cJust how do we tell Susan Borman, \u2018Frank is stranded in orbit around the moon\u2019?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApollo 8 was the first moonshot. No human being had ever been beyond low Earth orbit. Even the Apollo 8 astronauts \u2014 Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr. and Bill Anders \u2014 struggled to wrap their heads around what they were about to do.Muscle cars. Bell-bottoms. 8-tracks. It\u2019s 1968. Astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders get a call to cancel their holiday plans. By December, the three were suddenly farther away than any human had ever been from our home planet. Start your flashback here: https://t.co/VdgeiLDnbE pic.twitter.com/F90LhIXmR2\u2014 NASA (@NASA) December 21, 2018\n\nThey shared their final prelaunch lunch with Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, at Cape Kennedy. \u201cThink, it\u2019s hard to believe, this time tomorrow we\u2019ll be on our way to the moon,\u201d one of the astronauts said, according to Morrow Lindbergh\u2019s subsequent article in LIFE magazine.What\u2019s more, Apollo 8 was improvisational. It wasn\u2019t even supposed to be a mission to the moon.\u201cIt was an extraordinarily bold decision,\u201d says Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of Apollo Spacecraft at the National Air and Space Museum.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the most risky decisions in the history of spaceflight\u201d is the verdict of historian Asif Siddiqi of Fordham University.As part of the mission, three astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon and see an Earthrise above its surface on Christmas Eve. (NASA)NASA had a clear goal, established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, of landing an astronaut on the moon before the end of the decade. The agency carried out a sequence of missions that incrementally advanced its expertise in human spaceflight. Rather than sending astronauts directly from Earth to the moon\u2019s surface, NASA\u2019s engineers decided that the Apollo program should build a separate lunar lander, which greatly reduced the size of the rocket needed for the mission.AdvertisementThis relatively lightweight vehicle would separate from the command module in lunar orbit and two astronauts would descend to the moon\u2019s surface. They would then blast off and dock with the orbiting vehicle. Katherine Johnson, one of the NASA human \u201ccomputers\u201d made famous decades later by the movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d said her greatest contribution to the space program was her calculations for the Apollo program, according to NASA.Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.By early 1967, the United States appeared to be winning the race to the moon. Then came disaster. During a test of the command module on a launchpad at Cape Kennedy, during which the cabin was filled with pure oxygen, a fire broke out and killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts \u2014 Virgil \u201cGus\u201d Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White.Story continues below advertisementThe tragedy threatened to ruin any chance of putting boots on the moon by the decade\u2019s end. By late summer 1968, NASA was desperate to get back on schedule. The refashioned NASA schedule called for Apollo 7 to be an Earth-orbital flight that would test the re-engineered Apollo command module. Apollo 8, the first crewed flight of the Saturn V rocket, would also stay in Earth orbit and test the lunar lander.AdvertisementBut the lunar lander wasn\u2019t ready to fly.Meanwhile, the Soviets were building a giant moon rocket, the N1. The CIA circulated a report in the spring of 1968 saying that the Soviets could potentially send a human being on a mission around the moon before the end of the year. (And in September 1968, a pressurized spacecraft named Zond 5 zoomed around the moon with turtles aboard, clearly a precursor to a human mission.)Story continues below advertisementGeorge Low, the manager of the Apollo spacecraft program office in Houston, knew that his Apollo schedule was a mess. So he tore it up. He decided Apollo 8 should be a moonshot.His logic was simple: We have the hardware to fly around the moon. We have the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo command module and the service module. The one missing piece is the lunar lander, and we don\u2019t need that for a mission that doesn\u2019t try to land.On Aug. 7, Low presented the idea to Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations in Houston, and asked him to study whether it was technically feasible. On Aug. 9, Low pitched the plan to the head of the Houston center, Bob Gilruth, who embraced it right away, and Kraft reported that there were no showstoppers. They phoned a number of top NASA officials at other centers and asked them to fly to Huntsville, Ala., immediately for a 2:30 p.m. meeting. The Apollo program pivoted in a matter of hours.The top officials at NASA, Administrator James Webb and Associate Administrator for Human Spaceflight George Mueller, were uncomfortable with what appeared to be a mad dash to the moon. Mueller feared \u201cirresponsible scheduling\u201d and the impact on Apollo were there to be a \u201ccatastrophic failure,\u201d according to Low\u2019s private notes. But the Apollo engineers persuaded Webb and Mueller.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe designer of the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun, who as a Nazi scientist had built the V-2 rockets launched against Britain in World War II, also signed on to the plan. According to Low\u2019s notes, von Braun said that \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter to the launch vehicle how far we go.\u201d (As the satirist Tom Lehrer sang: \u201c \u2018Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That\u2019s not my department,\u2019 says Wernher von Braun.\u201d)\u2018See you on the other side\u2019The refashioned Apollo 8 mission required NASA to send the spacecraft on an exquisitely precise trajectory that would enter the moon\u2019s gravity well, loop around the far side and come within 60 miles of the surface.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s where the service module engine would fire, slowing the spaceship. If it didn\u2019t fire for some reason, that wouldn\u2019t be a disaster, because the trajectory was designed to fling Apollo 8 right back toward Earth, a \u201cfree return\u201d courtesy of gravity.AdvertisementBut if the engine burned too long, Apollo 8 could crash on the lunar surface. If it burned too briefly, the spacecraft would neither enter lunar orbit nor return to Earth, but would fly off into the void of space.The plan called for a second burn, to circularize the remaining orbits. Then would come the most anxiety-inducing burn, the one that would send the spacecraft back to Earth. If that didn\u2019t work for some reason, the astronauts would circle the moon until their oxygen ran out. That would take about nine days.Story continues below advertisementAll this would happen over the Christmas holiday.On the morning of the launch, all eyes were focused on the towering Saturn V. Apollo 8 would be only the third launch of the giant rocket. The first test launch, with no crew, had gone beautifully (Cronkite had roared with glee about the \u201cterrific\u201d launch as the entire observation building shook). But the second launch, also without a crew, had suffered multiple technical failures.The engineers thought they had fixed the problems for Apollo 8. Now NASA was going to put human beings on top of this rocket that stood 363 feet tall and that had had one successful launch and one not-so-good launch.AdvertisementApollo 8 lifted off beautifully. Aerospace engineer James Oberg was watching from the beach nearby. \u201cNo TV screen or movie screen can show how bright the flame is. It\u2019s like a piece of the sun,\u201d he recalled in an interview.Story continues below advertisementThe astronauts were soon in orbit, and just 2\u00bd hours later, Michael Collins, the astronaut in Mission Control assigned to speak with his colleagues in space, said, \u201cApollo 8, you are go for T.L.I.\u201d That meant Trans Lunar Injection. (These people were not poets.) The third stage of the Saturn V ignited, and they were off for the moon.\u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen?Frank Borman got sick en route with vomiting and diarrhea. Bill Anders meticulously described how a floating bolus of vomit split apart in zero gravity and confirmed Newtonian physics.Jim Lovell peered into the eyepieces of the Apollo Guidance and Navigation System, which featured a telescope and a sextant, and navigated by the stars, the moon and the sun, as if a sailor on the high seas. NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network tracked the spacecraft with giant radio antennas, and computers in Houston handled calculations.Advertisement\u201cHow sure are you we\u2019re going to miss the moon?\u201d one of the top NASA officials demanded of engineer John Mayer in Houston as Apollo 8 cruised toward its destination. \u201cI\u2019m real sure,\u201d he said, laughing, though he had an uneasy afterthought: Why aren\u2019t they more worried about a miscalculation at reentry that burns up the spacecraft?The crew sent back images of Earth, and Earthlings were mesmerized. On CBS, the baritone commentator Eric Sevareid said, \u201cThree creatures of frail flesh and blood are floating through the blackness of space in the neighborhood of the moon. It is staggering and we do not know what it means.\u201dThe spacecraft reached the moon after nearly three days of flight. \u201cSee you on the other side,\u201d Lovell said just before the spaceship disappeared behind the moon.People had never seen that side of the moon with their own eyes. Nor had they ever been so cut off from their fellow humans. They had no way to communicate with Mission Control. In Houston, there was nothing to do but wait. The place was silent.AdvertisementEngineers wandered outside for a smoke.Then Apollo 8 could be heard again, popping from behind the moon in exactly the right place at the right time. Who said space is hard?The rest of the mission went splendidly, including that scary final burn, which again happened behind the moon. As the spacecraft came back into contact, on track to return to Earth, Lovell told Houston, \u201cPlease be informed, there is a Santa Claus.\u201dThe spacecraft splashed into the Pacific just a couple of miles from the Navy aircraft carrier waiting to pick up the astronauts.On NBC, anchorman David Brinkley said, \u201cThe great adventure ended today as it began, with almost everybody in the world holding his breath and hoping it would all work. It all did. It was almost unreasonably perfect. \u2026 The human race, without many victories lately, had one today. And it will be remembered as long at the human race lasts.\u201dOr at least for seven months. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon the following July. Apollo 8 would thereafter reside in the huge shadow of Apollo 11.Read more Retropolis:\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteAn asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famous No human being had ever been beyond low Earth orbit when Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr., and Bill Anders blasted off on Dec. 21, 1968. Apollo 8: NASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisation",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 8: NASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisation (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2932",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/12/20/apollo-nasas-first-moonshot-was-bold-terrifying-improvisation/",
        "text": "Walter Cronkite held a tiny model of the Apollo 8 spacecraft and strode across a darkened studio where two dangling spheres represented Earth and the moon. This was the CBS Evening News, Dec. 20, 1968, and three Apollo 8 astronauts were scheduled to blast off the following morning on a huge Saturn V rocket. Cronkite explained that the astronauts would fly for three days to the vicinity of the moon, fire an engine to slow the spacecraft and enter lunar orbit, circle the moon 10 times, then fire the engine a final time to return to Earth and enter the atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThey must come in at JUST the right angle. If they come in too steeply, they will be CRUSHED in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If they come in too shallow, they will SKIP OUT and go into Earth orbit and not be able to return,\u201d Cronkite said.Fifty years later, it\u2019s hard to remember how mind-blowing Apollo 8 was, and how scary. No space mission had ever presented so many exotic ways to kill astronauts. Before the launch, a NASA official was overheard imagining what might go wrong: \u201cJust how do we tell Susan Borman, \u2018Frank is stranded in orbit around the moon\u2019?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApollo 8 was the first moonshot. No human being had ever been beyond low Earth orbit. Even the Apollo 8 astronauts \u2014 Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr. and Bill Anders \u2014 struggled to wrap their heads around what they were about to do.Muscle cars. Bell-bottoms. 8-tracks. It\u2019s 1968. Astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders get a call to cancel their holiday plans. By December, the three were suddenly farther away than any human had ever been from our home planet. Start your flashback here: https://t.co/VdgeiLDnbE pic.twitter.com/F90LhIXmR2\u2014 NASA (@NASA) December 21, 2018\n\nThey shared their final prelaunch lunch with Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, at Cape Kennedy. \u201cThink, it\u2019s hard to believe, this time tomorrow we\u2019ll be on our way to the moon,\u201d one of the astronauts said, according to Morrow Lindbergh\u2019s subsequent article in LIFE magazine.What\u2019s more, Apollo 8 was improvisational. It wasn\u2019t even supposed to be a mission to the moon.\u201cIt was an extraordinarily bold decision,\u201d says Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of Apollo Spacecraft at the National Air and Space Museum.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the most risky decisions in the history of spaceflight\u201d is the verdict of historian Asif Siddiqi of Fordham University.As part of the mission, three astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon and see an Earthrise above its surface on Christmas Eve. (NASA)NASA had a clear goal, established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, of landing an astronaut on the moon before the end of the decade. The agency carried out a sequence of missions that incrementally advanced its expertise in human spaceflight. Rather than sending astronauts directly from Earth to the moon\u2019s surface, NASA\u2019s engineers decided that the Apollo program should build a separate lunar lander, which greatly reduced the size of the rocket needed for the mission.AdvertisementThis relatively lightweight vehicle would separate from the command module in lunar orbit and two astronauts would descend to the moon\u2019s surface. They would then blast off and dock with the orbiting vehicle. Katherine Johnson, one of the NASA human \u201ccomputers\u201d made famous decades later by the movie \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d said her greatest contribution to the space program was her calculations for the Apollo program, according to NASA.Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.By early 1967, the United States appeared to be winning the race to the moon. Then came disaster. During a test of the command module on a launchpad at Cape Kennedy, during which the cabin was filled with pure oxygen, a fire broke out and killed the three Apollo 1 astronauts \u2014 Virgil \u201cGus\u201d Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White.Story continues below advertisementThe tragedy threatened to ruin any chance of putting boots on the moon by the decade\u2019s end. By late summer 1968, NASA was desperate to get back on schedule. The refashioned NASA schedule called for Apollo 7 to be an Earth-orbital flight that would test the re-engineered Apollo command module. Apollo 8, the first crewed flight of the Saturn V rocket, would also stay in Earth orbit and test the lunar lander.AdvertisementBut the lunar lander wasn\u2019t ready to fly.Meanwhile, the Soviets were building a giant moon rocket, the N1. The CIA circulated a report in the spring of 1968 saying that the Soviets could potentially send a human being on a mission around the moon before the end of the year. (And in September 1968, a pressurized spacecraft named Zond 5 zoomed around the moon with turtles aboard, clearly a precursor to a human mission.)Story continues below advertisementGeorge Low, the manager of the Apollo spacecraft program office in Houston, knew that his Apollo schedule was a mess. So he tore it up. He decided Apollo 8 should be a moonshot.His logic was simple: We have the hardware to fly around the moon. We have the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo command module and the service module. The one missing piece is the lunar lander, and we don\u2019t need that for a mission that doesn\u2019t try to land.On Aug. 7, Low presented the idea to Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations in Houston, and asked him to study whether it was technically feasible. On Aug. 9, Low pitched the plan to the head of the Houston center, Bob Gilruth, who embraced it right away, and Kraft reported that there were no showstoppers. They phoned a number of top NASA officials at other centers and asked them to fly to Huntsville, Ala., immediately for a 2:30 p.m. meeting. The Apollo program pivoted in a matter of hours.The top officials at NASA, Administrator James Webb and Associate Administrator for Human Spaceflight George Mueller, were uncomfortable with what appeared to be a mad dash to the moon. Mueller feared \u201cirresponsible scheduling\u201d and the impact on Apollo were there to be a \u201ccatastrophic failure,\u201d according to Low\u2019s private notes. But the Apollo engineers persuaded Webb and Mueller.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe designer of the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun, who as a Nazi scientist had built the V-2 rockets launched against Britain in World War II, also signed on to the plan. According to Low\u2019s notes, von Braun said that \u201cit doesn\u2019t matter to the launch vehicle how far we go.\u201d (As the satirist Tom Lehrer sang: \u201c \u2018Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That\u2019s not my department,\u2019 says Wernher von Braun.\u201d)\u2018See you on the other side\u2019The refashioned Apollo 8 mission required NASA to send the spacecraft on an exquisitely precise trajectory that would enter the moon\u2019s gravity well, loop around the far side and come within 60 miles of the surface.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s where the service module engine would fire, slowing the spaceship. If it didn\u2019t fire for some reason, that wouldn\u2019t be a disaster, because the trajectory was designed to fling Apollo 8 right back toward Earth, a \u201cfree return\u201d courtesy of gravity.AdvertisementBut if the engine burned too long, Apollo 8 could crash on the lunar surface. If it burned too briefly, the spacecraft would neither enter lunar orbit nor return to Earth, but would fly off into the void of space.The plan called for a second burn, to circularize the remaining orbits. Then would come the most anxiety-inducing burn, the one that would send the spacecraft back to Earth. If that didn\u2019t work for some reason, the astronauts would circle the moon until their oxygen ran out. That would take about nine days.Story continues below advertisementAll this would happen over the Christmas holiday.On the morning of the launch, all eyes were focused on the towering Saturn V. Apollo 8 would be only the third launch of the giant rocket. The first test launch, with no crew, had gone beautifully (Cronkite had roared with glee about the \u201cterrific\u201d launch as the entire observation building shook). But the second launch, also without a crew, had suffered multiple technical failures.The engineers thought they had fixed the problems for Apollo 8. Now NASA was going to put human beings on top of this rocket that stood 363 feet tall and that had had one successful launch and one not-so-good launch.AdvertisementApollo 8 lifted off beautifully. Aerospace engineer James Oberg was watching from the beach nearby. \u201cNo TV screen or movie screen can show how bright the flame is. It\u2019s like a piece of the sun,\u201d he recalled in an interview.Story continues below advertisementThe astronauts were soon in orbit, and just 2\u00bd hours later, Michael Collins, the astronaut in Mission Control assigned to speak with his colleagues in space, said, \u201cApollo 8, you are go for T.L.I.\u201d That meant Trans Lunar Injection. (These people were not poets.) The third stage of the Saturn V ignited, and they were off for the moon.\u2018First Man\u2019 shows Neil Armstrong mourning his daughter on the moon. But did that really happen?Frank Borman got sick en route with vomiting and diarrhea. Bill Anders meticulously described how a floating bolus of vomit split apart in zero gravity and confirmed Newtonian physics.Jim Lovell peered into the eyepieces of the Apollo Guidance and Navigation System, which featured a telescope and a sextant, and navigated by the stars, the moon and the sun, as if a sailor on the high seas. NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network tracked the spacecraft with giant radio antennas, and computers in Houston handled calculations.Advertisement\u201cHow sure are you we\u2019re going to miss the moon?\u201d one of the top NASA officials demanded of engineer John Mayer in Houston as Apollo 8 cruised toward its destination. \u201cI\u2019m real sure,\u201d he said, laughing, though he had an uneasy afterthought: Why aren\u2019t they more worried about a miscalculation at reentry that burns up the spacecraft?The crew sent back images of Earth, and Earthlings were mesmerized. On CBS, the baritone commentator Eric Sevareid said, \u201cThree creatures of frail flesh and blood are floating through the blackness of space in the neighborhood of the moon. It is staggering and we do not know what it means.\u201dThe spacecraft reached the moon after nearly three days of flight. \u201cSee you on the other side,\u201d Lovell said just before the spaceship disappeared behind the moon.People had never seen that side of the moon with their own eyes. Nor had they ever been so cut off from their fellow humans. They had no way to communicate with Mission Control. In Houston, there was nothing to do but wait. The place was silent.AdvertisementEngineers wandered outside for a smoke.Then Apollo 8 could be heard again, popping from behind the moon in exactly the right place at the right time. Who said space is hard?The rest of the mission went splendidly, including that scary final burn, which again happened behind the moon. As the spacecraft came back into contact, on track to return to Earth, Lovell told Houston, \u201cPlease be informed, there is a Santa Claus.\u201dThe spacecraft splashed into the Pacific just a couple of miles from the Navy aircraft carrier waiting to pick up the astronauts.On NBC, anchorman David Brinkley said, \u201cThe great adventure ended today as it began, with almost everybody in the world holding his breath and hoping it would all work. It all did. It was almost unreasonably perfect. \u2026 The human race, without many victories lately, had one today. And it will be remembered as long at the human race lasts.\u201dOr at least for seven months. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon the following July. Apollo 8 would thereafter reside in the huge shadow of Apollo 11.Read more Retropolis:\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteAn asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famous No human being had ever been beyond low Earth orbit when Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr., and Bill Anders blasted off on Dec. 21, 1968. Apollo 8: NASA\u2019s first moonshot was a bold and terrifying improvisation",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "She awed the country before Amelia Earhart even took to the skies (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2933",
        "date": "2019-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/01/06/she-amazed-country-before-amelia-earhart-even-flew-plane/",
        "text": "In April 1918, during World War I, a pilot flew over the District, rallying crowds at a parade and raising money for troops overseas.This spring day was a transitional American moment: The uniformed pilot flying above the houses of Washington power was a woman \u2014 Ruth Law. Change was literally in the air. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLaw had been flying since 1912, a short nine years after the Wright brothers\u2019 flights in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Most famously, she broke the American long-distance record in 1916, flying from Chicago to New York. Four years before Amelia Earhart first flew, Law was the country\u2019s \u201cQueen of the Air.\u201dWhen America entered World War I, Law lobbied the government to fly in battle, but Secretary of War Newton D. Baker refused. She wrote a newspaper article that said that if President Woodrow Wilson sent her after the Kaiser, \u201cI should fly away on my bombing mission with not only a free conscience but a glad heart.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNevertheless, Law became the first woman to wear a noncommissioned officer\u2019s Army uniform and spent her time soaring over the United States, dropping paper \u201cbombs\u201d that advertised Liberty Loans.The Liberty Loan parades, which took place nationwide, brought citizens marching, buying bonds and demonstrating their support for troops overseas. In Washington alone, the parade would tally about 35,000, according to the Washington Star, with some news accounts setting the number closer to 40,000.Listen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d:\nFor more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More options\nWhat made the loan committee want Law? She was, \u201cwith the Stinson sisters [aviators Marjorie and Katherine Stinson], publicly ranked as one of the three most prominent women then flying in the U.S.,\u201d said Fred Erisman, an author and professor emeritus at Texas Christian University.Story continues below advertisementToday the airspace around the District is more restricted than anywhere else in the United States, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. But during parade week in 1918, pilots treated the skies like a playground. Law and others, including an Italian army captain named Antonio Resnati, who gave rides to diplomats and members of Congress, gamboled in their planes. One morning, they plunged and swooped until a bald eagle joined them. The bird \u201creally appeared to resent the appearance of the machine-birds,\u201d wrote a Washington Post reporter.AdvertisementThe day before the parade, Law started at the top of the Washington Monument and corkscrewed around it, spinning to 10 feet above the ground. Next, she flipped and pivoted through a skills contest with a British aviator, and then flew on, seeming to graze the tops of streetcars and trees. Her plane\u2019s propeller roared and whooshed hats from the heads of onlookers. They clapped; drivers honked.When parade day came, spectators lined the sidewalks to watch the festivities. Navy Yard workers carried a bier labeled, \u201cThe Kaiser\u2019s Funeral.\u201d A billy goat marched alongside, wearing a sign that read, \u201cWe\u2019ve Got The Kaiser\u2019s Goat.\u201d Munitions laborers walked in overalls, their shirt sleeves rolled up. There were about a thousand soldiers in uniform, and 492 men who had just been drafted kept pace in their street clothes, according to the Washington Star.Story continues below advertisementPresident Wilson stood smiling in his car, taking in the procession, his hat held over his heart. He had burned himself touching a tank\u2019s hot exhaust pipe, so his arm was in a sling and his hand was bandaged in white gauze.AdvertisementLaw took off over the crowds from the roped-off Ellipse around 3:10 p.m. In her Curtiss biplane, she sat out in front of the engine, as one spectator said, \u201cOn the ragged edge of nothing.\u201d She sailed over Memorial Continental Hall \u2014 now the headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution \u2014 but then returned to the Ellipse, calling for her mechanic to help fix a spark plug. Then she was up again.\u201cLord! Be that a woman?\u201d an elderly woman exclaimed.Story continues below advertisementLaw flung her plane into loops over the White House and the State, War, and Navy building, now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, just to its west. More loops in front of Wilson, close enough that he could see her wave.\u201cIt\u2019s astounding to me what she did in an aircraft,\u201d said Jerry Kidrick, assistant professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. \u201cIt was a piano wire and fabric aircraft, not a newly manufactured airplane.\u201dAdvertisementFlying toward Capitol Hill, Law dropped her black and white paper \u201cbombs.\u201d On one side, they read, \u201cAmerica\u2019s war chest or the kaiser\u2019s? Which?\u201d On the other: \u201cYou must put your money in the war chest or the next bomb dropped may be a German bomb. You must fight or give until it hurts, to help save your country. Ruth Law.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPeople stared and clapped. Law\u2019s flight \u201cwould be like today watching a spaceship fly over your parade,\u201d Kidrick said.Law stood inside the roped-off Ellipse after she landed. Via a megaphone, a man named Charles W. Semmes reminded people that just by flying, Law had taken a 50-50 chance with her life. The implication was that the least they could do was buy a bond. People stood in line and waved their hands for the chance to purchase $50 and $100 bonds \u2014 and get Law\u2019s autograph on the receipt.Advertisement\u201cPeople like Ruth,\u201d Kidrick said, \u201cwere the equivalent of the Mercury 7 astronauts of today. Celebrities. Rock stars.\u201dYes, Law admitted, she\u2019d been disappointed when the secretary refused to let her fly in the war, but she wouldn\u2019t be denied her part. \u201cI\u2019m going to \u2018carry on\u2019 anyway by raising money by dropping bombs of literature, appeals for funds for the Red Cross, all over the country this summer.\u201dStory continues below advertisementLaw would go on to do a wing-walk, perform in Asia and found her own air circus. In 1922, Law woke up to find that her husband, tired of her dangerous job, had announced her retirement in the newspaper, according to the Smithsonian\u2019s Air and Space Museum. It was about six years later that Earhart became the first woman to make a transatlantic flight in 1928. In June 1937, she began her flight around the world, then disappeared a month later. And while Earhart may be the most iconic aviatrix, it was Law who paved the way.AdvertisementRead More on Retropolis: Two French aviators vanished a decade before Amelia Earhart. Their fate remains a mystery, too.A newly unearthed photo shows Amelia Earhart survived her final flight, investigators sayDiscovered: Never-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flightAn asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquote While Earhart may be the most iconic aviatrix, it was Ruth Law who paved the way. She awed the country before Amelia Earhart even took to the skies",
        "author": "Eliza McGraw"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2934",
        "date": "2017-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/10/10/presidents-love-evoking-jfks-iconic-moon-speech-now-its-the-trump-administrations-turn/",
        "text": "The oratory was lofty, the setting, before the space shuttle Discovery, was fitting. Guests included the secretaries of state, transportation and commerce, and the chief executives of some of the largest aerospace companies in the world, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDuring the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council last week, Vice President Pence vowed in soaring rhetoric that the United States would not only return astronauts to the moon, but that \u201cwe will push the boundaries of human knowledge. We will blaze new trails into the great frontier. And we will once again astonish the world as we boldly go to meet our future in the skies and stars.\u201d Although he did not include a timeline, a budget or a commitment of resources, his words evoked the pair of speeches that John F. Kennedy gave in the early 1960s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the first, to a joint session of Congress in 1961, he said that \u201cthis nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.\u201dThen, in 1962, he gave the famous \u201cbecause-it-is-hard\u201d speech at Rice University: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.\u201dSince then, presidents have given their own version of the space speech, an attempt to rally the country and recapture the national pride that came with the 1960s-era Apollo program. It\u00a0has become something of a rite of passage. And last week, at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center, it was the Trump administration\u2019s turn to make the space speech, with Pence at the podium.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, for all the talk, there has been little progress over the past four decades. The United States has not returned astronauts to the moon, or gone to Mars \u2014 or met any of the lofty promises wafting out of the White House, as one administration aims for the moon, the next for Mars, then the next for the moon again.Instead, NASA\u2019s astronauts go to the International Space Station. The orbiting laboratory is a marvel, but at 250 miles above the Earth, is not near the accomplishment of the moon, which is about 250,000 miles away. And NASA doesn\u2019t fly them there. It hasn\u2019t been able to since the space shuttle retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for rides to the station.So, as the Trump administration makes it promises of returning to the moon, here\u2019s a look at the pantheon of White House space speeches Pence\u2019s joins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPresident Reagan: Jan. 25, 1984Over the advice of many of his advisers, Ronald Reagan resurrected the idea for a space station. The Gipper stood at the same podium where Kennedy had announced the nation\u2019s lunar ambitions, and his lofty tone matched Kennedy\u2019s, tying national pride to its prowess in space. Reagan gave the announcement prominent placement in his State of the Union address.\u201cAmerica has always been greatest when we dared to be great,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe space station would be named Freedom.Two years later, however, as Reagan prepared to give another State of the Union address, Vice President Bush and Pat Buchanan, a communications aide, burst into the Oval Office. Bush started to inform the president of the news, but Buchanan couldn\u2019t contain himself. \u201cSir, the Challenger just blew up!\u201d he said.Until then, the shuttle program had been hitting its stride. The first two years it had launched 10 astronauts into space. Then in 1983, 25 had gone up. Another 23 the following year. In 1985, 58 astronauts had flown into orbit, and now NASA had grand plans to open up space with a special program that would grant everyday Americans a chance to hitch on ride on the shuttle. The first of those would be a bright, beaming high school social studies teacher named Christa McAuliffe, who was chosen from more than 11,000 applicants. But now she was dead, along with six NASA astronauts.Reagan delayed his State of the Union until a few days later. That night, his voice caught for just a moment as he said, \u201cWe will never forget those brave seven, but we shall go forward.\u201dThe Challenger disaster grounded the shuttle for more than two years and delayed the increasingly complicated space station program, which was running over budget and facing design challenges.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPresident George H.W. Bush: July 20, 1989On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, President George H.W. Bush went to the National Air and Space Museum to announce he would continue plans to build a space station, and then direct a mission back not just to the moon but to Mars, as well.In 1961, the country was motivated by the Cold War space race to \u201cspeed things up,\u201d he said. \u201cToday we don\u2019t have a crisis; we have an opportunity. To seize this opportunity, I\u2019m not proposing a 10-year plan like Apollo; I\u2019m proposing a long-range continuing commitment\u2026\u201cWhy the moon? Why Mars? Because it is humanity\u2019s destiny to strive, to seek, to find. And because it\u2019s America\u2019s destiny to lead.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteBut at the White House, the new NASA administrator was fumbling the rollout, buckling under intense questions by the media.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow much would it cost? He didn\u2019t know.What was the specific timetable? He didn\u2019t know.Would Congress go along? He couldn\u2019t answer that, either. And at one point he seemed so flustered that when he was asked when the first astronauts might land on Mars, he stammered, \u201cI just frankly learned this morning what [Bush\u2019s] direction was.\u201dThere was so much pressure to make the announcement on the 20th anniversary of the lunar landing that many details had yet to be sorted out.When Congress did finally become aware of the total program cost \u2014\u00a0about $500 billion \u2014 it choked. NASA wasn\u2019t going to the moon, and it certainly wasn\u2019t going to Mars.President George W. Bush: Jan. 14, 2004Story continues below advertisementGene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, was in the audience at NASA headquarters when President George W. Bush took the stage and said that the country needed to strike out more boldly, going further than the space station in low Earth orbit. Bush recited what Cernan had said as he departed the lunar surface in 1972, promising, \u201cWe shall return.\u201d In his speech, Bush promised that \u201cAmerica will make those words come true.\u201dAdvertisementBy 2008, he said, \u201cWe will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration.\u201d By as early as 2015, manned missions would begin \u201cwith the goal of living and working there for an increasingly extended period of time.\u201dMeanwhile, Bush\u2019s plan became fodder for late-night television, which mocked an ambition for space exploration that a generation earlier had been venerated for achieving the impossible. Not that long ago the United States had reached the moon, but America\u2019s space program had since had so many false starts\u00a0and been subject to so many unfulfilled political promises that the critics were quick to pierce the soaring rhetoric and bring it back to ground.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe wants to build like a space station on the moon, and then from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars,\u201d David Letterman said in one of his monologues. \u201cYou know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? He\u2019s been drinking again.\u201dAdvertisementPresident Barack Obama: April 15, 2010By the time President Barack Obama was elected, Bush\u2019s moon program was so over budget and behind schedule that it was an easy target for the new administration. During a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, with Buzz Aldrin in the audience,\u00a0Obama outlined his plan for space.\u201cNow, I understand that some believe we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We\u2019ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There\u2019s a lot more space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it\u2019s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach \u2014 and operate at \u2014 a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward.\u201dAdvertisementThose targets would include first an asteroid, and then by the mid-2030s NASA would send astronauts to orbit Mars. But NASA\u2019s \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d never got much momentum. Then a new administration took office, and with it a new space speech\u2014and a new destination.Vice President Pence: Oct. 5, 2017\"We will win the 21st century in space,\" Vice President Pence said at the first meeting of the National Space Council on Oct. 5. (The Washington Post)During his speech last week, Pence scuttled the Mars first mission, vowing to direct NASA back to the moon.Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industryAfter Apollo, \u201csending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated,\u201d he said. Every passing year that the moon remained squarely in the rearview mirror further eroded our ability to return to the lunar domain and made it more likely that we would forget why we ever wanted to go in the first place.\u201cAnd now we find ourselves in a position where the United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect.\u201dLike other administrations, the Trump White House would do something about it, he vowed.\u201cThe president has charged us with laying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial, human presence in low Earth orbit. There, we will turn our attention back toward our celestial neighbors. We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dRead more Retropolis:An asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquote\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famousDiscovered: Never-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flight The vice president and past presidents love evoking JFK's iconic moon speech. But their space declarations often go unfulfilled.  Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2935",
        "date": "2017-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/10/10/presidents-love-evoking-jfks-iconic-moon-speech-now-its-the-trump-administrations-turn/",
        "text": "The oratory was lofty, the setting, before the space shuttle Discovery, was fitting. Guests included the secretaries of state, transportation and commerce, and the chief executives of some of the largest aerospace companies in the world, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDuring the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council last week, Vice President Pence vowed in soaring rhetoric that the United States would not only return astronauts to the moon, but that \u201cwe will push the boundaries of human knowledge. We will blaze new trails into the great frontier. And we will once again astonish the world as we boldly go to meet our future in the skies and stars.\u201d Although he did not include a timeline, a budget or a commitment of resources, his words evoked the pair of speeches that John F. Kennedy gave in the early 1960s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the first, to a joint session of Congress in 1961, he said that \u201cthis nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.\u201dThen, in 1962, he gave the famous \u201cbecause-it-is-hard\u201d speech at Rice University: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.\u201dSince then, presidents have given their own version of the space speech, an attempt to rally the country and recapture the national pride that came with the 1960s-era Apollo program. It\u00a0has become something of a rite of passage. And last week, at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center, it was the Trump administration\u2019s turn to make the space speech, with Pence at the podium.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, for all the talk, there has been little progress over the past four decades. The United States has not returned astronauts to the moon, or gone to Mars \u2014 or met any of the lofty promises wafting out of the White House, as one administration aims for the moon, the next for Mars, then the next for the moon again.Instead, NASA\u2019s astronauts go to the International Space Station. The orbiting laboratory is a marvel, but at 250 miles above the Earth, is not near the accomplishment of the moon, which is about 250,000 miles away. And NASA doesn\u2019t fly them there. It hasn\u2019t been able to since the space shuttle retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for rides to the station.So, as the Trump administration makes it promises of returning to the moon, here\u2019s a look at the pantheon of White House space speeches Pence\u2019s joins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPresident Reagan: Jan. 25, 1984Over the advice of many of his advisers, Ronald Reagan resurrected the idea for a space station. The Gipper stood at the same podium where Kennedy had announced the nation\u2019s lunar ambitions, and his lofty tone matched Kennedy\u2019s, tying national pride to its prowess in space. Reagan gave the announcement prominent placement in his State of the Union address.\u201cAmerica has always been greatest when we dared to be great,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe space station would be named Freedom.Two years later, however, as Reagan prepared to give another State of the Union address, Vice President Bush and Pat Buchanan, a communications aide, burst into the Oval Office. Bush started to inform the president of the news, but Buchanan couldn\u2019t contain himself. \u201cSir, the Challenger just blew up!\u201d he said.Until then, the shuttle program had been hitting its stride. The first two years it had launched 10 astronauts into space. Then in 1983, 25 had gone up. Another 23 the following year. In 1985, 58 astronauts had flown into orbit, and now NASA had grand plans to open up space with a special program that would grant everyday Americans a chance to hitch on ride on the shuttle. The first of those would be a bright, beaming high school social studies teacher named Christa McAuliffe, who was chosen from more than 11,000 applicants. But now she was dead, along with six NASA astronauts.Reagan delayed his State of the Union until a few days later. That night, his voice caught for just a moment as he said, \u201cWe will never forget those brave seven, but we shall go forward.\u201dThe Challenger disaster grounded the shuttle for more than two years and delayed the increasingly complicated space station program, which was running over budget and facing design challenges.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPresident George H.W. Bush: July 20, 1989On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, President George H.W. Bush went to the National Air and Space Museum to announce he would continue plans to build a space station, and then direct a mission back not just to the moon but to Mars, as well.In 1961, the country was motivated by the Cold War space race to \u201cspeed things up,\u201d he said. \u201cToday we don\u2019t have a crisis; we have an opportunity. To seize this opportunity, I\u2019m not proposing a 10-year plan like Apollo; I\u2019m proposing a long-range continuing commitment\u2026\u201cWhy the moon? Why Mars? Because it is humanity\u2019s destiny to strive, to seek, to find. And because it\u2019s America\u2019s destiny to lead.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteBut at the White House, the new NASA administrator was fumbling the rollout, buckling under intense questions by the media.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow much would it cost? He didn\u2019t know.What was the specific timetable? He didn\u2019t know.Would Congress go along? He couldn\u2019t answer that, either. And at one point he seemed so flustered that when he was asked when the first astronauts might land on Mars, he stammered, \u201cI just frankly learned this morning what [Bush\u2019s] direction was.\u201dThere was so much pressure to make the announcement on the 20th anniversary of the lunar landing that many details had yet to be sorted out.When Congress did finally become aware of the total program cost \u2014\u00a0about $500 billion \u2014 it choked. NASA wasn\u2019t going to the moon, and it certainly wasn\u2019t going to Mars.President George W. Bush: Jan. 14, 2004Story continues below advertisementGene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, was in the audience at NASA headquarters when President George W. Bush took the stage and said that the country needed to strike out more boldly, going further than the space station in low Earth orbit. Bush recited what Cernan had said as he departed the lunar surface in 1972, promising, \u201cWe shall return.\u201d In his speech, Bush promised that \u201cAmerica will make those words come true.\u201dAdvertisementBy 2008, he said, \u201cWe will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration.\u201d By as early as 2015, manned missions would begin \u201cwith the goal of living and working there for an increasingly extended period of time.\u201dMeanwhile, Bush\u2019s plan became fodder for late-night television, which mocked an ambition for space exploration that a generation earlier had been venerated for achieving the impossible. Not that long ago the United States had reached the moon, but America\u2019s space program had since had so many false starts\u00a0and been subject to so many unfulfilled political promises that the critics were quick to pierce the soaring rhetoric and bring it back to ground.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe wants to build like a space station on the moon, and then from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars,\u201d David Letterman said in one of his monologues. \u201cYou know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? He\u2019s been drinking again.\u201dAdvertisementPresident Barack Obama: April 15, 2010By the time President Barack Obama was elected, Bush\u2019s moon program was so over budget and behind schedule that it was an easy target for the new administration. During a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, with Buzz Aldrin in the audience,\u00a0Obama outlined his plan for space.\u201cNow, I understand that some believe we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We\u2019ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There\u2019s a lot more space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it\u2019s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach \u2014 and operate at \u2014 a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward.\u201dAdvertisementThose targets would include first an asteroid, and then by the mid-2030s NASA would send astronauts to orbit Mars. But NASA\u2019s \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d never got much momentum. Then a new administration took office, and with it a new space speech\u2014and a new destination.Vice President Pence: Oct. 5, 2017\"We will win the 21st century in space,\" Vice President Pence said at the first meeting of the National Space Council on Oct. 5. (The Washington Post)During his speech last week, Pence scuttled the Mars first mission, vowing to direct NASA back to the moon.Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industryAfter Apollo, \u201csending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated,\u201d he said. Every passing year that the moon remained squarely in the rearview mirror further eroded our ability to return to the lunar domain and made it more likely that we would forget why we ever wanted to go in the first place.\u201cAnd now we find ourselves in a position where the United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect.\u201dLike other administrations, the Trump White House would do something about it, he vowed.\u201cThe president has charged us with laying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial, human presence in low Earth orbit. There, we will turn our attention back toward our celestial neighbors. We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dRead more Retropolis:An asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquote\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famousDiscovered: Never-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flight The vice president and past presidents love evoking JFK's iconic moon speech. But their space declarations often go unfulfilled.  Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2936",
        "date": "2017-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/10/10/presidents-love-evoking-jfks-iconic-moon-speech-now-its-the-trump-administrations-turn/",
        "text": "The oratory was lofty, the setting, before the space shuttle Discovery, was fitting. Guests included the secretaries of state, transportation and commerce, and the chief executives of some of the largest aerospace companies in the world, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDuring the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council last week, Vice President Pence vowed in soaring rhetoric that the United States would not only return astronauts to the moon, but that \u201cwe will push the boundaries of human knowledge. We will blaze new trails into the great frontier. And we will once again astonish the world as we boldly go to meet our future in the skies and stars.\u201d Although he did not include a timeline, a budget or a commitment of resources, his words evoked the pair of speeches that John F. Kennedy gave in the early 1960s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the first, to a joint session of Congress in 1961, he said that \u201cthis nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.\u201dThen, in 1962, he gave the famous \u201cbecause-it-is-hard\u201d speech at Rice University: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.\u201dSince then, presidents have given their own version of the space speech, an attempt to rally the country and recapture the national pride that came with the 1960s-era Apollo program. It\u00a0has become something of a rite of passage. And last week, at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center, it was the Trump administration\u2019s turn to make the space speech, with Pence at the podium.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, for all the talk, there has been little progress over the past four decades. The United States has not returned astronauts to the moon, or gone to Mars \u2014 or met any of the lofty promises wafting out of the White House, as one administration aims for the moon, the next for Mars, then the next for the moon again.Instead, NASA\u2019s astronauts go to the International Space Station. The orbiting laboratory is a marvel, but at 250 miles above the Earth, is not near the accomplishment of the moon, which is about 250,000 miles away. And NASA doesn\u2019t fly them there. It hasn\u2019t been able to since the space shuttle retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for rides to the station.So, as the Trump administration makes it promises of returning to the moon, here\u2019s a look at the pantheon of White House space speeches Pence\u2019s joins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPresident Reagan: Jan. 25, 1984Over the advice of many of his advisers, Ronald Reagan resurrected the idea for a space station. The Gipper stood at the same podium where Kennedy had announced the nation\u2019s lunar ambitions, and his lofty tone matched Kennedy\u2019s, tying national pride to its prowess in space. Reagan gave the announcement prominent placement in his State of the Union address.\u201cAmerica has always been greatest when we dared to be great,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe space station would be named Freedom.Two years later, however, as Reagan prepared to give another State of the Union address, Vice President Bush and Pat Buchanan, a communications aide, burst into the Oval Office. Bush started to inform the president of the news, but Buchanan couldn\u2019t contain himself. \u201cSir, the Challenger just blew up!\u201d he said.Until then, the shuttle program had been hitting its stride. The first two years it had launched 10 astronauts into space. Then in 1983, 25 had gone up. Another 23 the following year. In 1985, 58 astronauts had flown into orbit, and now NASA had grand plans to open up space with a special program that would grant everyday Americans a chance to hitch on ride on the shuttle. The first of those would be a bright, beaming high school social studies teacher named Christa McAuliffe, who was chosen from more than 11,000 applicants. But now she was dead, along with six NASA astronauts.Reagan delayed his State of the Union until a few days later. That night, his voice caught for just a moment as he said, \u201cWe will never forget those brave seven, but we shall go forward.\u201dThe Challenger disaster grounded the shuttle for more than two years and delayed the increasingly complicated space station program, which was running over budget and facing design challenges.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPresident George H.W. Bush: July 20, 1989On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, President George H.W. Bush went to the National Air and Space Museum to announce he would continue plans to build a space station, and then direct a mission back not just to the moon but to Mars, as well.In 1961, the country was motivated by the Cold War space race to \u201cspeed things up,\u201d he said. \u201cToday we don\u2019t have a crisis; we have an opportunity. To seize this opportunity, I\u2019m not proposing a 10-year plan like Apollo; I\u2019m proposing a long-range continuing commitment\u2026\u201cWhy the moon? Why Mars? Because it is humanity\u2019s destiny to strive, to seek, to find. And because it\u2019s America\u2019s destiny to lead.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteBut at the White House, the new NASA administrator was fumbling the rollout, buckling under intense questions by the media.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow much would it cost? He didn\u2019t know.What was the specific timetable? He didn\u2019t know.Would Congress go along? He couldn\u2019t answer that, either. And at one point he seemed so flustered that when he was asked when the first astronauts might land on Mars, he stammered, \u201cI just frankly learned this morning what [Bush\u2019s] direction was.\u201dThere was so much pressure to make the announcement on the 20th anniversary of the lunar landing that many details had yet to be sorted out.When Congress did finally become aware of the total program cost \u2014\u00a0about $500 billion \u2014 it choked. NASA wasn\u2019t going to the moon, and it certainly wasn\u2019t going to Mars.President George W. Bush: Jan. 14, 2004Story continues below advertisementGene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, was in the audience at NASA headquarters when President George W. Bush took the stage and said that the country needed to strike out more boldly, going further than the space station in low Earth orbit. Bush recited what Cernan had said as he departed the lunar surface in 1972, promising, \u201cWe shall return.\u201d In his speech, Bush promised that \u201cAmerica will make those words come true.\u201dAdvertisementBy 2008, he said, \u201cWe will send a series of robotic missions to the lunar surface to research and prepare for future human exploration.\u201d By as early as 2015, manned missions would begin \u201cwith the goal of living and working there for an increasingly extended period of time.\u201dMeanwhile, Bush\u2019s plan became fodder for late-night television, which mocked an ambition for space exploration that a generation earlier had been venerated for achieving the impossible. Not that long ago the United States had reached the moon, but America\u2019s space program had since had so many false starts\u00a0and been subject to so many unfulfilled political promises that the critics were quick to pierce the soaring rhetoric and bring it back to ground.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe wants to build like a space station on the moon, and then from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars,\u201d David Letterman said in one of his monologues. \u201cYou know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? He\u2019s been drinking again.\u201dAdvertisementPresident Barack Obama: April 15, 2010By the time President Barack Obama was elected, Bush\u2019s moon program was so over budget and behind schedule that it was an easy target for the new administration. During a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, with Buzz Aldrin in the audience,\u00a0Obama outlined his plan for space.\u201cNow, I understand that some believe we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We\u2019ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There\u2019s a lot more space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it\u2019s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach \u2014 and operate at \u2014 a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward.\u201dAdvertisementThose targets would include first an asteroid, and then by the mid-2030s NASA would send astronauts to orbit Mars. But NASA\u2019s \u201cJourney to Mars\u201d never got much momentum. Then a new administration took office, and with it a new space speech\u2014and a new destination.Vice President Pence: Oct. 5, 2017\"We will win the 21st century in space,\" Vice President Pence said at the first meeting of the National Space Council on Oct. 5. (The Washington Post)During his speech last week, Pence scuttled the Mars first mission, vowing to direct NASA back to the moon.Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industryAfter Apollo, \u201csending Americans to the moon was treated as a triumph to be remembered, but not repeated,\u201d he said. Every passing year that the moon remained squarely in the rearview mirror further eroded our ability to return to the lunar domain and made it more likely that we would forget why we ever wanted to go in the first place.\u201cAnd now we find ourselves in a position where the United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect.\u201dLike other administrations, the Trump White House would do something about it, he vowed.\u201cThe president has charged us with laying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial, human presence in low Earth orbit. There, we will turn our attention back toward our celestial neighbors. We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dRead more Retropolis:An asteroid was streaking toward Earth. A collision seemed all too possible.\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquote\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in spaceThe solar eclipse that made Einstein famousDiscovered: Never-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flight The vice president and past presidents love evoking JFK's iconic moon speech. But their space declarations often go unfulfilled.  Pence vows America will return to the moon. The history of such promises suggests otherwise.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The end of an era: Farewell to the 747 (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2937",
        "date": "2017-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/12/the-end-of-an-era-farewell-to-the-747/",
        "text": "It\u2019s been more than 40 years, but Tamula Sawyer still remembers the soft emerald green dress and stylish high heels she wore on her first trip aboard a Boeing 747 from Boston to Honolulu.Back then, said Sawyer, who lives in Worcester, Mass., people dressed to fly. The seats were huge and comfortable and the plane was nearly empty \u2014 so empty that passengers could choose their seats. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDixie Deans was 18 when he immigrated with his family to the United States from Dublin. It was the first time he\u2019d flown anywhere and the 747 was just about the biggest thing he\u2019d ever seen. His mother, father and seven siblings took up two full rows of seats in the middle on the world\u2019s first widebody jet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI remember thinking that the first plane I was on, going to America, was a 747 and how cool that was,\u201d he recalled.AdvertisementAnd so the announcement this year that two of the country\u2019s biggest airlines, United and Delta, were retiring the iconic plane hit hard. While international carriers and freight companies will continue to use the 747, it will no longer be a sight.\u201cI feel sad that this wonderful plane that brought [me] to America is coming to an end,\u201d said Deans, 55. \u201cIt will stay in my heart forever.\u201dThe retirement announcement spurred a wave of nostalgia for a plane that for better or worse forever changed the way people traveled. Air travel was still considered a luxury when Boeing made its huge\u00a0bet on a jet like no other. The company, still recouping the money it had invested in the 707, was already stretched thin and had to borrow money for the new airliner. It even shut down one of its divisions, which made turbines, to help finance the project.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOh, it was a huge gamble,\u201d said Boeing\u2019s historian Michael Lombardi.\u201cIt was a very, very special airplane when it entered service,\u201d said Bob van der Linden, curator of air transportation at the Smithsonian\u2019s Air and Space Museum. \u201cIt was huge \u2014 it was so much larger than anything that had flown before.\u201dThe 747 took international air travel to the next level, said Omar Idris, the station manager for United Airlines hub at Dulles International Airport, who remembers donning a suit for his first 747 trip \u2014 from New York to Cairo \u2014 when he was just five.\u201cIt allowed more people to fly to far away places at a lower cost,\u201d he said.The nostalgia for the 747 is a rare warm and fuzzy for an industry more often under fire for its treatment of passengers.Story continues below advertisementFor some, it was the spiral staircase to the plane\u2019s upper deck. John van Dyke, who was 14 and terrified of flying, remembers being invited into the cockpit to sit with the pilots. Once the plane leveled off, he returned to his seat, his anxiety allayed.AdvertisementDhruva Gurushankar, just seven when he flew, remembers sneaking past the flight attendant to use the bathroom in the upstairs lounge and returning with a bowl of strawberry ice cream.For Deans, his trip to America was the first and only time he\u2019s ever flown in a 747.\u201cTo this day I get goose bumps looking at the new planes being put together,\u201d said Deans, who grew up to become a maintenance mechanic for Boeing based in Everett, Wash., where the 747s are built.Story continues below advertisementAs evidence of that goodwill, United sent one of the last 747s in its fleet on a farewell tour of its major hubs this fall. The trip included a stop at Dulles where United used to fly the 747 direct to Beijing. Seats on the airline\u2019s final 747 flight from San Francisco to Honolulu, which took place earlier this month, sold out within two hours of being announced. Delta\u2019s last flight, scheduled for December, is likely to draw a similar outpouring.Advertisement\u201cIt just has a certain class, a certain panache,\u201d said veteran pilot Jeff Greco, 65,\u00a0of San Francisco, who spent much of his career flying the successor of the \u201cQueen of the Skies\u201d but made sure to take a run in the 747 before hanging up his wings this year.Boeing\u2019s 747 was, indeed, a game changer. It made its debut when people were just waking up to the possibilities that air travel offered. Its tail was taller than a six-story building and it carried enough fuel to power a small automobile around the globe 36 times. With its distinctive hump and double-deck, it quickly became the most recognizable plane in the world. A special version of the 747 has been used as the president\u2019s Air Force One since 1990. Another version was used to carry Space Shuttles for NASA.Story continues below advertisementAn oft-told tale is that the 747 was born on a golf course during a match between Juan Trippe, the chief executive of Pan American World Airways, and Bill Allen, the CEO of Boeing.\u201cThat\u2019s pretty close to the truth,\u201d said Lombardi, Boeing\u2019s historian. \u201cIn those days a lot of the leaders in the industry had very good relationships. They would often get together play golf, go on vacations together.\u201dLombardi said gate space at airports was getting more crowded and Trippe thought bigger planes that could carry more passengers was one solution for the problem.AdvertisementBoeing\u2019s team of engineers, led by\u00a0Joe Sutter, went to work. One idea \u2014 to stack two airplanes on top of each other \u2014 proved unworkable in part because it would be too difficult to evacuate passengers in case of an emergency, Lombardi said. But the second idea \u2014 a twin aisle airplane now known as the widebody \u2014 proved to be the winner.Story continues below advertisementAnd that famous hump? At the same time Boeing was working on the 747, it was also competing for a contract to design supersonic jets \u2014 planes that could get travelers to their destination three times faster than conventional jets. Because many thought those planes would quickly render the 747 obsolete, designers thought by adding cargo capacity, they could turn the 747 into a cargo plane and thus, add to its longevity. Putting the flight deck above the fuselage enabled cargo to be loaded quickly but it also gave the 747 its distinctive hump, Lombardi said.Because it was such a massive undertaking, Boeing built a factory the size of 40 football fields to accommodate the project. In all, it took a little less than three years for the team of 4,500 people to build the jetliner. Since then there have been 18 different versions of the 747.Joe Sutter, father of the 747, dies at 95The plane took its first test flight in 1969 and began carrying passengers in 1970. Since then, it has carried more than 3.5 billion passengers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFirst lady Patricia Nixon attended the plane\u2019s christening, held at Dulles International Airport in 1970. There\u2019s a black and white photo of Nixon, seated in the plane\u2019s cockpit with Transportation Secretary John Volpe and Najeeb Halaby, the chairman of the board for Pan Am. Instead of champagne, red, white and blue water was sprayed on the plane. A week later, the first flight operated by Pan Am left New York bound for London.With its four engines, the 747\u00a0represented a significant leap forward for air travel. It was faster and could travel further, using less fuel than any previous jet. But the plane\u2019s real selling point was that it could carry more than 400 passengers \u2014 more than twice as many as the largest airliner previously in use.Despite the excitement, it wasn\u2019t an immediate success in part because of the economic downturn that began in 1969, Lombardi said. But as the economy recovered, it soon became a status symbol of airlines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEveryone had to have a 747,\u201d said van der Linden, the Smithsonian curator. \u201cIt became the flagship for every major airline. If you didn\u2019t have one, you weren\u2019t a top notch airline.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t just passengers who loved the plane.Pilot Melinda Cerisano flew 747s for United out of Los Angeles for 14 years before moving back to Northern Virginia a few years ago. She said the plane is surprisingly docile for its size, forgiving and easy to land.\u201cIt\u2019s a majestic bird,\u201d she said. \u201cIt taxis out slow but it\u2019s just gorgeous.\u201dShe too, is sorry to see it leave the United fleet.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great part of American history,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the wonderful things one of our companies birthed.\u201dAdded Lombardi, the Boeing historian:\u00a0\u201cIt really represented America at the time \u2014 this feeling that we could do anything if we put our minds to it.\u201dAdvertisementGreco, the veteran pilot, still remembers when the first 747 came to Phoenix in early 1970.\u201cI remembered seeing it and being enthralled,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was so big, but so graceful.\u201dHe was determined to fly the 747 before he retired. And he wasn\u2019t disappointed.One of his very last assignments was to fly a\u00a0747 to the airline graveyard in Southern California. With no passengers and no luggage aboard, the plane \u201cleapt off the ground,\u201d he said.\u201cIt had a lot of life in it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou almost wish it wasn\u2019t going to be retired.\u201dBut despite its dominance, it came time for the plane to be phased out for lighter, more environmentally friendly, fuel efficient jets like Boeing\u2019s 777 and 787.A Boeing Dreamliner drew a giant outline of itself in the air, and it\u2019s awesome\u201cFor many of us, it\u2019s very sad to see the aircraft go, even though we understand why,\u201d said Idris, United\u2019s station chief at Dulles. \u201cThere\u2019s just a lot of nostalgia associated with that aircraft, a lot of fond memories \u2014 a lot of association with a different time in air travel. While we have a wonderful future ahead of us with these new aircraft \u2014 it\u2019s very nostalgic to think about how the 747 changed us personally as well as the industry.\u201dCorrections: A previous version of this post incorrectly identified former transportation secretary John Volpe and former Pan Am chairman Najeeb Halaby. It also gave the wrong home town for Jeff Greco.\u00a0 This version has been corrected. The retirement of the \u201cQueen of the Skies\u201d conjures fond memories of when flying was fun. The end of an era: Farewell to the 747",
        "author": "Lori Aratani"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will the State of the Union be postponed? That hasn\u2019t happened since the Challenger disaster. (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2938",
        "date": "2019-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/01/16/will-state-union-be-postponed-that-hasnt-happened-since-challenger-disaster/",
        "text": "As a federal shutdown lumbered through its fourth week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday sent a letter to President Trump urging him to postpone his Jan. 29 State of the Union address because of shutdown-related security reasons. Perhaps Trump could deliver his speech in writing that day, Pelosi suggested. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe letter was immediately described as a \u201cpower move\u201d against Trump and as Pelosi \u201cplaying hardball\u201d by threatening to deprive the president of both a stage and an audience. Meanwhile, the GOP decried it as \u201cunprecedented\u201d partisanship, with some (including Trump\u2019s eldest son) accusing Pelosi of attempted censorship.Pelosi waved off criticisms, maintaining she was genuinely concerned about security and gently twisting the knife further by telling reporters Trump could \u201cmake the speech from the Oval Office instead, if he wants.\u201d As of Wednesday afternoon, the White House still had not responded to the letter.But postponing a State of the Union speech is not unprecedented. It last happened more than three decades ago \u2014 though at the time it was rescheduled because of an unthinkable national tragedy.On the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, a Tuesday, President Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office making final preparations for a State of the Union address he was scheduled to give on television later that night. He had hoped to strike an optimistic tone, highlighting the country\u2019s economic growth in his second term as president.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNearly 1,000 miles to the south, the Space Shuttle Challenger was preparing for launch. The seven astronauts onboard \u2014 including, for the first time, civilian teacher Christa McAuliffe \u2014 would never make it to space.Sometime in the middle of Reagan\u2019s briefing, his communications director interrupted with an alarming message: \u201cMr. President, the shuttle\u2019s blown up!\"30 years ago, the Shuttle Challenger exploded during launch while CNN broadcasted on live television. All seven crew members were killed. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)A surreal scene unfolded in the White House Roosevelt Room, where preparations for the State of the Union speech continued amid \u201ca state of confusion and numbness,\u201d as The Washington Post\u2019s David Hoffman reported then:There, the president\u2019s top assistants continued discussing the State of the Union message with television correspondents while, in the background, the scene of the exploding space shuttle was repeated on a large television screen that had been wheeled into the room.Whenever a news bulletin about the disaster was broadcast, an aide signaled White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan, who stopped the discussion in the room to hear the latest developments.An hour and twenty minutes after the explosion, the president came into the Roosevelt Room for what was supposed to be a sales pitch for the State of the Union address. Standing by a fireplace at the head of a long, oval table, Reagan immediately acknowledged to the television correspondents that there wasn\u2019t much sense in talking about the details of the planned speech that night.Despite the tragedy, Reagan\u2019s first desire was to press forward with the speech as scheduled, even if it needed to be revised.Story continues below advertisementHe might have been motivated by history. Since 1913, when then-President Woodrow Wilson revived the practice of addressing Congress in person, plans for the State of the Union address had been significantly changed or delayed only twice, according to the House of Representatives archives.AdvertisementOnce was in 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to address Congress but rather to deliver his speech in writing and also read it as a live radio broadcast. In 1946, President Harry Truman postponed his State of the Union address by four days and chose to simply deliver it in writing.\u201cThere could be no speech without mentioning [the Challenger tragedy],\u201d Reagan told television correspondents and aides immediately after the disaster. \u201cBut you can\u2019t stop governing the nation because of a tragedy of this kind. So, yes, one will continue.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut the consensus on Capitol Hill, from Republicans and Democrats, was to postpone the speech; first lady Nancy Reagan reportedly also urged her husband to reschedule. At last, Reagan agreed, and the White House soon announced the State of the Union would be pushed back until the following Tuesday.Reagan would still appear on television that night, but to give a very different address to a nation in shock and grief. It would go down in history as one of the best speeches of his career \u2014 as well as that of speechwriter Peggy Noonan.Advertisement\u201cLadies and gentlemen, I\u2019d planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans,\u201d a visibly moved Reagan said from the Oval Office. \u201cToday is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.\u201dExactly the right words, exactly the right way: Reagan\u2019s amazing Challenger disaster speechAt one point, the camera trained more closely on Reagan\u2019s face as he spoke directly to the schoolchildren who might have watched the shuttle takeoff live.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen,\u201d Reagan said. \u201cIt\u2019s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It\u2019s all part of taking a chance and expanding man\u2019s horizons. The future doesn\u2019t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we\u2019ll continue to follow them.\u201dOn Jan. 6, 1947, President Truman delivered the State of the Union address to Congress, which was the first one broadcast on television. (National Archives)Read more Retropolis:AdvertisementA State of the Union delivered by the president in person? Congress was agog.\u2018Lincoln: \u201cFour score and seven y \u2014 \u201d Trump: \u201cLOOK AT ALL THESE BURGERS!!\u201d \u2019Truman declared an emergency when he felt thwarted. Trump should know: It didn\u2019t end well.The strange history of the House\u2019s 181-year-old ban on hats \u2014 and the push to overturn itA 400-pound gavel? The story of a symbol of congressional power and its heavy-handed abusers. On Jan. 28, 1986, a staff member interrupted Ronald Reagan's State of the Union preparations: \u201cMr. President, the shuttle\u2019s blown up!\" Will the State of the Union be postponed? That hasn\u2019t happened since the Challenger disaster.",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Smithsonian\u2019s legendary rocket plane heads for storage during renovations (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2939",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/29/smithsonians-legendary-rocket-plane-heads-storage-during-renovations/",
        "text": "They swept the dirt from its path as the old rocket plane was rolled out of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum on Tuesday night.Beneath the spotlights, it still looked menacing, with its long, dark silhouette, tiny cockpit windows and stubby wings. Once the legend of the skies, the X-15 flew faster than a rifle bullet and lofted its pilots to the edge of space 60 miles up. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd as workers crowded around, it seemed as if it was being set for another mission. But its wings were wrapped in padding. Its skin was coated in dust. And around midnight it was plucked by a crane, lowered backward onto a truck and driven off into storage.But for a moment as it hung over Independence Avenue, with the yellow-and-black NASA logo on its tail and \u201cU.S. Air Force\u201d on its fuselage, it was a reminder of the days when pilots called it \u201cthe bull,\u201d and it took them on harrowing rides that could turn deadly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe aircraft started rolling violently back and forth. At the same time, it was pitching up and down. I was being thrown against the straps with tremendous force. I was flying at almost 4,000 mph and the aircraft was totally out of control. I happened to glance out the window during one oscillation and everything was black.\u2014 Test pilot Milton O. ThompsonThe Smithsonian\u2019s X-15 had hung from the ceiling of the museum since its opening in 1976. It was lowered for the first time in 43 years on the evening of Aug. 21, one of 40 airplanes that have been moved out of the popular museum on the Mall as the building undergoes a seven-year renovation.Partial closure of popular Air and Space Museum set for DecemberThe museum remains open, with other famous aircraft such as Charles Lindbergh\u2019s Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers\u2019 1903 Flyer still on display.But the X-15 holds a unique place among aircraft.Its flight was a controlled explosion. It was carried like a huge bomb, shackled to the wing of a B-52 \u201cmother ship.\u201d The pilot sat in an ejection seat that suggested the electric chair, in front of a fuel compartment containing 2,400 gallons of liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt about 40,000 feet, the X-15 was dropped, the engine was \u201clit\u201d and the airplane streaked away, marked by a looping white contrail.The engine burned up its fuel in about 90 seconds. It pushed the plane so fast that the NASA insignia near the cockpit often burned away in flight, and the nose had to be cooled with liquid nitrogen so it didn\u2019t melt.And when the X-15 came back to earth, it landed with a nose wheel and rear skids that left a rooster tail of dust on the dry lake bed strip before it came to a top.\u201cIt was, and still is, the fastest, highest-flying piloted airplane in history,\u201d scientist historians John Anderson and Richard Passman wrote in their 2014 book about the X-15.Story continues below advertisementThe engine was liquid-fueled and had a throttle. But it operated best when the throttle was wide open and being fed 30 gallons of fuel a second, according to Thompson\u2019s 1992 memoir.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the world\u2019s first hypersonic aircraft,\u201d said Bob van der Linden, the Smithsonian museum\u2019s curator of special purpose aircraft. \u201cThis is in essence an early version of the space shuttle. \u2026 It\u2019s fast. \u2026 And it\u2019s really sharp-looking.\u201dIt was also a bull, Thompson recalled of his hair-raising flight in 1965. \u201cWhen it decided to do something on its own, it did it. There was nothing you could do to stop it. I had momentarily lost control of the bull.\u201dWhile Thompson regained control and landed safely that day in January 1965, two years later, on Nov. 15, 1967, pilot Michael J. Adams did not. His X-15 went into a spin, was torn apart, and he was found dead on the desert floor.Story continues below advertisementIt could also be dangerous on the ground.On June 8, 1960, the late test pilot and Herndon, Va., resident Scott Crossfield was sitting in an X-15 for ground test when the engine blew up. He was lucky and unhurt. (Crossfield, then 84, was killed in 2007 when his Cessna was ripped apart in a storm over northeast Georgia.)The X-15 is being stored in a Smithsonian facility at Dulles International Airport, said Zachary Guttendorf, a supervisory museum specialist. It will probably be in storage for the next four years, museum spokeswoman Alison Mitchell said.Three X-15s were built. The Smithsonian has the first. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force says it has the second one built. The third was destroyed in Adams\u2019s crash. The planes made 199 flights between 1959 and 1968 out of Edwards Air Force Base in California.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second plane flew at six times the speed of sound \u2014 about 4,600 mph \u2014 and reached an altitude of 365,000 feet, said van der Linden, of the Smithsonian.The museum\u2019s plane \u201conly did 4,000 mph,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s plenty fast. It got as high as 250,000, 300,000 feet.\u201dThe X-15 was a research aircraft developed in the late 1950s to study the effects of hypersonic speed \u2014 roughly five times the speed of sound \u2014 and high-altitude flying.It was built of super heat-resistant nickel alloy called Iconel-X, which gave it its dark color. And it was equipped with small \u201cattitude rockets\u201d in the nose and wings, much like the space shuttle 20 years later.They were designed to control the aircraft at ultra-high altitudes, where the air is so thin the wings are not effective. Among the test pilots was Neil Armstrong, later to be the first man on the moon, who made seven flights in the Smithsonian\u2019s X-15.How The Washington Post covered the first moon walk\u201cThis was all part of NASA and the Air Force\u2019s pushing to go higher, faster and farther,\u201d van der Linden said, as he stood overlooking the plane before it was moved. \u201cThey knew very little about hypersonic flight and so they built this strictly as a test vehicle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe challenges \u2026 were remarkable,\u201d he said. \u201cAerodynamics was a problem. Flight control at very high altitude was a problem. When you\u2019re so high in altitude the flight control surfaces don\u2019t work. Hypersonic speed. The air does funky things.\u201dIn his 1992 book, Thompson, the test pilot, recounts the radio transmissions during the final moments of Adams\u2019s fateful X-15 flight. At an altitude of about 260,000 feet and going 3,500 mph, Adams started losing control of the plane.The nose of the plane drifts slightly to the right, and then more dramatically to the right as the plane streaks ahead.As the nose continues to drift sideways, Adams radios that the plane feels \u201csquirrelly.\u201d The plane turns completely around so that it\u2019s facing backward while hurtling forward.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m in a spin,\u201d Adams radioed.Advertisement\u201cSay again,\u201d a ground controller replied.\u201cI\u2019m in a spin,\u201d the pilot repeated.Thompson was in the control room and recalled thinking: \u201cWhat the hell do you mean you\u2019re in a spin? How can you spin traveling 3,500 mph? There\u2019s no such thing as a hypersonic spin.\u201dThere was no further voice contact with Adams. The X-15 came apart as it fell.A few seconds later the pilot of a chase plane radioed: \u201cI got dust on the lake down there.\u201dThe X-15 had crashed.A search party was organized to look for the pieces, and a helicopter quickly found the cockpit with Adams\u2019s body still in it.What had gone wrong?\u201cMy personal conclusion,\u201d Thompson wrote, \u201cwas that Mike was thrown off the bull, and the bull killed him.\u201dRead more:Dozens heard Amelia Earhart\u2019s final chilling pleas for help, researchers sayNever-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flightThe end of the 747 marks the end of an era The X-15 was once the fastest piloted plane in the world. It traveled faster than a rifle bullet, and reached the edge of space in the late 1950s and 60s. Under floodlights the night of August 27, it was carefully moved out of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, picked up with a crane and placed on a flatbed tractor trailer, which took it to a storage site. Smithsonian\u2019s legendary rocket plane heads for storage during renovations",
        "author": "Michael E. Ruane"
    },
    {
        "title": "Smithsonian\u2019s legendary rocket plane heads for storage during renovations (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2940",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/29/smithsonians-legendary-rocket-plane-heads-storage-during-renovations/",
        "text": "They swept the dirt from its path as the old rocket plane was rolled out of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum on Tuesday night.Beneath the spotlights, it still looked menacing, with its long, dark silhouette, tiny cockpit windows and stubby wings. Once the legend of the skies, the X-15 flew faster than a rifle bullet and lofted its pilots to the edge of space 60 miles up. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd as workers crowded around, it seemed as if it was being set for another mission. But its wings were wrapped in padding. Its skin was coated in dust. And around midnight it was plucked by a crane, lowered backward onto a truck and driven off into storage.But for a moment as it hung over Independence Avenue, with the yellow-and-black NASA logo on its tail and \u201cU.S. Air Force\u201d on its fuselage, it was a reminder of the days when pilots called it \u201cthe bull,\u201d and it took them on harrowing rides that could turn deadly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe aircraft started rolling violently back and forth. At the same time, it was pitching up and down. I was being thrown against the straps with tremendous force. I was flying at almost 4,000 mph and the aircraft was totally out of control. I happened to glance out the window during one oscillation and everything was black.\u2014 Test pilot Milton O. ThompsonThe Smithsonian\u2019s X-15 had hung from the ceiling of the museum since its opening in 1976. It was lowered for the first time in 43 years on the evening of Aug. 21, one of 40 airplanes that have been moved out of the popular museum on the Mall as the building undergoes a seven-year renovation.Partial closure of popular Air and Space Museum set for DecemberThe museum remains open, with other famous aircraft such as Charles Lindbergh\u2019s Spirit of St. Louis and the Wright brothers\u2019 1903 Flyer still on display.But the X-15 holds a unique place among aircraft.Its flight was a controlled explosion. It was carried like a huge bomb, shackled to the wing of a B-52 \u201cmother ship.\u201d The pilot sat in an ejection seat that suggested the electric chair, in front of a fuel compartment containing 2,400 gallons of liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt about 40,000 feet, the X-15 was dropped, the engine was \u201clit\u201d and the airplane streaked away, marked by a looping white contrail.The engine burned up its fuel in about 90 seconds. It pushed the plane so fast that the NASA insignia near the cockpit often burned away in flight, and the nose had to be cooled with liquid nitrogen so it didn\u2019t melt.And when the X-15 came back to earth, it landed with a nose wheel and rear skids that left a rooster tail of dust on the dry lake bed strip before it came to a top.\u201cIt was, and still is, the fastest, highest-flying piloted airplane in history,\u201d scientist historians John Anderson and Richard Passman wrote in their 2014 book about the X-15.Story continues below advertisementThe engine was liquid-fueled and had a throttle. But it operated best when the throttle was wide open and being fed 30 gallons of fuel a second, according to Thompson\u2019s 1992 memoir.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the world\u2019s first hypersonic aircraft,\u201d said Bob van der Linden, the Smithsonian museum\u2019s curator of special purpose aircraft. \u201cThis is in essence an early version of the space shuttle. \u2026 It\u2019s fast. \u2026 And it\u2019s really sharp-looking.\u201dIt was also a bull, Thompson recalled of his hair-raising flight in 1965. \u201cWhen it decided to do something on its own, it did it. There was nothing you could do to stop it. I had momentarily lost control of the bull.\u201dWhile Thompson regained control and landed safely that day in January 1965, two years later, on Nov. 15, 1967, pilot Michael J. Adams did not. His X-15 went into a spin, was torn apart, and he was found dead on the desert floor.Story continues below advertisementIt could also be dangerous on the ground.On June 8, 1960, the late test pilot and Herndon, Va., resident Scott Crossfield was sitting in an X-15 for ground test when the engine blew up. He was lucky and unhurt. (Crossfield, then 84, was killed in 2007 when his Cessna was ripped apart in a storm over northeast Georgia.)The X-15 is being stored in a Smithsonian facility at Dulles International Airport, said Zachary Guttendorf, a supervisory museum specialist. It will probably be in storage for the next four years, museum spokeswoman Alison Mitchell said.Three X-15s were built. The Smithsonian has the first. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force says it has the second one built. The third was destroyed in Adams\u2019s crash. The planes made 199 flights between 1959 and 1968 out of Edwards Air Force Base in California.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second plane flew at six times the speed of sound \u2014 about 4,600 mph \u2014 and reached an altitude of 365,000 feet, said van der Linden, of the Smithsonian.The museum\u2019s plane \u201conly did 4,000 mph,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s plenty fast. It got as high as 250,000, 300,000 feet.\u201dThe X-15 was a research aircraft developed in the late 1950s to study the effects of hypersonic speed \u2014 roughly five times the speed of sound \u2014 and high-altitude flying.It was built of super heat-resistant nickel alloy called Iconel-X, which gave it its dark color. And it was equipped with small \u201cattitude rockets\u201d in the nose and wings, much like the space shuttle 20 years later.They were designed to control the aircraft at ultra-high altitudes, where the air is so thin the wings are not effective. Among the test pilots was Neil Armstrong, later to be the first man on the moon, who made seven flights in the Smithsonian\u2019s X-15.How The Washington Post covered the first moon walk\u201cThis was all part of NASA and the Air Force\u2019s pushing to go higher, faster and farther,\u201d van der Linden said, as he stood overlooking the plane before it was moved. \u201cThey knew very little about hypersonic flight and so they built this strictly as a test vehicle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe challenges \u2026 were remarkable,\u201d he said. \u201cAerodynamics was a problem. Flight control at very high altitude was a problem. When you\u2019re so high in altitude the flight control surfaces don\u2019t work. Hypersonic speed. The air does funky things.\u201dIn his 1992 book, Thompson, the test pilot, recounts the radio transmissions during the final moments of Adams\u2019s fateful X-15 flight. At an altitude of about 260,000 feet and going 3,500 mph, Adams started losing control of the plane.The nose of the plane drifts slightly to the right, and then more dramatically to the right as the plane streaks ahead.As the nose continues to drift sideways, Adams radios that the plane feels \u201csquirrelly.\u201d The plane turns completely around so that it\u2019s facing backward while hurtling forward.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m in a spin,\u201d Adams radioed.Advertisement\u201cSay again,\u201d a ground controller replied.\u201cI\u2019m in a spin,\u201d the pilot repeated.Thompson was in the control room and recalled thinking: \u201cWhat the hell do you mean you\u2019re in a spin? How can you spin traveling 3,500 mph? There\u2019s no such thing as a hypersonic spin.\u201dThere was no further voice contact with Adams. The X-15 came apart as it fell.A few seconds later the pilot of a chase plane radioed: \u201cI got dust on the lake down there.\u201dThe X-15 had crashed.A search party was organized to look for the pieces, and a helicopter quickly found the cockpit with Adams\u2019s body still in it.What had gone wrong?\u201cMy personal conclusion,\u201d Thompson wrote, \u201cwas that Mike was thrown off the bull, and the bull killed him.\u201dRead more:Dozens heard Amelia Earhart\u2019s final chilling pleas for help, researchers sayNever-before seen photos of Charles Lindbergh\u2019s first Spirit of St. Louis flightThe end of the 747 marks the end of an era The X-15 was once the fastest piloted plane in the world. It traveled faster than a rifle bullet, and reached the edge of space in the late 1950s and 60s. Under floodlights the night of August 27, it was carefully moved out of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, picked up with a crane and placed on a flatbed tractor trailer, which took it to a storage site. Smithsonian\u2019s legendary rocket plane heads for storage during renovations",
        "author": "Michael E. Ruane"
    },
    {
        "title": "The ship Captain Cook used to \u2018discover\u2019 Australia may have been found \u2014 sunken in a U.S. harbor (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2941",
        "date": "2018-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/09/20/ship-captain-cook-used-discover-australia-may-have-been-found-sunken-us-harbor/",
        "text": "More than two centuries ago, the British Royal Navy purchased a 4-year-old merchant ship with a flat-bottomed hull that was ideal for transporting cargo. The year was 1768. To the west, across the Atlantic Ocean, unrest was brewing among a group of British colonies \u2014 but the Royal Navy\u2019s newest acquisition was intended for decidedly scientific purposes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe vessel would embark on an expedition to take British researchers to the South Pacific, with two goals: To observe Venus crossing the sun and to search for a continent called \u201cTerra Australis Incognita,\u201d better known now as Australia. The Royal Navy spent weeks refitting the ship and soon renamed it the HMB Endeavour, a moniker suitable for its epic journey to come.A 39-year-old naval officer and cartographer named James Cook was put in command of the Endeavour and, in August of 1768, the explorer and his crew set sail from Plymouth, England, on what would become the first of Cook\u2019s famed Pacific voyages.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor weeks, Cook and the Endeavour made their way slowly toward the Pacific, pushing south and west until they had cleared Cape Horn, at the southernmost tip of South America. They made it to Tahiti in April 1769, in time to document the Venus transit, and pressed on, mapping and exploring New Zealand and various Pacific islands along the way. A year later, they landed on the eastern coast of Australia.The trip left the Endeavour in poor shape, the more so after the ship ran aground on a portion of the Great Barrier Reef. Cook and his crew were forced to spend seven weeks docked on this foreign continent to repair the vessel but eventually were able to continue westward. Remarkably, the Endeavour rounded the Cape of Good Hope, on the southern tip of Africa, and made its way back to the British-occupied island of Saint Helena, nearly three years after it had departed England.Cook \u2014 and the HMB Endeavour \u2014 had successfully circumnavigated the globe.Divers to scour lake for Emperor Caligula\u2019s 2,000-year-old pleasure shipThe expedition brought fame and acclaim to Cook, who would go on to explore the Pacific twice more, on a different ship, until he was killed in the Hawaiian islands in 1779. The Endeavour, however, faded from glory. The ship was refitted again and used for routine naval trips to the Falkland Islands. In 1775, His Majesty\u2019s Bark Endeavour was sold to a private owner and given the far less evocative name \u201cLord Sandwich II.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the Revolutionary War underway, the Lord Sandwich was next used to transport British troops to North America. It joined about a dozen other British ships anchored in Newport Harbor, off Rhode Island, until a French fleet \u2014 outfitted with bigger guns \u2014 threatened to overrun the harbor in 1778.The British \u201cdecided that the best plan would be to scuttle their vessels and try to create a blockade around Newport so that the French ships couldn\u2019t sail in because they would get hung up on the sunken vessels,\u201d Brown University researcher Carolyn Frank told the Jamestown Press in 2012. \u201cThey took everything off of the ships and sunk them right before the Battle of Newport.\u201dThe once-legendary ship hasn\u2019t been seen since.Story continues below advertisementThose who have long sought the Endeavour\u2019s remains hope that will soon not be the case. More than two centuries later, researchers say they believe they have pinpointed the ship\u2019s final resting place, according to the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP).AdvertisementThe nonprofit has spent more than 25 years searching for the Endeavour, as well as dozens of other vessels lost off the coast of the state during the American Revolution. Over the years, RIMAP has whittled down possible locations for the ship\u2019s remains.This week, the group announced it would reveal Friday \u201cthe details of a promising candidate to be that iconic ship,\u201d just off Goat Island in Narragansett Bay.Searchers find the sunken stern of a doomed World War II destroyer off the coast of Alaska\u201cWe can say we think we know which one it is,\u201d RIMAP Director Kathy Abbass told Fairfax Media. \u201cIt is exciting. We are closing in. This is a vessel that is significant to people around the world, including Australia.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Abbass said the group has, over the years, methodically narrowed the search for the Endeavour from among the 13 British vessels sunk in 1778 to five, \u201cpossibly to one or two archaeological sites.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cNow that [we] have identified a possible site in Newport Harbor that might be the Lord Sandwich ex Endeavour, the detailed work must begin to prove it,\u201d the group said in an appeal for donations to fund the excavation.The Endeavour has arguably never been forgotten, however. Docked in the waters at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney is a faithful replica of the HMB Endeavour as it probably existed in Cook\u2019s day, complete with clothes hung out to dry.Story continues below advertisementAnd nearly 200 years after Cook explored the Pacific, NASA named the space shuttle Endeavour after the historic vessel; a wooden piece from the original ship was reportedly in the cockpit of the shuttle when it was blasted into space.Still, nothing is a substitute for the real thing. The group noted that this year is the 250th anniversary of Cook\u2019s departure on the Endeavour to the Pacific \u2014 and that 2020 will be the same anniversary of the explorer claiming Australia for Britain.Advertisement\u201cThe identification of the Lord Sandwich ex Endeavour in Newport Harbor will be particularly significant during this time of historical celebrations,\u201d the group said.Story continues below advertisementCorrection: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the Cape of Good Hope is the southernmost tip of Africa. It is on the southern tip of the continent but Cape Agulhas is the southernmost point of Africa. Read more Retropolis:Why you\u2019ve never heard of the six Chinese men who survived the TitanicA museum relegated an \u2018empty\u2019 coffin to a side room for decades. Inside was a 2,500-year-old mummy.\u2018Turn out your dead!\u2019 In America\u2019s War for Independence, POWs paid a terrible price. In 1768, Cook set sail on the HMB Endeavour for the Pacific, eventually reaching the then-uncharted continent of Australia. The ship Captain Cook used to \u2018discover\u2019 Australia may have been found \u2014 sunken in a U.S. harbor",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year in Space Travel (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2942",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-year-in-space-travel-11608594372?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=36",
        "text": "The part that looks surreal is when the Falcon 9\u2019s first stage plummets back to Earth, fires its engines to arrest its fall, and then sticks an upright landing. Saturday\u2019s rocket was launched from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. Eight minutes later, the first stage touched down on a landing pad at nearby Cape Canaveral. If you\u2019ve never seen the feat, check out the footage online.\nThe repeat landings are a technical and economic achievement since they lower the cost of access to orbit. The Falcon 9 booster on Saturday was completing its fifth mission. This was SpaceX\u2019s 70th successful recovery, and in November a booster was used for a seventh time. SpaceX says one might eventually fly 10 missions without a major refurbishing. The company is aiming at a 24-hour turnaround from landing to relaunch. For almost a decade after the final Space Shuttle flight in 2011, Americans had to hitch a ride to the International Space Station on Russian craft. Now they can take the Falcon 9. \n\n\nSpace exploration is risky, and two weeks ago a prototype of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, a 160-foot silvery rocket that founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n wants to send to Mars, was meant to gently land during a test. Instead it came down too fast and exploded in a fireball. But Mr. Musk wasn\u2019t fazed, at least on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n : \u201cWe got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!\u201d \nThe billionaire said this month that he\u2019s \u201chighly confident\u201d that his goal of putting a man on Mars is achievable \u201csix years from now,\u201d or \u201cif we get lucky, maybe four years.\u201d Mr. Musk can get ahead of himself, but this year especially we can use the high aspiration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The formerly Golden State is now sending companies to Texas. Image: Philip Pacheco/AFP/Getty Images SpaceX keeps making remarkable rocket launches look routine. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Returns to Space (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "2943",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-returns-to-space-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-11634162038?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=3",
        "text": "Good for him. In the days of his TV series, the government ran all space exploration. Today new paths are being blazed by private entrepreneurs. In addition to Mr. Bezos, others now funding space efforts include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n It\u2019s the beginning of a new era in space tourism, and probably exploration and commerce.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Shatner\u2019s transition from an actor playing a space explorer to a real-life space explorer has been fodder for many a laugh as pop-culture marketing. But the flight risk was real enough. Mr. Bezos says he was partly inspired to found Blue Origin because of his childhood enthusiasm for \u201cStar Trek.\u201d\n\n\nAs a result, what was once science fiction has become reality. We salute Mr. Bezos and Mr. Shatner and his three companions aboard that rocket for reminding us that dreams really can come true. Live long and prosper.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Jason Willick, Mene Ukueberuwa and Dan Henninger. Photo: Bloomberg The 90-year-old actor and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 pioneer takes a ride on a Blue Origin rocket. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Returns to Space (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2944",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-returns-to-space-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-11634162038?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=14",
        "text": "Good for him. In the days of his TV series, the government ran all space exploration. Today new paths are being blazed by private entrepreneurs. In addition to Mr. Bezos, others now funding space efforts include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n It\u2019s the beginning of a new era in space tourism, and probably exploration and commerce.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Shatner\u2019s transition from an actor playing a space explorer to a real-life space explorer has been fodder for many a laugh as pop-culture marketing. But the flight risk was real enough. Mr. Bezos says he was partly inspired to found Blue Origin because of his childhood enthusiasm for \u201cStar Trek.\u201d\n\n\nAs a result, what was once science fiction has become reality. We salute Mr. Bezos and Mr. Shatner and his three companions aboard that rocket for reminding us that dreams really can come true. Live long and prosper.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Jason Willick, Mene Ukueberuwa and Dan Henninger. Photo: Bloomberg The 90-year-old actor and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 pioneer takes a ride on a Blue Origin rocket. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Returns to Space (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2945",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/william-shatner-returns-to-space-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-11634162038?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=20",
        "text": "Good for him. In the days of his TV series, the government ran all space exploration. Today new paths are being blazed by private entrepreneurs. In addition to Mr. Bezos, others now funding space efforts include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n It\u2019s the beginning of a new era in space tourism, and probably exploration and commerce.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Shatner\u2019s transition from an actor playing a space explorer to a real-life space explorer has been fodder for many a laugh as pop-culture marketing. But the flight risk was real enough. Mr. Bezos says he was partly inspired to found Blue Origin because of his childhood enthusiasm for \u201cStar Trek.\u201d\n\n\nAs a result, what was once science fiction has become reality. We salute Mr. Bezos and Mr. Shatner and his three companions aboard that rocket for reminding us that dreams really can come true. Live long and prosper.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Jason Willick, Mene Ukueberuwa and Dan Henninger. Photo: Bloomberg The 90-year-old actor and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 pioneer takes a ride on a Blue Origin rocket. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "When America Aimed for the Moon (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2946",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-america-aimed-for-the-moon-11563575817?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=53",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019m going to step off the LM now,\u201d he announced. As millions watched live on their fuzzy black-and-white televisions, the shadowed figure, while keeping a tight grasp on the ladder, dipped slightly, perhaps tentatively. And then: \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for [a] man. One giant leap for mankind.\u201d Within the hour, he and Buzz Aldrin had planted an aluminum pole and raised the Stars and Stripes\u2014not the United Nations flag, as NASA at one point considered\u2014above the waveless Sea of Tranquility.\n*** Fifty years later, many people are reflecting on the tremendous achievement that the moon landing represented, both for the United States and humanity. This newspaper, writing on July 25, 1969, the day after the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo\n\n\n\n 11 astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific, called the mission \u201cvastly inspiring\u201d and \u201ca measure of hope for a doubting age,\u201d one beset by social unrest and nuclear threats.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Opinion: Potomac WatchThe House Impeachment Vote The House impeachment vote and the fallout from 'send her back.'ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\nFrom today\u2019s vantage, the Apollo era looks all the more remarkable. America\u2019s rush into the space race came at a moment of national confidence and consensus that seems unattainable now. When\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy,\n\n\n\n in May 1961, proposed putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he was an energetic new president with an approval rating touching 80%.\n\n\nVictory in World War II was still fresh and Communism was the new adversary. The U.S. had welcomed Nazi scientists such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun,\n\n\n\n who led development of the Saturn V rocket that would lift the Apollo astronauts to escape velocity. Even so, the Soviet Union got the jump. In April 1961 the cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first man to reach space. Kennedy pledged the U.S. would catch up and win.\nAlong with this political will, the U.S. had the economic means. Kennedy, besides wanting to defeat the Soviets in the Cold War, believed in free enterprise. He pledged to \u201cget this country moving again\u201d and said, with unifying spirit, that \u201ca rising tide lifts all the boats.\u201d Kennedy proposed tax cuts that were signed by his successor,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson,\n\n\n\n in early 1964. Real economic growth per capita hit 4.3% that year, then 5.2% in 1965, then 5.4% in 1966.\nThis growth financed the effort: Some estimates suggest that the Apollo program involved, across the private economy and government, roughly 400,000 people. NASA\u2019s share of federal outlays rocketed to 4.4% by 1966. Social Security\u2019s share at the time was 15.4%. Spending on Medicare was negligible, since LBJ had signed the program into law only a year earlier.\nWhatever unity Americans had felt in 1961, however, was giving way\u2014to the justified protests for civil rights, to the riots and assassinations of 1968, to the grim 1970s: Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, stagflation. The last foot to tread lunar soil returned home in 1972. NASA\u2019s priorities shifted to space stations in local orbit, the now-defunct Space Shuttle, and unmanned probes. These missions, from Voyager 1 and 2 to the New Horizons craft that buzzed Pluto in 2015, have surely deepened human understanding of the cosmos. But nothing has come close to the thrilling ambition of Apollo.\nCould America do it all again? Barring some new crisis, it is doubtful. Today many people in Washington can\u2019t see past the next tweet. Demands are rising, while discretionary funds are shrinking as a share of the federal budget. NASA commands less than 0.5% of outlays. Social Security is 24% and Medicare is 14.3%. Add Medicaid, welfare, veterans benefits, student assistance and so forth, and payments for individuals eat up 70.4% of the total. As the entitlement state expands, it leaves all else, including space exploration, fighting for scraps.\nThe larger problem is the lack of national will or even consensus about such a mission. A society with so much mistrust, and so little faith in government, will find it difficult to sustain anything so ambitious. \nIn a 2001 oral history for NASA, the historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Douglas Brinkley\n\n\n\n asked Armstrong, then 71, whether he envisioned such a complete pullback. \u201cThirty years ago,\u201d the aging astronaut replied, \u201cI probably would have said, no, I can\u2019t imagine that we\u2019ll make such a small number of steps over the next three decades. But looking back on it, I find it fairly understandable in the light of conflicting requirements for resources that the country has. It has a lot of other important challenges. I suspect that we\u2019ll get some chances.\u201d\n*** It\u2019s difficult to read that quote, especially after two more decades tethered by Earth\u2019s gravity, without feeling a tinge of sadness. Exploration Fifty years ago we did something remarkable. Could we do it again? ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "When America Aimed for the Moon (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2947",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-america-aimed-for-the-moon-11563575817?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=53",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019m going to step off the LM now,\u201d he announced. As millions watched live on their fuzzy black-and-white televisions, the shadowed figure, while keeping a tight grasp on the ladder, dipped slightly, perhaps tentatively. And then: \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for [a] man. One giant leap for mankind.\u201d Within the hour, he and Buzz Aldrin had planted an aluminum pole and raised the Stars and Stripes\u2014not the United Nations flag, as NASA at one point considered\u2014above the waveless Sea of Tranquility.\n*** Fifty years later, many people are reflecting on the tremendous achievement that the moon landing represented, both for the United States and humanity. This newspaper, writing on July 25, 1969, the day after the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo\n\n\n\n 11 astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific, called the mission \u201cvastly inspiring\u201d and \u201ca measure of hope for a doubting age,\u201d one beset by social unrest and nuclear threats.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom today\u2019s vantage, the Apollo era looks all the more remarkable. America\u2019s rush into the space race came at a moment of national confidence and consensus that seems unattainable now. When\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy,\n\n\n\n in May 1961, proposed putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he was an energetic new president with an approval rating touching 80%.\n\n\nVictory in World War II was still fresh and Communism was the new adversary. The U.S. had welcomed Nazi scientists such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun,\n\n\n\n who led development of the Saturn V rocket that would lift the Apollo astronauts to escape velocity. Even so, the Soviet Union got the jump. In April 1961 the cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first man to reach space. Kennedy pledged the U.S. would catch up and win.\nAlong with this political will, the U.S. had the economic means. Kennedy, besides wanting to defeat the Soviets in the Cold War, believed in free enterprise. He pledged to \u201cget this country moving again\u201d and said, with unifying spirit, that \u201ca rising tide lifts all the boats.\u201d Kennedy proposed tax cuts that were signed by his successor,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson,\n\n\n\n in early 1964. Real economic growth per capita hit 4.3% that year, then 5.2% in 1965, then 5.4% in 1966.\nThis growth financed the effort: Some estimates suggest that the Apollo program involved, across the private economy and government, roughly 400,000 people. NASA\u2019s share of federal outlays rocketed to 4.4% by 1966. Social Security\u2019s share at the time was 15.4%. Spending on Medicare was negligible, since LBJ had signed the program into law only a year earlier.\nWhatever unity Americans had felt in 1961, however, was giving way\u2014to the justified protests for civil rights, to the riots and assassinations of 1968, to the grim 1970s: Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, stagflation. The last foot to tread lunar soil returned home in 1972. NASA\u2019s priorities shifted to space stations in local orbit, the now-defunct Space Shuttle, and unmanned probes. These missions, from Voyager 1 and 2 to the New Horizons craft that buzzed Pluto in 2015, have surely deepened human understanding of the cosmos. But nothing has come close to the thrilling ambition of Apollo.\nCould America do it all again? Barring some new crisis, it is doubtful. Today many people in Washington can\u2019t see past the next tweet. Demands are rising, while discretionary funds are shrinking as a share of the federal budget. NASA commands less than 0.5% of outlays. Social Security is 24% and Medicare is 14.3%. Add Medicaid, welfare, veterans benefits, student assistance and so forth, and payments for individuals eat up 70.4% of the total. As the entitlement state expands, it leaves all else, including space exploration, fighting for scraps.\nThe larger problem is the lack of national will or even consensus about such a mission. A society with so much mistrust, and so little faith in government, will find it difficult to sustain anything so ambitious. \nIn a 2001 oral history for NASA, the historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Douglas Brinkley\n\n\n\n asked Armstrong, then 71, whether he envisioned such a complete pullback. \u201cThirty years ago,\u201d the aging astronaut replied, \u201cI probably would have said, no, I can\u2019t imagine that we\u2019ll make such a small number of steps over the next three decades. But looking back on it, I find it fairly understandable in the light of conflicting requirements for resources that the country has. It has a lot of other important challenges. I suspect that we\u2019ll get some chances.\u201d\n*** It\u2019s difficult to read that quote, especially after two more decades tethered by Earth\u2019s gravity, without feeling a tinge of sadness. Exploration has buoyed the human spirit for ages, since the first ships lost sight of the distant shoreline. In the 21st century, the frontier is straight up, yet everywhere people can\u2019t stop looking down. Perhaps China or India, nations with something still to prove, will launch the n Fifty years ago we did something remarkable. Could we do it again? ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "When America Aimed for the Moon (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2948",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-america-aimed-for-the-moon-11563575817?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=69",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019m going to step off the LM now,\u201d he announced. As millions watched live on their fuzzy black-and-white televisions, the shadowed figure, while keeping a tight grasp on the ladder, dipped slightly, perhaps tentatively. And then: \u201cThat\u2019s one small step for [a] man. One giant leap for mankind.\u201d Within the hour, he and Buzz Aldrin had planted an aluminum pole and raised the Stars and Stripes\u2014not the United Nations flag, as NASA at one point considered\u2014above the waveless Sea of Tranquility.\n*** Fifty years later, many people are reflecting on the tremendous achievement that the moon landing represented, both for the United States and humanity. This newspaper, writing on July 25, 1969, the day after the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo\n\n\n\n 11 astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific, called the mission \u201cvastly inspiring\u201d and \u201ca measure of hope for a doubting age,\u201d one beset by social unrest and nuclear threats.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom today\u2019s vantage, the Apollo era looks all the more remarkable. America\u2019s rush into the space race came at a moment of national confidence and consensus that seems unattainable now. When\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy,\n\n\n\n in May 1961, proposed putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he was an energetic new president with an approval rating touching 80%.\n\n\nVictory in World War II was still fresh and Communism was the new adversary. The U.S. had welcomed Nazi scientists such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun,\n\n\n\n who led development of the Saturn V rocket that would lift the Apollo astronauts to escape velocity. Even so, the Soviet Union got the jump. In April 1961 the cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin\n\n\n\n became the first man to reach space. Kennedy pledged the U.S. would catch up and win.\nAlong with this political will, the U.S. had the economic means. Kennedy, besides wanting to defeat the Soviets in the Cold War, believed in free enterprise. He pledged to \u201cget this country moving again\u201d and said, with unifying spirit, that \u201ca rising tide lifts all the boats.\u201d Kennedy proposed tax cuts that were signed by his successor,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lyndon Johnson,\n\n\n\n in early 1964. Real economic growth per capita hit 4.3% that year, then 5.2% in 1965, then 5.4% in 1966.\nThis growth financed the effort: Some estimates suggest that the Apollo program involved, across the private economy and government, roughly 400,000 people. NASA\u2019s share of federal outlays rocketed to 4.4% by 1966. Social Security\u2019s share at the time was 15.4%. Spending on Medicare was negligible, since LBJ had signed the program into law only a year earlier.\nWhatever unity Americans had felt in 1961, however, was giving way\u2014to the justified protests for civil rights, to the riots and assassinations of 1968, to the grim 1970s: Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, stagflation. The last foot to tread lunar soil returned home in 1972. NASA\u2019s priorities shifted to space stations in local orbit, the now-defunct Space Shuttle, and unmanned probes. These missions, from Voyager 1 and 2 to the New Horizons craft that buzzed Pluto in 2015, have surely deepened human understanding of the cosmos. But nothing has come close to the thrilling ambition of Apollo.\nCould America do it all again? Barring some new crisis, it is doubtful. Today many people in Washington can\u2019t see past the next tweet. Demands are rising, while discretionary funds are shrinking as a share of the federal budget. NASA commands less than 0.5% of outlays. Social Security is 24% and Medicare is 14.3%. Add Medicaid, welfare, veterans benefits, student assistance and so forth, and payments for individuals eat up 70.4% of the total. As the entitlement state expands, it leaves all else, including space exploration, fighting for scraps.\nThe larger problem is the lack of national will or even consensus about such a mission. A society with so much mistrust, and so little faith in government, will find it difficult to sustain anything so ambitious. \nIn a 2001 oral history for NASA, the historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Douglas Brinkley\n\n\n\n asked Armstrong, then 71, whether he envisioned such a complete pullback. \u201cThirty years ago,\u201d the aging astronaut replied, \u201cI probably would have said, no, I can\u2019t imagine that we\u2019ll make such a small number of steps over the next three decades. But looking back on it, I find it fairly understandable in the light of conflicting requirements for resources that the country has. It has a lot of other important challenges. I suspect that we\u2019ll get some chances.\u201d\n*** It\u2019s difficult to read that quote, especially after two more decades tethered by Earth\u2019s gravity, without feeling a tinge of sadness. Exploration has buoyed the human spirit for ages, since the first ships lost sight of the distant shoreline. In the 21st century, the frontier is straight up, yet everywhere people can\u2019t stop looking down. Perhaps China or India, nations with something still to prove, will launch t Fifty years ago we did something remarkable. Could we do it again? ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Captain Kirk vs. Prince William (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2949",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/captain-kirk-vs-prince-william-william-shatner-space-flight-11634335452?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=14",
        "text": "For one thing, exactly zero Earthlings are \u201cgiving up and heading out into space,\u201d as Prince William put it. Certainly Mr. Shatner isn\u2019t, judging by his remarks upon landing about the precariousness of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. \u201cIt\u2019s so thin,\u201d he said, \u201cand you\u2019re through it in an instant.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nAs for the carbon footprint, it isn\u2019t what you imagine. Mr. Shatner went up on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket, which burns liquid hydrogen and oxygen. \u201cThe main emissions will be water and some minor combustion products, and virtually no CO2,\u201d an atmospheric scientist told LiveScience.com in July. That isn\u2019t to claim no effects: Building the rocket and producing the flight creates carbon emissions, no doubt, but so does putting on a royal wedding with a crowd of global guests and a military flyover.\n\n\nThe larger point is what the prince\u2019s cramped view of private spaceflight says about the lowering of human ambitions. Think of the British mountaineer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Mallory,\n\n\n\n who was asked in the 1920s why he wanted to try scaling Mount Everest. His reported reply echoes through history: \u201cBecause it\u2019s there.\u201d We can imagine Mallory\u2019s answer if someone had scolded him to quit running away to a mountaintop, since we have real issues down here at sea level.\nThat seems to be the spirit of Captain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kirk\u2019s\n\n\n\n response to Prince William. \u201cHe\u2019s a lovely, gentle, educated man, but he\u2019s got the wrong idea,\u201d Mr. Shatner told Entertainment Tonight. \u201cThe idea here is not to go, \u2018Yeah, look at me. I\u2019m in space!\u2019\u201d He said the Blue Origin flight was simply another \u201cbaby step\u201d into the heavens.\nAfter the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, the U.S. ended up paying Russia to take astronauts to orbit. Isn\u2019t it better to have American billionaires competing for that business? And who knows what might come next. Mr. Shatner floated the idea of electricity generation in the heavens: \u201cYou can build a base 250, 280 miles above the Earth and send that power down here.\u201d Beam it down, Scotty.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Bad policy choices contribute to the energy supply crunch. Photo: Associated Press Actor William Shatner replies to a royal critic of his rocket flight. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Achieving Quantum Wokeness (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2950",
        "date": "2019-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/achieving-quantum-wokeness-11576540808?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=51",
        "text": "The word \u201csupremacy,\u201d they claim, is tainted with \u201covertones of violence, neocolonialism and racism.\u201d They lament that \u201cinherently violent language\u201d already has crept into other scientific fields, as with talk of human \u201ccolonization\u201d or \u201csettlement\u201d of outer space. These terms \u201cmust be contextualized against ongoing issues of neocolonialism.\u201d Instead of \u201csupremacy,\u201d they suggest using the term \u201cquantum advantage.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThere it is, folks: Mankind has hit quantum wokeness. Our species, akin to Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat, is simultaneously brilliant and brain-dead. We built a quantum computer and then argued about whether the write-up was linguistically racist.\n\n\nTaken seriously, the renaming game will never end. First put a Sharpie to the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says federal laws trump state laws. Cancel\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Damon\n\n\n\n for his 2004 role in \u201cThe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bourne\n\n\n\n Supremacy.\u201d Make the Air Force give up the term \u201cair supremacy.\u201d Tell lovers of supreme pizza to quit being so chauvinistic about their toppings. Please inform Motown legend\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Diana Ross\n\n\n\n that the Supremes are problematic.\nThe quirks of quantum mechanics, some people argue, are explained by the existence of many universes. How did we get stuck in this one?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Under political pressure, the chicken chain cuts off the Salvation Army and The Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Image: Mike Stewart/Associated Press Political correctness barges into a computer science breakthrough. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Risk Report: Trump\u2019s Signature Weakens U.S. Fight on Corruption (WSJ: Riskandcompliance Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2951",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2017/02/15/the-morning-risk-report-trumps-signature-weakens-u-s-fight-on-corruption/?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=88",
        "text": "Dan Zitting, chief product officer for risk and compliance software-provider ACL, said he is sure there is substantial bribery and corruption on the books of natural-resource companies masquerading as governmental fees, taxes or permits. \"There is also little doubt these payments are the cost of winning business in many countries,\" he said, but Mr. Zitting also said the repeal \"is an unfortunate change in direction\" on corruption. \"With the disclosure rule killed, a good opportunity for materially beneficial transparency in the battle against global corruption will die with it,\" he said.\nJoseph Williams, a senior advocacy officer at nonprofit Natural Resource Governance Institute, said more than 100 companies, including BP PLC, Total SA and Royal Dutch Shell PLC have reported these payments under European and Canadian laws with no harm to their bottom lines. He noted that the SEC still has to rewrite a new rule, and his group will play a role in that effort. \"We will continue to press the U.S. government to put effective transparency rules in place,\" said Mr. Williams.\nReaders can subscribe to The Morning Risk Report here:\u00a0http://on.wsj.com/MorningRiskReportSignup.\u00a0Follow us on Twitter at @WSJRisk.\n\nEXCLUSIVE ON RISK AND COMPLIANCE JOURNAL\nChanging a company's risk culture. John Fennell, executive vice president and chief risk officer at the Options Clearing Corp., an equity derivatives clearing firm, discusses his efforts to renovate the company\u2019s risk culture and install a culture based on the mantra of \u201cidentify, escalate, and then debate.\u201d\nReport finds U.K. anti-corruption on track. The U.K. government remains steadfast to its commitment to being a champion in the global anti-corruption effort, even if it is restricted in what it can do to push other countries to embrace its mission, according to a recent report by an investigative committee of members of Parliament.\nCOMPLIANCE\nHealth mergers felled by anti-trust. Two health-insurance mergers worth a combined $82 billion are unraveling in the wake of court rulings that found the transactions violated federal antitrust law, all but quashing a deal boom that would have reshaped the industry, the WSJ reports.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aetna\n\n\n Inc. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Humana\n\n\n Inc. said Tuesday they would terminate their $34 billion merger agreement instead of attempting to appeal a judge\u2019s decision last month that their combination would harm senior citizens. Just hours later,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Cigna Corp\n\n\n . said it was calling off its $48 billion merger agreement with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Anthem\n\n\n Inc. and pursuing litigation seeking a $1.85 billion breakup fee plus more than $13 billion in damages from its deal partner.\nRepublicans push space liberalization. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration maintained that international space treaties required the U.S. to vet and monitor any mission by companies or entrepreneurs headed for the moon, asteroids or deeper into the solar system. Mr. Obama\u2019s team set up a multiagency process including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to authorize such flights. Rep. James Bridenstine (R., Okla.), described by industry officials as the leading candidate to become NASA administrator under President Donald Trump, has supported similar enhanced rules and expanded authority for government agencies. But now, with a more laissez-faire attitude in the White House and commercial space proponents pushing for changes, other lawmakers want to scale back, or practically eliminate, federal oversight of commercial missions, the WSJ reports.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Orbital ATK Antares rocket, with the Cygnus spacecraft onboard, is rolled out on Oct. 13, 2016, at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Bill Ingalls/NASA/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nHK beefs up anti-money laundering, disclosure. Reuters reports Hong Kong is reinforcing up its anti-money laundering and corporate disclosure laws following last year's Panama Papers scandal, which showed Hong Kong's leading role in the creation of shell companies.\nInvestment firm probed. Reuters reports Premium Point Investments LP, which offers mortgage investments through hedge and private equity funds is being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over the valuation of assets held by its funds.\nGOVERNANCE\n\nCSX\nturns to holders in battle with activist. CSX Corp. turned the tables on an activist investor that threatened a fight for control of the railroad operator\u2019s board, revealing the investor\u2019s demands and calling for its shareholders to vote on the matter, the WSJ reports. The company said it made a written offer last week to hire railroad veteran Hunter Harrison as chief executive and to allow activist investor Paul Hilal to nominate five directors. But the company said talks fell apart over Mr. Hilal\u2019s demand that CSX reimburse his fund, Mantle Rid The first public-policy legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump was a rollback of the Dodd-Frank Act, repealing the Securities and Exchange rule requiring oil, gas and mining companies to disclose their foreign payments. ",
        "author": "Samuel RubenfeldWall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Risk Report: Sudan Compliance Remains Complicated (WSJ: Riskandcompliance Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2952",
        "date": "2017-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-risk-report-sudan-compliance-remains-complicated-1507548014?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=86",
        "text": "Sudan has been off limits to American companies for the past 20 years, noted Michael Casey, a partner at the firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP and author of the book \"Sanctions Enforcement and Compliance: A Practitioner's Guide to OFAC.\" The country has significant oil and gas resources that will \"present interesting business opportunities\" to U.S. energy companies, but \"various challenges remain as well,\" he said. \"A number of individuals and companies within Sudan continue to be targeted by U.S. sanctions, the U.S. government still maintains restrictions on exporting U.S. products to Sudan and Sudan suffers from endemic corruption,\" he said.\n\n\n\n\nThe licenses issued at the end of the Obama administration began the sanctions-easing process regarding Sudan, noted Peter Harrell, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Those licenses, legally speaking, \"already allowed U.S. companies to do the business they will be able to do\" after the sanctions revocation comes into effect. However, he said, the revocation increases policy certainty for U.S. companies looking at Sudan. \"The revocation will probably also somewhat simplify compliance processes,\" he said, but he noted the remaining blacklisted Sudanese people and entities, and the export restrictions. \"Sudan still won't be the simplest place for U.S. companies doing business,\" he said.\n\nReaders can subscribe to The Morning Risk Report here:\u00a0http://on.wsj.com/MorningRiskReportSignup.\u00a0Follow us on Twitter at @WSJRisk.\nEXCLUSIVE ON RISK AND COMPLIANCE JOURNAL\nThird-party risk on the rise. A survey by Ponemon Institute and compliance services firm Opus of 625 executives who are familiar with their organization\u2019s management of data risks found 56% said their business suffered a breach caused by a third party, up 7 percentage points from 2016. Forty-two percent said a cyberattack against a third-party partner resulted in the misuse of their organization\u2019s sensitive or confidential information, up from 34% last year. Seventeen percent said their organization was effective in mitigating third-party risks.\nCOMPLIANCE\nSecurities industry fights Nevada law. The securities industry is pushing back against a new Nevada law raising broker standards of care, highlighting industry concern that state rules could mushroom as the federal fiduciary rule hangs in limbo, the WSJ reports. In testimony Friday before Nevada\u2019s securities regulator, a representative for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association\u2014a trade group known as Sifma\u2014expressed concern about a state-by-state approach to broker regulation and argued that any new fiduciary duties under Nevada\u2019s law would violate an act of Congress passed 20 years ago to prevent patchwork regulation in financial markets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNevada Governor Brian Sandoval speaks on Oct. 4, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\nQualcomm\noffers concessions over deal. Reuters reports chip manufacturer Qualcomm Inc. has offered concessions to European Union antitrust regulators to try to secure approval for its $38-billion bid for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n NXP Semiconductors N.V .\n\nClass-action filed vs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Commonwealth Bank\n. Reuters reports Commonwealth Bank of Australia faces a class-action lawsuit from shareholders alleging failings in its disclosure of breaches of anti-money-laundering rules. The bank said it plans to defend itself vigorously against the allegations.\nDATA SECURITY\nWhite House to study social-security number alternatives. The White House has launched a working group to explore reducing government use of Social Security numbers to verify people\u2019s identities following the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Equifax\n\n\n Inc. breach, a senior administration official said Friday. The group is scheduled to hold its first meeting next week to map out strategies, the WSJ reports. The Equifax hack, which compromised the Social Security numbers and other critical personal data of 145.5 million Americans, has fueled a sense of urgency among administration officials to move away from the Social Security number.\nLondon setting up cyber court. Information Age reports the U.K. is to establish a specialist court in the City of London to hear cybersecurity cases.\nGOVERNANCE\nWeinstein fires co-chairman from board. Weinstein Co.\u2019s board of directors fired co-chairman Harvey Weinstein from the independent movie and television studio on Sunday, citing allegations of sexual misconduct by one of the highest-profile producers in Hollywood, the WSJ reports. In multiple conversations over the past few days, board members had been furious not just about revelations about Mr. Weinstein\u2019s previously undisclosed financial settlements with women who accused him of sexual harassment, but his public attempts to defend himself, according to a person with knowledge of the board\u2019s deliberations. A representative for Harvey Weinstein couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSecretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and producer Harvey Weinstein attend the TIME 100 Gala in New York on April 24, 2012.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Larry Busacca/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAn interview with Uber's HR head. The responsibility for reforming the culture of Uber Technologies Inc. and carrying out many of recommendations to improve the company's environment for women landed on the desk of Liane Hornsey, the company\u2019s human-resources chief and a former Google and SoftBank executive. In a recent interview, the 58-year-old Ms. Hornsey, who joined Uber in January, talked frankly about selling women on working at Uber and reshaping the company\u2019s hiring and management.\nREPUTATION\nMarvel drops planned JV with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman\n. Marvel Entertainment dropped a planned joint venture with Northrop Grumman Corp. on Saturday after fans of its superheroes attacked the company via social media for its potential ties with the defense contractor, the WSJ reports.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The Walt Disney\n\n\n Co. unit, best known for franchises including Spider-Man and the Avengers, had planned to launch the venture at the New York Comic Con event with a self-produced film on space exploration featuring Northrop employees and a magazine tie-in aimed at promoting science education. The launch was flagged in a tweet on Friday, but fans quickly attacked a online teaser promoting the first issue of a new Avengers comic featuring NGENs\u2014short for Northrop Grumman Elite Nexus\u2014that was subsequently pulled from its website. On Saturday, Marvel canceled the launch.\nOPERATIONS\nWhite House lays out immigration principles. The White House sent Congress an expansive set of principles that would sharply increase immigration enforcement at the border and inside the U.S. and significantly cut the number of new legal arrivals, demanding a high price for legislation under consideration to help \u201cDreamers,\u201d the WSJ reports. The documents arrive as lawmakers begin an emotional and contentious debate over whether to legalize young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children, often called Dreamers. These young migrants will lose work permits and protection from deportation starting in March under a six-month phaseout ordered by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump. Despite the listing of Sudan sanctions, experts told Risk & Compliance Journal that doing business there will remain a challenge. ",
        "author": "Samuel RubenfeldWall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Test Drive of the Tesla Model 3 Performance: A Thrilling, Modern Marvel (WSJ: Rumble Seat) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "2953",
        "date": "2018-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-ever-review-of-the-tesla-model-3-performance-a-thrilling-modern-marvel-1532022533?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=65",
        "text": "And this is guilt-free hooning since I\u2019ll recover, going downhill, most energy expended going up. Give her the spurs, Moon Flower.\nThe Model 3\u2019s uncanny stability while cornering is mostly the product of its lithium-battery keel; but Tesla didn\u2019t skimp on the suspension bits: upper and lower A arms (aluminum and steel) with virtual steer axis geometry, twin-tube coilovers and anti-roll bar in front; in the rear, a multi-link geometry, also with twin-tube shocks and anti-roll bar. For now the hottest tires available are the Michelin Pilot Sport 4S, which are nice all-rounders but not particularly grippy. My message to the engineers: more tire.\nI\u2019m no financial analyst, but I do know cars. If you were hoping Tesla would fail on account of the Model 3 I\u2019ve got bad news: This thing is magnificent, a little rainbow-farting space ship, so obviously representative of the next step in the history of autos. I know there are a lot of Tesla bears, haters and cynics out there. Tesla boss\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n makes it easy. But in the spirit of charity I think we can all agree many brilliant people are putzes.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s magnificent, a spaceship, so obviously representative of the next step in the history of automobiles.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe Model 3 is more than futuristic. It\u2019s optimistic. This is what ordinary cars should be, which is to say, better than they are.\n\n\nSure, Tesla has issues. I say this as a veteran of many plant tours: The factory in Fremont is a dimly lit, vertically integrated madhouse. The place is the Kobe beef of lean production, with subassemblies and panels stacked to the rafters. About 30 percent of the Model 3\u2019s robotic assemblers are hanging from above, to increase what one engineer called \u201cmanufacturing density.\u201d Jeez. Keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times.\nBut the car is a star. Doubters will have to bring it. Show me another car with an all-glass roof and five-star rollover crash rating. Point out another $80,000 sedan that out-clouds a Rolls-Royce, out-punches a Porsche Boxster and gets an electric equivalent of 116 mpg. You can\u2019t, unless you\u2019re building something in your garage we don\u2019t know about.\nSo now you are sitting in a tester with all the trimmings, including the ermine-white leather-like upholstery ($1,500) that is apparently in limited supply. The Model 3\u2019s dash incorporates a blade-like vent across its width, sandwiched between layers of stitched upholstery and laminated wood. Occupants can move focused airflow up, down and around, using the graphical compass available on the 15-inch high-resolution touch screen. When was the last time a car blew your mind with its climate vents? \nAlas, the Model 3\u2019s minimalist interior is rudely interrupted by the aforementioned touch screen, a big tablet suspended on a pylon in the middle of the dash. This is the broken flower pot on Mona Lisa\u2019s head. Also, the Model 3\u2019s A pillars are too thick, blocking the very best views of my next overcooked hairpin.\nThe center tablet hosts the car\u2019s navigation, audio, connectivity and Autopilot avionics, including graphical readouts from complex sensor array. Autopilot functions like distance-keeping are accessed with the unmarked compass selectors in the steering wheel. But I am having way too much fun to use Autopilot.\nBuild quality: Beta-phase Model 3s had pretty awful panel-gap tolerances\u2014even the show car at the 2017 Los Angeles Auto Show. Why? The stampings of the deep-draft aluminum body panels were \u201cmoving\u201d after they were stamped, explained a production engineer. That\u2019s not unusual. Such tool-fettling occurs with almost any aluminum-paneled car project; the difference is, Tesla made all these adjustments under the blazing lights of investors and speculators. \nBut the cars I\u2019ve driven are very straight, with uniform panel gaps. The wind noise around the windows that some early testers had noted was nowhere to be heard. Looks like the robots got the memo.\nThe Model 3 also debuts Tesla\u2019s more powerful battery packs, produced in its vast battery-making automaton outside of Reno, Nev., known as the Gigafactory. Inside these packs, the new 2170 cells are roughly 50% larger by volume than Tesla\u2019s earlier cells and more energy rich. Mr. Musk has called the new cell \u201cthe highest energy density cell in the world.\u201d \nTesla doesn\u2019t provide battery capacity figures but the Model 3 Performance pack is estimated to be worth about 75 kWh, good for an EPA-estimated 310 miles of range. \nThe battery pack sort of resembles a watch battery: wafer thin, with minimal intrusion into interior cabin space above. Lower floor, lower roof. The Model 3 also sports a minimal front overhang, low hood, cab-rearward proportions and a luxurious axle-to-dash ratio. Like the Model S, the Model 3 provides a trunk and a generous frunk.\nExit, stage right, still humming.\n\n\n2018 MODEL 3 PERFORMANCE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tesla Motors\n \n\n\n Base Price $64,000 Price, as Te The Tesla brand has its share of haters, but no one has yet driven the new Model 3 Performance\u2014until now. Dan Neil takes a first turn behind the wheel of the dual-motor dynamo. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launch Failure Can Spell Disruptions for NASA\u2019s Missions (WSJ: Russia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2954",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-headed-for-international-space-station-aborts-after-launcher-failure-1539249653?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=18",
        "text": "U.S. officials said the men were banged up but otherwise in good condition after experiencing roughly twice the normal amount of gravitational forces compared with a typical re-entry. The capsule\u2019s flight controls and communications systems worked as expected, according to NASA, before a parachute landing in the Kazakh desert.\n\u201cThe crew handled their procedures exactly as planned,\u201d said Kenny Todd, a senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration manager, and Russian recovery teams were nearby when the capsule touched down.\n\n\nThere were sighs of relief following the first such in-flight crisis on a Russian vehicle affecting a NASA astronaut. But the failure also raises difficult scheduling issues for replacing the three crew members currently occupying the space station, along with a host of questions about the safety and reliability of Russian boosters and spacecraft that are now the only way to take people to the orbiting laboratory.\nAt the very least, Thursday\u2019s developments ratcheted up pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles able to ferry crews to and from the space station. It adds urgency to efforts by two competing contractors\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014to conduct unmanned test flights so they can begin human missions around the middle of 2019.\nNASA\u2019s agreement to pay Russia for seats ends late next year. The U.S. replacements, however, already are years late and have continued in recent months to experience significant delays.\nThe cause of Thursday\u2019s mishap wasn\u2019t immediately clear, though NASA officials said there didn\u2019t appear to be any rocket explosion. Moscow has launched an investigation, and \u201cthey will put a lot of resources on trying to understand exactly what happened,\u201d Mr. Todd told reporters. NASA expects to cooperate and receive findings of the probe.\n\u201cThe answers we get to our questions [will be] paramount\u201d in determining when U.S. astronauts will be cleared to fly again on Russian hardware, Mr. Todd said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Nick Hague, left, speaks with the Russian space agency director Dmitry Rogozin after Thursday\u2019s emergency landing.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roscosmos/EPA-EFE/Rex/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nNASA officials predicted only minimal short-term impacts from the failed mission, since there is adequate food and other supplies to sustain the current three crew members for several months.\nBut the longer-term outlook is particularly complicated because the Russian capsule now docked at the space station will be deemed unfit to return those crew members to Earth past January. After that, a replacement Soyuz capsule will need to be launched to bring them home.\nAnd for safety reasons, initial U.S. replacement capsules destined for the orbiting laboratory months later will need crew on board the station to monitor docking procedures.\nSo in effect, the progress of NASA\u2019s commercially developed transportation systems suddenly is dependent on Russian authorities finishing their investigation quickly\u2014and declaring the Soyuz rocket fit for further manned flights. Space experts anticipate final conclusions could take months.\nUnder the worst-case scenario, the space station temporarily could be left without crew and operated by ground controllers. NASA wants to avoid such an outcome, and has started analyzing alternative strategies. But if necessary, Mr. Todd told reporters \u201cI feel very confident that we could fly for a significant amount of time\u201d with an unmanned station.\nIt has been 35 years since Russia was forced to abort a mission carrying cosmonauts into orbit. But in recent years, Moscow\u2019s space program has been hit with sharp funding cutbacks, sagging employee morale and a spate of unmanned launch failures.\nSince 2011, three Russian cargo capsules headed for the space station have been lost due to rocket malfunctions.\nThe Soyuz capsule involved in Thursday\u2019s mishap reached an altitude of about 30 miles\u2014roughly halfway to space\u2014before returning to Earth at a faster velocity and a sharper angle than in a typical re-entry, NASA said. But \u201cfrom everything we have seen, the crew is in great shape,\u201d according to Reid Wiseman, NASA\u2019s deputy chief astronaut. \nNASA stopped taking astronauts to the space station on its own with the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.\nNASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who was at the launch site, promised \u201ca thorough investigation\u201d into the failure. The next Soyuz launch to bring crew to the space station was scheduled for Dec. 20. \nThe setback comes two months after a crew on the station found a hole in a Soyuz escape capsule. They were able to plug the leak, though experts are still trying to determine the cause. Previous suggestions by some Russian officials about foul play generated friction with NASA managers.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pas The setback put more pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles for taking crews to and from space station and made it more dependent on Russia. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launch Failure Can Spell Disruptions for NASA\u2019s Missions (WSJ: Russia) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "2955",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-headed-for-international-space-station-aborts-after-launcher-failure-1539249653?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=68",
        "text": "U.S. officials said the men were banged up but otherwise in good condition after experiencing roughly twice the normal amount of gravitational forces compared with a typical re-entry. The capsule\u2019s flight controls and communications systems worked as expected, according to NASA, before a parachute landing in the Kazakh desert.\n\u201cThe crew handled their procedures exactly as planned,\u201d said Kenny Todd, a senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration manager, and Russian recovery teams were nearby when the capsule touched down.\n\n\nThere were sighs of relief following the first such in-flight crisis on a Russian vehicle affecting a NASA astronaut. But the failure also raises difficult scheduling issues for replacing the three crew members currently occupying the space station, along with a host of questions about the safety and reliability of Russian boosters and spacecraft that are now the only way to take people to the orbiting laboratory.\nAt the very least, Thursday\u2019s developments ratcheted up pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles able to ferry crews to and from the space station. It adds urgency to efforts by two competing contractors\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014to conduct unmanned test flights so they can begin human missions around the middle of 2019.\nNASA\u2019s agreement to pay Russia for seats ends late next year. The U.S. replacements, however, already are years late and have continued in recent months to experience significant delays.\nThe cause of Thursday\u2019s mishap wasn\u2019t immediately clear, though NASA officials said there didn\u2019t appear to be any rocket explosion. Moscow has launched an investigation, and \u201cthey will put a lot of resources on trying to understand exactly what happened,\u201d Mr. Todd told reporters. NASA expects to cooperate and receive findings of the probe.\n\u201cThe answers we get to our questions [will be] paramount\u201d in determining when U.S. astronauts will be cleared to fly again on Russian hardware, Mr. Todd said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Nick Hague, left, speaks with the Russian space agency director Dmitry Rogozin after Thursday\u2019s emergency landing.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roscosmos/EPA-EFE/Rex/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nNASA officials predicted only minimal short-term impacts from the failed mission, since there is adequate food and other supplies to sustain the current three crew members for several months.\nBut the longer-term outlook is particularly complicated because the Russian capsule now docked at the space station will be deemed unfit to return those crew members to Earth past January. After that, a replacement Soyuz capsule will need to be launched to bring them home.\nAnd for safety reasons, initial U.S. replacement capsules destined for the orbiting laboratory months later will need crew on board the station to monitor docking procedures.\nSo in effect, the progress of NASA\u2019s commercially developed transportation systems suddenly is dependent on Russian authorities finishing their investigation quickly\u2014and declaring the Soyuz rocket fit for further manned flights. Space experts anticipate final conclusions could take months.\nUnder the worst-case scenario, the space station temporarily could be left without crew and operated by ground controllers. NASA wants to avoid such an outcome, and has started analyzing alternative strategies. But if necessary, Mr. Todd told reporters \u201cI feel very confident that we could fly for a significant amount of time\u201d with an unmanned station.\nIt has been 35 years since Russia was forced to abort a mission carrying cosmonauts into orbit. But in recent years, Moscow\u2019s space program has been hit with sharp funding cutbacks, sagging employee morale and a spate of unmanned launch failures.\nSince 2011, three Russian cargo capsules headed for the space station have been lost due to rocket malfunctions.\nThe Soyuz capsule involved in Thursday\u2019s mishap reached an altitude of about 30 miles\u2014roughly halfway to space\u2014before returning to Earth at a faster velocity and a sharper angle than in a typical re-entry, NASA said. But \u201cfrom everything we have seen, the crew is in great shape,\u201d according to Reid Wiseman, NASA\u2019s deputy chief astronaut. \nNASA stopped taking astronauts to the space station on its own with the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.\nNASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who was at the launch site, promised \u201ca thorough investigation\u201d into the failure. The next Soyuz launch to bring crew to the space station was scheduled for Dec. 20. \nThe setback comes two months after a crew on the station found a hole in a Soyuz escape capsule. They were able to plug the leak, though experts are still trying to determine the cause. Previous suggestions by some Russian officials about foul play generated friction with NASA managers.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pas The setback put more pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles for taking crews to and from space station and made it more dependent on Russia. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launch Failure Can Spell Disruptions for NASA\u2019s Missions (WSJ: Russia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2956",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-headed-for-international-space-station-aborts-after-launcher-failure-1539249653?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=63",
        "text": "U.S. officials said the men were banged up but otherwise in good condition after experiencing roughly twice the normal amount of gravitational forces compared with a typical re-entry. The capsule\u2019s flight controls and communications systems worked as expected, according to NASA, before a parachute landing in the Kazakh desert.\n\u201cThe crew handled their procedures exactly as planned,\u201d said Kenny Todd, a senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration manager, and Russian recovery teams were nearby when the capsule touched down.\n\n\nThere were sighs of relief following the first such in-flight crisis on a Russian vehicle affecting a NASA astronaut. But the failure also raises difficult scheduling issues for replacing the three crew members currently occupying the space station, along with a host of questions about the safety and reliability of Russian boosters and spacecraft that are now the only way to take people to the orbiting laboratory.\nAt the very least, Thursday\u2019s developments ratcheted up pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles able to ferry crews to and from the space station. It adds urgency to efforts by two competing contractors\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014to conduct unmanned test flights so they can begin human missions around the middle of 2019.\nNASA\u2019s agreement to pay Russia for seats ends late next year. The U.S. replacements, however, already are years late and have continued in recent months to experience significant delays.\nThe cause of Thursday\u2019s mishap wasn\u2019t immediately clear, though NASA officials said there didn\u2019t appear to be any rocket explosion. Moscow has launched an investigation, and \u201cthey will put a lot of resources on trying to understand exactly what happened,\u201d Mr. Todd told reporters. NASA expects to cooperate and receive findings of the probe.\n\u201cThe answers we get to our questions [will be] paramount\u201d in determining when U.S. astronauts will be cleared to fly again on Russian hardware, Mr. Todd said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Nick Hague, left, speaks with the Russian space agency director Dmitry Rogozin after Thursday\u2019s emergency landing.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roscosmos/EPA-EFE/Rex/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nNASA officials predicted only minimal short-term impacts from the failed mission, since there is adequate food and other supplies to sustain the current three crew members for several months.\nBut the longer-term outlook is particularly complicated because the Russian capsule now docked at the space station will be deemed unfit to return those crew members to Earth past January. After that, a replacement Soyuz capsule will need to be launched to bring them home.\nAnd for safety reasons, initial U.S. replacement capsules destined for the orbiting laboratory months later will need crew on board the station to monitor docking procedures.\nSo in effect, the progress of NASA\u2019s commercially developed transportation systems suddenly is dependent on Russian authorities finishing their investigation quickly\u2014and declaring the Soyuz rocket fit for further manned flights. Space experts anticipate final conclusions could take months.\nUnder the worst-case scenario, the space station temporarily could be left without crew and operated by ground controllers. NASA wants to avoid such an outcome, and has started analyzing alternative strategies. But if necessary, Mr. Todd told reporters \u201cI feel very confident that we could fly for a significant amount of time\u201d with an unmanned station.\nIt has been 35 years since Russia was forced to abort a mission carrying cosmonauts into orbit. But in recent years, Moscow\u2019s space program has been hit with sharp funding cutbacks, sagging employee morale and a spate of unmanned launch failures.\nSince 2011, three Russian cargo capsules headed for the space station have been lost due to rocket malfunctions.\nThe Soyuz capsule involved in Thursday\u2019s mishap reached an altitude of about 30 miles\u2014roughly halfway to space\u2014before returning to Earth at a faster velocity and a sharper angle than in a typical re-entry, NASA said. But \u201cfrom everything we have seen, the crew is in great shape,\u201d according to Reid Wiseman, NASA\u2019s deputy chief astronaut. \nNASA stopped taking astronauts to the space station on its own with the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.\nNASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who was at the launch site, promised \u201ca thorough investigation\u201d into the failure. The next Soyuz launch to bring crew to the space station was scheduled for Dec. 20. \nThe setback comes two months after a crew on the station found a hole in a Soyuz escape capsule. They were able to plug the leak, though experts are still trying to determine the cause. Previous suggestions by some Russian officials about foul play generated friction with NASA managers.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pas The setback put more pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles for taking crews to and from space station and made it more dependent on Russia. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launch Failure Can Spell Disruptions for NASA\u2019s Missions (WSJ: Russia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2957",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-headed-for-international-space-station-aborts-after-launcher-failure-1539249653?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=86",
        "text": "U.S. officials said the men were banged up but otherwise in good condition after experiencing roughly twice the normal amount of gravitational forces compared with a typical re-entry. The capsule\u2019s flight controls and communications systems worked as expected, according to NASA, before a parachute landing in the Kazakh desert.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe crew handled their procedures exactly as planned,\u201d said Kenny Todd, a senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration manager, and Russian recovery teams were nearby when the capsule touched down.\n\n\nThere were sighs of relief following the first such in-flight crisis on a Russian vehicle affecting a NASA astronaut. But the failure also raises difficult scheduling issues for replacing the three crew members currently occupying the space station, along with a host of questions about the safety and reliability of Russian boosters and spacecraft that are now the only way to take people to the orbiting laboratory.\nAt the very least, Thursday\u2019s developments ratcheted up pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles able to ferry crews to and from the space station. It adds urgency to efforts by two competing contractors\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2014to conduct unmanned test flights so they can begin human missions around the middle of 2019.\nNASA\u2019s agreement to pay Russia for seats ends late next year. The U.S. replacements, however, already are years late and have continued in recent months to experience significant delays.\nThe cause of Thursday\u2019s mishap wasn\u2019t immediately clear, though NASA officials said there didn\u2019t appear to be any rocket explosion. Moscow has launched an investigation, and \u201cthey will put a lot of resources on trying to understand exactly what happened,\u201d Mr. Todd told reporters. NASA expects to cooperate and receive findings of the probe.\n\u201cThe answers we get to our questions [will be] paramount\u201d in determining when U.S. astronauts will be cleared to fly again on Russian hardware, Mr. Todd said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Nick Hague, left, speaks with the Russian space agency director Dmitry Rogozin after Thursday\u2019s emergency landing.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Roscosmos/EPA-EFE/Rex/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nNASA officials predicted only minimal short-term impacts from the failed mission, since there is adequate food and other supplies to sustain the current three crew members for several months.\nBut the longer-term outlook is particularly complicated because the Russian capsule now docked at the space station will be deemed unfit to return those crew members to Earth past January. After that, a replacement Soyuz capsule will need to be launched to bring them home.\nAnd for safety reasons, initial U.S. replacement capsules destined for the orbiting laboratory months later will need crew on board the station to monitor docking procedures.\nSo in effect, the progress of NASA\u2019s commercially developed transportation systems suddenly is dependent on Russian authorities finishing their investigation quickly\u2014and declaring the Soyuz rocket fit for further manned flights. Space experts anticipate final conclusions could take months.\nUnder the worst-case scenario, the space station temporarily could be left without crew and operated by ground controllers. NASA wants to avoid such an outcome, and has started analyzing alternative strategies. But if necessary, Mr. Todd told reporters \u201cI feel very confident that we could fly for a significant amount of time\u201d with an unmanned station.\nIt has been 35 years since Russia was forced to abort a mission carrying cosmonauts into orbit. But in recent years, Moscow\u2019s space program has been hit with sharp funding cutbacks, sagging employee morale and a spate of unmanned launch failures.\nSince 2011, three Russian cargo capsules headed for the space station have been lost due to rocket malfunctions.\nThe Soyuz capsule involved in Thursday\u2019s mishap reached an altitude of about 30 miles\u2014roughly halfway to space\u2014before returning to Earth at a faster velocity and a sharper angle than in a typical re-entry, NASA said. But \u201cfrom everything we have seen, the crew is in great shape,\u201d according to Reid Wiseman, NASA\u2019s deputy chief astronaut. \nNASA stopped taking astronauts to the space station on its own with the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.\nNASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who was at the launch site, promised \u201ca thorough investigation\u201d into the failure. The next Soyuz launch to bring crew to the space station was scheduled for Dec. 20. \nThe setback comes two months after a crew on the station found a hole in a Soyuz escape capsule. They were able to plug the leak, though experts are still trying to determine the cause. Previous suggestions by some Russian officials about foul play generated friction with NASA managers.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy The setback put more pressure on NASA to certify new U.S. vehicles for taking crews to and from space station and made it more dependent on Russia. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Missile Test in Space Created Risky Debris, U.S. Officials Say (WSJ: Russia) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2958",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-missile-test-in-space-creates-risky-debris-u-s-officials-say-11637076327?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=3",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Monday that it is continuing to monitor the debris to ensure crew safety. It said then that the facility was passing through or near a field of debris tied to the Russian test every 90 minutes.\nU.S. officials criticized Russia for carrying out the test, saying the debris created a new hazard for the space station.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re concerned about any nation that would weaponize space or make space less conducive to peaceful commercial enterprises and exploration,\u201d a Pentagon spokesman said. \u201cWe want to see space, the space domain subject to international norms and rules so that it can be explored by all space-faring nations in a responsible way.\u201d\nAfter the incident, those on board the International Space Station were awakened and directed to close hatches to different modules on the facility, NASA said Monday. Crew members then entered into spacecraft that are docked to the station around 2 a.m. ET on Monday and remained there for about two hours while the station twice passed through or near the vicinity of the new space debris, NASA said.\nSeven people are currently on board the space station, including two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut who arrived there in April. Four astronauts, including three from NASA and one from the European Space agency, arrived at the space station last week.\nRussia\u2019s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that it had carried out the tests because the U.S. was actively testing its own latest attack and combat weapons, including the latest modifications of the unmanned spacecraft X-37, without any prior warning.\n\u201cAgainst this background, the Russian Ministry of Defense is carrying out planned activities to strengthen the defense capability, excluding the possibility of sudden damage to the country\u2019s security in the space sector and on the ground by existing and prospective foreign space assets,\u201d the Defense Ministry channel cited the Defense Ministry as saying.\nOfficials from the Russian Foreign Ministry also said it considered State Department and Pentagon criticisms about the test to be hypocritical.\nThe State Department declined to comment on the Russian Defense Ministry\u2019s statements. \n\u2014William Mauldin contributed to this article. \n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com and Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com Russia defended its destruction of a satellite with a missile, after U.S. officials said the weapon test endangered astronauts on the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Ann M. Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Missile Test in Space Created Risky Debris, U.S. Officials Say (WSJ: Russia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2959",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-missile-test-in-space-creates-risky-debris-u-s-officials-say-11637076327?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=17",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Monday that it is continuing to monitor the debris to ensure crew safety. It said then that the facility was passing through or near a field of debris tied to the Russian test every 90 minutes.\n\n\n\n\nU.S. officials criticized Russia for carrying out the test, saying the debris created a new hazard for the space station.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re concerned about any nation that would weaponize space or make space less conducive to peaceful commercial enterprises and exploration,\u201d a Pentagon spokesman said. \u201cWe want to see space, the space domain subject to international norms and rules so that it can be explored by all space-faring nations in a responsible way.\u201d\nAfter the incident, those on board the International Space Station were awakened and directed to close hatches to different modules on the facility, NASA said Monday. Crew members then entered into spacecraft that are docked to the station around 2 a.m. ET on Monday and remained there for about two hours while the station twice passed through or near the vicinity of the new space debris, NASA said.\nSeven people are currently on board the space station, including two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut who arrived there in April. Four astronauts, including three from NASA and one from the European Space agency, arrived at the space station last week.\nRussia\u2019s Defense Ministry said Tuesday that it had carried out the tests because the U.S. was actively testing its own latest attack and combat weapons, including the latest modifications of the unmanned spacecraft X-37, without any prior warning.\n\u201cAgainst this background, the Russian Ministry of Defense is carrying out planned activities to strengthen the defense capability, excluding the possibility of sudden damage to the country\u2019s security in the space sector and on the ground by existing and prospective foreign space assets,\u201d the Defense Ministry channel cited the Defense Ministry as saying.\nOfficials from the Russian Foreign Ministry also said it considered State Department and Pentagon criticisms about the test to be hypocritical.\nThe State Department declined to comment on the Russian Defense Ministry\u2019s statements. \n\u2014William Mauldin contributed to this article. \n\n\n\nThe Space Race Is OnRelated coverage, selected by the editors.July 19, 2021When Is Jeff Bezos\u2019 Flight to Space and How to Watch the Blue Origin LaunchJuly 18, 2021Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space GoalsJuly 16, 2021Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Where Space Really BeginsJuly 15, 2021Blue Origin Says Teen to Replace Auction Winner on Space FlightJuly 15, 2021See What the 10-Minute Blue Origin Flight Will Be LikeJuly 12, 2021Virgin Galactic Took Branson to Space. Paying Customers Are Next.July 12, 2021Branson Went to Space. Here\u2019s What He Learned.July 12, 2021Heard on the Street: Is Virgin Galactic Truly a Space Company?\n\n\n\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com and Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com Russia defended its destruction of a satellite with a missile, after U.S. officials said the weapon test endangered astronauts on the International Space Station. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg and Ann M. Simmons"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s what you should know about the newfound TRAPPIST-1 solar system (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2960",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/22/heres-what-you-should-know-about-the-new-trappist-1-solar-system/",
        "text": "You may have heard that astronomers\u00a0made a big announcement today about a \u201cdiscovery outside our solar system.\u201dIt wasn't aliens.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, astronomers reported\u00a0the\u00a0discovery of a solar system containing seven rocky, Earth-size planets just 39 light years away. The bodies\u00a0orbit an ultracool dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1 in the constellation Aquarius. Several of the planets are\u00a0located in what's known as the \u201chabitable zone\u201d \u2014 the Goldilocks region where it's thought water can exist and life can thrive. Scientists discover 7 'Earthlike' planets orbiting a nearby starThis is the first time astronomers have discovered so many\u00a0terrestrial planets orbiting a single star, and this new system could be the best target in the galaxy to search for extraterrestrial\u00a0life. Even\u00a0they aren't home to aliens, TRAPPIST-1 will provide planetary scientists with an unprecedented new window on the formation of solar systems and the behavior of rocky worlds.So, sure, this is a really cool discovery. Even if I\u00a0hadn't\u00a0watched \u201cContact\u201d over the weekend, I'd be daydreaming about visiting\u00a0TRAPPIST-1, where transits are a daily spectacle and the star's dim glow\u00a0gives the appearance of a perpetual sunset. Just add an ocean and a few palm trees, and it's hard to imagine a better vacation spot.But I'm not packing my bags just yet, and you probably shouldn't either. Here's why:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTRAPPIST-1 is 39 light years away.Yes, that is crazy close in the scheme of the universe. The Milky Way galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across. But even if humanity had a spacecraft capable of moving at the speed of light, it would take almost four decades to get to TRAPPIST-1. I don't know about you, but I don't have that many vacation days.It's kind of a wimpy star.TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star, 10 times smaller and 2.5 times cooler than our own sun. In fact, it's more comparable to Jupiter than to the sun. Even though the TRAPPIST-1 planets\u00a0are Earthlike, the system is definitely an alien one. It's not clear what the likelihood of life\u00a0might be in such a system.How close is too close?The planets of this system orbit in super\u00a0tight circles around their sun.\u00a0The entire system is barely\u00a0bigger than the distance between the sun and Mercury.\u00a0This is what lets them stay warm by their star's dim light, but it also puts them at risk. Solar flares could damage their atmospheres (if they have atmospheres), radiation could blast away any nascent life (if life even emerged). Michael Gillon,\u00a0the lead author of the study, said that TRAPPIST-1 is a relatively quiet star, and the level of radiation the planets probably receive doesn't look totally hostile\u00a0to life. But it's still something to worry about.The planets don't have days and nights.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause the planets are close to the sun, and to one another, the astronomers believe that they are \u201ctidally locked.\u201d This is what happens when the amount of time it takes a body\u00a0to orbit matches the length of one rotation on its axis. The result is that the same side of the body always faces the object it orbits around. The moon is tidally locked with Earth, which is why we always see the same face of our satellite when we look up at night.For the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, this means that one side of each body is constantly blasted with their sun's heat, while the other sides are perpetually in darkness. This \u2026 doesn't sound very homey. It could create huge temperature gradients that drive powerful winds. It could mean that half of each planet freezes while the other half burns.We can't see the planets directly.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists were\u00a0able to detect the planets using the \u201ctransiting method,\u201d in which they use tiny dips in light from the star caused by the planets passing across its face. With the Hubble Space Telescope, the soon-to-launch James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, astronomers can also analyze the light that passes through the atmospheres of the planets to figure out what molecules those atmospheres contain.But\u00a0we won't be able to directly image the solar system with current technology, Gillon said. Because the planets are so close to their star, they will be impossible to distinguish amid its glare.Just because some of the\u00a0planets are in the habitable zone doesn't mean that they're actually habitable, let alone inhabited.Story continues below advertisementThe \u201chabitable zone\u201d is kind of a squishy concept.\u00a0Astronomers define it as the range of orbits around a given star at which planets are warm enough to sustain liquid water on their surface. But it's all theoretical. Scientists assume that a middling distance from the sun and liquid water make a planet habitable because they're so essential to life on Earth. But there are ways for bodies to hold water even if they're far away from their stars. Just look at Europa, the moon of Jupiter that is thought to have a vast, salty ocean beneath its icy surface. Plus, lots of liquid water isn't necessarily a good thing. In a paper published in the journal Science in 2013, astrophysicist Sara Seager pointed out that water is a greenhouse gas \u2014 too much of it too close to a star could\u00a0trap heat on a planet and turn it into something like Venus.Besides, a planet requires a lot more than water and light to be livable. Scientists think Mars once had water, but when its internal dynamo broke down, it lost its atmosphere and became\u00a0the frozen desert we know today. Truly habitable planets probably need strong magnetic fields to protect their inhabitants from radiation and fierce solar winds.Amy Barr Mlinar, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, pointed out that, in some ways, life is a requirement for life.\u00a0\u201cGeology and life have worked\u00a0together to make the Earth habitable,\u201d she\u00a0said. Without photosynthetic organisms to create oxygen, fungi to recycle waste products, bacteria to fix nitrogen in the soil, our planet would be unrecognizable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven with all these caveats, the planets are really, really exciting.\u00a0\u201cThere are other worlds out there just like the Earth that have some commonalities with the Earth and we can imagine them,\u201d NASA's Thomas Zurbuchen said at a news conference Wednesday. \u201cThe question, 'Are we alone out here?' is being answered as we speak.\u201dThere are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and it's thought that about 15 percent of them are ultracool dwarfs like TRAPPIST-1. If even a fraction of those stars host\u00a0multiple planet systems, and even a fraction of those have terrestrial\u00a0planets in the habitable zone, there could potentially be millions of rocky worlds waiting for us to explore.\u201cThe discovery gives us a hint that finding a second Earth is not just a matter of if, but when,\u201d Zurbuchen said.\u00a0But we don't need to wait to find other Earthlike exoplanets. The TRAPPIST-1 system has offered up seven such worlds, and they're right within our sights. All scientists have to do now is point their telescopes at it and look. The worlds are close and potentially habitable, but you shouldn't pack your bags for TRAPPIST-1 just yet. Here\u2019s what you should know about the newfound TRAPPIST-1 solar system",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "From a Texas dental office to the Canadian tundra, here\u2019s where space debris has crashed to Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2961",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/from-a-texas-dental-office-to-the-canadian-tundra-heres-where-space-debris-has-crashed-to-earth/2021/05/21/bb1bf46e-b992-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html",
        "text": "With oceans and unpopulated areas covering much of the globe, it\u2019s not so surprising that an Chinese booster rocket recently landed in the Indian Ocean. Although it\u2019s statistically unlikely that any piece of falling space junk would land in someone\u2019s suburban backyard, it\u2019s also not outside the realm of possibility: Ever since humans began sending rockets into space, pieces of debris have turned up in unexpected places. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere\u2019s a look at where some notable debris falls have occurred over the years.Sea of Japan (East Sea)The first known report of damage caused by space debris came as early as 1969. Japanese diplomats informed a United Nations committee that an unidentified object had fallen from space and hit a freighter that was traveling off the coast of Siberia, seriously injuring five crewmen. Soviet ships soon showed up looking for the wreckage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJapanese officials said that experts identified the debris as part of a Soviet spacecraft. But Tokyo initially kept that information secret to avoid provoking a conflict with Moscow, the Associated Press reported.Northwestern CanadaThe hazards of space junk became abundantly clear in 1978, when the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 plummeted to Earth, scattering potentially radioactive debris across the Northwest Territories, Alberta and Saskatchewan. A massive cleanup effort dubbed \u201cOperation Morning Light,\u201d which involved searching for tiny pieces of radioactive material in the Arctic tundra, ended up costing close to $14\u00a0million in Canadian dollars.Story continues below advertisementCanada billed the Soviet Union for $6 million, but Moscow ended up paying only half that amount.Western AustraliaWhen NASA\u2019s first space station, Skylab, disintegrated on reentry in 1979, it scattered debris across the previously obscure Western Australia farming community of Esperance. \u201cIt was the best fireworks display you would ever see,\u201d Brendan Freeman, a retired farmer, later told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.AdvertisementNo major damage was done, but Esperance jokingly issued a $311 fine for littering to NASA. The agency didn\u2019t pay up \u2014 perhaps due to fear of setting a precedent \u2014 but a radio host in California later crowdfunded the money and traveled to Esperance to deliver a novelty check.Lakeport, Calif.Early one weekend morning in 1987, a retired aircraft mechanic living in a small town outside the Mendocino National Forest in Northern California heard a loud noise outside his bedroom window that sounded like a gunshot. Later that day, he discovered a seven-foot-long, singed-looking piece of metal lying in the alleyway next to his house.Story continues below advertisementAir Force analysts determined that the object was most likely a piece of a Soviet rocket that had been seen streaking through the sky as it burned up and fell to Earth. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting because something like that usually doesn\u2019t happen around here,\u201d a neighbor, Maggie Pickle, told the AP.TulsaIn 1997, Lottie Williams was taking an early morning walk with friends in a Tulsa park in Oklahoma when she saw something that looked like a shooting star hurtling through the sky. It hit her on the shoulder \u2014 so lightly that she barely even felt it. Scientists later determined that the object was most likely a piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket. Williams kept it as a souvenir.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think I was blessed that it doesn\u2019t weigh that much,\u201d she told NPR years later. \u201cI mean, that was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me.\u201dEast Texas and LouisianaWhen the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in 2003 upon reentering the atmosphere, killing seven astronauts on board, impromptu memorials popped up in places where debris had landed. People in the rural area along the state line of Texas and Louisiana reported seeing pieces of the shuttle crash into a reservoir and come hurtling through the roof of a dentist\u2019s office, and one enterprising individual attempted to sell a piece of the debris for $10,000 on eBay.Roughly 84,000 pieces of the space shuttle were found after extensive searches through swamplands, forests and pastures. That debris was then used to reconstruct the shuttle and determine the cause of the disaster.Ivory CoastIn May 2020, a Chinese rocket hurtled back to Earth. Though it initially appeared to land in the Atlantic Ocean, reports of sonic booms and metallic debris falling from the sky suggested that some parts of the rocket had hit the Ivory Coast village of Mahounou.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhen you have a big chunk of metal screaming through the upper atmosphere in a particular direction at a particular time, and you get reports of things falling out of the sky at that location, at that time, it\u2019s not a big leap to connect them,\u201d Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told the Verge at the time.No injuries were reported, and the discovery of a nearly 40-foot-long piece of tubing appears to have provoked more curiosity than concern in the area.Grant County, Wash.A recent incident involving falling space debris took place a little over a month ago, when a SpaceX rocket disintegrated over the Pacific Northwest and created a dramatic light display that some initially mistook for falling stars.One piece of equipment landed in a Washington state farm, leaving a four-inch dent in the soil, the Verge reported. A similar object was found on an Oregon beach by a fisherman days later, though officials haven\u2019t confirmed that it came from the SpaceX launch.\n\n With oceans and unpopulated areas covering much of the globe, it\u2019s statistically unlikely that a piece of falling space junk will land in someone\u2019s suburban backyard. But there have been a handful of high-profile incidents. From a Texas dental office to the Canadian tundra, here\u2019s where space debris has crashed to Earth",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "From a Texas dental office to the Canadian tundra, here\u2019s where space debris has crashed to Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2962",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/from-a-texas-dental-office-to-the-canadian-tundra-heres-where-space-debris-has-crashed-to-earth/2021/05/21/bb1bf46e-b992-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html",
        "text": "With oceans and unpopulated areas covering much of the globe, it\u2019s not so surprising that an Chinese booster rocket recently landed in the Indian Ocean. Although it\u2019s statistically unlikely that any piece of falling space junk would land in someone\u2019s suburban backyard, it\u2019s also not outside the realm of possibility: Ever since humans began sending rockets into space, pieces of debris have turned up in unexpected places. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere\u2019s a look at where some notable debris falls have occurred over the years.Sea of Japan (East Sea)The first known report of damage caused by space debris came as early as 1969. Japanese diplomats informed a United Nations committee that an unidentified object had fallen from space and hit a freighter that was traveling off the coast of Siberia, seriously injuring five crewmen. Soviet ships soon showed up looking for the wreckage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJapanese officials said that experts identified the debris as part of a Soviet spacecraft. But Tokyo initially kept that information secret to avoid provoking a conflict with Moscow, the Associated Press reported.Northwestern CanadaThe hazards of space junk became abundantly clear in 1978, when the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 plummeted to Earth, scattering potentially radioactive debris across the Northwest Territories, Alberta and Saskatchewan. A massive cleanup effort dubbed \u201cOperation Morning Light,\u201d which involved searching for tiny pieces of radioactive material in the Arctic tundra, ended up costing close to $14\u00a0million in Canadian dollars.Story continues below advertisementCanada billed the Soviet Union for $6 million, but Moscow ended up paying only half that amount.Western AustraliaWhen NASA\u2019s first space station, Skylab, disintegrated on reentry in 1979, it scattered debris across the previously obscure Western Australia farming community of Esperance. \u201cIt was the best fireworks display you would ever see,\u201d Brendan Freeman, a retired farmer, later told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.AdvertisementNo major damage was done, but Esperance jokingly issued a $311 fine for littering to NASA. The agency didn\u2019t pay up \u2014 perhaps due to fear of setting a precedent \u2014 but a radio host in California later crowdfunded the money and traveled to Esperance to deliver a novelty check.Lakeport, Calif.Early one weekend morning in 1987, a retired aircraft mechanic living in a small town outside the Mendocino National Forest in Northern California heard a loud noise outside his bedroom window that sounded like a gunshot. Later that day, he discovered a seven-foot-long, singed-looking piece of metal lying in the alleyway next to his house.Story continues below advertisementAir Force analysts determined that the object was most likely a piece of a Soviet rocket that had been seen streaking through the sky as it burned up and fell to Earth. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting because something like that usually doesn\u2019t happen around here,\u201d a neighbor, Maggie Pickle, told the AP.TulsaIn 1997, Lottie Williams was taking an early morning walk with friends in a Tulsa park in Oklahoma when she saw something that looked like a shooting star hurtling through the sky. It hit her on the shoulder \u2014 so lightly that she barely even felt it. Scientists later determined that the object was most likely a piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket. Williams kept it as a souvenir.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think I was blessed that it doesn\u2019t weigh that much,\u201d she told NPR years later. \u201cI mean, that was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me.\u201dEast Texas and LouisianaWhen the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in 2003 upon reentering the atmosphere, killing seven astronauts on board, impromptu memorials popped up in places where debris had landed. People in the rural area along the state line of Texas and Louisiana reported seeing pieces of the shuttle crash into a reservoir and come hurtling through the roof of a dentist\u2019s office, and one enterprising individual attempted to sell a piece of the debris for $10,000 on eBay.Roughly 84,000 pieces of the space shuttle were found after extensive searches through swamplands, forests and pastures. That debris was then used to reconstruct the shuttle and determine the cause of the disaster.Ivory CoastIn May 2020, a Chinese rocket hurtled back to Earth. Though it initially appeared to land in the Atlantic Ocean, reports of sonic booms and metallic debris falling from the sky suggested that some parts of the rocket had hit the Ivory Coast village of Mahounou.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhen you have a big chunk of metal screaming through the upper atmosphere in a particular direction at a particular time, and you get reports of things falling out of the sky at that location, at that time, it\u2019s not a big leap to connect them,\u201d Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told the Verge at the time.No injuries were reported, and the discovery of a nearly 40-foot-long piece of tubing appears to have provoked more curiosity than concern in the area.Grant County, Wash.A recent incident involving falling space debris took place a little over a month ago, when a SpaceX rocket disintegrated over the Pacific Northwest and created a dramatic light display that some initially mistook for falling stars.One piece of equipment landed in a Washington state farm, leaving a four-inch dent in the soil, the Verge reported. A similar object was found on an Oregon beach by a fisherman days later, though officials haven\u2019t confirmed that it came from the SpaceX launch.\n\n With oceans and unpopulated areas covering much of the globe, it\u2019s statistically unlikely that a piece of falling space junk will land in someone\u2019s suburban backyard. But there have been a handful of high-profile incidents. From a Texas dental office to the Canadian tundra, here\u2019s where space debris has crashed to Earth",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Israel\u2019s Moon Lander Got to the Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2963",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/israel-moon-lander-spaceil.html",
        "text": "With $100 million and a lot of volunteer labor, SpaceIL\u2019s Beresheet spacecraft could be the first privately built vessel to reach the lunar surface. With $100 million and a lot of volunteer labor, SpaceIL\u2019s Beresheet spacecraft could be the first privately built vessel to reach the lunar surface. It started in 2010 with a Facebook post.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Israel\u2019s Moon Lander Got to the Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2964",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/israel-moon-lander-spaceil.html",
        "text": "With $100 million and a lot of volunteer labor, SpaceIL\u2019s Beresheet spacecraft could be the first privately built vessel to reach the lunar surface. With $100 million and a lot of volunteer labor, SpaceIL\u2019s Beresheet spacecraft could be the first privately built vessel to reach the lunar surface. It started in 2010 with a Facebook post.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Israel\u2019s Moon Lander Got to the Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2965",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/israel-moon-lander-spaceil.html",
        "text": "With $100 million and a lot of volunteer labor, SpaceIL\u2019s Beresheet spacecraft could be the first privately built vessel to reach the lunar surface. With $100 million and a lot of volunteer labor, SpaceIL\u2019s Beresheet spacecraft could be the first privately built vessel to reach the lunar surface. It started in 2010 with a Facebook post.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thousands of tardigrades crash-land on the moon. Did they survive? (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2966",
        "date": "2019-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/thousands-of-tardigrades-crash-land-on-the-moon-did-they-survive/2019/08/09/41944b72-b927-11e9-a091-6a96e67d9cce_story.html",
        "text": "When you look up at the moon, there may now be a few thousand tiny water bears looking back at you.The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the moon during a failed landing attempt on April 11. And it may have strewn the lunar surface with thousands of dehydrated tardigrades, Wired reported last week. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBeresheet, a robotic lander, had carried human DNA samples, along with the tardigrades and 30\u00a0million small digitized pages of information about human society and culture. But it is unknown whether the archive \u2014 and the water bears \u2014 survived the crash, according to Wired.The tardigrades and the human DNA were added to the mission a few weeks before Beresheet launched on Feb. 21. Much like Cretaceous fossils locked in amber, the DNA samples and tardigrades were sealed in a resin layer protecting the DVD-size lunar library, while thousands more tardigrades were poured onto the sticky tape that held the archive in place, Wired reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut why send tardigrades to the moon?Tardigrades, also known as moss piglets, are microscopic creatures measuring between 0.002 and 0.05 inches (0.05 to 1.2\u00a0millimeters) long. They have endearingly tubby bodies and eight legs tipped with tiny \u201chands.\u201dBut tardigrades are just as well-known for their ",
        "author": "Mindy Weisberger"
    },
    {
        "title": "T-minus one week until China\u2019s space lab crashes to Earth. Here\u2019s what it will look like. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2967",
        "date": "2018-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/24/t-minus-one-week-until-chinas-space-lab-crashes-to-earth-heres-what-it-will-look-like/",
        "text": "When Tiangong-1 rocketed into the sky in 2011, optimists hoped the space station \u2014\u00a0 literal translation: \u201cheavenly palace\u201d\u00a0\u2014 would be a model for a permanent fixture among the stars, a space laboratory that was among humankind\u2019s first footsteps in the Cosmos.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo, when an out-of-control Tiangong-1 comes plummeting to earth in a superheated trail of plasma and space debris, it may literally be an April Fool\u2019s joke. Scientists have known for more than a year that Tiangong-1 would eventually turn into a man-made meteorite after the station stopped responding to Chinese commands in 2016, according to Space.com. The lab was returning from where it came, they were certain, but when and where it would crash was out of anyone\u2019s control.\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerIn recent months, scientists got better numbers. They told Spain, Portugal, France and Greece a) don\u2019t worry too much, but b) a 19,000-pound flying laboratory might be disintegrating over your skies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOr, in the words of fear-allaying scientists,\u00a0Tiangong-1 was experiencing an \u201cuncontrolled reentry.\u201dBut semantics will do nothing to change the time of the increasingly likely disintegration date: April 1, or April Fools\u2019 Day, according to Business Insider.\u00a0Although there is some wiggle room with that date, scientists have a pretty good sense of the drama that will unfold over the next few days.Tiangong-1 is spinning around our atmosphere at a speed of about 17,500 mph, taking one trip around the planet every 90 minutes. Although the air is thin in the zone where Earth\u2019s atmosphere ends and space begins, it\u2019s enough to slow the craft.\u00a0As it loses its forward speed, gravity will continue to pull the craft toward Earth, and that\u2019s literally when the fireworks start.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHave you ever skipped a stone on a lake?\u201d Jesse Gossner, an orbital mechanics engineer who teaches at the U.S. Air Force\u2019s Advanced Space Operations School, told Business Insider. \u201cIt bounces a few times, then eventually goes into the water.\u201dAdvertisementThe friction caused by thicker air will rip off anything sticking out of the side\u00a0of Tiangong-1 \u2014 solar panels, antennae.\u00a0That friction will also likely surround parts of the craft in superheated plasma. (Really, it\u2019s nothing to worry about, France.)But don\u2019t let that whole \u201csuperheated plasma thing\u201d fool you. All might not be destroyed.Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in handThe station is built like an onion, with layers upon layers of material. While the outside is glowing bright enough to be seen hundreds of miles away, some components nestled inside may be relatively safe.Story continues below advertisementJonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist\u00a0at Harvard University,\u00a0told the Guardian\u00a0that pieces weighing up to 220\u00a0pounds could make it to Earth\u2019s surface.\u00a0According to the latest estimates, the parts of the lab that survive will crash into the ocean.Still, scientists say, eagle-eyed observers probably will see it.\u00a0According to the nonprofit research firm Aerospace, parts of the burning space station \u201cmay be visible and will likely last up to a minute or more, depending on time of day, visibility, conditions and the observer\u2019s location.\u201dSpace agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)And even in the warned countries, there's an infinitesimal chance that falling debris will actually strike someone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris,\u201d Aerospace said in January. \u201cOnly one\u00a0person\u00a0has ever been\u00a0recorded\u00a0as being\u00a0hit\u00a0by a piece of space debris, and, fortunately, she was not injured.\u201dFascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters)Clarification: A previous version of this story indicated that, as the Tiangong-1 loses its forward speed, gravity will begin to accelerate the craft toward Earth. The space station has continually been pulled toward Earth by gravity.Read more:With Putin\u2019s \u2018invincible\u2019 missile taunt, some hear chilling echoes of Sputnik and the Cold WarA NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthA flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn\u2019t even ignite. Parts of the craft may break off in a storm of superheated plasma, but chunks more than 200 pounds may make it to earth.  T-minus one week until China\u2019s space lab crashes to Earth. Here\u2019s what it will look like.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "T-minus one week until China\u2019s space lab crashes to Earth. Here\u2019s what it will look like. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2968",
        "date": "2018-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/24/t-minus-one-week-until-chinas-space-lab-crashes-to-earth-heres-what-it-will-look-like/",
        "text": "When Tiangong-1 rocketed into the sky in 2011, optimists hoped the space station \u2014\u00a0 literal translation: \u201cheavenly palace\u201d\u00a0\u2014 would be a model for a permanent fixture among the stars, a space laboratory that was among humankind\u2019s first footsteps in the Cosmos.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo, when an out-of-control Tiangong-1 comes plummeting to earth in a superheated trail of plasma and space debris, it may literally be an April Fool\u2019s joke. Scientists have known for more than a year that Tiangong-1 would eventually turn into a man-made meteorite after the station stopped responding to Chinese commands in 2016, according to Space.com. The lab was returning from where it came, they were certain, but when and where it would crash was out of anyone\u2019s control.\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerIn recent months, scientists got better numbers. They told Spain, Portugal, France and Greece a) don\u2019t worry too much, but b) a 19,000-pound flying laboratory might be disintegrating over your skies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOr, in the words of fear-allaying scientists,\u00a0Tiangong-1 was experiencing an \u201cuncontrolled reentry.\u201dBut semantics will do nothing to change the time of the increasingly likely disintegration date: April 1, or April Fools\u2019 Day, according to Business Insider.\u00a0Although there is some wiggle room with that date, scientists have a pretty good sense of the drama that will unfold over the next few days.Tiangong-1 is spinning around our atmosphere at a speed of about 17,500 mph, taking one trip around the planet every 90 minutes. Although the air is thin in the zone where Earth\u2019s atmosphere ends and space begins, it\u2019s enough to slow the craft.\u00a0As it loses its forward speed, gravity will continue to pull the craft toward Earth, and that\u2019s literally when the fireworks start.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHave you ever skipped a stone on a lake?\u201d Jesse Gossner, an orbital mechanics engineer who teaches at the U.S. Air Force\u2019s Advanced Space Operations School, told Business Insider. \u201cIt bounces a few times, then eventually goes into the water.\u201dAdvertisementThe friction caused by thicker air will rip off anything sticking out of the side\u00a0of Tiangong-1 \u2014 solar panels, antennae.\u00a0That friction will also likely surround parts of the craft in superheated plasma. (Really, it\u2019s nothing to worry about, France.)But don\u2019t let that whole \u201csuperheated plasma thing\u201d fool you. All might not be destroyed.Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in handThe station is built like an onion, with layers upon layers of material. While the outside is glowing bright enough to be seen hundreds of miles away, some components nestled inside may be relatively safe.Story continues below advertisementJonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist\u00a0at Harvard University,\u00a0told the Guardian\u00a0that pieces weighing up to 220\u00a0pounds could make it to Earth\u2019s surface.\u00a0According to the latest estimates, the parts of the lab that survive will crash into the ocean.Still, scientists say, eagle-eyed observers probably will see it.\u00a0According to the nonprofit research firm Aerospace, parts of the burning space station \u201cmay be visible and will likely last up to a minute or more, depending on time of day, visibility, conditions and the observer\u2019s location.\u201dSpace agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)And even in the warned countries, there's an infinitesimal chance that falling debris will actually strike someone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris,\u201d Aerospace said in January. \u201cOnly one\u00a0person\u00a0has ever been\u00a0recorded\u00a0as being\u00a0hit\u00a0by a piece of space debris, and, fortunately, she was not injured.\u201dFascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters)Clarification: A previous version of this story indicated that, as the Tiangong-1 loses its forward speed, gravity will begin to accelerate the craft toward Earth. The space station has continually been pulled toward Earth by gravity.Read more:With Putin\u2019s \u2018invincible\u2019 missile taunt, some hear chilling echoes of Sputnik and the Cold WarA NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthA flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn\u2019t even ignite. Parts of the craft may break off in a storm of superheated plasma, but chunks more than 200 pounds may make it to earth.  T-minus one week until China\u2019s space lab crashes to Earth. Here\u2019s what it will look like.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiny Moon May Orbit Distant Object That NASA\u2019s New Horizons Probe Will Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2969",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/science/tiny-moon-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "When the New Horizons spacecraft that passed Pluto in 2015 completes its flyby of 2014 MU69 at the solar system\u2019s edge, it may find a moon. When the New Horizons spacecraft that passed Pluto in 2015 completes its flyby of 2014 MU69 at the solar system\u2019s edge, it may find a moon. In just over a year, a NASA spacecraft will visit a tiny world at the edge of the solar system. Now that tiny object appears to have an even tinier moon, scientists announced on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiny Moon May Orbit Distant Object That NASA\u2019s New Horizons Probe Will Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2970",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/science/tiny-moon-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "When the New Horizons spacecraft that passed Pluto in 2015 completes its flyby of 2014 MU69 at the solar system\u2019s edge, it may find a moon. When the New Horizons spacecraft that passed Pluto in 2015 completes its flyby of 2014 MU69 at the solar system\u2019s edge, it may find a moon. In just over a year, a NASA spacecraft will visit a tiny world at the edge of the solar system. Now that tiny object appears to have an even tinier moon, scientists announced on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Pluto is even colder than it should be (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2971",
        "date": "2017-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/16/why-pluto-is-even-colder-than-it-should-be/",
        "text": "When the New Horizons spacecraft arrived at Pluto\u00a0in 2015, the probe revealed\u00a0the dwarf planet's\u00a0true nature: Pluto is a frozen lump, sure, but it is an odd and interesting lump. Pluto has a heart-shaped icecap that, in theory, could hide\u00a0an ocean. For no obvious reason, Pluto spits out X-rays. And when New Horizons took Pluto's temperature, the dwarf planet was\u00a0cold\u00a0\u2014 colder, even, than anyone had predicted. Researchers\u00a0were puzzled. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEarthbound instruments\u00a0gauged Pluto to be minus-280 degrees Fahrenheit. New Horizons showed that Pluto's thermostat\u00a0was dialed to 330 degrees below. Pluto makes the coldest spot on Earth seem downright balmy: In 2013, researchers announced that a\u00a0NASA satellite\u00a0observed a record\u00a0Antarctic chill at\u00a0minus 135.8, a temperature humans could survive for just three minutes.You would expect Pluto to be chilly. The dwarf planet drifts through the\u00a0solar system's back roads at an average distance of\u00a03.67 billion miles from the sun. Earth is 40 times as close to our star. Pluto is small, which means its gravity is weak. Lacking a firm grip, its atmosphere leaks into space. In fact, the thinness of Pluto's atmosphere made estimating its temperature from Earth very difficult, said Xi Zhang, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.Pluto is not so far away that the chemicals in its atmosphere are\u00a0immune to sunlight. Researchers hypothesize that the sun's ultraviolet rays break down nitrogen, methane and other gases in Pluto's atmosphere, creating a haze of solid particles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNew Horizons' images basically showed a lot of haze particles,\u201d Zhang said. Zhang and his colleagues, in a report\u00a0published in the journal Nature\u00a0this week, argue that Pluto's\u00a0hazy coat explains why the dwarf planet is extra-chilly.Pluto's haze is so abundant that it can absorb a lot of solar\u00a0radiation, Zhang said, though there's a good deal of uncertainty about this complex atmospheric chemistry. \u201cWe really don't know the detailed composition of the haze particles,\u201d he said. What is known is that the smog begins to form high in Pluto's atmosphere, several hundred miles up. Gases condense on the particles.The particles fall downward and chain together, like a formation of skydivers \u2014 except the chemical clusters won't break away before landing. New Horizons detected a thick layer of these hydrocarbon particles, called tholins, that paint Pluto's surface red.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCrucially, the haze particles\u00a0are much larger than gas molecules, which means that the haze's ability to heat up and cool down is greater. Modeling the heat transfer through Pluto's atmosphere, Zhang and his colleagues found that the net effect is cooling; the haze\u00a0absorbs solar energy and radiates it into space, a bit\u00a0like sweat that wicks\u00a0away body heat.Previous hypotheses suggested that gaseous\u00a0hydrogen cyanide\u00a0was the coolant. Recent probes of Pluto, however, found too little of the gas, Zhang said. Water vapor could also be chilling Pluto, but Zhang said the sheer amount of vapor that would be needed made this a dubious prospect.In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Robert West, an expert in planetary atmospheres at\u00a0Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described this conclusion as \u201cremarkable.\u201d\u00a0But West also wrote that \u201cthe case is not yet closed on our understanding of Pluto\u2019s atmospheric temperature.\u201d The study authors' model indicates that Pluto's smog radiates heat into space in the infrared spectrum\u00a0\u2014 a feature that New Horizons was not equipped to observe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResearchers may have their answer within two years. The James Webb Telescope, the observatory slated to\u00a0be launched into space in 2019, will have the right instruments. \u201cThat may be the best telescope we have ever built,\u201d Zhang said. Once aimed\u00a0at Pluto, the Webb telescope will show whether the dwarf planet indeed sweats in infrared.Read more:A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including PlutoFive new studies on Pluto show just how weird the little planet isPluto gets a buddy: A new dwarf planet is discovered in our solar system In 2015, the New Horizons space probe found that Pluto was too cold. A quirk of its atmosphere explains why, researchers say. Why Pluto is even colder than it should be",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Pluto is even colder than it should be (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2972",
        "date": "2017-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/16/why-pluto-is-even-colder-than-it-should-be/",
        "text": "When the New Horizons spacecraft arrived at Pluto\u00a0in 2015, the probe revealed\u00a0the dwarf planet's\u00a0true nature: Pluto is a frozen lump, sure, but it is an odd and interesting lump. Pluto has a heart-shaped icecap that, in theory, could hide\u00a0an ocean. For no obvious reason, Pluto spits out X-rays. And when New Horizons took Pluto's temperature, the dwarf planet was\u00a0cold\u00a0\u2014 colder, even, than anyone had predicted. Researchers\u00a0were puzzled. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEarthbound instruments\u00a0gauged Pluto to be minus-280 degrees Fahrenheit. New Horizons showed that Pluto's thermostat\u00a0was dialed to 330 degrees below. Pluto makes the coldest spot on Earth seem downright balmy: In 2013, researchers announced that a\u00a0NASA satellite\u00a0observed a record\u00a0Antarctic chill at\u00a0minus 135.8, a temperature humans could survive for just three minutes.You would expect Pluto to be chilly. The dwarf planet drifts through the\u00a0solar system's back roads at an average distance of\u00a03.67 billion miles from the sun. Earth is 40 times as close to our star. Pluto is small, which means its gravity is weak. Lacking a firm grip, its atmosphere leaks into space. In fact, the thinness of Pluto's atmosphere made estimating its temperature from Earth very difficult, said Xi Zhang, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz.Pluto is not so far away that the chemicals in its atmosphere are\u00a0immune to sunlight. Researchers hypothesize that the sun's ultraviolet rays break down nitrogen, methane and other gases in Pluto's atmosphere, creating a haze of solid particles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNew Horizons' images basically showed a lot of haze particles,\u201d Zhang said. Zhang and his colleagues, in a report\u00a0published in the journal Nature\u00a0this week, argue that Pluto's\u00a0hazy coat explains why the dwarf planet is extra-chilly.Pluto's haze is so abundant that it can absorb a lot of solar\u00a0radiation, Zhang said, though there's a good deal of uncertainty about this complex atmospheric chemistry. \u201cWe really don't know the detailed composition of the haze particles,\u201d he said. What is known is that the smog begins to form high in Pluto's atmosphere, several hundred miles up. Gases condense on the particles.The particles fall downward and chain together, like a formation of skydivers \u2014 except the chemical clusters won't break away before landing. New Horizons detected a thick layer of these hydrocarbon particles, called tholins, that paint Pluto's surface red.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCrucially, the haze particles\u00a0are much larger than gas molecules, which means that the haze's ability to heat up and cool down is greater. Modeling the heat transfer through Pluto's atmosphere, Zhang and his colleagues found that the net effect is cooling; the haze\u00a0absorbs solar energy and radiates it into space, a bit\u00a0like sweat that wicks\u00a0away body heat.Previous hypotheses suggested that gaseous\u00a0hydrogen cyanide\u00a0was the coolant. Recent probes of Pluto, however, found too little of the gas, Zhang said. Water vapor could also be chilling Pluto, but Zhang said the sheer amount of vapor that would be needed made this a dubious prospect.In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Robert West, an expert in planetary atmospheres at\u00a0Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, described this conclusion as \u201cremarkable.\u201d\u00a0But West also wrote that \u201cthe case is not yet closed on our understanding of Pluto\u2019s atmospheric temperature.\u201d The study authors' model indicates that Pluto's smog radiates heat into space in the infrared spectrum\u00a0\u2014 a feature that New Horizons was not equipped to observe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResearchers may have their answer within two years. The James Webb Telescope, the observatory slated to\u00a0be launched into space in 2019, will have the right instruments. \u201cThat may be the best telescope we have ever built,\u201d Zhang said. Once aimed\u00a0at Pluto, the Webb telescope will show whether the dwarf planet indeed sweats in infrared.Read more:A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including PlutoFive new studies on Pluto show just how weird the little planet isPluto gets a buddy: A new dwarf planet is discovered in our solar system In 2015, the New Horizons space probe found that Pluto was too cold. A quirk of its atmosphere explains why, researchers say. Why Pluto is even colder than it should be",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in April (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2973",
        "date": "2021-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-april/2021/03/27/f0169326-8e4b-11eb-a730-1b4ed9656258_story.html",
        "text": "When April begins, find the dim Mars high in the evening\u2019s western sky, lounging for now in the constellation Taurus.The Red Planet starts the month at +1.3 magnitude (dim, difficult to discern), and it gets dimmer at +1.7 magnitude by the end of April, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Mars \u2014 now with more rover traffic (nasa.gov) \u2014 gives the appearance of moving out of Taurus in the next several weeks toward the twins in the constellation Gemini.Shed your winter blues and catch some red: Aldebaran \u2014 the red giant star in the Taurus bull\u2019s eye, together with the red giant Betelgeuse at Orion\u2019s shoulder \u2014 and the hard-to-see Mars form (in the evening\u2019s western and southwestern sky) a red trio with differing triangles from about April 10 to April 24.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, the skinny crescent of a very young moon approaches Mars on April 15-16, then passes our neighboring planet by April 17.AdvertisementSaturn \u2014 in the southeast before sunrise \u2014 loiters in the constellation Capricornus throughout April. The ringed planet, farther from the Earth than Jupiter, rises around 4:30 a.m. at the start of the month. Jupiter follows, rising about a half-hour later.By month\u2019s end, the ringed planet rises around 2:30 a.m. and leads Jupiter into the morning heavens by nearly 45 minutes later.Much dimmer than Jupiter, the planet Saturn can be seen at zero magnitude, according to the observatory, while Jupiter starts April at a bright -2.1 magnitude, only to become slightly brighter at -2.2 magnitude at month\u2019s end. Throughout April the gaseous giant Jupiter appears to scoot toward the constellation Aquarius.Story continues below advertisementAs you walk your dog before sunrise, look southeast as the elderly last-quarter crescent moon passes under Saturn on April 6 and then passes under Jupiter on April 7, according to the observatory.AdvertisementVenus and Mercury are too close to the sun now, but they will be seen in May.Tonight\u2019s full moon (March 28) formally occurs at 2:48 p.m., according to astronomer Geoff Chester at the U.S. Naval Observatory. For us, the full moon rises in the east at sunset \u2014 as always. Chester notes that this moon is popularly known as the Worm Moon, the Crow Moon or the Sap Moon \u2014 as \u201cwinter loses its grip on the Northern Hemisphere,\u201d he said.April\u2019s full moon on the 26th at 11:32 p.m., according to the observatory, is a perigee (closest point to Earth) full moon, which means it will appear larger than normal. It is popularly known as a \u201csupermoon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile April\u2019s Lyrid meteors peak on the night of April 21-22, according to the American Meteor Society, a few of these streaking bits of comet dust could be washed away by the gibbous first-quarter moon high in the southern sky in the evening. The shower is predicted to peak at about 18 meteors per hour.Down-to-earth events: \u25cf March 30 \u2014 \u201cExoplanets and the Search for Habitable Worlds,\u201d an online lecture by Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hosted by Carnegie Science. 5 p.m. For registration: carnegiescience.edu/events.Advertisement\u25cf April 10 \u2014 \u201cIMAGINE\u2019ing Galactic Magnetic Fields,\u201d an online talk by researcher Tess Jaffe of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She will discuss the ubiquitous magnetic fields across the universe and how they play a key role in astrophysical processes. The event is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. 7 p.m. For registration: ",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Women of color face staggering harassment in space science (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2974",
        "date": "2017-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/11/women-of-color-face-staggering-harassment-in-space-science/",
        "text": "When anthropologist Kathryn Clancy saw the results of her recent survey on harassment in the space sciences, she burst into tears.Forty percent of women of color said that they felt unsafe in their current job as a result of\u00a0harassment about\u00a0their gender.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u00a0shocked and saddened me,\u201d said Clancy, an associate professor at the University of Illinois. She called the statistic\u00a0\u201cone of the strongest pieces of evidence that something is terribly wrong.\u201d The survey results, published Monday in the Journal of Geophyscial Research: Planets, illuminate the environment endured by many people in astronomy and planetary science, particularly women and especially women of color.\u00a0Almost\u00a090 percent of the more than 400 participants in the survey said that they had witnessed sexist, racist or otherwise disparaging remarks\u00a0in their workplaces. Nearly\u00a040 percent said they had been verbally harassed and almost 1\u00a0in 10 had been physically harassed. Most nonwhite respondents said that they had seen their peers make racist comments, and 22\u00a0percent said they\u00a0had heard\u00a0such remarks from their supervisors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe reported rates of sexual harassment were invariably higher for women than for men, and highest of all for minority women.\u00a0More than 1 in 10 white women and nearly 1 in 5 women of color said they had skipped a class, field work opportunity or professional event because they felt unsafe. In addition to the 40 percent of women of color who felt unsafe in their workplaces, 27 percent of white women said they felt unsafe at their jobs.\u201cWhat is different or striking about these data is we were tying it to some extent to outcomes,\u201d Clancy said. The survey results demonstrate not only that women and minorities face harassment while at work but\u00a0also that this harassment limits their careers.The survey asked respondents only to consider experiences at their current job and only within the last five years. \u201cThis is not something that happened a long time ago,\u201d Clancy said. \u201cIt's happening now.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor many women working in space science, the survey confirms what they already knew: The field has a serious diversity problem.Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a\u00a0dark matter expert\u00a0at the University of Washington at Seattle and the 63rd black woman in America to earn a PhD in physics, tweeted: \u201cSpent the last two decades being gaslit when I said this was true. Now we have the data. Very emotional day.\u201dPrescod-Weinstein was a contributor to the June\u00a0issue of the journal Nature Astronomy devoted to gender equity, which also featured studies reporting that women are consistently underrepresented\u00a0on\u00a0NASA's planetary science spacecraft teams\u00a0and that women astronomers\u00a0have their research cited 10 percent less often\u00a0than men. In her article, Prescod-Weinstein\u00a0called attention to intersectionality, or the way that\u00a0the effects of racism and sexism (or homophobia or other forms of bias) compound for people who are at the intersection of multiple underrepresented groups.\u00a0Having been the only black student\u00a0in her doctoral program,\u00a0she recalled\u00a0being the target of racist remarks, being objectified by men, and having to explain to white women why race was relevant to efforts to increase diversity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are unspeakable things too that are not daily or casual,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThese are the conversations that won\u2019t come up in Facebook discussions because our names are attached to them, and outing your PhD adviser \u2014 or pretty much anyone \u2014 as a racist or sexist harasser is like getting in an express shuttle to career death.\u201dEfforts to make the field more inclusive, Prescod-Weinstein argued, often don't consider intersectionality \u2014 and they need to.\u201cFor decades women of color\u00a0have been telling us this, and we just haven\u2019t been listening,\u201d Clancy said, emphasizing that her survey is indebted to work already done by these women.Clancy's survey results reflect Prescod-Weinstein's description of the double jeopardy faced by women of color. These women were more likely to report seeing harassment based on race than minority men, and are more likely to witness sexist remarks\u00a0than white woman.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe survey was conducted online, and participants were recruited through the American Astronomical Society and its committee on the status of women in astronomy. That may have influenced who chose to respond, Clancy said. But she and her colleagues were careful to construct the survey so that they would get the most conservative results.They\u00a0intentionally asked about \u201charassment,\u201d rather than \u201cinsults\u201d or \u201cnegative remarks,\u201d because past research shows that people are less likely to identify with such a harsh, legal term. In addition, research shows that people who have been victims of harassment are less likely to participate in a survey about harassment because of the potential to bring back to mind past trauma.\u201cWe were very intentionally\u00a0conservative and still ended up with appalling\u00a0numbers,\u201d Clancy said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe survey results are sobering, but Clancy and her colleagues note in their study that awareness of science's diversity problem has never been so high. Recent research has made painfully obvious the underrepresentation of women in STEM, especially in the physical sciences. Almost all major scientific conferences now include sessions on the issue. Conversations about sexual harassment have\u00a0gotten louder online, often using the hashtag #astrosh.\u00a0The high profile investigation\u00a0into Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, which concluded he had repeatedly sexually harassed students but was initially let off with only a light warning, pushed the problem even further into the spotlight.\u201cWe are living in a time when advances in the culture of science could match the advances in science and technology,\u201d the study authors\u00a0write.They suggest that the experiences of women and minorities in astronomy could be improved by hiring \u201ccohorts\u201d of underrepresented minorities.\u00a0A 2013 survey of American Astronomical Society members found that nearly three-quarters were men and 84 percent were white; many women and people of color find themselves in labs or faculty meetings where there\u00a0is no one else who looks like them. Reducing this isolation can make it easier to cope with and call out harassment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe authors also propose that schools, labs and other astronomy workplaces hold diversity and cultural awareness trainings \u2014 not just the standard sexual harassment training that many offices require. And the authors point out past studies that found\u00a0swiftly punishing perpetrators of harassment can go a long way toward making workplaces more inclusive.Read more:Sexism in science: Peer editor tells female researchers their study needs a male authorWhy scientists are marching on Washington and more than 600 other citiesGender gap: Women welcome in \u2018hard working\u2019 fields, but \u2018genius\u2019 fields are male-dominated, study finds Forty percent of women of color and 27 percent of white women feel unsafe at work because of harassment, a study found. Women of color face staggering harassment in space science",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Women of color face staggering harassment in space science (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2975",
        "date": "2017-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/11/women-of-color-face-staggering-harassment-in-space-science/",
        "text": "When anthropologist Kathryn Clancy saw the results of her recent survey on harassment in the space sciences, she burst into tears.Forty percent of women of color said that they felt unsafe in their current job as a result of\u00a0harassment about\u00a0their gender.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u00a0shocked and saddened me,\u201d said Clancy, an associate professor at the University of Illinois. She called the statistic\u00a0\u201cone of the strongest pieces of evidence that something is terribly wrong.\u201d The survey results, published Monday in the Journal of Geophyscial Research: Planets, illuminate the environment endured by many people in astronomy and planetary science, particularly women and especially women of color.\u00a0Almost\u00a090 percent of the more than 400 participants in the survey said that they had witnessed sexist, racist or otherwise disparaging remarks\u00a0in their workplaces. Nearly\u00a040 percent said they had been verbally harassed and almost 1\u00a0in 10 had been physically harassed. Most nonwhite respondents said that they had seen their peers make racist comments, and 22\u00a0percent said they\u00a0had heard\u00a0such remarks from their supervisors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe reported rates of sexual harassment were invariably higher for women than for men, and highest of all for minority women.\u00a0More than 1 in 10 white women and nearly 1 in 5 women of color said they had skipped a class, field work opportunity or professional event because they felt unsafe. In addition to the 40 percent of women of color who felt unsafe in their workplaces, 27 percent of white women said they felt unsafe at their jobs.\u201cWhat is different or striking about these data is we were tying it to some extent to outcomes,\u201d Clancy said. The survey results demonstrate not only that women and minorities face harassment while at work but\u00a0also that this harassment limits their careers.The survey asked respondents only to consider experiences at their current job and only within the last five years. \u201cThis is not something that happened a long time ago,\u201d Clancy said. \u201cIt's happening now.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor many women working in space science, the survey confirms what they already knew: The field has a serious diversity problem.Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a\u00a0dark matter expert\u00a0at the University of Washington at Seattle and the 63rd black woman in America to earn a PhD in physics, tweeted: \u201cSpent the last two decades being gaslit when I said this was true. Now we have the data. Very emotional day.\u201dPrescod-Weinstein was a contributor to the June\u00a0issue of the journal Nature Astronomy devoted to gender equity, which also featured studies reporting that women are consistently underrepresented\u00a0on\u00a0NASA's planetary science spacecraft teams\u00a0and that women astronomers\u00a0have their research cited 10 percent less often\u00a0than men. In her article, Prescod-Weinstein\u00a0called attention to intersectionality, or the way that\u00a0the effects of racism and sexism (or homophobia or other forms of bias) compound for people who are at the intersection of multiple underrepresented groups.\u00a0Having been the only black student\u00a0in her doctoral program,\u00a0she recalled\u00a0being the target of racist remarks, being objectified by men, and having to explain to white women why race was relevant to efforts to increase diversity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are unspeakable things too that are not daily or casual,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThese are the conversations that won\u2019t come up in Facebook discussions because our names are attached to them, and outing your PhD adviser \u2014 or pretty much anyone \u2014 as a racist or sexist harasser is like getting in an express shuttle to career death.\u201dEfforts to make the field more inclusive, Prescod-Weinstein argued, often don't consider intersectionality \u2014 and they need to.\u201cFor decades women of color\u00a0have been telling us this, and we just haven\u2019t been listening,\u201d Clancy said, emphasizing that her survey is indebted to work already done by these women.Clancy's survey results reflect Prescod-Weinstein's description of the double jeopardy faced by women of color. These women were more likely to report seeing harassment based on race than minority men, and are more likely to witness sexist remarks\u00a0than white woman.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe survey was conducted online, and participants were recruited through the American Astronomical Society and its committee on the status of women in astronomy. That may have influenced who chose to respond, Clancy said. But she and her colleagues were careful to construct the survey so that they would get the most conservative results.They\u00a0intentionally asked about \u201charassment,\u201d rather than \u201cinsults\u201d or \u201cnegative remarks,\u201d because past research shows that people are less likely to identify with such a harsh, legal term. In addition, research shows that people who have been victims of harassment are less likely to participate in a survey about harassment because of the potential to bring back to mind past trauma.\u201cWe were very intentionally\u00a0conservative and still ended up with appalling\u00a0numbers,\u201d Clancy said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe survey results are sobering, but Clancy and her colleagues note in their study that awareness of science's diversity problem has never been so high. Recent research has made painfully obvious the underrepresentation of women in STEM, especially in the physical sciences. Almost all major scientific conferences now include sessions on the issue. Conversations about sexual harassment have\u00a0gotten louder online, often using the hashtag #astrosh.\u00a0The high profile investigation\u00a0into Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, which concluded he had repeatedly sexually harassed students but was initially let off with only a light warning, pushed the problem even further into the spotlight.\u201cWe are living in a time when advances in the culture of science could match the advances in science and technology,\u201d the study authors\u00a0write.They suggest that the experiences of women and minorities in astronomy could be improved by hiring \u201ccohorts\u201d of underrepresented minorities.\u00a0A 2013 survey of American Astronomical Society members found that nearly three-quarters were men and 84 percent were white; many women and people of color find themselves in labs or faculty meetings where there\u00a0is no one else who looks like them. Reducing this isolation can make it easier to cope with and call out harassment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe authors also propose that schools, labs and other astronomy workplaces hold diversity and cultural awareness trainings \u2014 not just the standard sexual harassment training that many offices require. And the authors point out past studies that found\u00a0swiftly punishing perpetrators of harassment can go a long way toward making workplaces more inclusive.Read more:Sexism in science: Peer editor tells female researchers their study needs a male authorWhy scientists are marching on Washington and more than 600 other citiesGender gap: Women welcome in \u2018hard working\u2019 fields, but \u2018genius\u2019 fields are male-dominated, study finds Forty percent of women of color and 27 percent of white women feel unsafe at work because of harassment, a study found. Women of color face staggering harassment in space science",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Down here on Earth, NASA hunts for best ways we can live out there in the cosmos (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2976",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/down-here-on-earth-nasa-hunts-for-best-ways-we-can-live-out-there-in-the-cosmos/2019/10/03/d9be96b8-e547-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the best way to prepare for life beyond Earth?The answer is closer to home than you might think.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA knows where to look. Its analog missions \u2014 field tests in places that share similarities with space environments \u2014 assemble astronauts and scientists all over the globe in an effort to prepare humans for long-term space travel. Analog missions are devoted to everything from understanding space radiation to prepping for different gravity fields. They also help humans face the harsh possibilities that may one day challenge astronauts on long missions \u2014 hostile environments, cramped quarters and the psychological realities of life in isolation.Story continues below advertisementRight now, NASA has 14 active analog missions. Locations range from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where scientists study the effects of space radiation, to Antarctica\u2019s McMurdo Station, where teams are testing how to work together in space (and figuring out what might go wrong during long missions in isolation).AdvertisementThough many of the agency\u2019s analog missions take place on solid ground, some can be found at the bottom of the ocean. In June, NASA conducted a 10-day expedition deep in the Atlantic Ocean.The 23rd NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO-23) brought together an all-female team of astronauts and marine scientists, who spent time traversing the ocean floor and testing out potential methods for anchoring spacecrafts and exploring the moon\u2019s surface.Story continues below advertisementAnalog missions use the unique challenges of some of Earth\u2019s most extreme places to their advantage. Take Canada\u2019s Devon Island, the world\u2019s largest uninhabited island. It\u2019s on Baffin Bay in the Arctic Circle \u2014 and it\u2019s barren, cold and extremely isolated. That makes it perfect for simulations of life on Mars and other planets. Every summer, a group of international researchers lives there in an effort to test how astronauts might map Mars on a future mission.Want to know more about NASA\u2019s analog missions? Visit NASA.gov/analogs.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds50 astronauts, in their own wordsThe six biggest questions about space travel, answered The space agency conducts 14 field tests in places that share similarities with environments in the cosmos. Down here on Earth, NASA hunts for best ways we can live out there in the cosmos",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Down here on Earth, NASA hunts for best ways we can live out there in the cosmos (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2977",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/down-here-on-earth-nasa-hunts-for-best-ways-we-can-live-out-there-in-the-cosmos/2019/10/03/d9be96b8-e547-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the best way to prepare for life beyond Earth?The answer is closer to home than you might think.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA knows where to look. Its analog missions \u2014 field tests in places that share similarities with space environments \u2014 assemble astronauts and scientists all over the globe in an effort to prepare humans for long-term space travel. Analog missions are devoted to everything from understanding space radiation to prepping for different gravity fields. They also help humans face the harsh possibilities that may one day challenge astronauts on long missions \u2014 hostile environments, cramped quarters and the psychological realities of life in isolation.Story continues below advertisementRight now, NASA has 14 active analog missions. Locations range from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where scientists study the effects of space radiation, to Antarctica\u2019s McMurdo Station, where teams are testing how to work together in space (and figuring out what might go wrong during long missions in isolation).AdvertisementThough many of the agency\u2019s analog missions take place on solid ground, some can be found at the bottom of the ocean. In June, NASA conducted a 10-day expedition deep in the Atlantic Ocean.The 23rd NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO-23) brought together an all-female team of astronauts and marine scientists, who spent time traversing the ocean floor and testing out potential methods for anchoring spacecrafts and exploring the moon\u2019s surface.Story continues below advertisementAnalog missions use the unique challenges of some of Earth\u2019s most extreme places to their advantage. Take Canada\u2019s Devon Island, the world\u2019s largest uninhabited island. It\u2019s on Baffin Bay in the Arctic Circle \u2014 and it\u2019s barren, cold and extremely isolated. That makes it perfect for simulations of life on Mars and other planets. Every summer, a group of international researchers lives there in an effort to test how astronauts might map Mars on a future mission.Want to know more about NASA\u2019s analog missions? Visit NASA.gov/analogs.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds50 astronauts, in their own wordsThe six biggest questions about space travel, answered The space agency conducts 14 field tests in places that share similarities with environments in the cosmos. Down here on Earth, NASA hunts for best ways we can live out there in the cosmos",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Down here on Earth, NASA hunts for best ways we can live out there in the cosmos (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2978",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/down-here-on-earth-nasa-hunts-for-best-ways-we-can-live-out-there-in-the-cosmos/2019/10/03/d9be96b8-e547-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the best way to prepare for life beyond Earth?The answer is closer to home than you might think.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA knows where to look. Its analog missions \u2014 field tests in places that share similarities with space environments \u2014 assemble astronauts and scientists all over the globe in an effort to prepare humans for long-term space travel. Analog missions are devoted to everything from understanding space radiation to prepping for different gravity fields. They also help humans face the harsh possibilities that may one day challenge astronauts on long missions \u2014 hostile environments, cramped quarters and the psychological realities of life in isolation.Story continues below advertisementRight now, NASA has 14 active analog missions. Locations range from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where scientists study the effects of space radiation, to Antarctica\u2019s McMurdo Station, where teams are testing how to work together in space (and figuring out what might go wrong during long missions in isolation).AdvertisementThough many of the agency\u2019s analog missions take place on solid ground, some can be found at the bottom of the ocean. In June, NASA conducted a 10-day expedition deep in the Atlantic Ocean.The 23rd NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO-23) brought together an all-female team of astronauts and marine scientists, who spent time traversing the ocean floor and testing out potential methods for anchoring spacecrafts and exploring the moon\u2019s surface.Story continues below advertisementAnalog missions use the unique challenges of some of Earth\u2019s most extreme places to their advantage. Take Canada\u2019s Devon Island, the world\u2019s largest uninhabited island. It\u2019s on Baffin Bay in the Arctic Circle \u2014 and it\u2019s barren, cold and extremely isolated. That makes it perfect for simulations of life on Mars and other planets. Every summer, a group of international researchers lives there in an effort to test how astronauts might map Mars on a future mission.Want to know more about NASA\u2019s analog missions? Visit NASA.gov/analogs.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds50 astronauts, in their own wordsThe six biggest questions about space travel, answered The space agency conducts 14 field tests in places that share similarities with environments in the cosmos. Down here on Earth, NASA hunts for best ways we can live out there in the cosmos",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2979",
        "date": "2018-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/03/marsquakes-are-a-thing-and-this-nasa-spacecraft-will-go-look-for-them/",
        "text": "What do you call an earthquake when it happens on Mars?This is not the opener to a nerdy\u00a0joke. It's a central question facing NASA's newest spacecraft, InSight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rocket carrying the probe\u00a0launched Saturday from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base into a foggy predawn sky, carrying instruments\u00a0to\u00a0take the temperature and pulse of the Red Planet's deep interior.\u00a0Even the subtlest shake \u2014 known as, you got it, a marsquake \u2014 could carry clues about how the planet formed and what goes on today beneath its surface. Most intriguing of all,\u00a0InSight aims to\u00a0help scientists understand why Earth and Mars, which formed from the same primordial ingredients more than 4.5 billion years ago, now look so different.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEarth has plate tectonics, so its initial crust is essentially gone, it's all been recycled,\u201d explained\u00a0Suzanne\u00a0Smrekar, the mission's deputy principal investigator. \u201cMars gives us an opportunity to see the materials, the structure, the chemical reactions that are close to what we see in the interior of Earth, but it's preserved from the first 10 million years [of the solar system]. It gives us a chance to go back in time.\u201dAdvertisementLiftoff\u00a0Saturday was\u00a0NASA's first interplanetary launch from the West Coast. And if all goes according to plan, InSight will be the first mission to study seismic waves on another planet. (NASA tried, and failed, to do this with its twin Viking landers in the 1970s.)The probe had\u00a0company atop its Atlas V launch vehicle: two briefcase-size satellites called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. The twin spacecraft will fly behind InSight on its 300-million-mile, six-month journey, allowing NASA to test new, miniaturized deep-space communication equipment. If they make it to the planet, they can relay back data from InSight as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere and touches down on the surface.Story continues below advertisementInSight's ability to send back\u00a0scientific data does not depend on the success of the MarCO satellites, though. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has circled Mars since 2006, also will be recording broadcasts from the lander.AdvertisementBut success \u201cmeans that when we land on Mars in the future, we can choose to have something like MarCO go with it, and we'd be able to land in places that the orbiter might have a hard time hearing the landing happening,\u201d said Joel Krajewski, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the project manager for MarCO. \u201cAnd we\u00a0can contemplate doing this kind of relay for missions to other bodies that right now don\u2019t have orbiters around them to serve this useful function.\u201dInSight has been\u00a0postponed once; in 2015, NASA pushed back launch by 26 months after finding leaks in\u00a0the vacuum enclosure for the seismometer. The delay added $154 million to the cost of the mission.After touching down, InSight, which stands for \u201cInterior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,\u201d will spend the next two years sitting\u00a0patiently in the middle of\u00a0Elysium Planitia, a vast, flat plain near the Martian equator.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe lander's dome-shaped seismometer\u00a0resembles the tools\u00a0used to detect quakes on Earth. But the biggest seismic waves on this planet are generated by tectonic plates drifting and colliding. Tremors on Mars \u2014 if they happen \u2014 are probably caused by its cooling.The ultrasensitive instrument also can detect seismic rumblings of other origins: the thump of a meteorite impact, shivers\u00a0produced by dust storms.Whatever the source, the seismic waves that ripple through the planet will be distorted by\u00a0changes in the materials they encounter. InSight's seismometer is capable of detecting those distortions, giving scientists insight (get it?) into\u00a0lingering questions about the planet's interior: Where is the boundary between crust and mantle? Are there plumes of active volcanoes or reservoirs of liquid water hiding beneath the surface?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother instrument, the\u00a0Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe, will drill almost 16 feet into the planet\u2019s surface \u2014 farther than any craft has dug. Its goal is to measure the geothermal heat coming out of Mars as a result of radioactive decay. That in turn should reveal the kinds of materials from which Mars first formed,\u00a0Smrekar explained.Meanwhile, two antennas will track how the north pole \u201cwobbles\u201d during the planet's orbits around the sun\u00a0\u2014 an indicator of\u00a0the size and composition of the Martian core.\u201cIt's kind of like the difference between how a raw egg and a hard-boiled egg spins,\u201d\u00a0Smrekar said. \u201cWe'll be trying to determine whether the core is liquid or solid.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe results might be the key to a four-billion-year-old mystery.\u00a0Magnetization in ancient rocks suggests that the Red Planet\u00a0had a global magnetic field like Earth's in its very early history, one that was powered by a spinning liquid mantle and metallic core. That\u00a0field probably protected the planet from solar wind, helping it hold on to its atmosphere. In that era, Mars was a warm, wet place, brimming with oceans whose shorelines can still be seen today.\u00a0That planet and ours may have been nearly twins.AdvertisementBut Mars's internal dynamo died, and its magnetic field dissipated. Unprotected, its water and atmosphere were stripped away by a bombardment of charged particles streaming from the sun.\u00a0InSight's revelations about Mars's core could explain how\u00a0that disaster played out, resulting in the apparently lifeless\u00a0world we know today.Unfortunately, the planet's hostility extends to\u00a0the poor, puny spacecraft sent by humans. Mars missions fail about 50 percent of the time, in part thanks to an atmosphere that's too thin to slow down an incoming object, but thick enough to generate friction as the craft hurtles toward the ground. Mars's fearsome reputation is so well established that scientists refer\u00a0to the entry, descent and landing process as \u201cthe seven minutes of terror.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut those terrifying minutes are still six months away. On Saturday, NASA and those Californians who were willing to wake up early simply enjoyed\u00a0 the launch: a flare of light streaking southward, en route to another world.Read more:Mars: A virtual reality tour of the Red Planet'A fantastic find': Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surfaceCuriosity\u2019s five-year journey across Mars \u2014 in one stunning photo The lander carries seismic sensors and other instruments to \u201ctake the pulse\u201d of the Red Planet. NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2980",
        "date": "2018-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/03/marsquakes-are-a-thing-and-this-nasa-spacecraft-will-go-look-for-them/",
        "text": "What do you call an earthquake when it happens on Mars?This is not the opener to a nerdy\u00a0joke. It's a central question facing NASA's newest spacecraft, InSight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rocket carrying the probe\u00a0launched Saturday from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base into a foggy predawn sky, carrying instruments\u00a0to\u00a0take the temperature and pulse of the Red Planet's deep interior.\u00a0Even the subtlest shake \u2014 known as, you got it, a marsquake \u2014 could carry clues about how the planet formed and what goes on today beneath its surface. Most intriguing of all,\u00a0InSight aims to\u00a0help scientists understand why Earth and Mars, which formed from the same primordial ingredients more than 4.5 billion years ago, now look so different.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEarth has plate tectonics, so its initial crust is essentially gone, it's all been recycled,\u201d explained\u00a0Suzanne\u00a0Smrekar, the mission's deputy principal investigator. \u201cMars gives us an opportunity to see the materials, the structure, the chemical reactions that are close to what we see in the interior of Earth, but it's preserved from the first 10 million years [of the solar system]. It gives us a chance to go back in time.\u201dAdvertisementLiftoff\u00a0Saturday was\u00a0NASA's first interplanetary launch from the West Coast. And if all goes according to plan, InSight will be the first mission to study seismic waves on another planet. (NASA tried, and failed, to do this with its twin Viking landers in the 1970s.)The probe had\u00a0company atop its Atlas V launch vehicle: two briefcase-size satellites called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. The twin spacecraft will fly behind InSight on its 300-million-mile, six-month journey, allowing NASA to test new, miniaturized deep-space communication equipment. If they make it to the planet, they can relay back data from InSight as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere and touches down on the surface.Story continues below advertisementInSight's ability to send back\u00a0scientific data does not depend on the success of the MarCO satellites, though. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has circled Mars since 2006, also will be recording broadcasts from the lander.AdvertisementBut success \u201cmeans that when we land on Mars in the future, we can choose to have something like MarCO go with it, and we'd be able to land in places that the orbiter might have a hard time hearing the landing happening,\u201d said Joel Krajewski, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the project manager for MarCO. \u201cAnd we\u00a0can contemplate doing this kind of relay for missions to other bodies that right now don\u2019t have orbiters around them to serve this useful function.\u201dInSight has been\u00a0postponed once; in 2015, NASA pushed back launch by 26 months after finding leaks in\u00a0the vacuum enclosure for the seismometer. The delay added $154 million to the cost of the mission.After touching down, InSight, which stands for \u201cInterior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,\u201d will spend the next two years sitting\u00a0patiently in the middle of\u00a0Elysium Planitia, a vast, flat plain near the Martian equator.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe lander's dome-shaped seismometer\u00a0resembles the tools\u00a0used to detect quakes on Earth. But the biggest seismic waves on this planet are generated by tectonic plates drifting and colliding. Tremors on Mars \u2014 if they happen \u2014 are probably caused by its cooling.The ultrasensitive instrument also can detect seismic rumblings of other origins: the thump of a meteorite impact, shivers\u00a0produced by dust storms.Whatever the source, the seismic waves that ripple through the planet will be distorted by\u00a0changes in the materials they encounter. InSight's seismometer is capable of detecting those distortions, giving scientists insight (get it?) into\u00a0lingering questions about the planet's interior: Where is the boundary between crust and mantle? Are there plumes of active volcanoes or reservoirs of liquid water hiding beneath the surface?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother instrument, the\u00a0Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe, will drill almost 16 feet into the planet\u2019s surface \u2014 farther than any craft has dug. Its goal is to measure the geothermal heat coming out of Mars as a result of radioactive decay. That in turn should reveal the kinds of materials from which Mars first formed,\u00a0Smrekar explained.Meanwhile, two antennas will track how the north pole \u201cwobbles\u201d during the planet's orbits around the sun\u00a0\u2014 an indicator of\u00a0the size and composition of the Martian core.\u201cIt's kind of like the difference between how a raw egg and a hard-boiled egg spins,\u201d\u00a0Smrekar said. \u201cWe'll be trying to determine whether the core is liquid or solid.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe results might be the key to a four-billion-year-old mystery.\u00a0Magnetization in ancient rocks suggests that the Red Planet\u00a0had a global magnetic field like Earth's in its very early history, one that was powered by a spinning liquid mantle and metallic core. That\u00a0field probably protected the planet from solar wind, helping it hold on to its atmosphere. In that era, Mars was a warm, wet place, brimming with oceans whose shorelines can still be seen today.\u00a0That planet and ours may have been nearly twins.AdvertisementBut Mars's internal dynamo died, and its magnetic field dissipated. Unprotected, its water and atmosphere were stripped away by a bombardment of charged particles streaming from the sun.\u00a0InSight's revelations about Mars's core could explain how\u00a0that disaster played out, resulting in the apparently lifeless\u00a0world we know today.Unfortunately, the planet's hostility extends to\u00a0the poor, puny spacecraft sent by humans. Mars missions fail about 50 percent of the time, in part thanks to an atmosphere that's too thin to slow down an incoming object, but thick enough to generate friction as the craft hurtles toward the ground. Mars's fearsome reputation is so well established that scientists refer\u00a0to the entry, descent and landing process as \u201cthe seven minutes of terror.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut those terrifying minutes are still six months away. On Saturday, NASA and those Californians who were willing to wake up early simply enjoyed\u00a0 the launch: a flare of light streaking southward, en route to another world.Read more:Mars: A virtual reality tour of the Red Planet'A fantastic find': Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surfaceCuriosity\u2019s five-year journey across Mars \u2014 in one stunning photo The lander carries seismic sensors and other instruments to \u201ctake the pulse\u201d of the Red Planet. NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2981",
        "date": "2018-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/03/marsquakes-are-a-thing-and-this-nasa-spacecraft-will-go-look-for-them/",
        "text": "What do you call an earthquake when it happens on Mars?This is not the opener to a nerdy\u00a0joke. It's a central question facing NASA's newest spacecraft, InSight.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rocket carrying the probe\u00a0launched Saturday from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base into a foggy predawn sky, carrying instruments\u00a0to\u00a0take the temperature and pulse of the Red Planet's deep interior.\u00a0Even the subtlest shake \u2014 known as, you got it, a marsquake \u2014 could carry clues about how the planet formed and what goes on today beneath its surface. Most intriguing of all,\u00a0InSight aims to\u00a0help scientists understand why Earth and Mars, which formed from the same primordial ingredients more than 4.5 billion years ago, now look so different.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEarth has plate tectonics, so its initial crust is essentially gone, it's all been recycled,\u201d explained\u00a0Suzanne\u00a0Smrekar, the mission's deputy principal investigator. \u201cMars gives us an opportunity to see the materials, the structure, the chemical reactions that are close to what we see in the interior of Earth, but it's preserved from the first 10 million years [of the solar system]. It gives us a chance to go back in time.\u201dAdvertisementLiftoff\u00a0Saturday was\u00a0NASA's first interplanetary launch from the West Coast. And if all goes according to plan, InSight will be the first mission to study seismic waves on another planet. (NASA tried, and failed, to do this with its twin Viking landers in the 1970s.)The probe had\u00a0company atop its Atlas V launch vehicle: two briefcase-size satellites called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. The twin spacecraft will fly behind InSight on its 300-million-mile, six-month journey, allowing NASA to test new, miniaturized deep-space communication equipment. If they make it to the planet, they can relay back data from InSight as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere and touches down on the surface.Story continues below advertisementInSight's ability to send back\u00a0scientific data does not depend on the success of the MarCO satellites, though. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has circled Mars since 2006, also will be recording broadcasts from the lander.AdvertisementBut success \u201cmeans that when we land on Mars in the future, we can choose to have something like MarCO go with it, and we'd be able to land in places that the orbiter might have a hard time hearing the landing happening,\u201d said Joel Krajewski, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the project manager for MarCO. \u201cAnd we\u00a0can contemplate doing this kind of relay for missions to other bodies that right now don\u2019t have orbiters around them to serve this useful function.\u201dInSight has been\u00a0postponed once; in 2015, NASA pushed back launch by 26 months after finding leaks in\u00a0the vacuum enclosure for the seismometer. The delay added $154 million to the cost of the mission.After touching down, InSight, which stands for \u201cInterior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,\u201d will spend the next two years sitting\u00a0patiently in the middle of\u00a0Elysium Planitia, a vast, flat plain near the Martian equator.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe lander's dome-shaped seismometer\u00a0resembles the tools\u00a0used to detect quakes on Earth. But the biggest seismic waves on this planet are generated by tectonic plates drifting and colliding. Tremors on Mars \u2014 if they happen \u2014 are probably caused by its cooling.The ultrasensitive instrument also can detect seismic rumblings of other origins: the thump of a meteorite impact, shivers\u00a0produced by dust storms.Whatever the source, the seismic waves that ripple through the planet will be distorted by\u00a0changes in the materials they encounter. InSight's seismometer is capable of detecting those distortions, giving scientists insight (get it?) into\u00a0lingering questions about the planet's interior: Where is the boundary between crust and mantle? Are there plumes of active volcanoes or reservoirs of liquid water hiding beneath the surface?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother instrument, the\u00a0Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe, will drill almost 16 feet into the planet\u2019s surface \u2014 farther than any craft has dug. Its goal is to measure the geothermal heat coming out of Mars as a result of radioactive decay. That in turn should reveal the kinds of materials from which Mars first formed,\u00a0Smrekar explained.Meanwhile, two antennas will track how the north pole \u201cwobbles\u201d during the planet's orbits around the sun\u00a0\u2014 an indicator of\u00a0the size and composition of the Martian core.\u201cIt's kind of like the difference between how a raw egg and a hard-boiled egg spins,\u201d\u00a0Smrekar said. \u201cWe'll be trying to determine whether the core is liquid or solid.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe results might be the key to a four-billion-year-old mystery.\u00a0Magnetization in ancient rocks suggests that the Red Planet\u00a0had a global magnetic field like Earth's in its very early history, one that was powered by a spinning liquid mantle and metallic core. That\u00a0field probably protected the planet from solar wind, helping it hold on to its atmosphere. In that era, Mars was a warm, wet place, brimming with oceans whose shorelines can still be seen today.\u00a0That planet and ours may have been nearly twins.AdvertisementBut Mars's internal dynamo died, and its magnetic field dissipated. Unprotected, its water and atmosphere were stripped away by a bombardment of charged particles streaming from the sun.\u00a0InSight's revelations about Mars's core could explain how\u00a0that disaster played out, resulting in the apparently lifeless\u00a0world we know today.Unfortunately, the planet's hostility extends to\u00a0the poor, puny spacecraft sent by humans. Mars missions fail about 50 percent of the time, in part thanks to an atmosphere that's too thin to slow down an incoming object, but thick enough to generate friction as the craft hurtles toward the ground. Mars's fearsome reputation is so well established that scientists refer\u00a0to the entry, descent and landing process as \u201cthe seven minutes of terror.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut those terrifying minutes are still six months away. On Saturday, NASA and those Californians who were willing to wake up early simply enjoyed\u00a0 the launch: a flare of light streaking southward, en route to another world.Read more:Mars: A virtual reality tour of the Red Planet'A fantastic find': Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surfaceCuriosity\u2019s five-year journey across Mars \u2014 in one stunning photo The lander carries seismic sensors and other instruments to \u201ctake the pulse\u201d of the Red Planet. NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Prospect of life on Venus propels interest in robotic missions (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2982",
        "date": "2020-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/life-on-venus-robotic-missions/2020/09/19/fba4ec66-f782-11ea-89e3-4b9efa36dc64_story.html",
        "text": "Venus, at least, is having a good 2020.The hothouse planet, Earth\u2019s nearest planetary neighbor, suddenly looks more intriguing as a potential abode of life. On Monday, an international team of astronomers announced that it had remotely detected the presence of phosphine, a potential chemical \u201cbiosignature\u201d in Venus\u2019s atmosphere \u2014 possibly generated by living organisms. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe next obvious step is sending a robotic probe to take a closer look, something NASA and its Russian counterpart seem interested in doing. The U.S. space agency was already considering going forward with two different Venus missions, either or both of which could potentially be modified to look for phosphine or attempt a more direct detection of alien organisms.Story continues below advertisementRussia, meanwhile, has a long history of sending robotic spacecraft there, and this past week, the head of Roscosmos, that country\u2019s space agency, called Venus a \u201cRussian planet.\u201dAdvertisementBut both agencies could also get scooped. The day after the news broke, a privately funded organization backed by Israeli Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner, called Breakthrough Initiatives, announced that it had enlisted a team of top scientists to study ways to pull off a near-term Venus exploration mission.\u201cWe just want to do something small and fast and focused,\u201d said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who is leading the Breakthrough study and is also a co-author of the paper in Nature Astronomy that announced the detection of phosphine.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCan we send a microscope and look for life directly?\u201d she asked. It\u2019s conceivable, she said. \u201cObviously, we\u2019d love to see little microbes swimming around.\u201dLike other scientists, Seager knows that any claim of a discovery of extraterrestrial life would require tremendously persuasive evidence. Finding phosphine is not the same thing as finding hard evidence of life.AdvertisementOn Earth, the molecule can be produced through the metabolic processes of life as we know it, and through industrial manufacturing. The scientists who reported the phosphine discovery on Venus said they could think of no natural explanation, other than the presence of life, for the abundance of the molecule. And they detected it in the part of the Venusian atmosphere assumed to be most congenial to life.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAll we can say is we have a confident detection of phosphine gas at 20 parts per billion coming from 50 to 60 kilometers from the surface, where the temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life,\u201d Seager said.What kind of life? No one knows. The Venusians might have a truly alien biochemistry adapted to one of the harshest environments in the solar system.Venus is so hot \u2014 about 900 degrees \u2014 that the rocks literally glow at the surface. But this was not always the case.AdvertisementVenus, Earth and Mars all formed more than 4\u00a0billion years ago, and for a good chunk of their early history, they had many similarities, including moderate temperatures that allowed water to be liquid at the surface. It is conceivable that life existed on all three planets several billion years ago.Story continues below advertisementBut Venus\u2019s location so near the sun turned out to be disastrous. As the young sun aged, it grew hotter. Venus\u2019s oceans eventually boiled away. That flooded the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which had previously been largely dissolved in the ocean. The result was a runaway greenhouse effect.Astrobiologist David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson notes that the reflectivity of Venus\u2019s thick cloud cover is what makes the planet so bright in our night sky. The clouds are the result of ongoing volcanic activity, he said.Advertisement\u201cSo with your naked eye, you can confirm the presence of volcanic activity on our twin planet,\u201d Grinspoon said in an email. \u201cIt\u2019s hot enough on the surface to melt lead and zinc and some aluminum alloys. The Soviets sent a metallic bust of Lenin in one of their early landers, which must have quickly become a puddle.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut higher in the atmosphere, the temperature is more benign. In 1967, astronomer Carl Sagan speculated that microbes could survive in the Venusian clouds. Because the clouds are shot through with sulfuric acid, however, these microbes would probably need a protective shell.The Soviet Union had a special fascination with Venus and sent pioneering space probes there as part of its Venera program starting in the 1960s. The Soviets eventually managed to land six spacecraft on Venus, and they sent back images of a stark, rocky landscape.Advertisement\u201cBy the end of the \u201960s, the romance of Venus was gone,\u201d said Sanjay Limaye, a University of Wisconsin at Madison planetary scientist who, like Grinspoon, is a longtime proponent of the Venusian life hypothesis.Story continues below advertisementAnother Venus advocate is Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College and the chair of the Venus advisory committee for NASA. She knows her favorite planet is overshadowed by Mars, estimating the number of Venus specialists as no more than a tenth of those for Mars. There hasn\u2019t been a major mission to\u00a0explore Venus in a quarter-century, she said.But Venus, she argues, is unfairly overlooked, and the planetary science budget should be more balanced, in part because new research suggests that Venus probably had a congenial environment for several billion years.In fact, she said, Venus probably had oceans before Earth did. It had plenty of time for life to evolve \u2014 potentially into complex organisms. It\u2019s not out of the question that the rocks of Venus have fossils, she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe probability of there ever having been life on Venus has skyrocketed,\u201d Dyar said, referring to research on the longevity of Venusian oceans. \u201cThere are atmospheric models that show that Venus had as much water as Earth and had it in fact earlier.\u201dDyar is one of the scientists pushing for a mission called Veritas, which would send a probe to Venus to map its surface. It is one of four proposed planetary missions that are competing for NASA funding as part of the agency\u2019s Discovery Program, which backs relatively low-cost robotic explorations of the solar system.\u201cRight now, we know the topography of Pluto\u201d \u2014 the dwarf planet in the exurbs of the solar system \u2014 \u201cbetter than we know the topography of Venus,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementAnother proposed mission, DaVinci+, which is under development at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., would send a probe through the atmosphere of Venus and to the surface with the goal of understanding the history of water on the planet. According to NASA, the mission\u2019s instruments would be \u201cencapsulated within a purpose-built descent sphere to protect them from the intense environment of Venus.\u201d The mission would send back images of the surface.AdvertisementThe other two planetary missions competing for dollars are Trident, which would send a probe to study Neptune\u2019s large, icy moon Triton \u2014 which may have a subsurface ocean \u2014 and the Io Volcano Observer, or IVO, which would study one of the four large moons of Jupiter.NASA is expected to make its selection next April. The agency\u2019s reaction to the phosphine announcement was notably cautious. Its administrator, Jim Bridenstine, posted to his blog a description of the many astrobiology programs backed by NASA but did not promise any special treatment for Venus.A separate statement from the agency was similarly equivocal, but it mentioned one of the attractive features of Venus as a target of exploration: It is \u201ca planetary destination we can reach with smaller missions.\u201dProximity, in other words, is a cosmological virtue.\n\nScientists spot potential sign of life in Venus atmosphereHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions.A runaway greenhouse effect turned Venus into \u2018hell.\u2019 Could the same thing happen here? NASA ponders two Venusian probes; Russian official calls Venus a \u201cRussian planet.\u201d Prospect of life on Venus propels interest in robotic missions",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Prospect of life on Venus propels interest in robotic missions (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2983",
        "date": "2020-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/life-on-venus-robotic-missions/2020/09/19/fba4ec66-f782-11ea-89e3-4b9efa36dc64_story.html",
        "text": "Venus, at least, is having a good 2020.The hothouse planet, Earth\u2019s nearest planetary neighbor, suddenly looks more intriguing as a potential abode of life. On Monday, an international team of astronomers announced that it had remotely detected the presence of phosphine, a potential chemical \u201cbiosignature\u201d in Venus\u2019s atmosphere \u2014 possibly generated by living organisms. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe next obvious step is sending a robotic probe to take a closer look, something NASA and its Russian counterpart seem interested in doing. The U.S. space agency was already considering going forward with two different Venus missions, either or both of which could potentially be modified to look for phosphine or attempt a more direct detection of alien organisms.Story continues below advertisementRussia, meanwhile, has a long history of sending robotic spacecraft there, and this past week, the head of Roscosmos, that country\u2019s space agency, called Venus a \u201cRussian planet.\u201dAdvertisementBut both agencies could also get scooped. The day after the news broke, a privately funded organization backed by Israeli Russian billionaire investor Yuri Milner, called Breakthrough Initiatives, announced that it had enlisted a team of top scientists to study ways to pull off a near-term Venus exploration mission.\u201cWe just want to do something small and fast and focused,\u201d said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who is leading the Breakthrough study and is also a co-author of the paper in Nature Astronomy that announced the detection of phosphine.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCan we send a microscope and look for life directly?\u201d she asked. It\u2019s conceivable, she said. \u201cObviously, we\u2019d love to see little microbes swimming around.\u201dLike other scientists, Seager knows that any claim of a discovery of extraterrestrial life would require tremendously persuasive evidence. Finding phosphine is not the same thing as finding hard evidence of life.AdvertisementOn Earth, the molecule can be produced through the metabolic processes of life as we know it, and through industrial manufacturing. The scientists who reported the phosphine discovery on Venus said they could think of no natural explanation, other than the presence of life, for the abundance of the molecule. And they detected it in the part of the Venusian atmosphere assumed to be most congenial to life.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAll we can say is we have a confident detection of phosphine gas at 20 parts per billion coming from 50 to 60 kilometers from the surface, where the temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life,\u201d Seager said.What kind of life? No one knows. The Venusians might have a truly alien biochemistry adapted to one of the harshest environments in the solar system.Venus is so hot \u2014 about 900 degrees \u2014 that the rocks literally glow at the surface. But this was not always the case.AdvertisementVenus, Earth and Mars all formed more than 4\u00a0billion years ago, and for a good chunk of their early history, they had many similarities, including moderate temperatures that allowed water to be liquid at the surface. It is conceivable that life existed on all three planets several billion years ago.Story continues below advertisementBut Venus\u2019s location so near the sun turned out to be disastrous. As the young sun aged, it grew hotter. Venus\u2019s oceans eventually boiled away. That flooded the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which had previously been largely dissolved in the ocean. The result was a runaway greenhouse effect.Astrobiologist David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson notes that the reflectivity of Venus\u2019s thick cloud cover is what makes the planet so bright in our night sky. The clouds are the result of ongoing volcanic activity, he said.Advertisement\u201cSo with your naked eye, you can confirm the presence of volcanic activity on our twin planet,\u201d Grinspoon said in an email. \u201cIt\u2019s hot enough on the surface to melt lead and zinc and some aluminum alloys. The Soviets sent a metallic bust of Lenin in one of their early landers, which must have quickly become a puddle.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut higher in the atmosphere, the temperature is more benign. In 1967, astronomer Carl Sagan speculated that microbes could survive in the Venusian clouds. Because the clouds are shot through with sulfuric acid, however, these microbes would probably need a protective shell.The Soviet Union had a special fascination with Venus and sent pioneering space probes there as part of its Venera program starting in the 1960s. The Soviets eventually managed to land six spacecraft on Venus, and they sent back images of a stark, rocky landscape.Advertisement\u201cBy the end of the \u201960s, the romance of Venus was gone,\u201d said Sanjay Limaye, a University of Wisconsin at Madison planetary scientist who, like Grinspoon, is a longtime proponent of the Venusian life hypothesis.Story continues below advertisementAnother Venus advocate is Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College and the chair of the Venus advisory committee for NASA. She knows her favorite planet is overshadowed by Mars, estimating the number of Venus specialists as no more than a tenth of those for Mars. There hasn\u2019t been a major mission to\u00a0explore Venus in a quarter-century, she said.But Venus, she argues, is unfairly overlooked, and the planetary science budget should be more balanced, in part because new research suggests that Venus probably had a congenial environment for several billion years.In fact, she said, Venus probably had oceans before Earth did. It had plenty of time for life to evolve \u2014 potentially into complex organisms. It\u2019s not out of the question that the rocks of Venus have fossils, she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe probability of there ever having been life on Venus has skyrocketed,\u201d Dyar said, referring to research on the longevity of Venusian oceans. \u201cThere are atmospheric models that show that Venus had as much water as Earth and had it in fact earlier.\u201dDyar is one of the scientists pushing for a mission called Veritas, which would send a probe to Venus to map its surface. It is one of four proposed planetary missions that are competing for NASA funding as part of the agency\u2019s Discovery Program, which backs relatively low-cost robotic explorations of the solar system.\u201cRight now, we know the topography of Pluto\u201d \u2014 the dwarf planet in the exurbs of the solar system \u2014 \u201cbetter than we know the topography of Venus,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementAnother proposed mission, DaVinci+, which is under development at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., would send a probe through the atmosphere of Venus and to the surface with the goal of understanding the history of water on the planet. According to NASA, the mission\u2019s instruments would be \u201cencapsulated within a purpose-built descent sphere to protect them from the intense environment of Venus.\u201d The mission would send back images of the surface.AdvertisementThe other two planetary missions competing for dollars are Trident, which would send a probe to study Neptune\u2019s large, icy moon Triton \u2014 which may have a subsurface ocean \u2014 and the Io Volcano Observer, or IVO, which would study one of the four large moons of Jupiter.NASA is expected to make its selection next April. The agency\u2019s reaction to the phosphine announcement was notably cautious. Its administrator, Jim Bridenstine, posted to his blog a description of the many astrobiology programs backed by NASA but did not promise any special treatment for Venus.A separate statement from the agency was similarly equivocal, but it mentioned one of the attractive features of Venus as a target of exploration: It is \u201ca planetary destination we can reach with smaller missions.\u201dProximity, in other words, is a cosmological virtue.\n\nScientists spot potential sign of life in Venus atmosphereHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions.A runaway greenhouse effect turned Venus into \u2018hell.\u2019 Could the same thing happen here? NASA ponders two Venusian probes; Russian official calls Venus a \u201cRussian planet.\u201d Prospect of life on Venus propels interest in robotic missions",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 12-mile-wide body of water lies beneath a Mars ice cap (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2984",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/25/a-12-mile-wide-body-of-water-lies-beneath-the-ice-cap-of-mars/",
        "text": "Using a satellite to peer beneath layers of dust and ice at Mars's south pole,\u00a0scientists have detected a 12-mile-wide span of briny water, a large, stable reservoir akin to lakes buried beneath the Antarctic ice sheet on Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe long-sought discovery, the largest detection of liquid water on the Red Planet yet, raises the tantalizing possibility of a very cold, very salty niche where life might have once existed \u2014 or even persisted. \"This could be, perhaps, the first habitat we find on Mars,\" said planetary scientist Roberto Orosei of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy, who led the study published in the journal Science.To be clear, there's no sign of any Martian microbes swimming around, and the environment is not\u00a0obviously hospitable \u2014 the water at the base of the polar cap is estimated to be minus-90 degrees Fahrenheit, far below the typical freezing point of water. Scientists believe the water is kept in liquid form by a salty brine that Orosei and colleagues speculatively describe as a \"sludge.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists aren't even sure what to call the body of water, which they\u00a0detected by analyzing radar echoes gathered over three years by the orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. They cannot see the bottom with existing equipment, but they estimate it is at least three feet deep; otherwise, they would not have detected it at all. It could be a subglacial lake, an aquifer or a layer of sediment saturated with water.Scientists explained July 25 that the 12-mile body of water discovered under an ice cap in Mars raises the possibility of life on the red planet. (Reuters)'A fantastic find': Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surfaceEvidence of water has been seen on Mars many times, but it is usually ancient,\u00a0fleeting\u00a0or frozen. The detection of a long-standing reservoir of liquid water is thrilling evidence of an idea that began to be debated three decades ago: that there could be water at the base of Mars's ice caps, similar to what's present on Earth.The finding, if confirmed, will provide insight into Mars's climate history, spur a search for other subsurface water sources, provide a possible resource if people ever travel to the planet \u2014 and help focus the ever-hopeful search for signs of Martian life, past or present.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne of the ingredients that scientists look for in the search for life is water \u2014 not just trace amounts of humidity or ice that freezes and vaporizes, but stable sources of water \u2014 such as an underground lake or aquifer.\"When extremes occur, life moves into the rocks. That's a fundamental aspect of astrobiology,\" said Jim Green, chief scientist of NASA, who was not involved in the study. \"The concept of liquid water somewhere on Mars leads one to believe that there may be an environment that would harbor extant life.\"Orosei and colleagues used a radar instrument called MARSIS aboard the Mars Express spacecraft to make their discovery. MARSIS sends electromagnetic pulses down to the planet and measures how they echo back \u2014 and Orosei and colleagues discovered especially bright reflections from a broad region spanning about 12 miles,\u00a0about a mile below the ice.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe measurements were taken over three years. Then, concerned their hope that the bright spots might be water could blind them to other explanations, Orosei and colleagues spent almost as long trying to demolish their own data. Mars, like many frontier areas of science, has a history of exciting findings \u2014 such as the discovery of flowing water on the surface in 2015 \u2014 that turn out to be explained mostly by something far more mundane, such as\u00a0flowing dust.Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in an email that the interpretation that it is liquid water is \"certainly plausible, but it's not quite a slam dunk yet.\"\"On Earth, nobody would be surprised by such a discovery. The normal interpretation would be we have discovered a subglacial lake, and people would drill and find if that's true,\" Orosei said. \"On Mars, that\u2019s much more difficult, of course, because we can\u2019t really drill into the ice.\"NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft launches on mission to study \u2018Marsquakes\u2019Green said that a lander mission called InSight that's already on its way to Mars might be able to help provide corroborating evidence. The lander, set to touch down in November, has a heat probe instrument that will drill five meters into the ground and take temperature measurements. That will allow scientists to create models of the heat flowing out of the planet, like a cake that's cooling after it has been baked \u2014 and should give insight into whether it's plausible the temperature could\u00a0be high enough to keep water in liquid form at that depth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral researchers said it would be crucial\u00a0to figure out whether this body of water is the only one or part of an interconnecting body of underground aquifers \u2014 in part because a network increases the possibility it could have harbored life.Stephen Clifford, a scientist who works at the Planetary Science Institute, first laid out the idea that there could be bodies of water beneath Mars's polar caps three decades ago.\"It is rewarding, in the sense that the work that I did was purely theoretical, and I think it\u2019s always a good thing when someone finds some evidence your theoretical work has some relation to reality,\" Clifford said. \"This result has made the effort worth it \u2014 and the wait for the evidence worth it.\"Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters)Read more:NASA's next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientistShark scientists explain what's right and what's wrong about Shark Week A cold, salty body of water beneath the Martian south pole is a possible \"habitat.\" A 12-mile-wide body of water lies beneath a Mars ice cap",
        "author": "Carolyn Y. Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Gas Could Hint at Signs of Life on Mars. Why Hasn\u2019t a New Spacecraft Found It? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2985",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/mars-methane-life.html",
        "text": "Two spacecraft have detected methane in the Martian air. But the Trace Gas Orbiter, with more sensitive instruments, has come up empty. Two spacecraft have detected methane in the Martian air. But the Trace Gas Orbiter, with more sensitive instruments, has come up empty. Methane, a gas that offers a tantalizing hint of possible life below the barren landscape of Mars, displays a now-you-see-it, now-you-don\u2019t quality that is confounding scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Gas Could Hint at Signs of Life on Mars. Why Hasn\u2019t a New Spacecraft Found It? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2986",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/mars-methane-life.html",
        "text": "Two spacecraft have detected methane in the Martian air. But the Trace Gas Orbiter, with more sensitive instruments, has come up empty. Two spacecraft have detected methane in the Martian air. But the Trace Gas Orbiter, with more sensitive instruments, has come up empty. Methane, a gas that offers a tantalizing hint of possible life below the barren landscape of Mars, displays a now-you-see-it, now-you-don\u2019t quality that is confounding scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Gas Could Hint at Signs of Life on Mars. Why Hasn\u2019t a New Spacecraft Found It? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2987",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/mars-methane-life.html",
        "text": "Two spacecraft have detected methane in the Martian air. But the Trace Gas Orbiter, with more sensitive instruments, has come up empty. Two spacecraft have detected methane in the Martian air. But the Trace Gas Orbiter, with more sensitive instruments, has come up empty. Methane, a gas that offers a tantalizing hint of possible life below the barren landscape of Mars, displays a now-you-see-it, now-you-don\u2019t quality that is confounding scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2988",
        "date": "2018-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/09/hubble-space-telescope-is-limping-after-mechanical-failure/",
        "text": "Two of NASA\u2019s premier space telescopes, Hubble and Kepler, are currently out of commission \u2014 sad, if not entirely surprising, news for astronomers who depend on data from NASA\u2019s aging fleet.The 28-year-old Hubble went into temporary safe mode Friday after detecting a mechanical failure with one of its gyroscopes \u2014 the spinning instruments that keep the telescope pointed steadily toward its targets. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, Kepler, the powerhouse planet hunter that has detected some 4,000 planets since it launched in 2009, has been in sleep mode since Sept. 26 to preserve dwindling fuel before its next data dump.Both telescopes are nearing the ends of storied careers in space.Story continues below advertisementNASA stopped servicing Hubble in 2009, shortly before ending the shuttle program. Two of the six gyroscopes installed during the 2009 repair mission have already broken down, and the one that recently stopped working had been exhibiting what NASA called \u201cend of life\u201d behavior for about a year. It was no surprise when the slumping device stopped working a few days ago.AdvertisementBut then the backup gyro didn\u2019t kick into action, creating a \u201cvery stressful weekend\u201d for staffers at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, deputy mission head Rachel Osten said on Twitter. All astronomy work is on hold while a technical review board attempts to figure out what is wrong.The news prompted an outpouring of concern from scientists online. One Twitter account posted a \u201cHubble Prayer\u201d: \u201cGive us this day a fix for our broken gyroscope, and boot us out of safe mode operation. Thy vision come, space exploration be done, in Goddard Space Flight Center as it is in LEO.\u201d (LEO is a commonly used acronym for low earth orbit.)Story continues below advertisementBut NASA astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the mission, said her team is hopeful it will be able to \u201creawaken\u201d the malfunctioning gyro.AdvertisementIf scientists aren\u2019t able to get the device up and running again, Hubble will revert to reduced gyro mode, using only one of its two remaining gyroscopes at a time. That mode would limit where Hubble can point but prolong the overall mission.\u201cIt just takes a little finesse,\u201d Wiseman said of this mode. \u201cBut we will be able to achieve excellent science with Hubble quite a few years into the future.\u201dNASA had planned for Hubble to stay in the sky long enough to observe in concert with the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated Goliath built to capture the oldest light in the universe. But repeated budget problems and human failures have delayed the Webb telescope\u2019s launch by more than a decade; it is now not expected to launch until at least 2021. NASA\u2019s operations contract for Hubble ends that year, though optimists say the spacecraft could last into the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of NASA\u2019s top space telescopes are more than 10 years old. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have all exceeded the planned duration of their original missions by at least five years.The end for Kepler is even nearer. The spacecraft has already operated for more than double the length of its original 3\u00bd-year mission \u2014 functioning even after the second of four reaction wheels that keep it oriented was lost in 2013. It has long been expected to run out of propellant sometime this year, but zero gravity makes it hard to measure how much fuel is left in the spacecraft\u2019s tank.\u201cIt\u2019s like trying to decide when to gas up your car. Do you stop now? Or try to make it to the next station?\u201d Kepler system engineer Charlie Sobeck wrote in a blog post this year. \u201cIn our case, there is no next station, so we want to stop collecting data while we\u2019re still comfortable that we can aim the spacecraft to bring it back to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe recent decision to put the telescope in sleep mode is intended to preserve its remaining fuel until Kepler can make contact with the Deep Space Network, the global system of antennas through which spacecraft communicate with Earth. When Kepler\u2019s allotted DSN time begins Wednesday, it will switch on and beam back data on more than 30,000 stars and galaxies in the constellation Aquarius collected during its most recent 27-day observing campaign.There is no guarantee that the spacecraft will be able to transmit the science data.\u201cThe fact that we managed to collect data in light of Kepler\u2019s low fuel pressure is yet another incredible achievement by our engineers,\u201d the mission\u2019s guest observer office tweeted last week, adding, \u201cIf successful, it would be an unexpected bonus.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOnce NASA decides to close out the mission, engineers will command the spacecraft to turn off its transmitters \u2014 preventing \u201cpollution\u201d of the airwaves. Then the spacecraft will be allowed to drift, alone in the dark.AdvertisementIts wide, Earth-trailing orbit around the sun means that it will fall farther behind our planet until Earth effectively \u201claps\u201d it, giving the spacecraft a gravity boost that slings it forward until it nearly catches up with Earth from behind. This graceful gravitational dance may continue indefinitely, with Kepler never coming closer than the moon, until the sun expands into a red giant and engulfs the inner solar system in the far distant future, or some other cosmic phenomenon intervenes.In the meantime, Kepler\u2019s demise doesn\u2019t signal the end of humanity\u2019s planet hunting. The spacecraft\u2019s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), was launched into orbit in April and has already sent back its first science images and detected two potential planets.Story continues below advertisementJust last week, Hubble observations combined with Kepler data helped solidify evidence for the first suspected \u201cexomoon\u201d \u2014 a moon orbiting a planet in a star system other than our own.Advertisement\u201cThese missions are important to people, in the sense that they have become eyes to the universe,\u201d Wiseman said, acknowledging the popular dismay at this latest reminder of the spacecraft\u2019s mortality.But Hubble isn\u2019t dead yet \u2014 not nearly. Wiseman said there are more professional journal articles published using Hubble data today than there were a decade ago. \u201cWe\u2019re learning things with Hubble we never planned when it was launched.\u201d Another of NASA's top space telescopes, Kepler, is almost out of fuel. The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2989",
        "date": "2018-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/09/hubble-space-telescope-is-limping-after-mechanical-failure/",
        "text": "Two of NASA\u2019s premier space telescopes, Hubble and Kepler, are currently out of commission \u2014 sad, if not entirely surprising, news for astronomers who depend on data from NASA\u2019s aging fleet.The 28-year-old Hubble went into temporary safe mode Friday after detecting a mechanical failure with one of its gyroscopes \u2014 the spinning instruments that keep the telescope pointed steadily toward its targets. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, Kepler, the powerhouse planet hunter that has detected some 4,000 planets since it launched in 2009, has been in sleep mode since Sept. 26 to preserve dwindling fuel before its next data dump.Both telescopes are nearing the ends of storied careers in space.Story continues below advertisementNASA stopped servicing Hubble in 2009, shortly before ending the shuttle program. Two of the six gyroscopes installed during the 2009 repair mission have already broken down, and the one that recently stopped working had been exhibiting what NASA called \u201cend of life\u201d behavior for about a year. It was no surprise when the slumping device stopped working a few days ago.AdvertisementBut then the backup gyro didn\u2019t kick into action, creating a \u201cvery stressful weekend\u201d for staffers at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, deputy mission head Rachel Osten said on Twitter. All astronomy work is on hold while a technical review board attempts to figure out what is wrong.The news prompted an outpouring of concern from scientists online. One Twitter account posted a \u201cHubble Prayer\u201d: \u201cGive us this day a fix for our broken gyroscope, and boot us out of safe mode operation. Thy vision come, space exploration be done, in Goddard Space Flight Center as it is in LEO.\u201d (LEO is a commonly used acronym for low earth orbit.)Story continues below advertisementBut NASA astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the mission, said her team is hopeful it will be able to \u201creawaken\u201d the malfunctioning gyro.AdvertisementIf scientists aren\u2019t able to get the device up and running again, Hubble will revert to reduced gyro mode, using only one of its two remaining gyroscopes at a time. That mode would limit where Hubble can point but prolong the overall mission.\u201cIt just takes a little finesse,\u201d Wiseman said of this mode. \u201cBut we will be able to achieve excellent science with Hubble quite a few years into the future.\u201dNASA had planned for Hubble to stay in the sky long enough to observe in concert with the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated Goliath built to capture the oldest light in the universe. But repeated budget problems and human failures have delayed the Webb telescope\u2019s launch by more than a decade; it is now not expected to launch until at least 2021. NASA\u2019s operations contract for Hubble ends that year, though optimists say the spacecraft could last into the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of NASA\u2019s top space telescopes are more than 10 years old. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have all exceeded the planned duration of their original missions by at least five years.The end for Kepler is even nearer. The spacecraft has already operated for more than double the length of its original 3\u00bd-year mission \u2014 functioning even after the second of four reaction wheels that keep it oriented was lost in 2013. It has long been expected to run out of propellant sometime this year, but zero gravity makes it hard to measure how much fuel is left in the spacecraft\u2019s tank.\u201cIt\u2019s like trying to decide when to gas up your car. Do you stop now? Or try to make it to the next station?\u201d Kepler system engineer Charlie Sobeck wrote in a blog post this year. \u201cIn our case, there is no next station, so we want to stop collecting data while we\u2019re still comfortable that we can aim the spacecraft to bring it back to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe recent decision to put the telescope in sleep mode is intended to preserve its remaining fuel until Kepler can make contact with the Deep Space Network, the global system of antennas through which spacecraft communicate with Earth. When Kepler\u2019s allotted DSN time begins Wednesday, it will switch on and beam back data on more than 30,000 stars and galaxies in the constellation Aquarius collected during its most recent 27-day observing campaign.There is no guarantee that the spacecraft will be able to transmit the science data.\u201cThe fact that we managed to collect data in light of Kepler\u2019s low fuel pressure is yet another incredible achievement by our engineers,\u201d the mission\u2019s guest observer office tweeted last week, adding, \u201cIf successful, it would be an unexpected bonus.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOnce NASA decides to close out the mission, engineers will command the spacecraft to turn off its transmitters \u2014 preventing \u201cpollution\u201d of the airwaves. Then the spacecraft will be allowed to drift, alone in the dark.AdvertisementIts wide, Earth-trailing orbit around the sun means that it will fall farther behind our planet until Earth effectively \u201claps\u201d it, giving the spacecraft a gravity boost that slings it forward until it nearly catches up with Earth from behind. This graceful gravitational dance may continue indefinitely, with Kepler never coming closer than the moon, until the sun expands into a red giant and engulfs the inner solar system in the far distant future, or some other cosmic phenomenon intervenes.In the meantime, Kepler\u2019s demise doesn\u2019t signal the end of humanity\u2019s planet hunting. The spacecraft\u2019s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), was launched into orbit in April and has already sent back its first science images and detected two potential planets.Story continues below advertisementJust last week, Hubble observations combined with Kepler data helped solidify evidence for the first suspected \u201cexomoon\u201d \u2014 a moon orbiting a planet in a star system other than our own.Advertisement\u201cThese missions are important to people, in the sense that they have become eyes to the universe,\u201d Wiseman said, acknowledging the popular dismay at this latest reminder of the spacecraft\u2019s mortality.But Hubble isn\u2019t dead yet \u2014 not nearly. Wiseman said there are more professional journal articles published using Hubble data today than there were a decade ago. \u201cWe\u2019re learning things with Hubble we never planned when it was launched.\u201d Another of NASA's top space telescopes, Kepler, is almost out of fuel. The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2990",
        "date": "2018-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/09/hubble-space-telescope-is-limping-after-mechanical-failure/",
        "text": "Two of NASA\u2019s premier space telescopes, Hubble and Kepler, are currently out of commission \u2014 sad, if not entirely surprising, news for astronomers who depend on data from NASA\u2019s aging fleet.The 28-year-old Hubble went into temporary safe mode Friday after detecting a mechanical failure with one of its gyroscopes \u2014 the spinning instruments that keep the telescope pointed steadily toward its targets. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, Kepler, the powerhouse planet hunter that has detected some 4,000 planets since it launched in 2009, has been in sleep mode since Sept. 26 to preserve dwindling fuel before its next data dump.Both telescopes are nearing the ends of storied careers in space.Story continues below advertisementNASA stopped servicing Hubble in 2009, shortly before ending the shuttle program. Two of the six gyroscopes installed during the 2009 repair mission have already broken down, and the one that recently stopped working had been exhibiting what NASA called \u201cend of life\u201d behavior for about a year. It was no surprise when the slumping device stopped working a few days ago.AdvertisementBut then the backup gyro didn\u2019t kick into action, creating a \u201cvery stressful weekend\u201d for staffers at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, deputy mission head Rachel Osten said on Twitter. All astronomy work is on hold while a technical review board attempts to figure out what is wrong.The news prompted an outpouring of concern from scientists online. One Twitter account posted a \u201cHubble Prayer\u201d: \u201cGive us this day a fix for our broken gyroscope, and boot us out of safe mode operation. Thy vision come, space exploration be done, in Goddard Space Flight Center as it is in LEO.\u201d (LEO is a commonly used acronym for low earth orbit.)Story continues below advertisementBut NASA astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the mission, said her team is hopeful it will be able to \u201creawaken\u201d the malfunctioning gyro.AdvertisementIf scientists aren\u2019t able to get the device up and running again, Hubble will revert to reduced gyro mode, using only one of its two remaining gyroscopes at a time. That mode would limit where Hubble can point but prolong the overall mission.\u201cIt just takes a little finesse,\u201d Wiseman said of this mode. \u201cBut we will be able to achieve excellent science with Hubble quite a few years into the future.\u201dNASA had planned for Hubble to stay in the sky long enough to observe in concert with the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated Goliath built to capture the oldest light in the universe. But repeated budget problems and human failures have delayed the Webb telescope\u2019s launch by more than a decade; it is now not expected to launch until at least 2021. NASA\u2019s operations contract for Hubble ends that year, though optimists say the spacecraft could last into the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of NASA\u2019s top space telescopes are more than 10 years old. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have all exceeded the planned duration of their original missions by at least five years.The end for Kepler is even nearer. The spacecraft has already operated for more than double the length of its original 3\u00bd-year mission \u2014 functioning even after the second of four reaction wheels that keep it oriented was lost in 2013. It has long been expected to run out of propellant sometime this year, but zero gravity makes it hard to measure how much fuel is left in the spacecraft\u2019s tank.\u201cIt\u2019s like trying to decide when to gas up your car. Do you stop now? Or try to make it to the next station?\u201d Kepler system engineer Charlie Sobeck wrote in a blog post this year. \u201cIn our case, there is no next station, so we want to stop collecting data while we\u2019re still comfortable that we can aim the spacecraft to bring it back to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe recent decision to put the telescope in sleep mode is intended to preserve its remaining fuel until Kepler can make contact with the Deep Space Network, the global system of antennas through which spacecraft communicate with Earth. When Kepler\u2019s allotted DSN time begins Wednesday, it will switch on and beam back data on more than 30,000 stars and galaxies in the constellation Aquarius collected during its most recent 27-day observing campaign.There is no guarantee that the spacecraft will be able to transmit the science data.\u201cThe fact that we managed to collect data in light of Kepler\u2019s low fuel pressure is yet another incredible achievement by our engineers,\u201d the mission\u2019s guest observer office tweeted last week, adding, \u201cIf successful, it would be an unexpected bonus.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOnce NASA decides to close out the mission, engineers will command the spacecraft to turn off its transmitters \u2014 preventing \u201cpollution\u201d of the airwaves. Then the spacecraft will be allowed to drift, alone in the dark.AdvertisementIts wide, Earth-trailing orbit around the sun means that it will fall farther behind our planet until Earth effectively \u201claps\u201d it, giving the spacecraft a gravity boost that slings it forward until it nearly catches up with Earth from behind. This graceful gravitational dance may continue indefinitely, with Kepler never coming closer than the moon, until the sun expands into a red giant and engulfs the inner solar system in the far distant future, or some other cosmic phenomenon intervenes.In the meantime, Kepler\u2019s demise doesn\u2019t signal the end of humanity\u2019s planet hunting. The spacecraft\u2019s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), was launched into orbit in April and has already sent back its first science images and detected two potential planets.Story continues below advertisementJust last week, Hubble observations combined with Kepler data helped solidify evidence for the first suspected \u201cexomoon\u201d \u2014 a moon orbiting a planet in a star system other than our own.Advertisement\u201cThese missions are important to people, in the sense that they have become eyes to the universe,\u201d Wiseman said, acknowledging the popular dismay at this latest reminder of the spacecraft\u2019s mortality.But Hubble isn\u2019t dead yet \u2014 not nearly. Wiseman said there are more professional journal articles published using Hubble data today than there were a decade ago. \u201cWe\u2019re learning things with Hubble we never planned when it was launched.\u201d Another of NASA's top space telescopes, Kepler, is almost out of fuel. The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2991",
        "date": "2018-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/09/hubble-space-telescope-is-limping-after-mechanical-failure/",
        "text": "Two of NASA\u2019s premier space telescopes, Hubble and Kepler, are currently out of commission \u2014 sad, if not entirely surprising, news for astronomers who depend on data from NASA\u2019s aging fleet.The 28-year-old Hubble went into temporary safe mode Friday after detecting a mechanical failure with one of its gyroscopes \u2014 the spinning instruments that keep the telescope pointed steadily toward its targets. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, Kepler, the powerhouse planet hunter that has detected some 4,000 planets since it launched in 2009, has been in sleep mode since Sept. 26 to preserve dwindling fuel before its next data dump.Both telescopes are nearing the ends of storied careers in space.Story continues below advertisementNASA stopped servicing Hubble in 2009, shortly before ending the shuttle program. Two of the six gyroscopes installed during the 2009 repair mission have already broken down, and the one that recently stopped working had been exhibiting what NASA called \u201cend of life\u201d behavior for about a year. It was no surprise when the slumping device stopped working a few days ago.AdvertisementBut then the backup gyro didn\u2019t kick into action, creating a \u201cvery stressful weekend\u201d for staffers at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, deputy mission head Rachel Osten said on Twitter. All astronomy work is on hold while a technical review board attempts to figure out what is wrong.The news prompted an outpouring of concern from scientists online. One Twitter account posted a \u201cHubble Prayer\u201d: \u201cGive us this day a fix for our broken gyroscope, and boot us out of safe mode operation. Thy vision come, space exploration be done, in Goddard Space Flight Center as it is in LEO.\u201d (LEO is a commonly used acronym for low earth orbit.)Story continues below advertisementBut NASA astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the mission, said her team is hopeful it will be able to \u201creawaken\u201d the malfunctioning gyro.AdvertisementIf scientists aren\u2019t able to get the device up and running again, Hubble will revert to reduced gyro mode, using only one of its two remaining gyroscopes at a time. That mode would limit where Hubble can point but prolong the overall mission.\u201cIt just takes a little finesse,\u201d Wiseman said of this mode. \u201cBut we will be able to achieve excellent science with Hubble quite a few years into the future.\u201dNASA had planned for Hubble to stay in the sky long enough to observe in concert with the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated Goliath built to capture the oldest light in the universe. But repeated budget problems and human failures have delayed the Webb telescope\u2019s launch by more than a decade; it is now not expected to launch until at least 2021. NASA\u2019s operations contract for Hubble ends that year, though optimists say the spacecraft could last into the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of NASA\u2019s top space telescopes are more than 10 years old. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have all exceeded the planned duration of their original missions by at least five years.The end for Kepler is even nearer. The spacecraft has already operated for more than double the length of its original 3\u00bd-year mission \u2014 functioning even after the second of four reaction wheels that keep it oriented was lost in 2013. It has long been expected to run out of propellant sometime this year, but zero gravity makes it hard to measure how much fuel is left in the spacecraft\u2019s tank.\u201cIt\u2019s like trying to decide when to gas up your car. Do you stop now? Or try to make it to the next station?\u201d Kepler system engineer Charlie Sobeck wrote in a blog post this year. \u201cIn our case, there is no next station, so we want to stop collecting data while we\u2019re still comfortable that we can aim the spacecraft to bring it back to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe recent decision to put the telescope in sleep mode is intended to preserve its remaining fuel until Kepler can make contact with the Deep Space Network, the global system of antennas through which spacecraft communicate with Earth. When Kepler\u2019s allotted DSN time begins Wednesday, it will switch on and beam back data on more than 30,000 stars and galaxies in the constellation Aquarius collected during its most recent 27-day observing campaign.There is no guarantee that the spacecraft will be able to transmit the science data.\u201cThe fact that we managed to collect data in light of Kepler\u2019s low fuel pressure is yet another incredible achievement by our engineers,\u201d the mission\u2019s guest observer office tweeted last week, adding, \u201cIf successful, it would be an unexpected bonus.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOnce NASA decides to close out the mission, engineers will command the spacecraft to turn off its transmitters \u2014 preventing \u201cpollution\u201d of the airwaves. Then the spacecraft will be allowed to drift, alone in the dark.AdvertisementIts wide, Earth-trailing orbit around the sun means that it will fall farther behind our planet until Earth effectively \u201claps\u201d it, giving the spacecraft a gravity boost that slings it forward until it nearly catches up with Earth from behind. This graceful gravitational dance may continue indefinitely, with Kepler never coming closer than the moon, until the sun expands into a red giant and engulfs the inner solar system in the far distant future, or some other cosmic phenomenon intervenes.In the meantime, Kepler\u2019s demise doesn\u2019t signal the end of humanity\u2019s planet hunting. The spacecraft\u2019s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), was launched into orbit in April and has already sent back its first science images and detected two potential planets.Story continues below advertisementJust last week, Hubble observations combined with Kepler data helped solidify evidence for the first suspected \u201cexomoon\u201d \u2014 a moon orbiting a planet in a star system other than our own.Advertisement\u201cThese missions are important to people, in the sense that they have become eyes to the universe,\u201d Wiseman said, acknowledging the popular dismay at this latest reminder of the spacecraft\u2019s mortality.But Hubble isn\u2019t dead yet \u2014 not nearly. Wiseman said there are more professional journal articles published using Hubble data today than there were a decade ago. \u201cWe\u2019re learning things with Hubble we never planned when it was launched.\u201d Another of NASA's top space telescopes, Kepler, is almost out of fuel. The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2992",
        "date": "2018-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/30/nasa-has-new-years-date-with-distant-space-rock-heres-how-watch/",
        "text": "To ancient explorers, \u201cultima Thule,\u201d or the most distant region, was what lay past the northernmost edges of maps, beyond the borders of the known world.So when NASA chose a target for its New Horizons spacecraft that was farther than anything previously explored, Ultima Thule seemed a fitting moniker. The far-flung space rock is an inhabitant of the Kuiper belt, the ring of debris that encircles the icy outer reaches of the solar system. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUltima Thule is so dim and so distant that scientists aren\u2019t even certain what it looks like. Some of their only information about its size and shape comes from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow it cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementNew Horizons will finally fly by its target just after midnight on Jan. 1, taking close-up photographs and sophisticated scientific measurements of what it sees. By the time the first images and data stream back to Earth, the borders of the known world will have expanded once more.Advertisement\u201cThis is just raw exploration,\u201d said Alan Stern, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator for the mission. \u201cNo one has ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a point of light. No one has ever seen an object that\u2019s frozen almost to absolute zero. There are a lot of ideas and every one of them might be wrong.\u201dHe took a breath. \u201cWe\u2019ll find out Tuesday.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA is celebrating the record-setting encounter at what is perhaps the solar system\u2019s nerdiest New Year\u2019s party. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which built and operates the spacecraft, scientists will count down to the moment of New Horizons\u2019 closest approach, at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time, then reconvene 10 hours later to watch the first signals from the flyby stream on their screens. (It takes more than six hours for light to travel from Ultima Thule to Earth.) NASA\u2019s vaunted social media operation, a casualty of the partial government shutdown, has been temporarily restored to cover the event. The countdown, signal acquisition and subsequent news conferences will be streamed live on NASA TV and YouTube.AdvertisementAlice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons at APL, said the spacecraft entered \u201cencounter mode\u201d on Wednesday. This configuration limits the spacecraft\u2019s communication with Earth, commanding it to quickly address any technical issues on its own, then get back to science. Though nerve-racking for engineers, encounter mode ensures that New Horizons makes the most of its brief time near Ultima Thule.\u201cBecause this is a flyby, we only get one chance to get it right,\u201d Bowman said.New Horizons left Earth in January 2006. It was the first mission designed to explore the most distant part of the solar system. Nine years and 3.5 billion miles later, it took the first-ever close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter that flyby, Stern and his colleagues set about searching for a new target in the Kuiper belt, which extends from the edge of Neptune\u2019s orbit out to about 5 billion miles from the sun.Until the 1990s, no one knew what was hiding out there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as faint as it is on Earth. Now, the Kuiper belt is thought to include millions of icy objects, unused planetary building blocks left over from the earliest days of the solar system. These bodies are time capsules, preserved in a deep freeze for the past 4.6 billion years. NASA says Ultima Thule is likely the most primitive planetary object ever explored.The Kuiper belt object was discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. Subsequent observations suggest it is small \u2014 no more than 20 miles across \u2014 and shaped like a peanut. Astronomers believe it is a contact binary, made up of two objects touching each other, or perhaps even a binary system, in which two objects orbit each other.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe encounter with Ultima Thule will be brief and technically demanding \u2014 even more so than New Horizons\u2019 flyby of Pluto. Whereas Pluto is roughly the size of the United States, Ultima could fit atop Washington, D.C. This means New Horizons must get much closer to the space rock to examine it, and the encounter will be over much more quickly.A day before closest approach, Ultima Thule still takes up only two pixels in images taken by New Horizons\u2019 camera. As New Horizons speeds through space at 9 miles per second, it will take less than a day to turn Ultima Thule back into a speck in the rear view mirror.But New Horizons\u2019 performance so far suggests it is ready for the challenge, Stern said. Measurements taken Saturday showed that the spacecraft was within 20 miles of its intended flyby distance from Ultima Thule and that the timing of the encounter will be within 2 seconds of what was expected.\u201cWe\u2019re rendezvousing with something that\u2019s a mountain draped in black velvet in almost pitch-dark conditions, and we\u2019re screaming up to it . . . within 2 seconds of perfection,\u201d Stern said. \u201cYou can\u2019t get any better than that.\u201d Get ready for New Horizons' unprecedented exploration of the Kuiper belt. NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2993",
        "date": "2018-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/30/nasa-has-new-years-date-with-distant-space-rock-heres-how-watch/",
        "text": "To ancient explorers, \u201cultima Thule,\u201d or the most distant region, was what lay past the northernmost edges of maps, beyond the borders of the known world.So when NASA chose a target for its New Horizons spacecraft that was farther than anything previously explored, Ultima Thule seemed a fitting moniker. The far-flung space rock is an inhabitant of the Kuiper belt, the ring of debris that encircles the icy outer reaches of the solar system. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUltima Thule is so dim and so distant that scientists aren\u2019t even certain what it looks like. Some of their only information about its size and shape comes from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow it cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementNew Horizons will finally fly by its target just after midnight on Jan. 1, taking close-up photographs and sophisticated scientific measurements of what it sees. By the time the first images and data stream back to Earth, the borders of the known world will have expanded once more.Advertisement\u201cThis is just raw exploration,\u201d said Alan Stern, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator for the mission. \u201cNo one has ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a point of light. No one has ever seen an object that\u2019s frozen almost to absolute zero. There are a lot of ideas and every one of them might be wrong.\u201dHe took a breath. \u201cWe\u2019ll find out Tuesday.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA is celebrating the record-setting encounter at what is perhaps the solar system\u2019s nerdiest New Year\u2019s party. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which built and operates the spacecraft, scientists will count down to the moment of New Horizons\u2019 closest approach, at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time, then reconvene 10 hours later to watch the first signals from the flyby stream on their screens. (It takes more than six hours for light to travel from Ultima Thule to Earth.) NASA\u2019s vaunted social media operation, a casualty of the partial government shutdown, has been temporarily restored to cover the event. The countdown, signal acquisition and subsequent news conferences will be streamed live on NASA TV and YouTube.AdvertisementAlice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons at APL, said the spacecraft entered \u201cencounter mode\u201d on Wednesday. This configuration limits the spacecraft\u2019s communication with Earth, commanding it to quickly address any technical issues on its own, then get back to science. Though nerve-racking for engineers, encounter mode ensures that New Horizons makes the most of its brief time near Ultima Thule.\u201cBecause this is a flyby, we only get one chance to get it right,\u201d Bowman said.New Horizons left Earth in January 2006. It was the first mission designed to explore the most distant part of the solar system. Nine years and 3.5 billion miles later, it took the first-ever close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter that flyby, Stern and his colleagues set about searching for a new target in the Kuiper belt, which extends from the edge of Neptune\u2019s orbit out to about 5 billion miles from the sun.Until the 1990s, no one knew what was hiding out there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as faint as it is on Earth. Now, the Kuiper belt is thought to include millions of icy objects, unused planetary building blocks left over from the earliest days of the solar system. These bodies are time capsules, preserved in a deep freeze for the past 4.6 billion years. NASA says Ultima Thule is likely the most primitive planetary object ever explored.The Kuiper belt object was discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. Subsequent observations suggest it is small \u2014 no more than 20 miles across \u2014 and shaped like a peanut. Astronomers believe it is a contact binary, made up of two objects touching each other, or perhaps even a binary system, in which two objects orbit each other.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe encounter with Ultima Thule will be brief and technically demanding \u2014 even more so than New Horizons\u2019 flyby of Pluto. Whereas Pluto is roughly the size of the United States, Ultima could fit atop Washington, D.C. This means New Horizons must get much closer to the space rock to examine it, and the encounter will be over much more quickly.A day before closest approach, Ultima Thule still takes up only two pixels in images taken by New Horizons\u2019 camera. As New Horizons speeds through space at 9 miles per second, it will take less than a day to turn Ultima Thule back into a speck in the rear view mirror.But New Horizons\u2019 performance so far suggests it is ready for the challenge, Stern said. Measurements taken Saturday showed that the spacecraft was within 20 miles of its intended flyby distance from Ultima Thule and that the timing of the encounter will be within 2 seconds of what was expected.\u201cWe\u2019re rendezvousing with something that\u2019s a mountain draped in black velvet in almost pitch-dark conditions, and we\u2019re screaming up to it . . . within 2 seconds of perfection,\u201d Stern said. \u201cYou can\u2019t get any better than that.\u201d Get ready for New Horizons' unprecedented exploration of the Kuiper belt. NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2994",
        "date": "2018-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/30/nasa-has-new-years-date-with-distant-space-rock-heres-how-watch/",
        "text": "To ancient explorers, \u201cultima Thule,\u201d or the most distant region, was what lay past the northernmost edges of maps, beyond the borders of the known world.So when NASA chose a target for its New Horizons spacecraft that was farther than anything previously explored, Ultima Thule seemed a fitting moniker. The far-flung space rock is an inhabitant of the Kuiper belt, the ring of debris that encircles the icy outer reaches of the solar system. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUltima Thule is so dim and so distant that scientists aren\u2019t even certain what it looks like. Some of their only information about its size and shape comes from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow it cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementNew Horizons will finally fly by its target just after midnight on Jan. 1, taking close-up photographs and sophisticated scientific measurements of what it sees. By the time the first images and data stream back to Earth, the borders of the known world will have expanded once more.Advertisement\u201cThis is just raw exploration,\u201d said Alan Stern, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator for the mission. \u201cNo one has ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a point of light. No one has ever seen an object that\u2019s frozen almost to absolute zero. There are a lot of ideas and every one of them might be wrong.\u201dHe took a breath. \u201cWe\u2019ll find out Tuesday.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA is celebrating the record-setting encounter at what is perhaps the solar system\u2019s nerdiest New Year\u2019s party. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which built and operates the spacecraft, scientists will count down to the moment of New Horizons\u2019 closest approach, at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time, then reconvene 10 hours later to watch the first signals from the flyby stream on their screens. (It takes more than six hours for light to travel from Ultima Thule to Earth.) NASA\u2019s vaunted social media operation, a casualty of the partial government shutdown, has been temporarily restored to cover the event. The countdown, signal acquisition and subsequent news conferences will be streamed live on NASA TV and YouTube.AdvertisementAlice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons at APL, said the spacecraft entered \u201cencounter mode\u201d on Wednesday. This configuration limits the spacecraft\u2019s communication with Earth, commanding it to quickly address any technical issues on its own, then get back to science. Though nerve-racking for engineers, encounter mode ensures that New Horizons makes the most of its brief time near Ultima Thule.\u201cBecause this is a flyby, we only get one chance to get it right,\u201d Bowman said.New Horizons left Earth in January 2006. It was the first mission designed to explore the most distant part of the solar system. Nine years and 3.5 billion miles later, it took the first-ever close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter that flyby, Stern and his colleagues set about searching for a new target in the Kuiper belt, which extends from the edge of Neptune\u2019s orbit out to about 5 billion miles from the sun.Until the 1990s, no one knew what was hiding out there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as faint as it is on Earth. Now, the Kuiper belt is thought to include millions of icy objects, unused planetary building blocks left over from the earliest days of the solar system. These bodies are time capsules, preserved in a deep freeze for the past 4.6 billion years. NASA says Ultima Thule is likely the most primitive planetary object ever explored.The Kuiper belt object was discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. Subsequent observations suggest it is small \u2014 no more than 20 miles across \u2014 and shaped like a peanut. Astronomers believe it is a contact binary, made up of two objects touching each other, or perhaps even a binary system, in which two objects orbit each other.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe encounter with Ultima Thule will be brief and technically demanding \u2014 even more so than New Horizons\u2019 flyby of Pluto. Whereas Pluto is roughly the size of the United States, Ultima could fit atop Washington, D.C. This means New Horizons must get much closer to the space rock to examine it, and the encounter will be over much more quickly.A day before closest approach, Ultima Thule still takes up only two pixels in images taken by New Horizons\u2019 camera. As New Horizons speeds through space at 9 miles per second, it will take less than a day to turn Ultima Thule back into a speck in the rear view mirror.But New Horizons\u2019 performance so far suggests it is ready for the challenge, Stern said. Measurements taken Saturday showed that the spacecraft was within 20 miles of its intended flyby distance from Ultima Thule and that the timing of the encounter will be within 2 seconds of what was expected.\u201cWe\u2019re rendezvousing with something that\u2019s a mountain draped in black velvet in almost pitch-dark conditions, and we\u2019re screaming up to it . . . within 2 seconds of perfection,\u201d Stern said. \u201cYou can\u2019t get any better than that.\u201d Get ready for New Horizons' unprecedented exploration of the Kuiper belt. NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "2995",
        "date": "2018-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/30/nasa-has-new-years-date-with-distant-space-rock-heres-how-watch/",
        "text": "To ancient explorers, \u201cultima Thule,\u201d or the most distant region, was what lay past the northernmost edges of maps, beyond the borders of the known world.So when NASA chose a target for its New Horizons spacecraft that was farther than anything previously explored, Ultima Thule seemed a fitting moniker. The far-flung space rock is an inhabitant of the Kuiper belt, the ring of debris that encircles the icy outer reaches of the solar system. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUltima Thule is so dim and so distant that scientists aren\u2019t even certain what it looks like. Some of their only information about its size and shape comes from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow it cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementNew Horizons will finally fly by its target just after midnight on Jan. 1, taking close-up photographs and sophisticated scientific measurements of what it sees. By the time the first images and data stream back to Earth, the borders of the known world will have expanded once more.Advertisement\u201cThis is just raw exploration,\u201d said Alan Stern, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator for the mission. \u201cNo one has ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a point of light. No one has ever seen an object that\u2019s frozen almost to absolute zero. There are a lot of ideas and every one of them might be wrong.\u201dHe took a breath. \u201cWe\u2019ll find out Tuesday.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA is celebrating the record-setting encounter at what is perhaps the solar system\u2019s nerdiest New Year\u2019s party. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which built and operates the spacecraft, scientists will count down to the moment of New Horizons\u2019 closest approach, at 12:33 a.m. Eastern time, then reconvene 10 hours later to watch the first signals from the flyby stream on their screens. (It takes more than six hours for light to travel from Ultima Thule to Earth.) NASA\u2019s vaunted social media operation, a casualty of the partial government shutdown, has been temporarily restored to cover the event. The countdown, signal acquisition and subsequent news conferences will be streamed live on NASA TV and YouTube.AdvertisementAlice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons at APL, said the spacecraft entered \u201cencounter mode\u201d on Wednesday. This configuration limits the spacecraft\u2019s communication with Earth, commanding it to quickly address any technical issues on its own, then get back to science. Though nerve-racking for engineers, encounter mode ensures that New Horizons makes the most of its brief time near Ultima Thule.\u201cBecause this is a flyby, we only get one chance to get it right,\u201d Bowman said.New Horizons left Earth in January 2006. It was the first mission designed to explore the most distant part of the solar system. Nine years and 3.5 billion miles later, it took the first-ever close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter that flyby, Stern and his colleagues set about searching for a new target in the Kuiper belt, which extends from the edge of Neptune\u2019s orbit out to about 5 billion miles from the sun.Until the 1990s, no one knew what was hiding out there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as faint as it is on Earth. Now, the Kuiper belt is thought to include millions of icy objects, unused planetary building blocks left over from the earliest days of the solar system. These bodies are time capsules, preserved in a deep freeze for the past 4.6 billion years. NASA says Ultima Thule is likely the most primitive planetary object ever explored.The Kuiper belt object was discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. Subsequent observations suggest it is small \u2014 no more than 20 miles across \u2014 and shaped like a peanut. Astronomers believe it is a contact binary, made up of two objects touching each other, or perhaps even a binary system, in which two objects orbit each other.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe encounter with Ultima Thule will be brief and technically demanding \u2014 even more so than New Horizons\u2019 flyby of Pluto. Whereas Pluto is roughly the size of the United States, Ultima could fit atop Washington, D.C. This means New Horizons must get much closer to the space rock to examine it, and the encounter will be over much more quickly.A day before closest approach, Ultima Thule still takes up only two pixels in images taken by New Horizons\u2019 camera. As New Horizons speeds through space at 9 miles per second, it will take less than a day to turn Ultima Thule back into a speck in the rear view mirror.But New Horizons\u2019 performance so far suggests it is ready for the challenge, Stern said. Measurements taken Saturday showed that the spacecraft was within 20 miles of its intended flyby distance from Ultima Thule and that the timing of the encounter will be within 2 seconds of what was expected.\u201cWe\u2019re rendezvousing with something that\u2019s a mountain draped in black velvet in almost pitch-dark conditions, and we\u2019re screaming up to it . . . within 2 seconds of perfection,\u201d Stern said. \u201cYou can\u2019t get any better than that.\u201d Get ready for New Horizons' unprecedented exploration of the Kuiper belt. NASA has a New Year\u2019s date with a distant space rock. Here\u2019s how to watch.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch three space station astronauts make a bull\u2019s-eye landing in the Kazakhstan desert (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2996",
        "date": "2017-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/10/watch-three-space-station-astronauts-make-a-bulls-eye-landing-in-the-kazakhstan-desert/",
        "text": "Three\u00a0astronauts descended 250 miles to touch down in the desert near the city of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Monday. Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, both Russian cosmonauts, and NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough made a clean landing in their\u00a0Russian spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-02. Thanks to the accuracy of the descent \u2014 the craft landed just as planned \u2014\u00a0cameras were able to film the incoming capsule. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was a textbook touchdown,\u201d Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman said\u00a0in TV commentary after the landing, as Space.com reported. \u201cThe Soyuz was pulled by its main parachute onto its side, but the crew was quickly extracted and are in good shape.\u201dThe landing's precise nature was a testament to how far we've come since the early days of spaceflight. The second American\u00a0in space, Gus Grissom, almost drowned in the Atlantic in 1961 when his capsule, \u201cLiberty Bell 7,\u201d plopped into\u00a0the ocean and began to flood with seawater. (He maintained that there was a malfunction, contrary to insinuations that he panicked\u00a0and triggered\u00a0the escape hatch too early.)\u00a0\u201cLiberty Bell 7\" sank,\u00a0exiled to the ocean floor until a salvage boat recovered it in 1999.There was no such indignity for the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft. The recent touchdown had more than a touch of drama \u2014\u00a0the footage ends with an explosion of brown dust as the capsule's retrorockets fired \u2014 but the astronauts can be seen\u00a0grinning and shaking hands moments after personnel lift them out of the capsule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts from the International Space Station, including NASA's Shane Kimbrough, lands 'on target' in Kazakhstan on Monday morning. (Reuters)With the Soyuz MS-02's return came the end of the International Space Station's Expedition 50.\u00a0Kimbrough and his crewmates had logged\u00a0173 days, just under half a year, in space on this mission.Along the way, the astronauts on the space station completed 2,768 orbits of the planet\u00a0\u2014 a voyage of some\u00a073.2 million miles.After the Soyuz undocked from the ISS, the station's Expedition 51 officially began. The Earthbound astronauts bid farewell to three colleagues who remained on the station: cosmonaut\u00a0Oleg Novitskiy, the European Space Agency's Thomas Pesquet and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is now the\u00a0first woman to command two missions aboard the ISS and who is about to set a record for spending more time in space than any other U.S. astronaut.Read more:NASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in spaceHow filthy is the International Space Station? An astrobiologist weighs in.A bit of debris chipped the International Space Station. That\u2019s just one piece of a much bigger problem. A NASA representative called the spacecraft landing a \u201ctextbook touchdown.\"  Watch three space station astronauts make a bull\u2019s-eye landing in the Kazakhstan desert",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch three space station astronauts make a bull\u2019s-eye landing in the Kazakhstan desert (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "2997",
        "date": "2017-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/10/watch-three-space-station-astronauts-make-a-bulls-eye-landing-in-the-kazakhstan-desert/",
        "text": "Three\u00a0astronauts descended 250 miles to touch down in the desert near the city of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Monday. Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, both Russian cosmonauts, and NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough made a clean landing in their\u00a0Russian spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-02. Thanks to the accuracy of the descent \u2014 the craft landed just as planned \u2014\u00a0cameras were able to film the incoming capsule. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was a textbook touchdown,\u201d Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman said\u00a0in TV commentary after the landing, as Space.com reported. \u201cThe Soyuz was pulled by its main parachute onto its side, but the crew was quickly extracted and are in good shape.\u201dThe landing's precise nature was a testament to how far we've come since the early days of spaceflight. The second American\u00a0in space, Gus Grissom, almost drowned in the Atlantic in 1961 when his capsule, \u201cLiberty Bell 7,\u201d plopped into\u00a0the ocean and began to flood with seawater. (He maintained that there was a malfunction, contrary to insinuations that he panicked\u00a0and triggered\u00a0the escape hatch too early.)\u00a0\u201cLiberty Bell 7\" sank,\u00a0exiled to the ocean floor until a salvage boat recovered it in 1999.There was no such indignity for the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft. The recent touchdown had more than a touch of drama \u2014\u00a0the footage ends with an explosion of brown dust as the capsule's retrorockets fired \u2014 but the astronauts can be seen\u00a0grinning and shaking hands moments after personnel lift them out of the capsule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts from the International Space Station, including NASA's Shane Kimbrough, lands 'on target' in Kazakhstan on Monday morning. (Reuters)With the Soyuz MS-02's return came the end of the International Space Station's Expedition 50.\u00a0Kimbrough and his crewmates had logged\u00a0173 days, just under half a year, in space on this mission.Along the way, the astronauts on the space station completed 2,768 orbits of the planet\u00a0\u2014 a voyage of some\u00a073.2 million miles.After the Soyuz undocked from the ISS, the station's Expedition 51 officially began. The Earthbound astronauts bid farewell to three colleagues who remained on the station: cosmonaut\u00a0Oleg Novitskiy, the European Space Agency's Thomas Pesquet and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is now the\u00a0first woman to command two missions aboard the ISS and who is about to set a record for spending more time in space than any other U.S. astronaut.Read more:NASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in spaceHow filthy is the International Space Station? An astrobiologist weighs in.A bit of debris chipped the International Space Station. That\u2019s just one piece of a much bigger problem. A NASA representative called the spacecraft landing a \u201ctextbook touchdown.\"  Watch three space station astronauts make a bull\u2019s-eye landing in the Kazakhstan desert",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch three space station astronauts make a bull\u2019s-eye landing in the Kazakhstan desert (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "2998",
        "date": "2017-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/10/watch-three-space-station-astronauts-make-a-bulls-eye-landing-in-the-kazakhstan-desert/",
        "text": "Three\u00a0astronauts descended 250 miles to touch down in the desert near the city of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Monday. Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko, both Russian cosmonauts, and NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough made a clean landing in their\u00a0Russian spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-02. Thanks to the accuracy of the descent \u2014 the craft landed just as planned \u2014\u00a0cameras were able to film the incoming capsule. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was a textbook touchdown,\u201d Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman said\u00a0in TV commentary after the landing, as Space.com reported. \u201cThe Soyuz was pulled by its main parachute onto its side, but the crew was quickly extracted and are in good shape.\u201dThe landing's precise nature was a testament to how far we've come since the early days of spaceflight. The second American\u00a0in space, Gus Grissom, almost drowned in the Atlantic in 1961 when his capsule, \u201cLiberty Bell 7,\u201d plopped into\u00a0the ocean and began to flood with seawater. (He maintained that there was a malfunction, contrary to insinuations that he panicked\u00a0and triggered\u00a0the escape hatch too early.)\u00a0\u201cLiberty Bell 7\" sank,\u00a0exiled to the ocean floor until a salvage boat recovered it in 1999.There was no such indignity for the Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft. The recent touchdown had more than a touch of drama \u2014\u00a0the footage ends with an explosion of brown dust as the capsule's retrorockets fired \u2014 but the astronauts can be seen\u00a0grinning and shaking hands moments after personnel lift them out of the capsule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts from the International Space Station, including NASA's Shane Kimbrough, lands 'on target' in Kazakhstan on Monday morning. (Reuters)With the Soyuz MS-02's return came the end of the International Space Station's Expedition 50.\u00a0Kimbrough and his crewmates had logged\u00a0173 days, just under half a year, in space on this mission.Along the way, the astronauts on the space station completed 2,768 orbits of the planet\u00a0\u2014 a voyage of some\u00a073.2 million miles.After the Soyuz undocked from the ISS, the station's Expedition 51 officially began. The Earthbound astronauts bid farewell to three colleagues who remained on the station: cosmonaut\u00a0Oleg Novitskiy, the European Space Agency's Thomas Pesquet and NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is now the\u00a0first woman to command two missions aboard the ISS and who is about to set a record for spending more time in space than any other U.S. astronaut.Read more:NASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in spaceHow filthy is the International Space Station? An astrobiologist weighs in.A bit of debris chipped the International Space Station. That\u2019s just one piece of a much bigger problem. A NASA representative called the spacecraft landing a \u201ctextbook touchdown.\"  Watch three space station astronauts make a bull\u2019s-eye landing in the Kazakhstan desert",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "The International Space Station is super germy (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "2999",
        "date": "2017-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/05/the-international-space-station-is-super-germy/",
        "text": "Thousands\u00a0of species have colonized the International Space Station \u2014 and only one of them is Homo sapiens.According to a\u00a0new study in the journal PeerJ, the interior surfaces of the 17-year-old, 250-mile-high, airtight space station harbor at least 1,000 and\u00a0perhaps more than 4,000\u00a0microbe species \u2014 a finding that is actually \u201creassuring,\u201d according to co-author David Coil. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cDiversity is generally associated with a healthy ecosystem,\u201d said the University of California at Davis\u00a0microbiologist.\u00a0A varied population of microscopic inhabitants is probably a signature of a healthy spacecraft, he added. And as humanity considers even longer ventures in space \u2014 such as an 18-month voyage to Mars \u2014 scientists must understand who these microbes are.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe samples for Coil's paper were collected in 2014 as part of the citizen science program Project MERCCURI. The initiative, conceived by a group of National Football League and National Basketball Association cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers, involved swabbing down dozens of professional sports stadiums, identifying the microbes in the samples, and sending those species to the ISS\u00a0to see whether they would thrive. (Bacillus aryabhatti,\u00a0collected from a practice football field used by the Oakland Raiders, grew fastest.)AdvertisementIn exchange, the UC Davis scientists who partnered on the project\u00a0asked the ISS astronauts to swab down\u00a0the space station and return the samples to Earth. Seems like a fair trade.The samples were taken from 15 sites on the station, including the audio terminal unit microphone, air vents, the tab used to close the privacy panel\u00a0on the crew sleep compartment. These locations broadly correspond to places found in a terrestrial home \u2014 the audio terminal unit is like a telephone; the air vents, which suck up dust and debris, are similar to doorsills where dust bunnies gather; the privacy panel tab vaguely resembles the knob on the door to your bedroom.Story continues below advertisementThe microbe samples were packaged and flown to Earth, where the scientists at UC Davis sequenced\u00a0their genomes.\u00a0In each sample, they identified between\u00a01,036 and 4,294 operational taxonomic units \u2014 a biological measure\u00a0used to classify closely related organisms that roughly reflects\u00a0the number of species. Then they compared\u00a0what they found with results from surveys of the microbiomes of humans and their homes.AdvertisementThe study revealed no \u201cAndromeda Strains\u201d that threaten the astronauts' well-being; the ISS was dominated by human-associated microbes, particularly the kind that dwell on skin. (Then again, the sequencing technique the scientists used can only identify species that are already known, so the study\u00a0doesn't rule out the extremely unlikely possibility of something alien up there.)\u201cHonestly, I wasn't very surprised at all by the findings,\u201d\u00a0said microbiologist Jenna Lang,\u00a0the study's first author. Because all the equipment that goes into space is thoroughly sterilized, any germs that colonize the space station must hitch a ride on an astronaut.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI fully expected the ISS surfaces to look like human skin\u00a0and .\u2009.\u2009. upper airway, which it, for the most part, did,\u201d Lang said.The main difference was in the species' relative abundance. For example, the ISS\u00a0harbors more\u00a0Staphylococcus than a typical home. But Lang cautioned that this study\u00a0is based on a relatively small number of samples, all taken at a single point in time. When the crew of the ISS changes, it's likely the station's microbes will change, too.AdvertisementIt's important to keep tabs on what germs are circulating up there, Coil said. An unhealthy microbiome on the ISS could quickly lead to unhealthy astronauts. He noted that by the time the Russian space station Mir was decommissioned, it stank\u00a0with fumes from black mold that flourished behind panels and inside air conditioning equipment. Some researchers even worried that Mir's microbes might have mutated\u00a0into a\u00a0biohazard when the space station returned to Earth in 2001 (spoiler: everything was fine).Story continues below advertisement\u201cNow the questions are a little more nuanced,\u201d Coil said. \u201cMicrobiome science has advanced quite a lot.\u201d Scientists want to know what happens to the good microbes in astronauts, including the gut bacteria that help with digestion, and how those critters will interact with the microbiome of the space around them.\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of much bigger studies going on now asking these bigger questions,\u201d Coil said. \u201cOurs is\u00a0more of a preliminary piece of data.\u201dRead more:Microorganisms on your scalp, ears and elbows can be turned into musicYour office is a veritable petri dish of bacteriaYou're surrounded by a cloud of bacteria as unique as a fingerprint The more time humans spend in space, the more important it becomes for scientists to understand space microbiomes. The International Space Station is super germy",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The International Space Station is super germy (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3000",
        "date": "2017-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/05/the-international-space-station-is-super-germy/",
        "text": "Thousands\u00a0of species have colonized the International Space Station \u2014 and only one of them is Homo sapiens.According to a\u00a0new study in the journal PeerJ, the interior surfaces of the 17-year-old, 250-mile-high, airtight space station harbor at least 1,000 and\u00a0perhaps more than 4,000\u00a0microbe species \u2014 a finding that is actually \u201creassuring,\u201d according to co-author David Coil. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cDiversity is generally associated with a healthy ecosystem,\u201d said the University of California at Davis\u00a0microbiologist.\u00a0A varied population of microscopic inhabitants is probably a signature of a healthy spacecraft, he added. And as humanity considers even longer ventures in space \u2014 such as an 18-month voyage to Mars \u2014 scientists must understand who these microbes are.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe samples for Coil's paper were collected in 2014 as part of the citizen science program Project MERCCURI. The initiative, conceived by a group of National Football League and National Basketball Association cheerleaders who are also scientists and engineers, involved swabbing down dozens of professional sports stadiums, identifying the microbes in the samples, and sending those species to the ISS\u00a0to see whether they would thrive. (Bacillus aryabhatti,\u00a0collected from a practice football field used by the Oakland Raiders, grew fastest.)AdvertisementIn exchange, the UC Davis scientists who partnered on the project\u00a0asked the ISS astronauts to swab down\u00a0the space station and return the samples to Earth. Seems like a fair trade.The samples were taken from 15 sites on the station, including the audio terminal unit microphone, air vents, the tab used to close the privacy panel\u00a0on the crew sleep compartment. These locations broadly correspond to places found in a terrestrial home \u2014 the audio terminal unit is like a telephone; the air vents, which suck up dust and debris, are similar to doorsills where dust bunnies gather; the privacy panel tab vaguely resembles the knob on the door to your bedroom.Story continues below advertisementThe microbe samples were packaged and flown to Earth, where the scientists at UC Davis sequenced\u00a0their genomes.\u00a0In each sample, they identified between\u00a01,036 and 4,294 operational taxonomic units \u2014 a biological measure\u00a0used to classify closely related organisms that roughly reflects\u00a0the number of species. Then they compared\u00a0what they found with results from surveys of the microbiomes of humans and their homes.AdvertisementThe study revealed no \u201cAndromeda Strains\u201d that threaten the astronauts' well-being; the ISS was dominated by human-associated microbes, particularly the kind that dwell on skin. (Then again, the sequencing technique the scientists used can only identify species that are already known, so the study\u00a0doesn't rule out the extremely unlikely possibility of something alien up there.)\u201cHonestly, I wasn't very surprised at all by the findings,\u201d\u00a0said microbiologist Jenna Lang,\u00a0the study's first author. Because all the equipment that goes into space is thoroughly sterilized, any germs that colonize the space station must hitch a ride on an astronaut.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI fully expected the ISS surfaces to look like human skin\u00a0and .\u2009.\u2009. upper airway, which it, for the most part, did,\u201d Lang said.The main difference was in the species' relative abundance. For example, the ISS\u00a0harbors more\u00a0Staphylococcus than a typical home. But Lang cautioned that this study\u00a0is based on a relatively small number of samples, all taken at a single point in time. When the crew of the ISS changes, it's likely the station's microbes will change, too.AdvertisementIt's important to keep tabs on what germs are circulating up there, Coil said. An unhealthy microbiome on the ISS could quickly lead to unhealthy astronauts. He noted that by the time the Russian space station Mir was decommissioned, it stank\u00a0with fumes from black mold that flourished behind panels and inside air conditioning equipment. Some researchers even worried that Mir's microbes might have mutated\u00a0into a\u00a0biohazard when the space station returned to Earth in 2001 (spoiler: everything was fine).Story continues below advertisement\u201cNow the questions are a little more nuanced,\u201d Coil said. \u201cMicrobiome science has advanced quite a lot.\u201d Scientists want to know what happens to the good microbes in astronauts, including the gut bacteria that help with digestion, and how those critters will interact with the microbiome of the space around them.\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of much bigger studies going on now asking these bigger questions,\u201d Coil said. \u201cOurs is\u00a0more of a preliminary piece of data.\u201dRead more:Microorganisms on your scalp, ears and elbows can be turned into musicYour office is a veritable petri dish of bacteriaYou're surrounded by a cloud of bacteria as unique as a fingerprint The more time humans spend in space, the more important it becomes for scientists to understand space microbiomes. The International Space Station is super germy",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s newest planet hunter launches successfully (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3001",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/04/16/nasas-newest-planet-hunter-will-launch-monday-night-if-all-goes-well/",
        "text": "This story has been updated.NASA's newest planet hunter was launched Wednesday evening on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt the moment the spacecraft lifted off,\u00a0astronomers knew of nearly 4,000 alien worlds outside our solar system. During the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite's planned\u00a0two-year mission, scientists expect, it will increase that number by a factor of five. Among the new discoveries, they hope, will be a rocky world with an atmosphere that can be probed for signs of life. \u201cThis is opening an entirely new window on the universe,\u201d said MIT astrophysicist George Ricker, the principal investigator for the mission.TESS should arrive in orbit around Earth \u2014 on a never-before-used, highly elliptical path that takes it close to the moon \u2014 about two months after launch. It will begin science operations shortly after that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTESS is intended as\u00a0a high-powered\u00a0successor to the Kepler space telescope, which has orbited the sun alongside the Earth for the past 10 years and detected most of the exoplanets\u00a0 known to science.\u201cKepler broke open the field in a rather dramatic way,\u201d Ricker said \u2014 demonstrating that for every star in the sky, there are untold numbers of exoplanets waiting to be found.Now it is time to pass the torch.Unlike Kepler, which peered deep into a narrow stretch of sky to find faraway planets around stars like the sun, TESS's survey will be \u201cwide and shallow,\u201d Ricker explained. It is designed to look stars of all ages and sizes within a few hundred light-years of Earth, and it will be able to canvass the entire sky in just two years.Story continues below advertisementArmed with four sensitive cameras, the refrigerator-sized satellite will seek out the tiny, telltale dips in a star's light that occur when a planet \u201ctransits,\u201d or passes in front of it. The frequency of each faint flicker will indicate the planet's size and its distance from the star.Next, astronomers on Earth will measure the way the planet's gravity makes the star wobble as it orbits \u2014 an observation that will provide the planet's mass. Combined, those data will help scientists characterize the planet: Is it a small, rocky world like Earth? Is it light and water-rich? Does it have a solid surface, or does it resemble Neptune, with a dense core surrounded by swirling clouds of gas?The TESS mission coincides with the debut of powerful new ground- and space-based observatories, including NASA's James Webb Space Telescope\u00a0that\u00a0is scheduled to launch in 2020. If a TESS planet has an atmosphere, these instruments may be able to sense the way it alters the starlight that filters through it. That research could reveal \u201cbiosignatures\u201d \u2014 molecules including oxygen and methane that are often generated by living organisms.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is the reason we're all so excited,\u201d said Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at Caltech and NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute who sits on the steering committee for TESS's follow-up working group. Unlike Kepler's discoveries, the planets found by TESS will orbit stars nearby and bright enough to allow for detailed characterization.\u201cWe have this whole army of observatories and astronomers on the ground waiting eagerly to be told, 'Here\u2019s a candidate,'\" she said.It is unlikely that JWST or any other existing telescope would be capable of detecting biosignatures on an exoplanet as small as Earth. For that, astronomers must await missions that are still in their concept phase and will not launch for nearly two decades.Story continues below advertisementEven if TESS does not immediately find possible homes for alien life, it will essentially conduct a census of our galactic neighborhood, offering other insights into planets and solar systems.Advertisement\u201cWe can start to find out, how does planet occurrence vary as a function of the type of star and the age of the star?\u201d Christiansen said. \u201cWe can resolve competing theories about how planets form.\u201dBeyond planets, the spacecraft will also have its shutters open for other serendipitous, short-term events, such as supernovas, gamma ray bursts, or gravitational wave-generating neutron star collisions like the one that made headlines last fall.\u201cTESS is very much a trash-treasure sort of mission,\u201d said Natalia Guerrero, deputy manager for the TESS Objects of Interest team. Looking at light from across the whole sky, she said, it will\u00a0inevitably find something to satisfy almost everyone in the astronomy community.Read more:Found: Another star system with eight planets, just like oursThis broken space telescope keeps spotting new planetsThere's a new planet in the neighborhood \u2014 and it looks like a nice place to live What to know about the launch and the effort to find planets beyond our solar system.  NASA\u2019s newest planet hunter launches successfully",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Newfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3002",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/01/newfound-3-77-billion-year-old-fossils-could-be-earliest-evidence-of-life-on-earth/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.Tiny, tubular structures uncovered in ancient Canadian rocks could be\u00a0remnants of\u00a0some of the earliest life on Earth, scientists say.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe straw-shaped \u201cmicrofossils,\u201d narrower than the\u00a0width of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye, are believed to come from ancient microbes, according to a\u00a0new study in the journal Nature. Scientists debate\u00a0the age of the specimens, but the authors' youngest estimate \u2014 3.77 billion years \u2014 would make these fossils the\u00a0oldest ever found. Claims of ancient fossils are always contentious. Rocks as old as the ones in the new study\u00a0rarely survive the weathering, erosion, subduction and deformation of our geologically active Earth. Any signs of life in the\u00a0rocks that do survive are difficult to distinguish, let alone prove. Other researchers in the field expressed skepticism about whether the structures were really fossils, and whether the rocks that contain them are as old as the study authors say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the scientists behind the new finding believe their analysis should hold up to scrutiny. In addition to structures that look like fossil microbes, the rocks contain a cocktail of chemical compounds they say is almost\u00a0certainly the result of biological processes.If their results are confirmed, they\u00a0will boost a belief that organisms arose very early in the history of Earth \u2014 and may find it just as easy to evolve on worlds beyond our own.\u201cThe process to kick-start\u00a0life may not need a significant\u00a0length of time or special chemistry, but could actually be a relatively simple process to get started,\u201d\u00a0said Matthew Dodd, a biogeochemist at University College London and the lead author of the paper.\u00a0\u201cIt\u00a0has big implications for whether life is abundant or not in the universe.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMelting ice in Greenland exposes some of Earth's oldest fossilsThe microfossils were discovered in rocks from the Nuvvuagittuq (nuh-vu-ah-gi-took) belt in northeastern Canada. This strip of\u00a0iron-rich jasper now cuts across the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, but it was\u00a0once a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor. Billions of years ago, Dodd and his colleagues say, ancient microbes flourished around those vents, taking advantage of their chaotic chemistry to generate fuel.AdvertisementWhen the microbes died, iron in the water was deposited on their decaying bodies, replacing cellular structures with stone. The rocks that contained them were\u00a0buried, heated, squashed, and then forced upward to form the part of North America where they now sit. Depending on the dating method used, the material could be as old\u00a0as 3.77 billion years \u2014 or as stunningly ancient as 4.28 billion years.When Dodd's UCL colleague\u00a0Dominic Papineau\u00a0visited the Nuvvuagittuq belt in 2008, he knew immediately he would have\u00a0to bring some samples back to his lab. Once back in London, he and Dodd peered at very thin slices of the rocks, first with an optical microscope, then with a laser-based device called a Raman microscope.The optical observations revealed complex fossil structures encased in hematite, a mineral that would have formed as iron in the seawater interacted with the microbe's decaying organic matter. John Slack,\u00a0a co-author and emeritus scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey who studies jaspers from ancient hydrothermal vents, said the fossils look just like the ones he sees in younger rocks, and around modern-day vents.The Raman analysis, which\u00a0measures the vibrations of atoms as they are struck by a laser to figure out what molecules a material contains, showed that the rocks contain carbonate, apatite and magnetite \u2014 minerals that often form in the presence of organic matter.Was this ancient organism the first life on Earth, or just the luckiest?Graphite in the rocks also contained telltale signs of life. The mineral disproportionately contained the isotope carbon-12, a form of the atom in which the nucleus has six protons and six neutrons. This form of carbon is preferred for biological processes and is considered an isotopic signature of life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe can think of alternative\u00a0explanations for each of these singular observations,\u201d said Dodd, \u201cbut why all of these features occur together can really only be explained by one thing, which is a biological\u00a0interpretation.\u201dNot everyone is so convinced.\u00a0Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at MIT, said that the authors of the Nature paper are missing some key evidence for their claims. For one thing, she felt that the authors didn't include sufficient images of the site where they found the fossils, or a detailed explanation of their geologic setting.\u201cThis is the very first thing we tell our students, to look at the context and report the context and interpret the context carefully,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause\u00a0if the context isn\u2019t right, then everything else you do doesn't matter.\u201dNewly discovered 'missing link' shows how humans could evolve from single-celled organismsBosak\u00a0was also skeptical of the stated minimum age for the fossils. The Nuvvuagittuq belt is composed of metamorphic rock \u2014 stone that's been heated, squeezed and deformed by processes deep within the Earth.\u00a0It is also bisected by veins of igneous, or volcanic, rock that intruded into the sediments during this process. Dodd and his colleagues got their estimates of the formation's youngest age by dating zircon crystals in the igneous intrusions (the logic being that those intrusions had to have formed after the fossils did). Their oldest estimate \u2014 4.28 billion years old \u2014 comes from a more contested dating method\u00a0that measures the decay of the element samarium into neodymium.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther researchers said this fell into the category of \"extraordinary claims\u201d that \"require extraordinary evidence.\u201d Abigail Allwood,\u00a0an astrobiologist\u00a0at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the researchers did\u00a0\"a remarkable job\u201d analyzing the structures contained within their samples. But there just was just not enough data to definitely say they are evidence of life.\"That's geology \u2014 geology hands you whatever it hands you, and you deal with that,\u201d she said. \"The\u00a0problem with these rocks after they've been metamorphosed is that evidence of environment in and of\u00a0itself is hard to find.\u00a0Let alone studying how populations and supposed organisms reacted to that environment.\u201dKenneth Williford, another astrobiologist at\u00a0JPL, was more optimistic about the potential for these findings to be confirmed. He noted that the team behind the paper has a long\u00a0track record working in the\u00a0Nuvvuagittuq area, and that the features they describe match those of younger, undisputed fossils.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"It\u2019s a very exciting set of observations carefully made,\u201d Williford wrote in an email. \"\u2026 They may indeed have found something truly remarkable.\u201dFindings like these are subject to intense scrutiny because they have potentially far-reaching implications for the study of early organisms on Earth and other planets. The oldest universally accepted evidence of\u00a0life on Earth is dated to about 3.4 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. The new paper proposes pushing that date back by nearly 300 million years.\u201cThat's a long time,\u201d Bosak said. Just think: In the most recent 300 million years of history, the Earth has seen three mass extinctions,\u00a0a reshuffling of continents, the rise and fall of dinosaurs and the evolution of humankind.The 4 biggest milestones in the history of life on EarthAn earlier start date for the history of life also means that organisms were evolving at a time when Earth would have been quite hostile. Between 4 billion and 3.8 billion years ago, the planet was subjected to what's called the \u201cLate Heavy Bombardment,\u201d a time when asteroids and comets flew through the solar system and\u00a0barraged every body they struck. If microbes were able to\u00a0thrive in this chaotic time, that would imply that life\u00a0can take hold even\u00a0under the worst of circumstances.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSignificantly, the Nature paper comes just six months after researchers working in Greenland\u00a0reported finding ancient stromatolites\u00a0in\u00a03.7 billion-year-old rocks. Those conical structures are usually produced by photosynthetic bacteria living in shallow seas. If both papers are confirmed, Slack explained, that means life not only existed early in Earth's history, but also was diverse enough to include both chemosynthetic\u00a0and photosynthetic bacteria.If organisms found it so easy to thrive here on Earth,\u00a0why not elsewhere? Could it be, in the words of Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, a \u201ccosmic imperative?\u201dThat's what Dodd would like to know. He noted recent research suggesting that\u00a03.77 billion years ago, when the fossils formed,\u00a0Mars was warm and had oceans on its surface.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt means we could expect to find evidence of life on Mars at this time,\u201d Dodd said. And if we don't \u2014 \u201cthat suggests that life is a result of some fluke or phenomenon on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementWhatever consensus is reached on this paper, it will undoubtedly be helpful in the search for life on other worlds. Williford of JPL noted that hematite filaments like the ones discovered by Dodd are exactly what astrobiologists imagine\u00a0they might find as they look for fossils on Mars.And Allwood said that studies of ancient Earth life can be a \"proving ground\u201d for the techniques required to identify alien organisms.\"When\u00a0something like this comes out in the literature, and it is met with a lot of skepticism, and researchers say, 'What are the alternative explanations? Can something\u00a0like this can be produced non-biologically? ...\u00a0Every time we do that the science gets\u00a0better,\u201d she said.\u00a0\"So if we find something beyond Earth, we\u2019re in a better\u00a0position to understand it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCorrection: A previous version of this story mischaracterized the isotope Carbon-12. It has six protons and six neutrons in its nucleus.Read more:This triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex.NASA officials weigh risks of Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon missionScientists discover 7 \u2018Earthlike\u2019 planets orbiting a nearby starDear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it\u2019s the tip of a \u2018hidden continent.\u2019 If confirmed, the discovery would have implications for the origins of life on Earth \u2014 and beyond it.  Newfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on Earth",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3003",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/nasas-cassini-spacecraft-will-crash-into-saturn-its-final-screaming-success/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.On Friday, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will nose-dive into Saturn and burn up in the planet's atmosphere. It's the final, suicidal step of a months-long dance through Saturn's rings that has given scientists an unprecedented view of the sixth planet from the sun. It's also the end of a mission that has\u00a0revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and opened our eyes to two worlds that could be home to alien life \u2014 the moons Titan and Enceladus. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightQ&A: If Saturn is a gas giant, how will Cassini crash into it? Your questions answered by a NASA expert.It really is the end of an era. And Cassini fans are devastated.Five fun facts abt #Cassini's final five grand finale dives:1.I'm crying2.This can't be happening3.But it is4.Don't go5.NOOOOO \ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d https://t.co/aXAD4puf1D\u2014 Sophia Gad-Nasr (@Astropartigirl) August 17, 2017\n\nTFW you talk to someone at NASA about the end of Cassini and they make you cry a little during the interview pic.twitter.com/oPRuqy76Nm\u2014 Shannon (we're already in space) Stirone \ud83d\udc80 (@shannonmstirone) May 3, 2017\n\nTo understand why, you have to understand Cassini \u2014 a plucky, school-bus-size spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004.Story continues below advertisementFirst, a brief bio:\u00a0Cassini launched on its billion-mile journey from Earth to Saturn on Oct. 15, 1997. It was named for the astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who discovered four of the planet's moons and a gap in its rings. Cassini also carried a single passenger: the Huygens lander, built by the European Space Agency and named for the Dutch scientist who first spotted\u00a0the\u00a0moon Titan.AdvertisementCassini and Huygens\u00a0arrived in Saturn's orbit seven years after launch, in July 2004. Several\u00a0months later, Huygens split off and touched\u00a0down on the shore one of Titan's lakes of liquid methane.\u00a0It was humankind's first landing on a moon other than our own, and the first landing of any kind in the outer solar system. Cassini, meanwhile, was the first probe to orbit Saturn. (Pioneer and Voyager had simply flown by, in 1979 and 1980, respectively.)Cassini has been extraordinarily successful \u2014 indisputably\u00a0one of the most successful planetary missions ever. Its flight was smooth, its instruments worked, its software rarely acted up.\u00a0In addition to Huygens's perfectly stuck landing, Cassini probed the formation and behavior of Saturn's ring system, discovered a 5,000 mile-wide hurricane\u00a0at Saturn's south pole and got the first close-up view of the planet's hexagonal North Pole storm. Cassini\u00a0revealed that Saturn's rings have a lot of\u00a0three-dimensional texture and contain bumps\u00a0as big as the Rocky Mountains, solved the mystery of the moon Iapetus's two-tone black-and-white cookie coloration and photographed its odd equatorial bulge. Roughly 4,000 papers have been written using the 635 gigabytes of data collected by Cassini in nearly 300 orbits of Saturn.Story continues below advertisementBest of all were the revelations about Saturn's ocean moons. In the haze around Titan, Cassini\u00a0discovered molecules that could be precursors to \u2014 or even indicators of \u2014 biological activity on that methane-rich planet. Zooming past the icy moon Enceladus, it found evidence of an underground ocean of water, and spotted geysers spewing out ingredients for life.AdvertisementThe spacecraft is\u00a0not equipped with life-detecting instruments \u2014 no one could have imagined it might make such discoveries when it launched 20 years ago. But these moons are now considered two of the best places in the solar system to look for alien organisms, and they are the focus of several proposals for new NASA missions.\u201cThere\u2019s this tremendous legacy,\u201d said project scientist Linda Spilker, who has worked on the mission\u00a0since 1988. \u201cCassini has certainly rewritten the\u00a0textbooks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCassini is a victim of its own success.\u00a0It's precisely because of Cassini's revelations about Titan and Enceladus that the spacecraft has been sentenced to die.\u00a0Back in 2009, when it became apparent the spacecraft was running out of fuel, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory got together to assess their options. The craft couldn't be left to float around in space, on the off chance that it might be knocked out of orbit and crash into one of the potentially habitable moons. If that happened, Cassini could potentially contaminate those worlds with Earthling microbes.AdvertisementThe mission team considered moving Cassini to a more distant orbit, or sending it off to another planet. But then it came up with a proposal that would launch\u00a0Cassini into one last flyby past Titan and use the moon's pull to sling the craft into 22 close-in orbits of Saturn that would\u00a0explore the gaps between the planet's rings, then end by crashing into Saturn itself.It was the obvious choice, Spilker said.\u00a0She\u00a0compared these ring-grazing orbits to a \u201cbrand new mission.\u201d During the orbits, Cassini has mapped Saturn's gravity and magnetic fields to reveal the internal structure of the planet. It got close-up views of the rings and even sampled some of the icy particles that constitute them. It's expected to finally figure out the length of a Saturn day \u2014 a\u00a0measurement that has eluded scientists for decades.The \u201cGrand Finale\u201d began in April, and ends with a fiery plunge into Saturn's atmosphere in the early hours of\u00a0Sept. 15. On that day, scientists who have worked on the mission during the past 30 years will converge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Just after midnight, the spacecraft will point its instruments in the direction of Saturn's atmosphere and start rapidly transmitting real-time data about what it sees. It\u00a0will hit the\u00a0atmosphere three hours later. A minute after that, it will start tumbling through the increasingly dense clouds of gas and will lose the ability to send a signal back to Earth. Because of the time delay in communication between Saturn and Earth, that final message won't\u00a0arrive at JPL until 83 minutes later, just before 5 a.m.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt that point, Cassini will already have burned up in Saturn's atmosphere, a tiny, bright meteorite streaking across\u00a0an alien sky.The end of Cassini is also the end of humankind's presence at Saturn \u2014 for now.\u00a0NASA has no additional missions planned for the\u00a0ringed planet, though several proposals are in the works. But even if a mission were to get approval tomorrow, it would probably be\u00a0more than a decade before we see Saturn, its rings or its moons again. Building a spacecraft simply takes a long time, as does traversing the\u00a0750 million miles from Earth to the outer solar system.For the scientists who have devoted their lives to this mission, it's a tough loss.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCassini is our eyes and\u00a0ears\u00a0allowing us to be\u00a0there, allowing us to reach out and touch the world and the rings,\u201d Spilker said. \u201cAs long as Cassini\u00a0is there, we\u2019re there at Saturn, and when\u00a0Cassini is gone, that close personal connection to the Saturn\u00a0system will be gone, too.\u201dRead more:Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their mindsWhy this\u00a0weird moon of Saturn is a great place to look for aliensNASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn's icy moon EnceladusCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. What to know about the end of the Cassini mission, which discovered potentially habitable worlds and changed our understanding of the sixth planet from the sun.  NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3004",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/nasas-cassini-spacecraft-will-crash-into-saturn-its-final-screaming-success/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.On Friday, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will nose-dive into Saturn and burn up in the planet's atmosphere. It's the final, suicidal step of a months-long dance through Saturn's rings that has given scientists an unprecedented view of the sixth planet from the sun. It's also the end of a mission that has\u00a0revolutionized our understanding of Saturn and opened our eyes to two worlds that could be home to alien life \u2014 the moons Titan and Enceladus. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightQ&A: If Saturn is a gas giant, how will Cassini crash into it? Your questions answered by a NASA expert.It really is the end of an era. And Cassini fans are devastated.Five fun facts abt #Cassini's final five grand finale dives:1.I'm crying2.This can't be happening3.But it is4.Don't go5.NOOOOO \ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d https://t.co/aXAD4puf1D\u2014 Sophia Gad-Nasr (@Astropartigirl) August 17, 2017\n\nTFW you talk to someone at NASA about the end of Cassini and they make you cry a little during the interview pic.twitter.com/oPRuqy76Nm\u2014 Shannon (we're already in space) Stirone \ud83d\udc80 (@shannonmstirone) May 3, 2017\n\nTo understand why, you have to understand Cassini \u2014 a plucky, school-bus-size spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004.Story continues below advertisementFirst, a brief bio:\u00a0Cassini launched on its billion-mile journey from Earth to Saturn on Oct. 15, 1997. It was named for the astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who discovered four of the planet's moons and a gap in its rings. Cassini also carried a single passenger: the Huygens lander, built by the European Space Agency and named for the Dutch scientist who first spotted\u00a0the\u00a0moon Titan.AdvertisementCassini and Huygens\u00a0arrived in Saturn's orbit seven years after launch, in July 2004. Several\u00a0months later, Huygens split off and touched\u00a0down on the shore one of Titan's lakes of liquid methane.\u00a0It was humankind's first landing on a moon other than our own, and the first landing of any kind in the outer solar system. Cassini, meanwhile, was the first probe to orbit Saturn. (Pioneer and Voyager had simply flown by, in 1979 and 1980, respectively.)Cassini has been extraordinarily successful \u2014 indisputably\u00a0one of the most successful planetary missions ever. Its flight was smooth, its instruments worked, its software rarely acted up.\u00a0In addition to Huygens's perfectly stuck landing, Cassini probed the formation and behavior of Saturn's ring system, discovered a 5,000 mile-wide hurricane\u00a0at Saturn's south pole and got the first close-up view of the planet's hexagonal North Pole storm. Cassini\u00a0revealed that Saturn's rings have a lot of\u00a0three-dimensional texture and contain bumps\u00a0as big as the Rocky Mountains, solved the mystery of the moon Iapetus's two-tone black-and-white cookie coloration and photographed its odd equatorial bulge. Roughly 4,000 papers have been written using the 635 gigabytes of data collected by Cassini in nearly 300 orbits of Saturn.Story continues below advertisementBest of all were the revelations about Saturn's ocean moons. In the haze around Titan, Cassini\u00a0discovered molecules that could be precursors to \u2014 or even indicators of \u2014 biological activity on that methane-rich planet. Zooming past the icy moon Enceladus, it found evidence of an underground ocean of water, and spotted geysers spewing out ingredients for life.AdvertisementThe spacecraft is\u00a0not equipped with life-detecting instruments \u2014 no one could have imagined it might make such discoveries when it launched 20 years ago. But these moons are now considered two of the best places in the solar system to look for alien organisms, and they are the focus of several proposals for new NASA missions.\u201cThere\u2019s this tremendous legacy,\u201d said project scientist Linda Spilker, who has worked on the mission\u00a0since 1988. \u201cCassini has certainly rewritten the\u00a0textbooks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCassini is a victim of its own success.\u00a0It's precisely because of Cassini's revelations about Titan and Enceladus that the spacecraft has been sentenced to die.\u00a0Back in 2009, when it became apparent the spacecraft was running out of fuel, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory got together to assess their options. The craft couldn't be left to float around in space, on the off chance that it might be knocked out of orbit and crash into one of the potentially habitable moons. If that happened, Cassini could potentially contaminate those worlds with Earthling microbes.AdvertisementThe mission team considered moving Cassini to a more distant orbit, or sending it off to another planet. But then it came up with a proposal that would launch\u00a0Cassini into one last flyby past Titan and use the moon's pull to sling the craft into 22 close-in orbits of Saturn that would\u00a0explore the gaps between the planet's rings, then end by crashing into Saturn itself.It was the obvious choice, Spilker said.\u00a0She\u00a0compared these ring-grazing orbits to a \u201cbrand new mission.\u201d During the orbits, Cassini has mapped Saturn's gravity and magnetic fields to reveal the internal structure of the planet. It got close-up views of the rings and even sampled some of the icy particles that constitute them. It's expected to finally figure out the length of a Saturn day \u2014 a\u00a0measurement that has eluded scientists for decades.The \u201cGrand Finale\u201d began in April, and ends with a fiery plunge into Saturn's atmosphere in the early hours of\u00a0Sept. 15. On that day, scientists who have worked on the mission during the past 30 years will converge at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Just after midnight, the spacecraft will point its instruments in the direction of Saturn's atmosphere and start rapidly transmitting real-time data about what it sees. It\u00a0will hit the\u00a0atmosphere three hours later. A minute after that, it will start tumbling through the increasingly dense clouds of gas and will lose the ability to send a signal back to Earth. Because of the time delay in communication between Saturn and Earth, that final message won't\u00a0arrive at JPL until 83 minutes later, just before 5 a.m.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt that point, Cassini will already have burned up in Saturn's atmosphere, a tiny, bright meteorite streaking across\u00a0an alien sky.The end of Cassini is also the end of humankind's presence at Saturn \u2014 for now.\u00a0NASA has no additional missions planned for the\u00a0ringed planet, though several proposals are in the works. But even if a mission were to get approval tomorrow, it would probably be\u00a0more than a decade before we see Saturn, its rings or its moons again. Building a spacecraft simply takes a long time, as does traversing the\u00a0750 million miles from Earth to the outer solar system.For the scientists who have devoted their lives to this mission, it's a tough loss.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCassini is our eyes and\u00a0ears\u00a0allowing us to be\u00a0there, allowing us to reach out and touch the world and the rings,\u201d Spilker said. \u201cAs long as Cassini\u00a0is there, we\u2019re there at Saturn, and when\u00a0Cassini is gone, that close personal connection to the Saturn\u00a0system will be gone, too.\u201dRead more:Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their mindsWhy this\u00a0weird moon of Saturn is a great place to look for aliensNASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn's icy moon EnceladusCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. What to know about the end of the Cassini mission, which discovered potentially habitable worlds and changed our understanding of the sixth planet from the sun.  NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3005",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/trump-nominates-oklahoma-politician-and-climate-skeptic-to-run-nasa/",
        "text": "This article has been updated.President Trump recently announced his pick for NASA administrator: Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a former pilot whose goals for our solar system include installing humans\u00a0on the moon and cleaning up space junk. He also has expressed skepticism about human-caused climate change.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has lacked\u00a0a permanent administrator since January. The previous one, former astronaut and retired Marine Corps aviator\u00a0Charles Bolden, resigned the day that Trump took office. NASA's associate administrator, Robert Lightfoot Jr., stepped in as the temporary\u00a0head of the agency.\u00a0Lightfoot holds the record for longest tenure as an acting NASA administrator. Story continues below advertisementThe announcement, on Friday evening before Labor Day weekend, came after months of speculation that the 42-year-old representative from Oklahoma would\u00a0get the nod. Last year, Bridenstine \u2014 a strong supporter of Trump during the presidential race \u2014 informally told the\u00a0Trump campaign he was interested in a\u00a0leadership role at\u00a0NASA or the Air Force, The Washington Post reported three\u00a0days after the November election.Advertisement\u201cI am pleased to have Rep. Bridenstine nominated to lead our team,\u201d Lightfoot said in a statement\u00a0on Sept. 1. \u201cOf course, the nomination must go through the Senate confirmation process, but I look forward to ensuring a smooth transition and sharing the great work the NASA team is doing.\u201dBridenstine\u00a0has\u00a0advocated strengthening ties between NASA and the commercial spaceflight industry. He unveiled the American Space Renaissance Act in April 2016 \u2014 a sweeping measure so broad that, The Post reported, even Bridenstine was doubtful it would pass, and it has stalled in Congress. The act would have, among other things, updated the Defense Department's\u00a0satellite fleet and put a government agency in charge of space debris. It narrowed\u00a0what Bridenstine called NASA's \u201cjack-of-all-trades\u201d approach, setting the agency on course for the\u00a0moon, Mars and little else.\u00a0He has also called for a \u201cpermanent presence\u201d on the\u00a0moon, including a refueling station where satellites would load up on lunar ice.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBridenstine has the potential to be a pretty good administrator,\u201d said Phil Larson, assistant dean at the University of Colorado's engineering school. That Bridenstine has publicly taken positions on\u00a0space sets him apart from previous nominees, Larson said.\u00a0\u201cThe space community kind of knows where he\u2019s at on these issues.\u201dAdvertisementPerhaps a bigger question is his stance on earth and climate science.\u00a0From the House floor in 2013, Bridenstine said\u00a0that \u201cglobal temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,\u201d which is incorrect. In\u00a0a 2016 interview with Aerospace America, he said that the climate \u201chas always changed,\u201d\u00a0though remained open to \u201cstudying it.\u201dOn Twitter, Columbia University environmental law professor Michael Gerrard called Bridenstine a \u201cclimate denier,\u201d likening him to a fellow Oklahoman, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. But in a recent editorial at Tulsa World, editor Wayne Green recounted that Bridenstine understands that humans contribute to climate change, and that the congressman wishes he phrased his 2013 House speech differently.Story continues below advertisementResearcher\u00a0Kelvin Droegemeier of the University of Oklahoma at Norman, who worked with Bridenstine on a bill related to studying the\u00a0weather, said that the congressman acknowledges that climate change is real.\u00a0\u201cHe absolutely believes the planet is warming, that [carbon dioxide] is a greenhouse gas, and that it contributes to warming,\u201d\u00a0Droegemeier told\u00a0Science magazine.AdvertisementBefore his election to the House of Representatives, Bridenstine served as a Navy pilot and directed the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. He has not worked as a scientist or engineer, though he was involved with a rocket-powered aircraft league. (The Rocket Racing League \u2014 think NASCAR, but with rocket planes \u2014\u00a0failed to hold any races.\u00a0\u201cIt was before its time,\u201d Bridenstine said\u00a0to Space News in 2013.)If confirmed, Bridenstine\u00a0would be the first politician to serve as NASA administrator. He is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has frequently come into conflict with Republican leaders. Those opposed to his nomination, particularly Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, have pointed to his political\u00a0career as a critical flaw.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it\u2019s at a critical juncture in its history,\u201d Rubio said to\u00a0Politico. \u201cI would hate to see an administrator held up \u2014 on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes, or statements made in the past \u2014 because the agency can\u2019t afford it and it can\u2019t afford the controversy.\u201d Likewise, Nelson told Politico in a statement that, \u201cthe head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.\u201dAdvertisementLarson, who spent five years in the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy and advised the Obama administration on issues of space exploration,\u00a0pointed out that not all of the agency's past administrators have\u00a0had technical expertise.\u00a0\u201cSometimes the biggest challenges aren't the rocket science,\u201d he said, \u201cbut the political side of getting pragmatic engineering approaches to space exploration.\u201dJames Webb, for instance, was an attorney and business director before serving as NASA administrator between 1961 and 1968. Webb's managerial skills were lauded in his obituary in the New York Times. One aide recalled: \u201cThe reason we got to the moon before the Russians was they didn't have anybody to pull it together. The critical difference was we outmanaged them.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\"I\u2019m bullish on this pick,\u201d Larson said. \u201cThe top line flags \u2014 politician and climate \u2014 are not as serious when you look under the hood. He wants NASA to have a strong Earth science mission. And he wants to push the agency forward, including commercial. In current environment, this is a win for the space community.\u201dRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain Rep. James Bridenstine has long had an interest in space, but critics question his political background and climate stance. Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3006",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/trump-nominates-oklahoma-politician-and-climate-skeptic-to-run-nasa/",
        "text": "This article has been updated.President Trump recently announced his pick for NASA administrator: Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a former pilot whose goals for our solar system include installing humans\u00a0on the moon and cleaning up space junk. He also has expressed skepticism about human-caused climate change.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has lacked\u00a0a permanent administrator since January. The previous one, former astronaut and retired Marine Corps aviator\u00a0Charles Bolden, resigned the day that Trump took office. NASA's associate administrator, Robert Lightfoot Jr., stepped in as the temporary\u00a0head of the agency.\u00a0Lightfoot holds the record for longest tenure as an acting NASA administrator. Story continues below advertisementThe announcement, on Friday evening before Labor Day weekend, came after months of speculation that the 42-year-old representative from Oklahoma would\u00a0get the nod. Last year, Bridenstine \u2014 a strong supporter of Trump during the presidential race \u2014 informally told the\u00a0Trump campaign he was interested in a\u00a0leadership role at\u00a0NASA or the Air Force, The Washington Post reported three\u00a0days after the November election.Advertisement\u201cI am pleased to have Rep. Bridenstine nominated to lead our team,\u201d Lightfoot said in a statement\u00a0on Sept. 1. \u201cOf course, the nomination must go through the Senate confirmation process, but I look forward to ensuring a smooth transition and sharing the great work the NASA team is doing.\u201dBridenstine\u00a0has\u00a0advocated strengthening ties between NASA and the commercial spaceflight industry. He unveiled the American Space Renaissance Act in April 2016 \u2014 a sweeping measure so broad that, The Post reported, even Bridenstine was doubtful it would pass, and it has stalled in Congress. The act would have, among other things, updated the Defense Department's\u00a0satellite fleet and put a government agency in charge of space debris. It narrowed\u00a0what Bridenstine called NASA's \u201cjack-of-all-trades\u201d approach, setting the agency on course for the\u00a0moon, Mars and little else.\u00a0He has also called for a \u201cpermanent presence\u201d on the\u00a0moon, including a refueling station where satellites would load up on lunar ice.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBridenstine has the potential to be a pretty good administrator,\u201d said Phil Larson, assistant dean at the University of Colorado's engineering school. That Bridenstine has publicly taken positions on\u00a0space sets him apart from previous nominees, Larson said.\u00a0\u201cThe space community kind of knows where he\u2019s at on these issues.\u201dAdvertisementPerhaps a bigger question is his stance on earth and climate science.\u00a0From the House floor in 2013, Bridenstine said\u00a0that \u201cglobal temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,\u201d which is incorrect. In\u00a0a 2016 interview with Aerospace America, he said that the climate \u201chas always changed,\u201d\u00a0though remained open to \u201cstudying it.\u201dOn Twitter, Columbia University environmental law professor Michael Gerrard called Bridenstine a \u201cclimate denier,\u201d likening him to a fellow Oklahoman, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. But in a recent editorial at Tulsa World, editor Wayne Green recounted that Bridenstine understands that humans contribute to climate change, and that the congressman wishes he phrased his 2013 House speech differently.Story continues below advertisementResearcher\u00a0Kelvin Droegemeier of the University of Oklahoma at Norman, who worked with Bridenstine on a bill related to studying the\u00a0weather, said that the congressman acknowledges that climate change is real.\u00a0\u201cHe absolutely believes the planet is warming, that [carbon dioxide] is a greenhouse gas, and that it contributes to warming,\u201d\u00a0Droegemeier told\u00a0Science magazine.AdvertisementBefore his election to the House of Representatives, Bridenstine served as a Navy pilot and directed the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. He has not worked as a scientist or engineer, though he was involved with a rocket-powered aircraft league. (The Rocket Racing League \u2014 think NASCAR, but with rocket planes \u2014\u00a0failed to hold any races.\u00a0\u201cIt was before its time,\u201d Bridenstine said\u00a0to Space News in 2013.)If confirmed, Bridenstine\u00a0would be the first politician to serve as NASA administrator. He is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has frequently come into conflict with Republican leaders. Those opposed to his nomination, particularly Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, have pointed to his political\u00a0career as a critical flaw.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it\u2019s at a critical juncture in its history,\u201d Rubio said to\u00a0Politico. \u201cI would hate to see an administrator held up \u2014 on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes, or statements made in the past \u2014 because the agency can\u2019t afford it and it can\u2019t afford the controversy.\u201d Likewise, Nelson told Politico in a statement that, \u201cthe head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.\u201dAdvertisementLarson, who spent five years in the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy and advised the Obama administration on issues of space exploration,\u00a0pointed out that not all of the agency's past administrators have\u00a0had technical expertise.\u00a0\u201cSometimes the biggest challenges aren't the rocket science,\u201d he said, \u201cbut the political side of getting pragmatic engineering approaches to space exploration.\u201dJames Webb, for instance, was an attorney and business director before serving as NASA administrator between 1961 and 1968. Webb's managerial skills were lauded in his obituary in the New York Times. One aide recalled: \u201cThe reason we got to the moon before the Russians was they didn't have anybody to pull it together. The critical difference was we outmanaged them.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\"I\u2019m bullish on this pick,\u201d Larson said. \u201cThe top line flags \u2014 politician and climate \u2014 are not as serious when you look under the hood. He wants NASA to have a strong Earth science mission. And he wants to push the agency forward, including commercial. In current environment, this is a win for the space community.\u201dRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain Rep. James Bridenstine has long had an interest in space, but critics question his political background and climate stance. Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3007",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/trump-nominates-oklahoma-politician-and-climate-skeptic-to-run-nasa/",
        "text": "This article has been updated.President Trump recently announced his pick for NASA administrator: Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a former pilot whose goals for our solar system include installing humans\u00a0on the moon and cleaning up space junk. He also has expressed skepticism about human-caused climate change.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has lacked\u00a0a permanent administrator since January. The previous one, former astronaut and retired Marine Corps aviator\u00a0Charles Bolden, resigned the day that Trump took office. NASA's associate administrator, Robert Lightfoot Jr., stepped in as the temporary\u00a0head of the agency.\u00a0Lightfoot holds the record for longest tenure as an acting NASA administrator. Story continues below advertisementThe announcement, on Friday evening before Labor Day weekend, came after months of speculation that the 42-year-old representative from Oklahoma would\u00a0get the nod. Last year, Bridenstine \u2014 a strong supporter of Trump during the presidential race \u2014 informally told the\u00a0Trump campaign he was interested in a\u00a0leadership role at\u00a0NASA or the Air Force, The Washington Post reported three\u00a0days after the November election.Advertisement\u201cI am pleased to have Rep. Bridenstine nominated to lead our team,\u201d Lightfoot said in a statement\u00a0on Sept. 1. \u201cOf course, the nomination must go through the Senate confirmation process, but I look forward to ensuring a smooth transition and sharing the great work the NASA team is doing.\u201dBridenstine\u00a0has\u00a0advocated strengthening ties between NASA and the commercial spaceflight industry. He unveiled the American Space Renaissance Act in April 2016 \u2014 a sweeping measure so broad that, The Post reported, even Bridenstine was doubtful it would pass, and it has stalled in Congress. The act would have, among other things, updated the Defense Department's\u00a0satellite fleet and put a government agency in charge of space debris. It narrowed\u00a0what Bridenstine called NASA's \u201cjack-of-all-trades\u201d approach, setting the agency on course for the\u00a0moon, Mars and little else.\u00a0He has also called for a \u201cpermanent presence\u201d on the\u00a0moon, including a refueling station where satellites would load up on lunar ice.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBridenstine has the potential to be a pretty good administrator,\u201d said Phil Larson, assistant dean at the University of Colorado's engineering school. That Bridenstine has publicly taken positions on\u00a0space sets him apart from previous nominees, Larson said.\u00a0\u201cThe space community kind of knows where he\u2019s at on these issues.\u201dAdvertisementPerhaps a bigger question is his stance on earth and climate science.\u00a0From the House floor in 2013, Bridenstine said\u00a0that \u201cglobal temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,\u201d which is incorrect. In\u00a0a 2016 interview with Aerospace America, he said that the climate \u201chas always changed,\u201d\u00a0though remained open to \u201cstudying it.\u201dOn Twitter, Columbia University environmental law professor Michael Gerrard called Bridenstine a \u201cclimate denier,\u201d likening him to a fellow Oklahoman, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. But in a recent editorial at Tulsa World, editor Wayne Green recounted that Bridenstine understands that humans contribute to climate change, and that the congressman wishes he phrased his 2013 House speech differently.Story continues below advertisementResearcher\u00a0Kelvin Droegemeier of the University of Oklahoma at Norman, who worked with Bridenstine on a bill related to studying the\u00a0weather, said that the congressman acknowledges that climate change is real.\u00a0\u201cHe absolutely believes the planet is warming, that [carbon dioxide] is a greenhouse gas, and that it contributes to warming,\u201d\u00a0Droegemeier told\u00a0Science magazine.AdvertisementBefore his election to the House of Representatives, Bridenstine served as a Navy pilot and directed the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. He has not worked as a scientist or engineer, though he was involved with a rocket-powered aircraft league. (The Rocket Racing League \u2014 think NASCAR, but with rocket planes \u2014\u00a0failed to hold any races.\u00a0\u201cIt was before its time,\u201d Bridenstine said\u00a0to Space News in 2013.)If confirmed, Bridenstine\u00a0would be the first politician to serve as NASA administrator. He is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has frequently come into conflict with Republican leaders. Those opposed to his nomination, particularly Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, have pointed to his political\u00a0career as a critical flaw.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it\u2019s at a critical juncture in its history,\u201d Rubio said to\u00a0Politico. \u201cI would hate to see an administrator held up \u2014 on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes, or statements made in the past \u2014 because the agency can\u2019t afford it and it can\u2019t afford the controversy.\u201d Likewise, Nelson told Politico in a statement that, \u201cthe head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.\u201dAdvertisementLarson, who spent five years in the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy and advised the Obama administration on issues of space exploration,\u00a0pointed out that not all of the agency's past administrators have\u00a0had technical expertise.\u00a0\u201cSometimes the biggest challenges aren't the rocket science,\u201d he said, \u201cbut the political side of getting pragmatic engineering approaches to space exploration.\u201dJames Webb, for instance, was an attorney and business director before serving as NASA administrator between 1961 and 1968. Webb's managerial skills were lauded in his obituary in the New York Times. One aide recalled: \u201cThe reason we got to the moon before the Russians was they didn't have anybody to pull it together. The critical difference was we outmanaged them.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\"I\u2019m bullish on this pick,\u201d Larson said. \u201cThe top line flags \u2014 politician and climate \u2014 are not as serious when you look under the hood. He wants NASA to have a strong Earth science mission. And he wants to push the agency forward, including commercial. In current environment, this is a win for the space community.\u201dRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain Rep. James Bridenstine has long had an interest in space, but critics question his political background and climate stance. Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3008",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/trump-nominates-oklahoma-politician-and-climate-skeptic-to-run-nasa/",
        "text": "This article has been updated.President Trump recently announced his pick for NASA administrator: Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), a former pilot whose goals for our solar system include installing humans\u00a0on the moon and cleaning up space junk. He also has expressed skepticism about human-caused climate change.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has lacked\u00a0a permanent administrator since January. The previous one, former astronaut and retired Marine Corps aviator\u00a0Charles Bolden, resigned the day that Trump took office. NASA's associate administrator, Robert Lightfoot Jr., stepped in as the temporary\u00a0head of the agency.\u00a0Lightfoot holds the record for longest tenure as an acting NASA administrator. Story continues below advertisementThe announcement, on Friday evening before Labor Day weekend, came after months of speculation that the 42-year-old representative from Oklahoma would\u00a0get the nod. Last year, Bridenstine \u2014 a strong supporter of Trump during the presidential race \u2014 informally told the\u00a0Trump campaign he was interested in a\u00a0leadership role at\u00a0NASA or the Air Force, The Washington Post reported three\u00a0days after the November election.Advertisement\u201cI am pleased to have Rep. Bridenstine nominated to lead our team,\u201d Lightfoot said in a statement\u00a0on Sept. 1. \u201cOf course, the nomination must go through the Senate confirmation process, but I look forward to ensuring a smooth transition and sharing the great work the NASA team is doing.\u201dBridenstine\u00a0has\u00a0advocated strengthening ties between NASA and the commercial spaceflight industry. He unveiled the American Space Renaissance Act in April 2016 \u2014 a sweeping measure so broad that, The Post reported, even Bridenstine was doubtful it would pass, and it has stalled in Congress. The act would have, among other things, updated the Defense Department's\u00a0satellite fleet and put a government agency in charge of space debris. It narrowed\u00a0what Bridenstine called NASA's \u201cjack-of-all-trades\u201d approach, setting the agency on course for the\u00a0moon, Mars and little else.\u00a0He has also called for a \u201cpermanent presence\u201d on the\u00a0moon, including a refueling station where satellites would load up on lunar ice.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBridenstine has the potential to be a pretty good administrator,\u201d said Phil Larson, assistant dean at the University of Colorado's engineering school. That Bridenstine has publicly taken positions on\u00a0space sets him apart from previous nominees, Larson said.\u00a0\u201cThe space community kind of knows where he\u2019s at on these issues.\u201dAdvertisementPerhaps a bigger question is his stance on earth and climate science.\u00a0From the House floor in 2013, Bridenstine said\u00a0that \u201cglobal temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,\u201d which is incorrect. In\u00a0a 2016 interview with Aerospace America, he said that the climate \u201chas always changed,\u201d\u00a0though remained open to \u201cstudying it.\u201dOn Twitter, Columbia University environmental law professor Michael Gerrard called Bridenstine a \u201cclimate denier,\u201d likening him to a fellow Oklahoman, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. But in a recent editorial at Tulsa World, editor Wayne Green recounted that Bridenstine understands that humans contribute to climate change, and that the congressman wishes he phrased his 2013 House speech differently.Story continues below advertisementResearcher\u00a0Kelvin Droegemeier of the University of Oklahoma at Norman, who worked with Bridenstine on a bill related to studying the\u00a0weather, said that the congressman acknowledges that climate change is real.\u00a0\u201cHe absolutely believes the planet is warming, that [carbon dioxide] is a greenhouse gas, and that it contributes to warming,\u201d\u00a0Droegemeier told\u00a0Science magazine.AdvertisementBefore his election to the House of Representatives, Bridenstine served as a Navy pilot and directed the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. He has not worked as a scientist or engineer, though he was involved with a rocket-powered aircraft league. (The Rocket Racing League \u2014 think NASCAR, but with rocket planes \u2014\u00a0failed to hold any races.\u00a0\u201cIt was before its time,\u201d Bridenstine said\u00a0to Space News in 2013.)If confirmed, Bridenstine\u00a0would be the first politician to serve as NASA administrator. He is a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which has frequently come into conflict with Republican leaders. Those opposed to his nomination, particularly Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, have pointed to his political\u00a0career as a critical flaw.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics and it\u2019s at a critical juncture in its history,\u201d Rubio said to\u00a0Politico. \u201cI would hate to see an administrator held up \u2014 on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes, or statements made in the past \u2014 because the agency can\u2019t afford it and it can\u2019t afford the controversy.\u201d Likewise, Nelson told Politico in a statement that, \u201cthe head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.\u201dAdvertisementLarson, who spent five years in the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy and advised the Obama administration on issues of space exploration,\u00a0pointed out that not all of the agency's past administrators have\u00a0had technical expertise.\u00a0\u201cSometimes the biggest challenges aren't the rocket science,\u201d he said, \u201cbut the political side of getting pragmatic engineering approaches to space exploration.\u201dJames Webb, for instance, was an attorney and business director before serving as NASA administrator between 1961 and 1968. Webb's managerial skills were lauded in his obituary in the New York Times. One aide recalled: \u201cThe reason we got to the moon before the Russians was they didn't have anybody to pull it together. The critical difference was we outmanaged them.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\"I\u2019m bullish on this pick,\u201d Larson said. \u201cThe top line flags \u2014 politician and climate \u2014 are not as serious when you look under the hood. He wants NASA to have a strong Earth science mission. And he wants to push the agency forward, including commercial. In current environment, this is a win for the space community.\u201dRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain Rep. James Bridenstine has long had an interest in space, but critics question his political background and climate stance. Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASA",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "These record-breaking pictures were taken by the farthest camera from Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3009",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/09/these-record-breaking-pictures-were-taken-by-the-farthest-camera-from-earth/",
        "text": "They may not look like much more than blue-green smudges, but the images are record-breakers. The\u00a0machine that took these photos\u00a0was\u00a0farther from Earth than any other functioning camera in existence.NASA released the pictures,\u00a0captured at the end of 2017 by the\u00a0Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, on Thursday. The imager is one of seven instruments aboard the New Horizons spacecraft that reached Pluto in 2015. The camera photographed three subjects in December:\u00a0a star group nicknamed the Wishing Well, as well as two objects\u00a0closer to home that are part of the band of rocks, ice clumps and dwarf planets at the edge of our solar system called the\u00a0Kuiper belt. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cNew Horizons is in a very good trajectory to see a lot of these objects close up,\u201d said Simon Porter, an astrophysicist at\u00a0Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and part of the New Horizons mission. Porter calculated when New\u00a0Horizons could best observe the two Kuiper belt objects\u00a0and helped schedule the images. (It was a test run, he noted: The image of the object called\u00a02012 HE85, on the right, is a little bit off-center because it wasn't quite where predicted.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn taking these images, New Horizon broke a record that had stood for nearly three decades. When the probe Voyager 1\u00a0was 3.75 billion miles from Earth, on Valentine's Day 1990,\u00a0it turned its camera toward home and took a photo, called the\u00a0Pale Blue Dot. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who pitched\u00a0the photo concept, famously\u00a0remarked: \u201cLook again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.\u201dThe Pale Blue Dot was the final picture beamed back to Earth by Voyager 1, now the most distant thing made by humans and the first craft to cross into interstellar space. Voyager can\u00a0no longer send back postcards\u00a0\u2014 its camera was shut down. But the spacecraft is not dead yet. NASA turned on\u00a0Voyager's backup thrusters in 2017 after nearly 40 years of disuse.New Horizons is not as far from Earth as Voyager 1, but this spacecraft is also on track to leave the solar system. After New Horizons launched in 2006, it flung itself around\u00a0Jupiter in 2007 to get a boost toward Pluto, where it arrived in summer 2015. There, it changed the way we view the dwarf planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto in 2015. NASA launched New Horizons in 2006. (NASA)New Horizons continues its journey into the cosmos at a\u00a0rate of about 700,000 miles a day. During its travels, New Horizons alternates between periods of activity and dormancy to conserve fuel.It was most recently active between September and December 2017. In the first week of December, it passed the Pale Blue Dot's record distance. It imaged the Wishing Well at\u00a03.79 billion miles away, beating the Blue Dot photo shoot by 40 million miles. New Horizons broke its own record in the following days, photographing\u00a0Kuiper belt objects\u00a02012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85.With diameters of a hundred kilometers or so, the two Kuiper belt objects are not large enough to classify as dwarf planets.\u00a0Next to\u00a0nothing is known about the micro-surfaces of objects like these,\u00a0Porter said. The images of 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 provide vital context to the understudied bodies at the solar system's bleeding edge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kuiper belt is a vast expanse of rocks, ice clumps, comets and dwarf planets beyond Neptune. (Dwarf planet Pluto is a part of the belt, but it was not recognized as such until the discovery of other Kuiper objects in the early 2000s.) Pluto was estimated in 2015 to be the largest object in the belt, though there are other dwarf planets of note, such as Eris, Haumea and Makemake.For now, the Hubble telescope, which orbits Earth, can image most Kuiper belt objects in greater detail than New Horizon's eight-inch telescope, Porter said. But that will not be true when New Horizons wakes up in August.\u00a0The spacecraft's camera\u00a0will continue to set image records as it flies by a Kuiper belt object called\u00a02014 MU69 in January 2019.The Kuiper belt\u00a0object flyby is \u201cnot nearly as flashy as Pluto,\u201d Porter said, but \u201cit's a really unique observation.\u201d If a craft were launched today, it would take a decade to travel as far as New Horizons has, and there are no immediate\u00a0plans to\u00a0follow in its path.Read more:New Horizons studies its first mysterious, distant space object after PlutoWhy Pluto is even colder than it should beGorgeous new photo shows Pluto with jazzed up color The New Horizons spacecraft broke the \u201cPale Blue Dot\u201d record set by Voyager 1 in 1990.  These record-breaking pictures were taken by the farthest camera from Earth",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versa (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3010",
        "date": "2017-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/02/nasa-is-hiring-a-planetary-protection-officer-to-guard-us-against-alien-life-and-vice-versa/",
        "text": "There's a vacancy at NASA, and it may have one of the greatest job titles ever conceived: planetary protection officer.It pays well, between\u00a0$124,000\u00a0and $187,000 annually. You get to work with really\u00a0smart people as part of the three- to five-year appointment\u00a0but don't have to manage anyone. And your work could\u00a0stave off an\u00a0alien invasion of Earth or, more important, protect other planets from us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne small step for criminals: Someone burglarized the Armstrong Air and Space MuseumPresident Trump has expressed\u00a0bullish enthusiasm\u00a0for America's space\u00a0program, signing an executive order last month\u00a0resurrecting the National Space Council,\u00a0on hiatus since the 1990s, and gleefully\u00a0discussing\u00a0the prospect of sending people\u00a0to Mars. His proposed budget for NASA\u00a0seeks a slight funding reduction overall, though he wants to realign spending to focus on \u201cdeep space exploration rather than Earth-centric research,\u201d as The Washington Post reported in March.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo how does the one-person Planetary Protection Office fit in with NASA's broader objectives?The job announcement is rather dense.\u00a0But Catharine Conley, the NASA scientist who has been in this\u00a0role\u00a0since 2006, has spoken candidly about its scope and responsibilities, telling Scientific American in 2014 that\u00a0her focus is to ensure that the agency's activity complies with a 50-year-old international treaty that set standards for preventing biological contamination outside of Earth and safeguarding the planet's\u00a0biosphere from any alien life.To that end, the magazine asked Conley a lot about Mars, where NASA has deployed exploratory\u00a0spacecraft\u00a0and robots\u00a0since the mid-1970s to search for clues about the existence of water, prospects for habitability and any existence of life. The\u00a0earliest\u00a0missions, part of NASA's Viking program,\u00a0included\u00a0meticulous steps to not sully\u00a0the Martian landscape, she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe landers,\u201d Conley explained, \u201cwere packaged and put inside a bioshield and baked in an oven to kill all organisms \u2014 a 'full-system sterilization,' we call it. \u2026 We needed to protect the life-detection instruments and protect the Mars environment in case it turned out to be habitable to Earth life.\u201dTrump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term \u2018at worst\u2019Today, rovers operate where it's believed water once existed, gathering\u00a0imagery, analyzing the environment\u00a0and beaming that data back to Earth. And as scientists' understanding of the Red Planet evolves, so do the questions facing those working\u00a0to\u00a0send people\u00a0there in the coming decades.\u201cWill the humans be alive by the time they get to Mars?\u201d Conley asked in 2014. \u201cIf they die on Mars, are they then contaminating the surface?\u201d That could interfere with future research, she said.Story continues below advertisementEnvironmental and atmospheric samples may hold important\u00a0answers, \u201costensibly to seek out signs of aliens,\u201d\u00a0as Business Insider's Dave Mosher writes. But sending anything from Mars back to labs here on Earth presents risk.\u00a0The planetary protection officer will be instrumental in creating the tools and rules to reduce it.\u201cThe phrase that we use,\u201d Conley told Mosher, \u201cis 'Break the chain of contact with Mars.' \u201dShe has not said whether she intends to reapply for the job.Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Catharine Conley, NASA\u2019s planetary protection officer, has served in this role for three years. She\u2019s held the position since 2006. This post has been corrected.\u00a0 It pays six figures a year. NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versa",
        "author": "Andrew deGrandpre"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versa (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3011",
        "date": "2017-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/02/nasa-is-hiring-a-planetary-protection-officer-to-guard-us-against-alien-life-and-vice-versa/",
        "text": "There's a vacancy at NASA, and it may have one of the greatest job titles ever conceived: planetary protection officer.It pays well, between\u00a0$124,000\u00a0and $187,000 annually. You get to work with really\u00a0smart people as part of the three- to five-year appointment\u00a0but don't have to manage anyone. And your work could\u00a0stave off an\u00a0alien invasion of Earth or, more important, protect other planets from us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne small step for criminals: Someone burglarized the Armstrong Air and Space MuseumPresident Trump has expressed\u00a0bullish enthusiasm\u00a0for America's space\u00a0program, signing an executive order last month\u00a0resurrecting the National Space Council,\u00a0on hiatus since the 1990s, and gleefully\u00a0discussing\u00a0the prospect of sending people\u00a0to Mars. His proposed budget for NASA\u00a0seeks a slight funding reduction overall, though he wants to realign spending to focus on \u201cdeep space exploration rather than Earth-centric research,\u201d as The Washington Post reported in March.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo how does the one-person Planetary Protection Office fit in with NASA's broader objectives?The job announcement is rather dense.\u00a0But Catharine Conley, the NASA scientist who has been in this\u00a0role\u00a0since 2006, has spoken candidly about its scope and responsibilities, telling Scientific American in 2014 that\u00a0her focus is to ensure that the agency's activity complies with a 50-year-old international treaty that set standards for preventing biological contamination outside of Earth and safeguarding the planet's\u00a0biosphere from any alien life.To that end, the magazine asked Conley a lot about Mars, where NASA has deployed exploratory\u00a0spacecraft\u00a0and robots\u00a0since the mid-1970s to search for clues about the existence of water, prospects for habitability and any existence of life. The\u00a0earliest\u00a0missions, part of NASA's Viking program,\u00a0included\u00a0meticulous steps to not sully\u00a0the Martian landscape, she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe landers,\u201d Conley explained, \u201cwere packaged and put inside a bioshield and baked in an oven to kill all organisms \u2014 a 'full-system sterilization,' we call it. \u2026 We needed to protect the life-detection instruments and protect the Mars environment in case it turned out to be habitable to Earth life.\u201dTrump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term \u2018at worst\u2019Today, rovers operate where it's believed water once existed, gathering\u00a0imagery, analyzing the environment\u00a0and beaming that data back to Earth. And as scientists' understanding of the Red Planet evolves, so do the questions facing those working\u00a0to\u00a0send people\u00a0there in the coming decades.\u201cWill the humans be alive by the time they get to Mars?\u201d Conley asked in 2014. \u201cIf they die on Mars, are they then contaminating the surface?\u201d That could interfere with future research, she said.Story continues below advertisementEnvironmental and atmospheric samples may hold important\u00a0answers, \u201costensibly to seek out signs of aliens,\u201d\u00a0as Business Insider's Dave Mosher writes. But sending anything from Mars back to labs here on Earth presents risk.\u00a0The planetary protection officer will be instrumental in creating the tools and rules to reduce it.\u201cThe phrase that we use,\u201d Conley told Mosher, \u201cis 'Break the chain of contact with Mars.' \u201dShe has not said whether she intends to reapply for the job.Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Catharine Conley, NASA\u2019s planetary protection officer, has served in this role for three years. She\u2019s held the position since 2006. This post has been corrected.\u00a0 It pays six figures a year. NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versa",
        "author": "Andrew deGrandpre"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pair of studies confirm there is water on the moon  (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3012",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/10/26/water-on-the-moon/",
        "text": "There is water on the moon\u2019s surface, and ice may be widespread in its many shadows, according to a pair of studies published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. The research confirms long-standing theories about the existence of lunar water that could someday enable astronauts to live there for extended periods. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne scientific team found the telltale sign of water molecules, perhaps bound up in glass, in a sunlit region. Another group estimated the widespread prevalence of tiny shadowed pockmarks on the lunar landscape, possible shelter for water ice over an area of 15,000 square miles.Moon water has been eyed as a potential resource by NASA, which created a program named Artemis in 2019 to send American astronauts back to the moon this decade. Launching water to space costs thousands of dollars per gallon. Future explorers may be able to use lunar water not only to quench their own thirst but to refuel their rockets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe conception of a bone-dry moon persisted widely until relatively recently. Astronomers in the 1800s believed the moon must be waterless because they could not see lakes or clouds through their telescopes. That notion was reinforced by the powdery lunar surface the Apollo astronauts saw and felt through the soles of their boots a half century ago.A Soviet probe may have collected moon water, but that research, published in a Soviet journal in 1978, went largely ignored.But in the 2000s, a picture of a water-tinged moon began to emerge. Careful studies of moon samples and spacecraft observations helped overturn the notion of a total lunar desert. In 2018, scientists found ice deposits at the moon\u2019s poles, which the Apollo astronauts did not visit. The lunar south pole in particular is believed to have reservoirs of potentially useful water in either ice or molecular form \u2014 though certainly not liquid.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpacecraft such as India\u2019s Chandrayaan-1, using a NASA instrument to map minerals and other materials, hunted for lunar water and detected compounds of hydrogen and oxygen, the atomic components of water.But those detections could not rule out sources other than water in sunlit regions, said Casey Honniball, a research fellow at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Other hydrogen-oxygen compounds or the moon\u2019s thermal emissions may have muddled the signals.Studies published in the Nature Astronomy journal Oct. 26 confirmed there is water on the moon's surface. (NASA/Ames Research Center)The new discovery comes from remote observation of the moon\u2019s surface by an infrared telescope on SOFIA, a modified Boeing 747 airplane that flies high in Earth\u2019s atmosphere and scans the moon\u2019s surface. The instruments aboard the observatory detected subtleties in the moonlight at a wavelength of 6 microns, which the researchers believe is an unambiguous signal of water. \u201cOnly molecular water can create a 6-micron band,\u201d Honniball said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohn Grunsfeld, a physicist and former associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, who was not involved with this research, said the new study confirms what was previously measured. \u201cThe SOFIA measurements are similar to others, including the lunar samples from the Apollo missions,\u201d he said.The SOFIA study detected individual molecules of water near a massive crater formation, named Clavius, in the moon\u2019s southern region. Because the water molecules are so spread out, Honniball said, they \u201cdo not interact with one another and so cannot form liquid water or water ice.\u201dShe suspects they were protected in pockets between grains of dust or within glass beads, the size of pencil tips, formed by micrometeorite impacts. \u201cThe water must be sheltered from the harsh lunar environment, because at the time of our observations, the location on the moon was quite warm,\u201d Honniball said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe molecules of water found in this new study aren\u2019t abundant enough for astronauts to use, Honniball said. They detected the equivalent of a 12-ounce water bottle per cubic meter of soil. But greater concentrations may be found in other lunar regions, such as the moon\u2019s volcanic deposits.A second report estimated where ice could collect across the moon\u2019s permanently shadowed areas. Craters and indentations on the surface, which the authors called \u201cmicro cold traps,\u201d could cover more than 15,000 square miles of the moon\u2019s surface. The bogglingly chilly temperatures in those traps \u2014 minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit or below \u2014 could keep ice stable as a rock for a billion years, said study author Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.Using mathematical models plus temperature observations from a NASA robot, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Hayne and his colleagues estimated there are tens of billions of these traps. They range in size from about the width of pennies to a yard across. This research does not confirm ice exists in all the traps, but they would be tempting targets for astronauts, Hayne said. Instead of trekking into a vast crater to collect water, future astronauts may be able to bend down and pluck ice nuggets from these dark pockmarks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe great thing about science is that both papers make predictions that are testable,\u201d said Bethany Ehlmann, an assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech who was not involved in the research. She noted that a robotic mission, called Lunar Trailblazer, would orbit the moon to look for water in shadowy craters as well as the cold traps.NASA also announced in June that it had hired a private company to deploy a rover, named VIPER, to the moon\u2019s south pole in 2023, that will drill for water a meter below the surface.\u201cBoth papers deepen the mysteries of lunar water while providing pieces of the puzzle,\u201d she said in an email. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting to think that lurking in the shadow within ten degrees of the pole are tiny reservoirs of water ice.\u201dRead more:NASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn\u2019s icy moon EnceladusDear Science: Does a full moon really change human behavior?Asteroids splashed into the young moon \u2014 and they may be the source of its water New research confirms what scientists had theorized for years \u2014 the moon is wet. Pair of studies confirm there is water on the moon ",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune Has a Newly Discovered Moon. What Else Is It Hiding? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3013",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/science/neptune-moon-hippocamp.html",
        "text": "There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. It\u2019s time to add one more tiny moon to Neptune\u2019s icy family tree. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spied a previously undetected satellite around the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, bringing its total number to 14.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune Has a Newly Discovered Moon. What Else Is It Hiding? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3014",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/science/neptune-moon-hippocamp.html",
        "text": "There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. It\u2019s time to add one more tiny moon to Neptune\u2019s icy family tree. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spied a previously undetected satellite around the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, bringing its total number to 14.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune Has a Newly Discovered Moon. What Else Is It Hiding? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3015",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/science/neptune-moon-hippocamp.html",
        "text": "There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. It\u2019s time to add one more tiny moon to Neptune\u2019s icy family tree. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spied a previously undetected satellite around the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, bringing its total number to 14.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune Has a Newly Discovered Moon. What Else Is It Hiding? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3016",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/science/neptune-moon-hippocamp.html",
        "text": "There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. There is much more to learn about the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, which hasn\u2019t been visited by a spacecraft for 30 years. It\u2019s time to add one more tiny moon to Neptune\u2019s icy family tree. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spied a previously undetected satellite around the solar system\u2019s eighth planet, bringing its total number to 14.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Dubai to Mars, With Stops in Colorado and Japan (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3017",
        "date": "2020-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. BOULDER, Colo. \u2014 In December, a spacecraft named Hope was motionless in the middle of a large clean room on the campus of the University of Colorado, mounted securely on a stand.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Dubai to Mars, With Stops in Colorado and Japan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3018",
        "date": "2020-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. BOULDER, Colo. \u2014 In December, a spacecraft named Hope was motionless in the middle of a large clean room on the campus of the University of Colorado, mounted securely on a stand.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Dubai to Mars, With Stops in Colorado and Japan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3019",
        "date": "2020-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. BOULDER, Colo. \u2014 In December, a spacecraft named Hope was motionless in the middle of a large clean room on the campus of the University of Colorado, mounted securely on a stand.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Dubai to Mars, With Stops in Colorado and Japan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3020",
        "date": "2020-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. The United Arab Emirates used a novel approach to build the Hope spacecraft, which launches for the red planet this summer. BOULDER, Colo. \u2014 In December, a spacecraft named Hope was motionless in the middle of a large clean room on the campus of the University of Colorado, mounted securely on a stand.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We\u2019ve Learned About Ultima Thule From NASA\u2019s New Horizons Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3021",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The team that manages the spacecraft will have to wait 20 months for all of the data and images it recorded, but they have reported some early findings. The team that manages the spacecraft will have to wait 20 months for all of the data and images it recorded, but they have reported some early findings. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 A couple of days before the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby of a small, icy world far beyond Pluto, scientists working on the mission finally got a picture of the body, nicknamed Ultima Thule, that was more than a single dot. It looked a bit elongated, but that was really all that could be detected from the image.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We\u2019ve Learned About Ultima Thule From NASA\u2019s New Horizons Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3022",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The team that manages the spacecraft will have to wait 20 months for all of the data and images it recorded, but they have reported some early findings. The team that manages the spacecraft will have to wait 20 months for all of the data and images it recorded, but they have reported some early findings. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 A couple of days before the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby of a small, icy world far beyond Pluto, scientists working on the mission finally got a picture of the body, nicknamed Ultima Thule, that was more than a single dot. It looked a bit elongated, but that was really all that could be detected from the image.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We\u2019ve Learned About Ultima Thule From NASA\u2019s New Horizons Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3023",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The team that manages the spacecraft will have to wait 20 months for all of the data and images it recorded, but they have reported some early findings. The team that manages the spacecraft will have to wait 20 months for all of the data and images it recorded, but they have reported some early findings. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 A couple of days before the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby of a small, icy world far beyond Pluto, scientists working on the mission finally got a picture of the body, nicknamed Ultima Thule, that was more than a single dot. It looked a bit elongated, but that was really all that could be detected from the image.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Landing by Israel\u2019s Beresheet Spacecraft Ends in Crash (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3024",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/israel-moon-landing-beresheet.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed into the moon on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Landing by Israel\u2019s Beresheet Spacecraft Ends in Crash (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3025",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/israel-moon-landing-beresheet.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed into the moon on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Landing by Israel\u2019s Beresheet Spacecraft Ends in Crash (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3026",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/israel-moon-landing-beresheet.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed into the moon on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Landing by Israel\u2019s Beresheet Spacecraft Ends in Crash (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3027",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/israel-moon-landing-beresheet.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. The spacecraft\u2019s orbit of the moon was a first for a private effort, but the landing failure highlighted the risks of fast and cheap approaches to space exploration. A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed into the moon on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Telescope Checks In With the Most Distant Planets (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3028",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/science/hubble-telescope-jupiter-saturn-uranus-neptune.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s farseeing eye once again sets its gaze on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft\u2019s farseeing eye once again sets its gaze on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. You don\u2019t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on Jupiter. All you need is the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope for a close-up look at the candy-colored ribbons of clouds and storms on the face of the solar system\u2019s largest planet.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Telescope Checks In With the Most Distant Planets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3029",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/science/hubble-telescope-jupiter-saturn-uranus-neptune.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s farseeing eye once again sets its gaze on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The spacecraft\u2019s farseeing eye once again sets its gaze on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. You don\u2019t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on Jupiter. All you need is the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope for a close-up look at the candy-colored ribbons of clouds and storms on the face of the solar system\u2019s largest planet.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "LightSail-2 Mission Shows Solar Sailing\u2019s Potential for Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3030",
        "date": "2019-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/science/lightsail-solar-sail.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s controllers on Earth succeeded in steering the spacecraft, demonstrating that mylar sails could be used for propulsion. The spacecraft\u2019s controllers on Earth succeeded in steering the spacecraft, demonstrating that mylar sails could be used for propulsion. Sail on, pushed by the wind of sunlight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "LightSail-2 Mission Shows Solar Sailing\u2019s Potential for Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3031",
        "date": "2019-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/31/science/lightsail-solar-sail.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft\u2019s controllers on Earth succeeded in steering the spacecraft, demonstrating that mylar sails could be used for propulsion. The spacecraft\u2019s controllers on Earth succeeded in steering the spacecraft, demonstrating that mylar sails could be used for propulsion. Sail on, pushed by the wind of sunlight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Parker Solar Probe Launches on NASA Voyage to \u2018Touch the Sun\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3032",
        "date": "2018-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/science/parker-solar-probe-launch.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft, which NASA says will \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d was carried from the launchpad atop three columns of flame early on Sunday morning. The spacecraft, which NASA says will \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d was carried from the launchpad atop three columns of flame early on Sunday morning. Atop three columns of flame at 3:31 a.m. Eastern time, NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe lifted toward space on Sunday. The launch was the second attempt to carry the spacecraft, which NASA touts will \u201ctouch the sun\u201d one day, into orbit after a scrub early on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Parker Solar Probe Launches on NASA Voyage to \u2018Touch the Sun\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3033",
        "date": "2018-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/science/parker-solar-probe-launch.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft, which NASA says will \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d was carried from the launchpad atop three columns of flame early on Sunday morning. The spacecraft, which NASA says will \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d was carried from the launchpad atop three columns of flame early on Sunday morning. Atop three columns of flame at 3:31 a.m. Eastern time, NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe lifted toward space on Sunday. The launch was the second attempt to carry the spacecraft, which NASA touts will \u201ctouch the sun\u201d one day, into orbit after a scrub early on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Parker Solar Probe Launches on NASA Voyage to \u2018Touch the Sun\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3034",
        "date": "2018-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/science/parker-solar-probe-launch.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft, which NASA says will \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d was carried from the launchpad atop three columns of flame early on Sunday morning. The spacecraft, which NASA says will \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d was carried from the launchpad atop three columns of flame early on Sunday morning. Atop three columns of flame at 3:31 a.m. Eastern time, NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe lifted toward space on Sunday. The launch was the second attempt to carry the spacecraft, which NASA touts will \u201ctouch the sun\u201d one day, into orbit after a scrub early on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch as NASA and SpaceX Launch TESS, a Planet-Hunting Satellite (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3035",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/science/tess-nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft will scan the sky for planets orbiting nearby star systems, another step in the long search for signs of life in the Milky Way. The launch on Wednesday was postponed from Monday. The spacecraft will scan the sky for planets orbiting nearby star systems, another step in the long search for signs of life in the Milky Way. The launch on Wednesday was postponed from Monday. [This article has been updated to reflect changes to the launch schedule.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch as NASA and SpaceX Launch TESS, a Planet-Hunting Satellite (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3036",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/science/tess-nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft will scan the sky for planets orbiting nearby star systems, another step in the long search for signs of life in the Milky Way. The launch on Wednesday was postponed from Monday. The spacecraft will scan the sky for planets orbiting nearby star systems, another step in the long search for signs of life in the Milky Way. The launch on Wednesday was postponed from Monday. [This article has been updated to reflect changes to the launch schedule.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch as NASA and SpaceX Launch TESS, a Planet-Hunting Satellite (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3037",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/science/tess-nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft will scan the sky for planets orbiting nearby star systems, another step in the long search for signs of life in the Milky Way. The launch on Wednesday was postponed from Monday. The spacecraft will scan the sky for planets orbiting nearby star systems, another step in the long search for signs of life in the Milky Way. The launch on Wednesday was postponed from Monday. [This article has been updated to reflect changes to the launch schedule.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Spacecraft Is Headed for a Flyby With Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3038",
        "date": "2017-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/science/osiris-rex-flyby-nasa.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft will make a flyby of Earth on Friday, using the planet\u2019s gravity to steer it toward Bennu, an asteroid it will visit next year. The spacecraft will make a flyby of Earth on Friday, using the planet\u2019s gravity to steer it toward Bennu, an asteroid it will visit next year. A NASA spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, is speeding toward Earth after a year looping around the sun. On Friday afternoon, it will miss the planet by about 11,000 miles, zooming underneath our blue orb at 19,000 miles per hour, passing over Australia and Antarctica.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Spacecraft Is Headed for a Flyby With Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3039",
        "date": "2017-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/science/osiris-rex-flyby-nasa.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft will make a flyby of Earth on Friday, using the planet\u2019s gravity to steer it toward Bennu, an asteroid it will visit next year. The spacecraft will make a flyby of Earth on Friday, using the planet\u2019s gravity to steer it toward Bennu, an asteroid it will visit next year. A NASA spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, is speeding toward Earth after a year looping around the sun. On Friday afternoon, it will miss the planet by about 11,000 miles, zooming underneath our blue orb at 19,000 miles per hour, passing over Australia and Antarctica.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Spacecraft Is Headed for a Flyby With Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3040",
        "date": "2017-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/science/osiris-rex-flyby-nasa.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft will make a flyby of Earth on Friday, using the planet\u2019s gravity to steer it toward Bennu, an asteroid it will visit next year. The spacecraft will make a flyby of Earth on Friday, using the planet\u2019s gravity to steer it toward Bennu, an asteroid it will visit next year. A NASA spacecraft, Osiris-Rex, is speeding toward Earth after a year looping around the sun. On Friday afternoon, it will miss the planet by about 11,000 miles, zooming underneath our blue orb at 19,000 miles per hour, passing over Australia and Antarctica.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Literally, We Crushed It\u2019: Video Shows NASA Space Probe Touch an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3041",
        "date": "2020-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/science/nasa-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth. The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth. When NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX spacecraft touched the surface of an asteroid on Tuesday to gather a sample of rocks and dirt, the operation proceeded smoothly, to the glee of the mission\u2019s operators 200 million miles away on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Literally, We Crushed It\u2019: Video Shows NASA Space Probe Touch an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3042",
        "date": "2020-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/science/nasa-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth. The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth. When NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX spacecraft touched the surface of an asteroid on Tuesday to gather a sample of rocks and dirt, the operation proceeded smoothly, to the glee of the mission\u2019s operators 200 million miles away on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Literally, We Crushed It\u2019: Video Shows NASA Space Probe Touch an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3043",
        "date": "2020-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/science/nasa-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth. The spacecraft succeeded in pogo-sticking off the space rock, hinting that it may have been able to capture a large sample to bring back to Earth. When NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX spacecraft touched the surface of an asteroid on Tuesday to gather a sample of rocks and dirt, the operation proceeded smoothly, to the glee of the mission\u2019s operators 200 million miles away on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Selects Target Asteroid Landing Site (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3044",
        "date": "2019-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/science/osiris-rex-nasa-asteroid-bennu.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft spent a year mapping Bennu\u2019s rugged terrain, and next year it will touch down on the surface to collect a sample. The spacecraft spent a year mapping Bennu\u2019s rugged terrain, and next year it will touch down on the surface to collect a sample. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Selects Target Asteroid Landing Site (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3045",
        "date": "2019-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/science/osiris-rex-nasa-asteroid-bennu.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft spent a year mapping Bennu\u2019s rugged terrain, and next year it will touch down on the surface to collect a sample. The spacecraft spent a year mapping Bennu\u2019s rugged terrain, and next year it will touch down on the surface to collect a sample. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Selects Target Asteroid Landing Site (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3046",
        "date": "2019-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/science/osiris-rex-nasa-asteroid-bennu.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft spent a year mapping Bennu\u2019s rugged terrain, and next year it will touch down on the surface to collect a sample. The spacecraft spent a year mapping Bennu\u2019s rugged terrain, and next year it will touch down on the surface to collect a sample. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "The \u2018Sounds\u2019 of Space as NASA\u2019s Cassini Dives by Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3047",
        "date": "2017-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/science/nasa-cassini-sound-recording-saturn.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft recorded some light patter as it passed between Saturn and its innermost ring, when scientists had expected the sound of \u201cdriving through Iowa in a hailstorm.\u201d The spacecraft recorded some light patter as it passed between Saturn and its innermost ring, when scientists had expected the sound of \u201cdriving through Iowa in a hailstorm.\u201d The recording starts with the patter of a summer squall. Later, a drifting tone like that of a not-quite-tuned-in radio station rises and for a while drowns out the patter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The \u2018Sounds\u2019 of Space as NASA\u2019s Cassini Dives by Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3048",
        "date": "2017-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/science/nasa-cassini-sound-recording-saturn.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft recorded some light patter as it passed between Saturn and its innermost ring, when scientists had expected the sound of \u201cdriving through Iowa in a hailstorm.\u201d The spacecraft recorded some light patter as it passed between Saturn and its innermost ring, when scientists had expected the sound of \u201cdriving through Iowa in a hailstorm.\u201d The recording starts with the patter of a summer squall. Later, a drifting tone like that of a not-quite-tuned-in radio station rises and for a while drowns out the patter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The \u2018Sounds\u2019 of Space as NASA\u2019s Cassini Dives by Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3049",
        "date": "2017-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/science/nasa-cassini-sound-recording-saturn.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft recorded some light patter as it passed between Saturn and its innermost ring, when scientists had expected the sound of \u201cdriving through Iowa in a hailstorm.\u201d The spacecraft recorded some light patter as it passed between Saturn and its innermost ring, when scientists had expected the sound of \u201cdriving through Iowa in a hailstorm.\u201d The recording starts with the patter of a summer squall. Later, a drifting tone like that of a not-quite-tuned-in radio station rises and for a while drowns out the patter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Arrives at Asteroid Bennu After a Two-Year Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3050",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/science/osiris-rex-bennu-asteroid-arrival.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft now begins a close study of the primitive space rock, seeking clues to the early solar system. The spacecraft now begins a close study of the primitive space rock, seeking clues to the early solar system. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Arrives at Asteroid Bennu After a Two-Year Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3051",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/science/osiris-rex-bennu-asteroid-arrival.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft now begins a close study of the primitive space rock, seeking clues to the early solar system. The spacecraft now begins a close study of the primitive space rock, seeking clues to the early solar system. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex Arrives at Asteroid Bennu After a Two-Year Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3052",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/science/osiris-rex-bennu-asteroid-arrival.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft now begins a close study of the primitive space rock, seeking clues to the early solar system. The spacecraft now begins a close study of the primitive space rock, seeking clues to the early solar system. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What is New Shepard and where will it fly? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3053",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/new-shepard-flight.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. New Shepard is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. A booster rocket at the bottom stands six stories tall, with a capsule sitting on top that can seat up to six crew.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "What is New Shepard and where will it fly? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3054",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/new-shepard-flight.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. New Shepard is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. A booster rocket at the bottom stands six stories tall, with a capsule sitting on top that can seat up to six crew.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "What is New Shepard and where will it fly? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3055",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/new-shepard-flight.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. New Shepard is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. A booster rocket at the bottom stands six stories tall, with a capsule sitting on top that can seat up to six crew.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "What is New Shepard and where will it fly? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3056",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/new-shepard-flight.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. The spacecraft is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. New Shepard is the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin\u2019s space tourism business. A booster rocket at the bottom stands six stories tall, with a capsule sitting on top that can seat up to six crew.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Grand Finale: A Dive Between Saturn and Its Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3057",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/science/cassini-nasa-saturn.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is set to venture into the gap between Saturn and its innermost ring 22 times until Sept. 15, then crash into the planet. The spacecraft is set to venture into the gap between Saturn and its innermost ring 22 times until Sept. 15, then crash into the planet. The Cassini spacecraft is about to begin its great cosmic swan dive.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Grand Finale: A Dive Between Saturn and Its Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3058",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/science/cassini-nasa-saturn.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is set to venture into the gap between Saturn and its innermost ring 22 times until Sept. 15, then crash into the planet. The spacecraft is set to venture into the gap between Saturn and its innermost ring 22 times until Sept. 15, then crash into the planet. The Cassini spacecraft is about to begin its great cosmic swan dive.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Grand Finale: A Dive Between Saturn and Its Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3059",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/science/cassini-nasa-saturn.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is set to venture into the gap between Saturn and its innermost ring 22 times until Sept. 15, then crash into the planet. The spacecraft is set to venture into the gap between Saturn and its innermost ring 22 times until Sept. 15, then crash into the planet. The Cassini spacecraft is about to begin its great cosmic swan dive.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Video From NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Landing on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3060",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/science/mars-landing-nasa-video.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft has sent pictures, audio and video recordings to Earth since it landed on Mars last Thursday. The spacecraft has sent pictures, audio and video recordings to Earth since it landed on Mars last Thursday. What is it like to land on Mars?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Video From NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Landing on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3061",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/science/mars-landing-nasa-video.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft has sent pictures, audio and video recordings to Earth since it landed on Mars last Thursday. The spacecraft has sent pictures, audio and video recordings to Earth since it landed on Mars last Thursday. What is it like to land on Mars?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Video From NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Landing on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3062",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/science/mars-landing-nasa-video.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft has sent pictures, audio and video recordings to Earth since it landed on Mars last Thursday. The spacecraft has sent pictures, audio and video recordings to Earth since it landed on Mars last Thursday. What is it like to land on Mars?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s most impressive feat: Dropping a moon lander on Titan (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3063",
        "date": "2017-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/13/cassinis-most-impressive-feat-dropping-a-moon-lander-on-titan/",
        "text": "The spacecraft Cassini will become a streak of ash when it tumbles into Saturn\u00a0on Friday.Less than a million miles away, the probe Huygens, which Cassini launched onto Saturn's moon Titan, will be the only evidence\u00a0of\u00a0its partner's journey. Huygens\u00a0is\u00a0probably in the very spot where Cassini delivered it 12 years ago, settled like a headstone amid moon dust and icy cobblestones. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCassini and Huygens traveled together\u00a0from Earth to Saturn's orbit. Their mission represented the symbiotic pairing of NASA\u00a0and the\u00a0European Space Agency. NASA's Cassini provided the propulsion. The ESA's Huygens spent eight years and 934 million miles stuck, barnacle-like, to Cassini's much larger belly. On Christmas Eve 2004, Cassini and Huygens split. Huygens landed on Saturn's moon Titan three weeks\u00a0later.Story continues below advertisementA dozen years after the separation \u2014 and nine years beyond Cassini's expected lifetime \u2014 Cassini continued to\u00a0orbit Saturn. The program\u00a0was a massive success. Yet Huygens had the most ambitious goal of all: It is the only machine to land on a world beyond the asteroid belt. And, without Huygens, Cassini might\u00a0never have left Earth's gravity.The Post's Sarah Kaplan celebrates the accomplishments of NASA's Cassini spacecraft with a mock eulogy. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)In the early 1980s, scientists conceived of a Saturnian orbiter-lander, naming the proposal after\u00a0Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini, who discovered four of Saturn's moons. The\u00a0ESA's Science Program Committee added the title Huygens in 1989. (Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch mathematician\u00a0and stargazer, spotted Titan in 1655.)AdvertisementTitan's surface was a mystery before the ESA and NASA sent the\u00a0Huygens probe to investigate it. The moon, larger than Pluto or the planet Mercury, is a whopper of a satellite. Observed from space, Titan is a\u00a0hazy orb. Methane transforms into\u00a0hydrogen cyanide and other hydrocarbons in its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, coloring\u00a0the sky orange.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat lay beneath that smog?\u201d wrote University of Hawaii astronomer\u00a0Toby\u00a0Owen, in a 2004 article\u00a0about\u00a0Huygens. \u201cSpeculation ranged from a global ocean of ethane to a rugged landscape carved out by precipitating hydrocarbons, to a nondescript, gooey surface resembling a refrozen chocolate ice cream dessert.\u201dHuygens's final design, a hockey puck set in a tea saucer, was a hedge against the unknown. It would withstand the friction of Titan's atmosphere. It was prepared to\u00a0float, should it land on an ethane sea. But first the saucer had to\u00a0fly.The lander almost didn't make the journey offworld. Under the proposed fiscal budget for 1995, NASA would not have the funds for Cassini. The ESA, which needed Cassini to give Huygens its interplanetary ride, mounted a defense of the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe were very seriously on the chopping block,\u201d recalled\u00a0Earl Maize,\u00a0the deputy program manager of the Cassini-Huygens mission\u00a0at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,\u00a0to the Los Angeles Times.Maize credited the ESA\u00a0with keeping Cassini-Huygens alive. \u201cI think without their intervention, Cassini might have met an entirely different fate,\u201d he said.Cassini and its metal\u00a0limpet blasted into space in 1997. They had avoided financial doom \u2014 but disaster almost struck again. While the craft was flying toward Saturn, a Swedish engineer named Boris Smeds discovered a critical flaw in the plan to drop Huygens on Titan.Huygens was chock-a-block with sensors: to listen to the winds of Titan, to taste the chemicals in its atmosphere and to record the 2.5-hour descent. But it was not powerful enough to send any of these signals back to Earth by itself. Huygens\u00a0needed to reach Cassini, which would boost the information home.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe engineer realized that the exchange between the lander and Cassini's receiver would jumble the Titan data, as\u00a0IEEE Spectrum\u00a0reported in 2004. Under the initial plan, Cassini traveled at 3.4 miles per second relative to Huygens, a blistering speed that, thanks to the Doppler effect \u2014 the audio shift you can hear in a police siren \u2014 would have scrambled the signal.Smeds's tests convinced the project leaders they needed to alter Cassini's trajectory. The new path successfully eliminated the Doppler scrambling. It also delayed Huygens's departure from Cassini until Dec. 24, 2004.Huygens skidded onto\u00a0Titan on Jan. 14. \u201cRight on time,\u201d Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the French physicist and ESA leader of the Cassini-Huygens mission, told\u00a0Bloomberg Buisnessweek\u00a0in 2005. \u201cIt was a very emotional moment. It was hard not to cry.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn its way down, Huygens took the temperature of Titan's atmosphere. It was -150 degrees at 300 miles up, warming to -120 at an altitude of 150 miles, before dropping to -290 at the surface.The probe also hinted at an answer to one of Titan's curiosities: where the moon got its methane supply. Sunlight destroys methane after a few million years. At 4.5 billion years old, Titan should be tapped out. But Huygens sensed a sharp spike in the amount of methane, jumping by 40 percent on the ground, per the ESA. This suggested that liquid methane exists on Titan, mostly trapped beneath the surface but leaking enough to replenish atmosphere.The probe gave us \u201ca new view of Titan, which appears to have an extraordinarily Earthlike meteorology, geology and fluvial activity,\u201d wrote the ESA's Lebreton and his co-authors in the journal Nature\u00a0in 2005.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn the moon, the familiar has a\u00a0chemically alien twist. The scientists continued: \u201cInstead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane. Instead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere.\u201d Titan's twist on Earthly\u00a0features could in theory support microbial life,\u00a0some chemists say,\u00a0despite the frigid temperatures.Then there is Titan's geography. If you stop a\u00a0spinning Earth globe at random,\u00a0the chances are good there would be ocean beneath your fingertip. Titan as seen by Huygens was far more intriguing than Earth, at least in the eyes of Erich Karkoschka, a scientist at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.\u201cWhere Huygens landed, there were riverbeds and mountains,\u201d Karkoschka\u00a0told The Washington Post on Tuesday. \u201cIf you had picked a random spot on Earth it wouldn\u2019t be so interesting. It almost seems like a more lively planet than Earth.\u201dIn a 2012 paper, Karkoschka and two other researchers analyzed Huygens's descent. It hit Titan, scooping a 4.5-inch divot in the surface, before bouncing up and landing on a flat flood plain. There it\u00a0skidded about a foot and quivered\u00a0for 10 seconds, before coming to rest. The overall effect was not unlike dropping something on\u00a0snow capped by a\u00a0frozen upper layer: soft, but topped by a harder crust.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd there's evidence that, below the surface of the flood plain, the region is still wet,\u00a0Karkoschka said.After\u00a072 minutes, Cassini had flown past Titan's horizon, beyond\u00a0the reaches of Huygens\u2019s transmitter. About two hours after touching down, the lander's\u00a0batteries died. But Karkoschka said that he had no reason to suspect that Huygens was not where Cassini left it.\u201cIt could stay there a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe millions of years.\u201dRead more:How to steer a spacecraft into SaturnSee the most moving photo from the Cassini missionNASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success The spacecraft Cassini will burn up, but the Huygens probe it delivered to Titan will last for ages. Cassini\u2019s most impressive feat: Dropping a moon lander on Titan",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Sharper Picture of Ultima Thule From NASA\u2019s New Horizons (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3064",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/ultima-thule-photo.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft captured the image when it was 4,200 miles from the object in the solar system\u2019s distant Kuiper belt. The spacecraft captured the image when it was 4,200 miles from the object in the solar system\u2019s distant Kuiper belt. The icy rock that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year\u2019s Day is coming into focus.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Sharper Picture of Ultima Thule From NASA\u2019s New Horizons (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3065",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/ultima-thule-photo.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft captured the image when it was 4,200 miles from the object in the solar system\u2019s distant Kuiper belt. The spacecraft captured the image when it was 4,200 miles from the object in the solar system\u2019s distant Kuiper belt. The icy rock that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year\u2019s Day is coming into focus.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Sharper Picture of Ultima Thule From NASA\u2019s New Horizons (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3066",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/ultima-thule-photo.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft captured the image when it was 4,200 miles from the object in the solar system\u2019s distant Kuiper belt. The spacecraft captured the image when it was 4,200 miles from the object in the solar system\u2019s distant Kuiper belt. The icy rock that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year\u2019s Day is coming into focus.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Solar System\u2019s Secrets, NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX Mission Touches Bennu Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3067",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/science/osiris-rex-mission.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft attempted to suck up rocks and dirt from the asteroid, which could aid humanity\u2019s ability to divert one that might slam into Earth. The spacecraft attempted to suck up rocks and dirt from the asteroid, which could aid humanity\u2019s ability to divert one that might slam into Earth. [How much of Bennu did NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX collect? We\u2019re waiting to find out.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Solar System\u2019s Secrets, NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX Mission Touches Bennu Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3068",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/science/osiris-rex-mission.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft attempted to suck up rocks and dirt from the asteroid, which could aid humanity\u2019s ability to divert one that might slam into Earth. The spacecraft attempted to suck up rocks and dirt from the asteroid, which could aid humanity\u2019s ability to divert one that might slam into Earth. [How much of Bennu did NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX collect? We\u2019re waiting to find out.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Solar System\u2019s Secrets, NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX Mission Touches Bennu Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3069",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/science/osiris-rex-mission.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft attempted to suck up rocks and dirt from the asteroid, which could aid humanity\u2019s ability to divert one that might slam into Earth. The spacecraft attempted to suck up rocks and dirt from the asteroid, which could aid humanity\u2019s ability to divert one that might slam into Earth. [How much of Bennu did NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REX collect? We\u2019re waiting to find out.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A fantastic find\u2019: Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surface (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3070",
        "date": "2018-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/11/a-fantastic-find-mars-covered-in-thick-sheets-of-ice-just-below-the-surface/",
        "text": "The slope rises as high\u00a0as London's Big Ben tower. Beneath its ruddy layer of dirt is a sheet of ice 300 feet thick that gives the landscape a\u00a0blue-black\u00a0hue. If such a\u00a0scene\u00a0sounds otherworldly, it is. To visit it, you'll have to\u00a0travel to Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPlanetary scientists located eight of these geological features,\u00a0called scarps, on the Red Planet. An analysis of the scarps revealed that\u00a0thick\u00a0ice\u00a0hides\u00a0just below\u00a0the surface. This ice, the researchers say, could be a tempting target for future\u00a0exploration\u00a0\u2014 as well as a valuable resource for Earthlings camped out on Mars. \u201cWe've found a new window into the ice for study, which we hope will be of interest to those interested in all aspects of ice on Mars and its history,\u201d said Colin Dundas, a member of the U.S. Geological Survey\u2019s Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona and an author of a report published Thursday in the journal Science.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is not news that Mars\u00a0is icy. In 2001, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft arrived at the planet and began snooping for chemical signatures of ice. The craft's\u00a0gamma-ray spectrometer found telltale\u00a0hydrogen,\u00a0which indicated\u00a0Mars had\u00a0enormous\u00a0amounts of ice.\u00a0As much as a third of the Martian surface\u00a0contains\u00a0shallow\u00a0ice.\u00a0But remotely sensing elements such as hydrogen could not reveal the depth and makeup of the ice.The\u00a0newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped the surface in greater detail. Dundas and his colleagues used its pictures to locate exposed ice in\u00a0small craters, glaciers and ice sheets. \u201cThe high-resolution data has greatly improved our understanding of various ice-related land forms,\u201d he said.These cliffs are \u201crare peeks into the subsurface of Mars, giving us access to an undisturbed slice through Mars's ice in the mid-latitudes \u2014 a fantastic find!\u201d\u00a0said Susan Conway,\u00a0a planetary scientist\u00a0at the University of Nantes in France who was not involved with this research.Open University's\u00a0Matt Balme, a planetary scientist in Britain who did not participate in this study, said the key findings were the color images of a bluish tint. That indicates a sub-layer that is \u201csomehow compositionally different\u201d than the red dirt. It is unlikely that the frozen sheets are a mix of water and soil. \u201cIf the conclusions of the paper are correct,\u201d he said, \u201cyou\u2019re looking at something that's almost pure ice.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe scarps exist along the planet's middle latitudes, ruling out glaciers that migrated from the poles. The study authors propose\u00a0that these ice sheets formed when thick snows blanketed Mars. Balme agreed that snowfall probably created the ice over a period of a few thousand years.\u201cWe considered the possibility that we were seeing surface frost,\u201d Dundas said, \u201cbut the ice signatures persist through the summer.\u201d The\u00a0buried\u00a0ice\u00a0revealed itself after the structures became unstable and expanded. Those cliffs formed\u00a0through a process called sublimation, in which exposed ice turned directly into water vapor.\u00a0Boulders and dust that rested on the\u00a0ice suddenly had their\u00a0foundation vanish into the atmosphere.These slopes are unusually steep,\u00a0Balme said, though he imagines\u00a0that the scarps look similar to glacial moraines on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sheets' proximity to the surface makes them accessible, in theory, to robot explorers.\u00a0\u201cThis subsurface ice could contain valuable records of the Martian climate, just like the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores,\u201d Conway said.\u00a0In August,\u00a0geochemists obtained 2.7-million-year-old ice samples from Antarctica \u2014 the oldest ever \u2014 and they plan to study\u00a0air bubbles trapped within them to learn\u00a0about Earth's prehistoric atmosphere.Watch: How and when will humans get to Mars? (Gillian Brockell, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)And flesh-and-blood explorers might benefit, too (though the middle latitudes of Mars appear to be colder,\u00a0less welcoming\u00a0terrain than regions closer to the equator). \u201cIf we were to send humans to live on Mars for a substantial period of time, it would be a fantastic source of water,\u201d Balme said. Astronauts living in the pits would have a vital raw material next door. All a thirsty astronaut would have to do would be to go at the scarp with a hammer and, presto, fresh Martian ice chips.Read more:No, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on MarsThis is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA domeThe case for flowing water on Mars is drying up The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter discovered ice sheets that are 300 feet thick. \u2018A fantastic find\u2019: Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surface",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Follow NASA\u2019s New Horizons Mission as It Heads for New Year\u2019s Flyby With Ultima Thule  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3071",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The probe that visited Pluto will study a mysterious icy world just after midnight. Ultima Thule will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. The probe that visited Pluto will study a mysterious icy world just after midnight. Ultima Thule will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. [Update: Read Times coverage of the aftermath of the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Follow NASA\u2019s New Horizons Mission as It Heads for New Year\u2019s Flyby With Ultima Thule  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3072",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The probe that visited Pluto will study a mysterious icy world just after midnight. Ultima Thule will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. The probe that visited Pluto will study a mysterious icy world just after midnight. Ultima Thule will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. [Update: Read Times coverage of the aftermath of the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "After SpaceX Launch, Israeli Spacecraft Begins Journey to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3073",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/spacex-launch-israel.html",
        "text": "The privately built spacecraft will take a long trip to the moon, landing on its surface in April. The privately built spacecraft will take a long trip to the moon, landing on its surface in April. Can a scrappy Israeli nonprofit land on the moon on a $100 million shoestring? Tonight it took the first step as it launched and then set off on a long journey to the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "After SpaceX Launch, Israeli Spacecraft Begins Journey to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3074",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/spacex-launch-israel.html",
        "text": "The privately built spacecraft will take a long trip to the moon, landing on its surface in April. The privately built spacecraft will take a long trip to the moon, landing on its surface in April. Can a scrappy Israeli nonprofit land on the moon on a $100 million shoestring? Tonight it took the first step as it launched and then set off on a long journey to the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "After SpaceX Launch, Israeli Spacecraft Begins Journey to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3075",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/spacex-launch-israel.html",
        "text": "The privately built spacecraft will take a long trip to the moon, landing on its surface in April. The privately built spacecraft will take a long trip to the moon, landing on its surface in April. Can a scrappy Israeli nonprofit land on the moon on a $100 million shoestring? Tonight it took the first step as it launched and then set off on a long journey to the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Uranus Ejected a Giant Plasma Bubble During Voyager 2\u2019s Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3076",
        "date": "2020-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/science/uranus-bubble-voyager.html",
        "text": "The planet is shedding its atmosphere into the void, a signal that was recorded but overlooked in 1986 when the robotic spacecraft flew past. The planet is shedding its atmosphere into the void, a signal that was recorded but overlooked in 1986 when the robotic spacecraft flew past. Uranus is unquestionably weird. Swirling with mostly water, methane and ammonia, the solar system\u2019s seventh planet is tipped over at 98 degrees, so its magnetic poles take turns directly facing the sun. And its magnetic field is strangely misaligned with the planet\u2019s rotation, causing it to wildly lurch about.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Uranus Ejected a Giant Plasma Bubble During Voyager 2\u2019s Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3077",
        "date": "2020-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/science/uranus-bubble-voyager.html",
        "text": "The planet is shedding its atmosphere into the void, a signal that was recorded but overlooked in 1986 when the robotic spacecraft flew past. The planet is shedding its atmosphere into the void, a signal that was recorded but overlooked in 1986 when the robotic spacecraft flew past. Uranus is unquestionably weird. Swirling with mostly water, methane and ammonia, the solar system\u2019s seventh planet is tipped over at 98 degrees, so its magnetic poles take turns directly facing the sun. And its magnetic field is strangely misaligned with the planet\u2019s rotation, causing it to wildly lurch about.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Uranus Ejected a Giant Plasma Bubble During Voyager 2\u2019s Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3078",
        "date": "2020-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/science/uranus-bubble-voyager.html",
        "text": "The planet is shedding its atmosphere into the void, a signal that was recorded but overlooked in 1986 when the robotic spacecraft flew past. The planet is shedding its atmosphere into the void, a signal that was recorded but overlooked in 1986 when the robotic spacecraft flew past. Uranus is unquestionably weird. Swirling with mostly water, methane and ammonia, the solar system\u2019s seventh planet is tipped over at 98 degrees, so its magnetic poles take turns directly facing the sun. And its magnetic field is strangely misaligned with the planet\u2019s rotation, causing it to wildly lurch about.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mission Could Blast an Asteroid That Once Menaced Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3079",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/science/apophis-asteroid-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft, which collected samples from the asteroid Bennu, would visit a second space rock, Apophis. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft, which collected samples from the asteroid Bennu, would visit a second space rock, Apophis. First it punched an asteroid. Now, a NASA spacecraft\u2019s rampage may continue and it could blast a hole in another space rock.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mission Could Blast an Asteroid That Once Menaced Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3080",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/science/apophis-asteroid-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft, which collected samples from the asteroid Bennu, would visit a second space rock, Apophis. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft, which collected samples from the asteroid Bennu, would visit a second space rock, Apophis. First it punched an asteroid. Now, a NASA spacecraft\u2019s rampage may continue and it could blast a hole in another space rock.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Asteroid Mission Packs Away Its Cargo. Next Stop: Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3081",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/science/nasa-osirix-rex-mission.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft stowed the rock and dust it collected from Bennu, setting itself up to return the sample to our planet. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft stowed the rock and dust it collected from Bennu, setting itself up to return the sample to our planet. A NASA spacecraft 200 million miles away from Earth has packed up a sample of an asteroid it collected last week.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Asteroid Mission Packs Away Its Cargo. Next Stop: Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3082",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/science/nasa-osirix-rex-mission.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft stowed the rock and dust it collected from Bennu, setting itself up to return the sample to our planet. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft stowed the rock and dust it collected from Bennu, setting itself up to return the sample to our planet. A NASA spacecraft 200 million miles away from Earth has packed up a sample of an asteroid it collected last week.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Asteroid Mission Packs Away Its Cargo. Next Stop: Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3083",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/science/nasa-osirix-rex-mission.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft stowed the rock and dust it collected from Bennu, setting itself up to return the sample to our planet. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft stowed the rock and dust it collected from Bennu, setting itself up to return the sample to our planet. A NASA spacecraft 200 million miles away from Earth has packed up a sample of an asteroid it collected last week.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mission Springs a Small Leak After Touching an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3084",
        "date": "2020-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/science/osiris-rex-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft collected rock and dirt samples from Bennu, but it appears to be losing some of what it grabbed. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft collected rock and dirt samples from Bennu, but it appears to be losing some of what it grabbed. NASA\u2019s effort to grab a piece of an asteroid on Tuesday may have worked a little too well. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REX, grabbed so much rock and dirt that some of the material is now leaking back into space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mission Springs a Small Leak After Touching an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3085",
        "date": "2020-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/science/osiris-rex-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft collected rock and dirt samples from Bennu, but it appears to be losing some of what it grabbed. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft collected rock and dirt samples from Bennu, but it appears to be losing some of what it grabbed. NASA\u2019s effort to grab a piece of an asteroid on Tuesday may have worked a little too well. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REX, grabbed so much rock and dirt that some of the material is now leaking back into space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mission Springs a Small Leak After Touching an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3086",
        "date": "2020-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/science/osiris-rex-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft collected rock and dirt samples from Bennu, but it appears to be losing some of what it grabbed. The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft collected rock and dirt samples from Bennu, but it appears to be losing some of what it grabbed. NASA\u2019s effort to grab a piece of an asteroid on Tuesday may have worked a little too well. The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REX, grabbed so much rock and dirt that some of the material is now leaking back into space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019ve Never Seen the Sun\u2019s Top or Bottom. Solar Orbiter Will Change That. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3087",
        "date": "2020-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/science/nasa-solar-orbiter-launch.html",
        "text": "The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. A rocket carrying Solar Orbiter, a probe that will take pictures of the top and bottom of the sun, launched Sunday night. The Atlas 5 rocket launched on time, just as the final Oscar statues were being handed out for the 2020 Academy Awards. It illuminated the night sky over Florida\u2019s Atlantic coast as it headed away from Earth to place thespacecraft into an orbit around the sun.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019ve Never Seen the Sun\u2019s Top or Bottom. Solar Orbiter Will Change That. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3088",
        "date": "2020-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/science/nasa-solar-orbiter-launch.html",
        "text": "The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. A rocket carrying Solar Orbiter, a probe that will take pictures of the top and bottom of the sun, launched Sunday night. The Atlas 5 rocket launched on time, just as the final Oscar statues were being handed out for the 2020 Academy Awards. It illuminated the night sky over Florida\u2019s Atlantic coast as it headed away from Earth to place thespacecraft into an orbit around the sun.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019ve Never Seen the Sun\u2019s Top or Bottom. Solar Orbiter Will Change That. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3089",
        "date": "2020-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/science/nasa-solar-orbiter-launch.html",
        "text": "The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. A rocket carrying Solar Orbiter, a probe that will take pictures of the top and bottom of the sun, launched Sunday night. The Atlas 5 rocket launched on time, just as the final Oscar statues were being handed out for the 2020 Academy Awards. It illuminated the night sky over Florida\u2019s Atlantic coast as it headed away from Earth to place thespacecraft into an orbit around the sun.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "We\u2019ve Never Seen the Sun\u2019s Top or Bottom. Solar Orbiter Will Change That. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3090",
        "date": "2020-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/science/nasa-solar-orbiter-launch.html",
        "text": "The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. The NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, which launched Sunday, will spend the next decade closely observing the sun. A rocket carrying Solar Orbiter, a probe that will take pictures of the top and bottom of the sun, launched Sunday night. The Atlas 5 rocket launched on time, just as the final Oscar statues were being handed out for the 2020 Academy Awards. It illuminated the night sky over Florida\u2019s Atlantic coast as it headed away from Earth to place thespacecraft into an orbit around the sun.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are NASA\u2019s first up-close images of the most distant object ever explored (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3091",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/02/here-are-nasas-first-up-close-images-most-distant-object-ever-explored/",
        "text": "The most distant object ever explored by spacecraft is a reddish, snowman-shaped space rock 4 billion miles from Earth.The object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, was photographed by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft during a late-night rendezvous on the first day of 2019. It is the first inhabitant of the Kuiper belt \u2014 the ring of rocky relics that surrounds the outer solar system \u2014 that scientists have seen up close. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIts odd shape, which scientists term a \u201ccontact binary,\u201d indicates it formed as two spherical rocks slowly fused together in the early days of the solar system. This finding lends support to a theory of planet formation that suggests worlds are born from slow accumulation, rather than catastrophic collisions, researchers said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is exactly what we need to move the modeling work on planetary formation forward,\u201d said Cathy Olkin, the mission\u2019s deputy project scientist. \u201cUltima is telling us about our evolutionary history.\u201dAdvertisementNew Horizons\u2019s encounter with Ultima Thule happened so far away it took six hours for signals traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth. Scientists didn\u2019t receive confirmation that the spacecraft survived until Tuesday morning, and the first scientific results didn\u2019t start streaming in until that night.Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where New Horizons is operated, were up late working to transform those bits of data into the first-ever high-resolution image of an object in the Kuiper belt.Story continues below advertisementThe black-and-white photo was taken from about 30,000 miles away, as New Horizons sped toward its target at a blistering 32,000 miles per hour.\u201cSpectacular,\u201d principal investigator Alan Stern said at a Wednesday news conference at which he displayed the early images from the flyby. He described watching his colleagues jump out of their seats and embrace upon seeing the compelling, crystal-clear image. \u201cThat\u2019s elation,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg.\u201dAdvertisementScientists had suspected that Ultima Thule would not be perfectly round since the summer of 2017, when a global network of observers captured the rock passing in front of a distant star. But the Kuiper belt object is so distant and so dim that even the most powerful telescopes saw it only as a flicker of light in the sky. Even as New Horizons sped toward its target, in the hours before closest approach, Ultima Thule resembled little more than a blurry bowling pin.Story continues below advertisementBut now \u201cit\u2019s a world,\u201d Stern said \u2014 with shape, character and implications for our understanding of planetary science.Jeff Moore, the leader of the New Horizons geology team, said Ultima Thule probably formed in the first few million years of the solar system from a swirl of smaller objects. Over time, dust and pebbles clumped together to form the object\u2019s two lobes, which eventually combined to form a single body. The lack of evidence for damage at the sight of the collision suggests the joining was probably gentle, like tapping someone\u2019s bumper as you fit into a tight parking space, Moore said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to fill out any paperwork.\u201dAdvertisementThis would make Ultima Thule a lot like the early planetesimals from which larger worlds \u2014 including our own \u2014 ultimately formed. But unlike the planets, which have undergone dramatic geologic change, and comets, which are heated and transformed by the sun, the Kuiper belt object has existed in a \u201cdeep freeze\u201d since it first formed, 4.6 billion years ago.\u201cWhat we think we\u2019re looking at is the end product of a process that took place at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system,\u201d Moore said. He called New Horizons \u201ca time machine,\u201d capable of taking scientists back to the moment of our origins.Color images from New Horizons reveal that, like other Kuiper belt objects, it has a dark reddish hue. This is something of a mystery, because Ultima Thule is thought to be made mostly of ice. But researchers think radiation in this dark and distant part of the solar system could interact with contaminants in the ice, changing their color. Early observations about its chemical composition are expected to arrive Thursday, and they may help explain the phenomenon more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are many more oddities to be explored, scientists said. Olkin pointed out dramatic variations in brightness that speckle the object. Moore noted that the early images did not show any solid evidence of impact craters; additional images may reveal whether Ultima Thule has been struck in the past or is worn smooth.It will take as long as 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during their brief encounter with Ultima Thule, scientists said. That includes a brief delay next week, when the sun will be between Earth and the spacecraft, blocking all transmissions.And New Horizons\u2019s mission isn\u2019t over yet, Stern said. The spacecraft\u2019s subsystems are healthy, and it has sufficient fuel to operate for another 15 to 20 years. He and his colleagues plan to apply for NASA approval to extend their mission, either to conduct another Kuiper belt object flyby or to explore other aspects of the outer solar system.Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters) Ultima Thule, made of two icy space rocks smashed together, resembles a reddish snowman. Here are NASA\u2019s first up-close images of the most distant object ever explored",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are NASA\u2019s first up-close images of the most distant object ever explored (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3092",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/02/here-are-nasas-first-up-close-images-most-distant-object-ever-explored/",
        "text": "The most distant object ever explored by spacecraft is a reddish, snowman-shaped space rock 4 billion miles from Earth.The object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, was photographed by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft during a late-night rendezvous on the first day of 2019. It is the first inhabitant of the Kuiper belt \u2014 the ring of rocky relics that surrounds the outer solar system \u2014 that scientists have seen up close. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIts odd shape, which scientists term a \u201ccontact binary,\u201d indicates it formed as two spherical rocks slowly fused together in the early days of the solar system. This finding lends support to a theory of planet formation that suggests worlds are born from slow accumulation, rather than catastrophic collisions, researchers said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is exactly what we need to move the modeling work on planetary formation forward,\u201d said Cathy Olkin, the mission\u2019s deputy project scientist. \u201cUltima is telling us about our evolutionary history.\u201dAdvertisementNew Horizons\u2019s encounter with Ultima Thule happened so far away it took six hours for signals traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth. Scientists didn\u2019t receive confirmation that the spacecraft survived until Tuesday morning, and the first scientific results didn\u2019t start streaming in until that night.Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where New Horizons is operated, were up late working to transform those bits of data into the first-ever high-resolution image of an object in the Kuiper belt.Story continues below advertisementThe black-and-white photo was taken from about 30,000 miles away, as New Horizons sped toward its target at a blistering 32,000 miles per hour.\u201cSpectacular,\u201d principal investigator Alan Stern said at a Wednesday news conference at which he displayed the early images from the flyby. He described watching his colleagues jump out of their seats and embrace upon seeing the compelling, crystal-clear image. \u201cThat\u2019s elation,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg.\u201dAdvertisementScientists had suspected that Ultima Thule would not be perfectly round since the summer of 2017, when a global network of observers captured the rock passing in front of a distant star. But the Kuiper belt object is so distant and so dim that even the most powerful telescopes saw it only as a flicker of light in the sky. Even as New Horizons sped toward its target, in the hours before closest approach, Ultima Thule resembled little more than a blurry bowling pin.Story continues below advertisementBut now \u201cit\u2019s a world,\u201d Stern said \u2014 with shape, character and implications for our understanding of planetary science.Jeff Moore, the leader of the New Horizons geology team, said Ultima Thule probably formed in the first few million years of the solar system from a swirl of smaller objects. Over time, dust and pebbles clumped together to form the object\u2019s two lobes, which eventually combined to form a single body. The lack of evidence for damage at the sight of the collision suggests the joining was probably gentle, like tapping someone\u2019s bumper as you fit into a tight parking space, Moore said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to fill out any paperwork.\u201dAdvertisementThis would make Ultima Thule a lot like the early planetesimals from which larger worlds \u2014 including our own \u2014 ultimately formed. But unlike the planets, which have undergone dramatic geologic change, and comets, which are heated and transformed by the sun, the Kuiper belt object has existed in a \u201cdeep freeze\u201d since it first formed, 4.6 billion years ago.\u201cWhat we think we\u2019re looking at is the end product of a process that took place at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system,\u201d Moore said. He called New Horizons \u201ca time machine,\u201d capable of taking scientists back to the moment of our origins.Color images from New Horizons reveal that, like other Kuiper belt objects, it has a dark reddish hue. This is something of a mystery, because Ultima Thule is thought to be made mostly of ice. But researchers think radiation in this dark and distant part of the solar system could interact with contaminants in the ice, changing their color. Early observations about its chemical composition are expected to arrive Thursday, and they may help explain the phenomenon more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are many more oddities to be explored, scientists said. Olkin pointed out dramatic variations in brightness that speckle the object. Moore noted that the early images did not show any solid evidence of impact craters; additional images may reveal whether Ultima Thule has been struck in the past or is worn smooth.It will take as long as 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during their brief encounter with Ultima Thule, scientists said. That includes a brief delay next week, when the sun will be between Earth and the spacecraft, blocking all transmissions.And New Horizons\u2019s mission isn\u2019t over yet, Stern said. The spacecraft\u2019s subsystems are healthy, and it has sufficient fuel to operate for another 15 to 20 years. He and his colleagues plan to apply for NASA approval to extend their mission, either to conduct another Kuiper belt object flyby or to explore other aspects of the outer solar system.Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters) Ultima Thule, made of two icy space rocks smashed together, resembles a reddish snowman. Here are NASA\u2019s first up-close images of the most distant object ever explored",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here are NASA\u2019s first up-close images of the most distant object ever explored (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3093",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/02/here-are-nasas-first-up-close-images-most-distant-object-ever-explored/",
        "text": "The most distant object ever explored by spacecraft is a reddish, snowman-shaped space rock 4 billion miles from Earth.The object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, was photographed by NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft during a late-night rendezvous on the first day of 2019. It is the first inhabitant of the Kuiper belt \u2014 the ring of rocky relics that surrounds the outer solar system \u2014 that scientists have seen up close. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIts odd shape, which scientists term a \u201ccontact binary,\u201d indicates it formed as two spherical rocks slowly fused together in the early days of the solar system. This finding lends support to a theory of planet formation that suggests worlds are born from slow accumulation, rather than catastrophic collisions, researchers said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is exactly what we need to move the modeling work on planetary formation forward,\u201d said Cathy Olkin, the mission\u2019s deputy project scientist. \u201cUltima is telling us about our evolutionary history.\u201dAdvertisementNew Horizons\u2019s encounter with Ultima Thule happened so far away it took six hours for signals traveling at the speed of light to reach Earth. Scientists didn\u2019t receive confirmation that the spacecraft survived until Tuesday morning, and the first scientific results didn\u2019t start streaming in until that night.Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where New Horizons is operated, were up late working to transform those bits of data into the first-ever high-resolution image of an object in the Kuiper belt.Story continues below advertisementThe black-and-white photo was taken from about 30,000 miles away, as New Horizons sped toward its target at a blistering 32,000 miles per hour.\u201cSpectacular,\u201d principal investigator Alan Stern said at a Wednesday news conference at which he displayed the early images from the flyby. He described watching his colleagues jump out of their seats and embrace upon seeing the compelling, crystal-clear image. \u201cThat\u2019s elation,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just the tip of the iceberg.\u201dAdvertisementScientists had suspected that Ultima Thule would not be perfectly round since the summer of 2017, when a global network of observers captured the rock passing in front of a distant star. But the Kuiper belt object is so distant and so dim that even the most powerful telescopes saw it only as a flicker of light in the sky. Even as New Horizons sped toward its target, in the hours before closest approach, Ultima Thule resembled little more than a blurry bowling pin.Story continues below advertisementBut now \u201cit\u2019s a world,\u201d Stern said \u2014 with shape, character and implications for our understanding of planetary science.Jeff Moore, the leader of the New Horizons geology team, said Ultima Thule probably formed in the first few million years of the solar system from a swirl of smaller objects. Over time, dust and pebbles clumped together to form the object\u2019s two lobes, which eventually combined to form a single body. The lack of evidence for damage at the sight of the collision suggests the joining was probably gentle, like tapping someone\u2019s bumper as you fit into a tight parking space, Moore said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to fill out any paperwork.\u201dAdvertisementThis would make Ultima Thule a lot like the early planetesimals from which larger worlds \u2014 including our own \u2014 ultimately formed. But unlike the planets, which have undergone dramatic geologic change, and comets, which are heated and transformed by the sun, the Kuiper belt object has existed in a \u201cdeep freeze\u201d since it first formed, 4.6 billion years ago.\u201cWhat we think we\u2019re looking at is the end product of a process that took place at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system,\u201d Moore said. He called New Horizons \u201ca time machine,\u201d capable of taking scientists back to the moment of our origins.Color images from New Horizons reveal that, like other Kuiper belt objects, it has a dark reddish hue. This is something of a mystery, because Ultima Thule is thought to be made mostly of ice. But researchers think radiation in this dark and distant part of the solar system could interact with contaminants in the ice, changing their color. Early observations about its chemical composition are expected to arrive Thursday, and they may help explain the phenomenon more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are many more oddities to be explored, scientists said. Olkin pointed out dramatic variations in brightness that speckle the object. Moore noted that the early images did not show any solid evidence of impact craters; additional images may reveal whether Ultima Thule has been struck in the past or is worn smooth.It will take as long as 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during their brief encounter with Ultima Thule, scientists said. That includes a brief delay next week, when the sun will be between Earth and the spacecraft, blocking all transmissions.And New Horizons\u2019s mission isn\u2019t over yet, Stern said. The spacecraft\u2019s subsystems are healthy, and it has sufficient fuel to operate for another 15 to 20 years. He and his colleagues plan to apply for NASA approval to extend their mission, either to conduct another Kuiper belt object flyby or to explore other aspects of the outer solar system.Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters) Ultima Thule, made of two icy space rocks smashed together, resembles a reddish snowman. Here are NASA\u2019s first up-close images of the most distant object ever explored",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3094",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/31/this-millionaire-has-a-promising-idea-for-space-exploration-but-he-says-aliens-are-already-here/",
        "text": "The millionaires leading mankind's march to space have a few things in common \u2014 in particular, starry-eyed\u00a0visions of sending humans to the final frontier and galaxy-size bank accounts to launch their ideas into orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the motivation of Robert Bigelow \u2014 who made millions\u00a0in the extended-stay motel industry then launched his own aerospace company \u2014 is kind of, well, out there.\u00a0 Bigelow told \"60 Minutes\u201d reporter Lara Logan that not only is he \u201cabsolutely convinced\u201d that aliens exist but that he and his family members have had personal experiences with beings from another planet.He is, to quote dozens of alien movies, not alone. A Newsweek poll from 2015 showed that 54 percent of Americans believe in intelligent alien life.Story continues below advertisementBut Bigelow is capable of pumping millions of dollars into testing his\u00a0theories about space\u00a0colonization and alien life forms.AdvertisementHe spoke about his beliefs and his motivations with Logan, who asked whether he believed that aliens have ever visited Earth.\u201cThere has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I spent millions and millions and millions \u2014 I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.\u201dBy his own admission, it was millions that may not have been needed to make contact with beings from another planet.\u201cYou don't have to go anywhere,\u201d he said. \" \u2026 It's just like right under people's noses. Oh my gosh. Wow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhether people believe his claims doesn't really matter. He's used his own money \u2014 some $290 million, he told \"60 Minutes\u201d \u2014 to form a company with a stylized alien logo to send things into space.Last May, astronauts pumped up the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, a $17.8 million inflatable space beach ball that Bigelow hopes will be the future of space exploration.CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon next year. (Reuters)If it can survive the rigors of space, the modules could serve as\u00a0work spaces, labs and living quarters that are much wider than the narrow tube of a space shuttle.AdvertisementThe module was launched in 2016 and will be attached to the International Space Station for another year as NASA scientists test radiation levels and structural integrity.As \"60 Minutes\u201d reported: \u201cWith no formal training in science or engineering, Robert Bigelow created an aerospace company with scientists and engineers that's achieved what no one else in the industry has done. His expandable spacecraft are the first and only alternative to the metal structures that have housed every astronaut in space for over half a century.\u201dSeth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, told The Washington Post that Bigelow's inflatable module is a promising concept \u2014 even if people think his claims about alien contact are dubious.Story continues below advertisementShostak said he's talked with Bigelow several times over the years\u00a0about whether aliens are among us.AdvertisementHe asks the multimillionaire for the same thing he demands of other people who call with claims of close encounters: proof.\u201cI think the evidence is very poor, and it\u2019s usually witness testimony,\u201d Shostak said. \u201cNo one would have ever proved relativity by proving how clever the relativity witnesses are.\u201dShostak said he is skeptical that aliens have visited Earth but not\u00a0of the existence of aliens.Meet the latest multimillionaire with an out-of-this-world idea for spaceHe told The Post that it's hard to believe that of the trillions of planets in our galaxy, there's only one with intelligent life. It's more likely, he thinks, that there's intelligent life that hasn't been detected by humans.Story continues below advertisementBut Shostak said he is a scientist \u2014 one who works in a field that has also been the target of intense skepticism. That means he's not ruling anything out yet or writing Bigelow off as an eccentric billionaire.AdvertisementNot that Bigelow would care.Near the end of the \"60 Minutes\u201d interview, Logan asks the millionaire whether he's worried that people will think he's mentally unstable.\u201cIs it risky for you to say in public that you believe in UFOs and aliens?\u201d she asks.\u201cI don't give a damn,\u201d he replies. \u201cI don't care.\u201d\u201cYou don't worry that some people will say, 'Did you hear that guy, he sounds like he's crazy?'\u201cI don't care,\u201d Bigelow repeated.Read more:Trump tweets \u2018covfefe,\u2019 inspiring a semi-comedic act of CongressTiger mauls British zookeeper to death in \u2018freak accident\u2019Scientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachWith 800 offspring, \u2018very sexually active\u2019 tortoise saves species from extinction Robert Bigelow has joined the ranks of wealthy entrepreneurs with an expensive interest in space.  This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3095",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/31/this-millionaire-has-a-promising-idea-for-space-exploration-but-he-says-aliens-are-already-here/",
        "text": "The millionaires leading mankind's march to space have a few things in common \u2014 in particular, starry-eyed\u00a0visions of sending humans to the final frontier and galaxy-size bank accounts to launch their ideas into orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the motivation of Robert Bigelow \u2014 who made millions\u00a0in the extended-stay motel industry then launched his own aerospace company \u2014 is kind of, well, out there.\u00a0 Bigelow told \"60 Minutes\u201d reporter Lara Logan that not only is he \u201cabsolutely convinced\u201d that aliens exist but that he and his family members have had personal experiences with beings from another planet.He is, to quote dozens of alien movies, not alone. A Newsweek poll from 2015 showed that 54 percent of Americans believe in intelligent alien life.Story continues below advertisementBut Bigelow is capable of pumping millions of dollars into testing his\u00a0theories about space\u00a0colonization and alien life forms.AdvertisementHe spoke about his beliefs and his motivations with Logan, who asked whether he believed that aliens have ever visited Earth.\u201cThere has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I spent millions and millions and millions \u2014 I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.\u201dBy his own admission, it was millions that may not have been needed to make contact with beings from another planet.\u201cYou don't have to go anywhere,\u201d he said. \" \u2026 It's just like right under people's noses. Oh my gosh. Wow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhether people believe his claims doesn't really matter. He's used his own money \u2014 some $290 million, he told \"60 Minutes\u201d \u2014 to form a company with a stylized alien logo to send things into space.Last May, astronauts pumped up the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, a $17.8 million inflatable space beach ball that Bigelow hopes will be the future of space exploration.CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon next year. (Reuters)If it can survive the rigors of space, the modules could serve as\u00a0work spaces, labs and living quarters that are much wider than the narrow tube of a space shuttle.AdvertisementThe module was launched in 2016 and will be attached to the International Space Station for another year as NASA scientists test radiation levels and structural integrity.As \"60 Minutes\u201d reported: \u201cWith no formal training in science or engineering, Robert Bigelow created an aerospace company with scientists and engineers that's achieved what no one else in the industry has done. His expandable spacecraft are the first and only alternative to the metal structures that have housed every astronaut in space for over half a century.\u201dSeth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, told The Washington Post that Bigelow's inflatable module is a promising concept \u2014 even if people think his claims about alien contact are dubious.Story continues below advertisementShostak said he's talked with Bigelow several times over the years\u00a0about whether aliens are among us.AdvertisementHe asks the multimillionaire for the same thing he demands of other people who call with claims of close encounters: proof.\u201cI think the evidence is very poor, and it\u2019s usually witness testimony,\u201d Shostak said. \u201cNo one would have ever proved relativity by proving how clever the relativity witnesses are.\u201dShostak said he is skeptical that aliens have visited Earth but not\u00a0of the existence of aliens.Meet the latest multimillionaire with an out-of-this-world idea for spaceHe told The Post that it's hard to believe that of the trillions of planets in our galaxy, there's only one with intelligent life. It's more likely, he thinks, that there's intelligent life that hasn't been detected by humans.Story continues below advertisementBut Shostak said he is a scientist \u2014 one who works in a field that has also been the target of intense skepticism. That means he's not ruling anything out yet or writing Bigelow off as an eccentric billionaire.AdvertisementNot that Bigelow would care.Near the end of the \"60 Minutes\u201d interview, Logan asks the millionaire whether he's worried that people will think he's mentally unstable.\u201cIs it risky for you to say in public that you believe in UFOs and aliens?\u201d she asks.\u201cI don't give a damn,\u201d he replies. \u201cI don't care.\u201d\u201cYou don't worry that some people will say, 'Did you hear that guy, he sounds like he's crazy?'\u201cI don't care,\u201d Bigelow repeated.Read more:Trump tweets \u2018covfefe,\u2019 inspiring a semi-comedic act of CongressTiger mauls British zookeeper to death in \u2018freak accident\u2019Scientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachWith 800 offspring, \u2018very sexually active\u2019 tortoise saves species from extinction Robert Bigelow has joined the ranks of wealthy entrepreneurs with an expensive interest in space.  This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3096",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/31/this-millionaire-has-a-promising-idea-for-space-exploration-but-he-says-aliens-are-already-here/",
        "text": "The millionaires leading mankind's march to space have a few things in common \u2014 in particular, starry-eyed\u00a0visions of sending humans to the final frontier and galaxy-size bank accounts to launch their ideas into orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the motivation of Robert Bigelow \u2014 who made millions\u00a0in the extended-stay motel industry then launched his own aerospace company \u2014 is kind of, well, out there.\u00a0 Bigelow told \"60 Minutes\u201d reporter Lara Logan that not only is he \u201cabsolutely convinced\u201d that aliens exist but that he and his family members have had personal experiences with beings from another planet.He is, to quote dozens of alien movies, not alone. A Newsweek poll from 2015 showed that 54 percent of Americans believe in intelligent alien life.Story continues below advertisementBut Bigelow is capable of pumping millions of dollars into testing his\u00a0theories about space\u00a0colonization and alien life forms.AdvertisementHe spoke about his beliefs and his motivations with Logan, who asked whether he believed that aliens have ever visited Earth.\u201cThere has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I spent millions and millions and millions \u2014 I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.\u201dBy his own admission, it was millions that may not have been needed to make contact with beings from another planet.\u201cYou don't have to go anywhere,\u201d he said. \" \u2026 It's just like right under people's noses. Oh my gosh. Wow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhether people believe his claims doesn't really matter. He's used his own money \u2014 some $290 million, he told \"60 Minutes\u201d \u2014 to form a company with a stylized alien logo to send things into space.Last May, astronauts pumped up the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, a $17.8 million inflatable space beach ball that Bigelow hopes will be the future of space exploration.CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon next year. (Reuters)If it can survive the rigors of space, the modules could serve as\u00a0work spaces, labs and living quarters that are much wider than the narrow tube of a space shuttle.AdvertisementThe module was launched in 2016 and will be attached to the International Space Station for another year as NASA scientists test radiation levels and structural integrity.As \"60 Minutes\u201d reported: \u201cWith no formal training in science or engineering, Robert Bigelow created an aerospace company with scientists and engineers that's achieved what no one else in the industry has done. His expandable spacecraft are the first and only alternative to the metal structures that have housed every astronaut in space for over half a century.\u201dSeth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, told The Washington Post that Bigelow's inflatable module is a promising concept \u2014 even if people think his claims about alien contact are dubious.Story continues below advertisementShostak said he's talked with Bigelow several times over the years\u00a0about whether aliens are among us.AdvertisementHe asks the multimillionaire for the same thing he demands of other people who call with claims of close encounters: proof.\u201cI think the evidence is very poor, and it\u2019s usually witness testimony,\u201d Shostak said. \u201cNo one would have ever proved relativity by proving how clever the relativity witnesses are.\u201dShostak said he is skeptical that aliens have visited Earth but not\u00a0of the existence of aliens.Meet the latest multimillionaire with an out-of-this-world idea for spaceHe told The Post that it's hard to believe that of the trillions of planets in our galaxy, there's only one with intelligent life. It's more likely, he thinks, that there's intelligent life that hasn't been detected by humans.Story continues below advertisementBut Shostak said he is a scientist \u2014 one who works in a field that has also been the target of intense skepticism. That means he's not ruling anything out yet or writing Bigelow off as an eccentric billionaire.AdvertisementNot that Bigelow would care.Near the end of the \"60 Minutes\u201d interview, Logan asks the millionaire whether he's worried that people will think he's mentally unstable.\u201cIs it risky for you to say in public that you believe in UFOs and aliens?\u201d she asks.\u201cI don't give a damn,\u201d he replies. \u201cI don't care.\u201d\u201cYou don't worry that some people will say, 'Did you hear that guy, he sounds like he's crazy?'\u201cI don't care,\u201d Bigelow repeated.Read more:Trump tweets \u2018covfefe,\u2019 inspiring a semi-comedic act of CongressTiger mauls British zookeeper to death in \u2018freak accident\u2019Scientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachWith 800 offspring, \u2018very sexually active\u2019 tortoise saves species from extinction Robert Bigelow has joined the ranks of wealthy entrepreneurs with an expensive interest in space.  This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "In Artemis program, NASA to send astronauts to the moon again. This time, the crew will include a woman. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3097",
        "date": "2020-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/in-artemis-program-nasa-to-send-astronauts-to-the-moon-again-this-time-the-crew-will-include-a-woman/2020/01/03/d38ff482-2cee-11ea-bcb3-ac6482c4a92f_story.html",
        "text": "The last time an astronaut walked on the moon was nearly 50\u00a0years ago. Now, NASA has a plan to get back \u2014 and help humanity set its sights on even farther destinations in the process.The Artemis program is the agency\u2019s first crewed moon mission in decades. It carries some historic weight on its shoulders. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the moon. She also is the twin sister of Apollo, the god of the ancient Greeks and Romans after whom NASA named its first moon missions. The sister symbolism is doubly intentional: NASA expects the program to bring the first woman to the moon.The plan is to get her there by 2024 \u2014 a date that complies with White House pressure. But budget and timing concerns have plagued the mission. Despite those challenges, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said the agency can find a way to get a mission to the moon within the deadline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArtemis has multiple goals and a massive to-do list. NASA plans to use U.S. companies to deliver payloads to the moon\u2019s surface in preparation for human missions. Then, it will use the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever made, to send the Orion spacecraft on a test mission into lunar orbit and beyond. Afterward, NASA plans to send a crew into orbit and eventually to the moon itself. There are plans for a moon-orbiting command module, the Gateway, too.All that activity is designed to help scientists learn more about the moon, including its ",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Artemis program, NASA to send astronauts to the moon again. This time, the crew will include a woman. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3098",
        "date": "2020-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/in-artemis-program-nasa-to-send-astronauts-to-the-moon-again-this-time-the-crew-will-include-a-woman/2020/01/03/d38ff482-2cee-11ea-bcb3-ac6482c4a92f_story.html",
        "text": "The last time an astronaut walked on the moon was nearly 50\u00a0years ago. Now, NASA has a plan to get back \u2014 and help humanity set its sights on even farther destinations in the process.The Artemis program is the agency\u2019s first crewed moon mission in decades. It carries some historic weight on its shoulders. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the moon. She also is the twin sister of Apollo, the god of the ancient Greeks and Romans after whom NASA named its first moon missions. The sister symbolism is doubly intentional: NASA expects the program to bring the first woman to the moon.The plan is to get her there by 2024 \u2014 a date that complies with White House pressure. But budget and timing concerns have plagued the mission. Despite those challenges, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said the agency can find a way to get a mission to the moon within the deadline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArtemis has multiple goals and a massive to-do list. NASA plans to use U.S. companies to deliver payloads to the moon\u2019s surface in preparation for human missions. Then, it will use the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever made, to send the Orion spacecraft on a test mission into lunar orbit and beyond. Afterward, NASA plans to send a crew into orbit and eventually to the moon itself. There are plans for a moon-orbiting command module, the Gateway, too.All that activity is designed to help scientists learn more about the moon, including its ",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Artemis program, NASA to send astronauts to the moon again. This time, the crew will include a woman. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3099",
        "date": "2020-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/in-artemis-program-nasa-to-send-astronauts-to-the-moon-again-this-time-the-crew-will-include-a-woman/2020/01/03/d38ff482-2cee-11ea-bcb3-ac6482c4a92f_story.html",
        "text": "The last time an astronaut walked on the moon was nearly 50\u00a0years ago. Now, NASA has a plan to get back \u2014 and help humanity set its sights on even farther destinations in the process.The Artemis program is the agency\u2019s first crewed moon mission in decades. It carries some historic weight on its shoulders. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the moon. She also is the twin sister of Apollo, the god of the ancient Greeks and Romans after whom NASA named its first moon missions. The sister symbolism is doubly intentional: NASA expects the program to bring the first woman to the moon.The plan is to get her there by 2024 \u2014 a date that complies with White House pressure. But budget and timing concerns have plagued the mission. Despite those challenges, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said the agency can find a way to get a mission to the moon within the deadline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArtemis has multiple goals and a massive to-do list. NASA plans to use U.S. companies to deliver payloads to the moon\u2019s surface in preparation for human missions. Then, it will use the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever made, to send the Orion spacecraft on a test mission into lunar orbit and beyond. Afterward, NASA plans to send a crew into orbit and eventually to the moon itself. There are plans for a moon-orbiting command module, the Gateway, too.All that activity is designed to help scientists learn more about the moon, including its ",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Hires 3 Companies for Moon Science Deliveries (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3100",
        "date": "2019-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/science/nasa-moon.html",
        "text": "The landers would be the first American spacecraft to touch down on the moon since the astronauts of Apollo 17 left in 1972. The landers would be the first American spacecraft to touch down on the moon since the astronauts of Apollo 17 left in 1972. NASA is going to land on the moon again, maybe as soon as next year.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Hires 3 Companies for Moon Science Deliveries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3101",
        "date": "2019-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/science/nasa-moon.html",
        "text": "The landers would be the first American spacecraft to touch down on the moon since the astronauts of Apollo 17 left in 1972. The landers would be the first American spacecraft to touch down on the moon since the astronauts of Apollo 17 left in 1972. NASA is going to land on the moon again, maybe as soon as next year.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Hires 3 Companies for Moon Science Deliveries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3102",
        "date": "2019-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/31/science/nasa-moon.html",
        "text": "The landers would be the first American spacecraft to touch down on the moon since the astronauts of Apollo 17 left in 1972. The landers would be the first American spacecraft to touch down on the moon since the astronauts of Apollo 17 left in 1972. NASA is going to land on the moon again, maybe as soon as next year.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Just Visited the Solar System\u2019s Biggest Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3103",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/nasa-juno-jupiter-ganymede.html",
        "text": "The Juno spacecraft completed a close flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter\u2019s biggest moon, as it transitions into a new phase of its mission. The Juno spacecraft completed a close flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter\u2019s biggest moon, as it transitions into a new phase of its mission. Time for your close-up, Ganymede.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Just Visited the Solar System\u2019s Biggest Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3104",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/nasa-juno-jupiter-ganymede.html",
        "text": "The Juno spacecraft completed a close flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter\u2019s biggest moon, as it transitions into a new phase of its mission. The Juno spacecraft completed a close flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter\u2019s biggest moon, as it transitions into a new phase of its mission. Time for your close-up, Ganymede.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Just Visited the Solar System\u2019s Biggest Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3105",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/science/nasa-juno-jupiter-ganymede.html",
        "text": "The Juno spacecraft completed a close flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter\u2019s biggest moon, as it transitions into a new phase of its mission. The Juno spacecraft completed a close flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter\u2019s biggest moon, as it transitions into a new phase of its mission. Time for your close-up, Ganymede.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Telescope Will Provide X-Ray Views of the Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3106",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/science/nasa-spacex-ixpe-launch.html",
        "text": "The IXPE spacecraft will use X-ray polarimetry to better measure black holes, supernovas and other astronomical phenomena. The IXPE spacecraft will use X-ray polarimetry to better measure black holes, supernovas and other astronomical phenomena. A brand-new space telescope will soon reveal a hidden vision of the cosmos, potentially transforming our understanding of black holes, supernovas and even the nature of the universe itself.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Telescope Will Provide X-Ray Views of the Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3107",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/science/nasa-spacex-ixpe-launch.html",
        "text": "The IXPE spacecraft will use X-ray polarimetry to better measure black holes, supernovas and other astronomical phenomena. The IXPE spacecraft will use X-ray polarimetry to better measure black holes, supernovas and other astronomical phenomena. A brand-new space telescope will soon reveal a hidden vision of the cosmos, potentially transforming our understanding of black holes, supernovas and even the nature of the universe itself.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Telescope Will Provide X-Ray Views of the Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3108",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/science/nasa-spacex-ixpe-launch.html",
        "text": "The IXPE spacecraft will use X-ray polarimetry to better measure black holes, supernovas and other astronomical phenomena. The IXPE spacecraft will use X-ray polarimetry to better measure black holes, supernovas and other astronomical phenomena. A brand-new space telescope will soon reveal a hidden vision of the cosmos, potentially transforming our understanding of black holes, supernovas and even the nature of the universe itself.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Ultima Thule Photos Were Made in a Flash (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3109",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/science/ultima-thule-photos-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The images were recorded while the New Horizons spacecraft was moving at more than 32,000 miles per hour. The images were recorded while the New Horizons spacecraft was moving at more than 32,000 miles per hour. When NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew by a small distant world on New Year\u2019s Eve, it tried to use one of its cameras to capture the highest-resolution images that were possible. Pulling this off presented risks.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Ultima Thule Photos Were Made in a Flash (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3110",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/science/ultima-thule-photos-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The images were recorded while the New Horizons spacecraft was moving at more than 32,000 miles per hour. The images were recorded while the New Horizons spacecraft was moving at more than 32,000 miles per hour. When NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew by a small distant world on New Year\u2019s Eve, it tried to use one of its cameras to capture the highest-resolution images that were possible. Pulling this off presented risks.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Ultima Thule Photos Were Made in a Flash (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3111",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/science/ultima-thule-photos-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The images were recorded while the New Horizons spacecraft was moving at more than 32,000 miles per hour. The images were recorded while the New Horizons spacecraft was moving at more than 32,000 miles per hour. When NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew by a small distant world on New Year\u2019s Eve, it tried to use one of its cameras to capture the highest-resolution images that were possible. Pulling this off presented risks.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Great Red Spot Descends Deep Into Jupiter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3112",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/science/jupiter-great-red-spot-juno.html",
        "text": "The iconic storm plunges 200 miles beneath the clouds of the solar system\u2019s largest planet, and possibly much deeper, according to data from NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft. The iconic storm plunges 200 miles beneath the clouds of the solar system\u2019s largest planet, and possibly much deeper, according to data from NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft. NEW ORLEANS \u2014 Jupiter's Great Red Spot is not just a skin-deep beauty mark.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Great Red Spot Descends Deep Into Jupiter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3113",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/science/jupiter-great-red-spot-juno.html",
        "text": "The iconic storm plunges 200 miles beneath the clouds of the solar system\u2019s largest planet, and possibly much deeper, according to data from NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft. The iconic storm plunges 200 miles beneath the clouds of the solar system\u2019s largest planet, and possibly much deeper, according to data from NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft. NEW ORLEANS \u2014 Jupiter's Great Red Spot is not just a skin-deep beauty mark.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Mission From the U.A.E. Begins Orbit of Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3114",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/science/uae-mars-mission-red-planet.html",
        "text": "The Hope spacecraft fired its engines on Tuesday and was grappled by the planet\u2019s gravity to begin its atmospheric science studies. The Hope spacecraft fired its engines on Tuesday and was grappled by the planet\u2019s gravity to begin its atmospheric science studies. The first in a parade of three new visitors to Mars has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Mission From the U.A.E. Begins Orbit of Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3115",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/science/uae-mars-mission-red-planet.html",
        "text": "The Hope spacecraft fired its engines on Tuesday and was grappled by the planet\u2019s gravity to begin its atmospheric science studies. The Hope spacecraft fired its engines on Tuesday and was grappled by the planet\u2019s gravity to begin its atmospheric science studies. The first in a parade of three new visitors to Mars has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Mission From the U.A.E. Begins Orbit of Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3116",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/science/uae-mars-mission-red-planet.html",
        "text": "The Hope spacecraft fired its engines on Tuesday and was grappled by the planet\u2019s gravity to begin its atmospheric science studies. The Hope spacecraft fired its engines on Tuesday and was grappled by the planet\u2019s gravity to begin its atmospheric science studies. The first in a parade of three new visitors to Mars has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Remember When Japan Blasted an Asteroid? Here\u2019s What We Learned (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3117",
        "date": "2020-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/science/japan-hayabusa2-asteroid-ryugu.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. In April last year, a Japanese spacecraft launched a strike from above on an asteroid.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Remember When Japan Blasted an Asteroid? Here\u2019s What We Learned (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3118",
        "date": "2020-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/science/japan-hayabusa2-asteroid-ryugu.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. In April last year, a Japanese spacecraft launched a strike from above on an asteroid.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Remember When Japan Blasted an Asteroid? Here\u2019s What We Learned (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3119",
        "date": "2020-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/science/japan-hayabusa2-asteroid-ryugu.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. In April last year, a Japanese spacecraft launched a strike from above on an asteroid.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Remember When Japan Blasted an Asteroid? Here\u2019s What We Learned (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3120",
        "date": "2020-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/science/japan-hayabusa2-asteroid-ryugu.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft\u2019s explosive encounter reveals that a space rock called Ryugu looks extremely young for its age. In April last year, a Japanese spacecraft launched a strike from above on an asteroid.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Deeper Insights, Japanese Space Mission Bombed an Asteroid to Make a Crater (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3121",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/hayabusa2-ryugu-crater.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 spacecraft aimed to advance its study of the rock called Ryugu by making a hole on its surface with a copper projectile. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft aimed to advance its study of the rock called Ryugu by making a hole on its surface with a copper projectile. A Japanese space mission that has been studying an asteroid not far from Earth on Thursday night (Friday in Japan) fired a copper projectile at its surface.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Deeper Insights, Japanese Space Mission Bombed an Asteroid to Make a Crater (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3122",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/hayabusa2-ryugu-crater.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 spacecraft aimed to advance its study of the rock called Ryugu by making a hole on its surface with a copper projectile. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft aimed to advance its study of the rock called Ryugu by making a hole on its surface with a copper projectile. A Japanese space mission that has been studying an asteroid not far from Earth on Thursday night (Friday in Japan) fired a copper projectile at its surface.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Deeper Insights, Japanese Space Mission Bombed an Asteroid to Make a Crater (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3123",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/hayabusa2-ryugu-crater.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 spacecraft aimed to advance its study of the rock called Ryugu by making a hole on its surface with a copper projectile. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft aimed to advance its study of the rock called Ryugu by making a hole on its surface with a copper projectile. A Japanese space mission that has been studying an asteroid not far from Earth on Thursday night (Friday in Japan) fired a copper projectile at its surface.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn\u2019s icy moon Enceladus (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3124",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/13/nasa-finds-ingredients-for-life-spewing-out-of-saturns-moon/",
        "text": "The geysers of Saturn's moon Enceladus are gushing food\u00a0for life, scientists say.Researchers report Thursday in the journal Science that the jets of ice and gas coming from the moon's south pole contain molecular hydrogen, a chemical characteristic of hydrothermal activity. On Earth, hydrogen\u00a0provides fuel for communities of organisms that live around vents on the seafloor. Its\u00a0presence on Saturn's icy moon suggests that this alien world, which harbors a saltwater ocean encased in a frozen crust, has the right conditions to give rise to microbial life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor a microbiologist thinking about energy for microbes, hydrogen is like the gold coin of energy currency,\u201d said\u00a0Peter Girguis, a deep sea biologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the research.\u00a0\u201cIf you had to have one thing, one chemical compound, coming out of a vent that would lead you to think there\u2019s energy to support microbial life, hydrogen is\u00a0at the top of that list.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt makes the Enceladus ocean seem a heck of a lot more habitable than we were thinking\u00a0yesterday,\u201d agreed Ariel Anbar, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University. \u201cAnd wouldn\u2019t we like to know, is there life living there?\u201dDeep-sea life on Earth gives us a clue to what aliens would be likeEverything scientists know about biology on Earth suggests that life is irrepressible. It thrives in clouds, in caves, in lakes of meltwater buried half a mile beneath the ice sheets of Antarctica, in boiling water plumes that gush from the ocean's deepest, darkest depths. Almost no environment is too extreme, as long as water, organic molecules and a bit of energy are available for organisms to exploit.Enceladus\u00a0(pronounced \u201cen-SELL-a-dis\u201d) provides all three. It's looking more and more like the most habitable spot in our solar system beyond Earth, and scientists' best target yet in the search for alien organisms.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd it might not be alone. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest\u00a0that\u00a0plumes much like those on Enceladus are also spewing from Jupiter's moon Europa, NASA announced today.Like Enceladus, Europa harbors a subsurface saltwater ocean and could contain organic molecules. NASA hopes that Europa's geysers are likewise connected to the moon's watery\u00a0interior. In the coming decade,\u00a0the space agency will send a probe called the Europa Clipper to seek signs of life\u00a0on Jupiter's moon by flying through those plumes.NASA's Cassini spacecraft will take the deepest dive ever through the plume of Saturn's moon Enceladus. (YouTube/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)\u201cIn the NASA strategy for\u00a0searching for life, the key ingredients have always been\u00a0water, building blocks like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen \u2026 and a source of energy,\u201d said Mary Voytek, a senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA who was not involved in the research. Knowing that two worlds in the solar system might meet these requirements,\u00a0\u201cit's very possible that we\u00a0have life out on one of those moons,\u201d Voytek said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEnceladus's geysers have made it a target in the search for extraterrestrial organisms ever since the NASA space probe Cassini detected them in 2005. The plumes are rich with water and organic molecules, and the force with which they gush from the surface suggests that they are driven by a hydrothermal system 2\u00bd times as powerful as the one that powers Yellowstone's\u00a0geysers and bubbling hot springs. They are also physical evidence of the water in the moon's interior, which is heated by the gravitational pull of Saturn.In October 2015, Cassini flew deeper into the geysers than it ever had before, skimming a mere 30 miles above the moon's surface. The probe trapped particles from the plume inside its Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer \u2014 a \u201csniffing\u201d instrument that sorts material into its component parts based on mass \u2014 and analyzed the icy spray.Looking for aliens on ocean worlds: 'You'd be in denial to believe there isn't life out there'The results suggest that the geysers contain a surprising ratio of molecular hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane. The molecules are in \u201cthermodynamic disequilibrium,\u201d the researchers say; that is, they're chemically out of whack. Molecular hydrogen (a compound made of\u00a0two hydrogen atoms) is a very volatile gas, and is not easily trapped on a small, icy world like Enceladus. Its presence in the geyser plume indicates that\u00a0there are processes beneath the surface constantly replenishing the supply of molecular hydrogen.The paper's authors\u00a0examined a number of possible reasons for this chemical imbalance in their paper. The most likely explanation, they conclude, is something called serpenitinization. As hot water from Enceladus's ocean flows through cracks in the seafloor, it reacts with the iron-rich rock to form molecular hydrogen.This exact phenomenon is known to happen around Earth's hydrothermal vents, where it fuels entire ecosystems of chemosynthetic organisms. Instead of deriving energy from the light of the sun, as photosynthetic plants do, these creatures feed on chemical imbalances. They power themselves by getting hydrogen to react with carbon dioxide to form methane, a process called methanogenesis, just as a lightbulb is powered by electric charges moving across a circuit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMethanogenesis is one of the oldest\u00a0metabolic processes on the planet. It predates photosynthesis; it may even have powered Earth's very first\u00a0life. The fact that Enceladus produces the same chemical imbalances that drive chemosynthetic life on Earth is intriguing.\u201cBut it's not necessarily an indication for or against life\u201d on Saturn's moon, cautioned co-author Hunter Waite\u00a0of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas (SWRI).New photos of the ocean-filled, potentially habitable moon EnceladusWaite compared the surplus of molecular hydrogen on Enceladus to a stack of pizzas piled up outside a house. On the one hand, if there was anyone living in the house, you would think that the inhabitants would be eating it. The fact that the hydrogen persists could be evidence that there are no microbes around to use it for fuel.\u00a0On the other hand, maybe there's so much pizza arriving every day that the residents can't keep up. There may be other factors limiting how much hydrogen the hypothetical microbes can process,\u00a0allowing some molecules to escape up to the surface.If there is life on Enceladus, the scientists know\u00a0how much energy is available for it to consume based on the ratio of hydrogen in the plume. Co-author Christopher Glein, a geochemist\u00a0at SWRI, called it \u201cthe first assessment of the calorie count in an alien ocean.\u201d He and his colleagues found that the moon's hydrothermal activity supplies more than enough energy to power a chemosynthetic ecosystem \u2014 the equivalent of 300 pizzas per hour.Clearly, Enceladus's sea floor is a veritable hydrogen pizza party. But is anyone eating?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe're going to have to go back with new missions and more focused instrumentation to answer that question,\u201d Waite said.Cassini won't have any more opportunities to sample the geyser plumes. After orbiting Saturn for more than a decade, the spacecraft is scheduled to start dives between the planet and its rings next week. In September, Cassini will plunge\u00a0straight into Saturn, burning up almost as soon as it hits the gas giant's atmosphere. The command sequence for this final mission\u00a0was transmitted to the probe by NASA's Deep Space Network on Tuesday.It's Enceladus's fault that Cassini must die \u2014 NASA doesn't want to\u00a0risk the spacecraft inadvertently contaminating the potentially habitable moon, so they cannot leave it hanging out in space after it runs out of fuel.Scientists found that Enceladus, a 300 mile-wide moon of Saturn, has hot water under its icy crust, raising the possibility that it may host life. (Reuters)Yet the\u00a0space probe has already dramatically exceeded scientists' expectations. When Cassini launched toward Saturn in 1997, NASA didn't even know that Enceladus had geysers, let alone an ocean that could harbor life, and the spacecraft wasn't equipped with instruments that could test for biomarkers (the instrument used in this study was initially designed to study a different moon entirely). If scientists want to search for life on Enceladus in earnest, they will need to send another probe to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGlein is working on a proposal for exactly such a mission. But right now, NASA has no project in the works to revisit the Saturnian system. It could be more than a decade before we go back.\u201cIt's frustrating and thrilling at the same time,\u201d\u00a0Glein said.Fortunately, Enceladus no longer appears to be the only ocean world spitting its contents into space. The news that Europa also has geysers comes just as NASA begins the preliminary design phase of the Europa Clipper mission, which is slated to orbit Jupiter and perform 45 flybys of the planet's icy moon.This is not the first time scientists have detected evidence of geysers on Europa; Hubble has spotted similar plumes several times before. But this detection provides further evidence for the activity and will help scientists figure out the timing of Europa's geysers in advance of the Clipper mission.The plumes were detected by the Hubble Space Telescope as Europa passed in front of Jupiter. Silhouetted against the hot, glowing form of its host planet, scientists could see gusts of material shooting upward.\u00a0The jets were so powerful that they extended\u00a050 kilometers above the moon's surface \u2014 Old Faithful, the famous geyser at Yellowstone, only reaches 184 feet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen the Clipper arrives in the mid-2020s, it will carry instruments specifically designed to sample Europa's plumes and test for organic molecules. Unlike Cassini, which had no idea what it would encounter when it detected Enceladus's geysers for the first time, the spacecraft should be well-equipped to detect life \u2014 if there's any life to be found.Voytek said that her boss, NASA's planetary science director Jim Green, is determined to find organisms\u00a0beyond Earth before he retires. \u201cYou've got a couple of years,\u201d he told her, jokingly, when they heard about the Enceladus discovery.Green is optimistic about his chances.\u201cWe\u2019re just on the precipice\u00a0of moving this whole activity\u00a0forward,\u201d he told The Washington Post. \u201cI think in our lifetime we\u2019ll be able to answer the\u00a0question, 'Are we alone?' \"Read more:There's an 'Earthlike' planet with an atmosphere just 39 light-years awayWhat does a black hole look like? Astronomers are on a quest to find out.Scientists discover 7 'Earthlike' planets orbiting a nearby starYou can now spell 'Earthling' with a capital 'E,' and here's whyNo, NASA didn't find life on Saturn's moon. But deep sea life on Earth is pretty alien. Enceladus has jets of water with molecular hydrogen, discovered by the Cassini spacecraft. The moon may have something resembling deep-sea hydrothermal vents on Earth. NASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn\u2019s icy moon Enceladus",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dying Satellite, Not U.F.O. or Meteor, Likely Caused Midwest Fireball (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3125",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/science/russian-satellite-break-up.html",
        "text": "The fiery trail astonished viewers in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, but a Russian military spacecraft was the probable source. The fiery trail astonished viewers in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, but a Russian military spacecraft was the probable source. Something streaked across the night skies over Ohio, Michigan and Indiana during predawn hours on Wednesday. The fireball burned in hues of green, gold and pink, leaving a bright trail in its wake. It spent about two minutes breaking apart into smaller pieces during its descent from orbit before crossing over the border of the United States and Canada, somewhere over the Great Lakes.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dying Satellite, Not U.F.O. or Meteor, Likely Caused Midwest Fireball (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3126",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/science/russian-satellite-break-up.html",
        "text": "The fiery trail astonished viewers in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, but a Russian military spacecraft was the probable source. The fiery trail astonished viewers in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, but a Russian military spacecraft was the probable source. Something streaked across the night skies over Ohio, Michigan and Indiana during predawn hours on Wednesday. The fireball burned in hues of green, gold and pink, leaving a bright trail in its wake. It spent about two minutes breaking apart into smaller pieces during its descent from orbit before crossing over the border of the United States and Canada, somewhere over the Great Lakes.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "BepiColombo Launches on Long Journey to Mercury (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3127",
        "date": "2018-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/science/bepicolombo-mercury-launch.html",
        "text": "The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. Earth is going back to Mercury.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "BepiColombo Launches on Long Journey to Mercury (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3128",
        "date": "2018-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/science/bepicolombo-mercury-launch.html",
        "text": "The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. Earth is going back to Mercury.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "BepiColombo Launches on Long Journey to Mercury (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3129",
        "date": "2018-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/science/bepicolombo-mercury-launch.html",
        "text": "The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. Earth is going back to Mercury.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "BepiColombo Launches on Long Journey to Mercury (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3130",
        "date": "2018-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/science/bepicolombo-mercury-launch.html",
        "text": "The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. The European-Japanese spacecraft will be the third mission to the rocky planet closest to the sun. Earth is going back to Mercury.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Will Have a Fleet of Spacecraft as Europe Adds Orbiter Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3131",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/science/venus-europe-envision.html",
        "text": "The EnVision spacecraft will complement two NASA missions announced last week, ending the relative loneliness of a planet sometimes thought of as Earth\u2019s twin. The EnVision spacecraft will complement two NASA missions announced last week, ending the relative loneliness of a planet sometimes thought of as Earth\u2019s twin. Last week, NASA stunned planetary scientists when it announced that it was going to send not one but two different spacecraft to Venus by the end of the decade. On Thursday, the European Space Agency declared that it was launching its own mission there too: EnVision, an orbiter that would investigate even more of the planet\u2019s mysteries.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Will Have a Fleet of Spacecraft as Europe Adds Orbiter Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3132",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/science/venus-europe-envision.html",
        "text": "The EnVision spacecraft will complement two NASA missions announced last week, ending the relative loneliness of a planet sometimes thought of as Earth\u2019s twin. The EnVision spacecraft will complement two NASA missions announced last week, ending the relative loneliness of a planet sometimes thought of as Earth\u2019s twin. Last week, NASA stunned planetary scientists when it announced that it was going to send not one but two different spacecraft to Venus by the end of the decade. On Thursday, the European Space Agency declared that it was launching its own mission there too: EnVision, an orbiter that would investigate even more of the planet\u2019s mysteries.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Will Have a Fleet of Spacecraft as Europe Adds Orbiter Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3133",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/science/venus-europe-envision.html",
        "text": "The EnVision spacecraft will complement two NASA missions announced last week, ending the relative loneliness of a planet sometimes thought of as Earth\u2019s twin. The EnVision spacecraft will complement two NASA missions announced last week, ending the relative loneliness of a planet sometimes thought of as Earth\u2019s twin. Last week, NASA stunned planetary scientists when it announced that it was going to send not one but two different spacecraft to Venus by the end of the decade. On Thursday, the European Space Agency declared that it was launching its own mission there too: EnVision, an orbiter that would investigate even more of the planet\u2019s mysteries.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Lucy Launches on 12-Year Mission to Jupiter\u2019s Trojan Asteroids (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3134",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/science/nasa-lucy-launch.html",
        "text": "The elaborate journey of the robotic spacecraft will offer close encounters with some of the solar system\u2019s least understood objects. The elaborate journey of the robotic spacecraft will offer close encounters with some of the solar system\u2019s least understood objects. NASA embarked on a 12-year mission to study a group of asteroids on Saturday with the launch of Lucy, a robotic explorer that will meander through the unexplored caverns of deep space to find new clues about the creation of our solar system.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Lucy Launches on 12-Year Mission to Jupiter\u2019s Trojan Asteroids (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3135",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/science/nasa-lucy-launch.html",
        "text": "The elaborate journey of the robotic spacecraft will offer close encounters with some of the solar system\u2019s least understood objects. The elaborate journey of the robotic spacecraft will offer close encounters with some of the solar system\u2019s least understood objects. NASA embarked on a 12-year mission to study a group of asteroids on Saturday with the launch of Lucy, a robotic explorer that will meander through the unexplored caverns of deep space to find new clues about the creation of our solar system.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Lucy Launches on 12-Year Mission to Jupiter\u2019s Trojan Asteroids (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3136",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/16/science/nasa-lucy-launch.html",
        "text": "The elaborate journey of the robotic spacecraft will offer close encounters with some of the solar system\u2019s least understood objects. The elaborate journey of the robotic spacecraft will offer close encounters with some of the solar system\u2019s least understood objects. NASA embarked on a 12-year mission to study a group of asteroids on Saturday with the launch of Lucy, a robotic explorer that will meander through the unexplored caverns of deep space to find new clues about the creation of our solar system.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches New Mission: Crash Into Asteroid, Defend Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3137",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/science/nasa-dart-mission-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. It was 2017, and astronomers projected an asteroid the size of a cruise ship would strike Japan sometime in the next decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches New Mission: Crash Into Asteroid, Defend Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3138",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/science/nasa-dart-mission-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. It was 2017, and astronomers projected an asteroid the size of a cruise ship would strike Japan sometime in the next decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches New Mission: Crash Into Asteroid, Defend Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3139",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/science/nasa-dart-mission-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. It was 2017, and astronomers projected an asteroid the size of a cruise ship would strike Japan sometime in the next decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches New Mission: Crash Into Asteroid, Defend Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3140",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/science/nasa-dart-mission-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, launched on Wednesday, could be the first to alter an asteroid\u2019s path, a technique that may be used to defend the planet in the future. It was 2017, and astronomers projected an asteroid the size of a cruise ship would strike Japan sometime in the next decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "4 Astronauts Float Into the International Space Station and Open Arms (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3141",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/science/space/spacex-dragon-nasa.html",
        "text": "The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. \u201cEndeavour arriving.\u201d",
        "author": "By Maria Cramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "4 Astronauts Float Into the International Space Station and Open Arms (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3142",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/science/space/spacex-dragon-nasa.html",
        "text": "The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. \u201cEndeavour arriving.\u201d",
        "author": "By Maria Cramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "4 Astronauts Float Into the International Space Station and Open Arms (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3143",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/science/space/spacex-dragon-nasa.html",
        "text": "The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. \u201cEndeavour arriving.\u201d",
        "author": "By Maria Cramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "4 Astronauts Float Into the International Space Station and Open Arms (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3144",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/science/space/spacex-dragon-nasa.html",
        "text": "The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. The crew arrived on Saturday on the Dragon Endeavour, a spacecraft built by SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s space exploration company. \u201cEndeavour arriving.\u201d",
        "author": "By Maria Cramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch SpaceX\u2019s Starship Launch and Explode in Crash Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3145",
        "date": "2020-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/science/spacex-starship-crash.html",
        "text": "The company described the test of the next-generation spacecraft as \u201cawesome\u201d even though it ended in a fiery blast. The company described the test of the next-generation spacecraft as \u201cawesome\u201d even though it ended in a fiery blast. A test of a prototype of a rocket that Elon Musk has dreams of sending people to Mars in flew several miles high on Wednesday. But in attempting to land, it hit the ground too fast and exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Arrokoth is the most distant space object ever seen up close (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3146",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/13/meet-arrokoth-most-distant-space-object-ever-seen-up-close/",
        "text": "The bundle of ice and rock was discovered using a telescope operated out of Maryland. It was studied up close by a spacecraft built in the same state. So when NASA scientists had to choose an official name for the most distant object they had ever explored, they borrowed a word from the original inhabitants of this region: Arrokoth, the Powhatan/Algonquian term for \u201csky.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cBestowing the name Arrokoth signifies the strength and endurance of the indigenous Algonquian people of the Chesapeake region,\u201d Lori Glaze, the director of NASA\u2019s planetary science division, said at a naming ceremony Tuesday. \u201cTheir heritage continues to be a guiding light for all who search for meaning and understanding of the origins of the universe and the celestial connection of humanity.\u201dThe name also replaces a nickname with an unintended white supremacist connection: \u201cUltima Thule,\u201d a medieval term used to describe the lands beyond the edges of maps. Nazis used it to refer to a mythical homeland of the Aryan people, as was reported in Newsweek, and it remains in use by modern far-right groups.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArrokoth (pronounced AR-oh-kodh) is a Kuiper belt object, one of millions of icy bodies that exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. As a frozen fragment of the material that formed the planets, scientists say, it holds clues to the earliest days of the solar system.It was discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Viewed through Hubble\u2019s lens, it appeared as little more than a faint pixel of light in a sea of black.But just after midnight on New Year\u2019s Day, when NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft swooshed past the object, Arrokoth became the most distant object humans have ever seen up close. Images streamed down to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where New Horizons was built and operated, revealed a reddish, snowman-shaped world.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, initially defended the Ultima Thule nickname. \u201cJust because some bad guys once liked that term, we\u2019re not going to let them hijack it,\u201d he told reporters who asked about the Nazi connection shortly after the January flyby.But new names for space objects have to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, which has strict guidelines for identifying objects in the sky. Ultimately, NASA opted to put forward the name \u201cArrokoth,\u201d which honors the Native American nation whose land the discovery was made on.The space agency approached artist Phoebe Farris, a professor emeritus at Purdue University who is of Powhatan/Pamunkey heritage, to seek permission from Powhatan elders to use \u201cArrokoth.\u201d The tribe endorsed the choice, and it was accepted by the IAU\u2019s Minor Planet Center last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFarris presented the new name at the ceremony at NASA headquarters Tuesday.\u201cSince we are the original inhabitants of what is now called North America, known to us as Turtle Island, it is fitting that \u2018discoveries\u2019 over our skies, on our land and in our waters should be given indigenous names,\u201d she told Agence France-Presse.New Horizons has sailed past Arrokoth, zooming onward through more unexplored regions of the Kuiper belt. But scientists are still analyzing the data collected during the brief New Year\u2019s flyby.\u201cThis is, from a scientific standpoint, just a treasure trove of information about the conditions during the birth of the planets,\u201d Stern said at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston this spring. \u201cEverything we\u2019ve found so far is just the tip of the iceberg.\u201d The new designation for the Kuiper Belt object explored by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft comes from the Powhatan/Algonquian word for \"sky.\" It replaces a nickname that was revealed to have white supremacist connotations. Arrokoth is the most distant space object ever seen up close",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Arrokoth is the most distant space object ever seen up close (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3147",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/13/meet-arrokoth-most-distant-space-object-ever-seen-up-close/",
        "text": "The bundle of ice and rock was discovered using a telescope operated out of Maryland. It was studied up close by a spacecraft built in the same state. So when NASA scientists had to choose an official name for the most distant object they had ever explored, they borrowed a word from the original inhabitants of this region: Arrokoth, the Powhatan/Algonquian term for \u201csky.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cBestowing the name Arrokoth signifies the strength and endurance of the indigenous Algonquian people of the Chesapeake region,\u201d Lori Glaze, the director of NASA\u2019s planetary science division, said at a naming ceremony Tuesday. \u201cTheir heritage continues to be a guiding light for all who search for meaning and understanding of the origins of the universe and the celestial connection of humanity.\u201dThe name also replaces a nickname with an unintended white supremacist connection: \u201cUltima Thule,\u201d a medieval term used to describe the lands beyond the edges of maps. Nazis used it to refer to a mythical homeland of the Aryan people, as was reported in Newsweek, and it remains in use by modern far-right groups.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArrokoth (pronounced AR-oh-kodh) is a Kuiper belt object, one of millions of icy bodies that exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. As a frozen fragment of the material that formed the planets, scientists say, it holds clues to the earliest days of the solar system.It was discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Viewed through Hubble\u2019s lens, it appeared as little more than a faint pixel of light in a sea of black.But just after midnight on New Year\u2019s Day, when NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft swooshed past the object, Arrokoth became the most distant object humans have ever seen up close. Images streamed down to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where New Horizons was built and operated, revealed a reddish, snowman-shaped world.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, initially defended the Ultima Thule nickname. \u201cJust because some bad guys once liked that term, we\u2019re not going to let them hijack it,\u201d he told reporters who asked about the Nazi connection shortly after the January flyby.But new names for space objects have to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, which has strict guidelines for identifying objects in the sky. Ultimately, NASA opted to put forward the name \u201cArrokoth,\u201d which honors the Native American nation whose land the discovery was made on.The space agency approached artist Phoebe Farris, a professor emeritus at Purdue University who is of Powhatan/Pamunkey heritage, to seek permission from Powhatan elders to use \u201cArrokoth.\u201d The tribe endorsed the choice, and it was accepted by the IAU\u2019s Minor Planet Center last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFarris presented the new name at the ceremony at NASA headquarters Tuesday.\u201cSince we are the original inhabitants of what is now called North America, known to us as Turtle Island, it is fitting that \u2018discoveries\u2019 over our skies, on our land and in our waters should be given indigenous names,\u201d she told Agence France-Presse.New Horizons has sailed past Arrokoth, zooming onward through more unexplored regions of the Kuiper belt. But scientists are still analyzing the data collected during the brief New Year\u2019s flyby.\u201cThis is, from a scientific standpoint, just a treasure trove of information about the conditions during the birth of the planets,\u201d Stern said at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston this spring. \u201cEverything we\u2019ve found so far is just the tip of the iceberg.\u201d The new designation for the Kuiper Belt object explored by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft comes from the Powhatan/Algonquian word for \"sky.\" It replaces a nickname that was revealed to have white supremacist connotations. Arrokoth is the most distant space object ever seen up close",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Arrokoth is the most distant space object ever seen up close (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3148",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/13/meet-arrokoth-most-distant-space-object-ever-seen-up-close/",
        "text": "The bundle of ice and rock was discovered using a telescope operated out of Maryland. It was studied up close by a spacecraft built in the same state. So when NASA scientists had to choose an official name for the most distant object they had ever explored, they borrowed a word from the original inhabitants of this region: Arrokoth, the Powhatan/Algonquian term for \u201csky.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cBestowing the name Arrokoth signifies the strength and endurance of the indigenous Algonquian people of the Chesapeake region,\u201d Lori Glaze, the director of NASA\u2019s planetary science division, said at a naming ceremony Tuesday. \u201cTheir heritage continues to be a guiding light for all who search for meaning and understanding of the origins of the universe and the celestial connection of humanity.\u201dThe name also replaces a nickname with an unintended white supremacist connection: \u201cUltima Thule,\u201d a medieval term used to describe the lands beyond the edges of maps. Nazis used it to refer to a mythical homeland of the Aryan people, as was reported in Newsweek, and it remains in use by modern far-right groups.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArrokoth (pronounced AR-oh-kodh) is a Kuiper belt object, one of millions of icy bodies that exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. As a frozen fragment of the material that formed the planets, scientists say, it holds clues to the earliest days of the solar system.It was discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Viewed through Hubble\u2019s lens, it appeared as little more than a faint pixel of light in a sea of black.But just after midnight on New Year\u2019s Day, when NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft swooshed past the object, Arrokoth became the most distant object humans have ever seen up close. Images streamed down to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., where New Horizons was built and operated, revealed a reddish, snowman-shaped world.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlan Stern, the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, initially defended the Ultima Thule nickname. \u201cJust because some bad guys once liked that term, we\u2019re not going to let them hijack it,\u201d he told reporters who asked about the Nazi connection shortly after the January flyby.But new names for space objects have to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, which has strict guidelines for identifying objects in the sky. Ultimately, NASA opted to put forward the name \u201cArrokoth,\u201d which honors the Native American nation whose land the discovery was made on.The space agency approached artist Phoebe Farris, a professor emeritus at Purdue University who is of Powhatan/Pamunkey heritage, to seek permission from Powhatan elders to use \u201cArrokoth.\u201d The tribe endorsed the choice, and it was accepted by the IAU\u2019s Minor Planet Center last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFarris presented the new name at the ceremony at NASA headquarters Tuesday.\u201cSince we are the original inhabitants of what is now called North America, known to us as Turtle Island, it is fitting that \u2018discoveries\u2019 over our skies, on our land and in our waters should be given indigenous names,\u201d she told Agence France-Presse.New Horizons has sailed past Arrokoth, zooming onward through more unexplored regions of the Kuiper belt. But scientists are still analyzing the data collected during the brief New Year\u2019s flyby.\u201cThis is, from a scientific standpoint, just a treasure trove of information about the conditions during the birth of the planets,\u201d Stern said at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston this spring. \u201cEverything we\u2019ve found so far is just the tip of the iceberg.\u201d The new designation for the Kuiper Belt object explored by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft comes from the Powhatan/Algonquian word for \"sky.\" It replaces a nickname that was revealed to have white supremacist connotations. Arrokoth is the most distant space object ever seen up close",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3149",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/22/scientists-shot-bullet-into-an-asteroid-learn-about-origins-solar-system/",
        "text": "The asteroid Ryugu was floating in space, minding its own business, when it may have felt a slight sting.That\u2019s because a Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa2 briefly touched down on its surface and shot it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHayabusa2 was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2014, with the mission of studying Ryugu, a carbon-rich space rock that scientists believe could hold clues to the \u201corigin of life\u201d and the early days of the solar system. On Friday, JAXA announced it had successfully completed a mission to collect material from the surface of the asteroid, the first of three planned attempts. It did so by firing a metal \u201cbullet\u201d from Hayabusa2 into Ryugu, kicking up a cloud of debris that could be collected by the probe.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have been quite persistent in making meticulous presentations,\u201d project engineer Takanao Saiki told reporters in a news conference after the mission. \u201cThat persistence has resulted in this success today.\u201dEveryone, we did it!!! #haya2_TD Thank you so much for your support from all over the world! pic.twitter.com/cHkeTCBgcs\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 22, 2019\n\nHayabusa2 has been bugging Ryugu since it arrived in June, dropping rovers that \u201chopped\u201d across its surface, taking photos and, now, firing metal projectiles into its surface rock.AdvertisementIn this latest stage of the mission, JAXA wanted to collect a sample from the asteroid\u2019s gravelly surface that could be brought back to Earth and analyzed. But observations showed Ryugu was much rockier than expected, and scientists had to adjust their strategy for collecting the necessary samples.Story continues below advertisementHayabusa2 is equipped with a tool that can propel \u201cbullets\u201d into the asteroid\u2019s surface to kick up small fragments, which can be collected by a \u201csampler horn.\u201d In December, scientists did a practice run back on Earth, shooting a simulation of the gravel on Ryugu to see how much material would be kicked up. The test revealed that the bullet would produce enough debris to collect for the mission.The surface of Ryugu was not what we expected. So our sampler team had to conduct an experiment to check we could still gather material from the asteroid surface when we attempt #haya2_TD touchdown this Friday! https://t.co/bCzvW2gwSr pic.twitter.com/XxJXETKB6N\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 18, 2019\n\nIn the days leading up to the mission, the Twitter feed for Hayabusa2 provided updates and invited space fans to watch it unfold via live stream. There were cheers in the control room when data came back to confirm a touchdown.AdvertisementRyugu has \u201ca relatively high abundance of water and organic compounds,\u201d said John Bridges of the University of Leicester, who has been studying materials brought back from the first Hayabusa mission, which collected samples from a different asteroid called Itokawa.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s thought to be [made of] the really sort of primitive material from the start of the solar system,\u201d he said, making it critical to scientists.Scientists will get their hands on that primitive material in 2020, when the spacecraft is expected to return to Earth. Bridges said he was excited to study the findings.\u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019ll throw up unexpected results,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m pretty sure it will tell us more about the early solar system.\u201dRead more:Asteroid explorers take first hops, snap a photograph of their new world NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds. The Hayabusa2 mission is studying an asteroid for clues to the origin of life. Scientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system",
        "author": "Kayla Epstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3150",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/22/scientists-shot-bullet-into-an-asteroid-learn-about-origins-solar-system/",
        "text": "The asteroid Ryugu was floating in space, minding its own business, when it may have felt a slight sting.That\u2019s because a Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa2 briefly touched down on its surface and shot it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHayabusa2 was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2014, with the mission of studying Ryugu, a carbon-rich space rock that scientists believe could hold clues to the \u201corigin of life\u201d and the early days of the solar system. On Friday, JAXA announced it had successfully completed a mission to collect material from the surface of the asteroid, the first of three planned attempts. It did so by firing a metal \u201cbullet\u201d from Hayabusa2 into Ryugu, kicking up a cloud of debris that could be collected by the probe.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have been quite persistent in making meticulous presentations,\u201d project engineer Takanao Saiki told reporters in a news conference after the mission. \u201cThat persistence has resulted in this success today.\u201dEveryone, we did it!!! #haya2_TD Thank you so much for your support from all over the world! pic.twitter.com/cHkeTCBgcs\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 22, 2019\n\nHayabusa2 has been bugging Ryugu since it arrived in June, dropping rovers that \u201chopped\u201d across its surface, taking photos and, now, firing metal projectiles into its surface rock.AdvertisementIn this latest stage of the mission, JAXA wanted to collect a sample from the asteroid\u2019s gravelly surface that could be brought back to Earth and analyzed. But observations showed Ryugu was much rockier than expected, and scientists had to adjust their strategy for collecting the necessary samples.Story continues below advertisementHayabusa2 is equipped with a tool that can propel \u201cbullets\u201d into the asteroid\u2019s surface to kick up small fragments, which can be collected by a \u201csampler horn.\u201d In December, scientists did a practice run back on Earth, shooting a simulation of the gravel on Ryugu to see how much material would be kicked up. The test revealed that the bullet would produce enough debris to collect for the mission.The surface of Ryugu was not what we expected. So our sampler team had to conduct an experiment to check we could still gather material from the asteroid surface when we attempt #haya2_TD touchdown this Friday! https://t.co/bCzvW2gwSr pic.twitter.com/XxJXETKB6N\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 18, 2019\n\nIn the days leading up to the mission, the Twitter feed for Hayabusa2 provided updates and invited space fans to watch it unfold via live stream. There were cheers in the control room when data came back to confirm a touchdown.AdvertisementRyugu has \u201ca relatively high abundance of water and organic compounds,\u201d said John Bridges of the University of Leicester, who has been studying materials brought back from the first Hayabusa mission, which collected samples from a different asteroid called Itokawa.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s thought to be [made of] the really sort of primitive material from the start of the solar system,\u201d he said, making it critical to scientists.Scientists will get their hands on that primitive material in 2020, when the spacecraft is expected to return to Earth. Bridges said he was excited to study the findings.\u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019ll throw up unexpected results,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m pretty sure it will tell us more about the early solar system.\u201dRead more:Asteroid explorers take first hops, snap a photograph of their new world NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds. The Hayabusa2 mission is studying an asteroid for clues to the origin of life. Scientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system",
        "author": "Kayla Epstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3151",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/22/scientists-shot-bullet-into-an-asteroid-learn-about-origins-solar-system/",
        "text": "The asteroid Ryugu was floating in space, minding its own business, when it may have felt a slight sting.That\u2019s because a Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa2 briefly touched down on its surface and shot it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHayabusa2 was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2014, with the mission of studying Ryugu, a carbon-rich space rock that scientists believe could hold clues to the \u201corigin of life\u201d and the early days of the solar system. On Friday, JAXA announced it had successfully completed a mission to collect material from the surface of the asteroid, the first of three planned attempts. It did so by firing a metal \u201cbullet\u201d from Hayabusa2 into Ryugu, kicking up a cloud of debris that could be collected by the probe.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have been quite persistent in making meticulous presentations,\u201d project engineer Takanao Saiki told reporters in a news conference after the mission. \u201cThat persistence has resulted in this success today.\u201dEveryone, we did it!!! #haya2_TD Thank you so much for your support from all over the world! pic.twitter.com/cHkeTCBgcs\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 22, 2019\n\nHayabusa2 has been bugging Ryugu since it arrived in June, dropping rovers that \u201chopped\u201d across its surface, taking photos and, now, firing metal projectiles into its surface rock.AdvertisementIn this latest stage of the mission, JAXA wanted to collect a sample from the asteroid\u2019s gravelly surface that could be brought back to Earth and analyzed. But observations showed Ryugu was much rockier than expected, and scientists had to adjust their strategy for collecting the necessary samples.Story continues below advertisementHayabusa2 is equipped with a tool that can propel \u201cbullets\u201d into the asteroid\u2019s surface to kick up small fragments, which can be collected by a \u201csampler horn.\u201d In December, scientists did a practice run back on Earth, shooting a simulation of the gravel on Ryugu to see how much material would be kicked up. The test revealed that the bullet would produce enough debris to collect for the mission.The surface of Ryugu was not what we expected. So our sampler team had to conduct an experiment to check we could still gather material from the asteroid surface when we attempt #haya2_TD touchdown this Friday! https://t.co/bCzvW2gwSr pic.twitter.com/XxJXETKB6N\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) February 18, 2019\n\nIn the days leading up to the mission, the Twitter feed for Hayabusa2 provided updates and invited space fans to watch it unfold via live stream. There were cheers in the control room when data came back to confirm a touchdown.AdvertisementRyugu has \u201ca relatively high abundance of water and organic compounds,\u201d said John Bridges of the University of Leicester, who has been studying materials brought back from the first Hayabusa mission, which collected samples from a different asteroid called Itokawa.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s thought to be [made of] the really sort of primitive material from the start of the solar system,\u201d he said, making it critical to scientists.Scientists will get their hands on that primitive material in 2020, when the spacecraft is expected to return to Earth. Bridges said he was excited to study the findings.\u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019ll throw up unexpected results,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019m pretty sure it will tell us more about the early solar system.\u201dRead more:Asteroid explorers take first hops, snap a photograph of their new world NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds. The Hayabusa2 mission is studying an asteroid for clues to the origin of life. Scientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system",
        "author": "Kayla Epstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Set to Resume Astronaut Trips to the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3152",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/science/soyuz-russia-space-station.html",
        "text": "The announcement signals that the Soyuz spacecraft has been deemed safe for crewed travel following two astronauts\u2019 harrowing emergency return to Earth in October. The announcement signals that the Soyuz spacecraft has been deemed safe for crewed travel following two astronauts\u2019 harrowing emergency return to Earth in October. The Russian space agency announced on Thursday that it was planning to launch three astronauts to the International Space Station on Dec. 3., signaling that it believes the country\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft is safe for travel after an in-flight failure last month.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Set to Resume Astronaut Trips to the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3153",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/science/soyuz-russia-space-station.html",
        "text": "The announcement signals that the Soyuz spacecraft has been deemed safe for crewed travel following two astronauts\u2019 harrowing emergency return to Earth in October. The announcement signals that the Soyuz spacecraft has been deemed safe for crewed travel following two astronauts\u2019 harrowing emergency return to Earth in October. The Russian space agency announced on Thursday that it was planning to launch three astronauts to the International Space Station on Dec. 3., signaling that it believes the country\u2019s Soyuz spacecraft is safe for travel after an in-flight failure last month.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Launches to Space, Aiming to Reignite His Rocket Company\u2019s Ambitions (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3154",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/bezos-blue-origin-space.html",
        "text": "The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making. The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making. VAN HORN, Texas \u2014 Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt \u2014 rising more than 65 miles into the sky above West Texas \u2014 in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos\u2019 rocket company, Blue Origin.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Launches to Space, Aiming to Reignite His Rocket Company\u2019s Ambitions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3155",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/bezos-blue-origin-space.html",
        "text": "The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making. The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making. VAN HORN, Texas \u2014 Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt \u2014 rising more than 65 miles into the sky above West Texas \u2014 in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos\u2019 rocket company, Blue Origin.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Launches to Space, Aiming to Reignite His Rocket Company\u2019s Ambitions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3156",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/bezos-blue-origin-space.html",
        "text": "The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making. The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making. VAN HORN, Texas \u2014 Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt \u2014 rising more than 65 miles into the sky above West Texas \u2014 in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos\u2019 rocket company, Blue Origin.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scrutinizing SpaceX, NASA Overlooked Some Boeing Software Problems (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3157",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. After a couple of rounds of investigation and some soul-searching, NASA and Boeing believe that they have identified what went wrong during a troubled test flight of an uncrewed Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scrutinizing SpaceX, NASA Overlooked Some Boeing Software Problems (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3158",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. After a couple of rounds of investigation and some soul-searching, NASA and Boeing believe that they have identified what went wrong during a troubled test flight of an uncrewed Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scrutinizing SpaceX, NASA Overlooked Some Boeing Software Problems (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3159",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. After a couple of rounds of investigation and some soul-searching, NASA and Boeing believe that they have identified what went wrong during a troubled test flight of an uncrewed Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scrutinizing SpaceX, NASA Overlooked Some Boeing Software Problems (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3160",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. After a couple of rounds of investigation and some soul-searching, NASA and Boeing believe that they have identified what went wrong during a troubled test flight of an uncrewed Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scrutinizing SpaceX, NASA Overlooked Some Boeing Software Problems (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3161",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. The agency identified the causes of mishaps in orbit during an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft in December. After a couple of rounds of investigation and some soul-searching, NASA and Boeing believe that they have identified what went wrong during a troubled test flight of an uncrewed Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3162",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/16/chinas-first-space-station-will-soon-crash-to-earth-no-one-knows-where-itll-hit/",
        "text": "Sometime within the next few months, the heavens will come crashing down.China's first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, which translates to \u201cHeavenly Palace,\u201d launched on Sept. 30, 2011, serving as a prototype for the permanent space station China aims to eventually build. But six years after it first went into orbit,\u00a0the 9\u00bd-ton laboratory is expected to meet a fiery and uncontrolled end, hurtling to Earth and crashing somewhere \u2014 anywhere \u2014\u00a0 on the planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn September 2016, Chinese officials confirmed that they had lost control of the space lab and that it would crash into Earth sometime in the latter half of 2017. In May, China told the United Nations that the lab would reenter Earth between October and April 2018.Story continues below advertisementThis week, the Aerospace Corporation \u2014 a California-based research center \u2014 said\u00a0Tiangong-1 \u201cis predicted to reenter in mid-March ... \u00b1 2 weeks.\u201dAdvertisementMuch of the space lab, which measures 34 feet\u00a0in length and weighs more than 19,000 pounds (9\u00bd tons, or about 8\u00bd metric tons), is expected to burn up during its reentry.But Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University, told the Guardian that pieces weighing up to 220\u00a0pounds could make it to the Earth's surface.Where exactly the craft will fall is anyone's guess.Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverEven slight changes in atmospheric conditions can alter the landing site \u201cfrom one continent to the next,\u201d McDowell told the Guardian.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou really can\u2019t steer these things,\u201d he said. \u201cEven a couple of days before it reenters, we probably won\u2019t know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it\u2019s going to come down. Not knowing when it\u2019s going to come down translates as not knowing where it\u2019s going to come down.\u201dAdvertisementThe Aerospace Corporation noted that \u201cthere is a chance that a small amount of Tiangong-1 debris may survive reentry and impact the ground. Should this happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometers in size and centered along a point on the Earth that the station passes over.\u201dThe nonprofit research center provided a map showing\u00a0\u201cthe relative probabilities of debris landing within a given region.\u201dFrom the center: \u201cYellow indicates locations that have a higher probability while green indicates areas of lower probability. Blue areas have zero probability of debris reentry since Tiangong-1 does not fly over these areas (north of 42.7\u00b0 N latitude or south of 42.7\u00b0 S latitude). These zero probability areas constitute about a third of the total Earth\u2019s surface area.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAerospace noted that \u201cwhen considering the worst-case location (yellow regions of the map) the probability that a specific person (i.e., you) will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.\u201dHow often do sharks bite people? More often than they used to.Importantly, the center added:\u00a0\u201cIn the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris. Only one\u00a0person\u00a0has ever been\u00a0recorded\u00a0as being\u00a0hit\u00a0by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured.\u201dIn other words, no matter where Tiangong-1 lands, it almost certainly won't land on you. Or, as Aerospace noted in an FAQ:It is highly unlikely that debris from this reentry will strike any person or significantly damage any property.\u00a0Space agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)Uncontrolled crashes of larger spacecraft, while rare, have happened before. The Soviet Salyut 7 space station crashed to Earth in 1991, while NASA's Skylab space station fell over Western Australia in 1979.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina launched Tiangong-2, its second experimental station, in September 2016. China is aiming to have a permanently manned space station in orbit by 2020.The 2011 launch of Tiangong-1 was seen by some as a \u201cpotent political symbol\u201d that marked an important step forward in China's expanding space program. It was considered a geopolitically significant event, part of China's broader space program through which it wants to assert its emergence as a new superpower.Tiangong-1 ended its service in March after it had \u201ccomprehensively fulfilled its historical mission,\u201d Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, was quoted as saying at a news conference by Xinhua, China's state news agency. The lab had served as a base for space experiments for 4\u00bd years, two years longer than originally planned. It hosted two three-person crews, including China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe station has been descending gradually since its service ended. More recently, it has started to fall faster, reaching the denser layers of Earth's atmosphere, the Guardian reported.\u2018It has to be something, but it could be infinity\u2019: Trump ponders space in strange ceremonyThe odds that the crashing craft will damage aviation or ground activities is \u201cvery low,\u201d China told the United Nations, adding that it will closely monitor Tiangong-1's descent.For spacecraft that remain\u00a0under control, scientists carefully guide their reentry to a place on Earth called the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, a 2\u00bd-mile-deep spot in the ocean known as the \u201cspacecraft cemetery\u201d about 3,000 miles off the eastern coast of New Zealand and 2,000 miles north of Antarctica.As of June 2016, more than 263 spacecraft had crashed at the cemetery since 1971, according to Popular Science.This post has been updated.Read more:The new space race: The vehicles that will take you to space\u00a0Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year\u00a0Here's what 'Gravity' gets right and wrong about space Pieces weighing up to 220 pounds could soon make it to the Earth's surface. Somewhere. China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit.",
        "author": "Mary Hui"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3163",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/16/chinas-first-space-station-will-soon-crash-to-earth-no-one-knows-where-itll-hit/",
        "text": "Sometime within the next few months, the heavens will come crashing down.China's first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, which translates to \u201cHeavenly Palace,\u201d launched on Sept. 30, 2011, serving as a prototype for the permanent space station China aims to eventually build. But six years after it first went into orbit,\u00a0the 9\u00bd-ton laboratory is expected to meet a fiery and uncontrolled end, hurtling to Earth and crashing somewhere \u2014 anywhere \u2014\u00a0 on the planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn September 2016, Chinese officials confirmed that they had lost control of the space lab and that it would crash into Earth sometime in the latter half of 2017. In May, China told the United Nations that the lab would reenter Earth between October and April 2018.Story continues below advertisementThis week, the Aerospace Corporation \u2014 a California-based research center \u2014 said\u00a0Tiangong-1 \u201cis predicted to reenter in mid-March ... \u00b1 2 weeks.\u201dAdvertisementMuch of the space lab, which measures 34 feet\u00a0in length and weighs more than 19,000 pounds (9\u00bd tons, or about 8\u00bd metric tons), is expected to burn up during its reentry.But Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University, told the Guardian that pieces weighing up to 220\u00a0pounds could make it to the Earth's surface.Where exactly the craft will fall is anyone's guess.Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverEven slight changes in atmospheric conditions can alter the landing site \u201cfrom one continent to the next,\u201d McDowell told the Guardian.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou really can\u2019t steer these things,\u201d he said. \u201cEven a couple of days before it reenters, we probably won\u2019t know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it\u2019s going to come down. Not knowing when it\u2019s going to come down translates as not knowing where it\u2019s going to come down.\u201dAdvertisementThe Aerospace Corporation noted that \u201cthere is a chance that a small amount of Tiangong-1 debris may survive reentry and impact the ground. Should this happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometers in size and centered along a point on the Earth that the station passes over.\u201dThe nonprofit research center provided a map showing\u00a0\u201cthe relative probabilities of debris landing within a given region.\u201dFrom the center: \u201cYellow indicates locations that have a higher probability while green indicates areas of lower probability. Blue areas have zero probability of debris reentry since Tiangong-1 does not fly over these areas (north of 42.7\u00b0 N latitude or south of 42.7\u00b0 S latitude). These zero probability areas constitute about a third of the total Earth\u2019s surface area.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAerospace noted that \u201cwhen considering the worst-case location (yellow regions of the map) the probability that a specific person (i.e., you) will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.\u201dHow often do sharks bite people? More often than they used to.Importantly, the center added:\u00a0\u201cIn the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris. Only one\u00a0person\u00a0has ever been\u00a0recorded\u00a0as being\u00a0hit\u00a0by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured.\u201dIn other words, no matter where Tiangong-1 lands, it almost certainly won't land on you. Or, as Aerospace noted in an FAQ:It is highly unlikely that debris from this reentry will strike any person or significantly damage any property.\u00a0Space agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)Uncontrolled crashes of larger spacecraft, while rare, have happened before. The Soviet Salyut 7 space station crashed to Earth in 1991, while NASA's Skylab space station fell over Western Australia in 1979.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina launched Tiangong-2, its second experimental station, in September 2016. China is aiming to have a permanently manned space station in orbit by 2020.The 2011 launch of Tiangong-1 was seen by some as a \u201cpotent political symbol\u201d that marked an important step forward in China's expanding space program. It was considered a geopolitically significant event, part of China's broader space program through which it wants to assert its emergence as a new superpower.Tiangong-1 ended its service in March after it had \u201ccomprehensively fulfilled its historical mission,\u201d Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, was quoted as saying at a news conference by Xinhua, China's state news agency. The lab had served as a base for space experiments for 4\u00bd years, two years longer than originally planned. It hosted two three-person crews, including China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe station has been descending gradually since its service ended. More recently, it has started to fall faster, reaching the denser layers of Earth's atmosphere, the Guardian reported.\u2018It has to be something, but it could be infinity\u2019: Trump ponders space in strange ceremonyThe odds that the crashing craft will damage aviation or ground activities is \u201cvery low,\u201d China told the United Nations, adding that it will closely monitor Tiangong-1's descent.For spacecraft that remain\u00a0under control, scientists carefully guide their reentry to a place on Earth called the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, a 2\u00bd-mile-deep spot in the ocean known as the \u201cspacecraft cemetery\u201d about 3,000 miles off the eastern coast of New Zealand and 2,000 miles north of Antarctica.As of June 2016, more than 263 spacecraft had crashed at the cemetery since 1971, according to Popular Science.This post has been updated.Read more:The new space race: The vehicles that will take you to space\u00a0Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year\u00a0Here's what 'Gravity' gets right and wrong about space Pieces weighing up to 220 pounds could soon make it to the Earth's surface. Somewhere. China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit.",
        "author": "Mary Hui"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3164",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/16/chinas-first-space-station-will-soon-crash-to-earth-no-one-knows-where-itll-hit/",
        "text": "Sometime within the next few months, the heavens will come crashing down.China's first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, which translates to \u201cHeavenly Palace,\u201d launched on Sept. 30, 2011, serving as a prototype for the permanent space station China aims to eventually build. But six years after it first went into orbit,\u00a0the 9\u00bd-ton laboratory is expected to meet a fiery and uncontrolled end, hurtling to Earth and crashing somewhere \u2014 anywhere \u2014\u00a0 on the planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn September 2016, Chinese officials confirmed that they had lost control of the space lab and that it would crash into Earth sometime in the latter half of 2017. In May, China told the United Nations that the lab would reenter Earth between October and April 2018.Story continues below advertisementThis week, the Aerospace Corporation \u2014 a California-based research center \u2014 said\u00a0Tiangong-1 \u201cis predicted to reenter in mid-March ... \u00b1 2 weeks.\u201dAdvertisementMuch of the space lab, which measures 34 feet\u00a0in length and weighs more than 19,000 pounds (9\u00bd tons, or about 8\u00bd metric tons), is expected to burn up during its reentry.But Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University, told the Guardian that pieces weighing up to 220\u00a0pounds could make it to the Earth's surface.Where exactly the craft will fall is anyone's guess.Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverEven slight changes in atmospheric conditions can alter the landing site \u201cfrom one continent to the next,\u201d McDowell told the Guardian.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou really can\u2019t steer these things,\u201d he said. \u201cEven a couple of days before it reenters, we probably won\u2019t know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it\u2019s going to come down. Not knowing when it\u2019s going to come down translates as not knowing where it\u2019s going to come down.\u201dAdvertisementThe Aerospace Corporation noted that \u201cthere is a chance that a small amount of Tiangong-1 debris may survive reentry and impact the ground. Should this happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometers in size and centered along a point on the Earth that the station passes over.\u201dThe nonprofit research center provided a map showing\u00a0\u201cthe relative probabilities of debris landing within a given region.\u201dFrom the center: \u201cYellow indicates locations that have a higher probability while green indicates areas of lower probability. Blue areas have zero probability of debris reentry since Tiangong-1 does not fly over these areas (north of 42.7\u00b0 N latitude or south of 42.7\u00b0 S latitude). These zero probability areas constitute about a third of the total Earth\u2019s surface area.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAerospace noted that \u201cwhen considering the worst-case location (yellow regions of the map) the probability that a specific person (i.e., you) will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.\u201dHow often do sharks bite people? More often than they used to.Importantly, the center added:\u00a0\u201cIn the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris. Only one\u00a0person\u00a0has ever been\u00a0recorded\u00a0as being\u00a0hit\u00a0by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured.\u201dIn other words, no matter where Tiangong-1 lands, it almost certainly won't land on you. Or, as Aerospace noted in an FAQ:It is highly unlikely that debris from this reentry will strike any person or significantly damage any property.\u00a0Space agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)Uncontrolled crashes of larger spacecraft, while rare, have happened before. The Soviet Salyut 7 space station crashed to Earth in 1991, while NASA's Skylab space station fell over Western Australia in 1979.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina launched Tiangong-2, its second experimental station, in September 2016. China is aiming to have a permanently manned space station in orbit by 2020.The 2011 launch of Tiangong-1 was seen by some as a \u201cpotent political symbol\u201d that marked an important step forward in China's expanding space program. It was considered a geopolitically significant event, part of China's broader space program through which it wants to assert its emergence as a new superpower.Tiangong-1 ended its service in March after it had \u201ccomprehensively fulfilled its historical mission,\u201d Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, was quoted as saying at a news conference by Xinhua, China's state news agency. The lab had served as a base for space experiments for 4\u00bd years, two years longer than originally planned. It hosted two three-person crews, including China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe station has been descending gradually since its service ended. More recently, it has started to fall faster, reaching the denser layers of Earth's atmosphere, the Guardian reported.\u2018It has to be something, but it could be infinity\u2019: Trump ponders space in strange ceremonyThe odds that the crashing craft will damage aviation or ground activities is \u201cvery low,\u201d China told the United Nations, adding that it will closely monitor Tiangong-1's descent.For spacecraft that remain\u00a0under control, scientists carefully guide their reentry to a place on Earth called the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, a 2\u00bd-mile-deep spot in the ocean known as the \u201cspacecraft cemetery\u201d about 3,000 miles off the eastern coast of New Zealand and 2,000 miles north of Antarctica.As of June 2016, more than 263 spacecraft had crashed at the cemetery since 1971, according to Popular Science.This post has been updated.Read more:The new space race: The vehicles that will take you to space\u00a0Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year\u00a0Here's what 'Gravity' gets right and wrong about space Pieces weighing up to 220 pounds could soon make it to the Earth's surface. Somewhere. China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit.",
        "author": "Mary Hui"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA needs to upgrade its \u2018planetary protection\u2019 efforts, experts say (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3165",
        "date": "2018-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/02/nasa-needs-to-upgrade-its-planetary-protection-efforts-experts-say/",
        "text": "Solar system exploration isn't what it used to be. In the old days, various government agencies did all the space exploring. The 12 people who walked on the moon relied on government-run transportation.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow we're in the era of New Space, and entrepreneurs want to race ahead to the moon and Mars on private spacecraft. Elon Musk wants to build cities on Mars. NASA,\u00a0meanwhile, has its own aspirations for human missions to Mars, first to orbit the Red Planet and later to land, beginning in the 2030s. NASA also is slowly putting together a robotic sample-return project, which will begin when the next rover to reach Mars scoops up samples of the Martian surface to be launched back to Earth sometime in the future.Story continues below advertisementAll this raises the sticky issue of \u201cplanetary protection.\u201dTo adhere to the principle of planetary protection, any spacecraft going to Mars, or to any other destination where conditions for life might exist, should not contaminate that environment with our terrestrial microbes. The reverse is also true: Don't unwittingly bring back alien microbes to Earth.AdvertisementA report released Monday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is urging NASA to improve its planetary protection process in light of the new players in space exploration and the prospect of major missions to Mars and the moons of the outer solar system.\u201cThis process needs to begin now,\u201d said Joseph Alexander, a space consultant who chaired the committee that wrote the report. \u201cIf people go to Mars in 2030s, it's not too early now to be prepared.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe advocates for human missions to Mars have sometimes viewed planetary protection as a hindrance. But it's also the law: The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, an international agreement, states that signatories will do their exploration of other worlds in a manner \u201cto avoid their harmful contamination, and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.\u201dAdvertisementAlexander said no government agency in the United States has the authority to regulate the actions of private companies putting hardware on other worlds. The Federal Aviation Administration regulates launches and landings but not the payloads.Entrepreneurs will embrace a clear regulatory regime, said Norine Noonan, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, who was on the National Academies committee.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat does the regulated community want? They want certainty. They want predictability. They want to be told this is what you have to do,\u201d she said.In terms of planetary protection, she said, \u201cNASA really does not have a plan, right now, for human missions to Mars. .\u2009.\u2009. Once you start sending humans to other worlds, the game changes. Because you have to bring people back. Humans are spewing fountains of viruses and bacteria. We have more bacteria on the surface of our body than cells in our body.\u201dAdvertisementNo one knows if there is life on Mars. It's not obviously an abode of life, but life is amazingly adaptable, and there could be Martian organisms lurking in aquifers.Story continues below advertisementOne good reason to enforce planetary protection rules is for scientific credibility. NASA does not want the search for life on Mars to be fouled up by stowaway microbes from Earth.\u201cEarth organisms could completely sully what\u2019s there and compromise the science,\u201d said Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academies committee.That said, he thinks the planetary protection policies have been too restrictive. For example, fear of contaminating a location of biological interest on Mars or a moon in the outer planets could inhibit where a spacecraft could land or where a rover could explore.Advertisement\u201cIt inhibits the ability to explore. It naively thinks that if you have some bacteria on a spacecraft, they\u2019re just going to grow like crazy and mess up the next planet over,\u201d he said. \u201cI find it kind of laughable. It's kind of a '50s ideology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe also thinks it's extraordinarily unlikely that a Martian organism brought to Earth would wreak havoc.\u201cThe chances of some organism that\u2019s evolved to love Mars to suddenly say, 'Gosh, I\u2019m going to kill off kangaroos' \u2014 it ain't gonna happen,\u201d he said. \u201cThe pathogenesis is a highly evolved trait. There\u2019s been a billion years of evolution that makes a pathogen a pathogen.\u201dRead more:NASA's 1976 Viking mission did all that was hoped for \u2014 except find MartiansDon't worry, Matt Damon won't get stuck on Mars. NASA can't get him there.Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u201cworst plan yet\u201dIngredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn's moon EnceladusTrump\u00a0says he's directing Pentagon to create a new\u00a0'Space Force' Alien microbes could gum up the plans for Mars exploration. NASA needs to upgrade its \u2018planetary protection\u2019 efforts, experts say",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA needs to upgrade its \u2018planetary protection\u2019 efforts, experts say (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3166",
        "date": "2018-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/02/nasa-needs-to-upgrade-its-planetary-protection-efforts-experts-say/",
        "text": "Solar system exploration isn't what it used to be. In the old days, various government agencies did all the space exploring. The 12 people who walked on the moon relied on government-run transportation.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow we're in the era of New Space, and entrepreneurs want to race ahead to the moon and Mars on private spacecraft. Elon Musk wants to build cities on Mars. NASA,\u00a0meanwhile, has its own aspirations for human missions to Mars, first to orbit the Red Planet and later to land, beginning in the 2030s. NASA also is slowly putting together a robotic sample-return project, which will begin when the next rover to reach Mars scoops up samples of the Martian surface to be launched back to Earth sometime in the future.Story continues below advertisementAll this raises the sticky issue of \u201cplanetary protection.\u201dTo adhere to the principle of planetary protection, any spacecraft going to Mars, or to any other destination where conditions for life might exist, should not contaminate that environment with our terrestrial microbes. The reverse is also true: Don't unwittingly bring back alien microbes to Earth.AdvertisementA report released Monday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is urging NASA to improve its planetary protection process in light of the new players in space exploration and the prospect of major missions to Mars and the moons of the outer solar system.\u201cThis process needs to begin now,\u201d said Joseph Alexander, a space consultant who chaired the committee that wrote the report. \u201cIf people go to Mars in 2030s, it's not too early now to be prepared.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe advocates for human missions to Mars have sometimes viewed planetary protection as a hindrance. But it's also the law: The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, an international agreement, states that signatories will do their exploration of other worlds in a manner \u201cto avoid their harmful contamination, and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.\u201dAdvertisementAlexander said no government agency in the United States has the authority to regulate the actions of private companies putting hardware on other worlds. The Federal Aviation Administration regulates launches and landings but not the payloads.Entrepreneurs will embrace a clear regulatory regime, said Norine Noonan, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, who was on the National Academies committee.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat does the regulated community want? They want certainty. They want predictability. They want to be told this is what you have to do,\u201d she said.In terms of planetary protection, she said, \u201cNASA really does not have a plan, right now, for human missions to Mars. .\u2009.\u2009. Once you start sending humans to other worlds, the game changes. Because you have to bring people back. Humans are spewing fountains of viruses and bacteria. We have more bacteria on the surface of our body than cells in our body.\u201dAdvertisementNo one knows if there is life on Mars. It's not obviously an abode of life, but life is amazingly adaptable, and there could be Martian organisms lurking in aquifers.Story continues below advertisementOne good reason to enforce planetary protection rules is for scientific credibility. NASA does not want the search for life on Mars to be fouled up by stowaway microbes from Earth.\u201cEarth organisms could completely sully what\u2019s there and compromise the science,\u201d said Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academies committee.That said, he thinks the planetary protection policies have been too restrictive. For example, fear of contaminating a location of biological interest on Mars or a moon in the outer planets could inhibit where a spacecraft could land or where a rover could explore.Advertisement\u201cIt inhibits the ability to explore. It naively thinks that if you have some bacteria on a spacecraft, they\u2019re just going to grow like crazy and mess up the next planet over,\u201d he said. \u201cI find it kind of laughable. It's kind of a '50s ideology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe also thinks it's extraordinarily unlikely that a Martian organism brought to Earth would wreak havoc.\u201cThe chances of some organism that\u2019s evolved to love Mars to suddenly say, 'Gosh, I\u2019m going to kill off kangaroos' \u2014 it ain't gonna happen,\u201d he said. \u201cThe pathogenesis is a highly evolved trait. There\u2019s been a billion years of evolution that makes a pathogen a pathogen.\u201dRead more:NASA's 1976 Viking mission did all that was hoped for \u2014 except find MartiansDon't worry, Matt Damon won't get stuck on Mars. NASA can't get him there.Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u201cworst plan yet\u201dIngredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn's moon EnceladusTrump\u00a0says he's directing Pentagon to create a new\u00a0'Space Force' Alien microbes could gum up the plans for Mars exploration. NASA needs to upgrade its \u2018planetary protection\u2019 efforts, experts say",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Finds India\u2019s Vikram Moon Lander Crash Site, With Amateur\u2019s Help (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3167",
        "date": "2019-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/science/india-moon-mission-vikram-lander-found.html",
        "text": "Since India lost contact with the spacecraft in September, the precise location of its crash has been a mystery. Since India lost contact with the spacecraft in September, the precise location of its crash has been a mystery. NASA has found pieces of Vikram, a small spacecraft that India attempted to land on the moon in September. They did it with the help of an engineer from India who scoured the lunar surface in his spare time.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Finds India\u2019s Vikram Moon Lander Crash Site, With Amateur\u2019s Help (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3168",
        "date": "2019-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/science/india-moon-mission-vikram-lander-found.html",
        "text": "Since India lost contact with the spacecraft in September, the precise location of its crash has been a mystery. Since India lost contact with the spacecraft in September, the precise location of its crash has been a mystery. NASA has found pieces of Vikram, a small spacecraft that India attempted to land on the moon in September. They did it with the help of an engineer from India who scoured the lunar surface in his spare time.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Finds India\u2019s Vikram Moon Lander Crash Site, With Amateur\u2019s Help (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3169",
        "date": "2019-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/science/india-moon-mission-vikram-lander-found.html",
        "text": "Since India lost contact with the spacecraft in September, the precise location of its crash has been a mystery. Since India lost contact with the spacecraft in September, the precise location of its crash has been a mystery. NASA has found pieces of Vikram, a small spacecraft that India attempted to land on the moon in September. They did it with the help of an engineer from India who scoured the lunar surface in his spare time.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever before (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3170",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/22/this-nasa-spacecraft-will-get-closer-to-the-sun-than-anything-ever-before/",
        "text": "Shortly\u00a0after NASA was established in 1958, the nation's top scientists compiled a\u00a0list\u00a0of missions they thought the brand-new space agency should pursue. The proposals\u00a0were heady, considering at that point only three satellites had ever been launched. Researchers suggested an Earth-orbiting telescope that could detect the universe's most distant stars, probes that would venture to the solar system's other planets, an initiative to land humans on the surface of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith time, each of those dreams became a reality \u2014 the Hubble Space Telescope, the twin Voyager\u00a0spacecraft, the Apollo program. All except one:\u00a0an effort to get a close look at the sun, the source of Earth's light and heat, as well as solar storms that could disrupt our satellites and fry our electric grid.It took decades for the technology to protect scientific equipment from the sun's ferocious rays to be invented.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn a recent morning, a spacecraft not unlike the one\u00a0envisioned in 1958 sat in a sterile room\u00a0at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Its side panels were open to expose its inner workings \u2014 electronics boxes, a propulsion tank, instruments for measuring the sun's magnetic field and capturing images of its tumultuous atmosphere. The spacecraft's heat shield was encased in a separate container, emblazoned with large red lettering that admonished\u00a0\u201cHANDLE ONLY UNDER SUPERVISION\u201d and \u201cDO NOT EXPOSE TO DIRECT SUNLIGHT.\u201dPointing out the warnings, engineer Curtis Wilkerson chuckled. This summer, the Parker Solar Probe will launch on a journey that will send it skimming through the sun's atmosphere at a pace of 450,000 mph \u2014 fast enough to get from Washington to New York in about a second. It will fly\u00a0within 4 million miles of the sun's surface \u2014 seven times closer than any spacecraft has gotten before. That heat shield will not only be exposed to sunlight, it must withstand blasts of 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014 while simultaneously maintaining the instruments on the other side at roughly room temperature.After 60 years of advances in science and technology, this craft will probe our star's mysteries and monitor behavior that could affect everyone on Earth. \u201cWe will finally touch the sun,\u201d Nicola Fox, the mission's project scientist, likes to say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut first,\u201d\u00a0Wilkerson said, \u201cwe have to get it to the launchpad,\u201dWilkerson is a\u00a0systems assurance manager with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the Parker Solar Probe. It's his job to ensure the scientists and engineers who work on the spacecraft follow the protocols in place to protect it. Metal objects must be demagnetized so they don't affect the instruments. Technicians must wear hairnets, gloves and ground bracelets that\u00a0dispel static electricity so they won't give the spacecraft a shock. Even ordinary notebooks are banned \u2014 instead, visitors are handed sheets of special paper designed not to shed microscopic debris. Harsh though the environment around the sun may be, the biggest threat the probe will encounter in its lifetime is a careless human.(Here's where I make a confession: I sneezed inside the clean room. If something goes wrong, my mucus and I will take the blame.)With Wilkerson and his colleagues on hand to keep unreliable humans (especially rogue reporters) in check, APL's integration and test\u00a0lead\u00a0Annette Dolbow oversees the process of actually putting the Parker Solar Probe together. In the past few months, under her watchful eye, a collection of metal parts constructed at labs around the country coalesced into a Prius-sized, vase-shaped spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe process has made Dolbow intimately acquainted with the probe's quirks. She compared it to a toddler: endearing, but\u00a0constantly giving her cause for anxiety. On the one hand, there are features like the Solar Probe Cup, which will poke out from behind the heat shield to scoop up samples from the flood of high energy particles escaping the sun. \u201cIt's the bravest little instrument we have,\u201d Dolbow said.One the other hand, there's the probe's cooling system, which works like a radiator containing\u00a0five liters of pressurized water and is unlike anything\u00a0ever used on a spacecraft before. \u201cWater and electronics \u2014 they're not good friends,\u201d Dolbow said.Dolbow's team\u00a0has also subjected the spacecraft to a battery of tests\u00a0to ensure it can handle\u00a0the hazards of flight \u2014 baking it, shaking it, blasting it with lasers.Last week, they\u00a0began one of the probe's most significant trials yet: thermal vacuum testing. Over the course of seven weeks inside a dark, 40-foot-tall chamber, the spacecraft will be chilled to\u00a0-292 degrees to simulate the\u00a0bitter cold of space, then blasted with heat proportional to what it might experience during its closest approaches to the sun.\u00a0Engineers will test the spacecraft's hardware and perform a flight simulation under a range of harrowing conditions.With that over and done with, the spacecraft just has to be packed up, shipped to Florida, placed atop a rocket and blasted off the Earth. Passing by Venus, it'll get a gravitational boost needed to swing into a series of 24 egg-shaped orbits around the sun. With each close approach, the probe will fly through the sun's atmosphere, called the corona.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn those moments, the\u00a0carbon composite heat shield about the thickness of an encyclopedia\u00a0will be all that stands between the spacecraft and temperatures hot enough to melt iron.\u201cThat technology just didn't exist 30 years ago,\u201d said Eric Christian, a\u00a0physicist at Goddard and the deputy principal investigator for one of the Parker Solar Probe's main instruments.Why exert all this effort just to fly close to the sun \u2014 an endeavor multiple Greek myths warned us against? As Christian explained it, the story begins with a young solar scientist named Eugene Parker, who was the first person to realize the\u00a0solar wind of charged particles streaming from the corona moves faster than the speed of sound. That finding, published in the 1950s, was initially\u00a0dismissed\u00a0by the astrophysical community \u2014 but then direct observations confirmed it.The acceleration of the solar wind remains one of the \u201cfundamental science questions about the sun,\u201d Christian said. That lingering mystery is why NASA is so eager to explore our star, and why the space agency took the unprecedented step of naming the solar probe after Parker, who is now 90. No other spacecraft has ever been named for a living person.The probe will also investigate two related mysteries: Why is the sun's atmosphere hotter than its surface? And how do high-energy particles get sped out of the corona and into space?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese are questions we were trying to answer from 93 million miles away,\u201d Christian said. \u201cBut the fact is, you've got to go where the action is in order to really understand what's happening.\u201dThe answers are keenly relevant to life on Earth. Disruptions in the sun's atmosphere can generate\u00a0huge explosions of ionized gas, called coronal mass ejections, and bursts of radiation known as solar flares. When CMEs interact with our planet's magnetosphere, they induce electric currents that may travel through the ground and rupture power grids. Meanwhile, solar flares can interfere with radio communication and\u00a0cause radiation poisoning in any space-faring astronauts who are unprotected by Earth's magnetic field. Predicting these events will require the scientists to figure out the\u00a0complex\u00a0physics of the fusion reactor in our sky.\u201cPeople forget,\u201d\u00a0Christian said, \u201cbut the sun is a variable star.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom Earth, it may seem like a warm, monochrome orb.\u00a0But the picture Christian paints is more like something\u00a0Van Gogh would produce:\u00a0Jets of powerful radiation shoot out of the atmosphere. Long lashes\u00a0of plasma called magnetic loops arc across its surface. Bursting bubbles of super hot gas spew their contents into the sky.\u201cIt's this really dynamic place,\u201d Christian said. \u201cNow we're finally getting to go there.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the probe's solar panels will be tested in the thermal vacuum chamber. Additionally, the solar probe's heat shield can withstand temperatures up to 2,600 F degrees, not 3,000.Read more:Scientists are gearing up to take the longest-ever video of a solar eclipseListen to what space sounds like: an eerie chorus of 'alien birds'New Horizons sniffs out the space weather around Pluto The Parker Solar Probe will launch this year en route to the sun's atmosphere \u2014 a mission 60 years in the making.  This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever before",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever before (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3171",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/22/this-nasa-spacecraft-will-get-closer-to-the-sun-than-anything-ever-before/",
        "text": "Shortly\u00a0after NASA was established in 1958, the nation's top scientists compiled a\u00a0list\u00a0of missions they thought the brand-new space agency should pursue. The proposals\u00a0were heady, considering at that point only three satellites had ever been launched. Researchers suggested an Earth-orbiting telescope that could detect the universe's most distant stars, probes that would venture to the solar system's other planets, an initiative to land humans on the surface of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith time, each of those dreams became a reality \u2014 the Hubble Space Telescope, the twin Voyager\u00a0spacecraft, the Apollo program. All except one:\u00a0an effort to get a close look at the sun, the source of Earth's light and heat, as well as solar storms that could disrupt our satellites and fry our electric grid.It took decades for the technology to protect scientific equipment from the sun's ferocious rays to be invented.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn a recent morning, a spacecraft not unlike the one\u00a0envisioned in 1958 sat in a sterile room\u00a0at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Its side panels were open to expose its inner workings \u2014 electronics boxes, a propulsion tank, instruments for measuring the sun's magnetic field and capturing images of its tumultuous atmosphere. The spacecraft's heat shield was encased in a separate container, emblazoned with large red lettering that admonished\u00a0\u201cHANDLE ONLY UNDER SUPERVISION\u201d and \u201cDO NOT EXPOSE TO DIRECT SUNLIGHT.\u201dPointing out the warnings, engineer Curtis Wilkerson chuckled. This summer, the Parker Solar Probe will launch on a journey that will send it skimming through the sun's atmosphere at a pace of 450,000 mph \u2014 fast enough to get from Washington to New York in about a second. It will fly\u00a0within 4 million miles of the sun's surface \u2014 seven times closer than any spacecraft has gotten before. That heat shield will not only be exposed to sunlight, it must withstand blasts of 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014 while simultaneously maintaining the instruments on the other side at roughly room temperature.After 60 years of advances in science and technology, this craft will probe our star's mysteries and monitor behavior that could affect everyone on Earth. \u201cWe will finally touch the sun,\u201d Nicola Fox, the mission's project scientist, likes to say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut first,\u201d\u00a0Wilkerson said, \u201cwe have to get it to the launchpad,\u201dWilkerson is a\u00a0systems assurance manager with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the Parker Solar Probe. It's his job to ensure the scientists and engineers who work on the spacecraft follow the protocols in place to protect it. Metal objects must be demagnetized so they don't affect the instruments. Technicians must wear hairnets, gloves and ground bracelets that\u00a0dispel static electricity so they won't give the spacecraft a shock. Even ordinary notebooks are banned \u2014 instead, visitors are handed sheets of special paper designed not to shed microscopic debris. Harsh though the environment around the sun may be, the biggest threat the probe will encounter in its lifetime is a careless human.(Here's where I make a confession: I sneezed inside the clean room. If something goes wrong, my mucus and I will take the blame.)With Wilkerson and his colleagues on hand to keep unreliable humans (especially rogue reporters) in check, APL's integration and test\u00a0lead\u00a0Annette Dolbow oversees the process of actually putting the Parker Solar Probe together. In the past few months, under her watchful eye, a collection of metal parts constructed at labs around the country coalesced into a Prius-sized, vase-shaped spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe process has made Dolbow intimately acquainted with the probe's quirks. She compared it to a toddler: endearing, but\u00a0constantly giving her cause for anxiety. On the one hand, there are features like the Solar Probe Cup, which will poke out from behind the heat shield to scoop up samples from the flood of high energy particles escaping the sun. \u201cIt's the bravest little instrument we have,\u201d Dolbow said.One the other hand, there's the probe's cooling system, which works like a radiator containing\u00a0five liters of pressurized water and is unlike anything\u00a0ever used on a spacecraft before. \u201cWater and electronics \u2014 they're not good friends,\u201d Dolbow said.Dolbow's team\u00a0has also subjected the spacecraft to a battery of tests\u00a0to ensure it can handle\u00a0the hazards of flight \u2014 baking it, shaking it, blasting it with lasers.Last week, they\u00a0began one of the probe's most significant trials yet: thermal vacuum testing. Over the course of seven weeks inside a dark, 40-foot-tall chamber, the spacecraft will be chilled to\u00a0-292 degrees to simulate the\u00a0bitter cold of space, then blasted with heat proportional to what it might experience during its closest approaches to the sun.\u00a0Engineers will test the spacecraft's hardware and perform a flight simulation under a range of harrowing conditions.With that over and done with, the spacecraft just has to be packed up, shipped to Florida, placed atop a rocket and blasted off the Earth. Passing by Venus, it'll get a gravitational boost needed to swing into a series of 24 egg-shaped orbits around the sun. With each close approach, the probe will fly through the sun's atmosphere, called the corona.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn those moments, the\u00a0carbon composite heat shield about the thickness of an encyclopedia\u00a0will be all that stands between the spacecraft and temperatures hot enough to melt iron.\u201cThat technology just didn't exist 30 years ago,\u201d said Eric Christian, a\u00a0physicist at Goddard and the deputy principal investigator for one of the Parker Solar Probe's main instruments.Why exert all this effort just to fly close to the sun \u2014 an endeavor multiple Greek myths warned us against? As Christian explained it, the story begins with a young solar scientist named Eugene Parker, who was the first person to realize the\u00a0solar wind of charged particles streaming from the corona moves faster than the speed of sound. That finding, published in the 1950s, was initially\u00a0dismissed\u00a0by the astrophysical community \u2014 but then direct observations confirmed it.The acceleration of the solar wind remains one of the \u201cfundamental science questions about the sun,\u201d Christian said. That lingering mystery is why NASA is so eager to explore our star, and why the space agency took the unprecedented step of naming the solar probe after Parker, who is now 90. No other spacecraft has ever been named for a living person.The probe will also investigate two related mysteries: Why is the sun's atmosphere hotter than its surface? And how do high-energy particles get sped out of the corona and into space?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese are questions we were trying to answer from 93 million miles away,\u201d Christian said. \u201cBut the fact is, you've got to go where the action is in order to really understand what's happening.\u201dThe answers are keenly relevant to life on Earth. Disruptions in the sun's atmosphere can generate\u00a0huge explosions of ionized gas, called coronal mass ejections, and bursts of radiation known as solar flares. When CMEs interact with our planet's magnetosphere, they induce electric currents that may travel through the ground and rupture power grids. Meanwhile, solar flares can interfere with radio communication and\u00a0cause radiation poisoning in any space-faring astronauts who are unprotected by Earth's magnetic field. Predicting these events will require the scientists to figure out the\u00a0complex\u00a0physics of the fusion reactor in our sky.\u201cPeople forget,\u201d\u00a0Christian said, \u201cbut the sun is a variable star.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom Earth, it may seem like a warm, monochrome orb.\u00a0But the picture Christian paints is more like something\u00a0Van Gogh would produce:\u00a0Jets of powerful radiation shoot out of the atmosphere. Long lashes\u00a0of plasma called magnetic loops arc across its surface. Bursting bubbles of super hot gas spew their contents into the sky.\u201cIt's this really dynamic place,\u201d Christian said. \u201cNow we're finally getting to go there.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the probe's solar panels will be tested in the thermal vacuum chamber. Additionally, the solar probe's heat shield can withstand temperatures up to 2,600 F degrees, not 3,000.Read more:Scientists are gearing up to take the longest-ever video of a solar eclipseListen to what space sounds like: an eerie chorus of 'alien birds'New Horizons sniffs out the space weather around Pluto The Parker Solar Probe will launch this year en route to the sun's atmosphere \u2014 a mission 60 years in the making.  This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever before",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We have a fire in the cockpit!\u2019 The Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3172",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/26/50-years-ago-three-astronauts-died-in-the-apollo-1-fire/",
        "text": "Sheryl Chaffee remembers the January evening when astronaut Mike Collins came to the door and asked to speak with her mother.The two talked in a bedroom of the Chaffee home. Then Collins emerged and Chaffee and her brother were sent in to speak with their mother.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cSo we went back there, and she told us\u00a0that our dad was never coming home again,\u201d said Chaffee, who was 8 years old. \u201cOf course, I really didn't understand that. I think I even asked her, 'what, are you getting divorced?'\u201d Sheryl Chaffee's mother, Martha, explained that there had been a fire and her father, Roger, was dead.\u201cAnd then she gave me a necklace with two hearts, that he had planned on taking up to space with him,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementIt has been 50 years since the Apollo 1 fire killed Roger Chaffee at Cape Kennedy\u2019s Launch Complex 34 in Florida. Chaffee, along with astronauts Virgil \u201cGus\u201d Grissom and Ed White II, died on Jan. 27, 1967, when a blaze erupted in their command module during preflight testing.Three astronauts lost their lives in the Apollo 1 accident when a flash fire occurred in the command module during a launch pad test. (MSNBC)The tragedy occurred as the trio was preparing for the first manned Apollo flight. The disaster left families in mourning and a nation stunned. It temporarily stalled NASA's frenetic push to the moon. There was an intense investigation. Congressional hearings, too.Advertisement\u201cTo me, it's an emotional thing,\u201d said Bill Barry, NASA's chief historian, who was 9 years old when the fire occurred. \u201cBecause space is risky and dangerous and it's hard to do and can be expensive. But ultimately, you want to do it in a way that you don't hurt anybody, and everybody comes home alive. This is a reminder that you have to be on your toes, and make sure that happens.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the aftermath of Apollo 1, NASA did make space flight safer, and in 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon with Apollo 11.\u201cWe found the problems,\u201d said Bob Sieck, a former NASA launch director. \u201cWe fixed them. And as a result, the first time we attempted to put astronauts on the moon, and get them back safely, we did. And so, from my perspective, I think that the Apollo 1 crew would be good with that.\u201dThis is what the children of Apollo 1 remember: Gus Grissom was gone frequently, said his son Mark, but when he did get to come home, they'd catch a game or go hunting. He loved his Corvette. He had a dry sense of humor. He was always thinking about how to make something better. Grissom had a poster printed up\u00a0that read: \u201cDo Good Work.\u201d Grissom, a Mercury Seven astronaut and command pilot of Gemini 3, had concerns about the Apollo spacecraft before his death, Mark Grissom said, and he voiced them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI was kind of expecting him not to go,\u201d Mark said. \u201cBut he was doing everything he could to get the thing ready to go into space. He wasn't having much luck.\u201dFive decades after his father's death, Grissom's son Scott said the\u00a0fire should be reinvestigated, and called the Apollo families \u201cmistreated.\u201d\u201cThey kind of ignored the Apollo 1 fire for 50 years. \u2026\u00a0I mean, we've had tributes to Columbia and Challenger for years, and those are much more recent events,\u201d he said.Ed White III calls his dad a \u201crenaissance man.\u201d Astronaut White went to West Point, played soccer and ran track, and almost qualified for the Olympic team. He was the first American to conduct a spacewalk. He liked woodworking. He built his daughter a balance beam in their backyard.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe wasn't afraid. Nothing scared dad in any way,\u201d Ed White III said. \u201cFearless. Fearless, I would say.\u201dAdvertisementRoger Chaffee took his job seriously, his daughter Sheryl said, but liked to have a good time, too. They'd play with him in the pool, she said, describing her father as fun, and so smart.\u00a0Apollo 1 would have been his first spaceflight.\u201cThe day that it happened is pretty vivid,\u201d Sheryl Chaffee said. \u201cTo tell you the truth, we relive it every year.\u201dThe day it happened, the crew was going through what's called a \u201cplugs out\u201d test, a sort of dress rehearsal for flight. The test simulates flight conditions, so the craft was running on its own power.The crew entered the command module at around 1 p.m. There was a bad smell, which put the rehearsal countdown on hold but was later found to be unrelated to the fire. There were also communication problems. \u201cHow are we going to get to the moon if we can't talk between two or three buildings?\u201d one of the three can be heard saying in a recording from the capsule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt 6:31 p.m., cries began: \u201cWe have a fire in the cockpit!\u201d That's also captured on the recording, along with a scream. Those watching on a video feed saw White appear to reach for the handle of the hatch. The command module \u201cruptured,\u201d according to a NASA summary, and flames and gas spilled out.\u201cThe burst of fire, together with the sounds of rupture, caused several pad personnel to believe that the command module had exploded or was about to explode,\u201d it states.ABC's Jules Bergman reports about the deadly fire that claimed the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger Chaffee on January 27, 1967. (Universal)It took personnel about five minutes to open all the hatches into the capsule. And once they could get inside, they could barely see anything at all.A Washington Post story from Jan. 30, 1967, carried the observations from a\u00a0writer who was allowed to look at the craft. It was headlined: \u201cIt Looks Like the Inside of a Furnace,\u201d and described the interior of the spacecraft as a \u201cdarkened, dingy compartment \u2026\u00a0Its walls are covered with a slate-gray deposit of smoke and soot; its floor and couch frame are covered with ashes and debris.\u201dThe crew died by suffocation from the fire's toxic gases, according to\u00a0a review board report. They also suffered thermal burns. The Associated Press, describing the deaths in a recent report, wrote: \u201cIt was over for them in seconds.\u201dMark Grissom was out playing that night when another child came to fetch him. He was told to head home, that something had happened at the Cape. Scott Grissom was home when the doorbell rang. He went to the door, and found the wife of another astronaut.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cShe had a ghastly look on her face,\u201d Scott Grissom said. \u201cAnd I knew it was something bad.\u201dEd White III rode his bike home on that evening after playing football. Neil Armstrong's wife, who lived next door to the White family, was standing in the driveway. Ed and his sister were sent to another neighbor's home.\u201cWe didn't go into our house because they were talking to my mom about what had happened, and they weren't ready to tell us, but we knew something was wrong,\u201d he said.Those involved in NASA and the Apollo program remember that night, too.Walter Cunningham, along with Wally Schirra and Donn Eisele, was part of the backup crew for Apollo 1. They had gone through a similar test the night before.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen we got back, we came in and parked the airplanes, there was a guy out there, the assistant head of the flying department there, that took us upstairs to tell us they'd had the fire while we were on the way home,\u201d Cunningham said. \u201cAnd that they were all killed. And that, in fact, was a shock to us.\u201dA review board ultimately identified a number of conditions that led the fire. The sealed cabin had been pressurized with pure oxygen, which fuels fire. There were combustible materials all around the capsule, as well as \u201cvulnerable\u201d wiring and plumbing, according to the NASA summary.In the wake of the fire and investigation, the capsule's hatch was replaced with one that would open outward quickly. The cabin atmosphere during prelaunch testing was no longer 100 percent oxygen, but rather a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe crew's spacesuits were changed from nylon to beta cloth, which is nonflammable. A lot of the\u00a0flammable Velcro that had been stuck around the cabin was taken out. The capsule underwent a \u201chuge rebuild,\u201d said Barry, the NASA historian.The accident also led to a greater, although still imperfect, emphasis on safety.Before, Barry said, \u201cNASA sort of built the safety structure into programs. After the Apollo 1 fire, NASA set up a completely separate safety organization that was parallel alongside, so they weren't reporting to the same bosses.\u201dThe fire made NASA personnel more aware and focused on \u201cquality control,\u201d said Charlie Duke, another astronaut. Cunningham, who was on the backup crew, said it didn't really change him as an astronaut, but \u201cmay have given me a little bit more mental commitment to not go along with some of the things on the design, and what-have-you.\u201dAdvertisementAfter the fire, Sieck said, personnel did speak up more.\u201cThere was a lot more questioning of, 'well, please explain this to me,'\" Sieck said. \"'I see what's here, I hear what you're saying, but tell me more. I don't totally understand it.'\u201dIt was a lesson NASA would have to learn again after the space shuttle Challenger disaster. And again after the space shuttle Columbia disaster.The graves of Chaffee and Grissom can be found at Arlington National Cemetery. Ed White is buried at West Point. This week, their families gathered in Florida for the Astronauts Memorial Foundation's annual day of remembrance, which honored Apollo 1, as well as Challenger and Columbia crews.The Associated Press reported earlier this week that though the capsule is still kept in storage, the Apollo 1 hatch will be on display at Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementThese anniversaries are difficult for Sheryl Chaffee. As a child, she would dream of her father coming home after his death. As an adult, Chaffee eventually went to work for NASA herself, starting in a temp position and recently retiring after more than 30 years.She said she remembers walking through the buildings of the Space Center, thinking, \u201cI know I'm going to see him out here. He's just hiding from us.\u201dRead More:Annie Glenn: \u2018When I called John, he cried. People just couldn\u2019t believe that I could really talk.\u2019John Glenn and the courage of the Mercury SevenAstronaut Gene Cernan was the last man on the moon \u2014 and \u2018he wasn\u2019t happy about that\u2019 NASA made spaceflight safer after the accident, a lesson it would have to learn again and again. \u2018We have a fire in the cockpit!\u2019 The Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later.",
        "author": "Sarah Larimer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Guess how much someone paid for this dish full of mold (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3173",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/02/guess-how-much-someone-paid-for-this-dish-full-of-mold/",
        "text": "Serious question: How much would you pay for this dish\u00a0full of mold? I mean, pay to own it, not to get it out of your field of vision.A dish of mold just sold for thousands of dollars to an anonymous buyer in London. An auctioneer explains why the mold is so valuable. (The Washington Post)How about $14,600? That\u2019s how much an\u00a0anonymous buyer in London shelled out at an auction for this miserable patch of fuzz, according to the\u00a0Associated Press. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that sounds like a bad deal, consider this: the mold is actually a penicillin culture that belonged to Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered\u00a0the world's first antibiotic in 1928.If that still sounds like a bad deal, well,\u00a0maybe you are just not as nerdy as some people.Fleming himself would have considered the culture well worth the money. The Scottish biologist, who famously figured out penicillin\u2019s antimicrobial properties when\u00a0it fell into one of his petri dishes, was fond of distributing samples of his famous mold as mementos. He gave one to actress Ruth Draper after being captivated by one her performances. A neighbor who scared off burglars from Fleming\u2019s home got another. Kevin Brown, archivist at the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, told the AP that Fleming gave a sample to Queen Elizabeth\u2019s husband Prince Philip every time they met (it\u2019s not clear whether the prince kept the gifts).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd this December, another buyer paid $46,250 for a different Fleming sample, according to Smithsonian Magazine \u2014 making this week\u2019s purchase look like a steal.[The superbug that doctors have been dreading just reached the United States]As molds go, this one is pretty impressive. It won Fleming the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 (he shared the prize with pathologist Howard Florey and biochemist\u00a0Ernst Chain), and\u00a0is credited with saving millions of lives.In the U.S. alone,\u00a0more than 250 million\u00a0courses of antibiotics are prescribed per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And while dangerous \u2014 and potentially deadly \u2014 antibiotic resistance is on the rise, many of us owe our lives to Fleming's serendipitous discovery 90 years ago.Story continues below advertisementThat measly little mold is starting to sound pretty cool now, isn\u2019t it?Read more:This triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex.NASA officials weigh risks of Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon missionScientists discover 7 \u2018Earthlike\u2019 planets orbiting a nearby starDear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it\u2019s the tip of a \u2018hidden continent.\u2019 Something to consider: it contains penicillin that belonged to Alexander Fleming. Guess how much someone paid for this dish full of mold",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe Is Unlocking the Sun\u2019s Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3174",
        "date": "2019-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/science/nasa-parker-solar-probe-pictures.html",
        "text": "Scientists working with the solar diving mission have released the spacecraft\u2019s first batch of findings. Scientists working with the solar diving mission have released the spacecraft\u2019s first batch of findings. Since it launched last year, NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe has made three dives toward the sun as it reached the fastest speed ever clocked by a human-built vehicle. Scientists released the mission\u2019s first batch of findings on Wednesday, revealing that the dynamics of our star are even weirder than once imagined.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe Is Unlocking the Sun\u2019s Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3175",
        "date": "2019-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/science/nasa-parker-solar-probe-pictures.html",
        "text": "Scientists working with the solar diving mission have released the spacecraft\u2019s first batch of findings. Scientists working with the solar diving mission have released the spacecraft\u2019s first batch of findings. Since it launched last year, NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe has made three dives toward the sun as it reached the fastest speed ever clocked by a human-built vehicle. Scientists released the mission\u2019s first batch of findings on Wednesday, revealing that the dynamics of our star are even weirder than once imagined.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says an Asteroid Will Have a Close Brush With Earth. But Not Until the 2100s. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3176",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/science/asteroid-bennu-earth-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "Scientists have improved their forecast of the orbital path of Bennu, a space rock the size of the Empire State Building that was visited by the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft. Scientists have improved their forecast of the orbital path of Bennu, a space rock the size of the Empire State Building that was visited by the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft. An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building has a slight chance of hitting Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says an Asteroid Will Have a Close Brush With Earth. But Not Until the 2100s. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3177",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/science/asteroid-bennu-earth-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "Scientists have improved their forecast of the orbital path of Bennu, a space rock the size of the Empire State Building that was visited by the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft. Scientists have improved their forecast of the orbital path of Bennu, a space rock the size of the Empire State Building that was visited by the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft. An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building has a slight chance of hitting Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says an Asteroid Will Have a Close Brush With Earth. But Not Until the 2100s. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3178",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/science/asteroid-bennu-earth-osiris-rex.html",
        "text": "Scientists have improved their forecast of the orbital path of Bennu, a space rock the size of the Empire State Building that was visited by the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft. Scientists have improved their forecast of the orbital path of Bennu, a space rock the size of the Empire State Building that was visited by the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft. An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building has a slight chance of hitting Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Ultima Thule Is Like a Sticky, Pull-Apart Pastry (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3179",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/science/ultima-thule-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "Scientists from the New Horizons mission presented their latest findings about the small distant object visited by the NASA spacecraft at the start of the year. Scientists from the New Horizons mission presented their latest findings about the small distant object visited by the NASA spacecraft at the start of the year. HOUSTON \u2014 To Kirby Runyon, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the small distant object that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past on the first day of this year reminds him of monkey bread.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Ultima Thule Is Like a Sticky, Pull-Apart Pastry (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3180",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/science/ultima-thule-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "Scientists from the New Horizons mission presented their latest findings about the small distant object visited by the NASA spacecraft at the start of the year. Scientists from the New Horizons mission presented their latest findings about the small distant object visited by the NASA spacecraft at the start of the year. HOUSTON \u2014 To Kirby Runyon, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the small distant object that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past on the first day of this year reminds him of monkey bread.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Ultima Thule Is Like a Sticky, Pull-Apart Pastry (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3181",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/science/ultima-thule-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "Scientists from the New Horizons mission presented their latest findings about the small distant object visited by the NASA spacecraft at the start of the year. Scientists from the New Horizons mission presented their latest findings about the small distant object visited by the NASA spacecraft at the start of the year. HOUSTON \u2014 To Kirby Runyon, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the small distant object that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past on the first day of this year reminds him of monkey bread.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Next task for NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: Kiss an asteroid and avoid Mount Doom  (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3182",
        "date": "2019-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/12/17/next-task-nasas-osiris-rex-spacecraft-kiss-an-asteroid-avoid-mount-doom/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Plunge perilously into an alien crater. Ever-so-gently touch the asteroid\u2019s rocky surface. Suck up a few handfuls of pebbles and dust. Navigate out of the crater, avoiding the jagged rock walls and a boulder called \u201cMount Doom.\u201d Then fly back home to Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the tricky task NASA has set for OSIRIS-REx, a small spacecraft on a multiyear quest to collect fragments of an asteroid. It will push the limits of the SUV-size probe, which has already set multiple solar system records for its ambitious orbits. And it will test scientists\u2019 abilities to coordinate complex space maneuvers from more than a million miles away. But if OSIRIS-REx succeeds, it will gather material from the very earliest days of the solar system \u2014 material that could carry clues about our beginnings and perhaps even the ingredients for life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe choice to sample from this challenging site was announced last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.\u201cIt was not an easy decision,\u201d Lori Glaze, director of NASA\u2019s planetary science division, told colleagues at a NASA town hall. \u201cBut I think this is what we\u2019re doing at our best.\u201dOSIRIS-REx\u2019s target asteroid, Bennu, is the size of the Empire State Building in Manhattan and the shape of a piece of Fruit Gushers candy. Instead of sugar, it\u2019s made of carbon-rich rock \u2014 the kind of material researchers believe is representative of the disk of swirling gas and dust from which the solar system formed.Although \u201ccarbonaceous\u201d asteroids have been surveyed by telescopes and collected in the form of meteorites that fall to Earth, scientists have never been able to study pristine material from one up close. With OSIRIS-REx, they hope, they will get their first chance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft is equipped with an extendible arm containing a nitrogen gas canister and a sample collection tube. Sometime next August, in a maneuver that has been compared to a high-five, a kiss and blowing a raspberry, it will descend to Bennu\u2019s surface, reach out the arm, and release a puff of gas that sends pebbles and dust flying up from the surface and into the collection tube.The probe has been surveying Bennu in painstaking detail for more than a year, searching for the perfect place to conduct this complex operation. Bennu is the smallest object a spacecraft has ever orbited, and OSIRIS-REx has already gotten closer to the asteroid than any other craft has gone before.The terrain across the asteroid is far more treacherous than OSIRIS-REx was originally designed to navigate. Where scientists had expected to find a relatively smooth and dust-covered surface, Bennu is \u201crocky and blocky,\u201d Glaze said, with very little material fine enough to fit in the sampling instrument. The spacecraft could be irreversibly damaged if a quirk of gravity or minute flying miscalculation directed it into one of Bennu\u2019s crags or cliffs. And whatever maneuvering OSIRIS-REx might need to do, it will have to do alone. Radio signals take 15 minutes to travel from Bennu to Earth \u2014 much too long for scientists on the ground to operate the probe like a remote-controlled model airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo, over the course of OSIRIS-REx\u2019s many orbits, engineers have built a map of Bennu\u2019s many hazards. Using a tool called Natural Feature Tracking, OSIRIS-REx will be able to match what it sees during its descent with the prepared list of objects to avoid. Michael Moreau, an engineer at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and navigator for the mission, estimated that the upgrades to the probe\u2019s navigational systems have made it five times more precise.\u201cThose steps have been taken to allow us to get into what is otherwise a pretty precarious site on Bennu,\u201d he said.The sample site, a spot known as Nightingale, sits in a crater in Bennu\u2019s northern hemisphere. It harbors a collection of cold, colorful material that the mission\u2019s image-processing lead, University of Arizona planetary scientist Daniella DellaGiustina, deemed some of the most scientifically interesting rocks on the asteroid.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the site is just 52 feet in diameter \u2014 a tight fit for OSIRIS-REx\u2019s 20-foot wingspan. It\u2019s surrounded by jagged rocks and shadowed by the 20-foot precipice of Mount Doom.\u201cWe\u2019re essentially trying to navigate the spacecraft down to a location that\u2019s the width of a couple parking spaces, and it\u2019s just a few steps away from a two- or three-story-tall building,\u201d Moreau said. And they\u2019re doing it from millions of miles away.OSIRIS-REx is equipped with three nitrogen canisters, meaning NASA has three chances to collect its precious sample. The mission team has also picked out an easier-to-access backup site, called Osprey, if their efforts at Nightingale are unsuccessful.But the spacecraft has to finish its work by spring 2021, when the orbits of Bennu and Earth are best aligned for OSIRIS-REx to start its journey home.The sample container is expected to land in Utah in September 2023. Mark your calendars. The spacecraft will suck up material from a \"precarious\" crater on the asteroid Bennu. Next task for NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: Kiss an asteroid and avoid Mount Doom ",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Next task for NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: Kiss an asteroid and avoid Mount Doom  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3183",
        "date": "2019-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/12/17/next-task-nasas-osiris-rex-spacecraft-kiss-an-asteroid-avoid-mount-doom/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Plunge perilously into an alien crater. Ever-so-gently touch the asteroid\u2019s rocky surface. Suck up a few handfuls of pebbles and dust. Navigate out of the crater, avoiding the jagged rock walls and a boulder called \u201cMount Doom.\u201d Then fly back home to Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the tricky task NASA has set for OSIRIS-REx, a small spacecraft on a multiyear quest to collect fragments of an asteroid. It will push the limits of the SUV-size probe, which has already set multiple solar system records for its ambitious orbits. And it will test scientists\u2019 abilities to coordinate complex space maneuvers from more than a million miles away. But if OSIRIS-REx succeeds, it will gather material from the very earliest days of the solar system \u2014 material that could carry clues about our beginnings and perhaps even the ingredients for life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe choice to sample from this challenging site was announced last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.\u201cIt was not an easy decision,\u201d Lori Glaze, director of NASA\u2019s planetary science division, told colleagues at a NASA town hall. \u201cBut I think this is what we\u2019re doing at our best.\u201dOSIRIS-REx\u2019s target asteroid, Bennu, is the size of the Empire State Building in Manhattan and the shape of a piece of Fruit Gushers candy. Instead of sugar, it\u2019s made of carbon-rich rock \u2014 the kind of material researchers believe is representative of the disk of swirling gas and dust from which the solar system formed.Although \u201ccarbonaceous\u201d asteroids have been surveyed by telescopes and collected in the form of meteorites that fall to Earth, scientists have never been able to study pristine material from one up close. With OSIRIS-REx, they hope, they will get their first chance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft is equipped with an extendible arm containing a nitrogen gas canister and a sample collection tube. Sometime next August, in a maneuver that has been compared to a high-five, a kiss and blowing a raspberry, it will descend to Bennu\u2019s surface, reach out the arm, and release a puff of gas that sends pebbles and dust flying up from the surface and into the collection tube.The probe has been surveying Bennu in painstaking detail for more than a year, searching for the perfect place to conduct this complex operation. Bennu is the smallest object a spacecraft has ever orbited, and OSIRIS-REx has already gotten closer to the asteroid than any other craft has gone before.The terrain across the asteroid is far more treacherous than OSIRIS-REx was originally designed to navigate. Where scientists had expected to find a relatively smooth and dust-covered surface, Bennu is \u201crocky and blocky,\u201d Glaze said, with very little material fine enough to fit in the sampling instrument. The spacecraft could be irreversibly damaged if a quirk of gravity or minute flying miscalculation directed it into one of Bennu\u2019s crags or cliffs. And whatever maneuvering OSIRIS-REx might need to do, it will have to do alone. Radio signals take 15 minutes to travel from Bennu to Earth \u2014 much too long for scientists on the ground to operate the probe like a remote-controlled model airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo, over the course of OSIRIS-REx\u2019s many orbits, engineers have built a map of Bennu\u2019s many hazards. Using a tool called Natural Feature Tracking, OSIRIS-REx will be able to match what it sees during its descent with the prepared list of objects to avoid. Michael Moreau, an engineer at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and navigator for the mission, estimated that the upgrades to the probe\u2019s navigational systems have made it five times more precise.\u201cThose steps have been taken to allow us to get into what is otherwise a pretty precarious site on Bennu,\u201d he said.The sample site, a spot known as Nightingale, sits in a crater in Bennu\u2019s northern hemisphere. It harbors a collection of cold, colorful material that the mission\u2019s image-processing lead, University of Arizona planetary scientist Daniella DellaGiustina, deemed some of the most scientifically interesting rocks on the asteroid.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the site is just 52 feet in diameter \u2014 a tight fit for OSIRIS-REx\u2019s 20-foot wingspan. It\u2019s surrounded by jagged rocks and shadowed by the 20-foot precipice of Mount Doom.\u201cWe\u2019re essentially trying to navigate the spacecraft down to a location that\u2019s the width of a couple parking spaces, and it\u2019s just a few steps away from a two- or three-story-tall building,\u201d Moreau said. And they\u2019re doing it from millions of miles away.OSIRIS-REx is equipped with three nitrogen canisters, meaning NASA has three chances to collect its precious sample. The mission team has also picked out an easier-to-access backup site, called Osprey, if their efforts at Nightingale are unsuccessful.But the spacecraft has to finish its work by spring 2021, when the orbits of Bennu and Earth are best aligned for OSIRIS-REx to start its journey home.The sample container is expected to land in Utah in September 2023. Mark your calendars. The spacecraft will suck up material from a \"precarious\" crater on the asteroid Bennu. Next task for NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: Kiss an asteroid and avoid Mount Doom ",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA spacecraft circling the sun stumbled upon a trail of shooting stars (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3184",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/12/20/nasa-spacecraft-circling-sun-stumbled-upon-trail-shooting-stars/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Once there was an asteroid that flew too close to the sun. It was small and dark and rocky, too fragile to withstand such scorching conditions. The asteroid cracked, releasing a burst of dust and debris. Though it continued traveling along its orbit, it dropped millions of fragments in its wake. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHumans named the asteroid Phaethon, for the child of the Greek sun god who couldn\u2019t handle his father\u2019s chariot and nearly destroyed the world. Each December, when our planet plunges through Phaethon\u2019s wake, we can see bits of the broken asteroid burn up in our atmosphere. Researchers call the light flashes the Geminid meteor shower. Children call them shooting stars.Scientists have struggled for years to photograph Phaethon\u2019s debris trail \u2014 until a NASA spacecraft serendipitously stumbled upon it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementParker Solar Probe, which took flight in 2018, was designed to solve the enduring mystery of how our star gives off energy. Swooping closer to the sun\u2019s surface than any earthly object has before, the spacecraft measures magnetic fields, scoops up energetic particles and snaps images of the sun\u2019s atmosphere and its streaming solar wind.While retreating from a close approach to the sun in November 2018, the probe captured something curious with its wide-field imager. Just to the left of the Milky Way, there was a faint line of dust.Karl Battams, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, compared the position of the dust trail to Phaethon\u2019s known orbit. It was a perfect match.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re very confident that we\u2019re seeing the Geminid meteor shower,\u201d Battams said last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.AdvertisementThe segment of the trail captured by Parker Solar Probe is 60,000 miles across and 12 million miles long, though the dust in fact suffuses the entire length of Phaethon\u2019s 524-day orbit. Astronomers estimate it contains a billion kilograms of material.Phaethon\u2019s messy habits make it unusual among asteroids. Some researchers even refer to it as a \u201crock comet,\u201d though it spews dust instead of gas. By studying this debris trail, scientists hope to learn more about what caused Phaethon to splinter several thousand years ago.Story continues below advertisementThe asteroid\u2019s history may one day be deeply relevant to Earth\u2019s future; NASA has classified the Mount Kilimanjaro-size rock as a potentially hazardous Near-Earth Object (but no collisions are predicted for at least 400 years).Astronomers have tried several times to capture Phaethon\u2019s trail with the Hubble Space Telescope. But because it\u2019s so close to the sun, its light is swamped by our star\u2019s glow, and they\u2019d never been successful until Solar Probe went soaring past.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve seen something in the data that we\u2019ve never seen before, and in fact no one has ever seen before,\u201d Battams said. \u201cSolar Probe has given us answers to questions that we weren\u2019t even asking.\u201dParker Solar Probe is scheduled to perform at least 21 more loops around the sun, giving it 21 additional chances to capture Phaethon\u2019s dust. If NASA\u2019s luck holds, Battams said, this won\u2019t be our last look at the trail of shooting stars.Read more:An alien comet from another star is soaring through our solar systemNext task for NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft: Kiss an asteroid and avoid Mount Doom Surprising scientists, NASA's Parker Solar Probe snapped an image of the dust trail that causes the Geminid meteor shower. NASA spacecraft circling the sun stumbled upon a trail of shooting stars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 years (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3185",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/13/opportunity-nasas-record-setting-mars-rover-is-declared-dead-after-years/",
        "text": "Rolling up to the crater\u2019s edge, the Opportunity rover took in a landscape unlike anything any Earthling had ever seen. A vast, meteorite-blasted expanse of volcanic rock and iron oxide extended for 15 miles, ringed by rugged mountains under a dusky orange sky. In months to come, the enterprising robot would uncover signs that warm, liquid water had altered these ancient rocks \u2014 evidence that the conditions for life once existed on Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThat view was one of the most spectacular things I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d recalled Ashley Stroupe, the engineer who was driving the spacecraft the day it arrived at Endeavour Crater on Mars in August 2011.And although she was sitting a hundred million miles away, in Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in that moment Stroupe felt like the astronaut she\u2019d grown up always wanting to be. Opportunity had allowed her, and her fellow scientists, and her fellow humans, to experience another world.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOpportunity\u2019s historic mission, which uncovered signs of Mars\u2019s watery past and transformed our understanding of the Red Planet, has finally come to an end after 15 years, NASA declared Wednesday.The cause was system failure precipitated by power loss during a catastrophic, planetwide dust storm that engulfed the Mars rover last summer.\u201cIt\u2019s going to be very sad to say goodbye,\u201d said John Callas, the mission\u2019s project manager. \u201cBut at the same time, we\u2019ve got to remember this has been 15 years of incredible adventure.\u201dOpportunity\u2019s mission was planned to last just 90 days, but it worked for 5,000 Martian \u201csols\u201d (which are about 39 minutes longer than an Earth day) and traversed more than 28 treacherous miles \u2014 two records for NASA.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt will be a very long time,\u201d Callas predicted, \u201cbefore any other mission exceeds that duration or distance on the surface of another world.\u201dAdvertisement\u2018It\u2019s a miracle they got to the launchpad\u2019Before 2000, when NASA announced its ambitious plan for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, just three spacecraft had ever successfully operated on the Red Planet. Of these, only one \u2014 the tiny Sojourner rover that accompanied the 1997 Pathfinder mission \u2014 moved around on the surface. It never traveled more than 100 meters and lasted less than three months.The images these travelers sent back were alien and bleak. Though scientists had speculated about the possibility of finding life on the Red Planet, initial investigations revealed a world with no liquid water, hardly any atmosphere and a lethal daily dose of radiation.At that point, roughly two-thirds of all missions destined for Mars had failed, often in expensive and embarrassing ways. In 1999 alone, a unit conversion mix-up and a missing line of computer code doomed an orbiter and two landers, costing NASA a combined $200 million.The agency\u2019s chief scientist, Ed Weiler, called the failures \u201ca wake-up call.\u201d For years, NASA had pursued a \u201cbetter, faster, cheaper\u201d exploration strategy, attempting to use a shrinking budget to send several small missions into space. But now critics began to question the merits of the Mars program altogether. What could this desolate planet possibly teach us that would be worth the expense?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA would take an $800 million risk to find out.Shortly after the crashes, Cornell University planetary scientist Steve Squyres got an unexpected phone call. He\u2019d been trying to persuade NASA to send a sophisticated robotic geologist to Mars for more than a decade. Now the agency wanted to know \u2014 could he have his idea ready to launch by 2003?\u201cWe only had 34 months between when NASA said, \u2018Okay. Ready, set, go!\u2019 and when we had to be on top of the rockets in Florida,\u201d Squyres said. \u201cPeople say to me, \u2018Oh my goodness, it\u2019s a miracle the rover lasted so long on Mars,\u2019 and I want to go, \u2018It\u2019s a miracle they got to the launchpad.\u2019\u201dThe new plan was to place a package of scientific instruments developed by Squyres and his colleagues atop two rovers called Spirit and Opportunity. The task of building these mobile robotic geologists turned out to be herculean. Dimensions changed, parachute tests failed, launches were delayed by bad weather and battery glitches.Squyres recalled a sticky summer evening in 2003, after the scrubbing of yet another launch, when he took a walk on the beach near Cape Canaveral to clear his head.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo the East, he watched Mars \u2014 just a little red dot \u2014 rise over the glittering black Atlantic. It was hard to imagine how the rovers would ever get there, Squyres said. Mars seemed so forbidding, so alien, so impossibly far away.\u2018We\u2019re on Mars, everybody!\u2019 Opportunity launched into space aboard a Delta II rocket on July 7, 2003, three weeks after its sibling, Spirit, took off. The cruise was uneventful, and seven months later, on Jan. 25, 2004, Opportunity prepared to touch down in Mars\u2019s Meridiani Planum, a low-lying cratered expanse in Mars\u2019s southern hemisphere.\u201cI was in the control room\u201d at JPL, Squyres recalled. He laughed, \u201cWhich, interestingly, is a place where we have no control whatsoever.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBecause it took about 11 minutes for light signals to travel the roughly 100 million miles from Mars to Earth, a spacecraft\u2019s \u201cEDL\u201d (entry, descent and landing) is over before scientists learn of it.AdvertisementThe logistics of the MER rover landings were formidable, bordering on absurd. Within six minutes of entering Mars\u2019s thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, the spacecraft had to slow from 12,000 mph to just about 0. Right before impact, a cocoon of air bags inflated around the spacecraft, allowing it to bounce safely onto the surface of the Red Planet.For a moment, the spacecraft\u2019s radio link was lost as it shuddered to a standstill. And then a signal appeared on the computer screen in front of EDL manager Rob Manning. He flung out his arm and leaned back in his chair.\u201cWe\u2019re on Mars, everybody!\"Planetary scientist Abigail Fraeman, then 16, had been invited out to JPL as part of a Planetary Society program for high school students. She can still summon every detail of that night. The tones that rang out as each system was found healthy. The images that Opportunity sent down from its landing site of a smooth dark plain so vivid and sharp she almost felt she could reach out and touch it. The surge of elation that swept through the science team as researchers realized what they\u2019d landed on: layers of exposed bedrock that would reveal clues about Mars\u2019s geologic history stretching back billions of years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI realized I wanted to be one of those people who could jump up and down,\u201d Fraeman said. \u201cI wanted to be someone who could understand the significance of what those images were telling us.\u201dFraeman wound up going to college for physics and geology, then earning her PhD in planetary geoscience. Since 2016, she has served as the deputy project scientist for the Opportunity mission.15 years of explorationOpportunity\u2019s first great achievement came within two months of its arrival on the Red Planet. The layered outcrop on which the rover had landed \u2014 the one that made the scientists surrounding Fraeman jump for joy \u2014 contained evidence that water once flowed through the rocks: crystals, sulfur compounds, little spherical objects that scientists likened to blueberries, and rock patterns that looked like sediments laid down by a flowing current.This evidence constituted a \u201cgiant leap\u201d toward determining whether Mars ever hosted life, Weiler told The Post.That discovery was bolstered by scores more like it. Opportunity went on to find hematite, an iron mineral usually associated with water, and a vein of gypsum, which probably formed from mineral-rich water moving through rock.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt really changed the way scientists perceive Mars,\u201d said Squyres, who has been principal investigator for the instruments aboard Spirit and Opportunity since the beginning of their mission. \u201cIt is a cold and desolate world today, but in the distant past, in the time that the rocks explored by Spirit and Opportunity were formed, it was a very different world. It was a world that was more Earthlike, a time when life was emerging on Earth.\u201d\u201cSo it makes you seriously consider,\u201d he continued, \u201cif it happened on Earth, which it did, could it have happened under the warmer, wetter conditions that once existed on Mars?\u201dOpportunity, he said, \u201ccouldn\u2019t answer that question. But we helped frame it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThose discoveries helped build the case for subsequent missions to Mars, including the Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012 and is still exploring the Red Planet, and a 2020 mission that will collect rock samples for eventual return to Earth.AdvertisementOpportunity\u2019s scientific accomplishments were only possible because it had been such an engineering success, said NASA\u2019s acting director of planetary science Lori Glaze. The rover was adaptable, tenacious and diligent, and its drivers never failed to get it to its targets.\u201cBeing able to really roll right up to an outcrop and examine it, to look up close with your hand lens, do the chemistry measurements \u2026 it allows you to really feel like you\u2019re there,\u201d she said. \u201cThat absolutely changed the way we go about doing planetary exploration.\u201dThe MER mission\u2019s cultural legacy is just as wide-reaching. The intrepid rovers, with their humanlike proportions and endearing, Wall-E-esque antics, proved phenomenal ambassadors for the Mars program. Middle school science classes tracked the rovers\u2019 progress across the Martian landscape. A Twitter account shared selfies and snarky comments in the spacecraft\u2019s voice.When Opportunity went silent last summer, more than 10,000 fans sent the spacecraft digital \u201cpostcards\u201d wishing it well.\u201cWake up little buddy!\u201d one read. \u201cWe miss you!\u201dListen: Sarah Kaplan eulogizes the Opportunity roverEven the scientists who operated the spacecraft couldn\u2019t help but anthropomorphize them. Stroupe, the JPL engineer, jokes that Spirit and Opportunity had \u201cthe dynamic of being rival siblings.\u201d Spirit, which landed on Mars first, faced much tougher terrain and suffered several breakdowns, culminating in the rover\u2019s eventual loss of contact in 2010.As the \u201cyounger child,\u201d Stroupe said, \u201ceverything kind of came easy to Oppy.\u201d The engineer laughed. \u201cI mean, she found signs of water before we even drove off the lander!\u201dThe charmed rover barely escaped becoming trapped in a sand dune in 2005, survived a global dust storm in 2007, and undertook the longest-ever traverse performed by a rover \u2014 the three-year journey from its landing site at Victoria Crater to Endeavour Crater, 13 miles away.\u201cIt\u2019s been a privilege,\u201d Stroupe said, \u201cto see Mars through Opportunity\u2019s eyes.\u201dShe calls Spirit and Opportunity \u201cthe first Martians\u201d \u2014 the first things to live and work longer on another planet than they ever did on Earth.And as a systems and operations engineer for NASA\u2019s Mars missions, responsible for driving robots across unforgiving alien terrain, \u201cI do feel a bit like I have naturalized dual citizenship,\u201d Stroupe added.A sticker in her office declares, \u201cMy other vehicle is on Mars.\u201d She uses an app on her phone to track the 24-hour, 39-minute Martian day. When she closes her eyes to sleep, rusty landscapes and dust-filled skies are the background to her dreams.Learning to let goIn May 2018, scientists at JPL received a worrying weather report from NASA\u2019s Martian satellites: A large dust storm was brewing just a few hundred miles away from Opportunity, blocking out the solar-powered rover\u2019s view of the sun.The spacecraft had survived such storms before. But at more than 14 years old, it was no longer as hardy as it had once been. A fault in one of Opportunity\u2019s memory banks resulted in loss of all long-term memory. Problems with the rover\u2019s wheels and robotic arm looked like spacecraft arthritis. If Opportunity experienced another prolonged power loss, it might not recover so easily.By June, the dust storm had grown into a planet-encircling event, one of the most ferocious NASA had ever seen. It looked likely that Opportunity would experience a low-power fault, putting itself to sleep until the skies cleared. Efforts to make contact with the spacecraft went unanswered.When the storm finally began to subside, in September, NASA adopted a \u201csweep and beep\u201d strategy for waking the rover, sending commands multiple times per day. Except for a few false alarms from other spacecraft \u2014 NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter transmits on a similar frequency \u2014 scientists heard nothing back.Still, the team held out hope. If the storm had deposited dust on Opportunity\u2019s solar panels, the coming windy season \u2014 which runs from November to January \u2014 might help sweep them clean.\u201cThe hardest part was the not knowing,\u201d Stroupe said. \u201cIt takes a real toll.\u201dThe robot\u2019s 15th birthday, on Jan. 24, passed without so much as a ping from the Red Planet.After sending more than 835 recovery commands to the spacecraft, including a last-ditch program that would completely reboot Opportunity\u2019s clock, hope began to dwindle. Every day that passed, Callas said, it became less likely that NASA would ever get a response to its frantic calls.NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover captured spectacular views of MarsShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe first images from Opportunity reveal what scientists are calling a \u201cbizarre, alien landscape\u201d at the landing site, Meridiani Planum. Above, the first color photo from the rover\u2019s panoramic camera is displayed. A \u201cpostcard\u201d from the panoramic camera shows an outcrop of layered-looking rocks southwest of Opportunity. (NASA/JPL/Cornell)The very last signal was sent from JPL on Tuesday night. It was met with only silence.\u201cWe\u2019ve reached the end of the road,\u201d said NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen. \u201cWe\u2019ve exhausted all the good ideas [for waking the rover] \u2026 and now we declare the mission as being complete.\u201dA meeting with the mission\u2019s scientists and engineers this week felt almost like a funeral, Zurbuchen said. Researchers cried not just for the death of their rover, but for the disintegration of a 15-year-old team.Still, Squyres was resolute as the mission drew to a close.\u201cI always knew it was going to end,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd boy, if this is the end \u2026 getting killed by one of the most ferocious storms we have ever seen. Well, you can walk away from that with your head held high.\u201dThe rover is survived at Mars by Curiosity, the InSight lander and six orbiting spacecraft. NASA\u2019s next rover mission, which will seek out signs of ancient life, will launch in 2020.As for Opportunity, its metal shell will remain in the spot where it sent its last message, on the rim of Endeavour Crater. \u201cIt\u2019s always going to be there,\u201d Zurbuchen said, \u201clike a monument, or a shipwreck.\u201dIt is a marker of where humanity has been. And a beacon for whatever comes next. A eulogy for the spacecraft that transformed our understanding of the Red Planet. Opportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 years",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 years (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3186",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/13/opportunity-nasas-record-setting-mars-rover-is-declared-dead-after-years/",
        "text": "Rolling up to the crater\u2019s edge, the Opportunity rover took in a landscape unlike anything any Earthling had ever seen. A vast, meteorite-blasted expanse of volcanic rock and iron oxide extended for 15 miles, ringed by rugged mountains under a dusky orange sky. In months to come, the enterprising robot would uncover signs that warm, liquid water had altered these ancient rocks \u2014 evidence that the conditions for life once existed on Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThat view was one of the most spectacular things I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d recalled Ashley Stroupe, the engineer who was driving the spacecraft the day it arrived at Endeavour Crater on Mars in August 2011.And although she was sitting a hundred million miles away, in Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in that moment Stroupe felt like the astronaut she\u2019d grown up always wanting to be. Opportunity had allowed her, and her fellow scientists, and her fellow humans, to experience another world.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOpportunity\u2019s historic mission, which uncovered signs of Mars\u2019s watery past and transformed our understanding of the Red Planet, has finally come to an end after 15 years, NASA declared Wednesday.The cause was system failure precipitated by power loss during a catastrophic, planetwide dust storm that engulfed the Mars rover last summer.\u201cIt\u2019s going to be very sad to say goodbye,\u201d said John Callas, the mission\u2019s project manager. \u201cBut at the same time, we\u2019ve got to remember this has been 15 years of incredible adventure.\u201dOpportunity\u2019s mission was planned to last just 90 days, but it worked for 5,000 Martian \u201csols\u201d (which are about 39 minutes longer than an Earth day) and traversed more than 28 treacherous miles \u2014 two records for NASA.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt will be a very long time,\u201d Callas predicted, \u201cbefore any other mission exceeds that duration or distance on the surface of another world.\u201dAdvertisement\u2018It\u2019s a miracle they got to the launchpad\u2019Before 2000, when NASA announced its ambitious plan for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, just three spacecraft had ever successfully operated on the Red Planet. Of these, only one \u2014 the tiny Sojourner rover that accompanied the 1997 Pathfinder mission \u2014 moved around on the surface. It never traveled more than 100 meters and lasted less than three months.The images these travelers sent back were alien and bleak. Though scientists had speculated about the possibility of finding life on the Red Planet, initial investigations revealed a world with no liquid water, hardly any atmosphere and a lethal daily dose of radiation.At that point, roughly two-thirds of all missions destined for Mars had failed, often in expensive and embarrassing ways. In 1999 alone, a unit conversion mix-up and a missing line of computer code doomed an orbiter and two landers, costing NASA a combined $200 million.The agency\u2019s chief scientist, Ed Weiler, called the failures \u201ca wake-up call.\u201d For years, NASA had pursued a \u201cbetter, faster, cheaper\u201d exploration strategy, attempting to use a shrinking budget to send several small missions into space. But now critics began to question the merits of the Mars program altogether. What could this desolate planet possibly teach us that would be worth the expense?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA would take an $800 million risk to find out.Shortly after the crashes, Cornell University planetary scientist Steve Squyres got an unexpected phone call. He\u2019d been trying to persuade NASA to send a sophisticated robotic geologist to Mars for more than a decade. Now the agency wanted to know \u2014 could he have his idea ready to launch by 2003?\u201cWe only had 34 months between when NASA said, \u2018Okay. Ready, set, go!\u2019 and when we had to be on top of the rockets in Florida,\u201d Squyres said. \u201cPeople say to me, \u2018Oh my goodness, it\u2019s a miracle the rover lasted so long on Mars,\u2019 and I want to go, \u2018It\u2019s a miracle they got to the launchpad.\u2019\u201dThe new plan was to place a package of scientific instruments developed by Squyres and his colleagues atop two rovers called Spirit and Opportunity. The task of building these mobile robotic geologists turned out to be herculean. Dimensions changed, parachute tests failed, launches were delayed by bad weather and battery glitches.Squyres recalled a sticky summer evening in 2003, after the scrubbing of yet another launch, when he took a walk on the beach near Cape Canaveral to clear his head.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo the East, he watched Mars \u2014 just a little red dot \u2014 rise over the glittering black Atlantic. It was hard to imagine how the rovers would ever get there, Squyres said. Mars seemed so forbidding, so alien, so impossibly far away.\u2018We\u2019re on Mars, everybody!\u2019 Opportunity launched into space aboard a Delta II rocket on July 7, 2003, three weeks after its sibling, Spirit, took off. The cruise was uneventful, and seven months later, on Jan. 25, 2004, Opportunity prepared to touch down in Mars\u2019s Meridiani Planum, a low-lying cratered expanse in Mars\u2019s southern hemisphere.\u201cI was in the control room\u201d at JPL, Squyres recalled. He laughed, \u201cWhich, interestingly, is a place where we have no control whatsoever.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBecause it took about 11 minutes for light signals to travel the roughly 100 million miles from Mars to Earth, a spacecraft\u2019s \u201cEDL\u201d (entry, descent and landing) is over before scientists learn of it.AdvertisementThe logistics of the MER rover landings were formidable, bordering on absurd. Within six minutes of entering Mars\u2019s thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, the spacecraft had to slow from 12,000 mph to just about 0. Right before impact, a cocoon of air bags inflated around the spacecraft, allowing it to bounce safely onto the surface of the Red Planet.For a moment, the spacecraft\u2019s radio link was lost as it shuddered to a standstill. And then a signal appeared on the computer screen in front of EDL manager Rob Manning. He flung out his arm and leaned back in his chair.\u201cWe\u2019re on Mars, everybody!\"Planetary scientist Abigail Fraeman, then 16, had been invited out to JPL as part of a Planetary Society program for high school students. She can still summon every detail of that night. The tones that rang out as each system was found healthy. The images that Opportunity sent down from its landing site of a smooth dark plain so vivid and sharp she almost felt she could reach out and touch it. The surge of elation that swept through the science team as researchers realized what they\u2019d landed on: layers of exposed bedrock that would reveal clues about Mars\u2019s geologic history stretching back billions of years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI realized I wanted to be one of those people who could jump up and down,\u201d Fraeman said. \u201cI wanted to be someone who could understand the significance of what those images were telling us.\u201dFraeman wound up going to college for physics and geology, then earning her PhD in planetary geoscience. Since 2016, she has served as the deputy project scientist for the Opportunity mission.15 years of explorationOpportunity\u2019s first great achievement came within two months of its arrival on the Red Planet. The layered outcrop on which the rover had landed \u2014 the one that made the scientists surrounding Fraeman jump for joy \u2014 contained evidence that water once flowed through the rocks: crystals, sulfur compounds, little spherical objects that scientists likened to blueberries, and rock patterns that looked like sediments laid down by a flowing current.This evidence constituted a \u201cgiant leap\u201d toward determining whether Mars ever hosted life, Weiler told The Post.That discovery was bolstered by scores more like it. Opportunity went on to find hematite, an iron mineral usually associated with water, and a vein of gypsum, which probably formed from mineral-rich water moving through rock.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt really changed the way scientists perceive Mars,\u201d said Squyres, who has been principal investigator for the instruments aboard Spirit and Opportunity since the beginning of their mission. \u201cIt is a cold and desolate world today, but in the distant past, in the time that the rocks explored by Spirit and Opportunity were formed, it was a very different world. It was a world that was more Earthlike, a time when life was emerging on Earth.\u201d\u201cSo it makes you seriously consider,\u201d he continued, \u201cif it happened on Earth, which it did, could it have happened under the warmer, wetter conditions that once existed on Mars?\u201dOpportunity, he said, \u201ccouldn\u2019t answer that question. But we helped frame it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThose discoveries helped build the case for subsequent missions to Mars, including the Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012 and is still exploring the Red Planet, and a 2020 mission that will collect rock samples for eventual return to Earth.AdvertisementOpportunity\u2019s scientific accomplishments were only possible because it had been such an engineering success, said NASA\u2019s acting director of planetary science Lori Glaze. The rover was adaptable, tenacious and diligent, and its drivers never failed to get it to its targets.\u201cBeing able to really roll right up to an outcrop and examine it, to look up close with your hand lens, do the chemistry measurements \u2026 it allows you to really feel like you\u2019re there,\u201d she said. \u201cThat absolutely changed the way we go about doing planetary exploration.\u201dThe MER mission\u2019s cultural legacy is just as wide-reaching. The intrepid rovers, with their humanlike proportions and endearing, Wall-E-esque antics, proved phenomenal ambassadors for the Mars program. Middle school science classes tracked the rovers\u2019 progress across the Martian landscape. A Twitter account shared selfies and snarky comments in the spacecraft\u2019s voice.When Opportunity went silent last summer, more than 10,000 fans sent the spacecraft digital \u201cpostcards\u201d wishing it well.\u201cWake up little buddy!\u201d one read. \u201cWe miss you!\u201dListen: Sarah Kaplan eulogizes the Opportunity roverEven the scientists who operated the spacecraft couldn\u2019t help but anthropomorphize them. Stroupe, the JPL engineer, jokes that Spirit and Opportunity had \u201cthe dynamic of being rival siblings.\u201d Spirit, which landed on Mars first, faced much tougher terrain and suffered several breakdowns, culminating in the rover\u2019s eventual loss of contact in 2010.As the \u201cyounger child,\u201d Stroupe said, \u201ceverything kind of came easy to Oppy.\u201d The engineer laughed. \u201cI mean, she found signs of water before we even drove off the lander!\u201dThe charmed rover barely escaped becoming trapped in a sand dune in 2005, survived a global dust storm in 2007, and undertook the longest-ever traverse performed by a rover \u2014 the three-year journey from its landing site at Victoria Crater to Endeavour Crater, 13 miles away.\u201cIt\u2019s been a privilege,\u201d Stroupe said, \u201cto see Mars through Opportunity\u2019s eyes.\u201dShe calls Spirit and Opportunity \u201cthe first Martians\u201d \u2014 the first things to live and work longer on another planet than they ever did on Earth.And as a systems and operations engineer for NASA\u2019s Mars missions, responsible for driving robots across unforgiving alien terrain, \u201cI do feel a bit like I have naturalized dual citizenship,\u201d Stroupe added.A sticker in her office declares, \u201cMy other vehicle is on Mars.\u201d She uses an app on her phone to track the 24-hour, 39-minute Martian day. When she closes her eyes to sleep, rusty landscapes and dust-filled skies are the background to her dreams.Learning to let goIn May 2018, scientists at JPL received a worrying weather report from NASA\u2019s Martian satellites: A large dust storm was brewing just a few hundred miles away from Opportunity, blocking out the solar-powered rover\u2019s view of the sun.The spacecraft had survived such storms before. But at more than 14 years old, it was no longer as hardy as it had once been. A fault in one of Opportunity\u2019s memory banks resulted in loss of all long-term memory. Problems with the rover\u2019s wheels and robotic arm looked like spacecraft arthritis. If Opportunity experienced another prolonged power loss, it might not recover so easily.By June, the dust storm had grown into a planet-encircling event, one of the most ferocious NASA had ever seen. It looked likely that Opportunity would experience a low-power fault, putting itself to sleep until the skies cleared. Efforts to make contact with the spacecraft went unanswered.When the storm finally began to subside, in September, NASA adopted a \u201csweep and beep\u201d strategy for waking the rover, sending commands multiple times per day. Except for a few false alarms from other spacecraft \u2014 NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter transmits on a similar frequency \u2014 scientists heard nothing back.Still, the team held out hope. If the storm had deposited dust on Opportunity\u2019s solar panels, the coming windy season \u2014 which runs from November to January \u2014 might help sweep them clean.\u201cThe hardest part was the not knowing,\u201d Stroupe said. \u201cIt takes a real toll.\u201dThe robot\u2019s 15th birthday, on Jan. 24, passed without so much as a ping from the Red Planet.After sending more than 835 recovery commands to the spacecraft, including a last-ditch program that would completely reboot Opportunity\u2019s clock, hope began to dwindle. Every day that passed, Callas said, it became less likely that NASA would ever get a response to its frantic calls.NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover captured spectacular views of MarsShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe first images from Opportunity reveal what scientists are calling a \u201cbizarre, alien landscape\u201d at the landing site, Meridiani Planum. Above, the first color photo from the rover\u2019s panoramic camera is displayed. A \u201cpostcard\u201d from the panoramic camera shows an outcrop of layered-looking rocks southwest of Opportunity. (NASA/JPL/Cornell)The very last signal was sent from JPL on Tuesday night. It was met with only silence.\u201cWe\u2019ve reached the end of the road,\u201d said NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen. \u201cWe\u2019ve exhausted all the good ideas [for waking the rover] \u2026 and now we declare the mission as being complete.\u201dA meeting with the mission\u2019s scientists and engineers this week felt almost like a funeral, Zurbuchen said. Researchers cried not just for the death of their rover, but for the disintegration of a 15-year-old team.Still, Squyres was resolute as the mission drew to a close.\u201cI always knew it was going to end,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd boy, if this is the end \u2026 getting killed by one of the most ferocious storms we have ever seen. Well, you can walk away from that with your head held high.\u201dThe rover is survived at Mars by Curiosity, the InSight lander and six orbiting spacecraft. NASA\u2019s next rover mission, which will seek out signs of ancient life, will launch in 2020.As for Opportunity, its metal shell will remain in the spot where it sent its last message, on the rim of Endeavour Crater. \u201cIt\u2019s always going to be there,\u201d Zurbuchen said, \u201clike a monument, or a shipwreck.\u201dIt is a marker of where humanity has been. And a beacon for whatever comes next. A eulogy for the spacecraft that transformed our understanding of the Red Planet. Opportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 years",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Search for Life on Venus Could Start With This Private Company (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3187",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/venus-life-rocketlab.html",
        "text": "Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars with his rocket company SpaceX. Amazon\u2019s founder, Jeff Bezos, wants a trillion people living in space. But the chief executive of one private space company is approaching space exploration differently, and now aims to play a part in the search for life on Venus.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Search for Life on Venus Could Start With This Private Company (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3188",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/venus-life-rocketlab.html",
        "text": "Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars with his rocket company SpaceX. Amazon\u2019s founder, Jeff Bezos, wants a trillion people living in space. But the chief executive of one private space company is approaching space exploration differently, and now aims to play a part in the search for life on Venus.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Search for Life on Venus Could Start With This Private Company (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3189",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/venus-life-rocketlab.html",
        "text": "Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars with his rocket company SpaceX. Amazon\u2019s founder, Jeff Bezos, wants a trillion people living in space. But the chief executive of one private space company is approaching space exploration differently, and now aims to play a part in the search for life on Venus.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Search for Life on Venus Could Start With This Private Company (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3190",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/venus-life-rocketlab.html",
        "text": "Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Rocket Lab may be able to send a small spacecraft to probe the clouds of Venus long before NASA or other space agencies are able to do so. Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars with his rocket company SpaceX. Amazon\u2019s founder, Jeff Bezos, wants a trillion people living in space. But the chief executive of one private space company is approaching space exploration differently, and now aims to play a part in the search for life on Venus.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s space Tesla just might crash into Earth in the next million years (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3191",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/16/elon-musks-space-tesla-just-might-crash-into-earth-in-the-next-million-years/",
        "text": "Remember the Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk launched into space last week?SpaceX founder Elon Musk launched a Tesla sports car into space on Feb. 6, along with a \"driver\u201d dubbed Starman. (SpaceX)Yeah, that one.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, three scientists just took a close look at the vehicle's orbit over the next million years, and they found there is a slight chance the car might crash into Earth or Venus.Don't panic. The chance is pretty small \u2014 somewhere around 6 percent for Earth and 2.5 percent for Venus. And a million years is a very long time \u2014 our species has been around for only about a fifth of that span. There's plenty of room for civilization-ending catastrophes to occur long before the Tesla reenters Earth's atmosphere. Besides, the car would likely burn up before reaching the surface.Story continues below advertisementThe results, due to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, were posted this week on the e-print site arxiv.org.AdvertisementThe Tesla was launched into space Feb. 6 atop SpaceX's vaunted Falcon Heavy rocket; its only passenger a spacesuit-wearing mannequin named Starman.Study authors Hanno Rein, Daniel Tamayo and David Vokrouhlick\u00fd, all experts in orbital dynamics, emphasize that it's impossible to map out precisely where Starman will go as his vehicle floats through space. The roadster is drifting on an elliptical orbit around the sun that repeatedly crosses the path of Mars (though the two bodies are not predicted to collide). At its farthest, the car will be 1.67 times Earth's distance from the sun.Story continues below advertisementBy measuring the car's flickering brightness, other astronomers determined that it is rotating nearly every five minutes.You can see the car blinking in our time-lapse from the 4.1-m SOAR telescope in Chile, taken in twilight on 2018-02-10. The car is already more than 1 million km away, tens of thousands of times fainter than can be seen with the unaided eye. pic.twitter.com/WPHTPjps57\u2014 JJ Hermes (@jotajotahermes) February 11, 2018\n\nThe Roadster will experience its next close encounter with Earth sometime around the end of this century \u2014 the first of many, Rein and his colleagues say. With each successive flyby past Earth and other bodies in space, its orbit is perturbed and becomes harder to predict.AdvertisementBut by running many simulations of how those encounters might play out, the scientists can get a pretty good estimate of what's likely to happen. They conclude that the car's \u201cdynamical lifetime\u201d will probably be a few tens of millions of years.But aerospace engineer Ben Pearson, creator of the site whereisroadster.com, noted the car had already exceeded its 36,000\u00a0mile warranty 511 times as of Friday morning. Hope Starman has good insurance. Story continues below advertisementUpdate: Though Rein and his colleagues initially reported that the Roadster will experience a close encounter with Earth in 2091, they are revising their estimates as more up-to-date orbital elements have become available, so that date is no longer certain. Read more:SpaceX successfully launches the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, as it sends a Tesla on a path near Mars Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever before Don't panic: The chance of a collision is just 6 percent.  Elon Musk\u2019s space Tesla just might crash into Earth in the next million years",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s space Tesla just might crash into Earth in the next million years (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3192",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/16/elon-musks-space-tesla-just-might-crash-into-earth-in-the-next-million-years/",
        "text": "Remember the Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk launched into space last week?SpaceX founder Elon Musk launched a Tesla sports car into space on Feb. 6, along with a \"driver\u201d dubbed Starman. (SpaceX)Yeah, that one.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, three scientists just took a close look at the vehicle's orbit over the next million years, and they found there is a slight chance the car might crash into Earth or Venus.Don't panic. The chance is pretty small \u2014 somewhere around 6 percent for Earth and 2.5 percent for Venus. And a million years is a very long time \u2014 our species has been around for only about a fifth of that span. There's plenty of room for civilization-ending catastrophes to occur long before the Tesla reenters Earth's atmosphere. Besides, the car would likely burn up before reaching the surface.Story continues below advertisementThe results, due to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, were posted this week on the e-print site arxiv.org.AdvertisementThe Tesla was launched into space Feb. 6 atop SpaceX's vaunted Falcon Heavy rocket; its only passenger a spacesuit-wearing mannequin named Starman.Study authors Hanno Rein, Daniel Tamayo and David Vokrouhlick\u00fd, all experts in orbital dynamics, emphasize that it's impossible to map out precisely where Starman will go as his vehicle floats through space. The roadster is drifting on an elliptical orbit around the sun that repeatedly crosses the path of Mars (though the two bodies are not predicted to collide). At its farthest, the car will be 1.67 times Earth's distance from the sun.Story continues below advertisementBy measuring the car's flickering brightness, other astronomers determined that it is rotating nearly every five minutes.You can see the car blinking in our time-lapse from the 4.1-m SOAR telescope in Chile, taken in twilight on 2018-02-10. The car is already more than 1 million km away, tens of thousands of times fainter than can be seen with the unaided eye. pic.twitter.com/WPHTPjps57\u2014 JJ Hermes (@jotajotahermes) February 11, 2018\n\nThe Roadster will experience its next close encounter with Earth sometime around the end of this century \u2014 the first of many, Rein and his colleagues say. With each successive flyby past Earth and other bodies in space, its orbit is perturbed and becomes harder to predict.AdvertisementBut by running many simulations of how those encounters might play out, the scientists can get a pretty good estimate of what's likely to happen. They conclude that the car's \u201cdynamical lifetime\u201d will probably be a few tens of millions of years.But aerospace engineer Ben Pearson, creator of the site whereisroadster.com, noted the car had already exceeded its 36,000\u00a0mile warranty 511 times as of Friday morning. Hope Starman has good insurance. Story continues below advertisementUpdate: Though Rein and his colleagues initially reported that the Roadster will experience a close encounter with Earth in 2091, they are revising their estimates as more up-to-date orbital elements have become available, so that date is no longer certain. Read more:SpaceX successfully launches the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, as it sends a Tesla on a path near Mars Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever before Don't panic: The chance of a collision is just 6 percent.  Elon Musk\u2019s space Tesla just might crash into Earth in the next million years",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s space Tesla just might crash into Earth in the next million years (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3193",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/16/elon-musks-space-tesla-just-might-crash-into-earth-in-the-next-million-years/",
        "text": "Remember the Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk launched into space last week?SpaceX founder Elon Musk launched a Tesla sports car into space on Feb. 6, along with a \"driver\u201d dubbed Starman. (SpaceX)Yeah, that one.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, three scientists just took a close look at the vehicle's orbit over the next million years, and they found there is a slight chance the car might crash into Earth or Venus.Don't panic. The chance is pretty small \u2014 somewhere around 6 percent for Earth and 2.5 percent for Venus. And a million years is a very long time \u2014 our species has been around for only about a fifth of that span. There's plenty of room for civilization-ending catastrophes to occur long before the Tesla reenters Earth's atmosphere. Besides, the car would likely burn up before reaching the surface.Story continues below advertisementThe results, due to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, were posted this week on the e-print site arxiv.org.AdvertisementThe Tesla was launched into space Feb. 6 atop SpaceX's vaunted Falcon Heavy rocket; its only passenger a spacesuit-wearing mannequin named Starman.Study authors Hanno Rein, Daniel Tamayo and David Vokrouhlick\u00fd, all experts in orbital dynamics, emphasize that it's impossible to map out precisely where Starman will go as his vehicle floats through space. The roadster is drifting on an elliptical orbit around the sun that repeatedly crosses the path of Mars (though the two bodies are not predicted to collide). At its farthest, the car will be 1.67 times Earth's distance from the sun.Story continues below advertisementBy measuring the car's flickering brightness, other astronomers determined that it is rotating nearly every five minutes.You can see the car blinking in our time-lapse from the 4.1-m SOAR telescope in Chile, taken in twilight on 2018-02-10. The car is already more than 1 million km away, tens of thousands of times fainter than can be seen with the unaided eye. pic.twitter.com/WPHTPjps57\u2014 JJ Hermes (@jotajotahermes) February 11, 2018\n\nThe Roadster will experience its next close encounter with Earth sometime around the end of this century \u2014 the first of many, Rein and his colleagues say. With each successive flyby past Earth and other bodies in space, its orbit is perturbed and becomes harder to predict.AdvertisementBut by running many simulations of how those encounters might play out, the scientists can get a pretty good estimate of what's likely to happen. They conclude that the car's \u201cdynamical lifetime\u201d will probably be a few tens of millions of years.But aerospace engineer Ben Pearson, creator of the site whereisroadster.com, noted the car had already exceeded its 36,000\u00a0mile warranty 511 times as of Friday morning. Hope Starman has good insurance. Story continues below advertisementUpdate: Though Rein and his colleagues initially reported that the Roadster will experience a close encounter with Earth in 2091, they are revising their estimates as more up-to-date orbital elements have become available, so that date is no longer certain. Read more:SpaceX successfully launches the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, as it sends a Tesla on a path near Mars Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever before Don't panic: The chance of a collision is just 6 percent.  Elon Musk\u2019s space Tesla just might crash into Earth in the next million years",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars InSight Mission Launches for Six-Month Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3194",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/science/nasa-mars-insight-launch.html",
        "text": "Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California on Saturday, the spacecraft will study the deep interior of the red planet, contributing to understanding of how planets form. Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California on Saturday, the spacecraft will study the deep interior of the red planet, contributing to understanding of how planets form. Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft is now on a voyage of some six months to Mars to study the deep interior of the red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars InSight Mission Launches for Six-Month Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3195",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/science/nasa-mars-insight-launch.html",
        "text": "Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California on Saturday, the spacecraft will study the deep interior of the red planet, contributing to understanding of how planets form. Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California on Saturday, the spacecraft will study the deep interior of the red planet, contributing to understanding of how planets form. Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft is now on a voyage of some six months to Mars to study the deep interior of the red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars InSight Mission Launches for Six-Month Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3196",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/science/nasa-mars-insight-launch.html",
        "text": "Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California on Saturday, the spacecraft will study the deep interior of the red planet, contributing to understanding of how planets form. Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California on Saturday, the spacecraft will study the deep interior of the red planet, contributing to understanding of how planets form. Propelled by a predawn rocket launch from California, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft is now on a voyage of some six months to Mars to study the deep interior of the red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3197",
        "date": "2017-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/16/science-and-medicine-leaders-say-trump-budget-would-be-dire-for-u-s/",
        "text": "President Trump's budget blueprint calls for massive cuts to federally funded research. The leaders of the scientific and medical establishment woke up to that startling news Thursday morning and quickly fired off statements of protest and alarm. This budget, they collectively warned, threatens America's pre-eminence in science and technology.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThis is not a budget that\u2019s designed to make America first,\u201d Rush Holt, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told The Washington Post. His organization issued a statement\u00a0warning that the cuts, if implemented, would \u201ccripple the science and technology enterprise.\u201d In the interview with The Post, Holt said the Trump budget blueprint is only the first step in the budgetary process and that, historically, science and medicine have enjoyed bipartisan support from appropriators on the Hill. But this was a rough morning for some people, he said. Holt pointed to the administration's proposal to eliminate completely the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which does research on batteries, metals, electrical grids, etc.\u201cThey woke up to a shock this morning. Here\u2019s an organization that thought they were doing very well in what they were designed to do and what the country needs \u2014 doing pre-commercialization, far-reaching, imaginative research. And now they\u2019re told to close their operation,\u201d Holt said.Trump budget would create seismic disruption in medical and scientific researchOther science organizations are similarly alarmed. The statement Thursday morning from Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, warns of what a jaundiced observer might call the Acronymageddon: \u201cThe cuts to federal agencies such as DOE, EPA, NOAA, NSF, USGS, and programs within NASA, will put the safety and well-being of millions of families and companies at risk.\u201d She goes on:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe are disheartened and significantly concerned by the president\u2019s budget proposal, which clearly devalues science and research.Investment in Earth and space science has given us better satellite data for our military, more accurate forecasting that protects the public from natural hazards, and improved our understanding of the effects of a changing climate on agricultural, ecosystems, and human health. Without the critical data and information this research provides, who will farmers turn to when they need help managing their crops? Who will the Pentagon turn to when they need information to support effective troop movements? Who will families turn to when a hurricane or tornado threatens their lives and livelihoods?Glynda Becker, president of the Science Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for federal funding for public and private universities, issued a statement saying that China, South Korea and India are aggressively investing in research and development and that the Trump budget could imperil U.S. leadership in science:\u201cSince World War II, America\u2019s commitment to scientific breakthroughs has been a continual driver of U.S. economic growth. The personal computer, the Internet, smartphones are all based on research that had its beginnings in labs and centers funded in part by the federal government. Likewise, the biomedical revolution with its advancement of disease-fighting vaccines and lifesaving drugs and the advance of diagnostic tools such as the MRI would not have occurred without federal support of collaborative research. And, most of the technologies that have made our men and women in uniform the world\u2019s most effective fighting force, all had their start and ongoing improvements in federally funded scientific research.\u201dFrances M. Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, said in a statement to The Post that the Trump budget would have life-or-death consequences:The President's proposed budget will set back science and health by decades. It will\u00a0destroy the progress that has been made. We are not just talking numbers. Lives depend on continuing this nation's level of funding for research into biomedical funding and technologies. We need to build on the billions that have been invested to date to save lives, not go back to the dark ages. This is frightening.Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Chief Executive Officer of the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation, said in a written statement that her organization is \u201cdeeply troubled\u201d by the Trump budget plan, which includes severe cuts to foreign aid as well as the elimination of an NIH foundation that focuses on international health. She said American investments overseas have helped prevent the deaths of 122 million children and cut extreme poverty in half.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEmpowering people to lead healthy, productive lives creates more stable societies, which are critical to our national security.\u00a0In the United States, we must continue to focus on expanding access to education and economic opportunity. The proposed cuts will ultimately make America, and the world, less prosperous and less safe,\u201d she wrote.President Trump made lofty promises during his campaign, but parts of his spending proposal seem to contradict some of those pledges. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post)A spokesman for NIH, which would lose nearly a fifth of its funding under the Trump budget, said NIH would not be issuing any comment. NASA would take only a small top-line hit under the Trump budget, and the agency's acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, issued a statement Thursday, saying, \u201cThis is a positive budget overall for NASA.\u201dBut Phil Larson, a former Obama White House staffer who worked on space policy, and who now is at the University of Colorado, noted that the Trump budget kills four NASA Earth Science missions. One of those, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), is already almost 1 million miles from Earth, between Earth and the sun, from which perch it monitors solar storms as well as climate change on our planet. The satellite concept was first proposed in the 1990s, and was promoted by Vice President Al Gore, who liked the idea of a camera providing\u00a0real-time images of the Earth. Critics called it the GoreSat, and more than a decade passed before the program was finally up and running. The satellite launched in 2015.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCutting budget for science missions that are already in space and just beginning their work is quite baffling. The hard and costly part was getting them up there. Why turn them off early?\u201d Larson wrote in an email to The Post.How to contact Washington Post reporters covering federal agenciesThe Trump budget had good news for planetary science, with an uptick in funding and a green light for an ambitious NASA flagship mission that would send a robotic spacecraft to orbit Jupiter's moon Europa. But Joel Parriott, a policy analyst for the American Astronomical Society, said in an email to The Post that the science community should be united in the coming budget battles and avoid internecine conflicts: \u201cWe need to stand together in advocating for the critical role that all areas of science play in our nation\u2019s economic prosperity and national security.\u201dEchoing that is Michael Eisen, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley who is planning to run for Senate in 2018. He told The Post that Trump\u2019s proposed NIH cuts would \u201ccripple the whole biomedical enterprise.\u201d But he said Congress usually supports biomedical research. More vulnerable, he said, are programs that protect the environment and those that help the poor and needy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s very unlikely they\u2019re going to start attacking science by starting to attack biomedical science because everybody wants cures for diseases,\u201d Eisen said. \u201cStrategically, what they\u2019re doing is throwing out so many devastating cuts they\u2019re forcing everyone into fighting for scraps. I hope it doesn\u2019t turn into NIH vs. NSF, or EPA vs NOAA.\u201dEllen Williams, a University of Maryland physics professor who served as director of ARPA-E for the last two years of the Obama Administration, noted that the Trump budget is modeled on a blueprint put out a year ago by the conservative Heritage Foundation. That Heritage budget listed ARPA-E as one of the government agencies that should be terminated in an effort to bring down federal deficits and ensure that government activities do not crowd out private investment. But Williams said her former agency, founded under President George W. Bush, sticks to projects that the private sector won't bankroll.\u201cARPA-E is an innovation agency. Its funding is for high risk, potentially high payoff technologies that are too early-stage for the private sector to invest in,\u201d she said. \u201cThe proposal to kill the agency is very misguided. For an administration that says it wants economic growth, prosperity, new jobs, killing ARPA-E is absolutely the wrong thing to do.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKatie Tubb, a policy analyst for energy and environment at the Heritage Foundation, said the Heritage and Trump budgets are similar in principle and reflect a belief that government funding of research can crowd out private funding and be harmful to innovation over time.\u201cI would question why is it the role of the federal government to be funding science across the board. The private sector plays a huge role in supporting science,\" Tubb said. \"When the federal government funds particular projects, there\u2019s a dozen others that they\u2019re not funding. That, in the long run, is harmful for innovation. Yes, this is going to be painful for certain sciences, certain spheres of knowledge \u2013 for example, renewable energy \u2013 but in the long run I think it's healthier for the scientific community in general.\u201dCarolyn Johnson contributed to this report. Proposed cuts at NIH, DOE and EPA shock and alarm top doctors and scientists. Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S.",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3198",
        "date": "2017-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/16/science-and-medicine-leaders-say-trump-budget-would-be-dire-for-u-s/",
        "text": "President Trump's budget blueprint calls for massive cuts to federally funded research. The leaders of the scientific and medical establishment woke up to that startling news Thursday morning and quickly fired off statements of protest and alarm. This budget, they collectively warned, threatens America's pre-eminence in science and technology.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThis is not a budget that\u2019s designed to make America first,\u201d Rush Holt, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told The Washington Post. His organization issued a statement\u00a0warning that the cuts, if implemented, would \u201ccripple the science and technology enterprise.\u201d In the interview with The Post, Holt said the Trump budget blueprint is only the first step in the budgetary process and that, historically, science and medicine have enjoyed bipartisan support from appropriators on the Hill. But this was a rough morning for some people, he said. Holt pointed to the administration's proposal to eliminate completely the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which does research on batteries, metals, electrical grids, etc.\u201cThey woke up to a shock this morning. Here\u2019s an organization that thought they were doing very well in what they were designed to do and what the country needs \u2014 doing pre-commercialization, far-reaching, imaginative research. And now they\u2019re told to close their operation,\u201d Holt said.Trump budget would create seismic disruption in medical and scientific researchOther science organizations are similarly alarmed. The statement Thursday morning from Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, warns of what a jaundiced observer might call the Acronymageddon: \u201cThe cuts to federal agencies such as DOE, EPA, NOAA, NSF, USGS, and programs within NASA, will put the safety and well-being of millions of families and companies at risk.\u201d She goes on:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe are disheartened and significantly concerned by the president\u2019s budget proposal, which clearly devalues science and research.Investment in Earth and space science has given us better satellite data for our military, more accurate forecasting that protects the public from natural hazards, and improved our understanding of the effects of a changing climate on agricultural, ecosystems, and human health. Without the critical data and information this research provides, who will farmers turn to when they need help managing their crops? Who will the Pentagon turn to when they need information to support effective troop movements? Who will families turn to when a hurricane or tornado threatens their lives and livelihoods?Glynda Becker, president of the Science Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for federal funding for public and private universities, issued a statement saying that China, South Korea and India are aggressively investing in research and development and that the Trump budget could imperil U.S. leadership in science:\u201cSince World War II, America\u2019s commitment to scientific breakthroughs has been a continual driver of U.S. economic growth. The personal computer, the Internet, smartphones are all based on research that had its beginnings in labs and centers funded in part by the federal government. Likewise, the biomedical revolution with its advancement of disease-fighting vaccines and lifesaving drugs and the advance of diagnostic tools such as the MRI would not have occurred without federal support of collaborative research. And, most of the technologies that have made our men and women in uniform the world\u2019s most effective fighting force, all had their start and ongoing improvements in federally funded scientific research.\u201dFrances M. Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, said in a statement to The Post that the Trump budget would have life-or-death consequences:The President's proposed budget will set back science and health by decades. It will\u00a0destroy the progress that has been made. We are not just talking numbers. Lives depend on continuing this nation's level of funding for research into biomedical funding and technologies. We need to build on the billions that have been invested to date to save lives, not go back to the dark ages. This is frightening.Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Chief Executive Officer of the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation, said in a written statement that her organization is \u201cdeeply troubled\u201d by the Trump budget plan, which includes severe cuts to foreign aid as well as the elimination of an NIH foundation that focuses on international health. She said American investments overseas have helped prevent the deaths of 122 million children and cut extreme poverty in half.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEmpowering people to lead healthy, productive lives creates more stable societies, which are critical to our national security.\u00a0In the United States, we must continue to focus on expanding access to education and economic opportunity. The proposed cuts will ultimately make America, and the world, less prosperous and less safe,\u201d she wrote.President Trump made lofty promises during his campaign, but parts of his spending proposal seem to contradict some of those pledges. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post)A spokesman for NIH, which would lose nearly a fifth of its funding under the Trump budget, said NIH would not be issuing any comment. NASA would take only a small top-line hit under the Trump budget, and the agency's acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, issued a statement Thursday, saying, \u201cThis is a positive budget overall for NASA.\u201dBut Phil Larson, a former Obama White House staffer who worked on space policy, and who now is at the University of Colorado, noted that the Trump budget kills four NASA Earth Science missions. One of those, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), is already almost 1 million miles from Earth, between Earth and the sun, from which perch it monitors solar storms as well as climate change on our planet. The satellite concept was first proposed in the 1990s, and was promoted by Vice President Al Gore, who liked the idea of a camera providing\u00a0real-time images of the Earth. Critics called it the GoreSat, and more than a decade passed before the program was finally up and running. The satellite launched in 2015.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCutting budget for science missions that are already in space and just beginning their work is quite baffling. The hard and costly part was getting them up there. Why turn them off early?\u201d Larson wrote in an email to The Post.How to contact Washington Post reporters covering federal agenciesThe Trump budget had good news for planetary science, with an uptick in funding and a green light for an ambitious NASA flagship mission that would send a robotic spacecraft to orbit Jupiter's moon Europa. But Joel Parriott, a policy analyst for the American Astronomical Society, said in an email to The Post that the science community should be united in the coming budget battles and avoid internecine conflicts: \u201cWe need to stand together in advocating for the critical role that all areas of science play in our nation\u2019s economic prosperity and national security.\u201dEchoing that is Michael Eisen, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley who is planning to run for Senate in 2018. He told The Post that Trump\u2019s proposed NIH cuts would \u201ccripple the whole biomedical enterprise.\u201d But he said Congress usually supports biomedical research. More vulnerable, he said, are programs that protect the environment and those that help the poor and needy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s very unlikely they\u2019re going to start attacking science by starting to attack biomedical science because everybody wants cures for diseases,\u201d Eisen said. \u201cStrategically, what they\u2019re doing is throwing out so many devastating cuts they\u2019re forcing everyone into fighting for scraps. I hope it doesn\u2019t turn into NIH vs. NSF, or EPA vs NOAA.\u201dEllen Williams, a University of Maryland physics professor who served as director of ARPA-E for the last two years of the Obama Administration, noted that the Trump budget is modeled on a blueprint put out a year ago by the conservative Heritage Foundation. That Heritage budget listed ARPA-E as one of the government agencies that should be terminated in an effort to bring down federal deficits and ensure that government activities do not crowd out private investment. But Williams said her former agency, founded under President George W. Bush, sticks to projects that the private sector won't bankroll.\u201cARPA-E is an innovation agency. Its funding is for high risk, potentially high payoff technologies that are too early-stage for the private sector to invest in,\u201d she said. \u201cThe proposal to kill the agency is very misguided. For an administration that says it wants economic growth, prosperity, new jobs, killing ARPA-E is absolutely the wrong thing to do.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKatie Tubb, a policy analyst for energy and environment at the Heritage Foundation, said the Heritage and Trump budgets are similar in principle and reflect a belief that government funding of research can crowd out private funding and be harmful to innovation over time.\u201cI would question why is it the role of the federal government to be funding science across the board. The private sector plays a huge role in supporting science,\" Tubb said. \"When the federal government funds particular projects, there\u2019s a dozen others that they\u2019re not funding. That, in the long run, is harmful for innovation. Yes, this is going to be painful for certain sciences, certain spheres of knowledge \u2013 for example, renewable energy \u2013 but in the long run I think it's healthier for the scientific community in general.\u201dCarolyn Johnson contributed to this report. Proposed cuts at NIH, DOE and EPA shock and alarm top doctors and scientists. Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S.",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3199",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/15/the-cassini-spacecraft-just-crashed-into-saturn/",
        "text": "PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 NASA scientists just received their last message from the Cassini spacecraft, which plunged into Saturn early Friday morning. Those final bits of data signal the end of one of the most successful planetary science missions in history.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe signal from the spacecraft is gone and within the next 45 seconds so will be the spacecraft,\u201d program manager Earl Maize reported from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just after 4:55 a.m. local time. \u201cThis has been an incredible mission, an incredible spacecraft, and you're all an incredible team.\u201d One of the last pieces of data captured by Cassini was an infrared image of the place into which it took its final plunge. The image, taken 15 hours before the spacecraft's demise, reveals a spot on Saturn's dark side just north of the planet's equator where the spacecraft disintegrated shortly after losing contact with Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCassini was the first probe to orbit Saturn. Built and operated at JPL, it was launched in 1997 and inserted into orbit in 2004. The spacecraft revealed the structure of Saturn's rings and, by delivering the Huygens probe to the moon Titan, executed the first landing of a spacecraft in the outer solar system. It also exposed two moons \u2014 Titan, a land of methane lakes, and Enceladus, which has jets of water streaming from its southern pole \u2014 as prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth.After 13 years in orbit, Cassini leaves researchers with still more mysteries to ponder: They don't know the length of the Saturn day or understand the quirks of its magnetic field. And it will fall to a future mission to discover whether one of Saturn's potentially habitable moons could truly be home to alien life.Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.\u201cMost of what we have in science textbooks about Saturn comes from Cassini,\u201d JPL Director Mike Watkins said. \u201cThe discoveries are so compelling, we have to go back.\u201dNASA scientists received their last message from the Cassini spacecraft, before it plunged into Saturn on Sept. 15. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)It's precisely because of its successes that Cassini had to die. Once the spacecraft ran out of fuel, NASA would not risk letting it remain aloft, where it might be knocked into Titan or Enceladus. In April, Cassini began 22 close-in orbits that took it between and behind Saturn's rings. Earlier this week, NASA flew Cassini past Titan one last time, taking advantage of the moon's gravitational pull to slingshot the spacecraft toward Saturn.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat \u201cgoodbye kiss\u201d set Cassini on its final, fatal course. Just after 3:30 a.m. California time on Friday, Cassini entered Saturn's atmosphere, plummeting at a pace of about 77,000 miles per hour. For a few minutes, the spacecraft's thrusters fought to keep its high-gain antenna pointed toward Earth, so it could continue to send back real-time data from this uncharted territory.Q&A: NASA expert discusses Cassini's death spiral into SaturnDuring its last moments, the spacecraft's instruments sampled the molecules in the planet's atmosphere \u2014 information that scientists will use to understand the planet's formation and composition. It also collected data that researchers hope will help them solve the mystery of the speed of Saturn's rotation.NASA was able to maintain a link with the spacecraft 30 seconds longer than the team anticipated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThose last few seconds were our first taste of the atmosphere of Saturn,\u201d Watkins said. \u201cWho knows how many PhD theses are in that data?\u201dSeen against the vastness of space, NASA's spacecraft Cassini might look small. Here's a look at its actual dimensions. You might be surprised at how massive it actually is. (William Neff, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)Minutes later Cassini vaporized, just a small flash of light streaking across an alien sky. But because Saturn is so distant, Cassini's final signals didn't reach Earth until 83 minutes after the spacecraft was gone.AdvertisementThat last communication was displayed as a green spike of data on a screen above mission control. The spike shrank, then flickered, then flatlined.Cassini\u2019s most impressive feat: Dropping a moon lander on Titan\u201cWe call loss of signal,\u201d said spacecraft operations manager Julie Webster at 4:55 a.m. local time.There was utter silence at mission control. And then Maize spoke: \u201cI'm going to call this the end of mission. Project manager, off the net.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe room burst into applause. Maize immediately stood, strode over to Webster, and gave her a hug.\u201cI'm almost without words,\u201d Webster said at a news conference an hour later. She has worked on the Cassini mission for more than two decades and is among the few people at NASA who ventured inside the craft as it was being built.\u201cA perfect spacecraft,\u201d she said, her voice almost cracking with emotion. \u201cIt did exactly what it was supposed to do.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cEven better,\u201d chimed in Project Scientist Linda Spilker.\u201cEven better,\u201d Webster agreed. \u201cExactly as it always did.\u201dIn a JPL auditorium minutes after the end, science planner Jo Pitesky gazed up at the video from mission control with a slightly stricken look on her face.Story continues below advertisement\u201cShe's us,\u201d said Pitesky, who has worked on Cassini's operations team since 2001. \u201cWe can't go there ourselves, so we build a spacecraft and load it up with instruments, and then we put on our hopes and desires and we send them there.\u201dThanks to its scientific successes, stunning images, and the sad circumstances of its demise, Cassini is viewed with deep affection by NASA researchers and space enthusiasts alike. Some of the features in Saturn's rings are named for team members' pets; one of the engineers named his daughter Phoebe for one of Saturn's moons.AdvertisementMany members of the Cassini team refer to the spacecraft as a \u201cshe\u201d and they ascribe \u201cher\u201d human traits: curiosity, intelligence, determination, valor.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's like the loss of a friend,\u201d said Spilker, who has worked on the mission since its inception in the late 1980s.The start of the grand finale in April set off a months-long period of protracted public mourning for the spacecraft. The nonprofit Planetary Society filmed a short operatic tribute to the mission. Fans on Twitter posted silly cartoons and tearful eulogies. Maize told the story of a 6-year-old boy from Florida who sent a letter to JPL inviting staff to his end-of-mission party.\u201cIt's very heartwarming,\u201d he said. \u201cIt's not science in the ivory tower. It's for humanity.\u201dThe Post's Sarah Kaplan celebrates the accomplishments of NASA's Cassini spacecraft with a mock eulogy. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)The Cassini Virtual Singers \u2014 a group of JPL employees who perform Cassini-themed parodies of popular music \u2014 rewrote the lyrics to \u201cSeasons of Love,\u201d a ballad from the musical \u201cRent.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe truths that we learned, and the things that we tried,\u201d they crooned at a meeting of the Project Science Group this week. \u201cThe fuel that we burned. And the way that she'll die.\u201dTrina Ray, a senior science systems engineer for Cassini and founding member of the singing group, handed out handkerchiefs to her colleagues so they could mop up their inevitable tears.But the mood was all business at mission control early Friday. Conversations about the spacecraft's status were conducted in the same serious tones the flight team has always used. The only difference was a clock displayed above one of the room's main monitors, counting down the minutes until the signal from the spacecraft was lost.Story continues below advertisementSo many current and former Cassini team members have flocked to Pasadena for the end of the mission there wasn't room for them at JPL. Instead, a viewing party was arranged on the campus of nearby Caltech.AdvertisementIn the predawn dimness, hundreds of bleary-eyed scientists gathered to watch the live stream from mission control. Three jumbotrons had been set up on a lawn outside the auditorium; they played a slickly produced NASA video showing some of Cassini's greatest images. The glow of the screens and the soundtrack's dramatic drumbeat made the proceedings even more intense.Sean Hsu, a researcher at the University of Colorado\u00a0at Boulder who works on Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyzer, flew out with his wife and two children to attend. When he explained to 5-year-old Liese why they were waking up so early to celebrate a spacecraft, the\u00a0little girl started to cry.Hsu feels mournful, too.\u201cIt has been a tremendous mission to be a part of,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has been a lot of new science, a lot of new data, and suddenly there will be no more data.\u201dWith the loss of Cassini, the space around Saturn has gone dark. There are no missions in progress to return to the ringed planet.AdvertisementBut Cassini's revelations at Titan and Enceladus inspired NASA last year to add the moons to its call-out for proposals for the New Frontiers program \u2014 a group of medium-size missions that includes the New Horizons flyby of Pluto and the Juno orbiter around Jupiter.Spilker is co-investigator on a New Frontiers proposal to study Enceladus, a tiny body that harbors a subsurface ocean and boasts jets of water spouting from cracks in its icy surface. She called Cassini's revelations about this moon \u201cone of the most astonishing discoveries for planetary science \u2026 that has really changed our thinking about where to look for life.\u201dSpilker would like to return to Saturn and sample the Enceladus plumes for large organic molecules that could be signs of biological activity. Others have proposed similar missions to test for \u201cbiosignatures\u201d in Titan's atmosphere.If and when a spacecraft is sent back to Saturn, it will arrive at a place ever so slightly touched by humans. Because NASA chose to end Cassini's life by plunging it into the planet, \u201cits bits and pieces are now one with Saturn itself,\u201d Spilker said. \u201cSo when I look up at Saturn in the future, I'll know \u2026 Cassini is there too.\u201dRead more:How to steer a massive spacecraft into SaturnCassini's Saturn voyage came to an epic end. Here's why scientists had to crash it into the massive planetSee the most moving photo from the Cassini missionIt rains solid diamonds on Uranus and NeptuneThe stunning underwater picture this photographer wishes \u2018didn\u2019t exist\u2019The fanged, faceless sea creature that washed ashore during Harvey has been identifiedHospital staffers took photos of a patient\u2019s genitals \u2014 and the foreign object lodged there\u201820 seconds of burning\u2019: Friends partly blinded after watching solar eclipse warn of dangers The epic end to the mission that revolutionized how scientists see the ringed planet. The Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3200",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/15/the-cassini-spacecraft-just-crashed-into-saturn/",
        "text": "PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 NASA scientists just received their last message from the Cassini spacecraft, which plunged into Saturn early Friday morning. Those final bits of data signal the end of one of the most successful planetary science missions in history.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe signal from the spacecraft is gone and within the next 45 seconds so will be the spacecraft,\u201d program manager Earl Maize reported from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just after 4:55 a.m. local time. \u201cThis has been an incredible mission, an incredible spacecraft, and you're all an incredible team.\u201d One of the last pieces of data captured by Cassini was an infrared image of the place into which it took its final plunge. The image, taken 15 hours before the spacecraft's demise, reveals a spot on Saturn's dark side just north of the planet's equator where the spacecraft disintegrated shortly after losing contact with Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCassini was the first probe to orbit Saturn. Built and operated at JPL, it was launched in 1997 and inserted into orbit in 2004. The spacecraft revealed the structure of Saturn's rings and, by delivering the Huygens probe to the moon Titan, executed the first landing of a spacecraft in the outer solar system. It also exposed two moons \u2014 Titan, a land of methane lakes, and Enceladus, which has jets of water streaming from its southern pole \u2014 as prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth.After 13 years in orbit, Cassini leaves researchers with still more mysteries to ponder: They don't know the length of the Saturn day or understand the quirks of its magnetic field. And it will fall to a future mission to discover whether one of Saturn's potentially habitable moons could truly be home to alien life.Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.\u201cMost of what we have in science textbooks about Saturn comes from Cassini,\u201d JPL Director Mike Watkins said. \u201cThe discoveries are so compelling, we have to go back.\u201dNASA scientists received their last message from the Cassini spacecraft, before it plunged into Saturn on Sept. 15. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)It's precisely because of its successes that Cassini had to die. Once the spacecraft ran out of fuel, NASA would not risk letting it remain aloft, where it might be knocked into Titan or Enceladus. In April, Cassini began 22 close-in orbits that took it between and behind Saturn's rings. Earlier this week, NASA flew Cassini past Titan one last time, taking advantage of the moon's gravitational pull to slingshot the spacecraft toward Saturn.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat \u201cgoodbye kiss\u201d set Cassini on its final, fatal course. Just after 3:30 a.m. California time on Friday, Cassini entered Saturn's atmosphere, plummeting at a pace of about 77,000 miles per hour. For a few minutes, the spacecraft's thrusters fought to keep its high-gain antenna pointed toward Earth, so it could continue to send back real-time data from this uncharted territory.Q&A: NASA expert discusses Cassini's death spiral into SaturnDuring its last moments, the spacecraft's instruments sampled the molecules in the planet's atmosphere \u2014 information that scientists will use to understand the planet's formation and composition. It also collected data that researchers hope will help them solve the mystery of the speed of Saturn's rotation.NASA was able to maintain a link with the spacecraft 30 seconds longer than the team anticipated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThose last few seconds were our first taste of the atmosphere of Saturn,\u201d Watkins said. \u201cWho knows how many PhD theses are in that data?\u201dSeen against the vastness of space, NASA's spacecraft Cassini might look small. Here's a look at its actual dimensions. You might be surprised at how massive it actually is. (William Neff, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)Minutes later Cassini vaporized, just a small flash of light streaking across an alien sky. But because Saturn is so distant, Cassini's final signals didn't reach Earth until 83 minutes after the spacecraft was gone.AdvertisementThat last communication was displayed as a green spike of data on a screen above mission control. The spike shrank, then flickered, then flatlined.Cassini\u2019s most impressive feat: Dropping a moon lander on Titan\u201cWe call loss of signal,\u201d said spacecraft operations manager Julie Webster at 4:55 a.m. local time.There was utter silence at mission control. And then Maize spoke: \u201cI'm going to call this the end of mission. Project manager, off the net.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe room burst into applause. Maize immediately stood, strode over to Webster, and gave her a hug.\u201cI'm almost without words,\u201d Webster said at a news conference an hour later. She has worked on the Cassini mission for more than two decades and is among the few people at NASA who ventured inside the craft as it was being built.\u201cA perfect spacecraft,\u201d she said, her voice almost cracking with emotion. \u201cIt did exactly what it was supposed to do.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cEven better,\u201d chimed in Project Scientist Linda Spilker.\u201cEven better,\u201d Webster agreed. \u201cExactly as it always did.\u201dIn a JPL auditorium minutes after the end, science planner Jo Pitesky gazed up at the video from mission control with a slightly stricken look on her face.Story continues below advertisement\u201cShe's us,\u201d said Pitesky, who has worked on Cassini's operations team since 2001. \u201cWe can't go there ourselves, so we build a spacecraft and load it up with instruments, and then we put on our hopes and desires and we send them there.\u201dThanks to its scientific successes, stunning images, and the sad circumstances of its demise, Cassini is viewed with deep affection by NASA researchers and space enthusiasts alike. Some of the features in Saturn's rings are named for team members' pets; one of the engineers named his daughter Phoebe for one of Saturn's moons.AdvertisementMany members of the Cassini team refer to the spacecraft as a \u201cshe\u201d and they ascribe \u201cher\u201d human traits: curiosity, intelligence, determination, valor.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's like the loss of a friend,\u201d said Spilker, who has worked on the mission since its inception in the late 1980s.The start of the grand finale in April set off a months-long period of protracted public mourning for the spacecraft. The nonprofit Planetary Society filmed a short operatic tribute to the mission. Fans on Twitter posted silly cartoons and tearful eulogies. Maize told the story of a 6-year-old boy from Florida who sent a letter to JPL inviting staff to his end-of-mission party.\u201cIt's very heartwarming,\u201d he said. \u201cIt's not science in the ivory tower. It's for humanity.\u201dThe Post's Sarah Kaplan celebrates the accomplishments of NASA's Cassini spacecraft with a mock eulogy. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)The Cassini Virtual Singers \u2014 a group of JPL employees who perform Cassini-themed parodies of popular music \u2014 rewrote the lyrics to \u201cSeasons of Love,\u201d a ballad from the musical \u201cRent.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe truths that we learned, and the things that we tried,\u201d they crooned at a meeting of the Project Science Group this week. \u201cThe fuel that we burned. And the way that she'll die.\u201dTrina Ray, a senior science systems engineer for Cassini and founding member of the singing group, handed out handkerchiefs to her colleagues so they could mop up their inevitable tears.But the mood was all business at mission control early Friday. Conversations about the spacecraft's status were conducted in the same serious tones the flight team has always used. The only difference was a clock displayed above one of the room's main monitors, counting down the minutes until the signal from the spacecraft was lost.Story continues below advertisementSo many current and former Cassini team members have flocked to Pasadena for the end of the mission there wasn't room for them at JPL. Instead, a viewing party was arranged on the campus of nearby Caltech.AdvertisementIn the predawn dimness, hundreds of bleary-eyed scientists gathered to watch the live stream from mission control. Three jumbotrons had been set up on a lawn outside the auditorium; they played a slickly produced NASA video showing some of Cassini's greatest images. The glow of the screens and the soundtrack's dramatic drumbeat made the proceedings even more intense.Sean Hsu, a researcher at the University of Colorado\u00a0at Boulder who works on Cassini's Cosmic Dust Analyzer, flew out with his wife and two children to attend. When he explained to 5-year-old Liese why they were waking up so early to celebrate a spacecraft, the\u00a0little girl started to cry.Hsu feels mournful, too.\u201cIt has been a tremendous mission to be a part of,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has been a lot of new science, a lot of new data, and suddenly there will be no more data.\u201dWith the loss of Cassini, the space around Saturn has gone dark. There are no missions in progress to return to the ringed planet.AdvertisementBut Cassini's revelations at Titan and Enceladus inspired NASA last year to add the moons to its call-out for proposals for the New Frontiers program \u2014 a group of medium-size missions that includes the New Horizons flyby of Pluto and the Juno orbiter around Jupiter.Spilker is co-investigator on a New Frontiers proposal to study Enceladus, a tiny body that harbors a subsurface ocean and boasts jets of water spouting from cracks in its icy surface. She called Cassini's revelations about this moon \u201cone of the most astonishing discoveries for planetary science \u2026 that has really changed our thinking about where to look for life.\u201dSpilker would like to return to Saturn and sample the Enceladus plumes for large organic molecules that could be signs of biological activity. Others have proposed similar missions to test for \u201cbiosignatures\u201d in Titan's atmosphere.If and when a spacecraft is sent back to Saturn, it will arrive at a place ever so slightly touched by humans. Because NASA chose to end Cassini's life by plunging it into the planet, \u201cits bits and pieces are now one with Saturn itself,\u201d Spilker said. \u201cSo when I look up at Saturn in the future, I'll know \u2026 Cassini is there too.\u201dRead more:How to steer a massive spacecraft into SaturnCassini's Saturn voyage came to an epic end. Here's why scientists had to crash it into the massive planetSee the most moving photo from the Cassini missionIt rains solid diamonds on Uranus and NeptuneThe stunning underwater picture this photographer wishes \u2018didn\u2019t exist\u2019The fanged, faceless sea creature that washed ashore during Harvey has been identifiedHospital staffers took photos of a patient\u2019s genitals \u2014 and the foreign object lodged there\u201820 seconds of burning\u2019: Friends partly blinded after watching solar eclipse warn of dangers The epic end to the mission that revolutionized how scientists see the ringed planet. The Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3201",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/14/for-this-nasa-scientist-cassini-was-the-mission-of-a-lifetime-now-she-must-say-goodbye/",
        "text": "PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 Linda Spilker checks the clock: 12:04 p.m. As the NASA scientist sits in this crowded conference room on the Caltech campus, the aging Saturn orbiter Cassini is flying past the moon Titan for a final time. The maneuver\u00a0on Monday will give Cassini the gravitational tug needed to sling it straight into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere, where it will vaporize above roiling clouds of dust and gas. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightQ&A: What has Cassini's trip around Saturn unveiled? Your questions answered by NASA expert.There\u2019s no turning back now. Spilker\u2019s life\u2019s work is officially doomed.That is the nature of being a planetary scientist. No mission lasts forever. Every spacecraft eventually runs out of fuel. Spilker knew this when she joined the Cassini team half a lifetime ago. Later, as head scientist, she was part of the group that devised the mission\u2019s \u201cgrand finale,\u201d which has sent Cassini on dizzying dives between Saturn and its rings and ends Friday with the fatal plunge.The Post's Sarah Kaplan celebrates the accomplishments of NASA's Cassini spacecraft with a mock eulogy. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)\u201cI\u2019m trying to be stoic,\u201d Spilker says. The mission could have been prolonged by moving the probe into a safer, more distant orbit. But that isn\u2019t Spilker\u2019s style \u2014 or Cassini\u2019s. After 13 years at Saturn, it seemed only fitting to send the spacecraft out \u201cin a blaze of glory,\u201d the scientist says. Use that last bit of fuel to see what no one has seen before. Leave behind one more discovery for scientists to puzzle over after it\u2019s gone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpilker stands, and raises a plastic cocktail glass of sparkling apple juice (Caltech doesn\u2019t allow alcohol in school buildings) to a room of fellow scientists who have come to feel like family.Cassini\u2019s most impressive feat: Dropping a moon lander on Titan\u201cTitan has given Cassini that last push \u2014 a goodbye kiss. Its fate is sealed,\u201d she announces. \u201cA toast to a great spacecraft, a great mission.\u201dThe assembled researchers lift their glasses of juice and chorus their appreciation. A few are close to tears. After Cassini disintegrates, this team will be disbanded, and NASA\u2019s view of Saturn will go dark. For the moment, the space agency has no plans to return to the ringed planet.But Spilker and a young protegee have submitted a proposal for a new mission to the Saturnian system, which would investigate one of Cassini\u2019s most significant finds: jets of water on the moon Enceladus that could contain traces of alien life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis isn\u2019t a funeral, Spilker constantly reminds her colleagues \u2014 and herself. It\u2019s more like a graduation: \u201cBoth an end and a beginning.\u201dShe holds onto this idea as the mission\u2019s final minutes tick away. Cassini\u2019s work isn\u2019t over. It\u2019s just turning into something new.Stunning new NASA video depicts Cassini's finale (NASA/JPL-Caltech)Before Cassini, before Spilker, before NASA, there was Saturn. There has always been Saturn \u2014 that gold and glowing gas giant, encircled by shimmering rings of ice and dust. It was the most distant of the planets visible to ancient astronomers, who thought they could divine the secrets of existence from the behavior of lights in the skies. They called Saturn and its fellows \u201cplanetes,\u201d or \u201cwanderers,\u201d for the way they roamed the heavens against the steady background of stars.Story continues below advertisementIt wasn\u2019t until the Copernican Revolution of the 17th century that scientists realized the planets are actually bodies orbiting the sun and that Earth is among them, another wanderer. Then Galileo became the first to reveal the planet\u2019s rings with a telescope, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens spotted the largest of its moons, Italian scientist Giovanni Cassini (the spacecraft's namesake) detected several more satellites. Saturn became a world unto itself \u2014 not simply a spot in the sky but a place to explore.AdvertisementAs a child, gazing into the sky with her two-inch refractor telescope, Spilker was captivated. When she graduated from college in 1977, just before NASA\u2019s twin Voyager probes launched on a solar system tour that would send them past Saturn, she sought a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory studying the planet\u2019s rings.The data from Voyager was printed on rolls of paper so long Spilker had to take them into a hallway to study them. She recalls walking among those sheets as a 21-year-old, tracing the rippling pattern of rings a billion miles away and getting the feeling that she was stepping around Saturn itself.After the flyby, the Voyager probes sailed on to more distant parts of the solar system. And life on Earth marched forward. Spilker got married, got her PhD, had children. Many of her colleagues did the same.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA whole generation of JPL kids was born in that window,\u201d Spilker says. They would all grow up alongside one another and alongside the new mission Spilker was helping to develop. A flagship voyage that would, for the first time, be devoted entirely to Saturn.It took nearly a decade to get Cassini approved and built. Budget constraints required the team to scale back the spacecraft and its ambitions: a rotating platform that would make it easier to conduct observations was scrapped; an instrument that can \u201ctaste\u201d molecules was downsized.As the pieces came together in the cavernous \u201cclean room\u201d at JPL, Spilker made time each week to walk by and witness it. Someday soon this school bus-size contraption would be circling another world. But for now, it was almost close enough to touch.Story continues below advertisementIn October 1997, Spilker stood on a lawn at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and watched Cassini streak into the velvet predawn sky. Launch is the most nerve-racking phase of any mission; when you set fire to a tank of rocket fuel beneath a billion-dollar spacecraft, so much can go wrong.But nothing did. Seven years later, Cassini\u2019s entrance into orbit around Saturn was similarly flawless.Advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s Cassini,\u201d Spilker says, with affection and pride. \u201cShe\u2019s very hard-working, very diligent. And curious. Extremely curious. In that way, she\u2019s an extension of what we are.\u201dOnce at Saturn, the discoveries commenced at a rapid clip. The Huygens craft, provided by the European Space Agency, touched down on Titan \u2014 humanity\u2019s first landing in the outer solar system. Cassini revealed the composition of Saturn\u2019s rings and photographed the vast hexagonal storm at the planet\u2019s north pole. Each new batch of images kept Spilker at JPL late into the night; they were transporting. Looking at them, Spilker says, was as close as any human will ever get to being the first explorer at this new world.Story continues below advertisementPerhaps most astonishing of all was an image of the moon Enceladus backlit by the sun. For the first time, scientists saw that jets of water and ice were spewing out of cracks in the moon\u2019s frozen surface. Later surveys revealed that Enceladus harbors a vast subsurface ocean and important ingredients for life.AdvertisementCould alien organisms be swimming on that far-flung world? It looked increasingly possible.The problem was, Cassini wasn\u2019t built to be a life-finding mission. When it launched 20 years ago, such a goal seemed unimaginable. The molecular \u201ctaster\u201d that the team downsized to save money wasn\u2019t powerful enough to test for the long carbon chains that could be considered biological.Story continues below advertisementAnd with each passing year, Cassini was using up its fuel. If it stayed in orbit too long, NASA engineers would lose the ability to control the spacecraft. A passing moon or gravitational quirk might knock it off course and send it crashing into Enceladus, where it could contaminate the pristine \u2014 and perhaps inhabited? \u2014 landscape.So the \u201cgrand finale\u201d was set in motion. Cassini began its dives through the rings in April, each precipitous plunge bringing the craft closer to Saturn's storm clouds.AdvertisementMeanwhile, Cassini's human handlers started preparing themselves for the end.This week is the final meeting of Spilker's Project Science Group at which there's still new data to discuss. But it\u2019s also a chance for the team\u2019s few hundred members to collectively mourn. There are group stargazing sessions, group photos, group hugs. One of the engineers hands out purple handkerchiefs embroidered with the details of Cassini\u2019s mission. \u201cYou may need this,\u201d she tells Spilker.Story continues below advertisementPeople keep coming up to Spilker to shake her hand. \u201cCongratulations,\u201d they say, their voices thick with emotion. \u201cThank you.\u201dThe days are so hectic Spilker barely has time for her own feelings. Only at night does she stop to think. Thoughts like, \u201cThis is really happening.\u201d And, \u201cIt\u2019s been so long.\u201d And, \u201cMaybe I am getting old.\u201dAdvertisementShe thinks about Friday. Her daughters are traveling to Pasadena for those final moments \u2014 one of them will bring a daughter of her own.\u201cThey've been with, in a certain sense, with the Cassini mission their whole lives,\u201d she says, \u201cthe launch, Saturn orbital insertion, and now the end of Cassini.\u201dBut this is not really the end. With fellow Cassini scientist Morgan Cable, Spilker has developed a proposal to return to Enceladus and seek signs of life.\u201cI\u2019ve come full circle now,\u201d Spilker says. \u201cWorking on another new mission.\u201dShe and Cable will find out in December whether they get to move forward with their proposal. But even in the best-case scenario, it\u2019s unlikely Spilker will see the idea to fruition. At 62, she's contemplating retirement. If and when the Enceladus mission gets the go-ahead, Spilker will hand control to her younger counterpart.Cable is 35, the same age as Spilker when the Cassini mission was officially approved.Looking down into the same clean room where Cassini was built, Cable can picture the pieces of an Enceladus probe coming together. She can envision the spacecraft sailing through the moon\u2019s plumes, tasting for organic molecules, detecting something her predecessors only dreamed of.Like generations of astronomers before her, Cable seeks from Saturn the answers to humankind's biggest and oldest questions: Why are we here? Are we alone?\u201cDeep down, I think I always hoped that life exists out there somewhere, and I really hope that we find it in our lifetime,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of continuing to look, being persistent. Following the clues that missions like Cassini leave for us.\u201dShe, too, will be watching the mission\u2019s final moments Friday. Though she has worked on Cassini for only three years to Spilker's nearly 30, Cable shares her mentor\u2019s affection for the plucky space robot.\u201cAs a scientist, I always try to be empirical,\u201d she says. \u201cBut you get attached to the things you work on.\u201dAnd then her eyes fill with tears. \u201cCrap.\u201d She wipes her face and lets out a watery chuckle. \u201cSorry. This is going to happen a lot this week.\u201dShe can\u2019t help it. That is the nature of being human.The days until Cassini\u2019s demise turn into hours. On Thursday afternoon, the spacecraft will take its final images. Soon after, it will turn its antenna toward Earth, sending a steady pulse of radio waves about everything it senses as it plunges toward its demise.\u201cI see that signal like Cassini\u2019s heartbeat,\u201d Spilker says.Just past 3:30 California time on Friday morning, the spacecraft will cross the threshold into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere and burn up like a meteorite.But because Saturn is so distant, Cassini's final heartbeat won't reach Earth until 83 minutes after it's gone. When Spilker and her colleagues hear the last of their pioneering probe, it will be a whisper from a ghost: one final piece of insight from an alien planet, beckoning to whoever comes next.Read more:How to steer a massive spacecraft into SaturnNASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming successSee the most moving photo from the Cassini mission An emotional farewell to the spacecraft that revolutionized our view of Saturn.  Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3202",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/14/for-this-nasa-scientist-cassini-was-the-mission-of-a-lifetime-now-she-must-say-goodbye/",
        "text": "PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 Linda Spilker checks the clock: 12:04 p.m. As the NASA scientist sits in this crowded conference room on the Caltech campus, the aging Saturn orbiter Cassini is flying past the moon Titan for a final time. The maneuver\u00a0on Monday will give Cassini the gravitational tug needed to sling it straight into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere, where it will vaporize above roiling clouds of dust and gas. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightQ&A: What has Cassini's trip around Saturn unveiled? Your questions answered by NASA expert.There\u2019s no turning back now. Spilker\u2019s life\u2019s work is officially doomed.That is the nature of being a planetary scientist. No mission lasts forever. Every spacecraft eventually runs out of fuel. Spilker knew this when she joined the Cassini team half a lifetime ago. Later, as head scientist, she was part of the group that devised the mission\u2019s \u201cgrand finale,\u201d which has sent Cassini on dizzying dives between Saturn and its rings and ends Friday with the fatal plunge.The Post's Sarah Kaplan celebrates the accomplishments of NASA's Cassini spacecraft with a mock eulogy. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)\u201cI\u2019m trying to be stoic,\u201d Spilker says. The mission could have been prolonged by moving the probe into a safer, more distant orbit. But that isn\u2019t Spilker\u2019s style \u2014 or Cassini\u2019s. After 13 years at Saturn, it seemed only fitting to send the spacecraft out \u201cin a blaze of glory,\u201d the scientist says. Use that last bit of fuel to see what no one has seen before. Leave behind one more discovery for scientists to puzzle over after it\u2019s gone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpilker stands, and raises a plastic cocktail glass of sparkling apple juice (Caltech doesn\u2019t allow alcohol in school buildings) to a room of fellow scientists who have come to feel like family.Cassini\u2019s most impressive feat: Dropping a moon lander on Titan\u201cTitan has given Cassini that last push \u2014 a goodbye kiss. Its fate is sealed,\u201d she announces. \u201cA toast to a great spacecraft, a great mission.\u201dThe assembled researchers lift their glasses of juice and chorus their appreciation. A few are close to tears. After Cassini disintegrates, this team will be disbanded, and NASA\u2019s view of Saturn will go dark. For the moment, the space agency has no plans to return to the ringed planet.But Spilker and a young protegee have submitted a proposal for a new mission to the Saturnian system, which would investigate one of Cassini\u2019s most significant finds: jets of water on the moon Enceladus that could contain traces of alien life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis isn\u2019t a funeral, Spilker constantly reminds her colleagues \u2014 and herself. It\u2019s more like a graduation: \u201cBoth an end and a beginning.\u201dShe holds onto this idea as the mission\u2019s final minutes tick away. Cassini\u2019s work isn\u2019t over. It\u2019s just turning into something new.Stunning new NASA video depicts Cassini's finale (NASA/JPL-Caltech)Before Cassini, before Spilker, before NASA, there was Saturn. There has always been Saturn \u2014 that gold and glowing gas giant, encircled by shimmering rings of ice and dust. It was the most distant of the planets visible to ancient astronomers, who thought they could divine the secrets of existence from the behavior of lights in the skies. They called Saturn and its fellows \u201cplanetes,\u201d or \u201cwanderers,\u201d for the way they roamed the heavens against the steady background of stars.Story continues below advertisementIt wasn\u2019t until the Copernican Revolution of the 17th century that scientists realized the planets are actually bodies orbiting the sun and that Earth is among them, another wanderer. Then Galileo became the first to reveal the planet\u2019s rings with a telescope, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens spotted the largest of its moons, Italian scientist Giovanni Cassini (the spacecraft's namesake) detected several more satellites. Saturn became a world unto itself \u2014 not simply a spot in the sky but a place to explore.AdvertisementAs a child, gazing into the sky with her two-inch refractor telescope, Spilker was captivated. When she graduated from college in 1977, just before NASA\u2019s twin Voyager probes launched on a solar system tour that would send them past Saturn, she sought a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory studying the planet\u2019s rings.The data from Voyager was printed on rolls of paper so long Spilker had to take them into a hallway to study them. She recalls walking among those sheets as a 21-year-old, tracing the rippling pattern of rings a billion miles away and getting the feeling that she was stepping around Saturn itself.After the flyby, the Voyager probes sailed on to more distant parts of the solar system. And life on Earth marched forward. Spilker got married, got her PhD, had children. Many of her colleagues did the same.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA whole generation of JPL kids was born in that window,\u201d Spilker says. They would all grow up alongside one another and alongside the new mission Spilker was helping to develop. A flagship voyage that would, for the first time, be devoted entirely to Saturn.It took nearly a decade to get Cassini approved and built. Budget constraints required the team to scale back the spacecraft and its ambitions: a rotating platform that would make it easier to conduct observations was scrapped; an instrument that can \u201ctaste\u201d molecules was downsized.As the pieces came together in the cavernous \u201cclean room\u201d at JPL, Spilker made time each week to walk by and witness it. Someday soon this school bus-size contraption would be circling another world. But for now, it was almost close enough to touch.Story continues below advertisementIn October 1997, Spilker stood on a lawn at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and watched Cassini streak into the velvet predawn sky. Launch is the most nerve-racking phase of any mission; when you set fire to a tank of rocket fuel beneath a billion-dollar spacecraft, so much can go wrong.But nothing did. Seven years later, Cassini\u2019s entrance into orbit around Saturn was similarly flawless.Advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s Cassini,\u201d Spilker says, with affection and pride. \u201cShe\u2019s very hard-working, very diligent. And curious. Extremely curious. In that way, she\u2019s an extension of what we are.\u201dOnce at Saturn, the discoveries commenced at a rapid clip. The Huygens craft, provided by the European Space Agency, touched down on Titan \u2014 humanity\u2019s first landing in the outer solar system. Cassini revealed the composition of Saturn\u2019s rings and photographed the vast hexagonal storm at the planet\u2019s north pole. Each new batch of images kept Spilker at JPL late into the night; they were transporting. Looking at them, Spilker says, was as close as any human will ever get to being the first explorer at this new world.Story continues below advertisementPerhaps most astonishing of all was an image of the moon Enceladus backlit by the sun. For the first time, scientists saw that jets of water and ice were spewing out of cracks in the moon\u2019s frozen surface. Later surveys revealed that Enceladus harbors a vast subsurface ocean and important ingredients for life.AdvertisementCould alien organisms be swimming on that far-flung world? It looked increasingly possible.The problem was, Cassini wasn\u2019t built to be a life-finding mission. When it launched 20 years ago, such a goal seemed unimaginable. The molecular \u201ctaster\u201d that the team downsized to save money wasn\u2019t powerful enough to test for the long carbon chains that could be considered biological.Story continues below advertisementAnd with each passing year, Cassini was using up its fuel. If it stayed in orbit too long, NASA engineers would lose the ability to control the spacecraft. A passing moon or gravitational quirk might knock it off course and send it crashing into Enceladus, where it could contaminate the pristine \u2014 and perhaps inhabited? \u2014 landscape.So the \u201cgrand finale\u201d was set in motion. Cassini began its dives through the rings in April, each precipitous plunge bringing the craft closer to Saturn's storm clouds.AdvertisementMeanwhile, Cassini's human handlers started preparing themselves for the end.This week is the final meeting of Spilker's Project Science Group at which there's still new data to discuss. But it\u2019s also a chance for the team\u2019s few hundred members to collectively mourn. There are group stargazing sessions, group photos, group hugs. One of the engineers hands out purple handkerchiefs embroidered with the details of Cassini\u2019s mission. \u201cYou may need this,\u201d she tells Spilker.Story continues below advertisementPeople keep coming up to Spilker to shake her hand. \u201cCongratulations,\u201d they say, their voices thick with emotion. \u201cThank you.\u201dThe days are so hectic Spilker barely has time for her own feelings. Only at night does she stop to think. Thoughts like, \u201cThis is really happening.\u201d And, \u201cIt\u2019s been so long.\u201d And, \u201cMaybe I am getting old.\u201dAdvertisementShe thinks about Friday. Her daughters are traveling to Pasadena for those final moments \u2014 one of them will bring a daughter of her own.\u201cThey've been with, in a certain sense, with the Cassini mission their whole lives,\u201d she says, \u201cthe launch, Saturn orbital insertion, and now the end of Cassini.\u201dBut this is not really the end. With fellow Cassini scientist Morgan Cable, Spilker has developed a proposal to return to Enceladus and seek signs of life.\u201cI\u2019ve come full circle now,\u201d Spilker says. \u201cWorking on another new mission.\u201dShe and Cable will find out in December whether they get to move forward with their proposal. But even in the best-case scenario, it\u2019s unlikely Spilker will see the idea to fruition. At 62, she's contemplating retirement. If and when the Enceladus mission gets the go-ahead, Spilker will hand control to her younger counterpart.Cable is 35, the same age as Spilker when the Cassini mission was officially approved.Looking down into the same clean room where Cassini was built, Cable can picture the pieces of an Enceladus probe coming together. She can envision the spacecraft sailing through the moon\u2019s plumes, tasting for organic molecules, detecting something her predecessors only dreamed of.Like generations of astronomers before her, Cable seeks from Saturn the answers to humankind's biggest and oldest questions: Why are we here? Are we alone?\u201cDeep down, I think I always hoped that life exists out there somewhere, and I really hope that we find it in our lifetime,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of continuing to look, being persistent. Following the clues that missions like Cassini leave for us.\u201dShe, too, will be watching the mission\u2019s final moments Friday. Though she has worked on Cassini for only three years to Spilker's nearly 30, Cable shares her mentor\u2019s affection for the plucky space robot.\u201cAs a scientist, I always try to be empirical,\u201d she says. \u201cBut you get attached to the things you work on.\u201dAnd then her eyes fill with tears. \u201cCrap.\u201d She wipes her face and lets out a watery chuckle. \u201cSorry. This is going to happen a lot this week.\u201dShe can\u2019t help it. That is the nature of being human.The days until Cassini\u2019s demise turn into hours. On Thursday afternoon, the spacecraft will take its final images. Soon after, it will turn its antenna toward Earth, sending a steady pulse of radio waves about everything it senses as it plunges toward its demise.\u201cI see that signal like Cassini\u2019s heartbeat,\u201d Spilker says.Just past 3:30 California time on Friday morning, the spacecraft will cross the threshold into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere and burn up like a meteorite.But because Saturn is so distant, Cassini's final heartbeat won't reach Earth until 83 minutes after it's gone. When Spilker and her colleagues hear the last of their pioneering probe, it will be a whisper from a ghost: one final piece of insight from an alien planet, beckoning to whoever comes next.Read more:How to steer a massive spacecraft into SaturnNASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming successSee the most moving photo from the Cassini mission An emotional farewell to the spacecraft that revolutionized our view of Saturn.  Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Will Listen for Thumps From Its Rover\u2019s Arrival on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3203",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/science/nasa-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "Parts of the new visitor will make large impacts that could be picked up by the InSight spacecraft\u2019s seismometer. Parts of the new visitor will make large impacts that could be picked up by the InSight spacecraft\u2019s seismometer. When the Perseverance rover sets down on Mars on Thursday, another NASA spacecraft already there will be listening for the thump-thump that will result when the newcomer arrives.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Will Listen for Thumps From Its Rover\u2019s Arrival on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3204",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/science/nasa-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "Parts of the new visitor will make large impacts that could be picked up by the InSight spacecraft\u2019s seismometer. Parts of the new visitor will make large impacts that could be picked up by the InSight spacecraft\u2019s seismometer. When the Perseverance rover sets down on Mars on Thursday, another NASA spacecraft already there will be listening for the thump-thump that will result when the newcomer arrives.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Will Listen for Thumps From Its Rover\u2019s Arrival on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3205",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/science/nasa-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "Parts of the new visitor will make large impacts that could be picked up by the InSight spacecraft\u2019s seismometer. Parts of the new visitor will make large impacts that could be picked up by the InSight spacecraft\u2019s seismometer. When the Perseverance rover sets down on Mars on Thursday, another NASA spacecraft already there will be listening for the thump-thump that will result when the newcomer arrives.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "These elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do it (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3206",
        "date": "2017-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/03/these-elephants-sleep-only-2-hours-a-day-and-scientists-have-no-clue-how-they-do-it/",
        "text": "Parents of infants, college students during finals season and the White House press corps\u00a0should\u00a0stand back in awe. A new champion non-sleeper has been crowned:\u00a0Loxodonta africana, the African elephant.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter observing a pair of African elephant matriarchs for more than a month, scientists found that the venerable pachyderms slept an average of just two hours per night, according to a\u00a0new study in the\u00a0journal PLOS One. Yes, elephant societies are matriarchal. Yes, elephants are awesome.The researchers used GPS trackers and \u201cactiwatch implants\u201d \u2014 basically, an animal Fitbit \u2014 to measure the creatures' activity levels. They found that both were polyphasic sleepers, meaning they napped in\u00a0several short bouts over the course of a night. But those naps were few and far between; at one point, the elephants went 46 hours without resting. They traveled long distances during their sleepless periods, roaming as far as 19 miles, probably to escape predators or other disturbances. They only slept lying down every few days, and they dreamed just as infrequently.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementElephants in the zoo sleep for four to six hours a day, the scientists say. But, assuming the insomniacs in the study are representative of the rest of their kind, wild elephants' couple hours of shut-eye make them the most sleepless of any known land mammal.That points to an interesting yet bewildering rule of biology, study author\u00a0Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa told the BBC: The bigger an animal, the less it seems to sleep.\u00a0Compare an elephant's short rest time to that of a North American opossum (18 hours a day), a cat (12 hours) or a pig (7.8 hours).\u201cWhy this occurs, we're not really sure,\u201d Manger said. \u201cSleep is one of those really unusual mysteries of biology, that along with eating and reproduction, it's one of the biological imperatives. We must sleep to survive.\u201dWhat a year of working the graveyard shift taught me about sleepA review\u00a0published in 2008 found no clear evidence of species that don't sleep, though not every animal rests in the same way. For example,\u00a0dolphins \u2014 which need to be conscious to breathe \u2014 sleep by shutting half their brains down at a time. Even microbes exhibit circadian rhythms.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSleep is universal, tightly regulated and cannot be eliminated without deleterious consequences,\u201d the authors of the 2008 review wrote.Elephants' sleeplessness also calls into question the belief that rapid eye movement sleep (REM), when animals dream, is vital for memory consolidation. The female elephants in the latest study, who were both in their 30s, only exhibited REM sleep once every three to four days.\u201cGiven the well-known memory of the elephant, this calls into question theories associating REM sleep with memory consolidation,\u201d Manger said.Read more:This triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex.NASA officials weigh risks of Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon missionScientists discover 7 \u2018Earthlike\u2019 planets orbiting a nearby starDear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it\u2019s the tip of a \u2018hidden continent.\u2019 Loxodonta africana are the world's best power nappers.  These elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do it",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Vanishes Into Saturn, Its Mission Celebrated and Mourned (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3207",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/science/cassini-grand-finale-saturn.html",
        "text": "Orbiting the ringed planet since 2004, the spacecraft solved some mysteries and made discoveries that upended our notions about the solar system. Orbiting the ringed planet since 2004, the spacecraft solved some mysteries and made discoveries that upended our notions about the solar system. PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, the intrepid robotic explorer of Saturn\u2019s magnificent beauty, ended a journey of 20 years on Friday like a shooting star streaking across Saturn\u2019s sky.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Vanishes Into Saturn, Its Mission Celebrated and Mourned (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3208",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/science/cassini-grand-finale-saturn.html",
        "text": "Orbiting the ringed planet since 2004, the spacecraft solved some mysteries and made discoveries that upended our notions about the solar system. Orbiting the ringed planet since 2004, the spacecraft solved some mysteries and made discoveries that upended our notions about the solar system. PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, the intrepid robotic explorer of Saturn\u2019s magnificent beauty, ended a journey of 20 years on Friday like a shooting star streaking across Saturn\u2019s sky.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Vanishes Into Saturn, Its Mission Celebrated and Mourned (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3209",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/science/cassini-grand-finale-saturn.html",
        "text": "Orbiting the ringed planet since 2004, the spacecraft solved some mysteries and made discoveries that upended our notions about the solar system. Orbiting the ringed planet since 2004, the spacecraft solved some mysteries and made discoveries that upended our notions about the solar system. PASADENA, Calif. \u2014 NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, the intrepid robotic explorer of Saturn\u2019s magnificent beauty, ended a journey of 20 years on Friday like a shooting star streaking across Saturn\u2019s sky.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Space Telescope has a glitch \u2014 again (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3210",
        "date": "2019-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/09/hubble-space-telescope-has-glitch-again/",
        "text": "Operations on one of the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s most important instruments were suspended Tuesday as NASA investigates a hardware malfunction with the instrument.Tom Brown, the Hubble mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said the glitch affects the optical and ultraviolet channels on Hubble\u2019s Wide Field Camera 3. This camera, which was installed during a 2009 servicing mission, has produced about 50 percent of all Hubble science results in the past decade and many of its most celebrated images. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEngineers are working to find a solution to the problem, which could take days or even weeks, Brown said. But he was confident that the camera will soon be back up and working. Because NASA can no longer service the telescope, engineers built several redundancies into each instrument to ensure they keep functioning after a mishap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBrown did not expect the partial government shutdown to affect scientists' ability to address the problem. Though 95 percent of NASA employees are furloughed, those who operate currently flying missions like Hubble are exempt and currently working without pay. This is the second technical issue Hubble operators have faced in recent months. In October, a problem with one of the gyroscopes that keeps the telescope pointed in the proper direction brought operations to a halt for several weeks.The two glitches are unrelated, Brown said, but they\u2019re emblematic of the same challenge.\u201cEvery one of these issues is a sign of age,\u201d he said. Hubble is nearly 30 years old, and its orbit around Earth exposes it to an extreme space environment.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s billion-dollar-a-year astrophysics program flies eight major telescopes aimed at studying space beyond the solar system. Of these, all but one are in their \u201cextended missions\u201d \u2014 the bonus years beyond the time for which the spacecraft was originally designed. NASA has one new flagship observatory in development, the James Webb Space Telescope, but engineering mishaps and cost overruns have put it significantly behind schedule.AdvertisementHubble is expected to work well into the 2020s.Still, Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates Hubble on behalf of NASA, told The Washington Post in October that he worries about what will happen when it and other observatories are gone.\u201cWe\u2019re facing a very daunting prospect as a community,\u201d Mountain said. \u201cSome fields just won\u2019t have a telescope. And the science will not be possible to do in any other way.\u201dRead more:As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space A hardware problem has hobbled ultraviolet and optical observations from one of telescope's celebrated cameras. The Hubble Space Telescope has a glitch \u2014 again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Space Telescope has a glitch \u2014 again (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3211",
        "date": "2019-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/09/hubble-space-telescope-has-glitch-again/",
        "text": "Operations on one of the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s most important instruments were suspended Tuesday as NASA investigates a hardware malfunction with the instrument.Tom Brown, the Hubble mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said the glitch affects the optical and ultraviolet channels on Hubble\u2019s Wide Field Camera 3. This camera, which was installed during a 2009 servicing mission, has produced about 50 percent of all Hubble science results in the past decade and many of its most celebrated images. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEngineers are working to find a solution to the problem, which could take days or even weeks, Brown said. But he was confident that the camera will soon be back up and working. Because NASA can no longer service the telescope, engineers built several redundancies into each instrument to ensure they keep functioning after a mishap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBrown did not expect the partial government shutdown to affect scientists' ability to address the problem. Though 95 percent of NASA employees are furloughed, those who operate currently flying missions like Hubble are exempt and currently working without pay. This is the second technical issue Hubble operators have faced in recent months. In October, a problem with one of the gyroscopes that keeps the telescope pointed in the proper direction brought operations to a halt for several weeks.The two glitches are unrelated, Brown said, but they\u2019re emblematic of the same challenge.\u201cEvery one of these issues is a sign of age,\u201d he said. Hubble is nearly 30 years old, and its orbit around Earth exposes it to an extreme space environment.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s billion-dollar-a-year astrophysics program flies eight major telescopes aimed at studying space beyond the solar system. Of these, all but one are in their \u201cextended missions\u201d \u2014 the bonus years beyond the time for which the spacecraft was originally designed. NASA has one new flagship observatory in development, the James Webb Space Telescope, but engineering mishaps and cost overruns have put it significantly behind schedule.AdvertisementHubble is expected to work well into the 2020s.Still, Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates Hubble on behalf of NASA, told The Washington Post in October that he worries about what will happen when it and other observatories are gone.\u201cWe\u2019re facing a very daunting prospect as a community,\u201d Mountain said. \u201cSome fields just won\u2019t have a telescope. And the science will not be possible to do in any other way.\u201dRead more:As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space A hardware problem has hobbled ultraviolet and optical observations from one of telescope's celebrated cameras. The Hubble Space Telescope has a glitch \u2014 again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hubble Space Telescope has a glitch \u2014 again (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3212",
        "date": "2019-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/09/hubble-space-telescope-has-glitch-again/",
        "text": "Operations on one of the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s most important instruments were suspended Tuesday as NASA investigates a hardware malfunction with the instrument.Tom Brown, the Hubble mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said the glitch affects the optical and ultraviolet channels on Hubble\u2019s Wide Field Camera 3. This camera, which was installed during a 2009 servicing mission, has produced about 50 percent of all Hubble science results in the past decade and many of its most celebrated images. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEngineers are working to find a solution to the problem, which could take days or even weeks, Brown said. But he was confident that the camera will soon be back up and working. Because NASA can no longer service the telescope, engineers built several redundancies into each instrument to ensure they keep functioning after a mishap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBrown did not expect the partial government shutdown to affect scientists' ability to address the problem. Though 95 percent of NASA employees are furloughed, those who operate currently flying missions like Hubble are exempt and currently working without pay. This is the second technical issue Hubble operators have faced in recent months. In October, a problem with one of the gyroscopes that keeps the telescope pointed in the proper direction brought operations to a halt for several weeks.The two glitches are unrelated, Brown said, but they\u2019re emblematic of the same challenge.\u201cEvery one of these issues is a sign of age,\u201d he said. Hubble is nearly 30 years old, and its orbit around Earth exposes it to an extreme space environment.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s billion-dollar-a-year astrophysics program flies eight major telescopes aimed at studying space beyond the solar system. Of these, all but one are in their \u201cextended missions\u201d \u2014 the bonus years beyond the time for which the spacecraft was originally designed. NASA has one new flagship observatory in development, the James Webb Space Telescope, but engineering mishaps and cost overruns have put it significantly behind schedule.AdvertisementHubble is expected to work well into the 2020s.Still, Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates Hubble on behalf of NASA, told The Washington Post in October that he worries about what will happen when it and other observatories are gone.\u201cWe\u2019re facing a very daunting prospect as a community,\u201d Mountain said. \u201cSome fields just won\u2019t have a telescope. And the science will not be possible to do in any other way.\u201dRead more:As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space A hardware problem has hobbled ultraviolet and optical observations from one of telescope's celebrated cameras. The Hubble Space Telescope has a glitch \u2014 again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Found: Another star system with eight planets, just like ours (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3213",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/14/found-another-star-system-with-eight-planets-just-like-ours/",
        "text": "Only a handful of known star systems have more than a single planet. With eight worlds, our solar system has long taken the prize for the biggest lineup. But no longer.Our\u00a0corner of the galaxy now shares the\u00a0record with another system, Kepler 90, NASA and Google researchers announced Thursday. A Google algorithm uncovered a scorcher of a planet, a rock 30 percent larger than Earth, orbiting a star a few thousand\u00a0light-years away. This planet, Kepler 90i, brought the total number of planets circling its star to eight \u2014 just like our solar system's octet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor the first time, we\u2019ve discovered an eighth planet in a distant planetary system,\u201d\u00a0Paul Hertz, head of NASA's astrophysics division, said during a media briefing.\u00a0This discovery required an\u00a0advanced technology to comb through the gargantuan amount of data obtained by the Kepler space observatory.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kepler telescope, which trails millions of miles behind Earth like a loyal pup, has gazed out into space since 2009. During that time it has brought in data from 150,000 stars. When an exoplanet\u00a0crosses in front of one of them, Kepler registers a subtle dip in that star's sunlight.Fishing for those dips within the massive database is a challenge. \u201cThe Kepler mission has so much data it is impossible to examine manually,\u201d Christopher Shallue, a Google artificial intelligence software engineer, explained during the briefing.This animation shows a distant exoplanet transiting its star. (NASA)With help from\u00a0Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer\u00a0at the University of Texas at Austin, Shallue developed a machine-learning program that detects light curves. (Google and NASA have been collaborating for years; in 2013, they\u00a0unveiled the\u00a0Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, a machine-learning facility at the space agency's Ames Research Center.) The scientists did not give the program, called a neural network, explicit instructions to find the characteristic curves of an exoplanet. Instead,\u00a0it had to learn by example.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA neural network is loosely inspired by the structure of the human brain,\u201d Shallue said. \u201cYou can think of the neurons as switches.\u201d The U-shaped dip of\u00a0Kepler 90i passing in front of its star\u00a0was too weak a signal for human\u00a0detection. But it was strong enough for the AI, churning through 14 billion data points, to detect.Astronomers are confident that the exoplanet exists and that its surface temperature could\u00a0exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit.\u00a0It has a shorter orbit than Mercury's, completing a circle around\u00a0its star\u00a0once every two weeks. \u201cThis is almost certainly an exoplanet,\u201d\u00a0Vanderburg said, with the odds of a false positive being 1 in 10,000. Already, the results from this deep data dive have been accepted for publication in the\u00a0Astronomical Journal.But the number of worlds is not the only similarity between our solar system and the Kepler 90 system. As in ours, Kepler's small, rocky planets are closest to the sun and its gas giants farthest away.\u00a0Kepler 90 itself is larger than our sun, though not extremely so.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe planets in our system are far more spread out, however. Neptune is, at its closest, 2.8 billion miles from the sun. The most distant gas giant in the Kepler 90 system is\u00a093 million miles from its star.\u00a0\u201cAll the planets are found scrunched very close to their star,\u201d\u00a0Vanderburg said.Because the telescope has only observed the system's center, it may contain still other worlds. \u201cIt\u2019s very possible that Kepler 90 has even more planets that we don\u2019t know about,\u201d Vanderburg added. Any\u00a0planet with a longer orbit \u2014 a world as far from Kepler 90 as Jupiter is from our sun \u2014 would pass by the observatory undetected.(On the other hand,\u00a0some astronomers argue it's possible that our solar system has unknown planets, such as Planet Nine, lurking on the fringe. Perhaps we could reclaim our galactic exceptionalism once again.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Kepler telescope is in its twilight years. In 2013, two of four reaction wheels that had kept it on target failed. Without a fix, the mission was doomed.Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90. (NASA)Desperate to salvage the $550 million craft, researchers turned to the only available support: the sun. They harnessed the pressure\u00a0of solar radiation to stabilize Kepler, as The Post reported\u00a0in 2014.\u00a0With two functional wheels and the force of the sun acting like a\u00a0crutch, the craft could once again focus on distant stars. The reborn project was\u00a0given the name K2.During the\u00a0Kepler and K2 missions, astronomers\u00a0have confirmed the location of\u00a02,500 exoplanets.\u00a0Kepler has\u00a0detected another 5,000 exoplanet\u00a0candidates, which await confirmation.The K2 mission was funded for an additional three years\u00a0of life in 2016.\u00a0The spacecraft's fuel is expected to run dry at some point in 2018.Read more:Scientists discover a giant planet that orbits two suns \u2014 and could have habitable moonsThis broken space telescope keeps spotting new planetsThere's a new planet in the neighborhood \u2014 and it looks like a nice place to live Only a computer program, newly invented, could have detected the exoplanet in Kepler's massive database.  Found: Another star system with eight planets, just like ours",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rosetta\u2019s Lost Picture From Moments Before It Struck a Comet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3214",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/science/rosetta-comet-lost-photo.html",
        "text": "One year after the spacecraft dived into Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, it gave scientists a gift from beyond the grave. One year after the spacecraft dived into Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, it gave scientists a gift from beyond the grave. Nearly a year after it crashed into a comet, the Rosetta spacecraft has given scientists a gift from beyond the grave: the final image of its resting place on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3215",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/science/nasa-neptune-venus.html",
        "text": "One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3216",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/science/nasa-neptune-venus.html",
        "text": "One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3217",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/science/nasa-neptune-venus.html",
        "text": "One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Missions Will Study Venus, a World Overlooked for Decades (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3218",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/science/nasa-neptune-venus.html",
        "text": "One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. One of the spacecraft will probe the hellish planet\u2019s clouds, which could potentially help settle the debate over whether they are habitable by floating microbes. NASA is finally going back to Venus, for the first time in more than three decades. And a second time too.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Think you know how many days are in a year? Think again. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3219",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/24/think-you-know-how-many-days-are-in-a-year-think-again/",
        "text": "One of the great joys and headaches of writing about science for a D.C. audience is that there are a lot of brilliant people reading:\u00a0engineers at NASA, doctors for the National Institutes of Health, paleontologists at the Smithsonian, etc. And they always\u00a0notice when I make a mistake.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo I wasn't totally surprised when I arrived at work Thursday morning and found a disgruntled message on my answering machine. My story about the discovery of a nearby solar system with seven Earth-sized exoplanets had run in that day's paper. And Bert Schwarzschild, a particle physicist and former editor of the magazine Physics Today, had a bone to pick about one small number\u00a0in the piece:\u00a0365.26. That's how long we said a year on Earth lasts in a graphic that accompanied the story. The number came from NASA, so I felt pretty confident in it. But Schwarzschild said it wasn't right. A year is 365.24 days long \u2014 that's why we have to skip a leap day every 100 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPuzzled, I looked up the question online, only to end up more confused. No website I checked could agree on an exact number. Was it 365.25, as NASA states\u00a0on this page? Or\u00a0365.242196, as explained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology? Or had our original illustration been right all along, as this\u00a0Jet Propulsion Laboratory profile suggests?I called up the U.S. Naval Observatory, home of America's master clock. (Along with\u00a0NIST, the Naval Observatory also operates the website time.gov, which may be my new favorite government URL.) If anyone could tell me the correct length of the year, it was them.\u201cWell, it depends on what year you're referring to,\u201d said Geoff Chester, a public affairs officer for USNO, when I explained my quandary to him.Story continues below advertisementWhat year? There's more than one?\u201cThere are four principal years that are in use,\u201d Chester told me. \u201cNothing\u2019s as simple as it seems when it comes to this stuff.\u201dThe Doomsday Clock just advanced, 'thanks to Trump\u2019: It's now just 2\u00bd minutes to 'midnight.'First, there's the Julian year, which is exactly\u00a0365.25 days long. It's not very precise, since it's just a number someone decided on, rather than an exact measurement of an astrophysical phenomenon. But when it was introduced by the Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., it was revolutionary.AdvertisementBefore then, the Romans knew that it took about 365.25 days for the Earth to orbit the sun, but they decided to stick to a 355 day calendar anyway. Every so often the high priest of Rome would call for an \u201cintercalary month\u201d to put the calendar back on track. Theoretically these intercalations were supposed to be systematic, but they often were abused \u2014 priests would call for an extra month when their friends were in power, or omit a needed month if an enemy was consul. Things got pretty wonky pretty quickly, and the last years before Caesar swept in with his new system were known as \u201cthe years of confusion.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWe don't use the Julian year for calendars any more, but it\u00a0is used to define the light-year as a measurement of distance.Modern calendars are set according to\u00a0the tropical year, which tracks the amount of time it takes to get from spring equinox to spring equinox\u00a0\u2014 about 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, or 365.2422 days. It's probably the most well-known measure of a year because it's the most useful for people here on Earth. If you want to know when the seasons will change, the tropical year will tell you.AdvertisementBut there's a not-so-tiny problem with the tropical year: the Earth wobbles. Instead of spinning like a globe on\u00a0an axis, we turn like a top. This means that the orientation of Earth's equator is constantly shifting ever so slightly; thus the moment of the equinox (when the equator passes through the center of the sun) also changes. The consequence of all this wobbling is that a tropical year ends about 20 minutes\u00a0before Earth actually completes an orbit of the sun.Story continues below advertisementIf you want to know how long that journey takes, you've got to look at the anomalistic year.\u00a0That's the measurement of the number of days it takes for the Earth to return to its\u00a0perihelion \u2014 the point at which it is closest to the sun. It comes out to about\u00a0365.259636 days per year.The world's oldest computer is still revealing its secretsBut Earth's orbit doesn't stay the same each year. The large, looming presence of Jupiter in our solar system means that the ellipse that Earth circumscribes around the sun is distorted. If you're trying to do calculations across long time spans, or keep a telescope pointed at the same spot in the galaxy, then this measurement might lead you astray.Advertisement\u201cEverything moves in the universe,\u201d explained Jonathan McDowell of\u00a0the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. \u201cIt really causes problems.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAstronomers' solution is to measure time by the largest, most fixed frame they can find: the entire cosmos. They abide by the\u00a0sidereal year, the amount of time it takes for the sun to return to the same position relative to the fixed (most distant) stars. This year is 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 9 seconds, or about 365.26 days long. Since this is the measurement most useful to astronomers, it makes sense that NASA used it\u00a0to compare Earth to the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets.McDowell and his colleagues also live by the sidereal day, which is the amount of time it takes Earth to complete a single rotation relative to the fixed stars. This day is four minutes shorter than our 24-hour one, but astronomers don't mind.Advertisement\u201cWe don\u2019t care about the sun \u2014 we\u2019re never out when it\u2019s up,\u201d McDowell laughed. \u201cWe just want our observatories to point to the same spot in the sky they did yesterday.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWeirdly, the days in a sidereal year are ordinary days, not sidereal ones. This is why people think astrophysics is hard. (Okay, maybe there are a few other reasons.)But even the sidereal year is imperfect, McDowell said. After all, the so-called fixed stars aren't really fixed \u2014 everything in the universe is moving away from everything else at an accelerating rate. If you take the theory of general relativity into account, you'll find that time passes differently on Earth than it does elsewhere in space.\u201cEvery aspect of time, from the very small to these big scales \u2026 all of these things are fraught with a, 'Yes, but actually' caveat,\u201d McDowell said. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSure, we\u2019ve refined and refined over the centuries,\u201d he acknowledged \u2014 just ask the Romans who lived through the \u201cyears of confusion.\u201d But clearly, the confusion isn't over yet.Read more:Science societies have long shunned politics. But now they're ready to march.Here's what you should know about the newfound TRAPPIST-1 solar systemDear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it's the tip of a 'hidden continent.' Measuring a year is so complicated even astrophysicists can't agree on how to do it. Think you know how many days are in a year? Think again.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Don\u2019t panic: Scientists are practicing for a killer asteroid impact (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3220",
        "date": "2019-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/05/03/dont-panic-scientists-are-practicing-killer-asteroid-impact/",
        "text": "On the second day of a conference on cosmic threats to our planet, the proceedings were interrupted by an urgent message from Paul Chodas, the manager of NASA\u2019s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.New calculations suggested there was a 10 percent chance that an asteroid named 2019 PDC would strike Earth in eight years, unleashing enough energy to level a whole city. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightScientists didn\u2019t know where it might hit, although New York, Denver and a wide swath of West and Central Africa were all in the path of potential destruction. Chodas called the situation \u201cuncertain\u201d and \u201cunprecedented.\u201dSo, he asked his audience, what did they want to do about it?Story continues below advertisementBefore you start stocking up on canned goods: This was a fictional exercise. The asteroid 2019 PDC does not exist. No city on Earth is thought to be imperiled by a catastrophic impact. Indeed, analyses of more than 20,000 known near-Earth objects suggest the chance of any hitting us in the next century is less than 1 in 10,000.AdvertisementBut the scenario that played out this week at the International Academy of Astronautics\u2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Md., illuminated the very real (if very slim) possibility that such an asteroid might be discovered one day \u2014 and revealed just how hard it would be for humanity to mount a response.Congress first mandated that NASA track near-Earth objects, or NEOs \u2014 space rocks that circle around the sun and come within 30 million miles of Earth\u2019s orbit \u2014 in 1998, after people briefly panicked over a newly discovered asteroid that would pass by our planet.Story continues below advertisementTwo decades later, scientists say they have identified 90 percent of all NEOs 3,300 feet or larger \u2014 big enough to precipitate a global catastrophe. Research suggests these kinds of impacts happen once every 700,000 years.AdvertisementThe population of smaller objects such as the fictional 2019 PDC, which was estimated to be about 600 feet wide, is not so well defined \u2014 even though these objects could still demolish cities, states and even continents. This is the seventh tabletop exercise NASA has participated in to help game out what scientists and emergency managers would need to consider if one of these asteroids was headed our way.But the agency\u2019s top concern this week seemed to be making sure everyone understood this was a drill. \u201cIf you tweet about this,\u201d communications officer JoAnna Wendel urged the audience, \u201cplease use the hashtag \u2018exercise only.\u2019 We don\u2019t want to get into a \u2018War of the Worlds\u2019 scenario.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHer words were comforting to keep in mind as NASA programmer Lorien Wheeler took the stage to explain just how catastrophic an asteroid like 2019 PDC could be.AdvertisementShe had modeled millions of potential impact scenarios for the object, each featuring slightly different parameters. The asteroid might land in the Atlantic Ocean, triggering a catastrophic tsunami; or it could crash into New York, inflicting \u201cunsurvivable\u201d carnage on millions of people; or it could break up over a largely uninhabited area, causing relatively little damage. And it was still more likely than not that the rock would miss Earth altogether.Scientists would need more than a year of observations before they could say exactly where the asteroid was headed. But it takes several years to build and launch a mission in response, and any deflection effort would have to happen before 2025 to be effective.If humanity was going to try to stop the asteroid, we had to start considering our options now.In reality, the discovery of any rock with a 10 percent chance of hitting Earth would trigger an automatic response from the United Nations\u2019 Space Mission Planning Advisory Group \u2014 an international coalition of space agencies whose sole job is to coordinate the world\u2019s response to impending asteroid disasters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPreventing an impact is possible \u2014 theoretically. Humans need only change the asteroid\u2019s velocity by a few centimeters per second; over the course of several orbits around the sun, that change adds up to push the rock fully in front of or behind the Earth. But the proposed methods for deflection are expensive and untested.One, the \u201ckinetic impactor\u201d technique, involves crashing a spacecraft into the asteroid at high velocity to slow it down. (NASA last year gave the go-ahead to start design and assembly of a kinetic impactor test mission called DART, which will smash a spacecraft into a binary near-Earth asteroid called Didymos.)Alternatively, scientists could detonate a nuclear bomb beside the asteroid, vaporizing part of its surface and causing the rock to recoil. This method is equally effective at increasing or decreasing an asteroid\u2019s speed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth options raised red flags among the Planetary Defense Conference attendees. The kinetic impactor strategy carries the threat of imparting so much force to the asteroid that it \u201cdisrupts\u201d it, causing the rock to break apart into potentially even more dangerous pieces. But few people were excited about the notion of putting a nuclear device on top of a rocket. Which country would provide the weapon? And who would get to control it?One man stood up to point out that there were no scientists at the conference from any of the African nations in the asteroid\u2019s path.\u201cIn a real-life scenario, their interests would need to be represented,\u201d he said. \u201cEspecially if we\u2019re going to push the thing toward them.\u201dStory continues below advertisementUltimately, the group decided to keep every option on the table. They would immediately launch a reconnaissance mission to fly past the rock and get a better understanding of its trajectory. A scientific spacecraft already in flight would be rerouted to 2019 PDC. Meanwhile, several space agencies would begin work on a fleet of kinetic impactors and an additional spacecraft capable of carrying a nuclear device.AdvertisementIn a speech, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine acknowledged that these exercises could seem a bit outlandish \u2014 fodder for a Bruce Willis sci-fi action flick, perhaps, but not serious scientific discussion.But real life has at times come perilously close to imitating these fictions.Story continues below advertisementFifteen years ago, scientists detected a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis, which early calculations suggested had a more than 2 percent chance of colliding with Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029.The discovery launched frantic efforts to uncover old photos of where the asteroid had been, which would help researchers understand where it might be headed. Ultimately, scientists determined that Apophis will fly safely past Earth at a distance of about 19,400 miles \u2014 within the orbits of the moon and even some geosynchronous satellites.AdvertisementIf the skies are dark and the weather is right, Earthlings should be able to see Apophis swish by with their naked eyes. The asteroid will resemble a shooting star as it streaks through space.Story continues below advertisementThe geologic record reveals that Earth hasn\u2019t always been so lucky. The Chesapeake Bay was formed by a meteor that struck the East Coast 35 million years ago, scattering debris from Texas to New Jersey. Some 15 million years after that, a meteorite blasted the sand of the Libyan desert, creating a sea of foggy green glass.And of course, there\u2019s the Chicxulub impactor 66 million years ago, which triggered the extinction of three-quarters of all life on Earth, including most of the dinosaurs. That rock was thought to be dozens of miles in diameter and unleashed the energy of billions of atomic bombs.\u201cWe know for a fact the dinosaurs did not have a space program,\u201d Bridenstine said, quoting TV personality Bill Nye. \u201cBut we do, and we need to use it.\u201dAdvertisementBy Wednesday, the scenario fast-forwarded to December 2021. The reconnaissance spacecraft had finally given astronomers their first good look at 2019 PDC, revealing that the asteroid was actually a peanut-shaped \u201crubble pile\u201d about 450 feet across and 850 feet long.And, unless humanity took drastic action, just after 10 p.m. local time on April 28, 2027, it would enter Earth\u2019s atmosphere at a speed of 43,000 mph and smash right into Denver.The resulting blast wave would obliterate the city and some of the surrounding suburbs \u2014 setting fire to buildings, vaporizing vegetation, melting cars. People as far away as Pueblo, Colo., and Laramie, Wyo., would feel the Earth tremble and see their windows break. The drought-parched trees of the Rockies would be set ablaze, and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure would be lost.Worst of all, there were some 2 million people living in the \u201cunsurvivable\u201d zone.Horrific though the scenario sounded, physicist Mark Boslough, a global catastrophe expert, chose to look on the bright side.\u201cThat asteroid was headed toward Denver even before it was discovered,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it seems like very bad news, but this is actually good news, because we still have five years to deflect this thing.\u201dBetween Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, the clock spun forward three years. The diverted scientific spacecraft arrived at the asteroid and began to observe it. Six kinetic impactors were built, but one blew apart during launch and two others failed en route to their target. Widespread controversy over the use of a nuclear device meant that the second rendezvous spacecraft launched without any cargo. But that may have been for the best: It, too, suffered a total system failure before arrival.Now it was Sept. 3, 2024, and the world found itself facing a whole new kind of disaster: The three surviving kinetic impactors succeeded in deflecting most of the asteroid. But in the process they had broken off a 50- to 80-meter fragment that was still headed our way.The resulting debris cloud destroyed the observing spacecraft, and the asteroid was behind the sun, blocking our view of it. Yet early calculations suggest that the fragment would strike somewhere along a path that extended from Omaha to New York and into the Atlantic. The object was now too small to pose a significant tsunami risk, Wheeler said, but if it hit land \u2014 particularly a densely-populated place such as New York \u2014 as many as 11.5 million people would be affected. And it was too late to attempt another deflection.The prospect of losing a global financial center was shocking, even as make-believe. \u201cYou may freeze the economy,\u201d one audience member worried. \u201cYou might actually be looking at total economic collapse.\u201dAerospace engineer Brent Barbee agreed. That\u2019s why his team was considering a \u201clast-ditch effort\u201d to prevent an impact. The world might \u201cscramble,\u201d he said, to design and deploy a 300-kiloton nuclear device that would blast the asteroid into tiny pieces two to four months before it was due to hit Earth.The proposal immediately raised concerns.\u201cIf you couldn\u2019t launch a nuclear device before, what makes you think you could launch it now?\u201d one researcher wanted to know. (\u201cGreat question,\u201d was Barbee\u2019s reply.)\u201cCan we do a small kinetic impactor that puts it safely in the ocean?\u201d asked another. (\u201cToo many uncertainties,\u201d Chodas answered.)\u201cIt worries me when you say that we are going to scramble to put together a 300-kiloton nuclear device,\u201d said a third.She had a point, Barbee acknowledged. That so much of the initial fleet had failed shows how difficult it is to quickly build a successful spacecraft. \u201cWe probably should have been planning the backup option from the beginning,\u201d he said.Breaking the fourth wall, some of the researchers complained that the scenario was starting to seem unrealistically worst-case.\u201cIt is not likely at all,\u201d Chodas agreed, \u201cand we\u2019re not saying it is likely. But we will learn by studying these what-ifs.\u201dThings were about to get even more sensational. On the last day of the exercise, with 10 days to go before impact, Chodas announced that the disruption mission never got off the ground, and the fragment \u2014 now known to be 60 meters \u2014 was on a path to obliterate much of New York City.The skyscrapers of central Manhattan would be vaporized. Fire tornadoes would rip through the region. The \u201cmother of all gusts\u201d would blow from Yonkers to Staten Island and New Jersey to Queens. Ten million people would need to escape the disaster zone \u2014 more Americans than have ever been evacuated before.A chorus of \u201coohs\u201d rippled through the ballroom. \u201cTough,\u201d one person muttered.Suddenly, the tone of the conversation shifted. They had left behind the comfortable certainty of physics. Now they had to plan for the unpredictability of people.\u201cWe\u2019re very concerned,\u201d said Carol Lewis, who was playing the role of an \u201caffected citizen.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve actually called ourselves \u2018mad as hell.\u2019 And we have questions.\u201dWhat would happen to people in nursing homes? What would happen to pets? Who would prevent looting of abandoned buildings? Would they be compensated for their losses? Where would the survivors go? And would they ever be allowed to return?\u201cDon\u2019t think we haven\u2019t been doing anything before we\u2019re at T-minus 10 days,\u201d said Leviticus Lewis, a real-life operations manager for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (and Carol Lewis\u2019s husband).\u201cI can tell you there already is a New York evacuation plan,\u201d he assured people. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you what it is.\u201dThen Joseph Nuth, a NASA asteroid researcher, stood up and stated the obvious: \u201cIt\u2019s our fault.\u201d\u201cHow are we going to compensate those people, get them their lives back?\u201d he asked. \u201cThis is an enormous liability that we took on when we screwed this up.\u201dThat led to a question of whether the United Nations\u2019 \u201cConvention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects\u201d could apply to citizens suing their own government.\u201cThe questions now are so deep and so far-reaching,\u201d said Victoria Andrews, NASA\u2019s deputy planetary defense officer.And, she noted, they\u2019re not quite so esoteric as they might seem. Most natural disasters cannot be predicted as far in advance as an asteroid impact, but as a consequence of climate change, many are becoming more and more likely. Deadly wildfires and disastrous hurricanes that once were rare now seem inevitable \u2014 and communities have to prepare.\u201cThis exercise gets us thinking about how to do that,\u201d Andrews said.Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the fictional asteroid 2019 PDC was predicted to strike Denver on April 29, 2027. It was actually slated to strike late in the evening on April 28. Though, of course, both dates are safe, because the asteroid is made up. Read more:NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.Fossils show worldwide catastrophe on the day the dinosaurs diedMany asteroids might be remnants of five destroyed worlds, scientists say Yes, Steven Spielberg, they are considering the nuclear option. Don\u2019t panic: Scientists are practicing for a killer asteroid impact",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Don\u2019t panic: Scientists are practicing for a killer asteroid impact (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3221",
        "date": "2019-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/05/03/dont-panic-scientists-are-practicing-killer-asteroid-impact/",
        "text": "On the second day of a conference on cosmic threats to our planet, the proceedings were interrupted by an urgent message from Paul Chodas, the manager of NASA\u2019s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.New calculations suggested there was a 10 percent chance that an asteroid named 2019 PDC would strike Earth in eight years, unleashing enough energy to level a whole city. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightScientists didn\u2019t know where it might hit, although New York, Denver and a wide swath of West and Central Africa were all in the path of potential destruction. Chodas called the situation \u201cuncertain\u201d and \u201cunprecedented.\u201dSo, he asked his audience, what did they want to do about it?Story continues below advertisementBefore you start stocking up on canned goods: This was a fictional exercise. The asteroid 2019 PDC does not exist. No city on Earth is thought to be imperiled by a catastrophic impact. Indeed, analyses of more than 20,000 known near-Earth objects suggest the chance of any hitting us in the next century is less than 1 in 10,000.AdvertisementBut the scenario that played out this week at the International Academy of Astronautics\u2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Md., illuminated the very real (if very slim) possibility that such an asteroid might be discovered one day \u2014 and revealed just how hard it would be for humanity to mount a response.Congress first mandated that NASA track near-Earth objects, or NEOs \u2014 space rocks that circle around the sun and come within 30 million miles of Earth\u2019s orbit \u2014 in 1998, after people briefly panicked over a newly discovered asteroid that would pass by our planet.Story continues below advertisementTwo decades later, scientists say they have identified 90 percent of all NEOs 3,300 feet or larger \u2014 big enough to precipitate a global catastrophe. Research suggests these kinds of impacts happen once every 700,000 years.AdvertisementThe population of smaller objects such as the fictional 2019 PDC, which was estimated to be about 600 feet wide, is not so well defined \u2014 even though these objects could still demolish cities, states and even continents. This is the seventh tabletop exercise NASA has participated in to help game out what scientists and emergency managers would need to consider if one of these asteroids was headed our way.But the agency\u2019s top concern this week seemed to be making sure everyone understood this was a drill. \u201cIf you tweet about this,\u201d communications officer JoAnna Wendel urged the audience, \u201cplease use the hashtag \u2018exercise only.\u2019 We don\u2019t want to get into a \u2018War of the Worlds\u2019 scenario.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHer words were comforting to keep in mind as NASA programmer Lorien Wheeler took the stage to explain just how catastrophic an asteroid like 2019 PDC could be.AdvertisementShe had modeled millions of potential impact scenarios for the object, each featuring slightly different parameters. The asteroid might land in the Atlantic Ocean, triggering a catastrophic tsunami; or it could crash into New York, inflicting \u201cunsurvivable\u201d carnage on millions of people; or it could break up over a largely uninhabited area, causing relatively little damage. And it was still more likely than not that the rock would miss Earth altogether.Scientists would need more than a year of observations before they could say exactly where the asteroid was headed. But it takes several years to build and launch a mission in response, and any deflection effort would have to happen before 2025 to be effective.If humanity was going to try to stop the asteroid, we had to start considering our options now.In reality, the discovery of any rock with a 10 percent chance of hitting Earth would trigger an automatic response from the United Nations\u2019 Space Mission Planning Advisory Group \u2014 an international coalition of space agencies whose sole job is to coordinate the world\u2019s response to impending asteroid disasters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPreventing an impact is possible \u2014 theoretically. Humans need only change the asteroid\u2019s velocity by a few centimeters per second; over the course of several orbits around the sun, that change adds up to push the rock fully in front of or behind the Earth. But the proposed methods for deflection are expensive and untested.One, the \u201ckinetic impactor\u201d technique, involves crashing a spacecraft into the asteroid at high velocity to slow it down. (NASA last year gave the go-ahead to start design and assembly of a kinetic impactor test mission called DART, which will smash a spacecraft into a binary near-Earth asteroid called Didymos.)Alternatively, scientists could detonate a nuclear bomb beside the asteroid, vaporizing part of its surface and causing the rock to recoil. This method is equally effective at increasing or decreasing an asteroid\u2019s speed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth options raised red flags among the Planetary Defense Conference attendees. The kinetic impactor strategy carries the threat of imparting so much force to the asteroid that it \u201cdisrupts\u201d it, causing the rock to break apart into potentially even more dangerous pieces. But few people were excited about the notion of putting a nuclear device on top of a rocket. Which country would provide the weapon? And who would get to control it?One man stood up to point out that there were no scientists at the conference from any of the African nations in the asteroid\u2019s path.\u201cIn a real-life scenario, their interests would need to be represented,\u201d he said. \u201cEspecially if we\u2019re going to push the thing toward them.\u201dStory continues below advertisementUltimately, the group decided to keep every option on the table. They would immediately launch a reconnaissance mission to fly past the rock and get a better understanding of its trajectory. A scientific spacecraft already in flight would be rerouted to 2019 PDC. Meanwhile, several space agencies would begin work on a fleet of kinetic impactors and an additional spacecraft capable of carrying a nuclear device.AdvertisementIn a speech, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine acknowledged that these exercises could seem a bit outlandish \u2014 fodder for a Bruce Willis sci-fi action flick, perhaps, but not serious scientific discussion.But real life has at times come perilously close to imitating these fictions.Story continues below advertisementFifteen years ago, scientists detected a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis, which early calculations suggested had a more than 2 percent chance of colliding with Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029.The discovery launched frantic efforts to uncover old photos of where the asteroid had been, which would help researchers understand where it might be headed. Ultimately, scientists determined that Apophis will fly safely past Earth at a distance of about 19,400 miles \u2014 within the orbits of the moon and even some geosynchronous satellites.AdvertisementIf the skies are dark and the weather is right, Earthlings should be able to see Apophis swish by with their naked eyes. The asteroid will resemble a shooting star as it streaks through space.Story continues below advertisementThe geologic record reveals that Earth hasn\u2019t always been so lucky. The Chesapeake Bay was formed by a meteor that struck the East Coast 35 million years ago, scattering debris from Texas to New Jersey. Some 15 million years after that, a meteorite blasted the sand of the Libyan desert, creating a sea of foggy green glass.And of course, there\u2019s the Chicxulub impactor 66 million years ago, which triggered the extinction of three-quarters of all life on Earth, including most of the dinosaurs. That rock was thought to be dozens of miles in diameter and unleashed the energy of billions of atomic bombs.\u201cWe know for a fact the dinosaurs did not have a space program,\u201d Bridenstine said, quoting TV personality Bill Nye. \u201cBut we do, and we need to use it.\u201dAdvertisementBy Wednesday, the scenario fast-forwarded to December 2021. The reconnaissance spacecraft had finally given astronomers their first good look at 2019 PDC, revealing that the asteroid was actually a peanut-shaped \u201crubble pile\u201d about 450 feet across and 850 feet long.And, unless humanity took drastic action, just after 10 p.m. local time on April 28, 2027, it would enter Earth\u2019s atmosphere at a speed of 43,000 mph and smash right into Denver.The resulting blast wave would obliterate the city and some of the surrounding suburbs \u2014 setting fire to buildings, vaporizing vegetation, melting cars. People as far away as Pueblo, Colo., and Laramie, Wyo., would feel the Earth tremble and see their windows break. The drought-parched trees of the Rockies would be set ablaze, and billions of dollars worth of infrastructure would be lost.Worst of all, there were some 2 million people living in the \u201cunsurvivable\u201d zone.Horrific though the scenario sounded, physicist Mark Boslough, a global catastrophe expert, chose to look on the bright side.\u201cThat asteroid was headed toward Denver even before it was discovered,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it seems like very bad news, but this is actually good news, because we still have five years to deflect this thing.\u201dBetween Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, the clock spun forward three years. The diverted scientific spacecraft arrived at the asteroid and began to observe it. Six kinetic impactors were built, but one blew apart during launch and two others failed en route to their target. Widespread controversy over the use of a nuclear device meant that the second rendezvous spacecraft launched without any cargo. But that may have been for the best: It, too, suffered a total system failure before arrival.Now it was Sept. 3, 2024, and the world found itself facing a whole new kind of disaster: The three surviving kinetic impactors succeeded in deflecting most of the asteroid. But in the process they had broken off a 50- to 80-meter fragment that was still headed our way.The resulting debris cloud destroyed the observing spacecraft, and the asteroid was behind the sun, blocking our view of it. Yet early calculations suggest that the fragment would strike somewhere along a path that extended from Omaha to New York and into the Atlantic. The object was now too small to pose a significant tsunami risk, Wheeler said, but if it hit land \u2014 particularly a densely-populated place such as New York \u2014 as many as 11.5 million people would be affected. And it was too late to attempt another deflection.The prospect of losing a global financial center was shocking, even as make-believe. \u201cYou may freeze the economy,\u201d one audience member worried. \u201cYou might actually be looking at total economic collapse.\u201dAerospace engineer Brent Barbee agreed. That\u2019s why his team was considering a \u201clast-ditch effort\u201d to prevent an impact. The world might \u201cscramble,\u201d he said, to design and deploy a 300-kiloton nuclear device that would blast the asteroid into tiny pieces two to four months before it was due to hit Earth.The proposal immediately raised concerns.\u201cIf you couldn\u2019t launch a nuclear device before, what makes you think you could launch it now?\u201d one researcher wanted to know. (\u201cGreat question,\u201d was Barbee\u2019s reply.)\u201cCan we do a small kinetic impactor that puts it safely in the ocean?\u201d asked another. (\u201cToo many uncertainties,\u201d Chodas answered.)\u201cIt worries me when you say that we are going to scramble to put together a 300-kiloton nuclear device,\u201d said a third.She had a point, Barbee acknowledged. That so much of the initial fleet had failed shows how difficult it is to quickly build a successful spacecraft. \u201cWe probably should have been planning the backup option from the beginning,\u201d he said.Breaking the fourth wall, some of the researchers complained that the scenario was starting to seem unrealistically worst-case.\u201cIt is not likely at all,\u201d Chodas agreed, \u201cand we\u2019re not saying it is likely. But we will learn by studying these what-ifs.\u201dThings were about to get even more sensational. On the last day of the exercise, with 10 days to go before impact, Chodas announced that the disruption mission never got off the ground, and the fragment \u2014 now known to be 60 meters \u2014 was on a path to obliterate much of New York City.The skyscrapers of central Manhattan would be vaporized. Fire tornadoes would rip through the region. The \u201cmother of all gusts\u201d would blow from Yonkers to Staten Island and New Jersey to Queens. Ten million people would need to escape the disaster zone \u2014 more Americans than have ever been evacuated before.A chorus of \u201coohs\u201d rippled through the ballroom. \u201cTough,\u201d one person muttered.Suddenly, the tone of the conversation shifted. They had left behind the comfortable certainty of physics. Now they had to plan for the unpredictability of people.\u201cWe\u2019re very concerned,\u201d said Carol Lewis, who was playing the role of an \u201caffected citizen.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019ve actually called ourselves \u2018mad as hell.\u2019 And we have questions.\u201dWhat would happen to people in nursing homes? What would happen to pets? Who would prevent looting of abandoned buildings? Would they be compensated for their losses? Where would the survivors go? And would they ever be allowed to return?\u201cDon\u2019t think we haven\u2019t been doing anything before we\u2019re at T-minus 10 days,\u201d said Leviticus Lewis, a real-life operations manager for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (and Carol Lewis\u2019s husband).\u201cI can tell you there already is a New York evacuation plan,\u201d he assured people. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you what it is.\u201dThen Joseph Nuth, a NASA asteroid researcher, stood up and stated the obvious: \u201cIt\u2019s our fault.\u201d\u201cHow are we going to compensate those people, get them their lives back?\u201d he asked. \u201cThis is an enormous liability that we took on when we screwed this up.\u201dThat led to a question of whether the United Nations\u2019 \u201cConvention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects\u201d could apply to citizens suing their own government.\u201cThe questions now are so deep and so far-reaching,\u201d said Victoria Andrews, NASA\u2019s deputy planetary defense officer.And, she noted, they\u2019re not quite so esoteric as they might seem. Most natural disasters cannot be predicted as far in advance as an asteroid impact, but as a consequence of climate change, many are becoming more and more likely. Deadly wildfires and disastrous hurricanes that once were rare now seem inevitable \u2014 and communities have to prepare.\u201cThis exercise gets us thinking about how to do that,\u201d Andrews said.Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the fictional asteroid 2019 PDC was predicted to strike Denver on April 29, 2027. It was actually slated to strike late in the evening on April 28. Though, of course, both dates are safe, because the asteroid is made up. Read more:NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.Fossils show worldwide catastrophe on the day the dinosaurs diedMany asteroids might be remnants of five destroyed worlds, scientists say Yes, Steven Spielberg, they are considering the nuclear option. Don\u2019t panic: Scientists are practicing for a killer asteroid impact",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the last time people walked and rolled on the Moon 45 years ago (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3222",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/13/watch-the-last-time-people-set-foot-on-the-moon-45-years-ago/",
        "text": "On Monday, President Trump signed the\u00a0Space Policy Directive 1, the broad-brush outline of a plan to return American astronauts to the moon. The signing coincides with the 45th anniversary of the last time humans set foot on the moon: the 12-day mission of Apollo 17 in 1972.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightStanding behind President Trump as he signed the directive \u2014 see him at 0:37 of this video \u2014 was surviving Apollo 17 astronaut, geologist and former U.S. senator Harrison \u201cJack\u201d Schmitt (R-N.M.). As you\u2019ll see in the video, Schmitt practically rolled in Moon dirt in the course of his three-day geological field trip to the lunar Taurus-Littrow Valley. While mission commander Capt. Eugene Cernan\u2019s suit stands on display at the National Air and Space Museum here in Washington, Schmitt\u2019s suit has been put to work behind the scenes, providing test samples to determine how badly Moon dust damaged these suits. NASA\u2019s official conclusions, though they make for some dry reading, describe cloth worn out and metal seals and joints pitted and scored by the hard, sharp lunar regolith \u2014 dust, basically, but dust that's much more dangerous than the Earth kind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was after only three days on the Moon. Plans are sketchy and have seen many revisions over the years, but all of them call for much longer stays on the Moon as a rehearsal for eventual extended stays on Mars. There are many technical hurdles to be overcome before any of this can be realized \u2014 but getting a handle on Moon dust will have to be a first step.Read more:\u2018We shall return\u2019: Eugene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon. There was no return.Jupiter's Great Red Spot is 200 miles deepScientists detect gravitational waves from a new kind of nova, sparking a new era in astronomyWas it justified or needless? The debate surrounding the atomic bombing of JapanHow big was the Cassini spacecraft? One of the most surprising dangers of an extended trip to the Moon is dust. Watch the last time people walked and rolled on the Moon 45 years ago",
        "author": "William Neff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | If a satellite falls on your house, space law protects you \u2014 but there are no legal penalties for leaving junk in orbit (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3223",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/if-a-satellite-falls-on-your-house-space-law-protects-you--but-there-are-no-legal-penalties-for-leaving-junk-in-orbit/2021/05/21/e4700468-b8a7-11eb-a6b1-81296da0339b_story.html",
        "text": "On May 8, a piece of space junk from a Chinese rocket fell back to Earth and landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. A year ago, in May 2020, another Chinese rocket had met the same fate when it plummeted into the waters off the West African coast. No one knew when or where either of these pieces of space junk were going to hit, so it was a relief when neither crashed on land or injured anyone. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDebris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean, China reportsSpace debris is any nonfunctional, human-made object in space. As a professor of space and society focused on space governance, I\u2019ve noticed that there are three questions the public always asks when falling space debris gets into the news. Could this have been prevented? What would have happened if there was damage? And how will new commercial companies be regulated as space activities and launches increase exponentially?For space law to be effective, it needs to do three things. First, regulation must prevent as many dangerous situations from occurring as possible. Second, there needs to be a way to monitor and enforce compliance. And finally, laws need to lay out a framework for responsibility and liability if things do go wrong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo how do current laws and treaties about space stack up? They do okay, but interestingly, looking at environmental law here on Earth may give some ideas on how to improve the current legal regime on space debris.If a rocket hits your houseImagine that, instead of landing in the ocean, the recent Chinese rocket crashed into your house while you were at work. What would law allow you to do?According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and 1972 Liability Convention \u2014 both adopted by the United Nations \u2014 this would be a government-to-government issue. The treaties declare that states are internationally responsible and liable for any damage caused by a spacecraft, even if the damage was caused by a private company from that state.Story continues below advertisementAccording to these laws, your country wouldn\u2019t even need to prove that someone had done something wrong if a space object or its component parts caused damage on the surface of the Earth or to normal aircraft in flight.AdvertisementBasically, if a piece of space junk from China landed on your house, your own country\u2019s government would make a claim for compensation through diplomatic channels and then pay you, if government officials chose to make the claim at all.While the chances are slim to none that a broken satellite will land on your house, space debris has crashed onto land.In 1978, the Soviet Cosmos 954 satellite fell into a barren region of Canada\u2019s Northwest Territories. When it crashed, it spread radioactive debris from its onboard nuclear reactor over a wide swath of land. A joint Canadian-American team began a cleanup effort that cost over $14 million in Canadian dollars ($11.5 million in U.S. currency). Canada requested $6 million (Canadian) from the Soviet Union, but the Soviets paid only $3 million (Canadian) in the final settlement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was the first \u2014 and only \u2014 time the Liability Convention has been used when a spacecraft from one country has crashed in another. When the Liability Convention was put into use in this context, four governing norms emerged. Countries have a duty to: warn other governments about debris; provide any information they could about an impending crash; clean up any damage caused by the craft; and compensate your government for any injuries that might have resulted.There have been other instances where space junk has crashed back to Earth \u2014 most notably when Skylab, a U.S. space station, fell and broke up over the Indian Ocean and uninhabited parts of Western Australia in 1979. A local government jokingly fined NASA $311 for littering \u2014 a fine that NASA ignored, although it was eventually paid by an American radio host in 2009. But despite this and other incidences, Canada remains the only country to put the Liability Convention to use.But if you owned a small orbiting satellite that got hit by a piece of space junk, you and your government would have to prove who was at fault. Today, no globally coordinated space traffic management system exists. With tens of thousands of tracked pieces of debris in orbit \u2014 and multitudes of smaller, untrackable pieces \u2014 figuring out what destroyed your satellite would be a difficult.\nThe space pollution problem\nCurrent space law has worked so far because the issues have been few and far between and have been dealt with diplomatically. As more and more spacecraft take flight, the risks to property or life will inevitably increase and the Liability Convention may get more use.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut risks to life and property are not the only concerns about a busy sky. While launch providers, satellite operators and insurance companies care about the problem of space debris for its effect on space operations, space sustainability advocates argue that the environment of space has value itself and faces a much greater risk of harm than individuals on Earth.The mainstream view is that degrading the environment on Earth through pollution or mismanagement is bad because of its negative effect on the environment or living beings. The same is true for space, even if there is no clear direct victim or physical harm. In the Cosmos 954 settlement, the Canadians claimed that since the Soviet satellite deposited hazardous radioactive debris in Canadian territory, this constituted \u201cdamage to property\u201d within the meaning of the Liability Convention.But, as Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty declares that no state can own space or celestial bodies, it is not clear whether this interpretation would apply in the event of harm to objects in space. Space is shaping up to be a new frontier on which the tragedy of the commons can play out.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRemoving from orbit existing large objects that could collide with one another would be a great start for governments. But if the U.N. or governments agreed on laws that define legal consequences for creating space debris in the first place and punishment for not following best practices, this could help mitigate future pollution of the space environment.Such laws would not need to be invented from scratch.The 2007 U.N. Space Debris Mitigation guidelines already address the issue of debris prevention. While some countries have transferred these guidelines into national regulations, worldwide implementation is still pending, and there are no legal consequences for noncompliance.Story continues below advertisementThe chances of a person being killed by a falling satellite are close to zero. On the off chance it does happen, current space law provides a pretty good framework for dealing with such an event. But just like during the early 20th century on Earth, current laws are focusing on the individual and ignoring the bigger picture of the environment \u2014 albeit a cold, dark and unfamiliar one. Adapting and enforcing space law so that it prevents and deters actors from polluting the space environment, and holds them accountable if they break these laws, could help avoid a trash-filled sky.\n\nTimiebi Aganaba is assistant professor of space and society at Arizona State University. This article was originally published on theconversation.com.The Pentagon is tracking a Chinese rocket booster as it falls back to EarthA proliferation of space junk is blocking our view of the cosmos, research showsDear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die? It\u2019s unlikely falling space junk will destroy property or kill a person. If a satellite falls on your house, space law protects you \u2014 but there are no legal penalties for leaving junk in orbit",
        "author": "Timiebi Aganaba"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | If a satellite falls on your house, space law protects you \u2014 but there are no legal penalties for leaving junk in orbit (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3224",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/if-a-satellite-falls-on-your-house-space-law-protects-you--but-there-are-no-legal-penalties-for-leaving-junk-in-orbit/2021/05/21/e4700468-b8a7-11eb-a6b1-81296da0339b_story.html",
        "text": "On May 8, a piece of space junk from a Chinese rocket fell back to Earth and landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. A year ago, in May 2020, another Chinese rocket had met the same fate when it plummeted into the waters off the West African coast. No one knew when or where either of these pieces of space junk were going to hit, so it was a relief when neither crashed on land or injured anyone. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDebris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean, China reportsSpace debris is any nonfunctional, human-made object in space. As a professor of space and society focused on space governance, I\u2019ve noticed that there are three questions the public always asks when falling space debris gets into the news. Could this have been prevented? What would have happened if there was damage? And how will new commercial companies be regulated as space activities and launches increase exponentially?For space law to be effective, it needs to do three things. First, regulation must prevent as many dangerous situations from occurring as possible. Second, there needs to be a way to monitor and enforce compliance. And finally, laws need to lay out a framework for responsibility and liability if things do go wrong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo how do current laws and treaties about space stack up? They do okay, but interestingly, looking at environmental law here on Earth may give some ideas on how to improve the current legal regime on space debris.If a rocket hits your houseImagine that, instead of landing in the ocean, the recent Chinese rocket crashed into your house while you were at work. What would law allow you to do?According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and 1972 Liability Convention \u2014 both adopted by the United Nations \u2014 this would be a government-to-government issue. The treaties declare that states are internationally responsible and liable for any damage caused by a spacecraft, even if the damage was caused by a private company from that state.Story continues below advertisementAccording to these laws, your country wouldn\u2019t even need to prove that someone had done something wrong if a space object or its component parts caused damage on the surface of the Earth or to normal aircraft in flight.AdvertisementBasically, if a piece of space junk from China landed on your house, your own country\u2019s government would make a claim for compensation through diplomatic channels and then pay you, if government officials chose to make the claim at all.While the chances are slim to none that a broken satellite will land on your house, space debris has crashed onto land.In 1978, the Soviet Cosmos 954 satellite fell into a barren region of Canada\u2019s Northwest Territories. When it crashed, it spread radioactive debris from its onboard nuclear reactor over a wide swath of land. A joint Canadian-American team began a cleanup effort that cost over $14 million in Canadian dollars ($11.5 million in U.S. currency). Canada requested $6 million (Canadian) from the Soviet Union, but the Soviets paid only $3 million (Canadian) in the final settlement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was the first \u2014 and only \u2014 time the Liability Convention has been used when a spacecraft from one country has crashed in another. When the Liability Convention was put into use in this context, four governing norms emerged. Countries have a duty to: warn other governments about debris; provide any information they could about an impending crash; clean up any damage caused by the craft; and compensate your government for any injuries that might have resulted.There have been other instances where space junk has crashed back to Earth \u2014 most notably when Skylab, a U.S. space station, fell and broke up over the Indian Ocean and uninhabited parts of Western Australia in 1979. A local government jokingly fined NASA $311 for littering \u2014 a fine that NASA ignored, although it was eventually paid by an American radio host in 2009. But despite this and other incidences, Canada remains the only country to put the Liability Convention to use.But if you owned a small orbiting satellite that got hit by a piece of space junk, you and your government would have to prove who was at fault. Today, no globally coordinated space traffic management system exists. With tens of thousands of tracked pieces of debris in orbit \u2014 and multitudes of smaller, untrackable pieces \u2014 figuring out what destroyed your satellite would be a difficult.\nThe space pollution problem\nCurrent space law has worked so far because the issues have been few and far between and have been dealt with diplomatically. As more and more spacecraft take flight, the risks to property or life will inevitably increase and the Liability Convention may get more use.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut risks to life and property are not the only concerns about a busy sky. While launch providers, satellite operators and insurance companies care about the problem of space debris for its effect on space operations, space sustainability advocates argue that the environment of space has value itself and faces a much greater risk of harm than individuals on Earth.The mainstream view is that degrading the environment on Earth through pollution or mismanagement is bad because of its negative effect on the environment or living beings. The same is true for space, even if there is no clear direct victim or physical harm. In the Cosmos 954 settlement, the Canadians claimed that since the Soviet satellite deposited hazardous radioactive debris in Canadian territory, this constituted \u201cdamage to property\u201d within the meaning of the Liability Convention.But, as Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty declares that no state can own space or celestial bodies, it is not clear whether this interpretation would apply in the event of harm to objects in space. Space is shaping up to be a new frontier on which the tragedy of the commons can play out.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRemoving from orbit existing large objects that could collide with one another would be a great start for governments. But if the U.N. or governments agreed on laws that define legal consequences for creating space debris in the first place and punishment for not following best practices, this could help mitigate future pollution of the space environment.Such laws would not need to be invented from scratch.The 2007 U.N. Space Debris Mitigation guidelines already address the issue of debris prevention. While some countries have transferred these guidelines into national regulations, worldwide implementation is still pending, and there are no legal consequences for noncompliance.Story continues below advertisementThe chances of a person being killed by a falling satellite are close to zero. On the off chance it does happen, current space law provides a pretty good framework for dealing with such an event. But just like during the early 20th century on Earth, current laws are focusing on the individual and ignoring the bigger picture of the environment \u2014 albeit a cold, dark and unfamiliar one. Adapting and enforcing space law so that it prevents and deters actors from polluting the space environment, and holds them accountable if they break these laws, could help avoid a trash-filled sky.\n\nTimiebi Aganaba is assistant professor of space and society at Arizona State University. This article was originally published on theconversation.com.The Pentagon is tracking a Chinese rocket booster as it falls back to EarthA proliferation of space junk is blocking our view of the cosmos, research showsDear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die? It\u2019s unlikely falling space junk will destroy property or kill a person. If a satellite falls on your house, space law protects you \u2014 but there are no legal penalties for leaving junk in orbit",
        "author": "Timiebi Aganaba"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroid explorers take first hops, snap a photograph of their new world (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3225",
        "date": "2018-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/09/24/asteroid-explorers-take-first-hops-snap-photograph-their-new-world/",
        "text": "On a primitive piece of space rock more than 100 million miles from Earth, two tiny robotic explorers took their first cautious \u201chops\u201d this weekend \u2014 the first movements made by any human-made spacecraft across the surface of an asteroid.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe twin rovers were deposited Friday atop the half-mile-wide asteroid Ryugu by their parent spacecraft, the Japanese space agency\u2019s Hayabusa 2. The next day, JAXA shared an impressionistic image of the landing site: the craggy dark stone of the carbon-rich Ryugu lit by a brilliant beam of light from the sun. This dynamic photo was captured by Rover-1A on September 22 at around 11:44 JST. It was taken on Ryugu's surface during a hop. The left-half is the surface of Ryugu, while the white region on the right is due to sunlight. (Hayabusa2 Project) pic.twitter.com/IQLsFd4gJu\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) September 22, 2018\n\nThe rovers \u2014 dubbed MINERVA-II 1a and 1b \u2014 are each roughly the size and shape of a cookie tin. Solar-powered internal rotors loft them in the asteroid\u2019s low gravity, allowing them to propel themselves across its surface to snap photographs and take temperature data.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI cannot find words to express how happy I am,\u201d project manager Yuichi Tsuda said in a statement after the rovers' safe arrival was confirmed.In the coming months, the MINERVA-II rovers will be joined by two more landers. Hayabusa 2 will also smash the asteroid with explosives to blast away part of its surface, exposing underground material that the spacecraft will collect and eventually send back to Earth. If all goes to plan, it will be the first mission to return a sample from a C-type asteroid, which are often compared to time capsules from the earliest days of the solar system, more than 4 billion years ago.Ryugu is named for a magical palace at the bottom of the sea where a fisherman is given a mysterious box in a popular Japanese folk tale.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe Hayabusa 2 will also bring back a capsule with samples,\u201d JAXA explained in a news release announcing the asteroid\u2019s name, \u201cthus the theme of \u2018bringing back a treasure\u2019 is common.\u201d The space agency also noted that Ryugu is thought to contain water \u2014 making it an appropriate namesake of an underwater palace.AdvertisementHayabusa 2 will stay at Ryugu until late 2019, when it will depart with its collected samples and set course for Earth. JAXA hopes to receive the samples the following year.In labs on Earth, scientists will assess the asteroid fragments to understand the processes that allowed planets to form from the swirl of gas and dust that surrounded the primitive sun. They will compare the rocks to meteorites and to samples collected by other missions, including NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-Rex, which is slated to arrive at the asteroid Bennu in 2020.\u201cBy studying asteroids, we learn more about the early solar system and more about life itself,\u201d the \u201cscience guy\u201d and Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye tweeted as the rovers made their descent Friday. \u201cIt is amazing to be a human living at this moment in the history of space exploration.\u201d Two tiny robotic explorers took their first cautious \u201chops\u201d \u2014 the first movements made by any human-made spacecraft across the surface of an asteroid. Asteroid explorers take first hops, snap a photograph of their new world",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroid explorers take first hops, snap a photograph of their new world (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3226",
        "date": "2018-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/09/24/asteroid-explorers-take-first-hops-snap-photograph-their-new-world/",
        "text": "On a primitive piece of space rock more than 100 million miles from Earth, two tiny robotic explorers took their first cautious \u201chops\u201d this weekend \u2014 the first movements made by any human-made spacecraft across the surface of an asteroid.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe twin rovers were deposited Friday atop the half-mile-wide asteroid Ryugu by their parent spacecraft, the Japanese space agency\u2019s Hayabusa 2. The next day, JAXA shared an impressionistic image of the landing site: the craggy dark stone of the carbon-rich Ryugu lit by a brilliant beam of light from the sun. This dynamic photo was captured by Rover-1A on September 22 at around 11:44 JST. It was taken on Ryugu's surface during a hop. The left-half is the surface of Ryugu, while the white region on the right is due to sunlight. (Hayabusa2 Project) pic.twitter.com/IQLsFd4gJu\u2014 HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) September 22, 2018\n\nThe rovers \u2014 dubbed MINERVA-II 1a and 1b \u2014 are each roughly the size and shape of a cookie tin. Solar-powered internal rotors loft them in the asteroid\u2019s low gravity, allowing them to propel themselves across its surface to snap photographs and take temperature data.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI cannot find words to express how happy I am,\u201d project manager Yuichi Tsuda said in a statement after the rovers' safe arrival was confirmed.In the coming months, the MINERVA-II rovers will be joined by two more landers. Hayabusa 2 will also smash the asteroid with explosives to blast away part of its surface, exposing underground material that the spacecraft will collect and eventually send back to Earth. If all goes to plan, it will be the first mission to return a sample from a C-type asteroid, which are often compared to time capsules from the earliest days of the solar system, more than 4 billion years ago.Ryugu is named for a magical palace at the bottom of the sea where a fisherman is given a mysterious box in a popular Japanese folk tale.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe Hayabusa 2 will also bring back a capsule with samples,\u201d JAXA explained in a news release announcing the asteroid\u2019s name, \u201cthus the theme of \u2018bringing back a treasure\u2019 is common.\u201d The space agency also noted that Ryugu is thought to contain water \u2014 making it an appropriate namesake of an underwater palace.AdvertisementHayabusa 2 will stay at Ryugu until late 2019, when it will depart with its collected samples and set course for Earth. JAXA hopes to receive the samples the following year.In labs on Earth, scientists will assess the asteroid fragments to understand the processes that allowed planets to form from the swirl of gas and dust that surrounded the primitive sun. They will compare the rocks to meteorites and to samples collected by other missions, including NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-Rex, which is slated to arrive at the asteroid Bennu in 2020.\u201cBy studying asteroids, we learn more about the early solar system and more about life itself,\u201d the \u201cscience guy\u201d and Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye tweeted as the rovers made their descent Friday. \u201cIt is amazing to be a human living at this moment in the history of space exploration.\u201d Two tiny robotic explorers took their first cautious \u201chops\u201d \u2014 the first movements made by any human-made spacecraft across the surface of an asteroid. Asteroid explorers take first hops, snap a photograph of their new world",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Jupiter Mission Reveals the \u2018Brand-New and Unexpected\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3227",
        "date": "2017-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/science/nasa-juno-spacecraft-jupiter-storms.html",
        "text": "Observations taken from the first few orbits of the Juno spacecraft provide a glimpse of the interior, the poles and the equator of the solar system\u2019s largest planet. Observations taken from the first few orbits of the Juno spacecraft provide a glimpse of the interior, the poles and the equator of the solar system\u2019s largest planet. The top and bottom of Jupiter are pockmarked with a chaotic m\u00e9lange of swirls that are immense storms hundreds of miles across. The planet\u2019s interior core appears bigger than expected, and swirling electric currents are generating surprisingly strong magnetic fields. Auroral lights shining in Jupiter\u2019s polar regions seem to operate in a reverse way to those on Earth. And a belt of ammonia may be rising around the planet\u2019s equator.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Jupiter Mission Reveals the \u2018Brand-New and Unexpected\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3228",
        "date": "2017-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/science/nasa-juno-spacecraft-jupiter-storms.html",
        "text": "Observations taken from the first few orbits of the Juno spacecraft provide a glimpse of the interior, the poles and the equator of the solar system\u2019s largest planet. Observations taken from the first few orbits of the Juno spacecraft provide a glimpse of the interior, the poles and the equator of the solar system\u2019s largest planet. The top and bottom of Jupiter are pockmarked with a chaotic m\u00e9lange of swirls that are immense storms hundreds of miles across. The planet\u2019s interior core appears bigger than expected, and swirling electric currents are generating surprisingly strong magnetic fields. Auroral lights shining in Jupiter\u2019s polar regions seem to operate in a reverse way to those on Earth. And a belt of ammonia may be rising around the planet\u2019s equator.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Jupiter Mission Reveals the \u2018Brand-New and Unexpected\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3229",
        "date": "2017-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/science/nasa-juno-spacecraft-jupiter-storms.html",
        "text": "Observations taken from the first few orbits of the Juno spacecraft provide a glimpse of the interior, the poles and the equator of the solar system\u2019s largest planet. Observations taken from the first few orbits of the Juno spacecraft provide a glimpse of the interior, the poles and the equator of the solar system\u2019s largest planet. The top and bottom of Jupiter are pockmarked with a chaotic m\u00e9lange of swirls that are immense storms hundreds of miles across. The planet\u2019s interior core appears bigger than expected, and swirling electric currents are generating surprisingly strong magnetic fields. Auroral lights shining in Jupiter\u2019s polar regions seem to operate in a reverse way to those on Earth. And a belt of ammonia may be rising around the planet\u2019s equator.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: November\u2019s treats include a partial lunar eclipse and that sweet extra hour of sleep (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3230",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-novembers-treats-include-a-partial-lunar-eclipse-and-that-sweet-extra-hour/2021/10/30/4bdbc742-38c6-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html",
        "text": "November presents a cornucopia of familiar planets and their lunar encounters, a meteor shower negated by a bright moon, and a partial lunar eclipse imitating a total lunar eclipse. And you\u2019ll need to turn your clocks back.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen night falls in early November, look to the southwest to find the brilliant, neighboring planet Venus. It\u2019s exceptionally bright and easy to spot at dusk. Venus hangs out in the constellation Sagittarius and starts the month at -4.6 magnitude, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. There\u2019s more: It gets brighter and can be seen at -4.8 magnitude by the end of the month.The skinny young moon approaches Venus on Nov. 6-7, passing by the effervescent planet Nov. 8. The Sagittarius asterism is shaped like a teapot, and when it sets in the west, it gives a hint of pouring tea. While no scandalous overtones surround Venus, the planet appears to scoot through the teapot\u2019s dome about Nov. 11 through 16.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJupiter and Saturn happen to be in Venus\u2019s neighborhood. Look high to the south as evening descends. Of the two large gaseous planets, Jupiter is brighter because it is closer to us, and it starts the month at -2.5 magnitude (very bright), but it gets slightly dimmer throughout November. The ringed planet Saturn is seen at +0.7 magnitude (substantially dimmer than Jupiter) for most of the month.The young moon approaches Saturn on Nov. 9, passing under the planet on Nov. 10. Our lunar companion becomes a first-quarter moon on Nov. 11, and it scurries under Jupiter in the southern evening heavens.Just before sunrise late in the month, Earth\u2019s other neighbor Mars starts peeking above the eastern horizon to give us a sneak preview of its more prominent role in December\u2019s sky.Story continues below advertisementThe annual Leonid meteor shower peaks Nov. 17 to 18, but this shower will be a washout, as the shooting stars streak through the heavens just before a full moon (Nov. 19). The American Meteor Society predicts about 15 shooting stars an hour, but because the moon will be bright, its light effectively renders the meteors invisible.AdvertisementEnjoy a partial lunar eclipse in the early morning of Nov. 19. To watch, make sure your coffee is hot. Technically, it\u2019s a partial eclipse, but it will seem like a total lunar eclipse \u2014 which is very safe for your eyes. You\u2019re watching the moon change color.For Washington, the partial phase begins at 3:18 a.m. The moon will gradually darken as our lunar companion cruises through Earth\u2019s shadow \u2014 moving from the penumbral into the umbral phase.Story continues below advertisementThe exact middle of the eclipse occurs at 5:03 a.m., according to the Naval Observatory. Most of the moon will be in Earth\u2019s umbra, and astronomers expect it to take on a reddish tint. As sunrise for Washington occurs at 6:56 a.m., the moon moves out of Earth\u2019s shadow. By 8 a.m., the event is officially over.Next weekend, you\u2019ll be turning back time. Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday, Nov. 7, at 2 a.m., so turn your clocks back an hour for standard time. As a reward, you get an extra hour of sleep.Down-to-Earth events:\u25cf Nov. 13 \u2014 Julie McEnery of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center will discuss online the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, a next-generation space telescope in development. The presentation is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. The virtual Zoom doors open at 7 p.m., and the meeting starts at 7:30. To register, visit\u202fcapitalastronomers.org.\u25cf Nov. 14 \u2014 \u201cCome Fly Away to the Sun,\u201d an online talk by astrophysicist Kelly Korreck about the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, which is designed to study the sun and space weather. Hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. 7:30 p.m. Information: novac.com. Event: meet.google.com/osh-bcyd-gti.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com.  Sky Watch: November\u2019s treats include a partial lunar eclipse and that sweet extra hour of sleep",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: November\u2019s treats include a partial lunar eclipse and that sweet extra hour of sleep (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3231",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-novembers-treats-include-a-partial-lunar-eclipse-and-that-sweet-extra-hour/2021/10/30/4bdbc742-38c6-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html",
        "text": "November presents a cornucopia of familiar planets and their lunar encounters, a meteor shower negated by a bright moon, and a partial lunar eclipse imitating a total lunar eclipse. And you\u2019ll need to turn your clocks back.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen night falls in early November, look to the southwest to find the brilliant, neighboring planet Venus. It\u2019s exceptionally bright and easy to spot at dusk. Venus hangs out in the constellation Sagittarius and starts the month at -4.6 magnitude, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. There\u2019s more: It gets brighter and can be seen at -4.8 magnitude by the end of the month.The skinny young moon approaches Venus on Nov. 6-7, passing by the effervescent planet Nov. 8. The Sagittarius asterism is shaped like a teapot, and when it sets in the west, it gives a hint of pouring tea. While no scandalous overtones surround Venus, the planet appears to scoot through the teapot\u2019s dome about Nov. 11 through 16.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJupiter and Saturn happen to be in Venus\u2019s neighborhood. Look high to the south as evening descends. Of the two large gaseous planets, Jupiter is brighter because it is closer to us, and it starts the month at -2.5 magnitude (very bright), but it gets slightly dimmer throughout November. The ringed planet Saturn is seen at +0.7 magnitude (substantially dimmer than Jupiter) for most of the month.The young moon approaches Saturn on Nov. 9, passing under the planet on Nov. 10. Our lunar companion becomes a first-quarter moon on Nov. 11, and it scurries under Jupiter in the southern evening heavens.Just before sunrise late in the month, Earth\u2019s other neighbor Mars starts peeking above the eastern horizon to give us a sneak preview of its more prominent role in December\u2019s sky.Story continues below advertisementThe annual Leonid meteor shower peaks Nov. 17 to 18, but this shower will be a washout, as the shooting stars streak through the heavens just before a full moon (Nov. 19). The American Meteor Society predicts about 15 shooting stars an hour, but because the moon will be bright, its light effectively renders the meteors invisible.AdvertisementEnjoy a partial lunar eclipse in the early morning of Nov. 19. To watch, make sure your coffee is hot. Technically, it\u2019s a partial eclipse, but it will seem like a total lunar eclipse \u2014 which is very safe for your eyes. You\u2019re watching the moon change color.For Washington, the partial phase begins at 3:18 a.m. The moon will gradually darken as our lunar companion cruises through Earth\u2019s shadow \u2014 moving from the penumbral into the umbral phase.Story continues below advertisementThe exact middle of the eclipse occurs at 5:03 a.m., according to the Naval Observatory. Most of the moon will be in Earth\u2019s umbra, and astronomers expect it to take on a reddish tint. As sunrise for Washington occurs at 6:56 a.m., the moon moves out of Earth\u2019s shadow. By 8 a.m., the event is officially over.Next weekend, you\u2019ll be turning back time. Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday, Nov. 7, at 2 a.m., so turn your clocks back an hour for standard time. As a reward, you get an extra hour of sleep.Down-to-Earth events:\u25cf Nov. 13 \u2014 Julie McEnery of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center will discuss online the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, a next-generation space telescope in development. The presentation is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. The virtual Zoom doors open at 7 p.m., and the meeting starts at 7:30. To register, visit\u202fcapitalastronomers.org.\u25cf Nov. 14 \u2014 \u201cCome Fly Away to the Sun,\u201d an online talk by astrophysicist Kelly Korreck about the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, which is designed to study the sun and space weather. Hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. 7:30 p.m. Information: novac.com. Event: meet.google.com/osh-bcyd-gti.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com.  Sky Watch: November\u2019s treats include a partial lunar eclipse and that sweet extra hour of sleep",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: November\u2019s treats include a partial lunar eclipse and that sweet extra hour of sleep (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3232",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-novembers-treats-include-a-partial-lunar-eclipse-and-that-sweet-extra-hour/2021/10/30/4bdbc742-38c6-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html",
        "text": "November presents a cornucopia of familiar planets and their lunar encounters, a meteor shower negated by a bright moon, and a partial lunar eclipse imitating a total lunar eclipse. And you\u2019ll need to turn your clocks back.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen night falls in early November, look to the southwest to find the brilliant, neighboring planet Venus. It\u2019s exceptionally bright and easy to spot at dusk. Venus hangs out in the constellation Sagittarius and starts the month at -4.6 magnitude, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. There\u2019s more: It gets brighter and can be seen at -4.8 magnitude by the end of the month.The skinny young moon approaches Venus on Nov. 6-7, passing by the effervescent planet Nov. 8. The Sagittarius asterism is shaped like a teapot, and when it sets in the west, it gives a hint of pouring tea. While no scandalous overtones surround Venus, the planet appears to scoot through the teapot\u2019s dome about Nov. 11 through 16.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJupiter and Saturn happen to be in Venus\u2019s neighborhood. Look high to the south as evening descends. Of the two large gaseous planets, Jupiter is brighter because it is closer to us, and it starts the month at -2.5 magnitude (very bright), but it gets slightly dimmer throughout November. The ringed planet Saturn is seen at +0.7 magnitude (substantially dimmer than Jupiter) for most of the month.The young moon approaches Saturn on Nov. 9, passing under the planet on Nov. 10. Our lunar companion becomes a first-quarter moon on Nov. 11, and it scurries under Jupiter in the southern evening heavens.Just before sunrise late in the month, Earth\u2019s other neighbor Mars starts peeking above the eastern horizon to give us a sneak preview of its more prominent role in December\u2019s sky.Story continues below advertisementThe annual Leonid meteor shower peaks Nov. 17 to 18, but this shower will be a washout, as the shooting stars streak through the heavens just before a full moon (Nov. 19). The American Meteor Society predicts about 15 shooting stars an hour, but because the moon will be bright, its light effectively renders the meteors invisible.AdvertisementEnjoy a partial lunar eclipse in the early morning of Nov. 19. To watch, make sure your coffee is hot. Technically, it\u2019s a partial eclipse, but it will seem like a total lunar eclipse \u2014 which is very safe for your eyes. You\u2019re watching the moon change color.For Washington, the partial phase begins at 3:18 a.m. The moon will gradually darken as our lunar companion cruises through Earth\u2019s shadow \u2014 moving from the penumbral into the umbral phase.Story continues below advertisementThe exact middle of the eclipse occurs at 5:03 a.m., according to the Naval Observatory. Most of the moon will be in Earth\u2019s umbra, and astronomers expect it to take on a reddish tint. As sunrise for Washington occurs at 6:56 a.m., the moon moves out of Earth\u2019s shadow. By 8 a.m., the event is officially over.Next weekend, you\u2019ll be turning back time. Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday, Nov. 7, at 2 a.m., so turn your clocks back an hour for standard time. As a reward, you get an extra hour of sleep.Down-to-Earth events:\u25cf Nov. 13 \u2014 Julie McEnery of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center will discuss online the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, a next-generation space telescope in development. The presentation is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. The virtual Zoom doors open at 7 p.m., and the meeting starts at 7:30. To register, visit\u202fcapitalastronomers.org.\u25cf Nov. 14 \u2014 \u201cCome Fly Away to the Sun,\u201d an online talk by astrophysicist Kelly Korreck about the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, which is designed to study the sun and space weather. Hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. 7:30 p.m. Information: novac.com. Event: meet.google.com/osh-bcyd-gti.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com.  Sky Watch: November\u2019s treats include a partial lunar eclipse and that sweet extra hour of sleep",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "See more amazing images of Cassini\u2019s dive through Saturn\u2019s rings (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3233",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/27/cassini-just-sent-back-images-from-its-first-ever-dive-through-saturns-rings/",
        "text": "Note: This post has been updated\u00a0with new images sent back by Cassini, because HOLY COW!Scientists just got their first glimpse into the space between Saturn and its rings. And it's pretty stunning.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Wednesday, the NASA space probe Cassini performed the first of 22 planned dives\u00a0through the rings around the planet. No human-made object had ever ventured so far into those swirling bands of ice and dust particles. Cassini was traveling at speeds of 77,000 mph\u00a0through regions\u00a0thick with potentially destructive particles. It had to use its dish-shaped antenna as a shield, preventing any communication with Earth during the dive. All day, scientists anxiously awaited confirmation that their brave little space robot had made it through. Just before midnight Pacific time, the Deep Space Network (a group of telescopes that communicate with distant objects in space) picked up Cassini's far-off signal.\u00a0A massive cheer\u00a0went up at ground control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., as data began streaming the billion miles back to Earth. Cassini had made it through the gap and emerged safely on the other side.We did it! Cassini is in contact with Earth and sending back data after a successful dive through the gap between Saturn and its rings. pic.twitter.com/cej1yO7T6a\u2014 NASA Solar System (@NASASolarSystem) April 27, 2017\n\nIn September, the spacecraft's last dive will have it plummeting straight into Saturn itself, and the probe will be lost forever. But until then, Cassini's \u201cgrand finale\u201d promises to deliver some incredible images and some fascinating science.The raw images from the latest dive are being posted on NASA's website as they stream in. Here's some of what Cassini has seen: The NASA spacecraft just dived closer to Saturn than any human-made object has gone before. See more amazing images of Cassini\u2019s dive through Saturn\u2019s rings",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3234",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/27/launch-of-nasas-new-flagship-space-telescope-is-delayed-again/",
        "text": "Not for the first time, NASA will\u00a0postpone\u00a0the launch of\u00a0the James Webb Space Telescope by at least a year,\u00a0to May 2020, the agency announced\u00a0Tuesday.The delay may increase the cost of the mission\u00a0\u2014 the bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope \u2014\u00a0beyond\u00a0the $8 billion funding cap established by law. If that happens, the JWST will need to be reapproved by Congress. It's yet another setback for the ambitious but beleaguered mission, which has been in the works since 1996. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpeaking to reporters\u00a0Tuesday, Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said the delay is required to deal with issues that arose as the telescope components were brought together at the Redondo Beach, Calif., facility of Northrop Grumman, the project's main contractor. Tests of some of the spacecraft's main components, particularly the tennis-court-size sun shield, have taken longer than expected.\u00a0In addition, \u201ca few mistakes happened,\u201d\u00a0Zurbuchen said, prolonging the integration and testing phase.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cExtensive testing is the only way to ensure the mission will succeed with high confidence,\u201d Zurbuchen said.\u00a0\u201cSimply put, we have one shot to get this right before going into space.\u201dThe project's standing review board predicted with 70 percent confidence that, with further tests, the telescope will be ready to launch in May 2020.The massive space telescope, which has already cost $7.3 billion to develop, was a top priority in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's 2000 Decadal Survey.\u00a0Designed to work in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the JWST's gold-covered, 20-foot-wide mirror would\u00a0collect the oldest light in the universe, allowing scientists unprecedented insight into the time known as \u201ccosmic dawn.\u201d It would also probe the mysteries of black holes and seek out signs of life on planets orbiting distant suns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut much of the\u00a0technology required for such a fantastic instrument didn't yet exist. The JWST's\u00a0creators had to invent, among other things, a main mirror and a heat shield that could unfold like origami in orbit. The cost of the mission quickly ballooned past the initial projection of about $1 billion, and the launch was pushed back from 2007 to 2008, then 2009, then 2010, then 2011, then 2013, then 2014, then 2015 or maybe 2016.\u00a0The\u00a0journal Nature called\u00a0the JWST \u201cthe telescope that ate astronomy.\u201dAfter nearly canceling the mission in 2011, Congress voted to cap all additional funding for the project at $8 billion. A new plan put the telescope on target to launch in 2018. But that date has since slipped to 2019 and, today, to May 2020 at the earliest.The James Webb Space Telescope will give scientists the deepest look into space and back in time. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot said the exhaustive integration and testing process, which can feel excruciatingly slow at times, is needed to ensure that the JWST is functional when it arrives in orbit.\u00a0Unlike Hubble, which was in low Earth orbit and could be repaired by astronauts when a flaw in its main mirror was revealed after launch, the JWST will be a million miles from Earth, four times as far as the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's this really important balance between pushing and being considerate and absolutely thoughtful about where we\u2019re going,\u201d Lightfoot said.\u00a0According to Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, the launch schedule took hits after mishaps required the replacement of a transducer that was incorrectly powered, valves that were affected when the wrong solvent was run through the propulsion system and a catalyst bed that was overheated. Engineers are also working to fix small tears in the sun shield and slack in the cables that help it unfold. Meanwhile, each unfolding\u00a0and refolding of the sun shield has taken twice as long as expected, further delaying work.According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, Northrop Grumman\u00a0staff are working three shifts, 24 hours a day, to\u00a0handle the issues.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAndrucyk said Tuesday that NASA will increase engineering oversight of these final phases, including ensuring that\u00a0a senior official from the Goddard Space Flight Center (where the JWST was built) is always present at Northrop Grumman. In addition,\u00a0an independent review board chaired by retired aerospace executive Tom Young will review the project's schedule, helping to establish a firmer timeline for launch. NASA expects to give a full report to Congress in late June.The delay will have ramifications beyond the JWST team. NASA will need to negotiate a new launch date with the European Space Agency, which runs the spaceport in French Guiana where the telescope is supposed to lift off. And astronomers who wish to use the telescope for research will now have until 2019 to submit proposals for experiments.The ongoing drama with the JWST may also affect the outlook for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, a dark-matter observatory that was the top priority of the 2010 Decadal Survey.\u00a0NASA is already weighing cost-cutting measures for the mission, which was recently projected to cost 12 percent more than its budget. And in his most recent budget request, President Trump proposed scrapping the mission (for now, Congress has decided to keep funding it).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Zurbuchen said the two missions are different in design, if not in importance. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be in a situation where 10 miracles are required\u201d technologically, as happened with the JWST, he said.\u00a0Still, he mulled whether the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine should wait for data from Webb before\u00a0finalizing the next decadal survey, which will set priorities for the 2030s and beyond.Read more:NASA's new gold-covered telescope will put the Hubble to shameTrump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASANASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet The ambitious but beleaguered James Webb Space Telescope will not lift off until May 2020 at the earliest.  Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3235",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/27/launch-of-nasas-new-flagship-space-telescope-is-delayed-again/",
        "text": "Not for the first time, NASA will\u00a0postpone\u00a0the launch of\u00a0the James Webb Space Telescope by at least a year,\u00a0to May 2020, the agency announced\u00a0Tuesday.The delay may increase the cost of the mission\u00a0\u2014 the bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope \u2014\u00a0beyond\u00a0the $8 billion funding cap established by law. If that happens, the JWST will need to be reapproved by Congress. It's yet another setback for the ambitious but beleaguered mission, which has been in the works since 1996. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpeaking to reporters\u00a0Tuesday, Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said the delay is required to deal with issues that arose as the telescope components were brought together at the Redondo Beach, Calif., facility of Northrop Grumman, the project's main contractor. Tests of some of the spacecraft's main components, particularly the tennis-court-size sun shield, have taken longer than expected.\u00a0In addition, \u201ca few mistakes happened,\u201d\u00a0Zurbuchen said, prolonging the integration and testing phase.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cExtensive testing is the only way to ensure the mission will succeed with high confidence,\u201d Zurbuchen said.\u00a0\u201cSimply put, we have one shot to get this right before going into space.\u201dThe project's standing review board predicted with 70 percent confidence that, with further tests, the telescope will be ready to launch in May 2020.The massive space telescope, which has already cost $7.3 billion to develop, was a top priority in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's 2000 Decadal Survey.\u00a0Designed to work in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the JWST's gold-covered, 20-foot-wide mirror would\u00a0collect the oldest light in the universe, allowing scientists unprecedented insight into the time known as \u201ccosmic dawn.\u201d It would also probe the mysteries of black holes and seek out signs of life on planets orbiting distant suns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut much of the\u00a0technology required for such a fantastic instrument didn't yet exist. The JWST's\u00a0creators had to invent, among other things, a main mirror and a heat shield that could unfold like origami in orbit. The cost of the mission quickly ballooned past the initial projection of about $1 billion, and the launch was pushed back from 2007 to 2008, then 2009, then 2010, then 2011, then 2013, then 2014, then 2015 or maybe 2016.\u00a0The\u00a0journal Nature called\u00a0the JWST \u201cthe telescope that ate astronomy.\u201dAfter nearly canceling the mission in 2011, Congress voted to cap all additional funding for the project at $8 billion. A new plan put the telescope on target to launch in 2018. But that date has since slipped to 2019 and, today, to May 2020 at the earliest.The James Webb Space Telescope will give scientists the deepest look into space and back in time. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot said the exhaustive integration and testing process, which can feel excruciatingly slow at times, is needed to ensure that the JWST is functional when it arrives in orbit.\u00a0Unlike Hubble, which was in low Earth orbit and could be repaired by astronauts when a flaw in its main mirror was revealed after launch, the JWST will be a million miles from Earth, four times as far as the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's this really important balance between pushing and being considerate and absolutely thoughtful about where we\u2019re going,\u201d Lightfoot said.\u00a0According to Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, the launch schedule took hits after mishaps required the replacement of a transducer that was incorrectly powered, valves that were affected when the wrong solvent was run through the propulsion system and a catalyst bed that was overheated. Engineers are also working to fix small tears in the sun shield and slack in the cables that help it unfold. Meanwhile, each unfolding\u00a0and refolding of the sun shield has taken twice as long as expected, further delaying work.According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, Northrop Grumman\u00a0staff are working three shifts, 24 hours a day, to\u00a0handle the issues.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAndrucyk said Tuesday that NASA will increase engineering oversight of these final phases, including ensuring that\u00a0a senior official from the Goddard Space Flight Center (where the JWST was built) is always present at Northrop Grumman. In addition,\u00a0an independent review board chaired by retired aerospace executive Tom Young will review the project's schedule, helping to establish a firmer timeline for launch. NASA expects to give a full report to Congress in late June.The delay will have ramifications beyond the JWST team. NASA will need to negotiate a new launch date with the European Space Agency, which runs the spaceport in French Guiana where the telescope is supposed to lift off. And astronomers who wish to use the telescope for research will now have until 2019 to submit proposals for experiments.The ongoing drama with the JWST may also affect the outlook for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, a dark-matter observatory that was the top priority of the 2010 Decadal Survey.\u00a0NASA is already weighing cost-cutting measures for the mission, which was recently projected to cost 12 percent more than its budget. And in his most recent budget request, President Trump proposed scrapping the mission (for now, Congress has decided to keep funding it).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Zurbuchen said the two missions are different in design, if not in importance. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be in a situation where 10 miracles are required\u201d technologically, as happened with the JWST, he said.\u00a0Still, he mulled whether the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine should wait for data from Webb before\u00a0finalizing the next decadal survey, which will set priorities for the 2030s and beyond.Read more:NASA's new gold-covered telescope will put the Hubble to shameTrump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASANASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet The ambitious but beleaguered James Webb Space Telescope will not lift off until May 2020 at the earliest.  Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3236",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/27/launch-of-nasas-new-flagship-space-telescope-is-delayed-again/",
        "text": "Not for the first time, NASA will\u00a0postpone\u00a0the launch of\u00a0the James Webb Space Telescope by at least a year,\u00a0to May 2020, the agency announced\u00a0Tuesday.The delay may increase the cost of the mission\u00a0\u2014 the bigger and more powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope \u2014\u00a0beyond\u00a0the $8 billion funding cap established by law. If that happens, the JWST will need to be reapproved by Congress. It's yet another setback for the ambitious but beleaguered mission, which has been in the works since 1996. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpeaking to reporters\u00a0Tuesday, Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said the delay is required to deal with issues that arose as the telescope components were brought together at the Redondo Beach, Calif., facility of Northrop Grumman, the project's main contractor. Tests of some of the spacecraft's main components, particularly the tennis-court-size sun shield, have taken longer than expected.\u00a0In addition, \u201ca few mistakes happened,\u201d\u00a0Zurbuchen said, prolonging the integration and testing phase.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cExtensive testing is the only way to ensure the mission will succeed with high confidence,\u201d Zurbuchen said.\u00a0\u201cSimply put, we have one shot to get this right before going into space.\u201dThe project's standing review board predicted with 70 percent confidence that, with further tests, the telescope will be ready to launch in May 2020.The massive space telescope, which has already cost $7.3 billion to develop, was a top priority in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's 2000 Decadal Survey.\u00a0Designed to work in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the JWST's gold-covered, 20-foot-wide mirror would\u00a0collect the oldest light in the universe, allowing scientists unprecedented insight into the time known as \u201ccosmic dawn.\u201d It would also probe the mysteries of black holes and seek out signs of life on planets orbiting distant suns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut much of the\u00a0technology required for such a fantastic instrument didn't yet exist. The JWST's\u00a0creators had to invent, among other things, a main mirror and a heat shield that could unfold like origami in orbit. The cost of the mission quickly ballooned past the initial projection of about $1 billion, and the launch was pushed back from 2007 to 2008, then 2009, then 2010, then 2011, then 2013, then 2014, then 2015 or maybe 2016.\u00a0The\u00a0journal Nature called\u00a0the JWST \u201cthe telescope that ate astronomy.\u201dAfter nearly canceling the mission in 2011, Congress voted to cap all additional funding for the project at $8 billion. A new plan put the telescope on target to launch in 2018. But that date has since slipped to 2019 and, today, to May 2020 at the earliest.The James Webb Space Telescope will give scientists the deepest look into space and back in time. (Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot said the exhaustive integration and testing process, which can feel excruciatingly slow at times, is needed to ensure that the JWST is functional when it arrives in orbit.\u00a0Unlike Hubble, which was in low Earth orbit and could be repaired by astronauts when a flaw in its main mirror was revealed after launch, the JWST will be a million miles from Earth, four times as far as the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's this really important balance between pushing and being considerate and absolutely thoughtful about where we\u2019re going,\u201d Lightfoot said.\u00a0According to Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, the launch schedule took hits after mishaps required the replacement of a transducer that was incorrectly powered, valves that were affected when the wrong solvent was run through the propulsion system and a catalyst bed that was overheated. Engineers are also working to fix small tears in the sun shield and slack in the cables that help it unfold. Meanwhile, each unfolding\u00a0and refolding of the sun shield has taken twice as long as expected, further delaying work.According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, Northrop Grumman\u00a0staff are working three shifts, 24 hours a day, to\u00a0handle the issues.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAndrucyk said Tuesday that NASA will increase engineering oversight of these final phases, including ensuring that\u00a0a senior official from the Goddard Space Flight Center (where the JWST was built) is always present at Northrop Grumman. In addition,\u00a0an independent review board chaired by retired aerospace executive Tom Young will review the project's schedule, helping to establish a firmer timeline for launch. NASA expects to give a full report to Congress in late June.The delay will have ramifications beyond the JWST team. NASA will need to negotiate a new launch date with the European Space Agency, which runs the spaceport in French Guiana where the telescope is supposed to lift off. And astronomers who wish to use the telescope for research will now have until 2019 to submit proposals for experiments.The ongoing drama with the JWST may also affect the outlook for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, a dark-matter observatory that was the top priority of the 2010 Decadal Survey.\u00a0NASA is already weighing cost-cutting measures for the mission, which was recently projected to cost 12 percent more than its budget. And in his most recent budget request, President Trump proposed scrapping the mission (for now, Congress has decided to keep funding it).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Zurbuchen said the two missions are different in design, if not in importance. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be in a situation where 10 miracles are required\u201d technologically, as happened with the JWST, he said.\u00a0Still, he mulled whether the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine should wait for data from Webb before\u00a0finalizing the next decadal survey, which will set priorities for the 2030s and beyond.Read more:NASA's new gold-covered telescope will put the Hubble to shameTrump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASANASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet The ambitious but beleaguered James Webb Space Telescope will not lift off until May 2020 at the earliest.  Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The monster storm on Jupiter is 200 miles deep (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3237",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/12/the-monster-storm-on-jupiter-is-200-miles-deep/",
        "text": "NEW ORLEANS \u2014 Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm like nothing this world has ever seen. This crimson-hued anticyclone features winds three times as fast as the jet stream and is big enough to swallow Earth whole. It is almost surely older than any living human \u2014 187 years at least \u2014 and could well still rage across the gas giant's surface after all of us are gone. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightScientists don't know what makes the Great Red Spot so long-lasting. Nor can they explain the chemistry behind its brilliant color. But thanks to NASA's Juno spacecraft, now on its second year of orbiting Jupiter, they know that the storm's roots go deep: The well of hot, swirling gas that powers the Great Red Spot extends some 217 miles into Jupiter's interior.The finding was announced Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, along with other results from Juno's first eight flights past the solar system's largest planet. The spacecraft arrived in orbit around Jupiter in summer 2016 and has since performed looping orbits that take it skimming between Jupiter's cloud tops and radiation belts once every 53 days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Earth, the Great Red Spot would almost graze the orbit of the International Space Station. The highest clouds of our planet's worst hurricanes top out at around 10 miles.But understanding the behavior of the Great Red Spot could improve scientists' understanding of weather on Earth, said California Institute of Technology planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, a co-investigator for the Juno spacecraft. He called Jupiter's giant storm a good \u201cstress test\u201d for Earth-based weather models.It isn't clear what the new find means for the future of the storm \u2014 Ingersoll said the spot already has stretched traditional weather models to their limits. But the spot has been shrinking steadily since the Voyager 2 spacecraft visited it in 1979; it used to be big enough to engulf two Earths.Story continues below advertisementHigh above the cloud tops, Jupiter is enveloped in radiation belts formed by charged particles that get trapped by the planet's magnetic field. On Monday, scientists said that Juno had discovered a new area of radiation just above the planet's atmosphere at the equator. The high energy particles in this region are even more intense than those that make up the radiation belt. But none of the eight spacecraft that preceded Juno at Jupiter had spotted it.AdvertisementJuno's orbit meant \u201cwe literally flew through it,\u201d said Heidi Becker, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who leads Juno's radiation investigation team.The radiation in this region is thought to stem from fast-moving atoms of hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur. These particles are produced in the gas clouds around Jupiter's moons, Io and Europa, but are stripped of electrons and become charged as they interact with Jupiter's atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementThe spacecraft found another area of high-energy particles in Jupiter's inner radiation belt, where electrons move at nearly the speed of light. Becker and her colleagues are still studying the exact nature of these particles.Juno's other discoveries at Jupiter include clusters of 600-mile-wide cyclones at the planet's poles and an uneven magnetic field that is weak in some places, but in others is 10 times as strong as anything found on Earth. The spacecraft's high resolution camera has also taken thousands of detailed images, revealing a planet that looks like a cross between a Van Gogh painting and the world's most elaborate latte foam art.AdvertisementIn a lecture, project scientist Scott Bolton pulled up one of Juno's images of Jupiter's blue-tinged polar storms and burnt sienna gas clouds.\u201cIf you had shown us that five years ago, we couldn\u2019t have guessed what planet it was,\u201d he said.Read more:Jupiter's stunning Great Red Spot, seen like never before Jupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites show These are the photos of Jupiter's weather that everyone is talking about If the Great Red Spot were on Earth, it would almost graze the orbit of the International Space Station. (It could also swallow Earth whole.) The monster storm on Jupiter is 200 miles deep",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The monster storm on Jupiter is 200 miles deep (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3238",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/12/the-monster-storm-on-jupiter-is-200-miles-deep/",
        "text": "NEW ORLEANS \u2014 Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm like nothing this world has ever seen. This crimson-hued anticyclone features winds three times as fast as the jet stream and is big enough to swallow Earth whole. It is almost surely older than any living human \u2014 187 years at least \u2014 and could well still rage across the gas giant's surface after all of us are gone. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightScientists don't know what makes the Great Red Spot so long-lasting. Nor can they explain the chemistry behind its brilliant color. But thanks to NASA's Juno spacecraft, now on its second year of orbiting Jupiter, they know that the storm's roots go deep: The well of hot, swirling gas that powers the Great Red Spot extends some 217 miles into Jupiter's interior.The finding was announced Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, along with other results from Juno's first eight flights past the solar system's largest planet. The spacecraft arrived in orbit around Jupiter in summer 2016 and has since performed looping orbits that take it skimming between Jupiter's cloud tops and radiation belts once every 53 days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Earth, the Great Red Spot would almost graze the orbit of the International Space Station. The highest clouds of our planet's worst hurricanes top out at around 10 miles.But understanding the behavior of the Great Red Spot could improve scientists' understanding of weather on Earth, said California Institute of Technology planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, a co-investigator for the Juno spacecraft. He called Jupiter's giant storm a good \u201cstress test\u201d for Earth-based weather models.It isn't clear what the new find means for the future of the storm \u2014 Ingersoll said the spot already has stretched traditional weather models to their limits. But the spot has been shrinking steadily since the Voyager 2 spacecraft visited it in 1979; it used to be big enough to engulf two Earths.Story continues below advertisementHigh above the cloud tops, Jupiter is enveloped in radiation belts formed by charged particles that get trapped by the planet's magnetic field. On Monday, scientists said that Juno had discovered a new area of radiation just above the planet's atmosphere at the equator. The high energy particles in this region are even more intense than those that make up the radiation belt. But none of the eight spacecraft that preceded Juno at Jupiter had spotted it.AdvertisementJuno's orbit meant \u201cwe literally flew through it,\u201d said Heidi Becker, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who leads Juno's radiation investigation team.The radiation in this region is thought to stem from fast-moving atoms of hydrogen, oxygen and sulfur. These particles are produced in the gas clouds around Jupiter's moons, Io and Europa, but are stripped of electrons and become charged as they interact with Jupiter's atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementThe spacecraft found another area of high-energy particles in Jupiter's inner radiation belt, where electrons move at nearly the speed of light. Becker and her colleagues are still studying the exact nature of these particles.Juno's other discoveries at Jupiter include clusters of 600-mile-wide cyclones at the planet's poles and an uneven magnetic field that is weak in some places, but in others is 10 times as strong as anything found on Earth. The spacecraft's high resolution camera has also taken thousands of detailed images, revealing a planet that looks like a cross between a Van Gogh painting and the world's most elaborate latte foam art.AdvertisementIn a lecture, project scientist Scott Bolton pulled up one of Juno's images of Jupiter's blue-tinged polar storms and burnt sienna gas clouds.\u201cIf you had shown us that five years ago, we couldn\u2019t have guessed what planet it was,\u201d he said.Read more:Jupiter's stunning Great Red Spot, seen like never before Jupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites show These are the photos of Jupiter's weather that everyone is talking about If the Great Red Spot were on Earth, it would almost graze the orbit of the International Space Station. (It could also swallow Earth whole.) The monster storm on Jupiter is 200 miles deep",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3239",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/20/nasa-advances-missions-to-land-a-flying-robot-on-titan-or-snatch-a-piece-of-a-comet/",
        "text": "NASA's newest mission will either\u00a0land\u00a0a quadcopter-like spacecraft on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan or\u00a0collect a sample from the nucleus of a comet.The two proposals were selected from a group of 12 submitted to the New Frontiers program, which supports mid-level planetary science missions.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe first, called Dragonfly, would be an unprecedented project to send a\u00a0flying robot to an alien moon.\u00a0Equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, the quadcopter would be able to fly to multiple locations hundreds of miles apart to study the landscape on Titan. This large, cold moon of Saturn features a thick atmosphere and lakes and rivers of liquid methane, and scientists believe that a watery ocean may lurk beneath its frozen crust. Story continues below advertisementIt's \u201can environment that we know has the ingredients for life,\u201d said lead investigator Elizabeth Turtle, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. With\u00a0Dragonfly, \u201cwe can evaluate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed.\u201dAdvertisementThe Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple Return, or CAESAR, mission would circle back to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was visited by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft from 2014 to 2016. After rendezvousing with the Mount Fuji-size space rock, CAESAR would suck up a sample from its surface and send it back to Earth, where it would arrive in November 2038 (mark your calendars!).NASA has sampled a comet before; the Stardust mission collected dust from a comet's gassy outer envelope, called its \u201ccoma.\u201d But this would be the first mission to return material from a comet's icy surface.\u201cComets are among the most scientifically important objects in the solar system, but they're also among the most poorly understood,\u201d said\u00a0Cornell University researcher\u00a0Steve Squyres, the lead investigator for the mission. Researchers believe that comets delivered water and organic molecules to early Earth, potentially contributing to the origins of life. Surface samples from\u00a067P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will include precious \u201cvolatile\u201d molecules that easily turn to gas but are important for understanding the body's origin and history.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0selection of the two\u00a0concepts\u00a0was announced in a news conference Wednesday. The\u00a0missions now enter\u00a0a concept study phase,\u00a0when the scientists involved can further develop their proposals. A final selection will be made in July 2019, and whichever spacecraft is chosen will launch sometime in 2025.Other New Frontiers proposals included missions to\u00a0study Saturn, Venus or the asteroids around Jupiter, or probe another of Saturn's\u00a0moons, Enceladus. Two of those proposals were also selected for further technological development: the Enceladus Life Finder, which would look for markers of biological activity in the geyser plumes shooting out of Saturn's moon, and the Venus In situ Composition Investigations, which would be the first NASA spacecraft to conduct in-depth exploration of Venus in almost 30 years.NASA has three New Frontiers missions already in flight:\u00a0New Horizons,\u00a0which flew past Pluto in 2015; and Juno, which is orbiting Jupiter; as well as\u00a0OSIRIS REx, a spacecraft en route to the asteroid Bennu that will send back a sample from the rock's surface in September 2023. The two concepts are finalists for NASA's next New Frontiers mission.  NASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3240",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/20/nasa-advances-missions-to-land-a-flying-robot-on-titan-or-snatch-a-piece-of-a-comet/",
        "text": "NASA's newest mission will either\u00a0land\u00a0a quadcopter-like spacecraft on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan or\u00a0collect a sample from the nucleus of a comet.The two proposals were selected from a group of 12 submitted to the New Frontiers program, which supports mid-level planetary science missions.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe first, called Dragonfly, would be an unprecedented project to send a\u00a0flying robot to an alien moon.\u00a0Equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, the quadcopter would be able to fly to multiple locations hundreds of miles apart to study the landscape on Titan. This large, cold moon of Saturn features a thick atmosphere and lakes and rivers of liquid methane, and scientists believe that a watery ocean may lurk beneath its frozen crust. Story continues below advertisementIt's \u201can environment that we know has the ingredients for life,\u201d said lead investigator Elizabeth Turtle, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. With\u00a0Dragonfly, \u201cwe can evaluate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed.\u201dAdvertisementThe Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple Return, or CAESAR, mission would circle back to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was visited by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft from 2014 to 2016. After rendezvousing with the Mount Fuji-size space rock, CAESAR would suck up a sample from its surface and send it back to Earth, where it would arrive in November 2038 (mark your calendars!).NASA has sampled a comet before; the Stardust mission collected dust from a comet's gassy outer envelope, called its \u201ccoma.\u201d But this would be the first mission to return material from a comet's icy surface.\u201cComets are among the most scientifically important objects in the solar system, but they're also among the most poorly understood,\u201d said\u00a0Cornell University researcher\u00a0Steve Squyres, the lead investigator for the mission. Researchers believe that comets delivered water and organic molecules to early Earth, potentially contributing to the origins of life. Surface samples from\u00a067P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will include precious \u201cvolatile\u201d molecules that easily turn to gas but are important for understanding the body's origin and history.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0selection of the two\u00a0concepts\u00a0was announced in a news conference Wednesday. The\u00a0missions now enter\u00a0a concept study phase,\u00a0when the scientists involved can further develop their proposals. A final selection will be made in July 2019, and whichever spacecraft is chosen will launch sometime in 2025.Other New Frontiers proposals included missions to\u00a0study Saturn, Venus or the asteroids around Jupiter, or probe another of Saturn's\u00a0moons, Enceladus. Two of those proposals were also selected for further technological development: the Enceladus Life Finder, which would look for markers of biological activity in the geyser plumes shooting out of Saturn's moon, and the Venus In situ Composition Investigations, which would be the first NASA spacecraft to conduct in-depth exploration of Venus in almost 30 years.NASA has three New Frontiers missions already in flight:\u00a0New Horizons,\u00a0which flew past Pluto in 2015; and Juno, which is orbiting Jupiter; as well as\u00a0OSIRIS REx, a spacecraft en route to the asteroid Bennu that will send back a sample from the rock's surface in September 2023. The two concepts are finalists for NASA's next New Frontiers mission.  NASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3241",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/20/nasa-advances-missions-to-land-a-flying-robot-on-titan-or-snatch-a-piece-of-a-comet/",
        "text": "NASA's newest mission will either\u00a0land\u00a0a quadcopter-like spacecraft on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan or\u00a0collect a sample from the nucleus of a comet.The two proposals were selected from a group of 12 submitted to the New Frontiers program, which supports mid-level planetary science missions.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe first, called Dragonfly, would be an unprecedented project to send a\u00a0flying robot to an alien moon.\u00a0Equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, the quadcopter would be able to fly to multiple locations hundreds of miles apart to study the landscape on Titan. This large, cold moon of Saturn features a thick atmosphere and lakes and rivers of liquid methane, and scientists believe that a watery ocean may lurk beneath its frozen crust. Story continues below advertisementIt's \u201can environment that we know has the ingredients for life,\u201d said lead investigator Elizabeth Turtle, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. With\u00a0Dragonfly, \u201cwe can evaluate how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed.\u201dAdvertisementThe Comet Astrobiology Exploration SAmple Return, or CAESAR, mission would circle back to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was visited by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft from 2014 to 2016. After rendezvousing with the Mount Fuji-size space rock, CAESAR would suck up a sample from its surface and send it back to Earth, where it would arrive in November 2038 (mark your calendars!).NASA has sampled a comet before; the Stardust mission collected dust from a comet's gassy outer envelope, called its \u201ccoma.\u201d But this would be the first mission to return material from a comet's icy surface.\u201cComets are among the most scientifically important objects in the solar system, but they're also among the most poorly understood,\u201d said\u00a0Cornell University researcher\u00a0Steve Squyres, the lead investigator for the mission. Researchers believe that comets delivered water and organic molecules to early Earth, potentially contributing to the origins of life. Surface samples from\u00a067P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will include precious \u201cvolatile\u201d molecules that easily turn to gas but are important for understanding the body's origin and history.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0selection of the two\u00a0concepts\u00a0was announced in a news conference Wednesday. The\u00a0missions now enter\u00a0a concept study phase,\u00a0when the scientists involved can further develop their proposals. A final selection will be made in July 2019, and whichever spacecraft is chosen will launch sometime in 2025.Other New Frontiers proposals included missions to\u00a0study Saturn, Venus or the asteroids around Jupiter, or probe another of Saturn's\u00a0moons, Enceladus. Two of those proposals were also selected for further technological development: the Enceladus Life Finder, which would look for markers of biological activity in the geyser plumes shooting out of Saturn's moon, and the Venus In situ Composition Investigations, which would be the first NASA spacecraft to conduct in-depth exploration of Venus in almost 30 years.NASA has three New Frontiers missions already in flight:\u00a0New Horizons,\u00a0which flew past Pluto in 2015; and Juno, which is orbiting Jupiter; as well as\u00a0OSIRIS REx, a spacecraft en route to the asteroid Bennu that will send back a sample from the rock's surface in September 2023. The two concepts are finalists for NASA's next New Frontiers mission.  NASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Help name the most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3242",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/07/help-name-the-most-distant-object-ever-explored-by-a-spacecraft/",
        "text": "NASA's New Horizons probe has a New Year's Day date with a faint, oddly shaped, ice-covered object 4 billion miles away.The intrepid spacecraft has been sailing through the cold void of space for more than a decade, and it hasn't had a close encounter with another object since it left Pluto in 2015.\u00a0For more than two years,\u00a0but for a few distant glimpses of rocks hundreds of millions of miles away, all New Horizons has had to look forward to is\u00a0this rendezvous at the solar system's outermost edge. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd when the probe zips past in 2019, the object will become the most distant object ever to be explored by spacecraft.There's only one problem. It\u00a0doesn't have a name.Story continues below advertisementCorrection: It doesn't have a good name. Right now,\u00a0it goes by (486958) 2014 MU69, an unwieldy amalgam that indicates\u00a0its number in the minor-planet catalogue and when it was found.\u00a0Alan Stern, the principle investigator for New Horizons, called that name a \u201clicense-plate designator\u201d \u2014 way too much of a mouthful for a first meeting.\u00a0This month, NASA set up an online campaign to solicit nicknames for the object.AdvertisementThe space agency started things off with a few suggestions, including \u201cPluck,\u201d and the names of several types of nut \u2014 \u201cA contact binary is often shaped like a peanut,\u201d NASA explains. \u201cIf other bodies are found, we can name them after the type of nut they most closely resemble.\u201dNo wonder they need your help.Story continues below advertisementYou can submit your suggestion via this form\u00a0or vote for one of the names already being considered here. Polls close at 3 p.m. Eastern time on Dec. 1. To ensure this doesn't become another Boaty McBoatface situation, NASA\u00a0hasn't guaranteed that\u00a0it will go with the most popular option. Instead,\u00a0the agency and the New Horizons team will review the names with the most votes and choose their favorite.After the flyby, NASA will work to formalize the object's new\u00a0designation with the International Astronomical Union, which oversees the naming of all celestial objects. (You may remember the IAU as the organization responsible for Pluto's demotion from planet to dwarf planet in 2006.)AdvertisementNASA doesn't know much about\u00a0(486958) 2014 MU69, a.k.a. Pluck, a.k.a. Peanut, a.k.a. Rocky McRockface \u2014 that's the whole point of sending New Horizons to study it. It is a Kuiper-belt object \u2014 an inhabitant of the wide, frozen disk of debris that encircles the outer solar system \u2014 and it was discovered in 2014 during a Hubble Space Telescope survey aimed at pinpointing a suitable new target for New Horizons once it was finished at Pluto. It's tiny (about 25 miles across) and far away (about a billion miles farther from Earth than Pluto).Story continues below advertisementIn the summer, astronomers spotted\u00a0the object's shadow as it moved in front of a distant star, a phenomenon known as an \u201coccultation.\u201d The observations revealed\u00a0that the object\u00a0probably consists of two smaller bodies that are closely orbiting or stuck together.\u201cThis means we are very probably going to a primordial binary in the Kuiper Belt, a 4-billion-year-old relic of solar system formation and an exotic building block of the small planets of the Kuiper Belt like Pluto, Ixion, Makemake, Sedna and Eris,\u201d Stern wrote in a blog post.Read More:NASA's New Horizons may have a new target, far beyond PlutoA mysterious Mars-size planet may be hiding at the edge of our solar systemA new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including Pluto On New Years Day, New Horizons will rendezvous with a distance, icy object. What should NASA call it? Help name the most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Asteroid Was Shooting Rocks Into Space. \u2018Were We Safe in Orbit?\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3243",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/bennu-ryugu-asteroids.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex and Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached the space rocks they are surveying last year, and scientists from both teams announced early findings on Tuesday. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex and Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached the space rocks they are surveying last year, and scientists from both teams announced early findings on Tuesday. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Asteroid Was Shooting Rocks Into Space. \u2018Were We Safe in Orbit?\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3244",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/bennu-ryugu-asteroids.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex and Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached the space rocks they are surveying last year, and scientists from both teams announced early findings on Tuesday. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex and Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached the space rocks they are surveying last year, and scientists from both teams announced early findings on Tuesday. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Asteroid Was Shooting Rocks Into Space. \u2018Were We Safe in Orbit?\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3245",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/bennu-ryugu-asteroids.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex and Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached the space rocks they are surveying last year, and scientists from both teams announced early findings on Tuesday. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex and Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft reached the space rocks they are surveying last year, and scientists from both teams announced early findings on Tuesday. [Follow the OSIRIS-REX mission\u2019s attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private company (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3246",
        "date": "2018-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/29/first-nasa-is-outsourcing-its-next-moon-lander-private-company/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s next lunar science experiments will arrive at the moon via a spacecraft built by one of nine private companies \u2014 a first for one of the agency\u2019s science missions.In an announcement Thursday, the space agency named the organizations that are now eligible to bid on delivering science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. They include longtime players in the aerospace industry, like Lockheed Martin, but are mostly newer names with start-up cultures, such as Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems in Mojave, Calif. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is a priority of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who said in May that leveraging commercial capabilities would allow for more frequent and affordable access to the lunar surface. \u201cMore missions, more science,\u201d a news release about the CLPS program promised.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt also continues a trend at NASA toward public-private partnerships for exploration. Under President George W. Bush, companies were awarded contracts to fly cargo to the International Space Station. The Commercial Crew Program, developed under President Barack Obama, will pay companies to transport human crews.The CLPS missions would be the agency\u2019s first such partnership in deep space. The first could fly as early as next year, and NASA hopes to send two payloads each year for the next 10 years. It\u2019s not yet clear what kind of instruments NASA hopes to send, though the first call for proposals might come out in the coming weeks or months.Most of the companies involved have never flown a spacecraft of this complexity and scale, and Bridenstine acknowledged that some of the CLPS missions will likely fail to achieve a \u201csoft\u201d landing on the lunar surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a venture capital kind of effort,\u201d he told reporters Thursday. \u201cAt the end of the day the risk is high, but the return is also very high for a low investment.\"\u201cIt\u2019s a big experiment,\u201d Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen added.The relatively small and inexpensive payloads delivered via the CLPS program would be followed by more traditional medium- and large-class missions, Bridenstine said, including an eventual crewed mission to the moon.President Trump has named sending U.S. astronauts to the moon as a goal for his administration. His Space Policy Directive 1, signed last December, directs NASA to collaborate with the private sector in returning to the moon en route to a longer-term mission to Mars.Story continues below advertisementBut many critics say that NASA doesn\u2019t appear to be on track to send astronauts anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit. The agency\u2019s budget has been flat for decades, its much-vaunted new rocket is over budget and behind schedule, and its objectives have changed with every presidency.AdvertisementAsked about the chance of achieving his current plans, Bridenstine promised, \u201cThis is not going to be Lucy and the football.\u201dNo U.S. spacecraft has touched down on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972, and it\u2019s been 50 years since NASA last sent a robotic mission to the lunar surface. Earlier this year, NASA shocked scientists by canceling the Resource Prospector mission, the only American lunar rover currently in development.Story continues below advertisementStill, Earth\u2019s only natural satellite is being explored by other nations; China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 4 and 5 missions, which would deliver a rover to the moon and return rock samples from the surface, is slated to launch next year. India and Israel also plan to launch lunar landers next year.Notre Dame lunar geologist Clive Neal, who is emeritus chairman of the independent Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for science under the CLPS program. Many moon researchers were disappointed by the cancellation of the Resource Prospector mission, a rover that would have sought useful materials, like water, on the lunar surface.AdvertisementBut Neal said he is heartened by the possibility that partnerships with the aerospace industry might make the moon more accessible.Story continues below advertisementZurbuchen said Thursday that a mobile lunar laboratory remains one of NASA\u2019s goals for moon exploration, though such a mission would likely be developed through a more traditional process.He also said NASA hopes to be one of several customers providing payloads for these commercial missions. Carpooling to the moon \u2014 perhaps with academics or another company \u2014 should reduce the cost, he said.The CLPS announcement comes as NASA conducts safety reviews of two of its major private partners, SpaceX and Boeing. Both companies have been contracted to fly astronauts to the International Space Station but have suffered setbacks and delays as they work to develop their spacecraft. SpaceX in particular has drawn scrutiny after founder Elon Musk took a hit of marijuana and drank whiskey on a podcast. Neither company is among those selected for CLPS eligibility.Read more:NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space raceNext stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s next Mars rover \u201cThis is a venture capital kind of effort,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. In a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private company",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private company (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3247",
        "date": "2018-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/29/first-nasa-is-outsourcing-its-next-moon-lander-private-company/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s next lunar science experiments will arrive at the moon via a spacecraft built by one of nine private companies \u2014 a first for one of the agency\u2019s science missions.In an announcement Thursday, the space agency named the organizations that are now eligible to bid on delivering science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. They include longtime players in the aerospace industry, like Lockheed Martin, but are mostly newer names with start-up cultures, such as Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems in Mojave, Calif. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is a priority of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who said in May that leveraging commercial capabilities would allow for more frequent and affordable access to the lunar surface. \u201cMore missions, more science,\u201d a news release about the CLPS program promised.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt also continues a trend at NASA toward public-private partnerships for exploration. Under President George W. Bush, companies were awarded contracts to fly cargo to the International Space Station. The Commercial Crew Program, developed under President Barack Obama, will pay companies to transport human crews.The CLPS missions would be the agency\u2019s first such partnership in deep space. The first could fly as early as next year, and NASA hopes to send two payloads each year for the next 10 years. It\u2019s not yet clear what kind of instruments NASA hopes to send, though the first call for proposals might come out in the coming weeks or months.Most of the companies involved have never flown a spacecraft of this complexity and scale, and Bridenstine acknowledged that some of the CLPS missions will likely fail to achieve a \u201csoft\u201d landing on the lunar surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a venture capital kind of effort,\u201d he told reporters Thursday. \u201cAt the end of the day the risk is high, but the return is also very high for a low investment.\"\u201cIt\u2019s a big experiment,\u201d Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen added.The relatively small and inexpensive payloads delivered via the CLPS program would be followed by more traditional medium- and large-class missions, Bridenstine said, including an eventual crewed mission to the moon.President Trump has named sending U.S. astronauts to the moon as a goal for his administration. His Space Policy Directive 1, signed last December, directs NASA to collaborate with the private sector in returning to the moon en route to a longer-term mission to Mars.Story continues below advertisementBut many critics say that NASA doesn\u2019t appear to be on track to send astronauts anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit. The agency\u2019s budget has been flat for decades, its much-vaunted new rocket is over budget and behind schedule, and its objectives have changed with every presidency.AdvertisementAsked about the chance of achieving his current plans, Bridenstine promised, \u201cThis is not going to be Lucy and the football.\u201dNo U.S. spacecraft has touched down on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972, and it\u2019s been 50 years since NASA last sent a robotic mission to the lunar surface. Earlier this year, NASA shocked scientists by canceling the Resource Prospector mission, the only American lunar rover currently in development.Story continues below advertisementStill, Earth\u2019s only natural satellite is being explored by other nations; China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 4 and 5 missions, which would deliver a rover to the moon and return rock samples from the surface, is slated to launch next year. India and Israel also plan to launch lunar landers next year.Notre Dame lunar geologist Clive Neal, who is emeritus chairman of the independent Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for science under the CLPS program. Many moon researchers were disappointed by the cancellation of the Resource Prospector mission, a rover that would have sought useful materials, like water, on the lunar surface.AdvertisementBut Neal said he is heartened by the possibility that partnerships with the aerospace industry might make the moon more accessible.Story continues below advertisementZurbuchen said Thursday that a mobile lunar laboratory remains one of NASA\u2019s goals for moon exploration, though such a mission would likely be developed through a more traditional process.He also said NASA hopes to be one of several customers providing payloads for these commercial missions. Carpooling to the moon \u2014 perhaps with academics or another company \u2014 should reduce the cost, he said.The CLPS announcement comes as NASA conducts safety reviews of two of its major private partners, SpaceX and Boeing. Both companies have been contracted to fly astronauts to the International Space Station but have suffered setbacks and delays as they work to develop their spacecraft. SpaceX in particular has drawn scrutiny after founder Elon Musk took a hit of marijuana and drank whiskey on a podcast. Neither company is among those selected for CLPS eligibility.Read more:NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space raceNext stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s next Mars rover \u201cThis is a venture capital kind of effort,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. In a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private company",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private company (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3248",
        "date": "2018-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/29/first-nasa-is-outsourcing-its-next-moon-lander-private-company/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s next lunar science experiments will arrive at the moon via a spacecraft built by one of nine private companies \u2014 a first for one of the agency\u2019s science missions.In an announcement Thursday, the space agency named the organizations that are now eligible to bid on delivering science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. They include longtime players in the aerospace industry, like Lockheed Martin, but are mostly newer names with start-up cultures, such as Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems in Mojave, Calif. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is a priority of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who said in May that leveraging commercial capabilities would allow for more frequent and affordable access to the lunar surface. \u201cMore missions, more science,\u201d a news release about the CLPS program promised.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt also continues a trend at NASA toward public-private partnerships for exploration. Under President George W. Bush, companies were awarded contracts to fly cargo to the International Space Station. The Commercial Crew Program, developed under President Barack Obama, will pay companies to transport human crews.The CLPS missions would be the agency\u2019s first such partnership in deep space. The first could fly as early as next year, and NASA hopes to send two payloads each year for the next 10 years. It\u2019s not yet clear what kind of instruments NASA hopes to send, though the first call for proposals might come out in the coming weeks or months.Most of the companies involved have never flown a spacecraft of this complexity and scale, and Bridenstine acknowledged that some of the CLPS missions will likely fail to achieve a \u201csoft\u201d landing on the lunar surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a venture capital kind of effort,\u201d he told reporters Thursday. \u201cAt the end of the day the risk is high, but the return is also very high for a low investment.\"\u201cIt\u2019s a big experiment,\u201d Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen added.The relatively small and inexpensive payloads delivered via the CLPS program would be followed by more traditional medium- and large-class missions, Bridenstine said, including an eventual crewed mission to the moon.President Trump has named sending U.S. astronauts to the moon as a goal for his administration. His Space Policy Directive 1, signed last December, directs NASA to collaborate with the private sector in returning to the moon en route to a longer-term mission to Mars.Story continues below advertisementBut many critics say that NASA doesn\u2019t appear to be on track to send astronauts anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit. The agency\u2019s budget has been flat for decades, its much-vaunted new rocket is over budget and behind schedule, and its objectives have changed with every presidency.AdvertisementAsked about the chance of achieving his current plans, Bridenstine promised, \u201cThis is not going to be Lucy and the football.\u201dNo U.S. spacecraft has touched down on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972, and it\u2019s been 50 years since NASA last sent a robotic mission to the lunar surface. Earlier this year, NASA shocked scientists by canceling the Resource Prospector mission, the only American lunar rover currently in development.Story continues below advertisementStill, Earth\u2019s only natural satellite is being explored by other nations; China\u2019s Chang\u2019e 4 and 5 missions, which would deliver a rover to the moon and return rock samples from the surface, is slated to launch next year. India and Israel also plan to launch lunar landers next year.Notre Dame lunar geologist Clive Neal, who is emeritus chairman of the independent Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for science under the CLPS program. Many moon researchers were disappointed by the cancellation of the Resource Prospector mission, a rover that would have sought useful materials, like water, on the lunar surface.AdvertisementBut Neal said he is heartened by the possibility that partnerships with the aerospace industry might make the moon more accessible.Story continues below advertisementZurbuchen said Thursday that a mobile lunar laboratory remains one of NASA\u2019s goals for moon exploration, though such a mission would likely be developed through a more traditional process.He also said NASA hopes to be one of several customers providing payloads for these commercial missions. Carpooling to the moon \u2014 perhaps with academics or another company \u2014 should reduce the cost, he said.The CLPS announcement comes as NASA conducts safety reviews of two of its major private partners, SpaceX and Boeing. Both companies have been contracted to fly astronauts to the International Space Station but have suffered setbacks and delays as they work to develop their spacecraft. SpaceX in particular has drawn scrutiny after founder Elon Musk took a hit of marijuana and drank whiskey on a podcast. Neither company is among those selected for CLPS eligibility.Read more:NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space raceNext stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s next Mars rover \u201cThis is a venture capital kind of effort,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. In a first, NASA is outsourcing its next moon lander to a private company",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet TESS, Seeker of Alien Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3249",
        "date": "2018-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/science/tess-nasa-exoplanets.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s new spacecraft, to be launched next month, will give scientists a much clearer view of the planets orbiting stars near to us. NASA\u2019s new spacecraft, to be launched next month, will give scientists a much clearer view of the planets orbiting stars near to us. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The search for cosmic real estate is about to begin anew.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet TESS, Seeker of Alien Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3250",
        "date": "2018-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/science/tess-nasa-exoplanets.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s new spacecraft, to be launched next month, will give scientists a much clearer view of the planets orbiting stars near to us. NASA\u2019s new spacecraft, to be launched next month, will give scientists a much clearer view of the planets orbiting stars near to us. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The search for cosmic real estate is about to begin anew.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet TESS, Seeker of Alien Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3251",
        "date": "2018-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/science/tess-nasa-exoplanets.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s new spacecraft, to be launched next month, will give scientists a much clearer view of the planets orbiting stars near to us. NASA\u2019s new spacecraft, to be launched next month, will give scientists a much clearer view of the planets orbiting stars near to us. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The search for cosmic real estate is about to begin anew.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Journey Into the Solar System\u2019s Outer Reaches, Seeking New Worlds to Explore (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3252",
        "date": "2018-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/science/nasa-new-horizons-kuiper-belt.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. In 2015, a NASA spacecraft snapped spectacular photographs of Pluto, forever changing humanity\u2019s view of that world. On Tuesday that same probe, New Horizons, will provide a closeup of the farthest object ever visited.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Journey Into the Solar System\u2019s Outer Reaches, Seeking New Worlds to Explore (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3253",
        "date": "2018-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/science/nasa-new-horizons-kuiper-belt.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. In 2015, a NASA spacecraft snapped spectacular photographs of Pluto, forever changing humanity\u2019s view of that world. On Tuesday that same probe, New Horizons, will provide a closeup of the farthest object ever visited.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot Gets Its Close-Up (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3254",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/jupiter-great-red-spot-nasa-juno.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft passed a few thousand miles above the gargantuan storm, revealing intricate patterns of swirling clouds. NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft passed a few thousand miles above the gargantuan storm, revealing intricate patterns of swirling clouds. The Great Red Spot has never looked bigger.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot Gets Its Close-Up (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3255",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/jupiter-great-red-spot-nasa-juno.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft passed a few thousand miles above the gargantuan storm, revealing intricate patterns of swirling clouds. NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft passed a few thousand miles above the gargantuan storm, revealing intricate patterns of swirling clouds. The Great Red Spot has never looked bigger.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot Gets Its Close-Up (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3256",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/jupiter-great-red-spot-nasa-juno.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft passed a few thousand miles above the gargantuan storm, revealing intricate patterns of swirling clouds. NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft passed a few thousand miles above the gargantuan storm, revealing intricate patterns of swirling clouds. The Great Red Spot has never looked bigger.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroids (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3257",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/04/nasas-newest-missions-will-explore-the-solar-systems-asteroids/",
        "text": "NASA will launch two new missions to asteroids in search of clues about the early solar system, the space agency announced\u00a0Wednesday.The first mission, scheduled to launch in 2021, will send a probe to study the Trojan asteroids that swarm ahead of and behind Jupiter and are thought to be relics of the earliest days of the solar system. The project\u00a0has been dubbed \u201cLucy,\u201d in honor of the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus\u00a0who is humanity\u2019s most famous ancient relative.\u00a0\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe second, slated for 2023, will\u00a0send an orbiter to 16 Psyche, a massive metallic object in the asteroid belt that is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet.Story continues below advertisementThe missions are\u00a0part of\u00a0NASA\u2019s Discovery Program, launched in 1992 to promote what then-NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin\u00a0called \u201cbetter, faster, cheaper\u201d solar system\u00a0exploration. Discovery projects are shorter, more focused and smaller in scale than the average mission, and their costs are capped at around $500 million.How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space programBut they still do some pretty cool science. Mars Pathfinder \u2014 which successfully launched the first rover to explore Mars \u2014 was a Discovery mission. So were MESSENGER, the first (and so far, only) orbital survey of Mercury; Dawn, which is studying the two biggest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres; and the Kepler space telescope, which has found thousand of\u00a0exoplanets orbiting far-off stars, including nearly two dozen in the \u201chabitable zone.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve explored terrestrial planets, gas giants, and a range of other bodies orbiting the sun,\u201d Jim Green, NASA's planetary science director, said in a statement. \u201cLucy will observe primitive remnants from farther out in the solar system, while Psyche will directly observe the interior of a planetary body. These additional pieces of the puzzle will help us understand how the sun and its family of planets formed, changed over time, and became places where life could develop and be sustained \u2014 and what the future may hold.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPysche and Lucy were selected from a shortlist of five proposals. Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (or DAVINCI, because there\u2019s no better way to win over NASA than a convoluted acronym) would have sent a probe on a 63-minute descent through the atmosphere of Venus. Another Venusian mission, the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS),\u00a0would map the planet\u2019s surface\u00a0and search for\u00a0water and signs of geologic activity.The last, Near Earth Object\u00a0Camera, would have launched an infrared space telescope to seek out potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids. Though not selected, NEOCam will get an additional year of funding, NASA said, suggesting that the telescope could be built someday.How NASA is rehearsing for a mission to MarsBoth\u00a0Lucy and Pysche will seek to reveal the secrets of the solar system\u2019s beginnings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe six Trojan Asteroids to be explored by Lucy are dark bodies thought to have been pulled into orbits near Jupiter during the early days of the solar system, when planets were still forming and migrating into their current positions.\u201cThese small bodies really are the fossils of planet formation,\u201d said Harold Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator for the Lucy mission. They are made of the same material that existed in the early days of the solar system, and are thought to contain important organic molecules.Psyche, meanwhile, can provide clues about what happens inside\u00a0a planet\u2019s core. The 130-mile-wide asteroid is made of mostly iron and nickel, not ice and rock like other asteroids. Scientists think it may be the exposed core of an early planet that\u00a0lost its rocky exterior during a series of violent collisions not long after it was formed. There is no other object like it in the solar system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is the only way humankind ever can visit a planetary core,\u201d said principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. \u201cWe learn about inner space by visiting outer space.\u201dThe selection of two asteroid-focused missions also means that NASA will not be exploring any bodies with atmospheres (aside from Mars, which has negligible one). That\u2019s worrying to scientists working on the search for life beyond Earth, since organic molecules on an airless asteroid can\u00a0only offer so much insight into\u00a0how organisms arose. A place like Venus \u2014 which endures incredibly high pressures and is unbearably hot, but also has the kind of thick protective atmosphere we know life needs to survive \u2014\u00a0could help scientists understand how atmospheres operate. But NASA hasn\u2019t sent an orbiter to our neighboring planet since the 1970s, and seems unlikely to venture there anytime soon.What asteroids do have going for them is the presence of water, organics and valuable minerals\u00a0\u2014 all of which could potentially be used for life support, rocket fuel and commercial endeavors. NASA\u2019s interest in Lucy and Psyche, along with OSIRIS-REx, which is en route to the asteroid Bennu, and the Dawn mission, suggests that the agency is interested in worlds that might one day be mined.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsked\u00a0why two more asteroid missions were chosen over a return to Venus, Green demurred, saying only that the two selected missions were the best of the five finalists.But that doesn\u2019t mean the space agency has abandoned the second planet from the Sun. NASA\u2019s call-out for ideas for its next New Frontiers mission (a class of medium-cost projects\u00a0that includes New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx and the Jupiter probe Juno) includes a request for proposals for a Venus atmospheric probe and lander.Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate who was part of the selection committee, explained that as he reviewed\u00a0the finalists, \u201cI was imagining what the future would look like, where are the textbooks going to be rewritten.\u201dViewed in that light,\u00a0it seemed only right that\u00a0two complimentary asteroid missions be chosen.\u201cI think about Pysche and Lucy [as] two chapters of a book on the early solar system,\u201d he said. \u201cThey really belong together.\u201d22 stunning photos of our solar system and beyond in 2016ShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageIn this undated photo provided by NASA, Saturn's icy moon Mimas is dwarfed by the planet's enormous rings. Consider it a cosmic carousel with countless rings up for grabs. NASA\u2019s Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, has begun an unprecedented mission to skim the planet\u2019s rings. On Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, Cassini got a gravitational assist from Saturn\u2019s big moon Titan. That put the spacecraft on course to graze Saturn\u2019s main outer rings. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via AP) (AP)This post has been updated.\u00a0 Probes will venture to a giant, metal asteroid and the clusters of bodies around Jupiter in search of clues about the early solar system.  NASA\u2019s newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroids",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroids (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3258",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/04/nasas-newest-missions-will-explore-the-solar-systems-asteroids/",
        "text": "NASA will launch two new missions to asteroids in search of clues about the early solar system, the space agency announced\u00a0Wednesday.The first mission, scheduled to launch in 2021, will send a probe to study the Trojan asteroids that swarm ahead of and behind Jupiter and are thought to be relics of the earliest days of the solar system. The project\u00a0has been dubbed \u201cLucy,\u201d in honor of the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus\u00a0who is humanity\u2019s most famous ancient relative.\u00a0\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe second, slated for 2023, will\u00a0send an orbiter to 16 Psyche, a massive metallic object in the asteroid belt that is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet.Story continues below advertisementThe missions are\u00a0part of\u00a0NASA\u2019s Discovery Program, launched in 1992 to promote what then-NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin\u00a0called \u201cbetter, faster, cheaper\u201d solar system\u00a0exploration. Discovery projects are shorter, more focused and smaller in scale than the average mission, and their costs are capped at around $500 million.How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space programBut they still do some pretty cool science. Mars Pathfinder \u2014 which successfully launched the first rover to explore Mars \u2014 was a Discovery mission. So were MESSENGER, the first (and so far, only) orbital survey of Mercury; Dawn, which is studying the two biggest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres; and the Kepler space telescope, which has found thousand of\u00a0exoplanets orbiting far-off stars, including nearly two dozen in the \u201chabitable zone.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve explored terrestrial planets, gas giants, and a range of other bodies orbiting the sun,\u201d Jim Green, NASA's planetary science director, said in a statement. \u201cLucy will observe primitive remnants from farther out in the solar system, while Psyche will directly observe the interior of a planetary body. These additional pieces of the puzzle will help us understand how the sun and its family of planets formed, changed over time, and became places where life could develop and be sustained \u2014 and what the future may hold.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPysche and Lucy were selected from a shortlist of five proposals. Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (or DAVINCI, because there\u2019s no better way to win over NASA than a convoluted acronym) would have sent a probe on a 63-minute descent through the atmosphere of Venus. Another Venusian mission, the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS),\u00a0would map the planet\u2019s surface\u00a0and search for\u00a0water and signs of geologic activity.The last, Near Earth Object\u00a0Camera, would have launched an infrared space telescope to seek out potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids. Though not selected, NEOCam will get an additional year of funding, NASA said, suggesting that the telescope could be built someday.How NASA is rehearsing for a mission to MarsBoth\u00a0Lucy and Pysche will seek to reveal the secrets of the solar system\u2019s beginnings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe six Trojan Asteroids to be explored by Lucy are dark bodies thought to have been pulled into orbits near Jupiter during the early days of the solar system, when planets were still forming and migrating into their current positions.\u201cThese small bodies really are the fossils of planet formation,\u201d said Harold Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator for the Lucy mission. They are made of the same material that existed in the early days of the solar system, and are thought to contain important organic molecules.Psyche, meanwhile, can provide clues about what happens inside\u00a0a planet\u2019s core. The 130-mile-wide asteroid is made of mostly iron and nickel, not ice and rock like other asteroids. Scientists think it may be the exposed core of an early planet that\u00a0lost its rocky exterior during a series of violent collisions not long after it was formed. There is no other object like it in the solar system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is the only way humankind ever can visit a planetary core,\u201d said principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. \u201cWe learn about inner space by visiting outer space.\u201dThe selection of two asteroid-focused missions also means that NASA will not be exploring any bodies with atmospheres (aside from Mars, which has negligible one). That\u2019s worrying to scientists working on the search for life beyond Earth, since organic molecules on an airless asteroid can\u00a0only offer so much insight into\u00a0how organisms arose. A place like Venus \u2014 which endures incredibly high pressures and is unbearably hot, but also has the kind of thick protective atmosphere we know life needs to survive \u2014\u00a0could help scientists understand how atmospheres operate. But NASA hasn\u2019t sent an orbiter to our neighboring planet since the 1970s, and seems unlikely to venture there anytime soon.What asteroids do have going for them is the presence of water, organics and valuable minerals\u00a0\u2014 all of which could potentially be used for life support, rocket fuel and commercial endeavors. NASA\u2019s interest in Lucy and Psyche, along with OSIRIS-REx, which is en route to the asteroid Bennu, and the Dawn mission, suggests that the agency is interested in worlds that might one day be mined.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsked\u00a0why two more asteroid missions were chosen over a return to Venus, Green demurred, saying only that the two selected missions were the best of the five finalists.But that doesn\u2019t mean the space agency has abandoned the second planet from the Sun. NASA\u2019s call-out for ideas for its next New Frontiers mission (a class of medium-cost projects\u00a0that includes New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx and the Jupiter probe Juno) includes a request for proposals for a Venus atmospheric probe and lander.Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate who was part of the selection committee, explained that as he reviewed\u00a0the finalists, \u201cI was imagining what the future would look like, where are the textbooks going to be rewritten.\u201dViewed in that light,\u00a0it seemed only right that\u00a0two complimentary asteroid missions be chosen.\u201cI think about Pysche and Lucy [as] two chapters of a book on the early solar system,\u201d he said. \u201cThey really belong together.\u201d22 stunning photos of our solar system and beyond in 2016ShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageIn this undated photo provided by NASA, Saturn's icy moon Mimas is dwarfed by the planet's enormous rings. Consider it a cosmic carousel with countless rings up for grabs. NASA\u2019s Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, has begun an unprecedented mission to skim the planet\u2019s rings. On Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, Cassini got a gravitational assist from Saturn\u2019s big moon Titan. That put the spacecraft on course to graze Saturn\u2019s main outer rings. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via AP) (AP)This post has been updated.\u00a0 Probes will venture to a giant, metal asteroid and the clusters of bodies around Jupiter in search of clues about the early solar system.  NASA\u2019s newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroids",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroids (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3259",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/04/nasas-newest-missions-will-explore-the-solar-systems-asteroids/",
        "text": "NASA will launch two new missions to asteroids in search of clues about the early solar system, the space agency announced\u00a0Wednesday.The first mission, scheduled to launch in 2021, will send a probe to study the Trojan asteroids that swarm ahead of and behind Jupiter and are thought to be relics of the earliest days of the solar system. The project\u00a0has been dubbed \u201cLucy,\u201d in honor of the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus\u00a0who is humanity\u2019s most famous ancient relative.\u00a0\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe second, slated for 2023, will\u00a0send an orbiter to 16 Psyche, a massive metallic object in the asteroid belt that is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet.Story continues below advertisementThe missions are\u00a0part of\u00a0NASA\u2019s Discovery Program, launched in 1992 to promote what then-NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin\u00a0called \u201cbetter, faster, cheaper\u201d solar system\u00a0exploration. Discovery projects are shorter, more focused and smaller in scale than the average mission, and their costs are capped at around $500 million.How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space programBut they still do some pretty cool science. Mars Pathfinder \u2014 which successfully launched the first rover to explore Mars \u2014 was a Discovery mission. So were MESSENGER, the first (and so far, only) orbital survey of Mercury; Dawn, which is studying the two biggest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres; and the Kepler space telescope, which has found thousand of\u00a0exoplanets orbiting far-off stars, including nearly two dozen in the \u201chabitable zone.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve explored terrestrial planets, gas giants, and a range of other bodies orbiting the sun,\u201d Jim Green, NASA's planetary science director, said in a statement. \u201cLucy will observe primitive remnants from farther out in the solar system, while Psyche will directly observe the interior of a planetary body. These additional pieces of the puzzle will help us understand how the sun and its family of planets formed, changed over time, and became places where life could develop and be sustained \u2014 and what the future may hold.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPysche and Lucy were selected from a shortlist of five proposals. Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (or DAVINCI, because there\u2019s no better way to win over NASA than a convoluted acronym) would have sent a probe on a 63-minute descent through the atmosphere of Venus. Another Venusian mission, the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS),\u00a0would map the planet\u2019s surface\u00a0and search for\u00a0water and signs of geologic activity.The last, Near Earth Object\u00a0Camera, would have launched an infrared space telescope to seek out potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids. Though not selected, NEOCam will get an additional year of funding, NASA said, suggesting that the telescope could be built someday.How NASA is rehearsing for a mission to MarsBoth\u00a0Lucy and Pysche will seek to reveal the secrets of the solar system\u2019s beginnings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe six Trojan Asteroids to be explored by Lucy are dark bodies thought to have been pulled into orbits near Jupiter during the early days of the solar system, when planets were still forming and migrating into their current positions.\u201cThese small bodies really are the fossils of planet formation,\u201d said Harold Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the principal investigator for the Lucy mission. They are made of the same material that existed in the early days of the solar system, and are thought to contain important organic molecules.Psyche, meanwhile, can provide clues about what happens inside\u00a0a planet\u2019s core. The 130-mile-wide asteroid is made of mostly iron and nickel, not ice and rock like other asteroids. Scientists think it may be the exposed core of an early planet that\u00a0lost its rocky exterior during a series of violent collisions not long after it was formed. There is no other object like it in the solar system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is the only way humankind ever can visit a planetary core,\u201d said principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. \u201cWe learn about inner space by visiting outer space.\u201dThe selection of two asteroid-focused missions also means that NASA will not be exploring any bodies with atmospheres (aside from Mars, which has negligible one). That\u2019s worrying to scientists working on the search for life beyond Earth, since organic molecules on an airless asteroid can\u00a0only offer so much insight into\u00a0how organisms arose. A place like Venus \u2014 which endures incredibly high pressures and is unbearably hot, but also has the kind of thick protective atmosphere we know life needs to survive \u2014\u00a0could help scientists understand how atmospheres operate. But NASA hasn\u2019t sent an orbiter to our neighboring planet since the 1970s, and seems unlikely to venture there anytime soon.What asteroids do have going for them is the presence of water, organics and valuable minerals\u00a0\u2014 all of which could potentially be used for life support, rocket fuel and commercial endeavors. NASA\u2019s interest in Lucy and Psyche, along with OSIRIS-REx, which is en route to the asteroid Bennu, and the Dawn mission, suggests that the agency is interested in worlds that might one day be mined.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsked\u00a0why two more asteroid missions were chosen over a return to Venus, Green demurred, saying only that the two selected missions were the best of the five finalists.But that doesn\u2019t mean the space agency has abandoned the second planet from the Sun. NASA\u2019s call-out for ideas for its next New Frontiers mission (a class of medium-cost projects\u00a0that includes New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx and the Jupiter probe Juno) includes a request for proposals for a Venus atmospheric probe and lander.Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate who was part of the selection committee, explained that as he reviewed\u00a0the finalists, \u201cI was imagining what the future would look like, where are the textbooks going to be rewritten.\u201dViewed in that light,\u00a0it seemed only right that\u00a0two complimentary asteroid missions be chosen.\u201cI think about Pysche and Lucy [as] two chapters of a book on the early solar system,\u201d he said. \u201cThey really belong together.\u201d22 stunning photos of our solar system and beyond in 2016ShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageIn this undated photo provided by NASA, Saturn's icy moon Mimas is dwarfed by the planet's enormous rings. Consider it a cosmic carousel with countless rings up for grabs. NASA\u2019s Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, has begun an unprecedented mission to skim the planet\u2019s rings. On Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, Cassini got a gravitational assist from Saturn\u2019s big moon Titan. That put the spacecraft on course to graze Saturn\u2019s main outer rings. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via AP) (AP)This post has been updated.\u00a0 Probes will venture to a giant, metal asteroid and the clusters of bodies around Jupiter in search of clues about the early solar system.  NASA\u2019s newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroids",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA offering $25,000 prize for inventive ways to unload cargo from lunar rovers, other spacecraft (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3260",
        "date": "2020-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/man-on-moon-nasa-challenge/2020/11/27/8d28aeac-2f28-11eb-bae0-50bb17126614_story.html",
        "text": "NASA wants to put humans back on the moon.There\u2019s one potential snag: The agency isn\u2019t sure how it will unload the supplies astronauts will need to build their base camp and conduct scientific experiments there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEarth has plenty of systems to get cargo on and off vehicles. But they\u2019re too bulky for the moon \u2014 and they weren\u2019t designed to be shot into space or to be used in moon gravity, which is about six times weaker than that on Earth. That\u2019s where you come in.NASA\u2019s Lunar Delivery Challenge seeks innovative ways to unload goods from lunar rovers and other spacecraft. And it\u2019s willing to pay for the ideas: The agency has set aside a prize purse of $25,000, to be shared with up to six winning participants.Story continues below advertisementAlthough the agency welcomes simple solutions, the conditions under which the payloads will be unloaded will be complex. They\u2019ll be brought to the moon\u2019s south pole on commercial landers of different sizes, and once they get to the moon\u2019s surface, they\u2019ll experience just 17 percent of Earth\u2019s gravity.AdvertisementThe solutions have to be cost-effective and practical\u201a and they should be flexible enough to allow for a variety of payloads.Have any ideas? Hosted on the crowdsourcing social network HeroX, the challenge is open until Jan. 19.For more details and to enter, visit bit.ly/LunarDelivery.Pair of studies confirm there is water on the moonDoes a full moon really change human behavior?How did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time. The offloading solutions must be cost-effective and practical\u201a and they should be flexible enough to allow for a variety of payloads. NASA offering $25,000 prize for inventive ways to unload cargo from lunar rovers, other spacecraft",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Listen to the sound of Mars\n (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3261",
        "date": "2018-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/08/listen-sound-mars/",
        "text": "NASA scientists released audio Friday of rumbles captured by its InSight lander on the surface of Mars.The sound recorded with InSight\u2019s sensors on Dec. 1 comes from vibrations caused by wind that NASA estimates was blowing at about 10 to 15 mph.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInSight, which is an acronym for \u201cInterior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,\u201d successfully landed on Mars\u2019 Elysium Planitia on Nov. 26 after a six-month journey through space. \"Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,\u201d said Bruce Banerdt, InSight\u2019s principal investigator at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement released Friday. \u201cBut one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft is equipped with two sensors: one for air pressure and a seismometer to measure ground motion. The seismometer picked up on wind vibrations gliding over InSight\u2019s solar panels, which NASA says look like \u201ca giant pair of ears\u201d sticking out from its sides.Advertisement\u201cThe solar panels on the lander\u2019s sides respond to pressure fluctuations of the wind,\u201d said Tom Pike, who is part of the InSight science team. \u201cIt\u2019s like InSight is cupping its ears and hearing the Mars wind beating on it.\u201dWhile the seismometer is a part of the lander now, it will soon be deployed to the surface of Mars, where it will be covered by a protective dome to better measure the planet\u2019s tremors, also known as \u201cmarsquakes.\u201d Ultimately, scientists hope to better understand the interior of Mars.Unaltered, the sound recorded by InSight is at the lower range of human hearing capabilities, similar to what you might hear from a subwoofer. NASA also released an edited version that had been raised two octaves to be more perceptible to the human ear.Looking forward, NASA plans to equip the Mars 2020 rover with two microphones to garner more data on the sounds of the Red Planet. NASA\u2019s InSight lander captured the low murmur of Mars' wind vibrations. Listen to the sound of Mars\n",
        "author": "Blair Guild"
    },
    {
        "title": "Listen to the sound of Mars\n (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3262",
        "date": "2018-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/08/listen-sound-mars/",
        "text": "NASA scientists released audio Friday of rumbles captured by its InSight lander on the surface of Mars.The sound recorded with InSight\u2019s sensors on Dec. 1 comes from vibrations caused by wind that NASA estimates was blowing at about 10 to 15 mph.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInSight, which is an acronym for \u201cInterior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,\u201d successfully landed on Mars\u2019 Elysium Planitia on Nov. 26 after a six-month journey through space. \"Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat,\u201d said Bruce Banerdt, InSight\u2019s principal investigator at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement released Friday. \u201cBut one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft is equipped with two sensors: one for air pressure and a seismometer to measure ground motion. The seismometer picked up on wind vibrations gliding over InSight\u2019s solar panels, which NASA says look like \u201ca giant pair of ears\u201d sticking out from its sides.Advertisement\u201cThe solar panels on the lander\u2019s sides respond to pressure fluctuations of the wind,\u201d said Tom Pike, who is part of the InSight science team. \u201cIt\u2019s like InSight is cupping its ears and hearing the Mars wind beating on it.\u201dWhile the seismometer is a part of the lander now, it will soon be deployed to the surface of Mars, where it will be covered by a protective dome to better measure the planet\u2019s tremors, also known as \u201cmarsquakes.\u201d Ultimately, scientists hope to better understand the interior of Mars.Unaltered, the sound recorded by InSight is at the lower range of human hearing capabilities, similar to what you might hear from a subwoofer. NASA also released an edited version that had been raised two octaves to be more perceptible to the human ear.Looking forward, NASA plans to equip the Mars 2020 rover with two microphones to garner more data on the sounds of the Red Planet. NASA\u2019s InSight lander captured the low murmur of Mars' wind vibrations. Listen to the sound of Mars\n",
        "author": "Blair Guild"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past life (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3263",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/02/18/mars-landing-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA rover Perseverance landed safely Thursday on Mars to begin an ambitious mission to search for signs of past Martian life and obtain samples of soil and rock that could someday be hauled back to Earth for study in laboratories.\u201cTouchdown confirmed! Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life,\u201d announced Swati Mohan, the guidance and control operations lead for the mission at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Cheers, clapping and fist-pumps erupted in the control room, which was half-empty because of the coronavirus pandemic. Someone shouted: \u201cTRN, TRN,\u201d referring to the terrain relative navigation system that allowed Perseverance to land in a rugged area full of natural hazards.Perseverance, the first multibillion-dollar NASA mission to Mars in nine years, quickly produced two low-resolution images of the landing site \u2014 a forlorn landscape pocked with small craters. Dust kicked up by the landing covered the glass shields on the cameras. The pair of photos showed the rover casting a shadow on the Martian landscape.Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6X\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 18, 2021\n\nPerseverance used its autonomous guidance system to avoid hazardous terrain in the target area, an ancient lake bed known as Jezero Crater. The touchdown followed the \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d \u2014 in homage to the emotional state of engineers rooting for success. Mars is a notoriously difficult place to land a spacecraft.Going back more than half a century, about half of all robotic missions to the planet have failed, although NASA appears to have mastered the feat over the past two decades. The rover Curiosity, which landed in 2012 far to the east of Perseverance\u2019s location, remains operational. Perseverance is similar in scale but is slightly heavier and has about 50 percent more scientific instrumentation, according to NASA.The vehicle carrying Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph, used a heat shield to avoid burning up, then deployed a 70-foot-diameter parachute while still going nearly twice the speed of sound. Finally, the craft used rocket thrusters to slow down further and then a system known as a sky crane to lower the rover the final distance to the surface.The landing on rough terrain is the most hazardous phase of the mission. The entry, descent and landing had to be accomplished entirely autonomously. Mars is too far from Earth to permit technicians to joystick the landing; a signal between the spacecraft and Pasadena takes 11 minutes at the speed of light.For that reason, the spacecraft was loaded with navigation software to guide it to a safe spot in an area that features 200-foot cliffs, gullies, boulders and sand-filled craters that could potentially immobilize it.The rover touched down in a relatively rugged area, about a mile southeast of the center of its target. In this treacherous environment, the autonomous navigation system proved \u201cabsolutely essential,\u201d entry, descent and landing lead Allen Chen said at a news conference Thursday evening.\u201cWe found the parking lot and hit it,\u201d Chen said, avoiding dangerous terrain that was all but certain to doom the rover. The vehicle is almost level, tilted only a matter of a degree.Project scientist Ken Farley said the site is on the boundary between rock regions representing two important moments in Mars\u2019s geologic history. Off in the distance, images seem to show the cliffs of the river delta.\u201cThis is a great place to be,\u201d he said.But there is still a \u201cripple field\u201d \u2014 sand dunes \u2014 between the rover and the delta that scientists want to explore. The rover may have to drive around those sand dunes to get to the delta formation.NASA\u2019s Mars rover, Perseverance, aims for dicey landing to search for ancient lifeThursday\u2019s landing was just the latest hurdle for a mission fraught with obstacles. The spacecraft\u2019s journey to the launchpad had been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, which pushed much of NASA\u2019s workforce to go remote. Twenty minutes before Perseverance was scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., last July, an earthquake rocked mission control in Pasadena.But after a six-month 293-million-mile journey, the spacecraft hit the Martian atmosphere at 3:48 Eastern time Thursday afternoon \u2014 exactly on schedule.\u201cYes, yes, yes, yes,\u201d someone could be heard quietly chanting over the NASA live stream.Next stop, Mars: How scientists chose the Perseverance Rover's landing siteEngineers briefly lost contact with the spacecraft during the tremendous heat of its descent. At maximum deceleration, the craft experienced force 10 times the force of gravity on Earth.A minute later came the first sign that this landing was going well: \u201cParachute deployed.\u201dThere was a burst of applause before engineers settled back to anxious silence.The spacecraft jettisoned its heat shield. Its radar locked onto the ground. It turned on its navigation system and deployed the sky crane.And then came the words they had all been waiting for: \u201cTango Delta.\u201d TD. Touchdown.And, finally: \u201cNominal.\u201dPerseverance had arrived safely on Mars.On Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance is expected to land on Mars, joining two other spacecraft from the UAE and China also exploring the red planet. (Monica Rodman, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)\u201cThe vehicle is going on a roller-coaster ride, and you are, too,\u201d Chen said afterward. \u201cYou\u2019re second-guessing yourself as you go, even though it\u2019s already happened.\u201dWith the rover safely deposited at its landing site, the sky crane flew away and crash-landed elsewhere on the Martian surface.Now begins the rover\u2019s \u201ccommissioning\u201d phase, when engineers examine every inch of the vehicle\u2019s machinery to make sure it is ready for the mission. The rover will practice driving, test its robotic arm and update its software. Engineers who care for the vehicle will switch to \u201cMars time\u201d \u2014 organizing their lives according to the Red Planet\u2019s 24-hour, 37-minute day.Roughly 30 Martian days (or \u201csols\u201d) from now, Perseverance will drive to a flat area that can serve as the flight pad for Ingenuity, a tiny solar-powered helicopter. NASA will take another 30 sols to fly Ingenuity around the area, testing out the never-before-used autonomous flight technology.Next comes the central part of the rover\u2019s mission: exploring Jezero Crater. Perseverance has automated driving technology that allows it to navigate obstacles without help from the ground. It is expected to cover more ground than any previous Mars rover \u2014 an average of about 650 feet per Martian day.Typically, Mars landings are cause for great pomp and circumstance at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Pasadena campus swarms with scientists, journalists and schoolchildren. Huge projectors show a live steam from mission control. A tradition dating to the 1960s demands that a jar of peanuts be on hand at the space flight operations facility \u2014 supposedly the snack brings good luck.Thursday\u2019s events were more subdued, with only a minimal crew of ground controllers on site for the landing.But fans of the mission found socially distant ways to celebrate. In Switzerland, where NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen grew up and where the rover\u2019s motors were produced, artist Gerry Hofstetter projected images of the rover, Mars and the NASA logo onto an Alpine mountaintop.Though led by NASA, the mission is an international endeavor. The rover\u2019s instruments are operated by scientists in three countries, and the Mars Sample Return program is a partnership with the European Space Agency.It's so exciting to see communities around the globe join us as we #CountdownToMars. These images show @NASAPersevere & @NASA logos, along with a Martian globe projected at 12,000ft elevation on the Eiger Mountain in Switzerland. Thank you to Swiss Light Artist Gerry Hofstetter! pic.twitter.com/FzdXvtSPPz\u2014 Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) February 18, 2021\n\nPerseverance\u2019s new home is a little more than a mile from the cliffs that delineate the elevated remnants of a river delta. The river delta is considered one of the best places on Mars to search for signs of ancient life.Today, the crater is a bleak expanse of rock canyons and windswept sand. With no magnetic field to protect it, the planet\u2019s surface is bombarded by solar radiation. The air is thin and mostly carbon dioxide. Nighttime temperatures plunge to minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit. It is hardly a hospitable environment.But roughly 4 billion years ago, Mars looked a lot like ancient Earth. It boasted volcanic activity, a thick atmosphere and temperatures balmy enough to maintain liquid water on its surface.In those days, Jezero Crater contained a vast lake. The surrounding canyons were carved by mighty rivers. The feature that Perseverance is scheduled to inspect was a delta, where sediments from the surrounding watershed accumulated in layers of mud. On Earth, such sediments have preserved evidence of ancient life in the form of fossilized mats of microscopic pond scum called stromatolites.\u201cIf we could find something like that on Mars, that would be the holy grail for astrobiology,\u201d said Purdue University planetary scientist Briony Horgan, a member of Perseverance rover\u2019s science team. Horgan has led satellite surveys of the landing site that showed it is rich with the kinds of molecules known to help preserve the signatures of living organisms.Perseverance is armed with a battery of instruments designed to detect biosignatures. Two cameras will photograph the landscape and zoom in on tiny structures. A sensor will use X-rays to measure the chemical makeup of rocks while a machine mounted on the robot\u2019s arm deploys lasers to detect organic molecules and other potential biosignatures. Ground-penetrating radar will map the subsurface, and a Martian weather station will take in data about temperature, wind and clouds of dust.Many of these are more advanced versions of the instruments on the Curiosity rover, which has been exploring a spot far to the east of Jezero since 2012.But Perseverance is the first NASA rover with the capacity to collect samples of soil and rock and cache them on the Martian surface. If and when the space agency is able to launch follow-up missions, those spacecraft will retrieve Perseverance\u2019s samples and bring them back to Earth, where they can be analyzed with even more sophisticated tools in the world\u2019s top labs.\u201cFinding a sample suite that is worth bringing back is really important,\u201d Farley, the project scientist, said. \u201cWhat\u2019s at stake is the ability to really make the first step in answering the question of whether life exists elsewhere.\u201d\u201cAstrobiologists have been dreaming about this mission for decades,\u201d Mary Voytek, who directs NASA\u2019s astrobiology program, said. Microbiologists like her have found life on Earth virtually wherever they\u2019ve looked. Perseverance will play the role of robotic microbiologist on Mars.It is unlikely images alone will be considered definitive proof of ancient life, nor is it possible to miniaturize all the equipment necessary for the most detailed examinations of Martian samples. That\u2019s why Perseverance is part of a broader project to gather samples of Mars that can eventually be returned to Earth.There are dozens of sterilized tubes, designed to house chalk-size samples, tucked within the belly of the Perseverance robot. The rover will drill into Mars, secure rock and mineral samples in the tubes, seal the tubes and cache them for a future mission to retrieve.A follow-up robotic lander assigned to retrieve the samples must descend to within 100 yards of where Perseverance deposits the sample cache, Bobby Braun, the sample return program manager, said on Wednesday. The retriever will in turn hand off samples to a cargo spacecraft in orbit over Mars. This will be the largest craft ever sent to the Red Planet, in part because it will have to carry enough propellant for a return trip.Some of the scientists who will study those samples in the 2030s, in a facility that has not yet been built, may currently be students \u2014 or even children, said Elisabeth Hausrath, a University of Nevada at Las Vegas astrobiologist who is assigned to represent the interests of those future scientists.Detecting undisputed evidence of life in Martian rocks would be a spectacular scientific discovery \u2014 perhaps the most important humanity has ever made. It would suggest that still more life could exist somewhere else.The discovery might also remind humanity that life is not indestructible. If a changed environment is what doomed organisms on Mars, it could happen here, too.\u201cThese types of discoveries have the ability to affect people to their core,\u201d Kathryn Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for the mission, said. \u201cIt becomes something you have to confront about yourself and your species and your place in the universe.\u201dOther members of the team had a more quotidian take on the day\u2019s events. John McNamee, the mission\u2019s project manager, told reporters Thursday that he slept soundly the night before; he knew his engineers would guide Perseverance to a smooth landing.\u201cThen I got up, had a little exercise, had breakfast and landed on Mars,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, a pretty good day so far.\u201dChristian Davenport contributed to this report. The mission is an international endeavor. The Perseverance rover\u2019s instruments are operated by scientists in three countries, and the Mars Sample Return program is a partnership with the European Space Agency. NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past life",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past life (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3264",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/02/18/mars-landing-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA rover Perseverance landed safely Thursday on Mars to begin an ambitious mission to search for signs of past Martian life and obtain samples of soil and rock that could someday be hauled back to Earth for study in laboratories.\u201cTouchdown confirmed! Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life,\u201d announced Swati Mohan, the guidance and control operations lead for the mission at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Cheers, clapping and fist-pumps erupted in the control room, which was half-empty because of the coronavirus pandemic. Someone shouted: \u201cTRN, TRN,\u201d referring to the terrain relative navigation system that allowed Perseverance to land in a rugged area full of natural hazards.Perseverance, the first multibillion-dollar NASA mission to Mars in nine years, quickly produced two low-resolution images of the landing site \u2014 a forlorn landscape pocked with small craters. Dust kicked up by the landing covered the glass shields on the cameras. The pair of photos showed the rover casting a shadow on the Martian landscape.Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6X\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 18, 2021\n\nPerseverance used its autonomous guidance system to avoid hazardous terrain in the target area, an ancient lake bed known as Jezero Crater. The touchdown followed the \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d \u2014 in homage to the emotional state of engineers rooting for success. Mars is a notoriously difficult place to land a spacecraft.Going back more than half a century, about half of all robotic missions to the planet have failed, although NASA appears to have mastered the feat over the past two decades. The rover Curiosity, which landed in 2012 far to the east of Perseverance\u2019s location, remains operational. Perseverance is similar in scale but is slightly heavier and has about 50 percent more scientific instrumentation, according to NASA.The vehicle carrying Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph, used a heat shield to avoid burning up, then deployed a 70-foot-diameter parachute while still going nearly twice the speed of sound. Finally, the craft used rocket thrusters to slow down further and then a system known as a sky crane to lower the rover the final distance to the surface.The landing on rough terrain is the most hazardous phase of the mission. The entry, descent and landing had to be accomplished entirely autonomously. Mars is too far from Earth to permit technicians to joystick the landing; a signal between the spacecraft and Pasadena takes 11 minutes at the speed of light.For that reason, the spacecraft was loaded with navigation software to guide it to a safe spot in an area that features 200-foot cliffs, gullies, boulders and sand-filled craters that could potentially immobilize it.The rover touched down in a relatively rugged area, about a mile southeast of the center of its target. In this treacherous environment, the autonomous navigation system proved \u201cabsolutely essential,\u201d entry, descent and landing lead Allen Chen said at a news conference Thursday evening.\u201cWe found the parking lot and hit it,\u201d Chen said, avoiding dangerous terrain that was all but certain to doom the rover. The vehicle is almost level, tilted only a matter of a degree.Project scientist Ken Farley said the site is on the boundary between rock regions representing two important moments in Mars\u2019s geologic history. Off in the distance, images seem to show the cliffs of the river delta.\u201cThis is a great place to be,\u201d he said.But there is still a \u201cripple field\u201d \u2014 sand dunes \u2014 between the rover and the delta that scientists want to explore. The rover may have to drive around those sand dunes to get to the delta formation.NASA\u2019s Mars rover, Perseverance, aims for dicey landing to search for ancient lifeThursday\u2019s landing was just the latest hurdle for a mission fraught with obstacles. The spacecraft\u2019s journey to the launchpad had been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, which pushed much of NASA\u2019s workforce to go remote. Twenty minutes before Perseverance was scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., last July, an earthquake rocked mission control in Pasadena.But after a six-month 293-million-mile journey, the spacecraft hit the Martian atmosphere at 3:48 Eastern time Thursday afternoon \u2014 exactly on schedule.\u201cYes, yes, yes, yes,\u201d someone could be heard quietly chanting over the NASA live stream.Next stop, Mars: How scientists chose the Perseverance Rover's landing siteEngineers briefly lost contact with the spacecraft during the tremendous heat of its descent. At maximum deceleration, the craft experienced force 10 times the force of gravity on Earth.A minute later came the first sign that this landing was going well: \u201cParachute deployed.\u201dThere was a burst of applause before engineers settled back to anxious silence.The spacecraft jettisoned its heat shield. Its radar locked onto the ground. It turned on its navigation system and deployed the sky crane.And then came the words they had all been waiting for: \u201cTango Delta.\u201d TD. Touchdown.And, finally: \u201cNominal.\u201dPerseverance had arrived safely on Mars.On Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance is expected to land on Mars, joining two other spacecraft from the UAE and China also exploring the red planet. (Monica Rodman, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)\u201cThe vehicle is going on a roller-coaster ride, and you are, too,\u201d Chen said afterward. \u201cYou\u2019re second-guessing yourself as you go, even though it\u2019s already happened.\u201dWith the rover safely deposited at its landing site, the sky crane flew away and crash-landed elsewhere on the Martian surface.Now begins the rover\u2019s \u201ccommissioning\u201d phase, when engineers examine every inch of the vehicle\u2019s machinery to make sure it is ready for the mission. The rover will practice driving, test its robotic arm and update its software. Engineers who care for the vehicle will switch to \u201cMars time\u201d \u2014 organizing their lives according to the Red Planet\u2019s 24-hour, 37-minute day.Roughly 30 Martian days (or \u201csols\u201d) from now, Perseverance will drive to a flat area that can serve as the flight pad for Ingenuity, a tiny solar-powered helicopter. NASA will take another 30 sols to fly Ingenuity around the area, testing out the never-before-used autonomous flight technology.Next comes the central part of the rover\u2019s mission: exploring Jezero Crater. Perseverance has automated driving technology that allows it to navigate obstacles without help from the ground. It is expected to cover more ground than any previous Mars rover \u2014 an average of about 650 feet per Martian day.Typically, Mars landings are cause for great pomp and circumstance at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Pasadena campus swarms with scientists, journalists and schoolchildren. Huge projectors show a live steam from mission control. A tradition dating to the 1960s demands that a jar of peanuts be on hand at the space flight operations facility \u2014 supposedly the snack brings good luck.Thursday\u2019s events were more subdued, with only a minimal crew of ground controllers on site for the landing.But fans of the mission found socially distant ways to celebrate. In Switzerland, where NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen grew up and where the rover\u2019s motors were produced, artist Gerry Hofstetter projected images of the rover, Mars and the NASA logo onto an Alpine mountaintop.Though led by NASA, the mission is an international endeavor. The rover\u2019s instruments are operated by scientists in three countries, and the Mars Sample Return program is a partnership with the European Space Agency.It's so exciting to see communities around the globe join us as we #CountdownToMars. These images show @NASAPersevere & @NASA logos, along with a Martian globe projected at 12,000ft elevation on the Eiger Mountain in Switzerland. Thank you to Swiss Light Artist Gerry Hofstetter! pic.twitter.com/FzdXvtSPPz\u2014 Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) February 18, 2021\n\nPerseverance\u2019s new home is a little more than a mile from the cliffs that delineate the elevated remnants of a river delta. The river delta is considered one of the best places on Mars to search for signs of ancient life.Today, the crater is a bleak expanse of rock canyons and windswept sand. With no magnetic field to protect it, the planet\u2019s surface is bombarded by solar radiation. The air is thin and mostly carbon dioxide. Nighttime temperatures plunge to minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit. It is hardly a hospitable environment.But roughly 4 billion years ago, Mars looked a lot like ancient Earth. It boasted volcanic activity, a thick atmosphere and temperatures balmy enough to maintain liquid water on its surface.In those days, Jezero Crater contained a vast lake. The surrounding canyons were carved by mighty rivers. The feature that Perseverance is scheduled to inspect was a delta, where sediments from the surrounding watershed accumulated in layers of mud. On Earth, such sediments have preserved evidence of ancient life in the form of fossilized mats of microscopic pond scum called stromatolites.\u201cIf we could find something like that on Mars, that would be the holy grail for astrobiology,\u201d said Purdue University planetary scientist Briony Horgan, a member of Perseverance rover\u2019s science team. Horgan has led satellite surveys of the landing site that showed it is rich with the kinds of molecules known to help preserve the signatures of living organisms.Perseverance is armed with a battery of instruments designed to detect biosignatures. Two cameras will photograph the landscape and zoom in on tiny structures. A sensor will use X-rays to measure the chemical makeup of rocks while a machine mounted on the robot\u2019s arm deploys lasers to detect organic molecules and other potential biosignatures. Ground-penetrating radar will map the subsurface, and a Martian weather station will take in data about temperature, wind and clouds of dust.Many of these are more advanced versions of the instruments on the Curiosity rover, which has been exploring a spot far to the east of Jezero since 2012.But Perseverance is the first NASA rover with the capacity to collect samples of soil and rock and cache them on the Martian surface. If and when the space agency is able to launch follow-up missions, those spacecraft will retrieve Perseverance\u2019s samples and bring them back to Earth, where they can be analyzed with even more sophisticated tools in the world\u2019s top labs.\u201cFinding a sample suite that is worth bringing back is really important,\u201d Farley, the project scientist, said. \u201cWhat\u2019s at stake is the ability to really make the first step in answering the question of whether life exists elsewhere.\u201d\u201cAstrobiologists have been dreaming about this mission for decades,\u201d Mary Voytek, who directs NASA\u2019s astrobiology program, said. Microbiologists like her have found life on Earth virtually wherever they\u2019ve looked. Perseverance will play the role of robotic microbiologist on Mars.It is unlikely images alone will be considered definitive proof of ancient life, nor is it possible to miniaturize all the equipment necessary for the most detailed examinations of Martian samples. That\u2019s why Perseverance is part of a broader project to gather samples of Mars that can eventually be returned to Earth.There are dozens of sterilized tubes, designed to house chalk-size samples, tucked within the belly of the Perseverance robot. The rover will drill into Mars, secure rock and mineral samples in the tubes, seal the tubes and cache them for a future mission to retrieve.A follow-up robotic lander assigned to retrieve the samples must descend to within 100 yards of where Perseverance deposits the sample cache, Bobby Braun, the sample return program manager, said on Wednesday. The retriever will in turn hand off samples to a cargo spacecraft in orbit over Mars. This will be the largest craft ever sent to the Red Planet, in part because it will have to carry enough propellant for a return trip.Some of the scientists who will study those samples in the 2030s, in a facility that has not yet been built, may currently be students \u2014 or even children, said Elisabeth Hausrath, a University of Nevada at Las Vegas astrobiologist who is assigned to represent the interests of those future scientists.Detecting undisputed evidence of life in Martian rocks would be a spectacular scientific discovery \u2014 perhaps the most important humanity has ever made. It would suggest that still more life could exist somewhere else.The discovery might also remind humanity that life is not indestructible. If a changed environment is what doomed organisms on Mars, it could happen here, too.\u201cThese types of discoveries have the ability to affect people to their core,\u201d Kathryn Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for the mission, said. \u201cIt becomes something you have to confront about yourself and your species and your place in the universe.\u201dOther members of the team had a more quotidian take on the day\u2019s events. John McNamee, the mission\u2019s project manager, told reporters Thursday that he slept soundly the night before; he knew his engineers would guide Perseverance to a smooth landing.\u201cThen I got up, had a little exercise, had breakfast and landed on Mars,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, a pretty good day so far.\u201dChristian Davenport contributed to this report. The mission is an international endeavor. The Perseverance rover\u2019s instruments are operated by scientists in three countries, and the Mars Sample Return program is a partnership with the European Space Agency. NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past life",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past life (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3265",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/02/18/mars-landing-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA rover Perseverance landed safely Thursday on Mars to begin an ambitious mission to search for signs of past Martian life and obtain samples of soil and rock that could someday be hauled back to Earth for study in laboratories.\u201cTouchdown confirmed! Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life,\u201d announced Swati Mohan, the guidance and control operations lead for the mission at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Cheers, clapping and fist-pumps erupted in the control room, which was half-empty because of the coronavirus pandemic. Someone shouted: \u201cTRN, TRN,\u201d referring to the terrain relative navigation system that allowed Perseverance to land in a rugged area full of natural hazards.Perseverance, the first multibillion-dollar NASA mission to Mars in nine years, quickly produced two low-resolution images of the landing site \u2014 a forlorn landscape pocked with small craters. Dust kicked up by the landing covered the glass shields on the cameras. The pair of photos showed the rover casting a shadow on the Martian landscape.Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6X\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 18, 2021\n\nPerseverance used its autonomous guidance system to avoid hazardous terrain in the target area, an ancient lake bed known as Jezero Crater. The touchdown followed the \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d \u2014 in homage to the emotional state of engineers rooting for success. Mars is a notoriously difficult place to land a spacecraft.Going back more than half a century, about half of all robotic missions to the planet have failed, although NASA appears to have mastered the feat over the past two decades. The rover Curiosity, which landed in 2012 far to the east of Perseverance\u2019s location, remains operational. Perseverance is similar in scale but is slightly heavier and has about 50 percent more scientific instrumentation, according to NASA.The vehicle carrying Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph, used a heat shield to avoid burning up, then deployed a 70-foot-diameter parachute while still going nearly twice the speed of sound. Finally, the craft used rocket thrusters to slow down further and then a system known as a sky crane to lower the rover the final distance to the surface.The landing on rough terrain is the most hazardous phase of the mission. The entry, descent and landing had to be accomplished entirely autonomously. Mars is too far from Earth to permit technicians to joystick the landing; a signal between the spacecraft and Pasadena takes 11 minutes at the speed of light.For that reason, the spacecraft was loaded with navigation software to guide it to a safe spot in an area that features 200-foot cliffs, gullies, boulders and sand-filled craters that could potentially immobilize it.The rover touched down in a relatively rugged area, about a mile southeast of the center of its target. In this treacherous environment, the autonomous navigation system proved \u201cabsolutely essential,\u201d entry, descent and landing lead Allen Chen said at a news conference Thursday evening.\u201cWe found the parking lot and hit it,\u201d Chen said, avoiding dangerous terrain that was all but certain to doom the rover. The vehicle is almost level, tilted only a matter of a degree.Project scientist Ken Farley said the site is on the boundary between rock regions representing two important moments in Mars\u2019s geologic history. Off in the distance, images seem to show the cliffs of the river delta.\u201cThis is a great place to be,\u201d he said.But there is still a \u201cripple field\u201d \u2014 sand dunes \u2014 between the rover and the delta that scientists want to explore. The rover may have to drive around those sand dunes to get to the delta formation.NASA\u2019s Mars rover, Perseverance, aims for dicey landing to search for ancient lifeThursday\u2019s landing was just the latest hurdle for a mission fraught with obstacles. The spacecraft\u2019s journey to the launchpad had been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, which pushed much of NASA\u2019s workforce to go remote. Twenty minutes before Perseverance was scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., last July, an earthquake rocked mission control in Pasadena.But after a six-month 293-million-mile journey, the spacecraft hit the Martian atmosphere at 3:48 Eastern time Thursday afternoon \u2014 exactly on schedule.\u201cYes, yes, yes, yes,\u201d someone could be heard quietly chanting over the NASA live stream.Next stop, Mars: How scientists chose the Perseverance Rover's landing siteEngineers briefly lost contact with the spacecraft during the tremendous heat of its descent. At maximum deceleration, the craft experienced force 10 times the force of gravity on Earth.A minute later came the first sign that this landing was going well: \u201cParachute deployed.\u201dThere was a burst of applause before engineers settled back to anxious silence.The spacecraft jettisoned its heat shield. Its radar locked onto the ground. It turned on its navigation system and deployed the sky crane.And then came the words they had all been waiting for: \u201cTango Delta.\u201d TD. Touchdown.And, finally: \u201cNominal.\u201dPerseverance had arrived safely on Mars.On Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance is expected to land on Mars, joining two other spacecraft from the UAE and China also exploring the red planet. (Monica Rodman, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)\u201cThe vehicle is going on a roller-coaster ride, and you are, too,\u201d Chen said afterward. \u201cYou\u2019re second-guessing yourself as you go, even though it\u2019s already happened.\u201dWith the rover safely deposited at its landing site, the sky crane flew away and crash-landed elsewhere on the Martian surface.Now begins the rover\u2019s \u201ccommissioning\u201d phase, when engineers examine every inch of the vehicle\u2019s machinery to make sure it is ready for the mission. The rover will practice driving, test its robotic arm and update its software. Engineers who care for the vehicle will switch to \u201cMars time\u201d \u2014 organizing their lives according to the Red Planet\u2019s 24-hour, 37-minute day.Roughly 30 Martian days (or \u201csols\u201d) from now, Perseverance will drive to a flat area that can serve as the flight pad for Ingenuity, a tiny solar-powered helicopter. NASA will take another 30 sols to fly Ingenuity around the area, testing out the never-before-used autonomous flight technology.Next comes the central part of the rover\u2019s mission: exploring Jezero Crater. Perseverance has automated driving technology that allows it to navigate obstacles without help from the ground. It is expected to cover more ground than any previous Mars rover \u2014 an average of about 650 feet per Martian day.Typically, Mars landings are cause for great pomp and circumstance at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Pasadena campus swarms with scientists, journalists and schoolchildren. Huge projectors show a live steam from mission control. A tradition dating to the 1960s demands that a jar of peanuts be on hand at the space flight operations facility \u2014 supposedly the snack brings good luck.Thursday\u2019s events were more subdued, with only a minimal crew of ground controllers on site for the landing.But fans of the mission found socially distant ways to celebrate. In Switzerland, where NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen grew up and where the rover\u2019s motors were produced, artist Gerry Hofstetter projected images of the rover, Mars and the NASA logo onto an Alpine mountaintop.Though led by NASA, the mission is an international endeavor. The rover\u2019s instruments are operated by scientists in three countries, and the Mars Sample Return program is a partnership with the European Space Agency.It's so exciting to see communities around the globe join us as we #CountdownToMars. These images show @NASAPersevere & @NASA logos, along with a Martian globe projected at 12,000ft elevation on the Eiger Mountain in Switzerland. Thank you to Swiss Light Artist Gerry Hofstetter! pic.twitter.com/FzdXvtSPPz\u2014 Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) February 18, 2021\n\nPerseverance\u2019s new home is a little more than a mile from the cliffs that delineate the elevated remnants of a river delta. The river delta is considered one of the best places on Mars to search for signs of ancient life.Today, the crater is a bleak expanse of rock canyons and windswept sand. With no magnetic field to protect it, the planet\u2019s surface is bombarded by solar radiation. The air is thin and mostly carbon dioxide. Nighttime temperatures plunge to minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit. It is hardly a hospitable environment.But roughly 4 billion years ago, Mars looked a lot like ancient Earth. It boasted volcanic activity, a thick atmosphere and temperatures balmy enough to maintain liquid water on its surface.In those days, Jezero Crater contained a vast lake. The surrounding canyons were carved by mighty rivers. The feature that Perseverance is scheduled to inspect was a delta, where sediments from the surrounding watershed accumulated in layers of mud. On Earth, such sediments have preserved evidence of ancient life in the form of fossilized mats of microscopic pond scum called stromatolites.\u201cIf we could find something like that on Mars, that would be the holy grail for astrobiology,\u201d said Purdue University planetary scientist Briony Horgan, a member of Perseverance rover\u2019s science team. Horgan has led satellite surveys of the landing site that showed it is rich with the kinds of molecules known to help preserve the signatures of living organisms.Perseverance is armed with a battery of instruments designed to detect biosignatures. Two cameras will photograph the landscape and zoom in on tiny structures. A sensor will use X-rays to measure the chemical makeup of rocks while a machine mounted on the robot\u2019s arm deploys lasers to detect organic molecules and other potential biosignatures. Ground-penetrating radar will map the subsurface, and a Martian weather station will take in data about temperature, wind and clouds of dust.Many of these are more advanced versions of the instruments on the Curiosity rover, which has been exploring a spot far to the east of Jezero since 2012.But Perseverance is the first NASA rover with the capacity to collect samples of soil and rock and cache them on the Martian surface. If and when the space agency is able to launch follow-up missions, those spacecraft will retrieve Perseverance\u2019s samples and bring them back to Earth, where they can be analyzed with even more sophisticated tools in the world\u2019s top labs.\u201cFinding a sample suite that is worth bringing back is really important,\u201d Farley, the project scientist, said. \u201cWhat\u2019s at stake is the ability to really make the first step in answering the question of whether life exists elsewhere.\u201d\u201cAstrobiologists have been dreaming about this mission for decades,\u201d Mary Voytek, who directs NASA\u2019s astrobiology program, said. Microbiologists like her have found life on Earth virtually wherever they\u2019ve looked. Perseverance will play the role of robotic microbiologist on Mars.It is unlikely images alone will be considered definitive proof of ancient life, nor is it possible to miniaturize all the equipment necessary for the most detailed examinations of Martian samples. That\u2019s why Perseverance is part of a broader project to gather samples of Mars that can eventually be returned to Earth.There are dozens of sterilized tubes, designed to house chalk-size samples, tucked within the belly of the Perseverance robot. The rover will drill into Mars, secure rock and mineral samples in the tubes, seal the tubes and cache them for a future mission to retrieve.A follow-up robotic lander assigned to retrieve the samples must descend to within 100 yards of where Perseverance deposits the sample cache, Bobby Braun, the sample return program manager, said on Wednesday. The retriever will in turn hand off samples to a cargo spacecraft in orbit over Mars. This will be the largest craft ever sent to the Red Planet, in part because it will have to carry enough propellant for a return trip.Some of the scientists who will study those samples in the 2030s, in a facility that has not yet been built, may currently be students \u2014 or even children, said Elisabeth Hausrath, a University of Nevada at Las Vegas astrobiologist who is assigned to represent the interests of those future scientists.Detecting undisputed evidence of life in Martian rocks would be a spectacular scientific discovery \u2014 perhaps the most important humanity has ever made. It would suggest that still more life could exist somewhere else.The discovery might also remind humanity that life is not indestructible. If a changed environment is what doomed organisms on Mars, it could happen here, too.\u201cThese types of discoveries have the ability to affect people to their core,\u201d Kathryn Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for the mission, said. \u201cIt becomes something you have to confront about yourself and your species and your place in the universe.\u201dOther members of the team had a more quotidian take on the day\u2019s events. John McNamee, the mission\u2019s project manager, told reporters Thursday that he slept soundly the night before; he knew his engineers would guide Perseverance to a smooth landing.\u201cThen I got up, had a little exercise, had breakfast and landed on Mars,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, a pretty good day so far.\u201dChristian Davenport contributed to this report. The mission is an international endeavor. The Perseverance rover\u2019s instruments are operated by scientists in three countries, and the Mars Sample Return program is a partnership with the European Space Agency. NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars in mission to search for past life",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA names newest space telescope for pioneering female astronomer (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3266",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-to-name-newest-space-telescope-for-pioneering-female-astronomer/2020/05/20/2102267a-9a9c-11ea-a282-386f56d579e6_story.html",
        "text": "NASA is naming its newest space telescope for pioneering astronomer Nancy Grace Roman \u2014 marking the first time in the agency\u2019s 62-year history that one of its major, billion-dollar programs has been named for a woman.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRoman, who overcame obstacles that women faced in her male-dominated field and at NASA to become the agency\u2019s first female executive and its first chief astronomer, is a \u201cfitting\u201d eponym for the project, astronomer Heidi Hammel said Wednesday. Her championing of space-based observatories gave her the nickname \u201cMother of Hubble.\u201d With the new telescope, NASA is \u201ctaking her child and making it even more powerful,\u201d Hammel said. \u201cIt\u2019s widening the Hubble vision.\u201dStory continues below advertisementUntil Wednesday morning, the Roman Space Telescope had been named WFIRST, for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Still under development at NASA\u2019s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the telescope \u2014 identical in scale to the Hubble Space Telescope \u2014 will study dark matter, dark energy, distant planets and the evolution of the universe. Its launch target is the mid-2020s.AdvertisementIn a statement released by the agency, former senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), a champion of both the Hubble and now the Roman, said the decision is fitting as the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of women\u2019s suffrage: \u201cIt recognizes the incredible achievements of women in science and moves us even closer to no more hidden figures and no more hidden galaxies.\u201dRoman, who died in December 2018 at 93, joined NASA just months after its founding. She had a doctorate in astronomy, earned nearly a decade earlier at the University of Chicago.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists,\u201d she said in an interview late in life.Julie McEnery, deputy project scientist for the new telescope, said Roman was \u201csomebody I really admired, and it makes me excited and proud to be associated with a mission that\u2019s named after her.\u201dAdvertisementAs NASA\u2019s first chief astronomer, Roman oversaw the creation of its earliest orbiting observatories. \u201cLooking through the atmosphere is like looking through a piece of old stained glass,\u201d she wrote in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She knew an observatory in the sky would allow scientists to see objects farther and fainter than they ever had before.Story continues below advertisementIn the 1970s, Roman set up a steering group for what would become the Hubble telescope. She spent untold hours writing testimony for Congress and convincing budget offices of the project\u2019s importance. With its 7.9-foot mirror and $4.5 billion sticker price, the Hubble was far bigger and more costly than any space telescope ever launched. Skeptics wondered whether such an instrument was possible \u2014 and even if it was, would it be worth the cost?\u201cYou simply had to be solid in your vision and persistent, and [Roman] had those qualities,\u201d Hammel said.AdvertisementNASA has struggled to escape the gravity well of a storied history dominated by white males. Dan Goldin, its administrator in the 1990s, famously lamented the culture there as \u201ctoo stale, male and pale.\u201d The agency that put 12 white males on the moon had historically consigned women and racial minorities to second-tier roles.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s most ambitious effort today is a plan to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024. That program is named Artemis, after the Greek goddess who was the twin sister of Apollo.Last year, a telescope in Chile operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy was renamed after Vera C. Rubin. She also was a trailblazing astronomer, renowned for her research showing that galaxies were certain to contain dark matter that cannot be detected through direct observation.AdvertisementIf space scientists have neglected women in the naming of spacecraft, they have at times been downright hostile to women seeking to join their ranks. When NASA was established in 1958, many astronomy programs did not admit women. Observatories had no women\u2019s restrooms. Women were barred from research presentations and scholarly clubs.Story continues below advertisementAs recently as 2018, a sweeping report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that half of women in science had experienced harassment. The problem is especially bad for women of color; a 2017 survey of female space researchers found that 40 percent of nonwhite respondents had felt unsafe in their workplaces due to racism and sexism.In an essay for the journal Science, Roman wrote of the hurdles she faced during her early career. The physics department chairman at Swarthmore College, where she earned her bachelor\u2019s degree, told her that he usually tried to talk women out of his program but that she \u201cmight\u201d make it.\u201cBut I am glad I ignored the many people who told me that I could not be an astronomer,\u201d Roman wrote. \u201cI have had a wonderful career in a field that I love.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agencyHow Vera Rubin changed science The decision, a first for one of the agency\u2019s major programs, honors Nancy Grace Roman. NASA names newest space telescope for pioneering female astronomer",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA names newest space telescope for pioneering female astronomer (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3267",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-to-name-newest-space-telescope-for-pioneering-female-astronomer/2020/05/20/2102267a-9a9c-11ea-a282-386f56d579e6_story.html",
        "text": "NASA is naming its newest space telescope for pioneering astronomer Nancy Grace Roman \u2014 marking the first time in the agency\u2019s 62-year history that one of its major, billion-dollar programs has been named for a woman.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRoman, who overcame obstacles that women faced in her male-dominated field and at NASA to become the agency\u2019s first female executive and its first chief astronomer, is a \u201cfitting\u201d eponym for the project, astronomer Heidi Hammel said Wednesday. Her championing of space-based observatories gave her the nickname \u201cMother of Hubble.\u201d With the new telescope, NASA is \u201ctaking her child and making it even more powerful,\u201d Hammel said. \u201cIt\u2019s widening the Hubble vision.\u201dStory continues below advertisementUntil Wednesday morning, the Roman Space Telescope had been named WFIRST, for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Still under development at NASA\u2019s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the telescope \u2014 identical in scale to the Hubble Space Telescope \u2014 will study dark matter, dark energy, distant planets and the evolution of the universe. Its launch target is the mid-2020s.AdvertisementIn a statement released by the agency, former senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), a champion of both the Hubble and now the Roman, said the decision is fitting as the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of women\u2019s suffrage: \u201cIt recognizes the incredible achievements of women in science and moves us even closer to no more hidden figures and no more hidden galaxies.\u201dRoman, who died in December 2018 at 93, joined NASA just months after its founding. She had a doctorate in astronomy, earned nearly a decade earlier at the University of Chicago.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists,\u201d she said in an interview late in life.Julie McEnery, deputy project scientist for the new telescope, said Roman was \u201csomebody I really admired, and it makes me excited and proud to be associated with a mission that\u2019s named after her.\u201dAdvertisementAs NASA\u2019s first chief astronomer, Roman oversaw the creation of its earliest orbiting observatories. \u201cLooking through the atmosphere is like looking through a piece of old stained glass,\u201d she wrote in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She knew an observatory in the sky would allow scientists to see objects farther and fainter than they ever had before.Story continues below advertisementIn the 1970s, Roman set up a steering group for what would become the Hubble telescope. She spent untold hours writing testimony for Congress and convincing budget offices of the project\u2019s importance. With its 7.9-foot mirror and $4.5 billion sticker price, the Hubble was far bigger and more costly than any space telescope ever launched. Skeptics wondered whether such an instrument was possible \u2014 and even if it was, would it be worth the cost?\u201cYou simply had to be solid in your vision and persistent, and [Roman] had those qualities,\u201d Hammel said.AdvertisementNASA has struggled to escape the gravity well of a storied history dominated by white males. Dan Goldin, its administrator in the 1990s, famously lamented the culture there as \u201ctoo stale, male and pale.\u201d The agency that put 12 white males on the moon had historically consigned women and racial minorities to second-tier roles.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s most ambitious effort today is a plan to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024. That program is named Artemis, after the Greek goddess who was the twin sister of Apollo.Last year, a telescope in Chile operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy was renamed after Vera C. Rubin. She also was a trailblazing astronomer, renowned for her research showing that galaxies were certain to contain dark matter that cannot be detected through direct observation.AdvertisementIf space scientists have neglected women in the naming of spacecraft, they have at times been downright hostile to women seeking to join their ranks. When NASA was established in 1958, many astronomy programs did not admit women. Observatories had no women\u2019s restrooms. Women were barred from research presentations and scholarly clubs.Story continues below advertisementAs recently as 2018, a sweeping report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that half of women in science had experienced harassment. The problem is especially bad for women of color; a 2017 survey of female space researchers found that 40 percent of nonwhite respondents had felt unsafe in their workplaces due to racism and sexism.In an essay for the journal Science, Roman wrote of the hurdles she faced during her early career. The physics department chairman at Swarthmore College, where she earned her bachelor\u2019s degree, told her that he usually tried to talk women out of his program but that she \u201cmight\u201d make it.\u201cBut I am glad I ignored the many people who told me that I could not be an astronomer,\u201d Roman wrote. \u201cI have had a wonderful career in a field that I love.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agencyHow Vera Rubin changed science The decision, a first for one of the agency\u2019s major programs, honors Nancy Grace Roman. NASA names newest space telescope for pioneering female astronomer",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA names newest space telescope for pioneering female astronomer (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3268",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-to-name-newest-space-telescope-for-pioneering-female-astronomer/2020/05/20/2102267a-9a9c-11ea-a282-386f56d579e6_story.html",
        "text": "NASA is naming its newest space telescope for pioneering astronomer Nancy Grace Roman \u2014 marking the first time in the agency\u2019s 62-year history that one of its major, billion-dollar programs has been named for a woman.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRoman, who overcame obstacles that women faced in her male-dominated field and at NASA to become the agency\u2019s first female executive and its first chief astronomer, is a \u201cfitting\u201d eponym for the project, astronomer Heidi Hammel said Wednesday. Her championing of space-based observatories gave her the nickname \u201cMother of Hubble.\u201d With the new telescope, NASA is \u201ctaking her child and making it even more powerful,\u201d Hammel said. \u201cIt\u2019s widening the Hubble vision.\u201dStory continues below advertisementUntil Wednesday morning, the Roman Space Telescope had been named WFIRST, for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. Still under development at NASA\u2019s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the telescope \u2014 identical in scale to the Hubble Space Telescope \u2014 will study dark matter, dark energy, distant planets and the evolution of the universe. Its launch target is the mid-2020s.AdvertisementIn a statement released by the agency, former senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), a champion of both the Hubble and now the Roman, said the decision is fitting as the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of women\u2019s suffrage: \u201cIt recognizes the incredible achievements of women in science and moves us even closer to no more hidden figures and no more hidden galaxies.\u201dRoman, who died in December 2018 at 93, joined NASA just months after its founding. She had a doctorate in astronomy, earned nearly a decade earlier at the University of Chicago.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists,\u201d she said in an interview late in life.Julie McEnery, deputy project scientist for the new telescope, said Roman was \u201csomebody I really admired, and it makes me excited and proud to be associated with a mission that\u2019s named after her.\u201dAdvertisementAs NASA\u2019s first chief astronomer, Roman oversaw the creation of its earliest orbiting observatories. \u201cLooking through the atmosphere is like looking through a piece of old stained glass,\u201d she wrote in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She knew an observatory in the sky would allow scientists to see objects farther and fainter than they ever had before.Story continues below advertisementIn the 1970s, Roman set up a steering group for what would become the Hubble telescope. She spent untold hours writing testimony for Congress and convincing budget offices of the project\u2019s importance. With its 7.9-foot mirror and $4.5 billion sticker price, the Hubble was far bigger and more costly than any space telescope ever launched. Skeptics wondered whether such an instrument was possible \u2014 and even if it was, would it be worth the cost?\u201cYou simply had to be solid in your vision and persistent, and [Roman] had those qualities,\u201d Hammel said.AdvertisementNASA has struggled to escape the gravity well of a storied history dominated by white males. Dan Goldin, its administrator in the 1990s, famously lamented the culture there as \u201ctoo stale, male and pale.\u201d The agency that put 12 white males on the moon had historically consigned women and racial minorities to second-tier roles.Story continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s most ambitious effort today is a plan to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024. That program is named Artemis, after the Greek goddess who was the twin sister of Apollo.Last year, a telescope in Chile operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy was renamed after Vera C. Rubin. She also was a trailblazing astronomer, renowned for her research showing that galaxies were certain to contain dark matter that cannot be detected through direct observation.AdvertisementIf space scientists have neglected women in the naming of spacecraft, they have at times been downright hostile to women seeking to join their ranks. When NASA was established in 1958, many astronomy programs did not admit women. Observatories had no women\u2019s restrooms. Women were barred from research presentations and scholarly clubs.Story continues below advertisementAs recently as 2018, a sweeping report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that half of women in science had experienced harassment. The problem is especially bad for women of color; a 2017 survey of female space researchers found that 40 percent of nonwhite respondents had felt unsafe in their workplaces due to racism and sexism.In an essay for the journal Science, Roman wrote of the hurdles she faced during her early career. The physics department chairman at Swarthmore College, where she earned her bachelor\u2019s degree, told her that he usually tried to talk women out of his program but that she \u201cmight\u201d make it.\u201cBut I am glad I ignored the many people who told me that I could not be an astronomer,\u201d Roman wrote. \u201cI have had a wonderful career in a field that I love.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agencyHow Vera Rubin changed science The decision, a first for one of the agency\u2019s major programs, honors Nancy Grace Roman. NASA names newest space telescope for pioneering female astronomer",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "The survival of a Mars mission could depend on astronaut urine (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3269",
        "date": "2017-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/23/the-survival-of-a-mars-mission-could-depend-on-astronaut-urine/",
        "text": "NASA is funding new research to determine whether human urine and the carbon dioxide people exhale can be used to produce nutritional supplements, plastic parts and hand tools to help astronauts survive and thrive during prospective missions to Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe science centers on various yeast strains. One byproduct is omega-3 fatty acids. Commonly found in fish, nuts and leafy greens, these essential nutrients help fend off heart disease and arthritis, among other conditions. Another is polymer, which a 3-D printer can fashion\u00a0into durable materials. Early findings were presented Tuesday in Washington\u00a0by Clemson University's Mark Blenner, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, who says Mars-bound astronauts could come to rely on hibernating yeast that grows when mingled with the nitrogen in their pee and the carbon in their breath.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHaving a biological system that astronauts can awaken from a dormant state to start producing what they need, when they need it, is the motivation for our project,\u201d Blenner explained for the American Chemical Society\u00a0ahead of its annual convention.NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versaThe United States has deployed exploratory spacecraft and robots to Mars since the 1970s to search for clues about the existence of water, prospects for habitability and any existence of life. NASA aims\u00a0to send people there between the years 2030 and 2040,\u00a0first to orbit the planet only and, later, to attempt landing there.Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk endeavors to do it sooner \u2014\u00a0by 2025, he\u00a0has said.\u00a0President Trump, who has expressed bullish enthusiasm for America's space program, has indicated he'd like to see a crewed mission to\u00a0Mars before he leaves office.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAggressive preparations are well underway.\u00a0Late last year, for instance,\u00a0researchers traveled to\u00a0the Mauna Ulu volcano on Hawaii's Big Island,\u00a0terrain they believe to resemble the Red Planet's, for a\u00a0simulated expedition to field test equipment and communications capabilities.When considering the two planets' orbital alignment, officials\u00a0assume a mission from Earth to Mars could span one to three years. First, though, scientists must determine how a crew would survive the months-long trip and then sustain themselves once there.The next eclipse is on MarsSo think of Blenner's research as the\u00a0ultimate recycling program.\u00a0It\u00a0assumes \u201catom economy will become really important,\u201d he told the ACS, because space travel requires a light footprint.Story continues below advertisementIn short, here's how it works:Blenner\u2019s biological system includes a variety of strains of the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. These organisms require both nitrogen and carbon to grow. Blenner\u2019s team discovered that the yeast can obtain their nitrogen from urea in untreated urine. Meanwhile, the yeast obtain their carbon from CO2, which could come from astronauts\u2019 exhaled breath, or from the Martian atmosphere. But to use CO2, the yeast require a middleman to \u201cfix\u201d the carbon into a form they can ingest. For this purpose, the yeast rely on photosynthetic cyanobacteria or algae provided by the researchers.The next phase, Blenner said, will focus on\u00a0increasing output, which now is minimal. He's also\u00a0exploring\u00a0whether the science has other applications here at home, including in fish farming\u00a0and for other human nutritional\u00a0needs.AdvertisementThe science may seem a little out there, but bear in mind that astronauts already manufacture water \u2014 and consume it \u2014\u00a0from their pee, sweat and shower runoff. It's true. Watch this short video, which explains the science succinctly:Read more:From beer to bread and back again to solve \u2018the world\u2019s dumbest problem\u2019The best way to drink whiskey, according to scienceThe first animals evolved during the absolute worst time on Earth NASA is funding research to determine whether human waste can be used to produce nutritional supplements and plastic tools. The survival of a Mars mission could depend on astronaut urine",
        "author": "Andrew deGrandpre"
    },
    {
        "title": "The survival of a Mars mission could depend on astronaut urine (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3270",
        "date": "2017-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/23/the-survival-of-a-mars-mission-could-depend-on-astronaut-urine/",
        "text": "NASA is funding new research to determine whether human urine and the carbon dioxide people exhale can be used to produce nutritional supplements, plastic parts and hand tools to help astronauts survive and thrive during prospective missions to Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe science centers on various yeast strains. One byproduct is omega-3 fatty acids. Commonly found in fish, nuts and leafy greens, these essential nutrients help fend off heart disease and arthritis, among other conditions. Another is polymer, which a 3-D printer can fashion\u00a0into durable materials. Early findings were presented Tuesday in Washington\u00a0by Clemson University's Mark Blenner, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, who says Mars-bound astronauts could come to rely on hibernating yeast that grows when mingled with the nitrogen in their pee and the carbon in their breath.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHaving a biological system that astronauts can awaken from a dormant state to start producing what they need, when they need it, is the motivation for our project,\u201d Blenner explained for the American Chemical Society\u00a0ahead of its annual convention.NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versaThe United States has deployed exploratory spacecraft and robots to Mars since the 1970s to search for clues about the existence of water, prospects for habitability and any existence of life. NASA aims\u00a0to send people there between the years 2030 and 2040,\u00a0first to orbit the planet only and, later, to attempt landing there.Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk endeavors to do it sooner \u2014\u00a0by 2025, he\u00a0has said.\u00a0President Trump, who has expressed bullish enthusiasm for America's space program, has indicated he'd like to see a crewed mission to\u00a0Mars before he leaves office.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAggressive preparations are well underway.\u00a0Late last year, for instance,\u00a0researchers traveled to\u00a0the Mauna Ulu volcano on Hawaii's Big Island,\u00a0terrain they believe to resemble the Red Planet's, for a\u00a0simulated expedition to field test equipment and communications capabilities.When considering the two planets' orbital alignment, officials\u00a0assume a mission from Earth to Mars could span one to three years. First, though, scientists must determine how a crew would survive the months-long trip and then sustain themselves once there.The next eclipse is on MarsSo think of Blenner's research as the\u00a0ultimate recycling program.\u00a0It\u00a0assumes \u201catom economy will become really important,\u201d he told the ACS, because space travel requires a light footprint.Story continues below advertisementIn short, here's how it works:Blenner\u2019s biological system includes a variety of strains of the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. These organisms require both nitrogen and carbon to grow. Blenner\u2019s team discovered that the yeast can obtain their nitrogen from urea in untreated urine. Meanwhile, the yeast obtain their carbon from CO2, which could come from astronauts\u2019 exhaled breath, or from the Martian atmosphere. But to use CO2, the yeast require a middleman to \u201cfix\u201d the carbon into a form they can ingest. For this purpose, the yeast rely on photosynthetic cyanobacteria or algae provided by the researchers.The next phase, Blenner said, will focus on\u00a0increasing output, which now is minimal. He's also\u00a0exploring\u00a0whether the science has other applications here at home, including in fish farming\u00a0and for other human nutritional\u00a0needs.AdvertisementThe science may seem a little out there, but bear in mind that astronauts already manufacture water \u2014 and consume it \u2014\u00a0from their pee, sweat and shower runoff. It's true. Watch this short video, which explains the science succinctly:Read more:From beer to bread and back again to solve \u2018the world\u2019s dumbest problem\u2019The best way to drink whiskey, according to scienceThe first animals evolved during the absolute worst time on Earth NASA is funding research to determine whether human waste can be used to produce nutritional supplements and plastic tools. The survival of a Mars mission could depend on astronaut urine",
        "author": "Andrew deGrandpre"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3271",
        "date": "2018-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/31/nasa-lost-contact-with-a-satellite-12-years-ago-an-amateur-just-found-its-signal/",
        "text": "NASA confirmed\u00a0an\u00a0incredible discovery Tuesday \u2014 that an amateur radio astronomer, on the hunt for a classified government satellite, stumbled instead upon signals from a spacecraft\u00a0that had been thought lost 12 years earlier, raising hope that NASA\u00a0can\u00a0resurrect a mission that\u00a0changed our understanding of\u00a0the \u201cinvisible ocean\u201d around the Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight1. LostIMAGE was a machine designed to \u201csee the invisible,\u201d as one of the mission's lead scientists once put it. It was a squat and boxy thing, like many satellites, with a\u00a0long technical name \u2014 Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration \u2014 that obscured its\u00a0plain and noble purpose: to map the roiling sphere of\u00a0electric gas\u00a0around\u00a0the Earth that protects us\u00a0from the sun, and which we\u00a0had never seen in full before.Story continues below advertisementBefore\u00a0IMAGE launched in 2000,\u00a0humans had known only for\u00a0a few decades that a magnetosphere surrounded the planet. In an essay before the launch, the mission's lead investigator, James L. Burch, called it an \u201cinvisible ocean .\u2009.\u2009. where nothing tangible \u2014 no snow or sand or tree or even a cloud \u2014 records titanic currents and pulses.\u201dAdvertisementThe sphere shields\u00a0our planet\u00a0from\u00a0the sun's harsh winds while letting through its light.\u00a0Like an ocean, its plasma flows and ripples in a solar breeze. But also like an ocean, it is prone to storms \u2014\u00a0solar disruptions so violent\u00a0they can knock out satellites\u00a0and even power grids\u00a0on Earth.Scientists are slowly unlocking the secrets of the Earth's mysterious humIMAGE\u00a0was built, Burch wrote, to\u00a0send home images of the\u00a0global magnetosphere for the first time in history and help predict those storms.Story continues below advertisementFor five years, it astonished us.The satellite\u00a0beamed back pictures of an enormous solar storm\u00a0in the summer of 2000 and allowed scientists to essentially live-stream \u201cweather\u201d in space. The sphere around the Earth proved to be a much\u00a0stranger place than had been thought. IMAGE\u00a0discovered that the Earth spits out jets of its own atmosphere to\u00a0defend itself from\u00a0space storms \u2014 like a squid shooting ink \u2014\u00a0the Dallas Morning News wrote in 2002. It discovered cracks in the Earth's magnetic field, tracked down the source of mysterious radiation and\u00a0imaged 100,000-volt charged particles whipping around the circumference of the globe.AdvertisementAnd in the\u00a0last\u00a0month of 2005 \u2014 on the same day the U.S. president addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising\u00a0an end to\u00a0a still-young\u00a0Iraq War \u2014\u00a0IMAGE stopped sending pictures. The satellite\u00a0had suddenly gone invisible itself.Story continues below advertisementThe scientists\u00a0tried to figure out why. A\u00a0tripped\u00a0breaker in the radio was their best guess. But without a radio, they couldn't tell it to turn itself back on.After a month of silence from IMAGE, NASA\u00a0published a news release\u00a0that declared\u00a0the satellite's\u00a0mission\u00a0a great success \u2014\u00a0one that was now\u00a0over.\u201cThe craft's power supply subsystems failed,\u201d\u00a0the agency wrote, \u201crendering it lifeless.\u201dNASA was wrong. IMAGE was not dead,\u00a0but it would circle Earth for\u00a0more than a decade before a man with no professional astronomy training \u2014 one who did not always accept the official\u00a0explanation of events \u2014\u00a0heard its call.2. ContactThe 21st century moved into its second decade, and space exploration changed.\u00a0New machines were sent into orbit, and some of them, like IMAGE, were lost too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the first month of 2018, an unknown government agency\u00a0used a private company to launch a secret satellite, code-named \u201cZuma.\u201d It was nothing like IMAGE; it was a\u00a0machine\u00a0intended\u00a0to be invisible to most of the world.And it failed immediately.Lost in space? Questions mount over fate of secret satellite as SpaceX pushes aheadNo one has\u00a0said publicly\u00a0what, exactly,\u00a0went wrong during\u00a0the Jan. 7 launch, whether Zuma crashed back into an ocean or simply died in space. Its fate and purpose\u00a0have become a mystery of the new Space Age \u2014 and all of this bothered Scott Tilley very much.Tilley is a 47-year-old electrical engineer who\u00a0lives on the west coast of Canada. His\u00a0hobby is radio astronomy. In a sense, it's also his cause.\u201cSpace is not owned by anybody,\u201d\u00a0Tilley told The Washington Post. \u201cAnybody should be able to look up and know those little dots moving across the night sky are not bombs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSecret military satellites and\u00a0classified orbits bother him, so he has\u00a0banded together with a small group of fellow amateurs across the world to\u00a0to track down every\u00a0satellite\u00a0whose operators don't want it to be seen.Maybe Zuma was in pieces underwater,\u00a0Tilley thought. But maybe not. So he began to scan. He used no telescope, listening\u00a0instead for radio signals out there, in the invisible ocean.When Tilley caught\u00a0a signal after a week of searching, on Jan. 20, he almost ignored it.\u00a0Whatever it was, it\u00a0was orbiting much higher than Zuma\u00a0was supposed to be. There are hundreds of active satellites in space, most of which didn't interest him.\u00a0 \u201cI didn't think of it much more,\u201d\u00a0he wrote on his blog.Story continues below advertisementBut as he continued to scan for Zuma, he came across the signal again \u2014 stronger this time \u2014 and out of curiosity checked it against a standard catalogue.AdvertisementThe signal\u00a0matched for IMAGE. But IMAGE was supposed to be dead.Tilley had to Google the old satellite\u00a0to find out what it was, as it had been all but forgotten on Earth. Eventually, he came across a decade-old NASA report on the mission's failure.\u201cOnce I read through the failure report and all the geeky language the engineers use, I immediately understood what had happened,\u201d Tilley told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News.Then he rushed to contact NASA himself.3. AnswersThat old\u00a0news release announcing the death of IMAGE\u00a0had not actually been the end of its story on Earth. A week later, in early 2006, NASA quietly convened a board of experts to pore over the satellite's entire data set and figure out what went wrong.Story continues below advertisementThey worked for months. When their final report was released, the\u00a0board still\u00a0figured\u00a0IMAGE had tripped a power breaker and essentially bricked itself, like a bad iPhone.AdvertisementBut they had come up with a theory for how\u00a0the satellite might be fixed. Or rather how it might fix itself.IMAGE was solar-powered and designed so that if its battery ever drained enough, it would try to\u00a0reset\u00a0its computer and flip the\u00a0breaker back.\u00a0The board thought\u00a0this was most likely to happen in late\u00a02007, when IMAGE's orbit would put it in the Earth's shadow from the sun \u2014 from the satellite's point of view, a deep eclipse.The theory didn't pan out. When NASA tried to the contact IMAGE after the eclipse, it remained as silent as ever, so the agency closed down the mission for good.Story continues below advertisementAnd then, a decade later,\u00a0Tilley found\u00a0the machine chirping away.After his discovery, another\u00a0independent astronomer, Cees Bassa, looked for IMAGE's signal in\u00a0years of old data. He hypothesized that while the 2007 eclipse didn't manage to reset the satellite, another one did the trick, probably\u00a0sometime between 2014 and 2016.Advertisement\u201cMost likely the battery efficiency degraded such over the IMAGE lifetime that during the less deep eclipses the battery drained sufficiently to lead to the reset and bring the transmitter aboard IMAGE back to life,\u201d Bassa wrote.NASA hasn't confirmed that. In fact, the agency was initially skeptical that the signal\u00a0Tilley found actually came from IMAGE.After\u00a0Tilley contacted NASA last week, scientists\u00a0trained\u00a0antennas at the Goddard Space Flight Center on the object. Initial\u00a0tests showed its orbit, frequency, oscillation and spin rate all matched their old, lost satellite.Even so, NASA was cautious in its public updates, writing Sunday that it still wanted to analyze the signal's encoded data before it could be sure.Meanwhile, astronomers amateur and professional were getting excited. \u201cThe team is collectively holding their breath,\u201d Patricia Reiff, an investigator on the original mission, told Science Magazine.AdvertisementOn his blog, Tilley quoted from an email sent to him by Burch, the lead investigator on the IMAGE mission, who\u00a0wrote so many years ago of a machine to\u00a0map an invisible sea.\u201cVery excited,\u201d\u00a0 Burch\u00a0wrote to Tilley.Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in spaceConfirmation finally came Tuesday. It came couched\u00a0in the technical jargon of space science and was no less momentous for it.\u201cOn the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite,\u201d NASA wrote. \u201cThe signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 \u2014 the ID for IMAGE.\u201cThe NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.\u201dTranslation: There is hope that IMAGE will one day tell us\u00a0more about\u00a0the\u00a0\u201cocean\u201d it's been adrift in for\u00a0more than\u00a012 years.\u201cI really hope the scientists who built this thing and put it in space are able to repurpose this and put it back into action,\u201d Tilley told CBC News.\u00a0\u201cAnd we get the benefit of all the beautiful science coming home.\u201dHe was\u00a0named nowhere in NASA's news release, except as an anonymous \u201camateur astronomer.\u201dThat's fine. He knows he found the thing, when the professionals might have left it in the dark\u00a0forever.More reading:NASA wanted to talk about science. A congressman wanted to ask about Martian civilizations.Please stop annoying this NASA scientist with your ridiculous Planet X doomsday theoriesThis man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat A 47-year-old electrical engineer and radio astronomer hunting for a spy satellite came across the supposedly dead and lost spacecraft.  NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3272",
        "date": "2018-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/31/nasa-lost-contact-with-a-satellite-12-years-ago-an-amateur-just-found-its-signal/",
        "text": "NASA confirmed\u00a0an\u00a0incredible discovery Tuesday \u2014 that an amateur radio astronomer, on the hunt for a classified government satellite, stumbled instead upon signals from a spacecraft\u00a0that had been thought lost 12 years earlier, raising hope that NASA\u00a0can\u00a0resurrect a mission that\u00a0changed our understanding of\u00a0the \u201cinvisible ocean\u201d around the Earth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight1. LostIMAGE was a machine designed to \u201csee the invisible,\u201d as one of the mission's lead scientists once put it. It was a squat and boxy thing, like many satellites, with a\u00a0long technical name \u2014 Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration \u2014 that obscured its\u00a0plain and noble purpose: to map the roiling sphere of\u00a0electric gas\u00a0around\u00a0the Earth that protects us\u00a0from the sun, and which we\u00a0had never seen in full before.Story continues below advertisementBefore\u00a0IMAGE launched in 2000,\u00a0humans had known only for\u00a0a few decades that a magnetosphere surrounded the planet. In an essay before the launch, the mission's lead investigator, James L. Burch, called it an \u201cinvisible ocean .\u2009.\u2009. where nothing tangible \u2014 no snow or sand or tree or even a cloud \u2014 records titanic currents and pulses.\u201dAdvertisementThe sphere shields\u00a0our planet\u00a0from\u00a0the sun's harsh winds while letting through its light.\u00a0Like an ocean, its plasma flows and ripples in a solar breeze. But also like an ocean, it is prone to storms \u2014\u00a0solar disruptions so violent\u00a0they can knock out satellites\u00a0and even power grids\u00a0on Earth.Scientists are slowly unlocking the secrets of the Earth's mysterious humIMAGE\u00a0was built, Burch wrote, to\u00a0send home images of the\u00a0global magnetosphere for the first time in history and help predict those storms.Story continues below advertisementFor five years, it astonished us.The satellite\u00a0beamed back pictures of an enormous solar storm\u00a0in the summer of 2000 and allowed scientists to essentially live-stream \u201cweather\u201d in space. The sphere around the Earth proved to be a much\u00a0stranger place than had been thought. IMAGE\u00a0discovered that the Earth spits out jets of its own atmosphere to\u00a0defend itself from\u00a0space storms \u2014 like a squid shooting ink \u2014\u00a0the Dallas Morning News wrote in 2002. It discovered cracks in the Earth's magnetic field, tracked down the source of mysterious radiation and\u00a0imaged 100,000-volt charged particles whipping around the circumference of the globe.AdvertisementAnd in the\u00a0last\u00a0month of 2005 \u2014 on the same day the U.S. president addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising\u00a0an end to\u00a0a still-young\u00a0Iraq War \u2014\u00a0IMAGE stopped sending pictures. The satellite\u00a0had suddenly gone invisible itself.Story continues below advertisementThe scientists\u00a0tried to figure out why. A\u00a0tripped\u00a0breaker in the radio was their best guess. But without a radio, they couldn't tell it to turn itself back on.After a month of silence from IMAGE, NASA\u00a0published a news release\u00a0that declared\u00a0the satellite's\u00a0mission\u00a0a great success \u2014\u00a0one that was now\u00a0over.\u201cThe craft's power supply subsystems failed,\u201d\u00a0the agency wrote, \u201crendering it lifeless.\u201dNASA was wrong. IMAGE was not dead,\u00a0but it would circle Earth for\u00a0more than a decade before a man with no professional astronomy training \u2014 one who did not always accept the official\u00a0explanation of events \u2014\u00a0heard its call.2. ContactThe 21st century moved into its second decade, and space exploration changed.\u00a0New machines were sent into orbit, and some of them, like IMAGE, were lost too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the first month of 2018, an unknown government agency\u00a0used a private company to launch a secret satellite, code-named \u201cZuma.\u201d It was nothing like IMAGE; it was a\u00a0machine\u00a0intended\u00a0to be invisible to most of the world.And it failed immediately.Lost in space? Questions mount over fate of secret satellite as SpaceX pushes aheadNo one has\u00a0said publicly\u00a0what, exactly,\u00a0went wrong during\u00a0the Jan. 7 launch, whether Zuma crashed back into an ocean or simply died in space. Its fate and purpose\u00a0have become a mystery of the new Space Age \u2014 and all of this bothered Scott Tilley very much.Tilley is a 47-year-old electrical engineer who\u00a0lives on the west coast of Canada. His\u00a0hobby is radio astronomy. In a sense, it's also his cause.\u201cSpace is not owned by anybody,\u201d\u00a0Tilley told The Washington Post. \u201cAnybody should be able to look up and know those little dots moving across the night sky are not bombs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSecret military satellites and\u00a0classified orbits bother him, so he has\u00a0banded together with a small group of fellow amateurs across the world to\u00a0to track down every\u00a0satellite\u00a0whose operators don't want it to be seen.Maybe Zuma was in pieces underwater,\u00a0Tilley thought. But maybe not. So he began to scan. He used no telescope, listening\u00a0instead for radio signals out there, in the invisible ocean.When Tilley caught\u00a0a signal after a week of searching, on Jan. 20, he almost ignored it.\u00a0Whatever it was, it\u00a0was orbiting much higher than Zuma\u00a0was supposed to be. There are hundreds of active satellites in space, most of which didn't interest him.\u00a0 \u201cI didn't think of it much more,\u201d\u00a0he wrote on his blog.Story continues below advertisementBut as he continued to scan for Zuma, he came across the signal again \u2014 stronger this time \u2014 and out of curiosity checked it against a standard catalogue.AdvertisementThe signal\u00a0matched for IMAGE. But IMAGE was supposed to be dead.Tilley had to Google the old satellite\u00a0to find out what it was, as it had been all but forgotten on Earth. Eventually, he came across a decade-old NASA report on the mission's failure.\u201cOnce I read through the failure report and all the geeky language the engineers use, I immediately understood what had happened,\u201d Tilley told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News.Then he rushed to contact NASA himself.3. AnswersThat old\u00a0news release announcing the death of IMAGE\u00a0had not actually been the end of its story on Earth. A week later, in early 2006, NASA quietly convened a board of experts to pore over the satellite's entire data set and figure out what went wrong.Story continues below advertisementThey worked for months. When their final report was released, the\u00a0board still\u00a0figured\u00a0IMAGE had tripped a power breaker and essentially bricked itself, like a bad iPhone.AdvertisementBut they had come up with a theory for how\u00a0the satellite might be fixed. Or rather how it might fix itself.IMAGE was solar-powered and designed so that if its battery ever drained enough, it would try to\u00a0reset\u00a0its computer and flip the\u00a0breaker back.\u00a0The board thought\u00a0this was most likely to happen in late\u00a02007, when IMAGE's orbit would put it in the Earth's shadow from the sun \u2014 from the satellite's point of view, a deep eclipse.The theory didn't pan out. When NASA tried to the contact IMAGE after the eclipse, it remained as silent as ever, so the agency closed down the mission for good.Story continues below advertisementAnd then, a decade later,\u00a0Tilley found\u00a0the machine chirping away.After his discovery, another\u00a0independent astronomer, Cees Bassa, looked for IMAGE's signal in\u00a0years of old data. He hypothesized that while the 2007 eclipse didn't manage to reset the satellite, another one did the trick, probably\u00a0sometime between 2014 and 2016.Advertisement\u201cMost likely the battery efficiency degraded such over the IMAGE lifetime that during the less deep eclipses the battery drained sufficiently to lead to the reset and bring the transmitter aboard IMAGE back to life,\u201d Bassa wrote.NASA hasn't confirmed that. In fact, the agency was initially skeptical that the signal\u00a0Tilley found actually came from IMAGE.After\u00a0Tilley contacted NASA last week, scientists\u00a0trained\u00a0antennas at the Goddard Space Flight Center on the object. Initial\u00a0tests showed its orbit, frequency, oscillation and spin rate all matched their old, lost satellite.Even so, NASA was cautious in its public updates, writing Sunday that it still wanted to analyze the signal's encoded data before it could be sure.Meanwhile, astronomers amateur and professional were getting excited. \u201cThe team is collectively holding their breath,\u201d Patricia Reiff, an investigator on the original mission, told Science Magazine.AdvertisementOn his blog, Tilley quoted from an email sent to him by Burch, the lead investigator on the IMAGE mission, who\u00a0wrote so many years ago of a machine to\u00a0map an invisible sea.\u201cVery excited,\u201d\u00a0 Burch\u00a0wrote to Tilley.Meet the amateur astronomer who found NASA\u2019s lost satellite in spaceConfirmation finally came Tuesday. It came couched\u00a0in the technical jargon of space science and was no less momentous for it.\u201cOn the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite,\u201d NASA wrote. \u201cThe signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 \u2014 the ID for IMAGE.\u201cThe NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.\u201dTranslation: There is hope that IMAGE will one day tell us\u00a0more about\u00a0the\u00a0\u201cocean\u201d it's been adrift in for\u00a0more than\u00a012 years.\u201cI really hope the scientists who built this thing and put it in space are able to repurpose this and put it back into action,\u201d Tilley told CBC News.\u00a0\u201cAnd we get the benefit of all the beautiful science coming home.\u201dHe was\u00a0named nowhere in NASA's news release, except as an anonymous \u201camateur astronomer.\u201dThat's fine. He knows he found the thing, when the professionals might have left it in the dark\u00a0forever.More reading:NASA wanted to talk about science. A congressman wanted to ask about Martian civilizations.Please stop annoying this NASA scientist with your ridiculous Planet X doomsday theoriesThis man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat A 47-year-old electrical engineer and radio astronomer hunting for a spy satellite came across the supposedly dead and lost spacecraft.  NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth: Our Greatest Interplanetary Circus Act (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3273",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-sample-return-mission.html",
        "text": "NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. Send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, grab some rocks and dirt and bring those back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth: Our Greatest Interplanetary Circus Act (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3274",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-sample-return-mission.html",
        "text": "NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. Send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, grab some rocks and dirt and bring those back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth: Our Greatest Interplanetary Circus Act (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3275",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-sample-return-mission.html",
        "text": "NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. Send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, grab some rocks and dirt and bring those back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bringing Mars Rocks to Earth: Our Greatest Interplanetary Circus Act (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3276",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-sample-return-mission.html",
        "text": "NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. NASA and the European Space Agency plan to toss rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031. Send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, grab some rocks and dirt and bring those back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "7 billion-year-old stardust is the oldest stuff on Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3277",
        "date": "2020-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/01/13/seven-billion-year-old-stardust-is-oldest-stuff-earth/",
        "text": "Microscopic grains of dead stars are the oldest known material on the planet \u2014 older than the moon, Earth and the solar system itself. By examining chemical clues in a meteorite\u2019s mineral dust, researchers have determined the most ancient grains are 7 billion years old \u2014 about half as old as the universe. Rocks don\u2019t get much more classic than this. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe researchers studied minerals in the Murchison meteorite, a large space rock that disintegrated in 1969 above cow pastures in Murchison, Australia. Dairy farmers collected the fragments and sold kilograms of the meteorite to museums and universities.This paper shows that scientific collections \u201cinclude materials that have existed, in essentially their current form, for the better part of the life of the universe,\u201d said Gregory Herzog, an expert in extraterrestrial chemistry at Rutgers University who was not a part of the research team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve used this really old sample, the oldest solid samples available to science, to try to learn something about the history of our galaxy,\u201d said Philipp Heck, a meteorite expert at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Heck and an international team of cosmochemists published the new study Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Heck met an Australian professor who, as a student, dug through cow manure to hunt for meteorite fragments. \u201cPre-solar grains don\u2019t care about\u201d dung, Heck said. \u201cThey\u2019re tough.\u201d Years later, scientists have taken advantage of that toughness. They mashed part of the Murchison meteorite into powder and bathed the powder in acid. The chemical attack destroyed everything but the stardust grains, which are made of an exceptionally hard mineral called silicon carbide.Silicon carbide is so strong manufacturers use a synthetic version in bulletproof armor. Though natural silicon carbide is rare on Earth, stars make the mineral during their dying gasps.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the end of their lives, stars swell and release hot gas. When that cools, silicon carbide and other solid materials condense out of the gas. Tarry organic goo, newly formed alongside the grains, clumped the matter together into a form Heck likened to granola clusters. As clusters, they may have been able to better weather the supernova shock waves when the stars explode. Eventually, those clumps entered our solar neighborhood and became part of the rock that crashed into Australia.While the space granola floated through the cosmos, it was bombarded with cosmic rays. Every so often, a direct hit from a cosmic ray shattered an atom within the silicon carbide, turning silicon into other elements like neon and helium.\u201cThese hits are pretty constant over time, so we can just count the products from those hits and determine how long they were flying in space,\u201d Heck said. The study authors measured the amount of neon in the grains using an instrument called a mass spectrometer at ETH Zurich, a technology university in Switzerland. That spectrometer is the only one on the planet sensitive enough to detect the trace amounts of neon gas trapped in the stardust, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is hard, hard work,\u201d said Neyda Abreu, a planetary scientist at Pennsylvania State University at DuBois. Abreu, who was not involved with this study, added: \u201cYou\u2019re counting a signature that\u2019s incredibly tiny, of a gas.\u201dOf the 40 grains the researchers examined, the most ancient, at 7 billion years old, are 2.5 billion years older than Earth. The majority were 4.6 billion to 4.9 billion years old \u2014 not as extreme but still hundreds of millions of years older than the solar system.The unusual concentration of grains of about the same age suggests a \u201cbaby boom\u201d of stars, Heck said. Some astronomical studies of starlight suggest a surge in star formation in the galaxy about 7 billion or so years ago. As these boomer stars reached the end of their 2-billion-year lifetimes, the stardust they sloughed off could be responsible for the spike that Heck detected.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStudying matter like these grains can complement observations of stellar radiation as a way to \u201cunderstand large-scale processes\u201d in our galaxy, Abreu said. She anticipates more revelations in the future, she said, from missions like OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft scheduled to deliver pieces of the asteroid Bennu to Utah in 2023.For now, meteorites are \u201cthe only way that we have access to these materials,\u201d Abreu said. A fallen grain, as part of our galactic history, is the closest thing to a sample return from a star.Read more:Remnants of a supernova were found in Antarctic snow. The space dust could be 20 million years old.Scientists are practicing for a killer asteroid impactDear Science: Could my body include an atom from Shakespeare? Some minerals in the Murchison meteorite are 2.5 billion years older than Earth itself. 7 billion-year-old stardust is the oldest stuff on Earth",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Mars lost its atmosphere, and why Earth didn\u2019t (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3278",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/30/how-mars-lost-its-atmosphere-and-why-earth-didnt/",
        "text": "Mars was once wetter and warmer, and very possibly a congenial environment for life as we know it. Today it looks mighty dead, with all due respect. If there's life, it's cryptic.Mars just ain't the planet it used to be. It's a desert world, with a pitifully thin atmosphere less than 1 percent the density of Earth's. That leaves the surface exposed to radiation and prone to huge temperature swings from day to night. If Mars was ever blue or green, it is surely red now. What happened? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn 2013, NASA launched a robotic probe called MAVEN \u2014 for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution \u2014 to help crack the\u00a0 mystery. The spacecraft, a seven-foot cube flanked by solar panels that together span 37 feet, arrived in Mars orbit the next year. It since has made more than 4,000 elliptical orbits, sniffing the Martian upper atmosphere and dipping to within 100 miles of the surface in its path around the planet.Thursday, in a paper in the journal Science, the MAVEN team published its first major finding: Much and possibly most of the Martian atmosphere has been lost to space, violently scraped from the planet by the solar wind.The solar wind is a steady stream of particles, mostly protons and electrons, emitted by the sun. It continues far beyond Pluto before finally tuckering out. Earth is also in its path but has a protective magnetic field, something Mars conspicuously lacks. The solar wind is deflected by Earth's magnetic field while pummeling Mars head on.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLead author\u00a0Bruce Jakosky, a University of Colorado planetary scientist who is the principal investigator for the $600 million MAVEN mission, told The Washington Post that the spacecraft used a mass spectrometer to sample two isotopes of the element argon in the upper Martian atmosphere. Argon is special (a \u201cnoble\u201d gas) because it is nonreactive chemically. Unlike, say, carbon dioxide, it would not have reacted with the surface of the young Mars and been depleted from the atmosphere that way. Once in the atmosphere, it should stay there \u2014 unless something comes along and knocks it into space by brute force. The lighter variant of argon is more likely to be blown into space, and by studying the ratio of lighter and heavier argon, the MAVEN team could calculate the likely effects of the solar wind.That wind, streaming through space at several hundred miles per second, creates its own magnetic field, inciting atmospheric particles to accelerate to high speed and then start careening around, slamming into things. That process, known as sputtering, blew most of the argon and other atmospheric gases into space, the MAVEN team concluded.\u201cIt's like a break shot in pool when you send a cue ball in at high speed and everything goes every which way,\u201d Jakosky said. This process \u201cmay have played the major role in changing the climate. That is, the bulk of the atmosphere has been lost to space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd it's something still happening today, \u201cpotentially in quantities sufficient to change the planet's climate,\u201d the scientists write in the new paper.Why doesn't Mars have a magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind and all that sputtering? The problem is right in the core of the planet. Mars had a magnetic field when it was young and its iron core was molten and convecting \u2014 which is what Earth's iron core does to this day. But Mars is smaller than Earth, and sometime about 4.2 billion years ago that molten Martian core froze up, Jakosky said.In this scenario, turning off the magnetic field meant turning on the effects of the solar wind, and Mars began losing its atmosphere.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOn Earth, the magnetic dynamo can help divert some of these particles that cause sputtering all around,\u201d said Paul Mahaffy, a planetary scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and a co-author of the new paper.The bottom line is that, although planets are common in the universe, they need a lot of things to go right if they want to be brimming with life for billions of years. So far, the number of planets known to have all the right features is stuck at one.Read more: \u201cThey weren\u2019t actually Martians. They were merely Canadians.\u201dCan Mars, or any other planet, have just a little bit of life? The MAVEN spacecraft finds that solar wind blew away the atmosphere of Mars. How Mars lost its atmosphere, and why Earth didn\u2019t",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3279",
        "date": "2021-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/10/02/bebicolombo-mercury-space-image/",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Europe\u2019s space mission to the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our solar system, Mercury, sent back its first images of the planet after a flyby.The BepiColombo joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency comprises a spacecraft containing two orbiters. It was launched in 2018 and will take seven years to arrive at its destination in late 2025. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe black-and-white images were taken Friday and published Saturday after the spacecraft flew past the innermost planet of the solar system to undertake a gravity assist maneuver \u2014 essentially using gravitational pull to slow the spacecraft.Story continues below advertisementThe images, taken by the spacecraft\u2019s monitoring cameras about 1,500 miles from Mercury, show part of the planet\u2019s northern hemisphere, which has been flooded by lava, and a smoother and brighter area characterizing the plains around a large crater, the ESA said. The pictures also show some of the spacecraft\u2019s structural elements, including its antennas and magnetometer boom. A magnetometer is an observational instrument.A flawless, radiant, #MercuryflybyAfter a flawless flyby of Mercury, @BepiColombo is starting to feel the heat. pic.twitter.com/4di2Jux5nB\u2014 ESA Operations (@esaoperations) October 2, 2021\n\nMercury\u2019s surface is dark almost everywhere and was formed billions of years ago by vast outpourings of lava, which produced a scarred and cratered surface that at first glance can resemble the Earth\u2019s moon, the ESA said.AdvertisementBepiColombo will study these features once in orbit around the planet, along with Mercury\u2019s magnetic field, composition, geophysics, atmosphere and history. It also will try to perform a test of Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity while enduring temperatures higher than 660 F (349 \u00b0C).Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe flyby was flawless from the spacecraft point of view, and it\u2019s incredible to finally see our target planet,\u201d said Elsa Montagnon, spacecraft operations manager for the mission, in a statement.Companies in the CosmosThis mission was the first of six planned \u201cgravitational flybys\u201d of Mercury, each passing honing the spacecrafts\u2019 trajectory before the craft can be caught by Mercury\u2019s gravity and enter its orbit. To do so, BepiColombo must approach the planet on a precise path, which scientists have spent years meticulously calculating.AdvertisementThe mission is named after the Italian scientist Giuseppe \u2018Bepi\u2019 Colombo, who is credited with helping to develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA\u2019s Mariner 10, the first spacecraft sent to study Mercury, undertook when it flew by the planet in 1974.Keen night-sky watchers can follow the mission\u2019s travels with its next Mercury flyby due on June 23, the ESA said. In the meantime, they can expect more rare images to be released in the coming days. The BepiColombo joint mission sent back its first images of the planet after a gravitational flyby. European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3280",
        "date": "2021-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/10/02/bebicolombo-mercury-space-image/",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Europe\u2019s space mission to the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our solar system, Mercury, sent back its first images of the planet after a flyby.The BepiColombo joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency comprises a spacecraft containing two orbiters. It was launched in 2018 and will take seven years to arrive at its destination in late 2025. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe black-and-white images were taken Friday and published Saturday after the spacecraft flew past the innermost planet of the solar system to undertake a gravity assist maneuver \u2014 essentially using gravitational pull to slow the spacecraft.Story continues below advertisementThe images, taken by the spacecraft\u2019s monitoring cameras about 1,500 miles from Mercury, show part of the planet\u2019s northern hemisphere, which has been flooded by lava, and a smoother and brighter area characterizing the plains around a large crater, the ESA said. The pictures also show some of the spacecraft\u2019s structural elements, including its antennas and magnetometer boom. A magnetometer is an observational instrument.A flawless, radiant, #MercuryflybyAfter a flawless flyby of Mercury, @BepiColombo is starting to feel the heat. pic.twitter.com/4di2Jux5nB\u2014 ESA Operations (@esaoperations) October 2, 2021\n\nMercury\u2019s surface is dark almost everywhere and was formed billions of years ago by vast outpourings of lava, which produced a scarred and cratered surface that at first glance can resemble the Earth\u2019s moon, the ESA said.AdvertisementBepiColombo will study these features once in orbit around the planet, along with Mercury\u2019s magnetic field, composition, geophysics, atmosphere and history. It also will try to perform a test of Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity while enduring temperatures higher than 660 F (349 \u00b0C).Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe flyby was flawless from the spacecraft point of view, and it\u2019s incredible to finally see our target planet,\u201d said Elsa Montagnon, spacecraft operations manager for the mission, in a statement.Companies in the CosmosThis mission was the first of six planned \u201cgravitational flybys\u201d of Mercury, each passing honing the spacecrafts\u2019 trajectory before the craft can be caught by Mercury\u2019s gravity and enter its orbit. To do so, BepiColombo must approach the planet on a precise path, which scientists have spent years meticulously calculating.AdvertisementThe mission is named after the Italian scientist Giuseppe \u2018Bepi\u2019 Colombo, who is credited with helping to develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA\u2019s Mariner 10, the first spacecraft sent to study Mercury, undertook when it flew by the planet in 1974.Keen night-sky watchers can follow the mission\u2019s travels with its next Mercury flyby due on June 23, the ESA said. In the meantime, they can expect more rare images to be released in the coming days. The BepiColombo joint mission sent back its first images of the planet after a gravitational flyby. European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3281",
        "date": "2021-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/10/02/bebicolombo-mercury-space-image/",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Europe\u2019s space mission to the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our solar system, Mercury, sent back its first images of the planet after a flyby.The BepiColombo joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency comprises a spacecraft containing two orbiters. It was launched in 2018 and will take seven years to arrive at its destination in late 2025. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe black-and-white images were taken Friday and published Saturday after the spacecraft flew past the innermost planet of the solar system to undertake a gravity assist maneuver \u2014 essentially using gravitational pull to slow the spacecraft.Story continues below advertisementThe images, taken by the spacecraft\u2019s monitoring cameras about 1,500 miles from Mercury, show part of the planet\u2019s northern hemisphere, which has been flooded by lava, and a smoother and brighter area characterizing the plains around a large crater, the ESA said. The pictures also show some of the spacecraft\u2019s structural elements, including its antennas and magnetometer boom. A magnetometer is an observational instrument.A flawless, radiant, #MercuryflybyAfter a flawless flyby of Mercury, @BepiColombo is starting to feel the heat. pic.twitter.com/4di2Jux5nB\u2014 ESA Operations (@esaoperations) October 2, 2021\n\nMercury\u2019s surface is dark almost everywhere and was formed billions of years ago by vast outpourings of lava, which produced a scarred and cratered surface that at first glance can resemble the Earth\u2019s moon, the ESA said.AdvertisementBepiColombo will study these features once in orbit around the planet, along with Mercury\u2019s magnetic field, composition, geophysics, atmosphere and history. It also will try to perform a test of Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity while enduring temperatures higher than 660 F (349 \u00b0C).Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe flyby was flawless from the spacecraft point of view, and it\u2019s incredible to finally see our target planet,\u201d said Elsa Montagnon, spacecraft operations manager for the mission, in a statement.Companies in the CosmosThis mission was the first of six planned \u201cgravitational flybys\u201d of Mercury, each passing honing the spacecrafts\u2019 trajectory before the craft can be caught by Mercury\u2019s gravity and enter its orbit. To do so, BepiColombo must approach the planet on a precise path, which scientists have spent years meticulously calculating.AdvertisementThe mission is named after the Italian scientist Giuseppe \u2018Bepi\u2019 Colombo, who is credited with helping to develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA\u2019s Mariner 10, the first spacecraft sent to study Mercury, undertook when it flew by the planet in 1974.Keen night-sky watchers can follow the mission\u2019s travels with its next Mercury flyby due on June 23, the ESA said. In the meantime, they can expect more rare images to be released in the coming days. The BepiColombo joint mission sent back its first images of the planet after a gravitational flyby. European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3282",
        "date": "2021-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/10/02/bebicolombo-mercury-space-image/",
        "text": "LONDON \u2014 Europe\u2019s space mission to the smallest and least explored terrestrial planet in our solar system, Mercury, sent back its first images of the planet after a flyby.The BepiColombo joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency comprises a spacecraft containing two orbiters. It was launched in 2018 and will take seven years to arrive at its destination in late 2025. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe black-and-white images were taken Friday and published Saturday after the spacecraft flew past the innermost planet of the solar system to undertake a gravity assist maneuver \u2014 essentially using gravitational pull to slow the spacecraft.Story continues below advertisementThe images, taken by the spacecraft\u2019s monitoring cameras about 1,500 miles from Mercury, show part of the planet\u2019s northern hemisphere, which has been flooded by lava, and a smoother and brighter area characterizing the plains around a large crater, the ESA said. The pictures also show some of the spacecraft\u2019s structural elements, including its antennas and magnetometer boom. A magnetometer is an observational instrument.A flawless, radiant, #MercuryflybyAfter a flawless flyby of Mercury, @BepiColombo is starting to feel the heat. pic.twitter.com/4di2Jux5nB\u2014 ESA Operations (@esaoperations) October 2, 2021\n\nMercury\u2019s surface is dark almost everywhere and was formed billions of years ago by vast outpourings of lava, which produced a scarred and cratered surface that at first glance can resemble the Earth\u2019s moon, the ESA said.AdvertisementBepiColombo will study these features once in orbit around the planet, along with Mercury\u2019s magnetic field, composition, geophysics, atmosphere and history. It also will try to perform a test of Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity while enduring temperatures higher than 660 F (349 \u00b0C).Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe flyby was flawless from the spacecraft point of view, and it\u2019s incredible to finally see our target planet,\u201d said Elsa Montagnon, spacecraft operations manager for the mission, in a statement.Companies in the CosmosThis mission was the first of six planned \u201cgravitational flybys\u201d of Mercury, each passing honing the spacecrafts\u2019 trajectory before the craft can be caught by Mercury\u2019s gravity and enter its orbit. To do so, BepiColombo must approach the planet on a precise path, which scientists have spent years meticulously calculating.AdvertisementThe mission is named after the Italian scientist Giuseppe \u2018Bepi\u2019 Colombo, who is credited with helping to develop the gravity assist maneuver that NASA\u2019s Mariner 10, the first spacecraft sent to study Mercury, undertook when it flew by the planet in 1974.Keen night-sky watchers can follow the mission\u2019s travels with its next Mercury flyby due on June 23, the ESA said. In the meantime, they can expect more rare images to be released in the coming days. The BepiColombo joint mission sent back its first images of the planet after a gravitational flyby. European spacecraft reveals rare images of Mercury\u2019s craters after a \u2018flawless\u2019 flyby",
        "author": "Adela Suliman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alien life could thrive in a place like Saturn\u2019s icy moon Enceladus, experiment shows (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3283",
        "date": "2018-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/27/alien-life-could-thrive-in-a-place-like-saturns-icy-moon-enceladus-experiment-shows/",
        "text": "Life as we know it needs three things: energy, water and chemistry. Saturn's icy moon Enceladus has them all, as NASA spacecraft Cassini confirmed in the final years of its mission to that planet.While Cassini\u00a0explored the Saturnian neighborhood, its sensors detected\u00a0gas geysers that spewed from Enceladus's southern poles. Within those plumes\u00a0exists a chemical buffet\u00a0of carbon dioxide, ammonia and organic compounds such as methane. Crucially, the jets also contained\u00a0molecular hydrogen \u2014 two hydrogen atoms bound as one unit. This is a coin of the microbial realm\u00a0that Earth organisms can harness for energy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBeneath Enceladus's ice shell is a\u00a0liquid ocean.\u00a0Astronauts looking for a cosmic vacation destination would be disappointed. The moon is oxygen-poor. There is darkness down below, too, because the moon's ice\u00a0sheets reflect 90 percent of the incoming sunlight. Despite frigid temperatures at the surface, the water is thought to reach up to 194 degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs harsh as the moon\u2019s conditions are, a recent experiment suggests that Enceladus could support organisms like those that thrive on Earth. Tiny colonies of microbes that dwell near our planet\u2019s hydrothermal vents can tolerate a simulated Enceladus habitat, according to a new report by a team of researchers in Austria and Germany.\u201cWe tried to reproduce the putative Enceladus-like conditions in the lab,\u201d said\u00a0Simon Rittmann, who studies microbes called archaea at the\u00a0University of Vienna in Austria. Archaea\u00a0are microscopic, single-celled organisms.\u00a0Under magnification, they resemble bacteria. Yet archaea have their own domain of life\u00a0\u2014 they are as closely related to\u00a0humans as they are to bacteria.\u00a0Near hydrothermal vents, beyond the reach of\u00a0sunlight, their lives are fueled by\u00a0chemical nutrients.Rittmann and his colleagues constructed several growth chambers to simulate the\u00a0Enceladus environment. All of their recipes included molecular hydrogen. Astrobiologists hypothesize that a\u00a0process called\u00a0serpentinization creates these hydrogen molecules,\u00a0a result of the chemical reaction between the\u00a0moon's rocky core and its\u00a0hot ocean water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe scientists,\u00a0to reflect the uncertainty of the Enceladus environment, varied the\u00a0amount\u00a0of molecular hydrogen available to the organisms. They also altered the pH, pressure and gas concentrations\u00a0in the test habitats. \u201cWe tried to be as broad as possible with our assumptions,\u201d\u00a0Rittmann\u00a0said. There are no direct measurements for what exists beneath Enceladus's ice crust. \u201cNo one will be able to tell if these conditions are really occurring on Enceladus,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, we did our best to be as careful as possible.\u201dOne species tested, an archaeon called\u00a0Methanothermococcus okinawensi, fared the best on faux Enceladus. Scientists discovered this\u00a0organism\u00a0at\u00a0a hydrothermal vent system near Okinawa, Japan, 3,000 feet below sea level.\u00a0M.\u00a0okinawensi\u00a0uses carbon dioxide as a carbon source and molecular hydrogen for energy, as a suspected Enceladus microbe might.NASA's Cassini spacecraft will take the deepest dive ever through the plume of Saturn's moon Enceladus. (YouTube/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)Not only did M.\u00a0okinawensi survive most conditions, including the highest pressure tested, but also the archaeon produced methane as it grew. An organism with a similar lifestyle might explain methane's presence on Enceladus,\u00a0the scientists concluded in\u00a0their study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are, however, some important caveats. Cassini detected formaldehyde on Enceladus, which can disrupt the life\u00a0cycle of even the hardiest archaea.\u00a0M.\u00a0okinawensi\u00a0could resist certain concentrations of formaldehyde but only to a point. It failed to grow at the highest formaldehyde concentrations detected\u00a0by the Cassini probe.The study also assumes that hydrothermal\u00a0systems exist on Enceladus. As Rittmann emphasized, this remains an assumption. \u201cNo evidence exists for these systems,\u201d he said. What's more, biology is not required to explain the presence of methane on\u00a0Enceladus. Nonbiological processes also can create the gas.A much-needed step,\u00a0Rittmann said, will be to identify the\u00a0biomarkers that serve as telltale signs of life in the solar system's deep and dark seas.Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters)Read more:Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus is covered in a potentially habitable oceanNASA's Cassini spacecraft crashes into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming successNASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn\u2019s icy moon Enceladus A hardy microbe called an archaeon tolerated the harsh conditions of a simulated Enceladus habitat. Alien life could thrive in a place like Saturn\u2019s icy moon Enceladus, experiment shows",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Interstellar Probe, a mission concept for NASA, aims to travel 93 billion miles past the sun (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3284",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/interstellar-probe-a-mission-concept-for-nasa-aims-to-travel-93-billion-miles-past-the-sun/2019/07/11/e9b92f5c-92a8-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html",
        "text": "LAUREL, Md. \u2014 One of the top prizes in the March 1970 Fort Worth Regional Science Fair \u2014 a slide rule and a free dinner in Dallas \u2014 went to a high school junior named Ralph McNutt, who had written 30 pages on the question \u201cInterstellar travel: Is it feasible?\u201d and built a cardboard scale model of the spacecraft he said could be the first to visit another sun. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHumans had landed on the moon the previous summer, the 16-year-old noted in the treatise his mother transcribed for him on her Royal No. 10 typewriter. Soon, he was sure, we would venture to all the other planets of the solar system. Then it would be time for the next step: \u201cGoing to the stars.\u201dOn a sweaty summer afternoon, McNutt sits in his office at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a 65-year-old with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch and thinning hair. On his computer screen is the latest draft of his boyhood dream: a plan for a probe that would travel 1,000 times farther than Earth is from the sun, leaving behind the safety of our solar system to explore the wilds of interstellar space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom that far-flung vantage point, Interstellar Probe\n will help humans finally see ourselves for what we truly are, McNutt says: citizens of a galaxy. Our home planet will be just one world among many, and the sun that gives us life just another pinprick of light in the endless dark.It\u2019s an audacious proposal, even by space travel standards. The probe would take 50 years to reach its destination, by which time nearly everyone currently involved in the project will be dead.Apollo 11: Follow the anniversary coverageNevertheless, McNutt and a cadre of fellow dreamers hope to get an important endorsement in a few years, when the nation\u2019s space scientists release a list of their top research priorities. To get Interstellar Probe on the agenda, its supporters must convince their colleagues that its goal is scientifically valuable, not to mention politically viable, when there are so many questions inside the solar system still unanswered and so many Earthly squabbles still unsolved.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat makes McNutt believe it\u2019s possible?The scientist leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. When he answers, it\u2019s in the form of poetry.\u201cI think man\u2019s reach should exceed his grasp,\u201d he says, paraphrasing Robert Browning. \u201cOtherwise, what is a heaven for?\u201d93 billion miles from the sunOur sun sits on a minor arm of the spinning, star-strewn pinwheel of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core. Zooming through the cosmos at roughly half a million miles per hour, the solar system is buffeted by gusts of gas and dust and bombarded by energetic particles whose origins are a mystery.But we on Earth are partly shielded from this chaos by the heliosphere, a balloon-like structure inflated by the solar wind. Charged particles flowing from the sun stream out to the edge of the solar system \u2014 past the planets, beyond Pluto, through the frozen halo of the Kuiper belt, to a place called the heliopause.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is the liminal zone between the river of solar particles and the ocean of interstellar space; the boundary between our celestial neighborhood and the wider universe.Only two spacecraft have reached that zone and lived to tell the tale: the twin Voyager probes, which launched in 1977 and took more than 35 years to reach the heliopause. (The Pioneer probes left the solar system but were defunct by that time.) Now their radio communications are increasingly feeble, and several instruments have failed.Voyager 1, the most distant human-built object in the universe, is now 145 astronomical units from Earth (an astronomical unit is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun). At that pace, it would take 283 years to reach 1,000 AU \u2014 93 billion miles from the sun \u2014 the place McNutt hopes to reach.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTo really explore what\u2019s out there .\u2009.\u2009. you want to get out of the solar system as quickly as possible,\u201d he said.And for that, you need a really big rocket.NASA might soon have one. The ultrapowerful (but long-delayed) Space Launch System, which is capable of nearly twice as much thrust as the biggest rocket in operation, is expected to make its first flight sometime in 2020 or 2021.The vehicles that will take you to spaceWith the SLS, Interstellar Probe could leave Earth at a speed of about 9 miles per second. After looping around Jupiter, the probe would fall back toward the sun, picking up speed from our star\u2019s gravitational pull. It would pass the orbits of the inner planets and soar through the solar corona until finally, just above the sun\u2019s blazing surface, it would fire a second rocket and zoom off into the dark as fast as 60 miles per second. At that blistering \u2014 and admittedly aspirational \u2014 pace, it would need little more than a decade to reach the heliopause.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe travel time would not be wasted. Kathy Mandt, a planetary scientist, has been exploring the potential for Interstellar Probe to fly past Uranus, Neptune or an icy body in the Kuiper belt called Quaoar.Abigail Rymer, a physicist, is dreaming up ways for the mission to assist research on exoplanets. One experiment might involve looking back at the planets with the same techniques scientists on Earth use to study alien worlds.\u201cAgainst the backdrop of the stars,\u201d she says, \u201cwe will see our habitable home .\u2009.\u2009. and we\u2019ll have a better understanding of what habitability means.\u201dCrossing the boundary into interstellar space, the probe could scan for dust and slurp up particles to help researchers understand the structure of the heliosphere and the material from which our solar system formed.Story continues below advertisementAnd once it departed the sun\u2019s protective bubble, it could finally study phenomena the heliosphere obscures: galactic cosmic rays from exploding stars; light from the afterglow of the big bang; disks of debris where planets are forming around other suns.AdvertisementThe right time to try?For now, Interstellar Probe exists only in the form of PowerPoint presentations and a twinkle in McNutt\u2019s eye. His team has received about $700,000 for concept studies, and they are waiting to hear whether NASA will give them an additional $6.5 million over the next three years to pull together a more detailed science plan and mission design.Their do-or-die moment will come in 2023, when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are slated to publish their next decadal survey for solar and space physics. These assessments, conducted every 10 years at the request of Congress and NASA, represent the official consensus on the nation\u2019s space science goals and guide NASA\u2019s budget in subsequent years.Story continues below advertisementIf Interstellar Probe is going to launch in McNutt\u2019s lifetime, it needs to be ranked as a top priority.Advertisement\u201cIt was always something we couldn\u2019t do immediately, but set aside maybe for the future,\u201d says Richard Mewaldt, a Caltech physicist who served as chair for the solar and heliospheric physics panel during the most recent decadal survey, published in 2013. That report ranked \u201cadvance planning\u201d for an interstellar probe eighth among nine imperatives for NASA.Mewaldt notes that NASA\u2019s heliophysics division \u2014 which would oversee an interstellar mission \u2014 gets the least funding of any of the agency\u2019s science divisions. Interstellar Probe might fare better if the planners get an endorsement from the planetary science community, who could benefit from flights past the ice giants or through the Kuiper belt. Yet the scientific world tends to be siloed, he says, making it difficult to get missions funded across multiple NASA divisions.Story continues below advertisementEven if the project goes forward, it\u2019s not clear how a spacecraft could survive the solar flyby. The best heat shield humans have ever made, currently flying on NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe, is designed to keep a spacecraft safe within 3.8 million miles of the sun\u2019s surface. To achieve its desired speed, Interstellar Probe would need to get more than twice as close.Advertisement\u201cThere is a moment for every big mission, almost an \u2018aha\u2019 moment, when the technology is ready and you\u2019ve got a plan and it makes sense and is going to answer the science questions,\u201d says Nicky Fox, director of NASA\u2019s heliophysics division. The heat shield problem, she says, still stands between Interstellar Probe and that moment.But then again, she says, there also comes a moment for every big mission when scientists simply decide that now is the right time to try.Another question looms over the mission, one that goes beyond issues of budgets and bureaucracy to the boundaries of what humans can accomplish.By 2050 \u2014 the year in which the probe would reach the Interstellar Medium \u2014 the United Nations\u2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that the global average temperature will already be more than 2 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times. Unless the world dramatically cuts back its carbon consumption, we face a future in which cities are submerged beneath several feet of sea-level rise or are heated to unlivable extremes. But most large emitters are nowhere near meeting their climate goals.Rarely has the gulf between what the world can do and what it will do seemed so vast.\u2018They just can\u2019t wait for the future to come\u2019But maybe, Mandt says, the apparent audacity of an interstellar mission is exactly what makes it worth trying.\u201cThis would be an example of a large group of people working together on something multigenerational,\u201d she says. \u201cWhich is the same thing we need with climate change.\u201dMembers of the Interstellar Probe team, she noted, range from fellows just out of graduate school to people staving off retirement. They come from at least eight countries. They include planetary scientists, astronomers, engineers and a particle physicist.Last fall, Mandt invited Janet Vertesi of Princeton, who has conducted ethnographic studies of spacecraft teams, to advise the team on organizational issues. It is the first time they know of that a sociologist has been involved in the conception of a NASA mission.Her job is to \u201cremind them of the human side,\u201d Vertesi says: How to resolve conflict. Where to store data. How to conduct outreach so that the demographics of the project team today reflect the more diverse nation that will launch the probe in decades to come.\u201cWe\u2019re testing out this notion that you can actually plan a mission up front to achieve certain social objectives, too,\u201d Vertesi says.In these \u201cuncertain times,\u201d she adds, it\u2019s a heady feeling to take part in something so inherently optimistic. To watch as a computer calculates the precise location of the planets on the date 50 years from now. To see scientists commit the remainders of their careers to an idea whose fruition they may never live to see.\u201cThese people,\u201d she says, \u201cthey just can\u2019t wait for the future to come.\u201dAt his office in Maryland, McNutt turns away from the unfinished plan on his computer screen and tries to visualize the moment when Interstellar Probe reaches the void between the stars.There\u2019s no way of knowing what it will find out there, beyond the veil of the solar wind. But of one thing, he is certain.When the probe turns toward Earth to beam back the data it has gathered, it will have in its sights \u201cone of the most special places in the universe,\u201d McNutt says: the small, watery world where it was first dreamed into being. What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.50 astronauts, in their own words It would take 50 years, an audacious proposal even by space travel standards. Interstellar Probe, a mission concept for NASA, aims to travel 93 billion miles past the sun",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Interstellar Probe, a mission concept for NASA, aims to travel 93 billion miles past the sun (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3285",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/interstellar-probe-a-mission-concept-for-nasa-aims-to-travel-93-billion-miles-past-the-sun/2019/07/11/e9b92f5c-92a8-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html",
        "text": "LAUREL, Md. \u2014 One of the top prizes in the March 1970 Fort Worth Regional Science Fair \u2014 a slide rule and a free dinner in Dallas \u2014 went to a high school junior named Ralph McNutt, who had written 30 pages on the question \u201cInterstellar travel: Is it feasible?\u201d and built a cardboard scale model of the spacecraft he said could be the first to visit another sun. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHumans had landed on the moon the previous summer, the 16-year-old noted in the treatise his mother transcribed for him on her Royal No. 10 typewriter. Soon, he was sure, we would venture to all the other planets of the solar system. Then it would be time for the next step: \u201cGoing to the stars.\u201dOn a sweaty summer afternoon, McNutt sits in his office at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a 65-year-old with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch and thinning hair. On his computer screen is the latest draft of his boyhood dream: a plan for a probe that would travel 1,000 times farther than Earth is from the sun, leaving behind the safety of our solar system to explore the wilds of interstellar space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom that far-flung vantage point, Interstellar Probe\n will help humans finally see ourselves for what we truly are, McNutt says: citizens of a galaxy. Our home planet will be just one world among many, and the sun that gives us life just another pinprick of light in the endless dark.It\u2019s an audacious proposal, even by space travel standards. The probe would take 50 years to reach its destination, by which time nearly everyone currently involved in the project will be dead.Apollo 11: Follow the anniversary coverageNevertheless, McNutt and a cadre of fellow dreamers hope to get an important endorsement in a few years, when the nation\u2019s space scientists release a list of their top research priorities. To get Interstellar Probe on the agenda, its supporters must convince their colleagues that its goal is scientifically valuable, not to mention politically viable, when there are so many questions inside the solar system still unanswered and so many Earthly squabbles still unsolved.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat makes McNutt believe it\u2019s possible?The scientist leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. When he answers, it\u2019s in the form of poetry.\u201cI think man\u2019s reach should exceed his grasp,\u201d he says, paraphrasing Robert Browning. \u201cOtherwise, what is a heaven for?\u201d93 billion miles from the sunOur sun sits on a minor arm of the spinning, star-strewn pinwheel of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core. Zooming through the cosmos at roughly half a million miles per hour, the solar system is buffeted by gusts of gas and dust and bombarded by energetic particles whose origins are a mystery.But we on Earth are partly shielded from this chaos by the heliosphere, a balloon-like structure inflated by the solar wind. Charged particles flowing from the sun stream out to the edge of the solar system \u2014 past the planets, beyond Pluto, through the frozen halo of the Kuiper belt, to a place called the heliopause.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is the liminal zone between the river of solar particles and the ocean of interstellar space; the boundary between our celestial neighborhood and the wider universe.Only two spacecraft have reached that zone and lived to tell the tale: the twin Voyager probes, which launched in 1977 and took more than 35 years to reach the heliopause. (The Pioneer probes left the solar system but were defunct by that time.) Now their radio communications are increasingly feeble, and several instruments have failed.Voyager 1, the most distant human-built object in the universe, is now 145 astronomical units from Earth (an astronomical unit is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun). At that pace, it would take 283 years to reach 1,000 AU \u2014 93 billion miles from the sun \u2014 the place McNutt hopes to reach.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTo really explore what\u2019s out there .\u2009.\u2009. you want to get out of the solar system as quickly as possible,\u201d he said.And for that, you need a really big rocket.NASA might soon have one. The ultrapowerful (but long-delayed) Space Launch System, which is capable of nearly twice as much thrust as the biggest rocket in operation, is expected to make its first flight sometime in 2020 or 2021.The vehicles that will take you to spaceWith the SLS, Interstellar Probe could leave Earth at a speed of about 9 miles per second. After looping around Jupiter, the probe would fall back toward the sun, picking up speed from our star\u2019s gravitational pull. It would pass the orbits of the inner planets and soar through the solar corona until finally, just above the sun\u2019s blazing surface, it would fire a second rocket and zoom off into the dark as fast as 60 miles per second. At that blistering \u2014 and admittedly aspirational \u2014 pace, it would need little more than a decade to reach the heliopause.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe travel time would not be wasted. Kathy Mandt, a planetary scientist, has been exploring the potential for Interstellar Probe to fly past Uranus, Neptune or an icy body in the Kuiper belt called Quaoar.Abigail Rymer, a physicist, is dreaming up ways for the mission to assist research on exoplanets. One experiment might involve looking back at the planets with the same techniques scientists on Earth use to study alien worlds.\u201cAgainst the backdrop of the stars,\u201d she says, \u201cwe will see our habitable home .\u2009.\u2009. and we\u2019ll have a better understanding of what habitability means.\u201dCrossing the boundary into interstellar space, the probe could scan for dust and slurp up particles to help researchers understand the structure of the heliosphere and the material from which our solar system formed.Story continues below advertisementAnd once it departed the sun\u2019s protective bubble, it could finally study phenomena the heliosphere obscures: galactic cosmic rays from exploding stars; light from the afterglow of the big bang; disks of debris where planets are forming around other suns.AdvertisementThe right time to try?For now, Interstellar Probe exists only in the form of PowerPoint presentations and a twinkle in McNutt\u2019s eye. His team has received about $700,000 for concept studies, and they are waiting to hear whether NASA will give them an additional $6.5 million over the next three years to pull together a more detailed science plan and mission design.Their do-or-die moment will come in 2023, when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are slated to publish their next decadal survey for solar and space physics. These assessments, conducted every 10 years at the request of Congress and NASA, represent the official consensus on the nation\u2019s space science goals and guide NASA\u2019s budget in subsequent years.Story continues below advertisementIf Interstellar Probe is going to launch in McNutt\u2019s lifetime, it needs to be ranked as a top priority.Advertisement\u201cIt was always something we couldn\u2019t do immediately, but set aside maybe for the future,\u201d says Richard Mewaldt, a Caltech physicist who served as chair for the solar and heliospheric physics panel during the most recent decadal survey, published in 2013. That report ranked \u201cadvance planning\u201d for an interstellar probe eighth among nine imperatives for NASA.Mewaldt notes that NASA\u2019s heliophysics division \u2014 which would oversee an interstellar mission \u2014 gets the least funding of any of the agency\u2019s science divisions. Interstellar Probe might fare better if the planners get an endorsement from the planetary science community, who could benefit from flights past the ice giants or through the Kuiper belt. Yet the scientific world tends to be siloed, he says, making it difficult to get missions funded across multiple NASA divisions.Story continues below advertisementEven if the project goes forward, it\u2019s not clear how a spacecraft could survive the solar flyby. The best heat shield humans have ever made, currently flying on NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe, is designed to keep a spacecraft safe within 3.8 million miles of the sun\u2019s surface. To achieve its desired speed, Interstellar Probe would need to get more than twice as close.Advertisement\u201cThere is a moment for every big mission, almost an \u2018aha\u2019 moment, when the technology is ready and you\u2019ve got a plan and it makes sense and is going to answer the science questions,\u201d says Nicky Fox, director of NASA\u2019s heliophysics division. The heat shield problem, she says, still stands between Interstellar Probe and that moment.But then again, she says, there also comes a moment for every big mission when scientists simply decide that now is the right time to try.Another question looms over the mission, one that goes beyond issues of budgets and bureaucracy to the boundaries of what humans can accomplish.By 2050 \u2014 the year in which the probe would reach the Interstellar Medium \u2014 the United Nations\u2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that the global average temperature will already be more than 2 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times. Unless the world dramatically cuts back its carbon consumption, we face a future in which cities are submerged beneath several feet of sea-level rise or are heated to unlivable extremes. But most large emitters are nowhere near meeting their climate goals.Rarely has the gulf between what the world can do and what it will do seemed so vast.\u2018They just can\u2019t wait for the future to come\u2019But maybe, Mandt says, the apparent audacity of an interstellar mission is exactly what makes it worth trying.\u201cThis would be an example of a large group of people working together on something multigenerational,\u201d she says. \u201cWhich is the same thing we need with climate change.\u201dMembers of the Interstellar Probe team, she noted, range from fellows just out of graduate school to people staving off retirement. They come from at least eight countries. They include planetary scientists, astronomers, engineers and a particle physicist.Last fall, Mandt invited Janet Vertesi of Princeton, who has conducted ethnographic studies of spacecraft teams, to advise the team on organizational issues. It is the first time they know of that a sociologist has been involved in the conception of a NASA mission.Her job is to \u201cremind them of the human side,\u201d Vertesi says: How to resolve conflict. Where to store data. How to conduct outreach so that the demographics of the project team today reflect the more diverse nation that will launch the probe in decades to come.\u201cWe\u2019re testing out this notion that you can actually plan a mission up front to achieve certain social objectives, too,\u201d Vertesi says.In these \u201cuncertain times,\u201d she adds, it\u2019s a heady feeling to take part in something so inherently optimistic. To watch as a computer calculates the precise location of the planets on the date 50 years from now. To see scientists commit the remainders of their careers to an idea whose fruition they may never live to see.\u201cThese people,\u201d she says, \u201cthey just can\u2019t wait for the future to come.\u201dAt his office in Maryland, McNutt turns away from the unfinished plan on his computer screen and tries to visualize the moment when Interstellar Probe reaches the void between the stars.There\u2019s no way of knowing what it will find out there, beyond the veil of the solar wind. But of one thing, he is certain.When the probe turns toward Earth to beam back the data it has gathered, it will have in its sights \u201cone of the most special places in the universe,\u201d McNutt says: the small, watery world where it was first dreamed into being. What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.50 astronauts, in their own words It would take 50 years, an audacious proposal even by space travel standards. Interstellar Probe, a mission concept for NASA, aims to travel 93 billion miles past the sun",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Interstellar Probe, a mission concept for NASA, aims to travel 93 billion miles past the sun (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3286",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/interstellar-probe-a-mission-concept-for-nasa-aims-to-travel-93-billion-miles-past-the-sun/2019/07/11/e9b92f5c-92a8-11e9-aadb-74e6b2b46f6a_story.html",
        "text": "LAUREL, Md. \u2014 One of the top prizes in the March 1970 Fort Worth Regional Science Fair \u2014 a slide rule and a free dinner in Dallas \u2014 went to a high school junior named Ralph McNutt, who had written 30 pages on the question \u201cInterstellar travel: Is it feasible?\u201d and built a cardboard scale model of the spacecraft he said could be the first to visit another sun. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHumans had landed on the moon the previous summer, the 16-year-old noted in the treatise his mother transcribed for him on her Royal No. 10 typewriter. Soon, he was sure, we would venture to all the other planets of the solar system. Then it would be time for the next step: \u201cGoing to the stars.\u201dOn a sweaty summer afternoon, McNutt sits in his office at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a 65-year-old with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch and thinning hair. On his computer screen is the latest draft of his boyhood dream: a plan for a probe that would travel 1,000 times farther than Earth is from the sun, leaving behind the safety of our solar system to explore the wilds of interstellar space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom that far-flung vantage point, Interstellar Probe\n will help humans finally see ourselves for what we truly are, McNutt says: citizens of a galaxy. Our home planet will be just one world among many, and the sun that gives us life just another pinprick of light in the endless dark.It\u2019s an audacious proposal, even by space travel standards. The probe would take 50 years to reach its destination, by which time nearly everyone currently involved in the project will be dead.Apollo 11: Follow the anniversary coverageNevertheless, McNutt and a cadre of fellow dreamers hope to get an important endorsement in a few years, when the nation\u2019s space scientists release a list of their top research priorities. To get Interstellar Probe on the agenda, its supporters must convince their colleagues that its goal is scientifically valuable, not to mention politically viable, when there are so many questions inside the solar system still unanswered and so many Earthly squabbles still unsolved.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat makes McNutt believe it\u2019s possible?The scientist leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. When he answers, it\u2019s in the form of poetry.\u201cI think man\u2019s reach should exceed his grasp,\u201d he says, paraphrasing Robert Browning. \u201cOtherwise, what is a heaven for?\u201d93 billion miles from the sunOur sun sits on a minor arm of the spinning, star-strewn pinwheel of the Milky Way, about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core. Zooming through the cosmos at roughly half a million miles per hour, the solar system is buffeted by gusts of gas and dust and bombarded by energetic particles whose origins are a mystery.But we on Earth are partly shielded from this chaos by the heliosphere, a balloon-like structure inflated by the solar wind. Charged particles flowing from the sun stream out to the edge of the solar system \u2014 past the planets, beyond Pluto, through the frozen halo of the Kuiper belt, to a place called the heliopause.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is the liminal zone between the river of solar particles and the ocean of interstellar space; the boundary between our celestial neighborhood and the wider universe.Only two spacecraft have reached that zone and lived to tell the tale: the twin Voyager probes, which launched in 1977 and took more than 35 years to reach the heliopause. (The Pioneer probes left the solar system but were defunct by that time.) Now their radio communications are increasingly feeble, and several instruments have failed.Voyager 1, the most distant human-built object in the universe, is now 145 astronomical units from Earth (an astronomical unit is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun). At that pace, it would take 283 years to reach 1,000 AU \u2014 93 billion miles from the sun \u2014 the place McNutt hopes to reach.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTo really explore what\u2019s out there .\u2009.\u2009. you want to get out of the solar system as quickly as possible,\u201d he said.And for that, you need a really big rocket.NASA might soon have one. The ultrapowerful (but long-delayed) Space Launch System, which is capable of nearly twice as much thrust as the biggest rocket in operation, is expected to make its first flight sometime in 2020 or 2021.The vehicles that will take you to spaceWith the SLS, Interstellar Probe could leave Earth at a speed of about 9 miles per second. After looping around Jupiter, the probe would fall back toward the sun, picking up speed from our star\u2019s gravitational pull. It would pass the orbits of the inner planets and soar through the solar corona until finally, just above the sun\u2019s blazing surface, it would fire a second rocket and zoom off into the dark as fast as 60 miles per second. At that blistering \u2014 and admittedly aspirational \u2014 pace, it would need little more than a decade to reach the heliopause.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe travel time would not be wasted. Kathy Mandt, a planetary scientist, has been exploring the potential for Interstellar Probe to fly past Uranus, Neptune or an icy body in the Kuiper belt called Quaoar.Abigail Rymer, a physicist, is dreaming up ways for the mission to assist research on exoplanets. One experiment might involve looking back at the planets with the same techniques scientists on Earth use to study alien worlds.\u201cAgainst the backdrop of the stars,\u201d she says, \u201cwe will see our habitable home .\u2009.\u2009. and we\u2019ll have a better understanding of what habitability means.\u201dCrossing the boundary into interstellar space, the probe could scan for dust and slurp up particles to help researchers understand the structure of the heliosphere and the material from which our solar system formed.Story continues below advertisementAnd once it departed the sun\u2019s protective bubble, it could finally study phenomena the heliosphere obscures: galactic cosmic rays from exploding stars; light from the afterglow of the big bang; disks of debris where planets are forming around other suns.AdvertisementThe right time to try?For now, Interstellar Probe exists only in the form of PowerPoint presentations and a twinkle in McNutt\u2019s eye. His team has received about $700,000 for concept studies, and they are waiting to hear whether NASA will give them an additional $6.5 million over the next three years to pull together a more detailed science plan and mission design.Their do-or-die moment will come in 2023, when the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are slated to publish their next decadal survey for solar and space physics. These assessments, conducted every 10 years at the request of Congress and NASA, represent the official consensus on the nation\u2019s space science goals and guide NASA\u2019s budget in subsequent years.Story continues below advertisementIf Interstellar Probe is going to launch in McNutt\u2019s lifetime, it needs to be ranked as a top priority.Advertisement\u201cIt was always something we couldn\u2019t do immediately, but set aside maybe for the future,\u201d says Richard Mewaldt, a Caltech physicist who served as chair for the solar and heliospheric physics panel during the most recent decadal survey, published in 2013. That report ranked \u201cadvance planning\u201d for an interstellar probe eighth among nine imperatives for NASA.Mewaldt notes that NASA\u2019s heliophysics division \u2014 which would oversee an interstellar mission \u2014 gets the least funding of any of the agency\u2019s science divisions. Interstellar Probe might fare better if the planners get an endorsement from the planetary science community, who could benefit from flights past the ice giants or through the Kuiper belt. Yet the scientific world tends to be siloed, he says, making it difficult to get missions funded across multiple NASA divisions.Story continues below advertisementEven if the project goes forward, it\u2019s not clear how a spacecraft could survive the solar flyby. The best heat shield humans have ever made, currently flying on NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe, is designed to keep a spacecraft safe within 3.8 million miles of the sun\u2019s surface. To achieve its desired speed, Interstellar Probe would need to get more than twice as close.Advertisement\u201cThere is a moment for every big mission, almost an \u2018aha\u2019 moment, when the technology is ready and you\u2019ve got a plan and it makes sense and is going to answer the science questions,\u201d says Nicky Fox, director of NASA\u2019s heliophysics division. The heat shield problem, she says, still stands between Interstellar Probe and that moment.But then again, she says, there also comes a moment for every big mission when scientists simply decide that now is the right time to try.Another question looms over the mission, one that goes beyond issues of budgets and bureaucracy to the boundaries of what humans can accomplish.By 2050 \u2014 the year in which the probe would reach the Interstellar Medium \u2014 the United Nations\u2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that the global average temperature will already be more than 2 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times. Unless the world dramatically cuts back its carbon consumption, we face a future in which cities are submerged beneath several feet of sea-level rise or are heated to unlivable extremes. But most large emitters are nowhere near meeting their climate goals.Rarely has the gulf between what the world can do and what it will do seemed so vast.\u2018They just can\u2019t wait for the future to come\u2019But maybe, Mandt says, the apparent audacity of an interstellar mission is exactly what makes it worth trying.\u201cThis would be an example of a large group of people working together on something multigenerational,\u201d she says. \u201cWhich is the same thing we need with climate change.\u201dMembers of the Interstellar Probe team, she noted, range from fellows just out of graduate school to people staving off retirement. They come from at least eight countries. They include planetary scientists, astronomers, engineers and a particle physicist.Last fall, Mandt invited Janet Vertesi of Princeton, who has conducted ethnographic studies of spacecraft teams, to advise the team on organizational issues. It is the first time they know of that a sociologist has been involved in the conception of a NASA mission.Her job is to \u201cremind them of the human side,\u201d Vertesi says: How to resolve conflict. Where to store data. How to conduct outreach so that the demographics of the project team today reflect the more diverse nation that will launch the probe in decades to come.\u201cWe\u2019re testing out this notion that you can actually plan a mission up front to achieve certain social objectives, too,\u201d Vertesi says.In these \u201cuncertain times,\u201d she adds, it\u2019s a heady feeling to take part in something so inherently optimistic. To watch as a computer calculates the precise location of the planets on the date 50 years from now. To see scientists commit the remainders of their careers to an idea whose fruition they may never live to see.\u201cThese people,\u201d she says, \u201cthey just can\u2019t wait for the future to come.\u201dAt his office in Maryland, McNutt turns away from the unfinished plan on his computer screen and tries to visualize the moment when Interstellar Probe reaches the void between the stars.There\u2019s no way of knowing what it will find out there, beyond the veil of the solar wind. But of one thing, he is certain.When the probe turns toward Earth to beam back the data it has gathered, it will have in its sights \u201cone of the most special places in the universe,\u201d McNutt says: the small, watery world where it was first dreamed into being. What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.50 astronauts, in their own words It would take 50 years, an audacious proposal even by space travel standards. Interstellar Probe, a mission concept for NASA, aims to travel 93 billion miles past the sun",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Metal Ball the Size of Massachusetts That NASA Wants to Explore (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3287",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/science/nasa-psyche-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. NASA will be heading to a metal world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Metal Ball the Size of Massachusetts That NASA Wants to Explore (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3288",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/science/nasa-psyche-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. NASA will be heading to a metal world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Metal Ball the Size of Massachusetts That NASA Wants to Explore (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3289",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/science/nasa-psyche-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. NASA will be heading to a metal world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Metal Ball the Size of Massachusetts That NASA Wants to Explore (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3290",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/science/nasa-psyche-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. Launching in 2023, the spacecraft Psyche will reach the asteroid of the same name in 2030, and could reveal clues about the center of the Earth. NASA will be heading to a metal world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Dawn Mission to the Asteroid Belt Says Good Night (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3291",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/science/nasa-dawn-ceres-vesta-asteroids-end.html",
        "text": "Launched in 2007, the spacecraft discovered bright spots on Ceres and forbidding terrain on Vesta. Launched in 2007, the spacecraft discovered bright spots on Ceres and forbidding terrain on Vesta.  NASA\u2019s Dawn spacecraft, in orbit around the asteroid Ceres, has died quietly, the space agency announced on Thursday. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Dawn Mission to the Asteroid Belt Says Good Night (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3292",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/science/nasa-dawn-ceres-vesta-asteroids-end.html",
        "text": "Launched in 2007, the spacecraft discovered bright spots on Ceres and forbidding terrain on Vesta. Launched in 2007, the spacecraft discovered bright spots on Ceres and forbidding terrain on Vesta.  NASA\u2019s Dawn spacecraft, in orbit around the asteroid Ceres, has died quietly, the space agency announced on Thursday. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Dawn Mission to the Asteroid Belt Says Good Night (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3293",
        "date": "2018-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/science/nasa-dawn-ceres-vesta-asteroids-end.html",
        "text": "Launched in 2007, the spacecraft discovered bright spots on Ceres and forbidding terrain on Vesta. Launched in 2007, the spacecraft discovered bright spots on Ceres and forbidding terrain on Vesta.  NASA\u2019s Dawn spacecraft, in orbit around the asteroid Ceres, has died quietly, the space agency announced on Thursday. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Reverie for the Voyager Probes, Humanity\u2019s Calling Cards (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3294",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/voyager-nasa-40th-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Launched 40 years ago, the spacecraft have sailed beyond the solar system, artifacts of a civilization that may be gone before they\u2019re found. Launched 40 years ago, the spacecraft have sailed beyond the solar system, artifacts of a civilization that may be gone before they\u2019re found. In the shadow, one might say, of the Great American Eclipse, a major anniversary in the history of space exploration \u2014 and indeed cosmic consciousness \u2014 is being celebrated.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Reverie for the Voyager Probes, Humanity\u2019s Calling Cards (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3295",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/voyager-nasa-40th-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Launched 40 years ago, the spacecraft have sailed beyond the solar system, artifacts of a civilization that may be gone before they\u2019re found. Launched 40 years ago, the spacecraft have sailed beyond the solar system, artifacts of a civilization that may be gone before they\u2019re found. In the shadow, one might say, of the Great American Eclipse, a major anniversary in the history of space exploration \u2014 and indeed cosmic consciousness \u2014 is being celebrated.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Reverie for the Voyager Probes, Humanity\u2019s Calling Cards (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3296",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/voyager-nasa-40th-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Launched 40 years ago, the spacecraft have sailed beyond the solar system, artifacts of a civilization that may be gone before they\u2019re found. Launched 40 years ago, the spacecraft have sailed beyond the solar system, artifacts of a civilization that may be gone before they\u2019re found. In the shadow, one might say, of the Great American Eclipse, a major anniversary in the history of space exploration \u2014 and indeed cosmic consciousness \u2014 is being celebrated.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ingredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn\u2019s moon (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3297",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/27/complex-organic-molecules-discovered-in-enceladuss-plumes/",
        "text": "Last fall, as NASA's celebrated Cassini spacecraft spiraled toward its final, fatal descent into Saturn's clouds, astrochemist Morgan Cable couldn't help but shed a tear for the school-bus-size orbiter, which became a victim of its own success.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEarly in its mission, while flying past Saturn's ice-covered moon Enceladus, Cassini discovered jets of ice and saltwater gushing from cracks in the south pole \u2014 a sign that the body contained a subsurface ocean that could harbor life. When the orbiter began to run low on fuel, it smashed itself into Saturn rather than risk a wayward plunge that would contaminate the potentially habitable world. Now, from beyond the grave, the spacecraft has offered yet another prize for scientists. New analysis of Cassini data suggests those icy plumes shooting into space contain complex organic compounds \u2014 the essential building blocks of living beings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fact that an aging orbiter not designed for life detection was able to sense these molecules \u2014 which are among the largest and most complex organics found in the solar system \u2014 makes the icy moon an even more tantalizing target in the search for extraterrestrial life, said Cable, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in the new research.\u201cThis is a powerful study with a powerful result,\u201d she said.The findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature rely on data collected by two Cassini instruments \u2014 the Cosmic Dust Analyzer and the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer \u2014 as the spacecraft flew through Saturn's outermost ring and the plumes of Enceladus\u00a0(pronounced \u201cen-SELL-a-dus\u201d).Story continues below advertisementPrevious research using these instruments has detected small organic molecules such as methane, which consists of four hydrogen atoms attached to a single carbon. The INMS has also detected molecular hydrogen \u2014 a chemical characteristic of hydrothermal activity that provides important fuel for microbes living around seafloor vents on Earth.AdvertisementThe molecules reported in the new Nature paper are \u201corders of magnitude\u201d larger than anything that's been seen before, according to lead author Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. There were\u00a0stable carbon\u00a0ring structures known as aromatics as well as chains of carbon atoms linked to hydrogen, oxygen, maybe even nitrogen.NASA's Cassini spacecraft will take the deepest dive ever through the plume of Saturn's moon Enceladus. (YouTube/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)Some of the molecules sensed by the CDA were so large that the instrument couldn't analyze them. This suggests the organics Cassini found are only fragments of even bigger compounds, Postberg said. There may well be huge polymers \u2014 many-segmented molecules such as those that make up DNA and proteins \u2014 still waiting to be discovered.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe astrobiologists get excited about larger molecules and that sort of thing because it means that something is building upon itself and making itself more complex,\u201d said Kate Craft, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who was not involved in the research. AdvertisementThe molecules Cassini has detected may be produced abiotically \u2014 without the involvement of life. But they are also the kinds of compounds that microbes on Earth like to eat, and they might even be byproducts of microbial metabolisms.\u00a0\u201cPut it this way, if they did all these tests and didn't see these larger molecules, [Enceladus] wouldn't seem to be habitable,\u201d Craft said. \u201cBut these findings .\u2009.\u2009. are reason to say, 'Hey, we need to go back there and take a lot more data.' \"Scientists believe the gravitational influence of Saturn squeezes and flexes the porous, rocky material at Enceladus's core, generating heat. That heat allows for chemical interactions between the salty ocean and the seafloor. On Earth, such water-rock interactions provide fuel for chemotrophs \u2014 organisms that obtain energy by breaking down chemicals in their environments \u2014 and support vast ecosystems in the ocean's deepest, darkest depths.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPostberg and his colleagues propose that the organic molecules generated in Enceladus's ocean's depths eventually float to the surface, where they form a thin film just beneath the planet's icy crust.Earth's oceans are capped by a similar film, they note \u2014 a millimeter-thick blanket of tiny microbes and organic matter that serves as an important interface between sea and sky. Research shows this layer helps drive weather; as bubbles burst from breaking waves, particles from the film are lifted into the air, where they provide a nucleus around which water can condense to form clouds and fog.A similar process on the surface of Enceladus's ocean may form ice crystals with organics at their core, Postberg said. These grains are then sucked upward through cracks in the moon's crust called \u201ctiger stripes\u201d and then flung into the vacuum of space.Enceladus's plumes are extremely tenuous \u2014 more like a thin veil than a jet from a fire hose \u2014 and scientists have questioned whether a spacecraft flying through the spray would be able to collect enough organics to draw conclusions about their origin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis result, Postberg said, shows Enceladus \u201cis\u00a0kind to us and delivers its organic inventory in high concentrations into space.\u201dCable is deputy project scientist for a concept called Enceladus Life Finder, which would use more advanced instruments than the ones on Cassini to sample the plume during flybys. The mission has not been funded by NASA, and the space agency\u00a0 has no projects in development to return to Enceladus.She, Postberg and Craft expressed hope that this latest finding would generate interest in a new mission to the icy moon.\u201cEnceladus is screaming at us that it has all the ingredients for life as we know it: water, chemistry, organics,\u201d Cable said. \u201cWe have to go back.\u201dRead more:NASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn's icy moon EnceladusCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.Deep-sea life on Earth gives us a clue to what aliens would be like New findings from NASA's dear departed Cassini spacecraft show that plumes shooting out of the icy moon Enceladus contain complex organic molecules.  Ingredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn\u2019s moon",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Disruptive, disappointing, chaotic: Shutdown upends scientific research (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3298",
        "date": "2018-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/28/disruptive-disappointing-chaotic-shutdown-upends-scientific-research/",
        "text": "Kay Behrensmeyer was supposed to be preparing for a three-week expedition to look for evidence of ancient humans in Kenya. Instead, she spent Thursday packing her research permits, her fossil-collecting supplies, and maps she\u2019d spent weeks compiling and annotating by hand into a FedEx box, which she shipped to a junior colleague on the project. Behrensmeyer, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History, wasn\u2019t going anywhere. The federal government was shut down. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn research labs and at field sites across the world, the week-long government shutdown has ground scientific progress to a halt. Thousands of scientists are among the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors who must stay at home without pay. The furlough is expected to persist into the new year, which would mean a rocky start to 2019 for American science.\u201cIt\u2019s distressing, dispiriting, deflating,\u201d said Behrensmeyer, who has spent two years planning this trip. She was supposed to leave on Saturday but was instructed not to go when it became clear that the Smithsonian would run out of stopgap funding before a budget agreement was reached.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe partial shutdown, caused by President Trump\u2019s rejection of a bipartisan spending deal that did not allocate billions of dollars for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, also curtailed scientific operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Agriculture Department, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey. Furloughed government scientists are prohibited from checking on experiments, performing observations, collecting data, conducting tests or sharing their results.If the budget impasse extends into the new year, scientists say, it could harm critical research.\u201cAny shutdown of the federal government can disrupt or delay research projects, lead to uncertainty over new research, and reduce researcher access to agency data and infrastructure. .\u2009.\u2009. Continuing resolutions and short-term extensions are no way to run a government,\u201d Rush Holt, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a statement.What closes when the government shuts downAlice Harding, an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center who is among roughly 15,000 furloughed NASA employees, worries about missing rare astronomical phenomena \u2014 starbursts proceed with or without a federal budget. Just days before the government closed, she and her colleagues at the Fermi space telescope observed a pulsar flashing in an unprecedented way. She scrambled to get a follow-up observation using NASA\u2019s NICER instrument in her last days at work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut if the government ends up shutting down for more than a week, we won\u2019t get a second one,\u201d Harding said.Crucial research windows will slam shut on Earth, too. A crop-eating pest called the brown marmorated stink bug emerges only in the spring. Scientists must prepare for the insects' annual debut, and missing it would set researchers back an entire year, the Entomological Society of America warned. \u201cA lot of incredible science happens in our government every day,\u201d Robert K.D. Peterson, the organization\u2019s president, said in a statement. \u201cBut when the government shuts down, even partially, that work is derailed.\u201dIn Alexandria, Va., the National Science Foundation headquarters is closed. About 1,400 employees are furloughed, a spokesman said. \u201cOngoing operational and administrative activities will be minimal unless the suspension of these activities will imminently threaten the safety of human life or the protection of property,\u201d the agency said in a statement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe NSF is a funding agency, and its closure will have a massive effect on research if the shutdown lasts for an extended period. Review panels, which convene to approve or reject scientific grant proposals, were not scheduled in the final week of 2018. Should the shutdown extend into 2019, panels in January will have to be canceled and rescheduled, disrupting the flow of science. The NSF does not distribute grant payments to scientists during a shutdown.The U.S. Antarctic Program remains operational \u201cfor the foreseeable future,\u201d according to a statement from Kelly Falkner, director of the NSF\u2019s Office of Polar Programs.The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the Agriculture Department, is running on a skeleton crew. Only four of the 399 NIFA staff members, according to the USDA shutdown plan, report to work during a shutdown. As at the NSF, the NIFA grant program tends to be quiet during the final week of the year \u2014 but January is a critical time in its grant review process.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Agriculture Department\u2019s in-house body of scientists, the Agricultural Research Service, shrinks by 82 percent to just over 1,100 people. Those exempt from the furlough will maintain laboratories, greenhouses and care for research animals; there are time-sensitive data to collect as well as crops and cells to tend. The USDA shutdown plan allows studies involving human subjects to continue. The Agriculture Department did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday, perhaps because the USDA shutdown plan furloughs all but two of the 58 people who work in its communications office.Federal science agencies are \u201cbasically closed for business today,\u201d Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the likely next chair of the House Science Committee, said in a Dec. 22 statement. \u201cAs I\u2019ve noted in previous shutdowns, as our competitors in other countries surge ahead in their R & D investments, we have basically shut down a large chunk of our federal science and technology enterprise.\u201dSmithsonian museums and the National Zoo, supported by prior-year funds, remained open as scheduled this week. But if the shutdown continues into the new year, the museums and zoo will close on Jan. 2. All research will cease, but employees who feed and care for animals at the zoo and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute are exempted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s like being put in the penalty box and not being told when you can come back out on the ice,\u201d said Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History and author of \u201cSpying on Whales.\u201d Smithsonian scientists cannot communicate with collaborators. Researchers in the field \u2014 who are spread across the world \u2014 must return home. \u201cThat\u2019s really frustrating.\u201dThousands of atmospheric scientists are scheduled to converge in Phoenix starting Jan. 6 for the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society. Hundreds of those scientists work in the federal government, mainly in agencies such as NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service, and NASA. More than 800 of the presenters and speakers on the docket are federal employees. If the shutdown continues, those scientists will not attend.This meeting is where scientists hatch new ideas for lifesaving methods and warnings, said Dan Sobien, the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. \u201cAny delay in that research could someday cost someone their life, and that person could be you or me,\u201d Sobien said. Not having NWS meteorologists there to collaborate \u201cwill likely cost many more lives than the absence of any border wall, anywhere.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKeith Seitter, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society, said the effect of the shutdown on future advances is impossible to calculate, \u201cbut we know that it is significant.\u201d\u201cThe interactions that occur at these meetings foster new science and new services across the enterprise that greatly benefit all of society,\u201d Seitter said. \u201cHaving one of those sectors not represented at the meeting greatly impedes progress\u201d on saving lives, supporting the economy and building an understanding of the environment.At least 26 events at the meeting will be affected or wholly canceled because of the federal scientists' absence, including events such as a \u201ctown hall\u201d session on global weather models, where NOAA scientists hope to talk with colleagues about progress, challenges and ideas surrounding its new forecasting system. The United States has fallen behind in weather forecasting over the past couple of decades, outpaced by the United Kingdom and Europe in technology and computing power.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe student and early-career branch of the conference will be severely affected \u2014 many of the mentors for that group are federal employees in NOAA or NASA. A managing meteorologist at one of the National Weather Service offices, who wished to remain anonymous to speak openly about the shutdown, said the opportunities for young people to meet and interact with professionals are scant outside of conferences like these.\u201cYou are removing a large body of people whom they can meet as future mentors, giving them exposure to what federal agencies do,\u201d the manager said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to recruit talented people, and AMS and [the National Weather Association] are our two biggest opportunities to interact with these bright young people who are our future workforce.\u201dMore generally, the manager added, \u201cthe entire weather enterprise is impacted\u201d when a whole sector is absent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the shutdown lasts into the second week of 2019, it could also weaken the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which organizers bill as \u201cthe Super Bowl of astronomy.\u201d AAS\u2019s executive officer, Kevin Marvel, said that two of the meeting\u2019s seven invited speakers and roughly a third of its 3,100 participants are federally funded scientists who would be unable to attend if funding is not restored.\u201cThere could be a lot of empty poster boards, missing oral talks,\u201d Marvel said. \u201cIt\u2019s just going to be a mess.\u201dThe conference is the biggest annual gathering of astronomers in the United States and offers an important chance for researchers to meet with federal officials who operate their field\u2019s most important instruments, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.\u201cWithout the government scientists that make the missions go and make the telescopes operate,\u201d Marvel said, \u201cyou\u2019re missing a big component of what makes the meeting valuable.\u201dMuch astronomical research will go forward despite the lapse in federal funding. Operations staff for ongoing space missions are deemed essential, and observing time at ground-based telescopes is awarded far enough in advance to allow for several weeks of uninterrupted research. Facilities like the National Radio Astronomy Observatory have implemented short-term cash management measures to continue normal operations during the shutdown.But a prolonged closure could stretch these temporary measures to their breaking points, scientists said. Even though instrument operators are allowed to stay on the job, without working scientists they won\u2019t have new targets for their telescopes.For a time, it seemed as though the shutdown might also put a damper on two high-profile space events: the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft\u2019s arrival into orbit around its target asteroid, Bennu, on Monday; and the New Horizons probe\u2019s historic encounter with a faraway space rock called Ultima Thule, the most distant object ever explored by humans, early on New Year\u2019s Day. Though NASA scientists and engineers who operate the missions are considered essential and able to work, the people who run its vaunted publicity operation \u2014 which includes NASA TV and its Twitter account with 30 million followers \u2014 were among those furloughed without pay.Alan Stern, a Southwest Research Institute scientist and the principal investigator for New Horizons, said the absence of publicity from the agency would be \u201cincredibly disappointing.\u201dBut on Friday, NASA Administrator James Bridenstine announced that forward funding of the projects would allow for coverage of both missions.\u201cYay!!\u201d Stern tweeted.Read more:Trump administration threatens future of HIV research hubHalf of women in science experience harassment, a sweeping new report findsHouse Science Committee\u2019s likely next chair wants a return to scienceEverything you need to know about a government shutdown A prolonged government shutdown means a rocky start for science in the new year. Disruptive, disappointing, chaotic: Shutdown upends scientific research",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Disruptive, disappointing, chaotic: Shutdown upends scientific research (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3299",
        "date": "2018-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/28/disruptive-disappointing-chaotic-shutdown-upends-scientific-research/",
        "text": "Kay Behrensmeyer was supposed to be preparing for a three-week expedition to look for evidence of ancient humans in Kenya. Instead, she spent Thursday packing her research permits, her fossil-collecting supplies, and maps she\u2019d spent weeks compiling and annotating by hand into a FedEx box, which she shipped to a junior colleague on the project. Behrensmeyer, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History, wasn\u2019t going anywhere. The federal government was shut down. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn research labs and at field sites across the world, the week-long government shutdown has ground scientific progress to a halt. Thousands of scientists are among the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors who must stay at home without pay. The furlough is expected to persist into the new year, which would mean a rocky start to 2019 for American science.\u201cIt\u2019s distressing, dispiriting, deflating,\u201d said Behrensmeyer, who has spent two years planning this trip. She was supposed to leave on Saturday but was instructed not to go when it became clear that the Smithsonian would run out of stopgap funding before a budget agreement was reached.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe partial shutdown, caused by President Trump\u2019s rejection of a bipartisan spending deal that did not allocate billions of dollars for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, also curtailed scientific operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Agriculture Department, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey. Furloughed government scientists are prohibited from checking on experiments, performing observations, collecting data, conducting tests or sharing their results.If the budget impasse extends into the new year, scientists say, it could harm critical research.\u201cAny shutdown of the federal government can disrupt or delay research projects, lead to uncertainty over new research, and reduce researcher access to agency data and infrastructure. .\u2009.\u2009. Continuing resolutions and short-term extensions are no way to run a government,\u201d Rush Holt, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a statement.What closes when the government shuts downAlice Harding, an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center who is among roughly 15,000 furloughed NASA employees, worries about missing rare astronomical phenomena \u2014 starbursts proceed with or without a federal budget. Just days before the government closed, she and her colleagues at the Fermi space telescope observed a pulsar flashing in an unprecedented way. She scrambled to get a follow-up observation using NASA\u2019s NICER instrument in her last days at work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut if the government ends up shutting down for more than a week, we won\u2019t get a second one,\u201d Harding said.Crucial research windows will slam shut on Earth, too. A crop-eating pest called the brown marmorated stink bug emerges only in the spring. Scientists must prepare for the insects' annual debut, and missing it would set researchers back an entire year, the Entomological Society of America warned. \u201cA lot of incredible science happens in our government every day,\u201d Robert K.D. Peterson, the organization\u2019s president, said in a statement. \u201cBut when the government shuts down, even partially, that work is derailed.\u201dIn Alexandria, Va., the National Science Foundation headquarters is closed. About 1,400 employees are furloughed, a spokesman said. \u201cOngoing operational and administrative activities will be minimal unless the suspension of these activities will imminently threaten the safety of human life or the protection of property,\u201d the agency said in a statement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe NSF is a funding agency, and its closure will have a massive effect on research if the shutdown lasts for an extended period. Review panels, which convene to approve or reject scientific grant proposals, were not scheduled in the final week of 2018. Should the shutdown extend into 2019, panels in January will have to be canceled and rescheduled, disrupting the flow of science. The NSF does not distribute grant payments to scientists during a shutdown.The U.S. Antarctic Program remains operational \u201cfor the foreseeable future,\u201d according to a statement from Kelly Falkner, director of the NSF\u2019s Office of Polar Programs.The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, part of the Agriculture Department, is running on a skeleton crew. Only four of the 399 NIFA staff members, according to the USDA shutdown plan, report to work during a shutdown. As at the NSF, the NIFA grant program tends to be quiet during the final week of the year \u2014 but January is a critical time in its grant review process.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Agriculture Department\u2019s in-house body of scientists, the Agricultural Research Service, shrinks by 82 percent to just over 1,100 people. Those exempt from the furlough will maintain laboratories, greenhouses and care for research animals; there are time-sensitive data to collect as well as crops and cells to tend. The USDA shutdown plan allows studies involving human subjects to continue. The Agriculture Department did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday, perhaps because the USDA shutdown plan furloughs all but two of the 58 people who work in its communications office.Federal science agencies are \u201cbasically closed for business today,\u201d Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the likely next chair of the House Science Committee, said in a Dec. 22 statement. \u201cAs I\u2019ve noted in previous shutdowns, as our competitors in other countries surge ahead in their R & D investments, we have basically shut down a large chunk of our federal science and technology enterprise.\u201dSmithsonian museums and the National Zoo, supported by prior-year funds, remained open as scheduled this week. But if the shutdown continues into the new year, the museums and zoo will close on Jan. 2. All research will cease, but employees who feed and care for animals at the zoo and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute are exempted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s like being put in the penalty box and not being told when you can come back out on the ice,\u201d said Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History and author of \u201cSpying on Whales.\u201d Smithsonian scientists cannot communicate with collaborators. Researchers in the field \u2014 who are spread across the world \u2014 must return home. \u201cThat\u2019s really frustrating.\u201dThousands of atmospheric scientists are scheduled to converge in Phoenix starting Jan. 6 for the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society. Hundreds of those scientists work in the federal government, mainly in agencies such as NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service, and NASA. More than 800 of the presenters and speakers on the docket are federal employees. If the shutdown continues, those scientists will not attend.This meeting is where scientists hatch new ideas for lifesaving methods and warnings, said Dan Sobien, the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization. \u201cAny delay in that research could someday cost someone their life, and that person could be you or me,\u201d Sobien said. Not having NWS meteorologists there to collaborate \u201cwill likely cost many more lives than the absence of any border wall, anywhere.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKeith Seitter, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society, said the effect of the shutdown on future advances is impossible to calculate, \u201cbut we know that it is significant.\u201d\u201cThe interactions that occur at these meetings foster new science and new services across the enterprise that greatly benefit all of society,\u201d Seitter said. \u201cHaving one of those sectors not represented at the meeting greatly impedes progress\u201d on saving lives, supporting the economy and building an understanding of the environment.At least 26 events at the meeting will be affected or wholly canceled because of the federal scientists' absence, including events such as a \u201ctown hall\u201d session on global weather models, where NOAA scientists hope to talk with colleagues about progress, challenges and ideas surrounding its new forecasting system. The United States has fallen behind in weather forecasting over the past couple of decades, outpaced by the United Kingdom and Europe in technology and computing power.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe student and early-career branch of the conference will be severely affected \u2014 many of the mentors for that group are federal employees in NOAA or NASA. A managing meteorologist at one of the National Weather Service offices, who wished to remain anonymous to speak openly about the shutdown, said the opportunities for young people to meet and interact with professionals are scant outside of conferences like these.\u201cYou are removing a large body of people whom they can meet as future mentors, giving them exposure to what federal agencies do,\u201d the manager said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to recruit talented people, and AMS and [the National Weather Association] are our two biggest opportunities to interact with these bright young people who are our future workforce.\u201dMore generally, the manager added, \u201cthe entire weather enterprise is impacted\u201d when a whole sector is absent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the shutdown lasts into the second week of 2019, it could also weaken the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which organizers bill as \u201cthe Super Bowl of astronomy.\u201d AAS\u2019s executive officer, Kevin Marvel, said that two of the meeting\u2019s seven invited speakers and roughly a third of its 3,100 participants are federally funded scientists who would be unable to attend if funding is not restored.\u201cThere could be a lot of empty poster boards, missing oral talks,\u201d Marvel said. \u201cIt\u2019s just going to be a mess.\u201dThe conference is the biggest annual gathering of astronomers in the United States and offers an important chance for researchers to meet with federal officials who operate their field\u2019s most important instruments, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.\u201cWithout the government scientists that make the missions go and make the telescopes operate,\u201d Marvel said, \u201cyou\u2019re missing a big component of what makes the meeting valuable.\u201dMuch astronomical research will go forward despite the lapse in federal funding. Operations staff for ongoing space missions are deemed essential, and observing time at ground-based telescopes is awarded far enough in advance to allow for several weeks of uninterrupted research. Facilities like the National Radio Astronomy Observatory have implemented short-term cash management measures to continue normal operations during the shutdown.But a prolonged closure could stretch these temporary measures to their breaking points, scientists said. Even though instrument operators are allowed to stay on the job, without working scientists they won\u2019t have new targets for their telescopes.For a time, it seemed as though the shutdown might also put a damper on two high-profile space events: the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft\u2019s arrival into orbit around its target asteroid, Bennu, on Monday; and the New Horizons probe\u2019s historic encounter with a faraway space rock called Ultima Thule, the most distant object ever explored by humans, early on New Year\u2019s Day. Though NASA scientists and engineers who operate the missions are considered essential and able to work, the people who run its vaunted publicity operation \u2014 which includes NASA TV and its Twitter account with 30 million followers \u2014 were among those furloughed without pay.Alan Stern, a Southwest Research Institute scientist and the principal investigator for New Horizons, said the absence of publicity from the agency would be \u201cincredibly disappointing.\u201dBut on Friday, NASA Administrator James Bridenstine announced that forward funding of the projects would allow for coverage of both missions.\u201cYay!!\u201d Stern tweeted.Read more:Trump administration threatens future of HIV research hubHalf of women in science experience harassment, a sweeping new report findsHouse Science Committee\u2019s likely next chair wants a return to scienceEverything you need to know about a government shutdown A prolonged government shutdown means a rocky start for science in the new year. Disruptive, disappointing, chaotic: Shutdown upends scientific research",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sputnik for Sale, if You\u2019ll Settle for a Beeping Replica (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3300",
        "date": "2017-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/science/sputnik-replica-auction.html",
        "text": "Just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the first Earth launch of a satellite, an auction house will take bids on a replica of the shiny Soviet spacecraft. Just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the first Earth launch of a satellite, an auction house will take bids on a replica of the shiny Soviet spacecraft. This could be your chance to make Sputnik beep again.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sputnik for Sale, if You\u2019ll Settle for a Beeping Replica (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3301",
        "date": "2017-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/science/sputnik-replica-auction.html",
        "text": "Just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the first Earth launch of a satellite, an auction house will take bids on a replica of the shiny Soviet spacecraft. Just ahead of the 60th anniversary of the first Earth launch of a satellite, an auction house will take bids on a replica of the shiny Soviet spacecraft. This could be your chance to make Sputnik beep again.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3302",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/astronaut-peggy-whitson-has-returned-to-earth-a-couple-more-nasa-records-in-hand/",
        "text": "Just after dawn Sunday,\u00a0a Soyuz capsule broke through Earth\u2019s atmosphere and hurtled toward\u00a0the sprawling grasslands of central Kazakhstan. Even with a parachute\u00a0dragging its\u00a0speed, the spacecraft\u00a0crashed into the ground, triggering\u00a0an imposing\u00a0cloud of sand\u00a0and smoke.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn the other side of the world, a voice calmly called the sequence of events for NASA: \u201cTouchdown. Touchdown confirmed.\u201d Soon after, helicopter and ground crews rushed to retrieve the three people \u2014 NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin \u2014 from the toppled capsule.\u00a0Last to be plucked from the Soyuz, according to the Associated Press, was Whitson, who was given a pair of sunglasses and a bouquet of flowers with a note that read, \u201cWelcome back, Peggy.\u201dTouchdown! @AstroPeggy, @Astro2Fish & Russian crewmate land on Earth after 136 days in space; 288 days for Peggy: https://t.co/mzKW5uDsTi pic.twitter.com/SiylBnuJLG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 3, 2017\n\nIt was a simple message to conclude a mission to the International Space Station that cemented Whitson in the annals of space legends. Her return to Earth this weekend wrapped up 288 days in space, the longest time in orbit in a single spaceflight for a female astronaut. The mission also made her the U.S. astronaut, male or female, with the most cumulative time in space, at 665 days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhitson has commanded the International Space Station twice, the only female astronaut to do so. In March, in the middle of routine maintenance outside the ISS,\u00a0Whitson set the record for the female astronaut with the most cumulative spacewalking time, at 53 hours and 22 minutes. Though she had been scheduled to return to Earth in June, she extended her time in orbit by three extra months after a spot on the Soyuz opened up.Whitson would go on to surpass the records she had just set, eventually marking 10 separate spacewalks and logging\u00a060 hours and 21 minutes of cumulative spacewalking time. \u00a0(Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev holds the all-time spacewalking record, with 16 separate spacewalks and more than\u00a082 hours of cumulative spacewalking time.)Among her litany of accomplishments, NASA notes, almost\u00a0as an afterthought: Whitson broke all these records\u00a0at\u00a0age 57, and also set a record for the world\u2019s oldest spacewoman.638 days in space and the view is still amazing! Soaking up some sunset time in the cupola\u2026 pic.twitter.com/AiReQzkjJZ\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) August 6, 2017\n\nOne of the first phone calls Whitson received back on Earth was from President Trump, who called both NASA astronauts as they were flying home to Houston.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want to congratulate Peggy and Jack for their incredible accomplishments. They make us all very proud,\u201d Trump said, in a White House statement. \u201cExploration has always been at the core of who we are as Americans, and their brave contributions to human space flight have continued that great tradition.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t the first time the two spoke by phone. In April, Trump called the International Space Station to congratulate Whitson for breaking the record for cumulative time spent in space by any U.S. astronaut.\u201cPeggy is an inspiration to us all, especially to young women interested in or currently pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and math,\u201d Trump said..@AstroPeggy & @Astro2Fish received a special welcome from @POTUS as they were flying home to Houston: https://t.co/anCac2rFsy pic.twitter.com/z7CIFYY4Jj\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 4, 2017\n\nRobert Lightfoot, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said he appreciated the president\u2019s phone call to Whitson and Fischer.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe president has had the opportunity to hear from Peggy and Jack firsthand how the work aboard the International Space Station is directly pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, and advancing American leadership in the boundless frontier of space,\u201d Lightfoot said. \u201cI want to add my thanks to the teams on the ground across the globe, especially in Houston, who are dealing with the aftermath of a Harvey, yet still maintained the focus to get Peggy and Jack home safely. It is an amazing team.\u201dAdvertisementA NASA representative said Whitson was not yet available for\u00a0interviews Tuesday.Peggy Whitson set the record on Sept. 2, 2017, for most cumulative days living and working in space by a NASA astronaut at 665 days. pic.twitter.com/MOq3acvp4O\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) September 3, 2017\n\nWhitson, a native of Iowa, earned a doctorate in biochemistry at Rice University in Houston; outside of training for space missions, she\u00a0enjoys\u00a0weightlifting, biking, basketball and water skiing, according to her NASA bio.Story continues below advertisementShe has made a large impact on the space program's scientific research. \u201cIn space she's able to just work so efficiently that in general we can schedule a lot more activities for her than we normally can for crew members,\u201d Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut and the current director of the Johnson Space Center, told The Post. \u201cFor us to be able to have had her in orbit between nine to 10 months, we just got so much done with her up there.\u201dShe said Whitson's \u201ctremendous work ethic\u201d showed both in space and on the ground \u2014 something that was evident even 20 years ago, when the two first met.Advertisement\u201cI learned early on never to follow her in the gym because she can bench-press and legpress maybe like four times what I can,\u201d Ochoa said, laughing.Story continues below advertisementEven in space, Whitson (a.k.a.\u00a0@AstroPeggy on Twitter) gained a following for her exuberant social-media dispatches from aboard the space station that showed her doing everything from growing cabbage\u00a0(\u201cMy 3rd crop did the best!\") to strength training without gravity to conducting stem-cell research (\u201cmy favorite so far\").\u201cIt is one of those rides that you hope never ends,\u201d Whitson tweeted in April, shortly after\u00a0she decided to extend her time in space by three months. \u201cI am so grateful for all those who helped me on each of my missions! #LifeInSpace\u201dFashion police, you have to grade us on a curve \u2013 we just love our country\u2026 a LOT!! Happy Birthday U.S.A.! #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/gPVp4kJ8TH\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) July 4, 2017\n\nRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container Whitson, 57, has now spent the most cumulative time in space of any U.S. astronaut. Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3303",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/astronaut-peggy-whitson-has-returned-to-earth-a-couple-more-nasa-records-in-hand/",
        "text": "Just after dawn Sunday,\u00a0a Soyuz capsule broke through Earth\u2019s atmosphere and hurtled toward\u00a0the sprawling grasslands of central Kazakhstan. Even with a parachute\u00a0dragging its\u00a0speed, the spacecraft\u00a0crashed into the ground, triggering\u00a0an imposing\u00a0cloud of sand\u00a0and smoke.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn the other side of the world, a voice calmly called the sequence of events for NASA: \u201cTouchdown. Touchdown confirmed.\u201d Soon after, helicopter and ground crews rushed to retrieve the three people \u2014 NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin \u2014 from the toppled capsule.\u00a0Last to be plucked from the Soyuz, according to the Associated Press, was Whitson, who was given a pair of sunglasses and a bouquet of flowers with a note that read, \u201cWelcome back, Peggy.\u201dTouchdown! @AstroPeggy, @Astro2Fish & Russian crewmate land on Earth after 136 days in space; 288 days for Peggy: https://t.co/mzKW5uDsTi pic.twitter.com/SiylBnuJLG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 3, 2017\n\nIt was a simple message to conclude a mission to the International Space Station that cemented Whitson in the annals of space legends. Her return to Earth this weekend wrapped up 288 days in space, the longest time in orbit in a single spaceflight for a female astronaut. The mission also made her the U.S. astronaut, male or female, with the most cumulative time in space, at 665 days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhitson has commanded the International Space Station twice, the only female astronaut to do so. In March, in the middle of routine maintenance outside the ISS,\u00a0Whitson set the record for the female astronaut with the most cumulative spacewalking time, at 53 hours and 22 minutes. Though she had been scheduled to return to Earth in June, she extended her time in orbit by three extra months after a spot on the Soyuz opened up.Whitson would go on to surpass the records she had just set, eventually marking 10 separate spacewalks and logging\u00a060 hours and 21 minutes of cumulative spacewalking time. \u00a0(Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev holds the all-time spacewalking record, with 16 separate spacewalks and more than\u00a082 hours of cumulative spacewalking time.)Among her litany of accomplishments, NASA notes, almost\u00a0as an afterthought: Whitson broke all these records\u00a0at\u00a0age 57, and also set a record for the world\u2019s oldest spacewoman.638 days in space and the view is still amazing! Soaking up some sunset time in the cupola\u2026 pic.twitter.com/AiReQzkjJZ\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) August 6, 2017\n\nOne of the first phone calls Whitson received back on Earth was from President Trump, who called both NASA astronauts as they were flying home to Houston.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want to congratulate Peggy and Jack for their incredible accomplishments. They make us all very proud,\u201d Trump said, in a White House statement. \u201cExploration has always been at the core of who we are as Americans, and their brave contributions to human space flight have continued that great tradition.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t the first time the two spoke by phone. In April, Trump called the International Space Station to congratulate Whitson for breaking the record for cumulative time spent in space by any U.S. astronaut.\u201cPeggy is an inspiration to us all, especially to young women interested in or currently pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and math,\u201d Trump said..@AstroPeggy & @Astro2Fish received a special welcome from @POTUS as they were flying home to Houston: https://t.co/anCac2rFsy pic.twitter.com/z7CIFYY4Jj\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 4, 2017\n\nRobert Lightfoot, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said he appreciated the president\u2019s phone call to Whitson and Fischer.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe president has had the opportunity to hear from Peggy and Jack firsthand how the work aboard the International Space Station is directly pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, and advancing American leadership in the boundless frontier of space,\u201d Lightfoot said. \u201cI want to add my thanks to the teams on the ground across the globe, especially in Houston, who are dealing with the aftermath of a Harvey, yet still maintained the focus to get Peggy and Jack home safely. It is an amazing team.\u201dAdvertisementA NASA representative said Whitson was not yet available for\u00a0interviews Tuesday.Peggy Whitson set the record on Sept. 2, 2017, for most cumulative days living and working in space by a NASA astronaut at 665 days. pic.twitter.com/MOq3acvp4O\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) September 3, 2017\n\nWhitson, a native of Iowa, earned a doctorate in biochemistry at Rice University in Houston; outside of training for space missions, she\u00a0enjoys\u00a0weightlifting, biking, basketball and water skiing, according to her NASA bio.Story continues below advertisementShe has made a large impact on the space program's scientific research. \u201cIn space she's able to just work so efficiently that in general we can schedule a lot more activities for her than we normally can for crew members,\u201d Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut and the current director of the Johnson Space Center, told The Post. \u201cFor us to be able to have had her in orbit between nine to 10 months, we just got so much done with her up there.\u201dShe said Whitson's \u201ctremendous work ethic\u201d showed both in space and on the ground \u2014 something that was evident even 20 years ago, when the two first met.Advertisement\u201cI learned early on never to follow her in the gym because she can bench-press and legpress maybe like four times what I can,\u201d Ochoa said, laughing.Story continues below advertisementEven in space, Whitson (a.k.a.\u00a0@AstroPeggy on Twitter) gained a following for her exuberant social-media dispatches from aboard the space station that showed her doing everything from growing cabbage\u00a0(\u201cMy 3rd crop did the best!\") to strength training without gravity to conducting stem-cell research (\u201cmy favorite so far\").\u201cIt is one of those rides that you hope never ends,\u201d Whitson tweeted in April, shortly after\u00a0she decided to extend her time in space by three months. \u201cI am so grateful for all those who helped me on each of my missions! #LifeInSpace\u201dFashion police, you have to grade us on a curve \u2013 we just love our country\u2026 a LOT!! Happy Birthday U.S.A.! #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/gPVp4kJ8TH\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) July 4, 2017\n\nRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container Whitson, 57, has now spent the most cumulative time in space of any U.S. astronaut. Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3304",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/astronaut-peggy-whitson-has-returned-to-earth-a-couple-more-nasa-records-in-hand/",
        "text": "Just after dawn Sunday,\u00a0a Soyuz capsule broke through Earth\u2019s atmosphere and hurtled toward\u00a0the sprawling grasslands of central Kazakhstan. Even with a parachute\u00a0dragging its\u00a0speed, the spacecraft\u00a0crashed into the ground, triggering\u00a0an imposing\u00a0cloud of sand\u00a0and smoke.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn the other side of the world, a voice calmly called the sequence of events for NASA: \u201cTouchdown. Touchdown confirmed.\u201d Soon after, helicopter and ground crews rushed to retrieve the three people \u2014 NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin \u2014 from the toppled capsule.\u00a0Last to be plucked from the Soyuz, according to the Associated Press, was Whitson, who was given a pair of sunglasses and a bouquet of flowers with a note that read, \u201cWelcome back, Peggy.\u201dTouchdown! @AstroPeggy, @Astro2Fish & Russian crewmate land on Earth after 136 days in space; 288 days for Peggy: https://t.co/mzKW5uDsTi pic.twitter.com/SiylBnuJLG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 3, 2017\n\nIt was a simple message to conclude a mission to the International Space Station that cemented Whitson in the annals of space legends. Her return to Earth this weekend wrapped up 288 days in space, the longest time in orbit in a single spaceflight for a female astronaut. The mission also made her the U.S. astronaut, male or female, with the most cumulative time in space, at 665 days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhitson has commanded the International Space Station twice, the only female astronaut to do so. In March, in the middle of routine maintenance outside the ISS,\u00a0Whitson set the record for the female astronaut with the most cumulative spacewalking time, at 53 hours and 22 minutes. Though she had been scheduled to return to Earth in June, she extended her time in orbit by three extra months after a spot on the Soyuz opened up.Whitson would go on to surpass the records she had just set, eventually marking 10 separate spacewalks and logging\u00a060 hours and 21 minutes of cumulative spacewalking time. \u00a0(Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev holds the all-time spacewalking record, with 16 separate spacewalks and more than\u00a082 hours of cumulative spacewalking time.)Among her litany of accomplishments, NASA notes, almost\u00a0as an afterthought: Whitson broke all these records\u00a0at\u00a0age 57, and also set a record for the world\u2019s oldest spacewoman.638 days in space and the view is still amazing! Soaking up some sunset time in the cupola\u2026 pic.twitter.com/AiReQzkjJZ\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) August 6, 2017\n\nOne of the first phone calls Whitson received back on Earth was from President Trump, who called both NASA astronauts as they were flying home to Houston.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want to congratulate Peggy and Jack for their incredible accomplishments. They make us all very proud,\u201d Trump said, in a White House statement. \u201cExploration has always been at the core of who we are as Americans, and their brave contributions to human space flight have continued that great tradition.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t the first time the two spoke by phone. In April, Trump called the International Space Station to congratulate Whitson for breaking the record for cumulative time spent in space by any U.S. astronaut.\u201cPeggy is an inspiration to us all, especially to young women interested in or currently pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and math,\u201d Trump said..@AstroPeggy & @Astro2Fish received a special welcome from @POTUS as they were flying home to Houston: https://t.co/anCac2rFsy pic.twitter.com/z7CIFYY4Jj\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 4, 2017\n\nRobert Lightfoot, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said he appreciated the president\u2019s phone call to Whitson and Fischer.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe president has had the opportunity to hear from Peggy and Jack firsthand how the work aboard the International Space Station is directly pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, and advancing American leadership in the boundless frontier of space,\u201d Lightfoot said. \u201cI want to add my thanks to the teams on the ground across the globe, especially in Houston, who are dealing with the aftermath of a Harvey, yet still maintained the focus to get Peggy and Jack home safely. It is an amazing team.\u201dAdvertisementA NASA representative said Whitson was not yet available for\u00a0interviews Tuesday.Peggy Whitson set the record on Sept. 2, 2017, for most cumulative days living and working in space by a NASA astronaut at 665 days. pic.twitter.com/MOq3acvp4O\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) September 3, 2017\n\nWhitson, a native of Iowa, earned a doctorate in biochemistry at Rice University in Houston; outside of training for space missions, she\u00a0enjoys\u00a0weightlifting, biking, basketball and water skiing, according to her NASA bio.Story continues below advertisementShe has made a large impact on the space program's scientific research. \u201cIn space she's able to just work so efficiently that in general we can schedule a lot more activities for her than we normally can for crew members,\u201d Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut and the current director of the Johnson Space Center, told The Post. \u201cFor us to be able to have had her in orbit between nine to 10 months, we just got so much done with her up there.\u201dShe said Whitson's \u201ctremendous work ethic\u201d showed both in space and on the ground \u2014 something that was evident even 20 years ago, when the two first met.Advertisement\u201cI learned early on never to follow her in the gym because she can bench-press and legpress maybe like four times what I can,\u201d Ochoa said, laughing.Story continues below advertisementEven in space, Whitson (a.k.a.\u00a0@AstroPeggy on Twitter) gained a following for her exuberant social-media dispatches from aboard the space station that showed her doing everything from growing cabbage\u00a0(\u201cMy 3rd crop did the best!\") to strength training without gravity to conducting stem-cell research (\u201cmy favorite so far\").\u201cIt is one of those rides that you hope never ends,\u201d Whitson tweeted in April, shortly after\u00a0she decided to extend her time in space by three months. \u201cI am so grateful for all those who helped me on each of my missions! #LifeInSpace\u201dFashion police, you have to grade us on a curve \u2013 we just love our country\u2026 a LOT!! Happy Birthday U.S.A.! #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/gPVp4kJ8TH\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) July 4, 2017\n\nRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container Whitson, 57, has now spent the most cumulative time in space of any U.S. astronaut. Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3305",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/05/astronaut-peggy-whitson-has-returned-to-earth-a-couple-more-nasa-records-in-hand/",
        "text": "Just after dawn Sunday,\u00a0a Soyuz capsule broke through Earth\u2019s atmosphere and hurtled toward\u00a0the sprawling grasslands of central Kazakhstan. Even with a parachute\u00a0dragging its\u00a0speed, the spacecraft\u00a0crashed into the ground, triggering\u00a0an imposing\u00a0cloud of sand\u00a0and smoke.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn the other side of the world, a voice calmly called the sequence of events for NASA: \u201cTouchdown. Touchdown confirmed.\u201d Soon after, helicopter and ground crews rushed to retrieve the three people \u2014 NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin \u2014 from the toppled capsule.\u00a0Last to be plucked from the Soyuz, according to the Associated Press, was Whitson, who was given a pair of sunglasses and a bouquet of flowers with a note that read, \u201cWelcome back, Peggy.\u201dTouchdown! @AstroPeggy, @Astro2Fish & Russian crewmate land on Earth after 136 days in space; 288 days for Peggy: https://t.co/mzKW5uDsTi pic.twitter.com/SiylBnuJLG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 3, 2017\n\nIt was a simple message to conclude a mission to the International Space Station that cemented Whitson in the annals of space legends. Her return to Earth this weekend wrapped up 288 days in space, the longest time in orbit in a single spaceflight for a female astronaut. The mission also made her the U.S. astronaut, male or female, with the most cumulative time in space, at 665 days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhitson has commanded the International Space Station twice, the only female astronaut to do so. In March, in the middle of routine maintenance outside the ISS,\u00a0Whitson set the record for the female astronaut with the most cumulative spacewalking time, at 53 hours and 22 minutes. Though she had been scheduled to return to Earth in June, she extended her time in orbit by three extra months after a spot on the Soyuz opened up.Whitson would go on to surpass the records she had just set, eventually marking 10 separate spacewalks and logging\u00a060 hours and 21 minutes of cumulative spacewalking time. \u00a0(Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev holds the all-time spacewalking record, with 16 separate spacewalks and more than\u00a082 hours of cumulative spacewalking time.)Among her litany of accomplishments, NASA notes, almost\u00a0as an afterthought: Whitson broke all these records\u00a0at\u00a0age 57, and also set a record for the world\u2019s oldest spacewoman.638 days in space and the view is still amazing! Soaking up some sunset time in the cupola\u2026 pic.twitter.com/AiReQzkjJZ\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) August 6, 2017\n\nOne of the first phone calls Whitson received back on Earth was from President Trump, who called both NASA astronauts as they were flying home to Houston.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want to congratulate Peggy and Jack for their incredible accomplishments. They make us all very proud,\u201d Trump said, in a White House statement. \u201cExploration has always been at the core of who we are as Americans, and their brave contributions to human space flight have continued that great tradition.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t the first time the two spoke by phone. In April, Trump called the International Space Station to congratulate Whitson for breaking the record for cumulative time spent in space by any U.S. astronaut.\u201cPeggy is an inspiration to us all, especially to young women interested in or currently pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and math,\u201d Trump said..@AstroPeggy & @Astro2Fish received a special welcome from @POTUS as they were flying home to Houston: https://t.co/anCac2rFsy pic.twitter.com/z7CIFYY4Jj\u2014 NASA (@NASA) September 4, 2017\n\nRobert Lightfoot, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said he appreciated the president\u2019s phone call to Whitson and Fischer.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe president has had the opportunity to hear from Peggy and Jack firsthand how the work aboard the International Space Station is directly pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, and advancing American leadership in the boundless frontier of space,\u201d Lightfoot said. \u201cI want to add my thanks to the teams on the ground across the globe, especially in Houston, who are dealing with the aftermath of a Harvey, yet still maintained the focus to get Peggy and Jack home safely. It is an amazing team.\u201dAdvertisementA NASA representative said Whitson was not yet available for\u00a0interviews Tuesday.Peggy Whitson set the record on Sept. 2, 2017, for most cumulative days living and working in space by a NASA astronaut at 665 days. pic.twitter.com/MOq3acvp4O\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) September 3, 2017\n\nWhitson, a native of Iowa, earned a doctorate in biochemistry at Rice University in Houston; outside of training for space missions, she\u00a0enjoys\u00a0weightlifting, biking, basketball and water skiing, according to her NASA bio.Story continues below advertisementShe has made a large impact on the space program's scientific research. \u201cIn space she's able to just work so efficiently that in general we can schedule a lot more activities for her than we normally can for crew members,\u201d Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut and the current director of the Johnson Space Center, told The Post. \u201cFor us to be able to have had her in orbit between nine to 10 months, we just got so much done with her up there.\u201dShe said Whitson's \u201ctremendous work ethic\u201d showed both in space and on the ground \u2014 something that was evident even 20 years ago, when the two first met.Advertisement\u201cI learned early on never to follow her in the gym because she can bench-press and legpress maybe like four times what I can,\u201d Ochoa said, laughing.Story continues below advertisementEven in space, Whitson (a.k.a.\u00a0@AstroPeggy on Twitter) gained a following for her exuberant social-media dispatches from aboard the space station that showed her doing everything from growing cabbage\u00a0(\u201cMy 3rd crop did the best!\") to strength training without gravity to conducting stem-cell research (\u201cmy favorite so far\").\u201cIt is one of those rides that you hope never ends,\u201d Whitson tweeted in April, shortly after\u00a0she decided to extend her time in space by three months. \u201cI am so grateful for all those who helped me on each of my missions! #LifeInSpace\u201dFashion police, you have to grade us on a curve \u2013 we just love our country\u2026 a LOT!! Happy Birthday U.S.A.! #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/gPVp4kJ8TH\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) July 4, 2017\n\nRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming success\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerNASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container Whitson, 57, has now spent the most cumulative time in space of any U.S. astronaut. Astronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in hand",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "She made the discovery, but a man got the Nobel. A half-century later, she\u2019s won a $3 million prize. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3306",
        "date": "2018-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/09/08/she-made-discovery-man-got-nobel-half-century-later-shes-won-million-prize/",
        "text": "Jocelyn Bell Burnell built the telescope, laboring in damp and chilly English weather to install more than 100 miles of cable and copper wire across a windswept field near Cambridge. She operated the instruments and analyzed the data, poring over miles of chart paper etched with the inked recordings of galactic radio waves. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd, in 1967, when she spotted the first four light sources with repeated pulses beating a steady rhythm against the background noise of the stars, it was Bell Burnell who realized she'd detected something important. She had discovered the swiftly spinning cores of collapsed stars, whose powerful magnetic fields produce jets of radiation that flash across the sky like the rotating beam of a lighthouse.The objects, called pulsars, are among the most important astronomical finds of the 20th century \u2014 potent tools for testing physics, probing space-time and investigating the dark regions of the universe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Thursday, half a century after her pioneering work, it was announced that Bell Burnell will receive a $3 million Breakthrough Prize, one of the most lucrative and prestigious awards in science. The special award in fundamental physics, given for her scientific achievements and \u201cinspiring leadership,\u201d has only been granted three times before.To Bell Burnell's admirers, the prize is richly deserved and somewhat overdue. In 1974, when a Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of pulsars, Bell Burnell's adviser Antony Hewish was one of the recipients. Bell Burnell was not. No woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics since 1963.\"She represents something very important in our recent history,\u201d said Janna Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University. \u201cShe has tenacity, and ingenuity, and originality of thought, and a long legacy as an astronomer . . . that reaches into all branches of physics. I'm absolutely thrilled.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBright enoughLike the stars of \u201cHidden Figures\u201d and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, Bell Burnell\u2019s personal story embodies the challenges faced by women in scientific fields. Bell Burnell, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1943, had to fight to take science classes after age 12.\u201cThe assumption was that the boys would do science and the girls would do cookery and needlework,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was such a firm assumption that it wasn\u2019t even discussed, so there was no choice in the matter.\u201dBut Bell Burnell would not be denied. She had read her father's astronomy books cover to cover, teaching herself the jargon and grappling with complex concepts until she felt she could comprehend the universe. She complained to her parents, who complained to the school, which ultimately allowed her to attend lab along with two other girls. At the end of the semester, Bell Burnell ranked first in the class.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy her junior year at the University of Glasgow, she was the only woman enrolled in honors physics. Men would whistle and heckle her when she walked into the lecture hall. Blushing only made them louder, so she trained herself to be stoic.When she arrived at Cambridge University for graduate school, Bell Burnell was certain someone had made a mistake admitting her. She was one of two women in her graduate program, and Cambridge was far more affluent than anywhere she had lived before. Both factors, she said, probably contributed to her impostor syndrome \u2014 doubts about her accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud \u2014 \u201calthough, of course, we didn\u2019t know that term then.\u201d\"Surely they're going to realize I'm not bright enough,\u201d she recalled thinking. \u201cBut until they throw me out, I\u2019m going to work my very hardest.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBell Burnell joined Cambridge's radio astronomy department, where her adviser, Hewish, was on the hunt for quasars \u2014 incredibly bright objects in the distant sky whose origins were then unknown.Hewish had designed his own telescope for the task: a four-acre network of copper wires dubbed \u201cInterplanetary Scintillation Array.\u201d The wires would pick up the energy of radio waves streaming down from the cosmos and send an electric pulse to a pen recorder, which marked the signals on rolls of chart paper. The resulting plots resembled the dips and peaks on a cardiogram; studying them was like monitoring the heartbeat of the universe.After construction on the telescope was completed, Hewish assigned Bell Burnell to retrieve and analyze the information it collected. Just before lunch one day in the summer of 1967, the young physicist noticed an \u201cunclassifiable squiggle\u201d on one of her data sheets. It was the kind of detail that others might have disregarded or overlooked; indeed, Hewish initially insisted it was merely interference. But Bell Burnell's fear of flunking made her meticulous, and a lifetime of feeling like an outsider had opened her mind. She remained focused on the squiggle until she could figure it out.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe signal was remarkably regular, pulsing every 1\u2153 seconds. And rather than keeping to a 24-hour schedule \u2014 as would be expected if it was produced by \u201cJoe Doke driving home every day in a badly suppressed car,\u201d Bell Burnell said \u2014 it followed \u201csidereal time,\u201d which governs the movement of the stars. Estimates of its distance pegged it to a spot in the constellation Vulpecula, about 2,000 light-years away.Hewish and Bell Burnell jokingly christened their discovery \u201cLGM-1\" or \u201cLittle Green Man.\u201d They couldn't come up with any explanation for a signal so regular. Why not aliens?Then, on a frigid morning just before Christmas, Bell Burnell noticed a second pulsing signal coming from another part of the cosmos. Seeing the faint smudge on the telescope readout filled her with elation.Story continues below advertisement\"When you get a second one of something it makes the first one so much more believable,\u201d she said. \u201cThis begins to look like a new kind of star of which there\u2019s probably a whole lot in the sky.\"Advertisement'It was my stars'Soon Bell Burnell discovered her third and fourth LGM signals, and in February 1968, the finds were announced via a paper in Nature, one of science's most esteemed journals. Hewish's name was the first listed on the study, Bell Burnell's was second. She was 24.\"The radiation seems to come from local objects within the galaxy,\u201d the scientists wrote. They speculated that it might be associated with a white dwarf, the husk of a star that has burned through all of its nuclear material. Or it could have been a neutron star \u2014 the dark, dense nugget left behind after a stellar explosion in which all the matter of a massive star is collapsed into a space the size of Manhattan.Story continues below advertisementThe existence of neutron stars had been theorized but never demonstrated. Making something so dense would require gravity to overcome the forces that give atoms their structure. \u201cYou'd end up with something that has been crushed beyond all recognition into a state of matter that hasn't been known before,\u201d said Levin, the Barnard astrophysicist.AdvertisementMeanwhile, the Nature paper generated huge amounts of publicity for the researchers. In interviews, journalists would ask Hewish to explain the scientific significance of the discovery, then turn to Bell Burnell \u201cfor what they euphemistically called the 'human interest,' \" she recalled wryly.Reporters wanted to know her bust size and how many boyfriends she had. A photographer asked her to open one extra button on her blouse.Story continues below advertisement\"It was very unpleasant,\u201d Bell Burnell said. \u201cI would have loved to tell them to get lost. But I was still a student. I needed a reference from the laboratory, and they needed the publicity.\u201d So she smiled and claimed to have forgotten her body dimensions. And then she went back to investigating one of the most exciting mysteries in astrophysics.No one had yet figured out what the pulsing signals were. In the attic room above the observatory, she, Hewish and 13 other graduate students \u2014 all men \u2014 eagerly exchanged ideas about the objects' origins.Advertisement\"I loved the excitement of the chase,\u201d she said, \u201ctrying to understand what these things were and why they behaved the way they behaved.\"At the end of 1968, several teams of astronomers reported detecting a regular radio flash coming from the heart of the Crab nebula \u2014 the cloud of gas and dust left behind after a supernova lit up the sky in 1054.This confirmed one of Bell Burnell and Hewish's theories: The signals came from pulsars \u2014 a subset of neutron stars with intense magnetic fields accelerate particles into two powerful beams that blast from either pole. Each time the star spins, the beam briefly becomes visible from Earth, resulting in a periodic, predictable pulse.Bell Burnell earned her PhD \u2014 the pulsar discovery was part of her thesis \u2014 and was working at University College London when, in 1974, a colleague came \u201csteaming\u201d into her office. The Nobel Prize for Physics had just been announced, and her name had not been mentioned.\"I think he expected me to be angry,\u201d Bell Burnell recalled. Yet she was delighted. She hadn't expected to be acknowledged \u2014 graduate students rarely were. But this was the first time the physics Nobel had ever been granted to someone studying the stars.\"Finally the committee recognized there was good physics in astronomy,\u201d she said. \u201cI recognized that it was a huge precedent, and I was rather proud that it was my stars that did it.\"Bell Burnell said she harbors no ill will toward the Nobel committee, pointing out that she's received just about every other honor conceivable: fellow of the Royal Society, president of the Institute of Physics, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. \u201cI get a party almost every year for one thing or another,\u201d she said.But other researchers see her exclusion as an injustice.\"She helped build the array she used to make the observation. She is the one who noticed it. She is the one who argued it's a real signal,\u201d said Feryal \u00d6zel, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona who studies neutron stars. \u201cWhen a graduate student takes that kind of lead in her project, it\u2019s hard to play it down.\"\u00d6zel noted that only two women have received the Nobel Prize in physics, and none in the past half-century. This despite the fact that women researchers have pioneered the field of nanoscience, established the existence of dark matter, explored strange new kinds of particles and helped to map the universe.\"Women are underrepresented,\u201d \u00d6zel said. \u201cI think that it\u2019s great [Bell Burnell] made her peace with it. But it is not something we as a community today want to see happen.\"Cosmic lighthousesThe realization that pulsars exist \u201cwas an incredible discovery,\u201d said Alice Harding, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. \u201cBut I don't think anybody understood then how important pulsars were going to become.\"In the past five decades, an extraordinary array of astronomical discoveries has emerged from research on pulsars. Their regularity makes them ideal time keepers, more precise even than atomic clocks. Their occasional twinkle revealed that there was stuff in the dark and seemingly empty space between stars \u2014 helping scientists to figure out what constitutes the interstellar medium. The first confirmed exoplanets were discovered orbiting a pulsar in the constellation Virgo, and the extreme conditions at their centers have enabled some of the most stringent tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity.The detection of pulsars suggested that another hypothetical phenomenon \u2014 a black hole \u2014 might also be real. If the laws of physics allowed a dying star to fall in on itself until its very atoms were smothered, why couldn't the collapse go farther, until an entire star's worth of matter is packed into a single, invisible point?Observations of Cygnus X-1, a powerful source of X-rays in our galaxy, revealed that the black-hole theorists were right: There are bodies so dense that their gravity is powerful enough to prevent even light from escaping.Pulsars can also serve as \u201ccosmic lighthouses\u201d \u2014 important points of consistency in the vast and ever-changing cosmos. When the Golden Records \u2014 twin messages conveying sounds and images about life on Earth \u2014 launched on board the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, their covers bore an image showing the location of the sun relative to 14 pulsars. If alien explorers or space-faring humans came across the records sometime in the distant future, scientists hoped the pulsar \u201cmaps\u201d would help identify the far-flung planet from which the spacecraft came.Back on Earth, Bell Burnell's career was sometimes stymied by the strict social conventions of her era. Her family moved frequently for her husband's job. Each time she arrived in a new city, she would have to write a \u201cbegging letter\u201d to the nearest observatory asking for work. She wound up with a \u201cfantastic miscellany of jobs,\u201d studying the universe in every conceivable wavelength of light: X-ray, gamma ray, radio wave, infrared. But each time she worked her way to a top position within an organization, the Burnells would move, and she'd have to start over again.\"Do you have a game called snakes and ladders?\u201d she said. \u201cThat was my career.\"It was a constant battle to keep doing science. Child care was hard to find, because women in those days were expected to give up their professions once they became wives and mothers. Male colleagues often spoke over her, or dismissed her ideas, or diminished her accomplishments.\"I wasn\u2019t alone in that either,\u201d Bell Burnell said. \u201cI knew a number of other women in science who were equally frustrated and concerned.\"In 2005, Bell Burnell joined fellow female senior scientists to establish the Athena SWAN award, which is given to institutions that take demonstrable and productive action to address gender inequality.In 2011, Britain's chief medical office announced that medical schools could receive certain government research funding only if they held one of these awards.Bell Burnell said she was \u201cdelighted\u201d to receive the special Breakthrough Prize. But she won't be keeping any of the award money.\u201cI don\u2019t need a Porsche or Ferrari,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t have an affluent lifestyle.\u201dInstead, the funds will go to creating scholarships for women, underrepresented minorities and refugees who want to study physics. The funds will be administered by Britain's Institute of Physics.\u201cI reckon I discovered pulsars in large part because I was a minority person [at Cambridge],\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I have a strong suspicion that other minority people might have similar feelings and work equally hard and discover things.\" Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars \u2014 some of the most exotic objects in the universe \u2014 and changed astrophysics. She made the discovery, but a man got the Nobel. A half-century later, she\u2019s won a $3 million prize.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut apologizes for \u2018fake news\u2019 claim he grew 3\u00bd inches in space (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3307",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/09/in-space-everyone-grows-but-this-japanese-astronaut-shot-up-three-and-a-half-inches/",
        "text": "Japanese\u00a0astronaut Norishige Kanai told a tall tale.He\u00a0said Monday on Twitter\u00a0that he grew 3\u00bd inches since arriving at the International Space Station on Dec.\u00a019.\u00a0Weightlessness has that effect: Without gravitational force compressing\u00a0the spine, fluid between the discs fluctuates as they temporarily expand, like a coiled spring unspooled from the top. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat kind of growth would have been a little unusual.\u00a0NASA has said growing an inch or two in space is fairly normal for space walkers. Nearly double that? Kind of a stretch.\u201cGood morning, everyone. Today I share some serious news. Since coming to space, I have grown 9 centimeters. This is the most I\u2019ve grown in\u00a0three weeks since junior high school,\u201d Kanai wrote.Story continues below advertisementBut skepticism from a Russian colleague\u00a0on board led Kanai to remeasure himself, and he found the more accurate spurt: two centimeters, or less than an inch. In his retraction later posted on Twitter, he called his inaccurate announcement \u201cfake news,\u201d The Japan Times reported.AdvertisementStill, Kanai's initial viral tweet ignited the public's interest about the surprising ways that space\u00a0affects the human body, and important context about how extraordinarily ordinary it is for the bodies of astronauts to elongate\u00a0in space.Floating in zero gravity looks effortless and fun, but there are some health risks associated with space travel. (The Washington Post)It even happens on Earth every night. Humans regularly grow and shrink in a similar way, said J.D. Polk, NASA\u2019s chief health and medical officer. As you lie down to sleep, your spine decompresses by as much as half a centimeter. It compresses again while you are in a standing or sitting position. So the phenomenon is more earthbound than it would first seem.Story continues below advertisementWhile\u00a0growth is temporary and astronauts revert to their normal height when they slip the bonds of space and return\u00a0home, the height difference must be accounted for when figuring the\u00a0dimensions of spacesuits, stations and vehicles.AdvertisementSpace is at a premium in, well, space, with each inch scrutinized to pack in instruments, tools, plants and insects for experiments and other essentials such as food and water. That means the living and working quarters are tight. On the Russian Soyuz TMA spacecraft, the vehicle used to get astronauts to and from the ISS, personnel are limited to 6 feet 3 inches so they can fit inside the seats. That means anyone at that limit on Earth would be restricted from ISS operations.\u201cI am a little worried I won\u2019t fit in my seat on the return trip on Soyuz,\u201d Kanai said in his initial tweet, when he thought he grew much taller than he did. Polk said the spacesuits and seat liners inside the spacecraft were designed with fluctuating bodies in mind, including expanded spines. He and others are not concerned about Kanai squeezing into the seat, each one fitted with a liner customized for and molded to the body of each astronaut and taken aboard the Soyuz to ensure a tight fit during\u00a0the violent reintroduction to gravity.\u304a\u306f\u3088\u3046\u3054\u3056\u3044\u307e\u3059\uff01\u5e74\u306e\u59cb\u307e\u308a\u306b\u3042\u305f\u308a\u3001\u3044\u3064\u3082\u306f\u305f\u305f\u307e\u308c\u3066\u3044\u308b\u300c\u306e\u308c\u3093\u300d\u3092\u51fa\u3057\u3066\u307e\u3059\u3002\u65e5\u672c\u306e\u300c\u304d\u307c\u3046\u300d\u306f\u3001365\u65e5\u5e74\u4e2d\u7121\u4f11\u3067\u958b\u696d\u4e2d\u3002\u3082\u3046\u3059\u305010\u5468\u5e74\u3067\u3059\uff01\u5b87\u5b99\u5b9f\u9a13\u306e\u3054\u7528\u306f\u3001\u3044\u3064\u3067\u3082\u627f\u3063\u3066\u3044\u307e\u3059\u306e\u3067\u3001\u305c\u3072\u3054\u5229\u7528\u304f\u3060\u3055\u3044\u3002 pic.twitter.com/Fvb2G0LKLB\u2014 \u91d1\u4e95 \u5ba3\u8302 (@Astro_Kanai) January 5, 2018\n\n\u201cTo help absorb the shock of landing, explosive charges fired and instantly pushed our seats forward so that our faces were very close to the instrument panel,\u201d astronaut Ron Garan wrote\u00a0in October 2011, describing reentry from the Soyuz vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce the vehicle reenters Earth\u2019s atmosphere, astronauts are again compressed to their normal height,\u00a0Polk said.Taller space program hopefuls had their dreams dashed in earlier decades.\u00a0The country\u2019s first astronauts, the legendary Mercury 7 crew including John Glenn and Alan Shepard, were all under 6 feet \u2014\u00a0it would have been too much for anyone taller inside the claustrophobic Mercury capsule. Later recruits could exceed that limit in the space shuttle program, though some flirted with the restriction among the celestial bodies.\u201cAccording to my quick calculations here, I seem to have grown about an inch or so. So I\u2019m now too tall to fly in space,\u201d said 6-foot-3 Columbia payload commander Richard Hieb in July 1994, after measuring himself as part of a medical experiment. \u201cAnd that\u2019s without slipper-socks.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile height differences are fleeting, NASA scientists and researchers\u00a0are still learning about the longer-term effects of zero gravity on the human body, a vital lesson if humans reach beyond the moon to colonize Mars and other planets. The agency\u00a0got a rare opportunity in 2015 when astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year on the ISS, a record, providing researchers a wealth of metrics. His twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut, was studied so scientists could compare notes on terrestrial and extraterrestrial effects on the mind and body.There are a host of concerns, such as plaque buildup in arteries and how shifts in bodily fluids affect eyesight. Vision problems are a common issue among astronauts \u2014 gravity on Earth tends to draw fluids downward, but that does not occur in space, and scientists believe those fluids fluctuate and build in the skull and inflame the optic nerve.The strangest star in the sky finally has an explanation for its flickerAn exam of John Phillips, an astronaut on the ISS in 2005, determined that the backs of his eyes were flatter and pushed his retinas forward. In six months, his eyesight went from\u00a020/20 to 20/100. His vision later improved to 20/50 and remained there, even years later.\u00a0It\u2019s a battle against biology: \u201cYour body wasn\u2019t made to pump blood away from your brain,\u201d Polk said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut research yielded from the Kellys and others aboard the ISS suggest a resiliency in the human body, Polk said. Loss of bone density and vision issues appear to plateau after some time as the body, as with all life, bends toward homeostasis.And yet, some dangers will always be present and risks only reduced, chief among them radiation from the sun and galactic cosmic rays. A radiation detector aboard the Mars rover Curiosity concluded that a human would be bombarded with a minimum of 0.66 sieverts during a round-trip excursion to Mars, or the equivalent of receiving a CT body scan every five to six days. That would bolster the risk of cancer and other ailments.Earth\u2019s magnetic field helps protect humans from the sun\u2019s radiation. Earthlings on average are subjected to a perfectly tolerable 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sieverts) daily. But that isn\u2019t true for space, or for Mars. Cosmic rays penetrate just about every object, including astronauts, and the best way to reduce exposure is to get to your destination sooner, with bigger and faster engines. So plan accordingly.A trio of U.S., Japanese and Russian astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on Dec. 19. (Reuters)Read more:China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit.Nearby asteroid is surprisingly big, as seen by telescope that survived Hurricane MariaA \u2018UFO sighting\u2019 briefly freaked out the West Coast. There was an earthly explanation. The astronaut's inaccurate claim sparked interest in the extraordinary ways space affects the body. Astronaut apologizes for \u2018fake news\u2019 claim he grew 3\u00bd inches in space",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut apologizes for \u2018fake news\u2019 claim he grew 3\u00bd inches in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3308",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/09/in-space-everyone-grows-but-this-japanese-astronaut-shot-up-three-and-a-half-inches/",
        "text": "Japanese\u00a0astronaut Norishige Kanai told a tall tale.He\u00a0said Monday on Twitter\u00a0that he grew 3\u00bd inches since arriving at the International Space Station on Dec.\u00a019.\u00a0Weightlessness has that effect: Without gravitational force compressing\u00a0the spine, fluid between the discs fluctuates as they temporarily expand, like a coiled spring unspooled from the top. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat kind of growth would have been a little unusual.\u00a0NASA has said growing an inch or two in space is fairly normal for space walkers. Nearly double that? Kind of a stretch.\u201cGood morning, everyone. Today I share some serious news. Since coming to space, I have grown 9 centimeters. This is the most I\u2019ve grown in\u00a0three weeks since junior high school,\u201d Kanai wrote.Story continues below advertisementBut skepticism from a Russian colleague\u00a0on board led Kanai to remeasure himself, and he found the more accurate spurt: two centimeters, or less than an inch. In his retraction later posted on Twitter, he called his inaccurate announcement \u201cfake news,\u201d The Japan Times reported.AdvertisementStill, Kanai's initial viral tweet ignited the public's interest about the surprising ways that space\u00a0affects the human body, and important context about how extraordinarily ordinary it is for the bodies of astronauts to elongate\u00a0in space.Floating in zero gravity looks effortless and fun, but there are some health risks associated with space travel. (The Washington Post)It even happens on Earth every night. Humans regularly grow and shrink in a similar way, said J.D. Polk, NASA\u2019s chief health and medical officer. As you lie down to sleep, your spine decompresses by as much as half a centimeter. It compresses again while you are in a standing or sitting position. So the phenomenon is more earthbound than it would first seem.Story continues below advertisementWhile\u00a0growth is temporary and astronauts revert to their normal height when they slip the bonds of space and return\u00a0home, the height difference must be accounted for when figuring the\u00a0dimensions of spacesuits, stations and vehicles.AdvertisementSpace is at a premium in, well, space, with each inch scrutinized to pack in instruments, tools, plants and insects for experiments and other essentials such as food and water. That means the living and working quarters are tight. On the Russian Soyuz TMA spacecraft, the vehicle used to get astronauts to and from the ISS, personnel are limited to 6 feet 3 inches so they can fit inside the seats. That means anyone at that limit on Earth would be restricted from ISS operations.\u201cI am a little worried I won\u2019t fit in my seat on the return trip on Soyuz,\u201d Kanai said in his initial tweet, when he thought he grew much taller than he did. Polk said the spacesuits and seat liners inside the spacecraft were designed with fluctuating bodies in mind, including expanded spines. He and others are not concerned about Kanai squeezing into the seat, each one fitted with a liner customized for and molded to the body of each astronaut and taken aboard the Soyuz to ensure a tight fit during\u00a0the violent reintroduction to gravity.\u304a\u306f\u3088\u3046\u3054\u3056\u3044\u307e\u3059\uff01\u5e74\u306e\u59cb\u307e\u308a\u306b\u3042\u305f\u308a\u3001\u3044\u3064\u3082\u306f\u305f\u305f\u307e\u308c\u3066\u3044\u308b\u300c\u306e\u308c\u3093\u300d\u3092\u51fa\u3057\u3066\u307e\u3059\u3002\u65e5\u672c\u306e\u300c\u304d\u307c\u3046\u300d\u306f\u3001365\u65e5\u5e74\u4e2d\u7121\u4f11\u3067\u958b\u696d\u4e2d\u3002\u3082\u3046\u3059\u305010\u5468\u5e74\u3067\u3059\uff01\u5b87\u5b99\u5b9f\u9a13\u306e\u3054\u7528\u306f\u3001\u3044\u3064\u3067\u3082\u627f\u3063\u3066\u3044\u307e\u3059\u306e\u3067\u3001\u305c\u3072\u3054\u5229\u7528\u304f\u3060\u3055\u3044\u3002 pic.twitter.com/Fvb2G0LKLB\u2014 \u91d1\u4e95 \u5ba3\u8302 (@Astro_Kanai) January 5, 2018\n\n\u201cTo help absorb the shock of landing, explosive charges fired and instantly pushed our seats forward so that our faces were very close to the instrument panel,\u201d astronaut Ron Garan wrote\u00a0in October 2011, describing reentry from the Soyuz vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce the vehicle reenters Earth\u2019s atmosphere, astronauts are again compressed to their normal height,\u00a0Polk said.Taller space program hopefuls had their dreams dashed in earlier decades.\u00a0The country\u2019s first astronauts, the legendary Mercury 7 crew including John Glenn and Alan Shepard, were all under 6 feet \u2014\u00a0it would have been too much for anyone taller inside the claustrophobic Mercury capsule. Later recruits could exceed that limit in the space shuttle program, though some flirted with the restriction among the celestial bodies.\u201cAccording to my quick calculations here, I seem to have grown about an inch or so. So I\u2019m now too tall to fly in space,\u201d said 6-foot-3 Columbia payload commander Richard Hieb in July 1994, after measuring himself as part of a medical experiment. \u201cAnd that\u2019s without slipper-socks.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile height differences are fleeting, NASA scientists and researchers\u00a0are still learning about the longer-term effects of zero gravity on the human body, a vital lesson if humans reach beyond the moon to colonize Mars and other planets. The agency\u00a0got a rare opportunity in 2015 when astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year on the ISS, a record, providing researchers a wealth of metrics. His twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut, was studied so scientists could compare notes on terrestrial and extraterrestrial effects on the mind and body.There are a host of concerns, such as plaque buildup in arteries and how shifts in bodily fluids affect eyesight. Vision problems are a common issue among astronauts \u2014 gravity on Earth tends to draw fluids downward, but that does not occur in space, and scientists believe those fluids fluctuate and build in the skull and inflame the optic nerve.The strangest star in the sky finally has an explanation for its flickerAn exam of John Phillips, an astronaut on the ISS in 2005, determined that the backs of his eyes were flatter and pushed his retinas forward. In six months, his eyesight went from\u00a020/20 to 20/100. His vision later improved to 20/50 and remained there, even years later.\u00a0It\u2019s a battle against biology: \u201cYour body wasn\u2019t made to pump blood away from your brain,\u201d Polk said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut research yielded from the Kellys and others aboard the ISS suggest a resiliency in the human body, Polk said. Loss of bone density and vision issues appear to plateau after some time as the body, as with all life, bends toward homeostasis.And yet, some dangers will always be present and risks only reduced, chief among them radiation from the sun and galactic cosmic rays. A radiation detector aboard the Mars rover Curiosity concluded that a human would be bombarded with a minimum of 0.66 sieverts during a round-trip excursion to Mars, or the equivalent of receiving a CT body scan every five to six days. That would bolster the risk of cancer and other ailments.Earth\u2019s magnetic field helps protect humans from the sun\u2019s radiation. Earthlings on average are subjected to a perfectly tolerable 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sieverts) daily. But that isn\u2019t true for space, or for Mars. Cosmic rays penetrate just about every object, including astronauts, and the best way to reduce exposure is to get to your destination sooner, with bigger and faster engines. So plan accordingly.A trio of U.S., Japanese and Russian astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on Dec. 19. (Reuters)Read more:China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit.Nearby asteroid is surprisingly big, as seen by telescope that survived Hurricane MariaA \u2018UFO sighting\u2019 briefly freaked out the West Coast. There was an earthly explanation. The astronaut's inaccurate claim sparked interest in the extraordinary ways space affects the body. Astronaut apologizes for \u2018fake news\u2019 claim he grew 3\u00bd inches in space",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut apologizes for \u2018fake news\u2019 claim he grew 3\u00bd inches in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3309",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/09/in-space-everyone-grows-but-this-japanese-astronaut-shot-up-three-and-a-half-inches/",
        "text": "Japanese\u00a0astronaut Norishige Kanai told a tall tale.He\u00a0said Monday on Twitter\u00a0that he grew 3\u00bd inches since arriving at the International Space Station on Dec.\u00a019.\u00a0Weightlessness has that effect: Without gravitational force compressing\u00a0the spine, fluid between the discs fluctuates as they temporarily expand, like a coiled spring unspooled from the top. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat kind of growth would have been a little unusual.\u00a0NASA has said growing an inch or two in space is fairly normal for space walkers. Nearly double that? Kind of a stretch.\u201cGood morning, everyone. Today I share some serious news. Since coming to space, I have grown 9 centimeters. This is the most I\u2019ve grown in\u00a0three weeks since junior high school,\u201d Kanai wrote.Story continues below advertisementBut skepticism from a Russian colleague\u00a0on board led Kanai to remeasure himself, and he found the more accurate spurt: two centimeters, or less than an inch. In his retraction later posted on Twitter, he called his inaccurate announcement \u201cfake news,\u201d The Japan Times reported.AdvertisementStill, Kanai's initial viral tweet ignited the public's interest about the surprising ways that space\u00a0affects the human body, and important context about how extraordinarily ordinary it is for the bodies of astronauts to elongate\u00a0in space.Floating in zero gravity looks effortless and fun, but there are some health risks associated with space travel. (The Washington Post)It even happens on Earth every night. Humans regularly grow and shrink in a similar way, said J.D. Polk, NASA\u2019s chief health and medical officer. As you lie down to sleep, your spine decompresses by as much as half a centimeter. It compresses again while you are in a standing or sitting position. So the phenomenon is more earthbound than it would first seem.Story continues below advertisementWhile\u00a0growth is temporary and astronauts revert to their normal height when they slip the bonds of space and return\u00a0home, the height difference must be accounted for when figuring the\u00a0dimensions of spacesuits, stations and vehicles.AdvertisementSpace is at a premium in, well, space, with each inch scrutinized to pack in instruments, tools, plants and insects for experiments and other essentials such as food and water. That means the living and working quarters are tight. On the Russian Soyuz TMA spacecraft, the vehicle used to get astronauts to and from the ISS, personnel are limited to 6 feet 3 inches so they can fit inside the seats. That means anyone at that limit on Earth would be restricted from ISS operations.\u201cI am a little worried I won\u2019t fit in my seat on the return trip on Soyuz,\u201d Kanai said in his initial tweet, when he thought he grew much taller than he did. Polk said the spacesuits and seat liners inside the spacecraft were designed with fluctuating bodies in mind, including expanded spines. He and others are not concerned about Kanai squeezing into the seat, each one fitted with a liner customized for and molded to the body of each astronaut and taken aboard the Soyuz to ensure a tight fit during\u00a0the violent reintroduction to gravity.\u304a\u306f\u3088\u3046\u3054\u3056\u3044\u307e\u3059\uff01\u5e74\u306e\u59cb\u307e\u308a\u306b\u3042\u305f\u308a\u3001\u3044\u3064\u3082\u306f\u305f\u305f\u307e\u308c\u3066\u3044\u308b\u300c\u306e\u308c\u3093\u300d\u3092\u51fa\u3057\u3066\u307e\u3059\u3002\u65e5\u672c\u306e\u300c\u304d\u307c\u3046\u300d\u306f\u3001365\u65e5\u5e74\u4e2d\u7121\u4f11\u3067\u958b\u696d\u4e2d\u3002\u3082\u3046\u3059\u305010\u5468\u5e74\u3067\u3059\uff01\u5b87\u5b99\u5b9f\u9a13\u306e\u3054\u7528\u306f\u3001\u3044\u3064\u3067\u3082\u627f\u3063\u3066\u3044\u307e\u3059\u306e\u3067\u3001\u305c\u3072\u3054\u5229\u7528\u304f\u3060\u3055\u3044\u3002 pic.twitter.com/Fvb2G0LKLB\u2014 \u91d1\u4e95 \u5ba3\u8302 (@Astro_Kanai) January 5, 2018\n\n\u201cTo help absorb the shock of landing, explosive charges fired and instantly pushed our seats forward so that our faces were very close to the instrument panel,\u201d astronaut Ron Garan wrote\u00a0in October 2011, describing reentry from the Soyuz vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce the vehicle reenters Earth\u2019s atmosphere, astronauts are again compressed to their normal height,\u00a0Polk said.Taller space program hopefuls had their dreams dashed in earlier decades.\u00a0The country\u2019s first astronauts, the legendary Mercury 7 crew including John Glenn and Alan Shepard, were all under 6 feet \u2014\u00a0it would have been too much for anyone taller inside the claustrophobic Mercury capsule. Later recruits could exceed that limit in the space shuttle program, though some flirted with the restriction among the celestial bodies.\u201cAccording to my quick calculations here, I seem to have grown about an inch or so. So I\u2019m now too tall to fly in space,\u201d said 6-foot-3 Columbia payload commander Richard Hieb in July 1994, after measuring himself as part of a medical experiment. \u201cAnd that\u2019s without slipper-socks.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile height differences are fleeting, NASA scientists and researchers\u00a0are still learning about the longer-term effects of zero gravity on the human body, a vital lesson if humans reach beyond the moon to colonize Mars and other planets. The agency\u00a0got a rare opportunity in 2015 when astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year on the ISS, a record, providing researchers a wealth of metrics. His twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut, was studied so scientists could compare notes on terrestrial and extraterrestrial effects on the mind and body.There are a host of concerns, such as plaque buildup in arteries and how shifts in bodily fluids affect eyesight. Vision problems are a common issue among astronauts \u2014 gravity on Earth tends to draw fluids downward, but that does not occur in space, and scientists believe those fluids fluctuate and build in the skull and inflame the optic nerve.The strangest star in the sky finally has an explanation for its flickerAn exam of John Phillips, an astronaut on the ISS in 2005, determined that the backs of his eyes were flatter and pushed his retinas forward. In six months, his eyesight went from\u00a020/20 to 20/100. His vision later improved to 20/50 and remained there, even years later.\u00a0It\u2019s a battle against biology: \u201cYour body wasn\u2019t made to pump blood away from your brain,\u201d Polk said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut research yielded from the Kellys and others aboard the ISS suggest a resiliency in the human body, Polk said. Loss of bone density and vision issues appear to plateau after some time as the body, as with all life, bends toward homeostasis.And yet, some dangers will always be present and risks only reduced, chief among them radiation from the sun and galactic cosmic rays. A radiation detector aboard the Mars rover Curiosity concluded that a human would be bombarded with a minimum of 0.66 sieverts during a round-trip excursion to Mars, or the equivalent of receiving a CT body scan every five to six days. That would bolster the risk of cancer and other ailments.Earth\u2019s magnetic field helps protect humans from the sun\u2019s radiation. Earthlings on average are subjected to a perfectly tolerable 10 microsieverts (0.00001 sieverts) daily. But that isn\u2019t true for space, or for Mars. Cosmic rays penetrate just about every object, including astronauts, and the best way to reduce exposure is to get to your destination sooner, with bigger and faster engines. So plan accordingly.A trio of U.S., Japanese and Russian astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on Dec. 19. (Reuters)Read more:China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit.Nearby asteroid is surprisingly big, as seen by telescope that survived Hurricane MariaA \u2018UFO sighting\u2019 briefly freaked out the West Coast. There was an earthly explanation. The astronaut's inaccurate claim sparked interest in the extraordinary ways space affects the body. Astronaut apologizes for \u2018fake news\u2019 claim he grew 3\u00bd inches in space",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Smiled, With a Mysterious Wave Across Its Atmosphere (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3310",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/science/venus-wave-akatsuki.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s Akatsuki spacecraft detected what scientists called a gravity wave above the solar system\u2019s second planet, but it hasn\u2019t been seen since. Japan\u2019s Akatsuki spacecraft detected what scientists called a gravity wave above the solar system\u2019s second planet, but it hasn\u2019t been seen since. For a few days, Venus smiled \u2014 sideways.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Smiled, With a Mysterious Wave Across Its Atmosphere (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3311",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/science/venus-wave-akatsuki.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s Akatsuki spacecraft detected what scientists called a gravity wave above the solar system\u2019s second planet, but it hasn\u2019t been seen since. Japan\u2019s Akatsuki spacecraft detected what scientists called a gravity wave above the solar system\u2019s second planet, but it hasn\u2019t been seen since. For a few days, Venus smiled \u2014 sideways.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Smiled, With a Mysterious Wave Across Its Atmosphere (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3312",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/science/venus-wave-akatsuki.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s Akatsuki spacecraft detected what scientists called a gravity wave above the solar system\u2019s second planet, but it hasn\u2019t been seen since. Japan\u2019s Akatsuki spacecraft detected what scientists called a gravity wave above the solar system\u2019s second planet, but it hasn\u2019t been seen since. For a few days, Venus smiled \u2014 sideways.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3313",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/08/12/bennu-asteroid-could-hit-earth-yet-unlikely/",
        "text": "It\u2019s not the plot of another doomsday movie. Yet there is a pending, albeit unlikely, threat to life as we know it: an asteroid approaching Earth.Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction, on track to come very close to Earth in September of 2135. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut not to panic, scientists with NASA said Wednesday. Though Bennu will come within half the distance of the moon, the odds of the asteroid colliding with Earth in the next century and causing Armageddon-type of destruction are still very low.\u201cEven though there is no possibility whatsoever of an impact during that encounter, Bennu is going to be fairly close to the Earth,\u201d said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, a NASA center that calculates asteroid and comet orbits and their odds of impact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough researchers believe Bennu will not impact Earth, they now face the challenge of deciphering how our planet\u2019s gravity will alter the asteroid\u2019s path around the sun, NASA scientists said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.Scientists noted there is small possibility that the asteroid could pass through what\u2019s known as a \u201cgravitational keyhole\u201d that could put it in en route to Earth at a later date in the 22nd century. A gravitational keyhole is a tiny region in space where a planet\u2019s gravity can tweak the trajectory of a passing asteroid and put it on a path to collide with it in the future.Farnocchia said that although recent findings show the odds of impact have slightly increased \u2014 from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1,750 over the next century \u2014 it \u201cdoes not represent significant change,\u201d or a reason to worry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFarnocchia explained that scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu\u2019s path thanks to data collected by NASA\u2019s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which orbited and studied the asteroid for over two years.\u201cOverall the situation has improved,\u201d Farnocchia, the lead author of a study published Wednesday, told reporters in a conference call. \u201cI am not any more concerned about Bennu than I was before; the impact probability remains very small.\u201dIn the study, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to better understand Bennu\u2019s movements through 2300, improving scientists\u2019 ability to determine the probability of impacting Earth and predict the orbits of other asteroids.Story continues below advertisementUsing NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network of giant radio antennas that support interplanetary spacecraft missions and computer models, scientists were able to determine Bennu\u2019s overall probability of striking is about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057 percent.)AdvertisementLooking at it from a glass-half-full perspective, it means there is a 99.94 percent probability that Bennu will not hit our planet.Scientists also calculated the day with the highest risk of collision: Sept. 24, 2182, with a probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037 percent) \u2014 which is still lower than the overall probability of impact through 2300.The potentially hazardous asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Team, a program that works on detection and tracking, and has been closely observed with 580 ground-based \u201castrometric observations,\u201d mainly made by optical and radar telescopes through 2018, according to the study published in Icarus Journal.Story continues below advertisementSince its discovery, Bennu has had three close encounters with Earth, in 1999, 2005 and 2011, during which two radar stations collected data of the asteroid\u2019s measurements.AdvertisementAlthough the chances of it colliding with Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another called 1950 DA, NASA said in a news release.Researchers stated that the most pressing threat for Earth from space objects are hazardous asteroids that are undetected. However, they said they have detected about 60 percent of those similar in size to Bennu.In 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to fly in close proximity to Bennu to gather information about its size, shape, mass, and composition, while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory to evaluate its potential danger.Story continues below advertisementAfter a 27-month-long journey, OSIRIS-REx arrived in the asteroid\u2019s orbit in 2018 and spent two years closely studying the object, before coming back to earth on May 10 of this year.Advertisement\u201cThe OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,\u201d said Farnocchia. \u201cWe\u2019ve never modeled an asteroid\u2019s trajectory to this precision before.\u201dThe spacecraft also scooped up a sample of rocks and dust from the asteroid\u2019s surface, which it will drop to Earth two years from now, on Sept. 24, 2023, landing in Utah\u2019s Great Salt Lake Desert.NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.\u201cThe orbital data from this mission helped us better appreciate Bennu\u2019s impact chances over the next couple of centuries and our overall understanding of potentially hazardous asteroids \u2014 an incredible result,\u201d said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and professor at the University of Arizona.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe spacecraft is now returning home, carrying a precious sample from this fascinating ancient object that will help us better understand not only the history of the solar system but also the role of sunlight in altering Bennu\u2019s orbit since we will measure the asteroid\u2019s thermal properties at unprecedented scales in laboratories on Earth,\u201d he said, according to the news release.AdvertisementA week after the spacecraft entered its first orbit around Bennu, on Dec. 31, 2018, the mission\u2019s team came to the surprise realization that the asteroid was releasing small pieces of rock into space.Team members also were astonished to find that Bennu is littered with boulders, according to a NASA statement in May.Story continues below advertisementOSIRIS-REx is not the only spacecraft from Earth exploring an asteroid. Hayabusa2, launched by Japan\u2019s space agency in 2014, began orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in 2018 and in 2020 successfully completed its mission to collect samples and return them to Earth \u2014 according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.Traveling at approximately 600 miles per hour, Bennu would unleash the energy of more than a billion tons of TNS if it were to crash into Earth, according to NASA\u2019s calculations.AdvertisementThe resulting damage depends on a number of factors and specific circumstances, including location and angle of entry into our atmosphere, but it could create a crater three to six miles in diameter, said Lindley Johnson, NASA\u2019s planetary defense officer. The area of devastation would be much bigger: as much as 100 times the size of the crater.If an object Bennu\u2019s size hit the Eastern Seaboard, it \u201cwould pretty much devastate things up and down the coast,\u201d he told reporters.Read more:NASA gives all clear: Earth safe from asteroid for 100 yearsNASA says it collected a large sample from the asteroid Bennu. Maybe too large. Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction. The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero",
        "author": "Paulina Villegas"
    },
    {
        "title": "The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3314",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/08/12/bennu-asteroid-could-hit-earth-yet-unlikely/",
        "text": "It\u2019s not the plot of another doomsday movie. Yet there is a pending, albeit unlikely, threat to life as we know it: an asteroid approaching Earth.Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction, on track to come very close to Earth in September of 2135. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut not to panic, scientists with NASA said Wednesday. Though Bennu will come within half the distance of the moon, the odds of the asteroid colliding with Earth in the next century and causing Armageddon-type of destruction are still very low.\u201cEven though there is no possibility whatsoever of an impact during that encounter, Bennu is going to be fairly close to the Earth,\u201d said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, a NASA center that calculates asteroid and comet orbits and their odds of impact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough researchers believe Bennu will not impact Earth, they now face the challenge of deciphering how our planet\u2019s gravity will alter the asteroid\u2019s path around the sun, NASA scientists said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.Scientists noted there is small possibility that the asteroid could pass through what\u2019s known as a \u201cgravitational keyhole\u201d that could put it in en route to Earth at a later date in the 22nd century. A gravitational keyhole is a tiny region in space where a planet\u2019s gravity can tweak the trajectory of a passing asteroid and put it on a path to collide with it in the future.Farnocchia said that although recent findings show the odds of impact have slightly increased \u2014 from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1,750 over the next century \u2014 it \u201cdoes not represent significant change,\u201d or a reason to worry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFarnocchia explained that scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu\u2019s path thanks to data collected by NASA\u2019s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which orbited and studied the asteroid for over two years.\u201cOverall the situation has improved,\u201d Farnocchia, the lead author of a study published Wednesday, told reporters in a conference call. \u201cI am not any more concerned about Bennu than I was before; the impact probability remains very small.\u201dIn the study, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to better understand Bennu\u2019s movements through 2300, improving scientists\u2019 ability to determine the probability of impacting Earth and predict the orbits of other asteroids.Story continues below advertisementUsing NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network of giant radio antennas that support interplanetary spacecraft missions and computer models, scientists were able to determine Bennu\u2019s overall probability of striking is about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057 percent.)AdvertisementLooking at it from a glass-half-full perspective, it means there is a 99.94 percent probability that Bennu will not hit our planet.Scientists also calculated the day with the highest risk of collision: Sept. 24, 2182, with a probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037 percent) \u2014 which is still lower than the overall probability of impact through 2300.The potentially hazardous asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Team, a program that works on detection and tracking, and has been closely observed with 580 ground-based \u201castrometric observations,\u201d mainly made by optical and radar telescopes through 2018, according to the study published in Icarus Journal.Story continues below advertisementSince its discovery, Bennu has had three close encounters with Earth, in 1999, 2005 and 2011, during which two radar stations collected data of the asteroid\u2019s measurements.AdvertisementAlthough the chances of it colliding with Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another called 1950 DA, NASA said in a news release.Researchers stated that the most pressing threat for Earth from space objects are hazardous asteroids that are undetected. However, they said they have detected about 60 percent of those similar in size to Bennu.In 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to fly in close proximity to Bennu to gather information about its size, shape, mass, and composition, while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory to evaluate its potential danger.Story continues below advertisementAfter a 27-month-long journey, OSIRIS-REx arrived in the asteroid\u2019s orbit in 2018 and spent two years closely studying the object, before coming back to earth on May 10 of this year.Advertisement\u201cThe OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,\u201d said Farnocchia. \u201cWe\u2019ve never modeled an asteroid\u2019s trajectory to this precision before.\u201dThe spacecraft also scooped up a sample of rocks and dust from the asteroid\u2019s surface, which it will drop to Earth two years from now, on Sept. 24, 2023, landing in Utah\u2019s Great Salt Lake Desert.NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.\u201cThe orbital data from this mission helped us better appreciate Bennu\u2019s impact chances over the next couple of centuries and our overall understanding of potentially hazardous asteroids \u2014 an incredible result,\u201d said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and professor at the University of Arizona.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe spacecraft is now returning home, carrying a precious sample from this fascinating ancient object that will help us better understand not only the history of the solar system but also the role of sunlight in altering Bennu\u2019s orbit since we will measure the asteroid\u2019s thermal properties at unprecedented scales in laboratories on Earth,\u201d he said, according to the news release.AdvertisementA week after the spacecraft entered its first orbit around Bennu, on Dec. 31, 2018, the mission\u2019s team came to the surprise realization that the asteroid was releasing small pieces of rock into space.Team members also were astonished to find that Bennu is littered with boulders, according to a NASA statement in May.Story continues below advertisementOSIRIS-REx is not the only spacecraft from Earth exploring an asteroid. Hayabusa2, launched by Japan\u2019s space agency in 2014, began orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in 2018 and in 2020 successfully completed its mission to collect samples and return them to Earth \u2014 according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.Traveling at approximately 600 miles per hour, Bennu would unleash the energy of more than a billion tons of TNS if it were to crash into Earth, according to NASA\u2019s calculations.AdvertisementThe resulting damage depends on a number of factors and specific circumstances, including location and angle of entry into our atmosphere, but it could create a crater three to six miles in diameter, said Lindley Johnson, NASA\u2019s planetary defense officer. The area of devastation would be much bigger: as much as 100 times the size of the crater.If an object Bennu\u2019s size hit the Eastern Seaboard, it \u201cwould pretty much devastate things up and down the coast,\u201d he told reporters.Read more:NASA gives all clear: Earth safe from asteroid for 100 yearsNASA says it collected a large sample from the asteroid Bennu. Maybe too large. Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction. The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero",
        "author": "Paulina Villegas"
    },
    {
        "title": "The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3315",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/08/12/bennu-asteroid-could-hit-earth-yet-unlikely/",
        "text": "It\u2019s not the plot of another doomsday movie. Yet there is a pending, albeit unlikely, threat to life as we know it: an asteroid approaching Earth.Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction, on track to come very close to Earth in September of 2135. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut not to panic, scientists with NASA said Wednesday. Though Bennu will come within half the distance of the moon, the odds of the asteroid colliding with Earth in the next century and causing Armageddon-type of destruction are still very low.\u201cEven though there is no possibility whatsoever of an impact during that encounter, Bennu is going to be fairly close to the Earth,\u201d said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, a NASA center that calculates asteroid and comet orbits and their odds of impact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough researchers believe Bennu will not impact Earth, they now face the challenge of deciphering how our planet\u2019s gravity will alter the asteroid\u2019s path around the sun, NASA scientists said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.Scientists noted there is small possibility that the asteroid could pass through what\u2019s known as a \u201cgravitational keyhole\u201d that could put it in en route to Earth at a later date in the 22nd century. A gravitational keyhole is a tiny region in space where a planet\u2019s gravity can tweak the trajectory of a passing asteroid and put it on a path to collide with it in the future.Farnocchia said that although recent findings show the odds of impact have slightly increased \u2014 from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1,750 over the next century \u2014 it \u201cdoes not represent significant change,\u201d or a reason to worry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFarnocchia explained that scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu\u2019s path thanks to data collected by NASA\u2019s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which orbited and studied the asteroid for over two years.\u201cOverall the situation has improved,\u201d Farnocchia, the lead author of a study published Wednesday, told reporters in a conference call. \u201cI am not any more concerned about Bennu than I was before; the impact probability remains very small.\u201dIn the study, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to better understand Bennu\u2019s movements through 2300, improving scientists\u2019 ability to determine the probability of impacting Earth and predict the orbits of other asteroids.Story continues below advertisementUsing NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network of giant radio antennas that support interplanetary spacecraft missions and computer models, scientists were able to determine Bennu\u2019s overall probability of striking is about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057 percent.)AdvertisementLooking at it from a glass-half-full perspective, it means there is a 99.94 percent probability that Bennu will not hit our planet.Scientists also calculated the day with the highest risk of collision: Sept. 24, 2182, with a probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037 percent) \u2014 which is still lower than the overall probability of impact through 2300.The potentially hazardous asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Team, a program that works on detection and tracking, and has been closely observed with 580 ground-based \u201castrometric observations,\u201d mainly made by optical and radar telescopes through 2018, according to the study published in Icarus Journal.Story continues below advertisementSince its discovery, Bennu has had three close encounters with Earth, in 1999, 2005 and 2011, during which two radar stations collected data of the asteroid\u2019s measurements.AdvertisementAlthough the chances of it colliding with Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another called 1950 DA, NASA said in a news release.Researchers stated that the most pressing threat for Earth from space objects are hazardous asteroids that are undetected. However, they said they have detected about 60 percent of those similar in size to Bennu.In 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to fly in close proximity to Bennu to gather information about its size, shape, mass, and composition, while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory to evaluate its potential danger.Story continues below advertisementAfter a 27-month-long journey, OSIRIS-REx arrived in the asteroid\u2019s orbit in 2018 and spent two years closely studying the object, before coming back to earth on May 10 of this year.Advertisement\u201cThe OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,\u201d said Farnocchia. \u201cWe\u2019ve never modeled an asteroid\u2019s trajectory to this precision before.\u201dThe spacecraft also scooped up a sample of rocks and dust from the asteroid\u2019s surface, which it will drop to Earth two years from now, on Sept. 24, 2023, landing in Utah\u2019s Great Salt Lake Desert.NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.\u201cThe orbital data from this mission helped us better appreciate Bennu\u2019s impact chances over the next couple of centuries and our overall understanding of potentially hazardous asteroids \u2014 an incredible result,\u201d said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and professor at the University of Arizona.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe spacecraft is now returning home, carrying a precious sample from this fascinating ancient object that will help us better understand not only the history of the solar system but also the role of sunlight in altering Bennu\u2019s orbit since we will measure the asteroid\u2019s thermal properties at unprecedented scales in laboratories on Earth,\u201d he said, according to the news release.AdvertisementA week after the spacecraft entered its first orbit around Bennu, on Dec. 31, 2018, the mission\u2019s team came to the surprise realization that the asteroid was releasing small pieces of rock into space.Team members also were astonished to find that Bennu is littered with boulders, according to a NASA statement in May.Story continues below advertisementOSIRIS-REx is not the only spacecraft from Earth exploring an asteroid. Hayabusa2, launched by Japan\u2019s space agency in 2014, began orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in 2018 and in 2020 successfully completed its mission to collect samples and return them to Earth \u2014 according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.Traveling at approximately 600 miles per hour, Bennu would unleash the energy of more than a billion tons of TNS if it were to crash into Earth, according to NASA\u2019s calculations.AdvertisementThe resulting damage depends on a number of factors and specific circumstances, including location and angle of entry into our atmosphere, but it could create a crater three to six miles in diameter, said Lindley Johnson, NASA\u2019s planetary defense officer. The area of devastation would be much bigger: as much as 100 times the size of the crater.If an object Bennu\u2019s size hit the Eastern Seaboard, it \u201cwould pretty much devastate things up and down the coast,\u201d he told reporters.Read more:NASA gives all clear: Earth safe from asteroid for 100 yearsNASA says it collected a large sample from the asteroid Bennu. Maybe too large. Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction. The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero",
        "author": "Paulina Villegas"
    },
    {
        "title": "The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3316",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/08/12/bennu-asteroid-could-hit-earth-yet-unlikely/",
        "text": "It\u2019s not the plot of another doomsday movie. Yet there is a pending, albeit unlikely, threat to life as we know it: an asteroid approaching Earth.Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction, on track to come very close to Earth in September of 2135. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut not to panic, scientists with NASA said Wednesday. Though Bennu will come within half the distance of the moon, the odds of the asteroid colliding with Earth in the next century and causing Armageddon-type of destruction are still very low.\u201cEven though there is no possibility whatsoever of an impact during that encounter, Bennu is going to be fairly close to the Earth,\u201d said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, a NASA center that calculates asteroid and comet orbits and their odds of impact at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough researchers believe Bennu will not impact Earth, they now face the challenge of deciphering how our planet\u2019s gravity will alter the asteroid\u2019s path around the sun, NASA scientists said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.Scientists noted there is small possibility that the asteroid could pass through what\u2019s known as a \u201cgravitational keyhole\u201d that could put it in en route to Earth at a later date in the 22nd century. A gravitational keyhole is a tiny region in space where a planet\u2019s gravity can tweak the trajectory of a passing asteroid and put it on a path to collide with it in the future.Farnocchia said that although recent findings show the odds of impact have slightly increased \u2014 from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1,750 over the next century \u2014 it \u201cdoes not represent significant change,\u201d or a reason to worry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFarnocchia explained that scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu\u2019s path thanks to data collected by NASA\u2019s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft, which orbited and studied the asteroid for over two years.\u201cOverall the situation has improved,\u201d Farnocchia, the lead author of a study published Wednesday, told reporters in a conference call. \u201cI am not any more concerned about Bennu than I was before; the impact probability remains very small.\u201dIn the study, NASA researchers used precision-tracking data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to better understand Bennu\u2019s movements through 2300, improving scientists\u2019 ability to determine the probability of impacting Earth and predict the orbits of other asteroids.Story continues below advertisementUsing NASA\u2019s Deep Space Network of giant radio antennas that support interplanetary spacecraft missions and computer models, scientists were able to determine Bennu\u2019s overall probability of striking is about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057 percent.)AdvertisementLooking at it from a glass-half-full perspective, it means there is a 99.94 percent probability that Bennu will not hit our planet.Scientists also calculated the day with the highest risk of collision: Sept. 24, 2182, with a probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037 percent) \u2014 which is still lower than the overall probability of impact through 2300.The potentially hazardous asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Team, a program that works on detection and tracking, and has been closely observed with 580 ground-based \u201castrometric observations,\u201d mainly made by optical and radar telescopes through 2018, according to the study published in Icarus Journal.Story continues below advertisementSince its discovery, Bennu has had three close encounters with Earth, in 1999, 2005 and 2011, during which two radar stations collected data of the asteroid\u2019s measurements.AdvertisementAlthough the chances of it colliding with Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another called 1950 DA, NASA said in a news release.Researchers stated that the most pressing threat for Earth from space objects are hazardous asteroids that are undetected. However, they said they have detected about 60 percent of those similar in size to Bennu.In 2016, NASA launched the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to fly in close proximity to Bennu to gather information about its size, shape, mass, and composition, while monitoring its spin and orbital trajectory to evaluate its potential danger.Story continues below advertisementAfter a 27-month-long journey, OSIRIS-REx arrived in the asteroid\u2019s orbit in 2018 and spent two years closely studying the object, before coming back to earth on May 10 of this year.Advertisement\u201cThe OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,\u201d said Farnocchia. \u201cWe\u2019ve never modeled an asteroid\u2019s trajectory to this precision before.\u201dThe spacecraft also scooped up a sample of rocks and dust from the asteroid\u2019s surface, which it will drop to Earth two years from now, on Sept. 24, 2023, landing in Utah\u2019s Great Salt Lake Desert.NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.\u201cThe orbital data from this mission helped us better appreciate Bennu\u2019s impact chances over the next couple of centuries and our overall understanding of potentially hazardous asteroids \u2014 an incredible result,\u201d said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and professor at the University of Arizona.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe spacecraft is now returning home, carrying a precious sample from this fascinating ancient object that will help us better understand not only the history of the solar system but also the role of sunlight in altering Bennu\u2019s orbit since we will measure the asteroid\u2019s thermal properties at unprecedented scales in laboratories on Earth,\u201d he said, according to the news release.AdvertisementA week after the spacecraft entered its first orbit around Bennu, on Dec. 31, 2018, the mission\u2019s team came to the surprise realization that the asteroid was releasing small pieces of rock into space.Team members also were astonished to find that Bennu is littered with boulders, according to a NASA statement in May.Story continues below advertisementOSIRIS-REx is not the only spacecraft from Earth exploring an asteroid. Hayabusa2, launched by Japan\u2019s space agency in 2014, began orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu in 2018 and in 2020 successfully completed its mission to collect samples and return them to Earth \u2014 according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.Traveling at approximately 600 miles per hour, Bennu would unleash the energy of more than a billion tons of TNS if it were to crash into Earth, according to NASA\u2019s calculations.AdvertisementThe resulting damage depends on a number of factors and specific circumstances, including location and angle of entry into our atmosphere, but it could create a crater three to six miles in diameter, said Lindley Johnson, NASA\u2019s planetary defense officer. The area of devastation would be much bigger: as much as 100 times the size of the crater.If an object Bennu\u2019s size hit the Eastern Seaboard, it \u201cwould pretty much devastate things up and down the coast,\u201d he told reporters.Read more:NASA gives all clear: Earth safe from asteroid for 100 yearsNASA says it collected a large sample from the asteroid Bennu. Maybe too large. Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction. The chances of this asteroid hitting Earth are tiny, NASA says \u2014 but not zero",
        "author": "Paulina Villegas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists captured incredible photographic proof of a landslide on a comet (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3317",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/21/scientists-captured-incredible-photographic-proof-of-a-landslide-on-a-comet/",
        "text": "It was\u00a03 a.m., and astronomer Maurizio\u00a0Pajola had been up for hours looking through images taken by the Rosetta spacecraft of its dumpy, duck-shaped comet. Pajola had just started a new job studying Mars' moon Phobos at NASA's Ames Research Center. The only time he could continue this work on the Rosetta mission was the middle of the night. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis eyes were beginning to glaze over when he spotted something unusual: A patch of something bright and white shined out from the comet's dim surface. This photo was from December 2015. Pajola started flipping back though the catalogue of images taken by Rosetta's high power OSIRIS instrument\u00a0until he arrived at July 4. There, streaking across a cliff called Aswan in the comet's northern hemisphere, was a gash\u00a0more than 200 feet long and wide enough for a person to fall through.\u00a0The next image, taken by one of Rosetta's less powerful cameras on July 10, showed a plume of gas and dust\u00a0bursting from the comet. Five days later, OSIRIS got another good look at the site in question. The cliff face had collapsed, revealing\u00a0the radiant material beneath.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Astronomy, Pajola and his colleagues report that the event he spotted\u00a0was a landslide \u2014 the first captured\u00a0on a comet. The collapse of the dark organic material coating the cliff face revealed that pristine water ice lies beneath the comet's surface, the scientists say.The Rosetta comet landing has made historyThe landslide was the most dramatic of several geologic phenomena that Rosetta scientists have witnessed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a lump of ice and rock about the size of Mount Fuji. In a\u00a0second paper published in the journal Science, the astronomers describe how the comets' surface is constantly changing as a result of\u00a0its rotation and the glare of the sun.\u201cThese images are showing that comets are some of the most geologically active things in the solar system,\u201d Pajola said. \u201cWe see fractures increasing, dust covering areas that were not dusted before, boulders rolling, cliffs collapsing\u201d \u2014 all on an object barely wider than the Mall is long.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe landslide, which took place sometime\u00a0around July 10, 2015, would not have looked like a landslide on Earth. Comet 67P is so small it hardly has any gravity, so instead of tumbling down like\u00a0an avalanche, much of the material that broke off from the fractured cliff face produced an \u201coutburst.\u201d Some 22,000 cubic meters of material, enough to fill nine Olympic swimming pools, puffing up above the surface to form a cloud of dust and gas. This suggests an unambiguous link between outbursts (which give comets their\u00a0characteristic comas) and destructive events like landslides, the scientists say.Aswan's collapse also offered a crucial peek into the comet's interior. The Rosetta spacecraft had been accompanied by a lander, Philae, which was slated to take samples from Comet 67P's subsurface. But Philae's battery ran out\u00a0just two days after landing, and scientists never got their interior samples.\u201cWe have done this last job thanks to the cliff collapse,\u201d Pajola said. \u201cNow we can see the pristine material inside\u201d the comet.\u00a0Based on the exposed patch's high albedo \u2014 a measurement of how much light it reflects \u2014 the scientists say that it must be composed of water ice. Over time, the ice sublimated (transitioned straight from a solid to a gas), and the patch faded. If you looked at Comet 67P now, the only evidence of the landslide nearly two years ago would be a rubble pile at the bottom of the cliff.In the Science paper,\u00a0for which Pajola is a co-author, researchers describe how geologic events\u00a0like the cliff collapse are\u00a0driven by the heat of the sun. In summer 2015, Comet 67P was approaching its perihelion \u2014 its closest approach to the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is the time where you get maximum activity, the time where you get maximum amount of\u00a0change,\u201d said\u00a0Ramy El-Maarry, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who was the lead author on the Science study.\u00a0Since it has no atmosphere to protect it,\u00a0areas of Comet 67P facing the sun are exposed to extreme heat, while those that face away are cloaked in chilly darkness. The comet's wonky shape (it's been described as looking like a rubber duck) means that sunlight can stream into unexpected places, creating dramatic temperature gradients.The groundbreaking mission of the Rosetta spacecraft comes to end after a scheduled crash landing on the very comet it was chasing for 12 years. (Reuters)That's what probably happened at Aswan. Though the cliff is located in the comet's northern hemisphere, which was\u00a0experiencing a frigid winter. The area around the cliff was a frosty minus 140 degrees\u00a0Celsius \u2014 50 degrees colder than the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth. But a small ray of sun reached the cliff itself, heating that spot up to 50 degrees Celsius \u2014 the temperature of Death Valley in high summer. The extreme heat probably caused the material making up the cliff to fracture, then\u00a0collapse.The latest picture of Rosetta's comet is truly breathtakingThough Pajola has a full-time job as a researcher at NASA, he has\u00a0been involved with the Rosetta team almost since the spacecraft's launch in 2004. He continues to study data from Rosetta in his spare time, he said, \u201cbecause I love science ... and because comets are really important.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComets and asteroids are debris leftover from the early days of the solar system, when the planets were just being formed. Scientists consider them \u201ctime capsules\u201d from that ancient time, 4.6 billion years ago. Comets like 67P, which are thought to have originated in the water- and volatile-rich outer solar system and then migrated inward, may also have delivered water and organic molecules to early Earth.\u201cThat's why it's\u00a0important to understand how comets behave, how they work, and what is below the surface,\u201d Pajola said.Read more:A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including PlutoTrump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to MarsDear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is? Comets are tiny, but they're rocking with geologic activity.  Scientists captured incredible photographic proof of a landslide on a comet",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The biggest science stories of 2018: From the edge of the solar system to crises on Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3318",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/21/biggest-science-stories-edge-solar-system-crises-earth/",
        "text": "It was the year we left the heliosphere for the second time, and the year we got closer to the sun than ever. A year of biomedical breakthroughs and deadly disease outbreaks. It was a year in which humanity broke some crucial climate records (and not in a good way).WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere are a few of the biggest science stories from 2018: An onslaught of climate-induced disasters: Wildfires in California were made more catastrophic by extreme heat and years of drought. Storms such as Hurricane Michael and Typhoon Yutu got really big, really fast \u2014 a consequence of warmer oceans. The federal government\u2019s 1,600-page National Climate Assessment predicted even more extreme events: floods that destroy infrastructure, warming that spreads disease, deadly record-high temperatures. But global carbon emissions set a record this year, and even after international negotiators agreed to updated rules for implementing the Paris climate accord, experts say that humanity is nowhere close to meeting its goal of limiting total temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius.A neutrino detection and the age of multi messenger astronomy: Four billion years ago, when the solar system was in its infancy, a cataclysm in a distant galaxy produced a hard-to-detect subatomic particle called a neutrino. This year, scientists reported catching one of these ghostly particles with a massive instrument in Antarctica \u2014 the first time humanity has detected a high-energy neutrino and traced it back to where it came from. Paired with improvements in our ability to detect gravitational waves, the landmark achievement heralds a new era in astronomy in which researchers can learn about the universe using neutrinos and gravitational waves as well as ordinary light. The detection also helped solve a 100-year-old mystery about cosmic rays \u2014 extremely energetic particles that rain down from space. These rays probably come from the same source as the neutrino: a powerful jet of radiation known as a blazar.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists head to Washington: If 2017 was the year that scientists got political, 2018 was the year they stayed that way. A record number of candidates with STEM backgrounds ran for seats in Congress, and at least eight of them were elected. Many of the newcomers, who are mostly Democrats, were supported by 314 Action, a political action committee that bills itself as a leader in \u201cthe pro-science resistance.\u201d The Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives also means that Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), a nurse who has made action on climate change one of her top priorities, is poised to take control of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. She will be the first chair of the committee with a STEM background since the 1990s.Hacking the human body: In November a Chinese scientist shocked the world with claims that he had secretly helped produce the first genetically altered babies, prompting a renewed bioethics debate about deploying the rapidly advancing CRISPR technology in human reproduction. But new research this year has also suggested that many people possess immunity to Cas9, the bacterial enzyme deployed with CRISPR to cut DNA. Meanwhile, researchers made strides in growing human organs \u2014 tiny retinas, miniature brains \u2014 outside the body.Species at risk, ecosystems on the brink: Officials in Congress and the White House have moved to roll back parts of the Endangered Species Act, such as the provision that requires federal agencies to consult with scientists before granting permits for activities such as logging. After grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area were taken off the endangered species list last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a controversial plan to allow bear hunting around the national park. But a judge canceled the hunt with a last-minute court order, saying that the government\u2019s decision was \u201carbitrary and capricious.\u201d Meanwhile, another endangered species, the North Atlantic right whale, has edged closer to extinction. A toxic red tide prompted a state of emergency in Florida. In a \u201chyperalarming\u201d study, scientists reported huge losses in the numbers of insects worldwide. And a sweeping report from ecology experts around the globe forecast that climate change will render many ecosystems unrecognizable.Watch what you eat \u2014 and drink: At least five people died and scores more were hospitalized during outbreaks of E. coli illness tied to contaminated lettuce. Both outbreaks were eventually traced back to facilities where greens had been affected by tainted water. In Washington, a mammoth National Institutes of Health study on the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption was canceled after it was revealed that officials had solicited the majority of funding from liquor and beer companies.Saying goodbye to some of our favorite spacecraft: It\u2019s been a tough year for some of our most beloved space explorers. The 15-year-old Opportunity rover has been incommunicado since getting caught in a massive Martian dust storm in June. The rover depends on solar power, so it went into safe mode when the storm blocked out the sun, and NASA hasn\u2019t heard from it since. The Kepler space telescope, which revolutionized exoplanet research by revealing that we live in a galaxy crowded with more planets than stars, ran out of fuel. Two of NASA\u2019s flagship space telescopes, Hubble and Chandra X-ray telescope, were put temporarily out of commission by equipment glitches \u2014 a sign of their age. And a tiny unexplained hole was discovered in the International Space Station.And hello to some new ones: This year saw the launch of three NASA spacecraft. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite picked up where Kepler left off, looking for planets around stars nearest to our cosmic neighborhood. The Parker Solar Probe began circling the sun, where it will explore the mysteries of the sun\u2019s ultrahot atmosphere and help scientists figure out how to protect Earth from disruptive space weather. The InSight probe landed on Mars, where it will drill into the Red Planet\u2019s interior in an attempt to figure out what it\u2019s made of and how it came to be. And Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause, where the sun\u2019s sphere of influence ends and interstellar space begins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCompanies shoot for the stars: In February, SpaceX performed the much-delayed and much-ballyhooed test flight of the Falcon Heavy, the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, which carried a cherry red Tesla roadster to an orbit beyond Mars. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk\u2019s year was a rocky one: The tech mogul got in trouble with multiple federal agencies over potentially market-manipulating tweets and an ill-advised podcast appearance in which he smoked pot. Meanwhile, NASA plans to use commercially operated spacecraft to send astronauts to the International Space Station and instruments to the moon next year. Spacecraft launches and failures, disease outbreaks, climate catastrophes, biomedical breakthroughs and more. The biggest science stories of 2018: From the edge of the solar system to crises on Earth",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The biggest science stories of 2018: From the edge of the solar system to crises on Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3319",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/21/biggest-science-stories-edge-solar-system-crises-earth/",
        "text": "It was the year we left the heliosphere for the second time, and the year we got closer to the sun than ever. A year of biomedical breakthroughs and deadly disease outbreaks. It was a year in which humanity broke some crucial climate records (and not in a good way).WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere are a few of the biggest science stories from 2018: An onslaught of climate-induced disasters: Wildfires in California were made more catastrophic by extreme heat and years of drought. Storms such as Hurricane Michael and Typhoon Yutu got really big, really fast \u2014 a consequence of warmer oceans. The federal government\u2019s 1,600-page National Climate Assessment predicted even more extreme events: floods that destroy infrastructure, warming that spreads disease, deadly record-high temperatures. But global carbon emissions set a record this year, and even after international negotiators agreed to updated rules for implementing the Paris climate accord, experts say that humanity is nowhere close to meeting its goal of limiting total temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius.A neutrino detection and the age of multi messenger astronomy: Four billion years ago, when the solar system was in its infancy, a cataclysm in a distant galaxy produced a hard-to-detect subatomic particle called a neutrino. This year, scientists reported catching one of these ghostly particles with a massive instrument in Antarctica \u2014 the first time humanity has detected a high-energy neutrino and traced it back to where it came from. Paired with improvements in our ability to detect gravitational waves, the landmark achievement heralds a new era in astronomy in which researchers can learn about the universe using neutrinos and gravitational waves as well as ordinary light. The detection also helped solve a 100-year-old mystery about cosmic rays \u2014 extremely energetic particles that rain down from space. These rays probably come from the same source as the neutrino: a powerful jet of radiation known as a blazar.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists head to Washington: If 2017 was the year that scientists got political, 2018 was the year they stayed that way. A record number of candidates with STEM backgrounds ran for seats in Congress, and at least eight of them were elected. Many of the newcomers, who are mostly Democrats, were supported by 314 Action, a political action committee that bills itself as a leader in \u201cthe pro-science resistance.\u201d The Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives also means that Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), a nurse who has made action on climate change one of her top priorities, is poised to take control of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. She will be the first chair of the committee with a STEM background since the 1990s.Hacking the human body: In November a Chinese scientist shocked the world with claims that he had secretly helped produce the first genetically altered babies, prompting a renewed bioethics debate about deploying the rapidly advancing CRISPR technology in human reproduction. But new research this year has also suggested that many people possess immunity to Cas9, the bacterial enzyme deployed with CRISPR to cut DNA. Meanwhile, researchers made strides in growing human organs \u2014 tiny retinas, miniature brains \u2014 outside the body.Species at risk, ecosystems on the brink: Officials in Congress and the White House have moved to roll back parts of the Endangered Species Act, such as the provision that requires federal agencies to consult with scientists before granting permits for activities such as logging. After grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area were taken off the endangered species list last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a controversial plan to allow bear hunting around the national park. But a judge canceled the hunt with a last-minute court order, saying that the government\u2019s decision was \u201carbitrary and capricious.\u201d Meanwhile, another endangered species, the North Atlantic right whale, has edged closer to extinction. A toxic red tide prompted a state of emergency in Florida. In a \u201chyperalarming\u201d study, scientists reported huge losses in the numbers of insects worldwide. And a sweeping report from ecology experts around the globe forecast that climate change will render many ecosystems unrecognizable.Watch what you eat \u2014 and drink: At least five people died and scores more were hospitalized during outbreaks of E. coli illness tied to contaminated lettuce. Both outbreaks were eventually traced back to facilities where greens had been affected by tainted water. In Washington, a mammoth National Institutes of Health study on the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption was canceled after it was revealed that officials had solicited the majority of funding from liquor and beer companies.Saying goodbye to some of our favorite spacecraft: It\u2019s been a tough year for some of our most beloved space explorers. The 15-year-old Opportunity rover has been incommunicado since getting caught in a massive Martian dust storm in June. The rover depends on solar power, so it went into safe mode when the storm blocked out the sun, and NASA hasn\u2019t heard from it since. The Kepler space telescope, which revolutionized exoplanet research by revealing that we live in a galaxy crowded with more planets than stars, ran out of fuel. Two of NASA\u2019s flagship space telescopes, Hubble and Chandra X-ray telescope, were put temporarily out of commission by equipment glitches \u2014 a sign of their age. And a tiny unexplained hole was discovered in the International Space Station.And hello to some new ones: This year saw the launch of three NASA spacecraft. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite picked up where Kepler left off, looking for planets around stars nearest to our cosmic neighborhood. The Parker Solar Probe began circling the sun, where it will explore the mysteries of the sun\u2019s ultrahot atmosphere and help scientists figure out how to protect Earth from disruptive space weather. The InSight probe landed on Mars, where it will drill into the Red Planet\u2019s interior in an attempt to figure out what it\u2019s made of and how it came to be. And Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause, where the sun\u2019s sphere of influence ends and interstellar space begins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCompanies shoot for the stars: In February, SpaceX performed the much-delayed and much-ballyhooed test flight of the Falcon Heavy, the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, which carried a cherry red Tesla roadster to an orbit beyond Mars. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk\u2019s year was a rocky one: The tech mogul got in trouble with multiple federal agencies over potentially market-manipulating tweets and an ill-advised podcast appearance in which he smoked pot. Meanwhile, NASA plans to use commercially operated spacecraft to send astronauts to the International Space Station and instruments to the moon next year. Spacecraft launches and failures, disease outbreaks, climate catastrophes, biomedical breakthroughs and more. The biggest science stories of 2018: From the edge of the solar system to crises on Earth",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Behold, the solar system\u2019s best planet (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3320",
        "date": "2019-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/08/behold-solar-systems-best-planet/",
        "text": "It was January, the nights chilly and clear, when the astronomer Galileo Galilei made one of his most startling discoveries: The stars he had spotted beside Jupiter were moving. Which meant they were not stars after all, but moons. Which meant that Earth was not the only body that others orbited. Which meant we might not be the center of everything after all. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFour centuries later and an ocean away, on a balmy May evening, I climbed the ladder to the University of Maryland Observatory\u2019s 8-inch refractor telescope and held my breath as that tiger-striped wonder was brought into focus once more.Galileo was a celebrated physicist and mathematician who opened a new window onto the heavens using a telescope of his own invention. His findings, which he published in a pamphlet called the \u201cStarry Messenger,\u201d would rearrange the solar system and redefine humanity\u2019s place in it. I am just a journalist who barely scraped by in high school physics, and until that spring evening, had never looked through a telescope in my life.But I like to think that, for Galileo and for me, the effect of seeing another world suspended in our eyepieces was the same: Each of us became vividly, viscerally aware of where we stood in the universe.That is why Jupiter is my favorite planet. (Other than Earth, of course; but saying Earth is your favorite planet is like saying humanity is your favorite species \u2014 pretty self-centered and completely beside the point.) There is something about bearing witness to Jupiter\u2019s massive majesty that makes me feel simultaneously profoundly insignificant and positively grand, aware of space\u2019s vast and chilly expanse, and yet closer to the cosmos than I have ever been.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJupiter is the planet that puts all of us in our place.That is not just a metaphor. As the solar system\u2019s biggest planet, it is the most gravitationally powerful. Every other object bends to its influence; even the sun wobbles a bit thanks to Jupiter\u2019s irresistible sway. The planets follow paths that parallel the gas giant\u2019s own tilt, gaps appear in the asteroid belt at places where its influence resonates, and the trajectories of comets are changed as they swoosh past.Without Jupiter, our home might not even exist. Some astronomers believe that during the solar system\u2019s infancy, 4.6 billion years ago, Jupiter swung through the inner solar system, which was then inhabited by a number of embryonic \u201csuper Earths.\u201d The move set off a chain reaction of cataclysmic collisions, at the end of which Jupiter came to rest about half a billion miles from the Sun, tethered by Saturn\u2019s gravity, and the early inner planets were obliterated. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth would eventually be born from their wreckage, and some of the water that allowed life to get started on this planet may have been transported to the inner solar system during this tumultuous period.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the eons since, astronomers long believed, Jupiter has acted as a celestial vacuum cleaner, drawing rogue space rocks away from the inner solar system and shielding us from bombardment. The gas giant seems to bear the brunt of impacts from long-period comets; 25 years ago, scientists watched the fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy comet slam into Jupiter with the force of 6 million megatons of TNT.But recent studies suggest the story is more complex: Computer simulations found that Jupiter\u2019s disruptive gravity may redirect as many bodies inward as it deflects. Its jostling of bodies in the asteroid belt is thought to have created some of Earth\u2019s most destructive impactors \u2014 including the gigantic ball of nickel and iron that created Arizona\u2019s mile-wide Barringer Crater 50,000 years ago.This seems fitting to me. Jupiter is a Bengal tiger, a Mount Everest, a calving glacier, a Niagara Falls \u2014 captivating in its capacity to destroy us, worthy of our awe, admiration and wary respect.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlus, it is stunning. I mean, seriously, stunning. The images sent back to Earth by NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft, which has orbited Jupiter since 2016, show a wild impressionist painting of a world. Its poles glimmer with auroras powered by its tremendous magnetic field, and its clouds swirl like celestial latte art. Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot, the oldest and biggest storm in the solar system, could swallow Earth whole.Meanwhile, its moons \u2014 all 79 of them \u2014 are marvels of their own. Io is the most volcanically active body scientists have seen. Ice-covered Europa is one of their best targets in the search for life beyond Earth. The pockmarks on crater-strewn Callisto are filled with glimmering patches of ice, giving it the appearance of a cosmic disco ball.Seen through the U-Md. telescope, those moons were mere pinpoints of light. If I had not known better, I would have thought they were stars \u2014 much as Galileo assumed when he first saw them 400 years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo I waited an hour, swiveling the telescope toward the cosmos\u2019s other wonders: gleaming red Arcturus, the craggy, mountainous moon. The dusky sky turned to dark velvet as the dome of the stars drifted overhead.By the time I returned my gaze to Jupiter, the lights of its moons had reorganized. Like us, like the Earth, like everything else in the universe, they still move.Read more:Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.Next stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over NASA\u2019s next mission to the Red Planet How a giant of the solar system helped humanity find our place in the cosmos. Behold, the solar system\u2019s best planet",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3321",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/09/this-nasa-spacecraft-is-about-to-probe-one-of-earths-scariest-threats-the-sun/",
        "text": "It was dark on Earth when NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched on its journey to endless day. The first spacecraft designed to swoop by a star took flight from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 3:31 Sunday morning. A roaring Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe out of Earth's atmosphere. Next stop: A loop past Venus to rendezvous\u00a0with the sun. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe source of all light and life on Earth is also the source of one of its biggest natural threats: space weather. The sun's atmosphere regularly erupts with fast-moving flashes of protons and explosions of energetic particles that can hit Earth within minutes and disrupt radio communication, interfere with GPS, and fry the electric grid. A\u00a0\"worst case scenario\" space weather event could\u00a0cause more damage than Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Sandy combined.\u201cIt sounds like science fiction,\u201d said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist William Murtagh, who heads the Space Weather Prediction Center. \u201cBut it\u2019s something that\u2019s not only possible but very likely to happen in the not-too-distant future.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists have long struggled to understand and\u00a0predict space weather events, because the ferocious environment around the sun makes them\u00a0difficult to witness\u00a0as they form.Murtagh and scores of other researchers watched as NASA's newest spacecraft\u00a0embarked on a mission that should take it closer to the sun than any human-made object has gone before.Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters)The probe is the culmination of a half-century effort to understand our star, Murtagh says, and it may help us prepare for the hazards the sun may throw at us in the future.Part of the sun erupted\u00a0on Sept. 1, 1859. English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a brilliant white solar flare on the sun, brighter than the sunspots he usually observed. Roughly a day later, a blast of charged particles \u2014 known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME \u2014 arrived at Earth, jostling the planet\u2019s magnetic bubble. People as far south as Cuba saw the sky light up with auroras. Geomagnetic currents sent surges of electricity through\u00a0copper telegraph wires, zapping operators and setting telegraph paper aflame.If a similar event happened today,\u00a0it would bring life as we know it to a halt.The energetic particles within a coronal mass ejection can penetrate the walls of spacecraft and\u00a0pose a radiation risk to\u00a0astronauts and the technology they depend on. They can interfere with\u00a0satellites, disrupting radio communication and GPS. And if a CME hits our\u00a0planet\u2019s magnetosphere at the right angle, it can generate powerful waves of electricity within the Earth. These may then\u00a0infiltrate\u00a0utility grids and blow out\u00a0transformers that provide electricity \u2014 like tripping a circuit on a massive scale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sun exploded again in July 2012, spewing material toward Earth at nearly 6 million miles per hour. This time the coronal mass ejection hit a NASA spacecraft called STEREO-A at full-blast. The spacecraft\u2019s sensors were stressed, but they still managed to measure the solar particles, gusts of solar wind and the strength of the interplanetary magnetic field.A year after the explosion, in a paper published in the journal Space Weather, astrophysicists examined the STEREO-A data to answer a worst-case question. \u201cWhat if that coronal mass ejection had occurred 10 days earlier, when the Earth was in the line of fire?\"\u00a0said\u00a0Daniel Baker, a professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors of the study.Their conclusion: If it had hit Earth, Baker and his colleagues wrote, there was a \u201cvery legitimate question of whether our society would still be \u2018picking up the pieces.\u2019\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2008, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine\u00a0report on the economic and societal impacts of space weather came up with a worst-case estimate for an extreme geomagnetic storm: It could cost North America up to $2 trillion in the first year, and recovery would take four to 10 years.It's said\u00a0that space weather science lags about 50 years behind terrestrial weather forecasting. Meteorologists know what conditions cause hurricanes, and they can spot the seeds of a storm brewing over the ocean long before it makes landfall.But warning times for space weather events are often measured in minutes, Murtagh said, and there is too much we do not know.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s a lack of understanding,\u201d Murtagh said. \u201cIt\u2019s science. It\u2019s knowledge of the sun and the physical processes that are likely to produce those energetic particles. We just don\u2019t fully understand the science yet.\u201dMuch of our modern understanding of the sun stems from 91-year-old Eugene Parker, for whom NASA's new probe is named.In the mid-1950s, Parker discovered a link between two seemingly unrelated space mysteries. First, bizarrely, the corona, or atmosphere of the sun, is hotter than its surface \u2014 scientists liken the sun to a campfire that feels hotter the further one stands from the flames. And second, the dusty tails of comets always point away from the sun, as if blasted by a powerful wind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementParker realized the\u00a0corona is not a static halo, but a stream of material from the sun itself. It starts slow and dense and zooms up as it escapes the sun\u2019s gravity, eventually exceeding the speed of sound. The pointed tails of comets behave like windsocks\u00a0caught in the solar wind.The acceleration of the particles in the solar wind remains one of the \u201cfundamental mysteries of the sun,\u201d said Nicola Fox, a heliophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe. And it is one of the keys to understanding CMEs \u2014 the blasts that pose so much danger to life on Earth.After the National Academies released its sobering 2008 report, \"awareness, both at government and in the public, for this hazard really came to the fore,\" said a\u00a0Federal Emergency Management Agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrillion-dollar space storms are a\u00a0rare issue\u00a0that rallies Republicans and Democrats alike. The Obama administration\u2019s executive order 13744 created a national space weather policy in 2016. FEMA recently finished drafting a federal operations plan for space weather that was sent to the Trump administration for approval. Congress is also considering legislation directing funds toward developing a space weather plan.The issue is particularly pressing for the East Coast of the United States between Washington and Maine, not only because of the extensive electric infrastructure in this region. The very ground beneath our feet makes us vulnerable, Murtagh said. The 300 million-year-old igneous rock on which the Eastern Seaboard is perched does not conduct electricity well. If a current strikes this rock, it will seek an easier path \u2014 like metal pipes, telephone wires and electric cables. Eventually, the current can hit high-voltage transformers, the spine of the power grid, and overwhelm their magnetic cores.This is not idle speculation. It happened, on a relatively small scale, in Canada in 1989. The sun belched out a gas cloud in early March that cut off radio signals. (At first, some observers suspected Soviet, not solar, interference.) Electrical currents buzzed through the ground and flooded into the Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec power plant. Six million people in Qu\u00e9bec were without power for nine hours. Glancing effects were felt as far away as New Jersey, where the electrical surge roasted a transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndustry reports suggest operators would have enough time to shut down the grid before it suffered permanent damage. But others are not as optimistic.\u201cWe're not going to know until a real event happens whether or not that's a true statement,\u201d said the FEMA official,\u00a0who added power utility engineers \u201cwon't say this publicly,\" but they have been stocking up on spare transformers where they can. Installing new transformers \u2014 which would have to be built overseas\u00a0\u2014 might take one or two years.That a future solar storm will blast Earth is not a question of if, but when.\u00a0In 2012, Peter Riley, who studies the sun\u2019s corona at Predictive Science Inc., a San Diego-based company that develops computer models of the sun, published an article in Space Weather that calculated the odds of a Carrington-scale repeat. Within the next decade, he concluded, it could be about 12 percent \u2014 on par with the risk of other 100-year hazards, like massive floods.NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission will begin a historic journey in the summer of 2018. Here's what you need to know about it. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)Over the next seven years, the Parker Solar Probe will embark on a series of 24 egg-shaped orbits around the sun, repeatedly swinging past Venus to reorient itself. Each close approach will shoot it through the corona at a breathtaking 450,000 miles per hour \u2014 fast enough to get from Washington to New York in about a second.\u00a0With its dust detectors, particle counters, and a telescope that can take 3-D images of the corona, the probe will measure the sun\u2019s electric and magnetic fields, scoop particles from the solar wind for sampling and watch as shocks travel out from the sun\u2019s surface, through the atmosphere and into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere's no doubt in my mind that measurements from probe and our understanding is going to have a huge impact on our ability to predict space weather,\u201d said Christina Cohen, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology\u2019s Space Radiation Lab who studies energetic particles.It is a project scientists have dreamed about for roughly as long as they have known about the solar wind. But it took half a century to develop the necessary technology.\u00a0When the spacecraft makes its first close approach in November, a carbon-composite heat shield will be all that protects the minivan-sized Parker Solar Probe from the million-mile-wide ball of hot gas.Parker was interviewed on NASA-TV shortly after witnessing the launch of the probe that bears his name. \"All I can say is, wow, here we go,\" he said. \"We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years.\"Read more:This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever beforeAn alien star sideswiped our solar system and sent comets reeling, scientists sayFound: Another star system with eight planets, just like ours The Parker Solar Probe could help us understand and protect ourselves from solar eruptions. NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3322",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/09/this-nasa-spacecraft-is-about-to-probe-one-of-earths-scariest-threats-the-sun/",
        "text": "It was dark on Earth when NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched on its journey to endless day. The first spacecraft designed to swoop by a star took flight from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 3:31 Sunday morning. A roaring Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe out of Earth's atmosphere. Next stop: A loop past Venus to rendezvous\u00a0with the sun. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe source of all light and life on Earth is also the source of one of its biggest natural threats: space weather. The sun's atmosphere regularly erupts with fast-moving flashes of protons and explosions of energetic particles that can hit Earth within minutes and disrupt radio communication, interfere with GPS, and fry the electric grid. A\u00a0\"worst case scenario\" space weather event could\u00a0cause more damage than Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Sandy combined.\u201cIt sounds like science fiction,\u201d said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist William Murtagh, who heads the Space Weather Prediction Center. \u201cBut it\u2019s something that\u2019s not only possible but very likely to happen in the not-too-distant future.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists have long struggled to understand and\u00a0predict space weather events, because the ferocious environment around the sun makes them\u00a0difficult to witness\u00a0as they form.Murtagh and scores of other researchers watched as NASA's newest spacecraft\u00a0embarked on a mission that should take it closer to the sun than any human-made object has gone before.Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters)The probe is the culmination of a half-century effort to understand our star, Murtagh says, and it may help us prepare for the hazards the sun may throw at us in the future.Part of the sun erupted\u00a0on Sept. 1, 1859. English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a brilliant white solar flare on the sun, brighter than the sunspots he usually observed. Roughly a day later, a blast of charged particles \u2014 known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME \u2014 arrived at Earth, jostling the planet\u2019s magnetic bubble. People as far south as Cuba saw the sky light up with auroras. Geomagnetic currents sent surges of electricity through\u00a0copper telegraph wires, zapping operators and setting telegraph paper aflame.If a similar event happened today,\u00a0it would bring life as we know it to a halt.The energetic particles within a coronal mass ejection can penetrate the walls of spacecraft and\u00a0pose a radiation risk to\u00a0astronauts and the technology they depend on. They can interfere with\u00a0satellites, disrupting radio communication and GPS. And if a CME hits our\u00a0planet\u2019s magnetosphere at the right angle, it can generate powerful waves of electricity within the Earth. These may then\u00a0infiltrate\u00a0utility grids and blow out\u00a0transformers that provide electricity \u2014 like tripping a circuit on a massive scale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sun exploded again in July 2012, spewing material toward Earth at nearly 6 million miles per hour. This time the coronal mass ejection hit a NASA spacecraft called STEREO-A at full-blast. The spacecraft\u2019s sensors were stressed, but they still managed to measure the solar particles, gusts of solar wind and the strength of the interplanetary magnetic field.A year after the explosion, in a paper published in the journal Space Weather, astrophysicists examined the STEREO-A data to answer a worst-case question. \u201cWhat if that coronal mass ejection had occurred 10 days earlier, when the Earth was in the line of fire?\"\u00a0said\u00a0Daniel Baker, a professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors of the study.Their conclusion: If it had hit Earth, Baker and his colleagues wrote, there was a \u201cvery legitimate question of whether our society would still be \u2018picking up the pieces.\u2019\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2008, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine\u00a0report on the economic and societal impacts of space weather came up with a worst-case estimate for an extreme geomagnetic storm: It could cost North America up to $2 trillion in the first year, and recovery would take four to 10 years.It's said\u00a0that space weather science lags about 50 years behind terrestrial weather forecasting. Meteorologists know what conditions cause hurricanes, and they can spot the seeds of a storm brewing over the ocean long before it makes landfall.But warning times for space weather events are often measured in minutes, Murtagh said, and there is too much we do not know.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s a lack of understanding,\u201d Murtagh said. \u201cIt\u2019s science. It\u2019s knowledge of the sun and the physical processes that are likely to produce those energetic particles. We just don\u2019t fully understand the science yet.\u201dMuch of our modern understanding of the sun stems from 91-year-old Eugene Parker, for whom NASA's new probe is named.In the mid-1950s, Parker discovered a link between two seemingly unrelated space mysteries. First, bizarrely, the corona, or atmosphere of the sun, is hotter than its surface \u2014 scientists liken the sun to a campfire that feels hotter the further one stands from the flames. And second, the dusty tails of comets always point away from the sun, as if blasted by a powerful wind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementParker realized the\u00a0corona is not a static halo, but a stream of material from the sun itself. It starts slow and dense and zooms up as it escapes the sun\u2019s gravity, eventually exceeding the speed of sound. The pointed tails of comets behave like windsocks\u00a0caught in the solar wind.The acceleration of the particles in the solar wind remains one of the \u201cfundamental mysteries of the sun,\u201d said Nicola Fox, a heliophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe. And it is one of the keys to understanding CMEs \u2014 the blasts that pose so much danger to life on Earth.After the National Academies released its sobering 2008 report, \"awareness, both at government and in the public, for this hazard really came to the fore,\" said a\u00a0Federal Emergency Management Agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrillion-dollar space storms are a\u00a0rare issue\u00a0that rallies Republicans and Democrats alike. The Obama administration\u2019s executive order 13744 created a national space weather policy in 2016. FEMA recently finished drafting a federal operations plan for space weather that was sent to the Trump administration for approval. Congress is also considering legislation directing funds toward developing a space weather plan.The issue is particularly pressing for the East Coast of the United States between Washington and Maine, not only because of the extensive electric infrastructure in this region. The very ground beneath our feet makes us vulnerable, Murtagh said. The 300 million-year-old igneous rock on which the Eastern Seaboard is perched does not conduct electricity well. If a current strikes this rock, it will seek an easier path \u2014 like metal pipes, telephone wires and electric cables. Eventually, the current can hit high-voltage transformers, the spine of the power grid, and overwhelm their magnetic cores.This is not idle speculation. It happened, on a relatively small scale, in Canada in 1989. The sun belched out a gas cloud in early March that cut off radio signals. (At first, some observers suspected Soviet, not solar, interference.) Electrical currents buzzed through the ground and flooded into the Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec power plant. Six million people in Qu\u00e9bec were without power for nine hours. Glancing effects were felt as far away as New Jersey, where the electrical surge roasted a transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndustry reports suggest operators would have enough time to shut down the grid before it suffered permanent damage. But others are not as optimistic.\u201cWe're not going to know until a real event happens whether or not that's a true statement,\u201d said the FEMA official,\u00a0who added power utility engineers \u201cwon't say this publicly,\" but they have been stocking up on spare transformers where they can. Installing new transformers \u2014 which would have to be built overseas\u00a0\u2014 might take one or two years.That a future solar storm will blast Earth is not a question of if, but when.\u00a0In 2012, Peter Riley, who studies the sun\u2019s corona at Predictive Science Inc., a San Diego-based company that develops computer models of the sun, published an article in Space Weather that calculated the odds of a Carrington-scale repeat. Within the next decade, he concluded, it could be about 12 percent \u2014 on par with the risk of other 100-year hazards, like massive floods.NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission will begin a historic journey in the summer of 2018. Here's what you need to know about it. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)Over the next seven years, the Parker Solar Probe will embark on a series of 24 egg-shaped orbits around the sun, repeatedly swinging past Venus to reorient itself. Each close approach will shoot it through the corona at a breathtaking 450,000 miles per hour \u2014 fast enough to get from Washington to New York in about a second.\u00a0With its dust detectors, particle counters, and a telescope that can take 3-D images of the corona, the probe will measure the sun\u2019s electric and magnetic fields, scoop particles from the solar wind for sampling and watch as shocks travel out from the sun\u2019s surface, through the atmosphere and into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere's no doubt in my mind that measurements from probe and our understanding is going to have a huge impact on our ability to predict space weather,\u201d said Christina Cohen, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology\u2019s Space Radiation Lab who studies energetic particles.It is a project scientists have dreamed about for roughly as long as they have known about the solar wind. But it took half a century to develop the necessary technology.\u00a0When the spacecraft makes its first close approach in November, a carbon-composite heat shield will be all that protects the minivan-sized Parker Solar Probe from the million-mile-wide ball of hot gas.Parker was interviewed on NASA-TV shortly after witnessing the launch of the probe that bears his name. \"All I can say is, wow, here we go,\" he said. \"We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years.\"Read more:This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever beforeAn alien star sideswiped our solar system and sent comets reeling, scientists sayFound: Another star system with eight planets, just like ours The Parker Solar Probe could help us understand and protect ourselves from solar eruptions. NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3323",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/08/09/this-nasa-spacecraft-is-about-to-probe-one-of-earths-scariest-threats-the-sun/",
        "text": "It was dark on Earth when NASA's Parker Solar Probe launched on its journey to endless day. The first spacecraft designed to swoop by a star took flight from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 3:31 Sunday morning. A roaring Delta IV Heavy rocket carried the probe out of Earth's atmosphere. Next stop: A loop past Venus to rendezvous\u00a0with the sun. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe source of all light and life on Earth is also the source of one of its biggest natural threats: space weather. The sun's atmosphere regularly erupts with fast-moving flashes of protons and explosions of energetic particles that can hit Earth within minutes and disrupt radio communication, interfere with GPS, and fry the electric grid. A\u00a0\"worst case scenario\" space weather event could\u00a0cause more damage than Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Sandy combined.\u201cIt sounds like science fiction,\u201d said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist William Murtagh, who heads the Space Weather Prediction Center. \u201cBut it\u2019s something that\u2019s not only possible but very likely to happen in the not-too-distant future.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists have long struggled to understand and\u00a0predict space weather events, because the ferocious environment around the sun makes them\u00a0difficult to witness\u00a0as they form.Murtagh and scores of other researchers watched as NASA's newest spacecraft\u00a0embarked on a mission that should take it closer to the sun than any human-made object has gone before.Fascinating photos of our solar system and beyondShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageJan. 3, 2019 | The far side of the moon, in a photo taken by China\u2019s Chang'e-4 lunar probe, the first spacecraft to land on the side that always faces away from the Earth. (China National Space Administration/CNS/Reuters) (China Stringer Network/Reuters)The probe is the culmination of a half-century effort to understand our star, Murtagh says, and it may help us prepare for the hazards the sun may throw at us in the future.Part of the sun erupted\u00a0on Sept. 1, 1859. English astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a brilliant white solar flare on the sun, brighter than the sunspots he usually observed. Roughly a day later, a blast of charged particles \u2014 known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME \u2014 arrived at Earth, jostling the planet\u2019s magnetic bubble. People as far south as Cuba saw the sky light up with auroras. Geomagnetic currents sent surges of electricity through\u00a0copper telegraph wires, zapping operators and setting telegraph paper aflame.If a similar event happened today,\u00a0it would bring life as we know it to a halt.The energetic particles within a coronal mass ejection can penetrate the walls of spacecraft and\u00a0pose a radiation risk to\u00a0astronauts and the technology they depend on. They can interfere with\u00a0satellites, disrupting radio communication and GPS. And if a CME hits our\u00a0planet\u2019s magnetosphere at the right angle, it can generate powerful waves of electricity within the Earth. These may then\u00a0infiltrate\u00a0utility grids and blow out\u00a0transformers that provide electricity \u2014 like tripping a circuit on a massive scale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sun exploded again in July 2012, spewing material toward Earth at nearly 6 million miles per hour. This time the coronal mass ejection hit a NASA spacecraft called STEREO-A at full-blast. The spacecraft\u2019s sensors were stressed, but they still managed to measure the solar particles, gusts of solar wind and the strength of the interplanetary magnetic field.A year after the explosion, in a paper published in the journal Space Weather, astrophysicists examined the STEREO-A data to answer a worst-case question. \u201cWhat if that coronal mass ejection had occurred 10 days earlier, when the Earth was in the line of fire?\"\u00a0said\u00a0Daniel Baker, a professor of planetary and space physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors of the study.Their conclusion: If it had hit Earth, Baker and his colleagues wrote, there was a \u201cvery legitimate question of whether our society would still be \u2018picking up the pieces.\u2019\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2008, a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine\u00a0report on the economic and societal impacts of space weather came up with a worst-case estimate for an extreme geomagnetic storm: It could cost North America up to $2 trillion in the first year, and recovery would take four to 10 years.It's said\u00a0that space weather science lags about 50 years behind terrestrial weather forecasting. Meteorologists know what conditions cause hurricanes, and they can spot the seeds of a storm brewing over the ocean long before it makes landfall.But warning times for space weather events are often measured in minutes, Murtagh said, and there is too much we do not know.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s a lack of understanding,\u201d Murtagh said. \u201cIt\u2019s science. It\u2019s knowledge of the sun and the physical processes that are likely to produce those energetic particles. We just don\u2019t fully understand the science yet.\u201dMuch of our modern understanding of the sun stems from 91-year-old Eugene Parker, for whom NASA's new probe is named.In the mid-1950s, Parker discovered a link between two seemingly unrelated space mysteries. First, bizarrely, the corona, or atmosphere of the sun, is hotter than its surface \u2014 scientists liken the sun to a campfire that feels hotter the further one stands from the flames. And second, the dusty tails of comets always point away from the sun, as if blasted by a powerful wind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementParker realized the\u00a0corona is not a static halo, but a stream of material from the sun itself. It starts slow and dense and zooms up as it escapes the sun\u2019s gravity, eventually exceeding the speed of sound. The pointed tails of comets behave like windsocks\u00a0caught in the solar wind.The acceleration of the particles in the solar wind remains one of the \u201cfundamental mysteries of the sun,\u201d said Nicola Fox, a heliophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe. And it is one of the keys to understanding CMEs \u2014 the blasts that pose so much danger to life on Earth.After the National Academies released its sobering 2008 report, \"awareness, both at government and in the public, for this hazard really came to the fore,\" said a\u00a0Federal Emergency Management Agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrillion-dollar space storms are a\u00a0rare issue\u00a0that rallies Republicans and Democrats alike. The Obama administration\u2019s executive order 13744 created a national space weather policy in 2016. FEMA recently finished drafting a federal operations plan for space weather that was sent to the Trump administration for approval. Congress is also considering legislation directing funds toward developing a space weather plan.The issue is particularly pressing for the East Coast of the United States between Washington and Maine, not only because of the extensive electric infrastructure in this region. The very ground beneath our feet makes us vulnerable, Murtagh said. The 300 million-year-old igneous rock on which the Eastern Seaboard is perched does not conduct electricity well. If a current strikes this rock, it will seek an easier path \u2014 like metal pipes, telephone wires and electric cables. Eventually, the current can hit high-voltage transformers, the spine of the power grid, and overwhelm their magnetic cores.This is not idle speculation. It happened, on a relatively small scale, in Canada in 1989. The sun belched out a gas cloud in early March that cut off radio signals. (At first, some observers suspected Soviet, not solar, interference.) Electrical currents buzzed through the ground and flooded into the Hydro-Qu\u00e9bec power plant. Six million people in Qu\u00e9bec were without power for nine hours. Glancing effects were felt as far away as New Jersey, where the electrical surge roasted a transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIndustry reports suggest operators would have enough time to shut down the grid before it suffered permanent damage. But others are not as optimistic.\u201cWe're not going to know until a real event happens whether or not that's a true statement,\u201d said the FEMA official,\u00a0who added power utility engineers \u201cwon't say this publicly,\" but they have been stocking up on spare transformers where they can. Installing new transformers \u2014 which would have to be built overseas\u00a0\u2014 might take one or two years.That a future solar storm will blast Earth is not a question of if, but when.\u00a0In 2012, Peter Riley, who studies the sun\u2019s corona at Predictive Science Inc., a San Diego-based company that develops computer models of the sun, published an article in Space Weather that calculated the odds of a Carrington-scale repeat. Within the next decade, he concluded, it could be about 12 percent \u2014 on par with the risk of other 100-year hazards, like massive floods.NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission will begin a historic journey in the summer of 2018. Here's what you need to know about it. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)Over the next seven years, the Parker Solar Probe will embark on a series of 24 egg-shaped orbits around the sun, repeatedly swinging past Venus to reorient itself. Each close approach will shoot it through the corona at a breathtaking 450,000 miles per hour \u2014 fast enough to get from Washington to New York in about a second.\u00a0With its dust detectors, particle counters, and a telescope that can take 3-D images of the corona, the probe will measure the sun\u2019s electric and magnetic fields, scoop particles from the solar wind for sampling and watch as shocks travel out from the sun\u2019s surface, through the atmosphere and into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere's no doubt in my mind that measurements from probe and our understanding is going to have a huge impact on our ability to predict space weather,\u201d said Christina Cohen, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology\u2019s Space Radiation Lab who studies energetic particles.It is a project scientists have dreamed about for roughly as long as they have known about the solar wind. But it took half a century to develop the necessary technology.\u00a0When the spacecraft makes its first close approach in November, a carbon-composite heat shield will be all that protects the minivan-sized Parker Solar Probe from the million-mile-wide ball of hot gas.Parker was interviewed on NASA-TV shortly after witnessing the launch of the probe that bears his name. \"All I can say is, wow, here we go,\" he said. \"We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years.\"Read more:This NASA spacecraft will get closer to the sun than anything ever beforeAn alien star sideswiped our solar system and sent comets reeling, scientists sayFound: Another star system with eight planets, just like ours The Parker Solar Probe could help us understand and protect ourselves from solar eruptions. NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager 2 Has Entered the Space Between Solar Systems (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3324",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/science/voyager-2-solar-system.html",
        "text": "It is the second spacecraft to make the crossing into interstellar space, providing a new look at what lies beyond our local galactic neighborhood. It is the second spacecraft to make the crossing into interstellar space, providing a new look at what lies beyond our local galactic neighborhood. The Voyager 2 spacecraft is now in interstellar space, NASA announced on Monday, making it the second human-made machine to cross a boundary that divides our solar system from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager 2 Has Entered the Space Between Solar Systems (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3325",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/science/voyager-2-solar-system.html",
        "text": "It is the second spacecraft to make the crossing into interstellar space, providing a new look at what lies beyond our local galactic neighborhood. It is the second spacecraft to make the crossing into interstellar space, providing a new look at what lies beyond our local galactic neighborhood. The Voyager 2 spacecraft is now in interstellar space, NASA announced on Monday, making it the second human-made machine to cross a boundary that divides our solar system from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager 2 Has Entered the Space Between Solar Systems (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3326",
        "date": "2018-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/science/voyager-2-solar-system.html",
        "text": "It is the second spacecraft to make the crossing into interstellar space, providing a new look at what lies beyond our local galactic neighborhood. It is the second spacecraft to make the crossing into interstellar space, providing a new look at what lies beyond our local galactic neighborhood. The Voyager 2 spacecraft is now in interstellar space, NASA announced on Monday, making it the second human-made machine to cross a boundary that divides our solar system from the rest of the Milky Way galaxy.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "No, NASA didn\u2019t fix the Hubble Telescope by just turning it off and on again (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3327",
        "date": "2018-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/24/no-nasa-didnt-fix-hubble-telescope-by-just-turning-it-off-again/",
        "text": "It hasn\u2019t been the best month for the Hubble Space Telescope.During the first week of October, one of the spacecraft\u2019s three gyroscopes failed. The giant telescope needs the devices to measure turning speeds and to zero in on the things in space it observes and photographs.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a statement, NASA reassured the public that the breakdown was expected, saying the gyro \u201chad been exhibiting end-of-life behavior for approximately a year\u201d and, in any case, \u201ctwo other gyros of the same type had already failed.\u201d To replace it, NASA engineers powered up a backup gyroscope that had been dormant since early 2011. They were heartened, at first. The gyroscope began spinning despite not being used for 7\u00bd years. However, it sent back readings that were clearly too high.Story continues below advertisementThe discrepancy was \u201csimilar to a speedometer on your car continuously showing that your speed is 100 miles per hour faster than it actually is,\u201d NASA said. \u201cIt properly shows when your car speeds up or slows down, and by how much, but the actual speed is inaccurate.\u201dAdvertisementEngineers concluded the problem must have been some kind of mechanical obstruction. Vowing to fix it, NASA kept the telescope in \u201csafe mode,\u201d limiting its operations in the same way a computer in that mode operates at bare-bones settings.Keeping the telescope in safe mode also meant \u201cwe were not doing science,\u201d Hubble Operations Project Manager Patrick Crouse told The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementDays passed.As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in spaceNASA teams ran tests, reviewed the flight software and considered what they could do to remedy the problem with as little damage as possible to their prized (and expensive) telescope. (Though the Hubble can operate with fewer gyroscopes, it normally uses three for maximum efficiency.)On Oct. 16, the Hubble team even attempted a \u201crunning restart,\u201d turning the problematic gyroscope off for one second, then back on again. Unfortunately, the \u201chave you tried powering it off and on?\u201d approach \u2014 long favored as a first-resort by technical support staff on Earth \u2014 didn\u2019t work in space. Would that it were that easy, Crouse said.AdvertisementInstead, what appeared to work was repeatedly turning the entire Hubble spacecraft to see if it would \u201cdislodge\u201d anything that was blocking the gyroscope in question.Story continues below advertisementNASA explained the fix in more technical terms in a blog post Monday:On Oct. 18, the Hubble operations team commanded a series of spacecraft maneuvers, or turns, in opposite directions to attempt to clear any blockage that may have caused the float to be off-center and produce the exceedingly high rates. During each maneuver, the gyro was switched from high mode to low mode to dislodge any blockage that may have accumulated around the float.\u00a0Following the Oct. 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for brief periods of time. On Oct. 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to perform additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which appear to have cleared the issue. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode. \u00a0Hubble then executed additional maneuvers to make sure that the gyro remained stable within operational limits as the spacecraft moved. The team saw no problems and continued to observe the gyro through the weekend to ensure that it remained stable.The repeated maneuvers seemed to work, with the gyro reporting rotation rates that were back to normal \u2014 much to the relief of Hubble engineers, Crouse said.\u201cWe believed all along, or from very early on, that the gyro appeared to be useful and just had to make sure to get it back to a useful state,\u201d he said.Crouse paused when asked to explain what had happened in layman\u2019s terms.\u201cAt a high level, if people want to call it jiggling around, I suppose they can,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we were trying to do very particular activities we thought would clear the problem. It certainly wasn\u2019t as simple as turning it off and turning it back on.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, that didn\u2019t stop a variety of news outlets from reporting that NASA had fixed its telescope \u201cthe way you fix your router.\u201d\u201cNASA fixes Hubble gyroscope by turning it off and on again,\u201d Engadget stated Wednesday.\u201cWhat fixed NASA\u2019s Hubble space telescope? Someone flipped a switch on and off,\u201d USA Today followed.The rotation rates produced by the backup gyro have reduced and are now within a normal range. Additional tests to be performed to ensure Hubble can return to science operations with this gyro. For more info: https://t.co/lT2Wpycqw2\u2014 Hubble (@NASAHubble) October 22, 2018\n\nCrouse said those headlines were \u201can oversimplification,\u201d though he can understand the confusion over extremely technical matters.\u201cIt\u2019s hard to keep everybody up to date on exactly the process,\u201d he said. \u201cI can understand that some people maybe took the easy way out. But to reflect where we are [with Hubble], we\u2019re very optimistic. We\u2019re not out of the woods yet, but we\u2019re very optimistic we can get back to doing science again.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990, and ever since its first photo \u2014 an underwhelming grainy, black-and-white image of some stars, thanks to a flaw in a primary mirror \u2014 it has gone on to deliver some truly dazzling images from space. Time magazine has a roundup of the 50 \u201cbest\u201d photos taken by Hubble, though all are quite extraordinary in their own way, depending on one\u2019s interest in any particular corner of the universe.AdvertisementNASA has been developing a new telescope, the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, that will be able to see back in time, almost to the beginning of the universe. The Webb will be able to collect seven times the starlight as the Hubble and observe the universe in infrared wavelengths of light, which the Hubble can\u2019t, The Washington Post\u2019s Joel Achenbach reported in February. Eventually, the Webb telescope is expected to replace the Hubble, which \u201cis still working fabulously but getting long in the tooth,\u201d Achenbach wrote.NASA\u2019s Hubble telescope captured a never-before-seen view of the \"galactic core,\" the rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy. (YouTube/The Hubble Telescope)Read more:As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in spaceBehold, the Hubble Telescope\u2019s latest close-up photo of JupiterNASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsA NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of Earth Or by blowing into the cartridge. No, NASA didn\u2019t fix the Hubble Telescope by just turning it off and on again",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Moon Mission to Bring Back Lunar Rocks (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3328",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/science/china-moon-rocks.html",
        "text": "It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday (it was early on Tuesday, local time), aiming to be the first nation to bring back lunar rock and soil samples in more than four decades.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Moon Mission to Bring Back Lunar Rocks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3329",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/science/china-moon-rocks.html",
        "text": "It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday (it was early on Tuesday, local time), aiming to be the first nation to bring back lunar rock and soil samples in more than four decades.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Moon Mission to Bring Back Lunar Rocks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3330",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/science/china-moon-rocks.html",
        "text": "It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday (it was early on Tuesday, local time), aiming to be the first nation to bring back lunar rock and soil samples in more than four decades.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Moon Mission to Bring Back Lunar Rocks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3331",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/science/china-moon-rocks.html",
        "text": "It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. It has been four decades since lunar samples were brought to Earth, and the Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft\u2019s bounty could have great scientific value. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday (it was early on Tuesday, local time), aiming to be the first nation to bring back lunar rock and soil samples in more than four decades.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including Pluto (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3332",
        "date": "2017-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/20/a-new-definition-would-add-102-planets-to-our-solar-system-including-pluto/",
        "text": "Is Pluto a planet?It's not a question scientists\u00a0ask in\u00a0polite company.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt's like religion and politics,\u201d said Kirby Runyon, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. \u201cPeople get worked up over it. I've\u00a0gotten worked up over it.\u201dFor\u00a0years, astronomers, planetary scientists and other space researchers have fought about what to call the small, icy world at the edge of our solar system. Is it a planet, as scientists believed for nearly seven decades? Or must a planet be something bigger, something more dominant, as was decided by vote at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006? The issue\u00a0can bring conversations to a screeching halt, or turn them into shouting matches. \u201cSometimes,\u201d Runyon said, \u201cit's just easier not to bring it up.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut Runyon will ignore his own advice this week when he attends the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. In a giant\u00a0exhibit hall crowded with his colleagues, he's attempting to reignite the debate about Pluto's status with an audacious new definition for planet \u2014 one that includes not just Pluto, but several of its neighbors, objects in the asteroid belt, and a number of moons. By his count, 102 new planets could be added to our solar system under the new criteria.Advertisement\u201cIt's a scientifically useful bit of nomenclature and, I think, given the psychological power behind the word planet, it\u2019s also more consumable by the general public,\u201d Runyon said.\u201cA classification has to be useful, or else it\u2019s just lipstick on a pig,\u201d countered planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. Runyon's definition \u201cis not useful at all.\u201dThe debate rages on.If aliens arrived at our solar system tomorrow, they would not see planets laid out in the orderly parade depicted in textbooks. Instead, they'd encounter hundreds of constantly moving bodies engaged in a complex dance around a brightly burning star.Story continues below advertisementIt's hard to know what would immediately catch their attention. Probably Jupiter, the largest body in our solar system.\u00a0Next they'd spot Saturn, Neptune and Uranus \u2014 other giant worlds \u2014 and the two belts of debris that orbit the sun inside Jupiter's orbit (the asteroid belt) and beyond Neptune (the Kuiper belt).AdvertisementIf they peered a bit closer, they'd spot the small, rocky spheres of the inner solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. They might see the dozens of worlds\u00a0that circle the larger bodies\u00a0or Ceres in the asteroid belt. And finally, if they searched near the Kuiper belt, they'd discern Pluto, tinier than Earth's moon but undeniably captivating, with water ice mountains and a\u00a0heart-shaped plain.Which of these would they consider a\u00a0\u201cplanet\u201d \u2014 or whatever the alien term for \u201cplanet\u201d might be?Five new studies on Pluto show just how weird the little planet isWhen the IAU voted in 2006, scientists came to the conclusion that gravitational dominance is what distinguishes the eight planets from the solar system\u2019s other spheres. From giant Jupiter to tiny Mercury, each is massive enough to make them the bullies of their orbits, absorbing, ejecting or otherwise controlling the motion of every other object that gets too close. According to the definition, planets must also orbit the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPluto, which shares its zone of the solar system with a host of other objects, was reclassified as a \u201cdwarf planet\u201d \u2014 a body that resembles a planet but fails to \u201cclear its neighborhood,\u201d in the IAU's parlance.\u201cIf you look at the solar system with fresh eyes, it is really hard to not realize that there are eight big things dominating the solar system and millions of tiny things flitting around,\u201d said Caltech astronomer Mike Brown, whose discovery of the dwarf planet Eris, announced in 2005, precipitated the IAU vote a year later.Brown was not at that vote, but he said that a definition based on orbital dynamics \u201cis the most profound classification you can come up with.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s the one that asks the question we\u2019re asking as planetary scientists,\u201d he explained. \u201cWhy did the solar system form with these eight giant things and all these other things around them?\u201dAdvertisementBut to Runyon, that distinction is less important than what dozens of solar system worlds have in common: geology.\u201cI\u2019m interested in an object's intrinsic properties,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat it is on its surface and in its interior? Whether an object is in orbit around another planet or the sun doesn\u2019t really matter for me.\u201dRunyon calls his a \u201cgeophysical\u201d definition. A planet, he says, is anything massive enough that gravity pulls it into a sphere (a characteristic called \u201chydrostatic equilibrium\"), but not so massive that it starts to undergo nuclear fusion and become a star.New evidence suggests a ninth planet lurking at the edge of the solar system\u201cIt\u2019s only about one force and one property, the mass,\u201d said\u00a0Alan Stern, who led NASA's New Horizons mission to visit Pluto in 2015. Stern is a co-author on the paper outlining Runyon's new definition. \u201cI think that's very elegant, as a physicist.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin that definition, Runyon and Stern say, scientists can divide planets into subcategories: moon planets like Europa and Titan; rocky planets like Earth and Mars; gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn; icy planets like Eris and Pluto.But making \u201cplanet\u201d more inclusive would formalize something many scientists already do: use the term when comparing geologic features. Runyon said he found dozens of examples in the scientific literature of researchers referring to \u201cthe planets Pluto, Earth and Mars\u201d to talk about glacial processes on their surfaces, or \u201ca planet-wide haze layer\u201d when discussing the moon Titan's atmosphere.\u201cAs planetary scientists we feel like the situation got really badly mangled back in 2006,\u201d Stern said. \u201cIt was time somebody write this all down \u2026 and start a new conversation.\u201dQuestions about the definition of \u201cplanet\u201d\u00a0go back much further than the debate over Pluto. The moon was considered a planet until the 17th century, after Copernicus placed it in orbit around the Earth. Galileo initially referred to the four largest moons of Jupiter as planets, but astronomers eventually adopted the term \u201csatellite\u201d (\u201cattendant\u201d) instead.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCeres was considered a planet for several years after it was discovered circling between Mars and Jupiter in 1801. But when astronomers realized it was just the largest of thousands of objects inhabiting that stretch of sky, they renamed Ceres an \u201casteroid\u201d and called its crowded home orbit \u201cthe asteroid belt.\u201dWhen Pluto was named the ninth planet in 1930, astronomers vastly overestimated its size, suggesting it could be even larger than Jupiter. It would also take more than 50 years for them to realize that Pluto had plenty of company in its far-flung orbit.Jean-Luc Margot, a planetary scientist at the University of California\u00a0at Los Angeles who voted in favor of the IAU resolution in 2006, said Pluto might have gone the way of Ceres if scientists had found other Kuiper belt objects sooner.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAn aspect of science is that we revisit our ideas,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to be able to acknowledge when we make a mistake.\u201dScientists discover 7 \u2018Earthlike\u2019 planets orbiting a nearby starThat moment came in 2006. When astronomers arrived at IAU meeting in Prague that\u00a0year, they were surprised to hear that a group had been working in secret to devise\u00a0a formal definition for planet \u2014 something that had never been done before.\u201cPlanet,\u201d the group proposed, was any object made round by its gravity that's in orbit around a star. Though many bodies in the solar system met this requirement, only Ceres and Eris would be made new planets;\u00a0Pluto and its moon Charon would be called a binary planet system. The group also suggested a new classification, \u201cpluton,\u201d for bodies like Pluto whose orbits around the sun took 200 years or more.Story continues below advertisementThe draft definition made almost no one happy. It was criticized as awkward and arbitrary, and the secrecy in which it was developed meant that researchers who wanted to improve the definition had little time to do so.\u00a0Scientists spent the next two weeks of the conference rushing to come up with terminology they liked better.AdvertisementSara Seager, an exoplanet researcher at MIT who did not attend that year's meeting, recalled watching the chaos from afar.\u201cIt actually was very confusing,\u201d she said. \u201cEveryone was asking me what was going on. \u2026 I'd be in a taxi and the taxi driver would say, 'I really want Pluto to be a planet. Will it still be a planet?' And I couldn't say.\u201dThe vote happened on the meeting's last day. Despite the rushed circumstances, the resolution passed with a large enough majority that no one counted the votes. Pluto had lost.Stern, who missed the 2006 meeting to help his daughter move into her college dorm, said it felt like astronomers who study black holes and stars had hijacked the most important concept in his field. He hadn't even known that a\u00a0definition was being formulated\u00a0\u2014 otherwise, he might have tried to attend the meeting. Now, suddenly, he was a planetary scientist whose object of study was no longer a planet.He scoffed at Pluto's new classification, \u201cdwarf planet\u201d \u2014 \u201cHow can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun?\u201d Stern asked. \u201cThere are dwarf stars but they're still considered stars.\u201dRunyon, who was a 21-year-old college student at the time of the IAU vote, said that the result never sat well with him. In 2015,\u00a0he was on the data analysis team for the New Horizons spacecraft as it\u00a0flew past Pluto. That December, the stunning new images of that distant world fresh in his mind, he sat down and \u201cin a fit of creative passion\u201d drafted his definition.The paper that Runyon will present this week isn't a formal proposal, like the one that was devised at the IAU. He's not putting his definition up to a vote, or even suggesting that it should replace the IAUs. If he did, it's unlikely that the IAU would adopt it.But it's sure to spark debate. Porco, who is one of the lead scientists\u00a0for NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn, pointed out that she is a planetary scientist and has no problem with the IAU's orbital dynamics-based definition.She also noted that astronomers already have a perfectly serviceable term for the kind of body Stern and Runyon are trying to describe: \u201cworld.\u201d In her view, the only scientists who want to make those places\u00a0planets are people who study Pluto.Nearly everyone agrees that the IAU definition is imperfect. Margot, the UCLA planetary scientist who voted for the resolution, has tried to refine it. But the debate over Pluto was so \u201ctraumatic\u201d for the community, he said, that he doubts that the IAU would be willing to revisit the issue anytime soon.If you talk to enough scientists on either side of this debate, you'll notice that their arguments start to echo each other. They use the same terms to criticize the definitions they don't like: \u201cnot useful,\u201d \u201ctoo emotional,\u201d \u201cconfusing.\u201d\u00a0Both groups want the same thing: for the public to understand and embrace the science of the solar system. But each is convinced that only their definition can achieve that goal. And each accuses the other of confusing people by prolonging the debate.But Seager, the exoplanet researcher, said the opposite might be true. In her experience, the debate over Pluto's status has given her more opportunities to talk about the solar system than ever before.\u201cWhat I love about it is it\u2019s a teaching moment,\u201d she said. \u201cIf someone asks about Pluto \u2026 you use that as an opening to say, look whatever you want to call it, here\u2019s what\u2019s going on in our system today.\u201dSeager has no dog in this fight. Her gaze extends far beyond the Kuiper belt, to worlds that orbit stars light-years from our own. In the years since the IAU resolution, scientists have found thousands more planets outside our solar system. Many are like nothing astronomers have ever seen before \u2014 giant \u201chot Jupiters\u201d that orbit tightly around their stars; \u201crogue planets\u201d that rocket through the galaxy independent of any sun. For scientists like Seager, the age of planet discovery is just beginning.\u201cWhat else is out there? What\u2019s beyond Pluto?\u201d she asked. \u201cThere\u2019s so much we still don\u2019t know.Read more:Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to MarsDear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is?Now anyone can join the search for the mysterious 'Planet Nine' Pluto fans are attempting to reignite a contentious astronomy debate: What is a planet? A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including Pluto",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Mission Has Touched Down on Mars to Study the Red Planet\u2019s Deep Secrets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3333",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/science/nasa-insight-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "In the months ahead, the spacecraft will begin its study of the Martian underworld, listening for marsquakes and seeking clues about the dusty world\u2019s formation. In the months ahead, the spacecraft will begin its study of the Martian underworld, listening for marsquakes and seeking clues about the dusty world\u2019s formation. The InSight lander, NASA\u2019s latest foray to the red planet, has landed.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Mission Has Touched Down on Mars to Study the Red Planet\u2019s Deep Secrets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3334",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/science/nasa-insight-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "In the months ahead, the spacecraft will begin its study of the Martian underworld, listening for marsquakes and seeking clues about the dusty world\u2019s formation. In the months ahead, the spacecraft will begin its study of the Martian underworld, listening for marsquakes and seeking clues about the dusty world\u2019s formation. The InSight lander, NASA\u2019s latest foray to the red planet, has landed.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Farming on Mars will be a lot harder than \u2018The Martian\u2019 made it seem (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3335",
        "date": "2020-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/mars-growing-food/2020/11/27/cdc80e8a-2dc0-11eb-bae0-50bb17126614_story.html",
        "text": "In the film \u201cThe Martian,\u201d astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) survives being stranded on the Red Planet by farming potatoes in Martian dirt fertilized with feces.Future Mars astronauts could grow crops in dirt to avoid solely relying on resupply missions, and to grow a greater amount and variety of food than with hydroponics alone. But new lab experiments suggest that growing food on Mars will be a lot more complicated than simply planting crops with human manure. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightResearchers planted lettuce and the weed Arabidopsis thaliana in three kinds of fake Mars dirt. Two were made from materials mined in Hawaii or the Mojave Desert that look like dirt on Mars. To mimic the makeup of the Martian surface even more closely, the third was made from scratch using volcanic rock, clays, salts and other chemical ingredients that NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover has seen on the planet. While both lettuce and A. thaliana survived in the Marslike natural soils, neither could grow in the synthetic dirt, researchers report in the upcoming Jan. 15 Icarus.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not surprising at all that as you get [dirt] that\u2019s more and more accurate, closer to Mars, that it gets harder and harder for plants to grow in it,\u201d says planetary scientist Kevin Cannon of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo., who helped make the synthetic Mars dirt but wasn\u2019t involved in the new study.Soil on Earth is full of microbes and other organic matter that helps plants grow, but Mars dirt is basically crushed rock. The new result \u201ctells you that if you want to grow plants on Mars using soil, you\u2019re going to have to put in a lot of work to transform that material into something that plants can grow in,\u201d Cannon says.Biochemist Andrew Palmer and colleagues at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne planted lettuce and A. thaliana seeds in imitation Mars dirt under controlled lighting and temperature indoors, just as astronauts would on Mars. The plants were cultivated at 22 Celsius and about 70\u00a0percent humidity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeeds of both species germinated and grew in dirt mined from Hawaii or the Mojave Desert, as long as the plants were fertilized with a cocktail of nitrogen, potassium, calcium and other nutrients. No seeds of either species could germinate in the synthetic dirt, so \u201cwe would grow up plants under hydroponic-like conditions, and then we would transfer them\u201d to the artificial dirt, Palmer says. But even when given fertilizer, those seedlings died within a week of transplanting.Palmer\u2019s team suspected that the problem with the synthetic Mars dirt was its high pH, which was about 9.5. The two natural soils had pH levels of about 7. When the researchers treated the synthetic dirt with sulfuric acid to lower the pH to 7.2, transplanted seedlings survived an extra week but ultimately died.The team also ran up against another problem: The original synthetic dirt recipe did not include calcium perchlorate, a toxic salt that recent observations suggest make up to about 2 percent of the Martian surface. When Palmer\u2019s team added it at concentrations similar to those seen on Mars, neither lettuce nor A. thaliana grew in the dirt.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe perchlorate is a major problem\u201d for Martian farming, says Edward Guinan, an astrobiologist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the work. But calcium perchlorate may not have to be a showstopper. \u201cThere are bacteria on Earth that enjoy perchlorates as a food,\u201d Guinan says.As the microbes eat the salt, they give off oxygen. If these bacteria were taken from Earth to Mars to munch on perchlorates in Martian dirt, Guinan imagines that the organisms could not only get rid of a toxic component of the dirt but perhaps also help produce breathable oxygen for astronauts.What\u2019s more, the exact treatment required to make Martian dirt farmable may vary, depending on where astronauts make their homestead. \u201cIt probably depends where you land, what the geology and chemistry of the soil is going to be,\u201d Guinan says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo explore how that variety might affect future agricultural practices, geochemist Laura Fackrell of the University of Georgia in Athens and colleagues mixed up five new types of faux Mars dirt. The recipes for these fake Martian materials, also reported in the Jan. 15 Icarus, are based on observations of Mars\u2019 surface from the Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity rovers, as well as NASA\u2019s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Each new artificial Mars dirt represents a mix of materials that could be found or made on the planet. One is designed to represent the average composition across Mars, similar to the synthetic material created by Cannon\u2019s team. The other four varieties have slightly different makeups, such as dirt that is particularly rich in carbonates or sulfates. This collection \u201cexpands the palette of what we have available\u201d as test-beds for agricultural experiments, Fackrell says.She\u2019s now using her stock to run preliminary plant growth experiments. So far, a legume called moth bean, which has similar nutritional content to a soybean but is more drought resistant, has grown the best.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFuture experiments could explore what nutrient cocktails help plants survive in the various fake Martian terrains. But this much is clear: \u201cIt\u2019s not quite as easy as it looks in \u2018The Martian,\u2019\u2009\u201d Fackrell says.\n\n\u2014 Science News magazine\n\nNASA\u2019s next Mars rover is brawniest and brainiest one yetMars attracts fans on Earth even though it\u2019s a long-distance loveSalty lake, ponds may be gurgling beneath South Pole on Mars Growing plants in Red Planet soil will require adding nutrients and removing toxic chemicals. Farming on Mars will be a lot harder than \u2018The Martian\u2019 made it seem",
        "author": "Maria Temming"
    },
    {
        "title": "An asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rock (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3336",
        "date": "2017-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/17/an-asteroid-hunter-explains-how-shes-protecting-earth-from-a-killer-space-rock/",
        "text": "In the early hours of Oct. 6, 2008,\u00a0the astronomers who study objects in Earth's neighborhood in the solar system made a startling discovery: One of those objects was going to hit Earth. In 12 hours.Alerts were sent out to asteroid hunters around the globe, and dozens of observatories turned their telescopes to spot the swiftly approaching threat. Researchers at NASA calculated the impact site \u2014 the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan \u2014 and dispatched a fleet of airplanes to watch it fall. Fragments scattered across the desert. A professor from the University of Khartoum brought his students to search for the pieces. The rocks turned out to be a rare type of meteorite called ureilite, and they showed that the meteorite contained amino acids \u2014 important molecules for life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCaltech astronomer\u00a0Carrie Nugent\u00a0says stories like this, recounted in her new book \u201cAsteroid Hunters,\u201d illustrate what makes asteroids so fascinating to study.\u201cThey're something you can see in a telescope and also hold in your hand as a meteorite,\u201d Nugent said. \u201cSo, in some sense, we get a free sample return\u00a0mission on some of these\u00a0guys.\u201dAsteroids are some of the oldest objects in the solar system \u2014 scientists call them the \u201cbuilding blocks of planets\u201d \u2014 and they can tell us a lot about the origins of our world and the forces that have shaped it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut that's not the\u00a0only reason for hunting them. Nugent works at the space telescope NEOWISE, which uses infrared sensors to search for dark, nearby objects. The team has found more than 34,000 asteroids \u2014 including many\u00a0near-Earth objects, whose\u00a0closest approach takes them within 1.3 astronomical units of the sun. (An AU is the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles.)\u201cMost astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don\u2019t affect our lives very much,\u201d Nugent said. \u201cBut asteroids, as you know, can come and hit Earth occasionally. So I think it\u2019s important to find these objects so you can predict where they are going and potentially deflect one if we find one on the way to Earth.\u201dSpeaking of Science gave Nugent a call to learn more about her book and life as an asteroid hunter. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpeaking of Science:\u00a0How do you even hunt an asteroid? What's a day in your life like?Carrie Nugent: The basic method to find asteroids hasn\u2019t changed much in hundreds of\u00a0years. So asteroids in a telescope\u00a0look just like stars with one exception: They move with time. So to find an asteroid, you take an image of the sky, you wait a little bit, and you take another image of the same part of the sky, and you look for anything that\u00a0moves between those images. That\u2019s how the first asteroid was discovered. Obviously it wasn't\u00a0with photographs; it was with\u00a0drawings.But these days we do the same thing. We have a telescope that takes\u00a0images, and we use a very nice computer program to isolate the moving images. And then every potentially new asteroid is vetted by eye, so we take a look at each one, and then we send our\u00a0observations to the Minor Planet Center.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSOS: Do you have a favorite asteroid?CN: Not particularly.\u00a0Back in the day, I\u2019ve heard, particularly with the near-Earth asteroids, there were some asteroid hunters that knew the names of every one. But as of today on the minor planet website, there are 15,868 near-Earth objects discovered. So we\u2019ve gotten past the time when we\u2019ve memorized the names of each one. I like to think of them as an ensemble.SOS: Why is it important to know where all the near-Earth objects are?CN: I think most people are surprised\u00a0to learn that an asteroid impact is one of the most predictable and preventable natural disasters.\u00a0There\u2019s been a lot of really great intensive research into earthquakes, but we can't predict an earthquake down to the day. We can\u2019t predict where a hurricane is going to be a month in advance.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the thing about asteroids is they\u2019re physically very simple systems. So you can predict an asteroid's trajectory very precisely. If we can figure out where these things are going and know how to find them \u2014 and both those things we know how to do well \u2014 and you have the technology to deflect them, which we also do, then it\u2019s really a solvable problem.You want to find them now so you give yourself enough warning time so you can deflect them if you need to.SOS: But asteroids have\u00a0taken us by surprise before. Just look at 2008 TC3, the asteroid that landed in the Nubian Desert. Or the Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia in February 2013.Story continues below advertisementCN:\u00a0That\u2019s certainly true. But it's useful to break down asteroids in terms of size. So we\u2019ve discovered over 90 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer or larger across, and asteroid hunters are working toward a second goal, which is finding over 90 percent of the asteroids more than 140 meters across. 140 meters is pretty big, and the thing that exploded over Russia was only 20 meters. So what I really want to emphasize on finding the asteroids is, it's these really big ones. Certainly I wouldn\u2019t mind finding the smaller ones, too, but, you know, you prioritize it based on size.AdvertisementAnother\u00a0thing to keep in mind is that asteroids are all very different. Some asteroids are made out of metal, some are made out of rock, some are very loosely held-together accumulations of rock called rubble piles. Some rotate incredibly quickly in less than a minute, some rotate slowly. So your best option really would depend on the individual asteroid that you\u2019re dealing with.The best thing to do is to study these asteroids so we know the range of parameters we would have to deal with and also to find them so we have as much time as possible to prepare.Story continues below advertisementSOS: And if something big was headed straight at us, what would our options be? I'm guessing it wouldn't be like Bruce Willis in \u201cArmageddon.\u201dCN: The thing I was surprised to learn is that sometimes the best thing to do is simply get out of the way. If it is a small enough asteroid and, depending on where it\u2019s going, you might just want to evacuate the same way you would for a flood.SOS: And if getting out of the way isn't an option \u2026AdvertisementCN:\u00a0I was able to interview Lindley\u00a0Johnson, who is NASA's planetary defense officer,\u00a0which is the coolest job in the world, and he said there are three main ways being considered.The first way is the gravity tractor, which is where you would put a spacecraft next to the asteroid and slowly try to tug it off its course. The other option is the kinetic impactor technique, where you would have something heavy hit the asteroid and give it a hard shove.\u00a0And you know the one everyone thinks of as the nuclear option. The thing is, that might make for a great movie, but it\u2019s not the most controllable and predictable of these methods. And because of that we call it a last resort. But the plan would be to explode a nuclear detonation nearby and then irradiate the surface, not to drill and implant a bomb.Story continues below advertisementSOS:\u00a0You talk about all this very calmly. How worried should people be about a devastating asteroid impact?AdvertisementCN: This is the only natural disaster we have the technology to prevent. The dinosaurs didn\u2019t stand a chance, but we have telescopes and calculus and computers, and we can really do something about this.\u00a0I like that aspect of it. This is something that could be solved in my lifetime. We could really chart near-Earth space and have all of these hazards mapped out and perhaps find there is nothing headed toward us, which would be really wonderful. Or perhaps it would give us the warning time we need.ASTEROID HUNTERSBy Carrie NugentTed Books, Simon and Schuster. 108 pp. $16.99.Story continues below advertisementCorrection: An earlier version of this post misstated the number of near-Earth objects NEOWISE has identified. The team has detected more than 34,000 asteroids, some of which are NEOs.Read more:Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to MarsDear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is?Now anyone can join the search for the mysterious 'Planet Nine' Astronomer and writer Carrie Nugent talks about what it's like to hunt asteroids.  An asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rock",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "An asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rock (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3337",
        "date": "2017-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/17/an-asteroid-hunter-explains-how-shes-protecting-earth-from-a-killer-space-rock/",
        "text": "In the early hours of Oct. 6, 2008,\u00a0the astronomers who study objects in Earth's neighborhood in the solar system made a startling discovery: One of those objects was going to hit Earth. In 12 hours.Alerts were sent out to asteroid hunters around the globe, and dozens of observatories turned their telescopes to spot the swiftly approaching threat. Researchers at NASA calculated the impact site \u2014 the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan \u2014 and dispatched a fleet of airplanes to watch it fall. Fragments scattered across the desert. A professor from the University of Khartoum brought his students to search for the pieces. The rocks turned out to be a rare type of meteorite called ureilite, and they showed that the meteorite contained amino acids \u2014 important molecules for life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCaltech astronomer\u00a0Carrie Nugent\u00a0says stories like this, recounted in her new book \u201cAsteroid Hunters,\u201d illustrate what makes asteroids so fascinating to study.\u201cThey're something you can see in a telescope and also hold in your hand as a meteorite,\u201d Nugent said. \u201cSo, in some sense, we get a free sample return\u00a0mission on some of these\u00a0guys.\u201dAsteroids are some of the oldest objects in the solar system \u2014 scientists call them the \u201cbuilding blocks of planets\u201d \u2014 and they can tell us a lot about the origins of our world and the forces that have shaped it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut that's not the\u00a0only reason for hunting them. Nugent works at the space telescope NEOWISE, which uses infrared sensors to search for dark, nearby objects. The team has found more than 34,000 asteroids \u2014 including many\u00a0near-Earth objects, whose\u00a0closest approach takes them within 1.3 astronomical units of the sun. (An AU is the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles.)\u201cMost astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don\u2019t affect our lives very much,\u201d Nugent said. \u201cBut asteroids, as you know, can come and hit Earth occasionally. So I think it\u2019s important to find these objects so you can predict where they are going and potentially deflect one if we find one on the way to Earth.\u201dSpeaking of Science gave Nugent a call to learn more about her book and life as an asteroid hunter. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpeaking of Science:\u00a0How do you even hunt an asteroid? What's a day in your life like?Carrie Nugent: The basic method to find asteroids hasn\u2019t changed much in hundreds of\u00a0years. So asteroids in a telescope\u00a0look just like stars with one exception: They move with time. So to find an asteroid, you take an image of the sky, you wait a little bit, and you take another image of the same part of the sky, and you look for anything that\u00a0moves between those images. That\u2019s how the first asteroid was discovered. Obviously it wasn't\u00a0with photographs; it was with\u00a0drawings.But these days we do the same thing. We have a telescope that takes\u00a0images, and we use a very nice computer program to isolate the moving images. And then every potentially new asteroid is vetted by eye, so we take a look at each one, and then we send our\u00a0observations to the Minor Planet Center.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSOS: Do you have a favorite asteroid?CN: Not particularly.\u00a0Back in the day, I\u2019ve heard, particularly with the near-Earth asteroids, there were some asteroid hunters that knew the names of every one. But as of today on the minor planet website, there are 15,868 near-Earth objects discovered. So we\u2019ve gotten past the time when we\u2019ve memorized the names of each one. I like to think of them as an ensemble.SOS: Why is it important to know where all the near-Earth objects are?CN: I think most people are surprised\u00a0to learn that an asteroid impact is one of the most predictable and preventable natural disasters.\u00a0There\u2019s been a lot of really great intensive research into earthquakes, but we can't predict an earthquake down to the day. We can\u2019t predict where a hurricane is going to be a month in advance.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the thing about asteroids is they\u2019re physically very simple systems. So you can predict an asteroid's trajectory very precisely. If we can figure out where these things are going and know how to find them \u2014 and both those things we know how to do well \u2014 and you have the technology to deflect them, which we also do, then it\u2019s really a solvable problem.You want to find them now so you give yourself enough warning time so you can deflect them if you need to.SOS: But asteroids have\u00a0taken us by surprise before. Just look at 2008 TC3, the asteroid that landed in the Nubian Desert. Or the Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia in February 2013.Story continues below advertisementCN:\u00a0That\u2019s certainly true. But it's useful to break down asteroids in terms of size. So we\u2019ve discovered over 90 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer or larger across, and asteroid hunters are working toward a second goal, which is finding over 90 percent of the asteroids more than 140 meters across. 140 meters is pretty big, and the thing that exploded over Russia was only 20 meters. So what I really want to emphasize on finding the asteroids is, it's these really big ones. Certainly I wouldn\u2019t mind finding the smaller ones, too, but, you know, you prioritize it based on size.AdvertisementAnother\u00a0thing to keep in mind is that asteroids are all very different. Some asteroids are made out of metal, some are made out of rock, some are very loosely held-together accumulations of rock called rubble piles. Some rotate incredibly quickly in less than a minute, some rotate slowly. So your best option really would depend on the individual asteroid that you\u2019re dealing with.The best thing to do is to study these asteroids so we know the range of parameters we would have to deal with and also to find them so we have as much time as possible to prepare.Story continues below advertisementSOS: And if something big was headed straight at us, what would our options be? I'm guessing it wouldn't be like Bruce Willis in \u201cArmageddon.\u201dCN: The thing I was surprised to learn is that sometimes the best thing to do is simply get out of the way. If it is a small enough asteroid and, depending on where it\u2019s going, you might just want to evacuate the same way you would for a flood.SOS: And if getting out of the way isn't an option \u2026AdvertisementCN:\u00a0I was able to interview Lindley\u00a0Johnson, who is NASA's planetary defense officer,\u00a0which is the coolest job in the world, and he said there are three main ways being considered.The first way is the gravity tractor, which is where you would put a spacecraft next to the asteroid and slowly try to tug it off its course. The other option is the kinetic impactor technique, where you would have something heavy hit the asteroid and give it a hard shove.\u00a0And you know the one everyone thinks of as the nuclear option. The thing is, that might make for a great movie, but it\u2019s not the most controllable and predictable of these methods. And because of that we call it a last resort. But the plan would be to explode a nuclear detonation nearby and then irradiate the surface, not to drill and implant a bomb.Story continues below advertisementSOS:\u00a0You talk about all this very calmly. How worried should people be about a devastating asteroid impact?AdvertisementCN: This is the only natural disaster we have the technology to prevent. The dinosaurs didn\u2019t stand a chance, but we have telescopes and calculus and computers, and we can really do something about this.\u00a0I like that aspect of it. This is something that could be solved in my lifetime. We could really chart near-Earth space and have all of these hazards mapped out and perhaps find there is nothing headed toward us, which would be really wonderful. Or perhaps it would give us the warning time we need.ASTEROID HUNTERSBy Carrie NugentTed Books, Simon and Schuster. 108 pp. $16.99.Story continues below advertisementCorrection: An earlier version of this post misstated the number of near-Earth objects NEOWISE has identified. The team has detected more than 34,000 asteroids, some of which are NEOs.Read more:Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to MarsDear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is?Now anyone can join the search for the mysterious 'Planet Nine' Astronomer and writer Carrie Nugent talks about what it's like to hunt asteroids.  An asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rock",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "An asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rock (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3338",
        "date": "2017-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/17/an-asteroid-hunter-explains-how-shes-protecting-earth-from-a-killer-space-rock/",
        "text": "In the early hours of Oct. 6, 2008,\u00a0the astronomers who study objects in Earth's neighborhood in the solar system made a startling discovery: One of those objects was going to hit Earth. In 12 hours.Alerts were sent out to asteroid hunters around the globe, and dozens of observatories turned their telescopes to spot the swiftly approaching threat. Researchers at NASA calculated the impact site \u2014 the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan \u2014 and dispatched a fleet of airplanes to watch it fall. Fragments scattered across the desert. A professor from the University of Khartoum brought his students to search for the pieces. The rocks turned out to be a rare type of meteorite called ureilite, and they showed that the meteorite contained amino acids \u2014 important molecules for life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCaltech astronomer\u00a0Carrie Nugent\u00a0says stories like this, recounted in her new book \u201cAsteroid Hunters,\u201d illustrate what makes asteroids so fascinating to study.\u201cThey're something you can see in a telescope and also hold in your hand as a meteorite,\u201d Nugent said. \u201cSo, in some sense, we get a free sample return\u00a0mission on some of these\u00a0guys.\u201dAsteroids are some of the oldest objects in the solar system \u2014 scientists call them the \u201cbuilding blocks of planets\u201d \u2014 and they can tell us a lot about the origins of our world and the forces that have shaped it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut that's not the\u00a0only reason for hunting them. Nugent works at the space telescope NEOWISE, which uses infrared sensors to search for dark, nearby objects. The team has found more than 34,000 asteroids \u2014 including many\u00a0near-Earth objects, whose\u00a0closest approach takes them within 1.3 astronomical units of the sun. (An AU is the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles.)\u201cMost astronomical work has to do with things that are very, very far away and don\u2019t affect our lives very much,\u201d Nugent said. \u201cBut asteroids, as you know, can come and hit Earth occasionally. So I think it\u2019s important to find these objects so you can predict where they are going and potentially deflect one if we find one on the way to Earth.\u201dSpeaking of Science gave Nugent a call to learn more about her book and life as an asteroid hunter. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpeaking of Science:\u00a0How do you even hunt an asteroid? What's a day in your life like?Carrie Nugent: The basic method to find asteroids hasn\u2019t changed much in hundreds of\u00a0years. So asteroids in a telescope\u00a0look just like stars with one exception: They move with time. So to find an asteroid, you take an image of the sky, you wait a little bit, and you take another image of the same part of the sky, and you look for anything that\u00a0moves between those images. That\u2019s how the first asteroid was discovered. Obviously it wasn't\u00a0with photographs; it was with\u00a0drawings.But these days we do the same thing. We have a telescope that takes\u00a0images, and we use a very nice computer program to isolate the moving images. And then every potentially new asteroid is vetted by eye, so we take a look at each one, and then we send our\u00a0observations to the Minor Planet Center.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSOS: Do you have a favorite asteroid?CN: Not particularly.\u00a0Back in the day, I\u2019ve heard, particularly with the near-Earth asteroids, there were some asteroid hunters that knew the names of every one. But as of today on the minor planet website, there are 15,868 near-Earth objects discovered. So we\u2019ve gotten past the time when we\u2019ve memorized the names of each one. I like to think of them as an ensemble.SOS: Why is it important to know where all the near-Earth objects are?CN: I think most people are surprised\u00a0to learn that an asteroid impact is one of the most predictable and preventable natural disasters.\u00a0There\u2019s been a lot of really great intensive research into earthquakes, but we can't predict an earthquake down to the day. We can\u2019t predict where a hurricane is going to be a month in advance.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the thing about asteroids is they\u2019re physically very simple systems. So you can predict an asteroid's trajectory very precisely. If we can figure out where these things are going and know how to find them \u2014 and both those things we know how to do well \u2014 and you have the technology to deflect them, which we also do, then it\u2019s really a solvable problem.You want to find them now so you give yourself enough warning time so you can deflect them if you need to.SOS: But asteroids have\u00a0taken us by surprise before. Just look at 2008 TC3, the asteroid that landed in the Nubian Desert. Or the Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia in February 2013.Story continues below advertisementCN:\u00a0That\u2019s certainly true. But it's useful to break down asteroids in terms of size. So we\u2019ve discovered over 90 percent of asteroids 1 kilometer or larger across, and asteroid hunters are working toward a second goal, which is finding over 90 percent of the asteroids more than 140 meters across. 140 meters is pretty big, and the thing that exploded over Russia was only 20 meters. So what I really want to emphasize on finding the asteroids is, it's these really big ones. Certainly I wouldn\u2019t mind finding the smaller ones, too, but, you know, you prioritize it based on size.AdvertisementAnother\u00a0thing to keep in mind is that asteroids are all very different. Some asteroids are made out of metal, some are made out of rock, some are very loosely held-together accumulations of rock called rubble piles. Some rotate incredibly quickly in less than a minute, some rotate slowly. So your best option really would depend on the individual asteroid that you\u2019re dealing with.The best thing to do is to study these asteroids so we know the range of parameters we would have to deal with and also to find them so we have as much time as possible to prepare.Story continues below advertisementSOS: And if something big was headed straight at us, what would our options be? I'm guessing it wouldn't be like Bruce Willis in \u201cArmageddon.\u201dCN: The thing I was surprised to learn is that sometimes the best thing to do is simply get out of the way. If it is a small enough asteroid and, depending on where it\u2019s going, you might just want to evacuate the same way you would for a flood.SOS: And if getting out of the way isn't an option \u2026AdvertisementCN:\u00a0I was able to interview Lindley\u00a0Johnson, who is NASA's planetary defense officer,\u00a0which is the coolest job in the world, and he said there are three main ways being considered.The first way is the gravity tractor, which is where you would put a spacecraft next to the asteroid and slowly try to tug it off its course. The other option is the kinetic impactor technique, where you would have something heavy hit the asteroid and give it a hard shove.\u00a0And you know the one everyone thinks of as the nuclear option. The thing is, that might make for a great movie, but it\u2019s not the most controllable and predictable of these methods. And because of that we call it a last resort. But the plan would be to explode a nuclear detonation nearby and then irradiate the surface, not to drill and implant a bomb.Story continues below advertisementSOS:\u00a0You talk about all this very calmly. How worried should people be about a devastating asteroid impact?AdvertisementCN: This is the only natural disaster we have the technology to prevent. The dinosaurs didn\u2019t stand a chance, but we have telescopes and calculus and computers, and we can really do something about this.\u00a0I like that aspect of it. This is something that could be solved in my lifetime. We could really chart near-Earth space and have all of these hazards mapped out and perhaps find there is nothing headed toward us, which would be really wonderful. Or perhaps it would give us the warning time we need.ASTEROID HUNTERSBy Carrie NugentTed Books, Simon and Schuster. 108 pp. $16.99.Story continues below advertisementCorrection: An earlier version of this post misstated the number of near-Earth objects NEOWISE has identified. The team has detected more than 34,000 asteroids, some of which are NEOs.Read more:Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to MarsDear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is?Now anyone can join the search for the mysterious 'Planet Nine' Astronomer and writer Carrie Nugent talks about what it's like to hunt asteroids.  An asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rock",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Newest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3339",
        "date": "2018-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/07/newest-nasa-discoveries-make-search-for-martian-life-a-lot-more-opportune/",
        "text": "In puffs of gas from rocks more than 3 billion years old dug up by\u00a0one of NASA's robotic explorers on Mars, scientists have identified several complex\u00a0organic molecules\u00a0\u2014 possible\u00a0building blocks for ancient life.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt's not aliens. (It's never aliens.)But it is \u201cconsistent with the past presence of biology,\u201d said Ken Williford, an astrobiologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\u00a0\u201cAnd it makes us more confident that if biomarkers\u201d \u2014 or direct evidence of biologic activity \u2014 \u201care there, we might find them.\u201d In two studies published today in the journal Science, this new finding from NASA's Curiosity rover is paired with another discovery: The planet's\u00a0methane \u2014 another organic molecule that on Earth is usually\u00a0(but not always) produced by living beings \u2014 varies with the seasons.\u00a0In the past, scientists have seen plumes and patches of this intriguing substance, but this is the first time they've been able to discern a pattern in its presence.\u00a0The result could\u00a0pave the way for future missions to pin down\u00a0the\u00a0methane's source.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe closer we look, the more we see that Mars is a complex, dynamic planet that \u2014 particularly early in its history \u2014 was more conducive to life than we might have previously imagined,\u201d said Williford, who was not involved in either study.A reminder: Organic molecules aren't necessarily produced by organisms; they're just chemical compounds that contain carbon. But they're\u00a0of interest to astrobiologists because they are the\u00a0essential ingredients in all the chemistry that drives life on Earth.Mars's Gale Crater, where Curiosity has been trolling around for the past\u00a0six years, is a particularly interesting place to look for those molecules.\u00a0About 3.5 billion years ago, research suggests, this pockmark on the Martian surface was brimming with water.Story continues below advertisementBut the water vanished when most of\u00a0the Martian atmosphere was stripped away by brutal solar winds. And, given the intensity of the radiation bombarding the planet's surface, it wasn't clear\u00a0whether any relics from that warm, wet period could still be preserved in mudstones on\u00a0the lake's dried-up floor.The Mars rover Curiosity sent back photos to create a stunning panorama of its 5-year journey on the planet. (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)Using Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument \u2014 which heats soil and rock samples\u00a0to examine their contents \u2014 astrobiologist Jennifer Eigenbrode and her colleagues were able to identify an array of interesting organic molecules: ring structures known as aromatics, sulfur compounds and long carbon chains. Even more compelling was the fact that these compounds seemed to have broken off even bigger, more complex \u201cmacromolecules\u201d \u2014 substances found on Earth in coal, black shale and other ancient organic remains.Advertisement\u201cWhat we have detected is what we would expect from a sample from an ancient lake environment on Earth,\u201d said Eigenbrode, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.Story continues below advertisementThere are some non-biological explanations for the detection\u00a0\u2014 this combination of compounds has also been found in meteorites. But that explanation, too, suggests a provocative possibility; even if the organic molecules didn't come from life,\u00a0they are exactly what life likes to eat. Perhaps the meteorite-delivered molecules provided fuel for ancient alien organisms.Regardless, the\u00a0detection is a technical achievement, said Williford, because it demonstrates that organic molecules can\u00a0persist near Mars's surface for billions of years. If scientists keep drilling deeper and more widely, as they plan to do with the European and Russian space agencies'\u00a0ExoMars rover and NASA's Mars 2020 mission, who knows what they might find? (Williford is deputy project scientist for Mars 2020.)The methane study, spearheaded by\u00a0JPL atmospheric scientist Chris Webster, is also intriguing for astrobiologists. On Earth, 1,800 out of every billion molecules in the atmosphere is methane, and 95 percent of it comes for biological sources: burning fossil fuels, decomposing debris, burping cows. Some of our planet's earliest organisms may have been methanogens \u2014 microbes that eat organic molecules and exhale methane gas.Several spacecraft\u00a0including Curiosity have detected whiffs of this gas that \u201cdefied explanation,\u201d Webster said. Methane is quickly broken down by radiation, so it must be replenished by some source on the planet. One explanation \u201cthat no one talks about but is in the back of everyone's mind,\u201d as Goddard planetary scientist Mike Mumma put it to Science last winter, is that methanogens beneath the Martian surface were breathing it out.\u201cYou'd expect life to be seasonal,\u201d Mumma noted. But it was also possible that puffs of methane were delivered to the desert world by crashing meteorites or other less thrilling sources.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy\u00a0examining data spanning nearly\u00a0three Martian years (six Earth years),\u00a0Webster and his colleagues\u00a0discerned the first repeating pattern in Martian methane. During the summer months, levels of the gas detected by Curiosity rose to about 0.7 parts per billion; in winter, they fell to roughly half that. They suggest that warmer conditions might release the gas from reservoirs beneath the surface.The results don't explain shorter-lived spikes in methane levels \u2014 as high as 45 parts per billion \u2014 that have been detected. And even if the reservoir explanation is correct, it remains to be seen what's feeding them.To determine\u00a0whether the methane is biological, Webster said, scientists can weigh the kinds of carbon\u00a0atoms it contains (life prefers the lighter versions). Future missions might also seek places where there's \u201csignificant seepage\u201d and attempt to figure out its source.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn\u00a0a commentary for Science, astrobiologist Inge Loes ten Kate\u00a0of the Utrecht University in the Netherlands, explained what makes these two studies so compelling:\u201cCuriosity has shown that Gale crater was habitable around 3.5 billion years ago, with conditions comparable to those on the early Earth, where life evolved around that time,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThe question of whether life might have originated or existed on Mars is a lot more opportune now that we know that organic molecules were present on its surface at that time.\u201dRead more:Why NASA still believes we might find life on MarsCan Mars, or any other planet, have just a little bit of life?The case for flowing water on Mars is drying up It's not aliens. (It's never aliens.) Newest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pan, Moon of Saturn, Looks Like a Cosmic Ravioli (or Maybe a Walnut) (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3340",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/science/nasa-cassini-saturn-moon-pan.html",
        "text": "In photographs by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, the closest images ever taken, the tiny, wrinkly moon has a deep ridge that could be a couple of miles high. In photographs by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, the closest images ever taken, the tiny, wrinkly moon has a deep ridge that could be a couple of miles high. In a stunning set of close-ups, Pan, a diminutive moon of Saturn, looks like a floating ravioli lost in space, or a wrinkled flying saucer.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pan, Moon of Saturn, Looks Like a Cosmic Ravioli (or Maybe a Walnut) (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3341",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/science/nasa-cassini-saturn-moon-pan.html",
        "text": "In photographs by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, the closest images ever taken, the tiny, wrinkly moon has a deep ridge that could be a couple of miles high. In photographs by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, the closest images ever taken, the tiny, wrinkly moon has a deep ridge that could be a couple of miles high. In a stunning set of close-ups, Pan, a diminutive moon of Saturn, looks like a floating ravioli lost in space, or a wrinkled flying saucer.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "See the first images from NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance, direct from Mars  (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3342",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/02/19/mars-rover-perseverance/",
        "text": "In one photo, the rover\u2019s wheels sit atop an expanse of reddish dust pocked with pebbles. In another, there\u2019s a cluster of small rocks full of spongelike holes.That dark feature in the distance \u2014 could it be a cliff face? Did these deposits form from a volcanic eruption, or are they sediments left behind by vanished water? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the 24 hours since NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Thursday, scientists and engineers have been ecstatically scouring every image it sends back to Earth. The mission to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet has been years in the making. Now, pictures of the rover\u2019s perilous descent and perfect landing offer the first clues about the place they\u2019ve chosen to explore.Story continues below advertisementOver the coming days and weeks, engineers will begin to deploy the sophisticated cameras and other instruments that can reveal the composition of the rocks and the history of the surrounding landscape. It will take years, if not decades, for scientists to determine whether life ever dwelled here.For now, they\u2019re happy goggling at the pictures.Scientists were rendered almost speechless by the image taken from the rover\u2019s rocket-powered descent stage Thursday, mere seconds before it gently lowered the robot to ground.AdvertisementIn the photo, the rover dangles from four cables, its six wheels poised barely 20 feet above the rocky surface. An electronic umbilical cord spirals up to an unseen spacecraft, while plumes of dust puff upward at the vehicle\u2019s approach.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe clarity, and just \u2014 the reality of it,\u201d Pauline Hwang, strategic mission manager for the rover\u2019s surface operations, said at a news briefing Friday. A veteran of four Mars missions, Hwang has seen her share of landings. But this was the first time a camera had captured some of the \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d that occur between the second a spacecraft enters Mars\u2019 atmosphere and the moment it touches down.\u201cWe just \u2014 it was just \u2014 it was unbelievable,\u201d Hwang said. \u201cAll of us just gazed in awe last night.\u201dNASA on Friday also released an image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite positioned above Perseverance\u2019s landing site at Jezero Crater. It shows the faint bright blur of the spacecraft hurtling above the vast desolation of the Red Planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarly images taken by the rover\u2019s engineering cameras depict the robot positioned on relatively level ground.\u201cWhen I look at this image, first of all, I feel a great sense of relief,\u201d Aaron Stehura, the entry, descent and landing flight system engineer, said Friday. \u201cI see a landing site that looks relatively safe.\u201dThe spot has tremendous scientific significance. The rocks beneath the rover date back more than 3.5 billion years, to the time when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface, said deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan. Back then, a sprawling river delta spilled into a lake that filled Jezero Crater. If any microorganisms swam in those waters, their fossils might be preserved in the sediments that accumulated in the delta.Story continues below advertisementWhen Perseverance\u2019s first images came down overnight, \u201cour chats just lit up with the science teams saying, \u2018Look over here,\u2019\u2009\u201d Stack Morgan said Friday. \u201cWe\u2019re picking out different colors and tones and textures, trying to figure out what these rocks might represent.\u201dAdvertisementAnd they\u2019re already debating what route the rover should take to reach the cliffs of the delta.\u201cBetween us and the delta, we have a lot of interesting science to do,\u201d Stack Morgan said.Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult; about half of all missions to the planet have failed. But Perseverance is the ninth NASA spacecraft to reach the surface of the Red Planet. It is also the second mission to use the ambitious \u201csky crane\u201d technique.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance\u2019s voyage will be better documented than any other interplanetary mission in NASA history. There are 19 cameras on the rover, plus four more on parts of the spacecraft involved in Thursday\u2019s entry, descent and landing. NASA expects to release video of the terrifying landing process in the days ahead.Microphones affixed to the rover were set to record the spacecraft\u2019s arrival at the Red Planet and capture sound throughout its mission. Stehura said Friday it\u2019s not yet clear whether the microphones captured audio during the descent.How NASA achieved its dicey landing on MarsPerseverance\u2019s machinery is in good condition, Hwang reported Friday. Engineers have released the high gain antenna it will use to communicate with Earth. Soon, they\u2019ll command the rover to raise its head (called the mast) and start photographing its surroundings with more powerful cameras.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce the rover has gotten a software update and a clean bill of health, it will drive to a flat spot that can serve as a landing pad for the small, experimental helicopter that hitched a ride on the robot\u2019s underbelly. Engineers will spend about 30 days testing out the helicopter, named Ingenuity \u2014 the first-ever experiment in controlled, powered flight on another planet.Then, Perseverance will spend at least the next two years traversing the landscape in search of potential fossil-bearing rocks, which it will collect and store in sterilized tubes. NASA and the European Space Agency are in the early stages of designing follow-up missions to retrieve the sample tubes and return them to Earth, where they can be studied in state-of-the-art laboratories. Cameras attached to the spacecraft carrying the Perseverance rover give an unprecedented view of what it is like to land on Mars. See the first images from NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance, direct from Mars ",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "See the first images from NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance, direct from Mars  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3343",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/02/19/mars-rover-perseverance/",
        "text": "In one photo, the rover\u2019s wheels sit atop an expanse of reddish dust pocked with pebbles. In another, there\u2019s a cluster of small rocks full of spongelike holes.That dark feature in the distance \u2014 could it be a cliff face? Did these deposits form from a volcanic eruption, or are they sediments left behind by vanished water? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the 24 hours since NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on Thursday, scientists and engineers have been ecstatically scouring every image it sends back to Earth. The mission to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet has been years in the making. Now, pictures of the rover\u2019s perilous descent and perfect landing offer the first clues about the place they\u2019ve chosen to explore.Story continues below advertisementOver the coming days and weeks, engineers will begin to deploy the sophisticated cameras and other instruments that can reveal the composition of the rocks and the history of the surrounding landscape. It will take years, if not decades, for scientists to determine whether life ever dwelled here.For now, they\u2019re happy goggling at the pictures.Scientists were rendered almost speechless by the image taken from the rover\u2019s rocket-powered descent stage Thursday, mere seconds before it gently lowered the robot to ground.AdvertisementIn the photo, the rover dangles from four cables, its six wheels poised barely 20 feet above the rocky surface. An electronic umbilical cord spirals up to an unseen spacecraft, while plumes of dust puff upward at the vehicle\u2019s approach.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe clarity, and just \u2014 the reality of it,\u201d Pauline Hwang, strategic mission manager for the rover\u2019s surface operations, said at a news briefing Friday. A veteran of four Mars missions, Hwang has seen her share of landings. But this was the first time a camera had captured some of the \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d that occur between the second a spacecraft enters Mars\u2019 atmosphere and the moment it touches down.\u201cWe just \u2014 it was just \u2014 it was unbelievable,\u201d Hwang said. \u201cAll of us just gazed in awe last night.\u201dNASA on Friday also released an image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite positioned above Perseverance\u2019s landing site at Jezero Crater. It shows the faint bright blur of the spacecraft hurtling above the vast desolation of the Red Planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarly images taken by the rover\u2019s engineering cameras depict the robot positioned on relatively level ground.\u201cWhen I look at this image, first of all, I feel a great sense of relief,\u201d Aaron Stehura, the entry, descent and landing flight system engineer, said Friday. \u201cI see a landing site that looks relatively safe.\u201dThe spot has tremendous scientific significance. The rocks beneath the rover date back more than 3.5 billion years, to the time when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface, said deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan. Back then, a sprawling river delta spilled into a lake that filled Jezero Crater. If any microorganisms swam in those waters, their fossils might be preserved in the sediments that accumulated in the delta.Story continues below advertisementWhen Perseverance\u2019s first images came down overnight, \u201cour chats just lit up with the science teams saying, \u2018Look over here,\u2019\u2009\u201d Stack Morgan said Friday. \u201cWe\u2019re picking out different colors and tones and textures, trying to figure out what these rocks might represent.\u201dAdvertisementAnd they\u2019re already debating what route the rover should take to reach the cliffs of the delta.\u201cBetween us and the delta, we have a lot of interesting science to do,\u201d Stack Morgan said.Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult; about half of all missions to the planet have failed. But Perseverance is the ninth NASA spacecraft to reach the surface of the Red Planet. It is also the second mission to use the ambitious \u201csky crane\u201d technique.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance\u2019s voyage will be better documented than any other interplanetary mission in NASA history. There are 19 cameras on the rover, plus four more on parts of the spacecraft involved in Thursday\u2019s entry, descent and landing. NASA expects to release video of the terrifying landing process in the days ahead.Microphones affixed to the rover were set to record the spacecraft\u2019s arrival at the Red Planet and capture sound throughout its mission. Stehura said Friday it\u2019s not yet clear whether the microphones captured audio during the descent.How NASA achieved its dicey landing on MarsPerseverance\u2019s machinery is in good condition, Hwang reported Friday. Engineers have released the high gain antenna it will use to communicate with Earth. Soon, they\u2019ll command the rover to raise its head (called the mast) and start photographing its surroundings with more powerful cameras.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce the rover has gotten a software update and a clean bill of health, it will drive to a flat spot that can serve as a landing pad for the small, experimental helicopter that hitched a ride on the robot\u2019s underbelly. Engineers will spend about 30 days testing out the helicopter, named Ingenuity \u2014 the first-ever experiment in controlled, powered flight on another planet.Then, Perseverance will spend at least the next two years traversing the landscape in search of potential fossil-bearing rocks, which it will collect and store in sterilized tubes. NASA and the European Space Agency are in the early stages of designing follow-up missions to retrieve the sample tubes and return them to Earth, where they can be studied in state-of-the-art laboratories. Cameras attached to the spacecraft carrying the Perseverance rover give an unprecedented view of what it is like to land on Mars. See the first images from NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance, direct from Mars ",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is sending a tiny robot helicopter to Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3344",
        "date": "2018-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/15/nasa-is-sending-a-tiny-robot-helicopter-to-mars/",
        "text": "In five decades of exploring Mars, NASA has sent orbiters, landers and rovers\u00a0to explore Earth's neighbor. But the space agency's next mission will be the first to send a tiny robotic helicopter to another planet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Mars Helicopter, an autonomous spacecraft with a meter-long rotor and a body the size of a chihuahua, will fly in the underbelly of the Mars 2020 rover when it launches in two years, NASA announced Friday. The project will serve mainly as a test of the technology needed to fly a rotorcraft above a world 140 million miles away. It took four years of testing and redesign to create a helicopter capable of operating on the Red Planet. Mars's atmosphere is so thin that hovering just 10 feet above the surface is the equivalent of\u00a0soaring 100,000 feet above Earth.Story continues below advertisementThe altitude record for helicopters on Earth is 40,000 feet; above that, the air isn't dense enough to hold copters aloft.Advertisement\u201cTo make it fly at that low atmospheric density, we had to scrutinize everything, make it as light as possible while being as strong and as powerful as it can possibly be,\u201d Mimi Aung, the Mars Helicopter project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release.The helicopter is equipped with solar cells to charge its lithium batteries and an internal heating mechanism to keep it warm through the Martian night, when temperatures can plummet to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.It takes at least four minutes and almost as much as a half-hour\u00a0for light to travel from Mars to Earth, depending on\u00a0where the planets are in their orbits. That delay rules out the possibility of remotely operating the helicopter. Instead, the spacecraft must be able to receive commands from operators on Earth, then execute them on its own.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Mars 2020\u00a0spacecraft is slated to touch down on the Martian surface in February 2021. The car-size rover is equipped with a drill for collecting rock samples, instruments for conducting chemical analyses and seeking potentially habitable environments, an experiment to test the viability of producing oxygen from the planet's carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, and an array of sensors.After landing, the rover will deposit its helicopter payload, then retreat to a safe distance while the rotorcraft take off.The\u00a0helicopter's first flight\u00a0should be a short one: It will climb 10 feet and hover for 30 seconds\u00a0before returning to the ground. If all goes according to plan, the craft will make four more flights over the course of a 30-day test campaign, each progressively longer and more complex than the first.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the Mars Helicopter fails, the overall Mars 2020 mission will not be harmed. But\u00a0the potential upsides for NASA are thrilling; a successful mission could pave the way for future rotorcraft to act as scouts and explore parts of Mars that rovers can't reach.Read more:Scientists discover new evidence of plumes on Europa, a target in the search for lifeNASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a cometLaunch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again The project will test the technology needed to fly a rotorcraft above a world 140 million miles away.  NASA is sending a tiny robot helicopter to Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is sending a tiny robot helicopter to Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3345",
        "date": "2018-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/15/nasa-is-sending-a-tiny-robot-helicopter-to-mars/",
        "text": "In five decades of exploring Mars, NASA has sent orbiters, landers and rovers\u00a0to explore Earth's neighbor. But the space agency's next mission will be the first to send a tiny robotic helicopter to another planet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Mars Helicopter, an autonomous spacecraft with a meter-long rotor and a body the size of a chihuahua, will fly in the underbelly of the Mars 2020 rover when it launches in two years, NASA announced Friday. The project will serve mainly as a test of the technology needed to fly a rotorcraft above a world 140 million miles away. It took four years of testing and redesign to create a helicopter capable of operating on the Red Planet. Mars's atmosphere is so thin that hovering just 10 feet above the surface is the equivalent of\u00a0soaring 100,000 feet above Earth.Story continues below advertisementThe altitude record for helicopters on Earth is 40,000 feet; above that, the air isn't dense enough to hold copters aloft.Advertisement\u201cTo make it fly at that low atmospheric density, we had to scrutinize everything, make it as light as possible while being as strong and as powerful as it can possibly be,\u201d Mimi Aung, the Mars Helicopter project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a news release.The helicopter is equipped with solar cells to charge its lithium batteries and an internal heating mechanism to keep it warm through the Martian night, when temperatures can plummet to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit.It takes at least four minutes and almost as much as a half-hour\u00a0for light to travel from Mars to Earth, depending on\u00a0where the planets are in their orbits. That delay rules out the possibility of remotely operating the helicopter. Instead, the spacecraft must be able to receive commands from operators on Earth, then execute them on its own.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Mars 2020\u00a0spacecraft is slated to touch down on the Martian surface in February 2021. The car-size rover is equipped with a drill for collecting rock samples, instruments for conducting chemical analyses and seeking potentially habitable environments, an experiment to test the viability of producing oxygen from the planet's carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, and an array of sensors.After landing, the rover will deposit its helicopter payload, then retreat to a safe distance while the rotorcraft take off.The\u00a0helicopter's first flight\u00a0should be a short one: It will climb 10 feet and hover for 30 seconds\u00a0before returning to the ground. If all goes according to plan, the craft will make four more flights over the course of a 30-day test campaign, each progressively longer and more complex than the first.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the Mars Helicopter fails, the overall Mars 2020 mission will not be harmed. But\u00a0the potential upsides for NASA are thrilling; a successful mission could pave the way for future rotorcraft to act as scouts and explore parts of Mars that rovers can't reach.Read more:Scientists discover new evidence of plumes on Europa, a target in the search for lifeNASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a cometLaunch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 again The project will test the technology needed to fly a rotorcraft above a world 140 million miles away.  NASA is sending a tiny robot helicopter to Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3346",
        "date": "2018-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/19/nasas-next-mars-rover-will-look-signs-life-an-ancient-crater-lake/",
        "text": "In a search for ancient life on Mars, NASA will send its next rover to explore Jezero Crater \u2014 the site of a former delta and lake.The rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020, is equipped with a drilling system that can collect and store rock samples that contain clues to Mars\u2019s ancient past. Once the samples are cached, NASA hopes to send follow-up missions to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cGetting samples from this lake-delta system will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science.The landing site selection came after years of research and days of fierce debate over the best spot to look for evidence of ancient life on an alien world. Among the alternatives being considered were Columbia Hills, an ancient hot spring that was explored by the now-defunct rover Spirit, and Northeast Syrtis, a network of ancient mesas that may have harbored underground water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUltimately, Zurbuchen said, Jezero was selected for the diversity of its terrain. Each type of rock at the site \u2014 from clays that could preserve signs of ancient organisms to volcanic rocks that hint at Mars\u2019s planetary evolution \u2014 should help the rover achieve its two main science goals. First, to determine what the Red Planet\u2019s environment was like deep in the past. And second, to figure out whether life ever got going there.In a conference announcing the decision Monday, Mars 2020 project scientist Ken Farley described delta systems as \u201cextremely good at preserving biosignatures.\u201d On Earth, not only are these ecosystems rich in life but also headwater organisms swept downriver can be trapped in delta sediment.\u201cWe want to seek evidence of possible ancient life on Mars,\u201d Farley said. They do not expect to find anything alive. \u201cCurrently the surface of Mars is too dry, too cold and has too much radiation for life as we know it to survive.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResults from past missions have revealed that Mars was not always the desolate desert world we see today. Dormant volcanoes suggest it once boasted intense volcanic activity. And landforms like the dried-up delta at Jezero Crater demonstrate that liquid water existed on the surface \u2014 which means Mars may have had a thicker atmosphere to keep the water from boiling away.This new view of Mars resembles what is known about early Earth. And scientists know microbial life began here as early as 4 billion years ago.If it happened here, why not there?\n\n\n\n \n \n \n \n Jezero Crater is the site of an ancient delta that fed into\n a cratert lake.\n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 5 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n\nThe Washington Post\n\n \n Source: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\nJezero Crater is the best place on Mars to probe that question, said Tim Goudge, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin who is one of the leading advocates for the site. Deltas are beloved by scientists because of the way they gather sediments from across a watershed and deposit them in layers, which eventually harden into rock. Many of the most ancient fossils found on Earth come from this kind of environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf a microbe ever swam in Mars\u2019s waterways, its organic remains may still be buried in the mudstones along the rim of Jezero Crater.\u201cSedimentary rocks tell us the history of what\u2019s been happening at a site,\u201d Goudge said. \u201cIt\u2019s recorded in the layers, and you can read them like a book.\u201dIn a memo announcing his selection, Zurbuchen noted that Jezero offered opportunities for exploration after its initial mission, which will last 1.5 Martian years (or about 2.8 Earth years). The crater is not far from an area known as Midway, which shares many characteristics with Northeast Syrtis. At a recent workshop to assess the potential landing sites, members of the project science team for Mars 2020 said that an extended mission connecting Jezero to Midway might allow scientists to explore the best of both sites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJezero Crater is a more treacherous environment than the kinds NASA usually lands in. Often, landers have to arrive at what scientists jokingly refer to as a \u201cparking lot\u201d \u2014 a flat, featureless region \u2014 and then drive long distances to reach rocks of actual interest. But an innovative new technology called terrain relative navigation (TRN), which allows the spacecraft to compare images of the landscape beneath it to a map of known hazards, should make it possible for the rover to land safely.Only about 40 percent of Mars missions have been successful. And Mars 2020 is not a low-risk endeavor. \u2033There is no backup plan,\u201d Zurbuchen said Monday.Since TRN has never been deployed before, Zurbuchen asked engineers for an additional analysis of the technology. Without assurance that the technology will work as designed, the complex environment at Jezero might pose too high a risk for landing. But Zurbuchen said he was happy with the progress on TRN so far.Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division, told reporters that this mission will define the next decade of Martian exploration. \u201cThe more we understand about the Mars environment, the better equipped we\u2019re gonna be to send humans,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe launch window for Mars 2020 opens July 17, 2020, with an expected landing in February 2021. NASA plans to launch a mission in the late 2020s to collect the cached Jezero Crater samples, according to Zurbuchen. If the rendezvous on Mars succeeds, a returning spacecraft will make a delivery to Earth in the early 2030s.\u201cWe\u2019re not going to go to any other place any time soon,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cMars is the obvious place, after the moon, to extend our presence deeper and deeper into space.\u201dThis report has been updated. Read more:Next stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new rover \u2014 and a chance to make historyCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. In 2020, the space agency will launch a rover to look for evidence of ancient life in Mars's Jezero Crater. NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3347",
        "date": "2018-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/19/nasas-next-mars-rover-will-look-signs-life-an-ancient-crater-lake/",
        "text": "In a search for ancient life on Mars, NASA will send its next rover to explore Jezero Crater \u2014 the site of a former delta and lake.The rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020, is equipped with a drilling system that can collect and store rock samples that contain clues to Mars\u2019s ancient past. Once the samples are cached, NASA hopes to send follow-up missions to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cGetting samples from this lake-delta system will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science.The landing site selection came after years of research and days of fierce debate over the best spot to look for evidence of ancient life on an alien world. Among the alternatives being considered were Columbia Hills, an ancient hot spring that was explored by the now-defunct rover Spirit, and Northeast Syrtis, a network of ancient mesas that may have harbored underground water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUltimately, Zurbuchen said, Jezero was selected for the diversity of its terrain. Each type of rock at the site \u2014 from clays that could preserve signs of ancient organisms to volcanic rocks that hint at Mars\u2019s planetary evolution \u2014 should help the rover achieve its two main science goals. First, to determine what the Red Planet\u2019s environment was like deep in the past. And second, to figure out whether life ever got going there.In a conference announcing the decision Monday, Mars 2020 project scientist Ken Farley described delta systems as \u201cextremely good at preserving biosignatures.\u201d On Earth, not only are these ecosystems rich in life but also headwater organisms swept downriver can be trapped in delta sediment.\u201cWe want to seek evidence of possible ancient life on Mars,\u201d Farley said. They do not expect to find anything alive. \u201cCurrently the surface of Mars is too dry, too cold and has too much radiation for life as we know it to survive.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResults from past missions have revealed that Mars was not always the desolate desert world we see today. Dormant volcanoes suggest it once boasted intense volcanic activity. And landforms like the dried-up delta at Jezero Crater demonstrate that liquid water existed on the surface \u2014 which means Mars may have had a thicker atmosphere to keep the water from boiling away.This new view of Mars resembles what is known about early Earth. And scientists know microbial life began here as early as 4 billion years ago.If it happened here, why not there?\n\n\n\n \n \n \n \n Jezero Crater is the site of an ancient delta that fed into\n a cratert lake.\n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 5 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n\nThe Washington Post\n\n \n Source: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\nJezero Crater is the best place on Mars to probe that question, said Tim Goudge, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin who is one of the leading advocates for the site. Deltas are beloved by scientists because of the way they gather sediments from across a watershed and deposit them in layers, which eventually harden into rock. Many of the most ancient fossils found on Earth come from this kind of environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf a microbe ever swam in Mars\u2019s waterways, its organic remains may still be buried in the mudstones along the rim of Jezero Crater.\u201cSedimentary rocks tell us the history of what\u2019s been happening at a site,\u201d Goudge said. \u201cIt\u2019s recorded in the layers, and you can read them like a book.\u201dIn a memo announcing his selection, Zurbuchen noted that Jezero offered opportunities for exploration after its initial mission, which will last 1.5 Martian years (or about 2.8 Earth years). The crater is not far from an area known as Midway, which shares many characteristics with Northeast Syrtis. At a recent workshop to assess the potential landing sites, members of the project science team for Mars 2020 said that an extended mission connecting Jezero to Midway might allow scientists to explore the best of both sites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJezero Crater is a more treacherous environment than the kinds NASA usually lands in. Often, landers have to arrive at what scientists jokingly refer to as a \u201cparking lot\u201d \u2014 a flat, featureless region \u2014 and then drive long distances to reach rocks of actual interest. But an innovative new technology called terrain relative navigation (TRN), which allows the spacecraft to compare images of the landscape beneath it to a map of known hazards, should make it possible for the rover to land safely.Only about 40 percent of Mars missions have been successful. And Mars 2020 is not a low-risk endeavor. \u2033There is no backup plan,\u201d Zurbuchen said Monday.Since TRN has never been deployed before, Zurbuchen asked engineers for an additional analysis of the technology. Without assurance that the technology will work as designed, the complex environment at Jezero might pose too high a risk for landing. But Zurbuchen said he was happy with the progress on TRN so far.Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division, told reporters that this mission will define the next decade of Martian exploration. \u201cThe more we understand about the Mars environment, the better equipped we\u2019re gonna be to send humans,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe launch window for Mars 2020 opens July 17, 2020, with an expected landing in February 2021. NASA plans to launch a mission in the late 2020s to collect the cached Jezero Crater samples, according to Zurbuchen. If the rendezvous on Mars succeeds, a returning spacecraft will make a delivery to Earth in the early 2030s.\u201cWe\u2019re not going to go to any other place any time soon,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cMars is the obvious place, after the moon, to extend our presence deeper and deeper into space.\u201dThis report has been updated. Read more:Next stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new rover \u2014 and a chance to make historyCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. In 2020, the space agency will launch a rover to look for evidence of ancient life in Mars's Jezero Crater. NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3348",
        "date": "2018-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/19/nasas-next-mars-rover-will-look-signs-life-an-ancient-crater-lake/",
        "text": "In a search for ancient life on Mars, NASA will send its next rover to explore Jezero Crater \u2014 the site of a former delta and lake.The rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020, is equipped with a drilling system that can collect and store rock samples that contain clues to Mars\u2019s ancient past. Once the samples are cached, NASA hopes to send follow-up missions to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cGetting samples from this lake-delta system will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science.The landing site selection came after years of research and days of fierce debate over the best spot to look for evidence of ancient life on an alien world. Among the alternatives being considered were Columbia Hills, an ancient hot spring that was explored by the now-defunct rover Spirit, and Northeast Syrtis, a network of ancient mesas that may have harbored underground water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUltimately, Zurbuchen said, Jezero was selected for the diversity of its terrain. Each type of rock at the site \u2014 from clays that could preserve signs of ancient organisms to volcanic rocks that hint at Mars\u2019s planetary evolution \u2014 should help the rover achieve its two main science goals. First, to determine what the Red Planet\u2019s environment was like deep in the past. And second, to figure out whether life ever got going there.In a conference announcing the decision Monday, Mars 2020 project scientist Ken Farley described delta systems as \u201cextremely good at preserving biosignatures.\u201d On Earth, not only are these ecosystems rich in life but also headwater organisms swept downriver can be trapped in delta sediment.\u201cWe want to seek evidence of possible ancient life on Mars,\u201d Farley said. They do not expect to find anything alive. \u201cCurrently the surface of Mars is too dry, too cold and has too much radiation for life as we know it to survive.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResults from past missions have revealed that Mars was not always the desolate desert world we see today. Dormant volcanoes suggest it once boasted intense volcanic activity. And landforms like the dried-up delta at Jezero Crater demonstrate that liquid water existed on the surface \u2014 which means Mars may have had a thicker atmosphere to keep the water from boiling away.This new view of Mars resembles what is known about early Earth. And scientists know microbial life began here as early as 4 billion years ago.If it happened here, why not there?\n\n\n\n \n \n \n \n Jezero Crater is the site of an ancient delta that fed into\n a cratert lake.\n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 5 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n\nThe Washington Post\n\n \n Source: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\nJezero Crater is the best place on Mars to probe that question, said Tim Goudge, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin who is one of the leading advocates for the site. Deltas are beloved by scientists because of the way they gather sediments from across a watershed and deposit them in layers, which eventually harden into rock. Many of the most ancient fossils found on Earth come from this kind of environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf a microbe ever swam in Mars\u2019s waterways, its organic remains may still be buried in the mudstones along the rim of Jezero Crater.\u201cSedimentary rocks tell us the history of what\u2019s been happening at a site,\u201d Goudge said. \u201cIt\u2019s recorded in the layers, and you can read them like a book.\u201dIn a memo announcing his selection, Zurbuchen noted that Jezero offered opportunities for exploration after its initial mission, which will last 1.5 Martian years (or about 2.8 Earth years). The crater is not far from an area known as Midway, which shares many characteristics with Northeast Syrtis. At a recent workshop to assess the potential landing sites, members of the project science team for Mars 2020 said that an extended mission connecting Jezero to Midway might allow scientists to explore the best of both sites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJezero Crater is a more treacherous environment than the kinds NASA usually lands in. Often, landers have to arrive at what scientists jokingly refer to as a \u201cparking lot\u201d \u2014 a flat, featureless region \u2014 and then drive long distances to reach rocks of actual interest. But an innovative new technology called terrain relative navigation (TRN), which allows the spacecraft to compare images of the landscape beneath it to a map of known hazards, should make it possible for the rover to land safely.Only about 40 percent of Mars missions have been successful. And Mars 2020 is not a low-risk endeavor. \u2033There is no backup plan,\u201d Zurbuchen said Monday.Since TRN has never been deployed before, Zurbuchen asked engineers for an additional analysis of the technology. Without assurance that the technology will work as designed, the complex environment at Jezero might pose too high a risk for landing. But Zurbuchen said he was happy with the progress on TRN so far.Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division, told reporters that this mission will define the next decade of Martian exploration. \u201cThe more we understand about the Mars environment, the better equipped we\u2019re gonna be to send humans,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe launch window for Mars 2020 opens July 17, 2020, with an expected landing in February 2021. NASA plans to launch a mission in the late 2020s to collect the cached Jezero Crater samples, according to Zurbuchen. If the rendezvous on Mars succeeds, a returning spacecraft will make a delivery to Earth in the early 2030s.\u201cWe\u2019re not going to go to any other place any time soon,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cMars is the obvious place, after the moon, to extend our presence deeper and deeper into space.\u201dThis report has been updated. Read more:Next stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new rover \u2014 and a chance to make historyCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. In 2020, the space agency will launch a rover to look for evidence of ancient life in Mars's Jezero Crater. NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3349",
        "date": "2018-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/19/nasas-next-mars-rover-will-look-signs-life-an-ancient-crater-lake/",
        "text": "In a search for ancient life on Mars, NASA will send its next rover to explore Jezero Crater \u2014 the site of a former delta and lake.The rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020, is equipped with a drilling system that can collect and store rock samples that contain clues to Mars\u2019s ancient past. Once the samples are cached, NASA hopes to send follow-up missions to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cGetting samples from this lake-delta system will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science.The landing site selection came after years of research and days of fierce debate over the best spot to look for evidence of ancient life on an alien world. Among the alternatives being considered were Columbia Hills, an ancient hot spring that was explored by the now-defunct rover Spirit, and Northeast Syrtis, a network of ancient mesas that may have harbored underground water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUltimately, Zurbuchen said, Jezero was selected for the diversity of its terrain. Each type of rock at the site \u2014 from clays that could preserve signs of ancient organisms to volcanic rocks that hint at Mars\u2019s planetary evolution \u2014 should help the rover achieve its two main science goals. First, to determine what the Red Planet\u2019s environment was like deep in the past. And second, to figure out whether life ever got going there.In a conference announcing the decision Monday, Mars 2020 project scientist Ken Farley described delta systems as \u201cextremely good at preserving biosignatures.\u201d On Earth, not only are these ecosystems rich in life but also headwater organisms swept downriver can be trapped in delta sediment.\u201cWe want to seek evidence of possible ancient life on Mars,\u201d Farley said. They do not expect to find anything alive. \u201cCurrently the surface of Mars is too dry, too cold and has too much radiation for life as we know it to survive.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResults from past missions have revealed that Mars was not always the desolate desert world we see today. Dormant volcanoes suggest it once boasted intense volcanic activity. And landforms like the dried-up delta at Jezero Crater demonstrate that liquid water existed on the surface \u2014 which means Mars may have had a thicker atmosphere to keep the water from boiling away.This new view of Mars resembles what is known about early Earth. And scientists know microbial life began here as early as 4 billion years ago.If it happened here, why not there?\n\n\n\n \n \n \n \n Jezero Crater is the site of an ancient delta that fed into\n a cratert lake.\n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 5 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Jezero\n Crater\n \n \n Delta\n \n \n LANDING\n AREA\n \n \n Crater rim\n \n \n Detail\n \n \n 3 MILES\n \n \n Mudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into\n the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if\n biology ever existed).\n \n \n But windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard\n to the rover here and at other sites.\n \n \n \n\nThe Washington Post\n\n \n Source: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\nJezero Crater is the best place on Mars to probe that question, said Tim Goudge, a geologist at the University of Texas at Austin who is one of the leading advocates for the site. Deltas are beloved by scientists because of the way they gather sediments from across a watershed and deposit them in layers, which eventually harden into rock. Many of the most ancient fossils found on Earth come from this kind of environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf a microbe ever swam in Mars\u2019s waterways, its organic remains may still be buried in the mudstones along the rim of Jezero Crater.\u201cSedimentary rocks tell us the history of what\u2019s been happening at a site,\u201d Goudge said. \u201cIt\u2019s recorded in the layers, and you can read them like a book.\u201dIn a memo announcing his selection, Zurbuchen noted that Jezero offered opportunities for exploration after its initial mission, which will last 1.5 Martian years (or about 2.8 Earth years). The crater is not far from an area known as Midway, which shares many characteristics with Northeast Syrtis. At a recent workshop to assess the potential landing sites, members of the project science team for Mars 2020 said that an extended mission connecting Jezero to Midway might allow scientists to explore the best of both sites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJezero Crater is a more treacherous environment than the kinds NASA usually lands in. Often, landers have to arrive at what scientists jokingly refer to as a \u201cparking lot\u201d \u2014 a flat, featureless region \u2014 and then drive long distances to reach rocks of actual interest. But an innovative new technology called terrain relative navigation (TRN), which allows the spacecraft to compare images of the landscape beneath it to a map of known hazards, should make it possible for the rover to land safely.Only about 40 percent of Mars missions have been successful. And Mars 2020 is not a low-risk endeavor. \u2033There is no backup plan,\u201d Zurbuchen said Monday.Since TRN has never been deployed before, Zurbuchen asked engineers for an additional analysis of the technology. Without assurance that the technology will work as designed, the complex environment at Jezero might pose too high a risk for landing. But Zurbuchen said he was happy with the progress on TRN so far.Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division, told reporters that this mission will define the next decade of Martian exploration. \u201cThe more we understand about the Mars environment, the better equipped we\u2019re gonna be to send humans,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe launch window for Mars 2020 opens July 17, 2020, with an expected landing in February 2021. NASA plans to launch a mission in the late 2020s to collect the cached Jezero Crater samples, according to Zurbuchen. If the rendezvous on Mars succeeds, a returning spacecraft will make a delivery to Earth in the early 2030s.\u201cWe\u2019re not going to go to any other place any time soon,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cMars is the obvious place, after the moon, to extend our presence deeper and deeper into space.\u201dThis report has been updated. Read more:Next stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new rover \u2014 and a chance to make historyCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. In 2020, the space agency will launch a rover to look for evidence of ancient life in Mars's Jezero Crater. NASA\u2019s next Mars rover will look for signs of life on an ancient crater lake",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3350",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/03/china-lands-spacecraft-far-side-moon-historic-first/",
        "text": "In a first for the world, China has successfully landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration said Thursday as the nation announced its arrival as a bona fide space power.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe probe, named Chang\u2019e 4, launched from southwest China in early December and landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time Wednesday in Von Karman crater within the moon\u2019s South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest known impact crater in the solar system. Shortly after landing, a rover on the landing craft dispatched the first photo of the moon\u2019s surface from its far side back to Earth via a satellite communication relay. The landing \u201cmarked a new chapter in the human race\u2019s lunar and space exploration,\u201d the CNSA said in a statement.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe far side of the moon is a rare quiet place that is free from interference of radio signals from Earth,\u201d mission spokesman Yu Guobin said. \u201cThis probe can fill the gap of low-frequency observation in radio astronomy and will provide important information for studying the origin of stars and nebula evolution.\u201dA Chinese space probe landed on the far side of the moon, a historic first landing on a mission seen as an important step for China's space program. (Reuters)Although China, the United States and Russia have operated robotic spacecraft on the moon before, Chang\u2019e 4 is the first to land softly on the side of the satellite that always faces away from Earth. The geology on this side of the moon is distinctive, with more craters and less evidence of volcanic activity. But it is difficult to explore, because scientists on Earth cannot communicate via direct radio signal with spacecraft in this remote region \u2014 a quandary China\u2019s relay satellite has solved. The mission transmitted an orange-tinted, high-definition photo of the moon\u2019s lightly pockmarked surface on ThursdayAdvertisementThe landing demonstrated China\u2019s ambitions to become a space power and scientific force in an era when NASA funding has generally been shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. federal budget. China spends more on scientific research than any nation but the United States, and it launched more rockets than any other country in 2018. In December, China announced it was starting global service for BeiDou \u2014 a homegrown satellite navigation system designed to compete with the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) \u2014 ahead of schedule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is more than just a landing,\u201d said Alan Duffy, a lead scientist with the Royal Institution of Australia who focuses on space exploration. \u201cToday\u2019s announcement was a clear statement about the level of maturity that China\u2019s technology has now reached. Beijing\u2019s longer-term goal to match U.S. capabilities could now become reality within two decades and on the moon within perhaps only one decade.\u201dChina is far from the only nation with its eye on the lunar surface. India, Israel and Germany also have lander missions planned for this year, and the Russian and Japanese space agencies aim to send spacecraft to the moon in the early 2020s.Advertisement\u201cThe whole world is raising their game,\u201d said Maria Zuber, a lunar geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Story continues below advertisementNASA is not currently developing any robotic spacecraft to operate on the moon\u2019s surface. A sample return mission that would explore the same spot as Chang\u2019e 4 has been proposed but never selected for development by the space agency. The agency\u2019s first rover since the Apollo era, the Resource Prospector mission, was abruptly canceled last spring, stunning many scientists.However, in November NASA announced it would begin contracting with private aerospace companies to send scientific payloads to the lunar surface. Those missions could start as early as this year.A new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonChang\u2019e 4 is the latest in a series aimed at exploring the moon and paving the way for Chinese astronauts to eventually land on the lunar surface. Its predecessor, Chang\u2019e 3, delivered a rover called Jade Rabbit to the lunar nearside, where it worked for more than two years. In Chinese mythology, Chang\u2019e is the name of a goddess who lived on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Chang\u2019e 4 mission, which is mainly scientific, will use its cameras and ground-penetrating radar to understand the composition of Von Karman crater within the Aitken basin, which Zuber called \u201ca very special location.\u201dThere, it is thought that an ancient meteor impact during the early days of the solar system exposed material from the moon\u2019s deep interior. Obtaining a precise date for the event, and probing the primitive rock it revealed, could help solve lingering mysteries about the formation of the moon and the history of the solar system.Exploring the Aitken basin has been a top priority for the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the past two decades, noted Clive Neal, a Notre Dame geologist who is emeritus chair of the U.S. Lunar Exploration Analysis Group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cUnfortunately,\u201d he said, that goal \u201chas yet to be realized by a U.S.-led mission.\u201dStill, Zuber noted the Chang\u2019e 4 instrument suite does not include some of the tools required to probe the full array of questions scientists have about the basin.\u201cCertainly there will be some great new science,\u201d Zuber said. \u201cBut I would say the landing of Chang\u2019e 4 is a teaser for what comes next.\u201dA spectrometer on board the rover will also conduct low frequency radio astronomy observations away from the noise of Earth\u2019s radio networks. Contrary to popular belief (and Pink Floyd), this side of the moon is not \u201cdark.\u201d But the interaction of Earth\u2019s gravity with the moon\u2019s rotation means it perpetually faces away from us, making it an ideal site to probe the cosmos without interference.Story continues below advertisementAnd the static part of the Chang\u2019e 4 lander carries a small, sealed capsule containing plant seeds and insect eggs. If the delicate cargo can be encouraged to germinate and hatch in the moon\u2019s low gravity, they may form a complete biosphere \u2014 a tiny oasis of life on a cold and airless world.AdvertisementChina\u2019s space program, whose funding totaled $11 billion in 2017 \u2014 compared with $19 billion requested by NASA \u2014 has been a source of pride for both the Communist Party and the country\u2019s citizens. In 2003, China became the third country to put an astronaut in space. The country plans to launch a sample return mission to the moon later this year and has ambitions to crew a lunar base, launch a low-orbit space station and send a probe to Mars by the 2020s.China revealed little about the Chang\u2019e 4 mission in the run-up to the landing; it did not announce beforehand when it would attempt to land the spacecraft. The only information about the landing site and deployment of instruments has come from official Chinese sources.Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated China in a tweet Wednesday night, writing, \u201cThis is a first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment.\u201dAdvertisementAlthough other countries, including Sweden, contributed instruments to the mission, the United States was not involved. A clause in the appropriations bills for NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy bars the agencies from collaborating with any Chinese entity.Proponents of the ban, including its author, former representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.), say it protects U.S. national security. In a report last August, the Pentagon asserted China\u2019s space program was \u201ccentral to modern warfare.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Space Policy Institute, called the rule \u201cnonsense.\u201d\u201cChina deserves a seat at the central table in space exploration,\u201d he said. \u201cThe success so far of this mission is clear evidence of that reality.\u201dPlanetary scientist Heidi Hammel, who is the executive vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, expressed hope the ban would not stifle international discussions about the mission\u2019s scientific results.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019m keenly interested in what they\u2019ve learned .\u2009.\u2009. especially since [U.S. scientists] have talked about doing the same thing,\u201d she said. \u201cCooperation is preferable to this wall of silence.\u201dIn China, the official reaction was ebullient. The Global Times, a newspaper run by the Communist Party, took a swipe at the \u201cmania\u201d of world powers that historically participated in the space race \u2014 the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 and said China would instead share the data and pictures it obtained and work with any countries committed to the peaceful development of space.It channeled both President John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong in a triumphant editorial.\u201cWe choose to go to the back of the moon not because of the unique glory it brings,\" it said, \"but because this difficult step of destiny is also a forward step for human civilization!\u201d The mission will explore a massive crater at the lunar south pole. China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3351",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/03/china-lands-spacecraft-far-side-moon-historic-first/",
        "text": "In a first for the world, China has successfully landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration said Thursday as the nation announced its arrival as a bona fide space power.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe probe, named Chang\u2019e 4, launched from southwest China in early December and landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time Wednesday in Von Karman crater within the moon\u2019s South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest known impact crater in the solar system. Shortly after landing, a rover on the landing craft dispatched the first photo of the moon\u2019s surface from its far side back to Earth via a satellite communication relay. The landing \u201cmarked a new chapter in the human race\u2019s lunar and space exploration,\u201d the CNSA said in a statement.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe far side of the moon is a rare quiet place that is free from interference of radio signals from Earth,\u201d mission spokesman Yu Guobin said. \u201cThis probe can fill the gap of low-frequency observation in radio astronomy and will provide important information for studying the origin of stars and nebula evolution.\u201dA Chinese space probe landed on the far side of the moon, a historic first landing on a mission seen as an important step for China's space program. (Reuters)Although China, the United States and Russia have operated robotic spacecraft on the moon before, Chang\u2019e 4 is the first to land softly on the side of the satellite that always faces away from Earth. The geology on this side of the moon is distinctive, with more craters and less evidence of volcanic activity. But it is difficult to explore, because scientists on Earth cannot communicate via direct radio signal with spacecraft in this remote region \u2014 a quandary China\u2019s relay satellite has solved. The mission transmitted an orange-tinted, high-definition photo of the moon\u2019s lightly pockmarked surface on ThursdayAdvertisementThe landing demonstrated China\u2019s ambitions to become a space power and scientific force in an era when NASA funding has generally been shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. federal budget. China spends more on scientific research than any nation but the United States, and it launched more rockets than any other country in 2018. In December, China announced it was starting global service for BeiDou \u2014 a homegrown satellite navigation system designed to compete with the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) \u2014 ahead of schedule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is more than just a landing,\u201d said Alan Duffy, a lead scientist with the Royal Institution of Australia who focuses on space exploration. \u201cToday\u2019s announcement was a clear statement about the level of maturity that China\u2019s technology has now reached. Beijing\u2019s longer-term goal to match U.S. capabilities could now become reality within two decades and on the moon within perhaps only one decade.\u201dChina is far from the only nation with its eye on the lunar surface. India, Israel and Germany also have lander missions planned for this year, and the Russian and Japanese space agencies aim to send spacecraft to the moon in the early 2020s.Advertisement\u201cThe whole world is raising their game,\u201d said Maria Zuber, a lunar geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Story continues below advertisementNASA is not currently developing any robotic spacecraft to operate on the moon\u2019s surface. A sample return mission that would explore the same spot as Chang\u2019e 4 has been proposed but never selected for development by the space agency. The agency\u2019s first rover since the Apollo era, the Resource Prospector mission, was abruptly canceled last spring, stunning many scientists.However, in November NASA announced it would begin contracting with private aerospace companies to send scientific payloads to the lunar surface. Those missions could start as early as this year.A new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonChang\u2019e 4 is the latest in a series aimed at exploring the moon and paving the way for Chinese astronauts to eventually land on the lunar surface. Its predecessor, Chang\u2019e 3, delivered a rover called Jade Rabbit to the lunar nearside, where it worked for more than two years. In Chinese mythology, Chang\u2019e is the name of a goddess who lived on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Chang\u2019e 4 mission, which is mainly scientific, will use its cameras and ground-penetrating radar to understand the composition of Von Karman crater within the Aitken basin, which Zuber called \u201ca very special location.\u201dThere, it is thought that an ancient meteor impact during the early days of the solar system exposed material from the moon\u2019s deep interior. Obtaining a precise date for the event, and probing the primitive rock it revealed, could help solve lingering mysteries about the formation of the moon and the history of the solar system.Exploring the Aitken basin has been a top priority for the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the past two decades, noted Clive Neal, a Notre Dame geologist who is emeritus chair of the U.S. Lunar Exploration Analysis Group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cUnfortunately,\u201d he said, that goal \u201chas yet to be realized by a U.S.-led mission.\u201dStill, Zuber noted the Chang\u2019e 4 instrument suite does not include some of the tools required to probe the full array of questions scientists have about the basin.\u201cCertainly there will be some great new science,\u201d Zuber said. \u201cBut I would say the landing of Chang\u2019e 4 is a teaser for what comes next.\u201dA spectrometer on board the rover will also conduct low frequency radio astronomy observations away from the noise of Earth\u2019s radio networks. Contrary to popular belief (and Pink Floyd), this side of the moon is not \u201cdark.\u201d But the interaction of Earth\u2019s gravity with the moon\u2019s rotation means it perpetually faces away from us, making it an ideal site to probe the cosmos without interference.Story continues below advertisementAnd the static part of the Chang\u2019e 4 lander carries a small, sealed capsule containing plant seeds and insect eggs. If the delicate cargo can be encouraged to germinate and hatch in the moon\u2019s low gravity, they may form a complete biosphere \u2014 a tiny oasis of life on a cold and airless world.AdvertisementChina\u2019s space program, whose funding totaled $11 billion in 2017 \u2014 compared with $19 billion requested by NASA \u2014 has been a source of pride for both the Communist Party and the country\u2019s citizens. In 2003, China became the third country to put an astronaut in space. The country plans to launch a sample return mission to the moon later this year and has ambitions to crew a lunar base, launch a low-orbit space station and send a probe to Mars by the 2020s.China revealed little about the Chang\u2019e 4 mission in the run-up to the landing; it did not announce beforehand when it would attempt to land the spacecraft. The only information about the landing site and deployment of instruments has come from official Chinese sources.Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated China in a tweet Wednesday night, writing, \u201cThis is a first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment.\u201dAdvertisementAlthough other countries, including Sweden, contributed instruments to the mission, the United States was not involved. A clause in the appropriations bills for NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy bars the agencies from collaborating with any Chinese entity.Proponents of the ban, including its author, former representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.), say it protects U.S. national security. In a report last August, the Pentagon asserted China\u2019s space program was \u201ccentral to modern warfare.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Space Policy Institute, called the rule \u201cnonsense.\u201d\u201cChina deserves a seat at the central table in space exploration,\u201d he said. \u201cThe success so far of this mission is clear evidence of that reality.\u201dPlanetary scientist Heidi Hammel, who is the executive vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, expressed hope the ban would not stifle international discussions about the mission\u2019s scientific results.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019m keenly interested in what they\u2019ve learned .\u2009.\u2009. especially since [U.S. scientists] have talked about doing the same thing,\u201d she said. \u201cCooperation is preferable to this wall of silence.\u201dIn China, the official reaction was ebullient. The Global Times, a newspaper run by the Communist Party, took a swipe at the \u201cmania\u201d of world powers that historically participated in the space race \u2014 the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 and said China would instead share the data and pictures it obtained and work with any countries committed to the peaceful development of space.It channeled both President John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong in a triumphant editorial.\u201cWe choose to go to the back of the moon not because of the unique glory it brings,\" it said, \"but because this difficult step of destiny is also a forward step for human civilization!\u201d The mission will explore a massive crater at the lunar south pole. China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3352",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/03/china-lands-spacecraft-far-side-moon-historic-first/",
        "text": "In a first for the world, China has successfully landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration said Thursday as the nation announced its arrival as a bona fide space power.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe probe, named Chang\u2019e 4, launched from southwest China in early December and landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time Wednesday in Von Karman crater within the moon\u2019s South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest known impact crater in the solar system. Shortly after landing, a rover on the landing craft dispatched the first photo of the moon\u2019s surface from its far side back to Earth via a satellite communication relay. The landing \u201cmarked a new chapter in the human race\u2019s lunar and space exploration,\u201d the CNSA said in a statement.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe far side of the moon is a rare quiet place that is free from interference of radio signals from Earth,\u201d mission spokesman Yu Guobin said. \u201cThis probe can fill the gap of low-frequency observation in radio astronomy and will provide important information for studying the origin of stars and nebula evolution.\u201dA Chinese space probe landed on the far side of the moon, a historic first landing on a mission seen as an important step for China's space program. (Reuters)Although China, the United States and Russia have operated robotic spacecraft on the moon before, Chang\u2019e 4 is the first to land softly on the side of the satellite that always faces away from Earth. The geology on this side of the moon is distinctive, with more craters and less evidence of volcanic activity. But it is difficult to explore, because scientists on Earth cannot communicate via direct radio signal with spacecraft in this remote region \u2014 a quandary China\u2019s relay satellite has solved. The mission transmitted an orange-tinted, high-definition photo of the moon\u2019s lightly pockmarked surface on ThursdayAdvertisementThe landing demonstrated China\u2019s ambitions to become a space power and scientific force in an era when NASA funding has generally been shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. federal budget. China spends more on scientific research than any nation but the United States, and it launched more rockets than any other country in 2018. In December, China announced it was starting global service for BeiDou \u2014 a homegrown satellite navigation system designed to compete with the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) \u2014 ahead of schedule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is more than just a landing,\u201d said Alan Duffy, a lead scientist with the Royal Institution of Australia who focuses on space exploration. \u201cToday\u2019s announcement was a clear statement about the level of maturity that China\u2019s technology has now reached. Beijing\u2019s longer-term goal to match U.S. capabilities could now become reality within two decades and on the moon within perhaps only one decade.\u201dChina is far from the only nation with its eye on the lunar surface. India, Israel and Germany also have lander missions planned for this year, and the Russian and Japanese space agencies aim to send spacecraft to the moon in the early 2020s.Advertisement\u201cThe whole world is raising their game,\u201d said Maria Zuber, a lunar geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Story continues below advertisementNASA is not currently developing any robotic spacecraft to operate on the moon\u2019s surface. A sample return mission that would explore the same spot as Chang\u2019e 4 has been proposed but never selected for development by the space agency. The agency\u2019s first rover since the Apollo era, the Resource Prospector mission, was abruptly canceled last spring, stunning many scientists.However, in November NASA announced it would begin contracting with private aerospace companies to send scientific payloads to the lunar surface. Those missions could start as early as this year.A new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moonChang\u2019e 4 is the latest in a series aimed at exploring the moon and paving the way for Chinese astronauts to eventually land on the lunar surface. Its predecessor, Chang\u2019e 3, delivered a rover called Jade Rabbit to the lunar nearside, where it worked for more than two years. In Chinese mythology, Chang\u2019e is the name of a goddess who lived on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Chang\u2019e 4 mission, which is mainly scientific, will use its cameras and ground-penetrating radar to understand the composition of Von Karman crater within the Aitken basin, which Zuber called \u201ca very special location.\u201dThere, it is thought that an ancient meteor impact during the early days of the solar system exposed material from the moon\u2019s deep interior. Obtaining a precise date for the event, and probing the primitive rock it revealed, could help solve lingering mysteries about the formation of the moon and the history of the solar system.Exploring the Aitken basin has been a top priority for the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the past two decades, noted Clive Neal, a Notre Dame geologist who is emeritus chair of the U.S. Lunar Exploration Analysis Group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cUnfortunately,\u201d he said, that goal \u201chas yet to be realized by a U.S.-led mission.\u201dStill, Zuber noted the Chang\u2019e 4 instrument suite does not include some of the tools required to probe the full array of questions scientists have about the basin.\u201cCertainly there will be some great new science,\u201d Zuber said. \u201cBut I would say the landing of Chang\u2019e 4 is a teaser for what comes next.\u201dA spectrometer on board the rover will also conduct low frequency radio astronomy observations away from the noise of Earth\u2019s radio networks. Contrary to popular belief (and Pink Floyd), this side of the moon is not \u201cdark.\u201d But the interaction of Earth\u2019s gravity with the moon\u2019s rotation means it perpetually faces away from us, making it an ideal site to probe the cosmos without interference.Story continues below advertisementAnd the static part of the Chang\u2019e 4 lander carries a small, sealed capsule containing plant seeds and insect eggs. If the delicate cargo can be encouraged to germinate and hatch in the moon\u2019s low gravity, they may form a complete biosphere \u2014 a tiny oasis of life on a cold and airless world.AdvertisementChina\u2019s space program, whose funding totaled $11 billion in 2017 \u2014 compared with $19 billion requested by NASA \u2014 has been a source of pride for both the Communist Party and the country\u2019s citizens. In 2003, China became the third country to put an astronaut in space. The country plans to launch a sample return mission to the moon later this year and has ambitions to crew a lunar base, launch a low-orbit space station and send a probe to Mars by the 2020s.China revealed little about the Chang\u2019e 4 mission in the run-up to the landing; it did not announce beforehand when it would attempt to land the spacecraft. The only information about the landing site and deployment of instruments has come from official Chinese sources.Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated China in a tweet Wednesday night, writing, \u201cThis is a first for humanity and an impressive accomplishment.\u201dAdvertisementAlthough other countries, including Sweden, contributed instruments to the mission, the United States was not involved. A clause in the appropriations bills for NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy bars the agencies from collaborating with any Chinese entity.Proponents of the ban, including its author, former representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.), say it protects U.S. national security. In a report last August, the Pentagon asserted China\u2019s space program was \u201ccentral to modern warfare.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Space Policy Institute, called the rule \u201cnonsense.\u201d\u201cChina deserves a seat at the central table in space exploration,\u201d he said. \u201cThe success so far of this mission is clear evidence of that reality.\u201dPlanetary scientist Heidi Hammel, who is the executive vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, expressed hope the ban would not stifle international discussions about the mission\u2019s scientific results.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019m keenly interested in what they\u2019ve learned .\u2009.\u2009. especially since [U.S. scientists] have talked about doing the same thing,\u201d she said. \u201cCooperation is preferable to this wall of silence.\u201dIn China, the official reaction was ebullient. The Global Times, a newspaper run by the Communist Party, took a swipe at the \u201cmania\u201d of world powers that historically participated in the space race \u2014 the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 and said China would instead share the data and pictures it obtained and work with any countries committed to the peaceful development of space.It channeled both President John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong in a triumphant editorial.\u201cWe choose to go to the back of the moon not because of the unique glory it brings,\" it said, \"but because this difficult step of destiny is also a forward step for human civilization!\u201d The mission will explore a massive crater at the lunar south pole. China lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The James Webb Space Telescope is \u2014 wait for it \u2014 delayed again (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3353",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/27/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-been-wait-for-it-delayed-again/",
        "text": "In a blow to NASA's science, its budget and its ego, the space agency will push back the launch of its James Webb Space Telescope until March 2021.The delay\u00a0is the latest in embarrassing and expensive setbacks for the flagship space observatory, which has been billed as the high-powered successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It comes at the recommendation of an independent review board that found the ambitious mission has been plagued by human errors, embedded problems and unrealistic expectations about the time and money required to build such a complex instrument. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to NASA associate administrator Stephen Jurczyk, this latest delay will add an additional $800 million to the space telescope's development cost, bringing the total sticker price to $9.66 billion. This exceeds a funding cap set by Congress in 2011, and NASA will have to ask for reauthorization in the next budget cycle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite these difficulties, Jurczyk said, \u201cWebb is a top-priority mission with great national importance, and it's worth the wait.\u201dConceived in 1996 and originally slated to launch in the mid-2000s, JWST has been described as \u201cthe telescope that ate astronomy\u201d thanks to constantly slipping launch targets and ballooning budgets. The project has already been delayed once this year, to deal with\u00a0issues that arose as the telescope components were brought together at the Redondo Beach, Calif., facility of Northrop Grumman, the project's main contractor.Avoidable human mishaps have added 1.5 years and $600 million to the time and cost of development, the review board found. The wrong solvent was used to clean the propulsion system. A transducer was accidentally fried when it was incorrectly powered. And 70 improperly installed fasteners on the tennis-court-sized sun shield fell off during testing; as many as four of them may still be lost inside the spacecraft, officials said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTraining, discipline, high-quality procedures and assuring a failure-proof safety net is available are required to ensure human errors that occur in the future are minimized,\u201d review board chair Tom Young, a\u00a0former NASA official and aerospace executive, told reporters Wednesday.This 2014 video gives an in-depth look at what will happen when the James Webb Space Telescope deploys after launch. (YouTube: James Webb Space Telescope)In total, the report lists 32 recommendations for addressing these problems and ensuring the telescope makes it to the launchpad by its new deadline. These include providing Northrop Grumman with additional support staff from NASA, designating a commission manager with systems engineering experience to oversee the remainder of the spacecraft's development, and conducting a thorough audit of the flight hardware drawings and procedures to uncover any problems that haven't yet been detected.Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said NASA agreed with the recommendations and many were already being implemented.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsked whether Northrop Grumman would be penalized for the problems at its facility, NASA said the delays are factored into biannual evaluations of the contractor's performance, which determine whether it will earn awards on top of the cost of the project.\u201cMake no mistake, I\u2019m not happy sitting here having to share this story,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cBut the point is we\u2019re part of this team that has created this problem we\u2019re in.\u00a0Northrup is part of this, but we have oversight of this, so we take responsibility as well.\u201dThe James Webb, which has cost more than $7.3 billion to develop, was a top priority in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's 2000 Decadal Survey.\u00a0Designed to work in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, its gold-covered 20-foot-wide mirror will collect the oldest light in the universe, allowing scientists unprecedented insight into the time known as \u201ccosmic dawn.\u201d It will also probe the mysteries of black holes and seek out signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut much of the\u00a0technology required for such a fantastic instrument didn't exist when the telescope was first conceived.The new report chides NASA's \u201cexcessive optimism\u201d in estimating how much time and money it would take to build the telescope, noting that \u201cJWST is among the most complicated scientific experiments ever attempted.\u201dSeven major aspects of the mission have never been tried before \u2014 including the telescope's massive sun shield and honeycomb-like segmented mirror, the transport to and launch from a European Space Agency port in French Guiana, and the flight to and operation from a spot a million miles from Earth \u2014 far more distant than the Hubble Space Telescope.Story continues below advertisementThis last point is crucial. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which underwent repairs while in orbit, JWST cannot be fixed after launch.AdvertisementThe ongoing problems have NASA considering whether it may have bitten off more than it could chew with the telescope.\u201cWe want to take leaps, otherwise we\u2019re not NASA,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cBut how big a bite should we take is really something we\u2019re asking across the board and trying to learn how to do it the right way.\u201dRead more:Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 againNASA's new gold-covered telescope will put the Hubble to shameIngredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn\u2019s moon The cost of the new NASA telescope has risen to $9.66 billion after an independent review found that it was plagued by embedded problems and human errors.  The James Webb Space Telescope is \u2014 wait for it \u2014 delayed again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The James Webb Space Telescope is \u2014 wait for it \u2014 delayed again (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3354",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/27/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-been-wait-for-it-delayed-again/",
        "text": "In a blow to NASA's science, its budget and its ego, the space agency will push back the launch of its James Webb Space Telescope until March 2021.The delay\u00a0is the latest in embarrassing and expensive setbacks for the flagship space observatory, which has been billed as the high-powered successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It comes at the recommendation of an independent review board that found the ambitious mission has been plagued by human errors, embedded problems and unrealistic expectations about the time and money required to build such a complex instrument. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to NASA associate administrator Stephen Jurczyk, this latest delay will add an additional $800 million to the space telescope's development cost, bringing the total sticker price to $9.66 billion. This exceeds a funding cap set by Congress in 2011, and NASA will have to ask for reauthorization in the next budget cycle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite these difficulties, Jurczyk said, \u201cWebb is a top-priority mission with great national importance, and it's worth the wait.\u201dConceived in 1996 and originally slated to launch in the mid-2000s, JWST has been described as \u201cthe telescope that ate astronomy\u201d thanks to constantly slipping launch targets and ballooning budgets. The project has already been delayed once this year, to deal with\u00a0issues that arose as the telescope components were brought together at the Redondo Beach, Calif., facility of Northrop Grumman, the project's main contractor.Avoidable human mishaps have added 1.5 years and $600 million to the time and cost of development, the review board found. The wrong solvent was used to clean the propulsion system. A transducer was accidentally fried when it was incorrectly powered. And 70 improperly installed fasteners on the tennis-court-sized sun shield fell off during testing; as many as four of them may still be lost inside the spacecraft, officials said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTraining, discipline, high-quality procedures and assuring a failure-proof safety net is available are required to ensure human errors that occur in the future are minimized,\u201d review board chair Tom Young, a\u00a0former NASA official and aerospace executive, told reporters Wednesday.This 2014 video gives an in-depth look at what will happen when the James Webb Space Telescope deploys after launch. (YouTube: James Webb Space Telescope)In total, the report lists 32 recommendations for addressing these problems and ensuring the telescope makes it to the launchpad by its new deadline. These include providing Northrop Grumman with additional support staff from NASA, designating a commission manager with systems engineering experience to oversee the remainder of the spacecraft's development, and conducting a thorough audit of the flight hardware drawings and procedures to uncover any problems that haven't yet been detected.Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said NASA agreed with the recommendations and many were already being implemented.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsked whether Northrop Grumman would be penalized for the problems at its facility, NASA said the delays are factored into biannual evaluations of the contractor's performance, which determine whether it will earn awards on top of the cost of the project.\u201cMake no mistake, I\u2019m not happy sitting here having to share this story,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cBut the point is we\u2019re part of this team that has created this problem we\u2019re in.\u00a0Northrup is part of this, but we have oversight of this, so we take responsibility as well.\u201dThe James Webb, which has cost more than $7.3 billion to develop, was a top priority in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's 2000 Decadal Survey.\u00a0Designed to work in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, its gold-covered 20-foot-wide mirror will collect the oldest light in the universe, allowing scientists unprecedented insight into the time known as \u201ccosmic dawn.\u201d It will also probe the mysteries of black holes and seek out signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut much of the\u00a0technology required for such a fantastic instrument didn't exist when the telescope was first conceived.The new report chides NASA's \u201cexcessive optimism\u201d in estimating how much time and money it would take to build the telescope, noting that \u201cJWST is among the most complicated scientific experiments ever attempted.\u201dSeven major aspects of the mission have never been tried before \u2014 including the telescope's massive sun shield and honeycomb-like segmented mirror, the transport to and launch from a European Space Agency port in French Guiana, and the flight to and operation from a spot a million miles from Earth \u2014 far more distant than the Hubble Space Telescope.Story continues below advertisementThis last point is crucial. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which underwent repairs while in orbit, JWST cannot be fixed after launch.AdvertisementThe ongoing problems have NASA considering whether it may have bitten off more than it could chew with the telescope.\u201cWe want to take leaps, otherwise we\u2019re not NASA,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cBut how big a bite should we take is really something we\u2019re asking across the board and trying to learn how to do it the right way.\u201dRead more:Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 againNASA's new gold-covered telescope will put the Hubble to shameIngredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn\u2019s moon The cost of the new NASA telescope has risen to $9.66 billion after an independent review found that it was plagued by embedded problems and human errors.  The James Webb Space Telescope is \u2014 wait for it \u2014 delayed again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The James Webb Space Telescope is \u2014 wait for it \u2014 delayed again (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3355",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/27/the-james-webb-space-telescope-has-been-wait-for-it-delayed-again/",
        "text": "In a blow to NASA's science, its budget and its ego, the space agency will push back the launch of its James Webb Space Telescope until March 2021.The delay\u00a0is the latest in embarrassing and expensive setbacks for the flagship space observatory, which has been billed as the high-powered successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It comes at the recommendation of an independent review board that found the ambitious mission has been plagued by human errors, embedded problems and unrealistic expectations about the time and money required to build such a complex instrument. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to NASA associate administrator Stephen Jurczyk, this latest delay will add an additional $800 million to the space telescope's development cost, bringing the total sticker price to $9.66 billion. This exceeds a funding cap set by Congress in 2011, and NASA will have to ask for reauthorization in the next budget cycle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite these difficulties, Jurczyk said, \u201cWebb is a top-priority mission with great national importance, and it's worth the wait.\u201dConceived in 1996 and originally slated to launch in the mid-2000s, JWST has been described as \u201cthe telescope that ate astronomy\u201d thanks to constantly slipping launch targets and ballooning budgets. The project has already been delayed once this year, to deal with\u00a0issues that arose as the telescope components were brought together at the Redondo Beach, Calif., facility of Northrop Grumman, the project's main contractor.Avoidable human mishaps have added 1.5 years and $600 million to the time and cost of development, the review board found. The wrong solvent was used to clean the propulsion system. A transducer was accidentally fried when it was incorrectly powered. And 70 improperly installed fasteners on the tennis-court-sized sun shield fell off during testing; as many as four of them may still be lost inside the spacecraft, officials said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTraining, discipline, high-quality procedures and assuring a failure-proof safety net is available are required to ensure human errors that occur in the future are minimized,\u201d review board chair Tom Young, a\u00a0former NASA official and aerospace executive, told reporters Wednesday.This 2014 video gives an in-depth look at what will happen when the James Webb Space Telescope deploys after launch. (YouTube: James Webb Space Telescope)In total, the report lists 32 recommendations for addressing these problems and ensuring the telescope makes it to the launchpad by its new deadline. These include providing Northrop Grumman with additional support staff from NASA, designating a commission manager with systems engineering experience to oversee the remainder of the spacecraft's development, and conducting a thorough audit of the flight hardware drawings and procedures to uncover any problems that haven't yet been detected.Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said NASA agreed with the recommendations and many were already being implemented.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsked whether Northrop Grumman would be penalized for the problems at its facility, NASA said the delays are factored into biannual evaluations of the contractor's performance, which determine whether it will earn awards on top of the cost of the project.\u201cMake no mistake, I\u2019m not happy sitting here having to share this story,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cBut the point is we\u2019re part of this team that has created this problem we\u2019re in.\u00a0Northrup is part of this, but we have oversight of this, so we take responsibility as well.\u201dThe James Webb, which has cost more than $7.3 billion to develop, was a top priority in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's 2000 Decadal Survey.\u00a0Designed to work in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, its gold-covered 20-foot-wide mirror will collect the oldest light in the universe, allowing scientists unprecedented insight into the time known as \u201ccosmic dawn.\u201d It will also probe the mysteries of black holes and seek out signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut much of the\u00a0technology required for such a fantastic instrument didn't exist when the telescope was first conceived.The new report chides NASA's \u201cexcessive optimism\u201d in estimating how much time and money it would take to build the telescope, noting that \u201cJWST is among the most complicated scientific experiments ever attempted.\u201dSeven major aspects of the mission have never been tried before \u2014 including the telescope's massive sun shield and honeycomb-like segmented mirror, the transport to and launch from a European Space Agency port in French Guiana, and the flight to and operation from a spot a million miles from Earth \u2014 far more distant than the Hubble Space Telescope.Story continues below advertisementThis last point is crucial. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which underwent repairs while in orbit, JWST cannot be fixed after launch.AdvertisementThe ongoing problems have NASA considering whether it may have bitten off more than it could chew with the telescope.\u201cWe want to take leaps, otherwise we\u2019re not NASA,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cBut how big a bite should we take is really something we\u2019re asking across the board and trying to learn how to do it the right way.\u201dRead more:Launch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 againNASA's new gold-covered telescope will put the Hubble to shameIngredients for life discovered gushing out of Saturn\u2019s moon The cost of the new NASA telescope has risen to $9.66 billion after an independent review found that it was plagued by embedded problems and human errors.  The James Webb Space Telescope is \u2014 wait for it \u2014 delayed again",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s stunning Great Red Spot, seen like never before (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3356",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/12/jupiters-stunning-great-red-spot-seen-like-never-before/",
        "text": "Imagine a storm\u00a0so vast it could swallow the Earth and so powerful that it has swirled nonstop for 350 years.\u00a0That is Jupiter's Great Red Spot.On Monday, NASA sent its Juno spacecraft skimming just 2,200 miles above the spot's roiling cloud tops. It was the closest any human-built object has come to the biggest storm in our solar system. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plucky probe made it through without a scratch. Now, data and stunning images are streaming back to NASA, where scientists\u00a0are processing the information as quickly as they can. The raw image data is available here, and\u00a0anyone with the right editing software can try their hand at processing it. It will take weeks, even months, for the science data to come out, and scientists will likely study this flyby for years to come.First JunoCam raw images of Jupiter's Great Red Spot are here! Check 'em out: https://t.co/5tqqjs8o1w pic.twitter.com/WWWbOIJqmj\u2014 Emily Calandrelli (@TheSpaceGal) July 12, 2017\n\nThe Great Red Spot\u00a0has more than just good looks going for it. The massive weather system \u2014 its composition and internal dynamics are still something of a mystery \u2014 could help scientists understand weather on Earth and on worlds beyond our solar system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s Juno Mission released a video on July 5 which shows a timelapse of images taken from the Juno spacecraft between June 12 to June 29. Juno entered orbit around Jupiter on July 4 after an almost five-year journey. (NASA)\u201cIf you just look at reflected light from an extrasolar planet, you\u2019re not going to be able to tell what it\u2019s made of,\u201d Amy Simon, an expert in planetary atmospheres at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a NASA news release. \u201cLooking at as many possible different cases in our own solar system could enable us to then apply that knowledge to extrasolar planets.\u201dHere are a few of the best processed images to come online. We will update this post with more images as they become available.Jupiter's Great Red Spot as seen by the Juno spacecraft from Bjorn Jonsson on Vimeo.#Juno's flyby of #Jupiter's Great Red Spot immortalized in this GIF! Watch as @NASAJuno flies over Jupiter's cloud tops and over the #GRS! pic.twitter.com/TO7oeRhWxu\u2014 Sophia Gad-Nasr (@Astropartigirl) July 12, 2017\n\nThey're here! My first processed raw map-projected image of #Jupiter's Great Red Spot from @NASAJuno's P7 flyover on July 10-11 #GRSflyover pic.twitter.com/DpSYHA7IVt\u2014 Jason Major (@JPMajor) July 12, 2017\n\nGreat Red Spot Eats Earth! [ to scale ] @NASAJuno https://t.co/SaoGiaSFD4 pic.twitter.com/PiTaFVd5Ve\u2014 Se\u00e1n Doran (@_TheSeaning) July 14, 2017\n\nMy Best image process of #Jupiter to date--and it's the #GreatRedSpot!! #Juno https://t.co/AVqE4u6Flk pic.twitter.com/fiIjlKrwPj\u2014 Sophia Gad-Nasr (@Astropartigirl) July 13, 2017\n\n#Jupiter's Great Red Spot from @NASAJuno Perijove 7!!! - https://t.co/EieVHVIBXE pic.twitter.com/osGuU1EfPk\u2014 Kevin M. Gill (@kevinmgill) July 12, 2017\n\nhttps://t.co/soLU3D1USn pic.twitter.com/FtYBWx7RPG\u2014 Se\u00e1n Doran (@_TheSeaning) July 14, 2017\n\nNew @NASAJuno community images are amazing! With thanks to Gerald Eichst\u00e4dt & @_TheSeaning, here's a WIP visualisation! I \u2764\ufe0f the GRS. #Juno pic.twitter.com/G0JXHL6Rav\u2014 Tom Curse FRAS \ud83c\udf83 (@tomkerss) July 13, 2017\n\nJupiter's turbulent atmosphere with swirls and storms, via @NASAJuno P7 - https://t.co/nJQRyouovz pic.twitter.com/oWamW3YjyU\u2014 Kevin M. Gill (@kevinmgill) July 12, 2017\n\nMy contribution #GreatRedSpot #JunoCam #jupiter pic.twitter.com/aZE9cjcRuU\u2014 AmaurieRaz.eth (@AmaurieRaz) July 12, 2017\n\nPerijove 07 @NASAJuno Great Red Spot https://t.co/8V0hwzJC9U pic.twitter.com/c28NntorRC\u2014 Se\u00e1n Doran (@_TheSeaning) July 12, 2017\n\n#Jupiter's NNTZ Little Red Spot processed from #JunoCam raw data. An 8000km size anticyclone that has been around for more than 20yrs. pic.twitter.com/7bXD669Ecz\u2014 Damian Peach\ud83d\udc99 (@peachastro) July 13, 2017\n\nHere is @NASAJuno Perijove 07 [ 53 ] based on work by Gerald Eichst\u00e4dthttps://t.co/7PgJAXCzz1 & https://t.co/NrhSdlzGYr pic.twitter.com/1yT1jZwVeb\u2014 Se\u00e1n Doran (@_TheSeaning) July 13, 2017\n\nRead more:A massive atmospheric experiment is planned for August solar eclipseWomen of color face staggering harassment in space scienceA mysterious Mars-sized planet may be hiding at the edge of our solar system NASA's Juno probe just swooped past the biggest storm in our solar system. Jupiter\u2019s stunning Great Red Spot, seen like never before",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth\u2019s new \u2018mini-moon\u2019 is leaving soon. But it\u2019ll be back. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3357",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/02/28/mini-moon-2020-cd3/",
        "text": "Images of the night sky capture little more than a white dot zipping across gray static. Without the helpful green circle, it\u2019s easy to miss.But two astronomers soon recognized the speck on their screens as something special: a likely \u201cmini-moon\u201d caught orbiting the Earth, only the second ever recorded.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith close to 1 million known asteroids \u2014 rubble from the birth of our solar system \u2014 but hardly any spotted circling our planet, this roughly compact-car-size object is \u201ca big deal,\u201d tweeted Kacper Wierzchos, one of the people who made the discovery. Astronomers expect mini-moon sightings to grow far more common as a new, giant telescope going up in Chile starts scanning the sky. It\u2019s an exciting prospect for scientists interested in someday sending a spacecraft to study one of the rocks and maybe even bring it back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese asteroids are what built the planets,\u201d Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Washington Post. \u201cAnd if these things are in orbit of Earth, they\u2019re very easy for us to get to.\u201dThere\u2019s no time to plan such a visit to 2020 CD3, the mini-moon discovered this month by staffers at a NASA-funded, Arizona-based project called the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS). The object is already getting fainter, and next month it will slip away from the Earth\u2019s gravity to join other asteroids hurtling around the sun, said Eric Christensen, who directs the CSS.But 2020 CD3 will be back, he said.\u201cIt\u2019s likely coming to pay us another visit in another 25 or 50 years,\u201d Christensen told The Post.Story continues below advertisementHosted in Tucson by the University of Arizona, the CSS is devoted to tracking \u201cnear-Earth objects.\u201d Worried about asteroids that could hit the Earth and do serious damage, lawmakers have set a goal of cataloguing at least 90 percent of these near-Earth objects above a certain size.AdvertisementAn automated system at the CSS collects pictures throughout the night and then tries to spot moving objects, Christensen explained. Then astronomers take a look and decide which ones they should report.The images the project captured of the mini-moon on the night of Feb. 15 look a lot like any other asteroid streaking across the sky, he added. It wasn\u2019t until the next day that scientists decided they probably had an object temporarily \u201ccaptured\u201d by Earth.Story continues below advertisementThey still have questions.Exactly what the object is made of is not yet clear, researchers say. They also aren\u2019t totally sure how long 2020 CD3 has been orbiting us. It\u2019s at least a year, maybe a few.More data would help them be extra-sure they have the second recorded mini-moon, Christensen said. But the astronomers are fairly confident they have a hunk of rock \u2014 and thus a moonlet \u2014 rather than man-made space junk. Their find seems too heavy to be some artificial castoff, Christensen says.AdvertisementThe Catalina Sky Survey also discovered the one other mini-moon on record, in 2006. That object is expected to come back in 2028.\u201cFinding a second one demonstrates that yes, there are multiple \u2026 the first one was not a fluke,\u201d said Christensen.Story continues below advertisementSome researchers think we could start finding several mini-moons a year when the Vera Rubin Observatory starts operations in 2022 atop a Chilean mountain. That new observatory will spend its first decade making an \u201cunprecedented\u201d survey of the visible sky, the National Science Foundation says.For now, scientists say, the mini-moons are hard to spot. 2020 CD3 is already getting too faint for the Catalina Sky Survey to pick it up.\u201cI think it\u2019s highly likely that this has been observed before but that it\u2019s been mistaken for an artificial satellite,\u201d said Matthew Holman, director of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Minor Planet Center. \u201cThat\u2019s the much more common thing, if you\u2019re looking for something that\u2019s in orbit around the Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsteroids become mini-moons by \u201cbeing in the right place at the right time,\u201d said Sheppard, the Carnegie astronomer. They approach the Earth at just the right velocity to find themselves pulled into a typically chaotic orbit that\u2019s also influenced by the moon and the Sun.Sometimes, researchers said, 2020 CD3 was flung several times further away from Earth than our normal moon. Other times, it came within a few tens of thousands of kilometers.To stay in orbit for good, mini-moons would need to somehow have a bit of their energy zapped away, Sheppard said. So however many are out there without our knowledge, they\u2019re all fleeting.Read more: Mark your calendar for these celestial events in 2020Voyagers to the \u2018epicenter of global warming\u2019 struggle with bears, storms and thin iceNASA spacecraft circling the sun stumbled upon a trail of shooting stars Astronomers expect mini-moon sightings to grow far more common as a new, giant telescope going up in Chile starts scanning the sky. Earth\u2019s new \u2018mini-moon\u2019 is leaving soon. But it\u2019ll be back.",
        "author": "Hannah Knowles"
    },
    {
        "title": "This weird moon of Saturn has some essential ingredients for life (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3358",
        "date": "2017-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/08/this-weird-moon-of-saturn-has-some-essential-ingredients-for-life/",
        "text": "If you were going to cook up life on another world, Titan is\u00a0the place to do it.Saturn's largest moon is rich\u00a0with\u00a0carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen \u2014 elements required by\u00a0all living organisms on Earth. It has\u00a0two types of wet ingredients \u2014 an\u00a0ocean of water underground and lakes of liquid methane on the surface. And it's flush with energy \u2014 just one of those methane lakes\u00a0could\u00a0power every U.S. home for 300 years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightResearchers have now detected two more potentially important ingredients for making aliens:\u00a0a compound that can form a membrane like the kind that envelops cells, and long chains of carbon atoms that may be \u201cuniversal drivers\u201d for the chemistry that precedes life.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIt's as though\u00a0scientists have walked into a cosmic kitchen and found the oven has been preheated to 350 degrees and the flour and eggs are mixed together, said Sarah H\u00f6rst, a professor of planetary science at Johns Hopkins University.\u00a0\u201cBut you weren't there when they got mixed, so you don't know what they got mixed up to do. You don't know what will happen when you bake it,\u201d she said.AdvertisementAll those ingredients may add up to nothing. Or, \u201cYou might be like, holy s---, this is an amazing souffle!\u201d\u00a0H\u00f6rst laughed.Making an organism is a lot harder than baking a souffle. If biology is brewing on Titan, it will likely be very different from life as we know it. At nearly 1\u00a0billion miles from the Sun, Titan is bitterly cold \u2014\u00a0temperatures average minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit on a mild day. The hazy atmosphere is full of smog-like clouds that rain down liquid methane, and the lakes contain highly flammable hydrocarbons (the main component of gasoline) that would quickly catch fire if oxygen were present. Luckily (or not, depending on how much you enjoy breathing), Titan has hardly any oxygen to speak of.Story continues below advertisementBut\u00a0H\u00f6rst, who was not involved in the recent research, says Titan is an ideal target in our solar system to search for\u00a0life as we don't know it. The two latest discoveries just add to the mounting evidence.AdvertisementThe first, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters\u00a0late last month, comes from the NASA spacecraft Cassini, which\u00a0detected in Titan's atmosphere a peculiar kind of molecule previously only seen in meteorites, comets and the dusty space between stars. This molecule, called a carbon chain anion, appears to be a catalyst for complicated chemical reactions, said lead author Ravi Desai. Much the way lemon juice reacts with baking soda to make a cake rise, this anion, or negatively charged molecule, may trigger reactions that produce bigger organic molecules.The discovery of carbon chain anions high in Titan's atmosphere is as exciting to astrobiologists as any tasty dessert would be. These molecules are associated with the creation of organic\u00a0compounds in interstellar dust clouds and with the amino acids and other biological building blocks that have been detected on meteorites and comets.Story continues below advertisementThe fact that similar chemistry occurs in Titan's clouds suggests that the creation of life's building blocks could be a \u201cuniversal process,\u201d Desai said, \u201cwith universal drivers behind it.\u201dAdvertisementDesai, a physicist at University College London, emphasized that you'd need several steps to get from carbon chain anions to actual living beings. In an absolute best-case scenario, these molecules would trigger the reaction of bigger organic compounds, which are then combined into amino acids, which build proteins, which are an essential ingredient for cells. Scientists don't yet have proof that all those steps are happening on Saturn's moon.But they do know that Titan's atmosphere contains a wealth of large organic compounds\u00a0\u2014\u00a0rings and chains of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, some of them hundreds of atoms long, that emerge as you drift down toward the surface. And\u00a0H\u00f6rst has performed experiments in her lab here on Earth showing that amino acids and nucleotides (the basic units of DNA) can be concocted from\u00a0the chemical broth of the moon's haze.\u201cIt all sort of comes together,\u201d Desai said.Add to that list of intriguing ingredients another newly detected organic molecule, vinyl cyanide.\u00a0Despite the unpromising name \u2014 which sounds like the alias of a super villain who kills with toxic 1970s couches \u2014 this molecule has astrobiologists really excited, according to H\u00f6rst.\u00a0Research published in 2015 showed that vinyl cyanide molecules can clump to form a spherical envelope\u00a0much like the membranes that surround our cells.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnd we know that life is a whole bunch of containers, basically, that keep things where we want them until we want them somewhere else,\u201d H\u00f6rst said. \u201cMolecules like vinyl cyanide might be able to do that kind of thing.\u201dVinyl cyanide is exciting because it's amphiphilic: One end has an electric charge, the other doesn't. This is the same attribute that lets soap molecules cluster around oil and dirt\u00a0when you clean your dishes. It's also what makes the lipids\u00a0that form our cell membranes spontaneously assemble into a skin that can enclose a cell.Our cell membrane lipids require oxygen, and they only work when immersed\u00a0in water \u2014 both of which are hard to come by\u00a0on Titan's surface. But vinyl cyanide comprises just carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and it makes a membrane when submerged in liquid methane, which Titan is swimming in. Could this be a key to basic biochemistry on Titan?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUsing data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array,\u00a066\u00a0telescopes\u00a0spread across a desert plateau in Chile, NASA Goddard planetary scientist Maureen Palmer\u00a0was able to\u00a0detect the electromagnetic signature of vinyl cyanide \u2014 a tiny, seven-atom molecule in an atmosphere 900 million miles away.\u201cIt would be a lot different from the chemistry we're used to on Earth,\u201d Palmer said.\u00a0\u201cThat's why when we're thinking about astrobiology on Titan it's sometimes called 'weird life.' \u2026 It's a fascinating target for trying to explore the boundaries for what life would be possible.\u201dMuch of what we know about Titan's potential habitability comes from Cassini, the NASA probe that's been circling Saturn for more than a decade. The spacecraft dropped a lander onto Titan (humanity's first-ever landing on a moon beside our own), discovered the moon's lakes, and detected scores of important organic molecules on this weird body.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet Cassini is nearly out of fuel. Rather than leaving it aloft \u2014 and risk it crashing into Titan and contaminating the alien moon \u2014 scientists programmed the probe to take a\u00a0fatal plunge\u00a0into\u00a0Saturn's roiling interior in mid-September.Palmer's discovery, which was\u00a0published in the\u00a0journal Science Advances, is heartening to scientists who were dreading the\u00a0end of the Cassini mission, because it suggests that molecules\u00a0in an alien\u00a0atmosphere can be pinpointed with stunning precision by telescopes here on Earth.But\u00a0H\u00f6rst is still gunning for a return mission to\u00a0the giant moon.\u201cPeople ask me all the time if I think there's life on Titan, and you will get a different answer from me \u2026 depending on how much alcohol I've had,\u201d she said. \u201cBut we are pretty darn sure that everything in these broad, big-picture categories that's required for life exists on Titan. At some point it just comes down to, well, shouldn't we go check?\u201dRead more:See more amazing images of Cassini's dive through Saturn's ringsNASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn's icy moon EnceladusDeep-sea life on Earth gives us a clue to what aliens would be likeLooking for aliens on ocean worlds: 'You'd be in denial to believe there isn't life out there' Two new studies add to the mounting evidence that Titan \u2014 Saturn's moon of clouds, lakes and complex organic chemistry \u2014 could be home to life.  This weird moon of Saturn has some essential ingredients for life",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 Launches on Mission to the Moon\u2019s Far Side (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3359",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/china-moon-change-4.html",
        "text": "If the mission is successful, the spacecraft would be the first in human history to land on the moon\u2019s far side. If the mission is successful, the spacecraft would be the first in human history to land on the moon\u2019s far side. China is aiming to go where no one has gone before: the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 Launches on Mission to the Moon\u2019s Far Side (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3360",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/china-moon-change-4.html",
        "text": "If the mission is successful, the spacecraft would be the first in human history to land on the moon\u2019s far side. If the mission is successful, the spacecraft would be the first in human history to land on the moon\u2019s far side. China is aiming to go where no one has gone before: the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saturn\u2019s rings are halfway to their death (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3361",
        "date": "2018-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/19/saturns-rings-are-halfway-their-death/",
        "text": "If dinosaurs had possessed telescopes and the will to gaze skyward 100 million years ago, they might have seen a very different Saturn \u2014 one without its iconic rings.And if humans manage to survive another 100 million years, our descendants may also miss the discs of ice and dust that encircle the golden gas giant. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWe live in an extraordinary era, scientists say \u2014 the brief blip in the 4.6-billion-year life of our solar system in which Saturn\u2019s rings are visible. According to a study published this week in the planetary science journal Icarus, the material that makes up this feature is \u201craining\u201d into the planet\u2019s interior at a \u201cworst case scenario\u201d rate. The rings are already halfway to their death.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are lucky to be around\u201d right now, the study\u2019s lead author, James O\u2019Donoghue, said in a statement.AdvertisementScientists have long debated whether Saturn\u2019s rings were born with the planet or are a relatively new acquisition. Some models suggest that the ring material is debris left over from the planet\u2019s formation more than 4 billion years ago. But others theorize that the rings formed when objects like comets, asteroids or even moons broke apart in orbit around the massive planet.It\u2019s hard to imagine the sixth planet from the sun without its most famous feature. Though Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune are also banded, Saturn\u2019s adornment is by far the most impressive in the solar system. The planet\u2019s rings span 170,000 miles across and are bright enough to be visible with a child\u2019s telescope.Story continues below advertisementAnd although they look solid from Earth, observations by the Voyager and Cassini spacecraft have revealed that the rings are instead made of floating bits of material, ranging in size from as small as specks to larger than the Empire State Building. They stay suspended around the planet\u2019s midsection through a careful balance of gravity, which tries to pull the material inward, and their orbital velocity, which seeks to sling them into space.AdvertisementBut sometimes ring particles get electrically charged by light from the sun or other cosmic phenomena. This makes them susceptible to the siren song of Saturn\u2019s magnetic field, which bends inward at the rings. The particles slide along magnetic field lines into the planet\u2019s atmosphere, where they vaporize, generating glowing, charged hydrogen and droplets of water.O\u2019Donoghue and his colleagues observed this phenomenon with the huge Keck telescope in Hawaii and concluded that a combination of Saturn\u2019s gravity and magnetism pulls an Olympic-size swimming pool worth of material into the planet every 30 minutes. Combining this analysis with data collected by the departed Cassini spacecraft, which dove through the rings before plunging into Saturn last year, O\u2019Donoghue predicts that the rings have less than 100 million years to live.Look up while you can.Read more:See the most moving photo from the Cassini mission We live in an extraordinary era, scientists say \u2014 the brief blip in the 4.6-billion-year life of our solar system in which Saturn\u2019s rings are visible. According to a new study, the material that makes up this feature is \u201craining\u201d into the planet\u2019s interior. Saturn\u2019s rings are halfway to their death",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weird (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3362",
        "date": "2019-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/03/20/smallest-farthest-worlds-ever-explored-by-nasa-are-really-really-weird/",
        "text": "HOUSTON \u2014 In recent months, NASA has explored the smallest object ever orbited and the most distant body ever encountered \u2014 and found that both worlds are weirder than anyone could have imagined.The 1,600-foot-wide asteroid Bennu, which is being studied by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, produces strange plumes of dust particles. Principal investigator Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, called the discovery \u201cone of the biggest surprises of my scientific career.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, data collected during the New Horizons spacecraft\u2019s New Year\u2019s Day flight past a far-flung icy object called MU69 suggests that the body is weirdly flat. Planetary scientist William McKinnon, a co-investigator on the mission, compared the two-part body to \u201ca meatball attached to a pancake.\"Story continues below advertisementThe strange findings from both missions were presented this week at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outside Houston, raising questions and offering clues about how the solar system works.AdvertisementAlthough the dust plumes seen streaming off Bennu don\u2019t pose any threat to the spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx has revealed other, less pleasant, surprises in its four months at the asteroid. Researchers said Tuesday that the surface of Bennu is far more rugged than expected; some of the boulders that comprise this cosmic \u201crubble pile\u201d may be as large as 150 feet across \u2014 bigger than a baseball diamond.The finding could pose problems for plans to scoop up a sample of the asteroid\u2019s surface material and bring it back to Earth, researchers said. Because they had believed that Bennu would be dusty, OSIRIS-REx doesn\u2019t have a mechanism for breaking up big rocks. The mission team instead plans to give Bennu something like an air kiss, using a puff of gas to raise a cloud of dusty material and gather it into a capsule that will eventually be sent back home.Story continues below advertisementThe team will need to spend the next year or so carefully seeking a site that contains the right kind of material for this sample-collection process. When the time comes to grab the sample in 2020, spacecraft operators will have a tough time navigating Bennu\u2019s rough terrain. But NASA assured reporters Tuesday that it is up to the challenge.Advertisement\u201cThe first three months of OSIRIS-REx\u2019s up-close investigation of Bennu have reminded us what discovery is all about \u2014 surprises, quick thinking and flexibility,\u201d said Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA\u2019s planetary science division.The New Horizons spacecraft is already speeding away from MU69, an inhabitant of a dark and distant region called the Kuiper belt that surrounds the solar system beyond Neptune. The probe is now so far from Earth it takes more than six hours for signals from the spacecraft to reach scientists on the ground.Story continues below advertisementBut as data trickled down to Earth in the months since New Horizon\u2019s historic flyby, scientists have slowly built a picture of the most distant body ever explored.Its oddball shape suggests it was formed from two smaller bodies that danced around each other in a shared orbit, getting closer and closer until they gently fused together. The entire collision would have been about as forceful as a human briskly walking into a wall, McKinnon said.AdvertisementIn a solar system where many objects were born out of catastrophic cataclysms, this gentle formation process is intriguing, he added. It lends support for a theory in which the building blocks of planets slowly coalesce out of rotating clouds of pebbles, McKinnon said. This would also explain the orientation of MU69\u2032s two lobes, which appear to have been placed beside each other, rather than haphazardly smushed together.Story continues below advertisementIt will take many more months to retrieve all the data collected during New Horizons\u2019 brief encounter at MU69, and years to understand what it all means. Scientists still aren\u2019t sure what made the larger of the body\u2019s two lobes so flat; it looks as though a giant alien sat on it.\u201cIt\u2019s quite a spectacular object,\u201d said the mission\u2019s principal investigator, Alan Stern. \u201cIt caught us by surprise.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this article said the diameter of the asteroid Bennu is 800 feet. It is 1,600 feet wide. Historic encounters with the asteroid Bennu and the Kuiper belt object MU69 have revealed strange new features of these far-flung worlds. The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weird",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s a small chance an asteroid will smack into Earth in 2135. NASA is working on a plan. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3363",
        "date": "2018-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/19/theres-a-small-chance-an-asteroid-will-smack-into-earth-in-2135-nasa-is-working-on-a-plan/",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a tip for the planners among us: If you have dinner reservations or theater tickets for Sept. 22, 2135 (it\u2019s a Thursday), now might be a good time to scuttle them.Sometime the day before, scientists say, there is a small chance that an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building will smack into Earth, destroying a lot of living things on the planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut don\u2019t worry. NASA has got you covered.Forward-thinking astrophysicists and people who specialize in blowing things up with nuclear weapons have come up with a plan, which they swear was not drawn up by Bruce Willis.If the asteroid \u2014 it is named Bennu \u2014 decides to go rogue, they could send a nearly nine-ton \u201cbulk impactor\u201d to push it out of Earth\u2019s orbit. Or, more likely, they\u00a0would gently nudge it out of its apocalyptic path using a nuclear device.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe scheme is called the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response. Or, for people who love acronyms and\u00a0despise subtlety: HAMMER.Brent W. Barbee, the NASA aerospace engineer who helped author the study, insists that it is all theoretical. (His exact words: \u201cPlease don\u2019t print that an asteroid is going to crash into Earth in The Washington Post.\u201d)But using\u00a0granular detail and eye-glazing amounts of math, the researchers believe they have a viable solution to a world-rattling\u00a0what-if question.There is, of course, no massive mission to build a craft capable of playing a celestial game of space pool. The odds of Bennu actually hitting us are about 1 in 2,700. And the asteroid is not big enough to send us the way of the dinosaurs.Story continues below advertisementBut that doesn\u2019t mean there is no practical application, Barbee told The Post.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re doing these design studies to prepare ourselves, so if we do find a threatening object, we\u2019re better prepared to deal with it,\u201d he said.Things from space smack into Earth all the time. Most of them are not existential threats, but some are large enough to cause injury or property damage. Generating a working framework to avoid an Earth impact could save lives.Until recently, the framework has\u00a0basically been luck.In 1908, what many believe to be an asteroid crashed into\u00a0an area near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, according to the BBC. It struck with a force 185 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb, flattened 80 million trees and reduced hundreds of reindeer to charred carcasses.Story continues below advertisementA century later in 2013, a 10-ton, 49-foot-wide meteor streaked over Russia\u2019s Ural Mountains at hypersonic speeds, shattering windows and injuring 1,100 people, Fox News reported. (Most were injured by shattered glass as they watched the meteor cross the\u00a0daytime sky). The meteor broke up before it hit the ground but still\u00a0left scars in nearby ice that were the length of a bus.AdvertisementThe only reason more people weren\u2019t killed or injured, Barbee told The Post, is because the objects struck places where there weren\u2019t many people.With a spacecraft in trouble and the White House watching, SpaceX had to deliverNASA has a Planetary Defense Coordination Office that tries to detect dangerous asteroids and comets close to Earth\u2019s orbit.There are more of these things than many people think, Barbee said. Researchers detect about 1,000 new objects each year; 10,000 extraterrestrial objects beelining for Earth could still be unaccounted for.Story continues below advertisementThe defense coordination office also comes up with plans for deflecting or destroying discovered objects.What Asteroid Bennu provides, besides pretty good fodder for a doomsday cult, is an opportunity for scientists to test those theories.Bennu is, the report says, a \u201cwell-studied roughly spherical body\u201d that gives researchers a good target for their calculations \u2014 data points to punch into the algorithm. They can see Bennu with telescopes and track the impact its gravity has on other celestial objects.AdvertisementSoon we\u00a0will know more.\u00a0NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been en route to Bennu for two years, according to the agency. It contains instruments that \u201cwill map Bennu and establish the composition of the asteroid, including the distribution of the elements, minerals and organic materials.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt will also scrape off a 2.1-ounce sample and bring it back to Earth, NASA says.If the odds are not in Earth\u2019s favor, and Bennu becomes a bigger threat, OSIRIS-REx could be\u00a0followed by a beefier craft that would break off a lot more.Read more:\u00a0This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.Dentists keep dying of this lung disease. The CDC can\u2019t figure out why.\u00a0This ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the oceanScientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachBaby bison dies after Yellowstone tourists put it in their car because it looked cold An aerospace engineer insists the plan is theoretical. It sounds like a movie script.  There\u2019s a small chance an asteroid will smack into Earth in 2135. NASA is working on a plan.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s a small chance an asteroid will smack into Earth in 2135. NASA is working on a plan. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3364",
        "date": "2018-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/19/theres-a-small-chance-an-asteroid-will-smack-into-earth-in-2135-nasa-is-working-on-a-plan/",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a tip for the planners among us: If you have dinner reservations or theater tickets for Sept. 22, 2135 (it\u2019s a Thursday), now might be a good time to scuttle them.Sometime the day before, scientists say, there is a small chance that an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building will smack into Earth, destroying a lot of living things on the planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut don\u2019t worry. NASA has got you covered.Forward-thinking astrophysicists and people who specialize in blowing things up with nuclear weapons have come up with a plan, which they swear was not drawn up by Bruce Willis.If the asteroid \u2014 it is named Bennu \u2014 decides to go rogue, they could send a nearly nine-ton \u201cbulk impactor\u201d to push it out of Earth\u2019s orbit. Or, more likely, they\u00a0would gently nudge it out of its apocalyptic path using a nuclear device.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe scheme is called the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response. Or, for people who love acronyms and\u00a0despise subtlety: HAMMER.Brent W. Barbee, the NASA aerospace engineer who helped author the study, insists that it is all theoretical. (His exact words: \u201cPlease don\u2019t print that an asteroid is going to crash into Earth in The Washington Post.\u201d)But using\u00a0granular detail and eye-glazing amounts of math, the researchers believe they have a viable solution to a world-rattling\u00a0what-if question.There is, of course, no massive mission to build a craft capable of playing a celestial game of space pool. The odds of Bennu actually hitting us are about 1 in 2,700. And the asteroid is not big enough to send us the way of the dinosaurs.Story continues below advertisementBut that doesn\u2019t mean there is no practical application, Barbee told The Post.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re doing these design studies to prepare ourselves, so if we do find a threatening object, we\u2019re better prepared to deal with it,\u201d he said.Things from space smack into Earth all the time. Most of them are not existential threats, but some are large enough to cause injury or property damage. Generating a working framework to avoid an Earth impact could save lives.Until recently, the framework has\u00a0basically been luck.In 1908, what many believe to be an asteroid crashed into\u00a0an area near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, according to the BBC. It struck with a force 185 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb, flattened 80 million trees and reduced hundreds of reindeer to charred carcasses.Story continues below advertisementA century later in 2013, a 10-ton, 49-foot-wide meteor streaked over Russia\u2019s Ural Mountains at hypersonic speeds, shattering windows and injuring 1,100 people, Fox News reported. (Most were injured by shattered glass as they watched the meteor cross the\u00a0daytime sky). The meteor broke up before it hit the ground but still\u00a0left scars in nearby ice that were the length of a bus.AdvertisementThe only reason more people weren\u2019t killed or injured, Barbee told The Post, is because the objects struck places where there weren\u2019t many people.With a spacecraft in trouble and the White House watching, SpaceX had to deliverNASA has a Planetary Defense Coordination Office that tries to detect dangerous asteroids and comets close to Earth\u2019s orbit.There are more of these things than many people think, Barbee said. Researchers detect about 1,000 new objects each year; 10,000 extraterrestrial objects beelining for Earth could still be unaccounted for.Story continues below advertisementThe defense coordination office also comes up with plans for deflecting or destroying discovered objects.What Asteroid Bennu provides, besides pretty good fodder for a doomsday cult, is an opportunity for scientists to test those theories.Bennu is, the report says, a \u201cwell-studied roughly spherical body\u201d that gives researchers a good target for their calculations \u2014 data points to punch into the algorithm. They can see Bennu with telescopes and track the impact its gravity has on other celestial objects.AdvertisementSoon we\u00a0will know more.\u00a0NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been en route to Bennu for two years, according to the agency. It contains instruments that \u201cwill map Bennu and establish the composition of the asteroid, including the distribution of the elements, minerals and organic materials.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt will also scrape off a 2.1-ounce sample and bring it back to Earth, NASA says.If the odds are not in Earth\u2019s favor, and Bennu becomes a bigger threat, OSIRIS-REx could be\u00a0followed by a beefier craft that would break off a lot more.Read more:\u00a0This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.Dentists keep dying of this lung disease. The CDC can\u2019t figure out why.\u00a0This ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the oceanScientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachBaby bison dies after Yellowstone tourists put it in their car because it looked cold An aerospace engineer insists the plan is theoretical. It sounds like a movie script.  There\u2019s a small chance an asteroid will smack into Earth in 2135. NASA is working on a plan.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Had a Busy Year. Get Caught Up Before NASA\u2019s InSight Landing. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3365",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/science/mars-nasa-insight-landing.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a refresher of what\u2019s happened on the red planet in 2018 as a NASA spacecraft prepares to arrive there on Monday. Here\u2019s a refresher of what\u2019s happened on the red planet in 2018 as a NASA spacecraft prepares to arrive there on Monday.  NASA\u2019s attempt to place its InSight lander on Mars on Monday afternoon will mark the culmination of a busy year for news about the red planet. ",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Had a Busy Year. Get Caught Up Before NASA\u2019s InSight Landing. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3366",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/science/mars-nasa-insight-landing.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a refresher of what\u2019s happened on the red planet in 2018 as a NASA spacecraft prepares to arrive there on Monday. Here\u2019s a refresher of what\u2019s happened on the red planet in 2018 as a NASA spacecraft prepares to arrive there on Monday.  NASA\u2019s attempt to place its InSight lander on Mars on Monday afternoon will mark the culmination of a busy year for news about the red planet. ",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it forever (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3367",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/21/thousands-of-tiny-satellites-are-about-to-go-into-space-and-possibly-ruin-it-forever/",
        "text": "Halfway through\u00a0the European Space Agency's new film, we're at the part where \u2014\u00a0if\u00a0this were some happy space documentary from\u00a0yesteryear \u2014 Carl Sagan might be giving us a tour of\u00a0a\u00a0distant galaxy.But it's 2017, Sagan is dead, and this is a film about space trash. So six minutes in,\u00a0we're stuck a mere 800\u00a0miles above Earth, watching a wasp swarm of\u00a0defunct satellites whip around the globe to a frenetic soundtrack\u00a0that sounds like\u00a0the end of\u00a0\u201cThe Dark Knight.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt's a dramatic simulation of what low Earth orbit looks like today. You can even\u00a0watch it\u00a0in 3-D. Because the\u00a0European Space Agency really, really wants you to pay attention to the space debris problem.Story continues below advertisementThe problem\u00a0is about to get\u00a0worse, experts say, as\u00a0cheap, tiny satellites are shot through the stratosphere in\u00a0unprecedented numbers.Worst-case scenario: a massive, unstoppable, chain-reaction traffic wreck above our heads. So much for escaping Earth to\u00a0distant galaxies.AdvertisementThe short film \u201cSpace Debris: A Journey to Earth\u201d was screened this week in Germany at the world's largest annual gathering of space-debris experts.The\u00a0news from space was not great.Hundreds of thousands of bits of space junk are\u00a0orbiting Earth,\u00a0according to NASA. These include tiny\u00a0paint flecks that can take out a space shuttle window, and some 2,000 satellite shards left by a collision of Russian and American satellites\u00a0several years ago.Story continues below advertisementIn Germany, the\u00a0audience was shown\u00a0a slide\u00a0from another depressing space film, \u201cGravity.\u201d The part where the International Space Station is destroyed\u00a0in an avalanche of space trash.\u201cThere were many mistakes in that movie; I will not go through that,\u201d ESA Director General Jan Woerner said. \u201cBut the effect, as such, is a very serious one.\u201dWoerner\u00a0cut to video from\u00a0the real International Space Station, which has not yet been destroyed.AdvertisementBobbing around in zero gravity, astronaut Thomas Pesquet described what the space station crew has to do\u00a0when a piece of debris whizzes past: Climb into an escape shuttle, wait and hope.\u201cThis happened four times,\u201d Pesquet said. \u201cIn my own interests, let me wish you a successful conference.\u201dThen it was on to a keynote speech from retired NASA scientist Donald Kessler, known for coming up with an\u00a0apocalyptic space-crash theory called the Kessler syndrome\u00a0\u2014 or \u201corbital Nagasaki,\u201d as a\u00a0researcher once described\u00a0it to The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementBasically: A thing hits another thing at 25,000 mph or so. Those things then explode into more things, which hit yet more things, initiating a catastrophic chain reaction of collisions that makes\u00a0low Earth orbit totally unusable.Kessler predicted this\u00a0in the 1970s, when space had fewer things in it.\u00a0At this week's conference,\u00a0he previewed a new study he worked\u00a0on\u00a0that found\u00a0\u201ca statistically meaningful number of satellites\u201d that have been damaged by debris.Space trash is a big problem. These economists have a solution.And an ESA official described a recent\u00a0study finding that a particularly crowded region of space has already become unstable, which he\u00a0worried could foretell Kessler's\u00a0doomsday scenario.AdvertisementThe bad news didn't stop there.Story continues below advertisementAs satellites get smaller and cheaper, more and more of them are going into orbit to\u00a0potentially smash into each other.In February, the New York Times reported, India launched 104 tiny satellites into space from a single rocket.It was a world record, though one not likely to stand for long.In all of human history, ESA's debris chief said at the conference,\u00a0about\u00a07,000 spacecraft have\u00a0left Earth. He pulled up a slide of\u00a012,000 new satellites set\u00a0to go up soon, announced\u00a0by companies such as Samsung and SpaceX.Many of these \u2014 like the batch India sent into space \u2014\u00a0are nano-satellites: tiny, motorless machines\u00a0that promise to revolutionize communications.Story continues below advertisementThey're simple enough to make that grade school students in Arlington, Va.,\u00a0put one together\u00a0for a class project. Once in orbit, they fan out into wide constellations, outperforming their bulkier ancestors.Why investors are following Musk, Bezos in betting on the starsBut these tiny satellites have big problems, according to experts\u00a0at the conference. There will be lots of them, for one thing. And since they can't navigate, they'll keep careening through space long after they've stopped working and are thus more likely to collide with other things.AdvertisementHugh Lewis, an aerospace researcher with the University of Southampton, spoke at the conference about a dire computer model\u00a0his team ran. They simulated the effects of\u00a0270\u00a0nano-satellites launched into space each year for 50 years \u2014 a realistic assumption, Lewis said, as more than 100 a year are already going up.Story continues below advertisementHe projected the results of the simulation onto the wall; the chance\u00a0of space collisions more than doubled with the tiny satellites in play.Lewis noted that \u201cmega-constellations\u201d of satellites aren't necessarily bad. He said they\u00a0have the potential to provide affordable communications to the half of the world that lacks such technology.But other experts at the conference noted that voluntary\u00a0guidelines to mitigate space debris (bring your dead satellite out of orbit within 25 years, for example) often go ignored.Advertisement\u201cNo one has found an ideal solution for cleaning up the junk that\u2019s already there,\u201d Rachel Feltman wrote for The Post last year.And if the next Space Age only adds more of it, low Earth orbit could\u00a0resemble\u00a0something even worse than a dramatically scored\u00a0wasp swarm\u00a0by the time the ESA makes\u00a0a sequel to its space-trash\u00a0film.More reading:Terrorists are building drones. France is destroying them with eagles.Canadian scientists were followed, threatened and censored. They warn that Trump could do the same.We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it\u2019s the tip of a \u2018hidden continent.\u2019 Space is a mess. Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it forever",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it forever (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3368",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/21/thousands-of-tiny-satellites-are-about-to-go-into-space-and-possibly-ruin-it-forever/",
        "text": "Halfway through\u00a0the European Space Agency's new film, we're at the part where \u2014\u00a0if\u00a0this were some happy space documentary from\u00a0yesteryear \u2014 Carl Sagan might be giving us a tour of\u00a0a\u00a0distant galaxy.But it's 2017, Sagan is dead, and this is a film about space trash. So six minutes in,\u00a0we're stuck a mere 800\u00a0miles above Earth, watching a wasp swarm of\u00a0defunct satellites whip around the globe to a frenetic soundtrack\u00a0that sounds like\u00a0the end of\u00a0\u201cThe Dark Knight.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt's a dramatic simulation of what low Earth orbit looks like today. You can even\u00a0watch it\u00a0in 3-D. Because the\u00a0European Space Agency really, really wants you to pay attention to the space debris problem.Story continues below advertisementThe problem\u00a0is about to get\u00a0worse, experts say, as\u00a0cheap, tiny satellites are shot through the stratosphere in\u00a0unprecedented numbers.Worst-case scenario: a massive, unstoppable, chain-reaction traffic wreck above our heads. So much for escaping Earth to\u00a0distant galaxies.AdvertisementThe short film \u201cSpace Debris: A Journey to Earth\u201d was screened this week in Germany at the world's largest annual gathering of space-debris experts.The\u00a0news from space was not great.Hundreds of thousands of bits of space junk are\u00a0orbiting Earth,\u00a0according to NASA. These include tiny\u00a0paint flecks that can take out a space shuttle window, and some 2,000 satellite shards left by a collision of Russian and American satellites\u00a0several years ago.Story continues below advertisementIn Germany, the\u00a0audience was shown\u00a0a slide\u00a0from another depressing space film, \u201cGravity.\u201d The part where the International Space Station is destroyed\u00a0in an avalanche of space trash.\u201cThere were many mistakes in that movie; I will not go through that,\u201d ESA Director General Jan Woerner said. \u201cBut the effect, as such, is a very serious one.\u201dWoerner\u00a0cut to video from\u00a0the real International Space Station, which has not yet been destroyed.AdvertisementBobbing around in zero gravity, astronaut Thomas Pesquet described what the space station crew has to do\u00a0when a piece of debris whizzes past: Climb into an escape shuttle, wait and hope.\u201cThis happened four times,\u201d Pesquet said. \u201cIn my own interests, let me wish you a successful conference.\u201dThen it was on to a keynote speech from retired NASA scientist Donald Kessler, known for coming up with an\u00a0apocalyptic space-crash theory called the Kessler syndrome\u00a0\u2014 or \u201corbital Nagasaki,\u201d as a\u00a0researcher once described\u00a0it to The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementBasically: A thing hits another thing at 25,000 mph or so. Those things then explode into more things, which hit yet more things, initiating a catastrophic chain reaction of collisions that makes\u00a0low Earth orbit totally unusable.Kessler predicted this\u00a0in the 1970s, when space had fewer things in it.\u00a0At this week's conference,\u00a0he previewed a new study he worked\u00a0on\u00a0that found\u00a0\u201ca statistically meaningful number of satellites\u201d that have been damaged by debris.Space trash is a big problem. These economists have a solution.And an ESA official described a recent\u00a0study finding that a particularly crowded region of space has already become unstable, which he\u00a0worried could foretell Kessler's\u00a0doomsday scenario.AdvertisementThe bad news didn't stop there.Story continues below advertisementAs satellites get smaller and cheaper, more and more of them are going into orbit to\u00a0potentially smash into each other.In February, the New York Times reported, India launched 104 tiny satellites into space from a single rocket.It was a world record, though one not likely to stand for long.In all of human history, ESA's debris chief said at the conference,\u00a0about\u00a07,000 spacecraft have\u00a0left Earth. He pulled up a slide of\u00a012,000 new satellites set\u00a0to go up soon, announced\u00a0by companies such as Samsung and SpaceX.Many of these \u2014 like the batch India sent into space \u2014\u00a0are nano-satellites: tiny, motorless machines\u00a0that promise to revolutionize communications.Story continues below advertisementThey're simple enough to make that grade school students in Arlington, Va.,\u00a0put one together\u00a0for a class project. Once in orbit, they fan out into wide constellations, outperforming their bulkier ancestors.Why investors are following Musk, Bezos in betting on the starsBut these tiny satellites have big problems, according to experts\u00a0at the conference. There will be lots of them, for one thing. And since they can't navigate, they'll keep careening through space long after they've stopped working and are thus more likely to collide with other things.AdvertisementHugh Lewis, an aerospace researcher with the University of Southampton, spoke at the conference about a dire computer model\u00a0his team ran. They simulated the effects of\u00a0270\u00a0nano-satellites launched into space each year for 50 years \u2014 a realistic assumption, Lewis said, as more than 100 a year are already going up.Story continues below advertisementHe projected the results of the simulation onto the wall; the chance\u00a0of space collisions more than doubled with the tiny satellites in play.Lewis noted that \u201cmega-constellations\u201d of satellites aren't necessarily bad. He said they\u00a0have the potential to provide affordable communications to the half of the world that lacks such technology.But other experts at the conference noted that voluntary\u00a0guidelines to mitigate space debris (bring your dead satellite out of orbit within 25 years, for example) often go ignored.Advertisement\u201cNo one has found an ideal solution for cleaning up the junk that\u2019s already there,\u201d Rachel Feltman wrote for The Post last year.And if the next Space Age only adds more of it, low Earth orbit could\u00a0resemble\u00a0something even worse than a dramatically scored\u00a0wasp swarm\u00a0by the time the ESA makes\u00a0a sequel to its space-trash\u00a0film.More reading:Terrorists are building drones. France is destroying them with eagles.Canadian scientists were followed, threatened and censored. They warn that Trump could do the same.We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it\u2019s the tip of a \u2018hidden continent.\u2019 Space is a mess. Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it forever",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s TESS Satellite Spots \u2018Missing Link\u2019 Exoplanets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3369",
        "date": "2019-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/science/nasa-tess-exoplanets-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Halfway through its first tour of the local universe, the spacecraft has found a \u201cSuper Earth\u201d and two \u201csub-Neptunes.\u201d Halfway through its first tour of the local universe, the spacecraft has found a \u201cSuper Earth\u201d and two \u201csub-Neptunes.\u201d NASA\u2019s new planet-hunting spacecraft, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is now halfway through its first tour of the nearby universe. It has been looking for worlds that might be fit for you, me or some other form of life, and as usual, nature has been generous in its rewards. ",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chasing Shadows for a Glimpse of a Tiny World Beyond Pluto (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3370",
        "date": "2017-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/science/new-horizons-nasa-pluto-mu69-occultations.html",
        "text": "From just five blinks of starlight, scientists now know more about the next destination of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft. From just five blinks of starlight, scientists now know more about the next destination of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft. This summer, scientists crisscrossed two oceans, braved wind and cold and deployed two dozen telescopes \u2014 all for five blinks of starlight that lasted a second or less.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chasing Shadows for a Glimpse of a Tiny World Beyond Pluto (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3371",
        "date": "2017-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/science/new-horizons-nasa-pluto-mu69-occultations.html",
        "text": "From just five blinks of starlight, scientists now know more about the next destination of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft. From just five blinks of starlight, scientists now know more about the next destination of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft. This summer, scientists crisscrossed two oceans, braved wind and cold and deployed two dozen telescopes \u2014 all for five blinks of starlight that lasted a second or less.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chasing Shadows for a Glimpse of a Tiny World Beyond Pluto (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3372",
        "date": "2017-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/science/new-horizons-nasa-pluto-mu69-occultations.html",
        "text": "From just five blinks of starlight, scientists now know more about the next destination of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft. From just five blinks of starlight, scientists now know more about the next destination of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft. This summer, scientists crisscrossed two oceans, braved wind and cold and deployed two dozen telescopes \u2014 all for five blinks of starlight that lasted a second or less.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why do people believe the moon landing hoax or other conspiracy theories? (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3373",
        "date": "2018-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/20/why-do-people-believe-the-moon-landing-hoax-or-other-conspiracy-theories/",
        "text": "Forty-nine years ago Friday, the Apollo 11 spacecraft delivered the first astronauts to the surface of the moon. The footprints Buzz Aldrin left in lunar soil are still around \u2014 and so are the throngs of conspiracy theorists who claim the entire landing was faked. For one thing, they argue, the flag the crew planted seemed to flutter in videos, which shouldn't happen since there's no wind on the moon. Besides, wouldn't mini-meteors have killed the astronauts the moment they ventured outside? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cmoon landing hoax\u201d was among the first conspiracy theories to gain traction with the American public. In the years since, the theories have multiplied like jack rabbits, swarming all corners of the cultural landscape. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, some fringe activists insisted the U.S. government, rather than al-Qaeda, had planned the attacks. Conspiracies\u00a0about President Trump's ties to Russia compete with all the real news on the topic. \u201cPizzagate\u201d conspiracists claimed Hillary Clinton was operating a pedophile ring in a D.C. pizza parlor, leading one true believer to fire a gun in the restaurant.It's tempting to dismiss conspiracy theorists as wearers of tinfoil hats. But the theories should be taken seriously for their effects on political and social discourse \u2014 and research suggests that, under the right circumstances, many people are susceptible to their allure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile people's attraction to conspiracy theories might seem illogical, it stems from a very logical desire to make sense of the world. Assigning meaning to what happens has helped humans to thrive as a species, and conspiracy theories are internally cohesive stories that \u201chelp us to understand the unknown whenever things happen that are fearful or unexpected,\u201d said Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a social psychologist at Vrije University in Amsterdam. For some believers, the sense of comfort and clarity such stories bring can override the question of their truth value.Conspiracy theorists often have a high degree of tolerance for contradiction that allows them to ignore evidence against their theories. In one study at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, people who said Osama bin Laden had died before the U.S. raid on his compound were also more inclined to say he was still alive. The stories might have clashed, but both versions denied the Obama administration's report that bin Laden had been killed during the raid.Conspiracy theories also supply a seductive ego boost. Believers often consider themselves part of a select in-group that \u2014 unlike the deluded masses \u2014 has figured out what's really going on. In a study at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, belief in conspiracy theories was stronger among people who said they wanted to stand out from the crowd. People with a high \u201cconspiracy mentality\u201d also expressed more belief in a conspiracy theory when they were told a minority of survey-takers believed it, as opposed to a majority.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRejection and hardship can intensify people's need to believe a story that empowers them or justifies their situation, whether the story is true. People who are dissatisfied with the state of the world \u2014 such as the unemployed or those who support extreme ideologies \u2014 are highly vulnerable to conspiracy theories, van Prooijen said: \u201cIf people are satisfied, they are less likely to pursue this sort of theory.\u201dWhile conspiracy theories have been around for millennia, they are thriving in a political moment that rewards those who reject established knowledge. \u201cConspiracy theories are becoming part of our national dialogue,\u201d said University of Miami political scientist and conspiracy theory researcher Joseph Uscinski.When such theories become entrenched in the public consciousness, however, they erode people's trust in authorities and the status quo. In a vicious cycle, that creates fertile ground for the emergence of ever more outlandish conspiracy theories.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPart of the foundation of democracy, as writer Stephen Harrington points out, is a broad consensus about basic facts that persists even when the meaning of these facts is hotly debated. But conspiracy theorists operate from a set of facts untethered to reality, and people who call their bluff are often ignored or labeled as part of the proposed conspiracy. When people believe \u201cthere is no credible source of news,\u201d said Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital institute in Budapest, \u201cthere can be no real source of debunking.\u201dIn 2016, Kreko and his colleague, social psychologist Gabor Orosz of Budapest's E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd University, tested the usefulness of various ways to counter conspiracy theories. First, they played participants a recording of a conspiracy \u201csuper-theory\u201d stating that Jews, bankers and the European Union were exploiting Hungary. Then the researchers tried three debunking strategies: rationally arguing against the conspiracy theory; ridiculing those who believed in the theory; and empathizing with the people the theory targeted.It turned out that both rationality and ridicule were somewhat effective in reducing participants' belief in the theory, while empathy was largely ineffective. Showing concern for a conspiracy theory's victims, the study suggests, isn't a good debunking strategy \u2014 especially when the theory is racist, discriminatory or otherwise harmful.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat's the best way to put effective pushback tactics into practice? (Aldrin once\u00a0punched someone who accused him of faking the moon landing, but that's probably not the best solution.) If someone in your family or social circle is an ongoing fount of conspiracy theories, it's worthwhile to counter their stories with the truth \u2014 which will often be at your fingertips. \u201cJust check on our cellphone the story the other guy just told us,\u201d Orosz said. \u201cWe can use these rational strategies in everyday situations, say, 'These are the facts, my friend.' \u201d The theorist may or may not prove willing to accept reality, but either way, others who are listening will be able to hear evidence against a conspiracy.It makes sense to inoculate yourself against conspiracy theories, as well, and people who exercise the logical parts of their brains seem to have some immunity. In one University of Westminster study, people who were primed to think analytically by playing a sentence-unscrambling game were less likely to endorse conspiracy theories afterward.You can also give yourself an up-close look at how the sausage is made. Kreko has given some of his students a unique assignment: Take two completely unconnected events (9/11 and North Korea's nuclear bomb testing, for instance) and invent a plausible connection between them \u2014 which, as the Internet shows, is exactly what real conspiracy theorists do. \u201cThink about any tragic events in the past 100 years,\u201d Kreko said. \u201cGoogle this tragedy and 'Jews,' and you will find something.\u201d His students find the theory-generating exercise surprisingly easy, and he hopes it makes them wary of future supposed conspiracies they catch wind of.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it may be hard to remember in the heat of a debunking session, many conspiracy theorists' motives are noble, even if their yarn-spinning is not. \u201cPeople who believe conspiracy theories are deeply concerned about the future of society,\u201d van Prooijen said. \u201cWhy would we [try to] make sense of events we don't care about?\u201dStill, Uscinski doesn't foresee much true evolution for the hardest-core believers. \u201cThey're living in a different world,\u201d he said, \u201cand it's very tough to bring them back.\u201dRead more:What makes whistleblowers speak out when others stay silent about wrongdoing?Seven research-tested ways to stand up to sexual harassmentEvery Supreme Court justice attended Harvard or Yale. That's a problem, say decision-making experts. It's hard to reason with people who embrace conspiracy theories, but some strategies are more effective than others. Why do people believe the moon landing hoax or other conspiracy theories?",
        "author": "Elizabeth Svoboda"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover is fighting for its life in a Martian dust storm (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3374",
        "date": "2018-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/14/nasas-opportunity-rover-is-fighting-for-its-life-in-a-martian-dust-storm/",
        "text": "For weeks, Mars has been besieged by a massive dust storm. A thick haze fills the atmosphere and blots out the sun, immersing much of the Red Planet in\u00a0an\u00a0impenetrable, perpetual night.Caught in the middle of it all is NASA's Opportunity rover,\u00a0a 5-foot-tall,\u00a0bear-size spacecraft that has already\u00a0defied the odds by surviving on Mars more than 55 times longer than originally planned. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the solar-powered robot, the dust is not as dangerous as the darkness. Since the storm began two weeks ago, the amount of light the spacecraft receives has dropped to less than 1 percent of normal levels. Energy production has fallen from hundreds of watt-hours a day to almost nothing. NASA has not heard from the\u00a0rover since Tuesday.Story continues below advertisementThis is a \u201cspacecraft emergency,\u201d Mars Exploration Rover project manager John Callas said Wednesday. His team is operating under the assumption\u00a0that the charge in Opportunity's batteries has dipped below 24 volts and that the rover has entered a low-power fault mode, when all subsystems except the mission clock are turned off.AdvertisementThe clock is programmed to rouse the rover at periodic intervals to check whether light levels are sufficient to wake up\u00a0\u2014 a state called \u201csolar groovy.\u201d But the storm is still growing and should encircle the planet in a matter of days. NASA expects\u00a0that it will be weeks, if not months, before the dust clears enough to allow the spacecraft to turn back on.Though the rover is expected to survive the storm, \u201cIt's like you have a loved one in a coma in the hospital,\u201d Callas said. \u201cThe doctors are telling you, 'You just gotta give it time, and she\u2019ll wake up.'\u00a0But if it's your 97-year-old grandmother, you\u2019re going to be very concerned, and by all means we are.\u201dOpportunity, along with Spirit, its twin, landed on the planet in 2004. Though the mission was supposed to last only 90 days, Opportunity is approaching its 15th year there.\u00a0Before the storm began, it had been rolling down a channel called Perseverance Valley, which scientists think may have been carved by water billions of years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA's main worry now is that the rover's batteries may freeze\u00a0without the heat generated by its normal operations. (Opportunity is designed to withstand temperatures as low as minus 55 degrees Celsius.)\u00a0Other problems may arise if the rover's energy levels drop even further. That would trigger a \u201cclock fault,\u201d when the rover loses track of time entirely.Fortunately for NASA, dust storms tend to trap radiation,\u00a0preventing the kind of wild temperature swings that often occur on Mars. Callas also expressed faith in Opportunity's batteries \u2014 even though they are 15 years old, they are still working at 85 percent of their capacity.\u201cThey're\u00a0the\u00a0finest batteries in the solar system.\u00a0I wish my cellphone battery had half of that,\u201d he said.Local dust storms\u00a0are a common occurrence on Mars \u2014 strong winds lift particles the size of those in talcum powder and carry them into the sky.\u00a0The thin atmosphere makes these events different from storms on Earth; even the most powerful Martian winds couldn't topple a rover. But that atmosphere also makes it easier for sunlight to heat the dust and\u00a0loft it higher and higher. It may take weeks for the clouds to clear.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists aren't sure what causes huge, planet-scale dust storms like the one now raging. They seem to occur every three to four Mars years (six to eight Earth years), and they usually happen when the planet is at its closest to the sun.A similar storm in 2007\u00a0severely damaged Spirit, blanketing the little robot's solar panels and cutting its energy production to less than half of normal capacity. Spirit later got stuck in a sand trap, where it could not angle toward the sun in the winter,\u00a0and has been silent since 2010.This current storm is \u201cunprecedented\u00a0in the pace at which it has grown and spread across the globe,\u201d said Rich Zurek, chief scientist for the Mars Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\u00a0It covers almost a quarter of the surface of Mars, an area the size of North America and Russia combined. Its tau \u2014 a measure of how much light\u00a0is being absorbed \u2014 is 10.8, the highest ever recorded.Even on the opposite side of the planet, where the Curiosity rover is parked at Gale Crater, the thick red haze almost completely obscures the horizon. (Curiosity, which landed in 2012, is nuclear-powered and mostly unaffected by the dust.) The storm\u00a0is being monitored\u00a0by a fleet of orbiting spacecraft, particularly the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Its wide-angle camera first detected the event.NASA is deeply interested in understanding the triggers of these major storms,\u00a0Zurek said. The agency's next Mars mission, the InSight lander, due to arrive at the Red Planet this fall, depends on solar power. So will an autonomous rotorcraft that is slated fly with the Mars 2020 rover in two years. And if the space agency aims to one day send astronauts to the Martian surface, it\u00a0would probably like to protect them from dust clouds, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, \u201cwe're all pulling for Opportunity,\u201d Mars Exploration Program director Jim Watzin\u00a0said. \u201cIt's a remarkably resilient little rover.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Mars 2020 rover was solar powered. The rover will operate on nuclear power, but the mission also includes a solar-powered autonomous rotorcraft, the Mars Helicopter. Read more:Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.Curiosity\u2019s five-year journey across Mars \u2014 in one stunning photoNewest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars The seemingly unstoppable rover has already defied the odds by surviving on Mars 55 times longer than its original mission.  NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover is fighting for its life in a Martian dust storm",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover is fighting for its life in a Martian dust storm (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3375",
        "date": "2018-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/14/nasas-opportunity-rover-is-fighting-for-its-life-in-a-martian-dust-storm/",
        "text": "For weeks, Mars has been besieged by a massive dust storm. A thick haze fills the atmosphere and blots out the sun, immersing much of the Red Planet in\u00a0an\u00a0impenetrable, perpetual night.Caught in the middle of it all is NASA's Opportunity rover,\u00a0a 5-foot-tall,\u00a0bear-size spacecraft that has already\u00a0defied the odds by surviving on Mars more than 55 times longer than originally planned. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the solar-powered robot, the dust is not as dangerous as the darkness. Since the storm began two weeks ago, the amount of light the spacecraft receives has dropped to less than 1 percent of normal levels. Energy production has fallen from hundreds of watt-hours a day to almost nothing. NASA has not heard from the\u00a0rover since Tuesday.Story continues below advertisementThis is a \u201cspacecraft emergency,\u201d Mars Exploration Rover project manager John Callas said Wednesday. His team is operating under the assumption\u00a0that the charge in Opportunity's batteries has dipped below 24 volts and that the rover has entered a low-power fault mode, when all subsystems except the mission clock are turned off.AdvertisementThe clock is programmed to rouse the rover at periodic intervals to check whether light levels are sufficient to wake up\u00a0\u2014 a state called \u201csolar groovy.\u201d But the storm is still growing and should encircle the planet in a matter of days. NASA expects\u00a0that it will be weeks, if not months, before the dust clears enough to allow the spacecraft to turn back on.Though the rover is expected to survive the storm, \u201cIt's like you have a loved one in a coma in the hospital,\u201d Callas said. \u201cThe doctors are telling you, 'You just gotta give it time, and she\u2019ll wake up.'\u00a0But if it's your 97-year-old grandmother, you\u2019re going to be very concerned, and by all means we are.\u201dOpportunity, along with Spirit, its twin, landed on the planet in 2004. Though the mission was supposed to last only 90 days, Opportunity is approaching its 15th year there.\u00a0Before the storm began, it had been rolling down a channel called Perseverance Valley, which scientists think may have been carved by water billions of years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA's main worry now is that the rover's batteries may freeze\u00a0without the heat generated by its normal operations. (Opportunity is designed to withstand temperatures as low as minus 55 degrees Celsius.)\u00a0Other problems may arise if the rover's energy levels drop even further. That would trigger a \u201cclock fault,\u201d when the rover loses track of time entirely.Fortunately for NASA, dust storms tend to trap radiation,\u00a0preventing the kind of wild temperature swings that often occur on Mars. Callas also expressed faith in Opportunity's batteries \u2014 even though they are 15 years old, they are still working at 85 percent of their capacity.\u201cThey're\u00a0the\u00a0finest batteries in the solar system.\u00a0I wish my cellphone battery had half of that,\u201d he said.Local dust storms\u00a0are a common occurrence on Mars \u2014 strong winds lift particles the size of those in talcum powder and carry them into the sky.\u00a0The thin atmosphere makes these events different from storms on Earth; even the most powerful Martian winds couldn't topple a rover. But that atmosphere also makes it easier for sunlight to heat the dust and\u00a0loft it higher and higher. It may take weeks for the clouds to clear.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists aren't sure what causes huge, planet-scale dust storms like the one now raging. They seem to occur every three to four Mars years (six to eight Earth years), and they usually happen when the planet is at its closest to the sun.A similar storm in 2007\u00a0severely damaged Spirit, blanketing the little robot's solar panels and cutting its energy production to less than half of normal capacity. Spirit later got stuck in a sand trap, where it could not angle toward the sun in the winter,\u00a0and has been silent since 2010.This current storm is \u201cunprecedented\u00a0in the pace at which it has grown and spread across the globe,\u201d said Rich Zurek, chief scientist for the Mars Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\u00a0It covers almost a quarter of the surface of Mars, an area the size of North America and Russia combined. Its tau \u2014 a measure of how much light\u00a0is being absorbed \u2014 is 10.8, the highest ever recorded.Even on the opposite side of the planet, where the Curiosity rover is parked at Gale Crater, the thick red haze almost completely obscures the horizon. (Curiosity, which landed in 2012, is nuclear-powered and mostly unaffected by the dust.) The storm\u00a0is being monitored\u00a0by a fleet of orbiting spacecraft, particularly the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Its wide-angle camera first detected the event.NASA is deeply interested in understanding the triggers of these major storms,\u00a0Zurek said. The agency's next Mars mission, the InSight lander, due to arrive at the Red Planet this fall, depends on solar power. So will an autonomous rotorcraft that is slated fly with the Mars 2020 rover in two years. And if the space agency aims to one day send astronauts to the Martian surface, it\u00a0would probably like to protect them from dust clouds, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, \u201cwe're all pulling for Opportunity,\u201d Mars Exploration Program director Jim Watzin\u00a0said. \u201cIt's a remarkably resilient little rover.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Mars 2020 rover was solar powered. The rover will operate on nuclear power, but the mission also includes a solar-powered autonomous rotorcraft, the Mars Helicopter. Read more:Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.Curiosity\u2019s five-year journey across Mars \u2014 in one stunning photoNewest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars The seemingly unstoppable rover has already defied the odds by surviving on Mars 55 times longer than its original mission.  NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover is fighting for its life in a Martian dust storm",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover is fighting for its life in a Martian dust storm (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3376",
        "date": "2018-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/14/nasas-opportunity-rover-is-fighting-for-its-life-in-a-martian-dust-storm/",
        "text": "For weeks, Mars has been besieged by a massive dust storm. A thick haze fills the atmosphere and blots out the sun, immersing much of the Red Planet in\u00a0an\u00a0impenetrable, perpetual night.Caught in the middle of it all is NASA's Opportunity rover,\u00a0a 5-foot-tall,\u00a0bear-size spacecraft that has already\u00a0defied the odds by surviving on Mars more than 55 times longer than originally planned. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the solar-powered robot, the dust is not as dangerous as the darkness. Since the storm began two weeks ago, the amount of light the spacecraft receives has dropped to less than 1 percent of normal levels. Energy production has fallen from hundreds of watt-hours a day to almost nothing. NASA has not heard from the\u00a0rover since Tuesday.Story continues below advertisementThis is a \u201cspacecraft emergency,\u201d Mars Exploration Rover project manager John Callas said Wednesday. His team is operating under the assumption\u00a0that the charge in Opportunity's batteries has dipped below 24 volts and that the rover has entered a low-power fault mode, when all subsystems except the mission clock are turned off.AdvertisementThe clock is programmed to rouse the rover at periodic intervals to check whether light levels are sufficient to wake up\u00a0\u2014 a state called \u201csolar groovy.\u201d But the storm is still growing and should encircle the planet in a matter of days. NASA expects\u00a0that it will be weeks, if not months, before the dust clears enough to allow the spacecraft to turn back on.Though the rover is expected to survive the storm, \u201cIt's like you have a loved one in a coma in the hospital,\u201d Callas said. \u201cThe doctors are telling you, 'You just gotta give it time, and she\u2019ll wake up.'\u00a0But if it's your 97-year-old grandmother, you\u2019re going to be very concerned, and by all means we are.\u201dOpportunity, along with Spirit, its twin, landed on the planet in 2004. Though the mission was supposed to last only 90 days, Opportunity is approaching its 15th year there.\u00a0Before the storm began, it had been rolling down a channel called Perseverance Valley, which scientists think may have been carved by water billions of years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA's main worry now is that the rover's batteries may freeze\u00a0without the heat generated by its normal operations. (Opportunity is designed to withstand temperatures as low as minus 55 degrees Celsius.)\u00a0Other problems may arise if the rover's energy levels drop even further. That would trigger a \u201cclock fault,\u201d when the rover loses track of time entirely.Fortunately for NASA, dust storms tend to trap radiation,\u00a0preventing the kind of wild temperature swings that often occur on Mars. Callas also expressed faith in Opportunity's batteries \u2014 even though they are 15 years old, they are still working at 85 percent of their capacity.\u201cThey're\u00a0the\u00a0finest batteries in the solar system.\u00a0I wish my cellphone battery had half of that,\u201d he said.Local dust storms\u00a0are a common occurrence on Mars \u2014 strong winds lift particles the size of those in talcum powder and carry them into the sky.\u00a0The thin atmosphere makes these events different from storms on Earth; even the most powerful Martian winds couldn't topple a rover. But that atmosphere also makes it easier for sunlight to heat the dust and\u00a0loft it higher and higher. It may take weeks for the clouds to clear.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists aren't sure what causes huge, planet-scale dust storms like the one now raging. They seem to occur every three to four Mars years (six to eight Earth years), and they usually happen when the planet is at its closest to the sun.A similar storm in 2007\u00a0severely damaged Spirit, blanketing the little robot's solar panels and cutting its energy production to less than half of normal capacity. Spirit later got stuck in a sand trap, where it could not angle toward the sun in the winter,\u00a0and has been silent since 2010.This current storm is \u201cunprecedented\u00a0in the pace at which it has grown and spread across the globe,\u201d said Rich Zurek, chief scientist for the Mars Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\u00a0It covers almost a quarter of the surface of Mars, an area the size of North America and Russia combined. Its tau \u2014 a measure of how much light\u00a0is being absorbed \u2014 is 10.8, the highest ever recorded.Even on the opposite side of the planet, where the Curiosity rover is parked at Gale Crater, the thick red haze almost completely obscures the horizon. (Curiosity, which landed in 2012, is nuclear-powered and mostly unaffected by the dust.) The storm\u00a0is being monitored\u00a0by a fleet of orbiting spacecraft, particularly the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Its wide-angle camera first detected the event.NASA is deeply interested in understanding the triggers of these major storms,\u00a0Zurek said. The agency's next Mars mission, the InSight lander, due to arrive at the Red Planet this fall, depends on solar power. So will an autonomous rotorcraft that is slated fly with the Mars 2020 rover in two years. And if the space agency aims to one day send astronauts to the Martian surface, it\u00a0would probably like to protect them from dust clouds, too.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, \u201cwe're all pulling for Opportunity,\u201d Mars Exploration Program director Jim Watzin\u00a0said. \u201cIt's a remarkably resilient little rover.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Mars 2020 rover was solar powered. The rover will operate on nuclear power, but the mission also includes a solar-powered autonomous rotorcraft, the Mars Helicopter. Read more:Cassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye.Curiosity\u2019s five-year journey across Mars \u2014 in one stunning photoNewest NASA discoveries could boost search for ancient life on Mars The seemingly unstoppable rover has already defied the odds by surviving on Mars 55 times longer than its original mission.  NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover is fighting for its life in a Martian dust storm",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds. (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3377",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/03/nasa-is-about-grab-piece-an-asteroid-thats-even-harder-than-it-sounds/",
        "text": "For the past two years, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has sailed across the solar system by the light of the stars. Like ancient mariners and the Apollo astronauts, it needed the constancy of the constellations to navigate the dark unknown.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAll that changed Monday, when the NASA probe finally reached its target, an Empire State Building-size asteroid called Bennu. Now OSIRIS-REx faces a whole new kind of challenge: exploring the smallest object ever orbited by a spacecraft.Sitting at mission control at the Denver offices of Lockheed Martin, which operates the spacecraft for NASA, engineer Javi Cerna waited for the signal indicating OSIRIS-REx had begun the burn needed to bring it close to its target.Story continues below advertisement\u201cStandby for Bennu arrival,\u201d Cerna announced.He fidgeted in his chair, then stood. The room was utterly silent.AdvertisementThen Cerna grinned and spread his arms out wide.\u201cWe have arrived!\u201dOSIRIS-REx was within 12 miles of Bennu\u2019s surface \u2014 about the distance between the White House and NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, which manages the spacecraft.Soon an image of the asteroid appeared on the mission control screens: a diamond-shaped body with a rough, speckled exterior. OSIRIS-REx was finally at the doorstep of its new home.Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid \u2014 a primitive, carbon-rich piece of debris left over from the process that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. OSIRIS-REx will spend the next 18 months there, surveying the landscape and probing Bennu\u2019s chemical makeup before finally selecting what piece of the asteroid it wants to bring back home. In a kiss-like maneuver, the spacecraft\u2019s robotic arm will collect material from Bennu\u2019s surface, then sling the sample back toward Earth. It will be the largest planetary sample retrieved since the Apollo era, when astronauts brought rocks back from the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStudying the sample in terrestrial labs, scientists hope to uncover clues about the birth of the planets and the origins of Earth\u2019s water and life. They may also uncover potentially useful natural resources such as organic molecules and precious metals. And since Bennu has a 1-in-2,700 chance of impacting Earth about 200 years from now, researchers figure it would be good to glean insights about the asteroid\u2019s fate \u2014 and how it might intersect with our own.Bennu is so small, dark and distant (about 75 million miles from Earth at the moment) that scientists could only theorize about what it might look like when they launched OSIRIS-REx two years ago. To their delight, newly acquired close-ups of the asteroid closely match their predictions.But there\u2019s still a lot to learn about the object, said University of Arizona Planetary Scientist Bashar Rizk, who oversees three of OSIRIS-REx\u2019s cameras. In the coming weeks and months, his team aims to get detailed measurements of the asteroid\u2019s shape, density and gravity that will allow scientists to fine-tune how they orbit it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBennu is so small (about 0.05 percent of the mass of Mount Everest) that its gravity is nearly negligible. If you stood at Bennu\u2019s North Pole and jumped, you would achieve escape velocity and go soaring off into the void.That makes orbiting \u2014 which relies on a delicate balance between a spacecraft\u2019s velocity and an object\u2019s gravity \u2014 especially hard.\u201cIt will really be record-breaking in terms of the precision, the navigation, compared to anything we\u2019ve done before,\u201d said flight navigator Coralie Adam, an engineer at aerospace company KinetX.With gravity so weak, other factors could potentially knock OSIRIS-REx off course. Even the faint pressure of sunlight warming the spacecraft can create sufficient thrust to warp its orbit.Story continues below advertisementTo counteract the influence of the sun, Adam and her colleagues will fly over Bennu\u2019s \u201cterminator\u201d line, where day turns to night on the asteroid\u2019s surface. This ensures that the solar radiation pressure remains constant, so engineers can make sure they continuously counteract it.AdvertisementYet Bennu\u2019s small size also makes it possible for OSIRIS-REx to perform carefully choreographed hairpin maneuvers around the asteroid. Engineers will uplink new orbital instructions to the spacecraft every day (a typical planetary mission might update its trajectory only once a week, Adam said). Video animations of the spacecraft\u2019s planned orbits look like an elaborate cosmic ballet.In 2020, after 18 months of observations, OSIRIS-REx will swoop close to Bennu and extend a long robotic arm equipped with its sample-collecting instrument, called TAGSAM. With a puff of nitrogen gas, it will blow material off the asteroid\u2019s surface, gathering as much as 4.4 pounds of rock in the head of the sample. Then it must turn around and retrace its path back home.Story continues below advertisementFinally, on Sept. 24, 2023, a capsule containing the sample will streak through Earth\u2019s atmosphere and land in the Utah desert.AdvertisementAs NASA scientists learn more about Bennu, they\u2019ll be comparing their findings with counterparts from the Japanese Space Agency, whose Hayabusa 2 spacecraft arrived at the asteroid Ryugu earlier this year. The Japanese mission was the first to land moving rovers on the surface of an asteroid, and it will return samples to Earth in 2020. Asteroid scientists are eager for \u201cbonanza\u201d of discoveries that await, as one researcher at mission control put it.OSIRIS-REx scientists expect to reveal the results of their early surveys of Bennu next week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington.Asked how he was feeling at the moment of arrival, principal investigator Dante Lauretta tweeted, \u201crelieved, proud and anxious to start exploring!\"Read more:Astrophysicists count all the starlight in the universeNASA\u2019s InSight Mars explorer lands safely on the Red PlanetNext stop, Mars: Inside the debate about finding life on the Red Planet The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft, the first American mission to return a sample from an asteroid, arrived at its target Monday. NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3378",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/03/nasa-is-about-grab-piece-an-asteroid-thats-even-harder-than-it-sounds/",
        "text": "For the past two years, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has sailed across the solar system by the light of the stars. Like ancient mariners and the Apollo astronauts, it needed the constancy of the constellations to navigate the dark unknown.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAll that changed Monday, when the NASA probe finally reached its target, an Empire State Building-size asteroid called Bennu. Now OSIRIS-REx faces a whole new kind of challenge: exploring the smallest object ever orbited by a spacecraft.Sitting at mission control at the Denver offices of Lockheed Martin, which operates the spacecraft for NASA, engineer Javi Cerna waited for the signal indicating OSIRIS-REx had begun the burn needed to bring it close to its target.Story continues below advertisement\u201cStandby for Bennu arrival,\u201d Cerna announced.He fidgeted in his chair, then stood. The room was utterly silent.AdvertisementThen Cerna grinned and spread his arms out wide.\u201cWe have arrived!\u201dOSIRIS-REx was within 12 miles of Bennu\u2019s surface \u2014 about the distance between the White House and NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, which manages the spacecraft.Soon an image of the asteroid appeared on the mission control screens: a diamond-shaped body with a rough, speckled exterior. OSIRIS-REx was finally at the doorstep of its new home.Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid \u2014 a primitive, carbon-rich piece of debris left over from the process that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. OSIRIS-REx will spend the next 18 months there, surveying the landscape and probing Bennu\u2019s chemical makeup before finally selecting what piece of the asteroid it wants to bring back home. In a kiss-like maneuver, the spacecraft\u2019s robotic arm will collect material from Bennu\u2019s surface, then sling the sample back toward Earth. It will be the largest planetary sample retrieved since the Apollo era, when astronauts brought rocks back from the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStudying the sample in terrestrial labs, scientists hope to uncover clues about the birth of the planets and the origins of Earth\u2019s water and life. They may also uncover potentially useful natural resources such as organic molecules and precious metals. And since Bennu has a 1-in-2,700 chance of impacting Earth about 200 years from now, researchers figure it would be good to glean insights about the asteroid\u2019s fate \u2014 and how it might intersect with our own.Bennu is so small, dark and distant (about 75 million miles from Earth at the moment) that scientists could only theorize about what it might look like when they launched OSIRIS-REx two years ago. To their delight, newly acquired close-ups of the asteroid closely match their predictions.But there\u2019s still a lot to learn about the object, said University of Arizona Planetary Scientist Bashar Rizk, who oversees three of OSIRIS-REx\u2019s cameras. In the coming weeks and months, his team aims to get detailed measurements of the asteroid\u2019s shape, density and gravity that will allow scientists to fine-tune how they orbit it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBennu is so small (about 0.05 percent of the mass of Mount Everest) that its gravity is nearly negligible. If you stood at Bennu\u2019s North Pole and jumped, you would achieve escape velocity and go soaring off into the void.That makes orbiting \u2014 which relies on a delicate balance between a spacecraft\u2019s velocity and an object\u2019s gravity \u2014 especially hard.\u201cIt will really be record-breaking in terms of the precision, the navigation, compared to anything we\u2019ve done before,\u201d said flight navigator Coralie Adam, an engineer at aerospace company KinetX.With gravity so weak, other factors could potentially knock OSIRIS-REx off course. Even the faint pressure of sunlight warming the spacecraft can create sufficient thrust to warp its orbit.Story continues below advertisementTo counteract the influence of the sun, Adam and her colleagues will fly over Bennu\u2019s \u201cterminator\u201d line, where day turns to night on the asteroid\u2019s surface. This ensures that the solar radiation pressure remains constant, so engineers can make sure they continuously counteract it.AdvertisementYet Bennu\u2019s small size also makes it possible for OSIRIS-REx to perform carefully choreographed hairpin maneuvers around the asteroid. Engineers will uplink new orbital instructions to the spacecraft every day (a typical planetary mission might update its trajectory only once a week, Adam said). Video animations of the spacecraft\u2019s planned orbits look like an elaborate cosmic ballet.In 2020, after 18 months of observations, OSIRIS-REx will swoop close to Bennu and extend a long robotic arm equipped with its sample-collecting instrument, called TAGSAM. With a puff of nitrogen gas, it will blow material off the asteroid\u2019s surface, gathering as much as 4.4 pounds of rock in the head of the sample. Then it must turn around and retrace its path back home.Story continues below advertisementFinally, on Sept. 24, 2023, a capsule containing the sample will streak through Earth\u2019s atmosphere and land in the Utah desert.AdvertisementAs NASA scientists learn more about Bennu, they\u2019ll be comparing their findings with counterparts from the Japanese Space Agency, whose Hayabusa 2 spacecraft arrived at the asteroid Ryugu earlier this year. The Japanese mission was the first to land moving rovers on the surface of an asteroid, and it will return samples to Earth in 2020. Asteroid scientists are eager for \u201cbonanza\u201d of discoveries that await, as one researcher at mission control put it.OSIRIS-REx scientists expect to reveal the results of their early surveys of Bennu next week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington.Asked how he was feeling at the moment of arrival, principal investigator Dante Lauretta tweeted, \u201crelieved, proud and anxious to start exploring!\"Read more:Astrophysicists count all the starlight in the universeNASA\u2019s InSight Mars explorer lands safely on the Red PlanetNext stop, Mars: Inside the debate about finding life on the Red Planet The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft, the first American mission to return a sample from an asteroid, arrived at its target Monday. NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s even harder than it sounds.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A scientist explains how to take pictures on Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3379",
        "date": "2017-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/06/a-scientist-explains-how-to-take-pictures-on-mars/",
        "text": "For the past decade, the\u00a0High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment \u2014 a $40 million camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter \u2014 has been taking photographs of Mars and its rocky, ever-changing surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe spacecraft orbits about 200 miles above the massive planet, but it is powerful enough to zero in on objects as small as three feet across \u2014 about the size of your desk at work. Since it began orbiting the Red Planet in 2006, the HiRISE camera has captured about 50,000 images, thousands of which were commissioned by curious members of the public.Ingrid Daubar, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion lab in Pasadena, Calif., told The Washington Post that HiRISE is the largest camera ever sent to another planet and it's known among experts as \u201cthe people's camera.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cI haven't looked at all of the photos, but I think some of the images are beautiful,\u201d said Daubar, who spent nine years on the HiRISE operations team. \u201cSome members of the public are prolific photographers.\u201dMars: An interactive journeyMembers of the public don't actually shoot the images with a joystick, but they do play a significant role in identifying target locations for HiRISE to photograph. After selecting a location using NASA maps online, amateur photographers can request that scientists train the camera on their target of choice, often with a persuasive written explanation.AdvertisementHiRISE team members review the suggestions before adding approved requests to an extensive planning schedule created several weeks in advance.Story continues below advertisementPlanners consider what can be gleaned scientifically from each potential image and whether the photo request aligns with the spacecraft's timeline, as well as the operational schedule of a series of radio dishes around the world that are in contact with the orbiter when they're facing Mars.\u201cA lot of coordination goes into a single photograph,\u201d Daubar said. \u201cBut in the end you can get an image of your favorite crater. There are also valleys and volcanoes and cool geologic formations that people are drawn to.\u201dDespite taking tens of thousands of snapshots of the Martian surface, Daubar said, HiRISE has only mapped about two percent of the planet's surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording to NASA:\u201cThe camera operates in visible wavelengths, the same as human eyes, but with a telescopic lens that produces images at resolutions never before seen in planetary exploration missions. These high-resolution images enable scientists to distinguish 1-meter-size (about 3-foot-size) objects on Mars and to study the morphology (surface structure) in a much more comprehensive manner than ever before.\u201dSo far, Daubar said, the images have yielded valuable insights about the Red Planet's surface, which is much more dynamic than scientists initially thought. The images have revealed never-before-seen gullies, craters and valley networks, as well as seasonal changes among the planet's polar caps, which form \u201ccrazy patterns\u201d in the layers of dust and ice.She goes into more detail about the mapping process and her interest in craters in a recent episode of Spacepod.Many of those images will be featured in \u201cMars: The Pristine Beauty of The Red Planet,\u201d a book of curated images being published by the University of Arizona Press this year.\u201cWith tantalizing and artistic glimpses at actively eroding slopes, impact craters, strange polar landscapes, avalanches, and even spectacular descent pictures of probes like the Phoenix Lander and the Mars Science Laboratory, we see what researchers are seeing,\u201d the book's description says.HiRISE's practical function goes beyond producing artistic imagery and helping scientists map the vast planet. The camera is also searching for locations for NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 mission. So far, the agency says, it has located three areas for \u201cfurther evaluation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDaubar said one of the perks of the images is that they have given scientists a chance to compare particular locations over time, a practice that has led to unexpected discoveries.\u201cWe've actually been able to see current geologic activity going on and we've found that Mars is actually a much more active planet than anyone realized,\u201d she said. \u201cWe're seeing new craters and dunes move around and we're actually seeing the craters being formed, as well as avalanches and landslides.\u201d\u201cIt's all happening right before our eyes,\u201d she added.MORE READING:\u00a0Time is running out to determine if China holds the world\u2019s oldest animal fossilsStephen Hawking just moved up humanity\u2019s deadline for escaping EarthHuman noise pollution is everywhere, even in the national parks The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment has taken 50,000 photographs of Mars and its ever-changing surface, thousands of which were commissioned by curious members of the public. A scientist explains how to take pictures on Mars",
        "author": "Peter Holley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light years away, astronomers discover (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3380",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/04/mysterious-radio-burst-came-from-a-galaxy-2-5-billion-light-years-away-astronomers-discover/",
        "text": "For the first time, scientists have nailed down a source of fast radio bursts, one of astronomy's most enigmatic phenomena.A dim dwarf galaxy 2.5 billion light years from Earth is sending out the mysterious millisecond-long blasts of radio waves, researchers report Wednesday in Nature and Astrophysical Journal Letters. The bursts traverse vast expanses of time and intergalactic space before reaching our planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThis\u00a0really is the first ironclad association of a fast radio burst with another astronomical source, so it\u2019s a pretty huge result,\u201d said Duncan Lorimer, an\u00a0astronomer at West Virginia University who reported\u00a0the\u00a0first detection of a fast radio burst (FRB)\u00a0in 2007.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementFRBs are extremely brief pulses of radio waves, flaring with the power of about 500 million suns. Scientists have recorded just 18 of these\u00a0signals, but studies suggest there could be as many as 10,000 a day.\u00a0Their unpredictability\u00a0makes them difficult to spot, and they appear to come from all over the sky.Radio pulses from space have stumped scientists for years. Now we may be close to solving the mystery.Understanding these\u00a0bursts may open up a new field in astronomy, added Lorimer, who was not involved in the new reports. Because they travel so far to reach Earth, FRBs\u00a0could\u00a0be a tool for studying the mostly empty space between galaxies and mapping the distribution of matter across the universe. But first astronomers have to figure out what exactly they are.Advertisement\u201cI am not exaggerating when I say there are more models for what FRBs could be than there are FRBs,\u201d said Cornell astronomer Shami Chatterjee, the lead author of the new Nature paper. Story continues below advertisementMany scientists think the bursts are emitted by distant neutron stars, the super-dense embers of exploded suns. But some\u00a0believe they must originate\u00a0in our own galaxy. Still more suggest that FRBs could be caused by cataclysms like a supernova or a collision of two stars. This last theory was compelling because most FRB detections were one-off events \u2014 astronomers never spotted more than one flare from a single source.In spring, researchers looking at archival\u00a0data from\u00a0Arecibo Observatory \u2014 one of the largest radio telescopes in the world \u2014 found evidence that\u00a0bursts were repeatedly coming from the same spot in the sky. Each one carried the telltale signature of an FRB: the high frequency radio waves arrived first, followed by successively lower frequencies, which\u00a0get stretched out and slowed down as they travel across space. The signal, called FRB 121102, was definitely repeating, and it certainly traveled a long way to reach Earth.But where did\u00a0it come from? To answer that question, Chatterjee and his colleagues turned to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, a network of 27 radio telescopes spread over a 20-mile-wide area in the high grassland of New Mexico (Jodie Foster works there in the movie \u201cContact\u201d). Each of the telescopes making up the VLA has a smaller diameter than the one at Arecibo, meaning they don't take in very much of the sky. But combining the data from all 27 gives a very high-resolution glimpse of one small swatch of space \u2014 exactly what Chatterjee needed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe applied for 10 hours of telescope time, thinking that would be plenty to catch FRB 121102 flaring. But he saw nothing. He applied for 40 more hours. Nothing again.Finally, he asked for 40 more hours at the VLA, scheduled to coincide with 40 hours of time at Arecibo. During a trial run, the team caught its first flash from FRB 121102. Then it got eight more.\u201cNine pulses captured with two telescopes \u2014 now we have enormous resolution,\u201d Chatterjee said. \u201cWe've\u00a0pinpointed a speck, to a 10th of an arcsecond\u00a0[a unit of angular measurement]\u00a0.\u2009.\u2009. where the burst is coming from.\u201dNext, scientists at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii trained their optical telescope on the speck nailed down by Chatterjee. Their scan of the sky revealed that FRB 121102's source is 2.5\u00a0billion light years away, within a very faint dwarf galaxy with about 1 percent of the mass of the Milky Way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe discovery allows researchers to rule out some proposed explanations for FRBs. They can't be cataclysmic, since their source needs to survive whatever causes them in order to repeat, and they definitely don't originate within our galaxy.Observations from the European VLBI network \u2014 an array of telescopes spread all over the globe \u2014 offered\u00a0an even more precise snapshot of the\u00a0FRBs' origin point, which seems to coincide with another, more persistent source of radio waves. Those signals resemble the radio emissions that come from supermassive black holes. But those types of black holes are typically found only in bright galaxies \u2014 not small faint ones like that identified by the astronomers at Gemini.Another possible explanation\u00a0involves active galactic nuclei (bright compact regions at the centers of galaxies) emitting jets that vaporize blobs of plasma.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChatterjee said he's inclined to believe\u00a0FRBs are pulses emitted by magnetars \u2014 neutron stars with an especially strong magnetic field. These stars are already known to emit high-energy radiation, like gamma rays and X-rays. It would be unusual for a magnetar to flare\u00a0as brightly as\u00a0an FRB suggests it must. But Chatterjee said that blobs of plasma surrounding the star could act as a lens, coalescing in just the right manner to focus the light toward Earth.\u201cIt's not a slam-dunk explanation,\u201d Chatterjee said, noting that scientists usually are drawn to the\u00a0simplest possible interpretations of their results. But\u00a0for now,\u00a0he thinks it's the most compelling theory.It remains to be seen whether FRB 121102 \u2014 the only one that is known to repeat \u2014 is representative of all other fast radio bursts. Astronomers wonder whether\u00a0there are two classes of FRB, some that repeat and some that come from cataclysms that can only happen once.The cosmic hunt for Fast Radio Bursts just got a surprising new twistAll this uncertainty has hobbled previous\u00a0attempts to\u00a0identify a source of FRBs. One researcher at Australia's Parkes Radio Telescope spent months trying to track down what she thought were strange signals related to FRBs \u2014\u00a0only to discover they were actually blasts from the microwave\u00a0oven in the lab kitchen.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn February, an international team of astronomers announced in Nature that they'd\u00a0traced one of the flashes back to a galaxy 6 billion light years from Earth\u00a0based on an \u201cafterglow\u201d they saw emanating from the host galaxy. But\u00a0that identification\u00a0quickly fell apart when other researchers observed that the glow persisted long after the bursts came and went; two months later they reported that the purported burst was actually a flickering black hole. During those same two months, the researchers looking at Arecibo data announced that FRB 121102 was repeating \u2014 a\u00a0discovery that shifted the field of FRB research under astronomers' feet.That's how science works \u2014 it's surprising, sometimes silly and almost always\u00a0messy, especially when it involves phenomena researchers don't fully understand.Heino Falcke, an astronomer at\u00a0Radboud University-Nijmegen in the Netherlands, invoked past missteps in his analysis of the new study for Nature:\u00a0\u201cAs good detectives, we should avoid adopting newly emerging dogmas too soon, even when we think we have caught the suspect red-handed,\u201d he wrote. \u201cFRBs are nimble fugitives and are not necessarily all alike.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLorimer suggested that clarity might come from adopting Chatterjee's \u201csit and stare method\u201d \u2014 taking a telescope, pointing it at a known FRB source, and waiting to detect another pulse. This is no simple task; there are a limited number of radio telescopes in the world and an inexhaustible list of possible uses for them. On top of that, two of the U.S.'s top radio telescopes, Arecibo and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, are facing funding woes and could be shut down. But new instruments are about to come online, including China's Tianyan (\u201ceye of heaven\u201d) telescope, whose 500-meter dish makes it the largest in the world.The most sensitive radio telescope in the world was just completed in China - but at a high cost. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)But if astronomers can figure out where FRBs come from and why, they may start to use the signals to probe other mysteries.\u201cThis phenomenon is so well tuned to explore the universe,\u201d\u00a0said Sarah Burke-Spolaor, an astronomer at West Virginia University and co-author of the new study. Their dispersion \u2014 the fact that high-frequency wavelengths arrive slightly before lower frequencies \u2014 can inform astronomers about the matter they encountered during their journey to Earth.\u00a0The signals might even provide ways of testing Einstein's theory of relativity, because they cross so much of the universe over such long spans of cosmological time.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis detection has really broken open the gates of a new realm of science and discovery,\u201d Burke-Spolaor said.22 stunning photos of our solar system and beyond in 2016ShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageIn this undated photo provided by NASA, Saturn's icy moon Mimas is dwarfed by the planet's enormous rings. Consider it a cosmic carousel with countless rings up for grabs. NASA\u2019s Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, has begun an unprecedented mission to skim the planet\u2019s rings. On Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, Cassini got a gravitational assist from Saturn\u2019s big moon Titan. That put the spacecraft on course to graze Saturn\u2019s main outer rings. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via AP) (AP)Read more:How Vera Rubin changed scienceThese 17,000 rocks from the bottom of the world could unlock the secrets of existenceThis space engine breaks a law of physics. But a NASA test says it works anyway.Scientists are building a telescope to seek another Earth \u2014 and you can helpThe mysterious 'Planet Nine' might be causing the whole solar system to wobble For the first time, scientists have pinpointed the source of a fast radio burst, one of astronomy's most enigmatic phenomena.  Mysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light years away, astronomers discover",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A space rock from another star is spotted in our solar system \u2014 a cosmic first (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3381",
        "date": "2017-10-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/27/a-space-rock-from-another-star-is-spotted-in-our-solar-system-a-cosmic-first/",
        "text": "For the first time, a space rock from another solar system has been spotted cruising\u00a0through\u00a0our corner of the universe.The asteroid is about\u00a0400 meters across\u00a0and moving at a clip of nearly\u00a027 miles a second, according to NASA. For months, this\u00a0interstellar interloper\u00a0\u2014 a fragment of an alien solar system\u00a0\u2014 has been hanging around our\u00a0cosmic neighborhood. Now it's zooming away toward another part of the galaxy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u00a0was first seen Oct. 19, when\u00a0a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, Rob Weryk, witnessed a small bright object streaking across the sky.Weryk looked through the archives for the Pan-STARRS telescope, which conducts nightly sky surveys in search of celestial objects moving through the space near Earth, and found the mysterious body in images as far back as early September. The space rock followed a path like nothing he'd ever seen. Instead of circling around\u00a0the \u201cecliptic\u201d \u2014 the plane on which planets, asteroids, comets and other solar system objects orbit the sun \u2014 this new thing approached from above. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the constellation Lyra and had been cruising through the chilly void of interstellar space at nearly 16 miles a second.On Sept. 2, it crossed the ecliptic plane inside Mercury's orbit. A week later, it made its closest approach to the sun. Tugged by the sun's gravity, it reversed course and hurtled back above the ecliptic at an angle, passing\u00a0about 15 million miles from Earth on Oct. 14. It is now headed for the constellation Pegasus.\u201cThis is the most extreme orbit I have ever seen,\u201d Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies\u00a0at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a\u00a0statement. \u201cIt is going extremely fast and on such a trajectory that we can say with confidence that this object is on its way out of the solar system and not coming back.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause\u00a0no interstellar asteroid has ever been seen before, the International Astronomical Union has no rules for naming the new object. For now, it's been provisionally dubbed \u201cA/2017 U1,\u201d though\u00a0we're partial to\u00a0this moniker:Did we say comet? Make that an asteroid.An extrasolar asteroid.***AN EXOROID*** https://t.co/SnW2hEWqDq\u2014 Jason Major (@JPMajor) October 26, 2017\n\nScientists have suspected for a while that a visit from \u201cexoroids\u201d could be possible. So much material is flung about during the chaotic process of forming planets that it's likely some\u00a0bits and pieces might escape and make their way to other solar systems.What's most surprising is that we've never seen any, said Karen Meech, an astronomer at Hawaii's\u00a0IfA who specializes in small bodies. At least, not one of any significant size;\u00a0NASA's Stardust spacecraft has collected some dust particles with suspected interstellar origins.Astronomers aren't entirely sure what this object is. They initially called it a comet, but after failing to spot its\u00a0coma \u2014 the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds a comet's core \u2014 they revised their designation. It's an asteroid, they declared Thursday.But they're fairly certain that the rock doesn't come from our solar system. Their biggest clue is its\u00a0hyperbolic orbit: rather than endlessly circling the sun in an ellipse, the object's path extends into the unknown far beyond our solar system. Astronomers have seen objects with open-ended orbits like this before, but they were always nudged onto a hyperbolic path by outgassing (the warming and release of gasses as an object flies close to the sun, like air slowly slipping from a balloon) or gravitational interactions with planets. Neither seems to be the case for\u00a0A/2017 U1.Now, astronomers around the world are rushing to get a good look at the asteroid before it vanishes into the black. They will try to determine its exact size, shape and spin rate, as well as analyze\u00a0the colors of light emitted and absorbed by the object to determine its composition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have been waiting for this day for decades,\u201d said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's\u00a0Center for Near Earth Object Studies. \u201cIt's long been theorized that such objects exist .\u2009.\u2009. but this is the first such detection. So far, everything indicates this is likely an interstellar object, but more data would help to confirm it.\u201dRead more:An asteroid hunter explains how she's protecting Earth from a killer space rockNASA's newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroidsScientists detect gravitational waves from a new kind of nova, sparking a new era in astronomyAstronomers discover an ancient exploding star after a 30-year search The interstellar interloper, which appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Lyra, now is zooming toward another part of the galaxy. A space rock from another star is spotted in our solar system \u2014 a cosmic first",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A space rock from another star is spotted in our solar system \u2014 a cosmic first (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3382",
        "date": "2017-10-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/27/a-space-rock-from-another-star-is-spotted-in-our-solar-system-a-cosmic-first/",
        "text": "For the first time, a space rock from another solar system has been spotted cruising\u00a0through\u00a0our corner of the universe.The asteroid is about\u00a0400 meters across\u00a0and moving at a clip of nearly\u00a027 miles a second, according to NASA. For months, this\u00a0interstellar interloper\u00a0\u2014 a fragment of an alien solar system\u00a0\u2014 has been hanging around our\u00a0cosmic neighborhood. Now it's zooming away toward another part of the galaxy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u00a0was first seen Oct. 19, when\u00a0a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, Rob Weryk, witnessed a small bright object streaking across the sky.Weryk looked through the archives for the Pan-STARRS telescope, which conducts nightly sky surveys in search of celestial objects moving through the space near Earth, and found the mysterious body in images as far back as early September. The space rock followed a path like nothing he'd ever seen. Instead of circling around\u00a0the \u201cecliptic\u201d \u2014 the plane on which planets, asteroids, comets and other solar system objects orbit the sun \u2014 this new thing approached from above. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the constellation Lyra and had been cruising through the chilly void of interstellar space at nearly 16 miles a second.On Sept. 2, it crossed the ecliptic plane inside Mercury's orbit. A week later, it made its closest approach to the sun. Tugged by the sun's gravity, it reversed course and hurtled back above the ecliptic at an angle, passing\u00a0about 15 million miles from Earth on Oct. 14. It is now headed for the constellation Pegasus.\u201cThis is the most extreme orbit I have ever seen,\u201d Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies\u00a0at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a\u00a0statement. \u201cIt is going extremely fast and on such a trajectory that we can say with confidence that this object is on its way out of the solar system and not coming back.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause\u00a0no interstellar asteroid has ever been seen before, the International Astronomical Union has no rules for naming the new object. For now, it's been provisionally dubbed \u201cA/2017 U1,\u201d though\u00a0we're partial to\u00a0this moniker:Did we say comet? Make that an asteroid.An extrasolar asteroid.***AN EXOROID*** https://t.co/SnW2hEWqDq\u2014 Jason Major (@JPMajor) October 26, 2017\n\nScientists have suspected for a while that a visit from \u201cexoroids\u201d could be possible. So much material is flung about during the chaotic process of forming planets that it's likely some\u00a0bits and pieces might escape and make their way to other solar systems.What's most surprising is that we've never seen any, said Karen Meech, an astronomer at Hawaii's\u00a0IfA who specializes in small bodies. At least, not one of any significant size;\u00a0NASA's Stardust spacecraft has collected some dust particles with suspected interstellar origins.Astronomers aren't entirely sure what this object is. They initially called it a comet, but after failing to spot its\u00a0coma \u2014 the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds a comet's core \u2014 they revised their designation. It's an asteroid, they declared Thursday.But they're fairly certain that the rock doesn't come from our solar system. Their biggest clue is its\u00a0hyperbolic orbit: rather than endlessly circling the sun in an ellipse, the object's path extends into the unknown far beyond our solar system. Astronomers have seen objects with open-ended orbits like this before, but they were always nudged onto a hyperbolic path by outgassing (the warming and release of gasses as an object flies close to the sun, like air slowly slipping from a balloon) or gravitational interactions with planets. Neither seems to be the case for\u00a0A/2017 U1.Now, astronomers around the world are rushing to get a good look at the asteroid before it vanishes into the black. They will try to determine its exact size, shape and spin rate, as well as analyze\u00a0the colors of light emitted and absorbed by the object to determine its composition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have been waiting for this day for decades,\u201d said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's\u00a0Center for Near Earth Object Studies. \u201cIt's long been theorized that such objects exist .\u2009.\u2009. but this is the first such detection. So far, everything indicates this is likely an interstellar object, but more data would help to confirm it.\u201dRead more:An asteroid hunter explains how she's protecting Earth from a killer space rockNASA's newest missions will explore the solar system\u2019s asteroidsScientists detect gravitational waves from a new kind of nova, sparking a new era in astronomyAstronomers discover an ancient exploding star after a 30-year search The interstellar interloper, which appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Lyra, now is zooming toward another part of the galaxy. A space rock from another star is spotted in our solar system \u2014 a cosmic first",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is hiring new astronauts for moon landing in 2024 (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3383",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-is-hiring-new-astronauts-for-moon-landing-in-2024/2020/03/06/90634a94-5e65-11ea-b29b-9db42f7803a7_story.html",
        "text": "For the first time in four years, NASA is hiring new astronauts.The job application opened last week for the \u201cArtemis generation\u201d of space explorers. The Artemis program\u2019s goal is to return to the moon by 2024 \u2014 and land the first woman on it. As the job description notes, \u201cExtensive travel required.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe competition is sure to be fierce. The last time NASA sought astronauts, 18,300 people applied. NASA selected 12 astronauts. (That is an acceptance rate, as The Washington Post noted at the time, of one-twelfth of a percent.)This time, the requirements are a bit stricter.You must be a U.S. citizen and have a bachelor\u2019s degree. Plus, NASA is looking for a master\u2019s degree (in physical; computer or biological sciences; engineering; or math) or at least a few years of PhD work in one of those fields; if you\u2019re a medical doctor, that works, too; or if you\u2019re enrolled or a graduate of a test pilot program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApplicants who make it through this process enroll in a two-year evaluation program. Graduation from astronaut boot camp requires the completion of \u201cspacecraft systems training, Extravehicular Activity (EVA) skills training, robotics skills training, Russian language training, aircraft flight readiness training\u201d and more, NASA says.This post has been updated.Apollo 11 moon landing: 50th anniversaryAt NASA, women are still a big minority Applicants who make it through strict process enroll in a two-year evaluation program. NASA is hiring new astronauts for moon landing in 2024",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Mars explorer lands safely on the Red Planet (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3384",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/25/this-mars-explorer-will-probe-planets-history-if-it-can-land-one-piece/",
        "text": "For the eighth time ever, humanity has achieved one of the toughest tasks in the solar system: landing a spacecraft on Mars.The InSight lander, operated by NASA and built by scientists in the United States, France and Germany, touched down in the vast, red expanse of Mars\u2019 Elysium Planitia just before 3 p.m. Eastern on Monday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere it will operate for the next two Earth years, deploying a seismometer, a heat sensor and radio antenna to probe the Red Planet\u2019s interior. Scientists hope that InSight will uncover signs of tectonic activity and clues about the planet\u2019s past. Those findings could illuminate how Mars became the desolate desert world we see today.Story continues below advertisementMission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., erupted in laughter, applause, hugs and tears as soon as the lander touched down.\u201cThat was awesome,\u201d one woman said, wiping her eyes and clasping her colleague\u2019s hand. A few minutes later, a splotchy red and brown image appeared on the control room\u2019s main screen \u2014 InSight\u2019s first photograph from its new home.It was NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine\u2019s first landing as head of the agency.Advertisement\u201cThis was an amazing, amazing day,\u201d he said at a news conference Monday afternoon. \u201cTo be in the room when the data stops and to know how quiet it gets ... and then once the data comes back, the elation.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPrincipal investigator Bruce Banerdt began his career as an intern at JPL on the Viking mission, the first successful Mars landing. Seeing the initial grainy image from InSight felt like \u201ccoming full circle,\u201d he said. It was an early glimpse at a place on the brink of being explred.Through the debris covering its camera\u2019s dust cover, InSight captured a small rock (not expected to cause any problems for the science) and the edge of its own foot. Off in the distance, Mars\u2019 horizon looms.\u201cThis thing has a lot more to do,\u201d said descent and landing systems engineer Rob Grover. \u201cBut just getting to the surface of Mars is no mean feat.\u201dThe interminable stretch from the moment a spacecraft hits the Martian atmosphere to the second it touches down on the Red Planet\u2019s rusty surface is what scientists call \u201cthe seven minutes of terror.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMore than half of all missions don\u2019t make it safely to the surface. Because it takes more than eight minutes for light signals to travel 100 million miles to Earth, scientists have no control over the process. All they can do is program the spacecraft with their best technology and wait.\u201cEvery milestone is something that happened 8 minutes ago,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s already history.\u201dThe tension was palpable Monday morning in the control room at JPL, where InSight was built and will be operated. At watch parties around the globe \u2014 NASA\u2019s headquarters in Washington, the Nasdaq tower in Times Square, the grand hall of the Museum of Sciences and Industry in Paris, a public library in Haines, Alaska \u2014 legs jiggled and fingers were crossed as minutes ticked toward the beginning of entry, descent and landing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt about 11:47 a.m., engineers received a signal indicating that InSight had entered the Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft plummeted to the planet\u2019s surface at a pace of 12,300 mph. Within two minutes, the friction roasted InSight\u2019s heat shield to a blistering 2,700 degrees.Grover released a deep breath: \u201cThat\u2019s hot.\u201dhttps://twitter.com/tinyeggs/status/1067148323990183936In another two minutes, a supersonic parachute deployed to help slow down the spacecraft. Radar was powered on.From there, the most critical descent checklist unfolded at a rapid clip: 15 seconds to separate the heat shield. Ten seconds to deploy the legs. Activate the radar. Jettison the back shell. Fire the retrorockets. Orient for landing.Story continues below advertisementOne of the engineers leaned toward her computer, hands clasped in front of her face, elbows on her desk.Advertisement\u201c400 meters,\u201d came a voice over the radio at mission control. \u201c300 meters. 80 meters. 30 meters. Constant velocity.\"Engineer Kris Bruvold\u2019s eyes widened. His mouth opened in an \u201co.\u201d He bounced in his seat.\u201cTouchdown confirmed.\u201dBruvold grinned and threw his hands in the air. Others leaped from their chairs.Grover let out a relieved chuckle: \u201cWow, this never gets old.\u201dFinally, at 12:01 p.m., scientists heard a tiny X-band radio beep \u2014 the signal that InSight is active and functioning on the Red Planet.\u201cFlawless,\u201d Grover said. \u201cFlawless. This is what we really hoped and imagined in our mind\u2019s eye.\u201dVice President Pence was among the anxious watchers, Bridenstine said; he called the administrator to congratulate NASA minutes after InSight\u2019s successful landing.The missions\u2019s objective is to determine what Mars is made of and how it has changed since it formed more than 4 billion years ago. The results could help solve the mystery of how the Red Planet became the dry, desolate world we know today.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarly in its history, Mars may have looked a lot like Earth. Magnetization in ancient rocks suggests that it had a global magnetic field like that of Earth, powered by a churning mantle and metallic core. The field would have protected the planet from radiation, allowing it to hold on to an atmosphere much thicker than the one that exists now. This, in turn, probably enabled liquid water to pool on Mars\u2019s surface. Images from satellites reveal the outlines of long-gone lakes, deltas and river-carved canyons.But the last 3 billion years have been a slow-motion disaster for the Red Planet. The dynamo died, the magnetic field faltered, the water evaporated and more than half of the atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds. The InSight mission is designed to find out why.There is no orbiting spacecraft in the right position around Mars to relay real-time information about InSight\u2019s entry descent and landing back to Earth. But as InSight made its precarious descent, NASA hoped to learn about its status via the MarCo satellites \u2014 tiny twin experimental spacecraft known as CubeSats that accompanied the lander on its flight to Mars. Each has solar arrays, a color camera and an antenna for relaying communications from the Martian surface back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAbout 10 minutes before landing, the control room at JPL erupted in applause \u2014 both MarCo satellites were working.\u201cThat means the team now can watch the data flowing onto their screens,\u201d Grover said.Without MarCo, NASA would have had to wait several hours for the details of InSight\u2019s fate. Their success during this mission may provide \u201ca possible model for a new kind of interplanetary communications relay,\u201d systems engineer Anne Marinan said in a NASA news release last week.The two tiny spacecraft will continue in their sun-centered orbit, and the MarCo team is discussing with NASA options for further projects for the mission.NASA should know whether the lander\u2019s solar arrays have deployed within the next day, thanks to recordings from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The agency also will perform a checkup to ensure that everything on board survived the harrowing descent, and soon scientists will get their first clear images of the spacecraft\u2019s landing site \u2014 a vast, flat, almost featureless plain near the equator.\u201cI\u2019m incredibly happy to be in a very safe and boring landing location,\u201d said project manager Tom Hoffman.Unlike Opportunity and Curiosity, the rovers that trundle across Mars in search of interesting rocks, InSight is designed to sit still and listen. Using its dome-shaped seismic sensor, scientists hope to detect tiny tremors associated with meteorite impacts, dust storms and \u201cmarsquakes\u201d generated by the cooling of the planet\u2019s interior. As seismic waves ripple through, they will be distorted by changes in the materials they encounter \u2014 perhaps plumes of molten rock or reservoirs of liquid water \u2014 revealing what\u2019s under the planet\u2019s surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInSight\u2019s seismometer is so sensitive it can detect tremors smaller than a hydrogen atom. But it also must be robust enough to survive the perilous process of landing. Nothing like it has been deployed on any planet, even Earth.Designing this instrument, said principal investigator Philippe Lognonn\u00e9, \u201cwas not only a technical adventure, but a human adventure.\u201dInSight also has a drill capable of burrowing 16 feet \u2014 deeper than any previous Mars instrument. From there, it can take Mars\u2019s temperature to determine how much heat is still flowing out of the body of the planet. Meanwhile, two antennae will precisely track the lander\u2019s location to determine how much Mars wobbles as it orbits the sun.It will take two to three months for InSight to start conducting science, explained Elizabeth Barrett, science system engineer for the mission.AdvertisementThis is the first time NASA has used a robotic arm to place instruments on the surface of Mars, and the agency wants to be careful. There is no option to send a technician in for repairs if something goes wrong.\u201cI liken it to playing that claw game at a fairground, but with a very very valuable prize ... and you\u2019re doing blindfolded and remotely from 300 million miles away,\" Barret said.But the insights eventually gleaned from InSight won\u2019t just add to what we know about Mars; they could provide clues to things that happened on Earth billions of years ago. Most traces of Earth\u2019s early history have been lost to the inexorable churn of plate tectonics, explained Suzanne Smrekar, the mission\u2019s deputy principal investigator.\u201cMars gives us an opportunity to see the materials, the structure, the chemical reactions that are close to what we see in the interior of Earth, but it\u2019s preserved,\u201d she said. \u201cIt gives us a chance to go back in time.\u201dBridenstine said Monday that information from InSight may guide a potential crewed mission to Mars by providing information about Mars' water, the risk of asteroid impacts, and resources that could potentially be utilized by human explorers.\u201cThe more we learn, the more we\u2019re able to achieve,\u201d he said.Read more:Next stop, Mars: Inside the debate about finding life on the Red PlanetCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. Mars: A virtual reality tour of the Red Planet Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. But NASA's InSight spacecraft aims to be the first working seismic sensor on another planet. NASA\u2019s InSight Mars explorer lands safely on the Red Planet",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Listen to the eerie rumble of the first \u2018Mars quake\u2019 ever detected (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3385",
        "date": "2019-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/24/listen-eerie-rumble-first-mars-quake-ever-detected/",
        "text": "For months, the spacecraft sat very still in the vast, empty expanse of a flat Martian plain, alone and undisturbed but for the thin whine of an alien wind.Back on Earth, operators at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were getting worried. The whole point of the InSight mission was to track the Red Planet\u2019s quakes, shakes and tremors for clues about its interior. But the spacecraft hadn\u2019t felt so much as a twitch in the ground beneath its three feet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\"The longer we went without a quake, the more questionable or doubtful we were becoming that we\u2019d be able to do the science we came to Mars to do,\u201d said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator for the mission.Story continues below advertisementThen, on April 6, InSight\u2019s seismometer picked up a faint, eerie rumble \u2014 the sound, scientists say, of what is probably the first quake recorded on the surface of another planet.Advertisement\u201cFinally,\u201d Banerdt said, \u201cwe know Mars is seismically active; we know it\u2019s talking to us.\u201dNow, he continued, \u201cit\u2019s just a matter of being patient, waiting and listening, and collecting the quakes as they come along.\u201dScientists have long sought to explain how Mars, which looked a lot like Earth when the two bodies formed 4.6 billion years ago, became the desolate desert world we see today. Most think the Red Planet\u2019s defunct internal dynamo might be the culprit. Constant churning inside Earth generates a magnetic field that protects our surface from radiation and helps us hold on to our atmosphere, but evidence from ancient rocks suggest that Mars\u2019s magnetic field faltered about 3 billion years ago.Story continues below advertisementInSight is designed to figure out what happened by using seismic waves \u2014 the subterranean ripples produced by quakes \u2014 as probes.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s almost like an X-ray,\u201d Banerdt said. The spacecraft\u2019s exquisitely sensitive seismometer can track subtle changes in the waves as they pass through Mars\u2019s crust, mantle and core.\u201cEvery time you have a Mars quake, that gives you one more slice through the planet,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cEventually, we want to build up a number of these slices to create a 3-D picture of what\u2019s inside.\u201dBut it takes a quake to generate these waves \u2014 and none seemed to be happening.Banerdt was asleep at his California home when a fresh batch of InSight data was relayed from the Martian surface to seismologists in Switzerland. The scientists noticed a consistent, persistent signal in the data. It was unlike the sporadic shaking they were used to seeing from gusts of wind and the creaks and crackles of the spacecraft warming and cooling beneath the sun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy the time Banerdt woke, his phone screen bore an urgent text message: \u201cTeleconference in half an hour.\"\u201cI jumped right out of bed,\u201d he recalled. \u201cIt was exciting.\u201dThe scientists traded PowerPoint slides and debated interpretations. In a recording released by NASA, in which the seismic wave frequencies have been sped up to make them audible to human ears, the signal sounds almost like an airplane taking flight.Finally, they decided that the signal must have come from a very small quake \u2014 about magnitude 2 or 2.5. Dozens of temblors just like it occur in Southern California every day, utterly unnoticed amid the noise of human activity and ocean waves.Story continues below advertisementThe Martian signal was also prolonged; it lasted nearly 10 minutes, unusual for a seismic event this small. This is probably a result of fractures in the Martian crust that cause signals to bounce around, like echoes in a labyrinthine cave.AdvertisementThe signal, which Banerdt described in a keynote address at the Seismological Society of America\u2019s annual meeting Tuesday night, wasn\u2019t large enough to function as the kind of \u201cX-ray\u201d scientists had hoped to find. But it is still \u201clike catnip\u201d to them, Banerdt said.\u201cThis is a whole new planet that we\u2019re opening up to seismology,\u201d he said.Models using the new discovery suggest that the spacecraft should witness as many as a few dozen quakes over the course of its two-year mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s going to be a little bit sparse and tight. We\u2019re going to have to really squeeze the data for all its worth,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cBut it\u2019s putting us in the right ballpark to do that kind of science.\u201dRead more:Opportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 years Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new rover \u2014 and a chance to make historyNASA\u2019s InSight Mars explorer lands safely on the Red Planet \"Finally we know Mars is seismically active; we know it\u2019s talking to us,\" principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said. Listen to the eerie rumble of the first \u2018Mars quake\u2019 ever detected",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA plans to send a flying robot to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3386",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-plans-to-send-a-flying-robot-to-saturns-moon/2019/06/27/7bf6ecd8-98ee-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html",
        "text": "For its newest planetary science mission, NASA aims to land a flying robot on the surface of Saturn\u2019s moon Titan, a top target in the search for alien life.Dragonfly will be the first endeavor of its kind. NASA\u2019s car-sized quadcopter, equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, is slated to launch on a rocket in 2026, arrive at its destination in 2034 and then fly to multiple locations hundreds of miles apart. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe science is compelling .\u2009.\u2009. and the mission is bold,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science, said Thursday. \u201cI am convinced now is the right time to do this.\u201dTitan is bigger than the planet Mercury and as geographically diverse as Earth. This large, cold moon features a thick, methane-rich atmosphere, mountains of ice and the only surface seas in the solar system beside those on Earth. But on Titan, the rivers and lakes are full of sloshing liquid hydrocarbons. If the moon does harbor water, scientists think it exists in an ocean lurking beneath the frozen crust.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a world utterly unlike our own, and yet \u201cwe know it has all of the ingredients that are necessary to help life form,\u201d said Lori Glaze, NASA\u2019s planetary science division director. Titan\u2019s complex rings and chains of carbon are fundamental to many basic biological processes and may resemble the building blocks from which life on Earth evolved.Apollo 11: Follow the anniversary coverageDragonfly will provide \u201cthe opportunity to discover the processes that were present on early Earth and possibly even the conditions that might harbor life today,\u201d Glaze said.This is the fourth mission to be funded as part of NASA\u2019s New Frontiers program, which supports medium-size planetary science projects that cost less than $1 billion. It follows in the footsteps of the New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto and the Kuiper belt object MU69; the asteroid-explorer OSIRIS-REx; and the Juno probe currently orbiting Jupiter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was one of two program proposals that have been under consideration since December 2017. The other finalist was the CAESAR mission, for Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return, which would have circled to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. That craft would have rendezvoused with the huge space rock, sucked up a sample from its surface and returned it to Earth in November 2038.Dragonfly will land near Titan\u2019s equator, among dunes composed of solid hydrocarbon snowflakes. It will be powered by heat from radioactive plutonium, much like NASA\u2019s intrepid Mars rovers. But with eight rotors, it will be able to cover much more distance than any wheeled robot ever has \u2014 as many as nine miles per hop.\u201cIt\u2019s actually easier to fly on Titan,\u201d Elizabeth Turtle, the mission\u2019s principal investigator and a researcher at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said during a news conference Thursday. That world\u2019s atmosphere is thicker than Earth\u2019s and its gravity is weak.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe craft has to be able to maneuver on its own, however. Light signals from Earth take more than an hour to reach Titan, making Dragonfly much more complicated than a standard drone. Scientists had to develop a navigation system that will enable the spacecraft to identify hazards and fly and land autonomously.In flight, it will sample Titan\u2019s hazy atmosphere and provide aerial images of the landscape below. But the craft will spend most of its time on the ground, testing for biologically relevant materials.Its ultimate destination is Selk Crater, the site of an ancient meteor impact where scientists have found evidence of liquid water, organic molecules and the energy that could fuel chemical reactions.Story continues below advertisementThe gutsy design prompted NASA to ask two independent teams to examine the mission plan and assess whether the project could be executed at the cost allowed, Zurbuchen said. Ultimately, the agency decided the project was doable.Advertisement\u201cWhile this is a new way of exploring a different planet, this is actually technology that is very mature on Earth,\u201d Turtle noted. \u201cReally what we\u2019re doing with Dragonfly is innovation, not invention.\u201dNASA hasn\u2019t seen the surface of Titan since 2005, when the Huygens probe dropped through its hazy orange clouds to reveal an outlandish panorama. Every Earthlike feature on this strange moon had a chemically alien twist.\u201cInstead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane,\u201d scientists reported in the journal Nature. \u201cInstead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt nearly 1 billion miles from the sun, its world is bitterly cold; temperatures average minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit on a mild day. Were more oxygen present, those abundant hydrocarbons (the main component of gasoline) would quickly catch fire.AdvertisementThe presence of all that methane \u2014 a molecule that is usually destroyed by sunlight in a few million years \u2014 is what\u2019s most intriguing to scientists. Its persistence suggests some process that is continually renewing Titan\u2019s supply.They now believe that Titan experiences a weather much like what occurs on Earth \u2014 except its clouds are made of hydrocarbon gas, and its precipitation falls as organic compound rain and snow.Story continues below advertisementTurtle said Thursday that Titan in many ways resembles the infant Earth, before life evolved and irrevocably changed the planet.\u201cTitan is just a perfect chemical laboratory to understand the chemistry that occurred before chemistry took the step to biology,\u201d she said.Johns Hopkins University planetary scientist Sarah H\u00f6rst, a member of Dragonfly\u2019s science and engineering team, once compared Titan to a cosmic kitchen in which scientists have found all the ingredients for life.Advertisement\u201cBut you weren\u2019t there when they got mixed, so you don\u2019t know what they got mixed up to do. You don\u2019t know what will happen when you bake it,\u201d she said in 2017.All those ingredients may add up to nothing. Or they could be signs of \u201clife as we don\u2019t know it,\u201d she said \u2014 a form of biology based in hydrocarbons, rather than water.Story continues below advertisementIn the years since the Huygens landing, scientists have detected even more molecular riches: negatively charged molecules associated with complex chemical reactions; rings of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen from which amino acids can be built; and molecules that can clump together to form a spherical envelope much like the membranes that surround cells.\u201cWe are pretty darn sure that everything in these broad, big-picture categories that\u2019s required for life exists on Titan,\u201d H\u00f6rst said. \u201cAt some point it just comes down to, well, shouldn\u2019t we go check?\u201d The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weirdScientists had never seen anything like this supernova. Could it be a newborn black hole?This is what it looks like when galaxies are about to die The mission is the fourth to be funded as part of the agency\u2019s New Frontiers program. NASA plans to send a flying robot to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA plans to send a flying robot to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3387",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-plans-to-send-a-flying-robot-to-saturns-moon/2019/06/27/7bf6ecd8-98ee-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html",
        "text": "For its newest planetary science mission, NASA aims to land a flying robot on the surface of Saturn\u2019s moon Titan, a top target in the search for alien life.Dragonfly will be the first endeavor of its kind. NASA\u2019s car-sized quadcopter, equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, is slated to launch on a rocket in 2026, arrive at its destination in 2034 and then fly to multiple locations hundreds of miles apart. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe science is compelling .\u2009.\u2009. and the mission is bold,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science, said Thursday. \u201cI am convinced now is the right time to do this.\u201dTitan is bigger than the planet Mercury and as geographically diverse as Earth. This large, cold moon features a thick, methane-rich atmosphere, mountains of ice and the only surface seas in the solar system beside those on Earth. But on Titan, the rivers and lakes are full of sloshing liquid hydrocarbons. If the moon does harbor water, scientists think it exists in an ocean lurking beneath the frozen crust.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a world utterly unlike our own, and yet \u201cwe know it has all of the ingredients that are necessary to help life form,\u201d said Lori Glaze, NASA\u2019s planetary science division director. Titan\u2019s complex rings and chains of carbon are fundamental to many basic biological processes and may resemble the building blocks from which life on Earth evolved.Apollo 11: Follow the anniversary coverageDragonfly will provide \u201cthe opportunity to discover the processes that were present on early Earth and possibly even the conditions that might harbor life today,\u201d Glaze said.This is the fourth mission to be funded as part of NASA\u2019s New Frontiers program, which supports medium-size planetary science projects that cost less than $1 billion. It follows in the footsteps of the New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto and the Kuiper belt object MU69; the asteroid-explorer OSIRIS-REx; and the Juno probe currently orbiting Jupiter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was one of two program proposals that have been under consideration since December 2017. The other finalist was the CAESAR mission, for Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return, which would have circled to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. That craft would have rendezvoused with the huge space rock, sucked up a sample from its surface and returned it to Earth in November 2038.Dragonfly will land near Titan\u2019s equator, among dunes composed of solid hydrocarbon snowflakes. It will be powered by heat from radioactive plutonium, much like NASA\u2019s intrepid Mars rovers. But with eight rotors, it will be able to cover much more distance than any wheeled robot ever has \u2014 as many as nine miles per hop.\u201cIt\u2019s actually easier to fly on Titan,\u201d Elizabeth Turtle, the mission\u2019s principal investigator and a researcher at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said during a news conference Thursday. That world\u2019s atmosphere is thicker than Earth\u2019s and its gravity is weak.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe craft has to be able to maneuver on its own, however. Light signals from Earth take more than an hour to reach Titan, making Dragonfly much more complicated than a standard drone. Scientists had to develop a navigation system that will enable the spacecraft to identify hazards and fly and land autonomously.In flight, it will sample Titan\u2019s hazy atmosphere and provide aerial images of the landscape below. But the craft will spend most of its time on the ground, testing for biologically relevant materials.Its ultimate destination is Selk Crater, the site of an ancient meteor impact where scientists have found evidence of liquid water, organic molecules and the energy that could fuel chemical reactions.Story continues below advertisementThe gutsy design prompted NASA to ask two independent teams to examine the mission plan and assess whether the project could be executed at the cost allowed, Zurbuchen said. Ultimately, the agency decided the project was doable.Advertisement\u201cWhile this is a new way of exploring a different planet, this is actually technology that is very mature on Earth,\u201d Turtle noted. \u201cReally what we\u2019re doing with Dragonfly is innovation, not invention.\u201dNASA hasn\u2019t seen the surface of Titan since 2005, when the Huygens probe dropped through its hazy orange clouds to reveal an outlandish panorama. Every Earthlike feature on this strange moon had a chemically alien twist.\u201cInstead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane,\u201d scientists reported in the journal Nature. \u201cInstead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt nearly 1 billion miles from the sun, its world is bitterly cold; temperatures average minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit on a mild day. Were more oxygen present, those abundant hydrocarbons (the main component of gasoline) would quickly catch fire.AdvertisementThe presence of all that methane \u2014 a molecule that is usually destroyed by sunlight in a few million years \u2014 is what\u2019s most intriguing to scientists. Its persistence suggests some process that is continually renewing Titan\u2019s supply.They now believe that Titan experiences a weather much like what occurs on Earth \u2014 except its clouds are made of hydrocarbon gas, and its precipitation falls as organic compound rain and snow.Story continues below advertisementTurtle said Thursday that Titan in many ways resembles the infant Earth, before life evolved and irrevocably changed the planet.\u201cTitan is just a perfect chemical laboratory to understand the chemistry that occurred before chemistry took the step to biology,\u201d she said.Johns Hopkins University planetary scientist Sarah H\u00f6rst, a member of Dragonfly\u2019s science and engineering team, once compared Titan to a cosmic kitchen in which scientists have found all the ingredients for life.Advertisement\u201cBut you weren\u2019t there when they got mixed, so you don\u2019t know what they got mixed up to do. You don\u2019t know what will happen when you bake it,\u201d she said in 2017.All those ingredients may add up to nothing. Or they could be signs of \u201clife as we don\u2019t know it,\u201d she said \u2014 a form of biology based in hydrocarbons, rather than water.Story continues below advertisementIn the years since the Huygens landing, scientists have detected even more molecular riches: negatively charged molecules associated with complex chemical reactions; rings of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen from which amino acids can be built; and molecules that can clump together to form a spherical envelope much like the membranes that surround cells.\u201cWe are pretty darn sure that everything in these broad, big-picture categories that\u2019s required for life exists on Titan,\u201d H\u00f6rst said. \u201cAt some point it just comes down to, well, shouldn\u2019t we go check?\u201d The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weirdScientists had never seen anything like this supernova. Could it be a newborn black hole?This is what it looks like when galaxies are about to die The mission is the fourth to be funded as part of the agency\u2019s New Frontiers program. NASA plans to send a flying robot to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA plans to send a flying robot to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3388",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-plans-to-send-a-flying-robot-to-saturns-moon/2019/06/27/7bf6ecd8-98ee-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html",
        "text": "For its newest planetary science mission, NASA aims to land a flying robot on the surface of Saturn\u2019s moon Titan, a top target in the search for alien life.Dragonfly will be the first endeavor of its kind. NASA\u2019s car-sized quadcopter, equipped with instruments capable of identifying large organic molecules, is slated to launch on a rocket in 2026, arrive at its destination in 2034 and then fly to multiple locations hundreds of miles apart. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe science is compelling .\u2009.\u2009. and the mission is bold,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science, said Thursday. \u201cI am convinced now is the right time to do this.\u201dTitan is bigger than the planet Mercury and as geographically diverse as Earth. This large, cold moon features a thick, methane-rich atmosphere, mountains of ice and the only surface seas in the solar system beside those on Earth. But on Titan, the rivers and lakes are full of sloshing liquid hydrocarbons. If the moon does harbor water, scientists think it exists in an ocean lurking beneath the frozen crust.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a world utterly unlike our own, and yet \u201cwe know it has all of the ingredients that are necessary to help life form,\u201d said Lori Glaze, NASA\u2019s planetary science division director. Titan\u2019s complex rings and chains of carbon are fundamental to many basic biological processes and may resemble the building blocks from which life on Earth evolved.Apollo 11: Follow the anniversary coverageDragonfly will provide \u201cthe opportunity to discover the processes that were present on early Earth and possibly even the conditions that might harbor life today,\u201d Glaze said.This is the fourth mission to be funded as part of NASA\u2019s New Frontiers program, which supports medium-size planetary science projects that cost less than $1 billion. It follows in the footsteps of the New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto and the Kuiper belt object MU69; the asteroid-explorer OSIRIS-REx; and the Juno probe currently orbiting Jupiter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was one of two program proposals that have been under consideration since December 2017. The other finalist was the CAESAR mission, for Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return, which would have circled to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. That craft would have rendezvoused with the huge space rock, sucked up a sample from its surface and returned it to Earth in November 2038.Dragonfly will land near Titan\u2019s equator, among dunes composed of solid hydrocarbon snowflakes. It will be powered by heat from radioactive plutonium, much like NASA\u2019s intrepid Mars rovers. But with eight rotors, it will be able to cover much more distance than any wheeled robot ever has \u2014 as many as nine miles per hop.\u201cIt\u2019s actually easier to fly on Titan,\u201d Elizabeth Turtle, the mission\u2019s principal investigator and a researcher at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said during a news conference Thursday. That world\u2019s atmosphere is thicker than Earth\u2019s and its gravity is weak.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe craft has to be able to maneuver on its own, however. Light signals from Earth take more than an hour to reach Titan, making Dragonfly much more complicated than a standard drone. Scientists had to develop a navigation system that will enable the spacecraft to identify hazards and fly and land autonomously.In flight, it will sample Titan\u2019s hazy atmosphere and provide aerial images of the landscape below. But the craft will spend most of its time on the ground, testing for biologically relevant materials.Its ultimate destination is Selk Crater, the site of an ancient meteor impact where scientists have found evidence of liquid water, organic molecules and the energy that could fuel chemical reactions.Story continues below advertisementThe gutsy design prompted NASA to ask two independent teams to examine the mission plan and assess whether the project could be executed at the cost allowed, Zurbuchen said. Ultimately, the agency decided the project was doable.Advertisement\u201cWhile this is a new way of exploring a different planet, this is actually technology that is very mature on Earth,\u201d Turtle noted. \u201cReally what we\u2019re doing with Dragonfly is innovation, not invention.\u201dNASA hasn\u2019t seen the surface of Titan since 2005, when the Huygens probe dropped through its hazy orange clouds to reveal an outlandish panorama. Every Earthlike feature on this strange moon had a chemically alien twist.\u201cInstead of liquid water, Titan has liquid methane,\u201d scientists reported in the journal Nature. \u201cInstead of silicate rocks, Titan has frozen water ice. Instead of dirt, Titan has hydrocarbon particles settling out of the atmosphere.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt nearly 1 billion miles from the sun, its world is bitterly cold; temperatures average minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit on a mild day. Were more oxygen present, those abundant hydrocarbons (the main component of gasoline) would quickly catch fire.AdvertisementThe presence of all that methane \u2014 a molecule that is usually destroyed by sunlight in a few million years \u2014 is what\u2019s most intriguing to scientists. Its persistence suggests some process that is continually renewing Titan\u2019s supply.They now believe that Titan experiences a weather much like what occurs on Earth \u2014 except its clouds are made of hydrocarbon gas, and its precipitation falls as organic compound rain and snow.Story continues below advertisementTurtle said Thursday that Titan in many ways resembles the infant Earth, before life evolved and irrevocably changed the planet.\u201cTitan is just a perfect chemical laboratory to understand the chemistry that occurred before chemistry took the step to biology,\u201d she said.Johns Hopkins University planetary scientist Sarah H\u00f6rst, a member of Dragonfly\u2019s science and engineering team, once compared Titan to a cosmic kitchen in which scientists have found all the ingredients for life.Advertisement\u201cBut you weren\u2019t there when they got mixed, so you don\u2019t know what they got mixed up to do. You don\u2019t know what will happen when you bake it,\u201d she said in 2017.All those ingredients may add up to nothing. Or they could be signs of \u201clife as we don\u2019t know it,\u201d she said \u2014 a form of biology based in hydrocarbons, rather than water.Story continues below advertisementIn the years since the Huygens landing, scientists have detected even more molecular riches: negatively charged molecules associated with complex chemical reactions; rings of hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen from which amino acids can be built; and molecules that can clump together to form a spherical envelope much like the membranes that surround cells.\u201cWe are pretty darn sure that everything in these broad, big-picture categories that\u2019s required for life exists on Titan,\u201d H\u00f6rst said. \u201cAt some point it just comes down to, well, shouldn\u2019t we go check?\u201d The smallest and farthest worlds ever explored by NASA are really, really weirdScientists had never seen anything like this supernova. Could it be a newborn black hole?This is what it looks like when galaxies are about to die The mission is the fourth to be funded as part of the agency\u2019s New Frontiers program. NASA plans to send a flying robot to Saturn\u2019s moon Titan",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "See the most moving photo from the Cassini mission (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3389",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/08/see-the-most-moving-photo-from-the-cassini-mission/",
        "text": "For a moment four years ago, the\u00a0spacecraft Cassini watched Earth from 900 million miles away. The probe had ducked behind Saturn. There, shielded from the sun's rays, the robot turned its delicate lenses toward home. On July 19, 2013, Earthlings in the know\u00a0waved and\u00a0smiled for the paparazzo in the sky. Everyone else went about their day. Cassini, a gracious photographer, caught the entire Earth on\u00a0camera anyway. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCassini will end its 20-year mission on Sept. 15, burned up in Saturn's atmosphere. The mission has been a major success. Cassini landed the Huygens probe on Saturn's moon Titan and sensed hydrogen in the icy plumes of Enceladus. The spacecraft\u00a0took half a million photos while orbiting the sixth planet, capturing Saturn's rings and superstorms in unprecedented detail.But perhaps no other Cassini photograph carries the emotional heft of the Day the Earth Smiled.The greatest space photos are named.\u00a0Apollo 17 gave us Earth as the\u00a0Blue Marble.\u00a0Voyager 1's portrait of our planet from beyond Neptune is the\u00a0Pale Blue Dot. The\u00a0Pillars of Creation\u00a0show the hydrogen spires of the Eagle Nebula. Astronomer Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Cassini imaging team who conceived of the July 2013 photo shoot, decided to name the view from Saturn after the beaming residents of Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPorco and her colleagues organized a campaign to smile into the void at 21:27 Coordinated Universal Time (accounting, of course, for light's 15-minute dash from Earth to Saturn). It would\u00a0be only the third time that Earth had been photographed from such a distance, after an earlier Cassini image and the Voyager portrait. It also marked the\u00a0first time that Earth inhabitants knew they were being photographed from the outer solar system, beyond the asteroid belt.\u201cThis could be a day, I thought, when all the inhabitants of Earth, in unison, could issue a full-throated, cosmic shout-out and smile a big one for the cameras from far, far away,\u201d Porco wrote\u00a0in June 2013.\u201cThe experience itself was both exciting because so many people were interested in the event, but also a bit scary because we wouldn't know until afterward whether the images worked,\u201d said Matthew Hedman, a physicist at the University of Idaho who was involved with the project but spoke only on behalf of himself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementZooming in on the Day the Earth Smiled, you can see sunlight scattering through Saturn's E ring,\u00a0pointed out\u00a0Italian astronomer\u00a0Gianrico Filacchione in a recent article in Nature Astronomy. (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes this is a composite of images taken with green, red and blue filters, which when combined offers a view in natural color.) Brighter\u00a0are\u00a0the F and G rings, which contrast\u00a0against the darkness of Saturn's night.Stunning new NASA video depicts Cassini's finale (NASA/JPL-Caltech)It was a view of Saturn impossible to get from\u00a0Earth. Cassini photographed what was, essentially, an eclipse of the sun by Saturn, Hedman said. Our planet shines beneath those massive rings. Earth\u00a0is a pinprick \u2014 at that distance,\u00a0the image scale is 53,820 miles per pixel, and the Earth's diameter is just under 8,000 miles.\u201cAmong the numerous images returned by Cassini,\u201d Filacchione wrote, \u201cthis is the one that for me best collects the richness of Saturn\u2019s system.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe images came back in to Earth in pieces.\u00a0\u201cWe were seeing glimpses of the entire system, one image showing Tethys, another showing some of the main rings, another showing Enceladus in the E ring, and of course a few showing Earth near the rings,\u201d Hedman said. As the scientists assembled the images into a mosaic, Hedman could see light through the broad sweep of the E ring, made\u00a0of microscopic particles expelled from Enceladus. \u201cI guess it was kind of like putting [together] a jigsaw puzzle,\u201d he said.The picture of Earth wasn't the only image taken that day. The Cassini team ultimately stitched together 141 photos\u00a0into a sweeping view of Saturn, a mosaic 404,880 miles across. Shot from the back, Saturn is a black ball suspended in ink, enclosed in the coffee-colored circles of its rings.\u201cOn the one hand, it is a beautiful image that will serve as a reminder of all the great data Cassini obtained,\u201d Hedman said. \u201cAnd on the other, it contains a lot of information about the properties of the rings that we will be trying to understand for many years to come.\u201dRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming successGoogle made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their mindsWhy this\u00a0weird moon of Saturn is a great place to look for aliens The Day the Earth Smiled is one of the greatest space photos. See the most moving photo from the Cassini mission",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "See the most moving photo from the Cassini mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3390",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/08/see-the-most-moving-photo-from-the-cassini-mission/",
        "text": "For a moment four years ago, the\u00a0spacecraft Cassini watched Earth from 900 million miles away. The probe had ducked behind Saturn. There, shielded from the sun's rays, the robot turned its delicate lenses toward home. On July 19, 2013, Earthlings in the know\u00a0waved and\u00a0smiled for the paparazzo in the sky. Everyone else went about their day. Cassini, a gracious photographer, caught the entire Earth on\u00a0camera anyway. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCassini will end its 20-year mission on Sept. 15, burned up in Saturn's atmosphere. The mission has been a major success. Cassini landed the Huygens probe on Saturn's moon Titan and sensed hydrogen in the icy plumes of Enceladus. The spacecraft\u00a0took half a million photos while orbiting the sixth planet, capturing Saturn's rings and superstorms in unprecedented detail.But perhaps no other Cassini photograph carries the emotional heft of the Day the Earth Smiled.The greatest space photos are named.\u00a0Apollo 17 gave us Earth as the\u00a0Blue Marble.\u00a0Voyager 1's portrait of our planet from beyond Neptune is the\u00a0Pale Blue Dot. The\u00a0Pillars of Creation\u00a0show the hydrogen spires of the Eagle Nebula. Astronomer Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Cassini imaging team who conceived of the July 2013 photo shoot, decided to name the view from Saturn after the beaming residents of Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPorco and her colleagues organized a campaign to smile into the void at 21:27 Coordinated Universal Time (accounting, of course, for light's 15-minute dash from Earth to Saturn). It would\u00a0be only the third time that Earth had been photographed from such a distance, after an earlier Cassini image and the Voyager portrait. It also marked the\u00a0first time that Earth inhabitants knew they were being photographed from the outer solar system, beyond the asteroid belt.\u201cThis could be a day, I thought, when all the inhabitants of Earth, in unison, could issue a full-throated, cosmic shout-out and smile a big one for the cameras from far, far away,\u201d Porco wrote\u00a0in June 2013.\u201cThe experience itself was both exciting because so many people were interested in the event, but also a bit scary because we wouldn't know until afterward whether the images worked,\u201d said Matthew Hedman, a physicist at the University of Idaho who was involved with the project but spoke only on behalf of himself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementZooming in on the Day the Earth Smiled, you can see sunlight scattering through Saturn's E ring,\u00a0pointed out\u00a0Italian astronomer\u00a0Gianrico Filacchione in a recent article in Nature Astronomy. (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes this is a composite of images taken with green, red and blue filters, which when combined offers a view in natural color.) Brighter\u00a0are\u00a0the F and G rings, which contrast\u00a0against the darkness of Saturn's night.Stunning new NASA video depicts Cassini's finale (NASA/JPL-Caltech)It was a view of Saturn impossible to get from\u00a0Earth. Cassini photographed what was, essentially, an eclipse of the sun by Saturn, Hedman said. Our planet shines beneath those massive rings. Earth\u00a0is a pinprick \u2014 at that distance,\u00a0the image scale is 53,820 miles per pixel, and the Earth's diameter is just under 8,000 miles.\u201cAmong the numerous images returned by Cassini,\u201d Filacchione wrote, \u201cthis is the one that for me best collects the richness of Saturn\u2019s system.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe images came back in to Earth in pieces.\u00a0\u201cWe were seeing glimpses of the entire system, one image showing Tethys, another showing some of the main rings, another showing Enceladus in the E ring, and of course a few showing Earth near the rings,\u201d Hedman said. As the scientists assembled the images into a mosaic, Hedman could see light through the broad sweep of the E ring, made\u00a0of microscopic particles expelled from Enceladus. \u201cI guess it was kind of like putting [together] a jigsaw puzzle,\u201d he said.The picture of Earth wasn't the only image taken that day. The Cassini team ultimately stitched together 141 photos\u00a0into a sweeping view of Saturn, a mosaic 404,880 miles across. Shot from the back, Saturn is a black ball suspended in ink, enclosed in the coffee-colored circles of its rings.\u201cOn the one hand, it is a beautiful image that will serve as a reminder of all the great data Cassini obtained,\u201d Hedman said. \u201cAnd on the other, it contains a lot of information about the properties of the rings that we will be trying to understand for many years to come.\u201dRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming successGoogle made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their mindsWhy this\u00a0weird moon of Saturn is a great place to look for aliens The Day the Earth Smiled is one of the greatest space photos. See the most moving photo from the Cassini mission",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "See the most moving photo from the Cassini mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3391",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/08/see-the-most-moving-photo-from-the-cassini-mission/",
        "text": "For a moment four years ago, the\u00a0spacecraft Cassini watched Earth from 900 million miles away. The probe had ducked behind Saturn. There, shielded from the sun's rays, the robot turned its delicate lenses toward home. On July 19, 2013, Earthlings in the know\u00a0waved and\u00a0smiled for the paparazzo in the sky. Everyone else went about their day. Cassini, a gracious photographer, caught the entire Earth on\u00a0camera anyway. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCassini will end its 20-year mission on Sept. 15, burned up in Saturn's atmosphere. The mission has been a major success. Cassini landed the Huygens probe on Saturn's moon Titan and sensed hydrogen in the icy plumes of Enceladus. The spacecraft\u00a0took half a million photos while orbiting the sixth planet, capturing Saturn's rings and superstorms in unprecedented detail.But perhaps no other Cassini photograph carries the emotional heft of the Day the Earth Smiled.The greatest space photos are named.\u00a0Apollo 17 gave us Earth as the\u00a0Blue Marble.\u00a0Voyager 1's portrait of our planet from beyond Neptune is the\u00a0Pale Blue Dot. The\u00a0Pillars of Creation\u00a0show the hydrogen spires of the Eagle Nebula. Astronomer Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Cassini imaging team who conceived of the July 2013 photo shoot, decided to name the view from Saturn after the beaming residents of Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPorco and her colleagues organized a campaign to smile into the void at 21:27 Coordinated Universal Time (accounting, of course, for light's 15-minute dash from Earth to Saturn). It would\u00a0be only the third time that Earth had been photographed from such a distance, after an earlier Cassini image and the Voyager portrait. It also marked the\u00a0first time that Earth inhabitants knew they were being photographed from the outer solar system, beyond the asteroid belt.\u201cThis could be a day, I thought, when all the inhabitants of Earth, in unison, could issue a full-throated, cosmic shout-out and smile a big one for the cameras from far, far away,\u201d Porco wrote\u00a0in June 2013.\u201cThe experience itself was both exciting because so many people were interested in the event, but also a bit scary because we wouldn't know until afterward whether the images worked,\u201d said Matthew Hedman, a physicist at the University of Idaho who was involved with the project but spoke only on behalf of himself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementZooming in on the Day the Earth Smiled, you can see sunlight scattering through Saturn's E ring,\u00a0pointed out\u00a0Italian astronomer\u00a0Gianrico Filacchione in a recent article in Nature Astronomy. (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory notes this is a composite of images taken with green, red and blue filters, which when combined offers a view in natural color.) Brighter\u00a0are\u00a0the F and G rings, which contrast\u00a0against the darkness of Saturn's night.Stunning new NASA video depicts Cassini's finale (NASA/JPL-Caltech)It was a view of Saturn impossible to get from\u00a0Earth. Cassini photographed what was, essentially, an eclipse of the sun by Saturn, Hedman said. Our planet shines beneath those massive rings. Earth\u00a0is a pinprick \u2014 at that distance,\u00a0the image scale is 53,820 miles per pixel, and the Earth's diameter is just under 8,000 miles.\u201cAmong the numerous images returned by Cassini,\u201d Filacchione wrote, \u201cthis is the one that for me best collects the richness of Saturn\u2019s system.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe images came back in to Earth in pieces.\u00a0\u201cWe were seeing glimpses of the entire system, one image showing Tethys, another showing some of the main rings, another showing Enceladus in the E ring, and of course a few showing Earth near the rings,\u201d Hedman said. As the scientists assembled the images into a mosaic, Hedman could see light through the broad sweep of the E ring, made\u00a0of microscopic particles expelled from Enceladus. \u201cI guess it was kind of like putting [together] a jigsaw puzzle,\u201d he said.The picture of Earth wasn't the only image taken that day. The Cassini team ultimately stitched together 141 photos\u00a0into a sweeping view of Saturn, a mosaic 404,880 miles across. Shot from the back, Saturn is a black ball suspended in ink, enclosed in the coffee-colored circles of its rings.\u201cOn the one hand, it is a beautiful image that will serve as a reminder of all the great data Cassini obtained,\u201d Hedman said. \u201cAnd on the other, it contains a lot of information about the properties of the rings that we will be trying to understand for many years to come.\u201dRead more:NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will crash into Saturn \u2014 its final screaming successGoogle made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their mindsWhy this\u00a0weird moon of Saturn is a great place to look for aliens The Day the Earth Smiled is one of the greatest space photos. See the most moving photo from the Cassini mission",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Weather-Delayed Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3392",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. With gray clouds above and choppy waves in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a rocket launch for NASA that was to be the first to take American astronauts to orbit from American soil in nearly a decade.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Weather-Delayed Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3393",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. With gray clouds above and choppy waves in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a rocket launch for NASA that was to be the first to take American astronauts to orbit from American soil in nearly a decade.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Weather-Delayed Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3394",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. With gray clouds above and choppy waves in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a rocket launch for NASA that was to be the first to take American astronauts to orbit from American soil in nearly a decade.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Weather-Delayed Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3395",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. With gray clouds above and choppy waves in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a rocket launch for NASA that was to be the first to take American astronauts to orbit from American soil in nearly a decade.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Weather-Delayed Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3396",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. With gray clouds above and choppy waves in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a rocket launch for NASA that was to be the first to take American astronauts to orbit from American soil in nearly a decade.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Weather-Delayed Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3397",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Follow SpaceX's launch of NASA astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. With gray clouds above and choppy waves in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a rocket launch for NASA that was to be the first to take American astronauts to orbit from American soil in nearly a decade.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Jagged ice spikes cover Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, study suggests (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3398",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/08/jagged-ice-spikes-cover-jupiters-moon-europa-study-suggests/",
        "text": "Few moons in the solar system are as intriguing as Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa. A global ocean of salt water almost certainly surrounds the moon \u2014 and it holds more water than any ocean on Earth. Above this immense sea, where surface temperatures dip to minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, a crust of water ice forms a shell. Astronomers predict that Jupiter, which bombards the moon with intense radiation, causes the entire moon to groan with gravity\u2019s tug. Europa\u2019s liquid water is a tempting target for future missions looking for possible alien microbes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut before a future lander can search for microscopic E.T., the probe might have to contend with a forest of tall, jagged ice spikes. So argues a team of planetary scientists and geomorphologists Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. Their research suggests Europa is an icy hedgehog world, covered in ice formations rarely found on Earth.On our planet, ice takes several forms, as varied as needle ice, rime, parking lot slush and more exotic lumps. But because Europa\u2019s surface is \u201cincredibly cold,\u201d said Daniel Hobley, a geomorphologist at Cardiff University in the U.K., an author of the study, ice will not melt and refreeze.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, stranger things happen. Ice is not perfectly flat \u2014 it\u2019s made of little crystals. \u201cEach of those crystals has potential to lens light,\u201d Hobley said, channeling or refracting light down into ice. Over millions of years, energized by the sun\u2019s radiation, Europa\u2019s ice transforms into gas.Sunlight alone would not be enough to form huge ice blades. Europa is tidally locked with Jupiter, which means its orbit around Jupiter matches its own rotation. Put another way, the same face of Europa always faces Jupiter. That also means that the angle of the sun is constant in Europa\u2019s sky, Hobley said. The moon has no seasons.\u201cIt\u2019s just day-night, day-night, day-night,\u201d Hobley said, year after Jovian year.Story continues below advertisementHobley and his colleagues considered where on Earth might approximate Europa. They landed on the Andes, the South American mountain range that stretches from Venezuela to Argentina. At the highest peaks, the Andes has ice \u2014 and, in winter, the ice stays too cold to melt. What\u2019s more, near the equator, the sun\u2019s angle is high and constant, just like it is over Europa\u2019s middle.AdvertisementIn the Andes, Hobley and his co-authors knew, an ice formation called penitentes takes shape. Penitentes are named after an Easter religious festival, practiced by some Spanish-speaking Christians, in which monks wear pointed white hats (the \u201cpenitent,\u201d hence, penitentes). Charles Darwin, who made some of the first scientific observations of penitentes in the 1830s, imagined the wind created the ice spikes. But in 2001, University of Colorado at Boulder physicist Meredith Betterton grew penitentes in a lab via the solid-to-gas process.At mountain tops, the sun\u2019s light carves pits deep in the ice, leaving behind blades twice as tall as they are wide. Penitentes do not form at high latitudes because the sun is too low in the sky in winter; the ice crystals do not funnel the light so sharply downward.The bottom of these triangular cavities get hotter, and the sides stay cool. On Europa, they would grow \u201ccrazy, crazy slow,\u201d Hobley said, at about a foot every million years. But because Europa\u2019s surface has been largely unchanged for 50 million years, \u201cthey\u2019ve got a nice long time to do it.\u201d Europa\u2019s penitentes, the authors calculated, could be almost 50 feet long.\u201cThey have a pretty solid case,\u201d said astronomer William Grundy, an expert on icy solar system objects at Arizona\u2019s Lowell Observatory who was not involved with this work. To be clear, though, this work is a prediction. The conditions are right, but a future observation is required to confirm the penitentes. Grundy noted that the spatial resolution of Europa images, taken by uncrewed spacecraft like Galileo, are just slightly too fuzzy to make out these features. \u201cWho knows what dragons lurk down there?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSupporting this argument are radar and temperature imagery. Europa\u2019s midsection absorbs radar, in the way that resembles the \u201ceggcup-shaped sound baffles on recording walls,\u201d Hobley said. Which happens to be the shape of penitentes.What\u2019s more, blades of methane ice exist on Pluto. It\u2019s also possible, Grundy speculated, that the moons of Uranus \u2014 much farther from the sun than Europa \u2014 could have bladed terrain of solid carbon dioxide.As for a landing hazard, the danger is not that a spike will impale a robot. But a probe could very well be lost in one of the pits between the blades, Hobley warned. Space probes that have attempted landings on asteroids and comets have flipped like flailing beetles or gotten wedged in cracks.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not an insurmountable problem, just one of engineering and astronomy. Future landers could aim at a younger region of Europa\u2019s surface, where the ice has not had time to form such deep pits. Higher latitudes, too, should not be covered so thickly in ice blades. There are two planned orbiter missions to examine Europa: NASA is preparing to launch the Europa Clipper at some point in the 2020s; the European Space Agency\u2019s Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE), is planned to launch in 2022. Their sensors could confirm or reject the penitente prediction.AdvertisementEven if Europa\u2019s ice blades are too threatening for a lander, a spacecraft might not have to land on Europa to test the hidden ocean. Strong evidence indicates the moon spits plumes of water into space, which an orbiter could swoop up.Read more:Astronomers discover 12 more moons of Jupiter, including an oddityJupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites showThe monster storm on Jupiter is 200 miles deep One of our solar system\u2019s most interesting moons might be studded with a kind of ice that forms only in rare locations on Earth. Jagged ice spikes cover Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa, study suggests",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Voyager 2 spacecraft has escaped the sun\u2019s bubble (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3399",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/11/voyager-spacecraft-has-escaped-suns-bubble/",
        "text": "Ever since it left Earth 41 years ago, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has sailed across the solar system on a stream of energetic particles from the sun.But on Nov. 5, the whistling of the solar wind abruptly stopped. The current of charged particles dissipated. There was a period of turbulence, and then the probe found a strange new quality to the environment around it, the way the air smells of salt when you get close to the sea. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightVoyager had crossed the heliopause, where the river of solar particles meets the vast ocean of interstellar space. It is now beyond the bubble of our sun\u2019s influence, NASA announced Monday.For the second time, a human-made object has ventured into the void between the stars.Story continues below advertisementIts companion probe, Voyager 1, crossed that threshold in 2012. But Voyager 2 has a scientific leg up on its predecessor: It still possesses a working plasma instrument. This allows the spacecraft to sense a different kind of charged particle, called galactic cosmic rays.AdvertisementAfter decades of looking at the galaxy \u201cthrough the clouded lens of our heliosphere,\u201d NASA physicist Georgia de Nolfo said, \u201cwe\u2019re now able to take a step outside with Voyager and contemplate the vistas of our local galactic neighborhood.\u201dThe spacecraft is about 11 billion miles from Earth \u2014 so far it takes signals traveling at the speed of light 16.5 hours to reach mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. That\u2019s more than twice as distant as Pluto and 37 times farther than the journey from Earth to Mars.Story continues below advertisementNeither of the Voyager probes has technically left the solar system, said Ed Stone, who has been the project scientist for the mission since 1972. In about 300 years, they will reach the edge of the Oort cloud \u2014 a halo of icy bodies loosely bound by the sun\u2019s gravity that is thought to be the source of comets. It will take another 40,000 years for the spacecraft to exit that cloud and come under the influence of another star.AdvertisementFor all their long years of travel, both spacecraft are essentially still on the solar system\u2019s doormat.But even from this vantage point, the probes are gaining new insights about how our corner of the cosmos works. Each left the heliosphere at a different location, and encountered slightly different conditions when they reached interstellar space. This suggests that there are complex interactions between the solar wind and interstellar space that affect the shape of the sun\u2019s bubble, said NASA heliophysicist Nicola Fox.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a whole new view from the other side of that boundary,\u201d she said.Out there, highly energetic particles blow through space\u2019s dark expanse like a strange cosmic breeze. These galactic cosmic rays have tremendous energy and travel close to the speed of light; if they ever reached astronauts or spacecraft, the consequences could be severe. Fortunately, most of these particles are deflected from our solar system by the sun\u2019s magnetic field.AdvertisementBut scientists have to get beyond the sun\u2019s protective bubble if they want to study these rays. So that\u2019s what Voyager did.With its plasma instrument and other tools, Voyager 2 will use these cosmic rays as \u201cgalactic messengers,\u201d de Nolfo said, revealing clues about the stellar explosions that formed them.Story continues below advertisementBut both spacecraft are living on borrowed time. \u201cI like to say that they\u2019re healthy, if you consider them as senior citizens,\u201d said Suzanne Dodd, longtime project manager for the mission. Though the probes are functional, they are running out of the plutonium that powers them.Voyager 2 is especially vulnerable, Dodd said, because it\u2019s so cold \u2014 a few degrees above the freezing point of the hydrazine that powers its thrusters. Soon, researchers must make trade-offs about how to use the reserves that remain: Will they keep the spacecraft warm or continue to do science?Advertisement\u201cWe have difficult decisions ahead,\u201d she said.Scientists expect to receive their last signal from both Voyagers in the next five to 10 years. But their mission will not end then. Each spacecraft carries a copy of the Golden Record, a gold plated copper disk inscribed with sounds and images meant to communicate what life is like on Earth.As they drift through space, to the next star and beyond, they will always bear this message \u2014 a postcard, to whomever finds them, from the world their creators call home. To the heliopause and beyond! The Voyager 2 spacecraft has escaped the sun\u2019s bubble",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists discover new evidence of plumes on Europa, a target in the search for life (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3400",
        "date": "2018-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/14/scientists-discover-new-evidence-for-plumes-on-europa-a-target-in-the-search-for-life/",
        "text": "Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought\u00a0to harbor a warm, saltwater ocean sloshing beneath a thick, icy crust, has long been considered one of the best spots in the solar system to look for alien beings.Now, citing data collected by NASA's Galileo probe more than two decades ago, scientists\u00a0report that giant jets of water are spouting more than 100 miles off\u00a0that moon's surface. The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy,\u00a0adds to the mounting evidence that Europa is\u00a0spewing its contents into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf\u00a0the existence of the plumes is confirmed and they\u00a0are linked to Europa's ocean, they\u00a0could provide a tantalizingly straightforward way to sample\u00a0the moon in\u00a0search of signs of life. Rather than\u00a0land on the surface and drill as much as 15 miles through ice\u00a0\u2014 a feat that has never been achieved even on Earth\u00a0\u2014 a spacecraft could simply fly through the spray and test its contents.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResearchers are already working on missions to do just that. NASA's Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) are slated to launch in the early to mid-2020s, both armed with high-resolution cameras and a suite of other sensitive instruments.\u201cThe idea that Europa might possess plumes seems to be becoming more and more real, and that's very good news for future exploration,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0Xianzhe Jia, a space physicist at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the new paper on the phenomenon.The results of the Clipper and JUICE missions, he continued, \u201ccould have huge\u00a0implications\u201d\u00a0\u2014 nudging us Earthlings closer to understanding whether we are alone.Here's how researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to find water plumes on Jupiter's icy moon Europa. (NASA Goddard)Scientists have suspected since 2012 that Europa might harbor plumes, after the\u00a0Hubble Space Telescope observed\u00a0water vapor spouting above the moon's frigid south pole. Another set of observations, taken in 2014 and 2016, found a recurring jet\u00a0shooting from an unusually warm\u00a0\u201chot spot\u201d near the moon's equator.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe tallest of the plumes was so powerful that it extended\u00a0120 miles above the moon's surface; Old Faithful, the famous geyser at Yellowstone, reaches 184 feet.The interpretation of those images has been debated; the images pushed\u00a0the limits of Hubble's sensitivity, and\u00a0sometimes the space telescope was unable to spot the plumes altogether.The ongoing debate called for on-site observations, Jia said. But no spacecraft has gotten close to\u00a0Europa since Galileo, which\u00a0swooped 250 miles above the moon's\u00a0\u201chot spot\u201d in December 1997.That mission had a severe shortcoming: The spacecraft's\u00a0more powerful antenna failed to deploy after launch, limiting the amount of data the spacecraft could send back to Earth.Story continues below advertisementNevertheless, Jia \u2014 who\u00a0was a college student during the flyby \u2014\u00a0thought that if a plume existed, Galileo might have sensed its signatures with its magnetometer and plasma wave instruments.AdvertisementMargaret Kivelson,\u00a0a space physicist at\u00a0the University of California at Los Angeles who was principal investigator for Galileo's magnetometer, confirmed his hunch.\u201cOn one particular pass, the spacecraft came very, very close to the surface of Europa, and\u00a0it was on that pass that we saw signatures that we never really understood,\u201d she said at a news conference Monday.Galileo found Europa's magnetic field intensified and shifted orientation just as the spacecraft made its closest approach to the moon. Then, data from the plasma wave instrument showed unusual emissions that could be associated with a high density of charged particles. The results didn't make sense at the time \u2014 but they are\u00a0just what\u00a0scientists would expect to find near a speeding jet of salty water.Story continues below advertisementBut the environment around the moon is complex \u2014 warped by Jupiter's strong magnetic fields and by Europa's atmosphere. So Jia, Kivelson and their colleagues ran the data through a sophisticated modeling program that compared the observations with what scientists might expect to see from a plume of the dimensions reported by Hubble. The results were in \u201csatisfying agreement,\u201d Jia said.AdvertisementKivelson, who hadn't considered such a plume when she collected the data two decades ago, marveled at the new discovery. \u201cIt's amazing how hard it is to anticipate something that just hasn't happened before,\u201d she said.The source of the plume is still unclear. The prevailing theory is the water comes directly from Europa's subsurface ocean and is being driven upward by hydrothermal activity much like that which powers geysers on Earth.Story continues below advertisementBut the water\u00a0could originate elsewhere, Jia cautioned.\u00a0Some have suggested that there might be a subsurface lake hiding between layers of Europa's thick ice sheets.The behavior of the plumes is also unpredictable. Because they were initially seen\u00a0when\u00a0Europa was farthest from Jupiter, researchers thought they might be driven by tidal stress\u00a0\u2014 the friction generated by Jupiter's gravitational pull\u00a0that keeps Europa's interior liquid. But follow-up observations from Hubble\u00a0were unable to confirm that idea.AdvertisementJia hopes this paper will inspire fellow researchers to keep looking at Europa's plumes. Perhaps someone else will find further clues by mining\u00a0years-old data. Or, maybe when the powerful James Webb Space Telescope finally launches (it has\u00a0been pushed back several times), it will get a clearer picture of what is happening on the alien moon.Story continues below advertisementThe Clipper mission \u2014 now in the preliminary design phase \u2014 is projected to arrive\u00a0at Jupiter sometime around 2030. There it will perform 45 flybys past Europa, getting as close as 16 miles above the moon's surface.If it finds a plume, Clipper's instruments will be able measure its chemical composition, said Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and one of the primary researchers involved with the mission. The spacecraft will seek molecules associated\u00a0with biological activity.Advertisement\u201cBut it's a long stretch to go from being able to measure the specific composition to being able to say, 'There\u2019s life,' \u201d she cautioned at the news conference Monday.\u00a0Read more:NASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn's icy moon EnceladusDeep-sea life on Earth gives us a clue to what aliens would be likeLooking for aliens on ocean worlds: 'You'd be in denial to believe there isn't life out there' The result was hiding in 21-year-old data taken by the Galileo probe as it swooped past Jupiter's moon.  Scientists discover new evidence of plumes on Europa, a target in the search for life",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists discover new evidence of plumes on Europa, a target in the search for life (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3401",
        "date": "2018-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/14/scientists-discover-new-evidence-for-plumes-on-europa-a-target-in-the-search-for-life/",
        "text": "Europa, a moon of Jupiter thought\u00a0to harbor a warm, saltwater ocean sloshing beneath a thick, icy crust, has long been considered one of the best spots in the solar system to look for alien beings.Now, citing data collected by NASA's Galileo probe more than two decades ago, scientists\u00a0report that giant jets of water are spouting more than 100 miles off\u00a0that moon's surface. The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy,\u00a0adds to the mounting evidence that Europa is\u00a0spewing its contents into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf\u00a0the existence of the plumes is confirmed and they\u00a0are linked to Europa's ocean, they\u00a0could provide a tantalizingly straightforward way to sample\u00a0the moon in\u00a0search of signs of life. Rather than\u00a0land on the surface and drill as much as 15 miles through ice\u00a0\u2014 a feat that has never been achieved even on Earth\u00a0\u2014 a spacecraft could simply fly through the spray and test its contents.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementResearchers are already working on missions to do just that. NASA's Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) are slated to launch in the early to mid-2020s, both armed with high-resolution cameras and a suite of other sensitive instruments.\u201cThe idea that Europa might possess plumes seems to be becoming more and more real, and that's very good news for future exploration,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0Xianzhe Jia, a space physicist at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the new paper on the phenomenon.The results of the Clipper and JUICE missions, he continued, \u201ccould have huge\u00a0implications\u201d\u00a0\u2014 nudging us Earthlings closer to understanding whether we are alone.Here's how researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to find water plumes on Jupiter's icy moon Europa. (NASA Goddard)Scientists have suspected since 2012 that Europa might harbor plumes, after the\u00a0Hubble Space Telescope observed\u00a0water vapor spouting above the moon's frigid south pole. Another set of observations, taken in 2014 and 2016, found a recurring jet\u00a0shooting from an unusually warm\u00a0\u201chot spot\u201d near the moon's equator.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe tallest of the plumes was so powerful that it extended\u00a0120 miles above the moon's surface; Old Faithful, the famous geyser at Yellowstone, reaches 184 feet.The interpretation of those images has been debated; the images pushed\u00a0the limits of Hubble's sensitivity, and\u00a0sometimes the space telescope was unable to spot the plumes altogether.The ongoing debate called for on-site observations, Jia said. But no spacecraft has gotten close to\u00a0Europa since Galileo, which\u00a0swooped 250 miles above the moon's\u00a0\u201chot spot\u201d in December 1997.That mission had a severe shortcoming: The spacecraft's\u00a0more powerful antenna failed to deploy after launch, limiting the amount of data the spacecraft could send back to Earth.Story continues below advertisementNevertheless, Jia \u2014 who\u00a0was a college student during the flyby \u2014\u00a0thought that if a plume existed, Galileo might have sensed its signatures with its magnetometer and plasma wave instruments.AdvertisementMargaret Kivelson,\u00a0a space physicist at\u00a0the University of California at Los Angeles who was principal investigator for Galileo's magnetometer, confirmed his hunch.\u201cOn one particular pass, the spacecraft came very, very close to the surface of Europa, and\u00a0it was on that pass that we saw signatures that we never really understood,\u201d she said at a news conference Monday.Galileo found Europa's magnetic field intensified and shifted orientation just as the spacecraft made its closest approach to the moon. Then, data from the plasma wave instrument showed unusual emissions that could be associated with a high density of charged particles. The results didn't make sense at the time \u2014 but they are\u00a0just what\u00a0scientists would expect to find near a speeding jet of salty water.Story continues below advertisementBut the environment around the moon is complex \u2014 warped by Jupiter's strong magnetic fields and by Europa's atmosphere. So Jia, Kivelson and their colleagues ran the data through a sophisticated modeling program that compared the observations with what scientists might expect to see from a plume of the dimensions reported by Hubble. The results were in \u201csatisfying agreement,\u201d Jia said.AdvertisementKivelson, who hadn't considered such a plume when she collected the data two decades ago, marveled at the new discovery. \u201cIt's amazing how hard it is to anticipate something that just hasn't happened before,\u201d she said.The source of the plume is still unclear. The prevailing theory is the water comes directly from Europa's subsurface ocean and is being driven upward by hydrothermal activity much like that which powers geysers on Earth.Story continues below advertisementBut the water\u00a0could originate elsewhere, Jia cautioned.\u00a0Some have suggested that there might be a subsurface lake hiding between layers of Europa's thick ice sheets.The behavior of the plumes is also unpredictable. Because they were initially seen\u00a0when\u00a0Europa was farthest from Jupiter, researchers thought they might be driven by tidal stress\u00a0\u2014 the friction generated by Jupiter's gravitational pull\u00a0that keeps Europa's interior liquid. But follow-up observations from Hubble\u00a0were unable to confirm that idea.AdvertisementJia hopes this paper will inspire fellow researchers to keep looking at Europa's plumes. Perhaps someone else will find further clues by mining\u00a0years-old data. Or, maybe when the powerful James Webb Space Telescope finally launches (it has\u00a0been pushed back several times), it will get a clearer picture of what is happening on the alien moon.Story continues below advertisementThe Clipper mission \u2014 now in the preliminary design phase \u2014 is projected to arrive\u00a0at Jupiter sometime around 2030. There it will perform 45 flybys past Europa, getting as close as 16 miles above the moon's surface.If it finds a plume, Clipper's instruments will be able measure its chemical composition, said Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and one of the primary researchers involved with the mission. The spacecraft will seek molecules associated\u00a0with biological activity.Advertisement\u201cBut it's a long stretch to go from being able to measure the specific composition to being able to say, 'There\u2019s life,' \u201d she cautioned at the news conference Monday.\u00a0Read more:NASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn's icy moon EnceladusDeep-sea life on Earth gives us a clue to what aliens would be likeLooking for aliens on ocean worlds: 'You'd be in denial to believe there isn't life out there' The result was hiding in 21-year-old data taken by the Galileo probe as it swooped past Jupiter's moon.  Scientists discover new evidence of plumes on Europa, a target in the search for life",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe Is Named for Him. 60 Years Ago, No One Believed His Ideas About the Sun. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3402",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/science/eugene-parker-solar-wind-nasa-probe.html",
        "text": "Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft is the first named for a living person. Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft is the first named for a living person. CHICAGO \u2014 It was 1958. Sputnik had launched only a year earlier, the first human-made object to circle the planet. But the beach ball-size spacecraft had no instruments to measure anything in space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe Is Named for Him. 60 Years Ago, No One Believed His Ideas About the Sun. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3403",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/science/eugene-parker-solar-wind-nasa-probe.html",
        "text": "Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft is the first named for a living person. Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft is the first named for a living person. CHICAGO \u2014 It was 1958. Sputnik had launched only a year earlier, the first human-made object to circle the planet. But the beach ball-size spacecraft had no instruments to measure anything in space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe Is Named for Him. 60 Years Ago, No One Believed His Ideas About the Sun. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3404",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/science/eugene-parker-solar-wind-nasa-probe.html",
        "text": "Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft is the first named for a living person. Eugene N. Parker predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The NASA spacecraft is the first named for a living person. CHICAGO \u2014 It was 1958. Sputnik had launched only a year earlier, the first human-made object to circle the planet. But the beach ball-size spacecraft had no instruments to measure anything in space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Comet 67P\u2019s Face Changed During Its Trip Around the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3405",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/science/rosetta-comet-67p-landslides-cliff-collapse.html",
        "text": "During the two years that the Rosetta spacecraft stalked the comet, it observed cliffs that collapsed, boulders that moved and eruptions of dust and gas. During the two years that the Rosetta spacecraft stalked the comet, it observed cliffs that collapsed, boulders that moved and eruptions of dust and gas. Cliffs collapsed, boulders moved, cracks opened up, and jets of dust and gas erupted.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Comet 67P\u2019s Face Changed During Its Trip Around the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3406",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/science/rosetta-comet-67p-landslides-cliff-collapse.html",
        "text": "During the two years that the Rosetta spacecraft stalked the comet, it observed cliffs that collapsed, boulders that moved and eruptions of dust and gas. During the two years that the Rosetta spacecraft stalked the comet, it observed cliffs that collapsed, boulders that moved and eruptions of dust and gas. Cliffs collapsed, boulders moved, cracks opened up, and jets of dust and gas erupted.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Comet 67P\u2019s Face Changed During Its Trip Around the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3407",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/science/rosetta-comet-67p-landslides-cliff-collapse.html",
        "text": "During the two years that the Rosetta spacecraft stalked the comet, it observed cliffs that collapsed, boulders that moved and eruptions of dust and gas. During the two years that the Rosetta spacecraft stalked the comet, it observed cliffs that collapsed, boulders that moved and eruptions of dust and gas. Cliffs collapsed, boulders moved, cracks opened up, and jets of dust and gas erupted.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is? (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3408",
        "date": "2017-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/06/dear-science-how-do-we-know-how-old-the-earth-is/",
        "text": "Dear Science,How do we know how old the\u00a0Earth is?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere's what\u00a0science has to say:For millennia, humans assumed that the Earth was about as old as we were.\u00a0In Roman times, theorists guessed that Earth started around the time of the Trojan war \u2014 the earliest event in their\u00a0historical record. The \"begats\" in the Bible were another source for estimates: In the 17th century, Ireland's Archbishop James Ussher reconstructed the genealogy of biblical figures and declared that Earth was created at 6 p.m. on Oct. 26, 4004 B.C. Those dating\u00a0methodologies\u00a0didn't hold up to modern science, as it eventually became clear that the birth of our planet far predates the origin of humankind. Scientists now know the Earth is actually 4.54 billion years old, an age built on many lines of evidence from the\u00a0geologic record.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe modern effort to understand the age of the planet started with Nicholas Steno, a Danish anatomist and geologist who was among the first to realize that fossils are the remains of living creatures.\u00a0He proposed\u00a0that geologists might learn about Earth's history\u00a0by sifting through layers of rock, which were laid down over the course of millennia and provide a backward chronology of our planet.Dear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?A century later, William Smith realized that rock layers at distant locations came from the same time period. He created a catalogue of strata (which all got colorful names such as Lias Blue, and Ditto White) and argued that each one represented a distinct\u00a0time in Earth's history \u2014 a principle known as fossil succession.The accumulating evidence pointed to an\u00a0extraordinary\u00a0new idea:\u00a0that the history of Earth goes back much, much further than any human memory. In 1788, Scottish geologist James Hutton published his \u201cTheory of Earth,\u201d which introduced the world to the idea of \u201cdeep time.\u201d The implications of the treatise were revolutionary: Not only was the Earth not young, but it was not static, Hutton said.\u00a0The same geologic forces that operate today, like deposition, erosion and uplift, have been shaping the Earth for ages\u00a0with \u201cno vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScience provided a new way of thinking about Earth's history; it made the distant past knowable. Rather than\u00a0assume\u00a0the planet was the product of bygone catastrophes, such as a massive global flood, scientists could\u00a0explain the ancient rock record with phenomena that exist today.This spawned several earnest \u2014 if not entirely successful \u2014 attempts to determine the age of the Earth based on ongoing natural\u00a0processes. One calculated how long it would take rivers to deliver enough dissolved minerals\u00a0to the ocean to give it its current saltiness (answer:\u00a090 million to 100 million years).\u00a0Others looked at the average rate of sedimentation and concluded it would take anywhere from 3 million to 1.6 billion years for the rock record to reach its current thickness.Dear Science: Why do we love our pets?But the big breakthrough came with the invention of radiometric dating. Shortly after radioactivity was discovered in 1896, scientists realized they\u00a0could\u00a0figure out how old a rock was by measuring how much of the uranium in it had decayed into lead.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere's how that works:\u00a0The nuclei of radioactive elements\u00a0decay \u2014 or spontaneously break down \u2014 at predictable rates. For example, half of a given batch of uranium will decay into lead every 710 million to 4.47 billion years, depending on the isotope used (this number is termed the element's \u201chalf-life\"). That uranium, which was created during a supernova that occurred long before our solar system existed, lingers in trace amounts within the Earth. When a rock is formed in the bowels of the planet, uranium atoms are trapped within it. These atoms will decay as the rock ages, and by measuring the ratio of radioactive isotopes within the rock, scientists can figure out how long it has been around.In 1913, geologist Arthur Holmes published \u201cthe Age of the Earth,\u201d the first major effort to date the planet using radiometric dating. \u201cIt is perhaps a little indelicate to ask of our Mother Earth her age,\u201d he wrote in his introduction \u2014 then proceeded to reveal that she was roughly\u00a01.6 billion years old.When Holmes presented the findings at a meeting of the Geological Society of London two years later, he was \u201cviolently attacked\u201d by critics. \u201cI found myself an exasperated minority of one,\u201d he would later recall. But time would prove him right. By the 1940s, the geology community had mostly accepted his revised estimate of\u00a0about 4.5 billion years \u2014 a number not far from the one we use today.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementModern geologists date minerals called zircons, tiny crystals that form in\u00a0volcanic eruptions and that are hardy enough to survive for billions of years. Zircons consist of silica, oxygen and the element zirconium, but are occasionally contaminated with uranium as they form. Because of the structure of the crystals, zircons never include lead when they are forged inside the Earth. This makes them, as this University of California at Berkeley webpage put it, \u201cnearly perfect clocks.\u201d Any lead that scientists find in the crystals must come from radioactive decay.To do this, scientists use a technique called mass spectrometry. Put simply, they excite atoms from zircons or other materials, then expose the charged particles to a magnetic field. This allows researchers to sort the atoms by mass and charge, so they can detect the signatures of particular isotopes.But even the oldest zircons are not as old as the Earth itself. Everything\u00a0on our world eventually is eroded or subsumed back into the crust. To get a truly precise date for the origin of our planet, scientists have to look beyond it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeteorites offer exactly what they need. The asteroids that meteorites come from are some of the most primitive objects in the solar system. They were formed at the same time as our planet and everything else in our solar system, but they have not been changed by the tectonic processes that shape Earth, so they're like time capsules.Our first really solid estimate of the planet's age was obtained from radiometric analysis of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, a giant iron rock that blazed through Earth's atmosphere from space 50,000 years ago and was found by American scientists in 1891. (Native Americans had known about and utilized the iron fragments since prehistoric times.) Researchers used uranium-lead techniques to date the meteorite back 4.54 billion years, give or take about 70 million \u2014 the best age for our planet so far, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.But scientists will keep trying to shave down that degree of uncertainty in their estimate by analyzing every ancient Earth rock, meteorite and solar system sample they can get their hands on. As the U.S. Geological Survey explains:\u00a0\u201cThe best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system.\u201dHave a question for Dear Science? Ask it here.Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly described the mass spectrometry technique. Mass spectrometry is used to determine the composition of a sample by determining the mass and charge of its component parts. How volcanoes, uranium, and meteorites let us know that our planet is 4.54 billion years old Dear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is?",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is? (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3409",
        "date": "2017-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/06/dear-science-how-do-we-know-how-old-the-earth-is/",
        "text": "Dear Science,How do we know how old the\u00a0Earth is?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere's what\u00a0science has to say:For millennia, humans assumed that the Earth was about as old as we were.\u00a0In Roman times, theorists guessed that Earth started around the time of the Trojan war \u2014 the earliest event in their\u00a0historical record. The \"begats\" in the Bible were another source for estimates: In the 17th century, Ireland's Archbishop James Ussher reconstructed the genealogy of biblical figures and declared that Earth was created at 6 p.m. on Oct. 26, 4004 B.C. Those dating\u00a0methodologies\u00a0didn't hold up to modern science, as it eventually became clear that the birth of our planet far predates the origin of humankind. Scientists now know the Earth is actually 4.54 billion years old, an age built on many lines of evidence from the\u00a0geologic record.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe modern effort to understand the age of the planet started with Nicholas Steno, a Danish anatomist and geologist who was among the first to realize that fossils are the remains of living creatures.\u00a0He proposed\u00a0that geologists might learn about Earth's history\u00a0by sifting through layers of rock, which were laid down over the course of millennia and provide a backward chronology of our planet.Dear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?A century later, William Smith realized that rock layers at distant locations came from the same time period. He created a catalogue of strata (which all got colorful names such as Lias Blue, and Ditto White) and argued that each one represented a distinct\u00a0time in Earth's history \u2014 a principle known as fossil succession.The accumulating evidence pointed to an\u00a0extraordinary\u00a0new idea:\u00a0that the history of Earth goes back much, much further than any human memory. In 1788, Scottish geologist James Hutton published his \u201cTheory of Earth,\u201d which introduced the world to the idea of \u201cdeep time.\u201d The implications of the treatise were revolutionary: Not only was the Earth not young, but it was not static, Hutton said.\u00a0The same geologic forces that operate today, like deposition, erosion and uplift, have been shaping the Earth for ages\u00a0with \u201cno vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScience provided a new way of thinking about Earth's history; it made the distant past knowable. Rather than\u00a0assume\u00a0the planet was the product of bygone catastrophes, such as a massive global flood, scientists could\u00a0explain the ancient rock record with phenomena that exist today.This spawned several earnest \u2014 if not entirely successful \u2014 attempts to determine the age of the Earth based on ongoing natural\u00a0processes. One calculated how long it would take rivers to deliver enough dissolved minerals\u00a0to the ocean to give it its current saltiness (answer:\u00a090 million to 100 million years).\u00a0Others looked at the average rate of sedimentation and concluded it would take anywhere from 3 million to 1.6 billion years for the rock record to reach its current thickness.Dear Science: Why do we love our pets?But the big breakthrough came with the invention of radiometric dating. Shortly after radioactivity was discovered in 1896, scientists realized they\u00a0could\u00a0figure out how old a rock was by measuring how much of the uranium in it had decayed into lead.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere's how that works:\u00a0The nuclei of radioactive elements\u00a0decay \u2014 or spontaneously break down \u2014 at predictable rates. For example, half of a given batch of uranium will decay into lead every 710 million to 4.47 billion years, depending on the isotope used (this number is termed the element's \u201chalf-life\"). That uranium, which was created during a supernova that occurred long before our solar system existed, lingers in trace amounts within the Earth. When a rock is formed in the bowels of the planet, uranium atoms are trapped within it. These atoms will decay as the rock ages, and by measuring the ratio of radioactive isotopes within the rock, scientists can figure out how long it has been around.In 1913, geologist Arthur Holmes published \u201cthe Age of the Earth,\u201d the first major effort to date the planet using radiometric dating. \u201cIt is perhaps a little indelicate to ask of our Mother Earth her age,\u201d he wrote in his introduction \u2014 then proceeded to reveal that she was roughly\u00a01.6 billion years old.When Holmes presented the findings at a meeting of the Geological Society of London two years later, he was \u201cviolently attacked\u201d by critics. \u201cI found myself an exasperated minority of one,\u201d he would later recall. But time would prove him right. By the 1940s, the geology community had mostly accepted his revised estimate of\u00a0about 4.5 billion years \u2014 a number not far from the one we use today.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementModern geologists date minerals called zircons, tiny crystals that form in\u00a0volcanic eruptions and that are hardy enough to survive for billions of years. Zircons consist of silica, oxygen and the element zirconium, but are occasionally contaminated with uranium as they form. Because of the structure of the crystals, zircons never include lead when they are forged inside the Earth. This makes them, as this University of California at Berkeley webpage put it, \u201cnearly perfect clocks.\u201d Any lead that scientists find in the crystals must come from radioactive decay.To do this, scientists use a technique called mass spectrometry. Put simply, they excite atoms from zircons or other materials, then expose the charged particles to a magnetic field. This allows researchers to sort the atoms by mass and charge, so they can detect the signatures of particular isotopes.But even the oldest zircons are not as old as the Earth itself. Everything\u00a0on our world eventually is eroded or subsumed back into the crust. To get a truly precise date for the origin of our planet, scientists have to look beyond it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeteorites offer exactly what they need. The asteroids that meteorites come from are some of the most primitive objects in the solar system. They were formed at the same time as our planet and everything else in our solar system, but they have not been changed by the tectonic processes that shape Earth, so they're like time capsules.Our first really solid estimate of the planet's age was obtained from radiometric analysis of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, a giant iron rock that blazed through Earth's atmosphere from space 50,000 years ago and was found by American scientists in 1891. (Native Americans had known about and utilized the iron fragments since prehistoric times.) Researchers used uranium-lead techniques to date the meteorite back 4.54 billion years, give or take about 70 million \u2014 the best age for our planet so far, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.But scientists will keep trying to shave down that degree of uncertainty in their estimate by analyzing every ancient Earth rock, meteorite and solar system sample they can get their hands on. As the U.S. Geological Survey explains:\u00a0\u201cThe best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system.\u201dHave a question for Dear Science? Ask it here.Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly described the mass spectrometry technique. Mass spectrometry is used to determine the composition of a sample by determining the mass and charge of its component parts. How volcanoes, uranium, and meteorites let us know that our planet is 4.54 billion years old Dear Science: How do we know how old the Earth is?",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die? (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3410",
        "date": "2017-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/21/dear-science-where-do-old-spacecraft-go-when-they-die/",
        "text": "Dear Science,\u00a0What happens to spacecraft when\u00a0they\u00a0break or their batteries run out? Is space just full of old junk that scientists aren't using anymore?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere's what science has to say:There is no \u201cnice farm in the country\u201d for old spacecraft, sadly. Instead, space agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end: 1. Leave 'em out there.2. Send them hurtling into the atmosphere of the nearest planet, where they will die a fiery, spectacular death.The first option is a popular one. Earth's orbit is clogged with more than 500,000 piece of space junk the size of a marble or larger, according to NASA. These bits of trash travel at speeds up to 17,500 miles per hour and include abandoned launch vehicle stages, space station trash, stuff that astronauts lost (gloves, tool bags, a spatula), as well as abandoned satellites and spacecraft. Most space debris eventually falls out of orbit and burns up as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere, but plenty more is still out there. Vanguard I, a solar-powered U.S. satellite, has been hurtling around our planet since it was launched in 1958.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll this orbiting trash poses a threat to the spacecraft that are still operational. In 1999, a French satellite was damaged after being struck by debris from a rocket that had exploded 10 years earlier. In the\u00a0spring, a window on the International Space Station was chipped by a fleck of paint \u2014 really, just a fleck.\u201cThe greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris,\u201d Nicholas Johnson, then NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris, said in 2013.This star pulses when its planet is close. Happy Valentine's Day!For that reason, space agencies have been collaborating to find better ways of dealing with defunct spacecraft. One option is to send them up to an orbit so high above the Earth that they are out of the way of most active spacecraft.\u00a0This requires that aging satellites save a bit of juice at the end of their lives for a burn that will boost them into their high-altitude final resting place. Nearly 200 miles above crowded low Earth orbit, they can spin through space for eternity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther spacecraft are programmed to slow down at the end of their mission. Within 25 years, they will start falling toward Earth, burning up from the heat generated by friction as they hit the atmosphere.If engineers can't be certain that the spacecraft will burn up before they reach the ground, they are required to program the machines to fall into what's known as the \u201cspacecraft cemetery.\u201d This open expanse of the South Pacific Ocean is uninhabited, so old cargo craft and resupply ships can be dropped there without fear of harming anyone. The largest resident of this watery graveyard is the 143-ton Russian Mir space station, which deorbited in spectacular fashion in 2001.People are no better at picking up after themselves when we visit other solar system bodies. More than 70 vehicles are scattered across the moon, according to the Atlantic. Mars is the final resting place of over a dozen robots, from the 40-year-old Viking 2 lander to the smashed remains of Schiaparelli, the ill-fated European and Russian lander that crashed on impact with Mars's cold, hard surface in the fall.The spectacular aftermath of a supernova was just seen at its earliest stage everA few lucky spacecraft get to go out in a blaze of glory, by plunging heroically toward the nearest solar system body in pursuit of one last bit of science. This kind of Hollywood ending awaits Cassini, the NASA spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. Now in the final phase of a historic mission that included the first-ever outer solar system landing (Cassini's companion spacecraft, Huygens, landed on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005), Cassini is dancing through orbits that take it through Saturn's many rings. On April 22, it will begin the \u201cGrand Finale,\u201d dives between the planet and the inner edge of the rings. It'll all come to an end on Sept. 15, when Cassini will take one last dive toward Saturn and burn up in a fireball as it plunges into the gas giant's depths.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe \u201cGrand Finale\u201d will give scientists a view of Saturn as they've never seen it before, allowing researchers to map the planet's gravity and magnetic fields, sample the icy rings, and take ultra-close photographs of the rings and clouds. But that's not the\u00a0main reason for Cassini to sacrifice itself. Two of Saturn's moons, Enceladus and Titan, are thought to contain potentially habitable environments.\u201cIn order to avoid the unlikely possibility of Cassini someday colliding with one of these moons and contaminating them with any hardy Earth microbes that might have survived on the spacecraft, NASA has chosen to safely dispose of the spacecraft in the atmosphere of Saturn,\u201d the space agency says on its website.You gotta admit: It's a pretty cool reason for a spacecraft to die.Have a question for Dear Science? Ask it here. There's no 'nice farm in the country' for spacecraft at the ends of their lives. Dear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die? (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3411",
        "date": "2017-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/21/dear-science-where-do-old-spacecraft-go-when-they-die/",
        "text": "Dear Science,\u00a0What happens to spacecraft when\u00a0they\u00a0break or their batteries run out? Is space just full of old junk that scientists aren't using anymore?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere's what science has to say:There is no \u201cnice farm in the country\u201d for old spacecraft, sadly. Instead, space agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end: 1. Leave 'em out there.2. Send them hurtling into the atmosphere of the nearest planet, where they will die a fiery, spectacular death.The first option is a popular one. Earth's orbit is clogged with more than 500,000 piece of space junk the size of a marble or larger, according to NASA. These bits of trash travel at speeds up to 17,500 miles per hour and include abandoned launch vehicle stages, space station trash, stuff that astronauts lost (gloves, tool bags, a spatula), as well as abandoned satellites and spacecraft. Most space debris eventually falls out of orbit and burns up as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere, but plenty more is still out there. Vanguard I, a solar-powered U.S. satellite, has been hurtling around our planet since it was launched in 1958.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll this orbiting trash poses a threat to the spacecraft that are still operational. In 1999, a French satellite was damaged after being struck by debris from a rocket that had exploded 10 years earlier. In the\u00a0spring, a window on the International Space Station was chipped by a fleck of paint \u2014 really, just a fleck.\u201cThe greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris,\u201d Nicholas Johnson, then NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris, said in 2013.This star pulses when its planet is close. Happy Valentine's Day!For that reason, space agencies have been collaborating to find better ways of dealing with defunct spacecraft. One option is to send them up to an orbit so high above the Earth that they are out of the way of most active spacecraft.\u00a0This requires that aging satellites save a bit of juice at the end of their lives for a burn that will boost them into their high-altitude final resting place. Nearly 200 miles above crowded low Earth orbit, they can spin through space for eternity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther spacecraft are programmed to slow down at the end of their mission. Within 25 years, they will start falling toward Earth, burning up from the heat generated by friction as they hit the atmosphere.If engineers can't be certain that the spacecraft will burn up before they reach the ground, they are required to program the machines to fall into what's known as the \u201cspacecraft cemetery.\u201d This open expanse of the South Pacific Ocean is uninhabited, so old cargo craft and resupply ships can be dropped there without fear of harming anyone. The largest resident of this watery graveyard is the 143-ton Russian Mir space station, which deorbited in spectacular fashion in 2001.People are no better at picking up after themselves when we visit other solar system bodies. More than 70 vehicles are scattered across the moon, according to the Atlantic. Mars is the final resting place of over a dozen robots, from the 40-year-old Viking 2 lander to the smashed remains of Schiaparelli, the ill-fated European and Russian lander that crashed on impact with Mars's cold, hard surface in the fall.The spectacular aftermath of a supernova was just seen at its earliest stage everA few lucky spacecraft get to go out in a blaze of glory, by plunging heroically toward the nearest solar system body in pursuit of one last bit of science. This kind of Hollywood ending awaits Cassini, the NASA spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. Now in the final phase of a historic mission that included the first-ever outer solar system landing (Cassini's companion spacecraft, Huygens, landed on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005), Cassini is dancing through orbits that take it through Saturn's many rings. On April 22, it will begin the \u201cGrand Finale,\u201d dives between the planet and the inner edge of the rings. It'll all come to an end on Sept. 15, when Cassini will take one last dive toward Saturn and burn up in a fireball as it plunges into the gas giant's depths.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe \u201cGrand Finale\u201d will give scientists a view of Saturn as they've never seen it before, allowing researchers to map the planet's gravity and magnetic fields, sample the icy rings, and take ultra-close photographs of the rings and clouds. But that's not the\u00a0main reason for Cassini to sacrifice itself. Two of Saturn's moons, Enceladus and Titan, are thought to contain potentially habitable environments.\u201cIn order to avoid the unlikely possibility of Cassini someday colliding with one of these moons and contaminating them with any hardy Earth microbes that might have survived on the spacecraft, NASA has chosen to safely dispose of the spacecraft in the atmosphere of Saturn,\u201d the space agency says on its website.You gotta admit: It's a pretty cool reason for a spacecraft to die.Have a question for Dear Science? Ask it here. There's no 'nice farm in the country' for spacecraft at the ends of their lives. Dear Science: Where do old spacecraft go when they die?",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plumes From Saturn\u2019s Moon Enceladus Hint That It Could Support Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3412",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/science/saturn-cassini-moon-enceladus.html",
        "text": "Data from the Cassini spacecraft suggest that hydrothermal vents could provide ingredients for microbes or other forms of alien life to exist. Data from the Cassini spacecraft suggest that hydrothermal vents could provide ingredients for microbes or other forms of alien life to exist. Could icy moons like Saturn\u2019s Enceladus in the outer solar system be home to microbes or other forms of alien life?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plumes From Saturn\u2019s Moon Enceladus Hint That It Could Support Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3413",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/science/saturn-cassini-moon-enceladus.html",
        "text": "Data from the Cassini spacecraft suggest that hydrothermal vents could provide ingredients for microbes or other forms of alien life to exist. Data from the Cassini spacecraft suggest that hydrothermal vents could provide ingredients for microbes or other forms of alien life to exist. Could icy moons like Saturn\u2019s Enceladus in the outer solar system be home to microbes or other forms of alien life?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plumes From Saturn\u2019s Moon Enceladus Hint That It Could Support Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3414",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/science/saturn-cassini-moon-enceladus.html",
        "text": "Data from the Cassini spacecraft suggest that hydrothermal vents could provide ingredients for microbes or other forms of alien life to exist. Data from the Cassini spacecraft suggest that hydrothermal vents could provide ingredients for microbes or other forms of alien life to exist. Could icy moons like Saturn\u2019s Enceladus in the outer solar system be home to microbes or other forms of alien life?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saturn\u2019s Rings Are Sculpted by a Crew of Mini-Moons (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3415",
        "date": "2019-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/science/saturn-moons-rings.html",
        "text": "Data from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft are helping to explain how Atlas, Daphnis, Epimetheus, Pan and Pandora are distinctive among Saturn\u2019s many satellites. Data from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft are helping to explain how Atlas, Daphnis, Epimetheus, Pan and Pandora are distinctive among Saturn\u2019s many satellites. Saturn has more than 60 moons, but a handful of them do more than spangle the planet\u2019s skies.",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saturn\u2019s Rings Are Sculpted by a Crew of Mini-Moons (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3416",
        "date": "2019-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/science/saturn-moons-rings.html",
        "text": "Data from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft are helping to explain how Atlas, Daphnis, Epimetheus, Pan and Pandora are distinctive among Saturn\u2019s many satellites. Data from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft are helping to explain how Atlas, Daphnis, Epimetheus, Pan and Pandora are distinctive among Saturn\u2019s many satellites. Saturn has more than 60 moons, but a handful of them do more than spangle the planet\u2019s skies.",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "So long, Kepler, and thanks for all the planets (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3417",
        "date": "2018-10-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/31/so-long-kepler-thanks-all-planets/",
        "text": "Charlie Sobeck always believed in other worlds. The NASA engineer grew up watching the Star Trek series, imagining what it would be like to follow the starship Enterprise across the cosmos to explore planets orbiting other suns.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut with the very first transmissions from the Kepler space telescope, NASA\u2019s staggeringly successful exoplanet-seeking mission, Sobeck\u2019s belief was transformed into something even more powerful: knowledge. What had once seemed true only on television, in stargazers' imaginations, and in the hypothesis of theoreticians, was now a scientific fact. We live in a universe teeming with more planets than stars. \u201cIt hit me like a sledgehammer,\u201d recalled Sobeck, project system engineer for the mission at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center. \u201cKepler showed me there really are planets out there of all different kinds. That knowledge is so different from belief.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn nine years in orbit, Kepler has confirmed the existence of 2,681 exoplanets by tracking the shadows the cast as they pass in front of their stars. Scientists are in the midst of checking out an additional 2,899 candidates. No one can say how many worlds remain to be found in the reams of data beamed back to NASA in the spacecraft\u2019s final communication this month.But now the astronomy community must bid good night to the powerhouse planet hunter. NASA announced Tuesday that the spacecraft has run out of the hydrazine fuel that allows it to collect data and deliver it to Earth. Sometime in the next two weeks, Sobeck will send his final command to Kepler, triggering a 12-step sequence that will turn off fault protection, shut down the transmitters and put the spacecraft quietly to sleep.Alone in the dark, it will continue to drift in a wide, Earth-trailing orbit around the sun for untold years to come, until the sun expands into a red giant and consumes the inner solar system, or some other cosmic phenomenon intervenes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was the little spacecraft that could,\u201d said Jessie Dotson, project scientist for the mission. \u201cIt always did everything we asked of it, and sometimes more.\u201dBut Kepler\u2019s success was not always so assured.Earlier exoplanets had generally been discovered by detecting the faint \u201cwobble\u201d of a star that is being tugged on by an orbiting planet\u2019s gravity. But that technique is most likely to find the kinds of planets that are least likely to host life: gas giants with a powerful gravitational pull known as \u201chot Jupiters.\"Bill Borucki, Kepler\u2019s longtime principal investigator, wanted to launch a highly sensitive space telescope that would stare at thousands of stars in the hope of detecting the faint dimming of their light caused by a planet passing in front of them. This technique, called transit photometry, would dramatically boost the pace and sensitivity of the exoplanet search, and it would allow scientists to finally figure out whether the cosmos contained other small, rocky worlds like our own.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough NASA agreed that the search for Earth-sized planets around sun-like stars was an important one, Borucki\u2019s initial proposals for the mission were rejected because there was no proof that the science could be done in the manner proposed. It took five proposals and almost a decade for Kepler to finally launch.Borucki recalled the first image ever beamed back by the telescope: a snapshot of Kepler\u2019s entire field of view, taken in every wavelength of light it could detect.\u201cThousands and thousands of stars,\u201d Borucki said. \u201cIt was just mind-boggling to see.\u201dAmong those stars, Kepler eventually revealed, lurked worlds of every conceivable shape and size. Bodies so huge they were barely distinguishable from small stars. Small, rocky planets that orbited so quickly their surfaces were molten. A world of gas, rock and ice with not one but two suns \u2014 like Luke Skywalker\u2019s Tatooine. Though Kepler set off in search of planets like our own, most of the systems it discovered were unlike anything scientists had dreamed of.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s one thing I love about the Kepler results,\u201d Dotson said. \u201cImagination is not the limit here.\u201dBy the end of the spacecraft\u2019s prime mission, astronomers using Kepler data concluded that our galaxy contains a planet for every sun \u2014 meaning there are as many as 400 billion exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. Several of those planets even had solid surfaces and received the right amount of sunlight to harbor liquid water \u2014 making them candidates in the search for life.But then disaster struck. In May 2013, a second of Kepler\u2019s four reaction wheels failed, and the spacecraft was no longer able to keep itself pointed at a target. Engineers' efforts to restore one of the wheels failed.Story continues below advertisementSo they improvised a solution: orient Kepler with respect to the sun so that the faint pressure of its light provides the stability needed to balance the spacecraft. Under this new configuration, called \u201cK2,\u201d Kepler was able to scan an even wider patch of sky and found evidence for thousands more planets around distant stars.AdvertisementOne of Borucki\u2019s favorite discoveries came during this extended mission. In 2015, astronomers reported spotting five small, rocky planets orbiting a star that was 11.2 billion years old. The system, Kepler-444, was more than twice as old as our own solar system and more ancient than any other collection of planets in the known universe.\u201cIf life had been developing over the billions of years before Earth was formed,\u201d Borucki said, \u201cthere may be some very interesting life-forms.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA knew at the start of this year that Kepler was about to scrape the bottom of its fuel tank. This spring, it launched the space telescope\u2019s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is predicted to find as many as 10,000 exoplanets around the stars closest to our sun.\u201cKepler just kind of cracked open our typical expectations,\u201d said TESS project scientist Padi Boyd. \u201cNow we\u2019re poised to take the next steps to bring Kepler\u2019s exoplanet discoveries closer to home.\u201d The Kepler Space Telescope, NASA's powerhouse planet hunter, is out of fuel at age 9. So long, Kepler, and thanks for all the planets",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "So long, Kepler, and thanks for all the planets (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3418",
        "date": "2018-10-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/31/so-long-kepler-thanks-all-planets/",
        "text": "Charlie Sobeck always believed in other worlds. The NASA engineer grew up watching the Star Trek series, imagining what it would be like to follow the starship Enterprise across the cosmos to explore planets orbiting other suns.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut with the very first transmissions from the Kepler space telescope, NASA\u2019s staggeringly successful exoplanet-seeking mission, Sobeck\u2019s belief was transformed into something even more powerful: knowledge. What had once seemed true only on television, in stargazers' imaginations, and in the hypothesis of theoreticians, was now a scientific fact. We live in a universe teeming with more planets than stars. \u201cIt hit me like a sledgehammer,\u201d recalled Sobeck, project system engineer for the mission at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center. \u201cKepler showed me there really are planets out there of all different kinds. That knowledge is so different from belief.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn nine years in orbit, Kepler has confirmed the existence of 2,681 exoplanets by tracking the shadows the cast as they pass in front of their stars. Scientists are in the midst of checking out an additional 2,899 candidates. No one can say how many worlds remain to be found in the reams of data beamed back to NASA in the spacecraft\u2019s final communication this month.But now the astronomy community must bid good night to the powerhouse planet hunter. NASA announced Tuesday that the spacecraft has run out of the hydrazine fuel that allows it to collect data and deliver it to Earth. Sometime in the next two weeks, Sobeck will send his final command to Kepler, triggering a 12-step sequence that will turn off fault protection, shut down the transmitters and put the spacecraft quietly to sleep.Alone in the dark, it will continue to drift in a wide, Earth-trailing orbit around the sun for untold years to come, until the sun expands into a red giant and consumes the inner solar system, or some other cosmic phenomenon intervenes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was the little spacecraft that could,\u201d said Jessie Dotson, project scientist for the mission. \u201cIt always did everything we asked of it, and sometimes more.\u201dBut Kepler\u2019s success was not always so assured.Earlier exoplanets had generally been discovered by detecting the faint \u201cwobble\u201d of a star that is being tugged on by an orbiting planet\u2019s gravity. But that technique is most likely to find the kinds of planets that are least likely to host life: gas giants with a powerful gravitational pull known as \u201chot Jupiters.\"Bill Borucki, Kepler\u2019s longtime principal investigator, wanted to launch a highly sensitive space telescope that would stare at thousands of stars in the hope of detecting the faint dimming of their light caused by a planet passing in front of them. This technique, called transit photometry, would dramatically boost the pace and sensitivity of the exoplanet search, and it would allow scientists to finally figure out whether the cosmos contained other small, rocky worlds like our own.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough NASA agreed that the search for Earth-sized planets around sun-like stars was an important one, Borucki\u2019s initial proposals for the mission were rejected because there was no proof that the science could be done in the manner proposed. It took five proposals and almost a decade for Kepler to finally launch.Borucki recalled the first image ever beamed back by the telescope: a snapshot of Kepler\u2019s entire field of view, taken in every wavelength of light it could detect.\u201cThousands and thousands of stars,\u201d Borucki said. \u201cIt was just mind-boggling to see.\u201dAmong those stars, Kepler eventually revealed, lurked worlds of every conceivable shape and size. Bodies so huge they were barely distinguishable from small stars. Small, rocky planets that orbited so quickly their surfaces were molten. A world of gas, rock and ice with not one but two suns \u2014 like Luke Skywalker\u2019s Tatooine. Though Kepler set off in search of planets like our own, most of the systems it discovered were unlike anything scientists had dreamed of.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s one thing I love about the Kepler results,\u201d Dotson said. \u201cImagination is not the limit here.\u201dBy the end of the spacecraft\u2019s prime mission, astronomers using Kepler data concluded that our galaxy contains a planet for every sun \u2014 meaning there are as many as 400 billion exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. Several of those planets even had solid surfaces and received the right amount of sunlight to harbor liquid water \u2014 making them candidates in the search for life.But then disaster struck. In May 2013, a second of Kepler\u2019s four reaction wheels failed, and the spacecraft was no longer able to keep itself pointed at a target. Engineers' efforts to restore one of the wheels failed.Story continues below advertisementSo they improvised a solution: orient Kepler with respect to the sun so that the faint pressure of its light provides the stability needed to balance the spacecraft. Under this new configuration, called \u201cK2,\u201d Kepler was able to scan an even wider patch of sky and found evidence for thousands more planets around distant stars.AdvertisementOne of Borucki\u2019s favorite discoveries came during this extended mission. In 2015, astronomers reported spotting five small, rocky planets orbiting a star that was 11.2 billion years old. The system, Kepler-444, was more than twice as old as our own solar system and more ancient than any other collection of planets in the known universe.\u201cIf life had been developing over the billions of years before Earth was formed,\u201d Borucki said, \u201cthere may be some very interesting life-forms.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA knew at the start of this year that Kepler was about to scrape the bottom of its fuel tank. This spring, it launched the space telescope\u2019s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is predicted to find as many as 10,000 exoplanets around the stars closest to our sun.\u201cKepler just kind of cracked open our typical expectations,\u201d said TESS project scientist Padi Boyd. \u201cNow we\u2019re poised to take the next steps to bring Kepler\u2019s exoplanet discoveries closer to home.\u201d The Kepler Space Telescope, NASA's powerhouse planet hunter, is out of fuel at age 9. So long, Kepler, and thanks for all the planets",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "So long, Kepler, and thanks for all the planets (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3419",
        "date": "2018-10-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/31/so-long-kepler-thanks-all-planets/",
        "text": "Charlie Sobeck always believed in other worlds. The NASA engineer grew up watching the Star Trek series, imagining what it would be like to follow the starship Enterprise across the cosmos to explore planets orbiting other suns.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut with the very first transmissions from the Kepler space telescope, NASA\u2019s staggeringly successful exoplanet-seeking mission, Sobeck\u2019s belief was transformed into something even more powerful: knowledge. What had once seemed true only on television, in stargazers' imaginations, and in the hypothesis of theoreticians, was now a scientific fact. We live in a universe teeming with more planets than stars. \u201cIt hit me like a sledgehammer,\u201d recalled Sobeck, project system engineer for the mission at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center. \u201cKepler showed me there really are planets out there of all different kinds. That knowledge is so different from belief.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn nine years in orbit, Kepler has confirmed the existence of 2,681 exoplanets by tracking the shadows the cast as they pass in front of their stars. Scientists are in the midst of checking out an additional 2,899 candidates. No one can say how many worlds remain to be found in the reams of data beamed back to NASA in the spacecraft\u2019s final communication this month.But now the astronomy community must bid good night to the powerhouse planet hunter. NASA announced Tuesday that the spacecraft has run out of the hydrazine fuel that allows it to collect data and deliver it to Earth. Sometime in the next two weeks, Sobeck will send his final command to Kepler, triggering a 12-step sequence that will turn off fault protection, shut down the transmitters and put the spacecraft quietly to sleep.Alone in the dark, it will continue to drift in a wide, Earth-trailing orbit around the sun for untold years to come, until the sun expands into a red giant and consumes the inner solar system, or some other cosmic phenomenon intervenes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was the little spacecraft that could,\u201d said Jessie Dotson, project scientist for the mission. \u201cIt always did everything we asked of it, and sometimes more.\u201dBut Kepler\u2019s success was not always so assured.Earlier exoplanets had generally been discovered by detecting the faint \u201cwobble\u201d of a star that is being tugged on by an orbiting planet\u2019s gravity. But that technique is most likely to find the kinds of planets that are least likely to host life: gas giants with a powerful gravitational pull known as \u201chot Jupiters.\"Bill Borucki, Kepler\u2019s longtime principal investigator, wanted to launch a highly sensitive space telescope that would stare at thousands of stars in the hope of detecting the faint dimming of their light caused by a planet passing in front of them. This technique, called transit photometry, would dramatically boost the pace and sensitivity of the exoplanet search, and it would allow scientists to finally figure out whether the cosmos contained other small, rocky worlds like our own.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough NASA agreed that the search for Earth-sized planets around sun-like stars was an important one, Borucki\u2019s initial proposals for the mission were rejected because there was no proof that the science could be done in the manner proposed. It took five proposals and almost a decade for Kepler to finally launch.Borucki recalled the first image ever beamed back by the telescope: a snapshot of Kepler\u2019s entire field of view, taken in every wavelength of light it could detect.\u201cThousands and thousands of stars,\u201d Borucki said. \u201cIt was just mind-boggling to see.\u201dAmong those stars, Kepler eventually revealed, lurked worlds of every conceivable shape and size. Bodies so huge they were barely distinguishable from small stars. Small, rocky planets that orbited so quickly their surfaces were molten. A world of gas, rock and ice with not one but two suns \u2014 like Luke Skywalker\u2019s Tatooine. Though Kepler set off in search of planets like our own, most of the systems it discovered were unlike anything scientists had dreamed of.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s one thing I love about the Kepler results,\u201d Dotson said. \u201cImagination is not the limit here.\u201dBy the end of the spacecraft\u2019s prime mission, astronomers using Kepler data concluded that our galaxy contains a planet for every sun \u2014 meaning there are as many as 400 billion exoplanets in the Milky Way alone. Several of those planets even had solid surfaces and received the right amount of sunlight to harbor liquid water \u2014 making them candidates in the search for life.But then disaster struck. In May 2013, a second of Kepler\u2019s four reaction wheels failed, and the spacecraft was no longer able to keep itself pointed at a target. Engineers' efforts to restore one of the wheels failed.Story continues below advertisementSo they improvised a solution: orient Kepler with respect to the sun so that the faint pressure of its light provides the stability needed to balance the spacecraft. Under this new configuration, called \u201cK2,\u201d Kepler was able to scan an even wider patch of sky and found evidence for thousands more planets around distant stars.AdvertisementOne of Borucki\u2019s favorite discoveries came during this extended mission. In 2015, astronomers reported spotting five small, rocky planets orbiting a star that was 11.2 billion years old. The system, Kepler-444, was more than twice as old as our own solar system and more ancient than any other collection of planets in the known universe.\u201cIf life had been developing over the billions of years before Earth was formed,\u201d Borucki said, \u201cthere may be some very interesting life-forms.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA knew at the start of this year that Kepler was about to scrape the bottom of its fuel tank. This spring, it launched the space telescope\u2019s successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is predicted to find as many as 10,000 exoplanets around the stars closest to our sun.\u201cKepler just kind of cracked open our typical expectations,\u201d said TESS project scientist Padi Boyd. \u201cNow we\u2019re poised to take the next steps to bring Kepler\u2019s exoplanet discoveries closer to home.\u201d The Kepler Space Telescope, NASA's powerhouse planet hunter, is out of fuel at age 9. So long, Kepler, and thanks for all the planets",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch a Chinese Spacecraft Launch From the Moon and Start Its Trip Back to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3420",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/science/china-moon-mission.html",
        "text": "Chang\u2019e-5 will soon attempt to dock in lunar orbit with another spacecraft, ahead of returning a cache of moon rocks and dirt to scientists on our planet. Chang\u2019e-5 will soon attempt to dock in lunar orbit with another spacecraft, ahead of returning a cache of moon rocks and dirt to scientists on our planet. Two days after it landed on the moon, China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 mission is on its way again, blasting off back to space, the beginning of its journey back to Earth ferrying a bounty of soil and rocks for scientists to study.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch a Chinese Spacecraft Launch From the Moon and Start Its Trip Back to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3421",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/science/china-moon-mission.html",
        "text": "Chang\u2019e-5 will soon attempt to dock in lunar orbit with another spacecraft, ahead of returning a cache of moon rocks and dirt to scientists on our planet. Chang\u2019e-5 will soon attempt to dock in lunar orbit with another spacecraft, ahead of returning a cache of moon rocks and dirt to scientists on our planet. Two days after it landed on the moon, China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 mission is on its way again, blasting off back to space, the beginning of its journey back to Earth ferrying a bounty of soil and rocks for scientists to study.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Lucy in the sky with asteroids. Craft to study 8 unique bodies near Jupiter (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3422",
        "date": "2021-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/jupiter-asteroids-lucy-spacecraft-nasa/2021/10/08/b892c414-26e0-11ec-8d53-67cfb452aa60_story.html",
        "text": "by\u2009Erin BlakemoreOver 400 million miles away, two groups of chunky asteroids spin around Jupiter, trapped by the planet\u2019s orbit.They\u2019re known as Trojan asteroids. This month, a new probe will begin a 12-year mission to study their secrets.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe spacecraft, called Lucy, has an ambitious aim. It will be the first mission to study the Trojan asteroids, and the most complex in terms of number of destinations ever launched. Lucy is scheduled to visit eight asteroids in the next decade. Researchers hope that the data \u2014 drawn from asteroids with different characteristics \u2014 will yield insight into the formation of the universe.Story continues below advertisementAsteroids are the leftovers of the earliest days of our solar system \u2014 big chunks of rock that don\u2019t rate the designation \u201cplanet.\u201d There are about 1.1 million known asteroids in the solar system.AdvertisementMost asteroids orbit the sun. But Trojan asteroids share planets\u2019 orbits. Scientists named them after characters in the Iliad, the epic poem set during the legendary Trojan War in ancient Greece.NASA scientists want a close-up view of Jupiter\u2019s Trojans. They\u2019re \u201cthe fossils of planet formation,\u201d says Hal Levison of planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and the mission\u2019s principal investigator.Named after the fossilized, early hominid Australopithecus who became an iconic symbol of humans\u2019 ancient ancestry, the Lucy probe is equipped with a plaque aimed at future humans who might one day find her remains orbiting the sun. It\u2019s covered with quotations and song lyrics, many from band members of the Beatles. When anthropologists dug up Lucy\u2019s skeleton in the 1970s \u2014 the oldest ever found at the time \u2014 they christened her after singing the band\u2019s song \u201cLucy in the Sky With Diamonds.\u201d This month, the probe begins a 12-year journey to study eight Trojan asteroids. Researchers hope the mission will yield insight into the formation of the universe. NASA\u2019s Lucy in the sky with asteroids. Craft to study 8 unique bodies near Jupiter",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pluto has windswept dunes even though it shouldn\u2019t have enough wind to sweep (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3423",
        "date": "2018-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/31/pluto-shares-a-surprising-geographic-feature-with-earth-dunes/",
        "text": "By\u00a0Earth\u2019s\u00a0standards, you could hardly imagine a stranger world than frigid, tiny Pluto.\u00a0It\u00a0resides in the far corner of the solar system at an average of about 4 billion miles from the sun. NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe, which flew within 7,800 miles of the dwarf planet in July 2015, gave us the\u00a0best look at Pluto yet. There,\u00a0temperatures plunge to minus 380 Fahrenheit. At Plutonian noon, the sunlight is comparable to\u00a0Earth's dusk. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut perhaps the most surprising\u00a0outcome of New Horizons\u2019 journey was\u00a0not the deeper peek into Pluto\u2019s oddities. The\u00a0spacecraft also uncovered Pluto\u2019s versions of familiar geography. Like Earth, Pluto has jagged mountains, sweeping plains and changing seasons. A new study published Thursday in the journal Science reveals another feature shared across billions of miles: Pluto has dunes.This world, where the gravity is one-sixteenth as strong as Earth's, is \u201cso different from our own in so many ways,\u201d said study author Matthew Telfer, an expert in physical geography at Britain\u2019s University of Plymouth. But the dunes, he said, show that Pluto \u201cis actually so similar.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA released New Horizons images shortly after the flyby, including an famous picture of a heart-shaped basin on Pluto. In the western lobe of that heart, a plain called Sputnik Planitia, Telfer and other planetary scientists spotted something peculiar.Where Sputnik Planitia approaches mountains of ice, its surface ripples.\u00a0To Telfer and other planetary scientists, those ripples looked like windswept sand \u2014 a bit of a puzzle, because scientists weren\u2019t sure whether Pluto\u2019s thin atmosphere could muster enough wind for sweeping.Brigham Young University\u00a0planetary scientist Jani Radebaugh, an author of the new study, recalled seeing\u00a0the features in New Horizons images posted to\u00a0Facebook. \u201cThey just really looked like dunes,\u201d she said. No other team had plans to\u00a0investigate the formations, so she\u00a0joined\u00a0up with Telfer and members of\u00a0the New Horizons mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first reports\u00a0of possible dunes\u00a0\u2014 as the New Horizons\u00a0scientists were careful to qualify them in 2015\u00a0\u2014 did not pan out. \u201cThere\u2019re a bunch of things out there that are vaguely dunelike,\u201d\u00a0Telfer said. But in one area of the plain, the evidence kept\u00a0piling up.\u201cIt\u2019s an exciting discovery, I\u2019ll say that for sure,\u201d said Ryan Ewing, a geologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved with this report. \u201cThe way that they\u2019re recognizing the dunes on the surface is the same technique we\u2019ve used to identify dunes on Mars.\u201dTo build a dune requires\u00a0sand and wind. Quartz fragments\u00a0commonly supply the sand for Earth dunes. Pluto\u2019s\u00a0Sputnik Planitia is capped with\u00a0nitrogen ice, which\u00a0the scientists estimated would\u00a0not be sturdy enough to form dunes.\u00a0Frozen nitrogen, Radebaugh said, has a\u00a0consistency\u00a0that resembles toothpaste.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut\u00a0solid methane sits atop this toothpaste glacier, too. Methane ice breaks into tiny particles. The scientists calculated that\u00a0the methane grains\u00a0are probably a hundredth of an inch in diameter.\u00a0To hold\u00a0a handful of\u00a0methane grains, if you could handle the cold, would be like\u00a0scooping up \u201creally fine sand,\u201d\u00a0Radebaugh said.Walking on these dunes would be \u201cpretty much like\u00a0walking through sand on a dune on Earth, we reckon,\u201d Telfer said. (If you\u2019d feel anything through the\u00a0well-insulated\u00a0soles\u00a0of your spacesuit, that is.)Pluto\u2019s\u00a0dunes\u00a0rise to about 100 feet, roughly as high as the\u00a0Mesquite Flat Dunes\u00a0in Death Valley National Park.\u00a0Streaks on the surface indicate the\u00a0wind blows in a perpendicular direction to the dunes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe paper makes a very compelling case these are dunes,\u201d which have the necessary\u00a0spacing and orientation, said\u00a0William B. McKinnon\u00a0of Washington University in St. Louis,\u00a0who studies the geology of worlds in the outer solar system and was not an author of this report.AdvertisementYet the sand must flow. A model of Pluto\u2019s climate suggests that the wind can get as fast as about 20 mph. That\u2019s enough to\u00a0sculpt\u00a0floating particles into a dune shape. \u201cThis is one of the windiest spots on Pluto,\u201d Telfer said, \u201cand the winds are in exactly the right direction.\u201dBut\u00a0those winds are\u00a0too gentle to\u00a0kick up methane grains,\u00a0normally packed close together, from the surface. It\u2019s a little bit like flying a kite on a calm day: A running start\u00a0is needed to lift the kite off the ground, where\u00a0a weak breeze can carry it. Something else has to give the dune grains\u00a0that initial boost.Story continues below advertisementThe study authors suspect a process called sublimation\u00a0did the trick. On Earth, we\u2019re more familiar with evaporation\u00a0\u2014 when you get out of the ocean and walk along the beach, the sun dries you, turning liquid water to vapor. On Pluto, the sun turns solids directly into gas. Telfer\u00a0and his colleagues spotted pits along the edge of the plain,\u00a0where\u00a0they suspect\u00a0nitrogen ice sublimated. Nitrogen\u00a0sublimation\u00a0would be powerful enough to fling up methane grains, Telfer said, providing Pluto\u2019s winds with the airborne ingredients for a dune.AdvertisementMcKinnon said the\u00a0sublimation theory\u00a0was \u201csomewhat speculative.\u201d He said other explanations, such as periodic increases in Pluto\u2019s atmospheric pressure, could also\u00a0result in lofted\u00a0dune particles.The crucial finding, in\u00a0Radebaugh\u2019s view, is that the dunes exist. With its dunes, Pluto joins a club that includes Earth, Mars, Venus, Saturn\u2019s moon Titan and, possibly, a comet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAll we have to do is turn a spacecraft to a body and look at a region we have not seen before,\u00a0\" Radebaugh said, and a whole new realm of discovery opens. For New Horizons, that opening will come on New Year\u2019s Day 2019,\u00a0when it cruises\u00a0to an\u00a0object in the Kuiper belt\u00a0called\u00a02014 MU69,\u00a0nicknamed\u00a0Ultima Thule\u00a0\u2014\u00a0meaning beyond the borders of the known world.Read more:Pluto is even colder than it should beYes, Pluto is a planetPluto\u2019s icy heart may hide an underground ocean Walking on Pluto's dunes would be \u201cpretty much like walking through sand on a dune on Earth, we reckon,\u201d a planetary scientist said. Pluto has windswept dunes even though it shouldn\u2019t have enough wind to sweep",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft Touches Down After Test of Safety System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3424",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/science/space/nasa-boeing-starliner-tes.html",
        "text": "Boeing was one of two American companies chosen by NASA to develop spacecraft for flying astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing was one of two American companies chosen by NASA to develop spacecraft for flying astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing successfully tested a safety system of its commercial spacecraft on Monday morning, bringing the American aerospace industry one step closer to launching astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time since 2011.",
        "author": "By Mariel Padilla and Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Spacecraft Touches Down After Test of Safety System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3425",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/science/space/nasa-boeing-starliner-tes.html",
        "text": "Boeing was one of two American companies chosen by NASA to develop spacecraft for flying astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing was one of two American companies chosen by NASA to develop spacecraft for flying astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing successfully tested a safety system of its commercial spacecraft on Monday morning, bringing the American aerospace industry one step closer to launching astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time since 2011.",
        "author": "By Mariel Padilla and Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3426",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-nasa-return.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first astronaut trip to orbit by a private company has splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico. Two astronauts dropped out of orbit in what was the first water landing by NASA since 1975, when the agency\u2019s crews were still flying in the Apollo modules used for the historic American moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3427",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-nasa-return.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first astronaut trip to orbit by a private company has splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico. Two astronauts dropped out of orbit in what was the first water landing by NASA since 1975, when the agency\u2019s crews were still flying in the Apollo modules used for the historic American moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3428",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-nasa-return.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first astronaut trip to orbit by a private company has splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico. Two astronauts dropped out of orbit in what was the first water landing by NASA since 1975, when the agency\u2019s crews were still flying in the Apollo modules used for the historic American moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3429",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-nasa-return.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first astronaut trip to orbit by a private company has splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico. Two astronauts dropped out of orbit in what was the first water landing by NASA since 1975, when the agency\u2019s crews were still flying in the Apollo modules used for the historic American moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3430",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-nasa-return.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first astronaut trip to orbit by a private company has splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico. Two astronauts dropped out of orbit in what was the first water landing by NASA since 1975, when the agency\u2019s crews were still flying in the Apollo modules used for the historic American moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts in SpaceX Capsule Make First Water Landing Since 1975 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3431",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-nasa-return.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down on Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico in the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first astronaut trip to orbit by a private company has splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico. Two astronauts dropped out of orbit in what was the first water landing by NASA since 1975, when the agency\u2019s crews were still flying in the Apollo modules used for the historic American moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope launches in French Guiana (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3432",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/12/25/webb-space-telescope-launch/",
        "text": "BALTIMORE \u2014 NASA\u2019s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope is hurtling away from Earth and toward deep space on a long-awaited, high-risk mission that, if successful, will look deeper into the cosmic past than any telescope before.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Webb blasted off Christmas morning from the European Space Agency\u2019s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on South America\u2019s northeast coast, and early reports from NASA suggest the mission is going swimmingly. This is, however, an unusually difficult mission involving an extraordinarily complicated instrument, and in the coming days and weeks the telescope will have to transform itself through hardware deployments, each of which is critical to the telescope\u2019s ambitious astronomy.Story continues below advertisementThough relieved by the successful launch, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy acknowledged what everyone involved with the Webb knows: \u201cWe have some scary days ahead.\u201dAdvertisementThat NASA chose to forge ahead with a Christmas launch was a sign of how seriously the agency and the global scientific community take this $10 billion mission, the long-delayed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Officials had challenging discussions about launching on a holiday, and amid the rapid spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, but decided to go on the first possible day. After two technical problems and one weather delay, that turned out to be Dec. 25.Melroy put a positive spin on it: \u201cIt\u2019s not bad that it\u2019s happening on Christmas Day, which should be a day of hope and inspiration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe telescope left Earth in a folded position, fully enveloped in the cone of Arianespace\u2019s heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket, which rolled to the launchpad Thursday. Less than half an hour after launch, it separated from the final booster and was traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, \u201cflying on its own in coast phase,\u201d as NASA put it.AdvertisementEarly reports indicated that everything was \u201cnominal\u201d \u2014 precisely the space-jargon term that the thousands of people who have worked on the mission were hoping to hear on launch day.NASA's space telescope launched on Dec. 25 and will capture light from first stars and study distant worlds. (Reuters)\u201cIt was a perfect ride to orbit,\u201d announced Rob Navias, NASA\u2019s launch commentator.The separation from the final booster provided a stunning \u2014 and, for humanity, probably the final \u2014 view of the Webb. A camera on the upper stage of the rocket captured the rear end of the Webb receding, with Earth on the right side of the frame. Then came a critical deployment \u2014 solar arrays jutting from the spacecraft, gleaming brilliantly in full sun and ensuring the telescope will have power out there in the void.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere it is. There is your critical call. James Webb not only has legs, it has power,\u201d Navias said. \u201cQuite a Christmas present for the world\u2019s astronomers.\u201dAt a news conference in Kourou after the successful launch, NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen highlighted that image of the telescope receding into space: \u201cFor me that picture will be burned into my mind forever.\u201dThe launch and the deployment of the solar arrays was greeted with cheers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where officials, industry executives and a smattering of journalists gathered to watch events on a big screen in the institute\u2019s auditorium. Upstairs, in the high-security mission operations center \u2014 which took over the mission after the launch team in French Guiana concluded its task \u2014 the outcry of joy among the engineers and technicians was intense enough to send a rumble through the building.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy feet have stopped tapping,\u201d planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who could not bear to sit down during the launch, said in the institute cafeteria as the Webb flew through space. \u201cIt\u2019s all calming down now, and I\u2019m starting to breathe normally.\u201dMore drama is coming, though.\u201cI want to hear that the covers open on the sun shield and then that the sun shield starts to deploy properly,\u201d Hammel said. And then there\u2019s the less-heralded \u201csecondary mirror,\u201d which has to protrude properly to bounce light from the telescope\u2019s main mirror down through the center of the telescope.\u201cThe secondary mirror has to deploy, otherwise there\u2019s nothing,\u201d Hammel said.Story continues below advertisementThe launch date had been Dec. 18, but a technical mishap at the spaceport \u2014 a large clamp coming loose and jostling the telescope \u2014 required a four-day delay to ensure that nothing had been damaged. Another glitch with an essential cable delayed the launch for two days, to Dec. 24. Then came the one-day weather delay. Christmas morning dawned cloudy but without storms, and the launch proceeded without a hitch, at 9:20 a.m. local time in Kourou \u2014 7:20 a.m. in Baltimore.AdvertisementThe predawn streets and elevated highways of Baltimore were empty, but by 6 a.m. the Space Telescope Science Institute was bustling. Some news media and scientists dropped out in recent days as the omicron variant spread, and so the hoopla was limited. Visitors were handed KN95 masks and told to take rapid coronavirus tests.Saturday morning\u2019s prelaunch event at the institute began with remarks by Webb team members, including representatives of Europe\u2019s and Canada\u2019s space agencies, partners in the mission. The speakers emphasized the telescope\u2019s potential to answer fundamental questions about the history of the cosmos.Story continues below advertisement\u201cLook farther, delve deeper and measure more precisely, and you\u2019re bound to detect something new and wondrous,\u201d said Kenneth Sembach, director of the telescope institute. \u201cIt is a gift to everyone who contemplates the vastness of the universe.\u201dAdvertisementMelroy echoed that: \u201cWhen we see things with a new lens, we gain new knowledge and new perspectives that can change fundamentally how we see the universe and how we see ourselves.\u201dThe rocket will send the telescope far beyond Earth\u2019s gravity well, and into a gravitationally stable position known as L2, where the telescope will orbit the sun and remain roughly a million miles from Earth on the opposite side of our planet from the sun.Story continues below advertisementThe journey to L2 will take about 29 days. Along the way, the Webb will undergo course corrections and critically important deployments of its hardware, including a sun shield the size of a tennis court.After the sun shield opens up, NASA will send a command from Earth to unfold 18 gold-plated, hexagonal mirrors, which together will function as a 21-foot light bucket, nearly three times the diameter of the Hubble\u2019s mirror.AdvertisementThis is a novel design, driven by ambitious scientific objectives.NASA and its partners must overcome 344 potential single-point failures, according to an independent review board. That list began with launch, although the Ariane 5 has an excellent track record.Story continues below advertisementZurbuchen, who was in French Guiana for the launch, said last month that the agency has tested the telescope and its instruments thoroughly.\u201cWe\u2019ve gone through every systematic analysis that we can think of,\u201d he said.The Webb, named for NASA\u2019s administrator at the height of the 1960s space race, traces its scientific roots to the 1980s and has been under development since the mid-1990s. It has struggled through multiple delays and survived one congressional attempt to terminate the mission as its cost soared.\u201cIt\u2019s been a long road, as many of you know, to get where we are. Even so, we planned such a revolutionary telescope that it has stood the test of this time,\u201d Hammel said Thursday during a NASA science webinar on the goals on the mission.AdvertisementThe Webb is an infrared telescope, capturing wavelengths outside the spectral range of the Hubble Space Telescope. With the sprawling sun shield protecting it from the sun\u2019s heat, and with additional help from cooling devices, the Webb will take advantage of extremely cold temperatures, lower than minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit.It is designed to see the oldest stars in the universe and scrutinize the formation of the earliest galaxies. It will also study the atmospheres of exoplanets that orbit stars in our galaxy.It can even look at nearby neighbors, such as Jupiter \u2014 scientists still want to know why the planet\u2019s Great Red Spot is red, Hammel said. Two other targets are Jupiter\u2019s intriguing moon Europa and Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus, both of which have geysers believed to signal the presence of subsurface oceans.Advertisement\u201cIf we can put our beam there and detect organics in this plume material, that may give us clues to the habitability of subsurface oceans,\u201d Hammel said.It will take about six months for NASA and its partners to fully commission the telescope and begin delivering the promised images from deep space. In addition to the well-publicized challenges of deploying the sun shield and the mirrors, the spacecraft has to cool itself to extremely low temperatures. The individual mirrors can be adjusted to achieve the kind of resolution that should make the Webb roughly 100 times more powerful than the Hubble.So a lot of work is still ahead \u2014 but Saturday was a giant leap for a telescope that at times looked like it might never get off the ground.\u201cTens of thousands of people have committed over 20 years or more on a single project,\u201d Matt Mountain, an astronomer who is part of the team that designed the telescope, said at the telescope institute just minutes before launch Saturday. \u201cAnd why? Why have they committed this time? We solve incredibly hard problems. It\u2019s part of the human spirit. We\u2019re curious. We explore.\u201d The $10 billion telescope is NASA\u2019s long-delayed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope launches in French Guiana",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope launches in French Guiana (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3433",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/12/25/webb-space-telescope-launch/",
        "text": "BALTIMORE \u2014 NASA\u2019s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope is hurtling away from Earth and toward deep space on a long-awaited, high-risk mission that, if successful, will look deeper into the cosmic past than any telescope before.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Webb blasted off Christmas morning from the European Space Agency\u2019s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on South America\u2019s northeast coast, and early reports from NASA suggest the mission is going swimmingly. This is, however, an unusually difficult mission involving an extraordinarily complicated instrument, and in the coming days and weeks the telescope will have to transform itself through hardware deployments, each of which is critical to the telescope\u2019s ambitious astronomy.Story continues below advertisementThough relieved by the successful launch, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy acknowledged what everyone involved with the Webb knows: \u201cWe have some scary days ahead.\u201dAdvertisementThat NASA chose to forge ahead with a Christmas launch was a sign of how seriously the agency and the global scientific community take this $10 billion mission, the long-delayed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Officials had challenging discussions about launching on a holiday, and amid the rapid spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, but decided to go on the first possible day. After two technical problems and one weather delay, that turned out to be Dec. 25.Melroy put a positive spin on it: \u201cIt\u2019s not bad that it\u2019s happening on Christmas Day, which should be a day of hope and inspiration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe telescope left Earth in a folded position, fully enveloped in the cone of Arianespace\u2019s heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket, which rolled to the launchpad Thursday. Less than half an hour after launch, it separated from the final booster and was traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, \u201cflying on its own in coast phase,\u201d as NASA put it.AdvertisementEarly reports indicated that everything was \u201cnominal\u201d \u2014 precisely the space-jargon term that the thousands of people who have worked on the mission were hoping to hear on launch day.NASA's space telescope launched on Dec. 25 and will capture light from first stars and study distant worlds. (Reuters)\u201cIt was a perfect ride to orbit,\u201d announced Rob Navias, NASA\u2019s launch commentator.The separation from the final booster provided a stunning \u2014 and, for humanity, probably the final \u2014 view of the Webb. A camera on the upper stage of the rocket captured the rear end of the Webb receding, with Earth on the right side of the frame. Then came a critical deployment \u2014 solar arrays jutting from the spacecraft, gleaming brilliantly in full sun and ensuring the telescope will have power out there in the void.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere it is. There is your critical call. James Webb not only has legs, it has power,\u201d Navias said. \u201cQuite a Christmas present for the world\u2019s astronomers.\u201dAt a news conference in Kourou after the successful launch, NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen highlighted that image of the telescope receding into space: \u201cFor me that picture will be burned into my mind forever.\u201dThe launch and the deployment of the solar arrays was greeted with cheers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where officials, industry executives and a smattering of journalists gathered to watch events on a big screen in the institute\u2019s auditorium. Upstairs, in the high-security mission operations center \u2014 which took over the mission after the launch team in French Guiana concluded its task \u2014 the outcry of joy among the engineers and technicians was intense enough to send a rumble through the building.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy feet have stopped tapping,\u201d planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who could not bear to sit down during the launch, said in the institute cafeteria as the Webb flew through space. \u201cIt\u2019s all calming down now, and I\u2019m starting to breathe normally.\u201dMore drama is coming, though.\u201cI want to hear that the covers open on the sun shield and then that the sun shield starts to deploy properly,\u201d Hammel said. And then there\u2019s the less-heralded \u201csecondary mirror,\u201d which has to protrude properly to bounce light from the telescope\u2019s main mirror down through the center of the telescope.\u201cThe secondary mirror has to deploy, otherwise there\u2019s nothing,\u201d Hammel said.Story continues below advertisementThe launch date had been Dec. 18, but a technical mishap at the spaceport \u2014 a large clamp coming loose and jostling the telescope \u2014 required a four-day delay to ensure that nothing had been damaged. Another glitch with an essential cable delayed the launch for two days, to Dec. 24. Then came the one-day weather delay. Christmas morning dawned cloudy but without storms, and the launch proceeded without a hitch, at 9:20 a.m. local time in Kourou \u2014 7:20 a.m. in Baltimore.AdvertisementThe predawn streets and elevated highways of Baltimore were empty, but by 6 a.m. the Space Telescope Science Institute was bustling. Some news media and scientists dropped out in recent days as the omicron variant spread, and so the hoopla was limited. Visitors were handed KN95 masks and told to take rapid coronavirus tests.Saturday morning\u2019s prelaunch event at the institute began with remarks by Webb team members, including representatives of Europe\u2019s and Canada\u2019s space agencies, partners in the mission. The speakers emphasized the telescope\u2019s potential to answer fundamental questions about the history of the cosmos.Story continues below advertisement\u201cLook farther, delve deeper and measure more precisely, and you\u2019re bound to detect something new and wondrous,\u201d said Kenneth Sembach, director of the telescope institute. \u201cIt is a gift to everyone who contemplates the vastness of the universe.\u201dAdvertisementMelroy echoed that: \u201cWhen we see things with a new lens, we gain new knowledge and new perspectives that can change fundamentally how we see the universe and how we see ourselves.\u201dThe rocket will send the telescope far beyond Earth\u2019s gravity well, and into a gravitationally stable position known as L2, where the telescope will orbit the sun and remain roughly a million miles from Earth on the opposite side of our planet from the sun.Story continues below advertisementThe journey to L2 will take about 29 days. Along the way, the Webb will undergo course corrections and critically important deployments of its hardware, including a sun shield the size of a tennis court.After the sun shield opens up, NASA will send a command from Earth to unfold 18 gold-plated, hexagonal mirrors, which together will function as a 21-foot light bucket, nearly three times the diameter of the Hubble\u2019s mirror.AdvertisementThis is a novel design, driven by ambitious scientific objectives.NASA and its partners must overcome 344 potential single-point failures, according to an independent review board. That list began with launch, although the Ariane 5 has an excellent track record.Story continues below advertisementZurbuchen, who was in French Guiana for the launch, said last month that the agency has tested the telescope and its instruments thoroughly.\u201cWe\u2019ve gone through every systematic analysis that we can think of,\u201d he said.The Webb, named for NASA\u2019s administrator at the height of the 1960s space race, traces its scientific roots to the 1980s and has been under development since the mid-1990s. It has struggled through multiple delays and survived one congressional attempt to terminate the mission as its cost soared.\u201cIt\u2019s been a long road, as many of you know, to get where we are. Even so, we planned such a revolutionary telescope that it has stood the test of this time,\u201d Hammel said Thursday during a NASA science webinar on the goals on the mission.AdvertisementThe Webb is an infrared telescope, capturing wavelengths outside the spectral range of the Hubble Space Telescope. With the sprawling sun shield protecting it from the sun\u2019s heat, and with additional help from cooling devices, the Webb will take advantage of extremely cold temperatures, lower than minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit.It is designed to see the oldest stars in the universe and scrutinize the formation of the earliest galaxies. It will also study the atmospheres of exoplanets that orbit stars in our galaxy.It can even look at nearby neighbors, such as Jupiter \u2014 scientists still want to know why the planet\u2019s Great Red Spot is red, Hammel said. Two other targets are Jupiter\u2019s intriguing moon Europa and Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus, both of which have geysers believed to signal the presence of subsurface oceans.Advertisement\u201cIf we can put our beam there and detect organics in this plume material, that may give us clues to the habitability of subsurface oceans,\u201d Hammel said.It will take about six months for NASA and its partners to fully commission the telescope and begin delivering the promised images from deep space. In addition to the well-publicized challenges of deploying the sun shield and the mirrors, the spacecraft has to cool itself to extremely low temperatures. The individual mirrors can be adjusted to achieve the kind of resolution that should make the Webb roughly 100 times more powerful than the Hubble.So a lot of work is still ahead \u2014 but Saturday was a giant leap for a telescope that at times looked like it might never get off the ground.\u201cTens of thousands of people have committed over 20 years or more on a single project,\u201d Matt Mountain, an astronomer who is part of the team that designed the telescope, said at the telescope institute just minutes before launch Saturday. \u201cAnd why? Why have they committed this time? We solve incredibly hard problems. It\u2019s part of the human spirit. We\u2019re curious. We explore.\u201d The $10 billion telescope is NASA\u2019s long-delayed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope launches in French Guiana",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope launches in French Guiana (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3434",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/12/25/webb-space-telescope-launch/",
        "text": "BALTIMORE \u2014 NASA\u2019s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope is hurtling away from Earth and toward deep space on a long-awaited, high-risk mission that, if successful, will look deeper into the cosmic past than any telescope before.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Webb blasted off Christmas morning from the European Space Agency\u2019s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on South America\u2019s northeast coast, and early reports from NASA suggest the mission is going swimmingly. This is, however, an unusually difficult mission involving an extraordinarily complicated instrument, and in the coming days and weeks the telescope will have to transform itself through hardware deployments, each of which is critical to the telescope\u2019s ambitious astronomy.Story continues below advertisementThough relieved by the successful launch, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy acknowledged what everyone involved with the Webb knows: \u201cWe have some scary days ahead.\u201dAdvertisementThat NASA chose to forge ahead with a Christmas launch was a sign of how seriously the agency and the global scientific community take this $10 billion mission, the long-delayed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Officials had challenging discussions about launching on a holiday, and amid the rapid spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, but decided to go on the first possible day. After two technical problems and one weather delay, that turned out to be Dec. 25.Melroy put a positive spin on it: \u201cIt\u2019s not bad that it\u2019s happening on Christmas Day, which should be a day of hope and inspiration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe telescope left Earth in a folded position, fully enveloped in the cone of Arianespace\u2019s heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket, which rolled to the launchpad Thursday. Less than half an hour after launch, it separated from the final booster and was traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, \u201cflying on its own in coast phase,\u201d as NASA put it.AdvertisementEarly reports indicated that everything was \u201cnominal\u201d \u2014 precisely the space-jargon term that the thousands of people who have worked on the mission were hoping to hear on launch day.NASA's space telescope launched on Dec. 25 and will capture light from first stars and study distant worlds. (Reuters)\u201cIt was a perfect ride to orbit,\u201d announced Rob Navias, NASA\u2019s launch commentator.The separation from the final booster provided a stunning \u2014 and, for humanity, probably the final \u2014 view of the Webb. A camera on the upper stage of the rocket captured the rear end of the Webb receding, with Earth on the right side of the frame. Then came a critical deployment \u2014 solar arrays jutting from the spacecraft, gleaming brilliantly in full sun and ensuring the telescope will have power out there in the void.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere it is. There is your critical call. James Webb not only has legs, it has power,\u201d Navias said. \u201cQuite a Christmas present for the world\u2019s astronomers.\u201dAt a news conference in Kourou after the successful launch, NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen highlighted that image of the telescope receding into space: \u201cFor me that picture will be burned into my mind forever.\u201dThe launch and the deployment of the solar arrays was greeted with cheers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where officials, industry executives and a smattering of journalists gathered to watch events on a big screen in the institute\u2019s auditorium. Upstairs, in the high-security mission operations center \u2014 which took over the mission after the launch team in French Guiana concluded its task \u2014 the outcry of joy among the engineers and technicians was intense enough to send a rumble through the building.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cMy feet have stopped tapping,\u201d planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who could not bear to sit down during the launch, said in the institute cafeteria as the Webb flew through space. \u201cIt\u2019s all calming down now, and I\u2019m starting to breathe normally.\u201dMore drama is coming, though.\u201cI want to hear that the covers open on the sun shield and then that the sun shield starts to deploy properly,\u201d Hammel said. And then there\u2019s the less-heralded \u201csecondary mirror,\u201d which has to protrude properly to bounce light from the telescope\u2019s main mirror down through the center of the telescope.\u201cThe secondary mirror has to deploy, otherwise there\u2019s nothing,\u201d Hammel said.Story continues below advertisementThe launch date had been Dec. 18, but a technical mishap at the spaceport \u2014 a large clamp coming loose and jostling the telescope \u2014 required a four-day delay to ensure that nothing had been damaged. Another glitch with an essential cable delayed the launch for two days, to Dec. 24. Then came the one-day weather delay. Christmas morning dawned cloudy but without storms, and the launch proceeded without a hitch, at 9:20 a.m. local time in Kourou \u2014 7:20 a.m. in Baltimore.AdvertisementThe predawn streets and elevated highways of Baltimore were empty, but by 6 a.m. the Space Telescope Science Institute was bustling. Some news media and scientists dropped out in recent days as the omicron variant spread, and so the hoopla was limited. Visitors were handed KN95 masks and told to take rapid coronavirus tests.Saturday morning\u2019s prelaunch event at the institute began with remarks by Webb team members, including representatives of Europe\u2019s and Canada\u2019s space agencies, partners in the mission. The speakers emphasized the telescope\u2019s potential to answer fundamental questions about the history of the cosmos.Story continues below advertisement\u201cLook farther, delve deeper and measure more precisely, and you\u2019re bound to detect something new and wondrous,\u201d said Kenneth Sembach, director of the telescope institute. \u201cIt is a gift to everyone who contemplates the vastness of the universe.\u201dAdvertisementMelroy echoed that: \u201cWhen we see things with a new lens, we gain new knowledge and new perspectives that can change fundamentally how we see the universe and how we see ourselves.\u201dThe rocket will send the telescope far beyond Earth\u2019s gravity well, and into a gravitationally stable position known as L2, where the telescope will orbit the sun and remain roughly a million miles from Earth on the opposite side of our planet from the sun.Story continues below advertisementThe journey to L2 will take about 29 days. Along the way, the Webb will undergo course corrections and critically important deployments of its hardware, including a sun shield the size of a tennis court.After the sun shield opens up, NASA will send a command from Earth to unfold 18 gold-plated, hexagonal mirrors, which together will function as a 21-foot light bucket, nearly three times the diameter of the Hubble\u2019s mirror.AdvertisementThis is a novel design, driven by ambitious scientific objectives.NASA and its partners must overcome 344 potential single-point failures, according to an independent review board. That list began with launch, although the Ariane 5 has an excellent track record.Story continues below advertisementZurbuchen, who was in French Guiana for the launch, said last month that the agency has tested the telescope and its instruments thoroughly.\u201cWe\u2019ve gone through every systematic analysis that we can think of,\u201d he said.The Webb, named for NASA\u2019s administrator at the height of the 1960s space race, traces its scientific roots to the 1980s and has been under development since the mid-1990s. It has struggled through multiple delays and survived one congressional attempt to terminate the mission as its cost soared.\u201cIt\u2019s been a long road, as many of you know, to get where we are. Even so, we planned such a revolutionary telescope that it has stood the test of this time,\u201d Hammel said Thursday during a NASA science webinar on the goals on the mission.AdvertisementThe Webb is an infrared telescope, capturing wavelengths outside the spectral range of the Hubble Space Telescope. With the sprawling sun shield protecting it from the sun\u2019s heat, and with additional help from cooling devices, the Webb will take advantage of extremely cold temperatures, lower than minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit.It is designed to see the oldest stars in the universe and scrutinize the formation of the earliest galaxies. It will also study the atmospheres of exoplanets that orbit stars in our galaxy.It can even look at nearby neighbors, such as Jupiter \u2014 scientists still want to know why the planet\u2019s Great Red Spot is red, Hammel said. Two other targets are Jupiter\u2019s intriguing moon Europa and Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus, both of which have geysers believed to signal the presence of subsurface oceans.Advertisement\u201cIf we can put our beam there and detect organics in this plume material, that may give us clues to the habitability of subsurface oceans,\u201d Hammel said.It will take about six months for NASA and its partners to fully commission the telescope and begin delivering the promised images from deep space. In addition to the well-publicized challenges of deploying the sun shield and the mirrors, the spacecraft has to cool itself to extremely low temperatures. The individual mirrors can be adjusted to achieve the kind of resolution that should make the Webb roughly 100 times more powerful than the Hubble.So a lot of work is still ahead \u2014 but Saturday was a giant leap for a telescope that at times looked like it might never get off the ground.\u201cTens of thousands of people have committed over 20 years or more on a single project,\u201d Matt Mountain, an astronomer who is part of the team that designed the telescope, said at the telescope institute just minutes before launch Saturday. \u201cAnd why? Why have they committed this time? We solve incredibly hard problems. It\u2019s part of the human spirit. We\u2019re curious. We explore.\u201d The $10 billion telescope is NASA\u2019s long-delayed successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope launches in French Guiana",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "A newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3435",
        "date": "2017-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/21/a-newly-discovered-moon-tunnel-could-be-the-perfect-place-for-a-colony-scientists-say/",
        "text": "At the close of the Apollo age, a year before the final moonwalk in 1972, a NASA researcher argued that vast tunnels lie beneath the lunar surface.There was good reason to think so. Lava\u00a0from ancient volcanoes might\u00a0have bored\u00a0miles-long voids\u00a0beneath\u00a0the moon's surface,\u00a0just as volcanoes formed the Kaumana lava tubes in Hawaii. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat a\u00a0sight\u00a0a lunar lava cave would be. Protected from meteors and radiation that\u00a0bombards\u00a0the surface, the tunnels\u00a0might preserve evidence\u00a0from the moon\u2019s early history and clues to its mysterious origins.\u00a0And\u00a0many scientists\u00a0have long dreamed of building bases inside natural moon caves, where lunar explorers might sleep safely in inflatable homes, protected from the storms above.Story continues below advertisementBut the lava tunnels of the moon, like the mythical canals of Mars, proved elusive.NASA\u2019s Ronald Greeley\u00a0hypothesized in 1971 that\u00a0one of the great channels\u00a0in the moon\u2019s Marius Hills region might in fact be a collapsed tunnel. But he admitted that no mission had yet photographed a lunar cave entrance \u2014 and some doubted they even existed.AdvertisementHalf a century after Greeley\u2019s paper was published and NASA left the moon behind, in a paper published this week, Japanese researchers\u00a0say\u00a0they've found proof of the tunnels no one could see.Japan\u00a0calls its Kaguya orbiter\u00a0the \u201clargest lunar mission since the Apollo program.\u201d\u00a0It was launched in 2007 with state-of-the-art instruments, deployable satellites and a mission to solve the great mysteries of the moon\u2019s origin.Story continues below advertisementNew clues on the perplexing origin of the moonIn 2009,\u00a0Kaguya\u00a0drifted 60 miles above the Marius Hills and took a picture of a large, deep hole.Holes aren\u2019t unusual on the moon\u2019s pockmarked surface, but a NASA Lunar\u00a0Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to get a follow-up shot, closer to the ground,\u00a0as a team of Japanese and American researchers\u00a0recounted in Geophysical Research Letters last week.\u201cThe floor of the hole extended at least several meters eastward and westward under a ceiling of two other holes,\u201d the researchers wrote \u2014\u00a0like the mouth of a tunnel.AdvertisementBut\u00a0the murky picture revealed no more. Did the cave go on for miles, like the hypothetical lava tube, or dead-end just out of sight?It took years to find out. The Japanese got another assist from the United States in 2011, when NASA\u00a0put twin spacecraft \u2014 Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL \u2014 in orbit around the moon.Story continues below advertisementGRAIL\u00a0measured tiny fluctuations in the moon\u2019s gravity\u00a0to map out mountains and subterranean features. When\u00a0it flew over the Marius Hills, the researchers wrote,\u00a0it detected something long and hollow beneath the surface\u00a0 \u2014 extending\u00a0more than\u00a030 miles from\u00a0the hole Kaguya found.So Kaguya swung back into action. The Japanese probe blasted radar waves\u00a0down onto\u00a0the suspected tunnel, listening for anomalies in the echoes that came back from underground.Why it matters that Japan is going to the moonOver and over, Kaguya heard a distinctive pattern of echoes.\u00a0The researchers think it is either the floor or ceiling of a cave \u2014 the long-hoped-for lava tunnel.AdvertisementIt is very long \u2014 31 miles, according to Japan\u2019s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.Story continues below advertisementIt must be ancient, and may\u00a0be buried\u00a0more than 300 feet below the surface. It might even contain ice or water.If the researchers are correct, it sounds\u00a0just\u00a0like what the old Apollo scientists and would-be colonists were looking for.\u201cTheir existence has not been confirmed until now,\u201d Junichi Haruyama, one of the paper\u2019s authors, told\u00a0Agence France-Presse. And now that\u00a0he knows the tunnel exists,\u00a0he said, he\u00a0looks forward to finding out what\u2019s inside.Read more:Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverTerrorists are building drones. France is destroying them with eagles.Canadian scientists were followed, threatened and censored. They warn that Trump could do the same.We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it\u2019s the tip of a \u2018hidden continent.\u2019 A NASA researcher proposed the idea back in 1971. The lava tunnels of the moon, like the mythical canals of Mars, have proved elusive \u2014 until now. A newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "A newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3436",
        "date": "2017-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/21/a-newly-discovered-moon-tunnel-could-be-the-perfect-place-for-a-colony-scientists-say/",
        "text": "At the close of the Apollo age, a year before the final moonwalk in 1972, a NASA researcher argued that vast tunnels lie beneath the lunar surface.There was good reason to think so. Lava\u00a0from ancient volcanoes might\u00a0have bored\u00a0miles-long voids\u00a0beneath\u00a0the moon's surface,\u00a0just as volcanoes formed the Kaumana lava tubes in Hawaii. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat a\u00a0sight\u00a0a lunar lava cave would be. Protected from meteors and radiation that\u00a0bombards\u00a0the surface, the tunnels\u00a0might preserve evidence\u00a0from the moon\u2019s early history and clues to its mysterious origins.\u00a0And\u00a0many scientists\u00a0have long dreamed of building bases inside natural moon caves, where lunar explorers might sleep safely in inflatable homes, protected from the storms above.Story continues below advertisementBut the lava tunnels of the moon, like the mythical canals of Mars, proved elusive.NASA\u2019s Ronald Greeley\u00a0hypothesized in 1971 that\u00a0one of the great channels\u00a0in the moon\u2019s Marius Hills region might in fact be a collapsed tunnel. But he admitted that no mission had yet photographed a lunar cave entrance \u2014 and some doubted they even existed.AdvertisementHalf a century after Greeley\u2019s paper was published and NASA left the moon behind, in a paper published this week, Japanese researchers\u00a0say\u00a0they've found proof of the tunnels no one could see.Japan\u00a0calls its Kaguya orbiter\u00a0the \u201clargest lunar mission since the Apollo program.\u201d\u00a0It was launched in 2007 with state-of-the-art instruments, deployable satellites and a mission to solve the great mysteries of the moon\u2019s origin.Story continues below advertisementNew clues on the perplexing origin of the moonIn 2009,\u00a0Kaguya\u00a0drifted 60 miles above the Marius Hills and took a picture of a large, deep hole.Holes aren\u2019t unusual on the moon\u2019s pockmarked surface, but a NASA Lunar\u00a0Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to get a follow-up shot, closer to the ground,\u00a0as a team of Japanese and American researchers\u00a0recounted in Geophysical Research Letters last week.\u201cThe floor of the hole extended at least several meters eastward and westward under a ceiling of two other holes,\u201d the researchers wrote \u2014\u00a0like the mouth of a tunnel.AdvertisementBut\u00a0the murky picture revealed no more. Did the cave go on for miles, like the hypothetical lava tube, or dead-end just out of sight?It took years to find out. The Japanese got another assist from the United States in 2011, when NASA\u00a0put twin spacecraft \u2014 Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL \u2014 in orbit around the moon.Story continues below advertisementGRAIL\u00a0measured tiny fluctuations in the moon\u2019s gravity\u00a0to map out mountains and subterranean features. When\u00a0it flew over the Marius Hills, the researchers wrote,\u00a0it detected something long and hollow beneath the surface\u00a0 \u2014 extending\u00a0more than\u00a030 miles from\u00a0the hole Kaguya found.So Kaguya swung back into action. The Japanese probe blasted radar waves\u00a0down onto\u00a0the suspected tunnel, listening for anomalies in the echoes that came back from underground.Why it matters that Japan is going to the moonOver and over, Kaguya heard a distinctive pattern of echoes.\u00a0The researchers think it is either the floor or ceiling of a cave \u2014 the long-hoped-for lava tunnel.AdvertisementIt is very long \u2014 31 miles, according to Japan\u2019s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.Story continues below advertisementIt must be ancient, and may\u00a0be buried\u00a0more than 300 feet below the surface. It might even contain ice or water.If the researchers are correct, it sounds\u00a0just\u00a0like what the old Apollo scientists and would-be colonists were looking for.\u201cTheir existence has not been confirmed until now,\u201d Junichi Haruyama, one of the paper\u2019s authors, told\u00a0Agence France-Presse. And now that\u00a0he knows the tunnel exists,\u00a0he said, he\u00a0looks forward to finding out what\u2019s inside.Read more:Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverTerrorists are building drones. France is destroying them with eagles.Canadian scientists were followed, threatened and censored. They warn that Trump could do the same.We thought New Zealand was an island nation. Scientists say it\u2019s the tip of a \u2018hidden continent.\u2019 A NASA researcher proposed the idea back in 1971. The lava tunnels of the moon, like the mythical canals of Mars, have proved elusive \u2014 until now. A newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA finds 10 new potentially habitable, \u2018Earth-like\u2019 worlds (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3437",
        "date": "2017-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/19/nasa-finds-10-new-potentially-habitable-earth-like-worlds/",
        "text": "Astronomers\u00a0using the Kepler space telescope have detected 219 possible new exoplanets in our galaxy, including 10 relatively small, rocky and possibly habitable planets\u00a0similar to our own, NASA announced Monday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThese are the last additions to the catalog of exoplanets\u00a0compiled during the first phase of the\u00a0Kepler mission, when the space telescope scanned about\u00a0200,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation in an effort to\u00a0find\u00a0worlds beyond our own. The official catalog contains 4,034 total \u201ccandidates\u201d \u2014\u00a0tiny blips in the data that are thought to signal the presence of a planet around a star. Of these, 49 fit squarely into their star's \u201chabitable zone,\u201d that Goldilocks region where liquid water can pool on the surface and life may be able to thrive. The Kepler space telescope was launched into orbit around the sun in 2009. Its charge: Take a census of a\u00a0small slice of the Milky Way in an effort to understand the \u201cdemographics\u201d of our galaxy. How many stars are like our sun? How many of those host planets? How many planets orbit in the habitable zone? Is there anyplace else in this vast universe that living beings might call home?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its first four years, Kepler surveyed just .025 percent of the sky. And for every potential planet detected, NASA estimates that 100 to 200 lurk beyond the telescope's reach. Given a little time and some sophisticated models, scientists will use the Kepler catalogue to\u00a0estimate how many stars in our galaxy could host an \u201cEarth 2.0.\u201dBased on how many habitable-zone planets have already been identified, Caltech astrophysicist Courtney Dressing thinks that number could be sizable.\u201cI, for one, am ecstatic,\u201d she said\u00a0at a news conference Monday.\u201cThe important thing for us is, are we alone?\u201d added Kepler Program Scientist Mario Perez. \u201cKepler today tells us, indirectly \u2026\u00a0that we are probably not alone.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis is the eighth update\u00a0of the Kepler planet catalogue and the most thorough survey of the space telescope's data. Of the 4,034 candidates, more than half have been confirmed as exoplanets and not the result of miscalculations or false signals.\u00a0Kepler research scientist Susan Thompson, the lead author of the catalogue study, said her team is confident about all 10 of the new \u201cEarth-like\u201d planets found in their stars' habitable zones.AdvertisementSeveral of these planets orbit G dwarfs \u2014 the same species of star as our own sun. And one, dubbed\u00a0KOI 7711 (for Kepler Object of Interest), is a possible \u201cEarth twin,\u201d a rocky world just 30 percent\u00a0bigger than our own and about\u00a0the same distance from its star.It's too soon to say whether KOI 7711 truly merits the label \u201cEarth-like,\u201d\u00a0Thompson cautioned. Kepler is incapable of determining whether an exoplanet bears an atmosphere or liquid water. If aliens were observing our solar system using a similar instrument, they might think it\u00a0contained three rocky, potentially habitable worlds \u2014 Venus, Earth and Mars. \u201cBut I'd only want to live on one of them,\u201d\u00a0Thompson said.Story continues below advertisementA second research group combined the Kepler data with measurements from ground-based telescopes to calculate the approximate sizes and compositions of 2,000 exoplanets. They found that smaller worlds, the kind Kepler was designed to detect, fall into two distinct groups: rocky planets that could be up to 1.75 times the size of our own, called \u201csuper-Earths,\u201d and gaseous \u201cmini-Neptunes,\u201d which lack a solid surface and are two\u00a0to three\u00a0times bigger than Earth. Nearly every star surveyed hosted a planet in one of these two categories. But, curiously, no planets straddled the divide. Each world\u00a0was either smaller and rocky, or larger and gassy.AdvertisementBenjamin Fulton, an astronomer at Caltech and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, compared the new\u00a0categories with\u00a0species of animals.\u201cFinding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree,\u201d he told reporters Monday. And just as discovering distinctions between species helps us understand evolution, this revelation\u00a0could help astronomers determine how planets take shape.Story continues below advertisementFulton and his colleagues think\u00a0that the sharp distinction between \u201csuper-Earths\u201d and \u201cmini-Neptunes\u201d may be\u00a0because of how much hydrogen and helium contributed to their formation. These elements are extremely light and\u00a0exist as\u00a0gas\u00a0at all but the lowest temperatures. Rocky worlds such as\u00a0Earth, with thin atmospheres and nice, firm surfaces, contain\u00a0relatively little of these\u00a0elements. Perhaps they started off with less, or perhaps the light elements were burned or blown away.AdvertisementBut if a planet can hold onto\u00a0just a bit more of these gases, it \u201cpuffs up\u201d like a balloon, Fulton said. Hydrogen and helium form vast, thick atmospheres around\u00a0mini-Neptunes, making these worlds much bigger than their rocky counterparts.It's difficult to know for sure, because our own sun doesn't host a\u00a0mini-Neptune \u2014 unless you count the hypothesized \u201cPlanet Nine\u201d that some scientists think lurks at the outer edge of the solar system. (For the record, Fulton doesn't \u2014 not yet.) But researchers are bent on figuring out what leads a world to become rocky rather than gassy, because as far as we're aware life can only take shape on solid ground.Story continues below advertisementKepler's original mission ended in 2013 when one of the wheels that helped to keep the spacecraft pointed toward the Cygnus constellation failed,\u00a0so it could no longer scan the same small slice of sky. But by using pressure from light particles from the sun to stay oriented, the telescope has been refashioned for a second exoplanet search project called K2. NASA estimates the telescope has enough fuel to remain active into 2018.AdvertisementBy then, the space agency hopes to be ready to launch\u00a0the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which will search for small planets around the brightest stars in the sky, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is designed to detect atmospheres on other planets.\u00a0The results from Kepler, that new satellite and the Webb will inform the next\u00a0generation of telescopes \u2014 ones that can actually take pictures of planets in motion around distant stars.\u201cIt feels a bit like the end of an era,\u201d Thompson said, \u201cbut actually I see it as a new beginning. It's amazing the things that Kepler has found. It has shown us these terrestrial worlds, and we still have all this work to do to really understand how common Earths are in the galaxy.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article misstated the size of exoplanet KOB 7711. It is 30 percent bigger than Earth, not 30 times as big.\u00a0Read more:Quantum entanglement, science's 'spookiest' phenomenon, achieved in spaceAstronomers just achieved something Einstein said was impossibleJupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites show Scientists are using the Kepler space telescope to determine how many exoplanets our galaxy may harbor. And just maybe they'll answer the question: Are we alone? NASA finds 10 new potentially habitable, \u2018Earth-like\u2019 worlds",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA finds 10 new potentially habitable, \u2018Earth-like\u2019 worlds (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3438",
        "date": "2017-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/19/nasa-finds-10-new-potentially-habitable-earth-like-worlds/",
        "text": "Astronomers\u00a0using the Kepler space telescope have detected 219 possible new exoplanets in our galaxy, including 10 relatively small, rocky and possibly habitable planets\u00a0similar to our own, NASA announced Monday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThese are the last additions to the catalog of exoplanets\u00a0compiled during the first phase of the\u00a0Kepler mission, when the space telescope scanned about\u00a0200,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation in an effort to\u00a0find\u00a0worlds beyond our own. The official catalog contains 4,034 total \u201ccandidates\u201d \u2014\u00a0tiny blips in the data that are thought to signal the presence of a planet around a star. Of these, 49 fit squarely into their star's \u201chabitable zone,\u201d that Goldilocks region where liquid water can pool on the surface and life may be able to thrive. The Kepler space telescope was launched into orbit around the sun in 2009. Its charge: Take a census of a\u00a0small slice of the Milky Way in an effort to understand the \u201cdemographics\u201d of our galaxy. How many stars are like our sun? How many of those host planets? How many planets orbit in the habitable zone? Is there anyplace else in this vast universe that living beings might call home?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its first four years, Kepler surveyed just .025 percent of the sky. And for every potential planet detected, NASA estimates that 100 to 200 lurk beyond the telescope's reach. Given a little time and some sophisticated models, scientists will use the Kepler catalogue to\u00a0estimate how many stars in our galaxy could host an \u201cEarth 2.0.\u201dBased on how many habitable-zone planets have already been identified, Caltech astrophysicist Courtney Dressing thinks that number could be sizable.\u201cI, for one, am ecstatic,\u201d she said\u00a0at a news conference Monday.\u201cThe important thing for us is, are we alone?\u201d added Kepler Program Scientist Mario Perez. \u201cKepler today tells us, indirectly \u2026\u00a0that we are probably not alone.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis is the eighth update\u00a0of the Kepler planet catalogue and the most thorough survey of the space telescope's data. Of the 4,034 candidates, more than half have been confirmed as exoplanets and not the result of miscalculations or false signals.\u00a0Kepler research scientist Susan Thompson, the lead author of the catalogue study, said her team is confident about all 10 of the new \u201cEarth-like\u201d planets found in their stars' habitable zones.AdvertisementSeveral of these planets orbit G dwarfs \u2014 the same species of star as our own sun. And one, dubbed\u00a0KOI 7711 (for Kepler Object of Interest), is a possible \u201cEarth twin,\u201d a rocky world just 30 percent\u00a0bigger than our own and about\u00a0the same distance from its star.It's too soon to say whether KOI 7711 truly merits the label \u201cEarth-like,\u201d\u00a0Thompson cautioned. Kepler is incapable of determining whether an exoplanet bears an atmosphere or liquid water. If aliens were observing our solar system using a similar instrument, they might think it\u00a0contained three rocky, potentially habitable worlds \u2014 Venus, Earth and Mars. \u201cBut I'd only want to live on one of them,\u201d\u00a0Thompson said.Story continues below advertisementA second research group combined the Kepler data with measurements from ground-based telescopes to calculate the approximate sizes and compositions of 2,000 exoplanets. They found that smaller worlds, the kind Kepler was designed to detect, fall into two distinct groups: rocky planets that could be up to 1.75 times the size of our own, called \u201csuper-Earths,\u201d and gaseous \u201cmini-Neptunes,\u201d which lack a solid surface and are two\u00a0to three\u00a0times bigger than Earth. Nearly every star surveyed hosted a planet in one of these two categories. But, curiously, no planets straddled the divide. Each world\u00a0was either smaller and rocky, or larger and gassy.AdvertisementBenjamin Fulton, an astronomer at Caltech and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, compared the new\u00a0categories with\u00a0species of animals.\u201cFinding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree,\u201d he told reporters Monday. And just as discovering distinctions between species helps us understand evolution, this revelation\u00a0could help astronomers determine how planets take shape.Story continues below advertisementFulton and his colleagues think\u00a0that the sharp distinction between \u201csuper-Earths\u201d and \u201cmini-Neptunes\u201d may be\u00a0because of how much hydrogen and helium contributed to their formation. These elements are extremely light and\u00a0exist as\u00a0gas\u00a0at all but the lowest temperatures. Rocky worlds such as\u00a0Earth, with thin atmospheres and nice, firm surfaces, contain\u00a0relatively little of these\u00a0elements. Perhaps they started off with less, or perhaps the light elements were burned or blown away.AdvertisementBut if a planet can hold onto\u00a0just a bit more of these gases, it \u201cpuffs up\u201d like a balloon, Fulton said. Hydrogen and helium form vast, thick atmospheres around\u00a0mini-Neptunes, making these worlds much bigger than their rocky counterparts.It's difficult to know for sure, because our own sun doesn't host a\u00a0mini-Neptune \u2014 unless you count the hypothesized \u201cPlanet Nine\u201d that some scientists think lurks at the outer edge of the solar system. (For the record, Fulton doesn't \u2014 not yet.) But researchers are bent on figuring out what leads a world to become rocky rather than gassy, because as far as we're aware life can only take shape on solid ground.Story continues below advertisementKepler's original mission ended in 2013 when one of the wheels that helped to keep the spacecraft pointed toward the Cygnus constellation failed,\u00a0so it could no longer scan the same small slice of sky. But by using pressure from light particles from the sun to stay oriented, the telescope has been refashioned for a second exoplanet search project called K2. NASA estimates the telescope has enough fuel to remain active into 2018.AdvertisementBy then, the space agency hopes to be ready to launch\u00a0the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which will search for small planets around the brightest stars in the sky, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is designed to detect atmospheres on other planets.\u00a0The results from Kepler, that new satellite and the Webb will inform the next\u00a0generation of telescopes \u2014 ones that can actually take pictures of planets in motion around distant stars.\u201cIt feels a bit like the end of an era,\u201d Thompson said, \u201cbut actually I see it as a new beginning. It's amazing the things that Kepler has found. It has shown us these terrestrial worlds, and we still have all this work to do to really understand how common Earths are in the galaxy.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article misstated the size of exoplanet KOB 7711. It is 30 percent bigger than Earth, not 30 times as big.\u00a0Read more:Quantum entanglement, science's 'spookiest' phenomenon, achieved in spaceAstronomers just achieved something Einstein said was impossibleJupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites show Scientists are using the Kepler space telescope to determine how many exoplanets our galaxy may harbor. And just maybe they'll answer the question: Are we alone? NASA finds 10 new potentially habitable, \u2018Earth-like\u2019 worlds",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA finds 10 new potentially habitable, \u2018Earth-like\u2019 worlds (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3439",
        "date": "2017-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/19/nasa-finds-10-new-potentially-habitable-earth-like-worlds/",
        "text": "Astronomers\u00a0using the Kepler space telescope have detected 219 possible new exoplanets in our galaxy, including 10 relatively small, rocky and possibly habitable planets\u00a0similar to our own, NASA announced Monday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThese are the last additions to the catalog of exoplanets\u00a0compiled during the first phase of the\u00a0Kepler mission, when the space telescope scanned about\u00a0200,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation in an effort to\u00a0find\u00a0worlds beyond our own. The official catalog contains 4,034 total \u201ccandidates\u201d \u2014\u00a0tiny blips in the data that are thought to signal the presence of a planet around a star. Of these, 49 fit squarely into their star's \u201chabitable zone,\u201d that Goldilocks region where liquid water can pool on the surface and life may be able to thrive. The Kepler space telescope was launched into orbit around the sun in 2009. Its charge: Take a census of a\u00a0small slice of the Milky Way in an effort to understand the \u201cdemographics\u201d of our galaxy. How many stars are like our sun? How many of those host planets? How many planets orbit in the habitable zone? Is there anyplace else in this vast universe that living beings might call home?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its first four years, Kepler surveyed just .025 percent of the sky. And for every potential planet detected, NASA estimates that 100 to 200 lurk beyond the telescope's reach. Given a little time and some sophisticated models, scientists will use the Kepler catalogue to\u00a0estimate how many stars in our galaxy could host an \u201cEarth 2.0.\u201dBased on how many habitable-zone planets have already been identified, Caltech astrophysicist Courtney Dressing thinks that number could be sizable.\u201cI, for one, am ecstatic,\u201d she said\u00a0at a news conference Monday.\u201cThe important thing for us is, are we alone?\u201d added Kepler Program Scientist Mario Perez. \u201cKepler today tells us, indirectly \u2026\u00a0that we are probably not alone.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis is the eighth update\u00a0of the Kepler planet catalogue and the most thorough survey of the space telescope's data. Of the 4,034 candidates, more than half have been confirmed as exoplanets and not the result of miscalculations or false signals.\u00a0Kepler research scientist Susan Thompson, the lead author of the catalogue study, said her team is confident about all 10 of the new \u201cEarth-like\u201d planets found in their stars' habitable zones.AdvertisementSeveral of these planets orbit G dwarfs \u2014 the same species of star as our own sun. And one, dubbed\u00a0KOI 7711 (for Kepler Object of Interest), is a possible \u201cEarth twin,\u201d a rocky world just 30 percent\u00a0bigger than our own and about\u00a0the same distance from its star.It's too soon to say whether KOI 7711 truly merits the label \u201cEarth-like,\u201d\u00a0Thompson cautioned. Kepler is incapable of determining whether an exoplanet bears an atmosphere or liquid water. If aliens were observing our solar system using a similar instrument, they might think it\u00a0contained three rocky, potentially habitable worlds \u2014 Venus, Earth and Mars. \u201cBut I'd only want to live on one of them,\u201d\u00a0Thompson said.Story continues below advertisementA second research group combined the Kepler data with measurements from ground-based telescopes to calculate the approximate sizes and compositions of 2,000 exoplanets. They found that smaller worlds, the kind Kepler was designed to detect, fall into two distinct groups: rocky planets that could be up to 1.75 times the size of our own, called \u201csuper-Earths,\u201d and gaseous \u201cmini-Neptunes,\u201d which lack a solid surface and are two\u00a0to three\u00a0times bigger than Earth. Nearly every star surveyed hosted a planet in one of these two categories. But, curiously, no planets straddled the divide. Each world\u00a0was either smaller and rocky, or larger and gassy.AdvertisementBenjamin Fulton, an astronomer at Caltech and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, compared the new\u00a0categories with\u00a0species of animals.\u201cFinding two distinct groups of exoplanets is like discovering mammals and lizards make up distinct branches of a family tree,\u201d he told reporters Monday. And just as discovering distinctions between species helps us understand evolution, this revelation\u00a0could help astronomers determine how planets take shape.Story continues below advertisementFulton and his colleagues think\u00a0that the sharp distinction between \u201csuper-Earths\u201d and \u201cmini-Neptunes\u201d may be\u00a0because of how much hydrogen and helium contributed to their formation. These elements are extremely light and\u00a0exist as\u00a0gas\u00a0at all but the lowest temperatures. Rocky worlds such as\u00a0Earth, with thin atmospheres and nice, firm surfaces, contain\u00a0relatively little of these\u00a0elements. Perhaps they started off with less, or perhaps the light elements were burned or blown away.AdvertisementBut if a planet can hold onto\u00a0just a bit more of these gases, it \u201cpuffs up\u201d like a balloon, Fulton said. Hydrogen and helium form vast, thick atmospheres around\u00a0mini-Neptunes, making these worlds much bigger than their rocky counterparts.It's difficult to know for sure, because our own sun doesn't host a\u00a0mini-Neptune \u2014 unless you count the hypothesized \u201cPlanet Nine\u201d that some scientists think lurks at the outer edge of the solar system. (For the record, Fulton doesn't \u2014 not yet.) But researchers are bent on figuring out what leads a world to become rocky rather than gassy, because as far as we're aware life can only take shape on solid ground.Story continues below advertisementKepler's original mission ended in 2013 when one of the wheels that helped to keep the spacecraft pointed toward the Cygnus constellation failed,\u00a0so it could no longer scan the same small slice of sky. But by using pressure from light particles from the sun to stay oriented, the telescope has been refashioned for a second exoplanet search project called K2. NASA estimates the telescope has enough fuel to remain active into 2018.AdvertisementBy then, the space agency hopes to be ready to launch\u00a0the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which will search for small planets around the brightest stars in the sky, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is designed to detect atmospheres on other planets.\u00a0The results from Kepler, that new satellite and the Webb will inform the next\u00a0generation of telescopes \u2014 ones that can actually take pictures of planets in motion around distant stars.\u201cIt feels a bit like the end of an era,\u201d Thompson said, \u201cbut actually I see it as a new beginning. It's amazing the things that Kepler has found. It has shown us these terrestrial worlds, and we still have all this work to do to really understand how common Earths are in the galaxy.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article misstated the size of exoplanet KOB 7711. It is 30 percent bigger than Earth, not 30 times as big.\u00a0Read more:Quantum entanglement, science's 'spookiest' phenomenon, achieved in spaceAstronomers just achieved something Einstein said was impossibleJupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites show Scientists are using the Kepler space telescope to determine how many exoplanets our galaxy may harbor. And just maybe they'll answer the question: Are we alone? NASA finds 10 new potentially habitable, \u2018Earth-like\u2019 worlds",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Launches on Journey to See the Dawn of Starlight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3440",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/science/james-webb-telescope-launch.html",
        "text": "Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe. Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe. The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers headed for an orbit around the sun on Saturday in the form of the biggest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana, a teetering pillar of fire and smoke embarking on a million-mile trip to the morning of time.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye and Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Launches on Journey to See the Dawn of Starlight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3441",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/science/james-webb-telescope-launch.html",
        "text": "Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe. Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe. The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers headed for an orbit around the sun on Saturday in the form of the biggest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana, a teetering pillar of fire and smoke embarking on a million-mile trip to the morning of time.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye and Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Launches on Journey to See the Dawn of Starlight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3442",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/science/james-webb-telescope-launch.html",
        "text": "Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe. Astronomers were jubilant as the spacecraft made it off the launchpad following decades of delays and cost overruns. The Webb is set to offer a new keyhole into the earliest moments of our universe. The dreams and work of a generation of astronomers headed for an orbit around the sun on Saturday in the form of the biggest and most expensive space-based observatory ever built. The James Webb Space Telescope, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, lifted off from a spaceport near the Equator in Kourou, French Guiana, a teetering pillar of fire and smoke embarking on a million-mile trip to the morning of time.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye and Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "New planets discovered orbiting a star 11 light-years away (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3443",
        "date": "2020-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/06/25/new-planets-discovered-gliese-887/",
        "text": "Astronomers have discovered at least two, and possibly three, planets orbiting a nearby star \u2014 a planetary system so close that a new generation of telescopes should be able to scrutinize it for potential chemical signatures of a living world, according to a report published Thursday in the journal Science. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe star is officially GJ 887, or Gliese 887, named for the scientist who put together a catalogue of stars. It\u2019s a red dwarf star \u2014 cooler than our sun and not nearly as big. It is 11 light-years away, or 64 trillion miles, which is cosmically right next door. Only 11 star systems are closer to our sun than this one.Astronomers studied the light from the star for months and could see that it was being tugged by the gravity of orbiting bodies, according to the new report. The planets are outside our solar system \u2014 what astronomers call exoplanets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI would really like to go and explore,\u201d said Carole Haswell, an author of the paper and an exoplanet expert at Open University in London. \u201cI would like to think that\u2019s where the human adventure is going.\u201dAt the simplest level, the discovery is the latest reminder that planets around stars are common \u2014 something no one knew just a generation ago, before the hunt for exoplanets took off in 1995, the year Swiss astronomers announced that they\u2019d detected a planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi.\u201cOur dream is that every star has planets. It\u2019s becoming a reality,\u201d said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved with this study. \u201cIt\u2019s incredible to see it come true.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAstronomers have found more than 4,000 exoplanets in recent decades. Scientists are eager to know whether these worlds have atmospheres \u2014 and, if so, what kind of gases envelop them. Water vapor, carbon dioxide and oxygen gas, in particular, may be markers of life on an alien world.AdvertisementBut many exoplanets are too far beyond the reach of atmosphere-sensing telescopes. Which is why this study is part of a project, run by the European Southern Observatory, focused on the closest stars. The team has found seven exoplanets around four stars.\u201cThe newly detected planets orbiting Gliese 887 are the best possibilities, of all the known planets in close proximity to the sun, to see if they have atmospheres,\u201d said study author Sandra Jeffers, an astrophysicist at Germany\u2019s University of G\u00f6ttingen.Story continues below advertisementAstrobiologists have long debated whether red dwarf stars are congenial to life. Most of them writhe with magnetic activity and erupt in flares, belching radiation potent enough to sterilize life. Yet GJ 887, the study authors observe, is remarkably calm. \u201cThis particular one presents a benign environment for its planets,\u201d Haswell said. \u201cIt\u2019s quite a nice one.\u201dAdvertisementGJ 887 is the brightest red dwarf in the night sky but nonetheless is too dim to see with the naked eye.What red dwarf stars lack in mass and brightness they make up for in longevity. \u201cBecause they\u2019re burning their nuclear fuel so much more prudently, their life is very much longer\u201d than suns like ours, Haswell said.Story continues below advertisementThis study adds to evidence that red dwarf stars may commonly host planets, said Knicole Colon, an astrophysicist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center who was not a member of the research team. \u201cThe star closest to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is known to host at least one exoplanet,\u201d Colon said, referring to another red dwarf, \u201cbut discovering additional nearby planets is important to understand the demographics of exoplanets in the galaxy.\u201dJeffers, Haswell and an international team of astronomer colleagues used a planet-hunting telescope in the Chilean desert to monitor the star for three months. The device used is so sensitive that it can detect movements of a meter per second, Haswell said \u2014 it can sense a sun trillions of miles away, moving at speeds as slow as a person walks.AdvertisementSubtle perturbations in the star\u2019s light revealed that gravity from nearby planets tugged on Gliese 887.Story continues below advertisementThe pattern of those shifts of starlight suggested that two \u201csuperEarths\u201d \u2014 at least four to seven times the size of our own \u2014 are orbiting the star at a close distance and at a dizzying rate, with one needing just nine days to complete a full tour and the other, 22 days.Additional wobbles in the starlight hint at the existence of a third planet. \u201cWhether there\u2019s more planets in the system, I don\u2019t know,\u201d said study author Paul Butler, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.The scientists could not say conclusively that they had found it because the star\u2019s natural activity might have created a false signal of a third orbiting body.Story continues below advertisementBut if that planet is really there, it would be in the \u201chabitable zone,\u201d an orbital region in which the amount of radiation from the star would allow water to remain liquid at the planet\u2019s surface rather than freezing or boiling away.At 33,000 mph, the speed of NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft cruising at the edge of the solar system, a trip to GJ 887 would take more than 220,000 years.Read more:This star is the farthest ever seen. It\u2019s 9 billion light-years away.There\u2019s a new planet in the neighborhood \u2014 and it looks like a nice place to liveScientists discover 7 \u2018Earthlike\u2019 planets orbiting a nearby star The planets are so close that a new generation of telescopes should be able to scrutinize them for potential chemical signatures of a living world. New planets discovered orbiting a star 11 light-years away",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "The bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3444",
        "date": "2019-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/26/bizarre-brilliant-rules-naming-new-stuff-space/",
        "text": "Aspiring lunar explorers, take heed \u2014 any newly discovered ridges on the moon must be named for a geoscientist. If you want to name a landform on Saturn\u2019s satellite Titan, you\u2019d better be a fantasy or science fiction fan: Mountains and plains on the lake-covered moon are styled after places in Tolkien\u2019s Middle Earth and Frank Herbert\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d series. And almost everything on Io, the eruptive moon of Jupiter, must have a name associated with fire, volcanoes, or Dante\u2019s \u201cInferno.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo decrees the International Astronomical Union, the official arbiter of planetary and satellite nomenclature since 1919. As ever more powerful telescopes and ambitious new robotic missions add to the identified real estate of the solar system, the IAU\u2019s brilliant, byzantine and sometimes marvelously nerdy naming guidelines help bring order to our crowded skies.The IAU\u2019s rules are in the news this month after the Carnegie Institution for Science announced it needed help naming several moons of Jupiter discovered last year. Carnegie astronomer Scott Sheppard, who spotted the new moons using a giant telescope in Chile, said suggestions should be tweeted to the handle @JupiterLunacy using the hashtag #NameJupitersMoons.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, protocols for planetary nomenclature being what they are, Sheppard can only consider names that meet a few key criteria:It must come from a character in Greek or Roman mythology who was either a descendant or lover of the god known as Zeus (in Greek) or Jupiter (Latin). It must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can\u2019t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years. It can\u2019t belong to a living person and can\u2019t be too similar to the name of any existing moons or asteroids. If the moon in question is prograde (it circles in the same direction as its planet rotates) the name must end in an \u201ca.\u201d If it is retrograde (circling in the opposite direction), the name must end in an \u201ce.\u201dEasy peasy, right?Story continues below advertisement\u201cJupiter is one of the more restrictive ones,\u201d Sheppard said. Even though the king of the gods was quite the philanderer, there is a limit to the number of mythological characters who meet the IAU criteria. \u201cThe \u2018ends in e\u2019 scenario is actually running out of names,\u201d the astronomer said.AdvertisementGareth Williams, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who serves on the IAU working groups for planetary system and small bodies nomenclature, said that these stringent guidelines are necessary to avoid confusion in the study of the cosmos. Before the union came along in the early 20th century, the solar system was a mess.Political fights and international disputes occasionally broke out over the names of new planets; Uranus was very nearly called \u201cGeorge\u2019s star\u201d after England\u2019s King George III awarded an annual stipend and plush new digs in Windsor Castle to the planet\u2019s discoverer, William Herschel. Improvements to telescopes that made it possible to identify the inhabitants of the asteroid belt resulted in scores of new rocky bodies being discovered every year. (One scientist derisively called them \u201cvermin of the sky.\") But few researchers took the time to cross-check whether their supposed \u201cdiscovery\u201d had actually been seen before. Maps of Mars and the moon were similarly rife with conflicts. A given crater or dome could have three different names \u2014 and a given name might describe two entirely different objects.SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft carried a mannequin to the International Space Station, a big step for NASA proving commercial human spaceflight could happen soon. (NASA)It wasn\u2019t until 1913 that anyone published a definitive list of every known feature on the moon \u2014 then the solar system\u2019s most-studied object. Work by Mary Adela Blagg, an English astronomer who meticulously tracked each new discovery and mismatched name, led to the creation of the IAU\u2019s first formal list of lunar landmarks in 1935. Two decades later, the organization published a similar guide to Martian topography, drawing mostly on maps developed by astronomers over the past century.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the advent of the Space Age, \u201cpeople were making new discoveries by the bucketload,\u201d Williams said. It was far more than one person could keep track of, so the IAU established a Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) to oversee the naming process.When the first images are beamed back from a mission to a new celestial body, the spacecraft team behind the encounter typically proposes categories and themes for naming the landforms they observe, said Rita Schulz, the chairwoman of the WGPSN.After NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto in 2015, for example, scientists on the team and at the IAU devised a naming scheme focused on stories of the underworld and voyages of discovery. They agreed that mountains on the planet would be named for historic explorers while dark spots and plains on its moon Charon could commemorate the destinations of fictional space expeditions. As a result, we have the Tenzing Montes on Pluto \u2014 20,000-foot-tall ice mountains named for Nepalese mountaineer Tenzing Norgay \u2014 and a macula, or dark spot, on Charon called \u201cMordor.\u201d (Space is full of Lord of the Rings references.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce themes are decided, anyone can suggest a name for a new body or feature so long as he or she can demonstrate it is scientifically useful. New suggestions are reviewed by the relevant task group and the members of the overall working group and, once approved, are published in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. Among the most recent additions are Hippocamp, a tiny moon of Neptune discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope, and Statio Tainhe, the landing site where the Chinese spacecraft Chang\u2019e 4 touched down on the far side of the moon \u2014 a first for humanity. \u201cHippocampi\u201d are the horselike sea monsters that drove Neptune\u2019s chariot in ancient myth; \u201cTianhe\u201d comes from the ancient Chinese name for the Milky Way.Having themes \u201cminimizes the chance that someone will want to give the same name to two different features on two different bodies because the themes will be different on each,\u201d Williams said. \u201cIt also ties things together. If you know your mythology . . . you can immediately tell what body it\u2019s on and what type [of feature] it is.\u201dLately, space scientists have needed to learn more than just Greek and Roman myth. As secretary for the Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature, Williams said he has sought to diversify the themes asteroids and other small objects to reflect the \u201cchanging life experiences of the astronomers that are naming them.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe is particularly proud of asteroids named for popular musicians. \u201cNot the sort of teeny-bop noise that you get,\u201d he said, \u201cbut people who are as worthy as the great classical composers,\u201d such as Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday and David Bowie.Minor planets \u2014 any body in orbit around the sun that is not a planet or comet \u2014 are the most freewheeling of solar system objects. With a few exceptions, most new asteroids can bear any name that is not offensive or overtly commercial or political. These space rocks carry the names of mathematicians, chemists, engineers, high school teachers, the members of the Beatles and the British comedy group Monty Python, all three Bronte sisters, runner Jesse Owens, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor and activist Malala Yousafzai.But even the indulgent members of the minor planet community have their limits. In the 1980s, when astronomer James Gibson christened a newly discovered asteroid with the name of his cat, Mr. Spock, \u201ccertain people \u2014 I\u2019m not going to mention any names \u2014 felt that was inappropriate,\u201d Williams said. \u201cSo now that is strongly discouraged.\u201dBut the IAU does not change names once they are chosen. The asteroid 2309 Mr. Spock circles the sun still. Craters on Mars can be named for towns with 100,000 people or fewer. Everything on Venus is named for a woman. There are asteroids for every member of the Beatles -- but don't try to name one after your pet. The bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3445",
        "date": "2019-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/26/bizarre-brilliant-rules-naming-new-stuff-space/",
        "text": "Aspiring lunar explorers, take heed \u2014 any newly discovered ridges on the moon must be named for a geoscientist. If you want to name a landform on Saturn\u2019s satellite Titan, you\u2019d better be a fantasy or science fiction fan: Mountains and plains on the lake-covered moon are styled after places in Tolkien\u2019s Middle Earth and Frank Herbert\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d series. And almost everything on Io, the eruptive moon of Jupiter, must have a name associated with fire, volcanoes, or Dante\u2019s \u201cInferno.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo decrees the International Astronomical Union, the official arbiter of planetary and satellite nomenclature since 1919. As ever more powerful telescopes and ambitious new robotic missions add to the identified real estate of the solar system, the IAU\u2019s brilliant, byzantine and sometimes marvelously nerdy naming guidelines help bring order to our crowded skies.The IAU\u2019s rules are in the news this month after the Carnegie Institution for Science announced it needed help naming several moons of Jupiter discovered last year. Carnegie astronomer Scott Sheppard, who spotted the new moons using a giant telescope in Chile, said suggestions should be tweeted to the handle @JupiterLunacy using the hashtag #NameJupitersMoons.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, protocols for planetary nomenclature being what they are, Sheppard can only consider names that meet a few key criteria:It must come from a character in Greek or Roman mythology who was either a descendant or lover of the god known as Zeus (in Greek) or Jupiter (Latin). It must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can\u2019t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years. It can\u2019t belong to a living person and can\u2019t be too similar to the name of any existing moons or asteroids. If the moon in question is prograde (it circles in the same direction as its planet rotates) the name must end in an \u201ca.\u201d If it is retrograde (circling in the opposite direction), the name must end in an \u201ce.\u201dEasy peasy, right?Story continues below advertisement\u201cJupiter is one of the more restrictive ones,\u201d Sheppard said. Even though the king of the gods was quite the philanderer, there is a limit to the number of mythological characters who meet the IAU criteria. \u201cThe \u2018ends in e\u2019 scenario is actually running out of names,\u201d the astronomer said.AdvertisementGareth Williams, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who serves on the IAU working groups for planetary system and small bodies nomenclature, said that these stringent guidelines are necessary to avoid confusion in the study of the cosmos. Before the union came along in the early 20th century, the solar system was a mess.Political fights and international disputes occasionally broke out over the names of new planets; Uranus was very nearly called \u201cGeorge\u2019s star\u201d after England\u2019s King George III awarded an annual stipend and plush new digs in Windsor Castle to the planet\u2019s discoverer, William Herschel. Improvements to telescopes that made it possible to identify the inhabitants of the asteroid belt resulted in scores of new rocky bodies being discovered every year. (One scientist derisively called them \u201cvermin of the sky.\") But few researchers took the time to cross-check whether their supposed \u201cdiscovery\u201d had actually been seen before. Maps of Mars and the moon were similarly rife with conflicts. A given crater or dome could have three different names \u2014 and a given name might describe two entirely different objects.SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft carried a mannequin to the International Space Station, a big step for NASA proving commercial human spaceflight could happen soon. (NASA)It wasn\u2019t until 1913 that anyone published a definitive list of every known feature on the moon \u2014 then the solar system\u2019s most-studied object. Work by Mary Adela Blagg, an English astronomer who meticulously tracked each new discovery and mismatched name, led to the creation of the IAU\u2019s first formal list of lunar landmarks in 1935. Two decades later, the organization published a similar guide to Martian topography, drawing mostly on maps developed by astronomers over the past century.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the advent of the Space Age, \u201cpeople were making new discoveries by the bucketload,\u201d Williams said. It was far more than one person could keep track of, so the IAU established a Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) to oversee the naming process.When the first images are beamed back from a mission to a new celestial body, the spacecraft team behind the encounter typically proposes categories and themes for naming the landforms they observe, said Rita Schulz, the chairwoman of the WGPSN.After NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto in 2015, for example, scientists on the team and at the IAU devised a naming scheme focused on stories of the underworld and voyages of discovery. They agreed that mountains on the planet would be named for historic explorers while dark spots and plains on its moon Charon could commemorate the destinations of fictional space expeditions. As a result, we have the Tenzing Montes on Pluto \u2014 20,000-foot-tall ice mountains named for Nepalese mountaineer Tenzing Norgay \u2014 and a macula, or dark spot, on Charon called \u201cMordor.\u201d (Space is full of Lord of the Rings references.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce themes are decided, anyone can suggest a name for a new body or feature so long as he or she can demonstrate it is scientifically useful. New suggestions are reviewed by the relevant task group and the members of the overall working group and, once approved, are published in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. Among the most recent additions are Hippocamp, a tiny moon of Neptune discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope, and Statio Tainhe, the landing site where the Chinese spacecraft Chang\u2019e 4 touched down on the far side of the moon \u2014 a first for humanity. \u201cHippocampi\u201d are the horselike sea monsters that drove Neptune\u2019s chariot in ancient myth; \u201cTianhe\u201d comes from the ancient Chinese name for the Milky Way.Having themes \u201cminimizes the chance that someone will want to give the same name to two different features on two different bodies because the themes will be different on each,\u201d Williams said. \u201cIt also ties things together. If you know your mythology . . . you can immediately tell what body it\u2019s on and what type [of feature] it is.\u201dLately, space scientists have needed to learn more than just Greek and Roman myth. As secretary for the Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature, Williams said he has sought to diversify the themes asteroids and other small objects to reflect the \u201cchanging life experiences of the astronomers that are naming them.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe is particularly proud of asteroids named for popular musicians. \u201cNot the sort of teeny-bop noise that you get,\u201d he said, \u201cbut people who are as worthy as the great classical composers,\u201d such as Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday and David Bowie.Minor planets \u2014 any body in orbit around the sun that is not a planet or comet \u2014 are the most freewheeling of solar system objects. With a few exceptions, most new asteroids can bear any name that is not offensive or overtly commercial or political. These space rocks carry the names of mathematicians, chemists, engineers, high school teachers, the members of the Beatles and the British comedy group Monty Python, all three Bronte sisters, runner Jesse Owens, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor and activist Malala Yousafzai.But even the indulgent members of the minor planet community have their limits. In the 1980s, when astronomer James Gibson christened a newly discovered asteroid with the name of his cat, Mr. Spock, \u201ccertain people \u2014 I\u2019m not going to mention any names \u2014 felt that was inappropriate,\u201d Williams said. \u201cSo now that is strongly discouraged.\u201dBut the IAU does not change names once they are chosen. The asteroid 2309 Mr. Spock circles the sun still. Craters on Mars can be named for towns with 100,000 people or fewer. Everything on Venus is named for a woman. There are asteroids for every member of the Beatles -- but don't try to name one after your pet. The bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3446",
        "date": "2019-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/26/bizarre-brilliant-rules-naming-new-stuff-space/",
        "text": "Aspiring lunar explorers, take heed \u2014 any newly discovered ridges on the moon must be named for a geoscientist. If you want to name a landform on Saturn\u2019s satellite Titan, you\u2019d better be a fantasy or science fiction fan: Mountains and plains on the lake-covered moon are styled after places in Tolkien\u2019s Middle Earth and Frank Herbert\u2019s \u201cDune\u201d series. And almost everything on Io, the eruptive moon of Jupiter, must have a name associated with fire, volcanoes, or Dante\u2019s \u201cInferno.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo decrees the International Astronomical Union, the official arbiter of planetary and satellite nomenclature since 1919. As ever more powerful telescopes and ambitious new robotic missions add to the identified real estate of the solar system, the IAU\u2019s brilliant, byzantine and sometimes marvelously nerdy naming guidelines help bring order to our crowded skies.The IAU\u2019s rules are in the news this month after the Carnegie Institution for Science announced it needed help naming several moons of Jupiter discovered last year. Carnegie astronomer Scott Sheppard, who spotted the new moons using a giant telescope in Chile, said suggestions should be tweeted to the handle @JupiterLunacy using the hashtag #NameJupitersMoons.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, protocols for planetary nomenclature being what they are, Sheppard can only consider names that meet a few key criteria:It must come from a character in Greek or Roman mythology who was either a descendant or lover of the god known as Zeus (in Greek) or Jupiter (Latin). It must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can\u2019t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years. It can\u2019t belong to a living person and can\u2019t be too similar to the name of any existing moons or asteroids. If the moon in question is prograde (it circles in the same direction as its planet rotates) the name must end in an \u201ca.\u201d If it is retrograde (circling in the opposite direction), the name must end in an \u201ce.\u201dEasy peasy, right?Story continues below advertisement\u201cJupiter is one of the more restrictive ones,\u201d Sheppard said. Even though the king of the gods was quite the philanderer, there is a limit to the number of mythological characters who meet the IAU criteria. \u201cThe \u2018ends in e\u2019 scenario is actually running out of names,\u201d the astronomer said.AdvertisementGareth Williams, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who serves on the IAU working groups for planetary system and small bodies nomenclature, said that these stringent guidelines are necessary to avoid confusion in the study of the cosmos. Before the union came along in the early 20th century, the solar system was a mess.Political fights and international disputes occasionally broke out over the names of new planets; Uranus was very nearly called \u201cGeorge\u2019s star\u201d after England\u2019s King George III awarded an annual stipend and plush new digs in Windsor Castle to the planet\u2019s discoverer, William Herschel. Improvements to telescopes that made it possible to identify the inhabitants of the asteroid belt resulted in scores of new rocky bodies being discovered every year. (One scientist derisively called them \u201cvermin of the sky.\") But few researchers took the time to cross-check whether their supposed \u201cdiscovery\u201d had actually been seen before. Maps of Mars and the moon were similarly rife with conflicts. A given crater or dome could have three different names \u2014 and a given name might describe two entirely different objects.SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft carried a mannequin to the International Space Station, a big step for NASA proving commercial human spaceflight could happen soon. (NASA)It wasn\u2019t until 1913 that anyone published a definitive list of every known feature on the moon \u2014 then the solar system\u2019s most-studied object. Work by Mary Adela Blagg, an English astronomer who meticulously tracked each new discovery and mismatched name, led to the creation of the IAU\u2019s first formal list of lunar landmarks in 1935. Two decades later, the organization published a similar guide to Martian topography, drawing mostly on maps developed by astronomers over the past century.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the advent of the Space Age, \u201cpeople were making new discoveries by the bucketload,\u201d Williams said. It was far more than one person could keep track of, so the IAU established a Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) to oversee the naming process.When the first images are beamed back from a mission to a new celestial body, the spacecraft team behind the encounter typically proposes categories and themes for naming the landforms they observe, said Rita Schulz, the chairwoman of the WGPSN.After NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe flew past Pluto in 2015, for example, scientists on the team and at the IAU devised a naming scheme focused on stories of the underworld and voyages of discovery. They agreed that mountains on the planet would be named for historic explorers while dark spots and plains on its moon Charon could commemorate the destinations of fictional space expeditions. As a result, we have the Tenzing Montes on Pluto \u2014 20,000-foot-tall ice mountains named for Nepalese mountaineer Tenzing Norgay \u2014 and a macula, or dark spot, on Charon called \u201cMordor.\u201d (Space is full of Lord of the Rings references.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce themes are decided, anyone can suggest a name for a new body or feature so long as he or she can demonstrate it is scientifically useful. New suggestions are reviewed by the relevant task group and the members of the overall working group and, once approved, are published in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. Among the most recent additions are Hippocamp, a tiny moon of Neptune discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope, and Statio Tainhe, the landing site where the Chinese spacecraft Chang\u2019e 4 touched down on the far side of the moon \u2014 a first for humanity. \u201cHippocampi\u201d are the horselike sea monsters that drove Neptune\u2019s chariot in ancient myth; \u201cTianhe\u201d comes from the ancient Chinese name for the Milky Way.Having themes \u201cminimizes the chance that someone will want to give the same name to two different features on two different bodies because the themes will be different on each,\u201d Williams said. \u201cIt also ties things together. If you know your mythology . . . you can immediately tell what body it\u2019s on and what type [of feature] it is.\u201dLately, space scientists have needed to learn more than just Greek and Roman myth. As secretary for the Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature, Williams said he has sought to diversify the themes asteroids and other small objects to reflect the \u201cchanging life experiences of the astronomers that are naming them.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe is particularly proud of asteroids named for popular musicians. \u201cNot the sort of teeny-bop noise that you get,\u201d he said, \u201cbut people who are as worthy as the great classical composers,\u201d such as Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday and David Bowie.Minor planets \u2014 any body in orbit around the sun that is not a planet or comet \u2014 are the most freewheeling of solar system objects. With a few exceptions, most new asteroids can bear any name that is not offensive or overtly commercial or political. These space rocks carry the names of mathematicians, chemists, engineers, high school teachers, the members of the Beatles and the British comedy group Monty Python, all three Bronte sisters, runner Jesse Owens, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor and activist Malala Yousafzai.But even the indulgent members of the minor planet community have their limits. In the 1980s, when astronomer James Gibson christened a newly discovered asteroid with the name of his cat, Mr. Spock, \u201ccertain people \u2014 I\u2019m not going to mention any names \u2014 felt that was inappropriate,\u201d Williams said. \u201cSo now that is strongly discouraged.\u201dBut the IAU does not change names once they are chosen. The asteroid 2309 Mr. Spock circles the sun still. Craters on Mars can be named for towns with 100,000 people or fewer. Everything on Venus is named for a woman. There are asteroids for every member of the Beatles -- but don't try to name one after your pet. The bizarre and brilliant rules for naming new stuff in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deep-sea life on Earth gives us a clue to what aliens would be like (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3447",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/13/deep-sea-life-on-earth-gives-us-a-clue-to-what-aliens-would-be-like/",
        "text": "As the spacecraft Cassini flew past Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, the orbiter detected\u00a0molecular hydrogen, a finding announced\u00a0Thursday. It's\u00a0a nifty discovery, hinting\u00a0that heated vents beneath Enceladus's oceans may have the right conditions for life. We didn't find any actual evidence of extraterrestrial organisms, though, despite NASA's cryptic news conference\u00a0tease.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut! We don't have to travel far for an example of stumbling upon strange and unexpected creatures in a\u00a0deep sea: only back to the 1970s, when humans met a cluster of giant tubeworms. These worms, according to the science of the time, had no business wriggling their red tentacles 8,000 feet under the ocean surface. A small group of geologists had ventured 400 miles off the coast of Ecuador to scour the depths of the Pacific Ocean, looking for piping hot deep-sea vents. Scientists predicted that these hydrothermal vents should exist. Nobody had seen a vent before, until oceanographer Jack Corliss peered out the porthole of Alvin, one the world's first deep-sea\u00a0submersibles. Corliss also saw the worms.NASA finds ingredients for life spewing out of Saturn\u2019s icy moon EnceladusHe was no biologist. The oceanographer phoned up to the surface, where Kathy Crane, then a\u00a0graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was controlling the sub from the catamaran\u00a0Lulu.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIsn\u2019t the deep ocean supposed to be like a desert?\u201d Corliss asked.\u00a0\u201cWell, there\u2019s all these animals down here.\u201dThe researchers anticipated sterile lava fields. Instead they found not only the\u00a04-foot-long worms, but a host of clams, crabs and an octopus. The non-biologists, for want of formaldehyde,\u00a0preserved a few bizarre specimens in potent Russian vodka they'd bought in Panama.\u00a0(The Smithsonian\u00a0still has one of the worms collected from the 1977 expedition.)\u201cSome people would claim that this was one of the greatest biological discoveries of the last century,\u201d Edith Widder, a deep-sea scientist and founder of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, told The Washington Post.Story continues below advertisementThe explorers aboard Alvin were nearly a mile below the ocean's midnight zone \u2014 the point at which sunlight no longer penetrates water and photosynthesis is impossible. A process called chemosynthesis was the key to life in this Stygian seascape.Advertisement\u201cChemosynthesis is often called dark energy, in analogy to photosynthesis which is energy from the sun,\u201d said\u00a0Nicole Dubilier, director of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology.Plants and other photosynthetic organisms rely on solar energy to fuel a reaction between carbon dioxide and water, yielding sugar and oxygen.\u00a0Chemosynthesis works in a similar manner, substituting chemical nutrients for light. In the inky depths of the sea, bacteria soak up particles spewed by hydrothermal vents. Near the Pacific \u201cblack smokers\u201d found in the 1970s, which belch up thick plumes, microbes can turn compounds such as\u00a0hydrogen sulfide into sulfur. The microbes channel the energy released in this chemical reaction to create sugars. In the Atlantic, other bacteria live off methane vents, forming strange\u00a0yarnlike strands.Story continues below advertisementIn every\u00a0hydrothermal ecosystem, microbes are the foundation. \u201cOnly microorganisms can gain energy through chemosynthesis,\u201d Dubilier said. \u201cBy hooking up with bacteria that can use the \u2018dark energy\u2019 available at hydrothermal vents, animals can thrive.\u201d As she and her colleagues wrote in a 2008 review, these tiny organisms support a huge amount of biodiversity, representing at least\u00a0seven animal phyla.AdvertisementThe ecosystems are \u201cnatural wonders of the world,\u201d said Cindy Lee Van Dover, a deep-sea biologist at Duke University in North Carolina. \u201cWe think of them as living libraries, living laboratories.\u201dSome 3.77 billion years ago, these churning laboratories may have\u00a0supported the earliest life on the planet. The world's oldest known fossils were remnants of vent-dwelling microbial colonies, according to Canadian scientists who announced\u00a0the discovery in March.Story continues below advertisementSwimming along\u00a0vents today are snails and shrimp swarms, which feast on bacteria. Tubeworms grow in clumps that biologists liken to gardens. The worms Corliss spotted have no digestive\u00a0guts, instead using their flowerlike tentacles to sweep sulfur compounds inside their bodies. The chemicals end up in the worms'\u00a0trophosomes, an organ filled with billions and billions of bacterial cells. These chemosynthetic bacteria\u00a0use up the sulfur, producing nutrients that feed the worms.Advertisement(Available oxygen is a crucial difference between our deep sea and the one on Saturn's moon. \"Enceladus probably doesn\u2019t have oxygen, so animals \u2014 at least as we know them here on Earth \u2014 couldn\u2019t live there,\" Dubilier said. \"But many microorganisms can live without oxygen, so they might be able to live on Enceladus.\")Hydrothermal vents continue to spill new secrets. In June 2016, almost four decades after the scientists aboard Alvin saw the first vents, University of Rhode Island scientists discovered\u00a0the first\u00a0bioluminescent organism near a black smoker. Widder, an expert in bioluminescence, says the trick to spotting such animals is to get deep-sea vessels to turn off their lights\u00a0\u2014 which can be a hard sell near vents that eject nearly 700-degree water.Story continues below advertisementMining companies have also set their sights on the metal-rich areas around the hydrothermal vents. No corporation yet has permission to mine in international waters, Van Dover said. But Nautilus Minerals, a Canadian mining company, has embarked on a project called Solwara 1\u00a0to extract copper and gold off Papua New Guinea, a mile below the surface.Advertisement\u201cI don't advocate one way or another about mining,\u201d Van Dover said. Rather,\u00a0her research involves weighing options \u2014 \u201cwhy we would mine,\u201d she said, \u201cand why we wouldn't.\u201dHumans need resources that the deep sea could provide. Van Dover pointed out that, like many people, she owns a cellphone, which requires rare metals to function. Deep-sea mining, though, raises several environmental questions. \u201cWhat are you going to do with the wastewater?\u201d she said. Van Dover described vent ecosystems as \u201crobust,\u201d but\u00a0deep-sea conservationists do not yet know what the cumulative impact of mining might be on these habitats.Story continues below advertisementOne fear is that the ocean will lose something humans\u00a0never knew existed. The worms that lack digestive tracts are something of a biological marvel, among the seafloor's oddest animals. Was it just luck, Van Dover wondered, that these\u00a0creatures happened to live near the first hydrothermal vents humans ever encountered?AdvertisementPut another way: Is there something out there, skittering beneath a cloud of black smoke, that\u2019s stranger still?Read more:Looking for aliens on ocean worlds: \u2018You\u2019d be in denial to believe there isn\u2019t life out there\u2019Newfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on EarthOne of Saturn\u2019s moons could have the ingredients necessary for lifeNASA just\u00a0found the most habitable place\u00a0in our solar system While scientists make new discoveries near hydrothermal vents, mining companies see these habitats as valuable metal sources. Deep-sea life on Earth gives us a clue to what aliens would be like",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Deep Blue Vision of Earth From an Asteroid Hunter (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3448",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/science/osiris-rex-earth-photo.html",
        "text": "As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on Friday, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made a composite portrait of the planet. As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on Friday, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made a composite portrait of the planet. As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on its journey to an asteroid, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft took a moment to admire the view \u2014 from 106,000 miles away.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Deep Blue Vision of Earth From an Asteroid Hunter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3449",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/science/osiris-rex-earth-photo.html",
        "text": "As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on Friday, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made a composite portrait of the planet. As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on Friday, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made a composite portrait of the planet. As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on its journey to an asteroid, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft took a moment to admire the view \u2014 from 106,000 miles away.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Deep Blue Vision of Earth From an Asteroid Hunter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3450",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/science/osiris-rex-earth-photo.html",
        "text": "As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on Friday, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made a composite portrait of the planet. As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on Friday, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft made a composite portrait of the planet. As it slingshotted past Earth at 19,000 miles per hour on its journey to an asteroid, NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft took a moment to admire the view \u2014 from 106,000 miles away.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA releases new photos of Jupiter \u2014 and a recording of its moon that sounds like R2-D2 (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3451",
        "date": "2021-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/12/19/juno-mission-ganymede/",
        "text": "As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth\u2019s origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter. And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system\u2019s biggest planet \u2014 in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet\u2019s ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft\u2019s travels around one of its moons. But it\u2019s not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter \u2014 space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter\u2019s moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.NASA scientists captured sounds from the solar system's largest planet and its largest moon, Juno. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Univ. of Iowa)Juno, which NASA launched in 2011 and began orbiting Jupiter in July 2016, is the eighth spacecraft to visit Jupiter, and the first to probe below the giant planet\u2019s thick gas cover. It fought Jupiter\u2019s extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUncovering the secrets behind Jupiter\u2019s workings could shed light on the evolution of other planets and the formation of the solar system itself, said Scott Bolton, the Juno mission\u2019s principal investigator.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to understand where we came from, how we got here,\u201d Bolton told The Washington Post. \u201cAnd Jupiter is a big part of that story.\u201dTo accomplish that objective, the spacecraft has flown across the giant planet, mapping its magnetic field. The mission, which recently completed its 38th orbit, was extended this year to add flybys of Jupiter\u2019s moons \u2014 such as the one in June that led to the Ganymede audio track. The sound, Bolton said, represents an immersive experience into the mission\u2019s travels past the moon for the first time in more than two decades.Story continues below advertisementJuno also discovered that the planet is being pelted by tiny but powerful particles from Mars. Jupiter\u2019s gravity acts like a gate pushing the micrometeorites out of its orbit \u2014 similar to how it may have bullied other ancient planets out of the solar system.More evidence that Jupiter kicked ancient planets out of the solar systemScientists are now setting up to detail Jupiter\u2019s ring. Much like Saturn and Uranus, the gas giant has a faint ring of dust created by two of its moons. The spacecraft already took a look at it from inside the ring \u2014 an observation that allowed the researchers to see the Perseus constellation from a different perspective.\u201cWhat always impresses me is we wind up discovering all kinds of stuff that we never anticipated,\u201d said Jack Connerney, Juno\u2019s deputy principal investigator.Jupiter is unlike the eight other planets in our solar system. With the exception of a rocky core, the planet is made of gaseous and liquid elements. Surrounded by electrons, protons and ions that rapidly bounce around, Jupiter\u2019s cloud cover has a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen. Its core remains a mystery, but scientists believe a motley of diffused elements that are heavier than helium are at the very center. This configuration paves the way for a dynamo \u2014 or the source of a magnetic field \u2014 Connerney, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe result, he said, are \u201cspectacular aurorae, or tremendous depositions of energy.\u201d Much like our own Northern Lights, but thousands of times brighter.With the data generated by Juno, Connerney and his team were able to map Jupiter\u2019s magnetic field. Their study also revealed that the dynamo action stems from metallic hydrogen beneath a layer of helium raindrops.The interior of the planet is dynamic as well. It spins every 10 hours and holds raging wind jets that give Jupiter its Van Gogh-like swirls. Within its southern latitudes, the Great Red Spot is essentially a hurricane that has been observed since the age of Galileo. But scientists have found another formidable patch: the Great Blue Spot.Story continues below advertisementThe Great Blue Spot \u201cis really a magnetic anomaly,\u201d Connerney said. Its name stems not from its color but from how magnetic field lines are drawn \u2014 sporting blue when they go into the planet. It also offers clues about the planet\u2019s workings.\u201cWe actually detected a big change from the beginning of our Juno mission in 2016 to now,\u201d he said. \u201cWe detected a change in the magnetic field that is equivalent to the eastward drift of the great blue spot in time, very slow about four centimeters per second but fast enough to circle the planet in about 350 years.\u201dThe Great Blue Spot is being pulled away by Jupiter\u2019s jet streams \u2014 a pattern that shows that the planet\u2019s winds extend down much deeper than they originally believed. The discovery of the anomaly getting turned around, Bolton, Juno\u2019s principal investigator, could shed light into one of the biggest questions scientists are hoping to answer: How does Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere work?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is really the first time that we\u2019ve seen a magnetic field getting affected by the atmosphere,\u201d he said. \u201cIt really demonstrates that its deep atmosphere is very dynamic, much more than people had thought.\u201dUncovering Jupiter\u2019s secrets, said Bolton, is a humbling experience \u2014 one that can make us feel like tiny specks but also reminds us of how much there is left to explore.\u201cThroughout history we often thought of ourselves as the center of everything because, in a sense, you\u2019re looking out right from your own eyes and your own brain,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cBut there are many things out there.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this article omitted the first name of Jack Connerney, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The article has been corrected.Read moreScientists detect black holes devouring neutron starsNASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 yearsWestern monarch butterflies have been vanishing. This week, a sanctuary saw thousands return. NASA's Juno spacecraft collected electronic and magnetic data, then converted it into sounds humans can hear. NASA releases new photos of Jupiter \u2014 and a recording of its moon that sounds like R2-D2",
        "author": "Mar\u00eda Luisa Pa\u00fal"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA releases new photos of Jupiter \u2014 and a recording of its moon that sounds like R2-D2 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3452",
        "date": "2021-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/12/19/juno-mission-ganymede/",
        "text": "As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth\u2019s origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter. And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system\u2019s biggest planet \u2014 in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet\u2019s ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft\u2019s travels around one of its moons. But it\u2019s not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter \u2014 space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter\u2019s moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.NASA scientists captured sounds from the solar system's largest planet and its largest moon, Juno. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Univ. of Iowa)Juno, which NASA launched in 2011 and began orbiting Jupiter in July 2016, is the eighth spacecraft to visit Jupiter, and the first to probe below the giant planet\u2019s thick gas cover. It fought Jupiter\u2019s extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUncovering the secrets behind Jupiter\u2019s workings could shed light on the evolution of other planets and the formation of the solar system itself, said Scott Bolton, the Juno mission\u2019s principal investigator.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to understand where we came from, how we got here,\u201d Bolton told The Washington Post. \u201cAnd Jupiter is a big part of that story.\u201dTo accomplish that objective, the spacecraft has flown across the giant planet, mapping its magnetic field. The mission, which recently completed its 38th orbit, was extended this year to add flybys of Jupiter\u2019s moons \u2014 such as the one in June that led to the Ganymede audio track. The sound, Bolton said, represents an immersive experience into the mission\u2019s travels past the moon for the first time in more than two decades.Story continues below advertisementJuno also discovered that the planet is being pelted by tiny but powerful particles from Mars. Jupiter\u2019s gravity acts like a gate pushing the micrometeorites out of its orbit \u2014 similar to how it may have bullied other ancient planets out of the solar system.More evidence that Jupiter kicked ancient planets out of the solar systemScientists are now setting up to detail Jupiter\u2019s ring. Much like Saturn and Uranus, the gas giant has a faint ring of dust created by two of its moons. The spacecraft already took a look at it from inside the ring \u2014 an observation that allowed the researchers to see the Perseus constellation from a different perspective.\u201cWhat always impresses me is we wind up discovering all kinds of stuff that we never anticipated,\u201d said Jack Connerney, Juno\u2019s deputy principal investigator.Jupiter is unlike the eight other planets in our solar system. With the exception of a rocky core, the planet is made of gaseous and liquid elements. Surrounded by electrons, protons and ions that rapidly bounce around, Jupiter\u2019s cloud cover has a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen. Its core remains a mystery, but scientists believe a motley of diffused elements that are heavier than helium are at the very center. This configuration paves the way for a dynamo \u2014 or the source of a magnetic field \u2014 Connerney, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe result, he said, are \u201cspectacular aurorae, or tremendous depositions of energy.\u201d Much like our own Northern Lights, but thousands of times brighter.With the data generated by Juno, Connerney and his team were able to map Jupiter\u2019s magnetic field. Their study also revealed that the dynamo action stems from metallic hydrogen beneath a layer of helium raindrops.The interior of the planet is dynamic as well. It spins every 10 hours and holds raging wind jets that give Jupiter its Van Gogh-like swirls. Within its southern latitudes, the Great Red Spot is essentially a hurricane that has been observed since the age of Galileo. But scientists have found another formidable patch: the Great Blue Spot.Story continues below advertisementThe Great Blue Spot \u201cis really a magnetic anomaly,\u201d Connerney said. Its name stems not from its color but from how magnetic field lines are drawn \u2014 sporting blue when they go into the planet. It also offers clues about the planet\u2019s workings.\u201cWe actually detected a big change from the beginning of our Juno mission in 2016 to now,\u201d he said. \u201cWe detected a change in the magnetic field that is equivalent to the eastward drift of the great blue spot in time, very slow about four centimeters per second but fast enough to circle the planet in about 350 years.\u201dThe Great Blue Spot is being pulled away by Jupiter\u2019s jet streams \u2014 a pattern that shows that the planet\u2019s winds extend down much deeper than they originally believed. The discovery of the anomaly getting turned around, Bolton, Juno\u2019s principal investigator, could shed light into one of the biggest questions scientists are hoping to answer: How does Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere work?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is really the first time that we\u2019ve seen a magnetic field getting affected by the atmosphere,\u201d he said. \u201cIt really demonstrates that its deep atmosphere is very dynamic, much more than people had thought.\u201dUncovering Jupiter\u2019s secrets, said Bolton, is a humbling experience \u2014 one that can make us feel like tiny specks but also reminds us of how much there is left to explore.\u201cThroughout history we often thought of ourselves as the center of everything because, in a sense, you\u2019re looking out right from your own eyes and your own brain,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cBut there are many things out there.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this article omitted the first name of Jack Connerney, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The article has been corrected.Read moreScientists detect black holes devouring neutron starsNASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 yearsWestern monarch butterflies have been vanishing. This week, a sanctuary saw thousands return. NASA's Juno spacecraft collected electronic and magnetic data, then converted it into sounds humans can hear. NASA releases new photos of Jupiter \u2014 and a recording of its moon that sounds like R2-D2",
        "author": "Mar\u00eda Luisa Pa\u00fal"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA releases new photos of Jupiter \u2014 and a recording of its moon that sounds like R2-D2 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3453",
        "date": "2021-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/12/19/juno-mission-ganymede/",
        "text": "As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth\u2019s origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter. And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system\u2019s biggest planet \u2014 in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet\u2019s ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft\u2019s travels around one of its moons. But it\u2019s not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter \u2014 space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter\u2019s moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.NASA scientists captured sounds from the solar system's largest planet and its largest moon, Juno. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Univ. of Iowa)Juno, which NASA launched in 2011 and began orbiting Jupiter in July 2016, is the eighth spacecraft to visit Jupiter, and the first to probe below the giant planet\u2019s thick gas cover. It fought Jupiter\u2019s extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUncovering the secrets behind Jupiter\u2019s workings could shed light on the evolution of other planets and the formation of the solar system itself, said Scott Bolton, the Juno mission\u2019s principal investigator.\u201cWe\u2019re trying to understand where we came from, how we got here,\u201d Bolton told The Washington Post. \u201cAnd Jupiter is a big part of that story.\u201dTo accomplish that objective, the spacecraft has flown across the giant planet, mapping its magnetic field. The mission, which recently completed its 38th orbit, was extended this year to add flybys of Jupiter\u2019s moons \u2014 such as the one in June that led to the Ganymede audio track. The sound, Bolton said, represents an immersive experience into the mission\u2019s travels past the moon for the first time in more than two decades.Story continues below advertisementJuno also discovered that the planet is being pelted by tiny but powerful particles from Mars. Jupiter\u2019s gravity acts like a gate pushing the micrometeorites out of its orbit \u2014 similar to how it may have bullied other ancient planets out of the solar system.More evidence that Jupiter kicked ancient planets out of the solar systemScientists are now setting up to detail Jupiter\u2019s ring. Much like Saturn and Uranus, the gas giant has a faint ring of dust created by two of its moons. The spacecraft already took a look at it from inside the ring \u2014 an observation that allowed the researchers to see the Perseus constellation from a different perspective.\u201cWhat always impresses me is we wind up discovering all kinds of stuff that we never anticipated,\u201d said Jack Connerney, Juno\u2019s deputy principal investigator.Jupiter is unlike the eight other planets in our solar system. With the exception of a rocky core, the planet is made of gaseous and liquid elements. Surrounded by electrons, protons and ions that rapidly bounce around, Jupiter\u2019s cloud cover has a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen. Its core remains a mystery, but scientists believe a motley of diffused elements that are heavier than helium are at the very center. This configuration paves the way for a dynamo \u2014 or the source of a magnetic field \u2014 Connerney, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe result, he said, are \u201cspectacular aurorae, or tremendous depositions of energy.\u201d Much like our own Northern Lights, but thousands of times brighter.With the data generated by Juno, Connerney and his team were able to map Jupiter\u2019s magnetic field. Their study also revealed that the dynamo action stems from metallic hydrogen beneath a layer of helium raindrops.The interior of the planet is dynamic as well. It spins every 10 hours and holds raging wind jets that give Jupiter its Van Gogh-like swirls. Within its southern latitudes, the Great Red Spot is essentially a hurricane that has been observed since the age of Galileo. But scientists have found another formidable patch: the Great Blue Spot.Story continues below advertisementThe Great Blue Spot \u201cis really a magnetic anomaly,\u201d Connerney said. Its name stems not from its color but from how magnetic field lines are drawn \u2014 sporting blue when they go into the planet. It also offers clues about the planet\u2019s workings.\u201cWe actually detected a big change from the beginning of our Juno mission in 2016 to now,\u201d he said. \u201cWe detected a change in the magnetic field that is equivalent to the eastward drift of the great blue spot in time, very slow about four centimeters per second but fast enough to circle the planet in about 350 years.\u201dThe Great Blue Spot is being pulled away by Jupiter\u2019s jet streams \u2014 a pattern that shows that the planet\u2019s winds extend down much deeper than they originally believed. The discovery of the anomaly getting turned around, Bolton, Juno\u2019s principal investigator, could shed light into one of the biggest questions scientists are hoping to answer: How does Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere work?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is really the first time that we\u2019ve seen a magnetic field getting affected by the atmosphere,\u201d he said. \u201cIt really demonstrates that its deep atmosphere is very dynamic, much more than people had thought.\u201dUncovering Jupiter\u2019s secrets, said Bolton, is a humbling experience \u2014 one that can make us feel like tiny specks but also reminds us of how much there is left to explore.\u201cThroughout history we often thought of ourselves as the center of everything because, in a sense, you\u2019re looking out right from your own eyes and your own brain,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cBut there are many things out there.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this article omitted the first name of Jack Connerney, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The article has been corrected.Read moreScientists detect black holes devouring neutron starsNASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 yearsWestern monarch butterflies have been vanishing. This week, a sanctuary saw thousands return. NASA's Juno spacecraft collected electronic and magnetic data, then converted it into sounds humans can hear. NASA releases new photos of Jupiter \u2014 and a recording of its moon that sounds like R2-D2",
        "author": "Mar\u00eda Luisa Pa\u00fal"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3454",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/31/most-distant-space-encounter-history-is-happening-now/",
        "text": "As Earthlings marked the start of a new year, one of the most distant spacecraft successfully explored the farthest \u2014 4 billion miles from Earth \u2014 and most primitive objects that humans have ever seen. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA received confirmation Tuesday that its New Horizons probe survived its 12:33 a.m. eastern encounter with Ultima Thule, a rocky relic from the solar system\u2019s infancy whose name means \u201cbeyond the borders of the known world.\u201d The midnight rendezvous occurred in the Kuiper belt, a halo of icy bodies so far from Earth it takes more than six hours for signals to travel at the speed of light to reach the Earth. But just after 10:30 Eastern time on Tuesday, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., mission operations manager Alice Bowman turned to her colleagues with a wide grin. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe probe\u2019s systems were working. Its cameras and recorder were pointed in the right direction.\u201cWe have a healthy spacecraft,\u201d Bowman announced. \u201cWe have just completed the most distant fly-by. We are ready for Ultima Thule science transmission \u2014 science to help us understand the origins of our solar system.\u201dAt mission control, and in an APL auditorium where the rest of the science team was watching, people jumped from their seats and burst into cheers. The borders of the known world had expanded just a little bit more.\u201cI don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019m really liking 2019 so far,\u201d said the mission\u2019s principal investigator, Alan Stern.Though coincidental, the timing of New Horizons\u2019 encounter \u2013 in the early hours of a new year \u2013 is \u201causpicious,\u201d Stern said. At a moment when humanity marks the passage of time, looking forward and thinking back, New Horizons is doing the same. At 4 billion miles from Earth, Ultima Thule is the farthest celestial body scientists have ever viewed up close; it is a door to future exploration in a region that is still almost entirely unknown. But it is also a window to the past \u2013 a time capsule from the era when the planets formed, which might contain clues about how the Earth came to be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, scientists are analyzing early data collected just before the moment of closest approach. An image taken from half a million miles away from Ultima Thule showed a blurry bowling pin-shaped body about 20 miles across.Until New Horizons\u2019s fly-by, no person had ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a pinpoint of light in the distance. By Wednesday, the scientists at APL will receive their first high-resolution images of the distant rock, revealing whether it has craters, and whether it is one long object or comprises two small bodies orbiting each other.As for answers to other questions about the Kuiper belt object, Stern advised patience. \u201cThis mission has always been about delayed gratification,\u201d he said. \u201cIt took us 12 years to sell the spacecraft, five years to build it, 13 years to get here.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will take as long as 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during that brief encounter. But the resulting science will be worth the wait, project scientist Hal Weaver said. \u201cUltima Thule will be turned into a real world.\u201dNew Horizons was the first mission dedicated to exploring the outermost edges of the solar system. In 2015, it took the first close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain. When mission was first conceived in the early 1990s, no one knew what lay beyond the distant dwarf planet. But in the intervening decades, scientists discovered that the Kuiper belt \u2013 which extends from Neptune\u2019s orbit to 5 billion miles from the sun \u2014 is home to millions of small and icy objects. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOut there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as strong as it is on Earth and temperatures hover near absolute zero, primitive bodies like Ultima Thule have existed in a \u201cdeep freeze\u201d since they first formed.The Kuiper belt object, whose official name is 2014 MU69, was discovered five years ago during a sky-wide search for potential New Horizons targets after the probe left Pluto. But the rock is so dim and so distant that even the most powerful telescopes could barely make it out. Prior to Tuesday, some of the only information about its size and shape came from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow Ultima Thule cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementThe encounter was riddled with uncertainties, making it among the more difficult feats NASA has attempted. Ultima Thule is 1 percent the size of Pluto, and New Horizons had to get four times closer to image it. At the moment of closest approach, the spacecraft was moving at a breathtaking 32,000 miles per hour. If its cameras were even slightly off track, or if scientists\u2019 projections about Ultima Thule\u2019s trajectory were just a little bit wrong, the probe might fail to capture useful information about its target. AdvertisementBesides, New Horizons is a 13-year-old vehicle; operators must carefully prioritize their use of remaining fuel.\u201cThis is history-making, what we\u2019re doing, in more ways than one,\u201d Stern said. Every image sent back from New Horizons is the most distant photograph ever taken. Each maneuver is further than anything NASA has done before.Story continues below advertisementHelene Winters, the mission\u2019s project manager, said Monday that spacecraft operators had been subsisting on chocolate and sleeping on air mattresses at the APL so they could make the most of every minute until New Horizons reached its target. Navigators kept a watchful eye out for potential hazards, which can be hard to spot in this faraway corner of the solar system.Asked whether she thought she would be able to sleep that night, Winters laughed. \u201cAsk me again tomorrow.\u201dAdvertisementBut as minutes to the close encounter ticked by, the atmosphere at APL was festive. Scientists and their guests munched on crudit\u00e9s in a room lit with sparkling blue and white lights. Small children up long past their bedtimes scurried between chairs and sneaked cookies from the buffet.\u201cThis is like a dream come true,\u201d said Chuck Fields, a podcast producer from Indianapolis who drove nine hours to attend Monday\u2019s event. He was dressed in a blindingly bright blazer and tie bearing images of planets, galaxies and the sun. His wife, Dawn, wore matching pants.NASA nodded to the encounter by counting down to 12 a.m. and distributing plastic cups of champagne. Astrophysicist Brian May, better known as lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, debuted a song he wrote for the occasion.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is an anthem to human endeavor,\u201d he said.AdvertisementThirty-three minutes after the rest of the East Coast had already popped their champagne, the scientists at APL were still waiting. Way out in the Kuiper belt, they knew, New Horizons was performing its riskiest observations yet. Particle and dust detectors were probing the chilly Kuiper belt environment. Three cameras were snapping as many images as possible in an effort to map the tiny world and determine its composition. And Ultima Thule was growing ever larger in New Horizons\u2019s field of vision, glowing like a full moon. \u201cThirty seconds to fly-by,\u201d Stern said. \u201cAre you ready? Are you psyched? Are you jazzed?\u201dStory continues below advertisementTwenty seconds. Ten. And then Stern raised his hand in the air while confetti fell from the ceiling. The crowd cheered.\u201cNew Horizons is at Ultima Thule,\u201d Stern proclaimed.Or so he hoped. NASA said its New Horizons explorer spacecraft reached the solar system's outermost region on Jan. 1. (Reuters)The following morning, New Horizons\u2019s operators sat in mission control, anxious. Data from the Deep Space Network, a chain of radio antennas NASA uses to communicate with distant spacecraft, was displayed on their screens.AdvertisementBowman sat with her hands folded, leaning toward her computer.\u201cIn lock with telemetry,\u201d Bowman said.In the APL auditorium, where the rest of the team and their families were watching, the crowd erupted.Next came the status check: Planning \u2014 nominal. Power \u2014 green. Solid state recorders \u2014 pointed right where NASA wanted them. Every subsystem looked good. New Horizons had survived.Thirty minutes later, members of the New Horizons mission operations team entered the APL auditorium to high-fives and riotous cheers.\u201cI\u2019m not a New Year\u2019s kind of guy,\u201d said Mike Ryschkewitsch, the head of APL\u2019s space exploration sector. \u201cBut I can\u2019t think of a better reason to stay up late.\u201d Scientists rang in the new year with a flyby of Ultima Thule, a far-flung space rock that may hold clues to the earliest days of our solar system. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3455",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/31/most-distant-space-encounter-history-is-happening-now/",
        "text": "As Earthlings marked the start of a new year, one of the most distant spacecraft successfully explored the farthest \u2014 4 billion miles from Earth \u2014 and most primitive objects that humans have ever seen. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA received confirmation Tuesday that its New Horizons probe survived its 12:33 a.m. eastern encounter with Ultima Thule, a rocky relic from the solar system\u2019s infancy whose name means \u201cbeyond the borders of the known world.\u201d The midnight rendezvous occurred in the Kuiper belt, a halo of icy bodies so far from Earth it takes more than six hours for signals to travel at the speed of light to reach the Earth. But just after 10:30 Eastern time on Tuesday, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., mission operations manager Alice Bowman turned to her colleagues with a wide grin. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe probe\u2019s systems were working. Its cameras and recorder were pointed in the right direction.\u201cWe have a healthy spacecraft,\u201d Bowman announced. \u201cWe have just completed the most distant fly-by. We are ready for Ultima Thule science transmission \u2014 science to help us understand the origins of our solar system.\u201dAt mission control, and in an APL auditorium where the rest of the science team was watching, people jumped from their seats and burst into cheers. The borders of the known world had expanded just a little bit more.\u201cI don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019m really liking 2019 so far,\u201d said the mission\u2019s principal investigator, Alan Stern.Though coincidental, the timing of New Horizons\u2019 encounter \u2013 in the early hours of a new year \u2013 is \u201causpicious,\u201d Stern said. At a moment when humanity marks the passage of time, looking forward and thinking back, New Horizons is doing the same. At 4 billion miles from Earth, Ultima Thule is the farthest celestial body scientists have ever viewed up close; it is a door to future exploration in a region that is still almost entirely unknown. But it is also a window to the past \u2013 a time capsule from the era when the planets formed, which might contain clues about how the Earth came to be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, scientists are analyzing early data collected just before the moment of closest approach. An image taken from half a million miles away from Ultima Thule showed a blurry bowling pin-shaped body about 20 miles across.Until New Horizons\u2019s fly-by, no person had ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a pinpoint of light in the distance. By Wednesday, the scientists at APL will receive their first high-resolution images of the distant rock, revealing whether it has craters, and whether it is one long object or comprises two small bodies orbiting each other.As for answers to other questions about the Kuiper belt object, Stern advised patience. \u201cThis mission has always been about delayed gratification,\u201d he said. \u201cIt took us 12 years to sell the spacecraft, five years to build it, 13 years to get here.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will take as long as 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during that brief encounter. But the resulting science will be worth the wait, project scientist Hal Weaver said. \u201cUltima Thule will be turned into a real world.\u201dNew Horizons was the first mission dedicated to exploring the outermost edges of the solar system. In 2015, it took the first close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain. When mission was first conceived in the early 1990s, no one knew what lay beyond the distant dwarf planet. But in the intervening decades, scientists discovered that the Kuiper belt \u2013 which extends from Neptune\u2019s orbit to 5 billion miles from the sun \u2014 is home to millions of small and icy objects. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOut there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as strong as it is on Earth and temperatures hover near absolute zero, primitive bodies like Ultima Thule have existed in a \u201cdeep freeze\u201d since they first formed.The Kuiper belt object, whose official name is 2014 MU69, was discovered five years ago during a sky-wide search for potential New Horizons targets after the probe left Pluto. But the rock is so dim and so distant that even the most powerful telescopes could barely make it out. Prior to Tuesday, some of the only information about its size and shape came from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow Ultima Thule cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementThe encounter was riddled with uncertainties, making it among the more difficult feats NASA has attempted. Ultima Thule is 1 percent the size of Pluto, and New Horizons had to get four times closer to image it. At the moment of closest approach, the spacecraft was moving at a breathtaking 32,000 miles per hour. If its cameras were even slightly off track, or if scientists\u2019 projections about Ultima Thule\u2019s trajectory were just a little bit wrong, the probe might fail to capture useful information about its target. AdvertisementBesides, New Horizons is a 13-year-old vehicle; operators must carefully prioritize their use of remaining fuel.\u201cThis is history-making, what we\u2019re doing, in more ways than one,\u201d Stern said. Every image sent back from New Horizons is the most distant photograph ever taken. Each maneuver is further than anything NASA has done before.Story continues below advertisementHelene Winters, the mission\u2019s project manager, said Monday that spacecraft operators had been subsisting on chocolate and sleeping on air mattresses at the APL so they could make the most of every minute until New Horizons reached its target. Navigators kept a watchful eye out for potential hazards, which can be hard to spot in this faraway corner of the solar system.Asked whether she thought she would be able to sleep that night, Winters laughed. \u201cAsk me again tomorrow.\u201dAdvertisementBut as minutes to the close encounter ticked by, the atmosphere at APL was festive. Scientists and their guests munched on crudit\u00e9s in a room lit with sparkling blue and white lights. Small children up long past their bedtimes scurried between chairs and sneaked cookies from the buffet.\u201cThis is like a dream come true,\u201d said Chuck Fields, a podcast producer from Indianapolis who drove nine hours to attend Monday\u2019s event. He was dressed in a blindingly bright blazer and tie bearing images of planets, galaxies and the sun. His wife, Dawn, wore matching pants.NASA nodded to the encounter by counting down to 12 a.m. and distributing plastic cups of champagne. Astrophysicist Brian May, better known as lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, debuted a song he wrote for the occasion.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is an anthem to human endeavor,\u201d he said.AdvertisementThirty-three minutes after the rest of the East Coast had already popped their champagne, the scientists at APL were still waiting. Way out in the Kuiper belt, they knew, New Horizons was performing its riskiest observations yet. Particle and dust detectors were probing the chilly Kuiper belt environment. Three cameras were snapping as many images as possible in an effort to map the tiny world and determine its composition. And Ultima Thule was growing ever larger in New Horizons\u2019s field of vision, glowing like a full moon. \u201cThirty seconds to fly-by,\u201d Stern said. \u201cAre you ready? Are you psyched? Are you jazzed?\u201dStory continues below advertisementTwenty seconds. Ten. And then Stern raised his hand in the air while confetti fell from the ceiling. The crowd cheered.\u201cNew Horizons is at Ultima Thule,\u201d Stern proclaimed.Or so he hoped. NASA said its New Horizons explorer spacecraft reached the solar system's outermost region on Jan. 1. (Reuters)The following morning, New Horizons\u2019s operators sat in mission control, anxious. Data from the Deep Space Network, a chain of radio antennas NASA uses to communicate with distant spacecraft, was displayed on their screens.AdvertisementBowman sat with her hands folded, leaning toward her computer.\u201cIn lock with telemetry,\u201d Bowman said.In the APL auditorium, where the rest of the team and their families were watching, the crowd erupted.Next came the status check: Planning \u2014 nominal. Power \u2014 green. Solid state recorders \u2014 pointed right where NASA wanted them. Every subsystem looked good. New Horizons had survived.Thirty minutes later, members of the New Horizons mission operations team entered the APL auditorium to high-fives and riotous cheers.\u201cI\u2019m not a New Year\u2019s kind of guy,\u201d said Mike Ryschkewitsch, the head of APL\u2019s space exploration sector. \u201cBut I can\u2019t think of a better reason to stay up late.\u201d Scientists rang in the new year with a flyby of Ultima Thule, a far-flung space rock that may hold clues to the earliest days of our solar system. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3456",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/31/most-distant-space-encounter-history-is-happening-now/",
        "text": "As Earthlings marked the start of a new year, one of the most distant spacecraft successfully explored the farthest \u2014 4 billion miles from Earth \u2014 and most primitive objects that humans have ever seen. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA received confirmation Tuesday that its New Horizons probe survived its 12:33 a.m. eastern encounter with Ultima Thule, a rocky relic from the solar system\u2019s infancy whose name means \u201cbeyond the borders of the known world.\u201d The midnight rendezvous occurred in the Kuiper belt, a halo of icy bodies so far from Earth it takes more than six hours for signals to travel at the speed of light to reach the Earth. But just after 10:30 Eastern time on Tuesday, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., mission operations manager Alice Bowman turned to her colleagues with a wide grin. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe probe\u2019s systems were working. Its cameras and recorder were pointed in the right direction.\u201cWe have a healthy spacecraft,\u201d Bowman announced. \u201cWe have just completed the most distant fly-by. We are ready for Ultima Thule science transmission \u2014 science to help us understand the origins of our solar system.\u201dAt mission control, and in an APL auditorium where the rest of the science team was watching, people jumped from their seats and burst into cheers. The borders of the known world had expanded just a little bit more.\u201cI don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019m really liking 2019 so far,\u201d said the mission\u2019s principal investigator, Alan Stern.Though coincidental, the timing of New Horizons\u2019 encounter \u2013 in the early hours of a new year \u2013 is \u201causpicious,\u201d Stern said. At a moment when humanity marks the passage of time, looking forward and thinking back, New Horizons is doing the same. At 4 billion miles from Earth, Ultima Thule is the farthest celestial body scientists have ever viewed up close; it is a door to future exploration in a region that is still almost entirely unknown. But it is also a window to the past \u2013 a time capsule from the era when the planets formed, which might contain clues about how the Earth came to be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, scientists are analyzing early data collected just before the moment of closest approach. An image taken from half a million miles away from Ultima Thule showed a blurry bowling pin-shaped body about 20 miles across.Until New Horizons\u2019s fly-by, no person had ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a pinpoint of light in the distance. By Wednesday, the scientists at APL will receive their first high-resolution images of the distant rock, revealing whether it has craters, and whether it is one long object or comprises two small bodies orbiting each other.As for answers to other questions about the Kuiper belt object, Stern advised patience. \u201cThis mission has always been about delayed gratification,\u201d he said. \u201cIt took us 12 years to sell the spacecraft, five years to build it, 13 years to get here.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will take as long as 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during that brief encounter. But the resulting science will be worth the wait, project scientist Hal Weaver said. \u201cUltima Thule will be turned into a real world.\u201dNew Horizons was the first mission dedicated to exploring the outermost edges of the solar system. In 2015, it took the first close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain. When mission was first conceived in the early 1990s, no one knew what lay beyond the distant dwarf planet. But in the intervening decades, scientists discovered that the Kuiper belt \u2013 which extends from Neptune\u2019s orbit to 5 billion miles from the sun \u2014 is home to millions of small and icy objects. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOut there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as strong as it is on Earth and temperatures hover near absolute zero, primitive bodies like Ultima Thule have existed in a \u201cdeep freeze\u201d since they first formed.The Kuiper belt object, whose official name is 2014 MU69, was discovered five years ago during a sky-wide search for potential New Horizons targets after the probe left Pluto. But the rock is so dim and so distant that even the most powerful telescopes could barely make it out. Prior to Tuesday, some of the only information about its size and shape came from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow Ultima Thule cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementThe encounter was riddled with uncertainties, making it among the more difficult feats NASA has attempted. Ultima Thule is 1 percent the size of Pluto, and New Horizons had to get four times closer to image it. At the moment of closest approach, the spacecraft was moving at a breathtaking 32,000 miles per hour. If its cameras were even slightly off track, or if scientists\u2019 projections about Ultima Thule\u2019s trajectory were just a little bit wrong, the probe might fail to capture useful information about its target. AdvertisementBesides, New Horizons is a 13-year-old vehicle; operators must carefully prioritize their use of remaining fuel.\u201cThis is history-making, what we\u2019re doing, in more ways than one,\u201d Stern said. Every image sent back from New Horizons is the most distant photograph ever taken. Each maneuver is further than anything NASA has done before.Story continues below advertisementHelene Winters, the mission\u2019s project manager, said Monday that spacecraft operators had been subsisting on chocolate and sleeping on air mattresses at the APL so they could make the most of every minute until New Horizons reached its target. Navigators kept a watchful eye out for potential hazards, which can be hard to spot in this faraway corner of the solar system.Asked whether she thought she would be able to sleep that night, Winters laughed. \u201cAsk me again tomorrow.\u201dAdvertisementBut as minutes to the close encounter ticked by, the atmosphere at APL was festive. Scientists and their guests munched on crudit\u00e9s in a room lit with sparkling blue and white lights. Small children up long past their bedtimes scurried between chairs and sneaked cookies from the buffet.\u201cThis is like a dream come true,\u201d said Chuck Fields, a podcast producer from Indianapolis who drove nine hours to attend Monday\u2019s event. He was dressed in a blindingly bright blazer and tie bearing images of planets, galaxies and the sun. His wife, Dawn, wore matching pants.NASA nodded to the encounter by counting down to 12 a.m. and distributing plastic cups of champagne. Astrophysicist Brian May, better known as lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, debuted a song he wrote for the occasion.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is an anthem to human endeavor,\u201d he said.AdvertisementThirty-three minutes after the rest of the East Coast had already popped their champagne, the scientists at APL were still waiting. Way out in the Kuiper belt, they knew, New Horizons was performing its riskiest observations yet. Particle and dust detectors were probing the chilly Kuiper belt environment. Three cameras were snapping as many images as possible in an effort to map the tiny world and determine its composition. And Ultima Thule was growing ever larger in New Horizons\u2019s field of vision, glowing like a full moon. \u201cThirty seconds to fly-by,\u201d Stern said. \u201cAre you ready? Are you psyched? Are you jazzed?\u201dStory continues below advertisementTwenty seconds. Ten. And then Stern raised his hand in the air while confetti fell from the ceiling. The crowd cheered.\u201cNew Horizons is at Ultima Thule,\u201d Stern proclaimed.Or so he hoped. NASA said its New Horizons explorer spacecraft reached the solar system's outermost region on Jan. 1. (Reuters)The following morning, New Horizons\u2019s operators sat in mission control, anxious. Data from the Deep Space Network, a chain of radio antennas NASA uses to communicate with distant spacecraft, was displayed on their screens.AdvertisementBowman sat with her hands folded, leaning toward her computer.\u201cIn lock with telemetry,\u201d Bowman said.In the APL auditorium, where the rest of the team and their families were watching, the crowd erupted.Next came the status check: Planning \u2014 nominal. Power \u2014 green. Solid state recorders \u2014 pointed right where NASA wanted them. Every subsystem looked good. New Horizons had survived.Thirty minutes later, members of the New Horizons mission operations team entered the APL auditorium to high-fives and riotous cheers.\u201cI\u2019m not a New Year\u2019s kind of guy,\u201d said Mike Ryschkewitsch, the head of APL\u2019s space exploration sector. \u201cBut I can\u2019t think of a better reason to stay up late.\u201d Scientists rang in the new year with a flyby of Ultima Thule, a far-flung space rock that may hold clues to the earliest days of our solar system. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3457",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/31/most-distant-space-encounter-history-is-happening-now/",
        "text": "As Earthlings marked the start of a new year, one of the most distant spacecraft successfully explored the farthest \u2014 4 billion miles from Earth \u2014 and most primitive objects that humans have ever seen. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA received confirmation Tuesday that its New Horizons probe survived its 12:33 a.m. eastern encounter with Ultima Thule, a rocky relic from the solar system\u2019s infancy whose name means \u201cbeyond the borders of the known world.\u201d The midnight rendezvous occurred in the Kuiper belt, a halo of icy bodies so far from Earth it takes more than six hours for signals to travel at the speed of light to reach the Earth. But just after 10:30 Eastern time on Tuesday, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., mission operations manager Alice Bowman turned to her colleagues with a wide grin. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe probe\u2019s systems were working. Its cameras and recorder were pointed in the right direction.\u201cWe have a healthy spacecraft,\u201d Bowman announced. \u201cWe have just completed the most distant fly-by. We are ready for Ultima Thule science transmission \u2014 science to help us understand the origins of our solar system.\u201dAt mission control, and in an APL auditorium where the rest of the science team was watching, people jumped from their seats and burst into cheers. The borders of the known world had expanded just a little bit more.\u201cI don\u2019t know about you, but I\u2019m really liking 2019 so far,\u201d said the mission\u2019s principal investigator, Alan Stern.Though coincidental, the timing of New Horizons\u2019 encounter \u2013 in the early hours of a new year \u2013 is \u201causpicious,\u201d Stern said. At a moment when humanity marks the passage of time, looking forward and thinking back, New Horizons is doing the same. At 4 billion miles from Earth, Ultima Thule is the farthest celestial body scientists have ever viewed up close; it is a door to future exploration in a region that is still almost entirely unknown. But it is also a window to the past \u2013 a time capsule from the era when the planets formed, which might contain clues about how the Earth came to be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, scientists are analyzing early data collected just before the moment of closest approach. An image taken from half a million miles away from Ultima Thule showed a blurry bowling pin-shaped body about 20 miles across.Until New Horizons\u2019s fly-by, no person had ever seen a Kuiper belt object as anything but a pinpoint of light in the distance. By Wednesday, the scientists at APL will receive their first high-resolution images of the distant rock, revealing whether it has craters, and whether it is one long object or comprises two small bodies orbiting each other.As for answers to other questions about the Kuiper belt object, Stern advised patience. \u201cThis mission has always been about delayed gratification,\u201d he said. \u201cIt took us 12 years to sell the spacecraft, five years to build it, 13 years to get here.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will take as long as 20 months for scientists to download and process all the data collected during that brief encounter. But the resulting science will be worth the wait, project scientist Hal Weaver said. \u201cUltima Thule will be turned into a real world.\u201dNew Horizons was the first mission dedicated to exploring the outermost edges of the solar system. In 2015, it took the first close-up photos of Pluto, revealing a complex and colorful world mottled with methane mountains and a vast, heart-shaped nitrogen ice plain. When mission was first conceived in the early 1990s, no one knew what lay beyond the distant dwarf planet. But in the intervening decades, scientists discovered that the Kuiper belt \u2013 which extends from Neptune\u2019s orbit to 5 billion miles from the sun \u2014 is home to millions of small and icy objects. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOut there, where sunlight is 0.05 percent as strong as it is on Earth and temperatures hover near absolute zero, primitive bodies like Ultima Thule have existed in a \u201cdeep freeze\u201d since they first formed.The Kuiper belt object, whose official name is 2014 MU69, was discovered five years ago during a sky-wide search for potential New Horizons targets after the probe left Pluto. But the rock is so dim and so distant that even the most powerful telescopes could barely make it out. Prior to Tuesday, some of the only information about its size and shape came from coordinated observations last summer, when astronomers measured the shadow Ultima Thule cast as it passed in front of a star.Story continues below advertisementThe encounter was riddled with uncertainties, making it among the more difficult feats NASA has attempted. Ultima Thule is 1 percent the size of Pluto, and New Horizons had to get four times closer to image it. At the moment of closest approach, the spacecraft was moving at a breathtaking 32,000 miles per hour. If its cameras were even slightly off track, or if scientists\u2019 projections about Ultima Thule\u2019s trajectory were just a little bit wrong, the probe might fail to capture useful information about its target. AdvertisementBesides, New Horizons is a 13-year-old vehicle; operators must carefully prioritize their use of remaining fuel.\u201cThis is history-making, what we\u2019re doing, in more ways than one,\u201d Stern said. Every image sent back from New Horizons is the most distant photograph ever taken. Each maneuver is further than anything NASA has done before.Story continues below advertisementHelene Winters, the mission\u2019s project manager, said Monday that spacecraft operators had been subsisting on chocolate and sleeping on air mattresses at the APL so they could make the most of every minute until New Horizons reached its target. Navigators kept a watchful eye out for potential hazards, which can be hard to spot in this faraway corner of the solar system.Asked whether she thought she would be able to sleep that night, Winters laughed. \u201cAsk me again tomorrow.\u201dAdvertisementBut as minutes to the close encounter ticked by, the atmosphere at APL was festive. Scientists and their guests munched on crudit\u00e9s in a room lit with sparkling blue and white lights. Small children up long past their bedtimes scurried between chairs and sneaked cookies from the buffet.\u201cThis is like a dream come true,\u201d said Chuck Fields, a podcast producer from Indianapolis who drove nine hours to attend Monday\u2019s event. He was dressed in a blindingly bright blazer and tie bearing images of planets, galaxies and the sun. His wife, Dawn, wore matching pants.NASA nodded to the encounter by counting down to 12 a.m. and distributing plastic cups of champagne. Astrophysicist Brian May, better known as lead guitarist for the rock band Queen, debuted a song he wrote for the occasion.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is an anthem to human endeavor,\u201d he said.AdvertisementThirty-three minutes after the rest of the East Coast had already popped their champagne, the scientists at APL were still waiting. Way out in the Kuiper belt, they knew, New Horizons was performing its riskiest observations yet. Particle and dust detectors were probing the chilly Kuiper belt environment. Three cameras were snapping as many images as possible in an effort to map the tiny world and determine its composition. And Ultima Thule was growing ever larger in New Horizons\u2019s field of vision, glowing like a full moon. \u201cThirty seconds to fly-by,\u201d Stern said. \u201cAre you ready? Are you psyched? Are you jazzed?\u201dStory continues below advertisementTwenty seconds. Ten. And then Stern raised his hand in the air while confetti fell from the ceiling. The crowd cheered.\u201cNew Horizons is at Ultima Thule,\u201d Stern proclaimed.Or so he hoped. NASA said its New Horizons explorer spacecraft reached the solar system's outermost region on Jan. 1. (Reuters)The following morning, New Horizons\u2019s operators sat in mission control, anxious. Data from the Deep Space Network, a chain of radio antennas NASA uses to communicate with distant spacecraft, was displayed on their screens.AdvertisementBowman sat with her hands folded, leaning toward her computer.\u201cIn lock with telemetry,\u201d Bowman said.In the APL auditorium, where the rest of the team and their families were watching, the crowd erupted.Next came the status check: Planning \u2014 nominal. Power \u2014 green. Solid state recorders \u2014 pointed right where NASA wanted them. Every subsystem looked good. New Horizons had survived.Thirty minutes later, members of the New Horizons mission operations team entered the APL auditorium to high-fives and riotous cheers.\u201cI\u2019m not a New Year\u2019s kind of guy,\u201d said Mike Ryschkewitsch, the head of APL\u2019s space exploration sector. \u201cBut I can\u2019t think of a better reason to stay up late.\u201d Scientists rang in the new year with a flyby of Ultima Thule, a far-flung space rock that may hold clues to the earliest days of our solar system. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft just visited the farthest object ever explored",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hear the Sounds of Wind on Mars, Recorded by NASA\u2019s InSight Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3458",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/mars-wind-sounds.html",
        "text": "An instrument aboard the spacecraft for measuring the shaking of marsquakes picked up vibrations in the air. An instrument aboard the spacecraft for measuring the shaking of marsquakes picked up vibrations in the air. Before you listen, hook up a subwoofer or put on a pair of bass-heavy headphones. Otherwise, you might not hear anything.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hear the Sounds of Wind on Mars, Recorded by NASA\u2019s InSight Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3459",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/science/mars-wind-sounds.html",
        "text": "An instrument aboard the spacecraft for measuring the shaking of marsquakes picked up vibrations in the air. An instrument aboard the spacecraft for measuring the shaking of marsquakes picked up vibrations in the air. Before you listen, hook up a subwoofer or put on a pair of bass-heavy headphones. Otherwise, you might not hear anything.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their minds (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3460",
        "date": "2017-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/26/google-made-a-doodle-for-doomed-cassini-and-space-lovers-are-losing-their-minds/",
        "text": "An important thing to know about Cassini, the plucky little NASA spacecraft featured in today's Google doodle, is that it didn't need to die this way.When the probe launched toward Saturn in 1997, scientists had no idea that it was about to discover geysers on the moon Enceladus \u2014 now considered the best place in the solar system to look for life. In 2005, the spacecraft detected plumes of water erupting from the surface of that frozen world. Just this month, we found out that\u00a0Cassini also found ingredients for life spewing from\u00a0the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Cassini has been running out of power for years, and NASA can't risk the chance that\u00a0it might crash into Enceladus and contaminate it. So last week, the space agency beamed the command for Cassini to start a series of deep dives toward Saturn before eventually crashing into it. Today, the probe got closer to Saturn than any human-made object ever has before slipping between the planet and its rings. It's slated to do 22 more dives \u00a0\u2014 one every week! And on Sept. 15, the spacecraft will send its last set of images back to Earth and then plunge straight into the planet, burning up in the gas giant's atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn other words, Cassini is so good at its job that it necessitated its own death. And now it's going to sacrifice itself for the glory of science and the good of alien-kind (you know, if aliens\u00a0actually\u00a0exist).That's just the kind of spacecraft Cassini is. Which is\u00a0why basically all of space Twitter is reacting to the end of the mission\u00a0like this:\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94 https://t.co/6LTN950Kqd\u2014 Dr./Prof. Sarah H\u00f6rst (@PlanetDr) April 24, 2017\n\nThis is getting too real now. Cassini, we love you https://t.co/7AWCGTg3kh\u2014 STEMLORD (@upulie) April 26, 2017\n\nThis look at the last close flyby of Titan from @CassiniSaturn is soaked in my salty, salty tears. @CassiniNooo https://t.co/YCoUFXL3jv\u2014 JoAnna (@JoAnnaScience) April 20, 2017\n\nLook, I know that you're not supposed to anthropomorphize things in science. But how can we\u00a0help it? Cassini is literally the little spacecraft that could. Before it launched, NASA had only flown past Saturn and gotten quick glimpses of the sixth planet. But Cassini has orbited the planet for 13 years and made a series of stunning scientific discoveries. In addition to finding geysers on Enceladus, Cassini has \u2026Delivered the first-ever lander to the outer solar system: the Huygens lander, which plopped down on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005. Huygens introduced us to a chilly world with lakes and rivers of methane\u00a0that could help scientists learn what Earth looked like before life evolved.Discovered several previously unknown moons of Saturn, including tiny egg-shaped Methone.Detected mysterious spokes in Saturn's rings, possibly caused by small meteors or lightning on Saturn.Witnessed a historic, 30-year storm on Saturn.Made the whole Earth smile. On\u00a0July 19, 2013, Cassini\u00a0pointed its wide-angle camera past Saturn's rings and back to Earth\u00a0to snap a photo. In the image, our planet is little more than a tiny blue dot. But of all the fascinating worlds Cassini has encountered \u2014 Enceladus with its geysers; Titan with its hydrocarbon lakes; cute little\u00a0ravioli-shaped Pan; Saturn itself, with its swirling colors and dazzling rings\u00a0\u2014 Earth is still\u00a0the only place we can call \u201chome.\u201d The Saturn-orbiting probe is pretty much the little spacecraft that could, and everyone is sad to see it go.  Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their minds",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their minds (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3461",
        "date": "2017-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/26/google-made-a-doodle-for-doomed-cassini-and-space-lovers-are-losing-their-minds/",
        "text": "An important thing to know about Cassini, the plucky little NASA spacecraft featured in today's Google doodle, is that it didn't need to die this way.When the probe launched toward Saturn in 1997, scientists had no idea that it was about to discover geysers on the moon Enceladus \u2014 now considered the best place in the solar system to look for life. In 2005, the spacecraft detected plumes of water erupting from the surface of that frozen world. Just this month, we found out that\u00a0Cassini also found ingredients for life spewing from\u00a0the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Cassini has been running out of power for years, and NASA can't risk the chance that\u00a0it might crash into Enceladus and contaminate it. So last week, the space agency beamed the command for Cassini to start a series of deep dives toward Saturn before eventually crashing into it. Today, the probe got closer to Saturn than any human-made object ever has before slipping between the planet and its rings. It's slated to do 22 more dives \u00a0\u2014 one every week! And on Sept. 15, the spacecraft will send its last set of images back to Earth and then plunge straight into the planet, burning up in the gas giant's atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn other words, Cassini is so good at its job that it necessitated its own death. And now it's going to sacrifice itself for the glory of science and the good of alien-kind (you know, if aliens\u00a0actually\u00a0exist).That's just the kind of spacecraft Cassini is. Which is\u00a0why basically all of space Twitter is reacting to the end of the mission\u00a0like this:\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94 https://t.co/6LTN950Kqd\u2014 Dr./Prof. Sarah H\u00f6rst (@PlanetDr) April 24, 2017\n\nThis is getting too real now. Cassini, we love you https://t.co/7AWCGTg3kh\u2014 STEMLORD (@upulie) April 26, 2017\n\nThis look at the last close flyby of Titan from @CassiniSaturn is soaked in my salty, salty tears. @CassiniNooo https://t.co/YCoUFXL3jv\u2014 JoAnna (@JoAnnaScience) April 20, 2017\n\nLook, I know that you're not supposed to anthropomorphize things in science. But how can we\u00a0help it? Cassini is literally the little spacecraft that could. Before it launched, NASA had only flown past Saturn and gotten quick glimpses of the sixth planet. But Cassini has orbited the planet for 13 years and made a series of stunning scientific discoveries. In addition to finding geysers on Enceladus, Cassini has \u2026Delivered the first-ever lander to the outer solar system: the Huygens lander, which plopped down on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005. Huygens introduced us to a chilly world with lakes and rivers of methane\u00a0that could help scientists learn what Earth looked like before life evolved.Discovered several previously unknown moons of Saturn, including tiny egg-shaped Methone.Detected mysterious spokes in Saturn's rings, possibly caused by small meteors or lightning on Saturn.Witnessed a historic, 30-year storm on Saturn.Made the whole Earth smile. On\u00a0July 19, 2013, Cassini\u00a0pointed its wide-angle camera past Saturn's rings and back to Earth\u00a0to snap a photo. In the image, our planet is little more than a tiny blue dot. But of all the fascinating worlds Cassini has encountered \u2014 Enceladus with its geysers; Titan with its hydrocarbon lakes; cute little\u00a0ravioli-shaped Pan; Saturn itself, with its swirling colors and dazzling rings\u00a0\u2014 Earth is still\u00a0the only place we can call \u201chome.\u201d The Saturn-orbiting probe is pretty much the little spacecraft that could, and everyone is sad to see it go.  Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their minds",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their minds (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3462",
        "date": "2017-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/26/google-made-a-doodle-for-doomed-cassini-and-space-lovers-are-losing-their-minds/",
        "text": "An important thing to know about Cassini, the plucky little NASA spacecraft featured in today's Google doodle, is that it didn't need to die this way.When the probe launched toward Saturn in 1997, scientists had no idea that it was about to discover geysers on the moon Enceladus \u2014 now considered the best place in the solar system to look for life. In 2005, the spacecraft detected plumes of water erupting from the surface of that frozen world. Just this month, we found out that\u00a0Cassini also found ingredients for life spewing from\u00a0the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Cassini has been running out of power for years, and NASA can't risk the chance that\u00a0it might crash into Enceladus and contaminate it. So last week, the space agency beamed the command for Cassini to start a series of deep dives toward Saturn before eventually crashing into it. Today, the probe got closer to Saturn than any human-made object ever has before slipping between the planet and its rings. It's slated to do 22 more dives \u00a0\u2014 one every week! And on Sept. 15, the spacecraft will send its last set of images back to Earth and then plunge straight into the planet, burning up in the gas giant's atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn other words, Cassini is so good at its job that it necessitated its own death. And now it's going to sacrifice itself for the glory of science and the good of alien-kind (you know, if aliens\u00a0actually\u00a0exist).That's just the kind of spacecraft Cassini is. Which is\u00a0why basically all of space Twitter is reacting to the end of the mission\u00a0like this:\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94\ud83d\udc94 https://t.co/6LTN950Kqd\u2014 Dr./Prof. Sarah H\u00f6rst (@PlanetDr) April 24, 2017\n\nThis is getting too real now. Cassini, we love you https://t.co/7AWCGTg3kh\u2014 STEMLORD (@upulie) April 26, 2017\n\nThis look at the last close flyby of Titan from @CassiniSaturn is soaked in my salty, salty tears. @CassiniNooo https://t.co/YCoUFXL3jv\u2014 JoAnna (@JoAnnaScience) April 20, 2017\n\nLook, I know that you're not supposed to anthropomorphize things in science. But how can we\u00a0help it? Cassini is literally the little spacecraft that could. Before it launched, NASA had only flown past Saturn and gotten quick glimpses of the sixth planet. But Cassini has orbited the planet for 13 years and made a series of stunning scientific discoveries. In addition to finding geysers on Enceladus, Cassini has \u2026Delivered the first-ever lander to the outer solar system: the Huygens lander, which plopped down on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005. Huygens introduced us to a chilly world with lakes and rivers of methane\u00a0that could help scientists learn what Earth looked like before life evolved.Discovered several previously unknown moons of Saturn, including tiny egg-shaped Methone.Detected mysterious spokes in Saturn's rings, possibly caused by small meteors or lightning on Saturn.Witnessed a historic, 30-year storm on Saturn.Made the whole Earth smile. On\u00a0July 19, 2013, Cassini\u00a0pointed its wide-angle camera past Saturn's rings and back to Earth\u00a0to snap a photo. In the image, our planet is little more than a tiny blue dot. But of all the fascinating worlds Cassini has encountered \u2014 Enceladus with its geysers; Titan with its hydrocarbon lakes; cute little\u00a0ravioli-shaped Pan; Saturn itself, with its swirling colors and dazzling rings\u00a0\u2014 Earth is still\u00a0the only place we can call \u201chome.\u201d The Saturn-orbiting probe is pretty much the little spacecraft that could, and everyone is sad to see it go.  Google made a doodle for doomed Cassini, and space lovers are losing their minds",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Just Launched a Spacecraft That Will Crash Into an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3463",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/science/nasa-dart-launch-asteroid.html",
        "text": "An early morning liftoff kicks off DART, NASA\u2019s first mission to test a spacecraft that could one day save Earth from a deadly space rock. An early morning liftoff kicks off DART, NASA\u2019s first mission to test a spacecraft that could one day save Earth from a deadly space rock. NASA on Wednesday launched a spacecraft with one simple mission: Smash into an asteroid at 15,000 miles per hour.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Just Launched a Spacecraft That Will Crash Into an Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3464",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/science/nasa-dart-launch-asteroid.html",
        "text": "An early morning liftoff kicks off DART, NASA\u2019s first mission to test a spacecraft that could one day save Earth from a deadly space rock. An early morning liftoff kicks off DART, NASA\u2019s first mission to test a spacecraft that could one day save Earth from a deadly space rock. NASA on Wednesday launched a spacecraft with one simple mission: Smash into an asteroid at 15,000 miles per hour.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3465",
        "date": "2017-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/26/nasa-is-building-a-prototype-for-a-habitat-in-deep-space-by-recycling-an-old-cargo-container/",
        "text": "An aluminum cargo container, built more than 15 years ago to move large equipment to space, will be transformed\u00a0into a prototype of a space habitat where astronauts would live during long missions.The project is a step toward NASA's next big human spaceflight project called the\u00a0Deep Space Gateway, a \u201cspaceport\u201d in the moon's orbit where astronauts would live for up to a year. NASA's goal is to have it up and running by the\u00a0mid-2020s, and from there, the space agency hopes to gain some experience and develop capabilities needed to push farther into the solar system, specifically to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightColorado-based Lockheed Martin, a NASA contractor, announced last week that it will refurbish the cargo space container into a habitat prototype. It won't look like much on the outside \u2014 just a massive cylindrical metal container, about 21 feet long and 15 feet in diameter. The interior will be turned into a\u00a0living quarter, with robotics work stations for astronauts, a place to exercise and storage spaces for food, water, toiletries \u2014 \u201call the things you need to live and be happy in space,\u201d said Bill Pratt, of Lockheed Martin.Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u2018worst plan yet\u2019\u201cIt is easy to take things for granted when you are living at home \u2026 Something as simple as calling your family is completely different when you are outside of low Earth orbit,\u201d Pratt said in a news release. \u201cWhile building this habitat, we have to operate in a different mindset that's more akin to long trips to Mars to ensure we keep them safe, healthy and productive.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNamed Donatello, the cargo container was one of three built by the Italian Space Agency\u00a0in the 1990s to\u00a0serve as \u201cmoving vans\u201d carrying equipment, experiments and supplies to and from the International Space Station, a large spacecraft orbiting the Earth and where astronauts have lived since 2000.Donatello was delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center\u00a0from Italy in 2001. While the two other cargo containers, called Leonardo and Raffaello, flew on several shuttle missions to the International Space Station, Donatello was never used.Lockheed Martin will refurbish Donatello at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The work would take about 18 months.Story continues below advertisementAlthough Donatello was originally built to be flown to space, the refurbished hardware won't make it there, Pratt said. Lockheed will turn over its prototype to NASA, which will then start looking at building the actual habitat, Pratt said.Stephen Hawking, Kris Jenner and other famous people with plans to send humans to Mars\u201cIt's a steppingstone to the actual flight vehicle and pretty representative of the actual thing that flies,\u201d Pratt said.AdvertisementThe Deep Space Gateway habitat will be docked to a spacecraft called Orion, the \u201cexploration vehicle\u201d that will carry astronauts to space.Pratt said it's still too early to say how much the prototype would cost.Lockheed Martin is one of six U.S. companies\u00a0NASA contracted to build\u00a0habitat prototypes for the spaceflight project. The Deep Space Gateway, which focuses on\u00a0sending astronauts on extended missions in the moon's orbit, is a far more modest goal than reaching\u00a0Mars. But, as The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach wrote, it's more technologically doable in the near term under plausible budgets.NASA said it hopes to send humans to Mars\u00a0by the 2030s.In March, President Trump signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion to fund NASA programs, including Mars exploration.READ MORE:Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsNASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon missionStephen Hawking calls for a return to the moon as Earth\u2019s clock runs out The project is a step toward building what NASA calls the Deep Space Gateway, a lunar \u201cspaceport\u201d where astronauts would live for up to a year. NASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3466",
        "date": "2017-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/26/nasa-is-building-a-prototype-for-a-habitat-in-deep-space-by-recycling-an-old-cargo-container/",
        "text": "An aluminum cargo container, built more than 15 years ago to move large equipment to space, will be transformed\u00a0into a prototype of a space habitat where astronauts would live during long missions.The project is a step toward NASA's next big human spaceflight project called the\u00a0Deep Space Gateway, a \u201cspaceport\u201d in the moon's orbit where astronauts would live for up to a year. NASA's goal is to have it up and running by the\u00a0mid-2020s, and from there, the space agency hopes to gain some experience and develop capabilities needed to push farther into the solar system, specifically to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightColorado-based Lockheed Martin, a NASA contractor, announced last week that it will refurbish the cargo space container into a habitat prototype. It won't look like much on the outside \u2014 just a massive cylindrical metal container, about 21 feet long and 15 feet in diameter. The interior will be turned into a\u00a0living quarter, with robotics work stations for astronauts, a place to exercise and storage spaces for food, water, toiletries \u2014 \u201call the things you need to live and be happy in space,\u201d said Bill Pratt, of Lockheed Martin.Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u2018worst plan yet\u2019\u201cIt is easy to take things for granted when you are living at home \u2026 Something as simple as calling your family is completely different when you are outside of low Earth orbit,\u201d Pratt said in a news release. \u201cWhile building this habitat, we have to operate in a different mindset that's more akin to long trips to Mars to ensure we keep them safe, healthy and productive.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNamed Donatello, the cargo container was one of three built by the Italian Space Agency\u00a0in the 1990s to\u00a0serve as \u201cmoving vans\u201d carrying equipment, experiments and supplies to and from the International Space Station, a large spacecraft orbiting the Earth and where astronauts have lived since 2000.Donatello was delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center\u00a0from Italy in 2001. While the two other cargo containers, called Leonardo and Raffaello, flew on several shuttle missions to the International Space Station, Donatello was never used.Lockheed Martin will refurbish Donatello at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The work would take about 18 months.Story continues below advertisementAlthough Donatello was originally built to be flown to space, the refurbished hardware won't make it there, Pratt said. Lockheed will turn over its prototype to NASA, which will then start looking at building the actual habitat, Pratt said.Stephen Hawking, Kris Jenner and other famous people with plans to send humans to Mars\u201cIt's a steppingstone to the actual flight vehicle and pretty representative of the actual thing that flies,\u201d Pratt said.AdvertisementThe Deep Space Gateway habitat will be docked to a spacecraft called Orion, the \u201cexploration vehicle\u201d that will carry astronauts to space.Pratt said it's still too early to say how much the prototype would cost.Lockheed Martin is one of six U.S. companies\u00a0NASA contracted to build\u00a0habitat prototypes for the spaceflight project. The Deep Space Gateway, which focuses on\u00a0sending astronauts on extended missions in the moon's orbit, is a far more modest goal than reaching\u00a0Mars. But, as The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach wrote, it's more technologically doable in the near term under plausible budgets.NASA said it hopes to send humans to Mars\u00a0by the 2030s.In March, President Trump signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion to fund NASA programs, including Mars exploration.READ MORE:Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsNASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon missionStephen Hawking calls for a return to the moon as Earth\u2019s clock runs out The project is a step toward building what NASA calls the Deep Space Gateway, a lunar \u201cspaceport\u201d where astronauts would live for up to a year. NASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3467",
        "date": "2017-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/26/nasa-is-building-a-prototype-for-a-habitat-in-deep-space-by-recycling-an-old-cargo-container/",
        "text": "An aluminum cargo container, built more than 15 years ago to move large equipment to space, will be transformed\u00a0into a prototype of a space habitat where astronauts would live during long missions.The project is a step toward NASA's next big human spaceflight project called the\u00a0Deep Space Gateway, a \u201cspaceport\u201d in the moon's orbit where astronauts would live for up to a year. NASA's goal is to have it up and running by the\u00a0mid-2020s, and from there, the space agency hopes to gain some experience and develop capabilities needed to push farther into the solar system, specifically to Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightColorado-based Lockheed Martin, a NASA contractor, announced last week that it will refurbish the cargo space container into a habitat prototype. It won't look like much on the outside \u2014 just a massive cylindrical metal container, about 21 feet long and 15 feet in diameter. The interior will be turned into a\u00a0living quarter, with robotics work stations for astronauts, a place to exercise and storage spaces for food, water, toiletries \u2014 \u201call the things you need to live and be happy in space,\u201d said Bill Pratt, of Lockheed Martin.Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u2018worst plan yet\u2019\u201cIt is easy to take things for granted when you are living at home \u2026 Something as simple as calling your family is completely different when you are outside of low Earth orbit,\u201d Pratt said in a news release. \u201cWhile building this habitat, we have to operate in a different mindset that's more akin to long trips to Mars to ensure we keep them safe, healthy and productive.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNamed Donatello, the cargo container was one of three built by the Italian Space Agency\u00a0in the 1990s to\u00a0serve as \u201cmoving vans\u201d carrying equipment, experiments and supplies to and from the International Space Station, a large spacecraft orbiting the Earth and where astronauts have lived since 2000.Donatello was delivered to NASA's Kennedy Space Center\u00a0from Italy in 2001. While the two other cargo containers, called Leonardo and Raffaello, flew on several shuttle missions to the International Space Station, Donatello was never used.Lockheed Martin will refurbish Donatello at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The work would take about 18 months.Story continues below advertisementAlthough Donatello was originally built to be flown to space, the refurbished hardware won't make it there, Pratt said. Lockheed will turn over its prototype to NASA, which will then start looking at building the actual habitat, Pratt said.Stephen Hawking, Kris Jenner and other famous people with plans to send humans to Mars\u201cIt's a steppingstone to the actual flight vehicle and pretty representative of the actual thing that flies,\u201d Pratt said.AdvertisementThe Deep Space Gateway habitat will be docked to a spacecraft called Orion, the \u201cexploration vehicle\u201d that will carry astronauts to space.Pratt said it's still too early to say how much the prototype would cost.Lockheed Martin is one of six U.S. companies\u00a0NASA contracted to build\u00a0habitat prototypes for the spaceflight project. The Deep Space Gateway, which focuses on\u00a0sending astronauts on extended missions in the moon's orbit, is a far more modest goal than reaching\u00a0Mars. But, as The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach wrote, it's more technologically doable in the near term under plausible budgets.NASA said it hopes to send humans to Mars\u00a0by the 2030s.In March, President Trump signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion to fund NASA programs, including Mars exploration.READ MORE:Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsNASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon missionStephen Hawking calls for a return to the moon as Earth\u2019s clock runs out The project is a step toward building what NASA calls the Deep Space Gateway, a lunar \u201cspaceport\u201d where astronauts would live for up to a year. NASA is building a prototype for a habitat in deep space \u2014 by recycling an old cargo container",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3468",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/18/nasas-prized-telescopes-falter-astronomers-fear-losing-their-eyes-space/",
        "text": "America\u2019s Great Observatories \u2014 the Hubble, Chandra, Compton and Spitzer space telescopes \u2014 have peered into the unknown and made breakthrough discoveries about newborn stars, dark matter and the age of the universe itself.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut these telescopes, whose era began in 1990, are aging, if not already dead, and there is no budget or political will to replace them. That sobering reality was underscored this month when two, including the Hubble Space Telescope, were beset by technical problems that temporarily halted their science. Shrinking budgets and delayed projects means astronomers will lose some of their key eyes in the skies before NASA can launch new telescopes. It will make some research impossible.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe unwillingness to invest in substantial science has begun to worry us,\" said astrophysicist Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates the Hubble telescope on behalf of NASA. \u201cWe\u2019re facing a very daunting prospect as a community. Some fields just won\u2019t have a telescope. And the science will not be possible to do in any other way.\u201dAdvertisementSome of science\u2019s biggest questions \u2014 What is dark energy? Does life exist beyond the solar system? \u2014 can be answered only by large observatories working in particular parts of the light spectrum.Whether to invest in pursuing these questions \u201cis a choice for the nation,\" said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA. \u201cWhat missions we do will be influenced by priorities of the community as well as the funding choices made by the political system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe system prioritized the Great Observatories program when it was conceived in the 1970s and \u201980s \u2014 four telescope missions to cover the entire light spectrum in space. They launched between 1990 and 2003. There was the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory for capturing the most energetic explosions in the universe. The Spitzer Space Telescope to seek out infrared radiation from exoplanets and newborn stars. The Chandra X-ray Observatory could probe the depths of black holes and uncovered evidence for dark matter and dark energy.AdvertisementThe Hubble Space Telescope was the program\u2019s crown jewel, whose massive dish for collecting light in the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths helped determine the age of the universe, revealed black holes at the centers of galaxies and photographed the most distant objects ever seen.Stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope NOTE: REDIRECTED TO REPLACEMENT HubbleGallery2020.gallery.xml. Good URL in the metadataShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe Eagle Nebula\u2019s \u201cPillars of Creation,\u201d one of the Hubble\u2019s most iconic and popular images. (Hubble Heritage Team via AFP/Getty Images) (Hubble And The Heritage Team/AFP/Getty Images)Space telescopes are difficult to engineer and expensive to build. But they are necessary to get a clear glimpse into the cosmos. Even at night, Earth\u2019s atmosphere distorts light from space, making images blurry, and other signals \u2014 particularly gamma rays \u2014 impossible to see.Story continues below advertisementUsing the fleet in concert enhances these telescopes\u2019 power even further. Last year, observations by Hubble, Chandra, Fermi (another gamma-ray telescope) and dozens of others allowed astronomers to confirm theories about fundamental physics when they observed two dead stars colliding.AdvertisementThey might not always have that ability.The Compton telescope was lost in 2001, when a problem with its gyroscope \u2014 which allows a telescope to rotate and point at something \u2014 meant the space agency had to intentionally ground it or risk the spacecraft plummeting, uncontrolled, out of the sky.Spitzer, which has been slowly drifting away from Earth, will end its mission by early 2020. That loss has been expected, but the difficulties with Hubble and Chandra this month were an unanticipated one-two punch.Neither of the spacecraft\u2019s problems is fatal, NASA said. Chandra came back online just days after a glitch with one of its gyroscopes forced the telescope into safe mode. Hubble, which was also hobbled by a gyroscope difficulty, is expected to return to normal operations within a few weeks at the most. NASA expects both telescopes will continue functioning into the 2020s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, the brief brush with oblivion gave astronomers a lasting scare.\u201cPeople suddenly realized that Hubble is not going to live forever,\u201d said Tom Brown, the Hubble mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Chandra is 19 years old; Hubble is 28.Brown said frantic fellow astronomers have kept his phone ringing \u201cnonstop\u201d in the past two weeks. \u201cThey\u2019re thinking about what happens next.\u201dNASA\u2019s billion-dollar-a-year astrophysics program currently flies eight major telescopes aimed at studying space beyond the solar system. Of these, all but one are in their \u201cextended missions\u201d \u2014 the bonus years beyond the time for which the spacecraft was originally designed.Story continues below advertisementThe only flagship NASA space observatory under construction is the James Webb Space Telescope, whose gold-plated dish is designed to collect infrared radiation from the earliest objects in the universe.NASA intended for the timing of Webb\u2019s mission to overlap significantly with Hubble\u2019s. But the launch of the $10 billion behemoth has been repeatedly delayed as the space agency deals with design problems and costly human errors. This year, NASA announced that Webb won\u2019t launch until 2021 at the earliest, cutting the concerted observing time short.NASA\u2019s next big project would be the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which is also targeted toward infrared wavelengths and in 2010 was considered the top astrophysics priority of the National Academy of Sciences. But funding for the observatory has been up in the air after President Trump omitted the telescope from his last two budget requests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe outlook for research across other parts of the light spectrum are fuzzy at best. When Hubble fails, Brown pointed out, there will be no visible or ultraviolet telescopes at that scale. Likewise, NASA has no large X-ray observatories ready to replace Chandra. Compton was succeeded by the smaller Fermi telescope, which has two instruments to Compton\u2019s four. Fermi is already 10 years old and exceeded its original mission by five years.Gamma ray astrophysicist Julie McEnery, the project scientist for Fermi, worries that even a temporary gap in telescope coverage could have lasting repercussions in her field.\u201cYou have to have a minimal level of activity in any given telescope area to maintain expertise in the community so you can continue to build instruments,\u201d she said.To prevent such gaps, NASA would have to start developing new missions now; most space telescopes require several decades from conception to launch.Other nations\u2019 space agencies are already working on such programs. The European Space Agency is developing the ATHENA X-ray Observatory for launch in the 2030s. China announced in 2016 it would build its own optical telescope with a field of view 300 times greater than that of Hubble.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTheir budgets are increasing,\u201d Mountain said.In the United States, NASA\u2019s budget hasn\u2019t kept up with inflation, and the fraction of federal spending that goes to the agency has been cut almost in half since 1980. The agency has been scrutinized over the Webb telescope\u2019s dramatic delays and cost overruns. \u201cThe telescope that ate astronomy,\u201d it\u2019s been bitterly nicknamed.This spring, NASA announced that it would \u201cnarrow the scope\u201d (reduce the budget) of four proposals it is considering for launch in the 2030s.\u201cWe need to ensure we can accomplish breakthrough science while adhering to a realistic, executable scope and budget for the next decade,\u201d Hertz, the astrophysics division director, said earlier this year.But big budgets are necessary to do \u201ctextbook-rewriting science,\u201d Mountain said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be hard to replicate the capabilities of the Great Observatories without expending the equivalent kind of resources.\" Hubble\u2019s cumulative cost has been somewhere around $10 billion. But look at what it bought: Nobel Prize-winning research on the accelerating expansion of the universe, among other groundbreaking work.Hertz acknowledged that building successors to all four Great Observatories would require a much greater investment from the federal government. \u201cThere are some science questions that require extremely ambitious observatories and can\u2019t be done cheaply,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDetecting life outside our solar system requires a telescope like Webb. Explaining dark energy and why the universe\u2019s expansion is speeding up necessitates a huge, sensitive instrument like the Wide Field Infrared Survey.Hertz said that NASA is trying to make the most of limited resources. During the final servicing mission to Hubble in 2009, astronauts equipped the spacecraft with multiple backups of most essential hardware, adding decades to its life. At 19, Chandra has exceeded the duration of its original mission by more than a decade; this month\u2019s gyroscope glitch was the first such problem it has experienced.Modest \u201csmall and middle explorers\u201d \u2014 which cost less than $120 million and $200 million, respectively \u2014 are constantly in development. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a \u201cMidEx\u201d project designed to seek out unknown worlds around nearby stars, began science operations this summer.AdvertisementEven without a gamma-ray telescope on the horizon, McEnery said she was optimistic.\u201cYes, we\u2019re moving away from a golden age because this suite of great observatories has gone away,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there\u2019s new things coming to take its place. We\u2019re standing on the threshold of an entirely new era.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Spitzer mission would end when the telescope loses contact in the next year. In fact, Spitzer could continue to operate beyond that time, but NASA opted to end the mission.Read more:The Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers Meet NASA\u2019s newest planet hunter NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errors Two of NASA's aging \"great observatories\" have experienced technical problems in the past month, and astronomers are starting to worry about what happens when they fail. As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3469",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/18/nasas-prized-telescopes-falter-astronomers-fear-losing-their-eyes-space/",
        "text": "America\u2019s Great Observatories \u2014 the Hubble, Chandra, Compton and Spitzer space telescopes \u2014 have peered into the unknown and made breakthrough discoveries about newborn stars, dark matter and the age of the universe itself.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut these telescopes, whose era began in 1990, are aging, if not already dead, and there is no budget or political will to replace them. That sobering reality was underscored this month when two, including the Hubble Space Telescope, were beset by technical problems that temporarily halted their science. Shrinking budgets and delayed projects means astronomers will lose some of their key eyes in the skies before NASA can launch new telescopes. It will make some research impossible.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe unwillingness to invest in substantial science has begun to worry us,\" said astrophysicist Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates the Hubble telescope on behalf of NASA. \u201cWe\u2019re facing a very daunting prospect as a community. Some fields just won\u2019t have a telescope. And the science will not be possible to do in any other way.\u201dAdvertisementSome of science\u2019s biggest questions \u2014 What is dark energy? Does life exist beyond the solar system? \u2014 can be answered only by large observatories working in particular parts of the light spectrum.Whether to invest in pursuing these questions \u201cis a choice for the nation,\" said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA. \u201cWhat missions we do will be influenced by priorities of the community as well as the funding choices made by the political system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe system prioritized the Great Observatories program when it was conceived in the 1970s and \u201980s \u2014 four telescope missions to cover the entire light spectrum in space. They launched between 1990 and 2003. There was the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory for capturing the most energetic explosions in the universe. The Spitzer Space Telescope to seek out infrared radiation from exoplanets and newborn stars. The Chandra X-ray Observatory could probe the depths of black holes and uncovered evidence for dark matter and dark energy.AdvertisementThe Hubble Space Telescope was the program\u2019s crown jewel, whose massive dish for collecting light in the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths helped determine the age of the universe, revealed black holes at the centers of galaxies and photographed the most distant objects ever seen.Stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope NOTE: REDIRECTED TO REPLACEMENT HubbleGallery2020.gallery.xml. Good URL in the metadataShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe Eagle Nebula\u2019s \u201cPillars of Creation,\u201d one of the Hubble\u2019s most iconic and popular images. (Hubble Heritage Team via AFP/Getty Images) (Hubble And The Heritage Team/AFP/Getty Images)Space telescopes are difficult to engineer and expensive to build. But they are necessary to get a clear glimpse into the cosmos. Even at night, Earth\u2019s atmosphere distorts light from space, making images blurry, and other signals \u2014 particularly gamma rays \u2014 impossible to see.Story continues below advertisementUsing the fleet in concert enhances these telescopes\u2019 power even further. Last year, observations by Hubble, Chandra, Fermi (another gamma-ray telescope) and dozens of others allowed astronomers to confirm theories about fundamental physics when they observed two dead stars colliding.AdvertisementThey might not always have that ability.The Compton telescope was lost in 2001, when a problem with its gyroscope \u2014 which allows a telescope to rotate and point at something \u2014 meant the space agency had to intentionally ground it or risk the spacecraft plummeting, uncontrolled, out of the sky.Spitzer, which has been slowly drifting away from Earth, will end its mission by early 2020. That loss has been expected, but the difficulties with Hubble and Chandra this month were an unanticipated one-two punch.Neither of the spacecraft\u2019s problems is fatal, NASA said. Chandra came back online just days after a glitch with one of its gyroscopes forced the telescope into safe mode. Hubble, which was also hobbled by a gyroscope difficulty, is expected to return to normal operations within a few weeks at the most. NASA expects both telescopes will continue functioning into the 2020s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, the brief brush with oblivion gave astronomers a lasting scare.\u201cPeople suddenly realized that Hubble is not going to live forever,\u201d said Tom Brown, the Hubble mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Chandra is 19 years old; Hubble is 28.Brown said frantic fellow astronomers have kept his phone ringing \u201cnonstop\u201d in the past two weeks. \u201cThey\u2019re thinking about what happens next.\u201dNASA\u2019s billion-dollar-a-year astrophysics program currently flies eight major telescopes aimed at studying space beyond the solar system. Of these, all but one are in their \u201cextended missions\u201d \u2014 the bonus years beyond the time for which the spacecraft was originally designed.Story continues below advertisementThe only flagship NASA space observatory under construction is the James Webb Space Telescope, whose gold-plated dish is designed to collect infrared radiation from the earliest objects in the universe.NASA intended for the timing of Webb\u2019s mission to overlap significantly with Hubble\u2019s. But the launch of the $10 billion behemoth has been repeatedly delayed as the space agency deals with design problems and costly human errors. This year, NASA announced that Webb won\u2019t launch until 2021 at the earliest, cutting the concerted observing time short.NASA\u2019s next big project would be the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which is also targeted toward infrared wavelengths and in 2010 was considered the top astrophysics priority of the National Academy of Sciences. But funding for the observatory has been up in the air after President Trump omitted the telescope from his last two budget requests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe outlook for research across other parts of the light spectrum are fuzzy at best. When Hubble fails, Brown pointed out, there will be no visible or ultraviolet telescopes at that scale. Likewise, NASA has no large X-ray observatories ready to replace Chandra. Compton was succeeded by the smaller Fermi telescope, which has two instruments to Compton\u2019s four. Fermi is already 10 years old and exceeded its original mission by five years.Gamma ray astrophysicist Julie McEnery, the project scientist for Fermi, worries that even a temporary gap in telescope coverage could have lasting repercussions in her field.\u201cYou have to have a minimal level of activity in any given telescope area to maintain expertise in the community so you can continue to build instruments,\u201d she said.To prevent such gaps, NASA would have to start developing new missions now; most space telescopes require several decades from conception to launch.Other nations\u2019 space agencies are already working on such programs. The European Space Agency is developing the ATHENA X-ray Observatory for launch in the 2030s. China announced in 2016 it would build its own optical telescope with a field of view 300 times greater than that of Hubble.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTheir budgets are increasing,\u201d Mountain said.In the United States, NASA\u2019s budget hasn\u2019t kept up with inflation, and the fraction of federal spending that goes to the agency has been cut almost in half since 1980. The agency has been scrutinized over the Webb telescope\u2019s dramatic delays and cost overruns. \u201cThe telescope that ate astronomy,\u201d it\u2019s been bitterly nicknamed.This spring, NASA announced that it would \u201cnarrow the scope\u201d (reduce the budget) of four proposals it is considering for launch in the 2030s.\u201cWe need to ensure we can accomplish breakthrough science while adhering to a realistic, executable scope and budget for the next decade,\u201d Hertz, the astrophysics division director, said earlier this year.But big budgets are necessary to do \u201ctextbook-rewriting science,\u201d Mountain said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be hard to replicate the capabilities of the Great Observatories without expending the equivalent kind of resources.\" Hubble\u2019s cumulative cost has been somewhere around $10 billion. But look at what it bought: Nobel Prize-winning research on the accelerating expansion of the universe, among other groundbreaking work.Hertz acknowledged that building successors to all four Great Observatories would require a much greater investment from the federal government. \u201cThere are some science questions that require extremely ambitious observatories and can\u2019t be done cheaply,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDetecting life outside our solar system requires a telescope like Webb. Explaining dark energy and why the universe\u2019s expansion is speeding up necessitates a huge, sensitive instrument like the Wide Field Infrared Survey.Hertz said that NASA is trying to make the most of limited resources. During the final servicing mission to Hubble in 2009, astronauts equipped the spacecraft with multiple backups of most essential hardware, adding decades to its life. At 19, Chandra has exceeded the duration of its original mission by more than a decade; this month\u2019s gyroscope glitch was the first such problem it has experienced.Modest \u201csmall and middle explorers\u201d \u2014 which cost less than $120 million and $200 million, respectively \u2014 are constantly in development. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a \u201cMidEx\u201d project designed to seek out unknown worlds around nearby stars, began science operations this summer.AdvertisementEven without a gamma-ray telescope on the horizon, McEnery said she was optimistic.\u201cYes, we\u2019re moving away from a golden age because this suite of great observatories has gone away,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there\u2019s new things coming to take its place. We\u2019re standing on the threshold of an entirely new era.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Spitzer mission would end when the telescope loses contact in the next year. In fact, Spitzer could continue to operate beyond that time, but NASA opted to end the mission.Read more:The Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers Meet NASA\u2019s newest planet hunter NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errors Two of NASA's aging \"great observatories\" have experienced technical problems in the past month, and astronomers are starting to worry about what happens when they fail. As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3470",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/18/nasas-prized-telescopes-falter-astronomers-fear-losing-their-eyes-space/",
        "text": "America\u2019s Great Observatories \u2014 the Hubble, Chandra, Compton and Spitzer space telescopes \u2014 have peered into the unknown and made breakthrough discoveries about newborn stars, dark matter and the age of the universe itself.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut these telescopes, whose era began in 1990, are aging, if not already dead, and there is no budget or political will to replace them. That sobering reality was underscored this month when two, including the Hubble Space Telescope, were beset by technical problems that temporarily halted their science. Shrinking budgets and delayed projects means astronomers will lose some of their key eyes in the skies before NASA can launch new telescopes. It will make some research impossible.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe unwillingness to invest in substantial science has begun to worry us,\" said astrophysicist Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which operates the Hubble telescope on behalf of NASA. \u201cWe\u2019re facing a very daunting prospect as a community. Some fields just won\u2019t have a telescope. And the science will not be possible to do in any other way.\u201dAdvertisementSome of science\u2019s biggest questions \u2014 What is dark energy? Does life exist beyond the solar system? \u2014 can be answered only by large observatories working in particular parts of the light spectrum.Whether to invest in pursuing these questions \u201cis a choice for the nation,\" said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA. \u201cWhat missions we do will be influenced by priorities of the community as well as the funding choices made by the political system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe system prioritized the Great Observatories program when it was conceived in the 1970s and \u201980s \u2014 four telescope missions to cover the entire light spectrum in space. They launched between 1990 and 2003. There was the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory for capturing the most energetic explosions in the universe. The Spitzer Space Telescope to seek out infrared radiation from exoplanets and newborn stars. The Chandra X-ray Observatory could probe the depths of black holes and uncovered evidence for dark matter and dark energy.AdvertisementThe Hubble Space Telescope was the program\u2019s crown jewel, whose massive dish for collecting light in the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths helped determine the age of the universe, revealed black holes at the centers of galaxies and photographed the most distant objects ever seen.Stunning images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope NOTE: REDIRECTED TO REPLACEMENT HubbleGallery2020.gallery.xml. Good URL in the metadataShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe Eagle Nebula\u2019s \u201cPillars of Creation,\u201d one of the Hubble\u2019s most iconic and popular images. (Hubble Heritage Team via AFP/Getty Images) (Hubble And The Heritage Team/AFP/Getty Images)Space telescopes are difficult to engineer and expensive to build. But they are necessary to get a clear glimpse into the cosmos. Even at night, Earth\u2019s atmosphere distorts light from space, making images blurry, and other signals \u2014 particularly gamma rays \u2014 impossible to see.Story continues below advertisementUsing the fleet in concert enhances these telescopes\u2019 power even further. Last year, observations by Hubble, Chandra, Fermi (another gamma-ray telescope) and dozens of others allowed astronomers to confirm theories about fundamental physics when they observed two dead stars colliding.AdvertisementThey might not always have that ability.The Compton telescope was lost in 2001, when a problem with its gyroscope \u2014 which allows a telescope to rotate and point at something \u2014 meant the space agency had to intentionally ground it or risk the spacecraft plummeting, uncontrolled, out of the sky.Spitzer, which has been slowly drifting away from Earth, will end its mission by early 2020. That loss has been expected, but the difficulties with Hubble and Chandra this month were an unanticipated one-two punch.Neither of the spacecraft\u2019s problems is fatal, NASA said. Chandra came back online just days after a glitch with one of its gyroscopes forced the telescope into safe mode. Hubble, which was also hobbled by a gyroscope difficulty, is expected to return to normal operations within a few weeks at the most. NASA expects both telescopes will continue functioning into the 2020s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, the brief brush with oblivion gave astronomers a lasting scare.\u201cPeople suddenly realized that Hubble is not going to live forever,\u201d said Tom Brown, the Hubble mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Chandra is 19 years old; Hubble is 28.Brown said frantic fellow astronomers have kept his phone ringing \u201cnonstop\u201d in the past two weeks. \u201cThey\u2019re thinking about what happens next.\u201dNASA\u2019s billion-dollar-a-year astrophysics program currently flies eight major telescopes aimed at studying space beyond the solar system. Of these, all but one are in their \u201cextended missions\u201d \u2014 the bonus years beyond the time for which the spacecraft was originally designed.Story continues below advertisementThe only flagship NASA space observatory under construction is the James Webb Space Telescope, whose gold-plated dish is designed to collect infrared radiation from the earliest objects in the universe.NASA intended for the timing of Webb\u2019s mission to overlap significantly with Hubble\u2019s. But the launch of the $10 billion behemoth has been repeatedly delayed as the space agency deals with design problems and costly human errors. This year, NASA announced that Webb won\u2019t launch until 2021 at the earliest, cutting the concerted observing time short.NASA\u2019s next big project would be the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which is also targeted toward infrared wavelengths and in 2010 was considered the top astrophysics priority of the National Academy of Sciences. But funding for the observatory has been up in the air after President Trump omitted the telescope from his last two budget requests.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe outlook for research across other parts of the light spectrum are fuzzy at best. When Hubble fails, Brown pointed out, there will be no visible or ultraviolet telescopes at that scale. Likewise, NASA has no large X-ray observatories ready to replace Chandra. Compton was succeeded by the smaller Fermi telescope, which has two instruments to Compton\u2019s four. Fermi is already 10 years old and exceeded its original mission by five years.Gamma ray astrophysicist Julie McEnery, the project scientist for Fermi, worries that even a temporary gap in telescope coverage could have lasting repercussions in her field.\u201cYou have to have a minimal level of activity in any given telescope area to maintain expertise in the community so you can continue to build instruments,\u201d she said.To prevent such gaps, NASA would have to start developing new missions now; most space telescopes require several decades from conception to launch.Other nations\u2019 space agencies are already working on such programs. The European Space Agency is developing the ATHENA X-ray Observatory for launch in the 2030s. China announced in 2016 it would build its own optical telescope with a field of view 300 times greater than that of Hubble.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTheir budgets are increasing,\u201d Mountain said.In the United States, NASA\u2019s budget hasn\u2019t kept up with inflation, and the fraction of federal spending that goes to the agency has been cut almost in half since 1980. The agency has been scrutinized over the Webb telescope\u2019s dramatic delays and cost overruns. \u201cThe telescope that ate astronomy,\u201d it\u2019s been bitterly nicknamed.This spring, NASA announced that it would \u201cnarrow the scope\u201d (reduce the budget) of four proposals it is considering for launch in the 2030s.\u201cWe need to ensure we can accomplish breakthrough science while adhering to a realistic, executable scope and budget for the next decade,\u201d Hertz, the astrophysics division director, said earlier this year.But big budgets are necessary to do \u201ctextbook-rewriting science,\u201d Mountain said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be hard to replicate the capabilities of the Great Observatories without expending the equivalent kind of resources.\" Hubble\u2019s cumulative cost has been somewhere around $10 billion. But look at what it bought: Nobel Prize-winning research on the accelerating expansion of the universe, among other groundbreaking work.Hertz acknowledged that building successors to all four Great Observatories would require a much greater investment from the federal government. \u201cThere are some science questions that require extremely ambitious observatories and can\u2019t be done cheaply,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDetecting life outside our solar system requires a telescope like Webb. Explaining dark energy and why the universe\u2019s expansion is speeding up necessitates a huge, sensitive instrument like the Wide Field Infrared Survey.Hertz said that NASA is trying to make the most of limited resources. During the final servicing mission to Hubble in 2009, astronauts equipped the spacecraft with multiple backups of most essential hardware, adding decades to its life. At 19, Chandra has exceeded the duration of its original mission by more than a decade; this month\u2019s gyroscope glitch was the first such problem it has experienced.Modest \u201csmall and middle explorers\u201d \u2014 which cost less than $120 million and $200 million, respectively \u2014 are constantly in development. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a \u201cMidEx\u201d project designed to seek out unknown worlds around nearby stars, began science operations this summer.AdvertisementEven without a gamma-ray telescope on the horizon, McEnery said she was optimistic.\u201cYes, we\u2019re moving away from a golden age because this suite of great observatories has gone away,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there\u2019s new things coming to take its place. We\u2019re standing on the threshold of an entirely new era.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Spitzer mission would end when the telescope loses contact in the next year. In fact, Spitzer could continue to operate beyond that time, but NASA opted to end the mission.Read more:The Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangers Meet NASA\u2019s newest planet hunter NASA\u2019s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errors Two of NASA's aging \"great observatories\" have experienced technical problems in the past month, and astronomers are starting to worry about what happens when they fail. As NASA\u2019s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Most detailed close-ups of sun reveal massive, turbulent solar plasma (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3471",
        "date": "2020-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/most-detailed-close-ups-of-sun-reveal-massive-turbulent-solar-plasma/2020/01/31/3523aeea-4375-11ea-b503-2b077c436617_story.html",
        "text": "All is not calm on the sun. New images released last week, which the National Science Foundation says are the star\u2019s most detailed close-ups, show turbulent solar plasma: Charged particles that rise to the surface of the star, forming convection cells the size of Texas, which cool and descend back into the sun\u2019s depths. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe images, from the nearly complete Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, are the most zoomed-in examinations of that turbulence. They reveal structures as small as 18.6 miles on the surface of the sun. Those details are five times smaller than any solar image had captured before, Thomas Rimmele, the telescope\u2019s director, told reporters recently. (The sun is nearly 870,000 miles in diameter.)The Inouye telescope, a $344\u00a0million tool built on the peak of Haleakala on Maui, took these images on its first day of operation in December. This is the \u201clargest, most powerful solar telescope in the world,\u201d Rimmele said. The telescope will help astronomers understand the sun\u2019s magnetic field and its atmosphere, known as its corona, more fully.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom its violent atmosphere, the sun belches energetic particles that move so swiftly that they are able to hit Earth in minutes. Such solar storms are capable of overwhelming electric grids and disturbing radio communications.Protest against a billion-dollar telescope in Hawaii grows to 1,000 people, leading to brief arrests\u201cWe still do not understand how the corona is heated to millions of degrees when the surface of the sun is only 6,000 degrees,\u201d Rimmele said. (If that phenomenon sounds counterintuitive, well, it is. Solar experts often describe the effect like this: Imagine pulling your hand away from a hot plate, only for your palm to heat up even more.)\u201cThe Inouye telescope has the unique resolution and sensitivity required to perform the most precise measurements of the sun\u2019s magnetic field, especially in the corona,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe telescope is a marvel of engineering.A mirror within the telescope adjusts 2,000 times per second, to compensate for distortions introduced by Earth\u2019s atmosphere. As the telescope focuses on the sun, it generates heat \u2014 in the manner of a magnifying glass, except it gets hot enough to melt metal, Rimmele said. Coolant fed through 7.5 miles of pipe keeps the telescope chilled.Advertisement\u201cWe make the equivalent of a swimming pool full of ice every night to provide cooling for the optics and structures during the day,\u201d he said.NASA spacecraft circling the sun stumbled upon a trail of shooting starsThe construction at Haleakala was the target of protesters, who said the telescope was on sacred land. Twenty people were arrested there while attempting to block trucks from the summit in summer 2015. Protests have continued at another Hawaiian mountain, Mauna Kea, where construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope was put on hold in December.Story continues below advertisementAt Haleakala, after \u201csemiannual meetings with a native Hawaiian working group,\u201d telescope officials were \u201cable to smooth over a lot of that contention,\u201d said David Boboltz, program director for the NSF\u2019s astronomy division. Under an agreement, 2 percent of the telescope time will be allocated to native Hawaiian scientists.AdvertisementA new wave of solar astronomy is forming, which includes observation platforms in space. The Parker Solar Probe, which launched in August 2018, has been skimming by the sun to collect temperature and other data. The European Space Agency plans to launch its solar orbiter in February. The Inouye telescope will be finished in June, while the astronomers prep to catch the next hot spot cycle on the sun.Protest against a billion-dollar telescope in Hawaii grows to 1,000 people, leading to brief arrestsNASA spacecraft circling the sun stumbled upon a trail of shooting starsNASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe launches on a mission to study the sun and its dangersHere\u2019s a look at some amazing space images from 2019 Hawaii\u2019s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope will help us understand the star\u2019s magnetic field and its atmosphere, known as its corona. Most detailed close-ups of sun reveal massive, turbulent solar plasma",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA and Boeing Postpone Launch of Starliner Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3472",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/science/nasa-boeing-starliner-launch.html",
        "text": "After a flawed trip to orbit in 2019, the company hopes to take another crack at an uncrewed test flight of its spacecraft for NASA astronauts. After a flawed trip to orbit in 2019, the company hopes to take another crack at an uncrewed test flight of its spacecraft for NASA astronauts. For Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, NASA certainly hopes the second time\u2019s the charm. But the agency will have to wait a little longer.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA and Boeing Postpone Launch of Starliner Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3473",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/science/nasa-boeing-starliner-launch.html",
        "text": "After a flawed trip to orbit in 2019, the company hopes to take another crack at an uncrewed test flight of its spacecraft for NASA astronauts. After a flawed trip to orbit in 2019, the company hopes to take another crack at an uncrewed test flight of its spacecraft for NASA astronauts. For Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, NASA certainly hopes the second time\u2019s the charm. But the agency will have to wait a little longer.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A bright new star will burst into the sky in five years, astronomers predict (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3474",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/06/a-bright-new-star-will-burst-into-the-sky-in-five-years-astronomers-predict/",
        "text": "A team of astronomers is making a bold forecast: A binary star found in the summer constellation Cygnus the swan will burst into a red nova sometime in 2022.When the two stars in the binary system crash into one another, they will create a brick-red beacon so bright that sky gazers will see it with the naked eye, Larry Molnar of Calvin College said Friday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Grapevine, Tex. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs the constellation Cygnus\u00a0glides gracefully along the Milky Way every late spring and summer, the cosmic bird\u2019s left wing houses a faint binary star called KIC 9832227. The two stars spinning around one another are merging, on a path to an explosion that will result in a red nova, said Molnar and his colleagues.For KIC 9832227, the orbital period is currently just under 11 hours, he said, and \u201cas that period gets shorter, we infer that the separation between the stars is getting smaller. Hence they are spiraling in together.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe astronomers first presented this star\u2019s red nova prognostication at the January 2015 American Astronomical Society meeting, but the predictions teemed with unknowns. \u201cThe core of\u00a0this [new] scientific presentation is that we have done two strong tests and that our hypothesis [from 2015] is holding up,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have eliminated the alternative interpretations and we have also refined the predicted time to 2022, plus or minus one year.\u201dScientists discover a giant planet that orbits two suns \u2013 and could have habitable moonsTo refine the prediction, the astronomers examined a recent red nova \u2014 a star called V1309 Scorpii, discovered in September 2008. Using V1309 Scorpii research (conducted by Polish astronomer Romuald Tylenda) as a sort of cosmological blueprint, Molnar and colleagues found similar characteristics \u2014 from before the earlier explosion occurred.Like the current candidate, V1309 Scorpii was a contact binary star and \u2014 similarly \u2014 its orbiting period (the time it took for the two stars in the binary system to spin around one another) decreased. Scientists had noted a changing light curve, all evidence of impending eruption.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis quest to comprehend red novas began when Molnar and then-Calvin College student Daniel Van Noord attended a presentation by astronomer Karen Kinemuchi of Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, that asked if KIC 9832227 was a pulsing or binary star. Van Noord, who has since graduated, began dedicated observations at the Calvin observatory, where he found the orbital period shrinking.Skywatch: Beautiful planets and shooting starsThe two spinning stars share a communal atmosphere \u201clike two peanuts sharing a common shell,\u201d Molnar said.Beyond what humans can see with the unaided eye, KIC 9832227 is currently a 12th magnitude object, which means it's pretty dim. When it explodes sometime around 2022, \u201cwe expect it will reach second magnitude at the brightest,\u201d Molnar said, where it will be among the brighter stars in the sky.\u201cWe truly favor the merger hypothesis. \u2026 Now is the time to broaden our work and study the system more fully to \u2026 know what leads to a stellar explosion,\u201d Molnar said. \u201cLike many science stories, this one is gradually unfolding.\u201d22 stunning photos of our solar system and beyond in 2016ShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageIn this undated photo provided by NASA, Saturn's icy moon Mimas is dwarfed by the planet's enormous rings. Consider it a cosmic carousel with countless rings up for grabs. NASA\u2019s Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, has begun an unprecedented mission to skim the planet\u2019s rings. On Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, Cassini got a gravitational assist from Saturn\u2019s big moon Titan. That put the spacecraft on course to graze Saturn\u2019s main outer rings. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via AP) (AP) A dim binary star system in the Cygnus constellation is due to explode and become one of the brightest stars in the sky. A bright new star will burst into the sky in five years, astronomers predict",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "A bright new star will burst into the sky in five years, astronomers predict (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3475",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/06/a-bright-new-star-will-burst-into-the-sky-in-five-years-astronomers-predict/",
        "text": "A team of astronomers is making a bold forecast: A binary star found in the summer constellation Cygnus the swan will burst into a red nova sometime in 2022.When the two stars in the binary system crash into one another, they will create a brick-red beacon so bright that sky gazers will see it with the naked eye, Larry Molnar of Calvin College said Friday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Grapevine, Tex. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs the constellation Cygnus\u00a0glides gracefully along the Milky Way every late spring and summer, the cosmic bird\u2019s left wing houses a faint binary star called KIC 9832227. The two stars spinning around one another are merging, on a path to an explosion that will result in a red nova, said Molnar and his colleagues.For KIC 9832227, the orbital period is currently just under 11 hours, he said, and \u201cas that period gets shorter, we infer that the separation between the stars is getting smaller. Hence they are spiraling in together.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe astronomers first presented this star\u2019s red nova prognostication at the January 2015 American Astronomical Society meeting, but the predictions teemed with unknowns. \u201cThe core of\u00a0this [new] scientific presentation is that we have done two strong tests and that our hypothesis [from 2015] is holding up,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have eliminated the alternative interpretations and we have also refined the predicted time to 2022, plus or minus one year.\u201dScientists discover a giant planet that orbits two suns \u2013 and could have habitable moonsTo refine the prediction, the astronomers examined a recent red nova \u2014 a star called V1309 Scorpii, discovered in September 2008. Using V1309 Scorpii research (conducted by Polish astronomer Romuald Tylenda) as a sort of cosmological blueprint, Molnar and colleagues found similar characteristics \u2014 from before the earlier explosion occurred.Like the current candidate, V1309 Scorpii was a contact binary star and \u2014 similarly \u2014 its orbiting period (the time it took for the two stars in the binary system to spin around one another) decreased. Scientists had noted a changing light curve, all evidence of impending eruption.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis quest to comprehend red novas began when Molnar and then-Calvin College student Daniel Van Noord attended a presentation by astronomer Karen Kinemuchi of Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, that asked if KIC 9832227 was a pulsing or binary star. Van Noord, who has since graduated, began dedicated observations at the Calvin observatory, where he found the orbital period shrinking.Skywatch: Beautiful planets and shooting starsThe two spinning stars share a communal atmosphere \u201clike two peanuts sharing a common shell,\u201d Molnar said.Beyond what humans can see with the unaided eye, KIC 9832227 is currently a 12th magnitude object, which means it's pretty dim. When it explodes sometime around 2022, \u201cwe expect it will reach second magnitude at the brightest,\u201d Molnar said, where it will be among the brighter stars in the sky.\u201cWe truly favor the merger hypothesis. \u2026 Now is the time to broaden our work and study the system more fully to \u2026 know what leads to a stellar explosion,\u201d Molnar said. \u201cLike many science stories, this one is gradually unfolding.\u201d22 stunning photos of our solar system and beyond in 2016ShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageIn this undated photo provided by NASA, Saturn's icy moon Mimas is dwarfed by the planet's enormous rings. Consider it a cosmic carousel with countless rings up for grabs. NASA\u2019s Saturn-orbiting spacecraft, Cassini, has begun an unprecedented mission to skim the planet\u2019s rings. On Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016, Cassini got a gravitational assist from Saturn\u2019s big moon Titan. That put the spacecraft on course to graze Saturn\u2019s main outer rings. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via AP) (AP) A dim binary star system in the Cygnus constellation is due to explode and become one of the brightest stars in the sky. A bright new star will burst into the sky in five years, astronomers predict",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "New Dive Into Old Data Finds Plumes Erupt From Jupiter\u2019s Moon Europa (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3476",
        "date": "2018-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/science/europa-plumes-water.html",
        "text": "A re-examination of old data shows a NASA spacecraft may have flown through a plume in 1997. The plumes could offer hints of life on the ice-encrusted moon. A re-examination of old data shows a NASA spacecraft may have flown through a plume in 1997. The plumes could offer hints of life on the ice-encrusted moon. Europa is an ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter with a global ocean flowing underneath its surface. NASA is planning a mission soon that will look for signs of possible life there.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Dive Into Old Data Finds Plumes Erupt From Jupiter\u2019s Moon Europa (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3477",
        "date": "2018-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/science/europa-plumes-water.html",
        "text": "A re-examination of old data shows a NASA spacecraft may have flown through a plume in 1997. The plumes could offer hints of life on the ice-encrusted moon. A re-examination of old data shows a NASA spacecraft may have flown through a plume in 1997. The plumes could offer hints of life on the ice-encrusted moon. Europa is an ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter with a global ocean flowing underneath its surface. NASA is planning a mission soon that will look for signs of possible life there.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Dive Into Old Data Finds Plumes Erupt From Jupiter\u2019s Moon Europa (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3478",
        "date": "2018-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/science/europa-plumes-water.html",
        "text": "A re-examination of old data shows a NASA spacecraft may have flown through a plume in 1997. The plumes could offer hints of life on the ice-encrusted moon. A re-examination of old data shows a NASA spacecraft may have flown through a plume in 1997. The plumes could offer hints of life on the ice-encrusted moon. Europa is an ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter with a global ocean flowing underneath its surface. NASA is planning a mission soon that will look for signs of possible life there.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New dwarf planet spotted at the very fringe of our solar system (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3479",
        "date": "2018-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/02/new-dwarf-planet-spotted-very-fringe-our-solar-system/",
        "text": "A previously unknown dwarf planet circles through the far reaches of our solar system, the International Astronomical Union\u2019s Minor Planet Center announced Tuesday. Officially designated 2015 TG387, the small and spherical object is probably a ball of ice. Astronomers first observed the dwarf planet on Oct. 13, 2015, from the Subaru telescope at Hawaii\u2019s Mauna Kea Observatories. Embracing the near-Halloween October spirit \u2014 and for want of something pronounceable \u2014 its discoverers nicknamed 2015 TG387 \u201cthe Goblin.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Goblin is \u201cabout 300 kilometers in diameter, on the small end of a dwarf planet,\u201d said Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington who discovered the object along with colleagues at Northern Arizona University, University of Hawaii and the University of Oklahoma. Dwarf planet Pluto, by comparison, is six times as wide.Sheppard has embarked on an ongoing survey to find tiny planetoids on the solar system\u2019s outer rim. He\u2019s interested in the Goblin because it \u201calways stays well beyond the giant planet region,\u201d referring to the lineup of our solar system\u2019s four biggest planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Because 2015 TG387 exists so far away, speaking in terms of miles becomes unwieldy. Instead, astronomers refer to its orbit in astronomical units, or AU, where 1 AU is the distance between the sun and Earth. Pluto sits at an average of 40 AU from the sun. The Goblin comes no closer than 65 AU.It's been seven years since astronauts launched from American soil, now NASA has hired SpaceX and Boeing to restore launch capabilities to the U.S. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)Only a few known objects in our solar system have comparable orbits, such as dwarf planets 2012 VP113 (nickname: Biden) and Sedna. And 2015 TG387\u2032s lopsided elliptical orbit takes it much farther away than those two remote objects \u2014 at its farthest, the Goblin reaches 2,300 AU, into a region of space called the Oort cloud. This also means the Goblin takes 40,000 years to complete one orbit of the sun. If we set our calendars by 2015 TG387, then one \u201cGoblin year\u201d ago the last of the Neanderthals walked the earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementConfirming the orbit of 2015 TG387 required repeated observations, through May 2018, because the planet moves so slowly. The astronomers were lucky to catch the Goblin when they did. As it travels along 99 percent of its orbit, 2015 TG387 is too far and too faint to be detected. Sheppard said he predicts thousands of objects the same size as 2015 TG387 dot the rim of our solar system. But they are likewise too distant to be seen the vast majority of the time. He anticipates astronomers will be able to detect only another dozen or so objects in the next few years of the survey.\u201cObjects such as 2015 TG387 allow us to probe not only the makeup of the solar system itself but also the gravitational mechanisms that sculpt it,\u201d said Konstantin Batygin, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved with the observation. \u201cThis is a great discovery indeed.\u201dThe Goblin\u2019s orbit is very skewed, and so is Sedna\u2019s and Biden\u2019s. Sheppard says a large and unknown planet could be \u201cshepherding\u201d these dwarf planets, directing them like a cosmic border collie around the solar system\u2019s fringe.Sheppard is not the only astronomer to propose that a putative planet, called Planet Nine or Planet X, lurks at the dark edge of the solar system. The planet, if it exists, would be bigger than the Goblin or Pluto. Batygin, in a 2016 paper in the Astronomical Journal, estimated Planet Nine would be up to 10 times as massive as Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs such, Planet Nine would be a \u201cmassive perturber,\u201d as Sheppard called it in a 2014 Nature article. Smaller objects like the Goblin have to dance around Planet Nine, or else they would collide with it or be ejected from their orbits. So far, all of the objects Sheppard has spotted appear to dance as predicted.\u201cThis clustering can only be maintained if the solar system hosts an additional, yet unseen, super-Earth type planet,\u201d Batygin said. He added, \u201cI\u2019m running code as we speak that evaluates how the inferred orbit and mass of Planet Nine are affected by this new object.\u201d The Goblin sits right in the middle of the cluster of known objects, he said, and the astronomical search helps scientists home in on Planet Nine\u2019s location.In 2016, Sheppard told The Washington Post that he put the odds of Planet Nine\u2019s existence at about 60 percent. Now he\u2019s up to 80 percent, he said. \u201cIf the trends are true, then we don\u2019t know of another explanation for why they would be grouped in an orbit like this,\u201d Sheppard said. Though the trends have held, the astronomers admit they are dealing with a small number of known objects. For now, Sheppard is eager to find more.Chris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut, hopes to make history as the first corporate astronaut flying Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. (Whitney Leaming, Whitney Shefte, Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post)Read more:Astronomers discover 12 more moons of Jupiter, including an oddityIs there a Planet X, a \u2018massive perturber,\u2019 hidden beyond Pluto?Now anyone can join the search for the mysterious \u2018Planet Nine\u2019 The new object, nicknamed the Goblin, is very far from the sun. New dwarf planet spotted at the very fringe of our solar system",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking for Another Earth? Here Are 300 Million, Maybe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3480",
        "date": "2020-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/science/astronomy-exoplanets-kepler.html",
        "text": "A new analysis of data from NASA\u2019s Kepler spacecraft increases the number of habitable exoplanets thought to exist in this galaxy. A new analysis of data from NASA\u2019s Kepler spacecraft increases the number of habitable exoplanets thought to exist in this galaxy. A decade ago, a band of astronomers set out to investigate one of the oldest questions taunting philosophers, scientists, priests, astronomers, mystics and the rest of the human race: How many more Earths are out there, if any? How many far-flung planets exist that could harbor life as we know it?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking for Another Earth? Here Are 300 Million, Maybe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3481",
        "date": "2020-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/science/astronomy-exoplanets-kepler.html",
        "text": "A new analysis of data from NASA\u2019s Kepler spacecraft increases the number of habitable exoplanets thought to exist in this galaxy. A new analysis of data from NASA\u2019s Kepler spacecraft increases the number of habitable exoplanets thought to exist in this galaxy. A decade ago, a band of astronomers set out to investigate one of the oldest questions taunting philosophers, scientists, priests, astronomers, mystics and the rest of the human race: How many more Earths are out there, if any? How many far-flung planets exist that could harbor life as we know it?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A mysterious Mars-sized planet may be hiding at the edge of our solar system (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3482",
        "date": "2017-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/27/a-mysterious-mars-sized-planet-may-be-hiding-at-the-edge-of-our-solar-system/",
        "text": "A mysterious celestial body may be lurking in the frozen, far-flung\u00a0reaches of the solar system, scientists say.This is not the proposed \u201cPlanet Nine,\u201d a ginormous body that Caltech scientists\u00a0believe could be tugging at the orbits of the solar system's most distant inhabitants. And it's not Pluto. (Sorry Pluto, you still don't count). WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, University of Arizona astronomers Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra say it's a Mars-sized body\u00a0in the Kuiper belt, a swarm of small icy objects\u00a0that extends\u00a0beyond the orbit of\u00a0Pluto. If both the Arizona and Caltech researchers are right, then these proposed bodies\u00a0could bring the total number of planets in our solar system to 10.Story continues below advertisementVolk and Malhotra haven't seen their new planet, but they say they can sense its presence. In a new paper due to\u00a0be published in the Astronomical Journal, they describe an\u00a0odd distortion in the orbits of objects in the outer part of the Kuiper belt, ones that are between 50 and 80 AU away\u00a0(AU stands for astronomical unit, or the distance\u00a0from the sun to Earth, about 92 million miles).AdvertisementAlthough most of the nearer bodies in the solar system circle the sun in the same plane, largely thanks to Jupiter's steadying heft, these faraway Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) orbit at all kinds of wonky angles.That in itself wouldn't raise too many questions.\u00a0But when Volk and Malhotra analyzed these orbits in search of\u00a0the average plane, they found that it was offset by about 8 degrees.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's significant,\u201d Volk said. \u201cAnd\u00a0the most likely explanation is this object on the outer solar system.\u201dIf there is\u00a0a planet out there with roughly the same mass as Mars, its gravity\u00a0could pull on the orbits of small KBOs, dragging them out of the \u201cinvariable plane\u201d that Earth, Jupiter and the rest of the planets inhabit.The Caltech researchers used similar logic to infer the presence of Planet Nine, arguing that this \u201cmassive perturber\u201d is responsible for peculiarities in the point at which KBOs are closest to the sun.\u201cIt's the same idea of indirectly detecting a planet by its effects,\u201d Volk said.For their study, Volk and Malhotra examined the orbits\u00a0of about 600 KBOs. Scientists know of roughly 2,000 KBOs right now, but they think there may be as many as 100,000 of significant size.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt would be useful to have more Kuiper belt objects\u00a0to make sure this is a real signal,\u201d Volk acknowledged. But even so, their analysis suggests there's only a 1 to 2 percent chance that the results are because of a fluke in the data.Alessandro Morbidelli at the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur Observatory in Nice, France, told New Scientist he found it hard to believe that astronomers could have missed something as big as a planet so nearby. (The Caltech scientists' \u201cPlanet Nine\u201d is said to be 10 times as distant, which explains why it's been so hard to track down).\u201cI am dubious that a planet so close and so bright would have remained unnoticed,\u201d\u00a0Morbidelli said.Story continues below advertisementAdding an extra planet to the solar system has long been astronomers' favorite way to explain any orbital weirdness.\u00a0Scientists spent more than a century searching in vain for a fabled \u201cPlanet X\u201d that was believed to be disrupting the orbit of\u00a0Uranus. It wasn't until the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by in the 1990s that they realized\u00a0the \u201cdisturbance\u201d was actually a result of a miscalculation of Neptune's size. So the astronomy community is understandably skeptical when anyone claims to have proof of a new planet.AdvertisementBut none of the potential alternate explanations seem any more suitable, Volk said. Another force\u00a0capable of creating this effect, a large passing star, would be even more unlikely because the disturbance would be erased within 100,000 years \u2014 an astronomical blink of an eye.Besides,\u00a0humans\u00a0don't know nearly enough about our celestial back yard to rule out the possibility of finding\u00a0new neighbors, she said. Because they are so small and far away, KBOs look like faint stars even to the most powerful telescopes. We discover new bodies in this region only by detecting their motion against the background of stars \u2014 a process that requires long nights of\u00a0patient observation. Scientists have been accumulating new KBOs since they detected the first one, in 1992, and even still, we haven't surveyed the whole sky.Story continues below advertisementThe most likely hiding spot for the proposed 10th\u00a0planet, according to Volk, is the galactic plane \u2014 the region of the Kuiper belt that lines up with the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Because this region is so crowded with stars, it would be nearly impossible to detect even a Mars-sized object moving across the background. If\u00a0an ordinary search for a KBO is like a celestial game of \u201cWhere's Waldo,\u201d this is like trying to find Waldo when an additional billion background characters have been added to the page.\u201cWe have a good sense of the outer solar system,\u201d Volk said, \u201cbut it would not surprise\u00a0me at all if there are very distant things we have missed.\u201dRead more:New evidence suggests a ninth planet lurking at the edge of the solar systemNASA finds 10 new potentially habitable, 'Earthlike' worldsJupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites show What lurks beyond Pluto? Possibly, planets number nine and 10. A mysterious Mars-sized planet may be hiding at the edge of our solar system",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Latest Engineering Challenge: A Leaky Toilet (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3483",
        "date": "2021-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/spacex-toilet-nasa.html",
        "text": "A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Latest Engineering Challenge: A Leaky Toilet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3484",
        "date": "2021-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/spacex-toilet-nasa.html",
        "text": "A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Latest Engineering Challenge: A Leaky Toilet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3485",
        "date": "2021-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/spacex-toilet-nasa.html",
        "text": "A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Latest Engineering Challenge: A Leaky Toilet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3486",
        "date": "2021-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/spacex-toilet-nasa.html",
        "text": "A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Latest Engineering Challenge: A Leaky Toilet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3487",
        "date": "2021-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/spacex-toilet-nasa.html",
        "text": "A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. A discussion of repairs of the waste management systems used aboard the company\u2019s passenger spacecraft offered rare insight into how it fixes things. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiny new moon discovered around Neptune (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3488",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/20/tiny-new-moon-discovered-around-neptune/",
        "text": "A diminutive nugget of a moon has been discovered lurking in the inner orbit of Neptune.The moon, dubbed Hippocamp for the half-horse, half-fish sea monster from Greek legend, is about the size of Chicago and so faint only the powerful Hubble Space Telescope can spot it. But by examining data stretching more than a decade, researchers were able to discern its dim form from 3 billion miles away. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cBeing able to contribute to the real estate of the solar system is a real privilege,\u201d said planetary scientist Mark Showalter, the lead author of a study on the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature. \u201cBut it shows how much we still don\u2019t know about the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.\"Story continues below advertisementShowalter and his colleagues suggest Hippocamp is a fragment of a larger neighboring moon called Proteus, broken off during a cataclysmic collision some 4 billion years ago.AdvertisementNeptune has been explored just once in human history, with a brief flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. \u201cBut there are all these interesting processes going on there, that we only got a glimpse of,\u201d Showalter said. \u201cAtmospheric phenomena, rings with peculiar properties .\u2009.\u2009. and these collisions and breakups that formed the inner moons.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s not just a dinky little moon we\u2019ve found,\u201d he continued. Moons such as Hippocamp \u201care witnesses to the formation and evolution of the planets they orbit. In my mind, they have very interesting stories to tell.\u201dShowalter, a senior research scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., is something of a distant moon detective. By accumulating scores of long-exposure Hubble images, then adjusting them to account for an orbiting body\u2019s predicted movement, he has already uncovered two new moons each around Pluto and Uranus.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe resulting images \u201care not pretty,\u201d Showalter said. The planets are so overexposed they become big white blotches, and the moons at their centers are little more than pale dots. The procedure generally does not capture enough data from the moons to allow scientists to take spectra \u2014 splitting light into its component parts to reveal clues about the moons\u2019 composition.Hippocamp is the first new inner satellite found around the solar system\u2019s outermost planet since the Voyager 2 flyby.Researchers were initially surprised to find the tiny rock so close inside the orbit of Proteus, which is more than 100 times its size. Observations suggest tidal forces have been slowly pushing Proteus away from Neptune; a few billion years ago, it would have sat right where Hippocamp is today.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOur initial thought was that\u2019s a very strange place to find a moon,\u201d Showalter said.AdvertisementProteus also has a massive crater on its surface, called Pharos, likely left behind after an impact from a comet or another passing object that nearly destroyed the moon at some point in its history.Perhaps, Showalter and his colleagues suggest, Hippocamp is some of the shrapnel from that ancient collision. Only by sending a spacecraft back to the Neptune system to compare the worlds\u2019 compositions can scientists know for sure.Though the outer solar system is sometimes seen as dark, cold and dreary, the story of Hippocamp demonstrates how much activity has gone unnoticed in this distant region, said Kathleen Mandt, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who was not involved in the new research.Story continues below advertisementScientists say Neptune\u2019s icy largest moon, Triton, was acquired from the Kuiper belt sometime after the planet\u2019s formation. Triton\u2019s arrival probably jostled the inner moons, causing collisions that flung some bodies outward and fragmented others.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s just fascinating for dynamicists\u201d studying how solar system bodies interact and evolve, Mandt said.In addition, many of the exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system that have been discovered orbiting other suns, are roughly the same size and mass as the ice giants. Further study of Neptune and Uranus could offer insight into those even more alien worlds.\u201cThere is a lot each of these systems can tell us that we don\u2019t know because we haven\u2019t had the opportunity to visit and stay long enough to see it,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementDuring the planetary science community\u2019s last 10-year survey of goals for space exploration, scientists named a large-scale mission to one or both of the ice giants among their top three priorities. Mandt served on a NASA committee to outline what such a mission might look like, but nothing has been funded. The project will likely be bumped to the next decadal survey.Read more:It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and NeptuneScientists think they\u2019ve found the first moon outside our solar system What else lurks around the solar system\u2019s outermost planet? Tiny new moon discovered around Neptune",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiny new moon discovered around Neptune (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3489",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/20/tiny-new-moon-discovered-around-neptune/",
        "text": "A diminutive nugget of a moon has been discovered lurking in the inner orbit of Neptune.The moon, dubbed Hippocamp for the half-horse, half-fish sea monster from Greek legend, is about the size of Chicago and so faint only the powerful Hubble Space Telescope can spot it. But by examining data stretching more than a decade, researchers were able to discern its dim form from 3 billion miles away. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cBeing able to contribute to the real estate of the solar system is a real privilege,\u201d said planetary scientist Mark Showalter, the lead author of a study on the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature. \u201cBut it shows how much we still don\u2019t know about the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.\"Story continues below advertisementShowalter and his colleagues suggest Hippocamp is a fragment of a larger neighboring moon called Proteus, broken off during a cataclysmic collision some 4 billion years ago.AdvertisementNeptune has been explored just once in human history, with a brief flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. \u201cBut there are all these interesting processes going on there, that we only got a glimpse of,\u201d Showalter said. \u201cAtmospheric phenomena, rings with peculiar properties .\u2009.\u2009. and these collisions and breakups that formed the inner moons.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s not just a dinky little moon we\u2019ve found,\u201d he continued. Moons such as Hippocamp \u201care witnesses to the formation and evolution of the planets they orbit. In my mind, they have very interesting stories to tell.\u201dShowalter, a senior research scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., is something of a distant moon detective. By accumulating scores of long-exposure Hubble images, then adjusting them to account for an orbiting body\u2019s predicted movement, he has already uncovered two new moons each around Pluto and Uranus.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe resulting images \u201care not pretty,\u201d Showalter said. The planets are so overexposed they become big white blotches, and the moons at their centers are little more than pale dots. The procedure generally does not capture enough data from the moons to allow scientists to take spectra \u2014 splitting light into its component parts to reveal clues about the moons\u2019 composition.Hippocamp is the first new inner satellite found around the solar system\u2019s outermost planet since the Voyager 2 flyby.Researchers were initially surprised to find the tiny rock so close inside the orbit of Proteus, which is more than 100 times its size. Observations suggest tidal forces have been slowly pushing Proteus away from Neptune; a few billion years ago, it would have sat right where Hippocamp is today.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOur initial thought was that\u2019s a very strange place to find a moon,\u201d Showalter said.AdvertisementProteus also has a massive crater on its surface, called Pharos, likely left behind after an impact from a comet or another passing object that nearly destroyed the moon at some point in its history.Perhaps, Showalter and his colleagues suggest, Hippocamp is some of the shrapnel from that ancient collision. Only by sending a spacecraft back to the Neptune system to compare the worlds\u2019 compositions can scientists know for sure.Though the outer solar system is sometimes seen as dark, cold and dreary, the story of Hippocamp demonstrates how much activity has gone unnoticed in this distant region, said Kathleen Mandt, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who was not involved in the new research.Story continues below advertisementScientists say Neptune\u2019s icy largest moon, Triton, was acquired from the Kuiper belt sometime after the planet\u2019s formation. Triton\u2019s arrival probably jostled the inner moons, causing collisions that flung some bodies outward and fragmented others.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s just fascinating for dynamicists\u201d studying how solar system bodies interact and evolve, Mandt said.In addition, many of the exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system that have been discovered orbiting other suns, are roughly the same size and mass as the ice giants. Further study of Neptune and Uranus could offer insight into those even more alien worlds.\u201cThere is a lot each of these systems can tell us that we don\u2019t know because we haven\u2019t had the opportunity to visit and stay long enough to see it,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementDuring the planetary science community\u2019s last 10-year survey of goals for space exploration, scientists named a large-scale mission to one or both of the ice giants among their top three priorities. Mandt served on a NASA committee to outline what such a mission might look like, but nothing has been funded. The project will likely be bumped to the next decadal survey.Read more:It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and NeptuneScientists think they\u2019ve found the first moon outside our solar system What else lurks around the solar system\u2019s outermost planet? Tiny new moon discovered around Neptune",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiny new moon discovered around Neptune (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3490",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/20/tiny-new-moon-discovered-around-neptune/",
        "text": "A diminutive nugget of a moon has been discovered lurking in the inner orbit of Neptune.The moon, dubbed Hippocamp for the half-horse, half-fish sea monster from Greek legend, is about the size of Chicago and so faint only the powerful Hubble Space Telescope can spot it. But by examining data stretching more than a decade, researchers were able to discern its dim form from 3 billion miles away. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cBeing able to contribute to the real estate of the solar system is a real privilege,\u201d said planetary scientist Mark Showalter, the lead author of a study on the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature. \u201cBut it shows how much we still don\u2019t know about the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus.\"Story continues below advertisementShowalter and his colleagues suggest Hippocamp is a fragment of a larger neighboring moon called Proteus, broken off during a cataclysmic collision some 4 billion years ago.AdvertisementNeptune has been explored just once in human history, with a brief flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. \u201cBut there are all these interesting processes going on there, that we only got a glimpse of,\u201d Showalter said. \u201cAtmospheric phenomena, rings with peculiar properties .\u2009.\u2009. and these collisions and breakups that formed the inner moons.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s not just a dinky little moon we\u2019ve found,\u201d he continued. Moons such as Hippocamp \u201care witnesses to the formation and evolution of the planets they orbit. In my mind, they have very interesting stories to tell.\u201dShowalter, a senior research scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, Calif., is something of a distant moon detective. By accumulating scores of long-exposure Hubble images, then adjusting them to account for an orbiting body\u2019s predicted movement, he has already uncovered two new moons each around Pluto and Uranus.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe resulting images \u201care not pretty,\u201d Showalter said. The planets are so overexposed they become big white blotches, and the moons at their centers are little more than pale dots. The procedure generally does not capture enough data from the moons to allow scientists to take spectra \u2014 splitting light into its component parts to reveal clues about the moons\u2019 composition.Hippocamp is the first new inner satellite found around the solar system\u2019s outermost planet since the Voyager 2 flyby.Researchers were initially surprised to find the tiny rock so close inside the orbit of Proteus, which is more than 100 times its size. Observations suggest tidal forces have been slowly pushing Proteus away from Neptune; a few billion years ago, it would have sat right where Hippocamp is today.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOur initial thought was that\u2019s a very strange place to find a moon,\u201d Showalter said.AdvertisementProteus also has a massive crater on its surface, called Pharos, likely left behind after an impact from a comet or another passing object that nearly destroyed the moon at some point in its history.Perhaps, Showalter and his colleagues suggest, Hippocamp is some of the shrapnel from that ancient collision. Only by sending a spacecraft back to the Neptune system to compare the worlds\u2019 compositions can scientists know for sure.Though the outer solar system is sometimes seen as dark, cold and dreary, the story of Hippocamp demonstrates how much activity has gone unnoticed in this distant region, said Kathleen Mandt, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who was not involved in the new research.Story continues below advertisementScientists say Neptune\u2019s icy largest moon, Triton, was acquired from the Kuiper belt sometime after the planet\u2019s formation. Triton\u2019s arrival probably jostled the inner moons, causing collisions that flung some bodies outward and fragmented others.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s just fascinating for dynamicists\u201d studying how solar system bodies interact and evolve, Mandt said.In addition, many of the exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system that have been discovered orbiting other suns, are roughly the same size and mass as the ice giants. Further study of Neptune and Uranus could offer insight into those even more alien worlds.\u201cThere is a lot each of these systems can tell us that we don\u2019t know because we haven\u2019t had the opportunity to visit and stay long enough to see it,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementDuring the planetary science community\u2019s last 10-year survey of goals for space exploration, scientists named a large-scale mission to one or both of the ice giants among their top three priorities. Mandt served on a NASA committee to outline what such a mission might look like, but nothing has been funded. The project will likely be bumped to the next decadal survey.Read more:It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and NeptuneScientists think they\u2019ve found the first moon outside our solar system What else lurks around the solar system\u2019s outermost planet? Tiny new moon discovered around Neptune",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rover Perseverance will prowl ancient lake bed on Mars for signs of life (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3491",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-rover-perseverance-will-prowl-ancient-lake-bed-on-mars-for-signs-of-life/2020/07/27/a9772efc-cb83-11ea-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html",
        "text": "A $2.7\u00a0billion NASA rover is scheduled to blast off for Mars on Thursday on a mission that could help solve one of the greatest mysteries in all of science: the origin of life.If all goes as planned, the rover, named Perseverance, will collect rock and soil samples that would later be space-mailed back to Earth for close scrutiny. Scientists will be looking for fossils or \u201cbiosignatures\u201d of organisms that may have thrived about 3\u00a0billion years ago when the Red Planet was much warmer and wetter. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe have one data point for life on a planet,\u201d said planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology, part of the science team for Perseverance. \u201cMars is the second data point. We know from the investments that we\u2019ve made from exploration that there was this habitable world right next door. Right about the time that Earth was developing its life, Mars was also habitable, with lakes and rivers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA close match between ancient Martian life and life here on Earth would suggest a common origin, with one planet seeding the other through meteorites. Or perhaps Mars had life-forms of a completely alien nature. Or maybe they never existed and Mars has always been a sterile world.\u201cIs it a foregone conclusion that as long as you have the right mix, things are going to happen and you\u2019re going to end up with life?\u201d said Mary Voytek, head of NASA\u2019s astrobiology program. \u201cWe don\u2019t really have the answer to that.\u201dThe new rover mission is officially known as Mars 2020, and it is the first part of a multiphase project called the Mars Sample Return campaign. Only this leg has been fully funded by Congress.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance will launch from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas V rocket. It will be the second robotic mission to Mars in the span of a week: China on Thursday launched its own probe, named Tianwen-1, which is that country\u2019s first attempt to land a craft on Mars.AdvertisementWhile coping with additional challenges introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, NASA has been racing against a deadline imposed by physics: There\u2019s a narrow window when the Earth and Mars are properly positioned in their orbits. Perseverance must launch by Aug.\u00a015, after which the effort would have to be put on hold for a couple of years. It is slated to land on Mars on Feb.\u00a018.The engineering demands of any robotic mission are enormous. Perseverance will have to descend to the surface of Mars in the notoriously confounding atmosphere \u2014 it\u2019s too thin to be very helpful with braking, but just thick enough to cause aerodynamic trouble \u2014 and land in one piece, upright and functional. That is not an uncontested layup.Story continues below advertisementThe mission will benefit from autonomous navigation sensors that should allow a pinpoint landing in Jezero Crater, where a river delta once flowed into a deep lake \u2014 a site painstakingly selected by scientists as the kind of place that might host remnants of ancient organisms.AdvertisementPerseverance is being described by NASA as part of its long-term plan for a human mission to Mars. The rover carries an instrument that can manufacture oxygen out of Mars\u2019 carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, a process critical to future human missions. The rover also carries a small helicopter, named Ingenuity, which will perform the first rotorcraft flight on another planet.A geologist's dream worldLife as we know it here on Earth is both astonishing in its complexity and strangely ordinary. The simplest organism has a fairly elaborate genetic code. At the same time, it is built with some of the most common elements in the universe, such as hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen.Story continues below advertisementIn the past quarter-century, meanwhile, astronomers have learned that most stars have orbiting planets, theoretically offering plenty of potential real estate where life might be found. But although scientists are generally optimistic that there is life beyond Earth, they lack proof.AdvertisementTheir search is complicated by the lack of a watertight definition of life. It\u2019s clearly something that chemistry can achieve given the right conditions. A living thing is self-sustaining and structurally coherent. It obtains energy from the world and does something with it. It contains the code of information that allows it to replicate, and does so with enough inexactitude to allow natural selection to work its wonders.The quest to understand its origin on Earth is also made more challenging by the fact that this isn\u2019t the planet it used to be. The Earth\u2019s surface has been buried, melted, metamorphosed, eroded, crushed, frozen and flooded. There aren\u2019t that many old rocks around.Story continues below advertisementMars, by contrast, is a geologist\u2019s dream world. Unlike Earth, Mars lacks plate tectonics. As a result, the Martian surface hasn\u2019t been radically altered over the past 4\u00a0billion years the way Earth\u2019s has.Advertisement\u201cThose rocks still exist where they were deposited with no complicated overprinting,\u201d Ehlmann said.Even if the mission doesn\u2019t find signs of life, it might detect \u201csome kind of prebiotic phase of life,\u201d said Benjamin Weiss, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is part of the Perseverance science team.\u201cIf we could bring back a fossil record, a rock record, some kind of geological samples, that have some record of that prebiotic phase of the evolution of life, that would arguably be as exciting, or arguably more exciting, than finding life,\u201d Weiss said.Past controversiesMars has a knack for fooling human beings, especially those eager to discover Martian life. In the late 19th century, astronomer Percival Lowell famously claimed to see canals on Mars, which he posited as the handiwork of a civilization struggling with the drying out of the planet. That notion helped inspire H.G. Wells\u2019s \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d the canonical alien-invasion tale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe canals were, of course, imaginary, but well into the 20th century, some scientists thought Mars might be showing signs of seasonal vegetation. Then came the Space Age, and the first robotic probe to fly by Mars, Mariner 4 in 1965, captured images of a cratered and parched landscape.NASA\u2019s extraordinary Viking mission put two robotic landers on the planet in 1976 and performed several life-detection experiments. One result looked positive and briefly generated euphoria among the scientists, but when all the data came in, the consensus was that the experiments hadn\u2019t found signs of life.The field of astrobiology received a boost in 1996, when scientists announced they had found what looked like fossilized microorganisms in a Mars rock discovered in Antarctica after striking the Earth as a meteorite. The rock, scientists said, had been blasted off Mars and into space by an asteroid impact.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Mars rock generated tremendous media attention, but the microfossils discovery did not age well. Although never fully resolved \u2014 there are partisans on both sides of the issue \u2014 the consensus is that intriguing features in the Mars rock (officially ALH84001) could be produced non-biologically.\u201cWe learned a really hard lesson in 1996,\u201d said NASA\u2019s Voytek.Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of science at NASA, said the findings from Martian meteorites that land on Earth are inherently enigmatic, because they have been heated when ejected from Mars and lack the kind of geological context that scientists need.\u201cClearly those rocks do not answer the questions that we have. They don\u2019t have the context and they don\u2019t have the careful handling that it takes to make the sample valuable,\u201d Zurbuchen said.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance is an SUV-size rover that looks like a fraternal twin of Curiosity, the NASA rover that is still exploring the planet. Among other achievements, Curiosity discovered organic molecules in 3-billion-year-old mudstones, although such carbon-based molecules could have a non-biological origin. Perseverance has different tools, including new high-resolution cameras and other remote-sensing instruments.AdvertisementA discovery of life beyond Earth, even in fossil form, would be so significant that scientists want to make sure they get it right. That\u2019s one reason they want to see Mars samples up close, back on Earth, in facilities where the material can be studied for decades to come.Finding the best samplesPerseverance is equipped with a drill and 31\u00a0canisters. After scouting out the most inviting sites, aided by aerial surveillance from the helicopter, the rover will drill into the surface, put Martian soil and rock cores into the canisters, and then leave them scattered around the planet\u2019s surface the way Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs so they wouldn\u2019t get lost in the woods.A subsequent rover would then collect them in 2026 and put them into a launch vehicle to be blasted into orbit around Mars. They would then be transferred to an orbiting spacecraft, which would carry the material back to Earth in 2031, under current NASA plans. Given the project\u2019s complexity, it is critical that the rover pick the right samples, said Abigail Allwood, a geologist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the lead scientist for one of the rover\u2019s remote-sensing instruments. The exact itinerary \u2014 where the rover will drill and when \u2014 remains undetermined. Allwood said she hopes there is abundant time to study the environment first.\u201cAs a geologist, I know the importance of time in the field, looking at the rocks. The more time you spend looking at the rocks, the better you\u2019re going to understand any potential biosignatures,\u201d Allwood said.She makes a field geologist\u2019s point about what such life would look like: multiplicative. Life copies itself.\u201cIf it\u2019s life, it would not be just one. It will be multiple examples of whatever you are looking at,\u201d she said.\n\nThe Mars 2020 rover will visit the perfect spot to find signs of life, new studies showWhat the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsOpportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 yearsNASA Curiosity rover discovers evidence of freshwater Mars lake The mission is top priority for scientists who suspect life may have arisen when Mars was warm and wet. NASA rover Perseverance will prowl ancient lake bed on Mars for signs of life",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rover Perseverance will prowl ancient lake bed on Mars for signs of life (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3492",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-rover-perseverance-will-prowl-ancient-lake-bed-on-mars-for-signs-of-life/2020/07/27/a9772efc-cb83-11ea-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html",
        "text": "A $2.7\u00a0billion NASA rover is scheduled to blast off for Mars on Thursday on a mission that could help solve one of the greatest mysteries in all of science: the origin of life.If all goes as planned, the rover, named Perseverance, will collect rock and soil samples that would later be space-mailed back to Earth for close scrutiny. Scientists will be looking for fossils or \u201cbiosignatures\u201d of organisms that may have thrived about 3\u00a0billion years ago when the Red Planet was much warmer and wetter. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe have one data point for life on a planet,\u201d said planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology, part of the science team for Perseverance. \u201cMars is the second data point. We know from the investments that we\u2019ve made from exploration that there was this habitable world right next door. Right about the time that Earth was developing its life, Mars was also habitable, with lakes and rivers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA close match between ancient Martian life and life here on Earth would suggest a common origin, with one planet seeding the other through meteorites. Or perhaps Mars had life-forms of a completely alien nature. Or maybe they never existed and Mars has always been a sterile world.\u201cIs it a foregone conclusion that as long as you have the right mix, things are going to happen and you\u2019re going to end up with life?\u201d said Mary Voytek, head of NASA\u2019s astrobiology program. \u201cWe don\u2019t really have the answer to that.\u201dThe new rover mission is officially known as Mars 2020, and it is the first part of a multiphase project called the Mars Sample Return campaign. Only this leg has been fully funded by Congress.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance will launch from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas V rocket. It will be the second robotic mission to Mars in the span of a week: China on Thursday launched its own probe, named Tianwen-1, which is that country\u2019s first attempt to land a craft on Mars.AdvertisementWhile coping with additional challenges introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, NASA has been racing against a deadline imposed by physics: There\u2019s a narrow window when the Earth and Mars are properly positioned in their orbits. Perseverance must launch by Aug.\u00a015, after which the effort would have to be put on hold for a couple of years. It is slated to land on Mars on Feb.\u00a018.The engineering demands of any robotic mission are enormous. Perseverance will have to descend to the surface of Mars in the notoriously confounding atmosphere \u2014 it\u2019s too thin to be very helpful with braking, but just thick enough to cause aerodynamic trouble \u2014 and land in one piece, upright and functional. That is not an uncontested layup.Story continues below advertisementThe mission will benefit from autonomous navigation sensors that should allow a pinpoint landing in Jezero Crater, where a river delta once flowed into a deep lake \u2014 a site painstakingly selected by scientists as the kind of place that might host remnants of ancient organisms.AdvertisementPerseverance is being described by NASA as part of its long-term plan for a human mission to Mars. The rover carries an instrument that can manufacture oxygen out of Mars\u2019 carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, a process critical to future human missions. The rover also carries a small helicopter, named Ingenuity, which will perform the first rotorcraft flight on another planet.A geologist's dream worldLife as we know it here on Earth is both astonishing in its complexity and strangely ordinary. The simplest organism has a fairly elaborate genetic code. At the same time, it is built with some of the most common elements in the universe, such as hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen.Story continues below advertisementIn the past quarter-century, meanwhile, astronomers have learned that most stars have orbiting planets, theoretically offering plenty of potential real estate where life might be found. But although scientists are generally optimistic that there is life beyond Earth, they lack proof.AdvertisementTheir search is complicated by the lack of a watertight definition of life. It\u2019s clearly something that chemistry can achieve given the right conditions. A living thing is self-sustaining and structurally coherent. It obtains energy from the world and does something with it. It contains the code of information that allows it to replicate, and does so with enough inexactitude to allow natural selection to work its wonders.The quest to understand its origin on Earth is also made more challenging by the fact that this isn\u2019t the planet it used to be. The Earth\u2019s surface has been buried, melted, metamorphosed, eroded, crushed, frozen and flooded. There aren\u2019t that many old rocks around.Story continues below advertisementMars, by contrast, is a geologist\u2019s dream world. Unlike Earth, Mars lacks plate tectonics. As a result, the Martian surface hasn\u2019t been radically altered over the past 4\u00a0billion years the way Earth\u2019s has.Advertisement\u201cThose rocks still exist where they were deposited with no complicated overprinting,\u201d Ehlmann said.Even if the mission doesn\u2019t find signs of life, it might detect \u201csome kind of prebiotic phase of life,\u201d said Benjamin Weiss, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is part of the Perseverance science team.\u201cIf we could bring back a fossil record, a rock record, some kind of geological samples, that have some record of that prebiotic phase of the evolution of life, that would arguably be as exciting, or arguably more exciting, than finding life,\u201d Weiss said.Past controversiesMars has a knack for fooling human beings, especially those eager to discover Martian life. In the late 19th century, astronomer Percival Lowell famously claimed to see canals on Mars, which he posited as the handiwork of a civilization struggling with the drying out of the planet. That notion helped inspire H.G. Wells\u2019s \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d the canonical alien-invasion tale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe canals were, of course, imaginary, but well into the 20th century, some scientists thought Mars might be showing signs of seasonal vegetation. Then came the Space Age, and the first robotic probe to fly by Mars, Mariner 4 in 1965, captured images of a cratered and parched landscape.NASA\u2019s extraordinary Viking mission put two robotic landers on the planet in 1976 and performed several life-detection experiments. One result looked positive and briefly generated euphoria among the scientists, but when all the data came in, the consensus was that the experiments hadn\u2019t found signs of life.The field of astrobiology received a boost in 1996, when scientists announced they had found what looked like fossilized microorganisms in a Mars rock discovered in Antarctica after striking the Earth as a meteorite. The rock, scientists said, had been blasted off Mars and into space by an asteroid impact.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Mars rock generated tremendous media attention, but the microfossils discovery did not age well. Although never fully resolved \u2014 there are partisans on both sides of the issue \u2014 the consensus is that intriguing features in the Mars rock (officially ALH84001) could be produced non-biologically.\u201cWe learned a really hard lesson in 1996,\u201d said NASA\u2019s Voytek.Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of science at NASA, said the findings from Martian meteorites that land on Earth are inherently enigmatic, because they have been heated when ejected from Mars and lack the kind of geological context that scientists need.\u201cClearly those rocks do not answer the questions that we have. They don\u2019t have the context and they don\u2019t have the careful handling that it takes to make the sample valuable,\u201d Zurbuchen said.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance is an SUV-size rover that looks like a fraternal twin of Curiosity, the NASA rover that is still exploring the planet. Among other achievements, Curiosity discovered organic molecules in 3-billion-year-old mudstones, although such carbon-based molecules could have a non-biological origin. Perseverance has different tools, including new high-resolution cameras and other remote-sensing instruments.AdvertisementA discovery of life beyond Earth, even in fossil form, would be so significant that scientists want to make sure they get it right. That\u2019s one reason they want to see Mars samples up close, back on Earth, in facilities where the material can be studied for decades to come.Finding the best samplesPerseverance is equipped with a drill and 31\u00a0canisters. After scouting out the most inviting sites, aided by aerial surveillance from the helicopter, the rover will drill into the surface, put Martian soil and rock cores into the canisters, and then leave them scattered around the planet\u2019s surface the way Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs so they wouldn\u2019t get lost in the woods.A subsequent rover would then collect them in 2026 and put them into a launch vehicle to be blasted into orbit around Mars. They would then be transferred to an orbiting spacecraft, which would carry the material back to Earth in 2031, under current NASA plans. Given the project\u2019s complexity, it is critical that the rover pick the right samples, said Abigail Allwood, a geologist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the lead scientist for one of the rover\u2019s remote-sensing instruments. The exact itinerary \u2014 where the rover will drill and when \u2014 remains undetermined. Allwood said she hopes there is abundant time to study the environment first.\u201cAs a geologist, I know the importance of time in the field, looking at the rocks. The more time you spend looking at the rocks, the better you\u2019re going to understand any potential biosignatures,\u201d Allwood said.She makes a field geologist\u2019s point about what such life would look like: multiplicative. Life copies itself.\u201cIf it\u2019s life, it would not be just one. It will be multiple examples of whatever you are looking at,\u201d she said.\n\nThe Mars 2020 rover will visit the perfect spot to find signs of life, new studies showWhat the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsOpportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 yearsNASA Curiosity rover discovers evidence of freshwater Mars lake The mission is top priority for scientists who suspect life may have arisen when Mars was warm and wet. NASA rover Perseverance will prowl ancient lake bed on Mars for signs of life",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rover Perseverance will prowl ancient lake bed on Mars for signs of life (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3493",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-rover-perseverance-will-prowl-ancient-lake-bed-on-mars-for-signs-of-life/2020/07/27/a9772efc-cb83-11ea-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html",
        "text": "A $2.7\u00a0billion NASA rover is scheduled to blast off for Mars on Thursday on a mission that could help solve one of the greatest mysteries in all of science: the origin of life.If all goes as planned, the rover, named Perseverance, will collect rock and soil samples that would later be space-mailed back to Earth for close scrutiny. Scientists will be looking for fossils or \u201cbiosignatures\u201d of organisms that may have thrived about 3\u00a0billion years ago when the Red Planet was much warmer and wetter. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe have one data point for life on a planet,\u201d said planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology, part of the science team for Perseverance. \u201cMars is the second data point. We know from the investments that we\u2019ve made from exploration that there was this habitable world right next door. Right about the time that Earth was developing its life, Mars was also habitable, with lakes and rivers.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA close match between ancient Martian life and life here on Earth would suggest a common origin, with one planet seeding the other through meteorites. Or perhaps Mars had life-forms of a completely alien nature. Or maybe they never existed and Mars has always been a sterile world.\u201cIs it a foregone conclusion that as long as you have the right mix, things are going to happen and you\u2019re going to end up with life?\u201d said Mary Voytek, head of NASA\u2019s astrobiology program. \u201cWe don\u2019t really have the answer to that.\u201dThe new rover mission is officially known as Mars 2020, and it is the first part of a multiphase project called the Mars Sample Return campaign. Only this leg has been fully funded by Congress.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance will launch from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas V rocket. It will be the second robotic mission to Mars in the span of a week: China on Thursday launched its own probe, named Tianwen-1, which is that country\u2019s first attempt to land a craft on Mars.AdvertisementWhile coping with additional challenges introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, NASA has been racing against a deadline imposed by physics: There\u2019s a narrow window when the Earth and Mars are properly positioned in their orbits. Perseverance must launch by Aug.\u00a015, after which the effort would have to be put on hold for a couple of years. It is slated to land on Mars on Feb.\u00a018.The engineering demands of any robotic mission are enormous. Perseverance will have to descend to the surface of Mars in the notoriously confounding atmosphere \u2014 it\u2019s too thin to be very helpful with braking, but just thick enough to cause aerodynamic trouble \u2014 and land in one piece, upright and functional. That is not an uncontested layup.Story continues below advertisementThe mission will benefit from autonomous navigation sensors that should allow a pinpoint landing in Jezero Crater, where a river delta once flowed into a deep lake \u2014 a site painstakingly selected by scientists as the kind of place that might host remnants of ancient organisms.AdvertisementPerseverance is being described by NASA as part of its long-term plan for a human mission to Mars. The rover carries an instrument that can manufacture oxygen out of Mars\u2019 carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, a process critical to future human missions. The rover also carries a small helicopter, named Ingenuity, which will perform the first rotorcraft flight on another planet.A geologist's dream worldLife as we know it here on Earth is both astonishing in its complexity and strangely ordinary. The simplest organism has a fairly elaborate genetic code. At the same time, it is built with some of the most common elements in the universe, such as hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen.Story continues below advertisementIn the past quarter-century, meanwhile, astronomers have learned that most stars have orbiting planets, theoretically offering plenty of potential real estate where life might be found. But although scientists are generally optimistic that there is life beyond Earth, they lack proof.AdvertisementTheir search is complicated by the lack of a watertight definition of life. It\u2019s clearly something that chemistry can achieve given the right conditions. A living thing is self-sustaining and structurally coherent. It obtains energy from the world and does something with it. It contains the code of information that allows it to replicate, and does so with enough inexactitude to allow natural selection to work its wonders.The quest to understand its origin on Earth is also made more challenging by the fact that this isn\u2019t the planet it used to be. The Earth\u2019s surface has been buried, melted, metamorphosed, eroded, crushed, frozen and flooded. There aren\u2019t that many old rocks around.Story continues below advertisementMars, by contrast, is a geologist\u2019s dream world. Unlike Earth, Mars lacks plate tectonics. As a result, the Martian surface hasn\u2019t been radically altered over the past 4\u00a0billion years the way Earth\u2019s has.Advertisement\u201cThose rocks still exist where they were deposited with no complicated overprinting,\u201d Ehlmann said.Even if the mission doesn\u2019t find signs of life, it might detect \u201csome kind of prebiotic phase of life,\u201d said Benjamin Weiss, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is part of the Perseverance science team.\u201cIf we could bring back a fossil record, a rock record, some kind of geological samples, that have some record of that prebiotic phase of the evolution of life, that would arguably be as exciting, or arguably more exciting, than finding life,\u201d Weiss said.Past controversiesMars has a knack for fooling human beings, especially those eager to discover Martian life. In the late 19th century, astronomer Percival Lowell famously claimed to see canals on Mars, which he posited as the handiwork of a civilization struggling with the drying out of the planet. That notion helped inspire H.G. Wells\u2019s \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d the canonical alien-invasion tale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe canals were, of course, imaginary, but well into the 20th century, some scientists thought Mars might be showing signs of seasonal vegetation. Then came the Space Age, and the first robotic probe to fly by Mars, Mariner 4 in 1965, captured images of a cratered and parched landscape.NASA\u2019s extraordinary Viking mission put two robotic landers on the planet in 1976 and performed several life-detection experiments. One result looked positive and briefly generated euphoria among the scientists, but when all the data came in, the consensus was that the experiments hadn\u2019t found signs of life.The field of astrobiology received a boost in 1996, when scientists announced they had found what looked like fossilized microorganisms in a Mars rock discovered in Antarctica after striking the Earth as a meteorite. The rock, scientists said, had been blasted off Mars and into space by an asteroid impact.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Mars rock generated tremendous media attention, but the microfossils discovery did not age well. Although never fully resolved \u2014 there are partisans on both sides of the issue \u2014 the consensus is that intriguing features in the Mars rock (officially ALH84001) could be produced non-biologically.\u201cWe learned a really hard lesson in 1996,\u201d said NASA\u2019s Voytek.Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of science at NASA, said the findings from Martian meteorites that land on Earth are inherently enigmatic, because they have been heated when ejected from Mars and lack the kind of geological context that scientists need.\u201cClearly those rocks do not answer the questions that we have. They don\u2019t have the context and they don\u2019t have the careful handling that it takes to make the sample valuable,\u201d Zurbuchen said.Story continues below advertisementPerseverance is an SUV-size rover that looks like a fraternal twin of Curiosity, the NASA rover that is still exploring the planet. Among other achievements, Curiosity discovered organic molecules in 3-billion-year-old mudstones, although such carbon-based molecules could have a non-biological origin. Perseverance has different tools, including new high-resolution cameras and other remote-sensing instruments.AdvertisementA discovery of life beyond Earth, even in fossil form, would be so significant that scientists want to make sure they get it right. That\u2019s one reason they want to see Mars samples up close, back on Earth, in facilities where the material can be studied for decades to come.Finding the best samplesPerseverance is equipped with a drill and 31\u00a0canisters. After scouting out the most inviting sites, aided by aerial surveillance from the helicopter, the rover will drill into the surface, put Martian soil and rock cores into the canisters, and then leave them scattered around the planet\u2019s surface the way Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs so they wouldn\u2019t get lost in the woods.A subsequent rover would then collect them in 2026 and put them into a launch vehicle to be blasted into orbit around Mars. They would then be transferred to an orbiting spacecraft, which would carry the material back to Earth in 2031, under current NASA plans. Given the project\u2019s complexity, it is critical that the rover pick the right samples, said Abigail Allwood, a geologist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the lead scientist for one of the rover\u2019s remote-sensing instruments. The exact itinerary \u2014 where the rover will drill and when \u2014 remains undetermined. Allwood said she hopes there is abundant time to study the environment first.\u201cAs a geologist, I know the importance of time in the field, looking at the rocks. The more time you spend looking at the rocks, the better you\u2019re going to understand any potential biosignatures,\u201d Allwood said.She makes a field geologist\u2019s point about what such life would look like: multiplicative. Life copies itself.\u201cIf it\u2019s life, it would not be just one. It will be multiple examples of whatever you are looking at,\u201d she said.\n\nThe Mars 2020 rover will visit the perfect spot to find signs of life, new studies showWhat the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsOpportunity, NASA\u2019s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 yearsNASA Curiosity rover discovers evidence of freshwater Mars lake The mission is top priority for scientists who suspect life may have arisen when Mars was warm and wet. NASA rover Perseverance will prowl ancient lake bed on Mars for signs of life",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s new Mars rover Perseverance blasts off, rocketing to Red Planet to search for ancient life  (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3494",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/07/30/nasas-new-mars-rover-perseverance-poised-rocket-red-planet-search-ancient-life/",
        "text": "A $2.7 billion NASA rover, Perseverance, blasted off into clear skies over Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral on Thursday atop an Atlas V rocket, the start of a nearly seven-month journey to Mars. After spending an initial 30 minutes in Earth orbit, the firing of an upper-stage engine sent the spacecraft on its interplanetary mission. If all goes as planned, the vehicle will deposit the rover in a crater on Mars on Feb. 18. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe mission, officially known as Mars 2020, is designed to search for signs of ancient Martian life. The rover is supposed to obtain samples of rock cores and soil that could later be sent back to Earth for study in laboratories.\u201cSitting atop that rocket there is one of the finest interplanetary payloads ever assembled, and the thousands of scientists and engineers behind them \u2014 they would have to be the finest team ever assembled,\u201d Abigail Allwood, a geologist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is part of the science team, said in an email as she and her colleagues awaited the launch. \u201cThis rover is going to kick some astrobiological butt.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists and engineers at the mission control center at JPL, in Pasadena, Calif., had a doubly exciting morning: They experienced a modest earthquake just minutes before blastoff. That got everyone\u2019s attention but didn\u2019t throw off the launch schedule.The launch itself was flawless, NASA reported, but there was some midmorning drama as the huge ground-based antennae used by the space agency initially could not properly lock onto the spacecraft as it hurtled at 25,000 miles per hour away from the Earth. By midday, the communication problem had been resolved, and the data from the spacecraft was being analyzed.\u201cAll the indications that we have, and we have quite a few, is that the spacecraft is just fine. It\u2019s a very stable spacecraft,\u201d Mars 2020 Deputy Project Manager Matthew T. Wallace said at a post-launch news conference. Noting that the spacecraft was spinning 2.5 times per minute, he said, \u201cIt\u2019s like a spinning top. You can\u2019t knock it over.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe rover is the successor to the still-operating Curiosity rover, which has made breakthrough discoveries, including finding complex organic molecules of the type that could be associated with living things. Perseverance is superficially similar to Curiosity but has a different suite of instruments that will allow it to inspect and take images of rock formations in far greater detail.It has a drill for obtaining rock cores and soil samples, which the rover will stash in containers. NASA hopes to send another rover in 2026 that would collect the samples and launch them into Mars orbit. Another spacecraft would carry them back to Earth, with a targeted arrival of 2031.The mission is the first leg of what is known as the Mars Sample Return campaign. Returning samples of Mars to Earth has been the highest priority of the planetary science community.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s possible there is life on Mars today, said Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado and the lead scientist on a Mars orbiter that is studying the atmosphere of the planet. If so, that life would probably be deep underground in porous rock where water is liquid.\u201cWe\u2019ve learned that Mars has seasons and an atmosphere that behaves in many ways similar to the Earth\u2019s. Mars has geology that is very reminiscent of what we see on Earth \u2014 volcanoes, river channels. Mars has polar caps. And the climate has varied through times on many different time scales. Liquid water was abundant early in its history,\u201d Jakosky said.If all goes as planned, the rover will make a pinpoint landing in Jezero Crater, a site carefully picked by scientists for its plausible habitability in a distant era when Mars was warmer and wetter. The crater was once filled with water, and a river flowed into it, depositing sediments in a delta that is enticing to the scientists who will operate the rover remotely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis mission will shine light on \u201cthe potential biological history of Mars, and, of course, by doing so, also create a better understanding and basis for future human missions,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s top science administrator.As with all Mars missions, this one is fraught with promise and peril. Mars is notoriously difficult to explore with robotic probes, many of which have failed in some fashion upon reaching the planet.\u201cI find myself awake at night thinking about it,\u201d Zurbuchen said.At the post-launch news conference, he said: \u201cI\u2019m relieved. It\u2019s a space mission now, and it\u2019s on the way to Mars.\u201d The novel coronavirus pandemic has slowed many NASA missions, but this one had a deadline imposed by orbital physics: There\u2019s a narrow window when the Earth and Mars are properly positioned. Perseverance had to launch by Aug. 15. Otherwise, the mission would have been delayed by a couple of years until the planets were back in the right position. The rover has a drill for obtaining rock cores and soil samples, which it will stash in containers that in the future could be sent back to Earth for study in laboratories. NASA\u2019s new Mars rover Perseverance blasts off, rocketing to Red Planet to search for ancient life ",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s new Mars rover Perseverance blasts off, rocketing to Red Planet to search for ancient life  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3495",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/07/30/nasas-new-mars-rover-perseverance-poised-rocket-red-planet-search-ancient-life/",
        "text": "A $2.7 billion NASA rover, Perseverance, blasted off into clear skies over Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral on Thursday atop an Atlas V rocket, the start of a nearly seven-month journey to Mars. After spending an initial 30 minutes in Earth orbit, the firing of an upper-stage engine sent the spacecraft on its interplanetary mission. If all goes as planned, the vehicle will deposit the rover in a crater on Mars on Feb. 18. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe mission, officially known as Mars 2020, is designed to search for signs of ancient Martian life. The rover is supposed to obtain samples of rock cores and soil that could later be sent back to Earth for study in laboratories.\u201cSitting atop that rocket there is one of the finest interplanetary payloads ever assembled, and the thousands of scientists and engineers behind them \u2014 they would have to be the finest team ever assembled,\u201d Abigail Allwood, a geologist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is part of the science team, said in an email as she and her colleagues awaited the launch. \u201cThis rover is going to kick some astrobiological butt.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists and engineers at the mission control center at JPL, in Pasadena, Calif., had a doubly exciting morning: They experienced a modest earthquake just minutes before blastoff. That got everyone\u2019s attention but didn\u2019t throw off the launch schedule.The launch itself was flawless, NASA reported, but there was some midmorning drama as the huge ground-based antennae used by the space agency initially could not properly lock onto the spacecraft as it hurtled at 25,000 miles per hour away from the Earth. By midday, the communication problem had been resolved, and the data from the spacecraft was being analyzed.\u201cAll the indications that we have, and we have quite a few, is that the spacecraft is just fine. It\u2019s a very stable spacecraft,\u201d Mars 2020 Deputy Project Manager Matthew T. Wallace said at a post-launch news conference. Noting that the spacecraft was spinning 2.5 times per minute, he said, \u201cIt\u2019s like a spinning top. You can\u2019t knock it over.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe rover is the successor to the still-operating Curiosity rover, which has made breakthrough discoveries, including finding complex organic molecules of the type that could be associated with living things. Perseverance is superficially similar to Curiosity but has a different suite of instruments that will allow it to inspect and take images of rock formations in far greater detail.It has a drill for obtaining rock cores and soil samples, which the rover will stash in containers. NASA hopes to send another rover in 2026 that would collect the samples and launch them into Mars orbit. Another spacecraft would carry them back to Earth, with a targeted arrival of 2031.The mission is the first leg of what is known as the Mars Sample Return campaign. Returning samples of Mars to Earth has been the highest priority of the planetary science community.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s possible there is life on Mars today, said Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado and the lead scientist on a Mars orbiter that is studying the atmosphere of the planet. If so, that life would probably be deep underground in porous rock where water is liquid.\u201cWe\u2019ve learned that Mars has seasons and an atmosphere that behaves in many ways similar to the Earth\u2019s. Mars has geology that is very reminiscent of what we see on Earth \u2014 volcanoes, river channels. Mars has polar caps. And the climate has varied through times on many different time scales. Liquid water was abundant early in its history,\u201d Jakosky said.If all goes as planned, the rover will make a pinpoint landing in Jezero Crater, a site carefully picked by scientists for its plausible habitability in a distant era when Mars was warmer and wetter. The crater was once filled with water, and a river flowed into it, depositing sediments in a delta that is enticing to the scientists who will operate the rover remotely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis mission will shine light on \u201cthe potential biological history of Mars, and, of course, by doing so, also create a better understanding and basis for future human missions,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s top science administrator.As with all Mars missions, this one is fraught with promise and peril. Mars is notoriously difficult to explore with robotic probes, many of which have failed in some fashion upon reaching the planet.\u201cI find myself awake at night thinking about it,\u201d Zurbuchen said.At the post-launch news conference, he said: \u201cI\u2019m relieved. It\u2019s a space mission now, and it\u2019s on the way to Mars.\u201d The novel coronavirus pandemic has slowed many NASA missions, but this one had a deadline imposed by orbital physics: There\u2019s a narrow window when the Earth and Mars are properly positioned. Perseverance had to launch by Aug. 15. Otherwise, the mission would have been delayed by a couple of years until the planets were back in the right position. The rover has a drill for obtaining rock cores and soil samples, which it will stash in containers that in the future could be sent back to Earth for study in laboratories. NASA\u2019s new Mars rover Perseverance blasts off, rocketing to Red Planet to search for ancient life ",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "This was the first place to hear \u2018The Eagle has landed\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3496",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/07/20/this-was-first-place-hear-eagle-has-landed/",
        "text": "\u201cHello, Moon. How\u2019s the old backside?\u201dThis was one of the few radio communications from Michael Collins while the Apollo astronaut was orbiting the moon alone, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface below. Hours went by without any crackling words in Houston\u2019s mission control room as Collins careened around the far side of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor most of his day-long solo orbit, Collins was completely cut off from humankind.Collins is sometimes called the loneliest man in history, but he notes the great view and hot coffee that made his orbit enjoyable. But there were some team members who suffered loneliness and isolation during Apollo 11 \u2014 though not in space. On Earth.Story continues below advertisementSpecifically, documents in NASA\u2019s basement archives in Washington show, loneliness abounded on British-controlled Ascension Island, a rock halfway between Africa and South America, where NASA support staff tracked and communicated with the Apollo astronauts.AdvertisementA common misconception is that NASA was operating only in Houston and Cape Canaveral. But were it not for a charm bracelet of 16 giant antennas dotting the globe, some on repurposed warships parked in the high seas, most of the Apollo 11 path would have been out of communication reach. Ascension Island was part of NASA\u2019s largely invisible tracking network that was staffed by what Aldrin later called the mission\u2019s \u201cunsung heroes.\u201d Others called them \u201crange rats.\u201dThe Earth\u2019s rotation and curvature meant that launching, controlling and landing via radio communications needed to be relayed from multiple places around the world. By the 1990s, most of the scattered array of ground stations had been replaced by satellites.Story continues below advertisementBut in 1969, NASA couldn\u2019t track anything without a team on the ground in the remote South Atlantic Ocean.Advertisement\u201cAscension Island is known for being NASA\u2019s most remote tracking site. But I couldn\u2019t tell you much else!\u201d said NASA chief historian Bill Barry, with a chuckle.Historians have largely forgotten the site\u2019s key role in the moon landing, the critical relationship with NASA\u2019s British hosts, and the odd, isolating conditions NASA technicians endured there. This station was the first to receive the world\u2019s most famous radio transmission \u2014 \u201cThe Eagle has landed.\u201dThe official NASA headquarters reference file for this outpost is just one flimsy manila folder, containing no more than 50 pages. Inside, there are unclassified diplomatic cables, typewriter carbon copies and recently recorded oral histories about the site.Story continues below advertisementBut during the Apollo 11 anniversary this week, two former tracking station workers shared their personal stories from Ascension Island in the New York Post and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.AdvertisementThese new statements, and those found in the NASA headquarters basement, describe life working at Ascension as very similar to a military deployment. There were 16-hour work days, no TV, and Ascension was the only site where employees couldn\u2019t bring their families. It was that remote.\u201cI missed a lot of birthdays and anniversaries,\u201d said Ken Griffin, who now works at NASA\u2019s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and served as manager of the Ascension Station in the late 1980s, when it was supporting NASA\u2019s space shuttle missions.During the Apollo years, NASA\u2019s staff size there varied from 50 to 100. They slept in military barracks and ate at the mess hall in a small operating U.S. Air Force base that was a remnant from World War II. Movies were flown in once a week on a cargo plane from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. NASA staff and contractors made friends with the Royal Air Force and BBC operators, who shared the island with the Americans. But the population rarely passed 2,000.Ascension site employees kept a pet donkey just outside the operations building. \u201cJ.J.\u201d was an old female, part of the long line of donkeys left on the island by Portuguese sailors two centuries earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cShe was there at the tracking station to greet us every morning,\u201d Harry Turner wrote in 2003 for the Ascension Island Heritage Society about NASA\u2019s donkey mascot. \u201cWe were in the middle of the Apollo 11 mission and we lost all hydraulics to our antenna, resulting that within a short time we would lose the signal from the spacecraft. We ran out to the antenna and found that J.J. had backed her butt into the emergency stop switch.\u201dThe Apollo 11 astronauts came back to Earth safely a few days later. NASA\u2019s pet donkey went missing and was found dead in the septic tank soon after. The island was and still is a harsh place.Ascension had only five roads; NASA built a sixth in 1965, a long-winding route toward an extinct volcano called Devil\u2019s Ashpit on the far side of the island.Story continues below advertisementToday, Old NASA Road is still there, but it\u2019s cracked and potholed. NASA officially closed the tracking facility in 1989. At the Ashpit site, there is still a spectacular, unobstructed view of the South Atlantic Ocean, with loitering clouds that hang above, just shy of the island\u2019s single mountain peak. Wild donkeys still wander about with tattered coats. Perpetual ocean trade winds blow through an open door of an abandoned one-story building. It takes a strong imagination to envision the multimillion-dollar facility built by the Defense Department, with its 100-foot-tall radio tower, power plant and numerous instruments.AdvertisementGone is the pale-green carpet from the tracking station floor, packed with consoles and computers that ran on less memory than it takes to send a low-resolution photo over email. Gone is the 30-foot-high Apollo antenna, with its ability to pivot to almost any direction, with an operator guiding it using an enormous, arcade-style trackball. The trackball was literally a bowling ball.\u201cThe equipment seems rather crude\u201d in hindsight, Turner said.Story continues below advertisementBut Turner and the rest of Apollo 11\u2032s range rats on Ascension using that bowling ball heard Armstrong\u2019s words seconds before Houston.In this way, the range rats of Ascension Island were much like Collins, their NASA colleague and astronaut. They were part of history. Isolated by their roles \u2014 Collins in orbit and the range rats on a remote island \u2014 and they didn\u2019t even have TV to watch Armstrong\u2019s famous step.AdvertisementCollins did watch something equally spectacular. \u201cOutside my window I could see stars \u2014 and that was all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void; the moon\u2019s presence is defined solely by the absence of stars,\u201d Collins wrote in his memoir, \u201cCarrying the Fire.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd the range rats saw something spectacular, too. \u201cNASA hosted a massive party on the beach,\u201d recalls South Atlantic islander Stedon Stroud.He kept the coffee urns full throughout the Apollo 11 flight and he wouldn\u2019t see the moon landing footage until years later. \u201cI remember the Americans had Miller High Life flown to the island for this one party. Jack Daniels and Jim Bean. All the booze you could drink. A lot of sore heads and an excellent sunset.\"' Apollo 11 communications required giant antennas on a British ocean outpost full of donkeys. This was the first place to hear \u2018The Eagle has landed\u2019",
        "author": "Clare Fieseler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visitors on Mars Send New Views to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3497",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/30/science/mars-china-nasa.html",
        "text": "Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visitors on Mars Send New Views to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3498",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/30/science/mars-china-nasa.html",
        "text": "Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visitors on Mars Send New Views to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3499",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/30/science/mars-china-nasa.html",
        "text": "Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visitors on Mars Send New Views to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3500",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/30/science/mars-china-nasa.html",
        "text": "Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet. Three spacecraft reached Mars in February, starting a busy year of new exploration. Here's what they're showing us from the red planet.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Launch a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3501",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008027851/nasa-lucy-mission-probe-trojan-asteroids-orbit-space.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth. The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth. The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Launch a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3502",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008027851/nasa-lucy-mission-probe-trojan-asteroids-orbit-space.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth. The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth. The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Launch a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3503",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008027851/nasa-lucy-mission-probe-trojan-asteroids-orbit-space.html",
        "text": "The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth. The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth. The spacecraft is designed to study clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path, known as the Trojan swarms, as it seeks to answer questions about the origins of the solar system and how life might have emerged on Earth.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Lunar Mission Returns to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3504",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007507717/china-moon-rocks-earth.html",
        "text": "The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker. The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker. The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Lunar Mission Returns to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3505",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007507717/china-moon-rocks-earth.html",
        "text": "The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker. The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker. The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Lunar Mission Returns to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3506",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007507717/china-moon-rocks-earth.html",
        "text": "The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker. The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker. The lunar capsule from China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 spacecraft returned to Earth early Thursday, bringing back as much as 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from a volcanic plain known as Mons R\u00fcmker.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Augmented Reality: Explore NASA\u2019s InSight Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3507",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/01/science/mars-nasa-insight-ar-3d-ul.html",
        "text": "The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure. The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure. The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure.",
        "author": "By Graham Roberts, Jonathan Corum, Marcelle Hopkins, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Miles Peyton, Blacki Migliozzi, Benjamin Wilhelm and Jon Huang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Augmented Reality: Explore NASA\u2019s InSight Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3508",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/01/science/mars-nasa-insight-ar-3d-ul.html",
        "text": "The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure. The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure. The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure.",
        "author": "By Graham Roberts, Jonathan Corum, Marcelle Hopkins, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Miles Peyton, Blacki Migliozzi, Benjamin Wilhelm and Jon Huang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Augmented Reality: Explore NASA\u2019s InSight Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3509",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/01/science/mars-nasa-insight-ar-3d-ul.html",
        "text": "The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure. The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure. The InSight spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2018 to listen for marsquakes and study the planet\u2019s structure.",
        "author": "By Graham Roberts, Jonathan Corum, Marcelle Hopkins, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Miles Peyton, Blacki Migliozzi, Benjamin Wilhelm and Jon Huang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Land on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3510",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/25/science/insight-how-to-land-on-mars.html",
        "text": "On Monday afternoon, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars. On Monday afternoon, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars. On Monday afternoon, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Land on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3511",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/25/science/insight-how-to-land-on-mars.html",
        "text": "On Monday afternoon, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars. On Monday afternoon, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars. On Monday afternoon, NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "From 2018: How NASA\u2019s TESS Spacecraft Will Hunt Exoplanets (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3512",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005841583/how-nasas-tess-spacecraft-will-hunt-exoplanets.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s TESS spacecraft is searching the sky for nearby alien worlds. NASA\u2019s TESS spacecraft is searching the sky for nearby alien worlds. NASA\u2019s TESS spacecraft is searching the sky for nearby alien worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "From 2018: How NASA\u2019s TESS Spacecraft Will Hunt Exoplanets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3513",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005841583/how-nasas-tess-spacecraft-will-hunt-exoplanets.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s TESS spacecraft is searching the sky for nearby alien worlds. NASA\u2019s TESS spacecraft is searching the sky for nearby alien worlds. NASA\u2019s TESS spacecraft is searching the sky for nearby alien worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pictures of a Rugged Asteroid and Its Unexpected Plumes (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3514",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/19/science/osiris-rex-bennu-photos.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pictures of a Rugged Asteroid and Its Unexpected Plumes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3515",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/19/science/osiris-rex-bennu-photos.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pictures of a Rugged Asteroid and Its Unexpected Plumes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3516",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/19/science/osiris-rex-bennu-photos.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth. NASA\u2019s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is studying asteroid Bennu and will attempt to return a sample to Earth.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Horizons Glimpses the Flattened Shape of Ultima Thule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3517",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/31/science/new-horizons-ultima-thule-flyby.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the most distant object ever visited. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the most distant object ever visited. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft flew past the most distant object ever visited.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "InSight Will Plumb the Depths of Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3518",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005881658/nasa-insight-mars-lander.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft has arrived on Mars to listen for marsquakes and probe the geological heart of the planet. NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft has arrived on Mars to listen for marsquakes and probe the geological heart of the planet. NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft has arrived on Mars to listen for marsquakes and probe the geological heart of the planet.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "InSight Will Plumb the Depths of Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3519",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005881658/nasa-insight-mars-lander.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft has arrived on Mars to listen for marsquakes and probe the geological heart of the planet. NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft has arrived on Mars to listen for marsquakes and probe the geological heart of the planet. NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft has arrived on Mars to listen for marsquakes and probe the geological heart of the planet.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Moves Inside Saturn\u2019s Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3520",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/21/science/space/cassini-inside-saturns-rings.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will shift its orbit on Saturday, preparing to dive between Saturn and its rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will shift its orbit on Saturday, preparing to dive between Saturn and its rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will shift its orbit on Saturday, preparing to dive between Saturn and its rings.",
        "author": "By JONATHAN CORUM"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Moves Inside Saturn\u2019s Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3521",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/21/science/space/cassini-inside-saturns-rings.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will shift its orbit on Saturday, preparing to dive between Saturn and its rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will shift its orbit on Saturday, preparing to dive between Saturn and its rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will shift its orbit on Saturday, preparing to dive between Saturn and its rings.",
        "author": "By JONATHAN CORUM"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Burns Into Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3522",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005343498/cassini-burns-into-saturn.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will plunge into Saturn on September 15, incinerating itself after 20 years in space. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will plunge into Saturn on September 15, incinerating itself after 20 years in space. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft will plunge into Saturn on September 15, incinerating itself after 20 years in space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Images From Inside Saturn\u2019s Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3523",
        "date": "2017-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/cassini-saturn-rings.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft is orbiting inside Saturn\u2019s rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft is orbiting inside Saturn\u2019s rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft is orbiting inside Saturn\u2019s rings.",
        "author": "By JONATHAN CORUM"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Images From Inside Saturn\u2019s Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3524",
        "date": "2017-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/cassini-saturn-rings.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft is orbiting inside Saturn\u2019s rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft is orbiting inside Saturn\u2019s rings. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft is orbiting inside Saturn\u2019s rings.",
        "author": "By JONATHAN CORUM"
    },
    {
        "title": "Test Your Knowledge of Cassini and Its Grand Mission to Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3525",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/14/science/cassini-saturn-finale.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn for the past 13 years. How much do you know about this robotic explorer and the sixth planet from our sun? NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn for the past 13 years. How much do you know about this robotic explorer and the sixth planet from our sun? NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn for the past 13 years. How much do you know about this robotic explorer and the sixth planet from our sun?",
        "author": "By KENNETH CHANG"
    },
    {
        "title": "Test Your Knowledge of Cassini and Its Grand Mission to Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3526",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/14/science/cassini-saturn-finale.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn for the past 13 years. How much do you know about this robotic explorer and the sixth planet from our sun? NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn for the past 13 years. How much do you know about this robotic explorer and the sixth planet from our sun? NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn for the past 13 years. How much do you know about this robotic explorer and the sixth planet from our sun?",
        "author": "By KENNETH CHANG"
    },
    {
        "title": "100 Images From Cassini\u2019s Mission to Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3527",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/14/science/cassini-saturn-images.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Friday, after 20 years in space. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Friday, after 20 years in space. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Friday, after 20 years in space.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "100 Images From Cassini\u2019s Mission to Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3528",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/14/science/cassini-saturn-images.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Friday, after 20 years in space. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Friday, after 20 years in space. NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Friday, after 20 years in space.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager\u2019s 40th Anniversary (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3529",
        "date": "2017-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005343497/forty-years-of-voyager.html",
        "text": "Long after they have stopped communicating with Earth, the twin Voyager spacecraft will forever drift among the stars. Long after they have stopped communicating with Earth, the twin Voyager spacecraft will forever drift among the stars. Long after they have stopped communicating with Earth, the twin Voyager spacecraft will forever drift among the stars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager\u2019s 40th Anniversary (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3530",
        "date": "2017-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005343497/forty-years-of-voyager.html",
        "text": "Long after they have stopped communicating with Earth, the twin Voyager spacecraft will forever drift among the stars. Long after they have stopped communicating with Earth, the twin Voyager spacecraft will forever drift among the stars. Long after they have stopped communicating with Earth, the twin Voyager spacecraft will forever drift among the stars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hayabusa2 Touches Asteroid Ryugu (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3531",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/25/science/hayabusa-ryugu-photos.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system. Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system. Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hayabusa2 Touches Asteroid Ryugu (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3532",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/25/science/hayabusa-ryugu-photos.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system. Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system. Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hayabusa2 Touches Asteroid Ryugu (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3533",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/25/science/hayabusa-ryugu-photos.html",
        "text": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system. Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system. Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is exploring Ryugu, an asteroid thought to contain rubble from the early solar system.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts Land SpaceX Capsule Overnight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3534",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007741326/spacex-astronauts-night-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts Land SpaceX Capsule Overnight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3535",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007741326/spacex-astronauts-night-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts Land SpaceX Capsule Overnight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3536",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007741326/spacex-astronauts-night-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts Land SpaceX Capsule Overnight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3537",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007741326/spacex-astronauts-night-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station. Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Panama City, Fla., early Sunday in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, returning safely to Earth from a mission in November to the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner and Crew Float in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3538",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008023735/william-shatner-star-trek-captain-kirk-floating-in-space-video.html",
        "text": "Footage captured the 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor and three other passengers floating weightless inside the Blue Origin spacecraft capsule during their trip to the edge of space. Footage captured the 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor and three other passengers floating weightless inside the Blue Origin spacecraft capsule during their trip to the edge of space. Footage captured the 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor and three other passengers floating weightless inside the Blue Origin spacecraft capsule during their trip to the edge of space.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner and Crew Float in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3539",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008023735/william-shatner-star-trek-captain-kirk-floating-in-space-video.html",
        "text": "Footage captured the 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor and three other passengers floating weightless inside the Blue Origin spacecraft capsule during their trip to the edge of space. Footage captured the 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor and three other passengers floating weightless inside the Blue Origin spacecraft capsule during their trip to the edge of space. Footage captured the 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor and three other passengers floating weightless inside the Blue Origin spacecraft capsule during their trip to the edge of space.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Spacecraft Departs Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3540",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007485488/china-spacecraft-moon-launch.html",
        "text": "Footage and animation from Chinese state media show China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 ascender taking off from the moon\u2019s surface. The spacecraft departed Thursday after collecting soil and rock samples for scientists to study. Footage and animation from Chinese state media show China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 ascender taking off from the moon\u2019s surface. The spacecraft departed Thursday after collecting soil and rock samples for scientists to study. Footage and animation from Chinese state media show China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 ascender taking off from the moon\u2019s surface. The spacecraft departed Thursday after collecting soil and rock samples for scientists to study.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chang\u2019e-4 Studies the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3541",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/03/science/china-change-4-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chang\u2019e-4 Studies the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3542",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/03/science/china-change-4-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chang\u2019e-4 Studies the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3543",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/03/science/china-change-4-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon. China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Spacecraft to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3544",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007469511/china-launches-spacecraft-moon.html",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday. The mission, called Chang\u2019e-5, is China\u2019s aim to be the first country in more than four decades to bring back samples of lunar rocks and soil. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday. The mission, called Chang\u2019e-5, is China\u2019s aim to be the first country in more than four decades to bring back samples of lunar rocks and soil. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday. The mission, called Chang\u2019e-5, is China\u2019s aim to be the first country in more than four decades to bring back samples of lunar rocks and soil.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches Spacecraft to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3545",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007469511/china-launches-spacecraft-moon.html",
        "text": "China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday. The mission, called Chang\u2019e-5, is China\u2019s aim to be the first country in more than four decades to bring back samples of lunar rocks and soil. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday. The mission, called Chang\u2019e-5, is China\u2019s aim to be the first country in more than four decades to bring back samples of lunar rocks and soil. China launched a spacecraft to the moon\u2019s surface on Monday. The mission, called Chang\u2019e-5, is China\u2019s aim to be the first country in more than four decades to bring back samples of lunar rocks and soil.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Crashes Again During Prototype Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3546",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007584025/spacex-starship-crashes-prototype-launch.html",
        "text": "A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end. A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end. A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Crashes Again During Prototype Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3547",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007584025/spacex-starship-crashes-prototype-launch.html",
        "text": "A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end. A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end. A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Crashes Again During Prototype Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3548",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007584025/spacex-starship-crashes-prototype-launch.html",
        "text": "A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end. A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end. A test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Starship, Elon Musk\u2019s next-generation spacecraft which is intended to one day land on Mars, was launched on Feb. 2 for a brief flight, but came to an explosive end.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Exploring the Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3549",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/exploring-the-solar-system.html",
        "text": "A guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. A guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. A guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s orbit.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Exploring the Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3550",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/exploring-the-solar-system.html",
        "text": "A guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. A guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s orbit. A guide to the spacecraft beyond Earth\u2019s orbit.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Space Capsule Ferries Bits of Asteroid to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3551",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007488561/japan-hayabusa2-space-probe.html",
        "text": "A capsule from Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere Saturday after being launched in 2014 to explore and collect samples from an asteroid named Ryugu. It landed and was recovered in the Australian outback. A capsule from Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere Saturday after being launched in 2014 to explore and collect samples from an asteroid named Ryugu. It landed and was recovered in the Australian outback. A capsule from Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere Saturday after being launched in 2014 to explore and collect samples from an asteroid named Ryugu. It landed and was recovered in the Australian outback.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Space Capsule Ferries Bits of Asteroid to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3552",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007488561/japan-hayabusa2-space-probe.html",
        "text": "A capsule from Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere Saturday after being launched in 2014 to explore and collect samples from an asteroid named Ryugu. It landed and was recovered in the Australian outback. A capsule from Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere Saturday after being launched in 2014 to explore and collect samples from an asteroid named Ryugu. It landed and was recovered in the Australian outback. A capsule from Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere Saturday after being launched in 2014 to explore and collect samples from an asteroid named Ryugu. It landed and was recovered in the Australian outback.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-REx Mission Is on Track to Return Asteroid Grit (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3553",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-osiris-rex-mission-is-on-track-to-return-asteroid-grit-a-u-s-first-11604018221?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=10",
        "text": "Wrangling their spacecraft by remote control, mission operations engineers improvised a series of delicate recovery maneuvers to successfully close the canister and latch it down for its return voyage from the small, spinning asteroid 200 million miles or so from Earth.\nDespite the spill, the spacecraft may bring back as much as 2 pounds of pulverized rock, gravel and dust believed to date to the creation of the solar system billions of years ago, meeting the primary scientific goal of the $1.16 billion mission, space agency officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn Asteroid Touch and Go\nOriginally thought to have a smoother surface, Bennu asteroid is littered with boulders making spacecraft landing treacherous. A landing spot named Nightingale was chosen for its relative landing ease and the amount and value of available material to be collected.\n\n\n\nNightingale landing spot\n\n\nPreferred landing site width: 164\u2019\n\n\nSpacecraft\n\n\nLength: 20.25 feet with solar arrays deployed \nWidth: 8 feet \n\n\nLanding spot \n\n\nSits inside a small crate site : Diameter: 66'. The area covers a couple parking spaces wide. \n\n\nCollecting Samples\n\n\nAlmost 4.5 pounds of loose material\n\n\nSize Comparison\n\n\nEmpire\nState \nBuilding \n\n\nBennu \n\n\n1,673\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n1,453\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\nAlberto Cervantes, Taylor Umlauf/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cOur flight team went around the clock to accomplish this,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sandra Freund,\n\n\n\n mission operations manager at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colo., which built the spacecraft. \u201cAs you can imagine in the mission support area here, there was lots of cheering.\u201d\n\n\nIn a dramatic six-second grab and go maneuver last week, the spacecraft poked an automated arm tipped with collection filters into the unexpectedly soft surface of Bennu, a ball of orbiting debris about the size of the Empire State Building. The long arm penetrated more deeply than expected and picked up so much rubble that the lid of its collection chamber couldn\u2019t close properly, mission officials said on Thursday.\nAs images of the mishap relayed across the void from the spacecraft to Earth, NASA scientists watched in dismay while a swirl of asteroid particles billowed away from the spacecraft.\n\u201cI was concerned about that because every one of those particles is scientifically valuable,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dante Lauretta,\n\n\n\n Osiris-REx principal investigator and a professor at the University of Arizona. \u201cTens of grams of sample probably escaped throughout the entire sequence of operations. I believe we still have hundreds of grams of material in the sample collector head, probably over a kilogram easily.\u201d\nIt is the first time the US space agency has tried its hand at returning a piece of an asteroid. In 2010, Japan\u2019s space agency landed the first asteroid sample on Earth. It has a second sample set to land in Australia this coming December.\nIf all continues to go well, the robotic Osiris-REx spacecraft will leave its orbit around the small asteroid this coming March and arrive home in late September 2023. It is expected to deliver the asteroid samples by parachute to the military\u2019s Utah Test and Training Range, in the desert west of Salt Lake City.\nOnce retrieved, the asteroid samples will be studied at a new laboratory now under construction at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, as part of the agency\u2019s archive of extraterrestrial materials that includes lunar rocks, solar wind particles, meteorites, and comet samples.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n For the first time, a NASA spacecraft successfully brushed the surface of an ancient asteroid to collect samples and return them to Earth. WSJ\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz explains how Osiris-REx\u2019s mission to Bennu could shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Photo: Handout/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com U.S. spaceflight engineers safely stowed primeval grit collected from the asteroid Bennu for return to Earth, meeting the mission\u2019s scientific goal after overcoming a high-stakes spill, officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Thursday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-REx Mission Is on Track to Return Asteroid Grit (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3554",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-osiris-rex-mission-is-on-track-to-return-asteroid-grit-a-u-s-first-11604018221?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=39",
        "text": "Wrangling their spacecraft by remote control, mission operations engineers improvised a series of delicate recovery maneuvers to successfully close the canister and latch it down for its return voyage from the small, spinning asteroid 200 million miles or so from Earth.\nDespite the spill, the spacecraft may bring back as much as 2 pounds of pulverized rock, gravel and dust believed to date to the creation of the solar system billions of years ago, meeting the primary scientific goal of the $1.16 billion mission, space agency officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn Asteroid Touch and Go\nOriginally thought to have a smoother surface, Bennu asteroid is littered with boulders making spacecraft landing treacherous. A landing spot named Nightingale was chosen for its relative landing ease and the amount and value of available material to be collected.\n\n\n\nNightingale landing spot\n\n\nPreferred landing site width: 164\u2019\n\n\nSpacecraft\n\n\nLength: 20.25 feet with solar arrays deployed \nWidth: 8 feet \n\n\nLanding spot \n\n\nSits inside a small crate site : Diameter: 66'. The area covers a couple parking spaces wide. \n\n\nCollecting Samples\n\n\nAlmost 4.5 pounds of loose material\n\n\nSize Comparison\n\n\nEmpire\nState \nBuilding \n\n\nBennu \n\n\n1,673\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n1,453\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\nAlberto Cervantes, Taylor Umlauf/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cOur flight team went around the clock to accomplish this,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sandra Freund,\n\n\n\n mission operations manager at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colo., which built the spacecraft. \u201cAs you can imagine in the mission support area here, there was lots of cheering.\u201d\n\n\nIn a dramatic six-second grab and go maneuver last week, the spacecraft poked an automated arm tipped with collection filters into the unexpectedly soft surface of Bennu, a ball of orbiting debris about the size of the Empire State Building. The long arm penetrated more deeply than expected and picked up so much rubble that the lid of its collection chamber couldn\u2019t close properly, mission officials said on Thursday.\nAs images of the mishap relayed across the void from the spacecraft to Earth, NASA scientists watched in dismay while a swirl of asteroid particles billowed away from the spacecraft.\n\u201cI was concerned about that because every one of those particles is scientifically valuable,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dante Lauretta,\n\n\n\n Osiris-REx principal investigator and a professor at the University of Arizona. \u201cTens of grams of sample probably escaped throughout the entire sequence of operations. I believe we still have hundreds of grams of material in the sample collector head, probably over a kilogram easily.\u201d\nIt is the first time the US space agency has tried its hand at returning a piece of an asteroid. In 2010, Japan\u2019s space agency landed the first asteroid sample on Earth. It has a second sample set to land in Australia this coming December.\nIf all continues to go well, the robotic Osiris-REx spacecraft will leave its orbit around the small asteroid this coming March and arrive home in late September 2023. It is expected to deliver the asteroid samples by parachute to the military\u2019s Utah Test and Training Range, in the desert west of Salt Lake City.\nOnce retrieved, the asteroid samples will be studied at a new laboratory now under construction at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, as part of the agency\u2019s archive of extraterrestrial materials that includes lunar rocks, solar wind particles, meteorites, and comet samples.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n For the first time, a NASA spacecraft successfully brushed the surface of an ancient asteroid to collect samples and return them to Earth. WSJ\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz explains how Osiris-REx\u2019s mission to Bennu could shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Photo: Handout/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com U.S. spaceflight engineers safely stowed primeval grit collected from the asteroid Bennu for return to Earth, meeting the mission\u2019s scientific goal after overcoming a high-stakes spill, officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Thursday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Six-Second Brush With Asteroid Bennu (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3555",
        "date": "2020-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-six-second-brush-with-asteroid-bennu-11603325461?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=10",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s $1.16 billion Osiris-REx mission is the first attempt by a U.S. spacecraft to return to Earth primordial materials from an asteroid that may help answer basic questions about the origins of the planets and the ingredients for life. The spacecraft on Tuesday brushed Bennu\u2019s surface for about six seconds in a touch-and-go operation scientists hailed as a success even as they awaited details of what it managed to pick up.\n\u201cWe are on the way to returning the largest sample brought home from space since Apollo,\u201d NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridentine\n\n\n\n wrote in a Twitter post after the fleeting rendezvous. \u201cIf all goes well, this sample will be studied by scientists for generations to come!\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's Osiris-REx spacecraft brushed Bennu's surface for about six seconds on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\nSo far, basic telemetry signals received from the spacecraft confirmed that it survived its rendezvous with Bennu. Preliminary data NASA gave Wednesday also suggest that, as programmed, the craft\u2019s 11-foot-long robotic arm reached down and fired a quick burst of nitrogen gas to stir up grit and gravel from the asteroid\u2019s rocky surface.\n\n\nThe first few images of the encounter show the robotic arm brushing the asteroid\u2019s surface for about six seconds or so, stirring up a swirling cloud of asteroid dust.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScientists say the primordial materials gathered from the asteroid may help answer basic questions about the origins of the planets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI must have watched it a hundred times last night,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dante Lauretta,\n\n\n\n Osiris-REx principal investigator and a professor at the University of Arizona, said on Wednesday. \u201cParticles are flying all over the place. We kind of made a mess on the surface of this asteroid. It\u2019s the kind of mess we hoped for.\u201d\nIt may be days before scientists can determine what, if anything, the NASA probe snared in its collection filter and stainless steel Velcro pads before safely backing away into orbit late Tuesday. NASA engineers on Earth have no direct way to see inside the asteroid sample container so many million miles away, so they have devised several indirect ways to study whether they have succeeded in collecting a meaningful sample.\nTo meet the mission\u2019s main scientific goal, the engineers need to confirm the spacecraft collected at least two ounces or so (60 grams) of asteroid material\u2014equal to a few squares of baking chocolate. It can hold up to about 4.5 pounds (2 kilograms). Otherwise, they will prepare for another attempt to scrape up a load of asteroid material in January.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n WSJ\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz explains how Osiris-REx\u2019s mission to Bennu could shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Photo: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\nOver the next few days, the mission engineers and scientists will be studying images from the asteroid encounter now being transmitted back to Earth to analyze changes to the sampling site on the asteroid. Then they will direct the probe to take pictures of the collection apparatus itself, to see if they can spot any particles adhering to the equipment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAs a final measure, they plan on Saturday to send the spacecraft into a slow-speed spin with its robot arm extended, like a ballerina doing pirouettes, to detect any telltale changes in its mass as measured before and after the sampling attempt.\nBennu is just one in a million or more asteroids that speed through the solar system like buckshot. It\u2019s a spin-top of rocks and boulders\u2014so primitive that scientists believe it formed in the first 10 million years of the solar system\u2019s history, over 4.5 billion years ago. The asteroid is the smallest body that a NASA spacecraft has ever orbited, space agency officials said. If left undisturbed in its orbit, there is a remote chance that one day in the 22nd Century it might pose a threat of collision with Earth, the scientists said.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Mission Osiris-REx is working to analyze a sample it picked up from the surface of asteroid Bennu. Scientists say the material may hold clues on the origins of the planets. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Six-Second Brush With Asteroid Bennu (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3556",
        "date": "2020-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-six-second-brush-with-asteroid-bennu-11603325461?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=39",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s $1.16 billion Osiris-REx mission is the first attempt by a U.S. spacecraft to return to Earth primordial materials from an asteroid that may help answer basic questions about the origins of the planets and the ingredients for life. The spacecraft on Tuesday brushed Bennu\u2019s surface for about six seconds in a touch-and-go operation scientists hailed as a success even as they awaited details of what it managed to pick up.\n\u201cWe are on the way to returning the largest sample brought home from space since Apollo,\u201d NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridentine\n\n\n\n wrote in a Twitter post after the fleeting rendezvous. \u201cIf all goes well, this sample will be studied by scientists for generations to come!\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's Osiris-REx spacecraft brushed Bennu's surface for about six seconds on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\nSo far, basic telemetry signals received from the spacecraft confirmed that it survived its rendezvous with Bennu. Preliminary data NASA gave Wednesday also suggest that, as programmed, the craft\u2019s 11-foot-long robotic arm reached down and fired a quick burst of nitrogen gas to stir up grit and gravel from the asteroid\u2019s rocky surface.\n\n\nThe first few images of the encounter show the robotic arm brushing the asteroid\u2019s surface for about six seconds or so, stirring up a swirling cloud of asteroid dust.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScientists say the primordial materials gathered from the asteroid may help answer basic questions about the origins of the planets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI must have watched it a hundred times last night,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dante Lauretta,\n\n\n\n Osiris-REx principal investigator and a professor at the University of Arizona, said on Wednesday. \u201cParticles are flying all over the place. We kind of made a mess on the surface of this asteroid. It\u2019s the kind of mess we hoped for.\u201d\nIt may be days before scientists can determine what, if anything, the NASA probe snared in its collection filter and stainless steel Velcro pads before safely backing away into orbit late Tuesday. NASA engineers on Earth have no direct way to see inside the asteroid sample container so many million miles away, so they have devised several indirect ways to study whether they have succeeded in collecting a meaningful sample.\nTo meet the mission\u2019s main scientific goal, the engineers need to confirm the spacecraft collected at least two ounces or so (60 grams) of asteroid material\u2014equal to a few squares of baking chocolate. It can hold up to about 4.5 pounds (2 kilograms). Otherwise, they will prepare for another attempt to scrape up a load of asteroid material in January.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n WSJ\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz explains how Osiris-REx\u2019s mission to Bennu could shed light on the origins of life on Earth. Photo: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\nOver the next few days, the mission engineers and scientists will be studying images from the asteroid encounter now being transmitted back to Earth to analyze changes to the sampling site on the asteroid. Then they will direct the probe to take pictures of the collection apparatus itself, to see if they can spot any particles adhering to the equipment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAs a final measure, they plan on Saturday to send the spacecraft into a slow-speed spin with its robot arm extended, like a ballerina doing pirouettes, to detect any telltale changes in its mass as measured before and after the sampling attempt.\nBennu is just one in a million or more asteroids that speed through the solar system like buckshot. It\u2019s a spin-top of rocks and boulders\u2014so primitive that scientists believe it formed in the first 10 million years of the solar system\u2019s history, over 4.5 billion years ago. The asteroid is the smallest body that a NASA spacecraft has ever orbited, space agency officials said. If left undisturbed in its orbit, there is a remote chance that one day in the 22nd Century it might pose a threat of collision with Earth, the scientists said.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Mission Osiris-REx is working to analyze a sample it picked up from the surface of asteroid Bennu. Scientists say the material may hold clues on the origins of the planets. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Quest for Space Power Starts With Moon Dust (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3557",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-quest-for-space-power-starts-with-moon-dust-11639396804?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=2",
        "text": "The isotope, a variant of the atom helium with a different number of neutrons, is thought by scientists to have the potential to one day provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor, as it isn\u2019t radioactive. Rare on Earth, helium-3 is thought to be abundant on the moon. While researchers in the U.S. and other nations have studied the isotope, China\u2019s renewed pursuit is part of a decadeslong plan to establish itself as a leading space power, mirroring the country\u2019s rising economic and strategic influence on Earth. Since being shut out of working with the U.S. space agency by law a decade ago, the country has invested heavily in its own program. China is still playing catch-up technologically but is seeking to gain an edge through its moon missions.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Xi Jinping with samples carried back from the moon by Chang'e 5.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Wang Ye/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s counterpart to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Artemis program\u2014the U.S.-led plan to return humans to the moon around 2025\u2014is growing in ambition. From being the first nation to land on the far side of the moon in 2019, to maneuvering a rover across Mars and constructing its own space station this year, China\u2019s rapid moves have kicked off a new space race with the U.S. In October, Chinese scientists published findings from the Chang\u2019e 5 mission in the journals Science and Nature. The samples of volcanic rock they analyzed are the youngest lunar samples found, dating back two billion years. Their work shows how lunar composition and water content changed over time, offering new insights into the thermal and chemical evolution of the moon. China ultimately envisions a future where it commands more power in space: It will have powerful rockets ferrying its spacecraft, and its people will pioneer explorations around planets. Those goals are laid out in a 2016 white paper that outlines the country\u2019s space ambitions, akin to the U.S.\u2019s National Space Policy, and China has since been steadily achieving its milestones. The push corresponds with increasing Chinese nationalism under leader \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping.\n\n\n\n \u201cYou are the representatives of those who are striving and climbing in China\u2019s space industry in the new era,\u201d Mr. Xi said in a June call with astronauts spending time at the country\u2019s first space station. Beijing is also establishing more global alliances in space projects. In October, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced an agreement with its French counterpart to study the Chang\u2019e 5 lunar samples. In March, China announced a tie-up with Russia\u2019s space agency to develop a joint moon base in the coming decade.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n While the future of the nearly 23-year-old International Space Station remains uncertain after 2024, China says its newly equipped Tiangong station will be up and running by next year. WSJ unpacks the design and technology of both space stations. Photo: CCTV; NASA\n \n\n\n\u201cChina is now building the Silk Road to space,\u201d said James Head, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University who has lectured at universities across China in the past few years. Space missions take time, investment and long-term planning, he said, and Beijing is investing strategically. While China doesn\u2019t officially publish how much it spends on its space program, data compiled by Namrata Goswami, a co-author of the book \u201cScramble for the Skies,\u201d indicates that the country spends $8 billion to $11 billion on just its civilian space program. There is no data available on its military spending in space. Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, told a congressional hearing in May that approval of its proposed $24.8 billion budget for 2022 would better position the U.S. to compete with China by first returning humans to the moon and eventually landing them on Mars. Seeing the impact companies like SpaceX had in the U.S., China opened up its space industry in 2014 and now has dozens of private companies. The rivalry isn\u2019t like the bitter Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, said David Burbach, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. \u201cI don\u2019t think either country believes that whoever lands on the Moon next is nearly as meaningful to their foreign policy as is their overall economic power and diplomatic influence,\u201d said Mr. Burbach, who was speaking in a personal capacity. Still, China\u2019s space program did strengthen support in the U.S. for NASA\u2019s Artemis program, created in 2017 by then-President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump,\n \n\n\n\n Mr. Burbach said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rocket carrying Chang'e 5 launched last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThree taikonauts\u2014as Chinese astronauts are known\u2014are spending six months in its space station, which is scheduled for completion by the end of next year. Beijing is planning a series of unmanned miss The country\u2019s lunar program is a key step toward Beijing\u2019s vision of achieving territorial power in space, and scientists think lunar material could one day provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Quest for Space Power Starts With Moon Dust (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3558",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-quest-for-space-power-starts-with-moon-dust-11639396804?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=7",
        "text": "The isotope, a variant of the atom helium with a different number of neutrons, is thought by scientists to have the potential to one day provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor, as it isn\u2019t radioactive. Rare on Earth, helium-3 is thought to be abundant on the moon. While researchers in the U.S. and other nations have studied the isotope, China\u2019s renewed pursuit is part of a decadeslong plan to establish itself as a leading space power, mirroring the country\u2019s rising economic and strategic influence on Earth. Since being shut out of working with the U.S. space agency by law a decade ago, the country has invested heavily in its own program. China is still playing catch-up technologically but is seeking to gain an edge through its moon missions.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Xi Jinping with samples carried back from the moon by Chang'e 5.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Wang Ye/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s counterpart to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Artemis program\u2014the U.S.-led plan to return humans to the moon around 2025\u2014is growing in ambition. From being the first nation to land on the far side of the moon in 2019, to maneuvering a rover across Mars and constructing its own space station this year, China\u2019s rapid moves have kicked off a new space race with the U.S. In October, Chinese scientists published findings from the Chang\u2019e 5 mission in the journals Science and Nature. The samples of volcanic rock they analyzed are the youngest lunar samples found, dating back two billion years. Their work shows how lunar composition and water content changed over time, offering new insights into the thermal and chemical evolution of the moon. China ultimately envisions a future where it commands more power in space: It will have powerful rockets ferrying its spacecraft, and its people will pioneer explorations around planets. Those goals are laid out in a 2016 white paper that outlines the country\u2019s space ambitions, akin to the U.S.\u2019s National Space Policy, and China has since been steadily achieving its milestones. The push corresponds with increasing Chinese nationalism under leader \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping.\n\n\n\n \u201cYou are the representatives of those who are striving and climbing in China\u2019s space industry in the new era,\u201d Mr. Xi said in a June call with astronauts spending time at the country\u2019s first space station. Beijing is also establishing more global alliances in space projects. In October, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced an agreement with its French counterpart to study the Chang\u2019e 5 lunar samples. In March, China announced a tie-up with Russia\u2019s space agency to develop a joint moon base in the coming decade.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s Tiangong vs. International Space Station: Tech, Design UnpackedSkip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 6:55ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.China\u2019s Tiangong vs. International Space Station: Tech, Design UnpackedPlay video: China\u2019s Tiangong vs. International Space Station: Tech, Design Unpacked\n\n While the future of the nearly 23-year-old International Space Station remains uncertain after 2024, China says its newly equipped Tiangong station will be up and running by next year. WSJ unpacks the design and technology of both space stations. Photo: CCTV; NASA\n \n\n\n\u201cChina is now building the Silk Road to space,\u201d said James Head, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University who has lectured at universities across China in the past few years. Space missions take time, investment and long-term planning, he said, and Beijing is investing strategically. While China doesn\u2019t officially publish how much it spends on its space program, data compiled by Namrata Goswami, a co-author of the book \u201cScramble for the Skies,\u201d indicates that the country spends $8 billion to $11 billion on just its civilian space program. There is no data available on its military spending in space. Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, told a congressional hearing in May that approval of its proposed $24.8 billion budget for 2022 would better position the U.S. to compete with China by first returning humans to the moon and eventually landing them on Mars. Seeing the impact companies like SpaceX had in the U.S., China opened up its space industry in 2014 and now has dozens of private companies. The rivalry isn\u2019t like the bitter Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, said David Burbach, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. \u201cI don\u2019t think either country believes that whoever lands on the Moon next is nearly as meaningful to their foreign policy as is their overall economic power and diplomatic influence,\u201d said Mr. Burbach, who was speaking in a personal capacity. Still, China\u2019s space program did strengthen support in the U.S. for NASA\u2019s Artemis program, created in 2017 by then-President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump,\n \n\n\n\n Mr. Burbach said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rocket carrying Chang'e 5 launched last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThree taikonauts\u2014as Chinese astronauts are known\u2014are spending six months in its space station, which is scheduled for completion by the end of next year. Beijing is planning a series of unmanned missions, including sending robots to the moon, over the next few years as it builds its base with Russia. To prepare for humans spending months on the moon, a group of Chinese volunteers lived for a year in a self-contained lab in Beijing, growing their own food and recycling water. \u201cChina\u2019s moon program is the most important and central component of its entire space strategy,\u201d Ms. Goswami said. \u201cAll of these milestones help the country come closer to fulfilling Mr. Xi\u2019s space dream.\u201d Chinese officials tasked with nuclear fusion projects say it could be decades before efforts come to fruition. The Beijing institute studying helium-3, which is backed by the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation, discussed the efforts in an August state-media interview and didn\u2019t reply to a request for further comment. The theory that the moon might have abundant reserves of helium-3 goes back several decades. In 1986, scientists at the University of Wisconsin estimated that lunar soil could contain a million tons of the isotope, also known as He3. A byproduct of the sun\u2019s intense heat, it is carried through the solar system by solar winds. Since the moon doesn\u2019t have the magnetic field Earth does, a veneer of the colorless, inert atom is believed to be embedded on the moon\u2019s regolith\u2014the blanket of loose deposits that cover its surface.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe return module of Chang'e 5.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nExtracting a container from Chang'e 5 last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jin Liwang/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s renewed efforts to study helium-3 are at a very early stage, as there still isn\u2019t a way for humans to easily map, extract or process it. \u201cThere\u2019s no element of the operation that\u2019s been figured out yet,\u201d said Joseph Michalski, deputy director of the University of Hong Kong\u2019s Laboratory for Space Research, who isn\u2019t involved in the Beijing study. \u201cIt\u2019s like if someone offered you a suitcase stuffed with $5 million, but it\u2019ll cost $10 million to pick it up.\u201d In the future, there could be machines that vacuum up the top layer of the moon\u2019s surface, which could then be used to address Earth\u2019s energy needs or to power moon bases for future missions, Mr. Michalski said. And even after helium-3 can be contained,\u00a0 another hurdle will be generating enough heat in a short amount of time to create the appropriate reaction. China and the U.S. are among dozens of countries collaborating on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a $22 billion project being built in France that is intended to demonstrate the feasibility of nuclear fusion by maintaining the reaction for longer periods. Nuclear fusion has long been a holy grail in the energy world. No one has been able to produce more energy than it takes to create a fusion reaction, despite decades of research. China has also made progress at its own Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak reactor in the eastern city of Hefei. \u201cThe research is not only of great value for the potential exploitation of such nuclear energy resources on the moon in the future,\u201d Li Ziying, the head of the Beijing institute, told state-owned China Central Television in August, referring to the helium-3 study. It is also of \u201cgreat significance for the scientific study of the moon itself and its relationship with the Earth.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina\u2019s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak reactor.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n china stringer network/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com The country\u2019s lunar program is a key step toward Beijing\u2019s vision of achieving territorial power in space, and scientists think lunar material could one day provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Quest for Space Power Starts With Moon Dust (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3559",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-quest-for-space-power-starts-with-moon-dust-11639396804?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=10",
        "text": "The isotope, a variant of the atom helium with a different number of neutrons, is thought by scientists to have the potential to one day provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor, as it isn\u2019t radioactive. Rare on Earth, helium-3 is thought to be abundant on the moon. While researchers in the U.S. and other nations have studied the isotope, China\u2019s renewed pursuit is part of a decadeslong plan to establish itself as a leading space power, mirroring the country\u2019s rising economic and strategic influence on Earth. Since being shut out of working with the U.S. space agency by law a decade ago, the country has invested heavily in its own program. China is still playing catch-up technologically but is seeking to gain an edge through its moon missions.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Xi Jinping with samples carried back from the moon by Chang'e 5.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Wang Ye/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s counterpart to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Artemis program\u2014the U.S.-led plan to return humans to the moon around 2025\u2014is growing in ambition. From being the first nation to land on the far side of the moon in 2019, to maneuvering a rover across Mars and constructing its own space station this year, China\u2019s rapid moves have kicked off a new space race with the U.S. In October, Chinese scientists published findings from the Chang\u2019e 5 mission in the journals Science and Nature. The samples of volcanic rock they analyzed are the youngest lunar samples found, dating back two billion years. Their work shows how lunar composition and water content changed over time, offering new insights into the thermal and chemical evolution of the moon. China ultimately envisions a future where it commands more power in space: It will have powerful rockets ferrying its spacecraft, and its people will pioneer explorations around planets. Those goals are laid out in a 2016 white paper that outlines the country\u2019s space ambitions, akin to the U.S.\u2019s National Space Policy, and China has since been steadily achieving its milestones. The push corresponds with increasing Chinese nationalism under leader \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping.\n\n\n\n \u201cYou are the representatives of those who are striving and climbing in China\u2019s space industry in the new era,\u201d Mr. Xi said in a June call with astronauts spending time at the country\u2019s first space station. Beijing is also establishing more global alliances in space projects. In October, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced an agreement with its French counterpart to study the Chang\u2019e 5 lunar samples. In March, China announced a tie-up with Russia\u2019s space agency to develop a joint moon base in the coming decade.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n While the future of the nearly 23-year-old International Space Station remains uncertain after 2024, China says its newly equipped Tiangong station will be up and running by next year. WSJ unpacks the design and technology of both space stations. Photo: CCTV; NASA\n \n\n\n\u201cChina is now building the Silk Road to space,\u201d said James Head, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University who has lectured at universities across China in the past few years. Space missions take time, investment and long-term planning, he said, and Beijing is investing strategically. While China doesn\u2019t officially publish how much it spends on its space program, data compiled by Namrata Goswami, a co-author of the book \u201cScramble for the Skies,\u201d indicates that the country spends $8 billion to $11 billion on just its civilian space program. There is no data available on its military spending in space. Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, told a congressional hearing in May that approval of its proposed $24.8 billion budget for 2022 would better position the U.S. to compete with China by first returning humans to the moon and eventually landing them on Mars. Seeing the impact companies like SpaceX had in the U.S., China opened up its space industry in 2014 and now has dozens of private companies. The rivalry isn\u2019t like the bitter Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, said David Burbach, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. \u201cI don\u2019t think either country believes that whoever lands on the Moon next is nearly as meaningful to their foreign policy as is their overall economic power and diplomatic influence,\u201d said Mr. Burbach, who was speaking in a personal capacity. Still, China\u2019s space program did strengthen support in the U.S. for NASA\u2019s Artemis program, created in 2017 by then-President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump,\n \n\n\n\n Mr. Burbach said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rocket carrying Chang'e 5 launched last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThree taikonauts\u2014as Chinese astronauts are known\u2014are spending six months in its space station, which is scheduled for completion by the end of next year. Beijing is planning a series of unmanned miss The country\u2019s lunar program is a key step toward Beijing\u2019s vision of achieving territorial power in space, and scientists think lunar material could one day provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Webb Telescope Is to Unfold in NASA\u2019s Most Complex Spacecraft Plan (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3560",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-webb-telescope-is-to-unfold-in-nasas-most-complex-spacecraft-plan-11640169007?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=1",
        "text": "That won\u2019t be easy.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nOpening up the telescope\u2019s golden mirrors, extending its solar panels and unfurling its tissue-thin sunshield will require 50 separate deployments and 178 release mechanisms, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Everything must go just right, or the biggest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space could become a $10 billion heap of space debris. \u201cThose two weeks after launch are going to be nail-biters,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Amy Lo,\n\n\n\n deputy director for vehicle engineering on the James Webb Space Telescope for \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , in a video published in October. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Menzel,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Webb mission lead systems engineer, says in the video that unfolding Webb is \u201chands down, the most complicated spacecraft activity we\u2019ve ever done.\u201d\n\n\n\nHow the James Webb Space Telescope unfolds in outer space\nAt the time of its launch, the telescope will be folded inside the 18-foot-wide, 56-foot-high nose cone of the European Space Agency\u2019s Ariane 5 rocket.After launch, the telescope will separate from the rocket.About 30 minutes after launch, the spacecraft is programmed to release its solar panel, allowing it to generate power from the sun......and 90 minutes later, its antenna will pop out to allow communication between the telescope and the team back on Earth. Meanwhile, an engine will fire to push the telescope along in its journey about 1 million miles from Earth.After three days, once the telescope is in orbit, arms designed to hold the sunshield will lower into place.Next comes the extension of the critically important sunshield\u2014five layers of aluminum-coated, heat-resistant film, each as thin as a human hair. The sunshield is designed to keep the telescope super chilly\u2014below minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014by blocking heat from the sun, Earth and moon. If the sunshield rips or fails to extend fully, the telescope won\u2019t work properly.Then, a small secondary mirror will extend and lock into place. This mirror reflects the light collected by the primary mirror inside the telescope.About two weeks after launch, the folded-up sections of the primary mirror will swing open and lock into place, completing the deployment of the telescope. The 21.5-foot mirror consists of 18 hexagonal sections, each made of beryllium and coated with gold to optimize its ability to reflect infrared light.\n\n\n\n\nOnce the telescope unfolds, thrusters will propel it to its orbital path around the sun about 1 million miles from Earth. That should take about two weeks, with the mission team projecting that about five months will be needed to fine-tune the mirror, calibrate the instruments and let the telescope cool to below minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnlike the Hubble telescope, which orbits the Earth, the Webb will travel around the sun.\n\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nmoon\n\n\nWebb\norbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nConstruction of the James Webb Space Telescope began in 2004 and involved 40 million hours of work contributed by thousands of scientists in more than a dozen countries, according to NASA.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is set to launch on Saturday. Scientists say its technology makes it 100 times as powerful as the Hubble and could give it the ability to see back to the first galaxies in the universe. Illustration: Adele Morgan/WSJ\n \n\n\n Write to Brian McGill at Brian.McGill@wsj.com All needs to go right, or the strongest telescope to be sent into space risks becoming $10 billion of debris. ",
        "author": "Kevin Hand, Brian McGill and Taylor Umlauf"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Webb Telescope Is to Unfold in NASA\u2019s Most Complex Spacecraft Plan (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3561",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-webb-telescope-is-to-unfold-in-nasas-most-complex-spacecraft-plan-11640169007?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=4",
        "text": "That won\u2019t be easy.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nOpening up the telescope\u2019s golden mirrors, extending its solar panels and unfurling its tissue-thin sunshield will require 50 separate deployments and 178 release mechanisms, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Everything must go just right, or the biggest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space could become a $10 billion heap of space debris. \u201cThose two weeks after launch are going to be nail-biters,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Amy Lo,\n\n\n\n deputy director for vehicle engineering on the James Webb Space Telescope for \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , in a video published in October. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Menzel,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Webb mission lead systems engineer, says in the video that unfolding Webb is \u201chands down, the most complicated spacecraft activity we\u2019ve ever done.\u201d\n\n\n\nHow the James Webb Space Telescope unfolds in outer space\nAt the time of its launch, the telescope will be folded inside the 18-foot-wide, 56-foot-high nose cone of the European Space Agency\u2019s Ariane 5 rocket.After launch, the telescope will separate from the rocket.About 30 minutes after launch, the spacecraft is programmed to release its solar panel, allowing it to generate power from the sun......and 90 minutes later, its antenna will pop out to allow communication between the telescope and the team back on Earth. Meanwhile, an engine will fire to push the telescope along in its journey about 1 million miles from Earth.After three days, once the telescope is in orbit, arms designed to hold the sunshield will lower into place.Next comes the extension of the critically important sunshield\u2014five layers of aluminum-coated, heat-resistant film, each as thin as a human hair. The sunshield is designed to keep the telescope super chilly\u2014below minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014by blocking heat from the sun, Earth and moon. If the sunshield rips or fails to extend fully, the telescope won\u2019t work properly.Then, a small secondary mirror will extend and lock into place. This mirror reflects the light collected by the primary mirror inside the telescope.About two weeks after launch, the folded-up sections of the primary mirror will swing open and lock into place, completing the deployment of the telescope. The 21.5-foot mirror consists of 18 hexagonal sections, each made of beryllium and coated with gold to optimize its ability to reflect infrared light.\n\n\n\n\nOnce the telescope unfolds, thrusters will propel it to its orbital path around the sun about 1 million miles from Earth. That should take about two weeks, with the mission team projecting that about five months will be needed to fine-tune the mirror, calibrate the instruments and let the telescope cool to below minus-370 degrees Fahrenheit.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnlike the Hubble telescope, which orbits the Earth, the Webb will travel around the sun.\n\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nmoon\n\n\nWebb\norbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nConstruction of the James Webb Space Telescope began in 2004 and involved 40 million hours of work contributed by thousands of scientists in more than a dozen countries, according to NASA.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is set to launch on Saturday. Scientists say its technology makes it 100 times as powerful as the Hubble and could give it the ability to see back to the first galaxies in the universe. Illustration: Adele Morgan/WSJ\n \n\n\n Write to Brian McGill at Brian.McGill@wsj.com All needs to go right, or the strongest telescope to be sent into space risks becoming $10 billion of debris. ",
        "author": "Kevin Hand, Brian McGill and Taylor Umlauf"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israeli Nonprofit\u2019s Moon Mission Crashes During Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3562",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-nonprofits-moon-mission-crashes-during-landing-11555023241?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=16",
        "text": "More on Space Scientists Release First Image of a Black Hole Astronauts Can Withstand Longer Space Trips For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn\u2019t succeed with the landing process,\u201d the nonprofit SpaceIL, which had developed the spacecraft and organized its mission, said on its official Twitter account. SpaceIL couldn\u2019t be reached for further comment.\nA successful landing would have been a first. Landers from U.S., Russian and Chinese space agencies have successfully settled onto the moon\u2019s surface. But no private organization has been able to pull off the feat, a sign of the challenges of completing the mission.\n\n\nThree engineers from Israel established SpaceIL to win the multimillion-dollar Google Lunar XPrize promised to the first private-sector team that could land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon and transmit photos and videos.\nSpaceIL kept at the project, even after the prize was scrapped because contestants missed the deadline. The nonprofit aimed to encourage Israeli students to study science and engineering, what the organization compared to the \u201cApollo Effect\u201d in the U.S.\nThe Beresheet craft was propelled into space on Feb. 21 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.\nIt carried one device from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that could pinpoint the exact distance between the spacecraft and the Earth and another device for measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic field, according to SpaceIL\u2019s website.\nThe spacecraft orbited the Earth for six weeks before transitioning into orbit around the moon, where it remained for a week before attempting to land on a lava plain known as the Sea of Serenity.\nIts landing was commanded from a control room in Yehud, Israel, and broadcast on Israeli television and social media. Israeli Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Netanyahu\n\n\n\n attended the event. After the failure, he told the crowd at mission control that Israel would try again to put a spacecraft on the moon within the next two to three years. A small spacecraft launched by an Israeli nonprofit crashed while trying to land on the moon Thursday, dashing hopes for the first lunar landing by a private organization. ",
        "author": "Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israeli Nonprofit\u2019s Moon Mission Crashes During Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3563",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-nonprofits-moon-mission-crashes-during-landing-11555023241?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=57",
        "text": "More on Space Scientists Release First Image of a Black Hole Astronauts Can Withstand Longer Space Trips For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn\u2019t succeed with the landing process,\u201d the nonprofit SpaceIL, which had developed the spacecraft and organized its mission, said on its official Twitter account. SpaceIL couldn\u2019t be reached for further comment.\nA successful landing would have been a first. Landers from U.S., Russian and Chinese space agencies have successfully settled onto the moon\u2019s surface. But no private organization has been able to pull off the feat, a sign of the challenges of completing the mission.\n\n\nThree engineers from Israel established SpaceIL to win the multimillion-dollar Google Lunar XPrize promised to the first private-sector team that could land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon and transmit photos and videos.\nSpaceIL kept at the project, even after the prize was scrapped because contestants missed the deadline. The nonprofit aimed to encourage Israeli students to study science and engineering, what the organization compared to the \u201cApollo Effect\u201d in the U.S.\nThe Beresheet craft was propelled into space on Feb. 21 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.\nIt carried one device from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that could pinpoint the exact distance between the spacecraft and the Earth and another device for measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic field, according to SpaceIL\u2019s website.\nThe spacecraft orbited the Earth for six weeks before transitioning into orbit around the moon, where it remained for a week before attempting to land on a lava plain known as the Sea of Serenity.\nIts landing was commanded from a control room in Yehud, Israel, and broadcast on Israeli television and social media. Israeli Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Netanyahu\n\n\n\n attended the event. After the failure, he told the crowd at mission control that Israel would try again to put a spacecraft on the moon within the next two to three years. A small spacecraft launched by an Israeli nonprofit crashed while trying to land on the moon Thursday, dashing hopes for the first lunar landing by a private organization. ",
        "author": "Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israeli Nonprofit\u2019s Moon Mission Crashes During Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3564",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-nonprofits-moon-mission-crashes-during-landing-11555023241?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=62",
        "text": "More on Space Scientists Release First Image of a Black Hole Astronauts Can Withstand Longer Space Trips For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn\u2019t succeed with the landing process,\u201d the nonprofit SpaceIL, which had developed the spacecraft and organized its mission, said on its official Twitter account. SpaceIL couldn\u2019t be reached for further comment.\nA successful landing would have been a first. Landers from U.S., Russian and Chinese space agencies have successfully settled onto the moon\u2019s surface. But no private organization has been able to pull off the feat, a sign of the challenges of completing the mission.\n\n\nThree engineers from Israel established SpaceIL to win the multimillion-dollar Google Lunar XPrize promised to the first private-sector team that could land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon and transmit photos and videos.\nSpaceIL kept at the project, even after the prize was scrapped because contestants missed the deadline. The nonprofit aimed to encourage Israeli students to study science and engineering, what the organization compared to the \u201cApollo Effect\u201d in the U.S.\nThe Beresheet craft was propelled into space on Feb. 21 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.\nIt carried one device from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that could pinpoint the exact distance between the spacecraft and the Earth and another device for measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic field, according to SpaceIL\u2019s website.\nThe spacecraft orbited the Earth for six weeks before transitioning into orbit around the moon, where it remained for a week before attempting to land on a lava plain known as the Sea of Serenity.\nIts landing was commanded from a control room in Yehud, Israel, and broadcast on Israeli television and social media. Israeli Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Netanyahu\n\n\n\n attended the event. After the failure, he told the crowd at mission control that Israel would try again to put a spacecraft on the moon within the next two to three years. A small spacecraft launched by an Israeli nonprofit crashed while trying to land on the moon Thursday, dashing hopes for the first lunar landing by a private organization. ",
        "author": "Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israeli Nonprofit\u2019s Moon Mission Crashes During Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3565",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-nonprofits-moon-mission-crashes-during-landing-11555023241?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=75",
        "text": "More on Space Scientists Release First Image of a Black Hole Astronauts Can Withstand Longer Space Trips For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn\u2019t succeed with the landing process,\u201d the nonprofit SpaceIL, which had developed the spacecraft and organized its mission, said on its official Twitter account. SpaceIL couldn\u2019t be reached for further comment.\nA successful landing would have been a first. Landers from U.S., Russian and Chinese space agencies have successfully settled onto the moon\u2019s surface. But no private organization has been able to pull off the feat, a sign of the challenges of completing the mission.\n\n\nThree engineers from Israel established SpaceIL to win the multimillion-dollar Google Lunar XPrize promised to the first private-sector team that could land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon and transmit photos and videos.\nSpaceIL kept at the project, even after the prize was scrapped because contestants missed the deadline. The nonprofit aimed to encourage Israeli students to study science and engineering, what the organization compared to the \u201cApollo Effect\u201d in the U.S.\nThe Beresheet craft was propelled into space on Feb. 21 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.\nIt carried one device from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that could pinpoint the exact distance between the spacecraft and the Earth and another device for measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic field, according to SpaceIL\u2019s website.\nThe spacecraft orbited the Earth for six weeks before transitioning into orbit around the moon, where it remained for a week before attempting to land on a lava plain known as the Sea of Serenity.\nIts landing was commanded from a control room in Yehud, Israel, and broadcast on Israeli television and social media. Israeli Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Netanyahu\n\n\n\n attended the event. After the failure, he told the crowd at mission control that Israel would try again to put a spacecraft on the moon within the next two to three years. A small spacecraft launched by an Israeli nonprofit crashed while trying to land on the moon Thursday, dashing hopes for the first lunar landing by a private organization. ",
        "author": "Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Asteroid Defense Mission to Smash Probe Into Distant Space Rock (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3566",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-asteroid-defense-mission-to-smash-probe-into-distant-space-rock-11637679600?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=3",
        "text": "Mission planners expect the high-speed impact to alter the trajectory of the binary asteroid, which isn\u2019t believed to pose a threat.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn illustration of the mission that aims to crash a probe into a distant asteroid\u2019s tiny moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Johns Hopkins APL\n \n\n\n\n\u201cFor the first time, humanity will change the motion of a natural celestial body in space,\u201d said DART program scientist Tom Statler of NASA. The project is managed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.\n\nEvery day, Earth is showered with tons of cosmic debris, including chunks of ice, rock and iron that come at our planet like bricks from the junkyard of deep space. Most of these burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, though spectacular exceptions to that rule have raised fears that a colossal space rock might one day be found to be on a collision course with Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn 1908, for example, a mysterious space rock exploded over Siberia and leveled 830 square miles of forest. In 2013, a 65-foot asteroid blew apart 20 miles above Chelyabinsk, Russia. That airburst released more than 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It knocked people off their feet and blew out windows in thousands of buildings.\nAt the urging of Congress, astronomers have identified and tracked the trajectories of about 1,000 asteroids about 3,300 feet across or larger that periodically come near Earth\u2019s orbit. None of these mountain-size space rocks is believed to pose a threat to our planet for at least the next several centuries, though there\u2019s a remote chance an undetected asteroid could damage the planet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWhile this is not something that is very likely to happen, it is not something we want to completely ignore either,\u201d said University of Arizona astronomer Amy Mainzer, who specializes in asteroid detection and planetary defense.\nMore than 90% of the potentially hazardous mountain-size asteroids have been identified, according to NASA. But only about 40% of potentially hazardous asteroids with diameters of 460 feet or more are believed to have been identified. There may be as many as 25,000 of these smaller asteroids, each of which might lay waste to an entire region if it were to strike our planet.\nAsteroids 6 miles across or larger, like the one that wiped out most dinosaurs and torched much of the planet about 66 million years ago, are believed to strike only every 15 million years or so.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe DART spacecraft was moved into a thermal vacuum chamber in February, to be subjected to extreme temperatures in preparation for conditions in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ed Whitman/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA\n \n\n\n\nTo facilitate the search for potentially hazardous asteroids, space agency officials in June approved the design of a new space-based infrared telescope called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor. The $500 million instrument is scheduled for launch in 2026.\n\u201cThis is designed to find near-Earth asteroids large enough to cause regional damage,\u201c said Dr. Mainzer, who leads the project. \u201cThe question is to answer what could happen in the next 100 years. We hope the answer is nothing.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nResearchers have dreamed up various ways to eliminate the threat posed by asteroids, from obliterating them with nuclear-tipped missiles or burning them out of the sky with lasers to tugging them off course with the pull of gravity from a passing spacecraft. Some scientists have suggested unfurling solar sails on errant space rocks, so that the pressure of sunlight could alter their course.\nThe DART mission will test the simplest of these schemes\u2014what space scientists call kinetic impact deflection\u2014by steering the 1,200-pound, small-car-size probe into the moonlet with enough force to change its velocity by a fraction of a millimeter or so per second, according to Andy Rivkin, lead of the DART investigation team at the Applied Physics Laboratory. The action will be photographed by a free-flying, pint-size cubesat satellite designed by the Italian Space Agency, which the probe will release 10 days before the impact.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you hope to learn from the DART mission? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nIf the mission succeeds, NASA one day might use the impact technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.\n\u201cWe are going to learn an incredible amount and be so much more prepared in the future if indeed a potential asteroid could pose a threat,\u201d said Lori Glaze, director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA launched a space probe designed to deflect a distant asteroid in a test of technology that might one day save the world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Asteroid Defense Mission to Smash Probe Into Distant Space Rock (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3567",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-asteroid-defense-mission-to-smash-probe-into-distant-space-rock-11637679600?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=10",
        "text": "Mission planners expect the high-speed impact to alter the trajectory of the binary asteroid, which isn\u2019t believed to pose a threat.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn illustration of the mission that aims to crash a probe into a distant asteroid\u2019s tiny moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Johns Hopkins APL\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFor the first time, humanity will change the motion of a natural celestial body in space,\u201d said DART program scientist Tom Statler of NASA. The project is managed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.\n\nEvery day, Earth is showered with tons of cosmic debris, including chunks of ice, rock and iron that come at our planet like bricks from the junkyard of deep space. Most of these burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, though spectacular exceptions to that rule have raised fears that a colossal space rock might one day be found to be on a collision course with Earth.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingHow NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an AsteroidNASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nIn 1908, for example, a mysterious space rock exploded over Siberia and leveled 830 square miles of forest. In 2013, a 65-foot asteroid blew apart 20 miles above Chelyabinsk, Russia. That airburst released more than 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It knocked people off their feet and blew out windows in thousands of buildings.\nAt the urging of Congress, astronomers have identified and tracked the trajectories of about 1,000 asteroids about 3,300 feet across or larger that periodically come near Earth\u2019s orbit. None of these mountain-size space rocks is believed to pose a threat to our planet for at least the next several centuries, though there\u2019s a remote chance an undetected asteroid could damage the planet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWhile this is not something that is very likely to happen, it is not something we want to completely ignore either,\u201d said University of Arizona astronomer Amy Mainzer, who specializes in asteroid detection and planetary defense.\nMore than 90% of the potentially hazardous mountain-size asteroids have been identified, according to NASA. But only about 40% of potentially hazardous asteroids with diameters of 460 feet or more are believed to have been identified. There may be as many as 25,000 of these smaller asteroids, each of which might lay waste to an entire region if it were to strike our planet.\nAsteroids 6 miles across or larger, like the one that wiped out most dinosaurs and torched much of the planet about 66 million years ago, are believed to strike only every 15 million years or so.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe DART spacecraft was moved into a thermal vacuum chamber in February, to be subjected to extreme temperatures in preparation for conditions in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ed Whitman/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA\n \n\n\n\nTo facilitate the search for potentially hazardous asteroids, space agency officials in June approved the design of a new space-based infrared telescope called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor. The $500 million instrument is scheduled for launch in 2026.\n\u201cThis is designed to find near-Earth asteroids large enough to cause regional damage,\u201c said Dr. Mainzer, who leads the project. \u201cThe question is to answer what could happen in the next 100 years. We hope the answer is nothing.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nResearchers have dreamed up various ways to eliminate the threat posed by asteroids, from obliterating them with nuclear-tipped missiles or burning them out of the sky with lasers to tugging them off course with the pull of gravity from a passing spacecraft. Some scientists have suggested unfurling solar sails on errant space rocks, so that the pressure of sunlight could alter their course.\nThe DART mission will test the simplest of these schemes\u2014what space scientists call kinetic impact deflection\u2014by steering the 1,200-pound, small-car-size probe into the moonlet with enough force to change its velocity by a fraction of a millimeter or so per second, according to Andy Rivkin, lead of the DART investigation team at the Applied Physics Laboratory. The action will be photographed by a free-flying, pint-size cubesat satellite designed by the Italian Space Agency, which the probe will release 10 days before the impact.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you hope to learn from the DART mission? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nIf the mission succeeds, NASA one day might use the impact technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.\n\u201cWe are going to learn an incredible amount and be so much more prepared in the future if indeed a potential asteroid could pose a threat,\u201d said Lori Glaze, director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA launched a space probe designed to deflect a distant asteroid in a test of technology that might one day save the world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Asteroid Defense Mission to Smash Probe Into Distant Space Rock (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3568",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-asteroid-defense-mission-to-smash-probe-into-distant-space-rock-11637679600?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=17",
        "text": "Mission planners expect the high-speed impact to alter the trajectory of the binary asteroid, which isn\u2019t believed to pose a threat.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn illustration of the mission that aims to crash a probe into a distant asteroid\u2019s tiny moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Johns Hopkins APL\n \n\n\n\n\u201cFor the first time, humanity will change the motion of a natural celestial body in space,\u201d said DART program scientist Tom Statler of NASA. The project is managed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University\u2019s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.\n\nEvery day, Earth is showered with tons of cosmic debris, including chunks of ice, rock and iron that come at our planet like bricks from the junkyard of deep space. Most of these burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, though spectacular exceptions to that rule have raised fears that a colossal space rock might one day be found to be on a collision course with Earth.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingHow NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an AsteroidNASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nIn 1908, for example, a mysterious space rock exploded over Siberia and leveled 830 square miles of forest. In 2013, a 65-foot asteroid blew apart 20 miles above Chelyabinsk, Russia. That airburst released more than 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It knocked people off their feet and blew out windows in thousands of buildings.\nAt the urging of Congress, astronomers have identified and tracked the trajectories of about 1,000 asteroids about 3,300 feet across or larger that periodically come near Earth\u2019s orbit. None of these mountain-size space rocks is believed to pose a threat to our planet for at least the next several centuries, though there\u2019s a remote chance an undetected asteroid could damage the planet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWhile this is not something that is very likely to happen, it is not something we want to completely ignore either,\u201d said University of Arizona astronomer Amy Mainzer, who specializes in asteroid detection and planetary defense.\nMore than 90% of the potentially hazardous mountain-size asteroids have been identified, according to NASA. But only about 40% of potentially hazardous asteroids with diameters of 460 feet or more are believed to have been identified. There may be as many as 25,000 of these smaller asteroids, each of which might lay waste to an entire region if it were to strike our planet.\nAsteroids 6 miles across or larger, like the one that wiped out most dinosaurs and torched much of the planet about 66 million years ago, are believed to strike only every 15 million years or so.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe DART spacecraft was moved into a thermal vacuum chamber in February, to be subjected to extreme temperatures in preparation for conditions in space.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ed Whitman/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA\n \n\n\n\nTo facilitate the search for potentially hazardous asteroids, space agency officials in June approved the design of a new space-based infrared telescope called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor. The $500 million instrument is scheduled for launch in 2026.\n\u201cThis is designed to find near-Earth asteroids large enough to cause regional damage,\u201c said Dr. Mainzer, who leads the project. \u201cThe question is to answer what could happen in the next 100 years. We hope the answer is nothing.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nResearchers have dreamed up various ways to eliminate the threat posed by asteroids, from obliterating them with nuclear-tipped missiles or burning them out of the sky with lasers to tugging them off course with the pull of gravity from a passing spacecraft. Some scientists have suggested unfurling solar sails on errant space rocks, so that the pressure of sunlight could alter their course.\nThe DART mission will test the simplest of these schemes\u2014what space scientists call kinetic impact deflection\u2014by steering the 1,200-pound, small-car-size probe into the moonlet with enough force to change its velocity by a fraction of a millimeter or so per second, according to Andy Rivkin, lead of the DART investigation team at the Applied Physics Laboratory. The action will be photographed by a free-flying, pint-size cubesat satellite designed by the Italian Space Agency, which the probe will release 10 days before the impact.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do y NASA launched a space probe designed to deflect a distant asteroid in a test of technology that might one day save the world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Webb Telescope to See Deeper Than Hubble to Edge of Universe (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3569",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-webb-telescope-to-see-deeper-than-hubble-to-edge-of-universe-11640082607?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=3",
        "text": "In addition to providing fresh insights into our own solar system, the new telescope\u2014with its giant golden mirror and infrared eyes\u2014will go beyond what Hubble can see and capture images of some of the very first stars and galaxies as they appeared more than 13.5 billion years ago, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA said Tuesday that the launch, initially scheduled for Friday, would be postponed until Saturday because of bad weather at the launch site in French Guiana. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCOSMIC TIMELINE\n\n\nPRESENT DAY\n\n\nMODERN GALAXIES\n\n\nFIRST GALAXIES\n\n\nFIRST STARS\n\n\nBIG BANG\n\n\nWebb\n\n\nHubble\n\n\n\n\n\nHubble\n\n\nWebb\n\n\nPRESENT \nDAY\n\n\nMODERN \nGALAXIES\n\n\nFIRST \nGALAXIES\n\n\nFIRST \nSTARS\n\n\nBIG BANG\n\n\n\n\n\nHubble\n\n\nWebb\n\n\nPRESENT \nDAY\n\n\nMODERN \nGALAXIES\n\n\nFIRST \nGALAXIES\n\n\nFIRST \nSTARS\n\n\nBIG BANG\n\n\n\nNote: Not to scaleSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSeeing red Hubble is NASA\u2019s Energizer bunny, Dr. Windhorst said. In the 31 years since its launch in 1990, Hubble has taken more than 1.5 million photos, helped reveal that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and extended our understanding of how planets form. But Hubble was designed to primarily capture visible light, which represents only a small sliver of the spectrum of light emitted by stars and other celestial objects. In contrast, Webb will capture a range of infrared light that is invisible to the human eye but that makes up much of the light that comes our way from the universe\u2019s oldest and most distant galaxies.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElectromagnetic spectrum\n\n\n\nGamma\n\n\nVisible light\n\n\nX-Ray\n\n\nUltraviolet\n\n\nThe Hubble telescope \ncaptures light from this\npart of the electromagnetic\nspectrum.\n\n\nInfrared\n\n\nRadio\n\n\nMicrowave\n\n\nThe Webb telescope is designed to see mostly infrared light.\n\n\n\n\n\nGamma\n\n\nX-Ray\n\n\nUltraviolet\n\n\nHubble telescope\n\n\nVisible\n\n\nWebb telescope\n\n\nInfrared\n\n\nMicrowave\n\n\nRadio\n\n\n\n\n\nGamma\n\n\nX-Ray\n\n\nUltraviolet\n\n\nHubble telescope\n\n\nVisible\n\n\nWebb telescope\n\n\nInfrared\n\n\nMicrowave\n\n\nRadio\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe human eye can see wavelengths of light ranging from 380 to 700 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Hubble sees in the 90- to 2,500-nanometer range, while Webb will see an even wider range of light wavelengths\u2014from 600 to 28,500 nanometers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the Hubble photograph of the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, left, taken with visible light, dust clouds obscure many stars in this part of the sky. In the Hubble photograph of the same region of space using the telescope's limited infrared vision, many of those stars are revealed. Webb's extensive infrared capabilities will enable it to see even more detail.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team\n \n\n\n\nInfrared cuts through clouds of gas and dust, allowing Webb to discover new stars and planets.Mirror, mirror on the Webb The bigger a telescope\u2019s mirror, the more light it can collect and the more detailed the images it captures. Webb\u2019s 21.5-foot-wide gold-coated mirror\u2014once it unfolds in space via a dizzyingly complex process\u2014is nearly three times as large as Hubble\u2019s. That means it can capture images in extraordinary detail. It could even show the face of Abraham Lincoln on a penny from a distance of 24 miles.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\nNote: Spacecraft not to scale\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA wowed the world in 2004, when it released Hubble\u2019s Ultra Deep Field, an extraordinary photograph of deep space showing galaxies as they appeared as many as 13 billion years ago, or within one billion years after the cosmic dawn. This exposure displays 10,000 faint galaxies, including one barely visible red speck, shown below. This distant galaxy that Hubble caught a glimpse of dates back 13.4 billion years to 410 million years after the Big Bang. Dr. Windhorst likened Hubble\u2019s ability to spot it to using the naked eye to see a firefly on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis red speck is\na distant galaxy\ndating back 13.4\nbillion years\n\n\n\n\n\nThis red speck is\na distant galaxy\ndating back 13.4\nbillion years\n\n\n\n\n\nThis red speck is\na distant galaxy\ndating back 13.4\nbillion years\n\n\n\nPHOTO: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer and Z. Levay (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe combination of Webb\u2019s infrared detectors and large mirror will allow it to home in on that red speck in much greater d Giant mirror and infrared sensors will reveal a more detailed view than ever seen previously. ",
        "author": "Taylor Umlauf, Brian McGill and Kevin Hand"
    },
    {
        "title": "Superfast NASA Spacecraft Kisses the Sun for First Time Ever (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3570",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-parker-solar-probe-buzzes-the-sun-to-unlock-secrets-of-our-host-star-11639581719?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=2",
        "text": "Data beamed back from the heat-tolerant probe could help explain why the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere, or corona, which reaches temperatures of 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface, according to the scientists. The data could also yield new insights into the origin of solar wind, the potentially dangerous stream of charged particles and hot gas that blasts out into space from the sun\u2019s surface.\n\u201cThese are mysteries that have been bugging us for decades,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nour Raouafi,\n\n\n\n an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for the probe.\n\n\nDr. Raouafi was one of five mission scientists who discussed the probe\u2019s historic flyby in New Orleans at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The flyby was detailed in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Physical Review Letters.\nPreviously, scientific data about the solar wind came only from Earth- and space-based telescopes, other spacecraft operating farther from the sun and lunar experiments conducted decades ago by Apollo astronauts.\nImages taken by a camera aboard the probe helped Dr. Raouafi\u2019s team confirm that the probe had crossed the corona\u2019s upper boundary, or what astronomers call the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface. The boundary\u2014which the probe showed to be wrinkly rather than smooth\u2014marks the point at which material rising from the sun escapes the star\u2019s gravity and magnetic forces, and streams outward as the solar wind at speeds of up to 1.7 million miles an hour.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nImages taken by NASA\u2019s Parker probe while flying through the sun\u2019s upper atmosphere, called the corona, show streams of particles and magnetic forces.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Naval Research Laboratory/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing now is that the sun is like a balloon that has a bunch of little holes punched in it with the wind coming out of those little holes with different speeds and densities,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stuart Bale,\n\n\n\n a University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist and one of the scientists who described the flyby at the meeting.\nIn addition to a camera, the probe is equipped with instruments that measure electromagnetic fields and charged particles inside the corona\u2014all protected by an 8-foot-wide heat shield designed to withstand extreme temperatures.\nWith the probe to buzz the sun 14 more times over the next four years, Dr. Bale said he expects future data will help answer more questions about the sun. On the flybys to come, the probe is projected to come even closer to the sun\u2014within 3.8 million miles during its final passes in 2024 and 2025.\nThe sun is about 93 million miles from Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is set to launch later this month. Scientists say its technology makes it 100 times more powerful than the Hubble and could give it the ability to see back to the first galaxies in the universe. Illustration: Adele Morgan/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe final flybys are expected to coincide with what astronomers call the solar maximum, a period that comes every 11 years during which outbursts of energy from the corona known as coronal mass ejections and similar phenomena are especially intense.\nScientists are eager to obtain reliable data on the solar maximum, as the outbursts have the potential to trigger electrical blackouts, scuttle banking systems and disable global positioning satellites, according to scientists. The outbursts also pose a threat to airplane passengers and astronauts\u2014including those who one day might colonize the moon and Mars.\n\u201cOnce we start talking about people leaving the magnetic bubble of earth, which protects us from cosmic rays and solar particles, we need to be able to predict how those particles propagate,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cindy Cattell,\n\n\n\n a University of Minnesota physicist who attended the meeting but isn\u2019t involved with the mission. \u201cPerhaps we can improve those predictions with data from the Parker probe.\u201d\nThe probe was named for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Parker,\n\n\n\n a University of Chicago astrophysicist who first predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The superfast spacecraft came within 8.1 million miles of the sun\u2019s surface, marking humanity\u2019s closest approach and affording an unprecedented look at the solar corona. ",
        "author": "Aylin Woodward"
    },
    {
        "title": "Superfast NASA Spacecraft Kisses the Sun for First Time Ever (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3571",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-parker-solar-probe-buzzes-the-sun-to-unlock-secrets-of-our-host-star-11639581719?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=9",
        "text": "Data beamed back from the heat-tolerant probe could help explain why the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere, or corona, which reaches temperatures of 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit, is hundreds of times hotter than its surface, according to the scientists. The data could also yield new insights into the origin of solar wind, the potentially dangerous stream of charged particles and hot gas that blasts out into space from the sun\u2019s surface.\n\u201cThese are mysteries that have been bugging us for decades,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nour Raouafi,\n\n\n\n an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the project scientist for the probe.\n\n\nDr. Raouafi was one of five mission scientists who discussed the probe\u2019s historic flyby in New Orleans at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The flyby was detailed in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Physical Review Letters.\nPreviously, scientific data about the solar wind came only from Earth- and space-based telescopes, other spacecraft operating farther from the sun and lunar experiments conducted decades ago by Apollo astronauts.\nImages taken by a camera aboard the probe helped Dr. Raouafi\u2019s team confirm that the probe had crossed the corona\u2019s upper boundary, or what astronomers call the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface. The boundary\u2014which the probe showed to be wrinkly rather than smooth\u2014marks the point at which material rising from the sun escapes the star\u2019s gravity and magnetic forces, and streams outward as the solar wind at speeds of up to 1.7 million miles an hour.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nImages taken by NASA\u2019s Parker probe while flying through the sun\u2019s upper atmosphere, called the corona, show streams of particles and magnetic forces.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Naval Research Laboratory/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing now is that the sun is like a balloon that has a bunch of little holes punched in it with the wind coming out of those little holes with different speeds and densities,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stuart Bale,\n\n\n\n a University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist and one of the scientists who described the flyby at the meeting.\nIn addition to a camera, the probe is equipped with instruments that measure electromagnetic fields and charged particles inside the corona\u2014all protected by an 8-foot-wide heat shield designed to withstand extreme temperatures.\nWith the probe to buzz the sun 14 more times over the next four years, Dr. Bale said he expects future data will help answer more questions about the sun. On the flybys to come, the probe is projected to come even closer to the sun\u2014within 3.8 million miles during its final passes in 2024 and 2025.\nThe sun is about 93 million miles from Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is set to launch later this month. Scientists say its technology makes it 100 times more powerful than the Hubble and could give it the ability to see back to the first galaxies in the universe. Illustration: Adele Morgan/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe final flybys are expected to coincide with what astronomers call the solar maximum, a period that comes every 11 years during which outbursts of energy from the corona known as coronal mass ejections and similar phenomena are especially intense.\nScientists are eager to obtain reliable data on the solar maximum, as the outbursts have the potential to trigger electrical blackouts, scuttle banking systems and disable global positioning satellites, according to scientists. The outbursts also pose a threat to airplane passengers and astronauts\u2014including those who one day might colonize the moon and Mars.\n\u201cOnce we start talking about people leaving the magnetic bubble of earth, which protects us from cosmic rays and solar particles, we need to be able to predict how those particles propagate,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cindy Cattell,\n\n\n\n a University of Minnesota physicist who attended the meeting but isn\u2019t involved with the mission. \u201cPerhaps we can improve those predictions with data from the Parker probe.\u201d\nThe probe was named for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Parker,\n\n\n\n a University of Chicago astrophysicist who first predicted the existence of solar wind in 1958. The superfast spacecraft came within 8.1 million miles of the sun\u2019s surface, marking humanity\u2019s closest approach and affording an unprecedented look at the solar corona. ",
        "author": "Aylin Woodward"
    },
    {
        "title": "Webb Telescope Launch Could Shift Understanding of Early Universe (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3572",
        "date": "2021-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/webb-telescope-launch-could-shift-our-understanding-of-the-early-universe-11640341802?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=1",
        "text": "\u201cWe want to look at those first galaxies growing,\u201d said John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist and the senior project scientist for the Webb telescope at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. \u201cOne of our top goals is to see how stars grow with their young planets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe James Webb Space Telescope, set to travel into space folded inside an Ariane 5 rocket, will have six months of in-orbit setup and calibration before scientific observations begin; an artist\u2019s rendering.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n esa/d ducros handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nAstronomers will also use the new telescope to probe black holes at the centers of galaxies, search for the chemical signatures of life on extrasolar planets and, closer to home, study the frozen oceans on moons at the edge of our own solar system.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe $10 billion, truck-size telescope, now nestled inside the nose cone of a rocket, is poised for launch from Europe\u2019s Spaceport along the Atlantic coast in French Guiana. Once it clears Earth\u2019s atmosphere, it will set course on a 29-day voyage to a spot four times as far away as the moon. Plans call for the spacecraft to orbit the sun at this spot, called the second Lagrange point, at least through 2026, collecting distant starlight with its huge, gold-coated mirror and beaming back a steady stream of images and data.\n\nThe Webb\u2019s ultrasensitive infrared sensors are designed to capture light emitted more than 13.6 billion years ago by primordial stars, gargantuan furnaces that were hundreds of times larger than any stars shining today. It could reveal the earliest star clusters and supernovas, where almost all the elements were forged.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\nNote: Spacecraft not to scale\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe want to see the first objects that formed as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang,\u201d Dr. Mather said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly when the universe made the first stars and galaxies, or how for that matter. One way or another, the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium.\u201d\nStretched by time and distance, that first starlight has shifted from visible or ultraviolet light into redder wavelengths that are invisible to the Hubble Space Telescope and most terrestrial telescopes, because moisture in the atmosphere strongly absorbs infrared radiation.\nBy looking in the infrared, the Webb telescope also will be able to see through the cosmic dust that ordinarily obscures exoplanets, which are those outside our solar system orbiting other stars, and galaxies.\n\u201cThe Webb will be able to see in the infrared stars and galaxies that were a hundred times fainter than was previously possible,\u201d said Klaus Pontoppidan, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which will manage the telescope once it is in space.\nThe Webb also carries an advanced chemical analyzer called the Near Infrared Spectrograph that collects data about variations in light to reveal the temperatures, masses and chemical compositions of stars and planets.\n\u201cWe will be able to take a hundred spectra or more at the same time in a single exposure,\u201d said Antonella Nota, a Webb project scientist with the European Space Agency. \u201cImages are worth a thousand words; spectra, for astronomers, are worth a thousand images.\u201d\nIn the telescope\u2019s first year of operation, astronomers plan to use it to analyze atmospheres of 65 planets that orbit stars light-years away from our own solar system, seeking evidence of water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. \u201cWe will be able to look in the atmospheres of the planets to identify elements that are signs of life as we know it,\u201d said Bego\u00f1a Vila, an instrument systems engineer for the telescope.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnlike the Hubble telescope, which orbits the Earth, the Webb will travel around the sun.\n\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nmoon\n\n\nWebb\norbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles After years of delay, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch into space on Dec. 25. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Webb Telescope Launch Could Shift Understanding of Early Universe (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3573",
        "date": "2021-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/webb-telescope-launch-could-shift-our-understanding-of-the-early-universe-11640341802?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=2",
        "text": "\u201cWe want to look at those first galaxies growing,\u201d said John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist and the senior project scientist for the Webb telescope at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. \u201cOne of our top goals is to see how stars grow with their young planets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe James Webb Space Telescope, set to travel into space folded inside an Ariane 5 rocket, will have six months of in-orbit setup and calibration before scientific observations begin; an artist\u2019s rendering.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n esa/d ducros handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronomers will also use the new telescope to probe black holes at the centers of galaxies, search for the chemical signatures of life on extrasolar planets and, closer to home, study the frozen oceans on moons at the edge of our own solar system.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe $10 billion, truck-size telescope, now nestled inside the nose cone of a rocket, is poised for launch from Europe\u2019s Spaceport along the Atlantic coast in French Guiana. Once it clears Earth\u2019s atmosphere, it will set course on a 29-day voyage to a spot four times as far away as the moon. Plans call for the spacecraft to orbit the sun at this spot, called the second Lagrange point, at least through 2026, collecting distant starlight with its huge, gold-coated mirror and beaming back a steady stream of images and data.\n\nThe Webb\u2019s ultrasensitive infrared sensors are designed to capture light emitted more than 13.6 billion years ago by primordial stars, gargantuan furnaces that were hundreds of times larger than any stars shining today. It could reveal the earliest star clusters and supernovas, where almost all the elements were forged.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\nNote: Spacecraft not to scale\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe want to see the first objects that formed as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang,\u201d Dr. Mather said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly when the universe made the first stars and galaxies, or how for that matter. One way or another, the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium.\u201d\nStretched by time and distance, that first starlight has shifted from visible or ultraviolet light into redder wavelengths that are invisible to the Hubble Space Telescope and most terrestrial telescopes, because moisture in the atmosphere strongly absorbs infrared radiation.\nBy looking in the infrared, the Webb telescope also will be able to see through the cosmic dust that ordinarily obscures exoplanets, which are those outside our solar system orbiting other stars, and galaxies.\n\u201cThe Webb will be able to see in the infrared stars and galaxies that were a hundred times fainter than was previously possible,\u201d said Klaus Pontoppidan, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which will manage the telescope once it is in space.\nThe Webb also carries an advanced chemical analyzer called the Near Infrared Spectrograph that collects data about variations in light to reveal the temperatures, masses and chemical compositions of stars and planets.\n\u201cWe will be able to take a hundred spectra or more at the same time in a single exposure,\u201d said Antonella Nota, a Webb project scientist with the European Space Agency. \u201cImages are worth a thousand words; spectra, for astronomers, are worth a thousand images.\u201d\nIn the telescope\u2019s first year of operation, astronomers plan to use it to analyze atmospheres of 65 planets that orbit stars light-years away from our own solar system, seeking evidence of water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. \u201cWe will be able to look in the atmospheres of the planets to identify elements that are signs of life as we know it,\u201d said Bego\u00f1a Vila, an instrument systems engineer for the telescope.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnlike the Hubble telescope, which orbits the Earth, the Webb will travel around the sun.\n\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nmoon\n\n\nWebb\norbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Webb mission gets under way at a critical time for astronomy, as light pollution\u2014including that caused by vast networks of satellites now being sent into Earth orbit\u2014is making it hard to study the stars from our planet\u2019s surface.\n\u201cEven at the North Pole there will be light pollution from satellites,\u201d said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at Campion College and the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, and the lead author of a study on light pollution to be published in the Astronomical Journal. So many brightly shining satellites girdling Earth \u201cwill have a devastating effect on astronomy and stargazing world-wide.\u201d\nFrom deep space, however, the view is still unobstructed.\nTen years late and 10 times over budget\u2014in large part because of a series of design, production and quality-control lapses that a NASA review board laid at the feet of prime contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. and others\u2014the Webb telescope is among the most expensive science instruments ever built. Engineers had to fix faulty welds, missing bolts and tears in the telescope\u2019s giant sunshield, among other problems.\n\u201cThe complexity of this first-ever program inevitably creates opportunities for human error in design, manufacturing, integration and testing,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wesley Bush,\n\n\n\n then the chief executive officer of Northrop Grumman, said in testimony to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in 2018. \u201cAnd we have experienced some errors.\u201d\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingSpace Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next?There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? WSJ aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nIf all goes planned, the Webb telescope will join more than two dozen telescopes already in space, ranging from the vintage $11.3 billion Hubble telescope to the $188 million X-ray Polarimetry Observatory, which launched earlier this month to study pulsars, neutron stars and black holes.\nBut NASA scientists are acutely aware of the risks involved in sending such a complicated instrument into such a hostile environment\u2014especially since the Webb telescope will be too far away for any repair missions of the sort that NASA mounted to correct problems with the Hubble telescope.\nThe Webb telescope\u2019s gold-plated main mirror, measuring 21 feet in diameter, is too big to fit inside the nose cone of any existing rocket. So NASA engineers built it in 18 segments that fold up like the petals of an origami flower. They packed these and other parts of the telescope inside the European Ariane-5 rocket\u2014including solar panels and a tennis-court-size sun screen designed to keep the instrument at its minus 390 degree Fahrenheit operating temperature.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Webb telescope underwent a sunshield-deployment test last year at a Northrop Grumman facility in Redondo Beach, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Chris Gunn\n \n\n\n\nOnce in space, the mirror will take 10 days or so to unfold. NASA calls this remote-control effort one of the most complicated operations ever attempted in space. Like an elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption, it will take 50 mechanical procedures involving 70 hinges, 90 cables, 140 releases and 400 pulleys, NASA officials said.\nFor the 18 mirror elements to function as a single, perfectly focused lens, telescope engineers said, each must be aligned by remote control to within a fraction of a wavelength of near-infrared light\u2014about 1/10,000 the thickness of a human hair. To fine-tune them, 126 actuators will bend or flex each mirror into a specific prescription, a process that will likely take months.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow will the new space telescope help you understand the universe? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cWe will rebuild it in orbit,\u201d Mike Menzel, lead systems engineer for the Webb at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, said of the mirror. \u201dThis has never been done before.\u201d\nAll told, it will take about six months of setup and calibration before the telescope is ready to start scientific observations.\n\u201cI won\u2019t breathe a sigh of relief until 180 days after launch, when we are operational,\u201d said Bill Ochs, NASA Webb project manager.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com After years of delay, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch into space on Dec. 25. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Webb Telescope Launch Could Shift Understanding of Early Universe (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3574",
        "date": "2021-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/webb-telescope-launch-could-shift-our-understanding-of-the-early-universe-11640341802?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=3",
        "text": "\u201cWe want to look at those first galaxies growing,\u201d said John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist and the senior project scientist for the Webb telescope at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. \u201cOne of our top goals is to see how stars grow with their young planets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe James Webb Space Telescope, set to travel into space folded inside an Ariane 5 rocket, will have six months of in-orbit setup and calibration before scientific observations begin; an artist\u2019s rendering.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n esa/d ducros handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nAstronomers will also use the new telescope to probe black holes at the centers of galaxies, search for the chemical signatures of life on extrasolar planets and, closer to home, study the frozen oceans on moons at the edge of our own solar system.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe $10 billion, truck-size telescope, now nestled inside the nose cone of a rocket, is poised for launch from Europe\u2019s Spaceport along the Atlantic coast in French Guiana. Once it clears Earth\u2019s atmosphere, it will set course on a 29-day voyage to a spot four times as far away as the moon. Plans call for the spacecraft to orbit the sun at this spot, called the second Lagrange point, at least through 2026, collecting distant starlight with its huge, gold-coated mirror and beaming back a steady stream of images and data.\n\nThe Webb\u2019s ultrasensitive infrared sensors are designed to capture light emitted more than 13.6 billion years ago by primordial stars, gargantuan furnaces that were hundreds of times larger than any stars shining today. It could reveal the earliest star clusters and supernovas, where almost all the elements were forged.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nJAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nPrimary \nmirror\n\n\nSecondary\nmirror\n\n\nSunshield\n\n\nHUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE\n\n\nThe Webb mirror has 6.25 times as much collecting area as the Hubble's.\n\n\n21.5 ft.\n\n\n7.9 ft.\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\nNote: Spacecraft not to scale\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe want to see the first objects that formed as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang,\u201d Dr. Mather said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly when the universe made the first stars and galaxies, or how for that matter. One way or another, the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium.\u201d\nStretched by time and distance, that first starlight has shifted from visible or ultraviolet light into redder wavelengths that are invisible to the Hubble Space Telescope and most terrestrial telescopes, because moisture in the atmosphere strongly absorbs infrared radiation.\nBy looking in the infrared, the Webb telescope also will be able to see through the cosmic dust that ordinarily obscures exoplanets, which are those outside our solar system orbiting other stars, and galaxies.\n\u201cThe Webb will be able to see in the infrared stars and galaxies that were a hundred times fainter than was previously possible,\u201d said Klaus Pontoppidan, a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which will manage the telescope once it is in space.\nThe Webb also carries an advanced chemical analyzer called the Near Infrared Spectrograph that collects data about variations in light to reveal the temperatures, masses and chemical compositions of stars and planets.\n\u201cWe will be able to take a hundred spectra or more at the same time in a single exposure,\u201d said Antonella Nota, a Webb project scientist with the European Space Agency. \u201cImages are worth a thousand words; spectra, for astronomers, are worth a thousand images.\u201d\nIn the telescope\u2019s first year of operation, astronomers plan to use it to analyze atmospheres of 65 planets that orbit stars light-years away from our own solar system, seeking evidence of water, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. \u201cWe will be able to look in the atmospheres of the planets to identify elements that are signs of life as we know it,\u201d said Bego\u00f1a Vila, an instrument systems engineer for the telescope.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnlike the Hubble telescope, which orbits the Earth, the Webb will travel around the sun.\n\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nmoon\n\n\nWebb\norbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles \n\n\nmoon\n\n\nHubble orbit\n350 miles \nfrom Earth\n\n\nNote: not to scale\n\n\n\n\n\nWebb orbit\n\n\n1 million miles After years of delay, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch into space on Dec. 25. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-REx Mission Aims to Return Samples From Asteroid\u2019s Surface (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3575",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-osiris-rex-mission-aims-to-return-samples-from-asteroids-surface-11603218111?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=11",
        "text": "\u201cWe tagged the surface of the asteroid,\u2019 said Dante Lauretta, Osiris-REx principal investigator, as mission operations announced that telemetry signals showed the spacecraft made successful contact with Bennu. \u201cI\u2019m feeling transcendental. I can\u2019t believe we pulled this off,\u201d said Dr. Lauretta, who is also a professor at the University of Arizona.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn Asteroid Touch and Go\nOriginally thought to have a smoother surface, Bennu asteroid is littered with boulders making spacecraft landing treacherous. A landing spot named Nightingale was chosen for its relative landing ease and the amount and value of available material to be collected.\n\n\n\nNightingale landing spot\n\n\nPreferred landing site width: 164\u2019\n\n\nSpacecraft\n\n\nLength: 20.25 feet with solar arrays deployed \nWidth: 8 feet \n\n\nLanding spot \n\n\nSits inside a small crate site : Diameter: 66'. The area covers a couple parking spaces wide. \n\n\nCollecting Samples\n\n\nAlmost 4.5 pounds of loose material\n\n\nSize Comparison\n\n\nEmpire\nState \nBuilding \n\n\nBennu \n\n\n1,673\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n1,453\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\nAlberto Cervantes, Taylor Umlauf/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIf the asteroid mission continues successfully, it will return to Earth in several years with the types of materials that scientists can study to understand the origin of the solar system.\n\n\nScientists hope that rubble scraped from the boulder-strewn surface of Bennu will reveal clues to the primordial cataclysms that formed the planets and likely seeded organic chemicals throughout the solar system. Scientists say asteroids like Bennu, rich in carbon-based materials, almost certainly smashed into the infant Earth, potentially fostering the distinctive biochemistry of life as we know it.\n\u201cWe have widespread evidence that Bennu does contain carbon-rich material and water-based minerals,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Enos,\n\n\n\n deputy principal investigator for the Osiris-REx mission, as NASA calls it, at the University of Arizona. \u201cIt is exactly the kind of material we want to bring back to Earth.\u201d\nIf the mission goes well, NASA hopes to land the asteroid sample at the Utah Test and Training Range in September 2023.\nAsteroid sampling is a first for NASA. If it succeeds, it will be the third time robots from Earth brought home part of an asteroid for analysis. In 2010, Japan\u2019s Hayabusa mission brought back several micrograms from a small asteroid named Itokawa. Hayabusa2, its successor, is scheduled to drop off material at the Woomera Test Range in Australia from an asteroid named Ryugu in December.\n\u201cThe asteroids are like time capsules floating in space that can provide a fossil record of the birth of our solar system,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lori Glaze,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s planetary science division director. \u201cThey can provide valuable information about how the planets, including our own, came to be.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat would you like to know about the origins of planets? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nMeasuring about a third of a mile across, Bennu is a pile of loosely compacted rubble barely held together by gravity, according to planetary scientists at the University of Arizona. It appears to be so full of holes that it could easily fly apart one day from the force of its own rotation, the scientists said.\n\u201cDue to the low gravity, we can\u2019t actually land on the surface of Bennu,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beth Buck,\n\n\n\n mission operations program manager at Lockheed Martin Space, said before the spacecraft touched Bennu. \u201cSo, we will only be kissing the surface in a short touch and go measured in just seconds.\u201d Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe asteroid Bennu shown from the Osiris-REx spacecraft.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWhen they launched the spacecraft in 2016, NASA\u00a0mission planners expected the asteroid to offer a smooth sandy surface with ample room for sampling, and designed much of the mission accordingly. The spacecraft\u2019s automated scoop, for instance, can collect only particles smaller than an inch or so (2 centimeters). Upon arrival in 2018, however, they found instead that Bennu was covered with big rocks leaving almost no area clear enough for the two-ton Osiris-REx spacecraft to operate safely.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not the sandy beach I hoped we would see initially,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n associate administrator of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate.\nAt least six massive boulders on its surface apparently originated far away on a quite different asteroid called Vesta. They may have been knocked loose during an ancient billiard-ball collision between intersecting asteroids and veered off toward Bennu, said scientists at the space agency\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which is managing the mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sampling arm of the Osiris-REx spacecraft during an August rehearsal for an approach to the surface of the asteroid Bennu.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Scientists hope that rubble scraped from the boulder-strewn surface of Bennu, as the asteroid is named, will reveal clues to the primordial cataclysms that formed the planets and likely seeded organic chemicals throughout the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Osiris-REx Mission Aims to Return Samples From Asteroid\u2019s Surface (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3576",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-osiris-rex-mission-aims-to-return-samples-from-asteroids-surface-11603218111?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=39",
        "text": "\u201cWe tagged the surface of the asteroid,\u2019 said Dante Lauretta, Osiris-REx principal investigator, as mission operations announced that telemetry signals showed the spacecraft made successful contact with Bennu. \u201cI\u2019m feeling transcendental. I can\u2019t believe we pulled this off,\u201d said Dr. Lauretta, who is also a professor at the University of Arizona.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn Asteroid Touch and Go\nOriginally thought to have a smoother surface, Bennu asteroid is littered with boulders making spacecraft landing treacherous. A landing spot named Nightingale was chosen for its relative landing ease and the amount and value of available material to be collected.\n\n\n\nNightingale landing spot\n\n\nPreferred landing site width: 164\u2019\n\n\nSpacecraft\n\n\nLength: 20.25 feet with solar arrays deployed \nWidth: 8 feet \n\n\nLanding spot \n\n\nSits inside a small crate site : Diameter: 66'. The area covers a couple parking spaces wide. \n\n\nCollecting Samples\n\n\nAlmost 4.5 pounds of loose material\n\n\nSize Comparison\n\n\nEmpire\nState \nBuilding \n\n\nBennu \n\n\n1,673\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n1,453\n\n\nfeet\n\n\n\nSource: NASA\nAlberto Cervantes, Taylor Umlauf/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIf the asteroid mission continues successfully, it will return to Earth in several years with the types of materials that scientists can study to understand the origin of the solar system.\n\n\nScientists hope that rubble scraped from the boulder-strewn surface of Bennu will reveal clues to the primordial cataclysms that formed the planets and likely seeded organic chemicals throughout the solar system. Scientists say asteroids like Bennu, rich in carbon-based materials, almost certainly smashed into the infant Earth, potentially fostering the distinctive biochemistry of life as we know it.\n\u201cWe have widespread evidence that Bennu does contain carbon-rich material and water-based minerals,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Enos,\n\n\n\n deputy principal investigator for the Osiris-REx mission, as NASA calls it, at the University of Arizona. \u201cIt is exactly the kind of material we want to bring back to Earth.\u201d\nIf the mission goes well, NASA hopes to land the asteroid sample at the Utah Test and Training Range in September 2023.\nAsteroid sampling is a first for NASA. If it succeeds, it will be the third time robots from Earth brought home part of an asteroid for analysis. In 2010, Japan\u2019s Hayabusa mission brought back several micrograms from a small asteroid named Itokawa. Hayabusa2, its successor, is scheduled to drop off material at the Woomera Test Range in Australia from an asteroid named Ryugu in December.\n\u201cThe asteroids are like time capsules floating in space that can provide a fossil record of the birth of our solar system,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lori Glaze,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s planetary science division director. \u201cThey can provide valuable information about how the planets, including our own, came to be.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat would you like to know about the origins of planets? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nMeasuring about a third of a mile across, Bennu is a pile of loosely compacted rubble barely held together by gravity, according to planetary scientists at the University of Arizona. It appears to be so full of holes that it could easily fly apart one day from the force of its own rotation, the scientists said.\n\u201cDue to the low gravity, we can\u2019t actually land on the surface of Bennu,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beth Buck,\n\n\n\n mission operations program manager at Lockheed Martin Space, said before the spacecraft touched Bennu. \u201cSo, we will only be kissing the surface in a short touch and go measured in just seconds.\u201d Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe asteroid Bennu shown from the Osiris-REx spacecraft.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWhen they launched the spacecraft in 2016, NASA\u00a0mission planners expected the asteroid to offer a smooth sandy surface with ample room for sampling, and designed much of the mission accordingly. The spacecraft\u2019s automated scoop, for instance, can collect only particles smaller than an inch or so (2 centimeters). Upon arrival in 2018, however, they found instead that Bennu was covered with big rocks leaving almost no area clear enough for the two-ton Osiris-REx spacecraft to operate safely.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not the sandy beach I hoped we would see initially,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n associate administrator of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate.\nAt least six massive boulders on its surface apparently originated far away on a quite different asteroid called Vesta. They may have been knocked loose during an ancient billiard-ball collision between intersecting asteroids and veered off toward Bennu, said scientists at the space agency\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which is managing the mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sampling arm of the Osiris-REx spacecraft during an August rehearsal for an approach to the surface of the asteroid Bennu.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Scientists hope that rubble scraped from the boulder-strewn surface of Bennu, as the asteroid is named, will reveal clues to the primordial cataclysms that formed the planets and likely seeded organic chemicals throughout the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Find Evidence of Hidden Lake on Mars (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3577",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-find-evidence-of-hidden-lake-on-mars-1532527200?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=72",
        "text": "\u201cThis is the first potential habitat,\u201d said\u00a0researcher\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roberto Orosei\n\n\n\n at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. \u201cWe don\u2019t know it is inhabited, but if you\u2019re looking for life on Mars, this is one of the prime places to look.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nDr. Orosei\u00a0and an international team\u00a0of researchers probed through to the bottom of about a mile of ice on the planet\u2019s south pole using\u00a0a radar aboard the Mars Express Satellite, a European Space Agency mission. The Italy-based researchers published\u00a0in Science on Wednesday the results of four years of radar readings.\u00a0The lake, they say, was found because it produces different radar readings than the surrounding ice and bedrock.\n\n\n Waterworld Scientists discovered a huge underground reservoir of liquid water on Mars. When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Ice Water When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Ice Water When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Ice Water The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region Ice Water When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Note: Drawings are schematic Source: European Space Agency; Mars image: 3D illustration with elements by NASA/Shutterstock \n\n\n\u201cIf the result can be confirmed, it would be the largest known occurrence of present-day liquid water on Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Plaut\n\n\n\n at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is\u00a0the U.S. leader on the joint U.S.-Italy project that developed the radar system.\n\n\nThe technology used to find the lake has been pointed toward our own planet where it has effectively identified vast lakes\u00a0under the ice in Antarctica.\nBut the indirect nature of the observation leaves the Mars data open to alternate interpretations. The lake could turn out to be frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice.\nThe search for water on Mars has seen numerous false leads, including gullies more likely to have been caused by frozen carbon dioxide and ridges more likely to have been caused by sand than by water.\n\n\nRelated Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 2018) New Study Adds to Mystery of Water on Mars (Feb. 2017) Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water (Sept. 2015) Video: Mars May Hold Liquid Water, NASA Curiosity Rover Finds (April 2015) A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Murchie,\n\n\n\n planetary geologist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, who wasn\u2019t involved in the study, said more research is needed to ensure nothing about the unique environment of Mars could interfere with the results.\n\u201cMars, as an alien world, can surprise us in operating in ways very different from how Earth operates,\u201d\u00a0Dr. Murchie said. \u201cWe need to keep an open mind to other explanations.\u201d\n Dr.\u00a0Orosei said that the team examined other possible explanations. They concluded that the lake isn\u2019t carbon dioxide and that the possibility it is metal is too unlikely, he said. \nThe researchers also faced the challenge of explaining why the water they found isn\u2019t frozen. The temperature under the ice cap is too low for pure water to exist as a liquid, so the researchers propose the water is kept from freezing the same way ocean water is on\u00a0Earth\u2014by salt, in this case, perchlorate salt from surrounding soil.\n\u201cThere is certainly water available in the ice cap, but the mystery is whether the temperature and the composition are right to maintain melting,\u201d\u00a0Dr. Plaut said.\nWrite to Nishant Mohan at nishant.mohan@wsj.com Deep under the ice of the Martian south pole researchers have discovered signs of a hidden lake that could hold liquid water year-round, a crucial condition needed for life to develop. ",
        "author": "Nishant Mohan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Find Evidence of Hidden Lake on Mars (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3578",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-find-evidence-of-hidden-lake-on-mars-1532527200?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=65",
        "text": "\u201cThis is the first potential habitat,\u201d said\u00a0researcher\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roberto Orosei\n\n\n\n at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics. \u201cWe don\u2019t know it is inhabited, but if you\u2019re looking for life on Mars, this is one of the prime places to look.\u201d\nDr. Orosei\u00a0and an international team\u00a0of researchers probed through to the bottom of about a mile of ice on the planet\u2019s south pole using\u00a0a radar aboard the Mars Express Satellite, a European Space Agency mission. The Italy-based researchers published\u00a0in Science on Wednesday the results of four years of radar readings.\u00a0The lake, they say, was found because it produces different radar readings than the surrounding ice and bedrock.\n\n\n Waterworld Scientists discovered a huge underground reservoir of liquid water on Mars. When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Ice Water When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Ice Water When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Ice Water The Mars Express spacecraft uses radar to scan beneath the planet\u2019s South Pole. Mars south polar region Ice Water When the signals bounce off liquid water they create a unique signature, different from those generated by surrounding rock or ice. A 12-mile body of water was found about one mile below the surface. Note: Drawings are schematic Source: European Space Agency; Mars image: 3D illustration with elements by NASA/Shutterstock \n\n\n\u201cIf the result can be confirmed, it would be the largest known occurrence of present-day liquid water on Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Plaut\n\n\n\n at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is\u00a0the U.S. leader on the joint U.S.-Italy project that developed the radar system.\n\n\nThe technology used to find the lake has been pointed toward our own planet where it has effectively identified vast lakes\u00a0under the ice in Antarctica.\nBut the indirect nature of the observation leaves the Mars data open to alternate interpretations. The lake could turn out to be frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice.\nThe search for water on Mars has seen numerous false leads, including gullies more likely to have been caused by frozen carbon dioxide and ridges more likely to have been caused by sand than by water.\n\n\nRelated Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 2018) New Study Adds to Mystery of Water on Mars (Feb. 2017) Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water (Sept. 2015) Video: Mars May Hold Liquid Water, NASA Curiosity Rover Finds (April 2015) A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Murchie,\n\n\n\n planetary geologist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, who wasn\u2019t involved in the study, said more research is needed to ensure nothing about the unique environment of Mars could interfere with the results.\n\u201cMars, as an alien world, can surprise us in operating in ways very different from how Earth operates,\u201d\u00a0Dr. Murchie said. \u201cWe need to keep an open mind to other explanations.\u201d\n Dr.\u00a0Orosei said that the team examined other possible explanations. They concluded that the lake isn\u2019t carbon dioxide and that the possibility it is metal is too unlikely, he said. \nThe researchers also faced the challenge of explaining why the water they found isn\u2019t frozen. The temperature under the ice cap is too low for pure water to exist as a liquid, so the researchers propose the water is kept from freezing the same way ocean water is on\u00a0Earth\u2014by salt, in this case, perchlorate salt from surrounding soil.\n\u201cThere is certainly water available in the ice cap, but the mystery is whether the temperature and the composition are right to maintain melting,\u201d\u00a0Dr. Plaut said.\nWrite to Nishant Mohan at nishant.mohan@wsj.com Deep under the ice of the Martian south pole researchers have discovered signs of a hidden lake that could hold liquid water year-round, a crucial condition needed for life to develop. ",
        "author": "Nishant Mohan"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission Puts SUV-Size Craft in Orbit Around Red Planet (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3579",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-a-e-s-hope-mars-mission-signals-new-era-of-global-space-exploration-11612875601?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=9",
        "text": "\u201cThe operation went exactly as planned to the dot,\u201d said Sarah al-Amiri, Emirati minister of state for advanced sciences and chair of the U.A.E. Space Agency. \u201cWe got all the right feedback from the spacecraft to signal Mars orbital insertion. It\u2019s been a roller coaster journey. Relief is the word that comes to mind. And extreme happiness.\u201d\nThe Hope orbiter carries three sensors designed to make the first comprehensive weather observations across the planet\u2019s surface. The $200 million mission is the keystone of a national effort to make science and technology mainstays of the small Gulf state\u2019s economy in anticipation of a day when its oil revenues dwindle, U.A.E. officials said.\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s about stimulating a lot of change within the U.A.E.\u2019s economy that today more than ever should have a solid foundation in science,\u201d Ms. Amiri said in advance of the orbit insertion. \u201cThe best way to do that, from what we have been experimenting with as a nation, has been an exploration mission to space.\u201d\nIn the most critical moment of its 306 million mile journey from Earth, which began in July with the launch of a Japanese rocket that lofted it into space, the Hope spacecraft on Tuesday fired its onboard thrusters for 27 minutes to reach a stable orbit around Mars. The maneuver was controlled autonomously by onboard computers, because the 22-minute time lag in radio transmissions between the craft and Earth made ground control impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China, the U.A.E and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nBurning more than half its fuel, Hope slowed itself enough to be captured by the gravity of Mars, braking from about 75,185 miles an hour\u2014about 21 miles per second\u2014to about 11,185 miles an hour. The spacecraft settled into an elliptical orbit over the planet\u2019s equator, where it can scan the entire Martian surface every nine days, mission officials said.\nHope joins an international flotilla of six spacecraft, from India, the European Space Agency and the U.S., all actively studying the desert planet from orbit\u2014with more on the way. Hope\u2019s mission is scheduled to last for two years but could be extended.\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to enter Mars orbit on Wednesday in advance of a landing attempt in May. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is expected to touch down on the planet\u2019s surface on Feb. 18 to become the fifth rover the agency has successfully placed on Mars.\nThe $2.7 billion Perseverance mission will seek the first signs of life beyond Earth. China\u2019s effort aims to achieve the country\u2019s first landing on another planet, a milestone in its expanding national space program.\nIn the summer of 2022, the European Space Agency and Russia\u2019s Roscosmos Space Corp. are scheduled to launch a Mars mission to land a rover to look for water.\nJapan\u2019s space agency plans to launch two Mars missions by 2024. One aims to land on Mars. The other will visit the planet\u2019s moons to collect rocks and other surface material for return to Earth.\nIndia is planning to launch another Mars mission in 2025. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think humans will ever live on Mars? Would you want to be one of them? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cCountries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way, and backing it up with budgets,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who stepped down as NASA administrator on Jan. 20, said of the growing roster of spacefaring nations. \u201cThere is no better diplomacy than exploring our solar system together.\u201d\nIts otherworldly objectives notwithstanding, the Hope mission reflects some down-to-Earth ambitions of Emirati leaders, Ms. Amiri said. They expect the experience of space exploration to jump-start innovation in science and technology for the federation of seven territories, or emirates, on the Persian Gulf. Before oil exports started in the 1960s, the economy of what is now the U.A.E. was based primarily on fishing and a pearl industry.\nThe U.A.E.\u2019s first satellite was put into orbit around Earth in 2009. That craft, called DubaiSat-1, was built in South Korea and launched from Kazakhstan aboard a converted Russian ICBM. In 2018, the first satellite designed and built entirely in the Emirates was launched into Earth orbit.\u00a0Last year, the first U.A.E. astronaut rode a Russian Soyuz space capsule into orbit for an eight-day stint aboard the International Space Station.\n\u201cWith the lower cost of access to space, we\u2019ve been more and more empowered,\u201d Ms. Amiri said.\nTo develop skills for spaceflight design, precision manufacturing and deep space operations, the Emirati Hope project team tapped expertise at a number of U.S. research institutions, including the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, wh The first interplanetary probe from an Arab nation entered orbit around the red planet on Tuesday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission Puts SUV-Size Craft in Orbit Around Red Planet (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3580",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-a-e-s-hope-mars-mission-signals-new-era-of-global-space-exploration-11612875601?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=29",
        "text": "\u201cThe operation went exactly as planned to the dot,\u201d said Sarah al-Amiri, Emirati minister of state for advanced sciences and chair of the U.A.E. Space Agency. \u201cWe got all the right feedback from the spacecraft to signal Mars orbital insertion. It\u2019s been a roller coaster journey. Relief is the word that comes to mind. And extreme happiness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe Hope orbiter carries three sensors designed to make the first comprehensive weather observations across the planet\u2019s surface. The $200 million mission is the keystone of a national effort to make science and technology mainstays of the small Gulf state\u2019s economy in anticipation of a day when its oil revenues dwindle, U.A.E. officials said.\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s about stimulating a lot of change within the U.A.E.\u2019s economy that today more than ever should have a solid foundation in science,\u201d Ms. Amiri said in advance of the orbit insertion. \u201cThe best way to do that, from what we have been experimenting with as a nation, has been an exploration mission to space.\u201d\nIn the most critical moment of its 306 million mile journey from Earth, which began in July with the launch of a Japanese rocket that lofted it into space, the Hope spacecraft on Tuesday fired its onboard thrusters for 27 minutes to reach a stable orbit around Mars. The maneuver was controlled autonomously by onboard computers, because the 22-minute time lag in radio transmissions between the craft and Earth made ground control impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China, the U.A.E and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nBurning more than half its fuel, Hope slowed itself enough to be captured by the gravity of Mars, braking from about 75,185 miles an hour\u2014about 21 miles per second\u2014to about 11,185 miles an hour. The spacecraft settled into an elliptical orbit over the planet\u2019s equator, where it can scan the entire Martian surface every nine days, mission officials said.\nHope joins an international flotilla of six spacecraft, from India, the European Space Agency and the U.S., all actively studying the desert planet from orbit\u2014with more on the way. Hope\u2019s mission is scheduled to last for two years but could be extended.\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to enter Mars orbit on Wednesday in advance of a landing attempt in May. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is expected to touch down on the planet\u2019s surface on Feb. 18 to become the fifth rover the agency has successfully placed on Mars.\nThe $2.7 billion Perseverance mission will seek the first signs of life beyond Earth. China\u2019s effort aims to achieve the country\u2019s first landing on another planet, a milestone in its expanding national space program.\nIn the summer of 2022, the European Space Agency and Russia\u2019s Roscosmos Space Corp. are scheduled to launch a Mars mission to land a rover to look for water.\nJapan\u2019s space agency plans to launch two Mars missions by 2024. One aims to land on Mars. The other will visit the planet\u2019s moons to collect rocks and other surface material for return to Earth.\nIndia is planning to launch another Mars mission in 2025. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think humans will ever live on Mars? Would you want to be one of them? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cCountries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way, and backing it up with budgets,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who stepped down as NASA administrator on Jan. 20, said of the growing roster of spacefaring nations. \u201cThere is no better diplomacy than exploring our solar system together.\u201d\nIts otherworldly objectives notwithstanding, the Hope mission reflects some down-to-Earth ambitions of Emirati leaders, Ms. Amiri said. They expect the experience of space exploration to jump-start innovation in science and technology for the federation of seven territories, or emirates, on the Persian Gulf. Before oil exports started in the 1960s, the economy of what is now the U.A.E. was based primarily on fishing and a pearl industry.\nThe U.A.E.\u2019s first satellite was put into orbit around Earth in 2009. That craft, called DubaiSat-1, was built in South Korea and launched from Kazakhstan aboard a converted Russian ICBM. In 2018, the first satellite designed and built entirely in the Emirates was launched into Earth orbit.\u00a0Last year, the first U.A.E. astronaut rode a Russian Soyuz space capsule into orbit for an eight-day stint aboard the International Space Station.\n\u201cWith the lower cost of access to space, we\u2019ve been more and more empowered,\u201d Ms. Amiri said.\nTo develop skills for spaceflight design, precision manufacturing and deep space operations, the Emirati Hope project team tapped expertise at a number of U.S. research institutions, including the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, which has a long history of building spacecraft, as well as Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley. The satellite was launched aboard a Japanese H-IIA rocket from Japan\u2019s Tanegashima Space Center, which is on an island off the coast of the Japanese island of Kyushu.\n\u201cIt\u2019s definitely collaboratively designed,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Edwards,\n\n\n\n a remote-sensing specialist at Northern Arizona University, said of the Hope spacecraft. \u201cIt\u2019s like nothing I\u2019ve ever experienced in the spacecraft program so far. There\u2019s a huge training aspect to it and a huge collaborative aspect that is like nothing else.\u201d\nDr. Edwards, a veteran of NASA Mars missions, worked on the design of a spectrometer aboard Hope.\nAbout two-thirds of the Emirates Hope mission team are under 35 years of age. One-third are women. While they may be newcomers to spaceflight, they will bring a useful perspective to interplanetary exploration, said mission project manager Omran Sharaf at the Emirates\u2019 Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai.\n\u201cAs a new entrant, you don\u2019t need to carry the baggage of 50 years of space flight,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have something to add.\u201d\n\n\nExploring MarsJuly 30, 2020Space Race: Mission to MarsFeb. 9, 2021U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission in Orbit Around Red PlanetJuly 30, 2020NASA Rover Sent to Find Signs of LifeJuly 21, 2020U.S. and China to Launch Mars MissionsJune 26, 2020Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the WorldsApril 9, 2019Welcome to Your Home on MarsFeb. 13, 2019End of the Road for Opportunity RoverSept. 28, 2015Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The first interplanetary probe from an Arab nation entered orbit around the red planet on Tuesday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission Puts SUV-Size Craft in Orbit Around Red Planet (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3581",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-a-e-s-hope-mars-mission-signals-new-era-of-global-space-exploration-11612875601?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=34",
        "text": "\u201cThe operation went exactly as planned to the dot,\u201d said Sarah al-Amiri, Emirati minister of state for advanced sciences and chair of the U.A.E. Space Agency. \u201cWe got all the right feedback from the spacecraft to signal Mars orbital insertion. It\u2019s been a roller coaster journey. Relief is the word that comes to mind. And extreme happiness.\u201d\nThe Hope orbiter carries three sensors designed to make the first comprehensive weather observations across the planet\u2019s surface. The $200 million mission is the keystone of a national effort to make science and technology mainstays of the small Gulf state\u2019s economy in anticipation of a day when its oil revenues dwindle, U.A.E. officials said.\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s about stimulating a lot of change within the U.A.E.\u2019s economy that today more than ever should have a solid foundation in science,\u201d Ms. Amiri said in advance of the orbit insertion. \u201cThe best way to do that, from what we have been experimenting with as a nation, has been an exploration mission to space.\u201d\nIn the most critical moment of its 306 million mile journey from Earth, which began in July with the launch of a Japanese rocket that lofted it into space, the Hope spacecraft on Tuesday fired its onboard thrusters for 27 minutes to reach a stable orbit around Mars. The maneuver was controlled autonomously by onboard computers, because the 22-minute time lag in radio transmissions between the craft and Earth made ground control impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China, the U.A.E and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nBurning more than half its fuel, Hope slowed itself enough to be captured by the gravity of Mars, braking from about 75,185 miles an hour\u2014about 21 miles per second\u2014to about 11,185 miles an hour. The spacecraft settled into an elliptical orbit over the planet\u2019s equator, where it can scan the entire Martian surface every nine days, mission officials said.\nHope joins an international flotilla of six spacecraft, from India, the European Space Agency and the U.S., all actively studying the desert planet from orbit\u2014with more on the way. Hope\u2019s mission is scheduled to last for two years but could be extended.\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to enter Mars orbit on Wednesday in advance of a landing attempt in May. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is expected to touch down on the planet\u2019s surface on Feb. 18 to become the fifth rover the agency has successfully placed on Mars.\nThe $2.7 billion Perseverance mission will seek the first signs of life beyond Earth. China\u2019s effort aims to achieve the country\u2019s first landing on another planet, a milestone in its expanding national space program.\nIn the summer of 2022, the European Space Agency and Russia\u2019s Roscosmos Space Corp. are scheduled to launch a Mars mission to land a rover to look for water.\nJapan\u2019s space agency plans to launch two Mars missions by 2024. One aims to land on Mars. The other will visit the planet\u2019s moons to collect rocks and other surface material for return to Earth.\nIndia is planning to launch another Mars mission in 2025. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think humans will ever live on Mars? Would you want to be one of them? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cCountries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way, and backing it up with budgets,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who stepped down as NASA administrator on Jan. 20, said of the growing roster of spacefaring nations. \u201cThere is no better diplomacy than exploring our solar system together.\u201d\nIts otherworldly objectives notwithstanding, the Hope mission reflects some down-to-Earth ambitions of Emirati leaders, Ms. Amiri said. They expect the experience of space exploration to jump-start innovation in science and technology for the federation of seven territories, or emirates, on the Persian Gulf. Before oil exports started in the 1960s, the economy of what is now the U.A.E. was based primarily on fishing and a pearl industry.\nThe U.A.E.\u2019s first satellite was put into orbit around Earth in 2009. That craft, called DubaiSat-1, was built in South Korea and launched from Kazakhstan aboard a converted Russian ICBM. In 2018, the first satellite designed and built entirely in the Emirates was launched into Earth orbit.\u00a0Last year, the first U.A.E. astronaut rode a Russian Soyuz space capsule into orbit for an eight-day stint aboard the International Space Station.\n\u201cWith the lower cost of access to space, we\u2019ve been more and more empowered,\u201d Ms. Amiri said.\nTo develop skills for spaceflight design, precision manufacturing and deep space operations, the Emirati Hope project team tapped expertise at a number of U.S. research institutions, including the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, wh The first interplanetary probe from an Arab nation entered orbit around the red planet on Tuesday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission Puts SUV-Size Craft in Orbit Around Red Planet (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3582",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-a-e-s-hope-mars-mission-signals-new-era-of-global-space-exploration-11612875601?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=37",
        "text": "\u201cThe operation went exactly as planned to the dot,\u201d said Sarah al-Amiri, Emirati minister of state for advanced sciences and chair of the U.A.E. Space Agency. \u201cWe got all the right feedback from the spacecraft to signal Mars orbital insertion. It\u2019s been a roller coaster journey. Relief is the word that comes to mind. And extreme happiness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe Hope orbiter carries three sensors designed to make the first comprehensive weather observations across the planet\u2019s surface. The $200 million mission is the keystone of a national effort to make science and technology mainstays of the small Gulf state\u2019s economy in anticipation of a day when its oil revenues dwindle, U.A.E. officials said.\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s about stimulating a lot of change within the U.A.E.\u2019s economy that today more than ever should have a solid foundation in science,\u201d Ms. Amiri said in advance of the orbit insertion. \u201cThe best way to do that, from what we have been experimenting with as a nation, has been an exploration mission to space.\u201d\nIn the most critical moment of its 306 million mile journey from Earth, which began in July with the launch of a Japanese rocket that lofted it into space, the Hope spacecraft on Tuesday fired its onboard thrusters for 27 minutes to reach a stable orbit around Mars. The maneuver was controlled autonomously by onboard computers, because the 22-minute time lag in radio transmissions between the craft and Earth made ground control impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China, the U.A.E and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nBurning more than half its fuel, Hope slowed itself enough to be captured by the gravity of Mars, braking from about 75,185 miles an hour\u2014about 21 miles per second\u2014to about 11,185 miles an hour. The spacecraft settled into an elliptical orbit over the planet\u2019s equator, where it can scan the entire Martian surface every nine days, mission officials said.\nHope joins an international flotilla of six spacecraft, from India, the European Space Agency and the U.S., all actively studying the desert planet from orbit\u2014with more on the way. Hope\u2019s mission is scheduled to last for two years but could be extended.\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to enter Mars orbit on Wednesday in advance of a landing attempt in May. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is expected to touch down on the planet\u2019s surface on Feb. 18 to become the fifth rover the agency has successfully placed on Mars.\nThe $2.7 billion Perseverance mission will seek the first signs of life beyond Earth. China\u2019s effort aims to achieve the country\u2019s first landing on another planet, a milestone in its expanding national space program.\nIn the summer of 2022, the European Space Agency and Russia\u2019s Roscosmos Space Corp. are scheduled to launch a Mars mission to land a rover to look for water.\nJapan\u2019s space agency plans to launch two Mars missions by 2024. One aims to land on Mars. The other will visit the planet\u2019s moons to collect rocks and other surface material for return to Earth.\nIndia is planning to launch another Mars mission in 2025. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think humans will ever live on Mars? Would you want to be one of them? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cCountries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way, and backing it up with budgets,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n who stepped down as NASA administrator on Jan. 20, said of the growing roster of spacefaring nations. \u201cThere is no better diplomacy than exploring our solar system together.\u201d\nIts otherworldly objectives notwithstanding, the Hope mission reflects some down-to-Earth ambitions of Emirati leaders, Ms. Amiri said. They expect the experience of space exploration to jump-start innovation in science and technology for the federation of seven territories, or emirates, on the Persian Gulf. Before oil exports started in the 1960s, the economy of what is now the U.A.E. was based primarily on fishing and a pearl industry.\nThe U.A.E.\u2019s first satellite was put into orbit around Earth in 2009. That craft, called DubaiSat-1, was built in South Korea and launched from Kazakhstan aboard a converted Russian ICBM. In 2018, the first satellite designed and built entirely in the Emirates was launched into Earth orbit.\u00a0Last year, the first U.A.E. astronaut rode a Russian Soyuz space capsule into orbit for an eight-day stint aboard the International Space Station.\n\u201cWith the lower cost of access to space, we\u2019ve been more and more empowered,\u201d Ms. Amiri said.\nTo develop skills for spaceflight design, precision manufacturing and deep space operations, the Emirati Hope project team tapped expertise at a number of U.S. research institutions, including the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder The first interplanetary probe from an Arab nation entered orbit around the red planet on Tuesday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Perseverance Mission on Track for Ambitious Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3583",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-mission-2021-rover-perseverance-nasa-11613595107?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=28",
        "text": "\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission.\n\n\n\n\nBristling with sensors, cameras, microphones and a robotic arm, the one-ton, SUV-size Perseverance rover is designed to look for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life and pack what it finds into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis. NASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return these samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0\n\n\n250,000\n\n\n500,000\n\n\n750,000\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328.1 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSpirit\n(2004)\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nCuriosity\n(2012)\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nPlanned mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n2\n\n\n4\n\n\n6\n\n\n8\n\n\n10\n\n\n12\n\n\n14\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nPlanned mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n2\n\n\n4\n\n\n6\n\n\n8\n\n\n10\n\n\n12\n\n\n14\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDuring its two-year mission, Perseverance will roam the surface and look for traces of organic matter, which could be evidence of primordial microbes or other simple life-forms. Other places in the solar system\u2014from the searing clouds of Venus to the frozen oceans of moons around Jupiter and Saturn\u2014might also have the potential for life. But those places are considered even more inaccessible than Mars.\n\n\nPerseverance is accompanied by the first helicopter to be transported to another world. NASA engineers expect to conduct several test flights of the four-pound drone, called Ingenuity. These would be the first powered controlled flights on another planet.\n\u201cIt will truly be a Wright Brothers moment, but on another planet,\u201d said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity\u2019s project manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.\nBut getting Perseverance and Ingenuity on the ground won\u2019t be easy.\n\n\n\nThe Challenges of Landing on Mars\nNASA mission engineers call landing on Mars \u201cseven minutes of terror.\u201d Hundreds of things have to go perfectly. The landing zone is the smallest NASA has ever targeted. The spacecraft, though, is on its own all the way down, guided solely by pre-programmed commands in its onboard computer. That\u2019s because it takes about 11 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars, far too long for direct hands-on control. Here is how landing on Mars worked:\nAbout 10 minutes from landingThe spacecraft sheds solar panels, radios, and fuel tanks used during its flight to Mars. Only its protective aeroshell\u2014with rover and descent stage inside\u2014makes the trip to the surface. About 80 seconds after entering the atmosphere, the heat shield reaches about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Safe in the aeroshell, however, the rover gets up to only about room temperature.Six minutes, 50 seconds from landingTurbulence rocks the spacecraft as it descends, potentially nudging it off course. To compensate, it fires small thrusters on its backshell that adjust its angle and direction of lift. This \u201cguided entry\u201d technique helps the spacecraft stay on the path to its downrange target.Three minutes from landingTo balance its center of gravity, the spacecraft automatically ejects a half dozen small weights used to tilt the craft at the right angle for initial re-entry, preparing it for the parachute deployment.Two minutes, 45 seconds from landingParachute deploys, slowing the spacecraft from around 940 mph to around 200 mph. The spacecraft uses a new technology\u2014Range Trigger\u2014to calculate its distance to the landing target and open the parachute at the ideal time to hit its mark. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Two minutes, 25 seconds from landingThe spacecraft jettisons its heat shield, exposing the Perseverance rover to the onrush of air. Immediately, the rover starts photographing the approaching ground and using radar to figure out its altitude. The onboard computer compares the position data to an onboard map.One minute from landingTo slow down even more to its safe touchdown speed, the craft releases its back shield and cuts free of the parachute. It fires its eight descent stage engines. It maneuvers side-to-side to avoid the ejected parachute and shell.12 seconds from landingHovering about 66 feet above the surface, the descent stage lowers the rover on a set of cables about 21 feet long. Meanwhile, the rover unstows its mobility system, locking its legs and wheels into landing position.TouchdownThe rover lands safely in a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater. It cuts the tethers keeping it tied to the descent stage. This frees the descent stage to fly off and land at a safe distance from Perseverance.\nSource: NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryBrian McGill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\nFollowing a harrowing plunge through the salmon pink skies and blue clouds of Mars\u2014what NASA engineers call \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d\u2014the lander carrying Perseverance and Ingenuity will settle on an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater. It is the smallest, most rugged landing zone upon which the space agency has ever attempted a landing.\nOnce the lander begins its automated descent, mission controllers on Earth will have no contact with it\u2014and no way to control it\u2014until it has landed. Radio transmissions take 11 minutes, 22 seconds to travel from one planet to the other\u2014far too long to allow for controllers here on Earth to guide the craft.\nMission engineers radioed the spacecraft its pre-landing commands on Monday, activating onboard systems for entry, descent and landing and setting the stage for what may be the most daring engineering maneuver in interplanetary exploration. They said they didn\u2019t expect any last-minute course corrections.\n\u201cThe targeting is on the bull\u2019s-eye,\u201d said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance deputy project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cPerseverance is operating perfectly now and all systems are \u2018go\u2019 for landing. The spacecraft is focused. The team is focused.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTouch Down\nOn Feb. 18th, Perseverance became the eighth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars since NASA's Viking 1 landed there in 1976.\n\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nUpcoming missions\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nFailed landing or swift malfunction\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nHuoxing-I\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nUpcoming over missions\n\n\nFailed landing or swift malfunction\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nTianwen-1\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nUpcoming mission\n\n\nFailed landing or swift malfunction\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nTianwen-1\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nUpcoming mission\n\n\nFailed landing or quick malfunction\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nTianwen-1\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe lander, which carries Perseverance and Ingenuity inside a protective shell, will be going about 12,100 miles an hour\u2014about 3 miles a second\u2014when it enters the Martian atmosphere at 3:48 p.m. Thursday. Friction from the thin air will slow the craft and heat it to a temperature of about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hot enough to melt cast iron.\nNext, the lander will deploy a 70-foot-wide parachute, the largest high-speed chute ever constructed. Seconds later, the craft will jettison its protective heat shield and fire its retro rockets. As it descends, the lander\u2019s onboard navigation should help it steer clear of obstacles on the ground below.\nOnce the lander comes within a few feet of the surface, it should lower Perseverance to the surface on cables, like a crane lowering a heavy package. Soon thereafter, NASA engineers expect to receive a signal indicating that Perseverance is safely on the ground.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet.\n \n\n\n\u201cWe [will] have a brand-new baby spacecraft ready to start rolling around,\u201d said Erisa Stilley, Perseverance entry, descent, and landing systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\nIf the landing succeeds, it will be the ninth time NASA has managed to land a craft safely on Mars since it first successfully parked a lander on the planet\u2019s surface in 1976. More than half of attempted landings on the Red Planet have failed.\nChina\u2019s Tiawen-1 probe, which entered orbit around Mars last week, is expected to make the country\u2019s first landing on the planet in May.\n\u201cMars is hard, and we never take success for granted,\u201d said Dr. Zurbuchen. \u201cWe are entirely focused on one thing right now\u2014a successful landing.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think people one day will be able to live on Mars? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\n\nExploring MarsJuly 30, 2020Space Race: Mission to MarsFeb. 9, 2021U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission in Orbit Around Red PlanetJuly 30, 2020NASA Rover Sent to Find Signs of LifeJuly 21, 2020U.S. and China to Launch Mars MissionsJune 26, 2020Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the WorldsApril 9, 2019Welcome to Your Home on MarsFeb. 13, 2019End of the Road for Opportunity RoverSept. 28, 2015Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water\n\n\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tNASA\u2019s lander will be traveling at about 3 miles a second when it enters the Martian atmosphere. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it would be traveling at about 3 miles a minute. (Corrected on Feb. 17)\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The SUV-size rover and a tiny robotic helicopter are scheduled to touch down on Mars on Thursday, beginning a two-year quest to find evidence of past biological activity on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, Pluto is a planet (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3584",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/07/yes-pluto-is-a-planet/",
        "text": "Three years ago, NASA\u2019s New Horizons, the fastest spaceship ever launched, raced past Pluto, spectacularly revealing the wonders of that newly seen world. This coming New Year\u2019s Eve \u2014 if all goes well on board this small robot operating extremely far from home \u2014 it will treat us to images of the most distant body ever explored, provisionally named Ultima Thule. We know very little about it, but we do know it\u2019s not a planet. Pluto, by contrast \u2014 despite what you\u2019ve heard \u2014 is. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhy do we say this? We are planetary scientists, meaning we\u2019ve spent our careers exploring and studying objects that orbit stars. We use \u201cplanet\u201d to describe worlds with certain qualities. When we see one like Pluto, with its many familiar features \u2014 mountains of ice, glaciers of nitrogen, a blue sky with layers of smog \u2014 we and our colleagues quite naturally find ourselves using the word \u201cplanet\u201d to describe it and compare it to other planets that we know and love.In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced an attempted redefinition of the word \u201cplanet\u201d that excluded many objects, including Pluto. We think that decision was flawed, and that a logical and useful definition of planet will include many more worlds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe find ourselves using the word planet to describe the largest \u201cmoons\u201d in the solar system. Moon refers to the fact that they orbit around other worlds which themselves orbit our star, but when we discuss a world like Saturn\u2019s Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury, and has mountains, dunes and canyons, rivers, lakes and clouds, you will find us \u2014 in the literature and at our conferences \u2014 calling it a planet.\u00a0 This usage is not a mistake or a throwback. It is increasingly common in our profession and it is accurate.The New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto in 2015. NASA launched New Horizons in 2006. (NASA)Most essentially, planetary worlds (including planetary moons) are those large enough to have pulled themselves into a ball by the strength of their own gravity. Below a certain size, the strength of ice and rock is enough to resist rounding by gravity, and so the smallest worlds are lumpy. This is how, even before New Horizons arrives, we know that Ultima Thule is not a planet. Among the few facts we\u2019ve been able to ascertain about this body is that it is tiny (just 17 miles across) and distinctly nonspherical. This gives us a natural, physical criterion to separate planets from all the small bodies orbiting in space \u2014 boulders, icy comets or rocky and metallic asteroids, all of which are small and lumpy because their gravity is too weak for self-rounding.The desire to reconsider the meaning of \u201cplanet\u201d arose because of two thrilling discoveries about our universe: There are planets in unbelievable abundance beyond our solar system \u2014 called \u201cexoplanets\u201d \u2014 orbiting nearly every star we see in the sky. And there are a great many small icy objects orbiting our sun out in Pluto\u2019s realm, beyond the zone of the rocky inner worlds or \u201cterrestrial planets\u201d (like Earth), the \u201cgas giants\u201d (like Jupiter) and the \u201cice giants\u201d (like Neptune).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn light of these discoveries, it did then make sense to ask which objects discovered orbiting other stars should be considered planets. Some, at the largest end, are more like stars themselves. And just as stars like our sun are known as \u201cdwarf stars\u201d and still considered stars, it made some sense to consider small icy worlds like Pluto to occupy another subcategory of planet: \u201cdwarf planet.\u201dBut the process for redefining planet was deeply flawed and widely criticized even by those who accepted the outcome. At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world\u2019s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world\u2019s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun \u2014 thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined \u201cplanet\u201d in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has \u201ccleared its zone,\u201d or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what\u2019s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define \u201cplanet\u201d in terms of the other objects that are \u2014 or are not \u2014 orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that \u201ca dwarf planet is not a planet.\u201d This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire \u2014 for whatever reason \u2014 to ensure that Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d by the new definition.By and large, astronomers ignore the new definition of \u201cplanet\u201d every time they discuss all of the exciting discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. And those of us who actually study planets for a living also discuss dwarf planets without adding an asterisk. But it gets old having to address the misconceptions among the public who think that because Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d (not exactly a neutral term) that it must be more like a lumpy little asteroid than the complex and vibrant planet it is. It is this confusion among students and the public \u2014 fostered by journalists and textbook authors who mistakenly accepted the authority of the IAU as the final word \u2014 that makes this worth addressing.Last\u00a0March, in Houston, planetary scientists gathered to share new results and ideas at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. One presentation, titled \u201cA Geophysical Planet Definition,\u201d intended to set the record straight. It stated: \u201cIn keeping with both sound scientific classification and peoples\u2019 intuition, we propose a geophysically-based definition of 'planet' that importantly emphasizes a body\u2019s intrinsic physical properties over its extrinsic orbital properties.\u201d After giving a precise and nerdy definition, it offered: \u201cA simple paraphrase of our planet definition \u2014 especially suitable for elementary school students \u2014 could be, \u2018round objects in space that are smaller than stars.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt seems very likely that at some point the IAU will reconsider its flawed definition. In the meantime, people will keep referring to the planets being discovered around other stars as planets, and we\u2019ll keep referring to round objects in our solar system and elsewhere as planets. Eventually, \u201cofficial\u201d nomenclature will catch up to both common sense and scientific usage. The word \u201cplanet\u201d predates and transcends science. Language is malleable and responsive to culture. Words are not defined by voting. Neither is scientific paradigm.David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist who studies climate evolution and habitability of other worlds. Alan Stern is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. Their book \u201cChasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,\u201d was published May 1 by Picador.Read more:We're at the controls on planet Earth, but we're not in controlThe inside story of New Horizons' 'Apollo 13' moment on its way to PlutoThe Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission Two planetary scientists say Pluto, exoplanets and even many moons are planets, or \u201cround objects in space that are smaller than stars.\"  Yes, Pluto is a planet",
        "author": "David Grinspoon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, Pluto is a planet (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3585",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/07/yes-pluto-is-a-planet/",
        "text": "Three years ago, NASA\u2019s New Horizons, the fastest spaceship ever launched, raced past Pluto, spectacularly revealing the wonders of that newly seen world. This coming New Year\u2019s Eve \u2014 if all goes well on board this small robot operating extremely far from home \u2014 it will treat us to images of the most distant body ever explored, provisionally named Ultima Thule. We know very little about it, but we do know it\u2019s not a planet. Pluto, by contrast \u2014 despite what you\u2019ve heard \u2014 is. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhy do we say this? We are planetary scientists, meaning we\u2019ve spent our careers exploring and studying objects that orbit stars. We use \u201cplanet\u201d to describe worlds with certain qualities. When we see one like Pluto, with its many familiar features \u2014 mountains of ice, glaciers of nitrogen, a blue sky with layers of smog \u2014 we and our colleagues quite naturally find ourselves using the word \u201cplanet\u201d to describe it and compare it to other planets that we know and love.In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced an attempted redefinition of the word \u201cplanet\u201d that excluded many objects, including Pluto. We think that decision was flawed, and that a logical and useful definition of planet will include many more worlds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe find ourselves using the word planet to describe the largest \u201cmoons\u201d in the solar system. Moon refers to the fact that they orbit around other worlds which themselves orbit our star, but when we discuss a world like Saturn\u2019s Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury, and has mountains, dunes and canyons, rivers, lakes and clouds, you will find us \u2014 in the literature and at our conferences \u2014 calling it a planet.\u00a0 This usage is not a mistake or a throwback. It is increasingly common in our profession and it is accurate.The New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto in 2015. NASA launched New Horizons in 2006. (NASA)Most essentially, planetary worlds (including planetary moons) are those large enough to have pulled themselves into a ball by the strength of their own gravity. Below a certain size, the strength of ice and rock is enough to resist rounding by gravity, and so the smallest worlds are lumpy. This is how, even before New Horizons arrives, we know that Ultima Thule is not a planet. Among the few facts we\u2019ve been able to ascertain about this body is that it is tiny (just 17 miles across) and distinctly nonspherical. This gives us a natural, physical criterion to separate planets from all the small bodies orbiting in space \u2014 boulders, icy comets or rocky and metallic asteroids, all of which are small and lumpy because their gravity is too weak for self-rounding.The desire to reconsider the meaning of \u201cplanet\u201d arose because of two thrilling discoveries about our universe: There are planets in unbelievable abundance beyond our solar system \u2014 called \u201cexoplanets\u201d \u2014 orbiting nearly every star we see in the sky. And there are a great many small icy objects orbiting our sun out in Pluto\u2019s realm, beyond the zone of the rocky inner worlds or \u201cterrestrial planets\u201d (like Earth), the \u201cgas giants\u201d (like Jupiter) and the \u201cice giants\u201d (like Neptune).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn light of these discoveries, it did then make sense to ask which objects discovered orbiting other stars should be considered planets. Some, at the largest end, are more like stars themselves. And just as stars like our sun are known as \u201cdwarf stars\u201d and still considered stars, it made some sense to consider small icy worlds like Pluto to occupy another subcategory of planet: \u201cdwarf planet.\u201dBut the process for redefining planet was deeply flawed and widely criticized even by those who accepted the outcome. At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world\u2019s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world\u2019s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun \u2014 thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined \u201cplanet\u201d in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has \u201ccleared its zone,\u201d or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what\u2019s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define \u201cplanet\u201d in terms of the other objects that are \u2014 or are not \u2014 orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that \u201ca dwarf planet is not a planet.\u201d This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire \u2014 for whatever reason \u2014 to ensure that Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d by the new definition.By and large, astronomers ignore the new definition of \u201cplanet\u201d every time they discuss all of the exciting discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. And those of us who actually study planets for a living also discuss dwarf planets without adding an asterisk. But it gets old having to address the misconceptions among the public who think that because Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d (not exactly a neutral term) that it must be more like a lumpy little asteroid than the complex and vibrant planet it is. It is this confusion among students and the public \u2014 fostered by journalists and textbook authors who mistakenly accepted the authority of the IAU as the final word \u2014 that makes this worth addressing.Last\u00a0March, in Houston, planetary scientists gathered to share new results and ideas at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. One presentation, titled \u201cA Geophysical Planet Definition,\u201d intended to set the record straight. It stated: \u201cIn keeping with both sound scientific classification and peoples\u2019 intuition, we propose a geophysically-based definition of 'planet' that importantly emphasizes a body\u2019s intrinsic physical properties over its extrinsic orbital properties.\u201d After giving a precise and nerdy definition, it offered: \u201cA simple paraphrase of our planet definition \u2014 especially suitable for elementary school students \u2014 could be, \u2018round objects in space that are smaller than stars.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt seems very likely that at some point the IAU will reconsider its flawed definition. In the meantime, people will keep referring to the planets being discovered around other stars as planets, and we\u2019ll keep referring to round objects in our solar system and elsewhere as planets. Eventually, \u201cofficial\u201d nomenclature will catch up to both common sense and scientific usage. The word \u201cplanet\u201d predates and transcends science. Language is malleable and responsive to culture. Words are not defined by voting. Neither is scientific paradigm.David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist who studies climate evolution and habitability of other worlds. Alan Stern is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. Their book \u201cChasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,\u201d was published May 1 by Picador.Read more:We're at the controls on planet Earth, but we're not in controlThe inside story of New Horizons' 'Apollo 13' moment on its way to PlutoThe Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission Two planetary scientists say Pluto, exoplanets and even many moons are planets, or \u201cround objects in space that are smaller than stars.\"  Yes, Pluto is a planet",
        "author": "David Grinspoon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, Pluto is a planet (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3586",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/07/yes-pluto-is-a-planet/",
        "text": "Three years ago, NASA\u2019s New Horizons, the fastest spaceship ever launched, raced past Pluto, spectacularly revealing the wonders of that newly seen world. This coming New Year\u2019s Eve \u2014 if all goes well on board this small robot operating extremely far from home \u2014 it will treat us to images of the most distant body ever explored, provisionally named Ultima Thule. We know very little about it, but we do know it\u2019s not a planet. Pluto, by contrast \u2014 despite what you\u2019ve heard \u2014 is. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhy do we say this? We are planetary scientists, meaning we\u2019ve spent our careers exploring and studying objects that orbit stars. We use \u201cplanet\u201d to describe worlds with certain qualities. When we see one like Pluto, with its many familiar features \u2014 mountains of ice, glaciers of nitrogen, a blue sky with layers of smog \u2014 we and our colleagues quite naturally find ourselves using the word \u201cplanet\u201d to describe it and compare it to other planets that we know and love.In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced an attempted redefinition of the word \u201cplanet\u201d that excluded many objects, including Pluto. We think that decision was flawed, and that a logical and useful definition of planet will include many more worlds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe find ourselves using the word planet to describe the largest \u201cmoons\u201d in the solar system. Moon refers to the fact that they orbit around other worlds which themselves orbit our star, but when we discuss a world like Saturn\u2019s Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury, and has mountains, dunes and canyons, rivers, lakes and clouds, you will find us \u2014 in the literature and at our conferences \u2014 calling it a planet.\u00a0 This usage is not a mistake or a throwback. It is increasingly common in our profession and it is accurate.The New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto in 2015. NASA launched New Horizons in 2006. (NASA)Most essentially, planetary worlds (including planetary moons) are those large enough to have pulled themselves into a ball by the strength of their own gravity. Below a certain size, the strength of ice and rock is enough to resist rounding by gravity, and so the smallest worlds are lumpy. This is how, even before New Horizons arrives, we know that Ultima Thule is not a planet. Among the few facts we\u2019ve been able to ascertain about this body is that it is tiny (just 17 miles across) and distinctly nonspherical. This gives us a natural, physical criterion to separate planets from all the small bodies orbiting in space \u2014 boulders, icy comets or rocky and metallic asteroids, all of which are small and lumpy because their gravity is too weak for self-rounding.The desire to reconsider the meaning of \u201cplanet\u201d arose because of two thrilling discoveries about our universe: There are planets in unbelievable abundance beyond our solar system \u2014 called \u201cexoplanets\u201d \u2014 orbiting nearly every star we see in the sky. And there are a great many small icy objects orbiting our sun out in Pluto\u2019s realm, beyond the zone of the rocky inner worlds or \u201cterrestrial planets\u201d (like Earth), the \u201cgas giants\u201d (like Jupiter) and the \u201cice giants\u201d (like Neptune).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn light of these discoveries, it did then make sense to ask which objects discovered orbiting other stars should be considered planets. Some, at the largest end, are more like stars themselves. And just as stars like our sun are known as \u201cdwarf stars\u201d and still considered stars, it made some sense to consider small icy worlds like Pluto to occupy another subcategory of planet: \u201cdwarf planet.\u201dBut the process for redefining planet was deeply flawed and widely criticized even by those who accepted the outcome. At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world\u2019s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world\u2019s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun \u2014 thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined \u201cplanet\u201d in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has \u201ccleared its zone,\u201d or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what\u2019s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define \u201cplanet\u201d in terms of the other objects that are \u2014 or are not \u2014 orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that \u201ca dwarf planet is not a planet.\u201d This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire \u2014 for whatever reason \u2014 to ensure that Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d by the new definition.By and large, astronomers ignore the new definition of \u201cplanet\u201d every time they discuss all of the exciting discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. And those of us who actually study planets for a living also discuss dwarf planets without adding an asterisk. But it gets old having to address the misconceptions among the public who think that because Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d (not exactly a neutral term) that it must be more like a lumpy little asteroid than the complex and vibrant planet it is. It is this confusion among students and the public \u2014 fostered by journalists and textbook authors who mistakenly accepted the authority of the IAU as the final word \u2014 that makes this worth addressing.Last\u00a0March, in Houston, planetary scientists gathered to share new results and ideas at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. One presentation, titled \u201cA Geophysical Planet Definition,\u201d intended to set the record straight. It stated: \u201cIn keeping with both sound scientific classification and peoples\u2019 intuition, we propose a geophysically-based definition of 'planet' that importantly emphasizes a body\u2019s intrinsic physical properties over its extrinsic orbital properties.\u201d After giving a precise and nerdy definition, it offered: \u201cA simple paraphrase of our planet definition \u2014 especially suitable for elementary school students \u2014 could be, \u2018round objects in space that are smaller than stars.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt seems very likely that at some point the IAU will reconsider its flawed definition. In the meantime, people will keep referring to the planets being discovered around other stars as planets, and we\u2019ll keep referring to round objects in our solar system and elsewhere as planets. Eventually, \u201cofficial\u201d nomenclature will catch up to both common sense and scientific usage. The word \u201cplanet\u201d predates and transcends science. Language is malleable and responsive to culture. Words are not defined by voting. Neither is scientific paradigm.David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist who studies climate evolution and habitability of other worlds. Alan Stern is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. Their book \u201cChasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,\u201d was published May 1 by Picador.Read more:We're at the controls on planet Earth, but we're not in controlThe inside story of New Horizons' 'Apollo 13' moment on its way to PlutoThe Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission Two planetary scientists say Pluto, exoplanets and even many moons are planets, or \u201cround objects in space that are smaller than stars.\"  Yes, Pluto is a planet",
        "author": "David Grinspoon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Yes, Pluto is a planet (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3587",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/07/yes-pluto-is-a-planet/",
        "text": "Three years ago, NASA\u2019s New Horizons, the fastest spaceship ever launched, raced past Pluto, spectacularly revealing the wonders of that newly seen world. This coming New Year\u2019s Eve \u2014 if all goes well on board this small robot operating extremely far from home \u2014 it will treat us to images of the most distant body ever explored, provisionally named Ultima Thule. We know very little about it, but we do know it\u2019s not a planet. Pluto, by contrast \u2014 despite what you\u2019ve heard \u2014 is. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhy do we say this? We are planetary scientists, meaning we\u2019ve spent our careers exploring and studying objects that orbit stars. We use \u201cplanet\u201d to describe worlds with certain qualities. When we see one like Pluto, with its many familiar features \u2014 mountains of ice, glaciers of nitrogen, a blue sky with layers of smog \u2014 we and our colleagues quite naturally find ourselves using the word \u201cplanet\u201d to describe it and compare it to other planets that we know and love.In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced an attempted redefinition of the word \u201cplanet\u201d that excluded many objects, including Pluto. We think that decision was flawed, and that a logical and useful definition of planet will include many more worlds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe find ourselves using the word planet to describe the largest \u201cmoons\u201d in the solar system. Moon refers to the fact that they orbit around other worlds which themselves orbit our star, but when we discuss a world like Saturn\u2019s Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury, and has mountains, dunes and canyons, rivers, lakes and clouds, you will find us \u2014 in the literature and at our conferences \u2014 calling it a planet.\u00a0 This usage is not a mistake or a throwback. It is increasingly common in our profession and it is accurate.The New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto in 2015. NASA launched New Horizons in 2006. (NASA)Most essentially, planetary worlds (including planetary moons) are those large enough to have pulled themselves into a ball by the strength of their own gravity. Below a certain size, the strength of ice and rock is enough to resist rounding by gravity, and so the smallest worlds are lumpy. This is how, even before New Horizons arrives, we know that Ultima Thule is not a planet. Among the few facts we\u2019ve been able to ascertain about this body is that it is tiny (just 17 miles across) and distinctly nonspherical. This gives us a natural, physical criterion to separate planets from all the small bodies orbiting in space \u2014 boulders, icy comets or rocky and metallic asteroids, all of which are small and lumpy because their gravity is too weak for self-rounding.The desire to reconsider the meaning of \u201cplanet\u201d arose because of two thrilling discoveries about our universe: There are planets in unbelievable abundance beyond our solar system \u2014 called \u201cexoplanets\u201d \u2014 orbiting nearly every star we see in the sky. And there are a great many small icy objects orbiting our sun out in Pluto\u2019s realm, beyond the zone of the rocky inner worlds or \u201cterrestrial planets\u201d (like Earth), the \u201cgas giants\u201d (like Jupiter) and the \u201cice giants\u201d (like Neptune).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn light of these discoveries, it did then make sense to ask which objects discovered orbiting other stars should be considered planets. Some, at the largest end, are more like stars themselves. And just as stars like our sun are known as \u201cdwarf stars\u201d and still considered stars, it made some sense to consider small icy worlds like Pluto to occupy another subcategory of planet: \u201cdwarf planet.\u201dBut the process for redefining planet was deeply flawed and widely criticized even by those who accepted the outcome. At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world\u2019s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world\u2019s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun \u2014 thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined \u201cplanet\u201d in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has \u201ccleared its zone,\u201d or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what\u2019s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define \u201cplanet\u201d in terms of the other objects that are \u2014 or are not \u2014 orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that \u201ca dwarf planet is not a planet.\u201d This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire \u2014 for whatever reason \u2014 to ensure that Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d by the new definition.By and large, astronomers ignore the new definition of \u201cplanet\u201d every time they discuss all of the exciting discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. And those of us who actually study planets for a living also discuss dwarf planets without adding an asterisk. But it gets old having to address the misconceptions among the public who think that because Pluto was \u201cdemoted\u201d (not exactly a neutral term) that it must be more like a lumpy little asteroid than the complex and vibrant planet it is. It is this confusion among students and the public \u2014 fostered by journalists and textbook authors who mistakenly accepted the authority of the IAU as the final word \u2014 that makes this worth addressing.Last\u00a0March, in Houston, planetary scientists gathered to share new results and ideas at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. One presentation, titled \u201cA Geophysical Planet Definition,\u201d intended to set the record straight. It stated: \u201cIn keeping with both sound scientific classification and peoples\u2019 intuition, we propose a geophysically-based definition of 'planet' that importantly emphasizes a body\u2019s intrinsic physical properties over its extrinsic orbital properties.\u201d After giving a precise and nerdy definition, it offered: \u201cA simple paraphrase of our planet definition \u2014 especially suitable for elementary school students \u2014 could be, \u2018round objects in space that are smaller than stars.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt seems very likely that at some point the IAU will reconsider its flawed definition. In the meantime, people will keep referring to the planets being discovered around other stars as planets, and we\u2019ll keep referring to round objects in our solar system and elsewhere as planets. Eventually, \u201cofficial\u201d nomenclature will catch up to both common sense and scientific usage. The word \u201cplanet\u201d predates and transcends science. Language is malleable and responsive to culture. Words are not defined by voting. Neither is scientific paradigm.David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist who studies climate evolution and habitability of other worlds. Alan Stern is the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. Their book \u201cChasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,\u201d was published May 1 by Picador.Read more:We're at the controls on planet Earth, but we're not in controlThe inside story of New Horizons' 'Apollo 13' moment on its way to PlutoThe Cassini spacecraft crashed into Saturn, ending a successful 20-year mission Two planetary scientists say Pluto, exoplanets and even many moons are planets, or \u201cround objects in space that are smaller than stars.\"  Yes, Pluto is a planet",
        "author": "David Grinspoon"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA just found an orbiter that\u2019s been missing around the moon for 8 years (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3588",
        "date": "2017-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/13/nasa-just-found-an-orbiter-thats-been-missing-around-the-moon-for-8-years/",
        "text": "No one had heard from\u00a0Chandrayaan-1 since Aug. 29, 2009. That's when the pioneering moon orbiter\u00a0\u2014 the first lunar probe ever launched by the Indian Space Research Organization \u2014 abruptly went silent\u00a0just 312 days into what was supposed to be a two-year mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe orbiter has\u00a0been missing ever since. It's no bigger than a refrigerator and difficult for Earth-based telescopes to discern given the moon's nighttime glow, making the craft hard to track down. Plus, the moon's lopsided topography \u2014 riddled with mascons, or areas of dense material with higher-than-average gravitational pull \u2014 makes satellites' orbits incredibly unpredictable. But the silent, stealthy Chandrayaan-1 couldn't evade powerful radio telescopes. Scientists at NASA's\u00a0Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California's remote Mojave Desert and at the National Science Foundation's\u00a0Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia worked together to detect the long-lost orbiter by sending out radio waves in its direction and listening for the echoes that bounced back.A sun observatory that has been lost for 2 years just got back in touch with NASA\u201cTo be declared lost and then found after eight years is a great accomplishment,\u201d Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, the former ISRO chair who helped conceive the moon mission, told the Times of India.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe search technique, developed by researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is a new one. Capitalizing on\u00a0the fact that Chandrayaan-1's orbit takes it over the moon's north pole, they used Goldstone's largest antenna to direct a powerful beam of microwaves toward the spot they expected the probe to be. The antenna is usually used to communicate with spacecraft much farther away \u2014 it's still in touch with the Voyager 1 probe way outside the solar system. But it could also be applied much like a police officer's\u00a0radar gun.When the microwaves struck\u00a0Chandrayaan-1, they bounced back toward Earth, where the Green Bank radio telescope was listening. During four hours of observations, Green Bank detected two blips that resembled the signature of a small spacecraft. That timing matched the period of\u00a0Chandrayaan-1's orbit. The data also provided information about the spacecraft's speed and distance from Earth, which could be used to update projections of its orbit, and subsequent radar observations confirmed the new calculations.Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?The researchers used the same technique to find NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter \u2014 an easier task because the LRO is still operational.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut this could be just the beginning of interplanetary radar investigations.\u00a0The void between planets is filling up with human-made spacecraft, and it's only going to get more crowded. If scientists want to prevent potentially devastating collisions, they're going to need a powerful system to keep track of everything.\u201cGround-based radars could possibly play a part in future robotic and human missions to the moon, both for a collisional hazard assessment tool and as a safety mechanism for spacecraft that encounter navigation or communication issues,\u201d according to a NASA statement.Read more:Neanderthal microbes reveal surprises about what they ate \u2014 and whom they kissedCaught on film for the first time: One of the world's rarest whalesNewfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on EarthThese elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do itThis triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex. Powerful interplanetary radar helped track down the long-lost Chandrayaan-1 probe.  NASA just found an orbiter that\u2019s been missing around the moon for 8 years",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA just found an orbiter that\u2019s been missing around the moon for 8 years (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3589",
        "date": "2017-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/13/nasa-just-found-an-orbiter-thats-been-missing-around-the-moon-for-8-years/",
        "text": "No one had heard from\u00a0Chandrayaan-1 since Aug. 29, 2009. That's when the pioneering moon orbiter\u00a0\u2014 the first lunar probe ever launched by the Indian Space Research Organization \u2014 abruptly went silent\u00a0just 312 days into what was supposed to be a two-year mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe orbiter has\u00a0been missing ever since. It's no bigger than a refrigerator and difficult for Earth-based telescopes to discern given the moon's nighttime glow, making the craft hard to track down. Plus, the moon's lopsided topography \u2014 riddled with mascons, or areas of dense material with higher-than-average gravitational pull \u2014 makes satellites' orbits incredibly unpredictable. But the silent, stealthy Chandrayaan-1 couldn't evade powerful radio telescopes. Scientists at NASA's\u00a0Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California's remote Mojave Desert and at the National Science Foundation's\u00a0Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia worked together to detect the long-lost orbiter by sending out radio waves in its direction and listening for the echoes that bounced back.A sun observatory that has been lost for 2 years just got back in touch with NASA\u201cTo be declared lost and then found after eight years is a great accomplishment,\u201d Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, the former ISRO chair who helped conceive the moon mission, told the Times of India.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe search technique, developed by researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is a new one. Capitalizing on\u00a0the fact that Chandrayaan-1's orbit takes it over the moon's north pole, they used Goldstone's largest antenna to direct a powerful beam of microwaves toward the spot they expected the probe to be. The antenna is usually used to communicate with spacecraft much farther away \u2014 it's still in touch with the Voyager 1 probe way outside the solar system. But it could also be applied much like a police officer's\u00a0radar gun.When the microwaves struck\u00a0Chandrayaan-1, they bounced back toward Earth, where the Green Bank radio telescope was listening. During four hours of observations, Green Bank detected two blips that resembled the signature of a small spacecraft. That timing matched the period of\u00a0Chandrayaan-1's orbit. The data also provided information about the spacecraft's speed and distance from Earth, which could be used to update projections of its orbit, and subsequent radar observations confirmed the new calculations.Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?The researchers used the same technique to find NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter \u2014 an easier task because the LRO is still operational.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut this could be just the beginning of interplanetary radar investigations.\u00a0The void between planets is filling up with human-made spacecraft, and it's only going to get more crowded. If scientists want to prevent potentially devastating collisions, they're going to need a powerful system to keep track of everything.\u201cGround-based radars could possibly play a part in future robotic and human missions to the moon, both for a collisional hazard assessment tool and as a safety mechanism for spacecraft that encounter navigation or communication issues,\u201d according to a NASA statement.Read more:Neanderthal microbes reveal surprises about what they ate \u2014 and whom they kissedCaught on film for the first time: One of the world's rarest whalesNewfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on EarthThese elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do itThis triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex. Powerful interplanetary radar helped track down the long-lost Chandrayaan-1 probe.  NASA just found an orbiter that\u2019s been missing around the moon for 8 years",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Horizons images of Arrokoth show building blocks for planets (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3590",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/new-horizons-images-of-arrokoth-show-building-blocks-for-planets/2020/02/13/3ba09220-4dba-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a city-sized object just over a year ago. The most distant object ever explored, since named Arrokoth, was a \u201cplanetesimal\u201d lurking quietly in the outer solar system a billion miles past Pluto. The spacecraft beamed back images of what looked like two lumpy, reddish snowballs, one larger than the other, gently pressed together to form an extraterrestrial snowperson. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Thursday the New Horizons scientists published their full analysis and high-resolution images of Arrokoth in three voluminous reports in the journal Science. They contend this quirky object provides compelling evidence for how planets in our solar system, including Earth, formed four and a half billion years ago from a primordial cloud of dust. The reports suggest planet formation is not as violent and chaotic a process as once assumed.Arrokoth is a fossil. It has not changed for billions of years. It has been immaculately preserved, like an insect trapped in amber, in a cold, dim, stupendously serene realm of the solar system where nothing much happens, ever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Feb. 13, NASA published images of \"Arrokoth,\" a space object that scientist say sheds light on the history of the solar system. (New Horizons)\u201cThis is the best archaeological dig we\u2019ve ever found into the history of the solar system,\u201d enthused Alan Stern, the scientific leader of the New Horizons team.\u201cWe have a lot of thoughts about how the solar system formed, but we really need a lot more actual data and direct evidence in order to see which of those models are correct. We just could not have gotten this information any other way,\u201d said Kelsi Singer, deputy project scientist for the mission.The striking feature of Arrokoth is the two lobes. Originally they were separate, but mutually attracted by gravity. They slowly spiraled together and gently merged like two spaceships docking in low Earth orbit. They became a \u201ccontact binary.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cSometimes we call it the head and the body,\u201d said Singer, noting the snowperson-like shape of the object. \u201cAnd it\u2019s got a neck,\u201d she added.AdvertisementThe New Horizon team ran computer simulations that suggest the \u201ccollision\u201d of the so-called head and body occurred at a brisk walking pace. There are no signs of compression fractures, no snowball-smushing.That suggests the two lobes formed close to one another in individual clouds of dust and gas that coalesced due to gravity. The new papers suggest this \u201clocal\u201d cloud collapse was the norm in the embryonic solar system. The result of the process was the creation of Arrokoth-like objects that served as fundamental building blocks for larger planetesimals, dwarf planets, full-blown planets like Earth and eventually giant planets \u2014 with a couple of them, Jupiter and Saturn, so big they became gas giants.Story continues below advertisementThis model for planet formation rejects an older theory of \u201chierarchical accretion\u201d in which there is no gentle building-block stage but rather a wild and woolly process in which particles, pebbles and boulders of all sizes gradually come together amid many violent collisions to form a planet.Advertisement\u201cTo build planets, you don\u2019t just start with small grains and gradually they build up to larger and larger objects progressively, but instead you have local gravitational collapse of clusters of material in the solar nebula, that come together to form medium-size objects,\u201d said John Spencer, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and lead author of one of the new papers.One scientist outside of the New Horizons team, Anders Johansen of Lund University in Sweden, applauded the Arrokoth findings, having spent many years developing the local cloud collapse model for planet formation.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere was a previous picture that planetesimals formed \u2018bottom-up\u2019 as larger and larger chunks of rock would collide to form increasingly massive bodies. But this picture does not agree with Arrokoth, since that body has very few craters and since the collision of the two components must have been very slow,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cThis then also implies that the Solar System planets formed by gentle pebble accretion and not by violent collisions.\u201dAdvertisementArrokoth is one of billions of small bodies orbiting the sun at a distance of several billion miles, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, in a chilly region known as the Kuiper belt. To be more precise, Arrokoth is part of the \u201cCold Classical\u201d Kuiper belt, which is distinguished by how remarkably well-preserved everything is.The objects do not get disturbed gravitationally by nearby planets. They never make a dash toward the sun and turn into a comet, as do many Kuiper belt objects with orbits that wander outside the Cold Classical region. They do nothing, for eons, bathed in a dim light of the distant sun, a bright point of light with just enough candlepower to read a book if such a thing could be located. Story continues below advertisementOnly two interesting things appear to have happened to Arrokoth in four and a half billion years. The first was the merger of the larger lobe with the smaller lobe. The second was the visit by a spaceship from Earth.AdvertisementArrokoth happened to be roughly in the path of New Horizons after it made its historic flyby of Pluto in 2015. It was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in a search for something New Horizons could visit as it exited the more familiar realms of the solar system. The spacecraft burned some fuel to adjust its trajectory, and on Jan. 1, 2019, passed by the planetesimal at a distance of 2,198 miles.During the flyby the spacecraft had to be oriented precisely, via remote-control instructions sent far in advance, lest the cameras miss the shot. They did not miss.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s kind of amazing that we can target this tiny thing, 43 times farther from the sun than Earth is, and actually go there and see what it\u2019s like,\u201d Singer said. \u201cPluto was obviously hard to top, but this was pretty darn cool too.\u201dArrokoth was briefly dubbed \u201cUltima Thule\u201d before the New Horizons team learned the term was used by white supremacists to refer to a mythological Ayran homeland. Instead, with the endorsement of Powhatan elders, scientists gave it a name meaning \u201csky\u201d in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.AdvertisementThe trio of papers published Thursday represent a massive download of data from the distant spacecraft, combined with computer modeling in the months since the flyby.Story continues below advertisementNew Horizons is not dead yet. The spacecraft is continuing on its journey into what is clearly not quite a void.Later this year, Stern said, telescopes on Earth will examine that part of the sky to see if there is another target for observation somewhere in the path of the spacecraft. The spacecraft has enough power to operate for another 15 to 20 years, he said.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsScientists are baffled: What\u2019s up with the universe?Pluto gets a buddy: A new dwarf planet is discovered in our solar system Beyond Pluto, an immaculate 4.5 billion-year-old fossil suggests gentler origins for solar system objects. New Horizons images of Arrokoth show building blocks for planets",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Horizons images of Arrokoth show building blocks for planets (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3591",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/new-horizons-images-of-arrokoth-show-building-blocks-for-planets/2020/02/13/3ba09220-4dba-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a city-sized object just over a year ago. The most distant object ever explored, since named Arrokoth, was a \u201cplanetesimal\u201d lurking quietly in the outer solar system a billion miles past Pluto. The spacecraft beamed back images of what looked like two lumpy, reddish snowballs, one larger than the other, gently pressed together to form an extraterrestrial snowperson. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Thursday the New Horizons scientists published their full analysis and high-resolution images of Arrokoth in three voluminous reports in the journal Science. They contend this quirky object provides compelling evidence for how planets in our solar system, including Earth, formed four and a half billion years ago from a primordial cloud of dust. The reports suggest planet formation is not as violent and chaotic a process as once assumed.Arrokoth is a fossil. It has not changed for billions of years. It has been immaculately preserved, like an insect trapped in amber, in a cold, dim, stupendously serene realm of the solar system where nothing much happens, ever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Feb. 13, NASA published images of \"Arrokoth,\" a space object that scientist say sheds light on the history of the solar system. (New Horizons)\u201cThis is the best archaeological dig we\u2019ve ever found into the history of the solar system,\u201d enthused Alan Stern, the scientific leader of the New Horizons team.\u201cWe have a lot of thoughts about how the solar system formed, but we really need a lot more actual data and direct evidence in order to see which of those models are correct. We just could not have gotten this information any other way,\u201d said Kelsi Singer, deputy project scientist for the mission.The striking feature of Arrokoth is the two lobes. Originally they were separate, but mutually attracted by gravity. They slowly spiraled together and gently merged like two spaceships docking in low Earth orbit. They became a \u201ccontact binary.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cSometimes we call it the head and the body,\u201d said Singer, noting the snowperson-like shape of the object. \u201cAnd it\u2019s got a neck,\u201d she added.AdvertisementThe New Horizon team ran computer simulations that suggest the \u201ccollision\u201d of the so-called head and body occurred at a brisk walking pace. There are no signs of compression fractures, no snowball-smushing.That suggests the two lobes formed close to one another in individual clouds of dust and gas that coalesced due to gravity. The new papers suggest this \u201clocal\u201d cloud collapse was the norm in the embryonic solar system. The result of the process was the creation of Arrokoth-like objects that served as fundamental building blocks for larger planetesimals, dwarf planets, full-blown planets like Earth and eventually giant planets \u2014 with a couple of them, Jupiter and Saturn, so big they became gas giants.Story continues below advertisementThis model for planet formation rejects an older theory of \u201chierarchical accretion\u201d in which there is no gentle building-block stage but rather a wild and woolly process in which particles, pebbles and boulders of all sizes gradually come together amid many violent collisions to form a planet.Advertisement\u201cTo build planets, you don\u2019t just start with small grains and gradually they build up to larger and larger objects progressively, but instead you have local gravitational collapse of clusters of material in the solar nebula, that come together to form medium-size objects,\u201d said John Spencer, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and lead author of one of the new papers.One scientist outside of the New Horizons team, Anders Johansen of Lund University in Sweden, applauded the Arrokoth findings, having spent many years developing the local cloud collapse model for planet formation.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere was a previous picture that planetesimals formed \u2018bottom-up\u2019 as larger and larger chunks of rock would collide to form increasingly massive bodies. But this picture does not agree with Arrokoth, since that body has very few craters and since the collision of the two components must have been very slow,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cThis then also implies that the Solar System planets formed by gentle pebble accretion and not by violent collisions.\u201dAdvertisementArrokoth is one of billions of small bodies orbiting the sun at a distance of several billion miles, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, in a chilly region known as the Kuiper belt. To be more precise, Arrokoth is part of the \u201cCold Classical\u201d Kuiper belt, which is distinguished by how remarkably well-preserved everything is.The objects do not get disturbed gravitationally by nearby planets. They never make a dash toward the sun and turn into a comet, as do many Kuiper belt objects with orbits that wander outside the Cold Classical region. They do nothing, for eons, bathed in a dim light of the distant sun, a bright point of light with just enough candlepower to read a book if such a thing could be located. Story continues below advertisementOnly two interesting things appear to have happened to Arrokoth in four and a half billion years. The first was the merger of the larger lobe with the smaller lobe. The second was the visit by a spaceship from Earth.AdvertisementArrokoth happened to be roughly in the path of New Horizons after it made its historic flyby of Pluto in 2015. It was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in a search for something New Horizons could visit as it exited the more familiar realms of the solar system. The spacecraft burned some fuel to adjust its trajectory, and on Jan. 1, 2019, passed by the planetesimal at a distance of 2,198 miles.During the flyby the spacecraft had to be oriented precisely, via remote-control instructions sent far in advance, lest the cameras miss the shot. They did not miss.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s kind of amazing that we can target this tiny thing, 43 times farther from the sun than Earth is, and actually go there and see what it\u2019s like,\u201d Singer said. \u201cPluto was obviously hard to top, but this was pretty darn cool too.\u201dArrokoth was briefly dubbed \u201cUltima Thule\u201d before the New Horizons team learned the term was used by white supremacists to refer to a mythological Ayran homeland. Instead, with the endorsement of Powhatan elders, scientists gave it a name meaning \u201csky\u201d in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.AdvertisementThe trio of papers published Thursday represent a massive download of data from the distant spacecraft, combined with computer modeling in the months since the flyby.Story continues below advertisementNew Horizons is not dead yet. The spacecraft is continuing on its journey into what is clearly not quite a void.Later this year, Stern said, telescopes on Earth will examine that part of the sky to see if there is another target for observation somewhere in the path of the spacecraft. The spacecraft has enough power to operate for another 15 to 20 years, he said.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsScientists are baffled: What\u2019s up with the universe?Pluto gets a buddy: A new dwarf planet is discovered in our solar system Beyond Pluto, an immaculate 4.5 billion-year-old fossil suggests gentler origins for solar system objects. New Horizons images of Arrokoth show building blocks for planets",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Will Trump echo JFK\u2019s moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars? (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3592",
        "date": "2017-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/19/will-trump-echo-jfks-moonshot-and-vow-to-send-humans-to-mars/",
        "text": "For drive-by readers we offer this immediate answer to the question posed in our headline: Almost certainly not, at least in the inaugural address. Maybe later. By tradition, inaugurals are broadly thematic and not specific. President-elect Donald Trump has been studying past inaugurals, according to his aides, so he understands that this is not a State of the Union address with a laundry list of proposals. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat said, we feel no shame in plunging forward with speculation about Trump and Mars. It's plausible that Trump could talk about a Mars mission sometime in the very near future.For starters, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has made two trips to Trump Tower. He met at least once with Trump and, we\u2019re reliably told, discussed Mars and public-private partnerships.Story continues below advertisementAs we have reported many times, Musk and his people at SpaceX have the bold dream of colonizing Mars, and think they can launch the first human mission to the surface of the Red Planet as soon as 2024 \u2014 when Trump, if reelected, would still be in the White House. (We understand that Musk also talked with Trump about other issues, including the need for a smart grid \u2014 the kind of infrastructure that would give a boost to the solar energy business, in which Musk is a leader via his investments in the company Solar City.)AdvertisementMusk does not share the same political views as Trump, but both men have had success as motivators. Those of us who are realists may roll our eyes at some of Musk\u2019s most ambitious, outlandish proposals \u2014 including his desire to build a fleet of gigantic spaceships taking 100 people at a time to Mars as part of a commercial colonization venture \u2014 but we have to acknowledge that this kind of thinking is exciting for young engineers in a way that NASA\u2019s far more plodding, incremental approach to human spaceflight is not.Trump understands the power of a big idea, and the leverage that can come from a cult of personality. He has been interested in John F. Kennedy\u2019s vow to send humans to the moon. He discussed that early this month at Trump Tower with historian Douglas Brinkley.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHe reflected on how the Apollo program brought the country together,\u201d Brinkley told The Washington Post this week in a phone interview. \u201cIt captures the spirit of the American people. That\u2019s the word he used \u2014 \u2018spirit\u2019.\u201dAdvertisementThe United States is still the only country to put a human on the moon, and the only country to land a fully operational spacecraft on Mars. \u201cThat\u2019s American exceptionalism,\u201d Brinkley said.With Trump, Gingrich and GOP calling the shots, NASA may return to the moonBut he doesn\u2019t think Trump will talk about space missions in the inaugural address.\u201cHe might say something vague and morale-building about the moonshot in his inaugural, but if he got into something specific, that would seem to me a late-spring kind of thing,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementOne reason Trump wouldn\u2019t likely mention a specific proposal such as going to Mars is that it would immediately trigger difficult conversations and media coverage about the cost. The price tag would likely be jaw-dropping.\u00a0 Trump could find himself labeled a big spender. That wouldn\u2019t make Republicans happy.What is far more likely is that Trump and the Republicans will embrace a return to the moon as a steppingstone to a Mars mission. That was what President George W. Bush wanted to do, and his NASA team put together an elaborate moon program, called Constellation. Obama killed the idea, saying we\u2019d been there, done that. But Republicans still have the moon in their sights. Trump would have to find a rhetorical framework for selling a moonshot that didn\u2019t get labeled as an Apollo rerun.Further reading:Mars is not a Plan BHow Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space programElon Musk wants to colonize Mars, but don't pack your bags just yet Elon Musk visits Trump Tower. Let the speculation begin. Will Trump echo JFK\u2019s moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars?",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sorry, this strange space rock was not sent by aliens to save us (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3593",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/06/sorry-this-strange-space-rock-was-not-sent-by-aliens-save-us/",
        "text": "Fellow Americans: As you stood in line at your polling place Tuesday morning, you may have seen a headline or two claiming that the interstellar comet that visited our solar system last fall could be a spacecraft sent by an alien civilization \u2014 perhaps to deliver us from the nightmare of our political culture. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019m here to report that no aliens are coming. At least, not this time.Scientists have been puzzling over the cigar-shaped comet, dubbed 'Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for \u201cmessenger,\u201d since it was first spotted swooping past the planets at an odd angle. Its speed was so blistering and trajectory so strange that scientists concluded it had to be a visitor from another star. Subsequent observations by dozens of telescopes in every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum suggested it was an inert (if extraordinary) space rock \u2014 dense, dustless, and reddened by irradiation from cosmic rays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust to be on the safe side, astronomers at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia specifically listened for signals from any electronic device that might be attached to the object. They didn\u2019t hear a peep.But then a preprint of a research paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal appeared online this week, posing an \u201cexotic scenario\u201d in which the 'Oumuamua was a solar-powered probe built by an alien civilization.There\u2019s no evidence to support this idea. Indeed, the majority of the study is devoted to examining how radiation pressure from the sun might push on a natural object and contribute to 'Oumuamua\u2019s unexplained acceleration. This phenomenon is the basis for a proposed method of spacecraft propulsion called light sails, which I guess is how we get from \u201cwhoa, weird rock\u201d to \u201cit might be aliens!\u201d The study authors justify their speculation by arguing that the probability of an ordinary comet intercepting our solar system after being ejected by its home star is very small.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs astrophysicist Katie Mack pointed out on Twitter, coming up with far-out explanations for slightly strange phenomena is one of astronomers' favorite parlor games. (Remember the alien megastructure that turned out to be a star swathed in dust?)That doesn\u2019t mean you need to stock up on canned goods and tin foil hats every time a weird theory gets published.\u201cUntil every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don\u2019t believe it,\u201d Mack said.Other astronomers were not so forgiving of their colleagues' speculation.My publicist asked me for a quote on the 'Oumuamua story making the rounds. Here it is:\"No, 'Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it.\"Feel free to use that, @fcain, @tariqjmalik!\u2014 Paul M. Sutter (@PaulMattSutter) November 6, 2018\n\nSince \u2018Oumuamua has already sped far from our solar system, out of reach of all telescopes, scientists are stuck with the data they have. Luckily, there\u2019s reams of it \u2014 and scores of more likely explanations for the comet\u2019s behavior have not been exhausted.So, go ahead and cast your vote as if this is the only world we have, and no one else is out there to save us from ourselves. Vote like the interstellar comet is not an alien spacecraft sent to save us from ourselves (because it isn't). Sorry, this strange space rock was not sent by aliens to save us",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sorry, this strange space rock was not sent by aliens to save us (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3594",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/06/sorry-this-strange-space-rock-was-not-sent-by-aliens-save-us/",
        "text": "Fellow Americans: As you stood in line at your polling place Tuesday morning, you may have seen a headline or two claiming that the interstellar comet that visited our solar system last fall could be a spacecraft sent by an alien civilization \u2014 perhaps to deliver us from the nightmare of our political culture. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019m here to report that no aliens are coming. At least, not this time.Scientists have been puzzling over the cigar-shaped comet, dubbed 'Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for \u201cmessenger,\u201d since it was first spotted swooping past the planets at an odd angle. Its speed was so blistering and trajectory so strange that scientists concluded it had to be a visitor from another star. Subsequent observations by dozens of telescopes in every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum suggested it was an inert (if extraordinary) space rock \u2014 dense, dustless, and reddened by irradiation from cosmic rays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust to be on the safe side, astronomers at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia specifically listened for signals from any electronic device that might be attached to the object. They didn\u2019t hear a peep.But then a preprint of a research paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal appeared online this week, posing an \u201cexotic scenario\u201d in which the 'Oumuamua was a solar-powered probe built by an alien civilization.There\u2019s no evidence to support this idea. Indeed, the majority of the study is devoted to examining how radiation pressure from the sun might push on a natural object and contribute to 'Oumuamua\u2019s unexplained acceleration. This phenomenon is the basis for a proposed method of spacecraft propulsion called light sails, which I guess is how we get from \u201cwhoa, weird rock\u201d to \u201cit might be aliens!\u201d The study authors justify their speculation by arguing that the probability of an ordinary comet intercepting our solar system after being ejected by its home star is very small.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs astrophysicist Katie Mack pointed out on Twitter, coming up with far-out explanations for slightly strange phenomena is one of astronomers' favorite parlor games. (Remember the alien megastructure that turned out to be a star swathed in dust?)That doesn\u2019t mean you need to stock up on canned goods and tin foil hats every time a weird theory gets published.\u201cUntil every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don\u2019t believe it,\u201d Mack said.Other astronomers were not so forgiving of their colleagues' speculation.My publicist asked me for a quote on the 'Oumuamua story making the rounds. Here it is:\"No, 'Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it.\"Feel free to use that, @fcain, @tariqjmalik!\u2014 Paul M. Sutter (@PaulMattSutter) November 6, 2018\n\nSince \u2018Oumuamua has already sped far from our solar system, out of reach of all telescopes, scientists are stuck with the data they have. Luckily, there\u2019s reams of it \u2014 and scores of more likely explanations for the comet\u2019s behavior have not been exhausted.So, go ahead and cast your vote as if this is the only world we have, and no one else is out there to save us from ourselves. Vote like the interstellar comet is not an alien spacecraft sent to save us from ourselves (because it isn't). Sorry, this strange space rock was not sent by aliens to save us",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sorry, this strange space rock was not sent by aliens to save us (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3595",
        "date": "2018-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/06/sorry-this-strange-space-rock-was-not-sent-by-aliens-save-us/",
        "text": "Fellow Americans: As you stood in line at your polling place Tuesday morning, you may have seen a headline or two claiming that the interstellar comet that visited our solar system last fall could be a spacecraft sent by an alien civilization \u2014 perhaps to deliver us from the nightmare of our political culture. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019m here to report that no aliens are coming. At least, not this time.Scientists have been puzzling over the cigar-shaped comet, dubbed 'Oumuamua after the Hawaiian word for \u201cmessenger,\u201d since it was first spotted swooping past the planets at an odd angle. Its speed was so blistering and trajectory so strange that scientists concluded it had to be a visitor from another star. Subsequent observations by dozens of telescopes in every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum suggested it was an inert (if extraordinary) space rock \u2014 dense, dustless, and reddened by irradiation from cosmic rays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust to be on the safe side, astronomers at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia specifically listened for signals from any electronic device that might be attached to the object. They didn\u2019t hear a peep.But then a preprint of a research paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal appeared online this week, posing an \u201cexotic scenario\u201d in which the 'Oumuamua was a solar-powered probe built by an alien civilization.There\u2019s no evidence to support this idea. Indeed, the majority of the study is devoted to examining how radiation pressure from the sun might push on a natural object and contribute to 'Oumuamua\u2019s unexplained acceleration. This phenomenon is the basis for a proposed method of spacecraft propulsion called light sails, which I guess is how we get from \u201cwhoa, weird rock\u201d to \u201cit might be aliens!\u201d The study authors justify their speculation by arguing that the probability of an ordinary comet intercepting our solar system after being ejected by its home star is very small.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs astrophysicist Katie Mack pointed out on Twitter, coming up with far-out explanations for slightly strange phenomena is one of astronomers' favorite parlor games. (Remember the alien megastructure that turned out to be a star swathed in dust?)That doesn\u2019t mean you need to stock up on canned goods and tin foil hats every time a weird theory gets published.\u201cUntil every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don\u2019t believe it,\u201d Mack said.Other astronomers were not so forgiving of their colleagues' speculation.My publicist asked me for a quote on the 'Oumuamua story making the rounds. Here it is:\"No, 'Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it.\"Feel free to use that, @fcain, @tariqjmalik!\u2014 Paul M. Sutter (@PaulMattSutter) November 6, 2018\n\nSince \u2018Oumuamua has already sped far from our solar system, out of reach of all telescopes, scientists are stuck with the data they have. Luckily, there\u2019s reams of it \u2014 and scores of more likely explanations for the comet\u2019s behavior have not been exhausted.So, go ahead and cast your vote as if this is the only world we have, and no one else is out there to save us from ourselves. Vote like the interstellar comet is not an alien spacecraft sent to save us from ourselves (because it isn't). Sorry, this strange space rock was not sent by aliens to save us",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term \u2018at worst\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3596",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/24/trump-wants-nasa-to-send-humans-to-mars-pronto-by-his-second-term-at-worst/",
        "text": "What we are reporting here isn't fake news. But it doesn't feel exactly like real news, either. It's in that foggy realm of Trump news in which everything is slightly ambiguous and wobbly and internally inconsistent and almost certainly improvisational and not actually grounded in what you could call \u201cgovernment policy.\u201d What happened was: Trump called the International Space Station and talked to astronauts and, in passing, mentioned that he's going to send Americans to Mars, and soon, like really lickety-split. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump was marking the historic achievement of astronaut Peggy Whitson, the commander of the International Space Station, who set a record for most days in space by an American astronaut. (Also on the call from the Oval Office were Ivanka Trump, who spoke about the administration's efforts to encourage women and girls to get involved in STEM fields, and astronaut Kate Rubins.)During the call, the president asked Whitson and fellow American astronaut Jack Fischer a question:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTRUMP: \u201cTell me: Mars, what do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when would you see that happening?\u201dWHITSON: \u201cWell, I think as your bill directed, it'll be approximately in the 2030s. As I mentioned, we actually are building hardware to test the new heavy launch vehicle, and this vehicle will take us further than we've ever been away from this planet.\u201cSo, unfortunately space flight takes a lot of time and money so getting there will require some international cooperation to get the \u2014 it to be a planet-wide approach in order to make it successful just because it is a very expensive endeavor. But it is so worthwhile doing.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTRUMP: \u201cWell, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we'll have to speed that up a little bit, okay?\u201dAdvertisementWHITSON: \u201cWe'll do our best.\u201dIt's hard to know if Trump was entirely serious (it's possible he was just joshin') or if he even has been briefed on the current NASA human spaceflight program. He may not know where Mars is. (Who does, really? You know it moves around a lot.)Trump, with NASA, has a new spaceship. Where does he want to go?When Whitson said \u201cyour bill\u201d she was clearly referring to the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, passed by Congress and signed by Trump this year. The act essentially keeps NASA on the same course it's been for years when it comes to human spaceflight \u2014 aiming at a mission to Mars with a 2033 launch. The first mission would be an orbital mission only; a later mission would attempt a landing.NASA, understanding that Trump wants to do something big in the first term, has pondered adding astronauts to a test flight of the new Space Launch System rocket. There is very little chance that NASA is sending humans to Mars by 2024. That happens to be the year that Elon Musk \u2014 who has met with Trump \u2014 has said he thinks SpaceX can launch a Mars mission, though that's an extremely ambitious timeline, and Musk has a history of over-promising when it comes to schedules. For NASA to pull off such a thing, and to do it with proper safety margins and reliable hardware, would require a massive infusion of money into the space agency. This would be a crash program. Even then, it would be almost impossible to make the 2024 deadline \u2014 much less by the end of Trump's first term.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo we're going to mark this down as noise rather than signal when it comes to Trump's space policy. But who knows? We live in interesting times. We advise that you keep your seat belt securely fastened and your tray table and seat back in their full upright position.Further reading:Trump may echo JFK's \u2018moonshot\u2019 speech Trump's budget calls for seismic disruption in funding for science and medical research He asked an astronaut what the timeline is for going to the Red Planet. She replied: \u201cWell, as I think your bill directed \u2026\" Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term \u2018at worst\u2019",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program (WP: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3597",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/03/how-trump-could-really-disrupt-nasa-and-the-space-program/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.The Trump people are taking over NASA, and it\u2019s hard to predict how this will play out for the agency's human spaceflight program. That\u2019s in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology don\u2019t apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, there\u2019s no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat reversed, because a lot of Republicans support Big Government human spaceflight projects, as we\u2019ll discuss in a moment.) Moreover, the president-elect hasn\u2019t said much about space, and space wasn\u2019t an issue in his campaign, either. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo the extent that Donald Trump has signaled any intentions, it's in the makeup of the \"landing team\" now at NASA to plan the transition. The team has several people who have shown interest in going back to the moon. So, as we've reported, the moon could be very much back in play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn these waning days of the Obama administration, NASA continues to brand its programs as part of a \u201cJourney to Mars.\u201d The label is, to some degree, public relations pure and simple. In the near term, NASA's plan is to send astronauts around the moon in a series of missions in the 2020s. Why? Because there's nowhere else to go at the moment given current funding and hardware. Trump\u2019s people could say, hold on, let's actually land on the moon. That would require new hardware or international partners and a lot of money. Some moon advocates say there are resources there, such as ice, that could be turned into fuel for a Mars mission.Andy Weir and \"The Martian\" may have saved the space programA couple of weeks ago, Trump spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley, and afterward Brinkley said Trump \u201cwas very interested in a man going to the moon and the moon shot.\u201d That generated some press, because of the Mars vs. moon debate, but most likely Trump was merely thinking about how he could take a page from President John F. Kennedy when he gives his inaugural address. This was about style, not the space program, in other words.The people who want to go to Mars right away say the moon is a diversion and would result in many decades of delay. They note that the moon and Mars are completely different. Yes, they\u2019re both round objects in outer space,\u00a0 but beyond that, they\u2019re an apple and an orange. Each presents unique challenges for descent and landing, resource utilization, communications, crew psychology and more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet the moon-Mars question actually may not be the most consequential fork in the road for NASA. If the Trump folks want to be really disruptive, they could veer more dramatically toward commercial contracts and away from traditional contracts. They could favor \"New Space\" vs. \"Old Space,\" to be overly simplistic about it. (Disclosure: Among the most prominent entrepreneurial space companies is Blue Origin, which, like The Washington Post, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)Golden Spike space tourism company offers $750 million trips to the moonThe landing team at NASA was recently expanded to include several people associated with commercial space. Among them: Alan Stern, whom readers will recognize as the leader of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. A few years ago, Stern formed a company aspiring to create commercial flights to the moon.The Trump folks could conceivably take the radical step of killing the SLS rocket\u00a0--\u00a0the Space Launch System, a descendant of the heavy-lift rocket pushed a decade ago by the George W. Bush administration under its Constellation program. Obama officially killed Constellation, but elements survived, protected by several powerful senators. Those include the SLS and Orion, a crew capsule now in its second decade of development, with a price tag north of $10 billion. The idea is, the SLS will launch Orion into outer space, and Orion will orbit the moon, and the astronauts will return to Earth, and then they'll do that a bunch more times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s hard to kill big space programs that cost a lot of money. Think: stakeholders. Think: too big to fail.But there\u2019s this other avenue of attack in space, which is to let the private companies design, build and own the hardware and then for the government to pay those companies for access to space. This is already happening with cargo going to the International Space Station, and in the next few years, U.S. astronauts will fly \"commercial\" into orbit. SpaceX is already building a huge rocket called the Falcon Heavy. The George W. Bush administration pushed commercial space, which helped SpaceX get going, and then Obama doubled down on it. So this is a bipartisan concept, to the extent that anything in Washington is bipartisan.The problem is that it won\u2019t make some of the big aerospace contractors happy. And that means it won't make some powerful lawmakers happy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow the money, someone once said.*****Novelist\u00a0David Brin, author of Earth, The Postman and Heart of the Comet,\u00a0emailed a response to this blog item:Joel. I like most of your reporting a lot, but the piece on Trump and NASA, while informative, seems to miss an undercurrent.\u00a0Neither Democrats nor Republicans are eager for an all-out \"Mars or Bust\" push, though both see it as a long term goal. The alternative to the Moon is not Mars, it is\u00a0asteroids.Most of the scientific community and all the new space entrepreneurs, from [Elon] Musk and Bezos and [Peter] Diamandis to Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, are eager for missions to analyze the wide variety of near-Earth asteroids or NEOs. Ever since John Lewis wrote Mining the Sky, in the 1980s, we've known that some of these objects offer easy access to gobs of water \u2014 the massive necessity for space activities. Others offer prodigious amounts of iron, nickel, gold and platinum. Except for some meager ice at the hard-to-reach lunar poles, the moon has none of these things.For analysis of such samples, no place is better than lunar orbit, and that is why the Obama Administration aimed NASA there. Also, from lunar orbit, it would have been cool to offer transit services to all the wannabes and johnnies-come-lately who want to land on the sterile moon. Russians, Chinese, Europeans, billionaires...why do another useless \"joint program,\" when their prestige-race to imitate Apollo would make lively competition. And cash for our lunar-orbit station. More dusty, lunar footprints do nothing for us. Not at the bottom of that deep and useless gravity well.As it happens, this issue, like everything else, has become partisan. If you find some American wanting to go to the moon, it will almost always be a Republican. The facts and the math and any scintilla of national interest all point to asteroids. In fact, experience using asteroid resources could let us turn Phobos into a logistics hub, which would then make any Mars exploration much more practical. Moreover, many tech billionaires see the promise in potential trillions of return from asteroids, much to the horror of those whose fortunes depend on resource extraction from our dwindling planet.And another reflective email came from Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA's Astrobiology Program and Planetary Defense Coordination Office:Ideology has been a significant shaper and driver of the U.S. space program: the rabid anti-communism of the 1950s that led to the formation of NASA, the belief that capitalist democracy is the only viable form of political economy, American exceptionalism, technological determinism, libertarianism \u2013 which is really big now in aerospace. It\u2019s shocking how firmly the Obama administration embraced it with regard to the space program, and it's going to get worse. Libertarian thinking has been driving the discourse about \"commercial\" space development for decades...Even President Carter gave a little lip service to \"commercial\" space development,\u00a0but it was the Reagan administration that first made a big deal about it \u2014 which is how I came to enter the space community, as editor of a long-defunct trade publication called Space Business News. So all this \"news\" about \u201ccommercial space\u201d sounds like old news to me \u2014 what the \"commercial\" people want is the same thing the aerospace megacorporations want \u2014 tax breaks, subsidies, big fat contracts, access to government facilities and expertise. SpaceX is already one of NASA's top 10 contractors and also is on the list of the U.S. government's top 100 contractors.Looking around the web:Jeff Foust at SpaceNews discusses the landing team and warns against reading too much into the background of its members.Keith Cowing at NASAWatch has a blog post about old vs. new, traditional vs. commercial.Read more:NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Which way to space? Mars is not a Plan BWhy it's hard to get to MarsElon Musk wants to colonize Mars, but don't pack your bags just yet Old Space vs. New Space may be more important than moon vs. Mars. How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3598",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/03/how-trump-could-really-disrupt-nasa-and-the-space-program/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.The Trump people are taking over NASA, and it\u2019s hard to predict how this will play out for the agency's human spaceflight program. That\u2019s in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology don\u2019t apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, there\u2019s no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat reversed, because a lot of Republicans support Big Government human spaceflight projects, as we\u2019ll discuss in a moment.) Moreover, the president-elect hasn\u2019t said much about space, and space wasn\u2019t an issue in his campaign, either. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo the extent that Donald Trump has signaled any intentions, it's in the makeup of the \"landing team\" now at NASA to plan the transition. The team has several people who have shown interest in going back to the moon. So, as we've reported, the moon could be very much back in play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn these waning days of the Obama administration, NASA continues to brand its programs as part of a \u201cJourney to Mars.\u201d The label is, to some degree, public relations pure and simple. In the near term, NASA's plan is to send astronauts around the moon in a series of missions in the 2020s. Why? Because there's nowhere else to go at the moment given current funding and hardware. Trump\u2019s people could say, hold on, let's actually land on the moon. That would require new hardware or international partners and a lot of money. Some moon advocates say there are resources there, such as ice, that could be turned into fuel for a Mars mission.Andy Weir and \"The Martian\" may have saved the space programA couple of weeks ago, Trump spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley, and afterward Brinkley said Trump \u201cwas very interested in a man going to the moon and the moon shot.\u201d That generated some press, because of the Mars vs. moon debate, but most likely Trump was merely thinking about how he could take a page from President John F. Kennedy when he gives his inaugural address. This was about style, not the space program, in other words.The people who want to go to Mars right away say the moon is a diversion and would result in many decades of delay. They note that the moon and Mars are completely different. Yes, they\u2019re both round objects in outer space,\u00a0 but beyond that, they\u2019re an apple and an orange. Each presents unique challenges for descent and landing, resource utilization, communications, crew psychology and more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet the moon-Mars question actually may not be the most consequential fork in the road for NASA. If the Trump folks want to be really disruptive, they could veer more dramatically toward commercial contracts and away from traditional contracts. They could favor \"New Space\" vs. \"Old Space,\" to be overly simplistic about it. (Disclosure: Among the most prominent entrepreneurial space companies is Blue Origin, which, like The Washington Post, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)Golden Spike space tourism company offers $750 million trips to the moonThe landing team at NASA was recently expanded to include several people associated with commercial space. Among them: Alan Stern, whom readers will recognize as the leader of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. A few years ago, Stern formed a company aspiring to create commercial flights to the moon.The Trump folks could conceivably take the radical step of killing the SLS rocket\u00a0--\u00a0the Space Launch System, a descendant of the heavy-lift rocket pushed a decade ago by the George W. Bush administration under its Constellation program. Obama officially killed Constellation, but elements survived, protected by several powerful senators. Those include the SLS and Orion, a crew capsule now in its second decade of development, with a price tag north of $10 billion. The idea is, the SLS will launch Orion into outer space, and Orion will orbit the moon, and the astronauts will return to Earth, and then they'll do that a bunch more times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s hard to kill big space programs that cost a lot of money. Think: stakeholders. Think: too big to fail.But there\u2019s this other avenue of attack in space, which is to let the private companies design, build and own the hardware and then for the government to pay those companies for access to space. This is already happening with cargo going to the International Space Station, and in the next few years, U.S. astronauts will fly \"commercial\" into orbit. SpaceX is already building a huge rocket called the Falcon Heavy. The George W. Bush administration pushed commercial space, which helped SpaceX get going, and then Obama doubled down on it. So this is a bipartisan concept, to the extent that anything in Washington is bipartisan.The problem is that it won\u2019t make some of the big aerospace contractors happy. And that means it won't make some powerful lawmakers happy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow the money, someone once said.*****Novelist\u00a0David Brin, author of Earth, The Postman and Heart of the Comet,\u00a0emailed a response to this blog item:Joel. I like most of your reporting a lot, but the piece on Trump and NASA, while informative, seems to miss an undercurrent.\u00a0Neither Democrats nor Republicans are eager for an all-out \"Mars or Bust\" push, though both see it as a long term goal. The alternative to the Moon is not Mars, it is\u00a0asteroids.Most of the scientific community and all the new space entrepreneurs, from [Elon] Musk and Bezos and [Peter] Diamandis to Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, are eager for missions to analyze the wide variety of near-Earth asteroids or NEOs. Ever since John Lewis wrote Mining the Sky, in the 1980s, we've known that some of these objects offer easy access to gobs of water \u2014 the massive necessity for space activities. Others offer prodigious amounts of iron, nickel, gold and platinum. Except for some meager ice at the hard-to-reach lunar poles, the moon has none of these things.For analysis of such samples, no place is better than lunar orbit, and that is why the Obama Administration aimed NASA there. Also, from lunar orbit, it would have been cool to offer transit services to all the wannabes and johnnies-come-lately who want to land on the sterile moon. Russians, Chinese, Europeans, billionaires...why do another useless \"joint program,\" when their prestige-race to imitate Apollo would make lively competition. And cash for our lunar-orbit station. More dusty, lunar footprints do nothing for us. Not at the bottom of that deep and useless gravity well.As it happens, this issue, like everything else, has become partisan. If you find some American wanting to go to the moon, it will almost always be a Republican. The facts and the math and any scintilla of national interest all point to asteroids. In fact, experience using asteroid resources could let us turn Phobos into a logistics hub, which would then make any Mars exploration much more practical. Moreover, many tech billionaires see the promise in potential trillions of return from asteroids, much to the horror of those whose fortunes depend on resource extraction from our dwindling planet.And another reflective email came from Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA's Astrobiology Program and Planetary Defense Coordination Office:Ideology has been a significant shaper and driver of the U.S. space program: the rabid anti-communism of the 1950s that led to the formation of NASA, the belief that capitalist democracy is the only viable form of political economy, American exceptionalism, technological determinism, libertarianism \u2013 which is really big now in aerospace. It\u2019s shocking how firmly the Obama administration embraced it with regard to the space program, and it's going to get worse. Libertarian thinking has been driving the discourse about \"commercial\" space development for decades...Even President Carter gave a little lip service to \"commercial\" space development,\u00a0but it was the Reagan administration that first made a big deal about it \u2014 which is how I came to enter the space community, as editor of a long-defunct trade publication called Space Business News. So all this \"news\" about \u201ccommercial space\u201d sounds like old news to me \u2014 what the \"commercial\" people want is the same thing the aerospace megacorporations want \u2014 tax breaks, subsidies, big fat contracts, access to government facilities and expertise. SpaceX is already one of NASA's top 10 contractors and also is on the list of the U.S. government's top 100 contractors.Looking around the web:Jeff Foust at SpaceNews discusses the landing team and warns against reading too much into the background of its members.Keith Cowing at NASAWatch has a blog post about old vs. new, traditional vs. commercial.Read more:NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Which way to space? Mars is not a Plan BWhy it's hard to get to MarsElon Musk wants to colonize Mars, but don't pack your bags just yet Old Space vs. New Space may be more important than moon vs. Mars. How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3599",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/03/how-trump-could-really-disrupt-nasa-and-the-space-program/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.The Trump people are taking over NASA, and it\u2019s hard to predict how this will play out for the agency's human spaceflight program. That\u2019s in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology don\u2019t apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, there\u2019s no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat reversed, because a lot of Republicans support Big Government human spaceflight projects, as we\u2019ll discuss in a moment.) Moreover, the president-elect hasn\u2019t said much about space, and space wasn\u2019t an issue in his campaign, either. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo the extent that Donald Trump has signaled any intentions, it's in the makeup of the \"landing team\" now at NASA to plan the transition. The team has several people who have shown interest in going back to the moon. So, as we've reported, the moon could be very much back in play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn these waning days of the Obama administration, NASA continues to brand its programs as part of a \u201cJourney to Mars.\u201d The label is, to some degree, public relations pure and simple. In the near term, NASA's plan is to send astronauts around the moon in a series of missions in the 2020s. Why? Because there's nowhere else to go at the moment given current funding and hardware. Trump\u2019s people could say, hold on, let's actually land on the moon. That would require new hardware or international partners and a lot of money. Some moon advocates say there are resources there, such as ice, that could be turned into fuel for a Mars mission.Andy Weir and \"The Martian\" may have saved the space programA couple of weeks ago, Trump spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley, and afterward Brinkley said Trump \u201cwas very interested in a man going to the moon and the moon shot.\u201d That generated some press, because of the Mars vs. moon debate, but most likely Trump was merely thinking about how he could take a page from President John F. Kennedy when he gives his inaugural address. This was about style, not the space program, in other words.The people who want to go to Mars right away say the moon is a diversion and would result in many decades of delay. They note that the moon and Mars are completely different. Yes, they\u2019re both round objects in outer space,\u00a0 but beyond that, they\u2019re an apple and an orange. Each presents unique challenges for descent and landing, resource utilization, communications, crew psychology and more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet the moon-Mars question actually may not be the most consequential fork in the road for NASA. If the Trump folks want to be really disruptive, they could veer more dramatically toward commercial contracts and away from traditional contracts. They could favor \"New Space\" vs. \"Old Space,\" to be overly simplistic about it. (Disclosure: Among the most prominent entrepreneurial space companies is Blue Origin, which, like The Washington Post, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)Golden Spike space tourism company offers $750 million trips to the moonThe landing team at NASA was recently expanded to include several people associated with commercial space. Among them: Alan Stern, whom readers will recognize as the leader of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. A few years ago, Stern formed a company aspiring to create commercial flights to the moon.The Trump folks could conceivably take the radical step of killing the SLS rocket\u00a0--\u00a0the Space Launch System, a descendant of the heavy-lift rocket pushed a decade ago by the George W. Bush administration under its Constellation program. Obama officially killed Constellation, but elements survived, protected by several powerful senators. Those include the SLS and Orion, a crew capsule now in its second decade of development, with a price tag north of $10 billion. The idea is, the SLS will launch Orion into outer space, and Orion will orbit the moon, and the astronauts will return to Earth, and then they'll do that a bunch more times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s hard to kill big space programs that cost a lot of money. Think: stakeholders. Think: too big to fail.But there\u2019s this other avenue of attack in space, which is to let the private companies design, build and own the hardware and then for the government to pay those companies for access to space. This is already happening with cargo going to the International Space Station, and in the next few years, U.S. astronauts will fly \"commercial\" into orbit. SpaceX is already building a huge rocket called the Falcon Heavy. The George W. Bush administration pushed commercial space, which helped SpaceX get going, and then Obama doubled down on it. So this is a bipartisan concept, to the extent that anything in Washington is bipartisan.The problem is that it won\u2019t make some of the big aerospace contractors happy. And that means it won't make some powerful lawmakers happy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow the money, someone once said.*****Novelist\u00a0David Brin, author of Earth, The Postman and Heart of the Comet,\u00a0emailed a response to this blog item:Joel. I like most of your reporting a lot, but the piece on Trump and NASA, while informative, seems to miss an undercurrent.\u00a0Neither Democrats nor Republicans are eager for an all-out \"Mars or Bust\" push, though both see it as a long term goal. The alternative to the Moon is not Mars, it is\u00a0asteroids.Most of the scientific community and all the new space entrepreneurs, from [Elon] Musk and Bezos and [Peter] Diamandis to Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, are eager for missions to analyze the wide variety of near-Earth asteroids or NEOs. Ever since John Lewis wrote Mining the Sky, in the 1980s, we've known that some of these objects offer easy access to gobs of water \u2014 the massive necessity for space activities. Others offer prodigious amounts of iron, nickel, gold and platinum. Except for some meager ice at the hard-to-reach lunar poles, the moon has none of these things.For analysis of such samples, no place is better than lunar orbit, and that is why the Obama Administration aimed NASA there. Also, from lunar orbit, it would have been cool to offer transit services to all the wannabes and johnnies-come-lately who want to land on the sterile moon. Russians, Chinese, Europeans, billionaires...why do another useless \"joint program,\" when their prestige-race to imitate Apollo would make lively competition. And cash for our lunar-orbit station. More dusty, lunar footprints do nothing for us. Not at the bottom of that deep and useless gravity well.As it happens, this issue, like everything else, has become partisan. If you find some American wanting to go to the moon, it will almost always be a Republican. The facts and the math and any scintilla of national interest all point to asteroids. In fact, experience using asteroid resources could let us turn Phobos into a logistics hub, which would then make any Mars exploration much more practical. Moreover, many tech billionaires see the promise in potential trillions of return from asteroids, much to the horror of those whose fortunes depend on resource extraction from our dwindling planet.And another reflective email came from Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA's Astrobiology Program and Planetary Defense Coordination Office:Ideology has been a significant shaper and driver of the U.S. space program: the rabid anti-communism of the 1950s that led to the formation of NASA, the belief that capitalist democracy is the only viable form of political economy, American exceptionalism, technological determinism, libertarianism \u2013 which is really big now in aerospace. It\u2019s shocking how firmly the Obama administration embraced it with regard to the space program, and it's going to get worse. Libertarian thinking has been driving the discourse about \"commercial\" space development for decades...Even President Carter gave a little lip service to \"commercial\" space development,\u00a0but it was the Reagan administration that first made a big deal about it \u2014 which is how I came to enter the space community, as editor of a long-defunct trade publication called Space Business News. So all this \"news\" about \u201ccommercial space\u201d sounds like old news to me \u2014 what the \"commercial\" people want is the same thing the aerospace megacorporations want \u2014 tax breaks, subsidies, big fat contracts, access to government facilities and expertise. SpaceX is already one of NASA's top 10 contractors and also is on the list of the U.S. government's top 100 contractors.Looking around the web:Jeff Foust at SpaceNews discusses the landing team and warns against reading too much into the background of its members.Keith Cowing at NASAWatch has a blog post about old vs. new, traditional vs. commercial.Read more:NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Which way to space? Mars is not a Plan BWhy it's hard to get to MarsElon Musk wants to colonize Mars, but don't pack your bags just yet Old Space vs. New Space may be more important than moon vs. Mars. How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3600",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/03/how-trump-could-really-disrupt-nasa-and-the-space-program/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.The Trump people are taking over NASA, and it\u2019s hard to predict how this will play out for the agency's human spaceflight program. That\u2019s in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology don\u2019t apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, there\u2019s no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat reversed, because a lot of Republicans support Big Government human spaceflight projects, as we\u2019ll discuss in a moment.) Moreover, the president-elect hasn\u2019t said much about space, and space wasn\u2019t an issue in his campaign, either. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo the extent that Donald Trump has signaled any intentions, it's in the makeup of the \"landing team\" now at NASA to plan the transition. The team has several people who have shown interest in going back to the moon. So, as we've reported, the moon could be very much back in play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn these waning days of the Obama administration, NASA continues to brand its programs as part of a \u201cJourney to Mars.\u201d The label is, to some degree, public relations pure and simple. In the near term, NASA's plan is to send astronauts around the moon in a series of missions in the 2020s. Why? Because there's nowhere else to go at the moment given current funding and hardware. Trump\u2019s people could say, hold on, let's actually land on the moon. That would require new hardware or international partners and a lot of money. Some moon advocates say there are resources there, such as ice, that could be turned into fuel for a Mars mission.Andy Weir and \"The Martian\" may have saved the space programA couple of weeks ago, Trump spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley, and afterward Brinkley said Trump \u201cwas very interested in a man going to the moon and the moon shot.\u201d That generated some press, because of the Mars vs. moon debate, but most likely Trump was merely thinking about how he could take a page from President John F. Kennedy when he gives his inaugural address. This was about style, not the space program, in other words.The people who want to go to Mars right away say the moon is a diversion and would result in many decades of delay. They note that the moon and Mars are completely different. Yes, they\u2019re both round objects in outer space,\u00a0 but beyond that, they\u2019re an apple and an orange. Each presents unique challenges for descent and landing, resource utilization, communications, crew psychology and more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet the moon-Mars question actually may not be the most consequential fork in the road for NASA. If the Trump folks want to be really disruptive, they could veer more dramatically toward commercial contracts and away from traditional contracts. They could favor \"New Space\" vs. \"Old Space,\" to be overly simplistic about it. (Disclosure: Among the most prominent entrepreneurial space companies is Blue Origin, which, like The Washington Post, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)Golden Spike space tourism company offers $750 million trips to the moonThe landing team at NASA was recently expanded to include several people associated with commercial space. Among them: Alan Stern, whom readers will recognize as the leader of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. A few years ago, Stern formed a company aspiring to create commercial flights to the moon.The Trump folks could conceivably take the radical step of killing the SLS rocket\u00a0--\u00a0the Space Launch System, a descendant of the heavy-lift rocket pushed a decade ago by the George W. Bush administration under its Constellation program. Obama officially killed Constellation, but elements survived, protected by several powerful senators. Those include the SLS and Orion, a crew capsule now in its second decade of development, with a price tag north of $10 billion. The idea is, the SLS will launch Orion into outer space, and Orion will orbit the moon, and the astronauts will return to Earth, and then they'll do that a bunch more times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s hard to kill big space programs that cost a lot of money. Think: stakeholders. Think: too big to fail.But there\u2019s this other avenue of attack in space, which is to let the private companies design, build and own the hardware and then for the government to pay those companies for access to space. This is already happening with cargo going to the International Space Station, and in the next few years, U.S. astronauts will fly \"commercial\" into orbit. SpaceX is already building a huge rocket called the Falcon Heavy. The George W. Bush administration pushed commercial space, which helped SpaceX get going, and then Obama doubled down on it. So this is a bipartisan concept, to the extent that anything in Washington is bipartisan.The problem is that it won\u2019t make some of the big aerospace contractors happy. And that means it won't make some powerful lawmakers happy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow the money, someone once said.*****Novelist\u00a0David Brin, author of Earth, The Postman and Heart of the Comet,\u00a0emailed a response to this blog item:Joel. I like most of your reporting a lot, but the piece on Trump and NASA, while informative, seems to miss an undercurrent.\u00a0Neither Democrats nor Republicans are eager for an all-out \"Mars or Bust\" push, though both see it as a long term goal. The alternative to the Moon is not Mars, it is\u00a0asteroids.Most of the scientific community and all the new space entrepreneurs, from [Elon] Musk and Bezos and [Peter] Diamandis to Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, are eager for missions to analyze the wide variety of near-Earth asteroids or NEOs. Ever since John Lewis wrote Mining the Sky, in the 1980s, we've known that some of these objects offer easy access to gobs of water \u2014 the massive necessity for space activities. Others offer prodigious amounts of iron, nickel, gold and platinum. Except for some meager ice at the hard-to-reach lunar poles, the moon has none of these things.For analysis of such samples, no place is better than lunar orbit, and that is why the Obama Administration aimed NASA there. Also, from lunar orbit, it would have been cool to offer transit services to all the wannabes and johnnies-come-lately who want to land on the sterile moon. Russians, Chinese, Europeans, billionaires...why do another useless \"joint program,\" when their prestige-race to imitate Apollo would make lively competition. And cash for our lunar-orbit station. More dusty, lunar footprints do nothing for us. Not at the bottom of that deep and useless gravity well.As it happens, this issue, like everything else, has become partisan. If you find some American wanting to go to the moon, it will almost always be a Republican. The facts and the math and any scintilla of national interest all point to asteroids. In fact, experience using asteroid resources could let us turn Phobos into a logistics hub, which would then make any Mars exploration much more practical. Moreover, many tech billionaires see the promise in potential trillions of return from asteroids, much to the horror of those whose fortunes depend on resource extraction from our dwindling planet.And another reflective email came from Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA's Astrobiology Program and Planetary Defense Coordination Office:Ideology has been a significant shaper and driver of the U.S. space program: the rabid anti-communism of the 1950s that led to the formation of NASA, the belief that capitalist democracy is the only viable form of political economy, American exceptionalism, technological determinism, libertarianism \u2013 which is really big now in aerospace. It\u2019s shocking how firmly the Obama administration embraced it with regard to the space program, and it's going to get worse. Libertarian thinking has been driving the discourse about \"commercial\" space development for decades...Even President Carter gave a little lip service to \"commercial\" space development,\u00a0but it was the Reagan administration that first made a big deal about it \u2014 which is how I came to enter the space community, as editor of a long-defunct trade publication called Space Business News. So all this \"news\" about \u201ccommercial space\u201d sounds like old news to me \u2014 what the \"commercial\" people want is the same thing the aerospace megacorporations want \u2014 tax breaks, subsidies, big fat contracts, access to government facilities and expertise. SpaceX is already one of NASA's top 10 contractors and also is on the list of the U.S. government's top 100 contractors.Looking around the web:Jeff Foust at SpaceNews discusses the landing team and warns against reading too much into the background of its members.Keith Cowing at NASAWatch has a blog post about old vs. new, traditional vs. commercial.Read more:NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Which way to space? Mars is not a Plan BWhy it's hard to get to MarsElon Musk wants to colonize Mars, but don't pack your bags just yet Old Space vs. New Space may be more important than moon vs. Mars. How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3601",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/03/how-trump-could-really-disrupt-nasa-and-the-space-program/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.The Trump people are taking over NASA, and it\u2019s hard to predict how this will play out for the agency's human spaceflight program. That\u2019s in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology don\u2019t apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, there\u2019s no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat reversed, because a lot of Republicans support Big Government human spaceflight projects, as we\u2019ll discuss in a moment.) Moreover, the president-elect hasn\u2019t said much about space, and space wasn\u2019t an issue in his campaign, either. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo the extent that Donald Trump has signaled any intentions, it's in the makeup of the \"landing team\" now at NASA to plan the transition. The team has several people who have shown interest in going back to the moon. So, as we've reported, the moon could be very much back in play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn these waning days of the Obama administration, NASA continues to brand its programs as part of a \u201cJourney to Mars.\u201d The label is, to some degree, public relations pure and simple. In the near term, NASA's plan is to send astronauts around the moon in a series of missions in the 2020s. Why? Because there's nowhere else to go at the moment given current funding and hardware. Trump\u2019s people could say, hold on, let's actually land on the moon. That would require new hardware or international partners and a lot of money. Some moon advocates say there are resources there, such as ice, that could be turned into fuel for a Mars mission.Andy Weir and \"The Martian\" may have saved the space programA couple of weeks ago, Trump spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley, and afterward Brinkley said Trump \u201cwas very interested in a man going to the moon and the moon shot.\u201d That generated some press, because of the Mars vs. moon debate, but most likely Trump was merely thinking about how he could take a page from President John F. Kennedy when he gives his inaugural address. This was about style, not the space program, in other words.The people who want to go to Mars right away say the moon is a diversion and would result in many decades of delay. They note that the moon and Mars are completely different. Yes, they\u2019re both round objects in outer space,\u00a0 but beyond that, they\u2019re an apple and an orange. Each presents unique challenges for descent and landing, resource utilization, communications, crew psychology and more.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet the moon-Mars question actually may not be the most consequential fork in the road for NASA. If the Trump folks want to be really disruptive, they could veer more dramatically toward commercial contracts and away from traditional contracts. They could favor \"New Space\" vs. \"Old Space,\" to be overly simplistic about it. (Disclosure: Among the most prominent entrepreneurial space companies is Blue Origin, which, like The Washington Post, is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)Golden Spike space tourism company offers $750 million trips to the moonThe landing team at NASA was recently expanded to include several people associated with commercial space. Among them: Alan Stern, whom readers will recognize as the leader of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. A few years ago, Stern formed a company aspiring to create commercial flights to the moon.The Trump folks could conceivably take the radical step of killing the SLS rocket\u00a0--\u00a0the Space Launch System, a descendant of the heavy-lift rocket pushed a decade ago by the George W. Bush administration under its Constellation program. Obama officially killed Constellation, but elements survived, protected by several powerful senators. Those include the SLS and Orion, a crew capsule now in its second decade of development, with a price tag north of $10 billion. The idea is, the SLS will launch Orion into outer space, and Orion will orbit the moon, and the astronauts will return to Earth, and then they'll do that a bunch more times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s hard to kill big space programs that cost a lot of money. Think: stakeholders. Think: too big to fail.But there\u2019s this other avenue of attack in space, which is to let the private companies design, build and own the hardware and then for the government to pay those companies for access to space. This is already happening with cargo going to the International Space Station, and in the next few years, U.S. astronauts will fly \"commercial\" into orbit. SpaceX is already building a huge rocket called the Falcon Heavy. The George W. Bush administration pushed commercial space, which helped SpaceX get going, and then Obama doubled down on it. So this is a bipartisan concept, to the extent that anything in Washington is bipartisan.The problem is that it won\u2019t make some of the big aerospace contractors happy. And that means it won't make some powerful lawmakers happy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFollow the money, someone once said.*****Novelist\u00a0David Brin, author of Earth, The Postman and Heart of the Comet,\u00a0emailed a response to this blog item:Joel. I like most of your reporting a lot, but the piece on Trump and NASA, while informative, seems to miss an undercurrent.\u00a0Neither Democrats nor Republicans are eager for an all-out \"Mars or Bust\" push, though both see it as a long term goal. The alternative to the Moon is not Mars, it is\u00a0asteroids.Most of the scientific community and all the new space entrepreneurs, from [Elon] Musk and Bezos and [Peter] Diamandis to Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, are eager for missions to analyze the wide variety of near-Earth asteroids or NEOs. Ever since John Lewis wrote Mining the Sky, in the 1980s, we've known that some of these objects offer easy access to gobs of water \u2014 the massive necessity for space activities. Others offer prodigious amounts of iron, nickel, gold and platinum. Except for some meager ice at the hard-to-reach lunar poles, the moon has none of these things.For analysis of such samples, no place is better than lunar orbit, and that is why the Obama Administration aimed NASA there. Also, from lunar orbit, it would have been cool to offer transit services to all the wannabes and johnnies-come-lately who want to land on the sterile moon. Russians, Chinese, Europeans, billionaires...why do another useless \"joint program,\" when their prestige-race to imitate Apollo would make lively competition. And cash for our lunar-orbit station. More dusty, lunar footprints do nothing for us. Not at the bottom of that deep and useless gravity well.As it happens, this issue, like everything else, has become partisan. If you find some American wanting to go to the moon, it will almost always be a Republican. The facts and the math and any scintilla of national interest all point to asteroids. In fact, experience using asteroid resources could let us turn Phobos into a logistics hub, which would then make any Mars exploration much more practical. Moreover, many tech billionaires see the promise in potential trillions of return from asteroids, much to the horror of those whose fortunes depend on resource extraction from our dwindling planet.And another reflective email came from Linda Billings, a consultant to NASA's Astrobiology Program and Planetary Defense Coordination Office:Ideology has been a significant shaper and driver of the U.S. space program: the rabid anti-communism of the 1950s that led to the formation of NASA, the belief that capitalist democracy is the only viable form of political economy, American exceptionalism, technological determinism, libertarianism \u2013 which is really big now in aerospace. It\u2019s shocking how firmly the Obama administration embraced it with regard to the space program, and it's going to get worse. Libertarian thinking has been driving the discourse about \"commercial\" space development for decades...Even President Carter gave a little lip service to \"commercial\" space development,\u00a0but it was the Reagan administration that first made a big deal about it \u2014 which is how I came to enter the space community, as editor of a long-defunct trade publication called Space Business News. So all this \"news\" about \u201ccommercial space\u201d sounds like old news to me \u2014 what the \"commercial\" people want is the same thing the aerospace megacorporations want \u2014 tax breaks, subsidies, big fat contracts, access to government facilities and expertise. SpaceX is already one of NASA's top 10 contractors and also is on the list of the U.S. government's top 100 contractors.Looking around the web:Jeff Foust at SpaceNews discusses the landing team and warns against reading too much into the background of its members.Keith Cowing at NASAWatch has a blog post about old vs. new, traditional vs. commercial.Read more:NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Which way to space? Mars is not a Plan BWhy it's hard to get to MarsElon Musk wants to colonize Mars, but don't pack your bags just yet Old Space vs. New Space may be more important than moon vs. Mars. How Trump could really disrupt NASA and the space program",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visitor from beyond our solar system probed for signs of life. So far, it\u2019s silent. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3602",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/12/is-this-visitor-from-beyond-our-solar-system-an-asteroid-or-a-sign-of-life/",
        "text": "This article has been updated.Our solar system has a visitor. It's cylindrical, dark and reddish, a\u00a0quarter-mile long. The object won't be staying. This fall, astronomers announced that the thing came blazing into our neck of the galaxy at speeds of up to 196,000 mph. It\u00a0is now headed away as quickly as it came. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe object's trajectory is so strange and its speeds are so blistering\u00a0that it probably did not originate from within our solar system. Its discoverers concluded that the object is a rare\u00a0interstellar traveler from beyond our solar system, the first object of its kind\u00a0observed by humans.Astronomers at the University of Hawaii, who discovered\u00a0the object with the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, said the visitor was an asteroid. In October, they named the asteroid 'Oumuamua \u2014 Hawaiian for \u201cmessenger.\u201d\u00a0'Oumuamua, which appears rocky or metallic, lacks the characteristics of a comet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome scientists, though they are swift to say 'Oumuamua is probably natural, have not yet ruled out more extraordinary origins. \u201cThe possibility that this object is, in fact, an\u00a0artificial object\u00a0\u2014 that it is a spaceship, essentially \u2014 is a remote possibility,\u201d Andrew Siemion, director of the\u00a0Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center, told The Washington Post on Monday.Siemion is a member of the\u00a0Breakthrough Listen\u00a0initiative:\u00a0a $100 million project,\u00a0backed by Russian billionaire\u00a0Yuri Milner, to hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence.\u00a0This week, researchers with the Breakthrough Listen initiative announced\u00a0that a radio telescope will probe 'Oumuamua for signs of technology. The telescope, nestled within the hills of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, began its search Wednesday. The first round of radio observations, the team reported Thursday, detected no strange signals, but they\u2019ll keep listening.\u201cWe don\u2019t see anything continuously emitting from 'Oumuamua,\u201d Siemion said. He said the team is \u201cquite keen\u201d to examine observations in the 1 to 2 gigahertz frequencies to look for molecules associated with water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA slew of optical telescopes are continuing to look at 'Oumuamua,\u201d he said, \u201cand I suspect we will learn more about its size, shape and composition in coming days and weeks.\u201d (The Breakthrough Listen probe of 'Oumuamua will record a\u00a0whopping petabyte of raw data.) Siemion and his colleagues plan to submit a journal article\u00a0in December describing the\u00a0interstellar body.Psychologists at Arizona State University studied how humans are likely to respond to the discovery of alien microbes. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)'Oumuamua behaves oddly. Planets and asteroids\u00a0circle the sun on the same plane, like water swirling around a\u00a0basin. 'Oumuamua dipped into the solar system from outside the plane,\u00a0as if leaked\u00a0from a cosmic faucet.It is shaped strangely, too. Most asteroids of this size are spherical. This object has the proportions of a giant cucumber. In fact, Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb recently told Milner that 'Oumuamua has the optimal design of a vessel meant to travel through space, the Atlantic reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet all of its features are \u201centirely consistent with being a natural object,\u201d said Karen Meech, the University of Hawaii astronomer who led the research team to measure\u00a0'Oumuamua's physical properties.\u00a0\u201cThat being said, we cannot disprove the unlikely hypothesis that it is not.\u201dAstronomers across the planet have\u00a0turned their sensors at the object. The European Southern Observatory followed up on the initial Hawaiian detection from\u00a0Chile, peering at 'Oumuamua through the Very Large Telescope in Chile.Though the most likely explanation for 'Oumuamua\u00a0is that it's lifeless rock, scientists aren't about to let it breeze by without\u00a0scrutiny. That's why they\u00a0are using Green Bank. Over the past 18 months, SETI astronomers have installed detectors at the telescope to look for signs of electromagnetic activity in space.\u00a0If an electronic device no more powerful than a WiFi router or telephone handset is transmitting on 'Oumuamua, the telescope will be able to sense it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGreen Bank is the most capable radio telescope in the world for conducting these types of observations,\u201d Siemion said.\u201cThis is the sort of opportunity that one would hate to miss, even if the chances are extremely low for success,\u201d Meech said. SETI researchers typically\u00a0measure the distance to curious objects in light-years. 'Oumuamua is still within light-minutes of Earth.\u201cIf you don't try the experiment,\u201d she added, \u201cyou will never know.\u201dRead more:A space rock from another star is spotted in our solar system \u2014 a cosmic firstAn asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rockHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions. A space oddity is zipping through our solar system, and astronomers are probing it for signs of intelligent life. Visitor from beyond our solar system probed for signs of life. So far, it\u2019s silent.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visitor from beyond our solar system probed for signs of life. So far, it\u2019s silent. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3603",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/12/is-this-visitor-from-beyond-our-solar-system-an-asteroid-or-a-sign-of-life/",
        "text": "This article has been updated.Our solar system has a visitor. It's cylindrical, dark and reddish, a\u00a0quarter-mile long. The object won't be staying. This fall, astronomers announced that the thing came blazing into our neck of the galaxy at speeds of up to 196,000 mph. It\u00a0is now headed away as quickly as it came. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe object's trajectory is so strange and its speeds are so blistering\u00a0that it probably did not originate from within our solar system. Its discoverers concluded that the object is a rare\u00a0interstellar traveler from beyond our solar system, the first object of its kind\u00a0observed by humans.Astronomers at the University of Hawaii, who discovered\u00a0the object with the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, said the visitor was an asteroid. In October, they named the asteroid 'Oumuamua \u2014 Hawaiian for \u201cmessenger.\u201d\u00a0'Oumuamua, which appears rocky or metallic, lacks the characteristics of a comet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome scientists, though they are swift to say 'Oumuamua is probably natural, have not yet ruled out more extraordinary origins. \u201cThe possibility that this object is, in fact, an\u00a0artificial object\u00a0\u2014 that it is a spaceship, essentially \u2014 is a remote possibility,\u201d Andrew Siemion, director of the\u00a0Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center, told The Washington Post on Monday.Siemion is a member of the\u00a0Breakthrough Listen\u00a0initiative:\u00a0a $100 million project,\u00a0backed by Russian billionaire\u00a0Yuri Milner, to hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence.\u00a0This week, researchers with the Breakthrough Listen initiative announced\u00a0that a radio telescope will probe 'Oumuamua for signs of technology. The telescope, nestled within the hills of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, began its search Wednesday. The first round of radio observations, the team reported Thursday, detected no strange signals, but they\u2019ll keep listening.\u201cWe don\u2019t see anything continuously emitting from 'Oumuamua,\u201d Siemion said. He said the team is \u201cquite keen\u201d to examine observations in the 1 to 2 gigahertz frequencies to look for molecules associated with water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA slew of optical telescopes are continuing to look at 'Oumuamua,\u201d he said, \u201cand I suspect we will learn more about its size, shape and composition in coming days and weeks.\u201d (The Breakthrough Listen probe of 'Oumuamua will record a\u00a0whopping petabyte of raw data.) Siemion and his colleagues plan to submit a journal article\u00a0in December describing the\u00a0interstellar body.Psychologists at Arizona State University studied how humans are likely to respond to the discovery of alien microbes. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)'Oumuamua behaves oddly. Planets and asteroids\u00a0circle the sun on the same plane, like water swirling around a\u00a0basin. 'Oumuamua dipped into the solar system from outside the plane,\u00a0as if leaked\u00a0from a cosmic faucet.It is shaped strangely, too. Most asteroids of this size are spherical. This object has the proportions of a giant cucumber. In fact, Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb recently told Milner that 'Oumuamua has the optimal design of a vessel meant to travel through space, the Atlantic reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet all of its features are \u201centirely consistent with being a natural object,\u201d said Karen Meech, the University of Hawaii astronomer who led the research team to measure\u00a0'Oumuamua's physical properties.\u00a0\u201cThat being said, we cannot disprove the unlikely hypothesis that it is not.\u201dAstronomers across the planet have\u00a0turned their sensors at the object. The European Southern Observatory followed up on the initial Hawaiian detection from\u00a0Chile, peering at 'Oumuamua through the Very Large Telescope in Chile.Though the most likely explanation for 'Oumuamua\u00a0is that it's lifeless rock, scientists aren't about to let it breeze by without\u00a0scrutiny. That's why they\u00a0are using Green Bank. Over the past 18 months, SETI astronomers have installed detectors at the telescope to look for signs of electromagnetic activity in space.\u00a0If an electronic device no more powerful than a WiFi router or telephone handset is transmitting on 'Oumuamua, the telescope will be able to sense it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGreen Bank is the most capable radio telescope in the world for conducting these types of observations,\u201d Siemion said.\u201cThis is the sort of opportunity that one would hate to miss, even if the chances are extremely low for success,\u201d Meech said. SETI researchers typically\u00a0measure the distance to curious objects in light-years. 'Oumuamua is still within light-minutes of Earth.\u201cIf you don't try the experiment,\u201d she added, \u201cyou will never know.\u201dRead more:A space rock from another star is spotted in our solar system \u2014 a cosmic firstAn asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rockHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions. A space oddity is zipping through our solar system, and astronomers are probing it for signs of intelligent life. Visitor from beyond our solar system probed for signs of life. So far, it\u2019s silent.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visitor from beyond our solar system probed for signs of life. So far, it\u2019s silent. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3604",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/12/is-this-visitor-from-beyond-our-solar-system-an-asteroid-or-a-sign-of-life/",
        "text": "This article has been updated.Our solar system has a visitor. It's cylindrical, dark and reddish, a\u00a0quarter-mile long. The object won't be staying. This fall, astronomers announced that the thing came blazing into our neck of the galaxy at speeds of up to 196,000 mph. It\u00a0is now headed away as quickly as it came. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe object's trajectory is so strange and its speeds are so blistering\u00a0that it probably did not originate from within our solar system. Its discoverers concluded that the object is a rare\u00a0interstellar traveler from beyond our solar system, the first object of its kind\u00a0observed by humans.Astronomers at the University of Hawaii, who discovered\u00a0the object with the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, said the visitor was an asteroid. In October, they named the asteroid 'Oumuamua \u2014 Hawaiian for \u201cmessenger.\u201d\u00a0'Oumuamua, which appears rocky or metallic, lacks the characteristics of a comet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome scientists, though they are swift to say 'Oumuamua is probably natural, have not yet ruled out more extraordinary origins. \u201cThe possibility that this object is, in fact, an\u00a0artificial object\u00a0\u2014 that it is a spaceship, essentially \u2014 is a remote possibility,\u201d Andrew Siemion, director of the\u00a0Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center, told The Washington Post on Monday.Siemion is a member of the\u00a0Breakthrough Listen\u00a0initiative:\u00a0a $100 million project,\u00a0backed by Russian billionaire\u00a0Yuri Milner, to hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence.\u00a0This week, researchers with the Breakthrough Listen initiative announced\u00a0that a radio telescope will probe 'Oumuamua for signs of technology. The telescope, nestled within the hills of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, began its search Wednesday. The first round of radio observations, the team reported Thursday, detected no strange signals, but they\u2019ll keep listening.\u201cWe don\u2019t see anything continuously emitting from 'Oumuamua,\u201d Siemion said. He said the team is \u201cquite keen\u201d to examine observations in the 1 to 2 gigahertz frequencies to look for molecules associated with water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA slew of optical telescopes are continuing to look at 'Oumuamua,\u201d he said, \u201cand I suspect we will learn more about its size, shape and composition in coming days and weeks.\u201d (The Breakthrough Listen probe of 'Oumuamua will record a\u00a0whopping petabyte of raw data.) Siemion and his colleagues plan to submit a journal article\u00a0in December describing the\u00a0interstellar body.Psychologists at Arizona State University studied how humans are likely to respond to the discovery of alien microbes. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)'Oumuamua behaves oddly. Planets and asteroids\u00a0circle the sun on the same plane, like water swirling around a\u00a0basin. 'Oumuamua dipped into the solar system from outside the plane,\u00a0as if leaked\u00a0from a cosmic faucet.It is shaped strangely, too. Most asteroids of this size are spherical. This object has the proportions of a giant cucumber. In fact, Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb recently told Milner that 'Oumuamua has the optimal design of a vessel meant to travel through space, the Atlantic reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet all of its features are \u201centirely consistent with being a natural object,\u201d said Karen Meech, the University of Hawaii astronomer who led the research team to measure\u00a0'Oumuamua's physical properties.\u00a0\u201cThat being said, we cannot disprove the unlikely hypothesis that it is not.\u201dAstronomers across the planet have\u00a0turned their sensors at the object. The European Southern Observatory followed up on the initial Hawaiian detection from\u00a0Chile, peering at 'Oumuamua through the Very Large Telescope in Chile.Though the most likely explanation for 'Oumuamua\u00a0is that it's lifeless rock, scientists aren't about to let it breeze by without\u00a0scrutiny. That's why they\u00a0are using Green Bank. Over the past 18 months, SETI astronomers have installed detectors at the telescope to look for signs of electromagnetic activity in space.\u00a0If an electronic device no more powerful than a WiFi router or telephone handset is transmitting on 'Oumuamua, the telescope will be able to sense it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGreen Bank is the most capable radio telescope in the world for conducting these types of observations,\u201d Siemion said.\u201cThis is the sort of opportunity that one would hate to miss, even if the chances are extremely low for success,\u201d Meech said. SETI researchers typically\u00a0measure the distance to curious objects in light-years. 'Oumuamua is still within light-minutes of Earth.\u201cIf you don't try the experiment,\u201d she added, \u201cyou will never know.\u201dRead more:A space rock from another star is spotted in our solar system \u2014 a cosmic firstAn asteroid hunter explains how she\u2019s protecting Earth from a killer space rockHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions. A space oddity is zipping through our solar system, and astronomers are probing it for signs of intelligent life. Visitor from beyond our solar system probed for signs of life. So far, it\u2019s silent.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science funding spared under congressional budget deal, but more battles ahead (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3605",
        "date": "2017-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/01/science-funding-spared-under-congressional-budget-deal-but-more-battles-ahead/",
        "text": "The lights will stay on in the federal government, and also in the countless laboratories and universities that depend on federal funding for scientific and medical research. That's one upshot\u00a0of the bipartisan budget deal congressional negotiators reached late Sunday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe bill, clocking in at more than 1,600 pages, is likely to pass both houses of Congress and be signed into law by President Trump this week. It covers funding through September. This is welcome news for the research community, which had been shocked and dismayed by Trump's March 16 budget blueprint for fiscal 2018. What's unclear is whether the 2017 budget deal represents a full-throated repudiation of Trump's goals, or is just an act of political expediency \u2014 a rare bipartisan compromise designed to avoid an imminent government shutdown.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump's \u201cskinny budget\u201d for 2018 calls for massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. A more detailed 2018 budget from Trump's Office of Management and Budget is expected to be released in the coming weeks.But in the meantime, Congress hadn't even passed a 2017 budget \u2014 something it was supposed to do last year. The government has been operating on temporary spending measures based on the 2016 budget. The administration in late March sent to the Hill some suggestions for reductions to the fiscal 2017 budget. Among the suggestions: Cut $300 million from four programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), $50 million from the NASA science office, and $350 million from the National Science Foundation.Trump's budget calls for seismic disruption in federally funded researchScience and medical research, however, have long received bipartisan support, and that political reality has not changed under the Trump administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere are the Republican and Democratic wins in the $1 trillion funding package. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)The new budget deal calls for an additional $2 billion for NIH, including $300 million\u00a0for the cancer \u201cmoonshot\u201d initiative \u2014 the 21st Century Cures Act \u2014 championed by former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. The funding for the moonshot drew praise from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The budget deal also includes $175 million more for the National Cancer Institute.The new bill includes a small cut to the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fully funded, however, are programs designed to prepare for pandemics or bioterrorism attacks. The CDC will have $35 million in emergency funding to deal with the lead crisis in Flint, Mich. The effort to combat the Zika virus will be allotted $394 million.The Office of Adolescent Health\u2019s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program received $101 million, on par with 2016 funding. A Health and Human Services Department program to promote abstinence education for teenagers, now renamed \u201csexual risk avoidance\u201d in the new budget, increased its 2016 funding by 50 percent, to $15 million. Most federal money for sex education supports comprehensive programs, which also teach the use of contraception. Abstinence-only programs have faded in popularity as more research suggests it does not work to reduce teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and may actually worsen those problems. But advocates say more research is needed and have been lobbying Congress for more funding for their programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Energy Department's Office of Science will get a $42 million funding increase instead of the $900 million cut Trump called for in his budget blueprint. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) would get a modest increase, to $306 million, for 2017, which is good news for an agency marked for elimination by Trump and his budget team.The National Park Service will get a boost of $81 million over the 2016 level \u2014 money that can be used for long-needed repairs to park infrastructure nationwide.The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will receive $11 million more than last year. Some of that money will be used to boost funding for an effort to remove plants and animals from the endangered species list \u2014 a priority of conservatives. The bill maintains a one-year delay on any further Endangered Species Act status \u201creviews, determinations, and rulemakings\u201d for the greater sage-grouse, according to the summary provided by the House Appropriations Committee.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe U.S. Geological Survey will receive an additional $23 million. Nearly half of the USGS money is marked for an earthquake early-warning system.Trump had called for a 31 percent cut to EPA's budget for 2018, but the 2017 deal shows a 1 percent cut. The budget plan, as written by lawmakers, does carry with it some demands and restrictions. For example, EPA is prohibited from changing Clean Water Act exemptions for agriculture. It can't regulate lead in ammunition and fishing tackle that has led to eagle deaths and the poisoning of many other species.NASA will get an increase of $368 million, putting the agency within shouting distance of $20 billion overall for 2017.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a wonderful budget for NASA. This is higher than either the Senate or the House proposed individually,\u201d said Casey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society. The additional money includes funding for two missions to Europa, the intriguing moon of Jupiter. The first would be an orbiter, and the second a lander. Europa is believed to have a subsurface ocean, and a lander would include life-detection instruments. The Trump budget outline in March nixed money for the Europa lander, but such a mission has champions on the Hill.Brady Dennis, Lisa Rein, Sandhya Somashekhar and Lena Sun contributed to this report.Further Reading:Atom-smashing scientists are unnerved by harsh Trump budgetTrump has a new rocket and spaceship \u2014 where does he want to go? Does Trump really want to send astronauts to Mars right away? Despite Trump's goal of massive cuts, lawmakers on deadline continue support for science, health and environment agencies. Science funding spared under congressional budget deal, but more battles ahead",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science funding spared under congressional budget deal, but more battles ahead (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3606",
        "date": "2017-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/01/science-funding-spared-under-congressional-budget-deal-but-more-battles-ahead/",
        "text": "The lights will stay on in the federal government, and also in the countless laboratories and universities that depend on federal funding for scientific and medical research. That's one upshot\u00a0of the bipartisan budget deal congressional negotiators reached late Sunday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe bill, clocking in at more than 1,600 pages, is likely to pass both houses of Congress and be signed into law by President Trump this week. It covers funding through September. This is welcome news for the research community, which had been shocked and dismayed by Trump's March 16 budget blueprint for fiscal 2018. What's unclear is whether the 2017 budget deal represents a full-throated repudiation of Trump's goals, or is just an act of political expediency \u2014 a rare bipartisan compromise designed to avoid an imminent government shutdown.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump's \u201cskinny budget\u201d for 2018 calls for massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. A more detailed 2018 budget from Trump's Office of Management and Budget is expected to be released in the coming weeks.But in the meantime, Congress hadn't even passed a 2017 budget \u2014 something it was supposed to do last year. The government has been operating on temporary spending measures based on the 2016 budget. The administration in late March sent to the Hill some suggestions for reductions to the fiscal 2017 budget. Among the suggestions: Cut $300 million from four programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), $50 million from the NASA science office, and $350 million from the National Science Foundation.Trump's budget calls for seismic disruption in federally funded researchScience and medical research, however, have long received bipartisan support, and that political reality has not changed under the Trump administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere are the Republican and Democratic wins in the $1 trillion funding package. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)The new budget deal calls for an additional $2 billion for NIH, including $300 million\u00a0for the cancer \u201cmoonshot\u201d initiative \u2014 the 21st Century Cures Act \u2014 championed by former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. The funding for the moonshot drew praise from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The budget deal also includes $175 million more for the National Cancer Institute.The new bill includes a small cut to the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fully funded, however, are programs designed to prepare for pandemics or bioterrorism attacks. The CDC will have $35 million in emergency funding to deal with the lead crisis in Flint, Mich. The effort to combat the Zika virus will be allotted $394 million.The Office of Adolescent Health\u2019s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program received $101 million, on par with 2016 funding. A Health and Human Services Department program to promote abstinence education for teenagers, now renamed \u201csexual risk avoidance\u201d in the new budget, increased its 2016 funding by 50 percent, to $15 million. Most federal money for sex education supports comprehensive programs, which also teach the use of contraception. Abstinence-only programs have faded in popularity as more research suggests it does not work to reduce teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and may actually worsen those problems. But advocates say more research is needed and have been lobbying Congress for more funding for their programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Energy Department's Office of Science will get a $42 million funding increase instead of the $900 million cut Trump called for in his budget blueprint. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) would get a modest increase, to $306 million, for 2017, which is good news for an agency marked for elimination by Trump and his budget team.The National Park Service will get a boost of $81 million over the 2016 level \u2014 money that can be used for long-needed repairs to park infrastructure nationwide.The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will receive $11 million more than last year. Some of that money will be used to boost funding for an effort to remove plants and animals from the endangered species list \u2014 a priority of conservatives. The bill maintains a one-year delay on any further Endangered Species Act status \u201creviews, determinations, and rulemakings\u201d for the greater sage-grouse, according to the summary provided by the House Appropriations Committee.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe U.S. Geological Survey will receive an additional $23 million. Nearly half of the USGS money is marked for an earthquake early-warning system.Trump had called for a 31 percent cut to EPA's budget for 2018, but the 2017 deal shows a 1 percent cut. The budget plan, as written by lawmakers, does carry with it some demands and restrictions. For example, EPA is prohibited from changing Clean Water Act exemptions for agriculture. It can't regulate lead in ammunition and fishing tackle that has led to eagle deaths and the poisoning of many other species.NASA will get an increase of $368 million, putting the agency within shouting distance of $20 billion overall for 2017.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a wonderful budget for NASA. This is higher than either the Senate or the House proposed individually,\u201d said Casey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society. The additional money includes funding for two missions to Europa, the intriguing moon of Jupiter. The first would be an orbiter, and the second a lander. Europa is believed to have a subsurface ocean, and a lander would include life-detection instruments. The Trump budget outline in March nixed money for the Europa lander, but such a mission has champions on the Hill.Brady Dennis, Lisa Rein, Sandhya Somashekhar and Lena Sun contributed to this report.Further Reading:Atom-smashing scientists are unnerved by harsh Trump budgetTrump has a new rocket and spaceship \u2014 where does he want to go? Does Trump really want to send astronauts to Mars right away? Despite Trump's goal of massive cuts, lawmakers on deadline continue support for science, health and environment agencies. Science funding spared under congressional budget deal, but more battles ahead",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u2018worst plan yet\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3607",
        "date": "2017-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/17/mars-society-founder-blasts-nasa-for-worst-plan-yet/",
        "text": "Robert Zubrin started the Mars Society nearly two decades ago with the dream of creating a human settlement on the Red Planet.\u201cThe time has come for humanity to journey to Mars!\u201d he announced one night in the summer of 1998, at the group's founding convention in Boulder, Colo. He then read the society's Founding Declaration: \u201cWe must go, not for us, but for the people who are yet to be. We must do it for the Martians.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis reporter was there and filed a story for The Washington Post's Style section. In the years since, Zubrin has continued to lobby for humans to go to Mars \u2014 though no one has managed to get beyond low Earth orbit since the last moon landing in 1972. Until recently, NASA branded virtually everything it was doing as part of a \u201cJourney to Mars,\u201d and Mars remains the horizon goal. The destination was even mandated in a recent congressional authorization act for NASA that was signed by President Trump.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the meantime, NASA has more modest plans \u2014 and these plans don't please Zubrin, for one.NASA wants to put a \u201cspaceport\u201d in orbit around the moon. It would be a habitat for astronauts on long-duration missions. You could call it a \u201cspace station\u201d if you wanted, though it wouldn't be nearly as big as the one that's circling the Earth right now. NASA refers to it as the Deep Space Gateway and describes it as \u201ca crew tended spaceport in lunar orbit.\u201dThis is NASA's next big human spaceflight project, which is supposed to materialize in the mid-2020s. Astronauts would live in the spaceport for as much as a year at a time.The agency's stated goal is to test the systems necessary for a human mission to Mars. Any Mars mission would take something on the order of 2\u00bd years round-trip, with seven or eight months in transit each way. On a Mars mission, there's no turning around halfway. The crew can't be resupplied. The life support system can't be swapped out when something goes wrong. There are no pit stops \u2014 no oases in interplanetary space where one could pause to slake one's thirst.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo NASA wants to do what effectively would be a trial run, only at a point in space just three days away by rocket transport (as opposed to the International Space Station, which is more like three hours away).Trump has a new rocket and spaceship. Where's he want to go?The NASA lunar spaceport plan has the redeeming feature of being technologically doable in the near term under plausible budgets. But it's also a far more modest goal than sending humans to Mars.Zubrin, for one, thinks it's a terrible idea.\u201cNASA's Worst Plan Yet\u201d blares the headline in National Review over Zubrin's byline. He opens with a reference to the now-defunct, \u201cabsurd\u201d Asteroid Redirect Mission developed by NASA under President Barack Obama (The Washington Post described it as \u201cNASA's Mission Improbable.\") Then Zubrin writes: \u201cAmazingly, the space agency has managed to come up with an even dumber idea.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementZubrin considers the lunar spaceport a waste of money \u2014 an idea designed merely as a way to give the new Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule somewhere to go.We caught up with Zubrin on Tuesday at the Newseum, where he participated in a forum sponsored by the Atlantic titled \u201cOn the Launchpad: Return to Deep Space.\u201d (Among others speaking at the forum were Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and former NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan.)\u201cWhat we have right now is just drift \u2014 it's not a program,\u201d Zubrin told the forum. He said the lunar spaceport is not needed to go to Mars or even to the surface of the moon. It's just a way to spend money, he said:\u00a0\u201cThere is not a plan. This is random activity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter the presentations, Zubrin gave The Post some additional thoughts on what he perceives as NASA's failure to come up with a bold and coherent plan. He said that in the long history of NASA studies on the future of human spaceflight \u2014 and there is a long list of these lengthy reports \u2014 no one ever suggested that an orbital lunar outpost was a necessary part of an exploration program. Part of the problem, as he sees it, is the agency's recent announcement that the first, uncrewed flight of the Space Launch System rocket will be delayed again, to 2019: \u201cThe tragedy of SLS is not that it is being delayed. The tragedy is that it doesn't matter that it's being delayed, because there's nothing for it to launch anyway.\u201dNASA won't put astronauts on first flight of new rocketJohn Logsdon, professor emeritus of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, weighed in on Zubrin's comments.Advertisement\u201cRobert has always lived in a parallel universe of what ought to be rather than what is,\u201d Logsdon said gently as Zubrin stood beside him.Story continues below advertisementWe asked Logsdon why NASA is building this spaceport in lunar orbit.\u201cIt's a sneaky way to go back to the moon,\u201d he said.Zubrin chimed in, \u201cIf you want to go back to the moon, go back to the moon!\u201dThe backstory here is that President George W. Bush had a back-to-the-moon program, called Constellation. Obama killed it. Two of the three big elements of that program \u2014 a heavy-lift rocket and a new crew capsule \u2014 were preserved by powerful members of the Senate. The result is that NASA is spending billions of dollars on hardware to put astronauts in the vicinity of the moon, but there's no way to get them down to the surface. If an international partner offered up the money for a lander, NASA presumably could put astronauts back on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMary Lynne Dittmar, who advocates on behalf of the aerospace industry as head of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, defended the NASA plans on stage, and then again in an interview with The Post. We asked her about Logsdon's suggestion that NASA's lunar spaceport is really a way to get humans back on the moon.\u201cIt's not sneaky,\u201d she said, and pointed us to a NASA request for proposals for ways to deliver cargo to and from the lunar surface. She said the Deep Space Gateway makes sense: \u201cThink of the ISS as the first foothold. This is the second foothold.\u201dEveryone agrees that Mars is the horizon goal. But Mars is hard. The moon is close, cosmically speaking. We are already seeing a shift toward \u201ccommercial\u201d spaceflight, so it could be that the first people on Mars will arrive in spaceships with private company logos and participating in a reality TV show. (Crazier things have happened!) Elon Musk really wants to go to Mars with SpaceX, and his drive and ambition are not to be discounted. Jeffrey P. Bezos (disclosure: he owns The Washington Post) has invested much of his fortune in the rocket company Blue Origin, and he repeatedly has said he wants lots of people doing lots of things in space.So where will NASA be in, say, 2027?Logsdon said, \u201cHumans will be back on the moon.\u201dZubrin agreed: \u201cI think that's possible actually \u2014 if you're asking me what is likely, rather than what I'd like.\u201dRead more:With Trump, Gingrich and GOP calling the shots, NASA may return to the moon Our series of stories in 2013 for the project \u201cDestination Unknown\u201dTrump wants to send astronauts to Mars pronto Do we really need a \u201cspaceport\u201d for humans in orbit around the moon? Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u2018worst plan yet\u2019",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u2018worst plan yet\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3608",
        "date": "2017-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/17/mars-society-founder-blasts-nasa-for-worst-plan-yet/",
        "text": "Robert Zubrin started the Mars Society nearly two decades ago with the dream of creating a human settlement on the Red Planet.\u201cThe time has come for humanity to journey to Mars!\u201d he announced one night in the summer of 1998, at the group's founding convention in Boulder, Colo. He then read the society's Founding Declaration: \u201cWe must go, not for us, but for the people who are yet to be. We must do it for the Martians.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis reporter was there and filed a story for The Washington Post's Style section. In the years since, Zubrin has continued to lobby for humans to go to Mars \u2014 though no one has managed to get beyond low Earth orbit since the last moon landing in 1972. Until recently, NASA branded virtually everything it was doing as part of a \u201cJourney to Mars,\u201d and Mars remains the horizon goal. The destination was even mandated in a recent congressional authorization act for NASA that was signed by President Trump.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the meantime, NASA has more modest plans \u2014 and these plans don't please Zubrin, for one.NASA wants to put a \u201cspaceport\u201d in orbit around the moon. It would be a habitat for astronauts on long-duration missions. You could call it a \u201cspace station\u201d if you wanted, though it wouldn't be nearly as big as the one that's circling the Earth right now. NASA refers to it as the Deep Space Gateway and describes it as \u201ca crew tended spaceport in lunar orbit.\u201dThis is NASA's next big human spaceflight project, which is supposed to materialize in the mid-2020s. Astronauts would live in the spaceport for as much as a year at a time.The agency's stated goal is to test the systems necessary for a human mission to Mars. Any Mars mission would take something on the order of 2\u00bd years round-trip, with seven or eight months in transit each way. On a Mars mission, there's no turning around halfway. The crew can't be resupplied. The life support system can't be swapped out when something goes wrong. There are no pit stops \u2014 no oases in interplanetary space where one could pause to slake one's thirst.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo NASA wants to do what effectively would be a trial run, only at a point in space just three days away by rocket transport (as opposed to the International Space Station, which is more like three hours away).Trump has a new rocket and spaceship. Where's he want to go?The NASA lunar spaceport plan has the redeeming feature of being technologically doable in the near term under plausible budgets. But it's also a far more modest goal than sending humans to Mars.Zubrin, for one, thinks it's a terrible idea.\u201cNASA's Worst Plan Yet\u201d blares the headline in National Review over Zubrin's byline. He opens with a reference to the now-defunct, \u201cabsurd\u201d Asteroid Redirect Mission developed by NASA under President Barack Obama (The Washington Post described it as \u201cNASA's Mission Improbable.\") Then Zubrin writes: \u201cAmazingly, the space agency has managed to come up with an even dumber idea.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementZubrin considers the lunar spaceport a waste of money \u2014 an idea designed merely as a way to give the new Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule somewhere to go.We caught up with Zubrin on Tuesday at the Newseum, where he participated in a forum sponsored by the Atlantic titled \u201cOn the Launchpad: Return to Deep Space.\u201d (Among others speaking at the forum were Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and former NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan.)\u201cWhat we have right now is just drift \u2014 it's not a program,\u201d Zubrin told the forum. He said the lunar spaceport is not needed to go to Mars or even to the surface of the moon. It's just a way to spend money, he said:\u00a0\u201cThere is not a plan. This is random activity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter the presentations, Zubrin gave The Post some additional thoughts on what he perceives as NASA's failure to come up with a bold and coherent plan. He said that in the long history of NASA studies on the future of human spaceflight \u2014 and there is a long list of these lengthy reports \u2014 no one ever suggested that an orbital lunar outpost was a necessary part of an exploration program. Part of the problem, as he sees it, is the agency's recent announcement that the first, uncrewed flight of the Space Launch System rocket will be delayed again, to 2019: \u201cThe tragedy of SLS is not that it is being delayed. The tragedy is that it doesn't matter that it's being delayed, because there's nothing for it to launch anyway.\u201dNASA won't put astronauts on first flight of new rocketJohn Logsdon, professor emeritus of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, weighed in on Zubrin's comments.Advertisement\u201cRobert has always lived in a parallel universe of what ought to be rather than what is,\u201d Logsdon said gently as Zubrin stood beside him.Story continues below advertisementWe asked Logsdon why NASA is building this spaceport in lunar orbit.\u201cIt's a sneaky way to go back to the moon,\u201d he said.Zubrin chimed in, \u201cIf you want to go back to the moon, go back to the moon!\u201dThe backstory here is that President George W. Bush had a back-to-the-moon program, called Constellation. Obama killed it. Two of the three big elements of that program \u2014 a heavy-lift rocket and a new crew capsule \u2014 were preserved by powerful members of the Senate. The result is that NASA is spending billions of dollars on hardware to put astronauts in the vicinity of the moon, but there's no way to get them down to the surface. If an international partner offered up the money for a lander, NASA presumably could put astronauts back on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMary Lynne Dittmar, who advocates on behalf of the aerospace industry as head of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, defended the NASA plans on stage, and then again in an interview with The Post. We asked her about Logsdon's suggestion that NASA's lunar spaceport is really a way to get humans back on the moon.\u201cIt's not sneaky,\u201d she said, and pointed us to a NASA request for proposals for ways to deliver cargo to and from the lunar surface. She said the Deep Space Gateway makes sense: \u201cThink of the ISS as the first foothold. This is the second foothold.\u201dEveryone agrees that Mars is the horizon goal. But Mars is hard. The moon is close, cosmically speaking. We are already seeing a shift toward \u201ccommercial\u201d spaceflight, so it could be that the first people on Mars will arrive in spaceships with private company logos and participating in a reality TV show. (Crazier things have happened!) Elon Musk really wants to go to Mars with SpaceX, and his drive and ambition are not to be discounted. Jeffrey P. Bezos (disclosure: he owns The Washington Post) has invested much of his fortune in the rocket company Blue Origin, and he repeatedly has said he wants lots of people doing lots of things in space.So where will NASA be in, say, 2027?Logsdon said, \u201cHumans will be back on the moon.\u201dZubrin agreed: \u201cI think that's possible actually \u2014 if you're asking me what is likely, rather than what I'd like.\u201dRead more:With Trump, Gingrich and GOP calling the shots, NASA may return to the moon Our series of stories in 2013 for the project \u201cDestination Unknown\u201dTrump wants to send astronauts to Mars pronto Do we really need a \u201cspaceport\u201d for humans in orbit around the moon? Mars Society founder blasts NASA for \u2018worst plan yet\u2019",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Rocket Ship Reaches Space, a Milestone in Space Tourism (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3609",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/science/virgin-galactic-spaceship.html",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s company, which sent the crewed craft, SpaceShipTwo, more than 50 miles above Earth, is one of several racing to make space tourism a reality. Richard Branson\u2019s company, which sent the crewed craft, SpaceShipTwo, more than 50 miles above Earth, is one of several racing to make space tourism a reality. A Virgin Galactic spacecraft flew more than 50 miles above the Mojave Desert in California on Thursday morning, climbing into the edge of space for about a minute, a crucial milestone in the race to make big-business space tourism a reality.",
        "author": "By Matthew Haag"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Intelligent life probably exists on distant planets \u2014 even if we can\u2019t make contact, astrophysicist says (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3610",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/intelligent-life-probably-exists-on-distant-planets--even-if-we-cant-make-contact-astrophysicist-says/2021/06/18/ee6a5316-cd2d-11eb-8cd2-4e95230cfac2_story.html",
        "text": "Recently released Navy videos of what the U.S. government now classifies as \u201cunidentified aerial phenomena\u201d have set off another round of speculative musings on the possibility of aliens visiting our planet. Like other astrophysicists who have weighed in on these sightings, I\u2019m skeptical of their extraterrestrial origins. I am confident, however, that intelligent life-forms inhabit planets elsewhere in the universe. Math and physics point to this likely conclusion. But I think we\u2019re unlikely to be able to communicate or interact with them \u2014 at least in our lifetimes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWanting to understand what\u2019s \u201cout there\u201d is a timeless human drive, one that I understand well. Growing up in poorer and rougher neighborhoods of Watts, Houston\u2019s Third Ward and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, I was always intrigued by the night sky even if I couldn\u2019t see it very easily given big-city lights and smog. And for the sake of my survival, I didn\u2019t want to be caught staring off into space. Celestial navigation wasn\u2019t going to help me find my way home without getting beaten up or shaken down.From early childhood, I compulsively and continuously counted the objects in my environment \u2014 partly to soothe my anxieties and partly to unlock the mysteries inside things by enumerating them. This habit earned me nothing but taunts and bullying in my hood where, as a bookish kid, I was already a soft target. But whenever I looked up at a moonless night sky, I wondered how I might one day count the stars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy age 10, I\u2019d become fascinated, even obsessed, with Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity and the quantum possibilities for the multiple dimensions of the universe it opened up in my mind. By high school, I was winning statewide science fairs by plotting the effects of special relativity on a first-generation desktop computer.So perhaps it\u2019s not surprising that I have gone on to spend much of my career working with other astrophysicists to develop telescopes and detectors that peer into the remote reaches of space and measure the structure and evolution of our universe. The international Dark Energy Survey collaboration has been mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies, detecting thousands of supernovae, and finding patterns of cosmic structure that reveal the nature of dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our universe. Meanwhile, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time will make trillions of observations of 20 billion stars in the Milky Way.Scientists are creating the first maps of the universe\u2019s dark matterWhat we\u2019re discovering is that the cosmos is much vaster than we ever imagined. According to our best estimate, the universe is home to a hundred billion trillion stars \u2014 most of which have planets revolving around them. This newly revealed trove of orbiting exoplanets greatly improves the odds of our discovering advanced extraterrestrial life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientific evidence from astrobiology suggests that simple life \u2014 composed of individual cells, or small multicellular organisms \u2014 is ubiquitous in the universe. It has probably occurred multiple times in our own solar system. But the presence of humanlike, technologically advanced life-forms is a much tougher proposition to prove. It\u2019s all a matter of solar energy. The first simple life on Earth probably began underwater and in the absence of oxygen and light \u2014 conditions that are not that difficult to achieve. But what enabled the evolution of advanced, complex life on Earth was its adaptation to the energy of the sun\u2019s light for photosynthesis. Photosynthesis created the abundant oxygen on which high life-forms rely.It helps that Earth\u2019s atmosphere is transparent to visible light. On most planets, atmospheres are thick, absorbing light before it reaches the surface \u2014 like on Venus. Or, like Mercury, they have no atmosphere at all. Earth maintains its thin atmosphere because it spins quickly and has a liquid iron core, conditions that lead to our strong and protective magnetic field. This magnetosphere, in the region above the ionosphere, shields all life on Earth, and its atmosphere, from damaging solar winds and the corrosive effects of solar radiation. That combination of planetary conditions is difficult to replicate.Still, I\u2019m optimistic that there have been Cambrian explosions of life on other planets similar to what occurred on Earth some 541 million years ago, spawning a cornucopia of biodiversity that is preserved in the fossil record. The more expert we become in observing and calculating the outer reaches of the cosmos, and the more we understand about how many galaxies, stars and exoplanets exist, the greater the possibility of there being intelligent life on one of those planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor millennia, humans have gazed in wonder at the stars, trying to understand their nature and import. We developed telescopes only a few hundred years ago, and since then the dimensions of our observable universe have expanded exponentially with technological advances and the insights of quantum physics and relativity. Beginning in the early 1960s, scientists have tried to calculate the odds of advanced extraterrestrial life. In 1961, researchers at the NASA-funded search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) developed the \u201cDrake Equation\u201d to estimate how many civilizations in the Milky Way might evolve to develop the technology to emit detectable radio waves.Do we really want to know if we\u2019re not alone in the universe?Those estimates have been updated over the decades, most recently by Sara Seager\u2019s group at MIT, based on observations of exoplanets outside our solar system by successive generations of advanced space-based telescopes \u2014 such as the Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009, and NASA\u2019s MIT-led Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in 2018. Detecting the presence of life on exoplanets requires large telescopes outfitted with advanced spectroscopy instruments, which is what the James Webb Space Telescope will deliver when it launches in November.In 1995 the first exoplanet was discovered orbiting Pegasus 51, 50 light-years distant from Earth. Since then, there have been more than 4,000 confirmed discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy. More important, astronomers agree that almost all stars have planets, which radically improves the odds of our discovering intelligent life in the universe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the low end of consensus estimates among astrophysicists, there may be only one or two planets hospitable to the evolution of technologically advanced civilizations in a typical galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars. But with 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, that adds up to a lot of possible intelligent, although distant, neighbors.If only one in a hundred billion stars can support advanced life, that means that our own Milky Way galaxy \u2014 home to 400 billion stars \u2014 would have four likely candidates. Of course, the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe is much greater if you multiply by the 2 trillion galaxies beyond the Milky Way.Unfortunately, we\u2019re unlikely to ever make contact with life in other galaxies. Travel by spaceship to our closest intergalactic neighbor, the Canis Major Dwarf, would take almost 750,000,000 years with current technology. Even a radio signal, which moves at close to the speed of light, would take 25,000 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe enormity of the cosmos confronts us with an existential dilemma: There\u2019s a high statistical likelihood of intelligent life-forms having evolved elsewhere in the universe, but a very low probability that we\u2019ll be able to communicate or interact with them.Regardless of the odds, the existence of intelligent life in the universe matters deeply to me, and to most other humans on this planet. Why? I believe it\u2019s because we humans are fundamentally social creatures who thrive on connection and wither in isolation. In the past year, many of us felt the hardship of isolation as deeply as the threat of a potentially fatal infectious disease. Enforced seclusion during the pandemic tested the limits of our tolerance for separation and made us acutely aware of our interdependence with all life on Earth. So, it\u2019s no wonder that the idea of a trackless universe devoid of intelligent life fills us with the dread of cosmic solitary confinement.For a hundred years, we\u2019ve been emitting radio signals into space. For the past 60 years, we\u2019ve been listening \u2014 and so far, in vain \u2014 for the beginning of a celestial conversation. The prospect of life on other planets remains a profound one, regardless of our ability to contact and interact with them. As we await evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, I draw comfort from the knowledge that there are many powerful forces in the universe more abstract than the idea of alien intelligence. Love, friendship and faith, for example, are impossible to measure or calculate, yet they remain central to our fulfillment and sense of purpose.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I head into my mid-50s, I look forward with an infinity of hope to the moment when humans will finally make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence \u2014 in whatever far-flung star system they may live, and in whatever century or millennium moment that momentous meeting may occur. Until that day, I have no doubt that generations of young humans around the globe will continue to stand watch, looking skyward with the same sense of amazement and wonder that intoxicated me as a young boy.\n\nHakeem Oluseyi, president-elect of the National Society of Black Physicists, has taught and conducted research at MIT, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cape Town. His memoir, \u201cA Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars,\u201d co-written with Joshua Horwitz, was published last week.A new reason we haven\u2019t found alien life in the universeHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions.NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versaBlack scientists call out racism in the field and counter it Despite the odds, the existence of such life-forms in the universe matters deeply to me and many others on Earth. Intelligent life probably exists on distant planets \u2014 even if we can\u2019t make contact, astrophysicist says",
        "author": "Hakeem Oluseyi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Intelligent life probably exists on distant planets \u2014 even if we can\u2019t make contact, astrophysicist says (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3611",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/intelligent-life-probably-exists-on-distant-planets--even-if-we-cant-make-contact-astrophysicist-says/2021/06/18/ee6a5316-cd2d-11eb-8cd2-4e95230cfac2_story.html",
        "text": "Recently released Navy videos of what the U.S. government now classifies as \u201cunidentified aerial phenomena\u201d have set off another round of speculative musings on the possibility of aliens visiting our planet. Like other astrophysicists who have weighed in on these sightings, I\u2019m skeptical of their extraterrestrial origins. I am confident, however, that intelligent life-forms inhabit planets elsewhere in the universe. Math and physics point to this likely conclusion. But I think we\u2019re unlikely to be able to communicate or interact with them \u2014 at least in our lifetimes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWanting to understand what\u2019s \u201cout there\u201d is a timeless human drive, one that I understand well. Growing up in poorer and rougher neighborhoods of Watts, Houston\u2019s Third Ward and the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, I was always intrigued by the night sky even if I couldn\u2019t see it very easily given big-city lights and smog. And for the sake of my survival, I didn\u2019t want to be caught staring off into space. Celestial navigation wasn\u2019t going to help me find my way home without getting beaten up or shaken down.From early childhood, I compulsively and continuously counted the objects in my environment \u2014 partly to soothe my anxieties and partly to unlock the mysteries inside things by enumerating them. This habit earned me nothing but taunts and bullying in my hood where, as a bookish kid, I was already a soft target. But whenever I looked up at a moonless night sky, I wondered how I might one day count the stars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy age 10, I\u2019d become fascinated, even obsessed, with Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity and the quantum possibilities for the multiple dimensions of the universe it opened up in my mind. By high school, I was winning statewide science fairs by plotting the effects of special relativity on a first-generation desktop computer.So perhaps it\u2019s not surprising that I have gone on to spend much of my career working with other astrophysicists to develop telescopes and detectors that peer into the remote reaches of space and measure the structure and evolution of our universe. The international Dark Energy Survey collaboration has been mapping hundreds of millions of galaxies, detecting thousands of supernovae, and finding patterns of cosmic structure that reveal the nature of dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our universe. Meanwhile, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time will make trillions of observations of 20 billion stars in the Milky Way.Scientists are creating the first maps of the universe\u2019s dark matterWhat we\u2019re discovering is that the cosmos is much vaster than we ever imagined. According to our best estimate, the universe is home to a hundred billion trillion stars \u2014 most of which have planets revolving around them. This newly revealed trove of orbiting exoplanets greatly improves the odds of our discovering advanced extraterrestrial life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientific evidence from astrobiology suggests that simple life \u2014 composed of individual cells, or small multicellular organisms \u2014 is ubiquitous in the universe. It has probably occurred multiple times in our own solar system. But the presence of humanlike, technologically advanced life-forms is a much tougher proposition to prove. It\u2019s all a matter of solar energy. The first simple life on Earth probably began underwater and in the absence of oxygen and light \u2014 conditions that are not that difficult to achieve. But what enabled the evolution of advanced, complex life on Earth was its adaptation to the energy of the sun\u2019s light for photosynthesis. Photosynthesis created the abundant oxygen on which high life-forms rely.It helps that Earth\u2019s atmosphere is transparent to visible light. On most planets, atmospheres are thick, absorbing light before it reaches the surface \u2014 like on Venus. Or, like Mercury, they have no atmosphere at all. Earth maintains its thin atmosphere because it spins quickly and has a liquid iron core, conditions that lead to our strong and protective magnetic field. This magnetosphere, in the region above the ionosphere, shields all life on Earth, and its atmosphere, from damaging solar winds and the corrosive effects of solar radiation. That combination of planetary conditions is difficult to replicate.Still, I\u2019m optimistic that there have been Cambrian explosions of life on other planets similar to what occurred on Earth some 541 million years ago, spawning a cornucopia of biodiversity that is preserved in the fossil record. The more expert we become in observing and calculating the outer reaches of the cosmos, and the more we understand about how many galaxies, stars and exoplanets exist, the greater the possibility of there being intelligent life on one of those planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor millennia, humans have gazed in wonder at the stars, trying to understand their nature and import. We developed telescopes only a few hundred years ago, and since then the dimensions of our observable universe have expanded exponentially with technological advances and the insights of quantum physics and relativity. Beginning in the early 1960s, scientists have tried to calculate the odds of advanced extraterrestrial life. In 1961, researchers at the NASA-funded search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) developed the \u201cDrake Equation\u201d to estimate how many civilizations in the Milky Way might evolve to develop the technology to emit detectable radio waves.Do we really want to know if we\u2019re not alone in the universe?Those estimates have been updated over the decades, most recently by Sara Seager\u2019s group at MIT, based on observations of exoplanets outside our solar system by successive generations of advanced space-based telescopes \u2014 such as the Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009, and NASA\u2019s MIT-led Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in 2018. Detecting the presence of life on exoplanets requires large telescopes outfitted with advanced spectroscopy instruments, which is what the James Webb Space Telescope will deliver when it launches in November.In 1995 the first exoplanet was discovered orbiting Pegasus 51, 50 light-years distant from Earth. Since then, there have been more than 4,000 confirmed discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy. More important, astronomers agree that almost all stars have planets, which radically improves the odds of our discovering intelligent life in the universe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the low end of consensus estimates among astrophysicists, there may be only one or two planets hospitable to the evolution of technologically advanced civilizations in a typical galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars. But with 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, that adds up to a lot of possible intelligent, although distant, neighbors.If only one in a hundred billion stars can support advanced life, that means that our own Milky Way galaxy \u2014 home to 400 billion stars \u2014 would have four likely candidates. Of course, the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe is much greater if you multiply by the 2 trillion galaxies beyond the Milky Way.Unfortunately, we\u2019re unlikely to ever make contact with life in other galaxies. Travel by spaceship to our closest intergalactic neighbor, the Canis Major Dwarf, would take almost 750,000,000 years with current technology. Even a radio signal, which moves at close to the speed of light, would take 25,000 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe enormity of the cosmos confronts us with an existential dilemma: There\u2019s a high statistical likelihood of intelligent life-forms having evolved elsewhere in the universe, but a very low probability that we\u2019ll be able to communicate or interact with them.Regardless of the odds, the existence of intelligent life in the universe matters deeply to me, and to most other humans on this planet. Why? I believe it\u2019s because we humans are fundamentally social creatures who thrive on connection and wither in isolation. In the past year, many of us felt the hardship of isolation as deeply as the threat of a potentially fatal infectious disease. Enforced seclusion during the pandemic tested the limits of our tolerance for separation and made us acutely aware of our interdependence with all life on Earth. So, it\u2019s no wonder that the idea of a trackless universe devoid of intelligent life fills us with the dread of cosmic solitary confinement.For a hundred years, we\u2019ve been emitting radio signals into space. For the past 60 years, we\u2019ve been listening \u2014 and so far, in vain \u2014 for the beginning of a celestial conversation. The prospect of life on other planets remains a profound one, regardless of our ability to contact and interact with them. As we await evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, I draw comfort from the knowledge that there are many powerful forces in the universe more abstract than the idea of alien intelligence. Love, friendship and faith, for example, are impossible to measure or calculate, yet they remain central to our fulfillment and sense of purpose.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs I head into my mid-50s, I look forward with an infinity of hope to the moment when humans will finally make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence \u2014 in whatever far-flung star system they may live, and in whatever century or millennium moment that momentous meeting may occur. Until that day, I have no doubt that generations of young humans around the globe will continue to stand watch, looking skyward with the same sense of amazement and wonder that intoxicated me as a young boy.\n\nHakeem Oluseyi, president-elect of the National Society of Black Physicists, has taught and conducted research at MIT, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cape Town. His memoir, \u201cA Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars,\u201d co-written with Joshua Horwitz, was published last week.A new reason we haven\u2019t found alien life in the universeHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions.NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versaBlack scientists call out racism in the field and counter it Despite the odds, the existence of such life-forms in the universe matters deeply to me and many others on Earth. Intelligent life probably exists on distant planets \u2014 even if we can\u2019t make contact, astrophysicist says",
        "author": "Hakeem Oluseyi"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It has to be something, but it could be infinity\u2019: Trump ponders space in strange ceremony (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3612",
        "date": "2017-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/01/it-has-to-be-something-but-it-could-be-infinity-trump-ponders-space-in-strange-ceremony/",
        "text": "President Trump's ceremony Friday\u00a0to bring back the National Space Council began to confuse\u00a0people even before it took place.It was, Trump would say, a big deal: an executive order to\u00a0resurrect an advisory council that kick-started the first\u00a0moon missions 60 years ago, went dormant in the 1990s, and\u00a0could now\u00a0lead astronauts into deep space \u2014 even Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAt some point in the future, we\u2019re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?\u201d\u00a0is how the president put it.Yet the signing surprised many: The White House had not listed the ceremony on the president's calendar,\u00a0no\u00a0one from NASA\u00a0headquarters came,\u00a0and the only female astronaut in attendance was left off the thank-you list.Story continues below advertisementNot to mention\u00a0the president's sometimes\u00a0baffling remarks about the cosmos.This is a bit of Trump's remarks about space today during his E.O. signing. Just listen (and watch Buzz Aldrin's face). pic.twitter.com/hrUFAUpptX\u2014 Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 30, 2017\n\nPraise for\u00a0the\u00a0(male)\u00a0astronautsAdvertisementVice President Pence, who will chair the new space council, introduced the president and others gathered in the Roosevelt Room.\u201cEspecially the three American astronauts,\u201d he said, listing NASA's Alvin Drew, former astronaut David Wolf, and \u201cthe second man on the moon: the legendary Buzz Aldrin.\u201d\u201cWelcome to the White House,\u201d Pence said.But he didn't mention\u00a0the former astronaut\u00a0standing\u00a0about five\u00a0feet away\u00a0\u2014 Sandy Magnus.Trump would also name the three male astronauts without mentioning Magnus \u2014 an omission\u00a0quickly noticed in the wider space community.Pence and Trump talked about the \"3\" astronauts in the room: Wolf, Drew & Aldrin. But there were 4 - Sandy Magnus, standing right there.\u2014 Marcia Smith (@SpcPlcyOnline) June 30, 2017\n\nMagnus didn't seem put out, though. The next morning she wrote\u00a0she had attended the ceremony as executive\u00a0director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and hadn't been wearing a\u00a0NASA uniform like two of the men.Hey everyone-I appreciate your comments, but I was attending as the AIAA Exec Dir not as an \"Astro\" so no worries! (No blue jacket)\u2014 Sandy Magnus (@Astro_Sandy) July 1, 2017\n\n\u201cCan you believe that space is going to do that?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Pence finished his introduction, it was on to the president \u2014 a known space aficionado who\u00a0once phoned astronauts in orbit\u00a0and asked them to hurry up and get to Mars.\u201cOur travels beyond the Earth propel scientific discoveries that improve our lives in countless ways here,\u201d Trump said, listing new industry, technology and \u201cspace security\u201d among the benefits.\u201cAt some point in the future, we\u2019re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?\u201d Trump then said, causing Buzz Aldrin's eyebrows to shoot up.Eyebrows across the Internet would do likewise as Trump proceeded through his\u00a0speech, a mix of eloquence and questionable ad-libs.pic.twitter.com/5bwrSAOnZq\"One day we will look back and say how did we do it without space?\"-Donald Trump #makespacegreatagain? \ud83e\udd37\ud83c\udffc",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It has to be something, but it could be infinity\u2019: Trump ponders space in strange ceremony (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3613",
        "date": "2017-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/01/it-has-to-be-something-but-it-could-be-infinity-trump-ponders-space-in-strange-ceremony/",
        "text": "President Trump's ceremony Friday\u00a0to bring back the National Space Council began to confuse\u00a0people even before it took place.It was, Trump would say, a big deal: an executive order to\u00a0resurrect an advisory council that kick-started the first\u00a0moon missions 60 years ago, went dormant in the 1990s, and\u00a0could now\u00a0lead astronauts into deep space \u2014 even Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAt some point in the future, we\u2019re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?\u201d\u00a0is how the president put it.Yet the signing surprised many: The White House had not listed the ceremony on the president's calendar,\u00a0no\u00a0one from NASA\u00a0headquarters came,\u00a0and the only female astronaut in attendance was left off the thank-you list.Story continues below advertisementNot to mention\u00a0the president's sometimes\u00a0baffling remarks about the cosmos.This is a bit of Trump's remarks about space today during his E.O. signing. Just listen (and watch Buzz Aldrin's face). pic.twitter.com/hrUFAUpptX\u2014 Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 30, 2017\n\nPraise for\u00a0the\u00a0(male)\u00a0astronautsAdvertisementVice President Pence, who will chair the new space council, introduced the president and others gathered in the Roosevelt Room.\u201cEspecially the three American astronauts,\u201d he said, listing NASA's Alvin Drew, former astronaut David Wolf, and \u201cthe second man on the moon: the legendary Buzz Aldrin.\u201d\u201cWelcome to the White House,\u201d Pence said.But he didn't mention\u00a0the former astronaut\u00a0standing\u00a0about five\u00a0feet away\u00a0\u2014 Sandy Magnus.Trump would also name the three male astronauts without mentioning Magnus \u2014 an omission\u00a0quickly noticed in the wider space community.Pence and Trump talked about the \"3\" astronauts in the room: Wolf, Drew & Aldrin. But there were 4 - Sandy Magnus, standing right there.\u2014 Marcia Smith (@SpcPlcyOnline) June 30, 2017\n\nMagnus didn't seem put out, though. The next morning she wrote\u00a0she had attended the ceremony as executive\u00a0director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and hadn't been wearing a\u00a0NASA uniform like two of the men.Hey everyone-I appreciate your comments, but I was attending as the AIAA Exec Dir not as an \"Astro\" so no worries! (No blue jacket)\u2014 Sandy Magnus (@Astro_Sandy) July 1, 2017\n\n\u201cCan you believe that space is going to do that?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Pence finished his introduction, it was on to the president \u2014 a known space aficionado who\u00a0once phoned astronauts in orbit\u00a0and asked them to hurry up and get to Mars.\u201cOur travels beyond the Earth propel scientific discoveries that improve our lives in countless ways here,\u201d Trump said, listing new industry, technology and \u201cspace security\u201d among the benefits.\u201cAt some point in the future, we\u2019re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?\u201d Trump then said, causing Buzz Aldrin's eyebrows to shoot up.Eyebrows across the Internet would do likewise as Trump proceeded through his\u00a0speech, a mix of eloquence and questionable ad-libs.pic.twitter.com/5bwrSAOnZq\"One day we will look back and say how did we do it without space?\"-Donald Trump #makespacegreatagain? \ud83e\udd37\ud83c\udffc",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It has to be something, but it could be infinity\u2019: Trump ponders space in strange ceremony (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3614",
        "date": "2017-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/01/it-has-to-be-something-but-it-could-be-infinity-trump-ponders-space-in-strange-ceremony/",
        "text": "President Trump's ceremony Friday\u00a0to bring back the National Space Council began to confuse\u00a0people even before it took place.It was, Trump would say, a big deal: an executive order to\u00a0resurrect an advisory council that kick-started the first\u00a0moon missions 60 years ago, went dormant in the 1990s, and\u00a0could now\u00a0lead astronauts into deep space \u2014 even Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAt some point in the future, we\u2019re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?\u201d\u00a0is how the president put it.Yet the signing surprised many: The White House had not listed the ceremony on the president's calendar,\u00a0no\u00a0one from NASA\u00a0headquarters came,\u00a0and the only female astronaut in attendance was left off the thank-you list.Story continues below advertisementNot to mention\u00a0the president's sometimes\u00a0baffling remarks about the cosmos.This is a bit of Trump's remarks about space today during his E.O. signing. Just listen (and watch Buzz Aldrin's face). pic.twitter.com/hrUFAUpptX\u2014 Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 30, 2017\n\nPraise for\u00a0the\u00a0(male)\u00a0astronautsAdvertisementVice President Pence, who will chair the new space council, introduced the president and others gathered in the Roosevelt Room.\u201cEspecially the three American astronauts,\u201d he said, listing NASA's Alvin Drew, former astronaut David Wolf, and \u201cthe second man on the moon: the legendary Buzz Aldrin.\u201d\u201cWelcome to the White House,\u201d Pence said.But he didn't mention\u00a0the former astronaut\u00a0standing\u00a0about five\u00a0feet away\u00a0\u2014 Sandy Magnus.Trump would also name the three male astronauts without mentioning Magnus \u2014 an omission\u00a0quickly noticed in the wider space community.Pence and Trump talked about the \"3\" astronauts in the room: Wolf, Drew & Aldrin. But there were 4 - Sandy Magnus, standing right there.\u2014 Marcia Smith (@SpcPlcyOnline) June 30, 2017\n\nMagnus didn't seem put out, though. The next morning she wrote\u00a0she had attended the ceremony as executive\u00a0director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and hadn't been wearing a\u00a0NASA uniform like two of the men.Hey everyone-I appreciate your comments, but I was attending as the AIAA Exec Dir not as an \"Astro\" so no worries! (No blue jacket)\u2014 Sandy Magnus (@Astro_Sandy) July 1, 2017\n\n\u201cCan you believe that space is going to do that?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Pence finished his introduction, it was on to the president \u2014 a known space aficionado who\u00a0once phoned astronauts in orbit\u00a0and asked them to hurry up and get to Mars.\u201cOur travels beyond the Earth propel scientific discoveries that improve our lives in countless ways here,\u201d Trump said, listing new industry, technology and \u201cspace security\u201d among the benefits.\u201cAt some point in the future, we\u2019re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?\u201d Trump then said, causing Buzz Aldrin's eyebrows to shoot up.Eyebrows across the Internet would do likewise as Trump proceeded through his\u00a0speech, a mix of eloquence and questionable ad-libs.pic.twitter.com/5bwrSAOnZq\"One day we will look back and say how did we do it without space?\"-Donald Trump #makespacegreatagain? \ud83e\udd37\ud83c\udffc",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "President Trump relaunches the National Space Council (WP: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3615",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/30/trump-relaunches-the-national-space-council/",
        "text": "President Trump is bringing\u00a0back the National Space Council, a group formed 60 years ago aimed at coordinating the nation's activities beyond Earth. But with NASA still without an administrator, it's not yet clear what this means for Trump's vision for space exploration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAn executive order signed Friday appoints\u00a0Vice President Pence chairman of the resurrected advisory body, which will also include the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security; the NASA administrator; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and several other government officials. The order\u00a0also called for the establishment of a \u201cUsers' Advisory Group\u201d including representatives from states and private industry. \u201cWe're going to lead again,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt's been a long time, over 25 years, and we're opening up and we're going to lead again like we never led before. \u2026 The next great American frontier is space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBesides having not named a NASA administrator,\u00a0the president has not yet appointed a director for the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy, who also is supposed to sit on the council.I\u2019m honored and frankly enthusiastic about the role @POTUS has asked me to play in renewing our nation\u2019s commitment to space. pic.twitter.com/deAukbZzh7\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) June 30, 2017\n\nThe National Space Council was created during President Dwight Eisenhower's administration, with the aim of making sure there was someone close to the president to coordinate national policy on space.\u00a0It would eventually include the NASA administrator, some Cabinet secretaries for relevant agencies (Defense, Energy, Transportation) and a handful of other officials and heads of private industry.After Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u00a0became the first human in space in 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked the council to draft a report on where the United States\u00a0stood in comparison. The council ultimately suggested setting a moon landing as a national goal, and soon after, Kennedy\u00a0told\u00a0a Texas crowd: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe council's influence waned over the next few decades, and after a brief resurgence during the George H.W. Bush administration, it was ultimately disbanded.The component\u00a0agencies, especially NASA, tended to bristle\u00a0at the council's oversight, according to a history compiled by George Washington University space policy expert John Logsdon. Critics saw the council as adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to an already convoluted endeavor.But proponents of a revived National Space Council say it could help coordinate the nation's agenda\u00a0in an increasingly complex environment. Recently, the commercial space sector has\u00a0grown bigger and more\u00a0ambitious.\u00a0And\u00a0many critics have been frustrated by NASA's seeming lack of direction in the past few decades: First we were going to the moon, then\u00a0to Mars, now back to the moon, maybe?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGiven this diffuse space system, if there is to be a national strategy for space, it must come from the center of government,\u201d Logsdon wrote\u00a0this year.Trump has generally spoken about space travel in sweeping terms \u2014 \u201cAmerican footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,\u201d he said in a February address to Congress. Earlier this year, the president asked NASA to conduct a feasibility study to see if it could put astronauts on the first test flight of its new rocket and crew capsule; the agency ultimately rejected the idea. Now the plan seems to be for a \u201cDeep Space Gateway\u201d\u00a0\u2014 a crew-tended space port in lunar orbit, kind of like the International Space Station but farther away. The president has also indicated\u00a0he'd like to send people to Mars by his second term, though it's not clear how serious these plans are.Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary for the National Space Council under George H.W. Bush, applauded the decision to revive it. \u201cThe agenda for a White House-coordinating-body on space policy will be substantial and urgent,\u201d he told The Post in an email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House signing ceremony was held without much fanfare \u2014 it wasn't even on the president's daily schedule.\u00a0Four former astronauts and several members of Congress were on hand, and the\u00a0president gave the pen he used to Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon. Representatives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin\u00a0and other private companies were also in attendance.But some of the biggest names in the \u201cnew\u201d commercial space industry, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos of Blue Origin, were absent from the event. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)In a tweet, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation said it was \u201cencouraged\u201d by the executive order but hoped \u201cthe innovation and value of commercial space is adequately represented on [the] council.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlso missing were top officials from NASA. Though astronaut Benjamin Alvin Drew was in attendance, no one from headquarters was present for the signing.AdvertisementAfter the event, NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot issued a statement calling the establishment of the council \u201canother demonstration of the Trump administration\u2019s deep interest in our work.\u201dCorrection:\u00a0An earlier version of this story misstated what cabinet secretaries were initially involved in the National Space Council. The secretaries of Transportation and Energy were added to the council after those agencies were created in 1966 and 1977, respectively.\u00a0Read more:Analysis | Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term 'at worst'Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?Trump budget seeks huge cuts to science and medical research, disease prevention Vice President Pence will head the council, but a NASA administrator has yet to be appointed. President Trump relaunches the National Space Council",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "President Trump relaunches the National Space Council (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3616",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/30/trump-relaunches-the-national-space-council/",
        "text": "President Trump is bringing\u00a0back the National Space Council, a group formed 60 years ago aimed at coordinating the nation's activities beyond Earth. But with NASA still without an administrator, it's not yet clear what this means for Trump's vision for space exploration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAn executive order signed Friday appoints\u00a0Vice President Pence chairman of the resurrected advisory body, which will also include the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security; the NASA administrator; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and several other government officials. The order\u00a0also called for the establishment of a \u201cUsers' Advisory Group\u201d including representatives from states and private industry. \u201cWe're going to lead again,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt's been a long time, over 25 years, and we're opening up and we're going to lead again like we never led before. \u2026 The next great American frontier is space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBesides having not named a NASA administrator,\u00a0the president has not yet appointed a director for the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy, who also is supposed to sit on the council.I\u2019m honored and frankly enthusiastic about the role @POTUS has asked me to play in renewing our nation\u2019s commitment to space. pic.twitter.com/deAukbZzh7\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) June 30, 2017\n\nThe National Space Council was created during President Dwight Eisenhower's administration, with the aim of making sure there was someone close to the president to coordinate national policy on space.\u00a0It would eventually include the NASA administrator, some Cabinet secretaries for relevant agencies (Defense, Energy, Transportation) and a handful of other officials and heads of private industry.After Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u00a0became the first human in space in 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked the council to draft a report on where the United States\u00a0stood in comparison. The council ultimately suggested setting a moon landing as a national goal, and soon after, Kennedy\u00a0told\u00a0a Texas crowd: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe council's influence waned over the next few decades, and after a brief resurgence during the George H.W. Bush administration, it was ultimately disbanded.The component\u00a0agencies, especially NASA, tended to bristle\u00a0at the council's oversight, according to a history compiled by George Washington University space policy expert John Logsdon. Critics saw the council as adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to an already convoluted endeavor.But proponents of a revived National Space Council say it could help coordinate the nation's agenda\u00a0in an increasingly complex environment. Recently, the commercial space sector has\u00a0grown bigger and more\u00a0ambitious.\u00a0And\u00a0many critics have been frustrated by NASA's seeming lack of direction in the past few decades: First we were going to the moon, then\u00a0to Mars, now back to the moon, maybe?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGiven this diffuse space system, if there is to be a national strategy for space, it must come from the center of government,\u201d Logsdon wrote\u00a0this year.Trump has generally spoken about space travel in sweeping terms \u2014 \u201cAmerican footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,\u201d he said in a February address to Congress. Earlier this year, the president asked NASA to conduct a feasibility study to see if it could put astronauts on the first test flight of its new rocket and crew capsule; the agency ultimately rejected the idea. Now the plan seems to be for a \u201cDeep Space Gateway\u201d\u00a0\u2014 a crew-tended space port in lunar orbit, kind of like the International Space Station but farther away. The president has also indicated\u00a0he'd like to send people to Mars by his second term, though it's not clear how serious these plans are.Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary for the National Space Council under George H.W. Bush, applauded the decision to revive it. \u201cThe agenda for a White House-coordinating-body on space policy will be substantial and urgent,\u201d he told The Post in an email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House signing ceremony was held without much fanfare \u2014 it wasn't even on the president's daily schedule.\u00a0Four former astronauts and several members of Congress were on hand, and the\u00a0president gave the pen he used to Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon. Representatives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin\u00a0and other private companies were also in attendance.But some of the biggest names in the \u201cnew\u201d commercial space industry, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos of Blue Origin, were absent from the event. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)In a tweet, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation said it was \u201cencouraged\u201d by the executive order but hoped \u201cthe innovation and value of commercial space is adequately represented on [the] council.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlso missing were top officials from NASA. Though astronaut Benjamin Alvin Drew was in attendance, no one from headquarters was present for the signing.AdvertisementAfter the event, NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot issued a statement calling the establishment of the council \u201canother demonstration of the Trump administration\u2019s deep interest in our work.\u201dCorrection:\u00a0An earlier version of this story misstated what cabinet secretaries were initially involved in the National Space Council. The secretaries of Transportation and Energy were added to the council after those agencies were created in 1966 and 1977, respectively.\u00a0Read more:Analysis | Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term 'at worst'Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?Trump budget seeks huge cuts to science and medical research, disease prevention Vice President Pence will head the council, but a NASA administrator has yet to be appointed. President Trump relaunches the National Space Council",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "President Trump relaunches the National Space Council (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3617",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/30/trump-relaunches-the-national-space-council/",
        "text": "President Trump is bringing\u00a0back the National Space Council, a group formed 60 years ago aimed at coordinating the nation's activities beyond Earth. But with NASA still without an administrator, it's not yet clear what this means for Trump's vision for space exploration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAn executive order signed Friday appoints\u00a0Vice President Pence chairman of the resurrected advisory body, which will also include the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security; the NASA administrator; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and several other government officials. The order\u00a0also called for the establishment of a \u201cUsers' Advisory Group\u201d including representatives from states and private industry. \u201cWe're going to lead again,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt's been a long time, over 25 years, and we're opening up and we're going to lead again like we never led before. \u2026 The next great American frontier is space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBesides having not named a NASA administrator,\u00a0the president has not yet appointed a director for the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy, who also is supposed to sit on the council.I\u2019m honored and frankly enthusiastic about the role @POTUS has asked me to play in renewing our nation\u2019s commitment to space. pic.twitter.com/deAukbZzh7\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) June 30, 2017\n\nThe National Space Council was created during President Dwight Eisenhower's administration, with the aim of making sure there was someone close to the president to coordinate national policy on space.\u00a0It would eventually include the NASA administrator, some Cabinet secretaries for relevant agencies (Defense, Energy, Transportation) and a handful of other officials and heads of private industry.After Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u00a0became the first human in space in 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked the council to draft a report on where the United States\u00a0stood in comparison. The council ultimately suggested setting a moon landing as a national goal, and soon after, Kennedy\u00a0told\u00a0a Texas crowd: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe council's influence waned over the next few decades, and after a brief resurgence during the George H.W. Bush administration, it was ultimately disbanded.The component\u00a0agencies, especially NASA, tended to bristle\u00a0at the council's oversight, according to a history compiled by George Washington University space policy expert John Logsdon. Critics saw the council as adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to an already convoluted endeavor.But proponents of a revived National Space Council say it could help coordinate the nation's agenda\u00a0in an increasingly complex environment. Recently, the commercial space sector has\u00a0grown bigger and more\u00a0ambitious.\u00a0And\u00a0many critics have been frustrated by NASA's seeming lack of direction in the past few decades: First we were going to the moon, then\u00a0to Mars, now back to the moon, maybe?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGiven this diffuse space system, if there is to be a national strategy for space, it must come from the center of government,\u201d Logsdon wrote\u00a0this year.Trump has generally spoken about space travel in sweeping terms \u2014 \u201cAmerican footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,\u201d he said in a February address to Congress. Earlier this year, the president asked NASA to conduct a feasibility study to see if it could put astronauts on the first test flight of its new rocket and crew capsule; the agency ultimately rejected the idea. Now the plan seems to be for a \u201cDeep Space Gateway\u201d\u00a0\u2014 a crew-tended space port in lunar orbit, kind of like the International Space Station but farther away. The president has also indicated\u00a0he'd like to send people to Mars by his second term, though it's not clear how serious these plans are.Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary for the National Space Council under George H.W. Bush, applauded the decision to revive it. \u201cThe agenda for a White House-coordinating-body on space policy will be substantial and urgent,\u201d he told The Post in an email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House signing ceremony was held without much fanfare \u2014 it wasn't even on the president's daily schedule.\u00a0Four former astronauts and several members of Congress were on hand, and the\u00a0president gave the pen he used to Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon. Representatives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin\u00a0and other private companies were also in attendance.But some of the biggest names in the \u201cnew\u201d commercial space industry, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos of Blue Origin, were absent from the event. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)In a tweet, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation said it was \u201cencouraged\u201d by the executive order but hoped \u201cthe innovation and value of commercial space is adequately represented on [the] council.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlso missing were top officials from NASA. Though astronaut Benjamin Alvin Drew was in attendance, no one from headquarters was present for the signing.AdvertisementAfter the event, NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot issued a statement calling the establishment of the council \u201canother demonstration of the Trump administration\u2019s deep interest in our work.\u201dCorrection:\u00a0An earlier version of this story misstated what cabinet secretaries were initially involved in the National Space Council. The secretaries of Transportation and Energy were added to the council after those agencies were created in 1966 and 1977, respectively.\u00a0Read more:Analysis | Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term 'at worst'Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?Trump budget seeks huge cuts to science and medical research, disease prevention Vice President Pence will head the council, but a NASA administrator has yet to be appointed. President Trump relaunches the National Space Council",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "President Trump relaunches the National Space Council (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3618",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/30/trump-relaunches-the-national-space-council/",
        "text": "President Trump is bringing\u00a0back the National Space Council, a group formed 60 years ago aimed at coordinating the nation's activities beyond Earth. But with NASA still without an administrator, it's not yet clear what this means for Trump's vision for space exploration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAn executive order signed Friday appoints\u00a0Vice President Pence chairman of the resurrected advisory body, which will also include the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security; the NASA administrator; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and several other government officials. The order\u00a0also called for the establishment of a \u201cUsers' Advisory Group\u201d including representatives from states and private industry. \u201cWe're going to lead again,\u201d Trump said. \u201cIt's been a long time, over 25 years, and we're opening up and we're going to lead again like we never led before. \u2026 The next great American frontier is space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBesides having not named a NASA administrator,\u00a0the president has not yet appointed a director for the Office of\u00a0Science and Technology Policy, who also is supposed to sit on the council.I\u2019m honored and frankly enthusiastic about the role @POTUS has asked me to play in renewing our nation\u2019s commitment to space. pic.twitter.com/deAukbZzh7\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) June 30, 2017\n\nThe National Space Council was created during President Dwight Eisenhower's administration, with the aim of making sure there was someone close to the president to coordinate national policy on space.\u00a0It would eventually include the NASA administrator, some Cabinet secretaries for relevant agencies (Defense, Energy, Transportation) and a handful of other officials and heads of private industry.After Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin\u00a0became the first human in space in 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked the council to draft a report on where the United States\u00a0stood in comparison. The council ultimately suggested setting a moon landing as a national goal, and soon after, Kennedy\u00a0told\u00a0a Texas crowd: \u201cWe choose to go to the moon in this decade.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe council's influence waned over the next few decades, and after a brief resurgence during the George H.W. Bush administration, it was ultimately disbanded.The component\u00a0agencies, especially NASA, tended to bristle\u00a0at the council's oversight, according to a history compiled by George Washington University space policy expert John Logsdon. Critics saw the council as adding an extra layer of bureaucracy to an already convoluted endeavor.But proponents of a revived National Space Council say it could help coordinate the nation's agenda\u00a0in an increasingly complex environment. Recently, the commercial space sector has\u00a0grown bigger and more\u00a0ambitious.\u00a0And\u00a0many critics have been frustrated by NASA's seeming lack of direction in the past few decades: First we were going to the moon, then\u00a0to Mars, now back to the moon, maybe?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cGiven this diffuse space system, if there is to be a national strategy for space, it must come from the center of government,\u201d Logsdon wrote\u00a0this year.Trump has generally spoken about space travel in sweeping terms \u2014 \u201cAmerican footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,\u201d he said in a February address to Congress. Earlier this year, the president asked NASA to conduct a feasibility study to see if it could put astronauts on the first test flight of its new rocket and crew capsule; the agency ultimately rejected the idea. Now the plan seems to be for a \u201cDeep Space Gateway\u201d\u00a0\u2014 a crew-tended space port in lunar orbit, kind of like the International Space Station but farther away. The president has also indicated\u00a0he'd like to send people to Mars by his second term, though it's not clear how serious these plans are.Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary for the National Space Council under George H.W. Bush, applauded the decision to revive it. \u201cThe agenda for a White House-coordinating-body on space policy will be substantial and urgent,\u201d he told The Post in an email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House signing ceremony was held without much fanfare \u2014 it wasn't even on the president's daily schedule.\u00a0Four former astronauts and several members of Congress were on hand, and the\u00a0president gave the pen he used to Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the moon. Representatives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin\u00a0and other private companies were also in attendance.But some of the biggest names in the \u201cnew\u201d commercial space industry, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos of Blue Origin, were absent from the event. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)In a tweet, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation said it was \u201cencouraged\u201d by the executive order but hoped \u201cthe innovation and value of commercial space is adequately represented on [the] council.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlso missing were top officials from NASA. Though astronaut Benjamin Alvin Drew was in attendance, no one from headquarters was present for the signing.AdvertisementAfter the event, NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot issued a statement calling the establishment of the council \u201canother demonstration of the Trump administration\u2019s deep interest in our work.\u201dCorrection:\u00a0An earlier version of this story misstated what cabinet secretaries were initially involved in the National Space Council. The secretaries of Transportation and Energy were added to the council after those agencies were created in 1966 and 1977, respectively.\u00a0Read more:Analysis | Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term 'at worst'Trump, with NASA, has a new rocket and spaceship. Where\u2019s he going to go?Trump budget seeks huge cuts to science and medical research, disease prevention Vice President Pence will head the council, but a NASA administrator has yet to be appointed. President Trump relaunches the National Space Council",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3619",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/24/nasa-officials-discuss-trumps-push-for-first-term-moon-mission/",
        "text": "NASA generally proceeds slowly and incrementally \u2014 especially when human beings are blasted into space. But President Trump apparently wants to do something bold with the space program, and his team has asked NASA to consider speeding up a long-planned moon mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo NASA has launched a feasibility study to see what the risks and benefits would be if the agency added two astronauts to the first test flight of a new rocket and capsule. That flight, Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, is scheduled for November 2018. The new Space Launch System rocket would blast off with a new Orion capsule on top. The Orion would orbit the moon, undergoing a kind of stress test, and then return to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at tremendous speed and splashing down in an ocean.Story continues below advertisementNASA's current plan is to do this with mannequins aboard.AdvertisementOnly after this shakedown mission would it then put live astronauts into Orion and send them on toward the moon. That second mission is not scheduled until 2021.On Friday, two NASA officials held a teleconference with reporters to discuss the feasibility study, and they avoided signaling whether they think adding astronauts to a test flight is a good idea.\u201cI don\u2019t have a preconceived position as to whether I'm for this or against this,\u201d said William Gerstenmaier, an associate administrator who is the top official for human spaceflight. Echoing that sentiment was William Hill, a deputy associate administrator: \u201cWe will let the identified risk and benefits drive this, as well as the data.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA, heeding Trump, may try a first-term moon missionGerstenmaier said the first flight, if astronauts are involved, would probably last eight or nine days.The officials made clear that changing the current plan, and adding a crew to the first test flight, would increase the mission risk. Gerstenmaier said there are ways to limit the risk, including putting the Orion in an Earth orbit for a day or so to ensure that the life-support systems were working properly. If necessary, at that point the flight to the moon could be aborted. \u201cWe might lose the mission, but we could still protect the crew,\u201d he said.AdvertisementGerstenmaier said adding a crew would offer benefits: \u201cWe\u2019ll get a chance to test systems in a very rigorous way with a crew on board.\u201d Hill seemed to contradict that a few minutes later, saying that NASA would like to \u201cstress the systems\u201d on Orion in the initial flight, \u201cwhich we probably wouldn\u2019t do with a crew on board.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe feasibility study should be complete in about a month. Adding a crew would probably push a launch date for EM-1 into 2019, Gerstenmaier said. If it proves impossible to launch with a crew aboard by late 2019, he said, NASA would stick to the current plan of a crew on EM-2 in 2021.How Trump could really disrupt NASATrump has shown an interest in President John F. Kennedy's vow more than half a century ago to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, and, eyeing his reelection prospects, Trump\u00a0could potentially announce some kind of ambitious space mission for NASA, likely in combination with entrepreneurial space companies.AdvertisementBut a lot remains uncertain at NASA, including the top leadership posts. Trump and his team have yet to nominate anyone to run the agency, and NASA is currently guided by acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, a civil servant.Read more:With Trump, Gingrich and GOP in charge, NASA may go back to the moonNASA under Trump is waiting for marching orders Will trump echo JFK's moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars? NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Would NASA really replace mannequins with real-life astronauts in a brand new spaceship?  NASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon mission",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3620",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/24/nasa-officials-discuss-trumps-push-for-first-term-moon-mission/",
        "text": "NASA generally proceeds slowly and incrementally \u2014 especially when human beings are blasted into space. But President Trump apparently wants to do something bold with the space program, and his team has asked NASA to consider speeding up a long-planned moon mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo NASA has launched a feasibility study to see what the risks and benefits would be if the agency added two astronauts to the first test flight of a new rocket and capsule. That flight, Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, is scheduled for November 2018. The new Space Launch System rocket would blast off with a new Orion capsule on top. The Orion would orbit the moon, undergoing a kind of stress test, and then return to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at tremendous speed and splashing down in an ocean.Story continues below advertisementNASA's current plan is to do this with mannequins aboard.AdvertisementOnly after this shakedown mission would it then put live astronauts into Orion and send them on toward the moon. That second mission is not scheduled until 2021.On Friday, two NASA officials held a teleconference with reporters to discuss the feasibility study, and they avoided signaling whether they think adding astronauts to a test flight is a good idea.\u201cI don\u2019t have a preconceived position as to whether I'm for this or against this,\u201d said William Gerstenmaier, an associate administrator who is the top official for human spaceflight. Echoing that sentiment was William Hill, a deputy associate administrator: \u201cWe will let the identified risk and benefits drive this, as well as the data.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA, heeding Trump, may try a first-term moon missionGerstenmaier said the first flight, if astronauts are involved, would probably last eight or nine days.The officials made clear that changing the current plan, and adding a crew to the first test flight, would increase the mission risk. Gerstenmaier said there are ways to limit the risk, including putting the Orion in an Earth orbit for a day or so to ensure that the life-support systems were working properly. If necessary, at that point the flight to the moon could be aborted. \u201cWe might lose the mission, but we could still protect the crew,\u201d he said.AdvertisementGerstenmaier said adding a crew would offer benefits: \u201cWe\u2019ll get a chance to test systems in a very rigorous way with a crew on board.\u201d Hill seemed to contradict that a few minutes later, saying that NASA would like to \u201cstress the systems\u201d on Orion in the initial flight, \u201cwhich we probably wouldn\u2019t do with a crew on board.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe feasibility study should be complete in about a month. Adding a crew would probably push a launch date for EM-1 into 2019, Gerstenmaier said. If it proves impossible to launch with a crew aboard by late 2019, he said, NASA would stick to the current plan of a crew on EM-2 in 2021.How Trump could really disrupt NASATrump has shown an interest in President John F. Kennedy's vow more than half a century ago to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, and, eyeing his reelection prospects, Trump\u00a0could potentially announce some kind of ambitious space mission for NASA, likely in combination with entrepreneurial space companies.AdvertisementBut a lot remains uncertain at NASA, including the top leadership posts. Trump and his team have yet to nominate anyone to run the agency, and NASA is currently guided by acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, a civil servant.Read more:With Trump, Gingrich and GOP in charge, NASA may go back to the moonNASA under Trump is waiting for marching orders Will trump echo JFK's moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars? NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Would NASA really replace mannequins with real-life astronauts in a brand new spaceship?  NASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon mission",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3621",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/24/nasa-officials-discuss-trumps-push-for-first-term-moon-mission/",
        "text": "NASA generally proceeds slowly and incrementally \u2014 especially when human beings are blasted into space. But President Trump apparently wants to do something bold with the space program, and his team has asked NASA to consider speeding up a long-planned moon mission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo NASA has launched a feasibility study to see what the risks and benefits would be if the agency added two astronauts to the first test flight of a new rocket and capsule. That flight, Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, is scheduled for November 2018. The new Space Launch System rocket would blast off with a new Orion capsule on top. The Orion would orbit the moon, undergoing a kind of stress test, and then return to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at tremendous speed and splashing down in an ocean.Story continues below advertisementNASA's current plan is to do this with mannequins aboard.AdvertisementOnly after this shakedown mission would it then put live astronauts into Orion and send them on toward the moon. That second mission is not scheduled until 2021.On Friday, two NASA officials held a teleconference with reporters to discuss the feasibility study, and they avoided signaling whether they think adding astronauts to a test flight is a good idea.\u201cI don\u2019t have a preconceived position as to whether I'm for this or against this,\u201d said William Gerstenmaier, an associate administrator who is the top official for human spaceflight. Echoing that sentiment was William Hill, a deputy associate administrator: \u201cWe will let the identified risk and benefits drive this, as well as the data.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA, heeding Trump, may try a first-term moon missionGerstenmaier said the first flight, if astronauts are involved, would probably last eight or nine days.The officials made clear that changing the current plan, and adding a crew to the first test flight, would increase the mission risk. Gerstenmaier said there are ways to limit the risk, including putting the Orion in an Earth orbit for a day or so to ensure that the life-support systems were working properly. If necessary, at that point the flight to the moon could be aborted. \u201cWe might lose the mission, but we could still protect the crew,\u201d he said.AdvertisementGerstenmaier said adding a crew would offer benefits: \u201cWe\u2019ll get a chance to test systems in a very rigorous way with a crew on board.\u201d Hill seemed to contradict that a few minutes later, saying that NASA would like to \u201cstress the systems\u201d on Orion in the initial flight, \u201cwhich we probably wouldn\u2019t do with a crew on board.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe feasibility study should be complete in about a month. Adding a crew would probably push a launch date for EM-1 into 2019, Gerstenmaier said. If it proves impossible to launch with a crew aboard by late 2019, he said, NASA would stick to the current plan of a crew on EM-2 in 2021.How Trump could really disrupt NASATrump has shown an interest in President John F. Kennedy's vow more than half a century ago to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, and, eyeing his reelection prospects, Trump\u00a0could potentially announce some kind of ambitious space mission for NASA, likely in combination with entrepreneurial space companies.AdvertisementBut a lot remains uncertain at NASA, including the top leadership posts. Trump and his team have yet to nominate anyone to run the agency, and NASA is currently guided by acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, a civil servant.Read more:With Trump, Gingrich and GOP in charge, NASA may go back to the moonNASA under Trump is waiting for marching orders Will trump echo JFK's moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars? NASA has a spaceship, but where will it go? Would NASA really replace mannequins with real-life astronauts in a brand new spaceship?  NASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon mission",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Alien Visitor Turns Out to Be a Comet (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3622",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/science/oumuamua-comet-asteroid.html",
        "text": "First Oumuamua was an alien comet, then maybe a spaceship, then an asteroid, now it\u2019s a comet from way, way beyond. First Oumuamua was an alien comet, then maybe a spaceship, then an asteroid, now it\u2019s a comet from way, way beyond. Oumuamua, we never knew you.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Alien Visitor Turns Out to Be a Comet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3623",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/science/oumuamua-comet-asteroid.html",
        "text": "First Oumuamua was an alien comet, then maybe a spaceship, then an asteroid, now it\u2019s a comet from way, way beyond. First Oumuamua was an alien comet, then maybe a spaceship, then an asteroid, now it\u2019s a comet from way, way beyond. Oumuamua, we never knew you.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rare asteroid duo dances in the stars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3624",
        "date": "2018-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/20/rare-asteroid-duo-dances-in-the-stars/",
        "text": "Finding a life partner, someone to spend your days with while you circle\u00a0the sun, is hard.\u00a0Now scientists have discovered a rare perfect match: Asteroid 2017 YE5, originally thought to be solo, is actually a double asteroid. Two asteroids, each\u00a0approximately 800 meters (almost half a mile) in diameter, are orbiting each other about once a\u00a0day, as they orbit the sun together. Scientists do not know how long the two have been together. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAn asteroid that has as a companion, another chunk that\u2019s just as big. Two of equal size. Those we don\u2019t have very many of,\u201d said Anne Virkki, the group lead for the Planetary Radar Research Group at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The asteroid, originally discovered by the MOSS observatory in Morocco\u00a0in December 2017, was thought to be a single asteroid. Last month, Virkki and her team, working parallel with a team at\u00a0NASA's Goldstone Observatory in California, independently\u00a0confirmed that it was a matched set.There are only four known double asteroids of equal size, according to Lindley Johnson, NASA\u2019s planetary defense officer. Far more common than 2017 YE5 are double asteroids that consist of one large \u201cprimary\u201d asteroid and one smaller asteroid that orbits the larger one. Double asteroids, or binary asteroids, usually form after an impact breaks off a small piece of one asteroid. This piece then\u00a0gives the primary, original asteroid a \u201cmoonlet,\u201d according to Marina Brozovi\u0107, a radar scientist at Jet Propulsion Labs in California.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe radar observations for 2017 YE5 were scheduled during Brozovi\u0107's shift.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s wonderful because you know with that first track you\u2019re looking into the unknown, and it\u2019s always an opportunity for discovery.\u00a0As the radar images are coming down live, you are seeing it for the first time,\u201d Brozovi\u0107 said.\u00a0\u201cWhen we look at this object, it\u2019s so interesting to us, it kind of generates more questions than answers.\u201dOne leading theory about this rare double rock is that it started out as conjoined twins. Large asteroids can be more like cemented rubble piles than solid rock. Brozovi\u0107 said that a spinning object like this can become elongated, like a peanut. It can then spin rapidly enough to separate, forming two roughly equal asteroids.Alternatively, though less likely, the asteroids could have started out as two separate asteroids with similar orbits and locations, slowly getting closer and closer until they joined orbits. Starting out apart,\u00a0the asteroids could eventually have become \u201cgravitationally bound,\u201d and begun\u00a0to swing around each other.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt looks like they were doing a dance in space,\u201d Johnson said, \u201cand then the question came up is it a tango or cha-cha.\u201d\u00a0In grainy radar images,\u00a0the asteroids twirl around each other, looking like something between an ultrasound and a Bigfoot sighting.The Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA finds, tracks and investigates space objects that come close to Earth. \u201cIt\u2019s not the highest priority thing we do at all, but the day might come it\u2019s the most important thing we do,\u201d Johnson said. According to its website, Planetary Defense Coordination is responsible for \u201censuring the early detection of potentially hazardous objects,\u201d such as asteroids or comets that come close to Earth. 2017 YE5's closest approach to Earth would be 3.7 million miles away.\u00a0\u201cWe knew it was not an impact concern,\u201d Johnson said.\u201cPart of our job is to find these [space objects] and know about them. But we don\u2019t get worried. Most of what we\u2019re talking about is less than 10 meters [about 30 feet] in size. Earth\u2019s atmosphere will take care of those,\u201d Johnson said. The work is part of a congressionally directed objective to track near-Earth objects, called the Nearest Object Preparedness Plan. So far they have found 8,000 of 25,000 estimated target objects that are within about 4 million miles of Earth and larger than 100 feet across.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAsteroids are debris left over from the solar system formation, so they are about 4.6 billion years old,\u201d Brozovi\u0107 said. By studying them,\u00a0\u201cyou're understanding the solar system past.\u201d NASA investigates not only the trajectory, size and location of near-Earth objects, but also\u00a0their composition.\u00a0\u201cWe believe that the building blocks of life exist with these objects,\u201d Johnson said.\u201cI know they\u2019re rocks but they\u2019re awesome rocks,\u201d Brozovi\u0107 said. The asteroids have been described as \u201cdark as charcoal,\u201d although in the infinite blackness of space, she said, charcoal actually looks bright.What are the chances of an asteroid being an equally sized duo? Currently, Planetary Defense is tracking more than 18,000 objects near Earth of all sizes.\u00a0Of those,\u00a015 percent are confirmed binary, but only four are binary and equally sized. So they're really rare. And the odds of two equally sized asteroids joining after billions of years of solo space travel is extremely low (far lower even than your supposed\u00a0odds of finding a mate, which a dating site has calculated to be 1 in 560).Read more:Many asteroids might be remnants of five destroyed worlds, scientists sayIt\u2019s a comet! No, it\u2019s an asteroid! No, it\u2019s an alien spaceship! (Actually, it\u2019s a comet.)Watch an asteroid light up the sky as it disintegrates above Earth hours after discovery Two equally matched asteroids are circling each other as they circle the sun. Rare asteroid duo dances in the stars",
        "author": "Kate Furby"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s a comet! No, it\u2019s an asteroid! No, it\u2019s an alien spaceship! (Actually, it\u2019s a comet.) (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3625",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/27/its-a-comet-no-its-an-asteroid-no-its-an-alien-spaceship-actually-its-a-comet/",
        "text": "A mysterious, strangely elongated object streaking through our solar system is probably a comet. That's the conclusion of astronomers who used the Hubble Space Telescope and 27 ground-based telescopes to scrutinize the interstellar visitor, which was first detected Oct. 19. It is the first object ever seen that originated beyond our planetary neighborhood. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTheir new report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, will not close the book on what has been named 'Oumuamua, for the Hawaiian word meaning \u201cscout.\u201d Even if it is a comet, it's a weird one.After astronomers spotted 'Oumuamua with a telescope in Hawaii, they struggled to classify it. A comet seemed the best guess, because such things are predicted by theorists to arrive from deep space routinely. But it didn't look like a comet. It lacked a visible atmosphere. It had no coma, no tail.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstronomers quickly changed the classification from comet to asteroid, and then changed it again to \u201cinterstellar object.\u201d It is the only member of that exclusive club.Predictably, the mystery object invited speculation \u2014 at least among those with a speculative bent \u2014 that it could be artificial. Science fiction fans noted that Arthur C. Clarke's 1973 novel \u201cRendezvous With Rama\u201d centers on an alleged asteroid from interstellar space that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a giant alien starship. Although conjectured aliens are a recurring nuisance to serious scientists, in this case there was sufficient weirdness to 'Oumuamua that some astronomers used the big radio telescope in Green Bank, W.Va., to see if it might perchance be emitting signals.It didn't look like a comet at any point in its journey. But its motion through the solar system suggested it was emitting gas from its interior when heated by the sun, according to the report in Nature. By observing the object for many weeks from multiple telescopes, astronomers were able to pick up the signature of a subtle change in acceleration that's consistent with cometary outgassing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe explored a variety of possible physical mechanisms to explain the acceleration we detected, and we found that comet-like outgassing works well, while the others can be ruled out,\" lead author Marco Micheli, an astronomer at a European Space Agency center in Frascati, Italy, said via email.So why didn't it appear cometary? One of the paper's co-authors, Karen Meech, a University of Hawaii astronomer, said tiny dust grains that are typically on the surface of comets and blown off by outgassing may have been eroded during 'Oumuamua's journey across the galaxy. Bigger dust grains would have remained, but they'd be far fewer in number and harder to detect, she said.Astronomers looked for the chemical signature of cyanide, which is typically ejected from comets along with water. They saw none. That's potentially a data point about the diversity of solar systems in our galaxy, Meech said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re seeing that not all solar systems are going to have the same chemical ingredients when they\u2019re put together,\u201d she said. \u201cWhich again is what we\u2019d expect, but this is our first sample.\u201dOther astronomers are not ready to put the mystery to rest.\u201cI will be awaiting the submission of the data with interest to run my own analysis and see what I think,\u201d said Gareth Williams, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Minor Planet Center.\u201cI do think they have found something interesting, but I'm not sure it is quite as clear cut as it is presented in the paper,\u201d Alan Jackson, a University of Toronto astronomer, said in an email. Jackson, who earlier this year co-wrote\u00a0a paper describing 'Oumuamua as an asteroid ejected from a double-star system, noted this week that it \u201cis a somewhat ambiguous object. The terms comet and asteroid are themselves a little ambiguous. The original, strict distinction between asteroids and comets is whether or not they have a visible coma, and from that perspective 'Oumuamua is an asteroid since it didn't.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat view was echoed by senior scientist David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center,\u00a0who said the distinction between a comet and an asteroid can be a bit \u201cfuzzy.\u201d Sometimes an object can evolve over time \u2014 becoming more like one or the other, he said.This object is still special in any case. \u201cIt has two unique things. It\u2019s the first object we\u2019ve ever seen from another solar system, and its shape is unlike anything we\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Morrison said. No one can say precisely what the dimensions are, but the best estimate is that it's half a mile long and only a 10th of that in diameter, according to Meech. \u201cCigar shaped\u201d has been the common description.'Oumuamua came into the solar system after cruising through the void at 59,000 miles per hour. As it neared, it sped up due to the sun's gravitational field. In September, still unseen by Earthlings, it made its closest approach to the sun \u2014 about 24 million miles. It also reached a top speed of 196,000 miles per hour. On its outbound leg the next month, it came close enough to Earth \u2014 20 million miles \u2014 to be spotted by astronomers at the Haleakala Observatory on Maui.Its age is unknown. The object could plausibly be the oldest thing ever detected in our solar system \u2014 older than the planets, moons, asteroids and comets that formed along with the sun about 4.6 billion years ago. It could have been ejected from another solar system when that formed billions of years earlier. In our own solar system, comets can be accelerated by Jupiter's gravitational field as well as the sun's and reach escape velocity, hurtling into interstellar space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne of the Nature paper's co-authors, Paul Chodas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had closely examined comets for decades, hoping to find one with a clearly interstellar origin. He'd failed. Then along came 'Oumuamua.\u201cRight away, it looked like an asteroid,\u201d Chodas said Monday. After several days observing the object, astronomers realized that its trajectory and speed indicated it must have come from beyond our solar system. The Minor Planet Center at Harvard named it Asteroid 2017 U1.But in December came another twist, when Micheli detected something odd in its motion that suggested a factor other than the sun's gravity was affecting the acceleration.Story continues below advertisementChodas knows the alien-spaceship crowd may not be fully satisfied with the scientific explanation involving natural outgassing. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t act like a rocket or a spaceship. It's acting like a comet. That\u2019s the first thing to say,\u201d he said Tuesday. \u201cSecondly, interstellar space just has countless billions of these objects that are thrown out in the formation of various solar systems.\u201dAdvertisementWhatever can be learned at this point about 'Oumuamua has to be gleaned from data already collected, because at 1 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday it was already 595 million miles from Earth, 13 times as faint as anything the Hubble Space Telescope can detect and headed to the middle of the galactic nowhere.It's already farther from the sun than the planet Jupiter, and in a few years it will be farther from the sun than Neptune. The sun's gravity is slowing it but not enough to keep it. With nifty symmetry, it will eventually resume its interstellar cruising speed of 59,000 mph as it heads toward the constellation Pegasus.Story continues below advertisementIn theory, a space probe could be launched to catch up with 'Oumuamua and take a close look. Don't count on that in an era of flat space budgets, though. Whatever this thing is, it's going away \u2014 and it won't be back.Read more:Visitor from beyond the solar system probed for life, but is silent so far'I've never seen anything like this': Astronomers dazzled by brilliant supernovaThis bizarre, backward asteroid might be a visitor from another star An interstellar visitor becomes just slightly less mysterious. It\u2019s a comet! No, it\u2019s an asteroid! No, it\u2019s an alien spaceship! (Actually, it\u2019s a comet.)",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Detect for the First Time Quakes on Mars (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3626",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-detect-for-the-first-time-quakes-on-mars-11582560000?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=48",
        "text": "\u201cWe have finally for the first time established that Mars is a seismically active planet,\u201d said geophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Banerdt\n\n\n\n at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He directs an international science team drawn from more than three dozen research facilities. \u201cThe seismicity is greater than the Moon but less than the Earth.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nOn Monday, the scientists published their initial findings about the Martian interior, atmosphere and magnetic field from the $828 million mission in a series of research papers in Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications.\n\n\nQuakes may be common on Mars, the scientists said. However, the atmosphere around the shallow impact crater\u2014nicknamed Homestead Hollow\u2014where the InSight probe landed is stirred by thousands of dust-devil swirls that make the area home to the planet\u2019s most turbulent winds.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\nSource: NASA, Nature Geosciences\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMoreover, surprisingly strong traces of the planet\u2019s primordial magnetic field billions of years ago still linger in some rocks around the landing zone, the scientists said. Unlike Mars, Earth today has a protective magnetic field generated by electric currents from the motion of molten iron in the planet\u2019s core, shielding the surface from cosmic rays and charged solar particles.\n\u201cWe unexpectedly see that there is today a [magnetic] field about 10 times stronger than predicted by satellite observations,\u201d said mission scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Catherine Johnson,\n\n\n\n a geophysicist at the University of British Columbia. \u201cThat magnetism is essentially frozen in the rocks.\u201d\nMars appears to experience about two tiny quakes a day, although the number has gradually increased over the past year. The scientists don\u2019t know why.\nBy contrast, geophysicists normally detect about 14,000 sizable quakes on Earth every year. After a powerful earthquake, such as the magnitude 7.1 Ridgecrest earthquake that shook California\u2019s Mojave Desert last July, scientists recorded about 80,000 or so aftershocks within a few weeks of the event.\nOf the 174 marsquakes fully analyzed so far, about 150 are high-frequency seismic squeaks that would not rattle a window on Earth, the scientists said.\n\n\nRelated Welcome to Your Home on Mars (April 9) Musk\u2019s Timetable for Mars Spaceship Contrasts With Delays for NASA Capsules (Sept. 30, 2019) NASA Calls It Quits for Opportunity Mars Rover (Feb. 13, 2019) Scientists Find Evidence of Hidden Lake on Mars (July 25, 2018) \n\n\nIn fact, they appear to be so small that the scientists couldn't determine how far away the epicenters were located or their precise magnitude. None of them would pose a danger to future astronauts or colonists, NASA scientists said.\n\u201cWe can probably say that Mars is a place where the seismic hazard is extremely low,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philippe Lognonn\u00e9,\n\n\n\n a geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and the lead investigator for the InSight\u2019s seismic experiments. \nMarsquakes often originate at much greater depths than on Earth, so their energy usually dissipates before reaching the surface.\nGenerally, most of the marsquakes likely are caused by the planet gradually cooling and shrinking, the scientists said.\nSome of these small tremors might have been caused by the impact of large meteors hitting the ground. Scientists set the lander\u2019s onboard cameras to scan the nighttime Martian sky for telltale streaks of shooting stars but so far haven\u2019t detected any, the scientists said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you expect that colonists will one day live on Mars? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThey tracked two of the strongest quakes, measuring about magnitude 4.0, to a region called Cerberus Fossae almost 1,000 miles away, an area of fissures, fault lines and lava flows with signs of ancient volcanic activity. \n\u201cThat is really intriguing,\u201d said mission deputy principal investigator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Suzanne Smrekar\n\n\n\n at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t expect such recent volcanism in that area.\u201d\nFor now, however, the deep heart of Mars remains a mystery. No marsquake has generated seismic waves strong enough yet to reveal the composition of the planet\u2019s core. The scientists hope that more powerful quakes in the year ahead will reveal its structure and composition.\n\u201cRight now, we have a lot more data than we have conclusions,\u201d said Dr. Banerdt. \u201cIt\u2019s still a very mysterious situation.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Faint tremors on Mars are detected by scientists for the first time, according to new findings from NASA\u2019s InSight lander, which landed on the red planet almost 15 months ago. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3627",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/18/trump-says-hes-directing-pentagon-to-create-a-new-space-force/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.President Trump said Monday that he would direct the Defense Department and the Pentagon to create a new \u201cSpace\u00a0Force\u201d \u2014 an independent\u00a0sixth branch of the armed forces.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump has floated this idea before \u2014 in March, he said he initially conceived it as a joke \u2014 but has offered\u00a0few\u00a0details about how the\u00a0Space Force would operate. Several experts noted that an act of Congress is required to establish a new branch of the military. Trump said Monday that the branch would be \u201cseparate but equal\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis the Air Force and that Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would oversee its creation.\u201cIt is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space,\u201d Trump said, adding that he did not want to see\u00a0\u201cChina and other countries leading us.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDunford's staff acknowledged Trump\u2019s comments in a statement Monday afternoon, pledging to work closely with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis\u2019s office, other Defense Department officials and Congress to \u201cimplement the President\u2019s guidance.\u201d\u201cSpace is a warfighting domain, so it is vital that our military maintains its dominance and competitive advantage in that domain,\u201d the statement said.And a spokeswoman for Mattis said in a statement that Pentagon officials \u201cunderstand\u201d the guidance.\u201cOur Policy Board will begin working on this issue, which has implications for intelligence operations for the Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy,\u201d Dana White said without elaborating. \u201cWorking with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967 and subsequently ratified, bars states from testing weapons and establishing military bases on the moon and other celestial bodies. It also prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around Earth. Both China and Russia are signatories to the treaty. But the treaty has no enforcement mechanism (indeed, the Air Force's\u00a0unmanned\u00a0space plane,\u00a0the X-37B, has completed several clandestine missions).AdvertisementJohn Logsdon, a space policy expert and professor emeritus at George Washington University, said the treaty is generally interpreted as barring only \u201caggressive\u201d military activity in space and would not prohibit the creation of a Space Force.The idea goes back at least a year to a proposal by Reps. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces, and Cooper, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, argued that it made sense to have a \u201cSpace Corps,\u201d a separate branch of service with its own four-star general serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under their plan, it would have reported to the Department of the Air Force, in similar fashion to how the Marine Corps reports to the Department of the Navy.Story continues below advertisementIn essence, the new service would elevate the Air Force Space Command to be on par with other military services in its own right. The command focuses on space and cyberspace operations, including the management and launch of satellites that provide Global Positioning System coordinates, weather and navigational data, and surveillance of everything from militant groups to potential ballistic missile launches.AdvertisementUnlike\u00a0NASA, which focuses primarily on space exploration and scientific discovery, the new Space Force would concentrate on the military and defense aspects of space.\u201cI think there's a recognition that space is an area of activity critical to our national security .\u2009.\u2009. and as long as space is part of the Air Force, it\u2019s going to take kind of second fiddle to airplanes,\u201d Logsdon\u00a0said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe threat is real,\u201d he added, \u201cand the history of the ability to organize and be effective in space under the Air Force, many people\u00a0think, is less than optimum.\u201dThe creation of the Space Force would mark the first time that the military has created a new branch since the 1947 National Security Act, in which Congress directed a massive overhaul of the military after World War II. It merged the Department of War and the Navy Department and created the Air Force from the Army Air Forces.AdvertisementA\u00a0full Space Force \u2014 including a service chief, service secretary and related staffs \u2014\u00a0cannot be established without a\u00a0congressional act, said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and defense analyst.Story continues below advertisementBut Trump can direct the formation of an interim \u201cSpace Corps\u201d in the meantime that still falls under the Air Force Department but has a separate military staff, he said.Hendrix, who advocated recently for a separate Space Force in the conservative National Review magazine, said the Pentagon will need to make sure it decouples existing space operations from the other services.The idea\u00a0has faced resistance from senior Pentagon officials. Last fall, Rogers and Cooper's proposal\u00a0was scrapped\u00a0after Mattis, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Gen. David L. Goldfein, the\u00a0Air Force chief of staff,\u00a0 said it would lead to unnecessary costs and bureaucracy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions,\u201d Mattis said in October in a memo to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.In a Monday news briefing, retired Air Force Lt. Gen.\u00a0Dave Deptula, dean of the Air Force Association-founded Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, described the decision to create a Space Force as \u201canother example of ready, fire, aim.\u201dRep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) applauded the move in a statement, saying that \u201ctoo little emphasis has been placed on space defense.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe announcement was made at a meeting of the National Space Council, at which Trump signed a new space policy directive aimed at space traffic management. The policy sets up new guidelines for satellite design and operation, as well as tracking the growing amount of clutter in Earth's orbit.AdvertisementBut, citing the number of regulations his administration has dismantled since he took office, Trump warned the Space Council, \u201cDon't get too carried away.\u201dThe president also reasserted plans to land astronauts on the moon again and, eventually, Mars. The president issued his first space policy directive in December, making a crewed lunar mission the centerpiece of his administration's space strategy.Story continues below advertisementCheryl Warner, a spokeswoman for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, told Reuters\u00a0on Monday that the space agency wants to send robotic explorers\u00a0to the moon as soon as next year. Those missions would pave the way for an eventual crewed mission.Trump's declaration about the Space Force was one of several digressions he made during the meeting. He led off his remarks by talking for several minutes about the separation of undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the border, repeating a false claim that this\u00a0is the result of a law enacted by Democrats. In fact, the separations largely stem from a \u201czero-tolerance policy\u201d announced last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.AdvertisementThe president also criticized United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that is one of the government's biggest space contractors, while introducing the company's CEO:\u201cI don\u2019t like when Boeing and Lockheed get together because the pricing only goes up, but that\u2019s okay in this case,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t love that stuff. We\u2019re going to have to talk about that.\u201dBut\u00a0then he pivoted to emphasizing the need to partner with the commercial sector, the focus of his second space policy directive, which was issued in May.\u201cRich guys seem to like rockets,\u201d Trump said. \u201c\u2026 As long as it\u2019s an American rich person, that\u2019s good. If you beat us to Mars, we\u2019ll be very happy, and you\u2019ll be even more famous. We\u2019ll save a lot of money and take the credit for it.\u201dAaron Gregg and Missy Ryan contributed to this report. Trump has floated this idea before \u2014 in March, he said he initially conceived it as a joke \u2014 and offered few details about how the force would operate. Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3628",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/18/trump-says-hes-directing-pentagon-to-create-a-new-space-force/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.President Trump said Monday that he would direct the Defense Department and the Pentagon to create a new \u201cSpace\u00a0Force\u201d \u2014 an independent\u00a0sixth branch of the armed forces.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump has floated this idea before \u2014 in March, he said he initially conceived it as a joke \u2014 but has offered\u00a0few\u00a0details about how the\u00a0Space Force would operate. Several experts noted that an act of Congress is required to establish a new branch of the military. Trump said Monday that the branch would be \u201cseparate but equal\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis the Air Force and that Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would oversee its creation.\u201cIt is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space,\u201d Trump said, adding that he did not want to see\u00a0\u201cChina and other countries leading us.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDunford's staff acknowledged Trump\u2019s comments in a statement Monday afternoon, pledging to work closely with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis\u2019s office, other Defense Department officials and Congress to \u201cimplement the President\u2019s guidance.\u201d\u201cSpace is a warfighting domain, so it is vital that our military maintains its dominance and competitive advantage in that domain,\u201d the statement said.And a spokeswoman for Mattis said in a statement that Pentagon officials \u201cunderstand\u201d the guidance.\u201cOur Policy Board will begin working on this issue, which has implications for intelligence operations for the Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy,\u201d Dana White said without elaborating. \u201cWorking with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967 and subsequently ratified, bars states from testing weapons and establishing military bases on the moon and other celestial bodies. It also prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around Earth. Both China and Russia are signatories to the treaty. But the treaty has no enforcement mechanism (indeed, the Air Force's\u00a0unmanned\u00a0space plane,\u00a0the X-37B, has completed several clandestine missions).AdvertisementJohn Logsdon, a space policy expert and professor emeritus at George Washington University, said the treaty is generally interpreted as barring only \u201caggressive\u201d military activity in space and would not prohibit the creation of a Space Force.The idea goes back at least a year to a proposal by Reps. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces, and Cooper, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, argued that it made sense to have a \u201cSpace Corps,\u201d a separate branch of service with its own four-star general serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under their plan, it would have reported to the Department of the Air Force, in similar fashion to how the Marine Corps reports to the Department of the Navy.Story continues below advertisementIn essence, the new service would elevate the Air Force Space Command to be on par with other military services in its own right. The command focuses on space and cyberspace operations, including the management and launch of satellites that provide Global Positioning System coordinates, weather and navigational data, and surveillance of everything from militant groups to potential ballistic missile launches.AdvertisementUnlike\u00a0NASA, which focuses primarily on space exploration and scientific discovery, the new Space Force would concentrate on the military and defense aspects of space.\u201cI think there's a recognition that space is an area of activity critical to our national security .\u2009.\u2009. and as long as space is part of the Air Force, it\u2019s going to take kind of second fiddle to airplanes,\u201d Logsdon\u00a0said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe threat is real,\u201d he added, \u201cand the history of the ability to organize and be effective in space under the Air Force, many people\u00a0think, is less than optimum.\u201dThe creation of the Space Force would mark the first time that the military has created a new branch since the 1947 National Security Act, in which Congress directed a massive overhaul of the military after World War II. It merged the Department of War and the Navy Department and created the Air Force from the Army Air Forces.AdvertisementA\u00a0full Space Force \u2014 including a service chief, service secretary and related staffs \u2014\u00a0cannot be established without a\u00a0congressional act, said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and defense analyst.Story continues below advertisementBut Trump can direct the formation of an interim \u201cSpace Corps\u201d in the meantime that still falls under the Air Force Department but has a separate military staff, he said.Hendrix, who advocated recently for a separate Space Force in the conservative National Review magazine, said the Pentagon will need to make sure it decouples existing space operations from the other services.The idea\u00a0has faced resistance from senior Pentagon officials. Last fall, Rogers and Cooper's proposal\u00a0was scrapped\u00a0after Mattis, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Gen. David L. Goldfein, the\u00a0Air Force chief of staff,\u00a0 said it would lead to unnecessary costs and bureaucracy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions,\u201d Mattis said in October in a memo to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.In a Monday news briefing, retired Air Force Lt. Gen.\u00a0Dave Deptula, dean of the Air Force Association-founded Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, described the decision to create a Space Force as \u201canother example of ready, fire, aim.\u201dRep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) applauded the move in a statement, saying that \u201ctoo little emphasis has been placed on space defense.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe announcement was made at a meeting of the National Space Council, at which Trump signed a new space policy directive aimed at space traffic management. The policy sets up new guidelines for satellite design and operation, as well as tracking the growing amount of clutter in Earth's orbit.AdvertisementBut, citing the number of regulations his administration has dismantled since he took office, Trump warned the Space Council, \u201cDon't get too carried away.\u201dThe president also reasserted plans to land astronauts on the moon again and, eventually, Mars. The president issued his first space policy directive in December, making a crewed lunar mission the centerpiece of his administration's space strategy.Story continues below advertisementCheryl Warner, a spokeswoman for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, told Reuters\u00a0on Monday that the space agency wants to send robotic explorers\u00a0to the moon as soon as next year. Those missions would pave the way for an eventual crewed mission.Trump's declaration about the Space Force was one of several digressions he made during the meeting. He led off his remarks by talking for several minutes about the separation of undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the border, repeating a false claim that this\u00a0is the result of a law enacted by Democrats. In fact, the separations largely stem from a \u201czero-tolerance policy\u201d announced last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.AdvertisementThe president also criticized United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that is one of the government's biggest space contractors, while introducing the company's CEO:\u201cI don\u2019t like when Boeing and Lockheed get together because the pricing only goes up, but that\u2019s okay in this case,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t love that stuff. We\u2019re going to have to talk about that.\u201dBut\u00a0then he pivoted to emphasizing the need to partner with the commercial sector, the focus of his second space policy directive, which was issued in May.\u201cRich guys seem to like rockets,\u201d Trump said. \u201c\u2026 As long as it\u2019s an American rich person, that\u2019s good. If you beat us to Mars, we\u2019ll be very happy, and you\u2019ll be even more famous. We\u2019ll save a lot of money and take the credit for it.\u201dAaron Gregg and Missy Ryan contributed to this report. Trump has floated this idea before \u2014 in March, he said he initially conceived it as a joke \u2014 and offered few details about how the force would operate. Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3629",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/18/trump-says-hes-directing-pentagon-to-create-a-new-space-force/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.President Trump said Monday that he would direct the Defense Department and the Pentagon to create a new \u201cSpace\u00a0Force\u201d \u2014 an independent\u00a0sixth branch of the armed forces.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump has floated this idea before \u2014 in March, he said he initially conceived it as a joke \u2014 but has offered\u00a0few\u00a0details about how the\u00a0Space Force would operate. Several experts noted that an act of Congress is required to establish a new branch of the military. Trump said Monday that the branch would be \u201cseparate but equal\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis the Air Force and that Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would oversee its creation.\u201cIt is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space,\u201d Trump said, adding that he did not want to see\u00a0\u201cChina and other countries leading us.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDunford's staff acknowledged Trump\u2019s comments in a statement Monday afternoon, pledging to work closely with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis\u2019s office, other Defense Department officials and Congress to \u201cimplement the President\u2019s guidance.\u201d\u201cSpace is a warfighting domain, so it is vital that our military maintains its dominance and competitive advantage in that domain,\u201d the statement said.And a spokeswoman for Mattis said in a statement that Pentagon officials \u201cunderstand\u201d the guidance.\u201cOur Policy Board will begin working on this issue, which has implications for intelligence operations for the Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy,\u201d Dana White said without elaborating. \u201cWorking with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967 and subsequently ratified, bars states from testing weapons and establishing military bases on the moon and other celestial bodies. It also prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around Earth. Both China and Russia are signatories to the treaty. But the treaty has no enforcement mechanism (indeed, the Air Force's\u00a0unmanned\u00a0space plane,\u00a0the X-37B, has completed several clandestine missions).AdvertisementJohn Logsdon, a space policy expert and professor emeritus at George Washington University, said the treaty is generally interpreted as barring only \u201caggressive\u201d military activity in space and would not prohibit the creation of a Space Force.The idea goes back at least a year to a proposal by Reps. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) and Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces, and Cooper, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, argued that it made sense to have a \u201cSpace Corps,\u201d a separate branch of service with its own four-star general serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under their plan, it would have reported to the Department of the Air Force, in similar fashion to how the Marine Corps reports to the Department of the Navy.Story continues below advertisementIn essence, the new service would elevate the Air Force Space Command to be on par with other military services in its own right. The command focuses on space and cyberspace operations, including the management and launch of satellites that provide Global Positioning System coordinates, weather and navigational data, and surveillance of everything from militant groups to potential ballistic missile launches.AdvertisementUnlike\u00a0NASA, which focuses primarily on space exploration and scientific discovery, the new Space Force would concentrate on the military and defense aspects of space.\u201cI think there's a recognition that space is an area of activity critical to our national security .\u2009.\u2009. and as long as space is part of the Air Force, it\u2019s going to take kind of second fiddle to airplanes,\u201d Logsdon\u00a0said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe threat is real,\u201d he added, \u201cand the history of the ability to organize and be effective in space under the Air Force, many people\u00a0think, is less than optimum.\u201dThe creation of the Space Force would mark the first time that the military has created a new branch since the 1947 National Security Act, in which Congress directed a massive overhaul of the military after World War II. It merged the Department of War and the Navy Department and created the Air Force from the Army Air Forces.AdvertisementA\u00a0full Space Force \u2014 including a service chief, service secretary and related staffs \u2014\u00a0cannot be established without a\u00a0congressional act, said Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and defense analyst.Story continues below advertisementBut Trump can direct the formation of an interim \u201cSpace Corps\u201d in the meantime that still falls under the Air Force Department but has a separate military staff, he said.Hendrix, who advocated recently for a separate Space Force in the conservative National Review magazine, said the Pentagon will need to make sure it decouples existing space operations from the other services.The idea\u00a0has faced resistance from senior Pentagon officials. Last fall, Rogers and Cooper's proposal\u00a0was scrapped\u00a0after Mattis, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Gen. David L. Goldfein, the\u00a0Air Force chief of staff,\u00a0 said it would lead to unnecessary costs and bureaucracy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI oppose the creation of a new military service and additional organizational layers at a time when we are focused on reducing overhead and integrating joint warfighting functions,\u201d Mattis said in October in a memo to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.In a Monday news briefing, retired Air Force Lt. Gen.\u00a0Dave Deptula, dean of the Air Force Association-founded Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, described the decision to create a Space Force as \u201canother example of ready, fire, aim.\u201dRep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) applauded the move in a statement, saying that \u201ctoo little emphasis has been placed on space defense.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe announcement was made at a meeting of the National Space Council, at which Trump signed a new space policy directive aimed at space traffic management. The policy sets up new guidelines for satellite design and operation, as well as tracking the growing amount of clutter in Earth's orbit.AdvertisementBut, citing the number of regulations his administration has dismantled since he took office, Trump warned the Space Council, \u201cDon't get too carried away.\u201dThe president also reasserted plans to land astronauts on the moon again and, eventually, Mars. The president issued his first space policy directive in December, making a crewed lunar mission the centerpiece of his administration's space strategy.Story continues below advertisementCheryl Warner, a spokeswoman for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Directorate, told Reuters\u00a0on Monday that the space agency wants to send robotic explorers\u00a0to the moon as soon as next year. Those missions would pave the way for an eventual crewed mission.Trump's declaration about the Space Force was one of several digressions he made during the meeting. He led off his remarks by talking for several minutes about the separation of undocumented immigrant children from their parents at the border, repeating a false claim that this\u00a0is the result of a law enacted by Democrats. In fact, the separations largely stem from a \u201czero-tolerance policy\u201d announced last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.AdvertisementThe president also criticized United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that is one of the government's biggest space contractors, while introducing the company's CEO:\u201cI don\u2019t like when Boeing and Lockheed get together because the pricing only goes up, but that\u2019s okay in this case,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t love that stuff. We\u2019re going to have to talk about that.\u201dBut\u00a0then he pivoted to emphasizing the need to partner with the commercial sector, the focus of his second space policy directive, which was issued in May.\u201cRich guys seem to like rockets,\u201d Trump said. \u201c\u2026 As long as it\u2019s an American rich person, that\u2019s good. If you beat us to Mars, we\u2019ll be very happy, and you\u2019ll be even more famous. We\u2019ll save a lot of money and take the credit for it.\u201dAaron Gregg and Missy Ryan contributed to this report. Trump has floated this idea before \u2014 in March, he said he initially conceived it as a joke \u2014 and offered few details about how the force would operate. Trump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA won\u2019t put astronauts on first flight of new rocket (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3630",
        "date": "2017-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/12/nasa-wont-put-astronauts-on-first-flight-of-new-rocket/",
        "text": "The first flight of NASA's expensive new deep-space rocket is going to be delayed again, and it won't have any astronauts aboard, the agency announced Friday. That decision comes after NASA and White House officials pondered an alternative plan to add two astronauts to the test flight in an attempt to do something dramatic in space during the current term of President Trump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGoing without crew in that first test flight has been NASA's plan all along. The agency wanted to do a rigorous test flight of the new rocket, called the Space Launch System, and the new crew capsule, Orion, that pushed the hardware to its limits during a three-week lunar orbit. The agency had hoped to launch in 2018, with a crewed mission in 2021.The election of Trump scrambled the picture. Soon after the inauguration, Trump political appointees showed up at NASA headquarters and met with the veteran civil servants running the agency and reviewed the human spaceflight program. Robert Lightfoot, NASA's acting administrator, soon announced that the agency would conduct a thorough review of the program to see whether it would be possible to add two astronauts to the first test flight, then scheduled for late 2018.Trump, via NASA, has a new rocket. Where does he want to go?On Friday, Lightfoot said the staff members doing the feasibility study had concluded that NASA should stick to its original idea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhile it's technically feasible, they really reaffirmed that the baseline plan we had in place was the best way to go,\u201d Lightfoot said in a teleconference with reporters.William Gerstenmaier, the top NASA official for human spaceflight, repeatedly emphasized that the agency wants a steady, sustainable program that involves building the infrastructure for decades of deep-space ventures not only for NASA but for the private sector.\u201cWe\u2019re essentially building a multidecadal infrastructure that allows us to move the human presence into the solar system,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.This is not happening quickly. NASA does not operate with the kind of budgets available during the Apollo era. The agency has had some setbacks, including a tornado that seriously damaged the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans in February. This month, as first reported by the blog NASA Watch, workers at Michoud accidentally damaged beyond repair a large dome that was to be part of a liquid oxygen fuel tank. \u201cThis was a significant event for us,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first flight of the SLS was originally envisioned by Congress for 2016. On Friday, Lightfoot said that various delays in the program have pushed the first mission to 2019, with the exact timing still uncertain. Gerstenmaier said that, after the first uncrewed mission, NASA will need about 33 months to revamp a mobile launcher at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to handle the second SLS mission, which will have additional hardware and stand 40 feet taller on the launchpad. That means it is unlikely NASA will launch astronauts on the SLS before 2022.NASA considers adding two astronauts to rocket test flightPhil Larson, the space policy adviser in the Obama White House, said of this new delay in the rocket schedule, \u201cThis is something that I think a lot of people saw coming. I don\u2019t think too many people within NASA are shocked.\u201dThe commercial space sector \u2014 including SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos (who also owns The Washington Post) \u2014 is racing to develop its own rockets that are comparable in scale to the SLS.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis really isn\u2019t about NASA versus SpaceX, or NASA versus Blue Origin, it's more about the past way of doing business versus how do we run the government more like a business,\u201d Larson said.The agency had considered adding two astronauts to the first SLS flight in an effort to respond to the clear desire of Trump and his aides for some kind of dramatic space mission, with astronauts, that could be achieved in the first term. Trump has made allusions to space exploration in speeches but has never spelled out exactly what he wants.Trump says he wants to send astronauts to Mars prontoDuring a conversation recently with astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Trump said he wanted to send astronauts to Mars in his first term, or by the end of his second term \u201cat worst\u201d \u2014 but the manner of his comment suggested that he was either joking or speaking off the cuff with minimal grasp of the technical challenges of a Mars mission.Lightfoot, asked about that comment, said of the White House, \u201cThey have not asked us to go to Mars by 2024.\u201dRead more:With Trump, Gingrich and the GOP in charge, NASA may go back to the moonThousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year The launch of a new mission is delayed until 2019 at the earliest.  NASA won\u2019t put astronauts on first flight of new rocket",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA won\u2019t put astronauts on first flight of new rocket (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3631",
        "date": "2017-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/12/nasa-wont-put-astronauts-on-first-flight-of-new-rocket/",
        "text": "The first flight of NASA's expensive new deep-space rocket is going to be delayed again, and it won't have any astronauts aboard, the agency announced Friday. That decision comes after NASA and White House officials pondered an alternative plan to add two astronauts to the test flight in an attempt to do something dramatic in space during the current term of President Trump. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGoing without crew in that first test flight has been NASA's plan all along. The agency wanted to do a rigorous test flight of the new rocket, called the Space Launch System, and the new crew capsule, Orion, that pushed the hardware to its limits during a three-week lunar orbit. The agency had hoped to launch in 2018, with a crewed mission in 2021.The election of Trump scrambled the picture. Soon after the inauguration, Trump political appointees showed up at NASA headquarters and met with the veteran civil servants running the agency and reviewed the human spaceflight program. Robert Lightfoot, NASA's acting administrator, soon announced that the agency would conduct a thorough review of the program to see whether it would be possible to add two astronauts to the first test flight, then scheduled for late 2018.Trump, via NASA, has a new rocket. Where does he want to go?On Friday, Lightfoot said the staff members doing the feasibility study had concluded that NASA should stick to its original idea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhile it's technically feasible, they really reaffirmed that the baseline plan we had in place was the best way to go,\u201d Lightfoot said in a teleconference with reporters.William Gerstenmaier, the top NASA official for human spaceflight, repeatedly emphasized that the agency wants a steady, sustainable program that involves building the infrastructure for decades of deep-space ventures not only for NASA but for the private sector.\u201cWe\u2019re essentially building a multidecadal infrastructure that allows us to move the human presence into the solar system,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.This is not happening quickly. NASA does not operate with the kind of budgets available during the Apollo era. The agency has had some setbacks, including a tornado that seriously damaged the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans in February. This month, as first reported by the blog NASA Watch, workers at Michoud accidentally damaged beyond repair a large dome that was to be part of a liquid oxygen fuel tank. \u201cThis was a significant event for us,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first flight of the SLS was originally envisioned by Congress for 2016. On Friday, Lightfoot said that various delays in the program have pushed the first mission to 2019, with the exact timing still uncertain. Gerstenmaier said that, after the first uncrewed mission, NASA will need about 33 months to revamp a mobile launcher at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to handle the second SLS mission, which will have additional hardware and stand 40 feet taller on the launchpad. That means it is unlikely NASA will launch astronauts on the SLS before 2022.NASA considers adding two astronauts to rocket test flightPhil Larson, the space policy adviser in the Obama White House, said of this new delay in the rocket schedule, \u201cThis is something that I think a lot of people saw coming. I don\u2019t think too many people within NASA are shocked.\u201dThe commercial space sector \u2014 including SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos (who also owns The Washington Post) \u2014 is racing to develop its own rockets that are comparable in scale to the SLS.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis really isn\u2019t about NASA versus SpaceX, or NASA versus Blue Origin, it's more about the past way of doing business versus how do we run the government more like a business,\u201d Larson said.The agency had considered adding two astronauts to the first SLS flight in an effort to respond to the clear desire of Trump and his aides for some kind of dramatic space mission, with astronauts, that could be achieved in the first term. Trump has made allusions to space exploration in speeches but has never spelled out exactly what he wants.Trump says he wants to send astronauts to Mars prontoDuring a conversation recently with astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Trump said he wanted to send astronauts to Mars in his first term, or by the end of his second term \u201cat worst\u201d \u2014 but the manner of his comment suggested that he was either joking or speaking off the cuff with minimal grasp of the technical challenges of a Mars mission.Lightfoot, asked about that comment, said of the White House, \u201cThey have not asked us to go to Mars by 2024.\u201dRead more:With Trump, Gingrich and the GOP in charge, NASA may go back to the moonThousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year The launch of a new mission is delayed until 2019 at the earliest.  NASA won\u2019t put astronauts on first flight of new rocket",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Obama\u2019s science diaspora prepares for a fight (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3632",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/24/obamas-science-diaspora-prepares-for-a-fight/",
        "text": "Science, more than many fields, feeds on a collaborative spirit. Former staffers from President Barack Obama\u2019s science office have taken this to heart: They are fanning out, finding jobs in academia, at nonprofits and elsewhere, but they continue to work together, largely behind the scenes. This science diaspora, as one former staffer called it, is ready to both push forward on the ambitious science-related agendas of the previous administration, and to defend against the attacks on science emanating from the new White House. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThere was a pretty explicit sense of community-building as people walked out the door,\u201d said Kumar Garg, who served as a senior adviser inside Obama\u2019s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). \u201cPeople have this really strong sense of mission that they want to carry forward.\u201dOSTP is housed inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House and is part of the executive branch. Its director \u2014 John Holdren under Obama\u00a0but currently among the unfilled positions\u00a0in the current administration \u2014 traditionally also serves as the science adviser to the president. OSTP offers up technical expertise on a wide range of issues, helps the president launch science-related initiatives, and in general serves as the science and technology support system for much of the government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArguably, OSTP just wrapped up its most influential eight-year period since the science adviser\u2019s early days under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. (OSTP was officially formed by statute in 1976, though other similar offices preceded it.) Phil Larson, who focused on space exploration issues at OSTP under Obama for five years before leaving for SpaceX and now the University of Colorado, said the way Obama and Holdren emphasized science and technology left a mark on those who worked there. \u201cTheir time at OSTP specifically under President Obama and Dr. Holdren galvanized a whole new kind of passion from them, because they saw it being paid attention to at the highest levels.\u201dAfter Donald Trump\u2019s election, though, it quickly became clear that science would not have such a prominent seat at the table after the self-proclaimed nerd left office. OSTP staffers decided to form a sort of phalanx of science- and tech-friendly experts and policy wonks. The coalition is informal \u2014 they stay in touch via Facebook and Google groups and lines of communication they established before heading out the door.\u201cA position at White House OSTP means that you have developed a pretty amazing network,\u201d said Cristin Dorgelo, who served as chief of staff under Holdren.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost of OSTP left when the administration turned over, with a staff that peaked around 140 people now down to a much more bare-bones cohort. (OSTP would not divulge the exact number currently on staff.)\u201cWe can\u2019t walk across the hall to each other anymore,\u201d said Kei Koizumi, who was a senior adviser on research and development budgeting at OSTP and is now a visiting scholar at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). \u201cThe team may have moved on, but we still think of ourselves as a team.\u201dThe former staffers aim to push forward on STEM \u2014 science, technology, engineering and mathematics \u2014 education initiatives, on specific research programs, on clean energy and climate efforts, and they consider themselves on call to help where needed.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI can check in and say, \u2018Here\u2019s a little bit of a fire drill, who is interested?\u2019\u201d Garg said. His focus was on technology innovation and STEM education initiatives, and that portion of the new defense team now encompasses as many as 50 people spread out across the country. \u201cThat\u2019s a very tight-knit group where I can call somebody and they can drop what they\u2019re doing and help.\u201dThe science whiz who dazzled Obama has schizophrenia and his family faces crushing expensesThe fire drills may involve helping out on Capitol Hill when congressional staffers need input on science-related policy issues, connecting experts with the government office or an NGO that needs them, or, importantly in the coming weeks and months, working on responses to the president\u2019s and congressional budget requests.AdvertisementMany former staffers said the budgeting battle is a primary focus. The White House released a preliminary budget blueprint this month confirming the science community\u2019s worst fears. If enacted, the cuts would be staggering: The Environmental Protection Agency would lose more than 30 percent of its budget. NASA\u2019s earth science section, which contributes enormously to our understanding of climate change, would lose four entire missions and more than $100 million. (Budget director Mick Mulvaney called all climate change spending \u201ca waste of your money.\u201d) The National Institutes of Health, the primary source of biomedical research funding in the country, would lose 20 percent of its $31 billion. The Advanced Research Projects Agency \u2014 Energy (ARPA-E) would disappear entirely, and on down the line.Story continues below advertisementNow that these battles are taking shape, one former OSTP staffer said many in the group are in touch with agencies, politicians, NGOs and advocacy organizations, \u201cmaking sure all the groups are ready for what is going to be a pretty consequential budget fight.\u201dSome members of the diaspora are reluctant to give away specifics of their plans. Why offer up your playbook to the opposition as the game is just getting started? But the Google groups and phone trees are becoming more and more active, one staffer said. \u201cWe are preparing, we are talking.\u201dAdvertisementThe OSTPers would have stayed in touch and collaborated regardless of who won in November, but the specifics are certainly different than anticipated. \u201cThere were some things that the administration said specifically about scaling back certain policies that made people more alarmed,\u201d said Thomas Kalil, who served as OSTP\u2019s deputy director for technology and innovation for the full eight years of Obama\u2019s presidency and has now moved back to the San Francisco Bay area. Instead of simply passing on their knowledge to a new administration that would likely have treated scientific issues similarly, staffers instead began to focus on playing defense.Story continues below advertisementGarg agreed that the early days of the Trump administration have provided a host of issues that have galvanized the diaspora. Budgeting for research and development may be chief among them, but others such as making sure science isn\u2019t muzzled, and discussions about scientific integrity, have similarly energized the group \u2014 topics that some staffers argue wouldn\u2019t even be on the table if the election had turned out differently. Also among the early projects has been coordination with the March for Science leadership, since many see it as a time to consolidate pro-science messaging.The March will take place on April 22 in Washington, and in other cities around the country, and has the support of major organizations including AAAS, the American Geophysical Union, the Society for Neuroscience and many others. Kristen Gunther, the March\u2019s mission strategy leader, said the OSTPers have been \u201cincredible resources\u201d in planning and organizing, and in particular in forming those partnerships. \u201cThey have also given us advice on the interaction between science and federal policy to help us better understand where we can effectively direct our efforts,\u201d she said.How Trump's travel ban could hurt scienceOf course, there are limits to what people on the outside looking in can accomplish, but some say that they\u2019re also hearing from people on the inside looking for help. People now involved with some of the specific projects started under Obama and Holdren \u2014 the BRAIN Initiative, say, or the Computer Science for All initiative \u2014 are now looking to former OSTPers for guidance on how to maintain those projects in uncertain waters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re being called upon \u2014 sometimes behind the scenes \u2014 as a resource,\u201d said Larson, highlighting NASA and space-related issues as another area where that is occurring. \u201cI think you\u2019ll see that continue, because I think it\u2019s less politically based, and more [that] civil servants want to do good work.\u201dThe Obama administration was considered among the most science-friendly administrations in history, so it isn\u2019t surprising that his staffers at the center of that effort feel a sense of mission that carries beyond the White House gates. And now, with the Trump administration\u2019s assault on science taking form, that mission is rapidly increasing in scope and magnitude.\u201cI think the moment does call for a certain degree of focus,\u201d Garg said. \u201cThis is a really unheralded moment. People want to step through it together.\u201dDave Levitan is a science journalist, and author of \u201cNot A Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science.\u201d\u00a0Follow him on Twitter at @davelevitan. Former science staffers are trying to promote the Obama administration's STEM projects and protect science funding from Trump administration cuts. Obama\u2019s science diaspora prepares for a fight",
        "author": "Dave Levitan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Obama\u2019s science diaspora prepares for a fight (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3633",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/24/obamas-science-diaspora-prepares-for-a-fight/",
        "text": "Science, more than many fields, feeds on a collaborative spirit. Former staffers from President Barack Obama\u2019s science office have taken this to heart: They are fanning out, finding jobs in academia, at nonprofits and elsewhere, but they continue to work together, largely behind the scenes. This science diaspora, as one former staffer called it, is ready to both push forward on the ambitious science-related agendas of the previous administration, and to defend against the attacks on science emanating from the new White House. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThere was a pretty explicit sense of community-building as people walked out the door,\u201d said Kumar Garg, who served as a senior adviser inside Obama\u2019s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). \u201cPeople have this really strong sense of mission that they want to carry forward.\u201dOSTP is housed inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House and is part of the executive branch. Its director \u2014 John Holdren under Obama\u00a0but currently among the unfilled positions\u00a0in the current administration \u2014 traditionally also serves as the science adviser to the president. OSTP offers up technical expertise on a wide range of issues, helps the president launch science-related initiatives, and in general serves as the science and technology support system for much of the government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArguably, OSTP just wrapped up its most influential eight-year period since the science adviser\u2019s early days under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. (OSTP was officially formed by statute in 1976, though other similar offices preceded it.) Phil Larson, who focused on space exploration issues at OSTP under Obama for five years before leaving for SpaceX and now the University of Colorado, said the way Obama and Holdren emphasized science and technology left a mark on those who worked there. \u201cTheir time at OSTP specifically under President Obama and Dr. Holdren galvanized a whole new kind of passion from them, because they saw it being paid attention to at the highest levels.\u201dAfter Donald Trump\u2019s election, though, it quickly became clear that science would not have such a prominent seat at the table after the self-proclaimed nerd left office. OSTP staffers decided to form a sort of phalanx of science- and tech-friendly experts and policy wonks. The coalition is informal \u2014 they stay in touch via Facebook and Google groups and lines of communication they established before heading out the door.\u201cA position at White House OSTP means that you have developed a pretty amazing network,\u201d said Cristin Dorgelo, who served as chief of staff under Holdren.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost of OSTP left when the administration turned over, with a staff that peaked around 140 people now down to a much more bare-bones cohort. (OSTP would not divulge the exact number currently on staff.)\u201cWe can\u2019t walk across the hall to each other anymore,\u201d said Kei Koizumi, who was a senior adviser on research and development budgeting at OSTP and is now a visiting scholar at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). \u201cThe team may have moved on, but we still think of ourselves as a team.\u201dThe former staffers aim to push forward on STEM \u2014 science, technology, engineering and mathematics \u2014 education initiatives, on specific research programs, on clean energy and climate efforts, and they consider themselves on call to help where needed.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI can check in and say, \u2018Here\u2019s a little bit of a fire drill, who is interested?\u2019\u201d Garg said. His focus was on technology innovation and STEM education initiatives, and that portion of the new defense team now encompasses as many as 50 people spread out across the country. \u201cThat\u2019s a very tight-knit group where I can call somebody and they can drop what they\u2019re doing and help.\u201dThe science whiz who dazzled Obama has schizophrenia and his family faces crushing expensesThe fire drills may involve helping out on Capitol Hill when congressional staffers need input on science-related policy issues, connecting experts with the government office or an NGO that needs them, or, importantly in the coming weeks and months, working on responses to the president\u2019s and congressional budget requests.AdvertisementMany former staffers said the budgeting battle is a primary focus. The White House released a preliminary budget blueprint this month confirming the science community\u2019s worst fears. If enacted, the cuts would be staggering: The Environmental Protection Agency would lose more than 30 percent of its budget. NASA\u2019s earth science section, which contributes enormously to our understanding of climate change, would lose four entire missions and more than $100 million. (Budget director Mick Mulvaney called all climate change spending \u201ca waste of your money.\u201d) The National Institutes of Health, the primary source of biomedical research funding in the country, would lose 20 percent of its $31 billion. The Advanced Research Projects Agency \u2014 Energy (ARPA-E) would disappear entirely, and on down the line.Story continues below advertisementNow that these battles are taking shape, one former OSTP staffer said many in the group are in touch with agencies, politicians, NGOs and advocacy organizations, \u201cmaking sure all the groups are ready for what is going to be a pretty consequential budget fight.\u201dSome members of the diaspora are reluctant to give away specifics of their plans. Why offer up your playbook to the opposition as the game is just getting started? But the Google groups and phone trees are becoming more and more active, one staffer said. \u201cWe are preparing, we are talking.\u201dAdvertisementThe OSTPers would have stayed in touch and collaborated regardless of who won in November, but the specifics are certainly different than anticipated. \u201cThere were some things that the administration said specifically about scaling back certain policies that made people more alarmed,\u201d said Thomas Kalil, who served as OSTP\u2019s deputy director for technology and innovation for the full eight years of Obama\u2019s presidency and has now moved back to the San Francisco Bay area. Instead of simply passing on their knowledge to a new administration that would likely have treated scientific issues similarly, staffers instead began to focus on playing defense.Story continues below advertisementGarg agreed that the early days of the Trump administration have provided a host of issues that have galvanized the diaspora. Budgeting for research and development may be chief among them, but others such as making sure science isn\u2019t muzzled, and discussions about scientific integrity, have similarly energized the group \u2014 topics that some staffers argue wouldn\u2019t even be on the table if the election had turned out differently. Also among the early projects has been coordination with the March for Science leadership, since many see it as a time to consolidate pro-science messaging.The March will take place on April 22 in Washington, and in other cities around the country, and has the support of major organizations including AAAS, the American Geophysical Union, the Society for Neuroscience and many others. Kristen Gunther, the March\u2019s mission strategy leader, said the OSTPers have been \u201cincredible resources\u201d in planning and organizing, and in particular in forming those partnerships. \u201cThey have also given us advice on the interaction between science and federal policy to help us better understand where we can effectively direct our efforts,\u201d she said.How Trump's travel ban could hurt scienceOf course, there are limits to what people on the outside looking in can accomplish, but some say that they\u2019re also hearing from people on the inside looking for help. People now involved with some of the specific projects started under Obama and Holdren \u2014 the BRAIN Initiative, say, or the Computer Science for All initiative \u2014 are now looking to former OSTPers for guidance on how to maintain those projects in uncertain waters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re being called upon \u2014 sometimes behind the scenes \u2014 as a resource,\u201d said Larson, highlighting NASA and space-related issues as another area where that is occurring. \u201cI think you\u2019ll see that continue, because I think it\u2019s less politically based, and more [that] civil servants want to do good work.\u201dThe Obama administration was considered among the most science-friendly administrations in history, so it isn\u2019t surprising that his staffers at the center of that effort feel a sense of mission that carries beyond the White House gates. And now, with the Trump administration\u2019s assault on science taking form, that mission is rapidly increasing in scope and magnitude.\u201cI think the moment does call for a certain degree of focus,\u201d Garg said. \u201cThis is a really unheralded moment. People want to step through it together.\u201dDave Levitan is a science journalist, and author of \u201cNot A Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science.\u201d\u00a0Follow him on Twitter at @davelevitan. Former science staffers are trying to promote the Obama administration's STEM projects and protect science funding from Trump administration cuts. Obama\u2019s science diaspora prepares for a fight",
        "author": "Dave Levitan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3634",
        "date": "2017-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/23/a-466-million-year-old-space-collision-is-still-raining-shrapnel-down-on-earth/",
        "text": "Roughly 466 million\u00a0years ago, something huge exploded\u00a0in space and sent shrapnel raining down on Earth.It was the biggest such cataclysm to happen in our celestial neighborhood\u00a0in some 3 billion years. An asteroid belt body, roughly as large as Connecticut and made of some of the most ancient material in the solar system, collided with another object and splintered into pieces. Those pieces in turn slammed into one another, creating more debris. One by one, the fragments fell toward ancient Earth, where the continents were clumped into a single, gigantic mass called Gondwana\u00a0and the very first terrestrial plants were just beginning to creep onto land. At the time, those meteorites, called L chondrites, made up 99 percent of all space rocks that landed on our planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMillennia passed, the continents broke apart and bunched back together, mountain ranges rose up and eroded away, countless creatures \u2014 trilobites, dinosaurs, woolly mammoths \u2014 evolved and went extinct. But the\u00a0debris from that 466-million-year-old breakup continued to fall. And fall. And fall. Even now, they make up the largest group of meteorites that land on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat collision cascade\u201d \u2014 the series of smaller smashes and crashes that followed the initial breakup \u2014 \u201chad consequences\u00a0that are still felt today,\u201d said Philipp Heck, a cosmochemist at the University of Chicago and curator of meteorites for the Field Museum.We really need to figure out how to stop a killer asteroid, scientists sayThe L chondrite meteorites that we find all over Earth aren't representative of the asteroid belt from which they came.\u00a0For the past several years, Heck has been working to understand the implications of the \u201cL chondrite parent body breakup\u201d (astronomers clearly weren't feeling very creative when they named that one) \u2014 and it's become clear to him that the event masks the true diversity of space rocks that bombard our world. Looking at Earth today and assuming that \u201cL chondrites\u201d are common is like looking out the window after a big blizzard\u00a0and assuming that snow is the most common type of weather.\u201cWhat has arrived on Earth is definitely\u00a0not representative of what\u2019s out there,\u201d Heck said. \u201cIf we want\u00a0to understand nature better, especially the asteroid belt, we have to look at other time windows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, Heck and his colleagues take their first look out a new time window, at the period just before the L chondrite parent body breakup. They report that the meteorite \u201cweather\u201d during that time was dramatically different from what we now see.Back then, in the early part of the geologic period known as the\u00a0Ordovician, now-rare meteorites like achondrites (stony meteorites that come from planets and the largest asteroids) were common. Among these were\u00a0space rocks thought to come from Vesta, a bright protoplanet that is the second-largest object in the asteroid belt. There were also far more \u201cungrouped\u201d meteorites \u2014 the designation given to rocks too weird to fit into any of the\u00a0established categories.By comparison,\u00a0L-chondrites (many of which, but not all, come from the 466-million-year-old breakup)\u00a0represented just a small proportion of Earth's meteorite flux (the quantity and type of meteorites that rained down).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOur main finding was that these primitive achondrites and the ungrouped meteorites ...\u00a0were almost 100 times more abundant than they are today,\u201d Heck said.\u00a0 \u201cThat was a big surprise that no one expected.\u201dThese 17,000 rocks from the bottom of the world could unlock the secrets of existenceUncovering this fact was no easy task. Meteorites are hard to spot under any circumstances. Finding ones that have survived half a billion years without being eroded into dust or subsumed into the Earth by weather and plate tectonics\u00a0 is even harder.Instead of looking for whole meteorites, Heck and his colleagues sought chrome spinels, hardy black minerals found in space rocks in rock formations from China, Sweden and Russia. Though the sediments are now on land, they once formed the bottom of ancient seas, where the minerals were most likely to survive. The team dug up nearly 600\u00a0pounds of rock in search of mineral grains that can barely be seen without\u00a0a microscope.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a needle in the haystack problem,\u201d Heck acknowledged. \u201cSo we have to take a brute force approach: We burn away the haystack to find the needles.\u201dThe scientists didn't actually light the rock on fire. Instead, they used acid to dissolve the sedimentary rock. This left them with 41 extraterrestrial chrome spinels, most of them the diameter of a human hair.\u00a0By analyzing the chemical composition of the minerals \u2014 particularly the varying ratios of oxygen isotopes \u2014 they were able to develop a chemical \u201cfingerprint\u201d for each one, giving at least a rough understanding of what kind of meteorite it came from.NASA's OSIRIS-REx blasts off on ambitious mission to visit asteroid, bring a piece homeThose fingerprints can also be compared to spectroscopic analysis of bodies out in the solar system, offering important clues about bodies scientists will never get to see up close. \u201cWe can do essentially space exploration by finding rock fragments on Earth,\u201d Heck said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHeck said his latest findings \u2014 along with future looks through other \u201ctime windows\u201d on the meteorite record \u2014 will help astronomers understand the collision history of the asteroid belt (which circles the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter)\u00a0and its influence on our planet.\u00a0He\u00a0pointed out that scientists are just beginning to understand the behavior of near-Earth objects \u2014 asteroids and other bodies in space that could one day strike Earth. Understanding which meteorites fell in the past could answer questions like, \u201cHow long does it take\u00a0[after a collision] until the fragments arrive on Earth, and when are they all used up?\u201d he said. \u201cHow important is the collision cascade in\u00a0generating fragments?\u201d\u201cPeople always ask me, \u2018Why is it important to know about the past?\u2019 \u201d Heck said. \u201cI answer, \u2018because it's interesting.\u2019 But also because we need to learn about how nature works if we want to know what's going to happen in the future.\u201dRead more:Dear Science: Why is everything backward in a mirror?Will Trump echo JFK's moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars?Think your dog talks like people? Scientists say you might just be right.The astonishing science behind the desert's mysterious fairy circles The most common meteorites today come from a single cataclysm a half-billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth's meteorite flux once looked quite different.  A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3635",
        "date": "2017-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/23/a-466-million-year-old-space-collision-is-still-raining-shrapnel-down-on-earth/",
        "text": "Roughly 466 million\u00a0years ago, something huge exploded\u00a0in space and sent shrapnel raining down on Earth.It was the biggest such cataclysm to happen in our celestial neighborhood\u00a0in some 3 billion years. An asteroid belt body, roughly as large as Connecticut and made of some of the most ancient material in the solar system, collided with another object and splintered into pieces. Those pieces in turn slammed into one another, creating more debris. One by one, the fragments fell toward ancient Earth, where the continents were clumped into a single, gigantic mass called Gondwana\u00a0and the very first terrestrial plants were just beginning to creep onto land. At the time, those meteorites, called L chondrites, made up 99 percent of all space rocks that landed on our planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMillennia passed, the continents broke apart and bunched back together, mountain ranges rose up and eroded away, countless creatures \u2014 trilobites, dinosaurs, woolly mammoths \u2014 evolved and went extinct. But the\u00a0debris from that 466-million-year-old breakup continued to fall. And fall. And fall. Even now, they make up the largest group of meteorites that land on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat collision cascade\u201d \u2014 the series of smaller smashes and crashes that followed the initial breakup \u2014 \u201chad consequences\u00a0that are still felt today,\u201d said Philipp Heck, a cosmochemist at the University of Chicago and curator of meteorites for the Field Museum.We really need to figure out how to stop a killer asteroid, scientists sayThe L chondrite meteorites that we find all over Earth aren't representative of the asteroid belt from which they came.\u00a0For the past several years, Heck has been working to understand the implications of the \u201cL chondrite parent body breakup\u201d (astronomers clearly weren't feeling very creative when they named that one) \u2014 and it's become clear to him that the event masks the true diversity of space rocks that bombard our world. Looking at Earth today and assuming that \u201cL chondrites\u201d are common is like looking out the window after a big blizzard\u00a0and assuming that snow is the most common type of weather.\u201cWhat has arrived on Earth is definitely\u00a0not representative of what\u2019s out there,\u201d Heck said. \u201cIf we want\u00a0to understand nature better, especially the asteroid belt, we have to look at other time windows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, Heck and his colleagues take their first look out a new time window, at the period just before the L chondrite parent body breakup. They report that the meteorite \u201cweather\u201d during that time was dramatically different from what we now see.Back then, in the early part of the geologic period known as the\u00a0Ordovician, now-rare meteorites like achondrites (stony meteorites that come from planets and the largest asteroids) were common. Among these were\u00a0space rocks thought to come from Vesta, a bright protoplanet that is the second-largest object in the asteroid belt. There were also far more \u201cungrouped\u201d meteorites \u2014 the designation given to rocks too weird to fit into any of the\u00a0established categories.By comparison,\u00a0L-chondrites (many of which, but not all, come from the 466-million-year-old breakup)\u00a0represented just a small proportion of Earth's meteorite flux (the quantity and type of meteorites that rained down).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOur main finding was that these primitive achondrites and the ungrouped meteorites ...\u00a0were almost 100 times more abundant than they are today,\u201d Heck said.\u00a0 \u201cThat was a big surprise that no one expected.\u201dThese 17,000 rocks from the bottom of the world could unlock the secrets of existenceUncovering this fact was no easy task. Meteorites are hard to spot under any circumstances. Finding ones that have survived half a billion years without being eroded into dust or subsumed into the Earth by weather and plate tectonics\u00a0 is even harder.Instead of looking for whole meteorites, Heck and his colleagues sought chrome spinels, hardy black minerals found in space rocks in rock formations from China, Sweden and Russia. Though the sediments are now on land, they once formed the bottom of ancient seas, where the minerals were most likely to survive. The team dug up nearly 600\u00a0pounds of rock in search of mineral grains that can barely be seen without\u00a0a microscope.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a needle in the haystack problem,\u201d Heck acknowledged. \u201cSo we have to take a brute force approach: We burn away the haystack to find the needles.\u201dThe scientists didn't actually light the rock on fire. Instead, they used acid to dissolve the sedimentary rock. This left them with 41 extraterrestrial chrome spinels, most of them the diameter of a human hair.\u00a0By analyzing the chemical composition of the minerals \u2014 particularly the varying ratios of oxygen isotopes \u2014 they were able to develop a chemical \u201cfingerprint\u201d for each one, giving at least a rough understanding of what kind of meteorite it came from.NASA's OSIRIS-REx blasts off on ambitious mission to visit asteroid, bring a piece homeThose fingerprints can also be compared to spectroscopic analysis of bodies out in the solar system, offering important clues about bodies scientists will never get to see up close. \u201cWe can do essentially space exploration by finding rock fragments on Earth,\u201d Heck said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHeck said his latest findings \u2014 along with future looks through other \u201ctime windows\u201d on the meteorite record \u2014 will help astronomers understand the collision history of the asteroid belt (which circles the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter)\u00a0and its influence on our planet.\u00a0He\u00a0pointed out that scientists are just beginning to understand the behavior of near-Earth objects \u2014 asteroids and other bodies in space that could one day strike Earth. Understanding which meteorites fell in the past could answer questions like, \u201cHow long does it take\u00a0[after a collision] until the fragments arrive on Earth, and when are they all used up?\u201d he said. \u201cHow important is the collision cascade in\u00a0generating fragments?\u201d\u201cPeople always ask me, \u2018Why is it important to know about the past?\u2019 \u201d Heck said. \u201cI answer, \u2018because it's interesting.\u2019 But also because we need to learn about how nature works if we want to know what's going to happen in the future.\u201dRead more:Dear Science: Why is everything backward in a mirror?Will Trump echo JFK's moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars?Think your dog talks like people? Scientists say you might just be right.The astonishing science behind the desert's mysterious fairy circles The most common meteorites today come from a single cataclysm a half-billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth's meteorite flux once looked quite different.  A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3636",
        "date": "2017-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/23/a-466-million-year-old-space-collision-is-still-raining-shrapnel-down-on-earth/",
        "text": "Roughly 466 million\u00a0years ago, something huge exploded\u00a0in space and sent shrapnel raining down on Earth.It was the biggest such cataclysm to happen in our celestial neighborhood\u00a0in some 3 billion years. An asteroid belt body, roughly as large as Connecticut and made of some of the most ancient material in the solar system, collided with another object and splintered into pieces. Those pieces in turn slammed into one another, creating more debris. One by one, the fragments fell toward ancient Earth, where the continents were clumped into a single, gigantic mass called Gondwana\u00a0and the very first terrestrial plants were just beginning to creep onto land. At the time, those meteorites, called L chondrites, made up 99 percent of all space rocks that landed on our planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMillennia passed, the continents broke apart and bunched back together, mountain ranges rose up and eroded away, countless creatures \u2014 trilobites, dinosaurs, woolly mammoths \u2014 evolved and went extinct. But the\u00a0debris from that 466-million-year-old breakup continued to fall. And fall. And fall. Even now, they make up the largest group of meteorites that land on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat collision cascade\u201d \u2014 the series of smaller smashes and crashes that followed the initial breakup \u2014 \u201chad consequences\u00a0that are still felt today,\u201d said Philipp Heck, a cosmochemist at the University of Chicago and curator of meteorites for the Field Museum.We really need to figure out how to stop a killer asteroid, scientists sayThe L chondrite meteorites that we find all over Earth aren't representative of the asteroid belt from which they came.\u00a0For the past several years, Heck has been working to understand the implications of the \u201cL chondrite parent body breakup\u201d (astronomers clearly weren't feeling very creative when they named that one) \u2014 and it's become clear to him that the event masks the true diversity of space rocks that bombard our world. Looking at Earth today and assuming that \u201cL chondrites\u201d are common is like looking out the window after a big blizzard\u00a0and assuming that snow is the most common type of weather.\u201cWhat has arrived on Earth is definitely\u00a0not representative of what\u2019s out there,\u201d Heck said. \u201cIf we want\u00a0to understand nature better, especially the asteroid belt, we have to look at other time windows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, Heck and his colleagues take their first look out a new time window, at the period just before the L chondrite parent body breakup. They report that the meteorite \u201cweather\u201d during that time was dramatically different from what we now see.Back then, in the early part of the geologic period known as the\u00a0Ordovician, now-rare meteorites like achondrites (stony meteorites that come from planets and the largest asteroids) were common. Among these were\u00a0space rocks thought to come from Vesta, a bright protoplanet that is the second-largest object in the asteroid belt. There were also far more \u201cungrouped\u201d meteorites \u2014 the designation given to rocks too weird to fit into any of the\u00a0established categories.By comparison,\u00a0L-chondrites (many of which, but not all, come from the 466-million-year-old breakup)\u00a0represented just a small proportion of Earth's meteorite flux (the quantity and type of meteorites that rained down).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOur main finding was that these primitive achondrites and the ungrouped meteorites ...\u00a0were almost 100 times more abundant than they are today,\u201d Heck said.\u00a0 \u201cThat was a big surprise that no one expected.\u201dThese 17,000 rocks from the bottom of the world could unlock the secrets of existenceUncovering this fact was no easy task. Meteorites are hard to spot under any circumstances. Finding ones that have survived half a billion years without being eroded into dust or subsumed into the Earth by weather and plate tectonics\u00a0 is even harder.Instead of looking for whole meteorites, Heck and his colleagues sought chrome spinels, hardy black minerals found in space rocks in rock formations from China, Sweden and Russia. Though the sediments are now on land, they once formed the bottom of ancient seas, where the minerals were most likely to survive. The team dug up nearly 600\u00a0pounds of rock in search of mineral grains that can barely be seen without\u00a0a microscope.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a needle in the haystack problem,\u201d Heck acknowledged. \u201cSo we have to take a brute force approach: We burn away the haystack to find the needles.\u201dThe scientists didn't actually light the rock on fire. Instead, they used acid to dissolve the sedimentary rock. This left them with 41 extraterrestrial chrome spinels, most of them the diameter of a human hair.\u00a0By analyzing the chemical composition of the minerals \u2014 particularly the varying ratios of oxygen isotopes \u2014 they were able to develop a chemical \u201cfingerprint\u201d for each one, giving at least a rough understanding of what kind of meteorite it came from.NASA's OSIRIS-REx blasts off on ambitious mission to visit asteroid, bring a piece homeThose fingerprints can also be compared to spectroscopic analysis of bodies out in the solar system, offering important clues about bodies scientists will never get to see up close. \u201cWe can do essentially space exploration by finding rock fragments on Earth,\u201d Heck said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHeck said his latest findings \u2014 along with future looks through other \u201ctime windows\u201d on the meteorite record \u2014 will help astronomers understand the collision history of the asteroid belt (which circles the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter)\u00a0and its influence on our planet.\u00a0He\u00a0pointed out that scientists are just beginning to understand the behavior of near-Earth objects \u2014 asteroids and other bodies in space that could one day strike Earth. Understanding which meteorites fell in the past could answer questions like, \u201cHow long does it take\u00a0[after a collision] until the fragments arrive on Earth, and when are they all used up?\u201d he said. \u201cHow important is the collision cascade in\u00a0generating fragments?\u201d\u201cPeople always ask me, \u2018Why is it important to know about the past?\u2019 \u201d Heck said. \u201cI answer, \u2018because it's interesting.\u2019 But also because we need to learn about how nature works if we want to know what's going to happen in the future.\u201dRead more:Dear Science: Why is everything backward in a mirror?Will Trump echo JFK's moonshot and vow to send humans to Mars?Think your dog talks like people? Scientists say you might just be right.The astonishing science behind the desert's mysterious fairy circles The most common meteorites today come from a single cataclysm a half-billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth's meteorite flux once looked quite different.  A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s acting administrator to retire without a clear successor (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3637",
        "date": "2018-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/12/nasas-acting-administrator-to-retire-without-a-clear-successor/",
        "text": "Robert M. Lightfoot Jr., who has served as acting administrator at NASA for more than a year,\u00a0said Monday that he will retire from his position in April. No immediate announcement was made on who will\u00a0follow him.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn an agencywide memo, Lightfoot wrote that he\u00a0had\u00a0\u201cbittersweet feelings\u201d about the decision. He also said he will \u201cwork with the White House on a smooth transition to the new administrator.\u201d NASA\u00a0has been without a permanent administrator since\u00a0Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and retired Marine Corps aviator, resigned the\u00a0day that President Trump took office last year. The second-in-command, deputy administrator Dava Newman, also left the agency as Trump was inaugurated. In stepped Lightfoot, who had\u00a0held NASA's highest-ranking non-appointee position.Story continues below advertisementIn September, Trump nominated\u00a0Jim Bridenstine,\u00a0a Republican congressman who represents\u00a0Oklahoma in the House, to be NASA administrator. Bridenstine previously worked as the\u00a0director of the\u00a0Tulsa Air and Space Museum. He supports an increased role of private industry\u00a0in spaceflight.AdvertisementBridenstine's confirmation process has not gone smoothly. At a hearing in November, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) argued that Bridenstine lacked the ability to be \u201ca leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration.\u201d Senate Democrats have been joined by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in\u00a0opposition to Bridenstine, putting the nominee's future in jeopardy.In an email late Monday, a NASA representative wrote that \u201cthe White House may direct anyone who qualifies under the Vacancies Reform Act to serve as acting NASA Administrator.\u201d The agency also has no chief of staff or deputy director.Story continues below advertisementOf the seats normally filled by scientists or engineers in Washington, many remain empty. The White House does not have a science adviser, and other positions in the Office of Science and Technology Policy\u00a0remain vacant. Trump also has yet to appoint members to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.AdvertisementBelow is\u00a0a copy of Lightfoot's memo:NASA team,\u00a0It is with bittersweet feelings that I am announcing I will be retiring from the agency on April, 30, 2018.\u00a0 I will work with the White House on a smooth transition to the new administrator.\u00a0I cannot express enough my gratitude to the entire NASA team for the support during my career and especially the last 14 months as your acting administrator.\u00a0 The grit and determination you all demonstrate every day in achieving our missions of discovery and exploration are simply awe inspiring.\u00a0 I leave NASA blessed with a career full of memories of stunning missions, cherished friendships, and an incredible hope for what is yet to come.Story continues below advertisement\u00a0When I look back on my time at NASA, I can\u2019t help but think about the people. From my friends in the test areas at Marshall and Stennis, to the folks that I sat with on console launching shuttles, to the Marshall team when I was the center director, and now as the acting administrator to the entire NASA team \u2014 what a privilege to work with such dedicated and passionate people every day.Advertisement\u00a0There is no way I would be where I am today without having had such amazing opportunities and such a great set of colleagues.\u00a0 I\u2019ve learned in so many ways that at NASA we make the impossible possible \u2014 whether it is with the missions we do or whether it is a small town kid who was able to lead the greatest agency in the world.\u00a0NASA\u2019s history has many chapters with each of us having a part.\u00a0 I\u2019ve written my part and now the pen is in your hands \u2014 each one of you.\u00a0 I know you will make this nation proud as you accomplish the many missions you have in front of you. For me, I look forward to more time with my family and closest friends, and cheering the NASA team on from the outside.\u00a0\u00a0God speed to all of you and thanks for the opportunity to be part of something truly bigger than each of us individually!\u00a0 It\u2019s been an unbelievable ride!\u00a0Sincerely,RobertRead more:Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASABill Nye was a Trump nominee's guest at the State of the Union. Scientists were not amused. In a memo to NASA employees, the acting administrator wrote that he had \u201cbittersweet feelings\u201d about his decision.  NASA\u2019s acting administrator to retire without a clear successor",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3638",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/21/trump-signs-nasa-bill-aimed-at-landing-on-mars/",
        "text": "President Trump just signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion in funding for NASA \u2014 the first such authorization bill for the space agency in seven years.The bill more or less aligns with the budget blueprint Trump laid out last week. NASA won't face the same cuts as\u00a0other science and medical agencies, which stand to lose huge portions of their budget\u00a0under the president's proposal. Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s remains NASA's long-term goal, and Congress will continue to fund the construction of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule for that mission. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI think it's really more of a vote for stability,\u201d said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He noted that the passage of the last NASA authorization bill in 2010 was fairly chaotic, since it involved ending the\u00a0Constellation program that would have sent astronauts to the moon.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year's bill left NASA's Earth science budget\u00a0untouched \u2014 for now. Earth science would\u00a0see a 5 percent cut in the president's blueprint, and Trump made clear\u00a0Tuesday that he thinks NASA should be focused on deep space, not Earth.\u201cIt's been a long time since a bill like this has been signed reaffirming our national commitment to the core mission of NASA, human space exploration, space science and technology,\u201d he said. Later he added, \u201cWe support jobs. It's about jobs.\u201dThe bill, which was passed with bipartisan support, can be read in full\u00a0here. Here are highlights from the bill signing:Astronauts will get health care for lifeThe TREAT Astronauts Act included in the bill will finally mandate that NASA pay for monitoring, diagnosis and treatment of any health problems related to spaceflight for all former astronauts.\u00a0The space agency has long monitored its astronauts for health problems after their time in space was over \u2014 that's how we know about visual impairment intracranial pressure syndrome, eye damage\u00a0caused by microgravity. But NASA couldn't\u00a0treat any problems that were found; it could only refer astronauts back to their primary-care doctors. In 2010, then-administrator Charles Bolden asked Congress to guarantee lifetime benefits for astronauts. He was opposed by the union that represents many NASA civil servants, according to the Wall Street Journal, because his proposal benefited only a small group of people.Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNow, NASA's retired astronauts will receive lifetime health care for all space flight-related issues. This is good news not just for astronauts, but for scientists studying the health effects of space travel \u2014 something that NASA will need to consider as it prepares to send humans on a seven-month journey to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump will relaunch the National Space CouncilVice President Pence said at the bill signing that he will be heading a revamped\u00a0National Space Council, an advisory board that serves as a go-between for NASA and the White House that hasn't operated since George H.W. Bush was president. It's not clear yet when the council will be established, or how it might promote\u00a0the president's space policy.Pace, who served on the space council under Bush, said that the council helps address issues that cut across multiple federal agencies: for example, questions about cooperation on the International Space Station (ISS) that would involve both NASA and the State Department.Story continues below advertisementThe Asteroid Redirect Mission is definitely deadThe authorization bill directs NASA to keep its sights on a human mission to Mars in 2033 (though it doesn't specify whether that would be a landing or just a visit to Mars orbit). But Congress wants the space agency to come up with an alternative\u00a0to the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which was supposed to send humans to lunar orbit as a steppingstone toward the Red Planet. NASA doesn't need to be told twice \u2014 after the blueprint budget included no funding for ARM, acting administrator Robert Lightfoot announced that NASA will no longer pursue that mission.Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S.But that means NASA\u00a0is looking for other \u201cintermediate\u201d stops on the path from Earth to Mars. Will the moon be one of them? At the president's request, NASA is currently studying the feasibility of adding astronauts to the first test flight of the SLS rocket, which is slated to fly around the moon next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump also referenced the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969\u00a0on Tuesday.\u201cIt was a big moment in our history,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, this nation is ready to be the first in space once again.\u201dNASA could\u00a0soon be chartering commercial\u00a0flights to the ISSThe authorization bill mandates that NASA can't acquire space flight services from a foreign entity unless there are no NASA vehicles or U.S. commercial providers available. It also directs the space\u00a0agency to look into ways to boost the private space industry.Trump\u00a0is not personally interested in a trip to space (though he's willing to send Congress)During the bill signing, Trump turned to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to comment on the difficulty of being an astronaut.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI don't know Ted, would you like to do it?\u201d he asked. \u201cI don't think I would.\u201dCruz shook his head, so Trump looked at Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).Advertisement\u201cMarco, do you want to do it?\u201dRubio also declined. Both senators are co-sponsors of the bill, and their states are home to two major NASA centers: Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\u201cYou could send Congress to space,\u201d Cruz suggested, apparently disregarding the fact that he's a member of Congress.\u201cWe could,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWhat a great idea that could be.\u201dRead more:Scientists captured incredible photographic proof of a landslide on a cometA new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including PlutoNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to Mars Former astronauts will get health care. Pence will run the National Space Council. Trump doesn't want to be an astronaut.  Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3639",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/21/trump-signs-nasa-bill-aimed-at-landing-on-mars/",
        "text": "President Trump just signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion in funding for NASA \u2014 the first such authorization bill for the space agency in seven years.The bill more or less aligns with the budget blueprint Trump laid out last week. NASA won't face the same cuts as\u00a0other science and medical agencies, which stand to lose huge portions of their budget\u00a0under the president's proposal. Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s remains NASA's long-term goal, and Congress will continue to fund the construction of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule for that mission. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI think it's really more of a vote for stability,\u201d said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He noted that the passage of the last NASA authorization bill in 2010 was fairly chaotic, since it involved ending the\u00a0Constellation program that would have sent astronauts to the moon.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year's bill left NASA's Earth science budget\u00a0untouched \u2014 for now. Earth science would\u00a0see a 5 percent cut in the president's blueprint, and Trump made clear\u00a0Tuesday that he thinks NASA should be focused on deep space, not Earth.\u201cIt's been a long time since a bill like this has been signed reaffirming our national commitment to the core mission of NASA, human space exploration, space science and technology,\u201d he said. Later he added, \u201cWe support jobs. It's about jobs.\u201dThe bill, which was passed with bipartisan support, can be read in full\u00a0here. Here are highlights from the bill signing:Astronauts will get health care for lifeThe TREAT Astronauts Act included in the bill will finally mandate that NASA pay for monitoring, diagnosis and treatment of any health problems related to spaceflight for all former astronauts.\u00a0The space agency has long monitored its astronauts for health problems after their time in space was over \u2014 that's how we know about visual impairment intracranial pressure syndrome, eye damage\u00a0caused by microgravity. But NASA couldn't\u00a0treat any problems that were found; it could only refer astronauts back to their primary-care doctors. In 2010, then-administrator Charles Bolden asked Congress to guarantee lifetime benefits for astronauts. He was opposed by the union that represents many NASA civil servants, according to the Wall Street Journal, because his proposal benefited only a small group of people.Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNow, NASA's retired astronauts will receive lifetime health care for all space flight-related issues. This is good news not just for astronauts, but for scientists studying the health effects of space travel \u2014 something that NASA will need to consider as it prepares to send humans on a seven-month journey to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump will relaunch the National Space CouncilVice President Pence said at the bill signing that he will be heading a revamped\u00a0National Space Council, an advisory board that serves as a go-between for NASA and the White House that hasn't operated since George H.W. Bush was president. It's not clear yet when the council will be established, or how it might promote\u00a0the president's space policy.Pace, who served on the space council under Bush, said that the council helps address issues that cut across multiple federal agencies: for example, questions about cooperation on the International Space Station (ISS) that would involve both NASA and the State Department.Story continues below advertisementThe Asteroid Redirect Mission is definitely deadThe authorization bill directs NASA to keep its sights on a human mission to Mars in 2033 (though it doesn't specify whether that would be a landing or just a visit to Mars orbit). But Congress wants the space agency to come up with an alternative\u00a0to the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which was supposed to send humans to lunar orbit as a steppingstone toward the Red Planet. NASA doesn't need to be told twice \u2014 after the blueprint budget included no funding for ARM, acting administrator Robert Lightfoot announced that NASA will no longer pursue that mission.Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S.But that means NASA\u00a0is looking for other \u201cintermediate\u201d stops on the path from Earth to Mars. Will the moon be one of them? At the president's request, NASA is currently studying the feasibility of adding astronauts to the first test flight of the SLS rocket, which is slated to fly around the moon next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump also referenced the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969\u00a0on Tuesday.\u201cIt was a big moment in our history,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, this nation is ready to be the first in space once again.\u201dNASA could\u00a0soon be chartering commercial\u00a0flights to the ISSThe authorization bill mandates that NASA can't acquire space flight services from a foreign entity unless there are no NASA vehicles or U.S. commercial providers available. It also directs the space\u00a0agency to look into ways to boost the private space industry.Trump\u00a0is not personally interested in a trip to space (though he's willing to send Congress)During the bill signing, Trump turned to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to comment on the difficulty of being an astronaut.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI don't know Ted, would you like to do it?\u201d he asked. \u201cI don't think I would.\u201dCruz shook his head, so Trump looked at Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).Advertisement\u201cMarco, do you want to do it?\u201dRubio also declined. Both senators are co-sponsors of the bill, and their states are home to two major NASA centers: Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\u201cYou could send Congress to space,\u201d Cruz suggested, apparently disregarding the fact that he's a member of Congress.\u201cWe could,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWhat a great idea that could be.\u201dRead more:Scientists captured incredible photographic proof of a landslide on a cometA new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including PlutoNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to Mars Former astronauts will get health care. Pence will run the National Space Council. Trump doesn't want to be an astronaut.  Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3640",
        "date": "2017-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/21/trump-signs-nasa-bill-aimed-at-landing-on-mars/",
        "text": "President Trump just signed a bill authorizing $19.5 billion in funding for NASA \u2014 the first such authorization bill for the space agency in seven years.The bill more or less aligns with the budget blueprint Trump laid out last week. NASA won't face the same cuts as\u00a0other science and medical agencies, which stand to lose huge portions of their budget\u00a0under the president's proposal. Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s remains NASA's long-term goal, and Congress will continue to fund the construction of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule for that mission. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI think it's really more of a vote for stability,\u201d said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He noted that the passage of the last NASA authorization bill in 2010 was fairly chaotic, since it involved ending the\u00a0Constellation program that would have sent astronauts to the moon.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year's bill left NASA's Earth science budget\u00a0untouched \u2014 for now. Earth science would\u00a0see a 5 percent cut in the president's blueprint, and Trump made clear\u00a0Tuesday that he thinks NASA should be focused on deep space, not Earth.\u201cIt's been a long time since a bill like this has been signed reaffirming our national commitment to the core mission of NASA, human space exploration, space science and technology,\u201d he said. Later he added, \u201cWe support jobs. It's about jobs.\u201dThe bill, which was passed with bipartisan support, can be read in full\u00a0here. Here are highlights from the bill signing:Astronauts will get health care for lifeThe TREAT Astronauts Act included in the bill will finally mandate that NASA pay for monitoring, diagnosis and treatment of any health problems related to spaceflight for all former astronauts.\u00a0The space agency has long monitored its astronauts for health problems after their time in space was over \u2014 that's how we know about visual impairment intracranial pressure syndrome, eye damage\u00a0caused by microgravity. But NASA couldn't\u00a0treat any problems that were found; it could only refer astronauts back to their primary-care doctors. In 2010, then-administrator Charles Bolden asked Congress to guarantee lifetime benefits for astronauts. He was opposed by the union that represents many NASA civil servants, according to the Wall Street Journal, because his proposal benefited only a small group of people.Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNow, NASA's retired astronauts will receive lifetime health care for all space flight-related issues. This is good news not just for astronauts, but for scientists studying the health effects of space travel \u2014 something that NASA will need to consider as it prepares to send humans on a seven-month journey to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump will relaunch the National Space CouncilVice President Pence said at the bill signing that he will be heading a revamped\u00a0National Space Council, an advisory board that serves as a go-between for NASA and the White House that hasn't operated since George H.W. Bush was president. It's not clear yet when the council will be established, or how it might promote\u00a0the president's space policy.Pace, who served on the space council under Bush, said that the council helps address issues that cut across multiple federal agencies: for example, questions about cooperation on the International Space Station (ISS) that would involve both NASA and the State Department.Story continues below advertisementThe Asteroid Redirect Mission is definitely deadThe authorization bill directs NASA to keep its sights on a human mission to Mars in 2033 (though it doesn't specify whether that would be a landing or just a visit to Mars orbit). But Congress wants the space agency to come up with an alternative\u00a0to the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which was supposed to send humans to lunar orbit as a steppingstone toward the Red Planet. NASA doesn't need to be told twice \u2014 after the blueprint budget included no funding for ARM, acting administrator Robert Lightfoot announced that NASA will no longer pursue that mission.Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S.But that means NASA\u00a0is looking for other \u201cintermediate\u201d stops on the path from Earth to Mars. Will the moon be one of them? At the president's request, NASA is currently studying the feasibility of adding astronauts to the first test flight of the SLS rocket, which is slated to fly around the moon next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump also referenced the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969\u00a0on Tuesday.\u201cIt was a big moment in our history,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, this nation is ready to be the first in space once again.\u201dNASA could\u00a0soon be chartering commercial\u00a0flights to the ISSThe authorization bill mandates that NASA can't acquire space flight services from a foreign entity unless there are no NASA vehicles or U.S. commercial providers available. It also directs the space\u00a0agency to look into ways to boost the private space industry.Trump\u00a0is not personally interested in a trip to space (though he's willing to send Congress)During the bill signing, Trump turned to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to comment on the difficulty of being an astronaut.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI don't know Ted, would you like to do it?\u201d he asked. \u201cI don't think I would.\u201dCruz shook his head, so Trump looked at Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).Advertisement\u201cMarco, do you want to do it?\u201dRubio also declined. Both senators are co-sponsors of the bill, and their states are home to two major NASA centers: Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\u201cYou could send Congress to space,\u201d Cruz suggested, apparently disregarding the fact that he's a member of Congress.\u201cWe could,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWhat a great idea that could be.\u201dRead more:Scientists captured incredible photographic proof of a landslide on a cometA new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including PlutoNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 yearsBill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to Mars Former astronauts will get health care. Pence will run the National Space Council. Trump doesn't want to be an astronaut.  Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3641",
        "date": "2017-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/14/bill-nye-has-some-advice-for-president-trump-about-getting-to-mars/",
        "text": "No one is completely sure\u00a0where President\u00a0Trump plans to take Americans in space \u2014 not even NASA.But Bill Nye has a few suggestions.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLast year, the nonprofit space-exploration advocacy group he runs, the Planetary Society, drew up a 16-page report for the president's transition team offering suggestions about how it should run the nation's space agency. Now Nye is sharing that report, and\u00a0a video message to the president, with the rest of the world. The report lists several recommendations for the future of space travel, but the main message is straightforward. Nye wants Trump to keep NASA on the path it's on, with the goal of getting humans to Mars by 2033.Story continues below advertisementCasey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, told the Verge that the decision to make the report public was a response to all the uncertainty about the president's space goals. Trump hasn't nominated anyone to run NASA yet or picked a science adviser. But he has hinted at interest in a return to the moon. Last month, NASA's acting administrator called for a study on the feasibility of adding astronauts to the first test flight of the agency's new rocket and crew capsule, which will orbit Earth's only natural satellite.Advertisement\u201cOne of the reasons we just put this out is because we have heard those rumors,\u201d Dreier said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want NASA to shift again and put the majority of its resources into a lunar program. These shifts don\u2019t turn on a dime.\u201d\u201cWe strongly recommend against starting over,\u201d Nye says in his video message. That's what happened the last time a president took office: Barack Obama shut down George W. Bush's Constellation program, which was headed for the moon, and asked NASA to instead look toward Mars. There's no way NASA could maintain missions aimed at the moon and Mars simultaneously, the report says, and a lunar landing would inevitably push back the timeline for Mars even further.NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon missionSo the Planetary Society report urges that NASA\u00a0orbit Mars first \u2014 something that could happen in 2033 \u2014 then land astronauts on the surface later in the decade. This can happen if NASA's budget grows to match inflation, the report says (something that hasn't always been the case in the past several years), and if funding responsibilities for the International Space Station are gradually handed over to private space flight companies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe report also urges Trump to spend about 30 percent of NASA's budget on science programs, including Earth-observing and planetary science missions.The most optimistic recommendation is saved for last: Nye wants Trump to increase NASA's budget by 5 percent per year over the next five years \u2014 enough to match inflation and give the space agency a bit extra to spend. This seems unlikely. Historically, NASA's budget rises and falls with overall non-defense domestic spending, and Trump has pledged to enact major cuts.But people who work in space exploration have always been a little pie in the sky. It's the nature of the business.\u201cYou have the opportunity to provide clear direction to our nation's space program,\u201d Nye tells Trump in the video. \u201cThe advances and discoveries made on your watch could be historic.\u201dRead more:Neanderthal microbes reveal surprises about what they ate \u2014 and whom they kissedCaught on film for the first time: One of the world's rarest whalesNewfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on EarthThese elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do itThis triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex. The legendary \u201cscience guy\u201d wants the president to keep NASA on it's current course: toward Mars, not the moon.   Bill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3642",
        "date": "2017-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/14/bill-nye-has-some-advice-for-president-trump-about-getting-to-mars/",
        "text": "No one is completely sure\u00a0where President\u00a0Trump plans to take Americans in space \u2014 not even NASA.But Bill Nye has a few suggestions.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLast year, the nonprofit space-exploration advocacy group he runs, the Planetary Society, drew up a 16-page report for the president's transition team offering suggestions about how it should run the nation's space agency. Now Nye is sharing that report, and\u00a0a video message to the president, with the rest of the world. The report lists several recommendations for the future of space travel, but the main message is straightforward. Nye wants Trump to keep NASA on the path it's on, with the goal of getting humans to Mars by 2033.Story continues below advertisementCasey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, told the Verge that the decision to make the report public was a response to all the uncertainty about the president's space goals. Trump hasn't nominated anyone to run NASA yet or picked a science adviser. But he has hinted at interest in a return to the moon. Last month, NASA's acting administrator called for a study on the feasibility of adding astronauts to the first test flight of the agency's new rocket and crew capsule, which will orbit Earth's only natural satellite.Advertisement\u201cOne of the reasons we just put this out is because we have heard those rumors,\u201d Dreier said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want NASA to shift again and put the majority of its resources into a lunar program. These shifts don\u2019t turn on a dime.\u201d\u201cWe strongly recommend against starting over,\u201d Nye says in his video message. That's what happened the last time a president took office: Barack Obama shut down George W. Bush's Constellation program, which was headed for the moon, and asked NASA to instead look toward Mars. There's no way NASA could maintain missions aimed at the moon and Mars simultaneously, the report says, and a lunar landing would inevitably push back the timeline for Mars even further.NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon missionSo the Planetary Society report urges that NASA\u00a0orbit Mars first \u2014 something that could happen in 2033 \u2014 then land astronauts on the surface later in the decade. This can happen if NASA's budget grows to match inflation, the report says (something that hasn't always been the case in the past several years), and if funding responsibilities for the International Space Station are gradually handed over to private space flight companies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe report also urges Trump to spend about 30 percent of NASA's budget on science programs, including Earth-observing and planetary science missions.The most optimistic recommendation is saved for last: Nye wants Trump to increase NASA's budget by 5 percent per year over the next five years \u2014 enough to match inflation and give the space agency a bit extra to spend. This seems unlikely. Historically, NASA's budget rises and falls with overall non-defense domestic spending, and Trump has pledged to enact major cuts.But people who work in space exploration have always been a little pie in the sky. It's the nature of the business.\u201cYou have the opportunity to provide clear direction to our nation's space program,\u201d Nye tells Trump in the video. \u201cThe advances and discoveries made on your watch could be historic.\u201dRead more:Neanderthal microbes reveal surprises about what they ate \u2014 and whom they kissedCaught on film for the first time: One of the world's rarest whalesNewfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on EarthThese elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do itThis triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex. The legendary \u201cscience guy\u201d wants the president to keep NASA on it's current course: toward Mars, not the moon.   Bill Nye has some advice for President Trump about getting to Mars",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Venus: Highlights From History, and When We May Go Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3643",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-spacecraft-life.html",
        "text": "Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Carl Sagan once said that Venus is the planet in our solar system most like hell. So when are we going back?",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Venus: Highlights From History, and When We May Go Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3644",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-spacecraft-life.html",
        "text": "Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Carl Sagan once said that Venus is the planet in our solar system most like hell. So when are we going back?",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Venus: Highlights From History, and When We May Go Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3645",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-spacecraft-life.html",
        "text": "Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Carl Sagan once said that Venus is the planet in our solar system most like hell. So when are we going back?",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Venus: Highlights From History, and When We May Go Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3646",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-spacecraft-life.html",
        "text": "Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Much visited in an earlier era of space exploration, the planet has been overlooked in recent decades. Carl Sagan once said that Venus is the planet in our solar system most like hell. So when are we going back?",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye was a Trump nominee\u2019s guest at the State of the Union. Scientists were not amused. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3647",
        "date": "2018-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/31/bill-nye-was-a-trump-nominees-guest-at-the-state-of-the-union-scientists-were-not-amused/",
        "text": "Less than a year ago, Bill Nye was the scientific community's bow-tied spirit animal, preparing to lead a legion of scientists in protesting what they called President Trump's assault on science.As The Washington Post's Caitlin Gibson wrote before the Nye-chaired March for Science, Nye \u201chas become more than the zany educator-entertainer who charmed kids with cartoonish sound effects. He is an activist for science, leading those now-grownups into political battle.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, Nye finds himself in the crosshairs of that same community after many say he spent Tuesday night hobnobbing with the enemy: Sitting next to Trump's pick to head NASA at the State of the Union address.Story continues below advertisementThe conflict has been brewing for weeks, since the Planetary Society announced that Nye, its CEO, had accepted an invitation to attend the speech with Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), whom\u00a0Trump tapped to lead NASA in September.Advertisement\u201cWhen a congressman and current nominee for NASA Administrator asks you to be his guest at the State of the Union address in Washington, D.C., how do you respond?\u201d the society said in making the announcement.\u00a0\u201cFor us, the answer was easy. Yes, Bill would be there.\u201dWhat has not been easy has been dealing with the fallout from a decision that has angered a vocal group of people in the scientific community.The group 500 Women Scientists wrote in an editorial in Scientific American that Nye's presence lent credibility to Bridenstine and, ostensibly, to Trump, despite viewpoints some say are anti-science:Story continues below advertisementAs scientists, we cannot stand by while Nye lends our community\u2019s credibility to a man who would undermine the United States\u2019 most prominent science agency. And we cannot stand by while Nye uses his public persona as a science entertainer to support an administration that is expressly xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, ableist, and anti-science.Even before he entered the Capitol, Nye was engaged in damage control:Tomorrow night I will attend the State of the Union as a guest of Congressman Jim Bridenstine \u2013 nominee for NASA Administrator \u2013 who extended me an invitation in my role as CEO of The Planetary Society....\u2014 Bill Nye (@BillNye) January 29, 2018\n\n\u2026The Society is the world\u2019s largest and most influential non-governmental nonpartisan space organization, co-founded by Carl Sagan. While the Congressman and I disagree on a great many issues \u2013 we share a deep respect for NASA and its achievements...\u2014 Bill Nye (@BillNye) January 29, 2018\n\nand a strong interest in the future of space exploration. My attendance tomorrow should not be interpreted as an endorsement of this administration, or of Congressman Bridenstine\u2019s nomination, or seen as an acceptance of the recent attacks on science and the scientific community.\u2014 Bill Nye (@BillNye) January 29, 2018\n\nThe U.S. Space Program has long been a source of American technical achievement, a symbol of our innovative spirit, and a source of national pride. There are extraordinary opportunities for our country, and for all humanity, in the continued exploration of space.\u2014 Bill Nye (@BillNye) January 29, 2018\n\nHistorically, the Space Program has brought Americans together, and during his address, I hope to hear the President\u2019s plans to continue exploring the space frontier.\u2014 Bill Nye (@BillNye) January 29, 2018\n\nCasey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, defended Nye in a post on the society's page. He said Nye's attendance at the State of the Union does not endorse Bridenstine's opinions or nomination to head NASA. The society is \u201ccommitted\u00a0 to working with whoever serves in that position,\u201d he wrote.Advertisement\u201cSpace exploration is one of the few areas of politics that still offers significant opportunities for bipartisan rapprochement,\u201d Dreier wrote. \u201cA shared passion for space can lay the groundwork for a relationship between individuals of very different political beliefs.\u201dThe March for Science was a moment made for Bill NyeDreier also said some people were misrepresenting Bridenstine's stances, particularly the ones on climate change.Story continues below advertisementAs The Post's Christian Davenport wrote, the congressman walked a fine line on the issue during his confirmation hearing.During the hearing, Bridenstine said he \u201cabsolutely\u201d believes in climate change, that it is already having devastating effects and that humans contribute to it. But he demurred when asked whether human activity was the leading cause, saying more study was needed. In response to questions, he vowed to protect the integrity of NASA\u2019s research, and to keep it an \u201capolitical\u201d organization that should be driven by science, not politics.At a time when no one here in Washington seems to want to reach out and talk to people with different opinions so as to seek common ground and enable collaboration Jim Bridenstine and Bill Nye are. And the net result? The #stopbridenstine crowd complains. pic.twitter.com/p4M0hY5eZi\u2014 NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) January 30, 2018\n\nAs Davenport wrote, \u201ca growing chorus of opponents\u201d has blasted Bridenstine since his nomination, including fellow house members who say his beliefs \u2014 notably opposition to same-sex marriage and the Violence Against Women Act \u2014 mean that he is out of step with the mores of NASA.But he has also garnered the support of industry groups such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and of Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon.Read more:Australian scientists went looking for deep sea creatures and pulled up your nightmares insteadScientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachThis ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the ocean Nye said attending the speech was not an endorsement of the policies of the Trump administration or Jim Bridenstine.  Bill Nye was a Trump nominee\u2019s guest at the State of the Union. Scientists were not amused.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "In his first speech, White House science adviser stresses the importance of the private sector (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3648",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/15/his-first-speech-white-house-science-adviser-stresses-importance-private-sector/",
        "text": "In his first major speech since being sworn in, the leading scientist in the Trump administration emphasized the growing importance of private companies in basic research and downplayed the importance of the government\u2019s investment in science.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhite House science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier took the stage at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to describe his vision of the nation\u2019s research ecosystem as one that has changed dramatically since the end of World War II, when the government made a major push to fund basic scientific research. Droegemeier stopped short of specific recommendations on what should happen to the government\u2019s investment in science, but the emphasis on other sources of funding and innovation was noticeable in an address to an auditorium full of scientists who often depend on federal funding to run their laboratories.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn fact, in 2015, for the first time in the history of this country, the private sector funded more basic research than did the federal government. Now, that didn\u2019t happen because the federal government stopped funding basic research, but it happened because American companies have the freedom to be creative and to invest and to explore new ideas,\u201d Droegemeier said.Droegemeier gave a list of statistics illustrating how much basic research is now being done by private companies or funded by nonprofit groups, and he called for a \u201csecond bold era of America\u2019s endless frontier in science and technology\u201d that reflects how the nation\u2019s research portfolio has shifted. In 1957, only the government could have responded to the threat of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, that launched the Space Age and triggered an investment that cemented American scientific, military and technological dominance for decades. But today, a private company \u2014 perhaps even a start-up \u2014 could play that role, Droegemeier argued.Instead of launching a new federal research initiative, Droegemeier described a potential throwback to the blue-sky industrial research labs of the past run by giant companies, such as Bell Laboratories. He called for \u201calpha institutes\u201d that could be located at colleges and universities and funded primarily by companies and nonprofit foundations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlpha institutes \u201ccould serve as a scientific crucible of exceptional faculty, students and postdoctoral researchers \u2014 from industry, from academia, from government \u2014 to pursue absolutely transformational ideas on the biggest challenges that face humanity today, like space exploration, climate change, eradicating disease and making it possible for people to live longer and healthier lives,\u201d he said. Many companies and foundations already invest in research institutes.The scientific community took heart when the Trump administration finally filled a gaping hole, appointing Droegemeier, a respected meteorologist and extreme-weather expert, to serve as his top science and technology adviser after the position remained vacant for nearly two years. Rush Holt, chief executive of the AAAS, welcomed Droegemeier to give his first major speech since being officially sworn in, and Holt listed hopes that scientists had.\u201cI think we hope and expect he will be able to clearly communicate the accepted and understood evidence on climate science, that human activity is changing the climate, and it is costly in lives and dollars, and action is required,\u201d Holt said. \u201cThat funding for science from the federal government is suboptimal. \u2026. The administration should understand, and we hope that Dr. Droegemeier will help them understand, the funding is suboptimal; this is no time to reduce federal funding for research.\u201d After his remarks, Droegemeier quickly left the stage without taking questions.Read More:Senate confirms Trump\u2019s science and tech adviser after lengthy vacancyTaxpayers helped fund this $129,000 cancer drug. Should the government help cut the price?Trump\u2019s most inspiring story about American innovation depends on the rest of the world Kelvin Droegemeier, Trump's newly confirmed science adviser, proposed that \"alpha institutes\" funded by private companies and nonprofits, could become engines of innovation. In his first speech, White House science adviser stresses the importance of the private sector",
        "author": "Carolyn Y. Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "In his first speech, White House science adviser stresses the importance of the private sector (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3649",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/15/his-first-speech-white-house-science-adviser-stresses-importance-private-sector/",
        "text": "In his first major speech since being sworn in, the leading scientist in the Trump administration emphasized the growing importance of private companies in basic research and downplayed the importance of the government\u2019s investment in science.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhite House science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier took the stage at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to describe his vision of the nation\u2019s research ecosystem as one that has changed dramatically since the end of World War II, when the government made a major push to fund basic scientific research. Droegemeier stopped short of specific recommendations on what should happen to the government\u2019s investment in science, but the emphasis on other sources of funding and innovation was noticeable in an address to an auditorium full of scientists who often depend on federal funding to run their laboratories.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn fact, in 2015, for the first time in the history of this country, the private sector funded more basic research than did the federal government. Now, that didn\u2019t happen because the federal government stopped funding basic research, but it happened because American companies have the freedom to be creative and to invest and to explore new ideas,\u201d Droegemeier said.Droegemeier gave a list of statistics illustrating how much basic research is now being done by private companies or funded by nonprofit groups, and he called for a \u201csecond bold era of America\u2019s endless frontier in science and technology\u201d that reflects how the nation\u2019s research portfolio has shifted. In 1957, only the government could have responded to the threat of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, that launched the Space Age and triggered an investment that cemented American scientific, military and technological dominance for decades. But today, a private company \u2014 perhaps even a start-up \u2014 could play that role, Droegemeier argued.Instead of launching a new federal research initiative, Droegemeier described a potential throwback to the blue-sky industrial research labs of the past run by giant companies, such as Bell Laboratories. He called for \u201calpha institutes\u201d that could be located at colleges and universities and funded primarily by companies and nonprofit foundations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlpha institutes \u201ccould serve as a scientific crucible of exceptional faculty, students and postdoctoral researchers \u2014 from industry, from academia, from government \u2014 to pursue absolutely transformational ideas on the biggest challenges that face humanity today, like space exploration, climate change, eradicating disease and making it possible for people to live longer and healthier lives,\u201d he said. Many companies and foundations already invest in research institutes.The scientific community took heart when the Trump administration finally filled a gaping hole, appointing Droegemeier, a respected meteorologist and extreme-weather expert, to serve as his top science and technology adviser after the position remained vacant for nearly two years. Rush Holt, chief executive of the AAAS, welcomed Droegemeier to give his first major speech since being officially sworn in, and Holt listed hopes that scientists had.\u201cI think we hope and expect he will be able to clearly communicate the accepted and understood evidence on climate science, that human activity is changing the climate, and it is costly in lives and dollars, and action is required,\u201d Holt said. \u201cThat funding for science from the federal government is suboptimal. \u2026. The administration should understand, and we hope that Dr. Droegemeier will help them understand, the funding is suboptimal; this is no time to reduce federal funding for research.\u201d After his remarks, Droegemeier quickly left the stage without taking questions.Read More:Senate confirms Trump\u2019s science and tech adviser after lengthy vacancyTaxpayers helped fund this $129,000 cancer drug. Should the government help cut the price?Trump\u2019s most inspiring story about American innovation depends on the rest of the world Kelvin Droegemeier, Trump's newly confirmed science adviser, proposed that \"alpha institutes\" funded by private companies and nonprofits, could become engines of innovation. In his first speech, White House science adviser stresses the importance of the private sector",
        "author": "Carolyn Y. Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking calls for a return to the moon as Earth\u2019s clock runs out (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3650",
        "date": "2017-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/21/stephen-hawking-calls-for-a-return-to-the-moon-as-earths-clock-runs-out/",
        "text": "Humans are overdue for a return trip to the moon, Stephen Hawking has just opined.Speaking on Tuesday at the Starmus Festival, a science-slash-musical gathering, the astrophysicist offered two parts doom cut with one part scientific optimism. He argued that we should prepare for a cosmic\u00a0exodus\u00a0to take place in the next 200 to 500 years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe are running out of space, and the only place we can go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems,\u201d he said via video link to the audience gathered in Trondheim, Norway. \u201cSpreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.\u201dHawking's plan to boogie\u00a0off this planet is ambitious:\u00a0Countries should collaborate to construct a moon colony within 30 years. We can reach Mars \u201cin the next 15 years,\u201d he said, with a base to\u00a0follow a few decades later.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe head of the European Space Agency said in 2016 that a \u201cmoon village\u201d would take 20 years to plan and construct. NASA's long-term plans include\u00a0sending humans to Mars\u00a0by the 2030s.Astronauts last walked on the moon in 1972, the same year that Elton John's \u201cRocket Man\u201d debuted on vinyl. The final lunar visitor, Eugene Cernan, died in\u00a0January. Cernan remained a lifelong advocate for space travel, testifying before Congress in 2011 that American\u00a0space exploration was on \u201ca path of decay\u201d after the Obama administration shuttered NASA's Constellation moon program.Hawking's gloom goes beyond\u00a0decay into eschatology. In November, he said we had about 1,000 years left before escaping to the stars. In May, he chopped\u00a0that timetable to the\u00a0next hundred years.\u00a0During his speech Tuesday, titled \u201cThe future of humanity,\u201d the 75-year-old black hole expert said that \u201cEarth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are\u00a0extraterrestrial\u00a0apocalypses,\u00a0such as asteroid impacts \u201cguaranteed by the laws of physics and probability.\u201d On Earth, Hawking cited melting polar ice caps, loss of animal life and dwindling physical resources, among other ill portents.\u201cThe Earth is becoming too small for us,\u201d he said. Global\u00a0warming is a threat, too, a view he knows is not shared by President Trump, \u201cwho may just have taken the most serious and wrong decision on climate change this world has seen. I am arguing for the future of humanity and a long-term strategy to achieve this.\u201dSo let us\u00a0set our sights on\u00a0other worlds.\u00a0At a neighborly 4.37 light-years away, the planet\u00a0Proxima B\u00a0in the Alpha Centauri system is a promising target, Hawking said \u2014 except that with current technology, interstellar travel is \u201cutterly impractical.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe outlined some of the theoretical technology behind Breakthrough Starshot, a mission he supports along with Russian tycoon Yuri Milner. The goal is to send tiny probes all 25 trillion miles to Proxima B and have them beam back information.Here's how the Breakthrough Starshot would work (Breakthrough Initiative)In theory, an array of powerful\u00a0lasers, blasting up to 100 gigawatts of power combined into space, could propel nanocraft like sailboats caught in a mighty wind. The probes would fly by Mars in an hour, Pluto in days and Alpha Centauri in 20 years, Hawking said. (He does not envision such a system being useful for\u00a0human interstellar travel, though, in part because light-propelled craft\u00a0have no brakes to pump.)\u201cThe human race has existed as a separate species for about 2 million years. Civilization began about 10,000 years ago, and the rate of development has been steadily increasing,\u201d Hawking said. \u201cIf humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article reported an incorrect distance to Proxima B.Read more:Stephen Hawking just moved up humanity\u2019s deadline for escaping EarthStephen Hawking: \u2018I fear that I may not be welcome\u2019 in Trump\u2019s America'Why Stephen Hawking believes the next 100 years may be humanity\u2019s toughest test The astrophysicist thinks we should prepare for a cosmic exodus in the next 200 to 500 years. Stephen Hawking calls for a return to the moon as Earth\u2019s clock runs out",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why scientists are upset about a dinosaur fossil\u2019s sale \u2014 and $2.4 million price tag (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3651",
        "date": "2018-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/06/dinosaur-fossils-2-4-million-tag-has-experts-worried-museums-are-being-priced-out-of-the-market/",
        "text": "By the time the scientists had catalogued the last bone, they realized they might be staring at\u00a0the discovery of a lifetime \u2014 the 70 percent intact fossil of a carnivorous creature as long as a telephone pole that may represent a new kind of dinosaur.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut that is not all that they unearthed. Five years after it was discovered in Wyoming, the bones of the creature \u2014 it still has no name \u2014 have been sold at auction to a private art collector for $2.36 million on Monday, exhuming a debate that is at once economic, political and ethical.Should\u00a0the fate of a 150-million-year-old fossil lie in the hands of one deep-pocketed person who happens to be the highest bidder? Or should it be controlled by a museum or another authority who can ensure that it can be studied by scientists and preserved for posterity?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAn auction is a device to get the highest possible price out of something,\u201d P. David Polly, the president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and a professor of sedimentary geology at Indiana University, told Live Science. \u201cAnd, generally speaking, even big museums don\u2019t have budgets for purchasing specimens.\u201dThe T. rex that got away: Smithsonian\u2019s quest for Sue ends with different dinosaurThe dinosaur in question was dug up between 2013 and 2015 and may be a relative of the allosaurus, a Jurassic-era biped that was among the earliest and most widely studied dinosaur discoveries, according to Live Science.Eric Mickeler, who works for the Aguttes auction house that organized the bidding battle, told Agence France-Presse that the dinosaur is \u201cthe only one of its species\u201d that has been discovered.Story continues below advertisementEric Geneste, a dinosaur expert, told the news organization that scientists can\u2019t classify the dino as an allosaurus yet. The number of teeth don\u2019t match up, and the new dinosaur has longer shoulder blades.Advertisement\u201cIn fact, there are as many differences between it and an allosaurus as between a human and a gorilla,\u201d he added.Obviously, the Wyoming fossil needs additional study, scientists say. But paleontologists worry they may never get a close enough look at it \u2014 because the fossil belongs to a private buyer, not a person or an organization bound by the mores and rules of the greater scientific community.A few weeks ago, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which represents more than 2,000 students and professionals, asked the auction house to scuttle the sale.Story continues below advertisement\u201cScientifically important vertebrate fossils are part of our collective natural heritage and deserve to be held in public trust,\u201d the society said in an open letter.\u201cFossil specimens that are sold into private hands are lost to science. Even if made accessible to scientists, information contained within privately owned specimens cannot be included in the scientific literature because the availability of the fossil material to other scientists cannot be guaranteed, and therefore verification of scientific claims (the essence of scientific progress) cannot be performed.\u201dAdvertisementThe person who bought the dinosaur doesn\u2019t exactly plan to make it the centerpiece of a fountain in his French villa, auctioneers said. The buyer, identified only as a British businessman, has pledged to lend it to a museum and said that it will be made available to scientists.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEveryone will be able to see it, it will soon be lent to a museum, it will be studied by scientists, everything is perfect,\u201d auctioneer Claude Aguttes told Reuters.But the buyer has remained at least publicly silent on another issue that is vexing scientists: If it is a new species, who gets to name it?Naming new species \u201cis governed by the International Code of Nomenclature, which award priority to the first validly published name, not to the owner of the specimen that formed the basis of that name,\u201d the society said.AdvertisementStill, it\u2019s unclear whether the owner was influenced by the near-promise made on page 51 of the auction brochure.\u201cThe buyer will be acquiring the skeleton of a dinosaur which could be named after them or after one of their children, with the agreement of the scientist who formally describes the species,\u201d the auction brochure states. \u201cOne\u2019s name would thus remain forever linked to a significant cultural and scientific event.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRead more:There\u2019s a small chance an asteroid will smack into Earth in 2135. NASA is working on a plan.This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.Dentists keep dying of this lung disease. The CDC can\u2019t figure out why.\u00a0This ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the oceanScientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beach Should the fate of a 150-million-year-old fossil lie in the hands of one deep-pocketed person who happens to be the highest bidder?   Why scientists are upset about a dinosaur fossil\u2019s sale \u2014 and $2.4 million price tag",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Freeman Dyson, Math Genius Turned Technological Visionary, Dies at 96 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3652",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/freeman-dyson-dead.html",
        "text": "After an early breakthrough on light and matter, he became a writer who challenged climate science and pondered space exploration and nuclear warfare. After an early breakthrough on light and matter, he became a writer who challenged climate science and pondered space exploration and nuclear warfare. Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth\u2019s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96.",
        "author": "By George Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Freeman Dyson, Math Genius Turned Technological Visionary, Dies at 96 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3653",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/freeman-dyson-dead.html",
        "text": "After an early breakthrough on light and matter, he became a writer who challenged climate science and pondered space exploration and nuclear warfare. After an early breakthrough on light and matter, he became a writer who challenged climate science and pondered space exploration and nuclear warfare. Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth\u2019s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96.",
        "author": "By George Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Everything is awesome for the Women of NASA Lego set (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3654",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/01/everything-is-awesome-for-the-women-of-nasa-lego-set/",
        "text": "A Lego set that celebrates the contributions of NASA's female pioneers will soon be available for children who dream of space and are interested in STEM fields.Lego has announced that\u00a0\u201cWomen of NASA\u201d \u2014 a set featuring women\u00a0who played important roles in the U.S. space program \u2014 will be developed.\u00a0The proposed set, the final design of which is not yet available, includes figurines of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and Katherine Johnson, who was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d\u00a0That's according to the project's Lego Ideas page, which begins: \u201cLadies rock outer space!\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to CNN, the Women of NASA set\u00a0was created as part of Lego Ideas, which allows fans and users to\u00a0come up with ideas for Lego sets. This project was created by\u00a0Maia Weinstock, a science editor and writer at MIT News.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re really excited to be able to introduce Maia\u2019s Women of NASA set for its\u00a0inspirational value as well as build and play experience,\u201d a Lego Ideas post states.Thrilled to finally share: @LegoNASAWomen has passed the @LEGOIdeas Review and will soon be a real LEGO set! https://t.co/rcyjANsVD9 pic.twitter.com/b9OVx5UBaL\u2014 Maia Weinstock (@20tauri) February 28, 2017\n\n\u2018Hidden\u2019 no more: Katherine Johnson, a black NASA pioneer, finds acclaim at 98The proposed Women of NASA Lego lineup also includes:\u2022 Nancy Grace Roman:\u00a0Also known as\u00a0\u201cMother of Hubble,\u201d a nickname she earned\u00a0for her role in the Hubble Space Telescope\u2022 Mae Jemison:\u00a0The first African American woman in space\u2022 Margaret Hamilton: A pioneering computer scientist, pictured here next to a tower of Apollo Guidance Computer source code books that is as tall as she is. (That stack is also part of the Lego set.)In an email to The Washington Post, Weinstock\u00a0wrote that this was not the first time she had offered a project for the Lego Ideas contest. With Women\u00a0of NASA, though, she was able to combine two of her passions:\u00a0space exploration and the history of women in STEM, she wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAmong other things, both subjects have healthy social media presence, and I figured combining the two could leverage those similar passions in others,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThere are a number of books and documentaries on women at NASA that I've read and seen, but also a couple of photos \u2014 the two I re-create as vignettes of Katherine Johnson and Margaret Hamilton \u2014 I knew I wanted to do in Lego anyway, so this just pulled them all together.\u201dPersonally,\u00a0Weinstock wrote, she doesn't have a favorite\u00a0figurine in the set, but she did note that Ride \u2014 someone Weinstock looked up to when she was growing up \u2014\u00a0was the first that she created.\u201cWhat she did to support women and girls in the STEM fields is remarkable. \u2026 I knew I wanted to include her because she's already fairly famous, so that would help the set gain some traction, but also because of all of the work she's done post-NASA, to encourage young people to go into science and [engineering],\u201d she wrote.This project is dedicated to the memory of Sally Ride, who tirelessly encouraged children to \"reach for the stars.\" pic.twitter.com/ZaIRGaacDh\u2014 Maia Weinstock (@20tauri) August 2, 2016\n\nWeinstock wrote in her email that it is \u201ccritical to have toys that girls can look at and play with and think, \u2018that's me!'\u2019 or \u2018that could be me!\u2019 \u201d When people read about\u00a0or see the set, she wrote, Weinstock hopes that they will learn about the women portrayed in it and their stories and contributions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut I also just hope that girls *and* boys will take away from it the sense that women belong in engineering, in mathematics,\u201d Weinstock wrote.\u00a0\u201cI hope in some small way it helps to inspire the kids of the future!\u201dIt is unclear when the Women of NASA set will be available in stores. The Lego Ideas website notes that the company is still working\u00a0on final product design and pricing.Here are a few more pictures of the proposed set:Read More:This triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex.Now anyone can join the search for the mysterious \u2018Planet Nine\u2019NASA officials discuss Trump\u2019s push for first-term moon mission You will be able to buy a Lego depicting astronaut Sally Ride \u2014 and, yes, a Lego of physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson, too. Everything is awesome for the Women of NASA Lego set",
        "author": "Sarah Larimer"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome (WP: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3655",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/this-is-the-true-story-of-six-strangers-picked-to-live-in-a-nasa-dome/",
        "text": "\"10, 9, 8 \u2026\u201dInside the 1,200-square-foot dome on Hawaii, 29-year-old James Bevington listened to the countdown with a combination of excitement and fear.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside, family members and the media\u00a0waited\u00a0near\u00a0the summit of the world\u2019s largest active volcano\u00a0for\u00a0six scientists and engineers to emerge\u00a0after\u00a0eight months\u00a0simulating life on Mars.For Bevington,\u00a0an aspiring astronaut, the chance to live in the Mars-like habitat as a NASA-backed space psychology research subject was a dream come true. Leaving the dome\u00a0\u2014 and eight months of self-imposed seclusion \u2014 on the overcast morning of Sept. 17 was bittersweet. It meant leaving the people who were his colleagues, his roommates and who eventually became his best friends. Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a really difficult moment\u00a0\u2014 it's scary but exciting,\u201d said Bevington, commander of the 2017 Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission. \u201cYou're leaving the people who have been by your side 24/7, and you're walking into a whirlwind.\u201dAdvertisementWith cameras flashing and video cameras rolling, the group emerged onto the rocky, red plains\u00a0below the summit of Mauna Loa on the overcast Sunday. Wearing matching red HI-SEAS polo shirts, they answered\u00a0journalists\u2019\u00a0questions, posed for selfies with their families and feasted on watermelon, mango and berries \u2014 luxuries they had missed after subsisting on mostly freeze-dried food during their months of isolation.The journey\u00a0is bittersweet:\u00a0Five of the six members of the Hawaii team received rejection letters from NASA's most recent round of astronaut selection when they were in the dome, Bevington said. The sixth, a U.K. resident, hopes to go to space as a tourist one day.Story continues below advertisementBut for eight months, Bevington came closer to experiencing life on Mars than most people ever will. This is what he found.AdvertisementWhat it would be like living on MarsDuring the simulation, the crew of four men and two women did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits on biweekly exploratory missions, during which they conducted geological surveys and mapping studies, said the project\u2019s lead investigator, University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted. All their communication with the outside world had\u00a0a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars, meaning no calls, Skype or turning to Google to answer a quick question. Food and supplies were dropped off at a distance from the dome and retrieved by the crew on their exploratory missions.The project, which is the fifth of six NASA-funded studies at the University of Hawaii facility, was designed to better understand the psychological impacts of a long-term space mission on astronauts. Researchers hope the results will help NASA choose individuals best-suited to cope with the isolation and stress of two-to-three year trips to Mars\u00a0\u2014 which the U.S. space agency hopes to begin by the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow to handle conflict in a domeAs the Hawaii team went about day-to-day business, including cooking, cleaning and working out, in\u00a0a shelter\u00a0roughly the size of a small two-bedroom home, they wore specially designed sensors that measured their voice levels and proximity to other people, allowing researchers to collect data on whether people were arguing or avoiding each other. That data will not be analyzed until Mission 6, the final study funded by the U.S. space agency, is completed, Binsted said.\u201cWhat I can tell you is that this group did well,\u201d she said. \u201cThey completed their mission.\u201dBevington, the group's commander and researcher focused on synthetic biology and space studies,\u00a0said conflict in the small space, which has sleeping quarters, a kitchen, laboratory and two bathrooms, was inevitable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you put six people together in a stressful situation, there will be conflict,\u201d said Bevington, who will return to the University of New South Wales in Sydney to pursue his PhD after visiting his grandparents in Tennessee. \u201cBut the crew was very open with each other about conflict. We realized it was two people versus the thing in between them, rather than two people against each other.\u201dResearchers are studying how the mood-gauging sensors could be used on future NASA trips to space, where it is especially important that conflict be addressed early,\u00a0Binsted said. NASA has dedicated about $2.5 million for research at the facility, according to the Associated Press.\u201cThe idea is that you're not just relying on self-reporting,\u201d Binsted said. \u201cAstronauts tend to be very stoic and positive. So their self-reports tend to be very positive. That's well and good. But the downside is that you don't detect issues until they become very prominent.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow they passed the timeBevington said the crew, which included a software engineer from Google, a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin and an electrical engineer, played board games and watched movies in their downtime. One member knitted, while another learned how to play the ukulele. It was recommended that they all exercise for an hour and a half every day because \u201cyour bones would start to deteriorate on Mars,\u201d Bevington explained.Bevington said the decision to cease steady contact with his friends and family and pause his studies in Australia was \u201ccompletely worth it for him.\u201dNo\u00a0one who has participated in HI-SEAS so far has become an astronaut, Binsted said, although a few have advanced to become finalists.Story continues below advertisementMore than 18,300 people\u00a0applied to join NASA's 2017 class\u00a0\u2014 almost three times the number of applications received in 2012\u00a0\u2014 and only eight to 14 individuals will ultimately become astronaut candidates, according to NASA.Advertisement\u201cWith those odds, it's not something you can plan your life around,\u201d Bevington said. \u201cYou have to enjoy everything along the way. But this was a step in the right direction.\u201dThis story has been updated.\u00a0Read more: Russian \u2018cannibal couple\u2019 may have drugged, killed and eaten as many as 30 people, police sayOtto Warmbier\u2019s parents lash out: \u2018North Korea is not a victim. They\u2019re terrorists.\u2019Two black Chicago police officers took a knee in a precinct lobby \u2014 and were reprimanded During the simulation, the crew did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits, and all communications with the outside world had a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars. This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome",
        "author": "Rachel Chason"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3656",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/this-is-the-true-story-of-six-strangers-picked-to-live-in-a-nasa-dome/",
        "text": "\"10, 9, 8 \u2026\u201dInside the 1,200-square-foot dome on Hawaii, 29-year-old James Bevington listened to the countdown with a combination of excitement and fear.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside, family members and the media\u00a0waited\u00a0near\u00a0the summit of the world\u2019s largest active volcano\u00a0for\u00a0six scientists and engineers to emerge\u00a0after\u00a0eight months\u00a0simulating life on Mars.For Bevington,\u00a0an aspiring astronaut, the chance to live in the Mars-like habitat as a NASA-backed space psychology research subject was a dream come true. Leaving the dome\u00a0\u2014 and eight months of self-imposed seclusion \u2014 on the overcast morning of Sept. 17 was bittersweet. It meant leaving the people who were his colleagues, his roommates and who eventually became his best friends. Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a really difficult moment\u00a0\u2014 it's scary but exciting,\u201d said Bevington, commander of the 2017 Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission. \u201cYou're leaving the people who have been by your side 24/7, and you're walking into a whirlwind.\u201dAdvertisementWith cameras flashing and video cameras rolling, the group emerged onto the rocky, red plains\u00a0below the summit of Mauna Loa on the overcast Sunday. Wearing matching red HI-SEAS polo shirts, they answered\u00a0journalists\u2019\u00a0questions, posed for selfies with their families and feasted on watermelon, mango and berries \u2014 luxuries they had missed after subsisting on mostly freeze-dried food during their months of isolation.The journey\u00a0is bittersweet:\u00a0Five of the six members of the Hawaii team received rejection letters from NASA's most recent round of astronaut selection when they were in the dome, Bevington said. The sixth, a U.K. resident, hopes to go to space as a tourist one day.Story continues below advertisementBut for eight months, Bevington came closer to experiencing life on Mars than most people ever will. This is what he found.AdvertisementWhat it would be like living on MarsDuring the simulation, the crew of four men and two women did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits on biweekly exploratory missions, during which they conducted geological surveys and mapping studies, said the project\u2019s lead investigator, University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted. All their communication with the outside world had\u00a0a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars, meaning no calls, Skype or turning to Google to answer a quick question. Food and supplies were dropped off at a distance from the dome and retrieved by the crew on their exploratory missions.The project, which is the fifth of six NASA-funded studies at the University of Hawaii facility, was designed to better understand the psychological impacts of a long-term space mission on astronauts. Researchers hope the results will help NASA choose individuals best-suited to cope with the isolation and stress of two-to-three year trips to Mars\u00a0\u2014 which the U.S. space agency hopes to begin by the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow to handle conflict in a domeAs the Hawaii team went about day-to-day business, including cooking, cleaning and working out, in\u00a0a shelter\u00a0roughly the size of a small two-bedroom home, they wore specially designed sensors that measured their voice levels and proximity to other people, allowing researchers to collect data on whether people were arguing or avoiding each other. That data will not be analyzed until Mission 6, the final study funded by the U.S. space agency, is completed, Binsted said.\u201cWhat I can tell you is that this group did well,\u201d she said. \u201cThey completed their mission.\u201dBevington, the group's commander and researcher focused on synthetic biology and space studies,\u00a0said conflict in the small space, which has sleeping quarters, a kitchen, laboratory and two bathrooms, was inevitable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you put six people together in a stressful situation, there will be conflict,\u201d said Bevington, who will return to the University of New South Wales in Sydney to pursue his PhD after visiting his grandparents in Tennessee. \u201cBut the crew was very open with each other about conflict. We realized it was two people versus the thing in between them, rather than two people against each other.\u201dResearchers are studying how the mood-gauging sensors could be used on future NASA trips to space, where it is especially important that conflict be addressed early,\u00a0Binsted said. NASA has dedicated about $2.5 million for research at the facility, according to the Associated Press.\u201cThe idea is that you're not just relying on self-reporting,\u201d Binsted said. \u201cAstronauts tend to be very stoic and positive. So their self-reports tend to be very positive. That's well and good. But the downside is that you don't detect issues until they become very prominent.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow they passed the timeBevington said the crew, which included a software engineer from Google, a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin and an electrical engineer, played board games and watched movies in their downtime. One member knitted, while another learned how to play the ukulele. It was recommended that they all exercise for an hour and a half every day because \u201cyour bones would start to deteriorate on Mars,\u201d Bevington explained.Bevington said the decision to cease steady contact with his friends and family and pause his studies in Australia was \u201ccompletely worth it for him.\u201dNo\u00a0one who has participated in HI-SEAS so far has become an astronaut, Binsted said, although a few have advanced to become finalists.Story continues below advertisementMore than 18,300 people\u00a0applied to join NASA's 2017 class\u00a0\u2014 almost three times the number of applications received in 2012\u00a0\u2014 and only eight to 14 individuals will ultimately become astronaut candidates, according to NASA.Advertisement\u201cWith those odds, it's not something you can plan your life around,\u201d Bevington said. \u201cYou have to enjoy everything along the way. But this was a step in the right direction.\u201dThis story has been updated.\u00a0Read more: Russian \u2018cannibal couple\u2019 may have drugged, killed and eaten as many as 30 people, police sayOtto Warmbier\u2019s parents lash out: \u2018North Korea is not a victim. They\u2019re terrorists.\u2019Two black Chicago police officers took a knee in a precinct lobby \u2014 and were reprimanded During the simulation, the crew did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits, and all communications with the outside world had a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars. This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome",
        "author": "Rachel Chason"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3657",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/this-is-the-true-story-of-six-strangers-picked-to-live-in-a-nasa-dome/",
        "text": "\"10, 9, 8 \u2026\u201dInside the 1,200-square-foot dome on Hawaii, 29-year-old James Bevington listened to the countdown with a combination of excitement and fear.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside, family members and the media\u00a0waited\u00a0near\u00a0the summit of the world\u2019s largest active volcano\u00a0for\u00a0six scientists and engineers to emerge\u00a0after\u00a0eight months\u00a0simulating life on Mars.For Bevington,\u00a0an aspiring astronaut, the chance to live in the Mars-like habitat as a NASA-backed space psychology research subject was a dream come true. Leaving the dome\u00a0\u2014 and eight months of self-imposed seclusion \u2014 on the overcast morning of Sept. 17 was bittersweet. It meant leaving the people who were his colleagues, his roommates and who eventually became his best friends. Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a really difficult moment\u00a0\u2014 it's scary but exciting,\u201d said Bevington, commander of the 2017 Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission. \u201cYou're leaving the people who have been by your side 24/7, and you're walking into a whirlwind.\u201dAdvertisementWith cameras flashing and video cameras rolling, the group emerged onto the rocky, red plains\u00a0below the summit of Mauna Loa on the overcast Sunday. Wearing matching red HI-SEAS polo shirts, they answered\u00a0journalists\u2019\u00a0questions, posed for selfies with their families and feasted on watermelon, mango and berries \u2014 luxuries they had missed after subsisting on mostly freeze-dried food during their months of isolation.The journey\u00a0is bittersweet:\u00a0Five of the six members of the Hawaii team received rejection letters from NASA's most recent round of astronaut selection when they were in the dome, Bevington said. The sixth, a U.K. resident, hopes to go to space as a tourist one day.Story continues below advertisementBut for eight months, Bevington came closer to experiencing life on Mars than most people ever will. This is what he found.AdvertisementWhat it would be like living on MarsDuring the simulation, the crew of four men and two women did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits on biweekly exploratory missions, during which they conducted geological surveys and mapping studies, said the project\u2019s lead investigator, University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted. All their communication with the outside world had\u00a0a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars, meaning no calls, Skype or turning to Google to answer a quick question. Food and supplies were dropped off at a distance from the dome and retrieved by the crew on their exploratory missions.The project, which is the fifth of six NASA-funded studies at the University of Hawaii facility, was designed to better understand the psychological impacts of a long-term space mission on astronauts. Researchers hope the results will help NASA choose individuals best-suited to cope with the isolation and stress of two-to-three year trips to Mars\u00a0\u2014 which the U.S. space agency hopes to begin by the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow to handle conflict in a domeAs the Hawaii team went about day-to-day business, including cooking, cleaning and working out, in\u00a0a shelter\u00a0roughly the size of a small two-bedroom home, they wore specially designed sensors that measured their voice levels and proximity to other people, allowing researchers to collect data on whether people were arguing or avoiding each other. That data will not be analyzed until Mission 6, the final study funded by the U.S. space agency, is completed, Binsted said.\u201cWhat I can tell you is that this group did well,\u201d she said. \u201cThey completed their mission.\u201dBevington, the group's commander and researcher focused on synthetic biology and space studies,\u00a0said conflict in the small space, which has sleeping quarters, a kitchen, laboratory and two bathrooms, was inevitable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you put six people together in a stressful situation, there will be conflict,\u201d said Bevington, who will return to the University of New South Wales in Sydney to pursue his PhD after visiting his grandparents in Tennessee. \u201cBut the crew was very open with each other about conflict. We realized it was two people versus the thing in between them, rather than two people against each other.\u201dResearchers are studying how the mood-gauging sensors could be used on future NASA trips to space, where it is especially important that conflict be addressed early,\u00a0Binsted said. NASA has dedicated about $2.5 million for research at the facility, according to the Associated Press.\u201cThe idea is that you're not just relying on self-reporting,\u201d Binsted said. \u201cAstronauts tend to be very stoic and positive. So their self-reports tend to be very positive. That's well and good. But the downside is that you don't detect issues until they become very prominent.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow they passed the timeBevington said the crew, which included a software engineer from Google, a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin and an electrical engineer, played board games and watched movies in their downtime. One member knitted, while another learned how to play the ukulele. It was recommended that they all exercise for an hour and a half every day because \u201cyour bones would start to deteriorate on Mars,\u201d Bevington explained.Bevington said the decision to cease steady contact with his friends and family and pause his studies in Australia was \u201ccompletely worth it for him.\u201dNo\u00a0one who has participated in HI-SEAS so far has become an astronaut, Binsted said, although a few have advanced to become finalists.Story continues below advertisementMore than 18,300 people\u00a0applied to join NASA's 2017 class\u00a0\u2014 almost three times the number of applications received in 2012\u00a0\u2014 and only eight to 14 individuals will ultimately become astronaut candidates, according to NASA.Advertisement\u201cWith those odds, it's not something you can plan your life around,\u201d Bevington said. \u201cYou have to enjoy everything along the way. But this was a step in the right direction.\u201dThis story has been updated.\u00a0Read more: Russian \u2018cannibal couple\u2019 may have drugged, killed and eaten as many as 30 people, police sayOtto Warmbier\u2019s parents lash out: \u2018North Korea is not a victim. They\u2019re terrorists.\u2019Two black Chicago police officers took a knee in a precinct lobby \u2014 and were reprimanded During the simulation, the crew did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits, and all communications with the outside world had a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars. This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome",
        "author": "Rachel Chason"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3658",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/this-is-the-true-story-of-six-strangers-picked-to-live-in-a-nasa-dome/",
        "text": "\"10, 9, 8 \u2026\u201dInside the 1,200-square-foot dome on Hawaii, 29-year-old James Bevington listened to the countdown with a combination of excitement and fear.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside, family members and the media\u00a0waited\u00a0near\u00a0the summit of the world\u2019s largest active volcano\u00a0for\u00a0six scientists and engineers to emerge\u00a0after\u00a0eight months\u00a0simulating life on Mars.For Bevington,\u00a0an aspiring astronaut, the chance to live in the Mars-like habitat as a NASA-backed space psychology research subject was a dream come true. Leaving the dome\u00a0\u2014 and eight months of self-imposed seclusion \u2014 on the overcast morning of Sept. 17 was bittersweet. It meant leaving the people who were his colleagues, his roommates and who eventually became his best friends. Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a really difficult moment\u00a0\u2014 it's scary but exciting,\u201d said Bevington, commander of the 2017 Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission. \u201cYou're leaving the people who have been by your side 24/7, and you're walking into a whirlwind.\u201dAdvertisementWith cameras flashing and video cameras rolling, the group emerged onto the rocky, red plains\u00a0below the summit of Mauna Loa on the overcast Sunday. Wearing matching red HI-SEAS polo shirts, they answered\u00a0journalists\u2019\u00a0questions, posed for selfies with their families and feasted on watermelon, mango and berries \u2014 luxuries they had missed after subsisting on mostly freeze-dried food during their months of isolation.The journey\u00a0is bittersweet:\u00a0Five of the six members of the Hawaii team received rejection letters from NASA's most recent round of astronaut selection when they were in the dome, Bevington said. The sixth, a U.K. resident, hopes to go to space as a tourist one day.Story continues below advertisementBut for eight months, Bevington came closer to experiencing life on Mars than most people ever will. This is what he found.AdvertisementWhat it would be like living on MarsDuring the simulation, the crew of four men and two women did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits on biweekly exploratory missions, during which they conducted geological surveys and mapping studies, said the project\u2019s lead investigator, University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted. All their communication with the outside world had\u00a0a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars, meaning no calls, Skype or turning to Google to answer a quick question. Food and supplies were dropped off at a distance from the dome and retrieved by the crew on their exploratory missions.The project, which is the fifth of six NASA-funded studies at the University of Hawaii facility, was designed to better understand the psychological impacts of a long-term space mission on astronauts. Researchers hope the results will help NASA choose individuals best-suited to cope with the isolation and stress of two-to-three year trips to Mars\u00a0\u2014 which the U.S. space agency hopes to begin by the 2030s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow to handle conflict in a domeAs the Hawaii team went about day-to-day business, including cooking, cleaning and working out, in\u00a0a shelter\u00a0roughly the size of a small two-bedroom home, they wore specially designed sensors that measured their voice levels and proximity to other people, allowing researchers to collect data on whether people were arguing or avoiding each other. That data will not be analyzed until Mission 6, the final study funded by the U.S. space agency, is completed, Binsted said.\u201cWhat I can tell you is that this group did well,\u201d she said. \u201cThey completed their mission.\u201dBevington, the group's commander and researcher focused on synthetic biology and space studies,\u00a0said conflict in the small space, which has sleeping quarters, a kitchen, laboratory and two bathrooms, was inevitable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you put six people together in a stressful situation, there will be conflict,\u201d said Bevington, who will return to the University of New South Wales in Sydney to pursue his PhD after visiting his grandparents in Tennessee. \u201cBut the crew was very open with each other about conflict. We realized it was two people versus the thing in between them, rather than two people against each other.\u201dResearchers are studying how the mood-gauging sensors could be used on future NASA trips to space, where it is especially important that conflict be addressed early,\u00a0Binsted said. NASA has dedicated about $2.5 million for research at the facility, according to the Associated Press.\u201cThe idea is that you're not just relying on self-reporting,\u201d Binsted said. \u201cAstronauts tend to be very stoic and positive. So their self-reports tend to be very positive. That's well and good. But the downside is that you don't detect issues until they become very prominent.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow they passed the timeBevington said the crew, which included a software engineer from Google, a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin and an electrical engineer, played board games and watched movies in their downtime. One member knitted, while another learned how to play the ukulele. It was recommended that they all exercise for an hour and a half every day because \u201cyour bones would start to deteriorate on Mars,\u201d Bevington explained.Bevington said the decision to cease steady contact with his friends and family and pause his studies in Australia was \u201ccompletely worth it for him.\u201dNo\u00a0one who has participated in HI-SEAS so far has become an astronaut, Binsted said, although a few have advanced to become finalists.Story continues below advertisementMore than 18,300 people\u00a0applied to join NASA's 2017 class\u00a0\u2014 almost three times the number of applications received in 2012\u00a0\u2014 and only eight to 14 individuals will ultimately become astronaut candidates, according to NASA.Advertisement\u201cWith those odds, it's not something you can plan your life around,\u201d Bevington said. \u201cYou have to enjoy everything along the way. But this was a step in the right direction.\u201dThis story has been updated.\u00a0Read more: Russian \u2018cannibal couple\u2019 may have drugged, killed and eaten as many as 30 people, police sayOtto Warmbier\u2019s parents lash out: \u2018North Korea is not a victim. They\u2019re terrorists.\u2019Two black Chicago police officers took a knee in a precinct lobby \u2014 and were reprimanded During the simulation, the crew did not leave the dome unless they were in full space suits, and all communications with the outside world had a 20-minute delay, the time it takes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars. This is the true story of six strangers picked to live in a NASA dome",
        "author": "Rachel Chason"
    },
    {
        "title": "Peggy Whitson Breaks Another Record in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3659",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005060720/peggy-whitson-trump.html",
        "text": "The astronaut Peggy Whitson on Monday surpassed the 534-day record for most time in space by an American. Throughout her career, she has paved the way for women in space exploration. The astronaut Peggy Whitson on Monday surpassed the 534-day record for most time in space by an American. Throughout her career, she has paved the way for women in space exploration. The astronaut Peggy Whitson on Monday surpassed the 534-day record for most time in space by an American. Throughout her career, she has paved the way for women in space exploration.",
        "author": "By Neeti Upadhye"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket to International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3660",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000004942728/spacex-launches-rocket-to-internation-space-station.html",
        "text": "A Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, was launched at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying supplies, experiments and cargo to the International Space Station. A Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, was launched at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying supplies, experiments and cargo to the International Space Station. A Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, was launched at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying supplies, experiments and cargo to the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By NASA"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Launches After Years of Delay (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3661",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-webb-telescopes-complicated-launch-has-astronomers-nervously-waiting-11640428205?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=2",
        "text": "For scientists world-wide, the sun-orbiting observatory\u2014the largest, most powerful instrument of its type ever built\u2014will herald a new era of discovery in space. One hundred times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb will help astronomers peer at some of the oldest galaxies and stars in the universe, search for signs of habitability in the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system and study mysterious forces like dark energy using its infrared sensors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTesting mirror segments for the James Webb Space Telescope.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Gunn/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWhat an emotional day,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. The launch marks \u201cthe beginning of one of the most amazing missions that humanity has ever conceived,\u201d he said.\n\nThe launch was delayed twice in recent weeks, first because of technical issues and then because of poor weather.\nTo fit it into the rocket\u2019s 18-foot-wide, 56-foot-high nose cone, mission scientists had to build the telescope\u2019s gold-plated mirror\u2014measuring 21.5 feet in diameter when fully deployed\u2014as 18 separate segments that have to fold together like petals of an origami flower.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nShortly after launch, the telescope successfully separated from the rocket and deployed its solar array so that it can begin generating electricity and charging its batteries, NASA said. Within the next 24 hours, plans call for mission scientists to command Webb to course-correct using on-board rockets so that it heads toward a point four times as distant as the moon called the second Lagrange point.\nThen, complicated unfolding processes will begin, taking about two weeks to complete. Seventy hinges, 90 cables, 140 releases and 400 pulleys will be involved in unfolding the telescope\u2019s tennis court-size sunshield by issuing commands to Webb from Earth. Webb will then open the two wings of its primary mirror and lock them in place.\n\u201cNow we have to realize there are still innumerable things that have to work, and they have to work perfectly,\u201d NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. \u201cBut we know that with great reward there is great risk.\u201d\nWebb has 344 \u201csingle-point failure\u201d items. A single-point failure is a piece of equipment or part of the system that, should it fail, could scuttle the entire mission.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018If Webb is a spectacular success, and there\u2019s no reason to think it won\u2019t be if everything works, then it makes future flagship missions more likely\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Robert Smith, a historian of astronomy at the University of Alberta in Canada \n\n\n\nAbout 80% of those items are associated with the sunshield deployment. If a deployment mechanism malfunctions, or the sunshield snags as it unfolds, there is no way to repair it from Earth.\nBut if a malfunction were to occur, that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean Webb would become a $10 billion piece of space junk.\n\u201cThere are enough redundancies built in that everything will be OK,\u201d said Michael Maseda, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. \u201cIf one thing doesn\u2019t work it won\u2019t completely cancel the mission.\u201d\nA malfunction might affect Webb\u2019s ability to see fainter stars or galaxies. \n\u201cEven with Webb at 90%, we\u2019re still going to be seeing things we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Ariane 5 rocket with the James Webb Space Telescope on board, in Kourou, French Guiana, on Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIt will take Webb 29 days to reach the second Lagrange point. There it will orbit the sun, 1 million miles from Earth, until at least 2026.\nIf all goes well, Webb can start conducting its first science experiments about six months after launch and is expected to produce its first photo this summer. It takes that long to completely unfold and align its mirrors, calibrate its cameras and infrared light spectrographs, and cool the telescope to its operating temperature. The telescope was jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.\nWebb\u2019s mission is expected to last at least five years, though it will likely be 10, Dr. Maseda said. That timeline is constrained by the amount of fuel Webb has on board\u2014fuel that is necessary to keep the telescope in its proper orbit and pointed in the direction that astronomers want it.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat questions about our cosmos are you hoping the new space telescope will answer? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWebb is designed to complement Hubble, which is orbiting Earth after being launched in 1990 on what was planned to be a 15-year mission. A series of technical issues shut it down twice this year.\n\u201cHubble\u2019s really elderly,\u201d said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\nIf the Webb mission fails and Hubble stops working, \u201cit would mean there\u2019s a gap in our capabilities and we might be without a major space telescope for a while,\u201d he added.\nLikely, the next space telescope to launch is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which won\u2019t be ready until the mid-2020s.\n\u201cHistory of these big projects has been that success gives success,\u201d said Robert Smith, a historian of astronomy at the University of Alberta in Canada. \u201cIf Webb is a spectacular success, and there\u2019s no reason to think it won\u2019t be if everything works, then it makes future flagship missions more likely.\u201d\n\n\nSpace ExplorationRead more articles about efforts to learn about and go into space, as selected by editors. NASA\u2019s Webb Telescope to See Deeper Than Hubble to Edge of Universe (Dec. 22) China\u2019s Quest for Space Power Starts With Moon Dust (Dec. 13) China\u2019s Space Station Tiangong Is Coming Together Bit by Bit (Sept. 17) \u201cMilestone achieved\u201d: The biggest, most powerful space-based observatory ever built lifted off early Saturday from a launchpad in French Guiana. ",
        "author": "Aylin Woodward"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Launches After Years of Delay (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3662",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-webb-telescopes-complicated-launch-has-astronomers-nervously-waiting-11640428205?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=2",
        "text": "For scientists world-wide, the sun-orbiting observatory\u2014the largest, most powerful instrument of its type ever built\u2014will herald a new era of discovery in space. One hundred times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb will help astronomers peer at some of the oldest galaxies and stars in the universe, search for signs of habitability in the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system and study mysterious forces like dark energy using its infrared sensors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTesting mirror segments for the James Webb Space Telescope.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Gunn/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWhat an emotional day,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. The launch marks \u201cthe beginning of one of the most amazing missions that humanity has ever conceived,\u201d he said.\n\nThe launch was delayed twice in recent weeks, first because of technical issues and then because of poor weather.\nTo fit it into the rocket\u2019s 18-foot-wide, 56-foot-high nose cone, mission scientists had to build the telescope\u2019s gold-plated mirror\u2014measuring 21.5 feet in diameter when fully deployed\u2014as 18 separate segments that have to fold together like petals of an origami flower.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nShortly after launch, the telescope successfully separated from the rocket and deployed its solar array so that it can begin generating electricity and charging its batteries, NASA said. Within the next 24 hours, plans call for mission scientists to command Webb to course-correct using on-board rockets so that it heads toward a point four times as distant as the moon called the second Lagrange point.\nThen, complicated unfolding processes will begin, taking about two weeks to complete. Seventy hinges, 90 cables, 140 releases and 400 pulleys will be involved in unfolding the telescope\u2019s tennis court-size sunshield by issuing commands to Webb from Earth. Webb will then open the two wings of its primary mirror and lock them in place.\n\u201cNow we have to realize there are still innumerable things that have to work, and they have to work perfectly,\u201d NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. \u201cBut we know that with great reward there is great risk.\u201d\nWebb has 344 \u201csingle-point failure\u201d items. A single-point failure is a piece of equipment or part of the system that, should it fail, could scuttle the entire mission.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018If Webb is a spectacular success, and there\u2019s no reason to think it won\u2019t be if everything works, then it makes future flagship missions more likely\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Robert Smith, a historian of astronomy at the University of Alberta in Canada \n\n\n\nAbout 80% of those items are associated with the sunshield deployment. If a deployment mechanism malfunctions, or the sunshield snags as it unfolds, there is no way to repair it from Earth.\nBut if a malfunction were to occur, that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean Webb would become a $10 billion piece of space junk.\n\u201cThere are enough redundancies built in that everything will be OK,\u201d said Michael Maseda, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. \u201cIf one thing doesn\u2019t work it won\u2019t completely cancel the mission.\u201d\nA malfunction might affect Webb\u2019s ability to see fainter stars or galaxies. \n\u201cEven with Webb at 90%, we\u2019re still going to be seeing things we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Ariane 5 rocket with the James Webb Space Telescope on board, in Kourou, French Guiana, on Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIt will take Webb 29 days to reach the second Lagrange point. There it will orbit the sun, 1 million miles from Earth, until at least 2026.\nIf all goes well, Webb can start conducting its first science experiments about six months after launch and is expected to produce its first photo this summer. It takes that long to completely unfold and align its mirrors, calibrate its cameras and infrared light spectrographs, and cool the telescope to its operating temperature. The telescope was jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.\nWebb\u2019s mission is expected to last at least five years, though it will likely be 10, Dr. Maseda said. That timeline is constrained by the amount of fuel Webb has on board\u2014fuel that is necessary to keep the telescope in its proper orbit and pointed in the direction that astronomers want it.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat questions about our cosmos are you hoping the new space telescope will answer? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWebb is designed to complement Hubble, which is orbiting Earth after being launched in 1990 on what was planned to be a 15-year mission. A series of technical issues shut it down twice this year.\n\u201cHubble\u2019s really elderly,\u201d said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.\nIf the Webb mission fails and Hubble stops working, \u201cit would mean there\u2019s a gap in our capabilities and we might be without a major space telescope for a while,\u201d he added.\nLikely, the next space telescope to launch is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which won\u2019t be ready until the mid-2020s.\n\u201cHistory of these big projects has been that success gives success,\u201d said Robert Smith, a historian of astronomy at the University of Alberta in Canada. \u201cIf Webb is a spectacular success, and there\u2019s no reason to think it won\u2019t be if everything works, then it makes future flagship missions more likely.\u201d\n\n\nSpace ExplorationRead more articles about efforts to learn about and go into space, as selected by editors. NASA\u2019s Webb Telescope to See Deeper Than Hubble to Edge of Universe (Dec. 22) China\u2019s Quest for Space Power Starts With Moon Dust (Dec. 13) China\u2019s Space Station Tiangong Is Coming Together Bit by Bit (Sept. 17) \u201cMilestone achieved\u201d: The biggest, most powerful space-based observatory ever built lifted off early Saturday from a launchpad in French Guiana. ",
        "author": "Aylin Woodward"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science & Health Briefing: The Ethics of Genetics Research, What\u2019s Next in Space, and More (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3663",
        "date": "2019-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-health-briefing-the-ethics-of-genetics-research-whats-next-in-space-and-more-11558962000?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=60",
        "text": "Ethics of the future. The world\u2019s first known gene-edited babies are less than a year old, and serious questions surround the ethics of their creation. Meanwhile, ongoing breakthroughs in understanding about DNA and disease are whipsawing families. And last month, researchers reported they found a way to restore some activity to pig brains hours after death, in a series of experiments that medical and legal experts said could reshape our understanding of the brain\u2019s limits.\n\n\n\n\nMedical cures. Researchers recently said they treated a teenager\u2019s antibiotic-resistant infection with the help of genetically engineered viruses. That could point to a potential path for countering the growing threat of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.\n\n\nClimate change. A new model suggests a slower decline in glaciers than most scientists thought. Some shareholders, meanwhile, are successfully pushing company boards with demands that they improve disclosures on topics including greenhouse-gas emissions.\n2. Peering into the future.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDennis Danzik, an industrial engineer, says about the devices he has invented, \u2018Honestly, there are things about the phenomenon I don\u2019t understand.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nNew inventions. One man is on a quest to power the world with magnets. Dennis Danzik, the science and technology officer for Wyoming-based Inductance Energy, says he has invented a magnetic generator, a flywheel system that extracts usable energy from the interplay of exotic magnets\u2014also known as a free-energy device, a cousin to the fabled perpetual-motion machine.\nNew ideas. At the recent WSJ Future of Everything Festival in New York, we explored the future of inventions, medicine, technology and more. Alexis Ohanian hopes for a future of work that moves away from \u201chustle culture.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n tech executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arvind Krishna\n\n\n\n predicts quantum computing is about to become mainstream. And Land O\u2019Lakes CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beth Ford\n\n\n\n isn\u2019t afraid of the explosion in meatless food\u2019s popularity.\nRead more from our Future of Everything series.\n\nExpanding the imagination. New discoveries don\u2019t always guarantee complete understanding. Accurate measurement of time is one of the glories of physics, but also one of the most exciting frontiers of current research, for example. Today\u2019s atomic clocks are more accurate than ever, but the nature of time itself remains enigmatic.\n3. A new study last month hailed a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn example array of intracranial electrodes of the type used to record brain activity in the current study.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n University of California|, San Francisco\n \n\n\n\nHarnessing AI. A research team introduced an experimental brain decoder that combined direct recording of signals from the brains of subjects with artificial intelligence, machine learning and a speech synthesizer. The findings could be a step toward brain implants that one day let people with impaired abilities speak their minds. Scientists utilized the motor-nerve impulses generated by the brain to control the muscles that articulate our thoughts once we\u2019ve decided to express them aloud.\nResponsible AI. Today\u2019s middle-schoolers may be the first \u201cartificial intelligence natives,\u201d a generation that has grown up interacting with YouTube\u2019s algorithm or Amazon\u2019s Alexa smart speaker. Educators are grappling with how to teach children to be responsible consumers of the technology. Blakeley H. Payne, a graduate research assistant at MIT Media Lab, has an idea.\n4. What\u2019s next for the global space race?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nNew players. Half a century after the U.S. landed on the moon, a new space race is gathering pace. China has particularly ambitious plans: It wants to build a manned lunar base within the next decade and start mining for energy resources. Other governments have plans, too. In the U.S., NASA recently unveiled plans to return to the moon, and requested a $1.6 billion budget increase for 2020. President Trump has also proposed a Space Force, a military branch dedicated to space, though some lawmakers are skeptical.\nPrivate enterprise. It isn\u2019t just governments that are looking to the skies. Amazon chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n funds the Blue Origin space company, which employs more than 2,000 people at five sites and is looking to be a player in the lucrative market for government and commercial business in space. And\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX has raised millions in funding, though there are questions about the financial viability of an internet-via-satellite business considered key to its growth.\nFrom science writer Robert Lee Hotz:\nWhat a difference a half-century makes. When the U.S. landed the first humans on the moon in 1969, it was the climax of a Cold War superpower struggle that relied on the arms race technology of intercontinental ballistic missiles and air defense computers to launch our dreams of space exploration. Now commercial startups are marshaling smartphone microelectronics, 3D printers, reusable rockets and robotics in a new race to the moon and beyond. What hasn\u2019t changed, though, is the human drive to explore, expand and seek new opportunities in space. \u2014lee.hotz@wsj.com\n5. Top science stories you might have missed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFossil jawbone of the early humans species called Denisovans, found in 1980 in the Baishiya Karst Cave.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Dongju Zhang/Lanzhou University\n \n\n\n\n\u2022 A fossil jaw found in the Himalayan highlands of Tibet belongs to a vanished human species called Denisovans. The discovery deepens the mystery of human evolution in Asia. (Read)\n\u2022 B-12 deficiency affects millions of people and, if left untreated, could lead to permanent neurological damage and even death. But it is difficult to diagnose. (Read)\n\u2022 Welcome to the Surf Ranch, home to an artificial wave 100 miles from the nearest beach that is as powerful as any surf produced by an actual ocean. (Read)\n\u2022 Lab-grown meat is coming, but the price may be hard to stomach. (Read)\n\u2022 The move to make hyperloop travel a reality. (Read)\n\u2022 A new report from the United Nations says about one million species face the risk of extinction over the next few decades. (Read)\n6. We want to hear from you!\n\n\n\n\n\n\nViewers gathered at a sidewalk cafe in Milan, Italy, to watch the Apollo 11 astronauts' moon landing on July 20, 1969.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nDo you remember the moon landing in 1969? Has the moon landing inspired something in you? Reach out! Share your stories, photos, videos or other memorabilia and be a part of The Wall Street Journal\u2019s coverage of the moon landing anniversary and what the historic space-race era has meant for the culture and memory of Americans. Email us at moon@wsj.com.\nThe 10-Point was the name given to the news column that runs on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.\nToday\u2019s newsletter was curated and edited by Eleanor Miller (eleanor.miller@wsj.com) in collaboration with Editor in Chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Murray.\n\n\n\n \nGet a daily, guided tour of the best scoops and stories in The Wall Street Journal. Sign up for The 10-Point newsletter. A special edition of The 10-Point newsletter ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Close Call\u2019: NASA-Boeing Investigation of Starliner Flight Finds Lapses (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3664",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. An uncrewed test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts, could have ended in disaster in December because of lapses that allowed software errors to slip through undetected and unfixed before the spacecraft launched, according to a review by NASA and Boeing that was announced on Friday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Close Call\u2019: NASA-Boeing Investigation of Starliner Flight Finds Lapses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3665",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. An uncrewed test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts, could have ended in disaster in December because of lapses that allowed software errors to slip through undetected and unfixed before the spacecraft launched, according to a review by NASA and Boeing that was announced on Friday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Close Call\u2019: NASA-Boeing Investigation of Starliner Flight Finds Lapses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3666",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. An uncrewed test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts, could have ended in disaster in December because of lapses that allowed software errors to slip through undetected and unfixed before the spacecraft launched, according to a review by NASA and Boeing that was announced on Friday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Close Call\u2019: NASA-Boeing Investigation of Starliner Flight Finds Lapses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3667",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. An uncrewed test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts, could have ended in disaster in December because of lapses that allowed software errors to slip through undetected and unfixed before the spacecraft launched, according to a review by NASA and Boeing that was announced on Friday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Close Call\u2019: NASA-Boeing Investigation of Starliner Flight Finds Lapses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3668",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. The uncrewed December space mission could have ended in disaster. An uncrewed test flight of Starliner, a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts, could have ended in disaster in December because of lapses that allowed software errors to slip through undetected and unfixed before the spacecraft launched, according to a review by NASA and Boeing that was announced on Friday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Neil deGrasse Tyson failed to prove Earth isn\u2019t flat (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3669",
        "date": "2018-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/12/why-neil-degrasse-tyson-failed-to-prove-earth-isnt-flat/",
        "text": "In the early 20th century, the famous scientist Albert Einstein explained to the world\u00a0that what we call gravity is actually the fabric of space-time\u00a0bending around massive planets.Some\u00a0100\u00a0years later, most people\u00a0still\u00a0don\u2019t understand\u00a0what Einstein was talking about. Meanwhile, famous scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson is trying to\u00a0convince\u00a0us the\u00a0Earth isn\u2019t flat.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFlat-Earth theory \u2014 in which we all live on\u00a0a big dinner plate that a global\u00a0discal conspiracy of elites has tricked us\u00a0into\u00a0believing is a ball \u2014\u00a0has lately seen something of a popular renaissance.Basketball star Kyrie Irving declared the Earth flat on a podcast last year. This led to a class of middle-schoolers so convinced of the\u00a0idea that they thought their teacher was in on the conspiracy. Then came the round-Earth skeptic daredevil Mike Hughes, whose repeated failures to launch himself in a homemade rocket\u00a0have drawn\u00a0international attention to his flat-Earth space mission. Story continues below advertisementEnter Tyson, one of the great explanatory scientists of our age. He\u2019s an astrophysicist who communes with the masses. He has explained the universe on Twitter\u00a0and hosted a\u00a0well-reviewed sequel to Carl Sagan\u2019s science\u00a0show \u201cCosmos.\u201dAdvertisementSo surely he can convince the world it\u2019s round.Right?Unfortunately (and we really can\u2019t believe we\u2019re saying this), Tyson largely failed to debunk the pillars of flat-Earth theory in\u00a0last week\u2019s episode of \u201cStarTalk.\u201dIn fairness to him, that\u2019s largely because flat-Earthism \u2014 which LiveScience dates\u00a0to at least the 19th century \u2014 has evolved into a pseudoscientific\u00a0conspiracy theory that resists any attempt to prove or disprove it. Find a hole in the theory? There will be an explanation for it, or at\u00a0least a strong suspicion that you\u2019re part of the conspiracy.Story continues below advertisementWe can best demonstrate this by letting Tyson\u00a0lay out his arguments\u00a0in\u00a0calm, logical statements \u2014 and then counter\u00a0each one with some nonsense\u00a0pulled from\u00a0the Flat Earth Wiki\u00a0or Twitter.Said Tyson: \u201cThere\u2019s people who think Earth is flat but recognize that the moon is round. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune are all spheres, but Earth is flat. Something doesn\u2019t square.\u201dThis is a good pun, and Tyson\u2019s video illustrates the ridiculous notion with a graphic of Frisbee Earth lined up in orbit with all the normal, spherical planets.Alas, that\u2019s not\u00a0actually fair to the flat Earthers. Their Frisbee Earth is conventionally rendered with the sun, moon, planets and stars all whirling around directly above\u00a0us like a\u00a0nursery mobile,\u00a0moving in\u00a0complex\u00a0epicycles that\u00a0we mistake for sunsets and orbits and whatnot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaid Tyson: \u201cThe universe favors spheres.\u201dHe meant that gravity and other basic laws of physics naturally pull\u00a0matter into a spherical shape \u2014 thus the trillions and trillions of spherical stars\u00a0and planets\u00a0in the universe. Spheres are natural, and something special has to happen to make an object flat.Tyson\u00a0should have read the Flat Earth Society\u2019s FAQ, which says\u00a0right there in black and white: \u201cThe earth isn\u2019t pulled into a sphere because the force known as gravity exists in a greatly diminished form compared to what is commonly taught.\u201dWhat we think of as gravity isn\u2019t what Newton or, later, Einstein taught. Our big Frisbee and its galactic baby mobile is\u00a0actually\u00a0being pushed upward through space by a constant \u201caetheric wind,\u201d like a penny in a wind tunnel.Story continues below advertisementAlso, there\u2019s probably a giant ring of sea ice around the\u00a0world\u2019s edge that keeps the oceans from\u00a0spilling over the edge.AdvertisementTyson: \u201cWe have video from space of the rotating spherical Earth.\u201dWiki: No, we have a conspiracy of astronauts who fake those videos\u00a0to keep the round Earth hoax going.Tyson: \u201cThe Greeks knew this, a thousand years before Columbus.\u201dWiki: The ancient Greeks actually weren't advanced enough to understand flat-Earth theory.Tyson: \u201cSeafarers knew this\u201d because they saw ships sink beneath the horizon of the curving Earth.Wiki: Here are some unlabeled diagrams proving that\u2019s just an optical illusion.Tyson: \u201cIf Earth were flat, sometimes you'd get a flat shadow [on the moon]. And we\u2019ve never seen a flat shadow.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWiki: You globeheads always get the moon stuff backward.Tyson: \u201cWe live in a country with a failed educational system.\u201dAnd here the two sides\u00a0finally agree, at least in a narrow sense.But where\u00a0Tyson\u00a0sees a system that\u00a0has failed to teach people the difference between\u00a0a valid argument and unprovable nonsense,\u00a0the flat Earthers see one that\u2019s been corrupted by the lying astronauts NASA and their fake moon photos.Not true. Even 100 years ago there was schools who tought flat earth. With nasa (fakery) coming to the scene that changed. Sun is still up even if u cant see it anymore it is prooved. pic.twitter.com/6aL4AZkFnB\u2014 Zazingwa (@zazingwa) March 12, 2018\n\nTyson used to serve on a NASA advisory council, by the way. Just one more reason that no\u00a0true flat-Earther\u00a0is going to be convinced by his video.More depressing science stories:NASA wanted to talk about science. A congressman wanted to ask about Martian civilizations.Please stop annoying this NASA scientist with your ridiculous Planet X doomsday theoriesThis man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat We can't even believe we're writing this. Why Neil deGrasse Tyson failed to prove Earth isn\u2019t flat",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | A flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn\u2019t even ignite. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3670",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/06/a-flat-earther-finally-tried-to-fly-away-his-rocket-didnt-even-ignite/",
        "text": "A man who claims that Earth is flat\u00a0tried to leave it in a homemade rocket Saturday but failed to\u00a0overcome the gravitational force of\u00a0a 13,166,800,000,000,000,000,000,000-pound\u00a0sphere\u00a0directly beneath him.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn fairness to Mike Hughes, he knows how to build a rocket.\u00a0He\u00a0built them\u00a0for many years under the precepts of classical physics,\u00a0when he\u00a0was still a relatively conventional daredevil, which is to say, one who believed Earth\u00a0is round. But\u00a0Saturday marked\u00a0Hughes's third\u00a0aborted launch\u00a0since he\u00a0declared himself a flat-earther last year and announced a multipart\u00a0plan to fly to\u00a0space by the end of 2018 so\u00a0he could\u00a0prove astronauts\u00a0have\u00a0been lying about\u00a0the\u00a0shape of the planet.Story continues below advertisementThe Washington Post, like many news outlets, covered Hughes's plan.\u00a0In retrospect, we admit, there was never any chance he'd pull it off.AdvertisementHughes blamed technical difficulties \u2014 possibly a bad O-ring \u2014 for his steam-powered rocket's failure to ignite this weekend in the Mojave Desert. But even if it had, and even if he managed to\u00a0subsequently rocket-pack\u00a0himself into space by the end of the year, his mission would have ended at worst in death, and at best in disappointment as he realized what ancient Greeks and schoolchildren\u00a0already\u00a0knew: The world is round; it\u00a0has always been round; Mike Hughes will never see its edges.This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flatIf you were already caught up on the saga, feel free to skip directly to our coverage of Saturday's sad launch. If you need a recap, here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of The Post's coverage of Hughes's flat-Earth space mission.Story continues below advertisementIt began last year, as\u00a0the daredevil struggled to raise\u00a0money for a follow-up to his last successful homemade rocket launch in 2012. He gave an interview to a flat-Earth\u00a0group\u00a0about his newfound skepticism in the planet's shape and subsequently raised thousands of dollars from a community that believes we all live, basically, on a big Frisbee.AdvertisementThe money was enough for Hughes to build a rocket. The\u00a0slogan on that rocket, \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH,\u201d\u00a0drew attention\u00a0not only from this newspaper but\u00a0also from\u00a0the Associated Press, Fox News, the Guardian, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation .\u2009.\u2009. truly from every corner of Earth, pun intended.It\u00a0was more attention than Hughes, whose previous stunts had drawn only modest coverage, planned for. It might\u00a0have been more attention than was good for him, as the\u00a0Bureau of Land Management subsequently contacted him and forbade him from flying a mile across the Mojave in November, as he had planned.Story continues below advertisementTo pile on problems, his rocket/rocket launcher/mobile home broke down the same week.While of no scientific value to either classical or flat-Earth physics,\u00a0the Mojave stunt was\u00a0intended to publicize Hughes's mission and raise the $2 million necessary for\u00a0his final\u00a0mission later this year:\u00a0to ride a hot-air balloon many miles into the sky, then use\u00a0a rocket-pack to\u00a0fly even\u00a0higher and assess\u00a0the shape\u00a0of the horizon.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019ll shut the door on this ball Earth,\u201d as Hughes\u00a0put it in one of his pitches.But as he spent months rebuilding his rocket and\u00a0working through government red tape, the world threatened to shut the door on his ambitions. When The Post updated on Hughes last month, he was arguing with\u00a0trolls\u00a0on Facebook who questioned his ability to launch the rocket or his\u00a0commitment to flat-Earth philosophy, or both.A flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpAll critics would be silenced, Hughes promised then, when he finally launched on private property outside the town of Amboy, Calif., on Saturday.Obviously, it didn't work out that way.Story continues below advertisementHughes started a GoFundMe to offset the cost of the much-delayed launch, which by Saturday had\u00a0raised no more than $100 of its $10,000 goal.The press was still interested, though there were mostly obscure and independent outfits that towed cameras out to\u00a0Amboy on the big day. The crowd gave wide berth to Hughes's rocket, which stood in the desert, pointed at the sky. California mountains\u00a0were visible behind it. Much taller mountains beyond them were not, because Earth is definitely round.The Web channel Noize TV live-streamed the would-be launch. \u201cThe sun is up, the moon is up, and soon we're going to find out if the Earth is flat,\u201d said the host, Paul Zero, when optimism still ran high.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNo, I'm just kidding,\u201d Zero said. He was not himself a believer in the flat Earth. \u201cBut what we will see is the most amazing f---ing thing I've ever f---ing seen in my life: a man make his own g---damn rocket, put himself in it, and then launch it in the f---ing air!\u201dBecause of the international attention, Zero said, he had with him a translator\u00a0called the Baron.For some reason, the Baron mostly spoke English as he and Zero stood in the desert for the entire day, waiting.\u201cI feel like NASA right now,\u201d Zero said. \u201cI wonder how fast he's going to go.\u201d\u201cThey were saying between 300 and 500 mph,\u201d Baron said.\u201cJesus Christ!\u201dOff in the distance, Hughes stood on a ladder in front of the rocket and fiddled with his helmet.Story continues below advertisementMore time passed. Struggling to fill the silence,\u00a0Zero began talking about a free chicken dinner he expected would be provided after the launch. But spectators\u00a0were getting\u00a0frustrated.Advertisement\u201cWhat's up with your boy?\u201d asked a man in a Chubb Life T-shirt, who had come all the way from Texas for the launch.Zero didn't know what was up, but believed in Hughes, if not his conception of Earth.\u201cF--- your complaints,\u201d he told the camera. \u201cBuild a rocket, shoot yourself up in it and shut the f--- up.\u201dThe host\u00a0perked up when\u00a0Hughes finally climbed inside the rocket and closed the hatch before sundown. \u201cThis is f---ing about to be amazing,\u201d Zero said.He paused to have a coughing fit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI hear words!\u201d he said.\u201cI hear numbers!\u201d said the Baron.But the rocket just sat there, pulled directly down\u00a0toward Earth's core, as Isaac Newton predicted, not going up and not sliding sideways toward the\u00a0infinite\u00a0cliffs of ice\u00a0that ring the edge of the world\u00a0in\u00a0flat-Earth models.Can this flat-Earther's long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out.\u201cThe launch ain't happening,\u201d Zero finally admitted.AdvertisementHughes climbed out of the rocket to face the cameras. He scratched his head. \u201cMaybe I left a plug in there,\u201d he said. Maybe an\u00a0O-ring\u00a0melted. Who knew?\u201cI pulled the plunger five different times,\u201d\u00a0Hughes said. \u201cI considered beating on the rocket nozzle from the underneath side. But you can't get anyone under there. It'll kill you.\u00a0It'll scald you to death. It'll blow the skin and muscle off your bones.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut at this point he could not even sell the drama of his hypothetical death to the demure crowd.Two women walked\u00a0up\u00a0and\u00a0gave Hughes a hug. \u201cYou did your best,\u201d a man told him, \u201cand you haven't gave up yet.\u201dHughes's plans are unclear now.\u00a0He said he'd take apart the rocket to see what went wrong, but he has commitments to think of besides science. He was supposed to be in court on Tuesday, he told the crowd, because he was suing the governor of California for unspecified reasons. He was also trying to claim the legal right to Charles Manson's guitar. He is a\u00a0man\u00a0of many ambitions.Advertisement\u201cGuys, I'm sorry,\u201d\u00a0Hughes said. \u201cWhat can you do?\u201dOnly what is possible, we now know.Read the rest of our series on Hughes's\u00a0flat-Earth space mission, if you really want to:This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flatA flat-earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpA flat-earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 againCan this flat-earther's long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out. Flat-earth science: 0\nClassical physics: 1 A flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn\u2019t even ignite.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | A flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn\u2019t even ignite. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3671",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/06/a-flat-earther-finally-tried-to-fly-away-his-rocket-didnt-even-ignite/",
        "text": "A man who claims that Earth is flat\u00a0tried to leave it in a homemade rocket Saturday but failed to\u00a0overcome the gravitational force of\u00a0a 13,166,800,000,000,000,000,000,000-pound\u00a0sphere\u00a0directly beneath him.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn fairness to Mike Hughes, he knows how to build a rocket.\u00a0He\u00a0built them\u00a0for many years under the precepts of classical physics,\u00a0when he\u00a0was still a relatively conventional daredevil, which is to say, one who believed Earth\u00a0is round. But\u00a0Saturday marked\u00a0Hughes's third\u00a0aborted launch\u00a0since he\u00a0declared himself a flat-earther last year and announced a multipart\u00a0plan to fly to\u00a0space by the end of 2018 so\u00a0he could\u00a0prove astronauts\u00a0have\u00a0been lying about\u00a0the\u00a0shape of the planet.Story continues below advertisementThe Washington Post, like many news outlets, covered Hughes's plan.\u00a0In retrospect, we admit, there was never any chance he'd pull it off.AdvertisementHughes blamed technical difficulties \u2014 possibly a bad O-ring \u2014 for his steam-powered rocket's failure to ignite this weekend in the Mojave Desert. But even if it had, and even if he managed to\u00a0subsequently rocket-pack\u00a0himself into space by the end of the year, his mission would have ended at worst in death, and at best in disappointment as he realized what ancient Greeks and schoolchildren\u00a0already\u00a0knew: The world is round; it\u00a0has always been round; Mike Hughes will never see its edges.This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flatIf you were already caught up on the saga, feel free to skip directly to our coverage of Saturday's sad launch. If you need a recap, here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 of The Post's coverage of Hughes's flat-Earth space mission.Story continues below advertisementIt began last year, as\u00a0the daredevil struggled to raise\u00a0money for a follow-up to his last successful homemade rocket launch in 2012. He gave an interview to a flat-Earth\u00a0group\u00a0about his newfound skepticism in the planet's shape and subsequently raised thousands of dollars from a community that believes we all live, basically, on a big Frisbee.AdvertisementThe money was enough for Hughes to build a rocket. The\u00a0slogan on that rocket, \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH,\u201d\u00a0drew attention\u00a0not only from this newspaper but\u00a0also from\u00a0the Associated Press, Fox News, the Guardian, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation .\u2009.\u2009. truly from every corner of Earth, pun intended.It\u00a0was more attention than Hughes, whose previous stunts had drawn only modest coverage, planned for. It might\u00a0have been more attention than was good for him, as the\u00a0Bureau of Land Management subsequently contacted him and forbade him from flying a mile across the Mojave in November, as he had planned.Story continues below advertisementTo pile on problems, his rocket/rocket launcher/mobile home broke down the same week.While of no scientific value to either classical or flat-Earth physics,\u00a0the Mojave stunt was\u00a0intended to publicize Hughes's mission and raise the $2 million necessary for\u00a0his final\u00a0mission later this year:\u00a0to ride a hot-air balloon many miles into the sky, then use\u00a0a rocket-pack to\u00a0fly even\u00a0higher and assess\u00a0the shape\u00a0of the horizon.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019ll shut the door on this ball Earth,\u201d as Hughes\u00a0put it in one of his pitches.But as he spent months rebuilding his rocket and\u00a0working through government red tape, the world threatened to shut the door on his ambitions. When The Post updated on Hughes last month, he was arguing with\u00a0trolls\u00a0on Facebook who questioned his ability to launch the rocket or his\u00a0commitment to flat-Earth philosophy, or both.A flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpAll critics would be silenced, Hughes promised then, when he finally launched on private property outside the town of Amboy, Calif., on Saturday.Obviously, it didn't work out that way.Story continues below advertisementHughes started a GoFundMe to offset the cost of the much-delayed launch, which by Saturday had\u00a0raised no more than $100 of its $10,000 goal.The press was still interested, though there were mostly obscure and independent outfits that towed cameras out to\u00a0Amboy on the big day. The crowd gave wide berth to Hughes's rocket, which stood in the desert, pointed at the sky. California mountains\u00a0were visible behind it. Much taller mountains beyond them were not, because Earth is definitely round.The Web channel Noize TV live-streamed the would-be launch. \u201cThe sun is up, the moon is up, and soon we're going to find out if the Earth is flat,\u201d said the host, Paul Zero, when optimism still ran high.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNo, I'm just kidding,\u201d Zero said. He was not himself a believer in the flat Earth. \u201cBut what we will see is the most amazing f---ing thing I've ever f---ing seen in my life: a man make his own g---damn rocket, put himself in it, and then launch it in the f---ing air!\u201dBecause of the international attention, Zero said, he had with him a translator\u00a0called the Baron.For some reason, the Baron mostly spoke English as he and Zero stood in the desert for the entire day, waiting.\u201cI feel like NASA right now,\u201d Zero said. \u201cI wonder how fast he's going to go.\u201d\u201cThey were saying between 300 and 500 mph,\u201d Baron said.\u201cJesus Christ!\u201dOff in the distance, Hughes stood on a ladder in front of the rocket and fiddled with his helmet.Story continues below advertisementMore time passed. Struggling to fill the silence,\u00a0Zero began talking about a free chicken dinner he expected would be provided after the launch. But spectators\u00a0were getting\u00a0frustrated.Advertisement\u201cWhat's up with your boy?\u201d asked a man in a Chubb Life T-shirt, who had come all the way from Texas for the launch.Zero didn't know what was up, but believed in Hughes, if not his conception of Earth.\u201cF--- your complaints,\u201d he told the camera. \u201cBuild a rocket, shoot yourself up in it and shut the f--- up.\u201dThe host\u00a0perked up when\u00a0Hughes finally climbed inside the rocket and closed the hatch before sundown. \u201cThis is f---ing about to be amazing,\u201d Zero said.He paused to have a coughing fit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI hear words!\u201d he said.\u201cI hear numbers!\u201d said the Baron.But the rocket just sat there, pulled directly down\u00a0toward Earth's core, as Isaac Newton predicted, not going up and not sliding sideways toward the\u00a0infinite\u00a0cliffs of ice\u00a0that ring the edge of the world\u00a0in\u00a0flat-Earth models.Can this flat-Earther's long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out.\u201cThe launch ain't happening,\u201d Zero finally admitted.AdvertisementHughes climbed out of the rocket to face the cameras. He scratched his head. \u201cMaybe I left a plug in there,\u201d he said. Maybe an\u00a0O-ring\u00a0melted. Who knew?\u201cI pulled the plunger five different times,\u201d\u00a0Hughes said. \u201cI considered beating on the rocket nozzle from the underneath side. But you can't get anyone under there. It'll kill you.\u00a0It'll scald you to death. It'll blow the skin and muscle off your bones.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut at this point he could not even sell the drama of his hypothetical death to the demure crowd.Two women walked\u00a0up\u00a0and\u00a0gave Hughes a hug. \u201cYou did your best,\u201d a man told him, \u201cand you haven't gave up yet.\u201dHughes's plans are unclear now.\u00a0He said he'd take apart the rocket to see what went wrong, but he has commitments to think of besides science. He was supposed to be in court on Tuesday, he told the crowd, because he was suing the governor of California for unspecified reasons. He was also trying to claim the legal right to Charles Manson's guitar. He is a\u00a0man\u00a0of many ambitions.Advertisement\u201cGuys, I'm sorry,\u201d\u00a0Hughes said. \u201cWhat can you do?\u201dOnly what is possible, we now know.Read the rest of our series on Hughes's\u00a0flat-Earth space mission, if you really want to:This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flatA flat-earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpA flat-earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 againCan this flat-earther's long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out. Flat-earth science: 0\nClassical physics: 1 A flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn\u2019t even ignite.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is the Free Jumpsuit You\u2019ll Get With a $250,000 Ticket to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3672",
        "date": "2019-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/science/virgin-galactic-spacesuit.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. YONKERS, N.Y. \u2014 Once there was the era of space-age fashion. Now the age of fashion for space has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is the Free Jumpsuit You\u2019ll Get With a $250,000 Ticket to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3673",
        "date": "2019-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/science/virgin-galactic-spacesuit.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. YONKERS, N.Y. \u2014 Once there was the era of space-age fashion. Now the age of fashion for space has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is the Free Jumpsuit You\u2019ll Get With a $250,000 Ticket to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3674",
        "date": "2019-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/science/virgin-galactic-spacesuit.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. YONKERS, N.Y. \u2014 Once there was the era of space-age fashion. Now the age of fashion for space has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is the Free Jumpsuit You\u2019ll Get With a $250,000 Ticket to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3675",
        "date": "2019-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/science/virgin-galactic-spacesuit.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Virgin Galactic\u2019s space tourists will wear the outfits, which would look at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. YONKERS, N.Y. \u2014 Once there was the era of space-age fashion. Now the age of fashion for space has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Is Getting Astronaut Wings. But Soon, the F.A.A. Won\u2019t Award Them. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3676",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/science/astronaut-wings-faa-bezos-musk.html",
        "text": "Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Jeff Bezos is officially an astronaut. Really \u2014 just ask the federal government.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Is Getting Astronaut Wings. But Soon, the F.A.A. Won\u2019t Award Them. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3677",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/science/astronaut-wings-faa-bezos-musk.html",
        "text": "Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Jeff Bezos is officially an astronaut. Really \u2014 just ask the federal government.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Is Getting Astronaut Wings. But Soon, the F.A.A. Won\u2019t Award Them. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3678",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/science/astronaut-wings-faa-bezos-musk.html",
        "text": "Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Jeff Bezos is officially an astronaut. Really \u2014 just ask the federal government.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Is Getting Astronaut Wings. But Soon, the F.A.A. Won\u2019t Award Them. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3679",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/science/astronaut-wings-faa-bezos-musk.html",
        "text": "Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Starting in January, space tourists will not receive a participation trophy for flying to space. But everyone will be on the honor roll. Jeff Bezos is officially an astronaut. Really \u2014 just ask the federal government.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Company Is Carrying Scientific Cargo to Space. It\u2019s Not Amazon. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3680",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket hasn\u2019t flown space tourists yet, but it has found a business niche with NASA and private science experiments. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket hasn\u2019t flown space tourists yet, but it has found a business niche with NASA and private science experiments. West Texas is not quite like the moon. But it can serve as a handy stand-in.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Company Is Carrying Scientific Cargo to Space. It\u2019s Not Amazon. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3681",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket hasn\u2019t flown space tourists yet, but it has found a business niche with NASA and private science experiments. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket hasn\u2019t flown space tourists yet, but it has found a business niche with NASA and private science experiments. West Texas is not quite like the moon. But it can serve as a handy stand-in.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Company Is Carrying Scientific Cargo to Space. It\u2019s Not Amazon. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3682",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket hasn\u2019t flown space tourists yet, but it has found a business niche with NASA and private science experiments. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket hasn\u2019t flown space tourists yet, but it has found a business niche with NASA and private science experiments. West Texas is not quite like the moon. But it can serve as a handy stand-in.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bidding Opens for a Seat on Blue Origin\u2019s First Passenger Space Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3683",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/blue-origin-space-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin has teased space tourism for years. Its first flight with people on board launches July 20. Blue Origin has teased space tourism for years. Its first flight with people on board launches July 20. Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, will launch a rocket into space with passengers on board for the first time in July, the company said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Marie Fazio"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bidding Opens for a Seat on Blue Origin\u2019s First Passenger Space Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3684",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/blue-origin-space-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin has teased space tourism for years. Its first flight with people on board launches July 20. Blue Origin has teased space tourism for years. Its first flight with people on board launches July 20. Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, will launch a rocket into space with passengers on board for the first time in July, the company said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Marie Fazio"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bidding Opens for a Seat on Blue Origin\u2019s First Passenger Space Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3685",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/blue-origin-space-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin has teased space tourism for years. Its first flight with people on board launches July 20. Blue Origin has teased space tourism for years. Its first flight with people on board launches July 20. Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, will launch a rocket into space with passengers on board for the first time in July, the company said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Marie Fazio"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Inspiration4 flight showed space tourism\u2019s potential and limitations. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3686",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/inspiration4-crew-spacex.html",
        "text": "A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. When NASA owned and operated its own spacecraft, there was no chance it would rent out a Saturn 5 rocket or a space shuttle to someone else. But during the Obama administration, NASA decided to hire private companies to take its astronauts to the space station. One of the program\u2019s secondary goals was to spur more commercial use of low-Earth orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Inspiration4 flight showed space tourism\u2019s potential and limitations. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3687",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/inspiration4-crew-spacex.html",
        "text": "A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. When NASA owned and operated its own spacecraft, there was no chance it would rent out a Saturn 5 rocket or a space shuttle to someone else. But during the Obama administration, NASA decided to hire private companies to take its astronauts to the space station. One of the program\u2019s secondary goals was to spur more commercial use of low-Earth orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Inspiration4 flight showed space tourism\u2019s potential and limitations. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3688",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/inspiration4-crew-spacex.html",
        "text": "A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. When NASA owned and operated its own spacecraft, there was no chance it would rent out a Saturn 5 rocket or a space shuttle to someone else. But during the Obama administration, NASA decided to hire private companies to take its astronauts to the space station. One of the program\u2019s secondary goals was to spur more commercial use of low-Earth orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Inspiration4 flight showed space tourism\u2019s potential and limitations. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3689",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/inspiration4-crew-spacex.html",
        "text": "A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. A crew of everypersons showed what space tourism could become in the future. When NASA owned and operated its own spacecraft, there was no chance it would rent out a Saturn 5 rocket or a space shuttle to someone else. But during the Obama administration, NASA decided to hire private companies to take its astronauts to the space station. One of the program\u2019s secondary goals was to spur more commercial use of low-Earth orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Mad\u2019 Mike Hughes, who wanted to prove the flat-Earth theory, dies in homemade-rocket disaster (WP: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3690",
        "date": "2020-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/02/23/mad-mike-hughes-dead/",
        "text": "In December, buttressed by his conviction and advances in homemade rocketry, \u201cMad\u201d Mike Hughes flipped on a camera and fantasized about the moment when he shows mankind that it lives on a verdant disk.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plan: Float dozens of miles high in a balloon, then fly a rocket to the Karman line, the 62-mile-high barrier that separates the atmosphere and the cold vacuum of space, filming the entire way. \u201cFor three hours, the world stops,\u201d Hughes said during a live stream, imagining the reaction. Hughes, a self-styled daredevil, flat-Earth theorist and limousine-jumping stuntman, died Saturday when his crudely built contraption propelled him on a column of steam, spiraled through the air and cratered into the sagebrush outside Barstow, Calif. He was 64.Justin Chapman, a freelance reporter, witnessed the launch while reporting a longer story on Hughes. The rocket\u2019s green parachute tore away moments after takeoff, sending the crowd of 50 or so people into a panic, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEveryone was just stunned and didn\u2019t know what to do,\u201d he told The Washington Post on Sunday. \u201cThey were silent for a long time.\u201dHughes\u2019s support team went to inspect the crash site about a half mile away, Chapman said, and returned with the harrowing news: Hughes was dead, the rocket had pancaked, and the other three parachutes never deployed.\u201cIt was unsuccessful, and he passed away,\u201d longtime collaborator and friend Waldo Stakes told the Associated Press. Stakes declined to say what he thinks went wrong. Hughes had at least one successful launch, in which he was strapped to a rocket bearing the words \u201cFLAT EARTH.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s a daredevil thing,\u201d Stakes said in a short phone interview with The Post on Sunday, describing the danger and Hughes\u2019s experience building seven rockets. \u201cHe was one of the smartest guys I\u2019ve ever met.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe rockets he had ridden are not designed to reach space; Hughes\u2019s goal was to ride past the 5,000 foot mark on Saturday. But his previous launches were an apparent step toward his ultimate vehicle.It was a tragic end for Hughes, perhaps the most visible and colorful advocate of the theory that Earth isn\u2019t a sapphire-and-emerald globe revolving around a massive star but rather a flat plane with a tiny sun above it. While there is no one hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally holds the oceans in.He dedicated the past several years of his life to proving the theory from a high perch \u2014 an ambitious goal that began in the front seat of a limousine.Story continues below advertisementHughes achieved some fame in 2002 when he soared in a 103-foot jump in a Lincoln Town Car stretch limo, earning a Guinness world record. Years later, he looked to re-create a failed jump by legendary daredevil Evel Knievel, who in 1974 tried to vault Idaho\u2019s Snake River Canyon in a similarly designed steam-powered rocket. Knievel\u2019s chute deployed early, and he missed the mark.An amateur rocket-maker finally launched himself off Earth. Now to prove it\u2019s flat \u2026That interest sparked communication between Hughes and the Federal Aviation Administration sometime around 2010, said James Van Laak, who was then a senior official in the agency\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.AdvertisementThe two struck up an odd-couple, phone-based friendship, with Hughes as the swaggering stuntman paranoid of the federal government and Van Laak the fed trying to help him find a way to legally launch the rocket, he told The Post on Sunday.Story continues below advertisementAfter Van Laak met with the FAA\u2019s general counsel, the agency determined that it wasn\u2019t quite a rocket launch by definition, since a ramp would be the main propulsion system. That helped avoid complicated safety reviews, and Hughes agreed to keep local safety officials in the loop, Van Laak said.They last spoke in 2012, he said. Two years later, Hughes flew a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Ariz., in a flight that ended with Hughes being dragged from the remains of the rocket. He watched another daredevil make the Snake River Canyon jump in 2016.In March 2018, Hughes rode his garage-made rocket 1,875 feet above the Mojave Desert, reaching a speed of 350 mph, the AP reported. It was the next step in his mission to photograph the world. \u201cIt\u2019ll shut the door on this ball Earth,\u201d Hughes said then.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut whether the planet is a flat plane, or a globe, is something he openly wrestled with, telling CBS News that he was both confident in what he would find but open to other ideas.An elephant's story does not end when it dies\u201cI expect to see a flat disk up there,\u201d he said of his ultimate goal to get to space, months after his 2018 launch. \u201cI don\u2019t have an agenda. If it\u2019s a round Earth or a ball, I\u2019m going to come down and say, \u2018Hey, guys, I\u2019m bad. It\u2019s a ball, okay?\u2019 \u201dHughes recently signed on with the Science Channel to document his project on the television program \u201cHomemade Astronauts,\u201d the channel, which is part of Discovery, said in a statement.\u201cOur thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends during this difficult time. It was always his dream to do this launch, and Science Channel was there to chronicle his journey,\u201d the Science Channel said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut a spokeswoman for the network wouldn\u2019t say whether producers asked Hughes to rein in his flat-Earth commentary for a channel that has science in its name \u2014 and, at least theoretically, would want to assure viewers that Earth is, in fact, round.In a promo video posted on Discovery\u2019s website ahead of the launch, Hughes does not mention his beliefs when he explains why he embarked on his now-tragic mission.\u201cIt\u2019s to convince people they can do things extraordinary with their lives,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe it pushes people to do things they wouldn\u2019t normally do with their lives that will maybe inspire someone else.\"Then Hughes expressed optimism about the takeoff.\u201cWe look forward to Saturday,\u201d he said.Avi Selk contributed to this report, which has been updated.Read more:46,000-year-old bird found frozen in Siberia sheds light on the end of the ice ageTraditional Japanese art method of printing fish provides important details about endangered, extinct species Hughes was perhaps the most visible advocate of the theory that Earth isn\u2019t a sapphire-and-emerald globe revolving around a massive star. \u2018Mad\u2019 Mike Hughes, who wanted to prove the flat-Earth theory, dies in homemade-rocket disaster",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Six months later, the March for Science tries to build a lasting movement (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3691",
        "date": "2017-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/23/six-months-later-the-march-for-science-tries-to-build-a-lasting-movement/",
        "text": "Six months after the March for Science, organizers and activists across the country are trying to turn\u00a0the\u00a0day of demonstration into a lasting movement.This week the organization will file paperwork to become a registered nonprofit. It has also\u00a0launched an overhauled version of its website\u00a0\u2014 the homepage hadn't been updated since the day of the march\u00a0\u2014 aimed at promoting science advocacy and outreach. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe April 22 march in Washington and more than 600 satellite cities around the world was \u201cpretty unprecedented,\u201d according to historians of science. Galvanized by the Trump administration's moves to cut funding for research and roll back environmental regulations, tens of thousands of researchers, teachers and enthusiasts took to the streets wearing lab coats, carrying clever signs and\u00a0chanting nerdy\u00a0slogans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere were just so many people who were so passionate .\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0there was kind of this sense of 'We cannot possibly be working this hard just for one day,'\u201d\u00a0said Caroline Weinberg, a public health researcher who was one of the march's lead organizers and who will serve as a director for the new nonprofit. \u201cWe all felt that it should be and needed to be something longer.\u201dIn the months since the march, the usually politics-averse scientific community has undergone a piecemeal transformation.\u00a0Many scientists are quicker to sign petitions or speak out on social media about political issues.\u00a0Scientific societies are providing more outreach training for members and issuing frequent statements on policies they say harm science and scientists, such as the Trump administration's travel ban, the U.S.\u00a0withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement\u00a0and the dismissal of Environmental Protection Agency scientists. This weekend, the EPA cancelled talks by its scientists at a water conference in Rhode Island.Several satellite marches have transitioned to become full-time advocacy organizations: The Houston march recently organized relief efforts for labs and schools damaged during Hurricane Harvey; the Indianapolis group helps host a monthly science book club; in\u00a0New Mexico\u00a0this month, local groups called on\u00a0marchers to protest changes to the state science curriculum that would have downplayed climate change and removed references to evolution.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe march was just one flash point in a tumultuous year, and scientists are still struggling to find their political voice,\u00a0said Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an Earth and space science organization.\u201cBut the march was kind of a galvanizing point,\u201d she added.\u00a0\u201cI think that scientists are fearful, anxious, concerned and, at the same time, realizing that this is their time to speak up and be very clear about what they can contribute to society.\u201dThe march was inspired by a \u201cthrowaway\u201d comment on Reddit and pulled together over the course of three hectic months by a group of\u00a0mostly 20- and 30-something scientists who had no experience in organizing. The lead organizers devoted as many as 80 hours a week to the effort; none were paid.Story continues below advertisementIt was \u201cchaos,\u201d acknowledged Valorie Aquino, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who was a co-chair of the national committee.\u00a0Organizers struggled to counter criticisms from all sides: that\u00a0the march was too politicized;\u00a0that they\u00a0bungled\u00a0diversity issues;\u00a0that they lacked a cohesive vision of what they were actually marching for.\u201cWe did do the best we could have done given the resources we had,\u201d Aquino said.Craig Fryer, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who studies substance use among teenagers, attended the march to raise awareness about racial disparities in funding for research. He came away \u201chaving an appreciation for the sense of belonging,\u201d he said this month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the days after the march, organizers held a \u201cweek of action,\u201d urging participants to harness the energy of the event by contributing to\u00a0citizen science projects and\u00a0contacting elected officials. According to\u00a0Sofia Ahsanuddin, a public health researcher and March for Science board member, participants reached all 100 senators, 97 percent of members of the House of Representatives and 49 out of 50 governors.\u00a0Then the efforts tapered off, to the disappointment of some marchers. \u201cIt looks to me as if the March for Science was a singular event which the public has forgotten already,\u201d said Wolf Krebs, a retired anatomy professor.Others said they felt subtler ripple effects from the event.Story continues below advertisementFryer, who still reads the weekly emails from march organizers, say the messages make him feel connected to people who feel science is important. He and several colleagues who also attended the Washington event have formed a writing support group to help one another\u00a0draft\u00a0grant\u00a0proposals, edit articles for publication and craft public outreach efforts.AdvertisementMolecular biologist Maryam Zaringhalam was dissatisfied with\u00a0march organizers' response to criticism about the way they addressed sexism and racism in science. She marched anyway alongside fellow members of the activist group 500 Women Scientists \u201cto show this is what a scientist looks like,\u201d she said. Months later, she is still in touch with people she met at the march and during online debates about\u00a0diversity at the event.She said that the march \u2014 intentionally or not \u2014 forced discussions about the treatment of women and people of color in science into the spotlight.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was like a catalyst to open more eyes and minds,\u201d she said. \u201cWe still have prominent scientific thinkers that are out there tweeting, saying that inclusion and diversity are distractions. But for every tweet that I see like that, I see 10 more that are people waking up to the fact that we haven\u2019t done well by a lot of different kinds of people.\u201dAdvertisementMcEntee said the march has increased cooperation among scientific societies, many of which\u00a0signed on as partners for the event after it became clear that the march would be a landmark moment for the scientific community.In another sign of the times, more than a dozen new events have been added to the schedule for the AGU's fall meeting in December, with titles such as \u201cCongressional Visits Workshop,\u201d \u201cPolicymaker Call-a-thon,\u201d and \u201cThe scientific integrity and freedom session.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAaron Huertas, a science communication consultant who\u00a0volunteered with the march but is no longer involved with the organization, said that scientists seem more willing to talk about social issues these days. He noted how many researchers participated in #ScientistsTakeaKnee, a show of support for NFL players protesting racial discrimination and police violence, and the backlash against the science journal Nature for publishing an editorial\u00a0in defense of a statue of a gynecologist known to have committed medical atrocities.AdvertisementBut he thinks the scientific community hasn't fully wrestled with its own demons \u2014 sexual harassment, racial\u00a0disparities, a legacy\u00a0of violence\u00a0in marginalized\u00a0communities.\u201cThe march is a major step in the science advocacy community\u2019s evolution, but I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve seen it translate into really massive grass-roots action yet,\u201d Huertas said.March organizers say\u00a0that's what they're working on now \u2014 their\u00a0efforts are simply more under the radar.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s kind of a delight to\u00a0have months to build a website and process things, instead of having everything be urgent,\u201d Weinberg said.The organization now has eight paid part-time staff members (Weinberg among them) and a single full-time employee:\u00a0Chief Operating Officer Terry Kush, a consultant who has worked for the National Consumers League and several nonprofits.AdvertisementOrganizers continue to face accusations of mismanagement. On Monday, Huertas posted an open letter criticizing the national group's handling of volunteers and diversity issues and the transparency of its hiring process. The letter urged people to work with local marches instead. As of early Monday afternoon the letter has been signed by six other volunteers with the national organization and one march participant.Weinberg said that the group will consider the concerns brought up in the letter, but the national organization has sought to make its transition transparent, hosting biweekly calls with partners and satellite marches and conducting open hiring processes for positions that were not filled by pre-March volunteers. She noted that the March also offers a general breakdown of how donations are spent on its fundraising page.The goals of the March for Science nonprofit are still being worked out: \u201cIn general, what we\u2019re working toward is promoting\u00a0science for the common good in\u00a0society and policy,\u201d Weinberg said. \u201cThe way we\u00a0can work on that is\u00a0empowering\u00a0people to be effective advocates and giving them the knowledge they need.\u201dAdvertisementThe group is developing free resources for scientists interested in advocacy, including manuals for\u00a0attending town halls, scripts for calling public officials, and one-page informational memos on science-related policy issues, such as clean air or vector-borne disease. They have also developed\u00a0guides to organizing science outreach events, such as science cafes and trivia nights. The materials include tips for ensuring that the events feature a diverse group of speakers and are accessible to people with disabilities or limited resources.The march is also developing a grant program to support science advocacy, outreach and organizing in under-served communities.Meanwhile, several satellite marches have been working on their own to maintain the momentum from April 22.\u00a0Navid Zohoury, a\u00a0manager at an autoimmune diagnostic company who had never participated in a political protest before he signed up to help organize the march in San Diego, said his group is in the process of filing for\u00a0nonprofit status.He bristled at the idea that the march\u00a0missed its chance to make a long-term impact.\u201cWhen you have an organic movement, sure, I wish we could harness all that energy that the movement created immediately after,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we had never done this before. All we were trying to do was make sure we\u00a0had\u00a0caution tape and the bull horns and porta-potties.\u201dAfter April 22, everyone was so exhausted that it was difficult to think about next steps.\u201cBut there is still energy\u00a0within the community,\u201d Zohoury continued. \u201cIt's one of those things where we just keep poking each other, putting one step in front of the other, and, hopefully, things happen.\u201dAnd when April comes around in another six months, Weinberg said, they plan to march again.Read more:What's changed since the March for Science? Readers respond.Trump has taken longer to name a science adviser than any modern presidentWhy people are marching for science: \u2018There is no Planet B\u2019Women of color face staggering harassment in space science The March for Science will file paperwork this week to become a registered nonprofit.  Six months later, the March for Science tries to build a lasting movement",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists struggle with sexism and racism: \u2018We think these bias studies don\u2019t apply to us\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3692",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/13/scientists-struggle-with-sexism-and-racism-we-think-these-bias-studies-dont-apply-to-us/",
        "text": "Scientists pride themselves on objectivity \u2014 they deal in empirical methods, double-blind studies, data-driven conclusions.But when it comes to human bias, even the most rigorous researchers are vulnerable.\u00a0At the Society for Neuroscience conference\u00a0in Washington \u2014 attended by 30,000 brain scientists from around the world \u2014 Jo Handelsman\u00a0presented the harsh realities faced by women and minorities in science. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe have this tendency as scientists to not want to believe in this data, not believe that it applies to us,\u201d she said Monday after going through study after study documenting the problem of bias in the academic world.Handelsman, a molecular biologist, served as White House associate director for science during the Obama administration. In recent years, she has become a leading researcher of bias in the scientific community. She synthesized the findings from hundreds of studies conducted over 30 years, including her own work, that show the depth of bias problems in the scientific community in virtually every aspect of hiring, pay, opportunity, publication and tenure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe cited, for example, national data showing that men with bachelor\u2019s degrees receive higher salaries than female counterparts. Hiring studies have revealed that applicants with male names were more likely to be contacted than those with female names even though their other information is identical.She delved into one of her own studies \u2014 a 2012 experiment that involved 127 academic scientists at six top research universities. The participants were sent a description of a student applying to work in their lab who was randomly given the name Jennifer or John. She found that professors were less likely to offer a job or mentoring to women. And when a job was offered to a woman, it was at a lower salary.Handelsman, who spent much of her career as a professor at Yale University and now heads the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin\u00a0at Madison, described how in recent years she has been invited to present this data to faculty at Harvard, Yale and many of the country's other prestigious institutions. The most common response, she says: The bias may exist in other places, but \u201cit's not like that here.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re trained to be objective, so we think these bias studies don\u2019t apply to us,\u201d she said. But just as scientists run \u201cblinded\u201d studies to keep details secret from themselves to ensure their own biases don't creep into the data, Handelsman argued, they need to take steps to ensure equality in the field today and in the future generation of scientists being trained in their laboratories.Among her suggestions for mitigating bias in labs and academic institutions:Identify your criteria for hiring before reviewing applications to prevent after-the-fact explanations for biased hiring choices.Adopt a blind review process at scientific journals. She cited a surprising study showing that after a blind review process was adopted at one ecology journal in 2008, the number of papers published by women increased by 30 percent.Hold training sessions on how unconscious biases can influence hiring.Make bias part of larger regular discussions with colleagues so that faculty don't feel singled out and everyone is held accountable.READ MORE:Gender pay gap: The day women start working for freeWomen of color face staggering harassment in space scienceThe gender gap in computer science is hurting U.S. businesses A former White House science adviser outlines how to fight discrimination against women and people of color. Scientists struggle with sexism and racism: \u2018We think these bias studies don\u2019t apply to us\u2019",
        "author": "William Wan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Half of women in science experience harassment, a sweeping new report finds (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3693",
        "date": "2018-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/12/half-of-women-in-science-experience-harassment-a-sweeping-new-report-finds/",
        "text": "Science has a sexual harassment problem. From the most polished ivory tower to the local community college, harassment pervades lecture halls and laboratories, observatories and offices, teaching hospitals and Antarctic field sites. And it takes an economic and emotional toll on female researchers and stifles their scientific contributions, according to a sweeping new study released Tuesday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe solution will require a \u201csystemwide change to the culture and climate in higher education,\u201d the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine conclude.The study draws on decades of research and dozens of interviews with women who were targets of harassment. Though female researchers have talked about the problem for years, some say the findings from one of science\u2019s most prestigious institutions come at a critical juncture: As long-rumored allegations involving high-profile scientists finally come to light and organizations rethink their own rules for harassment, the 300-page report could help push substantive change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a spectacular and encyclopedic piece of research and writing, and will no doubt serve as the touchstone for research, policy and advocacy in this area for years to come,\u201d said Heidi Lockwood, a professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University and an advocate for victims of sexual harassment in academia.Yet among the institutions under fire are the National Academies themselves, criticized for maintaining members who have been found guilty of misconduct by the institutions where they work.BethAnn McLaughlin, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University, last month launched a petition urging the academies to revoke the membership of anyone found guilty of harassment, assault or retaliation. She voiced little faith that National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt will act on the recommendations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor McNutt not to have cleaned house is offensive to me as a woman,\u201d McLaughlin said. \u201cAnd it certainly undermines the credibility of the National Academy to implement meaningful change.\u201dScience\u2019s #MeToo moment began well before that term ever trended on Twitter. In October 2015, BuzzFeed reported the results of a Title IX investigation at the University of California at Berkeley: The school\u2019s star astronomy professor, Geoff Marcy, had repeatedly violated campus sexual harassment policies but was never sanctioned. Amid the ensuing outcry, the school concluded that Marcy had been \u201cinadequately disciplined.\u201d He ultimately resigned; still a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he did not respond to The Washington Post\u2019s request for comment.In the wake of that scandal, similar revelations led to the firing or resignation of prominent figures in fields including astrophysics, anthropology, geology and physics.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe findings released Tuesday are both broad and deep. Georgia State University researcher Kevin M. Swartout\u00a0compiled data from surveys at the University of Texas and Pennsylvania State University school systems. Those represented more than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as female faculty. Between 20 percent and 50 percent of\u00a0female\u00a0students in science, engineering and medicine, and more than 50 percent of faculty, said they\u00a0had experienced harassment.\u00a0Medical students were the most likely to be harassed by faculty or staff.It's time to focus on academia, concludes a sweeping new report, especially in male-dominated fields. (The Washington Post)LGBTQ women and women of color were more likely than their straight, white counterparts to have been harassed, and women of color were more likely to report feeling unsafe because of their gender. But there is a dearth of data on the experiences of underrepresented minorities and other marginalized groups, the study said.Forty\u00a0qualitative interviews, with women from multiple fields, institutions and stages of their career, delved deeper into these episodes. About half of the women detailed physical abuse but far more prevalent were sexist remarks, jokes and inappropriate comments. One assistant professor of engineering described the \u201cmind games\u201d of other colleagues, meant to demean women at an intellectual level.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhat victims are really looking for is to get back to work and to have the behavior stop,\u201d said Kathryn Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a member of the committee that wrote the new report. But\u00a0institutions\u00a0rely on a legal system poorly equipped for \u201ceveryday workplace harassment,\u201d she said, leaving victims feeling isolated.\u00a0\u201cThis is one of the big findings of the report.\u201dThe study notes that science\u2019s strict hierarchies and \u201cstar culture\u201d make institutions less likely to hold perpetrators accountable. It says targets of harassment rarely formally report their experience, often because they (correctly) perceive that they might experience retaliation.During a\u00a0news conference on Tuesday,\u00a0committee co-chair Paula Johnson,\u00a0a physician and the president of Wellesley College,\u00a0said\u00a0the report uncovered \u201cno evidence\u201d that current policies, particularly anti-harassment training, actually address harmful behavior.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe findings help explain how harassment can push women out of science or create an environment so hostile that their work suffers. One of the women interviewed, a tenure-track assistant professor who was raped by a colleague, described being fearful of conferences and distrustful of potential collaborators. She wound up leaving her university for a smaller institution where she could teach and not conduct research, because at the front of a classroom \u201cfor the most part, nothing is going to happen to you that is going to be embarrassing, traumatizing.\u201dThe report has 14 major recommendations for combating the problem at academic institutions, scientific societies and federal agencies. They include improving transparency in the investigation and reporting process, providing better support to individuals targeted and updating ethics codes to treat harassment with the same scrutiny as plagiarism, falsification of data and other forms of scientific misconduct.The report also urges Congress to consider actions including legislation barring confidentiality in settlement agreements and requiring institutions receiving federal funds to publicly disclose information about sexual harassment investigations\u00a0and the results of surveys of how safe women feel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBecause it\u2019s coming out of the National Academy, and that is an institution that people put on a pedestal, I believe that people will finally begin to listen to this,\u201d said Julie Libarkin, an environmental scientist at Michigan State University who maintains a database of sexual harassment allegations in academia going back to the 1980s.Libarkin\u2019s database\u00a0is cited in the new report. The Post used it to identify five men sanctioned for sexual harassment who retain membership in the National Academies, and three who are still listed as investigators on federal grants.The National Academy of Sciences, created by congressional act in 1863, is exclusive by design. It is charged with providing the executive and legislative branches with scientific advice, and its reports have informed court decisions.\u00a0Its official publication, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the world\u2019s most cited science journals.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAn appointment \u2014 new members\u00a0are elected by current ones\u00a0\u2014 lasts for life. The average member is a 72-year-old male.The organization came under scrutiny in April when Science magazine reported that eight women had accused\u00a0cancer biologist Inder Verma of sexual harassment. He resigned from his position as the journal's editor in chief, and the\u00a0Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he has worked since the 1970s, placed him on leave. But Verma, who did not reply to a request for comment last week, remains an academy member.\u201cIt was just infuriating to me that the National Academies are studying sexual harassment and also harboring sexual harassers,\u201d said McLaughlin, whose petition on Change.org had\u00a0more than\u00a03,550 signatures as of Tuesday.Story continues below advertisementIn a May 22 statement, the three organizations' presidents said they had \u201cbegun a dialogue about the standards of professional conduct for membership.\u201d Bylaws don\u2019t include a sexual harassment policy or any mechanism for expelling members found guilty of problematic behavior.AdvertisementThe new report\u00a0will guide the National Academy's\u00a0upcoming discussions, but \u201cit is too early to talk about timeline,\u201d McNutt told The Post on Tuesday. She added: \u201cThe concern is real that if it should become possible to expel members, such an option would be subverted for personal agendas or political purposes.\u201dOther groups have already confronted this issue. The American Astronomical Society revamped its ethics policy in the wake of the Marcy scandal, labeling harassment as scientific misconduct. \u201cWe should recognize this as research misconduct and as an abrogation of our responsibility as mentors,\u201d said Yale University astrophysicist and\u00a0former\u00a0AAS president\u00a0Meg Urry, who\u00a0oversaw the\u00a0policy change.The American Geophysical Union adopted a similar policy in 2017. In the spring, under the new rule, the organization quietly rescinded one of its top awards after finding the recipient responsible for an ethics violation.\u201cData and research shows us that harassment and bullying and discrimination can have profound and destructive effects on research, on individuals involved in research ... and on institutions,\u201d Executive Director Christine McEntee said.\u00a0\u201cTo us it harms the scientific enterprise in an equal fashion to plagiarism and fabrication of results.\u201dThe National Science Foundation \u2014 which funds roughly a quarter of all federally supported basic research \u2014 is considering whether\u00a0to require institutions to report findings of sexual harassment involving NSF grant recipients. If approved, the rules would allow the foundation to require institutions to remove people who committed harassment from federally funded projects.Had she the power, Clancy said, \u201cI would say, \u2018Burn it all down, and let's start over.\u2019 \u201d The National Academies' report stops far short of reaching for the flamethrower.Its recommendations aim for more and less: more inclusive and diverse environments,\u00a0more support for victims of harassment\u00a0and more meaningful enforcement of Title VII prohibitions on discrimination, but less institutional opacity and less adherence to minimal\u00a0legal compliance.\u201cScientists have equated rigor and being critical with being cruel,\u201d Clancy said. \u201cIf we can move away from that cultural norm, toward understanding that rigor and criticism come from collaboration and cooperation, we're just going to be so much better off.\u201dRead more:What makes some men sexual harassers? Science tries to explain the creeps of the world.Antarctic geologist accused of sexually harassing, assaulting female researchersWomen of color face staggering harassment in space science The findings from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine \u2014 among science\u2019s most prestigious institutions \u2014 are released as the organizations themselves are under fire for their handling of sexual harassment. Half of women in science experience harassment, a sweeping new report finds",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA pulled this astronaut from a space station crew. Her brother blames racism. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3694",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/22/nasa-pulled-this-astronaut-from-a-space-station-crew-her-brother-blames-racism/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, who was slated to become the first\u00a0black crew member to live on board the International Space Station, was unexpectedly pulled from\u00a0her June flight.In a brief news release Thursday, NASA announced that\u00a0Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor, a fellow member of Epps's astronaut class who was scheduled to launch later in the year, would be bumped up to take Epps's place. Epps, who\u00a0had\u00a0already started training for her role on Expedition 56-57, will return to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she\u00a0will be a candidate for future crews. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA did not give an explanation for the crew change.\u00a0But Epps's brother blamed racism at the space agency.\u201cMy sister Dr. Jeannette Epps has been fighting against oppressive racism and misogynist in NASA and now they are holding her back and allowing a Caucasian Astronaut to take her place!\u201d Henry Epps wrote\u00a0in a Facebook post Saturday. (The post has since been removed.) He linked to a MoveOn.org petition asking NASA to reinstate Epps.In an email, Epps said she could not comment on her brother's post or the reason for the crew change and clarified that neither she nor anyone in her family created the petition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEpps said that she did not have a medical condition or family problem that would have prevented her from participating in the mission and that her overseas training in Russia and Kazakhstan had been successful.NASA likewise declined to comment about Henry Epps's post but provided a statement saying, \u201cDiversity and inclusion are integral to mission success at NASA and we have a diverse astronaut corps reflective of that approach.\u201dLast-minute crew changes are not unusual at NASA. Apollo 13 pilot Ken Mattingly was\u00a0famously pulled from his mission days before launch after being exposed to German measles. It's also common for NASA to give limited explanations for these changes, which may involve private medical reasons or other sensitive information.Epps, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering, was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009 after seven years of working for the CIA. In an interview with New York Magazine last year, after her historic assignment to\u00a0the ISS crew was announced, Epps said she felt\u00a0\u201ca huge amount of responsibility.\u201dFourteen African American astronauts have flown in space, and several have visited the space station. In 2008, astronaut Leland Melvin was part of the space shuttle crew that delivered the Columbus science laboratory to the space station. But Epps would have been the first to serve\u00a0on the ISS long-term.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs a steward, I want to do well with this honor,\u201d Epps said. \u201cI want to make sure that young people know that this didn\u2019t happen overnight. There was a lot of work involved, and a lot of commitment and consistency. It is a daunting task to take on.\u201dAlongside Epps, Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor was one of 14 astronaut candidates selected out of\u00a0some 3,500 applicants for NASA's 20th astronaut class in 2009. She has a medical degree and previously served as a surgeon\u00a0and managed medical operations for a range of NASA missions.Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor's selection was also history-making: She will be the first Hispanic woman to live on the space station.Read more:Women of color face staggering harassment in space scienceAstronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in handThe International Space Station is super germy Jeanette Epps would have been the first African-American astronaut to live on board the International Space Station.  NASA pulled this astronaut from a space station crew. Her brother blames racism.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA pulled this astronaut from a space station crew. Her brother blames racism. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3695",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/22/nasa-pulled-this-astronaut-from-a-space-station-crew-her-brother-blames-racism/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, who was slated to become the first\u00a0black crew member to live on board the International Space Station, was unexpectedly pulled from\u00a0her June flight.In a brief news release Thursday, NASA announced that\u00a0Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor, a fellow member of Epps's astronaut class who was scheduled to launch later in the year, would be bumped up to take Epps's place. Epps, who\u00a0had\u00a0already started training for her role on Expedition 56-57, will return to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she\u00a0will be a candidate for future crews. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA did not give an explanation for the crew change.\u00a0But Epps's brother blamed racism at the space agency.\u201cMy sister Dr. Jeannette Epps has been fighting against oppressive racism and misogynist in NASA and now they are holding her back and allowing a Caucasian Astronaut to take her place!\u201d Henry Epps wrote\u00a0in a Facebook post Saturday. (The post has since been removed.) He linked to a MoveOn.org petition asking NASA to reinstate Epps.In an email, Epps said she could not comment on her brother's post or the reason for the crew change and clarified that neither she nor anyone in her family created the petition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEpps said that she did not have a medical condition or family problem that would have prevented her from participating in the mission and that her overseas training in Russia and Kazakhstan had been successful.NASA likewise declined to comment about Henry Epps's post but provided a statement saying, \u201cDiversity and inclusion are integral to mission success at NASA and we have a diverse astronaut corps reflective of that approach.\u201dLast-minute crew changes are not unusual at NASA. Apollo 13 pilot Ken Mattingly was\u00a0famously pulled from his mission days before launch after being exposed to German measles. It's also common for NASA to give limited explanations for these changes, which may involve private medical reasons or other sensitive information.Epps, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering, was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009 after seven years of working for the CIA. In an interview with New York Magazine last year, after her historic assignment to\u00a0the ISS crew was announced, Epps said she felt\u00a0\u201ca huge amount of responsibility.\u201dFourteen African American astronauts have flown in space, and several have visited the space station. In 2008, astronaut Leland Melvin was part of the space shuttle crew that delivered the Columbus science laboratory to the space station. But Epps would have been the first to serve\u00a0on the ISS long-term.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs a steward, I want to do well with this honor,\u201d Epps said. \u201cI want to make sure that young people know that this didn\u2019t happen overnight. There was a lot of work involved, and a lot of commitment and consistency. It is a daunting task to take on.\u201dAlongside Epps, Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor was one of 14 astronaut candidates selected out of\u00a0some 3,500 applicants for NASA's 20th astronaut class in 2009. She has a medical degree and previously served as a surgeon\u00a0and managed medical operations for a range of NASA missions.Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor's selection was also history-making: She will be the first Hispanic woman to live on the space station.Read more:Women of color face staggering harassment in space scienceAstronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in handThe International Space Station is super germy Jeanette Epps would have been the first African-American astronaut to live on board the International Space Station.  NASA pulled this astronaut from a space station crew. Her brother blames racism.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA pulled this astronaut from a space station crew. Her brother blames racism. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3696",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/22/nasa-pulled-this-astronaut-from-a-space-station-crew-her-brother-blames-racism/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, who was slated to become the first\u00a0black crew member to live on board the International Space Station, was unexpectedly pulled from\u00a0her June flight.In a brief news release Thursday, NASA announced that\u00a0Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor, a fellow member of Epps's astronaut class who was scheduled to launch later in the year, would be bumped up to take Epps's place. Epps, who\u00a0had\u00a0already started training for her role on Expedition 56-57, will return to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where she\u00a0will be a candidate for future crews. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA did not give an explanation for the crew change.\u00a0But Epps's brother blamed racism at the space agency.\u201cMy sister Dr. Jeannette Epps has been fighting against oppressive racism and misogynist in NASA and now they are holding her back and allowing a Caucasian Astronaut to take her place!\u201d Henry Epps wrote\u00a0in a Facebook post Saturday. (The post has since been removed.) He linked to a MoveOn.org petition asking NASA to reinstate Epps.In an email, Epps said she could not comment on her brother's post or the reason for the crew change and clarified that neither she nor anyone in her family created the petition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEpps said that she did not have a medical condition or family problem that would have prevented her from participating in the mission and that her overseas training in Russia and Kazakhstan had been successful.NASA likewise declined to comment about Henry Epps's post but provided a statement saying, \u201cDiversity and inclusion are integral to mission success at NASA and we have a diverse astronaut corps reflective of that approach.\u201dLast-minute crew changes are not unusual at NASA. Apollo 13 pilot Ken Mattingly was\u00a0famously pulled from his mission days before launch after being exposed to German measles. It's also common for NASA to give limited explanations for these changes, which may involve private medical reasons or other sensitive information.Epps, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering, was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009 after seven years of working for the CIA. In an interview with New York Magazine last year, after her historic assignment to\u00a0the ISS crew was announced, Epps said she felt\u00a0\u201ca huge amount of responsibility.\u201dFourteen African American astronauts have flown in space, and several have visited the space station. In 2008, astronaut Leland Melvin was part of the space shuttle crew that delivered the Columbus science laboratory to the space station. But Epps would have been the first to serve\u00a0on the ISS long-term.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs a steward, I want to do well with this honor,\u201d Epps said. \u201cI want to make sure that young people know that this didn\u2019t happen overnight. There was a lot of work involved, and a lot of commitment and consistency. It is a daunting task to take on.\u201dAlongside Epps, Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor was one of 14 astronaut candidates selected out of\u00a0some 3,500 applicants for NASA's 20th astronaut class in 2009. She has a medical degree and previously served as a surgeon\u00a0and managed medical operations for a range of NASA missions.Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor's selection was also history-making: She will be the first Hispanic woman to live on the space station.Read more:Women of color face staggering harassment in space scienceAstronaut Peggy Whitson has returned to Earth, a couple more NASA records in handThe International Space Station is super germy Jeanette Epps would have been the first African-American astronaut to live on board the International Space Station.  NASA pulled this astronaut from a space station crew. Her brother blames racism.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two communities of scientists host very different eclipse parties (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3697",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/07/03/two-communities-scientists-host-very-different-eclipse-parties/",
        "text": "It\u2019s extremely rare to have a complete solar eclipse pass over an observatory. On Tuesday, it happened over two. The observatories in Chile\u2019s Atacama Desert, the darkest, driest part of the world, are less than 70 miles apart ",
        "author": "Clare Fieseler"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA satellites help scientists learn where polluting microplastics go in the ocean (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3698",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/microplastic-pollution-satellite-detection/2021/07/02/10e45874-d9cc-11eb-8fb8-aea56b785b00_story.html",
        "text": "Among the NASA satellites swirling around Earth are eight small ones that measure wind speeds and hurricanes.Turns out they can do another task: help scientists figure out where microplastics go in the ocean.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLaunched in 2016, NASA\u2019s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) measures wind speeds over oceans using radar. The constellation of satellites takes stock of ocean surface roughness \u2014 rougher waters mean higher winds. But the University of Michigan researchers who helped develop the system wondered whether their measurements could help them spot microplastics, too.Most plastics floating in the ocean break up into what are known as microplastics \u2014 plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter. Smaller than a sesame seed, these fragments make their way into animals\u2019 stomachs and even our water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince microplastics are so tiny, they\u2019re difficult to spot. Researchers have long relied on reports from trawlers that snag small bits of plastic along with plankton for a sense of where microplastics go once they enter the water. But that data is incomplete and doesn\u2019t reflect real-time conditions.The researchers used the satellite data to search for areas where the ocean seemed smoother than it should while it was buffeted by high winds. When they compared those areas with observations from plankton trawlers and added in prediction data about where microplastics go given ocean currents, they found a direct connection between surface smoothness and the presence of microplastics.The new technique revealed that microplastic concentrations peak in each hemisphere during its respective summer season. It also provided even more evidence that China\u2019s Yangtze River \u2014 long suspected to be a big source of microplastics \u2014 spews them into the oceans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to suspect a source of microplastic pollution, but quite another to see it happening,\u201d said Christopher S. Ruf, a climate and space science professor at the University of Michigan who is CYGNSS\u2019s principal investigator, in a news release.He worked on the new method alongside undergraduate Madeline C. Evans. The duo published a paper on their technique in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience in Remote Sensing.They said they hope the new model helps with cleanup efforts, and attempts to spot pollution at its source. The new technique reveals that concentrations of the tiny particles peak in each hemisphere during its respective summer season, researchers say. NASA satellites help scientists learn where polluting microplastics go in the ocean",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018A towering legacy of goodness\u2019: Ben Barres\u2019s fight for diversity in science (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3699",
        "date": "2017-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/28/a-towering-legacy-of-goodness-ben-barress-fight-for-diversity-in-science/",
        "text": "A few years\u00a0after neuroscientist Ben Barres became a tenured professor at Stanford, he overheard a colleague talking about one of his classes:\u00a0\u201cBen Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister\u2019s.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Barres had no sister in\u00a0the field. The woman whose research the colleague disparaged was the same person as the man he now praised. Barres,\u00a0who\u00a0was named Barbara and designated female at birth, had transitioned not long before. That experience gave Barres keen insight into the inequalities that pervaded science \u2014 and a determination to correct them. Barres died\u00a0Wednesday\u00a0of pancreatic cancer, Stanford announced. He was 63. Within neuroscience, he was known as \u201cthe godfather of glia\u201d for his pioneering work on the cells that make up 90 percent of the human brain.\u00a0And across academia, Barres was beloved for his efforts to make science more inclusive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHis passion was for science,\u201d\u00a0Andrew Huberman, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford who spent five years as Barres's advisee, said in Barres's Stanford obituary. \u201cHis mission was to bring equality to how people are treated and promoted in science.\u201dBarres's championing of diversity was sparked by two events:First, in a controversial speech at a 2005 conference on diversifying science and engineering, Harvard University president Larry Summers suggested that innate differences between genders were responsible for the underrepresentation of women.Then the National Institutes of Health announced the winners of a prestigious award program; all nine were men.Story continues below advertisementThose events, Barres would later write, prompted him to\u00a0rethink episodes from his years as Barbara: The time a high school guidance counselor discouraged him from applying to MIT, which in the 1970s admitted very few women. (Barres ignored him, was accepted early and became the first person in his family to go to college.) And when a math professor said Barres's boyfriend must have helped\u00a0in Barres's solving a problem that stumped the other male classmates. And the time a Harvard dean confided that Barres was by far the most qualified\u00a0applicant for a\u00a0fellowship but awarded it to a man.AdvertisementBarres\u00a0transitioned in the late 1990s, at age 42. As\u00a0Ben, he faced transphobia and discrimination in health care. But he also found that his colleagues were treating him with more respect. \u201cI can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man,\u201d he\u00a0often said.Recognizing that his experience offered a counterpoint\u00a0to\u00a0\u201cthe Summers hypothesis,\u201d Barres opened up about his transition in an in-depth rebuttal published in the journal Nature.Story continues below advertisementBut those were just anecdotes; a scientist seeks data. So he found that, too \u2014 studies revealing high math scores among young girls and the gender bias that holds them back later in life.\u201cUntil intolerance is addressed, women will continue to advance only slowly,\u201d Barres wrote. \u201cThe comments \u2026 about women\u2019s lesser innate abilities are all wrongful and personal attacks on my character and capabilities, as well as on my colleagues\u2019 and students\u2019 abilities and self-esteem.\u00a0I will certainly not sit around silently and endure them.\u201dAdvertisementIn a time when few scientists \u2014 especially male scientists \u2014 were eager to embroil themselves in\u00a0the\u00a0debate\u00a0over gender bias, Barres repeatedly brought up the issue in\u00a0his lectures.Story continues below advertisementAndrew Giessel, a biologist and computer scientist at the biotech firm Moderna Therapeutics, recalled attending a seminar about Barres's research. At the end of the session, the neuroscientist set aside time to delve into a discussion of diversity\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0\u201can act\u00a0so outside the norm that it sticks with me to this day,\u201d Giessel tweeted.Barres\u00a0worried that his\u00a0activism might make his colleagues less willing to consider his research. \u201cBesides changing sex, the only time in my life when I have taken an action \u2026 I thought might harm my career is when I started fighting for the welfare of women in academia,\u201d he said in a 2008 talk at Harvard.AdvertisementEven as Barres became an oft-referenced figure and sought-after speaker in discussions about gender equality, he achieved important breakthroughs in the study of glia. In 2005, he showed that the overlooked brain cells were essential for forming connections between neurons. He was elected\u00a0a fellow of\u00a0the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011 and two years later became the first openly transgender person elected to the National Academy of Sciences.Story continues below advertisementBarres's efforts to make science more welcoming went beyond gender equity. His own students describe him as a generous mentor, and he went out of his way to look out for the careers of others.\u00a0Alycia Mosley Austin,\u00a0a neuroscience\u00a0doctoral student, recalled on Twitter how Barres once stopped in the middle of an interview to call another school and advocate in her behalf.\u00a0One of his last publications was an article in Nature\u00a0urging researchers to\u00a0make it easier for scientists who recently obtained their PhDs to set up their own labs. According to his Stanford obituary, Barres spent his final weeks making sure he'd finished letters of recommendation for the younger researchers in his lab.\u201cHe gave lots of advice, but he treated us as equals,\u201d neurobiologist Cagla Eroglu, now at Duke University, told Discover Magazine. \u201cHe taught us to be independent thinkers and manage projects by ourselves.\u201dAdvertisementNews of Barres's death prompted an outpouring of heartfelt tributes online. \u201cI knocked on his door as a first year and Ben Barres stayed an hour later to give me advice about women and medicine,\u201d said\u00a0Stanford medical student Natalia Birgisson. \u201cI once invited Ben Barres to speak to young LGBT students. \u2026 He responded in 10 minutes,\u201d recalled\u00a0Rockefeller University researcher Trevor Sorrells.\u00a0\u201cHe made my life possible as a transgender\u00a0neuroscientist,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0E. Kale Edmiston, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.Story continues below advertisementIn a tweet, Jo Handelsman, a molecular biologist and director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, called Barres \u201ca\u00a0great scientist, leader, mentor, and friend.\u201d\u201cHis impact on our understanding of glia was rivaled by his impact on diversity in science,\u201d she wrote. \u201cBen \u2026 you leave a towering legacy of goodness.\u201dRead more:Women of color face staggering harassment in space scienceSix months later, the March for Science tries to build a lasting movementScientists struggle with sexism and racism: 'We think these bias studies don't apply to us' Ben Barres, a neuroscience pioneer, was beloved across academia for his tireless work to make science more inclusive.  \u2018A towering legacy of goodness\u2019: Ben Barres\u2019s fight for diversity in science",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boston University professor sexually harassed graduate student, investigation finds (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3700",
        "date": "2017-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/20/boston-university-professor-sexually-harassed-graduate-student-investigation-finds/",
        "text": "A Boston University geologist and prominent Antarctic researcher has been placed on administrative leave with pay \u2014 and soon could face termination \u2014 after a 13-month university investigation found that he sexually harassed a female graduate student nearly two decades ago.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightProvost Jean Morrison wrote in a Nov. 17 letter to faculty that investigators found, \u201cby a preponderance of evidence,\u201d that David Marchant \u201cengaged in sexual harassment in violation of Boston University\u2019s Sexual Harassment Policy.\u201d Marchant was accused by Jane Willenbring, now a Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor, of calling her a \u201cslut\u201d and \u201cwhore\u201d when she accompanied him on an expedition to Antarctica as a 22-year-old graduate student. The researcher directed \u201cderogatory and sex-based slurs and sexual comments at Dr. Willenbring during the 1999-2000 field expedition to Antarctica,\u201d according to the provost. Her letter\u00a0 was linked from a brief statement on BU Today, the university's official\u00a0online publication, that announced the institution's Office of Equal Opportunity had concluded its review.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBacked by statements from other individuals, Willenbring and a second graduate student brought a complaint against Marchant in 2016. The two women accused the professor of verbal harassment and physical abuse during that expedition, including throwing rocks at\u00a0Willenbring while she urinated and blowing volcanic ash into her eyes.\u00a0Science magazine first broke the story about their allegations in early October.Morrison wrote that the investigation, based on 1,000 pages of records and 30 witness reports, did not find \u201ccredible evidence\u201d of physical attacks. But the investigators concluded that the \u201csexual harassment was sufficiently severe and pervasive so as to create a hostile learning and living environment.\u201d Marchant,\u00a0a tenured professor in the College of Arts\u00a0and Sciences, retains his status as a faculty member but\u00a0is no longer on campus, the letter continued.\u201cDr. Marchant is extremely disappointed in the findings and continues to maintain that he did not engage in any sexually harassing behavior in 1999 or at another time,\u201d his attorney, Jeffrey Sankey, told the Boston Globe on Friday. He also said the findings would be appealed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf an appeal is unsuccessful, the university will begin \u201cproceedings to terminate his faculty appointment,\u201d the provost wrote.In late October, in the wake of media reports about the case, the\u00a0House Science, Space, and Technology Committee launched its own investigation. Marchant has received nearly $5.5 million in federal grant money since the late 1990s, the committee noted.Several high-profile scientists have been accused of harassment in recent years. As The Washington Post wrote\u00a0last month:In 2015,\u00a0BuzzFeed\u00a0published findings from an investigation at the University of California at Berkeley that astronomer Geoff Marcy had violated the school\u2019s\u00a0sexual harassment policy\u00a0by touching and kissing undergraduates.Last year, prominent paleoanthropologist Brian Richmond resigned his position as curator\u00a0at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A museum employee accused Richmond of sexual assault, and in a subsequent investigation three undergraduate students said he\u00a0groped them\u00a0at a field site in Kenya.In September, Mother Jones\u00a0reported\u00a0on a complaint filed by cognitive scientist Celeste Kidd against Florian Jaeger, a linguistics expert at the University of Rochester in New York. Kidd alleged that Jaeger sent her sexual messages and pressured her into renting a spare bedroom in his apartment, where he would mock her body and diet.The University of Rochester, which\u00a0promoted Jaeger while he was being investigated, came under fire for how it handled\u00a0the complaint. In a recent open letter, more than 200 brain and cognitive scientists wrote that they have urged students not to apply to graduate programs there.As for the Boston University investigation into Marchant's behavior, Willenbring told the Globe that \u201ccommon sense prevailed.\u201dRead more:Women of color face staggering harassment in space scienceThe shifting tide of sexual harassment in scienceAmerican Museum of Natural History researcher faces sexual assault and harassment accusations The geologist and Antarctic researcher was accused of verbal abuse as well as pelting a graduate student with rocks. Boston University professor sexually harassed graduate student, investigation finds",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Physics Prize Awarded to Trio for Study of Complex Systems (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3701",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nobel-prize-in-physics-awarded-to-trio-for-study-of-complex-systems-including-climate-change-11633428420?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=14",
        "text": "Dr. Parisi had his phone close at hand when the Nobel committee called early Tuesday. \u201cIn some sense I was not expecting it, but I knew there was some chance, so I kept the phone near me,\u201d he said. \u201cI was very happy.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe other half of the prize was shared by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Syukuro Manabe,\n\n\n\n a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Klaus Hasselmann\n\n\n\n at Germany\u2019s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg for their independent work on modeling the Earth\u2019s climate.\n\n\nTaken together, the prize awards theory and practice.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe three winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics were announced at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n jonathan nackstrand/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cYou think you will drown in complexity, but this science can show that simplicity can emerge and you can get an insight into the true behavior of these complex systems,\u201d said physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. \u201cIt is difficult to think of something more complex than the world\u2019s climate.\u201d\nDr. Manabe\u2019s research, dating back to the 1960s, demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide can lead to increased temperatures on the surface of the Earth, laying the foundation for the creation of climate models used today.\n\u201cThe whole field of climate modeling originates with Suki,\u201d said Gabriel Vecchi, deputy director of Princeton\u2019s Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System. \u201cThe idea that you can take something so complex as the climate system and code the equations that govern it and put them in a computer and use that to simulate the climate system started with him.\u201d\nIn the 1970s, Dr. Hasselmann in Hamburg created a model tying together weather and climate, helping to remove uncertainty over the reliability of climate models, despite weather being erratic and inconsistent, the academy said. His work, which includes methods for attributing the various impacts on climate from both human activity and natural phenomena, has been used to show how human carbon-dioxide emissions can cause increases in temperatures.\n\u201cI\u2019m completely surprised \u2026 a bolt from the blue,\u201d Dr. Hasselman told the Nobel officials when they called. \u201cI came to climate as a physicist,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is difficult for somebody not actually working in climate to recognize that we are actually changing climate until it has become quite obvious.\u201d\nMost scientists have coalesced in recent years around the idea that greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity, like burning coal for power, have contributed to a warming climate since preindustrial times. The decision to honor the work of Messrs. Manabe, originally from Japan, and Hasselmann came a little less than a month before a United Nations summit on climate in Glasgow, Scotland. \n\u201cI\u2019m hugely impressed that climate is even on their radar,\u201d said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York, a leading center for global climate modeling. \u201cThis is not the usual fare for the Nobel Prize committee. For the topic to be recognized by them is remarkable.\u201d\nA total of 218 people have won the physics prize since it was first awarded in 1901, for breakthroughs in fields from black holes to gravitational waves. It is the third time that a Nobel Prize has been awarded for work related to the impact of human activity on global climate. The prize carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to about $1.15 million.\nIn 1995, Paul J. Crutzen, Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pinpointing how industrial chemicals damaged Earth\u2019s protective ozone layer, which helped spur an international treaty banning the compounds. In 2007, the U.N.\u2019s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former U.S. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Al Gore\n\n\n\n were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to bring climate change to the world\u2019s attention.\n\u201cClimate science in general has also been relatively slow in the scientific community to gain a wide acceptance and appreciation,\u201d said Sylvester James Gates Jr., a physicist at Brown University and president of the American Physical Society. \u201cThis is the work of physics done on a grand scale for all of humanity.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com and Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, Germany\u2019s Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi of Italy were awarded the prize for the study of complex systems, including climate change. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Physics Prize Awarded to Trio for Study of Complex Systems (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3702",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nobel-prize-in-physics-awarded-to-trio-for-study-of-complex-systems-including-climate-change-11633428420?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=21",
        "text": "Dr. Parisi had his phone close at hand when the Nobel committee called early Tuesday. \u201cIn some sense I was not expecting it, but I knew there was some chance, so I kept the phone near me,\u201d he said. \u201cI was very happy.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe other half of the prize was shared by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Syukuro Manabe,\n\n\n\n a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Klaus Hasselmann\n\n\n\n at Germany\u2019s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg for their independent work on modeling the Earth\u2019s climate.\n\n\nTaken together, the prize awards theory and practice.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe three winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics were announced at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n jonathan nackstrand/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cYou think you will drown in complexity, but this science can show that simplicity can emerge and you can get an insight into the true behavior of these complex systems,\u201d said physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. \u201cIt is difficult to think of something more complex than the world\u2019s climate.\u201d\nDr. Manabe\u2019s research, dating back to the 1960s, demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide can lead to increased temperatures on the surface of the Earth, laying the foundation for the creation of climate models used today.\n\u201cThe whole field of climate modeling originates with Suki,\u201d said Gabriel Vecchi, deputy director of Princeton\u2019s Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System. \u201cThe idea that you can take something so complex as the climate system and code the equations that govern it and put them in a computer and use that to simulate the climate system started with him.\u201d\nIn the 1970s, Dr. Hasselmann in Hamburg created a model tying together weather and climate, helping to remove uncertainty over the reliability of climate models, despite weather being erratic and inconsistent, the academy said. His work, which includes methods for attributing the various impacts on climate from both human activity and natural phenomena, has been used to show how human carbon-dioxide emissions can cause increases in temperatures.\n\u201cI\u2019m completely surprised \u2026 a bolt from the blue,\u201d Dr. Hasselman told the Nobel officials when they called. \u201cI came to climate as a physicist,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is difficult for somebody not actually working in climate to recognize that we are actually changing climate until it has become quite obvious.\u201d\nMost scientists have coalesced in recent years around the idea that greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity, like burning coal for power, have contributed to a warming climate since preindustrial times. The decision to honor the work of Messrs. Manabe, originally from Japan, and Hasselmann came a little less than a month before a United Nations summit on climate in Glasgow, Scotland. \n\u201cI\u2019m hugely impressed that climate is even on their radar,\u201d said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences in New York, a leading center for global climate modeling. \u201cThis is not the usual fare for the Nobel Prize committee. For the topic to be recognized by them is remarkable.\u201d\nA total of 218 people have won the physics prize since it was first awarded in 1901, for breakthroughs in fields from black holes to gravitational waves. It is the third time that a Nobel Prize has been awarded for work related to the impact of human activity on global climate. The prize carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor, equivalent to about $1.15 million.\nIn 1995, Paul J. Crutzen, Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pinpointing how industrial chemicals damaged Earth\u2019s protective ozone layer, which helped spur an international treaty banning the compounds. In 2007, the U.N.\u2019s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former U.S. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Al Gore\n\n\n\n were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to bring climate change to the world\u2019s attention.\n\u201cClimate science in general has also been relatively slow in the scientific community to gain a wide acceptance and appreciation,\u201d said Sylvester James Gates Jr., a physicist at Brown University and president of the American Physical Society. \u201cThis is the work of physics done on a grand scale for all of humanity.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com and Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, Germany\u2019s Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi of Italy were awarded the prize for the study of complex systems, including climate change. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From NASA Astronauts\u2019 Trip to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3703",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. The United States opened a new era of human space travel on Saturday as a private company for the first time launched astronauts into orbit, nearly a decade after the government retired the storied space shuttle program in the aftermath of national tragedy.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From NASA Astronauts\u2019 Trip to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3704",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. The United States opened a new era of human space travel on Saturday as a private company for the first time launched astronauts into orbit, nearly a decade after the government retired the storied space shuttle program in the aftermath of national tragedy.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From NASA Astronauts\u2019 Trip to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3705",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. The United States opened a new era of human space travel on Saturday as a private company for the first time launched astronauts into orbit, nearly a decade after the government retired the storied space shuttle program in the aftermath of national tragedy.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From NASA Astronauts\u2019 Trip to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3706",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. The United States opened a new era of human space travel on Saturday as a private company for the first time launched astronauts into orbit, nearly a decade after the government retired the storied space shuttle program in the aftermath of national tragedy.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From NASA Astronauts\u2019 Trip to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3707",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. The United States opened a new era of human space travel on Saturday as a private company for the first time launched astronauts into orbit, nearly a decade after the government retired the storied space shuttle program in the aftermath of national tragedy.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From NASA Astronauts\u2019 Trip to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3708",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. The United States opened a new era of human space travel on Saturday as a private company for the first time launched astronauts into orbit, nearly a decade after the government retired the storied space shuttle program in the aftermath of national tragedy.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From NASA Astronauts\u2019 Trip to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3709",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. Look back at the day when a NASA crew headed to the space station from the United States for the first time since the space shuttles were retired in 2011. The United States opened a new era of human space travel on Saturday as a private company for the first time launched astronauts into orbit, nearly a decade after the government retired the storied space shuttle program in the aftermath of national tragedy.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kids (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3710",
        "date": "2017-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/16/trump-wants-to-kill-nasa-office-popular-with-congress-astronauts-and-kids/",
        "text": "Leland Melvin was, in his own words, \u201ca skinny kid from public schools in Lynchburg, Va., who never in my wildest dreams thought of being an astronaut.\u201d Boys like him aimed to\u00a0become athletes, and that's where Melvin seemed headed: He went to college on a football scholarship and got drafted by the Detroit Lions after graduation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut then Melvin\u00a0found out about NASA's\u00a0Graduate Student\u00a0Researchers Project, which would pay for him to take night classes for a\u00a0master's degree in materials science engineering. When a hamstring injury derailed his football career, he had science to fall back on. Melvin got a job building sensors for rockets at Langley Research Center, then a second fellowship from NASA that allowed him to\u00a0take more engineering courses. Eventually Melvin became associate administrator for the NASA Office of Education, which runs the same programs that funded his education.In between, he flew to the International Space Station aboard the space shuttle. Twice.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf it hadn\u2019t been for NASA Education I wouldn't have\u00a0been funded to go to school, to work at NASA Langley, to become an astronaut,\u201d Melvin said.\u00a0The $115 million NASA Office of Education is one of several science programs on\u00a0the chopping block in\u00a0President Trump's 2018 budget proposal.\u00a0The Environmental Protection Agency\u00a0stands to lose more than 30 percent of its budget, and the National Institutes of Health\u00a0could shrink by $6 billion. The amount of money involved is smaller, but to scientists who have benefited from the Office of\u00a0Education, which represents just half a percent of NASA's overall budget, its elimination\u00a0is hard to swallow.President Trump just released his budget plan for the next fiscal year, which proposes some big changes in government spending. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S.\u201cIt's how I started my career in the space industry. It's how so many people I know got started in the space industry,\u201d said Laura\u00a0Seward Forczyk, a planetary scientist and space consultant who got three internships through the NASA Office of Education. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementForczyk's interest in science stems from the time astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, visited her school as part of a NASA education program. She hopes to fly in space herself and has participated in a training session for potential astronaut applicants conducted by the Office of Education.\u201cIt would be devastating if all that didn't exist any more,\u201d she said.\u00a0Though the\u00a0Science Mission Directorate and the individual NASA centers operate some outreach programs, the Office of Education is responsible for coordinating those efforts. It also\u00a0runs a space camp for\u00a0children, develops curriculums for teachers, and funds scholarships and fellowships for young scientists, particularly women and underrepresented minorities. The office's\u00a0biggest initiative\u00a0is the\u00a0$40 million Space Grant program, which funded Forczyk's internships.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of times the only way women or minorities can actually succeed is through these grants,\u201d\u00a0Forczyk said. \u201cIt's the only way they continue getting funding.\u201dTrump\u2019s budget calls for seismic disruption in medical and science researchThe Office of Education\u00a0has faced scrutiny before. Its budget\u00a0declined over the past decade from $180 million dollars in 2010 to $115 million last year. In 2015, an audit conducted by the Office of the Inspector General concluded that NASA Education needed to \u201ccollaborate and consolidate\u201d its programs, which it said were fragmented and not effectively monitored.Trump's budget proposal, which was released early Thursday, criticized the Office of Education as \u201cduplicative\u201d and said it had failed to implement a NASA-wide education strategy.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement released Thursday, acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said that the space agency would absorb its education and outreach efforts into the Science Mission Directorate.AdvertisementMelvin, who retired from NASA in 2014 and works as a writer, motivational speaker and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) advocate, said that the Science Mission Directorate may not be able to coordinate agencywide initiatives as well as the Education Office does. The Science Mission Directorate's budget for education and outreach is also much smaller than the Office of Education's \u2014 about $40 million. Unless the division gets new funding (none is allocated in the president's budget proposal) many of NASA Education's programs would be cut or killed.NASA budget would cut Earth science and educationTwo weeks ago, Congress passed the \u201cInspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers Women Act,\u201d which directs NASA to develop a specific plan for promoting women in STEM fields. Melvin also noted that the NASA Education program MUREP, which helps fund students seeking STEM degrees at historically black colleges and universities, will be eliminated \u2014 weeks after Trump signed an executive order\u00a0moving oversight of a federal initiative to support HBCUs from the Education Department to the White House.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe can\u2019t say \u2018we support this\u2019 out of one side of our mouths and then go and cut the programs that fuel them,\u201d Melvin said. He said he didn't understand the president's reasoning in eliminating the education office: \u201c$115 million \u2014 that's a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.\u201dAdvertisement(It's less than 0.003 percent of the federal budget).\u201cBut\u00a0the effectiveness of those programs for getting kids to stay in college, getting them into the STEM pipeline, there is no way to reproduce\u00a0that if you cut that money out.\u201dCasey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, said\u00a0the cut may not be approved. In the past several years, Congress has allocated more money for NASA's Office of Education than the president requested. And\u00a0many of its programs, including Space Grant, fund offices and projects in all 50 states, making them popular with\u00a0pretty much everyone.Story continues below advertisementGeorgia Tech professor Stephen Ruffin, who chairs the\u00a0national council of NASA Space Grant directors, said he was \"very concerned\" by the proposed elimination of the education office.\u00a0\"The nation wants a NASA space program and aviation program that continues to lead the world,\" he said. \"Unless we train people, we\u2019re not going to\u00a0have that.\"Read more:Neanderthal microbes reveal surprises about what they ate \u2014 and whom they kissedCaught on film for the first time: One of the world's rarest whalesNewfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on EarthThese elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do itThis triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex. The $115 million office runs a space camp for children and funds scholarships for women and minorities in STEM.  Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kids",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kids (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3711",
        "date": "2017-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/16/trump-wants-to-kill-nasa-office-popular-with-congress-astronauts-and-kids/",
        "text": "Leland Melvin was, in his own words, \u201ca skinny kid from public schools in Lynchburg, Va., who never in my wildest dreams thought of being an astronaut.\u201d Boys like him aimed to\u00a0become athletes, and that's where Melvin seemed headed: He went to college on a football scholarship and got drafted by the Detroit Lions after graduation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut then Melvin\u00a0found out about NASA's\u00a0Graduate Student\u00a0Researchers Project, which would pay for him to take night classes for a\u00a0master's degree in materials science engineering. When a hamstring injury derailed his football career, he had science to fall back on. Melvin got a job building sensors for rockets at Langley Research Center, then a second fellowship from NASA that allowed him to\u00a0take more engineering courses. Eventually Melvin became associate administrator for the NASA Office of Education, which runs the same programs that funded his education.In between, he flew to the International Space Station aboard the space shuttle. Twice.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf it hadn\u2019t been for NASA Education I wouldn't have\u00a0been funded to go to school, to work at NASA Langley, to become an astronaut,\u201d Melvin said.\u00a0The $115 million NASA Office of Education is one of several science programs on\u00a0the chopping block in\u00a0President Trump's 2018 budget proposal.\u00a0The Environmental Protection Agency\u00a0stands to lose more than 30 percent of its budget, and the National Institutes of Health\u00a0could shrink by $6 billion. The amount of money involved is smaller, but to scientists who have benefited from the Office of\u00a0Education, which represents just half a percent of NASA's overall budget, its elimination\u00a0is hard to swallow.President Trump just released his budget plan for the next fiscal year, which proposes some big changes in government spending. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)Science and medicine leaders say Trump budget would be dire for U.S.\u201cIt's how I started my career in the space industry. It's how so many people I know got started in the space industry,\u201d said Laura\u00a0Seward Forczyk, a planetary scientist and space consultant who got three internships through the NASA Office of Education. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementForczyk's interest in science stems from the time astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, visited her school as part of a NASA education program. She hopes to fly in space herself and has participated in a training session for potential astronaut applicants conducted by the Office of Education.\u201cIt would be devastating if all that didn't exist any more,\u201d she said.\u00a0Though the\u00a0Science Mission Directorate and the individual NASA centers operate some outreach programs, the Office of Education is responsible for coordinating those efforts. It also\u00a0runs a space camp for\u00a0children, develops curriculums for teachers, and funds scholarships and fellowships for young scientists, particularly women and underrepresented minorities. The office's\u00a0biggest initiative\u00a0is the\u00a0$40 million Space Grant program, which funded Forczyk's internships.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of times the only way women or minorities can actually succeed is through these grants,\u201d\u00a0Forczyk said. \u201cIt's the only way they continue getting funding.\u201dTrump\u2019s budget calls for seismic disruption in medical and science researchThe Office of Education\u00a0has faced scrutiny before. Its budget\u00a0declined over the past decade from $180 million dollars in 2010 to $115 million last year. In 2015, an audit conducted by the Office of the Inspector General concluded that NASA Education needed to \u201ccollaborate and consolidate\u201d its programs, which it said were fragmented and not effectively monitored.Trump's budget proposal, which was released early Thursday, criticized the Office of Education as \u201cduplicative\u201d and said it had failed to implement a NASA-wide education strategy.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement released Thursday, acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said that the space agency would absorb its education and outreach efforts into the Science Mission Directorate.AdvertisementMelvin, who retired from NASA in 2014 and works as a writer, motivational speaker and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) advocate, said that the Science Mission Directorate may not be able to coordinate agencywide initiatives as well as the Education Office does. The Science Mission Directorate's budget for education and outreach is also much smaller than the Office of Education's \u2014 about $40 million. Unless the division gets new funding (none is allocated in the president's budget proposal) many of NASA Education's programs would be cut or killed.NASA budget would cut Earth science and educationTwo weeks ago, Congress passed the \u201cInspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers Women Act,\u201d which directs NASA to develop a specific plan for promoting women in STEM fields. Melvin also noted that the NASA Education program MUREP, which helps fund students seeking STEM degrees at historically black colleges and universities, will be eliminated \u2014 weeks after Trump signed an executive order\u00a0moving oversight of a federal initiative to support HBCUs from the Education Department to the White House.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe can\u2019t say \u2018we support this\u2019 out of one side of our mouths and then go and cut the programs that fuel them,\u201d Melvin said. He said he didn't understand the president's reasoning in eliminating the education office: \u201c$115 million \u2014 that's a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.\u201dAdvertisement(It's less than 0.003 percent of the federal budget).\u201cBut\u00a0the effectiveness of those programs for getting kids to stay in college, getting them into the STEM pipeline, there is no way to reproduce\u00a0that if you cut that money out.\u201dCasey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, said\u00a0the cut may not be approved. In the past several years, Congress has allocated more money for NASA's Office of Education than the president requested. And\u00a0many of its programs, including Space Grant, fund offices and projects in all 50 states, making them popular with\u00a0pretty much everyone.Story continues below advertisementGeorgia Tech professor Stephen Ruffin, who chairs the\u00a0national council of NASA Space Grant directors, said he was \"very concerned\" by the proposed elimination of the education office.\u00a0\"The nation wants a NASA space program and aviation program that continues to lead the world,\" he said. \"Unless we train people, we\u2019re not going to\u00a0have that.\"Read more:Neanderthal microbes reveal surprises about what they ate \u2014 and whom they kissedCaught on film for the first time: One of the world's rarest whalesNewfound 3.77-billion-year-old fossils could be earliest evidence of life on EarthThese elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do itThis triceratops is a Smithsonian icon. Now he\u2019ll be fed to a T. rex. The $115 million office runs a space camp for children and funds scholarships for women and minorities in STEM.  Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kids",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden Nominates Former Florida Senator to Lead NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3712",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/science/nasa-bill-nelson.html",
        "text": "Bill Nelson flew on a space shuttle in 1986 and lost re-election for a fourth Senate term in 2018. Some space advocates fear his approach to the agency could take it backward. Bill Nelson flew on a space shuttle in 1986 and lost re-election for a fourth Senate term in 2018. Some space advocates fear his approach to the agency could take it backward. President Biden on Friday nominated Bill Nelson, a former senator from Florida, to head NASA.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden Nominates Former Florida Senator to Lead NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3713",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/science/nasa-bill-nelson.html",
        "text": "Bill Nelson flew on a space shuttle in 1986 and lost re-election for a fourth Senate term in 2018. Some space advocates fear his approach to the agency could take it backward. Bill Nelson flew on a space shuttle in 1986 and lost re-election for a fourth Senate term in 2018. Some space advocates fear his approach to the agency could take it backward. President Biden on Friday nominated Bill Nelson, a former senator from Florida, to head NASA.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden Nominates Former Florida Senator to Lead NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3714",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/science/nasa-bill-nelson.html",
        "text": "Bill Nelson flew on a space shuttle in 1986 and lost re-election for a fourth Senate term in 2018. Some space advocates fear his approach to the agency could take it backward. Bill Nelson flew on a space shuttle in 1986 and lost re-election for a fourth Senate term in 2018. Some space advocates fear his approach to the agency could take it backward. President Biden on Friday nominated Bill Nelson, a former senator from Florida, to head NASA.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA facility with deep-space rocket takes direct hit from a tornado (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3715",
        "date": "2017-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/07/nasa-facility-with-deep-space-rocket-takes-direct-hit-from-a-tornado/",
        "text": "A tornado\u00a0on Tuesday damaged the NASA facility in New Orleans where workers are building key components of the agency's new deep-space rocket.The twister touched down before noon and ripped holes in the roof and walls of the sprawling Michoud Assembly Facility. NASA employees and contractors there are building the huge hydrogen and oxygen fuel tanks for the heavy-lift rocket known as the Space Launch System. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA NASA statement said all personnel were accounted for. A damage assessment was underway late Tuesday afternoon.Stephen C. Doering, manager of the SLS Stages Element Office for NASA, told The Washington Post that he was watching the twister from the parking lot when it moved toward the assembly facility. He and his colleagues ran inside to shelter in the restrooms, he said.\u201cYou could see it come in the parking lot. It took about a half a dozen cars and picked them up and knocked them over like rag dolls,\u201d Doering said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the tornado passed, workers smelled gas and were ordered out of the building. But with other tornadoes reported in the area, everyone had to shelter in place again, he said.Doering said he had heard of one injury but didn't know the severity. While the hardware for the new rocket was undamaged, he said, workers were busy patching holes in the building's exterior, hoping to prevent water damage to the elaborate and expensive equipment used to weld the big fuel tanks. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Scott Walker (@scottwalker504)\n View this post on Instagram A post shared by Samuel (@damnitsamit)\n\u201cWe didn\u2019t get to do a full damage assessment yet, because after the first [tornado] we had to shelter in place as two more of them came by,\u201d he said.Tornado rolls through New OrleansWorkers at Michoud built military planes in World War II and later key stages of the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo astronauts to the moon. More recently, NASA built the space shuttle's external fuel tanks there.With the SLS, NASA is planning the first uncrewed flight for late 2018. The first mission with astronauts is not expected until early in the next decade; that flight would put astronauts aboard the Orion capsule in orbit around the moon. NASA is not currently building a lunar lander.A version of the SLS could potentially be used for missions to Mars.A tornado that hit NASA\u2019s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on Feb. 7 caused some damage to buildings. (YouTube/pscwplb) Holes in the Michoud facility's walls and roof, but the rocket hardware there appears undamaged at first glance. NASA facility with deep-space rocket takes direct hit from a tornado",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA facility with deep-space rocket takes direct hit from a tornado (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3716",
        "date": "2017-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/07/nasa-facility-with-deep-space-rocket-takes-direct-hit-from-a-tornado/",
        "text": "A tornado\u00a0on Tuesday damaged the NASA facility in New Orleans where workers are building key components of the agency's new deep-space rocket.The twister touched down before noon and ripped holes in the roof and walls of the sprawling Michoud Assembly Facility. NASA employees and contractors there are building the huge hydrogen and oxygen fuel tanks for the heavy-lift rocket known as the Space Launch System. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA NASA statement said all personnel were accounted for. A damage assessment was underway late Tuesday afternoon.Stephen C. Doering, manager of the SLS Stages Element Office for NASA, told The Washington Post that he was watching the twister from the parking lot when it moved toward the assembly facility. He and his colleagues ran inside to shelter in the restrooms, he said.\u201cYou could see it come in the parking lot. It took about a half a dozen cars and picked them up and knocked them over like rag dolls,\u201d Doering said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the tornado passed, workers smelled gas and were ordered out of the building. But with other tornadoes reported in the area, everyone had to shelter in place again, he said.Doering said he had heard of one injury but didn't know the severity. While the hardware for the new rocket was undamaged, he said, workers were busy patching holes in the building's exterior, hoping to prevent water damage to the elaborate and expensive equipment used to weld the big fuel tanks. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Scott Walker (@scottwalker504)\n View this post on Instagram A post shared by Samuel (@damnitsamit)\n\u201cWe didn\u2019t get to do a full damage assessment yet, because after the first [tornado] we had to shelter in place as two more of them came by,\u201d he said.Tornado rolls through New OrleansWorkers at Michoud built military planes in World War II and later key stages of the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo astronauts to the moon. More recently, NASA built the space shuttle's external fuel tanks there.With the SLS, NASA is planning the first uncrewed flight for late 2018. The first mission with astronauts is not expected until early in the next decade; that flight would put astronauts aboard the Orion capsule in orbit around the moon. NASA is not currently building a lunar lander.A version of the SLS could potentially be used for missions to Mars.A tornado that hit NASA\u2019s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on Feb. 7 caused some damage to buildings. (YouTube/pscwplb) Holes in the Michoud facility's walls and roof, but the rocket hardware there appears undamaged at first glance. NASA facility with deep-space rocket takes direct hit from a tornado",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 06/01/2010 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3717",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2010/06/01/science/01scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This Week: A virus takes a toll on a major food source in eastern Africa, the last ride for the Space Shuttle boosters, and stressed out iguanas and nervous humans. This Week: A virus takes a toll on a major food source in eastern Africa, the last ride for the Space Shuttle boosters, and stressed out iguanas and nervous humans. This Week: A virus takes a toll on a major food source in eastern Africa, the last ride for the Space Shuttle boosters, and stressed out iguanas and nervous humans.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 06/01/2010 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3718",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2010/06/01/science/31scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This Week: A virus takes a toll on a major food source in eastern Africa, the last ride for the Space Shuttle boosters, and stressed out iguanas and nervous humans. This Week: A virus takes a toll on a major food source in eastern Africa, the last ride for the Space Shuttle boosters, and stressed out iguanas and nervous humans. This Week: A virus takes a toll on a major food source in eastern Africa, the last ride for the Space Shuttle boosters, and stressed out iguanas and nervous humans.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "A farewell in space, among the ancient Maya and the kidney transplant wars. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3719",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2011/03/01/science/01scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "Correspondent Bill Harwood talks about the last Space Shuttle flight, David Corcoran interviews Sally Satel about changes in kidney transplant policy and Thomas Lin talks to anthropologists in Guatemala about new discoveries about life in the Mayan civilization.\n Correspondent Bill Harwood talks about the last Space Shuttle flight, David Corcoran interviews Sally Satel about changes in kidney transplant policy and Thomas Lin talks to anthropologists in Guatemala about new discoveries about life in the Maya... Correspondent Bill Harwood talks about the last Space Shuttle flight, David Corcoran interviews Sally Satel about changes in kidney transplant policy and Thomas Lin talks to anthropologists in Guatemala about new discoveries about life in the Mayan civilization.\n",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts NASA Astronauts to Orbit, Launching New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3720",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts.html",
        "text": "The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts NASA Astronauts to Orbit, Launching New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3721",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts.html",
        "text": "The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts NASA Astronauts to Orbit, Launching New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3722",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts.html",
        "text": "The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts NASA Astronauts to Orbit, Launching New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3723",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts.html",
        "text": "The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts NASA Astronauts to Orbit, Launching New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3724",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts.html",
        "text": "The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. The trip to the space station was the first from American soil since 2011 when the space shuttles were retired. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets May Date to Launch 2 NASA Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3725",
        "date": "2020-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/science/spacex-nasa-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets May Date to Launch 2 NASA Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3726",
        "date": "2020-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/science/spacex-nasa-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets May Date to Launch 2 NASA Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3727",
        "date": "2020-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/science/spacex-nasa-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets May Date to Launch 2 NASA Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3728",
        "date": "2020-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/science/spacex-nasa-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets May Date to Launch 2 NASA Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3729",
        "date": "2020-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/science/spacex-nasa-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. The crew will be the first to travel to orbit from American soil since the space shuttle stopped flying in 2011. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rocket display at museum a tribute to astronauts who lost their lives in 2 missions (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3730",
        "date": "2020-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/space-shuttle-astronaut-deaths-memorial/2020/12/10/0a997fca-3a5e-11eb-bc68-96af0daae728_story.html",
        "text": "The age of the space shuttle is over. But its memory isn\u2019t \u2014 and now a titanic piece of equipment used to put shuttles in orbit will become a memorial to its fallen astronauts.A 150-foot-long space shuttle rocket booster recently took a trip to the March Field Air Museum in California, where it will serve as the centerpiece of a planned memorial garden for the two NASA crews who lost their lives during shuttle missions. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOnce on display at the Kennedy Space Center, the boosters were the most powerful solid rocket motors ever flown. Each provided over 3 million pounds of thrust \u2014 enough to push the shuttle\u2019s tank and orbiter into orbit before dropping into the Atlantic Ocean. About 270 boosters were built over the life of the space shuttle program, which lasted from 1981 until 2011.Story continues below advertisementThe rocket played a pivotal role in the 1986 Challenger disaster, when a leaky seal in one of the shuttle\u2019s boosters caused its fuel tanks to collapse and the orbiter to break apart. All seven of its crew members died.AdvertisementAt March Field, the booster will memorialize the astronauts who died on the Challenger mission and during the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed its seven-person crew.NASA and the museum split the $65,000 cost of acquiring and transporting the booster from the space agency\u2019s Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base in California, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reports. The booster\u2019s twin is part of the collection of the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson. At March Field in California, the 150-foot-long space shuttle booster will serve as remembrance of Challenger and Columbia disasters. NASA rocket display at museum a tribute to astronauts who lost their lives in 2 missions",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rocket display at museum a tribute to astronauts who lost their lives in 2 missions (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3731",
        "date": "2020-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/space-shuttle-astronaut-deaths-memorial/2020/12/10/0a997fca-3a5e-11eb-bc68-96af0daae728_story.html",
        "text": "The age of the space shuttle is over. But its memory isn\u2019t \u2014 and now a titanic piece of equipment used to put shuttles in orbit will become a memorial to its fallen astronauts.A 150-foot-long space shuttle rocket booster recently took a trip to the March Field Air Museum in California, where it will serve as the centerpiece of a planned memorial garden for the two NASA crews who lost their lives during shuttle missions. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOnce on display at the Kennedy Space Center, the boosters were the most powerful solid rocket motors ever flown. Each provided over 3 million pounds of thrust \u2014 enough to push the shuttle\u2019s tank and orbiter into orbit before dropping into the Atlantic Ocean. About 270 boosters were built over the life of the space shuttle program, which lasted from 1981 until 2011.Story continues below advertisementThe rocket played a pivotal role in the 1986 Challenger disaster, when a leaky seal in one of the shuttle\u2019s boosters caused its fuel tanks to collapse and the orbiter to break apart. All seven of its crew members died.AdvertisementAt March Field, the booster will memorialize the astronauts who died on the Challenger mission and during the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed its seven-person crew.NASA and the museum split the $65,000 cost of acquiring and transporting the booster from the space agency\u2019s Armstrong Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base in California, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reports. The booster\u2019s twin is part of the collection of the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson. At March Field in California, the 150-foot-long space shuttle booster will serve as remembrance of Challenger and Columbia disasters. NASA rocket display at museum a tribute to astronauts who lost their lives in 2 missions",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA wanted to talk about science. A congressman wanted to ask about Martian civilizations. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3732",
        "date": "2017-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/19/nasa-wanted-to-talk-about-science-a-congressman-wanted-to-ask-about-martian-civilizations/",
        "text": "Some of NASA's brightest minds were invited to Capitol Hill\u00a0on Tuesday to tell\u00a0members of Congress about water that once ran across Mars, and the possibility of life on Europa and missions to explore them.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cGood questions,\u201d the chairman of the space subcommittee said after an hour or so. Then he turned the microphone over to\u00a0Rep.\u00a0Dana Rohrabacher, who would save\u00a0his\u00a0most important question for the end. \u201cThank you,\u201d the California Republican\u00a0began.\u201cOne of the benefits, I should say, of your activities, is that, well \u2014 you have all these robots all over the universe and beyond.\u201dA\u00a0boy seated behind Rohrabacher\u00a0had been fiddling with his hair, but\u00a0now looked up at the congressman.Story continues below advertisement\u201cLet me just note,\u201d Rohrabacher said by way of disclaimer, \u201cthat I've been around for a while.\u201dSo he had.Elected to his office\u00a014 consecutive times, he\u00a0has sat on the House Space and Technology Committee for decades and run for the chairmanship at least twice, without success.Advertisement\u201cI love science,\u201d\u00a0Rohrabacher once told Science Magazine.His passion for the subject\u00a0is occasionally expressed in puzzling ways.Rohrabacher once told a hearing that \u201cdinosaur flatulence\u201d might have caused global warming \u2014\u00a0a bad joke, he said later.In a 2014 speech titled \u201cGlobal Warming as a Power Grab,\u201d he\u00a0railed against\u00a0the government \u201cputting fluoride into our water.\u201dNo, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on MarsOn Tuesday, seated across from NASA officials planning missions to Mars, a moon around\u00a0Jupiter and an asteroid between them,\u00a0Rohrabacher shared his thoughts on space with them.Story continues below advertisementThe space shuttle and space station programs were inspiring, he said \u2014 but also very expensive.NASA had a lot of projects going on, he said. Maybe too many; the agency should prioritize\u00a0more \u2014 though, he said, \u201cI'm certainly not an expert enough to tell you what those priorities should be.\u201dAdvertisementHe asked about NASA's plan to land a rover on Mars in 2020 \u2014 and about\u00a0Martian\u00a0rocks and space fuel. He said we should go back to the moon.And then, at\u00a0the end, \u201cthe most important thing.\u201d\u201cI ask for permission for one minute for this question,\u201d Rohrabacher\u00a0said.It was granted, and he began.A ridiculous YouTube video claiming we found aliens kept making the news, so NASA debunked it\u201cYou have indicated that Mars\u00a0was totally different thousands of years ago,\u201d he told the scientists.Story continues below advertisementBehind him, the boy whispered something to a seat mate.The congressman continued: \u201cIs it possible that there\u00a0was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?\u201dSilence filled the room,A scientist with the Mars 2020 project,\u00a0Kenneth Farley, leaned\u00a0toward his microphone and ventured\u00a0a reply.\u201cSo, the evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago. Not thousands of years ago,\u201d Farley said.\u201cBillions, well. Yes,\u201d Rohrabacher said.AdvertisementHe\u00a0began to form\u00a0another word, but Farley cut him off.\u201cThere's no evidence that I'm aware of.\u201dThe scientist\u00a0did not mention that he had already explained this half an hour earlier, when he told the\u00a0panel that ancient Mars once had\u00a0rivers, lakes and hot springs \u2014 but that nothing\u00a0more advanced than microbes was likely to have\u00a0lived\u00a0there.Story continues below advertisementAnd yet, Rohrabacher persisted.\u201cWould you rule that out?\u201d he asked. \u201cSee, there's some people, well, anyway \u2026 \"\u201cI would say that is extremely unlikely,\u201d Farley said.\u201cOkay. Well.\u201dRohrabacher still had 30 seconds\u00a0to ask about ancient civilization, but he gave up\u00a0at that point.\u201cThank you for the good job you're doing,\u201d he told the scientists. \u201cGod bless.\u201dThe next congressman to address the hearing\u00a0would quote a 19th century poem \u2014 \u201cFor I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see\u201d \u2014 and wonder aloud about the meaning of life.AdvertisementBut when reporters wrote about Tuesday's\u00a0hour-and-a-half discussion, they wrote mostly about Rohrabacher's final minute.Rohrabacher asks NASA whether there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago https://t.co/D7RgGAwO8P\u2014 Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) July 18, 2017\n\n\u201cNo, Congressman, There's No Evidence of an Ancient Mars Civilization,\u201d wrote Space.com, noting for good measure that previous reports of canals and a sculptured\u00a0face on the Red Planet had also been debunked.Story continues below advertisementArs Technica accused the\u00a0congressman of\u00a0marring an otherwise respectable discussion, and recalled\u00a0that earlier this month a NASA official had been forced\u00a0to deny\u00a0rumors that children were being kidnapped to the planet.Other outlets were even less kind to Rohrabacher, whose office\u00a0suggested to\u00a0The Washington Post that \u2014 as\u00a0with the dinosaur comment in 2007 \u2014 the congressman had not\u00a0seriously entertained the notion.\u201cBecause of his position on the space committee, he not infrequently gets inquiries about this from far and wide,\u201d Rohrabacher's spokesman, Ken Grubbs, wrote in an email Wednesday.Advertisement\u201cHe was looking for something definitive. Apparently, many of those who covered the exchange didn\u2019t hear the wink in his voice.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA previous version of this story incorrectly attributed a\u00a0Space.com story to Science.com.Read more:The \u2018X-Files\u2019 Dana Scully conquered GIFdom, one eye-roll at a timeTwo decades of mysterious Air Force UFO files now available onlineThere's an 'Earthlike' planet with an atmosphere just 39 light-years awayScientists discover 7 'Earthlike' planets orbiting a nearby starYou can now spell 'Earthling' with a capital 'E,' and here's whyNo, NASA didn't find life on Saturn's moon. But deep sea life on Earth is pretty alien. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher wanted a definitive answer during a hearing on \u201cPlanetary Flagship Missions: Mars Rover 2020 and Europa Clipper.\" NASA wanted to talk about science. A congressman wanted to ask about Martian civilizations.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s a way to up your knowledge of space travel, astronauts, rockets \u2014 and even the history of NASA\u2019s logo. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3733",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/heres-a-way-to-up-your-knowledge-of-space-travel-astronauts-rockets--and-even-the-history-of-nasas-logo/2019/09/20/54f56bfa-da0c-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html",
        "text": "Ready to escape?Time travel and teleportation aren\u2019t options (yet).WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, reading is probably your best option \u2014 and reading about space is even better.NASA might not come to mind when you think of which book to read next, but the space agency offers dozens of free e-books about space, science, aeronautics and the history of exploration. If you\u2019re curious about the history of space travel, check out books on the history of the Hubble Telescope, NASA\u2019s research facilities and the space shuttle program.There are more esoteric histories, too: \u201cEmblems of Exploration,\u201d for example, looks at the history of the NASA logo and those of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and \u201cRockets and People, Volume 1\u201d is the memoir of Boris Chertok, a Russian who designed rockets for the Soviet Union\u2019s space program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAeronautics are well represented in the collection, too.Keep your eyes out for books about the North American X-15, a rocket-powered research aircraft; the sonic boom; and even influential aerospace failures.The collection also includes books about NASA itself, and specific guides for researchers looking to conduct experiments aboard the International Space Station.The e-books open up the agency\u2019s hood and make e-readers, smartphone screens and computers feel a bit more Space Age, so to speak.They\u2019re available in formats that work with Nooks, Kindles and other platforms, or just as PDFs.Visit NASA.gov/connect/ebooks to see the full collection.Sounds from space can be heard on NASA siteHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds The agency\u2019s free e-books cover many topics, including the Hubble Telescope, the shuttle program, NASA failures \u2014 and a memoir of a Russian scientist. Here\u2019s a way to up your knowledge of space travel, astronauts, rockets \u2014 and even the history of NASA\u2019s logo.",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s a way to up your knowledge of space travel, astronauts, rockets \u2014 and even the history of NASA\u2019s logo. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3734",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/heres-a-way-to-up-your-knowledge-of-space-travel-astronauts-rockets--and-even-the-history-of-nasas-logo/2019/09/20/54f56bfa-da0c-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html",
        "text": "Ready to escape?Time travel and teleportation aren\u2019t options (yet).WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, reading is probably your best option \u2014 and reading about space is even better.NASA might not come to mind when you think of which book to read next, but the space agency offers dozens of free e-books about space, science, aeronautics and the history of exploration. If you\u2019re curious about the history of space travel, check out books on the history of the Hubble Telescope, NASA\u2019s research facilities and the space shuttle program.There are more esoteric histories, too: \u201cEmblems of Exploration,\u201d for example, looks at the history of the NASA logo and those of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and \u201cRockets and People, Volume 1\u201d is the memoir of Boris Chertok, a Russian who designed rockets for the Soviet Union\u2019s space program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAeronautics are well represented in the collection, too.Keep your eyes out for books about the North American X-15, a rocket-powered research aircraft; the sonic boom; and even influential aerospace failures.The collection also includes books about NASA itself, and specific guides for researchers looking to conduct experiments aboard the International Space Station.The e-books open up the agency\u2019s hood and make e-readers, smartphone screens and computers feel a bit more Space Age, so to speak.They\u2019re available in formats that work with Nooks, Kindles and other platforms, or just as PDFs.Visit NASA.gov/connect/ebooks to see the full collection.Sounds from space can be heard on NASA siteHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds The agency\u2019s free e-books cover many topics, including the Hubble Telescope, the shuttle program, NASA failures \u2014 and a memoir of a Russian scientist. Here\u2019s a way to up your knowledge of space travel, astronauts, rockets \u2014 and even the history of NASA\u2019s logo.",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump budget seeks cuts in science funding  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3735",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/03/11/trump-budget-seeks-cuts-science-funding/",
        "text": "President Trump\u2019s third budget request, released Monday, again seeks cuts to a number of scientific and medical research enterprises, including a 13 percent cut to the National Science Foundation, a 12 percent cut at the National Institutes of Health and the termination of an Energy Department program that funds speculative technologies deemed too risky for private investors. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNIH would face a roughly $4.5 billion budget cut, according to an HHS document. Among the big losers, if Congress were to sign off on the budget request, would be the National Cancer Institute, dropping from $6.1 billion to $5.2 billion, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, going from $5.5 billion to $4.75 billion.The administration is highlighting its request for $1.3 billion for opioid and pain research \u201cas part of the government-wide effort to combat the opioid epidemic.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe NSF, which funds roughly a quarter of all federally supported basic science and engineering research in the U.S., would see its budget fall from $8.1 billion this year to $7.1 billion in 2020.NASA faces a modest cut \u2014 2.3 percent lower than the agency\u2019s 2019 funding, which was approved last month by Congress. The $21 billion for NASA is more than the Trump administration asked for last year, as administrator Jim Bridenstine pointed out Monday in a statement describing the FY2020 budget as \u201cone of the strongest on record for our storied agency.\u201d Bridenstine said the budget keeps NASA on track for putting humans on the moon again by 2028.But the proposed NASA budget does not include money for a new space telescope, WFIRST, which would look for distant planets and study the mysterious \u201cdark energy\u201d permeating the cosmos. Two Earth science missions aimed at understanding climate would be eliminated, as would an educational effort, the Office of STEM Engagement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House also sought to defer upgrades to NASA\u2019s Space Launch System \u2014 a powerful new rocket that is still in development \u2014 and move some its proposed payloads to other vehicles.The Trump budget proposes to eliminate three environmental programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Sea Grant, which supports environmental research on the coasts and in the Great Lakes; the National Coastal Zone Management grants, which provides incentives for states to restore and sustainably develop coastal resources; and the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund, established by Congress 19 years ago to revive plummeting salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest.The new budget request drew immediate criticism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. \u201cIf enacted, the Trump administration\u2019s proposed cuts to the fiscal year 2020 non-defense discretionary budget would derail our nation\u2019s science enterprise,\u201d said AAAS chief executive Rush Holt, a physicist and former Democratic congressman.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the House Science Committee, called the cuts to science \u201cunreasonably deep.\u201d\u201cThis proposal is simply absurd and shows a complete disregard for the importance of civilian R&D and science and technology programs,\" she said in a statement.Trump has roiled the waters of the research establishment since he came into office, not only by embracing scientifically discredited theories and casting doubt on mainstream climate science, but also by proposing massive cuts to science and medicine programs funded by the federal government. His previous budgets have requested cuts to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Energy Department. The leaders of the scientific and medical community were outraged.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Congress, which has the power of the purse, largely ignored the 2018 Trump budget requests and protected the agencies.NASA\u2019s budgets have been generally flat for years, adjusted for inflation, which has forced the agency to terminate major programs (such as the space shuttle) to begin new ones (such as building a new rocket and capsule that could explore deep space). The civilian space agency accounts for roughly half of 1 percent of the federal budget.But NASA has been relatively flush lately: Under the budget recently passed by Congress, NASA got a 3.5 percent boost for fiscal 2019, to $21.5 billion. That\u2019s 8 percent more than the $19.9 billion requested by the White House in its 2019 budget proposal.Story continues below advertisementThis year the Environmental Protection Agency \u2014 one of the president\u2019s favored political targets \u2014 was subject to some of the most severe cuts. Trump\u2019s budget would reduce EPA funding $2.8 billion, a 31 percent cut from its current budget.AdvertisementThe budget describes the cuts as an effort to eliminate \u201clower-priority\u201d EPA programs and return the agency to its \u201ccore mission of protecting human health and the environment.\u201d The administration would eliminate the Global Change Research office, which helped produced the National Climate Assessment last fall, warning of growing impacts of climate change.The White House has proposed similar cuts at the EPA the past two years, but even the Republican-led Congress refused to embrace the sweeping reductions. Now, the Democratic-led House is certain to reject the administration\u2019s efforts to scale back the agency\u2019s reach and ambition.Story continues below advertisementThe White House request for $31.7 billion for the Department of Energy would be a cut of 11 percent if embraced by Congress. The administration seeks to reduce the department\u2019s science budget from $6.6 billion to $5.5 billion. For the third year in a row, the administration is seeking to terminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the Energy Department\u2019s incubator of new technologies, which is dedicated to \u201chigh-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment.\u201dAdvertisementThe president\u2019s budget request says that killing the agency will \u201cpromote effective and efficient use of taxpayer funds,\u201d and it adds that \u201cpositive aspects\u201d of the agency will be integrated into other programs. Killing ARPA-E has long been a priority for small-government advocates, who think the private sector is fully capable of handling innovation. But ARPA-E, first proposed under President George W. Bush, has remained popular with Congress.Read more:Trump proposes big cuts to health programs for poor, elderly and disabled people The e-cigarette industry would pay $100 million in user fees under Trump\u2019s budgetTrump proposal would slash overall cancer funding while boosting pediatric cancer research The proposed cuts target familiar science and research programs. Trump budget seeks cuts in science funding ",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | NASA\u2019s few remaining spacesuits are old, and they\u2019re not a great fit for women (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3736",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-spacesuits-women/2021/07/09/e5b5a95e-de9a-11eb-b507-697762d090dd_story.html",
        "text": "On June 25, astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet successfully completed an almost seven-hour spacewalk, also called an EVA (extravehicular activity), to install solar panels on the International Space Station. What does it take to don a spacesuit and venture out on such a technical and dangerous mission? Surprisingly, one of the main criteria (besides the years of astronaut training) is body size. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEVA capabilities blossomed during the era of NASA\u2019s space shuttle. Astronauts rode robotic arms, floated tetherless through the void using jet packs to steer, corralled satellites by hand and built the space station. They\u2019ve done it all while wearing spacesuits based on the design first developed for the Apollo missions in the 1960s.Each suit features a backpack that houses a primary life support system; a layered, pressurized outer garment to protect astronauts from the space environment; and a \u201clong john\u201d undergarment that circulates chilled water via tubes over the body to stop the astronauts getting too hot inside their suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen designing these \u201cnext-gen\u201d spacesuits in 1974, NASA opted for a modular \u201ctuxedo\u201d approach, in which the various components (upper torso, lower torso, helmet, arms and gloves) could be mixed and matched to fit individual astronauts. The suits came in five sizes, from extra small to extra large, and were based primarily on male body shapes \u2014 women were not eligible for NASA\u2019s astronaut program until 1978.Fast-forward 47 years, and Kimbrough and Pesquet were wearing those exact same spacesuits while working on the space station, although the suits were designed to last only 15 years.These days, NASA\u2019s spacesuits are less like bespoke tailoring and more like remainder stock at an outlet mall. Of the 18 suits originally made by the next-gen program, only four full suits remain. Four were lost in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and others came to the end of their working lives and weren\u2019t replaced.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis means that to be selected for a spacewalk at the space station, an astronaut must fit one of the two remaining available sizes: men\u2019s medium or men\u2019s large. The first all-female EVA, planned for March 2019, had to be postponed because only one medium-sized suit was available. Another medium suit was eventually cobbled together from spares, and astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir successfully performed their groundbreaking spacewalk on October 18 2019.Why NASA\u2019s historic all-female spacewalk isn\u2019t happeningMost EVAs are conducted in pairs, and flight controllers meticulously choreograph each astronaut\u2019s activities well in advance, to minimize \u201cidle\u201d time and complete the tasks as efficiently as possible.Each EVA participant undergoes up to 10 hours of training per hour of EVA time in a 39-foot deep pool, in which astronauts practice every aspect of their spacewalk by using life-size mock-ups of space station components.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the actual EVA, mission controllers on the ground keep an eye on the astronauts\u2019 progress, and the astronauts can communicate with ground control, each other, and the space station crew as required.Space is a harsh environment. The spacesuit provides protection against radiation, temperature extremes (from minus-270 to plus-120 Celsius), and small particles of debris. To guard against the risk of being hit by \u201cspace junk,\u201d EVAs are scheduled for periods of low risk, based on the tracking of known objects.Astronauts must also take steps to avoid decompression sickness, or \u201cthe bends.\u201d Much like a scuba diver ascending too fast from a deep dive, an astronaut who moves too fast from the pressurized space station to the lower pressure inside their spacesuit can suffer painful and potentially deadly bubbles of nitrogen forming in their bloodstream. Before an EVA, astronauts \u201ccamp out\u201d overnight in the space station\u2019s airlock at a reduced pressure to help acclimatize before donning their spacesuits.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo one has died during an EVA, but there have been some close calls. The first spacewalk, by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in 1965, almost ended in disaster when the expansion of his suit in the vacuum of space almost prevented him from reentering the Voskhod 2 capsule.And on July 16, 2013, Luca Parmitano entered the history books with two firsts: the first Italian to perform a spacewalk and the first near-drowning in space. A week before his EVA, one of the water pipes in his spacesuit had sprung a leak. But this information was not passed up the chain of command, and mission controllers authorized his EVA to begin. Within an hour, Luca had almost two quarts of water in his helmet, leaving him struggling to breathe. Unable to see out of his visor or communicate with colleagues, Luca said he used his tether to navigate his way back to the safety of the airlock.No doubt he and other astronauts will be keen to don NASA\u2019s new \u201cexploration extravehicular mobility unit (xEMU)\u201d spacesuits under development for the Artemis program, NASA\u2019s long-awaited return to the moon. The Artemis moonwalkers may have more options when donning their suit, meaning astronauts can be selected for missions because they\u2019ve got the right stuff, without also needing to be the right size.Steven Moore is a professor and deputy dean for research at the School of Engineering and Technology at CQUniversity Australia. This article was originally published on theconversation.com.A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthIn NASA\u2019s spacesuit saga, women see their own stories And only two remaining sizes are available for male and female astronauts: men\u2019s medium or men\u2019s large. But NASA is working on new ones for the upcoming moon program. NASA\u2019s few remaining spacesuits are old, and they\u2019re not a great fit for women",
        "author": "Steven Moore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | NASA\u2019s few remaining spacesuits are old, and they\u2019re not a great fit for women (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3737",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-spacesuits-women/2021/07/09/e5b5a95e-de9a-11eb-b507-697762d090dd_story.html",
        "text": "On June 25, astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet successfully completed an almost seven-hour spacewalk, also called an EVA (extravehicular activity), to install solar panels on the International Space Station. What does it take to don a spacesuit and venture out on such a technical and dangerous mission? Surprisingly, one of the main criteria (besides the years of astronaut training) is body size. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEVA capabilities blossomed during the era of NASA\u2019s space shuttle. Astronauts rode robotic arms, floated tetherless through the void using jet packs to steer, corralled satellites by hand and built the space station. They\u2019ve done it all while wearing spacesuits based on the design first developed for the Apollo missions in the 1960s.Each suit features a backpack that houses a primary life support system; a layered, pressurized outer garment to protect astronauts from the space environment; and a \u201clong john\u201d undergarment that circulates chilled water via tubes over the body to stop the astronauts getting too hot inside their suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen designing these \u201cnext-gen\u201d spacesuits in 1974, NASA opted for a modular \u201ctuxedo\u201d approach, in which the various components (upper torso, lower torso, helmet, arms and gloves) could be mixed and matched to fit individual astronauts. The suits came in five sizes, from extra small to extra large, and were based primarily on male body shapes \u2014 women were not eligible for NASA\u2019s astronaut program until 1978.Fast-forward 47 years, and Kimbrough and Pesquet were wearing those exact same spacesuits while working on the space station, although the suits were designed to last only 15 years.These days, NASA\u2019s spacesuits are less like bespoke tailoring and more like remainder stock at an outlet mall. Of the 18 suits originally made by the next-gen program, only four full suits remain. Four were lost in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and others came to the end of their working lives and weren\u2019t replaced.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis means that to be selected for a spacewalk at the space station, an astronaut must fit one of the two remaining available sizes: men\u2019s medium or men\u2019s large. The first all-female EVA, planned for March 2019, had to be postponed because only one medium-sized suit was available. Another medium suit was eventually cobbled together from spares, and astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir successfully performed their groundbreaking spacewalk on October 18 2019.Why NASA\u2019s historic all-female spacewalk isn\u2019t happeningMost EVAs are conducted in pairs, and flight controllers meticulously choreograph each astronaut\u2019s activities well in advance, to minimize \u201cidle\u201d time and complete the tasks as efficiently as possible.Each EVA participant undergoes up to 10 hours of training per hour of EVA time in a 39-foot deep pool, in which astronauts practice every aspect of their spacewalk by using life-size mock-ups of space station components.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the actual EVA, mission controllers on the ground keep an eye on the astronauts\u2019 progress, and the astronauts can communicate with ground control, each other, and the space station crew as required.Space is a harsh environment. The spacesuit provides protection against radiation, temperature extremes (from minus-270 to plus-120 Celsius), and small particles of debris. To guard against the risk of being hit by \u201cspace junk,\u201d EVAs are scheduled for periods of low risk, based on the tracking of known objects.Astronauts must also take steps to avoid decompression sickness, or \u201cthe bends.\u201d Much like a scuba diver ascending too fast from a deep dive, an astronaut who moves too fast from the pressurized space station to the lower pressure inside their spacesuit can suffer painful and potentially deadly bubbles of nitrogen forming in their bloodstream. Before an EVA, astronauts \u201ccamp out\u201d overnight in the space station\u2019s airlock at a reduced pressure to help acclimatize before donning their spacesuits.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo one has died during an EVA, but there have been some close calls. The first spacewalk, by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in 1965, almost ended in disaster when the expansion of his suit in the vacuum of space almost prevented him from reentering the Voskhod 2 capsule.And on July 16, 2013, Luca Parmitano entered the history books with two firsts: the first Italian to perform a spacewalk and the first near-drowning in space. A week before his EVA, one of the water pipes in his spacesuit had sprung a leak. But this information was not passed up the chain of command, and mission controllers authorized his EVA to begin. Within an hour, Luca had almost two quarts of water in his helmet, leaving him struggling to breathe. Unable to see out of his visor or communicate with colleagues, Luca said he used his tether to navigate his way back to the safety of the airlock.No doubt he and other astronauts will be keen to don NASA\u2019s new \u201cexploration extravehicular mobility unit (xEMU)\u201d spacesuits under development for the Artemis program, NASA\u2019s long-awaited return to the moon. The Artemis moonwalkers may have more options when donning their suit, meaning astronauts can be selected for missions because they\u2019ve got the right stuff, without also needing to be the right size.Steven Moore is a professor and deputy dean for research at the School of Engineering and Technology at CQUniversity Australia. This article was originally published on theconversation.com.A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthIn NASA\u2019s spacesuit saga, women see their own stories And only two remaining sizes are available for male and female astronauts: men\u2019s medium or men\u2019s large. But NASA is working on new ones for the upcoming moon program. NASA\u2019s few remaining spacesuits are old, and they\u2019re not a great fit for women",
        "author": "Steven Moore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | NASA\u2019s few remaining spacesuits are old, and they\u2019re not a great fit for women (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3738",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-spacesuits-women/2021/07/09/e5b5a95e-de9a-11eb-b507-697762d090dd_story.html",
        "text": "On June 25, astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet successfully completed an almost seven-hour spacewalk, also called an EVA (extravehicular activity), to install solar panels on the International Space Station. What does it take to don a spacesuit and venture out on such a technical and dangerous mission? Surprisingly, one of the main criteria (besides the years of astronaut training) is body size. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEVA capabilities blossomed during the era of NASA\u2019s space shuttle. Astronauts rode robotic arms, floated tetherless through the void using jet packs to steer, corralled satellites by hand and built the space station. They\u2019ve done it all while wearing spacesuits based on the design first developed for the Apollo missions in the 1960s.Each suit features a backpack that houses a primary life support system; a layered, pressurized outer garment to protect astronauts from the space environment; and a \u201clong john\u201d undergarment that circulates chilled water via tubes over the body to stop the astronauts getting too hot inside their suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen designing these \u201cnext-gen\u201d spacesuits in 1974, NASA opted for a modular \u201ctuxedo\u201d approach, in which the various components (upper torso, lower torso, helmet, arms and gloves) could be mixed and matched to fit individual astronauts. The suits came in five sizes, from extra small to extra large, and were based primarily on male body shapes \u2014 women were not eligible for NASA\u2019s astronaut program until 1978.Fast-forward 47 years, and Kimbrough and Pesquet were wearing those exact same spacesuits while working on the space station, although the suits were designed to last only 15 years.These days, NASA\u2019s spacesuits are less like bespoke tailoring and more like remainder stock at an outlet mall. Of the 18 suits originally made by the next-gen program, only four full suits remain. Four were lost in the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and others came to the end of their working lives and weren\u2019t replaced.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis means that to be selected for a spacewalk at the space station, an astronaut must fit one of the two remaining available sizes: men\u2019s medium or men\u2019s large. The first all-female EVA, planned for March 2019, had to be postponed because only one medium-sized suit was available. Another medium suit was eventually cobbled together from spares, and astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir successfully performed their groundbreaking spacewalk on October 18 2019.Why NASA\u2019s historic all-female spacewalk isn\u2019t happeningMost EVAs are conducted in pairs, and flight controllers meticulously choreograph each astronaut\u2019s activities well in advance, to minimize \u201cidle\u201d time and complete the tasks as efficiently as possible.Each EVA participant undergoes up to 10 hours of training per hour of EVA time in a 39-foot deep pool, in which astronauts practice every aspect of their spacewalk by using life-size mock-ups of space station components.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the actual EVA, mission controllers on the ground keep an eye on the astronauts\u2019 progress, and the astronauts can communicate with ground control, each other, and the space station crew as required.Space is a harsh environment. The spacesuit provides protection against radiation, temperature extremes (from minus-270 to plus-120 Celsius), and small particles of debris. To guard against the risk of being hit by \u201cspace junk,\u201d EVAs are scheduled for periods of low risk, based on the tracking of known objects.Astronauts must also take steps to avoid decompression sickness, or \u201cthe bends.\u201d Much like a scuba diver ascending too fast from a deep dive, an astronaut who moves too fast from the pressurized space station to the lower pressure inside their spacesuit can suffer painful and potentially deadly bubbles of nitrogen forming in their bloodstream. Before an EVA, astronauts \u201ccamp out\u201d overnight in the space station\u2019s airlock at a reduced pressure to help acclimatize before donning their spacesuits.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo one has died during an EVA, but there have been some close calls. The first spacewalk, by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in 1965, almost ended in disaster when the expansion of his suit in the vacuum of space almost prevented him from reentering the Voskhod 2 capsule.And on July 16, 2013, Luca Parmitano entered the history books with two firsts: the first Italian to perform a spacewalk and the first near-drowning in space. A week before his EVA, one of the water pipes in his spacesuit had sprung a leak. But this information was not passed up the chain of command, and mission controllers authorized his EVA to begin. Within an hour, Luca had almost two quarts of water in his helmet, leaving him struggling to breathe. Unable to see out of his visor or communicate with colleagues, Luca said he used his tether to navigate his way back to the safety of the airlock.No doubt he and other astronauts will be keen to don NASA\u2019s new \u201cexploration extravehicular mobility unit (xEMU)\u201d spacesuits under development for the Artemis program, NASA\u2019s long-awaited return to the moon. The Artemis moonwalkers may have more options when donning their suit, meaning astronauts can be selected for missions because they\u2019ve got the right stuff, without also needing to be the right size.Steven Moore is a professor and deputy dean for research at the School of Engineering and Technology at CQUniversity Australia. This article was originally published on theconversation.com.A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthIn NASA\u2019s spacesuit saga, women see their own stories And only two remaining sizes are available for male and female astronauts: men\u2019s medium or men\u2019s large. But NASA is working on new ones for the upcoming moon program. NASA\u2019s few remaining spacesuits are old, and they\u2019re not a great fit for women",
        "author": "Steven Moore"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Blink-182\u2019s Tom DeLonge Became a U.F.O. Researcher (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3739",
        "date": "2019-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/science/tom-delonge-ufo-research.html",
        "text": "Two years after Mr. DeLonge left the band, he found a new life trying to make sense of outer space. Two years after Mr. DeLonge left the band, he found a new life trying to make sense of outer space. For decades, the discussion of whether or not U.F.O.s exist has been debated in American pop culture and within science communities. ",
        "author": "By Derrick Bryson Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3740",
        "date": "2017-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/21/this-man-is-about-to-launch-himself-in-his-homemade-rocket-to-prove-the-earth-is-flat/",
        "text": "Seeking to\u00a0prove\u00a0that a conspiracy of astronauts\u00a0fabricated the\u00a0shape\u00a0of the\u00a0Earth,\u00a0a California man intends to\u00a0launch\u00a0himself 1,800 feet high\u00a0on Saturday in a rocket he built from scrap metal.Assuming the 500-mph, mile-long\u00a0flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill\u00a0him, Mike Hughes\u00a0told the Associated Press,\u00a0his\u00a0journey into the\u00a0atmosflat will\u00a0mark the first phase of\u00a0his ambitious flat-Earth space program. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHughes\u2019s ultimate goal is\u00a0a subsequent\u00a0launch that puts\u00a0him miles above the Earth,\u00a0where\u00a0the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to\u00a0photograph proof of\u00a0the\u00a0disc we all live on.\u201cIt\u2019ll shut the door on this ball earth,\u201d Hughes said\u00a0in a fundraising\u00a0interview with a flat-Earth group for\u00a0Saturday\u2019s flight. Theories discussed during the interview included\u00a0NASA\u00a0being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk\u00a0making fake rockets\u00a0from\u00a0blimps.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home\u00a0\u2014 though he\u00a0acknowledged that\u00a0he still had much to learn about rocket science.\u201cThis whole tech thing,\u201d he said in the June interview. \u201cI\u2019m really behind the eight ball.\u201dKyrie Irving believes the Earth is flat. It is not.That said, Hughes isn\u2019t a totally unproven engineer. He\u00a0set\u00a0a Guinness World Record in 2002 for\u00a0a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with\u00a0mixed results.\u201cOkay, Waldo. 3 .\u2009.\u2009. 2 .\u2009.\u2009. 1!\u201d someone yells in a test fire video from 2012.There\u2019s a brief hiss of boiling water, then .\u2009.\u2009. nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a\u00a0thick\u00a0cloud of steam belches out toward\u00a0the camera.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe\u00a0built\u00a0his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Ariz.As seen in a YouTube video, the\u00a0flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning from the\u00a0remains of the\u00a0rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.Elon Musk posted a video showcasing SpaceX rocket explosions, and the reason behind each explosion. (SpaceX)A Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theoryAnd the 2014\u00a0flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday\u2019s mile-long attempt.And it was based on round-Earth technology.Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign \u2014 \u201cFrom Garage to Outer Space!\u201d \u2014 that\u00a0mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts, and was themed after a NASCAR event.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,\u201d Hughes said in the pitch video, standing in his Apple Valley, Calif., living room,\u00a0which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.Advertisement\u201cThey have not put a man in space yet,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cThere are 20\u00a0different space agencies here in America, and I\u2019m the last person that\u2019s put a man in a rocket and launched it.\u201d\u00a0Comparing himself to Evel Knievel, he promised to launch\u00a0himself\u00a0from a California racetrack that year as the first step in\u00a0his\u00a0steam-powered leap toward space.The Kickstarter\u00a0raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.The explorers who really disproved flat-Earth theoriesHughes made other pitches, including a plan to\u00a0fly over Texas in a \u201cSkyLimo.\u201d But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty\u00a0of funding\u00a0his\u00a0dreams on a chauffeur\u2019s meager salary.Story continues below advertisementA year later, he called into a flat-Earth community\u00a0Web show to announce that he\u00a0had become a recent convert.\u201cWe were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I\u2019m a believer in the flat Earth,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cI researched it for several months.\u201dAdvertisementThe host\u00a0sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket,\u00a0he noted, whereas\u00a0astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.\u201cJohn\u00a0Glenn and Neil\u00a0Armstrong are Freemasons,\u201d Hughes agreed. \u201cOnce you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.\u201dThe host talked of \u201cElon Musk\u2019s fake reality,\u201d and Hughes talked of \u201canti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.\u201d After half an hour of this, the\u00a0host told his 300-some listeners to\u00a0back\u00a0Hughes\u2019s exploration of space.Story continues below advertisementWhile there is no one\u00a0hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disc\u00a0ringed by sea ice, which naturally\u00a0holds the oceans in.What\u2019s beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.\u201cWe need an\u00a0individual who\u2019s not compromised by the government,\u201d the host\u00a0told Hughes. \u201cAnd you could be that man.\u201dAdvertisementA flat-Earth GoFundMe subsequently\u00a0raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.By November, the AP reported, his $20,000\u00a0rocket had a\u00a0fancy\u00a0coat\u00a0of Rust-Oleum paint and \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH\u201d inscribed on the side.While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the AP reported, Hughes\u00a0will be making adjustments right up to Saturday\u2019s launch.Story continues below advertisementBut he won\u2019t be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph\u00a0across a mile of desert air. And even if it\u2019s a success, he's promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year,\u00a0into the space above the disc. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into outer space.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s scary as hell,\u201d\u00a0Hughes told the AP. \u201cBut none of us are getting out of this world alive.\u201dThis is true. And yet some hope\u00a0to live to see its edges.Read more:Kyrie Irving\u2019s flat-Earth beliefs now the bane of middle-school teachers\u2019 existenceThousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverThe real science behind the unreal predictions of major earthquakes in 2018NASA wanted to talk about science. A congressman wanted to ask about Martian civilizations.A newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say Goodbye, cold, flat Earth. This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump floats idea of \u2018space force\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3741",
        "date": "2018-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/13/trump-floats-idea-of-space-force/",
        "text": "President Trump floated the idea\u00a0adding a \u201cspace force\u201d to the country's military\u00a0in a speech Tuesday at Miramar Air Station in San Diego.\u201cMy new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea,\u201d Trump told the crowd of Marines. \u201cWe have the Air Force. We\u2019ll have the space force.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInitially, Trump explained, he'd proposed the idea as a joke. \u201cThen I said, 'What a great idea, maybe we'll have to do that.'\u201dHe did not specify Tuesday whether he was still joking.The Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed in 1967, bars states from testing weapons and establishing military bases on the moon and other celestial bodies. It also prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit around Earth.Story continues below advertisementCritics have pointed out that, since the treaty has no enforcement mechanism, nothing is really stopping a president or anyone else from militarizing space. (The U.S. Air Force has an unmanned space plane, the X-37B, which has completed several clandestine missions.) Still, the voluntary agreement has managed to prevent war in space for the past 51 years.AdvertisementThe United States does have a\u00a0National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which has, among other things,\u00a0landed 12 American astronauts on the moon.NASA has been without a permanent administrator since Trump's inauguration 14 months ago.\u00a0In April, it will also lose its acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, who announced his retirement Monday.Read more:Trump nominates Oklahoma politician and climate skeptic to run NASABill Nye was a Trump nominee's guest at the State of the Union. Scientists were not amused.NASA\u2019s acting administrator to retire without a clear successor Trump said he first conceived the idea as a joke. It's not clear if he is still joking.  Trump floats idea of \u2018space force\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018First protest in space\u2019 targets Trump with an astronaut\u2019s famous words (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3742",
        "date": "2017-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/14/first-protest-in-space-targets-trump-with-an-astronauts-famous-words/",
        "text": "On Wednesday, 56 years to the day after Russian cosmonaut Yuri\u00a0Gagarin became the first human in space,\u00a0a Phoenix-based collective called the Autonomous Space Agency Network\u00a0launched a weather balloon to about 90,000 feet. The balloon, Aphrodite 1, weighed a little over a pound and was inflated with 120 cubic feet of helium. Aphrodite 1's payload consisted of a GPS sensor, a camera and a message for President Trump. It was a printout of a tweet that read, \u201c@realDonaldTrump: Look at that, you son of a bitch.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cTo our knowledge, the Aphrodite 1 launch was the first political protest in near space,\u201d a member of the group wrote to The Washington Post in an email. (Members of the Autonomous Space Agency Network, or ASAN, are anonymous as \u201ca way to discourage the use of the group for the ego or vanity of individual members,\u201d the person said.)The tweet was\u00a0quoting\u00a0Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to walk on the moon. He famously said of viewing Earth from space: \u201cYou want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.\u2019 \u201d This\u00a0quote has been cited\u00a0as an example\u00a0of the overview effect, a perspective\u00a0shift toward global unity and conservation reported by astronauts struck by the planet's fragility.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEveryone at ASAN is a pretty big fan of Dr. Mitchell, who was one of the more \u2026 colorful characters to have ever set foot on another celestial body,\u201d the ASAN member said. \u201cWe sought to send a message of protest to President Trump against his proposed budget cuts for NASA\u2019s Earth science program, which is invaluable to understanding climate change and making informed, data-driven policy decisions.\u201d\u201cLook at that, you son of a bitch.\" pic.twitter.com/JyeiOV7lgv\u2014 Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) February 6, 2016\n\nAlthough 90,000 feet is certainly quite high, this was\u00a0not the political act farthest from the ground \u2014 astronauts, for instance, may\u00a0cast their ballots\u00a0from aboard the International Space Station. Although ASAN's YouTube video described the act as the \u201cfirst protest in space,\u201d what\u00a0counts as space can be a bit mushy. There is no abrupt boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space. The balloon ascended to about a fourth of the way to the Karman line, the point adopted as a shorthand for space more or less because 100 kilometers up has a nice ring to it.The launch was planned to coordinate not only with Yuri's Night but in solidarity with the upcoming March for Science, the ASAN member said. The group lamented White House budget cuts to four of\u00a0NASA's Earth science missions: CLARREO,\u00a0the solar wind monitoring system DSCOVR, the ocean and atmosphere monitoring program\u00a0PACE,\u00a0and the orbiting carbon observatory\u00a0OCO-3.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not only missing out on incredible opportunities to learn more about our planet,\u201d the person said, \u201cbut Trump is also endangering the lives of millions of people outside the United States who are most at risk of climate change-related disasters.\u201dAphrodite 1 marked the first of several planned projects from ASAN, an open-source, DIY space program composed of artists, scientists, engineers, students and even one \u201cIRL rocket-scientist.\u201d\u201cWe believe that we can't say that we've truly entered the 'space age' until outer space is demilitarized, democratic and accessible to all autonauts,\u201d the ASAN member told The Post, using the term the group prefers for astronauts. \u201cWe're here to show the world that space is not just for generals, autocrats and boy billionaires.\u201dRead more:Science societies have long shunned politics. But now they\u2019re ready to march.The \u2018March for Science\u2019 is gaining mainstream momentumBill Nye will join the March for Science Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell once made a profound, and somewhat profane, statement about politicians. \u2018First protest in space\u2019 targets Trump with an astronaut\u2019s famous words",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Happens to Spores in Space? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3743",
        "date": "2017-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/science/microbes-outer-space.html",
        "text": "Microbes can survive in outer space, but are harmed by the ultraviolet radiation found beyond the ozone layer. Microbes can survive in outer space, but are harmed by the ultraviolet radiation found beyond the ozone layer. Q. Are any microbes hardy enough to survive in outer space?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "A planned space hotel hopes to welcome guests by 2022 \u2014 for a cost of almost $800,000 a night (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3744",
        "date": "2018-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/04/06/a-planned-space-hotel-hopes-to-welcome-guests-by-2022-for-a-cost-of-almost-800000-a-night/",
        "text": "Looking for a getaway that offers unmatched views of sunrises and sunsets? Specifically, 384 of them in 12 days?Try outer space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHouston-based Orion Span hopes to launch the \u201cfirst luxury hotel in space\u201d \u2014 the 35-by-14-foot Aurora Station \u2014 by late 2021 and bring\u00a0guests on board\u00a0the following year. The hotel will accommodate up to four travelers and two crew members at a time,\u00a0racing them around the\u00a0planet at high speeds for 12 days, the company said in a news release. Adventurers pay $9.5 million per person \u2014 or about $791,666 a night \u2014 and their\u00a0$80,000 deposit can already be reserved online, company officials said. But don't fear: The deposit is fully refundable.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe want to get people\u00a0into space because it\u2019s the final frontier for our civilization,\u201d Orion Span\u2019s founder and chief executive,\u00a0Frank Bunger, told Bloomberg.AdvertisementBunger said that one reason Orion Span can aim for a price of less than $10 million per person is because of the declining price of launches.\u201cEverybody\u2019s forecasting that [launch prices are] going to fall,\u201d he told Bloomberg. \u201cAlmost every week, there\u2019s another rocket-launch company that\u2019s starting up with a new way to get to orbit cheaper, faster, better.\u201dThe crowds are back. Now can the space industry build on the momentum?Orion Span's announcement of a luxury hotel in space comes amid a revival of\u00a0the\u00a0commercial space industry. The launch of Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy from the\u00a0Kennedy Space Center in February, for example, was the latest in a series of milestones that have renewed companies' interest in space.Story continues below advertisementThe launch raised the question of whether SpaceX and other private enterprises could maintain their momentum and fulfill\u00a0the\u00a0promise of returning humans to space. That likelihood could increase as the Trump administration looks to\u00a0restructure the role of NASA, allowing private enterprise and international partners to work closely with the space agency.AdvertisementOrion Span's proposed\u00a0hotel offers plenty of attractions: zero-gravity flying throughout the station, views\u00a0of patrons' home towns from space, the ability to take part in research experiments such as growing food while in orbit, and live-streams with friends and family at home through high-speed Internet.Since commercial spaceflight has yet to launch humans into space, Aurora Station visitors will have three months of training, which would begin with online courses to better understand\u00a0\u201cbasic spaceflight, orbital mechanics, and pressurized environments in space,\u201d officials told Bloomberg. The guests will also have contingency training at the company's\u00a0headquarters in Houston.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOrion Span\u00a0has ... taken what was historically a 24-month training regimen to prepare travelers to visit a space station and streamlined it to three months, at a fraction of the cost,\u201d company officials said. \u201cOur goal is to make space accessible to all, by continuing to drive greater value at lower cost.\u201dAdvertisementBunger, a former software engineer, told Bloomberg that the experience won't be for everyone.\u00a0The Aurora Station will mainly cater to those who are passionate about space and astronomical study.\u201cWe're not selling a\u00a0hey-let\u2019s-go-to-the-beach equivalent in space,\u201d Bunger said. \u201cWe\u2019re selling the experience of being an astronaut. You reckon that there are people who are willing to pay to have that experience.\u201dStory continues below advertisementChristian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:\u00a0A protest damaged ancient monuments in Peru. The repair effort led to the discovery of even more.Scientists discover a whale species\u2019 mating songs are as complex as jazz The hotel will accommodate up to four travelers and two crew members at a time, the company says. A planned space hotel hopes to welcome guests by 2022 \u2014 for a cost of almost $800,000 a night",
        "author": "Marwa Eltagouri"
    },
    {
        "title": "A flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 again (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3745",
        "date": "2017-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/27/a-flat-earthers-plan-to-launch-himself-in-a-homemade-rocket-has-been-postponed-again/",
        "text": "By now, Mike Hughes should have already proved that the Earth was flat.That was according to his original plan, which had been to launch himself\u00a01,800 feet high last Saturday in his homemade scrap-metal rocket over Amboy, Calif., an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert along historic Route 66.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFrom the sky, he would snap a picture to prove that a conspiracy of astronauts fabricated the shape of the Earth. But a variety of roadblocks have forced him to push back his experiment, he claims.First, the Bureau of Land Management told him he couldn\u2019t\u00a0launch his rocket on public land, even though Hughes insisted that the federal agency had given him verbal permission more than a year ago.Story continues below advertisementA BLM spokeswoman said its local field office had no record of speaking with Hughes and that he had not applied for the necessary special recreation permit to hold an event on public land.Advertisement\u201cSomeone from our local office reached out to him after seeing some of these news articles [about the launch], because that was news to them,\u201d BLM spokeswoman Samantha Storms said.That same day, Hughes\u2019s \u201cmotor home-slash-rocket-launcher\u201d broke down in the driveway, he said in a YouTube video\u00a0filmed on Thanksgiving,\u00a0titled \u201cMAD MIKE HUGHES FLAT EARTH ROCKET UPDATE! CANCELLED.\u201dBut the launch was not canceled, contrary to the video\u2019s caption. Instead, Hughes said he was moving it to private property, albeit still in Amboy, and that it would take place sometime in the coming week.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s still happening. We\u2019re just moving it\u00a0three miles down the road,\u201d Hughes told The Washington Post on Friday, as he hauled the rocket to the new spot in Amboy. \u201cI don\u2019t see [the launch] happening until about Tuesday, honestly. It takes three days to set up .\u2009.\u2009. You know, it\u2019s not easy because it\u2019s not supposed to be easy.\u201dA Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theoryHughes\u00a0has been camped out in the desert ever since. It took the entire weekend to level the launch vehicle, he told The Post in text messages Monday. And it would likely take another one to two days to move the ramp to \u201claunch position,\u201d he said.AdvertisementAsked if people could still expect to see him launch Tuesday, Hughes said the weather would be too windy for the next three days \u2014 but that the launch would be within a week.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt is brutal here,\u201d Hughes said in a text message. \u201cI am sleeping in the rocket launcher every nite.\u201dAssuming the 500 mph, mile-long\u00a0flight above the Mojave Desert does not kill\u00a0him, Hughes\u00a0told the Associated Press,\u00a0his\u00a0journey into the\u00a0atmosflat will\u00a0mark the first phase of\u00a0his ambitious flat-Earth space program.Hughes\u2019s ultimate goal is\u00a0a subsequent\u00a0launch that puts\u00a0him miles above Earth,\u00a0where\u00a0the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to\u00a0photograph proof\u00a0that it\u2019s a\u00a0disk we all live on.\u201cIt\u2019ll shut the door on this ball Earth,\u201d Hughes said\u00a0in a flight fundraising\u00a0interview with a flat-Earth group. Theories discussed during the interview included\u00a0NASA\u00a0being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk\u00a0making fake rockets from blimps.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home\u00a0\u2014 though he\u00a0acknowledged that\u00a0he still had much to learn about rocket science.\u201cThis whole tech thing,\u201d he said in the June interview. \u201cI\u2019m really behind the eight ball.\u201dKyrie Irving believes Earth is flat. It is not.That said, Hughes isn\u2019t a totally unproven engineer. He\u00a0set\u00a0a Guinness World Record in 2002 for\u00a0a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with\u00a0mixed results.\u201cOkay, Waldo. 3 .\u2009.\u2009. 2 .\u2009.\u2009. 1!\u201d someone yells in a test-fire video from 2012.There\u2019s a brief hiss of boiling water, then .\u2009.\u2009. nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a\u00a0thick\u00a0cloud of steam belches out toward\u00a0the camera.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe\u00a0built\u00a0his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to launch it a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Ariz.As seen in a YouTube video, the\u00a0flight ended with footage of\u00a0Hughes being dragged, moaning,\u00a0from the\u00a0remains\u00a0of the\u00a0rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.Elon Musk posted a video showcasing SpaceX rocket explosions, and the reason behind each explosion. (SpaceX)The 2014\u00a0flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday\u2019s mile-long attempt.And it was based on round-Earth technology.Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.It was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign \u2014 \u201cFrom Garage to Outer Space!\u201d \u2014 that\u00a0mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts and was themed after a NASCAR event.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,\u201d Hughes said in the pitch video, standing in his Apple Valley, Calif., living room,\u00a0which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.Advertisement\u201cThey have not put a man in space yet,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cThere are 20\u00a0different space agencies here in America, and I\u2019m the last person that\u2019s put a man in a rocket and launched it.\u201d\u00a0Comparing himself to Evel Knievel, he promised to launch\u00a0himself\u00a0from a California racetrack that year as the first step in\u00a0his\u00a0steam-powered leap toward space.The Kickstarter\u00a0raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.Hughes made other pitches, including a plan to\u00a0fly over Texas in a \u201cSkyLimo.\u201d But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty\u00a0of funding\u00a0his\u00a0dreams on a chauffeur\u2019s meager salary.Story continues below advertisementA year later, he called into a flat-Earth community\u00a0Web show to announce that he\u00a0had become a recent convert.\u201cWe were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I\u2019m a believer in the flat Earth,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cI researched it for several months.\u201dAdvertisementThe host\u00a0sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket,\u00a0he noted, whereas\u00a0astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.\u201cJohn\u00a0Glenn and Neil\u00a0Armstrong are Freemasons,\u201d Hughes agreed. \u201cOnce you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.\u201dThe explorers who really disproved flat-Earth theoriesThe host talked of \u201cElon Musk\u2019s fake reality,\u201d and Hughes talked of \u201canti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.\u201d After half an hour of this, the\u00a0host told his 300-some listeners to\u00a0back\u00a0Hughes\u2019s exploration of space.Story continues below advertisementWhile there is no one\u00a0hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally\u00a0holds the oceans in.What\u2019s beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.\u201cWe need an\u00a0individual who\u2019s not compromised by the government,\u201d the host\u00a0told Hughes. \u201cAnd you could be that man.\u201dAdvertisementA flat-Earth GoFundMe effort subsequently\u00a0raised almost $8,000 for Hughes.By November, the AP reported, his $20,000\u00a0rocket had a coat\u00a0of Rust-Oleum paint and \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH\u201d inscribed on the side.While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the AP reported, Hughes\u00a0will be making adjustments right up to the launch.But he won\u2019t be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph\u00a0across a mile of desert air. And if it\u2019s a success, he\u2019s promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year,\u00a0into the space above the disk. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into space.\u201cIt\u2019s scary as hell,\u201d\u00a0Hughes told the AP. \u201cBut none of us are getting out of this world alive.\u201dThis is true. And yet some hope\u00a0to live to see its edges.Read more:Advertisement\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerKyrie Irving\u2019s flat-Earth beliefs now the bane of middle-school teachers\u2019 existenceThousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverBehold, the Hubble Telescope\u2019s latest close-up photo of JupiterA newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say Mike Hughes said he has been sleeping in the rocket launcher every night, waiting for ideal launch conditions. A flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 again",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.F.O.s: Is This All There Is? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3746",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/science/ufos-aliens-space-travel.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Hey, Mr. Spaceman,",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.F.O.s: Is This All There Is? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3747",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/science/ufos-aliens-space-travel.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Hey, Mr. Spaceman,",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.F.O.s: Is This All There Is? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3748",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/science/ufos-aliens-space-travel.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Hey, Mr. Spaceman,",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.F.O.s: Is This All There Is? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3749",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/science/ufos-aliens-space-travel.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Astronomers have their noses pressed against the windows of the unknown, wanting to believe in life elsewhere just like many outer space enthusiasts. Hey, Mr. Spaceman,",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3750",
        "date": "2017-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/science/moon-express-outer-space-treaty.html",
        "text": "Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of NASA\u2019s robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two massive towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant \u2014 Moon Express, a tiny company with far-out ambitions \u2014 is moving in.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3751",
        "date": "2017-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/science/moon-express-outer-space-treaty.html",
        "text": "Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of NASA\u2019s robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two massive towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant \u2014 Moon Express, a tiny company with far-out ambitions \u2014 is moving in.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3752",
        "date": "2017-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/science/moon-express-outer-space-treaty.html",
        "text": "Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of NASA\u2019s robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two massive towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant \u2014 Moon Express, a tiny company with far-out ambitions \u2014 is moving in.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3753",
        "date": "2017-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/science/moon-express-outer-space-treaty.html",
        "text": "Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. Ambiguities in the 50-year-old Outer Space Treaty may be getting in the way of entrepreneurs seeking opportunities elsewhere in our solar system. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 From Launch Complex 17 here at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, many of NASA\u2019s robotic planetary missions blasted off. Soon, the two massive towers that once cradled Delta 2 rockets will be torn down. A new tenant \u2014 Moon Express, a tiny company with far-out ambitions \u2014 is moving in.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bump (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3754",
        "date": "2017-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/24/a-flat-earthers-plan-to-launch-himself-in-a-homemade-rocket-just-hit-a-speed-bump/",
        "text": "A California man who planned to launch himself 1,800 feet high Saturday in a homemade scrap-metal rocket \u2014 in an effort to prove that\u00a0Earth is flat \u2014 said he is postponing the experiment\u00a0after he couldn't get permission from a federal agency to conduct it on public land.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, Mike Hughes said the launch\u00a0will take place sometime next week on private property, albeit still in Amboy, Calif., an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert along historic Route 66. \u201cIt's still happening. We're just moving it\u00a0three miles down the road,\u201d Hughes told The Washington Post on Friday. \u201cThis is what happens anytime you have to deal with any kind of government agency.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHughes claimed the Bureau of Land Management said he couldn't launch his rocket as planned Saturday in Amboy. He claimed the federal agency had given him verbal permission more than a year ago, pending approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.AdvertisementA BLM spokeswoman said its local field office had no record of speaking with Hughes and that he had not applied for the necessary special recreation permit to hold an event on public land.\"Someone from our local office reached out to him after seeing some of these news articles [about the launch], because that was news to them,\" BLM spokeswoman Samantha Storms said.Representatives\u00a0from the FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.Story continues below advertisementHughes said he had originally intended to arrive in Amboy on Wednesday to start setting up the rocket. The BLM's denial, along with some technical difficulties\u00a0\u2014 a motor in his modified motor home quit working for a day\u00a0\u2014 threw a wrench into his plans, according to Hughes.\u201cI don't see [the launch] happening until about Tuesday, honestly,\u201d he said. \u201cIt takes three days to set up. . . . You know, it's not easy because it's not supposed to be easy.\u201dA Trump team member just compared climate science to the flat-Earth theoryAssuming the 500-mph, mile-long\u00a0flight through the Mojave Desert does not kill\u00a0him, Hughes\u00a0told the Associated Press,\u00a0his\u00a0journey into the\u00a0atmosflat will\u00a0mark the first phase of\u00a0his ambitious flat-Earth space program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHughes\u2019s ultimate goal is\u00a0a subsequent\u00a0launch that puts\u00a0him miles above Earth,\u00a0where\u00a0the 61-year-old limousine driver hopes to\u00a0photograph proof\u00a0that it's a\u00a0disk we all live on.\u201cIt\u2019ll shut the door on this ball Earth,\u201d Hughes said\u00a0in a flight fundraising\u00a0interview with a flat-Earth group. Theories discussed during the interview included\u00a0NASA\u00a0being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk\u00a0making fake rockets\u00a0from\u00a0blimps.Hughes promised the flat-Earth community that he would expose the conspiracy with his steam-powered rocket, which will launch from a heavily modified mobile home\u00a0\u2014 though he\u00a0acknowledged that\u00a0he still had much to learn about rocket science.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis whole tech thing,\u201d he said in the June interview. \u201cI\u2019m really behind the eight ball.\u201dKyrie Irving believes Earth is flat. It is not.That said, Hughes isn\u2019t a totally unproven engineer. He\u00a0set\u00a0a Guinness World Record in 2002 for\u00a0a limousine jump, according to Ars Technica, and has been building rockets for years, albeit with\u00a0mixed results.Advertisement\u201cOkay, Waldo. 3 .\u2009.\u2009. 2 .\u2009.\u2009. 1!\u201d someone yells in a test-fire video from 2012.There\u2019s a brief hiss of boiling water, then .\u2009.\u2009. nothing. So Hughes walks up to the engine and pokes it with a stick, at which point a\u00a0thick\u00a0cloud of steam belches out toward\u00a0the camera.He\u00a0built\u00a0his first manned rocket in 2014, the Associated Press reported, and managed to fly a quarter-mile over Winkelman, Ariz.Story continues below advertisementAs seen in a YouTube video, the\u00a0flight ended with Hughes being dragged, moaning,\u00a0from the\u00a0remains of the\u00a0rocket. The injuries he suffered put him in a walker for two weeks, he said.Elon Musk posted a video showcasing SpaceX rocket explosions, and the reason behind each explosion. (SpaceX)The 2014\u00a0flight was only a quarter of the distance of Saturday\u2019s mile-long attempt.And it was based on round-Earth technology.Hughes only recently converted to flat-Eartherism, after struggling for months to raise funds for his follow-up flight over the Mojave.AdvertisementIt was originally scheduled for early 2016 in a Kickstarter campaign \u2014 \u201cFrom Garage to Outer Space!\u201d \u2014 that\u00a0mentioned nothing about Illuminati astronauts and was themed after a NASCAR event.\u201cWe want to do this and basically thumb our noses at all these billionaires trying to do this,\u201d Hughes said in the pitch video, standing in his Apple Valley, Calif., living room,\u00a0which he had plastered with drawings of his rockets.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey have not put a man in space yet,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cThere are 20\u00a0different space agencies here in America, and I\u2019m the last person that\u2019s put a man in a rocket and launched it.\u201d\u00a0Comparing himself to Evel Knievel, he promised to launch\u00a0himself\u00a0from a California racetrack that year as the first step in\u00a0his\u00a0steam-powered leap toward space.The Kickstarter\u00a0raised $310 of its $150,000 goal.The explorers who really disproved flat-Earth theoriesHughes made other pitches, including a plan to\u00a0fly over Texas in a \u201cSkyLimo.\u201d But he complained to Ars Technica last year about the difficulty\u00a0of funding\u00a0his\u00a0dreams on a chauffeur\u2019s meager salary.AdvertisementA year later, he called into a flat-Earth community\u00a0Web show to announce that he\u00a0had become a recent convert.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe were kind of looking for new sponsors for this. And I\u2019m a believer in the flat Earth,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cI researched it for several months.\u201dThe host\u00a0sounded impressed. Hughes had actually flown in a rocket,\u00a0he noted, whereas\u00a0astronauts were merely paid actors performing in front of a CGI globe.\u201cJohn\u00a0Glenn and Neil\u00a0Armstrong are Freemasons,\u201d Hughes agreed. \u201cOnce you understand that, you understand the roots of the deception.\u201dThe host talked of \u201cElon Musk\u2019s fake reality,\u201d and Hughes talked of \u201canti-Christ, Illuminati stuff.\u201d After half an hour of this, the\u00a0host told his 300-some listeners to\u00a0back\u00a0Hughes\u2019s exploration of space.While there is no one\u00a0hypothesis for what the flat Earth is supposed to look like, many believers envision a flat disk ringed by sea ice, which naturally\u00a0holds the oceans in.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat\u2019s beyond the sea ice, if anything, remains to be discovered.\u201cWe need an\u00a0individual who\u2019s not compromised by the government,\u201d the host\u00a0told Hughes. \u201cAnd you could be that man.\u201dA flat-Earth GoFundMe effort subsequently\u00a0raised nearly $8,000 for Hughes.By November, the AP reported, his $20,000\u00a0rocket had a coat\u00a0of Rust-Oleum paint and \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH\u201d inscribed on the side.While his flat-Earth friends helped him finally get the thing built, the AP reported, Hughes\u00a0will be making adjustments right up to the launch.But he won\u2019t be able to test the rocket before he climbs inside and attempts to steam himself at 500 mph\u00a0across a mile of desert air. And if it\u2019s a success, he's promised his backers an even riskier launch within the next year,\u00a0into the space above the disk. He told Ars Technica last year that the second phase of his mission might involve floating in a balloon up to 20,000 feet above the ground, then rocket-packing himself into space.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s scary as hell,\u201d\u00a0Hughes told the AP. \u201cBut none of us are getting out of this world alive.\u201dThis is true. And yet some hope\u00a0to live to see its edges.Read more:\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerKyrie Irving\u2019s flat-Earth beliefs now the bane of middle-school teachers\u2019 existenceThousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverBehold, the Hubble Telescope\u2019s latest close-up photo of JupiterA newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say \"It's still happening,\u201d Mike Hughes said of his plan to \u201cprove\u201d that Earth is flat. A flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bump",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Which of these places in the solar system contains the least amount of mass? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3755",
        "date": "2021-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/30/science/30sci-quiz.html",
        "text": "A question of space. Outer space. A question of space. Outer space. A question of space. Outer space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away later (WP: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3756",
        "date": "2021-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/interactive/2021/nasa-rams-an-asteroid-planetary-defense/",
        "text": " NASA is launching a spacecraft head-on into an asteroid, hoping to change the space rock's orbit. It is a test in case we really need to smack one out of the way someday. NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away later",
        "author": "Bonnie Berkowitz, Artur Galocha"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away later (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3757",
        "date": "2021-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/interactive/2021/nasa-rams-an-asteroid-planetary-defense/",
        "text": " NASA is launching a spacecraft head-on into an asteroid, hoping to change the space rock's orbit. It is a test in case we really need to smack one out of the way someday. NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away later",
        "author": "Bonnie Berkowitz, Artur Galocha"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Begins Its Search for Life on Mars (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3758",
        "date": "2021-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-perseverance-rover-is-looking-for-life-on-mars-11624527002?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=7",
        "text": "High-tech tool kit The rover is packed with 23 cameras, sensors, a laser and a drill-equipped robotic arm. NASA scientists will spend the next two years using the instruments to learn more about Jezero Crater and home-in on areas they might like to study in greater depth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro-imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe two zoomable cameras that make up the rover\u2019s Mastcam-Z imager survey the terrain. The SuperCam laser is being used to detect rocks\u2019 chemistry. The rover gathers more detailed chemical and mineralogical information using the spectrometers on its arm instruments: the Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL, and the Scanning for Habitable Environments With Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals, or Sherloc. The rover is equipped with a computer processor running at up to 200 megahertz, slow compared with a modern computer. It also has communications equipment, internal temperature controls and a large battery in the rear to ensure it has plenty of power. \n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history early Monday when the drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world. In this video, WSJ visits the company NASA contracted to build Ingenuity and how the engineers recreated Mars atmosphere during testing. Photo: NASA (Video from 4/19/21)\n \n\n\nSafe storage One of Perseverance\u2019s main jobs is collecting rock and soil samples. The rover is carrying 43 sample tubes and five witness tubes, used to ensure sample tubes aren\u2019t corrupted. The large robotic arm transports the sample tube inside the belly of the vehicle. There it is moved by the smaller sample-handling arm to be processed. The sample\u2019s volume is measured, an image of the sample is taken, and the tube is hermetically sealed. The tubes will later be deposited on the Martian surface in what NASA calls a sample cache depot. The depot\u2019s coordinates will be recorded based on landmarks and measurements from Mars\u2019 orbiting satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWitness tubes are similar to the collection tubes but used to ensure the integrity of the Martian samples. They are preloaded with material designed to trap molecular and particulate contaminants. Like the sample tubes, they will be opened and sealed on Mars as a recording of the ambient environment.Possible route of exploration Able to cover groun Here\u2019s how the spacecraft will conduct its first scientific mission on the red planet, surveying Jezero Crater and collecting samples. ",
        "author": "Merrill Sherman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Can Withstand Longer Space Trips, New Study of Twins Finds (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3759",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronauts-can-withstand-longer-space-trips-new-study-of-twins-finds-11555005600?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=62",
        "text": "While astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly,\n\n\n\n 50 years old, spent a record 340 days aboard the space station, researchers intensively monitored his life signs, from changes in gene activity, metabolism, gut bacteria and immune responses to variations in how his brain worked. They sequenced his DNA, analyzed his stool samples, distilled his body fluids and studied his cells. They then compared those findings to the same measures in his identical twin\u2014retired astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Kelly\n\n\n\n \u2014who remained on Earth and displayed none of the same effects. Mark Kelly, who is married to former congresswoman \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gabrielle Giffords,\n\n\n\n is running for Senate in Arizona.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScott Kelly, center, uses a lower body negative pressure Chibis device while Russian cosmonauts help medically monitor and measure his bodily fluids while in Earth orbit in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn a report published Thursday in Science, the scientists revealed a cascade of biomedical and genetic changes as Scott Kelly adapted to space. Genes related to the immune system and DNA repair ramped up their activity. The biochemistry of stress flooded his system. \u201cAs soon as he got into space, we saw a thousand genes dynamically changing,\u201d said biophysicist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Mason\n\n\n\n at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who analyzed the astronaut\u2019s DNA. \u201cGene expression data indicated six times the number of genes going up and down in the last six months of the mission compared to the first six months.\u201d\n\n\n Space Changes NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Eyesight Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. DNA Telomeres Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes Eyesight NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. Telomeres These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. DNA Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes Eyesight NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. Telomeres DNA Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. 1 2 3 4 5 Brain 1 Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Eyesight 2 Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Heart & blood circulation 3 Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Body mass 4 The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Microbiome 5 The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. DNA Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. Telomeres These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL \n\n\nScott Kelly\u2019s blood pressure also dropped. The bacteria living in his intestinal tract changed. He lost 7% of his body weight and his optic nerves thickened, affecting his sight. Moreover, he seemed to think more quickly, in measures of spatial orientation and motor accuracy, perhaps as a response to weightlessness, they said. None of the changes appeared to pose a health hazard, the scientists reported. Most of his biometric measures returned to normal within six months after Scott Kelly returned to Earth. \u201cWe had two genetically identical individuals,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Susan M. Bailey,\n\n\n\n an oncologist at Colorado State University. A specialist in the study of telomeres, which protect DNA as cells divide and multiply, she was one of the principal investigators who led 84 researchers at a dozen universities involved in the NASA project. \u201cAny of the differences we saw, we could attribute to space flight and not differences between the two individuals.\u201d \u201cWe learned the human body is pretty resilient,\u201d said Mark Kelly. \u201cWe can survive and maybe even thrive on these long duration flights.\u201d All told, hundreds of men and women have flown into orbit. Many of them shared common symptoms of life in space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScott Kelly gives himself a flu shot aboard the International Space Station for a continuing study on the human immune system in September 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAway from Earth, astronauts typically got severe headaches as quarts of body fluids shift in response to low gravity. Microgravity made many of them queasy. They endured chronic sleeplessness, as circadian rhythms were disrupted by artificial light and the spectacle of 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every 24 hours. They lost muscle mass, bone density and red blood cells. Many times, their vision changed: Astronauts who went to space with excellent eyesight often returned to Earth needing glasses, NASA medical experts said. As the space agency considers longer missions, experts in space medicine aren\u2019t sure how to handle the health hazards of deep space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nScott Kelly, appearing live on video, waves from the International Space Station to his brother, retired NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, center, during a National Press Club event in Washington in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe intensive study of the Kelly twins, relying on advanced techniques for measuring a body\u2019s molecular changes during spaceflight, points the way toward a kind of precision medicine for space travelers. Treatments and countermeasures could be tailored specifically to the biochemistry of individual astronauts and the conditions they expect to encounter, the scientists said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think people one day will be able to live all their lives in space or on planets like Mars? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cWhat this really does is open a door to the kind of analysis you could never do before that\u2019s going to be important for astronauts when they go on long-duration space flight to Mars and they\u2019re going to have to be progressively independent from the resources that are on the ground,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Feinberg,\n\n\n\n a specialist in epigenetics at Johns Hopkins University and a lead investigator on the Twins Study. One sure cure, however, for most ailments of life in space is being back home, the study showed.\n\n\nRelated Scientists Release First Image of a Black Hole Computer Scientists Play Key Role in First Image of Black Hole A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever How JFK Sent the U.S. to the Moon Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. \n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Astronauts may be better able to withstand long missions to the Moon and even Mars than previously realized, lifting what had loomed as a barrier to space exploration, a unique study of twin astronauts revealed. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Can Withstand Longer Space Trips, New Study of Twins Finds (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3760",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronauts-can-withstand-longer-space-trips-new-study-of-twins-finds-11555005600?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=57",
        "text": "While astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly,\n\n\n\n 50 years old, spent a record 340 days aboard the space station, researchers intensively monitored his life signs, from changes in gene activity, metabolism, gut bacteria and immune responses to variations in how his brain worked. They sequenced his DNA, analyzed his stool samples, distilled his body fluids and studied his cells. They then compared those findings to the same measures in his identical twin\u2014retired astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Kelly\n\n\n\n \u2014who remained on Earth and displayed none of the same effects. Mark Kelly, who is married to former congresswoman \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gabrielle Giffords,\n\n\n\n is running for Senate in Arizona.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScott Kelly, center, uses a lower body negative pressure Chibis device while Russian cosmonauts help medically monitor and measure his bodily fluids while in Earth orbit in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn a report published Thursday in Science, the scientists revealed a cascade of biomedical and genetic changes as Scott Kelly adapted to space. Genes related to the immune system and DNA repair ramped up their activity. The biochemistry of stress flooded his system. \u201cAs soon as he got into space, we saw a thousand genes dynamically changing,\u201d said biophysicist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Mason\n\n\n\n at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who analyzed the astronaut\u2019s DNA. \u201cGene expression data indicated six times the number of genes going up and down in the last six months of the mission compared to the first six months.\u201d\n\n\n Space Changes NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Eyesight Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. DNA Telomeres Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes Eyesight NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. Telomeres These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. DNA Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes Eyesight NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. Telomeres DNA Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physic Astronauts may be better able to withstand long missions to the Moon and even Mars than previously realized, lifting what had loomed as a barrier to space exploration, a unique study of twin astronauts revealed. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Can Withstand Longer Space Trips, New Study of Twins Finds (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3761",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronauts-can-withstand-longer-space-trips-new-study-of-twins-finds-11555005600?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=75",
        "text": "While astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly,\n\n\n\n 50 years old, spent a record 340 days aboard the space station, researchers intensively monitored his life signs, from changes in gene activity, metabolism, gut bacteria and immune responses to variations in how his brain worked. They sequenced his DNA, analyzed his stool samples, distilled his body fluids and studied his cells. They then compared those findings to the same measures in his identical twin\u2014retired astronaut \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Kelly\n\n\n\n \u2014who remained on Earth and displayed none of the same effects. Mark Kelly, who is married to former congresswoman \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gabrielle Giffords,\n\n\n\n is running for Senate in Arizona.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScott Kelly, center, uses a lower body negative pressure Chibis device while Russian cosmonauts help medically monitor and measure his bodily fluids while in Earth orbit in 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn a report published Thursday in Science, the scientists revealed a cascade of biomedical and genetic changes as Scott Kelly adapted to space. Genes related to the immune system and DNA repair ramped up their activity. The biochemistry of stress flooded his system. \u201cAs soon as he got into space, we saw a thousand genes dynamically changing,\u201d said biophysicist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Mason\n\n\n\n at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who analyzed the astronaut\u2019s DNA. \u201cGene expression data indicated six times the number of genes going up and down in the last six months of the mission compared to the first six months.\u201d\n\n\n Space Changes NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Eyesight Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. DNA Telomeres Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes Eyesight NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. Telomeres These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. DNA Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes Eyesight NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physical changes in a person\u2019s body. Many of these changes in Scott Kelly returned to normal within six months of being back on Earth. Optical nerves thickened. Vision became blurry due perhaps to changes in fluids inside the eyeball. Brain Cognitive speed improved while in space, with better spatial orientation and motor accuracy. Body mass The astronaut lost 7% of his weight while in space. Heart & blood circulation Cardiac output, which measures heart rate and volume of blood pumped, increased 10% in space. Blood pressure dropped. Some arteries swelled. Microbiome The types of bacteria living in the astronaut\u2019s stomach and intestines, which can affect health, changed while in space. Telomeres DNA Genes related to immune responses, damage repair, inflammation and cell growth were all more active in space. These protective caps on DNA strands usually shorten as we age. They got longer in space. Source: NASA Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Space Changes NASA\u2019s Twin Study verified that being in space can lead to various physic Astronauts may be better able to withstand long missions to the Moon and even Mars than previously realized, lifting what had loomed as a barrier to space exploration, a unique study of twin astronauts revealed. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why did Richard Branson take this risk? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3762",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-space-flight-risk.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic is one among a long line of flashy upstart businesses promoted by the English entrepreneur. Virgin Galactic is one among a long line of flashy upstart businesses promoted by the English entrepreneur. Founding a space exploration company was perhaps an unsurprising step for Mr. Branson, who has made a career \u2014 and a fortune estimated at $6 billion \u2014 building flashy upstart businesses that he promotes with a showman\u2019s flair.",
        "author": "By Michael J. de la Merced"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why did Richard Branson take this risk? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3763",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-space-flight-risk.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic is one among a long line of flashy upstart businesses promoted by the English entrepreneur. Virgin Galactic is one among a long line of flashy upstart businesses promoted by the English entrepreneur. Founding a space exploration company was perhaps an unsurprising step for Mr. Branson, who has made a career \u2014 and a fortune estimated at $6 billion \u2014 building flashy upstart businesses that he promotes with a showman\u2019s flair.",
        "author": "By Michael J. de la Merced"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why did Richard Branson take this risk? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3764",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-space-flight-risk.html",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic is one among a long line of flashy upstart businesses promoted by the English entrepreneur. Virgin Galactic is one among a long line of flashy upstart businesses promoted by the English entrepreneur. Founding a space exploration company was perhaps an unsurprising step for Mr. Branson, who has made a career \u2014 and a fortune estimated at $6 billion \u2014 building flashy upstart businesses that he promotes with a showman\u2019s flair.",
        "author": "By Michael J. de la Merced"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Brings Moon Rocks to Earth, and a New Era of Competition to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3765",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/science/china-moon-mission-rocks.html",
        "text": "The Chang\u2019e-5 mission\u2019s success highlights the progress of China\u2019s space program, and growing rivalry with the United States. The Chang\u2019e-5 mission\u2019s success highlights the progress of China\u2019s space program, and growing rivalry with the United States. China may have been a latecomer to the moon, but when its capsule full of lunar rocks and soil returned to Earth early Thursday, it set the stage for a new space race over the coming decades. This time, it will be a competition over resources on the moon that could propel deeper space exploration.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Brings Moon Rocks to Earth, and a New Era of Competition to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3766",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/science/china-moon-mission-rocks.html",
        "text": "The Chang\u2019e-5 mission\u2019s success highlights the progress of China\u2019s space program, and growing rivalry with the United States. The Chang\u2019e-5 mission\u2019s success highlights the progress of China\u2019s space program, and growing rivalry with the United States. China may have been a latecomer to the moon, but when its capsule full of lunar rocks and soil returned to Earth early Thursday, it set the stage for a new space race over the coming decades. This time, it will be a competition over resources on the moon that could propel deeper space exploration.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Brings Moon Rocks to Earth, and a New Era of Competition to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3767",
        "date": "2020-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/science/china-moon-mission-rocks.html",
        "text": "The Chang\u2019e-5 mission\u2019s success highlights the progress of China\u2019s space program, and growing rivalry with the United States. The Chang\u2019e-5 mission\u2019s success highlights the progress of China\u2019s space program, and growing rivalry with the United States. China may have been a latecomer to the moon, but when its capsule full of lunar rocks and soil returned to Earth early Thursday, it set the stage for a new space race over the coming decades. This time, it will be a competition over resources on the moon that could propel deeper space exploration.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Completes First Flight on Another Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3768",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Completes First Flight on Another Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3769",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Completes First Flight on Another Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3770",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Completes First Flight on Another Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3771",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Completes First Flight on Another Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3772",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground. A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Looks to Speed Timetable for Putting Astronauts in Deep Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3773",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/science/nasa-looks-to-speed-timetable-for-putting-astronauts-in-deep-space.html",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s acting administrator offered the first hints of a notable mission that could lead to a return to the moon in the Trump era. The agency\u2019s acting administrator offered the first hints of a notable mission that could lead to a return to the moon in the Trump era. In the first public inkling of the Trump administration\u2019s aspirations for space exploration, NASA announced on Wednesday that it wanted to consider taking astronauts on the first flight of its new heavy-lift rocket. That type of notable mission could speed up a return to the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Looks to Speed Timetable for Putting Astronauts in Deep Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3774",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/science/nasa-looks-to-speed-timetable-for-putting-astronauts-in-deep-space.html",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s acting administrator offered the first hints of a notable mission that could lead to a return to the moon in the Trump era. The agency\u2019s acting administrator offered the first hints of a notable mission that could lead to a return to the moon in the Trump era. In the first public inkling of the Trump administration\u2019s aspirations for space exploration, NASA announced on Wednesday that it wanted to consider taking astronauts on the first flight of its new heavy-lift rocket. That type of notable mission could speed up a return to the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Mars, the Moon and Beyond Await Earth in 2021 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3775",
        "date": "2021-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/science/space-astronomy-launches.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. About a month after the new year has started on Earth, three spacecraft will pull into the vicinity of Mars. These explorers, which launched in July last year, will be heralds of a busy year of space exploration, launches and astronomical occurrences.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Mars, the Moon and Beyond Await Earth in 2021 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3776",
        "date": "2021-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/science/space-astronomy-launches.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. About a month after the new year has started on Earth, three spacecraft will pull into the vicinity of Mars. These explorers, which launched in July last year, will be heralds of a busy year of space exploration, launches and astronomical occurrences.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Mars, the Moon and Beyond Await Earth in 2021 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3777",
        "date": "2021-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/science/space-astronomy-launches.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. About a month after the new year has started on Earth, three spacecraft will pull into the vicinity of Mars. These explorers, which launched in July last year, will be heralds of a busy year of space exploration, launches and astronomical occurrences.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missions to Mars, the Moon and Beyond Await Earth in 2021 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3778",
        "date": "2021-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/science/space-astronomy-launches.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. Here\u2019s a preview of what to expect in space and astronomy in the year to come. About a month after the new year has started on Earth, three spacecraft will pull into the vicinity of Mars. These explorers, which launched in July last year, will be heralds of a busy year of space exploration, launches and astronomical occurrences.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Webb Telescope\u2019s Latest Stumbling Block: Its Name (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3779",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/webb-telescope-astronomy-homophobia.html",
        "text": "The long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in December. But the NASA official for whom it is named has been accused of homophobia. The long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in December. But the NASA official for whom it is named has been accused of homophobia. Many astronomers were disappointed when NASA\u2019s up-and-coming space telescope, the successor to the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope, was named for James Webb, a former NASA administrator who led the agency through the glory years of the Apollo missions. Why not name it for an astronomer, the way other space missions \u2014 Hubble, Kepler \u2014 have been, instead of a bean counter? But they held their tongues.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Webb Telescope\u2019s Latest Stumbling Block: Its Name (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3780",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/webb-telescope-astronomy-homophobia.html",
        "text": "The long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in December. But the NASA official for whom it is named has been accused of homophobia. The long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in December. But the NASA official for whom it is named has been accused of homophobia. Many astronomers were disappointed when NASA\u2019s up-and-coming space telescope, the successor to the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope, was named for James Webb, a former NASA administrator who led the agency through the glory years of the Apollo missions. Why not name it for an astronomer, the way other space missions \u2014 Hubble, Kepler \u2014 have been, instead of a bean counter? But they held their tongues.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Webb Telescope\u2019s Latest Stumbling Block: Its Name (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3781",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/webb-telescope-astronomy-homophobia.html",
        "text": "The long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in December. But the NASA official for whom it is named has been accused of homophobia. The long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in December. But the NASA official for whom it is named has been accused of homophobia. Many astronomers were disappointed when NASA\u2019s up-and-coming space telescope, the successor to the vaunted Hubble Space Telescope, was named for James Webb, a former NASA administrator who led the agency through the glory years of the Apollo missions. Why not name it for an astronomer, the way other space missions \u2014 Hubble, Kepler \u2014 have been, instead of a bean counter? But they held their tongues.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Is Gone. Here Are the Next Space Missions to Watch Out For. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3782",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/science/cassini-nasa-missions.html",
        "text": "Now that Cassini has gone out in a blaze of glory, here's our guide to cosmic missions over the next decade that you should get excited about now. Now that Cassini has gone out in a blaze of glory, here's our guide to cosmic missions over the next decade that you should get excited about now. Now that Cassini has gone out in a blaze of glory, you\u2019re probably wondering what cosmic missions you can get excited about next. Though NASA is reviewing proposals that may include a return to Saturn to seek signs of life on ocean worlds like its moons Enceladus and Titan, other endeavors into deep space are already on the calendar. Here are a variety of space missions worth keeping tabs on over the next decade or so.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Is Gone. Here Are the Next Space Missions to Watch Out For. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3783",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/science/cassini-nasa-missions.html",
        "text": "Now that Cassini has gone out in a blaze of glory, here's our guide to cosmic missions over the next decade that you should get excited about now. Now that Cassini has gone out in a blaze of glory, here's our guide to cosmic missions over the next decade that you should get excited about now. Now that Cassini has gone out in a blaze of glory, you\u2019re probably wondering what cosmic missions you can get excited about next. Though NASA is reviewing proposals that may include a return to Saturn to seek signs of life on ocean worlds like its moons Enceladus and Titan, other endeavors into deep space are already on the calendar. Here are a variety of space missions worth keeping tabs on over the next decade or so.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "What is Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane, and what did it do? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3784",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/virgin-galactic-space-plane.html",
        "text": "The V.S.S. Unity is making its fourth trip to space. The V.S.S. Unity is making its fourth trip to space. The rocket plane, a type called SpaceShipTwo, is about the size of an executive jet. In addition to the two pilots, there can be up to four people in the cabin. The particular SpaceShipTwo that flew on Sunday is named V.S.S. Unity.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There Are 2 Seats Left for This Trip to the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3785",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/axiom-space-station.html",
        "text": "Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. If you have tens of millions of dollars to spare, you could as soon as next year be one of three passengers setting off aboard a spaceship to the International Space Station for a 10-day stay.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There Are 2 Seats Left for This Trip to the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3786",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/axiom-space-station.html",
        "text": "Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. If you have tens of millions of dollars to spare, you could as soon as next year be one of three passengers setting off aboard a spaceship to the International Space Station for a 10-day stay.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There Are 2 Seats Left for This Trip to the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3787",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/axiom-space-station.html",
        "text": "Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. If you have tens of millions of dollars to spare, you could as soon as next year be one of three passengers setting off aboard a spaceship to the International Space Station for a 10-day stay.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There Are 2 Seats Left for This Trip to the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3788",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/axiom-space-station.html",
        "text": "Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. Axiom Space is selling tickets on a SpaceX capsule for a $55 million, 10-day stay on the orbiting outpost that would be the first to involve no governmental space agencies. If you have tens of millions of dollars to spare, you could as soon as next year be one of three passengers setting off aboard a spaceship to the International Space Station for a 10-day stay.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the Moon Landing of China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3789",
        "date": "2020-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/science/china-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "Within hours of arriving, it started drilling and scooping lunar rocks and soil to bring back to Earth. Within hours of arriving, it started drilling and scooping lunar rocks and soil to bring back to Earth. China released video footage on Wednesday showing the arrival of its Chang\u2019e-5 robotic spacecraft on the moon\u2019s surface. Racing across a landscape sprinkled with craters on Tuesday, the camera pauses momentarily before a breathtaking fall begins. An instant later, a splash of moon dust and a shadow of the lander signaled that the probe\u2019s touchdown was a success.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the Moon Landing of China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3790",
        "date": "2020-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/science/china-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "Within hours of arriving, it started drilling and scooping lunar rocks and soil to bring back to Earth. Within hours of arriving, it started drilling and scooping lunar rocks and soil to bring back to Earth. China released video footage on Wednesday showing the arrival of its Chang\u2019e-5 robotic spacecraft on the moon\u2019s surface. Racing across a landscape sprinkled with craters on Tuesday, the camera pauses momentarily before a breathtaking fall begins. An instant later, a splash of moon dust and a shadow of the lander signaled that the probe\u2019s touchdown was a success.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "During Seven-Hour Spacewalk, Russian Astronauts Gather Clues to Orbital Mystery (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3791",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/science/spacewalk-russia-soyuz.html",
        "text": "Wielding sharp tools, the two men in spacesuits examined a tiny hole that has roiled space relations between the United States and Russia. Wielding sharp tools, the two men in spacesuits examined a tiny hole that has roiled space relations between the United States and Russia. About four hours into a spacewalk on Tuesday, Russian astronauts pulled out a knife and began cutting into a spacecraft docked at the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "During Seven-Hour Spacewalk, Russian Astronauts Gather Clues to Orbital Mystery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3792",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/science/spacewalk-russia-soyuz.html",
        "text": "Wielding sharp tools, the two men in spacesuits examined a tiny hole that has roiled space relations between the United States and Russia. Wielding sharp tools, the two men in spacesuits examined a tiny hole that has roiled space relations between the United States and Russia. About four hours into a spacewalk on Tuesday, Russian astronauts pulled out a knife and began cutting into a spacecraft docked at the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Surprise Russian Thruster Firing Prompts Space Station Emergency (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3793",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/science/international-space-station-russia.html",
        "text": "While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. The International Space Station was briefly tilted out of its normal position in orbit on Friday during a test firing of thrusters on one of Russia\u2019s docked spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Surprise Russian Thruster Firing Prompts Space Station Emergency (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3794",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/science/international-space-station-russia.html",
        "text": "While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. The International Space Station was briefly tilted out of its normal position in orbit on Friday during a test firing of thrusters on one of Russia\u2019s docked spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Surprise Russian Thruster Firing Prompts Space Station Emergency (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3795",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/science/international-space-station-russia.html",
        "text": "While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. The International Space Station was briefly tilted out of its normal position in orbit on Friday during a test firing of thrusters on one of Russia\u2019s docked spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Surprise Russian Thruster Firing Prompts Space Station Emergency (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3796",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/science/international-space-station-russia.html",
        "text": "While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. While the astronauts were said to not be in any danger, it was the second such incident since July. The International Space Station was briefly tilted out of its normal position in orbit on Friday during a test firing of thrusters on one of Russia\u2019s docked spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Orbital Rendezvous Demonstrates a Space Junk Solution (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3797",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/mev-1-northrop-grumman-space-junk.html",
        "text": "Two satellites docked together high above Earth on Tuesday, successfully extending the life of one that was running out of fuel. Two satellites docked together high above Earth on Tuesday, successfully extending the life of one that was running out of fuel. For the first time, one commercial satellite has grabbed hold of another one in orbit around Earth, demonstrating a technology that could help reduce the proliferation of space debris around our planet by enabling the repair and refueling of dying spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Orbital Rendezvous Demonstrates a Space Junk Solution (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3798",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/mev-1-northrop-grumman-space-junk.html",
        "text": "Two satellites docked together high above Earth on Tuesday, successfully extending the life of one that was running out of fuel. Two satellites docked together high above Earth on Tuesday, successfully extending the life of one that was running out of fuel. For the first time, one commercial satellite has grabbed hold of another one in orbit around Earth, demonstrating a technology that could help reduce the proliferation of space debris around our planet by enabling the repair and refueling of dying spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Orbital Rendezvous Demonstrates a Space Junk Solution (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3799",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/mev-1-northrop-grumman-space-junk.html",
        "text": "Two satellites docked together high above Earth on Tuesday, successfully extending the life of one that was running out of fuel. Two satellites docked together high above Earth on Tuesday, successfully extending the life of one that was running out of fuel. For the first time, one commercial satellite has grabbed hold of another one in orbit around Earth, demonstrating a technology that could help reduce the proliferation of space debris around our planet by enabling the repair and refueling of dying spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays Parker Solar Probe Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3800",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/science/parker-solar-probe-launch.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the sun and its power, and this mission will help to fill in the blanks in the years to come. A second launch attempt on Sunday is possible. There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the sun and its power, and this mission will help to fill in the blanks in the years to come. A second launch attempt on Sunday is possible. Early on Saturday, NASA postponed the launch of its Parker Solar Probe spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Fla. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays Parker Solar Probe Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3801",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/science/parker-solar-probe-launch.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the sun and its power, and this mission will help to fill in the blanks in the years to come. A second launch attempt on Sunday is possible. There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the sun and its power, and this mission will help to fill in the blanks in the years to come. A second launch attempt on Sunday is possible. Early on Saturday, NASA postponed the launch of its Parker Solar Probe spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Fla. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays Parker Solar Probe Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3802",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/science/parker-solar-probe-launch.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the sun and its power, and this mission will help to fill in the blanks in the years to come. A second launch attempt on Sunday is possible. There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the sun and its power, and this mission will help to fill in the blanks in the years to come. A second launch attempt on Sunday is possible. Early on Saturday, NASA postponed the launch of its Parker Solar Probe spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Fla. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Names Astronauts for Boeing and SpaceX Flights to International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3803",
        "date": "2018-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/science/nasa-astronauts-boeing-spacex.html",
        "text": "Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. NASA has named the astronauts chosen to fly on commercial spacecraft made by Boeing and SpaceX to and from the International Space Station, the research laboratory that orbits around Earth.",
        "author": "By Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Names Astronauts for Boeing and SpaceX Flights to International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3804",
        "date": "2018-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/science/nasa-astronauts-boeing-spacex.html",
        "text": "Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. NASA has named the astronauts chosen to fly on commercial spacecraft made by Boeing and SpaceX to and from the International Space Station, the research laboratory that orbits around Earth.",
        "author": "By Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Names Astronauts for Boeing and SpaceX Flights to International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3805",
        "date": "2018-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/science/nasa-astronauts-boeing-spacex.html",
        "text": "Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. NASA has named the astronauts chosen to fly on commercial spacecraft made by Boeing and SpaceX to and from the International Space Station, the research laboratory that orbits around Earth.",
        "author": "By Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Names Astronauts for Boeing and SpaceX Flights to International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3806",
        "date": "2018-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/science/nasa-astronauts-boeing-spacex.html",
        "text": "Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. Their voyages are scheduled for next year, and they would be the first American astronauts to launch from American soil since 2011. NASA has named the astronauts chosen to fly on commercial spacecraft made by Boeing and SpaceX to and from the International Space Station, the research laboratory that orbits around Earth.",
        "author": "By Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Getting to Mars Is Easy. It\u2019s the Stopping That Can Kill You. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3807",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/science/nasa-mars-perseverance-rover.html",
        "text": "The United States has an unparalleled record of success on the red planet\u2019s surface, but NASA\u2019s engineers aren\u2019t resting on their laurels. The United States has an unparalleled record of success on the red planet\u2019s surface, but NASA\u2019s engineers aren\u2019t resting on their laurels. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover arrives at Mars, mission managers will be watching, helpless to do anything. The $2.4 billion spacecraft will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 miles per hour and then come to a complete stop seven minutes later.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Getting to Mars Is Easy. It\u2019s the Stopping That Can Kill You. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3808",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/science/nasa-mars-perseverance-rover.html",
        "text": "The United States has an unparalleled record of success on the red planet\u2019s surface, but NASA\u2019s engineers aren\u2019t resting on their laurels. The United States has an unparalleled record of success on the red planet\u2019s surface, but NASA\u2019s engineers aren\u2019t resting on their laurels. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover arrives at Mars, mission managers will be watching, helpless to do anything. The $2.4 billion spacecraft will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 miles per hour and then come to a complete stop seven minutes later.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Getting to Mars Is Easy. It\u2019s the Stopping That Can Kill You. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3809",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/29/science/nasa-mars-perseverance-rover.html",
        "text": "The United States has an unparalleled record of success on the red planet\u2019s surface, but NASA\u2019s engineers aren\u2019t resting on their laurels. The United States has an unparalleled record of success on the red planet\u2019s surface, but NASA\u2019s engineers aren\u2019t resting on their laurels. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover arrives at Mars, mission managers will be watching, helpless to do anything. The $2.4 billion spacecraft will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 miles per hour and then come to a complete stop seven minutes later.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches Perseverance Rover, Capping Summer of Missions to Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3810",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/science/nasa-mars-launch.html",
        "text": "The third and final mission to the red planet of the month lifted off on Thursday. The third and final mission to the red planet of the month lifted off on Thursday. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is headed to Mars, the third spacecraft to head that way this month.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches Perseverance Rover, Capping Summer of Missions to Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3811",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/science/nasa-mars-launch.html",
        "text": "The third and final mission to the red planet of the month lifted off on Thursday. The third and final mission to the red planet of the month lifted off on Thursday. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is headed to Mars, the third spacecraft to head that way this month.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches Perseverance Rover, Capping Summer of Missions to Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3812",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/science/nasa-mars-launch.html",
        "text": "The third and final mission to the red planet of the month lifted off on Thursday. The third and final mission to the red planet of the month lifted off on Thursday. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is headed to Mars, the third spacecraft to head that way this month.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Debris From Test of Russian Antisatellite Weapon Forces Astronauts to Shelter (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3813",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/science/russia-anti-satellite-missile-test-debris.html",
        "text": "The State Department said the cloud of debris from the missile strike added more than 1,500 pieces of sizable space junk to Earth\u2019s orbit. The State Department said the cloud of debris from the missile strike added more than 1,500 pieces of sizable space junk to Earth\u2019s orbit. Russia carried out an antisatellite missile test on Monday, obliterating one of its own satellites in orbit. The test created a vast cloud of debris that continues to orbit Earth, and some of the material loomed dangerously close to the International Space Station, forcing astronauts to take shelter for hours in a pair of spacecraft capable of returning them to Earth.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Debris From Test of Russian Antisatellite Weapon Forces Astronauts to Shelter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3814",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/science/russia-anti-satellite-missile-test-debris.html",
        "text": "The State Department said the cloud of debris from the missile strike added more than 1,500 pieces of sizable space junk to Earth\u2019s orbit. The State Department said the cloud of debris from the missile strike added more than 1,500 pieces of sizable space junk to Earth\u2019s orbit. Russia carried out an antisatellite missile test on Monday, obliterating one of its own satellites in orbit. The test created a vast cloud of debris that continues to orbit Earth, and some of the material loomed dangerously close to the International Space Station, forcing astronauts to take shelter for hours in a pair of spacecraft capable of returning them to Earth.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Debris From Test of Russian Antisatellite Weapon Forces Astronauts to Shelter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3815",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/science/russia-anti-satellite-missile-test-debris.html",
        "text": "The State Department said the cloud of debris from the missile strike added more than 1,500 pieces of sizable space junk to Earth\u2019s orbit. The State Department said the cloud of debris from the missile strike added more than 1,500 pieces of sizable space junk to Earth\u2019s orbit. Russia carried out an antisatellite missile test on Monday, obliterating one of its own satellites in orbit. The test created a vast cloud of debris that continues to orbit Earth, and some of the material loomed dangerously close to the International Space Station, forcing astronauts to take shelter for hours in a pair of spacecraft capable of returning them to Earth.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin to Partner With 3 Companies on NASA Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3816",
        "date": "2019-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. WASHINGTON \u2014 The race is on to build the next spacecraft that will land American astronauts on the moon \u2014 and the richest man in the world wants to come in first.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin to Partner With 3 Companies on NASA Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3817",
        "date": "2019-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. WASHINGTON \u2014 The race is on to build the next spacecraft that will land American astronauts on the moon \u2014 and the richest man in the world wants to come in first.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin to Partner With 3 Companies on NASA Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3818",
        "date": "2019-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. WASHINGTON \u2014 The race is on to build the next spacecraft that will land American astronauts on the moon \u2014 and the richest man in the world wants to come in first.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin to Partner With 3 Companies on NASA Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3819",
        "date": "2019-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. The start-up launched by the Amazon founder will work with three older space companies in its bid to carry American astronauts back to the lunar surface. WASHINGTON \u2014 The race is on to build the next spacecraft that will land American astronauts on the moon \u2014 and the richest man in the world wants to come in first.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Deepens Probe Into Astronaut Capsule Woes, Prompting More Delays (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3820",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/nasa-boeing-starliner.html",
        "text": "The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. Boeing\u2019s second chance to test launch its troubled astronaut capsule to the International Space Station was delayed again, possibly until the middle of 2022, as NASA and the aerospace giant go to new lengths to investigate problems with the spacecraft\u2019s fuel valves.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Deepens Probe Into Astronaut Capsule Woes, Prompting More Delays (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3821",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/nasa-boeing-starliner.html",
        "text": "The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. Boeing\u2019s second chance to test launch its troubled astronaut capsule to the International Space Station was delayed again, possibly until the middle of 2022, as NASA and the aerospace giant go to new lengths to investigate problems with the spacecraft\u2019s fuel valves.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Deepens Probe Into Astronaut Capsule Woes, Prompting More Delays (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3822",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/nasa-boeing-starliner.html",
        "text": "The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. Boeing\u2019s second chance to test launch its troubled astronaut capsule to the International Space Station was delayed again, possibly until the middle of 2022, as NASA and the aerospace giant go to new lengths to investigate problems with the spacecraft\u2019s fuel valves.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Deepens Probe Into Astronaut Capsule Woes, Prompting More Delays (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3823",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/nasa-boeing-starliner.html",
        "text": "The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. Boeing\u2019s second chance to test launch its troubled astronaut capsule to the International Space Station was delayed again, possibly until the middle of 2022, as NASA and the aerospace giant go to new lengths to investigate problems with the spacecraft\u2019s fuel valves.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Deepens Probe Into Astronaut Capsule Woes, Prompting More Delays (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3824",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/nasa-boeing-starliner.html",
        "text": "The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. The Starliner capsule for NASA crews is now unlikely to have another orbital flight test until the middle of next year. Boeing\u2019s second chance to test launch its troubled astronaut capsule to the International Space Station was delayed again, possibly until the middle of 2022, as NASA and the aerospace giant go to new lengths to investigate problems with the spacecraft\u2019s fuel valves.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Far Side of the Moon: What China and the World Hope to Find (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3825",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/far-side-moon.html",
        "text": "The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. In a spaceflight first, China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 has landed where no spacecraft has touched down in one piece before: the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Far Side of the Moon: What China and the World Hope to Find (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3826",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/far-side-moon.html",
        "text": "The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. In a spaceflight first, China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 has landed where no spacecraft has touched down in one piece before: the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Far Side of the Moon: What China and the World Hope to Find (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3827",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/far-side-moon.html",
        "text": "The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. In a spaceflight first, China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 has landed where no spacecraft has touched down in one piece before: the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Far Side of the Moon: What China and the World Hope to Find (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3828",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/far-side-moon.html",
        "text": "The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. The side of the moon we never see from Earth contains secrets about our solar system\u2019s early days, and it could help astronomers see the universe more clearly. In a spaceflight first, China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-4 has landed where no spacecraft has touched down in one piece before: the far side of the moon.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Lands on Asteroid It Blasted a Hole In (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3829",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/science/japans-hayabusa2-spacecraft-lands-on-asteroid-it-blasted-a-hole-in.html",
        "text": "The robotic probe attempted to collect a sample scattered from a crater made on the surface of the space rock Ryugu in April. The robotic probe attempted to collect a sample scattered from a crater made on the surface of the space rock Ryugu in April. When last we checked in with Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in April, it had blown a crater in a large rock that orbits the sun. On Wednesday night (Thursday morning in Japan), the robotic probe went in for a landing, and appeared to have successfully touched down on the asteroid\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Lands on Asteroid It Blasted a Hole In (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3830",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/science/japans-hayabusa2-spacecraft-lands-on-asteroid-it-blasted-a-hole-in.html",
        "text": "The robotic probe attempted to collect a sample scattered from a crater made on the surface of the space rock Ryugu in April. The robotic probe attempted to collect a sample scattered from a crater made on the surface of the space rock Ryugu in April. When last we checked in with Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in April, it had blown a crater in a large rock that orbits the sun. On Wednesday night (Thursday morning in Japan), the robotic probe went in for a landing, and appeared to have successfully touched down on the asteroid\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Lands on Ryugu Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3831",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/ryugu-asteroid-hayabusa2.html",
        "text": "The probe ascended from the space rock after firing a bullet to help with the gathering of samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. The probe ascended from the space rock after firing a bullet to help with the gathering of samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. Tonight, a Japanese spacecraft completed a touchdown on the surface of an asteroid, where it fired a projectile at the rock\u2019s surface rock. A successful mission could help advance understanding of how our planet formed in the early solar system.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Lands on Ryugu Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3832",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/ryugu-asteroid-hayabusa2.html",
        "text": "The probe ascended from the space rock after firing a bullet to help with the gathering of samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. The probe ascended from the space rock after firing a bullet to help with the gathering of samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. Tonight, a Japanese spacecraft completed a touchdown on the surface of an asteroid, where it fired a projectile at the rock\u2019s surface rock. A successful mission could help advance understanding of how our planet formed in the early solar system.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Lands on Ryugu Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3833",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/ryugu-asteroid-hayabusa2.html",
        "text": "The probe ascended from the space rock after firing a bullet to help with the gathering of samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. The probe ascended from the space rock after firing a bullet to help with the gathering of samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. Tonight, a Japanese spacecraft completed a touchdown on the surface of an asteroid, where it fired a projectile at the rock\u2019s surface rock. A successful mission could help advance understanding of how our planet formed in the early solar system.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hazzaa al-Mansoori, First U.A.E. Astronaut, Launches to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3834",
        "date": "2019-09-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/science/emirati-astronaut-uae-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program. The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program. The United Arab Emirates has sent its first astronaut to space. That is a step in a budding, ambitious space program for an oil-rich country the size of Maine along the southern side of the Persian Gulf. Next year, it plans to send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, and its leaders talk of colonizing the red planet a century from now.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hazzaa al-Mansoori, First U.A.E. Astronaut, Launches to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3835",
        "date": "2019-09-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/science/emirati-astronaut-uae-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program. The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program. The United Arab Emirates has sent its first astronaut to space. That is a step in a budding, ambitious space program for an oil-rich country the size of Maine along the southern side of the Persian Gulf. Next year, it plans to send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, and its leaders talk of colonizing the red planet a century from now.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hazzaa al-Mansoori, First U.A.E. Astronaut, Launches to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3836",
        "date": "2019-09-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/science/emirati-astronaut-uae-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program. The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program. The United Arab Emirates has sent its first astronaut to space. That is a step in a budding, ambitious space program for an oil-rich country the size of Maine along the southern side of the Persian Gulf. Next year, it plans to send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, and its leaders talk of colonizing the red planet a century from now.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Newly Named NASA Spacecraft Will Aim Straight for the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3837",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/science/nasa-parker-solar-probe-sun.html",
        "text": "The Parker Solar Probe, named in honor of Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind, is to launch in 2018 and study the sun up close. The Parker Solar Probe, named in honor of Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind, is to launch in 2018 and study the sun up close. Last week, NASA teased that it would have an announcement about next year\u2019s mission to send a spacecraft into the outer atmosphere of the sun. Commenters on Twitter joked that the space agency might be sending humans there.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Newly Named NASA Spacecraft Will Aim Straight for the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3838",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/science/nasa-parker-solar-probe-sun.html",
        "text": "The Parker Solar Probe, named in honor of Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind, is to launch in 2018 and study the sun up close. The Parker Solar Probe, named in honor of Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind, is to launch in 2018 and study the sun up close. Last week, NASA teased that it would have an announcement about next year\u2019s mission to send a spacecraft into the outer atmosphere of the sun. Commenters on Twitter joked that the space agency might be sending humans there.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Newly Named NASA Spacecraft Will Aim Straight for the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3839",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/science/nasa-parker-solar-probe-sun.html",
        "text": "The Parker Solar Probe, named in honor of Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind, is to launch in 2018 and study the sun up close. The Parker Solar Probe, named in honor of Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind, is to launch in 2018 and study the sun up close. Last week, NASA teased that it would have an announcement about next year\u2019s mission to send a spacecraft into the outer atmosphere of the sun. Commenters on Twitter joked that the space agency might be sending humans there.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bye-Bye, Bennu: NASA Heads Back to Earth With Asteroid Stash in Tow (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3840",
        "date": "2021-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/science/nasa-osiris-rex-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX mission will spend two years cruising home with space rock samples that could unlock secrets of the early solar system. The OSIRIS-REX mission will spend two years cruising home with space rock samples that could unlock secrets of the early solar system. After more than two years of sightseeing at an asteroid, a NASA spacecraft is now heading home. Scientists cannot wait to get their hands on the souvenirs it is bringing back.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bye-Bye, Bennu: NASA Heads Back to Earth With Asteroid Stash in Tow (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3841",
        "date": "2021-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/science/nasa-osiris-rex-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX mission will spend two years cruising home with space rock samples that could unlock secrets of the early solar system. The OSIRIS-REX mission will spend two years cruising home with space rock samples that could unlock secrets of the early solar system. After more than two years of sightseeing at an asteroid, a NASA spacecraft is now heading home. Scientists cannot wait to get their hands on the souvenirs it is bringing back.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bye-Bye, Bennu: NASA Heads Back to Earth With Asteroid Stash in Tow (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3842",
        "date": "2021-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/science/nasa-osiris-rex-asteroid.html",
        "text": "The OSIRIS-REX mission will spend two years cruising home with space rock samples that could unlock secrets of the early solar system. The OSIRIS-REX mission will spend two years cruising home with space rock samples that could unlock secrets of the early solar system. After more than two years of sightseeing at an asteroid, a NASA spacecraft is now heading home. Scientists cannot wait to get their hands on the souvenirs it is bringing back.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars InSight: NASA\u2019s Journey Into the Red Planet\u2019s Deepest Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3843",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/science/mars-insight-launch.html",
        "text": "The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. NASA\u2019s Mars InSight spacecraft, scheduled to launch on Saturday, is headed to one of the most boring places on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars InSight: NASA\u2019s Journey Into the Red Planet\u2019s Deepest Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3844",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/science/mars-insight-launch.html",
        "text": "The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. NASA\u2019s Mars InSight spacecraft, scheduled to launch on Saturday, is headed to one of the most boring places on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars InSight: NASA\u2019s Journey Into the Red Planet\u2019s Deepest Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3845",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/science/mars-insight-launch.html",
        "text": "The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. NASA\u2019s Mars InSight spacecraft, scheduled to launch on Saturday, is headed to one of the most boring places on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars InSight: NASA\u2019s Journey Into the Red Planet\u2019s Deepest Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3846",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/science/mars-insight-launch.html",
        "text": "The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. The newest mission to Mars is to launch on Saturday morning. It will search for marsquakes and try to produce a map of the planet\u2019s insides. NASA\u2019s Mars InSight spacecraft, scheduled to launch on Saturday, is headed to one of the most boring places on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Lands in New Mexico After Clock Error Prompts Early Return (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3847",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/science/boeing-starliner-landing.html",
        "text": "The new ride to orbit built for NASA and its astronauts returned to Earth after problems during its first trip to space on Friday. The new ride to orbit built for NASA and its astronauts returned to Earth after problems during its first trip to space on Friday. Boeing\u2019s new spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, safely parachuted to Earth on Sunday, landing atop inflated airbags before dawn at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Lands in New Mexico After Clock Error Prompts Early Return (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3848",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/science/boeing-starliner-landing.html",
        "text": "The new ride to orbit built for NASA and its astronauts returned to Earth after problems during its first trip to space on Friday. The new ride to orbit built for NASA and its astronauts returned to Earth after problems during its first trip to space on Friday. Boeing\u2019s new spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, safely parachuted to Earth on Sunday, landing atop inflated airbags before dawn at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Lands in New Mexico After Clock Error Prompts Early Return (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3849",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/science/boeing-starliner-landing.html",
        "text": "The new ride to orbit built for NASA and its astronauts returned to Earth after problems during its first trip to space on Friday. The new ride to orbit built for NASA and its astronauts returned to Earth after problems during its first trip to space on Friday. Boeing\u2019s new spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, safely parachuted to Earth on Sunday, landing atop inflated airbags before dawn at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft Takes First Picture of Distant Rock It Will Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3850",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/science/nasa-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The mission\u2019s scientists were pleasantly surprised that the camera aboard the robotic probe could see the Kuiper belt object, known as 2014 MU69, so soon and from so far. The mission\u2019s scientists were pleasantly surprised that the camera aboard the robotic probe could see the Kuiper belt object, known as 2014 MU69, so soon and from so far. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft still has 100 million miles to go, but it has taken its first snapshot of the space rock that will be its date for New Year\u2019s Day 2019.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft Takes First Picture of Distant Rock It Will Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3851",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/science/nasa-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The mission\u2019s scientists were pleasantly surprised that the camera aboard the robotic probe could see the Kuiper belt object, known as 2014 MU69, so soon and from so far. The mission\u2019s scientists were pleasantly surprised that the camera aboard the robotic probe could see the Kuiper belt object, known as 2014 MU69, so soon and from so far. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft still has 100 million miles to go, but it has taken its first snapshot of the space rock that will be its date for New Year\u2019s Day 2019.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft Takes First Picture of Distant Rock It Will Visit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3852",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/science/nasa-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "The mission\u2019s scientists were pleasantly surprised that the camera aboard the robotic probe could see the Kuiper belt object, known as 2014 MU69, so soon and from so far. The mission\u2019s scientists were pleasantly surprised that the camera aboard the robotic probe could see the Kuiper belt object, known as 2014 MU69, so soon and from so far. NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft still has 100 million miles to go, but it has taken its first snapshot of the space rock that will be its date for New Year\u2019s Day 2019.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Chang\u2019e-5 Spacecraft on Moon to Gather Lunar Rocks and Soil (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3853",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/china-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The mission will now collect samples, aiming to return with them to Earth by mid-December. The mission will now collect samples, aiming to return with them to Earth by mid-December. China has landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon, Xinhua, the official statenews agency reported on Tuesday. The probe will spend two days gathering rocks and dirt from the lunar surface, with the goal of returning the first cache of moon samples to Earth since 1976.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Chang\u2019e-5 Spacecraft on Moon to Gather Lunar Rocks and Soil (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3854",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/china-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The mission will now collect samples, aiming to return with them to Earth by mid-December. The mission will now collect samples, aiming to return with them to Earth by mid-December. China has landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon, Xinhua, the official statenews agency reported on Tuesday. The probe will spend two days gathering rocks and dirt from the lunar surface, with the goal of returning the first cache of moon samples to Earth since 1976.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands Chang\u2019e-5 Spacecraft on Moon to Gather Lunar Rocks and Soil (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3855",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/china-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The mission will now collect samples, aiming to return with them to Earth by mid-December. The mission will now collect samples, aiming to return with them to Earth by mid-December. China has landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon, Xinhua, the official statenews agency reported on Tuesday. The probe will spend two days gathering rocks and dirt from the lunar surface, with the goal of returning the first cache of moon samples to Earth since 1976.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches and Trips to the Moon We\u2019re Looking Forward To in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3856",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/science/2018-spacex-moon.html",
        "text": "The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. If you love space and astronomy, 2018 will be an exciting year. NASA has announced windows of time for sending spacecraft to Mars and the sun. Japanese and American probes already in space are set to enter orbit around two near-Earth asteroids. And a variety of eclipses and meteor showers offer ample opportunities for skygazing.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches and Trips to the Moon We\u2019re Looking Forward To in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3857",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/science/2018-spacex-moon.html",
        "text": "The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. If you love space and astronomy, 2018 will be an exciting year. NASA has announced windows of time for sending spacecraft to Mars and the sun. Japanese and American probes already in space are set to enter orbit around two near-Earth asteroids. And a variety of eclipses and meteor showers offer ample opportunities for skygazing.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches and Trips to the Moon We\u2019re Looking Forward To in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3858",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/science/2018-spacex-moon.html",
        "text": "The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. If you love space and astronomy, 2018 will be an exciting year. NASA has announced windows of time for sending spacecraft to Mars and the sun. Japanese and American probes already in space are set to enter orbit around two near-Earth asteroids. And a variety of eclipses and meteor showers offer ample opportunities for skygazing.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches and Trips to the Moon We\u2019re Looking Forward To in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3859",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/science/2018-spacex-moon.html",
        "text": "The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. The launch of a new rocket by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and moon landings by India, China and private companies could occur this year, but no one is sure when. If you love space and astronomy, 2018 will be an exciting year. NASA has announced windows of time for sending spacecraft to Mars and the sun. Japanese and American probes already in space are set to enter orbit around two near-Earth asteroids. And a variety of eclipses and meteor showers offer ample opportunities for skygazing.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon Satellites Add to Astronomers\u2019 Worries About the Night Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3860",
        "date": "2020-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/science/amazon-project-kuiper.html",
        "text": "The F.C.C. approved the company\u2019s 3,236-satellite constellation, which aims to provide high-speed internet service around the world. The F.C.C. approved the company\u2019s 3,236-satellite constellation, which aims to provide high-speed internet service around the world. Welcome to the age of the satellite megaconstellation. Within the next few years, vast networks, containing hundreds or even thousands of spacecraft, could reshape the future of Earth\u2019s orbital environment.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon Satellites Add to Astronomers\u2019 Worries About the Night Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3861",
        "date": "2020-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/science/amazon-project-kuiper.html",
        "text": "The F.C.C. approved the company\u2019s 3,236-satellite constellation, which aims to provide high-speed internet service around the world. The F.C.C. approved the company\u2019s 3,236-satellite constellation, which aims to provide high-speed internet service around the world. Welcome to the age of the satellite megaconstellation. Within the next few years, vast networks, containing hundreds or even thousands of spacecraft, could reshape the future of Earth\u2019s orbital environment.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers NASA\u2019s Crew-3 Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3862",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/spacex-nasa-docking.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. Four astronauts boarded the International Space Station on Thursday after a daylong trip inside a spacecraft built by Elon Musk\u2019s space company, SpaceX. The quartet pushed to more than 600 the number of people to have flown to space, a further milestone in 2021, the busiest year for human spaceflight in over a decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers NASA\u2019s Crew-3 Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "3863",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/spacex-nasa-docking.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. Four astronauts boarded the International Space Station on Thursday after a daylong trip inside a spacecraft built by Elon Musk\u2019s space company, SpaceX. The quartet pushed to more than 600 the number of people to have flown to space, a further milestone in 2021, the busiest year for human spaceflight in over a decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers NASA\u2019s Crew-3 Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3864",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/spacex-nasa-docking.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. Four astronauts boarded the International Space Station on Thursday after a daylong trip inside a spacecraft built by Elon Musk\u2019s space company, SpaceX. The quartet pushed to more than 600 the number of people to have flown to space, a further milestone in 2021, the busiest year for human spaceflight in over a decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delivers NASA\u2019s Crew-3 Astronauts to Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3865",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/spacex-nasa-docking.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance docked on Thursday with the orbital outpost, where the four crewmates will stay until April 2022. Four astronauts boarded the International Space Station on Thursday after a daylong trip inside a spacecraft built by Elon Musk\u2019s space company, SpaceX. The quartet pushed to more than 600 the number of people to have flown to space, a further milestone in 2021, the busiest year for human spaceflight in over a decade.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA Launch Is First Step to Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3866",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/science/spacex-crew-dragon-launch.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon capsule carried no crew, but it sets up a near future with astronauts traveling to orbit from the United States again. The Crew Dragon capsule carried no crew, but it sets up a near future with astronauts traveling to orbit from the United States again. The first American spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts since the retirement of the space shuttles launched early Saturday. A successful mission could put NASA and the United States on the cusp of a renewed era of human spaceflight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA Launch Is First Step to Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3867",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/science/spacex-crew-dragon-launch.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon capsule carried no crew, but it sets up a near future with astronauts traveling to orbit from the United States again. The Crew Dragon capsule carried no crew, but it sets up a near future with astronauts traveling to orbit from the United States again. The first American spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts since the retirement of the space shuttles launched early Saturday. A successful mission could put NASA and the United States on the cusp of a renewed era of human spaceflight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA Launch Is First Step to Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3868",
        "date": "2019-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/science/spacex-crew-dragon-launch.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon capsule carried no crew, but it sets up a near future with astronauts traveling to orbit from the United States again. The Crew Dragon capsule carried no crew, but it sets up a near future with astronauts traveling to orbit from the United States again. The first American spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts since the retirement of the space shuttles launched early Saturday. A successful mission could put NASA and the United States on the cusp of a renewed era of human spaceflight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Loses Contact With Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander During Its Descent (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3869",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landing-chandrayaan-2.html",
        "text": "The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India\u2019s attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon\u2019s South Pole on Saturday appeared to end in failure.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman, Kenneth Chang, Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Loses Contact With Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander During Its Descent (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3870",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landing-chandrayaan-2.html",
        "text": "The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India\u2019s attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon\u2019s South Pole on Saturday appeared to end in failure.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman, Kenneth Chang, Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Loses Contact With Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander During Its Descent (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3871",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landing-chandrayaan-2.html",
        "text": "The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India\u2019s attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon\u2019s South Pole on Saturday appeared to end in failure.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman, Kenneth Chang, Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Loses Contact With Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander During Its Descent (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3872",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/india-moon-landing-chandrayaan-2.html",
        "text": "The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. The country will probably have to wait for a future mission to join the elite club of nations that have landed on the moon. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India\u2019s attempt to land a robotic spacecraft near the moon\u2019s South Pole on Saturday appeared to end in failure.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman, Kenneth Chang, Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Embarks on Mission to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3873",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/chandrayaan-2-india-moon.html",
        "text": "The country hopes to become the fourth to land on the lunar surface with the robotic probe. The country hopes to become the fourth to land on the lunar surface with the robotic probe. Only three nations have successfully landed spacecraft on the moon \u2014 the United States and the Soviet Union during the space race of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently, China. (An Israeli nonprofit attempted to send a lander named Beresheet to the moon earlier this year, but it crashed.)",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Embarks on Mission to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3874",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/chandrayaan-2-india-moon.html",
        "text": "The country hopes to become the fourth to land on the lunar surface with the robotic probe. The country hopes to become the fourth to land on the lunar surface with the robotic probe. Only three nations have successfully landed spacecraft on the moon \u2014 the United States and the Soviet Union during the space race of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently, China. (An Israeli nonprofit attempted to send a lander named Beresheet to the moon earlier this year, but it crashed.)",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab\u2019s Modest Launch Is Giant Leap for Small Rocket Business (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3875",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/science/rocket-lab-launch.html",
        "text": "The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. A small rocket from a little-known company lifted off Sunday from the east coast of New Zealand, carrying a clutch of tiny satellites. That modest event \u2014 the first commercial launch by a U.S.-New Zealand company known as Rocket Lab \u2014 could mark the beginning of a new era in the space business, where countless small rockets pop off from spaceports around the world. This miniaturization of rockets and spacecraft places outer space within reach of a broader swath of the economy.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab\u2019s Modest Launch Is Giant Leap for Small Rocket Business (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3876",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/science/rocket-lab-launch.html",
        "text": "The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. A small rocket from a little-known company lifted off Sunday from the east coast of New Zealand, carrying a clutch of tiny satellites. That modest event \u2014 the first commercial launch by a U.S.-New Zealand company known as Rocket Lab \u2014 could mark the beginning of a new era in the space business, where countless small rockets pop off from spaceports around the world. This miniaturization of rockets and spacecraft places outer space within reach of a broader swath of the economy.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab\u2019s Modest Launch Is Giant Leap for Small Rocket Business (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3877",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/science/rocket-lab-launch.html",
        "text": "The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. A small rocket from a little-known company lifted off Sunday from the east coast of New Zealand, carrying a clutch of tiny satellites. That modest event \u2014 the first commercial launch by a U.S.-New Zealand company known as Rocket Lab \u2014 could mark the beginning of a new era in the space business, where countless small rockets pop off from spaceports around the world. This miniaturization of rockets and spacecraft places outer space within reach of a broader swath of the economy.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab\u2019s Modest Launch Is Giant Leap for Small Rocket Business (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3878",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/science/rocket-lab-launch.html",
        "text": "The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. The company\u2019s Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business. A small rocket from a little-known company lifted off Sunday from the east coast of New Zealand, carrying a clutch of tiny satellites. That modest event \u2014 the first commercial launch by a U.S.-New Zealand company known as Rocket Lab \u2014 could mark the beginning of a new era in the space business, where countless small rockets pop off from spaceports around the world. This miniaturization of rockets and spacecraft places outer space within reach of a broader swath of the economy.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Express Sets Its Sights on Deliveries to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3879",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/moon-express-landers.html",
        "text": "The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. A Florida start-up that is striving to become the first private company to put a spacecraft on the moon revealed an ambitious road map on Wednesday for a regular delivery service to send payloads there and elsewhere in the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Express Sets Its Sights on Deliveries to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3880",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/moon-express-landers.html",
        "text": "The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. A Florida start-up that is striving to become the first private company to put a spacecraft on the moon revealed an ambitious road map on Wednesday for a regular delivery service to send payloads there and elsewhere in the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Express Sets Its Sights on Deliveries to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3881",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/moon-express-landers.html",
        "text": "The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. A Florida start-up that is striving to become the first private company to put a spacecraft on the moon revealed an ambitious road map on Wednesday for a regular delivery service to send payloads there and elsewhere in the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Express Sets Its Sights on Deliveries to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3882",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/moon-express-landers.html",
        "text": "The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. The company, Moon Express, is aiming to win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition and become a payload delivery company. A Florida start-up that is striving to become the first private company to put a spacecraft on the moon revealed an ambitious road map on Wednesday for a regular delivery service to send payloads there and elsewhere in the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Rover Finds Layers of Surprise Under Moon\u2019s Far Side (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3883",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/china-moon-far-side.html",
        "text": "The Chang\u2019e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. The Chang\u2019e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. China\u2019s robotic Chang\u2019e-4 spacecraft did something last year that had never been done before: It landed on the moon\u2019s far side, and Yutu-2, a small rover it was carrying, began trundling through a crater there. One of the rover\u2019s instruments, a ground-penetrating radar, is now revealing what lies beneath.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Rover Finds Layers of Surprise Under Moon\u2019s Far Side (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3884",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/china-moon-far-side.html",
        "text": "The Chang\u2019e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. The Chang\u2019e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. China\u2019s robotic Chang\u2019e-4 spacecraft did something last year that had never been done before: It landed on the moon\u2019s far side, and Yutu-2, a small rover it was carrying, began trundling through a crater there. One of the rover\u2019s instruments, a ground-penetrating radar, is now revealing what lies beneath.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Rover Finds Layers of Surprise Under Moon\u2019s Far Side (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3885",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/china-moon-far-side.html",
        "text": "The Chang\u2019e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. The Chang\u2019e-4 mission, the first to land on the lunar far side, is demonstrating the promise and peril of using ground-penetrating radar in planetary science. China\u2019s robotic Chang\u2019e-4 spacecraft did something last year that had never been done before: It landed on the moon\u2019s far side, and Yutu-2, a small rover it was carrying, began trundling through a crater there. One of the rover\u2019s instruments, a ground-penetrating radar, is now revealing what lies beneath.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Capsule Splashes Down After Return Trip to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3886",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/science/spacex-dragon-splashdown.html",
        "text": "The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The new American spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts and built by SpaceX gently splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday morning, ending a successful demonstration trip.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Capsule Splashes Down After Return Trip to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3887",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/science/spacex-dragon-splashdown.html",
        "text": "The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The new American spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts and built by SpaceX gently splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday morning, ending a successful demonstration trip.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Capsule Splashes Down After Return Trip to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3888",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/science/spacex-dragon-splashdown.html",
        "text": "The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The new American spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts and built by SpaceX gently splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday morning, ending a successful demonstration trip.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Capsule Splashes Down After Return Trip to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3889",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/science/spacex-dragon-splashdown.html",
        "text": "The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The capsule parachuted into the Atlantic Ocean hours after leaving the space station, completing its first successful uncrewed trip to and from orbit. The new American spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts and built by SpaceX gently splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday morning, ending a successful demonstration trip.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perseverance\u2019s Pictures From Mars Show NASA Rover\u2019s New Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3890",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/science/mars-nasa-landing-pictures.html",
        "text": "Scientists working on the mission are eagerly scrutinizing the first images sent back to Earth by the robotic explorer. Scientists working on the mission are eagerly scrutinizing the first images sent back to Earth by the robotic explorer. The newest Martian, a robot named Perseverance, is alive and well after its first day and night on the red planet, NASA scientists and engineers said on Friday. Members of the triumphant team managing the spacecraft were exhilarated as they shared pictures captured by its cameras during landing and after the rover reached the surface.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perseverance\u2019s Pictures From Mars Show NASA Rover\u2019s New Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3891",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/science/mars-nasa-landing-pictures.html",
        "text": "Scientists working on the mission are eagerly scrutinizing the first images sent back to Earth by the robotic explorer. Scientists working on the mission are eagerly scrutinizing the first images sent back to Earth by the robotic explorer. The newest Martian, a robot named Perseverance, is alive and well after its first day and night on the red planet, NASA scientists and engineers said on Friday. Members of the triumphant team managing the spacecraft were exhilarated as they shared pictures captured by its cameras during landing and after the rover reached the surface.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perseverance\u2019s Pictures From Mars Show NASA Rover\u2019s New Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3892",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/science/mars-nasa-landing-pictures.html",
        "text": "Scientists working on the mission are eagerly scrutinizing the first images sent back to Earth by the robotic explorer. Scientists working on the mission are eagerly scrutinizing the first images sent back to Earth by the robotic explorer. The newest Martian, a robot named Perseverance, is alive and well after its first day and night on the red planet, NASA scientists and engineers said on Friday. Members of the triumphant team managing the spacecraft were exhilarated as they shared pictures captured by its cameras during landing and after the rover reached the surface.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Lacks Plate Tectonics. But It Has Something Much More Quirky. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3893",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/science/venus-tectonic-activity.html",
        "text": "Scientists say giant slices of rock may move across the surface of Earth\u2019s closest neighbor like pack ice floating in the sea. Scientists say giant slices of rock may move across the surface of Earth\u2019s closest neighbor like pack ice floating in the sea. Within the next decade or so, Venus will be visited by a fleet of spacecraft. This grand tour of the second planet, the likes of which hasn\u2019t been seen since the Cold War, is being driven by the quest to solve a profound planetary puzzle. Earth and Venus are the same size, are right next to each other and are made of the same star stuff. But Earth became an oasis while Venus became an acid-flecked inferno. Why?",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Lacks Plate Tectonics. But It Has Something Much More Quirky. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3894",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/science/venus-tectonic-activity.html",
        "text": "Scientists say giant slices of rock may move across the surface of Earth\u2019s closest neighbor like pack ice floating in the sea. Scientists say giant slices of rock may move across the surface of Earth\u2019s closest neighbor like pack ice floating in the sea. Within the next decade or so, Venus will be visited by a fleet of spacecraft. This grand tour of the second planet, the likes of which hasn\u2019t been seen since the Cold War, is being driven by the quest to solve a profound planetary puzzle. Earth and Venus are the same size, are right next to each other and are made of the same star stuff. But Earth became an oasis while Venus became an acid-flecked inferno. Why?",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venus Lacks Plate Tectonics. But It Has Something Much More Quirky. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3895",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/science/venus-tectonic-activity.html",
        "text": "Scientists say giant slices of rock may move across the surface of Earth\u2019s closest neighbor like pack ice floating in the sea. Scientists say giant slices of rock may move across the surface of Earth\u2019s closest neighbor like pack ice floating in the sea. Within the next decade or so, Venus will be visited by a fleet of spacecraft. This grand tour of the second planet, the likes of which hasn\u2019t been seen since the Cold War, is being driven by the quest to solve a profound planetary puzzle. Earth and Venus are the same size, are right next to each other and are made of the same star stuff. But Earth became an oasis while Venus became an acid-flecked inferno. Why?",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Reports Progress in Ultra-Secure Satellite Transmission (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3896",
        "date": "2020-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/science/quantum-satellites-china-spying.html",
        "text": "Researchers enlisted quantum physics to send a \u201csecret key\u201d for encrypting and decrypting messages between two stations 700 miles apart. Researchers enlisted quantum physics to send a \u201csecret key\u201d for encrypting and decrypting messages between two stations 700 miles apart. The world of artificial satellites, silent in the void of space, might seem pacific. In fact it\u2019s a high-flying battlefield rife with jamming, snooping, blinding, spoofing, hacking and hostility among the planet\u2019s growing array of spacecraft and space powers. Now, Chinese scientists report new progress in building what appears to be the first unbreakable information link between an orbiting craft and its terrestrial controllers, raising the odds that Beijing may one day possess a super-secure global communications network.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Reports Progress in Ultra-Secure Satellite Transmission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3897",
        "date": "2020-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/science/quantum-satellites-china-spying.html",
        "text": "Researchers enlisted quantum physics to send a \u201csecret key\u201d for encrypting and decrypting messages between two stations 700 miles apart. Researchers enlisted quantum physics to send a \u201csecret key\u201d for encrypting and decrypting messages between two stations 700 miles apart. The world of artificial satellites, silent in the void of space, might seem pacific. In fact it\u2019s a high-flying battlefield rife with jamming, snooping, blinding, spoofing, hacking and hostility among the planet\u2019s growing array of spacecraft and space powers. Now, Chinese scientists report new progress in building what appears to be the first unbreakable information link between an orbiting craft and its terrestrial controllers, raising the odds that Beijing may one day possess a super-secure global communications network.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Is Delayed, Again, Possibly Until Next Year (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3898",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/science/starliner-boeing-nasa.html",
        "text": "Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft has been recalled to the factory because of sticky valves.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Is Delayed, Again, Possibly Until Next Year (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3899",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/science/starliner-boeing-nasa.html",
        "text": "Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft has been recalled to the factory because of sticky valves.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Is Delayed, Again, Possibly Until Next Year (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3900",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/science/starliner-boeing-nasa.html",
        "text": "Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft has been recalled to the factory because of sticky valves.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launch Is Delayed, Again, Possibly Until Next Year (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3901",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/science/starliner-boeing-nasa.html",
        "text": "Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Problems with the capsule\u2019s propulsion system require more troubleshooting, a setback for a program to carry NASA astronauts to the space station. Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft has been recalled to the factory because of sticky valves.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael Collins, \u2018Third Man\u2019 of the Moon Landing, Dies at 90 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3902",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/science/michael-collins-third-man-of-the-moon-landing-dies-at-90.html",
        "text": "Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia in orbit 60 miles above the moon while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Col. Buzz Aldrin, became the first men to walk on the lunar surface, died on Wednesday at a hospice facility in Naples, Fla. He was 90.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael Collins, \u2018Third Man\u2019 of the Moon Landing, Dies at 90 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3903",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/science/michael-collins-third-man-of-the-moon-landing-dies-at-90.html",
        "text": "Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia in orbit 60 miles above the moon while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Col. Buzz Aldrin, became the first men to walk on the lunar surface, died on Wednesday at a hospice facility in Naples, Fla. He was 90.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael Collins, \u2018Third Man\u2019 of the Moon Landing, Dies at 90 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3904",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/science/michael-collins-third-man-of-the-moon-landing-dies-at-90.html",
        "text": "Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia in orbit 60 miles above the moon while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Col. Buzz Aldrin, became the first men to walk on the lunar surface, died on Wednesday at a hospice facility in Naples, Fla. He was 90.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Michael Collins, \u2018Third Man\u2019 of the Moon Landing, Dies at 90 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3905",
        "date": "2021-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/science/michael-collins-third-man-of-the-moon-landing-dies-at-90.html",
        "text": "Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Orbiting dozens of miles above the lunar surface, he kept solitary watch of the Apollo command module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked for the moon. Michael Collins, who piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft Columbia in orbit 60 miles above the moon while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Col. Buzz Aldrin, became the first men to walk on the lunar surface, died on Wednesday at a hospice facility in Naples, Fla. He was 90.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons Takes Photos of Ultima Thule, 4 Billion Miles Away (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3906",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/science/new-horizons-ultima-thule.html",
        "text": "Now scientists await a bounty of new data about the small, mysterious icy body, the most distant object ever visited. Now scientists await a bounty of new data about the small, mysterious icy body, the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Thirty-three minutes into the new year, scientists, engineers and well-wishers here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory celebrated the moment that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to a small, icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons Takes Photos of Ultima Thule, 4 Billion Miles Away (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3907",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/science/new-horizons-ultima-thule.html",
        "text": "Now scientists await a bounty of new data about the small, mysterious icy body, the most distant object ever visited. Now scientists await a bounty of new data about the small, mysterious icy body, the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Thirty-three minutes into the new year, scientists, engineers and well-wishers here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory celebrated the moment that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to a small, icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Horizons Takes Photos of Ultima Thule, 4 Billion Miles Away (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3908",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/science/new-horizons-ultima-thule.html",
        "text": "Now scientists await a bounty of new data about the small, mysterious icy body, the most distant object ever visited. Now scientists await a bounty of new data about the small, mysterious icy body, the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Thirty-three minutes into the new year, scientists, engineers and well-wishers here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory celebrated the moment that NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to a small, icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA to Test Launch Crew Dragon, a New Ride to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3909",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/science/spacex-launch-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. The space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop on a runway at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, 2011, its last flight. That ended an era of American spacecraft carrying astronauts to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA to Test Launch Crew Dragon, a New Ride to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3910",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/science/spacex-launch-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. The space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop on a runway at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, 2011, its last flight. That ended an era of American spacecraft carrying astronauts to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA to Test Launch Crew Dragon, a New Ride to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3911",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/science/spacex-launch-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. The space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop on a runway at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, 2011, its last flight. That ended an era of American spacecraft carrying astronauts to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA to Test Launch Crew Dragon, a New Ride to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3912",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/science/spacex-launch-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. The space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop on a runway at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, 2011, its last flight. That ended an era of American spacecraft carrying astronauts to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA to Test Launch Crew Dragon, a New Ride to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3913",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/science/spacex-launch-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year. The space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop on a runway at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, 2011, its last flight. That ended an era of American spacecraft carrying astronauts to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chooses Private Companies for Future Moon Landings (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3914",
        "date": "2018-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/science/nasa-moon-landers.html",
        "text": "Nine companies will vie for a share of more than $2 billion dollars to build small landers to carry experimental payloads to the lunar surface. Nine companies will vie for a share of more than $2 billion dollars to build small landers to carry experimental payloads to the lunar surface. Astronauts may one day set foot on the moon again, and small robotic spacecraft will be there waiting for them. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chooses Private Companies for Future Moon Landings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3915",
        "date": "2018-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/science/nasa-moon-landers.html",
        "text": "Nine companies will vie for a share of more than $2 billion dollars to build small landers to carry experimental payloads to the lunar surface. Nine companies will vie for a share of more than $2 billion dollars to build small landers to carry experimental payloads to the lunar surface. Astronauts may one day set foot on the moon again, and small robotic spacecraft will be there waiting for them. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chooses Private Companies for Future Moon Landings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3916",
        "date": "2018-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/science/nasa-moon-landers.html",
        "text": "Nine companies will vie for a share of more than $2 billion dollars to build small landers to carry experimental payloads to the lunar surface. Nine companies will vie for a share of more than $2 billion dollars to build small landers to carry experimental payloads to the lunar surface. Astronauts may one day set foot on the moon again, and small robotic spacecraft will be there waiting for them. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel\u2019s Beresheet Lunar Lander Moves Into Moon Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3917",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/beresheet-israel-moon-orbit.html",
        "text": "Next week, the robotic probe built by the nonprofit SpaceIL is to attempt to land on the lunar surface. Next week, the robotic probe built by the nonprofit SpaceIL is to attempt to land on the lunar surface. Beresheet, a small Israeli spacecraft with the giant ambition of landing on the lunar surface, has completed maneuvers to go into orbit around the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel\u2019s Beresheet Lunar Lander Moves Into Moon Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3918",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/beresheet-israel-moon-orbit.html",
        "text": "Next week, the robotic probe built by the nonprofit SpaceIL is to attempt to land on the lunar surface. Next week, the robotic probe built by the nonprofit SpaceIL is to attempt to land on the lunar surface. Beresheet, a small Israeli spacecraft with the giant ambition of landing on the lunar surface, has completed maneuvers to go into orbit around the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel\u2019s Beresheet Lunar Lander Moves Into Moon Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3919",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/beresheet-israel-moon-orbit.html",
        "text": "Next week, the robotic probe built by the nonprofit SpaceIL is to attempt to land on the lunar surface. Next week, the robotic probe built by the nonprofit SpaceIL is to attempt to land on the lunar surface. Beresheet, a small Israeli spacecraft with the giant ambition of landing on the lunar surface, has completed maneuvers to go into orbit around the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Spitzer Space Telescope Ends 16-Year Mission of Discovery (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3920",
        "date": "2020-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/science/nasa-spitzer-space-telescope.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Spitzer space telescope spotted 7 Earth-size worlds orbiting another star, a new ring around Saturn and many more wonders in space. NASA\u2019s Spitzer space telescope spotted 7 Earth-size worlds orbiting another star, a new ring around Saturn and many more wonders in space. On Thursday, NASA\u2019s Spitzer space telescope  signed off and went silent. But even during its final week of operation, the spacecraft was making one-of-a-kind observations.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Spitzer Space Telescope Ends 16-Year Mission of Discovery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3921",
        "date": "2020-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/science/nasa-spitzer-space-telescope.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Spitzer space telescope spotted 7 Earth-size worlds orbiting another star, a new ring around Saturn and many more wonders in space. NASA\u2019s Spitzer space telescope spotted 7 Earth-size worlds orbiting another star, a new ring around Saturn and many more wonders in space. On Thursday, NASA\u2019s Spitzer space telescope  signed off and went silent. But even during its final week of operation, the spacecraft was making one-of-a-kind observations.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth to Voyager 2: After a Year in the Darkness, We Can Talk to You Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3922",
        "date": "2021-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/science/nasa-voyager-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. In the nearly 44 years since NASA launched Voyager 2, the spacecraft has gone beyond the frontiers of human exploration by visiting Uranus, Neptune and, eventually, interstellar space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth to Voyager 2: After a Year in the Darkness, We Can Talk to You Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3923",
        "date": "2021-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/science/nasa-voyager-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. In the nearly 44 years since NASA launched Voyager 2, the spacecraft has gone beyond the frontiers of human exploration by visiting Uranus, Neptune and, eventually, interstellar space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth to Voyager 2: After a Year in the Darkness, We Can Talk to You Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3924",
        "date": "2021-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/science/nasa-voyager-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. In the nearly 44 years since NASA launched Voyager 2, the spacecraft has gone beyond the frontiers of human exploration by visiting Uranus, Neptune and, eventually, interstellar space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth to Voyager 2: After a Year in the Darkness, We Can Talk to You Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3925",
        "date": "2021-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/science/nasa-voyager-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. NASA\u2019s sole means of sending commands to the distant space probe, launched 44 years ago, is being restored on Friday. In the nearly 44 years since NASA launched Voyager 2, the spacecraft has gone beyond the frontiers of human exploration by visiting Uranus, Neptune and, eventually, interstellar space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mushballs and a Great Blue Spot: What Lies Beneath Jupiter\u2019s Pretty Clouds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3926",
        "date": "2021-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/jupiter-juno-nasa-ganymede.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Juno probe is beginning an extended mission that may not have been possible if it hadn\u2019t experienced engine trouble when it first arrived at the giant planet. NASA\u2019s Juno probe is beginning an extended mission that may not have been possible if it hadn\u2019t experienced engine trouble when it first arrived at the giant planet. For something that was to have been done and thrown away three years ago, NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft has a busy schedule ahead exploring Jupiter and its big moons.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mushballs and a Great Blue Spot: What Lies Beneath Jupiter\u2019s Pretty Clouds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3927",
        "date": "2021-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/science/jupiter-juno-nasa-ganymede.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Juno probe is beginning an extended mission that may not have been possible if it hadn\u2019t experienced engine trouble when it first arrived at the giant planet. NASA\u2019s Juno probe is beginning an extended mission that may not have been possible if it hadn\u2019t experienced engine trouble when it first arrived at the giant planet. For something that was to have been done and thrown away three years ago, NASA\u2019s Juno spacecraft has a busy schedule ahead exploring Jupiter and its big moons.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Mission From United Arab Emirates Embarks on 7-Month Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3928",
        "date": "2020-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/science/emirates-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "Lifting off from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, it is the first of three missions headed to the red planet this summer. Lifting off from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, it is the first of three missions headed to the red planet this summer. You\u2019ll be hearing a lot about Mars in the weeks to come this summer. Three missions are launching toward the red planet, taking advantage of the way Earth and its neighbor get closer every 26 months or so, allowing a relatively short trip between the two worlds. If they launch successfully, the spacecraft will arrive at Mars early next year.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Mission From United Arab Emirates Embarks on 7-Month Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3929",
        "date": "2020-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/science/emirates-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "Lifting off from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, it is the first of three missions headed to the red planet this summer. Lifting off from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, it is the first of three missions headed to the red planet this summer. You\u2019ll be hearing a lot about Mars in the weeks to come this summer. Three missions are launching toward the red planet, taking advantage of the way Earth and its neighbor get closer every 26 months or so, allowing a relatively short trip between the two worlds. If they launch successfully, the spacecraft will arrive at Mars early next year.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Mission From United Arab Emirates Embarks on 7-Month Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3930",
        "date": "2020-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/science/emirates-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "Lifting off from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, it is the first of three missions headed to the red planet this summer. Lifting off from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, it is the first of three missions headed to the red planet this summer. You\u2019ll be hearing a lot about Mars in the weeks to come this summer. Three missions are launching toward the red planet, taking advantage of the way Earth and its neighbor get closer every 26 months or so, allowing a relatively short trip between the two worlds. If they launch successfully, the spacecraft will arrive at Mars early next year.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Flies Toward a Fiery Death on Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3931",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/science/cassini-saturn-nasa.html",
        "text": "Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited Saturn for the last 13 years would weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22 feet high, is somewhat longer and wider than a small moving van tipped on its rear. Bristling with cameras, antennas and other sensors, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated spy robots ever set loose in interplanetary space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Flies Toward a Fiery Death on Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3932",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/science/cassini-saturn-nasa.html",
        "text": "Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited Saturn for the last 13 years would weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22 feet high, is somewhat longer and wider than a small moving van tipped on its rear. Bristling with cameras, antennas and other sensors, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated spy robots ever set loose in interplanetary space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Flies Toward a Fiery Death on Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3933",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/science/cassini-saturn-nasa.html",
        "text": "Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited Saturn for the last 13 years would weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22 feet high, is somewhat longer and wider than a small moving van tipped on its rear. Bristling with cameras, antennas and other sensors, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated spy robots ever set loose in interplanetary space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini Flies Toward a Fiery Death on Saturn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3934",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/science/cassini-saturn-nasa.html",
        "text": "Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. Launched in 1997, the Cassini-Huygens mission has reshaped scientific understanding of the solar system\u2019s most exotic planet and its mysterious moons. The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited Saturn for the last 13 years would weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22 feet high, is somewhat longer and wider than a small moving van tipped on its rear. Bristling with cameras, antennas and other sensors, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated spy robots ever set loose in interplanetary space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Volcanic Eruption on Mars? Nope (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3935",
        "date": "2018-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/science/mars-cloud-volcano-eruption-arsia-mons.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s just a cloud. A very long cloud. It\u2019s just a cloud. A very long cloud. A photograph from a spacecraft orbiting Mars shows a long, white wisp, close to a thousand miles long, spilling out of a giant volcano.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Volcanic Eruption on Mars? Nope (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3936",
        "date": "2018-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/science/mars-cloud-volcano-eruption-arsia-mons.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s just a cloud. A very long cloud. It\u2019s just a cloud. A very long cloud. A photograph from a spacecraft orbiting Mars shows a long, white wisp, close to a thousand miles long, spilling out of a giant volcano.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Volcanic Eruption on Mars? Nope (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3937",
        "date": "2018-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/science/mars-cloud-volcano-eruption-arsia-mons.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s just a cloud. A very long cloud. It\u2019s just a cloud. A very long cloud. A photograph from a spacecraft orbiting Mars shows a long, white wisp, close to a thousand miles long, spilling out of a giant volcano.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Picks Moon Lander Designs by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Rocket Companies (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3938",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/science/nasa-moon-lander.html",
        "text": "It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. NASA announced on Thursday that it had picked three designs for spacecraft to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Picks Moon Lander Designs by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Rocket Companies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3939",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/science/nasa-moon-lander.html",
        "text": "It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. NASA announced on Thursday that it had picked three designs for spacecraft to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Picks Moon Lander Designs by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Rocket Companies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3940",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/science/nasa-moon-lander.html",
        "text": "It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. NASA announced on Thursday that it had picked three designs for spacecraft to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Picks Moon Lander Designs by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Rocket Companies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3941",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/science/nasa-moon-lander.html",
        "text": "It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. It seems unlikely the space agency will meet President Trump\u2019s goal of a return to the lunar surface by the end of 2024. NASA announced on Thursday that it had picked three designs for spacecraft to take astronauts back to the surface of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager 2\u2019s Discoveries From Interstellar Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3942",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/science/voyager-2-interstellar-solar-wind.html",
        "text": "In its journey beyond the boundary of the solar wind\u2019s bubble, the probe observed some notable differences from its twin, Voyager 1. In its journey beyond the boundary of the solar wind\u2019s bubble, the probe observed some notable differences from its twin, Voyager 1. The Voyager 2 spacecraft burst out of the bubble of gases expanding from the sun and into the wild of the Milky Way a year ago. It was the second spacecraft to cross that boundary and directly observe the interstellar medium. Its faster-moving twin, Voyager 1, made the crossing six years earlier, in August 2012.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager 2\u2019s Discoveries From Interstellar Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3943",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/science/voyager-2-interstellar-solar-wind.html",
        "text": "In its journey beyond the boundary of the solar wind\u2019s bubble, the probe observed some notable differences from its twin, Voyager 1. In its journey beyond the boundary of the solar wind\u2019s bubble, the probe observed some notable differences from its twin, Voyager 1. The Voyager 2 spacecraft burst out of the bubble of gases expanding from the sun and into the wild of the Milky Way a year ago. It was the second spacecraft to cross that boundary and directly observe the interstellar medium. Its faster-moving twin, Voyager 1, made the crossing six years earlier, in August 2012.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Voyager 2\u2019s Discoveries From Interstellar Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3944",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/science/voyager-2-interstellar-solar-wind.html",
        "text": "In its journey beyond the boundary of the solar wind\u2019s bubble, the probe observed some notable differences from its twin, Voyager 1. In its journey beyond the boundary of the solar wind\u2019s bubble, the probe observed some notable differences from its twin, Voyager 1. The Voyager 2 spacecraft burst out of the bubble of gases expanding from the sun and into the wild of the Milky Way a year ago. It was the second spacecraft to cross that boundary and directly observe the interstellar medium. Its faster-moving twin, Voyager 1, made the crossing six years earlier, in August 2012.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA Launched a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3945",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/nasa-lucy-trojans-asteroids.html",
        "text": "In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. NASA on Saturday launched a probe toward clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path. They\u2019re known as the Trojan swarms, and they represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. The spacecraft, a deep-space robotic archaeologist named Lucy, will seek to answer pressing questions about the origins of the solar system, how the planets migrated to their current orbits and how life might have emerged on Earth.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA Launched a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3946",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/nasa-lucy-trojans-asteroids.html",
        "text": "In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. NASA on Saturday launched a probe toward clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path. They\u2019re known as the Trojan swarms, and they represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. The spacecraft, a deep-space robotic archaeologist named Lucy, will seek to answer pressing questions about the origins of the solar system, how the planets migrated to their current orbits and how life might have emerged on Earth.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA Launched a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3947",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/nasa-lucy-trojans-asteroids.html",
        "text": "In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. NASA on Saturday launched a probe toward clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path. They\u2019re known as the Trojan swarms, and they represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. The spacecraft, a deep-space robotic archaeologist named Lucy, will seek to answer pressing questions about the origins of the solar system, how the planets migrated to their current orbits and how life might have emerged on Earth.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA Launched a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3948",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/nasa-lucy-trojans-asteroids.html",
        "text": "In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. In a vast odyssey across the solar system, the mission will study asteroids known as Trojans that may contain secrets of how the planets ended up in their current orbits. NASA on Saturday launched a probe toward clusters of asteroids along Jupiter\u2019s orbital path. They\u2019re known as the Trojan swarms, and they represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. The spacecraft, a deep-space robotic archaeologist named Lucy, will seek to answer pressing questions about the origins of the solar system, how the planets migrated to their current orbits and how life might have emerged on Earth.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos and his fellow passengers are back on the ground after completing their short flight to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3949",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/blue-origin-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "Here's what you need to know about the first Blue Origin New Shepard rocket flight with passengers on board. Here's what you need to know about the first Blue Origin New Shepard rocket flight with passengers on board. Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt \u2014 rising 60-some miles into the sky above West Texas \u2014 in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos\u2019 rocket company, Blue Origin.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos and his fellow passengers are back on the ground after completing their short flight to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3950",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/blue-origin-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "Here's what you need to know about the first Blue Origin New Shepard rocket flight with passengers on board. Here's what you need to know about the first Blue Origin New Shepard rocket flight with passengers on board. Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt \u2014 rising 60-some miles into the sky above West Texas \u2014 in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos\u2019 rocket company, Blue Origin.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Sent a Secret Message to Mars. Meet the People Who Decoded It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3951",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachute-code.html",
        "text": "Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it. Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it. As NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover fell through the Martian atmosphere last week, a video camera on the spacecraft captured the breakneck deployment of its parachute, which was decorated with splotches of reddish orange and white.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Sent a Secret Message to Mars. Meet the People Who Decoded It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3952",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachute-code.html",
        "text": "Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it. Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it. As NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover fell through the Martian atmosphere last week, a video camera on the spacecraft captured the breakneck deployment of its parachute, which was decorated with splotches of reddish orange and white.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Sent a Secret Message to Mars. Meet the People Who Decoded It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3953",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachute-code.html",
        "text": "Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it. Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it. As NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover fell through the Martian atmosphere last week, a video camera on the spacecraft captured the breakneck deployment of its parachute, which was decorated with splotches of reddish orange and white.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Israelis Put Two Landers on the Moon at Once? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3954",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/science/israel-moon-beresheet-2.html",
        "text": "Although the Beresheet lunar landing ended in a crash last year, SpaceIL wants to try again with a more complex mission by 2024. Although the Beresheet lunar landing ended in a crash last year,  SpaceIL wants to try again with a more complex mission by 2024. An Israeli nonprofit will try again to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon after its first attempt ended in a crash last year.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Israelis Put Two Landers on the Moon at Once? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3955",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/science/israel-moon-beresheet-2.html",
        "text": "Although the Beresheet lunar landing ended in a crash last year, SpaceIL wants to try again with a more complex mission by 2024. Although the Beresheet lunar landing ended in a crash last year,  SpaceIL wants to try again with a more complex mission by 2024. An Israeli nonprofit will try again to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon after its first attempt ended in a crash last year.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back to Saturn? Five Missions Proposed to Follow Cassini (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3956",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/science/saturn-cassini-return.html",
        "text": "Although NASA does not have yet a follow-up mission to Saturn on its schedule, scientists are dreaming up ideas for one. Although NASA does not have yet a follow-up mission to Saturn on its schedule, scientists are dreaming up ideas for one. For 13 years, NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft sent back captivating observations of Saturn, and its rings and moons, solving some mysteries but raising plenty of new questions. With the spacecraft\u2019s demise on Friday, the stream of data from Saturn has dried up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back to Saturn? Five Missions Proposed to Follow Cassini (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3957",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/science/saturn-cassini-return.html",
        "text": "Although NASA does not have yet a follow-up mission to Saturn on its schedule, scientists are dreaming up ideas for one. Although NASA does not have yet a follow-up mission to Saturn on its schedule, scientists are dreaming up ideas for one. For 13 years, NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft sent back captivating observations of Saturn, and its rings and moons, solving some mysteries but raising plenty of new questions. With the spacecraft\u2019s demise on Friday, the stream of data from Saturn has dried up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back to Saturn? Five Missions Proposed to Follow Cassini (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3958",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/science/saturn-cassini-return.html",
        "text": "Although NASA does not have yet a follow-up mission to Saturn on its schedule, scientists are dreaming up ideas for one. Although NASA does not have yet a follow-up mission to Saturn on its schedule, scientists are dreaming up ideas for one. For 13 years, NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft sent back captivating observations of Saturn, and its rings and moons, solving some mysteries but raising plenty of new questions. With the spacecraft\u2019s demise on Friday, the stream of data from Saturn has dried up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S., Russia Respond to Space Station Leak Rumors (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3959",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/science/space-station-leak-russia.html",
        "text": "After speaking for the first time, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, set out to reaffirm cooperation on orbital matters. After speaking for the first time, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, set out to reaffirm cooperation on orbital matters. Amid wild rumors in Russia that a NASA astronaut deliberately drilled a hole in a Russian spacecraft docked to the International Space Station, the space agencies of the two countries released a joint statement on Thursday saying that a leak last month was being investigated and that they would refrain from further comment.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S., Russia Respond to Space Station Leak Rumors (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3960",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/science/space-station-leak-russia.html",
        "text": "After speaking for the first time, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, set out to reaffirm cooperation on orbital matters. After speaking for the first time, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, set out to reaffirm cooperation on orbital matters. Amid wild rumors in Russia that a NASA astronaut deliberately drilled a hole in a Russian spacecraft docked to the International Space Station, the space agencies of the two countries released a joint statement on Thursday saying that a leak last month was being investigated and that they would refrain from further comment.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S., Russia Respond to Space Station Leak Rumors (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3961",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/science/space-station-leak-russia.html",
        "text": "After speaking for the first time, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, set out to reaffirm cooperation on orbital matters. After speaking for the first time, Jim Bridenstine of NASA and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, set out to reaffirm cooperation on orbital matters. Amid wild rumors in Russia that a NASA astronaut deliberately drilled a hole in a Russian spacecraft docked to the International Space Station, the space agencies of the two countries released a joint statement on Thursday saying that a leak last month was being investigated and that they would refrain from further comment.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Prototype of Mars and Moon Rocket After Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3962",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After a series of high-altitude test flights that ended in explosions, the new vehicle set down in one piece on a Texas launchpad. After a series of high-altitude test flights that ended in explosions, the new vehicle set down in one piece on a Texas launchpad. A prototype of a spacecraft that SpaceX hopes one day to send to the moon and Mars touched down in one piece on a landing pad in South Texas on Wednesday. It was the fifth high-altitude flight test of Starship, a vehicle that in several earlier test flights exploded either during or after landing.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Prototype of Mars and Moon Rocket After Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3963",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After a series of high-altitude test flights that ended in explosions, the new vehicle set down in one piece on a Texas launchpad. After a series of high-altitude test flights that ended in explosions, the new vehicle set down in one piece on a Texas launchpad. A prototype of a spacecraft that SpaceX hopes one day to send to the moon and Mars touched down in one piece on a landing pad in South Texas on Wednesday. It was the fifth high-altitude flight test of Starship, a vehicle that in several earlier test flights exploded either during or after landing.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Prototype of Mars and Moon Rocket After Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3964",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After a series of high-altitude test flights that ended in explosions, the new vehicle set down in one piece on a Texas launchpad. After a series of high-altitude test flights that ended in explosions, the new vehicle set down in one piece on a Texas launchpad. A prototype of a spacecraft that SpaceX hopes one day to send to the moon and Mars touched down in one piece on a landing pad in South Texas on Wednesday. It was the fifth high-altitude flight test of Starship, a vehicle that in several earlier test flights exploded either during or after landing.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Creeps Up on the Ryugu Asteroid  (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3965",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/science/hayabusa-japan-asteroid.html",
        "text": "After a journey that started in 2014, the probe will reach the space rock on Wednesday to begin studying it for clues to the solar system\u2019s origins. After a journey that started in 2014, the probe will reach the space rock on Wednesday to begin studying it for clues to the solar system\u2019s origins. Here\u2019s the mission for Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in a nutshell: Fly to a carbon-rich asteroid between the orbits of Earth and Mars, study it for a year and a half and then bring back some pieces for additional study on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Creeps Up on the Ryugu Asteroid  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3966",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/science/hayabusa-japan-asteroid.html",
        "text": "After a journey that started in 2014, the probe will reach the space rock on Wednesday to begin studying it for clues to the solar system\u2019s origins. After a journey that started in 2014, the probe will reach the space rock on Wednesday to begin studying it for clues to the solar system\u2019s origins. Here\u2019s the mission for Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in a nutshell: Fly to a carbon-rich asteroid between the orbits of Earth and Mars, study it for a year and a half and then bring back some pieces for additional study on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 Spacecraft Creeps Up on the Ryugu Asteroid  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3967",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/science/hayabusa-japan-asteroid.html",
        "text": "After a journey that started in 2014, the probe will reach the space rock on Wednesday to begin studying it for clues to the solar system\u2019s origins. After a journey that started in 2014, the probe will reach the space rock on Wednesday to begin studying it for clues to the solar system\u2019s origins. Here\u2019s the mission for Japan\u2019s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in a nutshell: Fly to a carbon-rich asteroid between the orbits of Earth and Mars, study it for a year and a half and then bring back some pieces for additional study on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Test Delayed to Sunday (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3968",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. Because of rough seas in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a test on Saturday that would have destroyed a rocket in flight to demonstrate that its spacecraft are safe for astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Test Delayed to Sunday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "3969",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. Because of rough seas in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a test on Saturday that would have destroyed a rocket in flight to demonstrate that its spacecraft are safe for astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Test Delayed to Sunday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "3970",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. Because of rough seas in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a test on Saturday that would have destroyed a rocket in flight to demonstrate that its spacecraft are safe for astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Test Delayed to Sunday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3971",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. Because of rough seas in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a test on Saturday that would have destroyed a rocket in flight to demonstrate that its spacecraft are safe for astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Test Delayed to Sunday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3972",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. Because of rough seas in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a test on Saturday that would have destroyed a rocket in flight to demonstrate that its spacecraft are safe for astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Test Delayed to Sunday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3973",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. A successful demonstration of the abort system on the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule would set up the next flight, which is to have astronauts aboard. Because of rough seas in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a test on Saturday that would have destroyed a rocket in flight to demonstrate that its spacecraft are safe for astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This NASA Mission May Cause an Artificial Meteor Shower (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3974",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/science/meteor-shower-nasa-dart.html",
        "text": "A study says the DART mission\u2019s collision with an asteroid near Earth may liberate enough debris to reach Earth\u2019s atmosphere. A study says the DART mission\u2019s collision with an asteroid near Earth may liberate enough debris to reach Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes to plan, in September 2022 a NASA spacecraft, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission or DART, will slam into a space rock with the equivalent energy of three tons of TNT. The goal is to nudge the orbit of its target object ever-so-slightly, a practice run to see if we could divert an asteroid from a catastrophic impact with our planet in the future.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "This NASA Mission May Cause an Artificial Meteor Shower (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3975",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/science/meteor-shower-nasa-dart.html",
        "text": "A study says the DART mission\u2019s collision with an asteroid near Earth may liberate enough debris to reach Earth\u2019s atmosphere. A study says the DART mission\u2019s collision with an asteroid near Earth may liberate enough debris to reach Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes to plan, in September 2022 a NASA spacecraft, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission or DART, will slam into a space rock with the equivalent energy of three tons of TNT. The goal is to nudge the orbit of its target object ever-so-slightly, a practice run to see if we could divert an asteroid from a catastrophic impact with our planet in the future.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "This NASA Mission May Cause an Artificial Meteor Shower (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3976",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/science/meteor-shower-nasa-dart.html",
        "text": "A study says the DART mission\u2019s collision with an asteroid near Earth may liberate enough debris to reach Earth\u2019s atmosphere. A study says the DART mission\u2019s collision with an asteroid near Earth may liberate enough debris to reach Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes to plan, in September 2022 a NASA spacecraft, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission or DART, will slam into a space rock with the equivalent energy of three tons of TNT. The goal is to nudge the orbit of its target object ever-so-slightly, a practice run to see if we could divert an asteroid from a catastrophic impact with our planet in the future.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Flight\u2019s Flaws Show \u2018Fundamental Problem,\u2019 NASA Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3977",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. An uncrewed test flight of a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts may have narrowly avoided catastrophic failure in December. A software error that could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft was discovered and fixed while the capsule, known as Starliner, was in orbit, and not long before it returned to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Flight\u2019s Flaws Show \u2018Fundamental Problem,\u2019 NASA Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3978",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. An uncrewed test flight of a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts may have narrowly avoided catastrophic failure in December. A software error that could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft was discovered and fixed while the capsule, known as Starliner, was in orbit, and not long before it returned to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Flight\u2019s Flaws Show \u2018Fundamental Problem,\u2019 NASA Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3979",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. An uncrewed test flight of a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts may have narrowly avoided catastrophic failure in December. A software error that could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft was discovered and fixed while the capsule, known as Starliner, was in orbit, and not long before it returned to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Flight\u2019s Flaws Show \u2018Fundamental Problem,\u2019 NASA Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3980",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-nasa.html",
        "text": "A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. A software glitch that could have destroyed the capsule was fixed in orbit, during an uncrewed December test flight that had already gone awry. An uncrewed test flight of a Boeing spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts may have narrowly avoided catastrophic failure in December. A software error that could have resulted in loss of the spacecraft was discovered and fixed while the capsule, known as Starliner, was in orbit, and not long before it returned to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches, Trips to the Moon and More Space and Astronomy Events in 2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3981",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/2019-launches-moon.html",
        "text": "A busy year in space just ended, and this one will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. A busy year in space just ended, and this one will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. Just as we\u2019ve caught our breaths from 2018\u2019s exciting and very busy year in space and astronomy, 2019 is already off to a rapid start. Before we finish the first week of this year, we\u2019ll see a Chinese probe landing on the moon, an eclipse and NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft complete a flyby of the most distant object ever visited in the solar system. ",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches, Trips to the Moon and More Space and Astronomy Events in 2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3982",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/2019-launches-moon.html",
        "text": "A busy year in space just ended, and this one will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. A busy year in space just ended, and this one will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. Just as we\u2019ve caught our breaths from 2018\u2019s exciting and very busy year in space and astronomy, 2019 is already off to a rapid start. Before we finish the first week of this year, we\u2019ll see a Chinese probe landing on the moon, an eclipse and NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft complete a flyby of the most distant object ever visited in the solar system. ",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches, Trips to the Moon and More Space and Astronomy Events in 2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "3983",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/2019-launches-moon.html",
        "text": "A busy year in space just ended, and this one will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. A busy year in space just ended, and this one will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. Just as we\u2019ve caught our breaths from 2018\u2019s exciting and very busy year in space and astronomy, 2019 is already off to a rapid start. Before we finish the first week of this year, we\u2019ll see a Chinese probe landing on the moon, an eclipse and NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft complete a flyby of the most distant object ever visited in the solar system. ",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel Wants to Land on the Moon. First Its Spacecraft Needs to Stick the Orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3984",
        "date": "2019-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/science/israel-beresheet-moon.html",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s not a complex maneuver. It\u2019s just not a time to have a sudden small problem. We\u2019ll be nervous.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not a complex maneuver. It\u2019s just not a time to have a sudden small problem. We\u2019ll be nervous.\u201d Beresheet, the plucky robotic spacecraft built by an Israeli nonprofit, remains on track for landing on the moon next week.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel Wants to Land on the Moon. First Its Spacecraft Needs to Stick the Orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3985",
        "date": "2019-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/science/israel-beresheet-moon.html",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s not a complex maneuver. It\u2019s just not a time to have a sudden small problem. We\u2019ll be nervous.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not a complex maneuver. It\u2019s just not a time to have a sudden small problem. We\u2019ll be nervous.\u201d Beresheet, the plucky robotic spacecraft built by an Israeli nonprofit, remains on track for landing on the moon next week.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel Wants to Land on the Moon. First Its Spacecraft Needs to Stick the Orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3986",
        "date": "2019-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/science/israel-beresheet-moon.html",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s not a complex maneuver. It\u2019s just not a time to have a sudden small problem. We\u2019ll be nervous.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not a complex maneuver. It\u2019s just not a time to have a sudden small problem. We\u2019ll be nervous.\u201d Beresheet, the plucky robotic spacecraft built by an Israeli nonprofit, remains on track for landing on the moon next week.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Docks at the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3987",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/science/space/spacex-docks-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "\u201cDocking confirmed,\u201d the company founded by Elon Musk announced Monday night. \u201cDocking confirmed,\u201d the company founded by Elon Musk announced Monday night. The Crew Dragon spacecraft, a privately built and operated vessel carrying four astronauts, successfully arrived at the International Space Station on Monday night.",
        "author": "By Azi Paybarah"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Docks at the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3988",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/science/space/spacex-docks-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "\u201cDocking confirmed,\u201d the company founded by Elon Musk announced Monday night. \u201cDocking confirmed,\u201d the company founded by Elon Musk announced Monday night. The Crew Dragon spacecraft, a privately built and operated vessel carrying four astronauts, successfully arrived at the International Space Station on Monday night.",
        "author": "By Azi Paybarah"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Council Chooses the Moon as Trump Administration Priority (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3989",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/science/national-space-council-moon-pence.html",
        "text": "Vice President Mike Pence accused the Obama administration of neglecting the space program, while others saw an ongoing renaissance. Vice President Mike Pence accused the Obama administration of neglecting the space program, while others saw an ongoing renaissance. CHANTILLY, Va. \u2014 Standing before the space shuttle Discovery in a voluminous hangar outside of Washington, Vice President Mike Pence announced on Thursday a renewed focus on putting Americans in space and making a return to the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bob and Doug\u2019s excellent journey. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3990",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/spacex-nasa-bob-behnken-doug-hurley.html",
        "text": "They went to the space station in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, launching a new era of human spaceflight. They went to the space station in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, launching a new era of human spaceflight. Two NASA astronauts, Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the first time that people headed to orbit in an American rocket launching from the United States since the previous space shuttle mission, in 2011.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bob and Doug\u2019s excellent journey. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3991",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/spacex-nasa-bob-behnken-doug-hurley.html",
        "text": "They went to the space station in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, launching a new era of human spaceflight. They went to the space station in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, launching a new era of human spaceflight. Two NASA astronauts, Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the first time that people headed to orbit in an American rocket launching from the United States since the previous space shuttle mission, in 2011.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bob and Doug\u2019s excellent journey. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3992",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/spacex-nasa-bob-behnken-doug-hurley.html",
        "text": "They went to the space station in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, launching a new era of human spaceflight. They went to the space station in SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, launching a new era of human spaceflight. Two NASA astronauts, Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was the first time that people headed to orbit in an American rocket launching from the United States since the previous space shuttle mission, in 2011.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rough Drafts of Richard Feynman\u2019s Ideas Head to Auction (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3993",
        "date": "2018-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/science/richard-feynman-auction.html",
        "text": "The scribblings of a brilliant 20th-century physicist show that he did not get everything right on the first try, either. The scribblings of a brilliant 20th-century physicist show that he did not get everything right on the first try, either. One of the titans of 20th-century physics, Richard Feynman deciphered the interplay of fundamental particles and forces. He wrote popular books in which he portrayed himself as a charming scientific rogue, and played a key role in the investigation of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger. While brilliant, he was not perfect. That becomes evident looking at some of his papers that go up for auction on Friday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket Carrying Space Station Cargo (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3994",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/science/spacex-launch-kennedy-space-center.html",
        "text": "The rocket lifted off from a launchpad used for the Apollo moon missions. It was the first launch from Kennedy Space Center in more than five years. The rocket lifted off from a launchpad used for the Apollo moon missions. It was the first launch from Kennedy Space Center in more than five years. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 Engines ignited and a rocket lifted off here on Sunday, for the first time since the last space shuttle launch five and a half years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket Carrying Space Station Cargo (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3995",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/19/science/spacex-launch-kennedy-space-center.html",
        "text": "The rocket lifted off from a launchpad used for the Apollo moon missions. It was the first launch from Kennedy Space Center in more than five years. The rocket lifted off from a launchpad used for the Apollo moon missions. It was the first launch from Kennedy Space Center in more than five years. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 Engines ignited and a rocket lifted off here on Sunday, for the first time since the last space shuttle launch five and a half years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dream Chaser Space Plane Aces Glide Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3996",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/science/dream-chaser-test-flight.html",
        "text": "Built by Sierra Nevada Corporation, the space plane that brings to mind NASA\u2019s retired shuttles completed a successful test flight and landing on Saturday. Built by Sierra Nevada Corporation, the space plane that brings to mind NASA\u2019s retired shuttles completed a successful test flight and landing on Saturday. If you miss NASA\u2019s space shuttles, you might like the Dream Chaser.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dream Chaser Space Plane Aces Glide Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "3997",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/science/dream-chaser-test-flight.html",
        "text": "Built by Sierra Nevada Corporation, the space plane that brings to mind NASA\u2019s retired shuttles completed a successful test flight and landing on Saturday. Built by Sierra Nevada Corporation, the space plane that brings to mind NASA\u2019s retired shuttles completed a successful test flight and landing on Saturday. If you miss NASA\u2019s space shuttles, you might like the Dream Chaser.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dream Chaser Space Plane Aces Glide Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "3998",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/science/dream-chaser-test-flight.html",
        "text": "Built by Sierra Nevada Corporation, the space plane that brings to mind NASA\u2019s retired shuttles completed a successful test flight and landing on Saturday. Built by Sierra Nevada Corporation, the space plane that brings to mind NASA\u2019s retired shuttles completed a successful test flight and landing on Saturday. If you miss NASA\u2019s space shuttles, you might like the Dream Chaser.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Millie Hughes-Fulford, NASA Shuttle Scientist, Dies at 75 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "3999",
        "date": "2021-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/science/space/millie-hughes-fulford-dead.html",
        "text": "As the space agency\u2019s first female payload specialist, she conducted experiments about the impact of weightlessness on astronauts\u2019 immune systems and loss of bone mass. As the space agency\u2019s first female payload specialist, she conducted experiments about the impact of weightlessness on astronauts\u2019 immune systems and loss of bone mass. Millie Hughes-Fulford, NASA\u2019s first female payload specialist, who conducted biomedical experiments on the physical toll of spaceflight on humans on board the space shuttle Columbia in 1991, died on Feb. 2 at her home in Mill Valley, Calif. She was 75.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "Millie Hughes-Fulford, NASA Shuttle Scientist, Dies at 75 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4000",
        "date": "2021-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/science/space/millie-hughes-fulford-dead.html",
        "text": "As the space agency\u2019s first female payload specialist, she conducted experiments about the impact of weightlessness on astronauts\u2019 immune systems and loss of bone mass. As the space agency\u2019s first female payload specialist, she conducted experiments about the impact of weightlessness on astronauts\u2019 immune systems and loss of bone mass. Millie Hughes-Fulford, NASA\u2019s first female payload specialist, who conducted biomedical experiments on the physical toll of spaceflight on humans on board the space shuttle Columbia in 1991, died on Feb. 2 at her home in Mill Valley, Calif. She was 75.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "Millie Hughes-Fulford, NASA Shuttle Scientist, Dies at 75 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4001",
        "date": "2021-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/science/space/millie-hughes-fulford-dead.html",
        "text": "As the space agency\u2019s first female payload specialist, she conducted experiments about the impact of weightlessness on astronauts\u2019 immune systems and loss of bone mass. As the space agency\u2019s first female payload specialist, she conducted experiments about the impact of weightlessness on astronauts\u2019 immune systems and loss of bone mass. Millie Hughes-Fulford, NASA\u2019s first female payload specialist, who conducted biomedical experiments on the physical toll of spaceflight on humans on board the space shuttle Columbia in 1991, died on Feb. 2 at her home in Mill Valley, Calif. She was 75.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "I took Bill Nye to three places he most wanted to visit \u2014 in outer space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4002",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/20/i-took-bill-nye-three-places-he-most-wanted-visit-outer-space/",
        "text": "When I learned that I\u2019d get to make a video with Bill Nye, my middle school self\u2019s brain exploded. Nye\u2019s career has sparked myriad kids\u2019 interest in science \u2014 which is a mission I share. So I hatched a plan that would be both imaginative and educational: I asked Nye where in the universe he wanted to visit and suggested we explore there \u2014 together. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNye, curious to the core, was game. And his top picks to visit were places in our solar system where we might find life.No person has yet reached another planet in our solar system, but we have learned quite a lot about nearby planets and moons by sending robots and probes. We also have a sense of the basic requirements for life. Most researchers agree that life needs certain elements (like carbon), a source of energy (like sunlight) and a temperature that\u2019s not too high and not too low. It also requires a liquid solvent \u2014 something that can dissolve chemicals.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWater happens to be a particularly good solvent, so Nye picked three planets or moons in our solar system where scientists think there may be bodies of liquid water: Mars, Europa and Enceladus. By watching this episode of \u201cScience Magic Show Hooray,\u201d a video series from The Washington Post, you can follow along on our virtual tour. We saw underground oceans, geysers of water shooting from icy moons and alien \u201cfish people\u201d (what Nye imagines the inhabitants of Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa might look like).Consider the following: We may not have to wait a lifetime to find extraterrestrials. Scientists are learning more about nearby habitable worlds all the time. Just recently, the InSight lander arrived on Mars. While studying the planet\u2019s interior structure, it could help scientists understand whether it\u2019s possible for underground water to exist on Mars, which other recent studies have predicted. Mars may look like a desolate, radiation-bombarded desert on its surface, but as we know from Earth, life is pretty good at finding places to survive.Of course, it will take a lot of work to meet our alien neighbors, if they are indeed out there. That\u2019s where the next generation of engineers, astrophysicists and biologists comes in. Science needs driven, curious people to help make these breakthroughs.At the end of our time together, Nye left us with a challenge: \u201cGo out there and change the world!\u201d If the TV host could go anywhere in the universe, he\u2019d search for life in our solar system. I took Bill Nye to three places he most wanted to visit \u2014 in outer space",
        "author": "Anna Rothschild"
    },
    {
        "title": "I took Bill Nye to three places he most wanted to visit \u2014 in outer space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4003",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/20/i-took-bill-nye-three-places-he-most-wanted-visit-outer-space/",
        "text": "When I learned that I\u2019d get to make a video with Bill Nye, my middle school self\u2019s brain exploded. Nye\u2019s career has sparked myriad kids\u2019 interest in science \u2014 which is a mission I share. So I hatched a plan that would be both imaginative and educational: I asked Nye where in the universe he wanted to visit and suggested we explore there \u2014 together. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNye, curious to the core, was game. And his top picks to visit were places in our solar system where we might find life.No person has yet reached another planet in our solar system, but we have learned quite a lot about nearby planets and moons by sending robots and probes. We also have a sense of the basic requirements for life. Most researchers agree that life needs certain elements (like carbon), a source of energy (like sunlight) and a temperature that\u2019s not too high and not too low. It also requires a liquid solvent \u2014 something that can dissolve chemicals.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWater happens to be a particularly good solvent, so Nye picked three planets or moons in our solar system where scientists think there may be bodies of liquid water: Mars, Europa and Enceladus. By watching this episode of \u201cScience Magic Show Hooray,\u201d a video series from The Washington Post, you can follow along on our virtual tour. We saw underground oceans, geysers of water shooting from icy moons and alien \u201cfish people\u201d (what Nye imagines the inhabitants of Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa might look like).Consider the following: We may not have to wait a lifetime to find extraterrestrials. Scientists are learning more about nearby habitable worlds all the time. Just recently, the InSight lander arrived on Mars. While studying the planet\u2019s interior structure, it could help scientists understand whether it\u2019s possible for underground water to exist on Mars, which other recent studies have predicted. Mars may look like a desolate, radiation-bombarded desert on its surface, but as we know from Earth, life is pretty good at finding places to survive.Of course, it will take a lot of work to meet our alien neighbors, if they are indeed out there. That\u2019s where the next generation of engineers, astrophysicists and biologists comes in. Science needs driven, curious people to help make these breakthroughs.At the end of our time together, Nye left us with a challenge: \u201cGo out there and change the world!\u201d If the TV host could go anywhere in the universe, he\u2019d search for life in our solar system. I took Bill Nye to three places he most wanted to visit \u2014 in outer space",
        "author": "Anna Rothschild"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Sparring, NASA and SpaceX Declare a Shared Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4004",
        "date": "2019-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/science/nasa-spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. A visit by the NASA administrator to a rocket factory is usually a predictable show-and-tell of the latest gadgets destined for outer space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Sparring, NASA and SpaceX Declare a Shared Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4005",
        "date": "2019-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/science/nasa-spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. A visit by the NASA administrator to a rocket factory is usually a predictable show-and-tell of the latest gadgets destined for outer space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Sparring, NASA and SpaceX Declare a Shared Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4006",
        "date": "2019-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/science/nasa-spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. A visit by the NASA administrator to a rocket factory is usually a predictable show-and-tell of the latest gadgets destined for outer space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Sparring, NASA and SpaceX Declare a Shared Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4007",
        "date": "2019-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/science/nasa-spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. The space agency\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, met Elon Musk at SpaceX headquarters on Thursday to review progress toward launching NASA astronauts. A visit by the NASA administrator to a rocket factory is usually a predictable show-and-tell of the latest gadgets destined for outer space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There were more people in space than ever before. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4008",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/inspiration4-spacex-record-crew.html",
        "text": "The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. Outer space got a little more crowded on Wednesday night. ",
        "author": "By Azi Paybarah"
    },
    {
        "title": "There were more people in space than ever before. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4009",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/inspiration4-spacex-record-crew.html",
        "text": "The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. Outer space got a little more crowded on Wednesday night. ",
        "author": "By Azi Paybarah"
    },
    {
        "title": "There were more people in space than ever before. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4010",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/inspiration4-spacex-record-crew.html",
        "text": "The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. Outer space got a little more crowded on Wednesday night. ",
        "author": "By Azi Paybarah"
    },
    {
        "title": "There were more people in space than ever before. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4011",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/inspiration4-spacex-record-crew.html",
        "text": "The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. The four-person team raised the number of people in space to 14 for about a day, passing a record set in 2009. Outer space got a little more crowded on Wednesday night. ",
        "author": "By Azi Paybarah"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rock That Ended the Dinosaurs Was Much More Than a Dino Killer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4012",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/science/chicxulub-dinosaur-extinction.html",
        "text": "In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself. In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself. The first cave art. The dawn of agriculture. While these are among the most crucial moments in humankind\u2019s beginnings, our most dramatic origin story starts 66 million years ago. It was the apocalyptic instant when a rock from outer space slammed into Earth, terminating the age of dinosaurs and eventually offering a bountiful new world to our mammalian ancestors.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rock That Ended the Dinosaurs Was Much More Than a Dino Killer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4013",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/science/chicxulub-dinosaur-extinction.html",
        "text": "In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself. In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself. The first cave art. The dawn of agriculture. While these are among the most crucial moments in humankind\u2019s beginnings, our most dramatic origin story starts 66 million years ago. It was the apocalyptic instant when a rock from outer space slammed into Earth, terminating the age of dinosaurs and eventually offering a bountiful new world to our mammalian ancestors.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rock That Ended the Dinosaurs Was Much More Than a Dino Killer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4014",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/science/chicxulub-dinosaur-extinction.html",
        "text": "In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself. In seeking the origin story of the Chicxulub impactor, scientists hope to also unlock secrets about the origin of life itself. The first cave art. The dawn of agriculture. While these are among the most crucial moments in humankind\u2019s beginnings, our most dramatic origin story starts 66 million years ago. It was the apocalyptic instant when a rock from outer space slammed into Earth, terminating the age of dinosaurs and eventually offering a bountiful new world to our mammalian ancestors.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who Gets Sick in Space? Orbital Tourists May Offer Better Clues. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4015",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/inspiration4-medical-research.html",
        "text": "Commercial spaceflight brings a more diverse cross section of humanity beyond Earth, helping medical researchers collect data. Commercial spaceflight brings a more diverse cross section of humanity beyond Earth, helping medical researchers collect data. Doctors have poked and prodded NASA astronauts for years, and the astronauts, as government employees, have largely acceded to their roles as test animals in studying how an alien environment \u2014 outer space \u2014 affects the human body.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who Gets Sick in Space? Orbital Tourists May Offer Better Clues. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4016",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/inspiration4-medical-research.html",
        "text": "Commercial spaceflight brings a more diverse cross section of humanity beyond Earth, helping medical researchers collect data. Commercial spaceflight brings a more diverse cross section of humanity beyond Earth, helping medical researchers collect data. Doctors have poked and prodded NASA astronauts for years, and the astronauts, as government employees, have largely acceded to their roles as test animals in studying how an alien environment \u2014 outer space \u2014 affects the human body.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who Gets Sick in Space? Orbital Tourists May Offer Better Clues. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4017",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/inspiration4-medical-research.html",
        "text": "Commercial spaceflight brings a more diverse cross section of humanity beyond Earth, helping medical researchers collect data. Commercial spaceflight brings a more diverse cross section of humanity beyond Earth, helping medical researchers collect data. Doctors have poked and prodded NASA astronauts for years, and the astronauts, as government employees, have largely acceded to their roles as test animals in studying how an alien environment \u2014 outer space \u2014 affects the human body.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Mysterious Crater\u2019s Age May Add Clues to the Dinosaur Extinction (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4018",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/science/boltysh-crater-dinosaurs.html",
        "text": "Boltysh crater in Ukraine formed around the same time as the Chicxulub event, raising questions about its role in this tumultuous era. Boltysh crater in Ukraine formed around the same time as the Chicxulub event, raising questions about its role in this tumultuous era. Some 65 million years ago, a rock from outer space slammed into Earth, wreaking havoc on life in its wake and leaving a large crater on our planet\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Cool a Planet With Extraterrestrial Dust (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4019",
        "date": "2019-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/science/asteroid-ice-age-dust.html",
        "text": "A study of fossil meteorites suggests that a distant asteroid collision once sent Earth into an ice age. A study of fossil meteorites suggests that a distant asteroid collision once sent Earth into an ice age. Extraterrestrial events \u2014 the collision of faraway black holes, a comet slamming into Jupiter \u2014 evoke wonder on Earth but rarely a sense of local urgency. By and large, what happens in outer space stays in outer space. ",
        "author": "By Emma Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Search for E.T. Goes on Hold, for Now (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4020",
        "date": "2020-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/science/seti-at-home-aliens.html",
        "text": "A popular screen saver takes a break while its inventors try to digest data that may yet be hiding news of extraterrestrials. A popular screen saver takes a break while its inventors try to digest data that may yet be hiding news of extraterrestrials. One of the great science fiction fantasies of all time \u2014 that you might discover aliens texting you from outer space on your computer \u2014 is about to take a breather.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Search for E.T. Goes on Hold, for Now (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4021",
        "date": "2020-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/science/seti-at-home-aliens.html",
        "text": "A popular screen saver takes a break while its inventors try to digest data that may yet be hiding news of extraterrestrials. A popular screen saver takes a break while its inventors try to digest data that may yet be hiding news of extraterrestrials. One of the great science fiction fantasies of all time \u2014 that you might discover aliens texting you from outer space on your computer \u2014 is about to take a breather.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Time Is Still a Mystery to \u2018Einstein\u2019s Dreams\u2019 Author (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4022",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/science/physics-einstein-broadway-lightman.html",
        "text": "Why Alan Lightman, astrophysicist turned writer, traded black holes for black ink. Why Alan Lightman, astrophysicist turned writer, traded black holes for black ink. \u201cDid you ever think you would be so old?\u201d",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is There a Black Hole in Our Backyard? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4023",
        "date": "2020-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/science/astronomy-planet-nine-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be. Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be. What is an astrophysicist to do during a pandemic, except maybe daydream about having a private black hole?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is There a Black Hole in Our Backyard? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4024",
        "date": "2020-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/science/astronomy-planet-nine-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be. Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be. What is an astrophysicist to do during a pandemic, except maybe daydream about having a private black hole?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is There a Black Hole in Our Backyard? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4025",
        "date": "2020-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/science/astronomy-planet-nine-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be. Astrophysicists have recently begun hatching plans to find out just how weird Planet Nine might be. What is an astrophysicist to do during a pandemic, except maybe daydream about having a private black hole?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Have Dark Forces Been Messing With the Cosmos? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4026",
        "date": "2019-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/science/cosmos-hubble-dark-energy.html",
        "text": "Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. There was, you might say, a disturbance in the Force.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Have Dark Forces Been Messing With the Cosmos? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4027",
        "date": "2019-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/science/cosmos-hubble-dark-energy.html",
        "text": "Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. There was, you might say, a disturbance in the Force.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Have Dark Forces Been Messing With the Cosmos? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4028",
        "date": "2019-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/science/cosmos-hubble-dark-energy.html",
        "text": "Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. There was, you might say, a disturbance in the Force.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "George Carruthers, Whose Telescopes Explored Space, Dies at 81 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4029",
        "date": "2021-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/science/space/george-carruthers-dead.html",
        "text": "At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. George Carruthers built his first telescope from a kit in 1949, when he was 10 and living in rural Ohio. Fascinated by space, he devoured magazine articles about space travel.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "George Carruthers, Whose Telescopes Explored Space, Dies at 81 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4030",
        "date": "2021-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/science/space/george-carruthers-dead.html",
        "text": "At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. George Carruthers built his first telescope from a kit in 1949, when he was 10 and living in rural Ohio. Fascinated by space, he devoured magazine articles about space travel.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "George Carruthers, Whose Telescopes Explored Space, Dies at 81 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4031",
        "date": "2021-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/science/space/george-carruthers-dead.html",
        "text": "At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. George Carruthers built his first telescope from a kit in 1949, when he was 10 and living in rural Ohio. Fascinated by space, he devoured magazine articles about space travel.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "George Carruthers, Whose Telescopes Explored Space, Dies at 81 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4032",
        "date": "2021-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/science/space/george-carruthers-dead.html",
        "text": "At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. George Carruthers built his first telescope from a kit in 1949, when he was 10 and living in rural Ohio. Fascinated by space, he devoured magazine articles about space travel.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vikings Were in the Americas Exactly 1,000 Years Ago (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4033",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/vikings-newfoundland-age.html",
        "text": "By studying tree rings and using a dash of astrophysics, researchers have pinned down a precise year that settlers from Europe were on land that would come to be known as Newfoundland. By studying tree rings and using a dash of astrophysics, researchers have pinned down a precise year that settlers from Europe were on land that would come to be known as Newfoundland. Six decades ago, a husband-and-wife team of archaeologists discovered the remains of a settlement on the windswept northern tip of Newfoundland. The site\u2019s eight timber-framed structures resemble Viking buildings in Greenland, and archaeological artifacts found there \u2014 including a bronze cloak pin \u2014 are decidedly Norse in style.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Black Hole\u2019s Boomerangs (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4034",
        "date": "2020-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/science/black-hole-astronomy-meerkat.html",
        "text": "Astronomers dissect the energy flow in a distant galaxy. Astronomers dissect the energy flow in a distant galaxy. Astronomers have deciphered the dynamics of yet another great trick that monster black holes can play.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Winter Solstice, a Meteor Shower, Jupiter and Saturn Walk Into Your Night Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4035",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/science/winter-solstice-jupiter-saturn-ursids.html",
        "text": "One day that has room for three distinct astronomical events. One day that has room for three distinct astronomical events. While it\u2019s been a terrible year in a lot of ways, 2020 has had some impressive astronomical occurrences. Remember Comet NEOWISE? Or when Betelgeuse dimmed in night skies? Those were just a couple of the celestial highlights as we stumbled our way around the sun during these 366 days (it was a leap year, too).",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Dinner Time on the Space Station. Lobster or Beef Bourguignon? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4036",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/astronauts-food-space-station.html",
        "text": "Earth\u2019s gastronomical delights are being adapted to life in orbit. Earth\u2019s gastronomical delights are being adapted to life in orbit. A French astronaut who leaves Earth these days does not leave French food behind.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Dinner Time on the Space Station. Lobster or Beef Bourguignon? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4037",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/astronauts-food-space-station.html",
        "text": "Earth\u2019s gastronomical delights are being adapted to life in orbit. Earth\u2019s gastronomical delights are being adapted to life in orbit. A French astronaut who leaves Earth these days does not leave French food behind.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Dinner Time on the Space Station. Lobster or Beef Bourguignon? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4038",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/astronauts-food-space-station.html",
        "text": "Earth\u2019s gastronomical delights are being adapted to life in orbit. Earth\u2019s gastronomical delights are being adapted to life in orbit. A French astronaut who leaves Earth these days does not leave French food behind.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Measure Time \u2014 From the Very Beginning of Time (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4039",
        "date": "2019-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/time-astronomical-units.html",
        "text": "Scientists still define astronomical time in years, with some recent refinements. Scientists still define astronomical time in years, with some recent refinements. A. Old habits die hard. The unit of time recognized by astronomers is an advanced refinement of what was originally another Earth-centric unit, the length of the day.",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Black Hole\u2019s Lunch: Stellar Spaghetti (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4040",
        "date": "2020-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/science/astronomy-black-hole-at1910qix.html",
        "text": "Astronomers observed a star become a \u201cfeast\u201d for a cosmic monster. Astronomers observed a star become a \u201cfeast\u201d for a cosmic monster. Astronomers call it \u201cspaghettification,\u201d and it\u2019s not a pretty idea: It\u2019s what happens when you venture too close to a black hole and fall in. Tidal forces stretch you and break you like a noodle, then your shreds circle the black hole until they collide and knock each other in.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Capturing the Aftermath of a Star Collision 1,900 Years Ago (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4041",
        "date": "2017-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/science/orion-ruanway-stars-collision.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have photographed images of the explosion, which created two runaway stars. Astronomers have photographed images of the explosion, which created two runaway stars. About 1,900 years ago and 1,350 light years away, stars in a giant gas cloud behind the Orion constellation collided, ejecting two other young stars.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Bakalar"
    },
    {
        "title": "After SpaceX Starlink Launch, a Fear of Satellites That Outnumber All Visible Stars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4042",
        "date": "2019-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/science/starlink-spacex-astronomers.html",
        "text": "Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Last month, SpaceX successfully launched 60 500-pound satellites into space. Soon amateur skywatchers started sharing images of those satellites in night skies, igniting an uproar among astronomers who fear that the planned orbiting cluster will wreak havoc on scientific research and trash our view of the cosmos.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "After SpaceX Starlink Launch, a Fear of Satellites That Outnumber All Visible Stars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4043",
        "date": "2019-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/science/starlink-spacex-astronomers.html",
        "text": "Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Last month, SpaceX successfully launched 60 500-pound satellites into space. Soon amateur skywatchers started sharing images of those satellites in night skies, igniting an uproar among astronomers who fear that the planned orbiting cluster will wreak havoc on scientific research and trash our view of the cosmos.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "After SpaceX Starlink Launch, a Fear of Satellites That Outnumber All Visible Stars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4044",
        "date": "2019-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/science/starlink-spacex-astronomers.html",
        "text": "Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Last month, SpaceX successfully launched 60 500-pound satellites into space. Soon amateur skywatchers started sharing images of those satellites in night skies, igniting an uproar among astronomers who fear that the planned orbiting cluster will wreak havoc on scientific research and trash our view of the cosmos.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "After SpaceX Starlink Launch, a Fear of Satellites That Outnumber All Visible Stars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4045",
        "date": "2019-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/science/starlink-spacex-astronomers.html",
        "text": "Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Images of the Starlink constellation in orbit have rattled astronomers around the world. Last month, SpaceX successfully launched 60 500-pound satellites into space. Soon amateur skywatchers started sharing images of those satellites in night skies, igniting an uproar among astronomers who fear that the planned orbiting cluster will wreak havoc on scientific research and trash our view of the cosmos.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blowtorch of the Gods Captured by Black Hole Image Makers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4046",
        "date": "2020-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/black-hole-jet-picture.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have given us a look into the engine compartment of a quasar. Astronomers have given us a look into the engine compartment of a quasar. Astronomers said Tuesday that they had for the first time seen a black hole spitting fire from the heart of a distant quasar. The work, by the same team that produced the first image of a black hole last year, illuminates the workings of one of the mysterious fountains of energy that dot deepest space and have tantalized astronomers with their ferocious energies ever since they were discovered more than 50 years ago.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Guide to Eclipses, Supermoons and More Lunar Events (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4047",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/moon-astronomy-calendar.html",
        "text": "Eclipses, supermoons and other astronomical highlights to look forward to, years into the future. Eclipses, supermoons and other astronomical highlights to look forward to, years into the future. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Glimpse of Oumuamua (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4048",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005592208/glimpse-of-oumuamua.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have discovered a passing rock from another star \u2014 the first interstellar asteroid. Astronomers have discovered a passing rock from another star \u2014 the first interstellar asteroid. Astronomers have discovered a passing rock from another star \u2014 the first interstellar asteroid.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Star Went Supernova in 1987. Where Is It Now? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4049",
        "date": "2020-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/science/supernova-neutron-star-sn1987a.html",
        "text": "Astronomers might have found the ultradense remnant of an explosion that wracked a nearby galaxy. Astronomers might have found the ultradense remnant of an explosion that wracked a nearby galaxy. It was one of the great fireworks displays of recent cosmic history.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Expected Soon: First-Ever Photo of a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4050",
        "date": "2019-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/science/black-hole-photo.html",
        "text": "Have astronomers finally recorded an image of a black hole? The world will know on Wednesday. Have astronomers finally recorded an image of a black hole? The world will know on Wednesday. Ridley Scott, eat your heart out.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Came From a Black Hole, and Landed in Antarctica (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4051",
        "date": "2018-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/science/space-neutrinos-blazar.html",
        "text": "For the first time, astronomers followed cosmic neutrinos into the fire-spitting heart of a supermassive blazar. For the first time, astronomers followed cosmic neutrinos into the fire-spitting heart of a supermassive blazar. It was the smallest bullet you could possibly imagine, a subatomic particle weighing barely more than a thought. It had been fired out of a gravitational gun barrel by a cosmic blunderbuss, a supermassive black hole.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Came From a Black Hole, and Landed in Antarctica (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4052",
        "date": "2018-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/science/space-neutrinos-blazar.html",
        "text": "For the first time, astronomers followed cosmic neutrinos into the fire-spitting heart of a supermassive blazar. For the first time, astronomers followed cosmic neutrinos into the fire-spitting heart of a supermassive blazar. It was the smallest bullet you could possibly imagine, a subatomic particle weighing barely more than a thought. It had been fired out of a gravitational gun barrel by a cosmic blunderbuss, a supermassive black hole.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Dance That Stops 2 of Neptune\u2019s Moons From Colliding (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4053",
        "date": "2019-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/science/neptune-moons-orbit.html",
        "text": "Astronomers detected an orbital resonance between the two innermost satellites of the mysterious ice giant planet. Astronomers detected an orbital resonance between the two innermost satellites of the mysterious ice giant planet. Neptune is the loneliest planet in the solar system. The ice giant, orbiting the sun at a distance of 2.8 billion miles, is the only planet that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Along with Uranus, we have only paid it a single visit, back when Voyager 2 zipped by in the late-1980s.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "American Astronomy\u2019s Future Goes on Trial in Washington (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4054",
        "date": "2020-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/science/telescopes-decadal-survey-hawaii.html",
        "text": "As competition with Europe heats up, astronomers pitch their dreams of giant telescopes astride the Earth. As competition with Europe heats up, astronomers pitch their dreams of giant telescopes astride the Earth. WASHINGTON \u2014 Recently, in what amounted to a kind of cosmic Supreme Court hearing, two giant telescope projects pleaded for their lives before a committee charged with charting the future of American astronomy.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune\u2019s Weird Dark Spot Just Got Weirder (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4055",
        "date": "2020-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/science/neptune-dark-spot.html",
        "text": "While observing the planet\u2019s large inky storm, astronomers spotted a smaller vortex they named Dark Spot Jr. While observing the planet\u2019s large inky storm, astronomers spotted a smaller vortex they named Dark Spot Jr. Neptune boasts some of the strangest weather in the solar system. The sun\u2019s eighth planet holds the record for the fastest winds observed on any world, with speeds cutting through the atmosphere upward of 1,100 miles per hour, or 1.5 times the speed of sound. Scientists still don\u2019t know exactly why its atmosphere is so tumultuous. Their latest glimpse of Neptune provided even more reason to be confused.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune\u2019s Weird Dark Spot Just Got Weirder (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4056",
        "date": "2020-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/science/neptune-dark-spot.html",
        "text": "While observing the planet\u2019s large inky storm, astronomers spotted a smaller vortex they named Dark Spot Jr. While observing the planet\u2019s large inky storm, astronomers spotted a smaller vortex they named Dark Spot Jr. Neptune boasts some of the strangest weather in the solar system. The sun\u2019s eighth planet holds the record for the fastest winds observed on any world, with speeds cutting through the atmosphere upward of 1,100 miles per hour, or 1.5 times the speed of sound. Scientists still don\u2019t know exactly why its atmosphere is so tumultuous. Their latest glimpse of Neptune provided even more reason to be confused.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Star Looked Like It Would Explode. Maybe It Just Sneezed (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4057",
        "date": "2020-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/science/betelgeuse-star-supernova.html",
        "text": "The mysterious dimming of the red supergiant Betelgeuse is the result of a stellar exhalation, astronomers say. The mysterious dimming of the red supergiant Betelgeuse is the result of a stellar exhalation, astronomers say. Apparently a star can sneeze.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the World\u2019s Astronomers Are Very, Very Anxious Right Now (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4058",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/science/james-webb-telescope-launch.html",
        "text": "The James Webb Space Telescope is endowed with the hopes and trepidations of a generation of astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is endowed with the hopes and trepidations of a generation of astronomers. What do astronomers eat for breakfast on the day that their $10 billion telescope launches into space? Their fingernails.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the World\u2019s Astronomers Are Very, Very Anxious Right Now (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4059",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/science/james-webb-telescope-launch.html",
        "text": "The James Webb Space Telescope is endowed with the hopes and trepidations of a generation of astronomers. The James Webb Space Telescope is endowed with the hopes and trepidations of a generation of astronomers. What do astronomers eat for breakfast on the day that their $10 billion telescope launches into space? Their fingernails.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vera Rubin Gets a Telescope of Her Own (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4060",
        "date": "2020-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/science/vera-rubin-telescope-astronomy.html",
        "text": "The astronomer missed her Nobel Prize. But she now has a whole new observatory to her name. The astronomer missed her Nobel Prize. But she now has a whole new observatory to her name. Vera Rubin, a young astronomer at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, was on the run in the 1970s when she overturned the universe.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vera Rubin Gets a Telescope of Her Own (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4061",
        "date": "2020-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/science/vera-rubin-telescope-astronomy.html",
        "text": "The astronomer missed her Nobel Prize. But she now has a whole new observatory to her name. The astronomer missed her Nobel Prize. But she now has a whole new observatory to her name. Vera Rubin, a young astronomer at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, was on the run in the 1970s when she overturned the universe.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans Sunshades to Save Night Skies From Starlink Satellites (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4062",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/science/spacex-starlink-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Some astronomers who have criticized the company\u2019s orbital internet constellation were encouraged by the measures it announced. Some astronomers who have criticized the company\u2019s orbital internet constellation were encouraged by the measures it announced. Perhaps the night sky has been saved.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans Sunshades to Save Night Skies From Starlink Satellites (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4063",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/science/spacex-starlink-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Some astronomers who have criticized the company\u2019s orbital internet constellation were encouraged by the measures it announced. Some astronomers who have criticized the company\u2019s orbital internet constellation were encouraged by the measures it announced. Perhaps the night sky has been saved.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans Sunshades to Save Night Skies From Starlink Satellites (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4064",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/science/spacex-starlink-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Some astronomers who have criticized the company\u2019s orbital internet constellation were encouraged by the measures it announced. Some astronomers who have criticized the company\u2019s orbital internet constellation were encouraged by the measures it announced. Perhaps the night sky has been saved.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Nearby Earth-Size Planet May Have Conditions for Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4065",
        "date": "2017-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/science/planet-ross-128.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have found a planet circling Ross 128, a quiet red star in our own galactic neighborhood. Astronomers have found a planet circling Ross 128, a quiet red star in our own galactic neighborhood. There\u2019s a new place to look for life in the universe.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond the Milky Way, a Galactic Wall (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4066",
        "date": "2020-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/science/astronomy-galaxies-attractor-universe.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the \u201czone of avoidance.\u201d Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the \u201czone of avoidance.\u201d Astronomers have discovered that there is a vast wall across the southern border of the local cosmos.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond the Milky Way, a Galactic Wall (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4067",
        "date": "2020-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/science/astronomy-galaxies-attractor-universe.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the \u201czone of avoidance.\u201d Astronomers have discovered a vast assemblage of galaxies hidden behind our own, in the \u201czone of avoidance.\u201d Astronomers have discovered that there is a vast wall across the southern border of the local cosmos.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "So Long, Exoplanet HD 17156b. Hello ... Sauron? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4068",
        "date": "2019-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/science/exoplanets-astronomy-space.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have announced a global contest to rename dozens of extrasolar planets. The nominees are pouring in. Astronomers have announced a global contest to rename dozens of extrasolar planets. The nominees are pouring in. One benefit of discovery is that you get to name the things you discovered. Astronomy is blessed in this regard. There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on Earth, trillions upon trillions \u2014 enough to name a galaxy for every human who ever did or will live and every god or goblin proposed by human imagination.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "So Long, Exoplanet HD 17156b. Hello ... Sauron? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4069",
        "date": "2019-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/science/exoplanets-astronomy-space.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have announced a global contest to rename dozens of extrasolar planets. The nominees are pouring in. Astronomers have announced a global contest to rename dozens of extrasolar planets. The nominees are pouring in. One benefit of discovery is that you get to name the things you discovered. Astronomy is blessed in this regard. There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on Earth, trillions upon trillions \u2014 enough to name a galaxy for every human who ever did or will live and every god or goblin proposed by human imagination.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Darkness Visible, Finally: Astronomers Capture First Ever Image of a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4070",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/black-hole-picture.html",
        "text": "Astronomers at last have captured a picture of one of the most secretive entities in the cosmos. Astronomers at last have captured a picture of one of the most secretive entities in the cosmos. Astronomers announced on Wednesday that at last they had captured an image of the unobservable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Nest of Alien Asteroids Orbits Our Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4071",
        "date": "2020-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/science/alien-asteroids-orbits.html",
        "text": "Astronomers say they have found orphan rocks from another star, or stars, stashed in the outer solar system. Astronomers say they have found orphan rocks from another star, or stars, stashed in the outer solar system. A pair of astronomers announced last week that they had identified 19 alien asteroids circling our sun.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Has a Comet-Like Tail. Every Month It Shoots a Beam Around Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4072",
        "date": "2021-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/science/moon-tail-beam.html",
        "text": "\u201cIt almost seems like a magical thing,\u201d said one of the astronomers involved in studying the lunar phenomenon. \u201cIt almost seems like a magical thing,\u201d said one of the astronomers involved in studying the lunar phenomenon. Carl Sagan once said that Earth is but a \u201cmote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.\u201d He would probably be thrilled to know that, around the time of a new moon, Earth is a speck of dust suspended in a moon tail.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Has a Comet-Like Tail. Every Month It Shoots a Beam Around Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4073",
        "date": "2021-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/science/moon-tail-beam.html",
        "text": "\u201cIt almost seems like a magical thing,\u201d said one of the astronomers involved in studying the lunar phenomenon. \u201cIt almost seems like a magical thing,\u201d said one of the astronomers involved in studying the lunar phenomenon. Carl Sagan once said that Earth is but a \u201cmote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.\u201d He would probably be thrilled to know that, around the time of a new moon, Earth is a speck of dust suspended in a moon tail.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Circling a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4074",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000006142535/circling-a-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Astronomers are probing the edge of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Astronomers are probing the edge of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Astronomers are probing the edge of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Our Universe\u2019s Very Dusty Early, Early Beginnings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4075",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/science/oldest-dust-in-universe.html",
        "text": "Far away, in a constellation called Sculptor, astronomers have glimpsed the universe\u2019s oldest dust. It\u2019s 13.2 billion years old. Far away, in a constellation called Sculptor, astronomers have glimpsed the universe\u2019s oldest dust. It\u2019s 13.2 billion years old. To the list of cosmic superlatives must now be added a new item: the oldest dust.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Metal Planet Orbits Its Star Every 7.7 Hours (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4076",
        "date": "2021-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/science/iron-exoplanet-super-mercury.html",
        "text": "Astronomers call it a \u201csuper-Mercury\u201d and think it holds clues to how planets form close in to their stars. Astronomers call it a \u201csuper-Mercury\u201d and think it holds clues to how planets form close in to their stars. Astronomers engaged in the sport of hunting exoplanets, or planets around other star systems have spotted a tiny world designated GJ 367 b with about half the mass of the Earth. Among the lightest exoplanets found to date, GJ 367 b zips around its parent star in a speedy 7.7 hours and is unusually dense, appearing to be made of almost pure iron.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Carolyn Shoemaker, Hunter of Comets and Asteroids, Dies at 92 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4077",
        "date": "2021-09-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/science/space/carolyn-shoemaker-dead.html",
        "text": "After her children left for college, she unexpectedly became astronomy\u2019s record-setting spotter of unidentified objects hurtling through the cosmos. After her children left for college, she unexpectedly became astronomy\u2019s record-setting spotter of unidentified objects hurtling through the cosmos. Carolyn Shoemaker, who for more than a decade managed a telescopic camera with her husband from a high-altitude observatory in California and became widely regarded, without academic training, as the world\u2019s foremost detector of comets and asteroids, died on Aug. 13 at a hospital in Flagstaff, Ariz. She was 92.",
        "author": "By Alex Traub"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Bitter Archaeological Feud Over an Ancient Vision of the Cosmos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4078",
        "date": "2021-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/science/nebra-sky-disk.html",
        "text": "The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a \u201cvery emotional object.\u201d The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a \u201cvery emotional object.\u201d The disk is small \u2014 just 12 inches in diameter \u2014 but it has loomed large in the minds of people across millenniums. Made of bronze, the artifact was inlaid in gold with an ancient vision of the cosmos by its crafters. Over generations, it was updated with new astronomical insights, until it was buried beneath land that would become the Federal Republic of Germany thousands of years later.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Bitter Archaeological Feud Over an Ancient Vision of the Cosmos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4079",
        "date": "2021-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/science/nebra-sky-disk.html",
        "text": "The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a \u201cvery emotional object.\u201d The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a \u201cvery emotional object.\u201d The disk is small \u2014 just 12 inches in diameter \u2014 but it has loomed large in the minds of people across millenniums. Made of bronze, the artifact was inlaid in gold with an ancient vision of the cosmos by its crafters. Over generations, it was updated with new astronomical insights, until it was buried beneath land that would become the Federal Republic of Germany thousands of years later.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Bitter Archaeological Feud Over an Ancient Vision of the Cosmos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4080",
        "date": "2021-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/science/nebra-sky-disk.html",
        "text": "The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a \u201cvery emotional object.\u201d The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a \u201cvery emotional object.\u201d The disk is small \u2014 just 12 inches in diameter \u2014 but it has loomed large in the minds of people across millenniums. Made of bronze, the artifact was inlaid in gold with an ancient vision of the cosmos by its crafters. Over generations, it was updated with new astronomical insights, until it was buried beneath land that would become the Federal Republic of Germany thousands of years later.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gaia\u2019s Map of 1.3 Billion Stars Makes for a Milky Way in a Bottle (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4081",
        "date": "2018-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/science/gaia-map-milky-way.html",
        "text": "European astronomers released a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy. European astronomers released a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy. Call it a galaxy in a bottle.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gaia\u2019s Map of 1.3 Billion Stars Makes for a Milky Way in a Bottle (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4082",
        "date": "2018-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/science/gaia-map-milky-way.html",
        "text": "European astronomers released a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy. European astronomers released a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy. Call it a galaxy in a bottle.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gaia\u2019s Map of 1.3 Billion Stars Makes for a Milky Way in a Bottle (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4083",
        "date": "2018-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/science/gaia-map-milky-way.html",
        "text": "European astronomers released a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy. European astronomers released a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the most detailed survey ever produced of our home galaxy. Call it a galaxy in a bottle.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Names Dark Energy Telescope for Nancy Grace Roman (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4084",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/science/nancy-grace-roman-telescope.html",
        "text": "Dr. Roman was a pioneer at NASA, joining the agency in its early days and becoming its first chief astronomer. Dr. Roman was a pioneer at NASA, joining the agency in its early days and becoming its first chief astronomer. NASA announced Wednesday that one of its most ambitious upcoming space telescopes would be named for Nancy Grace Roman, who pioneered the role of women in the space agency.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 22-Million-Year Journey From the Asteroid Belt to Botswana (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4085",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/science/meteorite-botswana-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Astronomers reconstructed a space rock\u2019s path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. Astronomers reconstructed a space rock\u2019s path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 22-Million-Year Journey From the Asteroid Belt to Botswana (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4086",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/science/meteorite-botswana-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Astronomers reconstructed a space rock\u2019s path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. Astronomers reconstructed a space rock\u2019s path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 22-Million-Year Journey From the Asteroid Belt to Botswana (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4087",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/science/meteorite-botswana-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Astronomers reconstructed a space rock\u2019s path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. Astronomers reconstructed a space rock\u2019s path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Sky & Telescope Had No Limit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4088",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/science/astronomy-magazine-telescope.html",
        "text": "A venerable astronomy magazine goes on the auction block, and a writer who grew up there reflects on its influence. A venerable astronomy magazine goes on the auction block, and a writer who grew up there reflects on its influence. In the spring of 1976, nearly broke, struggling with a novel and having exhausted the patience of everyone around me, I wrote a letter begging for some kind of job to every publisher listed in the Boston Yellow Pages. I had a physics degree from M.I.T., but I didn\u2019t want to be a physicist anymore; I had decided I was a writer.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Just a Fainting Spell? Or Is Betelgeuse About to Blow? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4089",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/science/astronomy-supernova-betelgeuse.html",
        "text": "A familiar star in the constellation Orion has dimmed noticeably since October. Astronomers wonder if its explosive finale is imminent. A familiar star in the constellation Orion has dimmed noticeably since October. Astronomers wonder if its explosive finale is imminent. Is Betelgeuse about to blow?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Name a Bunch of Black Holes? You Had Some Ideas. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4090",
        "date": "2021-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/science/black-hole-names-holley-bockelmann.html",
        "text": "Recently, astronomers asked aloud which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos. The responses were plentiful. Recently, astronomers asked aloud which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos. The responses were plentiful. In April, during the fetchingly (or chillingly) titled Black Hole Week, a group of astronomers initiated what amounted to a kind of cosmic Rorschach test.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Name a Bunch of Black Holes? You Had Some Ideas. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4091",
        "date": "2021-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/science/black-hole-names-holley-bockelmann.html",
        "text": "Recently, astronomers asked aloud which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos. The responses were plentiful. Recently, astronomers asked aloud which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos. The responses were plentiful. In April, during the fetchingly (or chillingly) titled Black Hole Week, a group of astronomers initiated what amounted to a kind of cosmic Rorschach test.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Came From Outside Our Solar System and Now It\u2019s Breaking Up (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4092",
        "date": "2020-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/comet-borisov-break-up.html",
        "text": "Comet Borisov, only the second interstellar object spotted by astronomers, shed at least one big chunk as it rounded our sun. Comet Borisov, only the second interstellar object spotted by astronomers, shed at least one big chunk as it rounded our sun. It came from beyond our solar system. But the sun wasn\u2019t content to let it leave in peace, or in one piece.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Interstellar Visitor Both Familiar and Alien (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4093",
        "date": "2017-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/science/oumuamua-space-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Astronomers offer new details about Oumuamua, a probable asteroid arriving from beyond the solar system and leaving in a big hurry. Astronomers offer new details about Oumuamua, a probable asteroid arriving from beyond the solar system and leaving in a big hurry. Visit the galaxy before the galaxy visits you.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Interstellar Visitor Both Familiar and Alien (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4094",
        "date": "2017-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/science/oumuamua-space-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Astronomers offer new details about Oumuamua, a probable asteroid arriving from beyond the solar system and leaving in a big hurry. Astronomers offer new details about Oumuamua, a probable asteroid arriving from beyond the solar system and leaving in a big hurry. Visit the galaxy before the galaxy visits you.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Detecting a Kilonova Explosion (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4095",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005491113/detecting-a-kilonova-explosion.html",
        "text": "For the first time, astronomers have seen and heard a pair of neutron stars collide in a crucible of cosmic alchemy. For the first time, astronomers have seen and heard a pair of neutron stars collide in a crucible of cosmic alchemy. For the first time, astronomers have seen and heard a pair of neutron stars collide in a crucible of cosmic alchemy.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Third Gravitational Wave Detection, From Black-Hole Merger 3 Billion Light Years Away (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4096",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/black-holes-collision-ligo-gravitational-waves.html",
        "text": "This is the third black-hole smashup that astronomers have detected since they started keeping watch on the cosmos back in September 2015. This is the third black-hole smashup that astronomers have detected since they started keeping watch on the cosmos back in September 2015. The void is rocking and rolling with invisible cataclysms.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s TESS Starts Collecting Planets (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4097",
        "date": "2018-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/science/nasa-tess-planets.html",
        "text": "The satellite, launched in April, has already identified at least 73 stars that may harbor exoplanets, most of them new to astronomers. The satellite, launched in April, has already identified at least 73 stars that may harbor exoplanets, most of them new to astronomers. Somewhere among these grains of celestial sugar and powder puffs of cloudy light there is a planet, perhaps many planets, perhaps even Earth 2.0, as astronomers sometimes call the object of their dreams \u2014 a terrestrial look-alike to our own world, a \u201cGoldilocks\u201d place not too hot nor too cold, where Darwin\u2019s dice might have come up sevens. ",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s TESS Starts Collecting Planets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4098",
        "date": "2018-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/science/nasa-tess-planets.html",
        "text": "The satellite, launched in April, has already identified at least 73 stars that may harbor exoplanets, most of them new to astronomers. The satellite, launched in April, has already identified at least 73 stars that may harbor exoplanets, most of them new to astronomers. Somewhere among these grains of celestial sugar and powder puffs of cloudy light there is a planet, perhaps many planets, perhaps even Earth 2.0, as astronomers sometimes call the object of their dreams \u2014 a terrestrial look-alike to our own world, a \u201cGoldilocks\u201d place not too hot nor too cold, where Darwin\u2019s dice might have come up sevens. ",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Webb Telescope Prepares to Ascend, With an Eye Toward Our Origins (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4099",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/science/webb-telescope-astronomy.html",
        "text": "The biggest space telescope in history aims to answer astronomy\u2019s oldest question: How did we get from the Big Bang to here? The biggest space telescope in history aims to answer astronomy\u2019s oldest question: How did we get from the Big Bang to here? There are only a few times in the history of a species when it gains the know-how, the audacity and the tools to greatly advance the interrogation of its origins. Humanity is at such a moment, astronomers say.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Webb Telescope Prepares to Ascend, With an Eye Toward Our Origins (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4100",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/science/webb-telescope-astronomy.html",
        "text": "The biggest space telescope in history aims to answer astronomy\u2019s oldest question: How did we get from the Big Bang to here? The biggest space telescope in history aims to answer astronomy\u2019s oldest question: How did we get from the Big Bang to here? There are only a few times in the history of a species when it gains the know-how, the audacity and the tools to greatly advance the interrogation of its origins. Humanity is at such a moment, astronomers say.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Webb Telescope Prepares to Ascend, With an Eye Toward Our Origins (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4101",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/science/webb-telescope-astronomy.html",
        "text": "The biggest space telescope in history aims to answer astronomy\u2019s oldest question: How did we get from the Big Bang to here? The biggest space telescope in history aims to answer astronomy\u2019s oldest question: How did we get from the Big Bang to here? There are only a few times in the history of a species when it gains the know-how, the audacity and the tools to greatly advance the interrogation of its origins. Humanity is at such a moment, astronomers say.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Cold Outside, but Earth Is at Its Closest Approach to the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4102",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/perihelion-earth-sun.html",
        "text": "Our planet\u2019s elliptical orbit doesn\u2019t affect winter or summer temperatures. But some astronomers wonder whether it\u2019s a factor in why life survives. Our planet\u2019s elliptical orbit doesn\u2019t affect winter or summer temperatures. But some astronomers wonder whether it\u2019s a factor in why life survives. This story was updated to reflect 2022\u2019s perihelion.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Very Hungry Black Hole Is Found, Gorging on Stars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4103",
        "date": "2018-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/science/hungry-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Astronomers in Australia say they have discovered a fast-growing black hole swallowing stars in a baby galaxy 12 billion light-years from here. Astronomers in Australia say they have discovered a fast-growing black hole swallowing stars in a baby galaxy 12 billion light-years from here. It is a truism of modern astronomy that every galaxy has a hungry heart, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, in the form of a massive black hole gulping gas, dust and even stars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Very Hungry Black Hole Is Found, Gorging on Stars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4104",
        "date": "2018-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/science/hungry-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Astronomers in Australia say they have discovered a fast-growing black hole swallowing stars in a baby galaxy 12 billion light-years from here. Astronomers in Australia say they have discovered a fast-growing black hole swallowing stars in a baby galaxy 12 billion light-years from here. It is a truism of modern astronomy that every galaxy has a hungry heart, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, in the form of a massive black hole gulping gas, dust and even stars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Broadcasting from Deep Space, a Mysterious Series of Radio Signals (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4105",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/science/radio-bursts-universe-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have identified a second set of odd radio bursts from the distant universe. Aliens probably aren\u2019t causing it, but what is? Astronomers have identified a second set of odd radio bursts from the distant universe. Aliens probably aren\u2019t causing it, but what is? Something is happening out there, and astronomers sure wish they knew what it was.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018Front-Row Seat\u2019 to the Birth of a Comet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4106",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/science/comet-jupiter-centaur.html",
        "text": "Astronomers are watching an object transform into a hyperactive comet that will head toward the inner solar system in the coming decades. Astronomers are watching an object transform into a hyperactive comet that will head toward the inner solar system in the coming decades. As Douglas Adams once said: Space is big. Really big. Consequently, scientists see only tiny slivers of space at any given moment, so on those infrequent occasions when something new is observed, it\u2019s a revelatory delight.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Mysterious Flash From a Faraway Galaxy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4107",
        "date": "2017-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/science/x-ray-burst-outer-space.html",
        "text": "Astronomers are puzzled by X-rays that for a brief time were a thousand times brighter than all of its home galaxy\u2019s light. Astronomers are puzzled by X-rays that for a brief time were a thousand times brighter than all of its home galaxy\u2019s light. It was a spark in the night. A flash of X-rays from a galaxy hovering nearly invisibly on the edge of infinity.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sunspots and Stranded Whales: A Bizarre Correlation (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4108",
        "date": "2020-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/science/whales-sunspots.html",
        "text": "A collaboration between biologists and an astronomer sought to add evidence to the idea that whale migration is affected by solar weather. A collaboration between biologists and an astronomer sought to add evidence to the idea that whale migration is affected by solar weather. As an astronomer at Chicago\u2019s Adler Planetarium, Lucianne Walkowicz usually has to stretch to connect the peculiarities of space physics with things that people experience on Earth.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4109",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4110",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4111",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4112",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4113",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4114",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4115",
        "date": "2020-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/2020-astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4116",
        "date": "2021-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4117",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4118",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sync your calendar with the solar system (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4119",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/science/astronomy-space-calendar.html",
        "text": "Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomers Reveal the First Picture of a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4120",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006453594/first-image-black-hole.html",
        "text": "\u201cThis is a remarkable achievement,\u201d said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at Harvard University. The image provides visual evidence that black holes exist. \u201cThis is a remarkable achievement,\u201d said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at Harvard University. The image provides visual evidence that black holes exist. \u201cThis is a remarkable achievement,\u201d said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at Harvard University. The image provides visual evidence that black holes exist.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "At the Edge of Time, a Litter of Galactic Puppies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4121",
        "date": "2020-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/science/astronomy-galaxies-black-hole.html",
        "text": "The discovery of a black hole surrounded by protogalaxies provides astronomers with a rare glimpse of the web of matter permeating the cosmos. The discovery of a black hole surrounded by protogalaxies provides astronomers with a rare glimpse of the web of matter permeating the cosmos. Astronomers announced on Thursday that they had discovered a giant black hole surrounded by a litter of young protogalaxies that date to the early universe \u2014 the beginning of time.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launched a Rocket 54 Years Ago. Has It Finally Come Home? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4122",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/nasa-rocket-orbit.html",
        "text": "Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. It was after midnight on Sept. 19 and Paul Chodas, the manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was working late, studying an object called 2020 SO that other astronomers had spotted in the night skies just the day before. Something about its orbit was peculiar.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launched a Rocket 54 Years Ago. Has It Finally Come Home? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4123",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/nasa-rocket-orbit.html",
        "text": "Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. It was after midnight on Sept. 19 and Paul Chodas, the manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was working late, studying an object called 2020 SO that other astronomers had spotted in the night skies just the day before. Something about its orbit was peculiar.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launched a Rocket 54 Years Ago. Has It Finally Come Home? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4124",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/nasa-rocket-orbit.html",
        "text": "Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. It was after midnight on Sept. 19 and Paul Chodas, the manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was working late, studying an object called 2020 SO that other astronomers had spotted in the night skies just the day before. Something about its orbit was peculiar.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launched a Rocket 54 Years Ago. Has It Finally Come Home? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4125",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/nasa-rocket-orbit.html",
        "text": "Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. Surveyor 2 crashed on the moon in 1966. Astronomers think they\u2019ve spotted a piece of the mission that kept going deeper into space. It was after midnight on Sept. 19 and Paul Chodas, the manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was working late, studying an object called 2020 SO that other astronomers had spotted in the night skies just the day before. Something about its orbit was peculiar.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watching an Interstellar Comet and Hoping for a Bang (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4126",
        "date": "2019-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/science/interstellar-comet-christmas.html",
        "text": "Seeing Comet Borisov won\u2019t be easy for the typical sky gazer, but astronomers still have a lot to learn from this extrasolar tourist. Seeing Comet Borisov won\u2019t be easy for the typical sky gazer, but astronomers still have a lot to learn from this extrasolar tourist. After drifting between stars for eons, Comet 2I/Borisov will make its closest approach to Earth on Saturday, Dec. 28. The comet is only the second confirmed interstellar object to be observed in our solar system, after Oumuamua in 2017. During the comet\u2019s close approach, it will be about 180 million miles away from us, which at that point will be farther away than Mars.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watching an Interstellar Comet and Hoping for a Bang (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4127",
        "date": "2019-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/science/interstellar-comet-christmas.html",
        "text": "Seeing Comet Borisov won\u2019t be easy for the typical sky gazer, but astronomers still have a lot to learn from this extrasolar tourist. Seeing Comet Borisov won\u2019t be easy for the typical sky gazer, but astronomers still have a lot to learn from this extrasolar tourist. After drifting between stars for eons, Comet 2I/Borisov will make its closest approach to Earth on Saturday, Dec. 28. The comet is only the second confirmed interstellar object to be observed in our solar system, after Oumuamua in 2017. During the comet\u2019s close approach, it will be about 180 million miles away from us, which at that point will be farther away than Mars.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos From the 2019 Solar Eclipse in Chile and Argentina (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4128",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/science/solar-eclipse-photos-pictures.html",
        "text": "Photographers and astronomers were strung out across the Atacama Desert waiting for the sun to spread its coronal wings on their examining table. Photographers and astronomers were strung out across the Atacama Desert waiting for the sun to spread its coronal wings on their examining table. On Tuesday morning the sun rose over Oeno Island, a normally uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific, as a black hole in the sky, feathered with pale whiskers of light.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos From the 2019 Solar Eclipse in Chile and Argentina (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4129",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/science/solar-eclipse-photos-pictures.html",
        "text": "Photographers and astronomers were strung out across the Atacama Desert waiting for the sun to spread its coronal wings on their examining table. Photographers and astronomers were strung out across the Atacama Desert waiting for the sun to spread its coronal wings on their examining table. On Tuesday morning the sun rose over Oeno Island, a normally uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific, as a black hole in the sky, feathered with pale whiskers of light.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Eclipse That Revealed the Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4130",
        "date": "2017-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/science/eclipse-einstein-general-relativity.html",
        "text": "In 1919, British astronomers photographed a solar eclipse and proved that light bends around our sun \u2014 affirming Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity. In 1919, British astronomers photographed a solar eclipse and proved that light bends around our sun \u2014 affirming Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity. So this is what it is like to play cosmic pinball. The worlds move, and sometimes they line up. Then you find yourself staring up the tube of blackness that is the moon\u2019s shadow, a sudden hole in the sky during a total solar eclipse.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will the United States Lose the Universe? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4131",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/science/telescopes-magellan-hawaii-astronomy.html",
        "text": "For more than a century, American astronomers have held bragging rights as observers of the cosmos. But that dominance may soon slip away. For more than a century, American astronomers have held bragging rights as observers of the cosmos. But that dominance may soon slip away. The United States is about to lose the universe.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Black Hole Drags Star to Dusty Death (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4132",
        "date": "2018-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/science/black-holes-stars-arp-299.html",
        "text": "Astronomers thought they saw an exploding star, but in fact it was a star having its guts ripped out by a black hole. Astronomers thought they saw an exploding star, but in fact it was a star having its guts ripped out by a black hole. Gulp. Burp.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Black Holes Colliding Not Enough? Make It Three (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4133",
        "date": "2020-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/science/black-hole-collision-ligo.html",
        "text": "Astronomers claim to have seen a flash from the merger of two black holes within the maelstrom of a third, far bigger one. Astronomers claim to have seen a flash from the merger of two black holes within the maelstrom of a third, far bigger one. In an announcement on Thursday, astronomers described the detection of an epistemological marvel: an invisible collision of invisible objects \u2014 black holes \u2014 had become briefly visible. The story goes like this:",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "An 8th Planet Is Found Orbiting a Distant Star, With A.I.\u2019s Help (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4134",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/science/eight-planets-star-system.html",
        "text": "A Google neural network analyzed data collected by NASA and helped astronomers detect another planet around a star some 2,500 light years away. A Google neural network analyzed data collected by NASA and helped astronomers detect another planet around a star some 2,500 light years away. With eight planets whirling around its sun, our solar system has held the galactic title for having the most known planets of any star system in the Milky Way.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Just in Time for the Election: An Asteroid? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4135",
        "date": "2020-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/science/asteroid-election-meteor.html",
        "text": "The object has a slender chance of hitting Earth \u2014 but even if it does, it\u2019s too small to do any damage, astronomers say. The object has a slender chance of hitting Earth \u2014 but even if it does, it\u2019s too small to do any damage, astronomers say. According to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about the only thing we don\u2019t have to worry about on the eve of the U.S. elections on Nov. 3 is being blasted to interplanetary bits by a rogue asteroid.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Count Endangered Species? Look to the Stars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4136",
        "date": "2018-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/science/drones-infrared-cameras-animals.html",
        "text": "Pairing astronomers\u2019 algorithms for star-hunting with drones equipped with infrared cameras, scientists have developed a new tool kit to help conservation and fight poaching. Pairing astronomers\u2019 algorithms for star-hunting with drones equipped with infrared cameras, scientists have developed a new tool kit to help conservation and fight poaching. The conversation started over a fence dividing two backyards. On one side, an ecologist remarked that surveying animals is a pain. His neighbor, an astronomer, said he could see objects in space billions of light years away.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New 10-Year Plan for the Cosmos (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4137",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/astronomy-decadal-survey-telescope.html",
        "text": "On astronomers\u2019 wish list for the next decade: two giant telescopes and a space telescope to search for life and habitable worlds beyond Earth. On astronomers\u2019 wish list for the next decade: two giant telescopes and a space telescope to search for life and habitable worlds beyond Earth. American astronomers on Thursday called for the nation to invest in a new generation of \u201cextremely large\u201d multibillion-dollar telescopes that would be bigger than any now on Earth or orbiting in space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New 10-Year Plan for the Cosmos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4138",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/astronomy-decadal-survey-telescope.html",
        "text": "On astronomers\u2019 wish list for the next decade: two giant telescopes and a space telescope to search for life and habitable worlds beyond Earth. On astronomers\u2019 wish list for the next decade: two giant telescopes and a space telescope to search for life and habitable worlds beyond Earth. American astronomers on Thursday called for the nation to invest in a new generation of \u201cextremely large\u201d multibillion-dollar telescopes that would be bigger than any now on Earth or orbiting in space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New 10-Year Plan for the Cosmos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4139",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/astronomy-decadal-survey-telescope.html",
        "text": "On astronomers\u2019 wish list for the next decade: two giant telescopes and a space telescope to search for life and habitable worlds beyond Earth. On astronomers\u2019 wish list for the next decade: two giant telescopes and a space telescope to search for life and habitable worlds beyond Earth. American astronomers on Thursday called for the nation to invest in a new generation of \u201cextremely large\u201d multibillion-dollar telescopes that would be bigger than any now on Earth or orbiting in space.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Watch the James Webb Space Telescope Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4140",
        "date": "2021-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/science/webb-telescope-launch-date-livestream.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have been waiting eagerly for the beginning of the powerful space observatory\u2019s mission, and on Christmas morning they may finally get their wish. Astronomers have been waiting eagerly for the beginning of the powerful space observatory\u2019s mission, and on Christmas morning they may finally get their wish. If you wake up early enough on Saturday, you\u2019ll be greeted with a spectacle of science and engineering: the launch to orbit of the James Webb Space Telescope.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye and Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Watch the James Webb Space Telescope Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4141",
        "date": "2021-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/science/webb-telescope-launch-date-livestream.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have been waiting eagerly for the beginning of the powerful space observatory\u2019s mission, and on Christmas morning they may finally get their wish. Astronomers have been waiting eagerly for the beginning of the powerful space observatory\u2019s mission, and on Christmas morning they may finally get their wish. If you wake up early enough on Saturday, you\u2019ll be greeted with a spectacle of science and engineering: the launch to orbit of the James Webb Space Telescope.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye and Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Watch the James Webb Space Telescope Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4142",
        "date": "2021-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/science/webb-telescope-launch-date-livestream.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have been waiting eagerly for the beginning of the powerful space observatory\u2019s mission, and on Christmas morning they may finally get their wish. Astronomers have been waiting eagerly for the beginning of the powerful space observatory\u2019s mission, and on Christmas morning they may finally get their wish. If you wake up early enough on Saturday, you\u2019ll be greeted with a spectacle of science and engineering: the launch to orbit of the James Webb Space Telescope.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye and Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Black Hole Feasted on a Neutron Star. 10 Days Later, It Happened Again. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4143",
        "date": "2021-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/science/black-holes.html",
        "text": "Astronomers had long suspected that collisions between black holes and dead stars occurred, but they had no evidence until a pair of recent detections. Astronomers had long suspected that collisions between black holes and dead stars occurred, but they had no evidence until a pair of recent detections. In January last year, astronomers definitively observed, for the first time, a black hole swallowing a dead star, like a raven devouring roadkill.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dancing With a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4144",
        "date": "2020-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/science/black-hole-sagittarius-a.html",
        "text": "Astronomers described the strange orbit of a star that loops the monster in the Milky Way, offering more evidence for one of Einstein\u2019s ideas. Astronomers described the strange orbit of a star that loops the monster in the Milky Way, offering more evidence for one of Einstein\u2019s ideas. For decades, astronomers have had their earthly eyes on the adventures of a star known as S2 that tickles the edges of oblivion.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Harmony That Keeps Trappist-1\u2019s 7 Earth-size Worlds From Colliding (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4145",
        "date": "2017-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/science/trappist-earth-size-planets-orbits-music.html",
        "text": "Astronomers can now explain why the recently discovered Earth-size planets, tightly packed, don\u2019t simply fly apart. And now, you can give it a listen. Astronomers can now explain why the recently discovered Earth-size planets, tightly packed, don\u2019t simply fly apart. And now, you can give it a listen. In February, astronomers announced the discovery of a nearby star with seven Earth-size planets, and at least some of the planets seemed to be in a zone that could provide cozy conditions for life.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Harmony That Keeps Trappist-1\u2019s 7 Earth-size Worlds From Colliding (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4146",
        "date": "2017-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/science/trappist-earth-size-planets-orbits-music.html",
        "text": "Astronomers can now explain why the recently discovered Earth-size planets, tightly packed, don\u2019t simply fly apart. And now, you can give it a listen. Astronomers can now explain why the recently discovered Earth-size planets, tightly packed, don\u2019t simply fly apart. And now, you can give it a listen. In February, astronomers announced the discovery of a nearby star with seven Earth-size planets, and at least some of the planets seemed to be in a zone that could provide cozy conditions for life.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Galaxy That Grew Up Too Fast (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4147",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/science/galaxy-early-universe-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A vast wheel of gas in the primordial cosmos is forcing astronomers to rethink how some of the universe\u2019s largest structures may have formed. A vast wheel of gas in the primordial cosmos is forcing astronomers to rethink how some of the universe\u2019s largest structures may have formed. In the early days of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers, eager to see how far out in space \u2014 and how far back in time \u2014 their new instrument could peer, pointed it at an empty tract of sky. What returned was an image of space littered with what the astronomer Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories called \u201ctrain wrecks\u201d: irregular, fragmented clouds of stars known as protogalaxies, flecks of starlight scattered like orphan jigsaw puzzle pieces across the primordial heavens.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Galaxy That Grew Up Too Fast (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4148",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/science/galaxy-early-universe-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A vast wheel of gas in the primordial cosmos is forcing astronomers to rethink how some of the universe\u2019s largest structures may have formed. A vast wheel of gas in the primordial cosmos is forcing astronomers to rethink how some of the universe\u2019s largest structures may have formed. In the early days of the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers, eager to see how far out in space \u2014 and how far back in time \u2014 their new instrument could peer, pointed it at an empty tract of sky. What returned was an image of space littered with what the astronomer Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories called \u201ctrain wrecks\u201d: irregular, fragmented clouds of stars known as protogalaxies, flecks of starlight scattered like orphan jigsaw puzzle pieces across the primordial heavens.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Casting Light on Mystery of a Star That Vanished After 14 Days (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4149",
        "date": "2017-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/science/nova-stars-korea.html",
        "text": "First spotted by Korean astronomers in 1437, scientists have found it again in the form of a violent star system that experienced a nova explosion. First spotted by Korean astronomers in 1437, scientists have found it again in the form of a violent star system that experienced a nova explosion. Nearly six centuries ago, Korean astronomers scanning the night sky for omens of the future spotted a new star in the cluster of stars they called Wei, and what today\u2019s star watchers consider the tail of the Scorpius constellation.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Magnetic Secrets of Mysterious Radio Bursts in a Faraway Galaxy (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4150",
        "date": "2018-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/science/neutron-star-fast-radio-bursts.html",
        "text": "Black holes or neutron stars behaving wildly are the likely suspects of a repetitious burst of cosmic energy 3 billion light years away, astronomers say. Black holes or neutron stars behaving wildly are the likely suspects of a repetitious burst of cosmic energy 3 billion light years away, astronomers say. Snap, crackle or pop?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Magnetic Secrets of Mysterious Radio Bursts in a Faraway Galaxy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4151",
        "date": "2018-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/science/neutron-star-fast-radio-bursts.html",
        "text": "Black holes or neutron stars behaving wildly are the likely suspects of a repetitious burst of cosmic energy 3 billion light years away, astronomers say. Black holes or neutron stars behaving wildly are the likely suspects of a repetitious burst of cosmic energy 3 billion light years away, astronomers say. Snap, crackle or pop?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "He Took a Picture of a Supernova While Setting Up His New Camera (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4152",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/science/supernova-photo-camera.html",
        "text": "Astronomers rarely see the beginnings of these explosions, but an Argentine amateur\u2019s lucky picture helped them study the start of a massive star\u2019s violent death. Astronomers rarely see the beginnings of these explosions, but an Argentine amateur\u2019s lucky picture helped them study the start of a massive star\u2019s violent death. Boom.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Do You Call a Bunch of Black Holes: A Crush? A Scream? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4153",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/black-holes-astrophysics-names.html",
        "text": "There are pods of whales and gaggles of geese. Now astronomers are wondering which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos. There are pods of whales and gaggles of geese. Now astronomers are wondering which plural term would best suit the most enigmatic entity in the cosmos. What do you call a black hole? Anything you want, the old joke goes, as long as you don\u2019t call it late for dinner. Black holes, after all, are nothing but hungry.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Webb telescope compares with the Hubble. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4154",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/science/hubble-telescope-vs-webb.html",
        "text": "The James Webb Space Telescope will advance astronomy far beyond the vaunted Hubble, which has been humanity\u2019s most powerful space observatory for more than 30 years. The James Webb Space Telescope will advance astronomy far beyond the vaunted Hubble, which has been humanity\u2019s most powerful space observatory for more than 30 years. The Webb telescope\u2019s primary mirror is 6.5 meters in diameter, compared with Hubble\u2019s, which is 2.4 meters, giving Webb about seven times as much light-gathering capability and thus the ability to see further into the past.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "All the Light There Is to See? 4 x 10\u2078\u2074 Photons (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4155",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/science/space-stars-photons-light.html",
        "text": "Astronomers have calculated all the light ever produced by all the stars in the cosmos. It\u2019s a lot, but on the cosmic whole, not that much. Astronomers have calculated all the light ever produced by all the stars in the cosmos. It\u2019s a lot, but on the cosmic whole, not that much. In one of those exercises that you think should be impossible or perhaps a punishment for some infraction, a team of astronomers has now measured the total amount of light that has ever been produced by all the stars in our universe.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deep in the Cosmic Forest, a Black Hole Goldilocks Might Like (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4156",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/science/black-hole-intermediate.html",
        "text": "Astronomers found an intermediate black hole \u2014 not too big, not too small \u2014 that sheds light on how the universe was assembled in the dark. Astronomers found an intermediate black hole \u2014 not too big, not too small \u2014 that sheds light on how the universe was assembled in the dark. Seven hundred and forty million years ago, a star disappeared in a shriek of X-rays.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deep in the Cosmic Forest, a Black Hole Goldilocks Might Like (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4157",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/science/black-hole-intermediate.html",
        "text": "Astronomers found an intermediate black hole \u2014 not too big, not too small \u2014 that sheds light on how the universe was assembled in the dark. Astronomers found an intermediate black hole \u2014 not too big, not too small \u2014 that sheds light on how the universe was assembled in the dark. Seven hundred and forty million years ago, a star disappeared in a shriek of X-rays.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Studies of Earth\u2019s Place in the Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4158",
        "date": "2019-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/science/nobel-physics.html",
        "text": "The cosmologist James Peebles split the prize with two astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for work the Nobel judges said \u201ctransformed our ideas about the cosmos.\u201d The cosmologist James Peebles split the prize with two astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for work the Nobel judges said \u201ctransformed our ideas about the cosmos.\u201d This year\u2019s Nobel Prize in Physics went to an astrophysicist who came up with sweeping ideas to explain how matter in the young universe swirled into galaxies, and to two astronomers who showed that other stars similar to the sun also possess planets.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Megan Specia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Studies of Earth\u2019s Place in the Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4159",
        "date": "2019-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/science/nobel-physics.html",
        "text": "The cosmologist James Peebles split the prize with two astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for work the Nobel judges said \u201ctransformed our ideas about the cosmos.\u201d The cosmologist James Peebles split the prize with two astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for work the Nobel judges said \u201ctransformed our ideas about the cosmos.\u201d This year\u2019s Nobel Prize in Physics went to an astrophysicist who came up with sweeping ideas to explain how matter in the young universe swirled into galaxies, and to two astronomers who showed that other stars similar to the sun also possess planets.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Megan Specia"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Strange Comet Erupted 4 Times in a \u2018Super Outburst\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4160",
        "date": "2021-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/science/comet-29p-eruption.html",
        "text": "Comet 29P is already known as one of the solar system\u2019s oddest icy objects, but the light show it put on in recent days has surprised astronomers. Comet 29P is already known as one of the solar system\u2019s oddest icy objects, but the light show it put on in recent days has surprised astronomers. This past Saturday, a speck of light shimmering in the shadows behind Jupiter erupted. And then it kept erupting, with two more violent jets of material firing into space on Sunday, followed by a fourth paroxysm on Monday. As it raged and flared, it became 250 times brighter than usual, like a lit match becoming a bonfire.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is What It Looks Like When an Asteroid Gets Destroyed (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4161",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/science/asteroid-belt-impact.html",
        "text": "At first astronomers thought they had spotted a comet, but it was really an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter being struck by another object. At first astronomers thought they had spotted a comet, but it was really an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter being struck by another object. The asteroid belt, hanging out between Mars and Jupiter, is not like the cluttered debris field in \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back.\u201d It may contain millions of rocky and metal objects, but the distances separating them are vast, and collisions are rare.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is What It Looks Like When an Asteroid Gets Destroyed (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4162",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/science/asteroid-belt-impact.html",
        "text": "At first astronomers thought they had spotted a comet, but it was really an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter being struck by another object. At first astronomers thought they had spotted a comet, but it was really an asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter being struck by another object. The asteroid belt, hanging out between Mars and Jupiter, is not like the cluttered debris field in \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back.\u201d It may contain millions of rocky and metal objects, but the distances separating them are vast, and collisions are rare.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should That Minor Planet Be Named Gonggong? Astronomers Want the Public\u2019s Help (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4163",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/science/2007-or10-dwarf-planet.html",
        "text": "Astronomers discovered the minor planet 2007 OR10 more than a decade ago. Now they\u2019re asking the public to vote on what to submit as its official name. Astronomers discovered the minor planet 2007 OR10 more than a decade ago. Now they\u2019re asking the public to vote on what to submit as its official name. In the far reaches of the solar system, beyond Neptune, there is a minor planet orbiting the sun in a sea of icy debris.",
        "author": "By Julia Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should That Minor Planet Be Named Gonggong? Astronomers Want the Public\u2019s Help (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4164",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/science/2007-or10-dwarf-planet.html",
        "text": "Astronomers discovered the minor planet 2007 OR10 more than a decade ago. Now they\u2019re asking the public to vote on what to submit as its official name. Astronomers discovered the minor planet 2007 OR10 more than a decade ago. Now they\u2019re asking the public to vote on what to submit as its official name. In the far reaches of the solar system, beyond Neptune, there is a minor planet orbiting the sun in a sea of icy debris.",
        "author": "By Julia Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should That Minor Planet Be Named Gonggong? Astronomers Want the Public\u2019s Help (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4165",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/science/2007-or10-dwarf-planet.html",
        "text": "Astronomers discovered the minor planet 2007 OR10 more than a decade ago. Now they\u2019re asking the public to vote on what to submit as its official name. Astronomers discovered the minor planet 2007 OR10 more than a decade ago. Now they\u2019re asking the public to vote on what to submit as its official name. In the far reaches of the solar system, beyond Neptune, there is a minor planet orbiting the sun in a sea of icy debris.",
        "author": "By Julia Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "As SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Satellites, Scientists See Threat to \u2018Astronomy Itself\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4166",
        "date": "2019-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/science/spacex-starlink-satellites.html",
        "text": "Various companies are pressing ahead with plans for internet service from space, which has prompted astronomers to voice concerns about the impact on research from telescopes on Earth. Various companies are pressing ahead with plans for internet service from space, which has prompted astronomers to voice concerns about the impact on research from telescopes on Earth. On Monday morning, SpaceX launched one of its reusable rockets from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying 60 satellites into space at once. It was the second payload of Starlink, its planned constellation of tens of thousands of orbiting transmitters to beam internet service across the globe. ",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "As SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Satellites, Scientists See Threat to \u2018Astronomy Itself\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4167",
        "date": "2019-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/science/spacex-starlink-satellites.html",
        "text": "Various companies are pressing ahead with plans for internet service from space, which has prompted astronomers to voice concerns about the impact on research from telescopes on Earth. Various companies are pressing ahead with plans for internet service from space, which has prompted astronomers to voice concerns about the impact on research from telescopes on Earth. On Monday morning, SpaceX launched one of its reusable rockets from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying 60 satellites into space at once. It was the second payload of Starlink, its planned constellation of tens of thousands of orbiting transmitters to beam internet service across the globe. ",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Case of the Disappearing Exoplanet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4168",
        "date": "2020-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/science/fomalhaut-exoplanet-asteroid.html",
        "text": "Fomalhaut b was one of the first planets around another star to be directly imaged by telescopes. Some astronomers now say it was a cloud of asteroid debris. Fomalhaut b was one of the first planets around another star to be directly imaged by telescopes. Some astronomers now say it was a cloud of asteroid debris. Humanity\u2019s growing tally of exoplanets \u2014 worlds seen orbiting other stars \u2014 stands at 4,151. Most were found indirectly, as they passed in front of their stars and cast a telltale shadow, or as they caused their star to wobble as they swung around it. Only 50 have been directly imaged through a telescope.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Goblin World That Points Toward Hidden Planet Nine in the Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4169",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/science/goblin-planet-nine.html",
        "text": "What astronomers have found about the curious orbit of a small ice world far away reinforces the idea that a large world is hidden out in the solar system. What astronomers have found about the curious orbit of a small ice world far away reinforces the idea that a large world is hidden out in the solar system. Among some astronomers, there is a growing suspicion that our solar system\u2019s distant reaches conceal a large, ninth planet that we have not yet seen. New findings about a small ice world far beyond Pluto buttress this idea.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Stars Were Born: Earliest Starlight\u2019s Effects Are Detected (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4170",
        "date": "2018-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/science/stars-dark-energy.html",
        "text": "Using a telescope in Australia, astronomers say they have glimpsed farther back in time than the Hubble Telescope to see what was happening when the first stars were forming. Using a telescope in Australia, astronomers say they have glimpsed farther back in time than the Hubble Telescope to see what was happening when the first stars were forming. It was morning in the universe and much colder than anyone had expected when light from the first stars began to tickle and excite their dark surroundings nearly 14 billion years ago.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth-Size Planets Among Final Tally of NASA\u2019s Kepler Telescope (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4171",
        "date": "2017-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/science/kepler-planets-earth-like-census.html",
        "text": "Setting the stage for the next chapter in the quest to end cosmic loneliness, astronomers released a list of objects they are 90 percent sure are planets orbiting other stars. Setting the stage for the next chapter in the quest to end cosmic loneliness, astronomers released a list of objects they are 90 percent sure are planets orbiting other stars. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. \u2014 Are we still alone?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth-Size Planets Among Final Tally of NASA\u2019s Kepler Telescope (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4172",
        "date": "2017-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/science/kepler-planets-earth-like-census.html",
        "text": "Setting the stage for the next chapter in the quest to end cosmic loneliness, astronomers released a list of objects they are 90 percent sure are planets orbiting other stars. Setting the stage for the next chapter in the quest to end cosmic loneliness, astronomers released a list of objects they are 90 percent sure are planets orbiting other stars. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. \u2014 Are we still alone?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth-Size Planets Among Final Tally of NASA\u2019s Kepler Telescope (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4173",
        "date": "2017-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/science/kepler-planets-earth-like-census.html",
        "text": "Setting the stage for the next chapter in the quest to end cosmic loneliness, astronomers released a list of objects they are 90 percent sure are planets orbiting other stars. Setting the stage for the next chapter in the quest to end cosmic loneliness, astronomers released a list of objects they are 90 percent sure are planets orbiting other stars. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. \u2014 Are we still alone?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Extremely Large, Extremely Expensive: The Race for the Next Giant Telescopes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4174",
        "date": "2018-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/science/thirty-meter-telescopes-costs.html",
        "text": "Even as astronomers await a verdict on construction of a huge telescope on Mauna Kea, they are still trying to figure out how to pay for the next stargazing Goliaths. Even as astronomers await a verdict on construction of a huge telescope on Mauna Kea, they are still trying to figure out how to pay for the next stargazing Goliaths. It is high noon, again, for astronomers who want to erect a gigantic telescope on Mauna Kea, the grand volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Summer Solstice 2021 and the Search for Life in the Galaxy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4175",
        "date": "2020-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/summer-solstice-meaning-sunset.html",
        "text": "As you mark the longest day of the year, consider the debate among astronomers over whether Earth\u2019s tilt toward the sun helps make life on our world and others possible. As you mark the longest day of the year, consider the debate among astronomers over whether Earth\u2019s tilt toward the sun helps make life on our world and others possible. On the summer solstice this Sunday, the Northern Hemisphere will dip toward the sun and bathe in direct sunlight for longer than any other day of the year. That will cause the sun to rise early, climb high into the sky \u2014 sweeping far above city skylines or mountain peaks \u2014 and set late into the evening.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Winner\u2019s Advice: Pursue Science Out of Love, Not Awards (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4176",
        "date": "2019-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006757287/nobel-prize-physics.html",
        "text": "The cosmologist James Peebles split the Nobel Prize in Physics with the astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. In accepting the prize, Dr. Peebles offered some guidance for young scientists. The cosmologist James Peebles split the Nobel Prize in Physics with the astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. In accepting the prize, Dr. Peebles offered some guidance for young scientists. The cosmologist James Peebles split the Nobel Prize in Physics with the astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz. In accepting the prize, Dr. Peebles offered some guidance for young scientists.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "7 Earth-Size Planets Orbit Dwarf Star, NASA and European Astronomers Say (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4177",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/science/trappist-1-exoplanets-nasa.html",
        "text": "Astronomers are excited by the discovery, which suggests that some of these exoplanets \u2014 planets around stars other than the sun \u2014 could support life and may be awash in oceans. Astronomers are excited by the discovery, which suggests that some of these exoplanets \u2014 planets around stars other than the sun \u2014 could support life and may be awash in oceans. Not just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to search for signs of alien life outside the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "7 Earth-Size Planets Orbit Dwarf Star, NASA and European Astronomers Say (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4178",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/science/trappist-1-exoplanets-nasa.html",
        "text": "Astronomers are excited by the discovery, which suggests that some of these exoplanets \u2014 planets around stars other than the sun \u2014 could support life and may be awash in oceans. Astronomers are excited by the discovery, which suggests that some of these exoplanets \u2014 planets around stars other than the sun \u2014 could support life and may be awash in oceans. Not just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to search for signs of alien life outside the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Exoplanet May Be Most Promising Yet in Search for Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4179",
        "date": "2017-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/science/exoplanet-signs-of-life.html",
        "text": "The planet, about 40 light years from Earth, is close enough that astronomers hope they will someday be able to probe its atmosphere for signs of water or other evidence of suitability for life. The planet, about 40 light years from Earth, is close enough that astronomers hope they will someday be able to probe its atmosphere for signs of water or other evidence of suitability for life. A prime planet listing has just appeared on the cosmic real estate market, possibly the most promising place yet to search for signs of life beyond the solar system, the astronomers who discovered it say.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ring of Fire\u2019 Eclipse Dazzles Asia and Middle East (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4180",
        "date": "2019-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/science/ring-of-fire-eclipse-asia.html",
        "text": "An annular solar eclipse, in which the moon covers the sun\u2019s center, leaving a ring of light around it, was visible on Thursday. \u201cYou can actually see the solar system in motion,\u201d an astronomer said. An annular solar eclipse, in which the moon covers the sun\u2019s center, leaving a ring of light around it, was visible on Thursday. \u201cYou can actually see the solar system in motion,\u201d an astronomer said. The final solar eclipse of the decade, which produced a stunning and photogenic \u201cring of fire\u201d around the moon, occurred on Thursday, bringing out droves of onlookers across Asia and the Middle East, where it was most visible.",
        "author": "By Derrick Bryson Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Saturday, museumgoers will be in for a treat when admission will be free for many institutions (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4181",
        "date": "2019-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/this-saturday-museumgoers-will-be-in-for-a-treat-when-admission-will-be-free-for-many-institutions/2019/09/13/00390a1a-d4ce-11e9-9610-fb56c5522e1c_story.html",
        "text": "Curious about engineering, Ebola or insects?\n You\u2019re in luck.On Saturday, hundreds of science museums will participate in Museum Day. The annual celebration is hosted by Smithsonian magazine, and it provides free admission to museums across the country.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe choices are seemingly endless \u2014 131 natural history museums, 159 science museums, and 40 zoos and gardens are on the list, along with hundreds of history, art and children\u2019s museums. If you\u2019re into science or engineering, you can explore space at planetariums galore. Chicago\u2019s Adler Planetarium, the Western Hemisphere\u2019s first, is on the list along with facilities in Michigan, New York, Texas and more.Story continues below advertisementAre animals your thing? You\u2019re in luck: Highlights include the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium in New Orleans, where visitors cozy up with bugs, and the Estuarium at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Dauphin Island, Ala., where visitors can touch stingrays and learn about salt marshes.AdvertisementIf you\u2019re more into your fellow humans, you have options, too. A wide assortment of institutions cover anthropology, medicine and more. Try the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, Egan Maritime Institute\u2019s Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum in Nantucket, Mass., or the National Museum of Psychology in Akron, Ohio.Big-name museums are on the list. But smaller, more niche ones are a major feature of the event. And the list of participating institutions can give you ideas for future visits, too.Story continues below advertisementVisit Smithsonianmag.com/museumday to get a ticket. The website has a search function and a place to get your free tickets, which provide general admission for the holder and one guest.Each email address can download only one ticket, so choose wisely \u2014 and get ready to immerse yourself in a museum you may not have even known ",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Readers share favorite destinations for our next \u2018science trip\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4182",
        "date": "2019-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/08/28/readers-share-favorite-destinations-our-next-science-trip/",
        "text": "The \u201cscience trip\u201d that we took Washington Post readers on this month featured a dozen sites with scientific importance, from the setting in Arizona where astronauts once trained for lunar landings to the Eastern Shore of Delaware and Maryland, a crucial stop for migrating snow geese. We asked you to share your experiences and to suggest additional destinations \u2014 and we now have an impressive list for another trek. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIvonne Rovira of Louisville felt as if she\u2019d been transported by \u201ctime machine!\u201d when she visited Illinois and the 100-foot-tall mounds that mark the ancient city of Cahokia.Physician Arthur Weinstein of Claremont, Calif., remembered the lecture he gave decades ago in the Ether Dome in Boston, an operating theater and the birthplace of anesthesiology. \u201cIt was both intimidating and awesome.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Barbara Davis of Pittsburgh described a days-long horseback ride through the gorge in the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania as \u201cone of the best [trips] of my life.\u201dDeb Grosner of Lake Frederick, Va., called the Green Bank Observatory in neighboring West Virginia \u201cfascinating\u201d but told us to head to the Very Large Array in central New Mexico. Its 28 radio dishes, mounted on train tracks, can maneuver \u201cto reach into the deepest depths of observable space. Way, way cool,\u201d Grosner said, dubbing it \u201cthe Green Bank Observatory on steroids.\u201dWe stuck to the same rules when evaluating your recommendations for where to go next: A location must have scientific value; it must be in the Lower 48 states; and it can\u2019t be in a national park, though national monuments and state parks are allowed. (Apologies to Kentucky\u2019s Mammoth Cave National Park, which earned several thumbs-ups from readers.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom Craig, Colo., MaryKaren Solomon urged us to take a geologic jaunt through Goblin Valley State Park in Utah, to witness the \u201cspooky hoodoos and unearthly environment.\u201d (Goblin Valley is so unearthly it provided an alien backdrop for Tim Allen\u2019s battle against a rock monster in the sci-fi comedy romp \u201cGalaxy Quest.\u201d)On a \u201eGalaxy Quest\u201c in the Goblin Valley State Park in Utah. \ud83d\udcab\ud83c\udfac pic.twitter.com/rBReA1SZEG\u2014 Andrea David (@filmtourismus) May 15, 2019\n\nSoutheastern Oregon\u2019s alkali Borax Lake is also well worth a visit, according to Scott Robinson, who lives in Olympia, Wash. \u201cBecause of continual deposits of siliceous sinter, the lake surface is the highest point on the surrounding floor of the valley,\u201d he explained. \u201cIn the lake are endemic species, including Borax Lake chub and ramshorn snail, that have evolved to tolerate the high-arsenic thermal water.\u201dAlexandra Chisam-Wiyninger alerted us to Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park in Nebraska. The site records a disaster of 600,000 years ago, when a volcanic eruption smothered a watering hole in ash \u2014 along with the critters drinking there. \u201cThere are skeletons of rhinos, horses, camels, sabretooth cats and many more,\u201d wrote Chisam-Wiyninger, of Bakersfield, Calif.Thanks to readers, we have plenty of options for the future. Here\u2019s a few you might watch for: the cave systems and Native American rock art at California\u2019s Lava Beds National Monument; the Trinity Site in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated; the Pando aspen grove in Utah, clones of a single tree that cover more than 100 acres; Philadelphia\u2019s M\u00fctter Museum, where a collection of anatomical specimens includes slices of Albert Einstein\u2019s brain; and Wakulla Springs in Florida, the world\u2019s largest freshwater springs and home to gators and manatees.Read more:At a dozen surprising sites across this country, discover the beauty, mystery, wildness and audacity of science What makes a great trip? Science!Tips to make your next road trip a learning experience for the whole family From spooky rocks to deep freshwater springs to giant astronomy arrays, here are more hot spots to witness science in the U.S. Readers share favorite destinations for our next \u2018science trip\u2019",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Collision of Two White Dwarf Stars Offers Clues About Cosmic Events (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4183",
        "date": "2020-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/collision-of-two-white-dwarf-stars-offers-clues-about-rare-cosmic-events-11583164800?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=48",
        "text": "\u201cThere is no way we could think of a normal star evolving by itself that would give you the results we\u2019ve seen,\u201d said lead author Mark Hollands, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. \u201cAnd studying white dwarfs that don\u2019t explode can tell you about the ones that do.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe research team led by University of Warwick astronomers first observed the star with the European Space Agency\u2019s Gaia Telescope in October 2018 after noticing its faint glow compared with surrounding white dwarfs. Researchers have since been studying properties of the star, which was named WDJ0551+4135.\n\n\nUsing spectroscopy\u2014a method used to break down light emitted by stars to determine their composition, temperature and density\u2014the team discovered the Milky Way star has an atmosphere made up of hydrogen and carbon, as opposed to hydrogen and helium. \u201cIt seemed completely bizarre,\u201d Dr. Hollands said.\nOnly when the researchers learn more about the star\u2019s core composition can their merger hypothesis be proved, he said.\nThe sun stays bright by burning hydrogen and helium at its core, but five billion years from now, scientists predict it will become a white dwarf: a remnant core of a star that has exhausted its fuel and shed its outer layers, shrinking to a size similar to Earth.\nWhite dwarf stars are typically about 0.6 times the mass of the sun, but this star is nearly twice the average mass for white dwarfs. Despite being heavier than the sun, the star is two-thirds the size of Earth. \n\n\nMore Science News\n\n\n\n\nSpace Junk Digs New Moon Crater, Astronomers Say\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nSpace Junk Set to Crash Into Moon Shows Debris Problem Is Spreading Beyond Earth \nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nCrispr Patent Ruling Picks Winners in Fight Over Gene-Editing Technology\nMarch 2, 2022 \n\n\nImpacts of Climate Change Now Severe and Widespread, U.N. Panel Says\nFebruary 28, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nResearchers also speculate the star may have been formed from a merger because of its age and temperature. The star was found traveling faster than 99% of nearby white dwarfs that appear to have the same cooling age. The faster a star travels, Dr. Hollands said, the older and colder it is because it has spent more time robbing energy from its neighbors and burning its available fuel. This suggests the star is older than it looks, he added.\nMost stars live in pairs, dancing around each other until one day, after billions of years, gravity brings them close enough to collide. If the product acquires enough mass, it can explode. Astronomers believe stars with a mass 1.4 times greater than the sun can explode in powerful events called supernovae.\nAlthough this star\u2014with 1.14 times the mass of the sun\u2014didn\u2019t explode, scientists can study it to understand the conditions that lead to supernovae and the frequency at which they occur.\n\u201cIf we can find more examples of white dwarf merger products, we can open another venue of trying to solve the origin of [these events],\u201d said Dan Maoz, an astrophysics professor at Tel Aviv University in Israel who wasn\u2019t involved in the study. \u201cSuspicions have been growing about what\u2019s behind these supernovae, and we think it\u2019s the mergers of white dwarfs.\u201d\nLast week, astronomers identified the largest explosion ever recorded from a black hole. The eruption\u2014five times greater than the previous record holder\u2014spewed out colossal amounts of stellar material.\nThis material, also released by supernovae from white dwarf stars, contains all the elements in the periodic table. \u201cSupernovae are nature\u2019s way of cooking up these elements,\u201d Dr. Maoz said.\nHis work involves mapping the double white dwarf systems in the Milky Way to estimate if these merger events can explain the frequency of supernovae, which occur about once every 200 years, he said.\n\u201cWhen we see these systems that will merge in the future or already merged, we\u2019re seeing a part of this element synthesis process,\u201d Dr. Maoz said. \u201cIf we want to understand how we came to be, it\u2019s important to understand these explosions.\u201d\n\u201cWe really are stardust,\u201d he added. Two dying stars converged in the galaxy, and decided not to explode, and that made all the difference. A group of astronomers believe the merger created a star heavier than the sun with an unusual carbon-rich atmosphere. ",
        "author": "Katie Camero"
    },
    {
        "title": "The spectacular aftermath of a supernova was just seen at its earliest stage ever (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4184",
        "date": "2017-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/14/the-spectacular-aftermath-of-a-supernova-was-just-seen-at-its-earliest-stage-ever/",
        "text": "Life in this universe begins and ends with supernovae. In a spectacular eruption\u00a0powerful enough to outshine a galaxy, a star is killed \u2014 and new elements are forged. The shock wave from the star\u2019s death throes can cause nearby clouds of gas to collapse, triggering the birth of new suns.\u00a0The ashes of the exploded star spread out into the dark void of space, filling it with ingredients for future stars and planets. Supernovae\u00a0are creative catastrophes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor years, scientists have been trying to capture the moment one happens.\u00a0And they\u2019re getting really close.In a new study in the journal Nature Physics, an international team of astronomers describes the first three to 10 hours after a supernova in the galaxy\u00a0NGC 7610, a faint smudge in the constellation Pegasus. Their observations,\u00a0which came from an array of telescopes scattered across the planet and encompass a wide range of the light spectrum, represent the most complete image of a supernova\u2019s immediate aftermath. Scientists were able to take spectra\u00a0\u2014 analyses that separate\u00a0light out into its component wavelengths \u2014 earlier in the event than had ever been done.A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on EarthThis is a \u201cremarkable achievement,\u201d Norbert Langer, an astronomer at the University of Bonn in Germany who was not involved in the study, wrote in an analysis for Nature Physics. \u201cYoung supernovae are hard to come by: without the knowledge of when and where they are going to explode, we tend to chance upon them when they are already several days old.\u00a0By this time, the supernova ejecta have already swept through a large volume, destroying any information about its immediate environment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis study, Langer continued, gives scientists a first good glimpse\u00a0not just at the explosion, but at the events immediately preceding it \u2014 opening a new window on stellar evolution.The supernova was spotted because of the efforts of scientists working on the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), a project that uses the Palomar Observatory near San Diego to scan the sky in search of new spots of light. Each night, the telescope sweeps across a wide swath of the sky, automatically snapping images of what it sees. A computer system compares images of the same patches of space, looking for signs of change. When it spots something interesting, it sends the location to the\u00a0Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where researchers are just waking up.Watch four alien worlds orbit a distant starOn\u00a0the morning of Oct. 6, 2013, two images of the patch of sky\u00a0around NGC 7610 streamed onto their computers. A bright white spot had appeared to the left of the galaxy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLess than 24 hours before there was nothing there, and suddenly you see there is something,\u201d said Ofer Yaron, an astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute and the lead author of the study.It looked like a star had gone boom.That set in motion a stream of efforts to capture the supernova up close. The scientists at the\u00a0Weizmann Institute sent a message to Dan Perely, a California Institute of Technology researcher who had secured some time on the massive Keck Telescope in Hawaii. With the supernova in his sights, he took four spectra of the supernova between six and 10 hours after the explosion \u2014 the earliest ever taken. Over the next days and months, colleagues running telescopes in Spain, Australia\u00a0and elsewhere conducted follow-up observations to collect more data. Their analyses revealed the nature of\u00a0what was given the ungainly name\u00a0Supernova 2013fs\u00a0in fine\u00a0detail.It was a type II supernova, the kind that occurs when a massive star evolves into a red supergiant, like the star Betelgeuse. In their waning days, these\u00a0huge, (relatively) cool bodies start to unravel, expelling\u00a0huge amounts of their mass until they are surrounded by shells of dense gas called circumstellar material, or CSM.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the past, it\u2019s been difficult to study the CSM, because it gets swept away\u00a0by ejecta (stellar shrapnel) once the star blows up. But the spectra taken by Yaron, Perley and their colleagues captured this gas shell before it vanished.By analyzing the wavelengths of light that\u00a0came from the CSM, scientists can begin to figure out its chemical composition, how dense it is, how quickly the matter accumulates \u2014 questions they could never answer before. They can also start to understand the instability of stars in the months and weeks before they go supernova \u2014 possibly allowing scientists to predict when stars are going to blow.Study suggests Earth once had many moonlets \u2014 until they merged to form the moon\u201cSeveral years ago if you found a supernova after about a week or so\u00a0from explosion, that would be regarded as a very early detection,\u201d Yaron said. \u201cNow we are in the area of Day\u00a0One supernova\u00a0detection and\u00a0science. But we want to go down to the hours and maybe even the minute scale.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year, the iPTF project, of\u00a0which Yaron is a part, will give way to the Zwicky Transient Factory. This initiative will operate at the same telescope as its predecessor, but it will use a camera with a much wider field of view, allowing it to photograph more of the sky more often. This survey will be more than an order of magnitude faster than iPTF, according to Yaron.Even better is the proposed\u00a0UltraSat mission, an as-yet-unfunded space telescope that would study the sky in the near ultraviolet end of the spectrum. Its field of view would be nearly 30 times bigger than that of the iPTF camera, enabling\u00a0it to return to the same patch of sky several times a night and allowing for even more rapid detection of \u201ctransients\u201d \u2014 celestial phenomena like supernovae that flash for a moment, then fade.\u201cIf we can really catch things during the first minutes of the event, and then our follow-up observations across the whole electromagnetic spectrum \u2026 that opens up a completely new window to exploration of the transient sky,\u201d Yaron said.\u00a0Read more:This is how you photograph a million dead plants without losing your mindForget the ring: Lab-grown diamonds are a scientist's best friendFrench presidential candidate to U.S. scientists afraid of Trump: 'Come to France'The 'March for Science' is gaining mainstream momentumThe imperiled saiga antelope is struck by a plague \u2014 again Astronomers spotted the exploding star just three hours after it went \u201cboom.\" The spectacular aftermath of a supernova was just seen at its earliest stage ever",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The spectacular aftermath of a supernova was just seen at its earliest stage ever (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4185",
        "date": "2017-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/14/the-spectacular-aftermath-of-a-supernova-was-just-seen-at-its-earliest-stage-ever/",
        "text": "Life in this universe begins and ends with supernovae. In a spectacular eruption\u00a0powerful enough to outshine a galaxy, a star is killed \u2014 and new elements are forged. The shock wave from the star\u2019s death throes can cause nearby clouds of gas to collapse, triggering the birth of new suns.\u00a0The ashes of the exploded star spread out into the dark void of space, filling it with ingredients for future stars and planets. Supernovae\u00a0are creative catastrophes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor years, scientists have been trying to capture the moment one happens.\u00a0And they\u2019re getting really close.In a new study in the journal Nature Physics, an international team of astronomers describes the first three to 10 hours after a supernova in the galaxy\u00a0NGC 7610, a faint smudge in the constellation Pegasus. Their observations,\u00a0which came from an array of telescopes scattered across the planet and encompass a wide range of the light spectrum, represent the most complete image of a supernova\u2019s immediate aftermath. Scientists were able to take spectra\u00a0\u2014 analyses that separate\u00a0light out into its component wavelengths \u2014 earlier in the event than had ever been done.A 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on EarthThis is a \u201cremarkable achievement,\u201d Norbert Langer, an astronomer at the University of Bonn in Germany who was not involved in the study, wrote in an analysis for Nature Physics. \u201cYoung supernovae are hard to come by: without the knowledge of when and where they are going to explode, we tend to chance upon them when they are already several days old.\u00a0By this time, the supernova ejecta have already swept through a large volume, destroying any information about its immediate environment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis study, Langer continued, gives scientists a first good glimpse\u00a0not just at the explosion, but at the events immediately preceding it \u2014 opening a new window on stellar evolution.The supernova was spotted because of the efforts of scientists working on the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF), a project that uses the Palomar Observatory near San Diego to scan the sky in search of new spots of light. Each night, the telescope sweeps across a wide swath of the sky, automatically snapping images of what it sees. A computer system compares images of the same patches of space, looking for signs of change. When it spots something interesting, it sends the location to the\u00a0Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where researchers are just waking up.Watch four alien worlds orbit a distant starOn\u00a0the morning of Oct. 6, 2013, two images of the patch of sky\u00a0around NGC 7610 streamed onto their computers. A bright white spot had appeared to the left of the galaxy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLess than 24 hours before there was nothing there, and suddenly you see there is something,\u201d said Ofer Yaron, an astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute and the lead author of the study.It looked like a star had gone boom.That set in motion a stream of efforts to capture the supernova up close. The scientists at the\u00a0Weizmann Institute sent a message to Dan Perely, a California Institute of Technology researcher who had secured some time on the massive Keck Telescope in Hawaii. With the supernova in his sights, he took four spectra of the supernova between six and 10 hours after the explosion \u2014 the earliest ever taken. Over the next days and months, colleagues running telescopes in Spain, Australia\u00a0and elsewhere conducted follow-up observations to collect more data. Their analyses revealed the nature of\u00a0what was given the ungainly name\u00a0Supernova 2013fs\u00a0in fine\u00a0detail.It was a type II supernova, the kind that occurs when a massive star evolves into a red supergiant, like the star Betelgeuse. In their waning days, these\u00a0huge, (relatively) cool bodies start to unravel, expelling\u00a0huge amounts of their mass until they are surrounded by shells of dense gas called circumstellar material, or CSM.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the past, it\u2019s been difficult to study the CSM, because it gets swept away\u00a0by ejecta (stellar shrapnel) once the star blows up. But the spectra taken by Yaron, Perley and their colleagues captured this gas shell before it vanished.By analyzing the wavelengths of light that\u00a0came from the CSM, scientists can begin to figure out its chemical composition, how dense it is, how quickly the matter accumulates \u2014 questions they could never answer before. They can also start to understand the instability of stars in the months and weeks before they go supernova \u2014 possibly allowing scientists to predict when stars are going to blow.Study suggests Earth once had many moonlets \u2014 until they merged to form the moon\u201cSeveral years ago if you found a supernova after about a week or so\u00a0from explosion, that would be regarded as a very early detection,\u201d Yaron said. \u201cNow we are in the area of Day\u00a0One supernova\u00a0detection and\u00a0science. But we want to go down to the hours and maybe even the minute scale.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year, the iPTF project, of\u00a0which Yaron is a part, will give way to the Zwicky Transient Factory. This initiative will operate at the same telescope as its predecessor, but it will use a camera with a much wider field of view, allowing it to photograph more of the sky more often. This survey will be more than an order of magnitude faster than iPTF, according to Yaron.Even better is the proposed\u00a0UltraSat mission, an as-yet-unfunded space telescope that would study the sky in the near ultraviolet end of the spectrum. Its field of view would be nearly 30 times bigger than that of the iPTF camera, enabling\u00a0it to return to the same patch of sky several times a night and allowing for even more rapid detection of \u201ctransients\u201d \u2014 celestial phenomena like supernovae that flash for a moment, then fade.\u201cIf we can really catch things during the first minutes of the event, and then our follow-up observations across the whole electromagnetic spectrum \u2026 that opens up a completely new window to exploration of the transient sky,\u201d Yaron said.\u00a0Read more:This is how you photograph a million dead plants without losing your mindForget the ring: Lab-grown diamonds are a scientist's best friendFrench presidential candidate to U.S. scientists afraid of Trump: 'Come to France'The 'March for Science' is gaining mainstream momentumThe imperiled saiga antelope is struck by a plague \u2014 again Astronomers spotted the exploding star just three hours after it went \u201cboom.\" The spectacular aftermath of a supernova was just seen at its earliest stage ever",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists spot potential sign of life in Venus atmosphere (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4186",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/venus-life-evidence/",
        "text": "An international team of astronomers has detected a rare molecule in the atmosphere of Venus that could be produced by living organisms, according to a study published Monday. The discovery instantly puts the brightest planet in the night sky back into the conversation about where to search for extraterrestrial life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe researchers made clear this is not a direct detection of life on Venus. But the astronomical observations confirmed the highly intriguing presence of the chemical phosphine near the top of the acidic clouds that blanket the planet.Phosphine is a simple molecule produced on Earth by bacteria and through industrial processes. As a result, it is on the list of molecules \u2014 oxygen being another \u2014 considered by scientists to be potential \u201cbiosignatures\u201d of life on Earth-sized planets whose atmospheres can be viewed through telescopes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe researchers said they know of no non-biological explanation for the relatively high abundance of the molecule in the Venusian atmosphere.\u201cWe did our very best to show what else would be causing phosphine in the abundance we found on Venus. And we found nothing. We found nothing close,\u201d said Clara Sousa-Silva, a molecular astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author of the paper published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.Venus is broiling at the surface, but there are layers of the atmosphere where temperatures and pressures are moderate and where solar radiation isn\u2019t too intense. For decades, some planetary scientists have speculated that microbes could be circulating in the atmosphere, which is dominated by sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide and has only small traces of water vapor.Scientists detected a rare chemical in the atmosphere of the planet Venus that could be produced by living organisms, according to a Sept. 14 study. (Reuters)Venus has long been overshadowed by Mars as a potential abode of life, because the planet\u2019s dense atmosphere and proximity to the sun has led to a runaway greenhouse effect, resulting in hellish surface temperatures and crushing atmospheric pressures. Robotic probes have revealed a landscape that appears inhospitable to any imaginable life form.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars has always appeared more congenial to life and potential human exploration, and has been targeted by multiple robotic missions, including most recently NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance. NASA is pondering proposals for two relatively low-cost robotic missions to Venus, but they have not been approved. Monday\u2019s announcement could push NASA and other space agencies to take a closer look at Venus.\u201cFor something this big, we need follow-up confirmations, we need to have strong scientific debate,\u201d said Casey Dreier, senior space policy adviser at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit pro-space organization that was not involved in the new research. \u201cUltimately, we\u2019re going to need missions to Venus, and maybe even bringing samples back to Earth.\u201dSarah Stewart Johnson, a planetary scientist at Georgetown University who also was not involved with the new study, echoed that sentiment in an email: \u201cThis is exactly the kind of anomalous finding we should be following up on. There may be things we\u2019re missing photochemically \u2014 that we simply don\u2019t understand \u2014 but it\u2019s possible that the phosphine is the result of a biotic process, and its detection surely increases the chances for life.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSousa-Silva said she had spent years studying phosphine as a potential biosignature in the atmospheres of exoplanets \u2014 the planets that orbit distant stars. But she had not considered searching for phosphine within our own solar system.Then, a bit more than a year ago, she received an email from Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University and lead author of the new paper, who said her telescopic observations within the solar system had turned up signs of phosphine in Venus.Follow-up observations with another telescope confirmed that initial detection.Phosphine is a toxic, malodorous gas that is extremely poisonous and has been used in chemical weapons. The molecule is composed of one phosphorus atom and three hydrogen atoms, and is shaped like a pyramid with the phosphorus on top. These atoms do not favor one another, and thus the molecule is generally rare in nature. To create a phosphine molecule, Sousa-Silva said, requires an unusual force or mechanism.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLiving things can create the molecule through a metabolic pathway not fully understood, she said. And extreme forces in nature can make the molecule. For example, phosphine has been detected in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, the solar system\u2019s two gas giants, where gravity creates extreme environments.But Venus, like Earth, is a relatively small, rocky planet. The researchers pondered many possible mechanisms for the creation of phosphine, including volcanoes and meteor impacts, but could not get the numbers to come out right.\u201cOn Venus, there are no mechanisms we know of that can spontaneously make phosphine, because it is so hard to produce,\" Sousa-Silva said.Story continues below advertisementThe scientists involved in this new detection were careful not to overstate their findings. For example, although a non-biological source of the phosphine in Venus is not known, that doesn\u2019t mean there isn\u2019t one, Sousa-Silva stipulated.AdvertisementAny claim of a detection of life beyond Earth carries with it a heavy burden of proof. The search for extraterrestrial life has had a long history of thrilling hypotheses, rancorous debates and crushing disappointments. To date, no alien life has been found \u2014 anywhere.Mars periodically has generated great excitement, only to have claims erode under the harsh light of further investigation. In several high-profile cases, something that looked irrefutably biological turned out on closer scrutiny to be potentially explicable through more prosaic processes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMy first reaction, as always, is skepticism,\u201d said Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado, when asked about the new report. \u201cOne of the things I\u2019ve seen is that when people discover new, cool things, their first thought is life, and then they\u2019re able to come up with alternative, plausible explanations for what they saw.\u201dAdvertisementEven so, he said, the phosphine discovery is \u201cintriguing.\u201dA similar situation has popped up over on Mars, where methane has been detected in the atmosphere. That incited speculation that it was produced by Martian organisms. But this remains unresolved, because there are non-biological explanations for the presence of the gas, according to NASA. One international mission designed specifically to look for it, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, couldn\u2019t find it at all.Monday\u2019s announcement suggests that maybe scientists should spend more time looking elsewhere \u2014 back toward the second rock from the Sun. An international team of astronomers say they have not directly detected life, but that the presence of phosphine can only be explained by living microbes. Scientists spot potential sign of life in Venus atmosphere",
        "author": "Marisa Iati"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists zoom in on fast radio bursts, the most mysterious signals in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4187",
        "date": "2018-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/10/scientists-zoom-in-on-fast-radio-bursts-the-most-mysterious-signals-in-space/",
        "text": "Nobody knows what causes fast radio bursts \u2014\u00a0brief, bizarre radio-wave beams that emit more energy in a fraction of a millisecond than the sun does all day. Scientists just got closer than ever to the source of one of these enigmatic signals.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn research presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, an international team of astronomers traced a repeating fast radio burst to a region of star formation in a dim dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. There, they said, the high-energy beam is being savagely twisted by a powerful magnetic field amid a dense cloud of hot, ionized gas. The finding helps illuminate the extreme environment these radio bursts call home. Scientists are still scratching their heads over what could cause such a mighty blast.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a mystery,\u201d said Cornell University astronomer Shami Chatterjee, one of the co-authors of a study on the findings published Wednesday in Nature. Then he laughed.Advertisement\u201cI say that as if I am disappointed, but let's be real \u2014 there is nothing like a good mystery to try to figure out. And this is such a tantalizing mystery, and as time goes on, we\u2019re getting more clues.\u201dScientists have been befuddled by fast radio bursts, or FRBs, since the first one was discovered in 2007. They are far more powerful than anything in our own galaxy and so fast and focused that they seem to have shot out of the barrel of some cosmic gun. They are also dispersed \u2014 high-frequency wavelengths arrive earlier than lower-frequency ones, indicating the bursts travel long distances across vast expanses of space to reach Earth.Story continues below advertisementResearch suggests as many as 10,000 of these bursts occur every day, but so far, astronomers have spotted only a few dozen. Of those, just one has gone off more than once: a signal called FRB 121102, captured in 2012 by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.AdvertisementIn research published last January, astronomers described how they took advantage of the repeating nature of FRB 121102 to trace the burst back to its host galaxy. Many of those same astronomers have been gazing at that galaxy ever since, ready to catch FRB 121102 whenever it flares.On Dec. 25, 2016, in a space of about half an hour, the telescope at Arecibo witnessed more than a dozen bursts. \u201cWe called it our Christmas present,\u201d said Jason Hessels, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam and a co-author of the new research.Story continues below advertisementSubsequent observations by a fleet of powerful telescopes working in a range of wavelengths captured dozens more bursts (FRB 121102 has now been seen flaring more than 200 times) and revealed some surprising characteristics of this far-off flashbulb.Chief among these quirks is the dramatic twisting of the signal's polarization \u2014 the plane on which the waves oscillate. The flares from FRB 121102 are 500 times as twisted as any other burst scientists have seen, suggesting they were warped by a potent magnetic field.AdvertisementThe only known source of such intense magnetism in our galaxy is the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, which sits at the Milky Way's center. \u201cMaybe this FRB source is in a similar environment, a galactic center environment,\u201d Hessels said.Story continues below advertisementAn alternative explanation is that the FRB source is surrounded by a highly magnetized cocoon of material \u2014 perhaps the fog of gas and dust from which new stars form, or the detritus created by a dying star when it explodes. It is theoretically possible that such a celestial dust devil could produce a large rotation measure \u2014 and co-author Betsey Adams of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy pointed out that optical observations of the FRB's origin indicate it comes from a nursery for newborn stars.The higher-resolution radio observations made possible by knowing the precise location of the burst also revealed bursts were clustered \u2014 several might happen in the space of a second \u2014 and oddly structured. A 3-D-printed image of one burst featured jagged spikes and unusual pauses in the signal, making it look a bit like Malificent's castle in \u201cSleeping Beauty.\u201dAndrew Seymour, another co-author of the new report and an astronomer at the Universities Space Research Association and Arecibo Observatory, said it is not clear whether those jagged features in the signal are produced at the source or are instead a reflection of the extreme environment around it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother oddity: Though FRB 121102 is \u201cprodigiously energetic,\u201d as Chatterjee put it, it emits radiation only in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum.\u201cWe were looking for it in X-rays, gamma rays, and there's nothing there,\u201d Chatterjee said.Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million initiative to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, also has taken an interest in FRB 121102. In a fanciful paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters this year, a pair of Harvard theorists suggested\u00a0a solar-powered alien craft could explain the bursts. Breakthrough's observations at the Green Bank Telescope revealed no extraterrestrial voyagers, but astronomers did find the same signatures of intense magnetism observed at Arecibo.Story continues below advertisementStill the astronomers have no idea what is actually producing these flares. They speculate that it may be a neutron star \u2014 the dark, dense, smoldering core that is left behind after a midsize star explodes and goes nova. Neutron stars are compact enough to produce the short, focused signal that characterizes an FRB and sufficiently matter-rich to generate something so powerful. But what could prompt a neutron star to burp out so much energy, over and over again?Advertisement\u201cThe joke is that there are far more theories than there are observed bursts,\u201d Hessels said.Meanwhile, astronomers are eager to detect additional repeating bursts. FRB 121102 is the only one they have witnessed more than once, and they are still not certain whether that is because of\u00a0a fluke of timing or something more fundamental. It is possible there are two classes of FRBs \u2014 those that repeat and those that do not. Or maybe there is something unique about FRB 121102 that makes it easier to see; Chatterjee suggested a cloud of ionized gas around the source might act like a magnifying glass's lens, focusing the signal in the direction of our telescopes.Story continues below advertisementWest Virginia University astrophysicist Sarah Burke-Spolaor, who has been involved in previous research on FRB 121102 but was not part of the most recent study, said this latest finding will help \u201csteer the field.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt's one of those fields that every step of the way every new thing we learn makes the phenomenon look more complex,\u201d Burke-Spolaor said.If astronomers are able to find more repeaters and track down their sources, she continued, they will open up a rare new window on the universe \u2014 particularly the murky expanse beyond the Milky Way. As FRBs traverse the dark spaces between galaxies, they interact with the diffuse material in those regions and carry a record of that interaction down to earth.\u201cI think the bottom line of that is, they basically allow us to observe the invisible universe between galaxies,\u201d Burke-Spolaor said.Read more:Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio burstsMysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light-years away, astronomers discover The cosmic hunt for fast radio bursts just got a surprising new twist \"This is such a tantalizing mystery, and as time goes on, we\u2019re getting more clues,\u201d astronomer Shami Chatterjee said.  Scientists zoom in on fast radio bursts, the most mysterious signals in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists zoom in on fast radio bursts, the most mysterious signals in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4188",
        "date": "2018-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/10/scientists-zoom-in-on-fast-radio-bursts-the-most-mysterious-signals-in-space/",
        "text": "Nobody knows what causes fast radio bursts \u2014\u00a0brief, bizarre radio-wave beams that emit more energy in a fraction of a millisecond than the sun does all day. Scientists just got closer than ever to the source of one of these enigmatic signals.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn research presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, an international team of astronomers traced a repeating fast radio burst to a region of star formation in a dim dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. There, they said, the high-energy beam is being savagely twisted by a powerful magnetic field amid a dense cloud of hot, ionized gas. The finding helps illuminate the extreme environment these radio bursts call home. Scientists are still scratching their heads over what could cause such a mighty blast.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a mystery,\u201d said Cornell University astronomer Shami Chatterjee, one of the co-authors of a study on the findings published Wednesday in Nature. Then he laughed.Advertisement\u201cI say that as if I am disappointed, but let's be real \u2014 there is nothing like a good mystery to try to figure out. And this is such a tantalizing mystery, and as time goes on, we\u2019re getting more clues.\u201dScientists have been befuddled by fast radio bursts, or FRBs, since the first one was discovered in 2007. They are far more powerful than anything in our own galaxy and so fast and focused that they seem to have shot out of the barrel of some cosmic gun. They are also dispersed \u2014 high-frequency wavelengths arrive earlier than lower-frequency ones, indicating the bursts travel long distances across vast expanses of space to reach Earth.Story continues below advertisementResearch suggests as many as 10,000 of these bursts occur every day, but so far, astronomers have spotted only a few dozen. Of those, just one has gone off more than once: a signal called FRB 121102, captured in 2012 by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.AdvertisementIn research published last January, astronomers described how they took advantage of the repeating nature of FRB 121102 to trace the burst back to its host galaxy. Many of those same astronomers have been gazing at that galaxy ever since, ready to catch FRB 121102 whenever it flares.On Dec. 25, 2016, in a space of about half an hour, the telescope at Arecibo witnessed more than a dozen bursts. \u201cWe called it our Christmas present,\u201d said Jason Hessels, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam and a co-author of the new research.Story continues below advertisementSubsequent observations by a fleet of powerful telescopes working in a range of wavelengths captured dozens more bursts (FRB 121102 has now been seen flaring more than 200 times) and revealed some surprising characteristics of this far-off flashbulb.Chief among these quirks is the dramatic twisting of the signal's polarization \u2014 the plane on which the waves oscillate. The flares from FRB 121102 are 500 times as twisted as any other burst scientists have seen, suggesting they were warped by a potent magnetic field.AdvertisementThe only known source of such intense magnetism in our galaxy is the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, which sits at the Milky Way's center. \u201cMaybe this FRB source is in a similar environment, a galactic center environment,\u201d Hessels said.Story continues below advertisementAn alternative explanation is that the FRB source is surrounded by a highly magnetized cocoon of material \u2014 perhaps the fog of gas and dust from which new stars form, or the detritus created by a dying star when it explodes. It is theoretically possible that such a celestial dust devil could produce a large rotation measure \u2014 and co-author Betsey Adams of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy pointed out that optical observations of the FRB's origin indicate it comes from a nursery for newborn stars.The higher-resolution radio observations made possible by knowing the precise location of the burst also revealed bursts were clustered \u2014 several might happen in the space of a second \u2014 and oddly structured. A 3-D-printed image of one burst featured jagged spikes and unusual pauses in the signal, making it look a bit like Malificent's castle in \u201cSleeping Beauty.\u201dAndrew Seymour, another co-author of the new report and an astronomer at the Universities Space Research Association and Arecibo Observatory, said it is not clear whether those jagged features in the signal are produced at the source or are instead a reflection of the extreme environment around it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother oddity: Though FRB 121102 is \u201cprodigiously energetic,\u201d as Chatterjee put it, it emits radiation only in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum.\u201cWe were looking for it in X-rays, gamma rays, and there's nothing there,\u201d Chatterjee said.Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million initiative to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, also has taken an interest in FRB 121102. In a fanciful paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters this year, a pair of Harvard theorists suggested\u00a0a solar-powered alien craft could explain the bursts. Breakthrough's observations at the Green Bank Telescope revealed no extraterrestrial voyagers, but astronomers did find the same signatures of intense magnetism observed at Arecibo.Story continues below advertisementStill the astronomers have no idea what is actually producing these flares. They speculate that it may be a neutron star \u2014 the dark, dense, smoldering core that is left behind after a midsize star explodes and goes nova. Neutron stars are compact enough to produce the short, focused signal that characterizes an FRB and sufficiently matter-rich to generate something so powerful. But what could prompt a neutron star to burp out so much energy, over and over again?Advertisement\u201cThe joke is that there are far more theories than there are observed bursts,\u201d Hessels said.Meanwhile, astronomers are eager to detect additional repeating bursts. FRB 121102 is the only one they have witnessed more than once, and they are still not certain whether that is because of\u00a0a fluke of timing or something more fundamental. It is possible there are two classes of FRBs \u2014 those that repeat and those that do not. Or maybe there is something unique about FRB 121102 that makes it easier to see; Chatterjee suggested a cloud of ionized gas around the source might act like a magnifying glass's lens, focusing the signal in the direction of our telescopes.Story continues below advertisementWest Virginia University astrophysicist Sarah Burke-Spolaor, who has been involved in previous research on FRB 121102 but was not part of the most recent study, said this latest finding will help \u201csteer the field.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt's one of those fields that every step of the way every new thing we learn makes the phenomenon look more complex,\u201d Burke-Spolaor said.If astronomers are able to find more repeaters and track down their sources, she continued, they will open up a rare new window on the universe \u2014 particularly the murky expanse beyond the Milky Way. As FRBs traverse the dark spaces between galaxies, they interact with the diffuse material in those regions and carry a record of that interaction down to earth.\u201cI think the bottom line of that is, they basically allow us to observe the invisible universe between galaxies,\u201d Burke-Spolaor said.Read more:Harvard theorists: How sailing aliens could have caused fast radio burstsMysterious radio burst came from a galaxy 2.5 billion light-years away, astronomers discover The cosmic hunt for fast radio bursts just got a surprising new twist \"This is such a tantalizing mystery, and as time goes on, we\u2019re getting more clues,\u201d astronomer Shami Chatterjee said.  Scientists zoom in on fast radio bursts, the most mysterious signals in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13: As They Shot It (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4189",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-moon-photos-as-they-shot-it.html",
        "text": "Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13: As They Shot It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4190",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-moon-photos-as-they-shot-it.html",
        "text": "Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13: As They Shot It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4191",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-moon-photos-as-they-shot-it.html",
        "text": "Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13: As They Shot It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4192",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-moon-photos-as-they-shot-it.html",
        "text": "Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. Surviving disaster, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "How did the Inspiration4 crew train for their flight? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4193",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-crew-training.html",
        "text": "Professional and amateur astronauts go through very similar training exercises. Professional and amateur astronauts go through very similar training exercises. SpaceX trained the Inspiration4 crew in largely the same way it has trained NASA crews.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How did the Inspiration4 crew train for their flight? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4194",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-crew-training.html",
        "text": "Professional and amateur astronauts go through very similar training exercises. Professional and amateur astronauts go through very similar training exercises. SpaceX trained the Inspiration4 crew in largely the same way it has trained NASA crews.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How did the Inspiration4 crew train for their flight? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4195",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-crew-training.html",
        "text": "Professional and amateur astronauts go through very similar training exercises. Professional and amateur astronauts go through very similar training exercises. SpaceX trained the Inspiration4 crew in largely the same way it has trained NASA crews.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11: As They Shot It - Returning Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4196",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-moon-earth-photos-ul.html",
        "text": "Apollo 11\u2019s return to Earth, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photos. Apollo 11\u2019s return to Earth, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photos. Apollo 11\u2019s return to Earth, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photos.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11: As They Shot It - Returning Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4197",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-moon-earth-photos-ul.html",
        "text": "Apollo 11\u2019s return to Earth, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photos. Apollo 11\u2019s return to Earth, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photos. Apollo 11\u2019s return to Earth, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photos.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11: As They Shot It (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4198",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-as-they-shot-it-ul.html",
        "text": "From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11: As They Shot It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4199",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-as-they-shot-it-ul.html",
        "text": "From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11: As They Shot It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4200",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-as-they-shot-it-ul.html",
        "text": "From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs. From the Earth to the moon, in the astronauts\u2019 words and photographs.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sian Proctor is the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4201",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/sian-proctor-inspiration4-spacex.html",
        "text": "The community college professor has long pursued her dream of being an astronaut. The community college professor has long pursued her dream of being an astronaut. Sian Proctor, 51, is a community college professor from Tempe, Ariz.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sian Proctor is the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4202",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/sian-proctor-inspiration4-spacex.html",
        "text": "The community college professor has long pursued her dream of being an astronaut. The community college professor has long pursued her dream of being an astronaut. Sian Proctor, 51, is a community college professor from Tempe, Ariz.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A perilous flight that reinforced Russia\u2019s rocketry skills. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4203",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/russia-soyuz-escape.html",
        "text": "The astronauts survived the accident, a reminder of the Soyuz rocket\u2019s excellent engineering. The astronauts survived the accident, a reminder of the Soyuz rocket\u2019s excellent engineering. A routine trip to send new crew members to the space station became one of the most dramatic moments in the recent history of Russia\u2019s space program.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "A perilous flight that reinforced Russia\u2019s rocketry skills. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4204",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/russia-soyuz-escape.html",
        "text": "The astronauts survived the accident, a reminder of the Soyuz rocket\u2019s excellent engineering. The astronauts survived the accident, a reminder of the Soyuz rocket\u2019s excellent engineering. A routine trip to send new crew members to the space station became one of the most dramatic moments in the recent history of Russia\u2019s space program.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "A perilous flight that reinforced Russia\u2019s rocketry skills. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4205",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/russia-soyuz-escape.html",
        "text": "The astronauts survived the accident, a reminder of the Soyuz rocket\u2019s excellent engineering. The astronauts survived the accident, a reminder of the Soyuz rocket\u2019s excellent engineering. A routine trip to send new crew members to the space station became one of the most dramatic moments in the recent history of Russia\u2019s space program.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "More than 600 human beings have now been to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4206",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/600-astronauts-space.html",
        "text": "Three of the four astronauts aboard Crew-3 are making their first trip to space. Three of the four astronauts aboard Crew-3 are making their first trip to space. Three rookie astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew-3 mission for NASA just launched to space for the first time. They\u2019ve tipped the number of people to have gone to space to over 600, according to a tally maintained by NASA.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "More than 600 human beings have now been to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4207",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/600-astronauts-space.html",
        "text": "Three of the four astronauts aboard Crew-3 are making their first trip to space. Three of the four astronauts aboard Crew-3 are making their first trip to space. Three rookie astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew-3 mission for NASA just launched to space for the first time. They\u2019ve tipped the number of people to have gone to space to over 600, according to a tally maintained by NASA.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Heroes of the Future\u2019: NASA Picks 18 Astronauts for Moon Mission Training (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4208",
        "date": "2020-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/science/nasa-astronauts-moon.html",
        "text": "Among the group are astronauts who could be the first woman on the moon. Among the group are astronauts who could be the first woman on the moon. NASA on Wednesday introduced the group of astronauts it has chosen for upcoming missions to the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Heroes of the Future\u2019: NASA Picks 18 Astronauts for Moon Mission Training (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4209",
        "date": "2020-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/science/nasa-astronauts-moon.html",
        "text": "Among the group are astronauts who could be the first woman on the moon. Among the group are astronauts who could be the first woman on the moon. NASA on Wednesday introduced the group of astronauts it has chosen for upcoming missions to the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong Walked on the Moon. To These Boys, He Was Just Dad. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4210",
        "date": "2018-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/neil-armstrong-auction.html",
        "text": "With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. DALLAS \u2014 In the summer of 1969, Rick Armstrong was 12 and whacking the baseball in the Houston-area Little League. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong Walked on the Moon. To These Boys, He Was Just Dad. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4211",
        "date": "2018-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/neil-armstrong-auction.html",
        "text": "With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. DALLAS \u2014 In the summer of 1969, Rick Armstrong was 12 and whacking the baseball in the Houston-area Little League. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong Walked on the Moon. To These Boys, He Was Just Dad. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4212",
        "date": "2018-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/neil-armstrong-auction.html",
        "text": "With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. DALLAS \u2014 In the summer of 1969, Rick Armstrong was 12 and whacking the baseball in the Houston-area Little League. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong Walked on the Moon. To These Boys, He Was Just Dad. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4213",
        "date": "2018-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/neil-armstrong-auction.html",
        "text": "With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. With an upcoming auction of the astronaut\u2019s keepsakes, his sons reflect on an unusual childhood. DALLAS \u2014 In the summer of 1969, Rick Armstrong was 12 and whacking the baseball in the Houston-area Little League. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earthrise: 50 Years Since Apollo 8 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4214",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000006271329/earthrise-50-years-since-apollo-8.html",
        "text": "On Christmas Eve, 1968, astronauts orbiting the moon saw Earth rising for the first time. On Christmas Eve, 1968, astronauts orbiting the moon saw Earth rising for the first time. On Christmas Eve, 1968, astronauts orbiting the moon saw Earth rising for the first time.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Crew Dragon Safety Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4215",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. [Follow two NASA astronauts\u2019 return trip aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Crew Dragon Safety Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4216",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. [Follow two NASA astronauts\u2019 return trip aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Crew Dragon Safety Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4217",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. [Follow two NASA astronauts\u2019 return trip aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Crew Dragon Safety Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4218",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. [Follow two NASA astronauts\u2019 return trip aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch: Highlights From the Crew Dragon Safety Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4219",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch-dragon.html",
        "text": "To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. To prove it is safe for astronauts, the company tested its Crew Dragon capsule\u2019s rescue system. [Follow two NASA astronauts\u2019 return trip aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, SpaceX\u2019s First NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4220",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/bob-behnken-doug-hurley.html",
        "text": "They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, SpaceX\u2019s First NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4221",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/bob-behnken-doug-hurley.html",
        "text": "They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, SpaceX\u2019s First NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4222",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/bob-behnken-doug-hurley.html",
        "text": "They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, SpaceX\u2019s First NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4223",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/bob-behnken-doug-hurley.html",
        "text": "They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. They\u2019re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Artemis Mission to Moon, NASA Seeks to Add Billions to Budget (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4224",
        "date": "2019-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/trump-nasa-moon-mars.html",
        "text": "The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. NASA officials on Monday evening unveiled an updated budget request to Congress, seeking more than $1 billion in additional funding in what they called a down payment to accelerate the return of astronauts to the moon by 2024.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Artemis Mission to Moon, NASA Seeks to Add Billions to Budget (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4225",
        "date": "2019-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/trump-nasa-moon-mars.html",
        "text": "The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. NASA officials on Monday evening unveiled an updated budget request to Congress, seeking more than $1 billion in additional funding in what they called a down payment to accelerate the return of astronauts to the moon by 2024.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Artemis Mission to Moon, NASA Seeks to Add Billions to Budget (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4226",
        "date": "2019-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/trump-nasa-moon-mars.html",
        "text": "The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. NASA officials on Monday evening unveiled an updated budget request to Congress, seeking more than $1 billion in additional funding in what they called a down payment to accelerate the return of astronauts to the moon by 2024.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Artemis Mission to Moon, NASA Seeks to Add Billions to Budget (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4227",
        "date": "2019-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/trump-nasa-moon-mars.html",
        "text": "The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. The funds would help accelerate the agency\u2019s schedule for returning astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. NASA officials on Monday evening unveiled an updated budget request to Congress, seeking more than $1 billion in additional funding in what they called a down payment to accelerate the return of astronauts to the moon by 2024.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Astronaut Launch Postponed to Saturday (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4228",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/what-time-is-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Astronaut Launch Postponed to Saturday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4229",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/what-time-is-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Astronaut Launch Postponed to Saturday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4230",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/what-time-is-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Astronaut Launch Postponed to Saturday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4231",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/what-time-is-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. What you need to know about the mission taking two NASA astronauts to the space station on Wednesday. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who are the other crew members? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4232",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-crew.html",
        "text": "In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission\u2019s commander, there are three more astronauts aboard the flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who are the other crew members? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4233",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-crew.html",
        "text": "In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission\u2019s commander, there are three more astronauts aboard the flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who are the other crew members? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4234",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-crew.html",
        "text": "In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission\u2019s commander, there are three more astronauts aboard the flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who are the other crew members? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4235",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-crew.html",
        "text": "In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, there are three other astronauts aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. In addition to Jared Isaacman, the mission\u2019s commander, there are three more astronauts aboard the flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Latest Breakthrough: \u2018Best Space Tacos Yet\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4236",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/nasa-space-tacos.html",
        "text": "For the first time, astronauts on the International Space Station cultivated chiles, adding some zing to their tacos. For the first time, astronauts on the International Space Station cultivated chiles, adding some zing to their tacos. One small step for man, one giant leap for carne asada.",
        "author": "By Daniel Victor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Latest Breakthrough: \u2018Best Space Tacos Yet\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4237",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/nasa-space-tacos.html",
        "text": "For the first time, astronauts on the International Space Station cultivated chiles, adding some zing to their tacos. For the first time, astronauts on the International Space Station cultivated chiles, adding some zing to their tacos. One small step for man, one giant leap for carne asada.",
        "author": "By Daniel Victor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Experience a Zero-Gravity Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4238",
        "date": "2017-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005311355/zero-gravity-flight.html",
        "text": "Experience zero gravity in 360. If you ever wished to become an astronaut, this is your first step. Experience zero gravity in 360. If you ever wished to become an astronaut, this is your first step. Experience zero gravity in 360. If you ever wished to become an astronaut, this is your first step.",
        "author": "By JEAN YVES CHAINON, KAITLYN MULLIN and JOSHUA THOMAS"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moment a Russian Rocket Failed During Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4239",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006156268/astronauts-rocket-failure.html",
        "text": "A rocket launched from Kazakhstan failed several minutes after liftoff. Both astronauts on board returned to earth safely. A rocket launched from Kazakhstan failed several minutes after liftoff. Both astronauts on board returned to earth safely. A rocket launched from Kazakhstan failed several minutes after liftoff. Both astronauts on board returned to earth safely.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press and Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Spacesuits Unveiled, for Trips to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4240",
        "date": "2019-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/science/nasa-spacesuits.html",
        "text": "The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. WASHINGTON \u2014 At NASA headquarters on Tuesday, officials introduced two prototype spacesuits to be used during upcoming moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Spacesuits Unveiled, for Trips to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4241",
        "date": "2019-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/science/nasa-spacesuits.html",
        "text": "The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. WASHINGTON \u2014 At NASA headquarters on Tuesday, officials introduced two prototype spacesuits to be used during upcoming moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Spacesuits Unveiled, for Trips to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4242",
        "date": "2019-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/science/nasa-spacesuits.html",
        "text": "The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. WASHINGTON \u2014 At NASA headquarters on Tuesday, officials introduced two prototype spacesuits to be used during upcoming moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s New Spacesuits Unveiled, for Trips to the Moon and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4243",
        "date": "2019-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/science/nasa-spacesuits.html",
        "text": "The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. The agency is racing to meet President Trump\u2019s timeline for putting American astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. WASHINGTON \u2014 At NASA headquarters on Tuesday, officials introduced two prototype spacesuits to be used during upcoming moon missions.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA\u2019s First All-Women Spacewalk Made History (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4244",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/science/all-female-spacewalk-nasa.html",
        "text": "Two women on Earth, Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal, had a chat about two women astronauts in medium-sized spacesuits. Two women on Earth, Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal, had a chat about two women astronauts in medium-sized spacesuits. It happened by accident, really. After a rocket launch aborted mid-flight, grounding two astronauts who were supposed to go to the International Space Station, NASA had to shift its schedule. Without thinking much of it, the agency announced that Christina Koch and Anne McClain \u2014 two women \u2014 would do the spacewalk instead.",
        "author": "By Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA\u2019s First All-Women Spacewalk Made History (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4245",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/science/all-female-spacewalk-nasa.html",
        "text": "Two women on Earth, Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal, had a chat about two women astronauts in medium-sized spacesuits. Two women on Earth, Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal, had a chat about two women astronauts in medium-sized spacesuits. It happened by accident, really. After a rocket launch aborted mid-flight, grounding two astronauts who were supposed to go to the International Space Station, NASA had to shift its schedule. Without thinking much of it, the agency announced that Christina Koch and Anne McClain \u2014 two women \u2014 would do the spacewalk instead.",
        "author": "By Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA\u2019s First All-Women Spacewalk Made History (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4246",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/science/all-female-spacewalk-nasa.html",
        "text": "Two women on Earth, Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal, had a chat about two women astronauts in medium-sized spacesuits. Two women on Earth, Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal, had a chat about two women astronauts in medium-sized spacesuits. It happened by accident, really. After a rocket launch aborted mid-flight, grounding two astronauts who were supposed to go to the International Space Station, NASA had to shift its schedule. Without thinking much of it, the agency announced that Christina Koch and Anne McClain \u2014 two women \u2014 would do the spacewalk instead.",
        "author": "By Jessica Bennett and Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Challenges NASA Over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4247",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/spacex-moon-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two of the richest men in the world, both with dreams of leading humanity out into the solar system, are fighting over the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Challenges NASA Over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4248",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/spacex-moon-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two of the richest men in the world, both with dreams of leading humanity out into the solar system, are fighting over the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Challenges NASA Over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4249",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/spacex-moon-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two of the richest men in the world, both with dreams of leading humanity out into the solar system, are fighting over the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Challenges NASA Over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4250",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/spacex-moon-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two of the richest men in the world, both with dreams of leading humanity out into the solar system, are fighting over the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Challenges NASA Over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4251",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/science/spacex-moon-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. The space agency picked Elon Musk\u2019s company over two other bidders to take its astronauts back to the lunar surface. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two of the richest men in the world, both with dreams of leading humanity out into the solar system, are fighting over the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Red Space Lettuce Might Feed Red Planet Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4252",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/space-lettuce-astronaut-food.html",
        "text": "Leafy vegetables grown by astronauts aboard the International Space Station were as healthful as lettuce on Earth, a study found. Leafy vegetables grown by astronauts aboard the International Space Station were as healthful as lettuce on Earth, a study found. When astronauts head for Mars, perhaps sometime in the 2030s, there is a good chance that they will be growing their own vegetables to eat along the way.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Red Space Lettuce Might Feed Red Planet Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4253",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/space-lettuce-astronaut-food.html",
        "text": "Leafy vegetables grown by astronauts aboard the International Space Station were as healthful as lettuce on Earth, a study found. Leafy vegetables grown by astronauts aboard the International Space Station were as healthful as lettuce on Earth, a study found. When astronauts head for Mars, perhaps sometime in the 2030s, there is a good chance that they will be growing their own vegetables to eat along the way.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The need for caffeine was the mother of invention. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4254",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-coffee.html",
        "text": "\u201cI love coffee and I was worried that our standard freeze-dried brew wasn\u2019t going to cut it,\u201d one astronaut said. \u201cI love coffee and I was worried that our standard freeze-dried brew wasn\u2019t going to cut it,\u201d one astronaut said. The first patented invention made in space was a coffee cup.",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Moves Moon Landing Deadline Back to 2025 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4255",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/nasa-moon-2025.html",
        "text": "The space agency acknowledged that it cannot return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a timeline set under President Trump. The space agency acknowledged that it cannot return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a timeline set under President Trump. NASA is pushing back its deadline for returning American astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by as much as one year, officials announced on Tuesday. It\u2019s the first official acknowledgment that 2024, the target set when Donald J. Trump was the president, cannot be met.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Moves Moon Landing Deadline Back to 2025 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4256",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/nasa-moon-2025.html",
        "text": "The space agency acknowledged that it cannot return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a timeline set under President Trump. The space agency acknowledged that it cannot return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a timeline set under President Trump. NASA is pushing back its deadline for returning American astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by as much as one year, officials announced on Tuesday. It\u2019s the first official acknowledgment that 2024, the target set when Donald J. Trump was the president, cannot be met.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Moves Moon Landing Deadline Back to 2025 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4257",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/nasa-moon-2025.html",
        "text": "The space agency acknowledged that it cannot return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a timeline set under President Trump. The space agency acknowledged that it cannot return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a timeline set under President Trump. NASA is pushing back its deadline for returning American astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by as much as one year, officials announced on Tuesday. It\u2019s the first official acknowledgment that 2024, the target set when Donald J. Trump was the president, cannot be met.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Loses Challenge to NASA SpaceX Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4258",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/nasa-bezos-lunar-lander-contract.html",
        "text": "The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company carried him to the edge of space last week. But it won\u2019t be flying NASA astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface, at least for now.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Catie Edmondson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Loses Challenge to NASA SpaceX Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4259",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/nasa-bezos-lunar-lander-contract.html",
        "text": "The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company carried him to the edge of space last week. But it won\u2019t be flying NASA astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface, at least for now.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Catie Edmondson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Loses Challenge to NASA SpaceX Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4260",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/nasa-bezos-lunar-lander-contract.html",
        "text": "The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company carried him to the edge of space last week. But it won\u2019t be flying NASA astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface, at least for now.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Catie Edmondson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Loses Challenge to NASA SpaceX Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4261",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/science/nasa-bezos-lunar-lander-contract.html",
        "text": "The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. The Government Accountability Office said a $2.9 billion award to SpaceX to build the next lunar lander for astronauts would stand. Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company carried him to the edge of space last week. But it won\u2019t be flying NASA astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface, at least for now.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Catie Edmondson"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Carries NASA Astronaut Mission Home With Safe Water Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4262",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/spacex-nasa-water-landing.html",
        "text": "The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. Four astronauts inside a capsule built by SpaceX streaked across the Florida night sky like a meteor before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night. The water landing capped an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Carries NASA Astronaut Mission Home With Safe Water Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4263",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/spacex-nasa-water-landing.html",
        "text": "The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. Four astronauts inside a capsule built by SpaceX streaked across the Florida night sky like a meteor before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night. The water landing capped an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Carries NASA Astronaut Mission Home With Safe Water Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4264",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/spacex-nasa-water-landing.html",
        "text": "The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. Four astronauts inside a capsule built by SpaceX streaked across the Florida night sky like a meteor before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night. The water landing capped an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Carries NASA Astronaut Mission Home With Safe Water Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4265",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/spacex-nasa-water-landing.html",
        "text": "The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. Four astronauts inside a capsule built by SpaceX streaked across the Florida night sky like a meteor before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night. The water landing capped an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Carries NASA Astronaut Mission Home With Safe Water Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4266",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/science/spacex-nasa-water-landing.html",
        "text": "The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. The Crew-2 astronauts spent nearly 200 days in orbit, and their stay aboard the International Space Station was punctuated with surprises. Four astronauts inside a capsule built by SpaceX streaked across the Florida night sky like a meteor before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night. The water landing capped an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Wins NASA $2.9 Billion Contract to Build Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4267",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/science/spacex-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s private space company is developing a giant rocket called Starship to one day take people to Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Wins NASA $2.9 Billion Contract to Build Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4268",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/science/spacex-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s private space company is developing a giant rocket called Starship to one day take people to Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Wins NASA $2.9 Billion Contract to Build Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4269",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/science/spacex-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s private space company is developing a giant rocket called Starship to one day take people to Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Wins NASA $2.9 Billion Contract to Build Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4270",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/science/spacex-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s private space company is developing a giant rocket called Starship to one day take people to Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Wins NASA $2.9 Billion Contract to Build Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4271",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/science/spacex-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s company bested Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin and others in the contest to carry American astronauts to the lunar surface. Elon Musk\u2019s private space company is developing a giant rocket called Starship to one day take people to Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sarah Gillis will be a key voice in the astronauts\u2019 ears as they head to orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4272",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/sarah-gillis-spacex-launch-orbit.html",
        "text": "The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. As the four amateur astronauts head into space, the voice of Sarah Gillis will guide them into orbit.",
        "author": "By Jesus Jim\u00e9nez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sarah Gillis will be a key voice in the astronauts\u2019 ears as they head to orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4273",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/sarah-gillis-spacex-launch-orbit.html",
        "text": "The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. As the four amateur astronauts head into space, the voice of Sarah Gillis will guide them into orbit.",
        "author": "By Jesus Jim\u00e9nez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sarah Gillis will be a key voice in the astronauts\u2019 ears as they head to orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4274",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/sarah-gillis-spacex-launch-orbit.html",
        "text": "The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. As the four amateur astronauts head into space, the voice of Sarah Gillis will guide them into orbit.",
        "author": "By Jesus Jim\u00e9nez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sarah Gillis will be a key voice in the astronauts\u2019 ears as they head to orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4275",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/sarah-gillis-spacex-launch-orbit.html",
        "text": "The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. The engineer trained the astronauts on the Crew Dragon capsule's systems and will also provide key communications on their trip to orbit. As the four amateur astronauts head into space, the voice of Sarah Gillis will guide them into orbit.",
        "author": "By Jesus Jim\u00e9nez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Christina Koch Lands on Earth, and Crosses a Threshold for Women in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4276",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/science/christina-koch-nasa-astronaut.html",
        "text": "The astronaut completed three all-female spacewalks and set a record for time in space, but you should remember her for much more. The astronaut completed three all-female spacewalks and set a record for time in space, but you should remember her for much more. How many astronauts can you name without consulting Google or Wikipedia?",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Christina Koch Lands on Earth, and Crosses a Threshold for Women in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4277",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/science/christina-koch-nasa-astronaut.html",
        "text": "The astronaut completed three all-female spacewalks and set a record for time in space, but you should remember her for much more. The astronaut completed three all-female spacewalks and set a record for time in space, but you should remember her for much more. How many astronauts can you name without consulting Google or Wikipedia?",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Christina Koch Lands on Earth, and Crosses a Threshold for Women in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4278",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/science/christina-koch-nasa-astronaut.html",
        "text": "The astronaut completed three all-female spacewalks and set a record for time in space, but you should remember her for much more. The astronaut completed three all-female spacewalks and set a record for time in space, but you should remember her for much more. How many astronauts can you name without consulting Google or Wikipedia?",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Jeff Bezos Really an Astronaut? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4279",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/science/jeff-bezos-astronaut-definition.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Say you\u2019re Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Jeff Bezos Really an Astronaut? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4280",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/science/jeff-bezos-astronaut-definition.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Say you\u2019re Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Jeff Bezos Really an Astronaut? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4281",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/science/jeff-bezos-astronaut-definition.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Say you\u2019re Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Jeff Bezos Really an Astronaut? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4282",
        "date": "2021-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/26/science/jeff-bezos-astronaut-definition.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Blue Origin pinned custom astronaut wings to his flight suit. The Federal Aviation Administration may disagree. Or it may not even matter. Say you\u2019re Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Delays Work on NASA\u2019s Moon Rocket and Capsule (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4283",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/science/nasa-coronavirus-sls-rocket-moon.html",
        "text": "Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. The coronavirus pandemic on Earth is knocking NASA\u2019s moon plans off course.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Delays Work on NASA\u2019s Moon Rocket and Capsule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4284",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/science/nasa-coronavirus-sls-rocket-moon.html",
        "text": "Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. The coronavirus pandemic on Earth is knocking NASA\u2019s moon plans off course.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Delays Work on NASA\u2019s Moon Rocket and Capsule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4285",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/science/nasa-coronavirus-sls-rocket-moon.html",
        "text": "Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. The coronavirus pandemic on Earth is knocking NASA\u2019s moon plans off course.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Delays Work on NASA\u2019s Moon Rocket and Capsule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4286",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/science/nasa-coronavirus-sls-rocket-moon.html",
        "text": "Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. The coronavirus pandemic on Earth is knocking NASA\u2019s moon plans off course.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Delays Work on NASA\u2019s Moon Rocket and Capsule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4287",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/science/nasa-coronavirus-sls-rocket-moon.html",
        "text": "Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. Work will be suspended at two NASA centers, a setback that could end hopes for sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024. The coronavirus pandemic on Earth is knocking NASA\u2019s moon plans off course.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "First American Woman to Walk in Space Reaches Deepest Spot in the Ocean (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4288",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/science/challenger-deep-kathy-sullivan-astronaut.html",
        "text": "The astronaut Kathy Sullivan, 68, is now also the first woman to reach the Challenger Deep, about seven miles below the ocean\u2019s surface. The astronaut Kathy Sullivan, 68, is now also the first woman to reach the Challenger Deep, about seven miles below the ocean\u2019s surface. The first American woman to walk in space has become the first woman to reach the deepest known spot in the ocean.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "First American Woman to Walk in Space Reaches Deepest Spot in the Ocean (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4289",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/science/challenger-deep-kathy-sullivan-astronaut.html",
        "text": "The astronaut Kathy Sullivan, 68, is now also the first woman to reach the Challenger Deep, about seven miles below the ocean\u2019s surface. The astronaut Kathy Sullivan, 68, is now also the first woman to reach the Challenger Deep, about seven miles below the ocean\u2019s surface. The first American woman to walk in space has become the first woman to reach the deepest known spot in the ocean.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "First American Woman to Walk in Space Reaches Deepest Spot in the Ocean (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4290",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/science/challenger-deep-kathy-sullivan-astronaut.html",
        "text": "The astronaut Kathy Sullivan, 68, is now also the first woman to reach the Challenger Deep, about seven miles below the ocean\u2019s surface. The astronaut Kathy Sullivan, 68, is now also the first woman to reach the Challenger Deep, about seven miles below the ocean\u2019s surface. The first American woman to walk in space has become the first woman to reach the deepest known spot in the ocean.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where NASA Will Send Its First Robotic Moon Rover to Search for Ice (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4291",
        "date": "2021-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/science/nasa-moon-viper.html",
        "text": "The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. NASA has been planning for years to send a robotic rover to the moon\u2019s polar regions. Water ice trapped at the bottoms of craters there could be a boon to future visiting astronauts, providing water to drink, air to breathe and rocket fuel to propel them back to Earth or even farther out into the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where NASA Will Send Its First Robotic Moon Rover to Search for Ice (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4292",
        "date": "2021-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/science/nasa-moon-viper.html",
        "text": "The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. NASA has been planning for years to send a robotic rover to the moon\u2019s polar regions. Water ice trapped at the bottoms of craters there could be a boon to future visiting astronauts, providing water to drink, air to breathe and rocket fuel to propel them back to Earth or even farther out into the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where NASA Will Send Its First Robotic Moon Rover to Search for Ice (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4293",
        "date": "2021-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/science/nasa-moon-viper.html",
        "text": "The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. NASA has been planning for years to send a robotic rover to the moon\u2019s polar regions. Water ice trapped at the bottoms of craters there could be a boon to future visiting astronauts, providing water to drink, air to breathe and rocket fuel to propel them back to Earth or even farther out into the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where NASA Will Send Its First Robotic Moon Rover to Search for Ice (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4294",
        "date": "2021-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/science/nasa-moon-viper.html",
        "text": "The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. The agency picked the Nobile crater near the lunar south pole to seek frozen water that will be essential to future astronaut missions. NASA has been planning for years to send a robotic rover to the moon\u2019s polar regions. Water ice trapped at the bottoms of craters there could be a boon to future visiting astronauts, providing water to drink, air to breathe and rocket fuel to propel them back to Earth or even farther out into the solar system.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronaut to Be First Black Woman to Join Space Station Crew (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4295",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/science/jessica-watkins-nasa-spacex.html",
        "text": "Jessica Watkins, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2017, is scheduled to fly to the orbital outpost in a SpaceX capsule in April. Jessica Watkins, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2017, is scheduled to fly to the orbital outpost in a SpaceX capsule in April. Two decades after the International Space Station became humanity\u2019s long-lasting home in orbit, Jessica Watkins, a NASA astronaut, is poised to become the first Black woman to join its crew for a long-term mission.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronaut to Be First Black Woman to Join Space Station Crew (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4296",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/science/jessica-watkins-nasa-spacex.html",
        "text": "Jessica Watkins, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2017, is scheduled to fly to the orbital outpost in a SpaceX capsule in April. Jessica Watkins, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2017, is scheduled to fly to the orbital outpost in a SpaceX capsule in April. Two decades after the International Space Station became humanity\u2019s long-lasting home in orbit, Jessica Watkins, a NASA astronaut, is poised to become the first Black woman to join its crew for a long-term mission.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronaut to Be First Black Woman to Join Space Station Crew (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4297",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/science/jessica-watkins-nasa-spacex.html",
        "text": "Jessica Watkins, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2017, is scheduled to fly to the orbital outpost in a SpaceX capsule in April. Jessica Watkins, who joined NASA\u2019s astronaut corps in 2017, is scheduled to fly to the orbital outpost in a SpaceX capsule in April. Two decades after the International Space Station became humanity\u2019s long-lasting home in orbit, Jessica Watkins, a NASA astronaut, is poised to become the first Black woman to join its crew for a long-term mission.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Astronaut Who Built Paths to Space for Other Women (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4298",
        "date": "2019-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/science/janet-kavandi-nasa.html",
        "text": "Janet Kavandi, who recently retired from a senior NASA post, went to space three times and added fairness to the astronaut selection process. Janet Kavandi, who recently retired from a senior NASA post, went to space three times and added fairness to the astronaut selection process. Every time an astronaut puts on an American spacesuit to conduct a spacewalk at the International Space Station, they pass through a portal installed in part by Janet Kavandi.",
        "author": "By Jillian Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Astronaut Who Built Paths to Space for Other Women (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4299",
        "date": "2019-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/science/janet-kavandi-nasa.html",
        "text": "Janet Kavandi, who recently retired from a senior NASA post, went to space three times and added fairness to the astronaut selection process. Janet Kavandi, who recently retired from a senior NASA post, went to space three times and added fairness to the astronaut selection process. Every time an astronaut puts on an American spacesuit to conduct a spacewalk at the International Space Station, they pass through a portal installed in part by Janet Kavandi.",
        "author": "By Jillian Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4300",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The rocket launched. It exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4301",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The rocket launched. It exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4302",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The rocket launched. It exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4303",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The rocket launched. It exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4304",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The rocket launched. It exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Explosive Test May Launch Year of Renewed Human Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4305",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. A NASA program could be ready to launch astronauts to orbit once again, and the number of people traveling to space could surge. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The rocket launched. It exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s SpaceX Crew-3 Docks at Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4306",
        "date": "2021-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008073421/nasa-spacex-iss-docking.html",
        "text": "The crew includes Raja Chari, the Crew-3 commander; two more NASA astronauts, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn; and a German astronaut, Matthias Maurer. The crew includes Raja Chari, the Crew-3 commander; two more NASA astronauts, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn; and a German astronaut, Matthias Maurer. The crew includes Raja Chari, the Crew-3 commander; two more NASA astronauts, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn; and a German astronaut, Matthias Maurer.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX to Bring Crew to Short-Staffed Space Station for Longer Stay (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4307",
        "date": "2020-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/science/nasa-spacex-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "Two NASA astronauts will now stay for more than a month and not two weeks during their first flight aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. Two NASA astronauts will now stay for more than a month and not two weeks during their first flight aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. What was intended as a two-week test flight of SpaceX\u2019s new astronaut-carrying capsule will now be a mission planned to last more than a month to help a short-handed crew aboard the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX to Bring Crew to Short-Staffed Space Station for Longer Stay (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4308",
        "date": "2020-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/science/nasa-spacex-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "Two NASA astronauts will now stay for more than a month and not two weeks during their first flight aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. Two NASA astronauts will now stay for more than a month and not two weeks during their first flight aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. What was intended as a two-week test flight of SpaceX\u2019s new astronaut-carrying capsule will now be a mission planned to last more than a month to help a short-handed crew aboard the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX to Bring Crew to Short-Staffed Space Station for Longer Stay (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4309",
        "date": "2020-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/science/nasa-spacex-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "Two NASA astronauts will now stay for more than a month and not two weeks during their first flight aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. Two NASA astronauts will now stay for more than a month and not two weeks during their first flight aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. What was intended as a two-week test flight of SpaceX\u2019s new astronaut-carrying capsule will now be a mission planned to last more than a month to help a short-handed crew aboard the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Newest Class of Astronauts Is Ready to Hit the Pool (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4310",
        "date": "2017-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/science/nasa-astronauts-class-2017.html",
        "text": "The newest class of astronauts will learn how to spacewalk in a 60-foot-deep pool, and learn to speak Russian to better communicate with cosmonauts. The newest class of astronauts will learn how to spacewalk in a 60-foot-deep pool, and learn to speak Russian to better communicate with cosmonauts. They don\u2019t yet know where they will be going, and they don\u2019t know how they will get there, but they do have a good chance of leaving the planet in the coming years.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Ends Up in Wrong Orbit After Clock Problem (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4311",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/science/boeing-starliner-launch.html",
        "text": "The company capped a bad week with a flawed test flight of a capsule built for NASA to carry astronauts to the space station. The company capped a bad week with a flawed test flight of a capsule built for NASA to carry astronauts to the space station. As an Atlas 5 rocket arced upward into the pre-dawn sky from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Friday morning, NASA\u2019s plans to finally break free of its reliance on Russian rockets for taking astronauts to orbit seemed to be on track.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner Ends Up in Wrong Orbit After Clock Problem (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4312",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/science/boeing-starliner-launch.html",
        "text": "The company capped a bad week with a flawed test flight of a capsule built for NASA to carry astronauts to the space station. The company capped a bad week with a flawed test flight of a capsule built for NASA to carry astronauts to the space station. As an Atlas 5 rocket arced upward into the pre-dawn sky from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Friday morning, NASA\u2019s plans to finally break free of its reliance on Russian rockets for taking astronauts to orbit seemed to be on track.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "First All-Female Spacewalk Canceled Because NASA Doesn\u2019t Have Two Suits That Fit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4313",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/science/female-spacewalk-canceled.html",
        "text": "The astronauts, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, will both walk in space \u2014 just not together, because only one medium-size torso component is available. The astronauts, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, will both walk in space \u2014 just not together, because only one medium-size torso component is available. It hadn\u2019t been planned as a historic mission, yet it would have represented a moment of sorts: the first all-female spacewalk.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin and Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "First All-Female Spacewalk Canceled Because NASA Doesn\u2019t Have Two Suits That Fit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4314",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/science/female-spacewalk-canceled.html",
        "text": "The astronauts, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, will both walk in space \u2014 just not together, because only one medium-size torso component is available. The astronauts, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, will both walk in space \u2014 just not together, because only one medium-size torso component is available. It hadn\u2019t been planned as a historic mission, yet it would have represented a moment of sorts: the first all-female spacewalk.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin and Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "First All-Female Spacewalk Canceled Because NASA Doesn\u2019t Have Two Suits That Fit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4315",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/science/female-spacewalk-canceled.html",
        "text": "The astronauts, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, will both walk in space \u2014 just not together, because only one medium-size torso component is available. The astronauts, Anne McClain and Christina Koch, will both walk in space \u2014 just not together, because only one medium-size torso component is available. It hadn\u2019t been planned as a historic mission, yet it would have represented a moment of sorts: the first all-female spacewalk.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin and Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prioritizes Moon Landings Under Trump Budget Proposal (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4316",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. In a shifting of priorities at NASA, the Trump administration\u2019s proposed budget for next year adds $600 million for an outpost high above the moon and the beginning of development for landers to take astronauts back to the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prioritizes Moon Landings Under Trump Budget Proposal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4317",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. In a shifting of priorities at NASA, the Trump administration\u2019s proposed budget for next year adds $600 million for an outpost high above the moon and the beginning of development for landers to take astronauts back to the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prioritizes Moon Landings Under Trump Budget Proposal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4318",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. In a shifting of priorities at NASA, the Trump administration\u2019s proposed budget for next year adds $600 million for an outpost high above the moon and the beginning of development for landers to take astronauts back to the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prioritizes Moon Landings Under Trump Budget Proposal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4319",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. The agency would get $600 million for infrastructure and research in support of lunar missions, but astronauts won\u2019t return until 2028 at the earliest. In a shifting of priorities at NASA, the Trump administration\u2019s proposed budget for next year adds $600 million for an outpost high above the moon and the beginning of development for landers to take astronauts back to the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Denies Trump\u2019s Request to Send Astronauts Past the Moon on New Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4320",
        "date": "2017-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/science/nasa-trump-request-moon-new-rocket.html",
        "text": "The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. When NASA launches its new big rocket for the first time \u2014 more than a year and a half from now, at the earliest \u2014 there will be no astronauts along for the ride.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Denies Trump\u2019s Request to Send Astronauts Past the Moon on New Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4321",
        "date": "2017-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/science/nasa-trump-request-moon-new-rocket.html",
        "text": "The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. When NASA launches its new big rocket for the first time \u2014 more than a year and a half from now, at the earliest \u2014 there will be no astronauts along for the ride.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Denies Trump\u2019s Request to Send Astronauts Past the Moon on New Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4322",
        "date": "2017-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/science/nasa-trump-request-moon-new-rocket.html",
        "text": "The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. When NASA launches its new big rocket for the first time \u2014 more than a year and a half from now, at the earliest \u2014 there will be no astronauts along for the ride.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Denies Trump\u2019s Request to Send Astronauts Past the Moon on New Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4323",
        "date": "2017-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/science/nasa-trump-request-moon-new-rocket.html",
        "text": "The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. The agency announced that adding astronauts to the mission would have cost $600 million to $900 million and required significantly more work and time. When NASA launches its new big rocket for the first time \u2014 more than a year and a half from now, at the earliest \u2014 there will be no astronauts along for the ride.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Rocket to Deep Space May Not Be Ready Until 2020 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4324",
        "date": "2017-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/science/nasa-space-launch-system-delay.html",
        "text": "Technological hiccups, a tornado and other factors have slowed the Space Launch System that NASA hopes will carry astronauts to the moon and Mars. Technological hiccups, a tornado and other factors have slowed the Space Launch System that NASA hopes will carry astronauts to the moon and Mars. NASA\u2019s new heavy-lift rocket will not get off the ground until December 2019 at the earliest, and its maiden flight could easily slip to the middle of 2020, the space agency announced on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Rocket to Deep Space May Not Be Ready Until 2020 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4325",
        "date": "2017-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/science/nasa-space-launch-system-delay.html",
        "text": "Technological hiccups, a tornado and other factors have slowed the Space Launch System that NASA hopes will carry astronauts to the moon and Mars. Technological hiccups, a tornado and other factors have slowed the Space Launch System that NASA hopes will carry astronauts to the moon and Mars. NASA\u2019s new heavy-lift rocket will not get off the ground until December 2019 at the earliest, and its maiden flight could easily slip to the middle of 2020, the space agency announced on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scott Kelly Spent a Year Taking Photos in Space. They\u2019re Beautiful. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4326",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/science/scott-kellys-photos-space.html",
        "text": "In orbit aboard the International Space Station, the astronaut wasn\u2019t just gathering data for NASA\u2019s Twins Study. He also produced some, well, stellar images. In orbit aboard the International Space Station, the astronaut wasn\u2019t just gathering data for NASA\u2019s Twins Study. He also produced some, well, stellar images. It was not supposed to be a photo safari. NASA lofted Scott Kelly into orbit aboard the International Space Station in March 2015 for a year so that scientists could learn what happens to the human body during long missions in space. (A lot, as it turned out.) ",
        "author": "By Scott Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scott Kelly Spent a Year Taking Photos in Space. They\u2019re Beautiful. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4327",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/science/scott-kellys-photos-space.html",
        "text": "In orbit aboard the International Space Station, the astronaut wasn\u2019t just gathering data for NASA\u2019s Twins Study. He also produced some, well, stellar images. In orbit aboard the International Space Station, the astronaut wasn\u2019t just gathering data for NASA\u2019s Twins Study. He also produced some, well, stellar images. It was not supposed to be a photo safari. NASA lofted Scott Kelly into orbit aboard the International Space Station in March 2015 for a year so that scientists could learn what happens to the human body during long missions in space. (A lot, as it turned out.) ",
        "author": "By Scott Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s Water and Ice on the Moon, and in More Places Than NASA Thought (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4328",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/science/moon-ice-water.html",
        "text": "Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts headed to the moon may have an easier time finding water and digging up ice than had been thought.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s Water and Ice on the Moon, and in More Places Than NASA Thought (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4329",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/science/moon-ice-water.html",
        "text": "Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts headed to the moon may have an easier time finding water and digging up ice than had been thought.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s Water and Ice on the Moon, and in More Places Than NASA Thought (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4330",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/science/moon-ice-water.html",
        "text": "Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts headed to the moon may have an easier time finding water and digging up ice than had been thought.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s Water and Ice on the Moon, and in More Places Than NASA Thought (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4331",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/science/moon-ice-water.html",
        "text": "Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts seeking water on the moon may not need to go into the most treacherous craters in its polar regions to find it. Future astronauts headed to the moon may have an easier time finding water and digging up ice than had been thought.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is It Art? You May Have to Ask a Neanderthal Critic. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4332",
        "date": "2021-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/10/science/neanderthal-deer-bone.html",
        "text": "A bone to pick from Germany\u2019s Unicorn Cave. Plus fireflies in sync, peer review in crisis and China\u2019s astronauts at work in their spacesuits. A bone to pick from Germany\u2019s Unicorn Cave. Plus fireflies in sync, peer review in crisis and China\u2019s astronauts at work in their spacesuits. In 2019, a team of archaeologists climbed a steep, rocky hill in central Germany and burrowed inside the collapsed entrance of the Unicorn Cave, named as such because people in the Middle Ages once scoured it for unicorn bones. Today it is famous for its animal fossils.",
        "author": "By Virginia Hughes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Orbit. His Body Is Not Quite the Same. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4333",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/scott-mark-kelly-twins-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists compared the astronaut to his earthbound twin, Mark. The results hint at what humans will have to endure on long journeys through space. NASA scientists compared the astronaut to his earthbound twin, Mark. The results hint at what humans will have to endure on long journeys through space. For 340 days, Scott Kelly circled the Earth aboard the International Space Station, gathering data about himself.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scott Kelly Spent a Year in Orbit. His Body Is Not Quite the Same. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4334",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/scott-mark-kelly-twins-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists compared the astronaut to his earthbound twin, Mark. The results hint at what humans will have to endure on long journeys through space. NASA scientists compared the astronaut to his earthbound twin, Mark. The results hint at what humans will have to endure on long journeys through space. For 340 days, Scott Kelly circled the Earth aboard the International Space Station, gathering data about himself.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Is a Hazardous Place to Live (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4335",
        "date": "2019-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/science/apollo-moon-colony-dangers.html",
        "text": "If we get back to the lunar surface, astronauts will have to contend with much more than perilous rocket flights and the vacuum of space. If we get back to the lunar surface, astronauts will have to contend with much more than perilous rocket flights and the vacuum of space. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Is a Hazardous Place to Live (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4336",
        "date": "2019-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/science/apollo-moon-colony-dangers.html",
        "text": "If we get back to the lunar surface, astronauts will have to contend with much more than perilous rocket flights and the vacuum of space. If we get back to the lunar surface, astronauts will have to contend with much more than perilous rocket flights and the vacuum of space. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong: First Man on the Moon, and Its First Great Geologist (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4337",
        "date": "2019-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/06/science/neil-armstrong-moon-rocks.html",
        "text": "Had the Apollo program stopped after July 21, 1969, another astronaut says, its lunar samples would have been enough to reshape knowledge of the solar system. Had the Apollo program stopped after July 21, 1969, another astronaut says, its lunar samples would have been enough to reshape knowledge of the solar system. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong: First Man on the Moon, and Its First Great Geologist (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4338",
        "date": "2019-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/06/science/neil-armstrong-moon-rocks.html",
        "text": "Had the Apollo program stopped after July 21, 1969, another astronaut says, its lunar samples would have been enough to reshape knowledge of the solar system. Had the Apollo program stopped after July 21, 1969, another astronaut says, its lunar samples would have been enough to reshape knowledge of the solar system. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese Astronauts Arrive at Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4339",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007822506/china-launch-space-station-astronauts.html",
        "text": "Three astronauts docked with the country\u2019s partly built space station Thursday, beginning what China plans as at least a decade of continuous presence in Earth\u2019s orbit. Three astronauts docked with the country\u2019s partly built space station Thursday, beginning what China plans as at least a decade of continuous presence in Earth\u2019s orbit. Three astronauts docked with the country\u2019s partly built space station Thursday, beginning what China plans as at least a decade of continuous presence in Earth\u2019s orbit.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years Ago, NASA Put a Car on the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4340",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/science/lunar-rover-apollo-nasa.html",
        "text": "The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. Dave Scott was not about to pass by an interesting rock without stopping. It was July 31, 1971, and he and Jim Irwin, his fellow Apollo 15 astronaut, were the first people to drive on the moon. After a 6-hour inaugural jaunt in the new lunar rover, the two were heading back to their lander, the Falcon, when Mr. Scott made an unscheduled pit stop.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years Ago, NASA Put a Car on the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4341",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/science/lunar-rover-apollo-nasa.html",
        "text": "The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. Dave Scott was not about to pass by an interesting rock without stopping. It was July 31, 1971, and he and Jim Irwin, his fellow Apollo 15 astronaut, were the first people to drive on the moon. After a 6-hour inaugural jaunt in the new lunar rover, the two were heading back to their lander, the Falcon, when Mr. Scott made an unscheduled pit stop.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years Ago, NASA Put a Car on the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4342",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/science/lunar-rover-apollo-nasa.html",
        "text": "The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. Dave Scott was not about to pass by an interesting rock without stopping. It was July 31, 1971, and he and Jim Irwin, his fellow Apollo 15 astronaut, were the first people to drive on the moon. After a 6-hour inaugural jaunt in the new lunar rover, the two were heading back to their lander, the Falcon, when Mr. Scott made an unscheduled pit stop.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years Ago, NASA Put a Car on the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4343",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/science/lunar-rover-apollo-nasa.html",
        "text": "The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions\u2019 astronaut explorers. Dave Scott was not about to pass by an interesting rock without stopping. It was July 31, 1971, and he and Jim Irwin, his fellow Apollo 15 astronaut, were the first people to drive on the moon. After a 6-hour inaugural jaunt in the new lunar rover, the two were heading back to their lander, the Falcon, when Mr. Scott made an unscheduled pit stop.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Civilian Crew Returns to Earth After 3 Days in Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4344",
        "date": "2021-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007981747/spacex-inspiration4-landing.html",
        "text": "The SpaceX capsule, carrying the first crew ever to go into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard, splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida\u2019s coast on Saturday. The SpaceX capsule, carrying the first crew ever to go into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard, splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida\u2019s coast on Saturday. The SpaceX capsule, carrying the first crew ever to go into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard, splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida\u2019s coast on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Reuters and The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Live: SpaceX to Launch NASA Crew-3 Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4345",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008070619/nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts are expected to head to the International Space Station for a stay of about six months, replacing another crew that returned to Earth earlier this week. Four astronauts are expected to head to the International Space Station for a stay of about six months, replacing another crew that returned to Earth earlier this week. Four astronauts are expected to head to the International Space Station for a stay of about six months, replacing another crew that returned to Earth earlier this week.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Menu for Mars? NASA Plans to Grow Chiles in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4346",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/science/nasa-food-gardening-mars.html",
        "text": "Astronauts would probably have to grow some of their own food to survive a round trip to Mars. Could a crop of chiles be the gateway to the future? Astronauts would probably have to grow some of their own food to survive a round trip to Mars. Could a crop of chiles be the gateway to the future? Ham salad from a tube. Apricot cereal cubes. Thermostabilized Cheddar cheese spread. ",
        "author": "By Sarah Mervosh"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Menu for Mars? NASA Plans to Grow Chiles in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4347",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/science/nasa-food-gardening-mars.html",
        "text": "Astronauts would probably have to grow some of their own food to survive a round trip to Mars. Could a crop of chiles be the gateway to the future? Astronauts would probably have to grow some of their own food to survive a round trip to Mars. Could a crop of chiles be the gateway to the future? Ham salad from a tube. Apricot cereal cubes. Thermostabilized Cheddar cheese spread. ",
        "author": "By Sarah Mervosh"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Russia, With Thrusters (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4348",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/baikonur-soyuz-space.html",
        "text": "As another Soyuz space rocket prepares to send a new batch of astronauts to the International Space Station, a photographer takes us inside the world\u2019s oldest and largest spaceport. As another Soyuz space rocket prepares to send a new batch of astronauts to the International Space Station, a photographer takes us inside the world\u2019s oldest and largest spaceport. BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan \u2014 More than a half-century ago, the launch site here became the first place to send humans into space. It is still our main route to the heavens, at least for now.",
        "author": "By Maxim Babenko and Steve Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Russia, With Thrusters (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4349",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/baikonur-soyuz-space.html",
        "text": "As another Soyuz space rocket prepares to send a new batch of astronauts to the International Space Station, a photographer takes us inside the world\u2019s oldest and largest spaceport. As another Soyuz space rocket prepares to send a new batch of astronauts to the International Space Station, a photographer takes us inside the world\u2019s oldest and largest spaceport. BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan \u2014 More than a half-century ago, the launch site here became the first place to send humans into space. It is still our main route to the heavens, at least for now.",
        "author": "By Maxim Babenko and Steve Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Russia, With Thrusters (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4350",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/baikonur-soyuz-space.html",
        "text": "As another Soyuz space rocket prepares to send a new batch of astronauts to the International Space Station, a photographer takes us inside the world\u2019s oldest and largest spaceport. As another Soyuz space rocket prepares to send a new batch of astronauts to the International Space Station, a photographer takes us inside the world\u2019s oldest and largest spaceport. BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan \u2014 More than a half-century ago, the launch site here became the first place to send humans into space. It is still our main route to the heavens, at least for now.",
        "author": "By Maxim Babenko and Steve Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s SpaceX Crew-2 Departs International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4351",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008066847/spacex-nasa-crew-return-earth.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts from the mission undocked from the International Space Station in the Crew Dragon capsule and headed back to Earth after spending about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the mission undocked from the International Space Station in the Crew Dragon capsule and headed back to Earth after spending about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the mission undocked from the International Space Station in the Crew Dragon capsule and headed back to Earth after spending about half a year in space.",
        "author": "By Spacex"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s SpaceX Crew-2 Departs International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4352",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008066847/spacex-nasa-crew-return-earth.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts from the mission undocked from the International Space Station in the Crew Dragon capsule and headed back to Earth after spending about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the mission undocked from the International Space Station in the Crew Dragon capsule and headed back to Earth after spending about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the mission undocked from the International Space Station in the Crew Dragon capsule and headed back to Earth after spending about half a year in space.",
        "author": "By Spacex"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Plans February Moon Launch With Giant Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4353",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/science/nasa-moon-rocket.html",
        "text": "A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Plans February Moon Launch With Giant Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4354",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/science/nasa-moon-rocket.html",
        "text": "A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Plans February Moon Launch With Giant Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4355",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/science/nasa-moon-rocket.html",
        "text": "A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Plans February Moon Launch With Giant Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4356",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/science/nasa-moon-rocket.html",
        "text": "A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. A flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule without astronauts aboard is planned for early next year, a first, long-delayed step toward returning astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Crew-3 Sends Four Astronauts to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4357",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008071421/nasa-spacex-launch-space-station.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts, three of whom were flying to space for the first time, will orbit Earth for a day before docking at the International Space Station for about six months. Four astronauts, three of whom were flying to space for the first time, will orbit Earth for a day before docking at the International Space Station for about six months. Four astronauts, three of whom were flying to space for the first time, will orbit Earth for a day before docking at the International Space Station for about six months.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv, Via Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s \u2018Worm\u2019 Logo Will Return to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4358",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/nasa-logo-worm-spacex.html",
        "text": "The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. It was designed for NASA in the 1970s, and it hasn\u2019t been back to space since the 1990s. But in 2020, it will head to orbit once more.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s \u2018Worm\u2019 Logo Will Return to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4359",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/nasa-logo-worm-spacex.html",
        "text": "The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. It was designed for NASA in the 1970s, and it hasn\u2019t been back to space since the 1990s. But in 2020, it will head to orbit once more.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s \u2018Worm\u2019 Logo Will Return to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4360",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/nasa-logo-worm-spacex.html",
        "text": "The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. It was designed for NASA in the 1970s, and it hasn\u2019t been back to space since the 1990s. But in 2020, it will head to orbit once more.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s \u2018Worm\u2019 Logo Will Return to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4361",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/nasa-logo-worm-spacex.html",
        "text": "The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. The new old logo, dropped in the 1990s in favor of a more vintage brand, will adorn a SpaceX rocket that is to carry astronauts to the space station in May. It was designed for NASA in the 1970s, and it hasn\u2019t been back to space since the 1990s. But in 2020, it will head to orbit once more.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Splashes Down Off Florida Coast (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4362",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008067580/spacex-nasa-crew-dragon-capsule-florida.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission safely landed at night off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The crew members have spent about half a year at the International Space Station. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission safely landed at night off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The crew members have spent about half a year at the International Space Station. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission safely landed at night off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The crew members have spent about half a year at the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule Splashes Down Off Florida Coast (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4363",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008067580/spacex-nasa-crew-dragon-capsule-florida.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission safely landed at night off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The crew members have spent about half a year at the International Space Station. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission safely landed at night off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The crew members have spent about half a year at the International Space Station. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission safely landed at night off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The crew members have spent about half a year at the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mega Rocket to the Moon Faces Setback After Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4364",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/science/nasa-rocket-sls-test.html",
        "text": "A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. After billions of dollars and a decade of work, NASA\u2019s plans to send astronauts back to the moon had a new setback on Saturday. A planned eight-minute test firing of the four engines of a new mega rocket needed for the moon missions came to an abrupt end after only about a minute.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mega Rocket to the Moon Faces Setback After Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4365",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/science/nasa-rocket-sls-test.html",
        "text": "A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. After billions of dollars and a decade of work, NASA\u2019s plans to send astronauts back to the moon had a new setback on Saturday. A planned eight-minute test firing of the four engines of a new mega rocket needed for the moon missions came to an abrupt end after only about a minute.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mega Rocket to the Moon Faces Setback After Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4366",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/science/nasa-rocket-sls-test.html",
        "text": "A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. After billions of dollars and a decade of work, NASA\u2019s plans to send astronauts back to the moon had a new setback on Saturday. A planned eight-minute test firing of the four engines of a new mega rocket needed for the moon missions came to an abrupt end after only about a minute.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mega Rocket to the Moon Faces Setback After Test (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4367",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/16/science/nasa-rocket-sls-test.html",
        "text": "A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. After billions of dollars and a decade of work, NASA\u2019s plans to send astronauts back to the moon had a new setback on Saturday. A planned eight-minute test firing of the four engines of a new mega rocket needed for the moon missions came to an abrupt end after only about a minute.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Launches a Film Crew Into Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4368",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008008757/russian-film-crew-space-station-soyuz.html",
        "text": "The Russian crew \u2014 an actress, a director and their professional astronaut guide \u2014 arrived at the International Space Station with a mission to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space. The Russian crew \u2014 an actress, a director and their professional astronaut guide \u2014 arrived at the International Space Station with a mission to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space. The Russian crew \u2014 an actress, a director and their professional astronaut guide \u2014 arrived at the International Space Station with a mission to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press and Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Launches a Film Crew Into Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4369",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008008757/russian-film-crew-space-station-soyuz.html",
        "text": "The Russian crew \u2014 an actress, a director and their professional astronaut guide \u2014 arrived at the International Space Station with a mission to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space. The Russian crew \u2014 an actress, a director and their professional astronaut guide \u2014 arrived at the International Space Station with a mission to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space. The Russian crew \u2014 an actress, a director and their professional astronaut guide \u2014 arrived at the International Space Station with a mission to shoot scenes for the first feature-length film in space.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press and Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Live: NASA Astronauts Return to Earth From Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4370",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000008066348/nasa-astronauts-spacex-return-live-video.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Live: NASA Astronauts Return to Earth From Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4371",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000008066348/nasa-astronauts-spacex-return-live-video.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Live: NASA Astronauts Return to Earth From Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4372",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000008066348/nasa-astronauts-spacex-return-live-video.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space. Four astronauts from the NASA Crew-2 mission are scheduled to undock from the International Space Station in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and head back to Earth after about half a year in space.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "20 Years Aboard the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4373",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/02/science/iss-20th-anniversary-timeline.html",
        "text": "Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard. Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard. Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard.",
        "author": "By Eleanor Lutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "20 Years Aboard the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4374",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/02/science/iss-20th-anniversary-timeline.html",
        "text": "Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard. Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard. Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard.",
        "author": "By Eleanor Lutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "20 Years Aboard the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4375",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/02/science/iss-20th-anniversary-timeline.html",
        "text": "Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard. Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard. Twenty years ago today, three astronauts stepped aboard the International Space Station. Since then, the I.S.S. has hosted hundreds of residents from many countries. This is a history of our first 20 years of living aboard.",
        "author": "By Eleanor Lutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Will Lead World \u2018In Human Space Exploration,\u2019 Pence Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4376",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006430146/mike-pence-moon.html",
        "text": "During a speech at a meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Ala., Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration hopes to have American astronauts back on the moon within the next five years. During a speech at a meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Ala., Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration hopes to have American astronauts back on the moon within the next five years. During a speech at a meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Ala., Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump administration hopes to have American astronauts back on the moon within the next five years.",
        "author": "By NASA"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Astronauts Inspect Mysterious Hole in Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4377",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006257630/russian-astronauts-hole-soyuz.html",
        "text": "The astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev examined a small hole on the Soyuz Capsule during a spacewalk. That hole has lead to some speculation in the Russian news media about an act of sabotage by the United States. The astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev examined a small hole on the Soyuz Capsule during a spacewalk. That hole has lead to some speculation in the Russian news media about an act of sabotage by the United States. The astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev examined a small hole on the Soyuz Capsule during a spacewalk. That hole has lead to some speculation in the Russian news media about an act of sabotage by the United States.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Astronauts Inspect Mysterious Hole in Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4378",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006257630/russian-astronauts-hole-soyuz.html",
        "text": "The astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev examined a small hole on the Soyuz Capsule during a spacewalk. That hole has lead to some speculation in the Russian news media about an act of sabotage by the United States. The astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev examined a small hole on the Soyuz Capsule during a spacewalk. That hole has lead to some speculation in the Russian news media about an act of sabotage by the United States. The astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev examined a small hole on the Soyuz Capsule during a spacewalk. That hole has lead to some speculation in the Russian news media about an act of sabotage by the United States.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking Back at People Watching the Apollo 11 Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4379",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/15/science/moon-landing-watching-vintage-photos.html",
        "text": "As the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission left Earth, landed on the moon and made the long trip home, The New York Times sent photographers to capture the excitement and wonder of people watching the journey. We asked award-winning poet Adrian Matejka to write about those images. As the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission left Earth, landed on the moon and made the long trip home, The New York Times sent photographers to capture the excitement and wonder of people watching the journey. We asked award-winning poet Adrian Ma... As the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission left Earth, landed on the moon and made the long trip home, The New York Times sent photographers to capture the excitement and wonder of people watching the journey. We asked award-winning poet Adrian Matejka to write about those images.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking Back at People Watching the Apollo 11 Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4380",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/15/science/moon-landing-watching-vintage-photos.html",
        "text": "As the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission left Earth, landed on the moon and made the long trip home, The New York Times sent photographers to capture the excitement and wonder of people watching the journey. We asked award-winning poet Adrian Matejka to write about those images. As the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission left Earth, landed on the moon and made the long trip home, The New York Times sent photographers to capture the excitement and wonder of people watching the journey. We asked award-winning poet Adrian Ma... As the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission left Earth, landed on the moon and made the long trip home, The New York Times sent photographers to capture the excitement and wonder of people watching the journey. We asked award-winning poet Adrian Matejka to write about those images.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "First, he played in the NFL. Then he became an astronaut. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4381",
        "date": "2017-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/02/former-nasa-astronaut-and-nfl-player-wants-to-send-the-president-to-space/",
        "text": "Leland Melvin is a man of many helmets. As an NFL wide receiver, he's worn one for the Detroit Lions. As a NASA astronaut, he donned a helmet and traveled to the International Space Station, twice, orbiting Earth 374 times.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMelvin, 53, also happens to have one of the few\u00a0official government portraits to go viral \u2014 of him, in his astronaut gear, being licked by his two adopted Rhodesian ridgeback mixes. (To take the photo, Melvin smuggled his dogs, Scout and Jake, onto the NASA campus in a\u00a0van.) That picture graces the cover of\u00a0Leland's\u00a0new autobiography, \u201cChasing Space: An Astronaut's Story of Grit, Grace, and Second Chances,\u201d published in May. The book describes his path from high school football star\u00a0to NFL draft pick to fiber optics\u00a0engineer to astronaut. Melvin spoke to The Washington Post on Friday about the need for second chances \u2014 a missed football catch almost ended his athletic career before it began \u2014 and how to encourage kids to pursue science.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOf his time in\u00a0orbit, one of the most powerful moments\u00a0came during dinner. \u201cWe're breaking bread at 17,500 mph, floating food into each other's mouths,\u201d Melvin said, \u201cand then I look out the window and I see I'm over Lynchburg, Virginia. And my family's probably breaking bread down there, eating.\u201d That\u00a0orbital perspective\u00a0gave Melvin an unflappability in the face of bad traffic and greater appreciation for our planet.\u00a0His recommendation? Send journalists, Congress, everyone, including the president, to space.Read more:Trump wants to kill NASA office popular with Congress, astronauts and kidsNASA needs 14 new astronauts. A record-breaking 18,300 folks applied.Why scientists are marching on Washington and more than 600 other cities Why Leland Melvin, a wide receiver, engineer and astronaut, wants to send the president to space. First, he played in the NFL. Then he became an astronaut.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts\u2019 bodily fluids might help build concrete-type shelters on other planets (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4382",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/astronauts-planets-construction-materials/2021/09/17/543a8390-164a-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html",
        "text": "Can humans build structures on other planets? Maybe it could be as easy as giving blood.Given the expense and difficulty of getting building materials to places like the moon or Mars, the idea of construction is tricky at best.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA new study suggests some surprising materials that could make the task much easier: astronauts\u2019 blood, urine, or even tears. In a paper in Materials Today Bio, researchers explore a proposed way to add astronauts\u2019 own bodily fluids to another planet\u2019s soil. The resulting material would be similar to concrete \u2014 but could be reinforced to be even stronger.The formula relies on combining human serum albumin, the most abundant protein in blood plasma, with water and the dust and rock on other planets. They call the resulting material, which is similar to concrete, AstroCrete.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen the researchers added urea \u2014 a substance found in urine, sweat and tears \u2014 to the mixture, it increased its compressive strength threefold, making it much stronger than concrete.The paper lays out the method and suggests ways to harvest the needed compounds and use them on a hypothetical lunar or Martian base. The compound could be used to create bricks or act as a mortar that binds existing rocks together, helping astronauts create much-needed shelters against the sun\u2019s radiation.The scientists admit the feasibility and health effects of the method would need \u201csignificant further investigation,\u201d but they suggest a single astronaut could fuel the creation of the equivalent of a single clay brick a month with their blood plasma alone. Over the course of a mission on Mars, they write, each astronaut \u201ccould produce enough additional habitat space to support another astronaut, potentially allowing the steady expansion of an early Martian colony.\u201d The compound could be used to create bricks or act as a mortar that binds existing rocks together, helping astronauts create habitats that would protect them against the elements. Astronauts\u2019 bodily fluids might help build concrete-type shelters on other planets",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts\u2019 bodily fluids might help build concrete-type shelters on other planets (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4383",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/astronauts-planets-construction-materials/2021/09/17/543a8390-164a-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html",
        "text": "Can humans build structures on other planets? Maybe it could be as easy as giving blood.Given the expense and difficulty of getting building materials to places like the moon or Mars, the idea of construction is tricky at best.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA new study suggests some surprising materials that could make the task much easier: astronauts\u2019 blood, urine, or even tears. In a paper in Materials Today Bio, researchers explore a proposed way to add astronauts\u2019 own bodily fluids to another planet\u2019s soil. The resulting material would be similar to concrete \u2014 but could be reinforced to be even stronger.The formula relies on combining human serum albumin, the most abundant protein in blood plasma, with water and the dust and rock on other planets. They call the resulting material, which is similar to concrete, AstroCrete.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen the researchers added urea \u2014 a substance found in urine, sweat and tears \u2014 to the mixture, it increased its compressive strength threefold, making it much stronger than concrete.The paper lays out the method and suggests ways to harvest the needed compounds and use them on a hypothetical lunar or Martian base. The compound could be used to create bricks or act as a mortar that binds existing rocks together, helping astronauts create much-needed shelters against the sun\u2019s radiation.The scientists admit the feasibility and health effects of the method would need \u201csignificant further investigation,\u201d but they suggest a single astronaut could fuel the creation of the equivalent of a single clay brick a month with their blood plasma alone. Over the course of a mission on Mars, they write, each astronaut \u201ccould produce enough additional habitat space to support another astronaut, potentially allowing the steady expansion of an early Martian colony.\u201d The compound could be used to create bricks or act as a mortar that binds existing rocks together, helping astronauts create habitats that would protect them against the elements. Astronauts\u2019 bodily fluids might help build concrete-type shelters on other planets",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a galaxy far, far away \u2026 astronauts will watch \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4384",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/13/in-a-galaxy-far-far-away-astronauts-will-watch-star-wars-the-last-jedi/",
        "text": "As \u201cStar Wars\u201d fans flock to the movie theaters this week, astronauts, too, will be able to watch the next installment\u00a0of the series\u2019s new trilogy \u2014 while\u00a0floating 220 miles above Earth.Very few details are available, but NASA spokesman Daniel Huot confirmed that the International Space Station crew will watch \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d in orbit. There\u2019s no timeline yet on when the screening will be. \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d the second of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d sequel trilogy following \u201cThe Force Awakens,\u201d which was released in 2015, comes out in theaters Friday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s not unusual for astronauts aboard the ISS to have movie nights. Huot said astronauts typically receive digital files that they play on a laptop or a standard projector.Story continues below advertisementAstronaut Scott Kelly tweeted about one movie night in 2015:#Movie night in micro #Gravity aboard #ISS on our new HD projector which we use for conferences, tech software, etc.. pic.twitter.com/Mhb03U3alz\u2014 Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) April 25, 2015\n\nFormer station astronaut Greg Chamitoff and his crew mates also\u00a0watched the \u201cStar Trek\u201d series every week.\u00a0In 2009, astronaut Michael Barratt watched the new \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie on a laptop after NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston transferred it\u00a0via satellite.AdvertisementNASA said the ISS has a collection of digital movies and DVDs, which were delivered during previous shuttle and station missions.Last year, Gizmodo reporter Matt Novak, through a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained a complete list of movies and TV shows available for the ISS crew. It runs the gamut, from classic films like the \u201cGodfather\u201d series, to action-comedy movies like \u201cBeverly Hills Cop,\u201d to\u00a0shows\u00a0like\u00a0\u201cHouse of Cards\u201d and \u201cModern Family.\u201d There\u2019s also a supply of sci-fi, action and space movies. (\u201cAliens,\u201d \u201cArmageddon,\u201d \u201cCaptain America,\u201d \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d and \u201cGravity\u201d are a few examples.)Read more:A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of Earth\u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 honors the franchise with affection and humor\u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019: Here\u2019s what the early reviews are saying Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (yes, we know it's in the same galaxy) will have a screening of the latest \"Star Wars\" movie. In a galaxy far, far away \u2026 astronauts will watch \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a galaxy far, far away \u2026 astronauts will watch \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4385",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/13/in-a-galaxy-far-far-away-astronauts-will-watch-star-wars-the-last-jedi/",
        "text": "As \u201cStar Wars\u201d fans flock to the movie theaters this week, astronauts, too, will be able to watch the next installment\u00a0of the series\u2019s new trilogy \u2014 while\u00a0floating 220 miles above Earth.Very few details are available, but NASA spokesman Daniel Huot confirmed that the International Space Station crew will watch \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d in orbit. There\u2019s no timeline yet on when the screening will be. \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d the second of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d sequel trilogy following \u201cThe Force Awakens,\u201d which was released in 2015, comes out in theaters Friday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s not unusual for astronauts aboard the ISS to have movie nights. Huot said astronauts typically receive digital files that they play on a laptop or a standard projector.Story continues below advertisementAstronaut Scott Kelly tweeted about one movie night in 2015:#Movie night in micro #Gravity aboard #ISS on our new HD projector which we use for conferences, tech software, etc.. pic.twitter.com/Mhb03U3alz\u2014 Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) April 25, 2015\n\nFormer station astronaut Greg Chamitoff and his crew mates also\u00a0watched the \u201cStar Trek\u201d series every week.\u00a0In 2009, astronaut Michael Barratt watched the new \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie on a laptop after NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston transferred it\u00a0via satellite.AdvertisementNASA said the ISS has a collection of digital movies and DVDs, which were delivered during previous shuttle and station missions.Last year, Gizmodo reporter Matt Novak, through a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained a complete list of movies and TV shows available for the ISS crew. It runs the gamut, from classic films like the \u201cGodfather\u201d series, to action-comedy movies like \u201cBeverly Hills Cop,\u201d to\u00a0shows\u00a0like\u00a0\u201cHouse of Cards\u201d and \u201cModern Family.\u201d There\u2019s also a supply of sci-fi, action and space movies. (\u201cAliens,\u201d \u201cArmageddon,\u201d \u201cCaptain America,\u201d \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d and \u201cGravity\u201d are a few examples.)Read more:A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of Earth\u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 honors the franchise with affection and humor\u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019: Here\u2019s what the early reviews are saying Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (yes, we know it's in the same galaxy) will have a screening of the latest \"Star Wars\" movie. In a galaxy far, far away \u2026 astronauts will watch \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear Gwyneth: Your Goop \u2018energy stickers\u2019 are not made with NASA material \u2014 NASA (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4386",
        "date": "2017-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/23/dear-gwyneth-your-goop-energy-stickers-are-not-made-with-nasa-material-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA just schooled Gwyneth Paltrow about wellness stickers\u00a0promoted on her lifestyle blog, Goop.Goop\u00a0said in a post that\u00a0the stickers, which are sold by Body Vibes, are \u201cmade with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut\u2019s vitals during wear\u201d and can\u00a0target energetic frequency imbalances in the body, according to\u00a0Gizmodo. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe idea?\u201cHuman bodies operate at an ideal energetic frequency, but everyday stresses and anxiety can throw off our internal balance, depleting our energy reserves and weakening our immune systems,\u201d Goop said.Body Vibes claims the stickers create a \u201ccalming effect\u201d that alleviates \u201cphysical tension and anxiety.\u201d The company also says they help clear skin.Story continues below advertisementThe stickers are sold in packages of 10 for $60 or 24 for $120.AdvertisementGwyneth Paltrow: We love to hate her, but we\u2019ll buy her cookbook anywayBut, as Gizmodo first reported Thursday:A representative from NASA\u2019s spacewalk office told Gizmodo that they \u201cdo not have any conductive carbon material lining the spacesuits.\u201d Spacesuits are actually made of synthetic polymers, spandex, and other materials that serve a purpose beyond making their wearer look like a resident of Nightmare Coachella.NASA spokeswoman Tabatha Thompson told The Washington Post on Friday that,\u00a0actually,\u00a0NASA does not use carbon fiber anywhere in the spacesuits.It appeared by Friday morning that\u00a0Goop had removed the reference to NASA materials from the product description\u00a0on its website.\u00a0Internet archives showed that the page had been edited both on Thursday and Friday.Body Vibes, which\u00a0sells the stickers, still had claims on its site Friday morning that the stickers use \u201can exclusive material originally developed for NASA.\u201d\u00a0\u201cThis waterproof,\u00a0carbon fiber compound can hold specific frequency charges that naturally stimulate the human body's receptors,\u201d it said. That description was gone by the afternoon.Body Vibes\u00a0has since apologized to NASA, Goop and its customers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe never intended to mislead anyone,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cWe have learned that our engineer was misinformed by a distributor\u00a0about\u00a0the\u00a0material in question, which was purchased for its unique specifications. We regret not doing our due diligence before including the distributor\u2019s information in the story of our product.\u201dIs there any science behind Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s $200 smoothie? Either way, we drank it.Goop said in a statement Friday to The Post that the advice and recommendations posted on Goop's website\u00a0are\u00a0not considered \u201cformal endorsements.\u201d\u201cThe opinions expressed by the experts and companies we profile do not necessarily represent the views of goop,\u201d according to the statement. \u201cOur content is meant to highlight unique products and offerings, find open-minded alternatives, and encourage conversation. We constantly strive to improve our site for our readers, and are continuing to improve our processes for evaluating the products and companies featured.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBased on the statement from NASA, we\u2019ve gone back to the company to inquire about the claim and removed the claim from our site until we get additional verification.\u201dThe lifestyle and wellness website has been known to offer health advice that doctors have found dubious, such as\u00a0the special benefits of inserting a jade egg into the vagina. GOOP\u00a0recently\u00a0launched its\u00a0first wellness summit, In Goop Health, where model Miranda Kerr discussed\u00a0using leeches in\u00a0her beauty routine.Read more:Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s food stamp challenge is the most Gwyneth Paltrow thing everA hungry Gwyneth Paltrow fails the food-stamp challenge four days inWhat Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s food stamp challenge gets totally wrong about poverty Goop said Body Vibes stickers are \u201cmade with the same conductive carbon material NASA uses to line space suits so they can monitor an astronaut\u2019s vitals during wear.\u201d Not true, NASA says. Dear Gwyneth: Your Goop \u2018energy stickers\u2019 are not made with NASA material \u2014 NASA",
        "author": "Lindsey Bever"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4387",
        "date": "2017-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/28/nasas-johnson-space-center-closed-amid-harveys-brutal-winds-and-rain/",
        "text": "After a weekend of bruising winds and relentless rain,\u00a0Houston\u2019s rising floodwaters reached the gates of the Johnson Space Center on Sunday.The NASA facility typically bustles with some\u00a010,000 scientists, engineers, other staff and contractors, including flight controllers for the International Space Station. But it is now closed to all but mission-essential\u00a0personnel. The Twitter account for the center\u2019s emergency management office reported that water in the neighborhood was knee-deep in some streets and inundating many sidewalks. Security officers had to be evacuated from the campus gates. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cCall if you need access,\u201d one tweet\u00a0read. \u201cHighly recommend not traveling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Spaceflight Meteorology Group based at JSC reported Sunday that the center had received more than 20 inches of rain.Only a\u00a0skeleton \u201cride-out\u201d crew remains as staffing. Flight Director Royce Renfrew arrived Sunday to relieve one of his colleagues at Mission Control Center, where flight controllers are supporting the six astronauts on board the ISS. The scene was \u201ckind of surreal,\u201d he tweeted.AdvertisementAs of Monday, mission control \u201cremains operational and fully capable of supporting the International Space Station station,\u201d according to a statement on NASA\u2019s website.JSC\u00a0also houses the huge thermal vacuum chamber where the James Webb Space Telescope is undergoing tests. The nearly $9 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is to be launched in October 2018 \u2014 years behind schedule. The telescope is safe at the moment, as are the personnel who have stayed to protect it, a spokeswoman said.Story continues below advertisementThe space center covers 1,700 acres southeast of Houston, almost within sight of\u00a0flood-prone Clear Lake and about 30 miles\u00a0from Galveston Bay. It is on low ground \u2014 just 13 feet above sea level at its lowest point, 22 feet at its highest. And it\u2019s only getting more vulnerable as a result of climate change.AdvertisementA 2012 NASA report identified storm surge and sea level rise as major threats to JSC: \u201cThe area has always been subject to hurricanes, and the associated high winds, storm surge and flooding. Rising sea level will increase the risk of catastrophic storm surge impacts on JSC and the surrounding high profile infrastructure assets, human capital and natural resources.\u201dEven under the most conservative climate change scenarios,\u00a0another study found, coastal flooding events that happened once every 10 years near the facility are expected to occur 50 percent more often by 2050.Story continues below advertisementDuring Hurricane Ike, which struck this same part of the Gulf Coast in 2008, three-quarters of the buildings on JSC\u2019s campus sustained some sort of roof damage \u2014 including mission control. Flight control for the International Space Station was temporarily moved to backup facilities in Austin and Huntsville, Ala. Power failures and piles of debris kept the center shut down for a week after the hurricane passed.AdvertisementCrew on board the space station\u00a0were briefed about the hurricane Friday, according to JSC news chief Kelly Humphries. From 250 miles above Earth, the six astronauts watched the corner of Texas where mission control sits become engulfed by a white whirlpool of cloud.\u201cOh boy \u2014 looks like a ton of rain is about to unload,\u201d astronaut Jack Fischer tweeted Friday.Oh boy \u2013 looks like a ton of rain is about to unload. Here\u2019s a prayer for family, friends & everyone in #HurricaneHarvey\u2019s path--stay safe. pic.twitter.com/r1LM1kwCXw\u2014 Jack Fischer (@Astro2fish) August 25, 2017\n\nLater, the main ISS account shared photos Fischer had taken through the space station\u2019s six-sided observation dome. Harvey\u2019s fearsome white mass filled the panoramic view \u2014 a monstrosity of wind and rain.JSC Director Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut, retweeted the images, adding: \u201cWish I was up there and not down here.\u201d.@Astro2fish orbited over Hurricane #Harvey2017 and photographed the storm bearing down on the Texas coast. pic.twitter.com/eBzNc7NlMZ\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) August 25, 2017\n\n A skeleton \u201cride-out\u201d crew remains at the center to support astronauts on the International Space Station and protect the $9 billion James Webb Space Telescope. NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4388",
        "date": "2017-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/28/nasas-johnson-space-center-closed-amid-harveys-brutal-winds-and-rain/",
        "text": "After a weekend of bruising winds and relentless rain,\u00a0Houston\u2019s rising floodwaters reached the gates of the Johnson Space Center on Sunday.The NASA facility typically bustles with some\u00a010,000 scientists, engineers, other staff and contractors, including flight controllers for the International Space Station. But it is now closed to all but mission-essential\u00a0personnel. The Twitter account for the center\u2019s emergency management office reported that water in the neighborhood was knee-deep in some streets and inundating many sidewalks. Security officers had to be evacuated from the campus gates. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cCall if you need access,\u201d one tweet\u00a0read. \u201cHighly recommend not traveling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Spaceflight Meteorology Group based at JSC reported Sunday that the center had received more than 20 inches of rain.Only a\u00a0skeleton \u201cride-out\u201d crew remains as staffing. Flight Director Royce Renfrew arrived Sunday to relieve one of his colleagues at Mission Control Center, where flight controllers are supporting the six astronauts on board the ISS. The scene was \u201ckind of surreal,\u201d he tweeted.AdvertisementAs of Monday, mission control \u201cremains operational and fully capable of supporting the International Space Station station,\u201d according to a statement on NASA\u2019s website.JSC\u00a0also houses the huge thermal vacuum chamber where the James Webb Space Telescope is undergoing tests. The nearly $9 billion successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is to be launched in October 2018 \u2014 years behind schedule. The telescope is safe at the moment, as are the personnel who have stayed to protect it, a spokeswoman said.Story continues below advertisementThe space center covers 1,700 acres southeast of Houston, almost within sight of\u00a0flood-prone Clear Lake and about 30 miles\u00a0from Galveston Bay. It is on low ground \u2014 just 13 feet above sea level at its lowest point, 22 feet at its highest. And it\u2019s only getting more vulnerable as a result of climate change.AdvertisementA 2012 NASA report identified storm surge and sea level rise as major threats to JSC: \u201cThe area has always been subject to hurricanes, and the associated high winds, storm surge and flooding. Rising sea level will increase the risk of catastrophic storm surge impacts on JSC and the surrounding high profile infrastructure assets, human capital and natural resources.\u201dEven under the most conservative climate change scenarios,\u00a0another study found, coastal flooding events that happened once every 10 years near the facility are expected to occur 50 percent more often by 2050.Story continues below advertisementDuring Hurricane Ike, which struck this same part of the Gulf Coast in 2008, three-quarters of the buildings on JSC\u2019s campus sustained some sort of roof damage \u2014 including mission control. Flight control for the International Space Station was temporarily moved to backup facilities in Austin and Huntsville, Ala. Power failures and piles of debris kept the center shut down for a week after the hurricane passed.AdvertisementCrew on board the space station\u00a0were briefed about the hurricane Friday, according to JSC news chief Kelly Humphries. From 250 miles above Earth, the six astronauts watched the corner of Texas where mission control sits become engulfed by a white whirlpool of cloud.\u201cOh boy \u2014 looks like a ton of rain is about to unload,\u201d astronaut Jack Fischer tweeted Friday.Oh boy \u2013 looks like a ton of rain is about to unload. Here\u2019s a prayer for family, friends & everyone in #HurricaneHarvey\u2019s path--stay safe. pic.twitter.com/r1LM1kwCXw\u2014 Jack Fischer (@Astro2fish) August 25, 2017\n\nLater, the main ISS account shared photos Fischer had taken through the space station\u2019s six-sided observation dome. Harvey\u2019s fearsome white mass filled the panoramic view \u2014 a monstrosity of wind and rain.JSC Director Ellen Ochoa, a former astronaut, retweeted the images, adding: \u201cWish I was up there and not down here.\u201d.@Astro2fish orbited over Hurricane #Harvey2017 and photographed the storm bearing down on the Texas coast. pic.twitter.com/eBzNc7NlMZ\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) August 25, 2017\n\n A skeleton \u201cride-out\u201d crew remains at the center to support astronauts on the International Space Station and protect the $9 billion James Webb Space Telescope. NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center closed amid Harvey\u2019s brutal winds and rain",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4389",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/30/nasa-astronauts-lose-key-piece-of-iss-shield-and-now-its-floating-free-in-space/",
        "text": "NASA astronauts on a spacewalk Thursday accidentally lost a fabric shield needed for the International Space Station\u00a0\u2014 a minor setback in what was otherwise a record-setting mission for one of the\u00a0crew members.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAstronauts Peggy Whitson and Shane Kimbrough were working on an area of the space station where a docking port had been disconnected and moved last week. They were in the process of using four large cloth panels to cover the access point where the docking port had been when one of the fabric shields suddenly drifted away and floated off into space. There was audible frustration in Whitson's voice as she reported the sequence of events to Mission Control, according to the Associated Press.Story continues below advertisementUp until that point, about 3 1/2 hours into the spacewalk,\u00a0everything had been going smoothly, NASA spokesman Dan Huot told The Washington Post.\u00a0It's unclear what happened or who was responsible for the lost fabric shield.Advertisement\u201cThe team will go back and look at what the chain of events were, but essentially it was untethered,\u201d Huot said.\u2018We have a fire in the cockpit!\u2019 The Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later.Covering the access point for the docking port was critical, Huot added, to protect that area of the module from what NASA calls \u201cMMOD\u201d (micro-meteoroids or orbital debris) \u2014 or, in layman's terms, \u201cbasically any space junk, any space rocks that might impact it.\u201dThe shield also provides a barrier from extreme temperature changes.Story continues below advertisementBecause it was such an important task, ground teams at Mission Control scrambled to find a solution for the quarter of the access point left exposed.Flight Director Emily Nelson, CapCom @AstroAnnimal & the Mission Control team guide @AstroPeggy & @astro_kimbrough during today's spacewalk. pic.twitter.com/tBjWVPy8oa\u2014 NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) March 30, 2017\n\nImmediately, teams gathered in a Mission Control office that contained replicas of everything up in space, Huot said.They quickly laid things on the floor and devised a way for the astronauts to use a different piece of cloth and wire ties as a substitute for the lost shield.\u201cIt was spur of the moment, completely unplanned,\u201d Huot said. \u201cThey got presented with a problem and the ingenuity kicked in.\u201dEach of the four cloth shields weighs 18 pounds and is a little over 5 feet long, 2 feet wide and almost 3 inches thick, Huot said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was the first time NASA had lost a fabric shield during a spacewalk\u00a0\u2014 though astronauts have lost other items during spacewalks before.\u201cSometimes bolts will go,\u201d Huot said. \u201cThere was one spacewalk where we lost an entire bag of tools.\u201dEventually, he said, the lost fabric shield will degrade, then burn up upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. However, because lost items in space run the risk of returning in orbit and damaging the space station, Mission Control closely monitored the lost cloth at first. It was spotted again one orbit, or about 90 minutes, later \u2014 at which point officials determined there was no risk it would come back into contact with the station.Story continues below advertisementThe rest of the spacewalk, which clocked in at seven hours and four minutes, went as planned, Huot said.NASA\u2019s Peggy Whitson sets spacewalk recordOf note: Part of the way through the spacewalk, Whitson set the record for the female astronaut with the most cumulative spacewalking time, at 53 hours and 22 minutes. She broke the previous record, 50 hours and 40 minutes, held by American astronaut Sunita \u201cSuni\u201d Williams.AdvertisementIt was Whitson's eighth spacewalk, also a record for a female astronaut.Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev holds the all-time spacewalking record, with 16 separate spacewalks and more than\u00a082 hours of cumulative spacewalking time.According to the AP, Whitson is scheduled to return to Earth in June but may extend her time in space for an additional three months, until September.Read more:Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsNASA\u2019s \u2018space poop challenge\u2019 is over, and it went boldly beyond the diaperNASA budget would cut Earth science and education Astronaut Peggy Whitson also set a record during the seven-hour spacewalk, NASA said. NASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in space",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4390",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/30/nasa-astronauts-lose-key-piece-of-iss-shield-and-now-its-floating-free-in-space/",
        "text": "NASA astronauts on a spacewalk Thursday accidentally lost a fabric shield needed for the International Space Station\u00a0\u2014 a minor setback in what was otherwise a record-setting mission for one of the\u00a0crew members.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAstronauts Peggy Whitson and Shane Kimbrough were working on an area of the space station where a docking port had been disconnected and moved last week. They were in the process of using four large cloth panels to cover the access point where the docking port had been when one of the fabric shields suddenly drifted away and floated off into space. There was audible frustration in Whitson's voice as she reported the sequence of events to Mission Control, according to the Associated Press.Story continues below advertisementUp until that point, about 3 1/2 hours into the spacewalk,\u00a0everything had been going smoothly, NASA spokesman Dan Huot told The Washington Post.\u00a0It's unclear what happened or who was responsible for the lost fabric shield.Advertisement\u201cThe team will go back and look at what the chain of events were, but essentially it was untethered,\u201d Huot said.\u2018We have a fire in the cockpit!\u2019 The Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later.Covering the access point for the docking port was critical, Huot added, to protect that area of the module from what NASA calls \u201cMMOD\u201d (micro-meteoroids or orbital debris) \u2014 or, in layman's terms, \u201cbasically any space junk, any space rocks that might impact it.\u201dThe shield also provides a barrier from extreme temperature changes.Story continues below advertisementBecause it was such an important task, ground teams at Mission Control scrambled to find a solution for the quarter of the access point left exposed.Flight Director Emily Nelson, CapCom @AstroAnnimal & the Mission Control team guide @AstroPeggy & @astro_kimbrough during today's spacewalk. pic.twitter.com/tBjWVPy8oa\u2014 NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) March 30, 2017\n\nImmediately, teams gathered in a Mission Control office that contained replicas of everything up in space, Huot said.They quickly laid things on the floor and devised a way for the astronauts to use a different piece of cloth and wire ties as a substitute for the lost shield.\u201cIt was spur of the moment, completely unplanned,\u201d Huot said. \u201cThey got presented with a problem and the ingenuity kicked in.\u201dEach of the four cloth shields weighs 18 pounds and is a little over 5 feet long, 2 feet wide and almost 3 inches thick, Huot said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was the first time NASA had lost a fabric shield during a spacewalk\u00a0\u2014 though astronauts have lost other items during spacewalks before.\u201cSometimes bolts will go,\u201d Huot said. \u201cThere was one spacewalk where we lost an entire bag of tools.\u201dEventually, he said, the lost fabric shield will degrade, then burn up upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. However, because lost items in space run the risk of returning in orbit and damaging the space station, Mission Control closely monitored the lost cloth at first. It was spotted again one orbit, or about 90 minutes, later \u2014 at which point officials determined there was no risk it would come back into contact with the station.Story continues below advertisementThe rest of the spacewalk, which clocked in at seven hours and four minutes, went as planned, Huot said.NASA\u2019s Peggy Whitson sets spacewalk recordOf note: Part of the way through the spacewalk, Whitson set the record for the female astronaut with the most cumulative spacewalking time, at 53 hours and 22 minutes. She broke the previous record, 50 hours and 40 minutes, held by American astronaut Sunita \u201cSuni\u201d Williams.AdvertisementIt was Whitson's eighth spacewalk, also a record for a female astronaut.Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev holds the all-time spacewalking record, with 16 separate spacewalks and more than\u00a082 hours of cumulative spacewalking time.According to the AP, Whitson is scheduled to return to Earth in June but may extend her time in space for an additional three months, until September.Read more:Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsNASA\u2019s \u2018space poop challenge\u2019 is over, and it went boldly beyond the diaperNASA budget would cut Earth science and education Astronaut Peggy Whitson also set a record during the seven-hour spacewalk, NASA said. NASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in space",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The truth about astronaut Scott Kelly\u2019s viral \u2018space genes\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4391",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/16/the-truth-about-astronaut-scott-kellys-viral-space-genes/",
        "text": "In March 2016, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned\u00a0from an unprecedented 340-day mission\u00a0on the International Space Station. A year later, his doctors released preliminary\u00a0results of an extensive study comparing his health to that of his earthbound identical twin, Mark. And\u00a0in January, NASA announced that attendees at a\u00a0recent scientific workshop agreed on the initial medical conclusion \u2014 that space travel takes a significant toll and\u00a0can result in changes\u00a0at the molecular level. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt no point in that process was Scott Kelly zapped by an alien laser beam, attacked by a xenomorph or otherwise transfigured into a previously unknown mutant variety of human.But you wouldn\u2019t know that from reading some of the\u00a0coverage the\u00a0January\u00a0announcement inexplicably spawned this week \u2014 articles claiming that the mission activated Kelly\u2019s \u201cspace genes,\u201d that 7 percent of his\u00a0genes\u00a0didn\u2019t return to normal post-spaceflight, and that he and his brother are no longer identical twins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAside from being about old news, these stories are biologically impossible. If 7 percent of Kelly\u2019s genome was altered, he would be about as different from a human as a rhesus monkey.The actual transformation is much subtler.\u00a0According to\u00a0a\u00a0NASA\u2019s research\u00a0\u2014 which is still preliminary, with the agency expecting to publish a more complete study this year \u2014 it was not Kelly\u2019s genes that changed but how they were expressed.Your genome dwells inside the nuclei of your cells. Think of it as an instruction manual: It is the complete set of\u00a0DNA that describes the form and function of every aspect of your being, with each\u00a0gene pertaining to a particular task that life requires.\u00a0But this manual is also like a rare book that can\u2019t be taken out of the library. It must be transcribed by enzymes, resulting in a copy of the sequence known as RNA. That RNA is then translated into proteins, the molecules that do the actual work of keeping you alive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Scott Kelly went into space, his DNA remained fundamentally the same. What changed was the way his DNA was transcribed and translated into functional products; the study of such shifts is called epigenetics. These epigenetic changes were likely the body\u2019s way of responding to the low gravity, oxygen deprivation, increased inflammation and diet challenges of spaceflight.According to NASA, Johns Hopkins researcher Andy Feinberg, one of 10 investigators on the Twins Study, observed variability in\u00a0patterns of DNA\u00a0methylation\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a process by which genes are chemically turned on and off.\u00a0Chris Mason\u00a0of\u00a0Weill Cornell Medicine reported\u00a0epigenetic changes in five biological pathways, including those related to oxygen deprivation, DNA repair and bone formation. These alterations may point to \u201cspace genes,\u201d the ones in which function is affected by time off Earth.\u00a0Other researchers noticed changes in Scott\u2019s body mass, telomere length and cognition over the course of the mission and after it. (Most shifts were not lasting.)In a statement Thursday, NASA clarified that Scott and Mark Kelly are still identical twins.\u00a0Their DNA does differ \u2014 but so does the DNA of\u00a0all humans, even twins, thanks to mutations that accumulate normally over the course of a lifetime.\u00a0Scott didn\u2019t have to spend a year in space to establish his uniqueness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd the changes in gene expression that scientists observed during Scott\u2019s time in space are within the range of what they\u00a0would expect to see in a mountain climber, scuba diver or other human under stress. About 93 percent of the changes reverted to preflight\u00a0levels within six months of Scott\u2019s return to Earth.The 7 percent that persisted is \u201cminimal,\u201d the space agency said. But it suggests that spaceflight does induce longer-term changes at the molecular level. This is important, because NASA plans to someday send astronauts on a three-year mission to Mars. If and when that day comes, it would be good to make sure they arrive at the Red Planet as healthy humans.Read more:Cells with lab-made DNA produce a new kind of protein, a 'Holy Grail' for synthetic biologyDear Science: Why are some genes dominant and some genes recessive?How do your 20,000 genes determine so many wildly different traits? They multitask. Spending a year in space did not make the NASA astronaut a mutant.  The truth about astronaut Scott Kelly\u2019s viral \u2018space genes\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The truth about astronaut Scott Kelly\u2019s viral \u2018space genes\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4392",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/16/the-truth-about-astronaut-scott-kellys-viral-space-genes/",
        "text": "In March 2016, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned\u00a0from an unprecedented 340-day mission\u00a0on the International Space Station. A year later, his doctors released preliminary\u00a0results of an extensive study comparing his health to that of his earthbound identical twin, Mark. And\u00a0in January, NASA announced that attendees at a\u00a0recent scientific workshop agreed on the initial medical conclusion \u2014 that space travel takes a significant toll and\u00a0can result in changes\u00a0at the molecular level. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt no point in that process was Scott Kelly zapped by an alien laser beam, attacked by a xenomorph or otherwise transfigured into a previously unknown mutant variety of human.But you wouldn\u2019t know that from reading some of the\u00a0coverage the\u00a0January\u00a0announcement inexplicably spawned this week \u2014 articles claiming that the mission activated Kelly\u2019s \u201cspace genes,\u201d that 7 percent of his\u00a0genes\u00a0didn\u2019t return to normal post-spaceflight, and that he and his brother are no longer identical twins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAside from being about old news, these stories are biologically impossible. If 7 percent of Kelly\u2019s genome was altered, he would be about as different from a human as a rhesus monkey.The actual transformation is much subtler.\u00a0According to\u00a0a\u00a0NASA\u2019s research\u00a0\u2014 which is still preliminary, with the agency expecting to publish a more complete study this year \u2014 it was not Kelly\u2019s genes that changed but how they were expressed.Your genome dwells inside the nuclei of your cells. Think of it as an instruction manual: It is the complete set of\u00a0DNA that describes the form and function of every aspect of your being, with each\u00a0gene pertaining to a particular task that life requires.\u00a0But this manual is also like a rare book that can\u2019t be taken out of the library. It must be transcribed by enzymes, resulting in a copy of the sequence known as RNA. That RNA is then translated into proteins, the molecules that do the actual work of keeping you alive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Scott Kelly went into space, his DNA remained fundamentally the same. What changed was the way his DNA was transcribed and translated into functional products; the study of such shifts is called epigenetics. These epigenetic changes were likely the body\u2019s way of responding to the low gravity, oxygen deprivation, increased inflammation and diet challenges of spaceflight.According to NASA, Johns Hopkins researcher Andy Feinberg, one of 10 investigators on the Twins Study, observed variability in\u00a0patterns of DNA\u00a0methylation\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a process by which genes are chemically turned on and off.\u00a0Chris Mason\u00a0of\u00a0Weill Cornell Medicine reported\u00a0epigenetic changes in five biological pathways, including those related to oxygen deprivation, DNA repair and bone formation. These alterations may point to \u201cspace genes,\u201d the ones in which function is affected by time off Earth.\u00a0Other researchers noticed changes in Scott\u2019s body mass, telomere length and cognition over the course of the mission and after it. (Most shifts were not lasting.)In a statement Thursday, NASA clarified that Scott and Mark Kelly are still identical twins.\u00a0Their DNA does differ \u2014 but so does the DNA of\u00a0all humans, even twins, thanks to mutations that accumulate normally over the course of a lifetime.\u00a0Scott didn\u2019t have to spend a year in space to establish his uniqueness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd the changes in gene expression that scientists observed during Scott\u2019s time in space are within the range of what they\u00a0would expect to see in a mountain climber, scuba diver or other human under stress. About 93 percent of the changes reverted to preflight\u00a0levels within six months of Scott\u2019s return to Earth.The 7 percent that persisted is \u201cminimal,\u201d the space agency said. But it suggests that spaceflight does induce longer-term changes at the molecular level. This is important, because NASA plans to someday send astronauts on a three-year mission to Mars. If and when that day comes, it would be good to make sure they arrive at the Red Planet as healthy humans.Read more:Cells with lab-made DNA produce a new kind of protein, a 'Holy Grail' for synthetic biologyDear Science: Why are some genes dominant and some genes recessive?How do your 20,000 genes determine so many wildly different traits? They multitask. Spending a year in space did not make the NASA astronaut a mutant.  The truth about astronaut Scott Kelly\u2019s viral \u2018space genes\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4393",
        "date": "2017-11-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/11/28/a-nasa-astronaut-films-his-spacewalk-and-a-breathtaking-view-of-earth/",
        "text": "On its surface, Earth is chaos. It is traffic jams and the\u00a0threat of nuclear war and fake news operations trying to punk real ones but owning themselves spectacularly in the process.But launch yourself a couple hundred miles above the atmosphere, and Earth seems a different world. It is quiet. It is harmonious. The strife of human conflict, no matter how small or large, is rendered inconsequential. (You\u2019ll also notice that Earth is round, not flat, but that is another story entirely.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA astronaut Randy Bresnik felt this way on a recent spacewalk around the International Space Station, as he was refurbishing one of the station\u2019s robotic arms. Floating above the planet, Bresnik couldn\u2019t help but pause from his project and let his GoPro camera capture the splendor of the globe from his vantage point.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe tweeted the footage Monday.\u201cSometimes on a #spacewalk, you just have to take a moment to enjoy the beauty of our planet Earth,\u201d Bresnik wrote on Twitter.His post soon went viral, shared thousands of times by those still at ground level who seemed to appreciate\u00a0the literal change in perspective.\u201cA very peaceful planet,\u201d one Twitter user commented. \u201cIt was hard to think that this place held so many problems, so many frustrations.\u201dAnother observed: \u201cOur leaders should go and see this wonderful view. There will be world peace.\u201dSuper Space Sammy: beef patty with spaghetti with a hint of mustard on a flying saucer tortilla. #NationalSandwichDay on @Space_Station. pic.twitter.com/aBEyWl9YJS\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) November 3, 2017\n\nIn the din of social media, there has always been something soothing and reductive about astronauts\u2019 Twitter feeds, especially those on the International Space Station. There they are, on board the largest (and perhaps most expensive) object built, thanks to the convergence of some of the most advanced scientific discoveries of several lifetimes. They have passed rigorous physical, psychological and technical training to get to this point in their careers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd yet, there they are, too, getting excited about the simplest of things: watching a sandwich float in space, eating\u00a0freshly harvested lettuce, anticipating a cargo shipment of pizza and ice cream, and using a map to look up their location. It can be jarring, but joyful, to realize that these highly trained astronauts took the time to pack Halloween costumes and matching shirts for their expedition.Our Earth is but an island in the cosmos. Exp 53 crew is embracing the island lifestyle with our @Space_Station Hawaiians on #Aloha Friday! pic.twitter.com/DwfTNQ597x\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) September 22, 2017\n\nBresnik has been in space since July, when he arrived with Russian astronaut Sergey Ryazanskiy and Paolo Nespoli of the European Space Agency. Bresnik has remained on the ISS as part of the Expedition 52 and 53 crews, and he is scheduled to return from space in December.Like many astronauts, several of Bresnik\u2019s observations from space have gone viral, in part for their breathtaking views of Earth. He frequently tweets out side-by-side photos of places on Earth as seen from the ground vs. how they look from the space station, using the hashtag #OneWorldManyViews. The project was inspired, in part, by childhood days spent with his grandfather, who was a professional photographer.Fuji-San or Mt Fuji, from any altitude an iconic symbol of Japan, rising 3,776m above the ground just west of Tokyo. #OneWorldManyViews pic.twitter.com/SSTgk0zg19\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) November 20, 2017\n\n\u201cI have always thoroughly enjoyed using photography to try to capture the beauty of a moment or the excitement of an instant and share it with others. I can only hope that I can do the same during this International Space Station mission of Expeditions 52/53,\u201d Bresnik wrote in September.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said he hoped the project would inspire people from that location to reply from their vantage point on the ground.\u201cI also hope that those of you not from the location will look upon the beauty of that place from both the ground and from space and perhaps someday desire to see it for yourself,\u201d Bresnik wrote. \u201cIn this small way perhaps our world becomes a little smaller, human-to-human.\u201dA fidget spinner in space! How long does it spin? I'm not sure, but it\u2019s a great way to experiment with Newton\u2019s laws of motion! pic.twitter.com/5xIJDs2544\u2014 Randy Bresnik (@AstroKomrade) October 13, 2017\n\nThe new ISS crew\u2019s social media posts are a welcome replacement after NASA\u2019s Peggy Whitson departed the space station in September. Whitson set numerous records in her most recent mission to the space station, including one for the longest time in orbit in a single spaceflight for a female astronaut and for the most cumulative time in space, at 665 days, for any U.S. astronaut.Story continues below advertisementWhitson (a.k.a.\u00a0@AstroPeggy\u00a0on Twitter) also gained a following for exuberant social media dispatches from aboard the space station that showed her\u00a0growing cabbage\u00a0(\u201cMy 3rd crop did the best!\u201d), doing strength training without gravity and conducting stem-cell research (\u201cmy favorite so far\u201d), among other things.Advertisement\u201cIt is one of those rides that you hope never ends,\u201d Whitson\u00a0tweeted\u00a0in April, shortly after\u00a0she decided to extend her time in space by three months. \u201cI am so grateful for all those who helped me on each of my missions! #LifeInSpace\u201dFashion police, you have to grade us on a curve \u2013 we just love our country\u2026 a LOT!! Happy Birthday U.S.A.! #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/gPVp4kJ8TH\u2014 Peggy Whitson (@AstroPeggy) July 4, 2017\n\nRead more:A flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 again\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerBehold, the Hubble Telescope\u2019s latest close-up photo of JupiterA newly discovered moon tunnel could be the perfect place for a colony, scientists say \"Sometimes on a #spacewalk, you just have to take a moment to enjoy the beauty of our planet,\u201d NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik tweeted. A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of Earth",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why NASA\u2019s historic all-female spacewalk isn\u2019t happening (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4394",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/03/26/nasas-first-all-female-spacewalk-isnt-happening-blame-wardrobe-malfunction/",
        "text": "NASA has aborted its first all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station because there are not enough spacesuits of the best size to fit both female astronauts, the agency said.Astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch had planned to conclude Women\u2019s History Month with a spacewalk Friday to continue work outside the space station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz said in an email Tuesday to The Washington Post that both women need a medium-size hard upper torso \u2014 the shirt of the spacesuit \u2014 and there is only one medium-size suit on the space station that is ready for use. NASA said astronauts Nick Hague and McClain completed the first spacewalk in the series earlier this month, so Hague and Koch plan to set out on the next one later this week.Story continues below advertisementStill, Schierholz said, \u201cWe believe an all-female spacewalk is inevitable.\u201dThe first all-female spacewalk will take place during Women\u2019s History MonthNASA said the two female astronauts had prepared to continue work outside the International Space Station installing lithium-ion batteries for the space station\u2019s solar arrays.AdvertisementThen there was a spacesuit problem.Schierholz told The Post that McClain had trained in both large-size and medium-size suits, but, during her first spacewalk last Friday, she realized that the medium was the better fit. Koch also wears a medium, and Schierholz said that although there are two mediums on board, only one of them is in a \u201creadily usable configuration.\u201d\u201cKoch will wear it,\u201d Schierholz said. \u201cIt is more efficient to swap spacewalkers than to reconfigure the elements of the spacesuit.\u201dWe\u2019ve seen your tweets about spacesuit availability for Friday\u2019s spacewalk. To clarify, we have more than 1 medium size spacesuit torso aboard, but to stay on schedule with @Space_Station upgrades, it\u2019s safer & faster to change spacewalker assignments than reconfigure spacesuits. pic.twitter.com/tPisBHaF2p\u2014 NASA (@NASA) March 26, 2019\n\nSchierholz explained that \u201cspacesuits are not \u2018one size fits all.\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cAstronauts typically describe spacewalks as the most physically challenging thing they do,\u201d she said. \u201cWorking in a pressurized spacesuit requires physical strength and endurance, and it is essential that the spacesuit fits as well as possible.\u201dAdvertisementShe added that \u201can optimally fitted spacesuit improves an astronaut\u2019s ability to accomplish the tasks. We do our best to anticipate the spacesuit sizes that each astronaut will need, based on the spacesuit size they wore in training on the ground, and in some cases astronauts train in multiple sizes. However, the sizing needs of crew members may change when they are on orbit, in response to the changes living in microgravity can bring about in a body.\u201cIn addition, no one training environment can fully simulate performing a spacewalk in microgravity, and an individual may find that their sizing preferences change in space.\u201dWhat does it take to get ready for a #spacewalk? A LOT! Watch our EVA live tomorrow at 6:30 a.m ET: https://t.co/XruQSLUeYN pic.twitter.com/f3FZWZJEgz\u2014 Anne McClain (@AstroAnnimal) March 21, 2019\n\nBoth McClain and Koch were members of NASA\u2019s 2013 astronaut class, 50 percent of which was made up of women, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementMcClain, a U.S. Army officer and a pilot, was chosen in June 2013 to join NASA\u2019s 21st astronaut class.Advertisement\"I wanted to be an astronaut from the time I was 3 or 4 years old,\u201d McClain said in a 2015 NASA video interview. \u201cI remember telling my mom at that time, and I never deviated from what I wanted to be. Something about exploration has fascinated me from a young age.\u201dThe astronaut said that the \u201ccombination of the teamwork, the exploration, being somewhere that nobody else has ever been always fascinated me.\u201dMcClain set out for the International Space Station in December, according to her biography.\ud835\ude08 \ud835\ude2e\ud835\ude2a\ud835\ude2d\ud835\ude2d\ud835\ude2a\ud835\ude30\ud835\ude2f \ud835\ude25\ud835\ude33\ud835\ude26\ud835\ude22\ud835\ude2e\ud835\ude34 \ud835\ude2a\ud835\ude34 \ud835\ude22\ud835\ude2d\ud835\ude2d \ud835\ude2a\ud835\ude35\u2019\ud835\ude34 \ud835\ude28\ud835\ude30\ud835\ude2f\ud835\ude2f\ud835\ude22 \ud835\ude35\ud835\ude22\ud835\ude2c\ud835\ude26\u2026 pic.twitter.com/2fDXJX94wa\u2014 Anne McClain (@AstroAnnimal) March 25, 2019\n\nKoch, an electrical engineer, also received her astronaut training in 2013, her biography said.Story continues below advertisementBut space is just the latest exciting frontier she has conquered: Her work has taken her on expeditions to the South Pole and the Arctic.Koch said in an interview last month that there were several spacewalks planned, and she would be \u201cvery excited to execute that mission.\u201dNo ordinary battery swap & work day routine. Pics from suiting up Anne & Nick for their first spacewalk! 7 hours later, success upgrading the batteries that allow us to have power even when we\u2019re shadowed by the Earth from the sun! Great day of teamwork both on and off the Earth. pic.twitter.com/a3R6y2jC7Q\u2014 Christina H Koch (@Astro_Christina) March 25, 2019\n\nWhen asked about the importance of conducting her mission during Women\u2019s History Month, she said, \u201cIt is a unique opportunity, and I hope that I\u2019m able to inspire folks that might be watching.\u201dAdvertisementNoting that she did not have many engineers to look up to growing up in Jacksonville, N.C., Koch added, \u201cI hope that I can be an example to people that might not have someone to look at as a mentor \u2026 that it doesn\u2019t matter where you come from or what examples there might be around you, you can actually achieve whatever you\u2019re passionate about.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf that\u2019s a role that I can serve,\u201d she said, \u201cit would be my honor to do that.\u201dKoch was sent to the International Space Station earlier this month.NASA said McClain became \u201cthe 13th female spacewalker\u201d earlier this month, and Koch will be the 14th later this week when she and Hague complete their spacewalk.Read More:A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthIntercontinental conflict ends peacefully as Norway agrees Canada\u2019s got the bigger mooseScientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch are not performing the first all-female spacewalk because there are not enough spacesuits of the best size to fit them. Why NASA\u2019s historic all-female spacewalk isn\u2019t happening",
        "author": "Lindsey Bever"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Jeff Bezos and crew wore to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4395",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/jeff-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "The Blue Origin flight suits are blue, of course. The Blue Origin flight suits are blue, of course. When Jeff Bezos blasted into space on Tuesday, he wasn\u2019t channeling the Apollo astronauts in at least one respect: his sartorial choice.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Jeff Bezos and crew wore to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4396",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/jeff-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "The Blue Origin flight suits are blue, of course. The Blue Origin flight suits are blue, of course. When Jeff Bezos blasted into space on Tuesday, he wasn\u2019t channeling the Apollo astronauts in at least one respect: his sartorial choice.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going Viral, or Not, in the Milky Way (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4397",
        "date": "2020-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/science/coronavirus-space-travel-colonization.html",
        "text": "Is the pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality? Is the pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality? Last weekend the American space program resumed one of its most cherished and iconic traditions: launching astronauts into space from its own soil and with its own rockets, after a decade of hitching rides to the International Space Station with the Russians.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going Viral, or Not, in the Milky Way (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4398",
        "date": "2020-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/science/coronavirus-space-travel-colonization.html",
        "text": "Is the pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality? Is the pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality? Last weekend the American space program resumed one of its most cherished and iconic traditions: launching astronauts into space from its own soil and with its own rockets, after a decade of hitching rides to the International Space Station with the Russians.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going Viral, or Not, in the Milky Way (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4399",
        "date": "2020-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/science/coronavirus-space-travel-colonization.html",
        "text": "Is the pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality? Is the pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality? Last weekend the American space program resumed one of its most cherished and iconic traditions: launching astronauts into space from its own soil and with its own rockets, after a decade of hitching rides to the International Space Station with the Russians.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Are water landings from space safe? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4400",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/inspiration4-landing-safety.html",
        "text": "SpaceX has completed two successful earlier water landings, one at night. SpaceX has completed two successful earlier water landings, one at night. Returning from the free-fall environment of orbit to the normal forces of gravity on Earth is often disorienting for astronauts. A water landing adds the possibility of seasickness.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Are water landings from space safe? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4401",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/inspiration4-landing-safety.html",
        "text": "SpaceX has completed two successful earlier water landings, one at night. SpaceX has completed two successful earlier water landings, one at night. Returning from the free-fall environment of orbit to the normal forces of gravity on Earth is often disorienting for astronauts. A water landing adds the possibility of seasickness.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Are water landings from space safe? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4402",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/inspiration4-landing-safety.html",
        "text": "SpaceX has completed two successful earlier water landings, one at night. SpaceX has completed two successful earlier water landings, one at night. Returning from the free-fall environment of orbit to the normal forces of gravity on Earth is often disorienting for astronauts. A water landing adds the possibility of seasickness.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chris Hadfield\u2019s spirited song in space was no \u201coddity.\u201d (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4403",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/chris-hadfield-space-oddity.html",
        "text": "Even David Bowie called it the most poignant version ever performed. Even David Bowie called it the most poignant version ever performed. Although Chris Hadfield\u2019s performance of David Bowie\u2019s \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d ranks among the International Space Station\u2019s most iconic moments, the Canadian astronaut insists he is not a \u201cbackwards looking guy.\u201d He prefers to anticipate the next set of challenges in space.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now launching to the space station: Vaccinated astronauts. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4404",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/astronauts-covid-vaccine.html",
        "text": "All four members of SpaceX's Crew-2 mission got their shots recently. All four members of SpaceX's Crew-2 mission got their shots recently. Without hospitals or medical specialists in space, NASA and other space agencies have always been concerned about astronauts falling sick during a mission. To minimize the chances of that, they typically spend the two weeks before launch in quarantine.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now launching to the space station: Vaccinated astronauts. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4405",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/astronauts-covid-vaccine.html",
        "text": "All four members of SpaceX's Crew-2 mission got their shots recently. All four members of SpaceX's Crew-2 mission got their shots recently. Without hospitals or medical specialists in space, NASA and other space agencies have always been concerned about astronauts falling sick during a mission. To minimize the chances of that, they typically spend the two weeks before launch in quarantine.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shrinking and Quaking Hint at Moon\u2019s Tectonic Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4406",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/moon-moonquakes-tectonic.html",
        "text": "Some seismic readings from the lunar surface couldn\u2019t be explained \u2014 until now. Some seismic readings from the lunar surface couldn\u2019t be explained \u2014 until now. Half a century ago, the Apollo astronauts left short-lived seismometers on the lunar surface. They found that the moon was alive and kicking. Some tremors deep below the surface likely were caused by Earth\u2019s gravitational pull. Others were vibrations from meteorite impacts. Still others resulted from expansion of the moon\u2019s chilly surface every two weeks when the sun rose.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shrinking and Quaking Hint at Moon\u2019s Tectonic Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4407",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/moon-moonquakes-tectonic.html",
        "text": "Some seismic readings from the lunar surface couldn\u2019t be explained \u2014 until now. Some seismic readings from the lunar surface couldn\u2019t be explained \u2014 until now. Half a century ago, the Apollo astronauts left short-lived seismometers on the lunar surface. They found that the moon was alive and kicking. Some tremors deep below the surface likely were caused by Earth\u2019s gravitational pull. Others were vibrations from meteorite impacts. Still others resulted from expansion of the moon\u2019s chilly surface every two weeks when the sun rose.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming up soon: The astronauts return to Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4408",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/spacex-return-inspiration4-landing.html",
        "text": "Barring issues with the weather, the crew will splash down near sun down. Barring issues with the weather, the crew will splash down near sun down. After three days in orbit, the crew of the Inspiration4 mission \u2014 the first trip to orbit where no one aboard is a professional astronaut \u2014 is headed home to Earth.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming up soon: The astronauts return to Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4409",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/spacex-return-inspiration4-landing.html",
        "text": "Barring issues with the weather, the crew will splash down near sun down. Barring issues with the weather, the crew will splash down near sun down. After three days in orbit, the crew of the Inspiration4 mission \u2014 the first trip to orbit where no one aboard is a professional astronaut \u2014 is headed home to Earth.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "A piece of debris whizzes past the Crew Dragon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4410",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/space-junk.html",
        "text": "The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. As the astronauts were getting ready for sleep, there were a few minutes of concern: Mission controllers at SpaceX headquarters in California warned the crew that a piece of space debris was going to whiz past the capsule at about 1:43 p.m. Eastern time.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A piece of debris whizzes past the Crew Dragon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4411",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/space-junk.html",
        "text": "The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. As the astronauts were getting ready for sleep, there were a few minutes of concern: Mission controllers at SpaceX headquarters in California warned the crew that a piece of space debris was going to whiz past the capsule at about 1:43 p.m. Eastern time.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A piece of debris whizzes past the Crew Dragon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4412",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/space-junk.html",
        "text": "The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. As the astronauts were getting ready for sleep, there were a few minutes of concern: Mission controllers at SpaceX headquarters in California warned the crew that a piece of space debris was going to whiz past the capsule at about 1:43 p.m. Eastern time.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A piece of debris whizzes past the Crew Dragon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4413",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/space-junk.html",
        "text": "The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. The crew were forced to put their spacesuits during their trip to the space station. As the astronauts were getting ready for sleep, there were a few minutes of concern: Mission controllers at SpaceX headquarters in California warned the crew that a piece of space debris was going to whiz past the capsule at about 1:43 p.m. Eastern time.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A new window that forever changed our view of Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4414",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-cupola.html",
        "text": "Many of the greatest images you\u2019ve seen from the space station were made in the cupola. Many of the greatest images you\u2019ve seen from the space station were made in the cupola. On Feb. 25, 2010, Terry Virts was in the cupola. The NASA astronaut and two other crewmates had finished installing this seven-windowed dome on the space station an hour earlier.",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "A new window that forever changed our view of Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4415",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-cupola.html",
        "text": "Many of the greatest images you\u2019ve seen from the space station were made in the cupola. Many of the greatest images you\u2019ve seen from the space station were made in the cupola. On Feb. 25, 2010, Terry Virts was in the cupola. The NASA astronaut and two other crewmates had finished installing this seven-windowed dome on the space station an hour earlier.",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Dragon Departs, Carrying NASA Astronauts Toward Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4416",
        "date": "2020-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/science/nasa-spacex-astronauts.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Dragon Departs, Carrying NASA Astronauts Toward Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4417",
        "date": "2020-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/science/nasa-spacex-astronauts.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Dragon Departs, Carrying NASA Astronauts Toward Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4418",
        "date": "2020-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/science/nasa-spacex-astronauts.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew Dragon Departs, Carrying NASA Astronauts Toward Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4419",
        "date": "2020-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/science/nasa-spacex-astronauts.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are getting ready to splash down after two months in orbit. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13\u2019s Astronauts Survived Disaster 50 Years Ago. Could It Happen Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4420",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-anniversary.html",
        "text": "A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. Apollo 13 almost killed three NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13\u2019s Astronauts Survived Disaster 50 Years Ago. Could It Happen Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4421",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-anniversary.html",
        "text": "A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. Apollo 13 almost killed three NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13\u2019s Astronauts Survived Disaster 50 Years Ago. Could It Happen Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4422",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-anniversary.html",
        "text": "A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. Apollo 13 almost killed three NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13\u2019s Astronauts Survived Disaster 50 Years Ago. Could It Happen Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4423",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-anniversary.html",
        "text": "A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. Apollo 13 almost killed three NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 13\u2019s Astronauts Survived Disaster 50 Years Ago. Could It Happen Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4424",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/apollo-13-anniversary.html",
        "text": "A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. A trip to the moon later this decade should be safer, but it won\u2019t be safe. Apollo 13 almost killed three NASA astronauts.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Campaign Removes Space Video That Violated NASA Ad Rules (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4425",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/science/spacex-trump-nasa.html",
        "text": "The president has tried to parlay space policy into an upbeat campaign issue for the 2020 election. The president has tried to parlay space policy into an upbeat campaign issue for the 2020 election. The campaign to re-elect President Trump pulled SpaceX, NASA and astronauts and their families into a campaign video that appeared to violate the space agency\u2019s advertising regulations.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Campaign Removes Space Video That Violated NASA Ad Rules (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4426",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/science/spacex-trump-nasa.html",
        "text": "The president has tried to parlay space policy into an upbeat campaign issue for the 2020 election. The president has tried to parlay space policy into an upbeat campaign issue for the 2020 election. The campaign to re-elect President Trump pulled SpaceX, NASA and astronauts and their families into a campaign video that appeared to violate the space agency\u2019s advertising regulations.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Campaign Removes Space Video That Violated NASA Ad Rules (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4427",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/science/spacex-trump-nasa.html",
        "text": "The president has tried to parlay space policy into an upbeat campaign issue for the 2020 election. The president has tried to parlay space policy into an upbeat campaign issue for the 2020 election. The campaign to re-elect President Trump pulled SpaceX, NASA and astronauts and their families into a campaign video that appeared to violate the space agency\u2019s advertising regulations.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Astronauts Became SpaceX\u2019s Customers (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4428",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. It took work across three presidencies, those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, but the United States is at last prepared once again, after nearly a decade, to launch American astronauts into orbit from American soil on an American-built rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Astronauts Became SpaceX\u2019s Customers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4429",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. It took work across three presidencies, those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, but the United States is at last prepared once again, after nearly a decade, to launch American astronauts into orbit from American soil on an American-built rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Astronauts Became SpaceX\u2019s Customers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4430",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. It took work across three presidencies, those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, but the United States is at last prepared once again, after nearly a decade, to launch American astronauts into orbit from American soil on an American-built rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Astronauts Became SpaceX\u2019s Customers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4431",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. It took work across three presidencies, those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, but the United States is at last prepared once again, after nearly a decade, to launch American astronauts into orbit from American soil on an American-built rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Astronauts Became SpaceX\u2019s Customers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4432",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/science/spacex-launch-nasa.html",
        "text": "A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. A successful launch on Wednesday could forever change how the world thinks about getting people to space. It took work across three presidencies, those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, but the United States is at last prepared once again, after nearly a decade, to launch American astronauts into orbit from American soil on an American-built rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Trump Put NASA Astronauts on the Moon by 2024? It\u2019s Unlikely (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4433",
        "date": "2019-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. The Trump administration announced an ambitious goal in March: It wants to send American astronauts back to the moon in just five years \u2014 four years earlier than the previous target of 2028.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Trump Put NASA Astronauts on the Moon by 2024? It\u2019s Unlikely (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4434",
        "date": "2019-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. The Trump administration announced an ambitious goal in March: It wants to send American astronauts back to the moon in just five years \u2014 four years earlier than the previous target of 2028.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Trump Put NASA Astronauts on the Moon by 2024? It\u2019s Unlikely (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4435",
        "date": "2019-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. The Trump administration announced an ambitious goal in March: It wants to send American astronauts back to the moon in just five years \u2014 four years earlier than the previous target of 2028.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Trump Put NASA Astronauts on the Moon by 2024? It\u2019s Unlikely (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4436",
        "date": "2019-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. The Trump administration announced an ambitious goal in March: It wants to send American astronauts back to the moon in just five years \u2014 four years earlier than the previous target of 2028.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Trump Put NASA Astronauts on the Moon by 2024? It\u2019s Unlikely (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4437",
        "date": "2019-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. While the Artemis program faces obstacles, the administration\u2019s plan could speed the status quo for America\u2019s space program. The Trump administration announced an ambitious goal in March: It wants to send American astronauts back to the moon in just five years \u2014 four years earlier than the previous target of 2028.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts Complete the First All-Female Spacewalk (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4438",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/science/space/nasa-female-spacewalk.html",
        "text": "Jessica Meir and Christina Koch ventured outside the International Space Station on Friday to replace a power controller. Jessica Meir and Christina Koch ventured outside the International Space Station on Friday to replace a power controller. NASA reached a milestone on Friday when two Americans, tasked with replacing a power controller, ventured out of the International Space Station: the astronauts, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, became the first to take part in an all-female spacewalk. ",
        "author": "By Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronauts Complete the First All-Female Spacewalk (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4439",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/science/space/nasa-female-spacewalk.html",
        "text": "Jessica Meir and Christina Koch ventured outside the International Space Station on Friday to replace a power controller. Jessica Meir and Christina Koch ventured outside the International Space Station on Friday to replace a power controller. NASA reached a milestone on Friday when two Americans, tasked with replacing a power controller, ventured out of the International Space Station: the astronauts, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, became the first to take part in an all-female spacewalk. ",
        "author": "By Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Makes First Nighttime Splashdown With Astronauts Since 1968 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4440",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/science/spacex-nasa-landing.html",
        "text": "Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. In darkness, four astronauts splashed down early Sunday morning in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City, Fla.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Makes First Nighttime Splashdown With Astronauts Since 1968 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4441",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/science/spacex-nasa-landing.html",
        "text": "Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. In darkness, four astronauts splashed down early Sunday morning in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City, Fla.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Makes First Nighttime Splashdown With Astronauts Since 1968 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4442",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/science/spacex-nasa-landing.html",
        "text": "Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. In darkness, four astronauts splashed down early Sunday morning in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City, Fla.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Makes First Nighttime Splashdown With Astronauts Since 1968 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4443",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/science/spacex-nasa-landing.html",
        "text": "Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. In darkness, four astronauts splashed down early Sunday morning in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City, Fla.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Makes First Nighttime Splashdown With Astronauts Since 1968 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4444",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/science/spacex-nasa-landing.html",
        "text": "Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. Crew-1, which launched to the space station in November, left the space station in the capsule called Resilience. In darkness, four astronauts splashed down early Sunday morning in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City, Fla.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018laggy\u2019 parachute on Monday led to questions for NASA. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4445",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/parachute-dragon-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency was satisfied after a review of the incident during Monday\u2019s landing of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The agency was satisfied after a review of the incident during Monday\u2019s landing of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Another crew of four astronauts, Crew-2, splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico inside a different Crew Dragon capsule on Monday. A set of four large parachutes were released about four minutes before they landed. Those chutes are designed to fully unfurl almost instantly once the capsule comes within a mile from landing. But one took roughly a minute to inflate, heaping most of the burden of slowing the capsule on the other three chutes.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018laggy\u2019 parachute on Monday led to questions for NASA. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4446",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/parachute-dragon-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency was satisfied after a review of the incident during Monday\u2019s landing of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The agency was satisfied after a review of the incident during Monday\u2019s landing of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Another crew of four astronauts, Crew-2, splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico inside a different Crew Dragon capsule on Monday. A set of four large parachutes were released about four minutes before they landed. Those chutes are designed to fully unfurl almost instantly once the capsule comes within a mile from landing. But one took roughly a minute to inflate, heaping most of the burden of slowing the capsule on the other three chutes.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018laggy\u2019 parachute on Monday led to questions for NASA. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4447",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/parachute-dragon-nasa.html",
        "text": "The agency was satisfied after a review of the incident during Monday\u2019s landing of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The agency was satisfied after a review of the incident during Monday\u2019s landing of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Another crew of four astronauts, Crew-2, splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico inside a different Crew Dragon capsule on Monday. A set of four large parachutes were released about four minutes before they landed. Those chutes are designed to fully unfurl almost instantly once the capsule comes within a mile from landing. But one took roughly a minute to inflate, heaping most of the burden of slowing the capsule on the other three chutes.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays Spacewalk, Citing Space Debris Threat to Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4448",
        "date": "2021-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/science/nasa-spacewalk-delay-debris.html",
        "text": "The agency did not link the postponement of repairs to wreckage caused by a recent Russian antisatellite weapon test. The agency did not link the postponement of repairs to wreckage caused by a recent Russian antisatellite weapon test. NASA officials called off a Tuesday spacewalk late Monday night for two of the agency\u2019s astronauts after receiving alerts that nearby space debris could endanger the crew. It was the latest abrupt change to the International Space Station\u2019s operations since Russia blew up one of its old satellites in space earlier this month.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays Spacewalk, Citing Space Debris Threat to Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4449",
        "date": "2021-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/science/nasa-spacewalk-delay-debris.html",
        "text": "The agency did not link the postponement of repairs to wreckage caused by a recent Russian antisatellite weapon test. The agency did not link the postponement of repairs to wreckage caused by a recent Russian antisatellite weapon test. NASA officials called off a Tuesday spacewalk late Monday night for two of the agency\u2019s astronauts after receiving alerts that nearby space debris could endanger the crew. It was the latest abrupt change to the International Space Station\u2019s operations since Russia blew up one of its old satellites in space earlier this month.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays Spacewalk, Citing Space Debris Threat to Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4450",
        "date": "2021-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/science/nasa-spacewalk-delay-debris.html",
        "text": "The agency did not link the postponement of repairs to wreckage caused by a recent Russian antisatellite weapon test. The agency did not link the postponement of repairs to wreckage caused by a recent Russian antisatellite weapon test. NASA officials called off a Tuesday spacewalk late Monday night for two of the agency\u2019s astronauts after receiving alerts that nearby space debris could endanger the crew. It was the latest abrupt change to the International Space Station\u2019s operations since Russia blew up one of its old satellites in space earlier this month.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want to Buy a Ticket to the Space Station? NASA Says Soon You Can (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4451",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/science/space-station-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA plans to open the International Space Station to commercial business, including tourism. But the tickets won\u2019t be cheap. NASA plans to open the International Space Station to commercial business, including tourism. But the tickets won\u2019t be cheap. Becoming a NASA astronaut is far harder than getting into Harvard, but soon, ordinary people \u2014 at least rich ones with tens of millions of dollars to blow on a big vacation \u2014 will be able to buy a rocket ride into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want to Buy a Ticket to the Space Station? NASA Says Soon You Can (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4452",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/science/space-station-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA plans to open the International Space Station to commercial business, including tourism. But the tickets won\u2019t be cheap. NASA plans to open the International Space Station to commercial business, including tourism. But the tickets won\u2019t be cheap. Becoming a NASA astronaut is far harder than getting into Harvard, but soon, ordinary people \u2014 at least rich ones with tens of millions of dollars to blow on a big vacation \u2014 will be able to buy a rocket ride into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want to Buy a Ticket to the Space Station? NASA Says Soon You Can (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4453",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/science/space-station-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA plans to open the International Space Station to commercial business, including tourism. But the tickets won\u2019t be cheap. NASA plans to open the International Space Station to commercial business, including tourism. But the tickets won\u2019t be cheap. Becoming a NASA astronaut is far harder than getting into Harvard, but soon, ordinary people \u2014 at least rich ones with tens of millions of dollars to blow on a big vacation \u2014 will be able to buy a rocket ride into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Calls @AstroPeggy at the International Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4454",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/science/peggy-whitson-nasa-trump.html",
        "text": "Ivanka Trump joined the call, in which the president congratulated Peggy Whitson for setting a new U.S. space record. Ivanka Trump joined the call, in which the president congratulated Peggy Whitson for setting a new U.S. space record. The astronaut Peggy Whitson, who early Monday surpassed the 534-day record for most time in space by an American, received a congratulatory call about nine hours later from President Trump and his daughter Ivanka.",
        "author": "By Jonah Engel Bromwich"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Small Tweet for Trump, One Giant Question for NASA\u2019s Moon Plans (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4455",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "A tweet by the president clashed with earlier statements, including his own, about a renewed focus on moon exploration. A tweet by the president clashed with earlier statements, including his own, about a renewed focus on moon exploration. For months the Trump administration has been proclaiming an Apollo-like urgency to return astronauts to the moon within five years. On Friday, President Trump appeared to suggest on Twitter that NASA was focusing on the wrong goal.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Small Tweet for Trump, One Giant Question for NASA\u2019s Moon Plans (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4456",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "A tweet by the president clashed with earlier statements, including his own, about a renewed focus on moon exploration. A tweet by the president clashed with earlier statements, including his own, about a renewed focus on moon exploration. For months the Trump administration has been proclaiming an Apollo-like urgency to return astronauts to the moon within five years. On Friday, President Trump appeared to suggest on Twitter that NASA was focusing on the wrong goal.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Small Tweet for Trump, One Giant Question for NASA\u2019s Moon Plans (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4457",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/science/trump-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "A tweet by the president clashed with earlier statements, including his own, about a renewed focus on moon exploration. A tweet by the president clashed with earlier statements, including his own, about a renewed focus on moon exploration. For months the Trump administration has been proclaiming an Apollo-like urgency to return astronauts to the moon within five years. On Friday, President Trump appeared to suggest on Twitter that NASA was focusing on the wrong goal.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s large cupola gave the astronauts, and us, a new window on planet Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4458",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/cupola-window-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The astronauts on the Inspiration4 mission finally gave people on Earth a good look through their cupola on Friday. That\u2019s a fancy word for dome.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s large cupola gave the astronauts, and us, a new window on planet Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4459",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/cupola-window-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The astronauts on the Inspiration4 mission finally gave people on Earth a good look through their cupola on Friday. That\u2019s a fancy word for dome.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s large cupola gave the astronauts, and us, a new window on planet Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4460",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/cupola-window-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The astronauts on the Inspiration4 mission finally gave people on Earth a good look through their cupola on Friday. That\u2019s a fancy word for dome.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s large cupola gave the astronauts, and us, a new window on planet Earth. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4461",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/cupola-window-crew-dragon.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The Inspiration4 mission was able to test out a big window to see back to Earth and out into space. The astronauts on the Inspiration4 mission finally gave people on Earth a good look through their cupola on Friday. That\u2019s a fancy word for dome.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Thanks for Flying SpaceX\u2019: NASA Astronauts Safely Splash Down After Journey From Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4462",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-astronauts-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Thanks for Flying SpaceX\u2019: NASA Astronauts Safely Splash Down After Journey From Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4463",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-astronauts-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Thanks for Flying SpaceX\u2019: NASA Astronauts Safely Splash Down After Journey From Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4464",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-astronauts-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Thanks for Flying SpaceX\u2019: NASA Astronauts Safely Splash Down After Journey From Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4465",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-astronauts-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Thanks for Flying SpaceX\u2019: NASA Astronauts Safely Splash Down After Journey From Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4466",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/science/spacex-astronauts-splashdown.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth in the first water landing by an American space crew since 1975. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alfred Worden, 88, Dies; Orbited Moon and Walked in Deep Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4467",
        "date": "2020-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/science/space/al-worden-dead.html",
        "text": "While two Apollo 15 crewmen roamed the lunar surface on a scientific mission, he took valuable photographs from the space capsule. While two Apollo 15 crewmen roamed the lunar surface on a scientific mission, he took valuable photographs from the space capsule. Alfred M. Worden, who orbited the moon in the summer of 1971, taking sophisticated photographs of the lunar terrain while his fellow astronauts of the Apollo 15 mission roamed its surface in a newly developed four-wheel rover, died overnight at an assisted living center in Sugar Land, Texas, his family said on Wednesday. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alfred Worden, 88, Dies; Orbited Moon and Walked in Deep Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4468",
        "date": "2020-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/science/space/al-worden-dead.html",
        "text": "While two Apollo 15 crewmen roamed the lunar surface on a scientific mission, he took valuable photographs from the space capsule. While two Apollo 15 crewmen roamed the lunar surface on a scientific mission, he took valuable photographs from the space capsule. Alfred M. Worden, who orbited the moon in the summer of 1971, taking sophisticated photographs of the lunar terrain while his fellow astronauts of the Apollo 15 mission roamed its surface in a newly developed four-wheel rover, died overnight at an assisted living center in Sugar Land, Texas, his family said on Wednesday. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alfred Worden, 88, Dies; Orbited Moon and Walked in Deep Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4469",
        "date": "2020-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/science/space/al-worden-dead.html",
        "text": "While two Apollo 15 crewmen roamed the lunar surface on a scientific mission, he took valuable photographs from the space capsule. While two Apollo 15 crewmen roamed the lunar surface on a scientific mission, he took valuable photographs from the space capsule. Alfred M. Worden, who orbited the moon in the summer of 1971, taking sophisticated photographs of the lunar terrain while his fellow astronauts of the Apollo 15 mission roamed its surface in a newly developed four-wheel rover, died overnight at an assisted living center in Sugar Land, Texas, his family said on Wednesday. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX astronauts will get a health check after splashdown. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4470",
        "date": "2021-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/egress-health-check-spacex.html",
        "text": "While the Inspiration4 crew was only in orbit for three days, doctors will performing screenings to make sure they are well. While the Inspiration4 crew was only in orbit for three days, doctors will performing screenings to make sure they are well. When astronauts return to Earth from space, they can experience a number of health and physical issues after they land \u2014 a result of living without gravity.",
        "author": "By Jesus Jim\u00e9nez"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX astronauts will get a health check after splashdown. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4471",
        "date": "2021-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/egress-health-check-spacex.html",
        "text": "While the Inspiration4 crew was only in orbit for three days, doctors will performing screenings to make sure they are well. While the Inspiration4 crew was only in orbit for three days, doctors will performing screenings to make sure they are well. When astronauts return to Earth from space, they can experience a number of health and physical issues after they land \u2014 a result of living without gravity.",
        "author": "By Jesus Jim\u00e9nez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Rocket Fails, and 2 Astronauts Make Safe Emergency Return (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4472",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/science/soyuz-rocket.html",
        "text": "The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. As they hurtled toward space faster than a rifle bullet, an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make a harrowing but safe emergency landing on Thursday when the rocket carrying the two men and hundreds of tons of explosive fuel failed less than two minutes after liftoff.",
        "author": "By Richard P\u00e9rez-Pe\u00f1a, Kenneth Chang and Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Rocket Fails, and 2 Astronauts Make Safe Emergency Return (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4473",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/science/soyuz-rocket.html",
        "text": "The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. As they hurtled toward space faster than a rifle bullet, an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make a harrowing but safe emergency landing on Thursday when the rocket carrying the two men and hundreds of tons of explosive fuel failed less than two minutes after liftoff.",
        "author": "By Richard P\u00e9rez-Pe\u00f1a, Kenneth Chang and Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Rocket Fails, and 2 Astronauts Make Safe Emergency Return (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4474",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/science/soyuz-rocket.html",
        "text": "The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. As they hurtled toward space faster than a rifle bullet, an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make a harrowing but safe emergency landing on Thursday when the rocket carrying the two men and hundreds of tons of explosive fuel failed less than two minutes after liftoff.",
        "author": "By Richard P\u00e9rez-Pe\u00f1a, Kenneth Chang and Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Rocket Fails, and 2 Astronauts Make Safe Emergency Return (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4475",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/science/soyuz-rocket.html",
        "text": "The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. The Soyuz craft experienced a problem minutes after liftoff, en route to the International Space Station, but the capsule landed safely. As they hurtled toward space faster than a rifle bullet, an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make a harrowing but safe emergency landing on Thursday when the rocket carrying the two men and hundreds of tons of explosive fuel failed less than two minutes after liftoff.",
        "author": "By Richard P\u00e9rez-Pe\u00f1a, Kenneth Chang and Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Announces That the Moon Is Astronauts\u2019 Next Destination (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4476",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/science/trump-moon-space-directive.html",
        "text": "The presidential directive called for partnership with other nations and commercial companies but did not offer details about schedule or cost. The presidential directive called for partnership with other nations and commercial companies but did not offer details about schedule or cost. President Trump announced on Monday that the moon would be the next destination for American astronauts, putting the Oval Office\u2019s imprimatur on what other administration officials have said for months.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Announces That the Moon Is Astronauts\u2019 Next Destination (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4477",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/science/trump-moon-space-directive.html",
        "text": "The presidential directive called for partnership with other nations and commercial companies but did not offer details about schedule or cost. The presidential directive called for partnership with other nations and commercial companies but did not offer details about schedule or cost. President Trump announced on Monday that the moon would be the next destination for American astronauts, putting the Oval Office\u2019s imprimatur on what other administration officials have said for months.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets Go-Ahead for NASA Astronaut Launch Next Week (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4478",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/spacex-nasa-launch.html",
        "text": "The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets Go-Ahead for NASA Astronaut Launch Next Week (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4479",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/spacex-nasa-launch.html",
        "text": "The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets Go-Ahead for NASA Astronaut Launch Next Week (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4480",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/spacex-nasa-launch.html",
        "text": "The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets Go-Ahead for NASA Astronaut Launch Next Week (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4481",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/spacex-nasa-launch.html",
        "text": "The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Gets Go-Ahead for NASA Astronaut Launch Next Week (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4482",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/spacex-nasa-launch.html",
        "text": "The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. The agency confirmed its mission was proceeding smoothly, but made the announcement amid the puzzling departure of a top NASA official. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of NASA Astronauts Is Postponed Over Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4483",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of NASA Astronauts Is Postponed Over Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4484",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of NASA Astronauts Is Postponed Over Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4485",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of NASA Astronauts Is Postponed Over Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4486",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of NASA Astronauts Is Postponed Over Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4487",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/science/nasa-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. Persistent clouds did not clear in time, pushing the launch back to either Saturday or Sunday, the next window of opportunity. [When to watch SpaceX\u2019s next NASA launch of astronauts.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Last Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4488",
        "date": "2021-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. Eleven years in the making, the most powerful NASA-built rocket since the Apollo program at last stands upright. Framed by the industrial test platform to which it is mounted, the Space Launch System\u2019s core section is a gleaming, apricot-colored column cast into relief by twisting pipes and steel latticework. The rocket is taller than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and all, and is the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s astronaut ambitions. The launch vehicle is central to the agency\u2019s Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface, and later, land them on Mars.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Last Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4489",
        "date": "2021-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. Eleven years in the making, the most powerful NASA-built rocket since the Apollo program at last stands upright. Framed by the industrial test platform to which it is mounted, the Space Launch System\u2019s core section is a gleaming, apricot-colored column cast into relief by twisting pipes and steel latticework. The rocket is taller than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and all, and is the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s astronaut ambitions. The launch vehicle is central to the agency\u2019s Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface, and later, land them on Mars.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Last Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4490",
        "date": "2021-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. Eleven years in the making, the most powerful NASA-built rocket since the Apollo program at last stands upright. Framed by the industrial test platform to which it is mounted, the Space Launch System\u2019s core section is a gleaming, apricot-colored column cast into relief by twisting pipes and steel latticework. The rocket is taller than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and all, and is the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s astronaut ambitions. The launch vehicle is central to the agency\u2019s Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface, and later, land them on Mars.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Last Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4491",
        "date": "2021-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. The United States is unlikely to build anything like the Space Launch System ever again. But it\u2019s still good that NASA did. Eleven years in the making, the most powerful NASA-built rocket since the Apollo program at last stands upright. Framed by the industrial test platform to which it is mounted, the Space Launch System\u2019s core section is a gleaming, apricot-colored column cast into relief by twisting pipes and steel latticework. The rocket is taller than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and all, and is the cornerstone of NASA\u2019s astronaut ambitions. The launch vehicle is central to the agency\u2019s Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface, and later, land them on Mars.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA-Russia Alliance in Space Is Shaken by Events on Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4492",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/science/russia-nasa-spacex-asat.html",
        "text": "The relationship between the nations\u2019 space agencies is facing a series of difficult tests, including an antisatellite weapon and friction over Ukraine. The relationship between the nations\u2019 space agencies is facing a series of difficult tests, including an antisatellite weapon and friction over Ukraine. When Russia\u2019s military blasted an old satellite to smithereens last month with an antisatellite missile, American officials reacted angrily, warning that thousands of tiny pieces of new orbital debris could endanger astronauts on the International Space Station. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, Russia\u2019s space agency, seemed to share some of that frustration.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA-Russia Alliance in Space Is Shaken by Events on Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4493",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/science/russia-nasa-spacex-asat.html",
        "text": "The relationship between the nations\u2019 space agencies is facing a series of difficult tests, including an antisatellite weapon and friction over Ukraine. The relationship between the nations\u2019 space agencies is facing a series of difficult tests, including an antisatellite weapon and friction over Ukraine. When Russia\u2019s military blasted an old satellite to smithereens last month with an antisatellite missile, American officials reacted angrily, warning that thousands of tiny pieces of new orbital debris could endanger astronauts on the International Space Station. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, Russia\u2019s space agency, seemed to share some of that frustration.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Resilience\u2019 Lifts 4 Astronauts Into New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4494",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts-launch.html",
        "text": "The crew will spend some 27 hours in a capsule built by the private company before docking with the space station Monday night. The crew will spend some 27 hours in a capsule built by the private company before docking with the space station Monday night. It\u2019s not yet the same as hopping on commuter flight from New York to Washington or renting a car from Avis, but Sunday\u2019s launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station in a capsule built by SpaceX was a momentous step toward making space travel commonplace and mundane.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Resilience\u2019 Lifts 4 Astronauts Into New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4495",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts-launch.html",
        "text": "The crew will spend some 27 hours in a capsule built by the private company before docking with the space station Monday night. The crew will spend some 27 hours in a capsule built by the private company before docking with the space station Monday night. It\u2019s not yet the same as hopping on commuter flight from New York to Washington or renting a car from Avis, but Sunday\u2019s launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station in a capsule built by SpaceX was a momentous step toward making space travel commonplace and mundane.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Resilience\u2019 Lifts 4 Astronauts Into New Era of Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4496",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/spacex-nasa-astronauts-launch.html",
        "text": "The crew will spend some 27 hours in a capsule built by the private company before docking with the space station Monday night. The crew will spend some 27 hours in a capsule built by the private company before docking with the space station Monday night. It\u2019s not yet the same as hopping on commuter flight from New York to Washington or renting a car from Avis, but Sunday\u2019s launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station in a capsule built by SpaceX was a momentous step toward making space travel commonplace and mundane.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Victor Glover will be the first Black crew member on the space station. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4497",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/victor-glover-black-astronaut.html",
        "text": "NASA, which has worked to spotlight the \u201chidden figures\u201d in its history, but has so far sent only 14 Black Americans to space. NASA, which has worked to spotlight the \u201chidden figures\u201d in its history, but has so far sent only 14 Black Americans to space. In the 20-some years that people have been living aboard the International Space Station, its extended crew has never included a Black astronaut. Victor J. Glover, a Navy commander and test pilot who joined the astronaut corps in 2013, will be the first.",
        "author": "By Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Victor Glover will be the first Black crew member on the space station. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4498",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/victor-glover-black-astronaut.html",
        "text": "NASA, which has worked to spotlight the \u201chidden figures\u201d in its history, but has so far sent only 14 Black Americans to space. NASA, which has worked to spotlight the \u201chidden figures\u201d in its history, but has so far sent only 14 Black Americans to space. In the 20-some years that people have been living aboard the International Space Station, its extended crew has never included a Black astronaut. Victor J. Glover, a Navy commander and test pilot who joined the astronaut corps in 2013, will be the first.",
        "author": "By Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Victor Glover will be the first Black crew member on the space station. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4499",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/victor-glover-black-astronaut.html",
        "text": "NASA, which has worked to spotlight the \u201chidden figures\u201d in its history, but has so far sent only 14 Black Americans to space. NASA, which has worked to spotlight the \u201chidden figures\u201d in its history, but has so far sent only 14 Black Americans to space. In the 20-some years that people have been living aboard the International Space Station, its extended crew has never included a Black astronaut. Victor J. Glover, a Navy commander and test pilot who joined the astronaut corps in 2013, will be the first.",
        "author": "By Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Big Rocket, the Falcon Heavy, Finally Reaches the Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4500",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "After years of delay, the Falcon Heavy \u2014 a beefed-up version of SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 \u2014 could launch in the weeks ahead. After years of delay, the Falcon Heavy \u2014 a beefed-up version of SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 \u2014 could launch in the weeks ahead. On July 16, 1969, a towering Saturn 5 rocket sat on Pad 39A at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At 9:32 a.m., the five enormous F-1 engines of its first stage ignited, expelling orange flame, dark smoke and 7.5 million pounds of thrust to lift the three astronauts of Apollo 11 into space. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon four days later.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Big Rocket, the Falcon Heavy, Finally Reaches the Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4501",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "After years of delay, the Falcon Heavy \u2014 a beefed-up version of SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 \u2014 could launch in the weeks ahead. After years of delay, the Falcon Heavy \u2014 a beefed-up version of SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 \u2014 could launch in the weeks ahead. On July 16, 1969, a towering Saturn 5 rocket sat on Pad 39A at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At 9:32 a.m., the five enormous F-1 engines of its first stage ignited, expelling orange flame, dark smoke and 7.5 million pounds of thrust to lift the three astronauts of Apollo 11 into space. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon four days later.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Big Rocket, the Falcon Heavy, Finally Reaches the Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4502",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "After years of delay, the Falcon Heavy \u2014 a beefed-up version of SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 \u2014 could launch in the weeks ahead. After years of delay, the Falcon Heavy \u2014 a beefed-up version of SpaceX\u2019s workhorse Falcon 9 \u2014 could launch in the weeks ahead. On July 16, 1969, a towering Saturn 5 rocket sat on Pad 39A at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At 9:32 a.m., the five enormous F-1 engines of its first stage ignited, expelling orange flame, dark smoke and 7.5 million pounds of thrust to lift the three astronauts of Apollo 11 into space. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon four days later.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Trump Administration Wants Astronauts on Moon by 2024. But What\u2019s the Plan? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4503",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/science/nasa-moon-pence.html",
        "text": "The vice president called for greater urgency at NASA, but how the Trump administration intends to accomplish an ambitious moon landing was not clear. The vice president called for greater urgency at NASA, but how the Trump administration intends to accomplish an ambitious moon landing was not clear. American astronauts will walk on the moon again before the end of 2024 \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d Vice President Mike Pence declared on Tuesday at a meeting of the National Space Council.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Trump Administration Wants Astronauts on Moon by 2024. But What\u2019s the Plan? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4504",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/science/nasa-moon-pence.html",
        "text": "The vice president called for greater urgency at NASA, but how the Trump administration intends to accomplish an ambitious moon landing was not clear. The vice president called for greater urgency at NASA, but how the Trump administration intends to accomplish an ambitious moon landing was not clear. American astronauts will walk on the moon again before the end of 2024 \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d Vice President Mike Pence declared on Tuesday at a meeting of the National Space Council.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Trump Administration Wants Astronauts on Moon by 2024. But What\u2019s the Plan? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4505",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/science/nasa-moon-pence.html",
        "text": "The vice president called for greater urgency at NASA, but how the Trump administration intends to accomplish an ambitious moon landing was not clear. The vice president called for greater urgency at NASA, but how the Trump administration intends to accomplish an ambitious moon landing was not clear. American astronauts will walk on the moon again before the end of 2024 \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d Vice President Mike Pence declared on Tuesday at a meeting of the National Space Council.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Names Headquarters After Its First Black Female Engineer, Mary Jackson (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4506",
        "date": "2020-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/science/nasa-mary-jackson-hidden-figures.html",
        "text": "Ms. Jackson\u2019s contributions received widespread attention after the release of the 2016 film \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d which chronicled black women\u2019s work during the space race. Ms. Jackson\u2019s contributions received widespread attention after the release of the 2016 film \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d which chronicled black women\u2019s work during the space race. NASA announced on Wednesday that it would name its Washington, D.C., headquarters after Mary Jackson, the organization\u2019s first black female engineer and a pivotal player in helping U.S. astronauts reach space.",
        "author": "By Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Introduces Class of 10 New Astronaut Candidates (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4507",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/science/nasa-astronaut-class.html",
        "text": "The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. NASA on Monday inaugurated 10 new astronaut candidates who could walk on the moon within the next decade, or carry out research on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Introduces Class of 10 New Astronaut Candidates (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4508",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/science/nasa-astronaut-class.html",
        "text": "The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. NASA on Monday inaugurated 10 new astronaut candidates who could walk on the moon within the next decade, or carry out research on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Introduces Class of 10 New Astronaut Candidates (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4509",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/science/nasa-astronaut-class.html",
        "text": "The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. NASA on Monday inaugurated 10 new astronaut candidates who could walk on the moon within the next decade, or carry out research on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Introduces Class of 10 New Astronaut Candidates (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4510",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/science/nasa-astronaut-class.html",
        "text": "The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. The recruits, selected from a pool of 12,000 applicants, will begin two years of training, and some of them may one day walk on the moon. NASA on Monday inaugurated 10 new astronaut candidates who could walk on the moon within the next decade, or carry out research on the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches 3 Astronauts Toward New Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4511",
        "date": "2021-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/science/china-launch-space-station.html",
        "text": "The crew, the first to launch since 2016, will begin what is expected to be a continuous Chinese presence in Earth\u2019s orbit for the next decade. The crew, the first to launch since 2016, will begin what is expected to be a continuous Chinese presence in Earth\u2019s orbit for the next decade. There will soon be two places in orbit where astronauts live.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches 3 Astronauts Toward New Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4512",
        "date": "2021-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/science/china-launch-space-station.html",
        "text": "The crew, the first to launch since 2016, will begin what is expected to be a continuous Chinese presence in Earth\u2019s orbit for the next decade. The crew, the first to launch since 2016, will begin what is expected to be a continuous Chinese presence in Earth\u2019s orbit for the next decade. There will soon be two places in orbit where astronauts live.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Launches 3 Astronauts Toward New Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4513",
        "date": "2021-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/science/china-launch-space-station.html",
        "text": "The crew, the first to launch since 2016, will begin what is expected to be a continuous Chinese presence in Earth\u2019s orbit for the next decade. The crew, the first to launch since 2016, will begin what is expected to be a continuous Chinese presence in Earth\u2019s orbit for the next decade. There will soon be two places in orbit where astronauts live.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Many Space Stations Does This Planet Need? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4514",
        "date": "2018-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/science/private-space-stations.html",
        "text": "The Trump administration wants to shift to a capitalist free-for-all in orbit. But the readiness of commercial space outposts to take NASA\u2019s place is far from certain. The Trump administration wants to shift to a capitalist free-for-all in orbit. But the readiness of commercial space outposts to take NASA\u2019s place is far from certain. NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. \u2014 At one end of Bigelow Aerospace\u2019s factory is a mock-up of a gargantuan home for future astronauts. With a unique design \u2014 it could be packed into a rocket, then unfurled in space \u2014 it would comfortably house a dozen people as a voluminous space station or serve as a building block of a moon base.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Many Space Stations Does This Planet Need? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4515",
        "date": "2018-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/science/private-space-stations.html",
        "text": "The Trump administration wants to shift to a capitalist free-for-all in orbit. But the readiness of commercial space outposts to take NASA\u2019s place is far from certain. The Trump administration wants to shift to a capitalist free-for-all in orbit. But the readiness of commercial space outposts to take NASA\u2019s place is far from certain. NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. \u2014 At one end of Bigelow Aerospace\u2019s factory is a mock-up of a gargantuan home for future astronauts. With a unique design \u2014 it could be packed into a rocket, then unfurled in space \u2014 it would comfortably house a dozen people as a voluminous space station or serve as a building block of a moon base.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Many Space Stations Does This Planet Need? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4516",
        "date": "2018-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/science/private-space-stations.html",
        "text": "The Trump administration wants to shift to a capitalist free-for-all in orbit. But the readiness of commercial space outposts to take NASA\u2019s place is far from certain. The Trump administration wants to shift to a capitalist free-for-all in orbit. But the readiness of commercial space outposts to take NASA\u2019s place is far from certain. NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. \u2014 At one end of Bigelow Aerospace\u2019s factory is a mock-up of a gargantuan home for future astronauts. With a unique design \u2014 it could be packed into a rocket, then unfurled in space \u2014 it would comfortably house a dozen people as a voluminous space station or serve as a building block of a moon base.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Completes Virgin Galactic Flight, Aiming to Open Up Space Tourism (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4517",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. \u2014 Soaring more than 50 miles into the hot, glaringly bright skies above New Mexico, Richard Branson at last fulfilled a dream that took decades to realize: He can now call himself an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Completes Virgin Galactic Flight, Aiming to Open Up Space Tourism (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4518",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. \u2014 Soaring more than 50 miles into the hot, glaringly bright skies above New Mexico, Richard Branson at last fulfilled a dream that took decades to realize: He can now call himself an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Completes Virgin Galactic Flight, Aiming to Open Up Space Tourism (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4519",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. \u2014 Soaring more than 50 miles into the hot, glaringly bright skies above New Mexico, Richard Branson at last fulfilled a dream that took decades to realize: He can now call himself an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Completes Virgin Galactic Flight, Aiming to Open Up Space Tourism (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4520",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. \u2014 Soaring more than 50 miles into the hot, glaringly bright skies above New Mexico, Richard Branson at last fulfilled a dream that took decades to realize: He can now call himself an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson Completes Virgin Galactic Flight, Aiming to Open Up Space Tourism (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4521",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. The successful trip was the first in a series to the edge of space and beyond by billionaire entrepreneurs that seek to make human spaceflight more routine. SPACEPORT AMERICA, N.M. \u2014 Soaring more than 50 miles into the hot, glaringly bright skies above New Mexico, Richard Branson at last fulfilled a dream that took decades to realize: He can now call himself an astronaut.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Anniversary: Everything You Need to Read on the Moon Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4522",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/apollo-11-landing-anniversary.html",
        "text": "The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. On the morning of July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off for the moon. Four days later, Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin set foot on the moon\u2019s surface, the first of 12 American astronauts to complete this feat. Apollo 11 fascinated the world, with hundreds of millions tuning in to watch it on TV. It also changed the way we understood our solar system.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Anniversary: Everything You Need to Read on the Moon Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4523",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/apollo-11-landing-anniversary.html",
        "text": "The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. On the morning of July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off for the moon. Four days later, Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin set foot on the moon\u2019s surface, the first of 12 American astronauts to complete this feat. Apollo 11 fascinated the world, with hundreds of millions tuning in to watch it on TV. It also changed the way we understood our solar system.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Anniversary: Everything You Need to Read on the Moon Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4524",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/apollo-11-landing-anniversary.html",
        "text": "The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. On the morning of July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off for the moon. Four days later, Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin set foot on the moon\u2019s surface, the first of 12 American astronauts to complete this feat. Apollo 11 fascinated the world, with hundreds of millions tuning in to watch it on TV. It also changed the way we understood our solar system.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Anniversary: Everything You Need to Read on the Moon Landing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4525",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/apollo-11-landing-anniversary.html",
        "text": "The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. The New York Times has been covering the anniversary of the moon landing, looking back at the event\u2019s meaning and forward to humankind\u2019s next giant leaps in space. On the morning of July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off for the moon. Four days later, Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin set foot on the moon\u2019s surface, the first of 12 American astronauts to complete this feat. Apollo 11 fascinated the world, with hundreds of millions tuning in to watch it on TV. It also changed the way we understood our solar system.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budgets for a Trip to the Moon, but Not While Trump Is President (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4526",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. Sending astronauts back to the moon is one of the top space priorities of President Trump. But his administration wants to accomplish that without giving NASA additional money, and it won\u2019t occur until after he leaves office, even if he wins re-election.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budgets for a Trip to the Moon, but Not While Trump Is President (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4527",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. Sending astronauts back to the moon is one of the top space priorities of President Trump. But his administration wants to accomplish that without giving NASA additional money, and it won\u2019t occur until after he leaves office, even if he wins re-election.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budgets for a Trip to the Moon, but Not While Trump Is President (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4528",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. Sending astronauts back to the moon is one of the top space priorities of President Trump. But his administration wants to accomplish that without giving NASA additional money, and it won\u2019t occur until after he leaves office, even if he wins re-election.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budgets for a Trip to the Moon, but Not While Trump Is President (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4529",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. Sending astronauts back to the moon is one of the top space priorities of President Trump. But his administration wants to accomplish that without giving NASA additional money, and it won\u2019t occur until after he leaves office, even if he wins re-election.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budgets for a Trip to the Moon, but Not While Trump Is President (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4530",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/11/science/nasa-budget-moon.html",
        "text": "The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. The administration sees a greater role for the private sector in returning to the moon and running the International Space Station, which it would stop financing in 2025. Sending astronauts back to the moon is one of the top space priorities of President Trump. But his administration wants to accomplish that without giving NASA additional money, and it won\u2019t occur until after he leaves office, even if he wins re-election.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Future for People With Disabilities in Outer Space Takes Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4531",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/science/astronauts-disabilities-astroaccess.html",
        "text": "People with different types of disabilities tested their skills and technologies on a zero-gravity research flight with the goal of proving that they can safely go to space. People with different types of disabilities tested their skills and technologies on a zero-gravity research flight with the goal of proving that they can safely go to space. Eric Ingram typically moves through the world on his wheelchair. The 31-year-old chief executive of SCOUT Inc., a smart satellite components company, was born with Freeman-Sheldon Syndrome, a rare condition that affects his joints and blocked him from his dream of becoming an astronaut. He applied and was rejected, twice.",
        "author": "By Amanda Morris"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Future for People With Disabilities in Outer Space Takes Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4532",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/science/astronauts-disabilities-astroaccess.html",
        "text": "People with different types of disabilities tested their skills and technologies on a zero-gravity research flight with the goal of proving that they can safely go to space. People with different types of disabilities tested their skills and technologies on a zero-gravity research flight with the goal of proving that they can safely go to space. Eric Ingram typically moves through the world on his wheelchair. The 31-year-old chief executive of SCOUT Inc., a smart satellite components company, was born with Freeman-Sheldon Syndrome, a rare condition that affects his joints and blocked him from his dream of becoming an astronaut. He applied and was rejected, twice.",
        "author": "By Amanda Morris"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Future for People With Disabilities in Outer Space Takes Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4533",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/science/astronauts-disabilities-astroaccess.html",
        "text": "People with different types of disabilities tested their skills and technologies on a zero-gravity research flight with the goal of proving that they can safely go to space. People with different types of disabilities tested their skills and technologies on a zero-gravity research flight with the goal of proving that they can safely go to space. Eric Ingram typically moves through the world on his wheelchair. The 31-year-old chief executive of SCOUT Inc., a smart satellite components company, was born with Freeman-Sheldon Syndrome, a rare condition that affects his joints and blocked him from his dream of becoming an astronaut. He applied and was rejected, twice.",
        "author": "By Amanda Morris"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wally Funk, Trailblazing Female Pilot, Will Join Jeff Bezos on Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4534",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/science/space/wally-funk-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. Mary Wallace Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who was prevented from becoming an astronaut in the 1960s because of her sex, will join Jeff Bezos on his rocket ship company\u2019s first human flight into space, the company announced on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Isabella Grull\u00f3n Paz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wally Funk, Trailblazing Female Pilot, Will Join Jeff Bezos on Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4535",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/science/space/wally-funk-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. Mary Wallace Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who was prevented from becoming an astronaut in the 1960s because of her sex, will join Jeff Bezos on his rocket ship company\u2019s first human flight into space, the company announced on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Isabella Grull\u00f3n Paz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wally Funk, Trailblazing Female Pilot, Will Join Jeff Bezos on Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4536",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/science/space/wally-funk-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. Mary Wallace Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who was prevented from becoming an astronaut in the 1960s because of her sex, will join Jeff Bezos on his rocket ship company\u2019s first human flight into space, the company announced on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Isabella Grull\u00f3n Paz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wally Funk, Trailblazing Female Pilot, Will Join Jeff Bezos on Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4537",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/science/space/wally-funk-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. At 82, Ms. Funk will become the oldest person ever to go to space. In the 1960s, she was part of a test program to determine whether women were fit for space. Mary Wallace Funk, an 82-year-old pilot who was prevented from becoming an astronaut in the 1960s because of her sex, will join Jeff Bezos on his rocket ship company\u2019s first human flight into space, the company announced on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Isabella Grull\u00f3n Paz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The four astronauts are minutes from launching to orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4538",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/the-four-astronauts-are-minutes-from-launching-to-orbit.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency \u2014 will be sitting inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, boosted to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1, and the astronauts named their capsule Resilience. They are headed to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.  Four astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency \u2014 will be sitting inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, boosted to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1, and the astronauts named their capsule Resilience. They are headed to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The four astronauts are minutes from launching to orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4539",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/the-four-astronauts-are-minutes-from-launching-to-orbit.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency \u2014 will be sitting inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, boosted to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1, and the astronauts named their capsule Resilience. They are headed to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.  Four astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency \u2014 will be sitting inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, boosted to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1, and the astronauts named their capsule Resilience. They are headed to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The four astronauts are minutes from launching to orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4540",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/the-four-astronauts-are-minutes-from-launching-to-orbit.html",
        "text": "Four astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency \u2014 will be sitting inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, boosted to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1, and the astronauts named their capsule Resilience. They are headed to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.  Four astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency \u2014 will be sitting inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, boosted to orbit on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is known as Crew-1, and the astronauts named their capsule Resilience. They are headed to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA contest aims to build a better toilet for astronauts on 2024 moon mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4541",
        "date": "2020-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/nasa-contest-aims-to-build-a-better-toilet-for-astronauts-on-2024-moon-mission/2020/07/17/45bb61a0-c6e0-11ea-a99f-3bbdffb1af38_story.html",
        "text": "Humans are going back to the moon. But how will they \u201cgo\u201d when they get there?NASA wants to build a better toilet for astronauts on its upcoming Artemis mission, a moon excursion with a target date of 2024. And it wants the public to help.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe agency has mounted what it calls the Lunar Loo Challenge, a contest inviting designs from the global community in exchange for a prize purse of $35,000. Space presents a set of challenges for anyone who needs to use the toilet. The International Space Station has a toilet that was installed in the 1990s, but it is difficult to use and has resulted in messes and unpleasant odors. A new toilet called Universal Waste Management System is scheduled for installation this year, but it\u2019s designed for only the microgravity of space, not the lunar gravity of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s going to need a toilet that can be used on the moon\u2019s surface, as well \u2014 and one that\u2019s small enough to be installed on the lunar lander.The challenge calls on the public to figure out how to capture sewage and smells in both microgravity and on the moon. NASA hopes the prize purse, which will be disbursed among three prize winners, will \u201cattract radically new and different approaches to the problem of human waste capture and containment.\u201d Kids can enter, too; they\u2019ll receive noncash prizes.Teams have until Aug. 17 to submit their plans for a lunar loo. The adult winners will be announced Sept. 30, and the younger winners on Oct. 20. Proposals will be evaluated on their quality, feasibility, the likelihood that the design could be developed within the next two to three years, and their innovation.Oh, and the toilet\u2019s ability to contain, in the agency\u2019s words, \u201curine, feces (accommodating simultaneous urination and defecation), diarrhea, vomit, [and] menses.\u201dPeople may soon walk the moon\u2019s surface, but they\u2019ll still be subject to the same inconveniences as people on Earth. Ready to tackle the toilet challenge? Learn more at Herox.com/LunarLoo The agency\u2019s Lunar Loo Challenge invites successful designs that will receive a prize purse of $35,000. NASA contest aims to build a better toilet for astronauts on 2024 moon mission",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronaut reveals the lows of space travel: packing poop with her hand (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4542",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/29/nasa-astronaut-reveals-the-lows-of-space-travel-packing-poop-with-her-hand/",
        "text": "Just in\u00a0case you watched\u00a0those\u00a0videos of\u00a0giant rockets landing in tandem\u00a0or of Elon Musk's\u00a0car\u00a0gliding through orbit\u00a0and\u00a0fell\u00a0under the delusion that modern space flight is glamorous, please listen to NASA astronaut Peggy\u00a0Whitson's story\u00a0about how she regularly packed poo with her hand.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightActually, not yet; that might be too much too soon.Let's start with the basics of the International Space Station's\u00a0toilet. Here it is, like a wet vac\u00a0crammed into\u00a0a fridge:Said toilet was installed on the American side of the ISS in 2008. A\u00a0curtain was added\u00a0shortly afterward.\u00a0Then it flooded.Fortunately, there's a\u00a0second toilet on the Russian\u00a0side, though it sometimes breaks, too, leaving the astronauts to go inside their shuttles or, as a last resort, to use what is euphemistically\u00a0called\u00a0an \u201cApollo bag.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWe're just saying: it could be much worse.You'll notice that someone has\u00a0decorated the\u00a0cubicle with\u00a0a cartoon of an astronaut and an outhouse. It's\u00a0probably important to keep your\u00a0sense of humor when using this toilet.AdvertisementSomeone\u00a0has also posted handwritten\u00a0notes around the stall, because carefully following instructions\u00a0will be very important, too.The best part of the toilet, or the least-terrible part of it, is the peeing apparatus. It's just a funnel, a hose and a vacuum, but it's relatively easy to use, and the pee goes into\u00a0a state-of-the-art recycling system that turns\u00a0it back into water.That's kind of cool. The worst part is pooping.The worst\u00a0thing in\u00a0all of space may be pooping.Pooping in deep space has NASA stumped. The \u2018Space Poop Challenge\u2019 is your way to help.A European Space Agency astronaut once explained\u00a0how the toilet works in a YouTube demonstration (don't worry; safe for work).Story continues below advertisementUnder the best of circumstances, you hover over the wet vac-looking thing and poop into a plastic bag lining a small hole at the top.The video\u00a0made it\u00a0seem easy, but it's not easy to aim poop in zero gravity.Advertisement\u201cYou're trying to hit a pretty small target,\u201d Whitson\u00a0told Business Insider last week, as prelude to her horror story.Her fellow NASA astronauts have to practice the technique\u00a0before they leave Earth \u2014 using\u00a0training toilets, and an alarmingly positioned video camera to help line things up.And there are accidents, said Whitson, who has spent two years of her life in space.\u00a0Free-floating\u00a0poop has been a hazard of space travel since the days of the moon landings.Story continues below advertisementBut, okay, so you successfully poop into the\u00a0hole and push the bag into the\u00a0wet vac, separated by a thin curtain from the rest of a space station\u00a0and the 250-mile void between it and Earth.What then? No one is going to recycle that poop.The best thing NASA knows to do with it is to shoot it out\u00a0of the International Space Station and let it burn up in Earth's atmosphere like a shooting star.\u00a0Do not make a wish.A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthBut\u00a0the poop can't just\u00a0be launched\u00a0into space immediately. Doing anything in space is\u00a0difficult and expensive; it reportedly cost\u00a0$19 million just to\u00a0build the fridge toilet,\u00a0flushing not included.AdvertisementPer the European Space Agency, the poop just sits\u00a0inside the toilet until mass disposal\u00a0\u2014 which is every\u00a010 days or so. If you've ever used a port-a-potty\u00a0on the last day of a music festival, you can imagine what the toilet on a crowded space station is like after\u00a0more than a week.Story continues below advertisementAnd so, not pictured in the YouTube video, is\u00a0a\u00a0final procedure that Whitson\u00a0revealed\u00a0with a grimace to Business Insider:\u201cAfter it starts getting full, you have to put a rubber glove on,\u201d she said, \u201cand pack it down.\u201dThis is not to say\u00a0that 21st century space travel is all bad. Far from it.On\u00a0a new episode of National Geographic's \u201cOne Strange Rock,\u201d Whitson\u00a0choked back her emotions as she remembered the splendor of her\u00a0record-setting time in space: gliding weightlessly through\u00a0a craft that represents the pinnacle of human ingenuity; looking out a window\u00a0at\u00a0an entire swirling hemisphere.But then you turn around, and there's the $19 million wet vac and funnel, and\u00a0it's been\u00a0a week\u00a0since the last trash day and that space poop needs squishing.Floating in zero gravity looks effortless and fun, but there are some health risks associated with space travel. (The Washington Post)More reading:An astronaut\u2019s surprisingly helpful guide to pooping in spaceHere comes your own little place in space. It\u2019s not a room with a view.Pooping in deep space has NASA stumped. The \u2018Space Poop Challenge\u2019 is your way to help. The toilet on the International Space Station looks like a wet vac crammed into a fridge and \"flushes\" only once every 10 days. NASA astronaut reveals the lows of space travel: packing poop with her hand",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, heeding Trump, may add astronauts to a test flight moon mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4543",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/15/nasa-heeding-trump-considers-adding-astronauts-to-a-practice-moon-mission/",
        "text": "President Trump has indicated that he wants to make a splash in space. During his transition, he spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley about John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 vow to go to the moon before the decade was out. Now Trump and his aides may do something very similar: demand that NASA send astronauts to orbit the moon before the end of Trump's first term \u2014 a move that one Trump adviser said would be a clear signal to the Chinese that the U.S. intends to retain dominance in space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA already has a plan to launch its new, jumbo Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with an Orion capsule on top in late 2018, a mission known as EM-1. No one would be aboard. The capsule would orbit the moon and return to Earth, splashing down in the ocean.This is intended as the first test flight of SLS and part of the integration of the new rocket and new capsule. Significantly, the SLS and Orion are both still under construction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording to current plans, a crewed mission, EM-2, would not be launched until several years later under the NASA timeline \u2014 certainly not during Trump's current term. That crewed mission would also orbit the moon.But on Wednesday, NASA's acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, sent a letter to employees saying he'd instructed the top NASA official for human spaceflight, associate administrator William Gerstenmaier, to explore the feasibility of adding astronauts to the EM-1 flight.Lightfoot wrote: \u201cI know the challenges associated with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date. That said, I also want to hear about the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans farther into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is, by NASA standards, a bombshell announcement, because major missions involving new hardware and astronauts are typically planned many years in advance. Rush jobs are not NASA's way.With Trump, Gingrich and GOP in charge, NASA may go back to the moonAt the same time, NASA officials and space policy experts understand that Trump wants to do something dramatic. Scott Pace, head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said earlier this week, \u201cThere is strong interest in finding significant near-term accomplishments that can be done in the first term.\u201dBob Walker, an adviser to the Trump transition team and a former congressman who chaired the House Science Committee, said Tuesday: \u201cWhat I hear being discussed is the potential for sometime within the first Trump term being able to go and do an Apollo 8 mission\" -- meaning a lunar orbit mission like the one performed by Apollo 8 in December 1968.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis would be another precursor to ultimately landing. And I think sometime within a second Trump term, you could think about putting a landing vehicle on the moon,\u201d Walker said.\u201cIt's also a demonstration of our technological competence. At some point, I think the Chinese need to awaken to the fact that the U.S. does intend to maintain its pre-eminence in space. I can guarantee you that if we don\u2019t go ahead and do a program like this, the Chinese are headed in that direction.\u201dBut Walker did not say such a mission would necessarily have to use NASA's SLS rocket and Orion capsule. Entrepreneurial space companies, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin, are planning their own heavy-lift rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementNewt Gingrich, an influential adviser to Trump when it comes to space issues, is among those pushing for a more entrepreneurial space program. In an email to The Washington Post, Gingrich, who said he was on a trip to Antarctica, blasted NASA for becoming an agency that avoids risk, and said the space program should leverage the enthusiasm and money of the many billionaires interested in commercializing space.\u201cThe key is to liberate space from government monopoly and maximize the inventive entrepreneurial spirit of the Wright brothers, Edison, Ford and other classic Americans,\u201d Gingrich wrote. \u201cDone properly we can be on the moon in President Trump's first term and orbiting Mars by the end of his second term.\u201dHere is the full \u201cAgency Update\u201d sent to NASA employees by Lightfoot:Good morning! As I've discussed before, we continue working closely with the transition team. The members of the team are excited to be a part of this great agency and everyone is committed to keeping you informed of developments. I know you\u2019ve been reading a lot in the media and hearing from colleagues about what may or may not be our future direction. I want you to know that when those decisions are made, you\u2019ll hear it from me.From my interactions with the transition team, NASA is clearly a priority for the President and his administration. Since most of you weren\u2019t able to join me today at the Space Launch System/Orion Suppliers Conference, I wanted to share what I told that group. I told them how critical their work is to our future \u2014 to the nation\u2019s future and our next giant leaps in exploration.I shared that we've already hit a lot of milestones, and the next ones are on the close horizon. It\u2019s a testament to your hard work that we were able to say that last year, and we\u2019re confidently able to say it again this year.The magnitude of what we\u2019re doing with SLS and Orion is incredible, as are the capabilities we\u2019re creating for this nation, which will take humans farther than we ever have before.At NASA, we\u2019re leveraging the very best the country has to offer on this work, and it\u2019s advancing the national economy.As the Acting Administrator, my perspective is that we are on the verge of even greater discoveries. President Trump said in his inaugural address that we will \u201cunlock the mysteries of space.\u201d Accordingly, it is imperative to the mission of this agency that we are successful in safely and effectively executing both the SLS and Orion programs.Related to that, I have asked Bill Gerstenmaier to initiate a study to assess the feasibility of adding a crew to Exploration Mission-1, the first integrated flight of SLS and Orion. I know the challenges associated with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date. That said, I also want to hear about the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans farther into space. The SLS and ORION missions, coupled with those promised from record levels of private investment in space, will help put NASA and America in a position to unlock those mysteries and to ensure this nation\u2019s world pre-eminence in exploring the cosmos.There has been a lot of speculation in the public discourse about NASA being pulled in two directions \u2014 what has come before and what we want to do now. At NASA, this is an \u201cand\u201d proposition, not an \u201cor.\u201d To get where we want to go, we need to work with the companies represented at the SLS and Orion suppliers conference AND those industry partners that work with us in other areas across the country \u2014 all of whom have the long-term view on this work. We must work with everyone to secure our leadership in space \u2014 and we will.This is indeed an exciting time for our agency, and I know all of us share in this enthusiasm. I admire your passion and energy, and I want you to know how important you are to the success of the team and to the future of NASA. Your innovation and creative thinking will drive America\u2019s influence in the coming years and decades.Stay focused. Thanks for all you are doing every day, and I will share more with you in future updates. \u201cThere is strong interest in finding significant near-term accomplishments that can be done in the first term.\u201d  NASA, heeding Trump, may add astronauts to a test flight moon mission",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, heeding Trump, may add astronauts to a test flight moon mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4544",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/15/nasa-heeding-trump-considers-adding-astronauts-to-a-practice-moon-mission/",
        "text": "President Trump has indicated that he wants to make a splash in space. During his transition, he spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley about John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 vow to go to the moon before the decade was out. Now Trump and his aides may do something very similar: demand that NASA send astronauts to orbit the moon before the end of Trump's first term \u2014 a move that one Trump adviser said would be a clear signal to the Chinese that the U.S. intends to retain dominance in space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA already has a plan to launch its new, jumbo Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with an Orion capsule on top in late 2018, a mission known as EM-1. No one would be aboard. The capsule would orbit the moon and return to Earth, splashing down in the ocean.This is intended as the first test flight of SLS and part of the integration of the new rocket and new capsule. Significantly, the SLS and Orion are both still under construction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording to current plans, a crewed mission, EM-2, would not be launched until several years later under the NASA timeline \u2014 certainly not during Trump's current term. That crewed mission would also orbit the moon.But on Wednesday, NASA's acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, sent a letter to employees saying he'd instructed the top NASA official for human spaceflight, associate administrator William Gerstenmaier, to explore the feasibility of adding astronauts to the EM-1 flight.Lightfoot wrote: \u201cI know the challenges associated with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date. That said, I also want to hear about the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans farther into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is, by NASA standards, a bombshell announcement, because major missions involving new hardware and astronauts are typically planned many years in advance. Rush jobs are not NASA's way.With Trump, Gingrich and GOP in charge, NASA may go back to the moonAt the same time, NASA officials and space policy experts understand that Trump wants to do something dramatic. Scott Pace, head of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said earlier this week, \u201cThere is strong interest in finding significant near-term accomplishments that can be done in the first term.\u201dBob Walker, an adviser to the Trump transition team and a former congressman who chaired the House Science Committee, said Tuesday: \u201cWhat I hear being discussed is the potential for sometime within the first Trump term being able to go and do an Apollo 8 mission\" -- meaning a lunar orbit mission like the one performed by Apollo 8 in December 1968.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis would be another precursor to ultimately landing. And I think sometime within a second Trump term, you could think about putting a landing vehicle on the moon,\u201d Walker said.\u201cIt's also a demonstration of our technological competence. At some point, I think the Chinese need to awaken to the fact that the U.S. does intend to maintain its pre-eminence in space. I can guarantee you that if we don\u2019t go ahead and do a program like this, the Chinese are headed in that direction.\u201dBut Walker did not say such a mission would necessarily have to use NASA's SLS rocket and Orion capsule. Entrepreneurial space companies, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin, are planning their own heavy-lift rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementNewt Gingrich, an influential adviser to Trump when it comes to space issues, is among those pushing for a more entrepreneurial space program. In an email to The Washington Post, Gingrich, who said he was on a trip to Antarctica, blasted NASA for becoming an agency that avoids risk, and said the space program should leverage the enthusiasm and money of the many billionaires interested in commercializing space.\u201cThe key is to liberate space from government monopoly and maximize the inventive entrepreneurial spirit of the Wright brothers, Edison, Ford and other classic Americans,\u201d Gingrich wrote. \u201cDone properly we can be on the moon in President Trump's first term and orbiting Mars by the end of his second term.\u201dHere is the full \u201cAgency Update\u201d sent to NASA employees by Lightfoot:Good morning! As I've discussed before, we continue working closely with the transition team. The members of the team are excited to be a part of this great agency and everyone is committed to keeping you informed of developments. I know you\u2019ve been reading a lot in the media and hearing from colleagues about what may or may not be our future direction. I want you to know that when those decisions are made, you\u2019ll hear it from me.From my interactions with the transition team, NASA is clearly a priority for the President and his administration. Since most of you weren\u2019t able to join me today at the Space Launch System/Orion Suppliers Conference, I wanted to share what I told that group. I told them how critical their work is to our future \u2014 to the nation\u2019s future and our next giant leaps in exploration.I shared that we've already hit a lot of milestones, and the next ones are on the close horizon. It\u2019s a testament to your hard work that we were able to say that last year, and we\u2019re confidently able to say it again this year.The magnitude of what we\u2019re doing with SLS and Orion is incredible, as are the capabilities we\u2019re creating for this nation, which will take humans farther than we ever have before.At NASA, we\u2019re leveraging the very best the country has to offer on this work, and it\u2019s advancing the national economy.As the Acting Administrator, my perspective is that we are on the verge of even greater discoveries. President Trump said in his inaugural address that we will \u201cunlock the mysteries of space.\u201d Accordingly, it is imperative to the mission of this agency that we are successful in safely and effectively executing both the SLS and Orion programs.Related to that, I have asked Bill Gerstenmaier to initiate a study to assess the feasibility of adding a crew to Exploration Mission-1, the first integrated flight of SLS and Orion. I know the challenges associated with such a proposition, like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date. That said, I also want to hear about the opportunities it could present to accelerate the effort of the first crewed flight and what it would take to accomplish that first step of pushing humans farther into space. The SLS and ORION missions, coupled with those promised from record levels of private investment in space, will help put NASA and America in a position to unlock those mysteries and to ensure this nation\u2019s world pre-eminence in exploring the cosmos.There has been a lot of speculation in the public discourse about NASA being pulled in two directions \u2014 what has come before and what we want to do now. At NASA, this is an \u201cand\u201d proposition, not an \u201cor.\u201d To get where we want to go, we need to work with the companies represented at the SLS and Orion suppliers conference AND those industry partners that work with us in other areas across the country \u2014 all of whom have the long-term view on this work. We must work with everyone to secure our leadership in space \u2014 and we will.This is indeed an exciting time for our agency, and I know all of us share in this enthusiasm. I admire your passion and energy, and I want you to know how important you are to the success of the team and to the future of NASA. Your innovation and creative thinking will drive America\u2019s influence in the coming years and decades.Stay focused. Thanks for all you are doing every day, and I will share more with you in future updates. \u201cThere is strong interest in finding significant near-term accomplishments that can be done in the first term.\u201d  NASA, heeding Trump, may add astronauts to a test flight moon mission",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ukraine\u2019s Lofty Ambitions, Fallen to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4545",
        "date": "2018-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/science/ukraine-space-science.html",
        "text": "Signs of the country\u2019s space-age glory are everywhere, and Ukrainians are determined to hold on to their scientific traditions. Signs of the country\u2019s space-age glory are everywhere, and Ukrainians are determined to hold on to their scientific traditions. Ukraine was once a vital part of the Soviet space program, home to many research institutes and rocket factories. Now, wracked by war and shaken by political upheaval, the nation struggles to hold on to its scientific traditions. On a recent visit, I was struck by the determination of researchers stripped of the resources taken for granted in the West. The biologist still tending a jar filled with bacteria once destined for space. The retiree holding together a small astronomy museum in Kiev with spare parts and pluck.",
        "author": "By Misha Friedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ukraine\u2019s Lofty Ambitions, Fallen to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4546",
        "date": "2018-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/science/ukraine-space-science.html",
        "text": "Signs of the country\u2019s space-age glory are everywhere, and Ukrainians are determined to hold on to their scientific traditions. Signs of the country\u2019s space-age glory are everywhere, and Ukrainians are determined to hold on to their scientific traditions. Ukraine was once a vital part of the Soviet space program, home to many research institutes and rocket factories. Now, wracked by war and shaken by political upheaval, the nation struggles to hold on to its scientific traditions. On a recent visit, I was struck by the determination of researchers stripped of the resources taken for granted in the West. The biologist still tending a jar filled with bacteria once destined for space. The retiree holding together a small astronomy museum in Kiev with spare parts and pluck.",
        "author": "By Misha Friedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Heads Up! A Used Chinese Rocket Is Tumbling Back to Earth This Weekend. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4547",
        "date": "2021-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/science/china-rocket-crash-long-march-5b.html",
        "text": "The chances of it hitting a populated area are small, but not zero. That has raised questions about how the country\u2019s space program designs its missions. The chances of it hitting a populated area are small, but not zero. That has raised questions about how the country\u2019s space program designs its missions. No, you are almost certainly not going to be hit by a 10-story, 23-ton piece of a rocket hurtling back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Heads Up! A Used Chinese Rocket Is Tumbling Back to Earth This Weekend. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4548",
        "date": "2021-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/science/china-rocket-crash-long-march-5b.html",
        "text": "The chances of it hitting a populated area are small, but not zero. That has raised questions about how the country\u2019s space program designs its missions. The chances of it hitting a populated area are small, but not zero. That has raised questions about how the country\u2019s space program designs its missions. No, you are almost certainly not going to be hit by a 10-story, 23-ton piece of a rocket hurtling back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Heads Up! A Used Chinese Rocket Is Tumbling Back to Earth This Weekend. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4549",
        "date": "2021-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/science/china-rocket-crash-long-march-5b.html",
        "text": "The chances of it hitting a populated area are small, but not zero. That has raised questions about how the country\u2019s space program designs its missions. The chances of it hitting a populated area are small, but not zero. That has raised questions about how the country\u2019s space program designs its missions. No, you are almost certainly not going to be hit by a 10-story, 23-ton piece of a rocket hurtling back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can this flat-Earther\u2019s long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4550",
        "date": "2018-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/24/can-this-flat-earthers-long-delayed-rocket-launch-be-saved-we-may-soon-find-out/",
        "text": "Even NASA had disasters\u00a0with\u00a0its moon missions, so was it\u00a0really fair to expect\u00a0Mike Hughes to\u00a0build a rocket, fly to\u00a0space, and prove once and\u00a0for all that the Earth is flat without\u00a0a few\u00a0hitches along the way?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHughes \u2014 a 61-year-old daredevil-turned-rocket-maker-turned-round-Earth-skeptic \u2014 intends to\u00a0launch himself 52 miles\u00a0into the sky by\u00a0the end of year. Then he'll see for himself whether the planet is shaped like a ball, as most of humankind has\u00a0believed for centuries, or like\u00a0a Frisbee, as most flat-earth philosophies assume. The problem is, Hughes said, the hot-air balloon, rocket pack and space suit\u00a0he needs to get him to the required vantage point (we're hazy on the\u00a0specific logistics) will cost about\u00a0$2 million. He's a limo\u00a0driver by trade.Story continues below advertisementTo raise the money, Hughes was going to launch himself a mile\u00a0across the Mojave Desert back in November, in a steam-powered rocket with \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH\u201d on the side, as a\u00a0fundraising stunt. Call it Phase 1 of his\u00a0one-man space program.AdvertisementHe got\u00a0the\u00a0publicity\u00a0he wanted, and then some, with headlines around across the world.\u00a0But the rocket launch never happened.This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat\u201cThis is what happens anytime you have to deal with any kind of government agency,\u201d Hughes told The Post\u00a0at the time. He said the Bureau of Land Management forbade him from launching\u00a0in Amboy, Calif., hours before he was set to go.Worse, he said, while\u00a0he tried to get the paperwork sorted out, his combined mobile home/rocket launcher\u00a0broke down in his driveway.While he set about his repairs, much of the public\u00a0turned against Hughes. Some mocked him for believing in a flat Earth.\u00a0Some suggested he'd only adopted the philosophy to raise funds for his stunts, and\u00a0a few even accused him of faking his previous rocket flight several years ago.Now, Hughes says, he's ready to\u00a0launch again \u2014 with a redesigned rocket that\u00a0he will climb inside on Feb. 3 and\u00a0fly straight up, for a third of a mile,\u00a0to complete phase 1 of his mission and win back\u00a0the public's faith.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe's got a bit of damage control to do in the meantime.\u201cThe flat-Earth stuff, it makes people crazy,\u201d\u00a0Hughes\u00a0told The Washington Post. \u201cNo matter what I do, people are going to minimize it.\u201dHe recorded a video last week rebutting some of the accusations against him \u2014 notably questioning his faith in flat-Earth theory, if not also his wisdom in trying to steam himself\u00a0off\u00a0the surface of the disc.\u201cPeople are calling me not a flat-Earther,\u201d Hughes said in the video. \u201cDo I believe the earth is shaped like a Frisbee, or flat, or whatever? I do, because in my months of research I've not been able to prove\u201d otherwise.Forget space, Hughes said,\u00a0he's also\u00a0come to doubt what lies under\u00a0the planet's\u00a0surface. \u201cWe've only drilled\u00a07 1/2 miles into the Earth,\u201d he said. \u201cSo all the crap we were taught in school about the mantle is all B.S. No one knows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHughes said\u00a0he's\u00a0parted ways with the Flat Earth Society and other flat-Earth organizations that helped fund and publicize his failed November launch. (He raised nearly $8,000 on GoFundMe.) He's an independent thinker now, and said if he makes it into space and sees a curved horizon, he'll accept that the Earth is round.He just needs to see for himself.Anyway, that's a ways off. First, Hughes needs to avoid another delay, and launch next week on private property outside Amboy \u2014 with \u201cFLAT EARTH\u201d emblazoned on the side of his new rocket, so as to convince people to\u00a0donate\u00a0hundreds of thousands of dollars\u00a0to build the balloon and buy the space suit for\u00a0Phase 2.\u00a0Because he plans to take off on private property this time, he said, the government can't get in his way.Story continues below advertisementIn his video, Hughes also addressed critics who accused him of faking his most famous stunt before his flat-Earth\u00a0conversion, a rocket launch in 2014, because\u00a0video\u00a0of the stunt never\u00a0shows him inside the thing.AdvertisementEasy explanation, Hughes said: His cameraman had to stop filming to help him with the canopy.While he won't allow live spectators at next Saturday's launch \u2014 and has promised to shoot down any drones \u2014 he said in the video it would be\u00a0live-streamed.When The Post phoned Hughes on Wednesday, he said\u00a0the pay-per-view company he planned to use was \u201cgoing bankrupt,\u201d and he was looking for alternatives. He contacted the paper\u00a0again a few hours later to say the company would stream his event after all.Story continues below advertisementWe'll see what happens next week. To paraphrase\u00a0John F. Kennedy\u00a0at the dawn of the moon missions, no one said\u00a0this would be\u00a0easy.This post has been updated to reflect Hughes's additional comments about the pay-per-view company.Read the rest of our series on the flat-Earth space program:This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flatA flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpA flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 again Mike Hughes was supposed to launch himself in a homemade rocket months ago as part of his flat-Earth space program. Now some doubt his beliefs. Can this flat-Earther\u2019s long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can this flat-Earther\u2019s long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4551",
        "date": "2018-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/24/can-this-flat-earthers-long-delayed-rocket-launch-be-saved-we-may-soon-find-out/",
        "text": "Even NASA had disasters\u00a0with\u00a0its moon missions, so was it\u00a0really fair to expect\u00a0Mike Hughes to\u00a0build a rocket, fly to\u00a0space, and prove once and\u00a0for all that the Earth is flat without\u00a0a few\u00a0hitches along the way?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHughes \u2014 a 61-year-old daredevil-turned-rocket-maker-turned-round-Earth-skeptic \u2014 intends to\u00a0launch himself 52 miles\u00a0into the sky by\u00a0the end of year. Then he'll see for himself whether the planet is shaped like a ball, as most of humankind has\u00a0believed for centuries, or like\u00a0a Frisbee, as most flat-earth philosophies assume. The problem is, Hughes said, the hot-air balloon, rocket pack and space suit\u00a0he needs to get him to the required vantage point (we're hazy on the\u00a0specific logistics) will cost about\u00a0$2 million. He's a limo\u00a0driver by trade.Story continues below advertisementTo raise the money, Hughes was going to launch himself a mile\u00a0across the Mojave Desert back in November, in a steam-powered rocket with \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH\u201d on the side, as a\u00a0fundraising stunt. Call it Phase 1 of his\u00a0one-man space program.AdvertisementHe got\u00a0the\u00a0publicity\u00a0he wanted, and then some, with headlines around across the world.\u00a0But the rocket launch never happened.This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat\u201cThis is what happens anytime you have to deal with any kind of government agency,\u201d Hughes told The Post\u00a0at the time. He said the Bureau of Land Management forbade him from launching\u00a0in Amboy, Calif., hours before he was set to go.Worse, he said, while\u00a0he tried to get the paperwork sorted out, his combined mobile home/rocket launcher\u00a0broke down in his driveway.While he set about his repairs, much of the public\u00a0turned against Hughes. Some mocked him for believing in a flat Earth.\u00a0Some suggested he'd only adopted the philosophy to raise funds for his stunts, and\u00a0a few even accused him of faking his previous rocket flight several years ago.Now, Hughes says, he's ready to\u00a0launch again \u2014 with a redesigned rocket that\u00a0he will climb inside on Feb. 3 and\u00a0fly straight up, for a third of a mile,\u00a0to complete phase 1 of his mission and win back\u00a0the public's faith.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe's got a bit of damage control to do in the meantime.\u201cThe flat-Earth stuff, it makes people crazy,\u201d\u00a0Hughes\u00a0told The Washington Post. \u201cNo matter what I do, people are going to minimize it.\u201dHe recorded a video last week rebutting some of the accusations against him \u2014 notably questioning his faith in flat-Earth theory, if not also his wisdom in trying to steam himself\u00a0off\u00a0the surface of the disc.\u201cPeople are calling me not a flat-Earther,\u201d Hughes said in the video. \u201cDo I believe the earth is shaped like a Frisbee, or flat, or whatever? I do, because in my months of research I've not been able to prove\u201d otherwise.Forget space, Hughes said,\u00a0he's also\u00a0come to doubt what lies under\u00a0the planet's\u00a0surface. \u201cWe've only drilled\u00a07 1/2 miles into the Earth,\u201d he said. \u201cSo all the crap we were taught in school about the mantle is all B.S. No one knows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHughes said\u00a0he's\u00a0parted ways with the Flat Earth Society and other flat-Earth organizations that helped fund and publicize his failed November launch. (He raised nearly $8,000 on GoFundMe.) He's an independent thinker now, and said if he makes it into space and sees a curved horizon, he'll accept that the Earth is round.He just needs to see for himself.Anyway, that's a ways off. First, Hughes needs to avoid another delay, and launch next week on private property outside Amboy \u2014 with \u201cFLAT EARTH\u201d emblazoned on the side of his new rocket, so as to convince people to\u00a0donate\u00a0hundreds of thousands of dollars\u00a0to build the balloon and buy the space suit for\u00a0Phase 2.\u00a0Because he plans to take off on private property this time, he said, the government can't get in his way.Story continues below advertisementIn his video, Hughes also addressed critics who accused him of faking his most famous stunt before his flat-Earth\u00a0conversion, a rocket launch in 2014, because\u00a0video\u00a0of the stunt never\u00a0shows him inside the thing.AdvertisementEasy explanation, Hughes said: His cameraman had to stop filming to help him with the canopy.While he won't allow live spectators at next Saturday's launch \u2014 and has promised to shoot down any drones \u2014 he said in the video it would be\u00a0live-streamed.When The Post phoned Hughes on Wednesday, he said\u00a0the pay-per-view company he planned to use was \u201cgoing bankrupt,\u201d and he was looking for alternatives. He contacted the paper\u00a0again a few hours later to say the company would stream his event after all.Story continues below advertisementWe'll see what happens next week. To paraphrase\u00a0John F. Kennedy\u00a0at the dawn of the moon missions, no one said\u00a0this would be\u00a0easy.This post has been updated to reflect Hughes's additional comments about the pay-per-view company.Read the rest of our series on the flat-Earth space program:This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flatA flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpA flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 again Mike Hughes was supposed to launch himself in a homemade rocket months ago as part of his flat-Earth space program. Now some doubt his beliefs. Can this flat-Earther\u2019s long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can this flat-Earther\u2019s long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4552",
        "date": "2018-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/24/can-this-flat-earthers-long-delayed-rocket-launch-be-saved-we-may-soon-find-out/",
        "text": "Even NASA had disasters\u00a0with\u00a0its moon missions, so was it\u00a0really fair to expect\u00a0Mike Hughes to\u00a0build a rocket, fly to\u00a0space, and prove once and\u00a0for all that the Earth is flat without\u00a0a few\u00a0hitches along the way?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHughes \u2014 a 61-year-old daredevil-turned-rocket-maker-turned-round-Earth-skeptic \u2014 intends to\u00a0launch himself 52 miles\u00a0into the sky by\u00a0the end of year. Then he'll see for himself whether the planet is shaped like a ball, as most of humankind has\u00a0believed for centuries, or like\u00a0a Frisbee, as most flat-earth philosophies assume. The problem is, Hughes said, the hot-air balloon, rocket pack and space suit\u00a0he needs to get him to the required vantage point (we're hazy on the\u00a0specific logistics) will cost about\u00a0$2 million. He's a limo\u00a0driver by trade.Story continues below advertisementTo raise the money, Hughes was going to launch himself a mile\u00a0across the Mojave Desert back in November, in a steam-powered rocket with \u201cRESEARCH FLAT EARTH\u201d on the side, as a\u00a0fundraising stunt. Call it Phase 1 of his\u00a0one-man space program.AdvertisementHe got\u00a0the\u00a0publicity\u00a0he wanted, and then some, with headlines around across the world.\u00a0But the rocket launch never happened.This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat\u201cThis is what happens anytime you have to deal with any kind of government agency,\u201d Hughes told The Post\u00a0at the time. He said the Bureau of Land Management forbade him from launching\u00a0in Amboy, Calif., hours before he was set to go.Worse, he said, while\u00a0he tried to get the paperwork sorted out, his combined mobile home/rocket launcher\u00a0broke down in his driveway.While he set about his repairs, much of the public\u00a0turned against Hughes. Some mocked him for believing in a flat Earth.\u00a0Some suggested he'd only adopted the philosophy to raise funds for his stunts, and\u00a0a few even accused him of faking his previous rocket flight several years ago.Now, Hughes says, he's ready to\u00a0launch again \u2014 with a redesigned rocket that\u00a0he will climb inside on Feb. 3 and\u00a0fly straight up, for a third of a mile,\u00a0to complete phase 1 of his mission and win back\u00a0the public's faith.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe's got a bit of damage control to do in the meantime.\u201cThe flat-Earth stuff, it makes people crazy,\u201d\u00a0Hughes\u00a0told The Washington Post. \u201cNo matter what I do, people are going to minimize it.\u201dHe recorded a video last week rebutting some of the accusations against him \u2014 notably questioning his faith in flat-Earth theory, if not also his wisdom in trying to steam himself\u00a0off\u00a0the surface of the disc.\u201cPeople are calling me not a flat-Earther,\u201d Hughes said in the video. \u201cDo I believe the earth is shaped like a Frisbee, or flat, or whatever? I do, because in my months of research I've not been able to prove\u201d otherwise.Forget space, Hughes said,\u00a0he's also\u00a0come to doubt what lies under\u00a0the planet's\u00a0surface. \u201cWe've only drilled\u00a07 1/2 miles into the Earth,\u201d he said. \u201cSo all the crap we were taught in school about the mantle is all B.S. No one knows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHughes said\u00a0he's\u00a0parted ways with the Flat Earth Society and other flat-Earth organizations that helped fund and publicize his failed November launch. (He raised nearly $8,000 on GoFundMe.) He's an independent thinker now, and said if he makes it into space and sees a curved horizon, he'll accept that the Earth is round.He just needs to see for himself.Anyway, that's a ways off. First, Hughes needs to avoid another delay, and launch next week on private property outside Amboy \u2014 with \u201cFLAT EARTH\u201d emblazoned on the side of his new rocket, so as to convince people to\u00a0donate\u00a0hundreds of thousands of dollars\u00a0to build the balloon and buy the space suit for\u00a0Phase 2.\u00a0Because he plans to take off on private property this time, he said, the government can't get in his way.Story continues below advertisementIn his video, Hughes also addressed critics who accused him of faking his most famous stunt before his flat-Earth\u00a0conversion, a rocket launch in 2014, because\u00a0video\u00a0of the stunt never\u00a0shows him inside the thing.AdvertisementEasy explanation, Hughes said: His cameraman had to stop filming to help him with the canopy.While he won't allow live spectators at next Saturday's launch \u2014 and has promised to shoot down any drones \u2014 he said in the video it would be\u00a0live-streamed.When The Post phoned Hughes on Wednesday, he said\u00a0the pay-per-view company he planned to use was \u201cgoing bankrupt,\u201d and he was looking for alternatives. He contacted the paper\u00a0again a few hours later to say the company would stream his event after all.Story continues below advertisementWe'll see what happens next week. To paraphrase\u00a0John F. Kennedy\u00a0at the dawn of the moon missions, no one said\u00a0this would be\u00a0easy.This post has been updated to reflect Hughes's additional comments about the pay-per-view company.Read the rest of our series on the flat-Earth space program:This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flatA flat-Earther's plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket just hit a speed bumpA flat-Earther\u2019s plan to launch himself in a homemade rocket has been postponed \u2014 again Mike Hughes was supposed to launch himself in a homemade rocket months ago as part of his flat-Earth space program. Now some doubt his beliefs. Can this flat-Earther\u2019s long-delayed rocket launch be saved? We may soon find out.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Rip in the Fabric of Interstellar Dreams (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4553",
        "date": "2020-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/science/space-telescope-puerto-rico-arecibo.html",
        "text": "The iconic Arecibo radio telescope is temporarily crippled by an accident. The iconic Arecibo radio telescope is temporarily crippled by an accident. The road to Arecibo Observatory in northwestern Puerto Rico winds upward through farms and rainforest. Chickens run across the road. Then, suddenly, you reach the top: a fence, guards and gleaming white buildings and towers, as if you had stumbled into the lair of a James Bond supervillain.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Arecibo Observatory, a Great Eye on the Cosmos, Is Going Dark (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4554",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/science/arecibo-observatory.html",
        "text": "The radio telescope in Puerto Rico has to come down before it collapses. The radio telescope in Puerto Rico has to come down before it collapses. One of the great icons of human curiosity, the Arecibo radio telescope, is going to be torn down, the National Science Foundation, its owner, announced today. From its perch in the mountains of Puerto Rico, the observatory has served for decades as the vanguard of the search for alien civilizations and guarded the planet against killer asteroids.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Images Show the Sun\u2019s Surface in Greater Detail Than Ever Before (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4555",
        "date": "2020-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/science/daniel-inouye-solar-telescope-pictures.html",
        "text": "A new telescope in Hawaii takes aim at our nearest star and its mysteries. A new telescope in Hawaii takes aim at our nearest star and its mysteries. On Wednesday, astronomers released what they said were the most detailed images ever taken of the surface of our sun.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How They Took the First Picture of a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4556",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/10/science/event-horizon-black-hole-images.html",
        "text": "A planet-sized network of radio telescopes has assembled the first image of a black hole. A planet-sized network of radio telescopes has assembled the first image of a black hole. A planet-sized network of radio telescopes has assembled the first image of a black hole.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Hawaii, Construction to Begin on Disputed Telescope Project (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4557",
        "date": "2019-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/science/telescope-mauna-kea-hawaii.html",
        "text": "Work on the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by Hawaiian activists, could start soon. Work on the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by Hawaiian activists, could start soon. Gov. David Ige of Hawaii announced on Thursday that a \u201cnotice to proceed\u201d had been issued for construction of a giant, long-contested telescope on Mauna Kea, the volcano on the Big Island that 13 major telescopes already call home. Construction could start as soon as July.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A costly and difficult path to the launchpad. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4558",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/science/webb-telescope-cost.html",
        "text": "It has been an expensive and difficult process to complete the most powerful space telescope ever built. It has been an expensive and difficult process to complete the most powerful space telescope ever built. Building the world\u2019s most powerful space telescope has been a bit difficult.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "A costly and difficult path to the launchpad. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4559",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/science/webb-telescope-cost.html",
        "text": "It has been an expensive and difficult process to complete the most powerful space telescope ever built. It has been an expensive and difficult process to complete the most powerful space telescope ever built. Building the world\u2019s most powerful space telescope has been a bit difficult.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Largest Comet Ever Found Is Making Its Move Into a Sky Near You (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4560",
        "date": "2021-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/science/comet-largest-ever-seen.html",
        "text": "By 2031, you may be able to spot the icy object in night skies with a good telescope. By 2031, you may be able to spot the icy object in night skies with a good telescope. Astronomers spy rocky and icy wanderers of all shapes and sizes zipping past Earth all the time. But earlier this month, they were flabbergasted when they caught sight of the largest comet they\u2019d ever seen.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Largest Comet Ever Found Is Making Its Move Into a Sky Near You (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4561",
        "date": "2021-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/science/comet-largest-ever-seen.html",
        "text": "By 2031, you may be able to spot the icy object in night skies with a good telescope. By 2031, you may be able to spot the icy object in night skies with a good telescope. Astronomers spy rocky and icy wanderers of all shapes and sizes zipping past Earth all the time. But earlier this month, they were flabbergasted when they caught sight of the largest comet they\u2019d ever seen.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Biggest Telescope Beat Loose Screws, Loose Budgets and Loose Clamps (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4562",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/science/webb-nasa-launch-delay.html",
        "text": "Getting the James Webb Space Telescope to the launchpad has been a difficult journey that has taken decades. Getting the James Webb Space Telescope to the launchpad has been a difficult journey that has taken decades. NASA\u2019s next flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is gearing up for its launch to space on Saturday morning \u2014 finally. The Webb telescope is the biggest observatory built for launch into space. Its 18 gold-plated mirrors make for a system that is far more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope, which it will succeed as humanity\u2019s most powerful scientific instrument for studying the formation of our universe and distant worlds in our galaxy.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Biggest Telescope Beat Loose Screws, Loose Budgets and Loose Clamps (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4563",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/science/webb-nasa-launch-delay.html",
        "text": "Getting the James Webb Space Telescope to the launchpad has been a difficult journey that has taken decades. Getting the James Webb Space Telescope to the launchpad has been a difficult journey that has taken decades. NASA\u2019s next flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is gearing up for its launch to space on Saturday morning \u2014 finally. The Webb telescope is the biggest observatory built for launch into space. Its 18 gold-plated mirrors make for a system that is far more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope, which it will succeed as humanity\u2019s most powerful scientific instrument for studying the formation of our universe and distant worlds in our galaxy.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Biggest Telescope Beat Loose Screws, Loose Budgets and Loose Clamps (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4564",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/science/webb-nasa-launch-delay.html",
        "text": "Getting the James Webb Space Telescope to the launchpad has been a difficult journey that has taken decades. Getting the James Webb Space Telescope to the launchpad has been a difficult journey that has taken decades. NASA\u2019s next flagship observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is gearing up for its launch to space on Saturday morning \u2014 finally. The Webb telescope is the biggest observatory built for launch into space. Its 18 gold-plated mirrors make for a system that is far more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope, which it will succeed as humanity\u2019s most powerful scientific instrument for studying the formation of our universe and distant worlds in our galaxy.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Scallop Sees With Space-Age Eyes \u2014 Hundreds of Them (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4565",
        "date": "2017-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/science/scallops-eyes.html",
        "text": "Each scallop eye is built something like the gigantic telescopes that peer into deep space, researchers reported on Thursday. Each scallop eye is built something like the gigantic telescopes that peer into deep space, researchers reported on Thursday. It\u2019s hard to see what\u2019s so special about a scallop. It looks a lot like a clam, mussel or any other bivalve. Inside its hinged shell lurks a musclebound creature that\u2019s best enjoyed seared in butter.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "The telescope stumbled over its own name. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4566",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/25/science/james-webb-homophobia.html",
        "text": "Choosing to name NASA\u2019s biggest telescope over James Webb, a former administrator of the space agency, has provoked controversy. Choosing to name NASA\u2019s biggest telescope over James Webb, a former administrator of the space agency, has provoked controversy. James Webb led NASA during the 1960s, when it was gearing up to land people on the moon.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Was That a Dropped Call From ET? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4567",
        "date": "2020-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/science/radio-signal-extraterrestrial.html",
        "text": "A spooky radio signal showed up after a radio telescope was aimed at the next star over from our sun. A spooky radio signal showed up after a radio telescope was aimed at the next star over from our sun. Nobody believes it was ET phoning, but radio astronomers admit they don\u2019t have an explanation yet for a beam of radio waves that apparently came from the direction of the star Proxima Centauri.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Seen 30 Years Ago, a Supernova Refuses to Be Ignored (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4568",
        "date": "2017-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/science/supernova-sn1987a-hubble-space-telescope.html",
        "text": "New images from the Hubble Space Telescope have been released of the supernova called SN1987A, first detected in February 1987. New images from the Hubble Space Telescope have been released of the supernova called SN1987A, first detected in February 1987. On the morning of Feb. 23, 1987, a couple of dozen subatomic particles known as neutrinos zinged through specially instrumented underground sensors in Japan, Ohio and Russia. The particles had squirted from the core of a collapsing star 163,000 light years away in a small galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. They were the heralds of doom.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Trouble for the Hubble Telescope as a Primary Camera Malfunctions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4569",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/science/hubble-telescope-nasa.html",
        "text": "Last year a gyroscope died, now there\u2019s a camera glitch. That\u2019s just the telescope \u201caging gracefully,\u201d the mission director said. Last year a gyroscope died, now there\u2019s a camera glitch. That\u2019s just the telescope \u201caging gracefully,\u201d the mission director said. The Hubble Space Telescope has a new problem. NASA reported on Wednesday that one of its most frequently used cameras, known as the Wide Field Camera 3, had turned itself off the previous day.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Trouble for the Hubble Telescope as a Primary Camera Malfunctions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4570",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/science/hubble-telescope-nasa.html",
        "text": "Last year a gyroscope died, now there\u2019s a camera glitch. That\u2019s just the telescope \u201caging gracefully,\u201d the mission director said. Last year a gyroscope died, now there\u2019s a camera glitch. That\u2019s just the telescope \u201caging gracefully,\u201d the mission director said. The Hubble Space Telescope has a new problem. NASA reported on Wednesday that one of its most frequently used cameras, known as the Wide Field Camera 3, had turned itself off the previous day.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hawaii Telescope Project, Long Disputed, Will Begin Construction (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4571",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/science/hawaii-telescope-tmt-mauna-kea.html",
        "text": "The governor announced that the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by local activists, will get underway next week. The governor announced that the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by local activists, will get underway next week. Gov. David Ige of Hawaii announced on Wednesday that construction will begin next week on a giant telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, the volcano that looms over the Big Island of Hawaii.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hawaii Telescope Project, Long Disputed, Will Begin Construction (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4572",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/science/hawaii-telescope-tmt-mauna-kea.html",
        "text": "The governor announced that the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by local activists, will get underway next week. The governor announced that the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, bitterly opposed by local activists, will get underway next week. Gov. David Ige of Hawaii announced on Wednesday that construction will begin next week on a giant telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, the volcano that looms over the Big Island of Hawaii.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "OneWeb Launches 34 Satellites as Astronomers Fear Radio Chatter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4573",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/science/oneweb-launch.html",
        "text": "Like SpaceX, the company aims to build a constellation of internet satellites, but its orbiters could interfere with telescopes on Earth. Like SpaceX, the company aims to build a constellation of internet satellites, but its orbiters could interfere with telescopes on Earth. The skies are growing crowded.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "OneWeb Launches 34 Satellites as Astronomers Fear Radio Chatter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4574",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/science/oneweb-launch.html",
        "text": "Like SpaceX, the company aims to build a constellation of internet satellites, but its orbiters could interfere with telescopes on Earth. Like SpaceX, the company aims to build a constellation of internet satellites, but its orbiters could interfere with telescopes on Earth. The skies are growing crowded.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hunting Ghost Particles Beneath the World\u2019s Deepest Lake (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4575",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/neutrinos-lake-baikal.html",
        "text": "A neutrino-spotting telescope beneath the frozen Lake Baikal in Russia is close to delivering scientific results after four decades of setbacks. A neutrino-spotting telescope beneath the frozen Lake Baikal in Russia is close to delivering scientific results after four decades of setbacks. ON LAKE BAIKAL, Russia \u2014 A glass orb, the size of a beach ball, plops into a hole in the ice and descends on a metal cable toward the bottom of the world\u2019s deepest lake.",
        "author": "By Anton Troianovski and Sergey Ponomarev"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Webb Telescope, NASA\u2019s Golden Surfer, Is Almost Ready, Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4576",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/webb-telescope-women-astronomy.html",
        "text": "After decades of fits and starts, the multibillion dollar successor to the Hubble telescope is expected to launch as soon as this fall. After decades of fits and starts, the multibillion dollar successor to the Hubble telescope is expected to launch as soon as this fall. Birthing a new space telescope takes a long time and a lot of money and inspiration. Astronomers first began pestering NASA for the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope even before that telescope was launched into orbit in 1990. Back then they thought it could cost less than a billion and be ready in the first decade of the 21st century.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Webb Telescope, NASA\u2019s Golden Surfer, Is Almost Ready, Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4577",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/webb-telescope-women-astronomy.html",
        "text": "After decades of fits and starts, the multibillion dollar successor to the Hubble telescope is expected to launch as soon as this fall. After decades of fits and starts, the multibillion dollar successor to the Hubble telescope is expected to launch as soon as this fall. Birthing a new space telescope takes a long time and a lot of money and inspiration. Astronomers first began pestering NASA for the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope even before that telescope was launched into orbit in 1990. Back then they thought it could cost less than a billion and be ready in the first decade of the 21st century.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Webb Telescope, NASA\u2019s Golden Surfer, Is Almost Ready, Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4578",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/webb-telescope-women-astronomy.html",
        "text": "After decades of fits and starts, the multibillion dollar successor to the Hubble telescope is expected to launch as soon as this fall. After decades of fits and starts, the multibillion dollar successor to the Hubble telescope is expected to launch as soon as this fall. Birthing a new space telescope takes a long time and a lot of money and inspiration. Astronomers first began pestering NASA for the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope even before that telescope was launched into orbit in 1990. Back then they thought it could cost less than a billion and be ready in the first decade of the 21st century.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Mini-Moon Was Found Orbiting Earth. There Will Be More. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4579",
        "date": "2020-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/science/mini-moon-earth.html",
        "text": "The object, a car-size asteroid called 2020 CD3, won\u2019t be here for long, and new telescopes will help us spot more of these objects. The object, a car-size asteroid called 2020 CD3, won\u2019t be here for long, and new telescopes will help us spot more of these objects. Earth gets a new moon most months, but this month, we got two.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Mini-Moon Was Found Orbiting Earth. There Will Be More. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4580",
        "date": "2020-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/science/mini-moon-earth.html",
        "text": "The object, a car-size asteroid called 2020 CD3, won\u2019t be here for long, and new telescopes will help us spot more of these objects. The object, a car-size asteroid called 2020 CD3, won\u2019t be here for long, and new telescopes will help us spot more of these objects. Earth gets a new moon most months, but this month, we got two.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos of Jupiter From NASA Spacecraft, Both Near and Far (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4581",
        "date": "2017-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/science/jupiter-photos-hubble-telescope-juno-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Juno space probe and the Hubble Space Telescope recorded new images of Jupiter that will help scientists study the solar system\u2019s largest planet. The Juno space probe and the Hubble Space Telescope recorded new images of Jupiter that will help scientists study the solar system\u2019s largest planet. NASA is getting new looks at Jupiter, from close up and far away.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos of Jupiter From NASA Spacecraft, Both Near and Far (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4582",
        "date": "2017-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/science/jupiter-photos-hubble-telescope-juno-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Juno space probe and the Hubble Space Telescope recorded new images of Jupiter that will help scientists study the solar system\u2019s largest planet. The Juno space probe and the Hubble Space Telescope recorded new images of Jupiter that will help scientists study the solar system\u2019s largest planet. NASA is getting new looks at Jupiter, from close up and far away.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomers Race to Study a Mystery Object From Outside Our Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4583",
        "date": "2017-10-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/science/interstellar-object-solar-system.html",
        "text": "The object, faster than known asteroids or comets, was first spotted by a telescope in Hawaii, and is leaving just as quickly as it arrived. The object, faster than known asteroids or comets, was first spotted by a telescope in Hawaii, and is leaving just as quickly as it arrived. For the first time that we know, an interstellar visitor has zoomed through our solar system. The small space rock, tentatively called A/2017 U1, is about a quarter of a mile long and astronomers across the world are racing to study it before it departs just as quickly as it arrived.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomers Race to Study a Mystery Object From Outside Our Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4584",
        "date": "2017-10-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/science/interstellar-object-solar-system.html",
        "text": "The object, faster than known asteroids or comets, was first spotted by a telescope in Hawaii, and is leaving just as quickly as it arrived. The object, faster than known asteroids or comets, was first spotted by a telescope in Hawaii, and is leaving just as quickly as it arrived. For the first time that we know, an interstellar visitor has zoomed through our solar system. The small space rock, tentatively called A/2017 U1, is about a quarter of a mile long and astronomers across the world are racing to study it before it departs just as quickly as it arrived.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "E. Margaret Burbidge, Astronomer Who Blazed Trails on Earth, Dies at 100 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4585",
        "date": "2020-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/science/space/e-margaret-burbidge-dead.html",
        "text": "She was denied access to a telescope because of her sex, but Dr. Burbidge forged ahead anyway, going on to make pathbreaking discoveries about the cosmos. She was denied access to a telescope because of her sex, but Dr. Burbidge forged ahead anyway, going on to make pathbreaking discoveries about the cosmos. ",
        "author": "By Margalit Fox"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Webb Telescope Faces More Setbacks (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4586",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nasa-webb-telescope.html",
        "text": "The space agency announced on Tuesday that its successor to the Hubble telescope has hit a series of testing snags, pushing back a planned launch next year. The space agency announced on Tuesday that its successor to the Hubble telescope has hit a series of testing snags, pushing back a planned launch next year. America\u2019s next big space telescope has been delayed at least a year to May 2020, NASA said on Tuesday, throwing the nation\u2019s plan and budget for space astrophysics into potential turmoil.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Webb Telescope Faces More Setbacks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4587",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nasa-webb-telescope.html",
        "text": "The space agency announced on Tuesday that its successor to the Hubble telescope has hit a series of testing snags, pushing back a planned launch next year. The space agency announced on Tuesday that its successor to the Hubble telescope has hit a series of testing snags, pushing back a planned launch next year. America\u2019s next big space telescope has been delayed at least a year to May 2020, NASA said on Tuesday, throwing the nation\u2019s plan and budget for space astrophysics into potential turmoil.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Webb Telescope Faces More Setbacks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4588",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/science/nasa-webb-telescope.html",
        "text": "The space agency announced on Tuesday that its successor to the Hubble telescope has hit a series of testing snags, pushing back a planned launch next year. The space agency announced on Tuesday that its successor to the Hubble telescope has hit a series of testing snags, pushing back a planned launch next year. America\u2019s next big space telescope has been delayed at least a year to May 2020, NASA said on Tuesday, throwing the nation\u2019s plan and budget for space astrophysics into potential turmoil.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hawaiian Elders Protesting Telescope Construction Are Arrested (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4589",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/mauna-kea-protest.html",
        "text": "When completed, the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea\u2019s summit is expected to be the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. But its construction has drawn heated opposition. When completed, the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea\u2019s summit is expected to be the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. But its construction has drawn heated opposition. Construction was set to begin this week on a giant telescope on the barren summit of Mauna Kea, a volcano on Hawaii\u2019s Big Island, considered the best observatory site in the Northern Hemisphere.",
        "author": "By Mihir Zaveri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kepler, the Little NASA Spacecraft That Could, No Longer Can (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4590",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/science/nasa-kepler-exoplanet.html",
        "text": "After nine and a half years in orbit, 530,506 stars observed and 2,662 planets around other stars discovered, the telescope will be left to drift forever around the sun. After nine and a half years in orbit, 530,506 stars observed and 2,662 planets around other stars discovered, the telescope will be left to drift forever around the sun. Kepler, NASA\u2019s vaunted planet-hunting space telescope, has run out of maneuvering fuel and is being retired, the space agency announced on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kepler, the Little NASA Spacecraft That Could, No Longer Can (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4591",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/science/nasa-kepler-exoplanet.html",
        "text": "After nine and a half years in orbit, 530,506 stars observed and 2,662 planets around other stars discovered, the telescope will be left to drift forever around the sun. After nine and a half years in orbit, 530,506 stars observed and 2,662 planets around other stars discovered, the telescope will be left to drift forever around the sun. Kepler, NASA\u2019s vaunted planet-hunting space telescope, has run out of maneuvering fuel and is being retired, the space agency announced on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kepler, the Little NASA Spacecraft That Could, No Longer Can (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4592",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/science/nasa-kepler-exoplanet.html",
        "text": "After nine and a half years in orbit, 530,506 stars observed and 2,662 planets around other stars discovered, the telescope will be left to drift forever around the sun. After nine and a half years in orbit, 530,506 stars observed and 2,662 planets around other stars discovered, the telescope will be left to drift forever around the sun. Kepler, NASA\u2019s vaunted planet-hunting space telescope, has run out of maneuvering fuel and is being retired, the space agency announced on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Giant Telescope Atop Hawaii\u2019s Mauna Kea Should Be Approved, Judge Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4593",
        "date": "2017-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/thirty-meter-telescope-hawaii-mauna-kea.html",
        "text": "The Thirty Meter Telescope, which would be the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, could survey black holes and planets orbiting distant stars, but opponents say it would desecrate a sacred mountain. The Thirty Meter Telescope, which would be the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, could survey black holes and planets orbiting distant stars, but opponents say it would desecrate a sacred mountain. The stars are still in reach for astronomers who want to build a $1.4 billion telescope on top of Hawaii\u2019s Mauna Kea.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman CEO is grilled about James Webb Space Telescope errors (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4594",
        "date": "2018-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/26/northrop-grumman-ceo-is-grilled-about-james-webb-space-telescope-errors/",
        "text": "NASA's troubled James Webb Space Telescope continues to enjoy congressional support, but lawmakers Thursday expressed dismay with the performance of Northrop Grumman, the huge aerospace contractor that has made a series of errors delaying the telescope's launch until 2021 at the earliest. Wes Bush, the company's chief executive, found himself on the defensive as he testified before the House Science Committee. He refused repeatedly to specify how much profit his company made last year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Webb telescope was conceived in 1996 as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and NASA had originally hoped to launch it in 2007.It is an infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter-wide segmented mirror, and it has to be kept cold to gather light emitted in the early universe when stars were just starting to form galaxies. This requires a tennis-court-sized, five-layer sun shield that has to unfold in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a shake test in April, screws came loose from the sun shield, just the latest in a series of technical glitches and human errors at Northrop Grumman. An independent review board this summer urged NASA and Congress to keep the program going but said there were 344 potential \u201csingle-point failures\u201d that could doom the telescope with a single mistake, and it urged greater care in rooting out technical problems. The latest cost estimate of the project is $9.7 billion, most of that already spent.Bush admitted that mistakes at Northrop Grumman had been a factor in the delays. He pledged that the company would put all of its past profits and potential future profits \u2014 known as \u201caward fees\u201d \u2014 into a common pot to be awarded only if the telescope is successful.But he pushed back when House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) asked him whether the company would consider paying for the latest $800 million cost overrun out of its own pocket. Bush said that would transform the company's cost-plus contract with NASA into a fixed-price contract, and would \u201csignificantly impair\u201d the relationship between the company and NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) scoffed at comments made by Bush and other lawmakers about how the Webb will inspire young people.\u201cI'm sorry that I cannot join you in this uplifting testimony that you've given today. Mr. Bush, I don\u2019t think we should look to our young people and give them an example of being, you know, eight times over budget and twice as long,\u201d he said.He added, \u201cYou can say, 'Is the Jim Webb telescope going to be worth all that money?' That's not what the question is. The question is, 'Is it worth all those other projects that we have been unable to fund in this committee because you have failed your job?' \u201dHe asked Bush how much profit Northrop Grumman made last year. Bush replied that that's in government filings.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIs it hundreds of millions or billions?\u201d the congressman asked.Advertisement\u201cIt's a very large number,\u201d Bush said.The tension in the room peaked at the end of Bush's testimony, when Smith pressed Bush on whether anyone had been fired for the errors with the Webb project and then tried anew to get Bush to discuss company profits.Smith: \u201cYou do not know as CEO whether any employees lost their job because of the human error?\u201dBush: \u201cWith respect to the mistakes we\u2019re talking about here today, I do not recall any losing their jobs.\u201dSmith: \u201cWhat was Northrop\u2019s profit last year in 2017 just to the nearest tenth of a billion?\u201dBush: \u201cWe can get you that for the record.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSmith: \u201cI\u2019m sorry?\u201dBush: \u201cWe can provide that for you for the record.\u201dSmith: \u201cWhy won\u2019t you tell us today what it is?\u201dBush: \u201cI don\u2019t have it in front of me.\u201dSmith: \u201cHow could a CEO not know what the profit of his company was last year?\u201dAdvertisementBush: \u201cWe will provide that to you for the record.\u201dThe chairman gave up.The company's financial report for 2017 states that it had pretax earnings of slightly more than $3 billion.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine had testified before the same committee on Wednesday and found himself in friendly territory. He served on the science committee as a Republican representative from Oklahoma until earlier this year, when he was confirmed as President Trump's pick to run the space agency.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine acknowledged that the Webb delays will force NASA to \u201ccannibalize\u201d funding meant for other missions. But he extolled the scientific virtues of Webb and said, \u201cWe're on the 5-yard line, and we're trying to punch it into the end zone.\u201dAlthough he faced some scolding comments, his former colleagues were generally gentle. The most pointed remarks came from Rohrabacher, who began by saying: \u201cThis, of course, is very disturbing. This is about the biggest screw job I\u2019ve ever seen, and the taxpayers are getting screwed here.\u201dRead more:NASA's next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsA 12-mile-wide body of liquid water lies beneath a Mars ice capCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist NASA's aerospace contractor doesn't want to pay for cost overruns as the telescope remains grounded. Northrop Grumman CEO is grilled about James Webb Space Telescope errors",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman CEO is grilled about James Webb Space Telescope errors (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4595",
        "date": "2018-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/26/northrop-grumman-ceo-is-grilled-about-james-webb-space-telescope-errors/",
        "text": "NASA's troubled James Webb Space Telescope continues to enjoy congressional support, but lawmakers Thursday expressed dismay with the performance of Northrop Grumman, the huge aerospace contractor that has made a series of errors delaying the telescope's launch until 2021 at the earliest. Wes Bush, the company's chief executive, found himself on the defensive as he testified before the House Science Committee. He refused repeatedly to specify how much profit his company made last year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Webb telescope was conceived in 1996 as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and NASA had originally hoped to launch it in 2007.It is an infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter-wide segmented mirror, and it has to be kept cold to gather light emitted in the early universe when stars were just starting to form galaxies. This requires a tennis-court-sized, five-layer sun shield that has to unfold in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a shake test in April, screws came loose from the sun shield, just the latest in a series of technical glitches and human errors at Northrop Grumman. An independent review board this summer urged NASA and Congress to keep the program going but said there were 344 potential \u201csingle-point failures\u201d that could doom the telescope with a single mistake, and it urged greater care in rooting out technical problems. The latest cost estimate of the project is $9.7 billion, most of that already spent.Bush admitted that mistakes at Northrop Grumman had been a factor in the delays. He pledged that the company would put all of its past profits and potential future profits \u2014 known as \u201caward fees\u201d \u2014 into a common pot to be awarded only if the telescope is successful.But he pushed back when House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) asked him whether the company would consider paying for the latest $800 million cost overrun out of its own pocket. Bush said that would transform the company's cost-plus contract with NASA into a fixed-price contract, and would \u201csignificantly impair\u201d the relationship between the company and NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) scoffed at comments made by Bush and other lawmakers about how the Webb will inspire young people.\u201cI'm sorry that I cannot join you in this uplifting testimony that you've given today. Mr. Bush, I don\u2019t think we should look to our young people and give them an example of being, you know, eight times over budget and twice as long,\u201d he said.He added, \u201cYou can say, 'Is the Jim Webb telescope going to be worth all that money?' That's not what the question is. The question is, 'Is it worth all those other projects that we have been unable to fund in this committee because you have failed your job?' \u201dHe asked Bush how much profit Northrop Grumman made last year. Bush replied that that's in government filings.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIs it hundreds of millions or billions?\u201d the congressman asked.Advertisement\u201cIt's a very large number,\u201d Bush said.The tension in the room peaked at the end of Bush's testimony, when Smith pressed Bush on whether anyone had been fired for the errors with the Webb project and then tried anew to get Bush to discuss company profits.Smith: \u201cYou do not know as CEO whether any employees lost their job because of the human error?\u201dBush: \u201cWith respect to the mistakes we\u2019re talking about here today, I do not recall any losing their jobs.\u201dSmith: \u201cWhat was Northrop\u2019s profit last year in 2017 just to the nearest tenth of a billion?\u201dBush: \u201cWe can get you that for the record.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSmith: \u201cI\u2019m sorry?\u201dBush: \u201cWe can provide that for you for the record.\u201dSmith: \u201cWhy won\u2019t you tell us today what it is?\u201dBush: \u201cI don\u2019t have it in front of me.\u201dSmith: \u201cHow could a CEO not know what the profit of his company was last year?\u201dAdvertisementBush: \u201cWe will provide that to you for the record.\u201dThe chairman gave up.The company's financial report for 2017 states that it had pretax earnings of slightly more than $3 billion.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine had testified before the same committee on Wednesday and found himself in friendly territory. He served on the science committee as a Republican representative from Oklahoma until earlier this year, when he was confirmed as President Trump's pick to run the space agency.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine acknowledged that the Webb delays will force NASA to \u201ccannibalize\u201d funding meant for other missions. But he extolled the scientific virtues of Webb and said, \u201cWe're on the 5-yard line, and we're trying to punch it into the end zone.\u201dAlthough he faced some scolding comments, his former colleagues were generally gentle. The most pointed remarks came from Rohrabacher, who began by saying: \u201cThis, of course, is very disturbing. This is about the biggest screw job I\u2019ve ever seen, and the taxpayers are getting screwed here.\u201dRead more:NASA's next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errorsA 12-mile-wide body of liquid water lies beneath a Mars ice capCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist NASA's aerospace contractor doesn't want to pay for cost overruns as the telescope remains grounded. Northrop Grumman CEO is grilled about James Webb Space Telescope errors",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope will open a new window on the cosmos \u2014 if everything goes just right (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4596",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/interactive/2021/webb-space-telescope-launch/",
        "text": " The successor to the Hubble must evade 344 \u201csingle point failures\u201d to achieve its ambitious mission. NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope will open a new window on the cosmos \u2014 if everything goes just right",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope will open a new window on the cosmos \u2014 if everything goes just right (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4597",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/interactive/2021/webb-space-telescope-launch/",
        "text": " The successor to the Hubble must evade 344 \u201csingle point failures\u201d to achieve its ambitious mission. NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope will open a new window on the cosmos \u2014 if everything goes just right",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s the Sweetest, Crispiest Way to Stay Safe in a Car Crash? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4598",
        "date": "2020-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/science/traffic-barrier-rice-krispies.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s made with marshmallows, too. It\u2019s made with marshmallows, too. If you\u2019re willing to do the tests to demonstrate it, it really might!",
        "author": "By Randall Munroe"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year in Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4599",
        "date": "2020-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/28/science/space-astronomy-highlights.html",
        "text": "It started with a literal bang. It started with a literal bang. It started with a literal bang.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year in Spaceflight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4600",
        "date": "2020-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/28/science/space-astronomy-highlights.html",
        "text": "It started with a literal bang. It started with a literal bang. It started with a literal bang.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Waiting for Betelgeuse to Explode (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4601",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/09/science/betelgeuse-supernova-fading.html",
        "text": "It could be a long wait. It could be a long wait. It could be a long wait.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Space, No One Can Hear Your Teeth Chatter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4602",
        "date": "2019-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/science/temperature-space.html",
        "text": "The void between galaxies is unfathomably cold. The void between galaxies is unfathomably cold. A. It depends on the location, but according to NASA, the average temperature of the void between galaxies, away from hot suns and the like, is about minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit.",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flat Pasta That Turns Into 3-D Shapes \u2014 Just Add Boiling Water (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4603",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/pasta-3d-flat.html",
        "text": "The engineers are in the kitchen, again. The engineers are in the kitchen, again. Don\u2019t be fooled. This pasta may look like your average fettuccine. But cook it for seven minutes in boiling water and it will transform, coiling into a neat spiral.",
        "author": "By Marion Renault"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Black Hole Threw a Star Out of the Milky Way Galaxy (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4604",
        "date": "2019-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/14/science/stars-black-hole-milky-way.html",
        "text": "So long, S5-HVS1, we hardly knew you. So long, S5-HVS1, we hardly knew you. There are fastballs, and then there are cosmic fastballs. Now it seems that the strongest arm in our galaxy might belong to a supermassive black hole that lives smack in the middle of the Milky Way.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now Boarding: SpaceX\u2019s New Ride to Orbit for NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4605",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/26/science/spacex-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now Boarding: SpaceX\u2019s New Ride to Orbit for NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4606",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/26/science/spacex-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now Boarding: SpaceX\u2019s New Ride to Orbit for NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4607",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/26/science/spacex-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now Boarding: SpaceX\u2019s New Ride to Orbit for NASA Astronauts (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4608",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/26/science/spacex-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday. The Crew Dragon launched successfully on Saturday.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos of the Moon by Israel\u2019s Beresheet Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4609",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/science/spaceil-beresheet-moon-photos.html",
        "text": "The Beresheet lander crashed into the moon. The Beresheet lander crashed into the moon. The Beresheet lander crashed into the moon.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos of the Moon by Israel\u2019s Beresheet Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4610",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/science/spaceil-beresheet-moon-photos.html",
        "text": "The Beresheet lander crashed into the moon. The Beresheet lander crashed into the moon. The Beresheet lander crashed into the moon.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Images of a Fading Betelgeuse (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4611",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/14/science/betelgeuse-images-fading.html",
        "text": "Glimpsing the surface of a shape-shifting star. Glimpsing the surface of a shape-shifting star. Glimpsing the surface of a shape-shifting star.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "How much material from space enters the Earth\u2019s atmosphere on an average day? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4612",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/14/science/14sci-quiz.html",
        "text": "Earth is under attack from space dust. Earth is under attack from space dust. Earth is under attack from space dust.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Praise of Lumpy Gravy From the Cosmic Kitchen (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4613",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/science/astrophysics-universe-microwave-background.html",
        "text": "Without that texture, there\u2019d be none of us. Without that texture, there\u2019d be none of us. As Thanksgiving approaches, would-be chefs and hosts, including apparently my editors, are perfecting their techniques for making the all-important gravy for the turkey and potatoes.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the 2019 Solar Eclipse as Seen in Chile and Argentina (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4614",
        "date": "2019-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/science/solar-eclipse-chile-argentina.html",
        "text": "The eclipse barreled across South America on Tuesday. The eclipse barreled across South America on Tuesday. Late on Tuesday afternoon, the moon blocked the sun in South America.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Long Is a Day on Saturn? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4615",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/saturn-day-length.html",
        "text": "The answer was hiding in the planet\u2019s rings. The answer was hiding in the planet\u2019s rings. For decades, it was a nagging mystery \u2014 how long does a day last on Saturn?",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Long Is a Day on Saturn? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4616",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/saturn-day-length.html",
        "text": "The answer was hiding in the planet\u2019s rings. The answer was hiding in the planet\u2019s rings. For decades, it was a nagging mystery \u2014 how long does a day last on Saturn?",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Long Is a Day on Saturn? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4617",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/saturn-day-length.html",
        "text": "The answer was hiding in the planet\u2019s rings. The answer was hiding in the planet\u2019s rings. For decades, it was a nagging mystery \u2014 how long does a day last on Saturn?",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Superpowers of Super-Thin Materials (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4618",
        "date": "2020-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/science/physics-materials-electronics.html",
        "text": "In materials science, 2-D is the new 3-D. In materials science, 2-D is the new 3-D. In recent years, internet-connected devices have colonized a range of new frontiers \u2014 wrists, refrigerators, doorbells, cars. But to some researchers, the spread of the \u201cinternet of things\u201d has not gone nearly far enough.",
        "author": "By Amos Zeeberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Theory Meets Chalk, Dust Flies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4619",
        "date": "2019-09-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/23/science/mathematicians-blackboard-photographs-jessica-wynne.html",
        "text": "A photo survey of the blackboards of mathematicians. A photo survey of the blackboards of mathematicians. This is what thought looks like.",
        "author": "By Jessica Wynne and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Which Animal Best Embodies 2020? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4620",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/23/science/which-animal-best-embodies-2020.html",
        "text": "It was a rough year for Homo sapiens. It was a rough year for Homo sapiens. It was a rough year for Homo sapiens.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays James Webb Telescope Launch Date, Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4621",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-delay.html",
        "text": "The universe will have to wait a little longer. The universe will have to wait a little longer. After years of budget overruns, testing problems and political difficulties, NASA\u2019s next great telescope has been delayed again, the space agency announced Thursday. The James Webb Space Telescope, which was proceeding toward a launch date of March 2021, will now be launched no sooner than Oct. 31, 2021.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Delays James Webb Telescope Launch Date, Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4622",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-delay.html",
        "text": "The universe will have to wait a little longer. The universe will have to wait a little longer. After years of budget overruns, testing problems and political difficulties, NASA\u2019s next great telescope has been delayed again, the space agency announced Thursday. The James Webb Space Telescope, which was proceeding toward a launch date of March 2021, will now be launched no sooner than Oct. 31, 2021.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Fruit in Your Garden Gets Its Shiny Blue Color (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4623",
        "date": "2020-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/science/blue-fruits-viburnum.html",
        "text": "Slabs of fat help give Viburnum tinus its gleam. Slabs of fat help give Viburnum tinus its gleam. Big, leafy viburnum bushes have lined yards in the United States and Europe for decades \u2014 their domes of blossoms have an understated attractiveness. But once the flowers of the Viburnum tinus plant fade, the shrub makes something unusual: shiny, brilliantly blue fruit.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking\u2019s Beautiful Mind (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4624",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/science/stephen-hawking-timeline.html",
        "text": "A brief history of the cosmologist's discoveries and life.  A brief history of the cosmologist's discoveries and life. Stephen Hawking spent his scientific life exploring some of the deepest questions a human caught in the Einsteinian opera of space and time could ask.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity Rover Dies on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4625",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/13/science/opportunity-rover-mars-map.html",
        "text": "Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet. Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet. Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity Rover Dies on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4626",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/13/science/opportunity-rover-mars-map.html",
        "text": "Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet. Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet. Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity Rover Dies on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4627",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/13/science/opportunity-rover-mars-map.html",
        "text": "Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet. Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet. Fifteen years and 28 miles on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Following Comet SWAN (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4628",
        "date": "2020-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/12/science/comet-swan-photos.html",
        "text": "A newly discovered comet is swinging around the sun. A newly discovered comet is swinging around the sun. A newly discovered comet is swinging around the sun.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Following Comet SWAN (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4629",
        "date": "2020-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/12/science/comet-swan-photos.html",
        "text": "A newly discovered comet is swinging around the sun. A newly discovered comet is swinging around the sun. A newly discovered comet is swinging around the sun.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Bees Avoid Bumping Into Nature\u2019s Obstacle Course (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4630",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/science/bees-obstacles-collisions.html",
        "text": "When the garden gets perilous, these pollinators hit the gas. When the garden gets perilous, these pollinators hit the gas. For a human, a breeze-ruffled garden is a peaceful scene: Dandelion seeds float, leaves rustle and flowers bob their heads.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the \u2018Super Weird\u2019 Moons of Mars Fascinate Scientists (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4631",
        "date": "2020-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/science/mars-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? Mars is the darling of many planetary scientists, who continue to visit it through increasingly advanced robotic explorers. But don\u2019t forget that our planetary neighbor is adorned with two moons: puny Phobos, a lumpy mass 17 miles across; and diminutive Deimos, just 9 miles long. Their names in ancient Greek may mean \u201cfear\u201d and \u201cdread\u2019, but the aesthetics of these Lilliputian space potatoes inspire anything but.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the \u2018Super Weird\u2019 Moons of Mars Fascinate Scientists (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4632",
        "date": "2020-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/science/mars-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? Mars is the darling of many planetary scientists, who continue to visit it through increasingly advanced robotic explorers. But don\u2019t forget that our planetary neighbor is adorned with two moons: puny Phobos, a lumpy mass 17 miles across; and diminutive Deimos, just 9 miles long. Their names in ancient Greek may mean \u201cfear\u201d and \u201cdread\u2019, but the aesthetics of these Lilliputian space potatoes inspire anything but.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the \u2018Super Weird\u2019 Moons of Mars Fascinate Scientists (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4633",
        "date": "2020-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/science/mars-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? Mars is the darling of many planetary scientists, who continue to visit it through increasingly advanced robotic explorers. But don\u2019t forget that our planetary neighbor is adorned with two moons: puny Phobos, a lumpy mass 17 miles across; and diminutive Deimos, just 9 miles long. Their names in ancient Greek may mean \u201cfear\u201d and \u201cdread\u2019, but the aesthetics of these Lilliputian space potatoes inspire anything but.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the \u2018Super Weird\u2019 Moons of Mars Fascinate Scientists (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4634",
        "date": "2020-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/science/mars-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? What\u2019s the big deal about little Phobos and tinier Deimos? Mars is the darling of many planetary scientists, who continue to visit it through increasingly advanced robotic explorers. But don\u2019t forget that our planetary neighbor is adorned with two moons: puny Phobos, a lumpy mass 17 miles across; and diminutive Deimos, just 9 miles long. Their names in ancient Greek may mean \u201cfear\u201d and \u201cdread\u2019, but the aesthetics of these Lilliputian space potatoes inspire anything but.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the World\u2019s Squarest Fish Gets Around (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4635",
        "date": "2020-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/science/yellow-boxfish-yaw.html",
        "text": "The yellow boxfish is much more agile than it looks. The yellow boxfish is much more agile than it looks. The yellow boxfish doesn\u2019t look nimble. Squat and rectangular, it resembles a plastic storage bin with fins. Even its coloring suggests clumsiness \u2014 juveniles are hard hat yellow with black spots, as if to say \u201ccoming through!\u201d",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiny Tyrannosaur Hints at How T. Rex Became King (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4636",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/tiny-tyrannosaur-fossil.html",
        "text": "The deer-sized dinosaur preceded one of Earth\u2019s most fearsome predators. The deer-sized dinosaur preceded one of Earth\u2019s most fearsome predators. Tyrannosaurs weren\u2019t always tyrants. For millions of years, the ancestors of the regal T. rex were relegated to second-class predator status while a different dinosaur dynasty ruled over what is now North America: towering allosaurs.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hot Dinosaur Summer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4637",
        "date": "2021-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/science/hot-dinosaur-summer.html",
        "text": "Plus:\u00a0Antarctica as a person, recycling bowling balls and \"Jeff Who?\" Plus:\u00a0Antarctica as a person, recycling bowling balls and \"Jeff Who?\" Dinosaurs, which ruled the planet for roughly 170 million years and were one of the most successful animals ever, may have been in a 10-million-year decline at the time of their apocalypse, according to research published this week.",
        "author": "By Matt McCann"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Perfect Valentine? A Math Formula (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4638",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/science/math-algorithm-valentine.html",
        "text": "Nothing says \u201cI love you\u201d like a customizable algebraic equation. Nothing says \u201cI love you\u201d like a customizable algebraic equation. Meet S\u00fcss, a math widget after your own heart. (You can also visit the widget on its website here, which you might want to do if you\u2019re reading this on a smartphone.)",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hubble Telescope, Disoriented by Mechanical Failure, Takes a Nap to Reboot (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4639",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/science/hubble-gyroscope-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s observational workhorse enters \u201csafe mode\u201d after a gyroscope malfunctions. NASA\u2019s observational workhorse enters \u201csafe mode\u201d after a gyroscope malfunctions. The Hubble Space Telescope, NASA\u2019s  jewel of the skies, is temporarily out of service. On Friday, the telescope stood down from observing and put itself into \u201csafe mode\u201d after one of its gyroscopes, which keep it aimed at objects of scientific interest, died.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hubble Telescope, Disoriented by Mechanical Failure, Takes a Nap to Reboot (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4640",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/science/hubble-gyroscope-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s observational workhorse enters \u201csafe mode\u201d after a gyroscope malfunctions. NASA\u2019s observational workhorse enters \u201csafe mode\u201d after a gyroscope malfunctions. The Hubble Space Telescope, NASA\u2019s  jewel of the skies, is temporarily out of service. On Friday, the telescope stood down from observing and put itself into \u201csafe mode\u201d after one of its gyroscopes, which keep it aimed at objects of scientific interest, died.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who else was aboard the flight? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4641",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/blue-origin-crew-bezos.html",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos brought three other passengers to space with him. Jeff Bezos brought three other passengers to space with him. Mr. Bezos brought his younger brother. Mark Bezos, 50, has lived a more private life. He is a co-founder and general partner at HighPost Capital, a private equity firm. Mark Bezos previously worked as head of communications at the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that aids anti-poverty efforts in New York City.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Old Is This Ancient Vision of the Stars? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4642",
        "date": "2020-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/science/nebra-sky-disk.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s a tale of bronze, iron, looting and archaeological conflict. It\u2019s a tale of bronze, iron, looting and archaeological conflict. The Nebra sky disk has been hailed as the oldest known representation of the cosmos. Uncovered by looters in 1999 and then recovered in a sting by archaeologists and law enforcement a few years later, the ancient bronze artifact, inlaid with gold decorations of the night sky, has provoked heated debates.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a 2nd-Grade Class Sent a Science Experiment to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4643",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/science/blue-origin-school-experiment.html",
        "text": "\u201cAny school district now that affords football can afford spaceflight.\u201d \u201cAny school district now that affords football can afford spaceflight.\u201d Back in 2015, students in Maggie Samudio\u2019s second-grade class at Cumberland Elementary School in West Lafayette, Ind., were contemplating an offbeat science question: If a firefly went to space, would it still be able to light up as it floated in zero gravity?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a 2nd-Grade Class Sent a Science Experiment to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4644",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/science/blue-origin-school-experiment.html",
        "text": "\u201cAny school district now that affords football can afford spaceflight.\u201d \u201cAny school district now that affords football can afford spaceflight.\u201d Back in 2015, students in Maggie Samudio\u2019s second-grade class at Cumberland Elementary School in West Lafayette, Ind., were contemplating an offbeat science question: If a firefly went to space, would it still be able to light up as it floated in zero gravity?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "On Venus, Cloudy With a Chance of Microbial Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4645",
        "date": "2020-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/science/venus-planets-microbes-life.html",
        "text": "Astrobiologists shift their gaze, and speculations, to Earth\u2019s broiling sister planet. Astrobiologists shift their gaze, and speculations, to Earth\u2019s broiling sister planet. It\u2019s been a while \u2014 like, forever \u2014 since anyone claimed to have discovered life on Venus.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We Learned in Science News in 2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4646",
        "date": "2019-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/science/science-news-2019.html",
        "text": "Developments in science that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. Developments in science that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. It\u2019s not easy to say that any particular space or astronomy development was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we\u2019d opt for these unforgettable events and findings.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "How\u2019s the View From a Spinning Star? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4647",
        "date": "2020-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/pulsar-xkcd-munroe-stars.html",
        "text": "Stargazing is fun. Now try it at 43,000 miles per second. Stargazing is fun. Now try it at 43,000 miles per second. What would the sky look like if you could stand on the surface of a pulsar?",
        "author": "By Randall Munroe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why These Mexican Fish Do the Wave (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4648",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/science/fish-wave-mexico.html",
        "text": "Soccer fans aren\u2019t the only ones on Earth who make waves. Soccer fans aren\u2019t the only ones on Earth who make waves. In the sulfur-infused ponds of Tabasco State in Mexico lives a tiny silver slip of a fish, the sulphur molly. Toss in a rock, and you might see a bunch of them dance: The water\u2019s surface will erupt in pale, pulsing waves, spreading through the eerie blue like milk through coffee. Every few seconds, thousands of fish will repeat a quick diving motion to generate the wave, sometimes for up to two minutes.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scorpions Are Ancient, but Some Species Are New to Science (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4649",
        "date": "2017-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/science/new-scorpions-species.html",
        "text": "Scorpion scientists have identified three new species among these ancient arachnids. Scorpion scientists have identified three new species among these ancient arachnids. Scorpions are ancient. They have been on earth some 435 million years. Some of the older creatures, the ancestors of modern scorpions, grew to a length of up to four feet. Some of today\u2019s scorpions can kill human beings, while others rarely sting or have venom that doesn\u2019t affect humans or other mammals.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Seas Warm, Whales Face New Dangers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4650",
        "date": "2017-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/science/humpbacks-right-whales.html",
        "text": "Scientists are worrying that many humpback and right whales are dying. Scientists are worrying that many humpback and right whales are dying. MOUNT DESERT ROCK, Me. \u2014 From the top of the six-story lighthouse, water stretches beyond the horizon in every direction. A foghorn bleats twice at 22-second intervals, interrupting the endless chatter of herring gulls.",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Seas Warm, Whales Face New Dangers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4651",
        "date": "2017-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/science/humpbacks-right-whales.html",
        "text": "Scientists are worrying that many humpback and right whales are dying. Scientists are worrying that many humpback and right whales are dying. MOUNT DESERT ROCK, Me. \u2014 From the top of the six-story lighthouse, water stretches beyond the horizon in every direction. A foghorn bleats twice at 22-second intervals, interrupting the endless chatter of herring gulls.",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "What a Fungus Reveals About the Space Program (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4652",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/science/fungus-pilobolus-space-astronauts.html",
        "text": "One thing\u2019s for sure: Escaping the dung heap doesn\u2019t come cheap. One thing\u2019s for sure: Escaping the dung heap doesn\u2019t come cheap. I spend a lot of time lately thinking about a fungus called Pilobolus. It lives on dung, mostly from cows and horses, happily munching away, enriching the soil as it goes, until it starts to run out of dung to eat. Then something magical happens: The fungus stops eating and rearranges itself into a giant stalk with a ball of cells \u2014 a sporangium \u2014 on top.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "What a Fungus Reveals About the Space Program (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4653",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/science/fungus-pilobolus-space-astronauts.html",
        "text": "One thing\u2019s for sure: Escaping the dung heap doesn\u2019t come cheap. One thing\u2019s for sure: Escaping the dung heap doesn\u2019t come cheap. I spend a lot of time lately thinking about a fungus called Pilobolus. It lives on dung, mostly from cows and horses, happily munching away, enriching the soil as it goes, until it starts to run out of dung to eat. Then something magical happens: The fungus stops eating and rearranges itself into a giant stalk with a ball of cells \u2014 a sporangium \u2014 on top.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Maybe Comet From Another Star (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4654",
        "date": "2019-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/science/comet-interstellar-oumuamua.html",
        "text": "Now zinging through Cancer: a glob of light from interstellar space? Now zinging through Cancer: a glob of light from interstellar space? The universe comes calling.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We Learned in 2018: Science (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4655",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/science/what-we-learned-2018.html",
        "text": "Developments in science that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. Developments in science that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. It\u2019s not easy to say that any particular scientific development was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we\u2019d opt for these unforgettable events and findings. ",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cut the Science Budget? Not So Fast (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4656",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/science-research-budget-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Contrary to first impressions, Congress has stood up for scientific research. Contrary to first impressions, Congress has stood up for scientific research. The president proposes and Congress disposes.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cut the Science Budget? Not So Fast (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4657",
        "date": "2019-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/science/science-research-budget-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Contrary to first impressions, Congress has stood up for scientific research. Contrary to first impressions, Congress has stood up for scientific research. The president proposes and Congress disposes.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back on Earth, Shatner and Bezos have a Kirk-Spock moment. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4658",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/bezos-shatner-star-trek.html",
        "text": "After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. A half-century ago, a television show told young people that space travel would be the coolest thing ever. Some of them were even inspired to work toward that goal. Science fiction met reality on Wednesday as one of those fans, now one of the richest people in the world, gave the show\u2019s leading actor a brief ride up into the ether.",
        "author": "By David Streitfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back on Earth, Shatner and Bezos have a Kirk-Spock moment. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4659",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/bezos-shatner-star-trek.html",
        "text": "After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. A half-century ago, a television show told young people that space travel would be the coolest thing ever. Some of them were even inspired to work toward that goal. Science fiction met reality on Wednesday as one of those fans, now one of the richest people in the world, gave the show\u2019s leading actor a brief ride up into the ether.",
        "author": "By David Streitfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back on Earth, Shatner and Bezos have a Kirk-Spock moment. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4660",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/bezos-shatner-star-trek.html",
        "text": "After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. A half-century ago, a television show told young people that space travel would be the coolest thing ever. Some of them were even inspired to work toward that goal. Science fiction met reality on Wednesday as one of those fans, now one of the richest people in the world, gave the show\u2019s leading actor a brief ride up into the ether.",
        "author": "By David Streitfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back on Earth, Shatner and Bezos have a Kirk-Spock moment. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4661",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/bezos-shatner-star-trek.html",
        "text": "After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. A half-century ago, a television show told young people that space travel would be the coolest thing ever. Some of them were even inspired to work toward that goal. Science fiction met reality on Wednesday as one of those fans, now one of the richest people in the world, gave the show\u2019s leading actor a brief ride up into the ether.",
        "author": "By David Streitfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back on Earth, Shatner and Bezos have a Kirk-Spock moment. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4662",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/bezos-shatner-star-trek.html",
        "text": "After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. After the Blue Origin crew set down, science fiction met reality. A half-century ago, a television show told young people that space travel would be the coolest thing ever. Some of them were even inspired to work toward that goal. Science fiction met reality on Wednesday as one of those fans, now one of the richest people in the world, gave the show\u2019s leading actor a brief ride up into the ether.",
        "author": "By David Streitfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lunar Eclipse and Supermoon: How to Watch It Tonight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4663",
        "date": "2019-01-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/science/lunar-eclipse-supermoon.html",
        "text": "You don\u2019t really need to call it a \u201cSuper Blood Wolf Moon.\u201d You don\u2019t really need to call it a \u201cSuper Blood Wolf Moon.\u201d Skygazers across the Western Hemisphere will be treated to celestial eye candy on Sunday night into early Monday morning as the full moon turns coppery red during a total lunar eclipse. It will be the only total lunar eclipse of the year, and that in itself should be reason enough to stay up late and marvel as the moon gets swallowed by Earth\u2019s shadow.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Science, as in Sports, the Sidelines Matter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4664",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/science/science-nobel-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Tomorrow\u2019s Nobel prizes are won today off-season and in the back office. Tomorrow\u2019s Nobel prizes are won today off-season and in the back office. Welcome to the hot stove science league.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Science, as in Sports, the Sidelines Matter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4665",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/science/science-nobel-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Tomorrow\u2019s Nobel prizes are won today off-season and in the back office. Tomorrow\u2019s Nobel prizes are won today off-season and in the back office. Welcome to the hot stove science league.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The toilet on the Crew Dragon capsule was out of service. The crew had to use diapers. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4666",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/science/spacex-diapers-toilet.html",
        "text": "The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. Last week, the SpaceX Crew-2 capsule was all clear to make its trek back home, but one thing stood in the way: its toilet. While the vehicle had been cleared to return to Earth, the toilet remained offline for the duration of the trip.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The toilet on the Crew Dragon capsule was out of service. The crew had to use diapers. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4667",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/science/spacex-diapers-toilet.html",
        "text": "The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. Last week, the SpaceX Crew-2 capsule was all clear to make its trek back home, but one thing stood in the way: its toilet. While the vehicle had been cleared to return to Earth, the toilet remained offline for the duration of the trip.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The toilet on the Crew Dragon capsule was out of service. The crew had to use diapers. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4668",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/science/spacex-diapers-toilet.html",
        "text": "The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. Last week, the SpaceX Crew-2 capsule was all clear to make its trek back home, but one thing stood in the way: its toilet. While the vehicle had been cleared to return to Earth, the toilet remained offline for the duration of the trip.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The toilet on the Crew Dragon capsule was out of service. The crew had to use diapers. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4669",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/science/spacex-diapers-toilet.html",
        "text": "The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. The malfunctioning toilet was first detected in another SpaceX capsule last month. Last week, the SpaceX Crew-2 capsule was all clear to make its trek back home, but one thing stood in the way: its toilet. While the vehicle had been cleared to return to Earth, the toilet remained offline for the duration of the trip.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Price They Pay for Your Perfect Vacation Photo (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4670",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/science/tourists-turtles-sharks-photography.html",
        "text": "Scientists are concerned about unregulated feeding of ocean wildlife by tour operators. Scientists are concerned about unregulated feeding of ocean wildlife by tour operators. It took nearly three months, but Jody Pinder eventually succeeded. Endangered green sea turtles, usually shy, skittish and satisfied with a diet of sea grass and algae, were accepting handouts of squid that he and other local tour operators were providing at Bottom Harbor in the Bahamas.",
        "author": "By Priyanka Runwal"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Price They Pay for Your Perfect Vacation Photo (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4671",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/science/tourists-turtles-sharks-photography.html",
        "text": "Scientists are concerned about unregulated feeding of ocean wildlife by tour operators. Scientists are concerned about unregulated feeding of ocean wildlife by tour operators. It took nearly three months, but Jody Pinder eventually succeeded. Endangered green sea turtles, usually shy, skittish and satisfied with a diet of sea grass and algae, were accepting handouts of squid that he and other local tour operators were providing at Bottom Harbor in the Bahamas.",
        "author": "By Priyanka Runwal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos From the Opportunity Rover\u2019s Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4672",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. In more than 14 years of roaming Mars, NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover took more than 210,000 pictures. (Its twin, Spirit, snapped an additional 125,000 on the other side of the planet.) Some were sweeping 360-degree panoramas of the reddish landscape. Others were microscopic close-ups of rocks. Through the images, mission scientists were able to decipher some of the geological history of Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos From the Opportunity Rover\u2019s Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4673",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. In more than 14 years of roaming Mars, NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover took more than 210,000 pictures. (Its twin, Spirit, snapped an additional 125,000 on the other side of the planet.) Some were sweeping 360-degree panoramas of the reddish landscape. Others were microscopic close-ups of rocks. Through the images, mission scientists were able to decipher some of the geological history of Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos From the Opportunity Rover\u2019s Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4674",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. In more than 14 years of roaming Mars, NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover took more than 210,000 pictures. (Its twin, Spirit, snapped an additional 125,000 on the other side of the planet.) Some were sweeping 360-degree panoramas of the reddish landscape. Others were microscopic close-ups of rocks. Through the images, mission scientists were able to decipher some of the geological history of Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos From the Opportunity Rover\u2019s Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4675",
        "date": "2019-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. Scientific highlights and snapshots from the journey of NASA\u2019s long-lasting robotic explorer. In more than 14 years of roaming Mars, NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover took more than 210,000 pictures. (Its twin, Spirit, snapped an additional 125,000 on the other side of the planet.) Some were sweeping 360-degree panoramas of the reddish landscape. Others were microscopic close-ups of rocks. Through the images, mission scientists were able to decipher some of the geological history of Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will We Survive Climate Change?  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4676",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/climate-change-doom.html",
        "text": "Possibly. There is \u2018no scientific support for inevitable doom,\u2019 one expert notes. Possibly. There is \u2018no scientific support for inevitable doom,\u2019 one expert notes.  Are we doomed?",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Does the Universe Still Need Einstein? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4677",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/einstein-physics-universe.html",
        "text": "Physicists are no longer unified in the search for a unified theory. Physicists are no longer unified in the search for a unified theory. Is Albert Einstein finally dead?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Dark Matter, They Detected Another Mystery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4678",
        "date": "2020-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/science/xenon-axions-neutrinos-tritium.html",
        "text": "Do signals from beneath an Italian mountain herald a revolution in physics? Do signals from beneath an Italian mountain herald a revolution in physics? It could be a key to the secret of the universe. Or just annoying background noise, another item to be calibrated in future experiments.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vantage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4679",
        "date": "2019-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/science/natasha-trethewey-apollo-11-poem.html",
        "text": "A poem by Natasha Trethewey, reflecting on the Apollo 11 moon landing. A poem by Natasha Trethewey, reflecting on the Apollo 11 moon landing. Why, some say, the moon?                              \u2014 John F. Kennedy, 1962",
        "author": "By Natasha Trethewey"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Perseverance of New York City\u2019s Wildflowers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4680",
        "date": "2021-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/science/new-york-flowers-spring.html",
        "text": "A park in Williamsburg awaits the miniature beauty of its spring blossoms. A park in Williamsburg awaits the miniature beauty of its spring blossoms. In Williamsburg, on a seven-acre park by the East River, spring will soon unfurl in blue blossoms. Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler and Andrew Garn"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Perseverance of New York City\u2019s Wildflowers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4681",
        "date": "2021-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/science/new-york-flowers-spring.html",
        "text": "A park in Williamsburg awaits the miniature beauty of its spring blossoms. A park in Williamsburg awaits the miniature beauty of its spring blossoms. In Williamsburg, on a seven-acre park by the East River, spring will soon unfurl in blue blossoms. Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler and Andrew Garn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Is Comet Borisov? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4682",
        "date": "2019-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/07/science/comet-borisov-tracker.html",
        "text": "The second known interstellar object is now passing through our solar system. The second known interstellar object is now passing through our solar system. The second known interstellar object is now passing through our solar system.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Timeline of SpaceX Missions (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4683",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/spacex-falcon-launch.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the second time on Thursday. SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the second time on Thursday. SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the second time on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Timeline of SpaceX Missions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4684",
        "date": "2018-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/spacex-falcon-launch.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the second time on Thursday. SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the second time on Thursday. SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the second time on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "Australia\u2019s Fire Season Ends, and Researchers Look to the Next One (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4685",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/science/australia-wildfires-technology-drones.html",
        "text": "With its otherworldly conditions, Australia has become a testing ground for fire-prediction technology. With its otherworldly conditions, Australia has become a testing ground for fire-prediction technology. SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 On March 2, for the first time in 240 days, not a single bush fire burned in the state of New South Wales. The state\u2019s Rural Fire Service declared the worst fire season in history, during which 25 people in NSW were killed, officially over. In those eight months, 6 percent, or 13.6 million acres, of the state that a third of Australians call home had been incinerated.",
        "author": "By Helen Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Australia\u2019s Fire Season Ends, and Researchers Look to the Next One (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4686",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/science/australia-wildfires-technology-drones.html",
        "text": "With its otherworldly conditions, Australia has become a testing ground for fire-prediction technology. With its otherworldly conditions, Australia has become a testing ground for fire-prediction technology. SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 On March 2, for the first time in 240 days, not a single bush fire burned in the state of New South Wales. The state\u2019s Rural Fire Service declared the worst fire season in history, during which 25 people in NSW were killed, officially over. In those eight months, 6 percent, or 13.6 million acres, of the state that a third of Australians call home had been incinerated.",
        "author": "By Helen Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Wet Clothes Become Translucent (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4687",
        "date": "2018-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/science/how-wet-clothes-become-translucent.html",
        "text": "When water replaces air in a fabric, the material itself reflects less light. When water replaces air in a fabric, the material itself reflects less light.  A. Cloth, like paper, is made up of discrete strands of fiber with air between them. Light hitting the dry material is somewhat scattered within it, but a good share is reflected to the eye. This renders the material visible.",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Branson and the crew received astronaut wings after their successful trip to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4688",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/when-is-virgin-galactic-launch-live-stream-details.html",
        "text": "What you need to know about Richard Branson and crew's space plane flight. What you need to know about Richard Branson and crew's space plane flight. Richard Branson finally got his trip to space on Sunday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiniest Ape Ever Discovered Hints at the Rise of the Monkeys (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4689",
        "date": "2018-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/science/tiniest-ape-extinct.html",
        "text": "The newly identified extinct primate weighed slightly less than an average house cat. The newly identified extinct primate weighed slightly less than an average house cat. A tiny fossilized molar found nestled in the sweltering shrub land of Kenya\u2019s Tugen Hills belonged to what may be the smallest species of ape yet discovered, according to a new study. The newly identified extinct species, Simiolus minutus, weighed only about 8 pounds, or slightly less than an average house cat.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "First the Worm Gets in the Bug\u2019s Head. Then the Bug Drowns Itself. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4690",
        "date": "2019-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/science/parasites-insects-drown.html",
        "text": "The mind-controlling parasites are \u201clike a back-seat driver, but a bit more sinister.\u201d The mind-controlling parasites are \u201clike a back-seat driver, but a bit more sinister.\u201d A few years back, Ryan Herbison, then a graduate student in parasitology at the University of Otago, painstakingly collected about 1,300 earwigs and more than 2,500 sandhoppers from gardens and a beach in New Zealand.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Robot Looks Like a Pancake and Jumps Like a Maggot (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4691",
        "date": "2021-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/science/robots-pancake-jump.html",
        "text": "Researchers designed a soft, legless robot that can hop and navigate obstacle courses. Researchers designed a soft, legless robot that can hop and navigate obstacle courses. If a pancake could dream, it might long for legs so it could jump off your breakfast plate in pursuit of a better, unchewed life.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Robot Looks Like a Pancake and Jumps Like a Maggot (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4692",
        "date": "2021-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/science/robots-pancake-jump.html",
        "text": "Researchers designed a soft, legless robot that can hop and navigate obstacle courses. Researchers designed a soft, legless robot that can hop and navigate obstacle courses. If a pancake could dream, it might long for legs so it could jump off your breakfast plate in pursuit of a better, unchewed life.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "How You Should Read Coronavirus Studies, or Any Science Paper (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4693",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/how-to-read-a-science-study-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Published scientific research, like any piece of writing, is a peculiar literary genre. Published scientific research, like any piece of writing, is a peculiar literary genre. A lot of people are reading scientific papers for the first time these days, hoping to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic. If you\u2019re one of them, be advised the scientific paper is a peculiar literary genre that can take some getting used to. And also bear in mind that these are not typical times for scientific publishing.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "How You Should Read Coronavirus Studies, or Any Science Paper (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4694",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/how-to-read-a-science-study-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Published scientific research, like any piece of writing, is a peculiar literary genre. Published scientific research, like any piece of writing, is a peculiar literary genre. A lot of people are reading scientific papers for the first time these days, hoping to make sense of the coronavirus pandemic. If you\u2019re one of them, be advised the scientific paper is a peculiar literary genre that can take some getting used to. And also bear in mind that these are not typical times for scientific publishing.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lunar Eclipse and Supermoon: Photos From Around the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4695",
        "date": "2019-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/science/lunar-eclipse-supermoon.html",
        "text": "Photographers captured scenes in the skies as the Earth\u2019s shadow covered the moon. Photographers captured scenes in the skies as the Earth\u2019s shadow covered the moon. There it was in the night sky as Sunday stretched into Monday: a total lunar eclipse. Where people had clear conditions and unobstructed views, the moon took on a coppery red color.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eyes in the Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4696",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/science/asteroids-probes-instruments.html",
        "text": "Instead of sending probes to faraway planets, why not hitch them to comets? Instead of sending probes to faraway planets, why not hitch them to comets? Q. Instead of sending space probes to distant planets, is it possible to land a powerful camera or another instrument on a comet or asteroid \u2014 and have it send back information as it travels through space?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eyes in the Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4697",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/science/asteroids-probes-instruments.html",
        "text": "Instead of sending probes to faraway planets, why not hitch them to comets? Instead of sending probes to faraway planets, why not hitch them to comets? Q. Instead of sending space probes to distant planets, is it possible to land a powerful camera or another instrument on a comet or asteroid \u2014 and have it send back information as it travels through space?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do Flying Snakes Glide Through the Air? \u2018It\u2019s Hard to Believe\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4698",
        "date": "2020-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/science/flying-snakes-physics.html",
        "text": "As they wiggle and undulate, the snakes are transforming their bodies for flight. As they wiggle and undulate, the snakes are transforming their bodies for flight. Jake Socha is an expert on flying snakes who uses detailed scientific terminology such as \u201cthis big, wiggly, ribbon thing\u201d to describe his soaring quarry.",
        "author": "By David Waldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who were the crew members aboard the flight? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4699",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/who-were-the-crew-members-aboard-the-flight.html",
        "text": "Along with Mr. Branson, three crew and two pilots are aboard the Unity. Along with Mr. Branson, three crew and two pilots are aboard the Unity. The pilots are David Mackay and Michael Masucci.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who were the crew members aboard the flight? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4700",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/who-were-the-crew-members-aboard-the-flight.html",
        "text": "Along with Mr. Branson, three crew and two pilots are aboard the Unity. Along with Mr. Branson, three crew and two pilots are aboard the Unity. The pilots are David Mackay and Michael Masucci.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus, Testing Delays Push Europe-Russia Mars Mission to 2022 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4701",
        "date": "2020-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/science/mars-rover-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe cannot really cut corners,\u201d said the head of the European Space Agency. \u201cWe cannot really cut corners,\u201d said the head of the European Space Agency. A European-Russian mission to put a rover on Mars and look for signs of life there has been postponed, to 2022.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus, Testing Delays Push Europe-Russia Mars Mission to 2022 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4702",
        "date": "2020-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/science/mars-rover-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe cannot really cut corners,\u201d said the head of the European Space Agency. \u201cWe cannot really cut corners,\u201d said the head of the European Space Agency. A European-Russian mission to put a rover on Mars and look for signs of life there has been postponed, to 2022.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus, Testing Delays Push Europe-Russia Mars Mission to 2022 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4703",
        "date": "2020-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/science/mars-rover-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe cannot really cut corners,\u201d said the head of the European Space Agency. \u201cWe cannot really cut corners,\u201d said the head of the European Space Agency. A European-Russian mission to put a rover on Mars and look for signs of life there has been postponed, to 2022.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Apollo 11 Moon Landing in Augmented Reality (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4704",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-moon-landing-photos-ul.html",
        "text": "See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk. See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk. See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Apollo 11 Moon Landing in Augmented Reality (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4705",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-moon-landing-photos-ul.html",
        "text": "See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk. See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk. See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Apollo 11 Moon Landing in Augmented Reality (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4706",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-moon-landing-photos-ul.html",
        "text": "See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk. See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk. See Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s historic photographs and words from the moonwalk.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Lingdong Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali and Graham Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Infinite Visions Were Hiding in the First Black Hole Image\u2019s Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4707",
        "date": "2020-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/science/black-hole-rings.html",
        "text": "Scientists proposed a technique that would allow us to see more of the unseeable. Scientists proposed a technique that would allow us to see more of the unseeable. A year ago a team of radio astronomers startled the world with the first photograph of a black hole, lurking like the eye of Sauron in the heart of a distant galaxy. Now it appears there was more hiding in that image than we had imagined.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Infinite Visions Were Hiding in the First Black Hole Image\u2019s Rings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4708",
        "date": "2020-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/science/black-hole-rings.html",
        "text": "Scientists proposed a technique that would allow us to see more of the unseeable. Scientists proposed a technique that would allow us to see more of the unseeable. A year ago a team of radio astronomers startled the world with the first photograph of a black hole, lurking like the eye of Sauron in the heart of a distant galaxy. Now it appears there was more hiding in that image than we had imagined.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomers See Moons Forming in Disk Around Distant Exoplanet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4709",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/science/exoplanet-moon-disc.html",
        "text": "Scientists have never before gotten such a clear view of moons in the making. Scientists have never before gotten such a clear view of moons in the making. Our solar system is home to a magnificent menagerie of moons, from icy ones filled with turbulent oceans to volcanic ones decorated with pits of raging hellfire. To date, astronomers have discovered 4,438 worlds orbiting other stars, and there is no doubt that diverse moons dance around most of these exoplanets. But stargazers have yet to conclusively find any \u2014 these exomoons have proven too small and too far-flung to be spotted.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missing: One Black Hole With 10 Billion Solar Masses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4710",
        "date": "2021-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/science/astronomy-black-hole-abell.html",
        "text": "One of the biggest galaxies in the universe seems to lack its dark centerpiece. One of the biggest galaxies in the universe seems to lack its dark centerpiece. Astronomers are searching the cosmic lost-and-found for one of the biggest, baddest black holes thought to exist. So far they haven\u2019t found it.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alien Asteroids Are Here, Scientists Say. Get Used to Them. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4711",
        "date": "2018-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/science/asteroid-interstellar-jupiter.html",
        "text": "An asteroid that cohabits an orbit with Jupiter came from outside the solar system. An asteroid that cohabits an orbit with Jupiter came from outside the solar system. Astronomers said on Monday that they had identified another invasive asteroid.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Swarms of Fireflies Sync Their Flashes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4712",
        "date": "2021-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/science/fireflies-sync-flashes.html",
        "text": "You can believe your eyes because lightning bugs really are coordinating their nightly glows. You can believe your eyes because lightning bugs really are coordinating their nightly glows. Swarms of synchronous fireflies are rather like melting ice, or at least that\u2019s how Raphael Sarfati, a physicist, sees it. Ice remains solid until it warms to a certain temperature and becomes a liquid. Likewise, a loose swarm fireflies will flash the lanterns in their abdomens randomly. But when the swarm reaches a certain density, the fireflies begin to blink in unison.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Many firsts for women in a very male orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4713",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-peggy-whitson.html",
        "text": "Women have accomplished a great deal on the space station, when they\u2019ve been there. Women have accomplished a great deal on the space station, when they\u2019ve been there. In 2007, Peggy Whitson set off on her second trip to the space station and soon became its first woman commander. At the time, she was one of only three women to have lived on the I.S.S. Sunita Williams later commanded it in 2012, and Dr. Whitson had command again in 2017. They are the only women ever to take command of the station.",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Many firsts for women in a very male orbit. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4714",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-peggy-whitson.html",
        "text": "Women have accomplished a great deal on the space station, when they\u2019ve been there. Women have accomplished a great deal on the space station, when they\u2019ve been there. In 2007, Peggy Whitson set off on her second trip to the space station and soon became its first woman commander. At the time, she was one of only three women to have lived on the I.S.S. Sunita Williams later commanded it in 2012, and Dr. Whitson had command again in 2017. They are the only women ever to take command of the station.",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who are William Shatner\u2019s crewmates? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4715",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/space/blue-origin-crew-new-shephard.html",
        "text": "Three other passengers are on the flight, two of them paying to be there. Three other passengers are on the flight, two of them paying to be there. Three other passengers will join Mr. Shatner on Wednesday\u2019s flight:",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who are William Shatner\u2019s crewmates? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4716",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/space/blue-origin-crew-new-shephard.html",
        "text": "Three other passengers are on the flight, two of them paying to be there. Three other passengers are on the flight, two of them paying to be there. Three other passengers will join Mr. Shatner on Wednesday\u2019s flight:",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chimp Sanctuaries Restrict Visits Over Concerns About the Coronavirus (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4717",
        "date": "2020-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/science/chimpanzee-sanctuaries-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s a possibility chimpanzees could be susceptible to Covid-19, so sanctuaries are taking precautions. There\u2019s a possibility chimpanzees could be susceptible to Covid-19, so sanctuaries are taking precautions. Chimpanzee sanctuaries are restricting human interactions with chimps to prevent passing a human coronavirus infection to the animals.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Mission Begins Orbit of the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4718",
        "date": "2021-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/science/china-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "The Tianwen-1 mission is the second of three new visitors to Mars this month. The Tianwen-1 mission is the second of three new visitors to Mars this month. China has landed on the moon three times, and even managed to bring one of its robotic lunar explorers back to Earth. Can it now pull off the challenge of landing on Mars?",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Mission Begins Orbit of the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4719",
        "date": "2021-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/science/china-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "The Tianwen-1 mission is the second of three new visitors to Mars this month. The Tianwen-1 mission is the second of three new visitors to Mars this month. China has landed on the moon three times, and even managed to bring one of its robotic lunar explorers back to Earth. Can it now pull off the challenge of landing on Mars?",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Travels With John Conway, in 258 Septillion Dimensions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4720",
        "date": "2020-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/science/john-conway-math.html",
        "text": "The Princeton mathemagician, who died in April, left an engaging legacy of numerical gamesmanship. The Princeton mathemagician, who died in April, left an engaging legacy of numerical gamesmanship. When John Horton Conway, the Princeton \u201cmathemagician\u201d who died in April at age 82, first found fame in the late 1960s and early \u201970s, he joined the academic equivalent of the jet set. Then at the University of Cambridge, he would fly to Montreal or New York, deliver a lecture on his Conway group \u2014 an entity in the realm of mathematical symmetry that inhabits 24 dimensions \u2014 and return home all within the space of a day.",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "A talk with Tom Cruise as the astronauts cruise around the planet. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4721",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/tom-cruise-spacex.html",
        "text": "The movie star may have his own ambitions of traveling to orbit one day. The movie star may have his own ambitions of traveling to orbit one day. Maverick has called space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A talk with Tom Cruise as the astronauts cruise around the planet. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4722",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/tom-cruise-spacex.html",
        "text": "The movie star may have his own ambitions of traveling to orbit one day. The movie star may have his own ambitions of traveling to orbit one day. Maverick has called space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "When a Mega-Tsunami Drowned Mars, This Spot May Have Been Ground Zero (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4723",
        "date": "2019-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/science/mars-tsunami-crater.html",
        "text": "The 75-mile-wide crater could be something like a Chicxulub crater for the red planet. The 75-mile-wide crater could be something like a Chicxulub crater for the red planet. Today, Mars is a cold, dry world, home to dust devils and robotic explorers. But many scientists suspect it was once waterlogged.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch a Lunar Eclipse, or at Least Try To (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4724",
        "date": "2020-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/29/science/lunar-eclipse-moon.html",
        "text": "Penumbral eclipses are subtle, but there are good reasons to try to notice one. Penumbral eclipses are subtle, but there are good reasons to try to notice one. This evening as you sneak some late-night Thanksgiving leftovers, take a moment to marvel at the full moon. Do you notice anything different? It\u2019s subtle, but on early Monday (Sunday night if you\u2019re on the west coast), the full moon should appear a bit darker than usual. That\u2019s because you\u2019re witnessing a penumbral lunar eclipse, a celestial occurrence in which the moon dips behind Earth\u2019s faint, outer shadow, or penumbra.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Congratulations, You Survived Black Hole Week (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4725",
        "date": "2019-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/science/black-hole-week.html",
        "text": "Here are three cosmic events you may have missed and that fortunately missed you. Here are three cosmic events you may have missed and that fortunately missed you. With everything else that has been going on lately down here on this planet, you might not have noticed that there has been a lot of news lately about black holes, those Einsteinian monsters that can swallow light and everything else, behaving badly. Black holes eating stars, or whole gangs of them. Black holes burping energy from the centers of galaxies. Black holes banging together in universe-shaking events.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 8\u2019s Earthrise: The Shot Seen Round the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4726",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/science/earthrise-moon-apollo-nasa.html",
        "text": "Half a century ago today, a photograph from the moon helped humans rediscover Earth. Half a century ago today, a photograph from the moon helped humans rediscover Earth. This is where we live. In space. On a marble fortified against bottomless blackness by a shell of air and color, fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 8\u2019s Earthrise: The Shot Seen Round the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4727",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/science/earthrise-moon-apollo-nasa.html",
        "text": "Half a century ago today, a photograph from the moon helped humans rediscover Earth. Half a century ago today, a photograph from the moon helped humans rediscover Earth. This is where we live. In space. On a marble fortified against bottomless blackness by a shell of air and color, fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Karen Uhlenbeck Is First Woman to Win Abel Prize for Mathematics (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4728",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/karen-uhlenbeck-abel-prize.html",
        "text": "Dr. Uhlenbeck helped pioneer geometric analysis, developing techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians. Dr. Uhlenbeck helped pioneer geometric analysis, developing techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians. For the first time, one of the top prizes in mathematics has been given to a woman.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Ocean\u2019s Youngest Monsters Are Ready for Glamour Shots (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4729",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/blackwater-photography-fish-larvae.html",
        "text": "Divers practicing blackwater photography are helping marine scientists gain new insights into fish larvae. Divers practicing blackwater photography are helping marine scientists gain new insights into fish larvae. For most scuba divers, few places underwater match the visual thrill of a kaleidoscopic coral reef teeming with colorful fish. For Jeff Milisen, a marine biologist and photographer in Kona, Hawaii, there is no better place to dive than an open stretch of deep ocean. At night.",
        "author": "By Erik Olsen"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We Learned in 2017 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4730",
        "date": "2017-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/science/what-we-learned-in-2017.html",
        "text": "Developments in science, medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. Developments in science, medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. It\u2019s impossible to say that any particular scientific development was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we\u2019d opt for these unforgettable events and findings. (Find the year in climate change news here.)",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We Learned in 2017 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4731",
        "date": "2017-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/science/what-we-learned-in-2017.html",
        "text": "Developments in science, medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. Developments in science, medicine and health that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. It\u2019s impossible to say that any particular scientific development was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we\u2019d opt for these unforgettable events and findings. (Find the year in climate change news here.)",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will Coronavirus Freeze the Search for Dark Matter? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4732",
        "date": "2020-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/dark-matter-elena-aprile-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "An experiment under 4,600 feet of Italian rock wasn\u2019t immune from the pandemic\u2019s interruption. An experiment under 4,600 feet of Italian rock wasn\u2019t immune from the pandemic\u2019s interruption. Elena Aprile was in a race against time.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Home Sweet Home in Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4733",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A visual tour of the International Space Station, humanity\u2019s high-tech home in the sky. A visual tour of the International Space Station, humanity\u2019s high-tech home in the sky. From afar, the International Space Station might look like a gangling machine, or like robot butterflies mating, but inside it is a cradle of humanity. Over the last 20 years, 141 people from 19 countries have worked, played with their food, grumbled about the toilet, drawn blood, space-walked and gazed up and down at the universe, and at Earth.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Home Sweet Home in Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4734",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A visual tour of the International Space Station, humanity\u2019s high-tech home in the sky. A visual tour of the International Space Station, humanity\u2019s high-tech home in the sky. From afar, the International Space Station might look like a gangling machine, or like robot butterflies mating, but inside it is a cradle of humanity. Over the last 20 years, 141 people from 19 countries have worked, played with their food, grumbled about the toilet, drawn blood, space-walked and gazed up and down at the universe, and at Earth.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Home Sweet Home in Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4735",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/space-station-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A visual tour of the International Space Station, humanity\u2019s high-tech home in the sky. A visual tour of the International Space Station, humanity\u2019s high-tech home in the sky. From afar, the International Space Station might look like a gangling machine, or like robot butterflies mating, but inside it is a cradle of humanity. Over the last 20 years, 141 people from 19 countries have worked, played with their food, grumbled about the toilet, drawn blood, space-walked and gazed up and down at the universe, and at Earth.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "During an Eclipse, Darkness Falls and Wonder Rises (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4736",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/watching-eclipse-august-21.html",
        "text": "A total solar eclipse brings tears, screams, even reverence to those in its path. A total solar eclipse brings tears, screams, even reverence to those in its path. Some people scream. Some people cry.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "During an Eclipse, Darkness Falls and Wonder Rises (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4737",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/watching-eclipse-august-21.html",
        "text": "A total solar eclipse brings tears, screams, even reverence to those in its path. A total solar eclipse brings tears, screams, even reverence to those in its path. Some people scream. Some people cry.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Pros and Cons of Swimming With a Hammerhead (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4738",
        "date": "2020-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/science/hammerhead-sharks-cephalofoil.html",
        "text": "A new study suggests that the ocean\u2019s strangest-looking headgear is difficult to tote around. A new study suggests that the ocean\u2019s strangest-looking headgear is difficult to tote around. People joke about asking horses, \u201cWhy the long face?\u201d We should redirect this question to hammerhead sharks. Their famous head extensions, called cephalofoils, can measure three feet from eye to eye. And scientists are still trying to nail down exactly what purposes they serve.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Selfish Are Plants? Let\u2019s Do Some Root Analysis (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4739",
        "date": "2020-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/science/roots-competition-game-theory.html",
        "text": "A new model further untangles the complex strategy games playing out under our feet. A new model further untangles the complex strategy games playing out under our feet. Imagine you\u2019re a pepper plant. You need water and nutrients. Luckily, you can grow roots that grab that stuff from the soil and pipe it back to you. So far, so good.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hubble Marks 30 Years of Seeing a Universe Being Born and Dying (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4740",
        "date": "2020-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/science/hubble-telescope-30th-birthday.html",
        "text": "A new image reminds us of what the orbiting observatory has let us see. A new image reminds us of what the orbiting observatory has let us see. \u201cHe not busy being born is busy dying.\u201d So said Bob Dylan in \u201cIt\u2019s Alright Ma (I\u2019m Only Bleeding).\u201d",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hubble Marks 30 Years of Seeing a Universe Being Born and Dying (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4741",
        "date": "2020-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/science/hubble-telescope-30th-birthday.html",
        "text": "A new image reminds us of what the orbiting observatory has let us see. A new image reminds us of what the orbiting observatory has let us see. \u201cHe not busy being born is busy dying.\u201d So said Bob Dylan in \u201cIt\u2019s Alright Ma (I\u2019m Only Bleeding).\u201d",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Six Stars, Six Eclipses: \u2018The Fact That It Exists Blows My Mind\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4742",
        "date": "2021-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/science/six-stars-eclipses.html",
        "text": "A handful of other six-star systems have been discovered, but this one is unique. A handful of other six-star systems have been discovered, but this one is unique. From star-destroying black holes to exploding comets, NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has spotted its share of surprises since it began searching the galaxy for exoplanets in 2018. But the source of starlight that was mysteriously brightening and dimming some 1,900 light-years away may top all those discoveries for its science fiction-like grandeur.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Six Stars, Six Eclipses: \u2018The Fact That It Exists Blows My Mind\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4743",
        "date": "2021-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/science/six-stars-eclipses.html",
        "text": "A handful of other six-star systems have been discovered, but this one is unique. A handful of other six-star systems have been discovered, but this one is unique. From star-destroying black holes to exploding comets, NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has spotted its share of surprises since it began searching the galaxy for exoplanets in 2018. But the source of starlight that was mysteriously brightening and dimming some 1,900 light-years away may top all those discoveries for its science fiction-like grandeur.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rise and Fall of Tiangong-1, China\u2019s First Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4744",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/31/science/tiangong-1-chinese-space-station.html",
        "text": "China\u2019s Tiangong-1 space station burned up over the South Pacific on Sunday, April 1. China\u2019s Tiangong-1 space station burned up over the South Pacific on Sunday, April 1. China\u2019s Tiangong-1 space station burned up over the South Pacific on Sunday, April 1.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rise and Fall of Tiangong-1, China\u2019s First Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4745",
        "date": "2018-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/31/science/tiangong-1-chinese-space-station.html",
        "text": "China\u2019s Tiangong-1 space station burned up over the South Pacific on Sunday, April 1. China\u2019s Tiangong-1 space station burned up over the South Pacific on Sunday, April 1. China\u2019s Tiangong-1 space station burned up over the South Pacific on Sunday, April 1.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "What We Learned in Space and Astronomy News in 2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4746",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/science/space-astronomy-news-2019.html",
        "text": "Developments in and out of this world that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. Developments in and out of this world that we\u2019re still thinking about at year\u2019s end. It\u2019s not easy to say that any particular space or astronomy development was the most important in a given year. But if we had to choose some highlights, we\u2019d opt for these unforgettable events and findings.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hypersonic Superweapons Are a Mirage, New Analysis Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4747",
        "date": "2021-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/science/hypersonic-missile-weapons.html",
        "text": "Two scientists find revolutionary claims about the evasion of detection and defenses to be \u201cnonsense.\u201d Two scientists find revolutionary claims about the evasion of detection and defenses to be \u201cnonsense.\u201d Military experts call hypersonic warheads the next big thing in intercontinental warfare. They see the emerging arms, which can deliver nuclear or conventional munitions, as zipping along at up to five miles a second while zigzagging through the atmosphere to outwit early-warning satellites and some interceptors. The superfast weapons, experts say, lend themselves to surprise attacks.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "At 90, William Shatner becomes the oldest person to reach \u2018the final frontier.\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4748",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space.html",
        "text": "The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. When William Shatner, 90, traveled to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard on Wednesday he became the oldest person ever to reach such heights.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik"
    },
    {
        "title": "At 90, William Shatner becomes the oldest person to reach \u2018the final frontier.\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4749",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space.html",
        "text": "The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. When William Shatner, 90, traveled to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard on Wednesday he became the oldest person ever to reach such heights.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik"
    },
    {
        "title": "At 90, William Shatner becomes the oldest person to reach \u2018the final frontier.\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4750",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space.html",
        "text": "The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. When William Shatner, 90, traveled to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard on Wednesday he became the oldest person ever to reach such heights.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik"
    },
    {
        "title": "At 90, William Shatner becomes the oldest person to reach \u2018the final frontier.\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4751",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space.html",
        "text": "The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. The previous record holder was Wally Funk, 82, who flew on Blue Origin in July. When William Shatner, 90, traveled to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard on Wednesday he became the oldest person ever to reach such heights.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Snowflakes and Unicorns, Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani Explored a Universe in Motion (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4752",
        "date": "2017-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/science/women-mathematicians-maryam-mirzakhani-marina-ratner.html",
        "text": "The legacies and achievements of two great mathematicians will dazzle and intrigue scholars for decades. The legacies and achievements of two great mathematicians will dazzle and intrigue scholars for decades. The mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences lists 104 members. Just four are women. As recently as June, that number was six.",
        "author": "By Amie Wilkinson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Sets Out SpaceX Starship\u2019s Ambitious Launch Timeline (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4753",
        "date": "2019-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Texas \u2014 As Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, says repeatedly, he created a rocket company because he wanted to colonize Mars. His fervent argument is that humanity must spread to a second planet as insurance for long-term survival.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Sets Out SpaceX Starship\u2019s Ambitious Launch Timeline (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4754",
        "date": "2019-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Texas \u2014 As Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, says repeatedly, he created a rocket company because he wanted to colonize Mars. His fervent argument is that humanity must spread to a second planet as insurance for long-term survival.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Sets Out SpaceX Starship\u2019s Ambitious Launch Timeline (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4755",
        "date": "2019-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Texas \u2014 As Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, says repeatedly, he created a rocket company because he wanted to colonize Mars. His fervent argument is that humanity must spread to a second planet as insurance for long-term survival.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Sets Out SpaceX Starship\u2019s Ambitious Launch Timeline (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4756",
        "date": "2019-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. The founder of the private launch company presented new details about its next major rocket. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Texas \u2014 As Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, says repeatedly, he created a rocket company because he wanted to colonize Mars. His fervent argument is that humanity must spread to a second planet as insurance for long-term survival.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars Helicopter\u2019s Second Flight Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4757",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/nasa-mars-helicopter-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. NASA\u2019s engineers already made history on Monday with the 39.1-second flight of Ingenuity, a small helicopter, in the thin atmosphere on Mars. On Thursday, they added to their success when the experimental vehicle flew higher, longer and riskier.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars Helicopter\u2019s Second Flight Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4758",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/nasa-mars-helicopter-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. NASA\u2019s engineers already made history on Monday with the 39.1-second flight of Ingenuity, a small helicopter, in the thin atmosphere on Mars. On Thursday, they added to their success when the experimental vehicle flew higher, longer and riskier.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars Helicopter\u2019s Second Flight Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4759",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/nasa-mars-helicopter-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. NASA\u2019s engineers already made history on Monday with the 39.1-second flight of Ingenuity, a small helicopter, in the thin atmosphere on Mars. On Thursday, they added to their success when the experimental vehicle flew higher, longer and riskier.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars Helicopter\u2019s Second Flight Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4760",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/science/nasa-mars-helicopter-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity flew higher and longer in its second flight on Mars. NASA\u2019s engineers already made history on Monday with the 39.1-second flight of Ingenuity, a small helicopter, in the thin atmosphere on Mars. On Thursday, they added to their success when the experimental vehicle flew higher, longer and riskier.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Search for Habitable Worlds Joined by New European Space Telescope (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4761",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/science/cheops-satellite-launch.html",
        "text": "The Cheops orbiter will give a closer examination to stars already known to host exoplanets. The Cheops orbiter will give a closer examination to stars already known to host exoplanets. The European Space Agency is continuing the search for new Earths this week with the launch of Cheops, a new telescope whose name stands for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Search for Habitable Worlds Joined by New European Space Telescope (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4762",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/science/cheops-satellite-launch.html",
        "text": "The Cheops orbiter will give a closer examination to stars already known to host exoplanets. The Cheops orbiter will give a closer examination to stars already known to host exoplanets. The European Space Agency is continuing the search for new Earths this week with the launch of Cheops, a new telescope whose name stands for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "If Algae Clings to Snow on This Volcano, Can It Grow on Other Desolate Worlds? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4763",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/science/chile-volcano-snow-algae.html",
        "text": "Scientists were surprised to find something living on the sterile heights of this Chilean volcano. Scientists were surprised to find something living on the sterile heights of this Chilean volcano. In Chile\u2019s Atacama Desert, Volcan Llullaillaco is Mars on Earth \u2014 or about as close to it as you can get. At 22,000 feet above sea level, it\u2019s the second highest active volcano on Earth. Most of the mountain is a barren, red landscape of volcanic rock and dust, with thin, dry air, intense sunlight and winds that will blow your tent down the mountain.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Leopard Cub With the Lioness Mom (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4764",
        "date": "2020-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/science/leopard-lion-adoption.html",
        "text": "Scientists documented a rare and very cute interspecies adoption in a national park in India. Scientists documented a rare and very cute interspecies adoption in a national park in India. The lions and leopards of Gir National Park, in Gujarat, India, normally do not get along.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Galaxy Far, Far Away (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4765",
        "date": "2018-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/science/galaxy-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "NASA has identified something 13.4 billion light-years away, as the farthest thing observed in space. NASA has identified something 13.4 billion light-years away, as the farthest thing observed in space. Q. What is the farthest object or galaxy we have seen in space?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is There Hope for These Great Apes? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4766",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/mountain-gorilla-endangered.html",
        "text": "Mountain gorillas are faring better \u2014 perhaps because some humans just won\u2019t listen to reason. Mountain gorillas are faring better \u2014 perhaps because some humans just won\u2019t listen to reason. Last Thursday there was a bit of good news relating to the impending extinction and destruction of everything. ",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Billionaire Names His Team to Ride SpaceX, No Pros Allowed (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4767",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/30spacex-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "Meet the four people who will take the first all-civilian rocket trip to orbit Earth. Meet the four people who will take the first all-civilian rocket trip to orbit Earth. [Follow live updates on the SpaceX launch of the Inspiration4 crew into orbit.] ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Billionaire Names His Team to Ride SpaceX, No Pros Allowed (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4768",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/30spacex-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "Meet the four people who will take the first all-civilian rocket trip to orbit Earth. Meet the four people who will take the first all-civilian rocket trip to orbit Earth. [Follow live updates on the SpaceX launch of the Inspiration4 crew into orbit.] ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Billionaire Names His Team to Ride SpaceX, No Pros Allowed (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4769",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/30spacex-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "Meet the four people who will take the first all-civilian rocket trip to orbit Earth. Meet the four people who will take the first all-civilian rocket trip to orbit Earth. [Follow live updates on the SpaceX launch of the Inspiration4 crew into orbit.] ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What will it cost to fly on New Shepard? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4770",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/cost-to-fly-blue-origin-bezos.html",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos' company says demand has been strong for launches to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos' company says demand has been strong for launches to the edge of space. For the first flight, Blue Origin auctioned off one of the seats with the proceeds going to Mr. Bezos\u2019 space-focused nonprofit, Club for the Future. The winning bid was $28 million, an amount that stunned even Blue Origin officials, far higher than they had hoped. Blue Origin announced it will distribute $19 million of that to 19 space-related organizations \u2014 $1 million each.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What will it cost to fly on New Shepard? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4771",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/cost-to-fly-blue-origin-bezos.html",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos' company says demand has been strong for launches to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos' company says demand has been strong for launches to the edge of space. For the first flight, Blue Origin auctioned off one of the seats with the proceeds going to Mr. Bezos\u2019 space-focused nonprofit, Club for the Future. The winning bid was $28 million, an amount that stunned even Blue Origin officials, far higher than they had hoped. Blue Origin announced it will distribute $19 million of that to 19 space-related organizations \u2014 $1 million each.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Scorpion Tails Do the Bend and Twist (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4772",
        "date": "2021-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/science/scorpion-tails-joint.html",
        "text": "It remains unknown if this move has an 83 percent return on a dinner invitation. It remains unknown if this move has an 83 percent return on a dinner invitation. In a nail salon, Elle Woods introduced a nail technician named Paulette to the bend and snap: a foolproof method of catching someone\u2019s attention, and the only move that has an 83 percent return on a dinner invitation, at least in the universe of the \u201cLegally Blonde\u201d films.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "250 Million Years Ago, They Hibernated at the Bottom of the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4773",
        "date": "2020-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/science/fossil-hibernation.html",
        "text": "In the tusks of creatures that lived before dinosaurs, paleontologists found signs of hibernation-like metabolism. In the tusks of creatures that lived before dinosaurs, paleontologists found signs of hibernation-like metabolism. How to tell if something that died 250 million years ago hibernated when it was alive?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hong Kong, Crossroads of the Criminal Wildlife Trade (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4774",
        "date": "2019-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/science/hong-kong-wildlife-trafficking.html",
        "text": "Despite reforms, the territory is a linchpin in the global traffic in illegal animal parts. Despite reforms, the territory is a linchpin in the global traffic in illegal animal parts. HONG KONG \u2014 It was after dark on a Tuesday evening in December 2017 when the vans pulled onto Island House Lane, a placid side street of residential complexes and community garden plots in the suburban Tai Po district. ",
        "author": "By Charles Homans"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hong Kong, Crossroads of the Criminal Wildlife Trade (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4775",
        "date": "2019-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/science/hong-kong-wildlife-trafficking.html",
        "text": "Despite reforms, the territory is a linchpin in the global traffic in illegal animal parts. Despite reforms, the territory is a linchpin in the global traffic in illegal animal parts. HONG KONG \u2014 It was after dark on a Tuesday evening in December 2017 when the vans pulled onto Island House Lane, a placid side street of residential complexes and community garden plots in the suburban Tai Po district. ",
        "author": "By Charles Homans"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beneath Antarctica\u2019s Ice Is a Graveyard of Dead Continents  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4776",
        "date": "2018-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/science/east-antarctica-supercontinent.html",
        "text": "Data from a European satellite has revealed the tectonic underworld below the frozen southernmost continent. Data from a European satellite has revealed the tectonic underworld below the frozen southernmost continent. The eastern section of Antarctica is buried beneath a thick ice sheet. Some scientists simply assumed that under that cold mass there was nothing more than a \u201cfrozen tectonic block,\u201d a somewhat homogeneous mass that distinguished it from the mixed up geologies of other continents.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beneath Antarctica\u2019s Ice Is a Graveyard of Dead Continents  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4777",
        "date": "2018-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/science/east-antarctica-supercontinent.html",
        "text": "Data from a European satellite has revealed the tectonic underworld below the frozen southernmost continent. Data from a European satellite has revealed the tectonic underworld below the frozen southernmost continent. The eastern section of Antarctica is buried beneath a thick ice sheet. Some scientists simply assumed that under that cold mass there was nothing more than a \u201cfrozen tectonic block,\u201d a somewhat homogeneous mass that distinguished it from the mixed up geologies of other continents.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "5 Rules for Sheltering in Place With Cockroaches, Spiders and Turtles (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4778",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/science/lab-animals-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Coronavirus has prompted many scientists to make space in their homes for their lab animals. Coronavirus has prompted many scientists to make space in their homes for their lab animals. Last month, the coronavirus pandemic prompted universities and museums around the world to dial down their operations, leaving scientists to make difficult decisions about the animals they work with. While some released or culled their specimens \u2014 or set up a visitation schedule \u2014 others decided to take theirs home, embarking on a different sort of relationship. We checked in with half a dozen scientists about how they\u2019re making it work with their new roommates in this time of social distancing.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Note to Future Space Travelers: Prepare for a Shrinking Heart (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4779",
        "date": "2021-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/science/space/astronaut-heart-scott-kelly-nasa.html",
        "text": "After almost a year in space, Scott Kelly\u2019s heart diminished, but he remained reasonably fit. After almost a year in space, Scott Kelly\u2019s heart diminished, but he remained reasonably fit. In space, your heart gets smaller.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Note to Future Space Travelers: Prepare for a Shrinking Heart (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4780",
        "date": "2021-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/science/space/astronaut-heart-scott-kelly-nasa.html",
        "text": "After almost a year in space, Scott Kelly\u2019s heart diminished, but he remained reasonably fit. After almost a year in space, Scott Kelly\u2019s heart diminished, but he remained reasonably fit. In space, your heart gets smaller.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly Are Still Identical Twins, Despite What You May Have Read (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4781",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/science/space/mark-scott-kelly-twins.html",
        "text": "A rash of news stories this week stemmed from a misinterpreted NASA update from January. A rash of news stories this week stemmed from a misinterpreted NASA update from January. Some of this week\u2019s headlines, it turns out, vastly oversold what might happen to your genes when you spend almost a year in space.",
        "author": "By Daniel Victor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quantum Computing Is Coming, Bit by Qubit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4782",
        "date": "2019-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/science/quantum-computer-physics-qubits.html",
        "text": "With transmons and entanglement, scientists strive to put subatomic weirdness to work on the human scale. With transmons and entanglement, scientists strive to put subatomic weirdness to work on the human scale. YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. \u2014 A bolt from the maybe-future struck the technology community in late September. A paper by Google computer scientists appeared on a NASA website, claiming that an innovative new machine called a quantum computer had demonstrated \u201cquantum supremacy.\u201d",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Is This Chocolate Shimmering Like a Rainbow? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4783",
        "date": "2020-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/science/chocolate-irisdescent-rainbow.html",
        "text": "This tasty treat is additive free, and it turns iridescent with a little help from physics. This tasty treat is additive free, and it turns iridescent with a little help from physics. Earlier this month, Samy Kamkar shared his latest creation on Twitter: chocolate that shimmers like a rainbow.",
        "author": "By Devi Lockwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos thanks Amazon workers and customers for his vast wealth, prompting backlash. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4784",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/bezos-amazon.html",
        "text": "The world\u2019s richest man thanked Amazon employees and customers for making his flight to space possible. The world\u2019s richest man thanked Amazon employees and customers for making his flight to space possible. From groceries and streaming subscriptions to web servers and Alexa, Amazon has become one of the most powerful economic forces in the world. And after Jeff Bezos returned from his brief flight to space on Tuesday in a rocket built by his private space company, Blue Origin, he made remarks that drew attention to the vast wealth the company had created for him.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Light for Science, and Cooperation, in the Middle East (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4785",
        "date": "2017-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/science/sesame-institute-jordan-synchrotron.html",
        "text": "The Sesame detector will use synchrotron light to study materials ranging from exotic semiconductors to viruses. The Sesame detector will use synchrotron light to study materials ranging from exotic semiconductors to viruses. In what they hope will be a spark of light in years of darkness, a group of scientists circulated a beam of electrons around a ring in Allan, Jordan, in January.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Light for Science, and Cooperation, in the Middle East (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4786",
        "date": "2017-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/science/sesame-institute-jordan-synchrotron.html",
        "text": "The Sesame detector will use synchrotron light to study materials ranging from exotic semiconductors to viruses. The Sesame detector will use synchrotron light to study materials ranging from exotic semiconductors to viruses. In what they hope will be a spark of light in years of darkness, a group of scientists circulated a beam of electrons around a ring in Allan, Jordan, in January.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Light for Science, and Cooperation, in the Middle East (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4787",
        "date": "2017-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/science/sesame-institute-jordan-synchrotron.html",
        "text": "The Sesame detector will use synchrotron light to study materials ranging from exotic semiconductors to viruses. The Sesame detector will use synchrotron light to study materials ranging from exotic semiconductors to viruses. In what they hope will be a spark of light in years of darkness, a group of scientists circulated a beam of electrons around a ring in Allan, Jordan, in January.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Baby Megalodons Were 6-Foot-Long Womb Cannibals, Study Suggests (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4788",
        "date": "2021-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/science/megalodons-baby-shark.html",
        "text": "The research appears to confirm that, even as newborns, the extinct sharks were very, very big. The research appears to confirm that, even as newborns, the extinct sharks were very, very big. In many ways, megalodons \u2014 the long-gone, leviathan predecessors of today\u2019s sharks \u2014 had it made. Stretching up to 50 feet in length and weighing perhaps 110,000 pounds, they ruled the ancient seas with an iron fin.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Further Adventures of Betelgeuse, the Fainting Star (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4789",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/science/betelgeuse-pictures-supernova.html",
        "text": "The red supergiant is no closer to exploding, it seems. It also no longer appears round. The red supergiant is no closer to exploding, it seems. It also no longer appears round. Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star that marks the armpit of Orion the Hunter, has been dramatically and mysteriously dimming for the last six months.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why is St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital involved? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4790",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/st-jude-cancer-fundraiser-spacex.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 launch is helping to raise money for the hospital, which helps treat pediatric cancer. The Inspiration4 launch is helping to raise money for the hospital, which helps treat pediatric cancer. When he announced Inspiration4 in February, Mr. Isaacman said he wanted it to be more than an extraterrestrial jaunt for rich people like him. He reached out to St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital in Memphis, which treats children at no charge and develops cures for childhood cancers as well as other diseases. Mr. Isaacman offered to use the mission as a fund-raising vehicle for St. Jude, setting a $200 million target.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why is St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital involved? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4791",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/st-jude-cancer-fundraiser-spacex.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 launch is helping to raise money for the hospital, which helps treat pediatric cancer. The Inspiration4 launch is helping to raise money for the hospital, which helps treat pediatric cancer. When he announced Inspiration4 in February, Mr. Isaacman said he wanted it to be more than an extraterrestrial jaunt for rich people like him. He reached out to St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital in Memphis, which treats children at no charge and develops cures for childhood cancers as well as other diseases. Mr. Isaacman offered to use the mission as a fund-raising vehicle for St. Jude, setting a $200 million target.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of Crew-3 Astronauts for NASA Delayed by Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4792",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/science/spacex-launch-time-live-stream.html",
        "text": "The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of Crew-3 Astronauts for NASA Delayed by Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4793",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/science/spacex-launch-time-live-stream.html",
        "text": "The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of Crew-3 Astronauts for NASA Delayed by Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4794",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/science/spacex-launch-time-live-stream.html",
        "text": "The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch of Crew-3 Astronauts for NASA Delayed by Weather (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4795",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/science/spacex-launch-time-live-stream.html",
        "text": "The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. The four crew members, three Americans and one German, were originally scheduled to launch on Sunday. [Follow the latest updates on SpaceX\u2019s NASA crew-3 launch mission.]",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Newton\u2019s Daunting Masterpiece Had a Surprisingly Wide Audience, Historians Find (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4796",
        "date": "2020-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/science/isaac-newton-principia.html",
        "text": "The discovery suggests that \u201cPrincipia\u201d had a stronger impact on Enlightenment science than previous research suggested. The discovery suggests that \u201cPrincipia\u201d had a stronger impact on Enlightenment science than previous research suggested. It had a reputation for unreadability. As its author walked by, a student at the University of Cambridge in England was said to have remarked: \u201cThere goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.\u201d Its hundreds of equations, diagrams and obscure references didn\u2019t help, nor that it was written in Latin, the scholarly language of the day.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Was the Moon Made? We Won\u2019t Know Until We Go Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4797",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/science/moon-facts.html",
        "text": "The closer scientists look at theories of how the moon formed, the more questions they find. The closer scientists look at theories of how the moon formed, the more questions they find. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Was the Moon Made? We Won\u2019t Know Until We Go Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4798",
        "date": "2019-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/science/moon-facts.html",
        "text": "The closer scientists look at theories of how the moon formed, the more questions they find. The closer scientists look at theories of how the moon formed, the more questions they find. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Does the Shape of a Head Affect the Brain? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4799",
        "date": "2018-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/science/head-shape-brain.html",
        "text": "Studies of head compression are inconclusive as to whether cranial shaping caused learning or behavior disorders. Studies of head compression are inconclusive as to whether cranial shaping caused learning or behavior disorders. Q. Did cranial deformation as practiced by the ancient Mayans change or impair brain function?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Birds Beware: The Praying Mantis Wants Your Brain (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4800",
        "date": "2017-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/science/praying-mantis-eating-birds.html",
        "text": "Scientists have developed a healthy respect for mantises, acrobatic hunters with 3-D vision and voracious appetites. Scientists have developed a healthy respect for mantises, acrobatic hunters with 3-D vision and voracious appetites. Tom Vaughan, a photographer then living in Colorado\u2019s Mancos Valley, kept a hummingbird feeder outside his house. One morning, he stepped through the portico door and noticed a black-chinned hummingbird dangling from the side of the red plastic feeder like a stray Christmas ornament.",
        "author": "By Natalie Angier"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Ink Is Alive and Made Entirely of Microbes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4801",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/science/microbes-construction-bacteria.html",
        "text": "Scientists have created a bacterial ink that reproduces itself and can be 3D-printed into living architecture. Scientists have created a bacterial ink that reproduces itself and can be 3D-printed into living architecture. The thought of combining a printer (the bane of office workers) with the bacterium E. coli (the scourge of romaine lettuce) may seem an odd, if not unpleasant, collaboration.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4802",
        "date": "2021-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/science/science-jargon-caves.html",
        "text": "Scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers. Scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers. Polje, nappe, vuggy, psammite. Some scientists who study caves might not bat an eye, but for the rest of us, these terms might as well be ancient Greek.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Solving a Leafy Mathematical Mystery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4803",
        "date": "2019-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/science/leaves-math-phyllotaxis.html",
        "text": "Researchers developed a model that explains a peculiar pattern found in a shrub common in Japan. Researchers developed a model that explains a peculiar pattern found in a shrub common in Japan. Next time you go outside, take a minute to look at your local leaf arrangements. You\u2019ll probably notice a few different patterns. In basil plants, each leaf is about 90 degrees \u2014 a quarter-turn \u2014 from the last, a template called \u201cdecussate.\u201d ",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Icefish Got Its Transparent Blood and See-Through Skull (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4804",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/science/antarctic-blackfin-icefish-genome.html",
        "text": "Research shows how the Antarctic blackfin icefish differs from its close relatives on the genetic level. Research shows how the Antarctic blackfin icefish differs from its close relatives on the genetic level. The Southern Ocean around Antarctica was once warmer. Then about 30 million years ago, the temperature dropped. Few fish could survive temperatures that were just above seawater\u2019s freezing point, and they either migrated to warmer waters or went extinct.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Microbes May Have Survived 100 Million Years Beneath the Seafloor (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4805",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/microbes-100-million-years-old.html",
        "text": "Rescued from their cold, cramped and nutrient-poor homes, the bacteria awoke in the lab and grew. Rescued from their cold, cramped and nutrient-poor homes, the bacteria awoke in the lab and grew. The South Pacific Gyre is an aquatic nowhere. It\u2019s the spot in the sea that\u2019s farther from land than any other, so devoid of nutrients, life and even continental dust that it\u2019s considered \u201cthe deadest spot in the ocean,\u201d said Steven D\u2019Hondt, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Rhode Island.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Rising Threat to Wildlife: Electrocution (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4806",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/wildlife-electrocution.html",
        "text": "Power lines and electrified fences are killing birds, monkeys, pangolins and even elephants in surprising numbers. Power lines and electrified fences are killing birds, monkeys, pangolins and even elephants in surprising numbers.  South Africa is a country of ranches, farms, reserves and national parks, many surrounded by miles of electric fencing. The fencing keeps out unwanted animal and human intruders, and protects livestock and desirable wildlife.",
        "author": "By Rachel Nuwer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Volcanoes on Venus Might Still Be Smoking (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4807",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/science/venus-volcanoes-active.html",
        "text": "Planetary science experiments on Earth suggest that the sun\u2019s second planet might have ongoing volcanic activity. Planetary science experiments on Earth suggest that the sun\u2019s second planet might have ongoing volcanic activity. Venus is our toxic twin. Its chemical makeup, size and density are similar to our world\u2019s, although its hellish temperatures can melt lead, and its atmosphere is rife with sulfuric acid.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Volcanoes on Venus Might Still Be Smoking (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4808",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/science/venus-volcanoes-active.html",
        "text": "Planetary science experiments on Earth suggest that the sun\u2019s second planet might have ongoing volcanic activity. Planetary science experiments on Earth suggest that the sun\u2019s second planet might have ongoing volcanic activity. Venus is our toxic twin. Its chemical makeup, size and density are similar to our world\u2019s, although its hellish temperatures can melt lead, and its atmosphere is rife with sulfuric acid.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Volcanoes on Venus Might Still Be Smoking (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4809",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/science/venus-volcanoes-active.html",
        "text": "Planetary science experiments on Earth suggest that the sun\u2019s second planet might have ongoing volcanic activity. Planetary science experiments on Earth suggest that the sun\u2019s second planet might have ongoing volcanic activity. Venus is our toxic twin. Its chemical makeup, size and density are similar to our world\u2019s, although its hellish temperatures can melt lead, and its atmosphere is rife with sulfuric acid.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "What I Didn\u2019t Do This Summer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4810",
        "date": "2019-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/science/summer-wedding-universe-church.html",
        "text": "Our reporter missed the solar eclipse. But he did handle a cosmic affair in Hudson Valley. Our reporter missed the solar eclipse. But he did handle a cosmic affair in Hudson Valley. So I missed the eclipse. It turned out that in early July something equally cosmic would be happening \u2014 likewise accompanied by crying, laughing, drinking and a last-minute, nail-biting weather watch \u2014 albeit something more local and hopefully far more lasting. I performed a wedding.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Signs of Recent Volcanic Eruption on Mars Hint at Habitats for Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4811",
        "date": "2020-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/science/mars-volcano-eruption.html",
        "text": "Not thought to be volcanically active, Mars may have experienced an eruption just 53,000 years ago. Not thought to be volcanically active, Mars may have experienced an eruption just 53,000 years ago. Mars was once home to seas and oceans, and perhaps even life. But our neighboring world has long since dried up and its atmosphere has been blown away, while most activity beneath its surface has long ceased. It\u2019s a dead planet.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Signs of Recent Volcanic Eruption on Mars Hint at Habitats for Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4812",
        "date": "2020-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/science/mars-volcano-eruption.html",
        "text": "Not thought to be volcanically active, Mars may have experienced an eruption just 53,000 years ago. Not thought to be volcanically active, Mars may have experienced an eruption just 53,000 years ago. Mars was once home to seas and oceans, and perhaps even life. But our neighboring world has long since dried up and its atmosphere has been blown away, while most activity beneath its surface has long ceased. It\u2019s a dead planet.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ancient-DNA Researchers Set Ethics Guidelines for Their Work (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4813",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/ancient-dna-archaeology-ethics.html",
        "text": "New, international standards for handling ancient genetic material draw support from many scientists, criticism from others. New, international standards for handling ancient genetic material draw support from many scientists, criticism from others. In 2017, a team of scientists successfully extracted the DNA of members of a Pueblo community who were buried starting around 1,300 years ago in what is now Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The DNA suggested that these people had lived in a matrilineal society, with power passed down through generations of mothers.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Revealed: The Shipworm Sex Tapes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4814",
        "date": "2021-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/science/shipworm-sex-pseudocopulation.html",
        "text": "Nature\u2019s weirdest clam surprises scientists once again, this time in video footage of its mating habits. Nature\u2019s weirdest clam surprises scientists once again, this time in video footage of its mating habits. Above the water, September would seem a month like any other in the boatyards of Charleston, Ore., where yachts and wooden fishing vessels gently bob against a backdrop of emerald-green trees. But under the surface, specifically under the boats and inside the hulls, it is a very special time of year, when the wood-eating giant feathery shipworms jettison sperm and eggs into the open water in the hopes that their genes will live on in a new generation.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is This the First Fossil of an Embryo? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4815",
        "date": "2019-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/27/science/fossil-embryo-paleontology-caveaspharea.html",
        "text": "Mysterious 609-million-year-old balls of cells may be the oldest animal embryos \u2014 or something else entirely. Mysterious 609-million-year-old balls of cells may be the oldest animal embryos \u2014 or something else entirely. A creature called Caveasphaera lived in China 609 million years ago, and it left behind fossils that resemble tiny grains of sand. But as innocuous as those fossils appear, they may speak volumes about our own evolutionary history.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should You Take Your Shoes Off at Home? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4816",
        "date": "2019-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/science/shoes-in-house-germs.html",
        "text": "It isn\u2019t even a question in many homes, but here\u2019s what the science has to say. It isn\u2019t even a question in many homes, but here\u2019s what the science has to say. Maybe you kick off your shoes at home because you don\u2019t want to track dirt across clean carpets or floors, or maybe it\u2019s just a relief to shed them.",
        "author": "By Christopher Mele"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Lifeboats\u2019 Amid the World\u2019s Wildfires (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4817",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/science/wildfire-biodiversity.html",
        "text": "Islands of greenery, called refugia, survive even the worst fires, sheltering species and renewing charred landscapes. Islands of greenery, called refugia, survive even the worst fires, sheltering species and renewing charred landscapes.  Forests have burned in spectacular fashion this year. From California to Colorado, Portugal to Greece, photographers have captured terrifying images of infernos soaring into the sky and spreading to the horizon.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Nothing Short of Amazing\u2019: NASA Mars Helicopter Makes Longest Flight Yet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4818",
        "date": "2021-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/25/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "Ingenuity made a 328-foot round-trip journey, helping to demonstrate the capability of the vehicle\u2019s navigation system. Ingenuity made a 328-foot round-trip journey, helping to demonstrate the capability of the vehicle\u2019s navigation system. NASA\u2019s Mars helicopter went up again, going faster and traveling a total distance that was about the length of an American football field on its third trip through the wispy air of Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Nothing Short of Amazing\u2019: NASA Mars Helicopter Makes Longest Flight Yet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4819",
        "date": "2021-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/25/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "Ingenuity made a 328-foot round-trip journey, helping to demonstrate the capability of the vehicle\u2019s navigation system. Ingenuity made a 328-foot round-trip journey, helping to demonstrate the capability of the vehicle\u2019s navigation system. NASA\u2019s Mars helicopter went up again, going faster and traveling a total distance that was about the length of an American football field on its third trip through the wispy air of Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Big Bang Produced Something Rather Than Nothing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4820",
        "date": "2020-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/science/physics-neutrino-antimatter-ichikawa-t2k.html",
        "text": "How did matter gain the edge over antimatter in the early universe? Maybe, just maybe, neutrinos. How did matter gain the edge over antimatter in the early universe? Maybe, just maybe, neutrinos. Scientists on Wednesday announced that they were perhaps one step closer to understanding why the universe contains something rather than nothing.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "When is the launch and how can I watch it? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4821",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-how-to-watch-live.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s what you need to know about the Inspiration4 mission and how to follow it live. Here\u2019s what you need to know about the Inspiration4 mission and how to follow it live. A five-hour launch window opens Wednesday at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. The exact time will depend on the weather. Current forecasts give an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions. In an update posted to Twitter at about 1:20 p.m., SpaceX said the rocket\u2019s systems were ready for flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "When is the launch and how can I watch it? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4822",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-how-to-watch-live.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s what you need to know about the Inspiration4 mission and how to follow it live. Here\u2019s what you need to know about the Inspiration4 mission and how to follow it live. A five-hour launch window opens Wednesday at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. The exact time will depend on the weather. Current forecasts give an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions. In an update posted to Twitter at about 1:20 p.m., SpaceX said the rocket\u2019s systems were ready for flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "When is the launch and how can I watch it? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4823",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-how-to-watch-live.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s what you need to know about the Inspiration4 mission and how to follow it live. Here\u2019s what you need to know about the Inspiration4 mission and how to follow it live. A five-hour launch window opens Wednesday at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. The exact time will depend on the weather. Current forecasts give an 80 percent chance of favorable conditions. In an update posted to Twitter at about 1:20 p.m., SpaceX said the rocket\u2019s systems were ready for flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Female Hummingbirds Avoid Harassment by Looking Like Males (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4824",
        "date": "2021-08-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/science/hummingbirds-female.html",
        "text": "Among white-necked Jacobin hummingbirds, those with plumage that resembles colors found on males get harassed less. Among white-necked Jacobin hummingbirds, those with plumage that resembles colors found on males get harassed less. An adult female white-necked Jacobin hummingbird is no stranger to invisible labor.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Self-Isolated at the End of the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4825",
        "date": "2020-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/antarctica-byrd-distancing-expedition.html",
        "text": "Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing. Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing. More than once recently, I have lain awake counting the sirens going up the otherwise empty streets of Manhattan, wondering if their number might serve as a metric for how bad the coming day would be. But I know that none of my days could approach what Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the American arctic explorer, endured in 1934, when he spent five months alone in a one-room shack in Antarctica, wintering over the long night.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Self-Isolated at the End of the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4826",
        "date": "2020-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/antarctica-byrd-distancing-expedition.html",
        "text": "Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing. Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing. More than once recently, I have lain awake counting the sirens going up the otherwise empty streets of Manhattan, wondering if their number might serve as a metric for how bad the coming day would be. But I know that none of my days could approach what Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the American arctic explorer, endured in 1934, when he spent five months alone in a one-room shack in Antarctica, wintering over the long night.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Self-Isolated at the End of the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4827",
        "date": "2020-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/antarctica-byrd-distancing-expedition.html",
        "text": "Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing. Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing. More than once recently, I have lain awake counting the sirens going up the otherwise empty streets of Manhattan, wondering if their number might serve as a metric for how bad the coming day would be. But I know that none of my days could approach what Adm. Richard E. Byrd, the American arctic explorer, endured in 1934, when he spent five months alone in a one-room shack in Antarctica, wintering over the long night.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Solving the Scorching Mystery of the Sun\u2019s Erupting Plasma Jets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4828",
        "date": "2017-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/science/sun-plasma-jets-spicules.html",
        "text": "After decades of study, scientists have developed a model to explain how violent solar spicules form. After decades of study, scientists have developed a model to explain how violent solar spicules form. Spiky bursts of plasma called spicules swirl around the surface of the sun. Millions erupt every moment, spurting solar material some 6,000 miles high at speeds of about 60 miles per second.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Small Step for Experimental Space Gear. Many Giant Leaps of Imagination. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4829",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/apollo-moon-spacesuits-gallery.html",
        "text": "A gallery of scenes from when the space age was young and extraterrestrial travel looked fun. A gallery of scenes from when the space age was young and extraterrestrial travel looked fun. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Small Step for Experimental Space Gear. Many Giant Leaps of Imagination. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4830",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/apollo-moon-spacesuits-gallery.html",
        "text": "A gallery of scenes from when the space age was young and extraterrestrial travel looked fun. A gallery of scenes from when the space age was young and extraterrestrial travel looked fun. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Termites Can Teach Us About Cooling Our Buildings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4831",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/science/termite-nest-ventilation.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe think humans are the best designers, but this is not really true,\u201d a researcher said. \u201cWe think humans are the best designers, but this is not really true,\u201d a researcher said. In the capital of Zimbabwe, a building called Eastgate Centre holds nearly 350,000 square-feet of office space and shops. It uses 90 percent less energy than a similar sized building next door.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Even Tiny Changes in Earth\u2019s Orbit Would Yield Global Catastrophe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4832",
        "date": "2017-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/science/earth-orbit-sun-catastrophe.html",
        "text": "A minute alteration in the planet\u2019s trajectory around the sun would have disastrous results, a scientist estimates. A minute alteration in the planet\u2019s trajectory around the sun would have disastrous results, a scientist estimates. Q. Let\u2019s say Earth\u2019s orbit moved closer to the sun. How small a change would be disastrous?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Was a Universe-Shaking Announcement. But What Is a Neutron Star Anyway? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4833",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/science/neutron-star-ligo.html",
        "text": "Here are answers to some questions you might have about the discovery that was announced on Monday. Here are answers to some questions you might have about the discovery that was announced on Monday. On Monday, astronomers made a universe-shaking announcement about the detection of reverberations from the collision of two neutron stars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Oumuamua, the Interstellar Visitor, Looks Eerily Familiar (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4834",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/science/astronomy-oumuamua-comet.html",
        "text": "A piece of an extrasolar Pluto may have passed through our cosmic neighborhood, a new study suggests. A piece of an extrasolar Pluto may have passed through our cosmic neighborhood, a new study suggests. One of the great shaggy-dog mysteries of the sky continues to mesmerize astronomers. That would be the nature of a strange interloper, Oumuamua, that came zooming through the solar system in 2017. Interstellar comet? Cosmic iceberg? Alien space wreck?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Oumuamua, the Interstellar Visitor, Looks Eerily Familiar (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4835",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/science/astronomy-oumuamua-comet.html",
        "text": "A piece of an extrasolar Pluto may have passed through our cosmic neighborhood, a new study suggests. A piece of an extrasolar Pluto may have passed through our cosmic neighborhood, a new study suggests. One of the great shaggy-dog mysteries of the sky continues to mesmerize astronomers. That would be the nature of a strange interloper, Oumuamua, that came zooming through the solar system in 2017. Interstellar comet? Cosmic iceberg? Alien space wreck?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Could You Make a Snowball of Neutrinos? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4836",
        "date": "2020-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/science/neutrinos-snowball-randall-munroe.html",
        "text": "You\u2019ll need more than a few \u2014 say, 300 decillion. And good luck trying to throw it. You\u2019ll need more than a few \u2014 say, 300 decillion. And good luck trying to throw it. \u201cHow many neutrinos would you need to make a snowball? Would it feel cold and squishy if you were hit in the face, or would it just pass through?\u201d",
        "author": "By Randall Munroe"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Brazil, Mending an Urban Fabric With Geometry and Bamboo (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4837",
        "date": "2019-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/science/math-weaving-bamboo.html",
        "text": "With designer and artist Alison Grace Martin, architects and engineers are embracing \u201cthe logic of the weave.\u201d With designer and artist Alison Grace Martin, architects and engineers are embracing \u201cthe logic of the weave.\u201d S\u00c3O PAULO, Brazil \u2014 On a Tuesday afternoon in early July,Alison Grace Martin, the British artist and weaver, joined a steady stream of Paulistanos along the elevated freeway that curves through downtown S\u00e3o Paulo. The two-mile \u201cMinhoc\u00e3o\u201d (named after a mythic \u201cgigantic earthworm\u201d) was closed to cars that day. The only traffic was on foot and bikes, skateboards and scooters. Picnickers lounged on the median sipping wine. Children ran after soccer balls. A retriever chased a coconut; a pit bull peed on a pile of bamboo.",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts and Gabriela Portilho"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Brazil, Mending an Urban Fabric With Geometry and Bamboo (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4838",
        "date": "2019-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/science/math-weaving-bamboo.html",
        "text": "With designer and artist Alison Grace Martin, architects and engineers are embracing \u201cthe logic of the weave.\u201d With designer and artist Alison Grace Martin, architects and engineers are embracing \u201cthe logic of the weave.\u201d S\u00c3O PAULO, Brazil \u2014 On a Tuesday afternoon in early July,Alison Grace Martin, the British artist and weaver, joined a steady stream of Paulistanos along the elevated freeway that curves through downtown S\u00e3o Paulo. The two-mile \u201cMinhoc\u00e3o\u201d (named after a mythic \u201cgigantic earthworm\u201d) was closed to cars that day. The only traffic was on foot and bikes, skateboards and scooters. Picnickers lounged on the median sipping wine. Children ran after soccer balls. A retriever chased a coconut; a pit bull peed on a pile of bamboo.",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts and Gabriela Portilho"
    },
    {
        "title": "Some of Australia\u2019s Smallest Species Could Be Lost to Wildfires (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4839",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/science/australia-fire-ecology-insects.html",
        "text": "Velvet worms, trapdoor spiders: Scientists worry about the fate of the nation\u2019s many remarkable, overlooked endemic creatures. Velvet worms, trapdoor spiders: Scientists worry about the fate of the nation\u2019s many remarkable, overlooked endemic creatures. SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 When Tanya Latty, an entomologist at the University of Sydney, started studying a species of velvet worm 18 months ago, she thought it was just a side project. ",
        "author": "By Helen Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Star System With Right-Angled Planets Surprises Astronomers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4840",
        "date": "2021-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/science/perpendicular-planets-star-system.html",
        "text": "Two planets orbit the poles while another revolves around the star\u2019s equator, suggesting a mysterious, undetected force. Two planets orbit the poles while another revolves around the star\u2019s equator, suggesting a mysterious, undetected force. Star systems come in all shapes and sizes. Some have lots of planets, some have larger planets and others have no planets at all. But a particularly unusual system about 150 light-years from our own has scientists scratching their heads.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lightning, Weather\u2019s Byproduct, May Become One of Its Predictors (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4841",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/science/lightning-weather-prediction.html",
        "text": "Two new space-based lightning sensors are set to join a growing global architecture of ground-based detection networks. Two new space-based lightning sensors are set to join a growing global architecture of ground-based detection networks. Lightning\u2019s intricate, darting dance across the sky can be mesmerizing or terrifying, elegant or explosive, divine or destructive, depending on how close it is.",
        "author": "By Kate Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Lizard With Scales That Behave Like a Computer Simulation (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4842",
        "date": "2017-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/12/science/ocellated-lizards-scales-cellular-automata.html",
        "text": "Two mathematical models converge to illuminate the process through which an ocellated lizard\u2019s scales repeatedly change color. Two mathematical models converge to illuminate the process through which an ocellated lizard\u2019s scales repeatedly change color. The ocellated lizard \u2014 known as the jeweled lacerta in the pet trade \u2014 is born rusty brown with white polka dots. Within a few months, its skin begins to change into a dizzying, labyrinthine array of black and bright green pixels. By the time the lizard has sexually matured, reaching up to two feet in length, some 4,000 scales along its back are all black or green, possibly to accommodate a habitat change between early life and adulthood. Through the rest of the lizard\u2019s life, many of these scales will continually flip between black and green.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The space station just dodged debris from a 2007 Chinese weapons test. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4843",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/china-debris-space-station.html",
        "text": "The object was expected to make a close pass with the outpost in orbit on Thursday night. The object was expected to make a close pass with the outpost in orbit on Thursday night. On Wednesday, about six hours before NASA\u2019s Crew-3 mission launched to orbit, the International Space Station was forced to maneuver itself to avoid a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite weapon test in 2007.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The space station just dodged debris from a 2007 Chinese weapons test. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4844",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/china-debris-space-station.html",
        "text": "The object was expected to make a close pass with the outpost in orbit on Thursday night. The object was expected to make a close pass with the outpost in orbit on Thursday night. On Wednesday, about six hours before NASA\u2019s Crew-3 mission launched to orbit, the International Space Station was forced to maneuver itself to avoid a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite weapon test in 2007.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The space station just dodged debris from a 2007 Chinese weapons test. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4845",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/china-debris-space-station.html",
        "text": "The object was expected to make a close pass with the outpost in orbit on Thursday night. The object was expected to make a close pass with the outpost in orbit on Thursday night. On Wednesday, about six hours before NASA\u2019s Crew-3 mission launched to orbit, the International Space Station was forced to maneuver itself to avoid a piece of debris spawned by a Chinese antisatellite weapon test in 2007.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Second Woman Quickly Follows First to Ocean\u2019s Nadir (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4846",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/vescovo-obrien-challenger-deep-ocean.html",
        "text": "The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The second of two women has made history by diving to the ocean\u2019s deepest spot: the Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the greatest of the sea\u2019s many recesses.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Second Woman Quickly Follows First to Ocean\u2019s Nadir (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4847",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/vescovo-obrien-challenger-deep-ocean.html",
        "text": "The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The second of two women has made history by diving to the ocean\u2019s deepest spot: the Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the greatest of the sea\u2019s many recesses.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Second Woman Quickly Follows First to Ocean\u2019s Nadir (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4848",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/vescovo-obrien-challenger-deep-ocean.html",
        "text": "The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The second of two women has made history by diving to the ocean\u2019s deepest spot: the Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the greatest of the sea\u2019s many recesses.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Second Woman Quickly Follows First to Ocean\u2019s Nadir (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4849",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/vescovo-obrien-challenger-deep-ocean.html",
        "text": "The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The second of two women has made history by diving to the ocean\u2019s deepest spot: the Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the greatest of the sea\u2019s many recesses.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Second Woman Quickly Follows First to Ocean\u2019s Nadir (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4850",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/vescovo-obrien-challenger-deep-ocean.html",
        "text": "The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The mountaineer Vanessa O\u2019Brien dove to the Challenger Deep, seven miles below the surface of the sea. The second of two women has made history by diving to the ocean\u2019s deepest spot: the Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the Mariana Trench, the greatest of the sea\u2019s many recesses.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wednesday\u2019s flight schedule (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4851",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-schedule-florida.html",
        "text": "The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that. The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that. The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wednesday\u2019s flight schedule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4852",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-schedule-florida.html",
        "text": "The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that. The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that. The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wednesday\u2019s flight schedule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4853",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-launch-schedule-florida.html",
        "text": "The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that. The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that. The launch could occur as early as 8:02 p.m. But the action will begin hours before that.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Ultra-Black Fish Disappear in the Deepest Seas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4854",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/ultra-black-fish.html",
        "text": "Researchers have found fish that absorb more than 99.9 percent of the light that hits their skin. Researchers have found fish that absorb more than 99.9 percent of the light that hits their skin. Alexander Davis admits that he can be a glutton for punishment. He staked part of his Ph.D. on finding some of the world\u2019s best-camouflaged fishes in the ocean\u2019s deepest depths. These animals are so keen on not being found that they\u2019ve evolved the ability to absorb more than 99.9 percent of the light that hits their skin.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Starry, Starry Dust (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4855",
        "date": "2017-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/science/cosmic-dust-nasa.html",
        "text": "Researchers are examining the enormous amount of cosmic dust, some from exploding stars, that sprinkle the universe. Researchers are examining the enormous amount of cosmic dust, some from exploding stars, that sprinkle the universe. Q. What is the cosmic dust that I keep hearing about? What is it made of? Where does it come from?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Starry, Starry Dust (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4856",
        "date": "2017-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/science/cosmic-dust-nasa.html",
        "text": "Researchers are examining the enormous amount of cosmic dust, some from exploding stars, that sprinkle the universe. Researchers are examining the enormous amount of cosmic dust, some from exploding stars, that sprinkle the universe. Q. What is the cosmic dust that I keep hearing about? What is it made of? Where does it come from?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "During a Solar Eclipse, What Are Plants Doing? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4857",
        "date": "2019-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/science/plants-solar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "Research conducted during the Great American Eclipse of 2017 suggested the sun\u2019s midday disappearance shocked some plants. Research conducted during the Great American Eclipse of 2017 suggested the sun\u2019s midday disappearance shocked some plants. As the total solar eclipse crosses South America on Tuesday, it won\u2019t just be people oohing and ahhing as the sun is blotted out.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Two Tiny Moons Eclipse the Sun on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4858",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/mars-eclipse-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. The cameras of NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover usually look down at the rocks on Mars, divining clues in the minerals of what the planet was like billions of years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Two Tiny Moons Eclipse the Sun on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4859",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/mars-eclipse-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. The cameras of NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover usually look down at the rocks on Mars, divining clues in the minerals of what the planet was like billions of years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Two Tiny Moons Eclipse the Sun on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4860",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/mars-eclipse-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. The cameras of NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover usually look down at the rocks on Mars, divining clues in the minerals of what the planet was like billions of years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Two Tiny Moons Eclipse the Sun on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4861",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/mars-eclipse-moons-phobos-deimos.html",
        "text": "Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. Phobos and Deimos, the two Martian moons, got between the red planet and the sun in March. The cameras of NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover usually look down at the rocks on Mars, divining clues in the minerals of what the planet was like billions of years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flattening the Coronavirus Curve (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4862",
        "date": "2020-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "One chart explains why slowing the spread of the infection is nearly as important as stopping it. One chart explains why slowing the spread of the infection is nearly as important as stopping it. At the end of February, Drew Harris, a population health analyst at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, had just flown across the country to visit his daughter in Eugene, Ore., when he saw an article on his Google news feed. It was from The Economist, and was about limiting the damage of the coronavirus.",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Reliving the Apollo 11 Moon Landing in Pictures (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4863",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/science/apollo-11-moon-landing-photos.html",
        "text": "It may be a familiar yarn, but humankind's lunar journey in 1969 continues to be a spellbinder. It may be a familiar yarn, but humankind's lunar journey in 1969 continues to be a spellbinder.  [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sarah Parcak Thinks We Need to Learn From the Fall of Egypt\u2019s Old Kingdom (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4864",
        "date": "2019-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/science/sarah-parcak-space-archaeology.html",
        "text": "In a new book, the archaeologist makes the case that ancient history illuminates solutions to modern problems. In a new book, the archaeologist makes the case that ancient history illuminates solutions to modern problems. Sarah Parcak, an archaeologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has scoured the globe for the faded outlines of Egyptian cities, Viking ruins and other ancient sites \u2014 often with a camera crew watching over her shoulder.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Do Zebras Have Stripes? Scientists Camouflaged Horses to Find Out (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4865",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/science/zebra-stripes-flies.html",
        "text": "If you spend time around horses or flies, you might want to invest in some zebra print. If you spend time around horses or flies, you might want to invest in some zebra print. What\u2019s black, white and striped all over \u2014 except for its head?",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018Honking Big\u2019 Cave in Canada Lures Geologists to Its Mouth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4866",
        "date": "2018-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/science/canada-cave-british-columbia.html",
        "text": "How did a hole large enough to fit the Statue of Liberty go undetected for so long? How did a hole large enough to fit the Statue of Liberty go undetected for so long? In the era of Google Maps, one might be tempted to believe that there are no undiscovered corners of the Earth.",
        "author": "By Emily S. Rueb"
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018Honking Big\u2019 Cave in Canada Lures Geologists to Its Mouth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4867",
        "date": "2018-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/science/canada-cave-british-columbia.html",
        "text": "How did a hole large enough to fit the Statue of Liberty go undetected for so long? How did a hole large enough to fit the Statue of Liberty go undetected for so long? In the era of Google Maps, one might be tempted to believe that there are no undiscovered corners of the Earth.",
        "author": "By Emily S. Rueb"
    },
    {
        "title": "Waking From Hibernation, the Hard Work of Spring Begins (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4868",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/science/hibernation-spring-bears-bees-bats-arctic-squirrels.html",
        "text": "Emerging from the torpor of winter means a busy spring for these bears, bees, bats and squirrels. Emerging from the torpor of winter means a busy spring for these bears, bees, bats and squirrels. For animals that hibernate, making it to spring is no small feat. Torpor \u2014 the state of reduced bodily activity that occurs during hibernation \u2014 is not restful. By the time they emerge, hibernating animals are often sleep-deprived: Most expend huge bursts of energy to arouse themselves occasionally in the winter so their body temperatures don\u2019t dip too low. This back-and-forth is exhausting, and hibernators do it with little to no food and water. By winter\u2019s end, some have shed more than half their body weight.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Neutrino Trappers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4869",
        "date": "2018-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/science/neutrinos-baksan.html",
        "text": "Deep in a mountain in southern Russia, scientists are tracking one of the universe\u2019s most elusive particles. Deep in a mountain in southern Russia, scientists are tracking one of the universe\u2019s most elusive particles. Just over the border from Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, lies a small town called Neytrino. For the last half-century,  its main business has been the study of the tiniest insubstantial bit of matter in the universe, an ephemeral fly-by-night subatomic particle called the neutrino.",
        "author": "By Maxim Babenko and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Dock With Space Station After Historic SpaceX Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4870",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/science/spacex-astronauts-arrival.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. The Crew Dragon has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Dock With Space Station After Historic SpaceX Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4871",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/science/spacex-astronauts-arrival.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. The Crew Dragon has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Dock With Space Station After Historic SpaceX Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4872",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/science/spacex-astronauts-arrival.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. The Crew Dragon has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Dock With Space Station After Historic SpaceX Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4873",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/science/spacex-astronauts-arrival.html",
        "text": "Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could stay in orbit for months to aid the station\u2019s short-staffed crew. The Crew Dragon has arrived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can We Make Our Robots Less Biased Than We Are? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4874",
        "date": "2020-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/science/artificial-intelligence-robots-racism-police.html",
        "text": "A.I. developers are committing to end the injustices in how their technology is often made and used. A.I. developers are committing to end the injustices in how their technology is often made and used. On a summer night in Dallas in 2016, a bomb-handling robot made technological history. Police officers had attached roughly a pound of C-4 explosive to it, steered the device up to a wall near an active shooter and detonated the charge. In the explosion, the assailant, Micah Xavier Johnson, became the first person in the United States to be killed by a police robot.",
        "author": "By David Berreby"
    },
    {
        "title": "Debunking the Myth That Earthquakes and Full Moons Are Linked (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4875",
        "date": "2018-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/science/earthquakes-moon-cycles.html",
        "text": "A seismologist scrutinized hundreds of strong earthquakes over four centuries and found no relationship to lunar cycles. A seismologist scrutinized hundreds of strong earthquakes over four centuries and found no relationship to lunar cycles. On Dec. 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake ruptured the ocean floor off the west coast of Sumatra. The resulting tsunami killed nearly 230,000 people in 14 countries, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. And it occurred during a full moon.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geminid Meteor Shower: How to Watch Its Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4876",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/science/meteor-shower-geminid.html",
        "text": "A picture from the meteor shower in 2020 highlights how brilliant this winter sky show can be. A picture from the meteor shower in 2020 highlights how brilliant this winter sky show can be. Night sky enthusiasts are gearing up to enjoy one of the best meteor showers of 2021, the Geminids, which peak on Monday night into Tuesday morning.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Big Science Be Too Big? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4877",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/science-research-psychology.html",
        "text": "A new study finds that small teams of researchers do more innovative work than large teams do. A new study finds that small teams of researchers do more innovative work than large teams do. Modern science is largely a team sport, and over the past few decades the makeup of those teams has shifted, from small groups of collaborators to ever larger consortiums, with rosters far longer than that of the New England Patriots. Answering big questions often requires scientists and institutions to pool resources and data, whether the research involves detecting gravitational waves in deep space, or sorting out the genetics of brain development.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "In the Oceans, the Volume Is Rising as Never Before (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4878",
        "date": "2021-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/science/ocean-marine-noise-pollution.html",
        "text": "A new review of the scientific literature confirms that anthropogenic noise is becoming unbearable for undersea life. A new review of the scientific literature confirms that anthropogenic noise is becoming unbearable for undersea life. Although clown fish are conceived on coral reefs, they spend the first part of their lives as larvae drifting in the open ocean. The fish are not yet orange, striped or even capable of swimming. They are still plankton, a term that comes from the Greek word for \u201cwanderer,\u201d and wander they do, drifting at the mercy of the currents in an oceanic rumspringa.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "In the Oceans, the Volume Is Rising as Never Before (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4879",
        "date": "2021-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/science/ocean-marine-noise-pollution.html",
        "text": "A new review of the scientific literature confirms that anthropogenic noise is becoming unbearable for undersea life. A new review of the scientific literature confirms that anthropogenic noise is becoming unbearable for undersea life. Although clown fish are conceived on coral reefs, they spend the first part of their lives as larvae drifting in the open ocean. The fish are not yet orange, striped or even capable of swimming. They are still plankton, a term that comes from the Greek word for \u201cwanderer,\u201d and wander they do, drifting at the mercy of the currents in an oceanic rumspringa.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Ship\u2019s Mission: Let the Deep Sea Be Seen (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4880",
        "date": "2020-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/science/ocean-exploration-dalio-ship.html",
        "text": "A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. In 2014, when crude oil was selling for more than $100 a barrel, the cost of a new drill ship for oil exploration could run to $100 million.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Ship\u2019s Mission: Let the Deep Sea Be Seen (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4881",
        "date": "2020-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/science/ocean-exploration-dalio-ship.html",
        "text": "A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. In 2014, when crude oil was selling for more than $100 a barrel, the cost of a new drill ship for oil exploration could run to $100 million.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Ship\u2019s Mission: Let the Deep Sea Be Seen (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4882",
        "date": "2020-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/science/ocean-exploration-dalio-ship.html",
        "text": "A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. In 2014, when crude oil was selling for more than $100 a barrel, the cost of a new drill ship for oil exploration could run to $100 million.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Ship\u2019s Mission: Let the Deep Sea Be Seen (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4883",
        "date": "2020-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/science/ocean-exploration-dalio-ship.html",
        "text": "A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. A giant new vessel, OceanXplorer, seeks to unveil the secrets of the abyss for a global audience. In 2014, when crude oil was selling for more than $100 a barrel, the cost of a new drill ship for oil exploration could run to $100 million.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 Was a Big Year in Orbit and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4884",
        "date": "2021-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/29/science/space-astronomy-2021.html",
        "text": "Journeys to Mars, space station emergencies and other events that made this year out of this world. Journeys to Mars, space station emergencies and other events that made this year out of this world. Journeys to Mars, space station emergencies and other events that made this year out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 Was a Big Year in Orbit and Beyond (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4885",
        "date": "2021-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/29/science/space-astronomy-2021.html",
        "text": "Journeys to Mars, space station emergencies and other events that made this year out of this world. Journeys to Mars, space station emergencies and other events that made this year out of this world. Journeys to Mars, space station emergencies and other events that made this year out of this world.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Needs to Find Ice on the Moon. This Rover Will Lead the Search. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4886",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/science/moon-robot-rover-viper-nasa.html",
        "text": "Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. After sending four rovers to Mars \u2014 with a fifth scheduled to launch in July \u2014 NASA announced on Thursday a contract for putting its first wheeled robot on the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Needs to Find Ice on the Moon. This Rover Will Lead the Search. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "4887",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/science/moon-robot-rover-viper-nasa.html",
        "text": "Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. After sending four rovers to Mars \u2014 with a fifth scheduled to launch in July \u2014 NASA announced on Thursday a contract for putting its first wheeled robot on the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Needs to Find Ice on the Moon. This Rover Will Lead the Search. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4888",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/science/moon-robot-rover-viper-nasa.html",
        "text": "Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. After sending four rovers to Mars \u2014 with a fifth scheduled to launch in July \u2014 NASA announced on Thursday a contract for putting its first wheeled robot on the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Needs to Find Ice on the Moon. This Rover Will Lead the Search. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4889",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/science/moon-robot-rover-viper-nasa.html",
        "text": "Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. After sending four rovers to Mars \u2014 with a fifth scheduled to launch in July \u2014 NASA announced on Thursday a contract for putting its first wheeled robot on the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Needs to Find Ice on the Moon. This Rover Will Lead the Search. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4890",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/science/moon-robot-rover-viper-nasa.html",
        "text": "Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, won a $199.5 million contract to transport NASA\u2019s VIPER rover to the lunar surface. After sending four rovers to Mars \u2014 with a fifth scheduled to launch in July \u2014 NASA announced on Thursday a contract for putting its first wheeled robot on the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Gravitational Wave Detection From Colliding Black Holes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4891",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/science/black-holes-collision-ligo-virgo.html",
        "text": "Virgo, a new detector for gravitational waves, joined the L-shaped antennas seeking space-time reverberations from colliding black holes. Virgo, a new detector for gravitational waves, joined the L-shaped antennas seeking space-time reverberations from colliding black holes. In another step forward for the rapidly expanding universe of invisible astronomy, scientists said on Wednesday that on Aug. 14 they had recorded the space-time reverberations known as gravitational waves from the collision of a pair of black holes 1.8 billion light years away from here.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oumuamua: Neither Comet nor Asteroid, but a Cosmic Iceberg (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4892",
        "date": "2020-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/science/oumuamua-astronomy-comets.html",
        "text": "A new study suggests the interloper may have arisen in an interstellar cloud, where stars are sometimes born. A new study suggests the interloper may have arisen in an interstellar cloud, where stars are sometimes born. It has been two and a half years since astronomers in Hawaii discovered a strange, cigar-shaped object speeding through the solar system on a trajectory from far away and toward even farther away. Today Oumuamua, the Hawaiian term for \u201cscout,\u201d as the object was named, is now long gone, somewhere between the orbits of Saturn and Neptune and on its way to the Great Out There, but astronomers are still wondering and debating what it was.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apocalypse Next? Astronomers Find a Chunk of Planet Around a Distant, Dead Star (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4893",
        "date": "2019-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/science/white-dwarf-fragment.html",
        "text": "A disk of debris around a faraway white dwarf offers a glimpse of our own planet\u2019s eventual fate. A disk of debris around a faraway white dwarf offers a glimpse of our own planet\u2019s eventual fate. In a shard of galactic archaeology that offers a less-than-inviting hint at our own future, astronomers have discovered a chunk of a former planet orbiting the remains of its former star, now a smoldering cinder known as a white dwarf.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fireball Cuts Through the Sky Over Michigan as Meteor Falls (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4894",
        "date": "2018-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/science/michigan-meteor.html",
        "text": "Videos showed a bright flash of light, followed by a pop almost like a light bulb burning out. Videos showed a bright flash of light, followed by a pop almost like a light bulb burning out. A fireball from a descending meteor lit up the sky north of Detroit on Tuesday night, creating a brief spectacle that people across the northern United States and parts of Canada reported seeing.",
        "author": "By Daniel Victor"
    },
    {
        "title": "With an Internet of Animals, Scientists Aim to Track and Save Wildlife (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4895",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/science/space-station-wildlife.html",
        "text": "Using tiny sensors and equipment aboard the space station, a project called ICARUS seeks to revolutionize animal tracking. Using tiny sensors and equipment aboard the space station, a project called ICARUS seeks to revolutionize animal tracking. The International Space Station, orbiting some 240 miles above the planet, is about to join the effort to monitor the world\u2019s wildlife \u2014 and to revolutionize the science of animal tracking.",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "With an Internet of Animals, Scientists Aim to Track and Save Wildlife (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4896",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/science/space-station-wildlife.html",
        "text": "Using tiny sensors and equipment aboard the space station, a project called ICARUS seeks to revolutionize animal tracking. Using tiny sensors and equipment aboard the space station, a project called ICARUS seeks to revolutionize animal tracking. The International Space Station, orbiting some 240 miles above the planet, is about to join the effort to monitor the world\u2019s wildlife \u2014 and to revolutionize the science of animal tracking.",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asia\u2019s Illegal Wildlife Trade Makes Tigers a Farm-to-Table Meal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4897",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/science/animal-farms-southeast-asia-endangered-animals.html",
        "text": "Throughout the region, endangered species like tigers are raised for their meat and bones, often in plain sight. Throughout the region, endangered species like tigers are raised for their meat and bones, often in plain sight. BOKEO PROVINCE, Laos \u2014 The tiger paced back and forth in its cage, groaning mournfully. A second big cat slept soundly in the corner, while a third stared blankly at the bars.",
        "author": "By Rachel Nuwer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asia\u2019s Illegal Wildlife Trade Makes Tigers a Farm-to-Table Meal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4898",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/science/animal-farms-southeast-asia-endangered-animals.html",
        "text": "Throughout the region, endangered species like tigers are raised for their meat and bones, often in plain sight. Throughout the region, endangered species like tigers are raised for their meat and bones, often in plain sight. BOKEO PROVINCE, Laos \u2014 The tiger paced back and forth in its cage, groaning mournfully. A second big cat slept soundly in the corner, while a third stared blankly at the bars.",
        "author": "By Rachel Nuwer"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Strange Dinosaur May Have Swum the Rivers of Africa (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4899",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/science/spinosaurus-dinosaur-tail-swimming.html",
        "text": "The Spinosaurus possessed a long, powerful tail. Paleontologists think the dinosaur used that to propel itself through water. The Spinosaurus possessed a long, powerful tail. Paleontologists think the dinosaur used that to propel itself through water. An enigmatic predatory dinosaur that lived in northern Africa about 95 million years ago possessed a long, powerful tail that may have propelled it through water, new fossils suggest.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Helicopter on Mars? NASA Wants to Try (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4900",
        "date": "2018-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "The space agency\u2019s next Martian rover, currently scheduled for a 2020 launch, is to carry a four-pound helicopter. The space agency\u2019s next Martian rover, currently scheduled for a 2020 launch, is to carry a four-pound helicopter. NASA currently has two cars roaming Mars \u2014 the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers. But the next one it will send there will carry a vehicle with a new approach for planetary exploration: a helicopter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Helicopter on Mars? NASA Wants to Try (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4901",
        "date": "2018-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "The space agency\u2019s next Martian rover, currently scheduled for a 2020 launch, is to carry a four-pound helicopter. The space agency\u2019s next Martian rover, currently scheduled for a 2020 launch, is to carry a four-pound helicopter. NASA currently has two cars roaming Mars \u2014 the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers. But the next one it will send there will carry a vehicle with a new approach for planetary exploration: a helicopter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Helicopter on Mars? NASA Wants to Try (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4902",
        "date": "2018-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "The space agency\u2019s next Martian rover, currently scheduled for a 2020 launch, is to carry a four-pound helicopter. The space agency\u2019s next Martian rover, currently scheduled for a 2020 launch, is to carry a four-pound helicopter. NASA currently has two cars roaming Mars \u2014 the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers. But the next one it will send there will carry a vehicle with a new approach for planetary exploration: a helicopter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Thinnest Paper in the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4903",
        "date": "2020-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/the-thinnest-paper-in-the-world.html",
        "text": "The process of making tengujo is fairly simple, but the nearly transparent product that results is almost magical. The process of making tengujo is fairly simple, but the nearly transparent product that results is almost magical. In 2017, Soyeon Choi, the head paper conservator at the Yale Center for British Art, received three folios of a letter written in 1753 by Eliza Pinckney, a prominent American agriculturalist. The scrawling lines on the cracked paper were elegant, but on close inspection they almost seemed to dance. And when Ms. Choi looked even more closely, through a binocular headband magnifier, she saw tiny rips around certain letters, and jagged holes around others.",
        "author": "By Oliver Whang"
    },
    {
        "title": "LightSail 2 Unfurls, Next Step Toward Space Travel by Solar Sail (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4904",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/science/lightsail-solar-sail.html",
        "text": "The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The ability to sail across the cosmos, powered by the energy of the sun, is finally becoming a reality.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "LightSail 2 Unfurls, Next Step Toward Space Travel by Solar Sail (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4905",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/science/lightsail-solar-sail.html",
        "text": "The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The ability to sail across the cosmos, powered by the energy of the sun, is finally becoming a reality.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "LightSail 2 Unfurls, Next Step Toward Space Travel by Solar Sail (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4906",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/science/lightsail-solar-sail.html",
        "text": "The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The ability to sail across the cosmos, powered by the energy of the sun, is finally becoming a reality.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "LightSail 2 Unfurls, Next Step Toward Space Travel by Solar Sail (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4907",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/science/lightsail-solar-sail.html",
        "text": "The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The Planetary Society deployed LightSail 2, aiming to further demonstrate the potential of the technology for space propulsion. The ability to sail across the cosmos, powered by the energy of the sun, is finally becoming a reality.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Snakes Found a New Way to Slither (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4908",
        "date": "2021-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/science/brown-tree-snake-climbing.html",
        "text": "The novel technique is great news for Guam\u2019s brown tree snakes, bad news for the island\u2019s nesting birds. The novel technique is great news for Guam\u2019s brown tree snakes, bad news for the island\u2019s nesting birds. In 2016, on the northern tip of Guam, two biologists, Tom Seibert and Julie Savidge, challenged several brown tree snakes to a battle of wits. The arena: a concrete pen with a narrow metal pole. The prize, at the top of the pole: two mice, a seed cake and a potato in a cage. (The potato and seed cake were for the mice.) The obstacle: a three-foot-tall metal stovepipe baffle cinched around the pole like a cummerbund.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia\u2019s New 23-Ton Module Docked, Then Sent the Space Station Spinning (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4909",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/science/russia-module-space-station.html",
        "text": "The Nauka module met up with the orbiting outpost on Thursday morning, and later unexpectedly fired its thrusters. The Nauka module met up with the orbiting outpost on Thursday morning, and later unexpectedly fired its thrusters. Hours after a new Russian module docked at the International Space Station on Thursday, it unexpectedly fired its thrusters again and set the space station into an unexpected spin.",
        "author": "By Oleg Matsnev and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia\u2019s New 23-Ton Module Docked, Then Sent the Space Station Spinning (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4910",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/science/russia-module-space-station.html",
        "text": "The Nauka module met up with the orbiting outpost on Thursday morning, and later unexpectedly fired its thrusters. The Nauka module met up with the orbiting outpost on Thursday morning, and later unexpectedly fired its thrusters. Hours after a new Russian module docked at the International Space Station on Thursday, it unexpectedly fired its thrusters again and set the space station into an unexpected spin.",
        "author": "By Oleg Matsnev and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia\u2019s New 23-Ton Module Docked, Then Sent the Space Station Spinning (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4911",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/science/russia-module-space-station.html",
        "text": "The Nauka module met up with the orbiting outpost on Thursday morning, and later unexpectedly fired its thrusters. The Nauka module met up with the orbiting outpost on Thursday morning, and later unexpectedly fired its thrusters. Hours after a new Russian module docked at the International Space Station on Thursday, it unexpectedly fired its thrusters again and set the space station into an unexpected spin.",
        "author": "By Oleg Matsnev and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Lies Beneath Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4912",
        "date": "2018-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/science/jupiter-red-spot.html",
        "text": "The mysterious, orangish storm has shrunk in diameter in recent decades, but has increased in height and depth. The mysterious, orangish storm has shrunk in diameter in recent decades, but has increased in height and depth. Q. Could there be a volcano under the Great Red Spot of Jupiter?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Lies Beneath Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4913",
        "date": "2018-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/science/jupiter-red-spot.html",
        "text": "The mysterious, orangish storm has shrunk in diameter in recent decades, but has increased in height and depth. The mysterious, orangish storm has shrunk in diameter in recent decades, but has increased in height and depth. Q. Could there be a volcano under the Great Red Spot of Jupiter?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Black Sea Turned Turquoise, Thanks to a Phytoplankton Bloom (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4914",
        "date": "2017-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/science/black-sea-turkey-turquoise-plankton.html",
        "text": "The bloom appears every summer, but it\u2019s so bright this year that it\u2019s visible from satellites in space. The bloom appears every summer, but it\u2019s so bright this year that it\u2019s visible from satellites in space. The Black Sea isn\u2019t black, and it\u2019s not usually turquoise either. But a huge bloom of phytoplankton has illuminated it \u2014 and the connected Bosporus and the Golden Horn of Istanbul \u2014 with beautiful swirls of milky blue-green. This aquatic artwork appears every summer, but this year\u2019s bloom is one of the brightest since 2012, according to Norman Kuring, a NASA scientist. It\u2019s so bright, it can be seen from space.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Powerful Lightning Strikes in Unexpected Places (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4915",
        "date": "2019-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/science/lightning-superbolts.html",
        "text": "Superbolts are extremely rare, and thousands of times more powerful than the tendrils in the typical electrical storm. Superbolts are extremely rare, and thousands of times more powerful than the tendrils in the typical electrical storm. The average lightning strike can pack a punch. But then there are superbolts. First identified in the 1970s by satellites designed to monitor nuclear explosions, they can be thousands of times more energetic than normal lightning.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Consider Indoor Ultraviolet Light to Zap Coronavirus in the Air (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4916",
        "date": "2020-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/science/ultraviolet-light-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Some researchers hope a decades-old technology might get its moment and be deployed in stores, restaurants and schools. Some researchers hope a decades-old technology might get its moment and be deployed in stores, restaurants and schools. As society tries to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, some scientists hope a decades-old technology could zap pathogens out of the air in stores, restaurants and classrooms, potentially playing a key role in containing further spread of the infection.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4917",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Opportunity, the longest-lived roving robot ever sent to another planet, explored the red plains of Mars for more than 14 years, snapping photos and revealing astonishing glimpses into its distant past. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4918",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Opportunity, the longest-lived roving robot ever sent to another planet, explored the red plains of Mars for more than 14 years, snapping photos and revealing astonishing glimpses into its distant past. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4919",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Opportunity, the longest-lived roving robot ever sent to another planet, explored the red plains of Mars for more than 14 years, snapping photos and revealing astonishing glimpses into its distant past. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4920",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/science/mars-opportunity-rover-dead.html",
        "text": "Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Silent since a giant dust storm last summer, the rover was the longest-lasting robot on another planet ever. Opportunity, the longest-lived roving robot ever sent to another planet, explored the red plains of Mars for more than 14 years, snapping photos and revealing astonishing glimpses into its distant past. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Look Familiar. Now Scientists Know Why. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4921",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/facial-recognition-brain-neurons.html",
        "text": "Researchers reported on Thursday that they had figured out how the brain stores and retrieves information about faces. Researchers reported on Thursday that they had figured out how the brain stores and retrieves information about faces. The brain has an amazing capacity for recognizing faces. It can identify a face in a few thousandths of a second, form a first impression of its owner and retain the memory for decades.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Wade"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Kind of Ice That Bends Like a Noodle Without Breaking (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4922",
        "date": "2021-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/science/ice-bending-microfibers.html",
        "text": "Perfect crystals of ice microfiber showed the flexibility of a material we usually assume to be rather brittle. Perfect crystals of ice microfiber showed the flexibility of a material we usually assume to be rather brittle. Ice is rigid and brittle \u2014 it would be astonishing to bend an icicle around a softball and have it spring back to its original straight shape. But that\u2019s what researchers have now done, although on a much smaller scale.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Interstellar Comet, in Time for the Holidays (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4923",
        "date": "2019-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/science/interstellar-comet-astronomy-borisov.html",
        "text": "On Dec. 7, the extrasolar comet now known as 2I/Borisov will make its closest approach to the sun. On Dec. 7, the extrasolar comet now known as 2I/Borisov will make its closest approach to the sun. That maybe-comet from another star really is a comet from another star, and now it has a name and a date with destiny. On Dec. 7, the newly named comet 2I/Borisov will make its closest approach to the sun and then begin a journey back outward through the southern sky in December and January.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Didn\u2019t Saturn Eat Titan, Its Biggest Moon? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4924",
        "date": "2020-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/science/saturn-titan-moon.html",
        "text": "New simulations explain how the ringed planet ended up with one giant moon that domineers its tinier siblings. New simulations explain how the ringed planet ended up with one giant moon that domineers its tinier siblings. In classical mythology, the titan Cronus, who was reinterpreted by the Romans as Saturn, devoured his newborn children to prevent a prophesied coup. (He did not succeed, and Zeus became the king of the gods.)",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "When the Surgeon Is a Mom (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4925",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/science/doctors-surgery-motherhood-medical-school.html",
        "text": "Nearly 40 percent of pregnant surgery residents consider dropping out. Many wonder: Why can\u2019t the system accommodate motherhood? Nearly 40 percent of pregnant surgery residents consider dropping out. Many wonder: Why can\u2019t the system accommodate motherhood? As a health care professional, Dr. Erika Rangel is trained to know when things are going wrong. That alarm went off one day in her fourth year of surgical residency. Her son, just 3 months old, had developed a fever. She couldn\u2019t be late for her operating shift, but his day care wouldn\u2019t accept him if he was sick. So she did what desperate mothers do and got inventive: She slipped liquid Tylenol into his bottle, in the hopes of lowering his temperature, and dropped him off. ",
        "author": "By Emma Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Cultural Treasures Are Made of Plastic. Now They\u2019re Falling Apart. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4926",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/science/plastics-preservation-getty.html",
        "text": "Museum conservators are racing to figure out how to preserve modern artworks and historical objects that are disintegrating. Museum conservators are racing to figure out how to preserve modern artworks and historical objects that are disintegrating.  LOS ANGELES \u2014 The custodians of Neil Armstrong\u2019s spacesuit at the National Air and Space Museum saw it coming. A marvel of human engineering, the suit is made of 21 layers of various plastics: nylon, neoprene, Mylar, Dacron, Kapton and Teflon. ",
        "author": "By XiaoZhi Lim"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Apollo 11 He Wasn\u2019t on the Moon. But His Coffee Was Warm. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4927",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/michael-collins-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "Michael Collins kept an orbital vigil during Neil\u2019s and Buzz\u2019s moonwalk, but he really didn\u2019t feel that lonely. Michael Collins kept an orbital vigil during Neil\u2019s and Buzz\u2019s moonwalk, but he really didn\u2019t feel that lonely. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Apollo 11 He Wasn\u2019t on the Moon. But His Coffee Was Warm. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4928",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/michael-collins-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "Michael Collins kept an orbital vigil during Neil\u2019s and Buzz\u2019s moonwalk, but he really didn\u2019t feel that lonely. Michael Collins kept an orbital vigil during Neil\u2019s and Buzz\u2019s moonwalk, but he really didn\u2019t feel that lonely. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Apollo 11 He Wasn\u2019t on the Moon. But His Coffee Was Warm. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4929",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/michael-collins-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "Michael Collins kept an orbital vigil during Neil\u2019s and Buzz\u2019s moonwalk, but he really didn\u2019t feel that lonely. Michael Collins kept an orbital vigil during Neil\u2019s and Buzz\u2019s moonwalk, but he really didn\u2019t feel that lonely. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lab Chimps Are Moving to Sanctuaries \u2014 Slowly (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4930",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/science/chimps-sanctuaries-research.html",
        "text": "Medical experimentation on chimpanzees has ended, but moving all of them into retirement will be a difficult task. Medical experimentation on chimpanzees has ended, but moving all of them into retirement will be a difficult task. BLUE RIDGE, Ga. \u2014 On the 16-hour ride from Louisiana, Bo looked out the window, took in the scenery, dozed and relaxed.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lab Chimps Are Moving to Sanctuaries \u2014 Slowly (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4931",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/science/chimps-sanctuaries-research.html",
        "text": "Medical experimentation on chimpanzees has ended, but moving all of them into retirement will be a difficult task. Medical experimentation on chimpanzees has ended, but moving all of them into retirement will be a difficult task. BLUE RIDGE, Ga. \u2014 On the 16-hour ride from Louisiana, Bo looked out the window, took in the scenery, dozed and relaxed.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titan\u2019s Methane Seas (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4932",
        "date": "2021-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/science/saturn-titan-moon-exploration.html",
        "text": "Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn\u2019s large, foggy moon Titan \u2014 plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titan\u2019s Methane Seas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4933",
        "date": "2021-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/science/saturn-titan-moon-exploration.html",
        "text": "Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn\u2019s large, foggy moon Titan \u2014 plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titan\u2019s Methane Seas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4934",
        "date": "2021-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/science/saturn-titan-moon-exploration.html",
        "text": "Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn\u2019s large, foggy moon Titan \u2014 plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titan\u2019s Methane Seas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4935",
        "date": "2021-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/21/science/saturn-titan-moon-exploration.html",
        "text": "Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn\u2019s strange moon. What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn\u2019s large, foggy moon Titan \u2014 plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Mars Disappear Behind the Moon in the Early Morning Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4936",
        "date": "2020-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/science/moon-occults-mars.html",
        "text": "In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. Want to see a cosmic magic trick?",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Mars Disappear Behind the Moon in the Early Morning Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4937",
        "date": "2020-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/science/moon-occults-mars.html",
        "text": "In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. Want to see a cosmic magic trick?",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Mars Disappear Behind the Moon in the Early Morning Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4938",
        "date": "2020-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/science/moon-occults-mars.html",
        "text": "In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. Want to see a cosmic magic trick?",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Mars Disappear Behind the Moon in the Early Morning Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4939",
        "date": "2020-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/science/moon-occults-mars.html",
        "text": "In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. In what is known as an occultation, Mars will briefly be blocked by the moon on Tuesday morning. Want to see a cosmic magic trick?",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Night 46 Million Grasshoppers Went to Vegas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4940",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/vegas-light-pollution-ecology-grasshoppers.html",
        "text": "In a new study, ecologists document the impact that the world\u2019s brightest city has on the insect population. In a new study, ecologists document the impact that the world\u2019s brightest city has on the insect population. Back in the summer of 2019, when joking about omens of the apocalypse still seemed fresh and fun, an endless swarm of grasshoppers descended on the Las Vegas Strip.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "Closest Pictures Ever Taken of Sun Show Tiny Campfire Flares (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4941",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/solar-orbiter-sun-images.html",
        "text": "Images of the new phenomenon were captured by Solar Orbiter, a joint European-NASA mission to study the sun. Images of the new phenomenon were captured by Solar Orbiter, a joint European-NASA mission to study the sun. The first images from a new solar mission \u2014 the closest ever taken of the sun \u2014 reveal a ubiquitous burbling of miniature solar flares. The discovery may provide clues for how turbulence heats the atmosphere of the sun and drives the ebb and flow of solar wind, the high-velocity charged particles throughout the solar system that buffet Earth and the other planets.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Closest Pictures Ever Taken of Sun Show Tiny Campfire Flares (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4942",
        "date": "2020-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/science/solar-orbiter-sun-images.html",
        "text": "Images of the new phenomenon were captured by Solar Orbiter, a joint European-NASA mission to study the sun. Images of the new phenomenon were captured by Solar Orbiter, a joint European-NASA mission to study the sun. The first images from a new solar mission \u2014 the closest ever taken of the sun \u2014 reveal a ubiquitous burbling of miniature solar flares. The discovery may provide clues for how turbulence heats the atmosphere of the sun and drives the ebb and flow of solar wind, the high-velocity charged particles throughout the solar system that buffet Earth and the other planets.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Down on the Farm That Harvests Metal From Plants (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4943",
        "date": "2020-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/science/metal-plants-farm.html",
        "text": "Hyper-accumulating plants thrive in metallic soil that kills other vegetation, and botanists are testing the potential of phytomining. Hyper-accumulating plants thrive in metallic soil that kills other vegetation, and botanists are testing the potential of phytomining. Some of Earth\u2019s plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets, these organisms \u2014 about 700 are known \u2014 flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die.",
        "author": "By Ian Morse"
    },
    {
        "title": "3 Great Mysteries About Life on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4944",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/science/mars-life-water.html",
        "text": "How habitable was early Mars? Why did it become less hospitable? And could there be life there now? How habitable was early Mars? Why did it become less hospitable? And could there be life there now? Mars is the most explored planet in the solar system other than Earth. With all of our robotic visitors there, we\u2019ve discovered that it is a world far too dry, cold and irradiated to support the scheming humanoids or tentacled invaders once imagined by science fiction.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "3 Great Mysteries About Life on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4945",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/science/mars-life-water.html",
        "text": "How habitable was early Mars? Why did it become less hospitable? And could there be life there now? How habitable was early Mars? Why did it become less hospitable? And could there be life there now? Mars is the most explored planet in the solar system other than Earth. With all of our robotic visitors there, we\u2019ve discovered that it is a world far too dry, cold and irradiated to support the scheming humanoids or tentacled invaders once imagined by science fiction.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Abel Prize in Mathematics Shared by 2 Trailblazers of Probability and Dynamics (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4946",
        "date": "2020-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/science/abel-prize-mathematics.html",
        "text": "Hillel Furstenberg, 84, and Gregory Margulis, 74, both retired professors, share the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Hillel Furstenberg, 84, and Gregory Margulis, 74, both retired professors, share the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Two mathematicians who showed how an underappreciated branch of the field could be employed to solve important problems share this year\u2019s Abel Prize, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to See Comet SWAN in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4947",
        "date": "2020-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/science/comet-swan.html",
        "text": "Fresh from the outer solar system, the cosmos offers us a show that\u2019s trailing a 10 million-mile tail. Fresh from the outer solar system, the cosmos offers us a show that\u2019s trailing a 10 million-mile tail. Even as humans on Earth remain locked down, the heavens abide. There is always reason to look up, perhaps now more than ever.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to See Comet SWAN in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4948",
        "date": "2020-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/science/comet-swan.html",
        "text": "Fresh from the outer solar system, the cosmos offers us a show that\u2019s trailing a 10 million-mile tail. Fresh from the outer solar system, the cosmos offers us a show that\u2019s trailing a 10 million-mile tail. Even as humans on Earth remain locked down, the heavens abide. There is always reason to look up, perhaps now more than ever.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Antarctica vs. Science (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4949",
        "date": "2020-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/science/antarctica-science-equipment.html",
        "text": "For researchers using delicate, one-of-a-kind equipment, the extreme conditions at the bottom of the planet pose special challenges. For researchers using delicate, one-of-a-kind equipment, the extreme conditions at the bottom of the planet pose special challenges. At the start of January, the same month the world marked the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica, scientists on snowmobiles were zipping across its diamantine ice, dragging a rig of metal detectors in their wake. Researchers were hoping to discover a hypothesized cache of iron-rich meteorites, the remnants of ancient asteroids and would-be planets, under the frozen wastes.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Antarctica vs. Science (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4950",
        "date": "2020-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/science/antarctica-science-equipment.html",
        "text": "For researchers using delicate, one-of-a-kind equipment, the extreme conditions at the bottom of the planet pose special challenges. For researchers using delicate, one-of-a-kind equipment, the extreme conditions at the bottom of the planet pose special challenges. At the start of January, the same month the world marked the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica, scientists on snowmobiles were zipping across its diamantine ice, dragging a rig of metal detectors in their wake. Researchers were hoping to discover a hypothesized cache of iron-rich meteorites, the remnants of ancient asteroids and would-be planets, under the frozen wastes.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hair From Ghostly Bears Reveals New Genetic Secrets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4951",
        "date": "2020-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/science/spirit-bears-canada.html",
        "text": "First Nations peoples along British Columbia\u2019s Central Coast led research to help preserve the area\u2019s white-furred Spirit bears. First Nations peoples along British Columbia\u2019s Central Coast led research to help preserve the area\u2019s white-furred Spirit bears. Douglas Neasloss was skeptical that Spirit bears existed. A member of the Kitasoo/Xai\u2019xais First Nation in Canada, he had heard the stories of white-furred bears that roamed British Columbia\u2019s rainforest. But Mr. Neasloss, a former tour leader and cultural interpreter, had never seen one until 2005, when he experienced \u201cone of the most magical moments\u201d of his guiding career. During a hike, he caught sight of a cinnamon-tinged white bear as it walked out ahead of him, then lay down 50 feet away to munch on a freshly caught salmon.",
        "author": "By Lesley Evans Ogden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hair From Ghostly Bears Reveals New Genetic Secrets (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4952",
        "date": "2020-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/science/spirit-bears-canada.html",
        "text": "First Nations peoples along British Columbia\u2019s Central Coast led research to help preserve the area\u2019s white-furred Spirit bears. First Nations peoples along British Columbia\u2019s Central Coast led research to help preserve the area\u2019s white-furred Spirit bears. Douglas Neasloss was skeptical that Spirit bears existed. A member of the Kitasoo/Xai\u2019xais First Nation in Canada, he had heard the stories of white-furred bears that roamed British Columbia\u2019s rainforest. But Mr. Neasloss, a former tour leader and cultural interpreter, had never seen one until 2005, when he experienced \u201cone of the most magical moments\u201d of his guiding career. During a hike, he caught sight of a cinnamon-tinged white bear as it walked out ahead of him, then lay down 50 feet away to munch on a freshly caught salmon.",
        "author": "By Lesley Evans Ogden"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Covid-19, a Seismic Quiet Like No Other (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "4953",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/science/coronavirus-seismic-activity.html",
        "text": "Coronavirus shutdowns led to \u201cthe longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,\u201d scientists report. Coronavirus shutdowns led to \u201cthe longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,\u201d scientists report. The shock waves of civilization travel through rocky ground and, at times, ricochet around the globe, as geologists know from decades of listening for earthquakes with sensitive seismometers. The human pulses come from heavy traffic, football games, rock concerts, fireworks, subways, mine explosions, rock drilling, factories, jackhammers, industrial blasts and other activities. In 2001, vibrations from the collapse of the World Trade Center registered in five states. Seismometers even picked up the impacts of the two airplanes.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Covid-19, a Seismic Quiet Like No Other (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4954",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/science/coronavirus-seismic-activity.html",
        "text": "Coronavirus shutdowns led to \u201cthe longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,\u201d scientists report. Coronavirus shutdowns led to \u201cthe longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history,\u201d scientists report. The shock waves of civilization travel through rocky ground and, at times, ricochet around the globe, as geologists know from decades of listening for earthquakes with sensitive seismometers. The human pulses come from heavy traffic, football games, rock concerts, fireworks, subways, mine explosions, rock drilling, factories, jackhammers, industrial blasts and other activities. In 2001, vibrations from the collapse of the World Trade Center registered in five states. Seismometers even picked up the impacts of the two airplanes.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "People Are Seeing U.F.O.s Everywhere, and This Book Proves It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4955",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/science/ufo-sightings-book.html",
        "text": "An unlikely new reference guide breaks down U.F.O. sightings county by county, shape by shape, month by month. An unlikely new reference guide breaks down U.F.O. sightings county by county, shape by shape, month by month. SYRACUSE \u2014 Why have sightings of unidentified flying objects around the nation more than tripled since 2001? Why is July the busiest month for U.F.O. sightings? Why did they spike in Texas in 2008, or in New Mexico in September 2015?",
        "author": "By Ralph Blumenthal"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Microbes May Help Future Martians and Moon People Mine Metals (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4956",
        "date": "2020-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/science/bacteria-mining-mars-moon.html",
        "text": "An experiment aboard the space station showed that bacteria were effective at extracting rare earth elements from rocks. An experiment aboard the space station showed that bacteria were effective at extracting rare earth elements from rocks. Microbes may be the friends of future colonists living off the land on the moon, Mars or elsewhere in the solar system and aiming to establish self-sufficient homes.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Microbes May Help Future Martians and Moon People Mine Metals (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4957",
        "date": "2020-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/science/bacteria-mining-mars-moon.html",
        "text": "An experiment aboard the space station showed that bacteria were effective at extracting rare earth elements from rocks. An experiment aboard the space station showed that bacteria were effective at extracting rare earth elements from rocks. Microbes may be the friends of future colonists living off the land on the moon, Mars or elsewhere in the solar system and aiming to establish self-sufficient homes.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Subway Swabbers Find a Microbe Jungle and Thousands of New Species (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4958",
        "date": "2021-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/science/microbes-subway-metasub-mason.html",
        "text": "A team of international researchers has assembled an atlas of microorganisms present in 60 cities around the world. A team of international researchers has assembled an atlas of microorganisms present in 60 cities around the world. For centuries, naturalists have mapped the world\u2019s flora and fauna. They have assembled atlases of migratory birds and cold-water fishes, sketched out the geography of carnivorous animals and alpine plants.",
        "author": "By Emily Anthes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Film Crew Wraps Space Station Shoot and Returns to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4959",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/science/russia-film-space-station.html",
        "text": "A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia\u2019s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia\u2019s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. A Russian actress and a film director landed safely on Earth early Sunday after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first feature-length drama made with scenes shot in space.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Film Crew Wraps Space Station Shoot and Returns to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4960",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/science/russia-film-space-station.html",
        "text": "A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia\u2019s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia\u2019s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. A Russian actress and a film director landed safely on Earth early Sunday after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first feature-length drama made with scenes shot in space.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Film Crew Wraps Space Station Shoot and Returns to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4961",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/science/russia-film-space-station.html",
        "text": "A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia\u2019s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. A Russian actress and film director landed near Russia\u2019s spaceflight base in Kazakhstan after 12 days in orbit. A Russian actress and a film director landed safely on Earth early Sunday after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station shooting scenes for the first feature-length drama made with scenes shot in space.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s Biggest Moons Started as Tiny Grains of Hail (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4962",
        "date": "2020-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/science/jupiter-moons-europa.html",
        "text": "A new model offers an explanation for how the Galilean satellites formed around the solar system\u2019s largest world. A new model offers an explanation for how the Galilean satellites formed around the solar system\u2019s largest world. Konstantin Batygin did not set out to solve one of the solar system\u2019s most puzzling mysteries when he went for a run up a hill in Nice, France. Dr. Batygin, a Caltech researcher, best known for his contributions to the search for the solar system\u2019s missing \u201cPlanet Nine,\u201d spotted a beer bottle. At a steep, 20 degree grade, he wondered why it wasn\u2019t rolling down the hill.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s Biggest Moons Started as Tiny Grains of Hail (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4963",
        "date": "2020-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/science/jupiter-moons-europa.html",
        "text": "A new model offers an explanation for how the Galilean satellites formed around the solar system\u2019s largest world. A new model offers an explanation for how the Galilean satellites formed around the solar system\u2019s largest world. Konstantin Batygin did not set out to solve one of the solar system\u2019s most puzzling mysteries when he went for a run up a hill in Nice, France. Dr. Batygin, a Caltech researcher, best known for his contributions to the search for the solar system\u2019s missing \u201cPlanet Nine,\u201d spotted a beer bottle. At a steep, 20 degree grade, he wondered why it wasn\u2019t rolling down the hill.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s Biggest Moons Started as Tiny Grains of Hail (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4964",
        "date": "2020-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/science/jupiter-moons-europa.html",
        "text": "A new model offers an explanation for how the Galilean satellites formed around the solar system\u2019s largest world. A new model offers an explanation for how the Galilean satellites formed around the solar system\u2019s largest world. Konstantin Batygin did not set out to solve one of the solar system\u2019s most puzzling mysteries when he went for a run up a hill in Nice, France. Dr. Batygin, a Caltech researcher, best known for his contributions to the search for the solar system\u2019s missing \u201cPlanet Nine,\u201d spotted a beer bottle. At a steep, 20 degree grade, he wondered why it wasn\u2019t rolling down the hill.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Outsized Influence of Teen T. Rex and Other Young Dinosaurs (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4965",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/science/tyrannosaurus-teenagers-dinosaurs.html",
        "text": "A deep dive into dinosaur data suggests that teenage T. rexes and other juvenile carnivores shaped their ecosystems. A deep dive into dinosaur data suggests that teenage T. rexes and other juvenile carnivores shaped their ecosystems. Adolescence is a time of great change for most of us. But it was particularly volatile for young T. rexes. Before they became fearsome, bone-crushing adults, they had to pass through a number of stages \u2014 two-foot hatchling, gangly preteen, bulky young adult. At each phase, they hunted different prey and filled different niches.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Horse You Rode In On May Have Been Made in Southern Russia (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4966",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/horse-domestication-russia.html",
        "text": "A comprehensive new paper tested 273 ancient horse genomes to pinpoint when and where modern horses were domesticated. A comprehensive new paper tested 273 ancient horse genomes to pinpoint when and where modern horses were domesticated. For thousands of years, the grassy plains of Europe and Asia were home to a mosaic of genetically distinct horse lineages. But a single lineage galloped ahead to overtake and replace all the other wild horses. This domesticated lineage became the horse of our modern imagination: slender legs, a muscular back and a mane that shimmers in the wind.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Bugs, You\u2019re Never Home Alone (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4967",
        "date": "2018-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/science/spider-insect-survey.html",
        "text": "A citizen-science project aims to catalog the spiders, insects and other many-legged creatures that live indoors with us. A citizen-science project aims to catalog the spiders, insects and other many-legged creatures that live indoors with us. \u201cStart with your windowsills,\u201d advises Rob Dunn. \u201cLight fittings are often a graveyard, too.\u201d ",
        "author": "By Nicola Twilley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bricks Alive! Scientists Create Living Concrete (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4968",
        "date": "2020-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/science/construction-concrete-bacteria-photosynthesis.html",
        "text": "\u201cA Frankenstein material\u201d is teeming with \u2014 and ultimately made by \u2014 photosynthetic microbes. And it can reproduce. \u201cA Frankenstein material\u201d is teeming with \u2014 and ultimately made by \u2014 photosynthetic microbes. And it can reproduce. For centuries, builders have been making concrete roughly the same way: by mixing hard materials like sand with various binders, and hoping it stays fixed and rigid for a long time to come.",
        "author": "By Amos Zeeberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Doctor From Nazi Germany and the Search for Life on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4969",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/science/mars-jars-strughold.html",
        "text": "Astrobiologists have used Mars Jars for decades. Many didn\u2019t know about the controversial Air Force scientist who started them. Astrobiologists have used Mars Jars for decades. Many didn\u2019t know about the controversial Air Force scientist who started them. When Penelope Boston was a student at the University of Colorado in the 1980s, she wanted to create a miniature Mars and see how some living things fared on it.",
        "author": "By Sarah Scoles"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Doctor From Nazi Germany and the Search for Life on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4970",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/science/mars-jars-strughold.html",
        "text": "Astrobiologists have used Mars Jars for decades. Many didn\u2019t know about the controversial Air Force scientist who started them. Astrobiologists have used Mars Jars for decades. Many didn\u2019t know about the controversial Air Force scientist who started them. When Penelope Boston was a student at the University of Colorado in the 1980s, she wanted to create a miniature Mars and see how some living things fared on it.",
        "author": "By Sarah Scoles"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Doctor From Nazi Germany and the Search for Life on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4971",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/science/mars-jars-strughold.html",
        "text": "Astrobiologists have used Mars Jars for decades. Many didn\u2019t know about the controversial Air Force scientist who started them. Astrobiologists have used Mars Jars for decades. Many didn\u2019t know about the controversial Air Force scientist who started them. When Penelope Boston was a student at the University of Colorado in the 1980s, she wanted to create a miniature Mars and see how some living things fared on it.",
        "author": "By Sarah Scoles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Absolutely Every Bit of Our Galaxy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4972",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/science/milky-way-galaxy-mass.html",
        "text": "With novel mathematical methods, scientists have come up with a new estimate for the mass of the Milky Way. With novel mathematical methods, scientists have come up with a new estimate for the mass of the Milky Way. Astronomers have arrived at what they believe to be the most accurate measure yet of the mass of the Milky Way: about 4.8 x 1011 times the mass of the sun, or \u201csolar masses,\u201d to use a standard unit of mass in astronomy.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Bakalar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is Frigid, Rusty and Haunted. We Can\u2019t Stop Looking at It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4973",
        "date": "2018-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/mars-life.html",
        "text": "An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet. An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet.  There it was: Glowering red on the dashboard of the sky like an astrological warning light next to the full Blood Moon Friday. Mars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is Frigid, Rusty and Haunted. We Can\u2019t Stop Looking at It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4974",
        "date": "2018-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/mars-life.html",
        "text": "An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet. An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet.  There it was: Glowering red on the dashboard of the sky like an astrological warning light next to the full Blood Moon Friday. Mars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is Frigid, Rusty and Haunted. We Can\u2019t Stop Looking at It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4975",
        "date": "2018-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/mars-life.html",
        "text": "An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet. An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet.  There it was: Glowering red on the dashboard of the sky like an astrological warning light next to the full Blood Moon Friday. Mars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is Frigid, Rusty and Haunted. We Can\u2019t Stop Looking at It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4976",
        "date": "2018-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/mars-life.html",
        "text": "An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet. An oasis in the sky inspires the imagination. A series of discoveries refreshes our yearning for the red planet.  There it was: Glowering red on the dashboard of the sky like an astrological warning light next to the full Blood Moon Friday. Mars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manhattanhenge July 2018: When and Where to Watch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4977",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/science/manhattanhenge-dates-time-locations.html",
        "text": "You might get another chance to take \u201cthe best sunset picture of the year\u201d this week in New York. You might get another chance to take \u201cthe best sunset picture of the year\u201d this week in New York. [This article was updated on Fri., July 13]",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "For a Split Second, a Quantum Computer Made History Go Backward (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4978",
        "date": "2019-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/science/quantum-physics-time.html",
        "text": "Using a quantum computer, physicists successfully reversed time for an artificial atom. You can even try it at home. Using a quantum computer, physicists successfully reversed time for an artificial atom. You can even try it at home. In \u201cThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button,\u201d a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and then a movie starring Brad Pitt, a man ages backward: He is born an old man, regresses over the years and dies an infant.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Too Much Mars? Let\u2019s Discuss Other Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4979",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-nasa-science.html",
        "text": "Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Three government space agencies around the world are getting ready to return to Mars this summer. Along with China and the United Arab Emirates, the United States plans to land the fifth NASA rover, Perseverance, on the red planet (along with a small, experimental helicopter, Ingenuity). But the rover\u2019s most important job will be scooping up and caching some samples that humans or robots may eventually retrieve.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle and David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Too Much Mars? Let\u2019s Discuss Other Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4980",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-nasa-science.html",
        "text": "Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Three government space agencies around the world are getting ready to return to Mars this summer. Along with China and the United Arab Emirates, the United States plans to land the fifth NASA rover, Perseverance, on the red planet (along with a small, experimental helicopter, Ingenuity). But the rover\u2019s most important job will be scooping up and caching some samples that humans or robots may eventually retrieve.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle and David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Too Much Mars? Let\u2019s Discuss Other Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4981",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-nasa-science.html",
        "text": "Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Three government space agencies around the world are getting ready to return to Mars this summer. Along with China and the United Arab Emirates, the United States plans to land the fifth NASA rover, Perseverance, on the red planet (along with a small, experimental helicopter, Ingenuity). But the rover\u2019s most important job will be scooping up and caching some samples that humans or robots may eventually retrieve.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle and David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Too Much Mars? Let\u2019s Discuss Other Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4982",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-nasa-science.html",
        "text": "Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Three government space agencies around the world are getting ready to return to Mars this summer. Along with China and the United Arab Emirates, the United States plans to land the fifth NASA rover, Perseverance, on the red planet (along with a small, experimental helicopter, Ingenuity). But the rover\u2019s most important job will be scooping up and caching some samples that humans or robots may eventually retrieve.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle and David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Too Much Mars? Let\u2019s Discuss Other Worlds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4983",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/mars-nasa-science.html",
        "text": "Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Two veteran space journalists discuss why so much attention and budget seems to be directed to the red planet. Three government space agencies around the world are getting ready to return to Mars this summer. Along with China and the United Arab Emirates, the United States plans to land the fifth NASA rover, Perseverance, on the red planet (along with a small, experimental helicopter, Ingenuity). But the rover\u2019s most important job will be scooping up and caching some samples that humans or robots may eventually retrieve.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle and David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mapping the Social Network of Coronavirus (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "4984",
        "date": "2020-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/science/coronavirus-social-networks-data.html",
        "text": "To slow the virus, Alessandro Vespignani and other analysts are racing to model the behavior of its human host. To slow the virus, Alessandro Vespignani and other analysts are racing to model the behavior of its human host. BOSTON \u2014 The offices of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University sit 10 floors above Boston\u2019s Back Bay. Wraparound windows offer a floating panorama of the city, from Boston Common to Fenway Park, as a half-dozen young analysts toil quietly at computers.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mapping the Social Network of Coronavirus (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4985",
        "date": "2020-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/science/coronavirus-social-networks-data.html",
        "text": "To slow the virus, Alessandro Vespignani and other analysts are racing to model the behavior of its human host. To slow the virus, Alessandro Vespignani and other analysts are racing to model the behavior of its human host. BOSTON \u2014 The offices of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University sit 10 floors above Boston\u2019s Back Bay. Wraparound windows offer a floating panorama of the city, from Boston Common to Fenway Park, as a half-dozen young analysts toil quietly at computers.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Magical Places That Sent Apollo 11 to the Moon and Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4986",
        "date": "2019-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/science/apollo-moon-nasa-engineers.html",
        "text": "They\u2019ve nearly vanished, but hubs in Southern California and on Long Island played key roles in the lunar race. They\u2019ve nearly vanished, but hubs in Southern California and on Long Island played key roles in the lunar race. DOWNEY, Calif. \u2014 The people and places that brought us Apollo 11 are disappearing.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Magical Places That Sent Apollo 11 to the Moon and Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4987",
        "date": "2019-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/science/apollo-moon-nasa-engineers.html",
        "text": "They\u2019ve nearly vanished, but hubs in Southern California and on Long Island played key roles in the lunar race. They\u2019ve nearly vanished, but hubs in Southern California and on Long Island played key roles in the lunar race. DOWNEY, Calif. \u2014 The people and places that brought us Apollo 11 are disappearing.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Magical Places That Sent Apollo 11 to the Moon and Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4988",
        "date": "2019-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/science/apollo-moon-nasa-engineers.html",
        "text": "They\u2019ve nearly vanished, but hubs in Southern California and on Long Island played key roles in the lunar race. They\u2019ve nearly vanished, but hubs in Southern California and on Long Island played key roles in the lunar race. DOWNEY, Calif. \u2014 The people and places that brought us Apollo 11 are disappearing.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Will Try to Beat Jeff Bezos to Space With July 11 Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4989",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/science/richard-branson-jeff-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "The Virgin Galactic founder hopes to edge out, by nine days, Blue Origin\u2019s first flight with a crew aboard. The Virgin Galactic founder hopes to edge out, by nine days, Blue Origin\u2019s first flight with a crew aboard. Seeking to upstage Jeff Bezos as the first rocket company owner to go to space, Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded a galaxy of Virgin companies, announced on Thursday night that he would be a member of the crew on the next test flight of the Virgin Galactic space plane.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Will Try to Beat Jeff Bezos to Space With July 11 Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4990",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/science/richard-branson-jeff-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "The Virgin Galactic founder hopes to edge out, by nine days, Blue Origin\u2019s first flight with a crew aboard. The Virgin Galactic founder hopes to edge out, by nine days, Blue Origin\u2019s first flight with a crew aboard. Seeking to upstage Jeff Bezos as the first rocket company owner to go to space, Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded a galaxy of Virgin companies, announced on Thursday night that he would be a member of the crew on the next test flight of the Virgin Galactic space plane.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Will Try to Beat Jeff Bezos to Space With July 11 Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4991",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/science/richard-branson-jeff-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "The Virgin Galactic founder hopes to edge out, by nine days, Blue Origin\u2019s first flight with a crew aboard. The Virgin Galactic founder hopes to edge out, by nine days, Blue Origin\u2019s first flight with a crew aboard. Seeking to upstage Jeff Bezos as the first rocket company owner to go to space, Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded a galaxy of Virgin companies, announced on Thursday night that he would be a member of the crew on the next test flight of the Virgin Galactic space plane.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Colbert added a dash of comedy as Branson and crew headed toward space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4992",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/stephen-colbert-branson-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "The talk show host, the R&B singer Khalid and others added glitz to an event full of rocket science. The talk show host, the R&B singer Khalid and others added glitz to an event full of rocket science. In this billionaire space race, slipping the surly bonds of Earth apparently isn\u2019t enough \u2014 not without some glitz and a bevy of celebrities.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Rover Mission Lands on the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "4993",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/science/china-mars.html",
        "text": "The success establishes China as a principal contender in what some see as a new era of space competition. The success establishes China as a principal contender in what some see as a new era of space competition. The United States now has company on Mars. ",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Rover Mission Lands on the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4994",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/science/china-mars.html",
        "text": "The success establishes China as a principal contender in what some see as a new era of space competition. The success establishes China as a principal contender in what some see as a new era of space competition. The United States now has company on Mars. ",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Rover Mission Lands on the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "4995",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/science/china-mars.html",
        "text": "The success establishes China as a principal contender in what some see as a new era of space competition. The success establishes China as a principal contender in what some see as a new era of space competition. The United States now has company on Mars. ",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Extraterrestrial Plutonium Atoms Turn Up on Ocean Bottom (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4996",
        "date": "2021-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/science/extraterrestrial-plutonium-atoms-turn-up-on-ocean-bottom.html",
        "text": "The rare form of the element found on the Pacific seabed points to its violent birth in colliding stars. The rare form of the element found on the Pacific seabed points to its violent birth in colliding stars. Scientists studying a sample of oceanic crust retrieved from the Pacific seabed nearly a mile down have discovered traces of a rare isotope of plutonium, the deadly element that has been central to the atomic age.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Earth Getting Bigger Over Time? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4997",
        "date": "2019-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/science/earth-size-mass.html",
        "text": "The planet is a magnet for stuff: space dust, dead leaves, old refrigerators. Is all that mass adding up? The planet is a magnet for stuff: space dust, dead leaves, old refrigerators. Is all that mass adding up? Has Earth grown larger from the buildup of decaying vegetation through the ages? ",
        "author": "By Randall Munroe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gregory Berns Knows What Your Dog Is Thinking (It\u2019s Sweet) (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "4998",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/science/gregory-berns-dogs-brains.html",
        "text": "The neuroscientist scans the brains of dogs for glimpses at their inner lives. One conclusion: Fido does love you. The neuroscientist scans the brains of dogs for glimpses at their inner lives. One conclusion: Fido does love you. Dr. Gregory Berns, 53, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, spends his days scanning the brains of dogs, trying to figure out what they\u2019re thinking. The research is detailed in a new book, \u201cWhat It\u2019s Like to Be a Dog.\u201d",
        "author": "By Claudia Dreifus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gregory Berns Knows What Your Dog Is Thinking (It\u2019s Sweet) (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "4999",
        "date": "2017-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/science/gregory-berns-dogs-brains.html",
        "text": "The neuroscientist scans the brains of dogs for glimpses at their inner lives. One conclusion: Fido does love you. The neuroscientist scans the brains of dogs for glimpses at their inner lives. One conclusion: Fido does love you. Dr. Gregory Berns, 53, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, spends his days scanning the brains of dogs, trying to figure out what they\u2019re thinking. The research is detailed in a new book, \u201cWhat It\u2019s Like to Be a Dog.\u201d",
        "author": "By Claudia Dreifus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors\u2019 Melted Uranium Fuel (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5000",
        "date": "2017-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-fuel.html",
        "text": "The Japanese government and companies used radiation-hardened machines to search for the fuel that escaped the plant\u2019s ruined reactors. The Japanese government and companies used radiation-hardened machines to search for the fuel that escaped the plant\u2019s ruined reactors. FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, Japan \u2014 Four engineers hunched before a bank of monitors, one holding what looked like a game controller. They had spent a month training for what they were about to do: pilot a small robot into the contaminated heart of the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant.",
        "author": "By Martin Fackler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors\u2019 Melted Uranium Fuel (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5001",
        "date": "2017-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/science/japan-fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-fuel.html",
        "text": "The Japanese government and companies used radiation-hardened machines to search for the fuel that escaped the plant\u2019s ruined reactors. The Japanese government and companies used radiation-hardened machines to search for the fuel that escaped the plant\u2019s ruined reactors. FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, Japan \u2014 Four engineers hunched before a bank of monitors, one holding what looked like a game controller. They had spent a month training for what they were about to do: pilot a small robot into the contaminated heart of the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant.",
        "author": "By Martin Fackler"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5002",
        "date": "2019-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/science/nasa-mars-rover-life.html",
        "text": "The Curiosity mission\u2019s scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. The Curiosity mission\u2019s scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5003",
        "date": "2019-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/science/nasa-mars-rover-life.html",
        "text": "The Curiosity mission\u2019s scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. The Curiosity mission\u2019s scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5004",
        "date": "2019-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/science/nasa-mars-rover-life.html",
        "text": "The Curiosity mission\u2019s scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. The Curiosity mission\u2019s scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking to Be Interred at Westminster Abbey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5005",
        "date": "2018-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/science/stephen-hawking-westminster-abbey.html",
        "text": "The cosmologist\u2019s ashes will be buried there later this year, near a few legendary scientists like Darwin and Newton. The cosmologist\u2019s ashes will be buried there later this year, near a few legendary scientists like Darwin and Newton. They played poker together on Star Trek: The Next Generation.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How much does a ticket to space on New Shepard cost? Blue Origin isn\u2019t saying. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5006",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/space/blue-origin-ticket-cost.html",
        "text": "The company said in July it had nearly $100 million in sales, but not how many tickets that included. The company said in July it had nearly $100 million in sales, but not how many tickets that included. Blue Origin has declined to publicly state a price for a ticket to fly on New Shepard. The company is nearing $100 million in sales so far, Mr. Bezos has said. But it\u2019s unclear how many ticket holders that includes.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "How much does a ticket to space on New Shepard cost? Blue Origin isn\u2019t saying. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5007",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/space/blue-origin-ticket-cost.html",
        "text": "The company said in July it had nearly $100 million in sales, but not how many tickets that included. The company said in July it had nearly $100 million in sales, but not how many tickets that included. Blue Origin has declined to publicly state a price for a ticket to fly on New Shepard. The company is nearing $100 million in sales so far, Mr. Bezos has said. But it\u2019s unclear how many ticket holders that includes.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth\u2019s Oldest Asteroid Impact Found in Australia (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5008",
        "date": "2020-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/science/oldest-asteroid-impact-australia.html",
        "text": "The cataclysm, which occurred roughly 2.2 billion years ago, might have catapulted the planet out of an ice age. The cataclysm, which occurred roughly 2.2 billion years ago, might have catapulted the planet out of an ice age. Earth is constantly being pummeled by space rocks. Several tons rain down on the planet each day in the form of dust. And larger strikes have created more visible features, including giant craters. But which of our planet\u2019s extraterrestrial scars is the oldest?",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Decision for Moon Rocket: Test Again or Prepare for Launch? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5009",
        "date": "2021-01-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/science/nasa-moon-rocket.html",
        "text": "The booster of the Space Launch System was in good condition after a test was cut short, officials said. The booster of the Space Launch System was in good condition after a test was cut short, officials said. A critical piece of NASA\u2019s giant moon rocket is in good shape even after a test firing on Saturday was abruptly cut short after just over a minute, space agency officials said on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Decision for Moon Rocket: Test Again or Prepare for Launch? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5010",
        "date": "2021-01-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/science/nasa-moon-rocket.html",
        "text": "The booster of the Space Launch System was in good condition after a test was cut short, officials said. The booster of the Space Launch System was in good condition after a test was cut short, officials said. A critical piece of NASA\u2019s giant moon rocket is in good shape even after a test firing on Saturday was abruptly cut short after just over a minute, space agency officials said on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Renews Focus on Blue Origin, Which Has Been Slower to Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5011",
        "date": "2021-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. For most of its two decades of existence, Blue Origin was like Willy Wonka\u2019s chocolate factory in the children\u2019s book by Roald Dahl.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Renews Focus on Blue Origin, Which Has Been Slower to Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5012",
        "date": "2021-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. For most of its two decades of existence, Blue Origin was like Willy Wonka\u2019s chocolate factory in the children\u2019s book by Roald Dahl.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Renews Focus on Blue Origin, Which Has Been Slower to Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5013",
        "date": "2021-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. For most of its two decades of existence, Blue Origin was like Willy Wonka\u2019s chocolate factory in the children\u2019s book by Roald Dahl.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Renews Focus on Blue Origin, Which Has Been Slower to Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5014",
        "date": "2021-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/science/blue-origin-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting. For most of its two decades of existence, Blue Origin was like Willy Wonka\u2019s chocolate factory in the children\u2019s book by Roald Dahl.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flying Toward the Light (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5015",
        "date": "2018-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/science/flying-insects-light.html",
        "text": "Several theories examine why night airborne insects are drawn to artificial lights, even if it spells doom for them. Several theories examine why night airborne insects are drawn to artificial lights, even if it spells doom for them. A. What draws some night-flying insects, notably a variety of moth species, to a flame or other bright light is one of the perennial riddles of natural science. Several theories have been advanced over the years, but none has been universally accepted or conclusively proved. ",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Want to Sell Balloon Rides 19 Miles Up. Haven\u2019t We Heard This Before? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5016",
        "date": "2020-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/science/space-balloon-trips.html",
        "text": "Seven years ago, entrepreneurs planned trips to the stratosphere, but tourists never got off the ground. They\u2019re trying again. Seven years ago, entrepreneurs planned trips to the stratosphere, but tourists never got off the ground. They\u2019re trying again. Nearly seven years ago, two entrepreneurs unveiled a company, World View, that would take tourists on a gentle balloon journey to the stratosphere, about 19 miles off the ground \u2014 high enough to view the blackness of space and the curvature of a round Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neanderthals Feasted on Seafood, Seabirds, Perhaps Even Dolphins (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5017",
        "date": "2020-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/science/neanderthals-fishing-ocean.html",
        "text": "Scientists say that a discovery in a seaside Portuguese cave further challenges popular images of Neanderthals as meat-eating brutes. Scientists say that a discovery in a seaside Portuguese cave further challenges popular images of Neanderthals as meat-eating brutes. Neanderthals are often portrayed chowing down on mammoth meals and woolly rhino ribs. But an analysis of their leftovers from a coastal cave in Portugal suggests fish and mollusks claimed a special place on their Paleolithic palates.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Small Worlds With Lava Oceans Might Have Given Us Meteorites (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5018",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/science/meteorites-chondrites-chondrules.html",
        "text": "Researchers propose a new model to explain the formation of most of the meteorites that make it to Earth. Researchers propose a new model to explain the formation of most of the meteorites that make it to Earth. \u201cDroplets of fiery rain.\u201d That\u2019s how Henry Clifton Sorby, a 19th-century British mineralogist, described the tiny spheres called chondrules found within meteorites. Chondrules are such dominant features of these meteorites that they are called chondrites, and they account for 86 percent of meteorites that have been found on Earth.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Small Worlds With Lava Oceans Might Have Given Us Meteorites (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5019",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/science/meteorites-chondrites-chondrules.html",
        "text": "Researchers propose a new model to explain the formation of most of the meteorites that make it to Earth. Researchers propose a new model to explain the formation of most of the meteorites that make it to Earth. \u201cDroplets of fiery rain.\u201d That\u2019s how Henry Clifton Sorby, a 19th-century British mineralogist, described the tiny spheres called chondrules found within meteorites. Chondrules are such dominant features of these meteorites that they are called chondrites, and they account for 86 percent of meteorites that have been found on Earth.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cleaning a Dirty Sponge Only Helps Its Worst Bacteria, Study Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5020",
        "date": "2017-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/science/sponges-bacteria-microwaving-cleaning.html",
        "text": "Researchers found that microwaving, boiling or throwing used sponges in the dishwasher encouraged the proliferation of its strongest microbes. Researchers found that microwaving, boiling or throwing used sponges in the dishwasher encouraged the proliferation of its strongest microbes. Stop. Drop the sponge and step away from the microwave.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Unveils Comfy Cabin for Jet-Setting to the Edge of Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5021",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/virgin-galactic-cabin.html",
        "text": "Passengers able to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat can escape gravity for a few minutes. Passengers able to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat can escape gravity for a few minutes. The inside of Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane is like a space-age executive jet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Unveils Comfy Cabin for Jet-Setting to the Edge of Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5022",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/virgin-galactic-cabin.html",
        "text": "Passengers able to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat can escape gravity for a few minutes. Passengers able to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat can escape gravity for a few minutes. The inside of Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane is like a space-age executive jet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "215 Million Americans Watched the Solar Eclipse, Study Finds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5023",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/science/solar-eclipse-record-numbers.html",
        "text": "It was bigger than the Super Bowl. Many more watched it in person or electronically than voted last year. It was bigger than the Super Bowl. Many more watched it in person or electronically than voted last year. We hear it all the time: Americans are more divided than ever, or at least since the Civil War.",
        "author": "By Jonah E. Bromwich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transformative? New Device Harvests Energy in Darkness (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5024",
        "date": "2019-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/science/solar-energy-power-electricity.html",
        "text": "It doesn\u2019t generate much power, but it works during the one time of day that solar cells can\u2019t: night. It doesn\u2019t generate much power, but it works during the one time of day that solar cells can\u2019t: night. Aaswath Raman was driving through a village in Sierra Leone in 2013 when an idea came to him as suddenly as, perhaps, a light bulb switching on.",
        "author": "By Rebecca Boyle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander Survive? The Chances Are Slim (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5025",
        "date": "2019-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/science/india-chandrayaan-2-vikram.html",
        "text": "In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. India\u2019s first moon lander, which fell silent as it headed toward the lunar surface on Friday, has been located from orbit, the country\u2019s space agency says. That has created hope that it might be revived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander Survive? The Chances Are Slim (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5026",
        "date": "2019-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/science/india-chandrayaan-2-vikram.html",
        "text": "In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. India\u2019s first moon lander, which fell silent as it headed toward the lunar surface on Friday, has been located from orbit, the country\u2019s space agency says. That has created hope that it might be revived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander Survive? The Chances Are Slim (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5027",
        "date": "2019-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/science/india-chandrayaan-2-vikram.html",
        "text": "In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. India\u2019s first moon lander, which fell silent as it headed toward the lunar surface on Friday, has been located from orbit, the country\u2019s space agency says. That has created hope that it might be revived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Moon Lander Survive? The Chances Are Slim (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5028",
        "date": "2019-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/science/india-chandrayaan-2-vikram.html",
        "text": "In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. In the history of spaceflight, robotic probes that malfunction while landing on another world are never heard from again. India\u2019s first moon lander, which fell silent as it headed toward the lunar surface on Friday, has been located from orbit, the country\u2019s space agency says. That has created hope that it might be revived.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Omicron variant\u2019s rapid spread could soon lead to a wave, the C.D.C. warns. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5029",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/science/omicron-cdc.html",
        "text": "In a call with state and local health officials, the agency warned of a possible surge peaking in January. In a call with state and local health officials, the agency warned of a possible surge peaking in January. The proportion of coronavirus cases in the United States caused by the Omicron variant has increased sharply, and may portend a significant surge in infections as soon as next month, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.",
        "author": "By Todd Gregory and Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "If I Touched the Moon, What Would It Feel Like? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5030",
        "date": "2019-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/science/randall-munroe-moon.html",
        "text": "If you like handling tiny glass shards, sure, go ahead and touch the lunar surface. But avoid the rocks. If you like handling tiny glass shards, sure, go ahead and touch the lunar surface. But avoid the rocks. Twelve people have walked on the moon since humans landed there 50 years ago, but no one has ever directly touched its surface.",
        "author": "By Randall Munroe"
    },
    {
        "title": "If I Touched the Moon, What Would It Feel Like? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5031",
        "date": "2019-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/science/randall-munroe-moon.html",
        "text": "If you like handling tiny glass shards, sure, go ahead and touch the lunar surface. But avoid the rocks. If you like handling tiny glass shards, sure, go ahead and touch the lunar surface. But avoid the rocks. Twelve people have walked on the moon since humans landed there 50 years ago, but no one has ever directly touched its surface.",
        "author": "By Randall Munroe"
    },
    {
        "title": "No, Seriously, Don\u2019t Look at the Sun During the Eclipse Without Special Glasses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5032",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/can-you-look-at-sun-eclipse.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s how to ensure the eyeglasses you obtained will offer adequate protection before you look at the solar eclipse. Here\u2019s how to ensure the eyeglasses you obtained will offer adequate protection before you look at the solar eclipse. We\u2019re all guilty of occasionally disregarding the warnings of scientists. Let she who has never ignored the risks and eaten raw cookie dough cast the first stone.",
        "author": "By Daniel Victor, Aneri Pattani and Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Researchers Explore a Cancer Paradox (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5033",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/science/cancer-genetic-mutations.html",
        "text": "Healthy cells carry a surprising number of cancer-linked mutations, but they don\u2019t turn into tumors. What\u2019s holding them back? Healthy cells carry a surprising number of cancer-linked mutations, but they don\u2019t turn into tumors. What\u2019s holding them back? Cancer is a disease of mutations. Tumor cells are riddled with genetic mutations not found in healthy cells. Scientists estimate that it takes five to 10 key mutations for a healthy cell to become cancerous. ",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Bubbles, She Sees a Mathematical Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5034",
        "date": "2019-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/science/uhlenbeck-bubbles-math-physics.html",
        "text": "For Karen Uhlenbeck, winner of the Abel Prize for math, a whimsical phenomenon offers a window onto higher dimensions. For Karen Uhlenbeck, winner of the Abel Prize for math, a whimsical phenomenon offers a window onto higher dimensions. PRINCETON, N.J. \u2014 On the evening of March 19, the mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck gathered with revelers at the Institute for Advanced Study for a champagne reception. Some hours earlier she\u2019d been awarded the Abel Prize \u2014 the first time a woman had won it \u2014 for her discovery of a phenomenon called \u201cbubbling,\u201d among other effervescent results.",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Doomed a Sprawling City Near St. Louis 1,000 Years Ago? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5035",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/science/cahokia-mounds-floods.html",
        "text": "Excavations at Cahokia, famous for its pre-Columbian mounds, challenge the idea that residents destroyed the city through wood clearing. Excavations at Cahokia, famous for its pre-Columbian mounds, challenge the idea that residents destroyed the city through wood clearing. A thousand years ago, a city rose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near what eventually became the city of St. Louis. Sprawling over miles of rich farms, public plazas and earthen mounds, the city \u2014 known today as Cahokia \u2014 was a thriving hub of immigrants, lavish feasting and religious ceremony. At its peak in the 1100s, Cahokia housed 20,000 people, greater than contemporaneous Paris.",
        "author": "By Asher Elbein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Volcanoes Helped Violent Revolts Erupt in Ancient Egypt (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5036",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/science/volcanoes-ancient-egypt-revolts.html",
        "text": "During the Ptolemaic Period, fluctuations in Nile flooding triggered by eruptions may have led to violent uprisings, researchers report. During the Ptolemaic Period, fluctuations in Nile flooding triggered by eruptions may have led to violent uprisings, researchers report. The Ptolemaic Kingdom was a prosperous time in Egypt\u2019s ancient history, nearly three centuries from 305 B.C. to 30 B.C. that saw the reign of Queen Cleopatra VII and the construction of the Great Library and the Lighthouse of Alexandria.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Marina Ratner, \u00c9migr\u00e9 Mathematician Who Found Midlife Acclaim, Dies at 78 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5037",
        "date": "2017-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/science/marina-ratner-dead-mathematician.html",
        "text": "Dr. Ratner defied the notion that the brightest in her field do their best work when they are young. Dr. Ratner defied the notion that the brightest in her field do their best work when they are young. Marina Ratner, an influential mathematician and Russian-Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 who defied the notion that the best and the brightest in her field do their finest work when they are young, died on July 7 at her home in El Cerrito, Calif. She was 78.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What if Space Junk and Climate Change Become the Same Problem? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5038",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/science/space-junk-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. It\u2019s easy to compare the space junk problem to climate change. Human activities leave too many dead satellites and fragments of machinery discarded in Earth orbit. If left unchecked, space junk could pose significant problems for future generations \u2014 rendering access to space increasingly difficult, or at worst, impossible.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "What if Space Junk and Climate Change Become the Same Problem? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5039",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/science/space-junk-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. It\u2019s easy to compare the space junk problem to climate change. Human activities leave too many dead satellites and fragments of machinery discarded in Earth orbit. If left unchecked, space junk could pose significant problems for future generations \u2014 rendering access to space increasingly difficult, or at worst, impossible.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "What if Space Junk and Climate Change Become the Same Problem? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5040",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/science/space-junk-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. It\u2019s easy to compare the space junk problem to climate change. Human activities leave too many dead satellites and fragments of machinery discarded in Earth orbit. If left unchecked, space junk could pose significant problems for future generations \u2014 rendering access to space increasingly difficult, or at worst, impossible.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "What if Space Junk and Climate Change Become the Same Problem? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5041",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/science/space-junk-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. Changes to the atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide emissions could increase the amount of debris that stays in orbit. It\u2019s easy to compare the space junk problem to climate change. Human activities leave too many dead satellites and fragments of machinery discarded in Earth orbit. If left unchecked, space junk could pose significant problems for future generations \u2014 rendering access to space increasingly difficult, or at worst, impossible.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Helping of Science With Your Thanksgiving Dinner (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5042",
        "date": "2017-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/science/thanksgiving-dinner-science.html",
        "text": "Biology. Chemistry. Physics. It\u2019s all there on your plate. Take a moment to appreciate it before you dig in. Biology. Chemistry. Physics. It\u2019s all there on your plate. Take a moment to appreciate it before you dig in. Happy Thanksgiving! You\u2019re about to enjoy one of the most wonderful meals of the year with family and friends. And you\u2019re probably looking forward to a plate full of food that you, or someone you care about, spent a lot of time preparing. ",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Celebrating the Eclipse That Let Einstein Shine (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5043",
        "date": "2019-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/science/solar-eclipse-einstein-physics.html",
        "text": "Before 1919, cosmology was as subjective as art criticism. A solar eclipse, and a patent clerk\u2019s equations, changed everything. Before 1919, cosmology was as subjective as art criticism. A solar eclipse, and a patent clerk\u2019s equations, changed everything. PRINCETON, N.J. \u2014 A century ago, on May 29, 1919, the universe was momentarily perturbed, and Albert Einstein became famous. ",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Celebrating the Eclipse That Let Einstein Shine (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5044",
        "date": "2019-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/science/solar-eclipse-einstein-physics.html",
        "text": "Before 1919, cosmology was as subjective as art criticism. A solar eclipse, and a patent clerk\u2019s equations, changed everything. Before 1919, cosmology was as subjective as art criticism. A solar eclipse, and a patent clerk\u2019s equations, changed everything. PRINCETON, N.J. \u2014 A century ago, on May 29, 1919, the universe was momentarily perturbed, and Albert Einstein became famous. ",
        "author": "By Siobhan Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will the Next Space-Weather Season Be Stormy or Fair? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5045",
        "date": "2021-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/science/astronomy-sun-space-weather.html",
        "text": "As another 11-year cycle of solar activity begins, scientists debate how violent our stellar friend is likely to be. As another 11-year cycle of solar activity begins, scientists debate how violent our stellar friend is likely to be. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will the Next Space-Weather Season Be Stormy or Fair? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5046",
        "date": "2021-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/science/astronomy-sun-space-weather.html",
        "text": "As another 11-year cycle of solar activity begins, scientists debate how violent our stellar friend is likely to be. As another 11-year cycle of solar activity begins, scientists debate how violent our stellar friend is likely to be. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Was Buried With a Silver Crown. Was She the One Who Held Power? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5047",
        "date": "2021-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/science/bronze-age-tomb-women.html",
        "text": "A tomb unearthed in Spain has prompted archaeologists to reconsider assumptions about women\u2019s power in Bronze Age European societies. A tomb unearthed in Spain has prompted archaeologists to reconsider assumptions about women\u2019s power in Bronze Age European societies. About 3,700 years ago, a man and a woman were buried together in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula. Their tomb was an ovoid jar beneath the floor of a grand hall in an expansive hilltop complex known as La Almoloya, in what is now Murcia, Spain. It\u2019s one of many archaeological sites associated with the El Argar culture of the Early Bronze Age that controlled an area about the size of Belgium from 2200 B.C. to 1500 B.C.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Pinkowski"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Coral Skeletons, Microscopic Portraits of Resilience? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5048",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/coral-skeletons-ocean-acidification.html",
        "text": "A study suggests that coral may be more robust in the face of human-driven ocean acidification than commonly thought. A study suggests that coral may be more robust in the face of human-driven ocean acidification than commonly thought. Coral reefs are sprawling, intricate ecosystems that house an estimated 25 percent of all marine life and can sometimes be seen from space. Yet they are formed by a process invisible to us.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Solstice, Solace for the Darkness (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5049",
        "date": "2020-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/science/christmas-star-jupiter-saturn-conjunction.html",
        "text": "A rare conjunction of planets serves as a reminder that there is more to the universe than just ourselves. A rare conjunction of planets serves as a reminder that there is more to the universe than just ourselves. We have now arrived at the longest, darkest night of the longest, darkest year. And yet rarely have the heavens so proclaimed their glory.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Fireball Ignored the Solar System\u2019s One-Way Signs (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5050",
        "date": "2020-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/science/fireball-meteor-australia.html",
        "text": "A meteoroid that grazed the night sky over Australia in 2017 took a very unusual path away from Earth. A meteoroid that grazed the night sky over Australia in 2017 took a very unusual path away from Earth. It\u2019s not unusual for meteors to illuminate night skies over southwestern Australia\u2019s desolate landscapes. But the fireball of July 7, 2017, was different. For a full minute and a half, it just kept burning and burning and burning. The object carved a trace of light as wide across as Texas, then faded.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Fireball Ignored the Solar System\u2019s One-Way Signs (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5051",
        "date": "2020-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/science/fireball-meteor-australia.html",
        "text": "A meteoroid that grazed the night sky over Australia in 2017 took a very unusual path away from Earth. A meteoroid that grazed the night sky over Australia in 2017 took a very unusual path away from Earth. It\u2019s not unusual for meteors to illuminate night skies over southwestern Australia\u2019s desolate landscapes. But the fireball of July 7, 2017, was different. For a full minute and a half, it just kept burning and burning and burning. The object carved a trace of light as wide across as Texas, then faded.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gas That Makes a Mountain Breathe Fire Is Turning Up Around the World (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5052",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/science/flames-chimaera-turkey-methane.html",
        "text": "A group of scientists have found unusual types of methane escaping from the deep earth in hundreds of locations. A group of scientists have found unusual types of methane escaping from the deep earth in hundreds of locations. At the top of a mountain in southwest Turkey, the ground spits fire. Known as the Flames of Chimaera, they have burned for millenniums.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Once Upon a Time on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5053",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/science/mars-perseverance-nasa-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A dune buggy is about to set off on behalf of its human owners to fulfill a primordial yearning. A dune buggy is about to set off on behalf of its human owners to fulfill a primordial yearning. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Once Upon a Time on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5054",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/science/mars-perseverance-nasa-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A dune buggy is about to set off on behalf of its human owners to fulfill a primordial yearning. A dune buggy is about to set off on behalf of its human owners to fulfill a primordial yearning. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Barry the Owl Brought Us Together. What Will We Do Without Her? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5055",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/science/barry-central-park-owl.html",
        "text": "A community formed in Central Park around a barred owl with a charming, people-friendly personality. Saying goodbye isn\u2019t easy. A community formed in Central Park around a barred owl with a charming, people-friendly personality. Saying goodbye isn\u2019t easy. She was a charismatic creature, as sassy and confident and constant as Harry Potter\u2019s beloved Hedwig. As wise and playful a teacher as Merlin\u2019s Archimedes. And in real life, an owl unusually accommodating of the many humans who gathered in Central Park every day to watch her snooze in her favorite hemlock tree or fly out through the Ramble on her nightly hunting rounds.",
        "author": "By Michiko Kakutani"
    },
    {
        "title": "Masks Work. Really. We\u2019ll Show You How (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5056",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/30/science/wear-mask-covid-particles-ul.html",
        "text": "A visual journey through the microscopic world of the coronavirus shows how masks provide an important defense against transmission. A visual journey through the microscopic world of the coronavirus shows how masks provide an important defense against transmission. A visual journey through the microscopic world of the coronavirus shows how masks provide an important defense against transmission.",
        "author": "By Or Fleisher, Gabriel Gianordoli, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Miles Peyton and Bedel Saget"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should Neil Armstrong\u2019s Bootprints Be on the Moon Forever? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5057",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/science/moon-apollo-11-archaeology-preservation.html",
        "text": "With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should Neil Armstrong\u2019s Bootprints Be on the Moon Forever? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5058",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/science/moon-apollo-11-archaeology-preservation.html",
        "text": "With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should Neil Armstrong\u2019s Bootprints Be on the Moon Forever? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5059",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/science/moon-apollo-11-archaeology-preservation.html",
        "text": "With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should Neil Armstrong\u2019s Bootprints Be on the Moon Forever? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5060",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/science/moon-apollo-11-archaeology-preservation.html",
        "text": "With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. With renewed interest in the moon, some say it\u2019s time to consider whether, and how, to preserve humanity\u2019s lunar heritage. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside Giza\u2019s Great Pyramid, Scientists Discover a Void (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5061",
        "date": "2017-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/science/pyramids-giza-void.html",
        "text": "Using a technique from particle physics, researchers detected a 100-foot-long space within the monument, but Egyptologists questioned the discovery\u2019s value. Using a technique from particle physics, researchers detected a 100-foot-long space within the monument, but Egyptologists questioned the discovery\u2019s value. The Great Pyramid of Giza has towered over Egypt for more than 4,500 years. Built during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu, the monument was a testament to the ruler\u2019s architectural prowess and is thought to have been a home for his mummified remains.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Attacks by Urban Coyotes Are Rare, but Frightening (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5062",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/science/chicago-coyote-attacks.html",
        "text": "Two people were injured in Chicago, a reminder that as more coyotes move to the cities, some conflicts are inevitable. Two people were injured in Chicago, a reminder that as more coyotes move to the cities, some conflicts are inevitable. A coyote attacked a 5-year-old boy near the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago on Wednesday, sending him to the hospital. ",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Is Very Big. Some of Its New Explorers Will Be Tiny. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5063",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/science/cubesats-marco-mars.html",
        "text": "The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. Last year, two satellites the size of cereal boxes sped toward Mars as though they were on an invisible track in space. Officially called MarCO A and MarCO B, they were nicknamed Wall-E and EVE, after the animated robots from the Pixar movie, by engineers at NASA.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Is Very Big. Some of Its New Explorers Will Be Tiny. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5064",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/science/cubesats-marco-mars.html",
        "text": "The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. Last year, two satellites the size of cereal boxes sped toward Mars as though they were on an invisible track in space. Officially called MarCO A and MarCO B, they were nicknamed Wall-E and EVE, after the animated robots from the Pixar movie, by engineers at NASA.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Is Very Big. Some of Its New Explorers Will Be Tiny. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5065",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/science/cubesats-marco-mars.html",
        "text": "The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. Last year, two satellites the size of cereal boxes sped toward Mars as though they were on an invisible track in space. Officially called MarCO A and MarCO B, they were nicknamed Wall-E and EVE, after the animated robots from the Pixar movie, by engineers at NASA.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Is Very Big. Some of Its New Explorers Will Be Tiny. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5066",
        "date": "2019-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/science/cubesats-marco-mars.html",
        "text": "The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. The success of NASA\u2019s MarCO mission means that so-called cubesats likely will travel to distant reaches of our solar system. Last year, two satellites the size of cereal boxes sped toward Mars as though they were on an invisible track in space. Officially called MarCO A and MarCO B, they were nicknamed Wall-E and EVE, after the animated robots from the Pixar movie, by engineers at NASA.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 Is Still the \u2018Ultimate Trip\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5067",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/science/2001-a-space-odyssey-kubrick.html",
        "text": "The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s masterpiece encourages us to reflect again on where we\u2019re coming from and where we\u2019re going. The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s masterpiece encourages us to reflect again on where we\u2019re coming from and where we\u2019re going. In the spring of 1964 the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 Is Still the \u2018Ultimate Trip\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5068",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/science/2001-a-space-odyssey-kubrick.html",
        "text": "The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s masterpiece encourages us to reflect again on where we\u2019re coming from and where we\u2019re going. The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s masterpiece encourages us to reflect again on where we\u2019re coming from and where we\u2019re going. In the spring of 1964 the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 Is Still the \u2018Ultimate Trip\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5069",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/science/2001-a-space-odyssey-kubrick.html",
        "text": "The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s masterpiece encourages us to reflect again on where we\u2019re coming from and where we\u2019re going. The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s masterpiece encourages us to reflect again on where we\u2019re coming from and where we\u2019re going. In the spring of 1964 the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was very worried. NASA was about to fly the Mariner 4 space probe past Mars.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fields Medals Awarded to 4 Mathematicians (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5070",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/science/fields-medals-mathematics.html",
        "text": "The prize, bestowed every four years to mathematicians 40 years or younger, is often described as the subject\u2019s Nobel Prize. The prize, bestowed every four years to mathematicians 40 years or younger, is often described as the subject\u2019s Nobel Prize. Every four years, at an international gathering of mathematicians, the subject\u2019s youngest and brightest are honored with the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fields Medals Awarded to 4 Mathematicians (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5071",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/science/fields-medals-mathematics.html",
        "text": "The prize, bestowed every four years to mathematicians 40 years or younger, is often described as the subject\u2019s Nobel Prize. The prize, bestowed every four years to mathematicians 40 years or younger, is often described as the subject\u2019s Nobel Prize. Every four years, at an international gathering of mathematicians, the subject\u2019s youngest and brightest are honored with the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can the World\u2019s Strangest Mammal Survive? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5072",
        "date": "2020-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/science/platypus-australia-wildfires.html",
        "text": "The platypus is imperiled by habitat loss, predation by feral cats, and now drought and wildfires wrought by climate change. The platypus is imperiled by habitat loss, predation by feral cats, and now drought and wildfires wrought by climate change. SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 Early on the morning of Dec. 27, Phoebe Meagher, a wildlife conservation officer at Taronga Zoo, set off on a rescue mission with colleagues from the zoo and academics from the University of New South Wales. Several platypuses were trapped in quickly shrinking bodies of water in Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in the Australian Capital Territory, and wildfires were fast approaching. There was a window of a few days before the park would be entirely closed off to the public, and two weeks until the bodies of water would be completely dry.",
        "author": "By Helen Sullivan and David Maurice Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can the World\u2019s Strangest Mammal Survive? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5073",
        "date": "2020-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/science/platypus-australia-wildfires.html",
        "text": "The platypus is imperiled by habitat loss, predation by feral cats, and now drought and wildfires wrought by climate change. The platypus is imperiled by habitat loss, predation by feral cats, and now drought and wildfires wrought by climate change. SYDNEY, Australia \u2014 Early on the morning of Dec. 27, Phoebe Meagher, a wildlife conservation officer at Taronga Zoo, set off on a rescue mission with colleagues from the zoo and academics from the University of New South Wales. Several platypuses were trapped in quickly shrinking bodies of water in Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in the Australian Capital Territory, and wildfires were fast approaching. There was a window of a few days before the park would be entirely closed off to the public, and two weeks until the bodies of water would be completely dry.",
        "author": "By Helen Sullivan and David Maurice Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Long-Awaited Miami Science Museum Comes to Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5074",
        "date": "2017-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/science/miami-science-museum-.html",
        "text": "The opening of the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science comes after a scramble to finish the 250,000-square-foot structure. The opening of the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science comes after a scramble to finish the 250,000-square-foot structure. MIAMI \u2014 For decades, South Florida schoolchildren and adults fascinated by far-off galaxies, earthly ecosystems, the properties of light and sound and other wonders of science had only a quaint, antiquated museum here in which to explore their interests.",
        "author": "By Nick Madigan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Long-Awaited Miami Science Museum Comes to Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5075",
        "date": "2017-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/science/miami-science-museum-.html",
        "text": "The opening of the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science comes after a scramble to finish the 250,000-square-foot structure. The opening of the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science comes after a scramble to finish the 250,000-square-foot structure. MIAMI \u2014 For decades, South Florida schoolchildren and adults fascinated by far-off galaxies, earthly ecosystems, the properties of light and sound and other wonders of science had only a quaint, antiquated museum here in which to explore their interests.",
        "author": "By Nick Madigan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fruit Flies and Mice to Get New Home on Space Station, at Least Temporarily (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5076",
        "date": "2017-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/science/spacex-cargo-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The next SpaceX mission will carry insects and rodents to help scientists understand the effects of long-term life in space. The next SpaceX mission will carry insects and rodents to help scientists understand the effects of long-term life in space. A bit of science trivia: Did you know that the heart of a fruit fly beats at about the same pace as yours?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fruit Flies and Mice to Get New Home on Space Station, at Least Temporarily (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5077",
        "date": "2017-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/science/spacex-cargo-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The next SpaceX mission will carry insects and rodents to help scientists understand the effects of long-term life in space. The next SpaceX mission will carry insects and rodents to help scientists understand the effects of long-term life in space. A bit of science trivia: Did you know that the heart of a fruit fly beats at about the same pace as yours?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fishing for Clues to Solve Namibia\u2019s Fairy Circle Mystery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5078",
        "date": "2017-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/science/fishing-for-clues-to-solve-namibias-fairy-circle-mystery.html",
        "text": "The new study suggests that both termites and plants may be jointly responsible for forming fairy circle landscapes in Namibia. The new study suggests that both termites and plants may be jointly responsible for forming fairy circle landscapes in Namibia. With its bone-dry grasslands and oppressive heat, the middle of the Namib Desert may seem like a strange place to go fishing. Yet there Jennifer Guyton and Tyler Coverdale were, standing in a sea of orange sand and brittle yellow grass with their 30-foot carp pole.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy Launch Postponed by SpaceX (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5079",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/falcon-heavy-launch-spacex.html",
        "text": "The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The flight of the Falcon Heavy will have to wait another day.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy Launch Postponed by SpaceX (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5080",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/falcon-heavy-launch-spacex.html",
        "text": "The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The flight of the Falcon Heavy will have to wait another day.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy Launch Postponed by SpaceX (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5081",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/falcon-heavy-launch-spacex.html",
        "text": "The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The flight of the Falcon Heavy will have to wait another day.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy Launch Postponed by SpaceX (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5082",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/falcon-heavy-launch-spacex.html",
        "text": "The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The most powerful rocket now available on Earth will wait another day for its next journey to orbit and back. The flight of the Falcon Heavy will have to wait another day.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Imagining the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5083",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/science/moon-art-culture.html",
        "text": "The moon in art has changed from symbol to something real, but that hasn\u2019t changed our will to see it. The moon in art has changed from symbol to something real, but that hasn\u2019t changed our will to see it. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Imagining the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5084",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/science/moon-art-culture.html",
        "text": "The moon in art has changed from symbol to something real, but that hasn\u2019t changed our will to see it. The moon in art has changed from symbol to something real, but that hasn\u2019t changed our will to see it. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finalists in NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Sweepstakes: A Drone on Titan, and a Comet-Chaser (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5085",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/science/nasa-new-frontiers-finalists.html",
        "text": "The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. Would you like NASA to fly a drone across Saturn\u2019s largest moon, or to send a probe to collect samples from a duck-shaped comet?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finalists in NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Sweepstakes: A Drone on Titan, and a Comet-Chaser (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5086",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/science/nasa-new-frontiers-finalists.html",
        "text": "The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. Would you like NASA to fly a drone across Saturn\u2019s largest moon, or to send a probe to collect samples from a duck-shaped comet?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finalists in NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Sweepstakes: A Drone on Titan, and a Comet-Chaser (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5087",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/science/nasa-new-frontiers-finalists.html",
        "text": "The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. Would you like NASA to fly a drone across Saturn\u2019s largest moon, or to send a probe to collect samples from a duck-shaped comet?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finalists in NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Sweepstakes: A Drone on Titan, and a Comet-Chaser (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5088",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/science/nasa-new-frontiers-finalists.html",
        "text": "The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. The missions, known as Dragonfly and Caesar, were selected from a dozen proposals made in the agency\u2019s New Frontiers competition. Would you like NASA to fly a drone across Saturn\u2019s largest moon, or to send a probe to collect samples from a duck-shaped comet?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Secret War Over Pentagon Aid in Fighting Wildfires (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5089",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/science/wildfires-military-satellites.html",
        "text": "The military\u2019s satellites excel at spotting new blazes, but for decades they have been mostly off limits to civilian firefighters. The military\u2019s satellites excel at spotting new blazes, but for decades they have been mostly off limits to civilian firefighters. In July, as wildfires tore through the American West, President Biden met with the region\u2019s governors to find better ways to battle the flames. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California requested use of military satellites that are designed to warn of missile attacks, calling the orbital fleet \u201ca game changer\u201d for spotting and fighting wildfires.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Secret War Over Pentagon Aid in Fighting Wildfires (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5090",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/science/wildfires-military-satellites.html",
        "text": "The military\u2019s satellites excel at spotting new blazes, but for decades they have been mostly off limits to civilian firefighters. The military\u2019s satellites excel at spotting new blazes, but for decades they have been mostly off limits to civilian firefighters. In July, as wildfires tore through the American West, President Biden met with the region\u2019s governors to find better ways to battle the flames. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California requested use of military satellites that are designed to warn of missile attacks, calling the orbital fleet \u201ca game changer\u201d for spotting and fighting wildfires.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Journey to an Asteroid Ends With a Hunt in Australia\u2019s Outback (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5091",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/science/japan-asteroid-hayabusa2-woomera.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan\u2019s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presented one last challenge. The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan\u2019s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presented one last challenge. This past weekend, Japan\u2019s space agency concluded a six-year, 3.25 billion-mile journey of discovery that aims to shed light on the earliest eons of the solar system and possibly provide clues about the origins of life on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Journey to an Asteroid Ends With a Hunt in Australia\u2019s Outback (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5092",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/science/japan-asteroid-hayabusa2-woomera.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan\u2019s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presented one last challenge. The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan\u2019s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presented one last challenge. This past weekend, Japan\u2019s space agency concluded a six-year, 3.25 billion-mile journey of discovery that aims to shed light on the earliest eons of the solar system and possibly provide clues about the origins of life on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Journey to an Asteroid Ends With a Hunt in Australia\u2019s Outback (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5093",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/science/japan-asteroid-hayabusa2-woomera.html",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan\u2019s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presented one last challenge. The Hayabusa2 mission cements Japan\u2019s role in exploring the solar system, but finding its asteroid cargo presented one last challenge. This past weekend, Japan\u2019s space agency concluded a six-year, 3.25 billion-mile journey of discovery that aims to shed light on the earliest eons of the solar system and possibly provide clues about the origins of life on Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Family\u2019s Shared Defect Sheds Light on the Human Genome (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5094",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/science/dna-tads.html",
        "text": "The genome is divided into thousands of \u2018neighborhoods,\u2019 or TADs, scientists are finding. Breaching the borders can have deadly consequences. The genome is divided into thousands of \u2018neighborhoods,\u2019 or TADs, scientists are finding. Breaching the borders can have deadly consequences. They said it was their family curse: a rare congenital deformity called syndactyly, in which the thumb and index finger are fused together on one or both hands. Ten members of the extended clan were affected, and with each new birth, they told Stefan Mundlos of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, the first question was always: \u201cHow are the baby\u2019s hands? Are they normal?\u201d",
        "author": "By Natalie Angier"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lunar Eclipse and Green Comet Make for Busy Friday Night in the Sky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5095",
        "date": "2017-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/science/penumbral-lunar-eclipse-friday-comet-45p.html",
        "text": "The casual skygazer shouldn\u2019t expect much of a spectacle from the back-to-back penumbral lunar eclipse and passage of Comet 45P. The casual skygazer shouldn\u2019t expect much of a spectacle from the back-to-back penumbral lunar eclipse and passage of Comet 45P. Two celestial events will take place on Friday night: a lunar eclipse and the passing of a comet.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "How It Works: The Large Mouth of the Largemouth Bass (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5096",
        "date": "2017-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/science/largemouth-bass-jaw.html",
        "text": "The bones in the legendary maw of the largemouth bass function according to a well-known engineering model, scientists have found. The bones in the legendary maw of the largemouth bass function according to a well-known engineering model, scientists have found. The eponymous maw of the largemouth bass \u2014 and the fish\u2019s ability to suck prey into that gaping gullet in a rapacious strike \u2014 are part of the lore and legend of the bass to the many anglers who pursue it. But they are not the only ones who are fascinated.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Give a Cow a Brush, and Watch It Scratch That Itch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5097",
        "date": "2018-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/science/cows-brush-grooming.html",
        "text": "Some researchers think mechanical brushes aren\u2019t just some spa amenity for dairy cows \u2014 they\u2019re important to the animal\u2019s well-being. Some researchers think mechanical brushes aren\u2019t just some spa amenity for dairy cows \u2014 they\u2019re important to the animal\u2019s well-being.  Cows, like dogs and people, like a good scratch. Outside, they\u2019ll rub their bodies against fence posts or trees to remove parasites or just stay clean. Some do it so much, they can break radio transmission towers if you don\u2019t fence it off. ",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ring of Fire\u2019 Eclipse Travels Across South America and Africa (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5098",
        "date": "2017-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/science/ring-of-fire-eclipse-travels-across-south-america-and-africa.html",
        "text": "Skywatchers in South America and Africa tweeted their experiences on Sunday, though some complained that overcast weather dampened their views. Skywatchers in South America and Africa tweeted their experiences on Sunday, though some complained that overcast weather dampened their views. People in parts of South America and Africa were treated to a rare sight on Sunday: a \u201cring of fire\u201d eclipse, when the moon moves in between the Earth and the sun, briefly replacing it with a blazing, fiery ring.",
        "author": "By Liam Stack"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hints of Phantom Crater Found Under Volcanic Plateau in Laos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5099",
        "date": "2020-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/science/crater-laos-meteorite.html",
        "text": "Scientists knew a meteorite impact had flung debris all over the world, but where it struck has remained a mystery. Scientists knew a meteorite impact had flung debris all over the world, but where it struck has remained a mystery. Earth has had many run-ins with space rocks. They\u2019ve triggered the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, lit up daytime skies over Russia in thousands of dash cam videos and even struck a human.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Solve a Moon Mystery? Fire a Laser at It (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5100",
        "date": "2020-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/science/moon-lasers-dust.html",
        "text": "Researchers have used reflective prisms left on the moon\u2019s surface for decades, but had increasingly seen problems with their effectiveness. Researchers have used reflective prisms left on the moon\u2019s surface for decades, but had increasingly seen problems with their effectiveness. The moon is drifting away. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Solve a Moon Mystery? Fire a Laser at It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5101",
        "date": "2020-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/science/moon-lasers-dust.html",
        "text": "Researchers have used reflective prisms left on the moon\u2019s surface for decades, but had increasingly seen problems with their effectiveness. Researchers have used reflective prisms left on the moon\u2019s surface for decades, but had increasingly seen problems with their effectiveness. The moon is drifting away. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Caligula\u2019s Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5102",
        "date": "2021-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/science/caligula-archaeology-rome-horti-lamiani.html",
        "text": "Relics from the favorite hideaway of ancient Rome\u2019s most infamous tyrant have been recovered and put on display by archaeologists. Relics from the favorite hideaway of ancient Rome\u2019s most infamous tyrant have been recovered and put on display by archaeologists. The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula \u2014 officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus \u2014 was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire\u2019s most tyrannical ruler. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.",
        "author": "By Franz Lidz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Caligula\u2019s Garden of Delights, Unearthed and Restored (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5103",
        "date": "2021-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/science/caligula-archaeology-rome-horti-lamiani.html",
        "text": "Relics from the favorite hideaway of ancient Rome\u2019s most infamous tyrant have been recovered and put on display by archaeologists. Relics from the favorite hideaway of ancient Rome\u2019s most infamous tyrant have been recovered and put on display by archaeologists. The fourth of the 12 Caesars, Caligula \u2014 officially, Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus \u2014 was a capricious, combustible first-century populist remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the empire\u2019s most tyrannical ruler. As reported by Suetonius, the Michael Wolff of ancient Rome, he never forgot a slight, slept only a few hours a night and married several times, lastly to a woman named Milonia.",
        "author": "By Franz Lidz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Earth\u2019s Shell Has Cracked, and We\u2019re Drifting on the Pieces  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5104",
        "date": "2018-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/science/plate-tectonics-continents-earth.html",
        "text": "Plate tectonics helped make our planet stable and habitable. But the slow shifting of continents is still a mysterious process. Plate tectonics helped make our planet stable and habitable. But the slow shifting of continents is still a mysterious process.  The theory of plate tectonics is one of the great scientific advances of our age, right up there with Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution and Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity.",
        "author": "By Natalie Angier"
    },
    {
        "title": "Grow Faster, Grow Stronger: Speed-Breeding Crops to Feed the Future (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5105",
        "date": "2019-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/food-agriculture-genetics.html",
        "text": "Plant breeders are fast-tracking genetic improvements in food crops to keep pace with global warming and a growing human population. Plant breeders are fast-tracking genetic improvements in food crops to keep pace with global warming and a growing human population. Farmers and plant breeders are in a race against time. The world population is growing rapidly, requiring ever more food, but the amount of cultivable land is limited. Warmer temperatures have extended growth seasons in some areas \u2014 and brought drought and pests to others. ",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Burning Lava Lake Concealed by a Volcano\u2019s Glacial Ice (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5106",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/lava-lake-volcano-antarctica.html",
        "text": "Persistent pools of lava are quite rare on Earth, and it took years of satellite images to find this one. Persistent pools of lava are quite rare on Earth, and it took years of satellite images to find this one. While Earth\u2019s surface is peppered with volcanoes, lava lakes appear to be vanishingly rare. Popular imagery of volcanoes may imply that these crowning caldrons of liquid fire are common, but there were thought to be only seven contemporary volcanoes on Earth with persistent lava lakes that have been seen to stick around beyond a single eruptive outburst.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Burning Lava Lake Concealed by a Volcano\u2019s Glacial Ice (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5107",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/lava-lake-volcano-antarctica.html",
        "text": "Persistent pools of lava are quite rare on Earth, and it took years of satellite images to find this one. Persistent pools of lava are quite rare on Earth, and it took years of satellite images to find this one. While Earth\u2019s surface is peppered with volcanoes, lava lakes appear to be vanishingly rare. Popular imagery of volcanoes may imply that these crowning caldrons of liquid fire are common, but there were thought to be only seven contemporary volcanoes on Earth with persistent lava lakes that have been seen to stick around beyond a single eruptive outburst.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Volcanic Eruptions Helped Dinosaurs Dominate Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5108",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/science/dinosaurs-volcanoes-triassic.html",
        "text": "Massive eruptions transformed the climate in the Triassic era, creating the conditions in which dinosaurs diversified into many more species. Massive eruptions transformed the climate in the Triassic era, creating the conditions in which dinosaurs diversified into many more species. The relationship between dinosaurs and volcanoes has historically not always appeared so amiable.",
        "author": "By Sam Jones"
    },
    {
        "title": "Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5109",
        "date": "2019-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/science/mars-methane-gas.html",
        "text": "Mars emits methane, a European orbiter has confirmed. But scientists can\u2019t say yet whether the source is geological or biological. Mars emits methane, a European orbiter has confirmed. But scientists can\u2019t say yet whether the source is geological or biological. Methane gas periodically wafts into the atmosphere of Mars; that notion, once considered implausible and perplexing, is now widely accepted by planetary scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5110",
        "date": "2019-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/science/mars-methane-gas.html",
        "text": "Mars emits methane, a European orbiter has confirmed. But scientists can\u2019t say yet whether the source is geological or biological. Mars emits methane, a European orbiter has confirmed. But scientists can\u2019t say yet whether the source is geological or biological. Methane gas periodically wafts into the atmosphere of Mars; that notion, once considered implausible and perplexing, is now widely accepted by planetary scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5111",
        "date": "2019-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/science/mars-methane-gas.html",
        "text": "Mars emits methane, a European orbiter has confirmed. But scientists can\u2019t say yet whether the source is geological or biological. Mars emits methane, a European orbiter has confirmed. But scientists can\u2019t say yet whether the source is geological or biological. Methane gas periodically wafts into the atmosphere of Mars; that notion, once considered implausible and perplexing, is now widely accepted by planetary scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Finally Picks a Science Adviser. And Scientists? They Seem Relieved. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5112",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/science/trump-droegemeier-science-adviser.html",
        "text": "Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist, has a long research record. But his views on climate change are not well known. Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist, has a long research record. But his views on climate change are not well known.  President Trump will nominate Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist who studies severe storms, to be director of the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Finally Picks a Science Adviser. And Scientists? They Seem Relieved. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5113",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/science/trump-droegemeier-science-adviser.html",
        "text": "Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist, has a long research record. But his views on climate change are not well known. Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist, has a long research record. But his views on climate change are not well known.  President Trump will nominate Kelvin Droegemeier, a well-regarded meteorologist who studies severe storms, to be director of the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Found the Ideal Hole on Mars to Land In (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5114",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/nasa-jezero-perseverance.html",
        "text": "Jezero crater, the destination of the Perseverance rover, is a promising place to look for evidence of extinct Martian life. Jezero crater, the destination of the Perseverance rover, is a promising place to look for evidence of extinct Martian life. Sixteen years ago, Caleb Fassett, then a graduate student at Brown University, spotted an intriguing hole in the ground on Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Found the Ideal Hole on Mars to Land In (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5115",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/nasa-jezero-perseverance.html",
        "text": "Jezero crater, the destination of the Perseverance rover, is a promising place to look for evidence of extinct Martian life. Jezero crater, the destination of the Perseverance rover, is a promising place to look for evidence of extinct Martian life. Sixteen years ago, Caleb Fassett, then a graduate student at Brown University, spotted an intriguing hole in the ground on Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Found the Ideal Hole on Mars to Land In (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5116",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/science/nasa-jezero-perseverance.html",
        "text": "Jezero crater, the destination of the Perseverance rover, is a promising place to look for evidence of extinct Martian life. Jezero crater, the destination of the Perseverance rover, is a promising place to look for evidence of extinct Martian life. Sixteen years ago, Caleb Fassett, then a graduate student at Brown University, spotted an intriguing hole in the ground on Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This May Be the First Planet Found Orbiting 3 Stars at Once (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5117",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/science/triple-sun-planet.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s called a circumtriple planet, and evidence that one exists suggests that planet formation is less unusual than once believed. It\u2019s called a circumtriple planet, and evidence that one exists suggests that planet formation is less unusual than once believed. GW Ori is a star system 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation of Orion. It is surrounded by a huge disk of dust and gas, a common feature of young star systems that are forming planets. But fascinatingly, it is a system with not one star, but three.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ice Age Asteroid Crater Discovered Beneath Greenland Glacier  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5118",
        "date": "2018-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/science/greenland-ice-crater.html",
        "text": "It is the first impact crater discovered under one of Earth\u2019s ice sheets, according to the scientists who found it. It is the first impact crater discovered under one of Earth\u2019s ice sheets, according to the scientists who found it. Buried beneath a half mile of snow and ice in Greenland, scientists have uncovered an impact crater large enough to swallow the District of Columbia. ",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Corporate Sponsors for NASA? Agency to Study Making Space for Brands (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5119",
        "date": "2018-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/science/nasa-corporate-sponsors.html",
        "text": "In an era of flat budgets for the agency, Jim Bridenstine has started talking about corporate sponsorships for NASA missions. In an era of flat budgets for the agency, Jim Bridenstine has started talking about corporate sponsorships for NASA missions. Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, posed a question two weeks ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Corporate Sponsors for NASA? Agency to Study Making Space for Brands (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5120",
        "date": "2018-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/science/nasa-corporate-sponsors.html",
        "text": "In an era of flat budgets for the agency, Jim Bridenstine has started talking about corporate sponsorships for NASA missions. In an era of flat budgets for the agency, Jim Bridenstine has started talking about corporate sponsorships for NASA missions. Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, posed a question two weeks ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Corporate Sponsors for NASA? Agency to Study Making Space for Brands (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5121",
        "date": "2018-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/science/nasa-corporate-sponsors.html",
        "text": "In an era of flat budgets for the agency, Jim Bridenstine has started talking about corporate sponsorships for NASA missions. In an era of flat budgets for the agency, Jim Bridenstine has started talking about corporate sponsorships for NASA missions. Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, posed a question two weeks ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming of Age on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5122",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/science/mars-sarah-stewart-johnson.html",
        "text": "In a new book, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson recalls how the Red Planet drew her to become a scientist. In a new book, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson recalls how the Red Planet drew her to become a scientist. In the winter of 2004, Sarah Stewart Johnson, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on a field trip in the desert east of California\u2019s Sierra Nevada. While learning to map geological terrains, she fell prey to an adolescent thrill. Boulders were perched on ledges; when nobody was watching, she would strain and push one over the edge just to watch it roll hundreds of feet, crash and break apart.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming of Age on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5123",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/science/mars-sarah-stewart-johnson.html",
        "text": "In a new book, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson recalls how the Red Planet drew her to become a scientist. In a new book, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson recalls how the Red Planet drew her to become a scientist. In the winter of 2004, Sarah Stewart Johnson, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on a field trip in the desert east of California\u2019s Sierra Nevada. While learning to map geological terrains, she fell prey to an adolescent thrill. Boulders were perched on ledges; when nobody was watching, she would strain and push one over the edge just to watch it roll hundreds of feet, crash and break apart.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming of Age on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5124",
        "date": "2020-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/science/mars-sarah-stewart-johnson.html",
        "text": "In a new book, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson recalls how the Red Planet drew her to become a scientist. In a new book, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson recalls how the Red Planet drew her to become a scientist. In the winter of 2004, Sarah Stewart Johnson, then a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on a field trip in the desert east of California\u2019s Sierra Nevada. While learning to map geological terrains, she fell prey to an adolescent thrill. Boulders were perched on ledges; when nobody was watching, she would strain and push one over the edge just to watch it roll hundreds of feet, crash and break apart.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin\u2019s Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5125",
        "date": "2019-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/science/jeff-bezos-moon.html",
        "text": "In a choreographed presentation, the Amazon founder said he wants to build the infrastructure for humans to live in space. In a choreographed presentation, the Amazon founder said he wants to build the infrastructure for humans to live in space. WASHINGTON \u2014 In a carefully choreographed event akin to an announcement of a new iPhone, Jeffrey P. Bezos unveiled a moon lander.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin\u2019s Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5126",
        "date": "2019-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/science/jeff-bezos-moon.html",
        "text": "In a choreographed presentation, the Amazon founder said he wants to build the infrastructure for humans to live in space. In a choreographed presentation, the Amazon founder said he wants to build the infrastructure for humans to live in space. WASHINGTON \u2014 In a carefully choreographed event akin to an announcement of a new iPhone, Jeffrey P. Bezos unveiled a moon lander.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin\u2019s Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5127",
        "date": "2019-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/science/jeff-bezos-moon.html",
        "text": "In a choreographed presentation, the Amazon founder said he wants to build the infrastructure for humans to live in space. In a choreographed presentation, the Amazon founder said he wants to build the infrastructure for humans to live in space. WASHINGTON \u2014 In a carefully choreographed event akin to an announcement of a new iPhone, Jeffrey P. Bezos unveiled a moon lander.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Companions for City Trees (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5128",
        "date": "2018-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/science/street-trees-plantings.html",
        "text": "If you\u2019re going to add plants around a street tree, make sure they\u2019re not too thirsty and have shallow roots. If you\u2019re going to add plants around a street tree, make sure they\u2019re not too thirsty and have shallow roots.  Q. Will planting flowers and bulbs in a tree pit seriously harm a city street tree?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Waves Above the Earth May Have Once Caused a \u2018Nocturnal Sun\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5129",
        "date": "2017-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/science/bright-nights-nocturnal-sun-zonal-waves.html",
        "text": "Historical observations of bright nights that were almost like daytime have a new explanation in forces of the upper atmosphere. Historical observations of bright nights that were almost like daytime have a new explanation in forces of the upper atmosphere. It was night, but people could see, almost as if it was day. There were no streetlamps, no flood lights, no candles, sun or moon. But they could read documents, make out pebbles on the ground and spot details of landscapes hundreds of yards away. Distant mountains were illuminated. Some called it the nocturnal sun.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "If China Tested a New Orbital Weapon, It\u2019s Not Much of a Surprise (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5130",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/china-orbital-weapon.html",
        "text": "Experts report that similar technologies were developed by Russia and the United States starting more than a half century ago. Experts report that similar technologies were developed by Russia and the United States starting more than a half century ago. The news report that emerged over the weekend sounded alarming: China, a rising military power, had unexpectedly fired a novel space weapon two months ago. It circled the planet and then re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere, gliding at velocities far faster than the speed of sound toward a destination on Chinese territory.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "If China Tested a New Orbital Weapon, It\u2019s Not Much of a Surprise (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5131",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/china-orbital-weapon.html",
        "text": "Experts report that similar technologies were developed by Russia and the United States starting more than a half century ago. Experts report that similar technologies were developed by Russia and the United States starting more than a half century ago. The news report that emerged over the weekend sounded alarming: China, a rising military power, had unexpectedly fired a novel space weapon two months ago. It circled the planet and then re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere, gliding at velocities far faster than the speed of sound toward a destination on Chinese territory.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "If China Tested a New Orbital Weapon, It\u2019s Not Much of a Surprise (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5132",
        "date": "2021-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/science/china-orbital-weapon.html",
        "text": "Experts report that similar technologies were developed by Russia and the United States starting more than a half century ago. Experts report that similar technologies were developed by Russia and the United States starting more than a half century ago. The news report that emerged over the weekend sounded alarming: China, a rising military power, had unexpectedly fired a novel space weapon two months ago. It circled the planet and then re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere, gliding at velocities far faster than the speed of sound toward a destination on Chinese territory.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Comet NEOWISE: How to See It in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5133",
        "date": "2020-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/neowise-comet.html",
        "text": "Enjoy it while you can. The frozen ball of ice won\u2019t return to the inner solar system for 6,800 years. Enjoy it while you can. The frozen ball of ice won\u2019t return to the inner solar system for 6,800 years. Eager sky watchers are turning to the heavens as Comet NEOWISE, one of the brightest comets in a generation, starts climbing ever higher among the evening stars.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Comet NEOWISE: How to See It in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5134",
        "date": "2020-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/neowise-comet.html",
        "text": "Enjoy it while you can. The frozen ball of ice won\u2019t return to the inner solar system for 6,800 years. Enjoy it while you can. The frozen ball of ice won\u2019t return to the inner solar system for 6,800 years. Eager sky watchers are turning to the heavens as Comet NEOWISE, one of the brightest comets in a generation, starts climbing ever higher among the evening stars.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Blow Up an Asteroid, It Might Put Itself Back Together (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5135",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/science/asteroids-nuclear-weapons.html",
        "text": "Despite what Hollywood tells us, stopping an asteroid from creating an extinction-level event by blowing it up may not work. Despite what Hollywood tells us, stopping an asteroid from creating an extinction-level event by blowing it up may not work. Faced with the prospect of a sizable asteroid heading toward Earth and causing doomsday, humanity has come up with various responses.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Blow Up an Asteroid, It Might Put Itself Back Together (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5136",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/science/asteroids-nuclear-weapons.html",
        "text": "Despite what Hollywood tells us, stopping an asteroid from creating an extinction-level event by blowing it up may not work. Despite what Hollywood tells us, stopping an asteroid from creating an extinction-level event by blowing it up may not work. Faced with the prospect of a sizable asteroid heading toward Earth and causing doomsday, humanity has come up with various responses.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Kinda Want to Believe Apollo 11 Was Maybe a Hoax (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5137",
        "date": "2019-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/moon-landing-hoax-conspiracy-theory.html",
        "text": "Conspiracy theories were once deadly serious. On the internet, skepticism about the moon landing shows how the mood has shifted. Conspiracy theories were once deadly serious. On the internet, skepticism about the moon landing shows how the mood has shifted. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Amanda Hess"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Kinda Want to Believe Apollo 11 Was Maybe a Hoax (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5138",
        "date": "2019-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/moon-landing-hoax-conspiracy-theory.html",
        "text": "Conspiracy theories were once deadly serious. On the internet, skepticism about the moon landing shows how the mood has shifted. Conspiracy theories were once deadly serious. On the internet, skepticism about the moon landing shows how the mood has shifted. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Amanda Hess"
    },
    {
        "title": "When You Go to the Loo, a Bat Might Go Boo (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5139",
        "date": "2021-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/science/bats-outhouses-africa.html",
        "text": "Among roosting bats in parts of Africa, the inside of a drop toilet can be a lovely place to hang. Among roosting bats in parts of Africa, the inside of a drop toilet can be a lovely place to hang. Imagine you are at a research camp in the Tanzanian grasslands and you need to relieve yourself. You walk to the nearby pit toilet: a concrete slab with a tiny portal that opens into an eight-foot pit heaped with human waste. You drop your pants, squat and carry out your business. Suddenly you realize you are not alone. Maybe it is a slight gust of air, or something even more corporeal.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Matter of Considerable Gravity (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5140",
        "date": "2017-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/science/planets-jupiter-orbit.html",
        "text": "All the planets in the solar system interact gravitationally with the sun, but Jupiter\u2019s great mass makes this interaction visible. All the planets in the solar system interact gravitationally with the sun, but Jupiter\u2019s great mass makes this interaction visible. Q. I read somewhere that the gravitational force exerted by Jupiter is so great that it makes the sun move in its direction. Is this true?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Mars Needs Leap Days, Too (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5141",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/leap-year.html",
        "text": "Alien civilizations on other worlds would need much more awkward contortions to their calendars than we make here on Earth. Alien civilizations on other worlds would need much more awkward contortions to their calendars than we make here on Earth. This Saturday, you have the gift of time. Feb. 29 is a leap day \u2014 a calendar oddity that gives us an extra day.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Mars Needs Leap Days, Too (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5142",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/leap-year.html",
        "text": "Alien civilizations on other worlds would need much more awkward contortions to their calendars than we make here on Earth. Alien civilizations on other worlds would need much more awkward contortions to their calendars than we make here on Earth. This Saturday, you have the gift of time. Feb. 29 is a leap day \u2014 a calendar oddity that gives us an extra day.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Mars Needs Leap Days, Too (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5143",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/science/leap-year.html",
        "text": "Alien civilizations on other worlds would need much more awkward contortions to their calendars than we make here on Earth. Alien civilizations on other worlds would need much more awkward contortions to their calendars than we make here on Earth. This Saturday, you have the gift of time. Feb. 29 is a leap day \u2014 a calendar oddity that gives us an extra day.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Flies Again and Gets a New Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5144",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "Ahead of a successful fourth flight, the agency announced that Ingenuity would continue to fly beyond its original monthlong mission. Ahead of a successful fourth flight, the agency announced that Ingenuity would continue to fly beyond its original monthlong mission. Ingenuity, NASA\u2019s little Mars helicopter that could, will get to fly some more.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Flies Again and Gets a New Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5145",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "Ahead of a successful fourth flight, the agency announced that Ingenuity would continue to fly beyond its original monthlong mission. Ahead of a successful fourth flight, the agency announced that Ingenuity would continue to fly beyond its original monthlong mission. Ingenuity, NASA\u2019s little Mars helicopter that could, will get to fly some more.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is It Time to Play With Spaceships Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5146",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/science/apollo-moon-space.html",
        "text": "After 50 years of Apollo nostalgia, we have yet to fully answer the central question: Why send humans into space? After 50 years of Apollo nostalgia, we have yet to fully answer the central question: Why send humans into space? [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is It Time to Play With Spaceships Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5147",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/science/apollo-moon-space.html",
        "text": "After 50 years of Apollo nostalgia, we have yet to fully answer the central question: Why send humans into space? After 50 years of Apollo nostalgia, we have yet to fully answer the central question: Why send humans into space? [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is It Time to Play With Spaceships Again? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5148",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/science/apollo-moon-space.html",
        "text": "After 50 years of Apollo nostalgia, we have yet to fully answer the central question: Why send humans into space? After 50 years of Apollo nostalgia, we have yet to fully answer the central question: Why send humans into space? [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Sloths Find These Branches, Their Family Trees Expand (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5149",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/sloths-diet-trees.html",
        "text": "A study showed that when some animals find a crucial resource, they can survive in changing environments and even thrive. A study showed that when some animals find a crucial resource, they can survive in changing environments and even thrive. Look closely up in the trees of a shade-grown cacao plantation in eastern Costa Rica, and you\u2019ll see an array of small furry faces peering back at you. Those are three-toed sloths that make their homes there, clambering ever so slowly into the upper branches to bask in the morning sun. You might also spot them munching on leaves from the guarumo tree, which shades the cacao plants.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Tell the World That Doomsday Has Arrived? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5150",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/science/dont-look-up-movie.html",
        "text": "A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago. A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Tell the World That Doomsday Has Arrived? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5151",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/science/dont-look-up-movie.html",
        "text": "A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago. A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on the Planet Mercury? \u2018It\u2019s Not Completely Nuts\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5152",
        "date": "2020-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/science/mercury-life-water.html",
        "text": "A new explanation for the rocky world\u2019s jumbled landscape opens a possibility that it could have had ingredients for habitability. A new explanation for the rocky world\u2019s jumbled landscape opens a possibility that it could have had ingredients for habitability. Mercury \u2014 a planet with a surface hot enough to melt lead \u2014 might once have contained ingredients needed for life. Though that\u2019s a pretty big might.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mount Wilson Observatory Survives a Trial by Fire (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5153",
        "date": "2020-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/science/wilson-observatory-bobcat-wildfires.html",
        "text": "The birthplace of modern cosmology \u201chas been declared safe\u201d from the wildfires that have ravaged the surrounding area in Southern California. The birthplace of modern cosmology \u201chas been declared safe\u201d from the wildfires that have ravaged the surrounding area in Southern California. Mount Wilson Observatory, where astronomers a century ago first described the expansion of the universe, appears to have survived a close call with the Bobcat fire, which has been ravaging the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Black Hole\u2019s Lunch Provides a Treat for Astronomers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5154",
        "date": "2020-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/science/black-hole-ligo-gravitational.html",
        "text": "Scientists have discovered the heaviest known neutron star, or maybe the lightest known black hole: \u201cEither way it breaks a record.\u201d Scientists have discovered the heaviest known neutron star, or maybe the lightest known black hole: \u201cEither way it breaks a record.\u201d Astronomers announced today that they had discovered something new out in the dark: a stellar corpse too heavy to be a neutron star \u2014 the remnant of a supernova explosion \u2014 but not heavy enough to be a black hole.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Black Hole\u2019s Lunch Provides a Treat for Astronomers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5155",
        "date": "2020-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/science/black-hole-ligo-gravitational.html",
        "text": "Scientists have discovered the heaviest known neutron star, or maybe the lightest known black hole: \u201cEither way it breaks a record.\u201d Scientists have discovered the heaviest known neutron star, or maybe the lightest known black hole: \u201cEither way it breaks a record.\u201d Astronomers announced today that they had discovered something new out in the dark: a stellar corpse too heavy to be a neutron star \u2014 the remnant of a supernova explosion \u2014 but not heavy enough to be a black hole.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Highlights From the Year in Space and Astronomy Developments (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5156",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/science/space-discoveries.html",
        "text": "Many of the stories this year kept our eyes pointed toward the stars, no matter what was happening on the ground. Many of the stories this year kept our eyes pointed toward the stars, no matter what was happening on the ground.  It was a busy year for space, full of launches, goodbyes, astronomical events and surprising discoveries. With the timeline below, look back at this orbit around the sun from start to finish. Join us in 2019 when we\u2019ll help you keep up with what is sure to be another busy year both on the ground and out in the void.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Highlights From the Year in Space and Astronomy Developments (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5157",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/science/space-discoveries.html",
        "text": "Many of the stories this year kept our eyes pointed toward the stars, no matter what was happening on the ground. Many of the stories this year kept our eyes pointed toward the stars, no matter what was happening on the ground.  It was a busy year for space, full of launches, goodbyes, astronomical events and surprising discoveries. With the timeline below, look back at this orbit around the sun from start to finish. Join us in 2019 when we\u2019ll help you keep up with what is sure to be another busy year both on the ground and out in the void.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Highlights From the Year in Space and Astronomy Developments (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5158",
        "date": "2018-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/science/space-discoveries.html",
        "text": "Many of the stories this year kept our eyes pointed toward the stars, no matter what was happening on the ground. Many of the stories this year kept our eyes pointed toward the stars, no matter what was happening on the ground.  It was a busy year for space, full of launches, goodbyes, astronomical events and surprising discoveries. With the timeline below, look back at this orbit around the sun from start to finish. Join us in 2019 when we\u2019ll help you keep up with what is sure to be another busy year both on the ground and out in the void.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Artist Sketches the Giant Gender Gap on the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5159",
        "date": "2021-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/science/moon-craters-women.html",
        "text": "By drawing the small number of lunar craters named for women, an artist hopes to highlight women\u2019s contributions to the sciences. By drawing the small number of lunar craters named for women, an artist hopes to highlight women\u2019s contributions to the sciences. The moon\u2019s surface is pockmarked with craters, the relics of violent impacts over cosmic time. A few of the largest are visible to the naked eye, and a backyard telescope reveals hundreds more. But turn astronomical observatories or even a space probe on our nearest celestial neighbor, and suddenly millions appear.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Artist Sketches the Giant Gender Gap on the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5160",
        "date": "2021-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/science/moon-craters-women.html",
        "text": "By drawing the small number of lunar craters named for women, an artist hopes to highlight women\u2019s contributions to the sciences. By drawing the small number of lunar craters named for women, an artist hopes to highlight women\u2019s contributions to the sciences. The moon\u2019s surface is pockmarked with craters, the relics of violent impacts over cosmic time. A few of the largest are visible to the naked eye, and a backyard telescope reveals hundreds more. But turn astronomical observatories or even a space probe on our nearest celestial neighbor, and suddenly millions appear.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did Something Burp? It Was an Earthquake (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5161",
        "date": "2020-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/science/earthquakes-carbon-dioxide.html",
        "text": "Years of observations in central Italy show that more carbon dioxide percolates through Earth\u2019s crust during periods of strong seismic activity. Years of observations in central Italy show that more carbon dioxide percolates through Earth\u2019s crust during periods of strong seismic activity. During earthquakes, spider webs of faults open up below ground, allowing gases deep within our planet to percolate upward. Researchers have now compiled the first long-term record that shows a relationship between earthquakes and the release of carbon dioxide gas.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "As New Space Race Beckons, Astronauts Face Identity Crisis (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5162",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/astronauts-nasa-apollo.html",
        "text": "With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "As New Space Race Beckons, Astronauts Face Identity Crisis (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5163",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/astronauts-nasa-apollo.html",
        "text": "With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "As New Space Race Beckons, Astronauts Face Identity Crisis (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5164",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/astronauts-nasa-apollo.html",
        "text": "With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "As New Space Race Beckons, Astronauts Face Identity Crisis (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5165",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/astronauts-nasa-apollo.html",
        "text": "With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. With the private sector moving aggressively into space, NASA is no longer the only game in town for would-be space travelers. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Veterinarian Will See Your Dinosaur Now (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5166",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/science/dinosaur-injuries-veterinarian.html",
        "text": "We asked a pet doctor how he\u2019d treat the fossilized injuries found to have affected some of prehistory\u2019s most fearsome reptiles. We asked a pet doctor how he\u2019d treat the fossilized injuries found to have affected some of prehistory\u2019s most fearsome reptiles. Dinosaurs loom large in the human imagination, towering above the treetops, bringing down prey and reigning over the ancient land, sea and sky.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Mars Rocket Prototype Explodes, but This Time It Lands First (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5167",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/science/spacex-starship-launch-sn10.html",
        "text": "Two earlier flights of the Starship rocket crashed spectacularly. This one returned to the ground in one piece, then blew up. Two earlier flights of the Starship rocket crashed spectacularly. This one returned to the ground in one piece, then blew up. Two spectacular flights, two spectacular crash landings. The third time was almost the charm.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Mars Rocket Prototype Explodes, but This Time It Lands First (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5168",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/science/spacex-starship-launch-sn10.html",
        "text": "Two earlier flights of the Starship rocket crashed spectacularly. This one returned to the ground in one piece, then blew up. Two earlier flights of the Starship rocket crashed spectacularly. This one returned to the ground in one piece, then blew up. Two spectacular flights, two spectacular crash landings. The third time was almost the charm.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Mars Rocket Prototype Explodes, but This Time It Lands First (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5169",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/science/spacex-starship-launch-sn10.html",
        "text": "Two earlier flights of the Starship rocket crashed spectacularly. This one returned to the ground in one piece, then blew up. Two earlier flights of the Starship rocket crashed spectacularly. This one returned to the ground in one piece, then blew up. Two spectacular flights, two spectacular crash landings. The third time was almost the charm.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Interstellar Comet Has Arrived in Time for the Holidays (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5170",
        "date": "2019-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/science/interstellar-comet-2i-borisov.html",
        "text": "This weekend an ice cube from beyond our solar system made its closest approach to the sun, trailing mystery and dust. This weekend an ice cube from beyond our solar system made its closest approach to the sun, trailing mystery and dust. It came out of the Northern sky, a frozen breath of gas and dust from the genesis of some distant star, launched across the galaxy by the gravitational maelstroms that accompany the birth of worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Interstellar Comet Has Arrived in Time for the Holidays (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5171",
        "date": "2019-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/science/interstellar-comet-2i-borisov.html",
        "text": "This weekend an ice cube from beyond our solar system made its closest approach to the sun, trailing mystery and dust. This weekend an ice cube from beyond our solar system made its closest approach to the sun, trailing mystery and dust. It came out of the Northern sky, a frozen breath of gas and dust from the genesis of some distant star, launched across the galaxy by the gravitational maelstroms that accompany the birth of worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Interstellar Comet Has Arrived in Time for the Holidays (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5172",
        "date": "2019-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/science/interstellar-comet-2i-borisov.html",
        "text": "This weekend an ice cube from beyond our solar system made its closest approach to the sun, trailing mystery and dust. This weekend an ice cube from beyond our solar system made its closest approach to the sun, trailing mystery and dust. It came out of the Northern sky, a frozen breath of gas and dust from the genesis of some distant star, launched across the galaxy by the gravitational maelstroms that accompany the birth of worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Didn\u2019t Touch These Jellyfish, but They Can Sting You With Tiny Grenades (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5173",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/science/jellyfish-stingers-floating.html",
        "text": "The upside-down jellyfish is mostly stationary, so it evolved self-propelling cells that can swim over and sting you on its behalf. The upside-down jellyfish is mostly stationary, so it evolved self-propelling cells that can swim over and sting you on its behalf. Jellyfish are very sneaky about stinging. Most are silent. Some have venom that kicks in on a time delay. Many species even manage to get in a few zingers after they\u2019re dead.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Didn\u2019t Touch These Jellyfish, but They Can Sting You With Tiny Grenades (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5174",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/science/jellyfish-stingers-floating.html",
        "text": "The upside-down jellyfish is mostly stationary, so it evolved self-propelling cells that can swim over and sting you on its behalf. The upside-down jellyfish is mostly stationary, so it evolved self-propelling cells that can swim over and sting you on its behalf. Jellyfish are very sneaky about stinging. Most are silent. Some have venom that kicks in on a time delay. Many species even manage to get in a few zingers after they\u2019re dead.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "2 Red Objects Were Found in the Asteroid Belt. They Shouldn\u2019t Be There. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5175",
        "date": "2021-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/science/red-asteroids-belt.html",
        "text": "The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system. The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system. Two red things are hiding in a part of the solar system where they shouldn\u2019t be.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "2 Red Objects Were Found in the Asteroid Belt. They Shouldn\u2019t Be There. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5176",
        "date": "2021-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/science/red-asteroids-belt.html",
        "text": "The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system. The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system. Two red things are hiding in a part of the solar system where they shouldn\u2019t be.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "2 Red Objects Were Found in the Asteroid Belt. They Shouldn\u2019t Be There. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5177",
        "date": "2021-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/science/red-asteroids-belt.html",
        "text": "The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system. The space rocks may have come from beyond Neptune, and potentially offer hints at the chaos of the early solar system. Two red things are hiding in a part of the solar system where they shouldn\u2019t be.",
        "author": "By Jonathan O'Callaghan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs Was Great for Bacteria (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5178",
        "date": "2020-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/science/asteroid-dinosaurs-crater-bacteria.html",
        "text": "The smoldering crater left by the apocalyptic space rock became a nice home for blue-green algae within years of the impact. The smoldering crater left by the apocalyptic space rock became a nice home for blue-green algae within years of the impact. The asteroid moved 24 times faster than a rifle bullet as it struck Earth some 66 million years ago. Its supersonic shock wave flattened trees across North and South America, and its heat wave sparked incomprehensibly large forest fires.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Tiny Creature Survived 24,000 Years Frozen in Siberian Permafrost (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5179",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/science/frozen-rotifers-siberia.html",
        "text": "The microscopic animals were frozen when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet, but were restored as though no time had passed. The microscopic animals were frozen when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet, but were restored as though no time had passed. Bdelloid rotifers may be the toughest, tiniest animal you\u2019ve never heard of.",
        "author": "By Marion Renault"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Water Bear Survives, Even When It\u2019s Dry (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5180",
        "date": "2017-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/science/tardigrades-water-bears-dried-out.html",
        "text": "The microscopic animals were found to produce a unique protein that coats the molecules in their cells in a glasslike substance. The microscopic animals were found to produce a unique protein that coats the molecules in their cells in a glasslike substance. \u201cTough\u201d takes on new meaning when it is used to describe the tardigrade.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Billion Pixels and the Search for India\u2019s Crashed Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5181",
        "date": "2019-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/science/india-moon-mission-vikram-found.html",
        "text": "The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. On Nov. 19, Mark S. Robinson opened an email with the subject line, \u201cVikram Lander\u2019s final resting place (Images with Proof).\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Billion Pixels and the Search for India\u2019s Crashed Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5182",
        "date": "2019-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/science/india-moon-mission-vikram-found.html",
        "text": "The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. On Nov. 19, Mark S. Robinson opened an email with the subject line, \u201cVikram Lander\u2019s final resting place (Images with Proof).\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Billion Pixels and the Search for India\u2019s Crashed Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5183",
        "date": "2019-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/science/india-moon-mission-vikram-found.html",
        "text": "The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. On Nov. 19, Mark S. Robinson opened an email with the subject line, \u201cVikram Lander\u2019s final resting place (Images with Proof).\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Billion Pixels and the Search for India\u2019s Crashed Moon Lander (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5184",
        "date": "2019-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/science/india-moon-mission-vikram-found.html",
        "text": "The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. The Indian space agency has been tight-lipped about the fate of Vikram, but crowdsourcing and NASA\u2019s openness led to its discovery. On Nov. 19, Mark S. Robinson opened an email with the subject line, \u201cVikram Lander\u2019s final resting place (Images with Proof).\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hunched Over a Microscope, He Sketched the Secrets of How the Brain Works (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5185",
        "date": "2017-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/science/santiago-ramon-y-cajal-beautiful-brain.html",
        "text": "The illustrations of Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, are featured in the new book \u201cThe Beautiful Brain.\u201d The illustrations of Santiago Ram\u00f3n y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, are featured in the new book \u201cThe Beautiful Brain.\u201d Some microscopes today are so powerful that they can\u00a0create a picture of the gap between brain cells, which is thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. They can even reveal the tiny sacs\u00a0carrying even tinier nuggets of information\u00a0to cross over that gap\u00a0to form memories. And in colorful\u00a0snapshots\u00a0made possible by a\u00a0giant magnet, we can see the activity of close to 100 billion brain cells talking.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Orbit Launch Attempt Ends Without Trip to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5186",
        "date": "2020-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/science/virgin-orbit-launch-time.html",
        "text": "The company, founded by Richard Branson, had hoped to show that it can send small satellites to orbit from virtually anywhere. The company, founded by Richard Branson, had hoped to show that it can send small satellites to orbit from virtually anywhere. Strap a rocket to the underside of a plane. Fly it up several miles. Drop it. The engine ignites, and the rocket and its payload zoom to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Orbit Launch Attempt Ends Without Trip to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5187",
        "date": "2020-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/science/virgin-orbit-launch-time.html",
        "text": "The company, founded by Richard Branson, had hoped to show that it can send small satellites to orbit from virtually anywhere. The company, founded by Richard Branson, had hoped to show that it can send small satellites to orbit from virtually anywhere. Strap a rocket to the underside of a plane. Fly it up several miles. Drop it. The engine ignites, and the rocket and its payload zoom to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Orbit Launch Attempt Ends Without Trip to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5188",
        "date": "2020-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/science/virgin-orbit-launch-time.html",
        "text": "The company, founded by Richard Branson, had hoped to show that it can send small satellites to orbit from virtually anywhere. The company, founded by Richard Branson, had hoped to show that it can send small satellites to orbit from virtually anywhere. Strap a rocket to the underside of a plane. Fly it up several miles. Drop it. The engine ignites, and the rocket and its payload zoom to space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It\u2019s Ready to Launch Rockets Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5189",
        "date": "2017-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/science/spacex-launch-rockets-explosion.html",
        "text": "The company says it has determined the likely cause of an explosion in September that led to setbacks in its schedule. The company says it has determined the likely cause of an explosion in September that led to setbacks in its schedule. After the explosion in September of one of its rockets, SpaceX is now ready to get back into the business of sending payloads to space, the company announced on Monday, with its next rocket headed to orbit as soon as Sunday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It\u2019s Ready to Launch Rockets Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5190",
        "date": "2017-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/science/spacex-launch-rockets-explosion.html",
        "text": "The company says it has determined the likely cause of an explosion in September that led to setbacks in its schedule. The company says it has determined the likely cause of an explosion in September that led to setbacks in its schedule. After the explosion in September of one of its rockets, SpaceX is now ready to get back into the business of sending payloads to space, the company announced on Monday, with its next rocket headed to orbit as soon as Sunday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says It\u2019s Ready to Launch Rockets Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5191",
        "date": "2017-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/science/spacex-launch-rockets-explosion.html",
        "text": "The company says it has determined the likely cause of an explosion in September that led to setbacks in its schedule. The company says it has determined the likely cause of an explosion in September that led to setbacks in its schedule. After the explosion in September of one of its rockets, SpaceX is now ready to get back into the business of sending payloads to space, the company announced on Monday, with its next rocket headed to orbit as soon as Sunday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Beat Cancer at 10. Now She\u2019s Set to Be the Youngest American in Space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5192",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/science/spacex-hayley-arceneaux.html",
        "text": "St. Jude Hospital and Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, selected Hayley Arceneaux for a trip to orbit in a SpaceX capsule. St. Jude Hospital and Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, selected Hayley Arceneaux for a trip to orbit in a SpaceX capsule. Hayley Arceneaux, 29, had hoped this would be the year that she would complete her aim of visiting all seven continents before she turned 30.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Beat Cancer at 10. Now She\u2019s Set to Be the Youngest American in Space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5193",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/science/spacex-hayley-arceneaux.html",
        "text": "St. Jude Hospital and Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, selected Hayley Arceneaux for a trip to orbit in a SpaceX capsule. St. Jude Hospital and Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, selected Hayley Arceneaux for a trip to orbit in a SpaceX capsule. Hayley Arceneaux, 29, had hoped this would be the year that she would complete her aim of visiting all seven continents before she turned 30.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Beat Cancer at 10. Now She\u2019s Set to Be the Youngest American in Space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5194",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/science/spacex-hayley-arceneaux.html",
        "text": "St. Jude Hospital and Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, selected Hayley Arceneaux for a trip to orbit in a SpaceX capsule. St. Jude Hospital and Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, selected Hayley Arceneaux for a trip to orbit in a SpaceX capsule. Hayley Arceneaux, 29, had hoped this would be the year that she would complete her aim of visiting all seven continents before she turned 30.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Solar Forecast With Good News for Civilization as We Know It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5195",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/sun-solar-cycle.html",
        "text": "Space weather experts believe the sun has entered a new sunspot cycle, and expect it to be a relatively quiet one. Space weather experts believe the sun has entered a new sunspot cycle, and expect it to be a relatively quiet one. The sun is beginning to perk up again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "4 Takeaways From That Huge Study of Scott Kelly (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5196",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/scott-kelly-twins-study-nasa.html",
        "text": "Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station for a unique study of the biological effects of space travel. Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station for a unique study of the biological effects of space travel. There\u2019s never been a study like it before, and there probably never will be again.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "4 Takeaways From That Huge Study of Scott Kelly (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5197",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/scott-kelly-twins-study-nasa.html",
        "text": "Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station for a unique study of the biological effects of space travel. Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station for a unique study of the biological effects of space travel. There\u2019s never been a study like it before, and there probably never will be again.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Plants Light Up When They Get Attacked (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5198",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/science/plant-defenses.html",
        "text": "Scientists showed that plants are much less passive than they seem by revealing the secret workings of their threat communication systems. Scientists showed that plants are much less passive than they seem by revealing the secret workings of their threat communication systems. Plants have no eyes, no ears, no mouth and no hands. They do not have a brain or a nervous system. Muscles? Forget them. They\u2019re stuck where they started, soaking up the sun and sucking up nutrients from the soil. And yet, when something comes around to eat them, they sense it.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tuskless Elephants Escape Poachers, but May Evolve New Problems (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5199",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/science/tuskless-elephants-evolution.html",
        "text": "Scientists identified the genes that played a role in many female elephants of Mozambique\u2019s Gorongosa National Park being born without tusks. Scientists identified the genes that played a role in many female elephants of Mozambique\u2019s Gorongosa National Park being born without tusks. A deep enough wound will leave a scar, but a traumatic event in the history of an animal population may leave a mark on the genome itself. During the Mozambican Civil War from 1977 to 1992, humans killed so many elephants for their lucrative ivory that the animals seem to have evolved in the space of a generation. The result was that a large number are now naturally tuskless.",
        "author": "By Elizabeth Preston"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Share Everything With Your Bestie. Even Brain Waves. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5200",
        "date": "2018-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/science/friendship-brain-health.html",
        "text": "Scientists have made astonishing discoveries about the nature and evolution of friendship. Without it, humans suffer significant physical and emotional damage. Scientists have made astonishing discoveries about the nature and evolution of friendship. Without it, humans suffer significant physical and emotional damage. A friend will help you move, goes an old saying, while a good friend will help you move a body. And why not? Moral qualms aside, that good friend would likely agree the victim was an intolerable jerk who had it coming and, jeez, you shouldn\u2019t have done this but where do you keep the shovel?",
        "author": "By Natalie Angier"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ancient Rome Was Teetering. Then a Volcano Erupted 6,000 Miles Away. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5201",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/science/rome-caesar-volcano.html",
        "text": "Scientists have linked historical political instability to a number of volcanic events, the latest involving an eruption in the Aleutian Islands. Scientists have linked historical political instability to a number of volcanic events, the latest involving an eruption in the Aleutian Islands. Chaos and conflict roiled the Mediterranean in the first century B.C. Against a backdrop of famine, disease and the assassinations of Julius Caesar and other political leaders, the Roman Republic collapsed, and the Roman Empire rose in its place. Tumultuous social unrest no doubt contributed to that transition \u2014 politics can unhinge a society. But so can something arguably more powerful.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Visualizing the Cosmic Streams That Spew Meteor Showers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5202",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/science/visualizing-the-cosmic-streams-that-spew-meteor-showers.html",
        "text": "Researchers recorded more than 300,000 meteoroid trajectories since 2010 to depict the drifting paths of meteor showers that Earth passes through. Researchers recorded more than 300,000 meteoroid trajectories since 2010 to depict the drifting paths of meteor showers that Earth passes through. The Earth sails through streams of cosmic debris as it orbits the sun. When specks of dust and ice left behind by comets or asteroids collide with our atmosphere, we experience meteor showers. But what we\u2019re seeing are only the final moments of a particle\u2019s path through space. Most flecks have traveled for millions of miles before we see them burn up (if we\u2019re lucky).",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "This World Is a Simmering Hellscape. They\u2019ve Been Watching Its Explosions. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5203",
        "date": "2019-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/science/io-volcanic-moon.html",
        "text": "Researchers have released a five-year record of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter, hoping others will find more patterns. Researchers have released a five-year record of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter, hoping others will find more patterns. On hundreds of clear nights over the last five years, giant telescopes on a dormant, sacred volcano in Hawaii have trained their gaze across space toward active volcanoes on a simmering hellscape of a moon that orbits Jupiter. It\u2019s called Io.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "This World Is a Simmering Hellscape. They\u2019ve Been Watching Its Explosions. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5204",
        "date": "2019-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/science/io-volcanic-moon.html",
        "text": "Researchers have released a five-year record of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter, hoping others will find more patterns. Researchers have released a five-year record of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter, hoping others will find more patterns. On hundreds of clear nights over the last five years, giant telescopes on a dormant, sacred volcano in Hawaii have trained their gaze across space toward active volcanoes on a simmering hellscape of a moon that orbits Jupiter. It\u2019s called Io.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "This World Is a Simmering Hellscape. They\u2019ve Been Watching Its Explosions. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5205",
        "date": "2019-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/science/io-volcanic-moon.html",
        "text": "Researchers have released a five-year record of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter, hoping others will find more patterns. Researchers have released a five-year record of volcanic activity on Io, a moon of Jupiter, hoping others will find more patterns. On hundreds of clear nights over the last five years, giant telescopes on a dormant, sacred volcano in Hawaii have trained their gaze across space toward active volcanoes on a simmering hellscape of a moon that orbits Jupiter. It\u2019s called Io.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Lunar New Year Reveals About the World\u2019s Calendars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5206",
        "date": "2019-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/science/chinese-new-year-lunar-calendar.html",
        "text": "Rather than a scientific given, calendars say a lot about the history and cultural values of the societies that created them. Rather than a scientific given, calendars say a lot about the history and cultural values of the societies that created them. Lunar New Year kicks off Saturday as one of the most important holidays in Vietnam, South Korea, China and other Asian countries. Typically, it starts on the second new moon after winter solstice.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "2017 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to LIGO Black Hole Researchers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5207",
        "date": "2017-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/science/nobel-prize-physics.html",
        "text": "Rainer Weiss of M.I.T. and his Caltech collaborators Kip Thorne and Barry Barish discovered ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. Rainer Weiss of M.I.T. and his Caltech collaborators Kip Thorne and Barry Barish discovered ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. Rainer Weiss, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of the California Institute of Technology, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but had never been directly seen.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where the Grass is Greener, Except When It\u2019s \u2018Nonfunctional Turf\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5208",
        "date": "2021-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/science/drought-las-vegas-grass-mars.html",
        "text": "Plus, mammoths in Vegas, watermelon snow, Miami\u2019s looming sea wall and more in the Friday edition of the Science Times newsletter. Plus, mammoths in Vegas, watermelon snow, Miami\u2019s looming sea wall and more in the Friday edition of the Science Times newsletter. If you\u2019re looking for a sign of the End Times, here\u2019s one: Las Vegas, the city where seemingly anything and everything is condoned, has made grass \u2014 the ornamental kind \u2014 illegal.",
        "author": "By Alan Burdick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot Isn\u2019t Dead Yet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5209",
        "date": "2019-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/science/jupiter-great-red-spot.html",
        "text": "Pieces of the gas giant\u2019s greatest storm had seemed to be slipping away, but scientists say the underlying vortex is unchanged. Pieces of the gas giant\u2019s greatest storm had seemed to be slipping away, but scientists say the underlying vortex is unchanged. Jupiter\u2019s Great Red Spot is shrinking, but that does not necessarily mean that it is dying.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5210",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/nasa-peseverance-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "Perseverance\u2019s arrival extends the successful U.S. landing record on the planet, and brings sophisticated tools to the hunt for alien life. Perseverance\u2019s arrival extends the successful U.S. landing record on the planet, and brings sophisticated tools to the hunt for alien life. NASA safely landed a new robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, beginning its most ambitious effort in decades to directly study whether there was ever life on the now barren red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5211",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/nasa-peseverance-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "Perseverance\u2019s arrival extends the successful U.S. landing record on the planet, and brings sophisticated tools to the hunt for alien life. Perseverance\u2019s arrival extends the successful U.S. landing record on the planet, and brings sophisticated tools to the hunt for alien life. NASA safely landed a new robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, beginning its most ambitious effort in decades to directly study whether there was ever life on the now barren red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5212",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/nasa-peseverance-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "Perseverance\u2019s arrival extends the successful U.S. landing record on the planet, and brings sophisticated tools to the hunt for alien life. Perseverance\u2019s arrival extends the successful U.S. landing record on the planet, and brings sophisticated tools to the hunt for alien life. NASA safely landed a new robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, beginning its most ambitious effort in decades to directly study whether there was ever life on the now barren red planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s a Briefcase! It\u2019s a Pizza Box! No, It\u2019s a Mini Satellite (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5213",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/science/satellites-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "Orbiting instruments are now so small they can be launched by the dozens, and even high school students can build them. Orbiting instruments are now so small they can be launched by the dozens, and even high school students can build them. Recently, officials in California announced that the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the state\u2019s history, had been fully contained. The achievement was made possible through the hard work of firefighters on the ground, with some help from above: a swarm of tiny, orbiting satellites that represent the next phase of the space age.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s a Briefcase! It\u2019s a Pizza Box! No, It\u2019s a Mini Satellite (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5214",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/science/satellites-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "Orbiting instruments are now so small they can be launched by the dozens, and even high school students can build them. Orbiting instruments are now so small they can be launched by the dozens, and even high school students can build them. Recently, officials in California announced that the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the state\u2019s history, had been fully contained. The achievement was made possible through the hard work of firefighters on the ground, with some help from above: a swarm of tiny, orbiting satellites that represent the next phase of the space age.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Black Holes Shouldn\u2019t Exist, but There They Are (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5215",
        "date": "2020-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/science/black-hole-astronomy-physics.html",
        "text": "On the far side of the universe, a collision of dark giants sheds light on an invisible process of cosmic growth. On the far side of the universe, a collision of dark giants sheds light on an invisible process of cosmic growth. Well, that was some clash of the heavyweights.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA Journey to the Moon May Need to Find Another Rocket or Two (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5216",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Struggling to get its new giant rocket ready in time for a scheduled launch next year, NASA might just leave it on the ground and turn to commercial alternatives.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA Journey to the Moon May Need to Find Another Rocket or Two (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5217",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Struggling to get its new giant rocket ready in time for a scheduled launch next year, NASA might just leave it on the ground and turn to commercial alternatives.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA Journey to the Moon May Need to Find Another Rocket or Two (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5218",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Struggling to get its new giant rocket ready in time for a scheduled launch next year, NASA might just leave it on the ground and turn to commercial alternatives.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA Journey to the Moon May Need to Find Another Rocket or Two (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5219",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/science/nasa-space-launch-system.html",
        "text": "Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Mounting delays to the Space Launch System, primarily built by Boeing, are leading the agency to consider alternative forms of transport. Struggling to get its new giant rocket ready in time for a scheduled launch next year, NASA might just leave it on the ground and turn to commercial alternatives.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Enough Is Enough\u2019: Science, Too, Has a Problem With Harassment (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5220",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/gender-harassment-science-universities.html",
        "text": "Many women in science thought that meritocracy was the antidote to sexism. Now some have decided on a more direct approach. Many women in science thought that meritocracy was the antidote to sexism. Now some have decided on a more direct approach. It is 2018, and the director of the National Science Foundation, France C\u00f3rdova, is tired of learning that male scientists whose research she supports with public funds have sexually harassed their female students, staff and colleagues.",
        "author": "By Amy Harmon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5221",
        "date": "2020-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/science/artificial-intelligence-ai-physics-theory.html",
        "text": "It might be possible, physicists say, but not anytime soon. And there\u2019s no guarantee that we humans will understand the result. It might be possible, physicists say, but not anytime soon. And there\u2019s no guarantee that we humans will understand the result. Once upon a time, Albert Einstein described scientific theories as \u201cfree inventions of the human mind.\u201d But in 1980, Stephen Hawking, the renowned Cambridge University cosmologist, had another thought. In a lecture that year, he argued that the so-called Theory of Everything might be achievable, but that the final touches on it were likely to be done by computers.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Eta Aquariids Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5222",
        "date": "2019-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/science/eta-aquariids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "It can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to see it. It can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to see it. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lyrids Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5223",
        "date": "2019-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/science/lyrids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "It can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to see it. It can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to see it. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Didn\u2019t Find Life in a Hopeless Place (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5224",
        "date": "2019-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/science/extreme-life-aliens.html",
        "text": "In some of the world\u2019s saltiest, most acidic bodies of superheated water, even the most extreme forms of archaea couldn\u2019t survive. In some of the world\u2019s saltiest, most acidic bodies of superheated water, even the most extreme forms of archaea couldn\u2019t survive. People can live on every continent, but our planet really belongs to the microbes. Some even thrive in particularly pernicious environments, from deep-sea vents cooking at 251 degrees Fahrenheit to highly radioactive mine shafts.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ruined \u2018Apartments\u2019 May Hold Clues to Native American History (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5225",
        "date": "2017-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/science/chaco-native-american-archaeology.html",
        "text": "In Colorado, archaeologists have begun excavating two \u201cgreat houses\u201d in what once was a northern settlement of the ancient Chaco civilization. In Colorado, archaeologists have begun excavating two \u201cgreat houses\u201d in what once was a northern settlement of the ancient Chaco civilization. NEAR MANCOS, Colo. \u2014 On the site of a former auto-repair shop here, broken stone walls mark the site of a 900-year-old village that may yield new insights into an ancient desert culture.",
        "author": "By Jon Hurdle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking\u2019s Final Paper: How to Escape From a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5226",
        "date": "2018-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/science/stephen-hawking-final-paper.html",
        "text": "In a study from beyond the grave, the theoretical physicist sings (mathematically) of memory, loss and the possibility of data redemption. In a study from beyond the grave, the theoretical physicist sings (mathematically) of memory, loss and the possibility of data redemption. The cosmologist and pop-science icon Stephen Hawking, who died last March on Einstein\u2019s birthday, spoke out from the grave recently in the form of his last scientific paper. Appropriately for a man on the Other Side, the paper is about how to escape from a black hole.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Loss of Federal Protections May Imperil Pacific Reefs, Scientists Warn (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5227",
        "date": "2017-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/science/trump-zinke-pacific-marine-reserves.html",
        "text": "Fisheries officials call the marine national monuments unnecessary, and their boundaries are said to be under review by the Trump administration. Fisheries officials call the marine national monuments unnecessary, and their boundaries are said to be under review by the Trump administration. HONOLULU \u2014 Terry Kerby has been piloting deep-sea submarines for four decades, but nothing prepared him for the devastation he observed recently on several underwater mountains called seamounts in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.",
        "author": "By Christopher Pala"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fish Depression Is Not a Joke (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5228",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/science/depressed-fish.html",
        "text": "Fish can get depressed, just like you, and that could make them a good model organism for studying depression in people. Fish can get depressed, just like you, and that could make them a good model organism for studying depression in people. Can a fish be depressed? This question has been floating around my head ever since I spent a night in a hotel across from an excruciatingly sad-looking Siamese fighting fish. His name was Bruce Lee, according to a sign beneath his little bowl.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fish Depression Is Not a Joke (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5229",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/science/depressed-fish.html",
        "text": "Fish can get depressed, just like you, and that could make them a good model organism for studying depression in people. Fish can get depressed, just like you, and that could make them a good model organism for studying depression in people. Can a fish be depressed? This question has been floating around my head ever since I spent a night in a hotel across from an excruciatingly sad-looking Siamese fighting fish. His name was Bruce Lee, according to a sign beneath his little bowl.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is About to Have Its \u2018Wright Brothers Moment\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5230",
        "date": "2020-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. NASA is about to take to the air on another planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is About to Have Its \u2018Wright Brothers Moment\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5231",
        "date": "2020-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. NASA is about to take to the air on another planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is About to Have Its \u2018Wright Brothers Moment\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5232",
        "date": "2020-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. NASA is about to take to the air on another planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Is About to Have Its \u2018Wright Brothers Moment\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5233",
        "date": "2020-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html",
        "text": "As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet\u2019s thin atmosphere. NASA is about to take to the air on another planet.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Mysteries of Animal Movement (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5234",
        "date": "2018-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/science/hu-robotics.html",
        "text": "A scientist\u2019s unfettered curiosity leads him to investigate the physics at work in some very odd corners of the natural world. A scientist\u2019s unfettered curiosity leads him to investigate the physics at work in some very odd corners of the natural world. David Hu was changing his infant son\u2019s diaper when he got the idea for a study that eventually won him the Ig Nobel prize. No, not the Nobel Prize \u2014 the Ig Nobel prize, which bills itself as a reward for \u201cachievements that make people laugh, then think.\u201d",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Touring Trinity, the Birthplace of Nuclear Dread (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5235",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/science/trinity-site-atomic-fat-man.html",
        "text": "A recent visit to the site of the first atomic bomb explosion offered desert vistas, (mildly) radioactive pebbles and troubling reflections. A recent visit to the site of the first atomic bomb explosion offered desert vistas, (mildly) radioactive pebbles and troubling reflections. TRINITY SITE, N.M. \u2014 Once, in another lifetime, I witnessed an atomic explosion. This was in the 1960s at the Nevada Test Site, a vast area about an hour northwest of Las Vegas where the American military tested bombs. I was working for EG&G, a military contracting company that, among other atomic chores, supplied all the instrumentation for the test site; it is now part of a company called Amentum. My job, to study the effects of nuclear explosions on the atmosphere, was sufficient to keep me out of the Vietnam War draft.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Suitcase-Size Satellite\u2019s Big Image of Frozen Earth Below (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5236",
        "date": "2018-01-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/science/iceye-satellite-images.html",
        "text": "A new image of Alaska from the recently launched Iceye satellite shows how much you can accomplish with a tiny satellite. A new image of Alaska from the recently launched Iceye satellite shows how much you can accomplish with a tiny satellite. About two weeks ago, a satellite called Iceye-X1 hitched a ride into orbit aboard an Indian rocket. It\u2019s about the size of a suitcase, and has already sent its first picture, constructed out of microwave radar reflections, back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Suitcase-Size Satellite\u2019s Big Image of Frozen Earth Below (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5237",
        "date": "2018-01-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/science/iceye-satellite-images.html",
        "text": "A new image of Alaska from the recently launched Iceye satellite shows how much you can accomplish with a tiny satellite. A new image of Alaska from the recently launched Iceye satellite shows how much you can accomplish with a tiny satellite. About two weeks ago, a satellite called Iceye-X1 hitched a ride into orbit aboard an Indian rocket. It\u2019s about the size of a suitcase, and has already sent its first picture, constructed out of microwave radar reflections, back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "During the Lunar Eclipse, Something Slammed Into the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5238",
        "date": "2019-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/science/lunar-eclipse-meteor-moon.html",
        "text": "A flash spotted on livestreams was likely caused by the crash of a tiny, fast-moving meteoroid left behind by a comet. A flash spotted on livestreams was likely caused by the crash of a tiny, fast-moving meteoroid left behind by a comet. On Sunday and Monday, those in the Western Hemisphere with clear skies were fortunate enough to see the last total lunar eclipse of the decade. As the moon took on a distinctly redder shade just before midnight Eastern Time, livestreams of the phenomenon showed a flash of light suddenly and briefly emanating from the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Been a Busy Month on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5239",
        "date": "2021-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/science/mars-missions-rovers.html",
        "text": "When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Been a Busy Month on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5240",
        "date": "2021-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/science/mars-missions-rovers.html",
        "text": "When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Been a Busy Month on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5241",
        "date": "2021-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/19/science/mars-missions-rovers.html",
        "text": "When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity. When NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the red planet on Thursday, it was the end of a bustling cycle of activity.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Illuminating Power of Eclipses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5242",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/eclipse-discoveries-science.html",
        "text": "With the sun obscured, eclipses can be revelatory: Starting at least over 2,000 years ago, they have been fodder for significant discoveries. With the sun obscured, eclipses can be revelatory: Starting at least over 2,000 years ago, they have been fodder for significant discoveries. Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer and mathematician who lived more than 2,000 years ago, used the solar eclipse to solve a celestial geometry problem.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Famous Black Hole Gets a Massive Update (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5243",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/cygnus-black-hole-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Cygnus X-1, one of the first identified black holes, is much weightier than expected, raising new questions about how such objects form. Cygnus X-1, one of the first identified black holes, is much weightier than expected, raising new questions about how such objects form. One of the biggest and first known black holes in the Milky Way galaxy is more massive than astronomers thought, a team of scientists announced on Thursday. The finding throws a wrench into long-held models of how massive stars evolve on the way to the ultimate doom.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Nuclear Bomb Could Save Earth From a Stealthy Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5244",
        "date": "2021-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/science/asteroid-nuclear-bomb.html",
        "text": "An atomic blast is not the preferred solution for planetary defense, but 3-D models are helping scientists prepare for a worst-case scenario. An atomic blast is not the preferred solution for planetary defense, but 3-D models are helping scientists prepare for a worst-case scenario. One day, astronomers may spot an asteroid months away from a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth. Our only chance of survival at such a late stage would be to try to use a nuclear explosive to obliterate it.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Nuclear Bomb Could Save Earth From a Stealthy Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5245",
        "date": "2021-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/science/asteroid-nuclear-bomb.html",
        "text": "An atomic blast is not the preferred solution for planetary defense, but 3-D models are helping scientists prepare for a worst-case scenario. An atomic blast is not the preferred solution for planetary defense, but 3-D models are helping scientists prepare for a worst-case scenario. One day, astronomers may spot an asteroid months away from a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth. Our only chance of survival at such a late stage would be to try to use a nuclear explosive to obliterate it.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Nuclear Bomb Could Save Earth From a Stealthy Asteroid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5246",
        "date": "2021-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/science/asteroid-nuclear-bomb.html",
        "text": "An atomic blast is not the preferred solution for planetary defense, but 3-D models are helping scientists prepare for a worst-case scenario. An atomic blast is not the preferred solution for planetary defense, but 3-D models are helping scientists prepare for a worst-case scenario. One day, astronomers may spot an asteroid months away from a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth. Our only chance of survival at such a late stage would be to try to use a nuclear explosive to obliterate it.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cosmos Controversy: The Universe Is Expanding, but How Fast? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5247",
        "date": "2017-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/science/hubble-constant-universe-expanding-speed.html",
        "text": "A small discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. A small discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cosmos Controversy: The Universe Is Expanding, but How Fast? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5248",
        "date": "2017-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/science/hubble-constant-universe-expanding-speed.html",
        "text": "A small discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. A small discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cosmos Controversy: The Universe Is Expanding, but How Fast? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5249",
        "date": "2017-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/science/hubble-constant-universe-expanding-speed.html",
        "text": "A small discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. A small discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch This Black Hole Blow Bubbles (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5250",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/science/black-hole-astronomy.html",
        "text": "A black hole was seen shooting electrified gas and energy into space. Each blob contained about 400 million billion pounds of matter. A black hole was seen shooting electrified gas and energy into space. Each blob contained about 400 million billion pounds of matter. In another example of casual cosmic malevolence, astronomers published a movie last month of what they said was a black hole shooting blobs of electrified gas and energy into space at almost the speed of light.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ladybugs Pack Wings and Engineering Secrets in Tidy Origami Packages (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5251",
        "date": "2017-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/science/ladybugs-wings-folding.html",
        "text": "Using high-speed cameras, a transparent artificial wing and other techniques, researchers in Japan created a window into how ladybugs fold their wings. Using high-speed cameras, a transparent artificial wing and other techniques, researchers in Japan created a window into how ladybugs fold their wings. The ladybug is a tiny insect with hind wings four times its size. Like an origami master, it folds them up into a neat package, tucking them away within a slender sliver of space between its abdomen and the usually polka-dotted, harder wings that protect it.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ladybugs Pack Wings and Engineering Secrets in Tidy Origami Packages (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5252",
        "date": "2017-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/science/ladybugs-wings-folding.html",
        "text": "Using high-speed cameras, a transparent artificial wing and other techniques, researchers in Japan created a window into how ladybugs fold their wings. Using high-speed cameras, a transparent artificial wing and other techniques, researchers in Japan created a window into how ladybugs fold their wings. The ladybug is a tiny insect with hind wings four times its size. Like an origami master, it folds them up into a neat package, tucking them away within a slender sliver of space between its abdomen and the usually polka-dotted, harder wings that protect it.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Just Before the Eagle Landed, an Alien Arrived in Our Living Room (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5253",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/science/apollo-11-television.html",
        "text": "Until the Apollo 11 mission, my family didn\u2019t have a television. Then, for one weekend, we joined the rest of Planet Earth. Until the Apollo 11 mission, my family didn\u2019t have a television. Then, for one weekend, we joined the rest of Planet Earth. No one who was alive then can forget the sights and sounds of that weekend in 1969. ",
        "author": "By Matthew Purdy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Just Before the Eagle Landed, an Alien Arrived in Our Living Room (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5254",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/science/apollo-11-television.html",
        "text": "Until the Apollo 11 mission, my family didn\u2019t have a television. Then, for one weekend, we joined the rest of Planet Earth. Until the Apollo 11 mission, my family didn\u2019t have a television. Then, for one weekend, we joined the rest of Planet Earth. No one who was alive then can forget the sights and sounds of that weekend in 1969. ",
        "author": "By Matthew Purdy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Just Before the Eagle Landed, an Alien Arrived in Our Living Room (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5255",
        "date": "2019-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/science/apollo-11-television.html",
        "text": "Until the Apollo 11 mission, my family didn\u2019t have a television. Then, for one weekend, we joined the rest of Planet Earth. Until the Apollo 11 mission, my family didn\u2019t have a television. Then, for one weekend, we joined the rest of Planet Earth. No one who was alive then can forget the sights and sounds of that weekend in 1969. ",
        "author": "By Matthew Purdy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Unlocking Mysteries in the Sun\u2019s 11-Year Cycle (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5256",
        "date": "2017-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/science/sun-cycles-solar-maximum-minimum-corona.html",
        "text": "Two studies focused on the sun\u2019s maximum and minimum periods of activity, yielding new findings about its internal processes and external corona. Two studies focused on the sun\u2019s maximum and minimum periods of activity, yielding new findings about its internal processes and external corona. Our sun may be special to us, but among all the stars in the galaxy, it\u2019s not that unique.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andromeda Is Coming for Our Milky Way Galaxy, Eventually (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5257",
        "date": "2019-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/science/andromeda-milky-way-galaxy-collision.html",
        "text": "Traveling at 68 miles per second, a nearby galaxy is still coming to consume us, just 600 million years later than expected. Traveling at 68 miles per second, a nearby galaxy is still coming to consume us, just 600 million years later than expected. The apocalypse has been postponed.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andromeda Is Coming for Our Milky Way Galaxy, Eventually (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5258",
        "date": "2019-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/science/andromeda-milky-way-galaxy-collision.html",
        "text": "Traveling at 68 miles per second, a nearby galaxy is still coming to consume us, just 600 million years later than expected. Traveling at 68 miles per second, a nearby galaxy is still coming to consume us, just 600 million years later than expected. The apocalypse has been postponed.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hours before the F.D.A. vote, the C.D.C. released a study showing waning protection of the Pfizer vaccine. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5259",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/cdc-pfizer-vaccine-efficacy.html",
        "text": "The study found that the shots\u2019 effectiveness in preventing hospitalization fell to 77 percent from 91 percent four months after full vaccination. The study found that the shots\u2019 effectiveness in preventing hospitalization fell to 77 percent from 91 percent four months after full vaccination. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data on Friday indicating that the level of protection against Covid hospitalizations afforded by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine dropped significantly in the four months after full inoculation.",
        "author": "By Benjamin Mueller"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars 2020 Rover Gets a Landing Site: A Crater That Contained a Lake (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5260",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/nasa-mars-2020-rover.html",
        "text": "The rover will search the Jezero Crater and delta for the chemical building blocks of life and other signs of past microbes. The rover will search the Jezero Crater and delta for the chemical building blocks of life and other signs of past microbes. NASA is aiming its next Mars rover at an ancient river delta, a location where evidence of past life could still be preserved \u2014 if life ever did arise on Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars 2020 Rover Gets a Landing Site: A Crater That Contained a Lake (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5261",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/nasa-mars-2020-rover.html",
        "text": "The rover will search the Jezero Crater and delta for the chemical building blocks of life and other signs of past microbes. The rover will search the Jezero Crater and delta for the chemical building blocks of life and other signs of past microbes. NASA is aiming its next Mars rover at an ancient river delta, a location where evidence of past life could still be preserved \u2014 if life ever did arise on Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars 2020 Rover Gets a Landing Site: A Crater That Contained a Lake (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5262",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/nasa-mars-2020-rover.html",
        "text": "The rover will search the Jezero Crater and delta for the chemical building blocks of life and other signs of past microbes. The rover will search the Jezero Crater and delta for the chemical building blocks of life and other signs of past microbes. NASA is aiming its next Mars rover at an ancient river delta, a location where evidence of past life could still be preserved \u2014 if life ever did arise on Mars.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission to Explore Titan (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5263",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/science/nasa-titan-dragonfly-caesar.html",
        "text": "The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn\u2019s largest moon.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission to Explore Titan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5264",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/science/nasa-titan-dragonfly-caesar.html",
        "text": "The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn\u2019s largest moon.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission to Explore Titan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5265",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/science/nasa-titan-dragonfly-caesar.html",
        "text": "The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn\u2019s largest moon.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission to Explore Titan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5266",
        "date": "2019-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/science/nasa-titan-dragonfly-caesar.html",
        "text": "The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. The quadcopter was selected to study the moon of Saturn after a \u201cShark Tank\u201d-like competition that lasted two and a half years. NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn\u2019s largest moon.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy Deploys Dozens of Satellites to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5267",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket took flight again early on Tuesday morning.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy Deploys Dozens of Satellites to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5268",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket took flight again early on Tuesday morning.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy Deploys Dozens of Satellites to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5269",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket took flight again early on Tuesday morning.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy Deploys Dozens of Satellites to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5270",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket took flight again early on Tuesday morning.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy Deploys Dozens of Satellites to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5271",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The powerful rocket is carrying an assortment of cargo, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket took flight again early on Tuesday morning.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did You Miss the Lunar Eclipse? Here\u2019s What It Looked Like. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5272",
        "date": "2021-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/science/lunar-eclipse-photos.html",
        "text": "The partial eclipse on Thursday night and Friday morning lasted more than six hours, and these photos captured the moon\u2019s rust-red hue. The partial eclipse on Thursday night and Friday morning lasted more than six hours, and these photos captured the moon\u2019s rust-red hue. If you slept through the latest partial lunar eclipse, we cannot fault you.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Matt McCann"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Violent Splash of Magma That May Have Made the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5273",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/science/moon-earth-collision.html",
        "text": "The object thought to have formed our lunar companion may have smashed into a baby Earth still covered in a fiery ocean. The object thought to have formed our lunar companion may have smashed into a baby Earth still covered in a fiery ocean. The moon is far more than a largely dead orb. Our planet\u2019s pale satellite is the creator of tides, the catcher of meteors and the only other world in the starry ocean where humanity has set foot. But scientists are still not entirely clear how it was made. Solving this mystery would not only reveal the moon\u2019s origins, it would also help explain our own planet\u2019s evolution.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Violent Splash of Magma That May Have Made the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5274",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/science/moon-earth-collision.html",
        "text": "The object thought to have formed our lunar companion may have smashed into a baby Earth still covered in a fiery ocean. The object thought to have formed our lunar companion may have smashed into a baby Earth still covered in a fiery ocean. The moon is far more than a largely dead orb. Our planet\u2019s pale satellite is the creator of tides, the catcher of meteors and the only other world in the starry ocean where humanity has set foot. But scientists are still not entirely clear how it was made. Solving this mystery would not only reveal the moon\u2019s origins, it would also help explain our own planet\u2019s evolution.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bringing the Ocean\u2019s Midnight Zone Into the Light (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5275",
        "date": "2020-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/science/monterey-bay-aquarium-midnight-zone.html",
        "text": "The Monterey Bay Aquarium has learned how to raise the deepest sea life to the surface and keep it alive for display. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has learned how to raise the deepest sea life to the surface and keep it alive for display. Have you ever seen a giant larvacean, the tiny sea squirt that lives inside a giant mucus house? How about a wildly iridescent bloodybelly comb jelly?",
        "author": "By Annie Roth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bringing the Ocean\u2019s Midnight Zone Into the Light (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5276",
        "date": "2020-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/science/monterey-bay-aquarium-midnight-zone.html",
        "text": "The Monterey Bay Aquarium has learned how to raise the deepest sea life to the surface and keep it alive for display. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has learned how to raise the deepest sea life to the surface and keep it alive for display. Have you ever seen a giant larvacean, the tiny sea squirt that lives inside a giant mucus house? How about a wildly iridescent bloodybelly comb jelly?",
        "author": "By Annie Roth"
    },
    {
        "title": "High Above Mars, a NASA Orbiter Spies the Curiosity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5277",
        "date": "2017-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/science/mars-curiosity-reconnaissance-orbiter.html",
        "text": "The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking images of the rover about every three months to monitor the surrounding area for changes. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking images of the rover about every three months to monitor the surrounding area for changes. The small blue dot is Curiosity.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "High Above Mars, a NASA Orbiter Spies the Curiosity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5278",
        "date": "2017-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/science/mars-curiosity-reconnaissance-orbiter.html",
        "text": "The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking images of the rover about every three months to monitor the surrounding area for changes. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking images of the rover about every three months to monitor the surrounding area for changes. The small blue dot is Curiosity.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "High Above Mars, a NASA Orbiter Spies the Curiosity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5279",
        "date": "2017-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/science/mars-curiosity-reconnaissance-orbiter.html",
        "text": "The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking images of the rover about every three months to monitor the surrounding area for changes. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking images of the rover about every three months to monitor the surrounding area for changes. The small blue dot is Curiosity.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Astronaut Crew Like No Other on Orbital Adventure (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5280",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-orbit.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 A SpaceX rocket lifted off on Wednesday night from a launchpad here, carrying four Americans on an adventure to orbit the Earth for three days that will be like no other.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Astronaut Crew Like No Other on Orbital Adventure (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5281",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-orbit.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 A SpaceX rocket lifted off on Wednesday night from a launchpad here, carrying four Americans on an adventure to orbit the Earth for three days that will be like no other.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Astronaut Crew Like No Other on Orbital Adventure (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5282",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-orbit.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 A SpaceX rocket lifted off on Wednesday night from a launchpad here, carrying four Americans on an adventure to orbit the Earth for three days that will be like no other.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Astronaut Crew Like No Other on Orbital Adventure (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5283",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/spacex-inspiration4-orbit.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. The Inspiration4 mission successfully lifted off from Florida, carrying with it an ambition of making spaceflight more accessible to the broader public. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 A SpaceX rocket lifted off on Wednesday night from a launchpad here, carrying four Americans on an adventure to orbit the Earth for three days that will be like no other.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans Have a Poor Sense of Smell? It\u2019s Just a Myth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5284",
        "date": "2017-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/science/human-sense-of-smell-nose.html",
        "text": "The belief that the human nose isn\u2019t very acute is not based on empirical evidence, a scientist says in a new review. The belief that the human nose isn\u2019t very acute is not based on empirical evidence, a scientist says in a new review. By shoving her nose against a fire hydrant, your terrier may be able to decipher which pit bull in the neighborhood marked it before her. But that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean she\u2019s a superior sniffer.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Actually, You Do Want to Know How This Sausage Gets Made (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5285",
        "date": "2017-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/sausage-salami-bacteria.html",
        "text": "Starter bacteria used in salami made by industrial manufacturers are safer, but result in less flavorful dried sausage than the artisanal process. Starter bacteria used in salami made by industrial manufacturers are safer, but result in less flavorful dried sausage than the artisanal process. When you slice into a salami, you are enjoying the fruits of some very small organisms\u2019 labor.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trolling the Monster in the Heart of the Milky Way (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5286",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/science/black-hole-milky-way.html",
        "text": "Something very large and dark occupies the center of our galaxy, and new data suggest that it is indeed a black hole. Something very large and dark occupies the center of our galaxy, and new data suggest that it is indeed a black hole. In a dark, dusty patch of sky in the constellation Sagittarius, a small star, known as S2 or, sometimes, S0-2, cruises on the edge of eternity. Every 16 years, it passes within a cosmic whisker of a mysterious dark object that weighs some 4 million suns, and that occupies the exact center of the Milky Way galaxy.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Everyone Wants to Go Back to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5287",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/nasa-moon-apollo-artemis.html",
        "text": "Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Everyone Wants to Go Back to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5288",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/nasa-moon-apollo-artemis.html",
        "text": "Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Everyone Wants to Go Back to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5289",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/nasa-moon-apollo-artemis.html",
        "text": "Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Everyone Wants to Go Back to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5290",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/nasa-moon-apollo-artemis.html",
        "text": "Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Everyone Wants to Go Back to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5291",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/nasa-moon-apollo-artemis.html",
        "text": "Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. Something of a new lunar race is underway, but the motivations differ from what put men on its surface 50 years ago. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Using Wolves as First Responders Against a Deadly Brain Disease (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5292",
        "date": "2020-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/science/wolves-chronic-wasting-disease.html",
        "text": "Some scientists say that the predators are essential to curbing the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease because they pick off weak deer. Some scientists say that the predators are essential to curbing the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease because they pick off weak deer. Are the wolves of Yellowstone National Park the first line of defense against a terrible disease that preys on herds of wildlife?",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Should Think of Hummingbirds as Bees With Feathers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5293",
        "date": "2017-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/science/hummingbirds-bees.html",
        "text": "Scientists say it will be easier to understand hummingbirds in some cases if we use insights gained from the study of bees. Scientists say it will be easier to understand hummingbirds in some cases if we use insights gained from the study of bees. What\u2019s small, buzzes here and there and visits flowers?",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch This Blob of Cells Become an Embryo in High-Resolution  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5294",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/science/mouse-embryo-microscope-cells.html",
        "text": "Researchers developed a new microscope that traces embryonic cell movement in real time, sketching a virtual map of how organ systems develop. Researchers developed a new microscope that traces embryonic cell movement in real time, sketching a virtual map of how organ systems develop. When the video above starts, this wiggling, glowing blue blob seen under a new high-resolution microscope doesn\u2019t look like much. But in just 26 seconds you and I can watch the blob\u2019s tiny cells multiply, interact and organize into the first organ systems of a living mouse embryo.",
        "author": "By Emily Baumgaertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Return of the Platypuses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5295",
        "date": "2020-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/science/platypuses-australia-wildfires.html",
        "text": "Rescued from Australia\u2019s fires, a small fleet of wild platypuses is launched back into their wetland home and into an uncertain future. Rescued from Australia\u2019s fires, a small fleet of wild platypuses is launched back into their wetland home and into an uncertain future. The platypus, liberated from the pillowcase in which it had been traveling, headed straight for water.",
        "author": "By David Maurice Smith and Brooke Jarvis"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Return of the Platypuses (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5296",
        "date": "2020-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/science/platypuses-australia-wildfires.html",
        "text": "Rescued from Australia\u2019s fires, a small fleet of wild platypuses is launched back into their wetland home and into an uncertain future. Rescued from Australia\u2019s fires, a small fleet of wild platypuses is launched back into their wetland home and into an uncertain future. The platypus, liberated from the pillowcase in which it had been traveling, headed straight for water.",
        "author": "By David Maurice Smith and Brooke Jarvis"
    },
    {
        "title": "A College Town Gets Ready for Its Moment Under No Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5297",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/science/total-solar-eclipse-2017-carbondale-illinois.html",
        "text": "One of the best places to view August\u2019s solar eclipse, Carbondale, home to Southern Illinois University, will host scientists and eclipse groupies. One of the best places to view August\u2019s solar eclipse, Carbondale, home to Southern Illinois University, will host scientists and eclipse groupies. CARBONDALE, Ill. \u2014 During football season, a maroon mob gathers in Saluki Stadium as thousands of Southern Illinois University fans come to cheer their hometown heroes. On Aug. 21, nearly three weeks before the first game, crowds will again pack the stadium. But all eyes will be on the sky, not the field.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "A College Town Gets Ready for Its Moment Under No Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5298",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/science/total-solar-eclipse-2017-carbondale-illinois.html",
        "text": "One of the best places to view August\u2019s solar eclipse, Carbondale, home to Southern Illinois University, will host scientists and eclipse groupies. One of the best places to view August\u2019s solar eclipse, Carbondale, home to Southern Illinois University, will host scientists and eclipse groupies. CARBONDALE, Ill. \u2014 During football season, a maroon mob gathers in Saluki Stadium as thousands of Southern Illinois University fans come to cheer their hometown heroes. On Aug. 21, nearly three weeks before the first game, crowds will again pack the stadium. But all eyes will be on the sky, not the field.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Giant Fungus Is Older, Bigger and Rarely Mutates (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5299",
        "date": "2019-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/science/fungus-michigan-mutation.html",
        "text": "New genetic analysis shows that an underground parasitic mold in Michigan is about 2,500 years old and has a low mutation rate. New genetic analysis shows that an underground parasitic mold in Michigan is about 2,500 years old and has a low mutation rate.  The scientists first reported finding it in 1992: a giant mushroom that weighed as much as a blue whale and sprawled across more than 30 acres of forest in Michigan\u2019s upper peninsula. It wasn\u2019t some Alice-in-Wonderland-type toadstool but a 1,500-year-old parasitic mold, with growing tentacles that foraged beneath the soil for roots and decaying wood to devour.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Releases First Detailed Map of the Insides of Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5300",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/science/mars-nasa-insight.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight mission revealed Mars\u2019s inner workings down to its core, highlighting great differences of the red planet from our blue world. NASA\u2019s InSight mission revealed Mars\u2019s inner workings down to its core, highlighting great differences of the red planet from our blue world. The fate of almost everything on Earth\u2019s surface is determined by infernal engines deep below. Mars is no different. Now, thanks to an intrepid robot parked on the Martian surface by NASA in November 2018, scientists have a map of our neighboring world\u2019s geologic abysses, the first ever made of another planet.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Releases First Detailed Map of the Insides of Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5301",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/science/mars-nasa-insight.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s InSight mission revealed Mars\u2019s inner workings down to its core, highlighting great differences of the red planet from our blue world. NASA\u2019s InSight mission revealed Mars\u2019s inner workings down to its core, highlighting great differences of the red planet from our blue world. The fate of almost everything on Earth\u2019s surface is determined by infernal engines deep below. Mars is no different. Now, thanks to an intrepid robot parked on the Martian surface by NASA in November 2018, scientists have a map of our neighboring world\u2019s geologic abysses, the first ever made of another planet.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside the C.I.A., She Became a Spy for Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5302",
        "date": "2021-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/science/linda-zall-cia.html",
        "text": "Linda Zall is disclosing how she toiled anonymously within the intelligence agency to help scientists intensify their studies of a changing planet. Linda Zall is disclosing how she toiled anonymously within the intelligence agency to help scientists intensify their studies of a changing planet. Linda Zall played a starring role in American science that led to decades of major advances. But she never described her breakthroughs on television, or had books written about her, or received high scientific honors. One database of scientific publications lists her contributions as consisting of just three papers, with a conspicuous gap running from 1980 to 2020.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside the C.I.A., She Became a Spy for Planet Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5303",
        "date": "2021-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/science/linda-zall-cia.html",
        "text": "Linda Zall is disclosing how she toiled anonymously within the intelligence agency to help scientists intensify their studies of a changing planet. Linda Zall is disclosing how she toiled anonymously within the intelligence agency to help scientists intensify their studies of a changing planet. Linda Zall played a starring role in American science that led to decades of major advances. But she never described her breakthroughs on television, or had books written about her, or received high scientific honors. One database of scientific publications lists her contributions as consisting of just three papers, with a conspicuous gap running from 1980 to 2020.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Air Pollution, Evolution, and the Fate of Billions of Humans (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5304",
        "date": "2020-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/science/air-pollution-fires-genes.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s not just a modern problem. Airborne toxins are so pernicious that they may have shaped our DNA over millions of years. It\u2019s not just a modern problem. Airborne toxins are so pernicious that they may have shaped our DNA over millions of years. The threat of air pollution grabs our attention when we see it \u2014 for example, the tendrils of smoke of Australian brush fires, now visible from space, or the poisonous soup of smog that descends on cities like New Delhi in the winter.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars Helicopter Makes One-Way Flight to New Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5305",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/science/mars-helicopter-nasa-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "Ingenuity has flown almost flawlessly through the red planet\u2019s thin air and will now assist the science mission of the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity has flown almost flawlessly through the red planet\u2019s thin air and will now assist the science mission of the Perseverance rover. This time, NASA\u2019s Mars robotic helicopter Ingenuity did not come back.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars Helicopter Makes One-Way Flight to New Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5306",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/science/mars-helicopter-nasa-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "Ingenuity has flown almost flawlessly through the red planet\u2019s thin air and will now assist the science mission of the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity has flown almost flawlessly through the red planet\u2019s thin air and will now assist the science mission of the Perseverance rover. This time, NASA\u2019s Mars robotic helicopter Ingenuity did not come back.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mars Helicopter Makes One-Way Flight to New Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5307",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/science/mars-helicopter-nasa-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "Ingenuity has flown almost flawlessly through the red planet\u2019s thin air and will now assist the science mission of the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity has flown almost flawlessly through the red planet\u2019s thin air and will now assist the science mission of the Perseverance rover. This time, NASA\u2019s Mars robotic helicopter Ingenuity did not come back.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meals for Your Eclipse Menu (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5308",
        "date": "2017-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/science/eclipse-food-menu.html",
        "text": "In parts of the United States, the eclipse will occur around lunchtime. Consider planning a picnic. (At least, have a crescent-shaped cookie.) In parts of the United States, the eclipse will occur around lunchtime. Consider planning a picnic. (At least, have a crescent-shaped cookie.) Historically, our sun is the only thing guaranteed to be eaten during a solar eclipse.",
        "author": "By Sara Bonisteel"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5309",
        "date": "2019-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. [Follow the latest SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5310",
        "date": "2019-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. [Follow the latest SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5311",
        "date": "2019-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. [Follow the latest SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5312",
        "date": "2019-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. If the mission is successful, it could point the way toward an important new line of business for the private rocket company. [Follow the latest SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Spotting Mysterious Twinkles on Earth From a Million Miles Away (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5313",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/science/dscovr-satellite-ice-glints-earth-atmosphere.html",
        "text": "Hundreds of reflections observed by a satellite are a result of ice crystals floating in clouds at high altitudes, NASA scientists say. Hundreds of reflections observed by a satellite are a result of ice crystals floating in clouds at high altitudes, NASA scientists say. When we look up at the night sky, we see twinkling stars. When a satellite orbiting a million miles away looks down upon Earth, it sees twinkles, too.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Spotting Mysterious Twinkles on Earth From a Million Miles Away (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5314",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/science/dscovr-satellite-ice-glints-earth-atmosphere.html",
        "text": "Hundreds of reflections observed by a satellite are a result of ice crystals floating in clouds at high altitudes, NASA scientists say. Hundreds of reflections observed by a satellite are a result of ice crystals floating in clouds at high altitudes, NASA scientists say. When we look up at the night sky, we see twinkling stars. When a satellite orbiting a million miles away looks down upon Earth, it sees twinkles, too.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Wanted You to Bet on Sharks. The Odds Were Not in Their Favor. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5315",
        "date": "2020-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/sharks-online-gambling.html",
        "text": "Gambling on shark migration patterns could raise awareness, some experts say. But it could also fuel the animals\u2019 reputation as mere entertainment. Gambling on shark migration patterns could raise awareness, some experts say. But it could also fuel the animals\u2019 reputation as mere entertainment. Some bookies warn that you\u2019ll sleep with the fishes. But one oddsmaker wanted you to bet on them instead.",
        "author": "By Katherine J. Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Rose Blooms: Its Genome Reveals the Traits for Scent and Color (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5316",
        "date": "2018-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/science/rose-genome-gene-editing.html",
        "text": "French researchers are completing a full map of the rose, pinpointing genes to edit for continuous blooming and its other signature features. French researchers are completing a full map of the rose, pinpointing genes to edit for continuous blooming and its other signature features. The scent of a rose fades over time, and has for hundreds of years.",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "How were the astronauts selected? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5317",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/inspiration4-crew-astronauts.html",
        "text": "For the mission, Mr. Isaacman named the four Crew Dragon seats to reflect positive aspects of humanity: leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity.  For the mission, Mr. Isaacman named the four Crew Dragon seats to reflect positive aspects of humanity: leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How were the astronauts selected? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5318",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/science/inspiration4-crew-astronauts.html",
        "text": "For the mission, Mr. Isaacman named the four Crew Dragon seats to reflect positive aspects of humanity: leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity.  For the mission, Mr. Isaacman named the four Crew Dragon seats to reflect positive aspects of humanity: leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Again Delays Starlink Internet Satellite Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5319",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company will wait until next week to test its system that aims to provide high-speed internet all over the world. Elon Musk\u2019s company will wait until next week to test its system that aims to provide high-speed internet all over the world. [Follow Monday\u2019s SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Again Delays Starlink Internet Satellite Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5320",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company will wait until next week to test its system that aims to provide high-speed internet all over the world. Elon Musk\u2019s company will wait until next week to test its system that aims to provide high-speed internet all over the world. [Follow Monday\u2019s SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Again Delays Starlink Internet Satellite Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5321",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s company will wait until next week to test its system that aims to provide high-speed internet all over the world. Elon Musk\u2019s company will wait until next week to test its system that aims to provide high-speed internet all over the world. [Follow Monday\u2019s SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Ever Get to Mars, the Beer Might Not Be Bad (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5322",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/science/mars-plants-soil.html",
        "text": "College students at Villanova University found that hops, leafy greens, carrots and scallions all could grow in an approximation of Martian dirt. College students at Villanova University found that hops, leafy greens, carrots and scallions all could grow in an approximation of Martian dirt. Here\u2019s an interplanetary botany discovery that took college students and not NASA scientists to find: Hops \u2014 the flowers used to add a pleasant bitterness to beer \u2014 grow well in Martian soil.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "If We Ever Get to Mars, the Beer Might Not Be Bad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5323",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/science/mars-plants-soil.html",
        "text": "College students at Villanova University found that hops, leafy greens, carrots and scallions all could grow in an approximation of Martian dirt. College students at Villanova University found that hops, leafy greens, carrots and scallions all could grow in an approximation of Martian dirt. Here\u2019s an interplanetary botany discovery that took college students and not NASA scientists to find: Hops \u2014 the flowers used to add a pleasant bitterness to beer \u2014 grow well in Martian soil.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5324",
        "date": "2019-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artificial-intelligence.html",
        "text": "Chess and Go were child\u2019s play. Now A.I. is winning at capture the flag. Will such skills translate to the real world? Chess and Go were child\u2019s play. Now A.I. is winning at capture the flag. Will such skills translate to the real world? Capture the flag is a game played by children across the open spaces of a summer camp, and by professional video gamers as part of popular titles like Quake III and Overwatch.",
        "author": "By Cade Metz"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Many Plants Have We Wiped Out? Here Are 5 Extinction Stories (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5325",
        "date": "2020-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/science/plants-extinction-north-america.html",
        "text": "Botanists have laid out evidence that dozens of North American trees, herbs, plants and shrubs have gone extinct since European settlers arrived. Botanists have laid out evidence that dozens of North American trees, herbs, plants and shrubs have gone extinct since European settlers arrived. It isn\u2019t easy to say that anything has truly \u201cgone extinct.\u201d",
        "author": "By Marion Renault"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Strange Origin of a Manakin\u2019s Golden Crown (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5326",
        "date": "2018-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/science/golden-crowned-manakin-hybrid.html",
        "text": "Biologists are unlocking how three neighboring birds became distinct species, with a golden-crowned hybrid emerging from two species with different head colorings. Biologists are unlocking how three neighboring birds became distinct species, with a golden-crowned hybrid emerging from two species with different head colorings. Three related species of manakins occupy adjacent parcels of the Amazon rain forest: Opal-crowned, snow-capped and golden-crowned. They are all plump like sparrows, small enough to cup in a hand and have radiant yellow-green upper bodies with golden undersides.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Snowman-like Photo of Ultima Thule Sent Home by NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5327",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Snowman-like Photo of Ultima Thule Sent Home by NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5328",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Snowman-like Photo of Ultima Thule Sent Home by NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5329",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Snowman-like Photo of Ultima Thule Sent Home by NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5330",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/science/ultima-thule-pictures-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. At a Wednesday news conference, scientists will announce some of the results from the flyby of the most distant object ever visited. LAUREL, Md. \u2014 Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shades of Noir: My Hunt for an Eclipse Glasses Villain (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5331",
        "date": "2017-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/science/eclipse-glasses-recalls.html",
        "text": "As the first reports of eclipse eye damage emerge, a reporter attempts to get to the bottom of the shady shades fiasco. As the first reports of eclipse eye damage emerge, a reporter attempts to get to the bottom of the shady shades fiasco. Earlier this week, a couple in Colorado filed a class-action lawsuit against an eyewear chain they say gave them faulty eclipse glasses. Watching the moon\u2019s spectacular crossing of the sun on Aug. 21 left them with distorted vision, according to their lawyer. A couple in South Carolina filed a similar lawsuit against Amazon in late August.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inked Mummies, Linking Tattoo Artists With Their Ancestors (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5332",
        "date": "2021-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/science/mummies-tattoos-archaeology.html",
        "text": "As scientists find more tattoos on preserved remains from Indigenous cultures, artists living today are drawing from them to revive cultural traditions. As scientists find more tattoos on preserved remains from Indigenous cultures, artists living today are drawing from them to revive cultural traditions. In the 1970s, hunters stumbled upon eight 500-year-old bodies preserved by the Arctic climate near Qilakitsoq, an abandoned Inuit settlement in northwest Greenland. Later, when scientists photographed the mummies with infrared film, they made an intriguing discovery: Five of the six females had delicate lines, dots and arches tattooed on their faces.",
        "author": "By Krista Langlois"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where NASA Put a Parking Lot, Dinosaurs and Mammals Once Crossed Paths (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5333",
        "date": "2018-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dinosaurs-footprints-nasa.html",
        "text": "An 8.5-foot-long slab found in Maryland preserved tracks left by prehistoric creatures. The site was almost obliterated before the rock was unearthed. An 8.5-foot-long slab found in Maryland preserved tracks left by prehistoric creatures. The site was almost obliterated before the rock was unearthed. More than 100 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed Maryland. So did our ancestors \u2014 small mammals the size of squirrels or badgers \u2014 and the flying reptiles known as pterosaurs.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteor Showers That Will Light Up Night Skies in 2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5334",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/science/meteor-showers-2019.html",
        "text": "All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteor Showers in 2020 That Will Light Up Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5335",
        "date": "2020-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/science/meteor-showers-2020.html",
        "text": "All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s a list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s a list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deflecting an Asteroid Before It Hits Earth May Take Multiple Bumps (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5336",
        "date": "2021-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/science/asteroid-deflection-collision.html",
        "text": "After years of shooting meteorites with a special gun owned by NASA, researchers highlighted challenges for a preferred method of planetary defense. After years of shooting meteorites with a special gun owned by NASA, researchers highlighted challenges for a preferred method of planetary defense. There\u2019s probably a large space rock out there, somewhere, that has Earth in its cross hairs. Scientists have in fact spotted one candidate \u2014 Bennu, which has a small chance of banging into our planet in the year 2182. But whether it\u2019s Bennu or another asteroid, the question will be how to avoid a very unwelcome cosmic rendezvous.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deflecting an Asteroid Before It Hits Earth May Take Multiple Bumps (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5337",
        "date": "2021-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/science/asteroid-deflection-collision.html",
        "text": "After years of shooting meteorites with a special gun owned by NASA, researchers highlighted challenges for a preferred method of planetary defense. After years of shooting meteorites with a special gun owned by NASA, researchers highlighted challenges for a preferred method of planetary defense. There\u2019s probably a large space rock out there, somewhere, that has Earth in its cross hairs. Scientists have in fact spotted one candidate \u2014 Bennu, which has a small chance of banging into our planet in the year 2182. But whether it\u2019s Bennu or another asteroid, the question will be how to avoid a very unwelcome cosmic rendezvous.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deflecting an Asteroid Before It Hits Earth May Take Multiple Bumps (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5338",
        "date": "2021-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/science/asteroid-deflection-collision.html",
        "text": "After years of shooting meteorites with a special gun owned by NASA, researchers highlighted challenges for a preferred method of planetary defense. After years of shooting meteorites with a special gun owned by NASA, researchers highlighted challenges for a preferred method of planetary defense. There\u2019s probably a large space rock out there, somewhere, that has Earth in its cross hairs. Scientists have in fact spotted one candidate \u2014 Bennu, which has a small chance of banging into our planet in the year 2182. But whether it\u2019s Bennu or another asteroid, the question will be how to avoid a very unwelcome cosmic rendezvous.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Prototype Mars Rocket Crashes in Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5339",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. If it exploded last time, try, try again. They did, and it exploded again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Prototype Mars Rocket Crashes in Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5340",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. If it exploded last time, try, try again. They did, and it exploded again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Prototype Mars Rocket Crashes in Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5341",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. If it exploded last time, try, try again. They did, and it exploded again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Prototype Mars Rocket Crashes in Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5342",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. If it exploded last time, try, try again. They did, and it exploded again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Prototype Mars Rocket Crashes in Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5343",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/science/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. After defying the F.A.A. during its last test flight in December, the company got approval but didn\u2019t succeed in sticking the landing. If it exploded last time, try, try again. They did, and it exploded again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "8 Minutes of Fire: NASA\u2019s 2nd Test of Giant New Moon Rocket Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5344",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/science/sls-engine-test-nasa.html",
        "text": "A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. \u2014 On Thursday, NASA\u2019s new big rocket, the Space Launch System, ignited four mighty engines for more than eight minutes and went nowhere.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "8 Minutes of Fire: NASA\u2019s 2nd Test of Giant New Moon Rocket Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5345",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/science/sls-engine-test-nasa.html",
        "text": "A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. \u2014 On Thursday, NASA\u2019s new big rocket, the Space Launch System, ignited four mighty engines for more than eight minutes and went nowhere.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "8 Minutes of Fire: NASA\u2019s 2nd Test of Giant New Moon Rocket Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5346",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/science/sls-engine-test-nasa.html",
        "text": "A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. \u2014 On Thursday, NASA\u2019s new big rocket, the Space Launch System, ignited four mighty engines for more than eight minutes and went nowhere.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "8 Minutes of Fire: NASA\u2019s 2nd Test of Giant New Moon Rocket Is a Success (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5347",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/science/sls-engine-test-nasa.html",
        "text": "A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. A test earlier this year of the Space Launch System core stage was marred by errors, so the agency conducted a do-over. STENNIS SPACE CENTER, Miss. \u2014 On Thursday, NASA\u2019s new big rocket, the Space Launch System, ignited four mighty engines for more than eight minutes and went nowhere.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Genius\u2019 Unravels the Mysteries of Einstein\u2019s Universe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5348",
        "date": "2017-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/science/albert-einstein-genius-national-geographic-channel.html",
        "text": "A new series on the National Geographic Channel introduces viewers to the man behind the cuddly accent and the curvatures of space-time. A new series on the National Geographic Channel introduces viewers to the man behind the cuddly accent and the curvatures of space-time. \u201cGenius,\u201d a new 10-part series about Albert Einstein on the National Geographic Channel, starts off with a bang.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Antarctica Map Is Like \u2018Putting on Glasses for the First Time and Seeing 20/20\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5349",
        "date": "2018-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/science/antarctica-map-rema.html",
        "text": "A high resolution terrain map of Earth\u2019s frozen continent will help researchers better track changes on the ice as the planet warms. A high resolution terrain map of Earth\u2019s frozen continent will help researchers better track changes on the ice as the planet warms. You may never make it to the South Pole, but you can now see Antarctica and its glaciers in unprecedented detail. ",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sealed Cache of Moon Rocks to Be Opened by NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5350",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/science/moon-rocks-nasa.html",
        "text": "A half-century ago, three containers of lunar samples were set aside, to await study by more advanced technology. Their time has come. A half-century ago, three containers of lunar samples were set aside, to await study by more advanced technology. Their time has come. Later this year, NASA will reveal never-before-seen morsels of the moon, the agency announced on Monday.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sealed Cache of Moon Rocks to Be Opened by NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5351",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/science/moon-rocks-nasa.html",
        "text": "A half-century ago, three containers of lunar samples were set aside, to await study by more advanced technology. Their time has come. A half-century ago, three containers of lunar samples were set aside, to await study by more advanced technology. Their time has come. Later this year, NASA will reveal never-before-seen morsels of the moon, the agency announced on Monday.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sealed Cache of Moon Rocks to Be Opened by NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5352",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/science/moon-rocks-nasa.html",
        "text": "A half-century ago, three containers of lunar samples were set aside, to await study by more advanced technology. Their time has come. A half-century ago, three containers of lunar samples were set aside, to await study by more advanced technology. Their time has come. Later this year, NASA will reveal never-before-seen morsels of the moon, the agency announced on Monday.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch These Rover Models Wiggle Out of Alien Sand Traps (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5353",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/science/nasa-rovers.html",
        "text": "A choreography of swimming, walking and rolling could help future rovers avoid getting stuck in loose soil on the moon or Mars. A choreography of swimming, walking and rolling could help future rovers avoid getting stuck in loose soil on the moon or Mars. Driving up a sandy hill on a distant world is a good way to get stuck.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch These Rover Models Wiggle Out of Alien Sand Traps (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5354",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/science/nasa-rovers.html",
        "text": "A choreography of swimming, walking and rolling could help future rovers avoid getting stuck in loose soil on the moon or Mars. A choreography of swimming, walking and rolling could help future rovers avoid getting stuck in loose soil on the moon or Mars. Driving up a sandy hill on a distant world is a good way to get stuck.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch These Rover Models Wiggle Out of Alien Sand Traps (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5355",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/science/nasa-rovers.html",
        "text": "A choreography of swimming, walking and rolling could help future rovers avoid getting stuck in loose soil on the moon or Mars. A choreography of swimming, walking and rolling could help future rovers avoid getting stuck in loose soil on the moon or Mars. Driving up a sandy hill on a distant world is a good way to get stuck.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watching the Total Eclipse? Share Your Photos: #NYTeclipsewatch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5356",
        "date": "2017-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/17/science/total-eclipse-where-are-you-watching.html",
        "text": "The New York Times would like to hear from people who plan to watch the total eclipse taking place on Aug. 21. The New York Times would like to hear from people who plan to watch the total eclipse taking place on Aug. 21. The New York Times would like to hear from people who plan to watch the total eclipse taking place on Aug. 21.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteor Showers That Lit Up Night Skies in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5357",
        "date": "2018-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/meteor-showers-2018.html",
        "text": "All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "2017\u2019s Meteor Showers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5358",
        "date": "2017-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/meteor-showers-2017.html",
        "text": "All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteor Showers That Lit Up Night Skies in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5359",
        "date": "2018-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/meteor-showers-2018.html",
        "text": "All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s our list of major meteor showers and how to spot one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Cube and Mysteries of the Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5360",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/08/science/moon-cube-pictures.html",
        "text": "A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity? A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity? A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity?",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Cube and Mysteries of the Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5361",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/08/science/moon-cube-pictures.html",
        "text": "A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity? A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity? A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity?",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon Cube and Mysteries of the Solar System (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5362",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/08/science/moon-cube-pictures.html",
        "text": "A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity? A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity? A Chinese lunar rover spotted an unusual object on the moon's surface. Extraterrestrial artifact, or the latest case of mistaken space identity?",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Intimate Portrait Yet of a Black Hole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5363",
        "date": "2021-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/science/astronomy-messier-87-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Two years of analyzing the polarized light from a galaxy\u2019s giant black hole has given scientists a glimpse at how quasars might arise. Two years of analyzing the polarized light from a galaxy\u2019s giant black hole has given scientists a glimpse at how quasars might arise. The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, an international team of radio astronomers that has been staring down the throat of a giant black hole for years, on Wednesday published what it called the most intimate portrait yet of the forces that give rise to quasars, the luminous fountains of energy that can reach across interstellar and intergalactic space and disrupt the growth of distant galaxies.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the United Arab Emirates Set Its Sights on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5364",
        "date": "2020-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html",
        "text": "The Hope orbiter will make contributions to research on the red planet. But the Emirati government really hopes it will inspire future scientists. The Hope orbiter will make contributions to research on the red planet. But the Emirati government really hopes it will inspire future scientists. As a girl growing up in Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates, Sarah al-Amiri looked at an astronomy book with a photograph of Andromeda, the giant galaxy neighboring our Milky Way.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the United Arab Emirates Set Its Sights on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5365",
        "date": "2020-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html",
        "text": "The Hope orbiter will make contributions to research on the red planet. But the Emirati government really hopes it will inspire future scientists. The Hope orbiter will make contributions to research on the red planet. But the Emirati government really hopes it will inspire future scientists. As a girl growing up in Abu Dhabi, one of the United Arab Emirates, Sarah al-Amiri looked at an astronomy book with a photograph of Andromeda, the giant galaxy neighboring our Milky Way.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "So You Think You Dove the Deepest? James Cameron Doesn\u2019t. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5366",
        "date": "2019-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/ocean-sea-challenger-exploration-james-cameron.html",
        "text": "Victor Vescovo claims to have set the record for the deepest ocean descent by a human. The director of \u2018Titanic\u2019 demands to differ. Victor Vescovo claims to have set the record for the deepest ocean descent by a human. The director of \u2018Titanic\u2019 demands to differ. How deep is the deep end of the ocean? The answer turns on an array of factors nearly as wide as the sea itself: the barometric pressure over the site in question, the seawater\u2019s density and temperature, the vagaries of measurement and, perhaps, on whether a world record is at stake.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "So You Think You Dove the Deepest? James Cameron Doesn\u2019t. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5367",
        "date": "2019-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/ocean-sea-challenger-exploration-james-cameron.html",
        "text": "Victor Vescovo claims to have set the record for the deepest ocean descent by a human. The director of \u2018Titanic\u2019 demands to differ. Victor Vescovo claims to have set the record for the deepest ocean descent by a human. The director of \u2018Titanic\u2019 demands to differ. How deep is the deep end of the ocean? The answer turns on an array of factors nearly as wide as the sea itself: the barometric pressure over the site in question, the seawater\u2019s density and temperature, the vagaries of measurement and, perhaps, on whether a world record is at stake.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "So You Think You Dove the Deepest? James Cameron Doesn\u2019t. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5368",
        "date": "2019-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/ocean-sea-challenger-exploration-james-cameron.html",
        "text": "Victor Vescovo claims to have set the record for the deepest ocean descent by a human. The director of \u2018Titanic\u2019 demands to differ. Victor Vescovo claims to have set the record for the deepest ocean descent by a human. The director of \u2018Titanic\u2019 demands to differ. How deep is the deep end of the ocean? The answer turns on an array of factors nearly as wide as the sea itself: the barometric pressure over the site in question, the seawater\u2019s density and temperature, the vagaries of measurement and, perhaps, on whether a world record is at stake.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the Newest Member of the Fluorescent Mammal Club (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5369",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/fluorescent-mammal-springhare.html",
        "text": "The springhare \u2014 whose coat glows a patchy pinkish-orange under UV light \u2014 joins the platypus and other mammals with this perplexing trait. The springhare \u2014 whose coat glows a patchy pinkish-orange under UV light \u2014 joins the platypus and other mammals with this perplexing trait. Platypuses do it. Opossums do it. Even three species of North American flying squirrel do it. Tasmanian devils, echidnas and wombats may also do it, although the evidence is not quite so robust.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the Newest Member of the Fluorescent Mammal Club (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5370",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/fluorescent-mammal-springhare.html",
        "text": "The springhare \u2014 whose coat glows a patchy pinkish-orange under UV light \u2014 joins the platypus and other mammals with this perplexing trait. The springhare \u2014 whose coat glows a patchy pinkish-orange under UV light \u2014 joins the platypus and other mammals with this perplexing trait. Platypuses do it. Opossums do it. Even three species of North American flying squirrel do it. Tasmanian devils, echidnas and wombats may also do it, although the evidence is not quite so robust.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden Has Elevated the Job of Science Adviser. Is That What Science Needs? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5371",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/science/biden-science-adviser-eric-lander.html",
        "text": "The Senate is considering Eric S. Lander\u2019s nomination after months of delay. Some experts ask if an adviser can actually have an impact. The Senate is considering Eric S. Lander\u2019s nomination after months of delay. Some experts ask if an adviser can actually have an impact. On the campaign trail, Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed to unseat Donald J. Trump and bring science back to the White House, the federal government and the nation after years of presidential attacks and disavowals, neglect and disarray.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5372",
        "date": "2019-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/science/apollo-11-mission-control-nasa.html",
        "text": "The restored room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back. The restored room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5373",
        "date": "2019-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/science/apollo-11-mission-control-nasa.html",
        "text": "The restored room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back. The restored room is a museum piece, and yet it is alive, as though engineers stepped out briefly but would be right back. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geniuses Wanted: NASA Challenges Coders to Speed Up Its Supercomputer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5374",
        "date": "2017-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/science/nasa-supercomputer-pleiades.html",
        "text": "The Pleiades, a NASA supercomputer, isn\u2019t working as quickly as it could. So NASA is offering cash prizes to programmers with fresh ideas. The Pleiades, a NASA supercomputer, isn\u2019t working as quickly as it could. So NASA is offering cash prizes to programmers with fresh ideas. Are you a computer programmer with an eye for aeronautics? Get in touch with NASA. They could use your help.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Myriam Sarachik Never Gave Up on Physics (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5375",
        "date": "2020-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/science/myriam-sarachik-physics.html",
        "text": "The New York-based scientist overcame sexism and personal tragedy to make major contributions to the field, for which she received recognition this year. The New York-based scientist overcame sexism and personal tragedy to make major contributions to the field, for which she received recognition this year. In 1963, Myriam P. Sarachik tackled a big question in her field.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Three Planets Will Slide Behind the Moon in an Occultation (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5376",
        "date": "2017-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/science/occultation-moon-mars-venus-mercury.html",
        "text": "The moon will momentarily block Venus, then Mars and then Mercury, offering a vivid reminder of the cosmic clockwork of our solar system. The moon will momentarily block Venus, then Mars and then Mercury, offering a vivid reminder of the cosmic clockwork of our solar system. At the start of this week, the moon will play a game of planetary peek-a-boo as it momentarily blocks Venus, then Mars and then Mercury in the sky. Although it will be difficult to see this disappearing act in much of the world, it\u2019s a vivid reminder of the cosmic clockwork at play in our solar system.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another Day, Another Exoplanet: NASA\u2019s TESS Keeps Counting More (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5377",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/exoplanets-tess-nasa.html",
        "text": "The latest discovery is a lumbering, dense ball of gas that orbits a red dwarf star 53 light-years away in the constellation Reticulum. The latest discovery is a lumbering, dense ball of gas that orbits a red dwarf star 53 light-years away in the constellation Reticulum. NASA\u2019s new planet-hunting machine, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is racking up scores of alien worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another Day, Another Exoplanet: NASA\u2019s TESS Keeps Counting More (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5378",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/exoplanets-tess-nasa.html",
        "text": "The latest discovery is a lumbering, dense ball of gas that orbits a red dwarf star 53 light-years away in the constellation Reticulum. The latest discovery is a lumbering, dense ball of gas that orbits a red dwarf star 53 light-years away in the constellation Reticulum. NASA\u2019s new planet-hunting machine, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is racking up scores of alien worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another Day, Another Exoplanet: NASA\u2019s TESS Keeps Counting More (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5379",
        "date": "2019-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/exoplanets-tess-nasa.html",
        "text": "The latest discovery is a lumbering, dense ball of gas that orbits a red dwarf star 53 light-years away in the constellation Reticulum. The latest discovery is a lumbering, dense ball of gas that orbits a red dwarf star 53 light-years away in the constellation Reticulum. NASA\u2019s new planet-hunting machine, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is racking up scores of alien worlds.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Very Ordinary\u2019 Astronauts Prepare for an Extraordinary Launch to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5380",
        "date": "2021-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/science/spacex-launch-mission-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission shows private spaceflight\u2019s promise, but also how far it has to go before just about anyone can travel to orbit. The Inspiration4 mission shows private spaceflight\u2019s promise, but also how far it has to go before just about anyone can travel to orbit. [Follow live updates and news from SpaceX\u2019s return to Earth.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Very Ordinary\u2019 Astronauts Prepare for an Extraordinary Launch to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5381",
        "date": "2021-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/science/spacex-launch-mission-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission shows private spaceflight\u2019s promise, but also how far it has to go before just about anyone can travel to orbit. The Inspiration4 mission shows private spaceflight\u2019s promise, but also how far it has to go before just about anyone can travel to orbit. [Follow live updates and news from SpaceX\u2019s return to Earth.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Very Ordinary\u2019 Astronauts Prepare for an Extraordinary Launch to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5382",
        "date": "2021-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/science/spacex-launch-mission-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "The Inspiration4 mission shows private spaceflight\u2019s promise, but also how far it has to go before just about anyone can travel to orbit. The Inspiration4 mission shows private spaceflight\u2019s promise, but also how far it has to go before just about anyone can travel to orbit. [Follow live updates and news from SpaceX\u2019s return to Earth.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Risky Business? NASA and Tom Cruise Talk Movie Shoot in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5383",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/nasa-tom-cruise-space-station.html",
        "text": "The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. NASA and Tom Cruise have had discussions about shooting a film at the International Space Station, NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Risky Business? NASA and Tom Cruise Talk Movie Shoot in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5384",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/nasa-tom-cruise-space-station.html",
        "text": "The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. NASA and Tom Cruise have had discussions about shooting a film at the International Space Station, NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Risky Business? NASA and Tom Cruise Talk Movie Shoot in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5385",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/nasa-tom-cruise-space-station.html",
        "text": "The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. NASA and Tom Cruise have had discussions about shooting a film at the International Space Station, NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Risky Business? NASA and Tom Cruise Talk Movie Shoot in Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5386",
        "date": "2020-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/science/nasa-tom-cruise-space-station.html",
        "text": "The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. The head of NASA said the agency is working with the \u201cMission: Impossible\u201d star on a new film aboard the International Space Station. NASA and Tom Cruise have had discussions about shooting a film at the International Space Station, NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Get Ready for the First Flight of NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5387",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. Before heading off to search for signs of long ago Martian microbes, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will first undertake what may be the most technologically exciting part of its mission: flying a helicopter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Get Ready for the First Flight of NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5388",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. Before heading off to search for signs of long ago Martian microbes, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will first undertake what may be the most technologically exciting part of its mission: flying a helicopter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Get Ready for the First Flight of NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5389",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. Before heading off to search for signs of long ago Martian microbes, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will first undertake what may be the most technologically exciting part of its mission: flying a helicopter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Get Ready for the First Flight of NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5390",
        "date": "2021-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. The experimental vehicle named Ingenuity traveled to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, which is also preparing for its main science mission. Before heading off to search for signs of long ago Martian microbes, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will first undertake what may be the most technologically exciting part of its mission: flying a helicopter.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New York and Boston Pigeons Don\u2019t Mix (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5391",
        "date": "2020-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/science/pigeons-boston-new-york.html",
        "text": "The East Coast is made up of two pigeon genetic megacities, and a patch of Connecticut seems to be what\u2019s keeping them apart. The East Coast is made up of two pigeon genetic megacities, and a patch of Connecticut seems to be what\u2019s keeping them apart. Almost one in five Americans lives in the megacity that is the Northeast, a sprawling cluster of paved surfaces, bitter sports rivalries and clashing opinions about which city\u2019s drivers are rudest.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking Taught Us a Lot About How to Live (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5392",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/science/stephen-hawking-life.html",
        "text": "The cosmologist not only overturned our imaginations, he became an icon of mystery, curiosity and determination to understand this place we are in. The cosmologist not only overturned our imaginations, he became an icon of mystery, curiosity and determination to understand this place we are in. Stephen Hawking, the English cosmologist and black hole maven, liked to say he was born 300 years to the day after Galileo died, and he died on Wednesday, 139 years after Albert Einstein was born.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Finish the Human Genome at Last (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5393",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/science/human-genome-complete.html",
        "text": "The complete genome uncovered more than 100 new genes that are probably functional, and many new variants that may be linked to diseases. The complete genome uncovered more than 100 new genes that are probably functional, and many new variants that may be linked to diseases. Two decades after the draft sequence of the human genome was unveiled to great fanfare, a team of 99 scientists has finally deciphered the entire thing. They have filled in vast gaps and corrected a long list of errors in previous versions, giving us a new view of our DNA.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroid Misses Earth Narrowly, by Cosmic Standards (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5394",
        "date": "2017-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/science/asteroid-earth-nasa.html",
        "text": "The asteroid, 2014 JO25, which is approximately 2,000 feet end-to-end, was about 1.1 million miles away when it passed by on Wednesday morning. The asteroid, 2014 JO25, which is approximately 2,000 feet end-to-end, was about 1.1 million miles away when it passed by on Wednesday morning. \u201cWe\u2019re safe. From this one.\u201d",
        "author": "By Jonah Engel Bromwich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroid Misses Earth Narrowly, by Cosmic Standards (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5395",
        "date": "2017-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/science/asteroid-earth-nasa.html",
        "text": "The asteroid, 2014 JO25, which is approximately 2,000 feet end-to-end, was about 1.1 million miles away when it passed by on Wednesday morning. The asteroid, 2014 JO25, which is approximately 2,000 feet end-to-end, was about 1.1 million miles away when it passed by on Wednesday morning. \u201cWe\u2019re safe. From this one.\u201d",
        "author": "By Jonah Engel Bromwich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroid Misses Earth Narrowly, by Cosmic Standards (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5396",
        "date": "2017-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/science/asteroid-earth-nasa.html",
        "text": "The asteroid, 2014 JO25, which is approximately 2,000 feet end-to-end, was about 1.1 million miles away when it passed by on Wednesday morning. The asteroid, 2014 JO25, which is approximately 2,000 feet end-to-end, was about 1.1 million miles away when it passed by on Wednesday morning. \u201cWe\u2019re safe. From this one.\u201d",
        "author": "By Jonah Engel Bromwich"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Gecko From Africa Crossed the Atlantic Ocean (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5397",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/science/african-house-geckos.html",
        "text": "The African house gecko, one of the most widely distributed invasive reptiles in the world, may have moved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The African house gecko, one of the most widely distributed invasive reptiles in the world, may have moved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. If you see a gecko scampering up the side of a house in Florida or somewhere in Central or South America closer to the Equator, there is good chance it is an African house gecko, Hemidactylus mabouia.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Gecko From Africa Crossed the Atlantic Ocean (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5398",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/science/african-house-geckos.html",
        "text": "The African house gecko, one of the most widely distributed invasive reptiles in the world, may have moved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The African house gecko, one of the most widely distributed invasive reptiles in the world, may have moved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. If you see a gecko scampering up the side of a house in Florida or somewhere in Central or South America closer to the Equator, there is good chance it is an African house gecko, Hemidactylus mabouia.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, Longevity Expert, Dies at (or Lives to) 105 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5399",
        "date": "2017-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/science/shigheaki-hinohara-dead-doctor-promoted-longevity-in-japan.html",
        "text": "The advice of Dr. Hinohara, who cautioned against early retirement and advocated climbing stairs regularly, helped make Japan the world leader in longevity. The advice of Dr. Hinohara, who cautioned against early retirement and advocated climbing stairs regularly, helped make Japan the world leader in longevity. Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, who cautioned against gluttony and early retirement and vigorously championed annual medical checkups, climbing stairs regularly and just having fun \u2014 advice that helped make Japan the world leader in longevity \u2014 died on July 18 in Tokyo. Dutifully practicing the credo of physician heal thyself, he lived to 105.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune\u2019s Moon Triton Is Destination of Proposed NASA Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5400",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/triton-neptune-nasa-trident.html",
        "text": "Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. HOUSTON \u2014 Is it time to go back to Neptune?",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune\u2019s Moon Triton Is Destination of Proposed NASA Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5401",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/triton-neptune-nasa-trident.html",
        "text": "Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. HOUSTON \u2014 Is it time to go back to Neptune?",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune\u2019s Moon Triton Is Destination of Proposed NASA Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5402",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/triton-neptune-nasa-trident.html",
        "text": "Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. HOUSTON \u2014 Is it time to go back to Neptune?",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neptune\u2019s Moon Triton Is Destination of Proposed NASA Mission (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5403",
        "date": "2019-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/science/triton-neptune-nasa-trident.html",
        "text": "Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. Scientists at a conference in Houston presented the concept for a flyby mission to study a mysterious moon that may contain an ocean. HOUSTON \u2014 Is it time to go back to Neptune?",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "The U.S. Is Getting Shorter, as Mapmakers Race to Keep Up (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5404",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/maps-elevation-geodetic-survey.html",
        "text": "Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It\u2019s not shrinkage \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cheight modernization.\u201d Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It\u2019s not shrinkage \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cheight modernization.\u201d Height is height, right? Look at a Manhattan skyscraper, or the Washington Monument, or a mountain peak in California, and you imagine that it will be the same height tomorrow as it is today.",
        "author": "By Alanna Mitchell"
    },
    {
        "title": "The U.S. Is Getting Shorter, as Mapmakers Race to Keep Up (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5405",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/maps-elevation-geodetic-survey.html",
        "text": "Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It\u2019s not shrinkage \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cheight modernization.\u201d Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It\u2019s not shrinkage \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cheight modernization.\u201d Height is height, right? Look at a Manhattan skyscraper, or the Washington Monument, or a mountain peak in California, and you imagine that it will be the same height tomorrow as it is today.",
        "author": "By Alanna Mitchell"
    },
    {
        "title": "The U.S. Is Getting Shorter, as Mapmakers Race to Keep Up (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5406",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/maps-elevation-geodetic-survey.html",
        "text": "Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It\u2019s not shrinkage \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cheight modernization.\u201d Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It\u2019s not shrinkage \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cheight modernization.\u201d Height is height, right? Look at a Manhattan skyscraper, or the Washington Monument, or a mountain peak in California, and you imagine that it will be the same height tomorrow as it is today.",
        "author": "By Alanna Mitchell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Soap, Detergent and Even Laxatives Could Turbocharge a Battery Alternative (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5407",
        "date": "2019-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/science/batteries-supercapacitors.html",
        "text": "Researchers are trying to develop options to lithium-ion and other batteries in a quest for quick bursts of power and extended energy storage. Researchers are trying to develop options to lithium-ion and other batteries in a quest for quick bursts of power and extended energy storage. Living in a world with smartphones, laptops and cars powered by batteries means putting up with two things: waiting for a depleted battery to charge, and charging it more frequently when its once-long life inevitably shortens. ",
        "author": "By XiaoZhi Lim"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Northern and Southern Lights Are Asymmetric Dancers in the Dark (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5408",
        "date": "2019-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/science/northern-lights-southern-lights.html",
        "text": "Our planet\u2019s auroras do not mirror one another, and their varying shapes result from the interplay of the sun and Earth\u2019s magnetic fields. Our planet\u2019s auroras do not mirror one another, and their varying shapes result from the interplay of the sun and Earth\u2019s magnetic fields. Earth\u2019s auroras, popularly known as the Northern and Southern Lights, are indisputably beautiful. They are also, perhaps surprisingly, not mirror images.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Our Moonshot for the Stage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5409",
        "date": "2019-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/science/apollo-11-play.html",
        "text": "On Sunday night, The Times presents a play, built from the words of the men and women who made the Apollo missions happen. On Sunday night, The Times presents a play, built from the words of the men and women who made the Apollo missions happen. At 2:56 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time on July 21, 1969, humans for the first time stepped onto another world. It was a kind of awakening. More than 500 million people around the world watched the event live on television \u2014 the largest-ever broadcast audience at the time \u2014 and tens of millions more listened on the radio. All with the same perspective: of the moon, symbol of the unattainable, attained; and of our own Earth, a pale blue dot in the vast emptiness of space.",
        "author": "By Alan Burdick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Our Moonshot for the Stage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5410",
        "date": "2019-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/science/apollo-11-play.html",
        "text": "On Sunday night, The Times presents a play, built from the words of the men and women who made the Apollo missions happen. On Sunday night, The Times presents a play, built from the words of the men and women who made the Apollo missions happen. At 2:56 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time on July 21, 1969, humans for the first time stepped onto another world. It was a kind of awakening. More than 500 million people around the world watched the event live on television \u2014 the largest-ever broadcast audience at the time \u2014 and tens of millions more listened on the radio. All with the same perspective: of the moon, symbol of the unattainable, attained; and of our own Earth, a pale blue dot in the vast emptiness of space.",
        "author": "By Alan Burdick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Our Moonshot for the Stage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5411",
        "date": "2019-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/science/apollo-11-play.html",
        "text": "On Sunday night, The Times presents a play, built from the words of the men and women who made the Apollo missions happen. On Sunday night, The Times presents a play, built from the words of the men and women who made the Apollo missions happen. At 2:56 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time on July 21, 1969, humans for the first time stepped onto another world. It was a kind of awakening. More than 500 million people around the world watched the event live on television \u2014 the largest-ever broadcast audience at the time \u2014 and tens of millions more listened on the radio. All with the same perspective: of the moon, symbol of the unattainable, attained; and of our own Earth, a pale blue dot in the vast emptiness of space.",
        "author": "By Alan Burdick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Picks 18-Year-Old Dutch Student for Blue Origin Rocket Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5412",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/science/jeff-bezos-oliver-daemen-space.html",
        "text": "Oliver Daemen will fly to the edge of space after another passenger who paid $28 million for the seat had a scheduling conflict. Oliver Daemen will fly to the edge of space after another passenger who paid $28 million for the seat had a scheduling conflict. Someone paid $28 million to not go to space with Jeff Bezos next week. Instead, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands will join the flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Picks 18-Year-Old Dutch Student for Blue Origin Rocket Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5413",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/science/jeff-bezos-oliver-daemen-space.html",
        "text": "Oliver Daemen will fly to the edge of space after another passenger who paid $28 million for the seat had a scheduling conflict. Oliver Daemen will fly to the edge of space after another passenger who paid $28 million for the seat had a scheduling conflict. Someone paid $28 million to not go to space with Jeff Bezos next week. Instead, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands will join the flight.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "States Confront the Spread of a Deadly Disease in Deer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5414",
        "date": "2018-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/science/chronic-wasting-disease-deer.html",
        "text": "Montana is the latest Western state to discover animals infected with chronic wasting disease. It may decimate herds and, biologists say, invade Yellowstone. Montana is the latest Western state to discover animals infected with chronic wasting disease. It may decimate herds and, biologists say, invade Yellowstone. JOLIET, Mont. \u2014 As darkness closed in, one hunter after another stopped at this newly opened game check station, deer carcasses loaded in the beds of their pickups.",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eta Aquarids: Watch Halley\u2019s Comet\u2019s Meteor Shower Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5415",
        "date": "2020-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/science/eta-aquarids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geminids Meteor Shower 2020: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5416",
        "date": "2020-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/science/geminid-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Watch the Geminids Meteor Shower 2019 This Weekend (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5417",
        "date": "2019-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/science/geminids-meteor-shower-2019.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Leonids Meteor Shower 2020: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5418",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/science/leonids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Leonids Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5419",
        "date": "2019-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/16/science/leonids-meteor-shower-2019.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lyrid Meteor Shower 2020: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5420",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/science/lyrids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Orionids Meteor Shower 2020: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5421",
        "date": "2020-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/science/orionids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perseid Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5422",
        "date": "2019-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/science/meteor-shower-perseids.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perseid Meteor Shower: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5423",
        "date": "2020-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/science/perseid-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quadrantids Meteor Shower 2020: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5424",
        "date": "2020-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/science/quadrantids-meteor-shower-2020.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lyrids Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5425",
        "date": "2021-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/science/lyrid-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Quadrantids Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5426",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/science/quadrantids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ursids Meteor Shower 2019: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5427",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/science/ursids-meteor-shower-2019.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the Eta Aquariids Meteor Shower Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5428",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/science/eta-aquarids-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the Perseids Meteor Shower Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5429",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/science/perseid-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the Southern Delta Aquariids Meteor Shower Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5430",
        "date": "2021-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/28/science/meteor-shower-july.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geminids Meteor Shower 2020: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5431",
        "date": "2020-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/science/geminid-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. Meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Station Could Be Split to Aid Privatization, New NASA Chief Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5432",
        "date": "2018-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/science/space-station-nasa-bridenstine.html",
        "text": "Jim Bridenstine, the agency\u2019s new administrator, said he is considering various ways to allow private companies to assume operation of the space station. Jim Bridenstine, the agency\u2019s new administrator, said he is considering various ways to allow private companies to assume operation of the space station. WASHINGTON \u2014 NASA is working on plans to commercialize the International Space Station, which currently costs up to $4 billion a year to maintain, the agency\u2019s new administrator said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Emily Baumgaertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Station Could Be Split to Aid Privatization, New NASA Chief Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5433",
        "date": "2018-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/science/space-station-nasa-bridenstine.html",
        "text": "Jim Bridenstine, the agency\u2019s new administrator, said he is considering various ways to allow private companies to assume operation of the space station. Jim Bridenstine, the agency\u2019s new administrator, said he is considering various ways to allow private companies to assume operation of the space station. WASHINGTON \u2014 NASA is working on plans to commercialize the International Space Station, which currently costs up to $4 billion a year to maintain, the agency\u2019s new administrator said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Emily Baumgaertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Station Could Be Split to Aid Privatization, New NASA Chief Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5434",
        "date": "2018-06-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/science/space-station-nasa-bridenstine.html",
        "text": "Jim Bridenstine, the agency\u2019s new administrator, said he is considering various ways to allow private companies to assume operation of the space station. Jim Bridenstine, the agency\u2019s new administrator, said he is considering various ways to allow private companies to assume operation of the space station. WASHINGTON \u2014 NASA is working on plans to commercialize the International Space Station, which currently costs up to $4 billion a year to maintain, the agency\u2019s new administrator said on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Emily Baumgaertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded for 3D Views of Life\u2019s Biological Machinery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5435",
        "date": "2017-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/science/nobel-prize-chemistry.html",
        "text": "Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson developed a process that may lead to \u201cdetailed images of life\u2019s complex machineries,\u201d the committee said. Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson developed a process that may lead to \u201cdetailed images of life\u2019s complex machineries,\u201d the committee said. Three European-born scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing a new way to assemble precise three-dimensional images of biological molecules like proteins, DNA and RNA.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Spied on Soviet Atomic Bombs. Now It\u2019s Solving Ecological Mysteries. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5436",
        "date": "2021-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/science/corona-satellites-environment.html",
        "text": "Imagery from the Cold War\u2019s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century. Imagery from the Cold War\u2019s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century. Not being able to see the forest for the trees isn\u2019t just a colloquialism for Mihai Nita \u2014 it\u2019s a professional disadvantage.",
        "author": "By Marion Renault"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Spied on Soviet Atomic Bombs. Now It\u2019s Solving Ecological Mysteries. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5437",
        "date": "2021-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/science/corona-satellites-environment.html",
        "text": "Imagery from the Cold War\u2019s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century. Imagery from the Cold War\u2019s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century. Not being able to see the forest for the trees isn\u2019t just a colloquialism for Mihai Nita \u2014 it\u2019s a professional disadvantage.",
        "author": "By Marion Renault"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Spied on Soviet Atomic Bombs. Now It\u2019s Solving Ecological Mysteries. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5438",
        "date": "2021-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/science/corona-satellites-environment.html",
        "text": "Imagery from the Cold War\u2019s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century. Imagery from the Cold War\u2019s Corona satellites is helping scientists fill in how we have changed our planet in the past half century. Not being able to see the forest for the trees isn\u2019t just a colloquialism for Mihai Nita \u2014 it\u2019s a professional disadvantage.",
        "author": "By Marion Renault"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dinosaurs Might Not Be Extinct Had the Asteroid Struck Elsewhere (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5439",
        "date": "2017-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/science/dinosaurs-asteroid-chicxulub-extinction.html",
        "text": "Had the asteroid that doomed dinosaurs crashed nearly anywhere other than the coast of Mexico, they might not have gone extinct, researchers say. Had the asteroid that doomed dinosaurs crashed nearly anywhere other than the coast of Mexico, they might not have gone extinct, researchers say. Dinosaurs reigned supreme for more than 160 million years. Their dynasty came to a cataclysmic close 66 million years ago when an asteroid crashed into the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula in Mexico at a site now known as the Chicxulub crater, paving the way for mammals \u2014 and eventually humans \u2014 to inherit the Earth.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bubble Subs Arise, Opening Eyes to the Deep Sea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5440",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/science/bubble-submarines-sea-exploration.html",
        "text": "Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Bruce H. Robison, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, began prowling the deep Pacific in a revolutionary craft in 1985. It was essentially a giant bubble of clear plastic that gave its occupant stunning panoramic views, instead of requiring them to peer through a tiny porthole.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bubble Subs Arise, Opening Eyes to the Deep Sea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5441",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/science/bubble-submarines-sea-exploration.html",
        "text": "Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Bruce H. Robison, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, began prowling the deep Pacific in a revolutionary craft in 1985. It was essentially a giant bubble of clear plastic that gave its occupant stunning panoramic views, instead of requiring them to peer through a tiny porthole.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bubble Subs Arise, Opening Eyes to the Deep Sea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5442",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/science/bubble-submarines-sea-exploration.html",
        "text": "Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Bruce H. Robison, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, began prowling the deep Pacific in a revolutionary craft in 1985. It was essentially a giant bubble of clear plastic that gave its occupant stunning panoramic views, instead of requiring them to peer through a tiny porthole.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bubble Subs Arise, Opening Eyes to the Deep Sea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5443",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/science/bubble-submarines-sea-exploration.html",
        "text": "Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Bruce H. Robison, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, began prowling the deep Pacific in a revolutionary craft in 1985. It was essentially a giant bubble of clear plastic that gave its occupant stunning panoramic views, instead of requiring them to peer through a tiny porthole.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bubble Subs Arise, Opening Eyes to the Deep Sea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5444",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/science/bubble-submarines-sea-exploration.html",
        "text": "Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Giant plastic spheres, with walls six inches thick or more, are making the depths of the ocean, and its strange denizens, more accessible. Bruce H. Robison, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, began prowling the deep Pacific in a revolutionary craft in 1985. It was essentially a giant bubble of clear plastic that gave its occupant stunning panoramic views, instead of requiring them to peer through a tiny porthole.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Strange Mammals That Stumped Darwin Finally Find a Home (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5445",
        "date": "2017-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/science/macrauchenia-darwin-mammal-tree-of-life.html",
        "text": "Fossils of bizarre creatures called Macrauchenia have long baffled scientists, who used DNA to confirm when they diverged from horses, rhinos and tapirs. Fossils of bizarre creatures called Macrauchenia have long baffled scientists, who used DNA to confirm when they diverged from horses, rhinos and tapirs. It looked like many different animals and, at the same time, like no other animal at all.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bluebonnet Season Came Early in Texas This Spring (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5446",
        "date": "2017-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/science/bluebonnet-season-came-early-in-texas-this-spring.html",
        "text": "Flowering plants that are blue are rare in nature. But Texas bluebonnets put on an annual show in pastures, parks and highway medians. Flowering plants that are blue are rare in nature. But Texas bluebonnets put on an annual show in pastures, parks and highway medians. Every year in Texas, millions of bluebonnets bloom after warm weather, just at the cusp of spring. Bumpy blankets of blue spread across pastures, parks and highway shoulders. And because of a series of warm days in February, this year\u2019s show has already begun. It\u2019s expected to peak in the next week or two, so grab your camera and hop in the car \u2014 it\u2019s time to get out there and find them.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dr. Lewis Rowland, Leading Neurologist on Nerve and Muscle Diseases, Dies at 91 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5447",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/science/lewis-rowland-dead-columbia-university-neurologist.html",
        "text": "Dr. Rowland, who had a special interest in A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, refused to be interrogated by investigators in the McCarthy era. Dr. Rowland, who had a special interest in A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, refused to be interrogated by investigators in the McCarthy era. Dr. Lewis P. Rowland, a neurologist who made fundamental discoveries in nerve and muscle diseases and clashed with government investigators during the McCarthy era, died on March 16 in Manhattan. He was 91.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "Putting the Compression in Compressed Air (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5448",
        "date": "2017-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/10/science/compressed-air.html",
        "text": "Creating compressed air relies on raising the pressure on the air while decreasing the volume of the container in which it is held. Creating compressed air relies on raising the pressure on the air while decreasing the volume of the container in which it is held. Q. How does compressed air get compressed?",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saturn\u2019s Rings Are Like a Seismometer That Reveal the Planet\u2019s Core (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5449",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/science/saturn-rings-core.html",
        "text": "Convulsions in the planet\u2019s interior are picked up in the region known as the C ring, and help scientists understand what lies within. Convulsions in the planet\u2019s interior are picked up in the region known as the C ring, and help scientists understand what lies within. Saturn\u2019s icy rings are not just aesthetically wondrous marvels. One of them also records a beautiful planetary soundtrack.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saturn\u2019s Rings Are Like a Seismometer That Reveal the Planet\u2019s Core (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5450",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/science/saturn-rings-core.html",
        "text": "Convulsions in the planet\u2019s interior are picked up in the region known as the C ring, and help scientists understand what lies within. Convulsions in the planet\u2019s interior are picked up in the region known as the C ring, and help scientists understand what lies within. Saturn\u2019s icy rings are not just aesthetically wondrous marvels. One of them also records a beautiful planetary soundtrack.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon to Launch First Two Internet Satellites in 2022 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5451",
        "date": "2021-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/science/amazon-satellite-launch.html",
        "text": "Competing with SpaceX, OneWeb and others, the e-commerce titan will rely on small rockets to get prototypes of its satellite constellation into space. Competing with SpaceX, OneWeb and others, the e-commerce titan will rely on small rockets to get prototypes of its satellite constellation into space. Amazon is getting ready to go to space.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon to Launch First Two Internet Satellites in 2022 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5452",
        "date": "2021-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/science/amazon-satellite-launch.html",
        "text": "Competing with SpaceX, OneWeb and others, the e-commerce titan will rely on small rockets to get prototypes of its satellite constellation into space. Competing with SpaceX, OneWeb and others, the e-commerce titan will rely on small rockets to get prototypes of its satellite constellation into space. Amazon is getting ready to go to space.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "On Ecstasy, Octopuses Reached Out for a Hug (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5453",
        "date": "2018-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/science/octopus-ecstasy-mdma.html",
        "text": "By dosing the tentacled creatures with MDMA, researchers found they share parts of an ancient messaging system involved in social behaviors with humans. By dosing the tentacled creatures with MDMA, researchers found they share parts of an ancient messaging system involved in social behaviors with humans. Octopuses are smart. They open jars, steal fish and high-five each other.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Forest Submerged 60,000 Years Ago Could Save Your Life One Day (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5454",
        "date": "2020-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/science/underwater-forest-shipworms.html",
        "text": "Before this underwater forest disappears, scientists recently raced to search for shipworms and other sea life that might conceal medicine of the future. Before this underwater forest disappears, scientists recently raced to search for shipworms and other sea life that might conceal medicine of the future. DAUPHIN ISLAND, Ala. \u2014 It was 6 a.m. at the dock on a Tuesday in December, and the weather did not look promising. Fog hovered over the water, and the engine of the Research Vessel E.O. Wilson rumbled.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein and Annie Flanagan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Forest Submerged 60,000 Years Ago Could Save Your Life One Day (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5455",
        "date": "2020-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/science/underwater-forest-shipworms.html",
        "text": "Before this underwater forest disappears, scientists recently raced to search for shipworms and other sea life that might conceal medicine of the future. Before this underwater forest disappears, scientists recently raced to search for shipworms and other sea life that might conceal medicine of the future. DAUPHIN ISLAND, Ala. \u2014 It was 6 a.m. at the dock on a Tuesday in December, and the weather did not look promising. Fog hovered over the water, and the engine of the Research Vessel E.O. Wilson rumbled.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein and Annie Flanagan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Did Mistletoe Get Into the Treetops? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5456",
        "date": "2020-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/science/mistletoe-trees-evolution.html",
        "text": "Before someone hung it up in your home, some animal had to get it into the canopies where it thrives to this day. Before someone hung it up in your home, some animal had to get it into the canopies where it thrives to this day. It\u2019s unclear what trendsetter first hung up mistletoe. Some blame the ancient Greeks, who kissed under the plants during harvest festivals. Others pin it on first-century druids, who might have decorated their homes with them for good luck.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Pacific Island Could Resemble Ancient Martian Volcanoes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5457",
        "date": "2017-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/science/mars-volcanoes-tonga-island.html",
        "text": "An explosive volcanic eruption in 2014 resulted in a new addition to the Tonga Islands. Its shifting landscape could help scientists studying Mars. An explosive volcanic eruption in 2014 resulted in a new addition to the Tonga Islands. Its shifting landscape could help scientists studying Mars. NEW ORLEANS \u2014 How is a little Pacific island like the planet Mars?",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Crazy Jigsaw Puzzles\u2019 Improve Our Views of Coral Reefs (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5458",
        "date": "2017-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/science/coral-reefs-3d-photomosaics.html",
        "text": "An analysis of 3D photomosaics of reefs in the Pacific Ocean could help scientists better understand the health of coral around the world. An analysis of 3D photomosaics of reefs in the Pacific Ocean could help scientists better understand the health of coral around the world. A century ago, if you wanted to document ocean life, you\u2019d throw on a 60-pound glass helmet, dive in and sketch whatever passed by with a lead pencil on a zinc tablet. Today most scientists studying corals still dive with an hour\u2019s worth of oxygen and a plastic piece of paper, using their personal judgments to jot down all they can before the air runs out.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteor Showers in 2021 That Will Light Up Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5459",
        "date": "2021-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/2021-meteor-showers.html",
        "text": "All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s a list of some major meteor showers and how to spot them. All year long, Earth passes through streams of cosmic debris. Here\u2019s a list of some major meteor showers and how to spot them. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oxygen on Mars Adds to Atmospheric Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5460",
        "date": "2019-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/science/mars-oxygen-methane-curiosity-rover.html",
        "text": "After a perplexing methane burst was measured by NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover earlier this year, scientists were surprised again by variations in atmospheric oxygen. After a perplexing methane burst was measured by NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover earlier this year, scientists were surprised again by variations in atmospheric oxygen. There is not much air on Mars \u2014 the atmospheric pressure there is less than one one-hundredth of what we breathe on Earth \u2014 but what little is there has baffled planetary scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oxygen on Mars Adds to Atmospheric Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5461",
        "date": "2019-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/science/mars-oxygen-methane-curiosity-rover.html",
        "text": "After a perplexing methane burst was measured by NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover earlier this year, scientists were surprised again by variations in atmospheric oxygen. After a perplexing methane burst was measured by NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover earlier this year, scientists were surprised again by variations in atmospheric oxygen. There is not much air on Mars \u2014 the atmospheric pressure there is less than one one-hundredth of what we breathe on Earth \u2014 but what little is there has baffled planetary scientists.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ivory From Shipwreck Reveals Elephant Slaughter During Spice Trade (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5462",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/science/ivory-elephants-shipwreck.html",
        "text": "A trove from a Portuguese trading ship that sank in 1533 preserved genetic traces of whole lineages that have vanished from West Africa. A trove from a Portuguese trading ship that sank in 1533 preserved genetic traces of whole lineages that have vanished from West Africa. In 2008, workers searching for diamonds off the coast of Namibia found a different kind of treasure: hundreds of gold coins mixed with timber and other debris. They had stumbled upon Bom Jesus, a Portuguese trading vessel lost during a voyage to India in 1533. Among the 40 tons of cargo recovered from the sunken ship were more than 100 elephant tusks.",
        "author": "By Rachel Nuwer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ivory From Shipwreck Reveals Elephant Slaughter During Spice Trade (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5463",
        "date": "2020-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/science/ivory-elephants-shipwreck.html",
        "text": "A trove from a Portuguese trading ship that sank in 1533 preserved genetic traces of whole lineages that have vanished from West Africa. A trove from a Portuguese trading ship that sank in 1533 preserved genetic traces of whole lineages that have vanished from West Africa. In 2008, workers searching for diamonds off the coast of Namibia found a different kind of treasure: hundreds of gold coins mixed with timber and other debris. They had stumbled upon Bom Jesus, a Portuguese trading vessel lost during a voyage to India in 1533. Among the 40 tons of cargo recovered from the sunken ship were more than 100 elephant tusks.",
        "author": "By Rachel Nuwer"
    },
    {
        "title": "A School of Fish, Captured in a Fossil (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5464",
        "date": "2019-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/science/fossil-fish-school.html",
        "text": "A slab of rock and the methods used to study it could offer clues to when a behavior common in fishes first evolved. A slab of rock and the methods used to study it could offer clues to when a behavior common in fishes first evolved. Fish can band together, sometimes in the millions, to form a school or shoal. They will move as one, like a flock of birds, so long as each fish stays in line with the fish that surround it.",
        "author": "By Lucas Joel"
    },
    {
        "title": "What will it cost to fly Virgin Galactic to space? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5465",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/cost-to-fly-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "A short suborbital jaunt to the edge of space for most people requires having a lot of spare cash on hand, for now. A short suborbital jaunt to the edge of space for most people requires having a lot of spare cash on hand, for now. Not long after Richard Branson re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere on Sunday, he and other employees of his Virgin Galactic venture boasted that the company would greatly expand opportunities for the general public to travel to space. For the moment, those otherworldly views and feelings of weightlessness will still be held in rarefied air.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What will it cost to fly Virgin Galactic to space? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5466",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/cost-to-fly-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "A short suborbital jaunt to the edge of space for most people requires having a lot of spare cash on hand, for now. A short suborbital jaunt to the edge of space for most people requires having a lot of spare cash on hand, for now. Not long after Richard Branson re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere on Sunday, he and other employees of his Virgin Galactic venture boasted that the company would greatly expand opportunities for the general public to travel to space. For the moment, those otherworldly views and feelings of weightlessness will still be held in rarefied air.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What will it cost to fly Virgin Galactic to space? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5467",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/cost-to-fly-virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "A short suborbital jaunt to the edge of space for most people requires having a lot of spare cash on hand, for now. A short suborbital jaunt to the edge of space for most people requires having a lot of spare cash on hand, for now. Not long after Richard Branson re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere on Sunday, he and other employees of his Virgin Galactic venture boasted that the company would greatly expand opportunities for the general public to travel to space. For the moment, those otherworldly views and feelings of weightlessness will still be held in rarefied air.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Way to Fight Crop Diseases, With a Smartphone (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5468",
        "date": "2019-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/science/tomato-potato-agriculture-blight.html",
        "text": "A hand-held device could help farmers identify blighted plants, and perhaps reduce agricultural losses. It\u2019s like a strep test for tomatoes and tubers. A hand-held device could help farmers identify blighted plants, and perhaps reduce agricultural losses. It\u2019s like a strep test for tomatoes and tubers. Late blight is a common disease of plants such as tomatoes and potatoes, capable of wiping out entire crops on commercial-scale fields. Caused by a fungus-like pathogen, it first appears as black or brown lesions on leaves, stems, fruit or tubers. If conditions are favorable, it can quickly spread to other plants through wet soil and as wind-scattered spores.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Will Answer \u2018Heavenly Question\u2019: Can It Land on Mars? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5469",
        "date": "2020-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/science/china-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "A goal of the Tianwen-1 launch is to catch up with decades of American success on the red planet, all in one mission. A goal of the Tianwen-1 launch is to catch up with decades of American success on the red planet, all in one mission. Having already joined the upper ranks of spacefaring nations, China is preparing to try its next bold leap: launching an orbiter, a lander and a rover to Mars.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Will Answer \u2018Heavenly Question\u2019: Can It Land on Mars? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5470",
        "date": "2020-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/science/china-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "A goal of the Tianwen-1 launch is to catch up with decades of American success on the red planet, all in one mission. A goal of the Tianwen-1 launch is to catch up with decades of American success on the red planet, all in one mission. Having already joined the upper ranks of spacefaring nations, China is preparing to try its next bold leap: launching an orbiter, a lander and a rover to Mars.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Will Answer \u2018Heavenly Question\u2019: Can It Land on Mars? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5471",
        "date": "2020-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/science/china-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "A goal of the Tianwen-1 launch is to catch up with decades of American success on the red planet, all in one mission. A goal of the Tianwen-1 launch is to catch up with decades of American success on the red planet, all in one mission. Having already joined the upper ranks of spacefaring nations, China is preparing to try its next bold leap: launching an orbiter, a lander and a rover to Mars.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Loses Legal Fight Over SpaceX\u2019s NASA Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5472",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-moon-contract.html",
        "text": "A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge on Thursday rejected Jeff Bezos\u2019 latest legal attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s multibillion-dollar moon lander contract with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. The decision ended a monthslong battle between the space companies of two of the world\u2019s richest men that posed a significant obstacle to NASA\u2019s plans for returning humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Loses Legal Fight Over SpaceX\u2019s NASA Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5473",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-moon-contract.html",
        "text": "A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge on Thursday rejected Jeff Bezos\u2019 latest legal attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s multibillion-dollar moon lander contract with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. The decision ended a monthslong battle between the space companies of two of the world\u2019s richest men that posed a significant obstacle to NASA\u2019s plans for returning humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Loses Legal Fight Over SpaceX\u2019s NASA Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5474",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-moon-contract.html",
        "text": "A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge on Thursday rejected Jeff Bezos\u2019 latest legal attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s multibillion-dollar moon lander contract with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. The decision ended a monthslong battle between the space companies of two of the world\u2019s richest men that posed a significant obstacle to NASA\u2019s plans for returning humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Loses Legal Fight Over SpaceX\u2019s NASA Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5475",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-moon-contract.html",
        "text": "A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge on Thursday rejected Jeff Bezos\u2019 latest legal attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s multibillion-dollar moon lander contract with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. The decision ended a monthslong battle between the space companies of two of the world\u2019s richest men that posed a significant obstacle to NASA\u2019s plans for returning humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Loses Legal Fight Over SpaceX\u2019s NASA Moon Contract (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5476",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-moon-contract.html",
        "text": "A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge rejected the argument by Jeff Bezos\u2019 rocket company that NASA unfairly awarded a lunar lander contract to Elon Musk\u2019s firm. A federal judge on Thursday rejected Jeff Bezos\u2019 latest legal attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s multibillion-dollar moon lander contract with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. The decision ended a monthslong battle between the space companies of two of the world\u2019s richest men that posed a significant obstacle to NASA\u2019s plans for returning humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on Set: Space Station May Host Wave of TV Shows and Films (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5477",
        "date": "2021-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/science/space-station-reality-tv-movies.html",
        "text": "A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. [Follow live updates from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceflight.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on Set: Space Station May Host Wave of TV Shows and Films (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5478",
        "date": "2021-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/science/space-station-reality-tv-movies.html",
        "text": "A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. [Follow live updates from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceflight.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on Set: Space Station May Host Wave of TV Shows and Films (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5479",
        "date": "2021-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/science/space-station-reality-tv-movies.html",
        "text": "A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. [Follow live updates from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceflight.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on Set: Space Station May Host Wave of TV Shows and Films (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5480",
        "date": "2021-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/science/space-station-reality-tv-movies.html",
        "text": "A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. [Follow live updates from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceflight.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on Set: Space Station May Host Wave of TV Shows and Films (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5481",
        "date": "2021-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/science/space-station-reality-tv-movies.html",
        "text": "A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year. [Follow live updates from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceflight.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Searching for Bird Life in a Former \u2018Ocean of Forest\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5482",
        "date": "2021-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/science/colombia-birds-expedition.html",
        "text": "A century after museum collectors surveyed Colombia\u2019s avian fauna, a new generation of researchers returns to see what remains, and what has changed. A century after museum collectors surveyed Colombia\u2019s avian fauna, a new generation of researchers returns to see what remains, and what has changed. FLORENCIA, Colombia \u2014 In June 1912, Leo Miller, a collector with the American Museum of Natural History, arrived in the Caqueta\u0301 region of Colombia, where the eastern foothills of the Andes melt into the forested lowlands of the Amazon basin.",
        "author": "By Jennie Erin Smith and Federico Rios"
    },
    {
        "title": "Searching for Bird Life in a Former \u2018Ocean of Forest\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5483",
        "date": "2021-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/science/colombia-birds-expedition.html",
        "text": "A century after museum collectors surveyed Colombia\u2019s avian fauna, a new generation of researchers returns to see what remains, and what has changed. A century after museum collectors surveyed Colombia\u2019s avian fauna, a new generation of researchers returns to see what remains, and what has changed. FLORENCIA, Colombia \u2014 In June 1912, Leo Miller, a collector with the American Museum of Natural History, arrived in the Caqueta\u0301 region of Colombia, where the eastern foothills of the Andes melt into the forested lowlands of the Amazon basin.",
        "author": "By Jennie Erin Smith and Federico Rios"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the 3 Spacecraft That Made It to Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5484",
        "date": "2020-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/mars-perseverance-tianwen-hope.html",
        "text": "Three missions launched to Mars last summer, and have now arrived. They carry a wide array of instruments to explore the red planet. Three missions launched to Mars last summer, and have now arrived. They carry a wide array of instruments to explore the red planet. Three missions launched to Mars last summer, and have now arrived. They carry a wide array of instruments to explore the red planet.",
        "author": "By Eleanor Lutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the 3 Spacecraft That Made It to Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5485",
        "date": "2020-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/mars-perseverance-tianwen-hope.html",
        "text": "Three missions launched to Mars last summer, and have now arrived. They carry a wide array of instruments to explore the red planet. Three missions launched to Mars last summer, and have now arrived. They carry a wide array of instruments to explore the red planet. Three missions launched to Mars last summer, and have now arrived. They carry a wide array of instruments to explore the red planet.",
        "author": "By Eleanor Lutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Helicopter Flies on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5486",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/19/science/mars-helicopter-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "NASA on Monday hailed its \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d when a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity took off on Mars. Here\u2019s what to know. NASA on Monday hailed its \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d when a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity took off on Mars. Here\u2019s what to know. NASA on Monday hailed its \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d when a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity took off on Mars. Here\u2019s what to know.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Helicopter Flies on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5487",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/19/science/mars-helicopter-ingenuity.html",
        "text": "NASA on Monday hailed its \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d when a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity took off on Mars. Here\u2019s what to know. NASA on Monday hailed its \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d when a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity took off on Mars. Here\u2019s what to know. NASA on Monday hailed its \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d when a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity took off on Mars. Here\u2019s what to know.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5488",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds.html",
        "text": "The detection of a gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere could turn scientists\u2019 gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life. The detection of a gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere could turn scientists\u2019 gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life. High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone, Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5489",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds.html",
        "text": "The detection of a gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere could turn scientists\u2019 gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life. The detection of a gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere could turn scientists\u2019 gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life. High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone, Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5490",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds.html",
        "text": "The detection of a gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere could turn scientists\u2019 gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life. The detection of a gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere could turn scientists\u2019 gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life. High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone, Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Don\u2019t Need a Spaceship to Grow \u2018Weird Little\u2019 Martian Radishes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5491",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/science/moon-mars-titan-simulations.html",
        "text": "Scientists on this planet have worked out a variety of techniques to simulate the conditions of other worlds that are near and very far. Scientists on this planet have worked out a variety of techniques to simulate the conditions of other worlds that are near and very far. In the historical imagination, astronomers look through telescopes, and photonic wisdom pours in at the speed of light. Taking what they can get, they passively receive information about far-off stars and planets. These objects are fixed, and their conditions cannot be tweaked.",
        "author": "By Sarah Scoles"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Don\u2019t Need a Spaceship to Grow \u2018Weird Little\u2019 Martian Radishes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5492",
        "date": "2021-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/science/moon-mars-titan-simulations.html",
        "text": "Scientists on this planet have worked out a variety of techniques to simulate the conditions of other worlds that are near and very far. Scientists on this planet have worked out a variety of techniques to simulate the conditions of other worlds that are near and very far. In the historical imagination, astronomers look through telescopes, and photonic wisdom pours in at the speed of light. Taking what they can get, they passively receive information about far-off stars and planets. These objects are fixed, and their conditions cannot be tweaked.",
        "author": "By Sarah Scoles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Billionaire Arrives at Space Station for 12-Day Tourist Trip (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5493",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/science/yusaku-maezawa-space-station.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the clothing retailer Zozo, will spend 12 days in orbit with a production assistant who will document his stay. Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the clothing retailer Zozo, will spend 12 days in orbit with a production assistant who will document his stay. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and fashion retail mogul, arrived at the International Space Station for a 12-day stay on Wednesday. He is the latest privately funded traveler to the orbital laboratory in a year that has seen more tourists making voyages to space than ever before.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Billionaire Arrives at Space Station for 12-Day Tourist Trip (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5494",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/science/yusaku-maezawa-space-station.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the clothing retailer Zozo, will spend 12 days in orbit with a production assistant who will document his stay. Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the clothing retailer Zozo, will spend 12 days in orbit with a production assistant who will document his stay. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and fashion retail mogul, arrived at the International Space Station for a 12-day stay on Wednesday. He is the latest privately funded traveler to the orbital laboratory in a year that has seen more tourists making voyages to space than ever before.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Billionaire Arrives at Space Station for 12-Day Tourist Trip (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5495",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/science/yusaku-maezawa-space-station.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the clothing retailer Zozo, will spend 12 days in orbit with a production assistant who will document his stay. Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of the clothing retailer Zozo, will spend 12 days in orbit with a production assistant who will document his stay. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and fashion retail mogul, arrived at the International Space Station for a 12-day stay on Wednesday. He is the latest privately funded traveler to the orbital laboratory in a year that has seen more tourists making voyages to space than ever before.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Does Fluffy Really Want to Be an Adventure Cat? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5496",
        "date": "2019-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/science/cats-leashes-training.html",
        "text": "With a leash and a harness, any feline can safely explore the great outdoors. But owners need to be mindful of signs of stress. With a leash and a harness, any feline can safely explore the great outdoors. But owners need to be mindful of signs of stress. On a cool, partly cloudy day in October 2017, Malaya Fletcher was about to go hiking near a cabin in Pennsylvania. The only thing left to do was to get her cat, Copurrnicus, into his harness. When Ms. Fletcher secured the harness, the feline went immobile, and thudded on the ground.",
        "author": "By Wudan Yan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Curiosity Rover Weighed a Mountain on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5497",
        "date": "2019-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/science/mars-curiosity-rover-mount-sharp.html",
        "text": "With a bit of technical improvisation, scientists worked out that the bedrock of Mount Sharp appeared to be less dense than had been expected. With a bit of technical improvisation, scientists worked out that the bedrock of Mount Sharp appeared to be less dense than had been expected. A mountain on Mars that is almost as tall as Denali in Alaska appears to be surprisingly light, scientists reported on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Curiosity Rover Weighed a Mountain on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5498",
        "date": "2019-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/science/mars-curiosity-rover-mount-sharp.html",
        "text": "With a bit of technical improvisation, scientists worked out that the bedrock of Mount Sharp appeared to be less dense than had been expected. With a bit of technical improvisation, scientists worked out that the bedrock of Mount Sharp appeared to be less dense than had been expected. A mountain on Mars that is almost as tall as Denali in Alaska appears to be surprisingly light, scientists reported on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5499",
        "date": "2018-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/science/virosphere-evolution.html",
        "text": "Viruses shape the ecology of the planet, but scientists still have only a rudimentary understanding of the microbial impacts on animals, plants and ecosystems. Viruses shape the ecology of the planet, but scientists still have only a rudimentary understanding of the microbial impacts on animals, plants and ecosystems. High in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, an international team of researchers set out four buckets to gather a shower of viruses falling from the sky.",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Again Delays Launch of Troubled Webb Telescope; Cost Estimate Rises to $9.7 Billion (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5500",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/science/webb-telescope-nasa.html",
        "text": "The successor to the Hubble has had a series of mishaps during testing. An independent review board pushed back the launch for three years. The successor to the Hubble has had a series of mishaps during testing. An independent review board pushed back the launch for three years. In a blow to NASA\u2019s prestige and its budget, America\u2019s next great space telescope has been postponed again.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Again Delays Launch of Troubled Webb Telescope; Cost Estimate Rises to $9.7 Billion (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5501",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/science/webb-telescope-nasa.html",
        "text": "The successor to the Hubble has had a series of mishaps during testing. An independent review board pushed back the launch for three years. The successor to the Hubble has had a series of mishaps during testing. An independent review board pushed back the launch for three years. In a blow to NASA\u2019s prestige and its budget, America\u2019s next great space telescope has been postponed again.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Again Delays Launch of Troubled Webb Telescope; Cost Estimate Rises to $9.7 Billion (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5502",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/science/webb-telescope-nasa.html",
        "text": "The successor to the Hubble has had a series of mishaps during testing. An independent review board pushed back the launch for three years. The successor to the Hubble has had a series of mishaps during testing. An independent review board pushed back the launch for three years. In a blow to NASA\u2019s prestige and its budget, America\u2019s next great space telescope has been postponed again.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Many \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans are eager to see William Shatner boldly go to space. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5503",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/star-trek-captain-kirk-william-shatner.html",
        "text": "The series\u2019 longtime viewers said they were excited to see the man who played Captain Kirk make science fiction seem a bit more real. The series\u2019 longtime viewers said they were excited to see the man who played Captain Kirk make science fiction seem a bit more real. The voyages of Captain James T. Kirk and the starship Enterprise in the 1960s created a fandom that has expanded exponentially over the decades, much like the cute but deadly tribbles of the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d television series. Now many \u201cTrek\u201d fans are excited as William Shatner, the man who embodies that role, readies himself to venture into space \u2014 for real.",
        "author": "By Jacob Meschke"
    },
    {
        "title": "From \u2018Jeff who?\u2019 to \u2018Thank you.\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5504",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/jeff-bezos-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos over spaceflight is well known, but the two made nice on Twitter over the Inspiration4 launch. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos over spaceflight is well known, but the two made nice on Twitter over the Inspiration4 launch. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men. Both own private rocket companies. And in public, their relationship has been characterized by conflict.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "From \u2018Jeff who?\u2019 to \u2018Thank you.\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5505",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/jeff-bezos-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos over spaceflight is well known, but the two made nice on Twitter over the Inspiration4 launch. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos over spaceflight is well known, but the two made nice on Twitter over the Inspiration4 launch. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men. Both own private rocket companies. And in public, their relationship has been characterized by conflict.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "From \u2018Jeff who?\u2019 to \u2018Thank you.\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5506",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/science/jeff-bezos-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos over spaceflight is well known, but the two made nice on Twitter over the Inspiration4 launch. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos over spaceflight is well known, but the two made nice on Twitter over the Inspiration4 launch. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men. Both own private rocket companies. And in public, their relationship has been characterized by conflict.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thursday and Friday\u2019s Partial Lunar Eclipse Was the Longest in 580 Years (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5507",
        "date": "2021-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/science/lunar-eclipse-full-moon-tonight.html",
        "text": "The partial eclipse will turn the moon rusty reddish hues and be visible across North America and parts of South America, Asia and Australia. The partial eclipse will turn the moon rusty reddish hues and be visible across North America and parts of South America, Asia and Australia. When the moon shines in night skies on Thursday into the early hours of Friday morning, you will get a chance to witness a celestial phenomenon not seen since the 1440s.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Nominee, Jim Bridenstine, Confirmed by Senate on Party-Line Vote (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5508",
        "date": "2018-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/science/jim-bridenstine-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Oklahoma congressman\u2019s nomination languished for more than seven months as senators raised objections to his record, and now additional concerns have been raised. The Oklahoma congressman\u2019s nomination languished for more than seven months as senators raised objections to his record, and now additional concerns have been raised. Seven and a half months after being nominated to lead NASA, Jim Bridenstine finally gets to start his new job. His confirmation following a vote in the Senate ends the longest span of time that NASA has operated without a permanent leader, and comes with a vivid reminder that few posts in Washington are now spared from partisan conflict.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nice Eclipse Photo, Though It Surely Falls Short of the Real Thing (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5509",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/science/nice-eclipse-photo-though-it-surely-falls-short-of-the-real-thing.html",
        "text": "The light and dark created when the moon blocks the sun create great confusion for human vision \u2014 and for the machines we make. The light and dark created when the moon blocks the sun create great confusion for human vision \u2014 and for the machines we make. Millions of people equipped with cameras, eclipse glasses, welder\u2019s helmets and homemade projectors (but hopefully not their own unprotected eyes) took in the total eclipse on Monday. At its peak along the path of totality, the moon became a dark disc, encircled all the way around by a bright, white light. The sun\u2019s corona seemed to stretch out, as if trying to grasp the stars and planets that were suddenly visible.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robert P. Langlands Is Awarded the Abel Prize, a Top Math Honor (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5510",
        "date": "2018-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/robert-langlands-abel-prize-mathematics.html",
        "text": "The honor, regarded by some as a Nobel Prize of mathematics, recognizes work on a \u201cgrand unified theory\u201d to connect different areas of mathematics. The honor, regarded by some as a Nobel Prize of mathematics, recognizes work on a \u201cgrand unified theory\u201d to connect different areas of mathematics. In 1967, Robert P. Langlands set out a road map to prove a \u201cgrand unified theory\u201d that would tie together disparate areas of mathematics.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Clues to Longevity in Lonesome George\u2019s Genes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5511",
        "date": "2018-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/science/lonesome-george-tortoise.html",
        "text": "The giant tortoise lived for more than a century, carrying genes linked to a robust immune system, efficient DNA repair and resistance to cancer. The giant tortoise lived for more than a century, carrying genes linked to a robust immune system, efficient DNA repair and resistance to cancer. When Lonesome George, the only survivor of the Pinta Island tortoises of the Gal\u00e1pagos, died in 2012, the news landed with a blow.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "David Reich Unearths Human History Etched in Bone (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5512",
        "date": "2018-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/science/david-reich-human-migrations.html",
        "text": "The geneticist at Harvard Medical School has retrieved DNA from more than 900 ancient people. His findings trace the prehistoric migrations of our species. The geneticist at Harvard Medical School has retrieved DNA from more than 900 ancient people. His findings trace the prehistoric migrations of our species. BOSTON \u2014 David Reich wore a hooded, white suit, cream-colored clogs, and a blue surgical mask. Only his eyes were visible as he inspected the bone fragments on the counter.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Dirty Secrets Saved in Dead Birds\u2019 Feathers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5513",
        "date": "2017-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/science/birds-air-pollution.html",
        "text": "The feathers of birds preserved in natural history museum collections record changes to historical air quality across America\u2019s Rust Belt, a new study finds. The feathers of birds preserved in natural history museum collections record changes to historical air quality across America\u2019s Rust Belt, a new study finds. Tucked away in the drawers of natural history museums across America\u2019s Rust Belt, thousands of dead birds carry dirty secrets from America\u2019s polluted past.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Betelgeuse Merely Burped, Astronomers Conclude (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5514",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/science/betelgeuse-montarges-star-supernova.html",
        "text": "The dramatic dimming of the red supergiant in 2019 was the product of dust, not a prelude to destruction, a new study has found. The dramatic dimming of the red supergiant in 2019 was the product of dust, not a prelude to destruction, a new study has found. Betelgeuse, to put it most politely, burped.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Orionids Meteor Shower 2021: Watch It Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5515",
        "date": "2021-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/science/orionid-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "The celestial event caused by debris from Halley\u2019s comet will be most active overnight, but a nearly full moon could interfere with your view. The celestial event caused by debris from Halley\u2019s comet will be most active overnight, but a nearly full moon could interfere with your view. This latest episode of cosmic action in the night sky is the Orionids meteor shower. The monthlong event will peak overnight, on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX Test Rocket for Mars Goes Up Again, and Explodes Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5516",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/space/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "Something went wrong early for Starship, with shards of metal raining down around the launch site including debris that hit one of the cameras. Something went wrong early for Starship, with shards of metal raining down around the launch site including debris that hit one of the cameras. On Tuesday morning, for the fourth time, SpaceX attempted a high-altitude test of its next-generation rocket and for the fourth time, it exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX Test Rocket for Mars Goes Up Again, and Explodes Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5517",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/space/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "Something went wrong early for Starship, with shards of metal raining down around the launch site including debris that hit one of the cameras. Something went wrong early for Starship, with shards of metal raining down around the launch site including debris that hit one of the cameras. On Tuesday morning, for the fourth time, SpaceX attempted a high-altitude test of its next-generation rocket and for the fourth time, it exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX Test Rocket for Mars Goes Up Again, and Explodes Again (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5518",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/science/space/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "Something went wrong early for Starship, with shards of metal raining down around the launch site including debris that hit one of the cameras. Something went wrong early for Starship, with shards of metal raining down around the launch site including debris that hit one of the cameras. On Tuesday morning, for the fourth time, SpaceX attempted a high-altitude test of its next-generation rocket and for the fourth time, it exploded.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A 3D Encounter With a Violent Volcano\u2019s Underbelly (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5519",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/science/volcano-3d-reunion-island.html",
        "text": "Scientists spent days aboard a helicopter with special sensors over a volcano to develop a picture of how its insides affect its frequent eruptions. Scientists spent days aboard a helicopter with special sensors over a volcano to develop a picture of how its insides affect its frequent eruptions. R\u00e9union, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, is a jigsaw of two massive shield volcanoes. The younger, Piton de la Fournaise or \u201cpeak of the furnace,\u201d is a furious factory of lava, erupting every eight months on average over the last four decades.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "How an Icy Moon of Saturn Got Its Stripes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5520",
        "date": "2019-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/science/enceladus-stripes-moon.html",
        "text": "Scientists have developed an explanation for one of the most striking features of Enceladus, an ocean world that has the right ingredients for life. Scientists have developed an explanation for one of the most striking features of Enceladus, an ocean world that has the right ingredients for life. Of the strange and unexplained terrains in our solar system, the south pole of Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus is among the most perplexing.",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Settling Arguments About Hydrogen With 168 Giant Lasers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5521",
        "date": "2018-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/metallic-hydrogen-lasers.html",
        "text": "Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said they were \u201cconverging on the truth\u201d in an experiment to understand hydrogen in its liquid metallic state. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said they were \u201cconverging on the truth\u201d in an experiment to understand hydrogen in its liquid metallic state. With gentle pulses from gigantic lasers, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California transformed hydrogen into droplets of shiny liquid metal.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Settling Arguments About Hydrogen With 168 Giant Lasers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5522",
        "date": "2018-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/metallic-hydrogen-lasers.html",
        "text": "Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said they were \u201cconverging on the truth\u201d in an experiment to understand hydrogen in its liquid metallic state. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said they were \u201cconverging on the truth\u201d in an experiment to understand hydrogen in its liquid metallic state. With gentle pulses from gigantic lasers, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California transformed hydrogen into droplets of shiny liquid metal.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For a Day, Scientists Pause Science to Confront Racism (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5523",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/science-diversity-racism-protests.html",
        "text": "Scholars said they would not hold classes or lectures on Wednesday, and leading journals and scientific associations said they would not announce most breakthroughs. Scholars said they would not hold classes or lectures on Wednesday, and leading journals and scientific associations said they would not announce most breakthroughs. Galvanized by the reaction to the killing of George Floyd and continued reports that minority researchers feel marginalized and disrespected, almost 6,000 scientists and academicians said they would participate in a one-day strike on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "For a Day, Scientists Pause Science to Confront Racism (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5524",
        "date": "2020-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/science/science-diversity-racism-protests.html",
        "text": "Scholars said they would not hold classes or lectures on Wednesday, and leading journals and scientific associations said they would not announce most breakthroughs. Scholars said they would not hold classes or lectures on Wednesday, and leading journals and scientific associations said they would not announce most breakthroughs. Galvanized by the reaction to the killing of George Floyd and continued reports that minority researchers feel marginalized and disrespected, almost 6,000 scientists and academicians said they would participate in a one-day strike on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ice on the Surface of the Moon? Almost Certainly, New Research Shows (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5525",
        "date": "2018-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/science/ice-moon.html",
        "text": "Researchers don\u2019t know whether the ice water runs deep, like the tips of buried icebergs, or is as thin as a layer of frost. Researchers don\u2019t know whether the ice water runs deep, like the tips of buried icebergs, or is as thin as a layer of frost. There is almost certainly ice water on the surface of the moon, hiding in the cold, dark places near the north and south poles, a new study shows.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ice on the Surface of the Moon? Almost Certainly, New Research Shows (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5526",
        "date": "2018-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/science/ice-moon.html",
        "text": "Researchers don\u2019t know whether the ice water runs deep, like the tips of buried icebergs, or is as thin as a layer of frost. Researchers don\u2019t know whether the ice water runs deep, like the tips of buried icebergs, or is as thin as a layer of frost. There is almost certainly ice water on the surface of the moon, hiding in the cold, dark places near the north and south poles, a new study shows.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where\u2019s Our Warp Drive to the Stars? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5527",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/space-travel-physics.html",
        "text": "Physicists haven\u2019t given up on the dream of zipping around the universe. Now they\u2019ve come up with a far-out idea for making it happen. Physicists haven\u2019t given up on the dream of zipping around the universe. Now they\u2019ve come up with a far-out idea for making it happen.  In the sci-fi franchise \u201cStar Trek,\u201d the U.S.S. Enterprise zips back and forth across the universe, propelled by a \u201cwarp drive.\u201d Sadly for fans of space travel, that would seem to run counter to Einstein\u2019s equations, which generally prohibit faster-than-light journeys.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "6 Bots That Deliver Science and Serendipity on Twitter (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5528",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/science/twitter-bots-science.html",
        "text": "Not all bots on Twitter are out to spam, hack or misinform you. These science-themed bots dole out humor, factual information and galactic perspective. Not all bots on Twitter are out to spam, hack or misinform you. These science-themed bots dole out humor, factual information and galactic perspective. Not all Twitter bots are trying to spam, hack or peddle you fake news. Some are works of creativity, programmed to tweet diagrams of imaginary bird migrations or haikus composed of words scavenged from surveys of marine mammals.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Better Weather Forecasts, and These Pretty Pictures, Too (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5529",
        "date": "2017-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/science/noaa-goes-16-satellite-photos.html",
        "text": "NOAA released the first batch of images taken by its GOES-16 satellite, which it says is like going from black and white to HDTV. NOAA released the first batch of images taken by its GOES-16 satellite, which it says is like going from black and white to HDTV. Here\u2019s a reminder of how beautiful our planet is.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Missing Piece of the Moon May Be Following Earth Around the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5530",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/moon-kamooalewa-asteroid.html",
        "text": "New data suggest an object known as Kamo\u02bboalewa was shorn off the moon by a meteor impact before becoming a quasi-satellite of our planet. New data suggest an object known as Kamo\u02bboalewa was shorn off the moon by a meteor impact before becoming a quasi-satellite of our planet. Space is vast and lonely. It is perfectly understandable, then, that a little rock would decide to tag along with Earth and the moon on their yearly circumnavigation of the sun.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Missing Piece of the Moon May Be Following Earth Around the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5531",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/moon-kamooalewa-asteroid.html",
        "text": "New data suggest an object known as Kamo\u02bboalewa was shorn off the moon by a meteor impact before becoming a quasi-satellite of our planet. New data suggest an object known as Kamo\u02bboalewa was shorn off the moon by a meteor impact before becoming a quasi-satellite of our planet. Space is vast and lonely. It is perfectly understandable, then, that a little rock would decide to tag along with Earth and the moon on their yearly circumnavigation of the sun.",
        "author": "By Robin George Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Says Debris From Its Rocket Landed Near Maldives (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5532",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/science/china-rocket-reentry-falling-long-march-5b.html",
        "text": "Most of the debris burned up on re-entry Sunday morning, China said. The head of NASA accused it of \u201cfailing to meet responsible standards.\u201d Most of the debris burned up on re-entry Sunday morning, China said. The head of NASA accused it of \u201cfailing to meet responsible standards.\u201d Debris from a large Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives early Sunday morning, China\u2019s space administration announced. ",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Says Debris From Its Rocket Landed Near Maldives (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5533",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/science/china-rocket-reentry-falling-long-march-5b.html",
        "text": "Most of the debris burned up on re-entry Sunday morning, China said. The head of NASA accused it of \u201cfailing to meet responsible standards.\u201d Most of the debris burned up on re-entry Sunday morning, China said. The head of NASA accused it of \u201cfailing to meet responsible standards.\u201d Debris from a large Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives early Sunday morning, China\u2019s space administration announced. ",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Says Debris From Its Rocket Landed Near Maldives (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5534",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/science/china-rocket-reentry-falling-long-march-5b.html",
        "text": "Most of the debris burned up on re-entry Sunday morning, China said. The head of NASA accused it of \u201cfailing to meet responsible standards.\u201d Most of the debris burned up on re-entry Sunday morning, China said. The head of NASA accused it of \u201cfailing to meet responsible standards.\u201d Debris from a large Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives early Sunday morning, China\u2019s space administration announced. ",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "With a Poof, Mars Methane Is Gone (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5535",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/mars-methane-nasa.html",
        "text": "Last week, NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover detected a belch of natural gas on the red planet. The gas has since dissipated, leaving only a mystery. Last week, NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover detected a belch of natural gas on the red planet. The gas has since dissipated, leaving only a mystery. Mars gave a good burp last week, but the gas has come and gone, leaving scientists no closer to knowing whether there is life on or beneath the red planet.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "With a Poof, Mars Methane Is Gone (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5536",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/science/mars-methane-nasa.html",
        "text": "Last week, NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover detected a belch of natural gas on the red planet. The gas has since dissipated, leaving only a mystery. Last week, NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover detected a belch of natural gas on the red planet. The gas has since dissipated, leaving only a mystery. Mars gave a good burp last week, but the gas has come and gone, leaving scientists no closer to knowing whether there is life on or beneath the red planet.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lithium-Ion Batteries Work Earns Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 3 Scientists (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5537",
        "date": "2019-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/science/nobel-prize-chemistry.html",
        "text": "John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino were recognized for research that has \u201claid the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel-free society.\u201d John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino were recognized for research that has \u201claid the foundation of a wireless, fossil fuel-free society.\u201d The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three scientists who developed lithium-ion batteries, which have revolutionized portable electronics and are very likely powering a device you\u2019re using now to read this article. Larger examples of the batteries have given rise to electric cars that can be driven on long trips, while the miniaturized versions are used in lifesaving medical devices like cardiac defibrillators.",
        "author": "By Knvul Sheikh, Brian X. Chen and Ivan Penn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Starfish See Pretty Well in the Deep Ocean. By the Way, Starfish Have Eyes. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5538",
        "date": "2018-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/science/starfish-eyes.html",
        "text": "In the deep seas, starfish make their own light, possibly to signal one another for mating, and they\u2019ve evolved sophisticated eyes to see it. In the deep seas, starfish make their own light, possibly to signal one another for mating, and they\u2019ve evolved sophisticated eyes to see it. Look at a starfish in a tidal pool and you may think: ah, there\u2019s one of those pretty, multi-armed sea worms that crawl around and don\u2019t do much. But look deeper and your views might change.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "DNA of \u2018Irish Pharaoh\u2019 Sheds Light on Ancient Tomb Builders (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5539",
        "date": "2020-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/science/irish-archaeology-incest-tomb.html",
        "text": "In one of Europe's most impressive Stone Age burial mounds, researchers found evidence of brother-sister incest that suggests the existence of a ruling elite. In one of Europe's most impressive Stone Age burial mounds, researchers found evidence of brother-sister incest that suggests the existence of a ruling elite. The vast Stone Age tomb mounds in the valley of the River Boyne, about 25 miles north of Dublin, are so impressive that the area has been called the Irish Valley of the Kings. And a new analysis of ancient human DNA from Newgrange, the most famous of the mounds in Ireland, suggests that the ancient Irish may have had more than monumental grave markers in common with the pharaohs.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Scientists Are Giving Themselves D.I.Y. Coronavirus Vaccines (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5540",
        "date": "2020-09-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/science/covid-19-vaccine-diy.html",
        "text": "Impatient for a coronavirus vaccine, dozens of scientists around the world are giving themselves \u2014 and sometimes, friends and family \u2014\u00a0their own unproven versions. Impatient for a coronavirus vaccine, dozens of scientists around the world are giving themselves \u2014 and sometimes, friends and family \u2014\u00a0their own unproven versions. In April, more than three months before any coronavirus vaccine would enter large clinical trials, the mayor of a picturesque island town in the Pacific Northwest invited a microbiologist friend to vaccinate him.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Demons of Darkness Will Eat Men, and Other Solar Eclipse Myths (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5541",
        "date": "2017-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/science/solar-eclipse-myths.html",
        "text": "Here\u2019s a glimpse at the way that civilizations around the world have understood solar eclipses, and used them to reinforce cultural norms and values. Here\u2019s a glimpse at the way that civilizations around the world have understood solar eclipses, and used them to reinforce cultural norms and values. We understand the cosmic calculus that leads to solar eclipses like the one that will enchant many Americans on Monday.",
        "author": "By Jonah Engel Bromwich"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Scuba Diving Flies of California\u2019s Mono Lake (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5542",
        "date": "2017-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/science/diving-flies-mono-lake.html",
        "text": "For most insects, water is a death trap. These alkali flies cover themselves with a bubble of air to dip into a salty lake. For most insects, water is a death trap. These alkali flies cover themselves with a bubble of air to dip into a salty lake. Most people visit Mono Lake in California for the Dr. Seuss-esque towers called tufas. But to experience the truly bizarre, look for the scuba diving alkali flies.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Never Mind the Summer Heat: Earth Is at Its Greatest Distance From the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5543",
        "date": "2018-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/science/earth-sun-aphelion.html",
        "text": "During aphelion, our planet receives 7 percent less sunlight than in January, but changes in the planet\u2019s orbit are not what causes our seasons. During aphelion, our planet receives 7 percent less sunlight than in January, but changes in the planet\u2019s orbit are not what causes our seasons. On Saturday, Earth will swing toward the outermost point in its orbit, known as aphelion. You, me and everyone on the planet will be three million miles farther from the sun than when we are closest to it.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Never Mind the Summer Heat: Earth Is at Its Greatest Distance From the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5544",
        "date": "2018-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/science/earth-sun-aphelion.html",
        "text": "During aphelion, our planet receives 7 percent less sunlight than in January, but changes in the planet\u2019s orbit are not what causes our seasons. During aphelion, our planet receives 7 percent less sunlight than in January, but changes in the planet\u2019s orbit are not what causes our seasons. On Saturday, Earth will swing toward the outermost point in its orbit, known as aphelion. You, me and everyone on the planet will be three million miles farther from the sun than when we are closest to it.",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Flushed the Toilet. They Made Some Bricks. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5545",
        "date": "2019-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/science/bricks-recycled-bodily-waste.html",
        "text": "Converting biosolids into building materials could keep a lot of leftovers of the waste process out of landfills, and provide other environmental benefits, too. Converting biosolids into building materials could keep a lot of leftovers of the waste process out of landfills, and provide other environmental benefits, too. It may be unpleasant to contemplate the ultimate fate of all the material from your own body that you flush down the pipes. But it\u2019s time we talk about biosolids \u2014 the disinfected leftovers from the water treatment process.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We Cannot Save Everything\u2019: A Historic Neighborhood Confronts Rising Seas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5546",
        "date": "2019-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/science/historic-preservation-climate-newport.html",
        "text": "Colonial-era homes line the streets of The Point in Newport, R.I. Climate change is forcing experts to reimagine the future of historic preservation here. Colonial-era homes line the streets of The Point in Newport, R.I. Climate change is forcing experts to reimagine the future of historic preservation here. NEWPORT, R.I. \u2014 The Point, a waterfront neighborhood here, is one of the largest, best preserved and most important Colonial-era communities in the United States. Its grid of 18th-century streets contains scores of houses built before the American Revolution, and dozens more that are almost as old.",
        "author": "By Cornelia Dean"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018We Cannot Save Everything\u2019: A Historic Neighborhood Confronts Rising Seas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5547",
        "date": "2019-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/science/historic-preservation-climate-newport.html",
        "text": "Colonial-era homes line the streets of The Point in Newport, R.I. Climate change is forcing experts to reimagine the future of historic preservation here. Colonial-era homes line the streets of The Point in Newport, R.I. Climate change is forcing experts to reimagine the future of historic preservation here. NEWPORT, R.I. \u2014 The Point, a waterfront neighborhood here, is one of the largest, best preserved and most important Colonial-era communities in the United States. Its grid of 18th-century streets contains scores of houses built before the American Revolution, and dozens more that are almost as old.",
        "author": "By Cornelia Dean"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wanted: Old Chimney, Suitable for Roosting (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5548",
        "date": "2019-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/science/chimney-swifts-trees.html",
        "text": "Chimney swifts in search of homes eventually may have to return to hollows in big, broken trees. But there probably aren\u2019t enough of them. Chimney swifts in search of homes eventually may have to return to hollows in big, broken trees. But there probably aren\u2019t enough of them. They would adapt by using other high, protected hollow spaces for roosting and nesting, including trees. ",
        "author": "By C. Claiborne Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Move Your Elephant During a Pandemic (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5549",
        "date": "2020-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/science/coronavirus-elephants-wildlife-zoo.html",
        "text": "After decades in captivity and a 1,700-mile road trip from Argentina into Brazil, an Asian elephant named Mara finally gained a chance to roam. After decades in captivity and a 1,700-mile road trip from Argentina into Brazil, an Asian elephant named Mara finally gained a chance to roam. The border between Argentina and Brazil had been closed by the coronavirus pandemic for nearly two months when, in early May, an unusual convoy approached the checkpoint in Puerto Iguaz\u00fa. There were 15 people, all of whom had gone days with little sleep, and six vehicles, including a crane and a large truck.",
        "author": "By Sof\u00eda L\u00f3pez Ma\u00f1\u00e1n and Brooke Jarvis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aging and Ailing Lab Chimps Are Still at Center of Fight for Sanctuary (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5550",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/science/lab-chimps-experiments.html",
        "text": "Activists and some congressional lawmakers are demanding that the N.I.H. reconsider its refusal to move 39 chimpanzees from a research center to a sanctuary. Activists and some congressional lawmakers are demanding that the N.I.H. reconsider its refusal to move 39 chimpanzees from a research center to a sanctuary. Montessa, a 46-year-old chimpanzee, has been through a lot. The first record of her life is the note that she was purchased from an importer in 1975 for the research colony in New Mexico at the Holloman Air Force Base, when she was about a year old. She\u2019s still there.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth in Suspension (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5551",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/eclipse-comic.html",
        "text": "A total solar eclipse is not just the momentary theft of day. It is a profound interruption of the world as we know it. A total solar eclipse is not just the momentary theft of day. It is a profound interruption of the world as we know it. ",
        "author": "By Ferris Jabr and Golden Cosmos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Dairy Farming Cruel to Cows? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5552",
        "date": "2020-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/science/dairy-farming-cows-milk.html",
        "text": "A small group of animal welfare scientists is seeking answers to that question. Facing a growing anti-dairy movement, many farmers are altering their practices. A small group of animal welfare scientists is seeking answers to that question. Facing a growing anti-dairy movement, many farmers are altering their practices. SCHODACK LANDING, N.Y. \u2014 The 1,500 Jersey cows that Nathan Chittenden and his family raise in upstate New York seem to lead carefree lives. They spend their days lolling around inside well-ventilated barns and eating their fill from troughs. Three times a day, they file into the milking parlor, where computer-calibrated vacuums drain several gallons of warm milk from their udders, a process that lasts about as long as a recitation of \u201cThe Farmer in the Dell.\u201d",
        "author": "By Andrew Jacobs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Some Lab Chimps May Never Retire to a Sanctuary (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5553",
        "date": "2019-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/science/chimps-retire-sanctuary.html",
        "text": "A panel of veterinarians has determined that 44 chimpanzees at a New Mexico facility are too ill to be moved to a new home. A panel of veterinarians has determined that 44 chimpanzees at a New Mexico facility are too ill to be moved to a new home. In 2015, the National Institutes of Health decided to retire all the chimpanzees it owned. Since then, animal welfare groups have been pushing for quicker action, even as some of the facilities that once conducted experiments have urged caution, arguing that some chimps are too old and sick to be moved.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "If Mars Is Colonized, We May Not Need to Ship In the Bricks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5554",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/science/mars-soil-bricks.html",
        "text": "A new study suggests the material humanity needs to one day construct structures on Mars may already exist within the red planet\u2019s desolate soil. A new study suggests the material humanity needs to one day construct structures on Mars may already exist within the red planet\u2019s desolate soil. We often wonder if somewhere hidden on Mars are the building blocks for life. But what about building blocks for a civilization?",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "If Mars Is Colonized, We May Not Need to Ship In the Bricks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5555",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/science/mars-soil-bricks.html",
        "text": "A new study suggests the material humanity needs to one day construct structures on Mars may already exist within the red planet\u2019s desolate soil. A new study suggests the material humanity needs to one day construct structures on Mars may already exist within the red planet\u2019s desolate soil. We often wonder if somewhere hidden on Mars are the building blocks for life. But what about building blocks for a civilization?",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Decide Whether Ailing Chimps Get Moved to a Sanctuary (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5556",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/science/ailing-chimps-sanctuary.html",
        "text": "A new report suggests that federally owned or supported chimps should go to sanctuaries unless the trip is \u201cextremely likely to shorten their lives.\u201d A new report suggests that federally owned or supported chimps should go to sanctuaries unless the trip is \u201cextremely likely to shorten their lives.\u201d Faylene is a 35-year-old chimpanzee now housed at the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Decide Whether Ailing Chimps Get Moved to a Sanctuary (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5557",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/science/ailing-chimps-sanctuary.html",
        "text": "A new report suggests that federally owned or supported chimps should go to sanctuaries unless the trip is \u201cextremely likely to shorten their lives.\u201d A new report suggests that federally owned or supported chimps should go to sanctuaries unless the trip is \u201cextremely likely to shorten their lives.\u201d Faylene is a 35-year-old chimpanzee now housed at the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "LIGO Detects Fierce Collision of Neutron Stars for the First Time (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5558",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/science/ligo-neutron-stars-collision.html",
        "text": "Seen and heard, the fireball is a stunning breakthrough into kilonovas, bursts of energy believed to produce metals like gold and uranium in the universe. Seen and heard, the fireball is a stunning breakthrough into kilonovas, bursts of energy believed to produce metals like gold and uranium in the universe. Astronomers announced on Monday that they had seen and heard a pair of dead stars collide, giving them their first glimpse of the violent process by which most of the gold and silver in the universe was created.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Shape of Your Ears Affects What You Hear (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5559",
        "date": "2018-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/science/ears-shape-hearing.html",
        "text": "We\u2019re able to locate sound because our brains grasp the shape of our ears. When that shape changes, we need time and practice to adapt. We\u2019re able to locate sound because our brains grasp the shape of our ears. When that shape changes, we need time and practice to adapt. Ears are a peculiarly individual piece of anatomy. Those little fleshy seashells, whether they stick out or hang low, can be instantly recognizable in family portraits. And they aren\u2019t just for show.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Watch Mercury\u2019s 2019 Transit of the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5560",
        "date": "2019-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/science/mercury-transit-2019.html",
        "text": "Viewers on the East and West Coasts of the U.S. can see part or all of the eclipse-like event, but not with the naked eye. Viewers on the East and West Coasts of the U.S. can see part or all of the eclipse-like event, but not with the naked eye. On Monday, Nov. 11, you can witness Mercury in motion as the tiny planet waltzes across the face of the sun. This celestial dance, known as the transit of Mercury, last occurred in 2016 and will not happen again until 2032. North American skywatchers will have to wait until 2049 for an encore.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5561",
        "date": "2018-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idleness.html",
        "text": "To dig a nest tunnel quickly and get the most out of their efforts, 30 percent of fire ants do 70 percent of the work. To dig a nest tunnel quickly and get the most out of their efforts, 30 percent of fire ants do 70 percent of the work. Ants are renowned for their industriousness. Ask the grasshopper in the story by Aesop. He had to come begging the hard-working ant for food when winter came because he had frittered away his summer.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Happened to Earth\u2019s Ancient Craters? Scientists Seek Clues on the Moon\u2019s Pocked Surface (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5562",
        "date": "2019-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/science/craters-meteors-moon.html",
        "text": "The pace of space rocks pummeling Earth and the moon was relatively infrequent, but then doubled or tripled for unknown reasons, a new study finds. The pace of space rocks pummeling Earth and the moon was relatively infrequent, but then doubled or tripled for unknown reasons, a new study finds. Where have Earth\u2019s craters gone? ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Happened to Earth\u2019s Ancient Craters? Scientists Seek Clues on the Moon\u2019s Pocked Surface (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5563",
        "date": "2019-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/science/craters-meteors-moon.html",
        "text": "The pace of space rocks pummeling Earth and the moon was relatively infrequent, but then doubled or tripled for unknown reasons, a new study finds. The pace of space rocks pummeling Earth and the moon was relatively infrequent, but then doubled or tripled for unknown reasons, a new study finds. Where have Earth\u2019s craters gone? ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Is the Eclipse Longer in Some Places Than in Others? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5564",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/why-is-the-eclipse-longer-in-some-places-than-in-others.html",
        "text": "The moon will completely block the sun for two minutes and 41 seconds above one Illinois town \u2014 longer than anywhere else in the country. The moon will completely block the sun for two minutes and 41 seconds above one Illinois town \u2014 longer than anywhere else in the country. The village of Makanda, Ill., is about to experience nearly three minutes of fame.",
        "author": "By Aneri Pattani"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Launch of Starlink Orbital Internet Satellites (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5565",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. [Follow Monday\u2019s SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Launch of Starlink Orbital Internet Satellites (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5566",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. [Follow Monday\u2019s SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Launch of Starlink Orbital Internet Satellites (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5567",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. [Follow Monday\u2019s SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Delays Launch of Starlink Orbital Internet Satellites (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5568",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/science/spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. The mission is to be a test of the company\u2019s ambitions to create a new line of business by connecting more parts of the world. [Follow Monday\u2019s SpaceX Starlink launch here.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Case of the Disappearing Cicadas (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5569",
        "date": "2021-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/science/brood-x-cicadas.html",
        "text": "The insect cohort known as Brood X may not emerge on Long Island, a sign of humanity\u2019s effects on even nature\u2019s most reliable periodic events. The insect cohort known as Brood X may not emerge on Long Island, a sign of humanity\u2019s effects on even nature\u2019s most reliable periodic events. On a bright day in July 1987, Elias Bonaros, then 15 years old, grabbed a bucket and headed from his home in Bayside, Queens, to Ronkonkoma, a town 40 miles to the east on Long Island. Dr. Bonaros \u2014 now a cardiologist, then a budding naturalist \u2014 wanted to see the huge, raucous group of periodical cicadas known as Brood X, which were due to come up in the town.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Mixed Science, Art and Costume Parties to Reveal Mysteries of the Sea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5570",
        "date": "2017-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/science/william-beebe-department-of-tropical-research-illustrations.html",
        "text": "The expeditions of William Beebe and his coed Department of Tropical Research are remembered at an upcoming show at The Drawing Center in New York. The expeditions of William Beebe and his coed Department of Tropical Research are remembered at an upcoming show at The Drawing Center in New York. Ernest Schoedsack and Ruth Rose helped bring King Kong to life on movie screens in 1933. But before they did that, the two \u2014 a cinematographer and a writer \u2014 fell in love aboard a ship bound for an unconventional scientific expedition. The man who brought them together was William Beebe.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Mixed Science, Art and Costume Parties to Reveal Mysteries of the Sea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5571",
        "date": "2017-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/science/william-beebe-department-of-tropical-research-illustrations.html",
        "text": "The expeditions of William Beebe and his coed Department of Tropical Research are remembered at an upcoming show at The Drawing Center in New York. The expeditions of William Beebe and his coed Department of Tropical Research are remembered at an upcoming show at The Drawing Center in New York. Ernest Schoedsack and Ruth Rose helped bring King Kong to life on movie screens in 1933. But before they did that, the two \u2014 a cinematographer and a writer \u2014 fell in love aboard a ship bound for an unconventional scientific expedition. The man who brought them together was William Beebe.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hawaiian Supreme Court Approves Giant Telescope on Mauna Kea (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5572",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/science/hawaii-telescope-mauna-kea.html",
        "text": "The court granted a building permit for a roughly $2 billion observatory, which activists had protested would further degrade the site of an ancient volcano. The court granted a building permit for a roughly $2 billion observatory, which activists had protested would further degrade the site of an ancient volcano. After years of hearings and litigation, the Supreme Court of Hawaii on Tuesday approved a building permit for a giant telescope on the ancient, contested site of the volcano Mauna Kea.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Rewilding\u2019 Missing Carnivores May Help Restore Some Landscapes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5573",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/science/rewilding-carnivores-wolves.html",
        "text": "The cascade of ecological benefits that followed the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho suggests opportunities for similar efforts around the planet. The cascade of ecological benefits that followed the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho suggests opportunities for similar efforts around the planet. If you\u2019re lucky, you can spot a gray wolf in Yellowstone National Park. But a century ago, you\u2019d have been hard pressed to find any there. Poisonings and unregulated hunting obliterated nearly all of these majestic canines from Canada to Mexico, their original home range.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018This Could Be the End\u2019 for NASA\u2019s Mars Opportunity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5574",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/mars-opportunity-rover.html",
        "text": "The agency has received only silence from the intrepid explorer since contact was lost during a global dust storm on the red planet last June. The agency has received only silence from the intrepid explorer since contact was lost during a global dust storm on the red planet last June. NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover began its 15th year on Mars this week, although the intrepid robotic explorer may already be dead.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018This Could Be the End\u2019 for NASA\u2019s Mars Opportunity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5575",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/mars-opportunity-rover.html",
        "text": "The agency has received only silence from the intrepid explorer since contact was lost during a global dust storm on the red planet last June. The agency has received only silence from the intrepid explorer since contact was lost during a global dust storm on the red planet last June. NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover began its 15th year on Mars this week, although the intrepid robotic explorer may already be dead.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018This Could Be the End\u2019 for NASA\u2019s Mars Opportunity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5576",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/science/mars-opportunity-rover.html",
        "text": "The agency has received only silence from the intrepid explorer since contact was lost during a global dust storm on the red planet last June. The agency has received only silence from the intrepid explorer since contact was lost during a global dust storm on the red planet last June. NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover began its 15th year on Mars this week, although the intrepid robotic explorer may already be dead.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Chinese Space Station Will Fall to Earth Soon. You\u2019ll Probably Be Fine. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5577",
        "date": "2018-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/science/chinese-space-station.html",
        "text": "The 19,000-pound station is expected to plummet to earth within a week, but experts say the odds are incredibly low that it will hurt anyone. The 19,000-pound station is expected to plummet to earth within a week, but experts say the odds are incredibly low that it will hurt anyone.  This article was updated March 26.",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saturn With No Rings? It Could Happen, and Sooner Than Astronomers Expected (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5578",
        "date": "2018-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/saturn-rings-vanish.html",
        "text": "The \u201cring rain\u201d that falls into the gas giant is so abundant that the icy bands could disappear in 300 million years, or even sooner. The \u201cring rain\u201d that falls into the gas giant is so abundant that the icy bands could disappear in 300 million years, or even sooner. Saturn\u2019s icy rings are among the most iconic features in the solar system. But they\u2019re raining so much water onto the planet that in 300 million years they could rain themselves nearly out of existence, leaving Saturn startlingly ringless.",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saturn With No Rings? It Could Happen, and Sooner Than Astronomers Expected (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5579",
        "date": "2018-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/saturn-rings-vanish.html",
        "text": "The \u201cring rain\u201d that falls into the gas giant is so abundant that the icy bands could disappear in 300 million years, or even sooner. The \u201cring rain\u201d that falls into the gas giant is so abundant that the icy bands could disappear in 300 million years, or even sooner. Saturn\u2019s icy rings are among the most iconic features in the solar system. But they\u2019re raining so much water onto the planet that in 300 million years they could rain themselves nearly out of existence, leaving Saturn startlingly ringless.",
        "author": "By Nadia Drake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finding Amelia Earhart\u2019s Plane Seemed Impossible. Then Came a Startling Clue. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5580",
        "date": "2019-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/science/amelia-earhart-search-robert-ballard.html",
        "text": "Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard is the finder of important lost things.",
        "author": "By Julie Cohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finding Amelia Earhart\u2019s Plane Seemed Impossible. Then Came a Startling Clue. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5581",
        "date": "2019-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/science/amelia-earhart-search-robert-ballard.html",
        "text": "Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard is the finder of important lost things.",
        "author": "By Julie Cohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finding Amelia Earhart\u2019s Plane Seemed Impossible. Then Came a Startling Clue. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5582",
        "date": "2019-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/science/amelia-earhart-search-robert-ballard.html",
        "text": "Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard is the finder of important lost things.",
        "author": "By Julie Cohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Finding Amelia Earhart\u2019s Plane Seemed Impossible. Then Came a Startling Clue. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5583",
        "date": "2019-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/science/amelia-earhart-search-robert-ballard.html",
        "text": "Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard has found the Titanic and other famous shipwrecks. This month his crew started trying to solve one of the 20th century\u2019s greatest mysteries. Robert Ballard is the finder of important lost things.",
        "author": "By Julie Cohn"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Supernova Was Hiding in Antarctica\u2019s Snow (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5584",
        "date": "2019-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/science/antarctica-snow-supernova.html",
        "text": "Researchers melted and analyzed 1,100 pounds of snow from the region. They found traces of cosmic dust, some of it created by nearby stellar explosions. Researchers melted and analyzed 1,100 pounds of snow from the region. They found traces of cosmic dust, some of it created by nearby stellar explosions. Earth is continuously plowing through extraterrestrial dust. Tens of thousands of tons of the stuff, mostly from asteroids and comets, settles all over the planet every year. We are the shoulder to a universe of dandruff.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Supernova Was Hiding in Antarctica\u2019s Snow (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5585",
        "date": "2019-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/science/antarctica-snow-supernova.html",
        "text": "Researchers melted and analyzed 1,100 pounds of snow from the region. They found traces of cosmic dust, some of it created by nearby stellar explosions. Researchers melted and analyzed 1,100 pounds of snow from the region. They found traces of cosmic dust, some of it created by nearby stellar explosions. Earth is continuously plowing through extraterrestrial dust. Tens of thousands of tons of the stuff, mostly from asteroids and comets, settles all over the planet every year. We are the shoulder to a universe of dandruff.",
        "author": "By Katherine Kornei"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Rodent Was Giant. Its Brain Was Tiny. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5586",
        "date": "2020-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/science/rodent-brain-fossil.html",
        "text": "Reconstruction of a fossil of an extinct South American relative of the capybara shows it didn\u2019t have much space in its skull for a brain. Reconstruction of a fossil of an extinct South American relative of the capybara shows it didn\u2019t have much space in its skull for a brain. When you look at a reconstruction of the skull and brain of Neoepiblema acreensis, an extinct rodent, it\u2019s hard to shake the feeling that something\u2019s not quite right.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Messages on the Moon From a World Turned Upside Down (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5587",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/science/apollo-11-goodwill-messages.html",
        "text": "Our journey to the moon took us a long way from Earth, but it was always tangled up with power politics here on the ground. Our journey to the moon took us a long way from Earth, but it was always tangled up with power politics here on the ground. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Ken Liu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Messages on the Moon From a World Turned Upside Down (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5588",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/science/apollo-11-goodwill-messages.html",
        "text": "Our journey to the moon took us a long way from Earth, but it was always tangled up with power politics here on the ground. Our journey to the moon took us a long way from Earth, but it was always tangled up with power politics here on the ground. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Ken Liu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Messages on the Moon From a World Turned Upside Down (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5589",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/science/apollo-11-goodwill-messages.html",
        "text": "Our journey to the moon took us a long way from Earth, but it was always tangled up with power politics here on the ground. Our journey to the moon took us a long way from Earth, but it was always tangled up with power politics here on the ground. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Ken Liu"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Space Station Became a Base to Launch Humanity\u2019s Future (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5590",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/international-space-station-20-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. For the International Space Station, Leroy Chiao was, in a sense, there before the beginning.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Space Station Became a Base to Launch Humanity\u2019s Future (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5591",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/international-space-station-20-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. For the International Space Station, Leroy Chiao was, in a sense, there before the beginning.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Space Station Became a Base to Launch Humanity\u2019s Future (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5592",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/international-space-station-20-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. For the International Space Station, Leroy Chiao was, in a sense, there before the beginning.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Space Station Became a Base to Launch Humanity\u2019s Future (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5593",
        "date": "2020-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/science/international-space-station-20-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. Once derided as a poster child for government waste, the outpost in orbit is now seen as a linchpin for future economic activity in space. For the International Space Station, Leroy Chiao was, in a sense, there before the beginning.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Robot\u2019s Journey to an Icy Alien Moon Starts Beneath Antarctica (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5594",
        "date": "2020-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/science/europa-rover-antarctica.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. CASEY STATION, Antarctica \u2014 Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Ad\u00e9lie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools. The chasm in the ice might have been an inviting entry to the krill-rich waters below. None of the members of the tuxedoed recon party dove into the hole, a square about six feet across. The risk of leopard seals was just too great.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Robot\u2019s Journey to an Icy Alien Moon Starts Beneath Antarctica (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5595",
        "date": "2020-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/science/europa-rover-antarctica.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. CASEY STATION, Antarctica \u2014 Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Ad\u00e9lie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools. The chasm in the ice might have been an inviting entry to the krill-rich waters below. None of the members of the tuxedoed recon party dove into the hole, a square about six feet across. The risk of leopard seals was just too great.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Robot\u2019s Journey to an Icy Alien Moon Starts Beneath Antarctica (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5596",
        "date": "2020-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/science/europa-rover-antarctica.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. CASEY STATION, Antarctica \u2014 Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Ad\u00e9lie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools. The chasm in the ice might have been an inviting entry to the krill-rich waters below. None of the members of the tuxedoed recon party dove into the hole, a square about six feet across. The risk of leopard seals was just too great.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Robot\u2019s Journey to an Icy Alien Moon Starts Beneath Antarctica (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5597",
        "date": "2020-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/05/science/europa-rover-antarctica.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. NASA scientists completed field tests in November of a floating rover they hope will one day travel to Europa, the frozen ocean moon of Jupiter. CASEY STATION, Antarctica \u2014 Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Ad\u00e9lie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools. The chasm in the ice might have been an inviting entry to the krill-rich waters below. None of the members of the tuxedoed recon party dove into the hole, a square about six feet across. The risk of leopard seals was just too great.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mountain Goats on Your Trail? They Like You, and Your Urine (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5598",
        "date": "2017-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/science/mountain-goats-urine-pee-glacier-national-park-montana.html",
        "text": "Mountain goats in Glacier National Park, drawn to tourist sites because of protection from bears and easy access to minerals, have abandoned some predator defenses. Mountain goats in Glacier National Park, drawn to tourist sites because of protection from bears and easy access to minerals, have abandoned some predator defenses. A few years ago, employees at Glacier National Park in Montana noticed that mountain goats were hanging out \u2014 even sleeping \u2014 far away from cliffs, and spending much of their time near humans. Researchers who investigated this atypical behavior determined that where there were people, there were fewer predators. Also where there were people, there was pee.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Caring for the Wildlife That Stray Into the Suburbs (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5599",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/20/science/suburbs-wildlife-deer-owls.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s baby-animal season in the towns north of New York. But with many of the mothers gone missing, humans are stepping in to help out. It\u2019s baby-animal season in the towns north of New York. But with many of the mothers gone missing, humans are stepping in to help out. A fawn\u2019s first role model is the forest floor. The white spots on its brown coat resemble the dappled beams of sunlight that cascade through the trees, breaking up the outline of the deer\u2019s figure. The camouflage helps keep baby white-tailed deer safe from bears and bobcats as the mother doe forages elsewhere.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler and Linda Kuo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy, SpaceX\u2019s Giant Rocket, Launches Into Orbit, and Sticks Its Landings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5600",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/falcon-heavy-launch-spacex.html",
        "text": "It was only the second flight for what is the most powerful rocket now available on Earth, improving on its spectacular test launch in 2018. It was only the second flight for what is the most powerful rocket now available on Earth, improving on its spectacular test launch in 2018. The Falcon Heavy roared into space on Thursday night, arcing atop three columns of flame toward orbit with a large satellite on board.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy, SpaceX\u2019s Giant Rocket, Launches Into Orbit, and Sticks Its Landings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5601",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/falcon-heavy-launch-spacex.html",
        "text": "It was only the second flight for what is the most powerful rocket now available on Earth, improving on its spectacular test launch in 2018. It was only the second flight for what is the most powerful rocket now available on Earth, improving on its spectacular test launch in 2018. The Falcon Heavy roared into space on Thursday night, arcing atop three columns of flame toward orbit with a large satellite on board.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Virtual Reality, How Much Body Do You Need? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5602",
        "date": "2018-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/science/virtual-reality-body.html",
        "text": "It might be as little as a pair of hands and feet, researchers in Japan found after recording subjects who wore an Oculus Rift headset. It might be as little as a pair of hands and feet, researchers in Japan found after recording subjects who wore an Oculus Rift headset. How connected are your body and your consciousness? ",
        "author": "By Steph Yin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Leonids Meteor Shower 2021: Watch It Peak in Night Skies Overnight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5603",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/science/leonid-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "If you\u2019re willing to stay up into the early hours of Wednesday morning, you may get a chance to spot fireballs streaking across the sky. If you\u2019re willing to stay up into the early hours of Wednesday morning, you may get a chance to spot fireballs streaking across the sky. The latest episode of cosmic action in the night sky is the Leonids meteor shower. The monthlong event will peak overnight into the early hours of Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking the Source of the Vanishing Great Salt Lake (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5604",
        "date": "2017-11-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/science/great-salt-lake-utah-vanishing.html",
        "text": "Human consumption \u2014 not seasonal fluctuations or climate change \u2014 is primarily to blame for the Great Salt Lake\u2019s desiccation, according to a recent analysis. Human consumption \u2014 not seasonal fluctuations or climate change \u2014 is primarily to blame for the Great Salt Lake\u2019s desiccation, according to a recent analysis. The Great Salt Lake in Utah is roughly the same area as 75 Manhattans. It feeds and houses millions of birds of hundreds of species, provides the namesake of Utah\u2019s capital city and some credit it for the state\u2019s trademarked claim to \u201cthe greatest snow on earth.\u201d",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Playlist for the Solar Eclipse (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5605",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/music-playlist-solar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "Eclipses provoke strong feelings that make us reckon with the awesomeness of space. Here are some songs that might give you the feeling of totality. Eclipses provoke strong feelings that make us reckon with the awesomeness of space. Here are some songs that might give you the feeling of totality. The ancients often believed a celestial event like an eclipse to be a bad omen, that the sun or the moon vanishing from the sky was a harbinger of disaster, a sign of devastation or destruction to come.",
        "author": "By Jenna Wortham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Arizona State Suspends Lawrence Krauss During Inquiry Over Sexual Misconduct Accusations (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5606",
        "date": "2018-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/science/lawrence-krauss-arizona-state.html",
        "text": "Dr. Krauss, a leading figure in the \u201cskeptics\u201d movement, was placed on paid leave and barred from campus after a report was published by BuzzFeed. Dr. Krauss, a leading figure in the \u201cskeptics\u201d movement, was placed on paid leave and barred from campus after a report was published by BuzzFeed. Arizona State University has suspended Lawrence M. Krauss, a prominent theoretical physicist, while the university investigates accusations of sexual misconduct over a decade.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Arizona State Suspends Lawrence Krauss During Inquiry Over Sexual Misconduct Accusations (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5607",
        "date": "2018-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/science/lawrence-krauss-arizona-state.html",
        "text": "Dr. Krauss, a leading figure in the \u201cskeptics\u201d movement, was placed on paid leave and barred from campus after a report was published by BuzzFeed. Dr. Krauss, a leading figure in the \u201cskeptics\u201d movement, was placed on paid leave and barred from campus after a report was published by BuzzFeed. Arizona State University has suspended Lawrence M. Krauss, a prominent theoretical physicist, while the university investigates accusations of sexual misconduct over a decade.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A New Formula to Help Tame China\u2019s Yellow River (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5608",
        "date": "2017-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/science/china-yellow-river-xiaolangdi-dam.html",
        "text": "China discharges water from the Xiaolangdi Dam in an annual cleansing ritual to prevent flooding along the Yellow River. New research could improve the results. China discharges water from the Xiaolangdi Dam in an annual cleansing ritual to prevent flooding along the Yellow River. New research could improve the results. Each year thousands of tourists flock to a reservoir along the Yellow River in China to witness a ritual cleansing so violent that it can look as if the earth just exploded. At the end of June and the start of July, for as long as two weeks before the flood season, Chinese officials open large portals along the walls of the Xiaolangdi Dam, releasing clear and muddy water simultaneously from the reservoir above to the river below. It gushes out, and in some years clouds the color of doom ascend beyond the dam\u2019s walls.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Scientists Who Put Light to Work (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5609",
        "date": "2018-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/science/physics-nobel-prize.html",
        "text": "Arthur Ashkin, G\u00e9rard Mourou and Donna Strickland developed tools made of light beams. Dr. Strickland is just the third woman to win the physics prize. Arthur Ashkin, G\u00e9rard Mourou and Donna Strickland developed tools made of light beams. Dr. Strickland is just the third woman to win the physics prize. The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to Arthur Ashkin of the United States, G\u00e9rard Mourou of France and Donna Strickland of Canada for harnessing one of the most ineffable aspects of nature, pure light, into a mighty microscopic force. Dr. Strickland, a self-described \u201claser jock,\u201d is only the third woman to win the physics prize, for work she did as a graduate student with Dr. Mourou.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "These Baby Mice Were Born From Sperm That Went to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5610",
        "date": "2017-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/22/science/freeze-dried-mice-sperm-space-station.html",
        "text": "Although tests did find slightly increased DNA damage, compared with freeze-dried earth sperm, the space version did the job when it came to fertilizing eggs. Although tests did find slightly increased DNA damage, compared with freeze-dried earth sperm, the space version did the job when it came to fertilizing eggs. Litters of healthy mice \u2014 \u201cspace pups\u201d \u2014 prove that mouse sperm can be freeze-dried, flown around on the International Space Station for nine months and then used to make babies, researchers from Japan are reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vampire Bats Know Sharing Blood With Friends Is Good Manners (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5611",
        "date": "2020-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/science/vampire-bats-blood.html",
        "text": "After a good blood meal, one bat will share with another, if the other bat is family, or has proved to be a reliable friend. After a good blood meal, one bat will share with another, if the other bat is family, or has proved to be a reliable friend. Vampire bats don\u2019t have the best reputation. For one thing, they are bats, and despite the value of bats and their great variety \u2014 about a quarter of all mammal species \u2014 not everyone loves them.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "What a Total Solar Eclipse Looks Like From Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5612",
        "date": "2017-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/science/what-a-total-solar-eclipse-looks-like-from-space.html",
        "text": "A time lapse made from a Japanese weather satellite\u2019s images shows the shadow the moon casts on the Earth when it blocks out the sun. A time lapse made from a Japanese weather satellite\u2019s images shows the shadow the moon casts on the Earth when it blocks out the sun. When the total solar eclipse traces a path on Aug. 21 from Oregon to South Carolina, millions will turn their gaze upward as the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, darkening the sky in the middle of the day. But what if they could see the eclipse from above instead?",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flecks of Extraterrestrial Dust, All Over the Roof (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5613",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/science/space-dust-on-earth.html",
        "text": "A jazz musician from Norway hunted bits of cosmic debris for eight years and found it everywhere. Turns out, tons of it land every day. A jazz musician from Norway hunted bits of cosmic debris for eight years and found it everywhere. Turns out, tons of it land every day. After decades of failures and misunderstandings, scientists have solved a cosmic riddle \u2014 what happens to the tons of dust particles that hit the Earth every day but seldom if ever get discovered in the places that humans know best, like buildings and parking lots, sidewalks and park benches.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Watch a Solar Eclipse (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5614",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/space/science-eclipse.html",
        "text": "What you need to know about eclipses, how to be safe during an eclipse and some fun experiments you can try during this rare event. What you need to know about eclipses, how to be safe during an eclipse and some fun experiments you can try during this rare event. What you need to know about eclipses, how to be safe during an eclipse and some fun experiments you can try during this rare event.",
        "author": "By David Baron and Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Intermission for the Large Hadron Collider (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5615",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/21/science/cern-large-hadron-collider-ar-ul.html",
        "text": "The largest machine ever built is shutting down for two years of upgrades. Take an immersive tour of the collider with AR and 360\u00b0 photos. The largest machine ever built is shutting down for two years of upgrades. Take an immersive tour of the collider with AR and 360\u00b0 photos. The largest machine ever built is shutting down for two years of upgrades. Take an immersive tour of the collider with AR and 360\u00b0 photos.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Graham Roberts and Marcelle Hopkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Intermission for the Large Hadron Collider (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5616",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/21/science/cern-large-hadron-collider-ar-ul.html",
        "text": "The largest machine ever built is shutting down for two years of upgrades. Take an immersive tour of the collider with AR and 360\u00b0 photos. The largest machine ever built is shutting down for two years of upgrades. Take an immersive tour of the collider with AR and 360\u00b0 photos. The largest machine ever built is shutting down for two years of upgrades. Take an immersive tour of the collider with AR and 360\u00b0 photos.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Karthik Patanjali, Graham Roberts and Marcelle Hopkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Friday the 13th Harvest Moon and Other Moons That Are Super in Their Own Ways (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5617",
        "date": "2017-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/science/full-moon-friday-13.html",
        "text": "Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly. Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly. Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Friday the 13th Harvest Moon and Other Moons That Are Super in Their Own Ways (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5618",
        "date": "2017-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/science/full-moon-friday-13.html",
        "text": "Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly. Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly. Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Friday the 13th Harvest Moon and Other Moons That Are Super in Their Own Ways (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5619",
        "date": "2017-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/science/full-moon-friday-13.html",
        "text": "Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly. Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly. Most of the time, you can shrug off a supermoon, although it is a good excuse to start gazing at the night sky more regularly.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Coronavirus in a Tiny Drop (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5620",
        "date": "2021-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/01/science/coronavirus-aerosol-simulation.html",
        "text": "A new simulation shows how the virus survives inside tiny airborne particles of water \u2014 and gives clues about how the Delta variant became dominant. A new simulation shows how the virus survives inside tiny airborne particles of water \u2014 and gives clues about how the Delta variant became dominant. A new simulation shows how the virus survives inside tiny airborne particles of water \u2014 and gives clues about how the Delta variant became dominant.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer and Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "79 Moons of Jupiter and Counting (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5621",
        "date": "2018-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/science/jupiter-new-moons.html",
        "text": "The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. A dozen years ago, astronomers debated, \u201cWhat is a planet?\u201d They may soon have to wrangle another question of solar system classification: \u201cWhat is a moon?\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "79 Moons of Jupiter and Counting (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5622",
        "date": "2018-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/science/jupiter-new-moons.html",
        "text": "The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. A dozen years ago, astronomers debated, \u201cWhat is a planet?\u201d They may soon have to wrangle another question of solar system classification: \u201cWhat is a moon?\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "79 Moons of Jupiter and Counting (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5623",
        "date": "2018-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/science/jupiter-new-moons.html",
        "text": "The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. A dozen years ago, astronomers debated, \u201cWhat is a planet?\u201d They may soon have to wrangle another question of solar system classification: \u201cWhat is a moon?\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "79 Moons of Jupiter and Counting (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5624",
        "date": "2018-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/science/jupiter-new-moons.html",
        "text": "The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. The latest survey of the region around the gas giant turned up a dozen new moons, including an oddball that was going in the wrong direction. A dozen years ago, astronomers debated, \u201cWhat is a planet?\u201d They may soon have to wrangle another question of solar system classification: \u201cWhat is a moon?\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Asteroid Shouldn\u2019t Be Where Astronomers Found It (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5625",
        "date": "2018-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/science/asteroid-kuiper-belt.html",
        "text": "Space rocks like 2004 EW95 are common between Mars and Jupiter. The discovery of the object near Neptune may provide insights into how the planets formed. Space rocks like 2004 EW95 are common between Mars and Jupiter. The discovery of the object near Neptune may provide insights into how the planets formed. At first the astronomers thought it was a mistake. They had found a carbon-covered asteroid floating among countless icy bodies far away in our solar system. The newly discovered space rock, which they named 2004 EW95, was something the scientists would have expected to have seen in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Instead, it was dancing near Neptune.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Was His Day Off. Then the Space Station Went for a Spin. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5626",
        "date": "2021-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/science/nasa-space-station-zebulon-scoville.html",
        "text": "Zebulon Scoville and others at NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston spent Thursday righting the International Space Station after a new Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters. Zebulon Scoville and others at NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston spent Thursday righting the International Space Station after a new Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters. The International Space Station, with a mass of more than 900,000 pounds and spanning an area as large as a football field, is not designed to do back flips like an Olympic gymnast.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Was His Day Off. Then the Space Station Went for a Spin. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5627",
        "date": "2021-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/science/nasa-space-station-zebulon-scoville.html",
        "text": "Zebulon Scoville and others at NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston spent Thursday righting the International Space Station after a new Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters. Zebulon Scoville and others at NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston spent Thursday righting the International Space Station after a new Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters. The International Space Station, with a mass of more than 900,000 pounds and spanning an area as large as a football field, is not designed to do back flips like an Olympic gymnast.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "It Was His Day Off. Then the Space Station Went for a Spin. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5628",
        "date": "2021-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/science/nasa-space-station-zebulon-scoville.html",
        "text": "Zebulon Scoville and others at NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston spent Thursday righting the International Space Station after a new Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters. Zebulon Scoville and others at NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston spent Thursday righting the International Space Station after a new Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters. The International Space Station, with a mass of more than 900,000 pounds and spanning an area as large as a football field, is not designed to do back flips like an Olympic gymnast.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Metropolis of 200 Million Termite Mounds Was Hidden in Plain Sight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5629",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/science/termite-mounds-brazil.html",
        "text": "What amount to garbage piles \u2014 some are 4,000 years old \u2014 are spread over an area the size of Britain in a remote Brazilian forest. What amount to garbage piles \u2014 some are 4,000 years old \u2014 are spread over an area the size of Britain in a remote Brazilian forest.  [Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Highlights From the \u2018Ring of Fire\u2019 Solar Eclipse at Sunrise (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5630",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/science/solar-eclipse-ring-of-fire.html",
        "text": "Weather and geography made it difficult to see the rare spectacle, but some intrepid people got an exciting view of the eclipse from unique vantage points. Weather and geography made it difficult to see the rare spectacle, but some intrepid people got an exciting view of the eclipse from unique vantage points. Thursday morning a few lucky or intrepid humans scattered from Siberia to Northern Canada got the chance to see the old familiar sun mostly blotted out from the sky. The cosmos will do that for you from time to time as the ceaseless wanderings of our planet, the sun and moon bring them into line like billiard balls on a velvet space table.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Highlights From the \u2018Ring of Fire\u2019 Solar Eclipse at Sunrise (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5631",
        "date": "2021-06-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/science/solar-eclipse-ring-of-fire.html",
        "text": "Weather and geography made it difficult to see the rare spectacle, but some intrepid people got an exciting view of the eclipse from unique vantage points. Weather and geography made it difficult to see the rare spectacle, but some intrepid people got an exciting view of the eclipse from unique vantage points. Thursday morning a few lucky or intrepid humans scattered from Siberia to Northern Canada got the chance to see the old familiar sun mostly blotted out from the sky. The cosmos will do that for you from time to time as the ceaseless wanderings of our planet, the sun and moon bring them into line like billiard balls on a velvet space table.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Being Antisocial Leads to a Longer Life. For Marmots. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5632",
        "date": "2018-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/science/marmots-antisocial-lifespan.html",
        "text": "Unlike most mammals, yellow-bellied marmots with more active social lives died younger than those that kept to themselves, scientists found after tracking them for 13 years. Unlike most mammals, yellow-bellied marmots with more active social lives died younger than those that kept to themselves, scientists found after tracking them for 13 years. For many mammals, a busy social life can be an important contributor to a long life. But some animals need more alone time than others, and failure to get it could be lethal, according to new research.",
        "author": "By Douglas Quenqua"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroids and Adversaries: Challenging What NASA Knows About Space Rocks (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5633",
        "date": "2018-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/science/asteroids-nasa-nathan-myhrvold.html",
        "text": "Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur\u2019s criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review. Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur\u2019s criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review. Thousands of asteroids are passing through Earth\u2019s neighborhood all the time. Although the odds of a direct hit on the planet any time soon are slim, even a small asteroid the size of a house could explode with as much energy as an atomic bomb.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroids and Adversaries: Challenging What NASA Knows About Space Rocks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5634",
        "date": "2018-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/science/asteroids-nasa-nathan-myhrvold.html",
        "text": "Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur\u2019s criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review. Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur\u2019s criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review. Thousands of asteroids are passing through Earth\u2019s neighborhood all the time. Although the odds of a direct hit on the planet any time soon are slim, even a small asteroid the size of a house could explode with as much energy as an atomic bomb.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Asteroids and Adversaries: Challenging What NASA Knows About Space Rocks (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5635",
        "date": "2018-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/science/asteroids-nasa-nathan-myhrvold.html",
        "text": "Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur\u2019s criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review. Two years ago, NASA dismissed and mocked an amateur\u2019s criticisms of its asteroids database. Now Nathan Myhrvold is back, and his papers have passed peer review. Thousands of asteroids are passing through Earth\u2019s neighborhood all the time. Although the odds of a direct hit on the planet any time soon are slim, even a small asteroid the size of a house could explode with as much energy as an atomic bomb.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Partial Lunar Eclipse Will Shadow the Moon on Monday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5636",
        "date": "2017-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/science/partial-lunar-eclipse-on-monday.html",
        "text": "Two weeks before a total solar eclipse crosses the United States, many other parts of the world will witness Earth\u2019s shadow covering part of the moon. Two weeks before a total solar eclipse crosses the United States, many other parts of the world will witness Earth\u2019s shadow covering part of the moon. Call it a cosmic consolation prize.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches a Satellite With a Partly Used Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5637",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/spacex-launches-a-satellite-with-a-partly-used-rocket.html",
        "text": "The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. SpaceX launched a commercial satellite into space on Thursday with the boost of a partly used rocket, a feat that may open an era of cheaper space travel.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches a Satellite With a Partly Used Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5638",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/spacex-launches-a-satellite-with-a-partly-used-rocket.html",
        "text": "The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. SpaceX launched a commercial satellite into space on Thursday with the boost of a partly used rocket, a feat that may open an era of cheaper space travel.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches a Satellite With a Partly Used Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5639",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/spacex-launches-a-satellite-with-a-partly-used-rocket.html",
        "text": "The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. SpaceX launched a commercial satellite into space on Thursday with the boost of a partly used rocket, a feat that may open an era of cheaper space travel.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches a Satellite With a Partly Used Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5640",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/spacex-launches-a-satellite-with-a-partly-used-rocket.html",
        "text": "The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. The use of a rocket booster that had flown once before may open an era of cheaper space travel, particularly for business ventures like satellite companies. SpaceX launched a commercial satellite into space on Thursday with the boost of a partly used rocket, a feat that may open an era of cheaper space travel.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Diamonds in a Meteorite May Be a Lost Planet\u2019s Fragments (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5641",
        "date": "2018-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/18/science/diamonds-meteorite-lost-planet.html",
        "text": "The space rock crashed in a desert in Sudan in 2008, and the flaws in its embedded minerals are like nothing seen in today\u2019s solar system. The space rock crashed in a desert in Sudan in 2008, and the flaws in its embedded minerals are like nothing seen in today\u2019s solar system. In 2008, chunks of space rock crashed in the deserts of Sudan. Diamonds discovered inside one of the recovered meteorites may have come from a destroyed planet that orbited our sun billions of years ago, scientists said on Tuesday. If confirmed, they say, it would be the first time anyone has recovered fragments from one of our solar system\u2019s so-called \u201clost\u201d planets.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden to Elevate Science Adviser to His Cabinet (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5642",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/science/biden-science-cabinet.html",
        "text": "The president-elect will nominate Eric S. Lander to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a post left vacant by President Trump for 18 months. The president-elect will nominate Eric S. Lander to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a post left vacant by President Trump for 18 months. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Friday that he will elevate the role of science in his cabinet as part of an effort to \u201crefresh and reinvigorate our national science and technology strategy.\u201d",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Gets an Artificial Star. Astronomers Ask: Do We Need More? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5643",
        "date": "2018-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/science/rocket-lab-humanity-star.html",
        "text": "The launch of a spinning geodesic sphere called the Humanity Star has set off concerns about the growing number of bright objects illuminating the dark sky. The launch of a spinning geodesic sphere called the Humanity Star has set off concerns about the growing number of bright objects illuminating the dark sky. A spinning, silver geodesic sphere reminiscent of the \u201cDancing With the Stars\u201d mirror ball trophy is moving through space and blinking as it orbits Earth every 90 minutes.",
        "author": "By Christina Caron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteor Puts on a Light Show Over Midwest, and for the Cameras (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5644",
        "date": "2017-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/science/meteorite-fireball-lisle-lake-michigan.html",
        "text": "The fiery object streaked across the Midwest sky early Monday morning. It was seen as far west as Nebraska and as far east as New York. The fiery object streaked across the Midwest sky early Monday morning. It was seen as far west as Nebraska and as far east as New York. A fiery meteor streaked across the Midwest sky early Monday morning, seen as far west as Nebraska and as far east as New York.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking at Your Home Planet from Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5645",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/science/earth-from-mars-photo.html",
        "text": "The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter needed to be calibrated, so it made this image of the moon and Earth, which NASA released on Friday. The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter needed to be calibrated, so it made this image of the moon and Earth, which NASA released on Friday. Greetings Earthlings! This is your planet and its moon as seen from Mars, some 127 million miles away.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking at Your Home Planet from Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5646",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/science/earth-from-mars-photo.html",
        "text": "The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter needed to be calibrated, so it made this image of the moon and Earth, which NASA released on Friday. The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter needed to be calibrated, so it made this image of the moon and Earth, which NASA released on Friday. Greetings Earthlings! This is your planet and its moon as seen from Mars, some 127 million miles away.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking at Your Home Planet from Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5647",
        "date": "2017-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/science/earth-from-mars-photo.html",
        "text": "The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter needed to be calibrated, so it made this image of the moon and Earth, which NASA released on Friday. The camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter needed to be calibrated, so it made this image of the moon and Earth, which NASA released on Friday. Greetings Earthlings! This is your planet and its moon as seen from Mars, some 127 million miles away.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Steve, a Famous Northern Light, Stays Mysterious (and Keeps His Name)  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5648",
        "date": "2018-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/science/steve-canada-aurora-borealis.html",
        "text": "Steve is a glowing strip in the night sky, not far from the northern lights. It was named after a cartoon. Now scientists have learned more. Steve is a glowing strip in the night sky, not far from the northern lights. It was named after a cartoon. Now scientists have learned more. For years, sky gazers in Canada have been training their camera lenses on a wispy strand of purple light running across the country from east to west, sometimes flanked by neon green fingers that appear to wave.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ancient Bits of Rock Help Solve an Asteroid Mystery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5649",
        "date": "2017-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/science/ancient-bits-of-rock-help-solve-an-asteroid-mystery.html",
        "text": "Scientists have a new explanation for why the composition of meteorites \u2014 pieces of space rock that land on Earth \u2014 is different from orbiting asteroids. Scientists have a new explanation for why the composition of meteorites \u2014 pieces of space rock that land on Earth \u2014 is different from orbiting asteroids. An asteroid is a smaller-than-a-planet rock orbiting in the inner solar system. A meteor is the streak of light of a space rock plunging into the atmosphere, and a meteorite is the remnant of space rock that survives the fiery descent and comes to rest on the ground.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manhattanhenge 2021: When and Where to Watch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5650",
        "date": "2021-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/science/manhattanhenge-when-to-watch.html",
        "text": "Saturday will bring New Yorkers their first shot at \u201cthe best sunset picture of the year.\u201d Sunday and two days in July will provide more opportunities. Saturday will bring New Yorkers their first shot at \u201cthe best sunset picture of the year.\u201d Sunday and two days in July will provide more opportunities. For two days every spring and summer, the sunset lines up with Manhattan\u2019s street grid, creating a gorgeous celestial spectacle. For a brief moment, the sun\u2019s golden rays illuminate the city\u2019s buildings and traffic with a breathtaking glow.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Secret Satellite Mission May Have Failed. What Happened? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5651",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/science/spacex-zuma-satellite.html",
        "text": "Rumors are that an expensive, classified mission code-named \u201cZuma\u201d failed to deploy in orbit and is now lost. Will we ever find out what actually happened? Rumors are that an expensive, classified mission code-named \u201cZuma\u201d failed to deploy in orbit and is now lost. Will we ever find out what actually happened? On Sunday, SpaceX launched its first rocket of the year. During the company\u2019s webcast of the liftoff, everything seemed to go without a hitch. The second stage of the rocket headed toward orbit as the booster returned to land at Cape Canaveral. But on Monday, word started spreading that something went very wrong with this highly classified mission, code-named \u201cZuma.\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Secret Satellite Mission May Have Failed. What Happened? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5652",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/science/spacex-zuma-satellite.html",
        "text": "Rumors are that an expensive, classified mission code-named \u201cZuma\u201d failed to deploy in orbit and is now lost. Will we ever find out what actually happened? Rumors are that an expensive, classified mission code-named \u201cZuma\u201d failed to deploy in orbit and is now lost. Will we ever find out what actually happened? On Sunday, SpaceX launched its first rocket of the year. During the company\u2019s webcast of the liftoff, everything seemed to go without a hitch. The second stage of the rocket headed toward orbit as the booster returned to land at Cape Canaveral. But on Monday, word started spreading that something went very wrong with this highly classified mission, code-named \u201cZuma.\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Secret Satellite Mission May Have Failed. What Happened? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5653",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/science/spacex-zuma-satellite.html",
        "text": "Rumors are that an expensive, classified mission code-named \u201cZuma\u201d failed to deploy in orbit and is now lost. Will we ever find out what actually happened? Rumors are that an expensive, classified mission code-named \u201cZuma\u201d failed to deploy in orbit and is now lost. Will we ever find out what actually happened? On Sunday, SpaceX launched its first rocket of the year. During the company\u2019s webcast of the liftoff, everything seemed to go without a hitch. The second stage of the rocket headed toward orbit as the booster returned to land at Cape Canaveral. But on Monday, word started spreading that something went very wrong with this highly classified mission, code-named \u201cZuma.\u201d",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ancient European Stone Monuments Said to Originate in Northwest France (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5654",
        "date": "2019-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/science/megaliths-archaeology-tombs.html",
        "text": "Research on Stone Age tombs throughout Europe offers a new answer to an old debate on where and when the iconic stone works were first built. Research on Stone Age tombs throughout Europe offers a new answer to an old debate on where and when the iconic stone works were first built. Thousands of years ago, megaliths began to appear in Europe \u2014 standing stones, dolmens, stone circles. They vary from single stones to complexes like Stonehenge.",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did a Cuttlefish Write This? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5655",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/science/cuttlefish-cognition-cephalopods.html",
        "text": "Octopuses and squid are full of cephalopod character. But more scientists are making the case that cuttlefish hold the key to unlocking evolutionary secrets about intelligence. Octopuses and squid are full of cephalopod character. But more scientists are making the case that cuttlefish hold the key to unlocking evolutionary secrets about intelligence. Captive cuttlefish require entertainment when they eat. Dinner and a show \u2014 if they can\u2019t get live prey, then they need some dancing from a dead shrimp on a stick in their tank.",
        "author": "By Veronique Greenwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jerry Nelson, Designer of the Segmented Telescope, Dies at 73 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5656",
        "date": "2017-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/science/jerry-nelson-segmented-telescope-dies-at-73.html",
        "text": "Mr. Nelson\u2019s design, made decades after the size limit was thought to have been reached, allowed scientists to peer farther into the universe than ever before. Mr. Nelson\u2019s design, made decades after the size limit was thought to have been reached, allowed scientists to peer farther into the universe than ever before. Jerry Nelson, who conceived of the design for the segmented telescope, which allowed scientists to peer farther into the universe than ever before, died on June 10 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 73.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robert Lightfoot, NASA\u2019s Acting Administrator, to Retire as Trump\u2019s Nominee Is Stalled (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5657",
        "date": "2018-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/science/robert-lightfoot-nasa-retirement.html",
        "text": "Mr. Lightfoot has filled in since the end of the Obama administration. The agency has never gone this long without a leader confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Lightfoot has filled in since the end of the Obama administration. The agency has never gone this long without a leader confirmed by the Senate. NASA has been without a permanent leader for more than a year. Now the agency\u2019s temporary leader is leaving, too.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robert Lightfoot, NASA\u2019s Acting Administrator, to Retire as Trump\u2019s Nominee Is Stalled (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5658",
        "date": "2018-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/science/robert-lightfoot-nasa-retirement.html",
        "text": "Mr. Lightfoot has filled in since the end of the Obama administration. The agency has never gone this long without a leader confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Lightfoot has filled in since the end of the Obama administration. The agency has never gone this long without a leader confirmed by the Senate. NASA has been without a permanent leader for more than a year. Now the agency\u2019s temporary leader is leaving, too.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robert Lightfoot, NASA\u2019s Acting Administrator, to Retire as Trump\u2019s Nominee Is Stalled (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5659",
        "date": "2018-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/science/robert-lightfoot-nasa-retirement.html",
        "text": "Mr. Lightfoot has filled in since the end of the Obama administration. The agency has never gone this long without a leader confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Lightfoot has filled in since the end of the Obama administration. The agency has never gone this long without a leader confirmed by the Senate. NASA has been without a permanent leader for more than a year. Now the agency\u2019s temporary leader is leaving, too.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s toilet is working fine, thanks for asking. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5660",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/spacex-toilet-diapers.html",
        "text": "It will be good for the crew to have a working toilet when they\u2019re spending nearly 24 hours in orbit before getting to the space station. It will be good for the crew to have a working toilet when they\u2019re spending nearly 24 hours in orbit before getting to the space station. The toilet on another Crew Dragon capsule sprang a leak in September during Inspiration4, SpaceX\u2019s first fully private mission. None of the four passengers noticed the problem during the mission, according to Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Experiment in Zurich Brings Us Nearer to a Black Hole\u2019s Mysteries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5661",
        "date": "2017-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/science/mixed-axial-gravitational-anomaly-weyl-semimetals-ibm.html",
        "text": "IBM researchers used an exotic material known as a Weyl semimetal to confirm the existence of a gravitational anomaly predicted in equations that describe the universe. IBM researchers used an exotic material known as a Weyl semimetal to confirm the existence of a gravitational anomaly predicted in equations that describe the universe. The equations that describe the universe at the smallest and largest scales \u2014 how the tiniest elementary particles dance, how the space-time of the cosmos bends \u2014 predicted a slight incongruity, a tiny unbalancing in the numbers of certain particles under certain circumstances.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Space Station May Crash to Earth on April Fools\u2019 Day (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5662",
        "date": "2018-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/science/falling-chinese-space-station-tiangong-1.html",
        "text": "Experts predict the abandoned space station, Tiangong-1, will fall back to Earth around this weekend. But the risk to anyone on the ground is almost nil. Experts predict the abandoned space station, Tiangong-1, will fall back to Earth around this weekend. But the risk to anyone on the ground is almost nil. The sky is falling. Again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Space Station May Crash to Earth on April Fools\u2019 Day (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5663",
        "date": "2018-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/science/falling-chinese-space-station-tiangong-1.html",
        "text": "Experts predict the abandoned space station, Tiangong-1, will fall back to Earth around this weekend. But the risk to anyone on the ground is almost nil. Experts predict the abandoned space station, Tiangong-1, will fall back to Earth around this weekend. But the risk to anyone on the ground is almost nil. The sky is falling. Again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Space Station May Crash to Earth on April Fools\u2019 Day (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5664",
        "date": "2018-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/science/falling-chinese-space-station-tiangong-1.html",
        "text": "Experts predict the abandoned space station, Tiangong-1, will fall back to Earth around this weekend. But the risk to anyone on the ground is almost nil. Experts predict the abandoned space station, Tiangong-1, will fall back to Earth around this weekend. But the risk to anyone on the ground is almost nil. The sky is falling. Again.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Moon as His Muse, Japanese Billionaire Signs Up for SpaceX Voyage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5665",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/science/spacex-moon-yusaku-maezawa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk shared a stage at a SpaceX factory on Monday night with Yusaku Maezawa, who will make a significant investment in the company\u2019s next-generation rocket. Elon Musk shared a stage at a SpaceX factory on Monday night with Yusaku Maezawa, who will make a significant investment in the company\u2019s next-generation rocket. HAWTHORNE, Calif. \u2014 When Yusaku Maezawa took the stage here at one corner of the SpaceX factory floor, the founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo explained that he did not just want to be the first private citizen to circle the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Moon as His Muse, Japanese Billionaire Signs Up for SpaceX Voyage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5666",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/science/spacex-moon-yusaku-maezawa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk shared a stage at a SpaceX factory on Monday night with Yusaku Maezawa, who will make a significant investment in the company\u2019s next-generation rocket. Elon Musk shared a stage at a SpaceX factory on Monday night with Yusaku Maezawa, who will make a significant investment in the company\u2019s next-generation rocket. HAWTHORNE, Calif. \u2014 When Yusaku Maezawa took the stage here at one corner of the SpaceX factory floor, the founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo explained that he did not just want to be the first private citizen to circle the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Moon as His Muse, Japanese Billionaire Signs Up for SpaceX Voyage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5667",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/science/spacex-moon-yusaku-maezawa.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk shared a stage at a SpaceX factory on Monday night with Yusaku Maezawa, who will make a significant investment in the company\u2019s next-generation rocket. Elon Musk shared a stage at a SpaceX factory on Monday night with Yusaku Maezawa, who will make a significant investment in the company\u2019s next-generation rocket. HAWTHORNE, Calif. \u2014 When Yusaku Maezawa took the stage here at one corner of the SpaceX factory floor, the founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo explained that he did not just want to be the first private citizen to circle the moon.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Unveils Silvery Vision to Mars: \u2018It\u2019s Basically an I.C.B.M. That Lands\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5668",
        "date": "2019-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. \u2014 As you drive east along Texas State Highway 4, it looks like a giant, shiny and pointy grain silo is rising out of the scrubby flatland at the tip of southern Texas. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Unveils Silvery Vision to Mars: \u2018It\u2019s Basically an I.C.B.M. That Lands\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5669",
        "date": "2019-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. \u2014 As you drive east along Texas State Highway 4, it looks like a giant, shiny and pointy grain silo is rising out of the scrubby flatland at the tip of southern Texas. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Unveils Silvery Vision to Mars: \u2018It\u2019s Basically an I.C.B.M. That Lands\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5670",
        "date": "2019-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. \u2014 As you drive east along Texas State Highway 4, it looks like a giant, shiny and pointy grain silo is rising out of the scrubby flatland at the tip of southern Texas. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Unveils Silvery Vision to Mars: \u2018It\u2019s Basically an I.C.B.M. That Lands\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5671",
        "date": "2019-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. Elon Musk delivered an update on his company\u2019s Starship prototype, which faces business challenges and neighbors not happy to live so close to its test site. BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. \u2014 As you drive east along Texas State Highway 4, it looks like a giant, shiny and pointy grain silo is rising out of the scrubby flatland at the tip of southern Texas. ",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Wants to Build a Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5672",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/science/space-station-blue-origin-sierra.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin says it will team up with Sierra Space, Boeing and other companies to build an outpost that could help replace the International Space Station. Blue Origin says it will team up with Sierra Space, Boeing and other companies to build an outpost that could help replace the International Space Station. Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is teaming up with other firms to build a space station in Earth orbit. The group announced its plans on Monday, revealing the latest concept for a privately built orbital outpost that could replace or complement the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Geology Is Our Destiny (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5673",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/science/natural-history-museum-gems-minerals.html",
        "text": "A visit to the renovated hall of gems and minerals at the American Museum of Natural History reveals how the cosmos works in the real world. A visit to the renovated hall of gems and minerals at the American Museum of Natural History reveals how the cosmos works in the real world. One day in October 1820 two young men, Elijah Hamlin and Ezekiel Holmes, were hiking on a hill in Maine called Mount Mica when they spotted a glowing, green stone on the ground. They picked it up and started to look for others, but darkness was falling. The next day it snowed.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "You\u2019ve Conquered the Escape Room. But Can You Escape the Lab? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5674",
        "date": "2019-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/science/escape-room-lab-physics.html",
        "text": "A physicist at the University of Illinois devised an immersive game in which teams solve science puzzles to unlock a mystery \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. A physicist at the University of Illinois devised an immersive game in which teams solve science puzzles to unlock a mystery \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. URBANA, Ill. \u2014 It was 10 p.m., and we were locked in a room at the mall.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "You\u2019ve Conquered the Escape Room. But Can You Escape the Lab? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5675",
        "date": "2019-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/science/escape-room-lab-physics.html",
        "text": "A physicist at the University of Illinois devised an immersive game in which teams solve science puzzles to unlock a mystery \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. A physicist at the University of Illinois devised an immersive game in which teams solve science puzzles to unlock a mystery \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. URBANA, Ill. \u2014 It was 10 p.m., and we were locked in a room at the mall.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "You\u2019ve Conquered the Escape Room. But Can You Escape the Lab? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5676",
        "date": "2019-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/science/escape-room-lab-physics.html",
        "text": "A physicist at the University of Illinois devised an immersive game in which teams solve science puzzles to unlock a mystery \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. A physicist at the University of Illinois devised an immersive game in which teams solve science puzzles to unlock a mystery \u2014 before it\u2019s too late. URBANA, Ill. \u2014 It was 10 p.m., and we were locked in a room at the mall.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stress Hormones Soar in Whales Trapped by Fishing Lines (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5677",
        "date": "2017-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/science/whales-feces-stress.html",
        "text": "A new study examining whale scat found very high hormone levels for stress in North Atlantic right whales that became entangled in comparison to healthy animals. A new study examining whale scat found very high hormone levels for stress in North Atlantic right whales that became entangled in comparison to healthy animals. In one more sign that North Atlantic right whales are struggling, a new study finds sky-high levels of stress in animals that have been caught in fishing nets.",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stress Hormones Soar in Whales Trapped by Fishing Lines (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5678",
        "date": "2017-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/science/whales-feces-stress.html",
        "text": "A new study examining whale scat found very high hormone levels for stress in North Atlantic right whales that became entangled in comparison to healthy animals. A new study examining whale scat found very high hormone levels for stress in North Atlantic right whales that became entangled in comparison to healthy animals. In one more sign that North Atlantic right whales are struggling, a new study finds sky-high levels of stress in animals that have been caught in fishing nets.",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Hair-Raising Hypothesis About Rodent Hair (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5679",
        "date": "2021-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/science/mice-hair-infrared.html",
        "text": "A new paper posits that the guard hairs of rodents and other small mammals may help sense the heat of predators, though more research is needed. A new paper posits that the guard hairs of rodents and other small mammals may help sense the heat of predators, though more research is needed. It\u2019s tough out there for a mouse. Outdoors, its enemies lurk on all sides: owls above, snakes below, weasels around the bend. Indoors, a mouse may find itself targeted by broom-wielding humans or bored cats.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellites Spot Oceans Aglow With Trillions of Organisms (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5680",
        "date": "2021-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/science/ocean-bioluminescent-satellite.html",
        "text": "A new generation of detectors let scientists identify a dozen large episodes of bioluminescence, one a hundred times larger than Manhattan \u2014 and that\u2019s the smallest. A new generation of detectors let scientists identify a dozen large episodes of bioluminescence, one a hundred times larger than Manhattan \u2014 and that\u2019s the smallest. The ocean has always glowed.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Expansive Life of Stephen Hawking (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5681",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2018/03/14/science/space/stephen-hawking-physicist-and-author-dies.html",
        "text": "Dr. Hawking captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world with his exploration of black holes and gravity. Dr. Hawking captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world with his exploration of black holes and gravity. Dr. Hawking captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world with his exploration of black holes and gravity.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Expansive Life of Stephen Hawking (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5682",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2018/03/14/science/space/stephen-hawking-physicist-and-author-dies.html",
        "text": "Dr. Hawking captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world with his exploration of black holes and gravity. Dr. Hawking captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world with his exploration of black holes and gravity. Dr. Hawking captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world with his exploration of black holes and gravity.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomers\u2019 Dark Energy Hopes Fade to Gray (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5683",
        "date": "2018-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/science/nasa-dark-energy-wfirst.html",
        "text": "The Wfirst project, which would have investigated the force of dark energy in the universe and searched for more planets, has been cut from NASA\u2019s proposed budget. The Wfirst project, which would have investigated the force of dark energy in the universe and searched for more planets, has been cut from NASA\u2019s proposed budget. A star-crossed mission nearly 20 years in the making that was intended to seek an answer to the most burning, baffling question in astronomy \u2014 and perhaps elucidate the fate of the universe \u2014 is in danger of being canceled.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomers\u2019 Dark Energy Hopes Fade to Gray (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5684",
        "date": "2018-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/science/nasa-dark-energy-wfirst.html",
        "text": "The Wfirst project, which would have investigated the force of dark energy in the universe and searched for more planets, has been cut from NASA\u2019s proposed budget. The Wfirst project, which would have investigated the force of dark energy in the universe and searched for more planets, has been cut from NASA\u2019s proposed budget. A star-crossed mission nearly 20 years in the making that was intended to seek an answer to the most burning, baffling question in astronomy \u2014 and perhaps elucidate the fate of the universe \u2014 is in danger of being canceled.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Venus? The Picture Gets Cloudier (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5685",
        "date": "2021-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/science/venus-life-phosphine.html",
        "text": "Despite doubts from many scientists, a team of researchers who said they had detected an unusual gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere were still confident of their findings. Despite doubts from many scientists, a team of researchers who said they had detected an unusual gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere were still confident of their findings. A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Venus? The Picture Gets Cloudier (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5686",
        "date": "2021-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/science/venus-life-phosphine.html",
        "text": "Despite doubts from many scientists, a team of researchers who said they had detected an unusual gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere were still confident of their findings. Despite doubts from many scientists, a team of researchers who said they had detected an unusual gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere were still confident of their findings. A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Venus? The Picture Gets Cloudier (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5687",
        "date": "2021-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/science/venus-life-phosphine.html",
        "text": "Despite doubts from many scientists, a team of researchers who said they had detected an unusual gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere were still confident of their findings. Despite doubts from many scientists, a team of researchers who said they had detected an unusual gas in the planet\u2019s atmosphere were still confident of their findings. A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where to Watch the Ring of Fire Solar Eclipse at Sunrise (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5688",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/science/solar-eclipse-june-10.html",
        "text": "An annular eclipse will start in Canada and end in a remote part of Russia. People in areas of the United States will see a partial eclipse. An annular eclipse will start in Canada and end in a remote part of Russia. People in areas of the United States will see a partial eclipse. If you\u2019re far enough north, the sun will rise like the horns of a bull on the morning of Thursday, June 10. It\u2019s an annular eclipse, also known as a ring of fire eclipse. Think of it as a beacon for the solstice on June 20, which is the astronomical start of summer.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches, Trips to Mars and More 2020 Space and Astronomy Events (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5689",
        "date": "2020-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/science/space-astronomy-2020.html",
        "text": "A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come  will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. If you follow space news and astronomy, the past year offered no shortage of highlights. Astronomers provided humanity\u2019s first glimpse of a black hole. China landed on the moon\u2019s far side. And the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing inspired us to look ahead to our future in space.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches, Trips to Mars and More 2020 Space and Astronomy Events (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5690",
        "date": "2020-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/science/space-astronomy-2020.html",
        "text": "A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come  will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. If you follow space news and astronomy, the past year offered no shortage of highlights. Astronomers provided humanity\u2019s first glimpse of a black hole. China landed on the moon\u2019s far side. And the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing inspired us to look ahead to our future in space.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches, Trips to Mars and More 2020 Space and Astronomy Events (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5691",
        "date": "2020-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/science/space-astronomy-2020.html",
        "text": "A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come  will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. If you follow space news and astronomy, the past year offered no shortage of highlights. Astronomers provided humanity\u2019s first glimpse of a black hole. China landed on the moon\u2019s far side. And the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing inspired us to look ahead to our future in space.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Launches, Trips to Mars and More 2020 Space and Astronomy Events (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5692",
        "date": "2020-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/science/space-astronomy-2020.html",
        "text": "A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. A year full of highs and lows in space just ended, and the 12 months to come  will be full of new highlights in orbit and beyond. If you follow space news and astronomy, the past year offered no shortage of highlights. Astronomers provided humanity\u2019s first glimpse of a black hole. China landed on the moon\u2019s far side. And the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing inspired us to look ahead to our future in space.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Physics Magic Trick: Take 2 Sheets of Carbon and Twist (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5693",
        "date": "2019-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/science/graphene-physics-superconductor.html",
        "text": "The study of graphene was starting to go out of style, but new experiments with sheets of the ultrathin material revealed there was much left to learn. The study of graphene was starting to go out of style, but new experiments with sheets of the ultrathin material revealed there was much left to learn. In the universe of office supplies, pencil lead \u2014 a mixture of graphite and clay, which does not include any lead \u2014 appears unexceptional beyond its ability to draw dark lines.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Summer Solstice: A Great Moment to Ponder the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5694",
        "date": "2017-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/science/summer-solstice-june-21.html",
        "text": "The scientific start to summer in the Northern Hemisphere this week comes ahead of a total solar eclipse in August, when the moon will engulf the sun. The scientific start to summer in the Northern Hemisphere this week comes ahead of a total solar eclipse in August, when the moon will engulf the sun. Wednesday at 12:24 a.m. Eastern Time marks the summer solstice, the scientific start to summer for half the world. The Northern Hemisphere will dip toward the sun, basking in its warmth for longer than at any other time. The solstice occurs because the Earth spins on a tilted axis. This slouch of 23.5 degrees is also responsible for the other seasons.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Summer Solstice: A Great Moment to Ponder the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5695",
        "date": "2017-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/science/summer-solstice-june-21.html",
        "text": "The scientific start to summer in the Northern Hemisphere this week comes ahead of a total solar eclipse in August, when the moon will engulf the sun. The scientific start to summer in the Northern Hemisphere this week comes ahead of a total solar eclipse in August, when the moon will engulf the sun. Wednesday at 12:24 a.m. Eastern Time marks the summer solstice, the scientific start to summer for half the world. The Northern Hemisphere will dip toward the sun, basking in its warmth for longer than at any other time. The solstice occurs because the Earth spins on a tilted axis. This slouch of 23.5 degrees is also responsible for the other seasons.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Stashes First Mars Rock Sample (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5696",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/science/nasa-mars-rock-sample.html",
        "text": "The rock, sealed in a tube, is the first of many the robotic explorer will collect to one day send back to Earth for scientists to study. The rock, sealed in a tube, is the first of many the robotic explorer will collect to one day send back to Earth for scientists to study. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover on Mars has confirmed the successful collection of its first rock sample.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Stashes First Mars Rock Sample (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5697",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/science/nasa-mars-rock-sample.html",
        "text": "The rock, sealed in a tube, is the first of many the robotic explorer will collect to one day send back to Earth for scientists to study. The rock, sealed in a tube, is the first of many the robotic explorer will collect to one day send back to Earth for scientists to study. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover on Mars has confirmed the successful collection of its first rock sample.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Stashes First Mars Rock Sample (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5698",
        "date": "2021-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/science/nasa-mars-rock-sample.html",
        "text": "The rock, sealed in a tube, is the first of many the robotic explorer will collect to one day send back to Earth for scientists to study. The rock, sealed in a tube, is the first of many the robotic explorer will collect to one day send back to Earth for scientists to study. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover on Mars has confirmed the successful collection of its first rock sample.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 Rover Gets New, Official Name: Perseverance (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5699",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-name.html",
        "text": "The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The next NASA rover headed to Mars, up to now blandly referred to as Mars 2020, has been named Perseverance.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 Rover Gets New, Official Name: Perseverance (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5700",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-name.html",
        "text": "The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The next NASA rover headed to Mars, up to now blandly referred to as Mars 2020, has been named Perseverance.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 Rover Gets New, Official Name: Perseverance (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5701",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-name.html",
        "text": "The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The next NASA rover headed to Mars, up to now blandly referred to as Mars 2020, has been named Perseverance.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 Rover Gets New, Official Name: Perseverance (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5702",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-name.html",
        "text": "The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The robotic explorer is to join Curiosity on the red planet next year, and is expected to get more rolling companions built by China, Europe and Russia. The next NASA rover headed to Mars, up to now blandly referred to as Mars 2020, has been named Perseverance.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Astronauts Beam After Return From 3-Day Journey to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5703",
        "date": "2021-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/spacex-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "The mission hinted at what space travel could look like in a more accessible future, while remaining in reach now to only the richest of the rich. The mission hinted at what space travel could look like in a more accessible future, while remaining in reach now to only the richest of the rich. After three days in orbit, a physician assistant, a community college professor, a data engineer and the billionaire who financed their trip arrived back on Earth, heralding a new era of space travel with a dramatic and successful Saturday evening landing in the Atlantic Ocean.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Astronauts Beam After Return From 3-Day Journey to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5704",
        "date": "2021-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/spacex-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "The mission hinted at what space travel could look like in a more accessible future, while remaining in reach now to only the richest of the rich. The mission hinted at what space travel could look like in a more accessible future, while remaining in reach now to only the richest of the rich. After three days in orbit, a physician assistant, a community college professor, a data engineer and the billionaire who financed their trip arrived back on Earth, heralding a new era of space travel with a dramatic and successful Saturday evening landing in the Atlantic Ocean.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Astronauts Beam After Return From 3-Day Journey to Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5705",
        "date": "2021-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/science/spacex-inspiration4.html",
        "text": "The mission hinted at what space travel could look like in a more accessible future, while remaining in reach now to only the richest of the rich. The mission hinted at what space travel could look like in a more accessible future, while remaining in reach now to only the richest of the rich. After three days in orbit, a physician assistant, a community college professor, a data engineer and the billionaire who financed their trip arrived back on Earth, heralding a new era of space travel with a dramatic and successful Saturday evening landing in the Atlantic Ocean.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronomers Found a Planet That Survived Its Star\u2019s Death (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5706",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/white-dwarf-planet.html",
        "text": "The Jupiter-size planet orbits a type of star called a white dwarf, and hints at what our solar system could be like when the sun burns out. The Jupiter-size planet orbits a type of star called a white dwarf, and hints at what our solar system could be like when the sun burns out. When our sun enters its death throes in about five billion years, it will incinerate our planet and then dramatically collapse into a dead ember known as a white dwarf. But the fate of more distant planets, such as Jupiter or Saturn, is less clear.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Has Auroras and a U.A.E. Spacecraft Captured New Pictures of Them (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5707",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/science/mars-aurora-uae.html",
        "text": "The Hope orbiter, built by the United Arab Emirates, was able to use its scientific instruments to capture an improved view of the red planet\u2019s night lights. The Hope orbiter, built by the United Arab Emirates, was able to use its scientific instruments to capture an improved view of the red planet\u2019s night lights. When barrages of charged protons and electrons erupted from the sun head our way, Earth\u2019s magnetic field deftly deflects them around the planet. This buffeting generates shimmering, glowing curtains of color known as the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere\u2019s polar regions, and aurora australis in the south.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Has Auroras and a U.A.E. Spacecraft Captured New Pictures of Them (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5708",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/science/mars-aurora-uae.html",
        "text": "The Hope orbiter, built by the United Arab Emirates, was able to use its scientific instruments to capture an improved view of the red planet\u2019s night lights. The Hope orbiter, built by the United Arab Emirates, was able to use its scientific instruments to capture an improved view of the red planet\u2019s night lights. When barrages of charged protons and electrons erupted from the sun head our way, Earth\u2019s magnetic field deftly deflects them around the planet. This buffeting generates shimmering, glowing curtains of color known as the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere\u2019s polar regions, and aurora australis in the south.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Black Hole Blew a Hole in the Cosmos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5709",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/black-hole-cosmos-astrophysics.html",
        "text": "The galaxy cluster Ophiuchus was doing just fine until WISEA J171227.81-232210.7 \u2014 a black hole several billion times as massive as our sun \u2014 burped on it. The galaxy cluster Ophiuchus was doing just fine until WISEA J171227.81-232210.7 \u2014 a black hole several billion times as massive as our sun \u2014 burped on it. If there were ever sentient beings in the Ophiuchus cluster, a faraway conglomeration of galaxies in the southern sky, they are long gone. A few hundred million years ago, a mighty cosmic storm swept through that region of space. Hot gas suffuses the cluster, but the storm blew a crater through it more than a million light-years wide, leaving just a near-vacuum, a nattering haze of ultrahot electrical particles.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Ride to Space on Virgin Galactic? That\u2019ll Be $450,000, Please. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5710",
        "date": "2021-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/science/virgin-galactic-ticket-price.html",
        "text": "The cost of a few minutes of weightlessness for new customers will be much higher than earlier prices, and they may have to wait awhile to fly. The cost of a few minutes of weightlessness for new customers will be much higher than earlier prices, and they may have to wait awhile to fly. If you were hoping to buy a ticket to space on one of Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic space planes, you\u2019ll probably wish you bought one seven years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Ride to Space on Virgin Galactic? That\u2019ll Be $450,000, Please. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5711",
        "date": "2021-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/science/virgin-galactic-ticket-price.html",
        "text": "The cost of a few minutes of weightlessness for new customers will be much higher than earlier prices, and they may have to wait awhile to fly. The cost of a few minutes of weightlessness for new customers will be much higher than earlier prices, and they may have to wait awhile to fly. If you were hoping to buy a ticket to space on one of Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic space planes, you\u2019ll probably wish you bought one seven years ago.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moderna applies for full F.D.A. approval for its Covid vaccine. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5712",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/science/moderna-vaccine-fda-approval.html",
        "text": "The company\u2019s application follows the move by Pfizer and BioNTech to seek full approval last month. The vaccines already have emergency use authorization in the United States. The company\u2019s application follows the move by Pfizer and BioNTech to seek full approval last month. The vaccines already have emergency use authorization in the United States. Moderna on Tuesday became the latest pharmaceutical company to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for full approval for its Covid-19 vaccine for use in people 18 and older. F.D.A. approval would allow the company to market the shot directly to consumers, and could also help raise public confidence in the vaccine.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Mission, Tianwen-1, Begins Its Monthslong Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5713",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/science/mars-china-launch.html",
        "text": "The combined orbiter, lander and rover will reach the red planet in February, if all goes well. NASA plans a Mars launch of its own next week. The combined orbiter, lander and rover will reach the red planet in February, if all goes well. NASA plans a Mars launch of its own next week. China set off on what it hoped would be its first successful journey to Mars on Thursday, launching a combined orbiter, lander and rover to the red planet on a voyage that will last until next year.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Mission, Tianwen-1, Begins Its Monthslong Journey (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5714",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/science/mars-china-launch.html",
        "text": "The combined orbiter, lander and rover will reach the red planet in February, if all goes well. NASA plans a Mars launch of its own next week. The combined orbiter, lander and rover will reach the red planet in February, if all goes well. NASA plans a Mars launch of its own next week. China set off on what it hoped would be its first successful journey to Mars on Thursday, launching a combined orbiter, lander and rover to the red planet on a voyage that will last until next year.",
        "author": "By Michael Roston and Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth\u2019s Gender Bias (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5715",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/women-astronauts-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. But NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond. The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. But NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth\u2019s Gender Bias (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5716",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/women-astronauts-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. But NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond. The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. But NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth\u2019s Gender Bias (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5717",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/women-astronauts-nasa.html",
        "text": "The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. But NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond. The Apollo program was designed by men, for men. But NASA can learn from its failures as it aims to send women to the moon and beyond. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Close-Up on Mysteries Made of Stone in Saudi Arabia\u2019s Desert (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5718",
        "date": "2017-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/science/saudi-arabia-gates.html",
        "text": "Structures that may have been created by ancient tribes could only be studied using Google Earth. Saudi officials finally invited an archaeologist to observe them via helicopter. Structures that may have been created by ancient tribes could only be studied using Google Earth. Saudi officials finally invited an archaeologist to observe them via helicopter. For nearly a decade, David Kennedy marveled from behind his computer screen at thousands of mysterious stone structures scattered across Saudi Arabia\u2019s desert. With Google Earth\u2019s satellite imagery at his fingertips, the archaeologist peeked at burial sites and other so-called Works of the Old Men, created by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chop Off This Worm\u2019s Head and It Can Still Detect Light (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5719",
        "date": "2017-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/science/planarian-flatworm-decapitation-light-detection.html",
        "text": "Planarian flatworms can react to light when they lose their heads and brains, and gradually regain their ability to distinguish different hues as they regenerate their bodies. Planarian flatworms can react to light when they lose their heads and brains, and gradually regain their ability to distinguish different hues as they regenerate their bodies. The planarian flatworm is a smooshed noodle of an organism that can be found all over the planet. It has a triangular head occupied by a rather primitive version of a brain and two black dots for eyes. You can chop off this head, and it will grow back in about a week \u2014 eyes, brain and all. And you can hack away at the critter until all that\u2019s left is a tiny speck of worm dust \u2014 and the thing will still grow back.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "When to Watch a Lunar Eclipse and Supermoon in Late Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5720",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/science/lunar-eclipse-blood-moon-how-to-watch.html",
        "text": "People out west in the United States and in Australia and East Asia will have a good view of an event some call a \u201csuper blood moon.\u201d People out west in the United States and in Australia and East Asia will have a good view of an event some call a \u201csuper blood moon.\u201d Night owls in California and other points out west are in for a treat on May 26 as the moon enters Earth\u2019s shadow and turns a blood red color during a total lunar eclipse, the first in more than two years visible from the United States.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "When to Watch a Lunar Eclipse and Supermoon in Late Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5721",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/science/lunar-eclipse-blood-moon-how-to-watch.html",
        "text": "People out west in the United States and in Australia and East Asia will have a good view of an event some call a \u201csuper blood moon.\u201d People out west in the United States and in Australia and East Asia will have a good view of an event some call a \u201csuper blood moon.\u201d Night owls in California and other points out west are in for a treat on May 26 as the moon enters Earth\u2019s shadow and turns a blood red color during a total lunar eclipse, the first in more than two years visible from the United States.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won\u2019t Be Able to Answer (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5722",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/science/voyager-2-nasa-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won\u2019t Be Able to Answer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5723",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/science/voyager-2-nasa-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won\u2019t Be Able to Answer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5724",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/science/voyager-2-nasa-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Voyager 2 Calls Home, Earth Soon Won\u2019t Be Able to Answer (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5725",
        "date": "2020-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/science/voyager-2-nasa-deep-space-network.html",
        "text": "NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the probe, which has crossed into interstellar space. Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Story of 8 Unforgettable Words About Apollo 11 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5726",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-john-noble-wilford.html",
        "text": "John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Story of 8 Unforgettable Words About Apollo 11 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5727",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-john-noble-wilford.html",
        "text": "John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Story of 8 Unforgettable Words About Apollo 11 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5728",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-john-noble-wilford.html",
        "text": "John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Story of 8 Unforgettable Words About Apollo 11 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5729",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/science/apollo-11-john-noble-wilford.html",
        "text": "John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. John Noble Wilford recounts some of what went into writing the story of humanity\u2019s giant leap for the July 21, 1969, edition of The New York Times. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5730",
        "date": "2017-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/science/film-clip-stored-in-dna.html",
        "text": "In a first, researchers converted a movie into a DNA sequence and inserted it into bacteria. They hope to someday use the technology to record cell behavior. In a first, researchers converted a movie into a DNA sequence and inserted it into bacteria. They hope to someday use the technology to record cell behavior. It was one of the very first motion pictures ever made: a galloping mare filmed in 1878 by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was trying to learn whether horses in motion ever become truly airborne.",
        "author": "By Gina Kolata"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Solar Eclipse: Highlights From Its Path Across the United States (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5731",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/solar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "For the first time since 1918, an eclipse traveled across the entire United States. Where the weather cooperated, those in the path took in a remarkable show. For the first time since 1918, an eclipse traveled across the entire United States. Where the weather cooperated, those in the path took in a remarkable show. \u2022 A total solar eclipse made contact in Oregon just after 1:15 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, darkening skies as the moon obscured the sun and cast a long shadow across Earth.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Solar Eclipse: Highlights From Its Path Across the United States (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5732",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/solar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "For the first time since 1918, an eclipse traveled across the entire United States. Where the weather cooperated, those in the path took in a remarkable show. For the first time since 1918, an eclipse traveled across the entire United States. Where the weather cooperated, those in the path took in a remarkable show. \u2022 A total solar eclipse made contact in Oregon just after 1:15 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, darkening skies as the moon obscured the sun and cast a long shadow across Earth.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Let Us Now Praise Tiny Ants (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5733",
        "date": "2021-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/science/ants-wilson-photography-niga-rice.html",
        "text": "Even in the densest human habitations, there are orders of magnitude more ants than there are of us, doing the hard work of making our crumbs disappear. Even in the densest human habitations, there are orders of magnitude more ants than there are of us, doing the hard work of making our crumbs disappear. It is telling, the entomologist Eleanor Spicer Rice writes in her introduction to a new book of ant photography by Eduard Florin Niga, that humans looking downward on each other from great heights like to describe the miniaturized people we see below us as looking \u201clike ants.\u201d By this we mean faceless, tiny, swarming: an indecipherable mass stripped of individuality or interest.",
        "author": "By Brooke Jarvis and Eduard Florin Niga"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Super Blue Blood Moon: Pictures From an Astronomical Hat Trick (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5734",
        "date": "2018-01-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/super-blue-blood-moon-photos.html",
        "text": "Around the world, people woke up early or stayed up late to take in the cosmic coincidence of a blue moon, a supermoon and a lunar eclipse. Around the world, people woke up early or stayed up late to take in the cosmic coincidence of a blue moon, a supermoon and a lunar eclipse. It\u2019s not every morning that you get the opportunity to witness a triple lunar coincidence in the pre-dawn skies before you\u2019ve even brewed your coffee. But on Wednesday morning in the United States, early morning skygazers were treated to what the internet has dubbed a \u201csuper blue blood moon.\u201d (Many of you in Australia and eastern Asia got to see this during your Wednesday evening, in which case you might have needed to brew something strong to help you stay up).",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "The DNA of Roma People Has Long Been Misused, Scientists Reveal (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5735",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/science/genetics-ethics-roma.html",
        "text": "An op-ed in Nature calls for higher ethical standards in the usage and analysis of genetic information from the Romani, a marginalized group living primarily in Europe. An op-ed in Nature calls for higher ethical standards in the usage and analysis of genetic information from the Romani, a marginalized group living primarily in Europe. For decades, geneticists have collected the blood of thousands of Roma people, a marginalized group living primarily in Europe, and deposited their DNA in public databases. The ostensible purpose of some of these studies was to learn more about the history and genetics of the Roma people.",
        "author": "By Sabrina Imbler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Women Making Science Videos on YouTube Face Hostile Comments (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5736",
        "date": "2018-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/science/youtube-science-women.html",
        "text": "After studying 23,005 comments left on videos about science and related topics, a researcher says, \u201cI could see why people would not want to be on YouTube.\u201d After studying 23,005 comments left on videos about science and related topics, a researcher says, \u201cI could see why people would not want to be on YouTube.\u201d Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are popular topics on YouTube. Some channels that stream videos on these subjects have millions of subscribers. Most are hosted by men.",
        "author": "By Adrianne Jeffries"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Total Solar Eclipse Leaves a Nation in Awe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5737",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/total-solar-eclipse-day.html",
        "text": "A total eclipse that crossed the sky from Oregon to South Carolina brought out throngs of spectators, who exulted in seeing the midday sky go briefly dark. A total eclipse that crossed the sky from Oregon to South Carolina brought out throngs of spectators, who exulted in seeing the midday sky go briefly dark. CHARLESTON, S.C. \u2014 The United States basked in the glory of a total eclipse on Monday, as the moon\u2019s shadow swept from the rocky beaches of Oregon to the marshes of South Carolina.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did Death Cheat Stephen Hawking of a Nobel Prize? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5738",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/science/hawking-nobel-black-hole.html",
        "text": "A recent study of black holes confirmed a fundamental prediction that the theoretical physicist made nearly five decades ago. But the ultimate award is beyond his reach. A recent study of black holes confirmed a fundamental prediction that the theoretical physicist made nearly five decades ago. But the ultimate award is beyond his reach. Did death cheat Stephen Hawking of a Nobel Prize?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gary Steigman, Who Teased Out the Universe\u2019s Dark Secrets, Dies at 76 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5739",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/27/science/space/gary-steigman-died-big-bang-astrophysicist.html",
        "text": "Dr. Steigman helped show that most matter in the universe was not made of atoms, a finding that led to modern conceptions of dark matter and dark energy. Dr. Steigman helped show that most matter in the universe was not made of atoms, a finding that led to modern conceptions of dark matter and dark energy. Gary Steigman, an astronomer whose pioneering studies of the Big Bang helped show that most of the matter in the universe was not made of atoms \u2014 a finding that led to the modern conception of a universe awash in dark matter being pushed into an infinite night by dark energy \u2014 died on April 9 in Columbus, Ohio. He was 76.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Voyage Customer, Yusaku Maezawa (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5740",
        "date": "2018-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/science/spacex-moon-tourism-passenger.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Elon Musk on Monday evening introduced Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo, as his first customer for a voyage around the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Voyage Customer, Yusaku Maezawa (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5741",
        "date": "2018-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/science/spacex-moon-tourism-passenger.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Elon Musk on Monday evening introduced Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo, as his first customer for a voyage around the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Voyage Customer, Yusaku Maezawa (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5742",
        "date": "2018-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/science/spacex-moon-tourism-passenger.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Elon Musk on Monday evening introduced Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo, as his first customer for a voyage around the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet SpaceX\u2019s First Moon Voyage Customer, Yusaku Maezawa (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5743",
        "date": "2018-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/science/spacex-moon-tourism-passenger.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain. Elon Musk on Monday evening introduced Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online Japanese clothing company Zozo, as his first customer for a voyage around the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Setting Fires and Restoring an American Landscape  (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5744",
        "date": "2018-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/science/prairie-fires-nachusa-illinois.html",
        "text": "Where development and fragmentation have disrupted natural cycles, teams run controlled burns every spring to help sustain prairies and other ecosystems that have long been shaped by fire. Where development and fragmentation have disrupted natural cycles, teams run controlled burns every spring to help sustain prairies and other ecosystems that have long been shaped by fire. North America was once a loose, sprawling conversation between landscapes. Soft boundaries linked prairie, savanna, shrubland, forest and marsh. During a dry spell, lightning might spark a fire that burned for miles and days on end, relenting only when it hit a lake or river.",
        "author": "By Steph Yin and Lyndon French"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Peer Through a Wormhole (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5745",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/science/wormholes-physics-astronomy-cosmos.html",
        "text": "Theoretically, the universe may be riddled with tunnels through space and time. Two scientists have now proposed a way to detect the existence of a cosmic escape hatch. Theoretically, the universe may be riddled with tunnels through space and time. Two scientists have now proposed a way to detect the existence of a cosmic escape hatch. Want to get away? Far away? There is a way. Maybe.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "There\u2019s Something Special About the Sun: It\u2019s a Bit Boring (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5746",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/science/sun-magnetic-storms.html",
        "text": "The sun seems a little less active than hundreds of similar stars in our galaxy, which could play a role in why life exists in our solar system. The sun seems a little less active than hundreds of similar stars in our galaxy, which could play a role in why life exists in our solar system. The sun, like all stars, is a blazing ball of fusion-powered plasma. From its surface emerge magnetic field lines that can cause dark patches known as sunspots. Turn up the activity of these magnetic whorls, and you get more solar storms flinging deadly charged particles and radiation throughout our solar system. If enough of these punishing waves hit a rocky planet, that planet might end up microwaved into a dreary condition where nothing could live.",
        "author": "By Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deep Beneath Your Feet, They Live in the Octillions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5747",
        "date": "2018-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/science/subsurface-microbes.html",
        "text": "The real journey to the center of the Earth has begun, and scientists are discovering subsurface microbial beings that shake up what we think we know about life. The real journey to the center of the Earth has begun, and scientists are discovering subsurface microbial beings that shake up what we think we know about life. At the surface, boiling water kills off most life. But Geogemma barossii is a living thing from another world, deep within our very own. Boiling water \u2014 212 degrees Fahrenheit \u2014 would be practically freezing for this creature, which thrives at temperatures around 250 degrees Fahrenheit.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "For 5 Contest Finalists, a $20 Million Dash to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5748",
        "date": "2017-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/science/google-lunar-xprize-finalists.html",
        "text": "The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The surface of the moon may soon be dotted with corporate logos, and its craters labeled with slogans. Families might be able to send their loved ones\u2019 ashes \u2014 or even their pets\u2019 remains \u2014 for lunar burial.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For 5 Contest Finalists, a $20 Million Dash to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5749",
        "date": "2017-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/science/google-lunar-xprize-finalists.html",
        "text": "The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The surface of the moon may soon be dotted with corporate logos, and its craters labeled with slogans. Families might be able to send their loved ones\u2019 ashes \u2014 or even their pets\u2019 remains \u2014 for lunar burial.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For 5 Contest Finalists, a $20 Million Dash to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5750",
        "date": "2017-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/science/google-lunar-xprize-finalists.html",
        "text": "The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The surface of the moon may soon be dotted with corporate logos, and its craters labeled with slogans. Families might be able to send their loved ones\u2019 ashes \u2014 or even their pets\u2019 remains \u2014 for lunar burial.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "For 5 Contest Finalists, a $20 Million Dash to the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5751",
        "date": "2017-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/24/science/google-lunar-xprize-finalists.html",
        "text": "The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The Google Lunar X Prize, announced in 2007 to spur private ventures to the moon, is down to five competitors. One or more may get there this year. The surface of the moon may soon be dotted with corporate logos, and its craters labeled with slogans. Families might be able to send their loved ones\u2019 ashes \u2014 or even their pets\u2019 remains \u2014 for lunar burial.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jim Bridenstine to Be Nominated by Trump to Lead NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5752",
        "date": "2017-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/science/jim-bridenstine-nasa-trump.html",
        "text": "The former Navy pilot is in his third term in Congress and would be the first elected official to serve as NASA administrator if confirmed by the Senate. The former Navy pilot is in his third term in Congress and would be the first elected official to serve as NASA administrator if confirmed by the Senate. Representative Jim Bridenstine, Republican of Oklahoma, will be nominated by President Trump to serve as NASA\u2019s next administrator, the White House said on Friday night.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jim Bridenstine to Be Nominated by Trump to Lead NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5753",
        "date": "2017-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/science/jim-bridenstine-nasa-trump.html",
        "text": "The former Navy pilot is in his third term in Congress and would be the first elected official to serve as NASA administrator if confirmed by the Senate. The former Navy pilot is in his third term in Congress and would be the first elected official to serve as NASA administrator if confirmed by the Senate. Representative Jim Bridenstine, Republican of Oklahoma, will be nominated by President Trump to serve as NASA\u2019s next administrator, the White House said on Friday night.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jim Bridenstine to Be Nominated by Trump to Lead NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5754",
        "date": "2017-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/science/jim-bridenstine-nasa-trump.html",
        "text": "The former Navy pilot is in his third term in Congress and would be the first elected official to serve as NASA administrator if confirmed by the Senate. The former Navy pilot is in his third term in Congress and would be the first elected official to serve as NASA administrator if confirmed by the Senate. Representative Jim Bridenstine, Republican of Oklahoma, will be nominated by President Trump to serve as NASA\u2019s next administrator, the White House said on Friday night.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Large Body of Water on Mars Is Detected, Raising the Potential for Alien Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5755",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/science/mars-liquid-alien-life.html",
        "text": "The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life-forms beyond Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Large Body of Water on Mars Is Detected, Raising the Potential for Alien Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5756",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/science/mars-liquid-alien-life.html",
        "text": "The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life-forms beyond Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Large Body of Water on Mars Is Detected, Raising the Potential for Alien Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5757",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/science/mars-liquid-alien-life.html",
        "text": "The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life-forms beyond Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Large Body of Water on Mars Is Detected, Raising the Potential for Alien Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5758",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/science/mars-liquid-alien-life.html",
        "text": "The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. The discovery suggests that the liquid conditions beneath the icy southern polar cap may have provided one of the critical building blocks for life on the red planet. For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life-forms beyond Earth.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kilauea Volcano\u2019s Lava Fields Offer Scientists a Portal to Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5759",
        "date": "2018-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/science/kilauea-volcanos-lava-fields-scientists-mars.html",
        "text": "Scientists are studying the Hawaiian volcano as part of a NASA-led project to answer questions like how life on Mars could have developed \u2014 if it ever did. Scientists are studying the Hawaiian volcano as part of a NASA-led project to answer questions like how life on Mars could have developed \u2014 if it ever did. The Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii has been setting off small earthquakes, creating gas-emitting fissures and releasing flows of lava this month that have destroyed dozens of homes and forced the evacuation of at least 2,000 people.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kilauea Volcano\u2019s Lava Fields Offer Scientists a Portal to Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5760",
        "date": "2018-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/science/kilauea-volcanos-lava-fields-scientists-mars.html",
        "text": "Scientists are studying the Hawaiian volcano as part of a NASA-led project to answer questions like how life on Mars could have developed \u2014 if it ever did. Scientists are studying the Hawaiian volcano as part of a NASA-led project to answer questions like how life on Mars could have developed \u2014 if it ever did. The Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii has been setting off small earthquakes, creating gas-emitting fissures and releasing flows of lava this month that have destroyed dozens of homes and forced the evacuation of at least 2,000 people.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon Eclipsed the Sun. Then the Bees Stopped Buzzing. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5761",
        "date": "2018-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/science/bees-eclipse-buzzing.html",
        "text": "Researchers worked with a small army of elementary school children to collect audio recordings of bees as they visited flowers along the path of last summer\u2019s total eclipse. Researchers worked with a small army of elementary school children to collect audio recordings of bees as they visited flowers along the path of last summer\u2019s total eclipse. Last year\u2019s Great American Eclipse drew hundreds of millions of eyes to the sky. But while people across the country \u201coohed\u201d and \u201caahed\u201d at the phenomenon, it appears the bees went silent.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5762",
        "date": "2017-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/science/elon-musk-mars.html",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s booster, scaled back from last year\u2019s plan but still the largest ever, could take travelers to Mars, the moon \u2014 or around the world in minutes. Mr. Musk\u2019s booster, scaled back from last year\u2019s plan but still the largest ever, could take travelers to Mars, the moon \u2014 or around the world in minutes. ADELAIDE, Australia \u2014 Elon Musk is revising his ambitions for sending people to Mars, and he says he now has a clearer picture of how his company, SpaceX, can make money along the way.",
        "author": "By Adam Baidawi and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5763",
        "date": "2017-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/science/elon-musk-mars.html",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s booster, scaled back from last year\u2019s plan but still the largest ever, could take travelers to Mars, the moon \u2014 or around the world in minutes. Mr. Musk\u2019s booster, scaled back from last year\u2019s plan but still the largest ever, could take travelers to Mars, the moon \u2014 or around the world in minutes. ADELAIDE, Australia \u2014 Elon Musk is revising his ambitions for sending people to Mars, and he says he now has a clearer picture of how his company, SpaceX, can make money along the way.",
        "author": "By Adam Baidawi and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5764",
        "date": "2017-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/science/elon-musk-mars.html",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s booster, scaled back from last year\u2019s plan but still the largest ever, could take travelers to Mars, the moon \u2014 or around the world in minutes. Mr. Musk\u2019s booster, scaled back from last year\u2019s plan but still the largest ever, could take travelers to Mars, the moon \u2014 or around the world in minutes. ADELAIDE, Australia \u2014 Elon Musk is revising his ambitions for sending people to Mars, and he says he now has a clearer picture of how his company, SpaceX, can make money along the way.",
        "author": "By Adam Baidawi and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Water on Mars Vanished. This Might Be Where It Went. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5765",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/science/mars-water-missing.html",
        "text": "Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. Although the planet is now desert dry, scientists say most of the water is still there, just locked up in rocks. Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. Although the planet is now desert dry, scientists say most of the water is still there, just locked up in rocks. Mars was once wet, with an ocean\u2019s worth of water on its surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Water on Mars Vanished. This Might Be Where It Went. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5766",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/science/mars-water-missing.html",
        "text": "Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. Although the planet is now desert dry, scientists say most of the water is still there, just locked up in rocks. Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. Although the planet is now desert dry, scientists say most of the water is still there, just locked up in rocks. Mars was once wet, with an ocean\u2019s worth of water on its surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Water on Mars Vanished. This Might Be Where It Went. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5767",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/science/mars-water-missing.html",
        "text": "Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. Although the planet is now desert dry, scientists say most of the water is still there, just locked up in rocks. Mars once had rivers, lakes and seas. Although the planet is now desert dry, scientists say most of the water is still there, just locked up in rocks. Mars was once wet, with an ocean\u2019s worth of water on its surface.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Form of Water, Both Liquid and Solid, Is \u2018Really Strange\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5768",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/superionic-water-neptune-uranus.html",
        "text": "Long theorized to be found in the mantles of Uranus and Neptune, the confirmation of the existence of superionic ice could lead to the development of new materials. Long theorized to be found in the mantles of Uranus and Neptune, the confirmation of the existence of superionic ice could lead to the development of new materials. Scientists have confirmed a form of water that is simultaneously solid and liquid. It is the latest advance in the study of water, a seemingly simple substance that can shift between many different configurations.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Form of Water, Both Liquid and Solid, Is \u2018Really Strange\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5769",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/superionic-water-neptune-uranus.html",
        "text": "Long theorized to be found in the mantles of Uranus and Neptune, the confirmation of the existence of superionic ice could lead to the development of new materials. Long theorized to be found in the mantles of Uranus and Neptune, the confirmation of the existence of superionic ice could lead to the development of new materials. Scientists have confirmed a form of water that is simultaneously solid and liquid. It is the latest advance in the study of water, a seemingly simple substance that can shift between many different configurations.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Get on This SpaceX Flight, You Don\u2019t Have to Be Rich, Just Lucky (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5770",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/science/spacex-jared-isaacman.html",
        "text": "Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. A new era is opening in spaceflight, a future where anyone \u2014 at least anyone with tens of millions of dollars \u2014 can buy a rocket ride to see Earth from a couple of hundred miles up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Get on This SpaceX Flight, You Don\u2019t Have to Be Rich, Just Lucky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5771",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/science/spacex-jared-isaacman.html",
        "text": "Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. A new era is opening in spaceflight, a future where anyone \u2014 at least anyone with tens of millions of dollars \u2014 can buy a rocket ride to see Earth from a couple of hundred miles up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Get on This SpaceX Flight, You Don\u2019t Have to Be Rich, Just Lucky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5772",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/science/spacex-jared-isaacman.html",
        "text": "Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. A new era is opening in spaceflight, a future where anyone \u2014 at least anyone with tens of millions of dollars \u2014 can buy a rocket ride to see Earth from a couple of hundred miles up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Get on This SpaceX Flight, You Don\u2019t Have to Be Rich, Just Lucky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5773",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/science/spacex-jared-isaacman.html",
        "text": "Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. A new era is opening in spaceflight, a future where anyone \u2014 at least anyone with tens of millions of dollars \u2014 can buy a rocket ride to see Earth from a couple of hundred miles up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Get on This SpaceX Flight, You Don\u2019t Have to Be Rich, Just Lucky (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5774",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/science/spacex-jared-isaacman.html",
        "text": "Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. Jared Isaacman, 37-year-old founder of Shift4 Payments, is chartering a trip to orbit and raffling a seat to a random winner to raise money for childhood cancer research. A new era is opening in spaceflight, a future where anyone \u2014 at least anyone with tens of millions of dollars \u2014 can buy a rocket ride to see Earth from a couple of hundred miles up.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Asteroids May Have Brought Water to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5775",
        "date": "2018-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/science/asteroids-water-earth.html",
        "text": "It was thought that water bound up in asteroids would be lost in the intense heat of the impacts when they hit our planet. New experiments say no. It was thought that water bound up in asteroids would be lost in the intense heat of the impacts when they hit our planet. New experiments say no. Water covers 70 percent of the surface of Earth. It\u2019s the source of life and home to countless living things. But where did it come from?",
        "author": "By James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5776",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html",
        "text": "Increasing ship traffic, sonar and seismic air gun blasts now planned for offshore energy exploration may be disrupting migration, reproduction and even the chatter of the seas\u2019 creatures. Increasing ship traffic, sonar and seismic air gun blasts now planned for offshore energy exploration may be disrupting migration, reproduction and even the chatter of the seas\u2019 creatures. Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean. ",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5777",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html",
        "text": "Increasing ship traffic, sonar and seismic air gun blasts now planned for offshore energy exploration may be disrupting migration, reproduction and even the chatter of the seas\u2019 creatures. Increasing ship traffic, sonar and seismic air gun blasts now planned for offshore energy exploration may be disrupting migration, reproduction and even the chatter of the seas\u2019 creatures. Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean. ",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oceans Are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5778",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html",
        "text": "Increasing ship traffic, sonar and seismic air gun blasts now planned for offshore energy exploration may be disrupting migration, reproduction and even the chatter of the seas\u2019 creatures. Increasing ship traffic, sonar and seismic air gun blasts now planned for offshore energy exploration may be disrupting migration, reproduction and even the chatter of the seas\u2019 creatures. Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean. ",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Father of Computer Science Decoded Nature\u2019s Mysterious Patterns (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5779",
        "date": "2018-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/science/alan-turing-desalination.html",
        "text": "In research shortly before his death in 1954, Alan Turing used mathematics to explore how forms emerge, yielding insights that are now being applied to problems like desalination. In research shortly before his death in 1954, Alan Turing used mathematics to explore how forms emerge, yielding insights that are now being applied to problems like desalination. Many have heard of Alan Turing, the mathematician and logician who invented modern computing in 1935. They know Turing, the cryptologist who cracked the Nazi Enigma code, helped win World War II. And they remember Turing as a martyr for gay rights who, after being prosecuted and sentenced to chemical castration, committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954. ",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5780",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/science/margaret-kivelson-europa.html",
        "text": "For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. LOS ANGELES \u2014 The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5781",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/science/margaret-kivelson-europa.html",
        "text": "For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. LOS ANGELES \u2014 The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5782",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/science/margaret-kivelson-europa.html",
        "text": "For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. LOS ANGELES \u2014 The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Find an Alien Ocean? Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5783",
        "date": "2018-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/science/margaret-kivelson-europa.html",
        "text": "For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. For forty years, the physicist at U.C.L.A. has been uncovering the outer solar system\u2019s secrets. Few scientists know more about the mysteries of Jupiter and its icy moons. LOS ANGELES \u2014 The data was like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.",
        "author": "By David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stalking the Endangered Wax Palm (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5784",
        "date": "2019-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/science/colombia-wax-palms-biodiversity.html",
        "text": "Colombia\u2019s national tree, the wax palm, is endangered. Now, with decades of guerrilla war in retreat, scientists are rediscovering vast forests and racing to study and protect them. Colombia\u2019s national tree, the wax palm, is endangered. Now, with decades of guerrilla war in retreat, scientists are rediscovering vast forests and racing to study and protect them. In 1991 Rodrigo Bernal, a botanist who specializes in palms, was driving into the Tochecito River Basin, a secluded mountain canyon in central Colombia, when he was seized by a sense of foreboding.",
        "author": "By Jennie Erin Smith and Federico Rios Escobar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stalking the Endangered Wax Palm (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5785",
        "date": "2019-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/science/colombia-wax-palms-biodiversity.html",
        "text": "Colombia\u2019s national tree, the wax palm, is endangered. Now, with decades of guerrilla war in retreat, scientists are rediscovering vast forests and racing to study and protect them. Colombia\u2019s national tree, the wax palm, is endangered. Now, with decades of guerrilla war in retreat, scientists are rediscovering vast forests and racing to study and protect them. In 1991 Rodrigo Bernal, a botanist who specializes in palms, was driving into the Tochecito River Basin, a secluded mountain canyon in central Colombia, when he was seized by a sense of foreboding.",
        "author": "By Jennie Erin Smith and Federico Rios Escobar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiangong-1, China\u2019s First Space Station, Crashes Into the Pacific (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5786",
        "date": "2018-04-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/science/chinese-space-station-crash-tiangong.html",
        "text": "China lost control of the craft in 2016, and sky watchers had been waiting months for it to re-enter the atmosphere, unsure where or when it would land. China lost control of the craft in 2016, and sky watchers had been waiting months for it to re-enter the atmosphere, unsure where or when it would land. A Chinese space station the size of a school bus re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere about 5:16 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, scattering its remaining pieces over the southern Pacific Ocean, according to the United States\u2019 Joint Force Space Component Command.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiangong-1, China\u2019s First Space Station, Crashes Into the Pacific (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5787",
        "date": "2018-04-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/science/chinese-space-station-crash-tiangong.html",
        "text": "China lost control of the craft in 2016, and sky watchers had been waiting months for it to re-enter the atmosphere, unsure where or when it would land. China lost control of the craft in 2016, and sky watchers had been waiting months for it to re-enter the atmosphere, unsure where or when it would land. A Chinese space station the size of a school bus re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere about 5:16 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, scattering its remaining pieces over the southern Pacific Ocean, according to the United States\u2019 Joint Force Space Component Command.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiangong-1, China\u2019s First Space Station, Crashes Into the Pacific (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5788",
        "date": "2018-04-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/science/chinese-space-station-crash-tiangong.html",
        "text": "China lost control of the craft in 2016, and sky watchers had been waiting months for it to re-enter the atmosphere, unsure where or when it would land. China lost control of the craft in 2016, and sky watchers had been waiting months for it to re-enter the atmosphere, unsure where or when it would land. A Chinese space station the size of a school bus re-entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere about 5:16 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, scattering its remaining pieces over the southern Pacific Ocean, according to the United States\u2019 Joint Force Space Component Command.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Southern Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower Will Peak in Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5789",
        "date": "2019-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/science/meteor-shower-delta-aquarids.html",
        "text": "Also called the Southern Delta Aquariids, the shower can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to see it. Also called the Southern Delta Aquariids, the shower can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to see it. All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you\u2019re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manhattanhenge July 2019 Day 2: When and Where to Watch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5790",
        "date": "2019-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/manhattanhenge-dates-time-locations.html",
        "text": "After getting rained out in May, many New Yorkers got to take \u201cthe best sunset picture of the year\u201d on Friday. They\u2019ll get a second chance on Saturday. After getting rained out in May, many New Yorkers got to take \u201cthe best sunset picture of the year\u201d on Friday. They\u2019ll get a second chance on Saturday. For two days every spring and summer, the sunset lines up with Manhattan\u2019s street grid, creating a gorgeous celestial spectacle. For a brief moment, the sun\u2019s golden rays illuminate the city\u2019s buildings and traffic with a breathtaking glow.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Did the Dinosaur-Killing Impactor Come From? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5791",
        "date": "2021-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/science/dinosaur-extinction-kt-comet-asteroid.html",
        "text": "A new study blames a comet fragment for the death of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But most experts maintain that an asteroid caused this cataclysmic event. A new study blames a comet fragment for the death of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But most experts maintain that an asteroid caused this cataclysmic event. In one searing apocalyptic moment 66 million years ago, Earth was transformed from a lush haven into a nightmare world with a fiery wound that bled soot into the skies. The extraterrestrial object that slammed into our planet spelled doom for dinosaurs and countless other species, even as its fallout opened new niches to our mammal ancestors.",
        "author": "By Becky Ferreira"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Are Some Mice (and People) Monogamous? A Study Points to Genes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5792",
        "date": "2017-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/science/parenting-genes-study.html",
        "text": "A groundbreaking study has found that genetic variations in mice are linked to parental care and monogamy, the first time such a link has been found in mammals. A groundbreaking study has found that genetic variations in mice are linked to parental care and monogamy, the first time such a link has been found in mammals. The oldfield mouse doesn\u2019t seem extraordinary. With soulful black eyes and tiny teacup ears, the rodent lives a humdrum life scurrying about meadows and beaches in the Southeast.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manhattanhenge 2017: Where and When to Watch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5793",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/science/manhattanhenge.html",
        "text": "The \u201cbest sunset picture of the year\u201d will come on July 12 and 13, the second half of this year\u2019s Manhattanhenge, when the sun kisses the city grid. The \u201cbest sunset picture of the year\u201d will come on July 12 and 13, the second half of this year\u2019s Manhattanhenge, when the sun kisses the city grid. The \u201cbest sunset picture of the year\u201d will come on July 12 and 13, the second half of this year\u2019s Manhattanhenge, when the sun kisses the city grid.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Before a Solar Eclipse Crosses 14 States, a Great American Road Trip (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5794",
        "date": "2017-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/science/solar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "Traffic and a run on Moon Pies were anticipated in some places as Americans prepared for Monday\u2019s eclipse, the first to move coast to coast in nearly a century. Traffic and a run on Moon Pies were anticipated in some places as Americans prepared for Monday\u2019s eclipse, the first to move coast to coast in nearly a century. CHARLESTON, S.C. \u2014 Americans across the country this weekend began a great, if brief, migration, rushing toward a swath of territory stretching from Oregon to South Carolina for a chance to witness a total eclipse of the sun.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Before a Solar Eclipse Crosses 14 States, a Great American Road Trip (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5795",
        "date": "2017-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/science/solar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "Traffic and a run on Moon Pies were anticipated in some places as Americans prepared for Monday\u2019s eclipse, the first to move coast to coast in nearly a century. Traffic and a run on Moon Pies were anticipated in some places as Americans prepared for Monday\u2019s eclipse, the first to move coast to coast in nearly a century. CHARLESTON, S.C. \u2014 Americans across the country this weekend began a great, if brief, migration, rushing toward a swath of territory stretching from Oregon to South Carolina for a chance to witness a total eclipse of the sun.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Give Thanks for the Winter Solstice. You Might Not Be Here Without It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5796",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/science/winter-solstice-december-21.html",
        "text": "The scientific start of winter offers a moment to reflect on how we might not be here to witness the changing seasons without Earth\u2019s particular tilt toward the sun. The scientific start of winter offers a moment to reflect on how we might not be here to witness the changing seasons without Earth\u2019s particular tilt toward the sun. [This article, which was originally published for 2017\u2019s winter solstice, has been updated for 2021. Sign up for The Times Space Calendar here.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Give Thanks for the Winter Solstice. You Might Not Be Here Without It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5797",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/science/winter-solstice-december-21.html",
        "text": "The scientific start of winter offers a moment to reflect on how we might not be here to witness the changing seasons without Earth\u2019s particular tilt toward the sun. The scientific start of winter offers a moment to reflect on how we might not be here to witness the changing seasons without Earth\u2019s particular tilt toward the sun. [This article, which was originally published for 2017\u2019s winter solstice, has been updated for 2021. Sign up for The Times Space Calendar here.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Give Thanks for the Winter Solstice. You Might Not Be Here Without It. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5798",
        "date": "2017-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/science/winter-solstice-december-21.html",
        "text": "The scientific start of winter offers a moment to reflect on how we might not be here to witness the changing seasons without Earth\u2019s particular tilt toward the sun. The scientific start of winter offers a moment to reflect on how we might not be here to witness the changing seasons without Earth\u2019s particular tilt toward the sun. [This article, which was originally published for 2017\u2019s winter solstice, has been updated for 2021. Sign up for The Times Space Calendar here.]",
        "author": "By Shannon Hall"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Eclipse Chaser\u2019s Guide to Your First Eclipse (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5799",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/science/eclipse-chasers-first.html",
        "text": "The coming solar eclipse will be a wondrous sight \u2014 if you get into viewing position in time, the clouds cooperate and you\u2019re ready to have your mind blown. The coming solar eclipse will be a wondrous sight \u2014 if you get into viewing position in time, the clouds cooperate and you\u2019re ready to have your mind blown. The United States has not seen a total solar eclipse sail from sea to shining sea in nearly a century. That means that next Monday, when the moon engulfs the sun in the sky, a new generation will experience a celestial extravaganza unlike anything else.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Renames Object After Uproar Over Old Name\u2019s Nazi Connotations (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5800",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/science/space/nasa-arrokoth-kuiper-belt.html",
        "text": "Scientists said an object four billion miles from Earth would be given a Native American name: Arrokoth. Its previous, informal name, Ultima Thule, had links to the Third Reich. Scientists said an object four billion miles from Earth would be given a Native American name: Arrokoth. Its previous, informal name, Ultima Thule, had links to the Third Reich. What does a small, icy world roughly four billion miles from Earth have to do with the Nazis?",
        "author": "By Liam Stack"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Renames Object After Uproar Over Old Name\u2019s Nazi Connotations (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5801",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/science/space/nasa-arrokoth-kuiper-belt.html",
        "text": "Scientists said an object four billion miles from Earth would be given a Native American name: Arrokoth. Its previous, informal name, Ultima Thule, had links to the Third Reich. Scientists said an object four billion miles from Earth would be given a Native American name: Arrokoth. Its previous, informal name, Ultima Thule, had links to the Third Reich. What does a small, icy world roughly four billion miles from Earth have to do with the Nazis?",
        "author": "By Liam Stack"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Renames Object After Uproar Over Old Name\u2019s Nazi Connotations (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5802",
        "date": "2019-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/science/space/nasa-arrokoth-kuiper-belt.html",
        "text": "Scientists said an object four billion miles from Earth would be given a Native American name: Arrokoth. Its previous, informal name, Ultima Thule, had links to the Third Reich. Scientists said an object four billion miles from Earth would be given a Native American name: Arrokoth. Its previous, informal name, Ultima Thule, had links to the Third Reich. What does a small, icy world roughly four billion miles from Earth have to do with the Nazis?",
        "author": "By Liam Stack"
    },
    {
        "title": "Go Ahead, Take a Spin on Titan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5803",
        "date": "2019-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/science/titan-saturn-map.html",
        "text": "Saturn\u2019s biggest moon has gasoline for rain, soot for snow and a subsurface ocean of ammonia. Now there\u2019s a map to help guide the search for possible life there. Saturn\u2019s biggest moon has gasoline for rain, soot for snow and a subsurface ocean of ammonia. Now there\u2019s a map to help guide the search for possible life there. How weird can nature get?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Go Ahead, Take a Spin on Titan (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5804",
        "date": "2019-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/science/titan-saturn-map.html",
        "text": "Saturn\u2019s biggest moon has gasoline for rain, soot for snow and a subsurface ocean of ammonia. Now there\u2019s a map to help guide the search for possible life there. Saturn\u2019s biggest moon has gasoline for rain, soot for snow and a subsurface ocean of ammonia. Now there\u2019s a map to help guide the search for possible life there. How weird can nature get?",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yearning for New Physics at CERN, in a Post-Higgs Way (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5805",
        "date": "2017-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/science/cern-large-hadron-collider-higgs-physics.html",
        "text": "Physicists monitoring the Large Hadron Collider are seeking clues to a theory that will answer deeper questions about the cosmos. But the silence from the frontier has been ominous. Physicists monitoring the Large Hadron Collider are seeking clues to a theory that will answer deeper questions about the cosmos. But the silence from the frontier has been ominous. MEYRIN, Switzerland \u2014 The world\u2019s biggest and most expensive time machine is running again.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Like Captain Kirk, William Shatner Will Travel to Space (Almost) (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5806",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/science/william-shatner-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. He\u2019s boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Like Captain Kirk, William Shatner Will Travel to Space (Almost) (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5807",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/science/william-shatner-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. He\u2019s boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Like Captain Kirk, William Shatner Will Travel to Space (Almost) (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5808",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/science/william-shatner-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. He\u2019s boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Like Captain Kirk, William Shatner Will Travel to Space (Almost) (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5809",
        "date": "2021-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/science/william-shatner-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. It\u2019s only the edge of space, but the man who played the \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain is heading there with three other people for Blue Origin\u2019s second flight with passengers. He\u2019s boldly going where Jeff Bezos has gone before.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Birder\u2019s Heaven: Just Follow the Stench to the Landfill (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5810",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/science/bird-watching-landfills.html",
        "text": "If you love bird watching, consider scurrying over sharp objects and mystery mush to catch a glimpse of some of the exotic flying things drawn to a free lunch. If you love bird watching, consider scurrying over sharp objects and mystery mush to catch a glimpse of some of the exotic flying things drawn to a free lunch. Bulldozers push around refuse. Machinery rumbles and beeps. Trucks barrel past. All the while, birds call out like flocks of screaming children. Welcome to the Brevard County Central Disposal Facility in Cocoa, Fla. \u2014 a birder\u2019s paradise.",
        "author": "By Joanna Klein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fire Blight Spreads Northward, Threatening Apple Orchards (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5811",
        "date": "2019-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/science/fire-blight-spreads-northward-threatening-apple-orchards.html",
        "text": "Growers in northern states are combating virulent outbreaks of a disease as seasons grow warmer, orchards have been reconfigured for higher yields and new varieties may be more vulnerable. Growers in northern states are combating virulent outbreaks of a disease as seasons grow warmer, orchards have been reconfigured for higher yields and new varieties may be more vulnerable. GENEVA, N.Y. \u2014 Across the country, hundreds of kinds of apples were meticulously developed by orchardists over the last couple of centuries and then, as farms and groves were abandoned and commercial production greatly narrowed the number of varieties for sale, many were forgotten.",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fire Blight Spreads Northward, Threatening Apple Orchards (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5812",
        "date": "2019-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/science/fire-blight-spreads-northward-threatening-apple-orchards.html",
        "text": "Growers in northern states are combating virulent outbreaks of a disease as seasons grow warmer, orchards have been reconfigured for higher yields and new varieties may be more vulnerable. Growers in northern states are combating virulent outbreaks of a disease as seasons grow warmer, orchards have been reconfigured for higher yields and new varieties may be more vulnerable. GENEVA, N.Y. \u2014 Across the country, hundreds of kinds of apples were meticulously developed by orchardists over the last couple of centuries and then, as farms and groves were abandoned and commercial production greatly narrowed the number of varieties for sale, many were forgotten.",
        "author": "By Jim Robbins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX\u2019s Ambition Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5813",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. (Sign up for the Science Times newsletter and sync your calendar with the solar system.)",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX\u2019s Ambition Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5814",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. (Sign up for the Science Times newsletter and sync your calendar with the solar system.)",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX\u2019s Ambition Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5815",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. (Sign up for the Science Times newsletter and sync your calendar with the solar system.)",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX\u2019s Ambition Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5816",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. (Sign up for the Science Times newsletter and sync your calendar with the solar system.)",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX\u2019s Ambition Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5817",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. Elon Musk disrupted the business of sending rockets into space and has now achieved a milestone in spaceflight by launching the most powerful rocket currently operating in the world. (Sign up for the Science Times newsletter and sync your calendar with the solar system.)",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ancient Jars Hold Clues About Earth\u2019s Fluctuating Magnetic Fields (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5818",
        "date": "2017-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/science/magnetic-field-earth-jars.html",
        "text": "By scanning pottery from the Iron Age kingdom of Judah, geoscientists detected a spike and then a decline in the planet\u2019s magnetic field starting in the eighth century B.C. By scanning pottery from the Iron Age kingdom of Judah, geoscientists detected a spike and then a decline in the planet\u2019s magnetic field starting in the eighth century B.C. The Earth\u2019s magnetic field \u2014 which deflects harmful space radiation from the surface \u2014 has been weakening, losing about 10 percent of its strength over the last two centuries, and the decay may have been accelerating in recent years.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Accused of Toxic Culture and Safety Issues (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5819",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/science/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-safety.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin launched the Amazon founder to the edge of space in July and has another flight planned in October, but the company has experienced other setbacks this year. Blue Origin launched the Amazon founder to the edge of space in July and has another flight planned in October, but the company has experienced other setbacks this year. Former and current employees at Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the richest people in the world, say the company is rife with sexism, intolerant of employees who dare to contradict their bosses and lax on safety.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Rocket Company Accused of Toxic Culture and Safety Issues (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5820",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/science/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-safety.html",
        "text": "Blue Origin launched the Amazon founder to the edge of space in July and has another flight planned in October, but the company has experienced other setbacks this year. Blue Origin launched the Amazon founder to the edge of space in July and has another flight planned in October, but the company has experienced other setbacks this year. Former and current employees at Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the richest people in the world, say the company is rife with sexism, intolerant of employees who dare to contradict their bosses and lax on safety.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "On Mars, NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Drilled the Rocks It Came For (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5821",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/science/mars-rover-rocks.html",
        "text": "After an earlier drilling attempt failed to collect anything, the rover appeared to gather its first sample. But mission managers need to take another look before sealing the tube. After an earlier drilling attempt failed to collect anything, the rover appeared to gather its first sample. But mission managers need to take another look before sealing the tube. The rock appeared right where it should have been \u2014 captured within the drill bit of NASA\u2019s latest Mars rover, Perseverance.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "On Mars, NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Drilled the Rocks It Came For (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5822",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/science/mars-rover-rocks.html",
        "text": "After an earlier drilling attempt failed to collect anything, the rover appeared to gather its first sample. But mission managers need to take another look before sealing the tube. After an earlier drilling attempt failed to collect anything, the rover appeared to gather its first sample. But mission managers need to take another look before sealing the tube. The rock appeared right where it should have been \u2014 captured within the drill bit of NASA\u2019s latest Mars rover, Perseverance.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ask Science Times (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5823",
        "date": "2018-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/science/ask-sciencetimes.html",
        "text": "For the 40th anniversary of Science Times, we invite readers to ask questions about all things science: space, medicine, environment, animals, genetics, archaeology \u2014 you name it. Ask away! For the 40th anniversary of Science Times, we invite readers to ask questions about all things science: space, medicine, environment, animals, genetics, archaeology \u2014 you name it. Ask away! For the 40th anniversary of Science Times, we invite readers to ask questions about all things science: space, medicine, environment, animals, genetics, archaeology \u2014 you name it. Ask away!",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Thoughts on Muons Upending Physics (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5824",
        "date": "2021-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/09/science/muon-particle-physics-comments.html",
        "text": "A story this week that involved wobbling muons, particle colliders, a Costco parking lot and the possible rewriting of the laws of physics drew an array of enthusiastic comments. A story this week that involved wobbling muons, particle colliders, a Costco parking lot and the possible rewriting of the laws of physics drew an array of enthusiastic comments. A story this week that involved wobbling muons, particle colliders, a Costco parking lot and the possible rewriting of the laws of physics drew an array of enthusiastic comments.",
        "author": "By Alan Burdick"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a Blue Origin Rocket, William Shatner Finally Goes to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5825",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. NEAR VAN HORN, TEXAS \u2014 William Shatner, the actor best known as the heroic Captain James T. Kirk in \u201cStar Trek,\u201d and three other passengers returned safely from a brief trip to the edge of space on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a Blue Origin Rocket, William Shatner Finally Goes to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5826",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. NEAR VAN HORN, TEXAS \u2014 William Shatner, the actor best known as the heroic Captain James T. Kirk in \u201cStar Trek,\u201d and three other passengers returned safely from a brief trip to the edge of space on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a Blue Origin Rocket, William Shatner Finally Goes to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5827",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. NEAR VAN HORN, TEXAS \u2014 William Shatner, the actor best known as the heroic Captain James T. Kirk in \u201cStar Trek,\u201d and three other passengers returned safely from a brief trip to the edge of space on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "In a Blue Origin Rocket, William Shatner Finally Goes to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5828",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/william-shatner-space-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. The actor who played Captain Kirk played the role of pitchman for Jeff Bezos\u2019 spaceflight company at a time that it is facing a number of workplace and business difficulties. NEAR VAN HORN, TEXAS \u2014 William Shatner, the actor best known as the heroic Captain James T. Kirk in \u201cStar Trek,\u201d and three other passengers returned safely from a brief trip to the edge of space on Wednesday.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Lunar Eclipse and Super Blue Moon Are Here. Watch It Before Work. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5829",
        "date": "2018-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/science/super-blood-blue-moon-eclipse.html",
        "text": "On Wednesday, Earth will cast its shadow over the second full moon of January, making it turn red in a lunar eclipse. Here\u2019s when and where you can see it. On Wednesday, Earth will cast its shadow over the second full moon of January, making it turn red in a lunar eclipse. Here\u2019s when and where you can see it. Early Wednesday morning, if you live in the United States, the moon will bloom red, like a giant rose in the predawn sky. If you live in the western part of the United States, the eastern part of Asia or in Australia, you can watch the show unfold better than anywhere else.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Google Lunar X Prize\u2019s Race to the Moon Is Over. Nobody Won. (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5830",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/science/google-lunar-x-prize-moon.html",
        "text": "None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. The Google Lunar X Prize competition, which has spent the past decade dangling a $20 million prize for the first privately financed venture to make it to the moon, came to a quiet end on Tuesday. Not with the ka-boom of a rocket launch or a winner beaming photos back from the lunar surface, but with a tweet and a statement.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Google Lunar X Prize\u2019s Race to the Moon Is Over. Nobody Won. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5831",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/science/google-lunar-x-prize-moon.html",
        "text": "None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. The Google Lunar X Prize competition, which has spent the past decade dangling a $20 million prize for the first privately financed venture to make it to the moon, came to a quiet end on Tuesday. Not with the ka-boom of a rocket launch or a winner beaming photos back from the lunar surface, but with a tweet and a statement.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Google Lunar X Prize\u2019s Race to the Moon Is Over. Nobody Won. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5832",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/science/google-lunar-x-prize-moon.html",
        "text": "None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. The Google Lunar X Prize competition, which has spent the past decade dangling a $20 million prize for the first privately financed venture to make it to the moon, came to a quiet end on Tuesday. Not with the ka-boom of a rocket launch or a winner beaming photos back from the lunar surface, but with a tweet and a statement.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Google Lunar X Prize\u2019s Race to the Moon Is Over. Nobody Won. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5833",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/science/google-lunar-x-prize-moon.html",
        "text": "None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. None of the remaining competitors for the $20 million award will be able to get off the ground by March 31, a deadline that had already been extended multiple times. The Google Lunar X Prize competition, which has spent the past decade dangling a $20 million prize for the first privately financed venture to make it to the moon, came to a quiet end on Tuesday. Not with the ka-boom of a rocket launch or a winner beaming photos back from the lunar surface, but with a tweet and a statement.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hunting for a Giant Black Hole, Astronomers Found a Nest of Darkness (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5834",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/science/astronomy-black-hole-ngc6397.html",
        "text": "No Gargantua dwells at the heart of stellar cluster NGC 6397. Instead, a few dozen smaller black holes seem to be swarming around in there, throwing their considerable masses around. No Gargantua dwells at the heart of stellar cluster NGC 6397. Instead, a few dozen smaller black holes seem to be swarming around in there, throwing their considerable masses around. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hunting for a Giant Black Hole, Astronomers Found a Nest of Darkness (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5835",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/science/astronomy-black-hole-ngc6397.html",
        "text": "No Gargantua dwells at the heart of stellar cluster NGC 6397. Instead, a few dozen smaller black holes seem to be swarming around in there, throwing their considerable masses around. No Gargantua dwells at the heart of stellar cluster NGC 6397. Instead, a few dozen smaller black holes seem to be swarming around in there, throwing their considerable masses around. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Right Now Feels So Long and Without Any End in Sight\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5836",
        "date": "2021-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/science/science-covid-mental-health.html",
        "text": "More than 700 people have been keeping digital diaries as part of Pandemic Journaling Project. It may be the most complete record of our shifting moods in this isolating year. More than 700 people have been keeping digital diaries as part of Pandemic Journaling Project. It may be the most complete record of our shifting moods in this isolating year. Those thoughts, typed into a digital journal on May 30, could stand as an anthem for this tragic pandemic year, a cry recognized around the world without explanation or context.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Right Now Feels So Long and Without Any End in Sight\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5837",
        "date": "2021-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/science/science-covid-mental-health.html",
        "text": "More than 700 people have been keeping digital diaries as part of Pandemic Journaling Project. It may be the most complete record of our shifting moods in this isolating year. More than 700 people have been keeping digital diaries as part of Pandemic Journaling Project. It may be the most complete record of our shifting moods in this isolating year. Those thoughts, typed into a digital journal on May 30, could stand as an anthem for this tragic pandemic year, a cry recognized around the world without explanation or context.",
        "author": "By Benedict Carey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47,000 Feet From the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5838",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/apollo-10-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. Soon we will recognize the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon. ",
        "author": "By Jim Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47,000 Feet From the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5839",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/apollo-10-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. Soon we will recognize the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon. ",
        "author": "By Jim Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47,000 Feet From the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5840",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/apollo-10-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. Soon we will recognize the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon. ",
        "author": "By Jim Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47,000 Feet From the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5841",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/apollo-10-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. Soon we will recognize the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon. ",
        "author": "By Jim Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47,000 Feet From the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5842",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/science/apollo-10-moon-nasa.html",
        "text": "In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. In a year when we\u2019ll celebrate Apollo 11\u2019s 50th anniversary, it\u2019s worth remembering the pathfinders who completed the same mission with one critical order: don\u2019t actually land on the moon. Soon we will recognize the 50th anniversary of the first humans to walk on the moon. ",
        "author": "By Jim Bell"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Group of Scientists Presses a Case Against the Lab Leak Theory of Covid (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5843",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/science/coronavirus-origins-lab-leak.html",
        "text": "In a review of recent studies and comparisons to other outbreaks, a group of virologists contends that there is more evidence to support a natural spillover from animals to humans. In a review of recent studies and comparisons to other outbreaks, a group of virologists contends that there is more evidence to support a natural spillover from animals to humans. In the latest volley of the debate over the origins of the coronavirus, a group of scientists this week presented a review of scientific findings that they argue shows a natural spillover from animal to human is a far more likely cause of the pandemic than a laboratory incident.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer and James Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Young Sun\u2019s Outbursts Were Trapped in Blue Crystals From Outer Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5844",
        "date": "2018-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/blue-crystals-sun.html",
        "text": "Gases trapped inside a meteorite that fell to Earth offer the first physical clues of the \u201cterrible twos\u201d phase of our star early in the life of the solar system. Gases trapped inside a meteorite that fell to Earth offer the first physical clues of the \u201cterrible twos\u201d phase of our star early in the life of the solar system. Much like a toddler throwing a tantrum, the sun was exceptionally explosive early in its life. It kicked and screamed with ferocious flares and rambunctious bursts of radiation that were much more energetic than what we see today.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5845",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/organoids-brain-alysson-muotri.html",
        "text": "Clusters of living brain cells are teaching scientists about diseases like autism. With a new finding, some experts wonder if these organoids may become too much like the real thing. Clusters of living brain cells are teaching scientists about diseases like autism. With a new finding, some experts wonder if these organoids may become too much like the real thing. SAN DIEGO \u2014 Two hundred and fifty miles over Alysson Muotri\u2019s head, a thousand tiny spheres of brain cells were sailing through space. ",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lights, Camera, Blastoff: SpaceX Rockets Light Up California\u2019s Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5846",
        "date": "2018-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/science/spacex-launch-california.html",
        "text": "As SpaceX and other companies use the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch hub near Los Angeles more often, the region can expect more spectacles like the one visible on Sunday. As SpaceX and other companies use the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch hub near Los Angeles more often, the region can expect more spectacles like the one visible on Sunday. Just after sundown on Sunday, people around Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California looked up and spotted the red glare of a rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lights, Camera, Blastoff: SpaceX Rockets Light Up California\u2019s Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5847",
        "date": "2018-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/science/spacex-launch-california.html",
        "text": "As SpaceX and other companies use the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch hub near Los Angeles more often, the region can expect more spectacles like the one visible on Sunday. As SpaceX and other companies use the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch hub near Los Angeles more often, the region can expect more spectacles like the one visible on Sunday. Just after sundown on Sunday, people around Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California looked up and spotted the red glare of a rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lights, Camera, Blastoff: SpaceX Rockets Light Up California\u2019s Night Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5848",
        "date": "2018-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/science/spacex-launch-california.html",
        "text": "As SpaceX and other companies use the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch hub near Los Angeles more often, the region can expect more spectacles like the one visible on Sunday. As SpaceX and other companies use the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch hub near Los Angeles more often, the region can expect more spectacles like the one visible on Sunday. Just after sundown on Sunday, people around Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California looked up and spotted the red glare of a rocket.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Reading Dan Frank, Book Editor and \u2018Champion of the Unexampled\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5849",
        "date": "2021-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/science/science-books-dan-frank-pantheon.html",
        "text": "Alan Lightman, Janna Levin and others recall the editor who shaped their work and a literary genre. Plus, more reading recommendations in the Friday edition of the Science Times newsletter. Alan Lightman, Janna Levin and others recall the editor who shaped their work and a literary genre. Plus, more reading recommendations in the Friday edition of the Science Times newsletter. Summer is basically here, and now is the moment to find a book to fall into.",
        "author": "By Alan Burdick"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Is a Black Hole? Here\u2019s Our Guide for Earthlings (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5850",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/science/what-is-black-hole.html",
        "text": "Welcome to the place of no return \u2014 a region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape it. This is a black hole. Welcome to the place of no return \u2014 a region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape it. This is a black hole. Welcome, earthlings, to the place of no return: a region in space where the gravitational pull is so strong, not even light can escape it. This is a black hole.",
        "author": "By JoAnna Klein and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gazing Into Danakil Depression\u2019s Mirror, and Seeing Mars Stare Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5851",
        "date": "2017-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/science/danakil-depression-ethiopia.html",
        "text": "Scientists are studying this area in a remote region of Ethiopia \u2014 one of the hottest places on Earth \u2014 to understand the possibilities of life on other planets and moons. Scientists are studying this area in a remote region of Ethiopia \u2014 one of the hottest places on Earth \u2014 to understand the possibilities of life on other planets and moons. DANAKIL DEPRESSION, Ethiopia \u2014 In oppressively dry heat and a miasma of sulfur and chlorine, the rocky landscape sprouts patches of neon green and yellow that resemble oozing scrambled eggs.",
        "author": "By Amy Yee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gazing Into Danakil Depression\u2019s Mirror, and Seeing Mars Stare Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5852",
        "date": "2017-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/science/danakil-depression-ethiopia.html",
        "text": "Scientists are studying this area in a remote region of Ethiopia \u2014 one of the hottest places on Earth \u2014 to understand the possibilities of life on other planets and moons. Scientists are studying this area in a remote region of Ethiopia \u2014 one of the hottest places on Earth \u2014 to understand the possibilities of life on other planets and moons. DANAKIL DEPRESSION, Ethiopia \u2014 In oppressively dry heat and a miasma of sulfur and chlorine, the rocky landscape sprouts patches of neon green and yellow that resemble oozing scrambled eggs.",
        "author": "By Amy Yee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gazing Into Danakil Depression\u2019s Mirror, and Seeing Mars Stare Back (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5853",
        "date": "2017-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/science/danakil-depression-ethiopia.html",
        "text": "Scientists are studying this area in a remote region of Ethiopia \u2014 one of the hottest places on Earth \u2014 to understand the possibilities of life on other planets and moons. Scientists are studying this area in a remote region of Ethiopia \u2014 one of the hottest places on Earth \u2014 to understand the possibilities of life on other planets and moons. DANAKIL DEPRESSION, Ethiopia \u2014 In oppressively dry heat and a miasma of sulfur and chlorine, the rocky landscape sprouts patches of neon green and yellow that resemble oozing scrambled eggs.",
        "author": "By Amy Yee"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Tiny Particle\u2019s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5854",
        "date": "2021-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/science/particle-physics-muon-fermilab-brookhaven.html",
        "text": "Experiments with particles known as muons suggest that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. Experiments with particles known as muons suggest that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics, scientists announced on Wednesday, a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the universe.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alone on a Mountaintop, Awaiting a Very Hard Rain (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5855",
        "date": "2020-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/science/observatory-cosmos-armenia-physics.html",
        "text": "Decades ago, Armenian scientists built a high-elevation trap to catch and study cosmic rays. Physics has mostly moved on, but the station persists \u2014 a ghost observatory with a skeleton crew. Decades ago, Armenian scientists built a high-elevation trap to catch and study cosmic rays. Physics has mostly moved on, but the station persists \u2014 a ghost observatory with a skeleton crew. On the windy flanks of Mount Aragats, a biblical-sounding massif in Armenia, an old man \u2014 a cook \u2014 shuffles through a sprawling array of oddly shaped, empty buildings.",
        "author": "By Yulia Grigoryants and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alone on a Mountaintop, Awaiting a Very Hard Rain (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5856",
        "date": "2020-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/science/observatory-cosmos-armenia-physics.html",
        "text": "Decades ago, Armenian scientists built a high-elevation trap to catch and study cosmic rays. Physics has mostly moved on, but the station persists \u2014 a ghost observatory with a skeleton crew. Decades ago, Armenian scientists built a high-elevation trap to catch and study cosmic rays. Physics has mostly moved on, but the station persists \u2014 a ghost observatory with a skeleton crew. On the windy flanks of Mount Aragats, a biblical-sounding massif in Armenia, an old man \u2014 a cook \u2014 shuffles through a sprawling array of oddly shaped, empty buildings.",
        "author": "By Yulia Grigoryants and Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5857",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/31/science/space/life-on-mars.html",
        "text": "On the side of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, six individuals are living in Mars-like conditions as part of a NASA-funded behavioral research study. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. On the side of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, six individuals are living in Mars-like conditions as part of a NASA-funded behavioral research study. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. On the side of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, six individuals are living in Mars-like conditions as part of a NASA-funded behavioral research study. We chronicle their mission in 360 video.",
        "author": "By Niko Koppel, Nick Capezzera and Veda Shastri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5858",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/31/science/space/life-on-mars.html",
        "text": "On the side of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, six individuals are living in Mars-like conditions as part of a NASA-funded behavioral research study. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. On the side of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, six individuals are living in Mars-like conditions as part of a NASA-funded behavioral research study. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. On the side of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, six individuals are living in Mars-like conditions as part of a NASA-funded behavioral research study. We chronicle their mission in 360 video.",
        "author": "By Niko Koppel, Nick Capezzera and Veda Shastri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars? Rover\u2019s Latest Discovery Puts It \u2018On the Table\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5859",
        "date": "2018-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/science/mars-nasa-life.html",
        "text": "The identification of organic molecules in rocks on the red planet does not necessarily point to life there, past or present, but does indicate that some of the building blocks were present. The identification of organic molecules in rocks on the red planet does not necessarily point to life there, past or present, but does indicate that some of the building blocks were present. Scientists for the first time have confidently identified on Mars a collection of carbon molecules used and produced by living organisms.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars? Rover\u2019s Latest Discovery Puts It \u2018On the Table\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5860",
        "date": "2018-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/science/mars-nasa-life.html",
        "text": "The identification of organic molecules in rocks on the red planet does not necessarily point to life there, past or present, but does indicate that some of the building blocks were present. The identification of organic molecules in rocks on the red planet does not necessarily point to life there, past or present, but does indicate that some of the building blocks were present. Scientists for the first time have confidently identified on Mars a collection of carbon molecules used and produced by living organisms.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars? Rover\u2019s Latest Discovery Puts It \u2018On the Table\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5861",
        "date": "2018-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/science/mars-nasa-life.html",
        "text": "The identification of organic molecules in rocks on the red planet does not necessarily point to life there, past or present, but does indicate that some of the building blocks were present. The identification of organic molecules in rocks on the red planet does not necessarily point to life there, past or present, but does indicate that some of the building blocks were present. Scientists for the first time have confidently identified on Mars a collection of carbon molecules used and produced by living organisms.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wally Funk Is Defying Gravity and 60 Years of Exclusion From Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5862",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/science/wally-funk-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Ms. Funk\u2019s trip to space with Jeff Bezos is reason to celebrate. But the launch this week, decades after she was denied the opportunity, also raises questions about whom space is for. Ms. Funk\u2019s trip to space with Jeff Bezos is reason to celebrate. But the launch this week, decades after she was denied the opportunity, also raises questions about whom space is for. Wally Funk is finally going to space. When on Tuesday she crosses that arbitrary altitude that divides the heavens from Earth below, in a rocket built by Jeff Bezos\u2019 company Blue Origin, she\u2019ll be 82, the oldest person ever to go into space. But that is not what makes her so special.",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wally Funk Is Defying Gravity and 60 Years of Exclusion From Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5863",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/science/wally-funk-jeff-bezos.html",
        "text": "Ms. Funk\u2019s trip to space with Jeff Bezos is reason to celebrate. But the launch this week, decades after she was denied the opportunity, also raises questions about whom space is for. Ms. Funk\u2019s trip to space with Jeff Bezos is reason to celebrate. But the launch this week, decades after she was denied the opportunity, also raises questions about whom space is for. Wally Funk is finally going to space. When on Tuesday she crosses that arbitrary altitude that divides the heavens from Earth below, in a rocket built by Jeff Bezos\u2019 company Blue Origin, she\u2019ll be 82, the oldest person ever to go into space. But that is not what makes her so special.",
        "author": "By Mary Robinette Kowal"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Animals See in the Stars, and What They Stand to Lose (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5864",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/science/animals-starlight-navigation-dacke.html",
        "text": "Humans aren\u2019t the only species that navigate by starlight. Animals from birds to dung beetles may do it, too \u2014 and might become disoriented as our city lights drown out the heavens. Humans aren\u2019t the only species that navigate by starlight. Animals from birds to dung beetles may do it, too \u2014 and might become disoriented as our city lights drown out the heavens. One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Animals See in the Stars, and What They Stand to Lose (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5865",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/science/animals-starlight-navigation-dacke.html",
        "text": "Humans aren\u2019t the only species that navigate by starlight. Animals from birds to dung beetles may do it, too \u2014 and might become disoriented as our city lights drown out the heavens. Humans aren\u2019t the only species that navigate by starlight. Animals from birds to dung beetles may do it, too \u2014 and might become disoriented as our city lights drown out the heavens. One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.",
        "author": "By Joshua Sokol"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work on Black Holes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5866",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/science/nobel-prize-physics.html",
        "text": "The prize was awarded half to Roger Penrose for showing how black holes could form and half to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering a supermassive object at the Milky Way\u2019s center. The prize was awarded half to Roger Penrose for showing how black holes could form and half to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering a supermassive object at the Milky Way\u2019s center. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists Tuesday for work that was literally out of the world, and indeed the universe. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. They were recognized for their work on the gateways to eternity known as black holes, massive objects that swallow light and everything else forever that falls in their unsparing maws.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye and Derrick Bryson Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Opposition 2018: How to See Its Closest Approach to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5867",
        "date": "2018-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/science/see-mars-opposition-earth.html",
        "text": "For the past few weeks, the red planet has been growing brighter in the night sky. A lunar eclipse with a \u201cblood moon\u201d will also be visible, mainly to those outside the Western Hemisphere. For the past few weeks, the red planet has been growing brighter in the night sky. A lunar eclipse with a \u201cblood moon\u201d will also be visible, mainly to those outside the Western Hemisphere.  Perhaps you\u2019ve already noticed the dazzling red dot dancing in the night sky. That\u2019s Mars, our planetary neighbor. And for the past few weeks it has been growing brighter as it slowly approached a state that astronomers call opposition, when it and the sun are on opposite sides of Earth. It\u2019s like we\u2019re in between the two right now in a cosmic game of monkey in the middle. ",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Opposition 2018: How to See Its Closest Approach to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5868",
        "date": "2018-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/science/see-mars-opposition-earth.html",
        "text": "For the past few weeks, the red planet has been growing brighter in the night sky. A lunar eclipse with a \u201cblood moon\u201d will also be visible, mainly to those outside the Western Hemisphere. For the past few weeks, the red planet has been growing brighter in the night sky. A lunar eclipse with a \u201cblood moon\u201d will also be visible, mainly to those outside the Western Hemisphere.  Perhaps you\u2019ve already noticed the dazzling red dot dancing in the night sky. That\u2019s Mars, our planetary neighbor. And for the past few weeks it has been growing brighter as it slowly approached a state that astronomers call opposition, when it and the sun are on opposite sides of Earth. It\u2019s like we\u2019re in between the two right now in a cosmic game of monkey in the middle. ",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Opposition 2018: How to See Its Closest Approach to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5869",
        "date": "2018-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/science/see-mars-opposition-earth.html",
        "text": "For the past few weeks, the red planet has been growing brighter in the night sky. A lunar eclipse with a \u201cblood moon\u201d will also be visible, mainly to those outside the Western Hemisphere. For the past few weeks, the red planet has been growing brighter in the night sky. A lunar eclipse with a \u201cblood moon\u201d will also be visible, mainly to those outside the Western Hemisphere.  Perhaps you\u2019ve already noticed the dazzling red dot dancing in the night sky. That\u2019s Mars, our planetary neighbor. And for the past few weeks it has been growing brighter as it slowly approached a state that astronomers call opposition, when it and the sun are on opposite sides of Earth. It\u2019s like we\u2019re in between the two right now in a cosmic game of monkey in the middle. ",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hanging Out With Humans Makes This Bird Bad at Its Job (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5870",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/science/weka-birds-seeds-new-zealand.html",
        "text": "The weka, a flightless bird in New Zealand, brings plants to new areas by eating their fruit and excreting the seeds. But some choose to stick close to humans and their food, limiting their range. The weka, a flightless bird in New Zealand, brings plants to new areas by eating their fruit and excreting the seeds. But some choose to stick close to humans and their food, limiting their range. Humans can be a terrible influence on birds. Crows that live near us end up with high cholesterol, sparrows screech to be heard over oil pumps, and instead of migrating, some storks now just eat trash.",
        "author": "By Cara Giaimo"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ring of Fire\u2019 Solar Eclipse Will Cross Southern Hemisphere on Sunday (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5871",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/science/when-is-the-solar-eclipse-ring-of-fire-south-america-africa.html",
        "text": "Known as an annular eclipse, it occurs when the moon moves in between the sun and the Earth but is too far to completely block the sun as it would during a total solar eclipse. Known as an annular eclipse, it occurs when the moon moves in between the sun and the Earth but is too far to completely block the sun as it would during a total solar eclipse. Cue the Johnny Cash music. On Sunday, a \u201cring of fire\u201d eclipse will blaze over parts of South America and the southern and western tips of Africa. Scientifically known as an annular eclipse, this solar phenomenon occurs when the moon moves in between the sun and the Earth but is too far away to completely block the sun as it would during a total solar eclipse.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "DNA Gets a New \u2014 and Bigger \u2014 Genetic Alphabet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5872",
        "date": "2019-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/science/dna-hachimoji-genetic-alphabet.html",
        "text": "DNA is spelled out with four letters, or bases. Researchers have now built a system with eight. It may hold clues to the potential for life elsewhere in the universe and could also expand our capacity to store digital data on Earth DNA is spelled out with four letters, or bases. Researchers have now built a system with eight. It may hold clues to the potential for life elsewhere in the universe and could also expand our capacity to store digital data on Earth In 1985, the chemist Steven A. Benner sat down with some colleagues and a notebook and sketched out a way to expand the alphabet of DNA. He has been trying to make those sketches real ever since.",
        "author": "By Carl Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "When is Jeff Bezos\u2019 flight, and how is it different? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5873",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/jeff-bezos-space-flight-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "On July 20, another billionaire is scheduled to take another rocket to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, founded his rocket company, Blue Origin, with a vision of millions of people living and working in space in the future.  On July 20, another billionaire is scheduled to take another rocket to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, founded his rocket company, Blue Origin, with a vision of millions of people living and working in space in the future.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "When is Jeff Bezos\u2019 flight, and how is it different? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5874",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/science/jeff-bezos-space-flight-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "On July 20, another billionaire is scheduled to take another rocket to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, founded his rocket company, Blue Origin, with a vision of millions of people living and working in space in the future.  On July 20, another billionaire is scheduled to take another rocket to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, founded his rocket company, Blue Origin, with a vision of millions of people living and working in space in the future.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "When is the launch and how can I watch it? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5875",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/when-is-the-launch-and-how-can-i-watch-it.html",
        "text": "The Crew-1 mission is scheduled to launch on Sunday at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Television will broadcast coverage beginning at 3:15 p.m. Or you can watch it in the video player at the top of this page.  The Crew-1 mission is scheduled to launch on Sunday at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Television will broadcast coverage beginning at 3:15 p.m. Or you can watch it in the video player at the top of this page.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "When is the launch and how can I watch it? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5876",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/science/when-is-the-launch-and-how-can-i-watch-it.html",
        "text": "The Crew-1 mission is scheduled to launch on Sunday at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Television will broadcast coverage beginning at 3:15 p.m. Or you can watch it in the video player at the top of this page.  The Crew-1 mission is scheduled to launch on Sunday at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Television will broadcast coverage beginning at 3:15 p.m. Or you can watch it in the video player at the top of this page.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why was the launch delayed one day? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5877",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/why-was-the-launch-delayed-one-day.html",
        "text": "The Crew-2 launch had been set for Thursday morning, and weather at the launchpad was favorable. But mission managers had to also take into account conditions in the Atlantic Ocean where the Crew Dragon capsule would splash down if something went wrong during launch. There, NASA and SpaceX decided, the winds and waves were too high.  The Crew-2 launch had been set for Thursday morning, and weather at the launchpad was favorable. But mission managers had to also take into account conditions in the Atlantic Ocean where the Crew Dragon capsule would splash down if something went wrong during launch. There, NASA and SpaceX decided, the winds and waves were too high.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why was the launch delayed one day? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5878",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/science/why-was-the-launch-delayed-one-day.html",
        "text": "The Crew-2 launch had been set for Thursday morning, and weather at the launchpad was favorable. But mission managers had to also take into account conditions in the Atlantic Ocean where the Crew Dragon capsule would splash down if something went wrong during launch. There, NASA and SpaceX decided, the winds and waves were too high.  The Crew-2 launch had been set for Thursday morning, and weather at the launchpad was favorable. But mission managers had to also take into account conditions in the Atlantic Ocean where the Crew Dragon capsule would splash down if something went wrong during launch. There, NASA and SpaceX decided, the winds and waves were too high.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "PBS series reveals great views of Earth from space, value of satellite photography (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5879",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/pbs-series-reveals-great-views-of-earth-from-space-value-of-satellite-photography/2019/10/18/ba55a39c-f0bf-11e9-8693-f487e46784aa_story.html",
        "text": "If you\u2019ve ever viewed a solar eclipse, you\u2019re familiar with the neck-stiffening sensation of looking up as the sun is briefly overshadowed by the moon.But what would the same eclipse look like if you viewed it from space? \u201cLife From Above,\u201d a four-part series from PBS and BBC Studios\u2019s Natural History Unit, has the answer. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe show, which premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday on PBS stations, showcases views of Earth from space \u2014 and also reveals the scientific importance of satellite photography.The first satellites helped trigger a space race that stoked the Cold War. But cameras posted above Earth also make plenty of scientific contributions.They allow scientists to measure oncoming storms and the extent of the flooding that follows. They help lead researchers to animal life in places that are hard to monitor or explore on land \u2014 such as Antarctica, where researchers can use satellite imagery to track penguin colonies using the brown color of their guano trails. And they capture the ebb and flow of animal and plant life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEpisode 1 of the series, \u201cMoving Planet,\u201d is filled with gorgeous imagery and breathtaking views. One of its highlights is footage of the 2017 solar eclipse taken from high-altitude weather balloons launched by schoolchildren and college students across the United States. (Not all satellite footage involves rockets.)The live, near-space views of the eclipse flip traditional eclipse imagery on its head. Suddenly, the eclipse isn\u2019t the sun disappearing behind the black disc of the Moon\u2019s shadow \u2014 it\u2019s the sweep of that shadow across the landscape. And imagery from the International Space Station shows the enormous shadow\u2019s trajectory across the entire country, illustrating the scale of the celestial body.Whether you watch for the scientific tidbits or just the pretty pictures of the planet, \u201cLife From Above\u201d offers plenty of eye candy \u2014 and a refreshing bit of perspective thanks to cameras that literally rise above daily life.Astronomy site is your guide to the universe, one picture at a timeWhat the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsSounds from space heard on NASA site \u201cLife From Above\u201d shows how such imagery contributes to the study of weather, environment, geology and other fields. PBS series reveals great views of Earth from space, value of satellite photography",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars attracts fans on Earth even though it\u2019s a long-distance love (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5880",
        "date": "2020-07-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/mars-attracts-fans-on-earth-even-though-its-a-long-distance-love/2020/07/02/5d752fa6-ba47-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html",
        "text": "Mars may be one of our closest neighbors, but its admirers here on Earth are doomed to a long-distance relationship for now.That hasn\u2019t stopped humans from nursing a centuries-long crush on the planet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cMars has been our mirror, our foil, a telltale reflection of what has been deepest in our hearts,\u201d writes planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson. \u201c.\u2009.\u2009. As a result, Mars has a human history inscribed on its surface, even though no human has ever touched it.\u201d In \u201cThe Sirens of Mars,\u201d Johnson tells the story of humans\u2019 long-distance love affair with Mars. Part memoir, part scientific history, it tracks the history and hopes of Mars science.Over the years, Mars has gone from a blurry object in the night sky to a planet whose surface humans can study in-depth thanks to the four rovers that have traversed its surface thus far.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough it had been observed for centuries, it only really started taking shape in 1610, when Galileo Galilei became the first to look at it through a telescope.Forty-nine years later, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens made its first map, identifying a feature first known as the Hourglass Sea. Today, it\u2019s called Syrtis Major, and scientists think it\u2019s a low-lying volcano made of basalt.Since then, scientists have slowly filled in the blanks of their knowledge of the Red Planet. We now know its red-orange surface is attributed to iron oxide. We know it\u2019s inhospitably cold, with an average temperature of minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit. And its thin air is susceptible to choking dust storms.Story continues below advertisementLearning more about those differences has only fueled the romance.Exploration of the planet will continue long after planned missions to Mars have helped humans get there in person.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve built an entire branch of science around something we can barely see in the night,\u201d Johnson writes. The love affair continues \u2014 and as her immersive book proves, it\u2019s a passion both frustrating and infinitely rewarding.NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of rangeWhat the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsHow Mars lost its atmosphere, and why Earth didn\u2019t \u201cThe Sirens of Mars\u201d describes the planet as reflecting something deep in human hearts. Mars attracts fans on Earth even though it\u2019s a long-distance love",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5881",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/chasing-the-moon-revisits-historic-apollo-11-mission/2019/06/28/04e5237a-9773-11e9-8d0a-5edd7e2025b1_story.html",
        "text": "Fifty years ago, people leaned toward their TVs, mesmerized by black-and-white footage of the first moon landing, something that had seemed almost impossible a decade before.A new documentary will draw you toward your television, too \u2014 and the undertaking depicted in \u201cChasing the Moon,\u201d a new six-hour PBS documentary that airs July 8-10, seems no less improbable 50 years later. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDirected by Robert Stone, the three-part American Experience film has no narration and no explanation, just footage from the actual events surrounding the historic Apollo 11 mission and interviews with key players.That seemingly simple scaffold contains a complex story. The decade-long quest to beat the Soviet Union to the moon had enormous financial, political, scientific and personal stakes.Story continues below advertisementThough the space program was ultimately celebrated, it was not universally supported, and NASA\u2019s attempts to get a person on the moon before the Soviet Union took place against a backdrop of social and political turmoil. Stone covers a mind-boggling number of those challenges without losing sight of the mission itself. An interactive website delves even further into the subject matter.AdvertisementYou\u2019ll see familiar footage in the film \u2014 ticker-tape parades, the moon landing films taken by the astronauts themselves \u2014 but plenty that feels fresh even among 2019\u2019s seemingly endless celebration of the Apollo 11 mission.There\u2019s plenty of struggle to match the mission\u2019s triumph. Despite being feted as American heroes, NASA astronauts, their families and the team devoted to keeping them safe faced enormous pressure. They endured grueling training and the very real possibility the mission might end in death and national shame.Story continues below advertisement\u201cChasing the Moon\u201d paints the space race as a tense tussle over the meaning of democracy and nation. It includes voices you may never have heard before: people of color, women, journalists and politicians who were as much a part of the story as the astronauts themselves.That narrative shift makes the tale of Apollo 11 seem richer and more relevant than ever \u2014 and the familiar black-and-white footage of men on the moon as astonishing as it was back then.How did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsApollo 11: 50th anniversary The six-hour PBS documentary paints the space race as a tense tussle over the meaning of democracy and nation. \u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 mission",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5882",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/chasing-the-moon-revisits-historic-apollo-11-mission/2019/06/28/04e5237a-9773-11e9-8d0a-5edd7e2025b1_story.html",
        "text": "Fifty years ago, people leaned toward their TVs, mesmerized by black-and-white footage of the first moon landing, something that had seemed almost impossible a decade before.A new documentary will draw you toward your television, too \u2014 and the undertaking depicted in \u201cChasing the Moon,\u201d a new six-hour PBS documentary that airs July 8-10, seems no less improbable 50 years later. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDirected by Robert Stone, the three-part American Experience film has no narration and no explanation, just footage from the actual events surrounding the historic Apollo 11 mission and interviews with key players.That seemingly simple scaffold contains a complex story. The decade-long quest to beat the Soviet Union to the moon had enormous financial, political, scientific and personal stakes.Story continues below advertisementThough the space program was ultimately celebrated, it was not universally supported, and NASA\u2019s attempts to get a person on the moon before the Soviet Union took place against a backdrop of social and political turmoil. Stone covers a mind-boggling number of those challenges without losing sight of the mission itself. An interactive website delves even further into the subject matter.AdvertisementYou\u2019ll see familiar footage in the film \u2014 ticker-tape parades, the moon landing films taken by the astronauts themselves \u2014 but plenty that feels fresh even among 2019\u2019s seemingly endless celebration of the Apollo 11 mission.There\u2019s plenty of struggle to match the mission\u2019s triumph. Despite being feted as American heroes, NASA astronauts, their families and the team devoted to keeping them safe faced enormous pressure. They endured grueling training and the very real possibility the mission might end in death and national shame.Story continues below advertisement\u201cChasing the Moon\u201d paints the space race as a tense tussle over the meaning of democracy and nation. It includes voices you may never have heard before: people of color, women, journalists and politicians who were as much a part of the story as the astronauts themselves.That narrative shift makes the tale of Apollo 11 seem richer and more relevant than ever \u2014 and the familiar black-and-white footage of men on the moon as astonishing as it was back then.How did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsApollo 11: 50th anniversary The six-hour PBS documentary paints the space race as a tense tussle over the meaning of democracy and nation. \u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 mission",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 mission (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5883",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/chasing-the-moon-revisits-historic-apollo-11-mission/2019/06/28/04e5237a-9773-11e9-8d0a-5edd7e2025b1_story.html",
        "text": "Fifty years ago, people leaned toward their TVs, mesmerized by black-and-white footage of the first moon landing, something that had seemed almost impossible a decade before.A new documentary will draw you toward your television, too \u2014 and the undertaking depicted in \u201cChasing the Moon,\u201d a new six-hour PBS documentary that airs July 8-10, seems no less improbable 50 years later. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDirected by Robert Stone, the three-part American Experience film has no narration and no explanation, just footage from the actual events surrounding the historic Apollo 11 mission and interviews with key players.That seemingly simple scaffold contains a complex story. The decade-long quest to beat the Soviet Union to the moon had enormous financial, political, scientific and personal stakes.Story continues below advertisementThough the space program was ultimately celebrated, it was not universally supported, and NASA\u2019s attempts to get a person on the moon before the Soviet Union took place against a backdrop of social and political turmoil. Stone covers a mind-boggling number of those challenges without losing sight of the mission itself. An interactive website delves even further into the subject matter.AdvertisementYou\u2019ll see familiar footage in the film \u2014 ticker-tape parades, the moon landing films taken by the astronauts themselves \u2014 but plenty that feels fresh even among 2019\u2019s seemingly endless celebration of the Apollo 11 mission.There\u2019s plenty of struggle to match the mission\u2019s triumph. Despite being feted as American heroes, NASA astronauts, their families and the team devoted to keeping them safe faced enormous pressure. They endured grueling training and the very real possibility the mission might end in death and national shame.Story continues below advertisement\u201cChasing the Moon\u201d paints the space race as a tense tussle over the meaning of democracy and nation. It includes voices you may never have heard before: people of color, women, journalists and politicians who were as much a part of the story as the astronauts themselves.That narrative shift makes the tale of Apollo 11 seem richer and more relevant than ever \u2014 and the familiar black-and-white footage of men on the moon as astonishing as it was back then.How did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsApollo 11: 50th anniversary The six-hour PBS documentary paints the space race as a tense tussle over the meaning of democracy and nation. \u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 mission",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "TV series explores why girls should see science, technology, engineering and math as the right career moves (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5884",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/a-look-at-how-science-technology-engineering-and-math-can-be-fun-careers-for-girls-and-women/2020/02/28/ed50b5d2-58c7-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html",
        "text": "When social science researchers asked children to draw a scientist in the 1960s and 1970s, more than 99 percent of the scientists they drew were men. That percentage has dropped over time, but kids still overwhelmingly think of scientists as men. \u201cMission Unstoppable With Miranda Cosgrove,\u201d which airs Saturday mornings on CBS, could help change that. Powered by women in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, the TV series recasts science as women\u2019s work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt also shows that science is fun \u2014 and how role models turn it into careers.Fields such as zoology, oceanography, neuroscience and biomedical engineering come along for the ride. The science lessons are delivered in snackable chunks.Story continues below advertisementIn one episode, teen correspondents interview bat conservationist Kristen Lear, who talks about why the winged mammals get a bad rap in the media; check in with Ashley Kimbel, a teen who used a 3-D printer to create a prosthetic foot for an amputee veteran; and chat with Ellen Stofan, NASA\u2019s former chief scientist and Mars director of the National Air and Space Museum. Kids also compete to make a Leonardo da Vinci-style wooden bridge held up by only friction and gravity.AdvertisementThe show aims to make its subject matter accessible and fun. It succeeds, packing plenty of information into a half-hour block hosted by Miranda Cosgrove, a TV vet who was once Hollywood\u2019s best-paid child actress.The series is executive-produced by actress Geena Davis and funded by Lyda Hill Philanthropies, which pledged $25 million to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers through its IF/THEN initiative.Story continues below advertisementOne memorable part of the show comes at the end when guests share \u201cone last thing\u201d with young viewers and get real about their fears, failures and inspirations.The show may be presented by and geared toward women, but it isn\u2019t didactic.The stimulating subject matter helps.Viewers of both genders may get so immersed in its exploration of carnivores, science fiction, microchips and the Mars rover that they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re starting to think differently about scientists \u2014 and their own futures.\u201cMission Unstoppable\u201d airs on CBS on Saturday mornings. Check your local listings for times.Men are more likely than women to call their science \u2018excellent\u2019Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during space race, dies at 101The brilliance of the women code breakers of World War II \u201cMission Unstoppable\u201d provides snackable chunks in such fields as zoology, oceanography, neuroscience, biomedical engineering and many others. TV series explores why girls should see science, technology, engineering and math as the right career moves",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "TV series explores why girls should see science, technology, engineering and math as the right career moves (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5885",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/a-look-at-how-science-technology-engineering-and-math-can-be-fun-careers-for-girls-and-women/2020/02/28/ed50b5d2-58c7-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html",
        "text": "When social science researchers asked children to draw a scientist in the 1960s and 1970s, more than 99 percent of the scientists they drew were men. That percentage has dropped over time, but kids still overwhelmingly think of scientists as men. \u201cMission Unstoppable With Miranda Cosgrove,\u201d which airs Saturday mornings on CBS, could help change that. Powered by women in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, the TV series recasts science as women\u2019s work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt also shows that science is fun \u2014 and how role models turn it into careers.Fields such as zoology, oceanography, neuroscience and biomedical engineering come along for the ride. The science lessons are delivered in snackable chunks.Story continues below advertisementIn one episode, teen correspondents interview bat conservationist Kristen Lear, who talks about why the winged mammals get a bad rap in the media; check in with Ashley Kimbel, a teen who used a 3-D printer to create a prosthetic foot for an amputee veteran; and chat with Ellen Stofan, NASA\u2019s former chief scientist and Mars director of the National Air and Space Museum. Kids also compete to make a Leonardo da Vinci-style wooden bridge held up by only friction and gravity.AdvertisementThe show aims to make its subject matter accessible and fun. It succeeds, packing plenty of information into a half-hour block hosted by Miranda Cosgrove, a TV vet who was once Hollywood\u2019s best-paid child actress.The series is executive-produced by actress Geena Davis and funded by Lyda Hill Philanthropies, which pledged $25 million to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers through its IF/THEN initiative.Story continues below advertisementOne memorable part of the show comes at the end when guests share \u201cone last thing\u201d with young viewers and get real about their fears, failures and inspirations.The show may be presented by and geared toward women, but it isn\u2019t didactic.The stimulating subject matter helps.Viewers of both genders may get so immersed in its exploration of carnivores, science fiction, microchips and the Mars rover that they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re starting to think differently about scientists \u2014 and their own futures.\u201cMission Unstoppable\u201d airs on CBS on Saturday mornings. Check your local listings for times.Men are more likely than women to call their science \u2018excellent\u2019Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during space race, dies at 101The brilliance of the women code breakers of World War II \u201cMission Unstoppable\u201d provides snackable chunks in such fields as zoology, oceanography, neuroscience, biomedical engineering and many others. TV series explores why girls should see science, technology, engineering and math as the right career moves",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "TV series explores why girls should see science, technology, engineering and math as the right career moves (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5886",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/a-look-at-how-science-technology-engineering-and-math-can-be-fun-careers-for-girls-and-women/2020/02/28/ed50b5d2-58c7-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html",
        "text": "When social science researchers asked children to draw a scientist in the 1960s and 1970s, more than 99 percent of the scientists they drew were men. That percentage has dropped over time, but kids still overwhelmingly think of scientists as men. \u201cMission Unstoppable With Miranda Cosgrove,\u201d which airs Saturday mornings on CBS, could help change that. Powered by women in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, the TV series recasts science as women\u2019s work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt also shows that science is fun \u2014 and how role models turn it into careers.Fields such as zoology, oceanography, neuroscience and biomedical engineering come along for the ride. The science lessons are delivered in snackable chunks.Story continues below advertisementIn one episode, teen correspondents interview bat conservationist Kristen Lear, who talks about why the winged mammals get a bad rap in the media; check in with Ashley Kimbel, a teen who used a 3-D printer to create a prosthetic foot for an amputee veteran; and chat with Ellen Stofan, NASA\u2019s former chief scientist and Mars director of the National Air and Space Museum. Kids also compete to make a Leonardo da Vinci-style wooden bridge held up by only friction and gravity.AdvertisementThe show aims to make its subject matter accessible and fun. It succeeds, packing plenty of information into a half-hour block hosted by Miranda Cosgrove, a TV vet who was once Hollywood\u2019s best-paid child actress.The series is executive-produced by actress Geena Davis and funded by Lyda Hill Philanthropies, which pledged $25 million to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers through its IF/THEN initiative.Story continues below advertisementOne memorable part of the show comes at the end when guests share \u201cone last thing\u201d with young viewers and get real about their fears, failures and inspirations.The show may be presented by and geared toward women, but it isn\u2019t didactic.The stimulating subject matter helps.Viewers of both genders may get so immersed in its exploration of carnivores, science fiction, microchips and the Mars rover that they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re starting to think differently about scientists \u2014 and their own futures.\u201cMission Unstoppable\u201d airs on CBS on Saturday mornings. Check your local listings for times.Men are more likely than women to call their science \u2018excellent\u2019Katherine Johnson, \u2018hidden figure\u2019 at NASA during space race, dies at 101The brilliance of the women code breakers of World War II \u201cMission Unstoppable\u201d provides snackable chunks in such fields as zoology, oceanography, neuroscience, biomedical engineering and many others. TV series explores why girls should see science, technology, engineering and math as the right career moves",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "A man conned his NASA-funded lab into paying for trips to see prostitutes and escorts, feds say (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5887",
        "date": "2019-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/18/man-conned-his-nasa-funded-lab-into-paying-trips-see-prostitutes-escorts-feds-say/",
        "text": "A former chief economist and consultant who worked for the United States\u2019 lab at the International Space Station has been charged by federal authorities with wire fraud for a pattern of expensing visits to escorts and prostitutes in cities around the world, officials say.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCharles R. Resnick, who worked for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit that manages the International Space Station National Lab and is funded by NASA, was charged in an indictment filed on April 11 by federal prosecutors in central Florida. Resnick was arrested around that time and released on bond on April 12, said William Daniels, a spokesman for Maria Chapa Lopez, the U.S. attorney for Middle Florida. Daniels declined to comment further.Story continues below advertisementAccording to the indictment, Resnick arranged to meet escorts and prostitutes in such cities as London and New York, using fabricated documents and later submitted reimbursement requests for the trips. Resnick provided \u201cmaterially false and fraudulent information about the purpose of travel, activities on trips, and the expenditure of funds,\u201d the indictment says, saying the activity took place between 2011 and 2015.Advertisement\u201cExpenses incurred for escorts, prostitutes, and commercial sexual activities were not part of the ordinary, necessary, and reasonable travel expenses or related expenses for which employees could be reimbursed,\u201d it notes.NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon missionResnick did not respond to a message left at a phone number listed for him in court records. His lawyer, James Felman, did not respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCASIS is fully aware of the recent charges brought against former employee Charles Resnick,\" Joseph Vockley, CASIS president and CEO, told reporters in a statement. \"In 2015, CASIS immediately cut ties with Mr. Resnick upon discovering his actions, which were in clear violation of company policies and procedures.\u201dVockley said that an internal investigation of Resnick\u2019s travel history had been referred to the Office of the Inspector General of NSAS around that time.Advertisement\u201cCASIS has fully cooperated with the OIG\u2019s investigation and will continue to do so,\" he said. \u201cWe will not have any further comment while this criminal matter is pending.\u201dResnick is also charged with filing false tax returns related to the way he reported his business expenses.Story continues below advertisementAs chief economist, Resnick had a salary of $220,000, according to the website NASA Watch.According to Motherboard, CASIS began operating the U.S. laboratory portion of the International Space Station in 2011, for which it receives about $15 million in funding a year.Read more:These historic buildings were bombed and burned \u2014 then rose againAn Israeli flight attendant contracted measles. Officials are now urging crews to get vaccinated.Great white sharks are afraid of orcas, new study shows According to the indictment, the man arranged to meet escorts and prostitutes in cities like London and New York with the help of fabricated documents, before submitting reimbursement requests for them. A man conned his NASA-funded lab into paying for trips to see prostitutes and escorts, feds say",
        "author": "Eli Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Citizen scientists may have located candidates for Planet Nine (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5888",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/04/citizen-scientists-may-have-located-candidates-for-planet-nine/",
        "text": "Astronomers have been hunting\u00a0for Planet Nine\u00a0\u2014 the large, mysterious body\u00a0thought to lurk at the edge of our solar system \u2014 ever since researchers at Caltech published evidence of its existence\u00a0last year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOrdinary people have now joined the search. And they've\u00a0made some intriguing finds.Participants in a citizen science campaign hosted by the crowdsourcing program Zooniverse,\u00a0and the BBC pinpointed\u00a0four previously unknown objects in the outer solar system that could be candidates for Planet Nine, according to researchers at the Australian National University. Through the project, dubbed \u201cPlanet 9 Search,\u201d\u00a0space enthusiasts and astronomers alike were\u00a0given access to thousands\u00a0of images taken by ANU's SkyMapper telescope.\u00a0Their task was to find anything that appears to move against the mostly motionless background of distant stars. This is how astronomers have looked for new solar system bodies for hundreds of years. (See the photos that helped pinpoint Pluto below.)In just three days, about 21,000 volunteers sifted through more than 100,000 images and classified\u00a0more than 5\u00a0million objects \u2014 work that would take an astronomy PhD student four years, ANU astronomer Brad Tucker wrote in the Conversation. They surveyed vast swaths of the southern sky and managed to rule out the possibility of an unknown Neptune-size object in about 90 percent of it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe four objects identified by the campaign are considered interesting enough that professional astronomers are taking a closer look. Much as Pluto did, they appear as tiny moving dots of light in the SkyMapper images; researchers don't know their distance or dimensions. Although these objects could be Planet Nine, it's more likely that they are dwarf planets, asteroids or perhaps mere blips in the data. Scientists at ANU and elsewhere will conduct further observations to figure this out.Mike Brown is the Caltech astronomer who\u00a0published evidence of Planet Nine's existence, theorizing its presence based on perturbations of other outer solar system bodies. He tweeted out support for the initiative last week.I would just like to say: you guys rock. We'd be thrilled if you find it!\u2014 Mike Brown (@plutokiller) March 31, 2017\n\nThis isn't the only citizen science effort to find the enigmatic ninth planet. NASA and the University of California at Berkeley are running a similar project, called Backyard Worlds, which gives planet seekers access to archived images from NASA's\u00a0Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe two projects are complementary, not competitive: Unlike the Planet 9 Search, which hunted for distant bodies in the visible light spectrum, Backyard Worlds\u00a0studies the infrared light useful for finding fainter objects.Astronomers say they have evidence of a ninth planet in our solar system. (Joel Achenbach, Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)Read more:New evidence suggests a ninth planet lurking at the edge of the solar systemNow anyone can join the search for the mysterious 'Planet Nine'The mysterious 'Planet Nine' might be causing the whole solar system to wobble Anyone can now look through images of space in search of the theorized distant planet.  Citizen scientists may have located candidates for Planet Nine",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Citizen scientists may have located candidates for Planet Nine (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5889",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/04/citizen-scientists-may-have-located-candidates-for-planet-nine/",
        "text": "Astronomers have been hunting\u00a0for Planet Nine\u00a0\u2014 the large, mysterious body\u00a0thought to lurk at the edge of our solar system \u2014 ever since researchers at Caltech published evidence of its existence\u00a0last year.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOrdinary people have now joined the search. And they've\u00a0made some intriguing finds.Participants in a citizen science campaign hosted by the crowdsourcing program Zooniverse,\u00a0and the BBC pinpointed\u00a0four previously unknown objects in the outer solar system that could be candidates for Planet Nine, according to researchers at the Australian National University. Through the project, dubbed \u201cPlanet 9 Search,\u201d\u00a0space enthusiasts and astronomers alike were\u00a0given access to thousands\u00a0of images taken by ANU's SkyMapper telescope.\u00a0Their task was to find anything that appears to move against the mostly motionless background of distant stars. This is how astronomers have looked for new solar system bodies for hundreds of years. (See the photos that helped pinpoint Pluto below.)In just three days, about 21,000 volunteers sifted through more than 100,000 images and classified\u00a0more than 5\u00a0million objects \u2014 work that would take an astronomy PhD student four years, ANU astronomer Brad Tucker wrote in the Conversation. They surveyed vast swaths of the southern sky and managed to rule out the possibility of an unknown Neptune-size object in about 90 percent of it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe four objects identified by the campaign are considered interesting enough that professional astronomers are taking a closer look. Much as Pluto did, they appear as tiny moving dots of light in the SkyMapper images; researchers don't know their distance or dimensions. Although these objects could be Planet Nine, it's more likely that they are dwarf planets, asteroids or perhaps mere blips in the data. Scientists at ANU and elsewhere will conduct further observations to figure this out.Mike Brown is the Caltech astronomer who\u00a0published evidence of Planet Nine's existence, theorizing its presence based on perturbations of other outer solar system bodies. He tweeted out support for the initiative last week.I would just like to say: you guys rock. We'd be thrilled if you find it!\u2014 Mike Brown (@plutokiller) March 31, 2017\n\nThis isn't the only citizen science effort to find the enigmatic ninth planet. NASA and the University of California at Berkeley are running a similar project, called Backyard Worlds, which gives planet seekers access to archived images from NASA's\u00a0Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe two projects are complementary, not competitive: Unlike the Planet 9 Search, which hunted for distant bodies in the visible light spectrum, Backyard Worlds\u00a0studies the infrared light useful for finding fainter objects.Astronomers say they have evidence of a ninth planet in our solar system. (Joel Achenbach, Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)Read more:New evidence suggests a ninth planet lurking at the edge of the solar systemNow anyone can join the search for the mysterious 'Planet Nine'The mysterious 'Planet Nine' might be causing the whole solar system to wobble Anyone can now look through images of space in search of the theorized distant planet.  Citizen scientists may have located candidates for Planet Nine",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch NASA\u2019s emergency spacewalk to repair the International Space Station (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5890",
        "date": "2017-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/23/watch-nasas-emergency-spacewalk-to-repair-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "Early\u00a0Tuesday morning, NASA astronaut and expedition commander Peggy Whitson left the International Space Station for her 10th spacewalk, and flight engineer Jack Fischer for his second. While Whitson tended to\u00a0a replacement for a\u00a0faulty computer, Fischer\u00a0installed wireless communications antennas on the Destiny Laboratory. The repairs lasted for close to three hours\u00a0\u2014 long enough for the ISS to complete nearly two full circles around the Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhitson, the commander of the expedition 51 mission on the ISS, has spent more time in space outside of the ISS than any other woman in history.\u00a0About an hour into the repair mission, she reached third place for most time\u00a0spent on spacewalks, with a career spacewalking total of 60 hours and 21 minutes.The busted box, a device called a multiplexer-demultiplexer\u00a0data relay, failed without warning Saturday. The box controls\u00a0radiators, solar arrays and cooling loops\u00a0from the central truss of the ISS. In a statement Monday, NASA said\u00a0that \u201cthe crew has never been in any danger;\u201d a secondary box took over for the broken relay while the astronauts readied a spare.Whitson prepared the replacement box within the ISS on Sunday. The last time astronauts conducted an emergency spacewalk was in late 2015, when astronauts had to unstick a\u00a0brake handle on an ISS external rail car. NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson replaced a\u00a0relay box\u00a0that went on the fritz in 2014.Spacewalks, though, are not exactly a jaunt through the park. NASA plays down the risk, but as The Washington Post noted\u00a0in 2014, they are \u201cextremely tricky and innately dangerous.\u201d In 2013, a line clogged with aluminum silicate waste caused water to flow into the\u00a0helmet of Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, who almost became the first person to drown in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs he recounted in a blog post, the leak first wet the sponges that covered his ears, and then impaired his ability to see. Then, it began to cover his nose. \u201cBy now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can\u2019t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid.\u201d He made it back safely, guided by astronaut\u00a0Chris Cassidy who also was spacewalking at the time.\u201cThere is nothing about this device that makes it susceptible to being replaced,\u201d NASA spokesman Daniel Huot told The Post in an email. \u201cIn fact, when the MDM was replaced in 2014, it had run nonstop for 12 years without issue.\u201d A power card component, which Huot likened to the power supply in a home computer, was responsible for the\u00a02014 failure. Although the device failed\u00a0with the same lack of symptoms in April 2014, it would not be possible to speculate whether\u00a0the power supply also broke down Saturday, he said.Engineers on the\u00a0ground will have to evaluate some\u00a0components from inside the relay box to determine what\u00a0malfunctioned. \u201cWe\u2019re currently looking at when we\u2019ll be able to return the hardware,\u201d Huot said, \u201cwith the upcoming SpaceX CRS-11 mission being the earliest candidate.\u201d That mission is set to launch June 1.This post has been updated.Read more:Watch live as astronauts perform an emergency spacewalkNASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in spaceMan, spacewalking astronauts get to take all the best photos The International Space Station had a  multiplexer-demultiplexer data relay go on the fritz. Watch NASA\u2019s emergency spacewalk to repair the International Space Station",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch NASA\u2019s emergency spacewalk to repair the International Space Station (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5891",
        "date": "2017-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/23/watch-nasas-emergency-spacewalk-to-repair-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "Early\u00a0Tuesday morning, NASA astronaut and expedition commander Peggy Whitson left the International Space Station for her 10th spacewalk, and flight engineer Jack Fischer for his second. While Whitson tended to\u00a0a replacement for a\u00a0faulty computer, Fischer\u00a0installed wireless communications antennas on the Destiny Laboratory. The repairs lasted for close to three hours\u00a0\u2014 long enough for the ISS to complete nearly two full circles around the Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhitson, the commander of the expedition 51 mission on the ISS, has spent more time in space outside of the ISS than any other woman in history.\u00a0About an hour into the repair mission, she reached third place for most time\u00a0spent on spacewalks, with a career spacewalking total of 60 hours and 21 minutes.The busted box, a device called a multiplexer-demultiplexer\u00a0data relay, failed without warning Saturday. The box controls\u00a0radiators, solar arrays and cooling loops\u00a0from the central truss of the ISS. In a statement Monday, NASA said\u00a0that \u201cthe crew has never been in any danger;\u201d a secondary box took over for the broken relay while the astronauts readied a spare.Whitson prepared the replacement box within the ISS on Sunday. The last time astronauts conducted an emergency spacewalk was in late 2015, when astronauts had to unstick a\u00a0brake handle on an ISS external rail car. NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson replaced a\u00a0relay box\u00a0that went on the fritz in 2014.Spacewalks, though, are not exactly a jaunt through the park. NASA plays down the risk, but as The Washington Post noted\u00a0in 2014, they are \u201cextremely tricky and innately dangerous.\u201d In 2013, a line clogged with aluminum silicate waste caused water to flow into the\u00a0helmet of Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, who almost became the first person to drown in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs he recounted in a blog post, the leak first wet the sponges that covered his ears, and then impaired his ability to see. Then, it began to cover his nose. \u201cBy now, the upper part of the helmet is full of water and I can\u2019t even be sure that the next time I breathe I will fill my lungs with air and not liquid.\u201d He made it back safely, guided by astronaut\u00a0Chris Cassidy who also was spacewalking at the time.\u201cThere is nothing about this device that makes it susceptible to being replaced,\u201d NASA spokesman Daniel Huot told The Post in an email. \u201cIn fact, when the MDM was replaced in 2014, it had run nonstop for 12 years without issue.\u201d A power card component, which Huot likened to the power supply in a home computer, was responsible for the\u00a02014 failure. Although the device failed\u00a0with the same lack of symptoms in April 2014, it would not be possible to speculate whether\u00a0the power supply also broke down Saturday, he said.Engineers on the\u00a0ground will have to evaluate some\u00a0components from inside the relay box to determine what\u00a0malfunctioned. \u201cWe\u2019re currently looking at when we\u2019ll be able to return the hardware,\u201d Huot said, \u201cwith the upcoming SpaceX CRS-11 mission being the earliest candidate.\u201d That mission is set to launch June 1.This post has been updated.Read more:Watch live as astronauts perform an emergency spacewalkNASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in spaceMan, spacewalking astronauts get to take all the best photos The International Space Station had a  multiplexer-demultiplexer data relay go on the fritz. Watch NASA\u2019s emergency spacewalk to repair the International Space Station",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Remnants of a supernova were found in Antarctic snow. The space dust could be 20 million years old. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5892",
        "date": "2019-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/08/27/remnants-supernova-were-found-antarctic-snow-space-dust-could-be-million-years-old/",
        "text": "A star collapses when it dies, spewing out space dust in a giant cloud of elements that make for very beautiful Hubble Telescope photos. The \u201cexplosion,\u201d called a supernova, results in either a black hole or an incredibly small, dense star that no longer generates heat.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA supernova also shoots space dust out in all directions that travels through the universe, occasionally coming into contact with other stars, planets \u2014 whatever happens to be in its path. Earth has been around long enough to collect particles from exploding stars, even though it\u2019s difficult to find the evidence. But sometime in the past 20 years, space dust from a supernova intersected with Earth and settled in Antarctica. The dust itself could be as old as 20 million years.Story continues below advertisementScientists found a strange version of iron in relatively fresh Antarctic snow, according to a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Specifically, it was an isotope of iron, Fe-60, that astronomers know was present when our solar system formed. The discovery of the iron-laden dust could help scientists form a clearer timeline of our solar system.AdvertisementGunther Korschinek and his colleagues at institutes in Germany and Austria were hunting for evidence on Earth of a supernova in space. They chose Antarctica, Korschinek said, because they wanted a sample from \u201ca very clean area, that is not disturbed by dust from surrounding material.\u201dThey ended up hauling a half-ton of snow from the nearly uninhabited, frozen continent to their labs in Europe, under the hypothesis that they might find such stardust evidence. And their methods were relatively rudimentary. Researchers found the best snow samples in unfrequented areas of Antarctica, of which there are many. The snow had to stay frozen on the trip for this analysis to work, so they scooped it into plastic-foam containers and kept the temperature low on the roughly 10,000-mile trek.Story continues below advertisementFrom the research station, the snow was loaded onto a plane and then headed to the shore of Antarctica\u2019s coast. From there, it was taken by a research boat to South Africa, before getting on another boat to Europe.AdvertisementFinally, the boxes made their way into a van and on their way to a lab, where the snow was melted and filtered. Korschinek was able to receive small samples so his team could analyze the elements found in the snow.The iron-60 was there, but they had to rule out other potential sources \u2014 such as residue from nuclear bombs or power plants \u2014 before they could determine it was interstellar. In the second half of the 20th century, nuclear weapons and their testing sent particles all over the planet, and those reactions also produced iron-60.Story continues below advertisementRuling out other sources allowed scientists to confirm it was space dust. The process was slow and included many steps, Korschinek said, but the closer they got to confirmation, the more excited the team became. The discovery opens up the window of possibilities for research.\u201cWe can hopefully learn more about supernovae, from this specific supernova,\u201d Korschinek said.Read more:There\u2019s a giant volcanic rock \u2018raft\u2019 floating in the ocean. It might actually help boost habitats.Plague-infected prairie dogs prompt shutdowns near Denver. Fleas can spread it to pets and humans.Thousands of tardigrades crash-land on the moon. Did they survive? Sometime in the past 20 years, space dust from a now-dead, exploded star settled into the snow in Antarctica. Remnants of a supernova were found in Antarctic snow. The space dust could be 20 million years old.",
        "author": "Morgan Krakow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Antarctica has enormous mountain ranges and valleys deep beneath its ice (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5893",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/26/antarctica-has-mountain-ranges-and-valleys-bigger-than-manhattan-deep-beneath-its-ice/",
        "text": "Mountain ranges and valleys hundreds of miles long are hidden deep beneath Western Antarctica\u2019s vast ice region, a discovery that scientists say shows Antarctica could contribute even more to rising global sea levels.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA team of researchers\u00a0used ice-penetrating radar to map the subglacial landscape, which they say adds a key piece of evidence for understanding the frozen continent. The researchers discovered three valleys\u00a0linking two major ice regions:\u00a0the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet and the far bigger Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet. The newly discovered land forms prevent\u00a0ice from East Antarctica from flowing through West Antarctica and to the coast. But as ice sheets thin because of warming temperatures, these valleys and mountain ranges could \u201cincrease the speed and rate at which ice flows out from the center of Antarctica to its edges, leading to an increase in global sea levels,\u201d said Kate Winter, the study\u2019s lead author and a research fellow at Northumbria University.One of the most worrisome predictions about climate change may be coming true\u201cUnderstanding how the East and West Antarctica ice sheets interact is fundamental to our understanding of past, present and future global sea level,\u201d said Neil Ross, a senior lecturer at Newcastle University.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe biggest of the valleys, called Foundation Trough, is 217 miles long, nearly equal to the distance\u00a0between Washington, D.C., and New York City.\u00a0Its width is more than 20 miles.The other valley, called Patuxent Trough, is nearly 200 miles long and nine miles wide. The smallest, the Offset Rift Basin, is 93 miles long and 18 miles wide.The research was part of the European Space Agency\u2019s PolarGAP project, an ambitious mission to collect data about the Earth\u2019s global gravity field, and was published earlier this month in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.Fausto Ferraccioli, principal investigator of the PolarGAP project, said the findings provide an important window into the South Pole region, \u201cone of the least understood frontiers in the whole of Antarctica.\u201dAn alarming 10 percent of Antarctica\u2019s coastal glaciers are now in retreat, scientists find\u201cThese new PolarGAP data gives us both insights into how the landscape beneath the ice influences present ice flow, and a better understanding of how the parts of the great Antarctic ice sheets near the South Pole can, and cannot, evolve in response to glaciological change around their margins,\u201d Ferraccioli said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe discovery was a surprise to researchers.Winter told NBC News that they had expected to find a mountainous region, but\u00a0they were not expecting the\u00a0enormous size of the land forms.Research has shown that Antarctica\u2019s coastal glaciers, particularly in West Antarctica, are retreating at an alarming rate, raising concerns about the massive continent\u2019s potential contribution to rising sea levels.Last month, a new satellite survey revealed that 10 percent of Antarctica\u2019s coastal glaciers are moving at a significant speed back toward the center of the continent as they melt below,\u00a0The Washington Post\u2019s Chris Mooney\u00a0reported.\u00a0In West Antarctica, more than 20 percent of coastal glaciers were retreating faster than 25 meters, or 82 feet, per year. The situation isn\u2019t as bad in East Antarctica, although the area\u2019s largest glacier is also retreating at a fast rate.Read more:Huge snowfall increases over Antarctica could counter sea level rise, scientists sayAntarctica is such a trendy vacation spot that Chinese officials made a don\u2019t-touch-penguins ruleThese penguins found a camera in Antarctica and captured a surprisingly good \u2018selfie\u2019This man is running 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 days, starting in Antarctica Scientists discovered three massive valleys underneath West Antarctica; one has a length that's nearly the distance between Washington, D.C., and New York City. Antarctica has enormous mountain ranges and valleys deep beneath its ice",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in July (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5894",
        "date": "2020-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-july/2020/06/27/a6a7df3a-b7cb-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html",
        "text": "For sky gazers, this warm July provides plenty of planets.As July opens its evening sky, cosmic companions Jupiter and Saturn rise in the southeast around 9:30 p.m. By midnight, the planetary chums hang out high in the south.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJupiter is magnificent at -2.7\u00a0magnitude, while the\u00a0ringed planet Saturn is substantially more dim at 0.2 magnitude,\u00a0brightening only slightly,\u00a0according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. The gibbous moon begins to approach the two gaseous giant planets July\u00a03 near the star-spangled Sagittarius constellation, which you can spot above the southeastern horizon. On July 5, the moon officially becomes full at 12:44 a.m. Eastern time. (For the Central and western time zones, the moon becomes officially full July\u00a04.)Story continues below advertisementThe bright moon scoots by the teapot handle asterism in Sagittarius on the evening of July 5 to form a trio with Jupiter and Saturn. By the next night, the gibbous lunar companion moves along.AdvertisementDon\u2019t worry, there\u2019s more. Jupiter and Saturn soon reach opposition \u2014 which is, more or less, a \u201cfull planet\u201d \u2014 in mid-July. Jupiter (July\u00a014) is opposite the sun, from our blue planet perspective. Saturn reaches opposition July\u00a020, according to the Naval Observatory.Effervescent Venus ascends the eastern sky before 4 a.m. early in July. Our brilliant neighboring planet starts the month at -4.7 magnitude, which is dazzling and easily seen. It\u2019s perfectly placed for beach lovers walking the sand before dawn or for \u201cstaycationers\u201d walking the dog.\u00a0The observatory notes that\u00a0Venus\u2019s magnitude diminishes slightly toward the end of July.Story continues below advertisementOur other neighboring planet, Mars, rises before 1 a.m. in the eastern sky early in the month. Find the rusty, ruddy Red Planet before dawn in the southeast. It really does have a red tint, especially because it is bright at\u00a0-0.5\u00a0magnitude when the month starts and reaches -1.07\u00a0magnitude (bright) at July\u2019s\u00a0end.AdvertisementMars is expecting more research traffic, as NASA\u2019s sturdy rover Perseverance and its small companion helicopter Ingenuity are scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on July 22 at 9:35 a.m. (nasa.gov).The mission will research Martian geology and scoop up soil samples for a return to Earth in a future mission.Before sunrise, an Atlantic Ocean beach in mid- to late July would be perfect to catch all five visible planets and an elderly moon. Find the fleet Mercury in the east-northeast loitering low on the horizon near the Gemini and Orion constellations. Moving south, you can see Venus is the heart of the constellation Taurus. On July 15, see the crescent moon approaching Venus. While Mars is almost due south, turn and find Saturn and Jupiter getting ready to set in the west.Story continues below advertisementOn July\u00a05, near the time the moon is officially full, there will be a very slight penumbral lunar eclipse, according to retired NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak (eclipsewise.com). In reality, it is so faint that you won\u2019t notice it. This will be the third eclipse in a series of 71\u00a0events, so for the first total lunar eclipse in this series, saros 149, you\u2019ll need patience \u2014 because it will occur April 16, 2489.AdvertisementTune in for a down-to-Earth event July\u00a07: \u201cMore Things in the Heavens: Infrared Exploration with the Spitzer Space Telescope,\u201d an online lecture by Michael Werner, the Spitzer project scientist, who will describe how the telescope explored the heavens in the infrared. The Exploring Space Lecture Series event is hosted by the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum (airandspace.si.edu) at 8 p.m. Link to the lecture: https://rb.gy/ud5bdg.Blaine Friedlander can be reached at PostSkyWatch@yahoo.com. NASA rover and helicopter headed to Mars are scheduled to\u00a0launch on July 22. Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in July",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. Scientists think they know where \u2014 sort of. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5895",
        "date": "2018-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/07/china-space-lab/",
        "text": "Heads up, Spain and Portugal. And France.\u00a0Maybe you, too, Greece.China's 9\u00bd-ton space station, Tiangong-1, will come falling from space soon, and it's predicted to head in that general direction.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the uninitiated, Tiangong-1 launched in 2011 as China's first space laboratory, a prototype for what the country hoped would eventually be a permanent space station. For about five years, it did just that, orbiting the Earth and acting as a base for three missions (two manned, one unmanned) for\u00a0the\u00a0Chinese National Space Administration. In September 2016, however, Chinese officials announced that they had lost control of the station, meaning Tiangong-1 (literally \u201cheavenly palace\u201d) would eventually defy its name and come hurtling back to Earth.Story continues below advertisementExactly when or where it would do so was a mystery.At first, Chinese scientists ventured that the \u201cuncontrolled reentry\u201d would take place sometime in the latter half of 2017. That window was later pushed back to sometime between\u00a0October 2017 and April 2018.AdvertisementIn January, the California-based nonprofit Aerospace Corp.\u00a0predicted\u00a0that Tiangong-1 would reenter in mid-March, give or take two weeks.This week, the European Space Agency gave a more specific time frame\u00a0\u2014 between March 29 and April 9\u00a0\u2014 and narrowed the reentry locations to \u201canywhere between 43 degrees N and 43 degrees S\u00a0(e.g. Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, etc.).\u201d\u2018My sister says I am an alien\u2019: A 9-year-old applies to be NASA\u2019s planetary protection officerIt\u00a0is worth noting that the new predictions come with enough caveats (see: \u201cetc.\u201d) to make a cable appointment seem exacting. The current estimated window is \u201chighly variable,\u201d the European Space Agency cautioned. Areas outside the given latitudes could be excluded \u2014 but the forecast is still being updated weekly, it added.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAt no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible,\u201d the agency said. Popular Mechanics notes that, given the station's path of orbit, it could also reenter the atmosphere in the Southern Hemisphere near 43\u00a0degrees latitude.Advertisement\u201cParts of the United States, the Iberian Peninsula, China, the Middle East, South America, Australia, and New Zealand are all potential reentry locations,\u201d the magazine reported.Still, there are several reasons not to panic. First and foremost, much, if not all, of the roughly 19,000-pound\u00a0laboratory is expected to disintegrate upon reentry.\u201cIn the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris,\u201d the Aerospace Corp. stated in January. \u201cOnly one\u00a0person\u00a0has ever been\u00a0recorded\u00a0as being\u00a0hit\u00a0by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured.\u201dThe nonprofit included a map that illustrated zones where Tiangong-1 could fall, noting that even for people in the \u201cworst-case location\u201d (the yellow region), the chances of being struck by debris are \u201cabout one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.\u201dBut Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University,\u00a0told the Guardian\u00a0that pieces weighing up to 220\u00a0pounds could make it to Earth's surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven slight changes in atmospheric conditions can alter the landing site \u201cfrom one continent to the next,\u201d McDowell told\u00a0the newspaper.\u201cYou really can\u2019t steer these things,\u201d he said. \u201cEven a couple of days before it reenters, we probably won\u2019t know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it\u2019s going to come down. Not knowing when it\u2019s going to come down translates as not knowing where it\u2019s going to come down.\u201dMary Hui and J. Freedom du Lac contributed to this report.Read more:With Putin\u2019s \u2018invincible\u2019 missile taunt, some hear chilling echoes of Sputnik and the Cold WarA NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthA flat-earther finally tried to fly away. His rocket didn\u2019t even ignite. Chinese officials said it had lost control of Tiangong-1, its first space station, in September 2016. China\u2019s 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. Scientists think they know where \u2014 sort of.",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "The first all-female spacewalk will take place during Women\u2019s History Month (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5896",
        "date": "2019-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/03/07/first-all-female-spacewalk-will-take-place-during-womens-history-month/",
        "text": "It is a big step for women.If all goes according to plan, on March 29, astronauts aboard the International Space Station are scheduled to conduct the first all-female spacewalk. Anne McClain and Christina Koch will venture out together about 240 miles above Earth and make history. Adding to the significance of their mission, the spacewalk will take place during Women\u2019s History Month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was not orchestrated to be this way,\u201d said NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz. \u201cThese spacewalks were originally scheduled to take place in the fall \u2014 they are to upgrade batteries on the space station.\u201d McClain and Koch\u2019s spacewalk will be the second of three planned excursions for Expedition 59, which launches next week on \u2014 what else? \u2014 Pi Day at 3:14 p.m. Eastern time.Story continues below advertisementSchierholz pointed to the fact that women would be at the controls as well. Mary Lawrence will serve as lead flight director, and Jackie Kagey will be the lead spacewalk flight controller.AdvertisementOne NASA flight controller expressed her excitement about working on the mission.I just found out that I\u2019ll be on console providing support for the FIRST ALL FEMALE SPACEWALK with @AstroAnnimal and @Astro_Christina and I can not contain my excitement!!!! #WomenInSTEM #WomenInEngineering #WomenInSpace\u2014 Kristen Facciol (@kfacciol) March 1, 2019\n\nMcClain is also slated to perform a spacewalk with astronaut Nick Hague on March 22.\u201cOf course, assignments and schedules could always change,\u201d Schierholz said.Both McClain and Koch were members of NASA\u2019s 2013 astronaut class, half of which was made up of women.McClain, a major in the U.S. Army and a pilot, \u201cwanted to be an astronaut from the time I was 3 or 4 years old,\u201d she said in a 2015 NASA video interview. \u201cI remember telling my mom at that time, and I never deviated from what I wanted to be. Something about exploration has fascinated me from a young age.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMcClain is currently aboard the ISS, where she is accompanied by an adorable Earth plush toy.(1/2) Earth\u2019s 3rd day was busy! Briefings on how we manage trash and how to work the controls for @csa_asc Canadarm2 (no, you cannot take it for a spin!), then a lesson on Soyuz descent with @Astro_DavidS (our lifeboat to get home in an evacuation, have to keep skills sharp)... pic.twitter.com/2n1hEZzj8J\u2014 Anne McClain (@AstroAnnimal) March 6, 2019\n\nKoch, an electrical engineer, will join her March 14 in what will be her first space flight, according to NASA. Space is just the latest exciting frontier Koch has conquered: Her work has taken her on expeditions to the South Pole and the Arctic.AdvertisementWhen asked in a February interview about the importance of conducting her mission during Women\u2019s History Month, she said, \u201cIt is a unique opportunity, and I hope that I\u2019m be able to inspire folks that might be watching.\u201dAstronauts spacewalked outside the International Space Station to make adjustments to the robotic arm on Jan. 23 , marking the first spacewalk of 2018. (Reuters)Noting she did not have many engineers to look up to growing up in Jacksonville, N.C., she added, \u201cI hope that I can be an example to people that might not have someone to look at as a mentor \u2026 that it doesn\u2019t matter where you come from or what examples there might be around you, you can actually achieve whatever you\u2019re passionate about.\u201d\u201cIf that\u2019s a role that I can serve,\u201d she said, \u201cit would be my honor to do that.\u201dRead More:A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthIntercontinental conflict ends peacefully as Norway agrees Canada\u2019s got the bigger mooseScientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system Christina Koch and Anne McClain are scheduled to conduct their mission March 29. The first all-female spacewalk will take place during Women\u2019s History Month",
        "author": "Kayla Epstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "The first all-female spacewalk will take place during Women\u2019s History Month (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5897",
        "date": "2019-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/03/07/first-all-female-spacewalk-will-take-place-during-womens-history-month/",
        "text": "It is a big step for women.If all goes according to plan, on March 29, astronauts aboard the International Space Station are scheduled to conduct the first all-female spacewalk. Anne McClain and Christina Koch will venture out together about 240 miles above Earth and make history. Adding to the significance of their mission, the spacewalk will take place during Women\u2019s History Month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was not orchestrated to be this way,\u201d said NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz. \u201cThese spacewalks were originally scheduled to take place in the fall \u2014 they are to upgrade batteries on the space station.\u201d McClain and Koch\u2019s spacewalk will be the second of three planned excursions for Expedition 59, which launches next week on \u2014 what else? \u2014 Pi Day at 3:14 p.m. Eastern time.Story continues below advertisementSchierholz pointed to the fact that women would be at the controls as well. Mary Lawrence will serve as lead flight director, and Jackie Kagey will be the lead spacewalk flight controller.AdvertisementOne NASA flight controller expressed her excitement about working on the mission.I just found out that I\u2019ll be on console providing support for the FIRST ALL FEMALE SPACEWALK with @AstroAnnimal and @Astro_Christina and I can not contain my excitement!!!! #WomenInSTEM #WomenInEngineering #WomenInSpace\u2014 Kristen Facciol (@kfacciol) March 1, 2019\n\nMcClain is also slated to perform a spacewalk with astronaut Nick Hague on March 22.\u201cOf course, assignments and schedules could always change,\u201d Schierholz said.Both McClain and Koch were members of NASA\u2019s 2013 astronaut class, half of which was made up of women.McClain, a major in the U.S. Army and a pilot, \u201cwanted to be an astronaut from the time I was 3 or 4 years old,\u201d she said in a 2015 NASA video interview. \u201cI remember telling my mom at that time, and I never deviated from what I wanted to be. Something about exploration has fascinated me from a young age.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMcClain is currently aboard the ISS, where she is accompanied by an adorable Earth plush toy.(1/2) Earth\u2019s 3rd day was busy! Briefings on how we manage trash and how to work the controls for @csa_asc Canadarm2 (no, you cannot take it for a spin!), then a lesson on Soyuz descent with @Astro_DavidS (our lifeboat to get home in an evacuation, have to keep skills sharp)... pic.twitter.com/2n1hEZzj8J\u2014 Anne McClain (@AstroAnnimal) March 6, 2019\n\nKoch, an electrical engineer, will join her March 14 in what will be her first space flight, according to NASA. Space is just the latest exciting frontier Koch has conquered: Her work has taken her on expeditions to the South Pole and the Arctic.AdvertisementWhen asked in a February interview about the importance of conducting her mission during Women\u2019s History Month, she said, \u201cIt is a unique opportunity, and I hope that I\u2019m be able to inspire folks that might be watching.\u201dAstronauts spacewalked outside the International Space Station to make adjustments to the robotic arm on Jan. 23 , marking the first spacewalk of 2018. (Reuters)Noting she did not have many engineers to look up to growing up in Jacksonville, N.C., she added, \u201cI hope that I can be an example to people that might not have someone to look at as a mentor \u2026 that it doesn\u2019t matter where you come from or what examples there might be around you, you can actually achieve whatever you\u2019re passionate about.\u201d\u201cIf that\u2019s a role that I can serve,\u201d she said, \u201cit would be my honor to do that.\u201dRead More:A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk \u2014 and a breathtaking view of EarthIntercontinental conflict ends peacefully as Norway agrees Canada\u2019s got the bigger mooseScientists shot a bullet into an asteroid to learn about the origins of the solar system Christina Koch and Anne McClain are scheduled to conduct their mission March 29. The first all-female spacewalk will take place during Women\u2019s History Month",
        "author": "Kayla Epstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "No, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on Mars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5898",
        "date": "2017-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/01/no-alex-jones-nasa-is-not-hiding-kidnapped-children-on-mars-nasa-says/",
        "text": "The situation for human beings on Mars is dire, and not just because the red planet's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and the average temperature is -81 degrees.There's also the issue of the child-trafficking ring operating in secret on the planet 33.9 million miles from earth, according to a guest on the Alex Jones Show. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,\u201d Robert David Steele said Thursday during a winding, conspiratorial dialogue with Jones about child victims of sex crimes. \u201cSo that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.\u201dMegyn Kelly calls Alex Jones\u2019s Sandy Hook views \u2018revolting\u2019 \u2014 but says interviewing him has valueNASA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Story continues below advertisementBut Guy Webster, a spokesman for Mars exploration at NASA, told the Daily Beast that rumors about live humans on Mars are false.Advertisement\u201cThere are no humans on Mars,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are active rovers on Mars. There was a rumor going around last week that there weren\u2019t. There are, but there are no humans.\u201dJones is known for peddling elaborate and debunked conspiracy theories on his radio show, which airs on 118 stations around the country and reaches millions of listeners.\u00a0The site had 4.5 million unique page views in the\u00a0past month and more than 5 million from mid-April to mid-May,\u00a0according to Quantcast. His\u00a0YouTube channel\u00a0has more than 2 million subscribers.Story continues below advertisementAmong his most well-known accusations in recent years is that the December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 children and six adults were killed at a school in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax. Jones has claimed that the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and, more recently, promoted the \u201cPizzagate\u201d conspiracy, which alleged that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was linked to a child-sex ring operating from the basement of a suburban Washington D.C. pizzeria.AdvertisementThe theory originated on Reddit, where a user claimed hacked emails belonging to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta revealed evidence of an international child-sex ring. The key, the user alleged, was\u00a0replacing the word \u201cpizza\u201d with \u201clittle boy.\u201dFrom that moment, the conspiracy theory took on a life of its own, culminating in a North Carolina man firing a military-style assault rifle inside the restaurant in December.\u00a0Edgar Maddison Welch told investigators he was there to save abused children. Instead, he pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges in March and was sentenced to four years in prison last month.Story continues below advertisementConfronted about his Sandy Hook allegations during a controversial interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly last month, Jones hedged.\u201cI tend to believe that children probably did die there,\u201d he told the anchor. \u201cBut then you look at all the other evidence on the other side. I can see how other people believe that nobody died there.\u201dAdvertisementOn Thursday\u2019s Infowars broadcast, Steele appeared to connect the kidnapped children being held captive on Mars to pedophile rings who allegedly use children for their youthful body parts and energy.\u201cPedophilia does not stop with sodomizing children,\u201d Steele said. \u201cIt goes straight into terrorizing them to adrenalize their blood and then murdering them. It also includes murdering them so that they can have their bone marrow harvested as well as body parts.\u201d\u201cThis is the original growth hormone,\u201d Jones said.\u201cYes, it's an anti-aging thing,\u201d Steele replied.Watch: How and when will humans get to Mars? (Gillian Brockell, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)MORE READING:\u00a0Controversial pesticides may threaten queen bees. Alternatives could be worse.A mysterious underwater forest warns of Earth\u2019s rapidly changing climateThis bizarre ancient creature mystified Darwin. Now we finally know what it was. One of the conspiracy-peddling talk-show host's guests accused the agency of a cover-up. No, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on Mars",
        "author": "Peter Holley"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Trump budget briefing, \u2018climate change musical\u2019 is cited as tax waste. Wait, what? (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5899",
        "date": "2017-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/23/in-trump-budget-briefing-climate-change-musical-cited-as-tax-waste-wait-what/",
        "text": "Tuesday morning,\u00a0during a\u00a0White House conference on President Trump's proposed 2018 federal budget, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney invoked a musical that, seven years ago, won a government grant worth nearly $700,000.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen asked if the administration considered climate change programs to be\u00a0taxpayer waste, Mulvaney replied,\u00a0\u201cThe National Science Foundation last year used your taxpayer money to fund a climate change musical. Do you think that\u2019s a waste of your money?\u201d Mulvaney said that the previous administration funded\u00a0\u201ccrazy stuff\u201d and spent too much money in its climate change efforts. \u201cDoes it mean that we are anti-science? Absolutely not,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are simply trying to get things back in order.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhen asked during an NSF budget briefing Tuesday afternoon, Director\u00a0France A. C\u00f3rdova declined to say whether she felt that Mulvaney's \u201cmusical\u201d comment characterized the current White House approach to\u00a0climate research. \u201cJust as a point of fact, that was actually awarded and proposed in 2010,\u201d C\u00f3rdova said, rather than last year, as Mulvaney suggested.AdvertisementThe musical in question, \u201cThe Great Immensity,\u201d received\u00a0$697,177\u00a0under a continuing grant that was awarded in August 2010 and ended in mid-2014. Brooklyn-based theater company the Civilians produced the musical. \u201cThe play uses real places and stories drawn from interviews conducted by the artists to create an experience that is part investigative journalism and part inventive theater,\u201d according to\u00a0the grant's\u00a0abstract published at the NSF website. \u201cAttendance at the performances is projected to be about 75,000.\u201dThe narrative follows a woman whose husband, a nature filmmaker, vanished from a tropical island. Along the way, she uncovers\u00a0a caper to disrupt a \u201cGlobal Climate Summit\u201d\u00a0held in Paris.\u00a0(The New York Times wrote that the \u201cwitty but unwieldy\u201d production \u201csometimes feels as if it were constructed by an impassioned college student with a brain full of facts and a fierce determination not to turn to Big Pharma to control that pesky attention-deficit problem.\u201d)Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe Great Immensity,\u201d which debuted in February 2014 in Missouri, ran for about four\u00a0weeks off-Broadway in New York. Republican politicians, most vocally Rep.\u00a0Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), condemned the project as wasteful. As\u00a0Science magazine noted\u00a0in late 2014, the musical remained a \u201cfavorite target\u201d of conservative media outlets. A September 2014\u00a0Fox News article\u00a0reported that just 5 percent of the anticipated audience saw the production before it closed.AdvertisementRep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.) questioned whether Smith or his staff may have leaked the attendance figures, which were not public; both Johnson and\u00a0Smith, as members of House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, had access to those numbers.Three years later, Republicans continue to hold up the dead show as\u00a0the standard for taxpayer waste. Except it appears \u201cThe Great Immensity\u201d has mutated into musicals, plural (or at least it was longer-lived, per Mulvaney). This month, in the House Science Committee authorization and oversight plan, Smith\u00a0listed \u201cclimate change musicals\u201d as examples of NSF projects that fail to meet national interest.Story continues below advertisementUnder the 2018 proposal, the NSF budget would be leaner by\u00a0$776 million\u00a0(enough to fund 1,100 climate change musicals). The $6.7 billion NSF budget would be reset to the level it was circa 2006 or 2007,\u00a0C\u00f3rdova\u00a0said. \u201cWe understand and appreciate the apprehension felt within the community,\u201d she said. But C\u00f3rdova\u00a0also said that the budget kept the agency's \u201ccore values\u201d\u00a0intact and that it could support some 8,000 grants. The NSF would \u201ccontinue to fund the very best research,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause our goal is to be the very best.\u201dThe Trump administration dropped their budget for next year on May 23. Here are three of the biggest cuts it proposes. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)Read more:What will President Trump mean for science?Science funding spared under congressional budget deal, but more battles aheadA university is eliminating its science collection \u2014 to expand a running track A review called the musical 'The Great Immensity' witty and unwieldy. Conservative media and politicians love to hate it. In Trump budget briefing, \u2018climate change musical\u2019 is cited as tax waste. Wait, what?",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Behold the marvelous, translucent teeth of the deep-sea dragonfish (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5900",
        "date": "2019-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/06/05/behold-marvelous-translucent-teeth-deep-sea-dragonfish/",
        "text": "The dragonfish is a top predator at the bottom of the sea. A bioluminescent lure on its head and spots on its belly beckon prey, like a lantern draws in moths. The rest of its body, as long as a pencil and almost as slender, is an inky black that blends in with water deeper than the sun can reach. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe predator\u2019s glow is the deep-sea embodiment of a light at the end of a tunnel. But wayward little fish won\u2019t find anything pearly here. Just long, pointy \u2014 and nearly invisible \u2014 fangs.And those teeth are remarkable, as a new study published Wednesday in the journal Matter reveals. The teeth contain the same minerals as the chompers that gleam in sharks\u2019 mouths and toothpaste ads. Except, as arranged in the dragonfish teeth, there\u2019s no shine: The structures are translucent.Story continues below advertisementMarc Meyers, a materials scientist at the University of California at San Diego, encountered dragonfish when he accompanied an oceanographic expedition to the San Diego Trough, an underwater canyon off the coast of its namesake city. The ship\u2019s nets collected animals from 1,500 feet below, and when Meyers saw the dragonfish, he became entranced by their \u201ctransparent little teeth,\u201d he said.AdvertisementHe transported several dragonfish heads to the Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Germany. There his colleagues examined the teeth with an electron microscope and other laboratory tools. To his knowledge, no one had studied teeth like these before.\u201cWe didn\u2019t know what these teeth would be made out of,\u201d he said, \u201cbut, lo and behold, it is hydroxyapatite.\u201d That\u2019s the same tough substance, a calcium mineral, that builds our bones and our tooth enamel.Story continues below advertisementWhat may be unique to the dragonfish are the structures within their teeth, which are extremely small arrangements of hydroxyapatite and collagen, a protein in many connective tissues. That nanostructure transmits most wavelengths of light instead of scattering it, Meyers said. The property, known as Rayleigh scattering, can be seen in the interplay between sunlight and atmospheric particles, which scatter blue light, giving the sky its color.Advertisement\u201cIf the teeth were nice and white,\u201d Meyers said, \u201cthe light would be reflected.\u201dChristopher Kenaley, a biologist at Boston College and an expert in deep-sea fish who was not involved with this study, said the bulk of the new report was a valuable contribution. \u201cWe don\u2019t know much about the materials of animals that live in the deep sea,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementTeeth translucency makes a certain kind of sense. \u201cYou don\u2019t want teeth to be an indicator that you\u2019re about to eat something,\u201d Kenaley said. Yet other species of dragonfish, which munch on small and unobservant crustaceans, also have translucent teeth, which may suggest this adaptation has another unknown purpose, he said.(But Kenaley also said he spotted a flaw in the report: The authors identified their specimens as the dragonfish Aristostomias scintillans. The images show a different type of dragonfish, belonging to the genus Stomias, Kenaley said.)AdvertisementMeyers and his colleagues tested the mechanical strength of the teeth. They were about as hard as a shark\u2019s tooth and as sharp as a piranha\u2019s.Story continues below advertisementKenaley said he had firsthand confirmation that a dragonfish\u2019s pointy ends mean business. \u201cJeez,\u201d he said, \u201cI was stabbed by one the other day working in the lab.\u201dMeyers said he plans to explore the materials inspired by dragonfish teeth in the future. He imagined a ceramic that is transparent like glass but much more resistant to cracking.\u201cNature has a limited number of materials,\u201d he said, but it remixes them into \u201cingenious solutions.\u201dRead more:Scientists finally found Zenkerella, the world\u2019s most mysterious mammalFish fossils show worldwide catastrophe on the day the dinosaurs diedThis tiny animal can survive basically anything, including the vacuum of space The teeth of a dragonfish don't sparkle. But they are as hard as a shark's and pointy as a piranha's. Behold the marvelous, translucent teeth of the deep-sea dragonfish",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: Summer wanes, ushers Northern Hemisphere into cooler fall (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5901",
        "date": "2021-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-summer-wanes-ushers-northern-hemisphere-into-cooler-fall/2021/08/28/c82d925a-0750-11ec-a266-7c7fe02fa374_story.html",
        "text": "The hot summer wanes in the next few weeks, officially ushering the Northern Hemisphere into the cooler fall. For September, Venus and the fleet Mercury hang out low in the western heavens, while two gas giants \u2014 Jupiter and Saturn \u2014 climb the eastern night sky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHovering just above the horizon in the west-southwest at dusk, find the planet Venus early in the night, quite bright at -4.1 magnitude, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. You\u2019ll need a good western view to see it. By mid-September, our effervescent neighboring planet scoots its way from the constellation Virgo into Libra, where it remains above the horizon, just before it sets each night. Sky gazers may appreciate Venus brightening at September\u2019s end.Story continues below advertisementWhile you won\u2019t be able to see it immediately, a new moon occurs Sept. 6 at 8:51 p.m. Eastern time, said the observatory. Two nights later, the faint sliver of the young moon sneaks past the very low planet Mercury (Sept. 8) that hugs the western horizon. It\u2019s low, so Mercury will be very difficult to spot. The new moon, looking like a fingernail clipping, scoots past the luminous Venus on Sept. 9.AdvertisementWhen dusk darkens, look to the southeast to find the solar system\u2019s gas giant planets Saturn and Jupiter climbing into the night sky.The ringed Saturn (in the constellation Capricornus) is seen at zero magnitude, which may be a little dim in light-polluted urban skies. You will have no problem spotting the much brighter Jupiter at -2.8 magnitude, according to the observatory, puttering (to the left of Saturn) between the constellations Aquarius and Capricornus.Story continues below advertisementLooking for Saturn? There is an easy way. On Sept. 16, the waxing first-quarter moon is nearly under Saturn, while on the next evening, the moon sits nearly under Jupiter.While we\u2019re in the cosmic neighborhood, stop by for some tea with the constellation Sagittarius. It\u2019s a teapot shape, just to the right of Jupiter and Saturn. The moon crosses through asterism of Sagittarius on Sept. 14.AdvertisementThe Sept. 20 full moon perches below the Great Square of Pegasus, which sits higher in the east just after moonrise.You won\u2019t find Mars now, since our neighboring Red Planet is roving around with the sun. Don\u2019t worry, we\u2019ll catch up with Mars early in December.Story continues below advertisementAfter more than 90 days of summer, meet glorious autumn. Guiding in the new season, the autumnal equinox officially occurs Sept. 22 at 3:21 p.m. Eastern time, according to the observatory. Soon we\u2019ll see the splendid auburn, russet and amber-colored leaves adorn our part of the Northern Hemisphere, while the Southern Hemisphere moves from winter into spring.Down-to-Earth Events: \u25cf Sept. 11 \u2014 Astronomer Heidi Hammel, vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), will speak virtually on what the James Webb Space Telescope may find in the cosmos, as the telescope is scheduled to launch in late October. The meeting is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers and starts at 7:30 p.m. To register, visit capitalastronomers.org.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cf Sept. 12 \u2014 \u201cAstronomy with X-rays: How, Where and Most Importantly Why?\u201d a virtual talk by Randall Smith of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. 7:30 p.m. Event: meet.google.com/osh-bcyd-gti.\u25cf Sept. 14 \u2014 \u201cEnvisioning a World of Space People,\u201d a virtual lecture by Kathryn Lueders, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. She will discuss making space more broadly accessible and the growing space economy. 8 p.m. Hosted by the National Air and Space Museum. To sign up and watch: tinyurl.com/2hymp5ww. Home: airandspace.si.edu.\u25cf Sept. 17 \u2014 Virtual Planetarium Show, hosted by the National Air and Space Museum. Kids of all ages can see what\u2019s happening in the early autumn heavens. 1 p.m. To sign up and watch: tinyurl.com/2akj63n3.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com. The autumnal equinox will occur Sept. 22, signaling the end of more than 90 days of summer. Sky Watch: Summer wanes, ushers Northern Hemisphere into cooler fall",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: Summer wanes, ushers Northern Hemisphere into cooler fall (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5902",
        "date": "2021-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-summer-wanes-ushers-northern-hemisphere-into-cooler-fall/2021/08/28/c82d925a-0750-11ec-a266-7c7fe02fa374_story.html",
        "text": "The hot summer wanes in the next few weeks, officially ushering the Northern Hemisphere into the cooler fall. For September, Venus and the fleet Mercury hang out low in the western heavens, while two gas giants \u2014 Jupiter and Saturn \u2014 climb the eastern night sky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHovering just above the horizon in the west-southwest at dusk, find the planet Venus early in the night, quite bright at -4.1 magnitude, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. You\u2019ll need a good western view to see it. By mid-September, our effervescent neighboring planet scoots its way from the constellation Virgo into Libra, where it remains above the horizon, just before it sets each night. Sky gazers may appreciate Venus brightening at September\u2019s end.Story continues below advertisementWhile you won\u2019t be able to see it immediately, a new moon occurs Sept. 6 at 8:51 p.m. Eastern time, said the observatory. Two nights later, the faint sliver of the young moon sneaks past the very low planet Mercury (Sept. 8) that hugs the western horizon. It\u2019s low, so Mercury will be very difficult to spot. The new moon, looking like a fingernail clipping, scoots past the luminous Venus on Sept. 9.AdvertisementWhen dusk darkens, look to the southeast to find the solar system\u2019s gas giant planets Saturn and Jupiter climbing into the night sky.The ringed Saturn (in the constellation Capricornus) is seen at zero magnitude, which may be a little dim in light-polluted urban skies. You will have no problem spotting the much brighter Jupiter at -2.8 magnitude, according to the observatory, puttering (to the left of Saturn) between the constellations Aquarius and Capricornus.Story continues below advertisementLooking for Saturn? There is an easy way. On Sept. 16, the waxing first-quarter moon is nearly under Saturn, while on the next evening, the moon sits nearly under Jupiter.While we\u2019re in the cosmic neighborhood, stop by for some tea with the constellation Sagittarius. It\u2019s a teapot shape, just to the right of Jupiter and Saturn. The moon crosses through asterism of Sagittarius on Sept. 14.AdvertisementThe Sept. 20 full moon perches below the Great Square of Pegasus, which sits higher in the east just after moonrise.You won\u2019t find Mars now, since our neighboring Red Planet is roving around with the sun. Don\u2019t worry, we\u2019ll catch up with Mars early in December.Story continues below advertisementAfter more than 90 days of summer, meet glorious autumn. Guiding in the new season, the autumnal equinox officially occurs Sept. 22 at 3:21 p.m. Eastern time, according to the observatory. Soon we\u2019ll see the splendid auburn, russet and amber-colored leaves adorn our part of the Northern Hemisphere, while the Southern Hemisphere moves from winter into spring.Down-to-Earth Events: \u25cf Sept. 11 \u2014 Astronomer Heidi Hammel, vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), will speak virtually on what the James Webb Space Telescope may find in the cosmos, as the telescope is scheduled to launch in late October. The meeting is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers and starts at 7:30 p.m. To register, visit capitalastronomers.org.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cf Sept. 12 \u2014 \u201cAstronomy with X-rays: How, Where and Most Importantly Why?\u201d a virtual talk by Randall Smith of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. 7:30 p.m. Event: meet.google.com/osh-bcyd-gti.\u25cf Sept. 14 \u2014 \u201cEnvisioning a World of Space People,\u201d a virtual lecture by Kathryn Lueders, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. She will discuss making space more broadly accessible and the growing space economy. 8 p.m. Hosted by the National Air and Space Museum. To sign up and watch: tinyurl.com/2hymp5ww. Home: airandspace.si.edu.\u25cf Sept. 17 \u2014 Virtual Planetarium Show, hosted by the National Air and Space Museum. Kids of all ages can see what\u2019s happening in the early autumn heavens. 1 p.m. To sign up and watch: tinyurl.com/2akj63n3.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com. The autumnal equinox will occur Sept. 22, signaling the end of more than 90 days of summer. Sky Watch: Summer wanes, ushers Northern Hemisphere into cooler fall",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: Summer wanes, ushers Northern Hemisphere into cooler fall (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5903",
        "date": "2021-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-summer-wanes-ushers-northern-hemisphere-into-cooler-fall/2021/08/28/c82d925a-0750-11ec-a266-7c7fe02fa374_story.html",
        "text": "The hot summer wanes in the next few weeks, officially ushering the Northern Hemisphere into the cooler fall. For September, Venus and the fleet Mercury hang out low in the western heavens, while two gas giants \u2014 Jupiter and Saturn \u2014 climb the eastern night sky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHovering just above the horizon in the west-southwest at dusk, find the planet Venus early in the night, quite bright at -4.1 magnitude, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. You\u2019ll need a good western view to see it. By mid-September, our effervescent neighboring planet scoots its way from the constellation Virgo into Libra, where it remains above the horizon, just before it sets each night. Sky gazers may appreciate Venus brightening at September\u2019s end.Story continues below advertisementWhile you won\u2019t be able to see it immediately, a new moon occurs Sept. 6 at 8:51 p.m. Eastern time, said the observatory. Two nights later, the faint sliver of the young moon sneaks past the very low planet Mercury (Sept. 8) that hugs the western horizon. It\u2019s low, so Mercury will be very difficult to spot. The new moon, looking like a fingernail clipping, scoots past the luminous Venus on Sept. 9.AdvertisementWhen dusk darkens, look to the southeast to find the solar system\u2019s gas giant planets Saturn and Jupiter climbing into the night sky.The ringed Saturn (in the constellation Capricornus) is seen at zero magnitude, which may be a little dim in light-polluted urban skies. You will have no problem spotting the much brighter Jupiter at -2.8 magnitude, according to the observatory, puttering (to the left of Saturn) between the constellations Aquarius and Capricornus.Story continues below advertisementLooking for Saturn? There is an easy way. On Sept. 16, the waxing first-quarter moon is nearly under Saturn, while on the next evening, the moon sits nearly under Jupiter.While we\u2019re in the cosmic neighborhood, stop by for some tea with the constellation Sagittarius. It\u2019s a teapot shape, just to the right of Jupiter and Saturn. The moon crosses through asterism of Sagittarius on Sept. 14.AdvertisementThe Sept. 20 full moon perches below the Great Square of Pegasus, which sits higher in the east just after moonrise.You won\u2019t find Mars now, since our neighboring Red Planet is roving around with the sun. Don\u2019t worry, we\u2019ll catch up with Mars early in December.Story continues below advertisementAfter more than 90 days of summer, meet glorious autumn. Guiding in the new season, the autumnal equinox officially occurs Sept. 22 at 3:21 p.m. Eastern time, according to the observatory. Soon we\u2019ll see the splendid auburn, russet and amber-colored leaves adorn our part of the Northern Hemisphere, while the Southern Hemisphere moves from winter into spring.Down-to-Earth Events: \u25cf Sept. 11 \u2014 Astronomer Heidi Hammel, vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), will speak virtually on what the James Webb Space Telescope may find in the cosmos, as the telescope is scheduled to launch in late October. The meeting is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers and starts at 7:30 p.m. To register, visit capitalastronomers.org.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cf Sept. 12 \u2014 \u201cAstronomy with X-rays: How, Where and Most Importantly Why?\u201d a virtual talk by Randall Smith of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club. 7:30 p.m. Event: meet.google.com/osh-bcyd-gti.\u25cf Sept. 14 \u2014 \u201cEnvisioning a World of Space People,\u201d a virtual lecture by Kathryn Lueders, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. She will discuss making space more broadly accessible and the growing space economy. 8 p.m. Hosted by the National Air and Space Museum. To sign up and watch: tinyurl.com/2hymp5ww. Home: airandspace.si.edu.\u25cf Sept. 17 \u2014 Virtual Planetarium Show, hosted by the National Air and Space Museum. Kids of all ages can see what\u2019s happening in the early autumn heavens. 1 p.m. To sign up and watch: tinyurl.com/2akj63n3.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com. The autumnal equinox will occur Sept. 22, signaling the end of more than 90 days of summer. Sky Watch: Summer wanes, ushers Northern Hemisphere into cooler fall",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "A \u2018UFO sighting\u2019 briefly freaked out the West Coast. There was an earthly explanation. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5904",
        "date": "2017-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/23/a-ufo-sighting-briefly-freaked-out-the-west-coast-there-was-an-earthly-explanation/",
        "text": "The people of Los Angeles can be forgiven if they were a little quick to jump to extraterrestrial conclusions.The government did, after all, just admit that it had spent $22 million to investigate unidentified flying objects. And after 70 years of keeping the government installation known as Area 51 under wraps, Uncle Sam conceded that, yes, it did exist, and yes, some super-secret stuff went on there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo, it\u2019s perfectly logical that Angelenos gazing into a darkening sky around 5:30 p.m. Friday would assume their city\u00a0was in the midst of an\u00a0alien invasion as they saw this:What... in the world???? #DTLA pic.twitter.com/gqhpwm9PJq\u2014 Aleen (@SoCalAleen) December 23, 2017\n\nElon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who ultimately wants to put people on a space-bound Megabus,\u00a0fanned the flames by saying on Twitter that the jellyfish-like shape in the sky was a \u201cnuclear alien UFO from North Korea.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSouthern Californians and other people\u00a0out West, well, freaked out.Jan Brewer, whose Twitter profile succinctly identifies her as \u201cArizona\u2019s 22nd Governor\u201d tweeted that she was wondering what the lights over Phoenix were. For some reason, she tagged President Donald Trump.Just wondering what these lights were over the city of Phoenix just now... @realDonaldTrump @POTUS pic.twitter.com/yS7p4OrIWW\u2014 Jan Brewer (@GovBrewer) December 23, 2017\n\nAnd many, many others pointed their smartphone cameras skyward,\u00a0capturing what they assumed was the first sign of the alien apocalypse \u2014 or something \u2014\u00a0 and musing about the vapory lights in the sky.What the hell is this? pic.twitter.com/8tGK4GQ5ks\u2014 Joe Mozingo (@joemozingo) December 23, 2017\n\nIs there a UFO in LA or what? Flying in tmrw and would like to be forewarned if aliens have invaded.\u2014 Brandi Cyrus (@BrandiCyrus) December 23, 2017\n\nThere was, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation.Musk\u2019s SpaceX had launched an Irdium-4 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California \u2014 about 150 miles from the City of Angels.Story continues below advertisementAccording to the Los Angeles Times, officials had warned that people would be able to see the launch across Southern California and elsewhere on the western half of the country. There was even a live webcast\u00a0for those with more than a passing interest in rockets.AdvertisementThe moment a SpaceX rocket launch produced a shining, billowing streak in the sky over CaliforniaShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches from the Space Launch Complex 4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, Calif. On its fourth launch toward a $3 billion upgrade to Virginia-based Iridium's mobile, voice and data network, the reused rocket carried 10 satellites into orbit, and left behind a trail of mystery and wonder. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)The government admits it studies UFOs. So about those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026But for most people, there was just confusion, awe and maybe a little bit of panic.And as Musk pointed out in the wee hours of Saturday morning, people along the East Coast can freak out next month.If you liked tonight\u2019s launch, you will really like Falcon Heavy next month: 3 rocket cores & 3X thrust. 2 cores return to base doing synchronized aerobatics. 3rd lands on droneship.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2017\n\nA test launch of that rocket, which Musk hopes will someday lead to missions to Mars, will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.It\u2019s not a joke: A Tesla is loaded onto SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocketThe Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)This post has been updated.Read more:Scientists have identified the 50-foot creature that washed up on an Indonesian beachThis ancient shark with a snake head and 300 teeth is why we should just say nope to the oceanResearchers think they know where Amelia Earhart died \u2014 days after a photo suggested she livedA lobster boat captain said a freak storm killed his crew. Then doctors found drugs in his system. The U.S. government did just admit that it had spent $22 million to investigate unidentified flying objects. So Angelenos could be forgiven for jumping to conclusions when they saw something streaking across the night sky. A \u2018UFO sighting\u2019 briefly freaked out the West Coast. There was an earthly explanation.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists in historic Arctic expedition choose ice floe where they\u2019ll spend the next year (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5905",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/10/04/scientists-historic-arctic-expedition-chose-ice-floe-where-theyll-spend-next-year/",
        "text": "After a rigorous search in the rapidly melting Siberian Arctic, researchers on the world\u2019s biggest North Pole expedition have finally found an ice floe on which to set up camp.Soon the scientists will cut the engine on the research vessel Polarstern and lodge their ship in ice. Trapped, the ship will spend the next 12 months floating with the floe across the central Arctic as its passengers collect crucial information about the effects of climate change in the fastest-warming part of the world. 10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightThe multination, $134 million Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) is the first major modern research project to drift across the North Pole. A rotating cast of some 300 scientists is slated to live and work aboard the Polarstern this year; by documenting an entire year of change in the north, they hope to improve models of how Arctic melting will affect weather in the rest of the world.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOrganizers spent months combing through satellite imagery and historic records, weeks conducting helicopter survey flights and days crisscrossing ice on snow machines and sleds before making their selection of a floe this week.The process was made more difficult after a summer of record warmth; by September, there were very few ice floes thick enough to support the expedition.[Adrift in the Arctic: Nowhere on Earth is warming as fast. Scientists will spend a year trapped in sea ice to understand what that means for the world.]On Sept. 28, scientists aboard the Polarstern set foot on an oval-shaped floe about 1.5 miles in diameter. Viewed from space, the floe looked mostly dark \u2014 a signature of thin ice riddled with melt ponds.Story continues below advertisementBut when researchers surveyed a bright white region in the floe\u2019s northern edge, they found several feet of firm, highly compressed ice \u2014 an ideal surface on which to set up camp. They named this stable area \u201cthe fortress.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve found our home for the months to come,\u201d MOSAiC\u2019s expedition leader, Markus Rex, a polar scientist at Germany\u2019s Alfred Wegener Institute, said in a statement. \u201cIt may not be the perfect floe, but it\u2019s the best one in this part of the Arctic and offers better working conditions than we could have expected after a warm Arctic summer.\u201dArctic ice extents at the end of this melt season were the third-lowest on record. About 800,000 square miles more open water was exposed in the middle of September than is typical for that time of year. This meant the Polarstern and its support ship, the Fedorov, had to sail farther and search harder for a suitable ice floe.Story continues below advertisementIn his blog, MOSAiC researcher Marc Oggier described the ships slicing through fragile, soupy \u201cgrease ice\u201d until at last, on the horizon, the voyagers spotted the thin white line of the ice edge.AdvertisementNow the researchers must work to swiftly set up camp. The six-month Arctic night is fast approaching; as of Friday, the sun will no longer rise above the horizon. Soon, all daylight will disappear.The camp will resemble a small city, lit by floodlights and linked by pathways made of wooden planks to ensure that no wayward explorers accidentally walk across a colleague\u2019s experiment. Oceanographers, geophysicists, meteorologists, biologists and a host of other researchers will collect information on every imaginable aspect of the sea, ice, sky and their inhabitants. The data will be fed into a gigantic database shared first with the hundreds of MOSAiC collaborators, then with scientists all over the world.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe data will be the legacy of this expedition,\u201d said Don Perovich, a Dartmouth geophysicist and one of the co-leaders for MOSAiC\u2019s sea ice experiments.Read more:Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking actionPlane takes off in rare, risky effort to rescue sick workers from the South PoleThis ancient climate catastrophe is our best clue about Earth\u2019s futureExtreme climate change has arrived in America After a rigorous search in a rapidly melting Arctic, researchers have finally found a suitable floe with which their vessel can drift across the North Pole. Scientists in historic Arctic expedition choose ice floe where they\u2019ll spend the next year",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dear Science: Is the eclipse moving backward? (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5906",
        "date": "2017-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/12/dear-science-is-the-eclipse-moving-backward/",
        "text": "Dear Science,I'm really excited about the total solar eclipse that's going to happen in the U.S. on Aug. 21. But some of the details have me confused. People say that the eclipse will start on the West Coast, in Oregon, and travel southeast toward South Carolina. But if the moon rises in the east and sets in the west, shouldn't the eclipse go in that direction too? Is the eclipse moving backward? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere's what science has to say:No, the moon will not reverse its course around the Earth for a few hours on Aug. 21. But we don't blame you for feeling confused. This definitely falls into the category of Space Questions That Are Really Tough to Wrap Your Mind Around.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt is actually something even astronomers struggle to see,\u201d said C. Alex Young, a heliophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. When the issue came up at a recent conference, \u201cit wound up with a bunch of astronomers sitting around trying to figure out how to explain it.\u201dAdvertisementWhen the moon passes in front of the sun on Aug. 21, it will cast a long shadow across the Earth's surface. As the moon moves in its orbit, that shadow will race from the west coast of the U.S. to the east \u2014 the opposite path we're used to watching the moon take.The phenomenon is so difficult to understand because it shifts our perspective. Even though we learned in elementary school that everything in space, including the Earth, is in motion, we are very bad at remembering that we are not standing still at the center of things. When we look up at night and see the moon rising in the east, we assume that's because the moon is circling from east to west around our planet.In reality, the moon appears to rise in the east because that's the way the Earth is spinning. If you looked down on Earth from above the North Pole, our planet would be rotating counterclockwise \u2014 or spinning toward the east. That's why you catch sight of the moon first peeping above the eastern horizon, and your last view of it is as it sets in the west.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, the moon is actually revolving in the same direction that Earth spins \u2014 and twice as fast. The moon is traveling eastward in its orbit at about 2,100 miles per hour, while the Earth spins at a sluggish 1,040 mph (at the equator). So the path of the moon's shadow will track eastward across the Earth's surface at a speed of about 2,100 minus 1,040 mph \u2014 roughly 1,060 mph.Head still spinning? That's understandable \u2014 this issue is easier to understand if you can visualize it. Take a look at this video of the moon taken by a camera aboard NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite last year.NASA camera captures images of the moon passing in front of the Earth for a second time this year. (Reuters)See how the moon travels quickly from west to east across the globe?Story continues below advertisementThe moon doesn't do anything differently during the eclipse. Instead, the eclipse is exposing us to a reality that exists every day of the year. For many of us, for the first time in our lives, the eclipse will let us witness the movement of the moon in its own orbit, and not as a result of the Earth's rotation. That's part of what makes astronomical events like this so cool: they are a reminder of our place in the universe.Have a question for Dear Science? Ask it here.More eclipse coverage:The first solar eclipse to cross America in 99 years is coming. To some, it's an act of God.Don't let clouds ruin your solar eclipse \u2014 here's where it's most likely to be clear Scientists are gearing up to take the longest-ever video of a solar eclipse In 6 months, the moon will block out the sun, and social media will explode Why will the total solar eclipse in August move from west to east? Dear Science: Is the eclipse moving backward?",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in March (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5907",
        "date": "2020-02-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-march/2020/02/29/9db52106-5a53-11ea-ab68-101ecfec2532_story.html",
        "text": "Before dawn or into the early evening throughout March, gaze toward the heavens to behold sublime planetary performances.Look to the southeast before sunrise to find Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. For the month\u2019s lion-like early days, the rusty red Mars (first magnitude, relatively dim) rises first, then leads luminous Jupiter (-2 magnitude, very bright). The ringed Saturn (zero magnitude, bright) brings up the planetary line low in the southeast. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMars appears to scoot closer to Jupiter and Saturn by mid-March. Within days, the scene resembles a fun, planetary mosh pit. The waning moon \u2014 by the Ides of March \u2014 heads toward these planets. The last quarter moon joins the fun March 18, as the faint Mars conjuncts Jupiter on March 20, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. Mars then skedaddles past the gaseous Jupiter on its way to Saturn, when the Red Planet and Saturn converge before sunrise March 31.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the evening sky, the effervescent Venus sports a great glow. It appears like a distant jetliner with its high-beam landing lights on in the western sky at dusk. Spy it easily at -4.3 magnitude (quite bright) early in the month, according to the observatory. It gets better: When March goes out like a lamb, Venus has become an even brighter, mesmerizing -4.5 magnitude. The sliver of a waxing young moon glides by Venus on March 27-28.All of our clocks move forward March 8 at 2 a.m. \u2014 the start of daylight saving time.Astronomically speaking, winter becomes spring as the vernal equinox arrives March 19 at 11:50 p.m. Eastern time, according to the observatory.Story continues below advertisementYou will soon hear about the March 9 full moon, informally nicknamed \u201csupermoon\u201d because of its closer proximity to Earth. The moon has an elliptical orbit around Earth, so when the moon is closer on its cycle to our blue planet, it is at perigee. When the moon is far, it is at apogee. Astronomers call this coming event a perigee full moon. The apogee \u2014 distant \u2014 new moon occurs March 24, according to the observatory.\nDown-to-Earth events\n\u25cfMarch 3 \u2014 The Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia returns to its display at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. Free admission. Parking $15. airandspace.si.edu.Advertisement\u25cfMarch 5 \u2014 \u201cNew Exoplanets from the TESS Mission,\u201d a talk by Drake Deming, astronomy professor at the University of Maryland, at the school\u2019s observatory, College Park. Afterward, weather permitting, enjoy heavenly objects through telescopes. 8 p.m. astro.umd.edu/openhouse.Story continues below advertisement\u25cfMarch 8 \u2014 \u201cHighlights of the Sky Using Gamma-ray Eyes,\u201d a talk by NASA research astrophysicist Elizabeth Hays, at the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club meeting, 163 Research Hall, George Mason University. 7 p.m. novac.com.\u25cfMarch 14 \u2014 \u201cSpontaneous Outbursts: New Studies of Cometary Activity,\u201d a talk by research scientist Tony Farnham, University of Maryland, at the regular meeting of the National Capital Astronomers, held at the University of Maryland observatory, College Park. 7:30 p.m. capitalastronomers.org.\u25cfMarch 15 \u2014 \u201cLooking Up at the Stars,\u201d public sky gazing at Fairland Regional Park, near the ballfields, 13950 Old Gunpowder Rd., Laurel. Hosted by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission park rangers in partnership with the National Capital Astronomers. 7:15 p.m. www.mncppc.org.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cfMarch 18 \u2014 \u201cMore Things in the Heavens: Infrared Exploration with the Spitzer Space Telescope,\u201d a lecture by astronomer Michael Werner, the Spitzer Project scientist for three decades. At the Lockheed Martin Imax Theater, National Air and Space Museum, Washington. 8 p.m. Tickets required. Free tickets available at airandspace.si.edu, on the events page.\u25cfMarch 20 \u2014 \u201cThe Galaxy Strikes Back: What We Have Learned After Visits by Two Interstellar Objects,\u201d a talk by research scientist Matthew Knight, at the University of Maryland observatory open house. Take in stars and planets through telescopes after the talk. 8 p.m. astro.umd.edu/openhouse.\u25cfMarch 31 \u2014 \u201cClimate Change: A Threat Multiplier,\u201d a lecture on the health of our own blue planet, by Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University\u2019s Climate Science Center, at Carnegie Science, 1530 P St. NW, Washington. 6:30 p.m. CarnegieScience.edu.Blaine Friedlander can be reached at PostSkyWatch@yahoo.com. In the lion-like days of this month, pay attention to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in March",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists discover India\u2019s oldest fossil of a Jurassic sea monster (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5908",
        "date": "2017-10-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/31/indias-oldest-fossil-of-a-jurassic-sea-monster-could-tell-us-how-they-roamed-ancient-seas/",
        "text": "Call it what you wish: fish lizard, sea monster,\u00a0ichthyosaur.After\u00a0tens of millions of years, and then 1,500 hours of digging,\u00a0paleontologists in India have unearthed the\u00a0strikingly intact skeleton of an ichthyosaur, a\u00a0marine reptile more than five meters long that\u00a0resembled modern dolphins and whales.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe truly rare find could redefine paleontologists' understanding of how the creatures spread throughout ancient oceans, as the skeleton is the first from the Jurassic era to be found in India. Such fossils are more familiar farther north, paleontologists say, making the Indian skeleton a scientific marvel both for its level of preservation and surprising final resting place. Two dozen octopuses crawled to shore en masse and no one knows why\u201cVertebrate fossils are rare from the Kachchh region, and we were expecting only bone fragments from this area,\u201d Guntupalli V.R. Prasad, one of the researchers behind the study, said in an interview with PLOS research news, which is affiliated with the journal PLOS ONE.\u00a0\u201cSo to find a near-complete skeleton is surprising as well as exciting.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDetails of the discovery were\u00a0published\u00a0last week\u00a0in PLOS ONE.In the interview, Prasad said that ichthyosaurs, or \u201cfish lizards,\u201d\u00a0lived between 250 and 90 million years ago. Native to oceans with warm and\u00a0humid\u00a0climates, the ichthyosaurs dominated the seas alongside sharks and another group of marine reptiles around the time Pangaea \u2014 Earth's single supercontinent \u2014 was breaking apart.Indian paleontologists came across the skeleton south of the village of Lodai, located in India's western Gujarat province, in 2016, National Geographic reported.\u00a0The bones were encased in\u00a0dense, sedimentary rock and posed a brutal test for excavators working in a region where temperatures hit nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit.Story continues below advertisementThose excavators were also tasked with maintaining the miraculous preservation of the skeleton. National Geographic reported that the sea monster's backbone was discovered more or less in a continuous line. Its left forefin had also maintained its true shape.AdvertisementPrasad said that based on the patterns in the ichthyosaur's teeth, the sea monster was a \u201ctop-tier predator that fed on hard and abrasive food material,\u201d like mollusks, fish and even other marine reptiles. Initially, Prasad and his team couldn't find any fragments of skull or jaw that had also been preserved. But after digging below the sea monster's front part, the paleontologists came across part of the jaw vertically embedded inside the rocks.A cyclist flipped off Trump\u2019s motorcade and entered the annals of presidential protests\u201cThis was an especially useful discovery because the teeth we found offered insights into the ichthyosaur's diet,\u201d Prasad said.Story continues below advertisementPrasad told National Geographic that he hadn't conducted much research on vertebrate fossils of the region, as the number of such finds there were \u201cvery few.\u201d Not only is this skeleton the most complete ichthyosaur ever unearthed in India, but it is also the oldest \u2014 by far. Previous finds tended to be about 50 million years younger and made up of only isolated teeth or poorly preserved vertebrae, Prasad said.AdvertisementResearchers also learned that the Indian ichthyosaur shares close relation with similar reptiles discovered farther north. The connection may suggest that a massive seaway once crossed the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, National Geographic reported. The seaway would have cut through land now covering India, Madagascar and South America, helping to explain how sea monsters like the India ichthyosaur navigated through Jurassic oceans.\u201cThis find helps to show how globally widespread ichthyosaurs were during the time of the dinosaurs,\u201d Steve Brusatte, a University of Edinburgh paleontologist who wasn't involved in the study, told National Geographic. \u201cThey seem to have lived everywhere in the oceans, all over the world, at the same time dinosaurs were thundering across land.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPrasad said his team plans to carry out \u201cextensive\u201d field exploration in the Kachchh region to unearth more ichthyosaur fossils and locate other marine reptiles.\u201cWe hope that our find may lead to renewed interest in vertebrate fossil research in this region, which could bring new discoveries to light,\u201d he said.Read more:Upstairs at home, with the TV on, Trump fumes over Russia indictments\u2018Kevin Spacey has set gay rights back\u2019: Actor blasted for response to sexual misconduct claim The ichthyosaur is the oldest and most intact such fossil to be discovered in India.  Scientists discover India\u2019s oldest fossil of a Jurassic sea monster",
        "author": "Rachel Siegel"
    },
    {
        "title": "One small step for criminals: Someone burglarized the Armstrong Air and Space Museum (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5909",
        "date": "2017-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/01/one-small-step-for-criminals-someone-burglarized-the-neil-armstrong-air-and-space-museum/",
        "text": "Wapakoneta, Ohio, population 9,816, is exemplary of\u00a0many Midwestern communities. It's encircled by farmland \u2014 corn and soybeans, mostly\u00a0\u2014 and prone to spontaneous\u00a0rainstorms that can erupt\u00a0on a hot, dry summer\u00a0day. Most everyone follows high school football, and they love the American icon who was born there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere's crime, but not a lot of it \u2014 making Friday night's break-in at the Armstrong Air and\u00a0Space Museum all the more unusual and unsettling for those who call Wapakoneta home. State and federal investigators have joined local authorities to search for\u00a0several historic artifacts that once belonged to astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. Among the missing items is an 18-karat gold replica of the Eagle lunar module that shuttled Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their historic mission to the moon's surface on July 20, 1969.Thieves also made off with rare medals, coins and other heirlooms from\u00a0the astronauts' subsequent world tour.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEverybody's real surprised,\u201d said Tom Wehrhahn, managing editor of the Wapakoneta Daily News.\u00a0\u201cPeople here are saddened and just hoping for the best.\u00a0We're extremely proud of Neil Armstrong, and everything\u00a0in the museum is cherished by the community.\u201dLocated 60 miles north of Dayton, Wapakoneta is\u00a0Armstrong's birthplace. The museum, which is owned by the state, opened in\u00a01972\u00a0\u2014 three years to the day after the Apollo 11 commander told NASA mission control,\u00a0\u201cthat's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d\u2018The Eagle Has Landed\u2019: How The Post covered the Apollo 11 landingAuthorities\u00a0say\u00a0there were multiple perpetrators, although they've been unable to identify them. Surveillance video released by police Monday night shows little more than a gray blur.Story continues below advertisementThe heist occurred just before midnight, when\u00a0one burglar attempted to make\u00a0a surgical entry\u00a0by picking a lock on the museum's front door, Mayor Thomas Stinebaugh\u00a0told the Wapakoneta Daily News.\u00a0An alarm was triggered, but\u00a0the\u00a0thieves had enough time\u00a0to swipe the keepsakes before police arrived.AdvertisementOn Tuesday, as the investigation entered its fourth day, Wapakoneta\u00a0Safety Service Director Chad Scott confirmed to\u00a0The Washington Post that the thieves sought to leave a light footprint and appeared to know precisely what they wanted, concentrating on a single exhibit. The matter remains under investigation, he said. But nothing at the museum was damaged during the burglary, Scott said, adding: \u201cThey didn't go in and ransack the place.\u201dThere's concern the burglars intend to\u00a0melt down the lunar module statue and sell the gold.\u00a0Chris Burton, the museum's executive director, cringes at that thought. He\u00a0declined to estimate the missing items' monetary value, saying\u00a0their significance to all of humanity essentially renders them priceless.\"Until Saturday morning, I had no idea what the price of gold was per ounce,\" he told The Post. \"It's just not something we deal with; it's not something we're interested in. We talk about historic value. This exhibit was about these explorers coming back victorious from their mission and embarking on a\u00a0world tour. That's why you have keys to cities. That's why you have tributes from Peru\u00a0and from Paris, tributes from India, from Afghanistan. This wasn't just an American accomplishment, it was an accomplishment for the entire world.\"The\u00a0lunar module replica, five inches\u00a0tall, had been\u00a0displayed on the museum's top floor, according to Wehrhahn's\u00a0report in the Wapakoneta Daily News. It was one of three made by French jeweler Cartier and presented to the Apollo 11 crew \u2014 Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 by enthralled readers of Le Figaro newspaper upon the trio's visit to Paris in October 1969.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCollins's family auctioned his in 2003, collecting $56,000, Wehrhahn\u00a0reported.Armstrong died in 2012 at the age of 82, but his legacy looms large in Wapakoneta, Scott said. The community is\u00a0hopeful, he said, that\u00a0authorities will be able to recover what was taken.\u201cThis is very disappointing,\u201d he said. \u201cHe grew up here. He\u00a0put our city on the map. Hopefully the evidence we collect at the scene will lead us to an arrest.\u201dMore reading:\u2018We have a fire in the cockpit!\u2019 The Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later.Annie Glenn: \u2018When I called John, he cried. People just couldn\u2019t believe that I could really talk.\u2019Astronaut Gene Cernan was the last man on the moon \u2014 and \u2018he wasn\u2019t happy about that\u2019 A small town in western Ohio is shaken after a burglary at the museum honoring the Apollo 11 legend. One small step for criminals: Someone burglarized the Armstrong Air and Space Museum",
        "author": "Andrew deGrandpre"
    },
    {
        "title": "One small step for criminals: Someone burglarized the Armstrong Air and Space Museum (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5910",
        "date": "2017-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/01/one-small-step-for-criminals-someone-burglarized-the-neil-armstrong-air-and-space-museum/",
        "text": "Wapakoneta, Ohio, population 9,816, is exemplary of\u00a0many Midwestern communities. It's encircled by farmland \u2014 corn and soybeans, mostly\u00a0\u2014 and prone to spontaneous\u00a0rainstorms that can erupt\u00a0on a hot, dry summer\u00a0day. Most everyone follows high school football, and they love the American icon who was born there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere's crime, but not a lot of it \u2014 making Friday night's break-in at the Armstrong Air and\u00a0Space Museum all the more unusual and unsettling for those who call Wapakoneta home. State and federal investigators have joined local authorities to search for\u00a0several historic artifacts that once belonged to astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. Among the missing items is an 18-karat gold replica of the Eagle lunar module that shuttled Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their historic mission to the moon's surface on July 20, 1969.Thieves also made off with rare medals, coins and other heirlooms from\u00a0the astronauts' subsequent world tour.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEverybody's real surprised,\u201d said Tom Wehrhahn, managing editor of the Wapakoneta Daily News.\u00a0\u201cPeople here are saddened and just hoping for the best.\u00a0We're extremely proud of Neil Armstrong, and everything\u00a0in the museum is cherished by the community.\u201dLocated 60 miles north of Dayton, Wapakoneta is\u00a0Armstrong's birthplace. The museum, which is owned by the state, opened in\u00a01972\u00a0\u2014 three years to the day after the Apollo 11 commander told NASA mission control,\u00a0\u201cthat's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d\u2018The Eagle Has Landed\u2019: How The Post covered the Apollo 11 landingAuthorities\u00a0say\u00a0there were multiple perpetrators, although they've been unable to identify them. Surveillance video released by police Monday night shows little more than a gray blur.Story continues below advertisementThe heist occurred just before midnight, when\u00a0one burglar attempted to make\u00a0a surgical entry\u00a0by picking a lock on the museum's front door, Mayor Thomas Stinebaugh\u00a0told the Wapakoneta Daily News.\u00a0An alarm was triggered, but\u00a0the\u00a0thieves had enough time\u00a0to swipe the keepsakes before police arrived.AdvertisementOn Tuesday, as the investigation entered its fourth day, Wapakoneta\u00a0Safety Service Director Chad Scott confirmed to\u00a0The Washington Post that the thieves sought to leave a light footprint and appeared to know precisely what they wanted, concentrating on a single exhibit. The matter remains under investigation, he said. But nothing at the museum was damaged during the burglary, Scott said, adding: \u201cThey didn't go in and ransack the place.\u201dThere's concern the burglars intend to\u00a0melt down the lunar module statue and sell the gold.\u00a0Chris Burton, the museum's executive director, cringes at that thought. He\u00a0declined to estimate the missing items' monetary value, saying\u00a0their significance to all of humanity essentially renders them priceless.\"Until Saturday morning, I had no idea what the price of gold was per ounce,\" he told The Post. \"It's just not something we deal with; it's not something we're interested in. We talk about historic value. This exhibit was about these explorers coming back victorious from their mission and embarking on a\u00a0world tour. That's why you have keys to cities. That's why you have tributes from Peru\u00a0and from Paris, tributes from India, from Afghanistan. This wasn't just an American accomplishment, it was an accomplishment for the entire world.\"The\u00a0lunar module replica, five inches\u00a0tall, had been\u00a0displayed on the museum's top floor, according to Wehrhahn's\u00a0report in the Wapakoneta Daily News. It was one of three made by French jeweler Cartier and presented to the Apollo 11 crew \u2014 Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 by enthralled readers of Le Figaro newspaper upon the trio's visit to Paris in October 1969.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCollins's family auctioned his in 2003, collecting $56,000, Wehrhahn\u00a0reported.Armstrong died in 2012 at the age of 82, but his legacy looms large in Wapakoneta, Scott said. The community is\u00a0hopeful, he said, that\u00a0authorities will be able to recover what was taken.\u201cThis is very disappointing,\u201d he said. \u201cHe grew up here. He\u00a0put our city on the map. Hopefully the evidence we collect at the scene will lead us to an arrest.\u201dMore reading:\u2018We have a fire in the cockpit!\u2019 The Apollo 1 disaster 50 years later.Annie Glenn: \u2018When I called John, he cried. People just couldn\u2019t believe that I could really talk.\u2019Astronaut Gene Cernan was the last man on the moon \u2014 and \u2018he wasn\u2019t happy about that\u2019 A small town in western Ohio is shaken after a burglary at the museum honoring the Apollo 11 legend. One small step for criminals: Someone burglarized the Armstrong Air and Space Museum",
        "author": "Andrew deGrandpre"
    },
    {
        "title": "The pediatrician who exposed lead in Flint, Mich., water will march for science (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5911",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/21/the-pediatrician-who-exposed-lead-in-flint-mich-water-will-march-for-science/",
        "text": "On Saturday, Mona Hanna-Attisha, the Michigan pediatrician who\u00a0sounded the alarm on lead in Flint\u2019s drinking water, will march on the Capitol. Many thousands of people \u2014 other scientists, yes, but droves of\u00a0science supporters and enthusiasts, as well \u2014 are expected to join her.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cHow could you not march for science?\u201d said Hanna-Attisha, who was invited to be an honorary co-chair of the March for Science. \u201cHow could you say no to anything with Bill Nye?\u201d\u00a0Before the marching begins, Hanna-Attisha\u00a0will speak at the base of the Washington Monument. (The Science Guy, too, is slated to give a brief talk.) Her\u00a0experience as a doctor in Flint paved the way for her science advocacy, Hanna-Attisha said. \u201cPediatricians care for a population that can\u2019t speak, can\u2019t vote,\u201d she said, noting that physicians take an\u00a0oath to protect patients from harm. \u201cIt is your role to be an advocate.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Hurley Medical Center, where Hanna-Attisha directs the pediatric residency program, released\u00a0a report in September 2015 detailing how lead was unusually prevalent\u00a0in the bloodstreams of local children. In December,\u00a0Flint's mayor declared a state of emergency. Then-President Barack Obama followed suit in January, directing federal aid to clean up the area's contaminated water supply.\u201cI could have stayed in my clinic. I took a risk, I stepped out of my exam room,\u201d Hanna-Attisha\u00a0said. \u201cIt\u2019s scary. It\u2019s not what I was used to. I was attacked.\u201d In the months that followed the lead report, some Michigan politicians dismissed the danger of Flint water as a hoax, as The Washington Post reported.Hanna-Attisha said that she recognized\u00a0how discomfiting it seems to leave the safety of a lab, university or hospital. Yet, she said,\u00a0scientists\u00a0do not always grasp the power and\u00a0credibility of their voices. \u201cScience speaks truth to power,\u201d she said. \u201cScience is not an alternative fact.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe March for Science will attempt to walk a careful line \u2014 to demonstrate that science is political without inflaming tensions between liberals and conservatives. (\u201cI have no problem with vitriol,\u201d as Michael Specter wrote\u00a0in the New Yorker in early April. \u201cBut there is a genuine risk that the March for Science will be widely regarded as a manifestation of the great urban-rural divide that helped elect Trump.\")\u201cTo me, this is not a partisan event,\u201d Hanna-Attisha said. The March for Science's literature echoes that refrain. Per its website: \u201cWe will not let our movement be defined by any one politician or party.\u201dIt would be \u201cmind-boggling,\u201d the pediatrician put it, \u201cthat only one party could or would believe in science.\u201d Science, she said, means that children have antibiotics and cancer patients have chemotherapy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe breadth of the\u00a0professional organizations supporting March for Science, she said, was also a testament to the march's\u00a0big-tent approach. Partners include the American Geophysical Union,\u00a0the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists\u00a0and dozens of other specialist organizations.\u00a0\u201cThese are not groups like Greenpeace. These are hardcore bench scientists.\u201dBut rallies, even ones that encourage participants to proclaim their\u00a0love for fish biology, are not spawned in a political vacuum. \u201cI think the current political climate has put fire in people\u2019s pants,\u201d she said, while noting that the climate \u201cis full of partisanship.\u201d Hanna-Attisha also pointed to the\u00a0current administration's proposed budget, which shrinks funds to the Environmental Protection Agency,\u00a0the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as scientific programs.Attacks on science go beyond budgets, she said, such as the rejection of science by the anti-vaccine movement or climate change denial. \u201cIf all those threats weren\u2019t happening, we probably wouldn\u2019t be having a March for Science.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPart of the solution is to elect more scientists into capitols and congressional buildings, Hanna-Attisha said. Some researchers are trying to make their way there;\u00a0volcanologist Jess Phoenix, for instance,\u00a0recently\u00a0declared her candidacy for California\u2019s 25th Congressional District.\u201cWe traditionally don\u2019t see scientists in the public arena,\u201d Hanna-Attisha said. \u201cScientists need to get into the streets and halls of government. We need you, the world needs you, our communities need you.\u201dRead more:\u2018First protest in space\u2019 targets Trump with an astronaut\u2019s famous wordsThe March for Science could break stubborn stereotypes about scientistsBill Nye will join the March for ScienceAtom-smashing scientists are unnerved by harsh Trump budget \"Scientists need to get into the streets and halls of government. We need you, the world needs you, our communities need you.\u201d  The pediatrician who exposed lead in Flint, Mich., water will march for science",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: See Venus, Saturn and Jupiter fall into line (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5912",
        "date": "2021-11-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-see-venus-saturn-and-jupiter-fall-into-line/2021/11/26/03529480-4ed1-11ec-b73b-a00d6e559a6e_story.html",
        "text": "The incredibly bright Venus, the large ringed Saturn and the giant planet Jupiter fall into line for December. Quite literally, see their line in the southern heavens in the early evening.As dusk darkens, look to the south-southwest and the southwest to spy this entertaining single-file planetary trio. Venus is the planet closest to the horizon when night falls, and this reflective planet seems to beam at -4.9 magnitude \u2014 the brightest it can be, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo the upper left of Venus, catch Saturn at +0.7 magnitude (much dimmer than Venus), and to the upper left of Saturn, find Jupiter at -2.3 magnitude (very bright) as December begins.Story continues below advertisementWhile Venus, Saturn and Jupiter fill out this fun formation \u2014 which illustrates that planets trace Earth\u2019s ecliptic \u2014 the young, waxing moon visits Venus on Dec. 6 and then sashays toward Saturn on Dec. 7. The fattening moon pays a social call to Jupiter on Dec. 8, passes the planet the following night.AdvertisementEarly in December, Venus sets first, obviously, followed by Saturn and Jupiter. By 10:30 p.m. now, all three have retired for the night.In the morning heavens, find the reddish Mars rising before the sun in the southeast. Currently, our red neighbor is hard to see at +1.6 magnitude, according to the observatory. Just before it becomes a new moon, the waning, skinny crescent reaches Mars on Dec. 2.Story continues below advertisementFour weeks later, the old, thin crescent moon finds Mars again on Dec. 31 and loiters with the Red Planet and the reddish binary star Antares. The morning triangle of Mars, Antares and the crescent moon may be the perfect punctuation mark to end the year.The total solar eclipse on Dec. 4 crosses and frames West Antarctica, the main peninsula in Antarctica and a structure that seems to reach out toward South America. The eclipse shadow creates an arc shape across Antarctica, which penguins may enjoy. Totality lasts 1 minute 54 seconds, with the greatest eclipse at 2:33 a.m. Eastern time, according to eclipse expert Fred Espenak\u2019s EclipseWise.com. Timeanddate.com will provide a live blog during the event.AdvertisementThe Geminid meteor shower peaks Dec. 14 at 2 a.m. Eastern, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. The International Meteor Organization (imo.net) and other groups suggest that there could be as many as 120 to 150 shooting stars an hour at peak. You won\u2019t see all 150, but you may see several if skies are clear. Early-morning-sky gazers have a good shot before sunrise Dec. 14, as the bright, waxing first-quarter moon sets at 3 a.m.Story continues below advertisementAstronomically speaking, winter begins at the solstice on Dec. 21, where in terms of light, we are in the darkest of days \u2014 but there is hope. The solstice represents the least amount of daylight for Washington, which is 9 hours 19 minutes of sun, according to Naval Observatory astronomer Geoff Chester.Ever so slightly after the solstice, we will start to gain daylight on Dec. 23, and then inch forward with additional light until the summer solstice in June.Down-to-Earth events:\u25cf Dec. 3 \u2014 \u201cThe Arecibo Observatory: Legacy and Ideas for the Future,\u201d a lecture by Francisco C\u00f3rdova, the observatory\u2019s director, will discuss this famous observing dish in Puerto Rico and will share thoughts on building a new observatory after its collapse late last year. Hosted by PSW Science. 8 p.m. For information, pswscience.org. Lecture: shorturl.at/aqC25.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cf Dec. 10 \u2014 Bring your curiosity: Enjoy late autumn\u2019s heavenly wonder through telescopes at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory, adjacent to the museum\u2019s building, southeast terrace, near Independence Avenue and Fourth Street SW. Masks required, 5-8 p.m. airandspace.si.edu.\u25cf Dec. 11 \u2014 \u201cSupernova Remnants,\u201d a virtual talk by Brian J. Williams of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. The Zoom doors open at 7 p.m. and the meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. To register, visit\u202fcapitalastronomers.org.\u25cf Dec. 12 \u2014 \u201cHow to Optimize Your Astrophotography Setup,\u201d an online talk by technology consultant Thomas B. Fowler, at the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club meeting. 7:30 p.m. Information: novac.com. Online event: meet.google.com/osh-bcyd-gti.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com.  Sky Watch: See Venus, Saturn and Jupiter fall into line",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Stunning scientists, NASA\u2019s only moon rover just got canceled (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5913",
        "date": "2018-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/04/27/stunning-scientists-nasas-only-moon-rover-just-got-canceled/",
        "text": "This story has been updated. Months after President Trump signed a directive ordering NASA to return\u00a0astronauts to the moon, the space agency has canceled its\u00a0only lunar rover currently in development.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to Clive Neal, a University of Notre Dame planetary scientist and emeritus chairman of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, members of the\u00a0Resource Prospector lunar mission were told to close out the project by the end of May. \u201cI'm a little shocked,\u201d he said. Neal, who is not directly involved in developing the mission, said he did not know the reason for the cancellation.NASA confirmed the cancellation in a statement\u00a0posted online Friday. The space agency said it is soliciting input to develop a series of progressively larger lunar landers, culminating in an eventual crewed mission. According to the statement, selected instruments that were being developed for Resource Prospector will fly on these other missions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOfficials did not offer a reason for the cancellation.Resource Prospector, which\u00a0was\u00a0in the concept formulation stage for potential launch in the 2020s,\u00a0would have surveyed one of the moon's poles\u00a0in search of volatile compounds such as hydrogen, oxygen and water that could be mined to support future human explorers. It would have been the first mission to mine another world and was seen as a steppingstone toward\u00a0long-term crewed missions beyond Earth.The cancellation, previously reported by NASA Watch and\u00a0the Verge,\u00a0troubles many lunar scientists. They say the mission is vital both to human exploration and to scientific understanding of the moon. In a letter to newly confirmed administrator Jim Bridenstine, the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group \u2014 which conducts analyses for NASA and other space agencies \u2014 called for the mission to be reinstated and scheduled to launch in 2022.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis action is viewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community,\u201d the group wrote. Members\u00a0 pointed out that Trump's\u00a0Space Policy Directive 1, signed in December, calls for the United States to \u201clead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization.\u201dDana Hurley, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, elaborated on the situation in an interview Friday.\u201cIf we want to go back to the moon and really work on the moon and make it a\u00a0place that we can set up research stations and study processes that are occurring on the moon ... all these things are really enabled by being able to use resources on the moon for making fuel, propellant, life support, that sort of thing,\u201d said Hurley, who also is a member of the LEAG executive committee.\u00a0\u201cThis mission is a first step in trying to understand how we\u2019re going to exploit those resources.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Resource Prospector was being developed as part of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. A prototype was field-tested in 2015 and underwent vacuum and thermal testing the following year. But recently, Neal said, NASA moved to transfer the project to its Science Mission Directorate, which develops robotic missions for mainly research, rather than exploration, purposes.That would have created a \u201cmismatch\u201d between\u00a0the science program's capabilities\u00a0and what Resource Prospector was designed to do, Neal said.In their letter, the LEAG members advocated for keeping the Resource Prospector as part of the human exploration program. They also emphasized the importance of launching soon. A 2022 launch, they wrote, would demonstrate NASA's ability to react quickly to changes in space policy, preempt robotic missions being developed by other nations, and pave the way for commercial activities on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have an\u00a0opportunity here to not only enhance the moon in\u00a0terms of science and human exploration but also to expand the lunar\u00a0economy,\u201d Neal said. \u201cAnd if the results from this prospecting are actually really good, we could go a long way to setting up sustainable human exploration of\u00a0Mars.\u00a0We just need to know exactly how much is there.\u201dSpace agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)Read more:Senate confirms Trump pick for NASA administrator over Democratic objectionsLaunch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 againNASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet The decision was made even though President Trump has directed the space agency to focus on a return to the moon.  Stunning scientists, NASA\u2019s only moon rover just got canceled",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stunning scientists, NASA\u2019s only moon rover just got canceled (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5914",
        "date": "2018-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/04/27/stunning-scientists-nasas-only-moon-rover-just-got-canceled/",
        "text": "This story has been updated. Months after President Trump signed a directive ordering NASA to return\u00a0astronauts to the moon, the space agency has canceled its\u00a0only lunar rover currently in development.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to Clive Neal, a University of Notre Dame planetary scientist and emeritus chairman of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, members of the\u00a0Resource Prospector lunar mission were told to close out the project by the end of May. \u201cI'm a little shocked,\u201d he said. Neal, who is not directly involved in developing the mission, said he did not know the reason for the cancellation.NASA confirmed the cancellation in a statement\u00a0posted online Friday. The space agency said it is soliciting input to develop a series of progressively larger lunar landers, culminating in an eventual crewed mission. According to the statement, selected instruments that were being developed for Resource Prospector will fly on these other missions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOfficials did not offer a reason for the cancellation.Resource Prospector, which\u00a0was\u00a0in the concept formulation stage for potential launch in the 2020s,\u00a0would have surveyed one of the moon's poles\u00a0in search of volatile compounds such as hydrogen, oxygen and water that could be mined to support future human explorers. It would have been the first mission to mine another world and was seen as a steppingstone toward\u00a0long-term crewed missions beyond Earth.The cancellation, previously reported by NASA Watch and\u00a0the Verge,\u00a0troubles many lunar scientists. They say the mission is vital both to human exploration and to scientific understanding of the moon. In a letter to newly confirmed administrator Jim Bridenstine, the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group \u2014 which conducts analyses for NASA and other space agencies \u2014 called for the mission to be reinstated and scheduled to launch in 2022.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis action is viewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community,\u201d the group wrote. Members\u00a0 pointed out that Trump's\u00a0Space Policy Directive 1, signed in December, calls for the United States to \u201clead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization.\u201dDana Hurley, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, elaborated on the situation in an interview Friday.\u201cIf we want to go back to the moon and really work on the moon and make it a\u00a0place that we can set up research stations and study processes that are occurring on the moon ... all these things are really enabled by being able to use resources on the moon for making fuel, propellant, life support, that sort of thing,\u201d said Hurley, who also is a member of the LEAG executive committee.\u00a0\u201cThis mission is a first step in trying to understand how we\u2019re going to exploit those resources.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Resource Prospector was being developed as part of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. A prototype was field-tested in 2015 and underwent vacuum and thermal testing the following year. But recently, Neal said, NASA moved to transfer the project to its Science Mission Directorate, which develops robotic missions for mainly research, rather than exploration, purposes.That would have created a \u201cmismatch\u201d between\u00a0the science program's capabilities\u00a0and what Resource Prospector was designed to do, Neal said.In their letter, the LEAG members advocated for keeping the Resource Prospector as part of the human exploration program. They also emphasized the importance of launching soon. A 2022 launch, they wrote, would demonstrate NASA's ability to react quickly to changes in space policy, preempt robotic missions being developed by other nations, and pave the way for commercial activities on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have an\u00a0opportunity here to not only enhance the moon in\u00a0terms of science and human exploration but also to expand the lunar\u00a0economy,\u201d Neal said. \u201cAnd if the results from this prospecting are actually really good, we could go a long way to setting up sustainable human exploration of\u00a0Mars.\u00a0We just need to know exactly how much is there.\u201dSpace agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)Read more:Senate confirms Trump pick for NASA administrator over Democratic objectionsLaunch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 againNASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet The decision was made even though President Trump has directed the space agency to focus on a return to the moon.  Stunning scientists, NASA\u2019s only moon rover just got canceled",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stunning scientists, NASA\u2019s only moon rover just got canceled (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5915",
        "date": "2018-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/04/27/stunning-scientists-nasas-only-moon-rover-just-got-canceled/",
        "text": "This story has been updated. Months after President Trump signed a directive ordering NASA to return\u00a0astronauts to the moon, the space agency has canceled its\u00a0only lunar rover currently in development.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to Clive Neal, a University of Notre Dame planetary scientist and emeritus chairman of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, members of the\u00a0Resource Prospector lunar mission were told to close out the project by the end of May. \u201cI'm a little shocked,\u201d he said. Neal, who is not directly involved in developing the mission, said he did not know the reason for the cancellation.NASA confirmed the cancellation in a statement\u00a0posted online Friday. The space agency said it is soliciting input to develop a series of progressively larger lunar landers, culminating in an eventual crewed mission. According to the statement, selected instruments that were being developed for Resource Prospector will fly on these other missions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOfficials did not offer a reason for the cancellation.Resource Prospector, which\u00a0was\u00a0in the concept formulation stage for potential launch in the 2020s,\u00a0would have surveyed one of the moon's poles\u00a0in search of volatile compounds such as hydrogen, oxygen and water that could be mined to support future human explorers. It would have been the first mission to mine another world and was seen as a steppingstone toward\u00a0long-term crewed missions beyond Earth.The cancellation, previously reported by NASA Watch and\u00a0the Verge,\u00a0troubles many lunar scientists. They say the mission is vital both to human exploration and to scientific understanding of the moon. In a letter to newly confirmed administrator Jim Bridenstine, the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group \u2014 which conducts analyses for NASA and other space agencies \u2014 called for the mission to be reinstated and scheduled to launch in 2022.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis action is viewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community,\u201d the group wrote. Members\u00a0 pointed out that Trump's\u00a0Space Policy Directive 1, signed in December, calls for the United States to \u201clead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization.\u201dDana Hurley, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, elaborated on the situation in an interview Friday.\u201cIf we want to go back to the moon and really work on the moon and make it a\u00a0place that we can set up research stations and study processes that are occurring on the moon ... all these things are really enabled by being able to use resources on the moon for making fuel, propellant, life support, that sort of thing,\u201d said Hurley, who also is a member of the LEAG executive committee.\u00a0\u201cThis mission is a first step in trying to understand how we\u2019re going to exploit those resources.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Resource Prospector was being developed as part of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. A prototype was field-tested in 2015 and underwent vacuum and thermal testing the following year. But recently, Neal said, NASA moved to transfer the project to its Science Mission Directorate, which develops robotic missions for mainly research, rather than exploration, purposes.That would have created a \u201cmismatch\u201d between\u00a0the science program's capabilities\u00a0and what Resource Prospector was designed to do, Neal said.In their letter, the LEAG members advocated for keeping the Resource Prospector as part of the human exploration program. They also emphasized the importance of launching soon. A 2022 launch, they wrote, would demonstrate NASA's ability to react quickly to changes in space policy, preempt robotic missions being developed by other nations, and pave the way for commercial activities on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have an\u00a0opportunity here to not only enhance the moon in\u00a0terms of science and human exploration but also to expand the lunar\u00a0economy,\u201d Neal said. \u201cAnd if the results from this prospecting are actually really good, we could go a long way to setting up sustainable human exploration of\u00a0Mars.\u00a0We just need to know exactly how much is there.\u201dSpace agencies have two options for satellites, rovers and probes whose missions have come to the end. The Post's Sarah Kaplan tells you more. (Monica Akhtar, Sarah Kaplan/The Washington Post)Read more:Senate confirms Trump pick for NASA administrator over Democratic objectionsLaunch of NASA\u2019s new flagship space telescope is delayed \u2014 againNASA advances missions to land a flying robot on Titan or snatch a piece of a comet The decision was made even though President Trump has directed the space agency to focus on a return to the moon.  Stunning scientists, NASA\u2019s only moon rover just got canceled",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in May (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5916",
        "date": "2021-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-may/2021/05/01/57376110-a9be-11eb-8d25-7b30e74923ea_story.html",
        "text": "Early in May, the planets Venus and Mercury closely follow the sun as it sets in the west-northwest.The fleet Mercury \u2014 at zero magnitude, bright enough to see in the dark heavens \u2014 climbs the western sky until the middle of May, when it appears to retreat again toward the western horizon to greet Venus (-3.8 magnitude, very bright) \u2014 leading to a conjunction May 29, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe new moon occurs May 11, but you probably won\u2019t be able to see the skinny young moon until May 13, when it nudges Mercury low on the western horizon just after dusk.Just a little higher in the western sky, in the heart of the Gemini constellation, our red neighbor Mars appears dim at +1.6 magnitude, but the young, fattening moon appears to step toward Mars, which sets after midnight early in May.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe very early morning heavens feature the large, gaseous planets Saturn and Jupiter. The ringed Saturn scales the southeast heavens around 2:30 a.m., while Jupiter follows just after 3 a.m.Saturn sits smack dab in the middle of the constellation Capricornus, at zero magnitude, bright enough in dark skies. Jupiter (on the edge of Aquarius) appears at -2.2 magnitude, quite bright, and by month\u2019s end, becomes brighter at -2.4, according to the observatory.This week, the old, skinny last-quarter moon scurries under Saturn on Monday, and then skitters under Jupiter on Tuesday and Wednesday. By the end of May, Saturn rises about 40 minutes after midnight, while Jupiter rises about 1:30 a.m.Story continues below advertisementThe full moon occurs on May 26, and since the moon sits at perigee (closest to the Earth in the moon's own monthly orbit), it will earn the nickname \"supermoon.\" Thus, due to proximity, it will be the largest full moon in 2021 and will probably produce large tides, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.AdvertisementThe Eastern United States gets a lousy view of the total lunar eclipse early on the morning of May 26. The Earth is in between the sun and the moon, and the sun\u2019s light casts our planet\u2019s shadow across the moon, providing Earth\u2019s residents a safe-for-viewing lunar eclipse.Western states fare better for this lunar eclipse. The West Coast gets the best seats. For Washington, D.C., the penumbral phase begins at 4:47 a.m., according to astronomer Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory. The partial lunar eclipse phase starts at 5:45 a.m., with the moon fully ensconced in the penumbral (outside) shadow, the moon gets darker.Story continues below advertisementFor the Eastern states, this action is extremely low on the western horizon. Officially, for Washington, moonset is 5:50 a.m., around sunrise. \u201cYou\u2019ll see a little bit of darkening when the moon is setting,\u201d Chester said, if you have a clear view of the horizon. \u201cYou\u2019ll see a little notch [of darkness] cut out of it, maybe, if you\u2019re lucky .\u2009.\u2009. but it\u2019s only a couple of degrees above the horizon.\u201dAdvertisementIn Los Angeles, for example, catch the red-tinted moon, fully in the umbral shadow, as totality begins at 4:11 a.m. Pacific time, and ends at 4:25 a.m.Down-to-earth events: \u25cf May 7 \u2014 \u201cSatellite Constellations and Astronomy,\u201d an online lecture by Tony Tyson, professor of physics and astronomy, University of California at Davis, discussing satellite interference with astronomical observations and potential solutions to this problem. Hosted by PSW, pswscience.org. 8 p.m., with lecture live on YouTube: bit.ly/32ZWKeZ.Story continues below advertisement\u25cf May 8 \u2014 \u201cRadio Astronomy Observes Earth\u2019s Ionosphere,\u201d an online talk by Joe Helmboldt, radio astronomer, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. 7 p.m. For registration: capitalastronomers.org.\u25cf May 12 \u2014 \u201cThe World in 2050 and Beyond,\u201d an online lecture by Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who will discuss his vision and outlook for humanity and science, from his forthcoming book, \u201cOn the Future.\u201d Hosted by Carnegie Science. 3 p.m. For registration: carnegiescience.edu/events.Advertisement\u25cf May 26 \u2014 \u201cDragonfly: In Situ Exploration of Saturn\u2019s Moon Titan,\u201d an online lecture by planetary scientist Elizabeth Turtle of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Scheduled to launch later this decade, NASA\u2019s Dragonfly mission will fly from place to place to explore Titan\u2019s surface, geology and meteorology. 8 p.m. Hosted by the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum. For registration: airandspace.si.edu, then go to \u201cVisit\u201d and \u201cEvents.\u201d A \u201csupermoon\u201d and total lunar eclipse coming at the end of the month. Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in May",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in May (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5917",
        "date": "2021-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-may/2021/05/01/57376110-a9be-11eb-8d25-7b30e74923ea_story.html",
        "text": "Early in May, the planets Venus and Mercury closely follow the sun as it sets in the west-northwest.The fleet Mercury \u2014 at zero magnitude, bright enough to see in the dark heavens \u2014 climbs the western sky until the middle of May, when it appears to retreat again toward the western horizon to greet Venus (-3.8 magnitude, very bright) \u2014 leading to a conjunction May 29, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe new moon occurs May 11, but you probably won\u2019t be able to see the skinny young moon until May 13, when it nudges Mercury low on the western horizon just after dusk.Just a little higher in the western sky, in the heart of the Gemini constellation, our red neighbor Mars appears dim at +1.6 magnitude, but the young, fattening moon appears to step toward Mars, which sets after midnight early in May.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe very early morning heavens feature the large, gaseous planets Saturn and Jupiter. The ringed Saturn scales the southeast heavens around 2:30 a.m., while Jupiter follows just after 3 a.m.Saturn sits smack dab in the middle of the constellation Capricornus, at zero magnitude, bright enough in dark skies. Jupiter (on the edge of Aquarius) appears at -2.2 magnitude, quite bright, and by month\u2019s end, becomes brighter at -2.4, according to the observatory.This week, the old, skinny last-quarter moon scurries under Saturn on Monday, and then skitters under Jupiter on Tuesday and Wednesday. By the end of May, Saturn rises about 40 minutes after midnight, while Jupiter rises about 1:30 a.m.Story continues below advertisementThe full moon occurs on May 26, and since the moon sits at perigee (closest to the Earth in the moon's own monthly orbit), it will earn the nickname \"supermoon.\" Thus, due to proximity, it will be the largest full moon in 2021 and will probably produce large tides, according to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.AdvertisementThe Eastern United States gets a lousy view of the total lunar eclipse early on the morning of May 26. The Earth is in between the sun and the moon, and the sun\u2019s light casts our planet\u2019s shadow across the moon, providing Earth\u2019s residents a safe-for-viewing lunar eclipse.Western states fare better for this lunar eclipse. The West Coast gets the best seats. For Washington, D.C., the penumbral phase begins at 4:47 a.m., according to astronomer Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory. The partial lunar eclipse phase starts at 5:45 a.m., with the moon fully ensconced in the penumbral (outside) shadow, the moon gets darker.Story continues below advertisementFor the Eastern states, this action is extremely low on the western horizon. Officially, for Washington, moonset is 5:50 a.m., around sunrise. \u201cYou\u2019ll see a little bit of darkening when the moon is setting,\u201d Chester said, if you have a clear view of the horizon. \u201cYou\u2019ll see a little notch [of darkness] cut out of it, maybe, if you\u2019re lucky .\u2009.\u2009. but it\u2019s only a couple of degrees above the horizon.\u201dAdvertisementIn Los Angeles, for example, catch the red-tinted moon, fully in the umbral shadow, as totality begins at 4:11 a.m. Pacific time, and ends at 4:25 a.m.Down-to-earth events: \u25cf May 7 \u2014 \u201cSatellite Constellations and Astronomy,\u201d an online lecture by Tony Tyson, professor of physics and astronomy, University of California at Davis, discussing satellite interference with astronomical observations and potential solutions to this problem. Hosted by PSW, pswscience.org. 8 p.m., with lecture live on YouTube: bit.ly/32ZWKeZ.Story continues below advertisement\u25cf May 8 \u2014 \u201cRadio Astronomy Observes Earth\u2019s Ionosphere,\u201d an online talk by Joe Helmboldt, radio astronomer, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. 7 p.m. For registration: capitalastronomers.org.\u25cf May 12 \u2014 \u201cThe World in 2050 and Beyond,\u201d an online lecture by Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who will discuss his vision and outlook for humanity and science, from his forthcoming book, \u201cOn the Future.\u201d Hosted by Carnegie Science. 3 p.m. For registration: carnegiescience.edu/events.Advertisement\u25cf May 26 \u2014 \u201cDragonfly: In Situ Exploration of Saturn\u2019s Moon Titan,\u201d an online lecture by planetary scientist Elizabeth Turtle of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Scheduled to launch later this decade, NASA\u2019s Dragonfly mission will fly from place to place to explore Titan\u2019s surface, geology and meteorology. 8 p.m. Hosted by the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum. For registration: airandspace.si.edu, then go to \u201cVisit\u201d and \u201cEvents.\u201d A \u201csupermoon\u201d and total lunar eclipse coming at the end of the month. Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in May",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "These diamonds from space formed inside a long-lost planet, scientists say (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5918",
        "date": "2018-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/04/17/these-space-diamonds-come-from-a-long-lost-planet-scientists-say/",
        "text": "Ten years ago, an\u00a0Arizona astronomer\u00a0spotted an asteroid that was headed straight for Earth. Swiftly he summoned the help of colleagues and casual stargazers, who tracked the space rock as it exploded in the sky, raining shrapnel down on the Nubian desert in Sudan.\u00a0Students from the University of Khartoum volunteered to search for fragments, ultimately recovering more than 600 pieces of the meteorite now known as Almahata Sitta. It was the first time scientists had ever traced an asteroid in the sky to a rock they could hold in their hands. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut that is not even the coolest thing about Almahata Sitta. Not nearly.A new study published in the journal Nature Communications reports that the meteorite contains tiny diamonds \u2014 yes, diamonds. Those diamonds contain even tinier impurities called inclusions. And within those inclusions are signatures of a long-lost planet as large as Mars \u2014 a 4.5 billion-year-old relic that was destroyed during the earliest days of the solar system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThese samples are coming from an era that we don\u2019t have any access to,\u201d said Farhang Nabiei, a materials scientist at the\u00a0Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the lead author of the new report. The diamonds with the Almahata Sitta meteorite formed during a transition era in the solar system, when\u00a0the dust and gas that swirled around the sun coalesced into planetary embryos, then grew into planets.\u00a0\u201cAnd we are part of the planets,\u201d\u00a0Nabiei said. \u201cThis is part of the story\u00a0of how we came to be.\u201dAlmahata Sitta belongs to a class of rocks known as\u00a0ureilites.\u00a0They are partly differentiated \u2014 not made of the primitive material that\u00a0constituted the solar nebula, but also not as well mixed and baked as rocks that come from modern planets. Unlike other\u00a0meteorites, which can be traced to\u00a0parent bodies\u00a0such as asteroids, Mars or the moon by comparing the ratios of different varieties of elements, these rocks have no known source. They seem to have been formed inside bodies that no longer exist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd they always contain tiny flecks of diamond.Because the crystals are so\u00a0small \u2014 less than a fraction of a percentage of an inch in diameter \u2014 many researchers assumed that they formed\u00a0when graphite (an alternate form of carbon) was \u201cshocked\u201d by a collision with another body. But\u00a0Nabiei and his colleagues noticed that\u00a0the diamonds in\u00a0Almahata Sitta were orders of magnitude larger than the kind that result from a shock event. They suspected that these crystals may have formed the same way diamonds do on Earth \u2014 under the unbelievably high temperatures and pressures that exist in the interior of a planet \u2014 and\u00a0only afterward were broken by a shock wave into smaller fragments.\u201cThen this opens a whole new idea,\u201d Nabiei said.\u00a0Diamond is so strong it\u00a0serves as a powerful protective packaging for anything trapped inside; it's\u00a0nature's safety vault, capable of preserving samples for billions of years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI thought, if there were\u00a0diamonds forming inside a planet, inside a parent body, they could have trapped some material from their environment,\u201d Nabiei said. He laughed. \u201cAnd indeed they did.\u201dThe impurities trapped within the\u00a0Almahata Sitta diamonds \u2014 crystals of chromite, phosphate and iron-nickel-sulfide \u2014 are the first to have been discovered in an extraterrestrial diamond. They could only\u00a0have formed\u00a0under incredible pressure \u2014 the equivalent of diving 600 kilometers into Earth's interior or attempting to hold up 100,000 tons with your bare hands.To\u00a0create these conditions, Nabiei said, the meteorite's parent body would have\u00a0to have been a planet at least as big as Mercury and possibly as large as Mars.Story continues below advertisementWhatever happened to this lost world?\u00a0Nabiei can't say for sure. Many researchers believe that the early inner solar system was crowded with large protoplanets that yanked and tugged at each other's orbits until they finally crashed, coalesced or disintegrated. By the end of that era, about 100 million years after the birth of the solar system,\u00a0only the four current terrestrial planets remained.AdvertisementNabiei thinks it's likely that all ureilites come from the same parent body, a protoplanet that\u00a0lasted just a few million years before it was destroyed in a collision. He plans to\u00a0seek out similar meteorites and search them for inclusions that might provide clues about their origins.Read more:These 17,000 rocks from the bottom of the world could unlock the secrets of existenceLaunch of NASA\u2019s newest planet hunter is delayedThis star is the farthest ever seen. It\u2019s 9 billion light-years away. Microscopic impurities from a rare meteorite are traces of a potentially Mars-size planet that no longer exists. These diamonds from space formed inside a long-lost planet, scientists say",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: October offers a night of sweet wonder as Venus is ready to shine brightly (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5919",
        "date": "2021-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-october-offers-a-night-sky-of-sweet-wonder/2021/10/02/90588368-22c5-11ec-9309-b743b79abc59_story.html",
        "text": "Like a child\u2019s bag of Halloween candy, October offers a night sky of sweet wonder in a starry heaven background, with perhaps a few meteors and lunar close encounters of the planetary kind.Turn to the southwest at dusk to catch the effervescent Venus low in the early evening sky. On Oct. 8, look carefully just above the western horizon to find the ultra-skinny moon aim for Venus. Our dazzling neighbor planet hangs at -4.3 magnitude, very bright, becoming brighter throughout October. The young crescent moon passes Venus by Oct. 9, as Venus prepares for a rendezvous with the nearby reddish star Antares, which looks like Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSadly, our neighboring planet Venus is so close to the horizon, it sets early around 8:30 p.m.Story continues below advertisementFacing south after sunset early in the month, the giant gaseous planets \u2014 Saturn and Jupiter \u2014 are high in the heavens after dusk.AdvertisementThe ringed Saturn is far dimmer than the robust Jupiter, but of course Jupiter is closer to us. Saturn holds at a +0.5 magnitude, and you\u2019ll find Jupiter at -2.7 magnitude, very bright, according to the Naval Observatory.After the moon leaves Venus, the lunar orb daily gains more heft. The fattening moon treks through the constellation Sagittarius on Oct. 11 and Oct. 12, approaches Saturn on Oct. 13, scoots under Saturn by the night of Oct. 14 and scurries under Jupiter by Oct. 15.Meanwhile on Oct. 16, low on the southwest horizon, find Venus and the red star Antares chase the sun and dance into horizon.Story continues below advertisementThe moon becomes full on Oct. 20.Just before sunrise in the east, find the fleet-footed Mercury ascending ahead of the sun, in the constellation Virgo. You could begin to see the zero-magnitude planet, bright enough to see in dark sky, around Oct. 18 through the end of the month. It\u2019s a good show, but you will still need a great view of the horizon.AdvertisementWhere is Mars? Our normally neighborly Red Planet is hanging out on the other side of the sun and its an official solar conjunction on Oct. 7 and Oct. 8, according to the Naval Observatory.Since NASA has a rover each for the Curiosity and Perseverance missions, as well as a stationary InSight mission, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is pressing the pause button on communicating with those missions from now until the middle of October. Mars returns to our morning heavens in late November and early December.Story continues below advertisementThe Orionid meteors peak on Oct. 20 and Oct. 21, according to the American Meteor Society. But that pesky full moon all but washes out most of the shooting stars, which in this case, are the leftover dust trail of the famous Comet Halley. (Earth passes through the remains of comet trails and the dust strikes our atmosphere and subsequently burn up, only to provide fun-to-watch meteor showers.)Down-to-Earth Events:\u25cf Oct. 8 \u2014 \u201cTaking the Twinkle Out of the Stars,\u201d a virtual lecture by astronomer Olivier Guyon, professor at the University of Arizona and winner of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. Guyon will explain how adaptive optics enable ground-based telescopes to become better than the Hubble Space Telescope. Hosted by PSW Science. 8 p.m. For information, pswscience.org. Lecture: shorturl.at/koGU0.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cf Oct. 9 \u2014 \u201cStar Gaze 2021\u201d hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club at C.M. Crockett Park, Fauquier County at 10066 Rogues Road, Midland, Va. Enjoy safe views of the sun and night sky tours. 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. For information, novac.com.\u25cf Oct. 9 \u2014 Astrophysicist Lynn Wilson of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center will speak online about the most energetic particles from the sun. The meeting is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. The virtual Zoom doors open at 7 p.m. and the meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. To register, visit capitalastronomers.org.\u25cf Oct. 10 \u2014 \u201cOperation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo,\u201d a virtual talk by science historian Teasel Muir Harmony, curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club, the meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. For details on listening to the lecture, go to novac.com.\u25cf Oct. 22 \u2014 \u201cTwelve Times Hubble and Halfway to Space: The Thirty Meter Telescope,\u201d a virtual talk by Fengchuan Liu, project manager of Thirty Meter Telescope project. Hosted by PSW Science. 8 p.m. For information, pswscience.org. Lecture: shorturl.at/itQU7.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com. Turn to the southwest at dusk to catch the effervescent Venus low in the early evening sky. Sky Watch: October offers a night of sweet wonder as Venus is ready to shine brightly",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Sky Watch: October offers a night of sweet wonder as Venus is ready to shine brightly (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5920",
        "date": "2021-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/sky-watch-october-offers-a-night-sky-of-sweet-wonder/2021/10/02/90588368-22c5-11ec-9309-b743b79abc59_story.html",
        "text": "Like a child\u2019s bag of Halloween candy, October offers a night sky of sweet wonder in a starry heaven background, with perhaps a few meteors and lunar close encounters of the planetary kind.Turn to the southwest at dusk to catch the effervescent Venus low in the early evening sky. On Oct. 8, look carefully just above the western horizon to find the ultra-skinny moon aim for Venus. Our dazzling neighbor planet hangs at -4.3 magnitude, very bright, becoming brighter throughout October. The young crescent moon passes Venus by Oct. 9, as Venus prepares for a rendezvous with the nearby reddish star Antares, which looks like Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSadly, our neighboring planet Venus is so close to the horizon, it sets early around 8:30 p.m.Story continues below advertisementFacing south after sunset early in the month, the giant gaseous planets \u2014 Saturn and Jupiter \u2014 are high in the heavens after dusk.AdvertisementThe ringed Saturn is far dimmer than the robust Jupiter, but of course Jupiter is closer to us. Saturn holds at a +0.5 magnitude, and you\u2019ll find Jupiter at -2.7 magnitude, very bright, according to the Naval Observatory.After the moon leaves Venus, the lunar orb daily gains more heft. The fattening moon treks through the constellation Sagittarius on Oct. 11 and Oct. 12, approaches Saturn on Oct. 13, scoots under Saturn by the night of Oct. 14 and scurries under Jupiter by Oct. 15.Meanwhile on Oct. 16, low on the southwest horizon, find Venus and the red star Antares chase the sun and dance into horizon.Story continues below advertisementThe moon becomes full on Oct. 20.Just before sunrise in the east, find the fleet-footed Mercury ascending ahead of the sun, in the constellation Virgo. You could begin to see the zero-magnitude planet, bright enough to see in dark sky, around Oct. 18 through the end of the month. It\u2019s a good show, but you will still need a great view of the horizon.AdvertisementWhere is Mars? Our normally neighborly Red Planet is hanging out on the other side of the sun and its an official solar conjunction on Oct. 7 and Oct. 8, according to the Naval Observatory.Since NASA has a rover each for the Curiosity and Perseverance missions, as well as a stationary InSight mission, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is pressing the pause button on communicating with those missions from now until the middle of October. Mars returns to our morning heavens in late November and early December.Story continues below advertisementThe Orionid meteors peak on Oct. 20 and Oct. 21, according to the American Meteor Society. But that pesky full moon all but washes out most of the shooting stars, which in this case, are the leftover dust trail of the famous Comet Halley. (Earth passes through the remains of comet trails and the dust strikes our atmosphere and subsequently burn up, only to provide fun-to-watch meteor showers.)Down-to-Earth Events:\u25cf Oct. 8 \u2014 \u201cTaking the Twinkle Out of the Stars,\u201d a virtual lecture by astronomer Olivier Guyon, professor at the University of Arizona and winner of the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. Guyon will explain how adaptive optics enable ground-based telescopes to become better than the Hubble Space Telescope. Hosted by PSW Science. 8 p.m. For information, pswscience.org. Lecture: shorturl.at/koGU0.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u25cf Oct. 9 \u2014 \u201cStar Gaze 2021\u201d hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club at C.M. Crockett Park, Fauquier County at 10066 Rogues Road, Midland, Va. Enjoy safe views of the sun and night sky tours. 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. For information, novac.com.\u25cf Oct. 9 \u2014 Astrophysicist Lynn Wilson of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center will speak online about the most energetic particles from the sun. The meeting is hosted by the National Capital Astronomers. The virtual Zoom doors open at 7 p.m. and the meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. To register, visit capitalastronomers.org.\u25cf Oct. 10 \u2014 \u201cOperation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo,\u201d a virtual talk by science historian Teasel Muir Harmony, curator of the Apollo collection at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Hosted by the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club, the meeting starts at 7:30 p.m. For details on listening to the lecture, go to novac.com.\u25cf Oct. 22 \u2014 \u201cTwelve Times Hubble and Halfway to Space: The Thirty Meter Telescope,\u201d a virtual talk by Fengchuan Liu, project manager of Thirty Meter Telescope project. Hosted by PSW Science. 8 p.m. For information, pswscience.org. Lecture: shorturl.at/itQU7.\u2009Blaine Friedlander can be reached at SkyWatchPost@gmail.com. Turn to the southwest at dusk to catch the effervescent Venus low in the early evening sky. Sky Watch: October offers a night of sweet wonder as Venus is ready to shine brightly",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "California will face a terrible choice: Save cliff-side homes or public beaches from rising seas (WP: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5921",
        "date": "2018-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/11/california-will-have-a-terrible-choice-save-cliff-side-homes-or-public-beaches-from-rising-seas/",
        "text": "Like an ax slowly chopping at the trunk of a massive tree, waves driven by sea-level rise will hack away the base of cliffs on the Southern California coast at an accelerated pace, a recent study says, increasing land erosion that could topple some bluffs and thousands of homes sitting atop them. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCalifornia officials from Santa Barbara to San Diego will face an awful choice as the sea rises, the U.S. Geological Survey study says: save public beaches enjoyed by millions, or close them off with boulders and concrete walls to armor the shore and stop the waves in a bid to save homes.The study predicts coastal land loss on an unimaginable scale over the remaining century, up to 135 feet beyond the existing shoreline. \u201cFor the highest sea-level rise scenario, taking an average cliff height of more than 25 meters, the total cliff volume loss would be more than 300 million meters by 2100,\u201d it says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne of the study\u2019s authors, Patrick Barnard, a USGS research geologist, tried to explain the issue in a way that laypeople can understand. \u201cIt\u2019s a huge volume of material,\u201d he said. \u201cWe place this in a context of dump truck loads. It would be 30 million dump trucks full of material that will be eroded from the cliffs.\u201d The trucks would stretch around the globe multiple times, he said.\u00a0The USGS undertook the study to inform the state\u2019s public planners and policymakers of possible effects of climate change, which is causing the seas to rise. The analysis focuses on Southern California, but future studies will examine possible effects on the state's central and northern coasts as well.In the San Francisco area, officials have already retreated from some parts of the coast, removing homes from cliffs that have eroded and areas that have flooded. San Francisco is taking steps to move the Great Highway away from Ocean Beach because erosion is eating away the earth beneath it. Houses and apartments in Pacifica, south of the city, were declared uninhabitable as cliffs that supported them gave way to erosion.The study was published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research. It predicts that by the end of the century, erosion in Southern California will double from the rates observed between 1930 and 2010, depending on how high the seas rise, as waves pound cliffs more frequently.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBarnard, who co-authored the study with fellow USGS researchers Patrick W. Limber and Sean Vitousek, along with Li Erikson of the University of Illinois at Chicago, acknowledged that the research was limited in the way it made predictions.For the study, they combined five computer models into one, the Coastal Storm Modeling System. CosMoS, as it is called, \u201csimulates changes in local coastal topography through the 21st century,\u201d predicting shoreline change, ocean energy and flooding scenarios, according to a statement announcing the study.But it does not account for the different textures along the nearly 300-mile coast between Santa Barbara County and San Diego County,\u00a0how some of the coast has been modified, or how humans will\u00a0alter the coast during the century.Story continues below advertisementAccording to the statement's synopsis of the study, \u201cWithout the supply of sand from eroding cliffs, beaches in southern California may not survive rising sea levels \u2014 and bluff-top development may not withstand the forecast 62 to 135 feet cliff recession.\u201d As a result, the authors wrote, \u201cmanagers could be faced with the difficult decision between prioritizing private cliff-top property or public beaches\u201d when they allow or ban hard shore protections.\u201cBeaches are perhaps the most iconic feature of California, and the potential for losing this identity is real,\u201d Vitousek, the study\u2019s lead author, said in the statement. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the USGS when this study was conducted and is now a professor in the department of civil and materials engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. \u201cThe effect of California losing its beaches is not just a matter of affecting the tourism economy. Losing the protecting swath of beach sand between us and the pounding surf exposes critical infrastructure, businesses and homes to damage.\u201dRead more:The military paid for a study on sea-level rise. The results were scarySea-level rise could destroy Tampa Bay if a hurricane hitsA new way of thinking as sea levels riseAs giant storms hammer Boston, officials are doing little to adaptVirginia residents call plans to adapt to rising seas a trick to take private property Waves have always pounded the California coast. But as seas rise over the remaining century, they will become stronger and more frequent. California will face a terrible choice: Save cliff-side homes or public beaches from rising seas",
        "author": "Darryl Fears"
    },
    {
        "title": "The tea plant has a whopper genome, four times that of coffee, scientists find (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5922",
        "date": "2017-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/05/02/the-tea-plant-has-a-whopper-genome-four-times-that-of-coffee-scientists-find/",
        "text": "From a single species of plant comes many teas. The tea tree, a shrub called Camellia sinensis,\u00a0produces white, green, black and oolong teas. The tea's destiny is a matter of variables. The final drink reflects the tea cultivar, the growing environment and how the leaves are\u00a0processed \u2014 dried, crushed, steamed, blended. Farmers pluck \u201cbaby\u201d leaves, as one Snapple commercial put it in the mid-2000s, to begin making\u00a0white tea. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd yet scientists in China, South Korea and the United States say there is another way to further tea's potential, beyond altering the dirt or the stages of harvest or processing.DNA analysis could lead to\u00a0\u201ca more diversified set of tea flavors\u201d by tracing the genes responsible for taste, according to Lizhi Gao, a botany professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Kunming Institute of Botany. He\u00a0and colleagues have completed the \u201cfirst high-quality\u201d genome of the\u00a0tea tree shrub, published this week in the journal Molecular Plant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe plant took five years to analyze, thanks to the sheer number\u00a0of DNA sequences involved. \u201cThe tea tree genome is extremely large,\u201d Gao wrote in an email to The Washington Post \u2014 counting 3 billion base pairs, about four times the size of coffee's genome.Of hot and invigorating drinks, coffee gets\u00a0most of the buzz, at least in the United States: This country is home to\u00a0140 million daily coffee drinkers\u00a0and the Starbucks\u00a0Unicorn Frappuccino, and Americans consume more coffee than people anywhere else. Researchers sequenced the\u00a0genome of robusta\u00a0coffee in 2014, hinting at a future of genetically modified coffees, as The Post reported at the time. Scientists followed up with the arabica coffee genome\u00a0in January.Monday marked\u00a0the tea tree's turn. It was a long time coming. Dried plants, recently found in a Chinese mausoleum, revealed that emperors in the Han Dynasty enjoyed tea\u00a02,100 years ago, possibly as part of a soup. The\u00a0sovereigns were onto something. Today, 3 billion people drink tea, and by one estimate, for every\u00a0mug of coffee consumed on the planet, humans drink\u00a0three cups of tea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGao and his\u00a0colleagues had to churn through the tea tree's huge levels of retrotransposons. These repeated DNA sequences, about 80 percent of the tea genome, duplicated themselves into the genome again and again over 50 million years of tea tree evolution.\u00a0\u201cIt is a mystery why retrotransposon sequences are abundant in this plant but not in another,\u201d Gao said.But the researchers were most interested not in size but in the way\u00a0tea produces tasty\u00a0molecules. \u201cThe tea-processing industries in tea-drinking countries, especially in China, have developed numerous tea products with diverse tea flavor,\u201d Gao said. But processing techniques alone aren't enough, he said. Tea also depends on\u00a0developing new plant\u00a0varieties, containing unique combinations of flavorful molecules.Three types of chemicals are most responsible for tea's taste. One is an amino acid\u00a0only found in tea, called l-theanine, which\u00a0in the last decade has been added to\u00a0drinks that promote focus and\u00a0concentration. (Such focus drinks are of dubious efficacy\u00a0and lack supporting research.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second type of chemical is a class of flavonoid, or plant pigment molecule, called catechins.\u00a0The third is caffeine, which evolved\u00a0in tea independently of cacao and coffee, akin to the way both sea turtles and dolphins evolved flippers separately.There are several theories as to why plants produce caffeine. Caffeine at high doses is a natural pesticide. But\u00a0at low doses, as in some nectars, it may be giving insects a memorable jolt.\u00a0Caffeine was one tool in tea's repertoire of\u00a0\u201cdisease defense and environmental stress tolerance\u201d methods to help it adapt globally to diverse habitats, Gao said.The tea genome answered a question the scientist had long pondered: Why can't we make tea from close\u00a0Camellia\u00a0sinensis cousins, such as the tea oil plant\u00a0Camellia oleifera?Story continues below advertisementIt turns out that\u00a0C. oleifera and its 100 other Camellia\u00a0relatives do not produce high amounts of the caffeine or catechin family of genes.\u00a0(Caffeine and catechins are not proteins but secondary metabolites, which means many\u00a0genes are required to construct\u00a0them.) Put another way, Gao said, the expression levels of caffeine- and catechin-related genes \u201cdetermines the tea processing suitability.\u201dAdvertisementThe chief horticulturist at Britain's Royal Horticultural Society, Guy Barter, said plant breeders would welcome this work. \u201cOnce you understand the basis for the flavors and the processing quality of the tea, you can then have genetic markers that breeders can look for when trying to produce new varieties,\u201d he told the BBC.Read more:Bees love caffeine, too \u2014 and tricky flowers take advantageGenetically modified coffee could be just around the cornerThe European Space Agency sent Kombucha into space for science and stuff The first high-quality DNA analysis of the tea tree genome could lead to \u201ca more diversified set of tea flavors.\u201d  The tea plant has a whopper genome, four times that of coffee, scientists find",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "The strangest star in the sky finally has an explanation for its flicker (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5923",
        "date": "2018-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/03/the-strangest-star-in-the-sky-finally-has-an-explanation-for-its-flicker/",
        "text": "Fourteen hundred light-years\u00a0separate Earth from the strangest star in the sky. The light from this star flickers, like a giant neon sign drifting through the constellation Cygnus. After the star's dim intervals, which last for days or weeks, it brightens again.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNo other star acted this way. No observation could explain its behavior. That is, until now. A 200-strong team of scientists says\u00a0it has arrived at an answer, thanks to\u00a0an astronomy project crowdfunded on Kickstarter. The culprits are not aliens, as some people have speculated, but probably a\u00a0cloud of dust, each particle less than a micrometer across. Combined, these dust particles coalesced into one of the\u00a0biggest question marks in recent astronomical memory.Story continues below advertisementIn 2015, astrophysicist\u00a0Tabetha Boyajian\u00a0published a paper describing the starlight dips. The brightness diminished\u00a0by 20 percent, according to observations from the\u00a0Kepler space telescope.\u00a0Planets block starlight when they pass\u00a0across stars, like a hand\u00a0waved in front of a\u00a0flashlight. But even an object as huge as\u00a0Jupiter can reduce a star's brightness by just 1 percent.AdvertisementOther natural explanations were raised and dismissed.\u00a0\u201cIt truly is something extraordinary,\u201d said Tyler Ellis, a PhD student, who, along with\u00a0Boyajian, works at Louisiana State University and studies this star and others.The star, a yellow-white dwarf labeled KIC\u00a08462852, was unusual enough to get a nickname, \u201cTabby's star,\u201d after\u00a0Boyajian. Tabby's Star\u00a0earned its own\u00a0Reddit forum.Story continues below advertisementAnd the star\u00a0was so\u00a0curious that Jason Wright, an\u00a0astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, floated the most exotic explanation available to astronomers: Aliens. Perhaps extraterrestrials had constructed a titanic array of solar panels around the star, a hypothetical concept proposed years ago by physicist Freeman Dyson. The construction project would, in theory,\u00a0diminish a star's brightness in a way consistent with observations of Tabby's Star.AdvertisementBut when astronomers with the\u00a0Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence\u00a0aimed their radio telescopes at Tabby's Star, they heard no signs of life.Meanwhile, Boyajian and her colleagues wanted to go beyond the Kepler data and watch the star\u00a0dip\u00a0in real time. They predicted the star would\u00a0dim\u00a0on a 750-day cycle.\u00a0But, to be sure, they needed to continuously collect images each night, in a variety of ranges across the light spectrum.Story continues below advertisementKepler is not equipped\u00a0for sustained observation. \u201cThe only facility that specializes in this is a private facility called the Las Cumbres Observatory,\u201d\u00a0Boyajian said.\u00a0A public Kickstarter campaign collected the necessary $100,000 to purchase telescope time,\u00a0and the hunt began through the lens of the California telescope.When the star began dimming in May 2017, astronomers\u00a0sounded the battle cry: \"#TabbysStar\u00a0IS DIPPING! OBSERVE!!\"\u00a0Boyajian wrote on Twitter.\u00a0They nicknamed the May dimming sequence Elsie (a pun on \u201cL-C,\u201d for \u201clight curves,\u201d as well as the telescope observatory's initials).\u00a0Between May and December 2017, the star's brightness dimmed three other times,\u00a0each dip lasting several days\u00a0to weeks.AdvertisementThe scientists probed the Elsie sequence\u00a0in multiple color bands. \u201cWe had blue light, red light and yellow light,\u201d\u00a0Boyajian said, a broader range\u00a0of light than Kepler's previous observations.Story continues below advertisementWhatever substance exists between us and Tabby's Star blocks\u00a0more blue light than red light, as Boyajian, Ellis, Wright and other researchers reported in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday. Planets cannot explain the dips. \u201cIf you have something that is completely opaque like a planet, you would expect all the colors of the light to be blocked out at the same levels,\u201d\u00a0Boyajian said. Likewise, the discovery also rules out alien industry.Dust is one of the few explanations this observation does not\u00a0eliminate. \u201cThe selective absorption of blue light has to point to dust,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cCertainly dust is the culprit.\u201d Very small particles could block blue light's shorter wavelengths while allowing red light, which has longer wavelengths, to\u00a0escape.Advertisement\u201cIt has the typical signature of dust,\u201d\u00a0Boyajian said.Story continues below advertisementYet even in space dust, there is mystery. If it is dust, the dust cloud has not spread far beyond its point of origin, the authors noted in the paper.\u00a0A ring of dust around the star would constantly block\u00a0starlight rather than dim light in bouts.And the amount of\u00a0dust needed is more than Tabby's Star should produce.\u00a0It is a main sequence star \u2014 middle-aged, so to speak, neither forming nor dying. \u201cThe star could be, essentially, burping out this material,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cBut that\u2019s way too much activity for a star of this type.\u201dEven with a natural cause for its dips, Tabby's Star has not lost its exceptional status. Nor does this work eliminate some other, unknown possibility that astronomers have not thought of yet, Boyajian said.\u201cWe are not done,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cWe are certainly not done with this star yet.\u201dRead more:The weirdest star in the sky is acting up againNo radio signals from that \u2018alien megastructure\u2019 yet \u2014 but scientists are listeningHow will humanity react to alien life? Psychologists have some predictions. It's not aliens. (It is never aliens.) The strangest star in the sky finally has an explanation for its flicker",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in June (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5924",
        "date": "2019-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-june/2019/06/01/a7a8133e-83b3-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html",
        "text": "Jupiter, the planetary king of the solar system, offers a gentle early summer reign.The big, gaseous planet rises in the southeast now just before 9 p.m. This giant planet at the lower end of the constellation Ophiuchus is a -2.6 magnitude object, very bright. On June 10, Jupiter rises at 8:21 p.m., according to the U.S. Naval Observatory, and it will be in opposition to the sun. This means that the planet will be a \u201cfull\u201d Jupiter, since the sun is opposite in the sky from Jupiter from our earthly perch. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJupiter effectively stays up all night in mid-June.Hours after the sun sets, Jupiter sits higher in the southeast. By June 14, a waxing gibbous moon begins to approach the big, bright planet. Since the moon officially becomes full on the (very early) morning of June 17, the night of June 16/17 has the portly moon pass Jupiter on its way to Saturn. The ringed planet (zero magnitude, bright) and the moon tango for a few nights between June 17 and 19. (In the mornings, see Jupiter leading Saturn in the southwest sky before sunrise.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, on the other side of sky, just past sunset June 18, look low in the west-northwest where the planets Mars and Mercury hang out like chums on a playground. Of the two, Mercury is brighter at about zero magnitude, and Mars is about +1.8 magnitude \u2014 which is on the dim side.Venus ascends the east-northeast just before 5 a.m. now, near the constellation Taurus. People standing on eastern beaches awaiting sunrise may see Venus ahead of the sun, as our neighboring planet is about -3.8 magnitude, very bright. This bright beacon of planetary beauty begins to disappear into the sun for the summer later in June, but it returns in the late summer \u2014 just before the autumnal equinox.The summer solstice arrives June 21 at 11:54 a.m. Eastern time. Between June 18 and June 24, there will be a lengthy 14 hours and 54 minutes of daylight on each day for Washington. But daylight gradually slips away, starting June 25 until December\u2019s winter solstice, according to the Naval Observatory.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDown-to-Earth Events:\u25cfJune 3 \u2014 Preview summer\u2019s heavenly happenings in the final \u201cStars Tonight\u201d for the season at the David M. Brown Planetarium, 1426 N. Quincy St., Arlington, adjacent to Washington-Lee High School. 7:30 p.m. $3. friendsoftheplanetarium.org.\u25cfJune 5 \u2014 \u201cRoad to the Red Planet: Human Exploration of Mars,\u201d a talk by NASA\u2019s Max Parks, at the University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. Enjoy the late spring heavens through telescopes afterward, weather permitting. 9 p.m. www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse.\u25cfJune 8 \u2014 The National Capital Astronomers will feature science fair winners and astronomy photos at their last regular meeting for the season, held at the University of Maryland Observatory, College Park. 7:30 p.m. capitalastronomers.org.Story continues below advertisement\u25cfJune 9 \u2014 The Northern Virginia Astronomy Club will hold its regular meeting, 163 Research Hall, George Mason University. 7\u200ap.m. novac.com.Advertisement\u25cfJune 19 \u2014 \u201cThe Future of Exploration,\u201d a lecture by Jim Green, NASA\u2019s chief scientist, will explain how the moon provides a challenging environment for robotic and human explorers. Lockheed Martin Imax Theater. 8 p.m. Information and tickets: airandspace.si.edu.\u25cfJune 20 \u2014 \u201cExtrasolar Planets: Exploring Alien Worlds,\u201d a talk by Eliza Kempton, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, at the university\u2019s observatory, College Park. 9 p.m. Afterward, see night sky wonder, weather permitting. www.astro.umd.edu/openhouse.Story continues below advertisement\u25cfJune 22 \u2014 Solstice Saturday at the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall offers extended hours from 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., featuring activities and exhibits. After hours, attend the Solstice Star Party from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m. at the 16-inch reflector telescope at the Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory, adjacent to the museum. airandspace.si.edu.Advertisement\u25cfJune 22 \u2014 Astronomy Festival on the Mall. See safe telescopic observations of the sun, Jupiter, Saturn and star clusters with astronomers from more than 20 groups. 6-11 p.m., on the Mall in front of the Smithsonian Castle, 1000 Jefferson Dr. SW. Organized and hosted by Hofstra University. goo.gl/tc2y42.\u25cfJune 25 \u2014 \u201cThe Dark Side of the Universe,\u201d a lecture by Neta A. Bahcall, professor of astrophysics, Princeton University. Bahcall discusses dark matter and dark energy of the universe as part of a legacy celebration for the late astronomer Vera Rubin. 6:30 p.m. At the Carnegie Institution for Science, 1530 P St. NW. Information and registration: carnegiescience.edu.\u25cfJune 27 \u2014 \u201cUniverse or Multiverse?\u201d a conversation with Andrei Linde, professor of physics, Stanford University, explains recent developments in inflationary cosmology, particle physics and string theory. 6:30 p.m. At the Carnegie Institution for Science, 1530 P St. NW. Information and registration: carnegiescience.edu.Blaine Friedlander may be reached at PostSkyWatch@yahoo.com. The sun shines fully on Jupiter before the summer solstice arrives. Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in June",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Would Neil deGrasse Tyson ever take SpaceX to Mars? Only if Elon Musk\u2019s mom does it first. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5925",
        "date": "2017-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/03/would-neil-degrasse-tyson-ever-take-spacex-to-mars-only-if-elon-musks-mom-does-it-first/",
        "text": "Famed astrophysicist and television personality Neil deGrasse Tyson has shown he is capable of achieving just about anything, from earning no fewer than a dozen honorary doctorates to\u00a0explaining the history of the universe in less than 10 minutes.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut would he ever take a one-way trip to Mars?That was one of many questions Tyson fielded in an \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d session Sunday on Reddit, one of Tyson's favorite pastimes. The query came on the heels of SpaceX's historic launch on Thursday of a \u201cflight-proven\u201d rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Falcon 9 became the first rocket to be successfully launched, landed vertically, then reused.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX's founder, tech billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has said he aims to send the first human mission to Mars as soon as 2025.\u201cHi Neil! Just wanted to know your thoughts on SpaceX's Falcon 9 relaunch and landing, and what do you think it means for the future of space travel?\u201d a Reddit user named patopc1999 asked Tyson on Sunday. \u201c[A]lso, would you ever consider to join a one-way trip to Mars?\u201dAdvertisementLike so many of Tyson's answers, his response was concise, elegant and based on scientific reasoning.\u00a0And it seems there remain a few key unsolved variables that prevent Tyson from committing to Musk's long-shot Mars mission.\u201cI really like Earth. So any space trip I take, I'm double-checking that there's sufficient funds for me to return,\u201d Tyson wrote.\u00a0\u201cAlso, I'm not taking that trip until Elon Musk (sends) his mother and brings her back alive. Then I'm good for it.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX makes history by launching a \u2018flight-proven\u2019 rocketSpaceX has been ambitious and aggressive when it comes to pursuing commercial space ventures, with mixed results. The company lost two rockets in two years, but has pushed on, announcing in February that it would fly two paying, private citizens around the moon late next year.Story continues below advertisementAmong Musk's many ambitions, he has said he wants to eventually colonize Mars.\u00a0Unfortunately for those who would like to see Tyson take up residence elsewhere in the solar system, Musk's mother has actually already addressed the matter \u2014 and it appears she has no plans to blast off into space.Advertisement\u201cOh no, I'm not moving to Mars,\u201d Maye Musk told Mashable last year. \u201cFrankly, it's because they need the younger people there like engineers to create a future. They don't need me.\u201dOn a more serious note, regarding SpaceX, Tyson did also praise the company for continuing to test and advance the technology behind reusable rockets.\u201cAny demonstration of rocket reusability is a good thing,\u201d Tyson wrote on Reddit. \u201cWhen we fly on a Boeing 747 across great distances, we don't throw it away and roll out a new one. Reusability is arguably the most fundamental feature of affordable expensive things.\u201dNeil deGrasse Tyson and others explain the big bang \u2014 and everything elseThat said, he also admitted he was \u201csimultaneously one of SpaceX's biggest critics and supporters,\u201d and predicted that a private company would not be the first to fly human beings to Mars without a government funding such a mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI've said many times and many places \u2026 that projects that are hugely expensive and dangerous, with uncertain returns on investments, make poor activities of profit-driven companies,\u201d Tyson wrote. \u201cGovernments do these things first, allowing private enterprise to learn what to do and what not to do, then come next with a plan that involves us all.\u201dThroughout the rest of Sunday's \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d session, Tyson discussed everything from his favorite books and philosophers to his poignant advice for a struggling undergraduate science major\u00a0to whether humans would find complex life beyond Earth in the next century.It was not the first time people had sought out Tyson to tackle life's complicated questions. The day after Election Day, late-night TV host Stephen Colbert invited Tyson on his show to help explain Donald Trump's path to the presidency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou know what we do in moments like this in my field?\u201d Tyson told Colbert. \u201cWe invoke the cosmic perspective.\u201d\u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d Colbert asked.\u201cThat\u2019s what Earth look likes from high above. Not just, like, from the atmosphere, but from space itself, from the universe,\u201d Tyson explained. \u201cAnd when you do that, all Earth\u2019s problems dissolve away into the infinitude of the space time continuum.\u201dWith the reveal of their plans for their interplanetary rocket, SpaceX is one step closer to their goal to colonize Mars. (SpaceX)Read more:Elon Musk is going to tunnel from his desk to LAX \u2014 or so he\u2019s tweetedElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next yearNASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in space \"I really like Earth,\u201d Tyson also said. \u201cSo any space trip I take, I'm double-checking that there's sufficient funds for me to return.\" Would Neil deGrasse Tyson ever take SpaceX to Mars? Only if Elon Musk\u2019s mom does it first.",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Would Neil deGrasse Tyson ever take SpaceX to Mars? Only if Elon Musk\u2019s mom does it first. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5926",
        "date": "2017-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/03/would-neil-degrasse-tyson-ever-take-spacex-to-mars-only-if-elon-musks-mom-does-it-first/",
        "text": "Famed astrophysicist and television personality Neil deGrasse Tyson has shown he is capable of achieving just about anything, from earning no fewer than a dozen honorary doctorates to\u00a0explaining the history of the universe in less than 10 minutes.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut would he ever take a one-way trip to Mars?That was one of many questions Tyson fielded in an \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d session Sunday on Reddit, one of Tyson's favorite pastimes. The query came on the heels of SpaceX's historic launch on Thursday of a \u201cflight-proven\u201d rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Falcon 9 became the first rocket to be successfully launched, landed vertically, then reused.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX's founder, tech billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has said he aims to send the first human mission to Mars as soon as 2025.\u201cHi Neil! Just wanted to know your thoughts on SpaceX's Falcon 9 relaunch and landing, and what do you think it means for the future of space travel?\u201d a Reddit user named patopc1999 asked Tyson on Sunday. \u201c[A]lso, would you ever consider to join a one-way trip to Mars?\u201dAdvertisementLike so many of Tyson's answers, his response was concise, elegant and based on scientific reasoning.\u00a0And it seems there remain a few key unsolved variables that prevent Tyson from committing to Musk's long-shot Mars mission.\u201cI really like Earth. So any space trip I take, I'm double-checking that there's sufficient funds for me to return,\u201d Tyson wrote.\u00a0\u201cAlso, I'm not taking that trip until Elon Musk (sends) his mother and brings her back alive. Then I'm good for it.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX makes history by launching a \u2018flight-proven\u2019 rocketSpaceX has been ambitious and aggressive when it comes to pursuing commercial space ventures, with mixed results. The company lost two rockets in two years, but has pushed on, announcing in February that it would fly two paying, private citizens around the moon late next year.Story continues below advertisementAmong Musk's many ambitions, he has said he wants to eventually colonize Mars.\u00a0Unfortunately for those who would like to see Tyson take up residence elsewhere in the solar system, Musk's mother has actually already addressed the matter \u2014 and it appears she has no plans to blast off into space.Advertisement\u201cOh no, I'm not moving to Mars,\u201d Maye Musk told Mashable last year. \u201cFrankly, it's because they need the younger people there like engineers to create a future. They don't need me.\u201dOn a more serious note, regarding SpaceX, Tyson did also praise the company for continuing to test and advance the technology behind reusable rockets.\u201cAny demonstration of rocket reusability is a good thing,\u201d Tyson wrote on Reddit. \u201cWhen we fly on a Boeing 747 across great distances, we don't throw it away and roll out a new one. Reusability is arguably the most fundamental feature of affordable expensive things.\u201dNeil deGrasse Tyson and others explain the big bang \u2014 and everything elseThat said, he also admitted he was \u201csimultaneously one of SpaceX's biggest critics and supporters,\u201d and predicted that a private company would not be the first to fly human beings to Mars without a government funding such a mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI've said many times and many places \u2026 that projects that are hugely expensive and dangerous, with uncertain returns on investments, make poor activities of profit-driven companies,\u201d Tyson wrote. \u201cGovernments do these things first, allowing private enterprise to learn what to do and what not to do, then come next with a plan that involves us all.\u201dThroughout the rest of Sunday's \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d session, Tyson discussed everything from his favorite books and philosophers to his poignant advice for a struggling undergraduate science major\u00a0to whether humans would find complex life beyond Earth in the next century.It was not the first time people had sought out Tyson to tackle life's complicated questions. The day after Election Day, late-night TV host Stephen Colbert invited Tyson on his show to help explain Donald Trump's path to the presidency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou know what we do in moments like this in my field?\u201d Tyson told Colbert. \u201cWe invoke the cosmic perspective.\u201d\u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d Colbert asked.\u201cThat\u2019s what Earth look likes from high above. Not just, like, from the atmosphere, but from space itself, from the universe,\u201d Tyson explained. \u201cAnd when you do that, all Earth\u2019s problems dissolve away into the infinitude of the space time continuum.\u201dWith the reveal of their plans for their interplanetary rocket, SpaceX is one step closer to their goal to colonize Mars. (SpaceX)Read more:Elon Musk is going to tunnel from his desk to LAX \u2014 or so he\u2019s tweetedElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next yearNASA astronauts lose key piece of ISS shield, and now it\u2019s floating free in space \"I really like Earth,\u201d Tyson also said. \u201cSo any space trip I take, I'm double-checking that there's sufficient funds for me to return.\" Would Neil deGrasse Tyson ever take SpaceX to Mars? Only if Elon Musk\u2019s mom does it first.",
        "author": "Amy B Wang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in June (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5927",
        "date": "2021-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/skywatch-whats-happening-in-the-heavens-in-june/2021/05/29/fedf2d9a-bfde-11eb-83e3-0ca705a96ba4_story.html",
        "text": "Venus puts on a bright face for June in the evening\u2019s western sky, Jupiter and Saturn command the morning, summer officially arrives, but Washington gets lousy seats for a partial solar eclipse.As dusk falls, Venus follows the sun into the west-northwestern horizon. It sets now just before 10 p.m., but it will appear brighter in July. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA very young crescent moon will appear low on the west-northwestern horizon below Venus on June 11. For the next evening, in the western sky, the skinny lunar crescent will sit between Venus and the higher, somewhat reddish, dim Mars. The thin moon skates above the Red Planet on June 13.Venus, by late June, will be to the left of the twins\u2019 asterism in the constellation Gemini, moving toward the constellation Cancer.Story continues below advertisementOur other neighbor, the red ruddy Mars \u2014 which needs a traffic signal and roadway signs \u2014 hangs out in the constellation Cancer for most of June. The planet is a hard-to-see 1.8 magnitude, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.AdvertisementThe distant, large gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn putter in the eastern morning heavens. Ringed Saturn rises after midnight as May ends and June begins. Jupiter ascends the eastern horizon at about 1:20 a.m. Find the waning moon beginning to scoot under Saturn (zero magnitude, dim) on May 30 before sunrise.Early-morning joggers or dog walkers can see the moon approach Jupiter, which is -2.2 magnitude, bright, according to the observatory. For June 2, the last quarter moon appears to have passed the two planets.Story continues below advertisementThe moon turns full June 24, according to the observatory.If you don\u2019t catch the early June action of Jupiter, Saturn and the moon, catch the replay June 27 when the waning gibbous moon dashes under Saturn and \u2014 on the mornings of June 28 to June 29 \u2014 scurries under bright Jupiter.AdvertisementGet ready to dab on sunscreen. For the Eastern United States, the summer solstice occurs on June 20 at 11:32 p.m., said the observatory. That\u2019s when summer officially starts.On June 10, at the new moon, there will be an annular solar eclipse \u2014 the type where the moon cuts in front of the sun and seems to generate a ring of fire. Don\u2019t get excited, the ring of fire won\u2019t be seen in the United States.Story continues below advertisementThe path of annularity runs from Canada north of the Great Lakes, through the Arctic and North Pole, and then ends in Russia. The Great Lakes and the Northeast regions get a partial eclipse. Again, don\u2019t get excited.For Washington, the sun rises at 5:42 a.m., which is when the sun (70 percent covered by the moon) ascends the eastern morning sky, according to astronomer Geoff Chester of the Naval Observatory. It all ends about 45 minutes later.AdvertisementConsidering how the sun sits at a difficult angle on the horizon, for sky gazers it will be hard to see even if you make a cardboard pinhole projector (safe method) to see it.Chester advises eye safety: Don\u2019t look at the sun directly, don\u2019t look at it through binoculars or a telescope. \u201cAny kind of solar eclipse is extremely dangerous to view without proper eye protection,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementSince this is a partial eclipse that\u2019s covering 70 percent the sun, at best, people are not going to miss anything. \u201cThat morning sunrise is not going to seem unusual. It will seem like a normal, sunny morning,\u201d he said. \u201cFor us, it\u2019s a partial solar eclipse, not a total eclipse. You will not see any of the eclipse phenomena associated with a total or annular eclipse.\u201dIt\u2019s not worth risking your eyesight, he said: \u201cIt\u2019s not real boffo.\u201dAdvertisementChester suggests saving excitement for the annular eclipse over the continental United States on Oct. 14, 2023, and for the total eclipse on April 8, 2024.Down-to-earth events: \u25cf June 4 \u2014 \u201cQuantum Gravity,\u201d an online lecture by Carlo Rovelli of Aix-Marseille University, France, speaking on the quantum theory of gravity and its implications for space and time. Hosted by PSW, pswscience.org. 8 p.m., with lecture live on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3wnD55a.Story continues below advertisement\u25cf June 18 \u2014 \u201cNASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program: Returning America to Human Spaceflight,\u201d an online lecture by Steve Stich, the program\u2019s manager for NASA. Stich will provide program overview and its implementation of public-private partnerships. Hosted by PSW, pswscience.org. 8 p.m., with lecture live on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3wnD55a.\u25cf June 29 \u2014 \u201cVenus Rediscovered: An Astrobiological or Astrophysical Frontier?\u201d an online lecture by James Garvin, chief scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, will discuss what we might learn of Venus. 8 p.m. Hosted by the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space Museum. For registration: airandspace.si.edu, then go to \u201cVisit\u201d and \u201cEvents.\u201d\u2009Friedlander can be reached at PostSkyWatch@yahoo.com.  Skywatch: What\u2019s happening in the heavens in June",
        "author": "Blaine P. Friedlander Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "The eclipse\u2019s really early birds (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5928",
        "date": "2017-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/18/the-eclipses-really-early-birds/",
        "text": "Thousands of eclipse oglers eager to secure their viewing spots have been\u00a0pouring into rural towns on Oregon\u2019s arid east side and craggy coast for days. But some Oregon residents have been preparing for Monday's total solar eclipse for much, much longer.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightKay Wyatt and her husband, Steven, moved to Depoe Bay, Ore., 15 years ago, in no small part because it lies on the centerline of the path of totality \u2014 the 60-mile-wide swath across the country where\u00a0the moon will completely block the sun on Monday.\u00a0The Wyatts are\u00a0geophysicists who traveled the world conducting seismic exploration for oil and natural gas. When they retired, they wanted to live somewhere they could indulge another mutual passion: amateur astronomy. They took their obsession a step further about four years ago and bought a plot of land near the coast, in Otis \u2014 also on the path of totality. They built a summer home and their own observatory, which shelters a telescope in an eight-foot-diameter dome. It\u2019s high enough to get a clear view of the sky, and far enough inland that it\u2019s less likely to be blocked by the fog and clouds that can cling to the coastal cliffs and beaches here even in summer. That's where they're planning to watch the eclipse.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI know it\u2019s going to be the most beautiful natural event that I\u2019ve ever seen. The hair on the back of my neck I\u2019m sure is going to stand up. And goose bumps,\u201d Kay Wyatt predicted. \u201cI\u2019m almost hyperventilating getting everything ready.\u201dSee full coverage of the August 21 total solar eclipseWyatt traces her unflagging fascination with the stars to her dad. He and Wyatt\u2019s mother worked at a laundromat, and for the 1963 eclipse, when Wyatt was 10, he brought home five cardboard washing machine boxes and converted them into pinhole theaters where each of his five kids could watch the event unfold as a tiny projection without damaging their eyes. When Wyatt asked him how she might become an astronaut, he suggested she write a letter to NASA. And when NASA wrote back to inform her that women couldn\u2019t be astronauts, but were welcome to assemble astronaut meals or sew space suits, he fired up the backyard grill, told her to tear the letter into a thousand pieces and watched as she threw them in the flames.\u201c\u2018Kay, don\u2019t you ever let somebody tell you that you can\u2019t do something; you can do and be anything you want to be,\u2019 \u201d Wyatt recalled him telling her. She held on to her love of science, and now she's\u00a0running simulations with her automated telescope-photography setup and testing battery systems that will power her picture-taking if the surge of people to the coast overwhelms the electrical grid. She's hosting a countdown podcast for a local radio station, interviewing astronomers, eclipse chasers \u00a0and local officials about every facet of the celestial event.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Wyatts\u2019 story isn\u2019t as unusual as you might think. Just east over the Coast Range, in Oregon\u2019s Willamette Valley, Jon and Susan Brewster made a similar move to the path of totality about 16 years ago, to build a home and observatory near Monmouth. Now a senior software engineer at HP, Jon Brewster had worked at a major observatory in Hawaii and had an astronomy obsession of his own. When the couple was clouded out of their attempt to see the 1979 total eclipse on its sweep through the Northwest, he said, they immediately began to plan for their next one \u2014 in 2017.They\u2019re so star-struck for space that even the temporary house in Monmouth proper, where they lived while they built their present dream home and telescope dome on a high hill with a clear, dark western view, needed opportunities for late-night astronomizing. \u201cI told the realtor, we\u2019ll meet you there at 9 o\u2019clock at night. Do NOT turn the lights on. Meet me in the back yard and we\u2019ll see if the sky is any good,\u201d Brewster said. \u201cHe thought we were nuts.\u201dIf that real estate agent has any celestial inklings, he\u2019s probably jealous now: With millions of people clamoring for spots in the path of totality where they can watch the eclipse unfold, the Brewsters get to hunker right down at home. Some 100 friends and family will join them to watch the moon\u2019s shadow rush across the valley floor at more than 2,000 miles per hour, to watch the sun become a cold, black, miasma-wreathed disk.Then again, it could be cloudy again, Jon pointed out. \u201cThe only thing we\u2019re promising is two minutes of darkness followed by hamburgers.\u201dRead more:A massive atmospheric experiment is planned for the August eclipseThe strangest, scariest eclipse myths throughout historyAmerica's greatest eclipse is coming, and this man really wants you to see it These people moved to the path of the total eclipse of the sun many years ago and are very excited about Monday's totality. The eclipse\u2019s really early birds",
        "author": "Sarah Gilman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Listen to what space sounds like: an eerie chorus of \u2018alien birds\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5929",
        "date": "2017-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/25/listen-to-what-space-sounds-like-an-eerie-chorus-of-alien-birds/",
        "text": "If you ask\u00a0Craig Kletzing, the recordings echo\u00a0the chirping of crickets. To his wife, they sound like a chorus of alien birds.But there is no life where these sounds are made, in the dazzling and dangerous\u00a0stream of highly charged particles that surrounds our planet. For years, Kletzing has been monitoring the radio waves that undulate through\u00a0the void around\u00a0Earth. When the data is turned into sound files, the result is an eerie cosmic symphony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIf\u00a0you had radio ears \u2026\u00a0you would hear these waves in space,\u201d said Kletzing,\u00a0a physics professor at the University of Iowa.A type of plasma wave known as chorus as heard by the\u00a0EMFISIS\u00a0instrument aboard NASA\u2019s Van Allen Probes. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.Although space is a vacuum, it is neither\u00a0empty nor quiet. Just above our atmosphere exist two belts of\u00a0energetic particles from the sun that get trapped by Earth's magnetic field.\u00a0This phenomenon is vital to making our planet livable; the captured electrons and protons\u00a0zip back and forth\u00a0between Earth's magnetic poles instead of streaming through the atmosphere to bombard the surface. But the zones where these particles dwell, called the Van Allen Belts, are\u00a0still dangerous: The\u00a0trapped particles pose a threat to satellites and astronauts at the International Space Station, and the belts\u00a0play a role in space weather that can destroy power grids on the ground.\u201cThere are lots of practical reasons,\u201d to be interested in the Van Allen belts, Kletzing said. The physics of this violent region is fascinating in and of itself. Fluctuating electric and magnetic fields plow through the cloud of charged particles,\u00a0called plasma, stealing energy from some particles and giving it to others, pushing them to high speeds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2012 NASA launched the Van Allen Space Probes, twin robotic crafts that orbit the Earth and monitor this roiling envelope of charged particles. The probes carried a suite of instruments called\u00a0EMFISIS,\u00a0short for\u00a0Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (apparently all aspiring physicists and astronomers\u00a0take\u00a0\u201cIntro to\u00a0Backronyms\u201d\u00a0before they get their PhDs). EMFISIS\u00a0is designed to detect radio\u00a0waves rippling around\u00a0the Earth.\u201cIt's literally like sticking a microphone out into space, but instead of listening to sound waves we\u2019re listening to electromagnetic\u00a0waves,\u201d said Kletzing,\u00a0EMFISIS's lead\u00a0investigator.Humans can't hear all the activity in the Van Allen belts. Our ears respond only to sound waves, which we sense via the vibration of molecules\u00a0that are disturbed by the waves as they propagate through the air. Space is airless \u2014 practically void of matter\u00a0\u2014 and therefore soundless.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the electromagnetic waves are in the same frequency range as the part of the sound spectrum that\u00a0is audible to humans. It was a simple matter to translate those radio waves as\u00a0MP3s\u00a0\u2014 turning EMFISIS data into a radio broadcast from the heavens.One variety of wave sounded like Star Wars light sabers. These \u201cwhistler waves\u201d were\u00a0generated by lightning in the Earth's atmosphere, but escaped and bounced along the magnetic field. The lightning generates waves at multiple frequencies, and the faster (higher-pitched) waves reached the sensors just before the slower (and lower-pitched ones), resulting in the signature falling pitch that gives these waves their name.Whistler waves. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.Story continues below advertisementWhen waves propagate through the plasmasphere \u2014\u00a0the\u00a0shell of relatively low-energy plasma that encases the Earth just above the atmosphere \u2014 they generate what's known as plasmaspheric hiss.AdvertisementPlasmaspheric hiss waves as heard by NASA\u2019s Polar mission as it passed around the Earth. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.Beyond the plasmasphere, where the plasma is warmer, electrons are pushed around in explosions generated by tangled lines of the Earth's magnetic field. As the particles from the sun are pushed toward the night side of the Earth,\u00a0lower-energy particles create the \u201cchorus\u201d waves that Kletzing's wife said sounded like alien birds.Story continues below advertisementChorus waves. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.\u201cThere\u2019s a side of me that listens to it and says 'Wow, what interesting wave forms,' \" Kletzing said. \u201cBut there\u2019s also a piece that just listens, and there's sort of an amazement at a certain level that the universe produces things that you\u00a0recognize: birds, and in the background it sounds to me ...\u00a0like crickets chirping.\u201dAdvertisementThe cricket-like sounds are compelling to Kletzing, not just because they evoke a languid summer evening. These sounds suggest that there could be smaller waves in space that trigger the larger ones \u2014 something Kletzing never noticed when he simply looked at the data on a computer screen.\u201cThere\u2019s little bits of stuff in there that our ear can kind of pick out \u2026\u00a0that\u00a0your eye on a plot doesn\u2019t do quite the same way,\u201d Kletzing said.\u00a0Read more:These bouncing balls on a hot pan led to a new physics discoveryA total solar eclipse is happening Aug. 21, and here's what you need to knowUpdate: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliens There is no sound in space. But if our ears could perceive the radio waves that ricochet around our planet, this is what you'd hear.  Listen to what space sounds like: an eerie chorus of \u2018alien birds\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Listen to what space sounds like: an eerie chorus of \u2018alien birds\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5930",
        "date": "2017-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/25/listen-to-what-space-sounds-like-an-eerie-chorus-of-alien-birds/",
        "text": "If you ask\u00a0Craig Kletzing, the recordings echo\u00a0the chirping of crickets. To his wife, they sound like a chorus of alien birds.But there is no life where these sounds are made, in the dazzling and dangerous\u00a0stream of highly charged particles that surrounds our planet. For years, Kletzing has been monitoring the radio waves that undulate through\u00a0the void around\u00a0Earth. When the data is turned into sound files, the result is an eerie cosmic symphony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIf\u00a0you had radio ears \u2026\u00a0you would hear these waves in space,\u201d said Kletzing,\u00a0a physics professor at the University of Iowa.A type of plasma wave known as chorus as heard by the\u00a0EMFISIS\u00a0instrument aboard NASA\u2019s Van Allen Probes. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.Although space is a vacuum, it is neither\u00a0empty nor quiet. Just above our atmosphere exist two belts of\u00a0energetic particles from the sun that get trapped by Earth's magnetic field.\u00a0This phenomenon is vital to making our planet livable; the captured electrons and protons\u00a0zip back and forth\u00a0between Earth's magnetic poles instead of streaming through the atmosphere to bombard the surface. But the zones where these particles dwell, called the Van Allen Belts, are\u00a0still dangerous: The\u00a0trapped particles pose a threat to satellites and astronauts at the International Space Station, and the belts\u00a0play a role in space weather that can destroy power grids on the ground.\u201cThere are lots of practical reasons,\u201d to be interested in the Van Allen belts, Kletzing said. The physics of this violent region is fascinating in and of itself. Fluctuating electric and magnetic fields plow through the cloud of charged particles,\u00a0called plasma, stealing energy from some particles and giving it to others, pushing them to high speeds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2012 NASA launched the Van Allen Space Probes, twin robotic crafts that orbit the Earth and monitor this roiling envelope of charged particles. The probes carried a suite of instruments called\u00a0EMFISIS,\u00a0short for\u00a0Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (apparently all aspiring physicists and astronomers\u00a0take\u00a0\u201cIntro to\u00a0Backronyms\u201d\u00a0before they get their PhDs). EMFISIS\u00a0is designed to detect radio\u00a0waves rippling around\u00a0the Earth.\u201cIt's literally like sticking a microphone out into space, but instead of listening to sound waves we\u2019re listening to electromagnetic\u00a0waves,\u201d said Kletzing,\u00a0EMFISIS's lead\u00a0investigator.Humans can't hear all the activity in the Van Allen belts. Our ears respond only to sound waves, which we sense via the vibration of molecules\u00a0that are disturbed by the waves as they propagate through the air. Space is airless \u2014 practically void of matter\u00a0\u2014 and therefore soundless.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the electromagnetic waves are in the same frequency range as the part of the sound spectrum that\u00a0is audible to humans. It was a simple matter to translate those radio waves as\u00a0MP3s\u00a0\u2014 turning EMFISIS data into a radio broadcast from the heavens.One variety of wave sounded like Star Wars light sabers. These \u201cwhistler waves\u201d were\u00a0generated by lightning in the Earth's atmosphere, but escaped and bounced along the magnetic field. The lightning generates waves at multiple frequencies, and the faster (higher-pitched) waves reached the sensors just before the slower (and lower-pitched ones), resulting in the signature falling pitch that gives these waves their name.Whistler waves. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.Story continues below advertisementWhen waves propagate through the plasmasphere \u2014\u00a0the\u00a0shell of relatively low-energy plasma that encases the Earth just above the atmosphere \u2014 they generate what's known as plasmaspheric hiss.AdvertisementPlasmaspheric hiss waves as heard by NASA\u2019s Polar mission as it passed around the Earth. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.Beyond the plasmasphere, where the plasma is warmer, electrons are pushed around in explosions generated by tangled lines of the Earth's magnetic field. As the particles from the sun are pushed toward the night side of the Earth,\u00a0lower-energy particles create the \u201cchorus\u201d waves that Kletzing's wife said sounded like alien birds.Story continues below advertisementChorus waves. (NASA/University of Iowa) Can't view audio embed? Click here.\u201cThere\u2019s a side of me that listens to it and says 'Wow, what interesting wave forms,' \" Kletzing said. \u201cBut there\u2019s also a piece that just listens, and there's sort of an amazement at a certain level that the universe produces things that you\u00a0recognize: birds, and in the background it sounds to me ...\u00a0like crickets chirping.\u201dAdvertisementThe cricket-like sounds are compelling to Kletzing, not just because they evoke a languid summer evening. These sounds suggest that there could be smaller waves in space that trigger the larger ones \u2014 something Kletzing never noticed when he simply looked at the data on a computer screen.\u201cThere\u2019s little bits of stuff in there that our ear can kind of pick out \u2026\u00a0that\u00a0your eye on a plot doesn\u2019t do quite the same way,\u201d Kletzing said.\u00a0Read more:These bouncing balls on a hot pan led to a new physics discoveryA total solar eclipse is happening Aug. 21, and here's what you need to knowUpdate: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliens There is no sound in space. But if our ears could perceive the radio waves that ricochet around our planet, this is what you'd hear.  Listen to what space sounds like: an eerie chorus of \u2018alien birds\u2019",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How science fared in the midterm elections (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5931",
        "date": "2018-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/07/how-science-fared-midterm-elections/",
        "text": "This year, more candidates with degrees in science, medicine and engineering ran for Congress than ever before. Of the nearly two-dozen new candidates in this crop, at least seven won seats in the House of Representatives.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe newcomers, mostly Democrats, include Chrissy Houlahan, who has a degree in industrial engineering and won in Pennsylvania. Sean Casten, who has worked as a biochemist, flipped a longtime Republican district in Chicago. Ocean engineer Joe Cunningham, who came out strongly against offshore drilling, won in South Carolina. Lauren Underwood, a registered nurse, won Illinois\u2019s 14th District. In Virginia, Elaine Luria, who has a nuclear engineering background, defeated the Republican incumbent, Scott Taylor. Jeff Van Drew, who won a seat representing the 2nd Congressional District in New Jersey, is a dentist. Pediatrician Kim Schrier is ahead in her race for Washington\u2019s 8th District, with more than half of the vote counted as of Wednesday morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne new GOP congressman, Oklahoma\u2019s Kevin Hern, has a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering.Two candidates with PhDs in science, chemist Randy Wadkins and data scientist Mel Hall, did not win their elections. Two incumbents with PhDs kept their seats: Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a former high-energy physicist at Fermilab, and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), who worked as an engineer and has a PhD in mathematics.The pending Democratic takeover of the House is likely to shake up how Congress handles science.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.) is poised to take control of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Johnson was the first registered nurse elected to Congress, and will be the first chair of the committee with a STEM background since the 1990s, when it was led by former engineer George Brown (D-Calif.). She has a strong positive rating from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohnson\u2019s leadership of the committee will be a departure from that of its current chair, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who will retire at the end of this term. Smith frequently questioned National Science Foundation grants, fought to curb federal research on climate change and used subpoena power to demand scientists\u2019 data and correspondence.Johnson wasted no time in setting a new agenda. In a statement released Tuesday night, she alluded to recent efforts by federal officials to change how science is considered in policymaking, declaring that \u201cdefending the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks\u201d and \u201cchallenging misguided or harmful administration actions\u201d would be among her top priorities. In the statement, Johnson affirmed that \u201cclimate change is real\u201d and said she would seek ways to mitigate it.Congress will probably lose one of its most outspoken climate change deniers, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), also a member of the science committee. (Rohrabacher told Pacific Standard last week that climate science is \u201cbogus,\u201d despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real.) Democrat Harley Rouda was ahead in the race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ripple effects of the Nov. 6 midterm elections won\u2019t stop at the stratosphere, with possible impacts as far away as Jupiter\u2019s largest moon. Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee who oversees funding for the NSF and NASA, lost his reelection bid to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher. Culberson had been a leading advocate for exploration of Europa, an ice-covered moon that is considered a target in the search for life; this year he earmarked $195 million for a proposed lander mission. It\u2019s not clear what will happen to the project now that its leading champion in Congress has been unseated.Many of the left-leaning science candidates were supported by 314 Action, a political action committee that bills itself as a leader in \u201cthe pro-science resistance.\u201d Among those were Jacky Rosen, a former computer programmer and congresswoman from Nevada who was elected to the U.S. Senate, whom Shaughnessy Naughton, president of 314 Action, called a \u201cstaunch defender of science in Congress\u201d in a statement.Naughton told The Washington Post on Wednesday that Cunningham\u2019s victory in South Carolina, where President Trump won by 13 points in 2016, was a particularly good example of a candidate leaning on a scientific background: Cunningham said he drew on his experience as an ocean engineer in his opposition to a Trump administration plan that would open up drilling off the Carolina coast.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re really excited to see what these new members of congress will be able to accomplish,\u201d Naughton said, citing problems as diverse as climate change, election security and gerrymandering. \u201cAs scientists they are problem-solvers.\u201d Next February, the PAC plans to train more scientists to run for office in 2019 and beyond.This story has been updated. Read more:2018 is the year of scientists running for CongressThis group wants to fight \u2018anti-science\u2019 rhetoric by getting scientists to run for officeWhy people are marching for science: \u2018There is no Planet B\u2019 This year, scientists, doctors and engineers ran for office like never before. Here's how they did. How science fared in the midterm elections",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "How science fared in the midterm elections (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5932",
        "date": "2018-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/07/how-science-fared-midterm-elections/",
        "text": "This year, more candidates with degrees in science, medicine and engineering ran for Congress than ever before. Of the nearly two-dozen new candidates in this crop, at least seven won seats in the House of Representatives.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe newcomers, mostly Democrats, include Chrissy Houlahan, who has a degree in industrial engineering and won in Pennsylvania. Sean Casten, who has worked as a biochemist, flipped a longtime Republican district in Chicago. Ocean engineer Joe Cunningham, who came out strongly against offshore drilling, won in South Carolina. Lauren Underwood, a registered nurse, won Illinois\u2019s 14th District. In Virginia, Elaine Luria, who has a nuclear engineering background, defeated the Republican incumbent, Scott Taylor. Jeff Van Drew, who won a seat representing the 2nd Congressional District in New Jersey, is a dentist. Pediatrician Kim Schrier is ahead in her race for Washington\u2019s 8th District, with more than half of the vote counted as of Wednesday morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne new GOP congressman, Oklahoma\u2019s Kevin Hern, has a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering.Two candidates with PhDs in science, chemist Randy Wadkins and data scientist Mel Hall, did not win their elections. Two incumbents with PhDs kept their seats: Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a former high-energy physicist at Fermilab, and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), who worked as an engineer and has a PhD in mathematics.The pending Democratic takeover of the House is likely to shake up how Congress handles science.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.) is poised to take control of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Johnson was the first registered nurse elected to Congress, and will be the first chair of the committee with a STEM background since the 1990s, when it was led by former engineer George Brown (D-Calif.). She has a strong positive rating from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohnson\u2019s leadership of the committee will be a departure from that of its current chair, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who will retire at the end of this term. Smith frequently questioned National Science Foundation grants, fought to curb federal research on climate change and used subpoena power to demand scientists\u2019 data and correspondence.Johnson wasted no time in setting a new agenda. In a statement released Tuesday night, she alluded to recent efforts by federal officials to change how science is considered in policymaking, declaring that \u201cdefending the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks\u201d and \u201cchallenging misguided or harmful administration actions\u201d would be among her top priorities. In the statement, Johnson affirmed that \u201cclimate change is real\u201d and said she would seek ways to mitigate it.Congress will probably lose one of its most outspoken climate change deniers, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), also a member of the science committee. (Rohrabacher told Pacific Standard last week that climate science is \u201cbogus,\u201d despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is real.) Democrat Harley Rouda was ahead in the race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ripple effects of the Nov. 6 midterm elections won\u2019t stop at the stratosphere, with possible impacts as far away as Jupiter\u2019s largest moon. Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.), a member of the House Appropriations Committee who oversees funding for the NSF and NASA, lost his reelection bid to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher. Culberson had been a leading advocate for exploration of Europa, an ice-covered moon that is considered a target in the search for life; this year he earmarked $195 million for a proposed lander mission. It\u2019s not clear what will happen to the project now that its leading champion in Congress has been unseated.Many of the left-leaning science candidates were supported by 314 Action, a political action committee that bills itself as a leader in \u201cthe pro-science resistance.\u201d Among those were Jacky Rosen, a former computer programmer and congresswoman from Nevada who was elected to the U.S. Senate, whom Shaughnessy Naughton, president of 314 Action, called a \u201cstaunch defender of science in Congress\u201d in a statement.Naughton told The Washington Post on Wednesday that Cunningham\u2019s victory in South Carolina, where President Trump won by 13 points in 2016, was a particularly good example of a candidate leaning on a scientific background: Cunningham said he drew on his experience as an ocean engineer in his opposition to a Trump administration plan that would open up drilling off the Carolina coast.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re really excited to see what these new members of congress will be able to accomplish,\u201d Naughton said, citing problems as diverse as climate change, election security and gerrymandering. \u201cAs scientists they are problem-solvers.\u201d Next February, the PAC plans to train more scientists to run for office in 2019 and beyond.This story has been updated. Read more:2018 is the year of scientists running for CongressThis group wants to fight \u2018anti-science\u2019 rhetoric by getting scientists to run for officeWhy people are marching for science: \u2018There is no Planet B\u2019 This year, scientists, doctors and engineers ran for office like never before. Here's how they did. How science fared in the midterm elections",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye will join the March for Science (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5933",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/30/bill-nye-will-join-the-march-for-science/",
        "text": "\u201cScience guy\u201d Bill Nye\u00a0will join\u00a0Mona Hanna-Attisha, the doctor who helped expose lead poisoning in Flint, Mich., and Lydia Villa-Komaroff, a molecular biologist who helped\u00a0develop\u00a0the technique for making insulin, in headlining the upcoming March for Science in Washington.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOrganizers announced Thursday that the three\u00a0will be honorary co-chairs and feature in the festivities on the Mall. The April 22 event, which will involve the event in Washington and sister events in more than 400 other cities, is shaping up to be one of the\u00a0scientific community's biggest demonstrations ever. Conceived\u00a0online after President Trump's inauguration and galvanized by the administration's handling of science issues, the march has gained a lot of steam in recent months. In February, some of the nation's biggest scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said they'd join in.\u00a0Some 800,000 people have said online that they'll attend one of the\u00a0events.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNye said Wednesday that he's never seen the scientific community so energized \u2014 or troubled by \u2014 political issues. Researchers are concerned by the president's proposed funding cuts to science agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. And everyone should be alarmed by the Trump administration's skepticism of\u00a0climate change, Nye said \u2014 \u201cthe most serious issue facing humankind.\u201d\u201cScience is what makes our world what it is,\u201d Nye said. \u201cTo have a movement or a tendency to set science aside is in no one\u2019s best\u00a0interest ... but nevertheless, that's what's happening in the U.S.\u201dScience societies have long shunned politics. But now they're ready to march.Nye is the only bona fide celebrity of the three co-chairs. The 1990s TV icon, who has squared off against creationists and climate change deniers and is now CEO of the space advocacy group the Planetary Society, is exactly the kind of person you'd expect to headline a science march.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHanna-Attisha and Villa-Komaroff are giants in the public health and science communities\u00a0but not necessarily household names.The Flint pediatrician risked her career to alert officials to the dangerous levels of lead in her patients' blood. Her whistleblowing drew public attention to the crisis and led\u00a0to an investigation of the city's water system. Time magazine named her one of its 100 most influential people in 2016, and her work garnered awards from environmental and social justice organizations.In 1975, Villa-Komaroff became the third Mexican American woman to receive a science doctorate in the United States. Shortly after getting her PhD in the 1970s, she was part of the team of researchers who discovered that bacteria could be used to generate insulin \u2014 a vital medication for treating diabetes. She is a fierce advocate for diversity in science and a founder of\u00a0SACNAS, the\u00a0Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese two co-chairs were consciously selected to address criticisms that the March for Science hasn't done enough to include women and minorities, who often face additional\u00a0barriers working in scientific fields. The organizers \u2014 volunteers who are mostly\u00a0new to political protest \u2014 have scrambled to\u00a0address that and other concerns.Some people say the march risks turning scientists into an interest group and are skeptical of explicit references to diversity. \u201cScience sees no color\u201d is a frequent refrain in online debates.Trump\u2019s budget calls for seismic disruption in medical and science researchOn the other hand, many contend that the march needs to be more aggressive in addressing inequality. An early organizer,\u00a0University of Maine paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill, quit the march's organizing committee\u00a0over frustration with its leadership's handling of diversity issues. The\u00a0diversity statement on the march website has gone through four revisions as organizers tried to keep up with criticisms.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording to BuzzFeed, march organizers initially planned to announce Nye as the first co-chair last week, but held off after deciding it would look bad to name a white man as the event's first public face.Adding Hanna-Attisha and Villa-Komaroff \u201cwas an opportunity to put up a picture of science that did not just fit the white male image,\u201d organizer Stephani Page told BuzzFeed.\u00a0Page was invited to join the march's steering committee in February after she faulted its handling of diversity.March spokesman Aaron Huertas stressed that\u00a0the work Hanna-Attisha and Villa-Komaroff have done is more important than their backgrounds. Both have devoted their careers to serving marginalized communities, and their research benefits people who might otherwise be left behind.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat\u00a0happened in Flint is so illustrative of why we want and need a March for Science,\u201d Huertas said, because it shows \"what happens when scientific information is hidden from the public.\u201dRead more:Mice have been infesting homes ever since humans started building themThis black hole is being pushed around its galaxy by gravitational wavesTrump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsAncient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians. Their bones tell a different story.A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including Pluto Flint pediatrician and whistleblower Mona Hanna-Attisha and molecular biologist Lydia Villa-Komaroff will also headline the event \u2014 a reflection of organizers' desire to reflect diversity in science.  Bill Nye will join the March for Science",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Company shoots shiny orb into orbit and angers astronomers over \u2018space graffiti.\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5934",
        "date": "2018-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/26/company-shoots-shiny-orb-into-orbit-astronomers-irked-over-space-graffiti/",
        "text": "Earlier this month, the New Zealand-based private spaceflight company Rocket Lab successfully delivered its first orbital payload. Rocket Lab's Electron rocket released, along with three commercial satellites, an art installation-as-satellite called the Humanity Star.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe satellite, a highly reflective 65-faced ball crafted of carbon fiber, will orbit Earth for nine months.\u00a0Around October, its orbit will decay, and the satellite will\u00a0disintegrate as it descends in the atmosphere. Until its destruction, the\u00a0Humanity Star will\u00a0twinkle so brilliantly it can be witnessed by observers below. It will be most visible at dawn or dusk, creating an effect Rocket Lab likened on its website to a \u201cbright flashing shooting star.\u201d Rocket Lab's goal is nothing less than a reflection on the cosmos. \u201cWait for when the Humanity Star is overhead and take your loved ones outside to look up and reflect. You may just feel a connection to the more than seven billion other people on this planet we share this ride with,\u201d founder\u00a0Peter Beck said in a statement on the company's website (which also hosts a location tracker\u00a0for the orb).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the giant\u00a0Dungeons & Dragons die floating through space is not a critical hit. Not among professional stargazers.\u00a0On Thursday, Mashable journalist Miriam Kramer collected criticisms from astronomers on Twitter. The scientists described the\u00a0Humanity Star as vandalism, a disco ball, \u201cspace graffiti\u201d and \u201cspace garbage.\u201d Naked eyes can already see the\u00a0International Space Station, astronomer Eric Mamajek tweeted, and\u00a0sending reflective objects into orbit has not, in the past, prompted\u00a0\u201cawe and world peace.\u201dColumbia University astronomer Caleb A. Scharf, writing at Scientific American, said the idea \u201csounds like jolly nice fun\u201d but also fills him \u201cwith a big dose of dread.\u201d The satellite, in his perspective, is an unwanted intrusion into an environment increasingly crowded by satellites.There are a few thousand\u00a0satellites in Earth's orbit. And our ability to deploy a bunch\u00a0of satellites at once is growing: In February, India deployed\u00a0104 small satellites from a single rocket, setting a world record.\u00a0Decades before space powers had such capabilities, NASA astrophysicist Donald Kessler worried about space debris triggering a chain reaction of collisions among a sky thick with satellites, a scenario termed\u00a0the \u201cKessler syndrome.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is not to suggest that\u00a0the Humanity Star will be the spark that sets off a Kessler syndrome. \u201cKessler was describing an orbital Nagasaki, where everything was annihilated,\u201d Federal Communications Commission economist Peter J. Alexander, who has written a paper on space trash, told The Washington Post in 2013. \u201cBut there are degrees in which the environment gets degraded even before that sort of collisional cascade,\u201d he added.\u201cI don't want to be too negative about the Rocket Lab ball \u2014 I salute them for their success in putting it into orbit,\u201d New York University astrophysicist Benjamin Pope told The Post. He also pointed to a tweet that suggested not everyone in the field was opposed, summing up the counternarrative: \u201cIt is probably short lived and kind of cool.\u201dThat said, he disagreed with Rocket Lab's decision. \u201cPrivately sending bright toys up there can harm the international astronomical community's use of it,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSatellites do not need to be chronic pests or annihilators to cause headaches.\u00a0A quick blaze through a telescope's field of view can\u00a0disrupt\u00a0research. \u201cAstronomers are well used to finding their hard won images streaked with the destructive\u00a0light trails of glinting objects as they pass overhead,\u201d wrote Scharf, who also compared launching the Humanity Star to sticking a \u201cbig flashing strobe-light on a polar bear.\u201dFor no reason at all, here's what it looks like when a satellite goes through Hubble's field of view whilst you are trying to image something in the distant solar system. pic.twitter.com/eLWR1ncdqx\u2014 Alex Parker (@Alex_Parker) January 25, 2018\n\n\u201cThis Humanity Star could well be a minor annoyance,\u201d Pope said, \u201cin particular, as it zooms through the sky it will pass through the fields of view of ground based observatories and ruin patches of their data.\u201d He could only find limited information about the object's orbit, but he was concerned it might travel above large observatories in Hawaii or Chile, which are particularly sensitive to bright objects.Rocket Lab did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But\u00a0when Pope tweeted, \u201cOh god why would you do this to us astronomers,\u201d the company replied that the object's presence\u00a0will be short-lived.The Humanity Star will blink across the sky for just a seconds, and it won't be visible in your region for the full 9 months in orbit. Our hope is that it draws people's attention to the stars, then leaves them looking to the universe long after The Humanity Star has passed.\u2014 Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) January 24, 2018\n\nThe company is also \u201cconsidering future iterations of the Humanity Star\u201d once this one is destroyed, according to its website.Read more:A \u2018UFO sighting\u2019 briefly freaked out the West Coast. There was an earthly explanation.Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverChina's 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit. Scientists on Twitter called the Humanity Star vandalism, a disco ball and \u201cspace garbage.\u201d  Company shoots shiny orb into orbit and angers astronomers over \u2018space graffiti.\u2019",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Company shoots shiny orb into orbit and angers astronomers over \u2018space graffiti.\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5935",
        "date": "2018-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/26/company-shoots-shiny-orb-into-orbit-astronomers-irked-over-space-graffiti/",
        "text": "Earlier this month, the New Zealand-based private spaceflight company Rocket Lab successfully delivered its first orbital payload. Rocket Lab's Electron rocket released, along with three commercial satellites, an art installation-as-satellite called the Humanity Star.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe satellite, a highly reflective 65-faced ball crafted of carbon fiber, will orbit Earth for nine months.\u00a0Around October, its orbit will decay, and the satellite will\u00a0disintegrate as it descends in the atmosphere. Until its destruction, the\u00a0Humanity Star will\u00a0twinkle so brilliantly it can be witnessed by observers below. It will be most visible at dawn or dusk, creating an effect Rocket Lab likened on its website to a \u201cbright flashing shooting star.\u201d Rocket Lab's goal is nothing less than a reflection on the cosmos. \u201cWait for when the Humanity Star is overhead and take your loved ones outside to look up and reflect. You may just feel a connection to the more than seven billion other people on this planet we share this ride with,\u201d founder\u00a0Peter Beck said in a statement on the company's website (which also hosts a location tracker\u00a0for the orb).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the giant\u00a0Dungeons & Dragons die floating through space is not a critical hit. Not among professional stargazers.\u00a0On Thursday, Mashable journalist Miriam Kramer collected criticisms from astronomers on Twitter. The scientists described the\u00a0Humanity Star as vandalism, a disco ball, \u201cspace graffiti\u201d and \u201cspace garbage.\u201d Naked eyes can already see the\u00a0International Space Station, astronomer Eric Mamajek tweeted, and\u00a0sending reflective objects into orbit has not, in the past, prompted\u00a0\u201cawe and world peace.\u201dColumbia University astronomer Caleb A. Scharf, writing at Scientific American, said the idea \u201csounds like jolly nice fun\u201d but also fills him \u201cwith a big dose of dread.\u201d The satellite, in his perspective, is an unwanted intrusion into an environment increasingly crowded by satellites.There are a few thousand\u00a0satellites in Earth's orbit. And our ability to deploy a bunch\u00a0of satellites at once is growing: In February, India deployed\u00a0104 small satellites from a single rocket, setting a world record.\u00a0Decades before space powers had such capabilities, NASA astrophysicist Donald Kessler worried about space debris triggering a chain reaction of collisions among a sky thick with satellites, a scenario termed\u00a0the \u201cKessler syndrome.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is not to suggest that\u00a0the Humanity Star will be the spark that sets off a Kessler syndrome. \u201cKessler was describing an orbital Nagasaki, where everything was annihilated,\u201d Federal Communications Commission economist Peter J. Alexander, who has written a paper on space trash, told The Washington Post in 2013. \u201cBut there are degrees in which the environment gets degraded even before that sort of collisional cascade,\u201d he added.\u201cI don't want to be too negative about the Rocket Lab ball \u2014 I salute them for their success in putting it into orbit,\u201d New York University astrophysicist Benjamin Pope told The Post. He also pointed to a tweet that suggested not everyone in the field was opposed, summing up the counternarrative: \u201cIt is probably short lived and kind of cool.\u201dThat said, he disagreed with Rocket Lab's decision. \u201cPrivately sending bright toys up there can harm the international astronomical community's use of it,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSatellites do not need to be chronic pests or annihilators to cause headaches.\u00a0A quick blaze through a telescope's field of view can\u00a0disrupt\u00a0research. \u201cAstronomers are well used to finding their hard won images streaked with the destructive\u00a0light trails of glinting objects as they pass overhead,\u201d wrote Scharf, who also compared launching the Humanity Star to sticking a \u201cbig flashing strobe-light on a polar bear.\u201dFor no reason at all, here's what it looks like when a satellite goes through Hubble's field of view whilst you are trying to image something in the distant solar system. pic.twitter.com/eLWR1ncdqx\u2014 Alex Parker (@Alex_Parker) January 25, 2018\n\n\u201cThis Humanity Star could well be a minor annoyance,\u201d Pope said, \u201cin particular, as it zooms through the sky it will pass through the fields of view of ground based observatories and ruin patches of their data.\u201d He could only find limited information about the object's orbit, but he was concerned it might travel above large observatories in Hawaii or Chile, which are particularly sensitive to bright objects.Rocket Lab did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But\u00a0when Pope tweeted, \u201cOh god why would you do this to us astronomers,\u201d the company replied that the object's presence\u00a0will be short-lived.The Humanity Star will blink across the sky for just a seconds, and it won't be visible in your region for the full 9 months in orbit. Our hope is that it draws people's attention to the stars, then leaves them looking to the universe long after The Humanity Star has passed.\u2014 Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) January 24, 2018\n\nThe company is also \u201cconsidering future iterations of the Humanity Star\u201d once this one is destroyed, according to its website.Read more:A \u2018UFO sighting\u2019 briefly freaked out the West Coast. There was an earthly explanation.Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it foreverChina's 9\u00bd-ton space lab will soon crash to Earth. No one knows where it will hit. Scientists on Twitter called the Humanity Star vandalism, a disco ball and \u201cspace garbage.\u201d  Company shoots shiny orb into orbit and angers astronomers over \u2018space graffiti.\u2019",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists regret to inform you that this mystery space object is (probably) not aliens (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5936",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/07/03/scientists-regret-inform-you-that-mystery-space-object-is-probably-not-aliens/",
        "text": "All of the stars Matthew Knight saw through the giant telescope in Arizona were bright with persistent light. All of them but one, which appeared to be flashing, in a way \u2014 light that went in and out, dull and then bright, every hour. He assumed there was something wrong with his data. But days earlier, the University of Maryland research scientist heard about a strange object out in space, when it was discovered by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat he was seeing was an interstellar object \u2014 the first we have ever been able to observe from Earth \u2014 tumble through our solar system, rotating and reflecting sunlight in pulses.When it was discovered, many theories about the object\u2019s origin emerged. One suggested it was from an alien civilization, sailing into our solar system. Some researchers thought it was possible the object was an alien solar sail, relying on the sun\u2019s light to push it through space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t want to completely say it\u2019s not aliens because we didn\u2019t actually go to it and see it up close,\u201d Knight said. \u201cBut I think that\u2019s a very unlikely possibility.\u201dThe Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)For a week in late October 2017, data was collected as the object sped through the solar system. Scientists concluded the cigar-shaped object, named \u2018Oumuamua, was natural. It did not originate from an alien civilization. In a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, 14 scientists, including Knight, wrote that they found \u201cno compelling evidence to favour an alien explanation for \u2018Oumuamua,\u201d to the dismay of alien hunters everywhere.Pronounced Oh-Moo-uh-Moo-uh, the Hawaiian word roughly translates to \u201cmessenger from afar.\u201d Co-author Karen Meech, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, asked Hawaiian linguists to name the object after the first week of observations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe object\u2019s path tipped scientists off to its origins, proving it was indeed interstellar \u2014 or, in other words, having come from outside our solar system. It simply was not taking the kind of path that one of our own solar system\u2019s objects would take.\u201cIt didn\u2019t actually get captured here, it was just passing through,\u201d Knight said, referring to when a solar system\u2019s gravity draws an object into orbit. \u201cSo, it whizzed by us, passed the sun and then it went back out.\"Scientists noticed that \u2018Oumuamua appeared to unexpectedly accelerate. According to Knight, this could have been because the object was a comet, with ice that was vaporizing and giving it \u201ca little bit of a kick\u201d as it entered the solar system. But the scientists did not see a gas tail or directly detect any ice.Story continues below advertisementInstead, the scientists categorized it more generally as planetesimal, meaning that \u2018Oumuamua is probably \u201cjust a leftover remnant from another solar system\u2019s birth process,\u201d Meech said, like a giant boulder that at some point could have fused with other space rocks to form a planet, but didn\u2019t. After that, scientists suspect, \u2018Oumuamua was ejected from its own solar system.Now it\u2019s on a road trip through the galaxy.\u201cIt was just traveling through space, kind of minding its own business, and at some point, it got close enough to our solar system that then it started feeling the gravitational tug from our sun, and then it got pulled through,\u201d Knight said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce in our solar system, \u2018Oumuamua sped and tumbled into visibility. Using Earth telescopes, Meech\u2019s team recorded data for a week. Then, from November 2018 through the first week of January, it was only faintly visible through the Hubble Space Telescope.\u2018Oumuamua\u2019s brightness changed in visibility, as one viewed the narrow side and then the long side. Knight compared it to looking at a bottle of soda.\u201cIf you\u2019re seeing the length of it, it\u2019s a very wide cross section,\u201d Knight said. \u201cBut if you\u2019re looking at it down the cap, you\u2019re only seeing a narrow area.\u201dScientists don\u2019t know exactly how big \u2018Oumuamua is. They could estimate only because of how it reflected sunlight. Knight said \u201csizes from about [650 feet] to about [3,300 feet] would all be consistent with known asteroids and comets in our solar system.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor about the past 30 years, scientists predicted that objects from another star system could be discovered. Over the past 10 years, the technology to survey for such faint and fast objects improved. \u2018Oumuamua is the first, but probably not the last, interstellar object to be observed. Over the next 10 years, scientists could probably see one every year.In early July, \u2018Oumuamua was just beyond Saturn.\u201cOver the next hundreds of years, it will be zooming out of our solar system,\u201d Knight said. \u201cAnd then eventually it will just be back out in interstellar space between stars.\u201dRead more:Midwestern farmers\u2019 struggles with extreme weather are visible from spaceHow do you read ancient scrolls too brittle to unfurl? An American scientist may have an answer. When it was discovered, many theories emerged, including \"aliens.\" But the actual explanation is significant. Scientists regret to inform you that this mystery space object is (probably) not aliens",
        "author": "Morgan Krakow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists regret to inform you that this mystery space object is (probably) not aliens (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5937",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/07/03/scientists-regret-inform-you-that-mystery-space-object-is-probably-not-aliens/",
        "text": "All of the stars Matthew Knight saw through the giant telescope in Arizona were bright with persistent light. All of them but one, which appeared to be flashing, in a way \u2014 light that went in and out, dull and then bright, every hour. He assumed there was something wrong with his data. But days earlier, the University of Maryland research scientist heard about a strange object out in space, when it was discovered by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Hawaii. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat he was seeing was an interstellar object \u2014 the first we have ever been able to observe from Earth \u2014 tumble through our solar system, rotating and reflecting sunlight in pulses.When it was discovered, many theories about the object\u2019s origin emerged. One suggested it was from an alien civilization, sailing into our solar system. Some researchers thought it was possible the object was an alien solar sail, relying on the sun\u2019s light to push it through space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t want to completely say it\u2019s not aliens because we didn\u2019t actually go to it and see it up close,\u201d Knight said. \u201cBut I think that\u2019s a very unlikely possibility.\u201dThe Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)For a week in late October 2017, data was collected as the object sped through the solar system. Scientists concluded the cigar-shaped object, named \u2018Oumuamua, was natural. It did not originate from an alien civilization. In a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, 14 scientists, including Knight, wrote that they found \u201cno compelling evidence to favour an alien explanation for \u2018Oumuamua,\u201d to the dismay of alien hunters everywhere.Pronounced Oh-Moo-uh-Moo-uh, the Hawaiian word roughly translates to \u201cmessenger from afar.\u201d Co-author Karen Meech, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, asked Hawaiian linguists to name the object after the first week of observations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe object\u2019s path tipped scientists off to its origins, proving it was indeed interstellar \u2014 or, in other words, having come from outside our solar system. It simply was not taking the kind of path that one of our own solar system\u2019s objects would take.\u201cIt didn\u2019t actually get captured here, it was just passing through,\u201d Knight said, referring to when a solar system\u2019s gravity draws an object into orbit. \u201cSo, it whizzed by us, passed the sun and then it went back out.\"Scientists noticed that \u2018Oumuamua appeared to unexpectedly accelerate. According to Knight, this could have been because the object was a comet, with ice that was vaporizing and giving it \u201ca little bit of a kick\u201d as it entered the solar system. But the scientists did not see a gas tail or directly detect any ice.Story continues below advertisementInstead, the scientists categorized it more generally as planetesimal, meaning that \u2018Oumuamua is probably \u201cjust a leftover remnant from another solar system\u2019s birth process,\u201d Meech said, like a giant boulder that at some point could have fused with other space rocks to form a planet, but didn\u2019t. After that, scientists suspect, \u2018Oumuamua was ejected from its own solar system.Now it\u2019s on a road trip through the galaxy.\u201cIt was just traveling through space, kind of minding its own business, and at some point, it got close enough to our solar system that then it started feeling the gravitational tug from our sun, and then it got pulled through,\u201d Knight said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce in our solar system, \u2018Oumuamua sped and tumbled into visibility. Using Earth telescopes, Meech\u2019s team recorded data for a week. Then, from November 2018 through the first week of January, it was only faintly visible through the Hubble Space Telescope.\u2018Oumuamua\u2019s brightness changed in visibility, as one viewed the narrow side and then the long side. Knight compared it to looking at a bottle of soda.\u201cIf you\u2019re seeing the length of it, it\u2019s a very wide cross section,\u201d Knight said. \u201cBut if you\u2019re looking at it down the cap, you\u2019re only seeing a narrow area.\u201dScientists don\u2019t know exactly how big \u2018Oumuamua is. They could estimate only because of how it reflected sunlight. Knight said \u201csizes from about [650 feet] to about [3,300 feet] would all be consistent with known asteroids and comets in our solar system.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor about the past 30 years, scientists predicted that objects from another star system could be discovered. Over the past 10 years, the technology to survey for such faint and fast objects improved. \u2018Oumuamua is the first, but probably not the last, interstellar object to be observed. Over the next 10 years, scientists could probably see one every year.In early July, \u2018Oumuamua was just beyond Saturn.\u201cOver the next hundreds of years, it will be zooming out of our solar system,\u201d Knight said. \u201cAnd then eventually it will just be back out in interstellar space between stars.\u201dRead more:Midwestern farmers\u2019 struggles with extreme weather are visible from spaceHow do you read ancient scrolls too brittle to unfurl? An American scientist may have an answer. When it was discovered, many theories emerged, including \"aliens.\" But the actual explanation is significant. Scientists regret to inform you that this mystery space object is (probably) not aliens",
        "author": "Morgan Krakow"
    },
    {
        "title": "This black hole is being pushed around its galaxy by gravitational waves (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5938",
        "date": "2017-03-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/24/this-black-hole-is-being-pushed-around-its-galaxy-by-gravitational-waves/",
        "text": "Black holes are the big bullies of space. They're so massive that\u00a0their gravity doesn't let any light escape. The biggest black holes \u2014 called \u201csupermassive\u201d \u2014 weigh as much as a billion suns. Looming at the center of seemingly every galaxy, including the Milky Way, they control the formation of stars and can deform the fabric of space-time itself. It takes a lot to push a black hole around. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut eight billion light-years from Earth, in a galaxy called 3C 186, astronomers have discovered a supermassive black hole that got kicked off its throne. Now it's rocketing through space at a speed of almost 5\u00a0million miles an hour.There's one thing that could unseat a supermassive black hole in this manner, the researchers say: gravitational waves.A year later, scientists keep listening to gravitational waves, the soundtrack of the cosmosFirst predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago, gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by the universe's most cataclysmic events \u2014 just as concentric circles form on the surface of a pond after you toss in a heavy rock. Last year, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) showed that\u00a0this phenomenon exists when they detected gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes.In a paper\u00a0that will publish next week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, Marco Chiaberge and his colleagues say that the weird behavior of the black hole in galaxy 3C 186 is likely the result of gravitational waves from another pair of colliding black holes.The roving black hole was detected in an image taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The fuzzy splotch that was galaxy 3C 186 contained an incredibly bright spot, a quasar. This wasn't unusual \u2014 a quasar is the\u00a0nucleus of a galaxy, and it's bright because of the disk of gas that surrounds the black hole at its center.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat caught\u00a0Chiaberge's eye was the quasar's location, 35,000 light-years from the center of its galaxy.\u201cI thought we were seeing something very peculiar,\u201d he said in a NASA news release.Scientists captured incredible photographic proof of a landslide on a cometChiaberge, who works at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University, asked fellow astronomers\u00a0for their observations from a range of other instruments, including the Chandra space observatory and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's telescope in New Mexico. The former measures X-rays; the latter specializes in detecting redshift, the stretching of light that is detected as something travels through space.Their observations confirmed the Hubble finding. They also helped pin down the black hole's\u00a0mass (equal to that of a billion suns) and the speed at which the gas around it was traveling (4.7 million miles an hour).Meanwhile, the Hubble image offered a clue about what dislodged the black hole from its galaxy's center.\u00a0The host galaxy bore faint, arc-shaped features called tidal tales, which are produced by\u00a0the gravitational tug-of-war that takes place when two galaxies collide. This suggested that\u00a0galaxy 3C 186 had recently merged with another system, and perhaps their black holes merged too.What happened next, scientists can only theorize.\u00a0Chiaberge and his colleagues suggest that as the galaxies collided, their black holes began to circle each other, flinging out gravity waves \u201clike water from a lawn sprinkler,\u201d as NASA described it. If the black holes had unequal masses and spin rates, they might have sent more gravitational waves in one direction than the other. When the collision was complete, the newly merged black hole would have then recoiled from the strongest gravitational waves, shooting off in the opposite direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis asymmetry depends on properties such as the mass and the relative orientation of the [black holes']\u00a0rotation axes before the merger,\u201d Colin Norman of STScI and Johns Hopkins University, a co-author on the paper, said in the NASA news release. \u201cThat's why these objects are so rare.\u201dThere is an alternative explanation for the roving black hole, the researchers noted. It's possible that the quasar only appears to be located in galaxy\u00a03C 186, but is actually just behind it \u2014 explaining why galaxy's nucleus seems to be off-center.But if that's the case, the scientists say, researchers should have detected the quasar's actual host galaxy \u2014 and they haven't yet. If\u00a0Chiaberge's interpretation is correct, it can help astronomers understand what happens in a black hole merger.Story continues below advertisementEven without knowing the source of the behavior, the scientists\u00a0have drawn some pretty incredible conclusions about it. They estimate that the energy required to jettison a black hole like the one in 3C 186 would be equivalent to 100 million supernovas. Now the black hole is moving so fast it could cover\u00a0the distance between the Earth and the Moon in a mere 3 minutes. In\u00a0about 20 million years, the astronomers predict, it will escape its galaxy and roam alone through the universe forever.Whatever is going on with this bizarre black hole, it's certainly had a wild ride.Read more:Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsAncient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians. Their bones tell a different story.A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including PlutoNASA just found an orbiter that's been missing around the moon for 8 years I thought we were seeing something very peculiar.' A wandering supermassive black hole may have been kicked off its throne by a pair of colliding black holes. This black hole is being pushed around its galaxy by gravitational waves",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "This bizarre, backward asteroid might be a visitor from another star (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5939",
        "date": "2018-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/21/this-bizarre-backward-asteroid-might-be-a-visitor-from-another-star/",
        "text": "For\u00a0billions of years, without our knowing it, scientists say, our solar system has harbored a visitor from another star.This interstellar immigrant \u2014 an asteroid\u00a0dubbed 2015 BZ509 \u2014 lurks in the orbit of Jupiter, where it circles the sun in the opposite direction of the gas-giant planet and nearly everything else in the solar system. The twin facts that it shares an orbit with a planet and flies against the flow of traffic makes it like no other known object in our celestial neighborhood. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to new research published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, that's because it doesn't come from here.\u00a0Careful analysis of the asteroid's orbit and repeated simulations of every possible origin scenario found it most likely migrated from another planetary system when the\u00a0sun\u00a0still inhabited the stellar nursery of its infancy 4.5 billion years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe were not at all expecting to find out it came from another star,\u201d said\u00a0Fathi Namouni, an astronomer with the\u00a0Observatory of\u00a0Cote d'Azur in France who co-authored the study\u00a0alongside\u00a0Sao Paulo State University researcher\u00a0Helena Morais.\u201cBut the general idea, which is very encouraging, is we now know the solar system did not form in isolation,\u201d Namouni said.\u00a0It's a provocative conclusion \u2014 reached by process of elimination and without demonstrating\u00a0how 2015 BZ509 could have\u00a0been captured from another star, outside researchers noted.\u201cIt's feasible what they're saying, but there are other possibilities,\u201d said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the new study. \u201cWe\u00a0live in such a dynamical universe, it's hard to rule out just pure chaos and collisions.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLast year, Quintana was part of a team of NASA researchers who analyzed\u00a0'Oumuamua \u2014\u00a0the first interstellar solar system visitor scientists have ever seen. That cigar-shaped space rock is\u00a0tumbling past us\u00a0at such high speeds it could only have originated elsewhere, researchers said, and it's already on its way back out into space. It will pass Neptune's orbit in 2022 and eventually leave the solar system en route to the constellation Pegasus, according to NASA.By comparison,\u00a02015 BZ509 \u2014 known to those who research it closely as \u201cBee Zed\u201d \u2014 appears to\u00a0be here for the long haul.The asteroid's\u00a0orbit immediately made it an outlier when it was discovered in 2014. Because basically everything in the solar system was born from the same spinning cloud of dust and gas that circled the infant sun, it takes extraordinary circumstances to knock an object into a \u201cretrograde,\u201d or backward, orbit. Just 95 of the nearly 800,000 known asteroids behave in this manner.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven among that select group, Bee Zed stands out. Whereas most retrograde asteroids are thought to be unstable, a 2017 study found Bee Zed has inhabited its current position for at least a million years.\u00a0It seems to be held in place by its unique relationship with Jupiter. As the three-kilometer space rock passes the gas giant\u00a0\u2014 twice during every 12-year-orbit of the sun \u2014 the gravitational interactions balance each other in\u00a0what's known as\u00a0an \u201corbital resonance.\u201d (This same phenomenon keeps Neptune and Pluto from crashing into each other, even though their orbits cross.)Namouni and Morais sought to push this back even further in time, building a computer simulation of our solar system and populating it with a million digital \u201cclones\u201d of Bee Zed. Each followed slightly different orbital parameters based on astronomers' limited knowledge of Bee Zed's behavior.\u00a0Of the scenarios that were stable over the lifetime of the solar system (the only statistically likely scenario that would allow humans to witness it), most\u00a0placed Bee Zed in its current position\u00a0since the beginning.After considering a range of possible origin stories, the scientists concluded that the asteroid must\u00a0be\u00a0a migrant. In a news release from the Royal Astronomical Society, Morais explained that the sun formed in a tightly packed cluster with other newborn stars.\u201cThe close proximity of the stars, aided by the gravitational forces of the planets, help these systems attract, remove and capture asteroids from one another,\u201d she said.If confirmed, the discovery could indicate that at least some components of our solar system came from elsewhere.\u00a0Namouni called for further observations of the object, especially measurements of its\u00a0composition that could reveal whether it carries water. The results might reveal further hints about the asteroid's origins and raise the possibility that our early environment was \u201cenriched\u201d by interstellar interactions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Quintana emphasized that\u00a0this extrasolar origin story is still just one possibility of many. She could imagine scenarios in which a combination of collisions and a large disturbance of the solar system \u2014 perhaps from a passing swarm of objects, or the movement of the hypothetical \u201cPlanet Nine\u201d \u2014 pushed Bee Zed into its current position.Other scientists suggested the object may be an inactive comet knocked in from the Oort cloud \u2014 the bubble of icy debris that enshrouds the outer solar system. Retrograde motion is more common in comets; for example, Halley's comet circles the sun backward and mostly below the plane in which the planets move.Whatever the answer, the questions posed by Bee Zed are worth probing further, Quintana said.\u201cEvery time we\u00a0find these\u00a0weird\u00a0objects in our solar system, it's just another puzzle piece that we have to fit with our idea of how planets formed,\u201d she said.Read more:An alien star sideswiped our solar system and sent comets reeling, scientists sayA long asteroid's jacket of gunkVisitor from beyond our solar system probed for signs of life. So far, it's silent. A curious \u2014 if controversial \u2014 study suggests that the odd space rock was captured when the solar system formed.   This bizarre, backward asteroid might be a visitor from another star",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "He broke ground in stem-cell research. Now he\u2019s running for Congress. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5940",
        "date": "2017-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/20/he-broke-ground-in-stem-cell-research-now-hes-running-for-congress/",
        "text": "The small pack of scientists running for political office has grown by one.Stem-cell researcher Hans Keirstead, 50, announced last week that he will try to unseat California\u2019s Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R). Keirstead, a Democrat with a PhD in neuroscience from the University of British Columbia, was a professor at the University of California at Irvine\u00a0before launching and selling several biotech companies. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRohrabacher, who represents the 48th District in Southern California, has been in Congress since 1988. Democrats there see 2018 as\u00a0a vulnerable year for the incumbent. Although Republicans outnumber Democrats in the\u00a0district, Hillary Clinton swung it in the 2016 election. And Rohrabacher has come under scrutiny for his support of a\u00a0closer relationship with Russia. In May, the chair of Orange County Democrats told\u00a0The Washington Post that challengers were \u201ccoming out the woodwork\u201d to oppose him. Five candidates\u00a0besides Keirstead have declared they are running for the seat.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKeirstead emerged from academic and entrepreneurial fields. He\u00a0pioneered a technique to purify stem cells \u2014 \u201cYou can\u2019t go putting toenails into the spinal cord,\u201d he said\u00a0\u2014 and applied this method to spinal-cord injuries and diseases such as\u00a0cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. In 2014,\u00a0he sold a stem-cell company in a deal reportedly worth more than $100 million. (He will not fund\u00a0his own campaign, he told the Los Angeles Times.) Keirstead has the\u00a0support\u00a0of\u00a0314 Action, a nonprofit group that encourages scientists to seek public office.The Post spoke by phone with the first-time candidate. The following is lightly edited for space and clarity.TWP: Your opponent, who is a member of the House Science Committee, told Science magazine in 2012 that he \u201cloved science.\u201d How would you compare your approaches to science?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKeirstead:\u00a0I\u2019m delighted that Dana Rohrabacher loves science. That\u2019s fabulous. But I\u2019m also very convinced that he doesn\u2019t understand science. There\u2019s a real big difference. If you love science, that\u2019s one thing. If you don\u2019t understand it, you can\u2019t effect change, and you make wrong decisions.Dana Rohrabacher does not understand global warming. He actually attributed it to the flatulence of dinosaurs, in a serious manner, a while back. [Rohrabacher has\u00a0said this was\u00a0a joke\u00a0to make fun of scientists who study cow methane.]His inaction and lack of understanding has tremendous detriment on the scientific community. Likewise is the funding to health care and how to fix the health-care system that [former president Barack] Obama put in place. That was not a perfect system by any means; it\u2019s got problems.\u00a0But it has also bettered our system. It needs to be worked with in order to further better our system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTWP: Has your career in stem-cell research influenced your politics?Keirstead:\u00a0I was front and center in the national and international debate on stem cells. I was the first scientist in the world to have developed a treatment for spinal-cord injury using stem cells. The dramatic nature of the recovery we saw in rodents, going from paralyzed to walking, drew a great deal of attention and really put me at the center of this issue as it was just coming to light in the public forums.I did a lot of advising of senators and congressmen all throughout those years and periodically since that time. . . . I was one of the key scientific advisers to Proposition 71 that turned into the $3 billion California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a not-for-profit that distributes $300 million every year for regenerative medicine in a broad sense.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat was a very good example of how medical breakthroughs and discoveries and advancement are not at odds with economic development. You do not have to cut medical budgets to stimulate the economy. Any scientist and medical doctor will tell you: \u201cGive me some time, and I will generate a treatment.\u201d And most of the time they are right. What happens with that treatment is small companies are born, people stop dying, quality of life improves.I see what the government\u2019s doing right now as very much opposite that. Frankly, when I look at the deficits of Congress, I see why. When I look at who is in the administration, the types of individuals that we have in Congress, I see very hard-working people doing what they feel is a terrific job. But there is just not the broad and deep field experience in the medical and health-care sectors.TWP: Was it this perceived deficit that motivated you to run for Congress?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKeirstead:\u00a0First and foremost, I see it as a continuation of my lifelong pursuits of trying to help people. I see Congress as a larger stage to effect positive change. If I could have some positive influence in Congress, I could aid [those] that are trying to do good in the world but are having difficulty.Let me give you an example: I\u2019m now expanding into brain cancer. I\u2019m running a Phase 2\u00a0clinical trial with my team.\u00a0I will not be able to do that if these policy changes of Trump\u2019s are instituted and a small company like mine is faced with double user fees. It\u2019s not in the budget. I can\u2019t ask an investor for another half of a million dollars for an administrative fee.Story continues below advertisementI see the administration putting insurmountable challenges in front of small businesses. I\u2019m about generating treatments to help people, putting medicines in people\u2019s homes. And I\u2019m looking to the future and seeing that tap shut off.Read more:As scientists erupt in protest, a volcanologist runs for CongressThis group wants to fight \u2018anti-science\u2019 rhetoric by getting scientists to run for officeTens of thousands marched for science. Now what? Researcher Hans Keirstead says he is convinced his opponent doesn't understand science. He broke ground in stem-cell research. Now he\u2019s running for Congress.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | A ridiculous YouTube video claiming we found aliens kept making the news, so NASA debunked it (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5941",
        "date": "2017-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/26/someone-made-a-ridiculous-video-about-nasa-finding-aliens-news-outlets-took-the-bait/",
        "text": "The headlines sound thrilling. One might say they\u00a0bait a click.\u201cANONYMOUS SAYS NASA HAS EVIDENCE OF ALIEN LIFE. DOES IT?\u201d \u2014 NewsweekWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe world's biggest hacking group thinks NASA\u00a0is about to announce alien life.\u201d \u2014 the IndependentMaybe you know of Anonymous as a band of socially enlightened hackers: liberators\u00a0of knowledge\u00a0from elites who\u00a0want to hide\u00a0it from the public. You certainly know what NASA is. So you click.And what you get, if you follow the articles to the\u00a0amateur YouTube channel that is their source, is video of a man in a Guy Fawkes mask \u2014 \u201cAnonymous Global,\u201d he calls himself \u2014 reading out old quotes from NASA spokespeople\u00a0in a spooky, synthesized voice.Story continues below advertisementThe\u00a0man in the anarchist mask quotes a NASA science director's testimony from a congressional hearing in April, all totally public: \u201cWe are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented discoveries in history.\u201dAdvertisementThat\u00a0quote \u2014 taken out of context and adorned with Anonymous Global's wild conspiracy theorizing\u00a0\u2014 became the basis for millions of views and countless news articles, forcing the science director in question and NASA officials\u00a0to explicitly deny the claims of a shoddily produced YouTube video this week.\u201cThere\u2019s no pending announcement regarding extraterrestrial life,\u201d a NASA spokesman\u00a0wrote to The Washington Post, in case you were still in doubt.Contrary to some reports, there\u2019s no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life.\u2014 Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) June 26, 2017\n\nAnonymous Gobal's video doesn't show Thomas Zurbuchen's actual\u00a0testimony, in which the director\u00a0talked up\u00a0recent discoveries of\u00a0planets around distant suns and organic chemicals on Saturn's moon but caveated that \u201cwe haven't found definitive\u00a0signs of life just yet.\u201dThe surprising places where Americans are running into UFOs, mappedLater in his\u00a012-minute video, between monetized ads, Anonymous Global runs out of quotes and just sits there\u00a0in front of\u00a0random UFO footage, talking about an\u00a0\u201calien protocol.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWell this was a whole lot of nothing,\u201d says one commenter\u00a0among the million-plus people who clicked.Not to mention all the people who clicked on\u00a0one of the many, many news headlines that played along with\u00a0the YouTuber's bait and switch.\u201cAnonymous says NASA\u00a0is \u2018on the verge\u2019 of announcing the existence of extraterrestrial life,\u201d writes the Independent, citing \u201ca YouTube account affiliated with the hacking group.\u201dIn this instance, even\u00a0the YouTuber calling himself \u201cAnonymous Global\u201d was more accurate\u00a0than the news. \u201cAnonymous is NOT a group or an organization,\u201d he notes, correctly, in a disclaimer\u00a0on his channel.Mysterious light blazes across California sky, sparking confusion, excitement and fears of alien invasionAs the New Yorker once wrote, Anonymous is\u00a0not an organization of hackers or anything else, but rather \u201ca shape-shifting subculture\u201d of anti-establishment Internet users.Story continues below advertisementIt's an open-access brand, essentially, and\u00a0anyone can\u00a0claim allegiance to it.AdvertisementIn the case of \u201cAnonymous Global,\u201d his YouTube history reveals that he started making videos about the flight simulator X-Plane, until a year ago, when he fully embraced the Anonymous brand.Preceding his\u00a0viral aliens video from\u00a0last week: \u201cAnonymous 10 Greatest Conspiracy Theories\u201d and \u201cAnonymous Some Thoughts on Christmas 2016.\u201dBut never mind.\u201cHUMANS are about to discover alien life, NASA\u00a0believes \u2014 according to the latest video from hacktivist group Anonymous,\u201d\u00a0says the Sun.And it's not just the\u00a0British tabloids \u2014 which before breathlessly reporting on the Anonymous aliens video, were\u00a0spotted lending credence to\u00a0the \u201cBreatharian\u201d movement, made up of people who claim\u00a0they don't need\u00a0food.\u2018If anything happens to me, investigate,\u2019 UFO hunter texted mother. Days later, he was dead.Newsweek picked up the story, too, with that ALL-CAPS question headline: \u201cANONYMOUS SAYS NASA HAS EVIDENCE OF ALIEN LIFE. DOES IT?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou have to read more than 200\u00a0words\u00a0into the article to find out the answer: No, it does not.Even Sputnik News, which is run by the Russian government and named after a satellite\u00a0that symbolizes its\u00a0space\u00a0rivalry with NASA,\u00a0flirted with the notion\u00a0that U.S. government scientists\u00a0might have beaten their Russian rivals to the biggest discovery in history.Hackers: 'A NASA diz que os extraterrestres est\u00e3o chegando!' (V\u00cdDEO): https://t.co/0YOFg02KEK via @sputnik_brasil\u2014 Donizete Costa (@zetaocosta) June 26, 2017\n\nOnce you click through, though, the\u00a0Russians quickly dispel\u00a0such nonsense.\u201cJust about anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the dark Web can grab themselves a few minutes in the online limelight by \u2018releasing\u2019 an \u2018announcement\u2019 and crediting the story as being from Anonymous,\u201d Sputnik writes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe all want the same outcome, certainly, but we'll stick with the peer-reviewed science, thanks.\u201dOr sometimes just calling the agency a YouTuber claims to speak for can help.Advertisement\u201cWhile we\u2019re excited about the latest findings from NASA\u2019s Kepler space observatory, there\u2019s no pending announcement regarding extraterrestrial life,\u201d a spokesman for the agency wrote to The Post on Monday.\u201cFor years NASA has expressed interest in searching for signs of life beyond Earth. We have a number of science missions that are moving forward with the goal of seeking signs of past and present life on Mars and ocean worlds in the outer solar system. While we do not yet have answers, we will continue to work to address the fundamental question, \u2018Are we alone?\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementSo there it is. For the\u00a0moment, the only confirmed intelligent life in the universe is human \u2014 more intelligent some weeks than others.This article has been updated with NASA's comments and the science director's rebuttal.\u00a0NASA's Thomas Zurbuchen testifies before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on the advances in the search for life on April 26. (House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology)Read more:AdvertisementThe \u2018X-Files\u2019 Dana Scully conquered GIFdom, one eye-roll at a timeTwo decades of mysterious Air Force UFO files now available onlineThere's an 'Earthlike' planet with an atmosphere just 39 light-years awayScientists discover 7 'Earthlike' planets orbiting a nearby starYou can now spell 'Earthling' with a capital 'E,' and here's whyNo, NASA didn't find life on Saturn's moon. But deep sea life on Earth is pretty alien. From an amateur YouTube clip, the \u201cnews\u201d traveled through British tabloids to Newsweek. It took Russian state media to set things straight. A ridiculous YouTube video claiming we found aliens kept making the news, so NASA debunked it",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "One space between each sentence, they said.\u2003Science just proved them wrong. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5942",
        "date": "2018-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/04/one-space-between-each-sentence-they-said-science-just-proved-them-wrong-2/",
        "text": "In the beginning, the rules of the space bar were\u00a0simple.\u00a0 Two spaces after each period.\u00a0 Every time.\u00a0 Easy.That made sense in the age of the typewriter. Letters of uniform width looked cramped without extra space after the period. Typists learned not to do it.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut then, at the end of the 20th century, the typewriter gave way to the word processor,\u00a0and the computer,\u00a0 and modern variable-width fonts.\u00a0 And the world divided. Some\u00a0insisted on\u00a0keeping the two-space rule.\u00a0 They couldn't get used to seeing just one space after a period.\u00a0 It simply looked wrong.Some said this was blasphemy. The designers of modern fonts\u00a0had built the perfect amount of spacing, they said. Anything more than a single space between sentences was too much.Story continues below advertisementAnd so the\u00a0rules of typography fell into chaos. \u201cTyping two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong,\u201d Farhad Manjoo wrote in Slate in 2011. \u00a0\u201cYou can have my double space when you pry it from my cold, dead hands,\u201d Megan McArdle wrote in the Atlantic the same year. \u00a0(And yes, she double-spaced it.)AdvertisementThis schism has actually existed throughout most of typed history, the writer and type enthusiast\u00a0James Felici once observed (in a single-spaced essay).The rules of spacing have\u00a0been wildly inconsistent going back to the invention of the printing press. The original printing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence used extra\u00a0long spaces between sentences. John Baskerville's 1763 Bible used a single space. WhoevenknowswhateffectPietroBembowasgoingforhere.Single spaces. Double spaces. \u00a0Em spaces.\u00a0 \u00a0Trends went back and forth between continents and eras for hundreds of years, Felici wrote.It's not a good look.Story continues below advertisementAnd that's just English. Somewrittenlanguageshavenospacesatall and o thers\u00a0re quire a space be tween ev e ry syl la ble.Ob viously, thereneed to be standards. Unless\u00a0 \u00a0 you're doing\u00a0avant - garde po e try, or\u00a0 \u00a0 something , you\u00a0 can'tjustspacew ords ho w e v\u00a0 \u00a0e\u00a0 \u00a0 r\u00a0 \u00a0y\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 o\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 u\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 want.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0That would be insanity. Or at least,Advertisementobnoxious.Enter three psychology researchers from Skidmore College, who decided it's time for modern science to sort this out once and for all.\u201cProfessionals and amateurs in a variety of fields have passionately argued for either one or two spaces following this punctuation mark,\u201d they wrote in a paper published last week in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.Story continues below advertisementThey cite dozens of theories and\u00a0previous\u00a0research, arguing for one space or two.\u00a0 A 2005 study that found two spaces reduced lateral interference in the eye and helped reading.\u00a0 A 2015 study that found the opposite.\u00a0 A 1998 experiment that suggested it didn't matter.\u201cHowever,\u201d they wrote, \u201cto date, there has been no direct empirical evidence in support of these claims, nor in favor of the one-space convention.\u201dSo the researchers,\u00a0 Rebecca L. Johnson,\u00a0 Becky Bui\u00a0 and Lindsay L. Schmitt,\u00a0 rounded up 60 students and some eye-tracking equipment,\u00a0 and\u00a0set out to\u00a0heal the divide.AdvertisementFirst, they put the students in front of computers and dictated a short paragraph, to see how many spaces they naturally used. Turns out, 21 of the 60 were \u201ctwo-spacers,\u201d and the rest typed with close-spaced sentences that would have horrified the Founding Fathers.Story continues below advertisementThe researchers then clamped\u00a0each student's head into place, and used an Eyelink 1000 to\u00a0record where they looked as they silently\u00a0read 20 paragraphs. The paragraphs were written in\u00a0various styles: one-spaced,\u00a0two-spaced,\u00a0 and strange combinations like two spaces after commas,\u00a0 but only one after periods.\u00a0 And vice versa, too.And the verdict was: two spaces after the period is better.\u00a0 It makes reading slightly easier.\u00a0 Congratulations, Yale University professor Nicholas A. Christakis.\u00a0 Sorry, Lifehacker.Hurray! Science vindicates my longstanding practice, learned at age 12, of using TWO SPACES after periods in text. NOT ONE SPACE. Text is easier to read that way. Of course, on twitter, I use one space, given 280 characters. https://t.co/4xI6sVbF88 Will arm-wrestle @Neuro_Skeptic pic.twitter.com/XpEr4KFR4x\u2014 Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) April 28, 2018\n\nActually, Lifehacker's one-space purist Nick Douglas pointed out some important caveats to the study's conclusion.AdvertisementMost notably, the test subjects read paragraphs in\u00a0Courier New, a fixed-width font similar to the old typewriters, and rarely used on modern computers.Story continues below advertisementJohnson, one of the authors, told\u00a0Douglas that\u00a0the fixed-width font\u00a0was standard\u00a0for eye-tracking tests, and\u00a0the benefits of two-spacing\u00a0should\u00a0carry over\u00a0to any modern font.Douglas found more\u00a0solace in the fact that\u00a0the benefits of two-spacing, as described in the study, appear to be very minor.Reading speed only improved marginally, the paper found, and only for\u00a0the 21\u00a0\u201ctwo-spacers,\u201d who naturally typed\u00a0with two spaces between sentences.\u00a0 The majority of one-spacers, on the other hand, read at pretty much the same speed either way.\u00a0 And reading comprehension was unaffected for everyone, regardless of how many spaces followed a period.The major reason to use two spaces,\u00a0the researchers wrote, was to make the reading process smoother, not faster.\u00a0 Everyone tended to spend\u00a0fewer milliseconds staring at periods when a little extra blank space followed it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement(Putting two spaces after a comma,\u00a0 if you're wondering,\u00a0 slowed down reading speed,\u00a0 so don't do that.)The study's authors concluded that two-spacers in the digital age actually have science on their side, and more research should be done to \u201cinvestigate\u00a0why reading is facilitated when periods are followed by two spaces.\u201dBut no sooner did the paper\u00a0publish than the researchers discovered that science doesn't necessarily govern\u00a0matters of the\u00a0space bar.Johnson told Lifehacker that she and her co-authors submitted\u00a0the paper with two spaces after each period \u2014 as was proper. And the journal\u00a0deleted all the \u2003\u2003\u2003extra spaces anyway.Note: An earlier version of this story published incorrectly because, seriously, putting two spaces in the headline broke the web\u00a0code.More reading:'Fits neatly inside a lizard's cloaca': Scientists are leaving Amazon reviews, and it's amazingScientists spent a month terrifying guppies to prove that fish have personalitiesThe extraordinary life and death of the world\u2019s oldest known spider Obviously,  there needs to be a standard.  But do we really want to leave it to science? One space between each sentence, they said.\u2003Science just proved them wrong.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists detect black holes devouring neutron stars (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5943",
        "date": "2021-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/06/29/black-hole-neutron-star-collision/",
        "text": "A billion years ago, long before the dawn of complex life on Earth, a black hole several times more massive than the sun engulfed the collapsed core of a once-giant star. The immense collision between two of the universe\u2019s most extreme objects sent gravitational waves hurtling through the cosmos, like ripples on an enormous pond. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn January 2020, those ancient waves reached the shores of our solar system, where they were picked up by ultrasensitive equipment at observatories in the United States and Italy. It marked the first time astronomers had ever detected a black hole swallowing a neutron star.A mere 10 days later, astronomers detected the same phenomenon in another part of the universe, a black hole devouring its companion neutron star.Story continues below advertisementThe discoveries, published Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, represent a key breakthrough in gravitational astronomy, a budding field of research in which scientists examine tiny distortions of space-time for clues about how the universe works.AdvertisementResearchers have previously documented two black holes colliding and two neutron stars crashing into each other. But while theoretical models had long predicted that black-hole-neutron-star mergers were possible, decades passed without any being observed.\u201cThese are remarkable events, and we have waited a very long time to witness them. So it\u2019s incredible to finally capture them,\u201d Susan Scott, a physicist at Australian National University and co-author of the study, said in a statement. \u201cNow, we\u2019ve completed the last piece of the puzzle with the first confirmed observations of gravitational waves from a black hole and a neutron star colliding.\"Story continues below advertisementThe study, which involved more than 1,000 scientists, will help researchers learn more about how these objects form and how common they are. It could even help unlock some mysteries of galaxy formation. Advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s still so much we don\u2019t know about neutron stars and black holes \u2014 how small or big they can get, how fast they can spin, how they pair off into merger partners,\u201d said study co-author Maya Fishbach, a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern. \"With future gravitational wave data, we will have the statistics to answer these questions, and ultimately learn how the most extreme objects in our universe are made.\u201dThe stellar death spiral researchers observed is exactly the type of violent, high-energy event that generates gravitational waves, which cause the fabric of the universe to warp and undulate as they propagate through space-time. Story continues below advertisementFirst theorized by Albert Einstein more than a century ago, gravitational waves weren\u2019t physically detected until 2015, when ripples generated by two colliding black holes were sensed by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Louisiana and Washington state. The landmark discovery ushered in a new era of astronomy, allowing scientists to harness gravitational waves as observational tools.AdvertisementBlack holes and neutron stars have been studied for decades, but many of their properties remain a mystery. Both form after massive stars exhaust their fuel. Some collapse into black holes where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape. Others leave behind corpses just a few miles in diameter and made almost entirely of neutrons. After black holes, neutron stars are the densest known objects in the universe.Scientists at LIGO and the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory in northern Italy \u2014 home to the most sensitive observational instruments ever constructed \u2014 detected the first collision of a black hole and neutron star on Jan. 5, 2020. The nature of the waves allowed them to infer the mass and ballpark the location. They determined the black hole was about nine times heavier than the sun, while the neutron star was about twice as heavy as the sun, according to the study.Story continues below advertisementThe second merger was detected on Jan. 15, 2020. It involved a black hole six times the mass of the sun and a neutron star about 1\u00bd times the sun\u2019s mass.Here is a supercomputer simulation of Einstein's general relativistic equations for this discovery.https://t.co/gUy7ieFmNkA black hole just about 9 times heavier than that of our Sun is shredding a neutron star. AND HOW! Simulation: Dr. Bhavesh Khamesra+ | MAYA Collaboration pic.twitter.com/EpjK04AMzy\u2014 Dr. Karan Jani (@AstroKPJ) June 29, 2021\n\nIn both cases, the neutron stars were consumed by their companions, according to the study. There were no associated flashes of light \u2014 and that was no surprise. There probably wasn\u2019t any light show to see, researchers said, because the black holes were big enough to completely swallow the neutron stars.Advertisement\u201cThese were not events where the black holes munched on the neutron stars like the cookie monster and flung bits and pieces about,\u201d Patrick Brady, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a LIGO spokesman, said in a statement. \u201cThat \u2018flinging about\u2019 is what would produce light, and we don\u2019t think that happened in these cases.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe first merger occurred about 900 million light-years from Earth, the second about a billion, according to the researchers. With these two observations documented, astronomers now estimate that about one such merger per month takes place within 1 billion light-years of Earth.The study highlighted another intriguing point: Neither merger took place in the Milky Way galaxy, posing a host of questions for scientists going forward.\u201cWith this new discovery of neutron star-black hole mergers outside our galaxy, we have found the missing type of binary,\u201d Astrid Lamberts, a researcher at Observatoire de la C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur, in Nice, France, said in a statement. \u201cWe can finally begin to understand how many of these systems exist, how often they merge, and why we have not yet seen examples in the Milky Way.\u201dRead more:China launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats upNASA is preparing to fly the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, in an otherworldly \u2018Wright brothers moment\u2019NASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 years The discovery will help researchers learn more about how some of the most extreme objects in the universe form and how common they are. Scientists detect black holes devouring neutron stars",
        "author": "Derek Hawkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "USDA science agencies\u2019 relocation may have violated law, inspector general report says  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5944",
        "date": "2019-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/08/05/usda-science-agencies-relocation-may-have-violated-law-inspector-general-report-says/",
        "text": "A federal watchdog challenged the Trump administration\u2019s authority to move two USDA science agencies out of Washington, in a report issued a few days after Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, praised the move for encouraging federal scientists to quit their jobs.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plan to relocate the two agencies from the District to Kansas City may have run afoul of the 2018 appropriations act, according to a report released Monday from the USDA\u2019s Office of Inspector General. In August 2018, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue unveiled a plan to relocate the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which oversees $1.7 billion in scientific grants and funding, and the Economic Research Service, a federal statistical agency that publishes influential reports on agricultural trade and rural America. Both agencies lease office space in the District.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUSDA selected the Kansas City region as the new home for these agencies in June 2019, in what Perdue has billed as a cost-saving decision. About two-thirds of nearly 400 employees refused the reassignment and will lose their jobs.\u201cThis is the brain drain we all feared, possibly a destruction of the agencies,\u201d Jack Payne, University of Florida\u2019s vice president for agriculture and natural resources, told The Washington Post last month.In his keynote speech at the Republican Party\u2019s black-tie-optional Silver Elephant Gala in South Carolina on Friday, Mulvaney seemed to celebrate the attrition at the agencies. \u201cYou\u2019ve heard about \u2018drain the swamp.\u2019 What you probably haven\u2019t heard is what we are actually doing. I don\u2019t know if you saw the news the other day, but the USDA just tried to move, or did move, two offices out of Washington, D.C.,\" he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the crowd clapped, Mulvaney continued: \u201cYes, you can applaud that one. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve been talking about doing. Guess what happened? Guess what happened? More than half the people quit.\u201cIt\u2019s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,\u201d Mulvaney said. \u201cI know that because a lot of them work for me, and I\u2019ve tried .\u2009.\u2009. By simply saying to people, \u2018You know what, we\u2019re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out in the real part of the country,' and they quit \u2014 what a wonderful way to sort of streamline government, and do what we haven\u2019t been able to do for a long time.\u201dTrump officials are planning additional shake-ups and exoduses from Washington. By 2020, more than 80 percent of the headquarters staff at the Bureau of Land Management will be moved west of the Rocky Mountains, the Interior Department told lawmakers in July. The Trump administration also wants to break up the Office of Personnel Management and split 5,500 workers among three other departments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJ. David Cox Sr., president of American Federation of Government Employees, which represents workers at the two USDA agencies, said Mulvaney\u2019s comments confirmed the union\u2019s concerns. \u201cThe administration\u2019s decision to transfer hundreds of USDA jobs from D.C. isn\u2019t about helping federal employees do their jobs better or delivering better services to the American taxpayer,\u201d Cox said in a statement. \u201cTheir goal is to drive out hard-working and dedicated civil servants and silence the parts of the agencies\u2019 research that the administration views as inconvenient.\u201d A study from ERS, for instance, one of the agencies targeted for the move, showed that a $1.5 trillion tax bill signed by Trump offered few, if any, benefits to low-income farmers.Congress questioned whether USDA has the legal authority to move the agencies. The department has this power, according to the inspector general\u2019s investigation. But USDA also needs budgetary approval from Congress to fund the moves, the watchdog group said, which the department did not obtain.In the fall, USDA awarded a $340,000 contract to the accounting firm Ernst & Young to assist with the relocation. The 2018 omnibus spending bill required USDA to receive congressional approval before spending this money. \u201cThat prior approval did not appear to have been granted,\u201d the inspector general report says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis expense may have also violated the Antideficiency Act, the report said, which prevents federal employees from involving the government \u201cin a contract or obligation for the payment of money before an appropriation is made.\u201dRep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D. C.), who requested the inspector general\u2019s investigation in September 2018, exhorted USDA to follow the law. \u201cThe Secretary must follow the will of Congress and refrain from moving forward with the relocation,\u201d they said in a joint statement Monday, \u201cuntil Congress approves the use of funds for those purposes as directed by the fiscal year 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act.\u201dRep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) called the inspector general report \u201cvery troubling\u201d said it confirms \u201csuspicions that the secretary does not have the authority to proceed with this relocation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementG. William Hoagland, a vice president at the D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, predicted that the failure to get congressional approval \u201cwill certainly set in motion legal challenges\u201d from the union to halt the move \u201cuntil either the courts or Congress act.\u201dIn a list of recommendations in the report, the inspector general\u2019s office advised USDA to seek approval from a congressional committee.USDA management refused to do so. \u201cTo say the department was out of step with budgetary requirements disregards the authority given to the executive branch by the U.S. Constitution,\u201d according to a statement provided by USDA. It continued: \u201cSince the inspector general affirms the department has the legal authority and we do not agree with the unconstitutional budgetary provision, this case is closed.\u201dThis report has been updated.Read more:USDA research agencies will move to Kansas City region despite oppositionInterior to move most of Bureau of Land Management\u2019s D.C. staff out west as part of larger reorganization pushDemocrats running out of options to stop Trump from moving two USDA offices The report comes weeks after USDA revealed that a majority of workers plan to quit rather than move. USDA science agencies\u2019 relocation may have violated law, inspector general report says ",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump desperately needs a science adviser, experts say. He just doubled the record for time without one. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5945",
        "date": "2018-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/07/27/trump-just-doubled-the-record-for-time-without-a-science-and-technology-adviser/",
        "text": "President Trump can add another tick in the records column: This week, he doubled the length of time that any modern president has gone without a science adviser.George W. Bush set the previous record for the longest science adviser vacancy at nine months and four days. Bush, four months into his presidency, nominated physicist John H. Marburger III to direct the\u00a0Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Senate confirmed\u00a0Marburger on Oct. 23, 2001. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBarack Obama selected his science adviser before assuming office, as did John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Every administration since Eisenhower named a science adviser by the first October of the presidency, according to a Washington Post analysis. Except for Trump\u00a0\u2014 who has yet to make a nomination, let alone begin the congressional confirmation process.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are many things about the Trump presidency that are historic, and the disregard for science will be seen as high on the list,\u201d said Kumar Garg, a fellow at the nonprofit organization Society for Science & the Public who was a member of the\u00a0Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Obama administration.\u201cIf you had asked somebody at the start of the administration if we would be approaching this sort of marker,\u201d Garg said, \u201cthey would have been shocked.\u201dCongress established the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, in 1976 as a way to channel scientific analysis and advice to the president. Most presidents also gave OSTP directors the title of assistant to the president for science and technology. That appointment allowed advisers to directly and confidentially communicate with the president.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the past, science advisers guided presidents during disease outbreaks, natural disasters, biological weapons attacks and other national crises. The advisers also led the OSTP's review of federal research and collaborated with the Office of Management and Budget to develop a research budget.Science advisers to the president typically hold advanced degrees and have leadership experience in research institutions. The job requires comprehension of dozens of branches of science and fields as varied as national security, climate and artificial intelligence. The highest-ranking member of OSTP is Deputy Assistant Michael Kratsios, a 31-year-old Princeton graduate who majored in politics, as a profile notes.On Monday, Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) sent a letter to Trump urging the president to select a science adviser. \u201cCurrently, nine out of ten key OSTP staff positions remain vacant,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNothing less than U.S. scientific leadership is at risk, Coons warned. \u201cI remain quite concerned that, when it comes to science, America is falling behind its major competitors,\u201d he said, citing a skyrocketing trend in Chinese research and development.This was not the first letter lawmakers have sent to Trump about vacancies at the OSTP. In November, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and six other Democrats issued a similar letter to the president, urging Trump to make a nomination.\u201cIn previous administrations, OSTP was central to disaster-mitigation efforts, including hurricanes \u2014 but when Hurricanes Irma, Harvey and Maria struck the United States, OSTP lacked key leaders,\u201d the senators said. \u201cScientific and technical input would also have contributed to decisions around climate change, the Iran nuclear deal and North Korea\u2019s nuclear program \u2014 areas where key decisions have been made over the past nine months in absence of a science adviser and other officials.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere is also an unusually large number of empty desks in the OSTP's wing of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the senators noted in the November letter. \u201cBeyond its leadership, OSTP continues to operate well below full capacity: recent reports indicate OSTP has fewer than 50 staff, well below its peak of 130 or more in the past.\u201d The OSTP did not respond to a request for comment from The Post asking for clarification about the number of staff members.In the absence of an official nomination, rumors and suggestions have filled the void. Garg said he has received about a phone call a month from a reporter, asking for his opinion on a possible nominee.When Bill Gates brought up the vacancy in a meeting with Trump, the president reportedly offered Gates the job on the spot. (Gates declined, telling the president it would not be a \u201cgood use of my time,\u201d the Microsoft founder\u00a0recalled to Stat in April.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Freedom of Information Act request by Science magazine revealed in February that Kratsios has met with at least three candidates for the position, but their names were redacted.\u00a0The Post reported in March that University of Oklahoma meteorology\u00a0professor Kelvin Droegemeier may get the nomination.Given Trump's track record with science, journalist Brian Palmer argued at Slate that the White House was better off without a science adviser. \u201cNo sane, credible scientist worth having in the position would take it,\u201d Palmer said. Just look at what happened to Marburger, Bush's science adviser, he suggested.Marburger, a Democrat, had publicly criticized Bush for his delay in picking a science adviser, so when Bush asked Marburger to take the job, the physicist accepted. But Bush did not give Marburger the assistant to the president appointment, which hamstrung the adviser's influence. Instead, Bush called on\u00a0Marburger to defend the White House's approach to climate change and stem cell research.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Marburger died in 2011, The Post wrote that he was \u201csingled out as the administration\u2019s whipping boy\u201d by critical scientists. (After Marburger took the job, Harvard University psychologist Howard Gardner told NPR that the physicist \u201cbasically has become a prostitute.\") Whoever accepts Trump's nomination, Palmer said, risks facing the same ridicule.But former OSTP officials maintained that a scientist with a line to the president's ear was better than nothing.\u201cThe science community should want the position filled,\u201d Garg said, \u201cand should want the position filled with someone who is qualified and capable.\u201dRead more:Thousands of scientists object to Trump\u2019s border wallScientists respond to court ruling on travel ban with fear and frustrationTrump says he\u2019s directing Pentagon to create a new \u2018Space Force\u2019 \"There are many things about the Trump presidency that are historic, and the disregard for science will be seen as high on the list,\u201d a member of the Obama administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy said. Trump desperately needs a science adviser, experts say. He just doubled the record for time without one.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "A super-cool science story about a really cold thing (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5946",
        "date": "2017-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/11/nist-scientists-just-supercooled-an-object-below-the-quantum-limit/",
        "text": "\u201cAbsolute zero\u201d isn't just cold \u2014 it's still. It is the point at which the motion of the atoms that make up an object stops completely, when\u00a0the object has no energy left to give.The rules of physics say it's impossible to cool an object to absolute zero, to remove all thermal energy until its atoms come to a standstill.\u00a0But researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology are getting really close. In a\u00a0paper\u00a0published Wednesday in the journal Nature, they describe using a laser to\u00a0make a microscopic aluminum\u00a0drum colder than anything like it\u00a0has been cooled before. In doing so, they defied the quantum limit for supercooling mechanical objects. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe new technique will allow physicists to make stuff colder than previously thought possible, said lead author John Teufel, a physicist at the NIST facility in Boulder. It opens the door to building instruments of unprecedented sensitivity, and to understanding quantum mechanics \u2014 one of physics's most mysterious branches \u2014 better than ever before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGives you chills, doesn't it? (Sorry, guys, I had to.)Recall that everything in the universe is in motion. Not just on broad scales \u2014 planets orbiting suns,\u00a0galaxies turning \u2014 but on the smallest ones. Even the most seemingly\u00a0impassive object buzzes with internal activity. The atoms\u00a0that make up\u00a0a\u00a0piece of aluminum, like the one in Teufel's experiment, are always bumping into and bouncing off one another, jumping, spinning, spreading out and pressing together. This is what physicists are referring to\u00a0when they talk about temperature: not some abstract idea of an object's \u201cwarmth\u201d but a measure of the thermal motion of its atoms.Why don't birds get lost? They may have mastered quantum mechanics.Physicists\u00a0are interested in supercooling for two reasons. First, if you can remove the thermal energy from an object, it becomes much more sensitive to outside perturbations. Researchers like those at LIGO \u2014 the lab that detected gravitational waves last year \u2014 want their instruments to be as cool as possible so they can be sure that\u00a0any\u00a0tiny fluctuations are a result of vast cosmic forces, and not just\u00a0boring thermal motion.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition, eliminating the distraction of an object's thermal motion\u00a0allows scientists\u00a0to finally see\u00a0the motion that results from quantum energy, which is much more interesting. It will give insight into the forces that dictate how the universe functions at atomic and subatomic scales.Researchers have managed to cool individual atoms\u00a0and even\u00a0a quantum gas until they near\u00a0or sink below\u00a0absolute zero. But supercooling larger, solid\u00a0objects \u2014 which will be essential to building better instruments and understanding quantum mechanics at a macroscopic level \u2014 has proved harder.Scientists just got one of the best measures yet of a fundamental of physicsThe best technique for removing\u00a0thermal energy from objects is called sideband cooling. It\u00a0uses an array of lasers to slow the atoms down.\u00a0This may seem counterintuitive \u2014 we're used to\u00a0light warming things up, like the sun \u2014 but in sideband cooling, the carefully calibrated angle and frequency of the light allows photons to snatch energy from the atoms as they interact.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you shine exactly the right light in the right way you can make sure the light is always pushing against the motion of the atoms,\u201d Teufel said.\u00a0(For an in-depth explanation of the process, see\u00a0this great video from\u00a0PBS.)Scientists have been cooling atoms with lasers for several decades, but there was a limit to how cold they could get. Quantum mechanics tells us that's because of the way light works. Instead of flowing in a continuous stream, it\u00a0travels in discrete packets, called quanta. Each packet \u201cgives a little kick\u201d as it arrives, Teufel said, meaning a little bit of heat gets added even as you remove energy over all. It's like trying to keep a leaf suspended in the air with several sputtering hoses \u2014 every time the stream falters, the leaf drifts.Using sideband cooling, researchers at NIST had previously cooled their quantum drum \u2014 a microscopic aluminum membrane that vibrates like a drumhead \u2014 to its lowest energy \u201cground state.\u201d At that point,\u00a0the drum's thermal motion was one-third the amount of its quantum motion. Some thought this represented the \u201cquantum limit\u201d \u2014 the coldest temperatures that could be achieved according to the laws of quantum mechanics.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe limit of how cold you can make things by shining light on them was the bottleneck that was keeping people from getting colder and colder,\u201d Teufel said. \u201cThe question was, is it fundamental or could we actually get colder?\u201dHe had a hunch that colder was possible, if scientists could eliminate the \u201ckicks\u201d from the packets of light.To do this, Teufel and his colleagues \u201csqueezed\u201d their lasers, using a special kind of superconducting circuit to produce a light beam in which the quanta were forced to follow one another in orderly fashion. This didn't eliminate all of the \u201ckicks\u201d from the lasers, but it got rid of a lot. When the scientists tried again to cool their drum with squeezed light, they got it so that thermal motion was one-fifth the magnitude of quantum motion. That's a million times colder than room temperature, 10,000 times colder than the vacuum of space, and colder than any object like this has been before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow that it's proven to work, Teufel says the technique can be refined to get objects even colder \u2014 maybe even as cold as absolute zero.\u201cIn principle if you had perfect squeezed light you could do perfect cooling,\u201d he said. \u201cNo matter what we\u2019re doing next with this research, this is now something we can keep in our bag of tricks to let us always start with a colder and quieter and better device that will help with whatever science we\u2019re trying to do.\u201dRead more:The man who uncovered the secret lives of snowflakesThe truth about vaccines, autism and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s conspiracy theoryDear Science: What's the point of mucus?\u00a0Scientists race to develop Zika vaccine: Health of a generation of babies depends on itScientists used light to turn mice into stone-cold killers Scientists just supercooled an object beyond the quantum limit.  A super-cool science story about a really cold thing",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars lander discovers quakes and a surprising magnetic field (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5947",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/02/24/nasas-mars-lander-discovers-quakes-surprising-magnetic-field/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Mars lander InSight is on a mission to probe the Red Planet\u2019s rocky guts. A suite of studies published Monday in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications describe the results of the robot\u2019s first 10 months of exploration. Mars trembles with seismic activity, and the planet is more strongly magnetic than experts predicted. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInSight touched down in November 2018 after surviving \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d \u2014 the descent, during which mission control can do nothing but wait, from when the lander met the Martian atmosphere to when it touched down on the planet\u2019s surface. The robot landed on a Martian plain, Elysium Planitia, in a dirt-filled crater nicknamed Homestead Hollow.There the robot deployed most of its instruments and has been transmitting data back to Earth. InSight\u2019s \u201cmole,\u201d its subterranean heat probe, has so far failed to penetrate the cementlike soil in the hollow. The probe will require a push from the robot\u2019s arm.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn April 2019, InSight made the first-ever detection of seismic activity, known as a marsquake, on the planet. By the end of September 2019, InSight had detected 174 seismic events on Mars. Twenty-four of those rumbled up from the planet\u2019s mantle and were relatively large marsquakes, between 3 to 4 on the moment magnitude scale (roughly similar to quakes of the same size on the Richter scale).Data from InSight, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in 2018, could supply human explorers with knowledge about Mars\u2019s natural resources, as well as its dangers, such as asteroid impacts.Quakes and volcanic action\u201cWe\u2019ve finally, for the first time, established that Mars is a seismically active planet,\u201d Bruce Banerdt, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the mission\u2019s principal investigator, told reporters at a news conference Thursday. It shakes with more activity than the moon, but Mars is less seismically active than Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s probably close to the kinds of seismic activity you would expect to find away from the plate boundaries on the Earth,\u201d Banerdt said. Quakes on Mars are caused by the planet\u2019s long-term cooling. \u201cWhen the planet cools, it contracts, and then the brittle outer layers then have to fracture,\u201d he said.On Earth, many quakes occur at comparatively shallow depths, of about 3 to 6 miles, said study author Philippe Lognonn\u00e9, a seismologist at the University of Paris. Marsquakes, he said, begin at depths of 18 to 30 miles.The majority of the quakes InSight sensed were so small they would pass by humans unnoticed. \u201cIf you are on the Earth, these quakes,\u201d Lognonn\u00e9 said, \u201cyou will not be able to detect them.\u201d If you were standing at the right place on Mars, you might feel the larger quakes, but they would not be dangerous.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo of the largest quakes came from Cerberus Fossae, large fissures that split open the Martian surface in the last few million years. \u201cThat\u2019s the area that is the most recent geologically and volcanically active,\u201d said Suzanne Smrekar, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and InSight\u2019s deputy principal investigator.A record of old magnetic fieldsMartian explorers won\u2019t be able to use a compass to find their way. Mars no longer has a magnetic north or south, as Catherine Johnson, a geophysicist at Canada\u2019s University of British Columbia and Arizona\u2019s Planetary Science Institute, told The Washington Post. When Mars was young, its liquid metal interior generated a global magnetic field, like Earth\u2019s. But the inner Martian dynamo stopped about 3.5 billion years ago, and its planetwide magnetic field went with it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet observations from satellites suggested there may still be magnetism on Mars. And InSight backed that up with a remarkable observation \u2014 the lander is sitting in a patch of a magnetic field 10 times stronger than scientists expected.At the landing site, Mars has a local \u201ccrustal field,\u201d Johnson said. Deep and ancient rocks, buried 2.5 miles or more below InSight, retain traces of the long-ago magnetic environment. \u201cThey\u2019re like little tape recorders,\u201d said Johnson, a member of the InSight mission. Minerals in the 4-billion-year-old rocks aligned with the now-vanished global field. The ancient magnetism remains essentially frozen in the rock, she said.Electric currents in the upper atmosphere, which vary from day to night, are also a source of small magnetic fields, InSight revealed.Story continues below advertisementWhen it comes to electromagnetism, the biggest question for future human exploration on Mars is \u201cwhat happens at the surface\u201d during space weather, Johnson said. The sun\u2019s solar cycle is ramping up, she said, and InSight should be able to sense magnetic signatures from solar storms that zap into Mars.AdvertisementDust devils and shining nightsInSight sensed thousands of pressure changes that could be strong enough to pick up dust, possibly producing the small whirlwinds known as dust devils. Lognonn\u00e9 hesitated to say that each vortex was a dust devil \u2014 the robot is sensitive to pressure, he said, but lacks a monitor to confirm dust flying through the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementNASA scientists already know the power of massive dust storms scour the Martian surface. A monster dust storm swamped the Opportunity rover in 2018, killing its power and ending its mission.But it can be a peaceful planet, too. As night falls, Mars goes quiet. \u201cThe wind fluctuations die out quite suddenly and the planet remains very quiet into the early night hours,\u201d write the authors of the new Nature Geoscience paper on seismic activity.InSight\u2019s cameras captured images of noctilucent, or \u201cnight-shining\u201d clouds, just after sunset. These clouds shine at the outer edges of the atmosphere. They form when ice collects around the dusty streaks left by meteors. It\u2019s a phenomenon that also happens on Earth, as astronaut Jessica Meir recently observed from the International Space Station.The mesospheric (noctilucent) clouds in the upper atmosphere of the Southern Hemisphere have been especially impressive recently. That breathtaking color palette is our Earth\u2019s atmosphere that allows you to breathe. Let\u2019s appreciate and protect it. pic.twitter.com/ODNVKEp5re\u2014 Jessica Meir (@Astro_Jessica) February 20, 2020\n\nRead more:Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new rover \u2014 and a chance to make historyListen to the eerie rumble of the first \u2018Mars quake\u2019 ever detected Rocks like \"little tape recorders\" remain magnetized from Mars' long-dead inner dynamo. NASA\u2019s Mars lander discovers quakes and a surprising magnetic field",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists detect gravitational waves from black holes colliding 3 billion light-years from Earth (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5948",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/01/scientists-detect-gravitational-waves-from-black-holes-colliding-3-billion-light-years-from-earth/",
        "text": "On Jan. 4, an exquisitely sensitive instrument on Earth detected a disturbance that rippled through space and time. Scientists traced the ripple 3 billion light-years away, back to two ancient black holes on a collision course. This marked the third time in about a year that physicists, thanks to the\u00a0Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, discovered gravitational waves from the violent death spirals of merging black holes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe first gravitational wave discovery was announced in February\u00a02016 and the second\u00a0a few months later. The black holes identified in January were slightly smaller than those in the first detection, but they were much farther away, according to\u00a0David Shoemaker, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spokesman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration,\u00a0an international group involving more than a thousand researchers. They reported the details of the new binary black hole system that generated the wave\u00a0Thursday in the journal Physical Review Letters.\u201cGravitational waves are distortions in the metric of space that we live in,\u201d\u00a0Michael Landry,\u00a0a LIGO physicist at California Institute of Technology, said during a news conference Wednesday. He used a metaphor of a\u00a0painting's canvas to describe distorted space. If you grip the top and bottom of the canvas and pull, the picture warps, expanding on\u00a0one axis\u00a0while contracting on the other.Video: Here's what space-time warping near two black holes looks like (S. Ossokine/A. Buonanno/T. Dietrich (MPI for Gravitational Physics)/R. Haas (NCSA)/SXS project)Two\u00a0L-shaped LIGO detectors, one in Washington state and the other in Louisiana, check for these distortions. They shoot synchronized laser beams down perpendicular vacuum tubes, each 2\u00bd miles long. As a gravitational wave passes by, one arm of the L will shrink or expand, throwing the beams out of alignment. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology spearhead the project, with support from the\u00a0National Science Foundation and scientific agencies from a host of other countries.\u201cThis is exactly what we hoped for from NSF's investment in LIGO: taking us deeper into time and space in ways we couldn't do before the detection of gravitational waves,\u201d NSF director France C\u00f3rdova said in a statement.The signal in January failed to set off the usual automated alarm\u00a0\u2014 the LIGO scientists had just restarted the detector, after a short winter break, and hadn't yet properly calibrated the trigger setting at the Washington site. A researcher in Germany, who happened to be poring over the LIGO data, first spotted the wave.\u00a0(The wave would have been caught eventually, the LIGO team said; in a worst-case scenario there's an offline backup to review.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe scientists named it GW170104. The wave hit Washington about 3 milliseconds before Louisiana. Given the data captured,\u00a0the LIGO team calculated that the chance an event like this would be a false alarm would occur once every 70,000 years.\u201cThe key thing to take away is we\u2019re looking for novelty,\u201d Shoemaker said\u00a0during Wednesday's briefing. On these terms, the new\u00a0black holes complied, at least a little bit.Both of these black holes were much more massive than our sun. One was\u00a0roughly 30 times solar mass, and the other 20 times the sun's mass, putting these black holes in the intermediate range between the first detection\u00a0(two larger black holes) and second (two smaller black holes).Story continues below advertisementDuring this hole-on-hole merger, the equivalent of two solar masses were converted into gravitational waves. \u201cThese are the most powerful astronomical events witnessed by human beings,\u201d Landry said.AdvertisementThe new detection\u00a0also offered hints about the ways black holes spin with respect to their orbits. Georgia Tech astrophysicist Laura Cadonati\u00a0on Wednesday likened the spinning black holes to a pair of tornadoes\u00a0that dance around each other. Black holes can spin\u00a0counterclockwise and clockwise, like tornadoes, but can also tilt at angles tornadoes could never achieve.\u201cWe opened a new window into the universe,\u201d Cadonati said. \u201cBefore our discoveries we didn't even know for sure that these black holes existed.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt is possible that one of the black holes had a misaligned spin, which is to say that it was not spinning in the same direction as its overall spiral orbit. \u201cWe have an indication that at least one of the two spins is not aligned with the orbital angular momentum,\u201d said\u00a0B.S. Sathyaprakash, a cosmologist at Pennsylvania State University, during Wednesday's conference.AdvertisementIf the two black holes are not spinning in the same way, that\u00a0hints at the way they met. Broadly speaking, there are two ways that binary\u00a0black hole systems form: They\u00a0began as an isolated pair of stars (think the dual Tatooine sunset in \u201cStar Wars\u201d) that collapsed, or the black holes collapsed independently in a dense star cluster. Cadonati said \u201cthis finding lightly favors the theory\u201d\u00a0of a cluster of stars.And once again, Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity held up. Einstein's theory indicates that gravitational waves do not disperse through a physical medium, unlike light through a prism.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEven for this new event, which is about two times farther away than our first two detections, we could not find any evidence that gravitational waves disperse as they travel in the fabric of space-time,\u201d\u00a0Alessandra Buonanno, a University of Maryland physics professor and LIGO collaborator, said in a statement.AdvertisementThe LIGO team\u00a0continues to increase the detectors' sensitivity. In Louisiana, workers recently entered the vacuum envelope, clad in sterile bunny suits, to patch up areas where light could scatter in the tubes, cutting down on noise at low frequencies. In Washington, the observatory beefed up its laser to reduce high-frequency noise. With every improvement in clarity, LIGO can push its reach deeper into space.The two teams will swap notes to improve their systems' range for the next run, scheduled to start in 2018. Italy's Virgo detector, too, is close to completion, which will join in LIGO's hunt for gravitational waves. It is possible, members of the LIGO team said during Wednesday's conference,\u00a0that future discoveries could include merging neutron stars\u00a0\u2014 collisions between the dense remnants\u00a0of spent stars,\u00a0the size of a city with the mass of a sun.Read more:Cosmic breakthrough: Physicists detect gravitational waves from violent black-hole mergerA brief history of gravity, gravitational waves and LIGOA year later, scientists keep listening to gravitational waves, the soundtrack of the cosmosFor the second time ever, scientists detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes A third time's the charm for, once again, proving Einstein was right about ripples in the fabric of space-time. Scientists detect gravitational waves from black holes colliding 3 billion light-years from Earth",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "House Science Committee\u2019s likely next chair wants a return to science (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5949",
        "date": "2018-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/11/12/house-science-committees-likely-next-chair-wants-return-science/",
        "text": "As soon as it became clear that Democrats would gain control of the House of Representatives after the midterm elections, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.) announced that she was seeking the chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Johnson, 82, plans to make the committee \u201ca place where science is respected and recognized,\u201d she said in a statement Tuesday night. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn 2010, she became the first female and first African American ranking member of the science committee. Johnson, trained as a psychiatric nurse, has served on the committee for more than two decades. If she secures the chair, she will succeed Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who has held the position since 2013.Smith, a lawyer and former journalist, frequently disparaged climate science, dismissing, for instance, a link between climate change and extreme weather events. In 2015, the House granted Smith the unusual ability to issue subpoenas without the support of the minority party\u2019s committee members. Smith tussled with academics, state officials and government scientists, all while playing down a human role in the changing climate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Washington Post spoke with Johnson on Friday about her plans to return more science to the science committee. The following is lightly edited for clarity.Q: If you become chair, what would be your first step to build the credibility and reputation of the House Science Committee? A: It really won\u2019t take a lot for us to get back on the agenda. We hope that we will carry out the mandate of the committee, which I consider the \u201cCommittee of the Future.\u201d We will focus on, of course, basic research.We will review the rules that we had to operate under during the Republican majority.I see moving back to a nonpartisan view of what the committee was organized for: oversight, a combination of investigative hearings, making sure that our subcommittees function and making sure that we give adequate time for examining proposed legislation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost of the things that we\u2019ve experienced under the chairmanship of Lamar Smith the past six years have skirted our usual way of functioning on this committee, going out of our way to spend lots of time questioning scientific discovery of the past. There\u2019s enough going now for the present, and for the future, that we can look ahead \u2014 and not spend all of our time badgering the agencies to dig up information that\u2019s already been determined.Q: At Smith\u2019s direction, the House Science Committee has scrutinized the National Science Foundation peer-review process, particularly for social and political science, among other grants. Under your guidance, how would that change?A: The main thing I\u2019d like to do is see them be able to function as they have been in the past.Story continues below advertisementThere probably is nothing so perfect that it does not require some dialogue and change, but for the most part, we\u2019ve had the National Science Foundation function in a very ethical and professional manner with peer review. I did not see any major flaws within that agency. I certainly did not agree with Lamar Smith\u2019s approach.AdvertisementQ: You\u2019ve expressed concern about sexism and racism in science. Are the proposed rules by the NSF sufficient? [A new NSF policy requires institutions to report grant recipients who commit harassment.] What else can be done?A: There is an ongoing concern and interest in making sure we weed out any practices that discourage women and minorities entering into the field.Story continues below advertisementWe need the brainpower. It would be great to have it more diverse. But what is even greater is to have more of the people from diverse backgrounds, and both genders, focusing in areas that will make our country remain on the stage of leadership in the world.I have legislation that I intend to reintroduce that goes back to when I first got on the committee over 25 years ago.Q: What would that legislation do?A: Primarily it keeps records. And encourages more women to enter into STEM fields. To look at attitudes, trying to keep in check and call attention to some areas that have never been thought about as being intimidating. Educating the people involved so that they will be more sensitive to some of the influences discouraging women from entering into those fields.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe must make sure that we allow opportunities, and include guidelines, that provide for women to have maternity leave without intimidation.Q: What are some new approaches to create a more scientifically and technically proficient workforce?A: Well, we\u2019ve been working on that a long time. What we need to do is continue to encourage young people, to continue to identify the opportunities. One thing that we have found is that they know scientific research does not always bring as much money as football or hip-hop. But it brings us many more bodies of knowledge for the future.And while they don\u2019t make as much financially, they can be great contributors to a future world. Getting that message out continues to be a challenge, but we\u2019ll continue to do that. We\u2019ve had great support from our scientific organizations, from NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd I was just really chagrined to see that the president recommends completely defunding the education component of NASA. To me that\u2019s a step backward. We will take a great look at that.Q: What is your message to the science-savvy reader who\u2019s concerned about the representation and the understanding of science on the Hill?A: What I want to do is put a sign on the window to say, \u201cWe are open. We want to hear from you.\u201dWe know that it\u2019s the scientists who are going to actually do the work. It\u2019s the scientists who have the best ideas as to our direction.We do not want to be in the way, which I think we\u2019ve been the last six years, of progress.That is the window to the future. So we want to cooperate with those scientific minds. We want to bring them inside so that we can hear from them.Read more:Trump officials faulted climate panel for having only \u2018one member from industry\u2019The March for Science tries to build a lasting movementTrump desperately needs a science adviser, experts say. He just doubled the record for time without one. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson has a message for scientists: Congress is open and wants to hear from you. House Science Committee\u2019s likely next chair wants a return to science",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "The biggest Arctic expedition in history is launching for the North Pole (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5950",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/20/biggest-arctic-expedition-history-launches-today/",
        "text": "Hundreds of scientists are about to strand themselves in sea ice in the North Pole \u2014 an ambitious effort to understand the consequences of a changing climate in the fastest-warming part of the globe.The effort begins Friday, when the German icebreaker RV Polarstern sets sail from the Norwegian port of Tromso with scores of researchers and hundreds of tons of scientific equipment onboard. As winter darkness descends on the Arctic, the adventurers will allow the sea to freeze around their vessel, trapping them. The Polarstern will spend the next 12 months drifting slowly across the pole, as scientists collect crucial observations on the water, the ice, the air and the living inhabitants, until summer melting finally sets the ship free. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) is the largest Arctic research project in history and one of humanity\u2019s greatest efforts to understand how melting at the pole will affect the rest of the planet.Adrift in the Arctic: Nowhere on Earth is warming as fast. Scientists will spend a year trapped in sea ice to understand what that means for the world.A decade in the making, the project costs at least $134 million. Its members come from 60 institutions in 17 countries, led by Germany\u2019s Alfred Wegener Institute.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSoon after departure, the project\u2019s coordinators will face a crucial decision: To which floe should they link their fates? If it drifts too far in any direction, the Polarstern could end up beyond the reach of emergency rescuers, or in waters where Russia prohibits the collection of scientific data.Drawing on historical records, oceanographers have developed sophisticated models aimed at understanding where a given piece of ice will travel over the course of the year. But the Arctic\u2019s past is not always a good predictor of its future; the Arctic sea ice extent in the summer fell to near record lows.Once locked into their chosen floe, the scientists will build a gigantic, floating research station around the ship. Each research division will have its own \u201ccity\u201d on the ice, connected by wooden walkways designed to ensure that no meteorologist accidentally stumbles through a biology experiment and alters the results. Via snowmobile and helicopter, scientists will be able to venture farther afield \u2014 but always under the watchful eye of an armed guard trained to ward off polar bears.Most of the researchers will live and work aboard the Polarstern for two months at a time, then switch with the next team, like participants in a gigantic intellectual relay race. Virtually their only link to the rest of the world will be the ships and aircraft scheduled to arrive at the end of each leg \u2014 winter blizzards and stormy seas permitting \u2014 to swap out passengers and restock food and fuel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s a Christmas Eve sense for all of us right now,\u201d said Dartmouth geophysicist Don Perovich, co-lead for the project\u2019s sea ice investigations. \u201cIt\u2019s just incredible to think about what we\u2019re going to get to see in the next year.\u201dExpedition head Markus Rex calls the Arctic \u201cthe epicenter of global warming.\u201d Nowhere on Earth is changing as fast as there, where temperatures are an estimated 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they were 150 years ago.But the deep cold and impenetrable dark of the central Arctic make it almost impossible to study during the winter; planes can\u2019t fly safely, and even the strongest icebreakers can\u2019t traverse the frozen seas. Drifting with the ice, as the Polarstern is doing, is the only way to access this remote part of the planet in its harshest season. But a successful transpolar drift has been achieved just twice before, and never by a modern research vessel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, for the first time, scientists will be able to watch as open water freezes white and still, as the sun dips behind the horizon and stays there, as life goes quiet while the auroras dance. They\u2019ll be there to bear witness when the light returns, when the days lengthen, and plants and animals start to flourish in increasingly open waters. They\u2019ll be able to track the Arctic\u2019s transformation across the seasons and make sense of small-scale processes that can have dramatic large-scale consequences.\u201cIt\u2019s like spending years reading a random chapter from a book and trying to figure out what\u2019s going on,\u201d Perovich said. \u201cIn this case, we\u2019ll be there from page one to the last page.\u201dBut MOSAiC is \u201cnot just an intellectual exercise,\u201d Perovich added. Research suggests that rising temperatures and declining sea ice in the Arctic are having dangerous ripple effects across the globe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor centuries, the persistent cold at the top of the world has been like a keystone in an arch \u2014 it stabilized the entire Earth system. Its absence, said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Woods Hole Research Center, could cause long-established weather patterns around the planet to topple like dominoes.\u201cWe should all be worrying,\u201d Francis said.Sea ice reflects the majority of sunlight that hits it back into space; without this reflective power, climate change is expected to accelerate. Already, it\u2019s thought that global warming is 25 to 40 percent worse than it would be if the Arctic ice hadn\u2019t melted so much.An increasingly open Arctic ocean also contributes to wild fluctuations in the jet stream, the atmospheric river that pushes weather across the Northern Hemisphere. Francis\u2019s research suggests that recent extreme weather events \u2014 the polar vortex that gripped the Midwest in the winter, the lasting drought in California, heat waves in Europe and Asia \u2014 are the product of these waves.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough she will not travel aboard the Polarstern, Francis was involved in developing the science plans for MOSAiC. Her research and the work of many others depend on the information the expedition collects, she said. The exchange of heat between water and air, the interactions between ice and clouds, even the exhalation of gases by microscopic Arctic algae all factor into phenomena that could reshape our world.Read more:Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking actionPlane takes off in rare, risky effort to rescue sick workers from the South PoleThis ancient climate catastrophe is our best clue about Earth\u2019s futureExtreme climate change has arrived in America Hundreds of researchers will be trapped in sea ice to understand climate change in the Arctic. The biggest Arctic expedition in history is launching for the North Pole",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gravitational waves? Neutron stars? Kilonovas? What the new physics announcement means. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5951",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/16/gravitational-waves-neutron-stars-kilonovas-what-the-new-physics-announcement-means/",
        "text": "On Monday, scientists announced the first observation of a cosmic event using\u00a0 gravitational wave detectors and conventional telescopes. They witnessed a kilonova, a violent, brilliant explosion that occurs when two neutron stars collide.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe discovery was a massive undertaking. Thousands of researchers from diverse fields in physics and astronomy played crucial roles. And there\u2019s a lot of science to understand. Here are answers to\u00a0basic\u00a0questions about today\u2019s news: Remind me, what are gravitational waves?Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by cosmic events. They\u00a0travel at the same speed as light. Their existence was first predicted by Albert Einstein as a byproduct of his theory of general relativity.Story continues below advertisementSee, Einstein had figured out that gravity was a consequence of the way mass warps space-time. Heavy objects sit in the fabric of the universe like bowling balls on a trampoline, curving the space around them. That\u2019s why moons orbit planets and planets orbit the sun \u2014 not because they\u2019re attached by some cosmic leash, but because space-time is curling around the larger object, and they\u2019re caught in the whirlpool.Sticking with the trampoline metaphor, gravitational waves are what might happen if you smash two bowling balls together and caused them to explode. The cataclysm would vibrate the fabric of the trampoline, sending ripples out toward the edge. When two black holes collide, or when neutron stars merge, the gravitational waves from the event ripple through the universe.What\u2019s a neutron star?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeutron stars are formed when an aging mid-sized star (about four to eight times bigger than the sun) goes supernova. That is, as the star\u2019s outer layers are blown off, the remnants collapse in on themselves, forming a small, compacted core so dense that a single teaspoon of matter would weigh a billion tons.The neutron stars that collided to create the kilonova observed by astronomers were small enough to fit inside the Beltway, but each contained as much matter as the sun.\u201cIt\u2019s the most tightly bound something can be and exist in our universe,\u201d said Andy Howell, an astronomer at the California-based Las Cumbres Observatory and a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara.Story continues below advertisementThe intense gravity of a neutron star crushes its atoms, compacting protons and electrons together until they combine to make neutrons \u2014 subatomic particles with no charge at all.AdvertisementWhat happens during a kilonova?\u201cNova is an ancient word. It basically means new star,\u201d said Michael Siegel, a Penn State University astronomer who leads the ultraviolet instrumentation team for NASA\u2019s Swift satellite. Long-ago stargazers observed new points of light in the night sky and assumed they'd witnessed the birth of infant\u00a0stars.But nova is a misnomer. These novas weren\u2019t completely new objects \u2014 rather, these were existing suns that flared up and spat out bright light before dying down.Story continues below advertisementScientists first coined the term kilonova about a decade ago, when they calculated that there should be events roughly 1,000 times brighter than the garden-variety cosmic nova. They\u2019re also sometimes called \u201cmacronova\u201d (a term, in Howell's estimation, that sounds \u201cstupid\u201d). \u201cWe\u2019re so early we don't have the terminology sorted out,\u201d Howell said.AdvertisementThis kilonova lived up to its 1,000-times-stronger namesake. \u201cThat was very satisfying,\u201d said Columbia University theoretical astrophysicist Brian D. Metzger, whose work involves predicting the electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.Neutron star collisions shoot jets of radioactive matter into space. Their expelled guts beam out in a line:\u00a0Metzger said it was almost like smashing your palm on a full tube of toothpaste with holes at both ends. \u201cA lot of matter will come flying out,\u201d he said. These are materials that the universe does not otherwise generate in bulk. The neutron star merger churned out the equivalent of 10,000 Earth masses in gold and tens of Earth masses in uranium.Story continues below advertisementThe cataclysm in galaxy NGC 4993 suggests neutron star mergers are the dominant process by which the universe creates\u00a0gold, platinum and other elements, Metzger said. \u201cThat\u2019s been a mystery for something like 60 years.\u201dAdvertisementThese stars were probably twin suns in a binary system. One after the other they became dead husks. They circled each other, shaking off gravitational waves, which in turn pulled them closer together.\u00a0Imagine two large marbles rolling toward the bottom of a\u00a0funnel, until they meet with a catastrophic thwack.How exactly do gravitational wave detectors work?There are three working gravitational wave detectors on the planet: one in Louisiana, Washington state and Italy, near Pisa. The American sensors are L-shaped tubes, 2.5 miles long, with all of the air sucked out. The Virgo detector in Italy is V-shaped, and is also a similarly\u00a0lengthy vacuum.Story continues below advertisementDetector facilities\u00a0emit a laser beam, which is split and shot down each tube.\u00a0At the end of the each tube sits a\u00a0mirror. Under normal conditions the lasers hit the mirrors and return to the detector at the same time. But if something warps the fabric of space, the lasers will no longer be synchronized. The difficulty is in sensing the asynchronous return: The\u00a0ripples are unfathomably tiny\u00a0\u2014 far less than the diameter of an atom.Virgo, which came online this summer, helped researchers target the location of the collision.\u00a0Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist\u00a0David Shoemaker, spokesman for the\u00a0LIGO Scientific Collaboration, has described the\u00a0three detectors like the feet of a camera tripod.\u00a0Travel up the legs, and where they meet is the cosmic object of interest\u00a0\u2014 in this case, the neutron star merger.Why were so many scientists involved?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo understand a\u00a0collision requires general relativity (to understand\u00a0why the stars merged),\u00a0hydrodynamics (to understand how they collide) and nuclear physics (to understand what elements they produced), Metzger said. And that's just the theory of the thing. This detection and follow-up via telescope involved professors, scientists, engineers, technicians and students.There were more than 3,500 names in the author list of the biggest paper to come out of this observation. \u201cIt's a monumental thing, a testimony to a lot of people working together,\u201d Shoemaker said (even, if he added, it's likely that, given the sheer number of researchers, some of the\u00a0author names are incorrect or missing).Merging the two communities together \u2014 the physicists, used to large collaborations, with the astronomers, some of whom\u00a0weren't \u2014 wasn't always easy. Shoemaker\u00a0said if he would have done anything differently two months ago, when the researchers realized they had a neutron star collision on their hands,\u00a0\u201cit would have been to read about the sociology of astronomy before making any decision to put papers together. That would have saved a lot of sturm und drang.\u201dRead more:2017 Nobel-winning research on gravitational waves, LIGO and gravity explainedOrigin of gold is likely in rare neutron-star collisionsThis suspected supernova is 570 billion times as bright as our sun There\u2019s a lot of science to understand about this new discovery.  Gravitational waves? Neutron stars? Kilonovas? What the new physics announcement means.",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Incoming! A June meteor swarm could be loaded with surprises.  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5952",
        "date": "2018-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/25/incoming-june-meteor-swarm-could-be-loaded-with-surprises/",
        "text": "On June 30, 1908, an object the size of an apartment building came hurtling out of the sky and exploded in the atmosphere above Siberia. The Tunguska event, named for a river, flattened trees for 800 square miles. It occurred in one of the least-populated places in Asia, and no one was killed or injured. But the Tunguska airburst stands as the most powerful impact event in recorded human history, and it remains enigmatic, as scientists don\u2019t know the origin of the object or whether it was an asteroid or a comet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne hypothesis: It was a Beta Taurid.The Taurids are meteor showers that occur twice a year, in late June and late October or early November. The June meteors are the Betas. They strike during the day, when sunlight washes out the \u201cshooting stars\u201d that are visible during the nighttime meteor shower later in the year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA new calculation by Mark Boslough, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, shows that the tree-fall pattern in Siberia is consistent with an asteroid coming from the same area in the sky as the Taurid meteor swarm. Boslough and physicist Peter Brown of Western University in London, Ontario, gave a presentation at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in Washington this month in which they called for a special observation campaign this June to search for Tunguska-class or larger objects embedded in the Taurids.In some years, Earth passes near the densest cluster of material in the Taurid stream \u2014 and 2019 will be such a year. The scientists say it presents potentially the richest batch of incoming material since 1975, when seismometers left on the moon by Apollo astronauts recorded a spike in impacts during the Taurid swarm.\u201cIf the Tunguska object was a member of a Beta Taurid stream \u2026 then the last week of June 2019 will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near misses,\u201d their AGU presentation stated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhile we are not predicting another Tunguska airburst, an enhanced population of small NEOs [near-Earth objects] in the Beta Taurids would increase the probability of another such event on or near next year\u2019s Tunguska anniversary,\u201d they concluded.To be clear, no one is saying that June should be declared National Wear a Helmet Month. Even if there is an \u201cenhanced\u201d number of Tunguska-class objects in the Taurid stream, the probability of one hitting Earth remains very low. Space rocks rarely come even as close as our moon.Experts have a simple explanation for this: Space is big. It\u2019s so much easier to miss the Earth than to hit it. Of course, it can happen, and it did in 2013, when an object smaller than the Tunguska impactor slammed into the atmosphere in Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk, creating a fireball and a shock wave that shattered windows and injured more than 1,000 people.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn all of recorded human history, the number of people killed by asteroid impacts is zero.\u201cThis is not something that should be keeping you up at night,\u201d Brown said.Boslough and Brown do not know if there is, in fact, an \u201cenhanced\u201d population of relatively large asteroids lurking in the Beta Taurids. It\u2019s a conjecture.Boslough puts the asteroid impact hazard in perspective: \u201cIt\u2019s one of those very low-probability but potentially high-consequence-type risks, which is hard to quantify and hard to talk about. The probability of a lot of people dying from an asteroid impact is super, super low, but it\u2019s not zero.\u201d He adds, \u201cThere are so many other hazards that are greater risk.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAstronomer Amy Mainzer, who hunts for asteroids at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is principal investigator for the proposed Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOcam), an infrared space telescope that would scout Earth\u2019s orbit for potentially hazardous asteroids, said scientists have identified more than 90 percent of the objects large enough to cause a global-scale disaster.AdvertisementBut moving down the size scale, the census is far spottier. Only about 30 percent of medium-size objects \u2014 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter or larger \u2014 have been spotted. And she said only about 1 percent of objects have been found that are the size of the Tunguska impactor, which was about 40 meters (130 feet) in diameter. She said she welcomed the idea of a special effort to look for objects during the Taurid swarm in June.One other reassuring note: The large asteroids so far identified do not pose any significant threat to Earth, as far as anyone can discern.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere are no objects in our catalogue that have any significant impact probability in the next 100 years,\u201d said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He noted that the asteroid Bennu \u2014 currently under scrutiny by NASA\u2019s Osiris-REx space probe \u2014 has a very small chance of hitting Earth a couple of hundred years from now. \u201cThat one we\u2019re going to keep an eye on,\u201d he said, but added, \u201cThere are no highly concerning asteroids.\u201dAdvertisementThe geometry of the Taurid stream is a bit tricky to visualize. Imagine it as a ring around the sun, a kind of miniature asteroid belt, with a highly elliptical shape, such that the orbit takes the material roughly as close to the sun as the first planet, Mercury, but also far beyond the Earth\u2019s orbit.This ring of material is roughly but not exactly on the same plane as the Earth\u2019s orbit. That means the Earth crosses the Taurid stream twice a year. The June crossing intersects Taurid material traveling away from the sun, and the October crossing intersects material traveling toward the sun. That\u2019s why you can see the October Taurids as they hit the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The June Taurids are washed out by sunshine but can be spotted by radar.Story continues below advertisementBoslough and Brown are suggesting that the secret to finding big objects among the Beta Taurids is to look in the other direction \u2014 into the night sky where the material would be streaking away from Earth. It wouldn\u2019t create shooting stars, of course \u2014 that\u2019s a phenomenon of meteors hitting the atmosphere \u2014 but any large objects could be seen with telescopes. As these big space rocks move away from Earth, they will be concentrated in a \u201cvanishing point\u201d geometry, a kind of \u201csweet spot\u201d in the night sky, Boslough said.If they\u2019re there, that is.Read More:NASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That\u2019s harder than it sounds.As asteroid whizzes by, surprise meteor makes an impact over RussiaIs it time to start worrying about killer meteors? Probably not. Scientists studying the Tunguska impact of 1908 call for a special observing campaign next summer. Incoming! A June meteor swarm could be loaded with surprises. ",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Earth\u2019s hellish birth deprived us of silver and gold (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5953",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/how-earths-hellish-birth-deprived-us-of-silver-and-gold/",
        "text": "Earth should have a lot more gold and silver than it does. These elements are strewn throughout the solar system, but they're relatively rare here. Now scientists say they think they know why: because of our planet's hellish birth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a paper\u00a0published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Oxford geologist Bernard Wood suggests\u00a0 our planet's missing riches evaporated when Earth was young and still molten. Gold and silver, along with other elements known as \u201cmoderate volatiles,\u201d turn to gas at moderately low temperatures. When Wood melted a mock version of early Earth in a furnace, he found that moderate volatiles were lost from the rock like steam from a cake. A second Nature study, led by University of Bristol geochemist Remco Hin, found that evaporation also explains why Earth is dominated by a heavier brand of the element magnesium than other places in the solar system. According to Hin, our planet may have lost up to 40 percent of its mass\u00a0when these elements were vaporized and blown into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a newborn sun surrounded by a swirling mass of gas and dust. Slowly, the material in that \u201cprotoplanetary disk\u201d clumped together, forming pebbles, then rocks, then mid-sized \u201cplanetesimals,\u201d then full-fledged planets. During a fiery period aptly named the \u201cHadean\u201d after the Greek god of the underworld, the molten mass of early Earth slammed into and absorbed other bodies. Slightly later, after the Earth\u00a0had cooled a bit, another impact\u00a0may have remelted the planet\u00a0and splashed some molten material\u00a0into space, creating the moon.The leftovers from this violent beginning still float around the solar system, much like flour and sugar scattered around a kitchen in which the baker has failed to clean up. These leftovers fall to Earth as meteorites that scientists call \u201cchondrites,\u201d and they provide clues about the conditions in which the planets formed.Yet\u00a0when it comes to moderate volatiles, Earth's composition is weirdly different from that of the chondrites. It's as though\u00a0scientists found cocoa powder all over the messy kitchen, but the cake on the table is vanilla. Many have suggested that the depletion is a result of the way these elements were incorporated into Earth as it solidified \u2014 perhaps the moderate volatiles all sank to our planet's core, where neither miners nor scientists can reach them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy\u00a0Wood's calculation, the amount of missing gold alone is enough to gild Earth's entire surface in a layer almost 20\u00a0inches thick. A planet with a hidden golden core sounds wonderful \u2014 about as wonderful as a vanilla cake with a\u00a0secret chocolate center, and about as complicated to engineer. Wood thought evaporation offered a simpler explanation.So he and graduate student C. Ashley Norris set about trying to bake up a model of early Earth. They heated a furnace to 1,300 degrees Celsius \u2014 about three times as hot as a pizza oven, a quarter as hot as the surface of the sun \u2014 to replicate the\u00a0scorching conditions of the Hadean.\u00a0They pumped the furnace full of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide gas \u2014 the chief components of our planet's first atmosphere.Then they stirred together the ingredients found in\u00a0the protoplanetary disk \u2014 melted\u00a0basaltic rock (imported from Iceland!) spiced with powdered versions of volatile elements, like zinc oxide \u2014 poured about half a teaspoon of the mixture into a metal cup, and stuck it in the furnace.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter baking, the sample was dropped into a bucket of water to\u00a0\u201cquench,\u201d or rapidly cool.\u00a0When Wood and Norris examined the sample, they found that its\u00a0volatiles were gone.\u201cOur experiment shows that melting processes explain the pattern [of volatile depletion] perfectly,\u201d Wood said.\u00a0The scientists\u00a0suggest that this evaporation could have happened on the planetesimals that smashed together to form Earth, or during the collision that led to the creation of the moon.Unknown to Wood, over at the University of Bristol, Hin was working on a very similar problem. For years, researchers have puzzled over inconsistencies in\u00a0Earth's\u00a0ratio of magnesium isotopes (isotopes are forms of the same element that carry\u00a0varying numbers of neutrons, which gives them different weights).\u00a0Rocks from Earth seemed to have more of a heavy magnesium isotope than the chondrites do \u2014 but perhaps that was just a result of mistakes made in the lab. Hin wanted to know for sure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUsing an instrument called a mass spectrometer, which sorts materials into their component isotopes, he and his colleagues\u00a0tested an array of Earth rocks, chondritic meteorites and space rocks from other bodies in the solar system. They found that Earth and other large bodies, like Mars and the asteroid Vesta,\u00a0are dominated by the\u00a0heavy form of magnesium. Because this element doesn't dissolve in metallic cores, the \u201cvanilla cake with a hidden chocolate center\u201d\u00a0model could not explain where all the magnesium went. The best explanation was that the magnesium had been vaporized, Hin concluded, then either sucked back into the sun or blown out into the void of space.In calculating how much magnesium \u2014 a relatively abundant element \u2014 and other elements might have evaporated, Hin was startled to discover that early\u00a0Earth should have lost 40 percent of its mass through this process. Disbelieving, he double- and triple-checked his math, but always wound up with the same result.\u201cFrom a gut feeling that\u2019s hard to believe,\u201d Hin said. But science is based on data, not gut feelings. \u201cIn the end I asked myself the question, what scientific argument do I have not to believe, and I basically couldn't come up with one.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen, while attending a conference in the south of France, Hin heard Wood give a talk about his experiments. Afterward, the two chatted about their research over glasses of wine. (Planetary science sounds like a pretty nice gig, doesn't it?)\u201cIt's always good to know that your colleagues go through the same thought process and end up with the same conclusion,\u201d Hin said.\u00a0In an analysis for Nature, University of California at Los Angeles geologist Edward Young noted that evaporation is not a cure-all interpretation for oddities in our planet's composition. Earth and Mars have different silicon ratios, for example, which Wood and Hin's findings can't explain. Nor are these studies the first to suggest evaporation as the reason for Earth's missing elements. But, Young wrote, \u201ctheir relative success should encourage further exploration of the potential role of collisions in determining the chemical and isotopic compositions of planets.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNext he hopes\u00a0to analyze\u00a0the evaporation of early Earth's more difficult-to-detect\u00a0elements, like chlorine, bromine and iodine. He's also working with a postdoctoral fellow to use the furnace to model the makeup of\u00a0exoplanets \u2014 worlds that orbit suns far beyond our own.Read more:The first animals evolved during the absolute worst time on EarthStudy suggests Earth once had many moonlets \u2014 until they merged to form the moonThese 17,000 rocks from the bottom of the world could unlock the secrets of existence Cataclysmic collisions with flying space rocks may have knocked off 40 percent of our planet's mass.  How Earth\u2019s hellish birth deprived us of silver and gold",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Earth\u2019s hellish birth deprived us of silver and gold (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5954",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/09/27/how-earths-hellish-birth-deprived-us-of-silver-and-gold/",
        "text": "Earth should have a lot more gold and silver than it does. These elements are strewn throughout the solar system, but they're relatively rare here. Now scientists say they think they know why: because of our planet's hellish birth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a paper\u00a0published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Oxford geologist Bernard Wood suggests\u00a0 our planet's missing riches evaporated when Earth was young and still molten. Gold and silver, along with other elements known as \u201cmoderate volatiles,\u201d turn to gas at moderately low temperatures. When Wood melted a mock version of early Earth in a furnace, he found that moderate volatiles were lost from the rock like steam from a cake. A second Nature study, led by University of Bristol geochemist Remco Hin, found that evaporation also explains why Earth is dominated by a heavier brand of the element magnesium than other places in the solar system. According to Hin, our planet may have lost up to 40 percent of its mass\u00a0when these elements were vaporized and blown into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a newborn sun surrounded by a swirling mass of gas and dust. Slowly, the material in that \u201cprotoplanetary disk\u201d clumped together, forming pebbles, then rocks, then mid-sized \u201cplanetesimals,\u201d then full-fledged planets. During a fiery period aptly named the \u201cHadean\u201d after the Greek god of the underworld, the molten mass of early Earth slammed into and absorbed other bodies. Slightly later, after the Earth\u00a0had cooled a bit, another impact\u00a0may have remelted the planet\u00a0and splashed some molten material\u00a0into space, creating the moon.The leftovers from this violent beginning still float around the solar system, much like flour and sugar scattered around a kitchen in which the baker has failed to clean up. These leftovers fall to Earth as meteorites that scientists call \u201cchondrites,\u201d and they provide clues about the conditions in which the planets formed.Yet\u00a0when it comes to moderate volatiles, Earth's composition is weirdly different from that of the chondrites. It's as though\u00a0scientists found cocoa powder all over the messy kitchen, but the cake on the table is vanilla. Many have suggested that the depletion is a result of the way these elements were incorporated into Earth as it solidified \u2014 perhaps the moderate volatiles all sank to our planet's core, where neither miners nor scientists can reach them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy\u00a0Wood's calculation, the amount of missing gold alone is enough to gild Earth's entire surface in a layer almost 20\u00a0inches thick. A planet with a hidden golden core sounds wonderful \u2014 about as wonderful as a vanilla cake with a\u00a0secret chocolate center, and about as complicated to engineer. Wood thought evaporation offered a simpler explanation.So he and graduate student C. Ashley Norris set about trying to bake up a model of early Earth. They heated a furnace to 1,300 degrees Celsius \u2014 about three times as hot as a pizza oven, a quarter as hot as the surface of the sun \u2014 to replicate the\u00a0scorching conditions of the Hadean.\u00a0They pumped the furnace full of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide gas \u2014 the chief components of our planet's first atmosphere.Then they stirred together the ingredients found in\u00a0the protoplanetary disk \u2014 melted\u00a0basaltic rock (imported from Iceland!) spiced with powdered versions of volatile elements, like zinc oxide \u2014 poured about half a teaspoon of the mixture into a metal cup, and stuck it in the furnace.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter baking, the sample was dropped into a bucket of water to\u00a0\u201cquench,\u201d or rapidly cool.\u00a0When Wood and Norris examined the sample, they found that its\u00a0volatiles were gone.\u201cOur experiment shows that melting processes explain the pattern [of volatile depletion] perfectly,\u201d Wood said.\u00a0The scientists\u00a0suggest that this evaporation could have happened on the planetesimals that smashed together to form Earth, or during the collision that led to the creation of the moon.Unknown to Wood, over at the University of Bristol, Hin was working on a very similar problem. For years, researchers have puzzled over inconsistencies in\u00a0Earth's\u00a0ratio of magnesium isotopes (isotopes are forms of the same element that carry\u00a0varying numbers of neutrons, which gives them different weights).\u00a0Rocks from Earth seemed to have more of a heavy magnesium isotope than the chondrites do \u2014 but perhaps that was just a result of mistakes made in the lab. Hin wanted to know for sure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUsing an instrument called a mass spectrometer, which sorts materials into their component isotopes, he and his colleagues\u00a0tested an array of Earth rocks, chondritic meteorites and space rocks from other bodies in the solar system. They found that Earth and other large bodies, like Mars and the asteroid Vesta,\u00a0are dominated by the\u00a0heavy form of magnesium. Because this element doesn't dissolve in metallic cores, the \u201cvanilla cake with a hidden chocolate center\u201d\u00a0model could not explain where all the magnesium went. The best explanation was that the magnesium had been vaporized, Hin concluded, then either sucked back into the sun or blown out into the void of space.In calculating how much magnesium \u2014 a relatively abundant element \u2014 and other elements might have evaporated, Hin was startled to discover that early\u00a0Earth should have lost 40 percent of its mass through this process. Disbelieving, he double- and triple-checked his math, but always wound up with the same result.\u201cFrom a gut feeling that\u2019s hard to believe,\u201d Hin said. But science is based on data, not gut feelings. \u201cIn the end I asked myself the question, what scientific argument do I have not to believe, and I basically couldn't come up with one.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen, while attending a conference in the south of France, Hin heard Wood give a talk about his experiments. Afterward, the two chatted about their research over glasses of wine. (Planetary science sounds like a pretty nice gig, doesn't it?)\u201cIt's always good to know that your colleagues go through the same thought process and end up with the same conclusion,\u201d Hin said.\u00a0In an analysis for Nature, University of California at Los Angeles geologist Edward Young noted that evaporation is not a cure-all interpretation for oddities in our planet's composition. Earth and Mars have different silicon ratios, for example, which Wood and Hin's findings can't explain. Nor are these studies the first to suggest evaporation as the reason for Earth's missing elements. But, Young wrote, \u201ctheir relative success should encourage further exploration of the potential role of collisions in determining the chemical and isotopic compositions of planets.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNext he hopes\u00a0to analyze\u00a0the evaporation of early Earth's more difficult-to-detect\u00a0elements, like chlorine, bromine and iodine. He's also working with a postdoctoral fellow to use the furnace to model the makeup of\u00a0exoplanets \u2014 worlds that orbit suns far beyond our own.Read more:The first animals evolved during the absolute worst time on EarthStudy suggests Earth once had many moonlets \u2014 until they merged to form the moonThese 17,000 rocks from the bottom of the world could unlock the secrets of existence Cataclysmic collisions with flying space rocks may have knocked off 40 percent of our planet's mass.  How Earth\u2019s hellish birth deprived us of silver and gold",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists warn against losing a crucial research ship: The National Science Foundation \u2018has betrayed us\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5955",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/07/scientists-warn-against-losing-a-crucial-research-ship-nsf-has-betrayed-us/",
        "text": "Marine scientists are bracing for the loss of the world-class research vessel\u00a0Marcus G.\u00a0Langseth. The National Science Foundation\u00a0plans to sell the 235-foot ship\u00a0in 2020,\u00a0according to a \"Dear Colleague\" letter published\u00a0on the agency's website last month. Without a vessel to replace the Langseth,\u00a0ocean seismologists fear their field will suffer.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to save the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0at all costs,\u201d said James Austin, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Austin. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to save deep-ocean crustal imaging.\u201d Deep-ocean crustal imaging is where the Langseth\u00a0excels. It is no ordinary ship. Its sophisticated array of pneumatic guns\u00a0generates\u00a0a blast that bounces off the Earth's crust and penetrates\u00a0dozens of miles\u00a0into the planet. Unspooled behind the ship, miles of cables strung with microphones capture the blast's reflection. This sonic bounce creates maps of mid-ocean-ridge magma chambers and tectonic plate edges, features that are otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to survey.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere really aren't any comparable vessels that are available to academic\u00a0scientists,\u201d said\u00a0geophysicist\u00a0Douglas Wiens, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and chair of the\u00a0Iris Consortium, a network of 100-plus universities that collect seismological data.This ship has propelled \u201chuge scientific advances\u201d in marine seismology, he said.\u00a0Marine imaging, for instance, helps scientists\u00a0identify where\u00a0underwater earthquakes could occur. Recent research conducted on the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0found a fault near the Alaskan coast similar to the fault responsible for the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan and other areas across the Pacific.In 2004, the NSF purchased the ship\u00a0from a contractor for the drilling\u00a0industry, which uses ships like the\u00a0Langseth to locate oil and other\u00a0natural resources. Over the next three years, dockworkers in Nova Scotia modified the vessel into a research platform, able to support a host of sensors and gadgetry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe academic community had grand ambitions for the ship, said Sean Higgins, director of marine operations at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which runs the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0on behalf of the NSF. The\u00a0ship, which accommodates 55 or so people, can make observations\u00a0as varied as the salt content in seawater and the detection of nearby marine mammals. Researchers do not fire the ship's air guns\u00a0when\u00a0whales or dolphins are close, Austin said, to avoid harming the animals.The ship\u00a0generates 3-D views into the Earth's crust, peering deeper than the Langseth's\u00a0retired predecessor, the Maurice Ewing.\u00a0The Langseth has buoyed the careers of scientists who never set foot aboard it. The marine science community shares seafloor data\u00a0collected\u00a0by the Langseth, similar to the way astronomers over the world can access images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.But financial problems plagued the\u00a0Langseth from the start. Its planned $4.4 million refit in Canada ran over\u00a0budget by $600,000.\u00a0An agreement between the NSF and the international Integrated Ocean Drilling Program to support the ship fell through during the 2008 recession, Higgins said, leaving the NSF holding the check. Rising fuel prices\u00a0drove up the cost of research excursions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0ship\u00a0remains\u00a0docked more often than not. The Langseth\u00a0sails only about 150 days a year. And an operational day\u00a0at sea\u00a0costs $70,000, give or take, Austin said.Despite the high price tag, the Langseth has traveled from the Arctic to the Pacific to the Atlantic over the past decade. It recently weathered\u00a030-foot\u00a0swells\u00a0south of New Zealand.But a 200-page document may\u00a0have sealed its fate. In 2015, the National Research Council published an influential report called \u201cSea Change: 2015-2025,\u201d a map of the next decade of marine science. This report was a \u201cgame changer,\u201d\u00a0Higgins said. The council recommended the \u201cimmediate lay-up of the R/V Langseth\u201d to shift resources elsewhere.Story continues below advertisementThe NSF concluded that it could pay about $10 million of the Langseth's $13 million annual operational costs. In the three years since the report, the NSF has held workshops and invited scientists to propose solutions for the\u00a0$3 million divide.AdvertisementFrom these workshops, \u201cthe conclusion was that the Langseth was still the best option\u201d for academic seismology,\u00a0Higgins said. One suggestion was to lease the ship to offshore companies. But because the\u00a0Langseth's cruises often take it to areas rich in scientific interest and poor in natural resources,\u00a0it would\u00a0not be a good fit for\u00a0industry demands.William E. Easterling, the NSF's geosciences assistant director, announced to the scientific community in an\u00a0April 10 letter that the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0is no longer sustainable. The science agency will divest itself of the ship in mid-2020 and will no longer accept research proposals that involve the\u00a0Langseth.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNSF has committed to several Langseth projects between now and 2020,\u201d Richard Murray, the NSF's division director of ocean sciences, said\u00a0in an email to The Washington Post. \u201cCruises are complex and require several years to plan, which is why there will be a full two-year transition period.\u201dAdvertisementThe April 10 letter took many marine scientists by surprise. \u201cWe can understand that the ship might be too expensive,\u201d\u00a0Wiens said.\u00a0But,\u00a0he said, the NSF had previously assured scientists that the agency would provide alternative sources for marine seismologic tests. \u201cIt looks like they just completely abandoned that effort.\u201d The NSF's letter recommends that scientists\u00a0secure time on\u00a0industry ships or\u00a0find\u00a0international partners.Marine seismologists\u00a0\u201cfeel that the NSF has betrayed us a bit here,\u201d Austin said. He said he knew of at least\u00a0two proposals\u00a0to fix the\u00a0Langseth's finances or provide comparable access to seismic imaging, submitted as part of a 2017 formal solicitation by the NSF. The agency rejected both.\u00a0\u201cIt's hard not to see that they are making a statement about the science,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe agency\u00a0\u201cwill continue to support seismic research through a variety of mechanisms,\u201d Murray said. \u201cThe 2017 solicitation as well as other NSF communications clearly state our commitment to seismic research and education. This decision is about finding the best means to fulfill this commitment.\u201dAdvertisementIn recent weeks, Columbia University and the\u00a0Iris Consortium\u00a0issued strongly worded letters to express their concerns. In its letter, the Iris Consortium said the loss of the\u00a0Langseth will have a\u00a0disproportionate impact on the careers of young scientists, who may not have the clout or contacts to gather seismic data beyond this ship.\u201cThe board doesn\u2019t have a personal stake in this ship,\u201d said Wiens, a signatory of the letter. \u201cWe see it as being a foundational capability for seismology and tectonics and studying the structure of the oceans.\u201d It is also a step backward for the U.S., he said, which has been at the forefront of marine seismology since the field's inception in the 1950s.Story continues below advertisementAustin said he could not fathom why the NSF was unwilling to pay more than $10 million for seismic imaging but has pledged, to the\u00a0International Ocean Discovery Program, six times as much money for deep-sea scientific drilling. \u201cWithout imaging, it's really irresponsible to drill holes in the ocean,\u201d he said, likening the scenario to turning on a Tesla's autopilot while shutting off the car's radar and GPS.AdvertisementNormally, in cases like these, scientists would seek the support of the\u00a0White House's science adviser. Except the Trump administration has not yet filled this role.\u00a0So\u00a0expect more letters, Austin said. \u201cWe're going to battle.\u201dRead more:A university is eliminating its science collection \u2014 to expand a running trackThe Galapagos might lose some of their best researchers, and they\u2019re blaming the gift shop The NSF plans to sell the Langseth in 2020, and scientists are afraid there will be no replacement. Scientists warn against losing a crucial research ship: The National Science Foundation \u2018has betrayed us\u2019",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists warn against losing a crucial research ship: The National Science Foundation \u2018has betrayed us\u2019 (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5956",
        "date": "2018-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/05/07/scientists-warn-against-losing-a-crucial-research-ship-nsf-has-betrayed-us/",
        "text": "Marine scientists are bracing for the loss of the world-class research vessel\u00a0Marcus G.\u00a0Langseth. The National Science Foundation\u00a0plans to sell the 235-foot ship\u00a0in 2020,\u00a0according to a \"Dear Colleague\" letter published\u00a0on the agency's website last month. Without a vessel to replace the Langseth,\u00a0ocean seismologists fear their field will suffer.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019re not trying to save the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0at all costs,\u201d said James Austin, a geoscientist at the University of Texas at Austin. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to save deep-ocean crustal imaging.\u201d Deep-ocean crustal imaging is where the Langseth\u00a0excels. It is no ordinary ship. Its sophisticated array of pneumatic guns\u00a0generates\u00a0a blast that bounces off the Earth's crust and penetrates\u00a0dozens of miles\u00a0into the planet. Unspooled behind the ship, miles of cables strung with microphones capture the blast's reflection. This sonic bounce creates maps of mid-ocean-ridge magma chambers and tectonic plate edges, features that are otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to survey.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere really aren't any comparable vessels that are available to academic\u00a0scientists,\u201d said\u00a0geophysicist\u00a0Douglas Wiens, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and chair of the\u00a0Iris Consortium, a network of 100-plus universities that collect seismological data.This ship has propelled \u201chuge scientific advances\u201d in marine seismology, he said.\u00a0Marine imaging, for instance, helps scientists\u00a0identify where\u00a0underwater earthquakes could occur. Recent research conducted on the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0found a fault near the Alaskan coast similar to the fault responsible for the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan and other areas across the Pacific.In 2004, the NSF purchased the ship\u00a0from a contractor for the drilling\u00a0industry, which uses ships like the\u00a0Langseth to locate oil and other\u00a0natural resources. Over the next three years, dockworkers in Nova Scotia modified the vessel into a research platform, able to support a host of sensors and gadgetry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe academic community had grand ambitions for the ship, said Sean Higgins, director of marine operations at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which runs the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0on behalf of the NSF. The\u00a0ship, which accommodates 55 or so people, can make observations\u00a0as varied as the salt content in seawater and the detection of nearby marine mammals. Researchers do not fire the ship's air guns\u00a0when\u00a0whales or dolphins are close, Austin said, to avoid harming the animals.The ship\u00a0generates 3-D views into the Earth's crust, peering deeper than the Langseth's\u00a0retired predecessor, the Maurice Ewing.\u00a0The Langseth has buoyed the careers of scientists who never set foot aboard it. The marine science community shares seafloor data\u00a0collected\u00a0by the Langseth, similar to the way astronomers over the world can access images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.But financial problems plagued the\u00a0Langseth from the start. Its planned $4.4 million refit in Canada ran over\u00a0budget by $600,000.\u00a0An agreement between the NSF and the international Integrated Ocean Drilling Program to support the ship fell through during the 2008 recession, Higgins said, leaving the NSF holding the check. Rising fuel prices\u00a0drove up the cost of research excursions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe\u00a0ship\u00a0remains\u00a0docked more often than not. The Langseth\u00a0sails only about 150 days a year. And an operational day\u00a0at sea\u00a0costs $70,000, give or take, Austin said.Despite the high price tag, the Langseth has traveled from the Arctic to the Pacific to the Atlantic over the past decade. It recently weathered\u00a030-foot\u00a0swells\u00a0south of New Zealand.But a 200-page document may\u00a0have sealed its fate. In 2015, the National Research Council published an influential report called \u201cSea Change: 2015-2025,\u201d a map of the next decade of marine science. This report was a \u201cgame changer,\u201d\u00a0Higgins said. The council recommended the \u201cimmediate lay-up of the R/V Langseth\u201d to shift resources elsewhere.Story continues below advertisementThe NSF concluded that it could pay about $10 million of the Langseth's $13 million annual operational costs. In the three years since the report, the NSF has held workshops and invited scientists to propose solutions for the\u00a0$3 million divide.AdvertisementFrom these workshops, \u201cthe conclusion was that the Langseth was still the best option\u201d for academic seismology,\u00a0Higgins said. One suggestion was to lease the ship to offshore companies. But because the\u00a0Langseth's cruises often take it to areas rich in scientific interest and poor in natural resources,\u00a0it would\u00a0not be a good fit for\u00a0industry demands.William E. Easterling, the NSF's geosciences assistant director, announced to the scientific community in an\u00a0April 10 letter that the\u00a0Langseth\u00a0is no longer sustainable. The science agency will divest itself of the ship in mid-2020 and will no longer accept research proposals that involve the\u00a0Langseth.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNSF has committed to several Langseth projects between now and 2020,\u201d Richard Murray, the NSF's division director of ocean sciences, said\u00a0in an email to The Washington Post. \u201cCruises are complex and require several years to plan, which is why there will be a full two-year transition period.\u201dAdvertisementThe April 10 letter took many marine scientists by surprise. \u201cWe can understand that the ship might be too expensive,\u201d\u00a0Wiens said.\u00a0But,\u00a0he said, the NSF had previously assured scientists that the agency would provide alternative sources for marine seismologic tests. \u201cIt looks like they just completely abandoned that effort.\u201d The NSF's letter recommends that scientists\u00a0secure time on\u00a0industry ships or\u00a0find\u00a0international partners.Marine seismologists\u00a0\u201cfeel that the NSF has betrayed us a bit here,\u201d Austin said. He said he knew of at least\u00a0two proposals\u00a0to fix the\u00a0Langseth's finances or provide comparable access to seismic imaging, submitted as part of a 2017 formal solicitation by the NSF. The agency rejected both.\u00a0\u201cIt's hard not to see that they are making a statement about the science,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe agency\u00a0\u201cwill continue to support seismic research through a variety of mechanisms,\u201d Murray said. \u201cThe 2017 solicitation as well as other NSF communications clearly state our commitment to seismic research and education. This decision is about finding the best means to fulfill this commitment.\u201dAdvertisementIn recent weeks, Columbia University and the\u00a0Iris Consortium\u00a0issued strongly worded letters to express their concerns. In its letter, the Iris Consortium said the loss of the\u00a0Langseth will have a\u00a0disproportionate impact on the careers of young scientists, who may not have the clout or contacts to gather seismic data beyond this ship.\u201cThe board doesn\u2019t have a personal stake in this ship,\u201d said Wiens, a signatory of the letter. \u201cWe see it as being a foundational capability for seismology and tectonics and studying the structure of the oceans.\u201d It is also a step backward for the U.S., he said, which has been at the forefront of marine seismology since the field's inception in the 1950s.Story continues below advertisementAustin said he could not fathom why the NSF was unwilling to pay more than $10 million for seismic imaging but has pledged, to the\u00a0International Ocean Discovery Program, six times as much money for deep-sea scientific drilling. \u201cWithout imaging, it's really irresponsible to drill holes in the ocean,\u201d he said, likening the scenario to turning on a Tesla's autopilot while shutting off the car's radar and GPS.AdvertisementNormally, in cases like these, scientists would seek the support of the\u00a0White House's science adviser. Except the Trump administration has not yet filled this role.\u00a0So\u00a0expect more letters, Austin said. \u201cWe're going to battle.\u201dRead more:A university is eliminating its science collection \u2014 to expand a running trackThe Galapagos might lose some of their best researchers, and they\u2019re blaming the gift shop The NSF plans to sell the Langseth in 2020, and scientists are afraid there will be no replacement. Scientists warn against losing a crucial research ship: The National Science Foundation \u2018has betrayed us\u2019",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Activism is a hot topic at the world\u2019s biggest Earth and planetary science conference (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5957",
        "date": "2017-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/15/activism-is-a-hot-topic-at-the-worlds-biggest-earth-and-planetary-science-conference/",
        "text": "NEW ORLEANS \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m going to start with some protest 101,\u201d Lee Rowland told the few dozen scientists who filled the windowless meeting room. \u201cYou know, basic rules for making sure if you go out and protest, you don\u2019t get arrested.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAudience members shifted in their seats. They included experts in Martian landscape evolution and glacier melting rates. For many, this information was new. They\u2019d come to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union \u2014 the Comic-Con of the Earth, space and climate sciences. Every year, some 25,000 researchers converge for a five-day bonanza of scientific presentations and free coffee.But this is 2017. The president has proposed a budget that include massive cuts to science agencies. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency has advocated for a \u201cred team/blue team\u201d debate on climate change science. In April, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in a \u201cMarch for Science,\u201d chanting slogans like \u201cscience cures alternative facts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor some AGU attendees this year, activism is on the agenda.The session \u201cLegal Advice for Scientists Interested in Activism\u201d is one new addition to the conference program. Lauren Kurtz, an attorney with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, said she suggested it after working with organizers of the March for Science \u2014 most of whom were researchers with no previous activism experience.\u201cThe science community is very well meaning,\u201d she said, \u201cbut there have been some situations recently \u2026 where they made some mistakes that really opened them up to attack.\u201dDuring her presentation, Kurtz ticked off a few examples of activism don\u2019ts: Don\u2019t use a public university emails to draft open letters on political issues \u2014 because they are considered government records, such emails are subject to open records requests and can be sought by outside groups to harass researchers they disagree with.\u00a0Don\u2019t wear your NASA apparel to the March for Science or invite colleagues to a protest at the end of the weekly faculty meeting \u2014 such activities could run afoul of anti-lobbying restrictions or workplace policies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA young man in the back of the room raised his hand. \u201cYou guys talked a lot about not doing activism activities \u2018on the clock,\u2019 \u201d he said, putting air quotes around the last three words. \u201cI feel like in science there is no clock.\u201d Several people laughed, undoubtedly recalling long nights spent running experiments and drafting research papers.But the attorneys were serious. \u201cIf it has to wait till you get home at 2 a.m. to send that email, that\u2019s what you have to do,\u201d said Rowland, who works for the American Civil Liberties Union.Audience members continued to pepper Rowland, Kurtz and fellow CSLDF attorney Susan Rosenthal with questions for more than an hour. They ended things only when they had to vacate the room for the next session.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a community that hasn\u2019t historically been super into public protests,\u201d Kurtz said as she packed up her materials. \u201cBut we had a huge swell of interest post-election.\u201dAdvertisementRowland nodded. \u201cThere\u2019s no real room for complacency any more.\u201dOther additions to the meeting agenda include daily updates on science policy and a discussion of threats to scientists\u2019 independence,\u00a0a workshop on how to visit legislators, and a \u201ccall-a-thon\u201d to members of Congress. A table outside the conference\u2019s \u201csharing science room\u201d \u2014 dedicated to sessions on communicating with the public \u2014 included cards bearing helpful reminders of how a nonscientist might interpret academic jargon. Pro tip: To most people, \u201cbonding\u201d does not describe an electrostatic connection between atoms. At a session added to the agenda at the last minute, on the outlooks for federal agencies, the National Science Foundation\u2019s geosciences head,\u00a0William Easterling, attempted to assuage concerns about likely budget cuts: \u201cRemember that in spite of the angst .\u2009.\u2009. life will continue no matter what,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat we\u2019re seeing again this year at the meeting is fear and anxiety, inside and outside the U.S.\u201d said AGU\u00a0 Executive Director Christine McEntee.\u00a0She cited proposed cuts to research funding, skepticism about climate science\u00a0 and politicians\u2019 overall fondness for the phrases \u201cfake news\u201d and \u201calternative facts\u201d as causes for concern.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re hearing from more and more AGU researchers wanting to be better equipped to speak, to advocate,\u201d she said.The attendees at Kurtz\u2019s legal-advice session skewed much younger than those at other sessions, and many had already dipped a toe into activism. Emilie Sinkler, a graduate student at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has been writing letters to her representatives. Alistair Hayden, the man\u00a0who complained that science had no \u201cclock,\u201d used to lead the graduate student government at Caltech and helped organized a walkout in protest of a proposed tax on tuition.Story continues below advertisementIn the cavernous poster hall, where researchers stand in front of 4-by-6-foot placards displaying their research, glaciologists Adam Greeley and Tyler Sutterley were surprised to hear that the conference offered so many policy-related sessions.Advertisement\u201cI've been so focused on the science,\u201d Sutterley said.Greeley said he\u2019s reticent to speak out about politics; like many of his colleagues, he\u2019s leery of anything that might make his work seem less objective. He attended the March for Science this April \u201cbecause it felt like a safe thing. That was just supporting science,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I feel like that\u2019s a unique one .\u2009.\u2009. A lot of scientists are just heads down.\u201dThe congressional call-a-thon drew no participants on the conference's first day, and it wasn\u2019t till the hour-long session Tuesday\u00a0 was almost over that Erin McDuffie, a 27-year-old graduate student from the University of Colorado at Boulder, walked in.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019ve never done a call like this before,\u201d she admitted. But she was worried about a provision in House Republicans\u2019 tax plan that would tax graduate students\u2019 tuition waivers \u2014 which are typically worth more money than students actually earn. The proposal could increase McDuffie\u2019s taxes by as much as 400 percent.AdvertisementTwo AGU public affairs staffers sat beside McDuffie, offering tips as she drafted her pitch, then looking up the phone number for Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) After a final glance at her notes, McDuffie dialed.\u201cHi, I\u2019d like to speak to a staffer who is working on the tax plan?\u201d She waited, then launched into her spiel. \u201cGraduate students are the backbone of our current scientific workforce. Mm hmm. Okay. I\u2019m hoping I can count on the senator\u2019s support.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe following evening, House and Senate Republicans announced that they had come to an agreement on a final version of their tax bill. The proposed graduate student tax had been dropped.\u201cI\u2019m relieved,\u201d McDuffie said. But she was holding onto the phone numbers for Bennet and her other representatives, just in case. \u201cThere\u2019s still a lot of other things I have opinions about.\u201dRead more:Six months later, the March for Science tries to build a lasting movement Analysis | Historians say the March for Science is 'pretty unprecedented' GAO to probe whether Trump administration is protecting agencies' scientific integrity Alongside sessions about the ocean and Mars, AGU offers a congressional call-a-thon and legal advice for activist scientists.  Activism is a hot topic at the world\u2019s biggest Earth and planetary science conference",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | How balloon travel brought science \u2014 and our view of the world \u2014 to new heights (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5958",
        "date": "2019-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/how-balloon-travel-brought-science--and-our-view-of-the-world--to-new-heights/2019/12/13/cede0202-1b9c-11ea-8d58-5ac3600967a1_story.html",
        "text": "Near the beginning of the new film \u201cThe Aeronauts,\u201d a giant gas-filled balloon called the \u201cMammoth\u201d departs from London\u2019s Vauxhall Gardens and ascends into the clouds, revealing a bird\u2019s-eye view of London.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo some moviegoers, these breathtaking views might seem like nothing special: Modern air travel has made many of us take for granted what we can see from the sky. But during the 19th century, the vast \u201cocean of air\u201d above our heads was a mystery. These first balloon trips changed all that. Directed by Tom Harper, the movie is inspired by the true story of Victorian scientist James Glaisher and the aeronaut Henry Coxwell. (In the film, Coxwell is replaced by a fictional aeronaut named Amelia Wren.)Story continues below advertisementIn 1862, Glaisher and Coxwell ascended to 37,000 feet in a balloon \u2014 8,000 feet higher than the summit of Mount Everest, and, at the time, the highest point in the atmosphere humans had ever reached.AdvertisementAs a historian of science and visual communication, I\u2019ve studied the balloon trips of Glaisher, Coxwell and others. Their voyages inspired art and philosophy, introduced new ways of seeing the world and transformed our understanding of the air we breathe.Before the invention of the balloon, the atmosphere was like a blank slate on which fantasies and fears were projected. Philosophers speculated that the skies went on forever, while there were medieval tales of birds that were so large they could whisk human passengers into the clouds. The atmosphere was also thought of as a \u201cfactory of death\u201d \u2014 a place where disease-causing vapors lingered. People feared that if they were to ascend into the clouds, they\u2019d die of oxygen deprivation.Story continues below advertisementThe dream of traveling skyward became a reality in 1783, when two French brothers, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-\u00c9tienne Montgolfier, launched the first piloted hot-air balloon.AdvertisementEarly balloon flights were difficult to pull off and dangerous. Aeronauts and passengers fell to their deaths when balloons unexpectedly deflated, caught fire or drifted out to sea. Partly due to this inherent danger, untethered balloon flight became forms of public entertainment, titillating crowds who wanted to see if something would go wrong. The novelist Charles Dickens, horrified by balloon ascents, wrote that these \u201cdangerous exhibitions\u201d were no different from public hangings.Over time, aeronauts became more skilled, the technology improved and trips became safe enough to bring along passengers \u2014 provided they could afford the trip. At the time of Glaisher\u2019s ascents, it cost about 600 pounds \u2014 about $90,000 today \u2014 to construct a balloon. Scientists who wanted to make a solo ascent needed to shell out about 50 pounds to hire an aeronaut, balloon and enough gas for a single trip.Story continues below advertisementSome of the first Europeans who ascended for amusement returned with tales of new sights and sensations, composed poems about what they had seen and circulated sketches. Common themes emerged: the sensation of being in a dream, a feeling of tranquility, and a sense of solitude and isolation.Advertisement\u201cWe were lost in an opaque ocean of ivory and alabaster,\u201d the balloon travelers Wilfrid de Fonvielle and Gaston Tissandier recalled in 1868 upon returning from one of their voyages.In an 1838 book, one of the most prolific writers on the topic, professional flutist Monck Mason, described ascending into the atmosphere as \u201cdistinct in all its bearings from every other process with which we are acquainted.\u201d Once aloft, the traveler is forced to consider the \u201cworld without him.\u201d French astronomer Camille Flammarion wrote that the atmosphere was \u201can ethereal sea reaching over the whole world; its waves wash the mountains and the valleys, and we live beneath it and are penetrated by it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTravelers were also awestruck by the diffusion of light, the intensity of colors and the effects of atmospheric illumination.AdvertisementOne scientific observer in 1873 described the atmosphere as a \u201csplendid world of colors which brightens the surface of our planet,\u201d noting the \u201clovely azure tint\u201d and \u201cchanging harmonies\u201d of hues that \u201clighten up the world.\u201dAnd then there were the bird\u2019s-eye views of the cities, farms and towns below. In 1852, the social reformer Henry Mayhew recalled his views of London from the perch of \u201can angel\u201d: \u201ctiny people, looking like so many black pins on a cushion,\u201d swarmed through \u201cthe strange, incongruous clump of palaces and workhouses.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo Mayhew, the sights of farmlands were \u201cthe most exquisite delight I ever experienced.\u201d The houses looked \u201clike the tiny wooden things out of a child\u2019s box of toys, and the streets like ruts.\u201dSo deep was the dusk in the distance that it \u201cwas difficult to tell where the earth ended and the sky began.\u201dAdvertisementThe atmosphere was not just a vantage point for picturesque views. It was also a laboratory for discovery, and balloons were a boon to scientists.At the time, different theories prevailed over how and why rain formed. Scientists debated the role of trade winds and the chemical composition of the atmosphere. People wondered what caused lightning and what would happen to the human body as it ascended higher.Story continues below advertisementTo scientists like Flammarion, the study of the atmosphere was the era\u2019s key scientific challenge. The hope was that the balloon would give scientists some answers \u2014 or, at the very least, provide more clues.Glaisher, a British astronomer and meteorologist, was already an established scientist by the time he made his famous balloon ascents. During his trips, he brought along delicate instruments to measure the temperature, barometric pressure and chemical composition of the air. He even recorded his own pulse at various altitudes.AdvertisementIn 1871 he published \u201cTravels in the Air,\u201d a collection of reports from his experiments. He didn\u2019t want to simply write about his findings for other scientists; he wanted the public to learn about his trips. So he fashioned his book to make the reports appealing to middle-class readers by including detailed drawings and maps, colorful accounts of his adventures and vivid descriptions of his precise observations.Story continues below advertisementGlaisher\u2019s books also featured innovative visual portrayals of meteorological data; the lithographs depicted temperatures and barometric pressure levels at different elevations, superimposed over picturesque views. He gave popular lectures, during which he relayed findings from his trips to riveted audiences. Two years later, he published an English translation of Flammarion\u2019s account of his balloon travels.The trips of Glaisher and others gave scientists new insights into meteors; the relationship between altitude and temperature; the formation of rain, hail and snow; and the forces behind thunder.AdvertisementAnd for members of the public, the atmosphere was transformed from an airy concept into a physical reality.Story continues below advertisementJennifer Tucker is associate professor of history and science in society at Wesleyan University. This report was originally published on theconversation.com. (\u201cThe Aeronauts\u201d movie is produced and distributed by Amazon Studios. Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\nRead more\n\n\nThe Air and Space Museum gets a facelift, and its famous planes get a thorough exam\n\n\n\nHow one man\u2019s obsession led to the discovery of a lost WWII pilot\n\n\n[]\n How 19th-century aerial voyages inspired art and philosophy, introduced new ways of seeing the Earth and transformed the study of the atmosphere. How balloon travel brought science \u2014 and our view of the world \u2014 to new heights",
        "author": "Jennifer Tucker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Black female biologist tests, entertains and explains science on TV, social media (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5959",
        "date": "2021-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/raven-the-science-maven/2021/09/24/e3415e9a-155c-11ec-9589-31ac3173c2e5_story.html",
        "text": "As a child growing up in Buffalo, Raven Baxter, a.k.a. \u201cRaven the Science Maven,\u201d loved seeing what would happen when she mixed two things together, sometimes raiding her mother\u2019s cosmetics for nail polish, lotion and other ingredients. Although she knew she wanted to do something with science, she rarely heard about Black female scientists, whether in class or on television. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, at age 28, with a master\u2019s degree in biology and a doctorate in science education, Baxter is often the one on television, explaining complicated science issues to a general audience. She\u2019s on Twitter with more than 100,000 followers, as well as TikTok and YouTube. Her music video breaking down the immune system, \u201cAntibodyody\u201d (a take on Megan Thee Stallion\u2019s hit \u201cBody\u201d), was inspired by a student who needed help on a microbiology exam \u2014 and got a personal shout out from the singer herself.The \u201cScience Maven\u201d is in high demand \u2014 she\u2019s doing a series on Facebook\u2019s \u201cScience and Culture\u201d Bulletin site, and working with NASA\u2019s TechRise Student Challenge. This fall, she has started a new job at the University of California at Irvine as director of culture and instruction for the School of Biological Sciences.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the move to California, she discussed the ways she uses social media to bring science to a new audience, her surprise at being a scientific role model, and how she sees her ADHD diagnosis as a scientific and creative advantage. The questions and answers have been edited for space.Q: You mentioned that your mom grew tired of you using her Clinique lotion and nail polish to do experiments. Was there an experiment that actually worked?A: I had gone through everything in the house, and one day my mom got me a science kit \u2014 it was one where you could make your own bouncy balls and I made one and it bounced. And I remember being so proud of myself, because those [type of balls] were in the quarter machines at the grocery store and I\u2019m like, \u201cOh my God, I just made one at home.\u201d It just blew my mind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: Were there scientists you particularly remember who were an influence growing up?A: Two people come to mind. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Al Roker, the weather guy from \u201cThe Today Show.\u201d I loved hearing him talking about the weather and meteorology, and for a long time I wanted to be a meteorologist.Q: Do you remember any female scientists from your childhood?A: There weren\u2019t any. I don\u2019t think I learned that there were female scientists until I went to space camp when I was around 10 years old, and then I learned about Mae Jemison [the first Black female astronaut].Q: Now you, a Black woman, are the picture of that scientist \u2014 in the media doing interviews, on social media, and in front of them in the classroom as Dr. Baxter.Story continues below advertisementA: Oh. I hadn\u2019t thought about that. That\u2019s really cool. I will have like a presence in many spaces. So by default I can totally see how I would become the image of a scientist.AdvertisementQ: Tell me about your molecular biology research.A: My work in graduate school involved looking at the evolution of structure and function of cellular proteins. My master\u2019s thesis involved looking at proteins and how they\u2019re structured, their sequences and how they evolve over time. I was looking at a molecular chaperone \u2014 it\u2019s a protein that helps other proteins function properly. It turns out that this one chaperone protein had a twin \u2014 it\u2019s called an isoform. I was looking at this isoform. At what point did it diverge and how did it evolve separately to have different functions? They were both chaperone proteins but they did different things to help proteins function in the cell.Story continues below advertisementQ: You've mentioned having attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. How do you incorporate ADHD into your life?AdvertisementA: I have a lot of random thoughts that my mind spits out, and it happens more when I\u2019m stressed. Like my songwriting. I have a deadline, but my brain is like, \u201cThat\u2019s nice, but I have a great idea for a song that\u2019s going to be a hit and that\u2019s what you\u2019re going to do right now.\u201d I see that creative spirit as a treat, and although sometimes it\u2019s really inconvenient, I try to work my life around that. I\u2019m so glad people are enjoying the music I\u2019ve created.Q: Did you always know you had ADHD?A: My mom knew when I was 6. I was very hyperactive, I was really a disruptive child. I was diagnosed then, but she never told me, I wasn\u2019t put on medication. She just handled it. She was great. It wasn\u2019t until I was in high school that I really started to have roadblocks with my attention and started to struggle in school. That\u2019s when she told me I\u2019d been diagnosed with ADHD as a child. I was retested and rediagnosed and started taking medication. It does help. Now I take it as needed, and it does a great job helping me when I need it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: Tell me about your Facebook newsletter.A: They reached out to me and .\u2009.\u2009. wanted me to be part of their new Bulletin platform, which is for independent writers, to share my thoughts about science and culture. I\u2019ll also be hosting biweekly audio chats \u2014 it\u2019s like Zoom but no cameras \u2014 talking about science. We\u2019ll be talking about everything from \u201cDo aliens exist?\u201d to elitism in science.My goal is to build a science community, and Facebook has 3 billion users. I want to do all I can to make sure they are informed and involved.Q: The challenge with live forums is that people can get kind of nasty.A: The problem with social media is that no one has figure out how to protect marginalized people. But I\u2019m not going to leave 3 billion people out just because I have an issue.Story continues below advertisementQ: Are you surprised at how science and scientists have become so doubted in so many place across the country during the pandemic, about the vaccines, masks?AdvertisementA: I am not surprised. I do not feel that the current and past states of our school systems have been focused enough on science literacy for it to be a surprise. We must learn from what is happening today regarding trust in science to move forward and build the country\u2019s science literacy through educationQ: You also have a fashion line: Smarty Pants. I did covet your boots with the planets on them in one video.A: I talk a lot about being yourself and not being afraid to be vibrant and loud and fun. Maybe it\u2019s through rhinestone safety goggles or a rhinestone shirt that says \u201cscientist\u201d on it \u2014 this is one way you can shine in science, and we don\u2019t see enough of that.\n\nWashington Post Live \u2014 Race in America: Mae Jemison, MDFor 16-year-old Black girl nerds, it\u2019s good that Katherine Johnson is no longer hidden Raven Baxter, a.k.a. \u201cRaven the Science Maven,\u201d is a role model for many with her music video, science teaching and other work. Having ADHD, she says, has helped her creativity. Black female biologist tests, entertains and explains science on TV, social media",
        "author": "Dawn Fallik"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to Earth  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5960",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/11/kelly-twin-astronauts-study-shows-harsh-effects-space-flight-brutal-return-earth/",
        "text": "Astronaut Scott Kelly made himself a guinea pig for all the people who dream of human journeys to Mars and other destinations in space. In 2015, Kelly rode a rocket into space and spent nearly a year on the International Space Station in low Earth orbit, while his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, stayed on Earth\u2019s surface for NASA\u2019s celebrated \u201ctwins study,\u201d designed to see what spaceflight does to the human body. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe full results, published Thursday in the journal Science, showed that Scott Kelly experienced numerous physiological and chromosomal changes during his long sojourn in orbit, including changes in gene expression. His immune system went on high alert, both when he went to space and upon returning to Earth. His body acted as if it were under attack.Mark Kelly served as the comparison subject for the experiment. The retired astronaut is married to former congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D) and is running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Arizona.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe researchers, echoing what NASA has suggested previously, said the twins study turned up no showstoppers \u2014 no shocking health consequences that would surely prevent a human mission to Mars or similar long-duration mission. But the report shows anew that the human body is adapted for life on the surface of Earth and goes haywire in zero gravity.One of the most dramatic findings concerned epigenetics \u2014 how genes are turned on or off to produce proteins. (Contrary to some breathless headlines, Scott Kelly didn\u2019t undergo a space-induced change in his genetic code.) Gene expression changed in both Kellys during the study but in significantly different ways. The study found that more than 90 percent of Scott Kelly\u2019s gene expression changes reverted to normal when he returned to the surface.Astronaut Scott Kelly said on March 4, 2016, that he has sore muscles, joint pain and over-sensitive skin after spending 340 days in space. (Reuters)Blood samples indicated that his telomeres \u2014 structures that protect the ends of chromosomes, much like the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces, and which erode over time as part of the natural aging process \u2014 lengthened in space. But space is no fountain of youth: The telomeres shortened dramatically when he returned to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe cause of these changes in telomere length is unclear, said Susan M. Bailey, a biologist at Colorado State University who led that part of the study. In a teleconference with reporters Thursday, she raised a number of possible explanations, from the healthier lifestyle in space, which includes a great deal of exercising, to some kind of injury or wound response due to radiation, leading to a rise in the number of stem-like cells with longer telomeres.Scott Kelly, who along with his brother Mark was on the call, interjected that previous experiments had found that worms have longer telomeres in space. \u201cI\u2019m pretty sure the worms weren\u2019t exercising more than on Earth,\u201d he said.Although his average telomere length returned roughly to normal after he returned to Earth, tests showed that he retained a slightly elevated number of cells with short telomeres. \u201cHe might be at some increased risk for cardiovascular disease or some types of cancer,\u201d Bailey said in a teleconference with reporters earlier in the week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAlthough average telomere length, global gene expression, and microbiome changes returned to near preflight levels within 6 months after return to Earth, increased numbers of short telomeres were observed and expression of some genes was still disrupted,\u201d the report states.The study found certain cognitive deficits during a battery of tests in orbit, which lingered when Scott Kelly later took tests back on Earth.But in an interview with The Washington Post, Scott Kelly, now 55, said that after landing he suffered flulike symptoms and felt bad for many weeks, and that altered his cognitive performance.\u201cImagine going to take the SATs when you have the flu. You probably wouldn\u2019t do as well,\u201d Kelly said.Story continues below advertisementAdjusting to life back on the ground was actually harder than adjusting to life in zero gravity, he said. In his memoir, \u201cEndurance,\u201d he wrote about suffering from skin rashes, burning sensations and horribly swollen legs as well as nausea in the days after he returned.Advertisement\u201cWhen first up there, I felt crappy because of the fluid shift and the carbon dioxide levels. I can\u2019t say I felt a change in my immune system, but I definitely felt not well. But I felt much worse coming back,\u201d he told The Post. \u201cThe most worrisome symptoms I had, which was swelling in my legs, the rashes, were gone after a couple of weeks. After a month I felt mostly better. I would say it took eight months before I felt completely back to normal.\u201dHe said one of the hardest problems he faced was adjusting to an unscheduled existence, in sharp contrast to life on the space station.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen you get back, you feel a little bit directionless,\u201d he said.The new study points out: \u201cIn addition to re-exposure to Earth\u2019s gravity, the post-flight period can be demanding for astronauts owing to participation in research studies and media events.\u201dAdvertisementAndrew P. Feinberg, one of the study co-authors and an epigenetics expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, cautioned that this research study is limited, focusing on a single pair of twins, and should not be seen as providing universal truths about the human health effects of spaceflight.\u201cThe study sample is two people,\u201d Feinberg said. \u201cIf you see a difference between these two people, how do you know if what you\u2019re looking at is because of the twin on the ground or the twin in space?\u201dStory continues below advertisementMoreover, Scott Kelly remained in low Earth orbit under the protective shield of the Earth\u2019s magnetic field. Interplanetary spaceflight, or journeys to the moon, will expose astronauts to much higher levels of radiation.\u201cWe need to get outside of low Earth orbit, and we need for the astronauts to spend longer periods of time to really evaluate some of these health effects. Radiation exposure will certainly be a very big concern,\u201d Bailey said.AdvertisementAt the start of the teleconference Thursday, Mark Kelly took a moment to praise his brother: \"As a citizen of our country, not just as his twin brother, I appreciate the sacrifice he took to spend a year in space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMark Kelly is six minutes older than his brother. But Scott Kelly says he\u2019s actually a few milliseconds younger still, due to having spent 500 more days in space than his astronaut brother. Einstein\u2019s special theory of relativity leads to a \u201ctwins paradox\u201d in which someone moving at a high velocity, such as 17,500 mph in low Earth orbit, ages more slowly than a twin on Earth.\u201cI look younger than he does,\u201d Scott said. \u201cHe\u2019s busy running for office. His telomeres are going to be way worse than mine. I\u2019m not worried. I\u2019ll be on a beach in the Bahamas, and he\u2019s going to be hopefully in the U.S. Senate. He\u2019s going to age much faster than me.\u201dRead More:The truth about Scott Kelly\u2019s viral \u201cspace genes\u201dHow Andy Weir and \u201cThe Martian\u201d may have saved NASA\u2019s Mars dream Scott Kelly says he didn\u2019t feel normal until 8 months after he returned from the International Space Station. NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to Earth ",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to Earth  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5961",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/11/kelly-twin-astronauts-study-shows-harsh-effects-space-flight-brutal-return-earth/",
        "text": "Astronaut Scott Kelly made himself a guinea pig for all the people who dream of human journeys to Mars and other destinations in space. In 2015, Kelly rode a rocket into space and spent nearly a year on the International Space Station in low Earth orbit, while his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, stayed on Earth\u2019s surface for NASA\u2019s celebrated \u201ctwins study,\u201d designed to see what spaceflight does to the human body. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe full results, published Thursday in the journal Science, showed that Scott Kelly experienced numerous physiological and chromosomal changes during his long sojourn in orbit, including changes in gene expression. His immune system went on high alert, both when he went to space and upon returning to Earth. His body acted as if it were under attack.Mark Kelly served as the comparison subject for the experiment. The retired astronaut is married to former congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D) and is running for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Arizona.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe researchers, echoing what NASA has suggested previously, said the twins study turned up no showstoppers \u2014 no shocking health consequences that would surely prevent a human mission to Mars or similar long-duration mission. But the report shows anew that the human body is adapted for life on the surface of Earth and goes haywire in zero gravity.One of the most dramatic findings concerned epigenetics \u2014 how genes are turned on or off to produce proteins. (Contrary to some breathless headlines, Scott Kelly didn\u2019t undergo a space-induced change in his genetic code.) Gene expression changed in both Kellys during the study but in significantly different ways. The study found that more than 90 percent of Scott Kelly\u2019s gene expression changes reverted to normal when he returned to the surface.Astronaut Scott Kelly said on March 4, 2016, that he has sore muscles, joint pain and over-sensitive skin after spending 340 days in space. (Reuters)Blood samples indicated that his telomeres \u2014 structures that protect the ends of chromosomes, much like the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces, and which erode over time as part of the natural aging process \u2014 lengthened in space. But space is no fountain of youth: The telomeres shortened dramatically when he returned to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe cause of these changes in telomere length is unclear, said Susan M. Bailey, a biologist at Colorado State University who led that part of the study. In a teleconference with reporters Thursday, she raised a number of possible explanations, from the healthier lifestyle in space, which includes a great deal of exercising, to some kind of injury or wound response due to radiation, leading to a rise in the number of stem-like cells with longer telomeres.Scott Kelly, who along with his brother Mark was on the call, interjected that previous experiments had found that worms have longer telomeres in space. \u201cI\u2019m pretty sure the worms weren\u2019t exercising more than on Earth,\u201d he said.Although his average telomere length returned roughly to normal after he returned to Earth, tests showed that he retained a slightly elevated number of cells with short telomeres. \u201cHe might be at some increased risk for cardiovascular disease or some types of cancer,\u201d Bailey said in a teleconference with reporters earlier in the week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAlthough average telomere length, global gene expression, and microbiome changes returned to near preflight levels within 6 months after return to Earth, increased numbers of short telomeres were observed and expression of some genes was still disrupted,\u201d the report states.The study found certain cognitive deficits during a battery of tests in orbit, which lingered when Scott Kelly later took tests back on Earth.But in an interview with The Washington Post, Scott Kelly, now 55, said that after landing he suffered flulike symptoms and felt bad for many weeks, and that altered his cognitive performance.\u201cImagine going to take the SATs when you have the flu. You probably wouldn\u2019t do as well,\u201d Kelly said.Story continues below advertisementAdjusting to life back on the ground was actually harder than adjusting to life in zero gravity, he said. In his memoir, \u201cEndurance,\u201d he wrote about suffering from skin rashes, burning sensations and horribly swollen legs as well as nausea in the days after he returned.Advertisement\u201cWhen first up there, I felt crappy because of the fluid shift and the carbon dioxide levels. I can\u2019t say I felt a change in my immune system, but I definitely felt not well. But I felt much worse coming back,\u201d he told The Post. \u201cThe most worrisome symptoms I had, which was swelling in my legs, the rashes, were gone after a couple of weeks. After a month I felt mostly better. I would say it took eight months before I felt completely back to normal.\u201dHe said one of the hardest problems he faced was adjusting to an unscheduled existence, in sharp contrast to life on the space station.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen you get back, you feel a little bit directionless,\u201d he said.The new study points out: \u201cIn addition to re-exposure to Earth\u2019s gravity, the post-flight period can be demanding for astronauts owing to participation in research studies and media events.\u201dAdvertisementAndrew P. Feinberg, one of the study co-authors and an epigenetics expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, cautioned that this research study is limited, focusing on a single pair of twins, and should not be seen as providing universal truths about the human health effects of spaceflight.\u201cThe study sample is two people,\u201d Feinberg said. \u201cIf you see a difference between these two people, how do you know if what you\u2019re looking at is because of the twin on the ground or the twin in space?\u201dStory continues below advertisementMoreover, Scott Kelly remained in low Earth orbit under the protective shield of the Earth\u2019s magnetic field. Interplanetary spaceflight, or journeys to the moon, will expose astronauts to much higher levels of radiation.\u201cWe need to get outside of low Earth orbit, and we need for the astronauts to spend longer periods of time to really evaluate some of these health effects. Radiation exposure will certainly be a very big concern,\u201d Bailey said.AdvertisementAt the start of the teleconference Thursday, Mark Kelly took a moment to praise his brother: \"As a citizen of our country, not just as his twin brother, I appreciate the sacrifice he took to spend a year in space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMark Kelly is six minutes older than his brother. But Scott Kelly says he\u2019s actually a few milliseconds younger still, due to having spent 500 more days in space than his astronaut brother. Einstein\u2019s special theory of relativity leads to a \u201ctwins paradox\u201d in which someone moving at a high velocity, such as 17,500 mph in low Earth orbit, ages more slowly than a twin on Earth.\u201cI look younger than he does,\u201d Scott said. \u201cHe\u2019s busy running for office. His telomeres are going to be way worse than mine. I\u2019m not worried. I\u2019ll be on a beach in the Bahamas, and he\u2019s going to be hopefully in the U.S. Senate. He\u2019s going to age much faster than me.\u201dRead More:The truth about Scott Kelly\u2019s viral \u201cspace genes\u201dHow Andy Weir and \u201cThe Martian\u201d may have saved NASA\u2019s Mars dream Scott Kelly says he didn\u2019t feel normal until 8 months after he returned from the International Space Station. NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to Earth ",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Slow, intense and unrelenting: The science behind Hurricane Dorian\u2019s most dangerous qualities (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5962",
        "date": "2019-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/04/slow-intense-unrelenting-science-behind-hurricane-dorians-most-dangerous-qualities/",
        "text": "The science connecting climate change to hurricanes like Dorian is strong. Warmer oceans fuel more extreme storms; rising sea levels bolster storm surges and lead to worse floods. Just this summer, after analyzing more than 70 years of Atlantic hurricane data, NASA scientist Tim Hall reported that storms have become much more likely to \u201cstall\u201d over land, prolonging the time when a community is subjected to devastating winds and drenching rain. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut none of the numbers in his spreadsheets could prepare Hall for the image on his computer screen this week: Dorian swirling as a Category 5 storm, monstrous and nearly motionless, above the islands of Great Abaco and Grand Bahama.Seeing it \u201cjust spinning there, spinning there, spinning there, over the same spot,\u201d Hall said, \u201cyou can\u2019t help but be awestruck to the point of speechlessness.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter pulverizing the Bahamas for more than 40 hours, Dorian finally swerved north Tuesday as a Category 2 storm. It is expected to skirt the coasts of Florida and Georgia before striking land again in the Carolinas, where it could deliver more life-threatening wind, storm surge and rain.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWind strength recorded in\n\t\t\t12-hour increments\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tTropical storm\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHurricane\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t39-73 mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t74+ mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJacksonville\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAtlantic Ocean\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFLA.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 3\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 1\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 31\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMiami\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFreeport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNassau\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWind strength recorded in 12-hour increments\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tTropical storm\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHurricane\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t39-73 mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t74+ mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJacksonville\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAtlantic Ocean\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFLA.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 3\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 1\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMiami\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 31\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFreeport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNassau\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWind strength recorded in 12-hour increments\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tTropical storm\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHurricane\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJacksonville\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t39-73 mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t74+ mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDaytona\n\t\t\tBeach\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOrlando\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAtlantic Ocean\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tGrand\n\t\t\tBahama\n\t\t\tIsland\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFLORIDA\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 3\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 1\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAbaco\n\t\t\tIslands\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFreeport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 31\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMiami\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNassau\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWind strength recorded in 12-hour increments\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tTropical storm\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHurricane\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJacksonville\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t39-73 mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t74+ mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDaytona Beach\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOrlando\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAtlantic Ocean\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tGrand\n\t\t\tBahama\n\t\t\tIsland\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFLORIDA\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 3\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 1\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAbaco\n\t\t\tIslands\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFreeport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 31\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMiami\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNassau\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWind strength recorded in 12-hour increments\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJacksonville\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tTropical storm\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHurricane\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t39-73 mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t74+ mph\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDaytona Beach\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAtlantic Ocean\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOrlando\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFLORIDA\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tGrand\n\t\t\tBahama\n\t\t\tIsland\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 3\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 1\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAbaco\n\t\t\tIslands\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFreeport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 31\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMiami\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNassau\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cSimply unbelievable,\u201d tweeted Marshall Shepherd, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society. \u201cI feel nausea over this, and I only get that feeling with a few storms.\u201dThe hurricane has matched or broken records for its intensity and for its creeping pace over the Bahamas. But it also fits a trend: Dorian\u2019s appearance made 2019 the fourth straight year in which a Category 5 hurricane formed in the Atlantic \u2014 the longest such streak on record.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShocking though the storm has been, meteorologists and climate scientists say it bears hallmarks of what hurricanes will increasingly look like as the climate warms.Tracking Hurricane Dorian: Follow the progress of the stormDorian\u2019s rapid intensification over the weekend was unprecedented for a hurricane that was already so strong. In the space of nine hours Sunday, its peak winds increased from 150 mph to 180 mph. By the time the storm made landfall, its sustained winds of 185 mph were tied for strongest ever observed in the Atlantic.The link between rapid intensification and climate change is robust, said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Woods Hole Research Center. Heat in the ocean is a hurricane\u2019s primary source of fuel, and the world\u2019s oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the warming of the past 50 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.South Carolina and North Carolina coastal areas are likely to see heavy rainfall, storm surge and high winds as Hurricane Dorian moves up the Southeast coast. (The Washington Post)The water that Dorian developed over was about 1 degree Celsius warmer than normal, Francis said: \u201cThat translates to a whole bunch of energy.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause warm air can hold more moisture, climate change has increased the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, leading to wetter hurricanes that unleash more extreme rainfall.The warm, wet air also gives further fuel to a growing storm.\u201cWhen that water vapor condenses into cloud droplets, it releases a lot of heat into the atmosphere and that\u2019s what a hurricane feeds off of,\u201d Francis said. \u201cThese factors are very clearly contributing to the storms we\u2019ve been seeing lately.\"Models predict that Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the North Atlantic could become nearly twice as common over the next century as a result of climate change, even as the total number of storms declines.Story continues below advertisementOnce a hurricane makes landfall, the sea level rise created by global warming can exacerbate its effects by amplifying storm surge. A hurricane\u2019s strong winds will push water toward the shore, causing extreme flooding in a relatively short time.AdvertisementThe higher the water level on a clear day, the worse floods will be once a storm arrives \u2014 and global sea levels are predicted to rise by about a meter by the end of the century.Video images of Hurricane Dorian captured by the U.S. Air Force Sept. 2 showed the inside of the eye of the storm after it hit the Bahamas. (Reuters)Hurricane Dorian was particularly striking \u2014 and devastating \u2014 because of the way it lingered over the Bahamas. Such \u201cstalling\u201d events have become far more common in the past three quarters of a century, said Hall, who is a senior scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.Story continues below advertisementIn a study published in the journal Climate and Atmospheric Science in June, Hall found that North Atlantic hurricanes have slowed about 17 percent since 1944; annual coastal rainfall averages from hurricanes increased by about 40 percent over the same period. A 2018 paper found that tropical cyclones worldwide have slowed significantly.AdvertisementIn stalling events, \u201cyou have longer time for the wind to build up that wall of water for the surge and you just get more and more accumulated rain on the same region,\u201d Hall said.\u201cThat was the catastrophe of Harvey,\u201d he added, referring to the hurricane that dumped more than five feet of rain over Texas in 2017. Hurricanes Dorian and Florence, the latter of which deluged the Carolinas last year, also fit this pattern.Story continues below advertisementHall and his colleagues believe there is a \u201cclimate change signal\u201d in this phenomenon, though they are still teasing out the link between human-caused warming and slow-moving storms.Hurricanes have no engines of their own; instead, they are steered across Earth\u2019s surface by large-scale atmospheric winds, like corks bobbing in a turbulent stream.If these guiding winds collapse, or even simply shift around, a hurricane can get caught in an eddy and \u201cstagnate,\u201d Hall said. Climate simulations have shown that atmospheric winds in the subtropics, where Dorian is, are slowing down \u2014 making these types of eddies more likely.Advertisement\u201cBut there are a lot of points in the chain of cause and effect that remain to be elaborated,\u201d Hall said.Story continues below advertisementSuch stalling events make hurricanes more difficult to track. Without a known large-scale wind to propel them, the storms are buffeted about by small-scale fluctuations in their environments that are far harder to forecast.Both Hall and Francis cautioned that scientists can\u2019t attribute any single weather disaster to climate change \u2014 especially not while that disaster is unfolding. What researchers can do is evaluate how much worse the disaster was made as a result of human-caused warming, and how likely it is that this type of disaster will occur again.When it comes to Dorian, Hall said, the answers to both those questions are grim.\u201cThis is what we expect more of,\u201d he said. But he doesn\u2019t think he\u2019ll ever get used to seeing it.Read more:Hurricanes are strengthening faster in the Atlantic, and climate change is a big reason, scientists sayBahamas lifts Hurricane Dorian storm warnings, assesses \u2018catastrophic\u2019 destructionPuerto Rico after Maria: A year of disruption The storm that struck the Bahamas with deadly force this week shows what hurricanes will look like as the planet warms. Slow, intense and unrelenting: The science behind Hurricane Dorian\u2019s most dangerous qualities",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Who can use the beach? Erosion, tide lines and state laws make a difference. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5963",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/the-squeeze-on-beaches/2021/07/23/130cdfec-e8de-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html",
        "text": "As Americans flock to beaches this summer, their toes are sinking into some of the most hotly contested real estate in the United States.It wasn\u2019t always this way. Through the mid-20th century, when the U.S. population was smaller and the coast was still something of a frontier in many states, laissez-faire and absentee coastal landowners tolerated people crossing their beachfront property. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, however, the coast has filled up. Property owners are much more inclined to seek to exclude an ever-growing population of beachgoers seeking access to less and less beach.On most U.S. shorelines, the public has a time-honored right to \u201clateral\u201d access. This means that people can move down the beach along the wet sand between high and low tide \u2014 a zone that usually is publicly owned. Waterfront property owners\u2019 control typically stops at the high tide line or, in a few cases, the low tide line.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut as climate change raises sea levels, property owners are trying to harden their shorelines with sea walls and other types of armoring, squeezing the sandy beach and the public into a shrinking and diminished space.Climate change is bad news for your beach vacationAs director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida College of Law and the Florida Sea Grant Legal Program, and as someone who grew up with sand between my toes, I have studied beach law and policy for most of my career. In my view, the collision between rising seas and coastal development \u2014 known as \u201ccoastal squeeze\u201d \u2014 represents an existential threat to beaches, and to the public\u2019s ability to reach them.Beachfront property law has evolved from ideas that date back to ancient Rome. Romans regarded the beach as \u201cpublic dominion,\u201d captured in an oft-cited quote from Roman law: \u201cBy the law of nature these things are common to all mankind; the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJudges in medieval England evolved this idea into the legal theory known as the \u201cpublic trust doctrine\u201d \u2014 the idea that certain resources should be preserved for all to use. The United States inherited this concept.Most states place the boundary between public and private property at the mean high tide line, an average tide over an astronomical epoch of 19 years. This means that at some point in the daily tidal cycle, there is usually a public beach to walk along, albeit a wet and sometimes narrow one. In states such as Maine that set the boundary at mean low tide, you have to be willing to wade.Early beach access laws in coastal states were largely designed to ensure that workaday activities such as fishing and gathering seaweed for fertilizer could occur, regardless of who owned the beach frontage. Increasingly, however, public recreation became the main use of beaches, and state laws evolved to recognize this shift.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor example, in 1984, the New Jersey Supreme Court extended the reach of the Public Trust Doctrine beyond the tide line to include recreational use of the dry sandy beach. In a pioneering move, Texas codified its common law in 1959 by enacting the Open Beaches Act, which provides that the sandy beach up to the line of vegetation is subject to an easement in favor of the public.Moreover, Texas allows this easement to \u201croll\u201d as the shoreline migrates inland, which is increasingly likely in an era of rising seas. Recent litigation and amendments to the act have somewhat modified its application, but the basic principle of public rights in privately owned dry sand beach still applies.Most states that give the public dry sand access on otherwise private property do so under a legal principle known as customary use rights. These rights evolved in feudal England to grant landless villagers access to the lord of the manor\u2019s lands for civic activities that had been conducted since \u201ctime immemorial,\u201d such as ritual maypole dancing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOregon\u2019s Supreme Court led the way in judicially applying customary use rights to beaches in 1969, declaring all the state\u2019s dry sand beaches open to the public. Florida followed suit in 1974, but its Supreme Court decision has since been interpreted to apply on a parcel-by-parcel basis.Like Texas, North Carolina, Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands all have enacted legislation that recognizes customary use of the sandy beach, and courts have upheld the laws.Florida has more sandy beaches than any other state, a year-round climate to enjoy them, and a seemingly unbounded appetite for growth, all of which makes beach access a chronic flash point.Story continues below advertisementAlong Florida\u2019s Panhandle, battles have erupted since 2016, with beachfront property owners and private resorts asserting their private property rights over the dry sandy beach and calling sheriffs to evict locals. When beachgoers responded by asserting their customary use rights, Walton County \u2014 no liberal bastion \u2014 backed them up, passing the local equivalent of a customary use law.AdvertisementFlorida\u2019s legislature stepped in and took away the local right to pass customary use laws, except according to a complicated legal process that only a few local governments have initiated. Critics argue that the law has made it harder for communities to establish lateral public access to beaches and has done little to resolve the ongoing disputes.Erosion is both an enemy and a potential savior of beach access.Story continues below advertisementAs rising seas erode beaches, pressure to harden shorelines grows. But armoring shorelines may actually increase erosion by interfering with the natural sand supply. Adding more sea walls thus makes it increasingly likely that in many developed areas the dry sand beach will all but disappear. And what once was the public wet sand beach \u2014 the area between mean high and low tide \u2014 will become two horizontal lines on a vertical sea wall.AdvertisementOne alternative is adding more sand. Congress authorizes and funds the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to restore beaches with sand pumped from offshore or trucked from ancient inland dunes. States must typically match these funds, and beachfront property owners occasionally collectively pitch in.But federal regulations require communities that receive these funds to ensure there is adequate access to nourished beaches from the street, including parking. And new beaches built from submerged shorelines must be maintained for public access until rising seas submerge them again.Story continues below advertisementThis requirement, along with more arcane property rights issues, led landowners in Florida\u2019s Walton County to fight a beach nourishment project that would have protected their property from erosion. They took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost.AdvertisementBeach nourishment, too, is a temporary solution. Good-quality, readily accessible offshore sand supplies are already depleted in some areas. And accelerating sea level rise may outpace readily available sand at some point in the future. Squeezed between condos and coral reefs, South Florida beaches are especially at risk, leading to some desperate proposals \u2014 including the idea of grinding up glass to create beach sand.Thomas Ankersen is legal skills professor and director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida College of Law. This article was originally published on theconversation.com.\nRead more\n\nCollecting seashells and grooming sand may damage beach ecosystems, a study finds\n\nBefore condo collapse, rising seas long pressured Miami coastal properties\n If you want to stroll the shoreline this summer, know your rights. Who can use the beach? Erosion, tide lines and state laws make a difference.",
        "author": "Thomas Ankersen"
    },
    {
        "title": "A university is eliminating its science collection \u2014 to expand a running track (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5964",
        "date": "2017-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/29/a-university-is-eliminating-its-science-collection-to-expand-a-running-track/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.\u00a0The curators of the Museum of Natural History\u00a0at the University of Louisiana-Monroe got grim news this March from the school's director: The museum's research collection had to be moved out of its current home. The reason? The space was needed for expanded track facilities.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe curators were given 48 hours to find a new place on campus to store the collection \u2014 something they weren't able to do. Now they must get another institution to take their several million specimens. Their hard deadline was\u00a0July, when the track renovations were slated to begin. And if the collection wasn't moved by then, curators said, it would be destroyed. Story continues below advertisementThe news raised alarms in the close-knit museum collections community. Faced with rising costs and competing priorities, dozens of small institutions have been forced to give up their specimens in recent decades.AdvertisementThe ULM collection includes some 6 million fish specimens collected by ULM ichthyologist Neil Douglas, one of the leading experts on the fish of Louisiana, as well as half a million native plants. It is an important record of\u00a0biodiversity in northern Louisiana \u2014 a region that stands to see significant environmental impacts as a result of climate change.But as of July 3, right on deadline, all 6.5 million specimens have found new homes. The plant collection will go to\u00a0the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, a\u00a0non-profit research center in\u00a0Fort Worth. Insects will be taken in by Mississippi State University, and the reptile and amphibian specimens are headed to the University of Texas at Arlington.Story continues below advertisementThe museum's famous fish collection will be cared for a consortium of universities headed by Tulane, according to local paper the News-Star. None of the specimens will be destroyed, ULM Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs Michael A. Camille told the paper.AdvertisementA public university, @ULM_Official, is preparing to throw a massive natural history collection away to make more room for the track team. pic.twitter.com/pEXixIuPZk\u2014 John Overholt (@john_overholt) March 29, 2017\n\nRobert Gropp, co-executive director\u00a0of the American Institute of Biological Sciences and policy director for the Natural Science Collections Alliance, said that\u00a0smaller collections like this one\u00a0offer unmatched insight into the history and fate of specific ecosystems.\u00a0\u201cSometimes those collections might be the world-class collection for that specific geographic area because that\u2019s where those researchers spent their careers collecting specimens,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re snapshots of the history, of the genetics and biodiversity, and what lived where and how they\u00a0interacted. You can't go back and collect those again.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cTo see an institution seemingly walking away from a research enterprise or even an educational enterprise, when these are in fact really informing modern research questions around climate, public health and life in general,\u201d Gropp continued. \u201cIt's disappointing.\u201dThis lion shot by Teddy Roosevelt carries a lesson about conservationULM Vice President for Academic Affairs Eric Pani told the News Star, that the university can no longer\u00a0afford to keep the collection, which is not open to the public but used for faculty and student research. The collection includes specimens stored in flammable alcohol, so it has to be housed in a building with a sprinkler system. But now that running facilities are being updated\u00a0to\u00a0meet national track and field standards, there's nowhere else for the specimens to go, he said.Advertisement\u201cUnfortunately, the fiscal situation facing the university over the years requires us to make choices like this,\u201d Pani said.Story continues below advertisementIn an email to The Washington Post, Pani said that he has asked the biology faculty to scale down the collection so it will fit in a classroom.\u00a0The remaining specimens will be better preserved at an institution with more resources to care for them, he said, adding that the university will try to make sure that remains in Louisiana or at least in the southeastern U.S.The museum itself will remain on campus and open to the public, Pani said,\u00a0but its planned expansion has been postponed for two years.The situation has sparked anger from the scientific community, which has seen this sort of thing happen before.This is awful. Museum collections are an invaluable and irreplaceable resource to study life on our planet. Shame on @ULM_Official. https://t.co/wBnlKusVA8\u2014 Dr. Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill) March 28, 2017\n\nNot to mention the 3.3 million specimens who were sacrificed for science. These were meant to be studied in perpetuity, not to be thrown out\u2014 Prosanta Chakrabarty (@PREAUX_FISH) March 28, 2017\n\nMost of the 1,800 or so natural history collections in the United States are smaller, highly specific collections like the one at ULM.\u00a0Faced with budget cuts and competing priorities, institutions have been forced to pare back.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe great majority of these are hanging by a thread,\u201d Michael Mares, director of the Sam Noble Museum at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, told Nature in 2015. \u201cThey have nobody to care for them.\u201dLast year, the National Science Foundation temporarily suspended its Collections in Support of Biological Research\u00a0program, which helps pay to organize, maintain and catalogue biological collections. The program has since restarted and is accepting new funding applications. But the NSF's future is unclear \u2014\u00a0the $7.7 billion agency wasn't even mentioned in the fiscal\u00a02018 budget proposal\u00a0that the White House\u00a0released this month.This is how you photograph a million dead plants without losing your mindWhen budgets are cut, research specimens and staff\u00a0are often the hardest hit. These collections are not on display, and much of the public wouldn't notice their disappearance. But they house about 99 percent of natural history specimens nationwide. They are where most museum science happens.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMore than 100 North American herbaria \u2014 research collections of dried and labeled plants \u2014 have been lost since 1997, according to a 2015 report in Nature.\u00a0The number of curators at several major museums has declined\u00a0significantly in the same period. When the Field Museum in Chicago fell into debt several years ago, it\u00a0slashed millions of dollars from its research budget. In 2013, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden laid off several\u00a0researchers, suspended its science program and donated its 330,000-specimen herbarium elsewhere.These research specimens \u2014 and the curators who study them \u2014 have immense scientific value, said Larry Page, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History. They are the basis for almost all taxonomic research and are vital to understanding changes in the health and distribution of species.\u00a0Collections-based research has resulted in the discovery of new species\u00a0and has\u00a0helped save creatures on the brink of extinction.\u201cIn a period of rapid changes in the environment and climate, specimens in natural history collections serve as the benchmark for gauging the impact,\u201d Page wrote in an email. \u201cThe loss of such large and valuable collections as those at the University of Louisiana at Monroe would be a tremendous tragedy to science.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt's rare for a collection to be thrown out entirely; another institution usually steps in to save it.\u00a0But Gropp, the American Institute of Biological Sciences co-director, noted that consolidation of collections means more and more specimens\u00a0are being studied and cared for by\u00a0fewer people with fewer resources.\u201cThe system as a whole is being stressed,\u201d he said.\u00a0Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified\u00a0the number of herbaria that have closed since 1997. More than 100 institutions have closed across North America, not just in the U.S.Read more:Mice have been infesting homes ever since humans started building themThis black hole is being pushed around its galaxy by gravitational wavesTrump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsAncient Romans depicted Huns as barbarians. Their bones tell a different story.A new definition would add 102 planets to our solar system \u2014 including Pluto Facing budget shortfalls and competing priorities, many institutions are losing their research collections \u2014 at a cost to science.   A university is eliminating its science collection \u2014 to expand a running track",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Update: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliens (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5965",
        "date": "2017-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/19/this-mysterious-space-signal-is-probably-not-from-aliens/",
        "text": "This post has been updatedThe signal was like nothing Abel M\u00e9ndez\u00a0had ever seen. It\u00a0had the same frequency as radio emissions from satellites, but it pulsed like it came from something much more distant.\u00a0It appeared only when Mendez and his colleagues had their telescope pointed at a single star\u00a0\u2014 an unassuming red dwarf called Ross 128 just 11 light-years away. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u00a0presented a mystery within a mystery, said M\u00e9ndez, a planetary astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. First, did it originate in space, on the ground, or somewhere in near-Earth orbit? And second, wherever it came from, what\u00a0could have produced it?After spotting the strange signal in May, M\u00e9ndez\u00a0did what a good scientist always does: He took a closer look. He sought the advice of experts, asked other observatories to watch for the signal and applied for more telescope time in hopes of\u00a0detecting\u00a0the pulses again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere's what he didn't do: speculate that it's aliens. But after\u00a0he described the signal in a brief blog post last week,\u00a0\u201cthat's all anyone wants to know about,\u201d M\u00e9ndez\u00a0said with an exasperated laugh. \u201cI have that experience even with my family.\u201dThe impulse\u00a0to attribute any odd astronomical phenomena to extraterrestrial intelligence is so compelling it's practically its own law of physics. But jumping to \u201caliens\u201d at the slightest mention of a strange signal kind of misses the point, M\u00e9ndez\u00a0said.\u00a0Not everything has to come from aliens to be important.On Friday,\u00a0M\u00e9ndez and his colleagues got confirmation that the emission \u2014 which they called the \u201cWeird! signal\u201d in tribute to the \u201cWow! signal\u201d that's been unexplained since 1977 \u2014 was nothing out of the ordinary. Follow-up observations revealed that it most likely comes from a geostationary satellite \u2014 a craft with an orbit that matches the rotation of the Earth, so that it appears motionless in the sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe result is admittedly mundane, but the path to it\u00a0was an important one. Space\u00a0is full of sights we don't yet understand, sounds we haven't quite explained. Clearly, humans don't even fully recognize the signs of our own presence\u00a0in the skies.\u00a0Astronomical mysteries, even ones with Earthly solutions, are a reminder of how much of our universe is left to understand \u2014 and motivation for scientists like M\u00e9ndez to keep probing for answers.\u201cUnexplained \u2026 does not mean inexplicable,\u201d M\u00e9ndez\u00a0wrote\u00a0in a blog post Friday.The Weird! signal was initially detected during a campaign\u00a0to observe nearby red dwarfs \u2014 very cool, dim stars that are widespread in our\u00a0galaxy. Several of these stars are thought to be candidates to host planets that may be hospitable to life, so scientists are interested in knowing more about them. A few months ago, Mendez and his colleagues spent an evening surveying several red dwarf stars at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico \u2014 the world's largest fully operational radio telescope (China's 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope is still undergoing testing).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArecibo also happens to be the observatory where fictional astronomer Ellie Arroway first looked for extraterrestrial signals in the movie \u201cContact,\u201d and where real astronomers, like Jill Tarter and Frank Drake, have sought signs of alien life \u2014 but Mendez doesn't let that go to his head, and you shouldn't either.Picture of the star field around #Ross128 (near center) that I generated from @AAVSO for @EliBonora pic.twitter.com/RbWBW7EmXl\u2014 Prof. Abel M\u00e9ndez (@ProfAbelMendez) July 19, 2017\n\nThe signal arrived while Arecibo was pointed at Ross 128,\u00a0a small star in the constellation Virgo that's too faint to be seen with the naked eye.That's when the investigation began. Just because the radio emission seemed to come from the direction of Ross 128 didn't mean the star was its source.\u00a0M\u00e9ndez had to consider the possibility that the signal's source is something much more prosaic. Because Arecibo is so sensitive, it often picks up ground-based signals. Something as small as a cellphone can create interference that disturbs radio telescope observations. Astronomers at Australia's Parkes Telescope famously spent months looking for the source of enigmatic signals called \u201cperytons,\u201d only to discover they came from the kitchen microwave.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet M\u00e9ndez was fairly confident that the signal didn't stem from the ground. It was detectable only during the brief minutes that Arecibo was trained on Ross 128, and not during the observations immediately before and after. This suggests that the signal came from something in Arecibo's field of view during its observation of Ross 128.M\u00e9ndez then consulted with four scientists from the SETI Institute, which searches for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. They compared the Arecibo signal to a catalogue of known kinds of radio emissions \u2014 a checklist used by astronomers to make sure their weird observations aren't just a satellite acting up. The SETI scientists noted that the frequency of the signal, somewhere between\u00a04.6 and 4.8 GHz, was in the same range as the radio emissions from many satellites.But the signal's \u201cshape\u201d didn't look like the emissions that come from satellites, M\u00e9ndez said earlier this week. Instead, it had the \u201cdistinctive structure of\u00a0something that comes from far away.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u00a0mean, really far away,\u201d he added. \u201cLike stellar or farther.\u201dRed dwarf stars are known to emit flares \u2014 eruptions\u00a0of high-energy radiation that go\u00a0rippling through space. But the radio signatures of these flares are usually at a different frequency than that of the signal. If the signal is a result of a dramatic stellar outburst, it would likely be a type of flare scientists haven't seen before.Such a\u00a0signal could also be a result of an interaction between the star and an orbiting planet, though no planets have been found\u00a0around Ross 128. In addition, it was possible that the signal was coming from\u00a0another source in space that the astronomers haven't identified yet.Story continues below advertisementM\u00e9ndez\u00a0said earlier this week that he hoped the signal would turn out to be astronomical \u201cThat would be something\u00a0to write about \u2026 there will be a lot of work and a paper there.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThat's astronomers for you. They're the kind of people who look forward to \u201ca lot of work\u201d and writing papers. And even though they hate mysteries, M\u00e9ndez said, they love solving them.On Sunday, M\u00e9ndez\u00a0was given almost an hour of time at Arecibo to observe\u00a0Ross 128 and another nearby red dwarf, Barnard's Star. He is still working to analyze the data from that effort, so it is too soon to tell whether he was able to detect the signal again.\u00a0Researchers at the Green Bank\u00a0radio telescope in West Virginia and the Allen Telescope Array in California also tuned into the star last weekend.Story continues below advertisementThe worst case scenario was that M\u00e9ndez\u00a0and his fellow astronomers couldn't find the signal again. Luckily, all three observatories were able to spot it.By triangulating their data, they concluded that the signal most likely comes from a geostationary satellite. These crafts orbit the Earth around the equator, and Ross 128 looks close to the celestial equator in our sky, which would explain why the signal only appeared when Arecibo was trained on the star. This explanation also addresses why the frequency of the signal matches the that of transmissions from satellites. But M\u00e9ndez still isn't sure why the signal shows a signature of having traveled a long distance.AdvertisementThis isn't a\u00a0particularly exciting result, Mendez acknowledged, but it is\u00a0satisfying nonetheless. It's essential for astronomers to know about\u00a0all the weird noises instruments on Earth can make, so they can be sure of what they're looking at if and when something truly alien streams down from the skies.Read more:These animals can survive until the end of the Earth, astrophysicists sayJupiter's stunning Great Red Spot, seen like never beforeNo, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on Mars Here's why it's still intriguing. Update: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliens",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Update: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliens (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5966",
        "date": "2017-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/07/19/this-mysterious-space-signal-is-probably-not-from-aliens/",
        "text": "This post has been updatedThe signal was like nothing Abel M\u00e9ndez\u00a0had ever seen. It\u00a0had the same frequency as radio emissions from satellites, but it pulsed like it came from something much more distant.\u00a0It appeared only when Mendez and his colleagues had their telescope pointed at a single star\u00a0\u2014 an unassuming red dwarf called Ross 128 just 11 light-years away. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u00a0presented a mystery within a mystery, said M\u00e9ndez, a planetary astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. First, did it originate in space, on the ground, or somewhere in near-Earth orbit? And second, wherever it came from, what\u00a0could have produced it?After spotting the strange signal in May, M\u00e9ndez\u00a0did what a good scientist always does: He took a closer look. He sought the advice of experts, asked other observatories to watch for the signal and applied for more telescope time in hopes of\u00a0detecting\u00a0the pulses again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere's what he didn't do: speculate that it's aliens. But after\u00a0he described the signal in a brief blog post last week,\u00a0\u201cthat's all anyone wants to know about,\u201d M\u00e9ndez\u00a0said with an exasperated laugh. \u201cI have that experience even with my family.\u201dThe impulse\u00a0to attribute any odd astronomical phenomena to extraterrestrial intelligence is so compelling it's practically its own law of physics. But jumping to \u201caliens\u201d at the slightest mention of a strange signal kind of misses the point, M\u00e9ndez\u00a0said.\u00a0Not everything has to come from aliens to be important.On Friday,\u00a0M\u00e9ndez and his colleagues got confirmation that the emission \u2014 which they called the \u201cWeird! signal\u201d in tribute to the \u201cWow! signal\u201d that's been unexplained since 1977 \u2014 was nothing out of the ordinary. Follow-up observations revealed that it most likely comes from a geostationary satellite \u2014 a craft with an orbit that matches the rotation of the Earth, so that it appears motionless in the sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe result is admittedly mundane, but the path to it\u00a0was an important one. Space\u00a0is full of sights we don't yet understand, sounds we haven't quite explained. Clearly, humans don't even fully recognize the signs of our own presence\u00a0in the skies.\u00a0Astronomical mysteries, even ones with Earthly solutions, are a reminder of how much of our universe is left to understand \u2014 and motivation for scientists like M\u00e9ndez to keep probing for answers.\u201cUnexplained \u2026 does not mean inexplicable,\u201d M\u00e9ndez\u00a0wrote\u00a0in a blog post Friday.The Weird! signal was initially detected during a campaign\u00a0to observe nearby red dwarfs \u2014 very cool, dim stars that are widespread in our\u00a0galaxy. Several of these stars are thought to be candidates to host planets that may be hospitable to life, so scientists are interested in knowing more about them. A few months ago, Mendez and his colleagues spent an evening surveying several red dwarf stars at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico \u2014 the world's largest fully operational radio telescope (China's 500-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope is still undergoing testing).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArecibo also happens to be the observatory where fictional astronomer Ellie Arroway first looked for extraterrestrial signals in the movie \u201cContact,\u201d and where real astronomers, like Jill Tarter and Frank Drake, have sought signs of alien life \u2014 but Mendez doesn't let that go to his head, and you shouldn't either.Picture of the star field around #Ross128 (near center) that I generated from @AAVSO for @EliBonora pic.twitter.com/RbWBW7EmXl\u2014 Prof. Abel M\u00e9ndez (@ProfAbelMendez) July 19, 2017\n\nThe signal arrived while Arecibo was pointed at Ross 128,\u00a0a small star in the constellation Virgo that's too faint to be seen with the naked eye.That's when the investigation began. Just because the radio emission seemed to come from the direction of Ross 128 didn't mean the star was its source.\u00a0M\u00e9ndez had to consider the possibility that the signal's source is something much more prosaic. Because Arecibo is so sensitive, it often picks up ground-based signals. Something as small as a cellphone can create interference that disturbs radio telescope observations. Astronomers at Australia's Parkes Telescope famously spent months looking for the source of enigmatic signals called \u201cperytons,\u201d only to discover they came from the kitchen microwave.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet M\u00e9ndez was fairly confident that the signal didn't stem from the ground. It was detectable only during the brief minutes that Arecibo was trained on Ross 128, and not during the observations immediately before and after. This suggests that the signal came from something in Arecibo's field of view during its observation of Ross 128.M\u00e9ndez then consulted with four scientists from the SETI Institute, which searches for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. They compared the Arecibo signal to a catalogue of known kinds of radio emissions \u2014 a checklist used by astronomers to make sure their weird observations aren't just a satellite acting up. The SETI scientists noted that the frequency of the signal, somewhere between\u00a04.6 and 4.8 GHz, was in the same range as the radio emissions from many satellites.But the signal's \u201cshape\u201d didn't look like the emissions that come from satellites, M\u00e9ndez said earlier this week. Instead, it had the \u201cdistinctive structure of\u00a0something that comes from far away.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u00a0mean, really far away,\u201d he added. \u201cLike stellar or farther.\u201dRed dwarf stars are known to emit flares \u2014 eruptions\u00a0of high-energy radiation that go\u00a0rippling through space. But the radio signatures of these flares are usually at a different frequency than that of the signal. If the signal is a result of a dramatic stellar outburst, it would likely be a type of flare scientists haven't seen before.Such a\u00a0signal could also be a result of an interaction between the star and an orbiting planet, though no planets have been found\u00a0around Ross 128. In addition, it was possible that the signal was coming from\u00a0another source in space that the astronomers haven't identified yet.Story continues below advertisementM\u00e9ndez\u00a0said earlier this week that he hoped the signal would turn out to be astronomical \u201cThat would be something\u00a0to write about \u2026 there will be a lot of work and a paper there.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThat's astronomers for you. They're the kind of people who look forward to \u201ca lot of work\u201d and writing papers. And even though they hate mysteries, M\u00e9ndez said, they love solving them.On Sunday, M\u00e9ndez\u00a0was given almost an hour of time at Arecibo to observe\u00a0Ross 128 and another nearby red dwarf, Barnard's Star. He is still working to analyze the data from that effort, so it is too soon to tell whether he was able to detect the signal again.\u00a0Researchers at the Green Bank\u00a0radio telescope in West Virginia and the Allen Telescope Array in California also tuned into the star last weekend.Story continues below advertisementThe worst case scenario was that M\u00e9ndez\u00a0and his fellow astronomers couldn't find the signal again. Luckily, all three observatories were able to spot it.By triangulating their data, they concluded that the signal most likely comes from a geostationary satellite. These crafts orbit the Earth around the equator, and Ross 128 looks close to the celestial equator in our sky, which would explain why the signal only appeared when Arecibo was trained on the star. This explanation also addresses why the frequency of the signal matches the that of transmissions from satellites. But M\u00e9ndez still isn't sure why the signal shows a signature of having traveled a long distance.AdvertisementThis isn't a\u00a0particularly exciting result, Mendez acknowledged, but it is\u00a0satisfying nonetheless. It's essential for astronomers to know about\u00a0all the weird noises instruments on Earth can make, so they can be sure of what they're looking at if and when something truly alien streams down from the skies.Read more:These animals can survive until the end of the Earth, astrophysicists sayJupiter's stunning Great Red Spot, seen like never beforeNo, NASA is not hiding kidnapped children on Mars Here's why it's still intriguing. Update: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliens",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | What\u2019s changed since the March for Science? Readers respond. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5967",
        "date": "2017-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/23/whats-changed-since-the-march-for-science-readers-respond/",
        "text": "It has been six months since scientists and science supporters marched on Washington and 600 cities around the world. We asked readers: How has your life changed since the March for Science?Here's what you had to say. (Responses have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI'm running for local office in Somerville, Mass., as a first-time candidate. I think that we need scientists in office not only at the national level, but at all levels, including the very local. ... At the Boston March, George Church said, \u201cAll you nerds need to run for office!\u201d Just last week, he spoke at a campaign rally of mine in Somerville, to a room full of politically engaged local science folks who want to get more involved in electoral politics at all levels. Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Ben Ewen-Campen, biology postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical SchoolAdvertisementScientists have an essential role to play in the Trump era, and it is our duty to bridge the communication gap between scientists and policymakers. I personally have been scheduling more frequent meetings with my senators and representatives, and paying close attention to the appropriations process so I am able to communicate what is happening at the federal level to those here at home in a way that is easy to understand. I frequently challenge myself to write letters to the editor and op-eds, and a few (to my surprise) have been published.\u2014 Naomi Charalambakis, PhD candidate at the University of Louisville School of MedicineOn April 22, seven of the 21 kids who are suing the federal government for failing to address climate change attended the March for Science in Washington, D.C. (McKenna Ewen/The Washington Post)There is no one protest that can change misguided government policies. It is only the sustained protest from a wide swath of the population in every legitimate way possible over and over again that can reverse the course. Certainly, more researchers are politically active than they were before the march, but in the future more must participate and the public, too, must join in. Although that is a positive development, we are still living in uncertain times for scientists. The Senate and House of Representatives haven\u2019t been able to agree on a funding bill for the National Institutes of Health. If NIH has to keep operating under continuing resolutions, the budget for research grants will effectively be reduced again. It is very difficult for young scientists to successfully apply for grant funding, which is forcing some promising young minds out of the field. Scientists need to continue speaking out about the importance of biomedical research funding.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014 Richard S. Legro, MD, professor and interim chair of research in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Pennsylvania State University College of MedicineAfter organizing the march here in Indianapolis with my wife, we formed a nonprofit to promote science communication and education in Indiana. We have never been in this space before, community organizing that is, but we have seen this nascent movement motivate people to have engaging conversations with their representatives and their friends and families who might have differing beliefs on science-based topics.This movement was the spark that brought so many STEM professionals out from behind their work and into a brand-new space called science advocacy. Communities were forged over weeks of planning these large marches, but building those communities into organizations that can effect real change and then putting in the long hours to make that vision a reality .\u2009.\u2009. that will take more than a few months.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThose steps are being taken, though, and those organizations are being built. So many people were looking for a signal that other people felt the same way and were ready to work together. The simple act of giving this common affinity for science a name to huddle under empowered millions of people to come together and understand they were not alone .\u2009.\u2009. that seems like an achievement to me.\u2014 Rufus Cochran, engineer and organizer for the Indianapolis March for ScienceBill Nye, \u201cThe Science Guy,\u201d serves as an honorary co-chair for the March for Science taking place on April 22 on the National Mall. (The Washington Post)I find the scientific community to be mostly politically naive in how to go about having an impact. I am a member of a couple of scientific societies and cannot see that they have made much of a difference since the march.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Linda G Silversmith, PhD, retired science writerThe rally itself was important if only as validation that the truth matters. The million people who came out declared unequivocally that they, America, and the world see \u201calternative facts\u201d for what they are and reject them. In that sense, the March for Science highlighted a broader movement across society to demand more accountability before accepting claims as true. Just one example is growing awareness of the responsibilities of platforms like Facebook and Google when it comes to fake news or accepting foreign ads explicitly designed to inflame and misinform. The fact that over a million people marched in April for the idea that truth matters adds support and public pressure for reforms like those.Advertisement\u2014 Robert Cooper, postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at San Diego and organizer for the San Diego March for ScienceStory continues below advertisementAlthough I participated in the Women's March earlier in the year, the March for Science really awoke me to advocacy. I feel more connected to my community than ever, have become a regular participant in similar events, and as March for Science pivots into a permanent organization have found myself invested in its efforts to promote the connection between scientists and their communities. I've also been more aware of the importance of equity and diversity in science and have become a more outspoken advocate for fair policies in my professional organizations.\u2014 Daniel Tell, planetarium engineer at the California Academy of SciencesFrom the perspective of trying to create a long-term, sustainable movement, I think the march was less successful. Much of the work that has been done since the march took place was already in motion before March for Science was conceived \u2014 and as such, despite acting as a catalyst, I don't think that the march created a new space, community or central initiative that will ultimately drive forward progress. Rather, it raised awareness and potentially facilitated the support of projects and programs which were already being developed (or already existed). To my knowledge, those initiatives are all continuing on an individual, locally supported projects without coordination or direct connection to the March for Science organizers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014 Elyse L. Aurbach-Pruitt, PhD, communication/public engagement skills lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at the University of MichiganIf our goals were to have a serious influence on the White House or Congress, then we did not succeed. On the other hand, the march clearly demonstrated a broad support for science among the populace. The difficulty we face is there is so much \u201cnoise\u201d created by other issues, many stemming from the White House, that drowns out serious discussion.\u2014 Thomas H. Mullen, retired middle-school science teacherI think it was a great one-day event, and it seemed to generate buzz for a week or two. But I feel that we need a sustained dialogue. We need to inject scientific and rational thinking back into the public discourse, and a single march cannot do that. To be clear, I'm not saying that everyone needs to be a scientist or scientifically trained. Instead everyone needs to be critical and willing to listen to facts. This requires an openness on the part of the populace, but also better communication skills (and a willingness to be humble) on the part of experts.\u2014 Justin Clifford Smith, postdoctoral researcher at University of California\u00a0at Los Angeles Running for office, writing letters to the editor, feeling frustrated \u2014 here's what readers are doing six months after the March for Science.   What\u2019s changed since the March for Science? Readers respond.",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "First all-Black team of climbers heading to Everest (WP: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5968",
        "date": "2021-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/mount-everest-black-climbers/2021/12/31/b5d28a70-3757-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html",
        "text": "Nearly 70 years ago, New Zealand explorer Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first confirmed climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world\u2019s tallest peak. Since then, just over 10,000 others have completed the feat. Of those, only a handful have been Black and only one a Black American. In May, under the name of Full Circle Everest Expedition, a team of nine, highly qualified Black climbers intend to change that. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe brainchild of team leader Philip Henderson, 58, the project is about \u201csummiting Everest first,\u201d and \u201ceverything else second.\u201dBut with 30 years of climbing, mountaineering and working in the outdoors industry, often as the only Black person in any group, Henderson sees the Everest expedition as a way to bring diversity and change to his chosen field.Story continues below advertisement\"The analogy I like to use is that there's a cruise ship that has been headed in one direction,\" he says. \"It's time to turn it around.\"The Racism of the Great OutdoorsThe name Full Circle is a nod to the team\u2019s efforts to both represent that diversity and bring more of it to the mountains in the future. Like any other team intending to tackle the world\u2019s highest mountain, the Full Circle members will have to put in months of training, fundraising, all the while serving as representatives to and for a population that for the most part hasn\u2019t had exposure to the world of mountaineering.Advertisement\u201cI hear \u2018Black people don\u2019t do that,\u2019 all the time when I talk about my climbing,\u201d says Seattle-based team member Rosemary Saal, 28, an outdoor educator. \u201cThat only perpetuates the stereotypes. It\u2019s important to change the narrative.\u201dStory continues below advertisementLike others in the group, growing up, Saal was often the only Black rock climber. \u201cI was exposed to climbing at age 12 through a local REI store. It was the first time I discovered this was something people did,\u201d she says.The climbers hope that seeing a group of Black Americans atop Everest will change that narrative, in part by creating stories that show it can be done. \u201cIt\u2019s hugely significant to contribute to representation in these outdoor spaces,\u201d Saal says.\u201cThere\u2019s been an intentional lack of access for Black people. When Hillary first summited [Everest], Black people couldn\u2019t even vote in this country\u201d and national parks had only recently been desegregated, Saal says. \u201cThis expedition is all about showing, \u2018Yes, we can do this.\u2019\u200a\u201dLowered Horizons: Famous climber Conrad Anker mulls what comes nextThe teamWhile Henderson likes to say that \u201cthe team picked itself,\u201d he is the nucleus and mentor to the others, having conceptualized the project and invited each member. This will be Henderson\u2019s second attempt at the summit, the first an unfinished bid back in 2012.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBesides Saal and Henderson, the other members include Eddie Taylor, 31, a Colorado high school teacher; Abby Dione, 45, owner of Coral Cliffs Climbing Gym in Florida; James Kagambi, 60, a Kenyan and National Outdoor Leadership school field instructor; Manoah Ainuu, 25, who leads climbing clinics for children; Fred Campbell, 37, of Seattle, a North Face-sponsored sports ambassador; Demond Mullins, 40, a sociology professor based in New York; Thomas Moore, 37, of Colorado; and Adina Scott, 41, a Washington state marine instrumentation and computer specialist.The group has some PhDs in environmental and science fields, multiple summits of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Denali in Alaska, and years of climbing, mountaineering and instructing experience. (For the record, climbing often refers just to a specific \u201cwall\u201d like El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, while mountaineering refers specifically to summiting big mountains).\u201cEach team member has the experience to say that Everest is a challenge,\u201d Henderson says, \u201cbut they all have the skills.\u201dInteractive: Scaling EverestEven with the necessary skills and their mountaineering experience, Everest, at about 29,032 feet, takes special preparation. Each of the Full Circle climbers is training on his or her own right now, but there are plans for more big-mountain-specific training in the new year, ideally as a group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have to be a bit spontaneous to work around everyone\u2019s schedules and commitments,\u201d Henderson says. \u201cBut some of us are getting in climbs up 14rs [peaks that top out over 14,000 feet], where we can. If we had the option of getting together and training regularly, we would.\u201dScott will provide tech and logistics support at base camp.\u201cI love the vision for the project and the people involved, but I don\u2019t want to climb Everest,\u201d she says. \u201cTaking people who are already doing amazing work in diverse communities and giving them a chance to reach more people via mountain climbing is really wonderful.\u201dIt\u2019s official: Mount Everest just got a little bit higherSaal, on the other hand, is headed to the summit. While climbing Everest has not been a long-held personal goal, she says that the mountain is usually in the back of every climber\u2019s mind.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEven people who don\u2019t know much about the sport know Everest, and so I\u2019m always asked if I plan to climb it,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen Phil called, I said yes immediately.\u201dAdvertisementLiving in Tucson, Saal doesn\u2019t have immediate access to big mountain climbing practice, but she\u2019s making do with her surroundings. \u201cI get out hiking as much as possible and aim for double-digit elevation gain each week,\u201d she says. \u201cI also have Mount Lemmon here at 9,000 feet, so that\u2019s helpful.\u201dTaylor lives in the Boulder area, and can get to higher peaks within a couple of hours drive. \u201cRight now, my focus is on planning and fundraising, but I\u2019ll be turning things up in January,\u201d he says. \u201cI did a good deal of climbing with heavy packs over the summer and have a decent level of fitness as a base.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNo matter who\u2019s climbing or what their experience level is, Everest brings with it a unique set of risks \u2014 on average, about five climbers lose their lives there annually.Saal says she has a \u201chealthy dose\u201d of nerves. \u201cMy ultimate goal is to come back from the expedition and that our team contributes to the safety of the mountain,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m mentally and emotionally preparing and remind myself that if the mountain allows us to climb it, that\u2019s beautiful.\u201dComplex plansHaving the desire, skill and determination to climb Everest is just one part of the equation. Funding is another big piece of the puzzle.AdvertisementA standard supported climb can range from about $30,000 to $85,000 per person. For custom climbs, where you choose your teammates, guides and guide ratio, the price tag can run well over $100,000 per person.Story continues below advertisementTo help defray those costs, Full Circle has lined up the support of several mountaineering brands although the group is still seeking donations.\u201cThe expedition is very timely, as I think many brands and organizations are beginning to recognize the colonial history of mountain climbing,\u201d Saal says \u2014 meaning the history of White male climbers, many from the British Empire that once ruled over India and the Himalayas \u2014 and are supportive of an effort to change the face of the sport and bring in traditionally marginalized populations.Among the brands supporting Full Circle are Perkins Coie, Hestra, North Face, Osprey Packs, Smartwool, MSR and the Greening Youth Foundation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSCARPA, a climbing shoemaker, is another. \u201cSCARPA believes that it is very important for these types of stories to be shared, from every community, and for the outdoor industry to do everything we can to support the individuals telling the stories,\u201d marketing and communications director Melanie Hood says.Taylor says that as more people hear about the effort, interest and financial support has picked up.\u201cA month or so ago, things were kind of quiet,\u201d he says. \u201cBut now we know we\u2019re going to Everest. I\u2019m happy to be part of a story that hasn\u2019t been shared before.\u201dHow Mount Everest became a tourist destinationInteractive: Climbing Everest without oxygenMount Everest is a \u2018fecal time bomb.\u2019 Here\u2019s one man\u2019s idea for handling 14 tons of poop. The highly qualified group is ready to change the narrative around big-mountain climbing. First all-Black team of climbers heading to Everest",
        "author": "Amanda Loudin"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Mars 2020 rover will visit the perfect spot to find signs of life, new studies show (WP: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5969",
        "date": "2019-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/16/mars-rover-will-visit-perfect-spot-find-signs-life-new-studies-show/",
        "text": "On some sunny day next summer, in front of a crowd at Kennedy Space Center, a rocket carrying NASA\u2019s next, best hope at finding life on Mars will launch into the sky.Seven months later, the car-sized Mars 2020 rover will touch down near Jezero Crater, a dried-up lake in Mars\u2019 northern hemisphere. With its six wheels and suite of high-tech instruments, it will scour the surrounding rocks for evidence that alien microbes once lived on the Red Planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDecades of surveying Mars with orbiting probes, landers and rovers has revealed the planet once harbored a thick atmosphere and water on its surface. Researchers have even discovered traces of complex organic molecules \u2014 possible building blocks for living cells.Story continues below advertisementNow, two new studies offer a tantalizing suggestion that Mars 2020 could find even stronger evidence of Martian life \u2014 if it ever existed.AdvertisementThe rocks around Jezero show evidence of carbonate and hydrated silica \u2014 molecules that are known on Earth to help preserve microscopic fossils over billions of years.\u201cIt\u2019s a big glaring road sign saying \u2018look here, look here,\u2019\" said Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and the lead author of a study in the journal Icarus reporting the carbonate detection. \u201cJezero Crater is an incredibly mineralogically diverse place, with lots of paths forward to search for biosignatures, which means we have a lot of chances to understand exactly what happened with the history of life here.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut what would Mars 2020 have to find for scientists to be certain there once were Martians?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJezero Crater is the site of an ancient delta that fed into a cratert lake. \n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJezero\n\t\t\tCrater\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDelta\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLANDING \n\t\t\tAREA\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCrater rim\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDetail\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t5 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if biology ever existed).\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBut windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard to the rover here and at other sites.\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJezero\n\t\t\tCrater\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDelta\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLANDING \n\t\t\tAREA\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCrater rim\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDetail\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t3 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if biology ever existed).\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBut windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard to the rover here and at other sites.\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJezero\n\t\t\tCrater\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDelta\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLANDING \n\t\t\tAREA\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCrater rim\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDetail\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t3 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if biology ever existed).\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBut windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard to the rover here and at other sites.\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJezero\n\t\t\tCrater\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDelta\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLANDING \n\t\t\tAREA\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCrater rim\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDetail\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t3 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMudstones formed from sediments that were slowly spilled into the lake may contain carbonates and even biological remains (if biology ever existed).\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBut windswept sand formations known as \"ripples\" pose a hazard to the rover here and at other sites.\n\t\t\n\t\n\tSatellite imagery from NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.\n\tJOE FOX AND BRITTANY RENEE MAYES/WASHINGTON POST\n\n\n\n\n\nBoth studies published this week relied on the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer (CRISM), an orbiting camera capable of scanning the Martian surface in infrared and visible light. From 250 miles high, CRISM produces colorful maps of minerals on the Red Planet.AdvertisementCarbonates, which form when carbon dioxide interacts with rock and water, have been found all over Jezero Crater. But CRISM showed a particularly high concentration of the mineral along the crater\u2019s inner rim, right where the shoreline of the lake would have been over 3 billion years ago.Story continues below advertisementTo Horgan, this suggests they could have been left behind by waves lapping at the rock. She compared the deposits to the line of scum that forms where water meets the sides of a bathtub (scientists have even taken to calling the region \u201cthe bathtub ring\u201d).\u201cWhat makes this so exciting is [carbonate] traps anything that it precipitates around,\u201d Horgan said. \u201cIt mimics the structures of the microbes, so you get preserved textures \u2026 but it also traps the organic material in there as well.\"If microbes had been living on Jezero\u2019s lakeshore, there\u2019s a decent chance the carbonate could have captured them.Some of the oldest fossils on Earth were entombed in carbonate. Scientists have found stromatolites \u2014 layered structures formed from carbonate-encased mats of bacteria \u2014 dating back as far as 3.7 billion years.Jesse Tarnas, a planetary scientist at Brown University, also relied on CRISM maps for his research. His paper, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, describes hydrated silica near Jezero\u2019s delta, where water from a long-gone river fed into the ancient crater lake.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHydrated silica, better known as opal, can form in volcanic eruptions and at the edges of hot springs. But when it is created from sediments settling on a seafloor, it can form strong, sturdy crystals that are exceptionally effective at preserving signs of life. On Earth, scientists have found samples of hydrated silica containing ancient organic material and even fossilized cells.Because the Martian hydrated silica is so close to a delta, it\u2019s possible that it contains material from the river system. And if Mars\u2019 rivers ever harbored life, remains of ancient organisms might still be trapped within those crystals.Hydrated silica \u201cis not something that\u2019s been found before,\u201d said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u2019s Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for the 2020 mission. Morgan, who was not involved in Tarnas\u2019 research, said that the mineral will likely be a prime target for the rover once it lands.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s really exciting to have the thought that there are deposits in Jezero like we have on Earth,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be thinking about ways to get as close to them as we can.\u201dThe 2020 rover will be armed with a wide array of tools for examining these minerals. Cameras could capture images of stromatolites, if they exist. Lasers and molecular \u201csniffers\u201d known as spectrometers will map out the composition of rocks at an elemental level.\u201cIt\u2019s going to be able to do the kind of astrobiological investigations we\u2019ve been wanting to do on Mars for decades,\u201d Horgan said.The Curiosity rover, which has been cruising around Gale Crater since 2012, can only measure molecules \u201cin bulk,\u201d Morgan said. Though it has found organic molecules, it cannot pinpoint them to particular rock layers, or associate them with microscopic structures.\u201cWith 2020 we can go there and we can say we\u2019re seeing a concentration of element or mineral associated with this very particular fine scale texture,\u201d Stack said. \u201cThose very subtle textural differences are what people look for and have kind of sharpened their eyes to when making a case for biosignatures.\u201dBut even in scientists\u2019 dream scenario \u2014 one in which there was life on Mars, and its remains were preserved, and the 2020 rover is able to find the fossils \u2014 it\u2019s unlikely that mission alone will prove whether Martians ever existed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe discovery of life beyond Earth is such an extraordinary claim, as Carl Sagan would say, it requires extraordinary evidence \u2014 evidence that only a human can deliver.\u201cWhat we\u2019re really trying to do with this rover is look for \u2018potential biosignatures,\u2019\u201d Horgan said. But only if \u201cwe verify it back here with all our incredible lab equipment,\u201d she continued, \u201ccan we turn a \u2018potential biosignature\u2019 into a \u2018biosignature.\u2019\u201dThe 2020 mission is only the first step of a proposed four-part program. Once it identifies the most compelling rocks around Jezero Crater, the rover will use a specially developed drill to collect and cache samples of the material.Story continues below advertisementSome day (if all goes according to plan) scientists will launch follow-up missions to retrieve the samples and bring them home. Finally, in an ultra-secure facility that hasn\u2019t been built yet, they will analyze the rocks at an elemental scale to determine, definitively, whether they contain evidence of life.AdvertisementThe entire process will take years, if not decades. It may never happen. The necessary follow up missions haven\u2019t been approved yet, let alone funded and developed. And voyages to Mars are notoriously difficult: About 50 percent of all attempts to reach the Red Planet have failed.\u201cThere\u2019s this tantalizing evidence that maybe [life] was there but you won\u2019t know until you get the samples back,\u201d Tarnas said. \u201cAnd you really just gotta have the patience and fortitude to hold out for it.\u201dRead more:Next stop, Mars: Inside the fierce debate over the fate of NASA\u2019s new rover \u2014 and a chance to make historyCassini was the mission of a lifetime for this NASA scientist. Now she must say goodbye. NASA's next Mars mission launches in July 2020. Two new studies show the new rover will visit a great spot to look for evidence for ancient life on the Red Planet. The Mars 2020 rover will visit the perfect spot to find signs of life, new studies show",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "USDA research agencies will move to Kansas City region despite opposition (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5970",
        "date": "2019-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/06/13/usda-research-agencies-will-move-kansas-city-region-perdue-announces/",
        "text": "Two scientific agencies in the Department of Agriculture will move from Washington to the greater Kansas City region, USDA announced Thursday, despite strong resistance to the plan.Nearly 550 positions at the Economic Research Service, a statistical agency, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which funds cutting-edge agricultural science, are expected to be moved by the end of the federal fiscal year, Sept. 30. USDA estimated the savings at $300 million over 15 years from employment and rent. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe Kansas City Region has proven itself to be hub for all things agriculture and is a booming city in America\u2019s heartland,\u201d Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement.Story continues below advertisementThe news release did not identify the location of the offices. But Tim Cowden, president and chief executive of the Kansas City Area Development Council, said the agency is evaluating office property on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border.AdvertisementPerdue had unveiled a plan to relocate the two agencies in August, without specifying a site. He called the decision a cost-saving measure and said it would bring them closer to their \u201cstakeholders\u201d in farming regions. Initially, he also proposed placing ERS under the Office of the Chief Economist but that was not part of the final plan, according to a letter the secretary sent employees on Thursday.Scientists across the country rely on NIFA grants to study topics ranging from climate change and crop genetics to farmland drones. ERS produces statistical reports that influence decisions in corporate boardrooms and in state and federal capitals.Story continues below advertisementRepublican senators representing Missouri and Kansas welcomed Thursday\u2019s announcement. \u201cWe\u2019re home to some of the hardest working farmers in the country, so this is a fantastic decision by the USDA,\u201d Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said in a statement.AdvertisementNIFA and ERS workers will join nearly 5,000 other USDA employees in Kansas City, said Cowden, whose group proposed the region to USDA last year.\u201cWe\u2019re within 300 miles of 13 land grant universities,\u201d said Kimberly Young, president of the Kansas City Animal Health Corridor, a development council initiative. The area is an epicenter of the animal health industry, Young said, with more than 300 such companies nearby.Story continues below advertisementBut current employees of the two agencies, several Democratic lawmakers and a bipartisan coalition of former USDA leaders warned that the move, more than 900 miles from Washington, would devastate the two agencies.\u201cThis is not just a change of address,\u201d said Jack Payne, University of Florida\u2019s senior vice president for agriculture. \u201cIt cuts NIFA off from the collaboration with other federal funding agencies in D.C. that are its major partners.\u201dAdvertisementNIFA unionized earlier this week, and ERS unionized in May in the face of the decision. Union officials have promised to fight the move. As Perdue addressed NIFA and ERS employees in an auditorium Thursday afternoon, members of the bargaining unit stood and turned their backs to the secretary in protest. Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe announcement today should be met with great skepticism that Secretary Perdue has the best interests of either federal employees or American agriculture in mind,\u201d said Kevin Hunt, acting vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, which represents ERS employees.In a call with reporters Thursday afternoon, Perdue acknowledged that some employees have \u201cexpressed displeasure\u201d with the move. \u201cI understand that no one ever wants their cheese moved,\u201d he said, referring to a 2000 book on business management. He suggested USDA employees who wish to remain in the District seek \u201cother options here in federal service.\u201dAdvertisementPerdue also said the General Services Administration, the agency that manages federal real estate, will begin the process of acquiring office space around July 1. Story continues below advertisementJeffrey Neal, a chief human resources officer in the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, said if USDA began issuing notices to employees this month the department \u201ccould pull it off by the end of the fiscal year.\u201d Neal predicted such a swift move would be expensive \u2014 USDA estimated relocation will cost $50,000 per worker \u2014 and \u201cmessy,\u201d losing numerous employees in the process. Gale Buchanan, USDA chief scientist under President George W. Bush, and Catherine E. Woteki, chief scientist in the Obama administration, predicted the relocation would set ERS back \u201cfive to 10 years\u201d due to a loss of specialized employees, as they wrote in a 2018 letter to Congress signed by dozens of agricultural leaders.Advertisement\u201cThere isn\u2019t a plan in place for how to manage this,\u201d Woteki told The Washington Post. The offices, which together employ about 700 people when fully staffed, are roughly two-thirds the size they were during the Obama administration.Story continues below advertisementWorkloads have ballooned as ERS employees have quit at double the normal rate since October, The Post reported. Acting officials have filled several vacant ERS leadership positions.USDA lacks a chief scientist, who oversees ERS, NIFA and other USDA research offices. Trump\u2019s first nominee, radio host Sam Clovis, withdrew from consideration over his ties to the investigation of Russia\u2019s influence on the 2016 election. Sen. Christopher Van Hollen (D-Md.) placed a hold on Trump\u2019s second nominee, former Dow Chemical executive Scott Hutchins, because the senator opposes the relocation, Van Hollen\u2019s spokeswoman said. In January, Perdue appointed Hutchins deputy undersecretary for research, education, and economics, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.Advertisement\u201cOur overarching concern is what happens to the important scientific work that these two agencies perform at USDA on behalf of the public, on behalf of farmers and rural communities and everyone who eats,\u201d said Karen Perry Stillerman, an analyst who specializes in food and the environment at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group that advocates for researchers.Story continues below advertisementNIFA currently rents costly offices on the Washington waterfront, and ERS leases space in the nearby Patriots Plaza. In April, Perdue announced a plan he dubbed \u201cOneNeighborhood,\u201d which seeks to consolidate workers into two USDA-owned buildings in the capital region. But ERS and NIFA employees slated for the move, per an April 19 memo obtained by The Post, were excluded from OneNeighborhood.Peter Winch, an organizer for American Federation of Government Employees, said the two agencies held all-hands meetings on May 22 to discuss buyouts and severance payments. Once employees receive relocation letters, they will have 30 days to decide whether to move. USDA will offer 30 or fewer buyouts per agency, he said employees were told.AdvertisementUsing an internal ERS document known as the \u201cstay-go\u201d list, analysts at the Union of Concerned Scientists identified nearly 80 jobs scheduled to remain in Washington. The bulk belong to administrative staff, analysts who perform market outlook estimates and those who collect data. Economists and other ERS researchers who make conclusions from that data are likely to be reassigned to Kansas City, according to this analysis.Story continues below advertisementBut USDA disputed that. \u201cOf the 76 ERS positions staying in the National Capitol Region, over half of these positions perform core research functions,\u201d USDA spokeswoman Meghan Rodgers said in an email.Democratic lawmakers have also vowed to try to block the move. \u201cWe hope that Congress will recognize that this is legitimate executive function,\u201d Perdue told reporters on Thursday. AdvertisementA federal department must pass a \u201cvery low bar\u201d in providing reasons for reassignments, Neal said. \u201cThe ability of Congress, with split control of the House and the Senate, to stop something like this in its tracks is questionable.\"House appropriators recently prohibited funds for the move in a 2020 appropriations bill. \u201cIt is alarming that the administration is rushing ahead with this relocation in order to circumvent Congress,\u201d House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said in a statement. Hoyer vowed \u201cto explore all options to reverse this decision.\u201dSenate Democrats introduced a bill to keep the agencies in the national capital region, mirroring House legislation introduced earlier this year by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine). Van Hollen said Thursday he would offer this legislation as an amendment to the defense budget bill recently released by the Senate Armed Services Committee. \u201cI will continue to fight this tooth and nail,\u201d he said in a statement.Lawmakers have also questioned whether the secretary has the authority to relocate these offices without congressional approval, prompting an investigation by the USDA\u2019s inspector general office.Read more:Trump administration plans to move USDA research divisions despite concernsWhite House to set up panel to counter climate change consensus, officials sayAfter outcry, USDA will no longer require scientists to label research \u2018preliminary\u2019 Almost a year after unveiling a plan to move USDA science divisions, the agriculture secretary has selected a relocation site. USDA research agencies will move to Kansas City region despite opposition",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump administration plans to move USDA research divisions despite concerns (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5971",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/25/trump-administration-plans-move-usda-research-divisions-despite-concerns/",
        "text": "Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue is moving forward with plans to relocate two influential scientific agencies out of downtown Washington, a cost-saving initiative that critics fear could provoke mass resignations among employees who perform critical agricultural research and produce statistics that shape farm policy.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a meeting last week, Chris Hartley, acting administrator of the Agriculture Department\u2019s Economic Research Service, told researchers at that agency to expect reassignment letters in mid-May, according to two ERS employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Although the new location has yet to be announced, Hartley told researchers that they would have about 120 days to uproot their families and report for duty. Of 68 towns and cities in contention to host the agency, College Park and Montgomery County, Md., are within a few dozen miles of its current offices. Many candidates, such as Denver, Des Moines and Kansas City, are hundreds or more than a thousand miles away.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStaff at the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, which Perdue also selected for relocation, haven\u2019t received a date for the move, said a NIFA employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person wasn\u2019t authorized to discuss the move.The relocation plan was unveiled in August, a prelude to the broad restructuring of the USDA workforce that Perdue announced this month, dubbed \u201cOneNeighborhood.\u201d Among other provisions, it seeks to consolidate USDA employees, moving them out of rented space across the capital region and into two department-owned buildings in the D.C. area that are undergoing renovations.NIFA rents expensive real estate on the D.C. waterfront. ERS leases offices in the nearby Patriots Plaza. Under the OneNeighborhood plan, some NIFA and ERS employees would move into renovated D.C. offices, according to an April 19 memo obtained by The Washington Post. But the majority of employees at both agencies will be ordered to relocate to a yet-to-be-named site, which Perdue has said would bring them closer to farmers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe plan has sparked an excited competition in the nation\u2019s agricultural hubs, with nearly 140 businesses, universities, city developers and local economic councils lobbying to become the agencies\u2019 new homes. But it has drawn fierce objections from Democrats in Congress, USDA employees and a bipartisan coalition of former USDA leaders, who fear the move would devastate the two agencies, which are already losing staff in the face of sharp budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration.The NIFA employee estimated the agency has shrunk from about 400 employees to 200 since President Trump took office. \u201cEvery two days, somebody takes off\u201d for another job or early retirement, the staffer said.ERS is down from more than 300 employees to 250, said Sandra Salstrom, a legal representative at the American Federation of Government Employees, a union for federal workers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPerdue\u2019s office did not respond to requests to discuss the proposal. In a written statement, the secretary\u2019s press office said the relocation plan is part of a broader \u201ceffort to make USDA the most effective, efficient and customer-focused department in the entire federal government,\u201d arguing the move will \u201cminimize costs\u201d while bringing USDA workers \u201ccloser to all of their stakeholders.\u201dPast USDA chief scientists expressed \u201cprofound concern\u201d in a letter to Congress, co-signed by more than 70 former USDA officials, university deans and agriculture scientists. \u201cIn a major relocation, there will be substantial staff loss because of either an unwillingness or other preventing circumstances to move,\u201d the letter said. Signatories also worried that move could fray the close ties between these offices and nearby federal research agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis parochial idea of, like, \u2018Washington messes everything up. Let\u2019s move it out of town\u2019 overlooks the important role that this agency plays,\u201d said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), a member of the House Agriculture Committee who has introduced legislation to block the move. \u201cThere\u2019s just a heightened level of concern about this administration, generally, about data collection and science.\u201dThere is currently no chief scientist overseeing the research at USDA. Trump\u2019s first nominee, the radio host Sam Clovis, had no scientific credentials and withdrew his nomination in 2017 over links to the Russia investigation. Scott Hutchins, the second nominee, was awaiting Senate confirmation when he was appointed, in January, as the deputy undersecretary for research, education and economics, a position that does not require congressional approval.The nation has a growing population that needs to be fed, a climate that is changing and a \u201cresearch process that is continuing to slide,\u201d said Gale Buchanan, who was the undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics under George W. Bush and who signed the letter warning against the proposed move. \u201cWe are on a collision course for \u2014 I won\u2019t say disaster \u2014 but we are on a collision course.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Economic Research Service is a statistical agency whose reports, such as its annual survey of rural America, influence policy and industry decisions. Its economists study subjects as diverse as avocado imports, farm labor practices and reliance on the national food assistance program, the latter of which is a frequent Republican target for budget cuts.NIFA provides funding to researchers at land grant universities and other institutions across the country. It has funded agricultural robots, gene-editing crop science and even space worms \u2014 in January the USDA announced a plan to send nematodes, small parasitic worms that kill insects, to the International Space Station to test whether the worms can control pests in microgravity.Story continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of us see NIFA as the core of USDA, in terms of discovering the knowledge needed for the future of feeding the world,\u201d said Jack Payne, the University of Florida\u2019s vice president for agriculture and natural resources.AdvertisementNIFA grants also fuel research into agriculture and climate change, science the Trump administration rejects. It also oversees the 4-H youth organization. When NIFA recently produced a policy to support 4-H\u2019s LGBT community, this caused \u201can enormous stink\u201d in the secretary\u2019s office, said the NIFA employee.The USDA\u2019s inspector general is reviewing the proposal to determine whether Perdue has the power to move the offices. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) argued in an April letter that USDA lacks the budgetary authority and must seek approval from the House and Senate appropriations committees.Story continues below advertisementCongress, in its 2019 appropriations bill, told the secretary\u2019s office to hold off on the plan, citing \u201cinsufficient information and justification\u201d for the relocation.AdvertisementThe president\u2019s 2020 budget proposal asks for $15.5 million to relocate ERS and $9.5 million to relocate NIFA. It also slashes ERS funding from $87 million to $61 million, and would trim the agency to 160 positions. The request would also eliminate research into food security and rural economies while keeping a focus on farm financial information, consumer data and trade. Congress ignored similar cuts proposed in 2018 and 2019.In the fall, the USDA hired accounting firm Ernst & Young, for $340,000, to guide the science agencies\u2019 relocation. Kristi J. Boswell, a senior adviser to the USDA secretary, told members of Congress the secretary plans to reveal the winning selection in May and, simultaneously, release a cost-benefit analysis.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have received stacks and stacks and stacks of support letters from senators, members of Congress, governors, community leaders, business leaders associations and local communities,\u201d Boswell said during the March congressional hearing about the proposal.AdvertisementTim Daman, president of the Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce in Michigan, said he was \u201cpleased\u201d that East Lansing is a contender. \u201cMichigan is one of the most agriculturally diverse states in the nation,\u201d he said, home to 50,000 farms, Michigan State University and a new dairy factory designed to produce 300 million pounds of cheese annually (nearly the weight, in cheddar, of two Washington Monuments). \u201cThe region is proud of our agricultural roots and the investment the industry has made in our community.\u201d Craig Beyrouty, the dean of the agriculture school at the University of Maryland at College Park, said his city\u2019s bid would fulfill Perdue\u2019s desire to move the agencies while keeping NIFA on the D.C. Metro\u2019s Green Line. He said a new building could be erected in College Park within 18 months, but declined to provide other details. In addition to the location offered in College Park, the USDA owns 7,000 acres in nearby Beltsville, Md.\u201cThere\u2019s a huge amount of support to keep NIFA and ERS located in, or very close to, the Washington district,\u201d Beyrouty said.\u201cFrom the perspective of what we actually do at our agency, we just can\u2019t see any good reason to do this,\u201d the NIFA employee said. \u201cIt just doesn\u2019t really make any sense.\u201dRead more:Report: Trump\u2019s \u2018wrecking ball\u2019 on science is posing a threat to public health and the environmentHouse Science Committee\u2019s likely next chair wants a return to scienceSenate confirms Trump\u2019s science and tech adviser after lengthy vacancy House Democrats and a bipartisan group of former USDA officials are trying to stop a plan to relocate research staff. Trump administration plans to move USDA research divisions despite concerns",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump budget cuts funding for health, science, environment agencies (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5972",
        "date": "2020-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/trump-budget-cuts-funding-for-health-science-environment-agencies/2020/02/10/9c8dd784-4c2d-11ea-b721-9f4cdc90bc1c_story.html",
        "text": "President Trump once again is asking Congress to make major cuts to the budgets of science and health agencies while favoring research deemed essential to national security.The 2021 budget request delivered Monday to Congress includes a nearly 10 percent cut to Health and Human Services and a 26 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt asks for increases in funding for research on quantum computing and artificial intelligence, areas in which the United States competes with China. Trump also wants to grant NASA a multibillion-dollar boost to help the space agency put astronauts back on the moon.Trump budgets have repeatedly targeted agencies and programs that deal with science, health and the environment, but if tradition holds, the requested cuts have little chance of winning approval from the House of Representatives, which has the power of the purse and a Democratic majority.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAdministration officials held a conference call with reporters Monday to tout the initiatives in science and technology. The budget request calls for $25 million to be spent building the National Quantum Internet, which would in theory be impossible to hack and would exploit breakthroughs in quantum computing.\u201cAs the Roman poet Ovid once said, the gods favor the bold,\u201d said Paul Dabbar, undersecretary for science at the Energy Department.Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said research and development \u201care at the absolute forefront\u201d of Trump\u2019s agenda.But the 2021 Trump budget received a cool reception from nonprofit organizations that advocate for research.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe administration\u2019s proposed budget cuts to research risk slowing our nation\u2019s science just when it is reaping benefits for all Americans in the forms of better health, a stronger economy, a more sustainable environment, a safer world, and awe-inspiring understanding,\u201d said Sudip Parikh, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Advertisement\u201cThe President\u2019s proposed budget is a severe disappointment for science and ignores the many ways in which science fuels our economy, safeguards our security, improves our health and well-being, and is critical for a thriving future,\u201d said Chris McEntee, chief executive and executive director of the American Geophysical Union.The Trump administration hopes to eliminate nearly 50 EPA programs. \u201cEnvironmental protection must go hand-in-hand with a strong economy, as proven by America\u2019s continued improvements to air quality and public health while simultaneously growing the economy,\u201d the administration\u2019s Office of Management and Budget wrote.Story continues below advertisementThe Energy Department would get a boost in funding for safeguarding the nuclear weapons stockpile, a core mission, but outside that program would see a 28.7 percent cut, including more than 1 billion cut from its $7 billion science program.AdvertisementThe budget request would trim funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by almost 16 percent. HHS officials said they want the CDC to focus on its core mission of preventing and controlling infectious diseases and on other emerging public health issues, such as opioid abuse.Officials propose to take the money that would normally go to fund individual disease prevention activities and funnel it into a single block grant to states. The budget says chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes have common risk factors, and thus consolidating funds \u201ccan help magnify the public health impact.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlthough the budget reduces overall funding for global health, from $571 million to $532 million in 2021, officials carved out an extra $50 million for global health security, which are measures aimed at disease detection and emergencies. That bump comes at the expense of international HIV/AIDS programs, which is being cut by about $58 million.AdvertisementThe budget proposes to give the National Institutes of Health, the government\u2019s biomedical research center in Bethesda, Md., a $38 billion budget for fiscal 2021, about $3 billion less than the total NIH has this fiscal year. Priorities at NIH under Trump include research on the opioid epidemic and stimulants such as methamphetamine, developing a universal flu vaccine, and the second year of a childhood cancer initiative.The president\u2019s other health priorities include more funding for Trump\u2019s initiative to nearly wipe out HIV transmission in the United States by 2030, which would receive $716 million, shared by several agencies, in his 2021 budget.Story continues below advertisementAcross HHS, $5 billion would go to battling the opioid crisis, which led to more than 67,000 deaths in 2018. That funding includes $1.6 billion for State Opioid Response grants, $85 million more than 2020 spending.AdvertisementThe president, as he has in the past, proposed a major cut \u2014 about $560 million \u2014 for the National Cancer Institute. Bipartisan NCI supporters in Congress have rejected such reductions in the past few years.The president is proposing to strip the regulation of e-cigarettes and cigarettes from the Food and Drug Administration. Instead, a new office within HHS would regulate tobacco products. The White House said such a move would \u201cincrease direct accountability and more effectively respond to this critical area of public health concern\u201d and allow the FDA to focus more intently on approving drugs and medical devices.Story continues below advertisementMatt Myers, president of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said taking the Center for Tobacco Products out of the FDA right now would be a \u201cdisaster\u201d for the agency\u2019s anti-vaping efforts. The agency just imposed a partial e-cigarette ban, and by May 12 vape manufacturers must submit product applications to the FDA for review.AdvertisementErika Sward, a spokeswoman for the American Lung Association, called the proposed reorganization a \u201cblatant effort to install the tobacco industry as the wolf in the henhouse.\u201d While the health advocates have sometimes criticized the FDA for being too slow to crack down on e-cigarettes, they are more worried about potential political interference if tobacco regulators were moved to HHS.One of the winners in the budget request is NASA, which would receive a boost of $2.6 billion, or about 12 percent, as the agency continues to put together the Artemis moon program. Trump is asking for $3.4 billion for the development of lunar landers, rovers and precursor robotic missions. The administration has vowed to land the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024.Story continues below advertisementZeroed out in the Trump budget is funding for a new space telescope, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, which is entering its construction phase. WFIRST would scrutinize planets orbiting distant stars and study the distribution of galaxies in an attempt to better understand the evolution of the universe. It remains a priority of the astronomy community and has survived two previous attempts by the administration to kill its funding.AdvertisementUnder the request, the National Science Foundation\u2019s budget would shrink from $8.3 billion in 2020 to $7.7 billion in 2021, a cut of about 7 percent. The NSF funds basic research through grants to a wide variety of scientists and plays a major role in funneling money to programs that might not normally receive investment from the private sector. The Trump budget reduction would return NSF\u2019s budget to close to the level it was in 2017.The budget would allot about $96 billion in discretionary spending \u2014 a 9 percent decrease \u2014 at HHS. Medicaid, the safety-net insurance for low-income Americans, would receive nearly $920 billion less than otherwise anticipated by 2030 as federal health officials encourage states to create work requirements and tighten eligibility checks. And a \u201chealth reform vision allowance\u201d would lower spending on the Affordable Care Act by $844 billion over the decade.Story continues below advertisementFor Medicare, the federal insurance for older and disabled Americans, the plan would curb spending by $480 billion over the decade, primarily through proposed cuts in payments to doctors and hospitals.AdvertisementThe Trump administration in recent months has said one of its priorities is improving America\u2019s mental health care. In December, it convened a mental-health summit at the White House.But some mental-health advocates \u2014 while praising the administration\u2019s highlighting of the issue \u2014 said the administration so far has been more talk than substance on the issue.\u201cWhat they\u2019re announcing won\u2019t be felt in any meaningful or positive way by people who are most in need,\u201d said Paul Gionfriddo, president and chief executive of Mental Health America, an advocacy organization. \u201cFirst of all, it\u2019s too little. Second, if you look at the other policy changes they\u2019re making, they\u2019re actually pulling more money out of the mental health system than they are putting in.\u201dOne key proposal touted in Trump\u2019s budget is a proposal to modify the Institutions for Mental Disease payment exclusion \u2014 a long-standing policy that prohibits federal reimbursement for many Medicaid-eligible patients who receive mental health care at psychiatric hospitals. Mental health groups like National Alliance on Mental Illness have pushed for that policy to change, calling it discriminatory to those struggling with mental illnesses compared to physical illnesses. By modifying that exclusion and other policy changes, Trump officials said the proposed budget could provide more than $5 billion in federal funding to states for mental illness.But at the same time, Trump administration\u2019s has proposed changes that some mental-health advocates say could significantly limit mental-health access in the country, such as reshaping Medicaid with block grants.\u201cThere are so many things the administration could do if it wanted to make a difference on mental health,\u201d Gionfriddo said. \u201cThe numbers they\u2019re talking about, like the $125 million for schools and community groups, you spread that around 50 states and it just doesn\u2019t amount to very much.\u201dLenny Bernstein, Lena H. Sun, Brady Dennis, Darryl Fears and William Wan contributed to this report. Administration touts new initiatives in quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Trump budget cuts funding for health, science, environment agencies",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists discover 7 \u2018Earthlike\u2019 planets orbiting a nearby star (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5973",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/02/22/scientists-discover-seven-earthlike-planets-orbiting-a-nearby-star/",
        "text": "A newfound solar system just 39 light-years away contains seven warm, rocky planets, scientists say.The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, represents the first time astronomers have detected so many terrestrial\u00a0planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying distant worlds\u00a0and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for\u00a0life beyond Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cBefore this, if you wanted to study terrestrial planets, we had only four of them and they were all in our solar system,\u201d said lead author Micha\u00ebl Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the\u00a0University of Liege in Belgium. \u201cNow we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But\u00a0even if we don't, whatever we find will be super-interesting.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe newly discovered solar system resembles a scaled-down version of our own. The star at its center, an ultra-cool dwarf called TRAPPIST-1, is less than a tenth the size of our sun and about a quarter as warm. Its planets circle tightly around it; the closest takes just a day and a half to complete an orbit and the most distant takes about 20 days.If these planets orbited a larger, brighter star\u00a0they would be fried to a crisp. But TRAPPIST-1 is so cool that all seven of the bodies are bathed in just the right amount of warmth\u00a0to\u00a0hold liquid water. And three of them receive the same amount of heat as Venus, Earth and Mars, putting them\u00a0in \u201cthe habitable zone,\u201d that Goldilocks region where it's thought life can thrive.The researchers call these worlds \u201cEarthlike,\u201d though it\u2019s a generous term. The planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system do resemble Earth\u00a0in terms of size, mass and the energy they receive from their star, but there's a lot that makes our planet livable besides being a warm\u00a0rock.\u00a0Further observation is required to determine the composition of the TRAPPIST-1 bodies, if they have atmospheres and if they hold water, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide \u2014 the molecules that scientists consider \u201cbiosignatures,\u201d or signs of life.\u201cYou can bet people will be rushing to take those measurements,\u201d said Elisabeth Adams, an exoplanet researcher at the Planetary Science Institute who was not involved in the study. \u201cThat's going to be fascinating to see.\u201dWhatever secrets it may harbor, the TRAPPIST-1 system would surely be a sight to behold.\u00a0Though the star is small, its nearness to the\u00a0planets means that, from their perspective, it appears about three times as large as our sun. The outermost planets enjoy the daily spectacle of their neighbors passing across the sky and\u00a0in front of their shared sun, each world a large dark spot silhouetted against the\u00a0salmon-colored star.\u00a0Its dim glow, which skews toward the red and infrared end of the light spectrum, bathes the planets in warmth and paints their skies with the crimson hues of a perpetual sunset.Dear Science: How do scientists find planets outside our solar system?Gillon\u00a0and his colleagues have been interested in\u00a0TRAPPIST-1 since\u00a0late 2015. Using the European Southern Observatory's Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, they sensed small dips in the star's brightness at regular intervals. These dips were caused by planets transiting \u2014 crossing between the star and Earth \u2014 and blocking some of its light. Last May, the scientists published their discovery in Nature: three rocky bodies, dubbed TRAPPIST-1b, -1c and -1d,\u00a0orbited the small star, they said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut right around the time the study was published,\u00a0Gillon\u00a0noticed that TRAPPIST-1d was\u00a0behaving oddly. When he went to get a closer look with the Very Large Telescope, the ESO's gigantic observatory in South America's Atacama Desert, he realized that the dip in brightness he thought came from\u00a01d was actually caused by\u00a0three planets, all transiting at the same time.From 2016: These three Earthlike planets may be our best chance yet at detecting lifeThis happens only once every three years, said Julien de Wit, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author on the study. \u201cThe chance of catching it is less than one in a thousand,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt's funny because it\u2019s such a huge paper with amazing results, and we got it from sheer luck.\u201dNext the team hurried\u00a0to request\u00a0time at the Spitzer Space Telescope,\u00a0whose Earth-trailing orbit around the sun offered an uninterrupted view of TRAPPIST-1 and its companions.\u00a0During 20 days with the Spitzer telescope, the team witnessed 34 transits.These observations \u201clifted the veil on the architecture of the system,\u201d as de Wit put it. Instead of three planets, TRAPPIST-1 had seven, renamed TRAPPIST-1b through -h in order of their\u00a0distance from the star.The scientists determined that the six inner planets are locked in an orbital resonance, meaning that the lengths of their orbits are related by a ratio of whole numbers. Because of this, the bodies\u00a0exert regular gravitational influences on one another. By measuring those influences, the astronomers could determine the mass of the planets, something that is impossible to figure out from transiting data alone. That in turn allowed them to loosely calculate their densities\u00a0\u2014 giving a sense of\u00a0how much iron, rock, water and gas the bodies contain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe fact\u00a0the planets are in orbital resonance also suggests that they formed farther out from their sun and then migrated inward, Gillon said. This makes it more likely that they will contain water in some form, since water and other volatile compounds (molecules that readily turn to gas) tend to concentrate on the outer edges of solar systems.Coincidentally, TRAPPIST-1 is in the constellation Aquarius \u2014 the water-bearer.NASA\u2019s Kepler telescope confirms a record-breaking 1,284 new planetsFor years, evidence has accumulated that the Milky Way galaxy is full of Earthlike planets. The discovery of seven such worlds around a single, faint star suggests that they may be even more common than originally thought.Three planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system resemble Earth in terms of size, mass, and the energy they receive from their star. (Reuters)Gillon and his colleagues plan to seek out similar\u00a0solar systems with a new project, Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultracool Stars, or SPECULOOS. (Like Trappist beer, speculoos cookies are a Belgian delicacy. His next effort will have to be called WAFFLES.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile,\u00a0scientists are scrambling to get a better look at Proxima b, a rocky world that was discovered orbiting our sun's nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, last August.Scientists say they\u2019ve found a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, our closest neighborBut the TRAPPIST-1 researchers, along with several astronomers not involved with the study, say this system is our best target yet to search for extraterrestrial life.\u00a0Though exoplanet\u00a0scientists often focus on worlds orbiting sunlike stars, the brightness of those stars makes it difficult to spot small, rocky planets.\u00a0TRAPPIST-1's planets are easy to find amid its dim, cool glow.The system is also incredibly close to Earth. Though 39 light-years would be a long way for humans to travel, it's practically\u00a0next door when you consider that the Milky Way galaxy alone is 100,000 light-years across. The closeness of TRAPPIST-1 puts it within the reach of the\u00a0James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to detect atmospheric components and thermal emissions from the planets after it launches in 2018.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the meantime, telescopes on several continents have been trained on the system to search for signs of life. Last summer, the scientists\u00a0published an early analysis of the atmospheres of planets b and c using data from the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201cThis is direct exploration of another solar\u00a0system that is happening right now,\u201d Gillon said.Planets e, f and g are the most intriguing targets for astrobiologists because of their position in TRAPPIST-1's habitable zone. But even if they turn out to be warm and wet, these worlds might not be great places to live. The planets' proximity to the star and one another means that they are probably tidally locked, like Earth's moon. One side of each planet always faces the sun; the other is stuck in constant darkness. This would make for a dramatic temperature gradient that could generate\u00a0powerful winds \u2014 not exactly an earthling's idea of a cozy home.And Adams, of the Planetary Science Institute, cautioned that it's very hard to tell whether a planet is habitable from a distance. An observer outside our solar system might look at Venus, Earth and Mars and reason that the sun hosts three habitable worlds. The alien would need to travel\u00a0here in person to discover that Venus is a cloudy hell-scape with a runaway greenhouse effect, while Mars is a barren, frozen desert with a defunct internal dynamo.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are a lot of\u00a0ways in which a planet could be like Earth, but not enough,\u201d Adams said.\u00a0Another major caveat, she added, is that the very idea of a \u201chabitable world\u201d is purely theoretical. Scientists have only\u00a0one source of data on habitable planets, and that's Earth. \u201cWe don\u2019t actually know the parameters that are needed for\u00a0life on another world,\u201d Adams said, \u201chow much it has to look exactly like Earth and how different life could be elsewhere.\u201dStill, even if no life is discovered on them, the TRAPPIST-1 planets\u00a0present an\u00a0unprecedented new window on how solar systems work.\u00a0Though the\u00a0planets are more or less Earth-size,\u00a0their varying densities and distances allow for detailed comparisons of the worlds. It's almost as if someone designed an experiment in planet formation, controlling for the bodies' size.De Wit\u00a0compared the new planets to seven new languages, each offering a new vocabulary for describing its\u00a0corner of the universe.\u201cThey all have\u00a0a slightly\u00a0different perspective on\u00a0the same story,\u201d he said, \u201cthe story of this solar system.\u201d\u00a0 The newfound solar system could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth. Scientists discover 7 \u2018Earthlike\u2019 planets orbiting a nearby star",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A massive change: Nations redefine the kilogram (WP: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "5974",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/a-massive-change-nations-will-vote-to-redefine-the-kilogram/2018/11/15/b5704b0a-e6c7-11e8-b8dc-66cca409c180_story.html",
        "text": "WASHINGTON \u2014 Humanity just made a weighty decision. On Friday, representatives of more than 60 nations, gathered in Versailles, France, approved a new definition for the kilogram.Since the 19th century, scientists have based their definition of the fundamental unit of mass on a physical object \u2014 a shining platinum iridium cylinder stored in a locked vault in the bowels of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sevres, France. A kilogram was equal to the heft of this aging hunk of metal, and this cylinder, by definition, weighed exactly a kilogram. If the cylinder changed, even a little bit, then the entire global system of measurement had to change, too. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith Friday\u2019s vote, scientists redefined the kilogram for the 21st century by tying it to a fundamental feature of the universe \u2014 a small, strange figure from quantum physics known as Planck\u2019s constant, which describes the smallest possible unit of energy.Experts redefined the kilogram Nov. 16 \u2014 ditching a relic made of a platinum-iridium alloy for something more up to date. (Reuters)Thanks to Albert Einstein\u2019s revelation that energy and mass are related, determining exactly how much energy is in that unit can let scientists define mass in terms of Planck\u2019s constant \u2014 a value that should hold up across space and time \u2014 rather than relying on an inconstant metal cylinder. (Mass determines something\u2019s weight, and for most purposes mass and weight are interchangeable.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe redefinition is the result of a decades-long, worldwide quest to measure Planck\u2019s constant precisely enough that the number would stand up to scientific scrutiny.Though the newly defined kilogram won\u2019t affect your bathroom scale, it will have practical applications in research and industries that depend on meticulous measurement.Friday\u2019s vote was mostly a formality; everyone involved knew the resolution would pass. But to Jon Pratt, one of the leaders of that global effort, the event was about more than symbolism, bigger than business and beyond even physics.In this era of violence and vitriol, when it seems there\u2019s so little on which people can agree, Pratt said, the redefinition represents something sublime.Story continues below advertisementIt is an acknowledgment of an immutable truth \u2014 that nature has laws to which all of us are subject. And it\u2019s one more step toward a lofty dream \u2014 that, in understanding nature\u2019s laws, scientists can help build a better world.AdvertisementThe scientist grinned, sheepish. \u201cIt\u2019s an emotional moment,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m just really proud of our species.\u201dLeaving behind 'Le Grand K'At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md., where Pratt works, measurement is often described as the \u201cinvisible infrastructure\u201d of the modern world. Everything a person does \u2014 whether it\u2019s checking a clock, forecasting the weather, cooking a meal, building a rocket, signing a contract, waging a war \u2014 requires measurements of some kind.Story continues below advertisementThe International System of Units, or SI, is what allows us to communicate measurements around the globe. This system, which has its origins in the heady days of the Enlightenment, was meant to end the bickering over the number of Spanish vara in a British furlong and ease the anxieties of a merchant who bought goods in the Netherlands, where the unit of weight was based on the amount of fish that could fit in a ship\u2019s hold, and sold them in France, where weight was tied to the heft of a wheat grain.AdvertisementThe motto of one of the system\u2019s creators, \u201cfor all times and for all people,\u201d is among Pratt\u2019s favorite phrases.\u201cIt\u2019s such an optimistic view,\u201d Pratt said. \u201cHe just imagined this business of science .\u2009.\u2009. was going to be a great force for freedom and a great force for moving the world forward.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn 1875, the signing of the Treaty of the Metre made the system official. Two platinum and iridium prototypes \u2014 a meter-length bar and a kilogram-mass cylinder \u2014 were forged to serve as the standard units for the whole world. The BIPM distributed copies of each prototype to the signatory nations; the century-old U.S. national kilogram still sits in a glass case in a locked room down the hall from Pratt\u2019s lab.As science and commerce advanced, the SI expanded to include units for other kinds of measurements and the definitions were revised to allow for greater and greater precision. The meter prototype was ditched in favor of the distance light travels in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second. The length of a second was pegged to the cycles of radiation of the element cesium.AdvertisementThese values \u2014 the speed of light, the behavior of atoms, the nature of electromagnetism \u2014 are fundamental features of nature that do not change whether the observer is on Earth or Mars, whether it\u2019s the year 1875 or 2018.Story continues below advertisementBut the kilogram prototype, known as \u201cLe Grand K,\u201d was made by humans and is subject to all our limitations. It is inaccessible \u2014 the safe containing the cylinder can be opened only by three custodians carrying three separate keys, an event that has happened fewer than a dozen times in the object\u2019s 139-year history. And it is inconsistent \u2014 when Le Grand K was examined in the 1980s, it weighed several micrograms less than it was supposed to. This meant that anyone who made products based on the standards had to reissue their weights. Manufacturers were furious. Lawmakers were called. Metrologists, people who study measurements, were accused of incompetence.So, in a 2014 meeting at the BIPM, the metrology community resolved to redefine the kilogram. But the value of Planck\u2019s constant was still uncertain, and scientists couldn\u2019t redefine the kilogram without it.'Chasing perfection'It has been more than 100 years since the quantum physicist Max Planck discovered that energy is expressed in discrete units \u2014 that is, it\u2019s \u201cquantized.\u201d But his constant \u2014 a figure that describes the size of these energy packets \u2014 has been hard to pin down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are only two experimental setups that allow scientists to calculate this number, and both require rare and expensive tools.One technique involves counting all the atoms in a perfectly round silicon sphere.The second option uses an exquisitely accurate weighing machine known as a watt balance, which measures an object\u2019s mass by calculating the force needed to lift it. This is no ordinary scale; it took a pair of British scientists several decades to invent and refine the instrument, and there are only two in the world powerful enough to meet the BIPM\u2019s high standards for precision.One is in Canada. The other sits inside Pratt\u2019s lab in the NIST basement.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt really is a beautiful instrument,\u201d Pratt said during a recent visit to the steel-encased room where the balance is stored. \u201cI like to just come here and stare at it.\u201dAdvertisementThe enormous metal machine, which took five years to build, is as tall as a professional basketball player and shiny as a disco ball, with a tungsten carbide fulcrum on which the balance hinges and a one-ton magnet that helps generate a force. While experiments are run, the entire balance is placed inside a vacuum chamber. Anyone who operates the instrument must wear a hairnet, a lab coat and bootees. Pratt and his colleagues measure every factor that could possibly affect their result, from the temperature of the room to the strength of Earth\u2019s gravity.\u201cIn a physics sense, we\u2019re really chasing perfection here,\u201d Pratt said. \u201cWe really need things to behave just as their idealized versions.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe 2014 resolution required that at least one instrument would need to calculate Planck\u2019s constant to an uncertainty of just 20 parts per billion \u2014 or within 0.000002 percent of what is thought to be the correct number.AdvertisementOn June 30, 2017, the day before the deadline to submit a value to the BIPM\u2019s weights and measures committee, Pratt and his team finally published a result that met this standard.Planck\u2019s constant is equal to 6.626069934 x 10-34 kg\u2219m2/s, they said. And their uncertainty was just 13 parts per billion.That number may be barely intelligible to the casual observer. But to Pratt, measuring it felt for a moment like some cosmic curtain had been lifted, revealing the innermost workings of the universe.Here in the echoing basement of an obscure federal agency, he and his crew of hair-netted nerds had gotten as close to one standard for perfection as any human has ever been. They had transcended their human biases and earthly flaws to make an observation so precise it will work \u201cfor all times and for all people\u201d \u2014 or at least, until the day when scientists are able to pull back another fold of the curtain, eliminating one more degree of uncertainty about this fundamental fact of physics.AdvertisementPratt and his colleagues are not the only scientists who have spent the better part of the past decade in pursuit of Planck\u2019s constant. Researchers using the watt balance in Canada have achieved a measurement with even less uncertainty than NIST\u2019s. Teams in Germany and Japan produced similarly precise measurements using the silicon-sphere technique.But not all the measurements agreed. In the metrology community, where careers can be staked on quibbles over decimal points, this discrepancy could have been catastrophic. \u201cThere was a lot of hemming and hawing, and at one point there were questions about whether [the vote] would even happen,\u201d Pratt said.But that debate, too, was an important part of the process. Only through repeated observations, refutations and confirmations does an idea become a globally accepted fact. It\u2019s what makes science bigger than scientists; it\u2019s how we establish that something is true.Still, Pratt didn\u2019t wait for the debate to end to get NIST\u2019s value for Planck\u2019s constant tattooed on his forearm \u2014 the 10-digit number and an illustration of a statue clutching a meter bar and a kilogram cylinder. And above it, in French, were the words that have guided metrologists since the beginning: A tous les temps, a tous les peuples.For all times, for all people. \u201cI\u2019m just really proud of our species,\u201d metrologist Jon Pratt said. A massive change: Nations redefine the kilogram",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "As shutdown continues, so does damage to U.S. science (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5975",
        "date": "2019-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/01/09/shutdown-continues-so-does-damage-us-science/",
        "text": "Neither bear nor rattlesnake nor hurricane has prevented ecosystem ecologist Jeff Atkins from collecting water samples in Shenandoah National Park. But a recent letter from the government did what wildlife and storms could not: For the first time since the early 1980s, the monitoring program, which traces the forest\u2019s recovery from acid rain, has a gap in its weekly data. Because the project uses federal money on federal land, the data point became another casualty of the ongoing shutdown. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cLosing that one point is going to be really detrimental,\u201d said Atkins, a postdoctoral researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University who usually takes samples of Shenandoah\u2019s streams on weekends. \u201cNow I have a hole in the data set. It\u2019s just a needless problem.\u201d Atkins is one of the many scientists whose work has been hobbled by the 18-day shutdown, which could last \u201cmonths or even years,\u201d President Trump recently threatened.Of the 800,000 federal employees furloughed or working without pay, thousands are researchers. These include agency scientists at the Agriculture Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which were separately funded through September, are almost entirely safe from this shutdown.) Furloughed government scientists are banned from any form of work activity \u2014 they cannot so much as open an email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe current government shutdown has far-reaching effects that put America\u2019s scientific progress at risk. While there are reports that agencies such as NOAA and the USGS are still issuing alerts about weather and natural hazards, much of the scientific research into how to prevent these kinds of disasters has stalled,\u201d said Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union. \u201cThis shutdown could affect the EPA\u2019s ability to meet deadlines for assessing chemicals, and NOAA isn\u2019t able to track fish for commercial harvesting or endangered species to protect them from passing ships.\u201dShe added, \u201cUntil funding is secured, many scientists employed by the U.S. government aren\u2019t able to make important observations or analyze data to protect life, property and ecosystems here at home and abroad.\"A small crew maintains the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Ill., which is normally staffed at 250 and is the largest research center run by the USDA. Studies there exploring new treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacteria have stopped. Employees exempted from the furlough are allowed only to keep the plants and other specimens alive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPresident Trump\u2019s shutdown impacts the lab\u2019s employees who are not able to work and are not getting paid,\u201d Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement. Research in agriculture and health, \u201cincluding preliminary testing building on a recent discovery at the lab that amplifies the effectiveness of antibiotics,\u201d the senator said, \u201chas been put on hold.\u201dAt the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which coordinates drug policy across the government, only three people are still working out of a staff of about 80. They include James Carroll, the agency\u2019s director, known informally as the nation\u2019s \u201cdrug czar.\u201d The Senate confirmed him last week.The office is largely responsible for developing drug policy and strategy, and it administers two grant programs. One sends money to state and local law enforcement agencies in \u201chigh-intensity drug-trafficking areas.\u201d The other helps support community groups working to curb youth substance abuse.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs The Washington Post reported last month, scientists will miss critical research windows, such as the emergence of seasonal insects or rare celestial phenomena, as the shutdown continues. Those missed opportunities and delays are stacking up. At the start of a new year, NOAA releases U.S. average temperatures for the previous year. The data for 2018 are not yet available.Scientists employed or funded by the federal government will also suffer the lack of paychecks. Leslie Rissler, program director for the NSF\u2019s environmental biology division, wrote on Twitter on Jan 3. that she had filed for unemployment.Kevin Johnson, a molecular ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at Louisiana State University, realized on Jan. 2 that his monthly stipend from the National Science Foundation wouldn\u2019t be available during the shutdown. Right away, he contacted his landlords in Baton Rouge, who generously told him not to worry. But he\u2019s unsure how long that offer will stand; his landlords are a younger couple who depend on his rent payment to help pay their mortgage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohnson, speaking by phone as he and his fellow laboratory members drove back to Louisiana after presenting research at a meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Tampa, said if he doesn\u2019t get paid by Jan. 21, he\u2019ll start to owe $300 in late charges on top of unpaid bills. Right now, he and his wife, a graduate student, are dipping into savings and putting everything on three credit cards.\u201cI\u2019m just going to work as usual,\u201d Johnson said, who added that he does feel lucky because he knows he will eventually get back pay, unlike some colleagues. \u201cWith science, you\u2019re trying to build up your research in order to publish, in order to be attractive to be hired for a job \u2014 and if I were to stop working and wait until I got paid, it would only hurt me more.\u201dJohnson studies how genes and the environment interact in oysters as they respond to changes in salinity \u2014 a big question for the oyster farming industry after natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey and as rainfall patterns have shifted because of climate change. He hopes his work will help scientists and oyster farmers understand how to make oysters more resilient.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJanuary is a critical time for the process by which scientists receive federal funding, via agencies such as the NSF and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. NIFA grants, which support long-term agriculture, are very likely stuck in the review process. Likewise, during the shutdown, the NSF cannot provide new funding or review new grant proposals. Although about 1,400 agency employees have been furloughed, the shutdown\u2019s most palpable effects have been felt this week.One hundred nonfederal scientists were scheduled to convene on panels to review hundreds of grant proposals on research topics such as earth sciences, polar programs and chemistry. The scientists who review those grants will have to cancel travel plans and may have to work any rescheduled reviews around their teaching and research schedules. Researchers waiting to hear about whether they receive funding will face uncertainty and delays.\u201cTo try and minimize the amount of impacts this will have, NSF plans to make decisions on a daily basis for canceling and rescheduling panels,\u201d NSF spokeswoman Amanda Greenwell said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA California researcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the privacy surrounding grant reviews, said he was scheduled to travel to Washington to review proposals early next week. He said he had no idea yet whether the panel, which will recommend which research projects have the most scientific merit, will take place. He also can\u2019t access the electronic system that he would use to review the grant proposals in advance and said he needs at least two days before the panel, which is scheduled to start Monday.Benjamin Corb, director of public affairs for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, calculated how much funding NSF provided through Jan. 8 last year: $42 million in 2018, vs. $0 in 2019.\u201cThis is the American scientific enterprise that\u2019s being strangled, for no good reason, through this process,\u201d Corb said. \u201cThis is going to ripple through science this year and next year, and it\u2019s silly for the NSF and all these other agencies to be held up over [a] political dispute.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn lecture halls nationwide, lessons are diminished. Mary Abercrombie, a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University who teaches earth science and environmental chemistry, uses information from NASA, NOAA and Environmental Protection Agency websites in her lectures. Those websites are down, with NOAA citing the \u201clapse in appropriation\u201d as the cause. \u201cI\u2019m sure I\u2019ve got lots of company in many, many classrooms,\u201d Abercrombie said. \u201cThis is going to be terrible!\u201dConferences were emptier, too, as federal researchers were unable to travel to scientific meetings. Hundreds of scientists could not attend the American Meteorological Society\u2019s annual meeting in Phoenix. More than 100 federal scientists scheduled to attend an International Soil Science Society of America meeting, which took place Jan. 5 through Jan. 9, did not.The shutdown dealt \u201ca significant blow\u201d to federal soil research, said Ellen Bergfeld, chief executive of the Soil Science Society of America. \u201cSoil science is understood globally to be a fundamental component of national security \u2014 as the resource for life as we know it. . . . Our U.S. federal scientists deserve to be able to communicate, disseminate their information and learn from their colleagues in this crucial area of science for the benefit of all Americans.\u201d A scientific tour of federal lands where California wildfires have altered soil ecosystems was canceled.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, hundreds of federal scientists were missed. The society estimated that roughly 15 percent of attendees \u2014 as many as 450 people \u2014 were unable to attend because of the shutdown.Presentations by invited federal researchers were canceled. Academic scientists had to scramble to serve as understudies for government colleagues who were supposed to present the results of their research. Committees to award prizes and plan future research were short several members.\u201cIt\u2019s been chaotic,\u201d said Rafaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University who was asked at the last minute to fill in on panels about the future of the Hubble Space Telescope and a new alert system for tracking fleeting celestial phenomena.The majority of those missing were NASA employees; about 95 percent of the agency\u2019s staff members are furloughed. AAS was forced to cancel an agency town hall meeting, which usually involves hundreds of people, as well as special sessions to discuss research priorities and plans for upcoming telescopes.The society urged its members to contact their representatives in Congress to demand a federal budget. And at the meeting\u2019s opening session, scientists recorded a video message to their absent government colleagues.\u201cWe miss you,\u201d AAS President Megan Donahue said. \u201cWe\u2019re facing a world where science is not always at the table.\u201dRead more:Disruptive, disappointing, chaotic: Shutdown upends scientific researchHundreds of scientists to miss world\u2019s largest weather conference because of federal shutdownFederal workers in Washington aren\u2019t the only ones going without pay Scientists are smarting from the loss of data, research opportunities and paychecks. As shutdown continues, so does damage to U.S. science",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Teen scientists went looking for meteorites in the Great Lakes. They found another type of alien.  (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5976",
        "date": "2018-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/10/18/teen-scientists-went-looking-meteorites-great-lakes-they-found-another-type-alien/",
        "text": "ON LAKE MICHIGAN \u2014 On a sunny July morning, a group of teenagers gathered in a circle aboard a 71-foot research vessel named the Neeskay. The teens, members of a scientific mission called the Aquarius Project, cheered:WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cOne \u2026 two \u2026 three \u2026 space rocks!\u201dThe Aquarius Project, run by the students in collaboration with professional researchers, operates out of Chicago\u2019s Adler Planetarium with help from the nearby Shedd Aquarium and Field Museum. Together, they are attempting a first in U.S. history: The recovery of meteorite fragments, or space rocks, from the bottom of a lake hundreds of feet deep. But the underwater fragments are tiny, the size of peas or golf balls. And Lake Michigan covers a poorly explored area of 22,300 square miles.Story continues below advertisementMark Hammergren, an astronomer at the Adler, said that researchers \u201cknow more about our neighborhood in space than we do about Chicago\u2019s backyard.\u201dAdvertisementInto this blue-green unknown, the Neeskay\u2019s crew dropped a submersible, a nest of pneumatic tubing and sensors tucked in a metal box. It sank with a splash. Teens and scientists crowded around a video monitor to watch the descent, which seemed to last for miles rather than 200 feet. The sub landed in a mucky cloud that enveloped the camera. No one in the cramped cabin took a breath until someone joked that he had spotted a megalodon.The screen cleared. When it did, the team joined a long line of scientists \u2014 the discoverers of penicillin, Velcro and Viagra, to name a few \u2014 who observed something unexpected. The Aquarius Project went fishing for meteorites. Instead, it found a living carpet of invasive mussels, each the size of a bottle cap, spread as far across a flat lake bed as the camera could show.Story continues below advertisementThe mussels looked like they were everywhere, Hammergren said.AdvertisementThis mussel invasion, Shedd biologist Andy Casper said, is the \u201cgeneral story of Lake Michigan.\u201d The Aquarius Project team is among the few scientists to directly observe the latest chapter.In the very early hours of Feb. 6, 2017, a 600-pound space rock hurtled at 38,000 mph into Earth\u2019s atmosphere, 60 miles above Wisconsin, according to NASA. Its brief and violent introduction to our planet shattered the meteor, releasing energy equivalent to 10 tons of TNT.Houses shook. Low-frequency vibrations traveled so far they registered at an infrasound station in Manitoba, 600 miles away. The meteorite fragments rained into the cold, still depths of Lake Michigan.Story continues below advertisementTiny pieces of space rock constantly fall to Earth. A 1996 estimate suggested that meteorites add 16,000 pounds to the planet each year. But because Earth\u2019s surface is mostly water and most land is uninhabited, the majority of them go unnoticed. Of all the meteorites that have landed, only 30 have enough video evidence \u2014 from cellphones, police dash cams and astronomy sky cameras \u2014 to trace the meteor\u2019s exact path through the sky.Officer Brett Volkmann was checking a campus emergency phone system when this white-green glow lit up the early morning sky over Wisconsin in February 2017. (Brett Volkmann/University of Wisconsin at Madison Police Department)The Wisconsin meteor was one of those cases. Police dashboard camera video, plus security cameras and other records, helped trace the rock back to the space between Mars and Jupiter.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s always nice to find a piece of a meteorite that you have a trajectory for,\u201d said William Cooke, who heads NASA\u2019s Meteoroid Environment Office in Alabama.Story continues below advertisementThis meteorite could be an ancient scrap of the solar system\u2019s building blocks. It is also possible, but less likely, that it was a sliver of the moon or Mars. The Aquarius Project is keen on hauling the fragments, wherever they\u2019re from, out of Lake Michigan.Because NASA and the National Science Foundation rarely issue grants to gather meteorites, amateurs dominate the search. A good specimen is worth about $20 to $50 per gram \u2014 literally worth its weight in gold \u2014 and an interesting story can inflate the price.In March 2003, one extraterrestrial \u201chammer stone\u201d punched through the roof, a rafter and a floor joist of a house in Olympia Fields, Ill. The rock collected a cocoon of fiberglass insulation and landed in a hamper in the basement. When the homeowner saw the fuzzy pink sphere that perforated his house, he attacked it with a broom. The 2,700-gram meteorite was bought for an undisclosed sum and was donated to the Adler Planetarium, where it is on display.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet no one, not even the most die-hard meteorite hunter, had figured out how to pull a meteorite off the bottom of a lake 200 feet below.After the news about the meteor, Chris Bresky, the teen programs manager at the Adler Planetarium, wanted to find the fragments. \u201cA piece of space, older than our solar system, just plopped down in our lake,\u201d he said. \u201cHow exciting is that?\u201dDown the street, others \u2014 such as senior research biologist Philip Willink at the Shedd Aquarium and Field Museum meteorite expert Philipp Heck \u2014 had the same notion. The Chicago museum triumvirate joined forces for the first time that any of them could recall.To lift the meteorites, the team decided to exploit the rocks\u2019 magnetic properties. About 70 percent of meteorites are rich in iron. Using a sufficiently strong magnet, the team could yank up the tiny pieces.After a year of design, failure and redesign, the students built a custom sub, the Starfall \u2014 an underwater sled built to skim across the bottom of the lake. Its frame is old cutting boards from the Shedd Aquarium kitchen. The students even tried to scavenge magnets from laptop hard drives. \u201cWe made a complete mess in our project space \u2014 there were computer components and screws everywhere,\u201d said Annelise Goldman, a student who is designing a 3-D model of the sled. \u201cBut it was so much fun!\u201dOn the Starfall\u2019s belly, snow brooms funnel sediment to a row of magnets with 400-pound pull. Wheels attached to the magnets dump the catch into holding bins.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s weather radar detected the meteor as it zipped through the sky. Marc Fries, a meteorite expert at Johnson Space Center, used the radar data, along with wind and ballistic trajectories, to map the meteorite landing zone \u2014 an area called a strewn field, where the Aquarius Project searched.Half-mile at a go, the Neeskay, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee\u2019s most advanced freshwater vessel, towed the Starfall to trawl for space rocks. When the crew and teens hoisted it the back to the surface, grime covered the sled. The students, undeterred by the thick gunk that smelled slightly like blood, scraped the Starfall clean with gloved hands and the gusto of gold prospectors.\u201cI didn\u2019t think there would be so much magnetite,\" Goldman said of the iron-rich mix of rocks and mud she held.Anything inorganic \u2014 sand, slag and small rocks \u2014 went into five-gallon buckets. Round pebbles sent the youths hollering for Hammergren\u2019s attention. With a jeweler\u2019s loupe, the astronomer examined the most promising spheres. The pieces that passed this exam went into a plastic container for further study.Neither Hammergren nor Heck has officially confirmed a meteorite. But several large buckets of sand and pebbles still need to be sieved. Heck said he will examine the most likely candidates with microscopes and a chemical technique called Raman spectroscopy. His laboratory tools can analyze meteorite grains as small as 3 nanometers in diameter, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sub also snagged dozens of the tiny invasive mussels that conquered the lake bed.These were quagga mussels, a species of European river clam that crossed the Atlantic by hiding in the ballast of container ships. \u201cWhen you say mussels, you think of them attached to rocks,\u201d said recently retired NOAA biologist Thomas Nalepa, who was not involved in the Aquarius Project and has studied mussels in the Great Lakes for decades.Quagga mussels are unusual clams, at home in soft, fluffy surfaces \u2014 exactly what the Aquarius Project team observed in this region of Lake Michigan. (Willink called the bottom sediment \u201cflocculent,\u201d meaning loosely clumped, like sheep\u2019s wool.) Their slow metabolism and tolerance for cold allows them to thrive at depths other aquatic animals cannot endure.Every five years between 1995 and 2015, Nalepa and his colleagues sampled a hundred sites in Lake Michigan. Between 2000 and 2005, the quagga mussels' population boomed. Now \u201cthere\u2019s not a site that we sample that does not have the least some quagga mussels,\u201d he said. Based on his work, NOAA estimated there may be as many as 950 trillion quagga mussels in the lake. Quagga mussels and their zebra mussel cousins may cost the United States up to $1 billion each year by clogging pipes and disrupting valuable ecosystems.Mussels have spared no corner of the Great Lakes environment. Between 2010 and 2015, the mass of quagga mussels in the lakes ballooned 17 percent, Nalepa said, as the older mussels grew larger. The animals have filtered so many nutrients and released so much carbon dioxide they are changing the lake\u2019s water chemistry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mussels had only recently transformed Lake Michigan. If the sub had filmed this area 40 years ago, \"none of this would be here,\u201d Willink said. These transplants were combatants in an \u201cinvasive species Thunderdome,\u201d he said, referring to the gladiatorial arena in the post-apocalyptic 1985 film \u201cMad Max Beyond Thunderdome.\u201dIf quagga mussels are the Thunderdome champions, the losers are small crustaceans called diporeia. Scientists aren\u2019t sure why they lost. The shrimplike animals used to be everywhere, a major component of the Great Lakes ecosystem. They feed on floating organic bits; salmon and other fish species, in turn, feed on diporeia. In many places, the crustaceans vanished completely, Nalepa said. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources no longer stocks as much salmon in the lake because there\u2019s so little for the fish to eat.Willink predicted he would see scattered mussels. But barely a patch of sand was visible beneath their tightly packed shells. The Aquarius Project had confirmed the march of the mussels into this unexplored area.AdvertisementWith one discovery in its hat, Aquarius Project will return to Lake Michigan to search for meteorites. The students recently modified the Starfall to cruise faster over the miles of quagga mussels while staying low on the lake. New students will join the program in 2019, picking up where the earlier groups left off. They will learn the art of meteorite fishing, but more important, the way scientists carefully observe into the abyss.\u201cThere are plenty of aliens down there,\u201d Willink said. \u201cWe\u2019re still looking for alien rocks.\u201dRead more:These diamonds from space formed inside a long-lost planet, scientists sayA 466-million-year-old space collision is still raining shrapnel on Earth\u2018Cosmic archaeologists\u2019 learn to read ancient meteorites like they\u2019re computer hard drives The teens knew they had a tough science problem to solve. But they did not expect what they found at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Teen scientists went looking for meteorites in the Great Lakes. They found another type of alien. ",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thinking about how dogs think (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5977",
        "date": "2021-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2021/08/12/dog-cognition-research/",
        "text": "Back in 2002, when Alexandra Horowitz was working toward her PhD at the University of California at San Diego, she believed that dogs were a worthy thing to study. But her dissertation committee, which favored apes and monkeys, needed convincing.\u201cThey were primate people,\u201d she said. \u201cThey all studied nonhuman primates or human primates, and that\u2019s where it was thought that the interesting cognitive work was going to happen. Trying to show them that there would be something interesting with dogs \u2014 that was a challenge.\u201d Oh, how things can change in just two decades, especially in a nation that includes about 90 million dogs among its residents \u2014 everything from beloved pets to working dogs doing all kinds of tasks, from sniffing out drugs in airports to assisting blind people with crossing a street. Today, Horowitz is a senior research fellow at Barnard College in New York City, where her specialty is dog cognition: understanding how dogs think, including the mental processes that go into tasks such as learning, problem-solving and communication. Dog cognition is now a widely respected field, a growing specialty branch of the more general animal-cognition research that has existed since the early 20th century.\u201cThis field, and animal cognition, really, is all within our lifetimes,\u201d Horowitz said. \u201cIt\u2019s not as if nobody ever looked at dogs, but they weren\u2019t looking at their minds.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLooking at dogs\u2019 minds, so far, has revealed quite a few insights. The Canine Cognition Center at Yale University, using a game where humans offer dogs pointing and looking cues to spot where treats are hidden, showed that dogs can follow our thinking even without verbal commands. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany figured out that dogs are smart about getting what they want \u2014 they will eat forbidden food more frequently if humans can\u2019t see them. Researchers from Austria, Israel and Britain determined that seeing a caregiver, versus a stranger, activated dogs\u2019 brain regions of emotion and attachment much as it does in the human mother-child bond. Other European researchers showed that negative-reinforcement training (like jerking on a leash) causes lingering emotional changes and makes the dog less optimistic overall.Read more stories of dogs, humans and the relationship they shareSome dog owners hear about this type of research and think: \u201cThey did a whole study to figure out that my dog looks where I point? I could have told you that.\u201d But the studies aren\u2019t just about what a dog is doing. They\u2019re indicating areas to research so that we can better understand why and how the dog is doing it \u2014 in other words, what\u2019s happening inside the dog\u2019s mind.\u201cMaybe they\u2019re not looking at your finger at all. Maybe they\u2019re paying attention to your face and not to your hand,\u201d said Federico Rossano, whose team at the University of California at San Diego is trying to determine whether dogs can translate their thoughts into words that humans can understand through a language device. \u201cA lot of this becomes interesting in terms of how you can train them better.\u201dAn evolving area of researchRight now, with no organizing body in the field, it\u2019s hard to say exactly how many people are doing dog-cognition research. You can count on two hands the number of dedicated university spaces led by professors with graduate students and funding grants. When the leaders from those places get together once a year, it\u2019s usually at someone\u2019s home.But researchers at universities doing studies on dogs? There are now many dozens of those, and there\u2019s no lack of students wanting to at least dabble in the work.\u201cThe thing that gets my students all abuzz is that people always want to know whether their dog loves them back,\u201d said Ellen Furlong, associate professor of psychology at Illinois Wesleyan University and leader of its Dog Scientists Group.Every semester, on the first day, she asks students if their dogs are happy. It\u2019s her way of helping them understand why the study of dog cognition is important.\u201cThey\u2019re always kind of offended \u2014 \u2018Of course my dog is happy. I love my dog,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cBut then you dig a little bit and push them and say: \u2018Your dog\u2019s life is different from your life. You get to decide when your dog gets to eat and play and go outside. You decide everything about your dog\u2019s life, but your dog isn\u2019t human. They have different wants and needs than you do.\u2019 They have a semester-long assignment where they have to consider how their work on cognition can help to design some enrichment activities to improve the dogs\u2019 lives.\u201dWith restrictions lifting and schedules changing, both pets and humans are experiencing separation anxiety. (Monica Rodman, Sarah Hashemi/The Washington Post)The topics that dog-cognition researchers focus on today often are chosen based on personal interests. While Furlong is most curious about ethics, welfare and how humans can meet dogs\u2019 psychological needs, Horowitz is focusing her research on what dogs understand through smell. At the Duke Canine Cognition Center in North Carolina, Brian Hare is trying to determine \u2014 when a dog is still a puppy \u2014 whether the way a dog thinks might make her a good candidate for different jobs as an adult.\u201cWe\u2019re saying, \u2018Here are some cognitive abilities that are critical for training for these jobs,\u2019 \u201d Hare said. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit like talking about personality, but we\u2019re talking about your cognitive personality, in a way. Maybe you have a really good memory for space, or maybe you\u2019re good at understanding human gestures. The question is whether we can identify some of these dogs really early, in the first two to three months of life, who will do well in these programs.\u201dHow the research is doneOne example of dog cognition research with a potential training application is a study that Horowitz did on nose work \u2014 an activity that lets dogs use their natural abilities with scents to find everything from a treat hidden under a cone to marijuana in somebody\u2019s suitcase.Horowitz and her team showed the dogs three buckets and taught them that one of the buckets always had a treat under it, and one did not. Then she measured how quickly the dogs went to the \u201cambiguous bucket\u201d in the middle.The dogs then attended nose-work classes. These types of advanced classes are widely available at the same types of schools that teach basic obedience. In the nose-work classes, dogs are encouraged and trained to use their noses to search for and find treats or favorite toys that are hidden under boxes or cones, inside suitcases or in other places.After a few weeks of nose-work classes, Horowitz repeated the bucket test.\u201cWhat we found was the dogs in the nose-work class got faster at approaching ambiguous stimulus,\u201d she said, adding that the results suggest that for some dogs, taking nose-work classes could help them feel more optimistic. \u201cThe group that had nose work changed their behavior afterward, so I have to say it\u2019s something about the nose work. I don\u2019t know exactly what it was, but if the effect is profound and we keep seeing it, we would go in and try to see what it was that made it useful for the subjects.\u201d\n\nHare is widely credited with having jump-started America\u2019s dog-cognition research field. In the late 1990s as an undergraduate, he was doing research with chimpanzees when he realized they couldn\u2019t do something that his dogs could do: follow a human\u2019s pointing gesture to find food. Chimpanzees are the closest animal relatives humans have, and dogs could do something they couldn\u2019t. Researchers suddenly wanted to know why dogs could understand something that chimpanzees could not.In his most recent study, published in July, Hare and his team looked at the difference between wolf and dog pups. There had been some debate in the dog-cognition field about where dogs\u2019 unusual abilities to cooperate with humans originate \u2014 whether those abilities are biological or taught. So the team gave a battery of temperament and cognition tests to dog and wolf puppies that were 5 weeks to 18 weeks old. The pups of both species were given the chance to approach familiar and unfamiliar humans to retrieve food; to follow a human\u2019s pointing gesture to find food; to make eye contact with humans, and more. The team found that even at such a young age, the dog pups were more attracted to humans, read the human gestures more skillfully, and made more eye contact with humans than the wolf pups did.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe conclusion? The way that humans domesticated dogs actually altered the dogs\u2019 developmental pathways, meaning their abilities to cooperate with us today are biological \u2014 a research result that is likely to have many practical implications.\u201cIt\u2019s highly inheritable, and it\u2019s potentially manipulatable through breeding,\u201d Hare said, adding that dogs might be bred to specialize in certain types of thinking. The finding opens up the idea of studying dogs in ways that could make deep-pocketed entities like the U.S. government want to fund more dog-cognition research, Hare said.By way of example, he talked about dogs he has worked with for the U.S. Marine Corps, compared with dogs he has worked with for Canine Companions for Independence in California. The Marines needed dogs in places like Afghanistan to help sniff out incendiary devices, while the companions agency needed dogs that were good at helping people with disabilities.Just looking at both types of purpose-bred dogs, most people would think they\u2019re the same \u2014 to the naked eye, they all look like Labrador retrievers, and on paper, they would all be considered Labrador retrievers. But behaviorally and cognitively, because of their breeding for specific program purposes, Hare said, they were different in many ways.Hare devised a test that could tell them apart in two or three minutes. It\u2019s a test that\u2019s intentionally impossible for the dog to solve \u2014 what Star Trek fans would recognize as the Kobayashi Maru. In Hare\u2019s version, the dog was at first able to get a reward from inside a container whose lid was loosely secured and easy to dislodge; then, the reward was placed inside the same container with the lid locked and unable to be opened. Just as Starfleet was trying to figure out what a captain\u2019s character would lead him to do in a no-win situation, Hare\u2019s team was watching whether the dog kept trying to solve the test indefinitely, or looked to a human for help.\u201cWhat we found is that the dogs that ask for help are fantastic at the assistance-dog training, and the dogs that persevere and try to solve the problem no matter what are ideal for the detector training,\u201d Hare said. \u201cIt\u2019s not testing to see which dog is smart or dumb. What we\u2019ve been able to show is that some of these measures tell you what jobs these dogs would be good at.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat comes next in the field of dog-cognition research is probably a bit more of everything. Some researchers are following their interests, while others are following the research grants. Those grants can come from a wide array of sources, including the government trying to help soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, shelters trying to rehome animals and neuroscience institutes looking for insights across species.\u201cIt\u2019s a really exciting moment,\u201d Hare said. \u201cI think we can continue on with individual researchers pursuing fun, interesting things \u2014 the students and the universities love it \u2014 but most successful academic endeavors have two parts. Being intellectual is wonderful, but that kind of research tends to struggle with funding. Academic endeavors with practical application tend to be incredibly well funded, and then the field grows.\u201cIf you can have both of those things, then it will grow, and it will grow phenomenally,\u201d he added. \u201cIf it\u2019s just, \u2018We\u2019re going to do this because people love dogs,\u2019 that\u2019ll be fun, but it will stay small like it is now.\u201d The field of dog cognition research has developed substantially in the past 20 years. Its next-level potential depends on a few things \u2014 including what we all decide it\u2019s most useful to learn. Thinking about how dogs think",
        "author": "Kim Kavin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why scientists are marching on Washington and more than 600 other cities (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5978",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/20/why-scientists-are-marching-on-washington-and-more-than-400-other-cities/",
        "text": "Saturday's March for Science is political, but not partisan. So say the organizers, who insist that they can walk that fine line even in an era of ideological rancor and extreme polarization.\u201cWe\u2019ve been asked not to make personal attacks or partisan attacks,\u201d said honorary national co-chair Lydia Villa-Komaroff, in a teleconference with reporters. But Villa-Komaroff, a cell biologist who will be among those with two-minute speaking slots, quickly added: \u201cThis is a group of people who don\u2019t take well being told what to do.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Science March, held on Earth Day, is expected to draw tens of thousands of people to the Mall, and satellite marches have been planned in more than 600 cities on six continents. The crowd will gather on Saturday near the Washington Monument for five hours of speeches and teach-ins, culminating in\u00a0the march at 2 p.m. The march will follow Constitution Avenue along the north edge of the Mall to the foot of Capitol Hill. The weather forecast is a tricky one \u2014 it's not an exact science, apparently \u2014 but attendees should be prepared for rain, particularly in the afternoon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProtest marches may be common in Washington these days, but one centered on the value of science is unprecedented. The march is part of a wave of activism in the research community. Scientists are jumping into the political fray by running for public office \u2014 such as in southern California, where geologist Jess Phoenix, a Democrat, has announced her candidacy for a congressional seat held by a Republican.She walks into active volcanoes. Now she's running for CongressThe idea for the event\u00a0was spawned during a Jan. 21 conversation\u00a0on Reddit, as millions of people\u00a0gathered in Washington and cities around the world for the record-breaking Women's Marches. Valorie Aquino, who is working on her PhD in anthropology at the University of New Mexico, signed on as one of the march's national co-chairs shortly after. She thought she'd be able to continue her research while coordinating the event, not anticipating\u00a0how quickly it would snowball.\"This March for Science organizing has consumed my last three months,\"\u00a0Aquino said Friday afternoon. \"I\u2019m overwhelmed. I\u2019m\u00a0inspired.\u00a0I\u2019m a little terrified.\u00a0I would\u00a0love to take a nap but I don\u2019t think it's going to happen.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost mainstream science organizations \u2014 such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Chemical Society \u2014 have\u00a0signed on as partners of the march, despite their lack of experience in going to the barricades.Rush Holt, head of AAAS, said there was initial hesitation\u00a0about whether this was the kind of event\u00a0a scientist ought to be joining but that members of his association overwhelmingly support the decision to participate.This is not simply a reaction to President Trump's election, Holt said. Scientists have been worried for years that \u201cevidence has been crowded out by ideology and opinion in public debate and policymaking.\u201d Long before Trump's election, people in the scientific and academic community\u00a0 raised concerns about the erosion of the value of expertise and the rise of pseudoscientific and anti-scientific notions. Science also found itself swept up into cultural and political battles; views on climate science, for example, increasingly reflect political ideology.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMona Hanna-Attisha, the Michigan pediatrician who sounded the alarm on lead in Flint\u2019s drinking water, is one of the march's honorary co-chairs.\u00a0Her experience as a physician in Flint paved the way for her science advocacy, Hanna-Attisha told The Post. \u201cPediatricians care for a population that can\u2019t speak, can\u2019t vote,\u201d she said, noting that doctors take an oath to protect patients from harm. \u201cIt is your role to be an advocate.\u201dArthur Edelman, who studies ovarian cancer at the State University of New York\u2019s University at Buffalo, was on the National Mall listening to the main stage sound check with his wife, Enid, on the afternoon before the march. The demonstration tents and the roughly 190 portable toilets had already been set up. (The song the keyboardist played was, naturally, \u201cShe Blinded Me with Science.\u201d)The 71-year-old had not marched since Vietnam, which he did then \u201cbecause I didn\u2019t want to die.\u201d This march is different, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a struggle that doesn\u2019t have to be such a struggle.\u201d He was marching for \u201cthe air we breathe and the water we drink.\u201d Edelman was concerned about the future of his graduate students at a time when the NIH can only fund 9 out of every 100 grant proposals submitted. \u201cThat means you\u2019re dead in the water unless you get results,\u201d he said. Edelman will march on Saturday, which is also his birthday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder the heading of \u201cWhat sign should I carry?\u201d, the march\u2019s official website nudges participants to go geeky rather than political: \u201cDo you have a special love for cell biology or physics? Maybe you want to proudly tell the world that vaccines have kept you healthy? Or thank the EPA for keeping your water safe? This could be the right time to declare your support for a well-funded NIH! This isn\u2019t about any one politician \u2014 this is about science and policy, scientists and science supporters.\u201dThe line up for the event on the Mall includes some of science and environmentalism's biggest names. Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society and another honorary co-chair, will\u00a0speak, as will\u00a0climate scientist Michael Mann, coordinator of the first Earth Day Denis Hayes, NASA Astronaut Leland Melvin, and the heads of many science and environmental advocacy groups.But the organizers also aim to buck stereotypes\u00a0of science as stodgy, academic and dominated by older white men by selecting speakers from a broad\u00a0range of ages, backgrounds and expertise. The lineup\u00a0includes Taylor Richardson, a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut who raised $17,000 earlier this year to send other young girls to see the film \"Hidden Figures;\"\u00a0YouTube star\u00a0Tyler DeWitt; chemist\u00a0Mary Jo Ondrechen, a member of the Mohawk Nation and chair of\u00a0the board of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society; and Gallaudet University biologist Caroline Solomon, who is deaf.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYouTube star Derek Muller and the musician Questlove are slated\u00a0to emcee.Notably, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the most well-known\u00a0living American scientist, will not be attending a science march, according to a representative.\u00a0Tyson did not respond to a request\u00a0to comment on why.No politicians have been invited to participate in the march, organizers say, even as they acknowledge that this was inspired by the Women\u2019s March on the day after Trump\u2019s inauguration.\u201cScience is nonpartisan.\u00a0That\u2019s the reason that we respect it, because it aims to reduce bias. That\u2019s why we have the scientific method. We felt very strongly that having politicians involved would skew that in some way,\u201d Caroline Weinberg, a public health researcher and co-organizer of the march, said at the National Press Club earlier this month.University of Maryland president: Why I march for scienceCarol Greider, a Johns Hopkins molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, said in the conference call this week that she\u00a0will bring dozens of students and postdoctoral researchers to the march. \u201cPeople are actually questioning whether they can even go on and have a career in science,\u201d she said, noting the Trump administration's proposal to cut nearly a fifth of the National Institutes of Health budget. \u201cPotentially, we will lose an entire generation of people who are now trained and have the talent and are eager to make the next breakthroughs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGreider said it's possible to fight for science without \u201clabeling ourselves\u201d as being on one partisan side or the other. That was echoed by Elias Zerhouni, former NIH head under President George W. Bush: \u201cThis is not a partisan issue. This is not one administration versus\u00a0another \u2026 It's really an age-old debate between rational approaches to the universe and irrational approaches to the universe.\u201dNot every scientist is convinced. Arthur Lambert, a cancer researcher at the Whitehead Institute at MIT in Boston, said he was initially excited about the science march. But as the event drew closer, it seemed increasingly unlikely that it would appear to be anything but partisan.\u201cIt\u2019s a bad idea to align all of science against any political administration,\u201d Lambert said. \u201cI don\u2019t think that's their goal \u2026\u00a0But it runs that risk, especially after such a heated election.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecent political developments in Washington are among the primary drivers of this march. Before he became president, Trump promoted\u00a0anti-scientific theories. He tweeted in 2012, \u201cThe concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.\u201d He echoed the fully discredited notion that there is a link between vaccines and autism. During the presidential transition he reportedly discussed with vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the possibility of creating a vaccine safety commission.To run the Environmental Protection Agency, he appointed Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general had sued the agency many times and who, during an interview in March, said he did not believe that human activity is a primary driver of the observed climate change\u00a0\u2014 a statement at odds with scientific research.The\u00a0entry ban pushed in the early days of the administration, and associated rhetoric about building walls and restricting immigration, alarmed many leaders of science-related institutions that rely on the expertise of foreign nationals (at MIT, for example, 40 percent of the faculty was born outside the United States, according to the university's president).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration has not taken some actions initially feared by the scientific community, such as wholesale deletions of government climate data. The EPA\u2019s website continues to describe climate change as largely driven by human activities.Trump has yet to appoint anyone to several key science-related posts. He has not picked a White House science adviser. He hasn\u2019t nominated anyone to run NASA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the U.S. Geological Survey. He has let Francis Collins stay on an interim basis as head of the NIH, though it\u2019s not clear that Collins will be permanently retained. Public health positions are unoccupied that are crucial for responding to a global pandemic, a disaster every president since Ronald Reagan has faced.Behind the scenes at the March for Science, there has been internal controversy about inclusiveness and diversity, and whether social justice should be central to the march\u2019s messaging. On social media, a number of scientists have said they are skipping the march because they think the organizers haven\u2019t focused enough on racism, sexism, and the scientific community\u2019s centuries-long history of marginalizing women and people of color.Meanwhile, conservative critics have derided the march as an ideological enterprise in which what\u2019s being advocated is not science, exactly, but left-leaning policies, such as the Obama administration\u2019s environmental regulations designed to curb carbon emissions.It's unclear what percentage of participants in Saturday's science marches around the country will be involved in research directly. Among the non-scientists will be Dennis Moore, a patrolman at the Cherry Hill, N.J. Police Department, who said he's going to the Boston march to make the point that science benefits everyone.\u201cI've always been kind of a nerd,\u201d he said, mentioning that he was wearing a flux capacitor T-shirt as he spoke. \u201cScience is our best tool for understanding the world\u00a0around us \u2026 but\u00a0I think we\u2019re basically just de-emphasizing science in our lives and in our communities.\u201dThe first official march-related event in Washington kicked off Thursday evening in Dupont Underground, an abandoned trolley car station and former fallout shelter that is now a cavernous arts space. \u201cPoetry x Posters\u201d featured seven-foot-tall posters with science-themed poems. \u201cI pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island,\u201d one poster read, \u201cone ecosystem/in diversity/under the sun.\u201d Four poets spoke from a stage while the audience of a few dozen listened, drinking wine from plastic cups and beer from tall cans. The poets professed a fascination with science, if not always a deep understanding.Science and poetry both arise from the same desire for exploration, said poet Jane Hirshfield. \u201cIf you don\u2019t think at all, you think of them as opposites,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are allies in discovery.\u201dIn one far corner of the subterranean network sat tables for making protest signs, with markers, construction paper and glue-sticks. For the first few hours of the event, though, people were more interested in the bar.Read more:Atom-smashing scientists are unnerved by harsh Trump budgetMarch for Science could break stubborn stereotypes about scientists\u2018First protest in space\u2019 targets Trump with an astronaut\u2019s famous wordsNASA's gold-mirrored, $8 billion space telescope The March for Science is supposed to be political but not partisan \u2014 but good luck toeing that line.  Why scientists are marching on Washington and more than 600 other cities",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why scientists are marching on Washington and more than 600 other cities (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5979",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/04/20/why-scientists-are-marching-on-washington-and-more-than-400-other-cities/",
        "text": "Saturday's March for Science is political, but not partisan. So say the organizers, who insist that they can walk that fine line even in an era of ideological rancor and extreme polarization.\u201cWe\u2019ve been asked not to make personal attacks or partisan attacks,\u201d said honorary national co-chair Lydia Villa-Komaroff, in a teleconference with reporters. But Villa-Komaroff, a cell biologist who will be among those with two-minute speaking slots, quickly added: \u201cThis is a group of people who don\u2019t take well being told what to do.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Science March, held on Earth Day, is expected to draw tens of thousands of people to the Mall, and satellite marches have been planned in more than 600 cities on six continents. The crowd will gather on Saturday near the Washington Monument for five hours of speeches and teach-ins, culminating in\u00a0the march at 2 p.m. The march will follow Constitution Avenue along the north edge of the Mall to the foot of Capitol Hill. The weather forecast is a tricky one \u2014 it's not an exact science, apparently \u2014 but attendees should be prepared for rain, particularly in the afternoon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProtest marches may be common in Washington these days, but one centered on the value of science is unprecedented. The march is part of a wave of activism in the research community. Scientists are jumping into the political fray by running for public office \u2014 such as in southern California, where geologist Jess Phoenix, a Democrat, has announced her candidacy for a congressional seat held by a Republican.She walks into active volcanoes. Now she's running for CongressThe idea for the event\u00a0was spawned during a Jan. 21 conversation\u00a0on Reddit, as millions of people\u00a0gathered in Washington and cities around the world for the record-breaking Women's Marches. Valorie Aquino, who is working on her PhD in anthropology at the University of New Mexico, signed on as one of the march's national co-chairs shortly after. She thought she'd be able to continue her research while coordinating the event, not anticipating\u00a0how quickly it would snowball.\"This March for Science organizing has consumed my last three months,\"\u00a0Aquino said Friday afternoon. \"I\u2019m overwhelmed. I\u2019m\u00a0inspired.\u00a0I\u2019m a little terrified.\u00a0I would\u00a0love to take a nap but I don\u2019t think it's going to happen.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost mainstream science organizations \u2014 such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Chemical Society \u2014 have\u00a0signed on as partners of the march, despite their lack of experience in going to the barricades.Rush Holt, head of AAAS, said there was initial hesitation\u00a0about whether this was the kind of event\u00a0a scientist ought to be joining but that members of his association overwhelmingly support the decision to participate.This is not simply a reaction to President Trump's election, Holt said. Scientists have been worried for years that \u201cevidence has been crowded out by ideology and opinion in public debate and policymaking.\u201d Long before Trump's election, people in the scientific and academic community\u00a0 raised concerns about the erosion of the value of expertise and the rise of pseudoscientific and anti-scientific notions. Science also found itself swept up into cultural and political battles; views on climate science, for example, increasingly reflect political ideology.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMona Hanna-Attisha, the Michigan pediatrician who sounded the alarm on lead in Flint\u2019s drinking water, is one of the march's honorary co-chairs.\u00a0Her experience as a physician in Flint paved the way for her science advocacy, Hanna-Attisha told The Post. \u201cPediatricians care for a population that can\u2019t speak, can\u2019t vote,\u201d she said, noting that doctors take an oath to protect patients from harm. \u201cIt is your role to be an advocate.\u201dArthur Edelman, who studies ovarian cancer at the State University of New York\u2019s University at Buffalo, was on the National Mall listening to the main stage sound check with his wife, Enid, on the afternoon before the march. The demonstration tents and the roughly 190 portable toilets had already been set up. (The song the keyboardist played was, naturally, \u201cShe Blinded Me with Science.\u201d)The 71-year-old had not marched since Vietnam, which he did then \u201cbecause I didn\u2019t want to die.\u201d This march is different, he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a struggle that doesn\u2019t have to be such a struggle.\u201d He was marching for \u201cthe air we breathe and the water we drink.\u201d Edelman was concerned about the future of his graduate students at a time when the NIH can only fund 9 out of every 100 grant proposals submitted. \u201cThat means you\u2019re dead in the water unless you get results,\u201d he said. Edelman will march on Saturday, which is also his birthday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder the heading of \u201cWhat sign should I carry?\u201d, the march\u2019s official website nudges participants to go geeky rather than political: \u201cDo you have a special love for cell biology or physics? Maybe you want to proudly tell the world that vaccines have kept you healthy? Or thank the EPA for keeping your water safe? This could be the right time to declare your support for a well-funded NIH! This isn\u2019t about any one politician \u2014 this is about science and policy, scientists and science supporters.\u201dThe line up for the event on the Mall includes some of science and environmentalism's biggest names. Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society and another honorary co-chair, will\u00a0speak, as will\u00a0climate scientist Michael Mann, coordinator of the first Earth Day Denis Hayes, NASA Astronaut Leland Melvin, and the heads of many science and environmental advocacy groups.But the organizers also aim to buck stereotypes\u00a0of science as stodgy, academic and dominated by older white men by selecting speakers from a broad\u00a0range of ages, backgrounds and expertise. The lineup\u00a0includes Taylor Richardson, a 13-year-old aspiring astronaut who raised $17,000 earlier this year to send other young girls to see the film \"Hidden Figures;\"\u00a0YouTube star\u00a0Tyler DeWitt; chemist\u00a0Mary Jo Ondrechen, a member of the Mohawk Nation and chair of\u00a0the board of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society; and Gallaudet University biologist Caroline Solomon, who is deaf.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYouTube star Derek Muller and the musician Questlove are slated\u00a0to emcee.Notably, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the most well-known\u00a0living American scientist, will not be attending a science march, according to a representative.\u00a0Tyson did not respond to a request\u00a0to comment on why.No politicians have been invited to participate in the march, organizers say, even as they acknowledge that this was inspired by the Women\u2019s March on the day after Trump\u2019s inauguration.\u201cScience is nonpartisan.\u00a0That\u2019s the reason that we respect it, because it aims to reduce bias. That\u2019s why we have the scientific method. We felt very strongly that having politicians involved would skew that in some way,\u201d Caroline Weinberg, a public health researcher and co-organizer of the march, said at the National Press Club earlier this month.University of Maryland president: Why I march for scienceCarol Greider, a Johns Hopkins molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, said in the conference call this week that she\u00a0will bring dozens of students and postdoctoral researchers to the march. \u201cPeople are actually questioning whether they can even go on and have a career in science,\u201d she said, noting the Trump administration's proposal to cut nearly a fifth of the National Institutes of Health budget. \u201cPotentially, we will lose an entire generation of people who are now trained and have the talent and are eager to make the next breakthroughs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGreider said it's possible to fight for science without \u201clabeling ourselves\u201d as being on one partisan side or the other. That was echoed by Elias Zerhouni, former NIH head under President George W. Bush: \u201cThis is not a partisan issue. This is not one administration versus\u00a0another \u2026 It's really an age-old debate between rational approaches to the universe and irrational approaches to the universe.\u201dNot every scientist is convinced. Arthur Lambert, a cancer researcher at the Whitehead Institute at MIT in Boston, said he was initially excited about the science march. But as the event drew closer, it seemed increasingly unlikely that it would appear to be anything but partisan.\u201cIt\u2019s a bad idea to align all of science against any political administration,\u201d Lambert said. \u201cI don\u2019t think that's their goal \u2026\u00a0But it runs that risk, especially after such a heated election.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecent political developments in Washington are among the primary drivers of this march. Before he became president, Trump promoted\u00a0anti-scientific theories. He tweeted in 2012, \u201cThe concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.\u201d He echoed the fully discredited notion that there is a link between vaccines and autism. During the presidential transition he reportedly discussed with vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the possibility of creating a vaccine safety commission.To run the Environmental Protection Agency, he appointed Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general had sued the agency many times and who, during an interview in March, said he did not believe that human activity is a primary driver of the observed climate change\u00a0\u2014 a statement at odds with scientific research.The\u00a0entry ban pushed in the early days of the administration, and associated rhetoric about building walls and restricting immigration, alarmed many leaders of science-related institutions that rely on the expertise of foreign nationals (at MIT, for example, 40 percent of the faculty was born outside the United States, according to the university's president).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration has not taken some actions initially feared by the scientific community, such as wholesale deletions of government climate data. The EPA\u2019s website continues to describe climate change as largely driven by human activities.Trump has yet to appoint anyone to several key science-related posts. He has not picked a White House science adviser. He hasn\u2019t nominated anyone to run NASA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the U.S. Geological Survey. He has let Francis Collins stay on an interim basis as head of the NIH, though it\u2019s not clear that Collins will be permanently retained. Public health positions are unoccupied that are crucial for responding to a global pandemic, a disaster every president since Ronald Reagan has faced.Behind the scenes at the March for Science, there has been internal controversy about inclusiveness and diversity, and whether social justice should be central to the march\u2019s messaging. On social media, a number of scientists have said they are skipping the march because they think the organizers haven\u2019t focused enough on racism, sexism, and the scientific community\u2019s centuries-long history of marginalizing women and people of color.Meanwhile, conservative critics have derided the march as an ideological enterprise in which what\u2019s being advocated is not science, exactly, but left-leaning policies, such as the Obama administration\u2019s environmental regulations designed to curb carbon emissions.It's unclear what percentage of participants in Saturday's science marches around the country will be involved in research directly. Among the non-scientists will be Dennis Moore, a patrolman at the Cherry Hill, N.J. Police Department, who said he's going to the Boston march to make the point that science benefits everyone.\u201cI've always been kind of a nerd,\u201d he said, mentioning that he was wearing a flux capacitor T-shirt as he spoke. \u201cScience is our best tool for understanding the world\u00a0around us \u2026 but\u00a0I think we\u2019re basically just de-emphasizing science in our lives and in our communities.\u201dThe first official march-related event in Washington kicked off Thursday evening in Dupont Underground, an abandoned trolley car station and former fallout shelter that is now a cavernous arts space. \u201cPoetry x Posters\u201d featured seven-foot-tall posters with science-themed poems. \u201cI pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island,\u201d one poster read, \u201cone ecosystem/in diversity/under the sun.\u201d Four poets spoke from a stage while the audience of a few dozen listened, drinking wine from plastic cups and beer from tall cans. The poets professed a fascination with science, if not always a deep understanding.Science and poetry both arise from the same desire for exploration, said poet Jane Hirshfield. \u201cIf you don\u2019t think at all, you think of them as opposites,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are allies in discovery.\u201dIn one far corner of the subterranean network sat tables for making protest signs, with markers, construction paper and glue-sticks. For the first few hours of the event, though, people were more interested in the bar.Read more:Atom-smashing scientists are unnerved by harsh Trump budgetMarch for Science could break stubborn stereotypes about scientists\u2018First protest in space\u2019 targets Trump with an astronaut\u2019s famous wordsNASA's gold-mirrored, $8 billion space telescope The March for Science is supposed to be political but not partisan \u2014 but good luck toeing that line.  Why scientists are marching on Washington and more than 600 other cities",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Super Awesome Sylvia was a role model to girls in science. Then he realized he is a boy. (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5980",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/08/20/super-awesome-sylvia-vs-his-robots-and-your-assumptions/",
        "text": "AUBURN, Calif. \u2014 This is the story of Super Awesome Sylvia, an ingenious little girl who made robots, or so everyone thought.At\u00a0age 8, Sylvia Todd put on a lab coat and started\u00a0a web show. A gaptoothed little kid with a pony tail and soldering iron, a rare sight\u00a0in the boy's club of amateur inventors. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBefore long, Sylvia had tens\u00a0of thousands of viewers.\u00a0And tons\u00a0of robots, of course.The most famous was Super Awesome Sylvia's\u00a0WaterColor Bot. It\u00a0did exactly what it sounds like \u2014 it painted any picture\u00a0you asked\u00a0it to.But that bot\u00a0did other things, too.When you are no longer the person the Internet fell in love with (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)It got Sylvia invited to the White House Science Fair in 2013, when\u00a0President Barack Obama tried it out and told its\u00a0shaky-legged, 11-year-old inventor that it was great to see girls in tech.Story continues below advertisementThen came reporters, magazine profiles, even book deals. A story in the New York Times\u00a0described\u00a0Sylvia as half-silly, half-serious \u2014 and \u201c(almost) certain that her future lies in science.\u201dAdvertisementBy\u00a0middle school, Sylvia was giving speeches all over\u00a0the world, from the United Nations to\u00a0elite girls' schools in Australia. This was a big deal for a kid from a small town in Northern California, whose parents often\u00a0worried about paying the next bill.That's\u00a0how \u2014 year after year, show after show, speech after speech\u00a0\u2014 Super Awesome Sylvia's robots turned a\u00a0little\u00a0kid\u00a0into a\u00a0role model for girls everywhere.And that's how they trapped him.Because underneath the pony tail and the prop lab coat, Sylvia didn't feel like a genius, or a celebrity, or a girl.Story continues below advertisementThis is the story of Zephyrus Todd, a 16-year-old boy who prefers art to science, and knows a lot more about himself now than when people called him\u00a0Sylvia and assumed he was a girl. It's about how Zeph\u00a0got stuck inside Super Awesome Sylvia, \u201ctrying to be that person,\u201d as he\u00a0puts it.AdvertisementAnd how he broke\u00a0free.Chapter 1 \u2014 'My name is Sylvia'In the beginning there was simply\u00a0Sylvia. No Zeph, no super awesome anything. Just Sylvia and his mom and dad (and later a brother and two sisters) growing up in Auburn, Calif. A regular little girl, by all appearances.\u201cWhen I was a kid, I was just a kid,\u201d Zeph said. \u201cMaking cool stuff.\u201dZeph had always wanted to know how things worked.He liked to pull apart old laptops and put together electronic kits with his dad, James,\u00a0a computer programmer.One day in 2010,\u00a0Zeph decided\u00a0to\u00a0make a YouTube show about making things. His mom, Christina, sewed a lab coat fit for an 8-year-old. Dad helped write the scripts and held the camera, and Zeph just did his thing.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHi! My name is Sylvia and this is our super awesome Maker shoooow!\u201d Zeph said in\u00a0the first episode, pumping his arms in the air. \u201cLet's get out there and experiment!\u201dAdvertisementSuper Awesome Sylvia showed\u00a0kids how to make\u00a0a pencil that squeaked when\u00a0it conducted electricity, and a cardboard periscope, and soft electric circuits and a heartbeat pendant.And kids watched. And\u00a0Zeph watched, amazed, as hundreds of\u00a0viewers became thousands. Make Magazine started hosting\u00a0the show on its YouTube channel, and\u00a0altogether more than a million people clicked on Sylvia's videos.Zeph got into the character. He wore the lab coat to\u00a0Maker fairs,\u00a0selling Sylvia bling at his booths,\u00a0or posing with idols like Adam Savage from \u201cMythBusters.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn time, Zeph would get emails from parents who told him\u00a0he was\u00a0an idol himself to their sons and daughters.Or at least,\u00a0Sylvia was an idol. She was.One day last\u00a0summer, when it was all over and Zeph was just Zeph, James sat on a\u00a0patio eating guacamole,\u00a0watching his son\u00a0splash in a pool, wondering if the fun had been worth all the trouble it caused.Advertisement\u201cBefore any of this s--- happened I used to tell Zeph, 'Fame happens to the unlucky; it's not a healthy thing.'\" James said. \u201cAs a kid, it's a trap.\u201dChapter 2 \u2014 Sylvia meets the presidentWhen he was\u00a011, with a few years of making practice behind him, Zeph decided to enter\u00a0the international RoboGames. The competition was fierce:\u00a0teams from around the world with\u00a0heavy-duty battle bots and\u00a0androids.Story continues below advertisementZeph dreamed up\u00a0something more his\u00a0style: the WaterColor Bot.He had always liked making props and puppets for the Super Awesome Sylvia Show (Curmudgeon Oxygen was a staple), at least as much as the bots\u00a0themselves.The WaterColor Bot had a paintbrush on two motors, a bright wood frame and\u00a0eight little trays\u00a0of paint. A local tech company partnered with the Todds to build it, Sylvia's fans helps crowdfund it, and James programmed\u00a0an app so you could send it sketches through an\u00a0iPad.AdvertisementIt won the silver medal in the artbot\u00a0category \u2014 and caught the eye of people at the\u00a0White House.\u201cThey were just freaking out that there's a girl making stuff,\u201d Zeph said.Story continues below advertisementZeph\u00a0remembers shaking nervously as he walked through\u00a0the White House that spring. The other kids' projects\u00a0all seemed so elaborate. A brain-controlled robotic arm; an artificial neural network; temperature-regulating athletic clothing\u00a0invented by two 8-year-old boys.\u201cWhy am I here?\u201d Zeph\u00a0thought. \u201cI have this weird robot that I made.\u201d\u201cIt's really neat!\u201d Super Awesome Sylvia told Bill Nye outside the White House.And he\u00a0smiled in his lab-coat with Obama, and held up a robot-painted watercolor\u00a0of the White House.He came back\u00a0to California with photos that still get passed around his family\u00a0\u2014 the highlight of his career as a supposed girl genius.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the end of that school\u00a0year he got a D in math.The truth was, Zeph says, he's never been a natural at science. He liked the fairs, and he\u00a0liked messing around with his family on\u00a0the show, and he knew how\u00a0to say the right things.\u201cI've learned how to seem like I know stuff,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople ask, 'Oh \u2014 do you know about this electronic\u00a0thing, blah-dee-blah-dee-blah, and\u00a0I'm like, 'I've heard of it!' so it seems like I know about it. But I actually don't.\u201dIt worked very well. Zeph's grades hardly improved as\u00a0nonstop invitations to amazing\u00a0places followed the White House trip.From the Katie Couric Show: \u201cIs there anything she can demo that explodes like a volcano but cooler?\u201dStory continues below advertisementFrom the United Nations in 2014: \u201cWould you and Sylvia consider coming to Geneva\u201d for an international girls-in-tech day?AdvertisementSo\u00a0he went. Zeph's parents were teenagers when he was born. James dropped out of high school and got a job\u00a0for the new family. Christina\u00a0went to college, but the family always\u00a0struggled to pay bills.While Super Awesome Sylvia's fame didn't\u00a0make them rich, it brought in some cash and gave the family a chance to see cities and countries\u00a0they never could have otherwise.The last big trip was to the other side of the world, Australia, where Zeph\u00a0would make speeches at\u00a0elite\u00a0private girls' schools \u2014 and\u00a0finally\u00a0begin to confront who he actually was.Chapter 3 \u2014 The end of SylviaEven before Australia, there had been signs that all was not as it seemed with the\u00a0person called Sylvia\u00a0Todd.Zeph remembers asking a friend in seventh grade, \u201cIs it weird to want to be a boy?\u201d In his private sketchbook, he started to draw himself with shorter hair and hairy legs.AdvertisementBut these were still passing thoughts. On the Gold Coast of Australia in 2014,\u00a0girls\u00a0in uniform skirts crowded around\u00a0the WaterColor Bot\u00a0and\u00a0listened to Super Awesome Sylvia's tips on\u00a0invention.Patience was important, Zeph told them:\u00a0\u201cSometimes I just don't want to do it; Making isn't something that should be forced.\u201d And the girls smiled.The tour went so well that after Zeph returned home, the Todds said, he\u00a0got an offer to come back to Australia and study free at one of the schools\u00a0\u2014 St. Hilda's,\u00a0\u201ca\u00a0place where girls dream and achieve.\u201d\u201cIt's an amazing school,\u201d Zeph said. \u201cAn entire wing dedicated to makers. Everything's leather.\u201dBut as he waited in Auburn for\u00a0start of the Australian school year, those questions began to pass through his mind more and more often.The character Super Awesome Sylvia began to fade from his life, and then so did the person called Sylvia.Zeph became reluctant to make new Web shows, and eventually\u00a0stopped altogether. His parents\u00a0weren't sure why at first. They didn't know that Zeph that could no longer\u00a0stand to\u00a0look at his\u00a0long curls, or listen to \u201chow squeaky my voice was.\u201dAnd the thought of that school in Australia, with its leather and laboratories and uniforms, loomed in Zeph's mind\u00a0like a deadline.Finally, he\u00a0decided, \u201cI can't live with myself wearing a skirt every day.\u201dAustralia would never\u00a0see Sylvia Todd again.Chapter 4 \u2014\u00a0God of the west windsThe fall of 2015 was a tough time\u00a0in the Todd household. James had just lost a job, and the family was in danger of losing their house, with its big wild yard and that\u00a0den that James and kids had turned\u00a0into a mad scientist's laboratory, plastered with\u00a0auto-drawers and computers and jury-rigged toys.Zeph, meanwhile, was spending more and more time alone in his pink-painted bedroom, not making things\u00a0anymore, not talking much, sometimes crying for unexplained reasons. The Web show was\u00a0all but abandoned.Christina\u00a0went into the room\u00a0one day to talk it out, mother and son \u2014 even if she still called her son daughter.\u201cHave I let my fans down?\u201d Zeph asked, Christina\u00a0remembers.No, she\u00a0said. \u201cBe the best person you can be.\u201dIn secret, Zeph was already working on that. He was drawing himself as a boy in his sketchbook all the time, prototyping new haircuts. He was looking up words on the Internet.Lesbian; gay; gender fluid; pansexual; asexual; bisexual; tri-gender; demi-girl.\u201cSo many labels,\u201d Zeph said. But one seemed to fit.He sat down at the dinner table one evening, and told\u00a0his parents and sisters and brother: \u201cI have something to say. I think I'm transgender.\u201dIt\u00a0took some time for the family to\u00a0get used to that.Zeph's sister Talulah wrote him an angry letter the next day. Christina\u00a0felt like \u201cit was the ending of that little girl, the amazing child I had,\u201d she remembers. And James thought it was just a phase, at first.But as fall turned to winter, Zeph fell silent less often, and his confidence grew.\u00a0He\u00a0painted his room blue from pink, covering one wall with a space alien mural, and another with Post-it notes to himself. \u201cIt's ok to cry. You are loved.\u201dThe family came to realize that Sylvia Todd's greatest project had been to figure\u00a0out that he was never Sylvia Todd at all.So\u00a0the\u00a0Todds all sat down and brainstormed a new name. They settled on\u00a0Zephyrus. It was fun to spell, and reminded the family of a character from a musical they'd once\u00a0seen in London.\u201cBut it's actually a Greek god,\u201d Zeph said. \u201cGod of the west winds.\u201dIt all seems pretty simple, in hindsight. It was anything but at the time.\u201cIn the palette of human experience, about the best thing we can do is apply labels that almost match,\u201d James told Zeph one day.\u201cSaying 'trans boy' probably covers 90 percent of what you are. The rest is something else that's just you.\u201dChapter 5 \u2014 Super science girls\u201cDo you want to just shut it down?\u201d James asked\u00a0Zeph one day. He meant the show, and Super Awesome\u00a0Sylvia. To erase and move past that\u00a0whole chunk of a life.But Zeph didn't want that.\u201cI was this girl role model at one point,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn't want it to just end.\u201dSo he decided to keep\u00a0Sylvia alive, as art \u2014 a drawing, a brainy girl\u00a0character who both is him and is not.Zeph\u00a0drew her into a comic strip, explaining his\u00a0transition. He sends\u00a0it\u00a0to people\u00a0who still write to him, asking\u00a0Sylvia to make an appearance.He sent it to an assistant principal this year, and added a note that he'd be happy to come down and talk to the students \u2014 \u201cas Zephyrus, not Sylvia.\u201dThe assistant principal\u00a0never wrote back.\u00a0No one writes back\u00a0after getting the comic,\u00a0Zeph said.One day this year, he\u00a0got a book in the mail. It was called \u201cSuper Science Girls!\u201d and the author had\u00a0including a note, hoping the Todds liked it.It was simple book, written for kids, about a girl who loved science but had trouble being herself. Zeph\u00a0couldn't bear to open it. He knew the character's\u00a0name\u00a0was Sylvia \u2014 and he knew she was very much him.The author, Ellen Langas, had interviewed\u00a0Zeph about his life a couple of years earlier, before she started to write and he started to question himself. It had been\u00a0Zeph's\u00a0last big project\u00a0as Sylvia.\u00a0Now the book\u00a0was finished, and Zeph had never\u00a0told Ellen that he was a boy.It sat on Zeph's shelf for weeks, unread. Finally, in April, he worked up the courage to\u00a0send Ellen a reply.\u201cI deeply apologize,\u201d he\u00a0wrote. \u201cI'm not a girl like I thought I was, I'm a boy. Regardless of what I was born as. My name is Zephyrus now.\u201d\u201cBut because of that realization, it's made everything associated with who I was very hard to deal with,\u201d Zeph went on. \u201cI've been having a hard time answering calls, and replying to emails because of the fear of explaining things. Again, I'm really sorry.\u201dHe typed all this\u00a0out and hit\u00a0send, and felt a familiar knot in his stomach.\u00a0But Ellen\u00a0replied the next morning.\u201cMy dear Zephyrus: I am happy for you and your family as you have discovered your true north and are following where it takes you,\u201d she wrote, and signed off: \u201cAs always, I am your fan.\u201dZeph still hasn't\u00a0read \u201cSuper Science Girls!\u201d But he held on to\u00a0that\u00a0email.Chapter 6 \u2014 GooLife now .\u2009.\u2009. well, it's never perfect. Zeph met another trans boy in school last year. They bonded over a shared hatred of gym and started dating. He's learning to silk screen and working on his drawings of Sylvia, and helping his little brother Dorian \u2014 one of Super Awesome Sylvia's biggest fans \u2014 make bots of his own.His old childhood idol Adam Savage accepted his transition without second thought at the next Maker Faire. So did many people he loved. But there are also glares in the hallways of high school, and anxious deliberations about locker rooms, and hassles with swimsuits\u00a0and chest binders.A few months ago, Zeph went with his family on his first science trip\u00a0since coming out as a boy.It was just a little expo\u00a0at a college a few miles up the road, so Dorian could show off his bots.Zeph and his boyfriend and James sat at the next table, trying to sell\u00a0goo to pass the time.To advertise, they\u00a0put up the same photo of Super Awesome Sylvia and Obama, which had always drawn\u00a0customers. That day, it\u00a0mostly\u00a0drew awkward conversations.\u201cOh, who's this person?\u201d someone would ask, looking\u00a0at\u00a0the ponytailed kid in the photo.\u201cWell .\u2009.\u2009. it's this person, right here,\u201d James\u00a0would say, and point to his son.\u201cBut that's a guy.\u201dJames\u00a0tried the direct\u00a0explanation: \u201cHe's a trans boy now.\u201d He tried the vague explanation: \u201cThat's my eldest.\u201d Everyone walked away regardless.Zeph endured all this mostly in silence. Until finally, he\u00a0got tired of having\u00a0Sylvia explained.The next time someone looked at the photo and asked for the girl \u2014 \u201cOh, is she here today?\u201d \u2014 the boy\u00a0replied for himself:\u201cI guess.\u201d This is the story of the famous girl genius Super Awesome Sylvia and the pretty regular boy Zephyrus Todd, and how they're the same person, and also not. Super Awesome Sylvia was a role model to girls in science. Then he realized he is a boy.",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Search for Alien Life Moves Well Beyond Mars (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5981",
        "date": "2021-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/search-for-alien-life-moves-well-beyond-mars-11617019200?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=32",
        "text": "The expanding quest for clues to life beyond Earth\u2014and for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence\u2014is edging into the mainstream of astronomy and planetary exploration. In addition to NASA\u2019s Mars rover missions now under way, dozens of research teams are searching for biosignatures of early microbial life, while the search for plausible evidence of alien civilizations is gaining respectability. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Mars, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will spend the next two years searching for signs of past life. This view, taken in March by an elevated rover camera, shows the mobile robot and its tracks across Jezero Crater.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nIndeed, for the first time in a generation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is supporting efforts to seek signs of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos, researchers say. If life does exist beyond Earth\u2014be it primitive or advanced\u2014scientists may find a trace of it soon. \u201cIf you\u2019re talking about looking for life, even intelligent life, this may be the special time,\u201d says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit in Mountain View, Calif., that searches for intelligent beings. \u201cWe have the technological capability to find life on other worlds and that ability is improving.\u201d To advance its search for primitive life, NASA is preparing a $4.25 billion mission to Europa around Jupiter for launch in 2024 or so to study whether the moon\u2019s frozen oceans and ice volcanoes are favorable for alien biology. In 2027, the agency plans to send its $1 billion Dragonfly mission to a moon of Saturn called Titan to analyze its lakes of liquid methane. \u201cWe think Titan has all the ingredients for life,\u201d says planetary scientist Sarah H\u00f6rst at Johns Hopkins University, who studies alien atmospheres.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScientists believe that Saturn\u2019s moon Titan, visible at upper right in this image taken by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, may be rich in the organic chemicals that form the building blocks of life.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sun glints off the polar seas of Titan in this color mosaic from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft. NASA plans a mission there to explore dozens of locations across the icy world.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho\n \n\n\n\nPrivate philanthropists are ramping up their efforts as well. In 2016, technology investor \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Milner\n\n\n\n gave $100 million for a 10-year search of a million nearby stars for intelligent extraterrestrial radio chatter. This year, the SETI Institute is upgrading its 42 radio telescopes with a $1.2 million grant from \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Franklin Antonio,\n\n\n\n co-founder of Qualcomm Inc.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSIn how many years, if ever, do you think scientists will find proof of alien life? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA is expanding its range of research. This past August, 53 scientists from 13 countries, sponsored by the space agency, started brainstorming ways to detect advanced intelligent life on Earth-like planets around distant stars by using new ground-based telescopes and orbital observatories\u2014without increasing their cost. The space agency had formally abandoned the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life in 1993. \u201cAfter 30 years, NASA wants to get involved again,\u201d says astrophysicist Hector Socas-Navarro at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands, lead author of a study on the proposals in the journal Acta Astronautica. \u201cExoplanet science has changed the picture tremendously because now we have the possibility of studying thousands of planets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn illustration of NASA\u2019s Dragonfly. Set for launch in 2027, the rotorcraft-lander will explore dozens of locations across the Titan, sampling and measuring the compositions of the Saturn moon\u2019s organic surface materials for evidence of the chemistry of life.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JHU-APL\n \n\n\n\nSo far, astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 4,000 worlds orbiting other stars. Moreover, it now seems likely that most stars have planets; and that tens of billions, in the Milky Way alone, are Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of their stars, where liquid water\u2014and so perhaps life\u2014could exist.\n\n\nLatest Science Journal\n\n\n\n\nGenetically Altered Mosquitoes Target Deadly Dengue Fever and Zika\nMay 31, 2021 \n\n\nCreation of First Human-Monkey Embryos Sparks Concern\nApril 26, 2021 \n\n\nFace Masks Are Disrupting a Key Tool of Communication\nJanuary 18, 2021 \n\n\n2020 Ties for Hottest Year on Record, NASA Says \nJanuary 14, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nIn fact, Earth may not even be the best place for life in the universe. Researchers at Washington State University this past December identified two dozen planets outside our solar system that may have conditions more suitable for life tha The expanding quest for clues to life beyond Earth\u2014and for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence\u2014is edging into the mainstream of astronomy and planetary exploration. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Search for Alien Life Moves Well Beyond Mars (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5982",
        "date": "2021-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/search-for-alien-life-moves-well-beyond-mars-11617019200?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=34",
        "text": "The expanding quest for clues to life beyond Earth\u2014and for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence\u2014is edging into the mainstream of astronomy and planetary exploration. In addition to NASA\u2019s Mars rover missions now under way, dozens of research teams are searching for biosignatures of early microbial life, while the search for plausible evidence of alien civilizations is gaining respectability. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Mars, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will spend the next two years searching for signs of past life. This view, taken in March by an elevated rover camera, shows the mobile robot and its tracks across Jezero Crater.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nIndeed, for the first time in a generation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is supporting efforts to seek signs of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos, researchers say. If life does exist beyond Earth\u2014be it primitive or advanced\u2014scientists may find a trace of it soon. \u201cIf you\u2019re talking about looking for life, even intelligent life, this may be the special time,\u201d says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit in Mountain View, Calif., that searches for intelligent beings. \u201cWe have the technological capability to find life on other worlds and that ability is improving.\u201d To advance its search for primitive life, NASA is preparing a $4.25 billion mission to Europa around Jupiter for launch in 2024 or so to study whether the moon\u2019s frozen oceans and ice volcanoes are favorable for alien biology. In 2027, the agency plans to send its $1 billion Dragonfly mission to a moon of Saturn called Titan to analyze its lakes of liquid methane. \u201cWe think Titan has all the ingredients for life,\u201d says planetary scientist Sarah H\u00f6rst at Johns Hopkins University, who studies alien atmospheres.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScientists believe that Saturn\u2019s moon Titan, visible at upper right in this image taken by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, may be rich in the organic chemicals that form the building blocks of life.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sun glints off the polar seas of Titan in this color mosaic from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft. NASA plans a mission there to explore dozens of locations across the icy world.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho\n \n\n\n\nPrivate philanthropists are ramping up their efforts as well. In 2016, technology investor \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Milner\n\n\n\n gave $100 million for a 10-year search of a million nearby stars for intelligent extraterrestrial radio chatter. This year, the SETI Institute is upgrading its 42 radio telescopes with a $1.2 million grant from \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Franklin Antonio,\n\n\n\n co-founder of Qualcomm Inc.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSIn how many years, if ever, do you think scientists will find proof of alien life? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA is expanding its range of research. This past August, 53 scientists from 13 countries, sponsored by the space agency, started brainstorming ways to detect advanced intelligent life on Earth-like planets around distant stars by using new ground-based telescopes and orbital observatories\u2014without increasing their cost. The space agency had formally abandoned the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life in 1993. \u201cAfter 30 years, NASA wants to get involved again,\u201d says astrophysicist Hector Socas-Navarro at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands, lead author of a study on the proposals in the journal Acta Astronautica. \u201cExoplanet science has changed the picture tremendously because now we have the possibility of studying thousands of planets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn illustration of NASA\u2019s Dragonfly. Set for launch in 2027, the rotorcraft-lander will explore dozens of locations across the Titan, sampling and measuring the compositions of the Saturn moon\u2019s organic surface materials for evidence of the chemistry of life.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JHU-APL\n \n\n\n\nSo far, astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 4,000 worlds orbiting other stars. Moreover, it now seems likely that most stars have planets; and that tens of billions, in the Milky Way alone, are Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of their stars, where liquid water\u2014and so perhaps life\u2014could exist.\n\n\nLatest Science Journal\n\n\n\n\nGenetically Altered Mosquitoes Target Deadly Dengue Fever and Zika\nMay 31, 2021 \n\n\nCreation of First Human-Monkey Embryos Sparks Concern\nApril 26, 2021 \n\n\nFace Masks Are Disrupting a Key Tool of Communication\nJanuary 18, 2021 \n\n\n2020 Ties for Hottest Year on Record, NASA Says \nJanuary 14, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nIn fact, Earth may not even be the best place for life in the universe. Researchers at Washington State University this past December identified two dozen planets outside our solar system that may have conditions more suitable for life tha The expanding quest for clues to life beyond Earth\u2014and for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence\u2014is edging into the mainstream of astronomy and planetary exploration. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Shooting Star You See in the Sky May Well Be a Satellite (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5983",
        "date": "2020-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-shooting-star-you-see-in-the-sky-may-well-be-a-satellite-11596999600?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=11",
        "text": "On the night, the college senior, who lives outside Lufkin, Texas, set his camera on a tripod in his backyard, framed the comet in his viewfinder and triggered the time-lapse shutter. When he checked the result, though, he saw that the long exposures had picked up bright lines, like scratches, across the images. \u201cI thought it was something on my lens or my screen,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were streaks from satellites, like 40 or something, that streamed across the sky. I would say they ruined it.\u201d\nHe\u2019d probably been photobombed by Starlink satellites. In the past 14 months, SpaceX, the space-transportation and aerospace company led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n has launched about 600 of them. The artificial constellation glitters overhead from reflected sunlight long after dark and before sunrise. Another 118 of the satellites are scheduled for launch in the next few months.\nAugust traditionally offers prime viewing for amateur and professional sky-watchers, with four planetary close approaches, three meteor showers, two dwarf planets and one asteroid making an appearance in the night sky\u2014 capped by the peak of the summer Perseids on Aug. 12, one of the best and most active meteor showers of the year, with up to 150 meteors per hour visible on a clear night.\n\n\nThis year, hundreds of those shooting stars likely will be satellite streaks.\nFor decades, astronomers, ecologists and health authorities have worried about the sky glow from streetlights and other artificial outdoor lighting. In the brightly lighted cities that half of the Earth\u2019s population now calls home, only a few dozen stars may be visible on a clear night, experts say. More than a third of humanity can\u2019t see its own home galaxy of the Milky Way, an international team that mapped the geography of night lighting reported in 2016.\nFor the past year, however, astronomers and aerospace engineers have been grappling with disruptive lighting changes in the sky itself. The problem arises from spacecraft design, altitude and the sheer number of new satellites crowding into low-Earth orbit, aerospace experts said.\nIt\u2019s launched a struggle over the dark of night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAccording to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, the diagonal lines running across this image of a galaxy group, made by the observatory on May 25, 2019, are trails of reflected light left by Starlink satellites. The observatory noted that the density of these satellites was significantly higher in the days after launch (as seen here) and that the satellites\u2019 brightness would diminish as they reached their final orbital altitude. SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Victoria Girgis/Lowell Observatory\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe are going through this new space industrial revolution, and the numbers of satellites are going up dramatically,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan McDowell\n\n\n\n at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. \u201cRight now, there is no right to an uncluttered sky.\u201d\nAccording to federal filings, SpaceX and other companies plan to launch up to 80,000 new small communications satellites in the next decade or so into a narrow band of space around Earth, where they will glint brightly in the glare of the rising or setting sun. Indeed, they will outnumber the stars normally visible world-wide with the unaided eye, potentially depriving everyone of an unblemished view of the night sky.\n\u201cThere have been satellites orbiting the earth for 60 years, but never anything of this scale,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Barentine,\n\n\n\n director of public policy at the International Dark-Sky Association, founded by astronomers 20 years ago to promote sky-friendly lighting.\nThe SpaceX network, designed to offer low-cost global broadband services, is authorized by the U.S. to orbit up to 12,000 satellites, but the company has sought permission for 30,000 more. Once it\u2019s all operational, SpaceX expects to retire and replace from 2,000 to 8,000 Starlink satellites every year, allowing them to burn up brightly in the atmosphere. \nThe company didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nSpaceX is just the first satellite company to flood the zone. In May, OneWeb asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch as many as 48,000 satellites. Early last month the British government and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bharti Global\n\n\n\n of India purchased the company; OneWeb didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment on their plans. On July 30, the FCC approved Amazon\u2019s plans to launch 3,236 satellites for its Kuiper high-speed broadband service, a rival to the SpaceX project. In China, several companies are planning networks of up to a thousand or so satellites. (Around the globe, approval methods vary for companies trying to launch these communications satellites.)\nPosters on some social-media forums considered the influx of shining satellites something to celebrate. \u201cIt shows our As meteor showers animate the skies this month, a growing number of satellites obscure views of the heavens--SpaceX alone has sought permission to orbit 30,000 more communications devices. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Shooting Star You See in the Sky May Well Be a Satellite (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5984",
        "date": "2020-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-shooting-star-you-see-in-the-sky-may-well-be-a-satellite-11596999600?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=37",
        "text": "On the night, the college senior, who lives outside Lufkin, Texas, set his camera on a tripod in his backyard, framed the comet in his viewfinder and triggered the time-lapse shutter. When he checked the result, though, he saw that the long exposures had picked up bright lines, like scratches, across the images. \u201cI thought it was something on my lens or my screen,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were streaks from satellites, like 40 or something, that streamed across the sky. I would say they ruined it.\u201d\nHe\u2019d probably been photobombed by Starlink satellites. In the past 14 months, SpaceX, the space-transportation and aerospace company led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n has launched about 600 of them. The artificial constellation glitters overhead from reflected sunlight long after dark and before sunrise. Another 118 of the satellites are scheduled for launch in the next few months.\nAugust traditionally offers prime viewing for amateur and professional sky-watchers, with four planetary close approaches, three meteor showers, two dwarf planets and one asteroid making an appearance in the night sky\u2014 capped by the peak of the summer Perseids on Aug. 12, one of the best and most active meteor showers of the year, with up to 150 meteors per hour visible on a clear night.\n\n\nThis year, hundreds of those shooting stars likely will be satellite streaks.\nFor decades, astronomers, ecologists and health authorities have worried about the sky glow from streetlights and other artificial outdoor lighting. In the brightly lighted cities that half of the Earth\u2019s population now calls home, only a few dozen stars may be visible on a clear night, experts say. More than a third of humanity can\u2019t see its own home galaxy of the Milky Way, an international team that mapped the geography of night lighting reported in 2016.\nFor the past year, however, astronomers and aerospace engineers have been grappling with disruptive lighting changes in the sky itself. The problem arises from spacecraft design, altitude and the sheer number of new satellites crowding into low-Earth orbit, aerospace experts said.\nIt\u2019s launched a struggle over the dark of night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAccording to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, the diagonal lines running across this image of a galaxy group, made by the observatory on May 25, 2019, are trails of reflected light left by Starlink satellites. The observatory noted that the density of these satellites was significantly higher in the days after launch (as seen here) and that the satellites\u2019 brightness would diminish as they reached their final orbital altitude. SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Victoria Girgis/Lowell Observatory\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe are going through this new space industrial revolution, and the numbers of satellites are going up dramatically,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan McDowell\n\n\n\n at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. \u201cRight now, there is no right to an uncluttered sky.\u201d\nAccording to federal filings, SpaceX and other companies plan to launch up to 80,000 new small communications satellites in the next decade or so into a narrow band of space around Earth, where they will glint brightly in the glare of the rising or setting sun. Indeed, they will outnumber the stars normally visible world-wide with the unaided eye, potentially depriving everyone of an unblemished view of the night sky.\n\u201cThere have been satellites orbiting the earth for 60 years, but never anything of this scale,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Barentine,\n\n\n\n director of public policy at the International Dark-Sky Association, founded by astronomers 20 years ago to promote sky-friendly lighting.\nThe SpaceX network, designed to offer low-cost global broadband services, is authorized by the U.S. to orbit up to 12,000 satellites, but the company has sought permission for 30,000 more. Once it\u2019s all operational, SpaceX expects to retire and replace from 2,000 to 8,000 Starlink satellites every year, allowing them to burn up brightly in the atmosphere. \nThe company didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nSpaceX is just the first satellite company to flood the zone. In May, OneWeb asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch as many as 48,000 satellites. Early last month the British government and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bharti Global\n\n\n\n of India purchased the company; OneWeb didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment on their plans. On July 30, the FCC approved Amazon\u2019s plans to launch 3,236 satellites for its Kuiper high-speed broadband service, a rival to the SpaceX project. In China, several companies are planning networks of up to a thousand or so satellites. (Around the globe, approval methods vary for companies trying to launch these communications satellites.)\nPosters on some social-media forums considered the influx of shining satellites something to celebrate. \u201cIt shows our As meteor showers animate the skies this month, a growing number of satellites obscure views of the heavens--SpaceX alone has sought permission to orbit 30,000 more communications devices. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Shooting Star You See in the Sky May Well Be a Satellite (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5985",
        "date": "2020-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/that-shooting-star-you-see-in-the-sky-may-well-be-a-satellite-11596999600?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=39",
        "text": "On the night, the college senior, who lives outside Lufkin, Texas, set his camera on a tripod in his backyard, framed the comet in his viewfinder and triggered the time-lapse shutter. When he checked the result, though, he saw that the long exposures had picked up bright lines, like scratches, across the images. \u201cI thought it was something on my lens or my screen,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were streaks from satellites, like 40 or something, that streamed across the sky. I would say they ruined it.\u201d\nHe\u2019d probably been photobombed by Starlink satellites. In the past 14 months, SpaceX, the space-transportation and aerospace company led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n has launched about 600 of them. The artificial constellation glitters overhead from reflected sunlight long after dark and before sunrise. Another 118 of the satellites are scheduled for launch in the next few months.\n\n\n\n\nAugust traditionally offers prime viewing for amateur and professional sky-watchers, with four planetary close approaches, three meteor showers, two dwarf planets and one asteroid making an appearance in the night sky\u2014 capped by the peak of the summer Perseids on Aug. 12, one of the best and most active meteor showers of the year, with up to 150 meteors per hour visible on a clear night.\n\n\nThis year, hundreds of those shooting stars likely will be satellite streaks.\nFor decades, astronomers, ecologists and health authorities have worried about the sky glow from streetlights and other artificial outdoor lighting. In the brightly lighted cities that half of the Earth\u2019s population now calls home, only a few dozen stars may be visible on a clear night, experts say. More than a third of humanity can\u2019t see its own home galaxy of the Milky Way, an international team that mapped the geography of night lighting reported in 2016.\nFor the past year, however, astronomers and aerospace engineers have been grappling with disruptive lighting changes in the sky itself. The problem arises from spacecraft design, altitude and the sheer number of new satellites crowding into low-Earth orbit, aerospace experts said.\nIt\u2019s launched a struggle over the dark of night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAccording to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, the diagonal lines running across this image of a galaxy group, made by the observatory on May 25, 2019, are trails of reflected light left by Starlink satellites. The observatory noted that the density of these satellites was significantly higher in the days after launch (as seen here) and that the satellites\u2019 brightness would diminish as they reached their final orbital altitude. SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Victoria Girgis/Lowell Observatory\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe are going through this new space industrial revolution, and the numbers of satellites are going up dramatically,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan McDowell\n\n\n\n at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. \u201cRight now, there is no right to an uncluttered sky.\u201d\nAccording to federal filings, SpaceX and other companies plan to launch up to 80,000 new small communications satellites in the next decade or so into a narrow band of space around Earth, where they will glint brightly in the glare of the rising or setting sun. Indeed, they will outnumber the stars normally visible world-wide with the unaided eye, potentially depriving everyone of an unblemished view of the night sky.\n\u201cThere have been satellites orbiting the earth for 60 years, but never anything of this scale,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Barentine,\n\n\n\n director of public policy at the International Dark-Sky Association, founded by astronomers 20 years ago to promote sky-friendly lighting.\nThe SpaceX network, designed to offer low-cost global broadband services, is authorized by the U.S. to orbit up to 12,000 satellites, but the company has sought permission for 30,000 more. Once it\u2019s all operational, SpaceX expects to retire and replace from 2,000 to 8,000 Starlink satellites every year, allowing them to burn up brightly in the atmosphere. \nThe company didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nSpaceX is just the first satellite company to flood the zone. In May, OneWeb asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch as many as 48,000 satellites. Early last month the British government and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bharti Global\n\n\n\n of India purchased the company; OneWeb didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment on their plans. On July 30, the FCC approved Amazon\u2019s plans to launch 3,236 satellites for its Kuiper high-speed broadband service, a rival to the SpaceX project. In China, several companies are planning networks of up to a thousand or so satellites. (Around the globe, approval methods vary for companies trying to launch these communications satellites.)\nPosters on some social-media forums considered the influx of shining satellites something to celebrate. \u201cIt shows our impact on a galactic phenomenon...I am entranced,\u201d one enthusiast wrote on Twitter. Many astronomers, though, fear that just about every telescope study from hundreds of ground-based observatories world-wide will someday be marred by the satellite streaks that spoiled Mr. Berry\u2019s comet images.\nThe astronomers worry most about the impact on the U.S.-funded Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction on Cerro Pach\u00f3n high in the Andes of Chile, which will survey the night sky with the world\u2019s largest digital camera ever fabricated for optical astronomy. Starting in 2022, the Rubin Observatory will take images of the entire Southern sky every three nights for 10 years in the most comprehensive visual survey yet of the universe.\nThe project will be \u201csignificantly impacted by bright satellite trails,\u201d according to a working group of scientists led by Tony Tyson, a physicist at the University of California at Davis and the observatory\u2019s chief scientist, who have been studying the impact of the new satellites and consulting with SpaceX.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX Falcon 9, carrying Starlink satellites among other craft, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida Friday, as seen in this 4-minute time exposure.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Malcolm Denemark/Florida Today/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAll optical observatories and their science will be impacted by tens of thousands\u201d of bright satellites in low Earth orbit, the working group reported at an online meeting of policy makers, satellite operators and sky watchers last month. \u201cWe find that generally no combination of mitigations can completely avoid the impacts of the satellite trails on the science programs of the coming generation of optical astronomy facilities.\u201d\nAmid the growing furor, SpaceX aerospace engineers have scrambled to modify their satellites, according to statements and astronomy workshop presentations by the company. They also lowered the proposed altitude for many of the future satellites in order to reduce the time they would spend in sunlight.\n\u201cSpace companies work hard on improving the satellites,\u201d said Ralf Vandebergh, a professional astrophotographer in the Netherlands who specializes in imaging spacecraft. \u201cAt this point, I\u2019m pretty optimistic.\u201d\nLast January, SpaceX engineers launched a Starlink satellite painted black to dim its brightness. Independent astronomers who tracked it in orbit calculated that it cut the glare by half. But the coating soaked up so much additional heat that it threatened to affect the satellite\u2019s onboard electronics\u2014and made it glow even more brightly in infrared frequencies often used for astronomy, Dr. McDowell said.\n\u201cThere is still a long way to go before people are happy,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeremy Tregloan-Reed\n\n\n\n at the University of Antofagasta in northern Chile, who led the team that tracked and analyzed SpaceX\u2019s blackened satellite, dubbed \u201cDarksat,\u201d in orbit. He\u2019s worried about how so many satellites will affect the search for exoplanets, which orbit stars other than the sun. That quest requires light measurements easily thrown off by the streaks.\nSpaceX engineers also equipped dozens of its latest satellites with experimental visors to act as sunshades to block the sunlight. SpaceX\u2019s Mr. Musk, the CEO, tweeted in April that all of the company\u2019s future Starlink satellites would be equipped with visors.\n\u201cIt is a mitigation, not a solution,\u201d said Dr. Barentine about the visors. \u201cNo one is pretending this is solved.\u201d As meteor showers animate the skies this month, a growing number of satellites obscure views of the heavens--SpaceX alone has sought permission to orbit 30,000 more communications devices. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Comet Neowise as Seen Around the World (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5986",
        "date": "2020-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/comet-neowise-as-seen-around-the-world-11595368898?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=12",
        "text": "A handout photo made available by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\n shows in greater detail the twin tails of comet Neowise on July 5, as captured by\n the Parker Solar Probe.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab/Parker Solar Probe/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe comet will have its closest encounter with Earth midweek, on Wednesday and Thursday,\n when it will be around 64 million miles away. To catch a glimpse of it, aim your binoculars,\n telescope or camera to the northwest about an hour after sunset.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA handout picture made available by NASA shows Comet Neowise as seen from the International\n Space Station on July 5.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nRussian cosmonaut \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ivan Vagner,\n\n\n\n who has been in space since April, says the comet\u2019s tail is clearly visible from\n orbit, as seen here through the window of the International Space Station. The comet\n has been spotted by several National Aeronautics and Space Administration spacecraft,\n including Parker Solar Probe, Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory and the international\n Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nComet Neowise as seen above Joshua Tree National Park on Tuesday in Twentynine Palms,\n Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ringo Chiu/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe comet Neowise made its closest approach to the Sun on July 3, coming within 26.7\n million miles (43 million km), a bit closer than the average distance from the sun\n to \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury,\n\n\n according to NASA. The sun\u2019s fierce heat boiled away the comet\u2019s outermost layers,\n but the comet survived.\n\n\n (L) Comet Neowise seen in the night sky at V\u00e4stra Hamnen in Malm\u00f6, Sweden, on Friday. (R) The comet above Tuttle Creek Lake just north of Manhattan, Kan., on Thursday.Photos: johan nilsson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Luke Townsend/Zuma Press\n\n\n\nAstronomers have identified 6,619 known comets like Neowise, a fraction of the total\n likely number that exist. The European Space Agency estimates that in the distant\n reaches of the solar system beyond Pluto, in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, there\n may be as many as a trillion comets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nResearchers at Boston University and the Planetary Science Institute used a special\n telescope called a coronagraph to reveal sodium atoms in the comet's tail. The image\n at left shows light reflected by dust in the comet's tail; at right, light emitted\n by sodium atoms.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeffrey Morgenthaler, Carl Schmidt\n \n\n\n\n Neowise is traveling at about 40 miles per second. As the comet passes close to Earth,\n astronomers are studying its composition and structure. Based on its infrared signature, Neowise is about 3 miles (5 kilometers)\u00a0across. By\n combining infrared data with visible-light images,\u00a0scientists at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion\n Laboratory can tell that the comet\u2019s nucleus is covered with sooty, dark particles\n left over from its formation near the birth of our solar system 4.6 billion years\n ago. Comets were born in its outer reaches, as planets were forming from dust and\n ice.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nComet Neowise after sunset over the fields and hills of Oreokastro, Greece, near Thessaloniki,\n on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Nicolas Economou/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n Astronomers have calculated that, once Comet Neowise passes out of view later this\n summer, it won\u2019t be visible from Earth for another 6800 years. Neowise is next scheduled\n to appear in the year 8786.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nComet Neowise passes over Stonehenge in the early hours of Tuesday in Salisbury, England.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Dan Kitwood/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at \n sciencejournal@wsj.com Comet Neowise, on its way to the deep freeze beyond the planets, makes its closest\n            approach to Earth this week, appearing as a large shooting star in the early evening\n            sky near the constellation of the Big Dipper. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Comet Neowise as Seen Around the World (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5987",
        "date": "2020-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/comet-neowise-as-seen-around-the-world-11595368898?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=50",
        "text": "A handout photo made available by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\n shows in greater detail the twin tails of comet Neowise on July 5, as captured by\n the Parker Solar Probe.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab/Parker Solar Probe/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe comet will have its closest encounter with Earth midweek, on Wednesday and Thursday,\n when it will be around 64 million miles away. To catch a glimpse of it, aim your binoculars,\n telescope or camera to the northwest about an hour after sunset.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA handout picture made available by NASA shows Comet Neowise as seen from the International\n Space Station on July 5.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nRussian cosmonaut \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ivan Vagner,\n\n\n\n who has been in space since April, says the comet\u2019s tail is clearly visible from\n orbit, as seen here through the window of the International Space Station. The comet\n has been spotted by several National Aeronautics and Space Administration spacecraft,\n including Parker Solar Probe, Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory and the international\n Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nComet Neowise as seen above Joshua Tree National Park on Tuesday in Twentynine Palms,\n Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ringo Chiu/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe comet Neowise made its closest approach to the Sun on July 3, coming within 26.7\n million miles (43 million km), a bit closer than the average distance from the sun\n to \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mercury,\n\n\n according to NASA. The sun\u2019s fierce heat boiled away the comet\u2019s outermost layers,\n but the comet survived.\n\n\n (L) Comet Neowise seen in the night sky at V\u00e4stra Hamnen in Malm\u00f6, Sweden, on Friday. (R) The comet above Tuttle Creek Lake just north of Manhattan, Kan., on Thursday.Photos: johan nilsson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Luke Townsend/Zuma Press\n\n\n\nAstronomers have identified 6,619 known comets like Neowise, a fraction of the total\n likely number that exist. The European Space Agency estimates that in the distant\n reaches of the solar system beyond Pluto, in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, there\n may be as many as a trillion comets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nResearchers at Boston University and the Planetary Science Institute used a special\n telescope called a coronagraph to reveal sodium atoms in the comet's tail. The image\n at left shows light reflected by dust in the comet's tail; at right, light emitted\n by sodium atoms.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeffrey Morgenthaler, Carl Schmidt\n \n\n\n\n Neowise is traveling at about 40 miles per second. As the comet passes close to Earth,\n astronomers are studying its composition and structure. Based on its infrared signature, Neowise is about 3 miles (5 kilometers)\u00a0across. By\n combining infrared data with visible-light images,\u00a0scientists at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion\n Laboratory can tell that the comet\u2019s nucleus is covered with sooty, dark particles\n left over from its formation near the birth of our solar system 4.6 billion years\n ago. Comets were born in its outer reaches, as planets were forming from dust and\n ice.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nComet Neowise after sunset over the fields and hills of Oreokastro, Greece, near Thessaloniki,\n on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Nicolas Economou/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n Astronomers have calculated that, once Comet Neowise passes out of view later this\n summer, it won\u2019t be visible from Earth for another 6800 years. Neowise is next scheduled\n to appear in the year 8786.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nComet Neowise passes over Stonehenge in the early hours of Tuesday in Salisbury, England.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Dan Kitwood/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at \n sciencejournal@wsj.com Comet Neowise, on its way to the deep freeze beyond the planets, makes its closest\n            approach to Earth this week, appearing as a large shooting star in the early evening\n            sky near the constellation of the Big Dipper. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Search for Alien Life Moves Well Beyond Mars (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5988",
        "date": "2021-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/search-for-alien-life-moves-well-beyond-mars-11617019200?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=25",
        "text": "The expanding quest for clues to life beyond Earth\u2014and for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence\u2014is edging into the mainstream of astronomy and planetary exploration. In addition to NASA\u2019s Mars rover missions now under way, dozens of research teams are searching for biosignatures of early microbial life, while the search for plausible evidence of alien civilizations is gaining respectability. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Mars, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will spend the next two years searching for signs of past life. This view, taken in March by an elevated rover camera, shows the mobile robot and its tracks across Jezero Crater.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nIndeed, for the first time in a generation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is supporting efforts to seek signs of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos, researchers say. If life does exist beyond Earth\u2014be it primitive or advanced\u2014scientists may find a trace of it soon. \u201cIf you\u2019re talking about looking for life, even intelligent life, this may be the special time,\u201d says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit in Mountain View, Calif., that searches for intelligent beings. \u201cWe have the technological capability to find life on other worlds and that ability is improving.\u201d To advance its search for primitive life, NASA is preparing a $4.25 billion mission to Europa around Jupiter for launch in 2024 or so to study whether the moon\u2019s frozen oceans and ice volcanoes are favorable for alien biology. In 2027, the agency plans to send its $1 billion Dragonfly mission to a moon of Saturn called Titan to analyze its lakes of liquid methane. \u201cWe think Titan has all the ingredients for life,\u201d says planetary scientist Sarah H\u00f6rst at Johns Hopkins University, who studies alien atmospheres.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nScientists believe that Saturn\u2019s moon Titan, visible at upper right in this image taken by NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft, may be rich in the organic chemicals that form the building blocks of life.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sun glints off the polar seas of Titan in this color mosaic from NASA\u2019s Cassini spacecraft. NASA plans a mission there to explore dozens of locations across the icy world.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho\n \n\n\n\nPrivate philanthropists are ramping up their efforts as well. In 2016, technology investor \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Milner\n\n\n\n gave $100 million for a 10-year search of a million nearby stars for intelligent extraterrestrial radio chatter. This year, the SETI Institute is upgrading its 42 radio telescopes with a $1.2 million grant from \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Franklin Antonio,\n\n\n\n co-founder of Qualcomm Inc.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSIn how many years, if ever, do you think scientists will find proof of alien life? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA is expanding its range of research. This past August, 53 scientists from 13 countries, sponsored by the space agency, started brainstorming ways to detect advanced intelligent life on Earth-like planets around distant stars by using new ground-based telescopes and orbital observatories\u2014without increasing their cost. The space agency had formally abandoned the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life in 1993. \u201cAfter 30 years, NASA wants to get involved again,\u201d says astrophysicist Hector Socas-Navarro at the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands, lead author of a study on the proposals in the journal Acta Astronautica. \u201cExoplanet science has changed the picture tremendously because now we have the possibility of studying thousands of planets.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn illustration of NASA\u2019s Dragonfly. Set for launch in 2027, the rotorcraft-lander will explore dozens of locations across the Titan, sampling and measuring the compositions of the Saturn moon\u2019s organic surface materials for evidence of the chemistry of life.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JHU-APL\n \n\n\n\nSo far, astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 4,000 worlds orbiting other stars. Moreover, it now seems likely that most stars have planets; and that tens of billions, in the Milky Way alone, are Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of their stars, where liquid water\u2014and so perhaps life\u2014could exist.\n\n\nLatest Science Journal\n\n\n\n\nGenetically Altered Mosquitoes Target Deadly Dengue Fever and Zika\nMay 31, 2021 \n\n\nCreation of First Human-Monkey Embryos Sparks Concern\nApril 26, 2021 \n\n\nFace Masks Are Disrupting a Key Tool of Communication\nJanuary 18, 2021 \n\n\n2020 Ties for Hottest Year on Record, NASA Says \nJanuary 14, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nIn fact, Earth may not even be the best place for life in the universe. Researchers at Washington State University this past December identified two dozen planets outside our solar system that may have conditions more suitable for life than our own world. All of them orbit stars at least 100 light years away, according to their study in Astrobiology. NASA\u2019s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, set for launch in October, will play a key role in the study of promising exoplanets and their atmospheres, including potential biosignatures on potentially habitable worlds. Three more advanced space-based telescopes suitable for such studies are on the drawing board. \u201cWe think the next-generation telescopes will have the capability to study atmospheres of small planets,\u201d says astrophysicist Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. \u201cThe goal is to look for signs of life by way of gases in an atmosphere that don\u2019t belong. We\u2019re going to be looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. It\u2019s going to be messy.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTechnicians conduct final tests of NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch later this year. Once in orbit, it can study the atmospheres of exoplanets as small as Earth with great precision.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Chris Gunn\n \n\n\n\nTo be sure, in the search for life beyond Earth, scientists risk ridicule when provocative hints of alien life are debunked. Last year, scientists detected an unexpected trace of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, which some speculated could be a potential sign of biological activity on a planet long dismissed as a lifeless hellscape. The find, published last September in Nature Astronomy, triggered a fusillade of harsh critiques from within the scientific community contending the key chemical had been misidentified. It also fueled more research, including plans for a privately funded mission to Venus. At NASA\u2019s request, other scientists also are trying to identify revealing signs of alien industry that could be detected across the vast void between the stars. One such clue might be polluted air, according to a study this past December led by researchers at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. They are studying industrial chlorofluorocarbons, widely used as refrigerants on Earth until banned to protect the ozone layer, and nitrogen dioxide, often a byproduct from burning fossil fuels as possibilities. They found that an alien civilization producing about the same level of nitrogen dioxide as on Earth could be detected by telescopes from up to 30 light years away.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nResearchers also are considering other potential techno-signatures, including alien artifacts. In 2017, scientists spotted a curious object from another star that had intersected our solar system\u2014the first ever detected. Astronomers have been arguing whether the object, which they named Oumuamua, is an asteroid, a comet or an alien spaceship. Earlier this month, scientists at Arizona State University theorized it might be a splinter of nitrogen ice from a Pluto-like exoplanet. \u201cWe are trying to brainstorm all the techno-signatures we can think of,\u201d says astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, a nonprofit research organization based in Seattle. \u201cWe are in the Pok\u00e9mon stage: we want to collect them all.\u201d So far, when it comes to techno-signatures, it\u2019s all hypothetical. The researchers say they have more than just technical hurdles to overcome. Many astronomers consider such efforts a waste of time, Dr. Haqq-Misra says. \u201cThere are a lot of astronomers who still giggle at the idea of techno-signatures,\u201d he says. \u201cWe are trying to reduce the giggle factor.\u201d Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The expanding quest for clues to life beyond Earth\u2014and for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence\u2014is edging into the mainstream of astronomy and planetary exploration. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Announces First Mission to the Sun (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5989",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/nasa-announces-first-mission-to-the-sun/9B9C046F-0296-4AC2-ABD6-A135D8AAB7C6.html?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=24",
        "text": " In a historic first, NASA said it's launching a spacecraft in 2018 to fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, zooming within four million miles of its surface. WSJ's Dipti Kapadia reports. Photo: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/AP ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA and China Missions Will Search for Life on Mars (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5990",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/how-nasa-and-china-missions-will-search-for-life-on-mars/C9494E3F-5133-402F-AFD2-19A0BA268279.html?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=9",
        "text": " China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA and China Missions Will Search for Life on Mars (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5991",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/how-nasa-and-china-missions-will-search-for-life-on-mars/C9494E3F-5133-402F-AFD2-19A0BA268279.html?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=34",
        "text": " China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA and China Missions Will Search for Life on Mars (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5992",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/how-nasa-and-china-missions-will-search-for-life-on-mars/C9494E3F-5133-402F-AFD2-19A0BA268279.html?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=37",
        "text": " China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Richard Branson Float in Space During Virgin Galactic Flight (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "5993",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-richard-branson-float-in-space-during-virgin-galactic-flight/5712C9EC-9D45-4FCD-B3FC-EAACB4CA3808.html?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=6",
        "text": " Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and five crew members successfully traveled to the edge of space, experiencing weightlessness aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft. The flight is part of a push to spur a new space-tourism industry. Photo: Virgin Galactic ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Could Space Debris Become a Hazard? (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5994",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/could-space-debris-become-a-hazard/8881492A-5A6D-4640-9600-C8F38A40CB2E.html?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=23",
        "text": " An ever-growing cloud of satellites, derelict rocket parts and decommissioned spacecraft is circling the earth, raising the risk of costly orbital collisions. Video: Gabe Johnson/WSJ. Photo: NASA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini: A Grand Finale for the 20-Year Saturn Mission (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "5995",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/cassini-a-grand-finale-for-the-20-year-saturn-mission/F0ABAFE0-FB71-4AB7-8350-A1C36A42FF3F.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=23",
        "text": " After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface.  Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini: A Grand Finale for the 20-Year Saturn Mission (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "5996",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/cassini-a-grand-finale-for-the-20-year-saturn-mission/F0ABAFE0-FB71-4AB7-8350-A1C36A42FF3F.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=88",
        "text": " After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface.  Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini: A Grand Finale for the 20-Year Saturn Mission (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "5997",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/cassini-a-grand-finale-for-the-20-year-saturn-mission/F0ABAFE0-FB71-4AB7-8350-A1C36A42FF3F.html?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=78",
        "text": " After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface.  Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini: A Grand Finale for the 20-Year Saturn Mission (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "5998",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/cassini-a-grand-finale-for-the-20-year-saturn-mission/F0ABAFE0-FB71-4AB7-8350-A1C36A42FF3F.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=114",
        "text": " After 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft made its suicide plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on Sept. 15. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn's rings, moons and surface.  Photo: NASA Video: Dipti Kapadia/The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "New EVs, Driverless Cars, and a Race to the Moon: What to Look For in 2022 (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "5999",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/george-downs/new-evs-driverless-cars-and-a-race-to-the-moon-what-to-look-for-in-2022/61096D57-8C1F-4567-97F7-48A09F84118B?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1",
        "text": " In 2021, Covid-19 still cast uncertainty over the future of travel, Rivian and Lucid shook up the auto industry, and Branson, Bezos and Musk launched their space tourism programs. But what does 2022 have in store? WSJ\u2019s George Downs takes a look. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "New EVs, Driverless Cars, and a Race to the Moon: What to Look For in 2022 (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6000",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/george-downs/new-evs-driverless-cars-and-a-race-to-the-moon-what-to-look-for-in-2022/61096D57-8C1F-4567-97F7-48A09F84118B?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1",
        "text": " In 2021, Covid-19 still cast uncertainty over the future of travel, Rivian and Lucid shook up the auto industry, and Branson, Bezos and Musk launched their space tourism programs. But what does 2022 have in store? WSJ\u2019s George Downs takes a look. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space: The Commercial Frontier (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6001",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/story/space-the-attainable-frontier-1cc25a5f?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=2",
        "text": " Wednesday's Blue Origin launch saw actor William Shatner boldly go where, increasingly, more space tourists have gone ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans to Take Tourists Around the Moon in Two Years (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6002",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-plans-to-take-tourists-around-the-moon-in-two-years/F184B75F-89B6-4E0A-84C7-2906085B1C83.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=28",
        "text": " Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans to Take Tourists Around the Moon in Two Years (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6003",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-plans-to-take-tourists-around-the-moon-in-two-years/F184B75F-89B6-4E0A-84C7-2906085B1C83.html?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=129",
        "text": " Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches NASA Astronauts into Space (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6004",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-successfully-launches-nasa-astronauts-into-space/857F9E12-2F64-4B75-A32F-838DA6F236FD.html?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=53",
        "text": " Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley made history Saturday as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX rocket successfully launched the NASA crew into orbit becoming the first private firm to do so.  The endeavor marks a new era for space exploration. Photo: David J. Philip/AP ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Staying Bed Bound for Space Science (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6005",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/staying-bed-bound-for-space-science/BADF9917-028C-4938-BD74-BCE52544727B.html?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=67",
        "text": " Scientists are studying bed-bound subjects to delve into the long-term effects of weightlessness, with implications not just for astronauts headed to Mars, but for those still back on Earth. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Staying Bed Bound for Space Science (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6006",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/staying-bed-bound-for-space-science/BADF9917-028C-4938-BD74-BCE52544727B.html?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=94",
        "text": " Scientists are studying bed-bound subjects to delve into the long-term effects of weightlessness, with implications not just for astronauts headed to Mars, but for those still back on Earth. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Mining the Universe (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6007",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mining-the-universe-1495194397?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=24",
        "text": " The technology behind the coming outer space gold rush ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Mining the Universe (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6008",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mining-the-universe-1495194397?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=82",
        "text": " The technology behind the coming outer space gold rush ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos: Cassini Mission Around Saturn Ends (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6009",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-cassini-mission-around-saturn-ends-1505492160?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=22",
        "text": " Tears and triumph mark the managed demise of the Cassini space probe, which ran rings around Saturn for 13 years and has spurred plans for new exploration for life in outer space. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos: Cassini Mission Around Saturn Ends (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6010",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-cassini-mission-around-saturn-ends-1505492160?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=77",
        "text": " Tears and triumph mark the managed demise of the Cassini space probe, which ran rings around Saturn for 13 years and has spurred plans for new exploration for life in outer space. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos: Cassini Mission Around Saturn Ends (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6011",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-cassini-mission-around-saturn-ends-1505492160?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=113",
        "text": " Tears and triumph mark the managed demise of the Cassini space probe, which ran rings around Saturn for 13 years and has spurred plans for new exploration for life in outer space. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos of the Day: Dec. 13 (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6012",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-of-the-day-dec-13-11544739583?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=61",
        "text": " In photos selected Thursday by Wall Street Journal editors, a badminton champ\u2019s reach, a successful test flight by Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, the aftermath of a train crash in Turkey, and more. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make Splashdown (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6013",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-spacex-capsule-nasa-crew-make-splashdown-11596404226?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=11",
        "text": " A SpaceX capsule carrying two U.S. astronauts splashed down safely off the Florida coast Sunday, skirting a tropical storm, to cap a notable two-month mission. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make Splashdown (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6014",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-spacex-capsule-nasa-crew-make-splashdown-11596404226?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=35",
        "text": " A SpaceX capsule carrying two U.S. astronauts splashed down safely off the Florida coast Sunday, skirting a tropical storm, to cap a notable two-month mission. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos: SpaceX Capsule, NASA Crew Make Splashdown (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6015",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-spacex-capsule-nasa-crew-make-splashdown-11596404226?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=42",
        "text": " A SpaceX capsule carrying two U.S. astronauts splashed down safely off the Florida coast Sunday, skirting a tropical storm, to cap a notable two-month mission. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "International Space Station Rocket Fails to Launch (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6016",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/international-space-station-rocket-fails-to-launch-1539273240?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=18",
        "text": " A Russian rocket carrying an American astronaut and his Russian counterpart to the international space station returned to Earth because of a booster failure. The Soyuz MS-10 typically deploys parachutes to slow the descent speed and reduce the impact of the landing. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | A 13-year-old entrepreneur takes 100 girls to the movies (WP: Small Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6017",
        "date": "2018-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2018/03/12/a-13-year-old-entrepreneur-takes-100-girls-to-the-movies/",
        "text": "Asking a girl out to the movies isn\u2019t easy for many guys, regardless of their age. But one 13-year-old entrepreneur came up with a way to get 100 girls to go with him. And it\u2019s for a good cause.Beau Shell is only\u00a013 but he\u2019s been running a successful mobile ice cream cart business \u2014 Lil\u2019 Ice Cream Dude in Athens, Ga.\u2013since the age of eight. Starting with a cart bought by his parents that was made up of a small freezer and attached to old bicycle wheels, Shell\u2019s company has worked hundreds of events, parties, festivals and weddings, according to this profile of him on The Red & Black. Shell sometimes employs others to help out at these events and is the youngest member to belong to the Athens Chamber of Commerce. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLike any normal 13-year-old, he uses his profits to buy video games and toys. But he also gives back. Over the past five years, Shell has raised more than $15,000 for various charities and community organizations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne of his passions is encouraging more girls to get into STEM \u2014 science, technology, engineering and math \u2014 careers. So with the help of a STEM advocate, Shell recently raised $5,000 to pay for 100 middle school girls to go and see \u201cA Wrinkle In Time\u201d the new sci-fi Disney movie starring Oprah Winfrey about a young girl named Meg and her little brother who travel through space in search of their long-lost father. The girls were handpicked by local teachers because of their interest in STEM and enjoyed a red carpet reception that included dinner and a goody bag.\u201cI hope they feel inspired just by seeing the movie,\u201d Shell told local television station CBS46. \u201cAnd seeing Meg because she\u2019s a strong, smart, powerful, brave character and I hope that they can relate and get a positive vibe.\u201dOne of those girls, he believes, could be the designer of a new iPhone, find a cure for cancer, help build a spacecraft or \u2014 more closer to home \u2014 come up with an awesome new type of ice cream. Now, that could be worth the price of a movie ticket. It's for a good cause A 13-year-old entrepreneur takes 100 girls to the movies",
        "author": "Gene Marks"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Some Apple employees may quit over new \u2018open\u2019 office floor plan (WP: Small Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6018",
        "date": "2017-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/2017/08/16/some-apple-employees-may-quit-over-new-open-office-floor-plan/",
        "text": "Construction at Apple Park, the tech giant\u2019s\u00a0new \u201cspaceship\u201d headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., is projected to be completed by the end of this year. The $5 billion campus is to\u00a0be a state-of-the-art facility, boasting the latest in energy efficiencies, green technologies, a 100,000 square foot fitness center,an orchard, a meadow and a pond. Some 12,000 Apple employees are moving into the 175-acre campus over the next six months. But unfortunately some of them aren\u2019t as excited as you\u2019d think they\u2019d be. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhy? Blame the new open office floor plan design.If you\u2019re an Apple employee this is a big change. Up until now you\u2019ve been used to having your own office space. But the new Apple Park will change all that. The programmers, engineers, developers and other employees who work there will be rubbing elbows with each other over long tables that they\u2019ll be sharing in the company\u2019s new open space environment. And some are not thrilled.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJon Gruber, a podcaster and blogger that follows the company is reported to have received emails from employees who\u00a0threatened to leave the company if the workplaces aren\u2019t suitable. \u201cJudging from the private feedback I\u2019ve gotten from some Apple employees, I\u2019m 100% certain there\u2019s going to be some degree of attrition based on the open floor plans,\u201d he said in this Macrumors report.Open office designs have been popular with many companies over the past few years. But they\u2019ve also been controversial. Executives believe that an environment without cubicles fosters collaboration, innovation and creativity. Research has backed up some of these claims. But many workers aren\u2019t so crazy about the lack of privacy\u2013and that guy who noisily eats his lunch just a few feet away. Tuna salad again?Gruber claims that one vice president had the company build his \u201cvery successful\u201d group their own building because he was so dissatisfied with the open floor plan.\u00a0Business Insider reports that the company\u2019s cloud services team have claimed its former headquarters for their own workspace, voicing concerns that \u201cApple employees used to privacy and a quiet work environment might be upset by the open floor plans.\u201dDoes your company have an \u201copen\u201d office like Apple\u2019s implementing? Do your employees like it? According to Gallup\u2019s 2017 State of the American Workplace report, about 70 percent of U.S. offices utilize an \u201copen\u201d environment, so if you do you\u2019re certainly in the mainstream.\u00a0 For now. Tuna sandwich anyone? Some Apple employees may quit over new \u2018open\u2019 office floor plan",
        "author": "Gene Marks"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Deal With Longing for a Distant Home (NYT: Smarter Living) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6019",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/smarter-living/coronavirus-distant-home.html",
        "text": "Where is home, really? Where is home, really? After months of containment, we understand a little better what it might be like to live on the moon. We have masked up to venture out the front door, floating in wide arcs around masked neighbors, while those unable to leave their homes have peered out the window at a world in orbit. For a period during the coronavirus pandemic, everyone on Earth has experienced the extremes of distance usually reserved for those in the death zone or outer space. In our rooms, apart, we have felt a longing for the places we can\u2019t go.",
        "author": "By Janet Manley"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Deal With Longing for a Distant Home (NYT: Smarter Living) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6020",
        "date": "2020-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/smarter-living/coronavirus-distant-home.html",
        "text": "Where is home, really? Where is home, really? After months of containment, we understand a little better what it might be like to live on the moon. We have masked up to venture out the front door, floating in wide arcs around masked neighbors, while those unable to leave their homes have peered out the window at a world in orbit. For a period during the coronavirus pandemic, everyone on Earth has experienced the extremes of distance usually reserved for those in the death zone or outer space. In our rooms, apart, we have felt a longing for the places we can\u2019t go.",
        "author": "By Janet Manley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Colombia advances in joyful noise, and Senegal is eliminated by cold arithmetic (WP: Soccer) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6021",
        "date": "2018-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soccer-insider/wp/2018/06/28/colombia-vs-senegal-2018-world-cup/",
        "text": "SAMARA, Russia \u2014 After another chapter in this stirring\u00a0World Cup lunacy to which millions willingly subject themselves, the ear canals rang while the sympathy gland gushed.The former owed to gobsmacking Colombian noise that rang through Samara Arena \u2014 7,310 gaping air miles from Bogota \u2014 great walls of noise that could raise goose bumps on a lizard. The latter came because Senegal became the first team to fall out of a World Cup on the fair play tiebreaker. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEverything you need to know about the World Cup\u2019s fair play tiebreakerThe former boomed through Colombia\u2019s leap from third place in Group H on Thursday morning through its 1-0 win over Senegal to the top of the group on Thursday night and a round-of-16 date with England. The latter sighed because Senegal had tied Japan for second place, and the two had tied with four goals scored and four allowed, and the two had tied, 2-2, when they played each other, so the system distilled to rating Japan\u2019s four yellow cards in three matches to Senegal\u2019s six.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the olden days of, say, four years ago, the flawed human species would have drawn lots.\u201cI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s cruel.\u201d said an understanding Aliou Cisse, the Senegal manager who captained his country to the 2002 World Cup quarterfinals.Others do claim to know.Want smart analysis, opinions, viewing guides and more from the World Cup?\u00a0Sign up for our month-long newsletter. Every match day through the final July 15.From the get-go in the stadium shaded from the burning Russian sun, it seemed as if South America\u2019s second-most-populous country had relocated itself all the way over here, not all that far from the Kazakhstan border, and as if Samara Arena, which resembles a spaceship, had floated off its moorings and zipped 7,000 miles and nine time zones to collect tens of thousands of Colombians before depositing them here in their startlingly dominant yellow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey made yellow seas that ringed the place, and the yellow seas made the kind of roars that figured to lurk long in the inner ear, the greatest of those during the 74th minute. That\u2019s when that redoubtable spark Juan Quintero blasted a corner kick, and the 23-year-old FC Barcelona employee Yerry Mina flicked a head onto it, and the thing screamed into an able bounce just left of goalkeeper Khadim Ndiaye before cuddling with the back of the net.What followed wowed: that sound.Here\u2019s the World Cup knockout round bracket and scheduleIt followed by 14 minutes or so upon a ripple of noise. That came when Colombians realized Poland had taken a 1-0 lead on Japan in Volgograd. Follow along if you dare: That score, plus the 0-0 score here at that moment, meant Senegal would win the group with five points, with Japan and Colombia tied with four, and Colombia would proceed on goal difference even though Japan had defeated Colombia, 2-1.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet in springing from that opening loss that left it briefly with zero points to its closing tally of a front-running six, Colombia did something else: It overcame a strange, unforeseen moment early on, when star James Rodriguez had proved almost invisible through the first 30 minutes, such that Manager Jose Pekerman removed him in the 31st. \u201cHe adds a lot of football and joy to our team,\u201d Mina said of Rodriguez, \u201cso we\u2019re sad about this, and we managed to overcome the challenge and claim victory.\u201dRodriguez trudged off glumly, and Pekerman later said worriedly: \u201cWhat I can say is that I am extremely concerned. It\u2019s a very tough situation for my team.\u201dThe 26-year-old Rodriguez had \u201ctrained normally\u201d Wednesday, staying on afterward per usual because, Pekerman said: \u201cHe likes to practice a lot. He was fully fit in training, and in the last training session there was no hint of injury.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAsked to pinpoint a body part, the manager said: \u201cRight now, I do not have that information. I cannot confirm or deny anything. We have to wait and see. .\u2009.\u2009. We do hope that we\u2019ll hear good news.\u201dAt least he had the news he had witnessed, that his team had weathered a match \u201cwith many worrying moments\u201d \u2014 including a near-penalty in the Colombia box in the 17th minute, which referee Milorad Mazic waved off after a video review \u2014 and a match in which, Pekerman said, \u201cIt was hard for us to keep our identity.\u201dIt was a match in which both sides proved objectively likable with their positivity, their bright colors and their fans, the gigantic Colombian throng surrounding the wee, tireless pockets of Senegalese supporters and drummers.Story continues below advertisementThat likability extended to Cisse\u2019s reaction afterward, when he cited \u201cthe law of the game of football\u201d and \u201cone of the rules.\u201d He said: \u201cWe would have preferred to be eliminated in another way. But like I say, it\u2019s a pity for us, it\u2019s a pity for our team, but this is how it works.\u201dAdvertisementPekerman offered, \u201cIt\u2019s actually quite incredible to be in this situation\u201d and saw it as further evidence of a taut Group H with \u201ca lot of tension in the air.\u201dCisse also said rationally, \u201cIt is difficult to play well if you don\u2019t play with a lot of commitment,\u201d and, \u201cI can\u2019t ask my players to go out on the pitch and avoid contact with other players.\u201dHappenstance did factor in, as with drawing a lot, in the exit of the last of Africa\u2019s five World Cup teams, and Cisse arrived at his philosophical moment. \u201cWe\u2019ve been here,\u201d he said, \u201cand I\u2019ve looked at the other teams, and I don\u2019t think we should be ashamed of our football. There\u2019s much less distance between us and the top teams.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Mina went about speaking thanks and said, \u201cI also want to thank the entire country of Colombia.\u201dHell, sometimes it seemed the whole place was way over here.Advertisement\u2014 Chuck Culpepper***In-game updatesFalcao subs outColombia used its final substitution in the 89th minute, with captain Radamel Falcao coming out for Miguel Borja. Colombia is a few minutes away from clinching a spot in the round of 16. If the current results in Group H hold, Senegal will be eliminated based on fair play points.Substitution for SenegalDiafra Sakho for M\u2019Baye Niang in the 86th minute.Japan loses to Poland, 1-0, but finishes second in Group HSubstitution for ColombiaJefferson Lerma replaced\u00a0Mateus Uribe in the 83rd minute.Story continues below advertisementSubstitution for SenegalMoussa Konat\u00e9 replaced Keita Balde in the 80th minute.Goal!In the 74th minute, Yerry Mina shook off his defender on a corner kick and headed the ball into the net to give Colombia a 1-0 lead. If this score and Poland\u2019s 1-0 lead over Japan hold, Colombia would win Group H, Japan would finish second, and Senegal would be eliminated.Come for the Yerry Mina goal, stay for the \ud83d\udd25 celebration! \ud83c\udde8\ud83c\uddf4 pic.twitter.com/zTgeAbBagD\u2014 FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) June 28, 2018\n\nSubstitution for SenegalAdvertisementMoussa Wagu\u00e9 replaced Youssouf Sabaly in the 74th minute due to injury.Quite a divotSenegal forward Sadio Man\u00e9 popped his free kick from just outside the box over the crossbar in the 64th minute after his plant foot slipped.Whoops \ud83d\ude05 pic.twitter.com/zUd9jMT2Xl\u2014 FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) June 28, 2018\n\nGood news for both sidesPoland has taken a 1-0 lead over Japan in Volgograd. If the current scores hold, Senegal would win Group H, and Colombia would finish second. Japan would be eliminated.Story continues below advertisementYellow card to SenegalSenegal\u2019s M\u2019Baye Niang\u00a0was issued a yellow card in the 51st minute. It\u2019s the forward\u2019s second card of the group stage, meaning he\u2019ll miss Senegal\u2019s round of 16 match if it advances.Halftime update: Colombia 0, Senegal 0Senegal had four of the five shots in a scoreless first half. Senegal will advance to the round of 16 with a win or a draw, or possibly even with a Japan loss to Poland in Thursday\u2019s other Group H finale. Colombia will advance with a win, or a draw coupled with a Japan loss. (Japan and Poland are also tied, 0-0, at halftime.)AdvertisementYellow card to ColombiaJohan Mojica was issued a yellow card in the 45th minute. It\u2019s his first of the group stage.James subs outIn the 31st minute, Colombia star forward James Rodr\u00edguez, who recently injured his left calf in training and didn\u2019t start against Japan, was replaced by Luis Muriel. That\u2019s a big blow for Colombia.Big blow to Colombia as James is subbed off just 30 minutes into the game! pic.twitter.com/FBCjqNfaaS\u2014 FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) June 28, 2018\n\nSenegal applying pressureThe pace has picked up midway through the first half. Colombia goalkeeper David Ospina made saves on shots by Keita Balde and Ismaila Sarr to keep the game scoreless in the 28th minute.Another chance for ColombiaColombia\u2019s Radamel Falcao headed the ball over the crossbar on a perfect free kick from Juan Quintero in the 25th minute. Colombia may have been ruled offside had Falcao\u2019s attempt found the net.Penalty call\u00a0overturnedIn the 17th minute, the referee awarded Senegal a penalty kick after\u00a0Sadio Man\u00e9 was taken down by Davinson S\u00e1nchez in the box. The referee reviewed the play and determined S\u00e1nchez got a piece of the ball with the heel of his foot. The initial call was overturned, and the match continued.Early VAR decision goes in favor of Colombia as the ref overturns the penalty! pic.twitter.com/gT4uGzOPR1\u2014 FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) June 28, 2018\n\nSave for SenegalColombia\u2019s Radamel Falcao was sandwiched by a couple of Senegal defenders in the 11th minute, resulting in a free kick from just outside the box. Juan Quintero put a tricky, one-bounce shot on net, but Senegal\u2019s Khadim N\u2019Diaye dived to make the save.A cautious startThere have been few chances for either side in the first 10 minutes. Possession has been fairly even, and Senegal has the only shot.Starting lineups announcedTEAM NEWS (2/2) // #SENCOL #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/tYmWhVILSd\u2014 FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) June 28, 2018\n\n\u2014 Scott AllenRead more about the World Cup:Complete World Cup schedule and resultsSenegal\u2019s Aliou Cisse is the World Cup\u2019s youngest and only black coach. He\u2019s also a sex symbol.How foreign-born players put the \u2018world\u2019 in World CupWashington is watching a ton of World Cup soccerGoff: What\u2019s it really like in Russia? During World Cup, more vibrant than I expected.Colombia pairing of Rodriguez, Quintero works at World Cup The din created by thousands of Colombian fans in Samara, Russia, stood in contrast to Senegal being the first team knocked out of the World Cup by FIFA's fair-play tiebreaker.  Colombia advances in joyful noise, and Senegal is eliminated by cold arithmetic",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "With MLS Cup, Atlanta United caps an overnight success 50 years in the making (WP: Soccer) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6022",
        "date": "2018-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2018/12/07/with-mls-cup-atlanta-united-caps-an-overnight-success-years-making/",
        "text": "ATLANTA \u2014 Fifty years ago, when the North American Soccer League was born and a young South African named Kaizer Motaung left his continent for the first time, there was no spaceship with a retractable roof housing a soccer team smashing league attendance records, scoring goals by the buckets and promising to bring a trophy to this hard-luck sports city. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLong before Atlanta United took MLS by storm and advanced to Saturday\u2019s final against the Portland Timbers in just its second season, the Atlanta Chiefs performed at what would later be named Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Crowds averaged just shy of 5,800, which was ahead of the NASL curve.In 1968, U.S. pro soccer was a foreign enterprise, introduced mostly by Europeans seeking to spread the gospel and make a few bucks. It would be another seven years before Pele would revolutionize the sport on these shores.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn that first NASL season, the Chiefs won a championship for Atlanta. They finished first in the Atlantic Division and, after a scoreless draw in the first leg of the finals, defeated the San Diego Toros, 3-0, before a September home audience of almost 15,000.Motaung, 23 at the time, scored the last goal. He was named rookie of the year, and a season later, led the league in scoring. The Chiefs returned to the finals in his final year, in 1971, losing to Dallas.Fifty years on from the championship, he speaks with immense pride in what soccer has become in Atlanta.\u201cIt was wonderful memories that never get away from my mind because I enjoyed my stay in Atlanta,\u201d he said Friday via phone from Johannesburg. \u201cAt the time, I had never traveled outside the country, except the neighboring countries here. I had an ambition to play overseas, and this opportunity presented itself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"Atlanta will always be my second home.\u201dSo much so, when he created his own pro team back home in 1970, he named it after himself and his NASL employer: Kaizer Chiefs.\u201cActually, we stole the logo,\u201d he said with a laugh. \u201cI just wanted to keep that experience going on. We wanted to model ourselves against what my experiences were in Atlanta. It\u2019s always in our minds, where we came from.\u201dToday, Kaizer Chiefs is one of the most well-known clubs in Africa and one involved in a great world soccer derby with the crosstown Orlando Pirates. Home matches are played at FNB Stadium, site of the 2010 World Cup final.From afar, the Kaizer Chiefs\u2019 chairman \u2014 and a legendary figure in South Africa \u2014 has marveled at Atlanta United\u2019s instant success. Financed by Falcons owner Arthur Blank, the 2017 expansion team averaged 53,002 visitors this regular season, breaking the attendance mark it set last year (48,200).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe seven largest regular season turnouts in MLS history have occurred at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which opened last year and was designed with both the Falcons and United in mind. United plays most games in a downsized seating arrangement (about 45,000), but on occasion the team has opened the full arena.Most MLS teams draw on par with NBA and NHL teams; the league average attendance this year was 21,875.The NASL lasted 17 seasons. MLS is in its 23rd.\u201cI watched on CNN the other day that it\u2019s a very big soccer city,\u201d said Motaung, who has not visited Atlanta since his NASL days, which included two seasons in Denver. \u201cI am just amazed but also proud that we laid the foundation of soccer in the United States and particularly in Atlanta.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnother figure will fall Saturday, when United will set the MLS Cup record, currently held by New England, which sold out Gillette Stadium (61,316) in 2002. (Most MLS championship games since the inaugural 1996 season have been played in medium-sized stadiums.)AdvertisementAsked about the soccer boom in a much-maligned sports city, Blank told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: \u201cI\u2019ve never been part of the camp that said Atlanta was not a great sports town. I always believed if you put a great product on the field, you give the fans a great experience, that they will respond to that. ... There were some people who were skeptical, but I didn\u2019t give them a lot of audience.\u201dAtlanta United is also poised to bring something that has largely eluded the city for decades: a championship.Story continues below advertisementThe Falcons have lost in the Super Bowl twice, including their epic collapse against the Patriots two years ago. Since arriving from St. Louis in 1968, the Hawks have never advanced to the NBA Finals. The Braves won the World Series in 1995.The Atlanta Dream has lost in the WNBA Finals three times. Atlanta\u2019s defunct women\u2019s soccer team, the Beat, lost in the finals twice.AdvertisementThe Atlanta Chiefs became the Apollos in 1973 (owned by the Hawks) and soon dissolved. They reformed as the Chiefs for the 1979-81 seasons. After the 1984 campaign, the NASL was dead.On Saturday, Atlanta United will have a big fan 8,425 miles away. Reflecting on soccer\u2019s passage of time, Motaung said: \u201cIt definitely had a future because we would go to the schools and give a lot of coaching during our spare time. I was confident Atlanta and, in fact, soccer in the United States would grow bigger and bigger.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI want to wish the team well tomorrow. I hope they can do what we did.\u201d***MLS CupWho: Portland Timbers at Atlanta United.Where: Mercedes-Benz Stadium.When: Saturday, 8 p.m. EasternTV: Fox, UniMas.***Read more soccer coverage:D.C. United fans will have to learn to share Audi Field with XFL and other eventsFox Sports to debut corner flag cams at MLS CupJosef Martinez, record-setting goal scorer, is the MLS MVPA Maryland soccer player\u2019s field work: Preventing goals and saving frogsU.S. women\u2019s soccer team will take on tough schedule before World Cup Long before the team took the U.S. pro soccer league by storm, the Atlanta Chiefs won a championship with a future pioneer of African club soccer named Kaizer Motaung. With MLS Cup, Atlanta United caps an overnight success 50 years in the making",
        "author": "Steven Goff"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6023",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/21/nasamoonmars/",
        "text": "With SpaceX now responsible for flying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA is reorganizing to put a new emphasis on deep space, including setting up a new directorate to develop the technologies needed to pursue what would be some of the most ambitious missions NASA has ever attempted, including building a permanent presence on the moon and eventually Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the new directorate, known as Exploration Systems Development, will oversee the development of new tools, including habitats, rovers and propulsion systems, to help NASA push new frontiers.The success of the agency\u2019s partnership with a growing commercial space industry allows \u201cNASA to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore,\u201d Nelson said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA announced the creation of the new directorate at a town hall meeting with agency employees. Jim Free, a former associate NASA administrator, will run the new directorate. Kathy Lueders, who leads the agency\u2019s current Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, will run a second new directorate, to be known as Space Operations. It will oversee programs once they transition out of development, such as the space station, the commercialization of low Earth orbit, and, in the years to come, operations on the moon, NASA said in a statement.A reorientation of NASA operations has been anticipated, hastened by the success of SpaceX, which has been delivering cargo and supplies to the space station for years. Then last year, SpaceX flew the first mission of NASA astronauts to the space station, demonstrating that NASA no longer was the only player in getting astronauts to low Earth orbit. That reality was cemented last week, when SpaceX, the venture founded by Elon Musk, successfully flew four civilians on a three-day mission orbiting the Earth without any NASA involvement.Get the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories in a brief text message.In addition to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman flies cargo to the station. And Boeing is under contract to fly astronauts there, though it has stumbled badly with the development of its Starliner spacecraft and is years behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ability to depend on commercial enterprises for low-Earth undertakings frees NASA to devote more attention to more ambitious missions.\u201cIf you look out over the next two decades, what we have is a string of programs,\u201d Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re talking habitats, transportation systems like rovers. We\u2019re talking infrastructure like power, communications, resource extraction. \u2026 The scope of what we have stretching out ahead of us, it\u2019s very different than what we\u2019ve done in the past.\u201dNelson said the changes were made because the enterprise, from flying astronauts to the space station, to its Artemis program to get astronauts to the moon and then eventually to Mars, \u201cgot too big. One person can\u2019t do it all.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFree said that the two directorates will work together but that he will be looking ahead to future missions and harnessing the technology that would make them happen, from new forms of propulsion to in-space manufacturing and mining. But first the agency must be focused on returning humans to the moon under the Artemis program, Free said during the town hall.Advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s our focus, that\u2019s our responsibility,\u201d he said.\u201cThere\u2019s so much new technology that has to be developed for the moon and Mars, as well as cultivating the international partnerships that are going to be with us,\u201d Nelson said.The change is unlikely to be greeted enthusiastically by all, especially in an enterprise where mistakes can be deadly. Critics are likely to say that the move creates another level of bureaucracy, requiring a separate budget and new channels to lawmakers, industry leaders and international partners, as well as the potential for competition between the two directorates.Story continues below advertisementNelson said the changes are not a diminishment of Lueders\u2019s responsibilities but rather \u201can enhancement of the tremendous success that she\u2019s already achieved.\u201dLueders oversaw the contract to build a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon that NASA awarded to SpaceX earlier this year. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion, or twice as much as SpaceX, and lost out on the contract, has alleged the procurement was badly flawed. It protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, lost and has since filed a lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementThe litigation has forced NASA to stop work on the contract.Story continues below advertisementAt the town hall, she said she was looking forward to working with Free. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how excited I am to have a partner here,\u201d she said. \u201cI keep thinking two heads are better than one and, and this is going to be a lot of fun.\u201dThe Artemis moon program has already seen several delays, and getting astronauts to the surface by 2024, NASA\u2019s goal, is not likely to happen. But Nelson said that the first mission of the program, known as Artemis I, is on track to launch the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, which would orbit the moon later this year or early next. The mission would be the first flight of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System, which also has suffered years of delays.The second flight, Artemis II, would be a crewed mission around the moon by the end of 2023, or early 2024, he said. But he was less confident about the timeline for landing astronauts on the surface.\u201cObviously there have been delays,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of a legal cat fight right now. And who knows what\u2019s going to happen after the federal judge rules. So, am I still holding 2024 as a goal? Yes. Oh, but I\u2019m also realistic to know that there are a lot of things beyond our control.\u201d As commercial companies take over flights to low Earth orbit, the space agency is looking to deep space for its new mission. NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6024",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/21/nasamoonmars/",
        "text": "With SpaceX now responsible for flying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA is reorganizing to put a new emphasis on deep space, including setting up a new directorate to develop the technologies needed to pursue what would be some of the most ambitious missions NASA has ever attempted, including building a permanent presence on the moon and eventually Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the new directorate, known as Exploration Systems Development, will oversee the development of new tools, including habitats, rovers and propulsion systems, to help NASA push new frontiers.The success of the agency\u2019s partnership with a growing commercial space industry allows \u201cNASA to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore,\u201d Nelson said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA announced the creation of the new directorate at a town hall meeting with agency employees. Jim Free, a former associate NASA administrator, will run the new directorate. Kathy Lueders, who leads the agency\u2019s current Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, will run a second new directorate, to be known as Space Operations. It will oversee programs once they transition out of development, such as the space station, the commercialization of low Earth orbit, and, in the years to come, operations on the moon, NASA said in a statement.A reorientation of NASA operations has been anticipated, hastened by the success of SpaceX, which has been delivering cargo and supplies to the space station for years. Then last year, SpaceX flew the first mission of NASA astronauts to the space station, demonstrating that NASA no longer was the only player in getting astronauts to low Earth orbit. That reality was cemented last week, when SpaceX, the venture founded by Elon Musk, successfully flew four civilians on a three-day mission orbiting the Earth without any NASA involvement.Get the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories in a brief text message.In addition to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman flies cargo to the station. And Boeing is under contract to fly astronauts there, though it has stumbled badly with the development of its Starliner spacecraft and is years behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ability to depend on commercial enterprises for low-Earth undertakings frees NASA to devote more attention to more ambitious missions.\u201cIf you look out over the next two decades, what we have is a string of programs,\u201d Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re talking habitats, transportation systems like rovers. We\u2019re talking infrastructure like power, communications, resource extraction. \u2026 The scope of what we have stretching out ahead of us, it\u2019s very different than what we\u2019ve done in the past.\u201dNelson said the changes were made because the enterprise, from flying astronauts to the space station, to its Artemis program to get astronauts to the moon and then eventually to Mars, \u201cgot too big. One person can\u2019t do it all.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFree said that the two directorates will work together but that he will be looking ahead to future missions and harnessing the technology that would make them happen, from new forms of propulsion to in-space manufacturing and mining. But first the agency must be focused on returning humans to the moon under the Artemis program, Free said during the town hall.Advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s our focus, that\u2019s our responsibility,\u201d he said.\u201cThere\u2019s so much new technology that has to be developed for the moon and Mars, as well as cultivating the international partnerships that are going to be with us,\u201d Nelson said.The change is unlikely to be greeted enthusiastically by all, especially in an enterprise where mistakes can be deadly. Critics are likely to say that the move creates another level of bureaucracy, requiring a separate budget and new channels to lawmakers, industry leaders and international partners, as well as the potential for competition between the two directorates.Story continues below advertisementNelson said the changes are not a diminishment of Lueders\u2019s responsibilities but rather \u201can enhancement of the tremendous success that she\u2019s already achieved.\u201dLueders oversaw the contract to build a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon that NASA awarded to SpaceX earlier this year. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion, or twice as much as SpaceX, and lost out on the contract, has alleged the procurement was badly flawed. It protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, lost and has since filed a lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementThe litigation has forced NASA to stop work on the contract.Story continues below advertisementAt the town hall, she said she was looking forward to working with Free. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how excited I am to have a partner here,\u201d she said. \u201cI keep thinking two heads are better than one and, and this is going to be a lot of fun.\u201dThe Artemis moon program has already seen several delays, and getting astronauts to the surface by 2024, NASA\u2019s goal, is not likely to happen. But Nelson said that the first mission of the program, known as Artemis I, is on track to launch the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, which would orbit the moon later this year or early next. The mission would be the first flight of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System, which also has suffered years of delays.The second flight, Artemis II, would be a crewed mission around the moon by the end of 2023, or early 2024, he said. But he was less confident about the timeline for landing astronauts on the surface.\u201cObviously there have been delays,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of a legal cat fight right now. And who knows what\u2019s going to happen after the federal judge rules. So, am I still holding 2024 as a goal? Yes. Oh, but I\u2019m also realistic to know that there are a lot of things beyond our control.\u201d As commercial companies take over flights to low Earth orbit, the space agency is looking to deep space for its new mission. NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6025",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/21/nasamoonmars/",
        "text": "With SpaceX now responsible for flying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA is reorganizing to put a new emphasis on deep space, including setting up a new directorate to develop the technologies needed to pursue what would be some of the most ambitious missions NASA has ever attempted, including building a permanent presence on the moon and eventually Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the new directorate, known as Exploration Systems Development, will oversee the development of new tools, including habitats, rovers and propulsion systems, to help NASA push new frontiers.The success of the agency\u2019s partnership with a growing commercial space industry allows \u201cNASA to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore,\u201d Nelson said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA announced the creation of the new directorate at a town hall meeting with agency employees. Jim Free, a former associate NASA administrator, will run the new directorate. Kathy Lueders, who leads the agency\u2019s current Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, will run a second new directorate, to be known as Space Operations. It will oversee programs once they transition out of development, such as the space station, the commercialization of low Earth orbit, and, in the years to come, operations on the moon, NASA said in a statement.A reorientation of NASA operations has been anticipated, hastened by the success of SpaceX, which has been delivering cargo and supplies to the space station for years. Then last year, SpaceX flew the first mission of NASA astronauts to the space station, demonstrating that NASA no longer was the only player in getting astronauts to low Earth orbit. That reality was cemented last week, when SpaceX, the venture founded by Elon Musk, successfully flew four civilians on a three-day mission orbiting the Earth without any NASA involvement.Get the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories in a brief text message.In addition to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman flies cargo to the station. And Boeing is under contract to fly astronauts there, though it has stumbled badly with the development of its Starliner spacecraft and is years behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ability to depend on commercial enterprises for low-Earth undertakings frees NASA to devote more attention to more ambitious missions.\u201cIf you look out over the next two decades, what we have is a string of programs,\u201d Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re talking habitats, transportation systems like rovers. We\u2019re talking infrastructure like power, communications, resource extraction. \u2026 The scope of what we have stretching out ahead of us, it\u2019s very different than what we\u2019ve done in the past.\u201dNelson said the changes were made because the enterprise, from flying astronauts to the space station, to its Artemis program to get astronauts to the moon and then eventually to Mars, \u201cgot too big. One person can\u2019t do it all.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFree said that the two directorates will work together but that he will be looking ahead to future missions and harnessing the technology that would make them happen, from new forms of propulsion to in-space manufacturing and mining. But first the agency must be focused on returning humans to the moon under the Artemis program, Free said during the town hall.Advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s our focus, that\u2019s our responsibility,\u201d he said.\u201cThere\u2019s so much new technology that has to be developed for the moon and Mars, as well as cultivating the international partnerships that are going to be with us,\u201d Nelson said.The change is unlikely to be greeted enthusiastically by all, especially in an enterprise where mistakes can be deadly. Critics are likely to say that the move creates another level of bureaucracy, requiring a separate budget and new channels to lawmakers, industry leaders and international partners, as well as the potential for competition between the two directorates.Story continues below advertisementNelson said the changes are not a diminishment of Lueders\u2019s responsibilities but rather \u201can enhancement of the tremendous success that she\u2019s already achieved.\u201dLueders oversaw the contract to build a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon that NASA awarded to SpaceX earlier this year. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion, or twice as much as SpaceX, and lost out on the contract, has alleged the procurement was badly flawed. It protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, lost and has since filed a lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementThe litigation has forced NASA to stop work on the contract.Story continues below advertisementAt the town hall, she said she was looking forward to working with Free. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how excited I am to have a partner here,\u201d she said. \u201cI keep thinking two heads are better than one and, and this is going to be a lot of fun.\u201dThe Artemis moon program has already seen several delays, and getting astronauts to the surface by 2024, NASA\u2019s goal, is not likely to happen. But Nelson said that the first mission of the program, known as Artemis I, is on track to launch the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, which would orbit the moon later this year or early next. The mission would be the first flight of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System, which also has suffered years of delays.The second flight, Artemis II, would be a crewed mission around the moon by the end of 2023, or early 2024, he said. But he was less confident about the timeline for landing astronauts on the surface.\u201cObviously there have been delays,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of a legal cat fight right now. And who knows what\u2019s going to happen after the federal judge rules. So, am I still holding 2024 as a goal? Yes. Oh, but I\u2019m also realistic to know that there are a lot of things beyond our control.\u201d As commercial companies take over flights to low Earth orbit, the space agency is looking to deep space for its new mission. NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6026",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/21/nasamoonmars/",
        "text": "With SpaceX now responsible for flying cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA is reorganizing to put a new emphasis on deep space, including setting up a new directorate to develop the technologies needed to pursue what would be some of the most ambitious missions NASA has ever attempted, including building a permanent presence on the moon and eventually Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the new directorate, known as Exploration Systems Development, will oversee the development of new tools, including habitats, rovers and propulsion systems, to help NASA push new frontiers.The success of the agency\u2019s partnership with a growing commercial space industry allows \u201cNASA to get out of low Earth orbit and go explore,\u201d Nelson said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA announced the creation of the new directorate at a town hall meeting with agency employees. Jim Free, a former associate NASA administrator, will run the new directorate. Kathy Lueders, who leads the agency\u2019s current Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, will run a second new directorate, to be known as Space Operations. It will oversee programs once they transition out of development, such as the space station, the commercialization of low Earth orbit, and, in the years to come, operations on the moon, NASA said in a statement.A reorientation of NASA operations has been anticipated, hastened by the success of SpaceX, which has been delivering cargo and supplies to the space station for years. Then last year, SpaceX flew the first mission of NASA astronauts to the space station, demonstrating that NASA no longer was the only player in getting astronauts to low Earth orbit. That reality was cemented last week, when SpaceX, the venture founded by Elon Musk, successfully flew four civilians on a three-day mission orbiting the Earth without any NASA involvement.Get the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories in a brief text message.In addition to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman flies cargo to the station. And Boeing is under contract to fly astronauts there, though it has stumbled badly with the development of its Starliner spacecraft and is years behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ability to depend on commercial enterprises for low-Earth undertakings frees NASA to devote more attention to more ambitious missions.\u201cIf you look out over the next two decades, what we have is a string of programs,\u201d Pam Melroy, NASA deputy administrator, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re talking habitats, transportation systems like rovers. We\u2019re talking infrastructure like power, communications, resource extraction. \u2026 The scope of what we have stretching out ahead of us, it\u2019s very different than what we\u2019ve done in the past.\u201dNelson said the changes were made because the enterprise, from flying astronauts to the space station, to its Artemis program to get astronauts to the moon and then eventually to Mars, \u201cgot too big. One person can\u2019t do it all.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFree said that the two directorates will work together but that he will be looking ahead to future missions and harnessing the technology that would make them happen, from new forms of propulsion to in-space manufacturing and mining. But first the agency must be focused on returning humans to the moon under the Artemis program, Free said during the town hall.Advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s our focus, that\u2019s our responsibility,\u201d he said.\u201cThere\u2019s so much new technology that has to be developed for the moon and Mars, as well as cultivating the international partnerships that are going to be with us,\u201d Nelson said.The change is unlikely to be greeted enthusiastically by all, especially in an enterprise where mistakes can be deadly. Critics are likely to say that the move creates another level of bureaucracy, requiring a separate budget and new channels to lawmakers, industry leaders and international partners, as well as the potential for competition between the two directorates.Story continues below advertisementNelson said the changes are not a diminishment of Lueders\u2019s responsibilities but rather \u201can enhancement of the tremendous success that she\u2019s already achieved.\u201dLueders oversaw the contract to build a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon that NASA awarded to SpaceX earlier this year. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion, or twice as much as SpaceX, and lost out on the contract, has alleged the procurement was badly flawed. It protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, lost and has since filed a lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementThe litigation has forced NASA to stop work on the contract.Story continues below advertisementAt the town hall, she said she was looking forward to working with Free. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how excited I am to have a partner here,\u201d she said. \u201cI keep thinking two heads are better than one and, and this is going to be a lot of fun.\u201dThe Artemis moon program has already seen several delays, and getting astronauts to the surface by 2024, NASA\u2019s goal, is not likely to happen. But Nelson said that the first mission of the program, known as Artemis I, is on track to launch the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, which would orbit the moon later this year or early next. The mission would be the first flight of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System, which also has suffered years of delays.The second flight, Artemis II, would be a crewed mission around the moon by the end of 2023, or early 2024, he said. But he was less confident about the timeline for landing astronauts on the surface.\u201cObviously there have been delays,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of a legal cat fight right now. And who knows what\u2019s going to happen after the federal judge rules. So, am I still holding 2024 as a goal? Yes. Oh, but I\u2019m also realistic to know that there are a lot of things beyond our control.\u201d As commercial companies take over flights to low Earth orbit, the space agency is looking to deep space for its new mission. NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronauts (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6027",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/13/shatner-blue-origin-space-tourism/",
        "text": "William Shatner, who as Capt. James T. Kirk on the TV series \u201cStar Trek\u201d flew in the USS Enterprise around the galaxy, on Wednesday reached the edge of space on a more modest quest and on a far less capable spacecraft \u2014 but on a mission that had the distinct advantage of being real. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightShatner and three other passengers lifted off at 10:49 a.m. Eastern time from a launch site in West Texas owned and operated by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company. The launch was the venture\u2019s second human spaceflight mission, and it came three months after Bezos himself flew to space on his company\u2019s New Shepard rocket.Lasting just more than 10 minutes, the autonomous vehicle, named for Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, climbed to a height of about 66 miles, four miles beyond one measurement of what is generally considered the edge of space. Aloft and free-floating above the Earth, the crew took in views of the planet below and the dark skies beyond while they experienced weightlessness for a few minutes.The love affair between Jeff Bezos and Star TrekThe capsule then touched down under parachutes in the desert as the company celebrated what appeared to be another successful mission. Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to have visited space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the mission, an emotional and philosophical Shatner rhapsodized about the experience to Bezos, who greeted the crew at the landing site and opened the spacecraft\u2019s hatch. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Shatner compared tearing through the blue sky on the rocket to whipping a comfortable blanket off in the morning. \u201cAnd you\u2019re staring into blackness,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing.\u201dThe line of the atmosphere, \u201cwhich is keeping us alive, is thinner than your skin,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a sliver. It\u2019s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe.\u201dThe contrast of the bright colorful Earth and the inky vastness above was a metaphor for life and death, he said. \u201cWhat you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,\u201d he told Bezos. \u201cI\u2019m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope I maintain what I feel now. I don\u2019t want to lose it.\u201dThe launch became part of a historic year in which the number of private astronauts who have reached space outnumber those sent to space by NASA, the start of a new dynamic that is beginning to open up space to ordinary people.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itShatner\u2019s flight was the sixth human spaceflight mission this year carrying civilian astronauts who have not received government training. Earlier this year, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic flew its space plane to the edge of space twice \u2014 once in May with a pair of pilots, and a second in July with Branson himself, three other passengers and two pilots.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLess than two weeks after Branson\u2019s flight, Blue Origin flew Bezos and three others to the edge of space. Last month, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew the Inspiration4 mission, which carried a crew of four amateur astronauts into orbit, where they stayed for three days inside the Dragon spacecraft.And earlier this month, Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko lifted off on a Russian rocket to shoot scenes for a film while aboard the International Space Station.Get the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories in a brief text message.If all goes to plan, there could be as many as nine flights this year with amateur astronauts on board. Virgin Galactic has said it\u2019s planning one more, as is Blue Origin, and Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and an assistant \u2014 who would document the flight \u2014 are scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz to the ISS. (More private astronaut missions are scheduled for next year, and Axiom Space plans to fly a crew of four to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the completion of Shatner\u2019s flight, 21 private citizens have been to space so far this year. (Virgin Galactic pilot Dave Mackay has been twice.) And more than a dozen other private astronauts could reach space by the end of the year, bringing the total to more than 30, depending on how many fill the seats of future flights and if they go off on schedule.NASA, by contrast, planned just two human spaceflight missions this year on SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft. It flew a crew of four in April and has another flight scheduled for Oct. 30 that will also carry a four-member crew to the space station.Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?\u201cI think, in 50 years, we\u2019ll look back at this year and go, \u2018This was the beginning of actually the public\u2019s movement into space and the opening up of the space frontier,\u2019 \u201d Chris Boshuizen, one of the passengers on Wednesday\u2019s flight, told Fox Business Network this week. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s a really exciting time to be doing this with this crew.\u201dOn Blue Origin\u2019s second spaceflight mission, Shatner was joined by Audrey Powers, who oversees the New Shepard program as vice president of mission and flight operations, and was a former flight controller at NASA. Also on the flight were two paying customers: Boshuizen, the co-founder of Planet, which deploys Earth observation satellites, and Glen de Vries, the co-founder of Medidata Solutions, which uses technology to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies.It\u2019s unclear how much they paid. Blue Origin is selling seats on its first flights to people who participated in an auction for a seat on the first flight before beginning regular ticket sales. (Virgin Galactic charges $450,000 for a seat on its suborbital space tourism flights.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight comes as Blue Origin has faced allegations that its culture is toxic and its leadership is out of touch. Some women complained to The Post that they were subjected to condescending remarks that at times verged on harassment.The company has said it takes all claims of harassment very seriously, investigates them and fires people when appropriate. It also said that the safety of the New Shepard system is rigorously tested and safe.\u201cSafety has always been our top priority,\u201d Powers told \u201cCBS This Morning\u201d this week.A former company official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, was very critical of the company\u2019s culture and leadership. But the person agreed that Blue Origin has thoroughly tested the system. \u201cI would fly on it in a heartbeat,\u201d the person said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the flight, Shatner said he was looking forward to the flight, joking in a video clip posted by Boshuizen on Twitter on Tuesday: \u201cI\u2019m so ready, I\u2019m thinking of jumping out of the capsule at apogee. That\u2019s how ready I am.\u201dIn another clip posted by Blue Origin, Shatner said he couldn\u2019t wait to see Earth from above, \u201cto see this gem, this warm, loving, nourishing planet.\u201d\u201cI plan to be looking out the window with my nose pressed against the window,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only thing I don\u2019t want to see is a little gremlin looking back at me.\u201d The actor joined a private space movement that has picked up speed and outpaced NASA. William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronauts",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronauts (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6028",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/13/shatner-blue-origin-space-tourism/",
        "text": "William Shatner, who as Capt. James T. Kirk on the TV series \u201cStar Trek\u201d flew in the USS Enterprise around the galaxy, on Wednesday reached the edge of space on a more modest quest and on a far less capable spacecraft \u2014 but on a mission that had the distinct advantage of being real. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightShatner and three other passengers lifted off at 10:49 a.m. Eastern time from a launch site in West Texas owned and operated by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company. The launch was the venture\u2019s second human spaceflight mission, and it came three months after Bezos himself flew to space on his company\u2019s New Shepard rocket.Lasting just more than 10 minutes, the autonomous vehicle, named for Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, climbed to a height of about 66 miles, four miles beyond one measurement of what is generally considered the edge of space. Aloft and free-floating above the Earth, the crew took in views of the planet below and the dark skies beyond while they experienced weightlessness for a few minutes.The love affair between Jeff Bezos and Star TrekThe capsule then touched down under parachutes in the desert as the company celebrated what appeared to be another successful mission. Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to have visited space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the mission, an emotional and philosophical Shatner rhapsodized about the experience to Bezos, who greeted the crew at the landing site and opened the spacecraft\u2019s hatch. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Shatner compared tearing through the blue sky on the rocket to whipping a comfortable blanket off in the morning. \u201cAnd you\u2019re staring into blackness,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing.\u201dThe line of the atmosphere, \u201cwhich is keeping us alive, is thinner than your skin,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a sliver. It\u2019s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe.\u201dThe contrast of the bright colorful Earth and the inky vastness above was a metaphor for life and death, he said. \u201cWhat you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,\u201d he told Bezos. \u201cI\u2019m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope I maintain what I feel now. I don\u2019t want to lose it.\u201dThe launch became part of a historic year in which the number of private astronauts who have reached space outnumber those sent to space by NASA, the start of a new dynamic that is beginning to open up space to ordinary people.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itShatner\u2019s flight was the sixth human spaceflight mission this year carrying civilian astronauts who have not received government training. Earlier this year, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic flew its space plane to the edge of space twice \u2014 once in May with a pair of pilots, and a second in July with Branson himself, three other passengers and two pilots.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLess than two weeks after Branson\u2019s flight, Blue Origin flew Bezos and three others to the edge of space. Last month, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew the Inspiration4 mission, which carried a crew of four amateur astronauts into orbit, where they stayed for three days inside the Dragon spacecraft.And earlier this month, Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko lifted off on a Russian rocket to shoot scenes for a film while aboard the International Space Station.Get the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories in a brief text message.If all goes to plan, there could be as many as nine flights this year with amateur astronauts on board. Virgin Galactic has said it\u2019s planning one more, as is Blue Origin, and Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and an assistant \u2014 who would document the flight \u2014 are scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz to the ISS. (More private astronaut missions are scheduled for next year, and Axiom Space plans to fly a crew of four to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the completion of Shatner\u2019s flight, 21 private citizens have been to space so far this year. (Virgin Galactic pilot Dave Mackay has been twice.) And more than a dozen other private astronauts could reach space by the end of the year, bringing the total to more than 30, depending on how many fill the seats of future flights and if they go off on schedule.NASA, by contrast, planned just two human spaceflight missions this year on SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft. It flew a crew of four in April and has another flight scheduled for Oct. 30 that will also carry a four-member crew to the space station.Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?\u201cI think, in 50 years, we\u2019ll look back at this year and go, \u2018This was the beginning of actually the public\u2019s movement into space and the opening up of the space frontier,\u2019 \u201d Chris Boshuizen, one of the passengers on Wednesday\u2019s flight, told Fox Business Network this week. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s a really exciting time to be doing this with this crew.\u201dOn Blue Origin\u2019s second spaceflight mission, Shatner was joined by Audrey Powers, who oversees the New Shepard program as vice president of mission and flight operations, and was a former flight controller at NASA. Also on the flight were two paying customers: Boshuizen, the co-founder of Planet, which deploys Earth observation satellites, and Glen de Vries, the co-founder of Medidata Solutions, which uses technology to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies.It\u2019s unclear how much they paid. Blue Origin is selling seats on its first flights to people who participated in an auction for a seat on the first flight before beginning regular ticket sales. (Virgin Galactic charges $450,000 for a seat on its suborbital space tourism flights.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight comes as Blue Origin has faced allegations that its culture is toxic and its leadership is out of touch. Some women complained to The Post that they were subjected to condescending remarks that at times verged on harassment.The company has said it takes all claims of harassment very seriously, investigates them and fires people when appropriate. It also said that the safety of the New Shepard system is rigorously tested and safe.\u201cSafety has always been our top priority,\u201d Powers told \u201cCBS This Morning\u201d this week.A former company official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, was very critical of the company\u2019s culture and leadership. But the person agreed that Blue Origin has thoroughly tested the system. \u201cI would fly on it in a heartbeat,\u201d the person said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the flight, Shatner said he was looking forward to the flight, joking in a video clip posted by Boshuizen on Twitter on Tuesday: \u201cI\u2019m so ready, I\u2019m thinking of jumping out of the capsule at apogee. That\u2019s how ready I am.\u201dIn another clip posted by Blue Origin, Shatner said he couldn\u2019t wait to see Earth from above, \u201cto see this gem, this warm, loving, nourishing planet.\u201d\u201cI plan to be looking out the window with my nose pressed against the window,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only thing I don\u2019t want to see is a little gremlin looking back at me.\u201d The actor joined a private space movement that has picked up speed and outpaced NASA. William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronauts",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronauts (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6029",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/13/shatner-blue-origin-space-tourism/",
        "text": "William Shatner, who as Capt. James T. Kirk on the TV series \u201cStar Trek\u201d flew in the USS Enterprise around the galaxy, on Wednesday reached the edge of space on a more modest quest and on a far less capable spacecraft \u2014 but on a mission that had the distinct advantage of being real. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightShatner and three other passengers lifted off at 10:49 a.m. Eastern time from a launch site in West Texas owned and operated by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company. The launch was the venture\u2019s second human spaceflight mission, and it came three months after Bezos himself flew to space on his company\u2019s New Shepard rocket.Lasting just more than 10 minutes, the autonomous vehicle, named for Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space, climbed to a height of about 66 miles, four miles beyond one measurement of what is generally considered the edge of space. Aloft and free-floating above the Earth, the crew took in views of the planet below and the dark skies beyond while they experienced weightlessness for a few minutes.The love affair between Jeff Bezos and Star TrekThe capsule then touched down under parachutes in the desert as the company celebrated what appeared to be another successful mission. Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to have visited space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the mission, an emotional and philosophical Shatner rhapsodized about the experience to Bezos, who greeted the crew at the landing site and opened the spacecraft\u2019s hatch. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Shatner compared tearing through the blue sky on the rocket to whipping a comfortable blanket off in the morning. \u201cAnd you\u2019re staring into blackness,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing.\u201dThe line of the atmosphere, \u201cwhich is keeping us alive, is thinner than your skin,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a sliver. It\u2019s immeasurably small when you think in terms of the universe.\u201dThe contrast of the bright colorful Earth and the inky vastness above was a metaphor for life and death, he said. \u201cWhat you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,\u201d he told Bezos. \u201cI\u2019m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope I maintain what I feel now. I don\u2019t want to lose it.\u201dThe launch became part of a historic year in which the number of private astronauts who have reached space outnumber those sent to space by NASA, the start of a new dynamic that is beginning to open up space to ordinary people.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itShatner\u2019s flight was the sixth human spaceflight mission this year carrying civilian astronauts who have not received government training. Earlier this year, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic flew its space plane to the edge of space twice \u2014 once in May with a pair of pilots, and a second in July with Branson himself, three other passengers and two pilots.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLess than two weeks after Branson\u2019s flight, Blue Origin flew Bezos and three others to the edge of space. Last month, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew the Inspiration4 mission, which carried a crew of four amateur astronauts into orbit, where they stayed for three days inside the Dragon spacecraft.And earlier this month, Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko lifted off on a Russian rocket to shoot scenes for a film while aboard the International Space Station.Get the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories in a brief text message.If all goes to plan, there could be as many as nine flights this year with amateur astronauts on board. Virgin Galactic has said it\u2019s planning one more, as is Blue Origin, and Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and an assistant \u2014 who would document the flight \u2014 are scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz to the ISS. (More private astronaut missions are scheduled for next year, and Axiom Space plans to fly a crew of four to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the completion of Shatner\u2019s flight, 21 private citizens have been to space so far this year. (Virgin Galactic pilot Dave Mackay has been twice.) And more than a dozen other private astronauts could reach space by the end of the year, bringing the total to more than 30, depending on how many fill the seats of future flights and if they go off on schedule.NASA, by contrast, planned just two human spaceflight missions this year on SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft. It flew a crew of four in April and has another flight scheduled for Oct. 30 that will also carry a four-member crew to the space station.Billionaires in space: The launch of a dream or just out-of-this-world ego?\u201cI think, in 50 years, we\u2019ll look back at this year and go, \u2018This was the beginning of actually the public\u2019s movement into space and the opening up of the space frontier,\u2019 \u201d Chris Boshuizen, one of the passengers on Wednesday\u2019s flight, told Fox Business Network this week. \u201cSo I think it\u2019s a really exciting time to be doing this with this crew.\u201dOn Blue Origin\u2019s second spaceflight mission, Shatner was joined by Audrey Powers, who oversees the New Shepard program as vice president of mission and flight operations, and was a former flight controller at NASA. Also on the flight were two paying customers: Boshuizen, the co-founder of Planet, which deploys Earth observation satellites, and Glen de Vries, the co-founder of Medidata Solutions, which uses technology to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies.It\u2019s unclear how much they paid. Blue Origin is selling seats on its first flights to people who participated in an auction for a seat on the first flight before beginning regular ticket sales. (Virgin Galactic charges $450,000 for a seat on its suborbital space tourism flights.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight comes as Blue Origin has faced allegations that its culture is toxic and its leadership is out of touch. Some women complained to The Post that they were subjected to condescending remarks that at times verged on harassment.The company has said it takes all claims of harassment very seriously, investigates them and fires people when appropriate. It also said that the safety of the New Shepard system is rigorously tested and safe.\u201cSafety has always been our top priority,\u201d Powers told \u201cCBS This Morning\u201d this week.A former company official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, was very critical of the company\u2019s culture and leadership. But the person agreed that Blue Origin has thoroughly tested the system. \u201cI would fly on it in a heartbeat,\u201d the person said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the flight, Shatner said he was looking forward to the flight, joking in a video clip posted by Boshuizen on Twitter on Tuesday: \u201cI\u2019m so ready, I\u2019m thinking of jumping out of the capsule at apogee. That\u2019s how ready I am.\u201dIn another clip posted by Blue Origin, Shatner said he couldn\u2019t wait to see Earth from above, \u201cto see this gem, this warm, loving, nourishing planet.\u201d\u201cI plan to be looking out the window with my nose pressed against the window,\u201d he said. \u201cThe only thing I don\u2019t want to see is a little gremlin looking back at me.\u201d The actor joined a private space movement that has picked up speed and outpaced NASA. William Shatner, Star Trek\u2019s Capt. Kirk, flies to space and back, adding to this year\u2019s number of civilian astronauts",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shakeup at NASA as space agency scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6030",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/shakeup-nasa-space-agency-scrambles-meet-trump-moon-mandate/",
        "text": "William Gerstenmaier, a NASA veteran, was removed Wednesday as head of the agency\u2019s human exploration office, a sudden move that comes as the agency is seeking to restore a human-space-flight program and return astronauts to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGerstenmaier, who served at the agency since 1977, had been in charge of some of NASA\u2019s most high-profile programs and is known as a steady and methodical force at the agency\u2019s headquarters. Known as \u201cGerst,\u201d he was working alongside Boeing and SpaceX as they developed spacecraft capable of ferrying NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station. He was also leading the effort to return astronauts to the moon, which had become a priority for the Trump administration.Story continues below advertisementIn an email to employees obtained by The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Gerstenmaier would become a special assistant to Jim Morhard, the deputy administrator.AdvertisementThe White House has shown frustration with the pace of getting U.S. astronauts to the moon, and with some of the problems that have plagued NASA\u2019s marquee efforts, including the massive rocket it is building, known as the Space Launch System, which is years behind schedule and way over budget.Vice President Pence this year directed NASA to speed up dramatically its return to the moon \u2014 by four years, to 2024 \u2014 a move that took many in the agency by surprise.In a speech in March, he took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying the agency \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization. If NASA\u2019s not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the United States needed a renewed sense of urgency to compete with powers such as China. \u201cIt\u2019s not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dAdvertisementIn the email to NASA employees sent Wednesday evening, Bridenstine wrote: \u201cAs you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars. In an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.\u201dHe said that Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut, who had served as the deputy associate administrator for the human exploration office, would take over in an acting capacity.Bill Hill, who had served with Gerstenmaier as deputy associate administrator in the human exploration office, was also reassigned. He will be a special adviser to Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator.  Shakeup at NASA as space agency scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shakeup at NASA as space agency scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6031",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/shakeup-nasa-space-agency-scrambles-meet-trump-moon-mandate/",
        "text": "William Gerstenmaier, a NASA veteran, was removed Wednesday as head of the agency\u2019s human exploration office, a sudden move that comes as the agency is seeking to restore a human-space-flight program and return astronauts to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGerstenmaier, who served at the agency since 1977, had been in charge of some of NASA\u2019s most high-profile programs and is known as a steady and methodical force at the agency\u2019s headquarters. Known as \u201cGerst,\u201d he was working alongside Boeing and SpaceX as they developed spacecraft capable of ferrying NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station. He was also leading the effort to return astronauts to the moon, which had become a priority for the Trump administration.Story continues below advertisementIn an email to employees obtained by The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Gerstenmaier would become a special assistant to Jim Morhard, the deputy administrator.AdvertisementThe White House has shown frustration with the pace of getting U.S. astronauts to the moon, and with some of the problems that have plagued NASA\u2019s marquee efforts, including the massive rocket it is building, known as the Space Launch System, which is years behind schedule and way over budget.Vice President Pence this year directed NASA to speed up dramatically its return to the moon \u2014 by four years, to 2024 \u2014 a move that took many in the agency by surprise.In a speech in March, he took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying the agency \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization. If NASA\u2019s not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the United States needed a renewed sense of urgency to compete with powers such as China. \u201cIt\u2019s not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dAdvertisementIn the email to NASA employees sent Wednesday evening, Bridenstine wrote: \u201cAs you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars. In an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.\u201dHe said that Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut, who had served as the deputy associate administrator for the human exploration office, would take over in an acting capacity.Bill Hill, who had served with Gerstenmaier as deputy associate administrator in the human exploration office, was also reassigned. He will be a special adviser to Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator.  Shakeup at NASA as space agency scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shakeup at NASA as space agency scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6032",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/shakeup-nasa-space-agency-scrambles-meet-trump-moon-mandate/",
        "text": "William Gerstenmaier, a NASA veteran, was removed Wednesday as head of the agency\u2019s human exploration office, a sudden move that comes as the agency is seeking to restore a human-space-flight program and return astronauts to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGerstenmaier, who served at the agency since 1977, had been in charge of some of NASA\u2019s most high-profile programs and is known as a steady and methodical force at the agency\u2019s headquarters. Known as \u201cGerst,\u201d he was working alongside Boeing and SpaceX as they developed spacecraft capable of ferrying NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station. He was also leading the effort to return astronauts to the moon, which had become a priority for the Trump administration.Story continues below advertisementIn an email to employees obtained by The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Gerstenmaier would become a special assistant to Jim Morhard, the deputy administrator.AdvertisementThe White House has shown frustration with the pace of getting U.S. astronauts to the moon, and with some of the problems that have plagued NASA\u2019s marquee efforts, including the massive rocket it is building, known as the Space Launch System, which is years behind schedule and way over budget.Vice President Pence this year directed NASA to speed up dramatically its return to the moon \u2014 by four years, to 2024 \u2014 a move that took many in the agency by surprise.In a speech in March, he took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying the agency \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization. If NASA\u2019s not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the United States needed a renewed sense of urgency to compete with powers such as China. \u201cIt\u2019s not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dAdvertisementIn the email to NASA employees sent Wednesday evening, Bridenstine wrote: \u201cAs you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars. In an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.\u201dHe said that Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut, who had served as the deputy associate administrator for the human exploration office, would take over in an acting capacity.Bill Hill, who had served with Gerstenmaier as deputy associate administrator in the human exploration office, was also reassigned. He will be a special adviser to Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator.  Shakeup at NASA as space agency scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "In wide-ranging interview, Bill Nelson lays out his vision for NASA (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6033",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/11/bill-nelson-nasa-interview/",
        "text": "While in the Senate, Bill Nelson held enormous sway over NASA, helping guide its budget and priorities \u2014 from picking who the NASA administrator would be, to overseeing the end of the space shuttle era, to paving the way for what was to follow. As a member of the House, he even flew to space on the shuttle in 1986. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, as NASA administrator himself, Nelson will continue to guide and shape an agency he adores \u2014 this time from the inside. But to achieve the goals he is beginning to lay out for the agency \u2014 landing the first astronauts on the moon in more than 50 years, launching the James Webb space telescope, continuing safe and reliable astronaut flights to the space station as well as planning for its successor \u2014 he will need the help and support of Congress and the members he used to call colleagues.For years, conventional wisdom was that the NASA administrator needed to be an engineer or a scientist, someone who deeply understood orbital dynamics and planetary science.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson, who was sworn in by Vice President Harris last week, is at his core a politician, like his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine, who was a member of Congress before leading the space agency under President Donald Trump.Bridenstine spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill, about a half-mile from NASA\u2019s Washington headquarters. He lobbied members to support the Artemis program to send astronauts to the moon and give the agency the money it needed to pull off the feat.Nelson, too, will try to use his political acumen and connections to help NASA achieve its goals.In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Nelson said he plans to spend much of his time and energy on the Hill and has already started reaching out to the congressional leaders who oversee NASA and its budget.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI had innumerable conversations with them leading up to the confirmation hearing,\u201d he said. But he added, \u201cI\u2019m afraid that the expectations are going to be so high that they expect me to be a Merlin the magician with the Congress and the White House.\u201dAdvertisementHis confirmation hearing last month went about as smoothly and swiftly as they go, with Nelson earning praise and adulation from Republicans and Democrats alike. He was introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison, the former Republican Senator from Texas.In the interview, he said he\u2019ll push the agency to land astronauts on the moon by 2024. But he added that \u201cspace is hard, and we know that because space is hard, sometimes there are delays. I hope not. But you\u2019ve got to have a hard dose of reality.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn Sunday, Nelson chided China for allowing a rocket booster to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere uncontrollably, a potentially dangerous situation, though the rocket stage debris fell harmlessly into the Indian Ocean.\u201cSpacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,\u201d he said in a statement. \u201cIt is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris.\u201dAdvertisementNelson reiterated the criticism Tuesday and said that rockets \u201cought to reserve enough fuel so that they\u2019ve got some kind of controlled reentry. And that\u2019s what the Chinese didn\u2019t do on this.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA on Tuesday confirmed that the Chinese booster came within about 180 miles of the International Space Station, though it emphasized that the two spacecraft were never on a collision course. In a statement to The Post, NASA said the astronauts on board the station \u201cwere never in danger\u201d and that the ISS \u201ccould have adjusted its orbit up or down if a potential [collision] was a concern.\u201dStill, they were close enough that Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, tweeted that it was \u201ca tad alarming.\u201d The U.S. Space Command, which had been tracking the Chinese booster, declined to comment and referred questions to NASA.AdvertisementAnother major challenge for Nelson will be the lunar lander contract NASA recently awarded that almost immediately created controversy.Story continues below advertisementThe $2.9 billion contract went to SpaceX to develop a spacecraft to fly astronauts to the lunar surface. But that award has been protested by the losing bidders, Blue Origin and Dynetics, and work on the contract has to cease while litigation plays out.\u201cIf the bid is overturned, of course, then you start the whole process again,\u201d he said.Either way, Nelson said he is committed to funding another spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon so that the agency is not reliant on a single provider. In awarding the sole contract to SpaceX, NASA officials said they simply did not have enough funding from Congress to award a second contract, as they had planned. In future missions to the moon, however, the agency has said it would award two contracts so that there is competition between bidders that would drive down cost, as well as ensuring there is a backup in case one of the companies stumbles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut getting that money will be a challenge.\u201cWhat I have to do is to try to get the Congress to come up with the funds so that you can have a vigorous competition for all the other flights,\u201d he said. NASA had requested more than $3 billion for this year to fund the lunar lander program but received just $850 million.\u201cYou\u2019ve got to have a lot more if you\u2019re going to have a vigorous competition,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cSo I have some work that I have to do.\u201dHe said he was pleased to see progress being made on the giant Space Launch System rocket that is intended to launch the next lunar mission. The rocket has been beset by years of setbacks, delays and cost overruns but recently had a successful test of its engines and was shipped to the Kennedy Space Center last month to prepare for its first launch, either later this year or early next. Nelson called the successful test \u201cvery, very important.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for the Gateway, the small space station NASA is planning to put in orbit around the moon, Nelson said he needed to review the program. \u201cGive me some time,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve only been here a week. But having said that, contracts have already been awarded for the Gateway.\u201dNelson also said he would push to fund the International Space Station past its current authorization through 2024. He\u2019s advocated for the authorization to last until 2030 and that a commercial space station \u2014 not one built and managed by the government \u2014 should replace it.\u201cI think that\u2019s a natural follow-on,\u201d he said, adding he believes a private station could be ready if the ISS is extended to 2030.\u201cThat\u2019s another nine years,\u201d he said. \u201cLook at the warp speed with which technology is being developed.\u201d Nelson tells The Washington Post he plans to spend much of his time and energy lobbying Congress for the money to land astronauts on the moon. In wide-ranging interview, Bill Nelson lays out his vision for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "In wide-ranging interview, Bill Nelson lays out his vision for NASA (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6034",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/11/bill-nelson-nasa-interview/",
        "text": "While in the Senate, Bill Nelson held enormous sway over NASA, helping guide its budget and priorities \u2014 from picking who the NASA administrator would be, to overseeing the end of the space shuttle era, to paving the way for what was to follow. As a member of the House, he even flew to space on the shuttle in 1986. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, as NASA administrator himself, Nelson will continue to guide and shape an agency he adores \u2014 this time from the inside. But to achieve the goals he is beginning to lay out for the agency \u2014 landing the first astronauts on the moon in more than 50 years, launching the James Webb space telescope, continuing safe and reliable astronaut flights to the space station as well as planning for its successor \u2014 he will need the help and support of Congress and the members he used to call colleagues.For years, conventional wisdom was that the NASA administrator needed to be an engineer or a scientist, someone who deeply understood orbital dynamics and planetary science.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson, who was sworn in by Vice President Harris last week, is at his core a politician, like his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine, who was a member of Congress before leading the space agency under President Donald Trump.Bridenstine spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill, about a half-mile from NASA\u2019s Washington headquarters. He lobbied members to support the Artemis program to send astronauts to the moon and give the agency the money it needed to pull off the feat.Nelson, too, will try to use his political acumen and connections to help NASA achieve its goals.In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Nelson said he plans to spend much of his time and energy on the Hill and has already started reaching out to the congressional leaders who oversee NASA and its budget.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI had innumerable conversations with them leading up to the confirmation hearing,\u201d he said. But he added, \u201cI\u2019m afraid that the expectations are going to be so high that they expect me to be a Merlin the magician with the Congress and the White House.\u201dAdvertisementHis confirmation hearing last month went about as smoothly and swiftly as they go, with Nelson earning praise and adulation from Republicans and Democrats alike. He was introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison, the former Republican Senator from Texas.In the interview, he said he\u2019ll push the agency to land astronauts on the moon by 2024. But he added that \u201cspace is hard, and we know that because space is hard, sometimes there are delays. I hope not. But you\u2019ve got to have a hard dose of reality.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn Sunday, Nelson chided China for allowing a rocket booster to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere uncontrollably, a potentially dangerous situation, though the rocket stage debris fell harmlessly into the Indian Ocean.\u201cSpacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,\u201d he said in a statement. \u201cIt is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris.\u201dAdvertisementNelson reiterated the criticism Tuesday and said that rockets \u201cought to reserve enough fuel so that they\u2019ve got some kind of controlled reentry. And that\u2019s what the Chinese didn\u2019t do on this.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA on Tuesday confirmed that the Chinese booster came within about 180 miles of the International Space Station, though it emphasized that the two spacecraft were never on a collision course. In a statement to The Post, NASA said the astronauts on board the station \u201cwere never in danger\u201d and that the ISS \u201ccould have adjusted its orbit up or down if a potential [collision] was a concern.\u201dStill, they were close enough that Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, tweeted that it was \u201ca tad alarming.\u201d The U.S. Space Command, which had been tracking the Chinese booster, declined to comment and referred questions to NASA.AdvertisementAnother major challenge for Nelson will be the lunar lander contract NASA recently awarded that almost immediately created controversy.Story continues below advertisementThe $2.9 billion contract went to SpaceX to develop a spacecraft to fly astronauts to the lunar surface. But that award has been protested by the losing bidders, Blue Origin and Dynetics, and work on the contract has to cease while litigation plays out.\u201cIf the bid is overturned, of course, then you start the whole process again,\u201d he said.Either way, Nelson said he is committed to funding another spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon so that the agency is not reliant on a single provider. In awarding the sole contract to SpaceX, NASA officials said they simply did not have enough funding from Congress to award a second contract, as they had planned. In future missions to the moon, however, the agency has said it would award two contracts so that there is competition between bidders that would drive down cost, as well as ensuring there is a backup in case one of the companies stumbles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut getting that money will be a challenge.\u201cWhat I have to do is to try to get the Congress to come up with the funds so that you can have a vigorous competition for all the other flights,\u201d he said. NASA had requested more than $3 billion for this year to fund the lunar lander program but received just $850 million.\u201cYou\u2019ve got to have a lot more if you\u2019re going to have a vigorous competition,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cSo I have some work that I have to do.\u201dHe said he was pleased to see progress being made on the giant Space Launch System rocket that is intended to launch the next lunar mission. The rocket has been beset by years of setbacks, delays and cost overruns but recently had a successful test of its engines and was shipped to the Kennedy Space Center last month to prepare for its first launch, either later this year or early next. Nelson called the successful test \u201cvery, very important.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for the Gateway, the small space station NASA is planning to put in orbit around the moon, Nelson said he needed to review the program. \u201cGive me some time,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve only been here a week. But having said that, contracts have already been awarded for the Gateway.\u201dNelson also said he would push to fund the International Space Station past its current authorization through 2024. He\u2019s advocated for the authorization to last until 2030 and that a commercial space station \u2014 not one built and managed by the government \u2014 should replace it.\u201cI think that\u2019s a natural follow-on,\u201d he said, adding he believes a private station could be ready if the ISS is extended to 2030.\u201cThat\u2019s another nine years,\u201d he said. \u201cLook at the warp speed with which technology is being developed.\u201d Nelson tells The Washington Post he plans to spend much of his time and energy lobbying Congress for the money to land astronauts on the moon. In wide-ranging interview, Bill Nelson lays out his vision for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examination  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6035",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/18/boeing-faced-only-limited-safety-review-nasa-while-spacex-got-full-examination/",
        "text": "When NASA confirmed last year that it would conduct a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies it had hired to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, a top agency official said it would be \u201cpretty invasive,\u201d involving hundreds of interviews with employees at every level of the companies at multiple locations. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSuch an in-depth probe of the corporate cultures would be time-consuming and expensive, requiring modifications to the contracts awarded to the companies. Ultimately, NASA agreed to pay SpaceX $5 million for its review, and it proceeded.Boeing, however, said such a review would require an additional payment of about $25 million, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. NASA balked at the cost and decided that a far more limited paper audit would suffice, along with a few interviews of key personnel, according to four agency and industry officials familiar with the matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Organizational Safety Assessments, as they are officially known, were triggered after Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, was seen taking a hit of marijuana and a sip of whisky during an interview streamed on the Internet late last year. NASA officials were more concerned about SpaceX, a relative newcomer founded by Musk in 2002, than they were about Boeing, which had worked alongside NASA since the dawn of the Space Age and had been a key partner of the federal government for even longer.\u201cBoeing didn\u2019t do anything to trigger a deeper dive,\u201d said one official, who like others was not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.NASA to launch safety review of SpaceX and Boeing after video of Elon Musk smoking pot rankled agency leadersBut it remains an open question whether that history will continue to protect Boeing in the wake of recent safety failings, especially the two crashes of Boeing\u2019s 737 Max airplane that killed 346 people. Members of Congress have accused Boeing of prioritizing profits over safety, and multiple reviews of the crashes have led to concerns that the deference federal regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration showed Boeing led to lax oversight that allowed Boeing to cut corners on safety.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has blasted the company for what he called \u201ca lack of candor with regulators and customers.\u201dHe said the 737 Max issue was \u201cnot about one employee; this is about a failure of a safety culture at Boeing in which undue pressure is placed on employees to meet deadlines and ensure profitability at the expense of safety.\u201dBoeing has defended its relationship with the FAA, while recently acknowledging it must \u201crestore the confidence of our customers and the flying public in Boeing,\u201d according to a senior executive.Boeing has shown an ability to leverage its relationship with NASA. In 2014, it was awarded a contract worth $4.2 billion to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. (SpaceX\u2019s award was $2.6 billion.) But even though the award was part of a \u201cfirm fixed price contract,\u201d Boeing was able to win an additional $287.2 million from the space agency in what a government watchdog recently said were \u201cunnecessary\u201d payments.Boeing faces a significant setback with the spacecraft it is designing to fly NASA astronautsNASA \u201cessentially paid Boeing higher prices to address a schedule slippage caused by Boeing\u2019s 13-month delay\u201d in completing a key design milestone, according to a report by NASA\u2019s inspector general. But the IG said the \u201cadditional compensation was unnecessary\u201d given that the risk of a gap between flights was \u201cminimal.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe IG found that Boeing\u2019s cost per seat for launches to the space station would be $90 million, or more than 60 percent higher than SpaceX\u2019s $55 million price.NASA and Boeing pushed back forcefully against the IG\u2019s conclusion, saying the additional costs were justified and that Boeing was forced to shoulder more of the costs up front.In a brief interview recently, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Boeing\u2019s problems with the 737 Max were separate from issues that have arisen in its work for NASA. Boeing, he said, \u201cis a big company. They do a lot of different things. \u2026 I don\u2019t want to suggest that the challenges with the 737 Max has implications on\u201d its work for the space program.SpaceX and Boeing continue to struggle with spacecraft designs, as watchdog raises safety concernsBut Boeing\u2019s space division is not immune from deficiencies that might affect flight safety. For example, last year propellant leaked during a test of Boeing\u2019s emergency abort system. Boeing determined why the leak had occurred, and the leak did not recur in a subsequent test.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHowever, earlier this month, another test of the emergency abort system encountered a different problem when only two of the capsule\u2019s three parachutes deployed. The uncrewed capsule made a soft return to Earth with just the two chutes, and NASA and Boeing declared the test a success. But the reason the third parachute didn\u2019t deploy was a human one: Someone had failed to notice that a smaller chute had not been hooked to the larger main chute it was designed to pull out.Boeing said the lapse hadn\u2019t been spotted because the point at which the two chutes were supposed to be latched together was hidden from view inside a housing.At the time the safety reviews were announced last year, Musk\u2019s behavior had rankled top NASA officials, who worried about the message Musk\u2019s public alcohol and marijuana consumption would send about how the company would enforce workplace safety and a drug-free environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine said then that he had \u201ca lot of confidence in the SpaceX team.\u201d But he added that \u201cculture and leadership start at the top. Anything that would result in some questioning the culture of safety, we need to fix immediately.\u201d\u201cIf I see something that\u2019s inappropriate, the key concern to me is what is the culture that led to that in appropriateness, and is NASA involved in that?\u201d he said. \u201cAs an agency, we\u2019re not just leading ourselves, but our contractors as well. We need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut in a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe.\u201dMusk responded to NASA\u2019s concerns by sending an email to SpaceX employees in which he admitted smoking pot \u201cwith no skill, obviously\u201d and said that \u201cit was not wise.\u201d He reiterated that while marijuana is legal in California, it is controlled by federal law. \u201cSpaceX maintains a drug free workplace,\u201d he wrote in the email, a copy of which The Washington Post obtained.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpaceX personnel may not use or posses any controlled substance while in the workplace, and also may not be under the influence of legal or illegal drugs while at work,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cAnyone who appears to be inebriated or under the influence while at work is subject to drug testing and potentially other employment actions.\u201dAstronauts make harrowing escape, but Russian rocket failure roils NASANASA and SpaceX reached terms on the safety review, which NASA spokesman Josh Finch, in a statement to The Post, called \u201ca comprehensive safety review through individual employee interviews.\u201dFinch said NASA officials went up and down the company, interviewing all kinds of employees about training, drug policies and safety procedures. The examination was exhaustive, \u201cincluding senior managers, mid-level management and supervision, and engineers and technicians at multiple sites,\u201d Finch said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, recently told reporters that the review was wrapping up. She said the \u201cresults came back very positive.\u201d\u201cI can tell you, it has gone very well,\u201d she said. \u201cNot that we haven\u2019t learned things, but it\u2019s gone very well.\u201dShe added that the company has an anonymous tip line called \u201csafety net\u201d for employees to report safety concerns.\u201cI think it makes sense actually to have these reviews. We had never undergone this kind of review before, but we are incredibly focused on safety. When an employee gets hurt at work, morale on the team goes down,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cPoor safety is horrible business.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor Boeing, however, the review had a far more limited scope, Finch said: a review of documents to ensure it was enforcing a drug-free workplace \u201cand a limited number of interviews with company personnel.\u201dAdvertisementFurther details about how the SpaceX and Boeing safety reviews differed were not available. NASA declined to make available to The Post copies of the \u201crequest for proposal\u201d it had prepared for Boeing or SpaceX laying out the extent of the safety check it originally proposed, calling the RFPs \u201cproprietary.\u201dIt was that proposal that Boeing used to seek the additional $25 million for the review and that NASA declined to pay.In a statement, Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher said, \u201cWe deeply appreciate NASA\u2019s trust in us.\u201d\u201cNASA has decades of insight into Boeing\u2019s commitment to safety,\u201d the statement said. \u201cNASA therefore had confidence that Boeing\u2019s assessment could be completed with fewer in-person interviews and detailed document requests than seems to be the case for our competitor.\u201d NASA had ordered the review after SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk smoked pot Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examination ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examination  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6036",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/18/boeing-faced-only-limited-safety-review-nasa-while-spacex-got-full-examination/",
        "text": "When NASA confirmed last year that it would conduct a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies it had hired to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, a top agency official said it would be \u201cpretty invasive,\u201d involving hundreds of interviews with employees at every level of the companies at multiple locations. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSuch an in-depth probe of the corporate cultures would be time-consuming and expensive, requiring modifications to the contracts awarded to the companies. Ultimately, NASA agreed to pay SpaceX $5 million for its review, and it proceeded.Boeing, however, said such a review would require an additional payment of about $25 million, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. NASA balked at the cost and decided that a far more limited paper audit would suffice, along with a few interviews of key personnel, according to four agency and industry officials familiar with the matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Organizational Safety Assessments, as they are officially known, were triggered after Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, was seen taking a hit of marijuana and a sip of whisky during an interview streamed on the Internet late last year. NASA officials were more concerned about SpaceX, a relative newcomer founded by Musk in 2002, than they were about Boeing, which had worked alongside NASA since the dawn of the Space Age and had been a key partner of the federal government for even longer.\u201cBoeing didn\u2019t do anything to trigger a deeper dive,\u201d said one official, who like others was not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.NASA to launch safety review of SpaceX and Boeing after video of Elon Musk smoking pot rankled agency leadersBut it remains an open question whether that history will continue to protect Boeing in the wake of recent safety failings, especially the two crashes of Boeing\u2019s 737 Max airplane that killed 346 people. Members of Congress have accused Boeing of prioritizing profits over safety, and multiple reviews of the crashes have led to concerns that the deference federal regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration showed Boeing led to lax oversight that allowed Boeing to cut corners on safety.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has blasted the company for what he called \u201ca lack of candor with regulators and customers.\u201dHe said the 737 Max issue was \u201cnot about one employee; this is about a failure of a safety culture at Boeing in which undue pressure is placed on employees to meet deadlines and ensure profitability at the expense of safety.\u201dBoeing has defended its relationship with the FAA, while recently acknowledging it must \u201crestore the confidence of our customers and the flying public in Boeing,\u201d according to a senior executive.Boeing has shown an ability to leverage its relationship with NASA. In 2014, it was awarded a contract worth $4.2 billion to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. (SpaceX\u2019s award was $2.6 billion.) But even though the award was part of a \u201cfirm fixed price contract,\u201d Boeing was able to win an additional $287.2 million from the space agency in what a government watchdog recently said were \u201cunnecessary\u201d payments.Boeing faces a significant setback with the spacecraft it is designing to fly NASA astronautsNASA \u201cessentially paid Boeing higher prices to address a schedule slippage caused by Boeing\u2019s 13-month delay\u201d in completing a key design milestone, according to a report by NASA\u2019s inspector general. But the IG said the \u201cadditional compensation was unnecessary\u201d given that the risk of a gap between flights was \u201cminimal.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe IG found that Boeing\u2019s cost per seat for launches to the space station would be $90 million, or more than 60 percent higher than SpaceX\u2019s $55 million price.NASA and Boeing pushed back forcefully against the IG\u2019s conclusion, saying the additional costs were justified and that Boeing was forced to shoulder more of the costs up front.In a brief interview recently, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Boeing\u2019s problems with the 737 Max were separate from issues that have arisen in its work for NASA. Boeing, he said, \u201cis a big company. They do a lot of different things. \u2026 I don\u2019t want to suggest that the challenges with the 737 Max has implications on\u201d its work for the space program.SpaceX and Boeing continue to struggle with spacecraft designs, as watchdog raises safety concernsBut Boeing\u2019s space division is not immune from deficiencies that might affect flight safety. For example, last year propellant leaked during a test of Boeing\u2019s emergency abort system. Boeing determined why the leak had occurred, and the leak did not recur in a subsequent test.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHowever, earlier this month, another test of the emergency abort system encountered a different problem when only two of the capsule\u2019s three parachutes deployed. The uncrewed capsule made a soft return to Earth with just the two chutes, and NASA and Boeing declared the test a success. But the reason the third parachute didn\u2019t deploy was a human one: Someone had failed to notice that a smaller chute had not been hooked to the larger main chute it was designed to pull out.Boeing said the lapse hadn\u2019t been spotted because the point at which the two chutes were supposed to be latched together was hidden from view inside a housing.At the time the safety reviews were announced last year, Musk\u2019s behavior had rankled top NASA officials, who worried about the message Musk\u2019s public alcohol and marijuana consumption would send about how the company would enforce workplace safety and a drug-free environment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine said then that he had \u201ca lot of confidence in the SpaceX team.\u201d But he added that \u201cculture and leadership start at the top. Anything that would result in some questioning the culture of safety, we need to fix immediately.\u201d\u201cIf I see something that\u2019s inappropriate, the key concern to me is what is the culture that led to that in appropriateness, and is NASA involved in that?\u201d he said. \u201cAs an agency, we\u2019re not just leading ourselves, but our contractors as well. We need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut in a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe.\u201dMusk responded to NASA\u2019s concerns by sending an email to SpaceX employees in which he admitted smoking pot \u201cwith no skill, obviously\u201d and said that \u201cit was not wise.\u201d He reiterated that while marijuana is legal in California, it is controlled by federal law. \u201cSpaceX maintains a drug free workplace,\u201d he wrote in the email, a copy of which The Washington Post obtained.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpaceX personnel may not use or posses any controlled substance while in the workplace, and also may not be under the influence of legal or illegal drugs while at work,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cAnyone who appears to be inebriated or under the influence while at work is subject to drug testing and potentially other employment actions.\u201dAstronauts make harrowing escape, but Russian rocket failure roils NASANASA and SpaceX reached terms on the safety review, which NASA spokesman Josh Finch, in a statement to The Post, called \u201ca comprehensive safety review through individual employee interviews.\u201dFinch said NASA officials went up and down the company, interviewing all kinds of employees about training, drug policies and safety procedures. The examination was exhaustive, \u201cincluding senior managers, mid-level management and supervision, and engineers and technicians at multiple sites,\u201d Finch said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, recently told reporters that the review was wrapping up. She said the \u201cresults came back very positive.\u201d\u201cI can tell you, it has gone very well,\u201d she said. \u201cNot that we haven\u2019t learned things, but it\u2019s gone very well.\u201dShe added that the company has an anonymous tip line called \u201csafety net\u201d for employees to report safety concerns.\u201cI think it makes sense actually to have these reviews. We had never undergone this kind of review before, but we are incredibly focused on safety. When an employee gets hurt at work, morale on the team goes down,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cPoor safety is horrible business.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor Boeing, however, the review had a far more limited scope, Finch said: a review of documents to ensure it was enforcing a drug-free workplace \u201cand a limited number of interviews with company personnel.\u201dAdvertisementFurther details about how the SpaceX and Boeing safety reviews differed were not available. NASA declined to make available to The Post copies of the \u201crequest for proposal\u201d it had prepared for Boeing or SpaceX laying out the extent of the safety check it originally proposed, calling the RFPs \u201cproprietary.\u201dIt was that proposal that Boeing used to seek the additional $25 million for the review and that NASA declined to pay.In a statement, Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher said, \u201cWe deeply appreciate NASA\u2019s trust in us.\u201d\u201cNASA has decades of insight into Boeing\u2019s commitment to safety,\u201d the statement said. \u201cNASA therefore had confidence that Boeing\u2019s assessment could be completed with fewer in-person interviews and detailed document requests than seems to be the case for our competitor.\u201d NASA had ordered the review after SpaceX\u2019s Elon Musk smoked pot Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examination ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virginia has a rocket launch site, and it\u2019s about to grow with the most successful startup since SpaceX  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6037",
        "date": "2020-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/02/virginia-has-rocket-launch-site-its-about-grow-with-most-successful-startup-since-spacex/",
        "text": "WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. \u2014 Over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, down past Chincoteague toward the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, sits an isolated spit of shoreline, near a wildlife refuge, that is home to one of the most unusual, and little known, rocket launch sites in the country.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBorn as a Navy air station during World War II, it has launched more than 16,000 rockets, most of them small sounding vehicles used for scientific research. But the Wallops Flight Facility, which at the dawn of the Space Age played a role as a test site for the Mercury program, is about to reinvent itself at a time when the commercial space industry is booming and spreading beyond the confines of Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral. After the Federal Aviation Administration last month granted Rocket Lab, a commercial launch company, a license to fly its small Electron rocket from the facility, Wallops could soon see a significant increase in launches as the company joins Northrop Grumman in launching from this remote site. While Rocket Lab is largely focused on national security missions, Northrop Grumman launches its Antares rocket to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station on cargo resupply missions at a rate of about two a year, including a picture-perfect launch from the Virginia coast Friday at 9:16 p.m. Northrop also launches its Minotaur rocket from Wallops.Rocket Lab wants to launch to orbit as frequently as once a month from Wallops, which would make the facility the second busiest launch site in the country, behind Cape Canaveral, which is on track to fly 39 rockets to orbit this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHoping to give birth to another rocket hub on the Eastern Seaboard, the state of Virginia has over the last 25 years pumped some $250 million into what it calls the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, most of that coming in the last decade, said Dale Nash, the agency\u2019s CEO and executive director of Virginia Space. NASA has also made some significant upgrades to the site, including a $15.7 million mission operations control center, which opened in 2018.The state also contributed to the $15 million it took to repair a launchpad after an Antares rocket exploded in 2014.On Oct. 28, 2014, a rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station blew up in Wallops Island, Va., just seconds after liftoff. (The Washington Post)The efforts paid off when Rocket Lab, perhaps the most successful space upstart since Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, announced last year it would launch its Electron rocket from here. Once NASA signs off on the company\u2019s autonomous flight abort system, it should be cleared to launch, with a mission coming potentially before the end of the year.Initially, Rocket Lab looked at Cape Canaveral, of course. But there are already a lot of big companies stationed there \u2014 Boeing, the United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is renovating a pad there while building a massive manufacturing facility nearby. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cWe ran a competitive process,\u201d Peter Beck, Rocket Lab\u2019s chief executive, said in an interview. In the end, Wallops was the winner because it had a facility nearby where the company could process its payloads, get the satellites ready for launch and then mate them to a rocket quickly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe whole facility is designed for rapid launch,\u201d Beck said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s a real requirement out there right now from our national security and national defense forces, to have an ability to respond to threats quickly.\u201dThe company plans to keep at least one rocket on site at all times so if they get the call, \u201cwe can roll out to the pad incredibly quickly and get assets on orbit.\u201dRocket Lab\u2019s Electron may be a pipsqueak of a rocket, a mere 60 feet tall, about a quarter of the size of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, but the company hopes it will be a workhorse, launching once a month from here, in flights that should be visible up and down the Mid-Atlantic.Story continues below advertisementIt already has had 14 successful launches to orbit, all from its launch site in New Zealand, earning a reputation for quick turnaround in an industry where getting rockets ready to fly was once a months-long endeavor. The Pentagon has taken notice. So has NASA.AdvertisementThe space agency has hired Rocket Lab to launch a small satellite to the moon to serve as a precursor for human missions by testing the orbit for the space station NASA hopes will help get astronauts to the lunar surface. That mission, scheduled for next year, would be the first NASA mission to the moon since the 2013 launch of a satellite \u2014 also launched from Wallops \u2014 that gathered data about the thin lunar atmosphere.The moon mission would be a major milestone for Wallops and Rocket Lab, which has taken a clear lead in a race to build small, relatively affordable launch vehicles that could fly small satellites to orbit frequently and on short notice. That is of particular interest to the Pentagon and intelligence community, which has long wanted the ability to quickly launch a reconnaissance satellite over, say, North Korea.Story continues below advertisementInstead of launching large, expensive satellites that stay on orbit for years and are targets for potential adversaries, the Pentagon is also interested in putting up swarms of smaller, inexpensive satellites that could be easily replaced.AdvertisementThe Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put on a competition between companies to see if any could launch payloads to orbit within days of each other from two different launch sites. The DARPA Launch Challenge, as it was called, ended earlier this year without a winner. But the Pentagon has vowed to press on.\u201cFlexible and responsive launch is critical for the Defense Department and its desire for space resilience, and the challenge has advanced the growth of what is now a more capable launch marketplace to meet those needs than what we saw just two years ago,\u201d Todd Master, DARPA\u2019s program manager, said at the time.Story continues below advertisementAs those capabilities grow and the newly established Space Force takes shape, officials hope Wallops, about 170 miles southeast of the Pentagon, could play a significant role.An Orbital ATK rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to the International Space Station on Nov. 12, 2017. (Reuters)While the number of launches now are relatively low, the cadence could grow dramatically, especially as Rocket Lab gets going. And Gen. John \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, has made it clear the department wants to rely heavily on the private sector.\u201cWe have developed a significant amount of partnerships in the national security space business,\u201d he said during a recent event sponsored by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Like NASA, he said, \u201cWe share some of those partners. We share an industrial base.\u201dWallops wants to position itself to capitalize on the growth. Though space is tight, there is some room to grow. \u201cWe\u2019re like New York City; we can get a few more launchpads close together in here,\u201d Nash said. \u201cWe\u2019re urbanizing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne launch a month will not be a big deal,\u201d Nash said. \u201cOnce a week, once we get going, won\u2019t be a big deal either. \u2026 We have the capability to grow to 50 or 60 launches a year.\u201dRichard Branson has also gotten into the small rocket business, founding a company called Virgin Orbit that would launch a small rocket by dropping it from the wing of a 747 airplane. But while the space industry has made strides, there are still more failures than successes, especially in the early attempts to build small rockets.In July, Rocket Lab had a major setback when one of its Electron rockets failed to reach orbit. The company quickly found the cause of the problem, a bad electrical connection, fixed it and launched successfully in August in a remarkably fast return to flight.Story continues below advertisementWhile others have gone bankrupt, Rocket Lab has been the unlikely success story. Founded by Beck in 2006 with money raised by venture capitalists, it has been able to move with alacrity from design to build to launch and has a significant backlog of launches that made Beck decide it needed a second launchpad in the United States for government customers.AdvertisementThe goal of the company is to launch its small and relatively inexpensive rockets much more frequently with on-demand efficiency that would allow defense and intelligence agencies to get satellites into orbit fast, and for cheap: dedicated launches start at $7.5 million.Rocket Lab\u2019s two-stage rocket is made of a carbon composite material, and all of the primary components of the nine Rutherford engines that power its first stage are 3-D printed, the company said.Story continues below advertisementLike SpaceX, Rocket Lab intends to recover its first stages so they can be reused for future flights. Initially, Beck said, the company planned to ditch its rockets in the ocean, as had been the practice for decades. Recovering such small vehicles wasn\u2019t worth the effort, he thought.\u201cBoy, was I wrong on that one,\u201d he said.After flying the vehicle a few times and getting a better sense of how it performed, Beck decided the company should attempt to reuse them \u2014 a decision he said would make the company more efficient.Advertisement\u201cThere was a moment when I was standing in the factory, and we\u2019ve got Electrons coming down the production line,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I thought, \u2018How could I double this production in the shortest time possible?\u2019 And really, the easiest thing to do was just not throw it away.\u201dInstead of flying the boosters back to land and then firing the engines to slow it down, as SpaceX does, Rocket Lab is going to have its booster deploy a parachute to slow it down as it falls back through the atmosphere. Then it would have a helicopter grapple it with a hook.It successfully tested the method with a prototype in April and plans to try to catch a first stage by the end of this year.In addition to the NASA moon mission, Beck has long been intrigued with Venus. Even before the announcement last month that scientists had discovered phosphine, a molecule that could be produced by living organisms, in Venus\u2019 atmosphere, the company had been planning to send a probe there to look for signs of life.The mission tentatively scheduled for 2023 would be largely self-funded and launch most likely from New Zealand, but it could be yet another coup for the company.\u201cIf you can prove that there is life on Venus, then it\u2019s fair to assume that life is not unique but likely prolific throughout the universe,\u201d Beck wrote on Twitter. \u201cThat\u2019s my view anyway.\u201d Over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, down past Chincoteague toward the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, sits an isolated spit of shoreline, near a wildlife refuge, that is home to one of the most unusual, and little known, rocket launch sites in the country. Virginia has a rocket launch site, and it\u2019s about to grow with the most successful startup since SpaceX ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five years (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6038",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/26/pence-calls-nasa-send-humans-moon-within-five-years/",
        "text": "Vice President Pence on Tuesday called for American astronauts to return to the lunar surface within five years, a bold and exceedingly difficult challenge that would push NASA to its limits.In a fiery speech in Huntsville, Ala., Pence repeatedly said the space agency needs to act with a renewed sense of urgency to land humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. And he cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as Russia and China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon earlier this year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic firstBut most of all, Pence said NASA and its major programs have been stifled by a crippling bureaucracy that prevented the agency from moving more boldly in human exploration.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d Pence said. \u201cWe're also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dAdvertisementPence did not provide details on how the agency would achieve landing humans on the moon in the five-year time frame, a monumental goal NASA had been hoping to achieve by 2028. He provided no details on the cost or how the mission would unfold. He added that he had learned the details of NASA\u2019s plans only five minutes before stepping onstage.NASA did not immediately respond to a request for more details about the plan or how it would be funded.NASA wants to get to the moon \u2018as fast as possible.\u2019 But countries like China and India are racing there, too.In his speech, which came during the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Pence took a shot at the rocket NASA is developing, known as the Space Launch System. With Boeing as the prime contractor, the rocket is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.Story continues below advertisementRecently, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate hearing that its first flight was going to be once again delayed, and, as a result, the agency would look at sidelining it in favor of commercial rockets.AdvertisementCompanies such as SpaceX, the United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are all developing new rockets that, while not as capable as the SLS is designed to be, would be less expensive. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, founded Blue Origin.)Pence doubled down on the idea of bypassing the SLS Tuesday, lamenting how the program has \u201cbeen plagued by bureaucratic inertia, by what some call the paralysis of analysis.\u201d He said he was saddened to hear that the first flight of the rocket would be pushed to 2021.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNow that would be 18 years after the SLS program was started and 11 years after the president of the United States directed NASA to return American astronauts to the moon,\u201d Pence said. \u201cLadies and gentlemen, that\u2019s just not good enough.\u201dHe also took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying the agency \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization. If NASA\u2019s not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dAdvertisementIn the space community, the announcement was greeted warmly for challenging the status quo and pushing NASA to move faster.Companies in the cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new space age\u201cIt was a sense of urgency that enabled the Apollo missions to successfully land on the Moon the first time,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA who now runs the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThis same urgency is what it will take to accomplish a successful mission to the Moon in the future -- and this call for a specific landing date has that sense of purpose and urgency.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPhilip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, also applauded the fast timeline, but said that \u201cfive years is very challenging. I\u2019m not sure it can be done. But it\u2019s a good goal.\u201dPence\u2019s speech comes at a time of increased activity and competition in space. The White House has pushed the creation of a Space Force to help the military combat potential adversaries in orbit. Earlier this year, China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon and plans to return another spacecraft later this year. India and Israel also plan to land spacecraft on the moon this year.AdvertisementThe White House, however, has been looking to make a big splash in space, hoping to send an Orion spacecraft without crew in a trip around the moon in this presidential term. The administration\u2019s plan calls for landing of humans on the moon in a second term, should President Trump be reelected.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, the Coalition for Deep Space exploration, a consortium of aerospace companies, said that while it supports \"aggressive timelines and goals, we also are cognizant of the resources that will be required to meet these objectives. Bold plans must be matched by bold resources made available in a consistent manner in order to assure successful execution.\u201dIt\u2019s not clear, though, how NASA intends to pull off a human landing in five years. Its current plan is to build what\u2019s called a Gateway, an outpost that would orbit around the moon. It\u2019s also unclear what rocket the agency would use. The SLS has been under fire for its delays and cost overruns. And Pence indicated the agency would look at alternatives, if need be.Advertisement\u201cIf commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets will be,\u201d Pence said. \u201c \u2018Urgency\u2019 must be our watchword. Failure to achieve our goal to return an American astronaut to the moon in the next five years is not an option.\u201dBridenstine said he believed that Boeing and the other contractors, working alongside NASA, could accelerate the schedule so that SLS could be launched in 2020. And he said the agency was dedicated to meeting the White House\u2019s goal.\u201cOur agency is going to do everything in its power to meet that vision, to meet that deadline,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe got it loud and clear.\u201d The vice president said if NASA cannot pull off the monumental feat, \"we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201d Pence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five years (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6039",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/26/pence-calls-nasa-send-humans-moon-within-five-years/",
        "text": "Vice President Pence on Tuesday called for American astronauts to return to the lunar surface within five years, a bold and exceedingly difficult challenge that would push NASA to its limits.In a fiery speech in Huntsville, Ala., Pence repeatedly said the space agency needs to act with a renewed sense of urgency to land humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. And he cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as Russia and China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon earlier this year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic firstBut most of all, Pence said NASA and its major programs have been stifled by a crippling bureaucracy that prevented the agency from moving more boldly in human exploration.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d Pence said. \u201cWe're also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dAdvertisementPence did not provide details on how the agency would achieve landing humans on the moon in the five-year time frame, a monumental goal NASA had been hoping to achieve by 2028. He provided no details on the cost or how the mission would unfold. He added that he had learned the details of NASA\u2019s plans only five minutes before stepping onstage.NASA did not immediately respond to a request for more details about the plan or how it would be funded.NASA wants to get to the moon \u2018as fast as possible.\u2019 But countries like China and India are racing there, too.In his speech, which came during the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Pence took a shot at the rocket NASA is developing, known as the Space Launch System. With Boeing as the prime contractor, the rocket is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.Story continues below advertisementRecently, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate hearing that its first flight was going to be once again delayed, and, as a result, the agency would look at sidelining it in favor of commercial rockets.AdvertisementCompanies such as SpaceX, the United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are all developing new rockets that, while not as capable as the SLS is designed to be, would be less expensive. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, founded Blue Origin.)Pence doubled down on the idea of bypassing the SLS Tuesday, lamenting how the program has \u201cbeen plagued by bureaucratic inertia, by what some call the paralysis of analysis.\u201d He said he was saddened to hear that the first flight of the rocket would be pushed to 2021.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNow that would be 18 years after the SLS program was started and 11 years after the president of the United States directed NASA to return American astronauts to the moon,\u201d Pence said. \u201cLadies and gentlemen, that\u2019s just not good enough.\u201dHe also took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying the agency \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization. If NASA\u2019s not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dAdvertisementIn the space community, the announcement was greeted warmly for challenging the status quo and pushing NASA to move faster.Companies in the cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new space age\u201cIt was a sense of urgency that enabled the Apollo missions to successfully land on the Moon the first time,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA who now runs the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThis same urgency is what it will take to accomplish a successful mission to the Moon in the future -- and this call for a specific landing date has that sense of purpose and urgency.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPhilip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, also applauded the fast timeline, but said that \u201cfive years is very challenging. I\u2019m not sure it can be done. But it\u2019s a good goal.\u201dPence\u2019s speech comes at a time of increased activity and competition in space. The White House has pushed the creation of a Space Force to help the military combat potential adversaries in orbit. Earlier this year, China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon and plans to return another spacecraft later this year. India and Israel also plan to land spacecraft on the moon this year.AdvertisementThe White House, however, has been looking to make a big splash in space, hoping to send an Orion spacecraft without crew in a trip around the moon in this presidential term. The administration\u2019s plan calls for landing of humans on the moon in a second term, should President Trump be reelected.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, the Coalition for Deep Space exploration, a consortium of aerospace companies, said that while it supports \"aggressive timelines and goals, we also are cognizant of the resources that will be required to meet these objectives. Bold plans must be matched by bold resources made available in a consistent manner in order to assure successful execution.\u201dIt\u2019s not clear, though, how NASA intends to pull off a human landing in five years. Its current plan is to build what\u2019s called a Gateway, an outpost that would orbit around the moon. It\u2019s also unclear what rocket the agency would use. The SLS has been under fire for its delays and cost overruns. And Pence indicated the agency would look at alternatives, if need be.Advertisement\u201cIf commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets will be,\u201d Pence said. \u201c \u2018Urgency\u2019 must be our watchword. Failure to achieve our goal to return an American astronaut to the moon in the next five years is not an option.\u201dBridenstine said he believed that Boeing and the other contractors, working alongside NASA, could accelerate the schedule so that SLS could be launched in 2020. And he said the agency was dedicated to meeting the White House\u2019s goal.\u201cOur agency is going to do everything in its power to meet that vision, to meet that deadline,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe got it loud and clear.\u201d The vice president said if NASA cannot pull off the monumental feat, \"we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201d Pence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five years (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6040",
        "date": "2019-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/26/pence-calls-nasa-send-humans-moon-within-five-years/",
        "text": "Vice President Pence on Tuesday called for American astronauts to return to the lunar surface within five years, a bold and exceedingly difficult challenge that would push NASA to its limits.In a fiery speech in Huntsville, Ala., Pence repeatedly said the space agency needs to act with a renewed sense of urgency to land humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. And he cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as Russia and China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon earlier this year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina lands spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic firstBut most of all, Pence said NASA and its major programs have been stifled by a crippling bureaucracy that prevented the agency from moving more boldly in human exploration.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt's not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d Pence said. \u201cWe're also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dAdvertisementPence did not provide details on how the agency would achieve landing humans on the moon in the five-year time frame, a monumental goal NASA had been hoping to achieve by 2028. He provided no details on the cost or how the mission would unfold. He added that he had learned the details of NASA\u2019s plans only five minutes before stepping onstage.NASA did not immediately respond to a request for more details about the plan or how it would be funded.NASA wants to get to the moon \u2018as fast as possible.\u2019 But countries like China and India are racing there, too.In his speech, which came during the fifth meeting of the National Space Council, Pence took a shot at the rocket NASA is developing, known as the Space Launch System. With Boeing as the prime contractor, the rocket is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.Story continues below advertisementRecently, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate hearing that its first flight was going to be once again delayed, and, as a result, the agency would look at sidelining it in favor of commercial rockets.AdvertisementCompanies such as SpaceX, the United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin are all developing new rockets that, while not as capable as the SLS is designed to be, would be less expensive. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, founded Blue Origin.)Pence doubled down on the idea of bypassing the SLS Tuesday, lamenting how the program has \u201cbeen plagued by bureaucratic inertia, by what some call the paralysis of analysis.\u201d He said he was saddened to hear that the first flight of the rocket would be pushed to 2021.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNow that would be 18 years after the SLS program was started and 11 years after the president of the United States directed NASA to return American astronauts to the moon,\u201d Pence said. \u201cLadies and gentlemen, that\u2019s just not good enough.\u201dHe also took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying the agency \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization. If NASA\u2019s not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dAdvertisementIn the space community, the announcement was greeted warmly for challenging the status quo and pushing NASA to move faster.Companies in the cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new space age\u201cIt was a sense of urgency that enabled the Apollo missions to successfully land on the Moon the first time,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA who now runs the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThis same urgency is what it will take to accomplish a successful mission to the Moon in the future -- and this call for a specific landing date has that sense of purpose and urgency.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPhilip Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, also applauded the fast timeline, but said that \u201cfive years is very challenging. I\u2019m not sure it can be done. But it\u2019s a good goal.\u201dPence\u2019s speech comes at a time of increased activity and competition in space. The White House has pushed the creation of a Space Force to help the military combat potential adversaries in orbit. Earlier this year, China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon and plans to return another spacecraft later this year. India and Israel also plan to land spacecraft on the moon this year.AdvertisementThe White House, however, has been looking to make a big splash in space, hoping to send an Orion spacecraft without crew in a trip around the moon in this presidential term. The administration\u2019s plan calls for landing of humans on the moon in a second term, should President Trump be reelected.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, the Coalition for Deep Space exploration, a consortium of aerospace companies, said that while it supports \"aggressive timelines and goals, we also are cognizant of the resources that will be required to meet these objectives. Bold plans must be matched by bold resources made available in a consistent manner in order to assure successful execution.\u201dIt\u2019s not clear, though, how NASA intends to pull off a human landing in five years. Its current plan is to build what\u2019s called a Gateway, an outpost that would orbit around the moon. It\u2019s also unclear what rocket the agency would use. The SLS has been under fire for its delays and cost overruns. And Pence indicated the agency would look at alternatives, if need be.Advertisement\u201cIf commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets will be,\u201d Pence said. \u201c \u2018Urgency\u2019 must be our watchword. Failure to achieve our goal to return an American astronaut to the moon in the next five years is not an option.\u201dBridenstine said he believed that Boeing and the other contractors, working alongside NASA, could accelerate the schedule so that SLS could be launched in 2020. And he said the agency was dedicated to meeting the White House\u2019s goal.\u201cOur agency is going to do everything in its power to meet that vision, to meet that deadline,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cWe got it loud and clear.\u201d The vice president said if NASA cannot pull off the monumental feat, \"we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201d Pence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6041",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/20/bezos-space-flight-live-updates-video/",
        "text": "VAN HORN, Tex. \u2014 Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses. Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the winner of an auction for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.As space travel goes, Blue Origin\u2019s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone \u2014 the company\u2019s first human spaceflight \u2014 and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Last month, Bezos, 57, announced he would be on the flight, a move that surprised few who know Bezos\u2019s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.About Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hatIt is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.Amazon, he has said, was the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dHe said his expectations for the flight \u201cwere high, and they were dramatically exceeded.\u201d\u201cThe zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.\u201dBezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, \u201cWho wants a Skittle?\u201d They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other\u2019s mouths.\u201cI loved it,\u201d Funk said. \u201cThe four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.\u201d She added that she only \u201cwished it had been longer\u201d and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. \u201cThere was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,\u201d she said.New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard\u2019s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard\u2019s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was \u201chonored\u201d to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when he started quietly acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.\u201cIt was harrowing,\u201d he later told The Post. \u201cWe were very lucky. I can\u2019t believe we all walked away from it.\u201dHis flight Tuesday was far smoother. The rocket fired its engines for nearly 2\u00bd minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. \u201cI wasn\u2019t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,\u201d Bezos said after the flight.It was not only Bezos\u2019s dream to fly to space, but Funk\u2019s as well. In the early 1960s, she was selected to be part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it because of \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201dThat paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin\u2019s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday\u2019s launch that it was receiving many orders.A suborbital space tourism business, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos\u2019s long-term vision of a future where there are \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dIt is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.It won the first round of NASA\u2019s contract. But earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but Blue Origin has protested the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and reach space before Bezos.But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. During an event in 2016, he said: \u201cCompetition is super healthy. \u2026 And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.\u201dAt Blue Origin, \u201cour biggest opponent is gravity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe physics of this problem are challenging enough. \u2026 Gravity is not watching us and saying, \u2018Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I\u2019m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.\u2019 Gravity doesn\u2019t care about us at all.\u201dBulletKey updateBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew members celebrate following \u2018picture perfect\u2019 New Shepard flightReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company\u2019s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a \u201cpicture perfect\u201d launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin\u2019s senior director.\u201cCongratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,\u201d Blue Origin posted on Twitter.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateWhat\u2019s next for Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkNew Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won\u2019t fly until late next year.In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX\u2019s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin\u2019s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and \u201curges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.\u201d NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule touchdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:22 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard reaches spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard flight was on holdReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:13 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won\u2019t be an issue.\u201cWe have a lot of time; we can take our time. It\u2019s better to pause and hold if there\u2019s any reason to,\u201d said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard with Jeff Bezos on board has launchedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew board New Shepard rocketReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin\u2019s first manned flight.The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket\u2019s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTesting New Shepard reflected Blue Origin\u2019s slow but steady philosophyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.But Blue Origin\u2019s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard\u2019s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. \u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe origins of Jeff Bezos\u2019s passion for spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:34 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos likes to say \u201cyou don\u2019t pick your passions, your passions pick you.\u201d And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on Homer Hickam\u2019s memoir, \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d and he now calls the company \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He also had a cameo appearance in the film \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d in 2016.\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, \u2018You have to let Bezos be in your \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie,\u2019\u201d Bezos joked, according to an account in GeekWire.Blue Origin\u2019s crew is \u2018a go\u2019 for company\u2019s first human launchReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 62 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11\u2032s lunar module on the moon.Blue Origin\u2019s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic jaunt just over a week ago was controlled by two pilots.The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests \u2014 with no people onboard \u2014 before today.The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin\u2019s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn\u2019t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.This is when Elon Musk will be the wealthiest man on Earth, if only for about 10 minutes Return to menuBy Jay Greene8:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAlthough Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk\u2019s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who\u2019s got the most money.But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That\u2019s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.And Branson? He\u2019s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.Bezos\u2019s West Texas launch site: Austere, isolated Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic calls the \u201cgateway to space.\u201dIt\u2019s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dBlue Origin\u2019s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin\u2019s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs \u2014 there\u2019s not even an elevator.Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there\u2019s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.Ahead of Blue Origin\u2019s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters \u2014 arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.BulletKey updateWho\u2019s going to space with Jeff Bezos?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York.One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company\u2019s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace \u201cWally\u201d Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside,\u201d Bezos said to her. \u201cWhat\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members \u2014 after the flight, they\u2019ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space \u2014 Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be \u201cvery bonding for the crew as individuals.\u201d\u201cI would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,\u201d he said in an interview. Jeff Bezos fulfilled a lifelong dream, blasting to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to reach space. Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6042",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/20/bezos-space-flight-live-updates-video/",
        "text": "VAN HORN, Tex. \u2014 Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses. Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the winner of an auction for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.As space travel goes, Blue Origin\u2019s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone \u2014 the company\u2019s first human spaceflight \u2014 and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Last month, Bezos, 57, announced he would be on the flight, a move that surprised few who know Bezos\u2019s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.About Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hatIt is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.Amazon, he has said, was the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dHe said his expectations for the flight \u201cwere high, and they were dramatically exceeded.\u201d\u201cThe zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.\u201dBezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, \u201cWho wants a Skittle?\u201d They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other\u2019s mouths.\u201cI loved it,\u201d Funk said. \u201cThe four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.\u201d She added that she only \u201cwished it had been longer\u201d and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. \u201cThere was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,\u201d she said.New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard\u2019s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard\u2019s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was \u201chonored\u201d to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when he started quietly acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.\u201cIt was harrowing,\u201d he later told The Post. \u201cWe were very lucky. I can\u2019t believe we all walked away from it.\u201dHis flight Tuesday was far smoother. The rocket fired its engines for nearly 2\u00bd minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. \u201cI wasn\u2019t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,\u201d Bezos said after the flight.It was not only Bezos\u2019s dream to fly to space, but Funk\u2019s as well. In the early 1960s, she was selected to be part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it because of \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201dThat paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin\u2019s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday\u2019s launch that it was receiving many orders.A suborbital space tourism business, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos\u2019s long-term vision of a future where there are \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dIt is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.It won the first round of NASA\u2019s contract. But earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but Blue Origin has protested the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and reach space before Bezos.But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. During an event in 2016, he said: \u201cCompetition is super healthy. \u2026 And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.\u201dAt Blue Origin, \u201cour biggest opponent is gravity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe physics of this problem are challenging enough. \u2026 Gravity is not watching us and saying, \u2018Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I\u2019m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.\u2019 Gravity doesn\u2019t care about us at all.\u201dBulletKey updateBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew members celebrate following \u2018picture perfect\u2019 New Shepard flightReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company\u2019s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a \u201cpicture perfect\u201d launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin\u2019s senior director.\u201cCongratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,\u201d Blue Origin posted on Twitter.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateWhat\u2019s next for Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkNew Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won\u2019t fly until late next year.In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX\u2019s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin\u2019s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and \u201curges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.\u201d NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule touchdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:22 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard reaches spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard flight was on holdReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:13 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won\u2019t be an issue.\u201cWe have a lot of time; we can take our time. It\u2019s better to pause and hold if there\u2019s any reason to,\u201d said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard with Jeff Bezos on board has launchedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew board New Shepard rocketReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin\u2019s first manned flight.The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket\u2019s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTesting New Shepard reflected Blue Origin\u2019s slow but steady philosophyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.But Blue Origin\u2019s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard\u2019s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. \u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe origins of Jeff Bezos\u2019s passion for spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:34 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos likes to say \u201cyou don\u2019t pick your passions, your passions pick you.\u201d And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on Homer Hickam\u2019s memoir, \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d and he now calls the company \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He also had a cameo appearance in the film \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d in 2016.\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, \u2018You have to let Bezos be in your \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie,\u2019\u201d Bezos joked, according to an account in GeekWire.Blue Origin\u2019s crew is \u2018a go\u2019 for company\u2019s first human launchReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 62 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11\u2032s lunar module on the moon.Blue Origin\u2019s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic jaunt just over a week ago was controlled by two pilots.The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests \u2014 with no people onboard \u2014 before today.The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin\u2019s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn\u2019t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.This is when Elon Musk will be the wealthiest man on Earth, if only for about 10 minutes Return to menuBy Jay Greene8:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAlthough Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk\u2019s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who\u2019s got the most money.But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That\u2019s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.And Branson? He\u2019s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.Bezos\u2019s West Texas launch site: Austere, isolated Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic calls the \u201cgateway to space.\u201dIt\u2019s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dBlue Origin\u2019s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin\u2019s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs \u2014 there\u2019s not even an elevator.Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there\u2019s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.Ahead of Blue Origin\u2019s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters \u2014 arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.BulletKey updateWho\u2019s going to space with Jeff Bezos?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York.One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company\u2019s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace \u201cWally\u201d Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside,\u201d Bezos said to her. \u201cWhat\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members \u2014 after the flight, they\u2019ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space \u2014 Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be \u201cvery bonding for the crew as individuals.\u201d\u201cI would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,\u201d he said in an interview. Jeff Bezos fulfilled a lifelong dream, blasting to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to reach space. Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6043",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/20/bezos-space-flight-live-updates-video/",
        "text": "VAN HORN, Tex. \u2014 Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses. Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the winner of an auction for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.As space travel goes, Blue Origin\u2019s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone \u2014 the company\u2019s first human spaceflight \u2014 and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Last month, Bezos, 57, announced he would be on the flight, a move that surprised few who know Bezos\u2019s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.About Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hatIt is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.Amazon, he has said, was the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dHe said his expectations for the flight \u201cwere high, and they were dramatically exceeded.\u201d\u201cThe zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.\u201dBezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, \u201cWho wants a Skittle?\u201d They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other\u2019s mouths.\u201cI loved it,\u201d Funk said. \u201cThe four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.\u201d She added that she only \u201cwished it had been longer\u201d and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. \u201cThere was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,\u201d she said.New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard\u2019s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard\u2019s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was \u201chonored\u201d to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when he started quietly acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.\u201cIt was harrowing,\u201d he later told The Post. \u201cWe were very lucky. I can\u2019t believe we all walked away from it.\u201dHis flight Tuesday was far smoother. The rocket fired its engines for nearly 2\u00bd minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. \u201cI wasn\u2019t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,\u201d Bezos said after the flight.It was not only Bezos\u2019s dream to fly to space, but Funk\u2019s as well. In the early 1960s, she was selected to be part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it because of \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201dThat paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin\u2019s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday\u2019s launch that it was receiving many orders.A suborbital space tourism business, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos\u2019s long-term vision of a future where there are \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dIt is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.It won the first round of NASA\u2019s contract. But earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but Blue Origin has protested the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and reach space before Bezos.But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. During an event in 2016, he said: \u201cCompetition is super healthy. \u2026 And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.\u201dAt Blue Origin, \u201cour biggest opponent is gravity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe physics of this problem are challenging enough. \u2026 Gravity is not watching us and saying, \u2018Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I\u2019m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.\u2019 Gravity doesn\u2019t care about us at all.\u201dBulletKey updateBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew members celebrate following \u2018picture perfect\u2019 New Shepard flightReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company\u2019s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a \u201cpicture perfect\u201d launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin\u2019s senior director.\u201cCongratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,\u201d Blue Origin posted on Twitter.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateWhat\u2019s next for Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkNew Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won\u2019t fly until late next year.In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX\u2019s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin\u2019s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and \u201curges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.\u201d NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule touchdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:22 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard reaches spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard flight was on holdReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:13 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won\u2019t be an issue.\u201cWe have a lot of time; we can take our time. It\u2019s better to pause and hold if there\u2019s any reason to,\u201d said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard with Jeff Bezos on board has launchedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew board New Shepard rocketReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin\u2019s first manned flight.The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket\u2019s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTesting New Shepard reflected Blue Origin\u2019s slow but steady philosophyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.But Blue Origin\u2019s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard\u2019s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. \u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe origins of Jeff Bezos\u2019s passion for spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:34 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos likes to say \u201cyou don\u2019t pick your passions, your passions pick you.\u201d And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on Homer Hickam\u2019s memoir, \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d and he now calls the company \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He also had a cameo appearance in the film \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d in 2016.\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, \u2018You have to let Bezos be in your \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie,\u2019\u201d Bezos joked, according to an account in GeekWire.Blue Origin\u2019s crew is \u2018a go\u2019 for company\u2019s first human launchReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 62 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11\u2032s lunar module on the moon.Blue Origin\u2019s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic jaunt just over a week ago was controlled by two pilots.The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests \u2014 with no people onboard \u2014 before today.The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin\u2019s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn\u2019t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.This is when Elon Musk will be the wealthiest man on Earth, if only for about 10 minutes Return to menuBy Jay Greene8:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAlthough Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk\u2019s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who\u2019s got the most money.But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That\u2019s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.And Branson? He\u2019s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.Bezos\u2019s West Texas launch site: Austere, isolated Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic calls the \u201cgateway to space.\u201dIt\u2019s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dBlue Origin\u2019s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin\u2019s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs \u2014 there\u2019s not even an elevator.Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there\u2019s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.Ahead of Blue Origin\u2019s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters \u2014 arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.BulletKey updateWho\u2019s going to space with Jeff Bezos?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York.One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company\u2019s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace \u201cWally\u201d Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside,\u201d Bezos said to her. \u201cWhat\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members \u2014 after the flight, they\u2019ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space \u2014 Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be \u201cvery bonding for the crew as individuals.\u201d\u201cI would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,\u201d he said in an interview. Jeff Bezos fulfilled a lifelong dream, blasting to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to reach space. Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6044",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/20/bezos-space-flight-live-updates-video/",
        "text": "VAN HORN, Tex. \u2014 Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses. Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the winner of an auction for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.As space travel goes, Blue Origin\u2019s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone \u2014 the company\u2019s first human spaceflight \u2014 and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Last month, Bezos, 57, announced he would be on the flight, a move that surprised few who know Bezos\u2019s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.About Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hatIt is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.Amazon, he has said, was the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dHe said his expectations for the flight \u201cwere high, and they were dramatically exceeded.\u201d\u201cThe zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.\u201dBezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, \u201cWho wants a Skittle?\u201d They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other\u2019s mouths.\u201cI loved it,\u201d Funk said. \u201cThe four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.\u201d She added that she only \u201cwished it had been longer\u201d and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. \u201cThere was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,\u201d she said.New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard\u2019s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard\u2019s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was \u201chonored\u201d to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when he started quietly acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.\u201cIt was harrowing,\u201d he later told The Post. \u201cWe were very lucky. I can\u2019t believe we all walked away from it.\u201dHis flight Tuesday was far smoother. The rocket fired its engines for nearly 2\u00bd minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. \u201cI wasn\u2019t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,\u201d Bezos said after the flight.It was not only Bezos\u2019s dream to fly to space, but Funk\u2019s as well. In the early 1960s, she was selected to be part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it because of \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201dThat paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin\u2019s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday\u2019s launch that it was receiving many orders.A suborbital space tourism business, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos\u2019s long-term vision of a future where there are \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dIt is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.It won the first round of NASA\u2019s contract. But earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but Blue Origin has protested the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and reach space before Bezos.But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. During an event in 2016, he said: \u201cCompetition is super healthy. \u2026 And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.\u201dAt Blue Origin, \u201cour biggest opponent is gravity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe physics of this problem are challenging enough. \u2026 Gravity is not watching us and saying, \u2018Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I\u2019m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.\u2019 Gravity doesn\u2019t care about us at all.\u201dBulletKey updateBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew members celebrate following \u2018picture perfect\u2019 New Shepard flightReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company\u2019s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a \u201cpicture perfect\u201d launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin\u2019s senior director.\u201cCongratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,\u201d Blue Origin posted on Twitter.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateWhat\u2019s next for Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkNew Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won\u2019t fly until late next year.In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX\u2019s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin\u2019s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and \u201curges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.\u201d NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule touchdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:22 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard reaches spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard flight was on holdReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:13 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won\u2019t be an issue.\u201cWe have a lot of time; we can take our time. It\u2019s better to pause and hold if there\u2019s any reason to,\u201d said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard with Jeff Bezos on board has launchedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew board New Shepard rocketReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin\u2019s first manned flight.The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket\u2019s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTesting New Shepard reflected Blue Origin\u2019s slow but steady philosophyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.But Blue Origin\u2019s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard\u2019s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. \u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe origins of Jeff Bezos\u2019s passion for spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:34 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos likes to say \u201cyou don\u2019t pick your passions, your passions pick you.\u201d And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on Homer Hickam\u2019s memoir, \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d and he now calls the company \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He also had a cameo appearance in the film \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d in 2016.\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, \u2018You have to let Bezos be in your \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie,\u2019\u201d Bezos joked, according to an account in GeekWire.Blue Origin\u2019s crew is \u2018a go\u2019 for company\u2019s first human launchReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 62 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11\u2032s lunar module on the moon.Blue Origin\u2019s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic jaunt just over a week ago was controlled by two pilots.The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests \u2014 with no people onboard \u2014 before today.The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin\u2019s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn\u2019t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.This is when Elon Musk will be the wealthiest man on Earth, if only for about 10 minutes Return to menuBy Jay Greene8:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAlthough Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk\u2019s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who\u2019s got the most money.But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That\u2019s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.And Branson? He\u2019s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.Bezos\u2019s West Texas launch site: Austere, isolated Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic calls the \u201cgateway to space.\u201dIt\u2019s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dBlue Origin\u2019s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin\u2019s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs \u2014 there\u2019s not even an elevator.Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there\u2019s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.Ahead of Blue Origin\u2019s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters \u2014 arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.BulletKey updateWho\u2019s going to space with Jeff Bezos?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York.One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company\u2019s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace \u201cWally\u201d Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside,\u201d Bezos said to her. \u201cWhat\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members \u2014 after the flight, they\u2019ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space \u2014 Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be \u201cvery bonding for the crew as individuals.\u201d\u201cI would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,\u201d he said in an interview. Jeff Bezos fulfilled a lifelong dream, blasting to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to reach space. Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6045",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/20/bezos-space-flight-live-updates-video/",
        "text": "VAN HORN, Tex. \u2014 Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses. Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the winner of an auction for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.As space travel goes, Blue Origin\u2019s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone \u2014 the company\u2019s first human spaceflight \u2014 and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Last month, Bezos, 57, announced he would be on the flight, a move that surprised few who know Bezos\u2019s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.About Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hatIt is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.Amazon, he has said, was the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dHe said his expectations for the flight \u201cwere high, and they were dramatically exceeded.\u201d\u201cThe zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.\u201dBezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, \u201cWho wants a Skittle?\u201d They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other\u2019s mouths.\u201cI loved it,\u201d Funk said. \u201cThe four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.\u201d She added that she only \u201cwished it had been longer\u201d and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. \u201cThere was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,\u201d she said.New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard\u2019s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard\u2019s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was \u201chonored\u201d to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when he started quietly acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.\u201cIt was harrowing,\u201d he later told The Post. \u201cWe were very lucky. I can\u2019t believe we all walked away from it.\u201dHis flight Tuesday was far smoother. The rocket fired its engines for nearly 2\u00bd minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. \u201cI wasn\u2019t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,\u201d Bezos said after the flight.It was not only Bezos\u2019s dream to fly to space, but Funk\u2019s as well. In the early 1960s, she was selected to be part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it because of \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201dThat paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin\u2019s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday\u2019s launch that it was receiving many orders.A suborbital space tourism business, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos\u2019s long-term vision of a future where there are \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dIt is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.It won the first round of NASA\u2019s contract. But earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but Blue Origin has protested the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and reach space before Bezos.But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. During an event in 2016, he said: \u201cCompetition is super healthy. \u2026 And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.\u201dAt Blue Origin, \u201cour biggest opponent is gravity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe physics of this problem are challenging enough. \u2026 Gravity is not watching us and saying, \u2018Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I\u2019m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.\u2019 Gravity doesn\u2019t care about us at all.\u201dBulletKey updateBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew members celebrate following \u2018picture perfect\u2019 New Shepard flightReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company\u2019s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a \u201cpicture perfect\u201d launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin\u2019s senior director.\u201cCongratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,\u201d Blue Origin posted on Twitter.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateWhat\u2019s next for Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkNew Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won\u2019t fly until late next year.In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX\u2019s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin\u2019s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and \u201curges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.\u201d NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule touchdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:22 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard reaches spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard flight was on holdReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:13 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won\u2019t be an issue.\u201cWe have a lot of time; we can take our time. It\u2019s better to pause and hold if there\u2019s any reason to,\u201d said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard with Jeff Bezos on board has launchedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew board New Shepard rocketReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin\u2019s first manned flight.The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket\u2019s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTesting New Shepard reflected Blue Origin\u2019s slow but steady philosophyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.But Blue Origin\u2019s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard\u2019s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. \u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe origins of Jeff Bezos\u2019s passion for spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:34 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos likes to say \u201cyou don\u2019t pick your passions, your passions pick you.\u201d And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on Homer Hickam\u2019s memoir, \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d and he now calls the company \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He also had a cameo appearance in the film \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d in 2016.\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, \u2018You have to let Bezos be in your \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie,\u2019\u201d Bezos joked, according to an account in GeekWire.Blue Origin\u2019s crew is \u2018a go\u2019 for company\u2019s first human launchReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 62 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11\u2032s lunar module on the moon.Blue Origin\u2019s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic jaunt just over a week ago was controlled by two pilots.The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests \u2014 with no people onboard \u2014 before today.The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin\u2019s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn\u2019t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.This is when Elon Musk will be the wealthiest man on Earth, if only for about 10 minutes Return to menuBy Jay Greene8:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAlthough Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk\u2019s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who\u2019s got the most money.But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That\u2019s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.And Branson? He\u2019s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.Bezos\u2019s West Texas launch site: Austere, isolated Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic calls the \u201cgateway to space.\u201dIt\u2019s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dBlue Origin\u2019s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin\u2019s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs \u2014 there\u2019s not even an elevator.Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there\u2019s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.Ahead of Blue Origin\u2019s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters \u2014 arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.BulletKey updateWho\u2019s going to space with Jeff Bezos?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York.One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company\u2019s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace \u201cWally\u201d Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside,\u201d Bezos said to her. \u201cWhat\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members \u2014 after the flight, they\u2019ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space \u2014 Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be \u201cvery bonding for the crew as individuals.\u201d\u201cI would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,\u201d he said in an interview. Jeff Bezos fulfilled a lifelong dream, blasting to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to reach space. Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6046",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/20/bezos-space-flight-live-updates-video/",
        "text": "VAN HORN, Tex. \u2014 Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses. Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the winner of an auction for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.As space travel goes, Blue Origin\u2019s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone \u2014 the company\u2019s first human spaceflight \u2014 and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Last month, Bezos, 57, announced he would be on the flight, a move that surprised few who know Bezos\u2019s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.About Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hatIt is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.Amazon, he has said, was the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dHe said his expectations for the flight \u201cwere high, and they were dramatically exceeded.\u201d\u201cThe zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.\u201dBezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, \u201cWho wants a Skittle?\u201d They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other\u2019s mouths.\u201cI loved it,\u201d Funk said. \u201cThe four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.\u201d She added that she only \u201cwished it had been longer\u201d and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. \u201cThere was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,\u201d she said.New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard\u2019s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard\u2019s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was \u201chonored\u201d to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when he started quietly acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.\u201cIt was harrowing,\u201d he later told The Post. \u201cWe were very lucky. I can\u2019t believe we all walked away from it.\u201dHis flight Tuesday was far smoother. The rocket fired its engines for nearly 2\u00bd minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. \u201cI wasn\u2019t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,\u201d Bezos said after the flight.It was not only Bezos\u2019s dream to fly to space, but Funk\u2019s as well. In the early 1960s, she was selected to be part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it because of \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201dThat paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin\u2019s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday\u2019s launch that it was receiving many orders.A suborbital space tourism business, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos\u2019s long-term vision of a future where there are \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dIt is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.It won the first round of NASA\u2019s contract. But earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but Blue Origin has protested the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and reach space before Bezos.But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. During an event in 2016, he said: \u201cCompetition is super healthy. \u2026 And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.\u201dAt Blue Origin, \u201cour biggest opponent is gravity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe physics of this problem are challenging enough. \u2026 Gravity is not watching us and saying, \u2018Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I\u2019m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.\u2019 Gravity doesn\u2019t care about us at all.\u201dBulletKey updateBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew members celebrate following \u2018picture perfect\u2019 New Shepard flightReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company\u2019s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a \u201cpicture perfect\u201d launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin\u2019s senior director.\u201cCongratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,\u201d Blue Origin posted on Twitter.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateWhat\u2019s next for Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkNew Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won\u2019t fly until late next year.In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX\u2019s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin\u2019s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and \u201curges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.\u201d NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule touchdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:22 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard reaches spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard flight was on holdReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:13 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won\u2019t be an issue.\u201cWe have a lot of time; we can take our time. It\u2019s better to pause and hold if there\u2019s any reason to,\u201d said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard with Jeff Bezos on board has launchedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew board New Shepard rocketReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin\u2019s first manned flight.The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket\u2019s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTesting New Shepard reflected Blue Origin\u2019s slow but steady philosophyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.But Blue Origin\u2019s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard\u2019s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. \u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe origins of Jeff Bezos\u2019s passion for spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:34 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos likes to say \u201cyou don\u2019t pick your passions, your passions pick you.\u201d And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on Homer Hickam\u2019s memoir, \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d and he now calls the company \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He also had a cameo appearance in the film \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d in 2016.\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, \u2018You have to let Bezos be in your \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie,\u2019\u201d Bezos joked, according to an account in GeekWire.Blue Origin\u2019s crew is \u2018a go\u2019 for company\u2019s first human launchReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 62 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11\u2032s lunar module on the moon.Blue Origin\u2019s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic jaunt just over a week ago was controlled by two pilots.The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests \u2014 with no people onboard \u2014 before today.The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin\u2019s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn\u2019t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.This is when Elon Musk will be the wealthiest man on Earth, if only for about 10 minutes Return to menuBy Jay Greene8:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAlthough Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk\u2019s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who\u2019s got the most money.But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That\u2019s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.And Branson? He\u2019s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.Bezos\u2019s West Texas launch site: Austere, isolated Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic calls the \u201cgateway to space.\u201dIt\u2019s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dBlue Origin\u2019s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin\u2019s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs \u2014 there\u2019s not even an elevator.Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there\u2019s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.Ahead of Blue Origin\u2019s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters \u2014 arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.BulletKey updateWho\u2019s going to space with Jeff Bezos?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York.One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company\u2019s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace \u201cWally\u201d Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside,\u201d Bezos said to her. \u201cWhat\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members \u2014 after the flight, they\u2019ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space \u2014 Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be \u201cvery bonding for the crew as individuals.\u201d\u201cI would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,\u201d he said in an interview. Jeff Bezos fulfilled a lifelong dream, blasting to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to reach space. Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6047",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/20/bezos-space-flight-live-updates-video/",
        "text": "VAN HORN, Tex. \u2014 Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses. Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos\u2019s brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the winner of an auction for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.As space travel goes, Blue Origin\u2019s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone \u2014 the company\u2019s first human spaceflight \u2014 and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Last month, Bezos, 57, announced he would be on the flight, a move that surprised few who know Bezos\u2019s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.About Jeff Bezos\u2019s cowboy hatIt is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.Amazon, he has said, was the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, \u201cI want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dHe said his expectations for the flight \u201cwere high, and they were dramatically exceeded.\u201d\u201cThe zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.\u201dBezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, \u201cWho wants a Skittle?\u201d They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other\u2019s mouths.\u201cI loved it,\u201d Funk said. \u201cThe four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.\u201d She added that she only \u201cwished it had been longer\u201d and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. \u201cThere was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,\u201d she said.New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard\u2019s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard\u2019s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was \u201chonored\u201d to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when he started quietly acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.\u201cIt was harrowing,\u201d he later told The Post. \u201cWe were very lucky. I can\u2019t believe we all walked away from it.\u201dHis flight Tuesday was far smoother. The rocket fired its engines for nearly 2\u00bd minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. \u201cI wasn\u2019t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,\u201d Bezos said after the flight.It was not only Bezos\u2019s dream to fly to space, but Funk\u2019s as well. In the early 1960s, she was selected to be part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it because of \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201dThat paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin\u2019s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday\u2019s launch that it was receiving many orders.A suborbital space tourism business, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos\u2019s long-term vision of a future where there are \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dIt is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.It won the first round of NASA\u2019s contract. But earlier this year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but Blue Origin has protested the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and reach space before Bezos.But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. During an event in 2016, he said: \u201cCompetition is super healthy. \u2026 And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.\u201dAt Blue Origin, \u201cour biggest opponent is gravity,\u201d he added. \u201cThe physics of this problem are challenging enough. \u2026 Gravity is not watching us and saying, \u2018Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I\u2019m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.\u2019 Gravity doesn\u2019t care about us at all.\u201dBulletKey updateBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew members celebrate following \u2018picture perfect\u2019 New Shepard flightReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:48 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company\u2019s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a \u201cpicture perfect\u201d launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin\u2019s senior director.\u201cCongratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,\u201d Blue Origin posted on Twitter.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBulletKey updateWhat\u2019s next for Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkNew Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won\u2019t fly until late next year.In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX\u2019s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin\u2019s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and \u201curges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.\u201d NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule touchdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:22 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard reaches spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard flight was on holdReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown9:13 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won\u2019t be an issue.\u201cWe have a lot of time; we can take our time. It\u2019s better to pause and hold if there\u2019s any reason to,\u201d said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew Shepard with Jeff Bezos on board has launchedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s flight crew board New Shepard rocketReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin\u2019s first manned flight.The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket\u2019s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTesting New Shepard reflected Blue Origin\u2019s slow but steady philosophyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that \u201cslow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.But Blue Origin\u2019s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard\u2019s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. \u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe origins of Jeff Bezos\u2019s passion for spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:34 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos likes to say \u201cyou don\u2019t pick your passions, your passions pick you.\u201d And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book \u201cHigh Frontier\u201d by Gerard O\u2019Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on Homer Hickam\u2019s memoir, \u201cRocket Boys,\u201d and he now calls the company \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning \u201clottery ticket\u201d that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He also had a cameo appearance in the film \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d in 2016.\u201cFor years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, \u2018You have to let Bezos be in your \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie,\u2019\u201d Bezos joked, according to an account in GeekWire.Blue Origin\u2019s crew is \u2018a go\u2019 for company\u2019s first human launchReturn to menuBy Dalvin Brown8:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkBlue Origin\u2019s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 62 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11\u2032s lunar module on the moon.Blue Origin\u2019s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic jaunt just over a week ago was controlled by two pilots.The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests \u2014 with no people onboard \u2014 before today.The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin\u2019s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn\u2019t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.\u201cThis is just the beginning,\u201d Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.This is when Elon Musk will be the wealthiest man on Earth, if only for about 10 minutes Return to menuBy Jay Greene8:05 a.m.Link copiedLinkAlthough Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk\u2019s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who\u2019s got the most money.But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That\u2019s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.And Branson? He\u2019s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.Bezos\u2019s West Texas launch site: Austere, isolated Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic calls the \u201cgateway to space.\u201dIt\u2019s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dBlue Origin\u2019s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin\u2019s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs \u2014 there\u2019s not even an elevator.Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there\u2019s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.Ahead of Blue Origin\u2019s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters \u2014 arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.BulletKey updateWho\u2019s going to space with Jeff Bezos?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:44 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York.One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.Instead, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company\u2019s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace \u201cWally\u201d Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside,\u201d Bezos said to her. \u201cWhat\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members \u2014 after the flight, they\u2019ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space \u2014 Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be \u201cvery bonding for the crew as individuals.\u201d\u201cI would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,\u201d he said in an interview. Jeff Bezos fulfilled a lifelong dream, blasting to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first NASA astronaut to reach space. Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA faces a key test of Orion spacecraft, as it scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6048",
        "date": "2019-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/01/nasa-faces-key-test-orion-spacecraft-it-scrambles-meet-trump-moon-mandate/",
        "text": "Usually, the most dramatic part of human space travel is the liftoff: a controlled explosion of massive amounts of propellant, blasting a rocket off the ground on a pillow of fire and smoke.But that was not the most dramatic part of NASA astronaut Nick Hague\u2019s first launch. Rather, it came about two minutes later. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne of the side boosters failed to separate properly last October and slammed into the Russian rocket he was atop. That triggered an emergency abort for the capsule carrying Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. They then went on a wild ride, slammed back into their seats by a force hitting seven Gs, or seven times the force of gravity, before touching down safely a few minutes later.Story continues below advertisementThe abort was \u201ca good message to all of us: This is serious stuff,\u201d said NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik. \u201cWe have to prepare for this, even though there\u2019s a low likelihood of it happening.\u201dA simulation released in 2017 illustrates the emergency abort system featured in NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft. (NASA)On Tuesday, NASA is scheduled to test the emergency abort system of its new spacecraft, the Orion crew capsule. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on a rocket motor to about 31,000 feet, where its abort system will fire and thrusters will pull the capsule away.AdvertisementNo astronauts will be on board, but the test is a crucial one for NASA and Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on Orion, which are hoping to demonstrate that the emergency system designed to safeguard astronauts in the case of a rocket failure is sound.Story continues below advertisementThe stakes are high, not just for the space agency but for the White House as well.In March, Vice President Pence called for the agency to speed up its plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface. Originally, NASA had been aiming to get astronauts to the moon by 2028. But Pence directed that the space agency cut four years from that timetable. In doing so, he took aim at NASA\u2019s bureaucracy, saying it \u201cmust transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization.\u201d50 astronauts, in their own wordsNASA is scrambling to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious timeline for the program, dubbed Artemis. It was already complex, calling for the construction of a lunar-orbiting space station called the Gateway, to which the Orion spacecraft would deliver astronauts, who would then board a lander for the trip to the moon\u2019s surface. Later, they would return to the Gateway aboard an ascent vehicle and reboard Orion for the return to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has awarded the contract for the power and propulsion elements of the mission, but other companies are vying to build the lander and the Gateway habitat.First, however, the space agency must demonstrate that Orion can fly crews successfully \u2014 and Tuesday\u2019s test is a huge moment for a system whose sole purpose is to save astronauts\u2019 lives.NASA\u2019s partners to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX and Boeing, have had problems with their abort systems \u2014 the space shuttle Challenger did not have such an escape system when its booster rocket exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986, killing all on board. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule exploded earlier this year during a test firing of its abort engines. And Boeing discovered a propellant leak during one of its tests.Story continues below advertisementBoeing has said it has since successfully tested the system; SpaceX is still investigating what caused its spacecraft to explode.AdvertisementIn Tuesday\u2019s planned test, the Orion spacecraft will lift off from Launch Pad 46. Then, 55 seconds later, at an altitude of 31,000 feet, when it would be traveling at more than 800 mph, the abort system should kick in, pulling the Orion from its booster and sending it on a ride through the upper edges of the atmosphere.If astronauts were on board, they would experience the same seven Gs that Hague did in October, and the capsule would experience \u201ctremendous aerodynamic forces,\" said Mark Kirasich, NASA\u2019s Orion program manager, in a briefing Monday at the Kennedy Space Center.Story continues below advertisementNormally, the capsule would be guided down softly by parachutes. But NASA officials said that since the parachutes for the system have already been tested, none will be used Tuesday. As a result, the capsule will be traveling at about 300 mph when it slams into the Atlantic Ocean several miles east of the Florida Space Coast.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not expecting it to stay intact when it hits,\u201d said Jenny Devolites, a NASA test manager. While the capsule would sink to the ocean floor, NASA would still be able to collect data from the flight. There are 900 sensors on the vehicle to measure temperature, pressure and acoustics, she said.During the October abort of the Russian launch, the first thing Hague noticed \u201cwas being shaken violently from side to side,\u201d he said. The alarm sounded and a light flashed. \u201cOnce I saw the light, I knew we had an emergency with the booster,\u201d he said.NASA officials have since called the mission a \u201csuccessful failure.\u201d  NASA faces a key test of Orion spacecraft, as it scrambles to meet Trump moon mandate ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to fly astronauts for a third time. But there is nothing routine about it. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6049",
        "date": "2021-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/20/elon-musk-spacex-nasa-crew-2/",
        "text": "UPDATE: The launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-2 mission for NASA has been postponed by a day, to Friday at 5:49 a.m. EDT, because of high winds along the flight path. In order to launch, SpaceX needs good weather not just at the launch site, but downrange in case of an emergency abort. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen Megan McArthur\u2019s husband, Bob Behnken, flew to space almost a year ago, she watched from the ground with their 6-year-old son. As an astronaut herself, she was optimistic and proud, especially since it was the first flight of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.But she was also fearful.\u201cOne of the hardest things to do is watch the person that you love launch into space,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s much harder than actually doing it yourself when you\u2019re in the rocket. You have the training. You\u2019re prepared for the mission. When you\u2019re watching, you\u2019re just a spectator. And no matter what happens, there\u2019s nothing you can do to contribute to the situation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, it\u2019s McArthur\u2019s turn to fly \u2014 and Behnken\u2019s turn to spend that fretful time on the ground with their son, now 7.If all goes well, McArthur will be strapped into SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft along with the rest of the astronauts known as Crew-2 \u2014 NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan \u2014 for a launch to the International Space Station scheduled for 6:11 a.m. Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The flight will be SpaceX\u2019s third with astronauts aboard. Last May, it flew Behnken and NASA astronaut Doug Hurley in a short test flight to the station. Then, in November, it flew a regular crew of four for a full-duration mission of about six months, restoring regular transportation to the station from U.S. soil after the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is expected to overlap with Crew-2 on the space station for about a week before coming back to Earth in a return flight scheduled to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico on April 28.That flight cadence stands in stark contrast with that of Boeing, the other company under contract with NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. Boeing has not flown for nearly a year and a half, after its Starliner spacecraft suffered a software malfunction that made the spacecraft think it was 11 hours later in a test mission without any astronauts aboard than it actually was. The company was able to bring the spacecraft down safely and said it would repeat the test before flying a mission with astronauts.The company recently said it would be ready to fly as early as May. But because of traffic on the space station and the availability of the launchpad it uses, Boeing does not expect the launch to occur until August or September. Still, it said in a statement that it \u201cwill be mission-ready in May should another launch opportunity arise.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is not clear when Boeing\u2019s first flight with astronauts aboard will be.SpaceX, meanwhile, is moving ahead with its launch schedule, which includes another flight with a crew later this year. For the flight Thursday, it is incorporating a key difference: The rocket and the spacecraft that will fly the crew have been flown before, marking the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to reuse its hardware in a human spaceflight.Instead of throwing away its rockets, as had been done in the space industry for years, SpaceX flies them back to Earth, where they land on ships at sea or on a landing pad near the launch site. SpaceX has been doing it for years now, perfecting a practice once thought impossible.Story continues below advertisementBut it only recently convinced NASA that it should be allowed to use its boosters and spacecraft again with humans aboard.AdvertisementSpaceX will use the same Falcon 9 rocket that flew the Crew-1 astronauts. It stands on Launchpad 39A not shiny white and new but bearing the sooty streaks from the previous launch. The Dragon spacecraft for the flight is the same one that Behnken and Hurley flew in their mission. McArthur will be sitting in the same seat Behnken occupied for his flight.SpaceX\u2019s goal is to get to something similar to airline-like efficiency, where rockets and spacecraft take off, land and fly again. But space presents all kinds of different challenges, particularly for the capsules, which come screaming back through Earth\u2019s atmosphere, generating temperatures in the thousands of degrees. Then they splash into the ocean under parachutes, which poses its own problems.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the things you have to worry about is water intrusion,\u201d Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said during a recent press briefing. \u201cSaltwater is very corrosive. It\u2019s not a great thing when you want to keep your physical materials sound and especially easy to refurbish and to reuse.\u201dAdvertisementAfter the spacecraft, dubbed Endeavour, came back last year, SpaceX inspected it to make sure it was safe to fly again. The company replaced some parts, Reed said, and the thermal protection system and the parachutes for this coming flight will be new as well. \u201cBut otherwise, it\u2019s really the same vehicle,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s very carefully inspected, carefully prepared, refurbished as needed and ready to fly.\u201dHe added that NASA signs off on the vehicle and ensures that it is safe to fly. In the days and weeks leading up to the launch, officials from NASA and SpaceX repeatedly said that while this will be the third mission with people, the flight is by no means routine and the serious risks inherent in all human spaceflight remain.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve completed thousands and thousands of tests to get to this day,\u201d Reed said.AdvertisementThe company has pored over the data and performed intensive reviews alongside NASA, always looking for the worst-case scenario, trying to find it in a spreadsheet or an engine-test stand before a flight.\u201cWe call them paranoia reviews. We want to be paranoid,\u201d Reed said. \u201cWe want to make sure that we\u2019re going to fly these people safely and be able to bring them home safely when it\u2019s time. So we check. We check under every rock. And we double-check and we triple-check and we ask each other and we challenge each other all the time.\u201dHe said that he feels responsible not only for the astronauts but their families as well, and that he and the engineers kept McArthur\u2019s 7-year-old son, Theo, in their minds when preparing for the mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn particular in my heart, there\u2019s a little boy out there whose mom is flying,\u201d Reed said. \u201cThis is something that we pay a lot of attention to. We ask ourselves all the time: Would we be willing to fly our families on these vehicles? That\u2019s kind of a test for us.\u201dAdvertisementBefore Behnken\u2019s flight last year, he and McArthur took their son to Cape Canaveral for a launch so he could see the rocket take off and give him a sense of what his parents were about to do. He was excited for the flight and thrilled when Behnken returned home safely from the mission \u2014 in part because his parents had promised him a puppy once the flight was over.Now he\u2019s looking forward to another flight. But the splashdown will be better than the liftoff.\u201cI think he\u2019ll mostly be thrilled when I come home again,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cThat would be the best part for him.\u201d NASA and SpaceX vowed to remain vigilant ahead of the flight to ensure safety: \u2018We want to be paranoid.\u2019 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to fly astronauts for a third time. But there is nothing routine about it.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to fly astronauts for a third time. But there is nothing routine about it. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6050",
        "date": "2021-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/20/elon-musk-spacex-nasa-crew-2/",
        "text": "UPDATE: The launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-2 mission for NASA has been postponed by a day, to Friday at 5:49 a.m. EDT, because of high winds along the flight path. In order to launch, SpaceX needs good weather not just at the launch site, but downrange in case of an emergency abort. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen Megan McArthur\u2019s husband, Bob Behnken, flew to space almost a year ago, she watched from the ground with their 6-year-old son. As an astronaut herself, she was optimistic and proud, especially since it was the first flight of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.But she was also fearful.\u201cOne of the hardest things to do is watch the person that you love launch into space,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s much harder than actually doing it yourself when you\u2019re in the rocket. You have the training. You\u2019re prepared for the mission. When you\u2019re watching, you\u2019re just a spectator. And no matter what happens, there\u2019s nothing you can do to contribute to the situation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, it\u2019s McArthur\u2019s turn to fly \u2014 and Behnken\u2019s turn to spend that fretful time on the ground with their son, now 7.If all goes well, McArthur will be strapped into SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft along with the rest of the astronauts known as Crew-2 \u2014 NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan \u2014 for a launch to the International Space Station scheduled for 6:11 a.m. Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The flight will be SpaceX\u2019s third with astronauts aboard. Last May, it flew Behnken and NASA astronaut Doug Hurley in a short test flight to the station. Then, in November, it flew a regular crew of four for a full-duration mission of about six months, restoring regular transportation to the station from U.S. soil after the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is expected to overlap with Crew-2 on the space station for about a week before coming back to Earth in a return flight scheduled to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico on April 28.That flight cadence stands in stark contrast with that of Boeing, the other company under contract with NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. Boeing has not flown for nearly a year and a half, after its Starliner spacecraft suffered a software malfunction that made the spacecraft think it was 11 hours later in a test mission without any astronauts aboard than it actually was. The company was able to bring the spacecraft down safely and said it would repeat the test before flying a mission with astronauts.The company recently said it would be ready to fly as early as May. But because of traffic on the space station and the availability of the launchpad it uses, Boeing does not expect the launch to occur until August or September. Still, it said in a statement that it \u201cwill be mission-ready in May should another launch opportunity arise.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is not clear when Boeing\u2019s first flight with astronauts aboard will be.SpaceX, meanwhile, is moving ahead with its launch schedule, which includes another flight with a crew later this year. For the flight Thursday, it is incorporating a key difference: The rocket and the spacecraft that will fly the crew have been flown before, marking the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to reuse its hardware in a human spaceflight.Instead of throwing away its rockets, as had been done in the space industry for years, SpaceX flies them back to Earth, where they land on ships at sea or on a landing pad near the launch site. SpaceX has been doing it for years now, perfecting a practice once thought impossible.Story continues below advertisementBut it only recently convinced NASA that it should be allowed to use its boosters and spacecraft again with humans aboard.AdvertisementSpaceX will use the same Falcon 9 rocket that flew the Crew-1 astronauts. It stands on Launchpad 39A not shiny white and new but bearing the sooty streaks from the previous launch. The Dragon spacecraft for the flight is the same one that Behnken and Hurley flew in their mission. McArthur will be sitting in the same seat Behnken occupied for his flight.SpaceX\u2019s goal is to get to something similar to airline-like efficiency, where rockets and spacecraft take off, land and fly again. But space presents all kinds of different challenges, particularly for the capsules, which come screaming back through Earth\u2019s atmosphere, generating temperatures in the thousands of degrees. Then they splash into the ocean under parachutes, which poses its own problems.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the things you have to worry about is water intrusion,\u201d Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said during a recent press briefing. \u201cSaltwater is very corrosive. It\u2019s not a great thing when you want to keep your physical materials sound and especially easy to refurbish and to reuse.\u201dAdvertisementAfter the spacecraft, dubbed Endeavour, came back last year, SpaceX inspected it to make sure it was safe to fly again. The company replaced some parts, Reed said, and the thermal protection system and the parachutes for this coming flight will be new as well. \u201cBut otherwise, it\u2019s really the same vehicle,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s very carefully inspected, carefully prepared, refurbished as needed and ready to fly.\u201dHe added that NASA signs off on the vehicle and ensures that it is safe to fly. In the days and weeks leading up to the launch, officials from NASA and SpaceX repeatedly said that while this will be the third mission with people, the flight is by no means routine and the serious risks inherent in all human spaceflight remain.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve completed thousands and thousands of tests to get to this day,\u201d Reed said.AdvertisementThe company has pored over the data and performed intensive reviews alongside NASA, always looking for the worst-case scenario, trying to find it in a spreadsheet or an engine-test stand before a flight.\u201cWe call them paranoia reviews. We want to be paranoid,\u201d Reed said. \u201cWe want to make sure that we\u2019re going to fly these people safely and be able to bring them home safely when it\u2019s time. So we check. We check under every rock. And we double-check and we triple-check and we ask each other and we challenge each other all the time.\u201dHe said that he feels responsible not only for the astronauts but their families as well, and that he and the engineers kept McArthur\u2019s 7-year-old son, Theo, in their minds when preparing for the mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn particular in my heart, there\u2019s a little boy out there whose mom is flying,\u201d Reed said. \u201cThis is something that we pay a lot of attention to. We ask ourselves all the time: Would we be willing to fly our families on these vehicles? That\u2019s kind of a test for us.\u201dAdvertisementBefore Behnken\u2019s flight last year, he and McArthur took their son to Cape Canaveral for a launch so he could see the rocket take off and give him a sense of what his parents were about to do. He was excited for the flight and thrilled when Behnken returned home safely from the mission \u2014 in part because his parents had promised him a puppy once the flight was over.Now he\u2019s looking forward to another flight. But the splashdown will be better than the liftoff.\u201cI think he\u2019ll mostly be thrilled when I come home again,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cThat would be the best part for him.\u201d NASA and SpaceX vowed to remain vigilant ahead of the flight to ensure safety: \u2018We want to be paranoid.\u2019 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to fly astronauts for a third time. But there is nothing routine about it.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to fly astronauts for a third time. But there is nothing routine about it. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6051",
        "date": "2021-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/20/elon-musk-spacex-nasa-crew-2/",
        "text": "UPDATE: The launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-2 mission for NASA has been postponed by a day, to Friday at 5:49 a.m. EDT, because of high winds along the flight path. In order to launch, SpaceX needs good weather not just at the launch site, but downrange in case of an emergency abort. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen Megan McArthur\u2019s husband, Bob Behnken, flew to space almost a year ago, she watched from the ground with their 6-year-old son. As an astronaut herself, she was optimistic and proud, especially since it was the first flight of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.But she was also fearful.\u201cOne of the hardest things to do is watch the person that you love launch into space,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s much harder than actually doing it yourself when you\u2019re in the rocket. You have the training. You\u2019re prepared for the mission. When you\u2019re watching, you\u2019re just a spectator. And no matter what happens, there\u2019s nothing you can do to contribute to the situation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, it\u2019s McArthur\u2019s turn to fly \u2014 and Behnken\u2019s turn to spend that fretful time on the ground with their son, now 7.If all goes well, McArthur will be strapped into SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft along with the rest of the astronauts known as Crew-2 \u2014 NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan \u2014 for a launch to the International Space Station scheduled for 6:11 a.m. Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The flight will be SpaceX\u2019s third with astronauts aboard. Last May, it flew Behnken and NASA astronaut Doug Hurley in a short test flight to the station. Then, in November, it flew a regular crew of four for a full-duration mission of about six months, restoring regular transportation to the station from U.S. soil after the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is expected to overlap with Crew-2 on the space station for about a week before coming back to Earth in a return flight scheduled to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico on April 28.That flight cadence stands in stark contrast with that of Boeing, the other company under contract with NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. Boeing has not flown for nearly a year and a half, after its Starliner spacecraft suffered a software malfunction that made the spacecraft think it was 11 hours later in a test mission without any astronauts aboard than it actually was. The company was able to bring the spacecraft down safely and said it would repeat the test before flying a mission with astronauts.The company recently said it would be ready to fly as early as May. But because of traffic on the space station and the availability of the launchpad it uses, Boeing does not expect the launch to occur until August or September. Still, it said in a statement that it \u201cwill be mission-ready in May should another launch opportunity arise.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is not clear when Boeing\u2019s first flight with astronauts aboard will be.SpaceX, meanwhile, is moving ahead with its launch schedule, which includes another flight with a crew later this year. For the flight Thursday, it is incorporating a key difference: The rocket and the spacecraft that will fly the crew have been flown before, marking the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to reuse its hardware in a human spaceflight.Instead of throwing away its rockets, as had been done in the space industry for years, SpaceX flies them back to Earth, where they land on ships at sea or on a landing pad near the launch site. SpaceX has been doing it for years now, perfecting a practice once thought impossible.Story continues below advertisementBut it only recently convinced NASA that it should be allowed to use its boosters and spacecraft again with humans aboard.AdvertisementSpaceX will use the same Falcon 9 rocket that flew the Crew-1 astronauts. It stands on Launchpad 39A not shiny white and new but bearing the sooty streaks from the previous launch. The Dragon spacecraft for the flight is the same one that Behnken and Hurley flew in their mission. McArthur will be sitting in the same seat Behnken occupied for his flight.SpaceX\u2019s goal is to get to something similar to airline-like efficiency, where rockets and spacecraft take off, land and fly again. But space presents all kinds of different challenges, particularly for the capsules, which come screaming back through Earth\u2019s atmosphere, generating temperatures in the thousands of degrees. Then they splash into the ocean under parachutes, which poses its own problems.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the things you have to worry about is water intrusion,\u201d Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said during a recent press briefing. \u201cSaltwater is very corrosive. It\u2019s not a great thing when you want to keep your physical materials sound and especially easy to refurbish and to reuse.\u201dAdvertisementAfter the spacecraft, dubbed Endeavour, came back last year, SpaceX inspected it to make sure it was safe to fly again. The company replaced some parts, Reed said, and the thermal protection system and the parachutes for this coming flight will be new as well. \u201cBut otherwise, it\u2019s really the same vehicle,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s very carefully inspected, carefully prepared, refurbished as needed and ready to fly.\u201dHe added that NASA signs off on the vehicle and ensures that it is safe to fly. In the days and weeks leading up to the launch, officials from NASA and SpaceX repeatedly said that while this will be the third mission with people, the flight is by no means routine and the serious risks inherent in all human spaceflight remain.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve completed thousands and thousands of tests to get to this day,\u201d Reed said.AdvertisementThe company has pored over the data and performed intensive reviews alongside NASA, always looking for the worst-case scenario, trying to find it in a spreadsheet or an engine-test stand before a flight.\u201cWe call them paranoia reviews. We want to be paranoid,\u201d Reed said. \u201cWe want to make sure that we\u2019re going to fly these people safely and be able to bring them home safely when it\u2019s time. So we check. We check under every rock. And we double-check and we triple-check and we ask each other and we challenge each other all the time.\u201dHe said that he feels responsible not only for the astronauts but their families as well, and that he and the engineers kept McArthur\u2019s 7-year-old son, Theo, in their minds when preparing for the mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn particular in my heart, there\u2019s a little boy out there whose mom is flying,\u201d Reed said. \u201cThis is something that we pay a lot of attention to. We ask ourselves all the time: Would we be willing to fly our families on these vehicles? That\u2019s kind of a test for us.\u201dAdvertisementBefore Behnken\u2019s flight last year, he and McArthur took their son to Cape Canaveral for a launch so he could see the rocket take off and give him a sense of what his parents were about to do. He was excited for the flight and thrilled when Behnken returned home safely from the mission \u2014 in part because his parents had promised him a puppy once the flight was over.Now he\u2019s looking forward to another flight. But the splashdown will be better than the liftoff.\u201cI think he\u2019ll mostly be thrilled when I come home again,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cThat would be the best part for him.\u201d NASA and SpaceX vowed to remain vigilant ahead of the flight to ensure safety: \u2018We want to be paranoid.\u2019 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to fly astronauts for a third time. But there is nothing routine about it.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX plans to destroy a rocket in a key test of its spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6052",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/17/spacex-plans-destroy-rocket-saturday-key-test-its-spacecrafts-emergency-abort-system/",
        "text": "Update: SpaceX has postponed the test mission until Sunday because of high winds and rough seas that would make recovering the capsule from the ocean difficult. The company said that a six-hour launch window would open at 8 a.m. for the second attempt.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX plans to destroy a rocket booster here Saturday morning in what promises to be a dramatic test of an abort system designed to save astronauts\u2019 lives in the event of an emergency. The company plans to fly a Falcon 9 rocket in what would initially appear to be a normal launch. But nearly 90 seconds after liftoff, the spacecraft the company is developing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts would fire its abort engines, hurling it quickly away from the booster. The force of that ejection is expected to send the rocket into an uncontrollable trajectory that could force it to come apart and possibly explode into a fireball a few miles downrange over the Atlantic Ocean.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEither way, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter it would be a \u201cgnarly\u201d display.The test is a critical milestone for SpaceX \u2014 a chance to prove that if something ever went wrong with its rocket, the astronauts in the Dragon spacecraft could be whisked away to safety.If successful, the mission would move the company a step closer to its first flights with astronauts, a key goal for Musk since he founded SpaceX in 2002.NASA is also looking forward to that flight. The space agency has been unable to fly human beings to space since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. Since then, the United States has been forced to rely on Russia for trips to the International Space Station, paying as much as $84 million a seat.Story continues below advertisementIn 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to design and build spacecraft capable of flying its astronauts to the space station. Both companies were supposed to fly by 2017 but have suffered setbacks and delays.Last month, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a major problem during a test flight without astronauts on board. After reaching space, a software problem failed to fire the spacecraft\u2019s main booster on time, and the plan for it to dock with the space station was canceled and the mission cut short. The Starliner spacecraft landed safely in the New Mexico desert two days later.Last spring, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines, sending a plume of smoke off the Florida Space Coast. The company blamed a valve that caused a propellant leak. The company made some modifications that it said fixed the problem and has since tested the engines successfully on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA and SpaceX hope they will never need to use the abort capability. But space is dangerous; rockets are lofted by a controlled explosion of enormous force, and accidents happen. In late 2018, the Russian rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian counterpart, Alexey Ovchinin, suffered a problem when its side boosters failed to separate properly. The Soyuz spacecraft\u2019s abort system kicked in, giving the astronauts a wild ride to the edge of space.The astronauts experienced \u201c7Gs,\u201d or seven times the force of gravity, and afterward Hague recalled \u201cbeing shaken violently from side to side\u201d as the escape motors fired. But they landed safely in what officials called a \u201csuccessful failure.\u201dThe Soyuz incident \u201creally drives home the point of why we need to have these systems,\u201d Benji Reed, the director of crew mission management for SpaceX, said during a briefing Friday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s test Saturday should go quickly. Once the rocket takes off, sometime between 8 a.m. and noon, the Dragon\u2019s abort engines should ignite 84 seconds into flight, when the rocket is about 12 miles high, two miles downrange over the Atlantic Ocean and traveling nearly twice the speed of sound.While the spacecraft flies away to safety, the rocket, which has been launched three previous times, is expected to come apart by aerodynamic forces that could also cause it to explode.\u201cWe expect there to be some sort of ignition and possibly a fireball of some kind,\u201d Reed said.Any excess propellant \u201cis expected to be consumed in the deflagration or aerosolized,\u201d according to an environmental assessment compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX expects most of the debris \u201cto sink relatively quickly after impact with the ocean\u2019s surface.\u201d But SpaceX would quickly deploy boats to clean up any debris left floating. It also will test recovering the capsule as quickly as possible.Kathy Lueders, who manages the Commercial Crew Program for NASA, said that if Saturday\u2019s mission goes well, and SpaceX successfully completes a series of additional tests of its parachute system, the company could conceivably launch its first mission with crews as early as March.\u201cWe\u2019ve got work to do,\u201d she said. \u201cBut honestly getting this test behind us is a huge milestone.\u201d If successful, the mission would move the company a step closer to its first flights with astronauts. SpaceX plans to destroy a rocket in a key test of its spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX plans to destroy a rocket in a key test of its spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6053",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/17/spacex-plans-destroy-rocket-saturday-key-test-its-spacecrafts-emergency-abort-system/",
        "text": "Update: SpaceX has postponed the test mission until Sunday because of high winds and rough seas that would make recovering the capsule from the ocean difficult. The company said that a six-hour launch window would open at 8 a.m. for the second attempt.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX plans to destroy a rocket booster here Saturday morning in what promises to be a dramatic test of an abort system designed to save astronauts\u2019 lives in the event of an emergency. The company plans to fly a Falcon 9 rocket in what would initially appear to be a normal launch. But nearly 90 seconds after liftoff, the spacecraft the company is developing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts would fire its abort engines, hurling it quickly away from the booster. The force of that ejection is expected to send the rocket into an uncontrollable trajectory that could force it to come apart and possibly explode into a fireball a few miles downrange over the Atlantic Ocean.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEither way, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter it would be a \u201cgnarly\u201d display.The test is a critical milestone for SpaceX \u2014 a chance to prove that if something ever went wrong with its rocket, the astronauts in the Dragon spacecraft could be whisked away to safety.If successful, the mission would move the company a step closer to its first flights with astronauts, a key goal for Musk since he founded SpaceX in 2002.NASA is also looking forward to that flight. The space agency has been unable to fly human beings to space since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. Since then, the United States has been forced to rely on Russia for trips to the International Space Station, paying as much as $84 million a seat.Story continues below advertisementIn 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to design and build spacecraft capable of flying its astronauts to the space station. Both companies were supposed to fly by 2017 but have suffered setbacks and delays.Last month, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a major problem during a test flight without astronauts on board. After reaching space, a software problem failed to fire the spacecraft\u2019s main booster on time, and the plan for it to dock with the space station was canceled and the mission cut short. The Starliner spacecraft landed safely in the New Mexico desert two days later.Last spring, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines, sending a plume of smoke off the Florida Space Coast. The company blamed a valve that caused a propellant leak. The company made some modifications that it said fixed the problem and has since tested the engines successfully on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA and SpaceX hope they will never need to use the abort capability. But space is dangerous; rockets are lofted by a controlled explosion of enormous force, and accidents happen. In late 2018, the Russian rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian counterpart, Alexey Ovchinin, suffered a problem when its side boosters failed to separate properly. The Soyuz spacecraft\u2019s abort system kicked in, giving the astronauts a wild ride to the edge of space.The astronauts experienced \u201c7Gs,\u201d or seven times the force of gravity, and afterward Hague recalled \u201cbeing shaken violently from side to side\u201d as the escape motors fired. But they landed safely in what officials called a \u201csuccessful failure.\u201dThe Soyuz incident \u201creally drives home the point of why we need to have these systems,\u201d Benji Reed, the director of crew mission management for SpaceX, said during a briefing Friday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s test Saturday should go quickly. Once the rocket takes off, sometime between 8 a.m. and noon, the Dragon\u2019s abort engines should ignite 84 seconds into flight, when the rocket is about 12 miles high, two miles downrange over the Atlantic Ocean and traveling nearly twice the speed of sound.While the spacecraft flies away to safety, the rocket, which has been launched three previous times, is expected to come apart by aerodynamic forces that could also cause it to explode.\u201cWe expect there to be some sort of ignition and possibly a fireball of some kind,\u201d Reed said.Any excess propellant \u201cis expected to be consumed in the deflagration or aerosolized,\u201d according to an environmental assessment compiled by the Federal Aviation Administration.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX expects most of the debris \u201cto sink relatively quickly after impact with the ocean\u2019s surface.\u201d But SpaceX would quickly deploy boats to clean up any debris left floating. It also will test recovering the capsule as quickly as possible.Kathy Lueders, who manages the Commercial Crew Program for NASA, said that if Saturday\u2019s mission goes well, and SpaceX successfully completes a series of additional tests of its parachute system, the company could conceivably launch its first mission with crews as early as March.\u201cWe\u2019ve got work to do,\u201d she said. \u201cBut honestly getting this test behind us is a huge milestone.\u201d If successful, the mission would move the company a step closer to its first flights with astronauts. SpaceX plans to destroy a rocket in a key test of its spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s positive and negative covid tests create a quandary for SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6054",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/13/musk-coronavius-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "Update: NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditionsCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 One day before his space company is scheduled to launch a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that he had two positive tests for coronavirus and two that were negative. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFollow live coverage of the SpaceX launch hereHe said he was suffering \u201csymptoms of a typical cold. Nothing unusual so far.\u201d And added that he was getting a more reliable PCR test and that the results of that should be ready in about 24 hours.Speaking at a news conference here, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday morning that it was NASA policy that anyone who tests positive must isolate and quarantine, and he said it was unclear whether it would have any effect on the launch. Musk was not at the Kennedy Space Center here on Friday, though he was expected to be in the company\u2019s control center for the launch on Saturday, as he has been for previous launches.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe astronauts have been in strict quarantine for about three weeks, and NASA has repeatedly said it was taking steps to ensure they remain healthy.Crew members from the first operational commercial mission to space, due to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, spoke on Nov. 8. (Reuters)Elon Musk, who has cold symptoms, says his coronavirus tests are inconclusive: \u2018Something extremely bogus is going on\u2019\"We are looking to SpaceX to do any contact tracing that is appropriate and then if there are changes that need to be made, we will look at those,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cBut it's very early right now to know if any changes are necessary at this point. We just don't know.\"SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon is scheduled to launch Saturday at 7:49 p.m.SpaceX did not respond immediately to a request for comment.\u201cNASA and SpaceX are going to work through it together and come to the right conclusion,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cI will tell you our astronauts have been in quarantine for weeks, and they should not have had contact with anybody. They should be in good shape.\u201dAsked if this could delay the launch, he said: \u201cI\u2019m not going to say that. There\u2019s a lot to learn.\u201d Speaking at a news conference, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday morning it was unclear whether Musk's positive test would have any affect on the launch. Musk also tested negative and another test was expected. Elon Musk\u2019s positive and negative covid tests create a quandary for SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s positive and negative covid tests create a quandary for SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6055",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/13/musk-coronavius-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "Update: NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditionsCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 One day before his space company is scheduled to launch a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that he had two positive tests for coronavirus and two that were negative. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFollow live coverage of the SpaceX launch hereHe said he was suffering \u201csymptoms of a typical cold. Nothing unusual so far.\u201d And added that he was getting a more reliable PCR test and that the results of that should be ready in about 24 hours.Speaking at a news conference here, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday morning that it was NASA policy that anyone who tests positive must isolate and quarantine, and he said it was unclear whether it would have any effect on the launch. Musk was not at the Kennedy Space Center here on Friday, though he was expected to be in the company\u2019s control center for the launch on Saturday, as he has been for previous launches.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe astronauts have been in strict quarantine for about three weeks, and NASA has repeatedly said it was taking steps to ensure they remain healthy.Crew members from the first operational commercial mission to space, due to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, spoke on Nov. 8. (Reuters)Elon Musk, who has cold symptoms, says his coronavirus tests are inconclusive: \u2018Something extremely bogus is going on\u2019\"We are looking to SpaceX to do any contact tracing that is appropriate and then if there are changes that need to be made, we will look at those,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cBut it's very early right now to know if any changes are necessary at this point. We just don't know.\"SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon is scheduled to launch Saturday at 7:49 p.m.SpaceX did not respond immediately to a request for comment.\u201cNASA and SpaceX are going to work through it together and come to the right conclusion,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cI will tell you our astronauts have been in quarantine for weeks, and they should not have had contact with anybody. They should be in good shape.\u201dAsked if this could delay the launch, he said: \u201cI\u2019m not going to say that. There\u2019s a lot to learn.\u201d Speaking at a news conference, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday morning it was unclear whether Musk's positive test would have any affect on the launch. Musk also tested negative and another test was expected. Elon Musk\u2019s positive and negative covid tests create a quandary for SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6056",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/15/spacex-launch-live-updates-crew1/",
        "text": "Update: Follow live coverage of the SpaceX capsule docking onto the International Space Station hereCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.While the launch was successful, the crew still had a day-long journey to the space station. They are scheduled to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft will then proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation, to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit at 17,500 mph.\u201cWe\u2019re not done yet. We need to keep going,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate said during a news conference after the launch. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on them, and we\u2019re going to get them to the International Space Station. ... Right now we\u2019re not expecting any issues and I\u2019m sure docking tomorrow we\u2019ll go smoothly.\u201dThe crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.Though heralded as a success that will open spaceflight to others, the road to this point was long and at times tortured. NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and then Orbital Sciences.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.If the technical challenges weren\u2019t enough, NASA and SpaceX were also warily eyeing Tropical Storm Eta\u2019s erratic path across the Florida Keys, then up the Gulf of Mexico before shooting across the top of the Florida peninsula and jetting off east into the Atlantic. Rough seas in the area where the booster was to return to Earth forced the delay of the launch from Saturday until Sunday.NASA also has been forced to take extra precautions to protect the astronauts and ground crews from the surging coronavirus pandemic, steps that were highlighted Friday when Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, announced that he had tested both positive and negative for the coronavirus. NASA regulations prohibit anyone with a positive test from being present for the launch, and Musk did not witness the launch from SpaceX\u2019s control center at the Kennedy Space Center.In the post-launch news conference, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who came here for the launch in his place, said that he \"was tied in very closely with the launch. I have the texts to prove it. As usual, regardless of where he is on the planet, he\u2019s is watching closely and providing guidance and support.\u201dThroughout it all, the astronauts remained upbeat and confident ahead of the launch. The crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center about a week before the launch, waving and smiling.\u201cWe are ready for this launch,\u201d Hopkins said. \u201cWe are ready for the six months of work that is waiting for us on board the International Space Station. And we are ready for the return.\u201dBoeing, however, continues to have problems. Its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit last December in a test flight with no astronauts on board.A software problem made the flight computers think it was at a completely different point in the mission. Another software issue could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module, but that was caught in time, and controllers on the ground were able to beam up a fix. Still, the mission ended after just two days, and the spacecraft never docked with the space station, one of the primary objectives.Below are the updates from the SpaceX\u2019s capsule launch.The International Space Station can be seen with the naked eye from EarthReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station, the destination for four astronauts aboard the SpaceX capsule that launched Sunday, is visible to the naked eye and appears as a fast moving plane, according to NASA.It\u2019s the third brightest object in the sky, flying in orbit about 240 miles (or 400 kilometers) above the Earth.You can use the space agency\u2019s \u201cspot the station tool\" to find when the station will pass overhead.Members of Crew-1 are scheduled to dock with the ISS at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday. Shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, the ISS will hold a welcoming ceremony for the incoming astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 booster lands successfully on drone shipReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:22 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter blasting off from Kennedy Space Center, the big moment in the flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 mission was the entry of the capsule, with its four astronauts, into orbit. That took place as scheduled about 12 minutes into the flight.But another key moment for the future of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program had happened just a few minutes before when the first stage booster of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully detached from and landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic.The recovery of the booster rocket is central to the partnership between SpaceX and NASA \u2014 and to SpaceX\u2019s plans to seriously reduce the cost of routine flights to the International Space Station.Historically, boosters have been ditched in the ocean, a practice that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has equated to throwing away an airplane after every flight. But SpaceX developed a system that returns the booster to Earth, saving millions with each launch. It\u2019s executed the return dozens of times.SpaceX plans to reuse the booster from Sunday night\u2019s launch for its second operational flight, slated for March 2021, making its safe landing on the drone ship named \u201cJust Read the Instructions\u201d a major moment of success. Falcon 9\u2019s first stage booster has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship! pic.twitter.com/HSFJKpR4Rm\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA successful SpaceX launch came after years of workReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe seemingly seamless countdown and launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday came with a spectacular evening liftoff just days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Unf1ScdVFB\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nBut the road to this point was long and at times tortured.NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and a company that was then known as Orbital Sciences and has since been subsumed by Northrup Grumman.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.SpaceX\u2019s rocket just exploded. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s such a big deal.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.A @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's #CrewDragon spacecraft is launched with @Astro_illini, @AstroVicGlover, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi onboard, from @NASAKennedy to begin a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost. pic.twitter.com/zXYkUbxCVS\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 16, 2020\n\nSunday\u2019s flight put SpaceX\u2019s Dragon on a trajectory to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday. If all goes well, the spacecraft will proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit, traveling 17,500 mph.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s coming for NASA in a Biden administration?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:18 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident-elect Biden hasn\u2019t talked much about space or what his administration\u2019s plans are for it. But it has appointed a transition team that will help guide the new administration. Leading the effort is Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and NASA\u2019s former chief scientist.SpaceX will still be launching crews to the station. But other programs seem less certain. The new administration is likely to keep the Trump administration\u2019s Artemis program to return to the moon, Democratic officials have said. But instead of pushing to get astronauts there by 2024, as the Trump White House has mandated, NASA would likely aim for a more realistic goal sometime after that.Democratic officials have said that their pick for a new NASA administrator would likely be a woman, and while there are lots of names floating around, nothing has been decided.It\u2019s also clear that under a Biden administration, NASA would be more focused on Earth science and helping to combat climate change.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is fueled in final crucial step before launch Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban7:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed loading propellant on the Falcon 9 rocket in a crucial late-stage step before astronauts launch into space.The fueling stage involves two main components, the loading of rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, which creates the massive plumes of what appears as white smoke \u2014 the oxygen changing from liquid form into gas form around the rocket in Florida\u2019s humid air.Before the propellants were loaded, the launch escape system was armed. That system allows the crew to abort from any point on the launchpad all the way up to orbit. In the event of an emergency, the capsule would propel itself off the Falcon 9 rocket, splashing down off the coast, in a rescue scenario. NASA and SpaceX tout the ability to abort from the pad or midflight as a safety upgrade, which the shuttle program lacked.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementExperienced Japanese astronaut defies age to fly on SpaceX, still feels like a kidReturn to menuBy Simon Denyer6:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkTOKYO \u2014 Experienced Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will become the first non-American to fly on a mission launched by SpaceX, and his participation has been welcomed with excitement and pride in his home country.The 55-year-old previously flew inside the space shuttle Discovery in 2005, and also used a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station for a 161-day stay between 2009 and 2010. He\u2019s determined to show he is still up to the job.\u201cMy physical and cognitive abilities will be challenged but I want to compete with the younger generation by duping them with my experience,\u201d he said in an online conversation with Japan\u2019s science and technology minister in October, Kyodo News reported. \u201cI want to hang in there to keep up with the younger generation.\u201dLaughing, Minister Koichi Hagiuda, who\u2019s 57, said: \u201cLet\u2019s show how determined middle-aged people are.\u201dBut at a news conference last week, Noguchi said his experience didn\u2019t dim his anticipation of what lay ahead.\u201cI feel very excited just like an elementary school kid who cannot sleep the night before an athletic meet, and also have a feeling of tension bracing for the important day with my colleagues,\u201d he said.The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has given the mission a catchphrase \u201cWe call creatures who don\u2019t stop taking on challenges humans,\u201d and Noguchi echoed this in his comments.\u201cHumans grow by challenging today what we could not do yesterday, and by repeating that challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cI want this mission to be one where I can share dreams and hopes for our new future in this tough situation with everyone in Japan. Please send us cheers.\u201dOver the past few weeks, Noguchi has been tweeting and creating videos on his YouTube channel to give his Japanese fans a better understanding of the mission and the technology involved, in a chatty and accessible way.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is certified for flights to the space station Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX pulled off a successful test flight that sent a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, for a two-month stay on the International Space Station. Now, NASA has certified the company for regular flights to the station and back, carrying full contingents of up to four astronauts for even longer visits to the station. That marks the first time a commercial company has been authorized to fly NASA astronauts to the space station.NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate, Kathy Lueders, said the certification is NASA\u2019s way of telling SpaceX, \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station. You\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dStill, the capsule has had some problems. After the test flight, SpaceX noticed that there was more erosion on the heat shield than they anticipated. As a result, SpaceX reinforced a few points where the crew capsule connects to the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is jettisoned before reentering the atmosphere.SpaceX also suffered a problem with its engines that caused an abort of a satellite launch for the U.S. Space Force with just two seconds left on the countdown clock. SpaceX later discovered the problem was caused by a bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, that was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves.As a result, SpaceX swapped out two engines of the Falcon 9 booster to be used in Sunday\u2019s flight and has said they are ready to go.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementOn space station, astronauts speak a mix of English and Russian Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt the International Space Station, global cooperation spans languages.The three people already at the ISS communicate with each other in a mix of English and Russian, NASA said, allowing American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to speak with one another seamlessly.In addition to their technical skills and scientific expertise, all NASA astronauts learn to speak Russian. So when the crew of the SpaceX mission reaches the ISS, they too will put their Russian language skills to use. While cosmonauts Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov most likely speak with each other in their native language, NASA said, all of the crew members communicate in a mix of English and Russian.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s coronavirus tests keep him from launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 NASA has a policy that bars anyone with a positive coronavirus test from entering the Kennedy Space Center. That\u2019s one reason Elon Musk, Space X\u2019s founder and chief executive, won\u2019t be present for Sunday\u2019s launch.On Friday, Musk tweeted that he had taken four coronavirus tests and that two had come back positive, and two, negative. He said he had minor symptoms, including a fever but was feeling okay.But that sent SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine if Musk had had contact with anyone who would have had contact with the astronauts. By the afternoon, SpaceX determined that the astronauts, who have been in quarantine for weeks, had not been exposed.\u201cThere should be no impact on this mission,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post on Friday. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dGiven the positive tests, however, Bridenstine said that under NASA rules Musk would not be allowed at the Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX has its launch control center. And NASA officials stressed they would continue to enforce safety rules as the pandemic surges.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re Elon Musk or Jim Bridenstine,\u201d Norm Knight, NASA\u2019s deputy manager for flight operations, told a news conference Friday evening. \u201cIf you have not met those protocols, or if any of those protocols have been compromised, then we\u2019re not going to let you near the crew.\u201dEven when there isn\u2019t a pandemic, NASA goes to great lengths to ensure astronauts remain healthy in the days and weeks leading up to their flights. The last thing NASA wants is a sick astronaut on the International Space Station, where astronauts live in close quarters and disease could spread quickly.SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell is expected to be on hand for the launch in Musk\u2019s place.After its Starliner capsule failed its test mission, Boeing hired a former SpaceX developer to oversee software Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX isn\u2019t the only company that has a contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing does as well. But Boeing\u2019s efforts to earn NASA\u2019s trust to do that has suffered a series of setbacks, and it\u2019s not clear exactly when it will be able to fly its first mission with crews.Late last year, its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit during a test flight without any astronauts on board. Software problems made it think it was at a completely different point in the mission, directing its thruster to fire at the wrong time. Another problem, which was caught and fixed in time, could have caused the service and crew modules to potentially collide with each other upon separation.Since then, Boeing has been working to fix the problems, but the progress has been slow. It initially said it would refly the test flight without crew by December or January, but it now appears that flight might be pushed back even further.Meantime, however, Boeing has created a new position, vice president of software engineering, to help the company deal with its complex systems. In addition to the software problems on Starliner, it has struggled with the software on its 737 Max airplanes, which crashed twice, killing a total of 346 people.The person it has hired for the job is Jinnah Hosein, who worked at Aurora, a self-driving vehicle company. But he also previously worked at SpaceX, where he led software development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and for the Crew Dragon capsule.Before docking with Space Station, astronauts will get some sleepReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter the Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station was delayed from Saturday until Sunday, the updated schedule will offer the four astronauts extra time in low Earth orbit before docking.That will give the crew enough time to get some sleep after a long day of preparation. Crew members of the SpaceX mission will have eight hours to rest, NASA said, after which they will wake up and continue the mission and eventually dock with the International Space Station.Under the previous launch schedule for Saturday, crew members were scheduled to dock about eight hours after launch. But after liftoff this evening, the astronauts won\u2019t dock with the International Space Station for more than 24 hours \u2014 at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday.The \u2018Times Square\u2019 of space real estate, updated by SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk has called the launchpad SpaceX is using tonight the \u201cTimes Square\u201d of spaceflight real estate, a sacrosanct piece of land on the Florida Space Coast with a long and rich history.Launchpad 39A is where many of the Apollo missions lifted off, including Apollo 11, whose crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon\u2019s surface in 1969 (the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, orbited the moon during their trip to the surface).Launchpad 39A was also where many space shuttle missions took off. But after NASA retired the space shuttle, it sat dormant, rusting away in the salt air.In 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease for the pad and has been flying its Falcon 9 rockets from there since. Over the years, the company has renovated it extensively, giving it a sleek arm that the astronauts walk down to board their spacecraft. The launch tower is now black and white, mimicking the color of the rocket and the spacesuits the astronauts wear.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d Musk said in an interview in 2016. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dWhy the launch was moved to SundayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Delays in launches are not unusual. SpaceX\u2019s test launch in May also was delayed for inclement weather.But the decision to move this launch from Saturday to Sunday evening was somewhat unusual because the forecast high winds and rough seas weren\u2019t expected to affect the launch itself, but SpaceX\u2019s ability to recover the first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket, which is supposed to land on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean after it separates from the remainder of the rocket.This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight of astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for March 30.The March flight would mark the first time NASA has allowed a crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.SpaceX has made an art out of landing boosters. Traditionally, rocket first stages were ditched into the ocean after propelling a payload to orbit. But SpaceX for five years has been flying its boosters back to Earth, landing them either on a ship at sea or on land. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that having reusable rockets is a key step toward lowering the cost of space travel, which in turn could make it more accessible.Weather looks good for tonight\u2019s SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow5:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Sunday evening, the weather around Cape Canaveral seemed favorable for launch.Skies featured just scattered clouds, while winds were light with temperatures in the 70s.The National Weather Service forecast for the evening indicated a 30 percent chance of showers through midnight. Radar showed widely scattered showers 30 to 45 miles inland drifting slowly toward the coast, but nothing appeared terribly ominous.The Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which provides official launch forecasts, wrote early Sunday that there was a 50 percent chance weather conditions would prevent liftoff, based on the potential for showers, lightning and tall clouds in the area.Weather is a GO for launch! #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) November 15, 2020\n\n SpaceX has launched four astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule is the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight, a certification SpaceX received only days ago. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6057",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/15/spacex-launch-live-updates-crew1/",
        "text": "Update: Follow live coverage of the SpaceX capsule docking onto the International Space Station hereCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.While the launch was successful, the crew still had a day-long journey to the space station. They are scheduled to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft will then proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation, to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit at 17,500 mph.\u201cWe\u2019re not done yet. We need to keep going,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate said during a news conference after the launch. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on them, and we\u2019re going to get them to the International Space Station. ... Right now we\u2019re not expecting any issues and I\u2019m sure docking tomorrow we\u2019ll go smoothly.\u201dThe crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.Though heralded as a success that will open spaceflight to others, the road to this point was long and at times tortured. NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and then Orbital Sciences.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.If the technical challenges weren\u2019t enough, NASA and SpaceX were also warily eyeing Tropical Storm Eta\u2019s erratic path across the Florida Keys, then up the Gulf of Mexico before shooting across the top of the Florida peninsula and jetting off east into the Atlantic. Rough seas in the area where the booster was to return to Earth forced the delay of the launch from Saturday until Sunday.NASA also has been forced to take extra precautions to protect the astronauts and ground crews from the surging coronavirus pandemic, steps that were highlighted Friday when Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, announced that he had tested both positive and negative for the coronavirus. NASA regulations prohibit anyone with a positive test from being present for the launch, and Musk did not witness the launch from SpaceX\u2019s control center at the Kennedy Space Center.In the post-launch news conference, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who came here for the launch in his place, said that he \"was tied in very closely with the launch. I have the texts to prove it. As usual, regardless of where he is on the planet, he\u2019s is watching closely and providing guidance and support.\u201dThroughout it all, the astronauts remained upbeat and confident ahead of the launch. The crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center about a week before the launch, waving and smiling.\u201cWe are ready for this launch,\u201d Hopkins said. \u201cWe are ready for the six months of work that is waiting for us on board the International Space Station. And we are ready for the return.\u201dBoeing, however, continues to have problems. Its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit last December in a test flight with no astronauts on board.A software problem made the flight computers think it was at a completely different point in the mission. Another software issue could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module, but that was caught in time, and controllers on the ground were able to beam up a fix. Still, the mission ended after just two days, and the spacecraft never docked with the space station, one of the primary objectives.Below are the updates from the SpaceX\u2019s capsule launch.The International Space Station can be seen with the naked eye from EarthReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station, the destination for four astronauts aboard the SpaceX capsule that launched Sunday, is visible to the naked eye and appears as a fast moving plane, according to NASA.It\u2019s the third brightest object in the sky, flying in orbit about 240 miles (or 400 kilometers) above the Earth.You can use the space agency\u2019s \u201cspot the station tool\" to find when the station will pass overhead.Members of Crew-1 are scheduled to dock with the ISS at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday. Shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, the ISS will hold a welcoming ceremony for the incoming astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 booster lands successfully on drone shipReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:22 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter blasting off from Kennedy Space Center, the big moment in the flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 mission was the entry of the capsule, with its four astronauts, into orbit. That took place as scheduled about 12 minutes into the flight.But another key moment for the future of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program had happened just a few minutes before when the first stage booster of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully detached from and landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic.The recovery of the booster rocket is central to the partnership between SpaceX and NASA \u2014 and to SpaceX\u2019s plans to seriously reduce the cost of routine flights to the International Space Station.Historically, boosters have been ditched in the ocean, a practice that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has equated to throwing away an airplane after every flight. But SpaceX developed a system that returns the booster to Earth, saving millions with each launch. It\u2019s executed the return dozens of times.SpaceX plans to reuse the booster from Sunday night\u2019s launch for its second operational flight, slated for March 2021, making its safe landing on the drone ship named \u201cJust Read the Instructions\u201d a major moment of success. Falcon 9\u2019s first stage booster has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship! pic.twitter.com/HSFJKpR4Rm\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA successful SpaceX launch came after years of workReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe seemingly seamless countdown and launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday came with a spectacular evening liftoff just days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Unf1ScdVFB\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nBut the road to this point was long and at times tortured.NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and a company that was then known as Orbital Sciences and has since been subsumed by Northrup Grumman.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.SpaceX\u2019s rocket just exploded. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s such a big deal.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.A @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's #CrewDragon spacecraft is launched with @Astro_illini, @AstroVicGlover, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi onboard, from @NASAKennedy to begin a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost. pic.twitter.com/zXYkUbxCVS\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 16, 2020\n\nSunday\u2019s flight put SpaceX\u2019s Dragon on a trajectory to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday. If all goes well, the spacecraft will proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit, traveling 17,500 mph.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s coming for NASA in a Biden administration?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:18 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident-elect Biden hasn\u2019t talked much about space or what his administration\u2019s plans are for it. But it has appointed a transition team that will help guide the new administration. Leading the effort is Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and NASA\u2019s former chief scientist.SpaceX will still be launching crews to the station. But other programs seem less certain. The new administration is likely to keep the Trump administration\u2019s Artemis program to return to the moon, Democratic officials have said. But instead of pushing to get astronauts there by 2024, as the Trump White House has mandated, NASA would likely aim for a more realistic goal sometime after that.Democratic officials have said that their pick for a new NASA administrator would likely be a woman, and while there are lots of names floating around, nothing has been decided.It\u2019s also clear that under a Biden administration, NASA would be more focused on Earth science and helping to combat climate change.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is fueled in final crucial step before launch Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban7:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed loading propellant on the Falcon 9 rocket in a crucial late-stage step before astronauts launch into space.The fueling stage involves two main components, the loading of rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, which creates the massive plumes of what appears as white smoke \u2014 the oxygen changing from liquid form into gas form around the rocket in Florida\u2019s humid air.Before the propellants were loaded, the launch escape system was armed. That system allows the crew to abort from any point on the launchpad all the way up to orbit. In the event of an emergency, the capsule would propel itself off the Falcon 9 rocket, splashing down off the coast, in a rescue scenario. NASA and SpaceX tout the ability to abort from the pad or midflight as a safety upgrade, which the shuttle program lacked.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementExperienced Japanese astronaut defies age to fly on SpaceX, still feels like a kidReturn to menuBy Simon Denyer6:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkTOKYO \u2014 Experienced Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will become the first non-American to fly on a mission launched by SpaceX, and his participation has been welcomed with excitement and pride in his home country.The 55-year-old previously flew inside the space shuttle Discovery in 2005, and also used a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station for a 161-day stay between 2009 and 2010. He\u2019s determined to show he is still up to the job.\u201cMy physical and cognitive abilities will be challenged but I want to compete with the younger generation by duping them with my experience,\u201d he said in an online conversation with Japan\u2019s science and technology minister in October, Kyodo News reported. \u201cI want to hang in there to keep up with the younger generation.\u201dLaughing, Minister Koichi Hagiuda, who\u2019s 57, said: \u201cLet\u2019s show how determined middle-aged people are.\u201dBut at a news conference last week, Noguchi said his experience didn\u2019t dim his anticipation of what lay ahead.\u201cI feel very excited just like an elementary school kid who cannot sleep the night before an athletic meet, and also have a feeling of tension bracing for the important day with my colleagues,\u201d he said.The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has given the mission a catchphrase \u201cWe call creatures who don\u2019t stop taking on challenges humans,\u201d and Noguchi echoed this in his comments.\u201cHumans grow by challenging today what we could not do yesterday, and by repeating that challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cI want this mission to be one where I can share dreams and hopes for our new future in this tough situation with everyone in Japan. Please send us cheers.\u201dOver the past few weeks, Noguchi has been tweeting and creating videos on his YouTube channel to give his Japanese fans a better understanding of the mission and the technology involved, in a chatty and accessible way.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is certified for flights to the space station Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX pulled off a successful test flight that sent a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, for a two-month stay on the International Space Station. Now, NASA has certified the company for regular flights to the station and back, carrying full contingents of up to four astronauts for even longer visits to the station. That marks the first time a commercial company has been authorized to fly NASA astronauts to the space station.NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate, Kathy Lueders, said the certification is NASA\u2019s way of telling SpaceX, \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station. You\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dStill, the capsule has had some problems. After the test flight, SpaceX noticed that there was more erosion on the heat shield than they anticipated. As a result, SpaceX reinforced a few points where the crew capsule connects to the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is jettisoned before reentering the atmosphere.SpaceX also suffered a problem with its engines that caused an abort of a satellite launch for the U.S. Space Force with just two seconds left on the countdown clock. SpaceX later discovered the problem was caused by a bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, that was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves.As a result, SpaceX swapped out two engines of the Falcon 9 booster to be used in Sunday\u2019s flight and has said they are ready to go.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementOn space station, astronauts speak a mix of English and Russian Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt the International Space Station, global cooperation spans languages.The three people already at the ISS communicate with each other in a mix of English and Russian, NASA said, allowing American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to speak with one another seamlessly.In addition to their technical skills and scientific expertise, all NASA astronauts learn to speak Russian. So when the crew of the SpaceX mission reaches the ISS, they too will put their Russian language skills to use. While cosmonauts Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov most likely speak with each other in their native language, NASA said, all of the crew members communicate in a mix of English and Russian.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s coronavirus tests keep him from launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 NASA has a policy that bars anyone with a positive coronavirus test from entering the Kennedy Space Center. That\u2019s one reason Elon Musk, Space X\u2019s founder and chief executive, won\u2019t be present for Sunday\u2019s launch.On Friday, Musk tweeted that he had taken four coronavirus tests and that two had come back positive, and two, negative. He said he had minor symptoms, including a fever but was feeling okay.But that sent SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine if Musk had had contact with anyone who would have had contact with the astronauts. By the afternoon, SpaceX determined that the astronauts, who have been in quarantine for weeks, had not been exposed.\u201cThere should be no impact on this mission,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post on Friday. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dGiven the positive tests, however, Bridenstine said that under NASA rules Musk would not be allowed at the Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX has its launch control center. And NASA officials stressed they would continue to enforce safety rules as the pandemic surges.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re Elon Musk or Jim Bridenstine,\u201d Norm Knight, NASA\u2019s deputy manager for flight operations, told a news conference Friday evening. \u201cIf you have not met those protocols, or if any of those protocols have been compromised, then we\u2019re not going to let you near the crew.\u201dEven when there isn\u2019t a pandemic, NASA goes to great lengths to ensure astronauts remain healthy in the days and weeks leading up to their flights. The last thing NASA wants is a sick astronaut on the International Space Station, where astronauts live in close quarters and disease could spread quickly.SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell is expected to be on hand for the launch in Musk\u2019s place.After its Starliner capsule failed its test mission, Boeing hired a former SpaceX developer to oversee software Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX isn\u2019t the only company that has a contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing does as well. But Boeing\u2019s efforts to earn NASA\u2019s trust to do that has suffered a series of setbacks, and it\u2019s not clear exactly when it will be able to fly its first mission with crews.Late last year, its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit during a test flight without any astronauts on board. Software problems made it think it was at a completely different point in the mission, directing its thruster to fire at the wrong time. Another problem, which was caught and fixed in time, could have caused the service and crew modules to potentially collide with each other upon separation.Since then, Boeing has been working to fix the problems, but the progress has been slow. It initially said it would refly the test flight without crew by December or January, but it now appears that flight might be pushed back even further.Meantime, however, Boeing has created a new position, vice president of software engineering, to help the company deal with its complex systems. In addition to the software problems on Starliner, it has struggled with the software on its 737 Max airplanes, which crashed twice, killing a total of 346 people.The person it has hired for the job is Jinnah Hosein, who worked at Aurora, a self-driving vehicle company. But he also previously worked at SpaceX, where he led software development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and for the Crew Dragon capsule.Before docking with Space Station, astronauts will get some sleepReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter the Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station was delayed from Saturday until Sunday, the updated schedule will offer the four astronauts extra time in low Earth orbit before docking.That will give the crew enough time to get some sleep after a long day of preparation. Crew members of the SpaceX mission will have eight hours to rest, NASA said, after which they will wake up and continue the mission and eventually dock with the International Space Station.Under the previous launch schedule for Saturday, crew members were scheduled to dock about eight hours after launch. But after liftoff this evening, the astronauts won\u2019t dock with the International Space Station for more than 24 hours \u2014 at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday.The \u2018Times Square\u2019 of space real estate, updated by SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk has called the launchpad SpaceX is using tonight the \u201cTimes Square\u201d of spaceflight real estate, a sacrosanct piece of land on the Florida Space Coast with a long and rich history.Launchpad 39A is where many of the Apollo missions lifted off, including Apollo 11, whose crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon\u2019s surface in 1969 (the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, orbited the moon during their trip to the surface).Launchpad 39A was also where many space shuttle missions took off. But after NASA retired the space shuttle, it sat dormant, rusting away in the salt air.In 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease for the pad and has been flying its Falcon 9 rockets from there since. Over the years, the company has renovated it extensively, giving it a sleek arm that the astronauts walk down to board their spacecraft. The launch tower is now black and white, mimicking the color of the rocket and the spacesuits the astronauts wear.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d Musk said in an interview in 2016. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dWhy the launch was moved to SundayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Delays in launches are not unusual. SpaceX\u2019s test launch in May also was delayed for inclement weather.But the decision to move this launch from Saturday to Sunday evening was somewhat unusual because the forecast high winds and rough seas weren\u2019t expected to affect the launch itself, but SpaceX\u2019s ability to recover the first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket, which is supposed to land on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean after it separates from the remainder of the rocket.This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight of astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for March 30.The March flight would mark the first time NASA has allowed a crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.SpaceX has made an art out of landing boosters. Traditionally, rocket first stages were ditched into the ocean after propelling a payload to orbit. But SpaceX for five years has been flying its boosters back to Earth, landing them either on a ship at sea or on land. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that having reusable rockets is a key step toward lowering the cost of space travel, which in turn could make it more accessible.Weather looks good for tonight\u2019s SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow5:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Sunday evening, the weather around Cape Canaveral seemed favorable for launch.Skies featured just scattered clouds, while winds were light with temperatures in the 70s.The National Weather Service forecast for the evening indicated a 30 percent chance of showers through midnight. Radar showed widely scattered showers 30 to 45 miles inland drifting slowly toward the coast, but nothing appeared terribly ominous.The Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which provides official launch forecasts, wrote early Sunday that there was a 50 percent chance weather conditions would prevent liftoff, based on the potential for showers, lightning and tall clouds in the area.Weather is a GO for launch! #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) November 15, 2020\n\n SpaceX has launched four astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule is the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight, a certification SpaceX received only days ago. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6058",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/15/spacex-launch-live-updates-crew1/",
        "text": "Update: Follow live coverage of the SpaceX capsule docking onto the International Space Station hereCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.While the launch was successful, the crew still had a day-long journey to the space station. They are scheduled to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft will then proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation, to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit at 17,500 mph.\u201cWe\u2019re not done yet. We need to keep going,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate said during a news conference after the launch. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on them, and we\u2019re going to get them to the International Space Station. ... Right now we\u2019re not expecting any issues and I\u2019m sure docking tomorrow we\u2019ll go smoothly.\u201dThe crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.Though heralded as a success that will open spaceflight to others, the road to this point was long and at times tortured. NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and then Orbital Sciences.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.If the technical challenges weren\u2019t enough, NASA and SpaceX were also warily eyeing Tropical Storm Eta\u2019s erratic path across the Florida Keys, then up the Gulf of Mexico before shooting across the top of the Florida peninsula and jetting off east into the Atlantic. Rough seas in the area where the booster was to return to Earth forced the delay of the launch from Saturday until Sunday.NASA also has been forced to take extra precautions to protect the astronauts and ground crews from the surging coronavirus pandemic, steps that were highlighted Friday when Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, announced that he had tested both positive and negative for the coronavirus. NASA regulations prohibit anyone with a positive test from being present for the launch, and Musk did not witness the launch from SpaceX\u2019s control center at the Kennedy Space Center.In the post-launch news conference, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who came here for the launch in his place, said that he \"was tied in very closely with the launch. I have the texts to prove it. As usual, regardless of where he is on the planet, he\u2019s is watching closely and providing guidance and support.\u201dThroughout it all, the astronauts remained upbeat and confident ahead of the launch. The crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center about a week before the launch, waving and smiling.\u201cWe are ready for this launch,\u201d Hopkins said. \u201cWe are ready for the six months of work that is waiting for us on board the International Space Station. And we are ready for the return.\u201dBoeing, however, continues to have problems. Its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit last December in a test flight with no astronauts on board.A software problem made the flight computers think it was at a completely different point in the mission. Another software issue could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module, but that was caught in time, and controllers on the ground were able to beam up a fix. Still, the mission ended after just two days, and the spacecraft never docked with the space station, one of the primary objectives.Below are the updates from the SpaceX\u2019s capsule launch.The International Space Station can be seen with the naked eye from EarthReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station, the destination for four astronauts aboard the SpaceX capsule that launched Sunday, is visible to the naked eye and appears as a fast moving plane, according to NASA.It\u2019s the third brightest object in the sky, flying in orbit about 240 miles (or 400 kilometers) above the Earth.You can use the space agency\u2019s \u201cspot the station tool\" to find when the station will pass overhead.Members of Crew-1 are scheduled to dock with the ISS at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday. Shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, the ISS will hold a welcoming ceremony for the incoming astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 booster lands successfully on drone shipReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:22 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter blasting off from Kennedy Space Center, the big moment in the flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 mission was the entry of the capsule, with its four astronauts, into orbit. That took place as scheduled about 12 minutes into the flight.But another key moment for the future of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program had happened just a few minutes before when the first stage booster of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully detached from and landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic.The recovery of the booster rocket is central to the partnership between SpaceX and NASA \u2014 and to SpaceX\u2019s plans to seriously reduce the cost of routine flights to the International Space Station.Historically, boosters have been ditched in the ocean, a practice that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has equated to throwing away an airplane after every flight. But SpaceX developed a system that returns the booster to Earth, saving millions with each launch. It\u2019s executed the return dozens of times.SpaceX plans to reuse the booster from Sunday night\u2019s launch for its second operational flight, slated for March 2021, making its safe landing on the drone ship named \u201cJust Read the Instructions\u201d a major moment of success. Falcon 9\u2019s first stage booster has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship! pic.twitter.com/HSFJKpR4Rm\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA successful SpaceX launch came after years of workReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe seemingly seamless countdown and launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday came with a spectacular evening liftoff just days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Unf1ScdVFB\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nBut the road to this point was long and at times tortured.NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and a company that was then known as Orbital Sciences and has since been subsumed by Northrup Grumman.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.SpaceX\u2019s rocket just exploded. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s such a big deal.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.A @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's #CrewDragon spacecraft is launched with @Astro_illini, @AstroVicGlover, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi onboard, from @NASAKennedy to begin a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost. pic.twitter.com/zXYkUbxCVS\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 16, 2020\n\nSunday\u2019s flight put SpaceX\u2019s Dragon on a trajectory to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday. If all goes well, the spacecraft will proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit, traveling 17,500 mph.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s coming for NASA in a Biden administration?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:18 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident-elect Biden hasn\u2019t talked much about space or what his administration\u2019s plans are for it. But it has appointed a transition team that will help guide the new administration. Leading the effort is Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and NASA\u2019s former chief scientist.SpaceX will still be launching crews to the station. But other programs seem less certain. The new administration is likely to keep the Trump administration\u2019s Artemis program to return to the moon, Democratic officials have said. But instead of pushing to get astronauts there by 2024, as the Trump White House has mandated, NASA would likely aim for a more realistic goal sometime after that.Democratic officials have said that their pick for a new NASA administrator would likely be a woman, and while there are lots of names floating around, nothing has been decided.It\u2019s also clear that under a Biden administration, NASA would be more focused on Earth science and helping to combat climate change.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is fueled in final crucial step before launch Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban7:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed loading propellant on the Falcon 9 rocket in a crucial late-stage step before astronauts launch into space.The fueling stage involves two main components, the loading of rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, which creates the massive plumes of what appears as white smoke \u2014 the oxygen changing from liquid form into gas form around the rocket in Florida\u2019s humid air.Before the propellants were loaded, the launch escape system was armed. That system allows the crew to abort from any point on the launchpad all the way up to orbit. In the event of an emergency, the capsule would propel itself off the Falcon 9 rocket, splashing down off the coast, in a rescue scenario. NASA and SpaceX tout the ability to abort from the pad or midflight as a safety upgrade, which the shuttle program lacked.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementExperienced Japanese astronaut defies age to fly on SpaceX, still feels like a kidReturn to menuBy Simon Denyer6:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkTOKYO \u2014 Experienced Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will become the first non-American to fly on a mission launched by SpaceX, and his participation has been welcomed with excitement and pride in his home country.The 55-year-old previously flew inside the space shuttle Discovery in 2005, and also used a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station for a 161-day stay between 2009 and 2010. He\u2019s determined to show he is still up to the job.\u201cMy physical and cognitive abilities will be challenged but I want to compete with the younger generation by duping them with my experience,\u201d he said in an online conversation with Japan\u2019s science and technology minister in October, Kyodo News reported. \u201cI want to hang in there to keep up with the younger generation.\u201dLaughing, Minister Koichi Hagiuda, who\u2019s 57, said: \u201cLet\u2019s show how determined middle-aged people are.\u201dBut at a news conference last week, Noguchi said his experience didn\u2019t dim his anticipation of what lay ahead.\u201cI feel very excited just like an elementary school kid who cannot sleep the night before an athletic meet, and also have a feeling of tension bracing for the important day with my colleagues,\u201d he said.The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has given the mission a catchphrase \u201cWe call creatures who don\u2019t stop taking on challenges humans,\u201d and Noguchi echoed this in his comments.\u201cHumans grow by challenging today what we could not do yesterday, and by repeating that challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cI want this mission to be one where I can share dreams and hopes for our new future in this tough situation with everyone in Japan. Please send us cheers.\u201dOver the past few weeks, Noguchi has been tweeting and creating videos on his YouTube channel to give his Japanese fans a better understanding of the mission and the technology involved, in a chatty and accessible way.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is certified for flights to the space station Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX pulled off a successful test flight that sent a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, for a two-month stay on the International Space Station. Now, NASA has certified the company for regular flights to the station and back, carrying full contingents of up to four astronauts for even longer visits to the station. That marks the first time a commercial company has been authorized to fly NASA astronauts to the space station.NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate, Kathy Lueders, said the certification is NASA\u2019s way of telling SpaceX, \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station. You\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dStill, the capsule has had some problems. After the test flight, SpaceX noticed that there was more erosion on the heat shield than they anticipated. As a result, SpaceX reinforced a few points where the crew capsule connects to the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is jettisoned before reentering the atmosphere.SpaceX also suffered a problem with its engines that caused an abort of a satellite launch for the U.S. Space Force with just two seconds left on the countdown clock. SpaceX later discovered the problem was caused by a bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, that was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves.As a result, SpaceX swapped out two engines of the Falcon 9 booster to be used in Sunday\u2019s flight and has said they are ready to go.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementOn space station, astronauts speak a mix of English and Russian Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt the International Space Station, global cooperation spans languages.The three people already at the ISS communicate with each other in a mix of English and Russian, NASA said, allowing American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to speak with one another seamlessly.In addition to their technical skills and scientific expertise, all NASA astronauts learn to speak Russian. So when the crew of the SpaceX mission reaches the ISS, they too will put their Russian language skills to use. While cosmonauts Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov most likely speak with each other in their native language, NASA said, all of the crew members communicate in a mix of English and Russian.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s coronavirus tests keep him from launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 NASA has a policy that bars anyone with a positive coronavirus test from entering the Kennedy Space Center. That\u2019s one reason Elon Musk, Space X\u2019s founder and chief executive, won\u2019t be present for Sunday\u2019s launch.On Friday, Musk tweeted that he had taken four coronavirus tests and that two had come back positive, and two, negative. He said he had minor symptoms, including a fever but was feeling okay.But that sent SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine if Musk had had contact with anyone who would have had contact with the astronauts. By the afternoon, SpaceX determined that the astronauts, who have been in quarantine for weeks, had not been exposed.\u201cThere should be no impact on this mission,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post on Friday. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dGiven the positive tests, however, Bridenstine said that under NASA rules Musk would not be allowed at the Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX has its launch control center. And NASA officials stressed they would continue to enforce safety rules as the pandemic surges.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re Elon Musk or Jim Bridenstine,\u201d Norm Knight, NASA\u2019s deputy manager for flight operations, told a news conference Friday evening. \u201cIf you have not met those protocols, or if any of those protocols have been compromised, then we\u2019re not going to let you near the crew.\u201dEven when there isn\u2019t a pandemic, NASA goes to great lengths to ensure astronauts remain healthy in the days and weeks leading up to their flights. The last thing NASA wants is a sick astronaut on the International Space Station, where astronauts live in close quarters and disease could spread quickly.SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell is expected to be on hand for the launch in Musk\u2019s place.After its Starliner capsule failed its test mission, Boeing hired a former SpaceX developer to oversee software Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX isn\u2019t the only company that has a contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing does as well. But Boeing\u2019s efforts to earn NASA\u2019s trust to do that has suffered a series of setbacks, and it\u2019s not clear exactly when it will be able to fly its first mission with crews.Late last year, its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit during a test flight without any astronauts on board. Software problems made it think it was at a completely different point in the mission, directing its thruster to fire at the wrong time. Another problem, which was caught and fixed in time, could have caused the service and crew modules to potentially collide with each other upon separation.Since then, Boeing has been working to fix the problems, but the progress has been slow. It initially said it would refly the test flight without crew by December or January, but it now appears that flight might be pushed back even further.Meantime, however, Boeing has created a new position, vice president of software engineering, to help the company deal with its complex systems. In addition to the software problems on Starliner, it has struggled with the software on its 737 Max airplanes, which crashed twice, killing a total of 346 people.The person it has hired for the job is Jinnah Hosein, who worked at Aurora, a self-driving vehicle company. But he also previously worked at SpaceX, where he led software development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and for the Crew Dragon capsule.Before docking with Space Station, astronauts will get some sleepReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter the Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station was delayed from Saturday until Sunday, the updated schedule will offer the four astronauts extra time in low Earth orbit before docking.That will give the crew enough time to get some sleep after a long day of preparation. Crew members of the SpaceX mission will have eight hours to rest, NASA said, after which they will wake up and continue the mission and eventually dock with the International Space Station.Under the previous launch schedule for Saturday, crew members were scheduled to dock about eight hours after launch. But after liftoff this evening, the astronauts won\u2019t dock with the International Space Station for more than 24 hours \u2014 at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday.The \u2018Times Square\u2019 of space real estate, updated by SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk has called the launchpad SpaceX is using tonight the \u201cTimes Square\u201d of spaceflight real estate, a sacrosanct piece of land on the Florida Space Coast with a long and rich history.Launchpad 39A is where many of the Apollo missions lifted off, including Apollo 11, whose crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon\u2019s surface in 1969 (the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, orbited the moon during their trip to the surface).Launchpad 39A was also where many space shuttle missions took off. But after NASA retired the space shuttle, it sat dormant, rusting away in the salt air.In 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease for the pad and has been flying its Falcon 9 rockets from there since. Over the years, the company has renovated it extensively, giving it a sleek arm that the astronauts walk down to board their spacecraft. The launch tower is now black and white, mimicking the color of the rocket and the spacesuits the astronauts wear.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d Musk said in an interview in 2016. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dWhy the launch was moved to SundayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Delays in launches are not unusual. SpaceX\u2019s test launch in May also was delayed for inclement weather.But the decision to move this launch from Saturday to Sunday evening was somewhat unusual because the forecast high winds and rough seas weren\u2019t expected to affect the launch itself, but SpaceX\u2019s ability to recover the first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket, which is supposed to land on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean after it separates from the remainder of the rocket.This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight of astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for March 30.The March flight would mark the first time NASA has allowed a crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.SpaceX has made an art out of landing boosters. Traditionally, rocket first stages were ditched into the ocean after propelling a payload to orbit. But SpaceX for five years has been flying its boosters back to Earth, landing them either on a ship at sea or on land. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that having reusable rockets is a key step toward lowering the cost of space travel, which in turn could make it more accessible.Weather looks good for tonight\u2019s SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow5:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Sunday evening, the weather around Cape Canaveral seemed favorable for launch.Skies featured just scattered clouds, while winds were light with temperatures in the 70s.The National Weather Service forecast for the evening indicated a 30 percent chance of showers through midnight. Radar showed widely scattered showers 30 to 45 miles inland drifting slowly toward the coast, but nothing appeared terribly ominous.The Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which provides official launch forecasts, wrote early Sunday that there was a 50 percent chance weather conditions would prevent liftoff, based on the potential for showers, lightning and tall clouds in the area.Weather is a GO for launch! #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) November 15, 2020\n\n SpaceX has launched four astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule is the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight, a certification SpaceX received only days ago. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6059",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/15/spacex-launch-live-updates-crew1/",
        "text": "Update: Follow live coverage of the SpaceX capsule docking onto the International Space Station hereCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.While the launch was successful, the crew still had a day-long journey to the space station. They are scheduled to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft will then proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation, to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit at 17,500 mph.\u201cWe\u2019re not done yet. We need to keep going,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate said during a news conference after the launch. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on them, and we\u2019re going to get them to the International Space Station. ... Right now we\u2019re not expecting any issues and I\u2019m sure docking tomorrow we\u2019ll go smoothly.\u201dThe crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.Though heralded as a success that will open spaceflight to others, the road to this point was long and at times tortured. NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and then Orbital Sciences.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.If the technical challenges weren\u2019t enough, NASA and SpaceX were also warily eyeing Tropical Storm Eta\u2019s erratic path across the Florida Keys, then up the Gulf of Mexico before shooting across the top of the Florida peninsula and jetting off east into the Atlantic. Rough seas in the area where the booster was to return to Earth forced the delay of the launch from Saturday until Sunday.NASA also has been forced to take extra precautions to protect the astronauts and ground crews from the surging coronavirus pandemic, steps that were highlighted Friday when Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, announced that he had tested both positive and negative for the coronavirus. NASA regulations prohibit anyone with a positive test from being present for the launch, and Musk did not witness the launch from SpaceX\u2019s control center at the Kennedy Space Center.In the post-launch news conference, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who came here for the launch in his place, said that he \"was tied in very closely with the launch. I have the texts to prove it. As usual, regardless of where he is on the planet, he\u2019s is watching closely and providing guidance and support.\u201dThroughout it all, the astronauts remained upbeat and confident ahead of the launch. The crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center about a week before the launch, waving and smiling.\u201cWe are ready for this launch,\u201d Hopkins said. \u201cWe are ready for the six months of work that is waiting for us on board the International Space Station. And we are ready for the return.\u201dBoeing, however, continues to have problems. Its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit last December in a test flight with no astronauts on board.A software problem made the flight computers think it was at a completely different point in the mission. Another software issue could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module, but that was caught in time, and controllers on the ground were able to beam up a fix. Still, the mission ended after just two days, and the spacecraft never docked with the space station, one of the primary objectives.Below are the updates from the SpaceX\u2019s capsule launch.The International Space Station can be seen with the naked eye from EarthReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station, the destination for four astronauts aboard the SpaceX capsule that launched Sunday, is visible to the naked eye and appears as a fast moving plane, according to NASA.It\u2019s the third brightest object in the sky, flying in orbit about 240 miles (or 400 kilometers) above the Earth.You can use the space agency\u2019s \u201cspot the station tool\" to find when the station will pass overhead.Members of Crew-1 are scheduled to dock with the ISS at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday. Shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, the ISS will hold a welcoming ceremony for the incoming astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 booster lands successfully on drone shipReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:22 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter blasting off from Kennedy Space Center, the big moment in the flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 mission was the entry of the capsule, with its four astronauts, into orbit. That took place as scheduled about 12 minutes into the flight.But another key moment for the future of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program had happened just a few minutes before when the first stage booster of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully detached from and landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic.The recovery of the booster rocket is central to the partnership between SpaceX and NASA \u2014 and to SpaceX\u2019s plans to seriously reduce the cost of routine flights to the International Space Station.Historically, boosters have been ditched in the ocean, a practice that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has equated to throwing away an airplane after every flight. But SpaceX developed a system that returns the booster to Earth, saving millions with each launch. It\u2019s executed the return dozens of times.SpaceX plans to reuse the booster from Sunday night\u2019s launch for its second operational flight, slated for March 2021, making its safe landing on the drone ship named \u201cJust Read the Instructions\u201d a major moment of success. Falcon 9\u2019s first stage booster has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship! pic.twitter.com/HSFJKpR4Rm\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA successful SpaceX launch came after years of workReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe seemingly seamless countdown and launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday came with a spectacular evening liftoff just days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Unf1ScdVFB\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nBut the road to this point was long and at times tortured.NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and a company that was then known as Orbital Sciences and has since been subsumed by Northrup Grumman.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.SpaceX\u2019s rocket just exploded. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s such a big deal.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.A @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's #CrewDragon spacecraft is launched with @Astro_illini, @AstroVicGlover, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi onboard, from @NASAKennedy to begin a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost. pic.twitter.com/zXYkUbxCVS\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 16, 2020\n\nSunday\u2019s flight put SpaceX\u2019s Dragon on a trajectory to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday. If all goes well, the spacecraft will proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit, traveling 17,500 mph.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s coming for NASA in a Biden administration?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:18 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident-elect Biden hasn\u2019t talked much about space or what his administration\u2019s plans are for it. But it has appointed a transition team that will help guide the new administration. Leading the effort is Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and NASA\u2019s former chief scientist.SpaceX will still be launching crews to the station. But other programs seem less certain. The new administration is likely to keep the Trump administration\u2019s Artemis program to return to the moon, Democratic officials have said. But instead of pushing to get astronauts there by 2024, as the Trump White House has mandated, NASA would likely aim for a more realistic goal sometime after that.Democratic officials have said that their pick for a new NASA administrator would likely be a woman, and while there are lots of names floating around, nothing has been decided.It\u2019s also clear that under a Biden administration, NASA would be more focused on Earth science and helping to combat climate change.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is fueled in final crucial step before launch Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban7:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed loading propellant on the Falcon 9 rocket in a crucial late-stage step before astronauts launch into space.The fueling stage involves two main components, the loading of rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, which creates the massive plumes of what appears as white smoke \u2014 the oxygen changing from liquid form into gas form around the rocket in Florida\u2019s humid air.Before the propellants were loaded, the launch escape system was armed. That system allows the crew to abort from any point on the launchpad all the way up to orbit. In the event of an emergency, the capsule would propel itself off the Falcon 9 rocket, splashing down off the coast, in a rescue scenario. NASA and SpaceX tout the ability to abort from the pad or midflight as a safety upgrade, which the shuttle program lacked.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementExperienced Japanese astronaut defies age to fly on SpaceX, still feels like a kidReturn to menuBy Simon Denyer6:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkTOKYO \u2014 Experienced Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will become the first non-American to fly on a mission launched by SpaceX, and his participation has been welcomed with excitement and pride in his home country.The 55-year-old previously flew inside the space shuttle Discovery in 2005, and also used a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station for a 161-day stay between 2009 and 2010. He\u2019s determined to show he is still up to the job.\u201cMy physical and cognitive abilities will be challenged but I want to compete with the younger generation by duping them with my experience,\u201d he said in an online conversation with Japan\u2019s science and technology minister in October, Kyodo News reported. \u201cI want to hang in there to keep up with the younger generation.\u201dLaughing, Minister Koichi Hagiuda, who\u2019s 57, said: \u201cLet\u2019s show how determined middle-aged people are.\u201dBut at a news conference last week, Noguchi said his experience didn\u2019t dim his anticipation of what lay ahead.\u201cI feel very excited just like an elementary school kid who cannot sleep the night before an athletic meet, and also have a feeling of tension bracing for the important day with my colleagues,\u201d he said.The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has given the mission a catchphrase \u201cWe call creatures who don\u2019t stop taking on challenges humans,\u201d and Noguchi echoed this in his comments.\u201cHumans grow by challenging today what we could not do yesterday, and by repeating that challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cI want this mission to be one where I can share dreams and hopes for our new future in this tough situation with everyone in Japan. Please send us cheers.\u201dOver the past few weeks, Noguchi has been tweeting and creating videos on his YouTube channel to give his Japanese fans a better understanding of the mission and the technology involved, in a chatty and accessible way.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is certified for flights to the space station Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX pulled off a successful test flight that sent a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, for a two-month stay on the International Space Station. Now, NASA has certified the company for regular flights to the station and back, carrying full contingents of up to four astronauts for even longer visits to the station. That marks the first time a commercial company has been authorized to fly NASA astronauts to the space station.NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate, Kathy Lueders, said the certification is NASA\u2019s way of telling SpaceX, \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station. You\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dStill, the capsule has had some problems. After the test flight, SpaceX noticed that there was more erosion on the heat shield than they anticipated. As a result, SpaceX reinforced a few points where the crew capsule connects to the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is jettisoned before reentering the atmosphere.SpaceX also suffered a problem with its engines that caused an abort of a satellite launch for the U.S. Space Force with just two seconds left on the countdown clock. SpaceX later discovered the problem was caused by a bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, that was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves.As a result, SpaceX swapped out two engines of the Falcon 9 booster to be used in Sunday\u2019s flight and has said they are ready to go.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementOn space station, astronauts speak a mix of English and Russian Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt the International Space Station, global cooperation spans languages.The three people already at the ISS communicate with each other in a mix of English and Russian, NASA said, allowing American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to speak with one another seamlessly.In addition to their technical skills and scientific expertise, all NASA astronauts learn to speak Russian. So when the crew of the SpaceX mission reaches the ISS, they too will put their Russian language skills to use. While cosmonauts Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov most likely speak with each other in their native language, NASA said, all of the crew members communicate in a mix of English and Russian.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s coronavirus tests keep him from launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 NASA has a policy that bars anyone with a positive coronavirus test from entering the Kennedy Space Center. That\u2019s one reason Elon Musk, Space X\u2019s founder and chief executive, won\u2019t be present for Sunday\u2019s launch.On Friday, Musk tweeted that he had taken four coronavirus tests and that two had come back positive, and two, negative. He said he had minor symptoms, including a fever but was feeling okay.But that sent SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine if Musk had had contact with anyone who would have had contact with the astronauts. By the afternoon, SpaceX determined that the astronauts, who have been in quarantine for weeks, had not been exposed.\u201cThere should be no impact on this mission,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post on Friday. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dGiven the positive tests, however, Bridenstine said that under NASA rules Musk would not be allowed at the Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX has its launch control center. And NASA officials stressed they would continue to enforce safety rules as the pandemic surges.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re Elon Musk or Jim Bridenstine,\u201d Norm Knight, NASA\u2019s deputy manager for flight operations, told a news conference Friday evening. \u201cIf you have not met those protocols, or if any of those protocols have been compromised, then we\u2019re not going to let you near the crew.\u201dEven when there isn\u2019t a pandemic, NASA goes to great lengths to ensure astronauts remain healthy in the days and weeks leading up to their flights. The last thing NASA wants is a sick astronaut on the International Space Station, where astronauts live in close quarters and disease could spread quickly.SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell is expected to be on hand for the launch in Musk\u2019s place.After its Starliner capsule failed its test mission, Boeing hired a former SpaceX developer to oversee software Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX isn\u2019t the only company that has a contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing does as well. But Boeing\u2019s efforts to earn NASA\u2019s trust to do that has suffered a series of setbacks, and it\u2019s not clear exactly when it will be able to fly its first mission with crews.Late last year, its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit during a test flight without any astronauts on board. Software problems made it think it was at a completely different point in the mission, directing its thruster to fire at the wrong time. Another problem, which was caught and fixed in time, could have caused the service and crew modules to potentially collide with each other upon separation.Since then, Boeing has been working to fix the problems, but the progress has been slow. It initially said it would refly the test flight without crew by December or January, but it now appears that flight might be pushed back even further.Meantime, however, Boeing has created a new position, vice president of software engineering, to help the company deal with its complex systems. In addition to the software problems on Starliner, it has struggled with the software on its 737 Max airplanes, which crashed twice, killing a total of 346 people.The person it has hired for the job is Jinnah Hosein, who worked at Aurora, a self-driving vehicle company. But he also previously worked at SpaceX, where he led software development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and for the Crew Dragon capsule.Before docking with Space Station, astronauts will get some sleepReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter the Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station was delayed from Saturday until Sunday, the updated schedule will offer the four astronauts extra time in low Earth orbit before docking.That will give the crew enough time to get some sleep after a long day of preparation. Crew members of the SpaceX mission will have eight hours to rest, NASA said, after which they will wake up and continue the mission and eventually dock with the International Space Station.Under the previous launch schedule for Saturday, crew members were scheduled to dock about eight hours after launch. But after liftoff this evening, the astronauts won\u2019t dock with the International Space Station for more than 24 hours \u2014 at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday.The \u2018Times Square\u2019 of space real estate, updated by SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk has called the launchpad SpaceX is using tonight the \u201cTimes Square\u201d of spaceflight real estate, a sacrosanct piece of land on the Florida Space Coast with a long and rich history.Launchpad 39A is where many of the Apollo missions lifted off, including Apollo 11, whose crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon\u2019s surface in 1969 (the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, orbited the moon during their trip to the surface).Launchpad 39A was also where many space shuttle missions took off. But after NASA retired the space shuttle, it sat dormant, rusting away in the salt air.In 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease for the pad and has been flying its Falcon 9 rockets from there since. Over the years, the company has renovated it extensively, giving it a sleek arm that the astronauts walk down to board their spacecraft. The launch tower is now black and white, mimicking the color of the rocket and the spacesuits the astronauts wear.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d Musk said in an interview in 2016. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dWhy the launch was moved to SundayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Delays in launches are not unusual. SpaceX\u2019s test launch in May also was delayed for inclement weather.But the decision to move this launch from Saturday to Sunday evening was somewhat unusual because the forecast high winds and rough seas weren\u2019t expected to affect the launch itself, but SpaceX\u2019s ability to recover the first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket, which is supposed to land on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean after it separates from the remainder of the rocket.This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight of astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for March 30.The March flight would mark the first time NASA has allowed a crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.SpaceX has made an art out of landing boosters. Traditionally, rocket first stages were ditched into the ocean after propelling a payload to orbit. But SpaceX for five years has been flying its boosters back to Earth, landing them either on a ship at sea or on land. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that having reusable rockets is a key step toward lowering the cost of space travel, which in turn could make it more accessible.Weather looks good for tonight\u2019s SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow5:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Sunday evening, the weather around Cape Canaveral seemed favorable for launch.Skies featured just scattered clouds, while winds were light with temperatures in the 70s.The National Weather Service forecast for the evening indicated a 30 percent chance of showers through midnight. Radar showed widely scattered showers 30 to 45 miles inland drifting slowly toward the coast, but nothing appeared terribly ominous.The Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which provides official launch forecasts, wrote early Sunday that there was a 50 percent chance weather conditions would prevent liftoff, based on the potential for showers, lightning and tall clouds in the area.Weather is a GO for launch! #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) November 15, 2020\n\n SpaceX has launched four astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule is the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight, a certification SpaceX received only days ago. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6060",
        "date": "2020-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/15/spacex-launch-live-updates-crew1/",
        "text": "Update: Follow live coverage of the SpaceX capsule docking onto the International Space Station hereCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.While the launch was successful, the crew still had a day-long journey to the space station. They are scheduled to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. ET Monday. The spacecraft will then proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation, to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit at 17,500 mph.\u201cWe\u2019re not done yet. We need to keep going,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate said during a news conference after the launch. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on them, and we\u2019re going to get them to the International Space Station. ... Right now we\u2019re not expecting any issues and I\u2019m sure docking tomorrow we\u2019ll go smoothly.\u201dThe crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.Though heralded as a success that will open spaceflight to others, the road to this point was long and at times tortured. NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and then Orbital Sciences.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.If the technical challenges weren\u2019t enough, NASA and SpaceX were also warily eyeing Tropical Storm Eta\u2019s erratic path across the Florida Keys, then up the Gulf of Mexico before shooting across the top of the Florida peninsula and jetting off east into the Atlantic. Rough seas in the area where the booster was to return to Earth forced the delay of the launch from Saturday until Sunday.NASA also has been forced to take extra precautions to protect the astronauts and ground crews from the surging coronavirus pandemic, steps that were highlighted Friday when Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, announced that he had tested both positive and negative for the coronavirus. NASA regulations prohibit anyone with a positive test from being present for the launch, and Musk did not witness the launch from SpaceX\u2019s control center at the Kennedy Space Center.In the post-launch news conference, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who came here for the launch in his place, said that he \"was tied in very closely with the launch. I have the texts to prove it. As usual, regardless of where he is on the planet, he\u2019s is watching closely and providing guidance and support.\u201dThroughout it all, the astronauts remained upbeat and confident ahead of the launch. The crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center about a week before the launch, waving and smiling.\u201cWe are ready for this launch,\u201d Hopkins said. \u201cWe are ready for the six months of work that is waiting for us on board the International Space Station. And we are ready for the return.\u201dBoeing, however, continues to have problems. Its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit last December in a test flight with no astronauts on board.A software problem made the flight computers think it was at a completely different point in the mission. Another software issue could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module, but that was caught in time, and controllers on the ground were able to beam up a fix. Still, the mission ended after just two days, and the spacecraft never docked with the space station, one of the primary objectives.Below are the updates from the SpaceX\u2019s capsule launch.The International Space Station can be seen with the naked eye from EarthReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station, the destination for four astronauts aboard the SpaceX capsule that launched Sunday, is visible to the naked eye and appears as a fast moving plane, according to NASA.It\u2019s the third brightest object in the sky, flying in orbit about 240 miles (or 400 kilometers) above the Earth.You can use the space agency\u2019s \u201cspot the station tool\" to find when the station will pass overhead.Members of Crew-1 are scheduled to dock with the ISS at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday. Shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, the ISS will hold a welcoming ceremony for the incoming astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 booster lands successfully on drone shipReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban8:22 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter blasting off from Kennedy Space Center, the big moment in the flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 mission was the entry of the capsule, with its four astronauts, into orbit. That took place as scheduled about 12 minutes into the flight.But another key moment for the future of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program had happened just a few minutes before when the first stage booster of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully detached from and landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic.The recovery of the booster rocket is central to the partnership between SpaceX and NASA \u2014 and to SpaceX\u2019s plans to seriously reduce the cost of routine flights to the International Space Station.Historically, boosters have been ditched in the ocean, a practice that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has equated to throwing away an airplane after every flight. But SpaceX developed a system that returns the booster to Earth, saving millions with each launch. It\u2019s executed the return dozens of times.SpaceX plans to reuse the booster from Sunday night\u2019s launch for its second operational flight, slated for March 2021, making its safe landing on the drone ship named \u201cJust Read the Instructions\u201d a major moment of success. Falcon 9\u2019s first stage booster has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship! pic.twitter.com/HSFJKpR4Rm\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA successful SpaceX launch came after years of workReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe seemingly seamless countdown and launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday came with a spectacular evening liftoff just days after the company\u2019s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Unf1ScdVFB\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 16, 2020\n\nBut the road to this point was long and at times tortured.NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and a company that was then known as Orbital Sciences and has since been subsumed by Northrup Grumman.Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.SpaceX\u2019s rocket just exploded. Here\u2019s why that\u2019s such a big deal.No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.With Sunday\u2019s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry\u2019s stalwarts and one of NASA\u2019s most significant partners.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 \u2014 Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday\u2019s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.A @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's #CrewDragon spacecraft is launched with @Astro_illini, @AstroVicGlover, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi onboard, from @NASAKennedy to begin a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost. pic.twitter.com/zXYkUbxCVS\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 16, 2020\n\nSunday\u2019s flight put SpaceX\u2019s Dragon on a trajectory to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday. If all goes well, the spacecraft will proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation to autonomously park itself on one of the station\u2019s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit, traveling 17,500 mph.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s coming for NASA in a Biden administration?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:18 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident-elect Biden hasn\u2019t talked much about space or what his administration\u2019s plans are for it. But it has appointed a transition team that will help guide the new administration. Leading the effort is Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and NASA\u2019s former chief scientist.SpaceX will still be launching crews to the station. But other programs seem less certain. The new administration is likely to keep the Trump administration\u2019s Artemis program to return to the moon, Democratic officials have said. But instead of pushing to get astronauts there by 2024, as the Trump White House has mandated, NASA would likely aim for a more realistic goal sometime after that.Democratic officials have said that their pick for a new NASA administrator would likely be a woman, and while there are lots of names floating around, nothing has been decided.It\u2019s also clear that under a Biden administration, NASA would be more focused on Earth science and helping to combat climate change.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is fueled in final crucial step before launch Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban7:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed loading propellant on the Falcon 9 rocket in a crucial late-stage step before astronauts launch into space.The fueling stage involves two main components, the loading of rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, which creates the massive plumes of what appears as white smoke \u2014 the oxygen changing from liquid form into gas form around the rocket in Florida\u2019s humid air.Before the propellants were loaded, the launch escape system was armed. That system allows the crew to abort from any point on the launchpad all the way up to orbit. In the event of an emergency, the capsule would propel itself off the Falcon 9 rocket, splashing down off the coast, in a rescue scenario. NASA and SpaceX tout the ability to abort from the pad or midflight as a safety upgrade, which the shuttle program lacked.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementExperienced Japanese astronaut defies age to fly on SpaceX, still feels like a kidReturn to menuBy Simon Denyer6:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkTOKYO \u2014 Experienced Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will become the first non-American to fly on a mission launched by SpaceX, and his participation has been welcomed with excitement and pride in his home country.The 55-year-old previously flew inside the space shuttle Discovery in 2005, and also used a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station for a 161-day stay between 2009 and 2010. He\u2019s determined to show he is still up to the job.\u201cMy physical and cognitive abilities will be challenged but I want to compete with the younger generation by duping them with my experience,\u201d he said in an online conversation with Japan\u2019s science and technology minister in October, Kyodo News reported. \u201cI want to hang in there to keep up with the younger generation.\u201dLaughing, Minister Koichi Hagiuda, who\u2019s 57, said: \u201cLet\u2019s show how determined middle-aged people are.\u201dBut at a news conference last week, Noguchi said his experience didn\u2019t dim his anticipation of what lay ahead.\u201cI feel very excited just like an elementary school kid who cannot sleep the night before an athletic meet, and also have a feeling of tension bracing for the important day with my colleagues,\u201d he said.The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has given the mission a catchphrase \u201cWe call creatures who don\u2019t stop taking on challenges humans,\u201d and Noguchi echoed this in his comments.\u201cHumans grow by challenging today what we could not do yesterday, and by repeating that challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cI want this mission to be one where I can share dreams and hopes for our new future in this tough situation with everyone in Japan. Please send us cheers.\u201dOver the past few weeks, Noguchi has been tweeting and creating videos on his YouTube channel to give his Japanese fans a better understanding of the mission and the technology involved, in a chatty and accessible way.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is certified for flights to the space station Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX pulled off a successful test flight that sent a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, for a two-month stay on the International Space Station. Now, NASA has certified the company for regular flights to the station and back, carrying full contingents of up to four astronauts for even longer visits to the station. That marks the first time a commercial company has been authorized to fly NASA astronauts to the space station.NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate, Kathy Lueders, said the certification is NASA\u2019s way of telling SpaceX, \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station. You\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dStill, the capsule has had some problems. After the test flight, SpaceX noticed that there was more erosion on the heat shield than they anticipated. As a result, SpaceX reinforced a few points where the crew capsule connects to the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is jettisoned before reentering the atmosphere.SpaceX also suffered a problem with its engines that caused an abort of a satellite launch for the U.S. Space Force with just two seconds left on the countdown clock. SpaceX later discovered the problem was caused by a bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, that was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves.As a result, SpaceX swapped out two engines of the Falcon 9 booster to be used in Sunday\u2019s flight and has said they are ready to go.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementOn space station, astronauts speak a mix of English and Russian Return to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt the International Space Station, global cooperation spans languages.The three people already at the ISS communicate with each other in a mix of English and Russian, NASA said, allowing American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to speak with one another seamlessly.In addition to their technical skills and scientific expertise, all NASA astronauts learn to speak Russian. So when the crew of the SpaceX mission reaches the ISS, they too will put their Russian language skills to use. While cosmonauts Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov most likely speak with each other in their native language, NASA said, all of the crew members communicate in a mix of English and Russian.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk\u2019s coronavirus tests keep him from launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 NASA has a policy that bars anyone with a positive coronavirus test from entering the Kennedy Space Center. That\u2019s one reason Elon Musk, Space X\u2019s founder and chief executive, won\u2019t be present for Sunday\u2019s launch.On Friday, Musk tweeted that he had taken four coronavirus tests and that two had come back positive, and two, negative. He said he had minor symptoms, including a fever but was feeling okay.But that sent SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine if Musk had had contact with anyone who would have had contact with the astronauts. By the afternoon, SpaceX determined that the astronauts, who have been in quarantine for weeks, had not been exposed.\u201cThere should be no impact on this mission,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post on Friday. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dGiven the positive tests, however, Bridenstine said that under NASA rules Musk would not be allowed at the Kennedy Space Center, where SpaceX has its launch control center. And NASA officials stressed they would continue to enforce safety rules as the pandemic surges.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re Elon Musk or Jim Bridenstine,\u201d Norm Knight, NASA\u2019s deputy manager for flight operations, told a news conference Friday evening. \u201cIf you have not met those protocols, or if any of those protocols have been compromised, then we\u2019re not going to let you near the crew.\u201dEven when there isn\u2019t a pandemic, NASA goes to great lengths to ensure astronauts remain healthy in the days and weeks leading up to their flights. The last thing NASA wants is a sick astronaut on the International Space Station, where astronauts live in close quarters and disease could spread quickly.SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell is expected to be on hand for the launch in Musk\u2019s place.After its Starliner capsule failed its test mission, Boeing hired a former SpaceX developer to oversee software Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX isn\u2019t the only company that has a contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. Boeing does as well. But Boeing\u2019s efforts to earn NASA\u2019s trust to do that has suffered a series of setbacks, and it\u2019s not clear exactly when it will be able to fly its first mission with crews.Late last year, its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit during a test flight without any astronauts on board. Software problems made it think it was at a completely different point in the mission, directing its thruster to fire at the wrong time. Another problem, which was caught and fixed in time, could have caused the service and crew modules to potentially collide with each other upon separation.Since then, Boeing has been working to fix the problems, but the progress has been slow. It initially said it would refly the test flight without crew by December or January, but it now appears that flight might be pushed back even further.Meantime, however, Boeing has created a new position, vice president of software engineering, to help the company deal with its complex systems. In addition to the software problems on Starliner, it has struggled with the software on its 737 Max airplanes, which crashed twice, killing a total of 346 people.The person it has hired for the job is Jinnah Hosein, who worked at Aurora, a self-driving vehicle company. But he also previously worked at SpaceX, where he led software development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and for the Crew Dragon capsule.Before docking with Space Station, astronauts will get some sleepReturn to menuBy Hamza Shaban6:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter the Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station was delayed from Saturday until Sunday, the updated schedule will offer the four astronauts extra time in low Earth orbit before docking.That will give the crew enough time to get some sleep after a long day of preparation. Crew members of the SpaceX mission will have eight hours to rest, NASA said, after which they will wake up and continue the mission and eventually dock with the International Space Station.Under the previous launch schedule for Saturday, crew members were scheduled to dock about eight hours after launch. But after liftoff this evening, the astronauts won\u2019t dock with the International Space Station for more than 24 hours \u2014 at about 11 p.m. Eastern time Monday.The \u2018Times Square\u2019 of space real estate, updated by SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk has called the launchpad SpaceX is using tonight the \u201cTimes Square\u201d of spaceflight real estate, a sacrosanct piece of land on the Florida Space Coast with a long and rich history.Launchpad 39A is where many of the Apollo missions lifted off, including Apollo 11, whose crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the moon\u2019s surface in 1969 (the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, orbited the moon during their trip to the surface).Launchpad 39A was also where many space shuttle missions took off. But after NASA retired the space shuttle, it sat dormant, rusting away in the salt air.In 2014, SpaceX signed a 20-year lease for the pad and has been flying its Falcon 9 rockets from there since. Over the years, the company has renovated it extensively, giving it a sleek arm that the astronauts walk down to board their spacecraft. The launch tower is now black and white, mimicking the color of the rocket and the spacesuits the astronauts wear.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d Musk said in an interview in 2016. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dWhy the launch was moved to SundayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Delays in launches are not unusual. SpaceX\u2019s test launch in May also was delayed for inclement weather.But the decision to move this launch from Saturday to Sunday evening was somewhat unusual because the forecast high winds and rough seas weren\u2019t expected to affect the launch itself, but SpaceX\u2019s ability to recover the first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket, which is supposed to land on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean after it separates from the remainder of the rocket.This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight of astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for March 30.The March flight would mark the first time NASA has allowed a crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.SpaceX has made an art out of landing boosters. Traditionally, rocket first stages were ditched into the ocean after propelling a payload to orbit. But SpaceX for five years has been flying its boosters back to Earth, landing them either on a ship at sea or on land. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that having reusable rockets is a key step toward lowering the cost of space travel, which in turn could make it more accessible.Weather looks good for tonight\u2019s SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow5:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkEarly Sunday evening, the weather around Cape Canaveral seemed favorable for launch.Skies featured just scattered clouds, while winds were light with temperatures in the 70s.The National Weather Service forecast for the evening indicated a 30 percent chance of showers through midnight. Radar showed widely scattered showers 30 to 45 miles inland drifting slowly toward the coast, but nothing appeared terribly ominous.The Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which provides official launch forecasts, wrote early Sunday that there was a 50 percent chance weather conditions would prevent liftoff, based on the potential for showers, lightning and tall clouds in the area.Weather is a GO for launch! #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) November 15, 2020\n\n SpaceX has launched four astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule is the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight, a certification SpaceX received only days ago. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA completes key engine test of its massive SLS moon rocket  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6061",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/18/nasa-sls-test-artemis/",
        "text": "Two months after being forced to cut short a major engine test of its moon rocket, NASA on Thursday successfully completed the test, firing four of the engines for more than eight minutes, sending a massive plume billowing into the air.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBefore the test, NASA and its prime contractor, Boeing, said they needed to fire the engines for just four minutes to get the data needed to proceed with the first launch of the Space Launch System after years of development. But the RS-25 engines were able to simulate an entire flight, burning through some 733,000 gallons of propellant, while bolted down to a stand at NASA\u2019s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. After the engines shut down, applause broke out in the mission control center. NASA officials said they were optimistic that the test achieved all of its milestones and would pave the way for the first launch of a booster more powerful than the one that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon five decades ago. The SLS rocket would be used to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cClearly there\u2019s a lot of data now that\u2019s going to have to be analyzed,\u201d said Bill Wrobel, NASA\u2019s manager of the test campaign. \u201cThe engineers need to see what worked and what didn\u2019t, or what needs to be tweaked and what doesn\u2019t. But that said, I think the applause says a lot about how the team feels. They got through the test, and it looks pretty good right now.\u201dIn a statement, acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said the SLS \u201cis an incredible feat of engineering and the only rocket capable of powering America\u2019s next-generation missions that will place the first woman and the next man on the Moon.\u201d He said that the successful test \"is an important milestone in NASA\u2019s goal to return humans to the lunar surface \u2013 and beyond.\u201dThe test came as the White House is preparing to nominate former U.S. senator Bill Nelson to be the next NASA administrator. If confirmed, Nelson would oversee the next phases of the program and the first launch of the SLS. That was supposed to come by the end of this year, but it\u2019s not clear whether the rocket will be ready in time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCompleting the test, though, was a much-needed bright spot for a program that has suffered years of delays and setbacks. In January the test ran for just over one minute, and as a result NASA and Boeing were forced to redo the test, known as the \u201cGreen Run.\u201dThe shortened January test came after sensors detected a problem with the hydraulic system that steers the rocket by moving the engines during flight. The issue would not have affected an actual launch because the space agency had set \u201cintentionally conservative\u201d limits to protect the rocket.After that shortened test, there was another setback when NASA and Boeing had to replace a valve inside the rocket. That, too, has been fixed, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementThe space agency intends to use the SLS rocket to propel the Orion crew capsule, built by Lockheed Martin, to the moon as part of its Artemis program. NASA had hoped to launch the first flight, known as Artemis I, a mission that would fly Orion around the moon without any astronauts aboard, by the end of this year. But given the recent delays, that appears unlikely to happen.AdvertisementIf NASA is able to complete that mission, it will follow up with Artemis II, a flight with astronauts around the moon, followed by Artemis III, which would return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.Artemis was a signature effort of the Donald Trump administration, which called for Artemis III to land on the moon by 2024, and one of the few embraced by President Biden\u2019s White House. Still, NASA has ordered a comprehensive review of the program, and the 2024 mandate is no longer achievable, officials have said, given the amount of funding Congress has appropriated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cToday\u2019s successful SLS test brings us one critical step closer to returning to the moon and, someday, landing humans on Mars,\u201d said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), chairman of the House space subcommittee. \u201cAfter years of development, it\u2019s gratifying to see important and encouraging progress in this key system, which we hope will eventually open opportunities for other scientific missions in addition to NASA\u2019s moon-Mars program.\u201dAdvertisementThe SLS program had been beset by cost overruns and schedule delays. Earlier this year, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the Artemis program through fiscal year 2025 would reach $86 billion, with $27.3 billion just for the SLS rocket.The powerful rocket, standing 212 feet tall and weighing more than 2.3 million pounds, has become a symbol of Boeing\u2019s prowess \u2014 and problems, including the deadly crashes of its 737 Max airliner and the failure of its Starliner spacecraft to reach the International Space Station during a critical test flight more than a year ago. A redo of that test is scheduled for this spring.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to the four RS-25 engines, the SLS\u2019s core stage will have two solid rocket boosters strapped to the side. The avionics computers have 18 miles of cabling and more than 500 sensors. And fully fueling the rocket with the supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen requires 114 tanker trucks.The RS-25 engines are not new. They were repurposed from the space shuttle, and each of the engines mounted to the SLS core stage has flown to space before. Combined, the engines served in 21 shuttle missions, including one from 1998. Two of the engines were a part of the last space shuttle mission in 2011. They have since been updated and reconfigured to work with the SLS. NASA hopes to eventually use the Space Launch System rocket to fly astronauts to the moon, but it has been plagued by problems. NASA completes key engine test of its massive SLS moon rocket ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA completes key engine test of its massive SLS moon rocket  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6062",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/18/nasa-sls-test-artemis/",
        "text": "Two months after being forced to cut short a major engine test of its moon rocket, NASA on Thursday successfully completed the test, firing four of the engines for more than eight minutes, sending a massive plume billowing into the air.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBefore the test, NASA and its prime contractor, Boeing, said they needed to fire the engines for just four minutes to get the data needed to proceed with the first launch of the Space Launch System after years of development. But the RS-25 engines were able to simulate an entire flight, burning through some 733,000 gallons of propellant, while bolted down to a stand at NASA\u2019s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. After the engines shut down, applause broke out in the mission control center. NASA officials said they were optimistic that the test achieved all of its milestones and would pave the way for the first launch of a booster more powerful than the one that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon five decades ago. The SLS rocket would be used to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cClearly there\u2019s a lot of data now that\u2019s going to have to be analyzed,\u201d said Bill Wrobel, NASA\u2019s manager of the test campaign. \u201cThe engineers need to see what worked and what didn\u2019t, or what needs to be tweaked and what doesn\u2019t. But that said, I think the applause says a lot about how the team feels. They got through the test, and it looks pretty good right now.\u201dIn a statement, acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said the SLS \u201cis an incredible feat of engineering and the only rocket capable of powering America\u2019s next-generation missions that will place the first woman and the next man on the Moon.\u201d He said that the successful test \"is an important milestone in NASA\u2019s goal to return humans to the lunar surface \u2013 and beyond.\u201dThe test came as the White House is preparing to nominate former U.S. senator Bill Nelson to be the next NASA administrator. If confirmed, Nelson would oversee the next phases of the program and the first launch of the SLS. That was supposed to come by the end of this year, but it\u2019s not clear whether the rocket will be ready in time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCompleting the test, though, was a much-needed bright spot for a program that has suffered years of delays and setbacks. In January the test ran for just over one minute, and as a result NASA and Boeing were forced to redo the test, known as the \u201cGreen Run.\u201dThe shortened January test came after sensors detected a problem with the hydraulic system that steers the rocket by moving the engines during flight. The issue would not have affected an actual launch because the space agency had set \u201cintentionally conservative\u201d limits to protect the rocket.After that shortened test, there was another setback when NASA and Boeing had to replace a valve inside the rocket. That, too, has been fixed, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementThe space agency intends to use the SLS rocket to propel the Orion crew capsule, built by Lockheed Martin, to the moon as part of its Artemis program. NASA had hoped to launch the first flight, known as Artemis I, a mission that would fly Orion around the moon without any astronauts aboard, by the end of this year. But given the recent delays, that appears unlikely to happen.AdvertisementIf NASA is able to complete that mission, it will follow up with Artemis II, a flight with astronauts around the moon, followed by Artemis III, which would return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.Artemis was a signature effort of the Donald Trump administration, which called for Artemis III to land on the moon by 2024, and one of the few embraced by President Biden\u2019s White House. Still, NASA has ordered a comprehensive review of the program, and the 2024 mandate is no longer achievable, officials have said, given the amount of funding Congress has appropriated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cToday\u2019s successful SLS test brings us one critical step closer to returning to the moon and, someday, landing humans on Mars,\u201d said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), chairman of the House space subcommittee. \u201cAfter years of development, it\u2019s gratifying to see important and encouraging progress in this key system, which we hope will eventually open opportunities for other scientific missions in addition to NASA\u2019s moon-Mars program.\u201dAdvertisementThe SLS program had been beset by cost overruns and schedule delays. Earlier this year, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the Artemis program through fiscal year 2025 would reach $86 billion, with $27.3 billion just for the SLS rocket.The powerful rocket, standing 212 feet tall and weighing more than 2.3 million pounds, has become a symbol of Boeing\u2019s prowess \u2014 and problems, including the deadly crashes of its 737 Max airliner and the failure of its Starliner spacecraft to reach the International Space Station during a critical test flight more than a year ago. A redo of that test is scheduled for this spring.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to the four RS-25 engines, the SLS\u2019s core stage will have two solid rocket boosters strapped to the side. The avionics computers have 18 miles of cabling and more than 500 sensors. And fully fueling the rocket with the supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen requires 114 tanker trucks.The RS-25 engines are not new. They were repurposed from the space shuttle, and each of the engines mounted to the SLS core stage has flown to space before. Combined, the engines served in 21 shuttle missions, including one from 1998. Two of the engines were a part of the last space shuttle mission in 2011. They have since been updated and reconfigured to work with the SLS. NASA hopes to eventually use the Space Launch System rocket to fly astronauts to the moon, but it has been plagued by problems. NASA completes key engine test of its massive SLS moon rocket ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6063",
        "date": "2021-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/26/private-space-flight-axiom/",
        "text": "Two are grandfathers, the other has three young children. All three are extremely wealthy, with the means to pay the $55 million ticket price for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station. They are the first would-be spaceflight crew comprised entirely of private citizens in a mission to the station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSometime early next year, if all goes according to plan, the trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for what is scheduled to be an eight-day stay on the International Space Station.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that is coordinating their trip to space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it takes place as envisioned, the flight would mark a watershed moment in human space flight, one that according to Axiom, which announced the identities of the three paying passengers on Tuesday, will eventually make space more accessible and further erode the monopoly that governments have long held on space travel. The company, which is still finalizing the deal with NASA, is planning two flights per year and also is developing a space station of its own that NASA hopes may one day replace the International Space Station, the orbiting lab that has been in space for 22 years.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?\u201cThis is just the first of several Axiom Space crews whose private missions to the International Space Station will truly inaugurate an expansive future for humans in space \u2014 and make a meaningful difference in the world when they return home,\u201d Michael Suffredini, Axiom Space president and chief executive, said in a statement.Over the years, several wealthy private citizens have flown to the space station before \u2014 but on the Russian Soyuz craft because NASA forbade the practice on flights from U.S. soil. In 2019, NASA reversed its stance, saying the missions would help boost a growing commercial space industry as well as help NASA\u2019s bottom line. The space agency charges $35,000 a day per passenger for food, storage and communication during stays on board the orbiting laboratory \u2014 a total of more than $1 million for four people for eight days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s former chief financial officer, said at the 2019 announcement of the policy change.SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station on Nov. 16, delivering four astronauts to the orbiting laboratory. (The Washington Post)Pathy, 51, who has three young children, has a lifelong passion for space but didn\u2019t think he would ever be able to go until a friend told him about the Axiom missions. His initial reaction was skeptical.\u201cI wasn\u2019t sure it was completely real, and I\u2019d never heard of this company, Axiom,\u201d he said. \u201cI obviously was not going to blast off in a rocket if this was some sort of Mickey Mouse travel outfit. But the more I inquired and the more I spoke with them directly, the more I realized they were the real deal. It was really possible. And that moment where you think, \u2018Holy cow, this is something I could actually do,' it\u2019s a bit of a surreal moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlying private citizens to space is a goal that NASA has had for years. At the beginning of the space shuttle program, it envisioned offering seats to private citizens and started a \u201cSpaceflight Participant\u201d program. A couple of members of Congress flew first, Sens. Jake Garn (R-Utah) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), but then NASA selected a teacher \u2014 Christa McAuliffe, who taught history in Concord, N.H. Next, a journalist was to go, then perhaps an artist.The program ended, however, after the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff on Jan. 28, 1986, killing McAuliffe and the other astronauts on board. The agency decided spaceflight was too risky for ordinary citizens.In an op-ed in The Washington Post two days after the disaster, Michael Collins, who flew to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard Apollo 11, seemed to take aim at NASA\u2019s efforts to send civilians to space as cavalier, warning that PR stunts can\u2019t overcome the punishing force of physics.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI have been expecting something like this for 20 years,\u201d he wrote of the Challenger disaster, which took place on a cold morning 35 years ago Thursday. \u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities. A thin and fragile barrier separates combustion from explosion.\u201dIn interviews with The Post, the crew of the Axiom flight said they were well aware of the risks and were taking the flight seriously. Within the ranks of the professional astronaut corps, there may very well be skepticism, if not outright objection, so their goal is to prove their merit through conviction and a humble dedication the endeavor deserves.\u201cThere will definitely be some resistance,\u201d said L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, 62, who spent 20 years as a NASA astronaut and holds the record for the most spacewalks. \u201cI think it\u2019s our job to win them over. We can do that certainly by being as prepared and expert as possible. And so, my goal is to get those guys to the point where no stone is unturned. And when they get on board station, the crews are pleased, maybe pleasantly surprised.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat was his experience when in 2006, he flew on the Soyuz with Anousheh Ansari, who reportedly paid about $20 million for the experience. But at first, he was dubious, thinking she was a dilettante.\u201cI think the hesitancy was natural when you come from a background as a military pilot and then spend your whole career studying to want to be an astronaut, and then somebody kind of cuts the line, if you will,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a little hard to swallow.\u201dBut what won him over was her \u201cconsummate professionalism\u201d and the fact that she wrote a blog from space. \u201cMillions of people were reading it,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are people that otherwise wouldn\u2019t have cared less about what was going on in human spaceflight. And that idea of sharing the experience really hit home for me.\u201dStibbe, 63, who flew combat missions for the Israeli Air Force and is the founding partner of an investment firm, is well aware of the risks, especially because he was close friends with Ilan Ramon, Israel\u2019s first astronaut, who died in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia came apart over Texas on reentry. He serves now on the board of a foundation created in Ramon\u2019s honor. As for his flight, Stibbe said, \u201cObviously there\u2019s some fear, and this is definitely extreme. And then there are risks, and I\u2019m aware of the risks.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementConnor, 71, would become the second-oldest person to go to space after John Glenn flew on the shuttle at age 77. He said wanted to leave a good impression so that others might follow in his footsteps. \u201cWe have a vital responsibility as a first group of private astronauts to do this thing correctly so that we don\u2019t end up being the last group,\u201d he said.They embrace the challenge wide-eyed, they said, chastened by past disasters, aware of the risks, but bullish on the benefits. Private citizens in space would not only bring attention to the space program but allow them to do research on board the station, raise awareness of science and math activities in their communities, and give their already robust philanthropic efforts a cosmic boost.They are aware, too, that there are problems on Earth that need to be addressed and that spaceflight is viewed by much of the public as a superfluous indulgence, especially during a pandemic and an economic crisis. The crew members say they see the flight as an enhancement of their other philanthropic efforts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are a lot of issues \u2014 adversity, and in some regards, crises, here, not only in the U.S., but worldwide,\u201d Connor said. \u201cAnd those absolutely need to be a priority. But we cannot forget about the future. We cannot forget about having long-term visions \u2026 And hopefully this mission and the research we\u2019re going to do is going to be one small step on that journey.\u201dIn space, he said, he does \u201cnot want to be a spectator. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I want to do something of value and how that translates into research and experiments.\u201dConnor is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic on research projects. He also intends to teach lessons to students at Dayton Early College Academy, a K-12 charter school with 1,300 students, 75 percent of them from low-income families.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPathy is working with the Canadian Space Agency and the Montreal Children\u2019s Hospital on health-related research projects. And Stibbe plans to conduct scientific research coordinated by the Ramon Foundation and the Israeli Space Agency.Their mission comes at a significant time for human spaceflight. Last year, SpaceX flew the first NASA astronauts to the space station from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011 \u2014 the first launch of humans into orbit by a private company, not a government. It flew another mission in November and is scheduled to fly more this year. Boeing also intends to fly NASA astronauts to the station this year.Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are planning to fly paying customers to space, as well. Those missions are not intended to go into orbit but rather to the edge of space, coming back down after giving passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin Galactic.Those trips, although still expensive, cost far less than trips to the space station. Virgin charged $250,000, although that price probably will go up in the short term. Blue Origin has not yet announced prices.Pathy and Connor traveled to Cape Canaveral last year to witness SpaceX\u2019s first launch of astronauts. It was the first time either of them had been to a rocket launch, and both said they were awestruck.\u201cYou feel that sound in your chest,\u201d Pathy said. \u201cAnd for me, especially, I\u2019m thinking that was going to be me in a few months. It was a really exciting and intense experience.\u201d The first space crew composed entirely of private citizens includes two grandfathers and a father with three young children. All are extremely wealthy. Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6064",
        "date": "2021-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/26/private-space-flight-axiom/",
        "text": "Two are grandfathers, the other has three young children. All three are extremely wealthy, with the means to pay the $55 million ticket price for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station. They are the first would-be spaceflight crew comprised entirely of private citizens in a mission to the station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSometime early next year, if all goes according to plan, the trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for what is scheduled to be an eight-day stay on the International Space Station.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that is coordinating their trip to space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it takes place as envisioned, the flight would mark a watershed moment in human space flight, one that according to Axiom, which announced the identities of the three paying passengers on Tuesday, will eventually make space more accessible and further erode the monopoly that governments have long held on space travel. The company, which is still finalizing the deal with NASA, is planning two flights per year and also is developing a space station of its own that NASA hopes may one day replace the International Space Station, the orbiting lab that has been in space for 22 years.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?\u201cThis is just the first of several Axiom Space crews whose private missions to the International Space Station will truly inaugurate an expansive future for humans in space \u2014 and make a meaningful difference in the world when they return home,\u201d Michael Suffredini, Axiom Space president and chief executive, said in a statement.Over the years, several wealthy private citizens have flown to the space station before \u2014 but on the Russian Soyuz craft because NASA forbade the practice on flights from U.S. soil. In 2019, NASA reversed its stance, saying the missions would help boost a growing commercial space industry as well as help NASA\u2019s bottom line. The space agency charges $35,000 a day per passenger for food, storage and communication during stays on board the orbiting laboratory \u2014 a total of more than $1 million for four people for eight days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s former chief financial officer, said at the 2019 announcement of the policy change.SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station on Nov. 16, delivering four astronauts to the orbiting laboratory. (The Washington Post)Pathy, 51, who has three young children, has a lifelong passion for space but didn\u2019t think he would ever be able to go until a friend told him about the Axiom missions. His initial reaction was skeptical.\u201cI wasn\u2019t sure it was completely real, and I\u2019d never heard of this company, Axiom,\u201d he said. \u201cI obviously was not going to blast off in a rocket if this was some sort of Mickey Mouse travel outfit. But the more I inquired and the more I spoke with them directly, the more I realized they were the real deal. It was really possible. And that moment where you think, \u2018Holy cow, this is something I could actually do,' it\u2019s a bit of a surreal moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlying private citizens to space is a goal that NASA has had for years. At the beginning of the space shuttle program, it envisioned offering seats to private citizens and started a \u201cSpaceflight Participant\u201d program. A couple of members of Congress flew first, Sens. Jake Garn (R-Utah) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), but then NASA selected a teacher \u2014 Christa McAuliffe, who taught history in Concord, N.H. Next, a journalist was to go, then perhaps an artist.The program ended, however, after the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff on Jan. 28, 1986, killing McAuliffe and the other astronauts on board. The agency decided spaceflight was too risky for ordinary citizens.In an op-ed in The Washington Post two days after the disaster, Michael Collins, who flew to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard Apollo 11, seemed to take aim at NASA\u2019s efforts to send civilians to space as cavalier, warning that PR stunts can\u2019t overcome the punishing force of physics.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI have been expecting something like this for 20 years,\u201d he wrote of the Challenger disaster, which took place on a cold morning 35 years ago Thursday. \u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities. A thin and fragile barrier separates combustion from explosion.\u201dIn interviews with The Post, the crew of the Axiom flight said they were well aware of the risks and were taking the flight seriously. Within the ranks of the professional astronaut corps, there may very well be skepticism, if not outright objection, so their goal is to prove their merit through conviction and a humble dedication the endeavor deserves.\u201cThere will definitely be some resistance,\u201d said L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, 62, who spent 20 years as a NASA astronaut and holds the record for the most spacewalks. \u201cI think it\u2019s our job to win them over. We can do that certainly by being as prepared and expert as possible. And so, my goal is to get those guys to the point where no stone is unturned. And when they get on board station, the crews are pleased, maybe pleasantly surprised.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat was his experience when in 2006, he flew on the Soyuz with Anousheh Ansari, who reportedly paid about $20 million for the experience. But at first, he was dubious, thinking she was a dilettante.\u201cI think the hesitancy was natural when you come from a background as a military pilot and then spend your whole career studying to want to be an astronaut, and then somebody kind of cuts the line, if you will,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a little hard to swallow.\u201dBut what won him over was her \u201cconsummate professionalism\u201d and the fact that she wrote a blog from space. \u201cMillions of people were reading it,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are people that otherwise wouldn\u2019t have cared less about what was going on in human spaceflight. And that idea of sharing the experience really hit home for me.\u201dStibbe, 63, who flew combat missions for the Israeli Air Force and is the founding partner of an investment firm, is well aware of the risks, especially because he was close friends with Ilan Ramon, Israel\u2019s first astronaut, who died in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia came apart over Texas on reentry. He serves now on the board of a foundation created in Ramon\u2019s honor. As for his flight, Stibbe said, \u201cObviously there\u2019s some fear, and this is definitely extreme. And then there are risks, and I\u2019m aware of the risks.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementConnor, 71, would become the second-oldest person to go to space after John Glenn flew on the shuttle at age 77. He said wanted to leave a good impression so that others might follow in his footsteps. \u201cWe have a vital responsibility as a first group of private astronauts to do this thing correctly so that we don\u2019t end up being the last group,\u201d he said.They embrace the challenge wide-eyed, they said, chastened by past disasters, aware of the risks, but bullish on the benefits. Private citizens in space would not only bring attention to the space program but allow them to do research on board the station, raise awareness of science and math activities in their communities, and give their already robust philanthropic efforts a cosmic boost.They are aware, too, that there are problems on Earth that need to be addressed and that spaceflight is viewed by much of the public as a superfluous indulgence, especially during a pandemic and an economic crisis. The crew members say they see the flight as an enhancement of their other philanthropic efforts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are a lot of issues \u2014 adversity, and in some regards, crises, here, not only in the U.S., but worldwide,\u201d Connor said. \u201cAnd those absolutely need to be a priority. But we cannot forget about the future. We cannot forget about having long-term visions \u2026 And hopefully this mission and the research we\u2019re going to do is going to be one small step on that journey.\u201dIn space, he said, he does \u201cnot want to be a spectator. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I want to do something of value and how that translates into research and experiments.\u201dConnor is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic on research projects. He also intends to teach lessons to students at Dayton Early College Academy, a K-12 charter school with 1,300 students, 75 percent of them from low-income families.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPathy is working with the Canadian Space Agency and the Montreal Children\u2019s Hospital on health-related research projects. And Stibbe plans to conduct scientific research coordinated by the Ramon Foundation and the Israeli Space Agency.Their mission comes at a significant time for human spaceflight. Last year, SpaceX flew the first NASA astronauts to the space station from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011 \u2014 the first launch of humans into orbit by a private company, not a government. It flew another mission in November and is scheduled to fly more this year. Boeing also intends to fly NASA astronauts to the station this year.Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are planning to fly paying customers to space, as well. Those missions are not intended to go into orbit but rather to the edge of space, coming back down after giving passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin Galactic.Those trips, although still expensive, cost far less than trips to the space station. Virgin charged $250,000, although that price probably will go up in the short term. Blue Origin has not yet announced prices.Pathy and Connor traveled to Cape Canaveral last year to witness SpaceX\u2019s first launch of astronauts. It was the first time either of them had been to a rocket launch, and both said they were awestruck.\u201cYou feel that sound in your chest,\u201d Pathy said. \u201cAnd for me, especially, I\u2019m thinking that was going to be me in a few months. It was a really exciting and intense experience.\u201d The first space crew composed entirely of private citizens includes two grandfathers and a father with three young children. All are extremely wealthy. Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6065",
        "date": "2021-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/26/private-space-flight-axiom/",
        "text": "Two are grandfathers, the other has three young children. All three are extremely wealthy, with the means to pay the $55 million ticket price for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station. They are the first would-be spaceflight crew comprised entirely of private citizens in a mission to the station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSometime early next year, if all goes according to plan, the trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for what is scheduled to be an eight-day stay on the International Space Station.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that is coordinating their trip to space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it takes place as envisioned, the flight would mark a watershed moment in human space flight, one that according to Axiom, which announced the identities of the three paying passengers on Tuesday, will eventually make space more accessible and further erode the monopoly that governments have long held on space travel. The company, which is still finalizing the deal with NASA, is planning two flights per year and also is developing a space station of its own that NASA hopes may one day replace the International Space Station, the orbiting lab that has been in space for 22 years.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?\u201cThis is just the first of several Axiom Space crews whose private missions to the International Space Station will truly inaugurate an expansive future for humans in space \u2014 and make a meaningful difference in the world when they return home,\u201d Michael Suffredini, Axiom Space president and chief executive, said in a statement.Over the years, several wealthy private citizens have flown to the space station before \u2014 but on the Russian Soyuz craft because NASA forbade the practice on flights from U.S. soil. In 2019, NASA reversed its stance, saying the missions would help boost a growing commercial space industry as well as help NASA\u2019s bottom line. The space agency charges $35,000 a day per passenger for food, storage and communication during stays on board the orbiting laboratory \u2014 a total of more than $1 million for four people for eight days.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s former chief financial officer, said at the 2019 announcement of the policy change.SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule docked with the International Space Station on Nov. 16, delivering four astronauts to the orbiting laboratory. (The Washington Post)Pathy, 51, who has three young children, has a lifelong passion for space but didn\u2019t think he would ever be able to go until a friend told him about the Axiom missions. His initial reaction was skeptical.\u201cI wasn\u2019t sure it was completely real, and I\u2019d never heard of this company, Axiom,\u201d he said. \u201cI obviously was not going to blast off in a rocket if this was some sort of Mickey Mouse travel outfit. But the more I inquired and the more I spoke with them directly, the more I realized they were the real deal. It was really possible. And that moment where you think, \u2018Holy cow, this is something I could actually do,' it\u2019s a bit of a surreal moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlying private citizens to space is a goal that NASA has had for years. At the beginning of the space shuttle program, it envisioned offering seats to private citizens and started a \u201cSpaceflight Participant\u201d program. A couple of members of Congress flew first, Sens. Jake Garn (R-Utah) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), but then NASA selected a teacher \u2014 Christa McAuliffe, who taught history in Concord, N.H. Next, a journalist was to go, then perhaps an artist.The program ended, however, after the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff on Jan. 28, 1986, killing McAuliffe and the other astronauts on board. The agency decided spaceflight was too risky for ordinary citizens.In an op-ed in The Washington Post two days after the disaster, Michael Collins, who flew to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard Apollo 11, seemed to take aim at NASA\u2019s efforts to send civilians to space as cavalier, warning that PR stunts can\u2019t overcome the punishing force of physics.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI have been expecting something like this for 20 years,\u201d he wrote of the Challenger disaster, which took place on a cold morning 35 years ago Thursday. \u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities. A thin and fragile barrier separates combustion from explosion.\u201dIn interviews with The Post, the crew of the Axiom flight said they were well aware of the risks and were taking the flight seriously. Within the ranks of the professional astronaut corps, there may very well be skepticism, if not outright objection, so their goal is to prove their merit through conviction and a humble dedication the endeavor deserves.\u201cThere will definitely be some resistance,\u201d said L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, 62, who spent 20 years as a NASA astronaut and holds the record for the most spacewalks. \u201cI think it\u2019s our job to win them over. We can do that certainly by being as prepared and expert as possible. And so, my goal is to get those guys to the point where no stone is unturned. And when they get on board station, the crews are pleased, maybe pleasantly surprised.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat was his experience when in 2006, he flew on the Soyuz with Anousheh Ansari, who reportedly paid about $20 million for the experience. But at first, he was dubious, thinking she was a dilettante.\u201cI think the hesitancy was natural when you come from a background as a military pilot and then spend your whole career studying to want to be an astronaut, and then somebody kind of cuts the line, if you will,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a little hard to swallow.\u201dBut what won him over was her \u201cconsummate professionalism\u201d and the fact that she wrote a blog from space. \u201cMillions of people were reading it,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are people that otherwise wouldn\u2019t have cared less about what was going on in human spaceflight. And that idea of sharing the experience really hit home for me.\u201dStibbe, 63, who flew combat missions for the Israeli Air Force and is the founding partner of an investment firm, is well aware of the risks, especially because he was close friends with Ilan Ramon, Israel\u2019s first astronaut, who died in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia came apart over Texas on reentry. He serves now on the board of a foundation created in Ramon\u2019s honor. As for his flight, Stibbe said, \u201cObviously there\u2019s some fear, and this is definitely extreme. And then there are risks, and I\u2019m aware of the risks.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementConnor, 71, would become the second-oldest person to go to space after John Glenn flew on the shuttle at age 77. He said wanted to leave a good impression so that others might follow in his footsteps. \u201cWe have a vital responsibility as a first group of private astronauts to do this thing correctly so that we don\u2019t end up being the last group,\u201d he said.They embrace the challenge wide-eyed, they said, chastened by past disasters, aware of the risks, but bullish on the benefits. Private citizens in space would not only bring attention to the space program but allow them to do research on board the station, raise awareness of science and math activities in their communities, and give their already robust philanthropic efforts a cosmic boost.They are aware, too, that there are problems on Earth that need to be addressed and that spaceflight is viewed by much of the public as a superfluous indulgence, especially during a pandemic and an economic crisis. The crew members say they see the flight as an enhancement of their other philanthropic efforts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are a lot of issues \u2014 adversity, and in some regards, crises, here, not only in the U.S., but worldwide,\u201d Connor said. \u201cAnd those absolutely need to be a priority. But we cannot forget about the future. We cannot forget about having long-term visions \u2026 And hopefully this mission and the research we\u2019re going to do is going to be one small step on that journey.\u201dIn space, he said, he does \u201cnot want to be a spectator. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I want to do something of value and how that translates into research and experiments.\u201dConnor is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic on research projects. He also intends to teach lessons to students at Dayton Early College Academy, a K-12 charter school with 1,300 students, 75 percent of them from low-income families.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPathy is working with the Canadian Space Agency and the Montreal Children\u2019s Hospital on health-related research projects. And Stibbe plans to conduct scientific research coordinated by the Ramon Foundation and the Israeli Space Agency.Their mission comes at a significant time for human spaceflight. Last year, SpaceX flew the first NASA astronauts to the space station from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011 \u2014 the first launch of humans into orbit by a private company, not a government. It flew another mission in November and is scheduled to fly more this year. Boeing also intends to fly NASA astronauts to the station this year.Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are planning to fly paying customers to space, as well. Those missions are not intended to go into orbit but rather to the edge of space, coming back down after giving passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin Galactic.Those trips, although still expensive, cost far less than trips to the space station. Virgin charged $250,000, although that price probably will go up in the short term. Blue Origin has not yet announced prices.Pathy and Connor traveled to Cape Canaveral last year to witness SpaceX\u2019s first launch of astronauts. It was the first time either of them had been to a rocket launch, and both said they were awestruck.\u201cYou feel that sound in your chest,\u201d Pathy said. \u201cAnd for me, especially, I\u2019m thinking that was going to be me in a few months. It was a really exciting and intense experience.\u201d The first space crew composed entirely of private citizens includes two grandfathers and a father with three young children. All are extremely wealthy. Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6066",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/14/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-safety/",
        "text": "Three months after Richard Branson reached the edge of space, Virgin Galactic, his space tourism company, is postponing its next test flight to make what it calls enhancements to its spaceplane that would make it safer and more robust and reliable over the long term, the company announced Thursday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe decision means that a test flight scheduled for this month, which was to have flown members of the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council, will be delayed until the second half of next year, and commercial service won\u2019t begin until the fourth quarter of that year, the company said.The stand-down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic has repeatedly delayed flying its paying customers, some of whom have waited years. After suspending ticket sales, which had been priced at $250,000 each, the company announced this year it was reopening ticket sales at $450,000 each.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said the company\u2019s spacecraft \u201care designed with significant margins for safety, providing layers of protection that far exceed loads experienced and expected to occur on our flights.\u201d The enhancement to the spacecraft \u201cunderscores our safety-first procedures, provides the most efficient path to commercial service and is the right approach for our business and our customers.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceEarlier this year, Branson, who had been itching to get to space for years, moved up his flight and was able to beat rival Jeff Bezos to space by less than two weeks. But Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin just completed its second successful human spaceflight on Wednesday, carrying William Shatner and three others on a quick suborbital flight to an altitude of more than 66 miles.It is planning one more flight by the end of the year and a half dozen or more next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Virgin Galactic spokesperson said that there were no issues with the vehicle currently and that it would be cleared to fly in the next month or two. But as the company tested materials in the laboratory to determine how often parts and materials would need to be inspected and maintained, the data projected lower strength margins over the long term.The company had been planning to stand down for some time at the end of the year to perform maintenance on its mother ship, which hoists the spaceplane aloft so that it can be \u201cair launched\u201d from about 45,000 feet. It will now perform that work immediately and include the additional spacecraft materials in the review as well.While the delay for the Italian Air Force mission is several months, the delay of commercial service from when it was originally foreseen should be only about a month or so, the person said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Italian Air Force flight had been delayed previously after the company noticed a potential defect in a component supplied by an outside contractor. The current delay is unrelated to that, the company said. The earlier issue has been resolved.Virgin Galactic was also grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration this year after Branson\u2019s flight went off course during its descent and controllers failed to inform the FAA it was flying outside of its restricted airspace. The FAA announced last month it was allowing the company to return to flight operations after the company made changes on how it would communicate with the FAA during flights. The stand down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6067",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/14/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-safety/",
        "text": "Three months after Richard Branson reached the edge of space, Virgin Galactic, his space tourism company, is postponing its next test flight to make what it calls enhancements to its spaceplane that would make it safer and more robust and reliable over the long term, the company announced Thursday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe decision means that a test flight scheduled for this month, which was to have flown members of the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council, will be delayed until the second half of next year, and commercial service won\u2019t begin until the fourth quarter of that year, the company said.The stand-down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic has repeatedly delayed flying its paying customers, some of whom have waited years. After suspending ticket sales, which had been priced at $250,000 each, the company announced this year it was reopening ticket sales at $450,000 each.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said the company\u2019s spacecraft \u201care designed with significant margins for safety, providing layers of protection that far exceed loads experienced and expected to occur on our flights.\u201d The enhancement to the spacecraft \u201cunderscores our safety-first procedures, provides the most efficient path to commercial service and is the right approach for our business and our customers.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceEarlier this year, Branson, who had been itching to get to space for years, moved up his flight and was able to beat rival Jeff Bezos to space by less than two weeks. But Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin just completed its second successful human spaceflight on Wednesday, carrying William Shatner and three others on a quick suborbital flight to an altitude of more than 66 miles.It is planning one more flight by the end of the year and a half dozen or more next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Virgin Galactic spokesperson said that there were no issues with the vehicle currently and that it would be cleared to fly in the next month or two. But as the company tested materials in the laboratory to determine how often parts and materials would need to be inspected and maintained, the data projected lower strength margins over the long term.The company had been planning to stand down for some time at the end of the year to perform maintenance on its mother ship, which hoists the spaceplane aloft so that it can be \u201cair launched\u201d from about 45,000 feet. It will now perform that work immediately and include the additional spacecraft materials in the review as well.While the delay for the Italian Air Force mission is several months, the delay of commercial service from when it was originally foreseen should be only about a month or so, the person said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Italian Air Force flight had been delayed previously after the company noticed a potential defect in a component supplied by an outside contractor. The current delay is unrelated to that, the company said. The earlier issue has been resolved.Virgin Galactic was also grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration this year after Branson\u2019s flight went off course during its descent and controllers failed to inform the FAA it was flying outside of its restricted airspace. The FAA announced last month it was allowing the company to return to flight operations after the company made changes on how it would communicate with the FAA during flights. The stand down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6068",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/14/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-safety/",
        "text": "Three months after Richard Branson reached the edge of space, Virgin Galactic, his space tourism company, is postponing its next test flight to make what it calls enhancements to its spaceplane that would make it safer and more robust and reliable over the long term, the company announced Thursday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe decision means that a test flight scheduled for this month, which was to have flown members of the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council, will be delayed until the second half of next year, and commercial service won\u2019t begin until the fourth quarter of that year, the company said.The stand-down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic has repeatedly delayed flying its paying customers, some of whom have waited years. After suspending ticket sales, which had been priced at $250,000 each, the company announced this year it was reopening ticket sales at $450,000 each.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said the company\u2019s spacecraft \u201care designed with significant margins for safety, providing layers of protection that far exceed loads experienced and expected to occur on our flights.\u201d The enhancement to the spacecraft \u201cunderscores our safety-first procedures, provides the most efficient path to commercial service and is the right approach for our business and our customers.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceEarlier this year, Branson, who had been itching to get to space for years, moved up his flight and was able to beat rival Jeff Bezos to space by less than two weeks. But Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin just completed its second successful human spaceflight on Wednesday, carrying William Shatner and three others on a quick suborbital flight to an altitude of more than 66 miles.It is planning one more flight by the end of the year and a half dozen or more next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Virgin Galactic spokesperson said that there were no issues with the vehicle currently and that it would be cleared to fly in the next month or two. But as the company tested materials in the laboratory to determine how often parts and materials would need to be inspected and maintained, the data projected lower strength margins over the long term.The company had been planning to stand down for some time at the end of the year to perform maintenance on its mother ship, which hoists the spaceplane aloft so that it can be \u201cair launched\u201d from about 45,000 feet. It will now perform that work immediately and include the additional spacecraft materials in the review as well.While the delay for the Italian Air Force mission is several months, the delay of commercial service from when it was originally foreseen should be only about a month or so, the person said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Italian Air Force flight had been delayed previously after the company noticed a potential defect in a component supplied by an outside contractor. The current delay is unrelated to that, the company said. The earlier issue has been resolved.Virgin Galactic was also grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration this year after Branson\u2019s flight went off course during its descent and controllers failed to inform the FAA it was flying outside of its restricted airspace. The FAA announced last month it was allowing the company to return to flight operations after the company made changes on how it would communicate with the FAA during flights. The stand down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6069",
        "date": "2021-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/14/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-safety/",
        "text": "Three months after Richard Branson reached the edge of space, Virgin Galactic, his space tourism company, is postponing its next test flight to make what it calls enhancements to its spaceplane that would make it safer and more robust and reliable over the long term, the company announced Thursday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe decision means that a test flight scheduled for this month, which was to have flown members of the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council, will be delayed until the second half of next year, and commercial service won\u2019t begin until the fourth quarter of that year, the company said.The stand-down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic has repeatedly delayed flying its paying customers, some of whom have waited years. After suspending ticket sales, which had been priced at $250,000 each, the company announced this year it was reopening ticket sales at $450,000 each.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said the company\u2019s spacecraft \u201care designed with significant margins for safety, providing layers of protection that far exceed loads experienced and expected to occur on our flights.\u201d The enhancement to the spacecraft \u201cunderscores our safety-first procedures, provides the most efficient path to commercial service and is the right approach for our business and our customers.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceEarlier this year, Branson, who had been itching to get to space for years, moved up his flight and was able to beat rival Jeff Bezos to space by less than two weeks. But Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin just completed its second successful human spaceflight on Wednesday, carrying William Shatner and three others on a quick suborbital flight to an altitude of more than 66 miles.It is planning one more flight by the end of the year and a half dozen or more next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA Virgin Galactic spokesperson said that there were no issues with the vehicle currently and that it would be cleared to fly in the next month or two. But as the company tested materials in the laboratory to determine how often parts and materials would need to be inspected and maintained, the data projected lower strength margins over the long term.The company had been planning to stand down for some time at the end of the year to perform maintenance on its mother ship, which hoists the spaceplane aloft so that it can be \u201cair launched\u201d from about 45,000 feet. It will now perform that work immediately and include the additional spacecraft materials in the review as well.While the delay for the Italian Air Force mission is several months, the delay of commercial service from when it was originally foreseen should be only about a month or so, the person said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Italian Air Force flight had been delayed previously after the company noticed a potential defect in a component supplied by an outside contractor. The current delay is unrelated to that, the company said. The earlier issue has been resolved.Virgin Galactic was also grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration this year after Branson\u2019s flight went off course during its descent and controllers failed to inform the FAA it was flying outside of its restricted airspace. The FAA announced last month it was allowing the company to return to flight operations after the company made changes on how it would communicate with the FAA during flights. The stand down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic pushes back next test flight as it makes \u2018enhancements\u2019 to its spaceplane",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What 2020 could bring in spaceflight (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6070",
        "date": "2020-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/06/what-could-bring-spaceflight/",
        "text": "This year could herald significant moments in space exploration: NASA astronauts flying from United States soil for the first time since 2011; the first paying tourists traveling to the edge of space; rockets sending hundreds of satellites into Earth orbit to beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe; and the first serious steps toward returning a human being to the surface of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut as 2020 begins, the rosy promise of those developments could quickly be overruled by gravity and engineering issues. Already, NASA finds itself struggling with a technical problem \u2014 a software issue that marred the maiden flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft just before Christmas and prevented it from reaching the International Space Station. It is a reminder of the many things that can go wrong when attempting to punch through the atmosphere.This year is born full of hope and enthusiastic predictions of triumph, despite 2019\u2019s catalogue of calamity, a one-step-forward-two-steps-back year, marked as much by failure as by success \u2014 by stuck valves, failed parachute systems and faulty onboard computers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet hope remains for triumph. NASA will celebrate 20 continuous years of humans living in orbit aboard the International Space Station, and there are other records likely to be set.The year in American spaceflightSpaceX intends to break its record of 21 launches in a single year. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, plans to fly about a dozen times, including Boeing\u2019s first mission with astronauts to the space station. Northrop Grumman has three launches planned.Despite the recent problems that have plagued Boeing and SpaceX, which lost its spacecraft when it blew up last year during an engine test, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine remains confident that those companies will boost astronauts into space in 2020, ending an ignominious nine-year hiatus of human spaceflight from the United States that began when the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther key moments in space set for 2020: as many as four missions to Mars by several countries, including China, and a key test of the monster rocket Boeing and others are building that NASA hopes will put astronauts on the moon by 2024.Then again, space is costly, dangerous and exceedingly difficult \u2014 and what looked like a sure thing in January could be questionable by summer.The space industry has had a nice run over the past several years, attracting millions of dollars of private investment, but now is headed to a turning point, said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.\u201cNow that\u2019s moving to a phase of: prove it,\u201d she said. \u201cCompanies are having to prove they\u2019re viable and their business model flows, and some are succeeding and some are not.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHuman spaceflight SpaceX started the year Monday night with a launch from Cape Canaveral to put 60 more satellites into low Earth orbit, part of a constellation that eventually could reach thousands that the company hopes would beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe without broadband.AdvertisementAssembling that architecture in space will require dozens of launches, which many think could have the California-based company break its record for the most launches in a single year, 21 in 2018. SpaceX\u2019s next launch is set to come as soon as Jan. 11, when it is scheduled to again test the emergency abort system of its Dragon spacecraft \u2014 this time in flight. A Falcon 9 rocket would blast off from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Then, shortly thereafter, the abort motors would fire, demonstrating that it has the ability to get crews away safely in the event of an emergency.Story continues below advertisementIf it goes well, SpaceX is hoping to follow that with its first flight with people in the coming months.Boeing is also moving aggressively, despite the problems that hampered the first test flight of its Starliner spacecraft. Officials said the spacecraft\u2019s onboard timer was off by 11 hours and, as a result, the engines that would have propelled it on a trajectory to the space station never fired.AdvertisementThe company, which fired chief executive Dennis Muilenburg in the wake of the 737 Max airplane crisis, is still investigating what caused the problem. But company officials said that they were preparing the spacecraft for its next mission and that its life-support system had performed well. The spacecraft \u201cshows little scorching from the heat of atmospheric re-entry,\u201d the company said.Story continues below advertisementWhen it comes to human spaceflight, no one has made more overly optimistic pronouncements than Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic. For years, the British-born billionaire has predicted that his company would soon ferry legions of paying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 only to have to delay again and again.But now, having reached what many consider the edge of space twice \u2014 once at the end of 2018, and then again early last year \u2014 the company says it is poised to finally begin flying the hundreds of people who have put down as much as $250,000 for a ticket.AdvertisementThe company, which recently went public after merging with a New York investment firm, projects flying 66 customers this year, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, has also said it intends to fly humans for the first time in 2020. But unlike Branson, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has been relatively quiet about his space tourism plans. The company has announced no price for the missions in its reusable New Shepard vehicle, which would offer a few minutes of weightlessness.In December, it launched its latest test without astronauts, a mission it said helped it move \u201ccloser toward verifying New Shepard for human flight.\u201dSmall satellites Virgin Orbit, another Branson venture, also could reach a significant milestone this year when it plans to launch its rocket, LauncherOne, for the first time. Instead of taking off vertically, the craft would be dropped from the wing of a 747 jet before its engines would fire to carry it into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s plan is to join in the competition to send small satellites into space inexpensively and quickly. A leader in that market has already emerged \u2014 Rocket Lab, a New Zealand company that also operates out of California. It\u2019s already launched 10 times, with six missions last year. It plans to launch a dozen times this year, including the maiden flight from the launchpad it is taking over at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.Rocket companies hope that a number of small satellite constellations, designed to beam the Internet to remote corners of the world, could fuel a demand for increased launches. SpaceX has already put up about 120 satellites as part of its Starlink program, and Monday\u2019s launch will add 60 more. It hopes to achieve moderate coverage by this year, which would require several more launches.Other companies such as OneWeb and Amazon also are planning to put up hundreds of satellites of their own, which many fear could create a traffic jam in space. Last year, the European Space Agency complained that it had to move one of its satellites to avoid a collision. Astronomers have also said the increased number of satellites could clutter space and interfere with their views of the cosmos.Moon and MarsIn addition to flying its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast, NASA\u2019s biggest priority for 2020 is to continue to work toward meeting the White House\u2019s mandate to return humans to the moon by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe next big step is to award the contract to build a lander capable of taking astronauts to the lunar surface. Boeing is vying for the contract, as is a team led by Blue Origin that also includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.It\u2019s not clear, however, whether the money will be there to meet the 2024 deadline. Congress has been reluctant to pay for a moon mission without seeing a specific breakdown of the total cost, and there are many other pressing needs in the budget in an election year. And the Space Launch System rocket that prime contractor Boeing is building for the NASA missions has never flown.Still, NASA remains optimistic.The SLS rocket is about to undergo a series of tests to fire its engines and stress the avionics systems to ensure the rocket will be ready for its first launch in 2021.Advertisement\u201cI refuse to go ahead and use funding as a crutch for not making it to the moon by 2024,\u201d Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s new associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told SpaceNews recently.India will try again to reach the lunar surface after its spacecraft, carrying no astronauts, crashed into the lunar surface last year. But it\u2019s unclear when the upcoming Chandrayaan-3 mission would launch.NASA is planning to launch a rover carrying a small helicopter to Mars this summer. In December, the Mars 2020 rover passed a key milestone, completing its first driving test, which \u201cunambiguously proved that the rover can operate under its own weight and demonstrated many of the autonomous-navigation functions for the first time,\u201d Rich Rieber, the lead mobility systems engineer for the mission, said in a statement.Other nations are eyeing the Red Planet as well. Russia and the European Space Agency are planning to send a rover and a lander there this year in a joint mission. So is China, which plans to send a spacecraft that would orbit Mars. The country, which last year landed on the far side of the moon, a historic first, plans as many as 40 launches in 2020 and saw the return to flight of its massive Long March 5 rocket late last year after a failure in 2017.And the United Arab Emirates is also planning to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to orbit Mars that would be launched by Japan later this year. NASA has big plans for the coming year. So do the space industry and foreign countries. What 2020 could bring in spaceflight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What 2020 could bring in spaceflight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6071",
        "date": "2020-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/06/what-could-bring-spaceflight/",
        "text": "This year could herald significant moments in space exploration: NASA astronauts flying from United States soil for the first time since 2011; the first paying tourists traveling to the edge of space; rockets sending hundreds of satellites into Earth orbit to beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe; and the first serious steps toward returning a human being to the surface of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut as 2020 begins, the rosy promise of those developments could quickly be overruled by gravity and engineering issues. Already, NASA finds itself struggling with a technical problem \u2014 a software issue that marred the maiden flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft just before Christmas and prevented it from reaching the International Space Station. It is a reminder of the many things that can go wrong when attempting to punch through the atmosphere.This year is born full of hope and enthusiastic predictions of triumph, despite 2019\u2019s catalogue of calamity, a one-step-forward-two-steps-back year, marked as much by failure as by success \u2014 by stuck valves, failed parachute systems and faulty onboard computers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet hope remains for triumph. NASA will celebrate 20 continuous years of humans living in orbit aboard the International Space Station, and there are other records likely to be set.The year in American spaceflightSpaceX intends to break its record of 21 launches in a single year. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, plans to fly about a dozen times, including Boeing\u2019s first mission with astronauts to the space station. Northrop Grumman has three launches planned.Despite the recent problems that have plagued Boeing and SpaceX, which lost its spacecraft when it blew up last year during an engine test, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine remains confident that those companies will boost astronauts into space in 2020, ending an ignominious nine-year hiatus of human spaceflight from the United States that began when the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther key moments in space set for 2020: as many as four missions to Mars by several countries, including China, and a key test of the monster rocket Boeing and others are building that NASA hopes will put astronauts on the moon by 2024.Then again, space is costly, dangerous and exceedingly difficult \u2014 and what looked like a sure thing in January could be questionable by summer.The space industry has had a nice run over the past several years, attracting millions of dollars of private investment, but now is headed to a turning point, said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.\u201cNow that\u2019s moving to a phase of: prove it,\u201d she said. \u201cCompanies are having to prove they\u2019re viable and their business model flows, and some are succeeding and some are not.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHuman spaceflight SpaceX started the year Monday night with a launch from Cape Canaveral to put 60 more satellites into low Earth orbit, part of a constellation that eventually could reach thousands that the company hopes would beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe without broadband.AdvertisementAssembling that architecture in space will require dozens of launches, which many think could have the California-based company break its record for the most launches in a single year, 21 in 2018. SpaceX\u2019s next launch is set to come as soon as Jan. 11, when it is scheduled to again test the emergency abort system of its Dragon spacecraft \u2014 this time in flight. A Falcon 9 rocket would blast off from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Then, shortly thereafter, the abort motors would fire, demonstrating that it has the ability to get crews away safely in the event of an emergency.Story continues below advertisementIf it goes well, SpaceX is hoping to follow that with its first flight with people in the coming months.Boeing is also moving aggressively, despite the problems that hampered the first test flight of its Starliner spacecraft. Officials said the spacecraft\u2019s onboard timer was off by 11 hours and, as a result, the engines that would have propelled it on a trajectory to the space station never fired.AdvertisementThe company, which fired chief executive Dennis Muilenburg in the wake of the 737 Max airplane crisis, is still investigating what caused the problem. But company officials said that they were preparing the spacecraft for its next mission and that its life-support system had performed well. The spacecraft \u201cshows little scorching from the heat of atmospheric re-entry,\u201d the company said.Story continues below advertisementWhen it comes to human spaceflight, no one has made more overly optimistic pronouncements than Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic. For years, the British-born billionaire has predicted that his company would soon ferry legions of paying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 only to have to delay again and again.But now, having reached what many consider the edge of space twice \u2014 once at the end of 2018, and then again early last year \u2014 the company says it is poised to finally begin flying the hundreds of people who have put down as much as $250,000 for a ticket.AdvertisementThe company, which recently went public after merging with a New York investment firm, projects flying 66 customers this year, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, has also said it intends to fly humans for the first time in 2020. But unlike Branson, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has been relatively quiet about his space tourism plans. The company has announced no price for the missions in its reusable New Shepard vehicle, which would offer a few minutes of weightlessness.In December, it launched its latest test without astronauts, a mission it said helped it move \u201ccloser toward verifying New Shepard for human flight.\u201dSmall satellites Virgin Orbit, another Branson venture, also could reach a significant milestone this year when it plans to launch its rocket, LauncherOne, for the first time. Instead of taking off vertically, the craft would be dropped from the wing of a 747 jet before its engines would fire to carry it into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s plan is to join in the competition to send small satellites into space inexpensively and quickly. A leader in that market has already emerged \u2014 Rocket Lab, a New Zealand company that also operates out of California. It\u2019s already launched 10 times, with six missions last year. It plans to launch a dozen times this year, including the maiden flight from the launchpad it is taking over at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.Rocket companies hope that a number of small satellite constellations, designed to beam the Internet to remote corners of the world, could fuel a demand for increased launches. SpaceX has already put up about 120 satellites as part of its Starlink program, and Monday\u2019s launch will add 60 more. It hopes to achieve moderate coverage by this year, which would require several more launches.Other companies such as OneWeb and Amazon also are planning to put up hundreds of satellites of their own, which many fear could create a traffic jam in space. Last year, the European Space Agency complained that it had to move one of its satellites to avoid a collision. Astronomers have also said the increased number of satellites could clutter space and interfere with their views of the cosmos.Moon and MarsIn addition to flying its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast, NASA\u2019s biggest priority for 2020 is to continue to work toward meeting the White House\u2019s mandate to return humans to the moon by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe next big step is to award the contract to build a lander capable of taking astronauts to the lunar surface. Boeing is vying for the contract, as is a team led by Blue Origin that also includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.It\u2019s not clear, however, whether the money will be there to meet the 2024 deadline. Congress has been reluctant to pay for a moon mission without seeing a specific breakdown of the total cost, and there are many other pressing needs in the budget in an election year. And the Space Launch System rocket that prime contractor Boeing is building for the NASA missions has never flown.Still, NASA remains optimistic.The SLS rocket is about to undergo a series of tests to fire its engines and stress the avionics systems to ensure the rocket will be ready for its first launch in 2021.Advertisement\u201cI refuse to go ahead and use funding as a crutch for not making it to the moon by 2024,\u201d Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s new associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told SpaceNews recently.India will try again to reach the lunar surface after its spacecraft, carrying no astronauts, crashed into the lunar surface last year. But it\u2019s unclear when the upcoming Chandrayaan-3 mission would launch.NASA is planning to launch a rover carrying a small helicopter to Mars this summer. In December, the Mars 2020 rover passed a key milestone, completing its first driving test, which \u201cunambiguously proved that the rover can operate under its own weight and demonstrated many of the autonomous-navigation functions for the first time,\u201d Rich Rieber, the lead mobility systems engineer for the mission, said in a statement.Other nations are eyeing the Red Planet as well. Russia and the European Space Agency are planning to send a rover and a lander there this year in a joint mission. So is China, which plans to send a spacecraft that would orbit Mars. The country, which last year landed on the far side of the moon, a historic first, plans as many as 40 launches in 2020 and saw the return to flight of its massive Long March 5 rocket late last year after a failure in 2017.And the United Arab Emirates is also planning to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to orbit Mars that would be launched by Japan later this year. NASA has big plans for the coming year. So do the space industry and foreign countries. What 2020 could bring in spaceflight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What 2020 could bring in spaceflight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6072",
        "date": "2020-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/06/what-could-bring-spaceflight/",
        "text": "This year could herald significant moments in space exploration: NASA astronauts flying from United States soil for the first time since 2011; the first paying tourists traveling to the edge of space; rockets sending hundreds of satellites into Earth orbit to beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe; and the first serious steps toward returning a human being to the surface of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut as 2020 begins, the rosy promise of those developments could quickly be overruled by gravity and engineering issues. Already, NASA finds itself struggling with a technical problem \u2014 a software issue that marred the maiden flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft just before Christmas and prevented it from reaching the International Space Station. It is a reminder of the many things that can go wrong when attempting to punch through the atmosphere.This year is born full of hope and enthusiastic predictions of triumph, despite 2019\u2019s catalogue of calamity, a one-step-forward-two-steps-back year, marked as much by failure as by success \u2014 by stuck valves, failed parachute systems and faulty onboard computers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet hope remains for triumph. NASA will celebrate 20 continuous years of humans living in orbit aboard the International Space Station, and there are other records likely to be set.The year in American spaceflightSpaceX intends to break its record of 21 launches in a single year. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, plans to fly about a dozen times, including Boeing\u2019s first mission with astronauts to the space station. Northrop Grumman has three launches planned.Despite the recent problems that have plagued Boeing and SpaceX, which lost its spacecraft when it blew up last year during an engine test, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine remains confident that those companies will boost astronauts into space in 2020, ending an ignominious nine-year hiatus of human spaceflight from the United States that began when the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther key moments in space set for 2020: as many as four missions to Mars by several countries, including China, and a key test of the monster rocket Boeing and others are building that NASA hopes will put astronauts on the moon by 2024.Then again, space is costly, dangerous and exceedingly difficult \u2014 and what looked like a sure thing in January could be questionable by summer.The space industry has had a nice run over the past several years, attracting millions of dollars of private investment, but now is headed to a turning point, said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.\u201cNow that\u2019s moving to a phase of: prove it,\u201d she said. \u201cCompanies are having to prove they\u2019re viable and their business model flows, and some are succeeding and some are not.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHuman spaceflight SpaceX started the year Monday night with a launch from Cape Canaveral to put 60 more satellites into low Earth orbit, part of a constellation that eventually could reach thousands that the company hopes would beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe without broadband.AdvertisementAssembling that architecture in space will require dozens of launches, which many think could have the California-based company break its record for the most launches in a single year, 21 in 2018. SpaceX\u2019s next launch is set to come as soon as Jan. 11, when it is scheduled to again test the emergency abort system of its Dragon spacecraft \u2014 this time in flight. A Falcon 9 rocket would blast off from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Then, shortly thereafter, the abort motors would fire, demonstrating that it has the ability to get crews away safely in the event of an emergency.Story continues below advertisementIf it goes well, SpaceX is hoping to follow that with its first flight with people in the coming months.Boeing is also moving aggressively, despite the problems that hampered the first test flight of its Starliner spacecraft. Officials said the spacecraft\u2019s onboard timer was off by 11 hours and, as a result, the engines that would have propelled it on a trajectory to the space station never fired.AdvertisementThe company, which fired chief executive Dennis Muilenburg in the wake of the 737 Max airplane crisis, is still investigating what caused the problem. But company officials said that they were preparing the spacecraft for its next mission and that its life-support system had performed well. The spacecraft \u201cshows little scorching from the heat of atmospheric re-entry,\u201d the company said.Story continues below advertisementWhen it comes to human spaceflight, no one has made more overly optimistic pronouncements than Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic. For years, the British-born billionaire has predicted that his company would soon ferry legions of paying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 only to have to delay again and again.But now, having reached what many consider the edge of space twice \u2014 once at the end of 2018, and then again early last year \u2014 the company says it is poised to finally begin flying the hundreds of people who have put down as much as $250,000 for a ticket.AdvertisementThe company, which recently went public after merging with a New York investment firm, projects flying 66 customers this year, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, has also said it intends to fly humans for the first time in 2020. But unlike Branson, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has been relatively quiet about his space tourism plans. The company has announced no price for the missions in its reusable New Shepard vehicle, which would offer a few minutes of weightlessness.In December, it launched its latest test without astronauts, a mission it said helped it move \u201ccloser toward verifying New Shepard for human flight.\u201dSmall satellites Virgin Orbit, another Branson venture, also could reach a significant milestone this year when it plans to launch its rocket, LauncherOne, for the first time. Instead of taking off vertically, the craft would be dropped from the wing of a 747 jet before its engines would fire to carry it into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s plan is to join in the competition to send small satellites into space inexpensively and quickly. A leader in that market has already emerged \u2014 Rocket Lab, a New Zealand company that also operates out of California. It\u2019s already launched 10 times, with six missions last year. It plans to launch a dozen times this year, including the maiden flight from the launchpad it is taking over at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.Rocket companies hope that a number of small satellite constellations, designed to beam the Internet to remote corners of the world, could fuel a demand for increased launches. SpaceX has already put up about 120 satellites as part of its Starlink program, and Monday\u2019s launch will add 60 more. It hopes to achieve moderate coverage by this year, which would require several more launches.Other companies such as OneWeb and Amazon also are planning to put up hundreds of satellites of their own, which many fear could create a traffic jam in space. Last year, the European Space Agency complained that it had to move one of its satellites to avoid a collision. Astronomers have also said the increased number of satellites could clutter space and interfere with their views of the cosmos.Moon and MarsIn addition to flying its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast, NASA\u2019s biggest priority for 2020 is to continue to work toward meeting the White House\u2019s mandate to return humans to the moon by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe next big step is to award the contract to build a lander capable of taking astronauts to the lunar surface. Boeing is vying for the contract, as is a team led by Blue Origin that also includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.It\u2019s not clear, however, whether the money will be there to meet the 2024 deadline. Congress has been reluctant to pay for a moon mission without seeing a specific breakdown of the total cost, and there are many other pressing needs in the budget in an election year. And the Space Launch System rocket that prime contractor Boeing is building for the NASA missions has never flown.Still, NASA remains optimistic.The SLS rocket is about to undergo a series of tests to fire its engines and stress the avionics systems to ensure the rocket will be ready for its first launch in 2021.Advertisement\u201cI refuse to go ahead and use funding as a crutch for not making it to the moon by 2024,\u201d Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s new associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told SpaceNews recently.India will try again to reach the lunar surface after its spacecraft, carrying no astronauts, crashed into the lunar surface last year. But it\u2019s unclear when the upcoming Chandrayaan-3 mission would launch.NASA is planning to launch a rover carrying a small helicopter to Mars this summer. In December, the Mars 2020 rover passed a key milestone, completing its first driving test, which \u201cunambiguously proved that the rover can operate under its own weight and demonstrated many of the autonomous-navigation functions for the first time,\u201d Rich Rieber, the lead mobility systems engineer for the mission, said in a statement.Other nations are eyeing the Red Planet as well. Russia and the European Space Agency are planning to send a rover and a lander there this year in a joint mission. So is China, which plans to send a spacecraft that would orbit Mars. The country, which last year landed on the far side of the moon, a historic first, plans as many as 40 launches in 2020 and saw the return to flight of its massive Long March 5 rocket late last year after a failure in 2017.And the United Arab Emirates is also planning to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to orbit Mars that would be launched by Japan later this year. NASA has big plans for the coming year. So do the space industry and foreign countries. What 2020 could bring in spaceflight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What 2020 could bring in spaceflight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6073",
        "date": "2020-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/06/what-could-bring-spaceflight/",
        "text": "This year could herald significant moments in space exploration: NASA astronauts flying from United States soil for the first time since 2011; the first paying tourists traveling to the edge of space; rockets sending hundreds of satellites into Earth orbit to beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe; and the first serious steps toward returning a human being to the surface of the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut as 2020 begins, the rosy promise of those developments could quickly be overruled by gravity and engineering issues. Already, NASA finds itself struggling with a technical problem \u2014 a software issue that marred the maiden flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft just before Christmas and prevented it from reaching the International Space Station. It is a reminder of the many things that can go wrong when attempting to punch through the atmosphere.This year is born full of hope and enthusiastic predictions of triumph, despite 2019\u2019s catalogue of calamity, a one-step-forward-two-steps-back year, marked as much by failure as by success \u2014 by stuck valves, failed parachute systems and faulty onboard computers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet hope remains for triumph. NASA will celebrate 20 continuous years of humans living in orbit aboard the International Space Station, and there are other records likely to be set.The year in American spaceflightSpaceX intends to break its record of 21 launches in a single year. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, plans to fly about a dozen times, including Boeing\u2019s first mission with astronauts to the space station. Northrop Grumman has three launches planned.Despite the recent problems that have plagued Boeing and SpaceX, which lost its spacecraft when it blew up last year during an engine test, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine remains confident that those companies will boost astronauts into space in 2020, ending an ignominious nine-year hiatus of human spaceflight from the United States that began when the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther key moments in space set for 2020: as many as four missions to Mars by several countries, including China, and a key test of the monster rocket Boeing and others are building that NASA hopes will put astronauts on the moon by 2024.Then again, space is costly, dangerous and exceedingly difficult \u2014 and what looked like a sure thing in January could be questionable by summer.The space industry has had a nice run over the past several years, attracting millions of dollars of private investment, but now is headed to a turning point, said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.\u201cNow that\u2019s moving to a phase of: prove it,\u201d she said. \u201cCompanies are having to prove they\u2019re viable and their business model flows, and some are succeeding and some are not.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHuman spaceflight SpaceX started the year Monday night with a launch from Cape Canaveral to put 60 more satellites into low Earth orbit, part of a constellation that eventually could reach thousands that the company hopes would beam the Internet to remote parts of the globe without broadband.AdvertisementAssembling that architecture in space will require dozens of launches, which many think could have the California-based company break its record for the most launches in a single year, 21 in 2018. SpaceX\u2019s next launch is set to come as soon as Jan. 11, when it is scheduled to again test the emergency abort system of its Dragon spacecraft \u2014 this time in flight. A Falcon 9 rocket would blast off from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Then, shortly thereafter, the abort motors would fire, demonstrating that it has the ability to get crews away safely in the event of an emergency.Story continues below advertisementIf it goes well, SpaceX is hoping to follow that with its first flight with people in the coming months.Boeing is also moving aggressively, despite the problems that hampered the first test flight of its Starliner spacecraft. Officials said the spacecraft\u2019s onboard timer was off by 11 hours and, as a result, the engines that would have propelled it on a trajectory to the space station never fired.AdvertisementThe company, which fired chief executive Dennis Muilenburg in the wake of the 737 Max airplane crisis, is still investigating what caused the problem. But company officials said that they were preparing the spacecraft for its next mission and that its life-support system had performed well. The spacecraft \u201cshows little scorching from the heat of atmospheric re-entry,\u201d the company said.Story continues below advertisementWhen it comes to human spaceflight, no one has made more overly optimistic pronouncements than Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic. For years, the British-born billionaire has predicted that his company would soon ferry legions of paying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 only to have to delay again and again.But now, having reached what many consider the edge of space twice \u2014 once at the end of 2018, and then again early last year \u2014 the company says it is poised to finally begin flying the hundreds of people who have put down as much as $250,000 for a ticket.AdvertisementThe company, which recently went public after merging with a New York investment firm, projects flying 66 customers this year, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, has also said it intends to fly humans for the first time in 2020. But unlike Branson, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has been relatively quiet about his space tourism plans. The company has announced no price for the missions in its reusable New Shepard vehicle, which would offer a few minutes of weightlessness.In December, it launched its latest test without astronauts, a mission it said helped it move \u201ccloser toward verifying New Shepard for human flight.\u201dSmall satellites Virgin Orbit, another Branson venture, also could reach a significant milestone this year when it plans to launch its rocket, LauncherOne, for the first time. Instead of taking off vertically, the craft would be dropped from the wing of a 747 jet before its engines would fire to carry it into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s plan is to join in the competition to send small satellites into space inexpensively and quickly. A leader in that market has already emerged \u2014 Rocket Lab, a New Zealand company that also operates out of California. It\u2019s already launched 10 times, with six missions last year. It plans to launch a dozen times this year, including the maiden flight from the launchpad it is taking over at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.Rocket companies hope that a number of small satellite constellations, designed to beam the Internet to remote corners of the world, could fuel a demand for increased launches. SpaceX has already put up about 120 satellites as part of its Starlink program, and Monday\u2019s launch will add 60 more. It hopes to achieve moderate coverage by this year, which would require several more launches.Other companies such as OneWeb and Amazon also are planning to put up hundreds of satellites of their own, which many fear could create a traffic jam in space. Last year, the European Space Agency complained that it had to move one of its satellites to avoid a collision. Astronomers have also said the increased number of satellites could clutter space and interfere with their views of the cosmos.Moon and MarsIn addition to flying its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast, NASA\u2019s biggest priority for 2020 is to continue to work toward meeting the White House\u2019s mandate to return humans to the moon by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe next big step is to award the contract to build a lander capable of taking astronauts to the lunar surface. Boeing is vying for the contract, as is a team led by Blue Origin that also includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.It\u2019s not clear, however, whether the money will be there to meet the 2024 deadline. Congress has been reluctant to pay for a moon mission without seeing a specific breakdown of the total cost, and there are many other pressing needs in the budget in an election year. And the Space Launch System rocket that prime contractor Boeing is building for the NASA missions has never flown.Still, NASA remains optimistic.The SLS rocket is about to undergo a series of tests to fire its engines and stress the avionics systems to ensure the rocket will be ready for its first launch in 2021.Advertisement\u201cI refuse to go ahead and use funding as a crutch for not making it to the moon by 2024,\u201d Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s new associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told SpaceNews recently.India will try again to reach the lunar surface after its spacecraft, carrying no astronauts, crashed into the lunar surface last year. But it\u2019s unclear when the upcoming Chandrayaan-3 mission would launch.NASA is planning to launch a rover carrying a small helicopter to Mars this summer. In December, the Mars 2020 rover passed a key milestone, completing its first driving test, which \u201cunambiguously proved that the rover can operate under its own weight and demonstrated many of the autonomous-navigation functions for the first time,\u201d Rich Rieber, the lead mobility systems engineer for the mission, said in a statement.Other nations are eyeing the Red Planet as well. Russia and the European Space Agency are planning to send a rover and a lander there this year in a joint mission. So is China, which plans to send a spacecraft that would orbit Mars. The country, which last year landed on the far side of the moon, a historic first, plans as many as 40 launches in 2020 and saw the return to flight of its massive Long March 5 rocket late last year after a failure in 2017.And the United Arab Emirates is also planning to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to orbit Mars that would be launched by Japan later this year. NASA has big plans for the coming year. So do the space industry and foreign countries. What 2020 could bring in spaceflight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship rocket lands successfully but then explodes (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6074",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/03/spacex-starship-test-sn10/",
        "text": "This time the explosion came after the landing.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully landed a prototype of its Starship rocket after flying it to an altitude of just over six miles, a key milestone in the test campaign of the spacecraft it hopes to one day fly astronauts to the moon and Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut eight minutes after the landing, the spacecraft exploded on the pad, spewing debris across SpaceX\u2019s launch site in South Texas. No one was on the rocket, and there were no reports of injuries.In previous attempts, the rocket landed hard and exploded. But this version, known as Serial Number 10, or SN 10, seemed to go successfully from start to finish. It lifted off at 6:14 p.m. Eastern time from SpaceX\u2019s launch site, coasted to its top altitude, and then fell back toward Earth horizontally as its fins provided stability.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft then righted itself, refired its three engines and touched down softly in a cloud of dust and smoke.\u201cThird time\u2019s a charm, as the saying goes,\u201d said John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer. \u201cA beautiful soft landing on the landing pad.\u201dBut the rocket was still emitting streams of smoke and visibly leaning, and eight minutes and about 20 seconds after landing, it exploded in a dramatic fireball, likely because of a fuel leak, sending the vehicle shooting into the air for the second time.Last month, a previous Starship prototype, SN9, launched successfully but landed hard and crashed on the pad. That was the same fate SN8 suffered during a test in December.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX likely won\u2019t waste much time before it flies again. Insprucker said the next one, SN11, is \u201cready to roll out to the pad in the very near future.\u201dAdvertisementThe test campaign for Starship is somewhat reminiscent of the process SpaceX went through as it learned to land its Falcon 9 rocket, the workhorse vehicle that flies cargo and crew to the International Space Station for NASA. At first, SpaceX crashed several boosters on ships at sea before finally pulling off a successful landing on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral in 2015.For SpaceX, the Starship test campaign is more than a way for the company to learn how to fly and land the vehicle \u2014 it is also an audition of sorts for NASA. SpaceX is currently competing to build a spacecraft that would land NASA\u2019s astronauts on the surface of the moon, as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program. Last year, SpaceX was one of three companies, along with Dynetics and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, chosen in the initial phase of the contract. NASA is expected to winnow that to two companies as early as next month. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementHaving a Starship prototype that can successfully launch and land could give SpaceX an advantage.AdvertisementNASA\u2019s leadership is reviewing the progress of its Artemis program and determining whether the program can meet the ambitious timetable set for it by the Trump administration, given the level of funding it has so far received from Congress.The company says it hopes to fly Starship to Earth orbit this year, and it has plans to fly a Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, and a crew of private citizens on a trip around the moon.The mission is supposed to happen by 2023 \u2014 an aggressive timeline that would be enormously difficult to achieve. But Musk said in a video released by Maezawa, announcing a competition for people to apply for the mission, that he was optimistic it could happen. Musk, though, often offers rosy schedule predictions that often don\u2019t come true.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m highly confident that we will have reached orbit many times with Starship before 2023,\u201d Musk said on the video. \u201cAnd that it will be safe enough for human transport by 2023. It\u2019s looking very, very promising.\u201dAdvertisementSpaceX has made a remote swath of land in the southern tip of Texas by the Gulf of Mexico its Starship base of operations. The site has grown tremendously in recent years as SpaceX has brought in more employees to boost its rocket development.Musk tweeted on Tuesday that SpaceX was \u201ccreating the city of Starbase, Texas.\u201dThe company has had conversations with local officials about incorporating the area, Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino said in an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday. But he said it has received no formal application and was \u201csurprised by the tweet.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe county\u2019s legal department is reviewing \u201cwhat the requirements are\u201d for establishing a city.Meanwhile, Trevino said Starship testing has given the area a new dimension he hopes will lead to a long-term economic benefit for a region beset by joblessness and poverty.\u201cIt\u2019s extremely exciting that the testing, the research and development continues to go forward literally on a daily basis,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a learning and growing experience for all of us. We\u2019re getting used to having SpaceX in our backyard, and we\u2019re trying to support them.\u201d The SN 10 prototype nearly pulled off a perfect test, as SpaceX pushes to flying to the moon and Mars Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship rocket lands successfully but then explodes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship rocket lands successfully but then explodes (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6075",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/03/spacex-starship-test-sn10/",
        "text": "This time the explosion came after the landing.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully landed a prototype of its Starship rocket after flying it to an altitude of just over six miles, a key milestone in the test campaign of the spacecraft it hopes to one day fly astronauts to the moon and Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut eight minutes after the landing, the spacecraft exploded on the pad, spewing debris across SpaceX\u2019s launch site in South Texas. No one was on the rocket, and there were no reports of injuries.In previous attempts, the rocket landed hard and exploded. But this version, known as Serial Number 10, or SN 10, seemed to go successfully from start to finish. It lifted off at 6:14 p.m. Eastern time from SpaceX\u2019s launch site, coasted to its top altitude, and then fell back toward Earth horizontally as its fins provided stability.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft then righted itself, refired its three engines and touched down softly in a cloud of dust and smoke.\u201cThird time\u2019s a charm, as the saying goes,\u201d said John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer. \u201cA beautiful soft landing on the landing pad.\u201dBut the rocket was still emitting streams of smoke and visibly leaning, and eight minutes and about 20 seconds after landing, it exploded in a dramatic fireball, likely because of a fuel leak, sending the vehicle shooting into the air for the second time.Last month, a previous Starship prototype, SN9, launched successfully but landed hard and crashed on the pad. That was the same fate SN8 suffered during a test in December.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX likely won\u2019t waste much time before it flies again. Insprucker said the next one, SN11, is \u201cready to roll out to the pad in the very near future.\u201dAdvertisementThe test campaign for Starship is somewhat reminiscent of the process SpaceX went through as it learned to land its Falcon 9 rocket, the workhorse vehicle that flies cargo and crew to the International Space Station for NASA. At first, SpaceX crashed several boosters on ships at sea before finally pulling off a successful landing on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral in 2015.For SpaceX, the Starship test campaign is more than a way for the company to learn how to fly and land the vehicle \u2014 it is also an audition of sorts for NASA. SpaceX is currently competing to build a spacecraft that would land NASA\u2019s astronauts on the surface of the moon, as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program. Last year, SpaceX was one of three companies, along with Dynetics and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, chosen in the initial phase of the contract. NASA is expected to winnow that to two companies as early as next month. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementHaving a Starship prototype that can successfully launch and land could give SpaceX an advantage.AdvertisementNASA\u2019s leadership is reviewing the progress of its Artemis program and determining whether the program can meet the ambitious timetable set for it by the Trump administration, given the level of funding it has so far received from Congress.The company says it hopes to fly Starship to Earth orbit this year, and it has plans to fly a Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, and a crew of private citizens on a trip around the moon.The mission is supposed to happen by 2023 \u2014 an aggressive timeline that would be enormously difficult to achieve. But Musk said in a video released by Maezawa, announcing a competition for people to apply for the mission, that he was optimistic it could happen. Musk, though, often offers rosy schedule predictions that often don\u2019t come true.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m highly confident that we will have reached orbit many times with Starship before 2023,\u201d Musk said on the video. \u201cAnd that it will be safe enough for human transport by 2023. It\u2019s looking very, very promising.\u201dAdvertisementSpaceX has made a remote swath of land in the southern tip of Texas by the Gulf of Mexico its Starship base of operations. The site has grown tremendously in recent years as SpaceX has brought in more employees to boost its rocket development.Musk tweeted on Tuesday that SpaceX was \u201ccreating the city of Starbase, Texas.\u201dThe company has had conversations with local officials about incorporating the area, Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino said in an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday. But he said it has received no formal application and was \u201csurprised by the tweet.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe county\u2019s legal department is reviewing \u201cwhat the requirements are\u201d for establishing a city.Meanwhile, Trevino said Starship testing has given the area a new dimension he hopes will lead to a long-term economic benefit for a region beset by joblessness and poverty.\u201cIt\u2019s extremely exciting that the testing, the research and development continues to go forward literally on a daily basis,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s a learning and growing experience for all of us. We\u2019re getting used to having SpaceX in our backyard, and we\u2019re trying to support them.\u201d The SN 10 prototype nearly pulled off a perfect test, as SpaceX pushes to flying to the moon and Mars Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship rocket lands successfully but then explodes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6076",
        "date": "2020-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/03/spacex-nasa-mission-update/",
        "text": "They\u2019ve been up there about a month now, floating around on the International Space Station, keeping tabs on their ride home.One, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, has taken a pair of spacewalks. The other, Doug Hurley, has turned his Twitter feed into a startling exhibition of Earth art photography. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth have been monitoring the health of the Dragon spacecraft that ferried them to the station, and will, in a few weeks, carry them home in a perilous second leg of their historic test mission.On May 30, the pair became the first NASA astronauts to launch on a commercial rocket to the station, hitching a ride on vehicles manufactured by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA.Story continues below advertisementA day after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center, their Dragon spacecraft, which they named Endeavor, docked with the station autonomously, and the duo were greeted on the station by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, as well as Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV)The journey marked the end of a long fallow period of launches for NASA, which had not flown humans from United States soil since 2011, when the space shuttle program was retired.Advertisement\u201cCertainly, the highlight for both Doug and I was the initial arrival at space station, coming through the hatch again and being on board after several years of working on a new spacecraft,\u201d Behnken said in an interview from the station this week.The next Americans in spaceSince then, he has performed two spacewalks with Cassidy, successfully replacing batteries on the outside of the station. During the spacewalk, they were able to see the Dragon spacecraft docked to the station, and Cassidy turned and took a photo.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just awesome to be able to look back and snap a picture, and I think we got a good daylight shot,\u201d Behnken said.Hurley has spent a fair amount of time in the station\u2019s cupola, a small dome with six windows that provide some of the best views. As the station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, traveling 17,500 mph, he\u2019s captured stunning images from all around the globe, posting them to his Twitter account.AdvertisementHere was the Saharan dust plume and the western Atlantic Ocean. Here were clouds coiled like Rorschach inkblots over the South Pacific; Iran\u2019s Lake Oroumieh, also known as Lake Urmia; clouds framing the St. Lawrence River; the tan expanse of the Middle East; and the deep blue of the Pacific off the Southern California coast.Story continues below advertisementAnd then on Thursday, he posted a shot of the Earth transitioning from day to night, one half dark, the other light. It is a peaceful image with no hint of the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic or the social unrest following the death of George Floyd while in policy custody.\u201cLook at the atmosphere!\u201d Tweeted Hurley\u2019s wife, Karen Nyberg, a retired NASA astronaut. \u201cIt is such a gorgeous blue, and so thin. @Astro_Doug has been taking some beautiful pictures of earth from @Space_Station. They serve as reminder to me that this amazing home belongs to all of us, together.\u201dI never get tired of this view from the Cupola as our orbit transitions into night. pic.twitter.com/5HruMJ012q\u2014 Col. Doug Hurley (@Astro_Doug) July 1, 2020\n\nNASA celebrated the mission as the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight, one where the private sector would play a larger role. President Trump and Vice President Pence were at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, and afterward, Trump heralded it in a speech as a victory for the country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA new age of American ambition has now begun,\u201d he said. \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dSpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and oldThe Trump campaign sought to seize on the launch with an ad titled \u201cMake Space Great Again.\u201d But the ad was quickly criticized by Democrats, who pointed out that NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program \u2014 the hiring of private companies to fly its astronauts \u2014 began under President Barack Obama. Others said it violated NASA rules that prohibit the agency from endorsing \u201ca commercial product, service or activity.\u201dPresident Trump watched a SpaceX rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on May 30, launching a new chapter in U.S. space exploration. (The Washington Post)Nyberg, who was featured in the ad with her son, said on Twitter that she found it \u201cdisturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dThe ad was taken down.Now, NASA and the astronauts are turning their focus to the return trip. At the moment, the space agency says the soonest Behnken and Hurley could return is Aug. 2. If all goes well, the Dragon would undock from the station, fire its thrusters and descend through the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe entire mission is a test to see how SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule performs, and while NASA said its ascent went flawlessly, there still are many risks ahead.As it plunges down, the thickening air will cause friction and generate enormous heat, testing the capsule\u2019s heat shield. Then the spacecraft\u2019s parachutes are to deploy to slow the vehicle further. SpaceX has struggled with its parachute designs in the past, however.\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d Musk said in an interview with The Post before the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean they soldiered through, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother risk will be landing in the ocean. American astronauts have not splashed down in the water since 1975 \u2014 the space shuttles landed on land, as do the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.Behnken said he and Hurley expect to spend about an hour bobbing on the ocean surface before they are hoisted on the deck of a ship. SpaceX has been training extensively for the recovery mission, working to get the astronauts to safety as quickly as possible, but that will also be a key test.\u201cI wouldn't call it nervousness,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut one of the areas that both Doug and I really need to make sure that we're prepared for is that if something doesn't go as smoothly as expected with that recovery operation and we end up in that capsule for a little bit longer.\u201dHe added: \u201cWe need to be on top of our game, both physically and mentally.\u201d Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have been floating around on the International Space Station for about a month and are now contemplating their return home. About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6077",
        "date": "2020-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/03/spacex-nasa-mission-update/",
        "text": "They\u2019ve been up there about a month now, floating around on the International Space Station, keeping tabs on their ride home.One, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, has taken a pair of spacewalks. The other, Doug Hurley, has turned his Twitter feed into a startling exhibition of Earth art photography. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth have been monitoring the health of the Dragon spacecraft that ferried them to the station, and will, in a few weeks, carry them home in a perilous second leg of their historic test mission.On May 30, the pair became the first NASA astronauts to launch on a commercial rocket to the station, hitching a ride on vehicles manufactured by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA.Story continues below advertisementA day after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center, their Dragon spacecraft, which they named Endeavor, docked with the station autonomously, and the duo were greeted on the station by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, as well as Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV)The journey marked the end of a long fallow period of launches for NASA, which had not flown humans from United States soil since 2011, when the space shuttle program was retired.Advertisement\u201cCertainly, the highlight for both Doug and I was the initial arrival at space station, coming through the hatch again and being on board after several years of working on a new spacecraft,\u201d Behnken said in an interview from the station this week.The next Americans in spaceSince then, he has performed two spacewalks with Cassidy, successfully replacing batteries on the outside of the station. During the spacewalk, they were able to see the Dragon spacecraft docked to the station, and Cassidy turned and took a photo.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just awesome to be able to look back and snap a picture, and I think we got a good daylight shot,\u201d Behnken said.Hurley has spent a fair amount of time in the station\u2019s cupola, a small dome with six windows that provide some of the best views. As the station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, traveling 17,500 mph, he\u2019s captured stunning images from all around the globe, posting them to his Twitter account.AdvertisementHere was the Saharan dust plume and the western Atlantic Ocean. Here were clouds coiled like Rorschach inkblots over the South Pacific; Iran\u2019s Lake Oroumieh, also known as Lake Urmia; clouds framing the St. Lawrence River; the tan expanse of the Middle East; and the deep blue of the Pacific off the Southern California coast.Story continues below advertisementAnd then on Thursday, he posted a shot of the Earth transitioning from day to night, one half dark, the other light. It is a peaceful image with no hint of the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic or the social unrest following the death of George Floyd while in policy custody.\u201cLook at the atmosphere!\u201d Tweeted Hurley\u2019s wife, Karen Nyberg, a retired NASA astronaut. \u201cIt is such a gorgeous blue, and so thin. @Astro_Doug has been taking some beautiful pictures of earth from @Space_Station. They serve as reminder to me that this amazing home belongs to all of us, together.\u201dI never get tired of this view from the Cupola as our orbit transitions into night. pic.twitter.com/5HruMJ012q\u2014 Col. Doug Hurley (@Astro_Doug) July 1, 2020\n\nNASA celebrated the mission as the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight, one where the private sector would play a larger role. President Trump and Vice President Pence were at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, and afterward, Trump heralded it in a speech as a victory for the country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA new age of American ambition has now begun,\u201d he said. \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dSpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and oldThe Trump campaign sought to seize on the launch with an ad titled \u201cMake Space Great Again.\u201d But the ad was quickly criticized by Democrats, who pointed out that NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program \u2014 the hiring of private companies to fly its astronauts \u2014 began under President Barack Obama. Others said it violated NASA rules that prohibit the agency from endorsing \u201ca commercial product, service or activity.\u201dPresident Trump watched a SpaceX rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on May 30, launching a new chapter in U.S. space exploration. (The Washington Post)Nyberg, who was featured in the ad with her son, said on Twitter that she found it \u201cdisturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dThe ad was taken down.Now, NASA and the astronauts are turning their focus to the return trip. At the moment, the space agency says the soonest Behnken and Hurley could return is Aug. 2. If all goes well, the Dragon would undock from the station, fire its thrusters and descend through the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe entire mission is a test to see how SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule performs, and while NASA said its ascent went flawlessly, there still are many risks ahead.As it plunges down, the thickening air will cause friction and generate enormous heat, testing the capsule\u2019s heat shield. Then the spacecraft\u2019s parachutes are to deploy to slow the vehicle further. SpaceX has struggled with its parachute designs in the past, however.\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d Musk said in an interview with The Post before the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean they soldiered through, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother risk will be landing in the ocean. American astronauts have not splashed down in the water since 1975 \u2014 the space shuttles landed on land, as do the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.Behnken said he and Hurley expect to spend about an hour bobbing on the ocean surface before they are hoisted on the deck of a ship. SpaceX has been training extensively for the recovery mission, working to get the astronauts to safety as quickly as possible, but that will also be a key test.\u201cI wouldn't call it nervousness,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut one of the areas that both Doug and I really need to make sure that we're prepared for is that if something doesn't go as smoothly as expected with that recovery operation and we end up in that capsule for a little bit longer.\u201dHe added: \u201cWe need to be on top of our game, both physically and mentally.\u201d Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have been floating around on the International Space Station for about a month and are now contemplating their return home. About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6078",
        "date": "2020-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/03/spacex-nasa-mission-update/",
        "text": "They\u2019ve been up there about a month now, floating around on the International Space Station, keeping tabs on their ride home.One, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, has taken a pair of spacewalks. The other, Doug Hurley, has turned his Twitter feed into a startling exhibition of Earth art photography. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth have been monitoring the health of the Dragon spacecraft that ferried them to the station, and will, in a few weeks, carry them home in a perilous second leg of their historic test mission.On May 30, the pair became the first NASA astronauts to launch on a commercial rocket to the station, hitching a ride on vehicles manufactured by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA.Story continues below advertisementA day after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center, their Dragon spacecraft, which they named Endeavor, docked with the station autonomously, and the duo were greeted on the station by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, as well as Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV)The journey marked the end of a long fallow period of launches for NASA, which had not flown humans from United States soil since 2011, when the space shuttle program was retired.Advertisement\u201cCertainly, the highlight for both Doug and I was the initial arrival at space station, coming through the hatch again and being on board after several years of working on a new spacecraft,\u201d Behnken said in an interview from the station this week.The next Americans in spaceSince then, he has performed two spacewalks with Cassidy, successfully replacing batteries on the outside of the station. During the spacewalk, they were able to see the Dragon spacecraft docked to the station, and Cassidy turned and took a photo.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just awesome to be able to look back and snap a picture, and I think we got a good daylight shot,\u201d Behnken said.Hurley has spent a fair amount of time in the station\u2019s cupola, a small dome with six windows that provide some of the best views. As the station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, traveling 17,500 mph, he\u2019s captured stunning images from all around the globe, posting them to his Twitter account.AdvertisementHere was the Saharan dust plume and the western Atlantic Ocean. Here were clouds coiled like Rorschach inkblots over the South Pacific; Iran\u2019s Lake Oroumieh, also known as Lake Urmia; clouds framing the St. Lawrence River; the tan expanse of the Middle East; and the deep blue of the Pacific off the Southern California coast.Story continues below advertisementAnd then on Thursday, he posted a shot of the Earth transitioning from day to night, one half dark, the other light. It is a peaceful image with no hint of the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic or the social unrest following the death of George Floyd while in policy custody.\u201cLook at the atmosphere!\u201d Tweeted Hurley\u2019s wife, Karen Nyberg, a retired NASA astronaut. \u201cIt is such a gorgeous blue, and so thin. @Astro_Doug has been taking some beautiful pictures of earth from @Space_Station. They serve as reminder to me that this amazing home belongs to all of us, together.\u201dI never get tired of this view from the Cupola as our orbit transitions into night. pic.twitter.com/5HruMJ012q\u2014 Col. Doug Hurley (@Astro_Doug) July 1, 2020\n\nNASA celebrated the mission as the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight, one where the private sector would play a larger role. President Trump and Vice President Pence were at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, and afterward, Trump heralded it in a speech as a victory for the country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA new age of American ambition has now begun,\u201d he said. \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dSpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and oldThe Trump campaign sought to seize on the launch with an ad titled \u201cMake Space Great Again.\u201d But the ad was quickly criticized by Democrats, who pointed out that NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program \u2014 the hiring of private companies to fly its astronauts \u2014 began under President Barack Obama. Others said it violated NASA rules that prohibit the agency from endorsing \u201ca commercial product, service or activity.\u201dPresident Trump watched a SpaceX rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on May 30, launching a new chapter in U.S. space exploration. (The Washington Post)Nyberg, who was featured in the ad with her son, said on Twitter that she found it \u201cdisturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dThe ad was taken down.Now, NASA and the astronauts are turning their focus to the return trip. At the moment, the space agency says the soonest Behnken and Hurley could return is Aug. 2. If all goes well, the Dragon would undock from the station, fire its thrusters and descend through the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe entire mission is a test to see how SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule performs, and while NASA said its ascent went flawlessly, there still are many risks ahead.As it plunges down, the thickening air will cause friction and generate enormous heat, testing the capsule\u2019s heat shield. Then the spacecraft\u2019s parachutes are to deploy to slow the vehicle further. SpaceX has struggled with its parachute designs in the past, however.\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d Musk said in an interview with The Post before the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean they soldiered through, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother risk will be landing in the ocean. American astronauts have not splashed down in the water since 1975 \u2014 the space shuttles landed on land, as do the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.Behnken said he and Hurley expect to spend about an hour bobbing on the ocean surface before they are hoisted on the deck of a ship. SpaceX has been training extensively for the recovery mission, working to get the astronauts to safety as quickly as possible, but that will also be a key test.\u201cI wouldn't call it nervousness,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut one of the areas that both Doug and I really need to make sure that we're prepared for is that if something doesn't go as smoothly as expected with that recovery operation and we end up in that capsule for a little bit longer.\u201dHe added: \u201cWe need to be on top of our game, both physically and mentally.\u201d Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have been floating around on the International Space Station for about a month and are now contemplating their return home. About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6079",
        "date": "2020-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/03/spacex-nasa-mission-update/",
        "text": "They\u2019ve been up there about a month now, floating around on the International Space Station, keeping tabs on their ride home.One, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, has taken a pair of spacewalks. The other, Doug Hurley, has turned his Twitter feed into a startling exhibition of Earth art photography. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoth have been monitoring the health of the Dragon spacecraft that ferried them to the station, and will, in a few weeks, carry them home in a perilous second leg of their historic test mission.On May 30, the pair became the first NASA astronauts to launch on a commercial rocket to the station, hitching a ride on vehicles manufactured by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA.Story continues below advertisementA day after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center, their Dragon spacecraft, which they named Endeavor, docked with the station autonomously, and the duo were greeted on the station by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, as well as Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV)The journey marked the end of a long fallow period of launches for NASA, which had not flown humans from United States soil since 2011, when the space shuttle program was retired.Advertisement\u201cCertainly, the highlight for both Doug and I was the initial arrival at space station, coming through the hatch again and being on board after several years of working on a new spacecraft,\u201d Behnken said in an interview from the station this week.The next Americans in spaceSince then, he has performed two spacewalks with Cassidy, successfully replacing batteries on the outside of the station. During the spacewalk, they were able to see the Dragon spacecraft docked to the station, and Cassidy turned and took a photo.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just awesome to be able to look back and snap a picture, and I think we got a good daylight shot,\u201d Behnken said.Hurley has spent a fair amount of time in the station\u2019s cupola, a small dome with six windows that provide some of the best views. As the station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, traveling 17,500 mph, he\u2019s captured stunning images from all around the globe, posting them to his Twitter account.AdvertisementHere was the Saharan dust plume and the western Atlantic Ocean. Here were clouds coiled like Rorschach inkblots over the South Pacific; Iran\u2019s Lake Oroumieh, also known as Lake Urmia; clouds framing the St. Lawrence River; the tan expanse of the Middle East; and the deep blue of the Pacific off the Southern California coast.Story continues below advertisementAnd then on Thursday, he posted a shot of the Earth transitioning from day to night, one half dark, the other light. It is a peaceful image with no hint of the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic or the social unrest following the death of George Floyd while in policy custody.\u201cLook at the atmosphere!\u201d Tweeted Hurley\u2019s wife, Karen Nyberg, a retired NASA astronaut. \u201cIt is such a gorgeous blue, and so thin. @Astro_Doug has been taking some beautiful pictures of earth from @Space_Station. They serve as reminder to me that this amazing home belongs to all of us, together.\u201dI never get tired of this view from the Cupola as our orbit transitions into night. pic.twitter.com/5HruMJ012q\u2014 Col. Doug Hurley (@Astro_Doug) July 1, 2020\n\nNASA celebrated the mission as the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight, one where the private sector would play a larger role. President Trump and Vice President Pence were at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, and afterward, Trump heralded it in a speech as a victory for the country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA new age of American ambition has now begun,\u201d he said. \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dSpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and oldThe Trump campaign sought to seize on the launch with an ad titled \u201cMake Space Great Again.\u201d But the ad was quickly criticized by Democrats, who pointed out that NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program \u2014 the hiring of private companies to fly its astronauts \u2014 began under President Barack Obama. Others said it violated NASA rules that prohibit the agency from endorsing \u201ca commercial product, service or activity.\u201dPresident Trump watched a SpaceX rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center on May 30, launching a new chapter in U.S. space exploration. (The Washington Post)Nyberg, who was featured in the ad with her son, said on Twitter that she found it \u201cdisturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dThe ad was taken down.Now, NASA and the astronauts are turning their focus to the return trip. At the moment, the space agency says the soonest Behnken and Hurley could return is Aug. 2. If all goes well, the Dragon would undock from the station, fire its thrusters and descend through the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe entire mission is a test to see how SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule performs, and while NASA said its ascent went flawlessly, there still are many risks ahead.As it plunges down, the thickening air will cause friction and generate enormous heat, testing the capsule\u2019s heat shield. Then the spacecraft\u2019s parachutes are to deploy to slow the vehicle further. SpaceX has struggled with its parachute designs in the past, however.\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d Musk said in an interview with The Post before the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean they soldiered through, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother risk will be landing in the ocean. American astronauts have not splashed down in the water since 1975 \u2014 the space shuttles landed on land, as do the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.Behnken said he and Hurley expect to spend about an hour bobbing on the ocean surface before they are hoisted on the deck of a ship. SpaceX has been training extensively for the recovery mission, working to get the astronauts to safety as quickly as possible, but that will also be a key test.\u201cI wouldn't call it nervousness,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut one of the areas that both Doug and I really need to make sure that we're prepared for is that if something doesn't go as smoothly as expected with that recovery operation and we end up in that capsule for a little bit longer.\u201dHe added: \u201cWe need to be on top of our game, both physically and mentally.\u201d Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have been floating around on the International Space Station for about a month and are now contemplating their return home. About halfway through their historic mission, a pair of NASA astronauts are preparing for their return",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6080",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/25/private-space-stations-blue-origin-boeing/",
        "text": "They\u2019re not just building rockets and spacecraft anymore.The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA number of companies are competing as part of a NASA-funded program to develop habitats that could house astronauts and scientists and help countries with emerging space programs get a foothold in orbit. Last week, Nanoracks, an aerospace venture that helps companies fly science experiments and other payloads to the ISS, announced it was partnering with its majority owner Voyager Space as well as Lockheed Martin to build a space station called Starlab.Story continues below advertisementAnd on Monday, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, followed that news by announcing it has formed a team with Sierra Space, Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering and Arizona State University to build a space station called Orbital Reef that it said \u201cwill provide anyone with the opportunity to establish their own address on orbit.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAt a news conference, Brent Sherwood, a senior vice president at Blue Origin, said that the station would be ready by the second half of the decade and that it would provide \u201ca vibrant, growing business ecosystem and low Earth orbit that will generate new discoveries, new products, new forms of entertainment, and global awareness of Earth\u2019s fragility and interconnectedness.\u201dThose teams would join Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a private space station. It has a contract with NASA to dock a module on the ISS by late 2024.Story continues below advertisementThe announcements come as NASA is looking to spend between $300 million to $400 million to fund the early development of as many as four private space stations in public-private partnerships that mimic how the space agency helped SpaceX and others build rockets and spacecraft that it now uses to fly cargo and astronauts to the ISS.AdvertisementThere is growing concern, however, that NASA isn\u2019t moving aggressively enough to fund a replacement for the ISS, which has been in operation for more than 20 years in the harsh vacuum of space and has been showing its age. While Congress is expected to extend funding for the ISS to 2030, it\u2019s not clear it will be able to last that long.Some in the space industry are worried the commercial space stations will be late, leaving NASA without anywhere to fly its astronauts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not ready for what comes after the International Space Station,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a Senate hearing last week. \u201cBuilding a space station takes a long time, especially when you\u2019re doing it in a way that\u2019s never been done before.\u201dHumans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?NASA this year requested $101 million for the program that would develop private space stations, but Bridenstine and other have said that is not nearly enough. In his written testimony, he said Congress needed to appropriate $2 billion annually to the effort.AdvertisementFor nearly a decade, NASA did not have the ability to fly its astronauts to space and had to rely on the Russians for rides to the ISS, until SpaceX flew its first mission with NASA astronauts last year. Many in the space industry are worried there will be a similar gap if the commercial sector can\u2019t get its stations online soon.Story continues below advertisementThat would leave China, which has been putting up segments of its own station this year, as the only country to own and operate a station in Earth\u2019s orbit.Industry officials said, however, that the capabilities of the commercial space industry have grown tremendously over the past several years and that they would be ready.Nanoracks said Starlab would be ready by 2027 in part because the model of NASA helping the industry flourish has proved itself.\u201cThis is the very beginning of the destinations of private space stations,\u201d Jeffrey Manber, CEO of Nanoracks, said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to enter the next decade, where you have multiple private space stations in a robust public-private partnership with NASA.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut companies would not just harness NASA\u2019s investment but be lifted by investors who are starting to see space as a viable bet, foreign governments with emerging space programs and institutions looking to do science experiments in space.\u201cWe see NASA as being a very small minority percentage of the revenue coming in,\u201d Manber said. \u201cNow is when the private capital can come in. Private capital sees you have transportation. Private capital sees you have the government as one customer of many. It ticks all the boxes.\u201dInvestors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit?If they come to fruition, the commercial stations would be far different from their government-run predecessor. Both Orbital Reef and Starlab would have a segment that would inflate like a ballon after it reaches space. That allows it to be packed more tightly into a single rocket, preventing multiple launches and tricky assembly on orbit.Artist renderings of the stations showed luxurious interiors, like the lobby of an upscale hotel, with large windows with views of the Earth below. The initial configuration would be quite large, about 90 percent of the interior volume of the ISS, with room for 10 astronauts. And it would have the ability to grow over time by adding more modules to it.Starlab would create the George Washington Carver \u201cscience park,\u201d a laboratory named for the famed scientist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Orbital Reef station to be built by Blue Origin and Sierra Space would serve a similar purpose, and the companies would market it to countries around the world as well. \u201cThis isn\u2019t an American station, this will be a global station that will carry on the proud international legacy of the ISS,\u201d said Mike Gold, a Redwire executive vice president.Blue Origin and Sierra Space said they have already invested heavily in the system and have been working on it for some time, but it\u2019s not clear how much time and money they\u2019ve put in so far \u2014 or even how much money would be available through federal contracts.\u201cIt is true that NASA doesn\u2019t know yet how much funding they will be able to apply to this program,\u201d Sherwood said. \u201cBut we do know that toward the end of the decade or at the end of the decade the station will be retired, that is NASA\u2019s own plan, and it becomes critically important to avoid a gap.\u201d The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6081",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/25/private-space-stations-blue-origin-boeing/",
        "text": "They\u2019re not just building rockets and spacecraft anymore.The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA number of companies are competing as part of a NASA-funded program to develop habitats that could house astronauts and scientists and help countries with emerging space programs get a foothold in orbit. Last week, Nanoracks, an aerospace venture that helps companies fly science experiments and other payloads to the ISS, announced it was partnering with its majority owner Voyager Space as well as Lockheed Martin to build a space station called Starlab.Story continues below advertisementAnd on Monday, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, followed that news by announcing it has formed a team with Sierra Space, Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering and Arizona State University to build a space station called Orbital Reef that it said \u201cwill provide anyone with the opportunity to establish their own address on orbit.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAt a news conference, Brent Sherwood, a senior vice president at Blue Origin, said that the station would be ready by the second half of the decade and that it would provide \u201ca vibrant, growing business ecosystem and low Earth orbit that will generate new discoveries, new products, new forms of entertainment, and global awareness of Earth\u2019s fragility and interconnectedness.\u201dThose teams would join Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a private space station. It has a contract with NASA to dock a module on the ISS by late 2024.Story continues below advertisementThe announcements come as NASA is looking to spend between $300 million to $400 million to fund the early development of as many as four private space stations in public-private partnerships that mimic how the space agency helped SpaceX and others build rockets and spacecraft that it now uses to fly cargo and astronauts to the ISS.AdvertisementThere is growing concern, however, that NASA isn\u2019t moving aggressively enough to fund a replacement for the ISS, which has been in operation for more than 20 years in the harsh vacuum of space and has been showing its age. While Congress is expected to extend funding for the ISS to 2030, it\u2019s not clear it will be able to last that long.Some in the space industry are worried the commercial space stations will be late, leaving NASA without anywhere to fly its astronauts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not ready for what comes after the International Space Station,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a Senate hearing last week. \u201cBuilding a space station takes a long time, especially when you\u2019re doing it in a way that\u2019s never been done before.\u201dHumans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?NASA this year requested $101 million for the program that would develop private space stations, but Bridenstine and other have said that is not nearly enough. In his written testimony, he said Congress needed to appropriate $2 billion annually to the effort.AdvertisementFor nearly a decade, NASA did not have the ability to fly its astronauts to space and had to rely on the Russians for rides to the ISS, until SpaceX flew its first mission with NASA astronauts last year. Many in the space industry are worried there will be a similar gap if the commercial sector can\u2019t get its stations online soon.Story continues below advertisementThat would leave China, which has been putting up segments of its own station this year, as the only country to own and operate a station in Earth\u2019s orbit.Industry officials said, however, that the capabilities of the commercial space industry have grown tremendously over the past several years and that they would be ready.Nanoracks said Starlab would be ready by 2027 in part because the model of NASA helping the industry flourish has proved itself.\u201cThis is the very beginning of the destinations of private space stations,\u201d Jeffrey Manber, CEO of Nanoracks, said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to enter the next decade, where you have multiple private space stations in a robust public-private partnership with NASA.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut companies would not just harness NASA\u2019s investment but be lifted by investors who are starting to see space as a viable bet, foreign governments with emerging space programs and institutions looking to do science experiments in space.\u201cWe see NASA as being a very small minority percentage of the revenue coming in,\u201d Manber said. \u201cNow is when the private capital can come in. Private capital sees you have transportation. Private capital sees you have the government as one customer of many. It ticks all the boxes.\u201dInvestors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit?If they come to fruition, the commercial stations would be far different from their government-run predecessor. Both Orbital Reef and Starlab would have a segment that would inflate like a ballon after it reaches space. That allows it to be packed more tightly into a single rocket, preventing multiple launches and tricky assembly on orbit.Artist renderings of the stations showed luxurious interiors, like the lobby of an upscale hotel, with large windows with views of the Earth below. The initial configuration would be quite large, about 90 percent of the interior volume of the ISS, with room for 10 astronauts. And it would have the ability to grow over time by adding more modules to it.Starlab would create the George Washington Carver \u201cscience park,\u201d a laboratory named for the famed scientist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Orbital Reef station to be built by Blue Origin and Sierra Space would serve a similar purpose, and the companies would market it to countries around the world as well. \u201cThis isn\u2019t an American station, this will be a global station that will carry on the proud international legacy of the ISS,\u201d said Mike Gold, a Redwire executive vice president.Blue Origin and Sierra Space said they have already invested heavily in the system and have been working on it for some time, but it\u2019s not clear how much time and money they\u2019ve put in so far \u2014 or even how much money would be available through federal contracts.\u201cIt is true that NASA doesn\u2019t know yet how much funding they will be able to apply to this program,\u201d Sherwood said. \u201cBut we do know that toward the end of the decade or at the end of the decade the station will be retired, that is NASA\u2019s own plan, and it becomes critically important to avoid a gap.\u201d The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6082",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/25/private-space-stations-blue-origin-boeing/",
        "text": "They\u2019re not just building rockets and spacecraft anymore.The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA number of companies are competing as part of a NASA-funded program to develop habitats that could house astronauts and scientists and help countries with emerging space programs get a foothold in orbit. Last week, Nanoracks, an aerospace venture that helps companies fly science experiments and other payloads to the ISS, announced it was partnering with its majority owner Voyager Space as well as Lockheed Martin to build a space station called Starlab.Story continues below advertisementAnd on Monday, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, followed that news by announcing it has formed a team with Sierra Space, Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering and Arizona State University to build a space station called Orbital Reef that it said \u201cwill provide anyone with the opportunity to establish their own address on orbit.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAt a news conference, Brent Sherwood, a senior vice president at Blue Origin, said that the station would be ready by the second half of the decade and that it would provide \u201ca vibrant, growing business ecosystem and low Earth orbit that will generate new discoveries, new products, new forms of entertainment, and global awareness of Earth\u2019s fragility and interconnectedness.\u201dThose teams would join Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a private space station. It has a contract with NASA to dock a module on the ISS by late 2024.Story continues below advertisementThe announcements come as NASA is looking to spend between $300 million to $400 million to fund the early development of as many as four private space stations in public-private partnerships that mimic how the space agency helped SpaceX and others build rockets and spacecraft that it now uses to fly cargo and astronauts to the ISS.AdvertisementThere is growing concern, however, that NASA isn\u2019t moving aggressively enough to fund a replacement for the ISS, which has been in operation for more than 20 years in the harsh vacuum of space and has been showing its age. While Congress is expected to extend funding for the ISS to 2030, it\u2019s not clear it will be able to last that long.Some in the space industry are worried the commercial space stations will be late, leaving NASA without anywhere to fly its astronauts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not ready for what comes after the International Space Station,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a Senate hearing last week. \u201cBuilding a space station takes a long time, especially when you\u2019re doing it in a way that\u2019s never been done before.\u201dHumans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?NASA this year requested $101 million for the program that would develop private space stations, but Bridenstine and other have said that is not nearly enough. In his written testimony, he said Congress needed to appropriate $2 billion annually to the effort.AdvertisementFor nearly a decade, NASA did not have the ability to fly its astronauts to space and had to rely on the Russians for rides to the ISS, until SpaceX flew its first mission with NASA astronauts last year. Many in the space industry are worried there will be a similar gap if the commercial sector can\u2019t get its stations online soon.Story continues below advertisementThat would leave China, which has been putting up segments of its own station this year, as the only country to own and operate a station in Earth\u2019s orbit.Industry officials said, however, that the capabilities of the commercial space industry have grown tremendously over the past several years and that they would be ready.Nanoracks said Starlab would be ready by 2027 in part because the model of NASA helping the industry flourish has proved itself.\u201cThis is the very beginning of the destinations of private space stations,\u201d Jeffrey Manber, CEO of Nanoracks, said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to enter the next decade, where you have multiple private space stations in a robust public-private partnership with NASA.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut companies would not just harness NASA\u2019s investment but be lifted by investors who are starting to see space as a viable bet, foreign governments with emerging space programs and institutions looking to do science experiments in space.\u201cWe see NASA as being a very small minority percentage of the revenue coming in,\u201d Manber said. \u201cNow is when the private capital can come in. Private capital sees you have transportation. Private capital sees you have the government as one customer of many. It ticks all the boxes.\u201dInvestors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit?If they come to fruition, the commercial stations would be far different from their government-run predecessor. Both Orbital Reef and Starlab would have a segment that would inflate like a ballon after it reaches space. That allows it to be packed more tightly into a single rocket, preventing multiple launches and tricky assembly on orbit.Artist renderings of the stations showed luxurious interiors, like the lobby of an upscale hotel, with large windows with views of the Earth below. The initial configuration would be quite large, about 90 percent of the interior volume of the ISS, with room for 10 astronauts. And it would have the ability to grow over time by adding more modules to it.Starlab would create the George Washington Carver \u201cscience park,\u201d a laboratory named for the famed scientist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Orbital Reef station to be built by Blue Origin and Sierra Space would serve a similar purpose, and the companies would market it to countries around the world as well. \u201cThis isn\u2019t an American station, this will be a global station that will carry on the proud international legacy of the ISS,\u201d said Mike Gold, a Redwire executive vice president.Blue Origin and Sierra Space said they have already invested heavily in the system and have been working on it for some time, but it\u2019s not clear how much time and money they\u2019ve put in so far \u2014 or even how much money would be available through federal contracts.\u201cIt is true that NASA doesn\u2019t know yet how much funding they will be able to apply to this program,\u201d Sherwood said. \u201cBut we do know that toward the end of the decade or at the end of the decade the station will be retired, that is NASA\u2019s own plan, and it becomes critically important to avoid a gap.\u201d The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6083",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/25/private-space-stations-blue-origin-boeing/",
        "text": "They\u2019re not just building rockets and spacecraft anymore.The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA number of companies are competing as part of a NASA-funded program to develop habitats that could house astronauts and scientists and help countries with emerging space programs get a foothold in orbit. Last week, Nanoracks, an aerospace venture that helps companies fly science experiments and other payloads to the ISS, announced it was partnering with its majority owner Voyager Space as well as Lockheed Martin to build a space station called Starlab.Story continues below advertisementAnd on Monday, Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, followed that news by announcing it has formed a team with Sierra Space, Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering and Arizona State University to build a space station called Orbital Reef that it said \u201cwill provide anyone with the opportunity to establish their own address on orbit.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAt a news conference, Brent Sherwood, a senior vice president at Blue Origin, said that the station would be ready by the second half of the decade and that it would provide \u201ca vibrant, growing business ecosystem and low Earth orbit that will generate new discoveries, new products, new forms of entertainment, and global awareness of Earth\u2019s fragility and interconnectedness.\u201dThose teams would join Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a private space station. It has a contract with NASA to dock a module on the ISS by late 2024.Story continues below advertisementThe announcements come as NASA is looking to spend between $300 million to $400 million to fund the early development of as many as four private space stations in public-private partnerships that mimic how the space agency helped SpaceX and others build rockets and spacecraft that it now uses to fly cargo and astronauts to the ISS.AdvertisementThere is growing concern, however, that NASA isn\u2019t moving aggressively enough to fund a replacement for the ISS, which has been in operation for more than 20 years in the harsh vacuum of space and has been showing its age. While Congress is expected to extend funding for the ISS to 2030, it\u2019s not clear it will be able to last that long.Some in the space industry are worried the commercial space stations will be late, leaving NASA without anywhere to fly its astronauts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not ready for what comes after the International Space Station,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a Senate hearing last week. \u201cBuilding a space station takes a long time, especially when you\u2019re doing it in a way that\u2019s never been done before.\u201dHumans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?NASA this year requested $101 million for the program that would develop private space stations, but Bridenstine and other have said that is not nearly enough. In his written testimony, he said Congress needed to appropriate $2 billion annually to the effort.AdvertisementFor nearly a decade, NASA did not have the ability to fly its astronauts to space and had to rely on the Russians for rides to the ISS, until SpaceX flew its first mission with NASA astronauts last year. Many in the space industry are worried there will be a similar gap if the commercial sector can\u2019t get its stations online soon.Story continues below advertisementThat would leave China, which has been putting up segments of its own station this year, as the only country to own and operate a station in Earth\u2019s orbit.Industry officials said, however, that the capabilities of the commercial space industry have grown tremendously over the past several years and that they would be ready.Nanoracks said Starlab would be ready by 2027 in part because the model of NASA helping the industry flourish has proved itself.\u201cThis is the very beginning of the destinations of private space stations,\u201d Jeffrey Manber, CEO of Nanoracks, said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to enter the next decade, where you have multiple private space stations in a robust public-private partnership with NASA.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut companies would not just harness NASA\u2019s investment but be lifted by investors who are starting to see space as a viable bet, foreign governments with emerging space programs and institutions looking to do science experiments in space.\u201cWe see NASA as being a very small minority percentage of the revenue coming in,\u201d Manber said. \u201cNow is when the private capital can come in. Private capital sees you have transportation. Private capital sees you have the government as one customer of many. It ticks all the boxes.\u201dInvestors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit?If they come to fruition, the commercial stations would be far different from their government-run predecessor. Both Orbital Reef and Starlab would have a segment that would inflate like a ballon after it reaches space. That allows it to be packed more tightly into a single rocket, preventing multiple launches and tricky assembly on orbit.Artist renderings of the stations showed luxurious interiors, like the lobby of an upscale hotel, with large windows with views of the Earth below. The initial configuration would be quite large, about 90 percent of the interior volume of the ISS, with room for 10 astronauts. And it would have the ability to grow over time by adding more modules to it.Starlab would create the George Washington Carver \u201cscience park,\u201d a laboratory named for the famed scientist.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Orbital Reef station to be built by Blue Origin and Sierra Space would serve a similar purpose, and the companies would market it to countries around the world as well. \u201cThis isn\u2019t an American station, this will be a global station that will carry on the proud international legacy of the ISS,\u201d said Mike Gold, a Redwire executive vice president.Blue Origin and Sierra Space said they have already invested heavily in the system and have been working on it for some time, but it\u2019s not clear how much time and money they\u2019ve put in so far \u2014 or even how much money would be available through federal contracts.\u201cIt is true that NASA doesn\u2019t know yet how much funding they will be able to apply to this program,\u201d Sherwood said. \u201cBut we do know that toward the end of the decade or at the end of the decade the station will be retired, that is NASA\u2019s own plan, and it becomes critically important to avoid a gap.\u201d The growing commercial space industry, which for years has worked to reliably launch cargo and more recently humans to space, is now looking to build space stations that would populate low Earth orbit and eventually replace the aging International Space Station. Rockets aren\u2019t enough. Jeff Bezos and the growing commercial space industry now want to build space stations.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule splash down in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6084",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/02/spacex-return-updates/",
        "text": "They\u2019re home.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley completed a fiery, high-speed journey back from the International Space Station on Sunday, splashing down in calm Gulf of Mexico waters off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., hundreds of miles from a churning Tropical Storm Isaias in the Atlantic in a triumphal denouement to a historic mission. It was the first time in the 59-year history of crewed American space travel that astronauts had used the Gulf as a landing site, adding to other firsts that marked a new chapter in NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program: the first launch of American astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011 and the first launch into orbit of humans on vehicles owned and operated by a private company.\u201cToday we really made history. We are entering a new era of human spaceflight,\" NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a news conference after the two astronauts had emerged from the capsule.Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, the private company that engineered the flight, called it \u201can extraordinary mission.\u201d\u201cThis is really just the beginning,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are starting the journey of bringing people regularly to and from low Earth orbit, then onto the moon and then ultimately onto Mars.\u201dFor days, NASA and SpaceX had kept a close eye on Isaias as it developed from tropical storm to hurricane and back again to tropical storm. But they always held the possibility of a Gulf landing in their pocket should the weather in the Atlantic prove unfavorable. NASA and SpaceX had designated seven potential landing targets, four of them in the Gulf, and SpaceX had positioned recovery craft in both locations for any eventuality.SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft floated down under a quartet of parachutes and splashed down traveling 15 miles per hour at 2:48 p.m. Eastern time, exactly on time, marking the first time NASA astronauts had landed at sea since Apollo-Soyuz, the joint U.S.-Soviet mission in 1975.\u201cOn behalf of the SpaceX and NASA teams, welcome home and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control radioed to the spacecraft after it landed.\u201cIt\u2019s truly our honor and privilege,\u201d Hurley responded. \u201cOn behalf of the Dragon Endeavour, congrats to NASA and SpaceX.\u201dThe mission \u2014 the final milestone in a rigorous test program years in the making \u2014 was celebrated as a victory for NASA and its decision under former President Barack Obama to entrust the private sector with the lives of its astronauts. And it served as a rare bright spot in a year full of turmoil and devastation, from the deadly coronavirus pandemic to the social unrest in the wake of George Floyd\u2019s killing to the clashes between protesters and authorities in cities from Portland, Ore., to Richmond, Va.Instead of scenes of exhausted hospital workers, smoke-filled streets, and mounting death tolls from a virus that continues to spread, here were a pair of astronauts, smiling and giving a thumbs up as flight technicians helped them from their spacecraft in a scene reminiscent of the early days of the space program. And it came just days after another triumphant moment for NASA, the launch of the Mars Perseverance rover that is expected to reach the red planet in February.Shortly after the May 30 launch of the astronauts into orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk grew emotional as he talked about the responsibility of getting the astronauts, both fathers to young boys, back to their families safely.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.To make it home, the spacecraft undocked from the space station at 7:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday evening while it was orbiting the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h., or more than 22 times the speed of sound. On Sunday, about an hour before splashdown, it fired its engines for one final burn that began its descent home. As it plunged into the thickening atmosphere, the friction generated enormous heat, as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.The capsule, named Endeavour by its crew in homage to the space shuttle of the same name, appeared to weather the trip home successfully, scorch marks and all. The heat shield withstood temperatures that left the once bright white capsule looking like a toasted marshmallow.Rescue crews descended on the Dragon spacecraft minutes after it landed, stabilizing the capsule as it bobbed in the water, checking to make sure there were no propellant leaks and gathering the parachutes. The spacecraft was then hoisted onto the deck of the Go Navigator recovery ship, where medical personnel were waiting to check out Hurley and Behnken.The recovery process experienced two small hiccups. After the spacecraft splashed down, private boaters quickly surrounded the Endeavour before SpaceX safety crews could shoo them away. One boat with a Trump flag came mere yards from spacecraft.The U.S. Coast Guard had cleared a 10-nautical-mile safe zone around the landing site, NASA and SpaceX officials said, but it was quickly breached. The Coast Guard said in a statement it had one 87-foot and one 45-foot ship near the landing site to try to enforce the protective area, but some boaters largely disregarded government warnings to stay clear.\u201cWith limited assets available and with no formal authority to establish zones that would stop boaters from entering the area, numerous boaters ignored the Coast Guard crews\u2019 requests and decided to encroach the area, putting themselves and those involved in the operation in potential danger,\u201d the Cost Guard said in a statement, adding that it would launch a \u201ccomprehensive review\u201d of the operation with NASA and SpaceX.\u201cWe had all the clearance that was required at landing. That capsule was in the water for a good period of time and the boats just made a bee line for it,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s a big area we have to clear and it\u2019s probably going to take more resources. ... We need to do a better job next time for sure.\"Technicians aboard the Go Navigator also briefly delayed opening the hatch because of a build-up of harmful fumes around the capsule. Mission controllers detected higher-than-appropriate amounts of \u201chypergolic fumes,\u201d or fumes that could explode when coming in contact with one another. Tests found no toxic fumes inside the capsule.NASA and SpaceX said they also took extra precautions because of the coronavirus pandemic. The crews on the ship were tested and quarantined, and everyone was to be wearing masks.Each of the astronauts gave a thumbs up sign as they were wheeled off the spacecraft on a stretcher \u2014 a routine practice for astronauts who\u2019ve experience prolonged period without gravity.\u201cThank you for doing the most important parts and most difficult parts of human spaceflight, sending us into orbit and bringing us home safely,\" said Behnken, who was first out of the capsule. \"Thank you very much for the good ship Endeavour.\u201dHurley came out moments later. \"For anyone who\u2019s touched Endeavour, you should take a moment to cherish this day given everything that\u2019s happened this year,\u201d he said.Behnken and Hurley were scheduled to fly back to Houston Sunday to be reunited with their families.Hurley and Behnken are both married to astronauts they met in their astronaut class 20 years ago. While Hurley\u2019s wife, Karen Nyberg, is no longer in the astronauts corps, Benhken\u2019s wife, Megan McArthur, is. She\u2019s scheduled to fly to the space station in the spring of 2021 on the very same spacecraft that brought her husband home Sunday.Before that happens, NASA and SpaceX will evaluate the capsule to make sure it performed as expected. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX\u2019s next human spaceflight mission could come within six weeks.CORRECTION: The Associated Press incorrectly described a photo published in an earlier version of this story as an image of Sunday\u2019s landing. It was in fact a photo from a March 2019 test. The image has been replaced with one of the actual splashdown. Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken leave their SpaceX Dragon capsuleReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have left the Dragon Endeavour capsule aboard the Go Navigator rescue ship, marking the end of the maiden voyage of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program.The astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., just as schedued at 2:48 p.m. Eastern time. Forty minutes later, the spacecraft was hoisted aboard the recovery ship. But SpaceX technicians delayed opening the side hatch to allow medical crews to evaluate Behnken and Hurley because of concerns about toxic fumes.The astronauts were return to shore via helicopter and be flown to Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base in Houston and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.Said Behnken, who was first out of the capsule: \u201cThank you for doing the most important parts and most difficult parts of human spaceflight, sending us into orbit and bringing us home safely. Thank you very much for the good ship Endeavour.\u201dHurley came out moments later. \"For anyone who\u2019s touched Endeavour, you should take a moment to cherish this day given everything that\u2019s happened this year.\u201dApplause is heard from the @SpaceX teams as @Astro_Doug has joins @AstroBehnken safely out of the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/3aBzXbAzuG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts\u2019 exit from spacecraft delayed by harmful fumesReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX landing crews delayed opening the hatch of the Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule aboard the recovery ship Go Navigator because of high levels of harmful fumes.Mission controllers detected higher-than-appropriate amounts of \u201chypergolic fumes,\u201d or fumes that could explode when coming in contact with one another. Technicians aboard the Go Navigator spent several minutes aerating the service components of the Endeavour to disperse the fumes, which never entered the cabin of the spacecraft. Tests found no toxic fumes inside the capsule.Even with the delay, SpaceX\u2019s egress, or exit, timeline was well on schedule. Flight planners predicted an hour-long process from the time Endeavour splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., to when technicians on Go Navigator would open the hatch and allow medical officials to evaluate Behnken and Hurley.After an hour and one minute past splashdown, which occurred at 2:48 p.m., mission controllers reported the fumes were below harmful levels, but chose to continue the aeration process as an extra safety measure. Asked if they wanted to come out sooner, Hurley said they were happy to wait as long as necessary.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s nextReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkIt\u2019s called Demo-2 for a reason. Demo is short for demonstration, meaning SpaceX\u2019s mission to fly a pair of NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station is one big test, a way to prove the company is capable to pulling off the feat safely.The launch and docking two months ago was picture perfect, NASA and SpaceX said. So did the return and splashdown. That means the space agency is likely to certify SpaceX\u2019s vehicles and allow them to begin flying regular operational missions.The first one, called Crew-1, could happen as soon as late September. NASA has already picked the crew, a quartet of astronauts from different backgrounds.Victor Glover is a former Navy pilot who flew F/A 18 Hornets. A father of four, he\u2019s never been to space before.Mike Hopkins is a former football player at the University of Illinois who applied four times to become an astronaut, waiting more than 10 years before he was finally selected in 2009. Since then, he\u2019s flown to space once on the Russian Soyuz.Shannon Walker was selected to be an astronaut in 2004 after working closely with the space agency, first as a robotics flight controller with Rockwell Collins. In 1995, she joined NASA, working on the space station program. She flew to space on the Soyuz in 2010.They will be joined by Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut, who has flown to space twice, including the first Space Shuttle mission after the 2003 Columbia disaster.See how astronauts prepare for space flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts report successful splashdownReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:01 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported a successful splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., completing their return mission to Earth from the International Space Station.Moments after the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule hit the water, mission controllers radioed to the crew congratulating them on their return journey.\u201cOn behalf of the SpaceX and NASA teams, welcome home and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control said.\u201cIt\u2019s truly our honor and privilege,\u201d Hurley responded. \u201cOn behalf of the Dragon Endeavour, congrats to NASA and SpaceX.\u201d He later radioed back, \u201cAll is well.\u201dSpaceX fast boats will soon approach the Endeavour to recover its parachutes from the water and check for any leaking propellants. The Go Navigator mother ship will then approach and hoist the Endeavour aboard, where recovery crews will secure the capsule and open the side hatch, allowing medical professionals to evaluate the astronauts and help them out of the spacecraft.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBoats speed in to recover astronauts inside landed Dragon capsuleReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are back on Earth, but still a ways from home. SpaceX landing crews will launch two speed boats from the recovery mother ship Go Navigator, stationed three miles away from the projected landing site, to verify that the Endeavour spacecraft is safe and prepared for recovery.Recovery teams are on their way to retrieve @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug from where they have splashed down inside the @SpaceX Dragon Endeavour. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/J7XUIt7sPt\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nThe first boat will check to see if the Dragon capsule is leaking any fluids, propellant or vapors. The second boat will retrieve Endeavour\u2019s four parachutes, which the capsule ejects upon splashdown.The Go Navigator recovery ship will then approach the Endeavour and hoist it aboard, allowing SpaceX crews to secure the capsule in place and open the side hatch to medically evaluate Behnken and Hurley before they disembark.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft splashes down in Gulf of MexicoReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule carrying NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., completing an 18-hour flight to Earth from the International Space Station.The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule carrying NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., on Aug. 2 (NASA)The landing marks the end of the first mission for a NASA crew aboard a private-sector spacecraft. SpaceX, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, beat out industry titan Boeing to send the first manned mission to space as part of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program. Hurley and Behnken lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 30, and spent 62 days aboard the ISS while NASA and SpaceX officials evaluated the Endeavour\u2019s performance and flightworthiness.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon Endeavour capsule deploys drogue parachutesReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon capsule has deployed its two drogue parachutes to slow its velocity as it plummets back to Earth on a return mission from the International Space Station. The chutes deploy when Dragon reaches an altitude of 18,000 feet and is traveling at 350 miles per hour.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpace X reacquires signal with Dragon spacecraftReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight engineers have regained communication with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley inside the Dragon capsule. Flight crews lost signal with Dragon for about six minutes as the capsule was engulfed in a blazing ball of heat while it reentered Earth\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon capsule goes silent as it enters a harrowing leg of its return journeyReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:37 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight engineers have lost contact with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley inside the Dragon capsule as it continues its return mission from the International Space Station. This temporary communication blackout was expected \u2014 engineers call the event \u201cLOS,\u201d or \u201closs of signal\u201d \u2014 and is caused by the intense heat that surrounds the capsule as it reenters Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The communication disruption is expected to last six minutes, according to flight plans.Conditions at the splashdown site are excellent.Great conditions for splashdown. Winds are at 2 knots. #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) August 2, 2020\n\nDragon capsule closes nose cone Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:24 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe nose cone that protects the forward hatch on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule has closed, readying the spacecraft to plunge through the Earth\u2019s atmosphere on its return mission from the International Space Station.The cone closed after the Endeavour capsule fired its Draco thrusters to align its trajectory with its scheduled landing site in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. About 20 minutes after the cone\u2019s closure, the spacecraft will perform several small \u201cattitude adjustments,\u201d or repositioning maneuvers to direct its heat shield downward as it prepares to enter Earth\u2019s atmosphere, where it will enduring temperatures up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and decelerate from 17,500 miles per hour down to just 15 mph when it splashes down.\u2714\ufe0fNose cone closed\u2714\ufe0fForward thrusters disabled \u2714\ufe0fNose cone latched with first set of hooks #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/VifWUtd9xG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nParachutes can be trickyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkThere is a lot of new technology loaded into SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft. It has touchscreens, like a tablet. Emergency abort thrusters that can fire automatically. It docked autonomously with the International Space Station, like a self-driving car.But for all the advances that make Dragon a next-generation spacecraft, it will rely on some old and relatively basic engineering to get the astronauts home safely: parachutes.And the design of the parachutes used by SpaceX turned out to be surprisingly tricky.\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in an interview with The Post in the days leading up to the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean, they soldiered though, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dIf all goes well, two drogue parachutes will deploy when the spacecraft is at about 18,000 feet, traveling at some 350 m.p.h. Then, as it slows down to about 119 m.p.h., four main parachutes should deploy at about 6,000 feet.27th and final test of Crew Dragon\u2019s upgraded Mark 3 parachutes complete \u2013 one step closer to flying @NASA astronauts @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug to the @space_station and safely returning them back home to Earth pic.twitter.com/tY9jKKwzFi\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 1, 2020\n\nSpaceX has struggled with its parachute design, upgrading the model from what it calls the Mark 2 design to Mark 3 after it suffered a failure during its test program. The upgraded version uses a stronger material in the lines that run to the canopy and a new stitching designed to handle the loads at deployment.At a press conference late last year, Musk said the Mark 3 parachutes are \u201cprobably 10 times safer\u201d than the Mark 2 version. \u201cIn my opinion they are the best parachutes ever. By a lot.\u201dDragon Endeavour begins \u2018de-orbit burn,\u2019 committing spacecraft to return missionReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Endeavour capsule has started its \u201cde-orbit burn,\u201d a nearly-12-minute firing of its engines that will plunge it into Earth\u2019s atmosphere from space and begin the most harrowing part of its descent toward the coast of Florida.Flying through the planet\u2019s atmosphere, the Endeavour will be engulfed by a 3,500-degee Fahrenheit fireball, testing the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield. SpaceX flight engineers will lose communications with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley for close to six minutes while the capsule endures that blast of heat.After emerging, Endeavour will fire off drogue parachutes to slow its momentum, then four larger parachutes to gently lower it into the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla.We have confirmation that the deorbit burn has begun at 1:56pm ET. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/GJcDk0A3NX\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nDragon Endeavour spacecraft jettisons \u2018trunk\u2019 in preparation for return to EarthReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe astronauts aboard the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft at 1:52 p.m. jettisoned the capsule\u2019s trunk, an annex that contains thermal control, power and avionics system components, in preparation for returning to Earth from the International Space Station.NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken left the ISS on Saturday and traveled nearly 17 hours to just outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Jettisoning the trunk is one of the mission\u2019s final steps before committing to return to Earth and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla.The Endeavour will soon begin a 12-minute \u201cde-orbit burn\u201d in which it will fire its engines to plunge out of Earth\u2019s orbit and into the atmosphere. If SpaceX flight engineers detect unsuitable splashdown conditions, they can call for a last-minute \u201cwave-off\u201d before the engine burn, meaning the Endeavour will stay in orbit for at least another day until conditions improve. But such an eventuality is not expected.SpaceX Dragon capsule begins its final orbit before reentryReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon capsule started its final orbit around the Earth at 12:51 p.m. Eastern time, before beginning its descent to Earth.About an hour after that final orbit begins, SpaceX flight engineers will give the final \u201cgo\u201d order for the capsule\u2019s return, carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla.The Endeavour capsule will jettison its trunk, an annex that contains thermal control, power and avionics system components, at approximately 1:51 p.m., then fire its engines for a nine-minute \u201cde-orbit burn\u201d that will catapult the spacecraft out of orbit and through Earth\u2019s atmosphere.The SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley started its final orbit around the Earth before beginning its descent on Aug. 2. (NASA)SpaceX flight engineers gave a provisional \u201cgo\u201d order for that burn shortly after the final orbit sequence began. Engineers, though, can still \u201cwave off\u201d the landing attempt at any time before the \u201cde-orbit burn\u201d if conditions change. The Endeavour has three days\u2019 worth of \u201cconsumables\u201d \u2014 food, water and oxygen \u2014 on board if the crew needs to postpone reentry. NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken have completed a successful splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule. NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule splash down in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule splash down in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6085",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/02/spacex-return-updates/",
        "text": "They\u2019re home.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley completed a fiery, high-speed journey back from the International Space Station on Sunday, splashing down in calm Gulf of Mexico waters off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., hundreds of miles from a churning Tropical Storm Isaias in the Atlantic in a triumphal denouement to a historic mission. It was the first time in the 59-year history of crewed American space travel that astronauts had used the Gulf as a landing site, adding to other firsts that marked a new chapter in NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program: the first launch of American astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011 and the first launch into orbit of humans on vehicles owned and operated by a private company.\u201cToday we really made history. We are entering a new era of human spaceflight,\" NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a news conference after the two astronauts had emerged from the capsule.Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, the private company that engineered the flight, called it \u201can extraordinary mission.\u201d\u201cThis is really just the beginning,\u201d she said. \u201cWe are starting the journey of bringing people regularly to and from low Earth orbit, then onto the moon and then ultimately onto Mars.\u201dFor days, NASA and SpaceX had kept a close eye on Isaias as it developed from tropical storm to hurricane and back again to tropical storm. But they always held the possibility of a Gulf landing in their pocket should the weather in the Atlantic prove unfavorable. NASA and SpaceX had designated seven potential landing targets, four of them in the Gulf, and SpaceX had positioned recovery craft in both locations for any eventuality.SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft floated down under a quartet of parachutes and splashed down traveling 15 miles per hour at 2:48 p.m. Eastern time, exactly on time, marking the first time NASA astronauts had landed at sea since Apollo-Soyuz, the joint U.S.-Soviet mission in 1975.\u201cOn behalf of the SpaceX and NASA teams, welcome home and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control radioed to the spacecraft after it landed.\u201cIt\u2019s truly our honor and privilege,\u201d Hurley responded. \u201cOn behalf of the Dragon Endeavour, congrats to NASA and SpaceX.\u201dThe mission \u2014 the final milestone in a rigorous test program years in the making \u2014 was celebrated as a victory for NASA and its decision under former President Barack Obama to entrust the private sector with the lives of its astronauts. And it served as a rare bright spot in a year full of turmoil and devastation, from the deadly coronavirus pandemic to the social unrest in the wake of George Floyd\u2019s killing to the clashes between protesters and authorities in cities from Portland, Ore., to Richmond, Va.Instead of scenes of exhausted hospital workers, smoke-filled streets, and mounting death tolls from a virus that continues to spread, here were a pair of astronauts, smiling and giving a thumbs up as flight technicians helped them from their spacecraft in a scene reminiscent of the early days of the space program. And it came just days after another triumphant moment for NASA, the launch of the Mars Perseverance rover that is expected to reach the red planet in February.Shortly after the May 30 launch of the astronauts into orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk grew emotional as he talked about the responsibility of getting the astronauts, both fathers to young boys, back to their families safely.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.To make it home, the spacecraft undocked from the space station at 7:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday evening while it was orbiting the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h., or more than 22 times the speed of sound. On Sunday, about an hour before splashdown, it fired its engines for one final burn that began its descent home. As it plunged into the thickening atmosphere, the friction generated enormous heat, as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.The capsule, named Endeavour by its crew in homage to the space shuttle of the same name, appeared to weather the trip home successfully, scorch marks and all. The heat shield withstood temperatures that left the once bright white capsule looking like a toasted marshmallow.Rescue crews descended on the Dragon spacecraft minutes after it landed, stabilizing the capsule as it bobbed in the water, checking to make sure there were no propellant leaks and gathering the parachutes. The spacecraft was then hoisted onto the deck of the Go Navigator recovery ship, where medical personnel were waiting to check out Hurley and Behnken.The recovery process experienced two small hiccups. After the spacecraft splashed down, private boaters quickly surrounded the Endeavour before SpaceX safety crews could shoo them away. One boat with a Trump flag came mere yards from spacecraft.The U.S. Coast Guard had cleared a 10-nautical-mile safe zone around the landing site, NASA and SpaceX officials said, but it was quickly breached. The Coast Guard said in a statement it had one 87-foot and one 45-foot ship near the landing site to try to enforce the protective area, but some boaters largely disregarded government warnings to stay clear.\u201cWith limited assets available and with no formal authority to establish zones that would stop boaters from entering the area, numerous boaters ignored the Coast Guard crews\u2019 requests and decided to encroach the area, putting themselves and those involved in the operation in potential danger,\u201d the Cost Guard said in a statement, adding that it would launch a \u201ccomprehensive review\u201d of the operation with NASA and SpaceX.\u201cWe had all the clearance that was required at landing. That capsule was in the water for a good period of time and the boats just made a bee line for it,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s a big area we have to clear and it\u2019s probably going to take more resources. ... We need to do a better job next time for sure.\"Technicians aboard the Go Navigator also briefly delayed opening the hatch because of a build-up of harmful fumes around the capsule. Mission controllers detected higher-than-appropriate amounts of \u201chypergolic fumes,\u201d or fumes that could explode when coming in contact with one another. Tests found no toxic fumes inside the capsule.NASA and SpaceX said they also took extra precautions because of the coronavirus pandemic. The crews on the ship were tested and quarantined, and everyone was to be wearing masks.Each of the astronauts gave a thumbs up sign as they were wheeled off the spacecraft on a stretcher \u2014 a routine practice for astronauts who\u2019ve experience prolonged period without gravity.\u201cThank you for doing the most important parts and most difficult parts of human spaceflight, sending us into orbit and bringing us home safely,\" said Behnken, who was first out of the capsule. \"Thank you very much for the good ship Endeavour.\u201dHurley came out moments later. \"For anyone who\u2019s touched Endeavour, you should take a moment to cherish this day given everything that\u2019s happened this year,\u201d he said.Behnken and Hurley were scheduled to fly back to Houston Sunday to be reunited with their families.Hurley and Behnken are both married to astronauts they met in their astronaut class 20 years ago. While Hurley\u2019s wife, Karen Nyberg, is no longer in the astronauts corps, Benhken\u2019s wife, Megan McArthur, is. She\u2019s scheduled to fly to the space station in the spring of 2021 on the very same spacecraft that brought her husband home Sunday.Before that happens, NASA and SpaceX will evaluate the capsule to make sure it performed as expected. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX\u2019s next human spaceflight mission could come within six weeks.CORRECTION: The Associated Press incorrectly described a photo published in an earlier version of this story as an image of Sunday\u2019s landing. It was in fact a photo from a March 2019 test. The image has been replaced with one of the actual splashdown. Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken leave their SpaceX Dragon capsuleReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have left the Dragon Endeavour capsule aboard the Go Navigator rescue ship, marking the end of the maiden voyage of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program.The astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., just as schedued at 2:48 p.m. Eastern time. Forty minutes later, the spacecraft was hoisted aboard the recovery ship. But SpaceX technicians delayed opening the side hatch to allow medical crews to evaluate Behnken and Hurley because of concerns about toxic fumes.The astronauts were return to shore via helicopter and be flown to Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base in Houston and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.Said Behnken, who was first out of the capsule: \u201cThank you for doing the most important parts and most difficult parts of human spaceflight, sending us into orbit and bringing us home safely. Thank you very much for the good ship Endeavour.\u201dHurley came out moments later. \"For anyone who\u2019s touched Endeavour, you should take a moment to cherish this day given everything that\u2019s happened this year.\u201dApplause is heard from the @SpaceX teams as @Astro_Doug has joins @AstroBehnken safely out of the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/3aBzXbAzuG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts\u2019 exit from spacecraft delayed by harmful fumesReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX landing crews delayed opening the hatch of the Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule aboard the recovery ship Go Navigator because of high levels of harmful fumes.Mission controllers detected higher-than-appropriate amounts of \u201chypergolic fumes,\u201d or fumes that could explode when coming in contact with one another. Technicians aboard the Go Navigator spent several minutes aerating the service components of the Endeavour to disperse the fumes, which never entered the cabin of the spacecraft. Tests found no toxic fumes inside the capsule.Even with the delay, SpaceX\u2019s egress, or exit, timeline was well on schedule. Flight planners predicted an hour-long process from the time Endeavour splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., to when technicians on Go Navigator would open the hatch and allow medical officials to evaluate Behnken and Hurley.After an hour and one minute past splashdown, which occurred at 2:48 p.m., mission controllers reported the fumes were below harmful levels, but chose to continue the aeration process as an extra safety measure. Asked if they wanted to come out sooner, Hurley said they were happy to wait as long as necessary.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s nextReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkIt\u2019s called Demo-2 for a reason. Demo is short for demonstration, meaning SpaceX\u2019s mission to fly a pair of NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station is one big test, a way to prove the company is capable to pulling off the feat safely.The launch and docking two months ago was picture perfect, NASA and SpaceX said. So did the return and splashdown. That means the space agency is likely to certify SpaceX\u2019s vehicles and allow them to begin flying regular operational missions.The first one, called Crew-1, could happen as soon as late September. NASA has already picked the crew, a quartet of astronauts from different backgrounds.Victor Glover is a former Navy pilot who flew F/A 18 Hornets. A father of four, he\u2019s never been to space before.Mike Hopkins is a former football player at the University of Illinois who applied four times to become an astronaut, waiting more than 10 years before he was finally selected in 2009. Since then, he\u2019s flown to space once on the Russian Soyuz.Shannon Walker was selected to be an astronaut in 2004 after working closely with the space agency, first as a robotics flight controller with Rockwell Collins. In 1995, she joined NASA, working on the space station program. She flew to space on the Soyuz in 2010.They will be joined by Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut, who has flown to space twice, including the first Space Shuttle mission after the 2003 Columbia disaster.See how astronauts prepare for space flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts report successful splashdownReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:01 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported a successful splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., completing their return mission to Earth from the International Space Station.Moments after the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule hit the water, mission controllers radioed to the crew congratulating them on their return journey.\u201cOn behalf of the SpaceX and NASA teams, welcome home and thanks for flying SpaceX,\u201d mission control said.\u201cIt\u2019s truly our honor and privilege,\u201d Hurley responded. \u201cOn behalf of the Dragon Endeavour, congrats to NASA and SpaceX.\u201d He later radioed back, \u201cAll is well.\u201dSpaceX fast boats will soon approach the Endeavour to recover its parachutes from the water and check for any leaking propellants. The Go Navigator mother ship will then approach and hoist the Endeavour aboard, where recovery crews will secure the capsule and open the side hatch, allowing medical professionals to evaluate the astronauts and help them out of the spacecraft.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBoats speed in to recover astronauts inside landed Dragon capsuleReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are back on Earth, but still a ways from home. SpaceX landing crews will launch two speed boats from the recovery mother ship Go Navigator, stationed three miles away from the projected landing site, to verify that the Endeavour spacecraft is safe and prepared for recovery.Recovery teams are on their way to retrieve @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug from where they have splashed down inside the @SpaceX Dragon Endeavour. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/J7XUIt7sPt\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nThe first boat will check to see if the Dragon capsule is leaking any fluids, propellant or vapors. The second boat will retrieve Endeavour\u2019s four parachutes, which the capsule ejects upon splashdown.The Go Navigator recovery ship will then approach the Endeavour and hoist it aboard, allowing SpaceX crews to secure the capsule in place and open the side hatch to medically evaluate Behnken and Hurley before they disembark.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft splashes down in Gulf of MexicoReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule carrying NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., completing an 18-hour flight to Earth from the International Space Station.The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule carrying NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., on Aug. 2 (NASA)The landing marks the end of the first mission for a NASA crew aboard a private-sector spacecraft. SpaceX, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, beat out industry titan Boeing to send the first manned mission to space as part of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program. Hurley and Behnken lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 30, and spent 62 days aboard the ISS while NASA and SpaceX officials evaluated the Endeavour\u2019s performance and flightworthiness.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon Endeavour capsule deploys drogue parachutesReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon capsule has deployed its two drogue parachutes to slow its velocity as it plummets back to Earth on a return mission from the International Space Station. The chutes deploy when Dragon reaches an altitude of 18,000 feet and is traveling at 350 miles per hour.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpace X reacquires signal with Dragon spacecraftReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight engineers have regained communication with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley inside the Dragon capsule. Flight crews lost signal with Dragon for about six minutes as the capsule was engulfed in a blazing ball of heat while it reentered Earth\u2019s atmosphere.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon capsule goes silent as it enters a harrowing leg of its return journeyReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:37 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight engineers have lost contact with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley inside the Dragon capsule as it continues its return mission from the International Space Station. This temporary communication blackout was expected \u2014 engineers call the event \u201cLOS,\u201d or \u201closs of signal\u201d \u2014 and is caused by the intense heat that surrounds the capsule as it reenters Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The communication disruption is expected to last six minutes, according to flight plans.Conditions at the splashdown site are excellent.Great conditions for splashdown. Winds are at 2 knots. #LaunchAmerica\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) August 2, 2020\n\nDragon capsule closes nose cone Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:24 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe nose cone that protects the forward hatch on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule has closed, readying the spacecraft to plunge through the Earth\u2019s atmosphere on its return mission from the International Space Station.The cone closed after the Endeavour capsule fired its Draco thrusters to align its trajectory with its scheduled landing site in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. About 20 minutes after the cone\u2019s closure, the spacecraft will perform several small \u201cattitude adjustments,\u201d or repositioning maneuvers to direct its heat shield downward as it prepares to enter Earth\u2019s atmosphere, where it will enduring temperatures up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and decelerate from 17,500 miles per hour down to just 15 mph when it splashes down.\u2714\ufe0fNose cone closed\u2714\ufe0fForward thrusters disabled \u2714\ufe0fNose cone latched with first set of hooks #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/VifWUtd9xG\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nParachutes can be trickyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkThere is a lot of new technology loaded into SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft. It has touchscreens, like a tablet. Emergency abort thrusters that can fire automatically. It docked autonomously with the International Space Station, like a self-driving car.But for all the advances that make Dragon a next-generation spacecraft, it will rely on some old and relatively basic engineering to get the astronauts home safely: parachutes.And the design of the parachutes used by SpaceX turned out to be surprisingly tricky.\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in an interview with The Post in the days leading up to the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean, they soldiered though, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dIf all goes well, two drogue parachutes will deploy when the spacecraft is at about 18,000 feet, traveling at some 350 m.p.h. Then, as it slows down to about 119 m.p.h., four main parachutes should deploy at about 6,000 feet.27th and final test of Crew Dragon\u2019s upgraded Mark 3 parachutes complete \u2013 one step closer to flying @NASA astronauts @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug to the @space_station and safely returning them back home to Earth pic.twitter.com/tY9jKKwzFi\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 1, 2020\n\nSpaceX has struggled with its parachute design, upgrading the model from what it calls the Mark 2 design to Mark 3 after it suffered a failure during its test program. The upgraded version uses a stronger material in the lines that run to the canopy and a new stitching designed to handle the loads at deployment.At a press conference late last year, Musk said the Mark 3 parachutes are \u201cprobably 10 times safer\u201d than the Mark 2 version. \u201cIn my opinion they are the best parachutes ever. By a lot.\u201dDragon Endeavour begins \u2018de-orbit burn,\u2019 committing spacecraft to return missionReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Endeavour capsule has started its \u201cde-orbit burn,\u201d a nearly-12-minute firing of its engines that will plunge it into Earth\u2019s atmosphere from space and begin the most harrowing part of its descent toward the coast of Florida.Flying through the planet\u2019s atmosphere, the Endeavour will be engulfed by a 3,500-degee Fahrenheit fireball, testing the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield. SpaceX flight engineers will lose communications with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley for close to six minutes while the capsule endures that blast of heat.After emerging, Endeavour will fire off drogue parachutes to slow its momentum, then four larger parachutes to gently lower it into the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla.We have confirmation that the deorbit burn has begun at 1:56pm ET. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/GJcDk0A3NX\u2014 NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020\n\nDragon Endeavour spacecraft jettisons \u2018trunk\u2019 in preparation for return to EarthReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe astronauts aboard the Dragon Endeavour spacecraft at 1:52 p.m. jettisoned the capsule\u2019s trunk, an annex that contains thermal control, power and avionics system components, in preparation for returning to Earth from the International Space Station.NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken left the ISS on Saturday and traveled nearly 17 hours to just outside the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Jettisoning the trunk is one of the mission\u2019s final steps before committing to return to Earth and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla.The Endeavour will soon begin a 12-minute \u201cde-orbit burn\u201d in which it will fire its engines to plunge out of Earth\u2019s orbit and into the atmosphere. If SpaceX flight engineers detect unsuitable splashdown conditions, they can call for a last-minute \u201cwave-off\u201d before the engine burn, meaning the Endeavour will stay in orbit for at least another day until conditions improve. But such an eventuality is not expected.SpaceX Dragon capsule begins its final orbit before reentryReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon capsule started its final orbit around the Earth at 12:51 p.m. Eastern time, before beginning its descent to Earth.About an hour after that final orbit begins, SpaceX flight engineers will give the final \u201cgo\u201d order for the capsule\u2019s return, carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla.The Endeavour capsule will jettison its trunk, an annex that contains thermal control, power and avionics system components, at approximately 1:51 p.m., then fire its engines for a nine-minute \u201cde-orbit burn\u201d that will catapult the spacecraft out of orbit and through Earth\u2019s atmosphere.The SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley started its final orbit around the Earth before beginning its descent on Aug. 2. (NASA)SpaceX flight engineers gave a provisional \u201cgo\u201d order for that burn shortly after the final orbit sequence began. Engineers, though, can still \u201cwave off\u201d the landing attempt at any time before the \u201cde-orbit burn\u201d if conditions change. The Endeavour has three days\u2019 worth of \u201cconsumables\u201d \u2014 food, water and oxygen \u2014 on board if the crew needs to postpone reentry. NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken have completed a successful splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour capsule. NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule splash down in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "During a year of tumult, space has been a rare bright spot. SpaceX and NASA hope to keep it that way. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6086",
        "date": "2020-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/11/nasa-spacex-crew1-launch-space-station/",
        "text": "They look like superheroes in their sleek new SpaceX spacesuits \u2014 dashing, confident and smiling, ripped from the pages of a comic book. If there\u2019s any hesitation about the risky adventure they\u2019re about to embark on, it\u2019s well hidden.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe quartet of astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from Japan that make up what NASA calls Crew-1 \u2014 exudes optimism and camaraderie. They even have a motto, as if they were a merry band of musketeers: \u201cAll for one, Crew-1 for all.\u201d If their launch, now scheduled for 7:27 p.m. Sunday, is successful, it would be another coup for the space agency that has been on a roll recently, providing dashes of good news in a year that has seen very little.Story continues below advertisementA safe mission would be yet another balm for a nation obsessively doom-scrolling from one calamity to another, from the devastating pandemic, to social unrest and protests, to a tumultuous election that further cleaved an already fractious population \u2014 further cementing the fact that space has been a bright spot during 2020.AdvertisementThis month, NASA is celebrating 20 years of continuous habitation on the International Space Station. In July, it launched a rover called Perseverance to Mars that\u2019s equipped with a small helicopter drone. The space agency also recently discovered reserves of water across the surface of the moon as well as the potential for life in Venus\u2019s atmosphere. And in a daring, delicate mission it extracted a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away that could contain answers to the origins of the universe.The historic launch of astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in picturesBut perhaps nothing symbolizes hope and promise quite like the astronaut corps, today a diverse and overachieving group that evokes a nostalgia for Americana as well as faith in the future. Last year, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir performed NASA\u2019s first all-female spacewalk. Now, the agency is looking to send astronauts back to the moon under its Artemis program, a mission NASA says would put the \u201cnext man and first woman\u201d on the lunar surface.Story continues below advertisementCommercial companies such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are making strides, opening what many think is a new era in human spaceflight. That new paradigm got a boost this year when SpaceX successfully launched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station in the agency\u2019s first human spaceflight from United States since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.AdvertisementIn a divisive election year, SpaceX\u2019s test flight in May elicited statements of support from then-candidate Joe Biden and President Trump, who was at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch. Trump\u2019s campaign used the launch in an ad but then took it down after Hurley\u2019s wife, former NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, said it was \u201cdisturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dAstronauts Behnken and Hurley \u201cadded their names to the long list of heroes who have changed the way we think about our universe and our place in it,\u201d Biden said in a statement.Story continues below advertisementDuring a speech after the launch, Trump declared that \u201ca new age of American ambition has now begun.\u201d He added: \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dAdvertisementSpace has often helped unify the country. That was especially true during the 1960s, when the Apollo program offered a reprieve from the death toll in Vietnam.\u201cWhen you explore, two things happen,\u201d said Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space exploration advocacy group. \u201cYou\u2019re going make discoveries. You\u2019re going to learn something, whether in your backyard or on orbit. \u2026 Everyone can see the great value of having a bunch of rocket scientists and space explorers in your society.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly.Often, however, the epiphanies born from discovery are ephemeral flashes that burn hot and bright but are quickly forgotten, if not overlooked entirely, by much of the population. Apollo was an inspiration \u2014 until it wasn\u2019t. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, interest waned, and no one has been back to the moon since 1972.For the moment, though, there\u2019s Crew-1, a roll call of NASA\u2019s best: Mike Hopkins, the veteran commander who applied to be an astronaut four times before being selected in 2009. Since then, the Air Force colonel flew to the space station on a Russian Soyuz rocket.Shannon Walker was selected to be an astronaut in 2004 after working closely with NASA, first as a robotics flight controller with avionics firm Rockwell Collins. In 1995, she joined NASA, working on the space station program. She launched to the station on the Soyuz in 2010.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVictor Glover is the rookie, who has never been to space before. A former Navy pilot who flew F/A-18 Hornets, he has four children.The Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, has flown to space twice, including on the first space shuttle mission after the 2003 Columbia disaster.Given the challenges of 2020, the crew decided to name their spacecraft Resilience, a tribute to the teams that have worked despite the hardships on the mission, Hopkins said.\u201cI think all of us can agree that 2020 has certainly been a challenging year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "During a year of tumult, space has been a rare bright spot. SpaceX and NASA hope to keep it that way. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6087",
        "date": "2020-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/11/nasa-spacex-crew1-launch-space-station/",
        "text": "They look like superheroes in their sleek new SpaceX spacesuits \u2014 dashing, confident and smiling, ripped from the pages of a comic book. If there\u2019s any hesitation about the risky adventure they\u2019re about to embark on, it\u2019s well hidden.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe quartet of astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from Japan that make up what NASA calls Crew-1 \u2014 exudes optimism and camaraderie. They even have a motto, as if they were a merry band of musketeers: \u201cAll for one, Crew-1 for all.\u201d If their launch, now scheduled for 7:27 p.m. Sunday, is successful, it would be another coup for the space agency that has been on a roll recently, providing dashes of good news in a year that has seen very little.Story continues below advertisementA safe mission would be yet another balm for a nation obsessively doom-scrolling from one calamity to another, from the devastating pandemic, to social unrest and protests, to a tumultuous election that further cleaved an already fractious population \u2014 further cementing the fact that space has been a bright spot during 2020.AdvertisementThis month, NASA is celebrating 20 years of continuous habitation on the International Space Station. In July, it launched a rover called Perseverance to Mars that\u2019s equipped with a small helicopter drone. The space agency also recently discovered reserves of water across the surface of the moon as well as the potential for life in Venus\u2019s atmosphere. And in a daring, delicate mission it extracted a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away that could contain answers to the origins of the universe.The historic launch of astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in picturesBut perhaps nothing symbolizes hope and promise quite like the astronaut corps, today a diverse and overachieving group that evokes a nostalgia for Americana as well as faith in the future. Last year, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir performed NASA\u2019s first all-female spacewalk. Now, the agency is looking to send astronauts back to the moon under its Artemis program, a mission NASA says would put the \u201cnext man and first woman\u201d on the lunar surface.Story continues below advertisementCommercial companies such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are making strides, opening what many think is a new era in human spaceflight. That new paradigm got a boost this year when SpaceX successfully launched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station in the agency\u2019s first human spaceflight from United States since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.AdvertisementIn a divisive election year, SpaceX\u2019s test flight in May elicited statements of support from then-candidate Joe Biden and President Trump, who was at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch. Trump\u2019s campaign used the launch in an ad but then took it down after Hurley\u2019s wife, former NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, said it was \u201cdisturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dAstronauts Behnken and Hurley \u201cadded their names to the long list of heroes who have changed the way we think about our universe and our place in it,\u201d Biden said in a statement.Story continues below advertisementDuring a speech after the launch, Trump declared that \u201ca new age of American ambition has now begun.\u201d He added: \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dAdvertisementSpace has often helped unify the country. That was especially true during the 1960s, when the Apollo program offered a reprieve from the death toll in Vietnam.\u201cWhen you explore, two things happen,\u201d said Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space exploration advocacy group. \u201cYou\u2019re going make discoveries. You\u2019re going to learn something, whether in your backyard or on orbit. \u2026 Everyone can see the great value of having a bunch of rocket scientists and space explorers in your society.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly.Often, however, the epiphanies born from discovery are ephemeral flashes that burn hot and bright but are quickly forgotten, if not overlooked entirely, by much of the population. Apollo was an inspiration \u2014 until it wasn\u2019t. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, interest waned, and no one has been back to the moon since 1972.For the moment, though, there\u2019s Crew-1, a roll call of NASA\u2019s best: Mike Hopkins, the veteran commander who applied to be an astronaut four times before being selected in 2009. Since then, the Air Force colonel flew to the space station on a Russian Soyuz rocket.Shannon Walker was selected to be an astronaut in 2004 after working closely with NASA, first as a robotics flight controller with avionics firm Rockwell Collins. In 1995, she joined NASA, working on the space station program. She launched to the station on the Soyuz in 2010.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVictor Glover is the rookie, who has never been to space before. A former Navy pilot who flew F/A-18 Hornets, he has four children.The Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, has flown to space twice, including on the first space shuttle mission after the 2003 Columbia disaster.Given the challenges of 2020, the crew decided to name their spacecraft Resilience, a tribute to the teams that have worked despite the hardships on the mission, Hopkins said.\u201cI think all of us can agree that 2020 has certainly been a challenging year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "During a year of tumult, space has been a rare bright spot. SpaceX and NASA hope to keep it that way. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6088",
        "date": "2020-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/11/nasa-spacex-crew1-launch-space-station/",
        "text": "They look like superheroes in their sleek new SpaceX spacesuits \u2014 dashing, confident and smiling, ripped from the pages of a comic book. If there\u2019s any hesitation about the risky adventure they\u2019re about to embark on, it\u2019s well hidden.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe quartet of astronauts \u2014 three from NASA, one from Japan that make up what NASA calls Crew-1 \u2014 exudes optimism and camaraderie. They even have a motto, as if they were a merry band of musketeers: \u201cAll for one, Crew-1 for all.\u201d If their launch, now scheduled for 7:27 p.m. Sunday, is successful, it would be another coup for the space agency that has been on a roll recently, providing dashes of good news in a year that has seen very little.Story continues below advertisementA safe mission would be yet another balm for a nation obsessively doom-scrolling from one calamity to another, from the devastating pandemic, to social unrest and protests, to a tumultuous election that further cleaved an already fractious population \u2014 further cementing the fact that space has been a bright spot during 2020.AdvertisementThis month, NASA is celebrating 20 years of continuous habitation on the International Space Station. In July, it launched a rover called Perseverance to Mars that\u2019s equipped with a small helicopter drone. The space agency also recently discovered reserves of water across the surface of the moon as well as the potential for life in Venus\u2019s atmosphere. And in a daring, delicate mission it extracted a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away that could contain answers to the origins of the universe.The historic launch of astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in picturesBut perhaps nothing symbolizes hope and promise quite like the astronaut corps, today a diverse and overachieving group that evokes a nostalgia for Americana as well as faith in the future. Last year, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir performed NASA\u2019s first all-female spacewalk. Now, the agency is looking to send astronauts back to the moon under its Artemis program, a mission NASA says would put the \u201cnext man and first woman\u201d on the lunar surface.Story continues below advertisementCommercial companies such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are making strides, opening what many think is a new era in human spaceflight. That new paradigm got a boost this year when SpaceX successfully launched NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station in the agency\u2019s first human spaceflight from United States since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.AdvertisementIn a divisive election year, SpaceX\u2019s test flight in May elicited statements of support from then-candidate Joe Biden and President Trump, who was at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch. Trump\u2019s campaign used the launch in an ad but then took it down after Hurley\u2019s wife, former NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, said it was \u201cdisturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dAstronauts Behnken and Hurley \u201cadded their names to the long list of heroes who have changed the way we think about our universe and our place in it,\u201d Biden said in a statement.Story continues below advertisementDuring a speech after the launch, Trump declared that \u201ca new age of American ambition has now begun.\u201d He added: \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dAdvertisementSpace has often helped unify the country. That was especially true during the 1960s, when the Apollo program offered a reprieve from the death toll in Vietnam.\u201cWhen you explore, two things happen,\u201d said Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space exploration advocacy group. \u201cYou\u2019re going make discoveries. You\u2019re going to learn something, whether in your backyard or on orbit. \u2026 Everyone can see the great value of having a bunch of rocket scientists and space explorers in your society.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly.Often, however, the epiphanies born from discovery are ephemeral flashes that burn hot and bright but are quickly forgotten, if not overlooked entirely, by much of the population. Apollo was an inspiration \u2014 until it wasn\u2019t. After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, interest waned, and no one has been back to the moon since 1972.For the moment, though, there\u2019s Crew-1, a roll call of NASA\u2019s best: Mike Hopkins, the veteran commander who applied to be an astronaut four times before being selected in 2009. Since then, the Air Force colonel flew to the space station on a Russian Soyuz rocket.Shannon Walker was selected to be an astronaut in 2004 after working closely with NASA, first as a robotics flight controller with avionics firm Rockwell Collins. In 1995, she joined NASA, working on the space station program. She launched to the station on the Soyuz in 2010.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVictor Glover is the rookie, who has never been to space before. A former Navy pilot who flew F/A-18 Hornets, he has four children.The Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi, has flown to space twice, including on the first space shuttle mission after the 2003 Columbia disaster.Given the challenges of 2020, the crew decided to name their spacecraft Resilience, a tribute to the teams that have worked despite the hardships on the mission, Hopkins said.\u201cI think all of us can agree that 2020 has certainly been a challenging year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6089",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/amazon-bezos-blue-origin/",
        "text": "They had just been to a matinee of \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on the starry-eyed memoir of Homer Hickam, the author and former NASA engineer. And now Jeff Bezos and his friend Neal Stephenson were sitting in a coffee shop, Hickam\u2019s dreams of one day building rockets to go to space still fresh in their minds. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos said he had always wanted to start a space company, and Stephenson, the author, said, \u201cWell, why don\u2019t you start it today?\u201dSoon, he did.For years, Bezos has spent one day a week, usually Wednesdays, at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company, injecting a sense of urgency into Blue Origin\u2019s activities at a time when NASA is pushing to return astronauts to the moon, space tourism is close to reality and the commercial space industry continues to grow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon may be what Bezos, who announced last week he would be stepping down as the company\u2019s chief executive, is best known for, but space is a lifelong passion. And if Bezos\u2019s career is to have a second act it would likely be focused largely on Blue Origin\u2019s mission of building a transportation network that would bring down the cost of space travel, allowing for what he\u2019s called a \u201cdynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAmazon was like a winning lottery ticket that allowed him to invest $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, he has said. Despite his many other ventures, including ownership of The Washington Post, achieving Blue Origin\u2019s goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing,\u201d he\u2019s said.Space is no passing fad. At his high school graduation, he gave a speech about going to space to save the Earth, which he said should be preserved as a national park. Today, he gives a similar version of that speech but has tweaked that line to say Earth should be zoned residential while all heavy industry should be moved into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos is a huge Star Trek fan, who had a cameo in the movie \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d and named a dog and a company after Star Trek characters. He was the president of the student space club at Princeton University, who devoured science fiction as a child and has been dedicated to making the far-fetched dreams of those novels reality \u2014 including building massive colonies in space.At first, Blue Origin was just a handful of people, including Stephenson, working in an industrial Seattle warehouse to see if there was any way to get to space other than using chemically fueled rockets. After studying several alternatives \u2014 even a massive whip that would fling objects into space \u2014 they decided that rockets were the best option, as long as they could be reused.Bucket list. Cast, crew and Justin Lin @trailingjohnson were amazing. #StarTrekBeyond https://t.co/VJ95D8pQeK\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 20, 2016\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve heard him say in the past that he has been accused of starting an Internet company so that he could start a space company, and I think that summarizes his perception of things,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cHis goal is to move humanity off the Earth \u2014 that\u2019s his fundamental objective. And to do that, he knows there\u2019s going to have to be transformational technology to drive down cost and increase access and those are things he\u2019s investing in.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Blue Origin has yet to send a spacecraft to orbit or fly humans. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon contract, and some have criticized the company for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Within six years of its founding, SpaceX sent a rocket to orbit, and last year sent two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station. It is moving fast on its next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, which Musk hopes will fly people to the moon and Mars.\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dJeff Bezos pulls back the curtain on his plans for spaceBlue Origin, by contrast, has been quiet and plodding like its mascot, the tortoise. The company\u2019s motto is Gradatim Ferociter or \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201d And one of Bezos\u2019s favorite sayings is, \u201cslow is smooth and smooth is fast.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother one might be, as Bezos once said, \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.\u201dWary of the hyperbole that goes with high-profile space companies, Bezos once said, \u201cSpace is really easy to overhype. There are very few things in the world where the ration of attention you get to what you\u2019ve actually done, can be extreme.\u201dEver quiet and secretive, Blue Origin has grown tremendously in recent years. Its headquarters, now located in a Seattle suburb, has grown as has its manufacturing sites in Huntsville, Ala., as well as a massive campus just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.\u201cEvery time I go down there, there\u2019s a new, massive structure,\u201d Bridenstine said.Story continues below advertisementThe company is getting close to flying its first humans to the edge of space and back on its suborbital vehicle New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, whose 15-minute trip to space also went straight up and down. And it hopes to fly its massive New Glenn rocket to orbit this year, though that may very well slip into next year. That vehicle is named for John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit.AdvertisementIt also is developing a spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon \u2014 a project of particular interest for Bezos, who\u2019s called the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him when he watched it at age 5.On Tuesday, Blue Origin announced it had built a full-scale prototype of part of the lunar lander that would land on the moon, known as the descent element. The company is planning a test mission of its lunar lander spacecraft to the moon, without crews on board, ahead of a human landing there as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a permanent presence on and around the moon. To build the lander, Blue Origin has teamed up with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to form what it calls the \u201cnational team.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe can begin to build up Artemis base camp,\u201d Steve Squyres, Blue Origin\u2019s chief scientist, said in a video released by the company. \u201cWe\u2019re not standing still at the national team.\u201d The plan, he said, is to \u201cenable long-term sustainability, getting America back to the moon, this time to stay.AdvertisementGetting to the moon is a dream of Bezos\u2019s. In 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Parts of the engines have gone on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.His goal now is to build a similarly massive rocket \u2014 but with boosters that can be reused, flying back to Earth to land on a ship at sea, the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rockets. Building that infrastructure to space, he has said, would be his life\u2019s work.\u201cIf I\u2019m 80 years old and I\u2019m looking back on my life,\u201d he said during an event in 2016, \u201cand I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I\u2019ll be a very happy 80-year-old.\u201d For years, Bezos has spent one day a week at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company. Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6090",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/amazon-bezos-blue-origin/",
        "text": "They had just been to a matinee of \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on the starry-eyed memoir of Homer Hickam, the author and former NASA engineer. And now Jeff Bezos and his friend Neal Stephenson were sitting in a coffee shop, Hickam\u2019s dreams of one day building rockets to go to space still fresh in their minds. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos said he had always wanted to start a space company, and Stephenson, the author, said, \u201cWell, why don\u2019t you start it today?\u201dSoon, he did.For years, Bezos has spent one day a week, usually Wednesdays, at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company, injecting a sense of urgency into Blue Origin\u2019s activities at a time when NASA is pushing to return astronauts to the moon, space tourism is close to reality and the commercial space industry continues to grow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon may be what Bezos, who announced last week he would be stepping down as the company\u2019s chief executive, is best known for, but space is a lifelong passion. And if Bezos\u2019s career is to have a second act it would likely be focused largely on Blue Origin\u2019s mission of building a transportation network that would bring down the cost of space travel, allowing for what he\u2019s called a \u201cdynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAmazon was like a winning lottery ticket that allowed him to invest $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, he has said. Despite his many other ventures, including ownership of The Washington Post, achieving Blue Origin\u2019s goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing,\u201d he\u2019s said.Space is no passing fad. At his high school graduation, he gave a speech about going to space to save the Earth, which he said should be preserved as a national park. Today, he gives a similar version of that speech but has tweaked that line to say Earth should be zoned residential while all heavy industry should be moved into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos is a huge Star Trek fan, who had a cameo in the movie \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d and named a dog and a company after Star Trek characters. He was the president of the student space club at Princeton University, who devoured science fiction as a child and has been dedicated to making the far-fetched dreams of those novels reality \u2014 including building massive colonies in space.At first, Blue Origin was just a handful of people, including Stephenson, working in an industrial Seattle warehouse to see if there was any way to get to space other than using chemically fueled rockets. After studying several alternatives \u2014 even a massive whip that would fling objects into space \u2014 they decided that rockets were the best option, as long as they could be reused.Bucket list. Cast, crew and Justin Lin @trailingjohnson were amazing. #StarTrekBeyond https://t.co/VJ95D8pQeK\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 20, 2016\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve heard him say in the past that he has been accused of starting an Internet company so that he could start a space company, and I think that summarizes his perception of things,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cHis goal is to move humanity off the Earth \u2014 that\u2019s his fundamental objective. And to do that, he knows there\u2019s going to have to be transformational technology to drive down cost and increase access and those are things he\u2019s investing in.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Blue Origin has yet to send a spacecraft to orbit or fly humans. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon contract, and some have criticized the company for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Within six years of its founding, SpaceX sent a rocket to orbit, and last year sent two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station. It is moving fast on its next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, which Musk hopes will fly people to the moon and Mars.\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dJeff Bezos pulls back the curtain on his plans for spaceBlue Origin, by contrast, has been quiet and plodding like its mascot, the tortoise. The company\u2019s motto is Gradatim Ferociter or \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201d And one of Bezos\u2019s favorite sayings is, \u201cslow is smooth and smooth is fast.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother one might be, as Bezos once said, \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.\u201dWary of the hyperbole that goes with high-profile space companies, Bezos once said, \u201cSpace is really easy to overhype. There are very few things in the world where the ration of attention you get to what you\u2019ve actually done, can be extreme.\u201dEver quiet and secretive, Blue Origin has grown tremendously in recent years. Its headquarters, now located in a Seattle suburb, has grown as has its manufacturing sites in Huntsville, Ala., as well as a massive campus just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.\u201cEvery time I go down there, there\u2019s a new, massive structure,\u201d Bridenstine said.Story continues below advertisementThe company is getting close to flying its first humans to the edge of space and back on its suborbital vehicle New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, whose 15-minute trip to space also went straight up and down. And it hopes to fly its massive New Glenn rocket to orbit this year, though that may very well slip into next year. That vehicle is named for John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit.AdvertisementIt also is developing a spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon \u2014 a project of particular interest for Bezos, who\u2019s called the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him when he watched it at age 5.On Tuesday, Blue Origin announced it had built a full-scale prototype of part of the lunar lander that would land on the moon, known as the descent element. The company is planning a test mission of its lunar lander spacecraft to the moon, without crews on board, ahead of a human landing there as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a permanent presence on and around the moon. To build the lander, Blue Origin has teamed up with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to form what it calls the \u201cnational team.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe can begin to build up Artemis base camp,\u201d Steve Squyres, Blue Origin\u2019s chief scientist, said in a video released by the company. \u201cWe\u2019re not standing still at the national team.\u201d The plan, he said, is to \u201cenable long-term sustainability, getting America back to the moon, this time to stay.AdvertisementGetting to the moon is a dream of Bezos\u2019s. In 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Parts of the engines have gone on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.His goal now is to build a similarly massive rocket \u2014 but with boosters that can be reused, flying back to Earth to land on a ship at sea, the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rockets. Building that infrastructure to space, he has said, would be his life\u2019s work.\u201cIf I\u2019m 80 years old and I\u2019m looking back on my life,\u201d he said during an event in 2016, \u201cand I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I\u2019ll be a very happy 80-year-old.\u201d For years, Bezos has spent one day a week at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company. Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6091",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/amazon-bezos-blue-origin/",
        "text": "They had just been to a matinee of \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on the starry-eyed memoir of Homer Hickam, the author and former NASA engineer. And now Jeff Bezos and his friend Neal Stephenson were sitting in a coffee shop, Hickam\u2019s dreams of one day building rockets to go to space still fresh in their minds. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos said he had always wanted to start a space company, and Stephenson, the author, said, \u201cWell, why don\u2019t you start it today?\u201dSoon, he did.For years, Bezos has spent one day a week, usually Wednesdays, at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company, injecting a sense of urgency into Blue Origin\u2019s activities at a time when NASA is pushing to return astronauts to the moon, space tourism is close to reality and the commercial space industry continues to grow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon may be what Bezos, who announced last week he would be stepping down as the company\u2019s chief executive, is best known for, but space is a lifelong passion. And if Bezos\u2019s career is to have a second act it would likely be focused largely on Blue Origin\u2019s mission of building a transportation network that would bring down the cost of space travel, allowing for what he\u2019s called a \u201cdynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAmazon was like a winning lottery ticket that allowed him to invest $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, he has said. Despite his many other ventures, including ownership of The Washington Post, achieving Blue Origin\u2019s goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing,\u201d he\u2019s said.Space is no passing fad. At his high school graduation, he gave a speech about going to space to save the Earth, which he said should be preserved as a national park. Today, he gives a similar version of that speech but has tweaked that line to say Earth should be zoned residential while all heavy industry should be moved into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos is a huge Star Trek fan, who had a cameo in the movie \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d and named a dog and a company after Star Trek characters. He was the president of the student space club at Princeton University, who devoured science fiction as a child and has been dedicated to making the far-fetched dreams of those novels reality \u2014 including building massive colonies in space.At first, Blue Origin was just a handful of people, including Stephenson, working in an industrial Seattle warehouse to see if there was any way to get to space other than using chemically fueled rockets. After studying several alternatives \u2014 even a massive whip that would fling objects into space \u2014 they decided that rockets were the best option, as long as they could be reused.Bucket list. Cast, crew and Justin Lin @trailingjohnson were amazing. #StarTrekBeyond https://t.co/VJ95D8pQeK\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 20, 2016\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve heard him say in the past that he has been accused of starting an Internet company so that he could start a space company, and I think that summarizes his perception of things,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cHis goal is to move humanity off the Earth \u2014 that\u2019s his fundamental objective. And to do that, he knows there\u2019s going to have to be transformational technology to drive down cost and increase access and those are things he\u2019s investing in.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Blue Origin has yet to send a spacecraft to orbit or fly humans. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon contract, and some have criticized the company for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Within six years of its founding, SpaceX sent a rocket to orbit, and last year sent two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station. It is moving fast on its next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, which Musk hopes will fly people to the moon and Mars.\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dJeff Bezos pulls back the curtain on his plans for spaceBlue Origin, by contrast, has been quiet and plodding like its mascot, the tortoise. The company\u2019s motto is Gradatim Ferociter or \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201d And one of Bezos\u2019s favorite sayings is, \u201cslow is smooth and smooth is fast.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother one might be, as Bezos once said, \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.\u201dWary of the hyperbole that goes with high-profile space companies, Bezos once said, \u201cSpace is really easy to overhype. There are very few things in the world where the ration of attention you get to what you\u2019ve actually done, can be extreme.\u201dEver quiet and secretive, Blue Origin has grown tremendously in recent years. Its headquarters, now located in a Seattle suburb, has grown as has its manufacturing sites in Huntsville, Ala., as well as a massive campus just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.\u201cEvery time I go down there, there\u2019s a new, massive structure,\u201d Bridenstine said.Story continues below advertisementThe company is getting close to flying its first humans to the edge of space and back on its suborbital vehicle New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, whose 15-minute trip to space also went straight up and down. And it hopes to fly its massive New Glenn rocket to orbit this year, though that may very well slip into next year. That vehicle is named for John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit.AdvertisementIt also is developing a spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon \u2014 a project of particular interest for Bezos, who\u2019s called the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him when he watched it at age 5.On Tuesday, Blue Origin announced it had built a full-scale prototype of part of the lunar lander that would land on the moon, known as the descent element. The company is planning a test mission of its lunar lander spacecraft to the moon, without crews on board, ahead of a human landing there as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a permanent presence on and around the moon. To build the lander, Blue Origin has teamed up with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to form what it calls the \u201cnational team.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe can begin to build up Artemis base camp,\u201d Steve Squyres, Blue Origin\u2019s chief scientist, said in a video released by the company. \u201cWe\u2019re not standing still at the national team.\u201d The plan, he said, is to \u201cenable long-term sustainability, getting America back to the moon, this time to stay.AdvertisementGetting to the moon is a dream of Bezos\u2019s. In 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Parts of the engines have gone on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.His goal now is to build a similarly massive rocket \u2014 but with boosters that can be reused, flying back to Earth to land on a ship at sea, the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rockets. Building that infrastructure to space, he has said, would be his life\u2019s work.\u201cIf I\u2019m 80 years old and I\u2019m looking back on my life,\u201d he said during an event in 2016, \u201cand I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I\u2019ll be a very happy 80-year-old.\u201d For years, Bezos has spent one day a week at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company. Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6092",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/amazon-bezos-blue-origin/",
        "text": "They had just been to a matinee of \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on the starry-eyed memoir of Homer Hickam, the author and former NASA engineer. And now Jeff Bezos and his friend Neal Stephenson were sitting in a coffee shop, Hickam\u2019s dreams of one day building rockets to go to space still fresh in their minds. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos said he had always wanted to start a space company, and Stephenson, the author, said, \u201cWell, why don\u2019t you start it today?\u201dSoon, he did.For years, Bezos has spent one day a week, usually Wednesdays, at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company, injecting a sense of urgency into Blue Origin\u2019s activities at a time when NASA is pushing to return astronauts to the moon, space tourism is close to reality and the commercial space industry continues to grow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon may be what Bezos, who announced last week he would be stepping down as the company\u2019s chief executive, is best known for, but space is a lifelong passion. And if Bezos\u2019s career is to have a second act it would likely be focused largely on Blue Origin\u2019s mission of building a transportation network that would bring down the cost of space travel, allowing for what he\u2019s called a \u201cdynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAmazon was like a winning lottery ticket that allowed him to invest $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, he has said. Despite his many other ventures, including ownership of The Washington Post, achieving Blue Origin\u2019s goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing,\u201d he\u2019s said.Space is no passing fad. At his high school graduation, he gave a speech about going to space to save the Earth, which he said should be preserved as a national park. Today, he gives a similar version of that speech but has tweaked that line to say Earth should be zoned residential while all heavy industry should be moved into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos is a huge Star Trek fan, who had a cameo in the movie \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d and named a dog and a company after Star Trek characters. He was the president of the student space club at Princeton University, who devoured science fiction as a child and has been dedicated to making the far-fetched dreams of those novels reality \u2014 including building massive colonies in space.At first, Blue Origin was just a handful of people, including Stephenson, working in an industrial Seattle warehouse to see if there was any way to get to space other than using chemically fueled rockets. After studying several alternatives \u2014 even a massive whip that would fling objects into space \u2014 they decided that rockets were the best option, as long as they could be reused.Bucket list. Cast, crew and Justin Lin @trailingjohnson were amazing. #StarTrekBeyond https://t.co/VJ95D8pQeK\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 20, 2016\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve heard him say in the past that he has been accused of starting an Internet company so that he could start a space company, and I think that summarizes his perception of things,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cHis goal is to move humanity off the Earth \u2014 that\u2019s his fundamental objective. And to do that, he knows there\u2019s going to have to be transformational technology to drive down cost and increase access and those are things he\u2019s investing in.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Blue Origin has yet to send a spacecraft to orbit or fly humans. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon contract, and some have criticized the company for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Within six years of its founding, SpaceX sent a rocket to orbit, and last year sent two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station. It is moving fast on its next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, which Musk hopes will fly people to the moon and Mars.\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dJeff Bezos pulls back the curtain on his plans for spaceBlue Origin, by contrast, has been quiet and plodding like its mascot, the tortoise. The company\u2019s motto is Gradatim Ferociter or \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201d And one of Bezos\u2019s favorite sayings is, \u201cslow is smooth and smooth is fast.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother one might be, as Bezos once said, \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.\u201dWary of the hyperbole that goes with high-profile space companies, Bezos once said, \u201cSpace is really easy to overhype. There are very few things in the world where the ration of attention you get to what you\u2019ve actually done, can be extreme.\u201dEver quiet and secretive, Blue Origin has grown tremendously in recent years. Its headquarters, now located in a Seattle suburb, has grown as has its manufacturing sites in Huntsville, Ala., as well as a massive campus just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.\u201cEvery time I go down there, there\u2019s a new, massive structure,\u201d Bridenstine said.Story continues below advertisementThe company is getting close to flying its first humans to the edge of space and back on its suborbital vehicle New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, whose 15-minute trip to space also went straight up and down. And it hopes to fly its massive New Glenn rocket to orbit this year, though that may very well slip into next year. That vehicle is named for John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit.AdvertisementIt also is developing a spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon \u2014 a project of particular interest for Bezos, who\u2019s called the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him when he watched it at age 5.On Tuesday, Blue Origin announced it had built a full-scale prototype of part of the lunar lander that would land on the moon, known as the descent element. The company is planning a test mission of its lunar lander spacecraft to the moon, without crews on board, ahead of a human landing there as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a permanent presence on and around the moon. To build the lander, Blue Origin has teamed up with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to form what it calls the \u201cnational team.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe can begin to build up Artemis base camp,\u201d Steve Squyres, Blue Origin\u2019s chief scientist, said in a video released by the company. \u201cWe\u2019re not standing still at the national team.\u201d The plan, he said, is to \u201cenable long-term sustainability, getting America back to the moon, this time to stay.AdvertisementGetting to the moon is a dream of Bezos\u2019s. In 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Parts of the engines have gone on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.His goal now is to build a similarly massive rocket \u2014 but with boosters that can be reused, flying back to Earth to land on a ship at sea, the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rockets. Building that infrastructure to space, he has said, would be his life\u2019s work.\u201cIf I\u2019m 80 years old and I\u2019m looking back on my life,\u201d he said during an event in 2016, \u201cand I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I\u2019ll be a very happy 80-year-old.\u201d For years, Bezos has spent one day a week at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company. Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6093",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/amazon-bezos-blue-origin/",
        "text": "They had just been to a matinee of \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on the starry-eyed memoir of Homer Hickam, the author and former NASA engineer. And now Jeff Bezos and his friend Neal Stephenson were sitting in a coffee shop, Hickam\u2019s dreams of one day building rockets to go to space still fresh in their minds. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos said he had always wanted to start a space company, and Stephenson, the author, said, \u201cWell, why don\u2019t you start it today?\u201dSoon, he did.For years, Bezos has spent one day a week, usually Wednesdays, at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company, injecting a sense of urgency into Blue Origin\u2019s activities at a time when NASA is pushing to return astronauts to the moon, space tourism is close to reality and the commercial space industry continues to grow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon may be what Bezos, who announced last week he would be stepping down as the company\u2019s chief executive, is best known for, but space is a lifelong passion. And if Bezos\u2019s career is to have a second act it would likely be focused largely on Blue Origin\u2019s mission of building a transportation network that would bring down the cost of space travel, allowing for what he\u2019s called a \u201cdynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAmazon was like a winning lottery ticket that allowed him to invest $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, he has said. Despite his many other ventures, including ownership of The Washington Post, achieving Blue Origin\u2019s goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing,\u201d he\u2019s said.Space is no passing fad. At his high school graduation, he gave a speech about going to space to save the Earth, which he said should be preserved as a national park. Today, he gives a similar version of that speech but has tweaked that line to say Earth should be zoned residential while all heavy industry should be moved into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos is a huge Star Trek fan, who had a cameo in the movie \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d and named a dog and a company after Star Trek characters. He was the president of the student space club at Princeton University, who devoured science fiction as a child and has been dedicated to making the far-fetched dreams of those novels reality \u2014 including building massive colonies in space.At first, Blue Origin was just a handful of people, including Stephenson, working in an industrial Seattle warehouse to see if there was any way to get to space other than using chemically fueled rockets. After studying several alternatives \u2014 even a massive whip that would fling objects into space \u2014 they decided that rockets were the best option, as long as they could be reused.Bucket list. Cast, crew and Justin Lin @trailingjohnson were amazing. #StarTrekBeyond https://t.co/VJ95D8pQeK\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 20, 2016\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve heard him say in the past that he has been accused of starting an Internet company so that he could start a space company, and I think that summarizes his perception of things,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cHis goal is to move humanity off the Earth \u2014 that\u2019s his fundamental objective. And to do that, he knows there\u2019s going to have to be transformational technology to drive down cost and increase access and those are things he\u2019s investing in.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Blue Origin has yet to send a spacecraft to orbit or fly humans. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon contract, and some have criticized the company for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Within six years of its founding, SpaceX sent a rocket to orbit, and last year sent two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station. It is moving fast on its next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, which Musk hopes will fly people to the moon and Mars.\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dJeff Bezos pulls back the curtain on his plans for spaceBlue Origin, by contrast, has been quiet and plodding like its mascot, the tortoise. The company\u2019s motto is Gradatim Ferociter or \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201d And one of Bezos\u2019s favorite sayings is, \u201cslow is smooth and smooth is fast.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother one might be, as Bezos once said, \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.\u201dWary of the hyperbole that goes with high-profile space companies, Bezos once said, \u201cSpace is really easy to overhype. There are very few things in the world where the ration of attention you get to what you\u2019ve actually done, can be extreme.\u201dEver quiet and secretive, Blue Origin has grown tremendously in recent years. Its headquarters, now located in a Seattle suburb, has grown as has its manufacturing sites in Huntsville, Ala., as well as a massive campus just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.\u201cEvery time I go down there, there\u2019s a new, massive structure,\u201d Bridenstine said.Story continues below advertisementThe company is getting close to flying its first humans to the edge of space and back on its suborbital vehicle New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, whose 15-minute trip to space also went straight up and down. And it hopes to fly its massive New Glenn rocket to orbit this year, though that may very well slip into next year. That vehicle is named for John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit.AdvertisementIt also is developing a spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon \u2014 a project of particular interest for Bezos, who\u2019s called the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him when he watched it at age 5.On Tuesday, Blue Origin announced it had built a full-scale prototype of part of the lunar lander that would land on the moon, known as the descent element. The company is planning a test mission of its lunar lander spacecraft to the moon, without crews on board, ahead of a human landing there as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a permanent presence on and around the moon. To build the lander, Blue Origin has teamed up with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to form what it calls the \u201cnational team.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe can begin to build up Artemis base camp,\u201d Steve Squyres, Blue Origin\u2019s chief scientist, said in a video released by the company. \u201cWe\u2019re not standing still at the national team.\u201d The plan, he said, is to \u201cenable long-term sustainability, getting America back to the moon, this time to stay.AdvertisementGetting to the moon is a dream of Bezos\u2019s. In 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Parts of the engines have gone on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.His goal now is to build a similarly massive rocket \u2014 but with boosters that can be reused, flying back to Earth to land on a ship at sea, the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rockets. Building that infrastructure to space, he has said, would be his life\u2019s work.\u201cIf I\u2019m 80 years old and I\u2019m looking back on my life,\u201d he said during an event in 2016, \u201cand I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I\u2019ll be a very happy 80-year-old.\u201d For years, Bezos has spent one day a week at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company. Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6094",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/amazon-bezos-blue-origin/",
        "text": "They had just been to a matinee of \u201cOctober Sky,\u201d the film based on the starry-eyed memoir of Homer Hickam, the author and former NASA engineer. And now Jeff Bezos and his friend Neal Stephenson were sitting in a coffee shop, Hickam\u2019s dreams of one day building rockets to go to space still fresh in their minds. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos said he had always wanted to start a space company, and Stephenson, the author, said, \u201cWell, why don\u2019t you start it today?\u201dSoon, he did.For years, Bezos has spent one day a week, usually Wednesdays, at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company, injecting a sense of urgency into Blue Origin\u2019s activities at a time when NASA is pushing to return astronauts to the moon, space tourism is close to reality and the commercial space industry continues to grow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon may be what Bezos, who announced last week he would be stepping down as the company\u2019s chief executive, is best known for, but space is a lifelong passion. And if Bezos\u2019s career is to have a second act it would likely be focused largely on Blue Origin\u2019s mission of building a transportation network that would bring down the cost of space travel, allowing for what he\u2019s called a \u201cdynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space.\u201dAmazon was like a winning lottery ticket that allowed him to invest $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, he has said. Despite his many other ventures, including ownership of The Washington Post, achieving Blue Origin\u2019s goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing,\u201d he\u2019s said.Space is no passing fad. At his high school graduation, he gave a speech about going to space to save the Earth, which he said should be preserved as a national park. Today, he gives a similar version of that speech but has tweaked that line to say Earth should be zoned residential while all heavy industry should be moved into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos is a huge Star Trek fan, who had a cameo in the movie \u201cStar Trek Beyond\u201d and named a dog and a company after Star Trek characters. He was the president of the student space club at Princeton University, who devoured science fiction as a child and has been dedicated to making the far-fetched dreams of those novels reality \u2014 including building massive colonies in space.At first, Blue Origin was just a handful of people, including Stephenson, working in an industrial Seattle warehouse to see if there was any way to get to space other than using chemically fueled rockets. After studying several alternatives \u2014 even a massive whip that would fling objects into space \u2014 they decided that rockets were the best option, as long as they could be reused.Bucket list. Cast, crew and Justin Lin @trailingjohnson were amazing. #StarTrekBeyond https://t.co/VJ95D8pQeK\u2014 Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) July 20, 2016\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve heard him say in the past that he has been accused of starting an Internet company so that he could start a space company, and I think that summarizes his perception of things,\u201d former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cHis goal is to move humanity off the Earth \u2014 that\u2019s his fundamental objective. And to do that, he knows there\u2019s going to have to be transformational technology to drive down cost and increase access and those are things he\u2019s investing in.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Blue Origin has yet to send a spacecraft to orbit or fly humans. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon contract, and some have criticized the company for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Within six years of its founding, SpaceX sent a rocket to orbit, and last year sent two crews of astronauts to the International Space Station. It is moving fast on its next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, which Musk hopes will fly people to the moon and Mars.\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dJeff Bezos pulls back the curtain on his plans for spaceBlue Origin, by contrast, has been quiet and plodding like its mascot, the tortoise. The company\u2019s motto is Gradatim Ferociter or \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201d And one of Bezos\u2019s favorite sayings is, \u201cslow is smooth and smooth is fast.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother one might be, as Bezos once said, \u201cWe\u2019ll talk about Blue Origin when we have something to talk about.\u201dWary of the hyperbole that goes with high-profile space companies, Bezos once said, \u201cSpace is really easy to overhype. There are very few things in the world where the ration of attention you get to what you\u2019ve actually done, can be extreme.\u201dEver quiet and secretive, Blue Origin has grown tremendously in recent years. Its headquarters, now located in a Seattle suburb, has grown as has its manufacturing sites in Huntsville, Ala., as well as a massive campus just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.\u201cEvery time I go down there, there\u2019s a new, massive structure,\u201d Bridenstine said.Story continues below advertisementThe company is getting close to flying its first humans to the edge of space and back on its suborbital vehicle New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, whose 15-minute trip to space also went straight up and down. And it hopes to fly its massive New Glenn rocket to orbit this year, though that may very well slip into next year. That vehicle is named for John Glenn, the first American to reach orbit.AdvertisementIt also is developing a spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon \u2014 a project of particular interest for Bezos, who\u2019s called the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him when he watched it at age 5.On Tuesday, Blue Origin announced it had built a full-scale prototype of part of the lunar lander that would land on the moon, known as the descent element. The company is planning a test mission of its lunar lander spacecraft to the moon, without crews on board, ahead of a human landing there as part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a permanent presence on and around the moon. To build the lander, Blue Origin has teamed up with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to form what it calls the \u201cnational team.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe can begin to build up Artemis base camp,\u201d Steve Squyres, Blue Origin\u2019s chief scientist, said in a video released by the company. \u201cWe\u2019re not standing still at the national team.\u201d The plan, he said, is to \u201cenable long-term sustainability, getting America back to the moon, this time to stay.AdvertisementGetting to the moon is a dream of Bezos\u2019s. In 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Parts of the engines have gone on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.His goal now is to build a similarly massive rocket \u2014 but with boosters that can be reused, flying back to Earth to land on a ship at sea, the way SpaceX lands its Falcon 9 rockets. Building that infrastructure to space, he has said, would be his life\u2019s work.\u201cIf I\u2019m 80 years old and I\u2019m looking back on my life,\u201d he said during an event in 2016, \u201cand I can say that I put in place, with the help of the teammates at Blue Origin, the heavy-lifting infrastructure that made access to space cheap and inexpensive so that the next generation could have the entrepreneurial explosion like I saw on the Internet, I\u2019ll be a very happy 80-year-old.\u201d For years, Bezos has spent one day a week at Blue Origin, the space company he founded in 2000. Many in the space community hope that soon he will be spending more time at the company. Jeff Bezos\u2019s next act after Amazon: Getting his space company, Blue Origin, off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6095",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/27/space-events-in-2022/",
        "text": "The year 2021 will probably go down in the annals of space history as a turning point, a moment when ordinary citizens started leaving Earth on a regular basis. Multiple crews lifted off on several different spacecraft, and for a brief moment this month, there were a record 19 people in the weightless environment of space \u2014 and eight of them were private citizens. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut for all the achievements of 2021 \u2014 which include a rover landing on Mars, a small drone called Ingenuity flying in that planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the launch of the James Webb Space telescope, the most powerful space telescope ever \u2014 2022 could hold just as much promise, if not more.If 2021 was the year of the private space tourist, 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon, as NASA and the growing space industry seek to maintain the momentum that has been building over the past several years in what has amounted to a renaissance of exploration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA pair of massive rockets, both more powerful than the Saturn V that flew the Apollo astronauts to the moon, are getting ready to fly in 2022. Those launches would mark the first significant steps in NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2025 and create a campaign that would allow a permanent presence on and around the moon.After years of development, and billions of dollars spent, NASA is finally gearing up to launch its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, which are designed to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since Apollo. The first mission, known as Artemis I, is scheduled for March or April and would send Orion, without any crew on board, to orbit around the moon.If all goes well, it would be followed by Artemis II, in May 2024, which would again send Orion to orbit the moon, but this time with astronauts on board. NASA hopes a crew would be able to land on the moon by 2025, but that would depend on the success of previous flight tests and SpaceX\u2019s ability to get its Starship spacecraft up and running.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past year, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been moving feverishly toward the first orbital launch of Starship, the vehicle that won a $3 billion NASA contract this year to rendezvous with the Orion and transport NASA\u2019s astronauts to the lunar surface.Musk has said the company could attempt a launch in early 2022. Unlike the SLS, which would ditch its massive booster stage into the ocean after launch, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. After putting the Starship spacecraft into orbit, the Super Heavy booster would fly back to its launchpad where it would be caught by a pair of arms extended like chopsticks.Earlier this year, the company attempted suborbital hops, where the spacecraft launched to an altitude of about six miles, belly flopped back to Earth horizontally, then righted itself and refired its engines before touching down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral of the landing attempts ended in fireballs. But in May, the company pulled off a successful landing, fueling Musk\u2019s hope that the rocket could be used to transport people and cargo across the solar system.\u201cThe overarching goal of Starship is to be able to transport enough tonnage to the moon and Mars,\u201d he said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year. \u201cAnd to have a self-sustaining base on the moon and ultimately a self-sustaining city on Mars.\u201dAhead of an astronaut landing, NASA is planning to send science missions to the lunar surface. Those missions would also be carried out by contractors, hired by the space agency to deliver science experiments and technology demonstrations that NASA says would \u201chelp the agency study Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor and prepare for human landing missions.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first would be by Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company that is aiming to deliver science experiments in early 2022 and again later in the year. That second mission, to the south pole of the moon, would have a drill that would probe the lunar regolith for ice. Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh, is also planning to deliver payloads to the lunar surface under the NASA contract.Rocket Lab is also scheduled to launch a small satellite to the moon to serve as a precursor for human missions by testing the orbit for the space station, known as Gateway, that NASA hopes to send to the moon. Rocket Lab, which launches from its site in New Zealand, hopes to have its first launch from the United States in 2022 from the pad it uses at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.It also plans to attempt to recover a booster next year. But unlike SpaceX, which flies the first stages of its rockets back to landing sites on the ground or ships at sea, Rocket Lab intends to catch its relatively small booster under a parachute with a helicopter.2022 should also see the debut of a number of new rockets, including the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan rocket, which would be used by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites. Relativity Space, which uses a 3-D printer to manufacture its rockets, plans to first launch of its Terran 1 vehicle from Cape Canaveral in the coming months as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing also is looking to get back on track. 2021 was supposed to be the year it finally completed a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, which is being designed to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But once again it ran into trouble. At the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered software problems, forcing the aviation behemoth to cut the test flight short. The spacecraft finally returned to the launchpad this summer, but never got off the ground.This time, the company said the issue was hardware: 13 valves in the service module got stuck, forcing the company to bring the spacecraft back into its manufacturing facility. The company recently announced that it would have to swap out the service module. It\u2019s now looking to attempt to launch again sometime in May. If that goes well, a launch with astronauts on board would follow.The space station could see another new vehicle visit in 2022: Sierra Space\u2019s Dream Chaser, a spaceplane that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle. The company has been developing the winged vehicle for years with the hopes of one day flying astronauts. But for now, it has a contract from NASA to use it to deliver cargo and supplies to the space station. And it recently announced that it received a $1.4 billion investment that it said would help accelerate the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which delivered two crews of astronauts to the space station in 2021, is slated to continue flying crews there in 2022. It also would fly at least one mission, chartered by Axiom Space, in which private astronauts who are paying $55 million apiece would spend a little more than a week on the station.Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which flew three trips to the edge of space in 2021, plans to fly six or more suborbital flights in 2022. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic is hoping to complete its test campaign and start offering commercial service on its suborbital spaceplane for paying space tourists.While those flights go just past the edge of space to a few dozen miles high, NASA\u2019s scientists and engineers will be focused on a far more distant destination, a million miles from Earth. There, the James Webb Space Telescope would begin to unfurl itself in delicate maneuvers after it was launched on Christmas Day on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket. NASA says there are 344 potential \u201csingle-point failures\u201d and if anything goes wrong there is no way to send a repair crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if it works, the telescope would be able to capture light from more than 13 billion years ago as the beginning of the formation of the universe.The telescope has been called an Apollo moment for science and could start answering some of astronomy\u2019s biggest questions about how the universe began.\u201cThe whole point of this is to see the unseen universe,\u201d John M. Grunsfeld, former head of science at NASA, recently told The Post. \u201cJames Webb will be able to see phenomena that Hubble can\u2019t see, that ground-based telescopes can\u2019t see. What are we going to discover that we had no idea was there?\u201d 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon. 2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6096",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/27/space-events-in-2022/",
        "text": "The year 2021 will probably go down in the annals of space history as a turning point, a moment when ordinary citizens started leaving Earth on a regular basis. Multiple crews lifted off on several different spacecraft, and for a brief moment this month, there were a record 19 people in the weightless environment of space \u2014 and eight of them were private citizens. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut for all the achievements of 2021 \u2014 which include a rover landing on Mars, a small drone called Ingenuity flying in that planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the launch of the James Webb Space telescope, the most powerful space telescope ever \u2014 2022 could hold just as much promise, if not more.If 2021 was the year of the private space tourist, 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon, as NASA and the growing space industry seek to maintain the momentum that has been building over the past several years in what has amounted to a renaissance of exploration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA pair of massive rockets, both more powerful than the Saturn V that flew the Apollo astronauts to the moon, are getting ready to fly in 2022. Those launches would mark the first significant steps in NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2025 and create a campaign that would allow a permanent presence on and around the moon.After years of development, and billions of dollars spent, NASA is finally gearing up to launch its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, which are designed to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since Apollo. The first mission, known as Artemis I, is scheduled for March or April and would send Orion, without any crew on board, to orbit around the moon.If all goes well, it would be followed by Artemis II, in May 2024, which would again send Orion to orbit the moon, but this time with astronauts on board. NASA hopes a crew would be able to land on the moon by 2025, but that would depend on the success of previous flight tests and SpaceX\u2019s ability to get its Starship spacecraft up and running.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past year, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been moving feverishly toward the first orbital launch of Starship, the vehicle that won a $3 billion NASA contract this year to rendezvous with the Orion and transport NASA\u2019s astronauts to the lunar surface.Musk has said the company could attempt a launch in early 2022. Unlike the SLS, which would ditch its massive booster stage into the ocean after launch, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. After putting the Starship spacecraft into orbit, the Super Heavy booster would fly back to its launchpad where it would be caught by a pair of arms extended like chopsticks.Earlier this year, the company attempted suborbital hops, where the spacecraft launched to an altitude of about six miles, belly flopped back to Earth horizontally, then righted itself and refired its engines before touching down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral of the landing attempts ended in fireballs. But in May, the company pulled off a successful landing, fueling Musk\u2019s hope that the rocket could be used to transport people and cargo across the solar system.\u201cThe overarching goal of Starship is to be able to transport enough tonnage to the moon and Mars,\u201d he said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year. \u201cAnd to have a self-sustaining base on the moon and ultimately a self-sustaining city on Mars.\u201dAhead of an astronaut landing, NASA is planning to send science missions to the lunar surface. Those missions would also be carried out by contractors, hired by the space agency to deliver science experiments and technology demonstrations that NASA says would \u201chelp the agency study Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor and prepare for human landing missions.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first would be by Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company that is aiming to deliver science experiments in early 2022 and again later in the year. That second mission, to the south pole of the moon, would have a drill that would probe the lunar regolith for ice. Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh, is also planning to deliver payloads to the lunar surface under the NASA contract.Rocket Lab is also scheduled to launch a small satellite to the moon to serve as a precursor for human missions by testing the orbit for the space station, known as Gateway, that NASA hopes to send to the moon. Rocket Lab, which launches from its site in New Zealand, hopes to have its first launch from the United States in 2022 from the pad it uses at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.It also plans to attempt to recover a booster next year. But unlike SpaceX, which flies the first stages of its rockets back to landing sites on the ground or ships at sea, Rocket Lab intends to catch its relatively small booster under a parachute with a helicopter.2022 should also see the debut of a number of new rockets, including the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan rocket, which would be used by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites. Relativity Space, which uses a 3-D printer to manufacture its rockets, plans to first launch of its Terran 1 vehicle from Cape Canaveral in the coming months as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing also is looking to get back on track. 2021 was supposed to be the year it finally completed a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, which is being designed to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But once again it ran into trouble. At the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered software problems, forcing the aviation behemoth to cut the test flight short. The spacecraft finally returned to the launchpad this summer, but never got off the ground.This time, the company said the issue was hardware: 13 valves in the service module got stuck, forcing the company to bring the spacecraft back into its manufacturing facility. The company recently announced that it would have to swap out the service module. It\u2019s now looking to attempt to launch again sometime in May. If that goes well, a launch with astronauts on board would follow.The space station could see another new vehicle visit in 2022: Sierra Space\u2019s Dream Chaser, a spaceplane that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle. The company has been developing the winged vehicle for years with the hopes of one day flying astronauts. But for now, it has a contract from NASA to use it to deliver cargo and supplies to the space station. And it recently announced that it received a $1.4 billion investment that it said would help accelerate the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which delivered two crews of astronauts to the space station in 2021, is slated to continue flying crews there in 2022. It also would fly at least one mission, chartered by Axiom Space, in which private astronauts who are paying $55 million apiece would spend a little more than a week on the station.Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which flew three trips to the edge of space in 2021, plans to fly six or more suborbital flights in 2022. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic is hoping to complete its test campaign and start offering commercial service on its suborbital spaceplane for paying space tourists.While those flights go just past the edge of space to a few dozen miles high, NASA\u2019s scientists and engineers will be focused on a far more distant destination, a million miles from Earth. There, the James Webb Space Telescope would begin to unfurl itself in delicate maneuvers after it was launched on Christmas Day on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket. NASA says there are 344 potential \u201csingle-point failures\u201d and if anything goes wrong there is no way to send a repair crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if it works, the telescope would be able to capture light from more than 13 billion years ago as the beginning of the formation of the universe.The telescope has been called an Apollo moment for science and could start answering some of astronomy\u2019s biggest questions about how the universe began.\u201cThe whole point of this is to see the unseen universe,\u201d John M. Grunsfeld, former head of science at NASA, recently told The Post. \u201cJames Webb will be able to see phenomena that Hubble can\u2019t see, that ground-based telescopes can\u2019t see. What are we going to discover that we had no idea was there?\u201d 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon. 2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6097",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/27/space-events-in-2022/",
        "text": "The year 2021 will probably go down in the annals of space history as a turning point, a moment when ordinary citizens started leaving Earth on a regular basis. Multiple crews lifted off on several different spacecraft, and for a brief moment this month, there were a record 19 people in the weightless environment of space \u2014 and eight of them were private citizens. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut for all the achievements of 2021 \u2014 which include a rover landing on Mars, a small drone called Ingenuity flying in that planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the launch of the James Webb Space telescope, the most powerful space telescope ever \u2014 2022 could hold just as much promise, if not more.If 2021 was the year of the private space tourist, 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon, as NASA and the growing space industry seek to maintain the momentum that has been building over the past several years in what has amounted to a renaissance of exploration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA pair of massive rockets, both more powerful than the Saturn V that flew the Apollo astronauts to the moon, are getting ready to fly in 2022. Those launches would mark the first significant steps in NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2025 and create a campaign that would allow a permanent presence on and around the moon.After years of development, and billions of dollars spent, NASA is finally gearing up to launch its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, which are designed to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since Apollo. The first mission, known as Artemis I, is scheduled for March or April and would send Orion, without any crew on board, to orbit around the moon.If all goes well, it would be followed by Artemis II, in May 2024, which would again send Orion to orbit the moon, but this time with astronauts on board. NASA hopes a crew would be able to land on the moon by 2025, but that would depend on the success of previous flight tests and SpaceX\u2019s ability to get its Starship spacecraft up and running.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past year, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been moving feverishly toward the first orbital launch of Starship, the vehicle that won a $3 billion NASA contract this year to rendezvous with the Orion and transport NASA\u2019s astronauts to the lunar surface.Musk has said the company could attempt a launch in early 2022. Unlike the SLS, which would ditch its massive booster stage into the ocean after launch, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. After putting the Starship spacecraft into orbit, the Super Heavy booster would fly back to its launchpad where it would be caught by a pair of arms extended like chopsticks.Earlier this year, the company attempted suborbital hops, where the spacecraft launched to an altitude of about six miles, belly flopped back to Earth horizontally, then righted itself and refired its engines before touching down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral of the landing attempts ended in fireballs. But in May, the company pulled off a successful landing, fueling Musk\u2019s hope that the rocket could be used to transport people and cargo across the solar system.\u201cThe overarching goal of Starship is to be able to transport enough tonnage to the moon and Mars,\u201d he said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year. \u201cAnd to have a self-sustaining base on the moon and ultimately a self-sustaining city on Mars.\u201dAhead of an astronaut landing, NASA is planning to send science missions to the lunar surface. Those missions would also be carried out by contractors, hired by the space agency to deliver science experiments and technology demonstrations that NASA says would \u201chelp the agency study Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor and prepare for human landing missions.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first would be by Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company that is aiming to deliver science experiments in early 2022 and again later in the year. That second mission, to the south pole of the moon, would have a drill that would probe the lunar regolith for ice. Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh, is also planning to deliver payloads to the lunar surface under the NASA contract.Rocket Lab is also scheduled to launch a small satellite to the moon to serve as a precursor for human missions by testing the orbit for the space station, known as Gateway, that NASA hopes to send to the moon. Rocket Lab, which launches from its site in New Zealand, hopes to have its first launch from the United States in 2022 from the pad it uses at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.It also plans to attempt to recover a booster next year. But unlike SpaceX, which flies the first stages of its rockets back to landing sites on the ground or ships at sea, Rocket Lab intends to catch its relatively small booster under a parachute with a helicopter.2022 should also see the debut of a number of new rockets, including the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan rocket, which would be used by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites. Relativity Space, which uses a 3-D printer to manufacture its rockets, plans to first launch of its Terran 1 vehicle from Cape Canaveral in the coming months as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing also is looking to get back on track. 2021 was supposed to be the year it finally completed a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, which is being designed to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But once again it ran into trouble. At the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered software problems, forcing the aviation behemoth to cut the test flight short. The spacecraft finally returned to the launchpad this summer, but never got off the ground.This time, the company said the issue was hardware: 13 valves in the service module got stuck, forcing the company to bring the spacecraft back into its manufacturing facility. The company recently announced that it would have to swap out the service module. It\u2019s now looking to attempt to launch again sometime in May. If that goes well, a launch with astronauts on board would follow.The space station could see another new vehicle visit in 2022: Sierra Space\u2019s Dream Chaser, a spaceplane that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle. The company has been developing the winged vehicle for years with the hopes of one day flying astronauts. But for now, it has a contract from NASA to use it to deliver cargo and supplies to the space station. And it recently announced that it received a $1.4 billion investment that it said would help accelerate the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which delivered two crews of astronauts to the space station in 2021, is slated to continue flying crews there in 2022. It also would fly at least one mission, chartered by Axiom Space, in which private astronauts who are paying $55 million apiece would spend a little more than a week on the station.Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which flew three trips to the edge of space in 2021, plans to fly six or more suborbital flights in 2022. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic is hoping to complete its test campaign and start offering commercial service on its suborbital spaceplane for paying space tourists.While those flights go just past the edge of space to a few dozen miles high, NASA\u2019s scientists and engineers will be focused on a far more distant destination, a million miles from Earth. There, the James Webb Space Telescope would begin to unfurl itself in delicate maneuvers after it was launched on Christmas Day on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket. NASA says there are 344 potential \u201csingle-point failures\u201d and if anything goes wrong there is no way to send a repair crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if it works, the telescope would be able to capture light from more than 13 billion years ago as the beginning of the formation of the universe.The telescope has been called an Apollo moment for science and could start answering some of astronomy\u2019s biggest questions about how the universe began.\u201cThe whole point of this is to see the unseen universe,\u201d John M. Grunsfeld, former head of science at NASA, recently told The Post. \u201cJames Webb will be able to see phenomena that Hubble can\u2019t see, that ground-based telescopes can\u2019t see. What are we going to discover that we had no idea was there?\u201d 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon. 2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6098",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/27/space-events-in-2022/",
        "text": "The year 2021 will probably go down in the annals of space history as a turning point, a moment when ordinary citizens started leaving Earth on a regular basis. Multiple crews lifted off on several different spacecraft, and for a brief moment this month, there were a record 19 people in the weightless environment of space \u2014 and eight of them were private citizens. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut for all the achievements of 2021 \u2014 which include a rover landing on Mars, a small drone called Ingenuity flying in that planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the launch of the James Webb Space telescope, the most powerful space telescope ever \u2014 2022 could hold just as much promise, if not more.If 2021 was the year of the private space tourist, 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon, as NASA and the growing space industry seek to maintain the momentum that has been building over the past several years in what has amounted to a renaissance of exploration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA pair of massive rockets, both more powerful than the Saturn V that flew the Apollo astronauts to the moon, are getting ready to fly in 2022. Those launches would mark the first significant steps in NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2025 and create a campaign that would allow a permanent presence on and around the moon.After years of development, and billions of dollars spent, NASA is finally gearing up to launch its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, which are designed to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since Apollo. The first mission, known as Artemis I, is scheduled for March or April and would send Orion, without any crew on board, to orbit around the moon.If all goes well, it would be followed by Artemis II, in May 2024, which would again send Orion to orbit the moon, but this time with astronauts on board. NASA hopes a crew would be able to land on the moon by 2025, but that would depend on the success of previous flight tests and SpaceX\u2019s ability to get its Starship spacecraft up and running.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past year, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been moving feverishly toward the first orbital launch of Starship, the vehicle that won a $3 billion NASA contract this year to rendezvous with the Orion and transport NASA\u2019s astronauts to the lunar surface.Musk has said the company could attempt a launch in early 2022. Unlike the SLS, which would ditch its massive booster stage into the ocean after launch, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. After putting the Starship spacecraft into orbit, the Super Heavy booster would fly back to its launchpad where it would be caught by a pair of arms extended like chopsticks.Earlier this year, the company attempted suborbital hops, where the spacecraft launched to an altitude of about six miles, belly flopped back to Earth horizontally, then righted itself and refired its engines before touching down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral of the landing attempts ended in fireballs. But in May, the company pulled off a successful landing, fueling Musk\u2019s hope that the rocket could be used to transport people and cargo across the solar system.\u201cThe overarching goal of Starship is to be able to transport enough tonnage to the moon and Mars,\u201d he said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year. \u201cAnd to have a self-sustaining base on the moon and ultimately a self-sustaining city on Mars.\u201dAhead of an astronaut landing, NASA is planning to send science missions to the lunar surface. Those missions would also be carried out by contractors, hired by the space agency to deliver science experiments and technology demonstrations that NASA says would \u201chelp the agency study Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor and prepare for human landing missions.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first would be by Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company that is aiming to deliver science experiments in early 2022 and again later in the year. That second mission, to the south pole of the moon, would have a drill that would probe the lunar regolith for ice. Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh, is also planning to deliver payloads to the lunar surface under the NASA contract.Rocket Lab is also scheduled to launch a small satellite to the moon to serve as a precursor for human missions by testing the orbit for the space station, known as Gateway, that NASA hopes to send to the moon. Rocket Lab, which launches from its site in New Zealand, hopes to have its first launch from the United States in 2022 from the pad it uses at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.It also plans to attempt to recover a booster next year. But unlike SpaceX, which flies the first stages of its rockets back to landing sites on the ground or ships at sea, Rocket Lab intends to catch its relatively small booster under a parachute with a helicopter.2022 should also see the debut of a number of new rockets, including the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan rocket, which would be used by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites. Relativity Space, which uses a 3-D printer to manufacture its rockets, plans to first launch of its Terran 1 vehicle from Cape Canaveral in the coming months as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing also is looking to get back on track. 2021 was supposed to be the year it finally completed a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, which is being designed to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But once again it ran into trouble. At the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered software problems, forcing the aviation behemoth to cut the test flight short. The spacecraft finally returned to the launchpad this summer, but never got off the ground.This time, the company said the issue was hardware: 13 valves in the service module got stuck, forcing the company to bring the spacecraft back into its manufacturing facility. The company recently announced that it would have to swap out the service module. It\u2019s now looking to attempt to launch again sometime in May. If that goes well, a launch with astronauts on board would follow.The space station could see another new vehicle visit in 2022: Sierra Space\u2019s Dream Chaser, a spaceplane that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle. The company has been developing the winged vehicle for years with the hopes of one day flying astronauts. But for now, it has a contract from NASA to use it to deliver cargo and supplies to the space station. And it recently announced that it received a $1.4 billion investment that it said would help accelerate the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which delivered two crews of astronauts to the space station in 2021, is slated to continue flying crews there in 2022. It also would fly at least one mission, chartered by Axiom Space, in which private astronauts who are paying $55 million apiece would spend a little more than a week on the station.Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which flew three trips to the edge of space in 2021, plans to fly six or more suborbital flights in 2022. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic is hoping to complete its test campaign and start offering commercial service on its suborbital spaceplane for paying space tourists.While those flights go just past the edge of space to a few dozen miles high, NASA\u2019s scientists and engineers will be focused on a far more distant destination, a million miles from Earth. There, the James Webb Space Telescope would begin to unfurl itself in delicate maneuvers after it was launched on Christmas Day on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket. NASA says there are 344 potential \u201csingle-point failures\u201d and if anything goes wrong there is no way to send a repair crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if it works, the telescope would be able to capture light from more than 13 billion years ago as the beginning of the formation of the universe.The telescope has been called an Apollo moment for science and could start answering some of astronomy\u2019s biggest questions about how the universe began.\u201cThe whole point of this is to see the unseen universe,\u201d John M. Grunsfeld, former head of science at NASA, recently told The Post. \u201cJames Webb will be able to see phenomena that Hubble can\u2019t see, that ground-based telescopes can\u2019t see. What are we going to discover that we had no idea was there?\u201d 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon. 2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6099",
        "date": "2021-12-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/27/space-events-in-2022/",
        "text": "The year 2021 will probably go down in the annals of space history as a turning point, a moment when ordinary citizens started leaving Earth on a regular basis. Multiple crews lifted off on several different spacecraft, and for a brief moment this month, there were a record 19 people in the weightless environment of space \u2014 and eight of them were private citizens. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut for all the achievements of 2021 \u2014 which include a rover landing on Mars, a small drone called Ingenuity flying in that planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the launch of the James Webb Space telescope, the most powerful space telescope ever \u2014 2022 could hold just as much promise, if not more.If 2021 was the year of the private space tourist, 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon, as NASA and the growing space industry seek to maintain the momentum that has been building over the past several years in what has amounted to a renaissance of exploration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA pair of massive rockets, both more powerful than the Saturn V that flew the Apollo astronauts to the moon, are getting ready to fly in 2022. Those launches would mark the first significant steps in NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2025 and create a campaign that would allow a permanent presence on and around the moon.After years of development, and billions of dollars spent, NASA is finally gearing up to launch its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule, which are designed to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since Apollo. The first mission, known as Artemis I, is scheduled for March or April and would send Orion, without any crew on board, to orbit around the moon.If all goes well, it would be followed by Artemis II, in May 2024, which would again send Orion to orbit the moon, but this time with astronauts on board. NASA hopes a crew would be able to land on the moon by 2025, but that would depend on the success of previous flight tests and SpaceX\u2019s ability to get its Starship spacecraft up and running.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past year, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been moving feverishly toward the first orbital launch of Starship, the vehicle that won a $3 billion NASA contract this year to rendezvous with the Orion and transport NASA\u2019s astronauts to the lunar surface.Musk has said the company could attempt a launch in early 2022. Unlike the SLS, which would ditch its massive booster stage into the ocean after launch, Starship is designed to be fully reusable. After putting the Starship spacecraft into orbit, the Super Heavy booster would fly back to its launchpad where it would be caught by a pair of arms extended like chopsticks.Earlier this year, the company attempted suborbital hops, where the spacecraft launched to an altitude of about six miles, belly flopped back to Earth horizontally, then righted itself and refired its engines before touching down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSeveral of the landing attempts ended in fireballs. But in May, the company pulled off a successful landing, fueling Musk\u2019s hope that the rocket could be used to transport people and cargo across the solar system.\u201cThe overarching goal of Starship is to be able to transport enough tonnage to the moon and Mars,\u201d he said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year. \u201cAnd to have a self-sustaining base on the moon and ultimately a self-sustaining city on Mars.\u201dAhead of an astronaut landing, NASA is planning to send science missions to the lunar surface. Those missions would also be carried out by contractors, hired by the space agency to deliver science experiments and technology demonstrations that NASA says would \u201chelp the agency study Earth\u2019s nearest neighbor and prepare for human landing missions.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first would be by Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company that is aiming to deliver science experiments in early 2022 and again later in the year. That second mission, to the south pole of the moon, would have a drill that would probe the lunar regolith for ice. Astrobotic, based in Pittsburgh, is also planning to deliver payloads to the lunar surface under the NASA contract.Rocket Lab is also scheduled to launch a small satellite to the moon to serve as a precursor for human missions by testing the orbit for the space station, known as Gateway, that NASA hopes to send to the moon. Rocket Lab, which launches from its site in New Zealand, hopes to have its first launch from the United States in 2022 from the pad it uses at NASA\u2019s facility on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore.It also plans to attempt to recover a booster next year. But unlike SpaceX, which flies the first stages of its rockets back to landing sites on the ground or ships at sea, Rocket Lab intends to catch its relatively small booster under a parachute with a helicopter.2022 should also see the debut of a number of new rockets, including the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Vulcan rocket, which would be used by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites. Relativity Space, which uses a 3-D printer to manufacture its rockets, plans to first launch of its Terran 1 vehicle from Cape Canaveral in the coming months as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing also is looking to get back on track. 2021 was supposed to be the year it finally completed a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, which is being designed to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But once again it ran into trouble. At the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered software problems, forcing the aviation behemoth to cut the test flight short. The spacecraft finally returned to the launchpad this summer, but never got off the ground.This time, the company said the issue was hardware: 13 valves in the service module got stuck, forcing the company to bring the spacecraft back into its manufacturing facility. The company recently announced that it would have to swap out the service module. It\u2019s now looking to attempt to launch again sometime in May. If that goes well, a launch with astronauts on board would follow.The space station could see another new vehicle visit in 2022: Sierra Space\u2019s Dream Chaser, a spaceplane that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle. The company has been developing the winged vehicle for years with the hopes of one day flying astronauts. But for now, it has a contract from NASA to use it to deliver cargo and supplies to the space station. And it recently announced that it received a $1.4 billion investment that it said would help accelerate the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which delivered two crews of astronauts to the space station in 2021, is slated to continue flying crews there in 2022. It also would fly at least one mission, chartered by Axiom Space, in which private astronauts who are paying $55 million apiece would spend a little more than a week on the station.Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which flew three trips to the edge of space in 2021, plans to fly six or more suborbital flights in 2022. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic is hoping to complete its test campaign and start offering commercial service on its suborbital spaceplane for paying space tourists.While those flights go just past the edge of space to a few dozen miles high, NASA\u2019s scientists and engineers will be focused on a far more distant destination, a million miles from Earth. There, the James Webb Space Telescope would begin to unfurl itself in delicate maneuvers after it was launched on Christmas Day on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket. NASA says there are 344 potential \u201csingle-point failures\u201d and if anything goes wrong there is no way to send a repair crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if it works, the telescope would be able to capture light from more than 13 billion years ago as the beginning of the formation of the universe.The telescope has been called an Apollo moment for science and could start answering some of astronomy\u2019s biggest questions about how the universe began.\u201cThe whole point of this is to see the unseen universe,\u201d John M. Grunsfeld, former head of science at NASA, recently told The Post. \u201cJames Webb will be able to see phenomena that Hubble can\u2019t see, that ground-based telescopes can\u2019t see. What are we going to discover that we had no idea was there?\u201d 2022 could be marked by the first steps toward a return to the moon. 2021 was a huge year for space exploration. 2022 could be even bigger.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A secretive space drone just broke its own orbit record, and almost no one knows what it\u2019s doing (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6100",
        "date": "2019-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/27/secretive-space-drone-just-broke-its-own-orbit-record-almost-no-one-knows-what-its-doing/",
        "text": "The X-37B \u2014 the Air Force\u2019s ultra-secretive, astronaut-free spacecraft that looks like a miniaturized space shuttle \u2014 just broke its own flight record of 719 days in continuous orbit.What, exactly, the experimental spacecraft has been doing for almost two years straight has puzzled analysts who can only speculate about the Pentagon\u2019s ambitions over the low-orbit vehicle. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Air Force has said, \u201cThe primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold: reusable spacecraft technologies for America\u2019s future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.\u201dPretty clear, right?In September 2017, defense officials said the X-37B\u2019s mission \u2014 its fifth since 2010 \u2014 would demonstrate the potential for getting to space quickly and \u201con-orbit testing of emerging space technologies\u201d while testing experimental electronics in zero gravity.U.S. military lands its X-37B robotic space plane at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, ending a classified 22-month mission that marked the third in Earth orbit for the experimental program. (Reuters)Its playground is an important one, and may provide clues to the spacecraft\u2019s true mission and what payload it may carry. Low Earth orbit is where the International Space Station circumnavigates the planet, and where many military and commercial satellites are situated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs future conflict increasingly has a dimension in space, war outside our atmosphere could be focused on killing vital surveillance and navigational satellites to give terrestrial armies an advantage.Scaling down big, unwieldy satellites to smaller, equally capable satellites to get lower in orbit makes a lot of sense when you need higher resolution images of, say, missile launch sites in North Korea or Chinese operations in contested areas of the South China Sea.Lower orbit requires more maneuverability, which means more fuel, Air and Space magazine reported. And the X-37B is using Hall thrusters that use an electric field to accelerate xenon propellant, which means more intricate movements can be done without relying on a lot of fuel on board.Story continues below advertisementThat application would be prized on reconnaissance satellites that need to stay low for years, the magazine reported.What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from spaceThe X-37B, a diminutive spacecraft with less than a 15-foot wingspan, has been the subject of intense speculation since its initial mission in 2010. And the Air Force has relied on SpaceX to get it to space. In 2017, the company launched the spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket.AdvertisementAir Force officials have been notoriously tight-lipped about the capabilities and mission of the classified X-37B program, and typically have dumped laundry lists of densely worded objectives onto reporters and analysts.\u201cTechnologies being tested in the program include advanced guidance, navigation and control, thermal protection systems, avionics, high temperature structures and seals, conformal reusable insulation, lightweight electromechanical flight systems, advanced propulsion systems, advanced materials and autonomous orbital flight, reentry and landing,\u201d Air Force spokesman Maj. William A. Russell said in a statement.Officials have touted the spacecraft\u2019s ability to get experiments back to Earth. That was possible with NASA\u2019s Shuttle Orbiter, Russell said. But the X-37B\u2019s stamina means it can stay in space much longer.\u201cThere are no other space platforms providing the performance and flexibilities to advance technologies in a way that allows the scientists and engineers to recover their experiments,\u201d Russell said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe X-37B is clearly state of the art while up in space. But on the Earth, it gets around a little more modestly.In 2017, when the previous mission\u2019s spacecraft landed, the Air Force released some of the few public images of the X-37B.The photos showed the secret vehicle guided by a particular land-propulsion system \u2014 a white Chevrolet pickup.Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space The Air Force X-37B is classified, but analysts have speculated its development heralds big advancements for reconnaissance satellites. A secretive space drone just broke its own orbit record, and almost no one knows what it\u2019s doing",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "A secretive space drone just broke its own orbit record, and almost no one knows what it\u2019s doing (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6101",
        "date": "2019-08-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/27/secretive-space-drone-just-broke-its-own-orbit-record-almost-no-one-knows-what-its-doing/",
        "text": "The X-37B \u2014 the Air Force\u2019s ultra-secretive, astronaut-free spacecraft that looks like a miniaturized space shuttle \u2014 just broke its own flight record of 719 days in continuous orbit.What, exactly, the experimental spacecraft has been doing for almost two years straight has puzzled analysts who can only speculate about the Pentagon\u2019s ambitions over the low-orbit vehicle. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Air Force has said, \u201cThe primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold: reusable spacecraft technologies for America\u2019s future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.\u201dPretty clear, right?In September 2017, defense officials said the X-37B\u2019s mission \u2014 its fifth since 2010 \u2014 would demonstrate the potential for getting to space quickly and \u201con-orbit testing of emerging space technologies\u201d while testing experimental electronics in zero gravity.U.S. military lands its X-37B robotic space plane at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, ending a classified 22-month mission that marked the third in Earth orbit for the experimental program. (Reuters)Its playground is an important one, and may provide clues to the spacecraft\u2019s true mission and what payload it may carry. Low Earth orbit is where the International Space Station circumnavigates the planet, and where many military and commercial satellites are situated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs future conflict increasingly has a dimension in space, war outside our atmosphere could be focused on killing vital surveillance and navigational satellites to give terrestrial armies an advantage.Scaling down big, unwieldy satellites to smaller, equally capable satellites to get lower in orbit makes a lot of sense when you need higher resolution images of, say, missile launch sites in North Korea or Chinese operations in contested areas of the South China Sea.Lower orbit requires more maneuverability, which means more fuel, Air and Space magazine reported. And the X-37B is using Hall thrusters that use an electric field to accelerate xenon propellant, which means more intricate movements can be done without relying on a lot of fuel on board.Story continues below advertisementThat application would be prized on reconnaissance satellites that need to stay low for years, the magazine reported.What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from spaceThe X-37B, a diminutive spacecraft with less than a 15-foot wingspan, has been the subject of intense speculation since its initial mission in 2010. And the Air Force has relied on SpaceX to get it to space. In 2017, the company launched the spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket.AdvertisementAir Force officials have been notoriously tight-lipped about the capabilities and mission of the classified X-37B program, and typically have dumped laundry lists of densely worded objectives onto reporters and analysts.\u201cTechnologies being tested in the program include advanced guidance, navigation and control, thermal protection systems, avionics, high temperature structures and seals, conformal reusable insulation, lightweight electromechanical flight systems, advanced propulsion systems, advanced materials and autonomous orbital flight, reentry and landing,\u201d Air Force spokesman Maj. William A. Russell said in a statement.Officials have touted the spacecraft\u2019s ability to get experiments back to Earth. That was possible with NASA\u2019s Shuttle Orbiter, Russell said. But the X-37B\u2019s stamina means it can stay in space much longer.\u201cThere are no other space platforms providing the performance and flexibilities to advance technologies in a way that allows the scientists and engineers to recover their experiments,\u201d Russell said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe X-37B is clearly state of the art while up in space. But on the Earth, it gets around a little more modestly.In 2017, when the previous mission\u2019s spacecraft landed, the Air Force released some of the few public images of the X-37B.The photos showed the secret vehicle guided by a particular land-propulsion system \u2014 a white Chevrolet pickup.Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space The Air Force X-37B is classified, but analysts have speculated its development heralds big advancements for reconnaissance satellites. A secretive space drone just broke its own orbit record, and almost no one knows what it\u2019s doing",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Pence names which astronauts will go to the moon, some see a political ploy (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6102",
        "date": "2020-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/09/pence-space-council-artemis/",
        "text": "The White House\u2019s last effort to leave an imprint on national space policy came in a Trumpian, chest-thumping meeting of the National Space Council on Wednesday that ended with a theatrical flourish when Vice President Pence introduced a group of 18 astronauts he said would participate in NASA\u2019s program to return to the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt really is amazing to think that the next man and the first woman on the moon are among the names that we just read and they may be standing in the room with us right now,\u201d Pence said during the meeting at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The astronaut unveiling put a human face on the program and was reminiscent of the announcement of the Mercury 7 astronauts who led NASA into space at the dawn of the Space Age. It also showcased a more diverse astronaut corps \u2014 the group was evenly divided between men and women \u2014 as part of the Trump administration\u2019s pledge to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the group is so large, and the mission timeline so uncertain that the event, the last meeting of the National Space Council, was criticized as being big on political theater \u2014 lots of flags, national pride and lofty rhetoric \u2014 but low on substance at a time when a new presidential administration is about to take over the White House.Still, despite having just a few weeks left in office, Pence, the chair of the council, used the meeting as something of a victory lap, hearing from various members of the council about their progress and proclaiming that under President Trump, \u201cAmerica is leading in space once again.\u201dSpace did get a significant boost from the Trump administration, which made it a priority from its first days in office \u2014 it resurrected the Space Council and created the Space Force as the first new branch of the military since the Air Force was created in 1947. The Trump administration also increased NASA\u2019s budget and saw NASA\u2019s astronauts return to space from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump has said NASA was \u201cdead as a doornail\u201d before he took office. And Pence on Wednesday said the resumption of human spaceflight from U.S. soil was \u201cthe result of real leadership and renewed American leadership in space.\u201d But that program began under the Obama administration, and some in the space community felt the council meeting was an unseemly political display that violated the space community\u2019s long-standing maxim to be as bipartisan as possible.\u201cListening to the National Space Council meeting, you might get the mistaken impression that Trump invented space policy,\u201d Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, wrote on Twitter.Trump campaign pulls ad about SpaceX launch after former astronaut calls it political propagandaThe hallmark of Trump\u2019s space policy has been the Artemis program, an effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Initially, NASA was aiming to do that by 2028, but last year the White House directed the agency to move up that timeline to 2024, a date that increasingly seems unlikely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe incoming Biden administration hasn\u2019t talked much at all about space policy, but many Democrats have said it will likely continue the Artemis program while injecting what they say is a more realistic timeline. They intend to take a hard look at the program, which has not received anywhere near the congressional funding NASA says it needs while the rocket and spacecraft NASA would use to get to the moon have suffered delays and setbacks for years.Unveiling a host of astronauts, then, was premature, according to many in the space industry, who bristled at the political nature of the council meeting and felt the astronauts were being used as props.\u201cIt\u2019s in the last month of the administration when you know this whole program, its schedule, is going to be reexamined by the new boss. I think the gracious thing to do is to let the new administration come in and show bipartisan support for Artemis,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a veteran NASA astronaut who is now a professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California. \u201cIf you\u2019re really interested in the continuation of the program, why not let the next group do it? But this administration is not known for being gracious.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe pageantry around the astronauts could put pressure on the incoming Biden team to continue the program.\u201cThis was a political victory lap to cement in the wins under the Trump administration,\u201d Weeden said. \u201cI also think they\u2019re trying to ensure as much as possible that the Biden administration continues it.\u201dA spokesman for the Biden transition team declined to comment.During the meeting, Pence read the names of the astronauts, a catalogue of impressive overachievers, and a mix of veterans and rookies that he said represent NASA\u2019s best and America\u2019s future. Two \u2014 Victor Glover and Kate Rubins \u2014 are currently on the International Space Station. Another, Nicole Mann, is already assigned to another flight. Of the group, five astronauts were present at the Kennedy Space Center for the meeting, wearing their blue flight suits and protective masks, but said nothing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was not a flight assignment. The astronauts still don\u2019t know what missions they would fly on, if any, or when they would be. And the fact that there was such a large group made the announcement \u201cvirtually meaningless,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cThis was a branding exercise more than anything else.\u201dBut he added that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has done a \u201cgreat job of building excitement for Artemis and NASA in general. And he should be commended for that.\u201d That excitement includes international partners, Weeden said. \u201cThe Artemis program is generating a lot of excitement,\u201d he said, especially from the international partners who have signed up to partner with NASA. \u201cWe\u2019ve been contacted by several countries that are concerned that the Biden administration might cancel or disrupt programs they\u2019ve already made commitments to.\u201d \u201cListening to the National Space Council meeting, you might get the mistaken impression that Trump invented space policy,\u201d Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, wrote on Twitter. As Pence names which astronauts will go to the moon, some see a political ploy",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Pence names which astronauts will go to the moon, some see a political ploy (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6103",
        "date": "2020-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/09/pence-space-council-artemis/",
        "text": "The White House\u2019s last effort to leave an imprint on national space policy came in a Trumpian, chest-thumping meeting of the National Space Council on Wednesday that ended with a theatrical flourish when Vice President Pence introduced a group of 18 astronauts he said would participate in NASA\u2019s program to return to the moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt really is amazing to think that the next man and the first woman on the moon are among the names that we just read and they may be standing in the room with us right now,\u201d Pence said during the meeting at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.The astronaut unveiling put a human face on the program and was reminiscent of the announcement of the Mercury 7 astronauts who led NASA into space at the dawn of the Space Age. It also showcased a more diverse astronaut corps \u2014 the group was evenly divided between men and women \u2014 as part of the Trump administration\u2019s pledge to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the group is so large, and the mission timeline so uncertain that the event, the last meeting of the National Space Council, was criticized as being big on political theater \u2014 lots of flags, national pride and lofty rhetoric \u2014 but low on substance at a time when a new presidential administration is about to take over the White House.Still, despite having just a few weeks left in office, Pence, the chair of the council, used the meeting as something of a victory lap, hearing from various members of the council about their progress and proclaiming that under President Trump, \u201cAmerica is leading in space once again.\u201dSpace did get a significant boost from the Trump administration, which made it a priority from its first days in office \u2014 it resurrected the Space Council and created the Space Force as the first new branch of the military since the Air Force was created in 1947. The Trump administration also increased NASA\u2019s budget and saw NASA\u2019s astronauts return to space from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump has said NASA was \u201cdead as a doornail\u201d before he took office. And Pence on Wednesday said the resumption of human spaceflight from U.S. soil was \u201cthe result of real leadership and renewed American leadership in space.\u201d But that program began under the Obama administration, and some in the space community felt the council meeting was an unseemly political display that violated the space community\u2019s long-standing maxim to be as bipartisan as possible.\u201cListening to the National Space Council meeting, you might get the mistaken impression that Trump invented space policy,\u201d Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, wrote on Twitter.Trump campaign pulls ad about SpaceX launch after former astronaut calls it political propagandaThe hallmark of Trump\u2019s space policy has been the Artemis program, an effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. Initially, NASA was aiming to do that by 2028, but last year the White House directed the agency to move up that timeline to 2024, a date that increasingly seems unlikely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe incoming Biden administration hasn\u2019t talked much at all about space policy, but many Democrats have said it will likely continue the Artemis program while injecting what they say is a more realistic timeline. They intend to take a hard look at the program, which has not received anywhere near the congressional funding NASA says it needs while the rocket and spacecraft NASA would use to get to the moon have suffered delays and setbacks for years.Unveiling a host of astronauts, then, was premature, according to many in the space industry, who bristled at the political nature of the council meeting and felt the astronauts were being used as props.\u201cIt\u2019s in the last month of the administration when you know this whole program, its schedule, is going to be reexamined by the new boss. I think the gracious thing to do is to let the new administration come in and show bipartisan support for Artemis,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a veteran NASA astronaut who is now a professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California. \u201cIf you\u2019re really interested in the continuation of the program, why not let the next group do it? But this administration is not known for being gracious.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe pageantry around the astronauts could put pressure on the incoming Biden team to continue the program.\u201cThis was a political victory lap to cement in the wins under the Trump administration,\u201d Weeden said. \u201cI also think they\u2019re trying to ensure as much as possible that the Biden administration continues it.\u201dA spokesman for the Biden transition team declined to comment.During the meeting, Pence read the names of the astronauts, a catalogue of impressive overachievers, and a mix of veterans and rookies that he said represent NASA\u2019s best and America\u2019s future. Two \u2014 Victor Glover and Kate Rubins \u2014 are currently on the International Space Station. Another, Nicole Mann, is already assigned to another flight. Of the group, five astronauts were present at the Kennedy Space Center for the meeting, wearing their blue flight suits and protective masks, but said nothing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis was not a flight assignment. The astronauts still don\u2019t know what missions they would fly on, if any, or when they would be. And the fact that there was such a large group made the announcement \u201cvirtually meaningless,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cThis was a branding exercise more than anything else.\u201dBut he added that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has done a \u201cgreat job of building excitement for Artemis and NASA in general. And he should be commended for that.\u201d That excitement includes international partners, Weeden said. \u201cThe Artemis program is generating a lot of excitement,\u201d he said, especially from the international partners who have signed up to partner with NASA. \u201cWe\u2019ve been contacted by several countries that are concerned that the Biden administration might cancel or disrupt programs they\u2019ve already made commitments to.\u201d \u201cListening to the National Space Council meeting, you might get the mistaken impression that Trump invented space policy,\u201d Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, wrote on Twitter. As Pence names which astronauts will go to the moon, some see a political ploy",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s White House pushes measure to harden satellites against cyber threats (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6104",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/04/satellites-hacking-trump-defense/",
        "text": "The White House on Friday released a new cybersecurity policy directed at better protecting vital systems in space that could be vulnerable to attack.The directive, the fifth from the National Space Council during the Trump administration, comes as space is increasingly viewed as a war-fighting domain. Potential adversaries, such as China and Russia as well as individual hackers, have demonstrated the ability to interfere with satellites and the associated ground systems, including the hack of a NOAA weather satellite in 2014. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOver the past years, the Pentagon has become increasingly reliant on satellites to provide missile defense, secure communications, reconnaissance and global positioning systems. But those system are vulnerable to attack\u2014not just by missiles that could knock them out but by an array of other means, including cyber attacks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCyberthreats happen all the time, not just from China but also from non-state actors,\u201d a senior administration official, not authorized to speak publicly told reporters. \u201cSo we need to secure our systems against a wide, wide range of potential threats. The threats are only getting more serious.\u201dThe policy, however, lays out a series of broad principles \u2014 but not enforceable regulations \u2014 that encourage satellite operators to better harden their systems, in space and on the ground, against attacks and to abide by best practices. In many cases, the practices, such as encrypting satellite to ground links, are already in use.But the policy highlights a vulnerability space and national security experts have been warning about for years. And it gives the issue the weight of the White House, which cast the measure as a broader attempt to combat cyberattacks, at a time when hackers are threatening to disrupt many facets of life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a report issued last year, the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, said that the \u201cvulnerability of satellites and other space assets to cyberattack is often overlooked in wider discussions of cyber threats to critical national infrastructure.\u201dIt said that generally \u201cspacecraft have been considered relatively safe from cyber intrusions; however, recent emerging threats have brought spacecraft into play as a direct target of an adversary.\u201dIn 2014, for example, American officials said China hacked a NOAA weather satellite. The hack only had a limited impact on its weather forecasts. But it showed how vulnerable the system was and how another nation could take advantage of it.Story continues below advertisementLike cyberattacks on the ground, hacks of satellites can have significant consequences, even allowing an adversary to seize control of a satellite, according to a report released earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Advertisement\u201cA cyberattack on space systems can result in data loss, widespread disruptions, and even permanent loss of a satellite,\u201d the report said.In addition to national security, commerce and everyday life in the United States has become bound to space \u2014 from weather forecasts, to television, as well as the little blue GPS dot on many people\u2019s phones that tracks their location as they navigate through a city. And so the White House said it needed to act.\u201cFrom communications to weather monitoring, Americans rely on capabilities provided by space systems in everyday life,\" Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in a statement. \u201cPresident Trump\u2019s directive ensures the U.S. Government promotes practices to protect American space systems and capabilities from cyber vulnerabilities and malicious threats.\u201d The directive comes as space is increasingly viewed as a war-fighting domain. Trump\u2019s White House pushes measure to harden satellites against cyber threats",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6105",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/13/trump-wants-an-additional-billion-nasas-audacious-moon-mission/",
        "text": "The White House is asking Congress for an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s budget next year as the space agency attempts to return humans to the moon by 2024.The announcement comes about six weeks after Vice President Pence called for an accelerated program to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since the last Apollo lunar landing in 1972. But since the White House issued that bold mandate, NASA has released few details about how it would achieve it or what the program would cost. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.In a tweet Monday evening, President Trump wrote: \u201cUnder my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe money would come from a surplus in Pell Grant money, a federal program used to help students pay for college, according to the Associated Press.AdvertisementIt was unclear what the reaction in Congress would be. Democrats in the House have been particularly critical of the White House\u2019s plan, calling it a political gambit timed to align with the elections calendar.\u201cThe lack of planning evident so far is no way to run our nation\u2019s human space exploration program,\u201d Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), chairwoman of a subcommittee that oversees NASA, said at a recent hearing. \u201cThe 2024 missive left NASA in a tizzy \u2014 scrambling to develop a plan and hastening to pull together a budget amendment that still have not been delivered to Congress; and upending groundwork with international partners on future exploration goals.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s announcement took many inside NASA by surprise. The agency had been aiming to get humans to the lunar surface by 2028. And in March, the White House submitted a budget request totaling just over $21 billion for NASA, a nearly $500 million cut from what the agency received this year.AdvertisementSince the White House called for NASA to speed up the timeline, the space agency has been scrambling to figure out how it could pull off such a complicated mission in a short amount of time. At the moment, NASA does not have the ability to fly astronauts anywhere in space. Instead, it pays Russia more than $80 million a seat to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station.As part of the amended budget request, the White House included $1 billion to begin the development of a lander capable of getting astronauts to the surface of the moon. An additional $651 million would go to help speed development of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, built largely by Boeing, and the Orion spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin.Story continues below advertisementIt would also boost technologies to help the agency explore the lunar poles with robots ahead of a human mission, using solar energy as a propulsion source and converting ice found under the moon\u2019s crust into water.AdvertisementUse of the Pell Grant money to fund the moon mission, dubbed Aretmis, would \"cut any spending for for Pell Grant programs as the budget continues to ensure all students will get their full Pell Grant and keeps the program on sound fiscal footing,\u201d Office of Management and Budget spokesman Wesley Denton said in a statement, according to the AP.After Trump\u2019s announcement Monday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted: \u201cThis is the boost @NASA needs to move forward with putting the next man and the first woman on the Moon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut NASA officials warned that the agency would need additional money in the future to meet the goal.\u201cThis additional investment is a down payment on NASA\u2019s effort to land humans on the moon by 2024,\u201d Bridenstine said in a call with reporters Monday evening. \u201cIn the coming years, we will need additional funds. This is a good amount that gets us out of the gate in a very strong fashion and sets us up for the future.\u201dAdvertisementInstead of going directly to the surface of the moon, as it did during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early \u201970s, NASA is instead looking to build a more permanent presence by building an orbiting outpost known as the Gateway.Story continues below advertisementWhile that is a more ambitious endeavor, Bridenstine has said the agency wants to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay. Still, to meet the five-year goal, NASA has said it would scale back the scope of the Gateway, at least initially. To accommodate getting humans to the surface quickly, the budget amendment proposes cutting $321 million from that project and shifting \u201cpotential Gateway capabilities into the future.\u201dIt is not clear what the reaction in Congress would be. Many would likely bristle against the notion that a popular student aide program is being used. Bridenstine said that he had been contacting key congressional leaders but that it was \u201cnot easy to get a hold of everyone\u201d on short notice.Advertisement\u201cWe will see various reactions\u201d from Congress, he said. \u201cBut I will tell you, when we talk about what NASA is trying to achieve, there is a lot of excitement.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA plans to launch its massive SLS rocket for the first time as early as next year, without astronauts. That would be followed by another mission, with astronauts in the Orion crew capsule, for a trip around the moon. The third mission, to come in 2024, would send a pair of astronauts, one woman and one man, to the Gateway and then to the lunar surface.Shortly after Pence\u2019s announcement, in which he said astronauts would get to the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d there was talk that the White House would ask for a huge amount of additional funding, as much as $8 billion a year.But at a recent congressional hearing, Bridenstine disputed that.NASA rocket becomes Boeing's latest headache as Trump demands moon missionThe White House\u2019s amended budget request comes a week after Jeff Bezos unveiled a lunar lander that his space company, Blue Origin, has pitched NASA to get cargo and eventually people to the lunar surface. Many other companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the Sierra Nevada Corporation, are also vying to build various parts of the Gateway. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The White House will ask Congress for the additional funding for NASA\u2019s budget next year as the space agency attempts to return humans to the moon within five years. Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6106",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/13/trump-wants-an-additional-billion-nasas-audacious-moon-mission/",
        "text": "The White House is asking Congress for an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s budget next year as the space agency attempts to return humans to the moon by 2024.The announcement comes about six weeks after Vice President Pence called for an accelerated program to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since the last Apollo lunar landing in 1972. But since the White House issued that bold mandate, NASA has released few details about how it would achieve it or what the program would cost. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.In a tweet Monday evening, President Trump wrote: \u201cUnder my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe money would come from a surplus in Pell Grant money, a federal program used to help students pay for college, according to the Associated Press.AdvertisementIt was unclear what the reaction in Congress would be. Democrats in the House have been particularly critical of the White House\u2019s plan, calling it a political gambit timed to align with the elections calendar.\u201cThe lack of planning evident so far is no way to run our nation\u2019s human space exploration program,\u201d Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), chairwoman of a subcommittee that oversees NASA, said at a recent hearing. \u201cThe 2024 missive left NASA in a tizzy \u2014 scrambling to develop a plan and hastening to pull together a budget amendment that still have not been delivered to Congress; and upending groundwork with international partners on future exploration goals.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s announcement took many inside NASA by surprise. The agency had been aiming to get humans to the lunar surface by 2028. And in March, the White House submitted a budget request totaling just over $21 billion for NASA, a nearly $500 million cut from what the agency received this year.AdvertisementSince the White House called for NASA to speed up the timeline, the space agency has been scrambling to figure out how it could pull off such a complicated mission in a short amount of time. At the moment, NASA does not have the ability to fly astronauts anywhere in space. Instead, it pays Russia more than $80 million a seat to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station.As part of the amended budget request, the White House included $1 billion to begin the development of a lander capable of getting astronauts to the surface of the moon. An additional $651 million would go to help speed development of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, built largely by Boeing, and the Orion spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin.Story continues below advertisementIt would also boost technologies to help the agency explore the lunar poles with robots ahead of a human mission, using solar energy as a propulsion source and converting ice found under the moon\u2019s crust into water.AdvertisementUse of the Pell Grant money to fund the moon mission, dubbed Aretmis, would \"cut any spending for for Pell Grant programs as the budget continues to ensure all students will get their full Pell Grant and keeps the program on sound fiscal footing,\u201d Office of Management and Budget spokesman Wesley Denton said in a statement, according to the AP.After Trump\u2019s announcement Monday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted: \u201cThis is the boost @NASA needs to move forward with putting the next man and the first woman on the Moon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut NASA officials warned that the agency would need additional money in the future to meet the goal.\u201cThis additional investment is a down payment on NASA\u2019s effort to land humans on the moon by 2024,\u201d Bridenstine said in a call with reporters Monday evening. \u201cIn the coming years, we will need additional funds. This is a good amount that gets us out of the gate in a very strong fashion and sets us up for the future.\u201dAdvertisementInstead of going directly to the surface of the moon, as it did during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early \u201970s, NASA is instead looking to build a more permanent presence by building an orbiting outpost known as the Gateway.Story continues below advertisementWhile that is a more ambitious endeavor, Bridenstine has said the agency wants to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay. Still, to meet the five-year goal, NASA has said it would scale back the scope of the Gateway, at least initially. To accommodate getting humans to the surface quickly, the budget amendment proposes cutting $321 million from that project and shifting \u201cpotential Gateway capabilities into the future.\u201dIt is not clear what the reaction in Congress would be. Many would likely bristle against the notion that a popular student aide program is being used. Bridenstine said that he had been contacting key congressional leaders but that it was \u201cnot easy to get a hold of everyone\u201d on short notice.Advertisement\u201cWe will see various reactions\u201d from Congress, he said. \u201cBut I will tell you, when we talk about what NASA is trying to achieve, there is a lot of excitement.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA plans to launch its massive SLS rocket for the first time as early as next year, without astronauts. That would be followed by another mission, with astronauts in the Orion crew capsule, for a trip around the moon. The third mission, to come in 2024, would send a pair of astronauts, one woman and one man, to the Gateway and then to the lunar surface.Shortly after Pence\u2019s announcement, in which he said astronauts would get to the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d there was talk that the White House would ask for a huge amount of additional funding, as much as $8 billion a year.But at a recent congressional hearing, Bridenstine disputed that.NASA rocket becomes Boeing's latest headache as Trump demands moon missionThe White House\u2019s amended budget request comes a week after Jeff Bezos unveiled a lunar lander that his space company, Blue Origin, has pitched NASA to get cargo and eventually people to the lunar surface. Many other companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the Sierra Nevada Corporation, are also vying to build various parts of the Gateway. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The White House will ask Congress for the additional funding for NASA\u2019s budget next year as the space agency attempts to return humans to the moon within five years. Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6107",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/13/trump-wants-an-additional-billion-nasas-audacious-moon-mission/",
        "text": "The White House is asking Congress for an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s budget next year as the space agency attempts to return humans to the moon by 2024.The announcement comes about six weeks after Vice President Pence called for an accelerated program to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since the last Apollo lunar landing in 1972. But since the White House issued that bold mandate, NASA has released few details about how it would achieve it or what the program would cost. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTrump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.In a tweet Monday evening, President Trump wrote: \u201cUnder my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe money would come from a surplus in Pell Grant money, a federal program used to help students pay for college, according to the Associated Press.AdvertisementIt was unclear what the reaction in Congress would be. Democrats in the House have been particularly critical of the White House\u2019s plan, calling it a political gambit timed to align with the elections calendar.\u201cThe lack of planning evident so far is no way to run our nation\u2019s human space exploration program,\u201d Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), chairwoman of a subcommittee that oversees NASA, said at a recent hearing. \u201cThe 2024 missive left NASA in a tizzy \u2014 scrambling to develop a plan and hastening to pull together a budget amendment that still have not been delivered to Congress; and upending groundwork with international partners on future exploration goals.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s announcement took many inside NASA by surprise. The agency had been aiming to get humans to the lunar surface by 2028. And in March, the White House submitted a budget request totaling just over $21 billion for NASA, a nearly $500 million cut from what the agency received this year.AdvertisementSince the White House called for NASA to speed up the timeline, the space agency has been scrambling to figure out how it could pull off such a complicated mission in a short amount of time. At the moment, NASA does not have the ability to fly astronauts anywhere in space. Instead, it pays Russia more than $80 million a seat to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station.As part of the amended budget request, the White House included $1 billion to begin the development of a lander capable of getting astronauts to the surface of the moon. An additional $651 million would go to help speed development of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, built largely by Boeing, and the Orion spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin.Story continues below advertisementIt would also boost technologies to help the agency explore the lunar poles with robots ahead of a human mission, using solar energy as a propulsion source and converting ice found under the moon\u2019s crust into water.AdvertisementUse of the Pell Grant money to fund the moon mission, dubbed Aretmis, would \"cut any spending for for Pell Grant programs as the budget continues to ensure all students will get their full Pell Grant and keeps the program on sound fiscal footing,\u201d Office of Management and Budget spokesman Wesley Denton said in a statement, according to the AP.After Trump\u2019s announcement Monday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted: \u201cThis is the boost @NASA needs to move forward with putting the next man and the first woman on the Moon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut NASA officials warned that the agency would need additional money in the future to meet the goal.\u201cThis additional investment is a down payment on NASA\u2019s effort to land humans on the moon by 2024,\u201d Bridenstine said in a call with reporters Monday evening. \u201cIn the coming years, we will need additional funds. This is a good amount that gets us out of the gate in a very strong fashion and sets us up for the future.\u201dAdvertisementInstead of going directly to the surface of the moon, as it did during the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early \u201970s, NASA is instead looking to build a more permanent presence by building an orbiting outpost known as the Gateway.Story continues below advertisementWhile that is a more ambitious endeavor, Bridenstine has said the agency wants to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay. Still, to meet the five-year goal, NASA has said it would scale back the scope of the Gateway, at least initially. To accommodate getting humans to the surface quickly, the budget amendment proposes cutting $321 million from that project and shifting \u201cpotential Gateway capabilities into the future.\u201dIt is not clear what the reaction in Congress would be. Many would likely bristle against the notion that a popular student aide program is being used. Bridenstine said that he had been contacting key congressional leaders but that it was \u201cnot easy to get a hold of everyone\u201d on short notice.Advertisement\u201cWe will see various reactions\u201d from Congress, he said. \u201cBut I will tell you, when we talk about what NASA is trying to achieve, there is a lot of excitement.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA plans to launch its massive SLS rocket for the first time as early as next year, without astronauts. That would be followed by another mission, with astronauts in the Orion crew capsule, for a trip around the moon. The third mission, to come in 2024, would send a pair of astronauts, one woman and one man, to the Gateway and then to the lunar surface.Shortly after Pence\u2019s announcement, in which he said astronauts would get to the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d there was talk that the White House would ask for a huge amount of additional funding, as much as $8 billion a year.But at a recent congressional hearing, Bridenstine disputed that.NASA rocket becomes Boeing's latest headache as Trump demands moon missionThe White House\u2019s amended budget request comes a week after Jeff Bezos unveiled a lunar lander that his space company, Blue Origin, has pitched NASA to get cargo and eventually people to the lunar surface. Many other companies, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the Sierra Nevada Corporation, are also vying to build various parts of the Gateway. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The White House will ask Congress for the additional funding for NASA\u2019s budget next year as the space agency attempts to return humans to the moon within five years. Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Trump and NASA, the stakes are enormous for upcoming flight with crew  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6108",
        "date": "2020-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/23/trump-spacex-launch-politics/",
        "text": "The upcoming launch of NASA astronauts will be a historic mission \u2014 the first launch of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired almost a decade ago.It\u2019s also a make-or-break moment for the Trump administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf it goes well, it would be a moment of triumph for an administration that boasts it is \u201crenewing American leadership in space\u201d and would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads. If something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. As a sign of how important the mission is, both President Trump and Vice President Pence are expected to go to the Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch on Wednesday.Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine came to the agency knowing the flight would likely happen on his watch and that the stakes would be enormous. During one of his very first news conferences, he addressed the risks, recalling the national devastation after the failures of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles, which together cost 14 lives.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.NASA wants to have \u201cthe absolute safest program we possibly can have. The reason for that, of course, is because if we lose an astronaut, the whole world stops,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t just mean that NASA stops doing human exploration for the next three years or more, as we saw after Columbia and Challenger. It means the president of the United States stops what he\u2019s doing. \u2026 And presidents and prime ministers around the world stop what they\u2019re doing. That\u2019s how important this is to the entire world.\u201dAdvertisementTo this White House, space holds a special place \u2014 as a frontier to explore, a domain that\u2019s been militarized and an opportunity for economic expansion. It has moved aggressively on all fronts, reconstituting the National Space Council with Pence as its chair, speeding up efforts to return to the moon, standing up the new Space Force military branch, and slashing regulations while promoting the growth of a commercial space industry.Story continues below advertisementEven some Democrats have praised the administration for making space a priority, and Bridenstine, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma who was confirmed by a narrow party-line vote, has earned admiration and respect from across the aisle.It, however, remains to be seen whether any of the administration\u2019s efforts will achieve the kind of success the Trump administration envisions. Despite the full force of the White House, and a pledge by Pence to get to the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d the Artemis lunar program is struggling to find support in Congress. Some Democrats have accused the White House of playing politics with the nation\u2019s space program by attempting to speed up a landing so that it would fall in Trump\u2019s second term.AdvertisementCritics say the Space Force is little more than a pointless exercise in bureaucratic reshuffling. And NASA\u2019s effort to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil, under the agency\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, has suffered years of delays and setbacks.Story continues below advertisementTrump has shown interest in space and has praised high-profile \u201cspace barons,\u201d such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have started space companies. \u201cRich guys, they love rocket ships,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cThat\u2019s good. That\u2019s better than us paying for them.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)But he\u2019s also sent confusing signs on his administration\u2019s goals, tweeting last year that \u201cNASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago.\u201d Officials later clarified that the statement that seemed to undercut his own administration\u2019s plans to return to the lunar surface was really intended to push the idea of using the moon as a steppingstone to Mars.AdvertisementBut before it does any of that, NASA must show it can fly astronauts reliably to a much closer target \u2014 the International Space Station, in orbit some 240 miles high. A successful launch would be the culmination of a program launched by former president Barack Obama.Story continues below advertisementThe Commercial Crew Program, as it is called, was a risky proposition from the start \u2014 a bold experiment by NASA to outsource human space flight to the private sector that has led to an improbable moment in the history of America\u2019s space program: two NASA astronauts strapping into SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, a spacecraft that has never flown humans. On Monday morning, the Space Force\u2019s weather office at Cape Canaveral predicted a 60 percent chance weather would prevent a launch.Now the stakes for the May 27 mission are even higher. On Monday, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, Douglas Loverro, abruptly resigned, a shocking development that has raised questions about the agency\u2019s position to pull it off safely with yet another glaring vacancy at the top of its bureaucracy.SpaceX faces its toughest testU.S. Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, wrote on Twitter that she was \u201cdeeply concerned over this sudden resignation, especially eight days before the first scheduled launch of US astronauts on US soil in almost a decade.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added that under \u201cthis Administration, we\u2019ve seen a pattern of abrupt departures that have disrupted our efforts at human space flight.\u201d Loverro\u2019s resignation came after William Gerstenmaier, the longtime head of human spaceflight, was demoted last year.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), chair of the House Science Committee, said in a statement she trusts Bridenstine \"will ensure that the right decision is made as to whether or not to delay the launch attempt.\u201dThe shake-up at NASA\u2019s highest ranks was not a distraction NASA or the White House wanted as they look to celebrate what would be a huge moment for the country. In the days leading up to the flight, the White House has talked in lofty terms about the significance of the flight and how it could help unify a country riven by a divisive election campaign and reeling from the pandemic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt a meeting Tuesday of the reconstituted National Space Council, Pence said the launch would play a key part in \u201crenewing American leadership in space.\u201dThe mission represents \u201cexactly the kind of leadership that has inspired our nation throughout my lifetime, and I know it is going to be a great inspiration to the American people when we see those rockets fire next week.\u201dPresident Trump even bragged recently that his administration has \u201creinvigorated\u201d NASA, which he wrongly said \u201cwas dead as a door nail, but now it\u2019s very much alive.\u201dInside NASA, officials are cautiously optimistic about the test flight that would propel two veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, to the International Space Station. But they also are keenly aware of the risks inherent in human spaceflight \u2014 especially on a spacecraft that has never before flown humans.NASA administrator visits SpaceX in bid to ease tension in their relationshipShould anything go wrong, it would be a blow not only to NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program but also to the White House\u2019s plan to win congressional support to increase funding so NASA could return astronauts to the lunar surface on an accelerated schedule that moved up the landing by four years to 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m excited to see an American rocket launch from American soil,\u201d Horn said in an interview before Loverro\u2019s resignation. \u201cBut I recognize there is a lot at stake here.\u201dIt\u2019s been a long, difficult road to get to the point of launching humans again.In 2014, the Obama administration awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, following a program from the George W. Bush White House that hired private companies to fly cargo and supplies there.Trump\u2019s budget proposal would give NASA one of the largest increases in yearsFlying astronauts is a far more difficult task, and Boeing and SpaceX have had to overcome challenges that delayed the first launches from 2017.The program took an especially embarrassing hit late last year when the maiden launch of a Boeing spacecraft, which had no crew on board, went awry as soon as it reached orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was a wake-up call for NASA to better police the companies it had entrusted with flying its astronauts.\u201cNASA oversight was insufficient \u2014 that\u2019s obvious,\u201d Loverro said earlier this year.The mishap puts even more pressure on the upcoming launch of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.\u201cIt\u2019s been a complex journey for SpaceX to get the mission to this level of readiness, and they are to be commended,\u201d said Paul Hill, a member of NASA\u2019s safety advisory panel and the former director of mission operations at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center.Still, he urged against what he called \u201cgo fever\u201d and to remain vigilant in the days leading up to the launch.Despite all the high-profile attention, Kathy Lueders, manager of the Commercial Crew Program, told the safety panel its decisions would be made with safety in mind.\u201cWe\u2019re not going to rush,\u201d she said. \"And we\u2019ll launch when we\u2019re ready.\u201d Wednesday's scheduled launch of a crewed spacecraft by SpaceX is a make or break moment for the Trump administration. For Trump and NASA, the stakes are enormous for upcoming flight with crew ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Trump and NASA, the stakes are enormous for upcoming flight with crew  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6109",
        "date": "2020-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/23/trump-spacex-launch-politics/",
        "text": "The upcoming launch of NASA astronauts will be a historic mission \u2014 the first launch of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired almost a decade ago.It\u2019s also a make-or-break moment for the Trump administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf it goes well, it would be a moment of triumph for an administration that boasts it is \u201crenewing American leadership in space\u201d and would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads. If something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. As a sign of how important the mission is, both President Trump and Vice President Pence are expected to go to the Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch on Wednesday.Story continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine came to the agency knowing the flight would likely happen on his watch and that the stakes would be enormous. During one of his very first news conferences, he addressed the risks, recalling the national devastation after the failures of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles, which together cost 14 lives.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.NASA wants to have \u201cthe absolute safest program we possibly can have. The reason for that, of course, is because if we lose an astronaut, the whole world stops,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t just mean that NASA stops doing human exploration for the next three years or more, as we saw after Columbia and Challenger. It means the president of the United States stops what he\u2019s doing. \u2026 And presidents and prime ministers around the world stop what they\u2019re doing. That\u2019s how important this is to the entire world.\u201dAdvertisementTo this White House, space holds a special place \u2014 as a frontier to explore, a domain that\u2019s been militarized and an opportunity for economic expansion. It has moved aggressively on all fronts, reconstituting the National Space Council with Pence as its chair, speeding up efforts to return to the moon, standing up the new Space Force military branch, and slashing regulations while promoting the growth of a commercial space industry.Story continues below advertisementEven some Democrats have praised the administration for making space a priority, and Bridenstine, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma who was confirmed by a narrow party-line vote, has earned admiration and respect from across the aisle.It, however, remains to be seen whether any of the administration\u2019s efforts will achieve the kind of success the Trump administration envisions. Despite the full force of the White House, and a pledge by Pence to get to the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d the Artemis lunar program is struggling to find support in Congress. Some Democrats have accused the White House of playing politics with the nation\u2019s space program by attempting to speed up a landing so that it would fall in Trump\u2019s second term.AdvertisementCritics say the Space Force is little more than a pointless exercise in bureaucratic reshuffling. And NASA\u2019s effort to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil, under the agency\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, has suffered years of delays and setbacks.Story continues below advertisementTrump has shown interest in space and has praised high-profile \u201cspace barons,\u201d such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have started space companies. \u201cRich guys, they love rocket ships,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cThat\u2019s good. That\u2019s better than us paying for them.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)But he\u2019s also sent confusing signs on his administration\u2019s goals, tweeting last year that \u201cNASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago.\u201d Officials later clarified that the statement that seemed to undercut his own administration\u2019s plans to return to the lunar surface was really intended to push the idea of using the moon as a steppingstone to Mars.AdvertisementBut before it does any of that, NASA must show it can fly astronauts reliably to a much closer target \u2014 the International Space Station, in orbit some 240 miles high. A successful launch would be the culmination of a program launched by former president Barack Obama.Story continues below advertisementThe Commercial Crew Program, as it is called, was a risky proposition from the start \u2014 a bold experiment by NASA to outsource human space flight to the private sector that has led to an improbable moment in the history of America\u2019s space program: two NASA astronauts strapping into SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, a spacecraft that has never flown humans. On Monday morning, the Space Force\u2019s weather office at Cape Canaveral predicted a 60 percent chance weather would prevent a launch.Now the stakes for the May 27 mission are even higher. On Monday, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, Douglas Loverro, abruptly resigned, a shocking development that has raised questions about the agency\u2019s position to pull it off safely with yet another glaring vacancy at the top of its bureaucracy.SpaceX faces its toughest testU.S. Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, wrote on Twitter that she was \u201cdeeply concerned over this sudden resignation, especially eight days before the first scheduled launch of US astronauts on US soil in almost a decade.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added that under \u201cthis Administration, we\u2019ve seen a pattern of abrupt departures that have disrupted our efforts at human space flight.\u201d Loverro\u2019s resignation came after William Gerstenmaier, the longtime head of human spaceflight, was demoted last year.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), chair of the House Science Committee, said in a statement she trusts Bridenstine \"will ensure that the right decision is made as to whether or not to delay the launch attempt.\u201dThe shake-up at NASA\u2019s highest ranks was not a distraction NASA or the White House wanted as they look to celebrate what would be a huge moment for the country. In the days leading up to the flight, the White House has talked in lofty terms about the significance of the flight and how it could help unify a country riven by a divisive election campaign and reeling from the pandemic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt a meeting Tuesday of the reconstituted National Space Council, Pence said the launch would play a key part in \u201crenewing American leadership in space.\u201dThe mission represents \u201cexactly the kind of leadership that has inspired our nation throughout my lifetime, and I know it is going to be a great inspiration to the American people when we see those rockets fire next week.\u201dPresident Trump even bragged recently that his administration has \u201creinvigorated\u201d NASA, which he wrongly said \u201cwas dead as a door nail, but now it\u2019s very much alive.\u201dInside NASA, officials are cautiously optimistic about the test flight that would propel two veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, to the International Space Station. But they also are keenly aware of the risks inherent in human spaceflight \u2014 especially on a spacecraft that has never before flown humans.NASA administrator visits SpaceX in bid to ease tension in their relationshipShould anything go wrong, it would be a blow not only to NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program but also to the White House\u2019s plan to win congressional support to increase funding so NASA could return astronauts to the lunar surface on an accelerated schedule that moved up the landing by four years to 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m excited to see an American rocket launch from American soil,\u201d Horn said in an interview before Loverro\u2019s resignation. \u201cBut I recognize there is a lot at stake here.\u201dIt\u2019s been a long, difficult road to get to the point of launching humans again.In 2014, the Obama administration awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, following a program from the George W. Bush White House that hired private companies to fly cargo and supplies there.Trump\u2019s budget proposal would give NASA one of the largest increases in yearsFlying astronauts is a far more difficult task, and Boeing and SpaceX have had to overcome challenges that delayed the first launches from 2017.The program took an especially embarrassing hit late last year when the maiden launch of a Boeing spacecraft, which had no crew on board, went awry as soon as it reached orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was a wake-up call for NASA to better police the companies it had entrusted with flying its astronauts.\u201cNASA oversight was insufficient \u2014 that\u2019s obvious,\u201d Loverro said earlier this year.The mishap puts even more pressure on the upcoming launch of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.\u201cIt\u2019s been a complex journey for SpaceX to get the mission to this level of readiness, and they are to be commended,\u201d said Paul Hill, a member of NASA\u2019s safety advisory panel and the former director of mission operations at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center.Still, he urged against what he called \u201cgo fever\u201d and to remain vigilant in the days leading up to the launch.Despite all the high-profile attention, Kathy Lueders, manager of the Commercial Crew Program, told the safety panel its decisions would be made with safety in mind.\u201cWe\u2019re not going to rush,\u201d she said. \"And we\u2019ll launch when we\u2019re ready.\u201d Wednesday's scheduled launch of a crewed spacecraft by SpaceX is a make or break moment for the Trump administration. For Trump and NASA, the stakes are enormous for upcoming flight with crew ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope probe reaches Mars orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6110",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/uae-hope-probe-mars-success/",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to send a spacecraft to Mars on Tuesday when its Hope probe reached the Red Planet, fired its thrusters and slowed down enough to enter orbit.The mission represents a victory for the country as it seeks to grow its space program. And it opens an unusually active period of deep-space exploration. In addition to the UAE, China and the United States have spacecraft that are also expected to reach Mars this month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 is scheduled to reach Mars orbit Wednesday before a landing sometime in May. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is expected to touch down on Mars on Feb. 18 and then explore for signs of past life.Story continues below advertisementThe UAE\u2019s Hope spacecraft fired its thruster for approximately 27 minutes, slowing the spacecraft from some 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph. In mission control, members of the UAE space agency celebrated the mission, and the agency tweeted: \u201cSuccess! Contact with #HopeProbe has been established again. The Mars Orbit Insertion is now complete.\u201dSuccess! Contact with #HopeProbe has been established again.The Mars Orbit Insertion is now complete.#ArabsToMars\u2014 Hope Mars Mission (@HopeMarsMission) February 9, 2021\n\nThomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, congratulated the UAE on Twitter, writing: \u201cYour bold endeavor to explore the Red Planet will inspire many others to reach for the stars. We hope to join you at Mars soon with @NASAPersevere.\u201dOn Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance is expected to land on Mars, joining two other spacecraft from the UAE and China also exploring the red planet. (Monica Rodman, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)The Hope probe will not land on Mars but rather stay in orbit, studying the Martian atmosphere. It launched from Japan in July, flying 306 million miles to reach Mars. Given that there was an 11-minute radio transmission delay to Earth, the probe had to be autonomous, relying on its own systems to insert itself into the correct orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementReaching Mars\u2019s orbit \u201cwas the most critical and dangerous part of our journey to Mars, exposing the Hope probe to stresses and pressures it has never before faced,\u201d said Omran Sharaf, head of the Mars mission for the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center. \"With this enormous milestone achieved, we are now preparing to transition to our science orbit and commence science data gathering.\u201dIt is a big step for the country\u2019s space agency, which is partnering on the mission with scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder\u2019s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.\u201cWe entered into this wild experiment,\u201d Sarah al-Amiri, chair of the UAE Space Agency and the minister of state for advanced technology, said last week. \u201cIt was something completely new for us.\u201d The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to send a spacecraft to Mars on Tuesday. United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope probe reaches Mars orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope probe reaches Mars orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6111",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/uae-hope-probe-mars-success/",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to send a spacecraft to Mars on Tuesday when its Hope probe reached the Red Planet, fired its thrusters and slowed down enough to enter orbit.The mission represents a victory for the country as it seeks to grow its space program. And it opens an unusually active period of deep-space exploration. In addition to the UAE, China and the United States have spacecraft that are also expected to reach Mars this month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 is scheduled to reach Mars orbit Wednesday before a landing sometime in May. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is expected to touch down on Mars on Feb. 18 and then explore for signs of past life.Story continues below advertisementThe UAE\u2019s Hope spacecraft fired its thruster for approximately 27 minutes, slowing the spacecraft from some 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph. In mission control, members of the UAE space agency celebrated the mission, and the agency tweeted: \u201cSuccess! Contact with #HopeProbe has been established again. The Mars Orbit Insertion is now complete.\u201dSuccess! Contact with #HopeProbe has been established again.The Mars Orbit Insertion is now complete.#ArabsToMars\u2014 Hope Mars Mission (@HopeMarsMission) February 9, 2021\n\nThomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, congratulated the UAE on Twitter, writing: \u201cYour bold endeavor to explore the Red Planet will inspire many others to reach for the stars. We hope to join you at Mars soon with @NASAPersevere.\u201dOn Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance is expected to land on Mars, joining two other spacecraft from the UAE and China also exploring the red planet. (Monica Rodman, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)The Hope probe will not land on Mars but rather stay in orbit, studying the Martian atmosphere. It launched from Japan in July, flying 306 million miles to reach Mars. Given that there was an 11-minute radio transmission delay to Earth, the probe had to be autonomous, relying on its own systems to insert itself into the correct orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementReaching Mars\u2019s orbit \u201cwas the most critical and dangerous part of our journey to Mars, exposing the Hope probe to stresses and pressures it has never before faced,\u201d said Omran Sharaf, head of the Mars mission for the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center. \"With this enormous milestone achieved, we are now preparing to transition to our science orbit and commence science data gathering.\u201dIt is a big step for the country\u2019s space agency, which is partnering on the mission with scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder\u2019s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.\u201cWe entered into this wild experiment,\u201d Sarah al-Amiri, chair of the UAE Space Agency and the minister of state for advanced technology, said last week. \u201cIt was something completely new for us.\u201d The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to send a spacecraft to Mars on Tuesday. United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope probe reaches Mars orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope probe reaches Mars orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6112",
        "date": "2021-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/09/uae-hope-probe-mars-success/",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to send a spacecraft to Mars on Tuesday when its Hope probe reached the Red Planet, fired its thrusters and slowed down enough to enter orbit.The mission represents a victory for the country as it seeks to grow its space program. And it opens an unusually active period of deep-space exploration. In addition to the UAE, China and the United States have spacecraft that are also expected to reach Mars this month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 is scheduled to reach Mars orbit Wednesday before a landing sometime in May. NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover is expected to touch down on Mars on Feb. 18 and then explore for signs of past life.Story continues below advertisementThe UAE\u2019s Hope spacecraft fired its thruster for approximately 27 minutes, slowing the spacecraft from some 75,000 mph to 11,000 mph. In mission control, members of the UAE space agency celebrated the mission, and the agency tweeted: \u201cSuccess! Contact with #HopeProbe has been established again. The Mars Orbit Insertion is now complete.\u201dSuccess! Contact with #HopeProbe has been established again.The Mars Orbit Insertion is now complete.#ArabsToMars\u2014 Hope Mars Mission (@HopeMarsMission) February 9, 2021\n\nThomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, congratulated the UAE on Twitter, writing: \u201cYour bold endeavor to explore the Red Planet will inspire many others to reach for the stars. We hope to join you at Mars soon with @NASAPersevere.\u201dOn Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s rover Perseverance is expected to land on Mars, joining two other spacecraft from the UAE and China also exploring the red planet. (Monica Rodman, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)The Hope probe will not land on Mars but rather stay in orbit, studying the Martian atmosphere. It launched from Japan in July, flying 306 million miles to reach Mars. Given that there was an 11-minute radio transmission delay to Earth, the probe had to be autonomous, relying on its own systems to insert itself into the correct orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementReaching Mars\u2019s orbit \u201cwas the most critical and dangerous part of our journey to Mars, exposing the Hope probe to stresses and pressures it has never before faced,\u201d said Omran Sharaf, head of the Mars mission for the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center. \"With this enormous milestone achieved, we are now preparing to transition to our science orbit and commence science data gathering.\u201dIt is a big step for the country\u2019s space agency, which is partnering on the mission with scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder\u2019s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.\u201cWe entered into this wild experiment,\u201d Sarah al-Amiri, chair of the UAE Space Agency and the minister of state for advanced technology, said last week. \u201cIt was something completely new for us.\u201d The United Arab Emirates became the first Arab country to send a spacecraft to Mars on Tuesday. United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope probe reaches Mars orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Pentagon is tracking a Chinese rocket booster as it falls back to Earth (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6113",
        "date": "2021-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/06/chinese-rocket-booster-falling-eath/",
        "text": "The U.S. Space Command is tracking a large Chinese rocket booster that is tumbling uncontrollably through space and is expected to come crashing down to Earth sometime this weekend.It\u2019s not clear where the 22-metric-ton rocket stage would land or what, if anything, the Pentagon would do if it were to come down over a populated area, spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI don\u2019t want to hypothesize or speculate about possible actions the department might or might not take here,\u201d he said. \u201cWe're tracking it. We're following it as closely as we can. It's just a little too soon right now to know where it's going to go or what if anything can be done about that.\u201dWhile the booster would be among the 10 largest objects ever to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere on an uncontrolled trajectory, the risk for those on the ground is very low \u2014 astronomically low, scientists say. There\u2019s a roughly 70 percent chance debris will fall mainly into the ocean, and even if not, the odds of it affecting a populated area are minuscule. There are no recorded instances of a human ever being killed by reentering space debris \u2014 though a cow in Cuba did lose its life in 1961.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen an object falls out of orbit, the amount of debris that makes it to the ground depends on the object\u2019s size, shape, mass and the melting temperatures of all materials used. Even the biggest satellites produce a comparatively tiny amount of debris.Some scientists estimate that nine metric tons of the Long March 5B rocket may survive reentry. The rocket was launched late last month, hoisting the first module of a space station China is assembling in orbit as part of the nation\u2019s ambitious plans in space.Unlike most rocket boosters, which deliver their payloads to orbit and then fall back to Earth in a predetermined area, the Long March 5B rocket, powered by four side boosters, reached orbit and is expected to stay aloft a few days before it reenters the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementScientists won\u2019t know where it will land until a few hours before the debris strikes. Most objects reenter Earth\u2019s outer atmosphere at about 18,000 mph. That means even a few minutes\u2019 discrepancy could mean debris falling on the opposite side of a continent.AdvertisementPart of the mystery surrounding where the debris enters is due to uncertainties about air density in Earth\u2019s \u201cmesosphere,\u201d the atmospheric layer 30 to 50 miles high, which can result in varying amounts of air drag.\u201cWe have detailed models of the upper atmosphere, but they\u2019re models that depend on things like today\u2019s solar activity,\u201d explained Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. \u201cWeather forecasting is hard, even in space. The [sun\u2019s] x-ray flux will change the head wind. There are ... all other kinds of terms that go into atmospheric density.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRight now, there\u2019s a 42-hour window, centered on Saturday night, during which the debris may crash down.The Pentagon tracks thousands of pieces of debris in space, and often warns satellite operators about potential collisions. From time to time, the International Space Station must maneuver to avoid pieces of space junk, which are traveling at 17,500 mph and have the potential to cause enormous damage.AdvertisementIt\u2019s not the first time China has contributed to the growing problem of space debris. In 2007, it shot down a dead satellite with a missile that, according to a statement from the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, \u201ccreated a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces of space debris, the largest ever tracked.\u201d Much of that debris \u201cwill remain in orbit for decades, posing a significant collision threat to other space objects in Low Earth Orbit.\u201dStory continues below advertisementLast year, during the first flight of the Long March 5B rocket, the booster passed over populated portions of Earth before pieces of debris landed in Africa. The NASA administrator at the time, Jim Bridenstine, criticized the Chinese space agency, according to SpaceNews, saying the event \u201ccould have been extremely dangerous. We\u2019re really fortunate in the sense that it doesn\u2019t appear to have hurt anybody.\u201dHaving yet another rocket stage reenter is problematic and poses a challenge for diplomats. \u201cIt is very much against the standard practice of the last few years,\u201d said Ted Muelhaupt, the principal director of Aerospace Corporation\u2019s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies. \u201cWe\u2019ve learned our lessons. And when something as big as this is coming down, the expected norms are to bring it down someplace where we know people aren\u2019t, such as the South Pacific.\u201dAdvertisementTensions between China and the United States in this arena are growing. After China landed a robotic spacecraft on the far side of the moon, former vice president Mike Pence said it was an attempt to \u201cseize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Biden administration this week took a more measured approach. In reaction to the rocket stage falling, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the United States \u201cis committed to addressing the risks of growing congestion due to space debris and growing activity in space.\u201dShe said the administration wants \u201cto work with the international community to promote leadership and responsible space behaviors. It\u2019s in the shared interests of all nations to act responsibly in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities.\u201d Scientists say the risk of debris from the 22-metric-ton rocket stage hitting people or causing property damage is extremely low. The Pentagon is tracking a Chinese rocket booster as it falls back to Earth",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "For NASA contractors,  lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit close to home (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6114",
        "date": "2019-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/13/nasa-contractors-share-grief-israeli-indian-lunar-failures/",
        "text": "The team was gathered in a conference room last week, about 35 in all, ready to celebrate India\u2019s triumph: the country\u2019s first lunar landing. Like many watching the live-stream broadcast from the control center in Bangalore half a world away, John Thornton, the chief executive of Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that is developing a moon lander of its own, was confident India would stick it, setting off celebrations across the world. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut there was silence and long faces in India\u2019s mission control, not celebration, when they lost contact with the lunar craft, and there was silence, too, in Astrobotic\u2019s conference room, as Thornton\u2019s team was reminded that the difficulties of orbital mechanics and the vacuum of space are not to be taken for granted. \u201cEverything has to be working just right,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like humankind against space.\"Soon it will be their turn to attempt to land on the moon. Astrobotic is one of nine companies that NASA is betting on as part of a program to deliver science experiments to the surface of the moon. The list comprises small start-ups, like Thornton\u2019s venture, that grew out of Carnegie Mellon University, and industry stalwarts, such as Lockheed Martin and Draper, which provided navigation and guidance systems during the Apollo era.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceNASA intends to invest $2.6 billion over 10 years in relatively small contracts \u2014 some under $100 million or so \u2014 for delivery services to the moon under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). That\u2019s a small fraction of the estimated $20 billion to $30 billion it would spend on its Artemis program, designed to get humans to the moon\u2019s surface by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder CLPS, NASA isn\u2019t designing, building or operating the landers that will make these lunar trips \u2014 that\u2019s all up to the companies. Instead, NASA is simply hiring them to provide a FedEx-like service to a lifeless celestial body 240,000 miles away. The plans even include sending a rover to the lunar south pole, a mission that could help NASA decide where its astronauts should land.The endeavor is risky, the effort entrepreneurial, and failure is more than an option, NASA says: It\u2019s likely.And that\u2019s just how NASA wants it, as it tries to hit a cadence of two deliveries to the moon per year starting in 2021.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine likens the program to a venture capital fund investing in a start-up, where the upside is as high as the risk of failure. And some of the companies NASA is looking to are unconventional. One, Firefly, went bankrupt in 2016 when it lost a key investor. Another, Masten, has 12 employees and works out of a dusty barn in the Mojave Desert.Listen: Moonrise, a Washington Post podcast that explores the real story behind the moonshot\u201cThe idea is that it is low investment, high risk, which means some will fail,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cBut if one is successful, the returns to NASA and the returns to the United States of America will be significant.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, he told reporters: \u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible. We\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201dAstrobotic plans its first moon mission in 2021. It would be the culmination of a long and unlikely odyssey. The company was co-founded in 2008 by a Carnegie Mellon University professor who recruited some of his current and former robotics students to join him in building a spacecraft for the Google Lunar X Prize, then a competition to get payloads to the moon.The company was able to drum up money from angel investors and the university, but still it went through \u201cnearly two deaths,\u201d Thornton said. He took over as chief executive and refocused the company on trying to develop and market a commercial delivery service to the moon.Story continues below advertisementThe idea was derided as fantasy, and as he was pitching Astrobotic to investors at a conference, there was \u201cone guy laughing the entire time,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd he wasn\u2019t laughing with me.\u201dEarlier this year, however, NASA awarded it a $79.5 million contract, a big source of revenue for the small company that gave it a level of credibility it hadn\u2019t had before. Last month, it chose its ride to the moon, signing a deal with the United Launch Alliance to launch its Peregrine lunar lander, which stands about 6 feet tall, on ULA\u2019s Vulcan Centaur rocket.But getting to the moon is hard, as Israel learned in April when its Beresheet spacecraft crashed into the moon. It was a devastating outcome, but industry leaders and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in the mission command center, vowed to learn from it and push on. \u201cIf at first you don\u2019t succeed, you try again,\u201d Netanyahu said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen last week, India lost communication with its spacecraft as it descended toward the moon, a heartbreaking outcome for the country\u2019s space agency. It has since located the lander but has not established communication with it or released any details about its condition.India is also taking stock of its lunar ambitions. The lunar lander seemed to be on the right trajectory, but then in the final moments appeared to fall straight down, stunning the people packed in the space agency\u2019s control center. Afterward, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, \u201cOur determination to touch the moon has become even stronger.\u201d And he consoled a distraught K. Sivan, the head of the county\u2019s space agency, with an emotional embrace.PM @narendramodi consoles an emotional @isro Chairman K. Sivan #Chandrayaan2 pic.twitter.com/SmRaNGtxAB\u2014 Doordarshan News (@DDNewsLive) September 7, 2019\n\nIn a tweet, NASA encouraged the Indian space agency, saying, \u201cYou have inspired us with your journey.\u201d And it vowed to work to \u201cexplore our solar system together.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese were the first attempts by Israel and India to land on the surface of the moon, so failure may have been expected, as it was at the dawn of the Space Age, when countries treated the moon like a dartboard, crashing spacecraft into the lunar surface as if it were target practice.In the 1960s, spacecraft like the Soviet Luna 2 and NASA\u2019s Ranger 7 plowed into the lunar surface routinely, as space agencies taught themselves how to hit another celestial body.How to dress for space: Five iconic spacesuits in 3-DFailed moon missions might have been politically acceptable when the United States was racing the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race. Today, however, there could be a backlash if NASA and its commercial partners can\u2019t successfully perform a feat that NASA first accomplished in the 1960s.Story continues below advertisementThere may also be institutional resistance to adopting a Silicon Valley ethos \u2014 fail fast, iterate, try again \u2014 to a 60-year-old federal bureaucracy overseen by the U.S. Congress, a body not likely to rejoice at the prospect of expensive spacecraft careening into Earth\u2019s closest neighbor.Advertisement\u201cIn reality, the question we\u2019ll have is how much tolerance will our political system have for failure?\u201d said Michael Neufeld, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cDoes the taxpayer want to pay for stuff that\u2019s blowing up and crashing? It\u2019s a lot easier to talk about taking risk than it is to actually do it.\u201dIf India, which has one of the most robust space agencies in the world and successfully put a spacecraft in orbit around the moon in 2008, had troubles landing, how can a bunch of start-ups, some working out of glorified garages and relying on small government contracts and venture capital funds do it?Story continues below advertisementThe answer, NASA says, is that the commercial space industry has come a long way, developing new technologies and taking on increasing responsibility for NASA. Two companies \u2014 Northrop Grumman and SpaceX \u2014 deliver cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and another two, SpaceX and Boeing, are working to fly astronauts there.AdvertisementGiven the maturity in the industry, Steven Clarke, NASA\u2019s deputy associate administrator for exploration, said he is confident that private industry is ready to take on the moon, even if some of the companies in the program have never flown anything to space before.The \u201cstrengths of the commercial industry have come up and matured, and so we\u2019re willing to take additional risk with them,\u201d he said in an interview.Story continues below advertisementBut while NASA says it\u2019s willing to tolerate a certain amount of failure, the companies involved say their goal is to succeed. They want to have not just NASA as a customer but also to ultimately build a commercial business flying science experiments and payloads to the lunar surface.\u201cFor us, success is of the utmost importance,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like we\u2019re out there taking unreasonable risk. That does not work for our business plan. The one who will lead in this market five years from now is the one who has successful flights.\u201d For 9 private companies under contract to get experiments to the moon, every miss is a reminder it\u2019s not a simple task. For NASA contractors,  lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit close to home",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "For NASA contractors,  lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit close to home (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6115",
        "date": "2019-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/13/nasa-contractors-share-grief-israeli-indian-lunar-failures/",
        "text": "The team was gathered in a conference room last week, about 35 in all, ready to celebrate India\u2019s triumph: the country\u2019s first lunar landing. Like many watching the live-stream broadcast from the control center in Bangalore half a world away, John Thornton, the chief executive of Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that is developing a moon lander of its own, was confident India would stick it, setting off celebrations across the world. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut there was silence and long faces in India\u2019s mission control, not celebration, when they lost contact with the lunar craft, and there was silence, too, in Astrobotic\u2019s conference room, as Thornton\u2019s team was reminded that the difficulties of orbital mechanics and the vacuum of space are not to be taken for granted. \u201cEverything has to be working just right,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like humankind against space.\"Soon it will be their turn to attempt to land on the moon. Astrobotic is one of nine companies that NASA is betting on as part of a program to deliver science experiments to the surface of the moon. The list comprises small start-ups, like Thornton\u2019s venture, that grew out of Carnegie Mellon University, and industry stalwarts, such as Lockheed Martin and Draper, which provided navigation and guidance systems during the Apollo era.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceNASA intends to invest $2.6 billion over 10 years in relatively small contracts \u2014 some under $100 million or so \u2014 for delivery services to the moon under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). That\u2019s a small fraction of the estimated $20 billion to $30 billion it would spend on its Artemis program, designed to get humans to the moon\u2019s surface by 2024.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder CLPS, NASA isn\u2019t designing, building or operating the landers that will make these lunar trips \u2014 that\u2019s all up to the companies. Instead, NASA is simply hiring them to provide a FedEx-like service to a lifeless celestial body 240,000 miles away. The plans even include sending a rover to the lunar south pole, a mission that could help NASA decide where its astronauts should land.The endeavor is risky, the effort entrepreneurial, and failure is more than an option, NASA says: It\u2019s likely.And that\u2019s just how NASA wants it, as it tries to hit a cadence of two deliveries to the moon per year starting in 2021.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine likens the program to a venture capital fund investing in a start-up, where the upside is as high as the risk of failure. And some of the companies NASA is looking to are unconventional. One, Firefly, went bankrupt in 2016 when it lost a key investor. Another, Masten, has 12 employees and works out of a dusty barn in the Mojave Desert.Listen: Moonrise, a Washington Post podcast that explores the real story behind the moonshot\u201cThe idea is that it is low investment, high risk, which means some will fail,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cBut if one is successful, the returns to NASA and the returns to the United States of America will be significant.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, he told reporters: \u201cIt\u2019s important we get back to the moon as fast as possible. We\u2019re going to take shots on goal.\u201dAstrobotic plans its first moon mission in 2021. It would be the culmination of a long and unlikely odyssey. The company was co-founded in 2008 by a Carnegie Mellon University professor who recruited some of his current and former robotics students to join him in building a spacecraft for the Google Lunar X Prize, then a competition to get payloads to the moon.The company was able to drum up money from angel investors and the university, but still it went through \u201cnearly two deaths,\u201d Thornton said. He took over as chief executive and refocused the company on trying to develop and market a commercial delivery service to the moon.Story continues below advertisementThe idea was derided as fantasy, and as he was pitching Astrobotic to investors at a conference, there was \u201cone guy laughing the entire time,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd he wasn\u2019t laughing with me.\u201dEarlier this year, however, NASA awarded it a $79.5 million contract, a big source of revenue for the small company that gave it a level of credibility it hadn\u2019t had before. Last month, it chose its ride to the moon, signing a deal with the United Launch Alliance to launch its Peregrine lunar lander, which stands about 6 feet tall, on ULA\u2019s Vulcan Centaur rocket.But getting to the moon is hard, as Israel learned in April when its Beresheet spacecraft crashed into the moon. It was a devastating outcome, but industry leaders and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in the mission command center, vowed to learn from it and push on. \u201cIf at first you don\u2019t succeed, you try again,\u201d Netanyahu said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen last week, India lost communication with its spacecraft as it descended toward the moon, a heartbreaking outcome for the country\u2019s space agency. It has since located the lander but has not established communication with it or released any details about its condition.India is also taking stock of its lunar ambitions. The lunar lander seemed to be on the right trajectory, but then in the final moments appeared to fall straight down, stunning the people packed in the space agency\u2019s control center. Afterward, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, \u201cOur determination to touch the moon has become even stronger.\u201d And he consoled a distraught K. Sivan, the head of the county\u2019s space agency, with an emotional embrace.PM @narendramodi consoles an emotional @isro Chairman K. Sivan #Chandrayaan2 pic.twitter.com/SmRaNGtxAB\u2014 Doordarshan News (@DDNewsLive) September 7, 2019\n\nIn a tweet, NASA encouraged the Indian space agency, saying, \u201cYou have inspired us with your journey.\u201d And it vowed to work to \u201cexplore our solar system together.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese were the first attempts by Israel and India to land on the surface of the moon, so failure may have been expected, as it was at the dawn of the Space Age, when countries treated the moon like a dartboard, crashing spacecraft into the lunar surface as if it were target practice.In the 1960s, spacecraft like the Soviet Luna 2 and NASA\u2019s Ranger 7 plowed into the lunar surface routinely, as space agencies taught themselves how to hit another celestial body.How to dress for space: Five iconic spacesuits in 3-DFailed moon missions might have been politically acceptable when the United States was racing the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race. Today, however, there could be a backlash if NASA and its commercial partners can\u2019t successfully perform a feat that NASA first accomplished in the 1960s.Story continues below advertisementThere may also be institutional resistance to adopting a Silicon Valley ethos \u2014 fail fast, iterate, try again \u2014 to a 60-year-old federal bureaucracy overseen by the U.S. Congress, a body not likely to rejoice at the prospect of expensive spacecraft careening into Earth\u2019s closest neighbor.Advertisement\u201cIn reality, the question we\u2019ll have is how much tolerance will our political system have for failure?\u201d said Michael Neufeld, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum. \u201cDoes the taxpayer want to pay for stuff that\u2019s blowing up and crashing? It\u2019s a lot easier to talk about taking risk than it is to actually do it.\u201dIf India, which has one of the most robust space agencies in the world and successfully put a spacecraft in orbit around the moon in 2008, had troubles landing, how can a bunch of start-ups, some working out of glorified garages and relying on small government contracts and venture capital funds do it?Story continues below advertisementThe answer, NASA says, is that the commercial space industry has come a long way, developing new technologies and taking on increasing responsibility for NASA. Two companies \u2014 Northrop Grumman and SpaceX \u2014 deliver cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and another two, SpaceX and Boeing, are working to fly astronauts there.AdvertisementGiven the maturity in the industry, Steven Clarke, NASA\u2019s deputy associate administrator for exploration, said he is confident that private industry is ready to take on the moon, even if some of the companies in the program have never flown anything to space before.The \u201cstrengths of the commercial industry have come up and matured, and so we\u2019re willing to take additional risk with them,\u201d he said in an interview.Story continues below advertisementBut while NASA says it\u2019s willing to tolerate a certain amount of failure, the companies involved say their goal is to succeed. They want to have not just NASA as a customer but also to ultimately build a commercial business flying science experiments and payloads to the lunar surface.\u201cFor us, success is of the utmost importance,\u201d Thornton said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like we\u2019re out there taking unreasonable risk. That does not work for our business plan. The one who will lead in this market five years from now is the one who has successful flights.\u201d For 9 private companies under contract to get experiments to the moon, every miss is a reminder it\u2019s not a simple task. For NASA contractors,  lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit close to home",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6116",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/white-house-frustration-over-moon-mission-delays-preceded-removal-top-nasa-official/",
        "text": "The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Trump administration is laser-focused on that date, which would come during a second term of the Trump presidency, should he be reelected. But despite the mandate, NASA has continued to struggle with delays and cost overruns that have threatened the program. And the ouster of one of the longest-serving stalwarts in the agency shows how far the White House and NASA\u2019s politically appointed leadership are willing to go toward disrupting NASA and attempting to break through the bureaucracy that many think has stilted its exploration efforts for years. In March, Vice President Pence fired the first warning shot, announcing an expedited new timeline for NASA\u2019s moon landing plans. Instead of getting humans there by 2028, he said, its new charge would be within five years. He put NASA leaders on notice, saying that if they couldn\u2019t complete the mission, they would be held accountable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn order to accomplish this, NASA must transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization,\u201d he said. \u201cIf NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dIndustry officials said that Pence and others in the White House have become livid about the agency\u2019s lack of progress, particularly regarding the massive rocket known as the Space Launch System, or SLS, that NASA has been developing for more than a decade but has yet to fly. White House officials expressed their dismay to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at a meeting within the last few weeks, according to a space industry official not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.In an interview Thursday evening, Bridenstine strongly denied that, saying, \u201cIf they are frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts, they haven\u2019t communicated that to me because we\u2019re moving out to get to the moon in 2024.\u201d He added: \u201cI just want to be clear \u2014 this was my decision. I didn\u2019t get this from the White House at all.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere had also been tension between Bridenstine and Gerstenmaier, officials said. Bridenstine repeatedly had said, for example, that he would not cut other programs within the agency to fund the moon program, known as Artemis. But Gerstenmaier contradicted him during an advisory council meeting, saying recently, \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to look for some efficiencies and make some internal cuts to the agency, and that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be hard,\u201d he said, according to SpaceNews.The National Space Council declined to comment, but an administration official said, \u201cThis was an internal NASA decision, and Administrator Bridenstine\u2019s statement speaks for itself.\u201dBridenstine said that he thinks \"very highly\u201d of Gerstenmaier, said there was no tension between them and praised Gerstenmaier\u2019s 42 years of service to the agency. But he added that he had been thinking about making a change for some time and had grown weary of the repeated schedule delays and cost overruns of the hardware needed to meet the White House\u2019s 2024 mandate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt some point there comes a time for new leadership,\u201d he said. \u201cCost and schedule matter. And I intend to make sure we use every taxpayer dollar wisely.\u201dU.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), chairwoman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, blasted the decision to so abruptly remove someone with Gerstenmaier\u2019s enormous institutional knowledge.\u201cThe Trump administration\u2019s ill-defined crash program to land astronauts on the Moon in 2024 was going to be challenging enough to achieve under the best of circumstances,\" she said in a statement. \u201cRemoving experienced engineering leadership from that effort and the rest of the nation\u2019s human spaceflight programs at such a crucial point in time seems misguided at best.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe White House, though, is keen to show real progress and tired of reports of delays in some of NASA\u2019s most critical programs.AdvertisementFor years, the SLS has faced withering criticism for being perpetually behind schedule and over budget. A recent report, however, caught the White House\u2019s attention with its especially grim picture of the program, officials said. The Government Accountability Office found that the cost of the rocket had grown by 30 percent and that the first launch, initially expected in 2017, might not happen until mid-2021.Despite those problems, NASA continued to pay tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d to Boeing for scoring high on performance evaluations, the report said. Another report highlighted problems with the agency\u2019s plan to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil.Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to grow, a threat to Trump's moon missionIn his speech, Pence also put Boeing and the other companies it works with on notice, saying: \u201cIf our current contractors can\u2019t meet this objective, then we\u2019ll find ones that will.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace has been a top priority for the White House, which sees exploration as a way to rejuvenate national pride as it commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It has also cast space as a race between superpowers, especially regarding China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon this year, a historic first.Trump has pushed for a Space Force, a new branch of the military that would bolster the Pentagon\u2019s efforts to defend the critical national security satellites in orbit that provide missile warning, intelligence and communications for soldiers on the battlefield.The White House also reconstituted the National Space Council, and its first directive in late 2017 was a return to the moon.Story continues below advertisementA year and a half later, however, the White House is not impressed with the agency\u2019s progress in fulfilling that goal. And Gerstenmaier\u2019s ouster was seen as a way to shake up the agency, according to industry officials.AdvertisementGerstenmaier first came to NASA in 1977, and his career spanned working on the space shuttle program and the International Space Station. More recently, he oversaw the agency\u2019s Commercial Crew program, the development of a new generation of spacecraft being built by SpaceX and Boeing that would carry the first NASA astronauts to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011. He also led the Artemis program.Along the way, \u201cGerst,\u201d as he is known, has gained the trust of many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, been the enduring face of NASA for international partners and developed a reputation as a low-key, hard-working stalwart of the agency.Story continues below advertisementHis sudden removal was \u201ca shot not across the bow because it hit the bow,\u201d said one industrial official. Like several others interviewed for this story, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations inside NASA and the White House.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a sign to Bridenstine: Get it together, or you\u2019re out,\u201d the official said. \u201cIf Gerst isn\u2019t safe, no one is \u2014 or maybe just the astronauts currently on the space station.\u201dNews of Gerstenmaier\u2019s removal broke in an email Bridenstine sent to NASA employees Wednesday evening, hours after Gerstenmaier had testified on Capitol Hill during a House space subcommittee.\u201cAs you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars,\u201d Bridenstine wrote. \u201cIn an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said that Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut who had served as the deputy associate administrator for the human exploration office, would take over in an acting capacity.AdvertisementBill Hill, who had served with Gerstenmaier as deputy associate administrator in the human exploration office, was also reassigned. He will be a special adviser to Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator.Gerstenmaier was scheduled to appear Thursday morning at a symposium in Ohio honoring John Glenn. Bowersox appeared in his place.He pledged that NASA would reach the moon by 2024.Read more:Companies in the Cosmos50 astronauts, in their own words The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024. White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6117",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/white-house-frustration-over-moon-mission-delays-preceded-removal-top-nasa-official/",
        "text": "The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Trump administration is laser-focused on that date, which would come during a second term of the Trump presidency, should he be reelected. But despite the mandate, NASA has continued to struggle with delays and cost overruns that have threatened the program. And the ouster of one of the longest-serving stalwarts in the agency shows how far the White House and NASA\u2019s politically appointed leadership are willing to go toward disrupting NASA and attempting to break through the bureaucracy that many think has stilted its exploration efforts for years. In March, Vice President Pence fired the first warning shot, announcing an expedited new timeline for NASA\u2019s moon landing plans. Instead of getting humans there by 2028, he said, its new charge would be within five years. He put NASA leaders on notice, saying that if they couldn\u2019t complete the mission, they would be held accountable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn order to accomplish this, NASA must transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization,\u201d he said. \u201cIf NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dIndustry officials said that Pence and others in the White House have become livid about the agency\u2019s lack of progress, particularly regarding the massive rocket known as the Space Launch System, or SLS, that NASA has been developing for more than a decade but has yet to fly. White House officials expressed their dismay to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at a meeting within the last few weeks, according to a space industry official not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.In an interview Thursday evening, Bridenstine strongly denied that, saying, \u201cIf they are frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts, they haven\u2019t communicated that to me because we\u2019re moving out to get to the moon in 2024.\u201d He added: \u201cI just want to be clear \u2014 this was my decision. I didn\u2019t get this from the White House at all.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere had also been tension between Bridenstine and Gerstenmaier, officials said. Bridenstine repeatedly had said, for example, that he would not cut other programs within the agency to fund the moon program, known as Artemis. But Gerstenmaier contradicted him during an advisory council meeting, saying recently, \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to look for some efficiencies and make some internal cuts to the agency, and that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be hard,\u201d he said, according to SpaceNews.The National Space Council declined to comment, but an administration official said, \u201cThis was an internal NASA decision, and Administrator Bridenstine\u2019s statement speaks for itself.\u201dBridenstine said that he thinks \"very highly\u201d of Gerstenmaier, said there was no tension between them and praised Gerstenmaier\u2019s 42 years of service to the agency. But he added that he had been thinking about making a change for some time and had grown weary of the repeated schedule delays and cost overruns of the hardware needed to meet the White House\u2019s 2024 mandate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt some point there comes a time for new leadership,\u201d he said. \u201cCost and schedule matter. And I intend to make sure we use every taxpayer dollar wisely.\u201dU.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), chairwoman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, blasted the decision to so abruptly remove someone with Gerstenmaier\u2019s enormous institutional knowledge.\u201cThe Trump administration\u2019s ill-defined crash program to land astronauts on the Moon in 2024 was going to be challenging enough to achieve under the best of circumstances,\" she said in a statement. \u201cRemoving experienced engineering leadership from that effort and the rest of the nation\u2019s human spaceflight programs at such a crucial point in time seems misguided at best.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe White House, though, is keen to show real progress and tired of reports of delays in some of NASA\u2019s most critical programs.AdvertisementFor years, the SLS has faced withering criticism for being perpetually behind schedule and over budget. A recent report, however, caught the White House\u2019s attention with its especially grim picture of the program, officials said. The Government Accountability Office found that the cost of the rocket had grown by 30 percent and that the first launch, initially expected in 2017, might not happen until mid-2021.Despite those problems, NASA continued to pay tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d to Boeing for scoring high on performance evaluations, the report said. Another report highlighted problems with the agency\u2019s plan to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil.Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to grow, a threat to Trump's moon missionIn his speech, Pence also put Boeing and the other companies it works with on notice, saying: \u201cIf our current contractors can\u2019t meet this objective, then we\u2019ll find ones that will.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace has been a top priority for the White House, which sees exploration as a way to rejuvenate national pride as it commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It has also cast space as a race between superpowers, especially regarding China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon this year, a historic first.Trump has pushed for a Space Force, a new branch of the military that would bolster the Pentagon\u2019s efforts to defend the critical national security satellites in orbit that provide missile warning, intelligence and communications for soldiers on the battlefield.The White House also reconstituted the National Space Council, and its first directive in late 2017 was a return to the moon.Story continues below advertisementA year and a half later, however, the White House is not impressed with the agency\u2019s progress in fulfilling that goal. And Gerstenmaier\u2019s ouster was seen as a way to shake up the agency, according to industry officials.AdvertisementGerstenmaier first came to NASA in 1977, and his career spanned working on the space shuttle program and the International Space Station. More recently, he oversaw the agency\u2019s Commercial Crew program, the development of a new generation of spacecraft being built by SpaceX and Boeing that would carry the first NASA astronauts to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011. He also led the Artemis program.Along the way, \u201cGerst,\u201d as he is known, has gained the trust of many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, been the enduring face of NASA for international partners and developed a reputation as a low-key, hard-working stalwart of the agency.Story continues below advertisementHis sudden removal was \u201ca shot not across the bow because it hit the bow,\u201d said one industrial official. Like several others interviewed for this story, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations inside NASA and the White House.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a sign to Bridenstine: Get it together, or you\u2019re out,\u201d the official said. \u201cIf Gerst isn\u2019t safe, no one is \u2014 or maybe just the astronauts currently on the space station.\u201dNews of Gerstenmaier\u2019s removal broke in an email Bridenstine sent to NASA employees Wednesday evening, hours after Gerstenmaier had testified on Capitol Hill during a House space subcommittee.\u201cAs you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars,\u201d Bridenstine wrote. \u201cIn an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said that Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut who had served as the deputy associate administrator for the human exploration office, would take over in an acting capacity.AdvertisementBill Hill, who had served with Gerstenmaier as deputy associate administrator in the human exploration office, was also reassigned. He will be a special adviser to Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator.Gerstenmaier was scheduled to appear Thursday morning at a symposium in Ohio honoring John Glenn. Bowersox appeared in his place.He pledged that NASA would reach the moon by 2024.Read more:Companies in the Cosmos50 astronauts, in their own words The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024. White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6118",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/white-house-frustration-over-moon-mission-delays-preceded-removal-top-nasa-official/",
        "text": "The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Trump administration is laser-focused on that date, which would come during a second term of the Trump presidency, should he be reelected. But despite the mandate, NASA has continued to struggle with delays and cost overruns that have threatened the program. And the ouster of one of the longest-serving stalwarts in the agency shows how far the White House and NASA\u2019s politically appointed leadership are willing to go toward disrupting NASA and attempting to break through the bureaucracy that many think has stilted its exploration efforts for years. In March, Vice President Pence fired the first warning shot, announcing an expedited new timeline for NASA\u2019s moon landing plans. Instead of getting humans there by 2028, he said, its new charge would be within five years. He put NASA leaders on notice, saying that if they couldn\u2019t complete the mission, they would be held accountable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn order to accomplish this, NASA must transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization,\u201d he said. \u201cIf NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dIndustry officials said that Pence and others in the White House have become livid about the agency\u2019s lack of progress, particularly regarding the massive rocket known as the Space Launch System, or SLS, that NASA has been developing for more than a decade but has yet to fly. White House officials expressed their dismay to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at a meeting within the last few weeks, according to a space industry official not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.In an interview Thursday evening, Bridenstine strongly denied that, saying, \u201cIf they are frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts, they haven\u2019t communicated that to me because we\u2019re moving out to get to the moon in 2024.\u201d He added: \u201cI just want to be clear \u2014 this was my decision. I didn\u2019t get this from the White House at all.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere had also been tension between Bridenstine and Gerstenmaier, officials said. Bridenstine repeatedly had said, for example, that he would not cut other programs within the agency to fund the moon program, known as Artemis. But Gerstenmaier contradicted him during an advisory council meeting, saying recently, \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to look for some efficiencies and make some internal cuts to the agency, and that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be hard,\u201d he said, according to SpaceNews.The National Space Council declined to comment, but an administration official said, \u201cThis was an internal NASA decision, and Administrator Bridenstine\u2019s statement speaks for itself.\u201dBridenstine said that he thinks \"very highly\u201d of Gerstenmaier, said there was no tension between them and praised Gerstenmaier\u2019s 42 years of service to the agency. But he added that he had been thinking about making a change for some time and had grown weary of the repeated schedule delays and cost overruns of the hardware needed to meet the White House\u2019s 2024 mandate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt some point there comes a time for new leadership,\u201d he said. \u201cCost and schedule matter. And I intend to make sure we use every taxpayer dollar wisely.\u201dU.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), chairwoman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, blasted the decision to so abruptly remove someone with Gerstenmaier\u2019s enormous institutional knowledge.\u201cThe Trump administration\u2019s ill-defined crash program to land astronauts on the Moon in 2024 was going to be challenging enough to achieve under the best of circumstances,\" she said in a statement. \u201cRemoving experienced engineering leadership from that effort and the rest of the nation\u2019s human spaceflight programs at such a crucial point in time seems misguided at best.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe White House, though, is keen to show real progress and tired of reports of delays in some of NASA\u2019s most critical programs.AdvertisementFor years, the SLS has faced withering criticism for being perpetually behind schedule and over budget. A recent report, however, caught the White House\u2019s attention with its especially grim picture of the program, officials said. The Government Accountability Office found that the cost of the rocket had grown by 30 percent and that the first launch, initially expected in 2017, might not happen until mid-2021.Despite those problems, NASA continued to pay tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d to Boeing for scoring high on performance evaluations, the report said. Another report highlighted problems with the agency\u2019s plan to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil.Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to grow, a threat to Trump's moon missionIn his speech, Pence also put Boeing and the other companies it works with on notice, saying: \u201cIf our current contractors can\u2019t meet this objective, then we\u2019ll find ones that will.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace has been a top priority for the White House, which sees exploration as a way to rejuvenate national pride as it commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It has also cast space as a race between superpowers, especially regarding China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon this year, a historic first.Trump has pushed for a Space Force, a new branch of the military that would bolster the Pentagon\u2019s efforts to defend the critical national security satellites in orbit that provide missile warning, intelligence and communications for soldiers on the battlefield.The White House also reconstituted the National Space Council, and its first directive in late 2017 was a return to the moon.Story continues below advertisementA year and a half later, however, the White House is not impressed with the agency\u2019s progress in fulfilling that goal. And Gerstenmaier\u2019s ouster was seen as a way to shake up the agency, according to industry officials.AdvertisementGerstenmaier first came to NASA in 1977, and his career spanned working on the space shuttle program and the International Space Station. More recently, he oversaw the agency\u2019s Commercial Crew program, the development of a new generation of spacecraft being built by SpaceX and Boeing that would carry the first NASA astronauts to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011. He also led the Artemis program.Along the way, \u201cGerst,\u201d as he is known, has gained the trust of many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, been the enduring face of NASA for international partners and developed a reputation as a low-key, hard-working stalwart of the agency.Story continues below advertisementHis sudden removal was \u201ca shot not across the bow because it hit the bow,\u201d said one industrial official. Like several others interviewed for this story, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations inside NASA and the White House.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a sign to Bridenstine: Get it together, or you\u2019re out,\u201d the official said. \u201cIf Gerst isn\u2019t safe, no one is \u2014 or maybe just the astronauts currently on the space station.\u201dNews of Gerstenmaier\u2019s removal broke in an email Bridenstine sent to NASA employees Wednesday evening, hours after Gerstenmaier had testified on Capitol Hill during a House space subcommittee.\u201cAs you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars,\u201d Bridenstine wrote. \u201cIn an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said that Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut who had served as the deputy associate administrator for the human exploration office, would take over in an acting capacity.AdvertisementBill Hill, who had served with Gerstenmaier as deputy associate administrator in the human exploration office, was also reassigned. He will be a special adviser to Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator.Gerstenmaier was scheduled to appear Thursday morning at a symposium in Ohio honoring John Glenn. Bowersox appeared in his place.He pledged that NASA would reach the moon by 2024.Read more:Companies in the Cosmos50 astronauts, in their own words The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024. White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6119",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/11/white-house-frustration-over-moon-mission-delays-preceded-removal-top-nasa-official/",
        "text": "The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Trump administration is laser-focused on that date, which would come during a second term of the Trump presidency, should he be reelected. But despite the mandate, NASA has continued to struggle with delays and cost overruns that have threatened the program. And the ouster of one of the longest-serving stalwarts in the agency shows how far the White House and NASA\u2019s politically appointed leadership are willing to go toward disrupting NASA and attempting to break through the bureaucracy that many think has stilted its exploration efforts for years. In March, Vice President Pence fired the first warning shot, announcing an expedited new timeline for NASA\u2019s moon landing plans. Instead of getting humans there by 2028, he said, its new charge would be within five years. He put NASA leaders on notice, saying that if they couldn\u2019t complete the mission, they would be held accountable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn order to accomplish this, NASA must transform itself into a leaner, more accountable and more agile organization,\u201d he said. \u201cIf NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission.\u201dIndustry officials said that Pence and others in the White House have become livid about the agency\u2019s lack of progress, particularly regarding the massive rocket known as the Space Launch System, or SLS, that NASA has been developing for more than a decade but has yet to fly. White House officials expressed their dismay to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at a meeting within the last few weeks, according to a space industry official not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations.In an interview Thursday evening, Bridenstine strongly denied that, saying, \u201cIf they are frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts, they haven\u2019t communicated that to me because we\u2019re moving out to get to the moon in 2024.\u201d He added: \u201cI just want to be clear \u2014 this was my decision. I didn\u2019t get this from the White House at all.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere had also been tension between Bridenstine and Gerstenmaier, officials said. Bridenstine repeatedly had said, for example, that he would not cut other programs within the agency to fund the moon program, known as Artemis. But Gerstenmaier contradicted him during an advisory council meeting, saying recently, \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to look for some efficiencies and make some internal cuts to the agency, and that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be hard,\u201d he said, according to SpaceNews.The National Space Council declined to comment, but an administration official said, \u201cThis was an internal NASA decision, and Administrator Bridenstine\u2019s statement speaks for itself.\u201dBridenstine said that he thinks \"very highly\u201d of Gerstenmaier, said there was no tension between them and praised Gerstenmaier\u2019s 42 years of service to the agency. But he added that he had been thinking about making a change for some time and had grown weary of the repeated schedule delays and cost overruns of the hardware needed to meet the White House\u2019s 2024 mandate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt some point there comes a time for new leadership,\u201d he said. \u201cCost and schedule matter. And I intend to make sure we use every taxpayer dollar wisely.\u201dU.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), chairwoman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, blasted the decision to so abruptly remove someone with Gerstenmaier\u2019s enormous institutional knowledge.\u201cThe Trump administration\u2019s ill-defined crash program to land astronauts on the Moon in 2024 was going to be challenging enough to achieve under the best of circumstances,\" she said in a statement. \u201cRemoving experienced engineering leadership from that effort and the rest of the nation\u2019s human spaceflight programs at such a crucial point in time seems misguided at best.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe White House, though, is keen to show real progress and tired of reports of delays in some of NASA\u2019s most critical programs.AdvertisementFor years, the SLS has faced withering criticism for being perpetually behind schedule and over budget. A recent report, however, caught the White House\u2019s attention with its especially grim picture of the program, officials said. The Government Accountability Office found that the cost of the rocket had grown by 30 percent and that the first launch, initially expected in 2017, might not happen until mid-2021.Despite those problems, NASA continued to pay tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d to Boeing for scoring high on performance evaluations, the report said. Another report highlighted problems with the agency\u2019s plan to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil.Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to grow, a threat to Trump's moon missionIn his speech, Pence also put Boeing and the other companies it works with on notice, saying: \u201cIf our current contractors can\u2019t meet this objective, then we\u2019ll find ones that will.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace has been a top priority for the White House, which sees exploration as a way to rejuvenate national pride as it commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It has also cast space as a race between superpowers, especially regarding China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon this year, a historic first.Trump has pushed for a Space Force, a new branch of the military that would bolster the Pentagon\u2019s efforts to defend the critical national security satellites in orbit that provide missile warning, intelligence and communications for soldiers on the battlefield.The White House also reconstituted the National Space Council, and its first directive in late 2017 was a return to the moon.Story continues below advertisementA year and a half later, however, the White House is not impressed with the agency\u2019s progress in fulfilling that goal. And Gerstenmaier\u2019s ouster was seen as a way to shake up the agency, according to industry officials.AdvertisementGerstenmaier first came to NASA in 1977, and his career spanned working on the space shuttle program and the International Space Station. More recently, he oversaw the agency\u2019s Commercial Crew program, the development of a new generation of spacecraft being built by SpaceX and Boeing that would carry the first NASA astronauts to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011. He also led the Artemis program.Along the way, \u201cGerst,\u201d as he is known, has gained the trust of many lawmakers on Capitol Hill, been the enduring face of NASA for international partners and developed a reputation as a low-key, hard-working stalwart of the agency.Story continues below advertisementHis sudden removal was \u201ca shot not across the bow because it hit the bow,\u201d said one industrial official. Like several others interviewed for this story, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations inside NASA and the White House.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a sign to Bridenstine: Get it together, or you\u2019re out,\u201d the official said. \u201cIf Gerst isn\u2019t safe, no one is \u2014 or maybe just the astronauts currently on the space station.\u201dNews of Gerstenmaier\u2019s removal broke in an email Bridenstine sent to NASA employees Wednesday evening, hours after Gerstenmaier had testified on Capitol Hill during a House space subcommittee.\u201cAs you know, NASA has been given a bold challenge to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024, with a focus on the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars,\u201d Bridenstine wrote. \u201cIn an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said that Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut who had served as the deputy associate administrator for the human exploration office, would take over in an acting capacity.AdvertisementBill Hill, who had served with Gerstenmaier as deputy associate administrator in the human exploration office, was also reassigned. He will be a special adviser to Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator.Gerstenmaier was scheduled to appear Thursday morning at a symposium in Ohio honoring John Glenn. Bowersox appeared in his place.He pledged that NASA would reach the moon by 2024.Read more:Companies in the Cosmos50 astronauts, in their own words The sudden removal of William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, late Wednesday is a clear sign that the White House is increasingly frustrated with the agency\u2019s efforts to return humans to the surface of the moon by 2024. White House frustration over moon mission delays preceded removal of top NASA official ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA says it collected a large sample from the asteroid Bennu. Maybe too large. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6120",
        "date": "2020-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/23/nasa-osirisrex-bennu-asteroid-leaking/",
        "text": "The spacecraft that reached out and grabbed a sample from an asteroid earlier this week may have collected so much material it prevented the lid of the sample holder from closing properly, allowing some of the precious dust and rocks to leak out, NASA officials said Friday evening.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the space agency is faced with the daunting task of stowing away the materials it does have without spilling a significant amount, a delicate procedure made all the more difficult by the weightless environment of space and the spacecraft being about 200 million miles away. On Tuesday, an arm of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, designed by Lockheed Martin, touched the surface of the asteroid Bennu and fired nitrogen gas that stirred up gravel and dust to be captured by a collection device.Story continues below advertisementBut the blast appears to have kicked up so much gravel and dust that some of it got jammed in the device, keeping the lid open. Still, NASA officials said they were confident that they have a large sample \u2014 far more than the 60 grams required \u2014 and will be able to stow the collection device away without too much leaking out.Advertisement\u201cI am highly confident that the [operation] was successful, that it collected abundant mass,\u201d said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the mission. There was \u201cdefinitely evidence of hundreds of grams of material, and possibly more. My big concern now is that the particles are escaping. Because we were almost a victim of our own success here, and some of the largest particles left the \u2026 flap open.\u201dInstead of trying to measure the amount of material collected, as originally planned, NASA now plans to store the collection device in the return capsule as early as Tuesday. Meanwhile, it is holding the spacecraft and collection device as steady as possible, fearful that any additional movement will cause more material to spill out.\u201cI was pretty concerned when I saw these images coming in, and I think the most prudent course of action is to very safely stow what we have and minimize any future mass loss,\u201d Lauretta said.But scientists won\u2019t know how much material was collected until the spacecraft returns to Earth \u2014 in 2023.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to have to wait till we get home to know precisely how much we have and as you can imagine that\u2019s hard,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the good news is we see a lot of material so where we are in the positive situation of having a lot more than the 60 grams that was required here.\u201dThe mission was the first time NASA has ever taken a sample from one of the estimated 1 million asteroids in the solar system. Scientists believe the material could shed light on how the universe was formed and how water ended up on Earth.More than 4.5 billion years old, Bennu is as large as the Empire State Building and looks like a giant walnut that scientists believe is full of scientific riches, such as carbon and water locked away inside clay materials. Some of the sample the spacecraft collected on Tuesday has kept a lid from closing properly, allowing the material to leak. NASA says it collected a large sample from the asteroid Bennu. Maybe too large.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "In historic first, an aging satellite is resurrected by another in a technology that could reduce junk in space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6121",
        "date": "2020-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/20/new-technology-creates-fountain-youth-aging-satellites-potentially-reducing-space-junk/",
        "text": "The satellite was getting old, pushing 19 \u2014 an age that verges on geriatric in spacecraft years. Still, it was healthy and could perform its duties, beaming the Internet to cruise ships and airplanes, among other tasks.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightProblem was, its fuel was running out.Normally in such a case, the satellite would have flown to a designated graveyard orbit, thousands of miles above the Earth, where spent satellites go to die peacefully and out of the way of others. Instead, two companies teamed up to extend the life of the satellite, known as Intelsat 901, for another five years. In February, a spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman reached the satellite more than 22,000 miles above the Earth, latched on to it and is now essentially serving as a tow truck. Northrop\u2019s spacecraft, known as a Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV), has taken over propulsion and steering for the satellite, making sure it maintains its orbit and is pointing in the right direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd late last week, Intelsat and Northrop Grumman announced that 901 has now successfully resumed operations, albeit with the MEV tethered to its back.The mission marked the first time two commercial spacecraft have docked with each other in space and holds the promise of limiting the amount of orbital debris, a growing and nettlesome problem, as well as creating a new business opportunity for companies in space.\u201cIt proves that in-orbit servicing is real,\u201d Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat\u2019s vice president of space systems engineering and operations, said in an interview. \u201cThis was a project that took years in planning. We had identified this satellite three years ago and decided it\u2019s healthy but it\u2019s going to run out of fuel in early 2020. And so rather than having to discard the satellite and retire it, we teamed up with Northrop Grumman to do this in-orbit servicing mission.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe companies are planning to perform the feat again, perhaps later this year with a different aging satellite. And there is now hope that robots in space will be able to look after each other and touch off a new chapter in commercial space operations. About 20 satellites a year reach the end of their lives and could be rescued, Northrop Grumman said.\u201cThis is further evidence that the technology is moving out of the realm of specialized government activities into the broader commercialized domain,\u201d said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. \u201cThat\u2019s a pretty important step for this nascent sector that one day holds promise for a whole range of things, from not only life extension but to on-orbit repair, fueling, inspection, assembly and manufacturing.\u201dSpace, while vast, has become increasingly littered with all sorts of debris, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, even a spatula dropped by an astronaut on a spacewalk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2007, China fired a missile that blew up one of its dead weather satellites. Two years later, an active U.S. communications satellite crashed into a defunct Russian spacecraft. Those two incidents alone created thousands of pieces of debris, raising concerns that junk in space can create more junk and lead to more collisions.In orbit, items move incredibly fast \u2014 as much as 17,500 mph \u2014 so even a small piece of debris, such as a screw, can cause enormous damage. Being able to pull dead satellites out of major traffic lanes in space, then, would be a welcome step, officials said.The mission comes at a time when there are increased concerns about adversaries\u2019 activities in space. The Trump administration has established the Space Force, as a part of the Air Force, to help deter conflict in space. Satellites are vital to the way the Pentagon wages war. They\u2019re used to detect missiles, to guide precision munitions, and to provide intelligence and communications. But the satellites are just sitting there, vulnerable. And potential adversaries such as Russia and China have demonstrated the ability to interfere with them \u2014 or take them out completely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis month, for example, Russia tested a missile the Pentagon said was designed to take out satellites in space. The Pentagon denounced the test, with Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of operations, saying in a statement that it was \u201cyet another example that the threats to U.S. and allied space systems are real, serious and growing.\u201dThis year, the Pentagon said two Russian spacecraft got uncomfortably close to a sensitive U.S. satellite. The Russian spacecraft \u201cexhibited characteristics of a space weapon,\u201d Raymond said, and \u201cconducted maneuvers near a U.S. government satellite that would be interpreted as irresponsible and potentially threatening in any other domain.\u201dNorthrop and Intelsat said their mission was for commercial purposes only. But it involved a great number of technological advances, years of planning and then a few nail-biting moments, as the MEV approached slowly over a period of weeks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe didn\u2019t make it on the first try,\u201d Intelsat\u2019s Froeliger said. \u201cIt required several tries to actually dock.\u201dBecause the satellite was built at a time when in-orbit satellite servicing was \u201ca remote concept,\u201d he said, it didn\u2019t have a docking port. So engineers had to get creative.They built a probe on the MEV that could extend like an arm, reach into one of the satellite\u2019s engine nozzles and then extend three fingers that acted like \u201can anchor in a wall,\u201d he said. After the five years is up, the companies will decide to either extend the mission or deliver the satellite to the graveyard orbit.Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Gen. John W. \u201cRay\u201d Raymond as an Air Force general. He is now a general in the Space Force. A satellite that was about to run out of fuel and be retired was successfully resuscitated by another satellite earlier this year in a development that promises to extend the life of spacecraft and cut down on the proliferation of space junk. In historic first, an aging satellite is resurrected by another in a technology that could reduce junk in space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "In historic first, an aging satellite is resurrected by another in a technology that could reduce junk in space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6122",
        "date": "2020-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/20/new-technology-creates-fountain-youth-aging-satellites-potentially-reducing-space-junk/",
        "text": "The satellite was getting old, pushing 19 \u2014 an age that verges on geriatric in spacecraft years. Still, it was healthy and could perform its duties, beaming the Internet to cruise ships and airplanes, among other tasks.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightProblem was, its fuel was running out.Normally in such a case, the satellite would have flown to a designated graveyard orbit, thousands of miles above the Earth, where spent satellites go to die peacefully and out of the way of others. Instead, two companies teamed up to extend the life of the satellite, known as Intelsat 901, for another five years. In February, a spacecraft built by Northrop Grumman reached the satellite more than 22,000 miles above the Earth, latched on to it and is now essentially serving as a tow truck. Northrop\u2019s spacecraft, known as a Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV), has taken over propulsion and steering for the satellite, making sure it maintains its orbit and is pointing in the right direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd late last week, Intelsat and Northrop Grumman announced that 901 has now successfully resumed operations, albeit with the MEV tethered to its back.The mission marked the first time two commercial spacecraft have docked with each other in space and holds the promise of limiting the amount of orbital debris, a growing and nettlesome problem, as well as creating a new business opportunity for companies in space.\u201cIt proves that in-orbit servicing is real,\u201d Jean-Luc Froeliger, Intelsat\u2019s vice president of space systems engineering and operations, said in an interview. \u201cThis was a project that took years in planning. We had identified this satellite three years ago and decided it\u2019s healthy but it\u2019s going to run out of fuel in early 2020. And so rather than having to discard the satellite and retire it, we teamed up with Northrop Grumman to do this in-orbit servicing mission.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe companies are planning to perform the feat again, perhaps later this year with a different aging satellite. And there is now hope that robots in space will be able to look after each other and touch off a new chapter in commercial space operations. About 20 satellites a year reach the end of their lives and could be rescued, Northrop Grumman said.\u201cThis is further evidence that the technology is moving out of the realm of specialized government activities into the broader commercialized domain,\u201d said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. \u201cThat\u2019s a pretty important step for this nascent sector that one day holds promise for a whole range of things, from not only life extension but to on-orbit repair, fueling, inspection, assembly and manufacturing.\u201dSpace, while vast, has become increasingly littered with all sorts of debris, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, even a spatula dropped by an astronaut on a spacewalk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2007, China fired a missile that blew up one of its dead weather satellites. Two years later, an active U.S. communications satellite crashed into a defunct Russian spacecraft. Those two incidents alone created thousands of pieces of debris, raising concerns that junk in space can create more junk and lead to more collisions.In orbit, items move incredibly fast \u2014 as much as 17,500 mph \u2014 so even a small piece of debris, such as a screw, can cause enormous damage. Being able to pull dead satellites out of major traffic lanes in space, then, would be a welcome step, officials said.The mission comes at a time when there are increased concerns about adversaries\u2019 activities in space. The Trump administration has established the Space Force, as a part of the Air Force, to help deter conflict in space. Satellites are vital to the way the Pentagon wages war. They\u2019re used to detect missiles, to guide precision munitions, and to provide intelligence and communications. But the satellites are just sitting there, vulnerable. And potential adversaries such as Russia and China have demonstrated the ability to interfere with them \u2014 or take them out completely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis month, for example, Russia tested a missile the Pentagon said was designed to take out satellites in space. The Pentagon denounced the test, with Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of operations, saying in a statement that it was \u201cyet another example that the threats to U.S. and allied space systems are real, serious and growing.\u201dThis year, the Pentagon said two Russian spacecraft got uncomfortably close to a sensitive U.S. satellite. The Russian spacecraft \u201cexhibited characteristics of a space weapon,\u201d Raymond said, and \u201cconducted maneuvers near a U.S. government satellite that would be interpreted as irresponsible and potentially threatening in any other domain.\u201dNorthrop and Intelsat said their mission was for commercial purposes only. But it involved a great number of technological advances, years of planning and then a few nail-biting moments, as the MEV approached slowly over a period of weeks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe didn\u2019t make it on the first try,\u201d Intelsat\u2019s Froeliger said. \u201cIt required several tries to actually dock.\u201dBecause the satellite was built at a time when in-orbit satellite servicing was \u201ca remote concept,\u201d he said, it didn\u2019t have a docking port. So engineers had to get creative.They built a probe on the MEV that could extend like an arm, reach into one of the satellite\u2019s engine nozzles and then extend three fingers that acted like \u201can anchor in a wall,\u201d he said. After the five years is up, the companies will decide to either extend the mission or deliver the satellite to the graveyard orbit.Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Gen. John W. \u201cRay\u201d Raymond as an Air Force general. He is now a general in the Space Force. A satellite that was about to run out of fuel and be retired was successfully resuscitated by another satellite earlier this year in a development that promises to extend the life of spacecraft and cut down on the proliferation of space junk. In historic first, an aging satellite is resurrected by another in a technology that could reduce junk in space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to rise, a threat to Trump\u2019s moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6123",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/18/government-watchdog-says-cost-nasa-rocket-continues-rise-threat-trumps-moon-mission/",
        "text": "The rocket NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon by 2024 has for years suffered significant cost overruns and schedule delays. But those problems are even worse than originally thought, according to a federal watchdog report expected to be released Wednesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, said NASA had masked the true price tag of the program by shifting some costs to future missions without accounting for them. It accused the space agency of \u201ca lack of transparency . . . especially for its human spaceflight program\" and said NASA misrepresentations made it hard to determine the true cost of the program. It said the cost of the rocket, known as the Space Launch System, had grown by nearly 30 percent or nearly $2 billion and that the first launch of the rocket, initially expected in late 2017, might not happen until June 2021.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, NASA has continued to pay tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d to Boeing, the SLS\u2019s primary contractor, for scoring high on performance evaluations.After issuing one award fee to Boeing, a NASA official even \u201cnoted that the significant schedule delays on this contract have caused NASA to restructure the flight manifest for SLS,\u201d the report said. The GAO called for NASA to use \u201congoing contract renegotiations\u201d to \u201creevaluate its strategy to incentivize contractors to obtain better outcomes.\u201dThe report comes as NASA is seeking congressional support for its plan to return humans to the moon within five years. Originally, NASA had planned to do that by 2028, but the Trump administration requested that the timetable be accelerated. To meet that demand, NASA recently requested an additional $1.6 billion from Congress for its moon effort, dubbed Artemis. Last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told CNN that the cost of the program would be far more: $20 to $30 billion over five years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the key to that mission is the SLS, a rocket with a cost that is not fully known since \u201cNASA\u2019s current approach for reporting cost growth misrepresents the cost performance of the program,\u201d according to the GAO.Last year, NASA\u2019s Inspector General blamed Boeing for a 2.5-year delay for the program.In its latest report, the GAO said that NASA diverted nearly $800 million of program costs to future missions, which it said \u201cobscures cost growth\u201d for the program. It also noted that NASA cost estimate runs only through the first launch of the rocket, meaning there is a lack of transparency into what the total cost of the program is.The GAO report also took aim at the program to develop the Orion spacecraft that would fly atop the SLS. The prime contractor for that program is Lockheed Martin, which also has been receiving regular award fees from NASA, despite being over budget.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA NASA spokesperson declined to comment Tuesday. But in a letter attached to the report released Wednesday morning, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human spaceflight and operations, strongly defended the agency\u2019s management of the program, saying it has been transparent about the costs. He accused the GAO of repeatedly projecting \u201cthe worst-case schedule outcome\u201d and said NASA takes \u201cexception to the unnecessarily negative language\u201d in the report.\u201cThe GAO report does not acknowledge NASA is constructing some of the most sophisticated hardware ever built,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLike all other development programs, the challenges we face are significant but not insurmountable.\u201dBoeing said in a statement that the SLS \u201cis critical to the nation and to the future of human spaceflight,\u201d and that it was continuing to make progress. The core stage integration, assembly and testing of the rocket to be used in the first mission are in \u201cthe final stages,\" it said. The company is also building the core stage for the second Artemis flight. And it said it recently \u201crestructured our leadership team to better align with current program challenges\u201d and to help it \u201ctransition from rocket development to rocket production.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCost isn\u2019t the only problem. The GAO report noted that SLS\u2019s launch date has been a moving target. It was initially expected to launch in 2017, then late 2018, then December of 2019 and then June 2020. But even that date \u201cis unlikely,\u201d the GAO said, noting that \u201cthe first launch may occur as late as June 2021 if all risks are realized.\u201dIt said that NASA and Boeing \u201cunderestimated the complexity of manufacturing and assembling the core engine stage section\u201d where the engines mate to the rocket. There was a problem of debris in the fuel lines. In order to \u201ckeep costs low\u201d Boeing initially hired only 100 technicians, but now has about 250 on the program.Another issue was that Boeing began work on the rocket before it had a set of \u201cdetailed directions on how the vehicle should be built.\u201d This slowed progress since \u201ctechnicians can only perform work that they have instructions to carry out.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the SLS is significantly delayed, that would be a huge problem for NASA\u2019s ability to get to the moon quickly. The agency has considered cutting out a major engine test known as the \u201cgreen run\u201d in order to speed up development. And Bridenstine even briefly considered using another rocket instead of the SLS for the first launch, which is planned to take an uncrewed spacecraft in orbit around the moon on a three-week mission. That would precede missions with astronauts who would eventually land on the lunar surface.Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, have expressed skepticism about the Artemis plan, and it\u2019s unclear whether NASA will get the money it says it need to pull off a lunar landing on such on an expedited timeline.Bridenstine has repeatedly said that NASA would not cut other programs within the agency to fund Artemis. But Gerstenmaier, the NASA associate administrator, said that eventually it might have to do just that.\u201cWe\u2019re going to have to look for some efficiencies and make some cuts internal to the agency, and that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be hard,\u201d he said, according to SpaceNews. The rocket NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon by 2024 has for years suffered significant cost overruns and schedule delays. But those problems are even worse than originally thought, according to a federal watchdog report expected to be released Wednesday. Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to rise, a threat to Trump\u2019s moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to rise, a threat to Trump\u2019s moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6124",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/18/government-watchdog-says-cost-nasa-rocket-continues-rise-threat-trumps-moon-mission/",
        "text": "The rocket NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon by 2024 has for years suffered significant cost overruns and schedule delays. But those problems are even worse than originally thought, according to a federal watchdog report expected to be released Wednesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, said NASA had masked the true price tag of the program by shifting some costs to future missions without accounting for them. It accused the space agency of \u201ca lack of transparency . . . especially for its human spaceflight program\" and said NASA misrepresentations made it hard to determine the true cost of the program. It said the cost of the rocket, known as the Space Launch System, had grown by nearly 30 percent or nearly $2 billion and that the first launch of the rocket, initially expected in late 2017, might not happen until June 2021.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, NASA has continued to pay tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d to Boeing, the SLS\u2019s primary contractor, for scoring high on performance evaluations.After issuing one award fee to Boeing, a NASA official even \u201cnoted that the significant schedule delays on this contract have caused NASA to restructure the flight manifest for SLS,\u201d the report said. The GAO called for NASA to use \u201congoing contract renegotiations\u201d to \u201creevaluate its strategy to incentivize contractors to obtain better outcomes.\u201dThe report comes as NASA is seeking congressional support for its plan to return humans to the moon within five years. Originally, NASA had planned to do that by 2028, but the Trump administration requested that the timetable be accelerated. To meet that demand, NASA recently requested an additional $1.6 billion from Congress for its moon effort, dubbed Artemis. Last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told CNN that the cost of the program would be far more: $20 to $30 billion over five years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the key to that mission is the SLS, a rocket with a cost that is not fully known since \u201cNASA\u2019s current approach for reporting cost growth misrepresents the cost performance of the program,\u201d according to the GAO.Last year, NASA\u2019s Inspector General blamed Boeing for a 2.5-year delay for the program.In its latest report, the GAO said that NASA diverted nearly $800 million of program costs to future missions, which it said \u201cobscures cost growth\u201d for the program. It also noted that NASA cost estimate runs only through the first launch of the rocket, meaning there is a lack of transparency into what the total cost of the program is.The GAO report also took aim at the program to develop the Orion spacecraft that would fly atop the SLS. The prime contractor for that program is Lockheed Martin, which also has been receiving regular award fees from NASA, despite being over budget.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA NASA spokesperson declined to comment Tuesday. But in a letter attached to the report released Wednesday morning, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human spaceflight and operations, strongly defended the agency\u2019s management of the program, saying it has been transparent about the costs. He accused the GAO of repeatedly projecting \u201cthe worst-case schedule outcome\u201d and said NASA takes \u201cexception to the unnecessarily negative language\u201d in the report.\u201cThe GAO report does not acknowledge NASA is constructing some of the most sophisticated hardware ever built,\u201d he wrote. \u201cLike all other development programs, the challenges we face are significant but not insurmountable.\u201dBoeing said in a statement that the SLS \u201cis critical to the nation and to the future of human spaceflight,\u201d and that it was continuing to make progress. The core stage integration, assembly and testing of the rocket to be used in the first mission are in \u201cthe final stages,\" it said. The company is also building the core stage for the second Artemis flight. And it said it recently \u201crestructured our leadership team to better align with current program challenges\u201d and to help it \u201ctransition from rocket development to rocket production.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCost isn\u2019t the only problem. The GAO report noted that SLS\u2019s launch date has been a moving target. It was initially expected to launch in 2017, then late 2018, then December of 2019 and then June 2020. But even that date \u201cis unlikely,\u201d the GAO said, noting that \u201cthe first launch may occur as late as June 2021 if all risks are realized.\u201dIt said that NASA and Boeing \u201cunderestimated the complexity of manufacturing and assembling the core engine stage section\u201d where the engines mate to the rocket. There was a problem of debris in the fuel lines. In order to \u201ckeep costs low\u201d Boeing initially hired only 100 technicians, but now has about 250 on the program.Another issue was that Boeing began work on the rocket before it had a set of \u201cdetailed directions on how the vehicle should be built.\u201d This slowed progress since \u201ctechnicians can only perform work that they have instructions to carry out.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the SLS is significantly delayed, that would be a huge problem for NASA\u2019s ability to get to the moon quickly. The agency has considered cutting out a major engine test known as the \u201cgreen run\u201d in order to speed up development. And Bridenstine even briefly considered using another rocket instead of the SLS for the first launch, which is planned to take an uncrewed spacecraft in orbit around the moon on a three-week mission. That would precede missions with astronauts who would eventually land on the lunar surface.Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, have expressed skepticism about the Artemis plan, and it\u2019s unclear whether NASA will get the money it says it need to pull off a lunar landing on such on an expedited timeline.Bridenstine has repeatedly said that NASA would not cut other programs within the agency to fund Artemis. But Gerstenmaier, the NASA associate administrator, said that eventually it might have to do just that.\u201cWe\u2019re going to have to look for some efficiencies and make some cuts internal to the agency, and that\u2019s where it\u2019s going to be hard,\u201d he said, according to SpaceNews. The rocket NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon by 2024 has for years suffered significant cost overruns and schedule delays. But those problems are even worse than originally thought, according to a federal watchdog report expected to be released Wednesday. Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to rise, a threat to Trump\u2019s moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6125",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/19/biden-nelson-nasa-artemis-moon/",
        "text": "The rocket engineers were giddy Thursday, cheering through their face masks. Applauding, virtually high-fiving and wishing they could hug each other to celebrate when NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System rocket finally successfully completed a key test of its main engines.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was a moment of triumph for the space agency, which over the past year successfully restored human spaceflight from United States soil, collected a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away and whose Perseverance rover made a pinpoint landing on Mars. On Friday, the Biden administration officially announced its intent to nominate former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead the agency as its next administrator. If confirmed, he would take over an agency that\u2019s rolling, and attracting public attention in a way not seen in years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, if confirmed, Nelson will face a host of serious challenges that could change the course of the agency for years. It will be up to him to oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierNASA is also in the early stages of flying its astronauts to the International Space Station with SpaceX and Boeing, a program that poses significant risks and has had a series of stumbles. And the agency plans to fly the James Webb telescope this year, after a series of delays and setbacks to a signature science program.In a statement Friday, Nelson said he was \u201chonored to be nominated by Joe Biden and, if confirmed, to help lead NASA into an exciting future of possibilities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAchieving that future, though, will be no easy task. One of the biggest tests will be shepherding the Artemis program from concept to reality.The return-to-the-moon program started as one of former president Trump\u2019s signature initiatives, but the burden of the execution will fall squarely on Nelson\u2019s shoulders.One of the keys will be the SLS rocket, which as a senator from Florida, Nelson championed. Now he would need to make sure it flies.NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried.Despite its successful engine test Thursday, the program has suffered years of setbacks, delays and significant cost overruns. NASA\u2019s Inspector General recently estimated the rocket would cost $27.3 billion through fiscal year 2025. It has never flown, and critics have long derided it as the Senate Launch System, more jobs program than exploration vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA was aiming to fly the rocket for the first time this year, but that timeline is very much in doubt given its many problems.Nelson also would oversee the awarding of the next phase of the contracts for the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the so-called \u201cHuman Landing System,\u201d the first time money has been spent on a lunar lander since Apollo. But that was well short of the $3.3 billion NASA had requested, and now the 2024 deadline the Trump administration had imposed on NASA to land people on the moon is out of the question.Under Nelson, the agency would have to figure out what sort of schedule is feasible.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Another challenge will be ensuring that Boeing is back on track with the Starliner capsule it is designing for NASA to fly crews to the space station. During a test flight without any astronauts on board in late 2019, the spacecraft ran into troubles almost as soon as it reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA and Boeing decided to redo the test, which is now scheduled for this spring. That will have to go well in order for Boeing to finally fly astronauts for the first time, a mission NASA hopes to achieve by the end of the year. And something rival Space X accomplished twice last year.It also hopes to fly the James Webb telescope, a massively ambitious project that would look back in time to the beginning of the formation of galaxies, explore galaxies and look for other signs of life in the universe.It is scheduled to launch in October, after years of problems that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Nelson is well suited to take over the agency, his supporters say, given his long tenure in Congress, where he took a keen interest in NASA and oversaw many of its signature programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the senate he was known as the go-to senator for our nation\u2019s space program,\u201d the White House said in its announcement, noting that Nelson even flew on the space shuttle in 1986.Nelson quickly received glowing praise from members of Congress and industry groups Friday.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the science, space and technology committee, said: \u201cThrough his committee leadership positions in both the House and Senate, Sen. Nelson has amassed decades of experience in dealing with NASA, Congress, and the space and aviation communities, and I know he will be able to hit the ground running when he becomes administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), chair of the subcommittee on science and space said, \u201cSenator Nelson has the experience to lead NASA to new heights.\u201dAnd former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a Republican who served under Trump, praised Nelson, who tried unsuccessfully to block Bridenstine\u2019s nomination. He said Nelson was \u201can excellent pick\u201d and urged the Senate to confirm him \u201cwithout delay.\u201d If confirmed as NASA administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson will oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6126",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/19/biden-nelson-nasa-artemis-moon/",
        "text": "The rocket engineers were giddy Thursday, cheering through their face masks. Applauding, virtually high-fiving and wishing they could hug each other to celebrate when NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System rocket finally successfully completed a key test of its main engines.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was a moment of triumph for the space agency, which over the past year successfully restored human spaceflight from United States soil, collected a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away and whose Perseverance rover made a pinpoint landing on Mars. On Friday, the Biden administration officially announced its intent to nominate former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead the agency as its next administrator. If confirmed, he would take over an agency that\u2019s rolling, and attracting public attention in a way not seen in years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, if confirmed, Nelson will face a host of serious challenges that could change the course of the agency for years. It will be up to him to oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierNASA is also in the early stages of flying its astronauts to the International Space Station with SpaceX and Boeing, a program that poses significant risks and has had a series of stumbles. And the agency plans to fly the James Webb telescope this year, after a series of delays and setbacks to a signature science program.In a statement Friday, Nelson said he was \u201chonored to be nominated by Joe Biden and, if confirmed, to help lead NASA into an exciting future of possibilities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAchieving that future, though, will be no easy task. One of the biggest tests will be shepherding the Artemis program from concept to reality.The return-to-the-moon program started as one of former president Trump\u2019s signature initiatives, but the burden of the execution will fall squarely on Nelson\u2019s shoulders.One of the keys will be the SLS rocket, which as a senator from Florida, Nelson championed. Now he would need to make sure it flies.NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried.Despite its successful engine test Thursday, the program has suffered years of setbacks, delays and significant cost overruns. NASA\u2019s Inspector General recently estimated the rocket would cost $27.3 billion through fiscal year 2025. It has never flown, and critics have long derided it as the Senate Launch System, more jobs program than exploration vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA was aiming to fly the rocket for the first time this year, but that timeline is very much in doubt given its many problems.Nelson also would oversee the awarding of the next phase of the contracts for the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the so-called \u201cHuman Landing System,\u201d the first time money has been spent on a lunar lander since Apollo. But that was well short of the $3.3 billion NASA had requested, and now the 2024 deadline the Trump administration had imposed on NASA to land people on the moon is out of the question.Under Nelson, the agency would have to figure out what sort of schedule is feasible.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Another challenge will be ensuring that Boeing is back on track with the Starliner capsule it is designing for NASA to fly crews to the space station. During a test flight without any astronauts on board in late 2019, the spacecraft ran into troubles almost as soon as it reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA and Boeing decided to redo the test, which is now scheduled for this spring. That will have to go well in order for Boeing to finally fly astronauts for the first time, a mission NASA hopes to achieve by the end of the year. And something rival Space X accomplished twice last year.It also hopes to fly the James Webb telescope, a massively ambitious project that would look back in time to the beginning of the formation of galaxies, explore galaxies and look for other signs of life in the universe.It is scheduled to launch in October, after years of problems that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Nelson is well suited to take over the agency, his supporters say, given his long tenure in Congress, where he took a keen interest in NASA and oversaw many of its signature programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the senate he was known as the go-to senator for our nation\u2019s space program,\u201d the White House said in its announcement, noting that Nelson even flew on the space shuttle in 1986.Nelson quickly received glowing praise from members of Congress and industry groups Friday.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the science, space and technology committee, said: \u201cThrough his committee leadership positions in both the House and Senate, Sen. Nelson has amassed decades of experience in dealing with NASA, Congress, and the space and aviation communities, and I know he will be able to hit the ground running when he becomes administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), chair of the subcommittee on science and space said, \u201cSenator Nelson has the experience to lead NASA to new heights.\u201dAnd former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a Republican who served under Trump, praised Nelson, who tried unsuccessfully to block Bridenstine\u2019s nomination. He said Nelson was \u201can excellent pick\u201d and urged the Senate to confirm him \u201cwithout delay.\u201d If confirmed as NASA administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson will oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6127",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/19/biden-nelson-nasa-artemis-moon/",
        "text": "The rocket engineers were giddy Thursday, cheering through their face masks. Applauding, virtually high-fiving and wishing they could hug each other to celebrate when NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System rocket finally successfully completed a key test of its main engines.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was a moment of triumph for the space agency, which over the past year successfully restored human spaceflight from United States soil, collected a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away and whose Perseverance rover made a pinpoint landing on Mars. On Friday, the Biden administration officially announced its intent to nominate former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead the agency as its next administrator. If confirmed, he would take over an agency that\u2019s rolling, and attracting public attention in a way not seen in years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, if confirmed, Nelson will face a host of serious challenges that could change the course of the agency for years. It will be up to him to oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierNASA is also in the early stages of flying its astronauts to the International Space Station with SpaceX and Boeing, a program that poses significant risks and has had a series of stumbles. And the agency plans to fly the James Webb telescope this year, after a series of delays and setbacks to a signature science program.In a statement Friday, Nelson said he was \u201chonored to be nominated by Joe Biden and, if confirmed, to help lead NASA into an exciting future of possibilities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAchieving that future, though, will be no easy task. One of the biggest tests will be shepherding the Artemis program from concept to reality.The return-to-the-moon program started as one of former president Trump\u2019s signature initiatives, but the burden of the execution will fall squarely on Nelson\u2019s shoulders.One of the keys will be the SLS rocket, which as a senator from Florida, Nelson championed. Now he would need to make sure it flies.NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried.Despite its successful engine test Thursday, the program has suffered years of setbacks, delays and significant cost overruns. NASA\u2019s Inspector General recently estimated the rocket would cost $27.3 billion through fiscal year 2025. It has never flown, and critics have long derided it as the Senate Launch System, more jobs program than exploration vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA was aiming to fly the rocket for the first time this year, but that timeline is very much in doubt given its many problems.Nelson also would oversee the awarding of the next phase of the contracts for the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the so-called \u201cHuman Landing System,\u201d the first time money has been spent on a lunar lander since Apollo. But that was well short of the $3.3 billion NASA had requested, and now the 2024 deadline the Trump administration had imposed on NASA to land people on the moon is out of the question.Under Nelson, the agency would have to figure out what sort of schedule is feasible.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Another challenge will be ensuring that Boeing is back on track with the Starliner capsule it is designing for NASA to fly crews to the space station. During a test flight without any astronauts on board in late 2019, the spacecraft ran into troubles almost as soon as it reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA and Boeing decided to redo the test, which is now scheduled for this spring. That will have to go well in order for Boeing to finally fly astronauts for the first time, a mission NASA hopes to achieve by the end of the year. And something rival Space X accomplished twice last year.It also hopes to fly the James Webb telescope, a massively ambitious project that would look back in time to the beginning of the formation of galaxies, explore galaxies and look for other signs of life in the universe.It is scheduled to launch in October, after years of problems that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Nelson is well suited to take over the agency, his supporters say, given his long tenure in Congress, where he took a keen interest in NASA and oversaw many of its signature programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the senate he was known as the go-to senator for our nation\u2019s space program,\u201d the White House said in its announcement, noting that Nelson even flew on the space shuttle in 1986.Nelson quickly received glowing praise from members of Congress and industry groups Friday.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the science, space and technology committee, said: \u201cThrough his committee leadership positions in both the House and Senate, Sen. Nelson has amassed decades of experience in dealing with NASA, Congress, and the space and aviation communities, and I know he will be able to hit the ground running when he becomes administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), chair of the subcommittee on science and space said, \u201cSenator Nelson has the experience to lead NASA to new heights.\u201dAnd former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a Republican who served under Trump, praised Nelson, who tried unsuccessfully to block Bridenstine\u2019s nomination. He said Nelson was \u201can excellent pick\u201d and urged the Senate to confirm him \u201cwithout delay.\u201d If confirmed as NASA administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson will oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6128",
        "date": "2021-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/19/biden-nelson-nasa-artemis-moon/",
        "text": "The rocket engineers were giddy Thursday, cheering through their face masks. Applauding, virtually high-fiving and wishing they could hug each other to celebrate when NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System rocket finally successfully completed a key test of its main engines.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was a moment of triumph for the space agency, which over the past year successfully restored human spaceflight from United States soil, collected a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away and whose Perseverance rover made a pinpoint landing on Mars. On Friday, the Biden administration officially announced its intent to nominate former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead the agency as its next administrator. If confirmed, he would take over an agency that\u2019s rolling, and attracting public attention in a way not seen in years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut, if confirmed, Nelson will face a host of serious challenges that could change the course of the agency for years. It will be up to him to oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierNASA is also in the early stages of flying its astronauts to the International Space Station with SpaceX and Boeing, a program that poses significant risks and has had a series of stumbles. And the agency plans to fly the James Webb telescope this year, after a series of delays and setbacks to a signature science program.In a statement Friday, Nelson said he was \u201chonored to be nominated by Joe Biden and, if confirmed, to help lead NASA into an exciting future of possibilities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAchieving that future, though, will be no easy task. One of the biggest tests will be shepherding the Artemis program from concept to reality.The return-to-the-moon program started as one of former president Trump\u2019s signature initiatives, but the burden of the execution will fall squarely on Nelson\u2019s shoulders.One of the keys will be the SLS rocket, which as a senator from Florida, Nelson championed. Now he would need to make sure it flies.NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried.Despite its successful engine test Thursday, the program has suffered years of setbacks, delays and significant cost overruns. NASA\u2019s Inspector General recently estimated the rocket would cost $27.3 billion through fiscal year 2025. It has never flown, and critics have long derided it as the Senate Launch System, more jobs program than exploration vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA was aiming to fly the rocket for the first time this year, but that timeline is very much in doubt given its many problems.Nelson also would oversee the awarding of the next phase of the contracts for the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the so-called \u201cHuman Landing System,\u201d the first time money has been spent on a lunar lander since Apollo. But that was well short of the $3.3 billion NASA had requested, and now the 2024 deadline the Trump administration had imposed on NASA to land people on the moon is out of the question.Under Nelson, the agency would have to figure out what sort of schedule is feasible.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Another challenge will be ensuring that Boeing is back on track with the Starliner capsule it is designing for NASA to fly crews to the space station. During a test flight without any astronauts on board in late 2019, the spacecraft ran into troubles almost as soon as it reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA and Boeing decided to redo the test, which is now scheduled for this spring. That will have to go well in order for Boeing to finally fly astronauts for the first time, a mission NASA hopes to achieve by the end of the year. And something rival Space X accomplished twice last year.It also hopes to fly the James Webb telescope, a massively ambitious project that would look back in time to the beginning of the formation of galaxies, explore galaxies and look for other signs of life in the universe.It is scheduled to launch in October, after years of problems that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Nelson is well suited to take over the agency, his supporters say, given his long tenure in Congress, where he took a keen interest in NASA and oversaw many of its signature programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the senate he was known as the go-to senator for our nation\u2019s space program,\u201d the White House said in its announcement, noting that Nelson even flew on the space shuttle in 1986.Nelson quickly received glowing praise from members of Congress and industry groups Friday.Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the science, space and technology committee, said: \u201cThrough his committee leadership positions in both the House and Senate, Sen. Nelson has amassed decades of experience in dealing with NASA, Congress, and the space and aviation communities, and I know he will be able to hit the ground running when he becomes administrator.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), chair of the subcommittee on science and space said, \u201cSenator Nelson has the experience to lead NASA to new heights.\u201dAnd former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a Republican who served under Trump, praised Nelson, who tried unsuccessfully to block Bridenstine\u2019s nomination. He said Nelson was \u201can excellent pick\u201d and urged the Senate to confirm him \u201cwithout delay.\u201d If confirmed as NASA administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson will oversee one of the most ambitious human exploration efforts since the Apollo era \u2014 NASA\u2019s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. As a member of Congress, Bill Nelson flew to space. As NASA administrator, he\u2019d face a host of challenges.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA watchdog takes aim at Boeing\u2019s SLS rocket; it says backbone of Trump\u2019s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6129",
        "date": "2020-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/10/nasa-boeing-trump-moon-cost/",
        "text": "The rocket and spacecraft NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon could cost $50 billion, according to a government watchdog report released Tuesday \u2014 far more than the space agency had said it would need to meet a White House mandate to return to the lunar surface by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report, by the NASA Inspector General, painted another grim picture of the troubles that have long plagued the Space Launch System rocket as Boeing, NASA\u2019s prime contractor on the rocket, struggles to get the unwieldy program under control. It said that more schedule delays were likely and that the space agency might not be able to meet the goal of landing people on the moon by 2024 or orbiting Mars by the 2030s.It was the second time in less than a week that Boeing\u2019s work for NASA has been criticized. On Friday, NASA officials said an investigation of the marred test flight of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December, when the spacecraft was unable to dock with the International Space Station, had identified major problems with Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. Officials said the investigation led to 61 corrective actions and identified 49 gaps in Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. NASA also determined that it would need to embed its own software experts with Boeing\u2019s team to more rigorously oversee its work and testing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe new IG report blames both NASA\u2019s lax oversight of the program and Boeing\u2019s poor performance for costly delays that would ratchet up the price of NASA\u2019s moon mission. Earlier this year, the White House proposed increasing NASA\u2019s budget significantly, to $25.2 billion for the next fiscal year, with annual increases after that, with a total cost of its moon program, dubbed Artemis, coming to $35 billion. In response to the report, NASA said the costs in the White House\u2019s budget and those reported by the IG were \u201cunrelated figures\u201d\u2014 one the cost of the years long SLS and Orion program; the other the Artemis effort to return to the moon, Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human spaceflight, said in a statement to The Post.The Artemis program costs are only for fiscal years 2021 through 2025, and include only systems such as the landers that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon. Its figure doesn\u2019t include the costs NASA has incurred over many years on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which would be used to fly astronauts to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"NASA accepts that its management of SLS and Boeing\u2019s performance has been deficient and we are moving to correct these issues,\u201d Loverro said. \"But nothing in the report was unexpected, nor does it alter our assessment of NASA\u2019s ability to achieve the goals established by the Administration to land on the Moon by 2024.\u201dNASA has so far obligated nearly $15 billion for the development of the SLS rocket, which is intended to be the most powerful ever flown. But its first launch, scheduled for November, is likely to slip to spring of 2021, the report said. If that happens, the cost would jump to $18.3 billion, the IG said.And if the second launch of the SLS slips to 2023, the cost of the program would increase to $22.8 billion, the IG reported.Story continues below advertisementWhen you add the costs of the Orion spacecraft and the associated ground systems, the total cost could balloon to $50 billion by 2024, the IG found.AdvertisementEvery major component of the rocket being designed for the first Artemis mission has \u201cexperienced technical challenges, performance issues and requirement changes that collectively have resulted in $2 billion in cost overruns and increases and at least two years of schedule delays,\u201d the report said.In a statement, Boeing defended its work and promised that the delays would pay off in the end.\u201cIn partnership with NASA, Boeing is building the only rocket capable of safely and efficiently delivering humans and necessary hardware back to the moon, and far beyond,\u201d the statement said. \u201cSuch an undertaking has certainly had its cost and schedule challenges over the years, but the investment has paid off in bringing together the required talent, technology and tooling to build this unprecedented deep space rocket.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it was making progress, delivering the first rocket core stage to NASA last month. And it said that the \u201chard-earned experience acquired during initial SLS development is resulting in significant savings and efficiencies in subsequent development and production.\u201dIn an appendix to the report, NASA concurred with each of the IG\u2019s recommendations, including getting better insight into the true costs of the program.NASA has \u201csignificantly increased the workforce\u201d to complete the core stage of the rocket, the IG found. But it said the agency \u201ccontinues to struggle managing SLS program costs and schedule as the launch date for the first integrated SLS/Orion mission slips further.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs the rocket enters a key testing phase, there may be additional delays. And the IG said, that \u201cmay hinder NASA\u2019s ability to meet the agency\u2019s mid and longer term space exploration goals, including landing on the moon by 2024 and reaching Mars in the 2030s.\u201dThe report comes at a bad time for Boeing, which is still facing the fallout from the grounding last year of its 737 Max aircraft after two planes crashed, killing 346 people.Meanwhile, NASA said that the investigation into what went wrong with the Starliner spacecraft is continuing. It was the second time in less than a week that Boeing\u2019s work for NASA has been criticized. NASA watchdog takes aim at Boeing\u2019s SLS rocket; it says backbone of Trump\u2019s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA watchdog takes aim at Boeing\u2019s SLS rocket; it says backbone of Trump\u2019s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6130",
        "date": "2020-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/10/nasa-boeing-trump-moon-cost/",
        "text": "The rocket and spacecraft NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon could cost $50 billion, according to a government watchdog report released Tuesday \u2014 far more than the space agency had said it would need to meet a White House mandate to return to the lunar surface by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report, by the NASA Inspector General, painted another grim picture of the troubles that have long plagued the Space Launch System rocket as Boeing, NASA\u2019s prime contractor on the rocket, struggles to get the unwieldy program under control. It said that more schedule delays were likely and that the space agency might not be able to meet the goal of landing people on the moon by 2024 or orbiting Mars by the 2030s.It was the second time in less than a week that Boeing\u2019s work for NASA has been criticized. On Friday, NASA officials said an investigation of the marred test flight of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December, when the spacecraft was unable to dock with the International Space Station, had identified major problems with Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. Officials said the investigation led to 61 corrective actions and identified 49 gaps in Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. NASA also determined that it would need to embed its own software experts with Boeing\u2019s team to more rigorously oversee its work and testing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe new IG report blames both NASA\u2019s lax oversight of the program and Boeing\u2019s poor performance for costly delays that would ratchet up the price of NASA\u2019s moon mission. Earlier this year, the White House proposed increasing NASA\u2019s budget significantly, to $25.2 billion for the next fiscal year, with annual increases after that, with a total cost of its moon program, dubbed Artemis, coming to $35 billion. In response to the report, NASA said the costs in the White House\u2019s budget and those reported by the IG were \u201cunrelated figures\u201d\u2014 one the cost of the years long SLS and Orion program; the other the Artemis effort to return to the moon, Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human spaceflight, said in a statement to The Post.The Artemis program costs are only for fiscal years 2021 through 2025, and include only systems such as the landers that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon. Its figure doesn\u2019t include the costs NASA has incurred over many years on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which would be used to fly astronauts to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"NASA accepts that its management of SLS and Boeing\u2019s performance has been deficient and we are moving to correct these issues,\u201d Loverro said. \"But nothing in the report was unexpected, nor does it alter our assessment of NASA\u2019s ability to achieve the goals established by the Administration to land on the Moon by 2024.\u201dNASA has so far obligated nearly $15 billion for the development of the SLS rocket, which is intended to be the most powerful ever flown. But its first launch, scheduled for November, is likely to slip to spring of 2021, the report said. If that happens, the cost would jump to $18.3 billion, the IG said.And if the second launch of the SLS slips to 2023, the cost of the program would increase to $22.8 billion, the IG reported.Story continues below advertisementWhen you add the costs of the Orion spacecraft and the associated ground systems, the total cost could balloon to $50 billion by 2024, the IG found.AdvertisementEvery major component of the rocket being designed for the first Artemis mission has \u201cexperienced technical challenges, performance issues and requirement changes that collectively have resulted in $2 billion in cost overruns and increases and at least two years of schedule delays,\u201d the report said.In a statement, Boeing defended its work and promised that the delays would pay off in the end.\u201cIn partnership with NASA, Boeing is building the only rocket capable of safely and efficiently delivering humans and necessary hardware back to the moon, and far beyond,\u201d the statement said. \u201cSuch an undertaking has certainly had its cost and schedule challenges over the years, but the investment has paid off in bringing together the required talent, technology and tooling to build this unprecedented deep space rocket.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it was making progress, delivering the first rocket core stage to NASA last month. And it said that the \u201chard-earned experience acquired during initial SLS development is resulting in significant savings and efficiencies in subsequent development and production.\u201dIn an appendix to the report, NASA concurred with each of the IG\u2019s recommendations, including getting better insight into the true costs of the program.NASA has \u201csignificantly increased the workforce\u201d to complete the core stage of the rocket, the IG found. But it said the agency \u201ccontinues to struggle managing SLS program costs and schedule as the launch date for the first integrated SLS/Orion mission slips further.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs the rocket enters a key testing phase, there may be additional delays. And the IG said, that \u201cmay hinder NASA\u2019s ability to meet the agency\u2019s mid and longer term space exploration goals, including landing on the moon by 2024 and reaching Mars in the 2030s.\u201dThe report comes at a bad time for Boeing, which is still facing the fallout from the grounding last year of its 737 Max aircraft after two planes crashed, killing 346 people.Meanwhile, NASA said that the investigation into what went wrong with the Starliner spacecraft is continuing. It was the second time in less than a week that Boeing\u2019s work for NASA has been criticized. NASA watchdog takes aim at Boeing\u2019s SLS rocket; it says backbone of Trump\u2019s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA watchdog takes aim at Boeing\u2019s SLS rocket; it says backbone of Trump\u2019s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6131",
        "date": "2020-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/10/nasa-boeing-trump-moon-cost/",
        "text": "The rocket and spacecraft NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon could cost $50 billion, according to a government watchdog report released Tuesday \u2014 far more than the space agency had said it would need to meet a White House mandate to return to the lunar surface by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe report, by the NASA Inspector General, painted another grim picture of the troubles that have long plagued the Space Launch System rocket as Boeing, NASA\u2019s prime contractor on the rocket, struggles to get the unwieldy program under control. It said that more schedule delays were likely and that the space agency might not be able to meet the goal of landing people on the moon by 2024 or orbiting Mars by the 2030s.It was the second time in less than a week that Boeing\u2019s work for NASA has been criticized. On Friday, NASA officials said an investigation of the marred test flight of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December, when the spacecraft was unable to dock with the International Space Station, had identified major problems with Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. Officials said the investigation led to 61 corrective actions and identified 49 gaps in Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. NASA also determined that it would need to embed its own software experts with Boeing\u2019s team to more rigorously oversee its work and testing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe new IG report blames both NASA\u2019s lax oversight of the program and Boeing\u2019s poor performance for costly delays that would ratchet up the price of NASA\u2019s moon mission. Earlier this year, the White House proposed increasing NASA\u2019s budget significantly, to $25.2 billion for the next fiscal year, with annual increases after that, with a total cost of its moon program, dubbed Artemis, coming to $35 billion. In response to the report, NASA said the costs in the White House\u2019s budget and those reported by the IG were \u201cunrelated figures\u201d\u2014 one the cost of the years long SLS and Orion program; the other the Artemis effort to return to the moon, Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human spaceflight, said in a statement to The Post.The Artemis program costs are only for fiscal years 2021 through 2025, and include only systems such as the landers that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon. Its figure doesn\u2019t include the costs NASA has incurred over many years on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which would be used to fly astronauts to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"NASA accepts that its management of SLS and Boeing\u2019s performance has been deficient and we are moving to correct these issues,\u201d Loverro said. \"But nothing in the report was unexpected, nor does it alter our assessment of NASA\u2019s ability to achieve the goals established by the Administration to land on the Moon by 2024.\u201dNASA has so far obligated nearly $15 billion for the development of the SLS rocket, which is intended to be the most powerful ever flown. But its first launch, scheduled for November, is likely to slip to spring of 2021, the report said. If that happens, the cost would jump to $18.3 billion, the IG said.And if the second launch of the SLS slips to 2023, the cost of the program would increase to $22.8 billion, the IG reported.Story continues below advertisementWhen you add the costs of the Orion spacecraft and the associated ground systems, the total cost could balloon to $50 billion by 2024, the IG found.AdvertisementEvery major component of the rocket being designed for the first Artemis mission has \u201cexperienced technical challenges, performance issues and requirement changes that collectively have resulted in $2 billion in cost overruns and increases and at least two years of schedule delays,\u201d the report said.In a statement, Boeing defended its work and promised that the delays would pay off in the end.\u201cIn partnership with NASA, Boeing is building the only rocket capable of safely and efficiently delivering humans and necessary hardware back to the moon, and far beyond,\u201d the statement said. \u201cSuch an undertaking has certainly had its cost and schedule challenges over the years, but the investment has paid off in bringing together the required talent, technology and tooling to build this unprecedented deep space rocket.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it was making progress, delivering the first rocket core stage to NASA last month. And it said that the \u201chard-earned experience acquired during initial SLS development is resulting in significant savings and efficiencies in subsequent development and production.\u201dIn an appendix to the report, NASA concurred with each of the IG\u2019s recommendations, including getting better insight into the true costs of the program.NASA has \u201csignificantly increased the workforce\u201d to complete the core stage of the rocket, the IG found. But it said the agency \u201ccontinues to struggle managing SLS program costs and schedule as the launch date for the first integrated SLS/Orion mission slips further.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs the rocket enters a key testing phase, there may be additional delays. And the IG said, that \u201cmay hinder NASA\u2019s ability to meet the agency\u2019s mid and longer term space exploration goals, including landing on the moon by 2024 and reaching Mars in the 2030s.\u201dThe report comes at a bad time for Boeing, which is still facing the fallout from the grounding last year of its 737 Max aircraft after two planes crashed, killing 346 people.Meanwhile, NASA said that the investigation into what went wrong with the Starliner spacecraft is continuing. It was the second time in less than a week that Boeing\u2019s work for NASA has been criticized. NASA watchdog takes aim at Boeing\u2019s SLS rocket; it says backbone of Trump\u2019s moon mission could cost a staggering $50 billion",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA and SpaceX now plan to bring Crew-1 astronauts home in the predawn darkness Sunday (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6132",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/30/nasa-spacex-crew1-splashdown-schedule/",
        "text": "The return of a quartet of astronauts from the International Space Station was going to be dramatic enough \u2014 a fiery flight through the thickening atmosphere, the deployment of parachutes and then the gentle touchdown in the ocean.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now NASA has set the splashdown of the Crew-1 astronauts to take place under the cover of darkness in the middle of the night. NASA on Friday said the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is now slated to undock from the space station at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday and splash down Sunday at 2:57 a.m.NASA\u2019s space shuttle had landings in the dark, including its final mission in 2011, which landed on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 a.m. But no capsule has splashed down at night since Apollo 8\u2019s return in 1968 with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, NASA said that the spacecraft \u201cis in great health on the space station, and teams now forecast ideal conditions for both splashdown and recovery during the weekend.\u201dIn response to questions from The Washington Post, NASA said that the winds are expected to be about 4 knots with wave heights below one foot at the scheduled arrival time.\u201cOther return opportunities continued to show high winds well above the return criteria for the foreseeable future, making this an ideal time for crew recovery,\u201d the space agency said. \u201cThe recovery team also has rehearsed for crew recovery at night, and has experience with nighttime landing operations.\u201d That includes a recent cargo resupply mission that splashed down at night, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementThe Crew-1 astronauts \u2014 Americans Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi \u2014 have already made history. It was the first full-duration mission under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program in which NASA is partnering with two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to transport astronauts to and from the station.AdvertisementThe astronauts also set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Since then, they doubled the duration after staying onboard the International Space Station for six months.Once the astronauts land in the water \u2014 either in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida or in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 the spacecraft will be hoisted onto a recovery ship that would transport the crew to shore.Story continues below advertisementLast August, SpaceX flew home a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight that paved the way for the Crew-1 mission, which launched to the space station in November.Crew-1 was originally scheduled to return Wednesday at 11:36 a.m., but the landing was postponed because of expected high winds in the landing zone.AdvertisementNASA has not said where the specific landing sites are. But during the test mission last year they were along the middle of the eastern coast of Florida, as well as along the panhandle on the gulf side. Last year, recreational boats descended on the capsule once it landed, creating a safety hazard.This time NASA and SpaceX said they are \u201cworking with the U.S. Coast Guard to establish a 10-nautical-mile safety zone around the expected splashdown location to ensure safety for the public and for those involved in the recovery operations, as well as the crew aboard the returning spacecraft.\u201d The fiery return of the capsule is dramatic enough, but coming home in the dark adds another layer of drama. NASA and SpaceX now plan to bring Crew-1 astronauts home in the predawn darkness Sunday",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA and SpaceX now plan to bring Crew-1 astronauts home in the predawn darkness Sunday (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6133",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/30/nasa-spacex-crew1-splashdown-schedule/",
        "text": "The return of a quartet of astronauts from the International Space Station was going to be dramatic enough \u2014 a fiery flight through the thickening atmosphere, the deployment of parachutes and then the gentle touchdown in the ocean.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now NASA has set the splashdown of the Crew-1 astronauts to take place under the cover of darkness in the middle of the night. NASA on Friday said the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is now slated to undock from the space station at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday and splash down Sunday at 2:57 a.m.NASA\u2019s space shuttle had landings in the dark, including its final mission in 2011, which landed on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 a.m. But no capsule has splashed down at night since Apollo 8\u2019s return in 1968 with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, NASA said that the spacecraft \u201cis in great health on the space station, and teams now forecast ideal conditions for both splashdown and recovery during the weekend.\u201dIn response to questions from The Washington Post, NASA said that the winds are expected to be about 4 knots with wave heights below one foot at the scheduled arrival time.\u201cOther return opportunities continued to show high winds well above the return criteria for the foreseeable future, making this an ideal time for crew recovery,\u201d the space agency said. \u201cThe recovery team also has rehearsed for crew recovery at night, and has experience with nighttime landing operations.\u201d That includes a recent cargo resupply mission that splashed down at night, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementThe Crew-1 astronauts \u2014 Americans Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi \u2014 have already made history. It was the first full-duration mission under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program in which NASA is partnering with two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to transport astronauts to and from the station.AdvertisementThe astronauts also set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Since then, they doubled the duration after staying onboard the International Space Station for six months.Once the astronauts land in the water \u2014 either in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida or in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 the spacecraft will be hoisted onto a recovery ship that would transport the crew to shore.Story continues below advertisementLast August, SpaceX flew home a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight that paved the way for the Crew-1 mission, which launched to the space station in November.Crew-1 was originally scheduled to return Wednesday at 11:36 a.m., but the landing was postponed because of expected high winds in the landing zone.AdvertisementNASA has not said where the specific landing sites are. But during the test mission last year they were along the middle of the eastern coast of Florida, as well as along the panhandle on the gulf side. Last year, recreational boats descended on the capsule once it landed, creating a safety hazard.This time NASA and SpaceX said they are \u201cworking with the U.S. Coast Guard to establish a 10-nautical-mile safety zone around the expected splashdown location to ensure safety for the public and for those involved in the recovery operations, as well as the crew aboard the returning spacecraft.\u201d The fiery return of the capsule is dramatic enough, but coming home in the dark adds another layer of drama. NASA and SpaceX now plan to bring Crew-1 astronauts home in the predawn darkness Sunday",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA and SpaceX now plan to bring Crew-1 astronauts home in the predawn darkness Sunday (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6134",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/30/nasa-spacex-crew1-splashdown-schedule/",
        "text": "The return of a quartet of astronauts from the International Space Station was going to be dramatic enough \u2014 a fiery flight through the thickening atmosphere, the deployment of parachutes and then the gentle touchdown in the ocean.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now NASA has set the splashdown of the Crew-1 astronauts to take place under the cover of darkness in the middle of the night. NASA on Friday said the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is now slated to undock from the space station at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday and splash down Sunday at 2:57 a.m.NASA\u2019s space shuttle had landings in the dark, including its final mission in 2011, which landed on the runway at the Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 a.m. But no capsule has splashed down at night since Apollo 8\u2019s return in 1968 with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, NASA said that the spacecraft \u201cis in great health on the space station, and teams now forecast ideal conditions for both splashdown and recovery during the weekend.\u201dIn response to questions from The Washington Post, NASA said that the winds are expected to be about 4 knots with wave heights below one foot at the scheduled arrival time.\u201cOther return opportunities continued to show high winds well above the return criteria for the foreseeable future, making this an ideal time for crew recovery,\u201d the space agency said. \u201cThe recovery team also has rehearsed for crew recovery at night, and has experience with nighttime landing operations.\u201d That includes a recent cargo resupply mission that splashed down at night, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementThe Crew-1 astronauts \u2014 Americans Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi \u2014 have already made history. It was the first full-duration mission under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program in which NASA is partnering with two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to transport astronauts to and from the station.AdvertisementThe astronauts also set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Since then, they doubled the duration after staying onboard the International Space Station for six months.Once the astronauts land in the water \u2014 either in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida or in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 the spacecraft will be hoisted onto a recovery ship that would transport the crew to shore.Story continues below advertisementLast August, SpaceX flew home a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight that paved the way for the Crew-1 mission, which launched to the space station in November.Crew-1 was originally scheduled to return Wednesday at 11:36 a.m., but the landing was postponed because of expected high winds in the landing zone.AdvertisementNASA has not said where the specific landing sites are. But during the test mission last year they were along the middle of the eastern coast of Florida, as well as along the panhandle on the gulf side. Last year, recreational boats descended on the capsule once it landed, creating a safety hazard.This time NASA and SpaceX said they are \u201cworking with the U.S. Coast Guard to establish a 10-nautical-mile safety zone around the expected splashdown location to ensure safety for the public and for those involved in the recovery operations, as well as the crew aboard the returning spacecraft.\u201d The fiery return of the capsule is dramatic enough, but coming home in the dark adds another layer of drama. NASA and SpaceX now plan to bring Crew-1 astronauts home in the predawn darkness Sunday",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA says SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts have set a space record (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6135",
        "date": "2021-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/08/spacex-crew-record-in-space/",
        "text": "The quartet of astronauts who launched to the International Space Station in November have passed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing a milestone that was set in the 1970s.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Crew-1 astronauts, launched on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, eclipsed the record of 84 days on Sunday. That record was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974. Th Crew-1 mission is the first operational mission launched from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. In May of last year, a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, spent about two months on the space station in a flight designed to test how SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft would operate.Story continues below advertisementOnce that mission was completed successfully, NASA proceeded with the Crew-1 flight with NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.They are scheduled to stay on the station for about six months in total.On Twitter, Glover wrote that the astronauts had the opportunity to speak with Edward Gibson, who was part of the crew that flew to Skylab, America\u2019s first space station, in 1974. The Crew-1 astronauts, launched on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, on Sunday eclipsed a record that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974. NASA says SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts have set a space record",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA says SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts have set a space record (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6136",
        "date": "2021-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/08/spacex-crew-record-in-space/",
        "text": "The quartet of astronauts who launched to the International Space Station in November have passed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing a milestone that was set in the 1970s.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Crew-1 astronauts, launched on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, eclipsed the record of 84 days on Sunday. That record was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974. Th Crew-1 mission is the first operational mission launched from U.S. soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011. In May of last year, a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, spent about two months on the space station in a flight designed to test how SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft would operate.Story continues below advertisementOnce that mission was completed successfully, NASA proceeded with the Crew-1 flight with NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.They are scheduled to stay on the station for about six months in total.On Twitter, Glover wrote that the astronauts had the opportunity to speak with Edward Gibson, who was part of the crew that flew to Skylab, America\u2019s first space station, in 1974. The Crew-1 astronauts, launched on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, on Sunday eclipsed a record that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974. NASA says SpaceX Crew-1 astronauts have set a space record",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6137",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/18/spacex-inspiration4-splashdown-live/",
        "text": "The quartet of amateur astronauts onboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean Saturday evening, completing the first all-civilian mission to orbit the Earth and setting the stage for more privately funded missions to come.The crew of the Inspiration4 spent three days in orbit, circling the globe at 17,500 mph, before coming back to Earth in a flight designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in calm waters, a SpaceX live stream of the event showed. The astronauts emerged from the capsule, which had been hoisted aboard a recovery ship, less than 50 minutes after the splashdown.That brought a successful end to a historic flight funded by the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire entrepreneur and aviation enthusiast. Never before had a group of amateurs flown to orbit before. While NASA had overseen the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft that flew them to space, the agency was not directly involved in the mission.\u201cThat was a heck of a ride for us, and we\u2019re just getting started,\u201d Isaacman said.In a post-flight news conference Todd \u201cLeif\u201d Ericson, an Inspiration4 mission director, said: \u201cWelcome to the second Space Age. \u2026 This is opening up a whole new chapter in spaceflight.\u201dBefore the flight, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX had flown three sets of professional, government-trained astronauts to the International Space Station, and the company has another mission for NASA scheduled for next month. But Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of opening space to the public and eventually building bases on the moon and Mars, and the Inspiration4 mission fit that goal. The company already has booked more private astronaut flights, including one tentatively scheduled for 2023 that would take a Japanese billionaire on a trip around the moon in the company\u2019s still-under development Starship spacecraft.During its three days in orbit, the Inspiration4 crew \u2014 which included the mission pilot, Sian Proctor, 51, a college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant \u2014 virtually rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange (virtually), and spoke to patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, one of whom asked if there any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d They also spoke with actor Tom Cruise, who has been in talks to fly on a later SpaceX flight to the International Space Station, as well as U2\u2019s Bono.In an interview with CBS News, Scott \u201cKidd\u201d Poteet, SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission director, said there was a \u201cminor waste management issue that the crew and mission control were required to troubleshoot. But honestly, this did not impact the mission.\u201dIn the post-flight news conference, Ericson said there was a problem with a fan. \u201cAs in most exploratory adventures like spaceflight there\u2019s always been one or two little hiccups along the way,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this was dealt with amazingly by the SpaceX team.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight, said, \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for a more successful mission.\u201dWhen planning the flight, Isaacman asked SpaceX about the feasibility of flying at an altitude even higher than the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at about 240 miles above the planet\u2019s surface.After SpaceX engineers deemed it safe, the Inspiration4 crew hit an altitude of about 367 miles, which is also higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and most space shuttle flights, and it set a record for SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft. Views of Earth from that height reportedly were amazing, especially since SpaceX added a curved window at the top of the spacecraft so the travelers could spend time gazing at the stars and earth below, almost as if they were outside the craft.At a press briefing before the flight, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond, we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.For the first day or so, there was limited information about what the crew was up to or how they were doing. Images and video were not made public.On Friday, though, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of the astronauts, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon upola.\u201dThen it posted the video of the crew speaking with patients at of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs whom had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dThe crew spent a fair amount of time conducting experiments to measure the effect of weightlessness on the human body. Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer, took ultrasound readings on her fellow astronauts to measure how their bodies were reacting. Chris Sembroski, a father of two and an engineer at Lockheed Martin, played his ukulele. And Sian Proctor, a professor at a community college, brought art supplies and drew a picture of their Dragon spacecraft.Isaacman placed the first bet from space, a $4,000 wager that the Philadelphia Eagles would win the Super Bowl. MGM, which announced the bet, said it was contributing $25,000 to St. Jude.The menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 pasta and meatballs, salami, bacon and cheddar, pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M & Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Proctor reportedly was especially fond of pizza. SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that the Dragon capsule hadn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe crew consists of the flight\u2019s commander and sponsor, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old who is the capsule\u2019s pilot; Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant.The flight was billed as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman donated $100 million to the hospital. Sembroski won his seat in a sweepstakes among donors to the hospital. Arcenaux was treated for cancer at the hospital as a child.Isaacman has not said how much he paid SpaceX for the flight, the first crewed space journey from the United States that was not planned and overseen by NASA. On its live feed, SpaceX said the total raised for St. Jude was $157 million so far, $4 million of that during the 90 minutes viewers could follow the spacecraft\u2019s return from space.The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. The Inspiration4 was launched into space about 71 hours earlier, at 8:02 p.m. Wednesday.Crew exiting the capsuleReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe hatch of the spacecraft was opened less than 40 minutes after splashdown. And the crew has exited the vehicle. First came Hayley Arceneaux, the 29-year old, cancer survivor who became the first person with a prosthetic to fly to space.Then came Sian Proctor, strutting away from the space capsule. She was followed by Chris Sembroski, who was seen watching the movie \u201cSpaceballs\u201d as the capsule started its descent toward Earth. Finally, came the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, who dropped out of high school at age 16 to start his company, Shift4 Payments. That made him a billionaire, rich enough to fund the first all-civilian to space.As he exited the spacecraft, he waved and pumped his fists, with a large smile on his face.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe capsule is on the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft has been hoisted into the \u201cnest\u201d of the recovery ship, located in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral. The crew should be able to exit the capsule shortly once safety checks are completed. Then the crew will be checked by medical personnel before being flown back to land to be reunited with their families and friends.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPleasure boaters be goneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkLast year, when SpaceX brought back its first crew of astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the spacecraft was crowded by a crowd of pleasure boaters who descended on the site off the Florida Panhandle.Since then, SpaceX has worked more closely with the Coast Guard to keep people away. The spacecraft floating on the sea is still loaded with combustible propellant, and the company wanted to do a better job of keeping people away.SpaceX did appear on this mission to keep the area clear so that the recovery crews could prepare the capsule to be raised on to the deck of the recovery ship. But Saturday\u2019s landing site was also in the Atlantic Ocean, at sunset, not the Gulf, which may have affected how accessible it was to pleasure boaters.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA missions of firstsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission completed a series of historic firsts that were catalogued and released to reporters this evening by the mission\u2019s public relations team. They include:First all-civilian human spaceflight to orbitFirst Black female spacecraft pilotYoungest American in orbitFirst person to fly to space with a prostheticFarthest flight for a human spaceflight since the Hubble missionsFirst time SpaceX has operated three Dragons in spaceFirst free-flight of a Dragon spacecraft on a human spaceflight mission. Previous Dragon missions had the International Space Station as destination. Largest contiguous window ever flown in spaceFirst splashdown of a Dragon crew in the Atlantic OceanFirst thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster to launch a human spaceflight missionAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member Inspiration4 crew has splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The crews would exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestones before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpacecraft is plunging through the atmosphere; communications blacked outReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begin its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last about four minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow much money did Inspiration4 raise for St. Jude?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkJared Isaacman, the commander of the Inspiration4 mission and its benefactor, designed the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The goal was to raise $200 million, with Isaacman donating $100 million of his own money.In its broadcast stream Saturday, SpaceX said the effort was more than halfway to the goal of raising another $100 million, with the total now at $153 million. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTalking to St. Jude patientsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:44 p.m.Link copiedLinkFrom the beginning, the mission was designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And some of the hospital\u2019s patients got to speak with the Inspiration4 crew while they were in space.That had a special meaning for Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer.\u201cAs a kid I was treated for bone cancer, and I spent a year at St. Jude,\u201d she told the patients, who were assembled on a Zoom call. \u201cI had some chemo and surgery, which might sound familiar to some of y\u2019all. But then I was able to grow up and get my dream job, and now I\u2019m adding astronaut to my resume.\u201dPatients asked questions about the astronauts\u2019 sleeping arrangements, the view, whether they could take pictures. And one asked if there were any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d\u201cI hope there will be one day,\u201d said Sian Proctor, an Arizona college professor and the mission\u2019s pilot.What science did Inspiration4 undertake in space?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDuring its three days in space, the Inspiration4 crew conducted science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance. During the flight, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, scanned organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.Limited views of the crew, at least at firstReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter launching on SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight, a test launch to the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley broadcast a tour of the capsule to give people on the ground a sense of what their journey was like.On the Inspiration4 mission, however, there was limited information about what the crew was up to and how they were doing. For the first day or so, at least, images and video were not made public. The day after the crew reached orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter, \u201cJust spoke to the @Inspiration4 crew. All is well.\u201dOn Friday, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of them, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon cupola.\u201dThen it posted a video of the crew speaking with patients of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs who had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very close proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dWith deorbit burn completed, spacecraft\u2019s return is set Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed the 15-minute deorbit burn that lowers the Dragon spacecraft out of Earth orbit and puts it on a path to splashdown off the Florida coast.The firing of the Draco engines on the spacecraft is the \u201cfinal burn before Dragon begins to reduce his altitude, get away from that orbital velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, and start to make its way to its splashdown zone off the coast of Florida,\u201d SpaceX engineer Andy Tran said during the broadcast.Engineers will now close the nosecone of the vehicle in preparation of coming through the atmosphere.Splashdown still is scheduled for 7:06 p.m. Eastern time.Tom Cruise called astronauts in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkTom Cruise called the Inspiration4 astronauts in space.It\u2019s not clear what they discussed, but Cruise may have wanted some pointers about what it\u2019s like to be in orbit. Last year, then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the space agency was working with Cruise to film a movie on the International Space Station.There haven\u2019t been any updates since. But a Russian film crew will beat Cruise to it.Next month, Yulia Peresild, an actress, and Klim Shipenko, the film\u2019s director, are scheduled to fly to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They would spend about 10 days filing a movie called \u201cThe Challenge,\u201d about a doctor sent to the station to save an astronaut\u2019s life.\u201cI am not afraid,\u201d the actress said, according to the New York Times.What the crew ateReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 ranging from pasta and meatballs, to salami, bacon and cheddar, and even pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M&Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Crew member Sian Proctor seemed to eat a lot of pizza. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that it was cold and the Dragon capsule didn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201d The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6138",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/18/spacex-inspiration4-splashdown-live/",
        "text": "The quartet of amateur astronauts onboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean Saturday evening, completing the first all-civilian mission to orbit the Earth and setting the stage for more privately funded missions to come.The crew of the Inspiration4 spent three days in orbit, circling the globe at 17,500 mph, before coming back to Earth in a flight designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in calm waters, a SpaceX live stream of the event showed. The astronauts emerged from the capsule, which had been hoisted aboard a recovery ship, less than 50 minutes after the splashdown.That brought a successful end to a historic flight funded by the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire entrepreneur and aviation enthusiast. Never before had a group of amateurs flown to orbit before. While NASA had overseen the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft that flew them to space, the agency was not directly involved in the mission.\u201cThat was a heck of a ride for us, and we\u2019re just getting started,\u201d Isaacman said.In a post-flight news conference Todd \u201cLeif\u201d Ericson, an Inspiration4 mission director, said: \u201cWelcome to the second Space Age. \u2026 This is opening up a whole new chapter in spaceflight.\u201dBefore the flight, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX had flown three sets of professional, government-trained astronauts to the International Space Station, and the company has another mission for NASA scheduled for next month. But Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of opening space to the public and eventually building bases on the moon and Mars, and the Inspiration4 mission fit that goal. The company already has booked more private astronaut flights, including one tentatively scheduled for 2023 that would take a Japanese billionaire on a trip around the moon in the company\u2019s still-under development Starship spacecraft.During its three days in orbit, the Inspiration4 crew \u2014 which included the mission pilot, Sian Proctor, 51, a college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant \u2014 virtually rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange (virtually), and spoke to patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, one of whom asked if there any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d They also spoke with actor Tom Cruise, who has been in talks to fly on a later SpaceX flight to the International Space Station, as well as U2\u2019s Bono.In an interview with CBS News, Scott \u201cKidd\u201d Poteet, SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission director, said there was a \u201cminor waste management issue that the crew and mission control were required to troubleshoot. But honestly, this did not impact the mission.\u201dIn the post-flight news conference, Ericson said there was a problem with a fan. \u201cAs in most exploratory adventures like spaceflight there\u2019s always been one or two little hiccups along the way,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this was dealt with amazingly by the SpaceX team.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight, said, \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for a more successful mission.\u201dWhen planning the flight, Isaacman asked SpaceX about the feasibility of flying at an altitude even higher than the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at about 240 miles above the planet\u2019s surface.After SpaceX engineers deemed it safe, the Inspiration4 crew hit an altitude of about 367 miles, which is also higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and most space shuttle flights, and it set a record for SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft. Views of Earth from that height reportedly were amazing, especially since SpaceX added a curved window at the top of the spacecraft so the travelers could spend time gazing at the stars and earth below, almost as if they were outside the craft.At a press briefing before the flight, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond, we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.For the first day or so, there was limited information about what the crew was up to or how they were doing. Images and video were not made public.On Friday, though, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of the astronauts, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon upola.\u201dThen it posted the video of the crew speaking with patients at of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs whom had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dThe crew spent a fair amount of time conducting experiments to measure the effect of weightlessness on the human body. Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer, took ultrasound readings on her fellow astronauts to measure how their bodies were reacting. Chris Sembroski, a father of two and an engineer at Lockheed Martin, played his ukulele. And Sian Proctor, a professor at a community college, brought art supplies and drew a picture of their Dragon spacecraft.Isaacman placed the first bet from space, a $4,000 wager that the Philadelphia Eagles would win the Super Bowl. MGM, which announced the bet, said it was contributing $25,000 to St. Jude.The menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 pasta and meatballs, salami, bacon and cheddar, pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M & Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Proctor reportedly was especially fond of pizza. SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that the Dragon capsule hadn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe crew consists of the flight\u2019s commander and sponsor, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old who is the capsule\u2019s pilot; Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant.The flight was billed as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman donated $100 million to the hospital. Sembroski won his seat in a sweepstakes among donors to the hospital. Arcenaux was treated for cancer at the hospital as a child.Isaacman has not said how much he paid SpaceX for the flight, the first crewed space journey from the United States that was not planned and overseen by NASA. On its live feed, SpaceX said the total raised for St. Jude was $157 million so far, $4 million of that during the 90 minutes viewers could follow the spacecraft\u2019s return from space.The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. The Inspiration4 was launched into space about 71 hours earlier, at 8:02 p.m. Wednesday.Crew exiting the capsuleReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe hatch of the spacecraft was opened less than 40 minutes after splashdown. And the crew has exited the vehicle. First came Hayley Arceneaux, the 29-year old, cancer survivor who became the first person with a prosthetic to fly to space.Then came Sian Proctor, strutting away from the space capsule. She was followed by Chris Sembroski, who was seen watching the movie \u201cSpaceballs\u201d as the capsule started its descent toward Earth. Finally, came the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, who dropped out of high school at age 16 to start his company, Shift4 Payments. That made him a billionaire, rich enough to fund the first all-civilian to space.As he exited the spacecraft, he waved and pumped his fists, with a large smile on his face.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe capsule is on the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft has been hoisted into the \u201cnest\u201d of the recovery ship, located in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral. The crew should be able to exit the capsule shortly once safety checks are completed. Then the crew will be checked by medical personnel before being flown back to land to be reunited with their families and friends.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPleasure boaters be goneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkLast year, when SpaceX brought back its first crew of astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the spacecraft was crowded by a crowd of pleasure boaters who descended on the site off the Florida Panhandle.Since then, SpaceX has worked more closely with the Coast Guard to keep people away. The spacecraft floating on the sea is still loaded with combustible propellant, and the company wanted to do a better job of keeping people away.SpaceX did appear on this mission to keep the area clear so that the recovery crews could prepare the capsule to be raised on to the deck of the recovery ship. But Saturday\u2019s landing site was also in the Atlantic Ocean, at sunset, not the Gulf, which may have affected how accessible it was to pleasure boaters.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA missions of firstsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission completed a series of historic firsts that were catalogued and released to reporters this evening by the mission\u2019s public relations team. They include:First all-civilian human spaceflight to orbitFirst Black female spacecraft pilotYoungest American in orbitFirst person to fly to space with a prostheticFarthest flight for a human spaceflight since the Hubble missionsFirst time SpaceX has operated three Dragons in spaceFirst free-flight of a Dragon spacecraft on a human spaceflight mission. Previous Dragon missions had the International Space Station as destination. Largest contiguous window ever flown in spaceFirst splashdown of a Dragon crew in the Atlantic OceanFirst thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster to launch a human spaceflight missionAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member Inspiration4 crew has splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The crews would exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestones before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpacecraft is plunging through the atmosphere; communications blacked outReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begin its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last about four minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow much money did Inspiration4 raise for St. Jude?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkJared Isaacman, the commander of the Inspiration4 mission and its benefactor, designed the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The goal was to raise $200 million, with Isaacman donating $100 million of his own money.In its broadcast stream Saturday, SpaceX said the effort was more than halfway to the goal of raising another $100 million, with the total now at $153 million. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTalking to St. Jude patientsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:44 p.m.Link copiedLinkFrom the beginning, the mission was designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And some of the hospital\u2019s patients got to speak with the Inspiration4 crew while they were in space.That had a special meaning for Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer.\u201cAs a kid I was treated for bone cancer, and I spent a year at St. Jude,\u201d she told the patients, who were assembled on a Zoom call. \u201cI had some chemo and surgery, which might sound familiar to some of y\u2019all. But then I was able to grow up and get my dream job, and now I\u2019m adding astronaut to my resume.\u201dPatients asked questions about the astronauts\u2019 sleeping arrangements, the view, whether they could take pictures. And one asked if there were any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d\u201cI hope there will be one day,\u201d said Sian Proctor, an Arizona college professor and the mission\u2019s pilot.What science did Inspiration4 undertake in space?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDuring its three days in space, the Inspiration4 crew conducted science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance. During the flight, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, scanned organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.Limited views of the crew, at least at firstReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter launching on SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight, a test launch to the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley broadcast a tour of the capsule to give people on the ground a sense of what their journey was like.On the Inspiration4 mission, however, there was limited information about what the crew was up to and how they were doing. For the first day or so, at least, images and video were not made public. The day after the crew reached orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter, \u201cJust spoke to the @Inspiration4 crew. All is well.\u201dOn Friday, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of them, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon cupola.\u201dThen it posted a video of the crew speaking with patients of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs who had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very close proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dWith deorbit burn completed, spacecraft\u2019s return is set Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed the 15-minute deorbit burn that lowers the Dragon spacecraft out of Earth orbit and puts it on a path to splashdown off the Florida coast.The firing of the Draco engines on the spacecraft is the \u201cfinal burn before Dragon begins to reduce his altitude, get away from that orbital velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, and start to make its way to its splashdown zone off the coast of Florida,\u201d SpaceX engineer Andy Tran said during the broadcast.Engineers will now close the nosecone of the vehicle in preparation of coming through the atmosphere.Splashdown still is scheduled for 7:06 p.m. Eastern time.Tom Cruise called astronauts in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkTom Cruise called the Inspiration4 astronauts in space.It\u2019s not clear what they discussed, but Cruise may have wanted some pointers about what it\u2019s like to be in orbit. Last year, then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the space agency was working with Cruise to film a movie on the International Space Station.There haven\u2019t been any updates since. But a Russian film crew will beat Cruise to it.Next month, Yulia Peresild, an actress, and Klim Shipenko, the film\u2019s director, are scheduled to fly to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They would spend about 10 days filing a movie called \u201cThe Challenge,\u201d about a doctor sent to the station to save an astronaut\u2019s life.\u201cI am not afraid,\u201d the actress said, according to the New York Times.What the crew ateReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 ranging from pasta and meatballs, to salami, bacon and cheddar, and even pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M&Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Crew member Sian Proctor seemed to eat a lot of pizza. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that it was cold and the Dragon capsule didn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201d The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6139",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/18/spacex-inspiration4-splashdown-live/",
        "text": "The quartet of amateur astronauts onboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean Saturday evening, completing the first all-civilian mission to orbit the Earth and setting the stage for more privately funded missions to come.The crew of the Inspiration4 spent three days in orbit, circling the globe at 17,500 mph, before coming back to Earth in a flight designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in calm waters, a SpaceX live stream of the event showed. The astronauts emerged from the capsule, which had been hoisted aboard a recovery ship, less than 50 minutes after the splashdown.That brought a successful end to a historic flight funded by the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire entrepreneur and aviation enthusiast. Never before had a group of amateurs flown to orbit before. While NASA had overseen the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft that flew them to space, the agency was not directly involved in the mission.\u201cThat was a heck of a ride for us, and we\u2019re just getting started,\u201d Isaacman said.In a post-flight news conference Todd \u201cLeif\u201d Ericson, an Inspiration4 mission director, said: \u201cWelcome to the second Space Age. \u2026 This is opening up a whole new chapter in spaceflight.\u201dBefore the flight, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX had flown three sets of professional, government-trained astronauts to the International Space Station, and the company has another mission for NASA scheduled for next month. But Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of opening space to the public and eventually building bases on the moon and Mars, and the Inspiration4 mission fit that goal. The company already has booked more private astronaut flights, including one tentatively scheduled for 2023 that would take a Japanese billionaire on a trip around the moon in the company\u2019s still-under development Starship spacecraft.During its three days in orbit, the Inspiration4 crew \u2014 which included the mission pilot, Sian Proctor, 51, a college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant \u2014 virtually rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange (virtually), and spoke to patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, one of whom asked if there any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d They also spoke with actor Tom Cruise, who has been in talks to fly on a later SpaceX flight to the International Space Station, as well as U2\u2019s Bono.In an interview with CBS News, Scott \u201cKidd\u201d Poteet, SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission director, said there was a \u201cminor waste management issue that the crew and mission control were required to troubleshoot. But honestly, this did not impact the mission.\u201dIn the post-flight news conference, Ericson said there was a problem with a fan. \u201cAs in most exploratory adventures like spaceflight there\u2019s always been one or two little hiccups along the way,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this was dealt with amazingly by the SpaceX team.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight, said, \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for a more successful mission.\u201dWhen planning the flight, Isaacman asked SpaceX about the feasibility of flying at an altitude even higher than the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at about 240 miles above the planet\u2019s surface.After SpaceX engineers deemed it safe, the Inspiration4 crew hit an altitude of about 367 miles, which is also higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and most space shuttle flights, and it set a record for SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft. Views of Earth from that height reportedly were amazing, especially since SpaceX added a curved window at the top of the spacecraft so the travelers could spend time gazing at the stars and earth below, almost as if they were outside the craft.At a press briefing before the flight, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond, we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.For the first day or so, there was limited information about what the crew was up to or how they were doing. Images and video were not made public.On Friday, though, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of the astronauts, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon upola.\u201dThen it posted the video of the crew speaking with patients at of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs whom had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dThe crew spent a fair amount of time conducting experiments to measure the effect of weightlessness on the human body. Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer, took ultrasound readings on her fellow astronauts to measure how their bodies were reacting. Chris Sembroski, a father of two and an engineer at Lockheed Martin, played his ukulele. And Sian Proctor, a professor at a community college, brought art supplies and drew a picture of their Dragon spacecraft.Isaacman placed the first bet from space, a $4,000 wager that the Philadelphia Eagles would win the Super Bowl. MGM, which announced the bet, said it was contributing $25,000 to St. Jude.The menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 pasta and meatballs, salami, bacon and cheddar, pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M & Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Proctor reportedly was especially fond of pizza. SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that the Dragon capsule hadn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe crew consists of the flight\u2019s commander and sponsor, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old who is the capsule\u2019s pilot; Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant.The flight was billed as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman donated $100 million to the hospital. Sembroski won his seat in a sweepstakes among donors to the hospital. Arcenaux was treated for cancer at the hospital as a child.Isaacman has not said how much he paid SpaceX for the flight, the first crewed space journey from the United States that was not planned and overseen by NASA. On its live feed, SpaceX said the total raised for St. Jude was $157 million so far, $4 million of that during the 90 minutes viewers could follow the spacecraft\u2019s return from space.The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. The Inspiration4 was launched into space about 71 hours earlier, at 8:02 p.m. Wednesday.Crew exiting the capsuleReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe hatch of the spacecraft was opened less than 40 minutes after splashdown. And the crew has exited the vehicle. First came Hayley Arceneaux, the 29-year old, cancer survivor who became the first person with a prosthetic to fly to space.Then came Sian Proctor, strutting away from the space capsule. She was followed by Chris Sembroski, who was seen watching the movie \u201cSpaceballs\u201d as the capsule started its descent toward Earth. Finally, came the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, who dropped out of high school at age 16 to start his company, Shift4 Payments. That made him a billionaire, rich enough to fund the first all-civilian to space.As he exited the spacecraft, he waved and pumped his fists, with a large smile on his face.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe capsule is on the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft has been hoisted into the \u201cnest\u201d of the recovery ship, located in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral. The crew should be able to exit the capsule shortly once safety checks are completed. Then the crew will be checked by medical personnel before being flown back to land to be reunited with their families and friends.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPleasure boaters be goneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkLast year, when SpaceX brought back its first crew of astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the spacecraft was crowded by a crowd of pleasure boaters who descended on the site off the Florida Panhandle.Since then, SpaceX has worked more closely with the Coast Guard to keep people away. The spacecraft floating on the sea is still loaded with combustible propellant, and the company wanted to do a better job of keeping people away.SpaceX did appear on this mission to keep the area clear so that the recovery crews could prepare the capsule to be raised on to the deck of the recovery ship. But Saturday\u2019s landing site was also in the Atlantic Ocean, at sunset, not the Gulf, which may have affected how accessible it was to pleasure boaters.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA missions of firstsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission completed a series of historic firsts that were catalogued and released to reporters this evening by the mission\u2019s public relations team. They include:First all-civilian human spaceflight to orbitFirst Black female spacecraft pilotYoungest American in orbitFirst person to fly to space with a prostheticFarthest flight for a human spaceflight since the Hubble missionsFirst time SpaceX has operated three Dragons in spaceFirst free-flight of a Dragon spacecraft on a human spaceflight mission. Previous Dragon missions had the International Space Station as destination. Largest contiguous window ever flown in spaceFirst splashdown of a Dragon crew in the Atlantic OceanFirst thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster to launch a human spaceflight missionAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member Inspiration4 crew has splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The crews would exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestones before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpacecraft is plunging through the atmosphere; communications blacked outReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begin its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last about four minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow much money did Inspiration4 raise for St. Jude?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkJared Isaacman, the commander of the Inspiration4 mission and its benefactor, designed the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The goal was to raise $200 million, with Isaacman donating $100 million of his own money.In its broadcast stream Saturday, SpaceX said the effort was more than halfway to the goal of raising another $100 million, with the total now at $153 million. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTalking to St. Jude patientsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:44 p.m.Link copiedLinkFrom the beginning, the mission was designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And some of the hospital\u2019s patients got to speak with the Inspiration4 crew while they were in space.That had a special meaning for Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer.\u201cAs a kid I was treated for bone cancer, and I spent a year at St. Jude,\u201d she told the patients, who were assembled on a Zoom call. \u201cI had some chemo and surgery, which might sound familiar to some of y\u2019all. But then I was able to grow up and get my dream job, and now I\u2019m adding astronaut to my resume.\u201dPatients asked questions about the astronauts\u2019 sleeping arrangements, the view, whether they could take pictures. And one asked if there were any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d\u201cI hope there will be one day,\u201d said Sian Proctor, an Arizona college professor and the mission\u2019s pilot.What science did Inspiration4 undertake in space?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDuring its three days in space, the Inspiration4 crew conducted science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance. During the flight, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, scanned organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.Limited views of the crew, at least at firstReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter launching on SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight, a test launch to the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley broadcast a tour of the capsule to give people on the ground a sense of what their journey was like.On the Inspiration4 mission, however, there was limited information about what the crew was up to and how they were doing. For the first day or so, at least, images and video were not made public. The day after the crew reached orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter, \u201cJust spoke to the @Inspiration4 crew. All is well.\u201dOn Friday, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of them, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon cupola.\u201dThen it posted a video of the crew speaking with patients of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs who had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very close proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dWith deorbit burn completed, spacecraft\u2019s return is set Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed the 15-minute deorbit burn that lowers the Dragon spacecraft out of Earth orbit and puts it on a path to splashdown off the Florida coast.The firing of the Draco engines on the spacecraft is the \u201cfinal burn before Dragon begins to reduce his altitude, get away from that orbital velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, and start to make its way to its splashdown zone off the coast of Florida,\u201d SpaceX engineer Andy Tran said during the broadcast.Engineers will now close the nosecone of the vehicle in preparation of coming through the atmosphere.Splashdown still is scheduled for 7:06 p.m. Eastern time.Tom Cruise called astronauts in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkTom Cruise called the Inspiration4 astronauts in space.It\u2019s not clear what they discussed, but Cruise may have wanted some pointers about what it\u2019s like to be in orbit. Last year, then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the space agency was working with Cruise to film a movie on the International Space Station.There haven\u2019t been any updates since. But a Russian film crew will beat Cruise to it.Next month, Yulia Peresild, an actress, and Klim Shipenko, the film\u2019s director, are scheduled to fly to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They would spend about 10 days filing a movie called \u201cThe Challenge,\u201d about a doctor sent to the station to save an astronaut\u2019s life.\u201cI am not afraid,\u201d the actress said, according to the New York Times.What the crew ateReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 ranging from pasta and meatballs, to salami, bacon and cheddar, and even pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M&Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Crew member Sian Proctor seemed to eat a lot of pizza. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that it was cold and the Dragon capsule didn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201d The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6140",
        "date": "2021-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/18/spacex-inspiration4-splashdown-live/",
        "text": "The quartet of amateur astronauts onboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean Saturday evening, completing the first all-civilian mission to orbit the Earth and setting the stage for more privately funded missions to come.The crew of the Inspiration4 spent three days in orbit, circling the globe at 17,500 mph, before coming back to Earth in a flight designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in calm waters, a SpaceX live stream of the event showed. The astronauts emerged from the capsule, which had been hoisted aboard a recovery ship, less than 50 minutes after the splashdown.That brought a successful end to a historic flight funded by the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old billionaire entrepreneur and aviation enthusiast. Never before had a group of amateurs flown to orbit before. While NASA had overseen the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft that flew them to space, the agency was not directly involved in the mission.\u201cThat was a heck of a ride for us, and we\u2019re just getting started,\u201d Isaacman said.In a post-flight news conference Todd \u201cLeif\u201d Ericson, an Inspiration4 mission director, said: \u201cWelcome to the second Space Age. \u2026 This is opening up a whole new chapter in spaceflight.\u201dBefore the flight, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX had flown three sets of professional, government-trained astronauts to the International Space Station, and the company has another mission for NASA scheduled for next month. But Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of opening space to the public and eventually building bases on the moon and Mars, and the Inspiration4 mission fit that goal. The company already has booked more private astronaut flights, including one tentatively scheduled for 2023 that would take a Japanese billionaire on a trip around the moon in the company\u2019s still-under development Starship spacecraft.During its three days in orbit, the Inspiration4 crew \u2014 which included the mission pilot, Sian Proctor, 51, a college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant \u2014 virtually rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange (virtually), and spoke to patients at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital, one of whom asked if there any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d They also spoke with actor Tom Cruise, who has been in talks to fly on a later SpaceX flight to the International Space Station, as well as U2\u2019s Bono.In an interview with CBS News, Scott \u201cKidd\u201d Poteet, SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission director, said there was a \u201cminor waste management issue that the crew and mission control were required to troubleshoot. But honestly, this did not impact the mission.\u201dIn the post-flight news conference, Ericson said there was a problem with a fan. \u201cAs in most exploratory adventures like spaceflight there\u2019s always been one or two little hiccups along the way,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this was dealt with amazingly by the SpaceX team.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight, said, \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for a more successful mission.\u201dWhen planning the flight, Isaacman asked SpaceX about the feasibility of flying at an altitude even higher than the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at about 240 miles above the planet\u2019s surface.After SpaceX engineers deemed it safe, the Inspiration4 crew hit an altitude of about 367 miles, which is also higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and most space shuttle flights, and it set a record for SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft. Views of Earth from that height reportedly were amazing, especially since SpaceX added a curved window at the top of the spacecraft so the travelers could spend time gazing at the stars and earth below, almost as if they were outside the craft.At a press briefing before the flight, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond, we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.For the first day or so, there was limited information about what the crew was up to or how they were doing. Images and video were not made public.On Friday, though, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of the astronauts, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon upola.\u201dThen it posted the video of the crew speaking with patients at of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs whom had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dThe crew spent a fair amount of time conducting experiments to measure the effect of weightlessness on the human body. Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer, took ultrasound readings on her fellow astronauts to measure how their bodies were reacting. Chris Sembroski, a father of two and an engineer at Lockheed Martin, played his ukulele. And Sian Proctor, a professor at a community college, brought art supplies and drew a picture of their Dragon spacecraft.Isaacman placed the first bet from space, a $4,000 wager that the Philadelphia Eagles would win the Super Bowl. MGM, which announced the bet, said it was contributing $25,000 to St. Jude.The menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 pasta and meatballs, salami, bacon and cheddar, pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M & Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Proctor reportedly was especially fond of pizza. SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that the Dragon capsule hadn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe crew consists of the flight\u2019s commander and sponsor, Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old who is the capsule\u2019s pilot; Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old college professor from Arizona; Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash.; and Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant.The flight was billed as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman donated $100 million to the hospital. Sembroski won his seat in a sweepstakes among donors to the hospital. Arcenaux was treated for cancer at the hospital as a child.Isaacman has not said how much he paid SpaceX for the flight, the first crewed space journey from the United States that was not planned and overseen by NASA. On its live feed, SpaceX said the total raised for St. Jude was $157 million so far, $4 million of that during the 90 minutes viewers could follow the spacecraft\u2019s return from space.The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. The Inspiration4 was launched into space about 71 hours earlier, at 8:02 p.m. Wednesday.Crew exiting the capsuleReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe hatch of the spacecraft was opened less than 40 minutes after splashdown. And the crew has exited the vehicle. First came Hayley Arceneaux, the 29-year old, cancer survivor who became the first person with a prosthetic to fly to space.Then came Sian Proctor, strutting away from the space capsule. She was followed by Chris Sembroski, who was seen watching the movie \u201cSpaceballs\u201d as the capsule started its descent toward Earth. Finally, came the mission commander, Jared Isaacman, who dropped out of high school at age 16 to start his company, Shift4 Payments. That made him a billionaire, rich enough to fund the first all-civilian to space.As he exited the spacecraft, he waved and pumped his fists, with a large smile on his face.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe capsule is on the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft has been hoisted into the \u201cnest\u201d of the recovery ship, located in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Canaveral. The crew should be able to exit the capsule shortly once safety checks are completed. Then the crew will be checked by medical personnel before being flown back to land to be reunited with their families and friends.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPleasure boaters be goneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkLast year, when SpaceX brought back its first crew of astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the spacecraft was crowded by a crowd of pleasure boaters who descended on the site off the Florida Panhandle.Since then, SpaceX has worked more closely with the Coast Guard to keep people away. The spacecraft floating on the sea is still loaded with combustible propellant, and the company wanted to do a better job of keeping people away.SpaceX did appear on this mission to keep the area clear so that the recovery crews could prepare the capsule to be raised on to the deck of the recovery ship. But Saturday\u2019s landing site was also in the Atlantic Ocean, at sunset, not the Gulf, which may have affected how accessible it was to pleasure boaters.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA missions of firstsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission completed a series of historic firsts that were catalogued and released to reporters this evening by the mission\u2019s public relations team. They include:First all-civilian human spaceflight to orbitFirst Black female spacecraft pilotYoungest American in orbitFirst person to fly to space with a prostheticFarthest flight for a human spaceflight since the Hubble missionsFirst time SpaceX has operated three Dragons in spaceFirst free-flight of a Dragon spacecraft on a human spaceflight mission. Previous Dragon missions had the International Space Station as destination. Largest contiguous window ever flown in spaceFirst splashdown of a Dragon crew in the Atlantic OceanFirst thrice-flown Falcon 9 booster to launch a human spaceflight missionAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:08 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member Inspiration4 crew has splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The crews would exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestones before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpacecraft is plunging through the atmosphere; communications blacked outReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begin its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last about four minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow much money did Inspiration4 raise for St. Jude?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkJared Isaacman, the commander of the Inspiration4 mission and its benefactor, designed the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The goal was to raise $200 million, with Isaacman donating $100 million of his own money.In its broadcast stream Saturday, SpaceX said the effort was more than halfway to the goal of raising another $100 million, with the total now at $153 million. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTalking to St. Jude patientsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:44 p.m.Link copiedLinkFrom the beginning, the mission was designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And some of the hospital\u2019s patients got to speak with the Inspiration4 crew while they were in space.That had a special meaning for Hayley Arceneaux, the crew\u2019s medical officer.\u201cAs a kid I was treated for bone cancer, and I spent a year at St. Jude,\u201d she told the patients, who were assembled on a Zoom call. \u201cI had some chemo and surgery, which might sound familiar to some of y\u2019all. But then I was able to grow up and get my dream job, and now I\u2019m adding astronaut to my resume.\u201dPatients asked questions about the astronauts\u2019 sleeping arrangements, the view, whether they could take pictures. And one asked if there were any cows on the \u201cmoooooon.\u201d\u201cI hope there will be one day,\u201d said Sian Proctor, an Arizona college professor and the mission\u2019s pilot.What science did Inspiration4 undertake in space?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDuring its three days in space, the Inspiration4 crew conducted science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at the Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance. During the flight, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, scanned organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.Limited views of the crew, at least at firstReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkAfter launching on SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight, a test launch to the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley broadcast a tour of the capsule to give people on the ground a sense of what their journey was like.On the Inspiration4 mission, however, there was limited information about what the crew was up to and how they were doing. For the first day or so, at least, images and video were not made public. The day after the crew reached orbit, SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter, \u201cJust spoke to the @Inspiration4 crew. All is well.\u201dOn Friday, the mission\u2019s Twitter account posted a photo of them, all smiling and looking healthy. \u201cThe crew of #Inspiration4 had an incredible first day in space! They\u2019ve completed more than 15 orbits around planet Earth since liftoff and made full use of the Dragon cupola.\u201dThen it posted a video of the crew speaking with patients of St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. And on Friday afternoon, the crew hosted a live broadcast showing viewers around the capsule and giving them a sense of how they had been spending their time.The lack of information was not a surprise, especially given that the crew is made up entirely of amateurs who had never been to space before, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank.\u201cI would not be surprised to find out that they had some \u2018adjustment\u2019 challenges with orbital spaceflight. Something like half of all people who have been in space have experienced initial bouts of nausea and space sickness as their body adjusts,\u201d he said.\u201cAlso, keep in mind that these people are spending three days in very close proximity to each other and are probably having to figure out everything from sleeping and eating to using the toilet with very little privacy. I\u2019m not surprised they\u2019re a bit reluctant to broadcast that to the world.\u201dWith deorbit burn completed, spacecraft\u2019s return is set Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has completed the 15-minute deorbit burn that lowers the Dragon spacecraft out of Earth orbit and puts it on a path to splashdown off the Florida coast.The firing of the Draco engines on the spacecraft is the \u201cfinal burn before Dragon begins to reduce his altitude, get away from that orbital velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, and start to make its way to its splashdown zone off the coast of Florida,\u201d SpaceX engineer Andy Tran said during the broadcast.Engineers will now close the nosecone of the vehicle in preparation of coming through the atmosphere.Splashdown still is scheduled for 7:06 p.m. Eastern time.Tom Cruise called astronauts in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkTom Cruise called the Inspiration4 astronauts in space.It\u2019s not clear what they discussed, but Cruise may have wanted some pointers about what it\u2019s like to be in orbit. Last year, then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the space agency was working with Cruise to film a movie on the International Space Station.There haven\u2019t been any updates since. But a Russian film crew will beat Cruise to it.Next month, Yulia Peresild, an actress, and Klim Shipenko, the film\u2019s director, are scheduled to fly to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They would spend about 10 days filing a movie called \u201cThe Challenge,\u201d about a doctor sent to the station to save an astronaut\u2019s life.\u201cI am not afraid,\u201d the actress said, according to the New York Times.What the crew ateReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe menu for the Inspiration4 crew was varied \u2014 ranging from pasta and meatballs, to salami, bacon and cheddar, and even pasta Bolognese. For snacks, there were granola bars, peanut butter cups, apricots and M&Ms, which are good for shooting around in the weightless environment of space.Crew member Sian Proctor seemed to eat a lot of pizza. But SpaceX founder Elon Musk apologized on Twitter that it was cold and the Dragon capsule didn\u2019t come equipped with a way to heat it up.\u201cSorry it was cold!\u201d he wrote. \u201cDragon will have a food warmer & free wifi next time.\u201d The splashdown came at 7:07 p.m. Eastern time in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast. All-amateur astronaut crew splashes down in Atlantic, another successful SpaceX mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX capsule heading to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6141",
        "date": "2020-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/01/nasa-spacex-return-splashdown/",
        "text": "The launch two months ago went about as smoothly as possible, flying American astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since 2011. And SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked so gracefully with the International Space Station that NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley didn\u2019t even feel it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow they are coming home.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley boarded their Endeavour spacecraft and undocked from the station at 7:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday as the space station flew 267 miles above Johannesburg.\u201cIt\u2019s been a great two months and we appreciate all you\u2019ve done to help us prove Dragon for its maiden flight,\" Hurley radioed to SpaceX mission control as the Dragon capsule left the station\u2019s immediate vicinity. \u201cWe look forward to splashdown tomorrow.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cSafe travels and have a successful landing. Endeavour\u2019s a great ship. Godspeed,\u201d said NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, the space station\u2019s commanding officer.AdvertisementEven though Hurricane Isaias is projected to hit the east coast of Florida just as Dragon would be returning, NASA and SpaceX, which owns and operates the spacecraft, could still proceed with a landing attempt, aiming for a site in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola in the Florida Panhandle, where waves are expected to be between one and two feet.\u201cNot intuitive, but Isaias may actually help make nice weather on landing a few hundred miles west,\u201d Zebulon Scoville, NASA\u2019s flight director, wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning.Story continues below advertisementIt will be the first landing ever by astronauts in the gulf, according to Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.The crew undocked from the station on schedule, first retracting cables that supplied power from the space station, then unlatching 12 hooks that had held the two together for more than two months. As it floated away, Endeavour fired small booster engines to push away. Splashdown Sunday is scheduled for 2:48 p.m. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV)Even without a menacing hurricane, the return journey is a treacherous one. The spacecraft will have to withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it plummets through the atmosphere. A quartet of parachutes will have to slow the 21,200-pound capsule for a soft landing at sea. Then rescue crews will have to quickly recover the vehicle from the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico in what would be the first water landing for United States astronauts since a joint U. S.-Soviet mission in 1975.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf all that weren\u2019t challenging enough, NASA and SpaceX are attempting to bring the crew home in the midst of an unusually active hurricane season. And the possibility of strong winds from Tropical Storm Isaias kicking up an unruly churn has put NASA and SpaceX officials on alert.But if SpaceX is able to bring Hurley and Behnken home safely in the first test flight with humans on board, it would be the triumphant culmination of years of work and the opening of a new era in human spaceflight in which corporations play a starring role alongside NASA.Last year, SpaceX successfully completed a test run of the mission without astronauts that went smoothly and paved the way for Hurley and Behnken\u2019s mission. It\u2019s also flown its cargo Dragon spacecraft back to Earth in water landings many times successfully, so it has lots of practice.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, no one is ready to celebrate until they are safely home.\u201cThe hardest part was getting us launched, but the most important part is bringing us home,\u201d Behnken said Saturday morning during a farewell ceremony on the space station.The next Americans in spaceAt the ceremony, Hurley and Behnken gathered with their fellow station crewmates, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian Cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner. Cassidy handed Hurley an American flag that was brought up to the station on the very last space shuttle mission in 2011. Hurley, a member of that flight, now gets to bring it home, marking the restoration of human spaceflight from American soil.\u201cThis flag has spent some time up here, on the order of nine years,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cI\u2019m very proud to return this flag home and see what\u2019s next for it on its journey to the Moon.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust after the successful launch of the spacecraft to orbit, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder, said \u201cthere\u2019s an argument that the return is more dangerous in some ways than the ascent. So we don\u2019t want to declare victory yet. We need to bring them home safely, make sure that we\u2019re doing everything we can to minimize the risk of reentry and return.\u201dThinking about the astronauts and their families, he got emotional, unable to speak. \u201cI\u2019m getting choked up. ... We\u2019re going to do everything we can to make sure they get home safely.\u201dSpaceX started putting pictures of Hurley and Behnken on work orders to remind employees that lives were at stake. Recently, they had another reminder. Behnken\u2019s wife, Megan McArthur, also a NASA astronaut, was recently chosen to fly on a SpaceX flight in the spring of 2021. To prepare, she spent a few days this week at the company\u2019s headquarters.At SpaceX this week for training with @astro_kimbrough, learning how to fly the Dragon. pic.twitter.com/UlLCZNTDGU\u2014 Megan McArthur (@Astro_Megan) July 28, 2020\n\nIn many ways, returning to Earth is more perilous than escaping it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit requires an enormous amount of energy. The spacecraft goes from sitting still atop the rocket on the launchpad to chasing the space station at 17,500 mph in a matter of minutes. Coming home requires doing the reverse, shedding all that energy quickly. Friction with the thickening atmosphere will generate an enormous amount of heat that will engulf the spacecraft in a fireball.\u201cOut the window, it\u2019s all orange, and it\u2019s glowing, and it\u2019s quite a sight,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who flew two shuttle missions. \u201cBut you don\u2019t feel anything. You know you don\u2019t want to be out there because its thousands of degrees, but on the inside it\u2019s pretty cool. It\u2019s very comfortable.\u201dIn mission control on the ground, NASA and SpaceX officials won\u2019t be comfortable. As the fireball envelops the spacecraft, testing the heat shield, communication with the astronauts will be lost. The blackout will last approximately six minutes, but it will feel much longer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring Apollo 13, the nearly catastrophic mission, the blackout went on for what seemed like forever, said Gerry Griffin, a legendary former flight director at NASA during the Apollo era.The capcom, the person in mission control communicating with the astronauts, \u201ckept calling Apollo 13. \u2019This is Houston,\u2019\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd nothing. He went on for two minutes. You could hear a pin drop in that control center.\u201dUnlike the shuttle, which landed on a runway, the Dragon spacecraft is something of a throwback, a capsule that will land in water under parachutes. Parachutes are an old technology but a tricky one, and SpaceX has struggled with their design. Last year, it suffered a failure during a test of the parachute system that ultimately prompted the company to upgrade the design.Story continues below advertisementThe upgraded version uses a stronger material in the lines that run to the canopy and a new stitching intended to handle the loads at deployment.Advertisement\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d Musk said in an interview with The Post in the days leading up to the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean, they soldiered though, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dIf all goes well, two drogue parachutes will deploy when the spacecraft\u2019s altitude is about 18,000 feet, traveling at some 350 mph. Then, as the drogue chutes slow the capsule to about 119 mph, four main parachutes should deploy at about 6,000 feet.At a news conference late last year, Musk said the Mark 3 parachutes are \u201cprobably 10 times safer\u201d than the Mark 2 version. \u201cIn my opinion they are the best parachutes ever. By a lot.\u201dAdvertisementSince the Apollo era, parachute design has come a long way, especially in the development of lightweight but stronger materials, said Kurt Hempe, the director of space business for Airborne Systems, which designs parachutes for SpaceX as well as several other space companies.\u201cBut testing is absolutely an ordeal,\u201d he said. \u201cOne of the big things we do today that they couldn\u2019t do then was create computer models. We can come up with a model and simulate before we go fly. And then we go fly and we compare the data results with the model we developed.\u201dNASA and SpaceX have picked out seven different landing sites along the east and west coasts of Florida, ranging from approximately 22 nautical miles from shore to 175. Two recovery ships will be ready to speed to the spacecraft once it lands.The Post's Matthew Cappucci explains what East Coast states can expect as they brace for Tropical Storm Isaias, the storm drenched the Bahamas on July 31. (The Washington Post)Adjusting to Earth\u2019s gravity is always a difficult transition for astronauts, but landing in the water makes it even harder.\u201cYou feel sick and you\u2019re walking like a drunken sailor, if you\u2019re walking at all,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cCouple that with landing in the ocean, bobbing up and down, even in relatively calm water, it\u2019s going to be unpleasant.\u201dThe water landing in itself presents a challenge. Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom nearly drowned after his spacecraft splashed down in 1961 and his Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft sank after the hatch blew early.That\u2019s why the NASA and SpaceX teams will be holding their breath until they see Hurley and Behnken safely on the deck of the boat.\u201cWe didn\u2019t celebrate anything in the control center until the guys stepped out on the carrier deck,\u201d said Griffin, the Apollo era flight director. \u201cThat\u2019s when we lit our cigars.\u201dIn the coronavirus era, however, that won\u2019t be likely. NASA is taking extra precautions to protect workers and the astronauts, including testing people who come in contact with the astronauts. And everyone will be wearing masks.Read more:Photos and video: See some of the best moments from the iconic liftoff.Companies in the Cosmos: Read how companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new Space Age.How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D.Listen to Moonrise: Our newest podcast tells a tale of nuclear brinkmanship, backroom politics and science fiction.Living in space: Read stories from 50 astronauts who describe what it\u2019s really like to live in space.The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing: No one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. It will be the first landing ever by astronauts in the gulf, according to Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The crew undocked from the station at 7:35 p.m. Saturday and is scheduled splash down Sunday at 2:48 p.m. NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX capsule heading to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX capsule heading to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6142",
        "date": "2020-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/01/nasa-spacex-return-splashdown/",
        "text": "The launch two months ago went about as smoothly as possible, flying American astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since 2011. And SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked so gracefully with the International Space Station that NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley didn\u2019t even feel it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow they are coming home.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley boarded their Endeavour spacecraft and undocked from the station at 7:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday as the space station flew 267 miles above Johannesburg.\u201cIt\u2019s been a great two months and we appreciate all you\u2019ve done to help us prove Dragon for its maiden flight,\" Hurley radioed to SpaceX mission control as the Dragon capsule left the station\u2019s immediate vicinity. \u201cWe look forward to splashdown tomorrow.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cSafe travels and have a successful landing. Endeavour\u2019s a great ship. Godspeed,\u201d said NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, the space station\u2019s commanding officer.AdvertisementEven though Hurricane Isaias is projected to hit the east coast of Florida just as Dragon would be returning, NASA and SpaceX, which owns and operates the spacecraft, could still proceed with a landing attempt, aiming for a site in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola in the Florida Panhandle, where waves are expected to be between one and two feet.\u201cNot intuitive, but Isaias may actually help make nice weather on landing a few hundred miles west,\u201d Zebulon Scoville, NASA\u2019s flight director, wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning.Story continues below advertisementIt will be the first landing ever by astronauts in the gulf, according to Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.The crew undocked from the station on schedule, first retracting cables that supplied power from the space station, then unlatching 12 hooks that had held the two together for more than two months. As it floated away, Endeavour fired small booster engines to push away. Splashdown Sunday is scheduled for 2:48 p.m. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV)Even without a menacing hurricane, the return journey is a treacherous one. The spacecraft will have to withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it plummets through the atmosphere. A quartet of parachutes will have to slow the 21,200-pound capsule for a soft landing at sea. Then rescue crews will have to quickly recover the vehicle from the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico in what would be the first water landing for United States astronauts since a joint U. S.-Soviet mission in 1975.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf all that weren\u2019t challenging enough, NASA and SpaceX are attempting to bring the crew home in the midst of an unusually active hurricane season. And the possibility of strong winds from Tropical Storm Isaias kicking up an unruly churn has put NASA and SpaceX officials on alert.But if SpaceX is able to bring Hurley and Behnken home safely in the first test flight with humans on board, it would be the triumphant culmination of years of work and the opening of a new era in human spaceflight in which corporations play a starring role alongside NASA.Last year, SpaceX successfully completed a test run of the mission without astronauts that went smoothly and paved the way for Hurley and Behnken\u2019s mission. It\u2019s also flown its cargo Dragon spacecraft back to Earth in water landings many times successfully, so it has lots of practice.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, no one is ready to celebrate until they are safely home.\u201cThe hardest part was getting us launched, but the most important part is bringing us home,\u201d Behnken said Saturday morning during a farewell ceremony on the space station.The next Americans in spaceAt the ceremony, Hurley and Behnken gathered with their fellow station crewmates, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian Cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner. Cassidy handed Hurley an American flag that was brought up to the station on the very last space shuttle mission in 2011. Hurley, a member of that flight, now gets to bring it home, marking the restoration of human spaceflight from American soil.\u201cThis flag has spent some time up here, on the order of nine years,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cI\u2019m very proud to return this flag home and see what\u2019s next for it on its journey to the Moon.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust after the successful launch of the spacecraft to orbit, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder, said \u201cthere\u2019s an argument that the return is more dangerous in some ways than the ascent. So we don\u2019t want to declare victory yet. We need to bring them home safely, make sure that we\u2019re doing everything we can to minimize the risk of reentry and return.\u201dThinking about the astronauts and their families, he got emotional, unable to speak. \u201cI\u2019m getting choked up. ... We\u2019re going to do everything we can to make sure they get home safely.\u201dSpaceX started putting pictures of Hurley and Behnken on work orders to remind employees that lives were at stake. Recently, they had another reminder. Behnken\u2019s wife, Megan McArthur, also a NASA astronaut, was recently chosen to fly on a SpaceX flight in the spring of 2021. To prepare, she spent a few days this week at the company\u2019s headquarters.At SpaceX this week for training with @astro_kimbrough, learning how to fly the Dragon. pic.twitter.com/UlLCZNTDGU\u2014 Megan McArthur (@Astro_Megan) July 28, 2020\n\nIn many ways, returning to Earth is more perilous than escaping it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit requires an enormous amount of energy. The spacecraft goes from sitting still atop the rocket on the launchpad to chasing the space station at 17,500 mph in a matter of minutes. Coming home requires doing the reverse, shedding all that energy quickly. Friction with the thickening atmosphere will generate an enormous amount of heat that will engulf the spacecraft in a fireball.\u201cOut the window, it\u2019s all orange, and it\u2019s glowing, and it\u2019s quite a sight,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who flew two shuttle missions. \u201cBut you don\u2019t feel anything. You know you don\u2019t want to be out there because its thousands of degrees, but on the inside it\u2019s pretty cool. It\u2019s very comfortable.\u201dIn mission control on the ground, NASA and SpaceX officials won\u2019t be comfortable. As the fireball envelops the spacecraft, testing the heat shield, communication with the astronauts will be lost. The blackout will last approximately six minutes, but it will feel much longer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring Apollo 13, the nearly catastrophic mission, the blackout went on for what seemed like forever, said Gerry Griffin, a legendary former flight director at NASA during the Apollo era.The capcom, the person in mission control communicating with the astronauts, \u201ckept calling Apollo 13. \u2019This is Houston,\u2019\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd nothing. He went on for two minutes. You could hear a pin drop in that control center.\u201dUnlike the shuttle, which landed on a runway, the Dragon spacecraft is something of a throwback, a capsule that will land in water under parachutes. Parachutes are an old technology but a tricky one, and SpaceX has struggled with their design. Last year, it suffered a failure during a test of the parachute system that ultimately prompted the company to upgrade the design.Story continues below advertisementThe upgraded version uses a stronger material in the lines that run to the canopy and a new stitching intended to handle the loads at deployment.Advertisement\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d Musk said in an interview with The Post in the days leading up to the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean, they soldiered though, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dIf all goes well, two drogue parachutes will deploy when the spacecraft\u2019s altitude is about 18,000 feet, traveling at some 350 mph. Then, as the drogue chutes slow the capsule to about 119 mph, four main parachutes should deploy at about 6,000 feet.At a news conference late last year, Musk said the Mark 3 parachutes are \u201cprobably 10 times safer\u201d than the Mark 2 version. \u201cIn my opinion they are the best parachutes ever. By a lot.\u201dAdvertisementSince the Apollo era, parachute design has come a long way, especially in the development of lightweight but stronger materials, said Kurt Hempe, the director of space business for Airborne Systems, which designs parachutes for SpaceX as well as several other space companies.\u201cBut testing is absolutely an ordeal,\u201d he said. \u201cOne of the big things we do today that they couldn\u2019t do then was create computer models. We can come up with a model and simulate before we go fly. And then we go fly and we compare the data results with the model we developed.\u201dNASA and SpaceX have picked out seven different landing sites along the east and west coasts of Florida, ranging from approximately 22 nautical miles from shore to 175. Two recovery ships will be ready to speed to the spacecraft once it lands.The Post's Matthew Cappucci explains what East Coast states can expect as they brace for Tropical Storm Isaias, the storm drenched the Bahamas on July 31. (The Washington Post)Adjusting to Earth\u2019s gravity is always a difficult transition for astronauts, but landing in the water makes it even harder.\u201cYou feel sick and you\u2019re walking like a drunken sailor, if you\u2019re walking at all,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cCouple that with landing in the ocean, bobbing up and down, even in relatively calm water, it\u2019s going to be unpleasant.\u201dThe water landing in itself presents a challenge. Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom nearly drowned after his spacecraft splashed down in 1961 and his Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft sank after the hatch blew early.That\u2019s why the NASA and SpaceX teams will be holding their breath until they see Hurley and Behnken safely on the deck of the boat.\u201cWe didn\u2019t celebrate anything in the control center until the guys stepped out on the carrier deck,\u201d said Griffin, the Apollo era flight director. \u201cThat\u2019s when we lit our cigars.\u201dIn the coronavirus era, however, that won\u2019t be likely. NASA is taking extra precautions to protect workers and the astronauts, including testing people who come in contact with the astronauts. And everyone will be wearing masks.Read more:Photos and video: See some of the best moments from the iconic liftoff.Companies in the Cosmos: Read how companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new Space Age.How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D.Listen to Moonrise: Our newest podcast tells a tale of nuclear brinkmanship, backroom politics and science fiction.Living in space: Read stories from 50 astronauts who describe what it\u2019s really like to live in space.The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing: No one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. It will be the first landing ever by astronauts in the gulf, according to Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The crew undocked from the station at 7:35 p.m. Saturday and is scheduled splash down Sunday at 2:48 p.m. NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX capsule heading to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX capsule heading to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6143",
        "date": "2020-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/01/nasa-spacex-return-splashdown/",
        "text": "The launch two months ago went about as smoothly as possible, flying American astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since 2011. And SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked so gracefully with the International Space Station that NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley didn\u2019t even feel it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow they are coming home.NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley boarded their Endeavour spacecraft and undocked from the station at 7:35 p.m. Eastern time Saturday as the space station flew 267 miles above Johannesburg.\u201cIt\u2019s been a great two months and we appreciate all you\u2019ve done to help us prove Dragon for its maiden flight,\" Hurley radioed to SpaceX mission control as the Dragon capsule left the station\u2019s immediate vicinity. \u201cWe look forward to splashdown tomorrow.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cSafe travels and have a successful landing. Endeavour\u2019s a great ship. Godspeed,\u201d said NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, the space station\u2019s commanding officer.AdvertisementEven though Hurricane Isaias is projected to hit the east coast of Florida just as Dragon would be returning, NASA and SpaceX, which owns and operates the spacecraft, could still proceed with a landing attempt, aiming for a site in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola in the Florida Panhandle, where waves are expected to be between one and two feet.\u201cNot intuitive, but Isaias may actually help make nice weather on landing a few hundred miles west,\u201d Zebulon Scoville, NASA\u2019s flight director, wrote on Twitter on Saturday morning.Story continues below advertisementIt will be the first landing ever by astronauts in the gulf, according to Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.The crew undocked from the station on schedule, first retracting cables that supplied power from the space station, then unlatching 12 hooks that had held the two together for more than two months. As it floated away, Endeavour fired small booster engines to push away. Splashdown Sunday is scheduled for 2:48 p.m. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV)Even without a menacing hurricane, the return journey is a treacherous one. The spacecraft will have to withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it plummets through the atmosphere. A quartet of parachutes will have to slow the 21,200-pound capsule for a soft landing at sea. Then rescue crews will have to quickly recover the vehicle from the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico in what would be the first water landing for United States astronauts since a joint U. S.-Soviet mission in 1975.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf all that weren\u2019t challenging enough, NASA and SpaceX are attempting to bring the crew home in the midst of an unusually active hurricane season. And the possibility of strong winds from Tropical Storm Isaias kicking up an unruly churn has put NASA and SpaceX officials on alert.But if SpaceX is able to bring Hurley and Behnken home safely in the first test flight with humans on board, it would be the triumphant culmination of years of work and the opening of a new era in human spaceflight in which corporations play a starring role alongside NASA.Last year, SpaceX successfully completed a test run of the mission without astronauts that went smoothly and paved the way for Hurley and Behnken\u2019s mission. It\u2019s also flown its cargo Dragon spacecraft back to Earth in water landings many times successfully, so it has lots of practice.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, no one is ready to celebrate until they are safely home.\u201cThe hardest part was getting us launched, but the most important part is bringing us home,\u201d Behnken said Saturday morning during a farewell ceremony on the space station.The next Americans in spaceAt the ceremony, Hurley and Behnken gathered with their fellow station crewmates, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian Cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner. Cassidy handed Hurley an American flag that was brought up to the station on the very last space shuttle mission in 2011. Hurley, a member of that flight, now gets to bring it home, marking the restoration of human spaceflight from American soil.\u201cThis flag has spent some time up here, on the order of nine years,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cI\u2019m very proud to return this flag home and see what\u2019s next for it on its journey to the Moon.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust after the successful launch of the spacecraft to orbit, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder, said \u201cthere\u2019s an argument that the return is more dangerous in some ways than the ascent. So we don\u2019t want to declare victory yet. We need to bring them home safely, make sure that we\u2019re doing everything we can to minimize the risk of reentry and return.\u201dThinking about the astronauts and their families, he got emotional, unable to speak. \u201cI\u2019m getting choked up. ... We\u2019re going to do everything we can to make sure they get home safely.\u201dSpaceX started putting pictures of Hurley and Behnken on work orders to remind employees that lives were at stake. Recently, they had another reminder. Behnken\u2019s wife, Megan McArthur, also a NASA astronaut, was recently chosen to fly on a SpaceX flight in the spring of 2021. To prepare, she spent a few days this week at the company\u2019s headquarters.At SpaceX this week for training with @astro_kimbrough, learning how to fly the Dragon. pic.twitter.com/UlLCZNTDGU\u2014 Megan McArthur (@Astro_Megan) July 28, 2020\n\nIn many ways, returning to Earth is more perilous than escaping it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit requires an enormous amount of energy. The spacecraft goes from sitting still atop the rocket on the launchpad to chasing the space station at 17,500 mph in a matter of minutes. Coming home requires doing the reverse, shedding all that energy quickly. Friction with the thickening atmosphere will generate an enormous amount of heat that will engulf the spacecraft in a fireball.\u201cOut the window, it\u2019s all orange, and it\u2019s glowing, and it\u2019s quite a sight,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who flew two shuttle missions. \u201cBut you don\u2019t feel anything. You know you don\u2019t want to be out there because its thousands of degrees, but on the inside it\u2019s pretty cool. It\u2019s very comfortable.\u201dIn mission control on the ground, NASA and SpaceX officials won\u2019t be comfortable. As the fireball envelops the spacecraft, testing the heat shield, communication with the astronauts will be lost. The blackout will last approximately six minutes, but it will feel much longer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring Apollo 13, the nearly catastrophic mission, the blackout went on for what seemed like forever, said Gerry Griffin, a legendary former flight director at NASA during the Apollo era.The capcom, the person in mission control communicating with the astronauts, \u201ckept calling Apollo 13. \u2019This is Houston,\u2019\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd nothing. He went on for two minutes. You could hear a pin drop in that control center.\u201dUnlike the shuttle, which landed on a runway, the Dragon spacecraft is something of a throwback, a capsule that will land in water under parachutes. Parachutes are an old technology but a tricky one, and SpaceX has struggled with their design. Last year, it suffered a failure during a test of the parachute system that ultimately prompted the company to upgrade the design.Story continues below advertisementThe upgraded version uses a stronger material in the lines that run to the canopy and a new stitching intended to handle the loads at deployment.Advertisement\u201cParachutes are way harder than they look,\u201d Musk said in an interview with The Post in the days leading up to the launch. \u201cThe Apollo program actually had a real morale issue with the parachutes because they were so damn hard. They had people quitting over how hard the parachutes were. And then you know we almost had people quit at SpaceX over how hard the parachutes were. I mean, they soldiered though, but, man, the parachutes are hard.\u201dIf all goes well, two drogue parachutes will deploy when the spacecraft\u2019s altitude is about 18,000 feet, traveling at some 350 mph. Then, as the drogue chutes slow the capsule to about 119 mph, four main parachutes should deploy at about 6,000 feet.At a news conference late last year, Musk said the Mark 3 parachutes are \u201cprobably 10 times safer\u201d than the Mark 2 version. \u201cIn my opinion they are the best parachutes ever. By a lot.\u201dAdvertisementSince the Apollo era, parachute design has come a long way, especially in the development of lightweight but stronger materials, said Kurt Hempe, the director of space business for Airborne Systems, which designs parachutes for SpaceX as well as several other space companies.\u201cBut testing is absolutely an ordeal,\u201d he said. \u201cOne of the big things we do today that they couldn\u2019t do then was create computer models. We can come up with a model and simulate before we go fly. And then we go fly and we compare the data results with the model we developed.\u201dNASA and SpaceX have picked out seven different landing sites along the east and west coasts of Florida, ranging from approximately 22 nautical miles from shore to 175. Two recovery ships will be ready to speed to the spacecraft once it lands.The Post's Matthew Cappucci explains what East Coast states can expect as they brace for Tropical Storm Isaias, the storm drenched the Bahamas on July 31. (The Washington Post)Adjusting to Earth\u2019s gravity is always a difficult transition for astronauts, but landing in the water makes it even harder.\u201cYou feel sick and you\u2019re walking like a drunken sailor, if you\u2019re walking at all,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cCouple that with landing in the ocean, bobbing up and down, even in relatively calm water, it\u2019s going to be unpleasant.\u201dThe water landing in itself presents a challenge. Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom nearly drowned after his spacecraft splashed down in 1961 and his Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft sank after the hatch blew early.That\u2019s why the NASA and SpaceX teams will be holding their breath until they see Hurley and Behnken safely on the deck of the boat.\u201cWe didn\u2019t celebrate anything in the control center until the guys stepped out on the carrier deck,\u201d said Griffin, the Apollo era flight director. \u201cThat\u2019s when we lit our cigars.\u201dIn the coronavirus era, however, that won\u2019t be likely. NASA is taking extra precautions to protect workers and the astronauts, including testing people who come in contact with the astronauts. And everyone will be wearing masks.Read more:Photos and video: See some of the best moments from the iconic liftoff.Companies in the Cosmos: Read how companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new Space Age.How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D.Listen to Moonrise: Our newest podcast tells a tale of nuclear brinkmanship, backroom politics and science fiction.Living in space: Read stories from 50 astronauts who describe what it\u2019s really like to live in space.The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing: No one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. It will be the first landing ever by astronauts in the gulf, according to Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The crew undocked from the station at 7:35 p.m. Saturday and is scheduled splash down Sunday at 2:48 p.m. NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX capsule heading to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6144",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/16/space-station-debris-threat/",
        "text": "The International Space Station has been taking a beating lately.It sprang a couple of small but stubbornly persistent leaks last year. Errant thruster firings from a Russian spacecraft attached to the station this year sent it spinning so wildly that a NASA flight director said he was relieved the solar arrays didn\u2019t snap off. And last week, ground controllers had to maneuver the station to dodge a piece of speeding debris from a satellite China destroyed 14 years ago. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Monday, the space station once again faced a menacing threat, this time from thousands of pieces of debris, scattered when Russia fired a missile that destroyed a dead satellite. By early Monday morning, the detritus of that strike was hurtling uncomfortably close to the station, like a barrage of bullets. But this time there was no time to maneuver out of the way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, mission control in Houston had to wake the astronauts to inform them that they needed to evacuate the space station and take shelter inside their spacecraft.\u201cGood morning. Sorry for the early call,\u201d the ground controller said. \u201cWe were recently informed of a satellite breakup and need to have you guys start reviewing the safe haven procedure.\u201dCool, if sleepy, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel and an Iraq War veteran, replied calmly, \u201cSounds good. Thanks for the heads-up.\u201dThe astronauts scrambled into their spacesuits, got into their spacecraft and waited for the worst.On orbit, the space station and the debris were traveling at about 17,500 mph. At that speed, even a small piece of debris can cause enormous damage. If the debris hit and breached the hull of the station, they were ready abandon it and head for home, possibly leaving the $100 billion station without any astronauts on board for the first time in 20 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVande Hei sheltered with his crewmates, two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, while the members of NASA\u2019s Crew-3 mission huddled in their SpaceX Dragon capsule.SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 10. (The Washington Post)Thankfully the debris missed, and the seven space travelers \u2014 four Americans, two Russians and a German \u2014 reentered the station, ready to resume their work on the orbiting laboratory.But the problems will remain for years, said Dan Ceperley, the founder and CEO of LeoLabs, a California-based company that tracks debris for satellite companies. The debris field stretches across more than a third of the globe, and over the weeks and months to come it will encompass the entire Earth, creating what he called a \u201cdebris belt.\u201d As the debris comes down toward Earth, much of it will pass through the altitude used not only by the International Space Station but also the one being assembled by China.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think we\u2019re going to be putting collision alerts out through 2030,\u201d he said.On the ground, tensions between the United States and Russia flared. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called the strike \u201coutrageous\u201d and \u201cunconscionable,\u201d and said it was \u201cinexplicable\u201d that the Russians would do such a \u201creckless\u201d and \u201cdangerous\u201d act that endangered the lives of not only Americans on the station but Russians, as well.On Tuesday, Russia\u2019s Defense Ministry confirmed carrying out a test that destroyed a dead satellite that had been in orbit since 1982. But it maintained that the debris field it created never posed a threat to the space station. \u201cThe U.S. knows for certain that the resulting fragments, in terms of test time and orbital parameters, did not and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementForeign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.S. claim \u201cthat Russia poses risks to activities for the peaceful use of outer space is, to say the least, hypocrisy.\u201dThe strike created a cloud of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that can be tracked by U.S. technology, as well as hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces. They will stay in orbit for years to come, continuing to threaten not just the International Space Station but the one China is assembling, as well, in addition to hundreds of commercial and government satellites in low Earth orbit.The astronauts got a reminder of how pernicious \u2014 and enduring \u2014 orbital debris can be just last week. Hours before the Crew-3 astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, the station had to maneuver to avoid a piece of debris left over from 2007, when China hit a dead weather satellite with a missile, creating a debris field of more than 3,000 objects. Last year, the space station had to move at least three times to dodge debris, and sometimes it does get hit, such as the time something collided with the station and cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times and ended up upside down before crews could right the football-field-size ship. But in the meantime, the crews were evacuated into their spacecraft in case they needed to abandon the station.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d NASA astronaut R. Shane Kimbrough said recently. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dNASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen, last month, the station was again tilted out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews struggled to get control, as crews in Houston and Russia issued instructions and warnings to the astronauts on board the station about how, yet again, the station was being forced off course. It took some 30 minutes for flight controllers to regain control.Nelson said that a delegation of top NASA officials happened to be in Russia this week to meet with Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency. The missile strike was expected to come up, but a NASA spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment about what was discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Twitter on Tuesday, Rogozin wrote that he spoke with Nelson and that they discussed ensuring the safety of their crews on the station. Nelson responded on Twitter, saying he expressed his \u201cdismay over the danger our astronauts and cosmonauts continue to face on the International Space Station.\u201dDespite the growing geopolitical tension, the astronauts on board the station continue their work, getting along even while their superiors on the ground cannot. That\u2019s the way it\u2019s always been.Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s air force, were among the first crew to live on the space station. During the Cold War, they had been trained to kill each other, but early on their tour in space they found themselves by the window, marveling at the Earth below.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201d Mission control in Houston woke the astronauts early Monday to tell them to evacuate the space station and take shelter inside their Dragon spacecraft. Trouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6145",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/16/space-station-debris-threat/",
        "text": "The International Space Station has been taking a beating lately.It sprang a couple of small but stubbornly persistent leaks last year. Errant thruster firings from a Russian spacecraft attached to the station this year sent it spinning so wildly that a NASA flight director said he was relieved the solar arrays didn\u2019t snap off. And last week, ground controllers had to maneuver the station to dodge a piece of speeding debris from a satellite China destroyed 14 years ago. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Monday, the space station once again faced a menacing threat, this time from thousands of pieces of debris, scattered when Russia fired a missile that destroyed a dead satellite. By early Monday morning, the detritus of that strike was hurtling uncomfortably close to the station, like a barrage of bullets. But this time there was no time to maneuver out of the way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, mission control in Houston had to wake the astronauts to inform them that they needed to evacuate the space station and take shelter inside their spacecraft.\u201cGood morning. Sorry for the early call,\u201d the ground controller said. \u201cWe were recently informed of a satellite breakup and need to have you guys start reviewing the safe haven procedure.\u201dCool, if sleepy, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel and an Iraq War veteran, replied calmly, \u201cSounds good. Thanks for the heads-up.\u201dThe astronauts scrambled into their spacesuits, got into their spacecraft and waited for the worst.On orbit, the space station and the debris were traveling at about 17,500 mph. At that speed, even a small piece of debris can cause enormous damage. If the debris hit and breached the hull of the station, they were ready abandon it and head for home, possibly leaving the $100 billion station without any astronauts on board for the first time in 20 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVande Hei sheltered with his crewmates, two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, while the members of NASA\u2019s Crew-3 mission huddled in their SpaceX Dragon capsule.SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 10. (The Washington Post)Thankfully the debris missed, and the seven space travelers \u2014 four Americans, two Russians and a German \u2014 reentered the station, ready to resume their work on the orbiting laboratory.But the problems will remain for years, said Dan Ceperley, the founder and CEO of LeoLabs, a California-based company that tracks debris for satellite companies. The debris field stretches across more than a third of the globe, and over the weeks and months to come it will encompass the entire Earth, creating what he called a \u201cdebris belt.\u201d As the debris comes down toward Earth, much of it will pass through the altitude used not only by the International Space Station but also the one being assembled by China.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think we\u2019re going to be putting collision alerts out through 2030,\u201d he said.On the ground, tensions between the United States and Russia flared. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called the strike \u201coutrageous\u201d and \u201cunconscionable,\u201d and said it was \u201cinexplicable\u201d that the Russians would do such a \u201creckless\u201d and \u201cdangerous\u201d act that endangered the lives of not only Americans on the station but Russians, as well.On Tuesday, Russia\u2019s Defense Ministry confirmed carrying out a test that destroyed a dead satellite that had been in orbit since 1982. But it maintained that the debris field it created never posed a threat to the space station. \u201cThe U.S. knows for certain that the resulting fragments, in terms of test time and orbital parameters, did not and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementForeign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.S. claim \u201cthat Russia poses risks to activities for the peaceful use of outer space is, to say the least, hypocrisy.\u201dThe strike created a cloud of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that can be tracked by U.S. technology, as well as hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces. They will stay in orbit for years to come, continuing to threaten not just the International Space Station but the one China is assembling, as well, in addition to hundreds of commercial and government satellites in low Earth orbit.The astronauts got a reminder of how pernicious \u2014 and enduring \u2014 orbital debris can be just last week. Hours before the Crew-3 astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, the station had to maneuver to avoid a piece of debris left over from 2007, when China hit a dead weather satellite with a missile, creating a debris field of more than 3,000 objects. Last year, the space station had to move at least three times to dodge debris, and sometimes it does get hit, such as the time something collided with the station and cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times and ended up upside down before crews could right the football-field-size ship. But in the meantime, the crews were evacuated into their spacecraft in case they needed to abandon the station.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d NASA astronaut R. Shane Kimbrough said recently. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dNASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen, last month, the station was again tilted out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews struggled to get control, as crews in Houston and Russia issued instructions and warnings to the astronauts on board the station about how, yet again, the station was being forced off course. It took some 30 minutes for flight controllers to regain control.Nelson said that a delegation of top NASA officials happened to be in Russia this week to meet with Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency. The missile strike was expected to come up, but a NASA spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment about what was discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Twitter on Tuesday, Rogozin wrote that he spoke with Nelson and that they discussed ensuring the safety of their crews on the station. Nelson responded on Twitter, saying he expressed his \u201cdismay over the danger our astronauts and cosmonauts continue to face on the International Space Station.\u201dDespite the growing geopolitical tension, the astronauts on board the station continue their work, getting along even while their superiors on the ground cannot. That\u2019s the way it\u2019s always been.Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s air force, were among the first crew to live on the space station. During the Cold War, they had been trained to kill each other, but early on their tour in space they found themselves by the window, marveling at the Earth below.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201d Mission control in Houston woke the astronauts early Monday to tell them to evacuate the space station and take shelter inside their Dragon spacecraft. Trouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6146",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/16/space-station-debris-threat/",
        "text": "The International Space Station has been taking a beating lately.It sprang a couple of small but stubbornly persistent leaks last year. Errant thruster firings from a Russian spacecraft attached to the station this year sent it spinning so wildly that a NASA flight director said he was relieved the solar arrays didn\u2019t snap off. And last week, ground controllers had to maneuver the station to dodge a piece of speeding debris from a satellite China destroyed 14 years ago. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Monday, the space station once again faced a menacing threat, this time from thousands of pieces of debris, scattered when Russia fired a missile that destroyed a dead satellite. By early Monday morning, the detritus of that strike was hurtling uncomfortably close to the station, like a barrage of bullets. But this time there was no time to maneuver out of the way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, mission control in Houston had to wake the astronauts to inform them that they needed to evacuate the space station and take shelter inside their spacecraft.\u201cGood morning. Sorry for the early call,\u201d the ground controller said. \u201cWe were recently informed of a satellite breakup and need to have you guys start reviewing the safe haven procedure.\u201dCool, if sleepy, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel and an Iraq War veteran, replied calmly, \u201cSounds good. Thanks for the heads-up.\u201dThe astronauts scrambled into their spacesuits, got into their spacecraft and waited for the worst.On orbit, the space station and the debris were traveling at about 17,500 mph. At that speed, even a small piece of debris can cause enormous damage. If the debris hit and breached the hull of the station, they were ready abandon it and head for home, possibly leaving the $100 billion station without any astronauts on board for the first time in 20 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVande Hei sheltered with his crewmates, two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, while the members of NASA\u2019s Crew-3 mission huddled in their SpaceX Dragon capsule.SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 10. (The Washington Post)Thankfully the debris missed, and the seven space travelers \u2014 four Americans, two Russians and a German \u2014 reentered the station, ready to resume their work on the orbiting laboratory.But the problems will remain for years, said Dan Ceperley, the founder and CEO of LeoLabs, a California-based company that tracks debris for satellite companies. The debris field stretches across more than a third of the globe, and over the weeks and months to come it will encompass the entire Earth, creating what he called a \u201cdebris belt.\u201d As the debris comes down toward Earth, much of it will pass through the altitude used not only by the International Space Station but also the one being assembled by China.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think we\u2019re going to be putting collision alerts out through 2030,\u201d he said.On the ground, tensions between the United States and Russia flared. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called the strike \u201coutrageous\u201d and \u201cunconscionable,\u201d and said it was \u201cinexplicable\u201d that the Russians would do such a \u201creckless\u201d and \u201cdangerous\u201d act that endangered the lives of not only Americans on the station but Russians, as well.On Tuesday, Russia\u2019s Defense Ministry confirmed carrying out a test that destroyed a dead satellite that had been in orbit since 1982. But it maintained that the debris field it created never posed a threat to the space station. \u201cThe U.S. knows for certain that the resulting fragments, in terms of test time and orbital parameters, did not and will not pose a threat to orbital stations, spacecraft and space activities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementForeign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.S. claim \u201cthat Russia poses risks to activities for the peaceful use of outer space is, to say the least, hypocrisy.\u201dThe strike created a cloud of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that can be tracked by U.S. technology, as well as hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces. They will stay in orbit for years to come, continuing to threaten not just the International Space Station but the one China is assembling, as well, in addition to hundreds of commercial and government satellites in low Earth orbit.The astronauts got a reminder of how pernicious \u2014 and enduring \u2014 orbital debris can be just last week. Hours before the Crew-3 astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, the station had to maneuver to avoid a piece of debris left over from 2007, when China hit a dead weather satellite with a missile, creating a debris field of more than 3,000 objects. Last year, the space station had to move at least three times to dodge debris, and sometimes it does get hit, such as the time something collided with the station and cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times and ended up upside down before crews could right the football-field-size ship. But in the meantime, the crews were evacuated into their spacecraft in case they needed to abandon the station.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d NASA astronaut R. Shane Kimbrough said recently. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dNASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen, last month, the station was again tilted out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews struggled to get control, as crews in Houston and Russia issued instructions and warnings to the astronauts on board the station about how, yet again, the station was being forced off course. It took some 30 minutes for flight controllers to regain control.Nelson said that a delegation of top NASA officials happened to be in Russia this week to meet with Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency. The missile strike was expected to come up, but a NASA spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment about what was discussed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Twitter on Tuesday, Rogozin wrote that he spoke with Nelson and that they discussed ensuring the safety of their crews on the station. Nelson responded on Twitter, saying he expressed his \u201cdismay over the danger our astronauts and cosmonauts continue to face on the International Space Station.\u201dDespite the growing geopolitical tension, the astronauts on board the station continue their work, getting along even while their superiors on the ground cannot. That\u2019s the way it\u2019s always been.Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s air force, were among the first crew to live on the space station. During the Cold War, they had been trained to kill each other, but early on their tour in space they found themselves by the window, marveling at the Earth below.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201d Mission control in Houston woke the astronauts early Monday to tell them to evacuate the space station and take shelter inside their Dragon spacecraft. Trouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6147",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/01/spacex-crew-1-nasa-astronauts-headed-home-after-six-month-stay-international-space-station/",
        "text": "The four Crew-1 astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico right on schedule early Sunday, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station.The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 had undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday. The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, with the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft firing its engines on schedule to slow it down enough to pull it out of orbit and into the atmosphere. Within an hour of splashdown, the capsule had been lifted aboard a recovery ship and the four astronauts had disembarked, to be flown first to Florida aboard a helicopter and then aboard a NASA plane to Houston.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dWhat you need to know:The Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday off the coast of Panama City, Fla.It\u2019s the first time a U.S. space capsule has landed under the cover of darkness since 1968. It was only the second time that a spacecraft has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.Weather conditions were excellent, with little wind and glass-like seas. The descent was captured by cameras on board the recovery ship and aboard a nearby aircraft.The astronauts aboard the capsule, Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of Japan, set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Astronauts leave capsule less than an hour after splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:51 a.m.Link copiedLinkHow we feel knowing that the astronauts of NASA's SpaceX Crew-1 mission have safely returned to our home planet. \ud83d\udc99 pic.twitter.com/CANUXMar9B\u2014 NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) May 2, 2021\n\nLess than an hour after splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, the astronauts disembarked the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.First out was NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission. He waved his arms, like doing a little dance once he crawled out of the capsule. Next out were NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, who were followed by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.The crews will head back to Houston to be reunited with their families.Before they popped out, Hopkins said he was grateful for the SpaceX team. \u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft hoisted onto the deck of the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:31 a.m.Link copiedLinkRecovery crews moved very quickly and were able to hoist the SpaceX Crew Dragon on to the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes after splashdown.Safety personnel will check to make sure there are no fuel leaks, and if the conditions are safe, the astronauts will exit the vehicle to be checked out by doctors on board the ship.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBoeing looking to fly its next test flight, without astronauts onboard, in August or SeptemberReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has launched its third mission with astronauts to the International Space Station. It is charging ahead with more to come, and getting a lot of the attention, in part because Elon Musk\u2019s company also won the contract to build NASA\u2019s lunar lander.But Boeing is also working to fly crews to the space station \u2014 although it has had problems with its Starliner spacecraft.Boeing flew a test mission with astronauts in December 2019. But the spacecraft had software problems that forced controllers on the ground to bring it down prematurely. It never docked with the station \u2014 one of the main objectives of the test flight. And the company decided to do the test flight over again.Solving the software problems took a long time, however, and the company has still not returned to the skies. It has recently said that the spacecraft will be ready to fly as early as this month but that scheduling on the space station and the availability of the rocket that propels it from Earth will mean its flight can\u2019t take place until August or September.Still, it said it would continue to \u201cevaluate options if an earlier launch opportunity becomes available.\u201dIf that flight is successful, Boeing would look to flying its first test flight with NASA astronauts onboard.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-1 splashes down in the Gulf of MexicoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe four Crew-1 astronauts have splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station. The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday evening, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday.The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, as the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft fired it engines to slow down enough to pull it out of orbit an into the atmosphere.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dSpeed boats on site are now speeding to the capsule to secure it and eventually hoist it on to the deck of the recovery ship, where doctors will tend to the crew and make sure they are okay. They would then fly by helicopter to shore where a plane is waiting to take them home to Houston.Splashdown of Dragon confirmed \u2013 welcome back to Earth, @AstroVicGlover, @Astro_illini, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi! pic.twitter.com/jEVQMyOgQT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon parachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:54 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe parachutes of the SpaceX Crew Dragon have deployed, guiding the spacecraft to the Gulf of Mexico. First drogue parachutes unfurled, stabilizing the spacecraft before the main chutes deployed, opening slowly to slow the vehicle methodically.The parachutes are one of the last major milestones to the landing, which so far has appeared to go flawlessly.Drogue and main parachutes have deployed pic.twitter.com/mdCJzt9ooK\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew Dragon has entered the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft has entered the atmosphere on the final leg of its ride home. The spacecraft is expected to lose communication with the ground as the heat builds up around the capsule. That blackout should last about seven minutes.\u201cWe will see you on the other side,\u201d ground controllers told the astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBusy months ahead for SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has been on a tear recently, launching a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station last week, then returning another one to Earth Sunday morning. And the pace isn\u2019t slowing down.In September, SpaceX plans to launch the first all-civilian crew in a mission that would orbit Earth for a few days before coming back. Called Inspiration4, the mission is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and is raising money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.That mission would fly on the same spacecraft, dubbed Resilience, that the Crew-1 astronauts are flying home now.In a briefing with reporters while on the space station, NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins said he thought the mission is \u201ca good thing for human spaceflight.\u201d By allowing the private sector to focus on low Earth orbit, \u201cthen NASA can continue to focus on exploration and getting back to the moon and onto Mars through the Artemis program,\u201d he said.The Crew-1 astronauts have not yet had the chance to speak with the members of the Inspiration4 mission. But he said they \u201cwould love to have that opportunity and kind of talk to them about what it\u2019s like inside Resilience going uphill. And we\u2019ll be able to tell them soon what it\u2019s like coming home as well.\u201dSpaceX is also working toward the next flight of professional astronauts, Crew-3, which is scheduled for late October.Finally, it\u2019s planning to fly another private astronaut mission as early as January. That flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a commercial space station. The flight is led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who would be joined by three wealthy individuals, each of whom are spending $55 million for the trip.The crew plans to spend about a week on the space station before coming home.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:21 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX Dragon has shut off its Draco engines for the last time, after slowing the spacecraft down enough to enter the atmosphere on its return home. The temperatures outside the spacecraft are climbing and will eventually reach about 3,500 degrees. Plasma will build outside the spacecraft, interfering with communications with the ground, and a blackout period is anticipated.The next major milestone will be the deployment of the drogue parachutes, which would slow and stabilize the spacecraft, then the four main chutes will deploy, bringing the the spacecraft to a landing in the Gulf of Mexico.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft has begun its deorbit burn, firing its engines to slow the spacecraft down and guide it back into the atmosphere. The engines are expected to fire for about 16 minutes in one of the most crucial moments of the return.The burn will put the spacecraft in a position to precisely land in the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Panama City. Meanwhile, the recovery ship has moved into place, getting ready to pick up the capsule.SpaceX Dragon spacecraft jettisons trunkReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has jettisoned its trunk, the module outfitted with solar panels that provides power to the capsule. With the trunk gone, the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield is now exposed and prepared to help withstand the extreme temperatures of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, as the capsule plunges through the thickening atmosphere.Meet the returning crew Return to menuBy Christian Davenport1:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the Crew-1 astronauts is Michael Hopkins, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. He previously flew to space on the Russia Soyuz spacecraft in 2013 in a mission that completed 2,656 orbits of Earth and traveled more than 70 million miles. He was the captain of the University of Illinois football team, and commissioned in the Air Force in 1992.In December, he became the first-ever U.S. Space Force officer assigned as an astronaut when he transferred from the Air Force while aboard the International Space Station.Shannon Walker began her career at NASA in 1987 as a robotics flight controller for the space shuttle program. She was selected for the astronaut corps in 2004. She flew to the space station on the Russian Soyuz in 2010. She is married to fellow NASA astronaut Andy Thomas.Victor Glover is the rookie of the group. He had never flown to space before this mission. A Navy commander, he is a test pilot who has flown the F/A 18 Hornet. He has four daughters and became the first African American astronaut ever to live aboard the space station.Soichi Noguchi is a veteran Japanese astronaut who has flown on the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz in addition to Crew Dragon. While onboard the station this time, he took a lot of stunning photographs of Earth that he posted to his Twitter account, including one of the Pyramids.The final day on #ISS \u2013 I got best shot of #Giza #Pyramid #worldheritage \u30ae\u30b6\u306e\u5927\u30d4\u30e9\u30df\u30c3\u30c9\u3001\u4eca\u65e5\u306f\u304d\u308c\u3044\u306b\u6355\u308c\u307e\u3057\u305f\u3002 pic.twitter.com/e3eYDG5i6h\u2014 NOGUCHI, Soichi \u91ce\u53e3\u3000\u8061\u4e00\uff08\u306e\u3050\u3061\u3000\u305d\u3046\u3044\u3061\uff09 (@Astro_Soichi) May 1, 2021\n\nGetting used to gravity againReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:08 a.m.Link copiedLinkFor the past six months, the Crew-1 astronauts have been living in the weightless environment of space, floating around the space station and enjoying one of the pure joys of being in space.But coming home and adjusting to gravity can be rough. Returning astronauts sometimes have a difficult time staying upright after landing, while their bodies, and minds, get used to the pull of gravity again.In an interview with The Washington Post a couple of years ago, former NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus said it was one of the most difficult transitions.\u201cGravity sucks. It\u2019s horrible,\u201d she said. \u201cWe adapt to this whole new environment .\u2009.\u2009. and then we come back and it\u2019s like, \u2018Oh, my gosh. What the heck is this? I can\u2019t believe we live in this all the time.\u2019 I mean it\u2019s just horrid. It\u2019s this huge force that\u2019s just pressing down on us every day.\u201dMike Massimino, another former NASA astronaut, recalled how in space he would just let go of items instead of putting them down because they\u2019d just float there next to him. On Earth, of course, they\u2019d just come crashing down. And many astronauts, home just a day or two from space, have let coffee cups go, thinking they would just remain floating next to them, only to have them fall and shatter on the ground.Massimino had another experience.\u201cIt was probably my third day back, and I was taking groceries out of the minivan, and I wasn\u2019t sure where to put them,\u201d he said. \u201cI had all these plastic bags from Kroger\u2019s and I had to get them out of the car and into the house. So I thought, \u2018Why don\u2019t I just float this one here?\u2019 And I just dropped it, thinking it was going to float.\u201dThe previous time-in-space record lasted nearly five decades. The new one may not last that long.Return to menuBy Christian Davenport12:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn February, the Crew-1 astronauts passed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Since then, they have doubled that record, staying onboard the International Space Station for 168 days.The record set by the Skylab crew \u201cis really pretty significant when you think about how long it stood,\u201d NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins recently told reporters in a briefing from the space station. \u201cI don\u2019t anticipate that our record is going to last that long. And that\u2019s a good thing.\u201dRead the full storyArrowRightWeather looking good for splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkHigh winds in the splashdown area forced NASA and SpaceX to postpone the splashdown of the Dragon capsule last week. But the weather is expected to be good, even \u201cideal\u201d Sunday.High winds that kick up the seas and create big waves can create a dangerous situation, not just for the astronauts in the spacecraft but for the recovery teams as well. But on Sunday, the winds are expected to be very light and the sea as smooth as glass, creating \u201cvery benign waves,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said during a broadcast of the return.The darkness also shouldn\u2019t be a problem, officials said.Separation confirmed. Dragon will perform four departure burns to move away from the @space_station pic.twitter.com/43GwSBrWJc\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\n\u201cThe vehicle is certified to land in day or night,\u201d Stich said. \u201cThere\u2019s really not an issue with the vehicle itself and the recovery. We have been practicing recovering the crews in day or night.\u201dThe skies would be generally clear, he said, so \u201cwe\u2019ll have quite a bit of moonlight.\u201d And the recovery ships are outfitted with lights as well, he said. All astronauts aboard the Dragon capsule - Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi - have exited the Dragon capsule. SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6148",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/01/spacex-crew-1-nasa-astronauts-headed-home-after-six-month-stay-international-space-station/",
        "text": "The four Crew-1 astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico right on schedule early Sunday, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station.The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 had undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday. The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, with the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft firing its engines on schedule to slow it down enough to pull it out of orbit and into the atmosphere. Within an hour of splashdown, the capsule had been lifted aboard a recovery ship and the four astronauts had disembarked, to be flown first to Florida aboard a helicopter and then aboard a NASA plane to Houston.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dWhat you need to know:The Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday off the coast of Panama City, Fla.It\u2019s the first time a U.S. space capsule has landed under the cover of darkness since 1968. It was only the second time that a spacecraft has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.Weather conditions were excellent, with little wind and glass-like seas. The descent was captured by cameras on board the recovery ship and aboard a nearby aircraft.The astronauts aboard the capsule, Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of Japan, set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Astronauts leave capsule less than an hour after splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:51 a.m.Link copiedLinkHow we feel knowing that the astronauts of NASA's SpaceX Crew-1 mission have safely returned to our home planet. \ud83d\udc99 pic.twitter.com/CANUXMar9B\u2014 NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) May 2, 2021\n\nLess than an hour after splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, the astronauts disembarked the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.First out was NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission. He waved his arms, like doing a little dance once he crawled out of the capsule. Next out were NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, who were followed by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.The crews will head back to Houston to be reunited with their families.Before they popped out, Hopkins said he was grateful for the SpaceX team. \u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft hoisted onto the deck of the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:31 a.m.Link copiedLinkRecovery crews moved very quickly and were able to hoist the SpaceX Crew Dragon on to the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes after splashdown.Safety personnel will check to make sure there are no fuel leaks, and if the conditions are safe, the astronauts will exit the vehicle to be checked out by doctors on board the ship.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBoeing looking to fly its next test flight, without astronauts onboard, in August or SeptemberReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has launched its third mission with astronauts to the International Space Station. It is charging ahead with more to come, and getting a lot of the attention, in part because Elon Musk\u2019s company also won the contract to build NASA\u2019s lunar lander.But Boeing is also working to fly crews to the space station \u2014 although it has had problems with its Starliner spacecraft.Boeing flew a test mission with astronauts in December 2019. But the spacecraft had software problems that forced controllers on the ground to bring it down prematurely. It never docked with the station \u2014 one of the main objectives of the test flight. And the company decided to do the test flight over again.Solving the software problems took a long time, however, and the company has still not returned to the skies. It has recently said that the spacecraft will be ready to fly as early as this month but that scheduling on the space station and the availability of the rocket that propels it from Earth will mean its flight can\u2019t take place until August or September.Still, it said it would continue to \u201cevaluate options if an earlier launch opportunity becomes available.\u201dIf that flight is successful, Boeing would look to flying its first test flight with NASA astronauts onboard.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-1 splashes down in the Gulf of MexicoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe four Crew-1 astronauts have splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station. The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday evening, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday.The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, as the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft fired it engines to slow down enough to pull it out of orbit an into the atmosphere.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dSpeed boats on site are now speeding to the capsule to secure it and eventually hoist it on to the deck of the recovery ship, where doctors will tend to the crew and make sure they are okay. They would then fly by helicopter to shore where a plane is waiting to take them home to Houston.Splashdown of Dragon confirmed \u2013 welcome back to Earth, @AstroVicGlover, @Astro_illini, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi! pic.twitter.com/jEVQMyOgQT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon parachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:54 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe parachutes of the SpaceX Crew Dragon have deployed, guiding the spacecraft to the Gulf of Mexico. First drogue parachutes unfurled, stabilizing the spacecraft before the main chutes deployed, opening slowly to slow the vehicle methodically.The parachutes are one of the last major milestones to the landing, which so far has appeared to go flawlessly.Drogue and main parachutes have deployed pic.twitter.com/mdCJzt9ooK\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew Dragon has entered the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft has entered the atmosphere on the final leg of its ride home. The spacecraft is expected to lose communication with the ground as the heat builds up around the capsule. That blackout should last about seven minutes.\u201cWe will see you on the other side,\u201d ground controllers told the astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBusy months ahead for SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has been on a tear recently, launching a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station last week, then returning another one to Earth Sunday morning. And the pace isn\u2019t slowing down.In September, SpaceX plans to launch the first all-civilian crew in a mission that would orbit Earth for a few days before coming back. Called Inspiration4, the mission is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and is raising money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.That mission would fly on the same spacecraft, dubbed Resilience, that the Crew-1 astronauts are flying home now.In a briefing with reporters while on the space station, NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins said he thought the mission is \u201ca good thing for human spaceflight.\u201d By allowing the private sector to focus on low Earth orbit, \u201cthen NASA can continue to focus on exploration and getting back to the moon and onto Mars through the Artemis program,\u201d he said.The Crew-1 astronauts have not yet had the chance to speak with the members of the Inspiration4 mission. But he said they \u201cwould love to have that opportunity and kind of talk to them about what it\u2019s like inside Resilience going uphill. And we\u2019ll be able to tell them soon what it\u2019s like coming home as well.\u201dSpaceX is also working toward the next flight of professional astronauts, Crew-3, which is scheduled for late October.Finally, it\u2019s planning to fly another private astronaut mission as early as January. That flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a commercial space station. The flight is led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who would be joined by three wealthy individuals, each of whom are spending $55 million for the trip.The crew plans to spend about a week on the space station before coming home.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:21 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX Dragon has shut off its Draco engines for the last time, after slowing the spacecraft down enough to enter the atmosphere on its return home. The temperatures outside the spacecraft are climbing and will eventually reach about 3,500 degrees. Plasma will build outside the spacecraft, interfering with communications with the ground, and a blackout period is anticipated.The next major milestone will be the deployment of the drogue parachutes, which would slow and stabilize the spacecraft, then the four main chutes will deploy, bringing the the spacecraft to a landing in the Gulf of Mexico.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft has begun its deorbit burn, firing its engines to slow the spacecraft down and guide it back into the atmosphere. The engines are expected to fire for about 16 minutes in one of the most crucial moments of the return.The burn will put the spacecraft in a position to precisely land in the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Panama City. Meanwhile, the recovery ship has moved into place, getting ready to pick up the capsule.SpaceX Dragon spacecraft jettisons trunkReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has jettisoned its trunk, the module outfitted with solar panels that provides power to the capsule. With the trunk gone, the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield is now exposed and prepared to help withstand the extreme temperatures of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, as the capsule plunges through the thickening atmosphere.Meet the returning crew Return to menuBy Christian Davenport1:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the Crew-1 astronauts is Michael Hopkins, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. He previously flew to space on the Russia Soyuz spacecraft in 2013 in a mission that completed 2,656 orbits of Earth and traveled more than 70 million miles. He was the captain of the University of Illinois football team, and commissioned in the Air Force in 1992.In December, he became the first-ever U.S. Space Force officer assigned as an astronaut when he transferred from the Air Force while aboard the International Space Station.Shannon Walker began her career at NASA in 1987 as a robotics flight controller for the space shuttle program. She was selected for the astronaut corps in 2004. She flew to the space station on the Russian Soyuz in 2010. She is married to fellow NASA astronaut Andy Thomas.Victor Glover is the rookie of the group. He had never flown to space before this mission. A Navy commander, he is a test pilot who has flown the F/A 18 Hornet. He has four daughters and became the first African American astronaut ever to live aboard the space station.Soichi Noguchi is a veteran Japanese astronaut who has flown on the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz in addition to Crew Dragon. While onboard the station this time, he took a lot of stunning photographs of Earth that he posted to his Twitter account, including one of the Pyramids.The final day on #ISS \u2013 I got best shot of #Giza #Pyramid #worldheritage \u30ae\u30b6\u306e\u5927\u30d4\u30e9\u30df\u30c3\u30c9\u3001\u4eca\u65e5\u306f\u304d\u308c\u3044\u306b\u6355\u308c\u307e\u3057\u305f\u3002 pic.twitter.com/e3eYDG5i6h\u2014 NOGUCHI, Soichi \u91ce\u53e3\u3000\u8061\u4e00\uff08\u306e\u3050\u3061\u3000\u305d\u3046\u3044\u3061\uff09 (@Astro_Soichi) May 1, 2021\n\nGetting used to gravity againReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:08 a.m.Link copiedLinkFor the past six months, the Crew-1 astronauts have been living in the weightless environment of space, floating around the space station and enjoying one of the pure joys of being in space.But coming home and adjusting to gravity can be rough. Returning astronauts sometimes have a difficult time staying upright after landing, while their bodies, and minds, get used to the pull of gravity again.In an interview with The Washington Post a couple of years ago, former NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus said it was one of the most difficult transitions.\u201cGravity sucks. It\u2019s horrible,\u201d she said. \u201cWe adapt to this whole new environment .\u2009.\u2009. and then we come back and it\u2019s like, \u2018Oh, my gosh. What the heck is this? I can\u2019t believe we live in this all the time.\u2019 I mean it\u2019s just horrid. It\u2019s this huge force that\u2019s just pressing down on us every day.\u201dMike Massimino, another former NASA astronaut, recalled how in space he would just let go of items instead of putting them down because they\u2019d just float there next to him. On Earth, of course, they\u2019d just come crashing down. And many astronauts, home just a day or two from space, have let coffee cups go, thinking they would just remain floating next to them, only to have them fall and shatter on the ground.Massimino had another experience.\u201cIt was probably my third day back, and I was taking groceries out of the minivan, and I wasn\u2019t sure where to put them,\u201d he said. \u201cI had all these plastic bags from Kroger\u2019s and I had to get them out of the car and into the house. So I thought, \u2018Why don\u2019t I just float this one here?\u2019 And I just dropped it, thinking it was going to float.\u201dThe previous time-in-space record lasted nearly five decades. The new one may not last that long.Return to menuBy Christian Davenport12:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn February, the Crew-1 astronauts passed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Since then, they have doubled that record, staying onboard the International Space Station for 168 days.The record set by the Skylab crew \u201cis really pretty significant when you think about how long it stood,\u201d NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins recently told reporters in a briefing from the space station. \u201cI don\u2019t anticipate that our record is going to last that long. And that\u2019s a good thing.\u201dRead the full storyArrowRightWeather looking good for splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkHigh winds in the splashdown area forced NASA and SpaceX to postpone the splashdown of the Dragon capsule last week. But the weather is expected to be good, even \u201cideal\u201d Sunday.High winds that kick up the seas and create big waves can create a dangerous situation, not just for the astronauts in the spacecraft but for the recovery teams as well. But on Sunday, the winds are expected to be very light and the sea as smooth as glass, creating \u201cvery benign waves,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said during a broadcast of the return.The darkness also shouldn\u2019t be a problem, officials said.Separation confirmed. Dragon will perform four departure burns to move away from the @space_station pic.twitter.com/43GwSBrWJc\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\n\u201cThe vehicle is certified to land in day or night,\u201d Stich said. \u201cThere\u2019s really not an issue with the vehicle itself and the recovery. We have been practicing recovering the crews in day or night.\u201dThe skies would be generally clear, he said, so \u201cwe\u2019ll have quite a bit of moonlight.\u201d And the recovery ships are outfitted with lights as well, he said. All astronauts aboard the Dragon capsule - Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi - have exited the Dragon capsule. SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6149",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/01/spacex-crew-1-nasa-astronauts-headed-home-after-six-month-stay-international-space-station/",
        "text": "The four Crew-1 astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico right on schedule early Sunday, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station.The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 had undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday. The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, with the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft firing its engines on schedule to slow it down enough to pull it out of orbit and into the atmosphere. Within an hour of splashdown, the capsule had been lifted aboard a recovery ship and the four astronauts had disembarked, to be flown first to Florida aboard a helicopter and then aboard a NASA plane to Houston.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dWhat you need to know:The Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday off the coast of Panama City, Fla.It\u2019s the first time a U.S. space capsule has landed under the cover of darkness since 1968. It was only the second time that a spacecraft has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.Weather conditions were excellent, with little wind and glass-like seas. The descent was captured by cameras on board the recovery ship and aboard a nearby aircraft.The astronauts aboard the capsule, Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of Japan, set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Astronauts leave capsule less than an hour after splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:51 a.m.Link copiedLinkHow we feel knowing that the astronauts of NASA's SpaceX Crew-1 mission have safely returned to our home planet. \ud83d\udc99 pic.twitter.com/CANUXMar9B\u2014 NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) May 2, 2021\n\nLess than an hour after splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, the astronauts disembarked the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.First out was NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission. He waved his arms, like doing a little dance once he crawled out of the capsule. Next out were NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, who were followed by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.The crews will head back to Houston to be reunited with their families.Before they popped out, Hopkins said he was grateful for the SpaceX team. \u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft hoisted onto the deck of the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:31 a.m.Link copiedLinkRecovery crews moved very quickly and were able to hoist the SpaceX Crew Dragon on to the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes after splashdown.Safety personnel will check to make sure there are no fuel leaks, and if the conditions are safe, the astronauts will exit the vehicle to be checked out by doctors on board the ship.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBoeing looking to fly its next test flight, without astronauts onboard, in August or SeptemberReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has launched its third mission with astronauts to the International Space Station. It is charging ahead with more to come, and getting a lot of the attention, in part because Elon Musk\u2019s company also won the contract to build NASA\u2019s lunar lander.But Boeing is also working to fly crews to the space station \u2014 although it has had problems with its Starliner spacecraft.Boeing flew a test mission with astronauts in December 2019. But the spacecraft had software problems that forced controllers on the ground to bring it down prematurely. It never docked with the station \u2014 one of the main objectives of the test flight. And the company decided to do the test flight over again.Solving the software problems took a long time, however, and the company has still not returned to the skies. It has recently said that the spacecraft will be ready to fly as early as this month but that scheduling on the space station and the availability of the rocket that propels it from Earth will mean its flight can\u2019t take place until August or September.Still, it said it would continue to \u201cevaluate options if an earlier launch opportunity becomes available.\u201dIf that flight is successful, Boeing would look to flying its first test flight with NASA astronauts onboard.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-1 splashes down in the Gulf of MexicoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe four Crew-1 astronauts have splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station. The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday evening, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday.The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, as the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft fired it engines to slow down enough to pull it out of orbit an into the atmosphere.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dSpeed boats on site are now speeding to the capsule to secure it and eventually hoist it on to the deck of the recovery ship, where doctors will tend to the crew and make sure they are okay. They would then fly by helicopter to shore where a plane is waiting to take them home to Houston.Splashdown of Dragon confirmed \u2013 welcome back to Earth, @AstroVicGlover, @Astro_illini, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi! pic.twitter.com/jEVQMyOgQT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon parachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:54 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe parachutes of the SpaceX Crew Dragon have deployed, guiding the spacecraft to the Gulf of Mexico. First drogue parachutes unfurled, stabilizing the spacecraft before the main chutes deployed, opening slowly to slow the vehicle methodically.The parachutes are one of the last major milestones to the landing, which so far has appeared to go flawlessly.Drogue and main parachutes have deployed pic.twitter.com/mdCJzt9ooK\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew Dragon has entered the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft has entered the atmosphere on the final leg of its ride home. The spacecraft is expected to lose communication with the ground as the heat builds up around the capsule. That blackout should last about seven minutes.\u201cWe will see you on the other side,\u201d ground controllers told the astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBusy months ahead for SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has been on a tear recently, launching a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station last week, then returning another one to Earth Sunday morning. And the pace isn\u2019t slowing down.In September, SpaceX plans to launch the first all-civilian crew in a mission that would orbit Earth for a few days before coming back. Called Inspiration4, the mission is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and is raising money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.That mission would fly on the same spacecraft, dubbed Resilience, that the Crew-1 astronauts are flying home now.In a briefing with reporters while on the space station, NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins said he thought the mission is \u201ca good thing for human spaceflight.\u201d By allowing the private sector to focus on low Earth orbit, \u201cthen NASA can continue to focus on exploration and getting back to the moon and onto Mars through the Artemis program,\u201d he said.The Crew-1 astronauts have not yet had the chance to speak with the members of the Inspiration4 mission. But he said they \u201cwould love to have that opportunity and kind of talk to them about what it\u2019s like inside Resilience going uphill. And we\u2019ll be able to tell them soon what it\u2019s like coming home as well.\u201dSpaceX is also working toward the next flight of professional astronauts, Crew-3, which is scheduled for late October.Finally, it\u2019s planning to fly another private astronaut mission as early as January. That flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a commercial space station. The flight is led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who would be joined by three wealthy individuals, each of whom are spending $55 million for the trip.The crew plans to spend about a week on the space station before coming home.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:21 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX Dragon has shut off its Draco engines for the last time, after slowing the spacecraft down enough to enter the atmosphere on its return home. The temperatures outside the spacecraft are climbing and will eventually reach about 3,500 degrees. Plasma will build outside the spacecraft, interfering with communications with the ground, and a blackout period is anticipated.The next major milestone will be the deployment of the drogue parachutes, which would slow and stabilize the spacecraft, then the four main chutes will deploy, bringing the the spacecraft to a landing in the Gulf of Mexico.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft has begun its deorbit burn, firing its engines to slow the spacecraft down and guide it back into the atmosphere. The engines are expected to fire for about 16 minutes in one of the most crucial moments of the return.The burn will put the spacecraft in a position to precisely land in the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Panama City. Meanwhile, the recovery ship has moved into place, getting ready to pick up the capsule.SpaceX Dragon spacecraft jettisons trunkReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has jettisoned its trunk, the module outfitted with solar panels that provides power to the capsule. With the trunk gone, the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield is now exposed and prepared to help withstand the extreme temperatures of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, as the capsule plunges through the thickening atmosphere.Meet the returning crew Return to menuBy Christian Davenport1:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the Crew-1 astronauts is Michael Hopkins, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. He previously flew to space on the Russia Soyuz spacecraft in 2013 in a mission that completed 2,656 orbits of Earth and traveled more than 70 million miles. He was the captain of the University of Illinois football team, and commissioned in the Air Force in 1992.In December, he became the first-ever U.S. Space Force officer assigned as an astronaut when he transferred from the Air Force while aboard the International Space Station.Shannon Walker began her career at NASA in 1987 as a robotics flight controller for the space shuttle program. She was selected for the astronaut corps in 2004. She flew to the space station on the Russian Soyuz in 2010. She is married to fellow NASA astronaut Andy Thomas.Victor Glover is the rookie of the group. He had never flown to space before this mission. A Navy commander, he is a test pilot who has flown the F/A 18 Hornet. He has four daughters and became the first African American astronaut ever to live aboard the space station.Soichi Noguchi is a veteran Japanese astronaut who has flown on the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz in addition to Crew Dragon. While onboard the station this time, he took a lot of stunning photographs of Earth that he posted to his Twitter account, including one of the Pyramids.The final day on #ISS \u2013 I got best shot of #Giza #Pyramid #worldheritage \u30ae\u30b6\u306e\u5927\u30d4\u30e9\u30df\u30c3\u30c9\u3001\u4eca\u65e5\u306f\u304d\u308c\u3044\u306b\u6355\u308c\u307e\u3057\u305f\u3002 pic.twitter.com/e3eYDG5i6h\u2014 NOGUCHI, Soichi \u91ce\u53e3\u3000\u8061\u4e00\uff08\u306e\u3050\u3061\u3000\u305d\u3046\u3044\u3061\uff09 (@Astro_Soichi) May 1, 2021\n\nGetting used to gravity againReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:08 a.m.Link copiedLinkFor the past six months, the Crew-1 astronauts have been living in the weightless environment of space, floating around the space station and enjoying one of the pure joys of being in space.But coming home and adjusting to gravity can be rough. Returning astronauts sometimes have a difficult time staying upright after landing, while their bodies, and minds, get used to the pull of gravity again.In an interview with The Washington Post a couple of years ago, former NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus said it was one of the most difficult transitions.\u201cGravity sucks. It\u2019s horrible,\u201d she said. \u201cWe adapt to this whole new environment .\u2009.\u2009. and then we come back and it\u2019s like, \u2018Oh, my gosh. What the heck is this? I can\u2019t believe we live in this all the time.\u2019 I mean it\u2019s just horrid. It\u2019s this huge force that\u2019s just pressing down on us every day.\u201dMike Massimino, another former NASA astronaut, recalled how in space he would just let go of items instead of putting them down because they\u2019d just float there next to him. On Earth, of course, they\u2019d just come crashing down. And many astronauts, home just a day or two from space, have let coffee cups go, thinking they would just remain floating next to them, only to have them fall and shatter on the ground.Massimino had another experience.\u201cIt was probably my third day back, and I was taking groceries out of the minivan, and I wasn\u2019t sure where to put them,\u201d he said. \u201cI had all these plastic bags from Kroger\u2019s and I had to get them out of the car and into the house. So I thought, \u2018Why don\u2019t I just float this one here?\u2019 And I just dropped it, thinking it was going to float.\u201dThe previous time-in-space record lasted nearly five decades. The new one may not last that long.Return to menuBy Christian Davenport12:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn February, the Crew-1 astronauts passed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Since then, they have doubled that record, staying onboard the International Space Station for 168 days.The record set by the Skylab crew \u201cis really pretty significant when you think about how long it stood,\u201d NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins recently told reporters in a briefing from the space station. \u201cI don\u2019t anticipate that our record is going to last that long. And that\u2019s a good thing.\u201dRead the full storyArrowRightWeather looking good for splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkHigh winds in the splashdown area forced NASA and SpaceX to postpone the splashdown of the Dragon capsule last week. But the weather is expected to be good, even \u201cideal\u201d Sunday.High winds that kick up the seas and create big waves can create a dangerous situation, not just for the astronauts in the spacecraft but for the recovery teams as well. But on Sunday, the winds are expected to be very light and the sea as smooth as glass, creating \u201cvery benign waves,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said during a broadcast of the return.The darkness also shouldn\u2019t be a problem, officials said.Separation confirmed. Dragon will perform four departure burns to move away from the @space_station pic.twitter.com/43GwSBrWJc\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\n\u201cThe vehicle is certified to land in day or night,\u201d Stich said. \u201cThere\u2019s really not an issue with the vehicle itself and the recovery. We have been practicing recovering the crews in day or night.\u201dThe skies would be generally clear, he said, so \u201cwe\u2019ll have quite a bit of moonlight.\u201d And the recovery ships are outfitted with lights as well, he said. All astronauts aboard the Dragon capsule - Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi - have exited the Dragon capsule. SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6150",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/01/spacex-crew-1-nasa-astronauts-headed-home-after-six-month-stay-international-space-station/",
        "text": "The four Crew-1 astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico right on schedule early Sunday, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station.The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 had undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday. The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, with the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft firing its engines on schedule to slow it down enough to pull it out of orbit and into the atmosphere. Within an hour of splashdown, the capsule had been lifted aboard a recovery ship and the four astronauts had disembarked, to be flown first to Florida aboard a helicopter and then aboard a NASA plane to Houston.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dWhat you need to know:The Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico at about 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday off the coast of Panama City, Fla.It\u2019s the first time a U.S. space capsule has landed under the cover of darkness since 1968. It was only the second time that a spacecraft has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.Weather conditions were excellent, with little wind and glass-like seas. The descent was captured by cameras on board the recovery ship and aboard a nearby aircraft.The astronauts aboard the capsule, Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of Japan, set the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a United States spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Astronauts leave capsule less than an hour after splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:51 a.m.Link copiedLinkHow we feel knowing that the astronauts of NASA's SpaceX Crew-1 mission have safely returned to our home planet. \ud83d\udc99 pic.twitter.com/CANUXMar9B\u2014 NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) May 2, 2021\n\nLess than an hour after splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, the astronauts disembarked the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.First out was NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission. He waved his arms, like doing a little dance once he crawled out of the capsule. Next out were NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, who were followed by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.The crews will head back to Houston to be reunited with their families.Before they popped out, Hopkins said he was grateful for the SpaceX team. \u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft hoisted onto the deck of the recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:31 a.m.Link copiedLinkRecovery crews moved very quickly and were able to hoist the SpaceX Crew Dragon on to the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes after splashdown.Safety personnel will check to make sure there are no fuel leaks, and if the conditions are safe, the astronauts will exit the vehicle to be checked out by doctors on board the ship.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBoeing looking to fly its next test flight, without astronauts onboard, in August or SeptemberReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport3:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has launched its third mission with astronauts to the International Space Station. It is charging ahead with more to come, and getting a lot of the attention, in part because Elon Musk\u2019s company also won the contract to build NASA\u2019s lunar lander.But Boeing is also working to fly crews to the space station \u2014 although it has had problems with its Starliner spacecraft.Boeing flew a test mission with astronauts in December 2019. But the spacecraft had software problems that forced controllers on the ground to bring it down prematurely. It never docked with the station \u2014 one of the main objectives of the test flight. And the company decided to do the test flight over again.Solving the software problems took a long time, however, and the company has still not returned to the skies. It has recently said that the spacecraft will be ready to fly as early as this month but that scheduling on the space station and the availability of the rocket that propels it from Earth will mean its flight can\u2019t take place until August or September.Still, it said it would continue to \u201cevaluate options if an earlier launch opportunity becomes available.\u201dIf that flight is successful, Boeing would look to flying its first test flight with NASA astronauts onboard.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-1 splashes down in the Gulf of MexicoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe four Crew-1 astronauts have splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, returning to Earth after a six-month stay on the International Space Station. The astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one from Japan \u2014 undocked from the station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday evening, flew through the atmosphere and then touched down in the Gulf of Mexico under four massive parachutes at 2:57 a.m. ET Sunday.The return mission appeared to go flawlessly from start to finish, as the autonomous SpaceX Dragon spacecraft fired it engines to slow down enough to pull it out of orbit an into the atmosphere.\u201cIt really could not have been a more flawless journey home for Crew Dragon Resilience,\u201d said NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier.Once the crew splashed down, SpaceX mission control had some fun with the astronauts: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dSpeed boats on site are now speeding to the capsule to secure it and eventually hoist it on to the deck of the recovery ship, where doctors will tend to the crew and make sure they are okay. They would then fly by helicopter to shore where a plane is waiting to take them home to Houston.Splashdown of Dragon confirmed \u2013 welcome back to Earth, @AstroVicGlover, @Astro_illini, Shannon Walker, and @Astro_Soichi! pic.twitter.com/jEVQMyOgQT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon parachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:54 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe parachutes of the SpaceX Crew Dragon have deployed, guiding the spacecraft to the Gulf of Mexico. First drogue parachutes unfurled, stabilizing the spacecraft before the main chutes deployed, opening slowly to slow the vehicle methodically.The parachutes are one of the last major milestones to the landing, which so far has appeared to go flawlessly.Drogue and main parachutes have deployed pic.twitter.com/mdCJzt9ooK\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew Dragon has entered the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft has entered the atmosphere on the final leg of its ride home. The spacecraft is expected to lose communication with the ground as the heat builds up around the capsule. That blackout should last about seven minutes.\u201cWe will see you on the other side,\u201d ground controllers told the astronauts.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBusy months ahead for SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has been on a tear recently, launching a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station last week, then returning another one to Earth Sunday morning. And the pace isn\u2019t slowing down.In September, SpaceX plans to launch the first all-civilian crew in a mission that would orbit Earth for a few days before coming back. Called Inspiration4, the mission is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and is raising money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.That mission would fly on the same spacecraft, dubbed Resilience, that the Crew-1 astronauts are flying home now.In a briefing with reporters while on the space station, NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins said he thought the mission is \u201ca good thing for human spaceflight.\u201d By allowing the private sector to focus on low Earth orbit, \u201cthen NASA can continue to focus on exploration and getting back to the moon and onto Mars through the Artemis program,\u201d he said.The Crew-1 astronauts have not yet had the chance to speak with the members of the Inspiration4 mission. But he said they \u201cwould love to have that opportunity and kind of talk to them about what it\u2019s like inside Resilience going uphill. And we\u2019ll be able to tell them soon what it\u2019s like coming home as well.\u201dSpaceX is also working toward the next flight of professional astronauts, Crew-3, which is scheduled for late October.Finally, it\u2019s planning to fly another private astronaut mission as early as January. That flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is also developing a commercial space station. The flight is led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who would be joined by three wealthy individuals, each of whom are spending $55 million for the trip.The crew plans to spend about a week on the space station before coming home.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:21 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX Dragon has shut off its Draco engines for the last time, after slowing the spacecraft down enough to enter the atmosphere on its return home. The temperatures outside the spacecraft are climbing and will eventually reach about 3,500 degrees. Plasma will build outside the spacecraft, interfering with communications with the ground, and a blackout period is anticipated.The next major milestone will be the deployment of the drogue parachutes, which would slow and stabilize the spacecraft, then the four main chutes will deploy, bringing the the spacecraft to a landing in the Gulf of Mexico.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport2:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft has begun its deorbit burn, firing its engines to slow the spacecraft down and guide it back into the atmosphere. The engines are expected to fire for about 16 minutes in one of the most crucial moments of the return.The burn will put the spacecraft in a position to precisely land in the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Panama City. Meanwhile, the recovery ship has moved into place, getting ready to pick up the capsule.SpaceX Dragon spacecraft jettisons trunkReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has jettisoned its trunk, the module outfitted with solar panels that provides power to the capsule. With the trunk gone, the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield is now exposed and prepared to help withstand the extreme temperatures of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, as the capsule plunges through the thickening atmosphere.Meet the returning crew Return to menuBy Christian Davenport1:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the Crew-1 astronauts is Michael Hopkins, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. He previously flew to space on the Russia Soyuz spacecraft in 2013 in a mission that completed 2,656 orbits of Earth and traveled more than 70 million miles. He was the captain of the University of Illinois football team, and commissioned in the Air Force in 1992.In December, he became the first-ever U.S. Space Force officer assigned as an astronaut when he transferred from the Air Force while aboard the International Space Station.Shannon Walker began her career at NASA in 1987 as a robotics flight controller for the space shuttle program. She was selected for the astronaut corps in 2004. She flew to the space station on the Russian Soyuz in 2010. She is married to fellow NASA astronaut Andy Thomas.Victor Glover is the rookie of the group. He had never flown to space before this mission. A Navy commander, he is a test pilot who has flown the F/A 18 Hornet. He has four daughters and became the first African American astronaut ever to live aboard the space station.Soichi Noguchi is a veteran Japanese astronaut who has flown on the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz in addition to Crew Dragon. While onboard the station this time, he took a lot of stunning photographs of Earth that he posted to his Twitter account, including one of the Pyramids.The final day on #ISS \u2013 I got best shot of #Giza #Pyramid #worldheritage \u30ae\u30b6\u306e\u5927\u30d4\u30e9\u30df\u30c3\u30c9\u3001\u4eca\u65e5\u306f\u304d\u308c\u3044\u306b\u6355\u308c\u307e\u3057\u305f\u3002 pic.twitter.com/e3eYDG5i6h\u2014 NOGUCHI, Soichi \u91ce\u53e3\u3000\u8061\u4e00\uff08\u306e\u3050\u3061\u3000\u305d\u3046\u3044\u3061\uff09 (@Astro_Soichi) May 1, 2021\n\nGetting used to gravity againReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:08 a.m.Link copiedLinkFor the past six months, the Crew-1 astronauts have been living in the weightless environment of space, floating around the space station and enjoying one of the pure joys of being in space.But coming home and adjusting to gravity can be rough. Returning astronauts sometimes have a difficult time staying upright after landing, while their bodies, and minds, get used to the pull of gravity again.In an interview with The Washington Post a couple of years ago, former NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus said it was one of the most difficult transitions.\u201cGravity sucks. It\u2019s horrible,\u201d she said. \u201cWe adapt to this whole new environment .\u2009.\u2009. and then we come back and it\u2019s like, \u2018Oh, my gosh. What the heck is this? I can\u2019t believe we live in this all the time.\u2019 I mean it\u2019s just horrid. It\u2019s this huge force that\u2019s just pressing down on us every day.\u201dMike Massimino, another former NASA astronaut, recalled how in space he would just let go of items instead of putting them down because they\u2019d just float there next to him. On Earth, of course, they\u2019d just come crashing down. And many astronauts, home just a day or two from space, have let coffee cups go, thinking they would just remain floating next to them, only to have them fall and shatter on the ground.Massimino had another experience.\u201cIt was probably my third day back, and I was taking groceries out of the minivan, and I wasn\u2019t sure where to put them,\u201d he said. \u201cI had all these plastic bags from Kroger\u2019s and I had to get them out of the car and into the house. So I thought, \u2018Why don\u2019t I just float this one here?\u2019 And I just dropped it, thinking it was going to float.\u201dThe previous time-in-space record lasted nearly five decades. The new one may not last that long.Return to menuBy Christian Davenport12:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn February, the Crew-1 astronauts passed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the milestone of 84 days that was set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.Since then, they have doubled that record, staying onboard the International Space Station for 168 days.The record set by the Skylab crew \u201cis really pretty significant when you think about how long it stood,\u201d NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins recently told reporters in a briefing from the space station. \u201cI don\u2019t anticipate that our record is going to last that long. And that\u2019s a good thing.\u201dRead the full storyArrowRightWeather looking good for splashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:19 a.m.Link copiedLinkHigh winds in the splashdown area forced NASA and SpaceX to postpone the splashdown of the Dragon capsule last week. But the weather is expected to be good, even \u201cideal\u201d Sunday.High winds that kick up the seas and create big waves can create a dangerous situation, not just for the astronauts in the spacecraft but for the recovery teams as well. But on Sunday, the winds are expected to be very light and the sea as smooth as glass, creating \u201cvery benign waves,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said during a broadcast of the return.The darkness also shouldn\u2019t be a problem, officials said.Separation confirmed. Dragon will perform four departure burns to move away from the @space_station pic.twitter.com/43GwSBrWJc\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 2, 2021\n\n\u201cThe vehicle is certified to land in day or night,\u201d Stich said. \u201cThere\u2019s really not an issue with the vehicle itself and the recovery. We have been practicing recovering the crews in day or night.\u201dThe skies would be generally clear, he said, so \u201cwe\u2019ll have quite a bit of moonlight.\u201d And the recovery ships are outfitted with lights as well, he said. All astronauts aboard the Dragon capsule - Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi - have exited the Dragon capsule. SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and old (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6151",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/01/spacex-launch-comparisons-space-shuttle/",
        "text": "The Falcon 9 is a slim, slick rocket \u2014 a powerful beast, for sure, that unleashes a menacing roar at liftoff that reverberates across the Florida Space Coast. But it also provides a deceptively smooth ride, at least at first, when compared with the space shuttle.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Falcon 9\u2019s second stage, though, packs a punch. That was the review of the first NASA astronauts to have flown on both Space X\u2019s Falcon 9 and its predecessor, the space shuttle, manufactured for NASA by prime contractor Rockwell International. The Falcon 9 was smooth at first, then a bit of a rumble, \u201clike driving fast over a gravel road,\u201d said astronaut Doug Hurley, who with Bob Behnken offered thoughts of the rockets\u2019 performance for reporters on Monday.Story continues below advertisementThe mission was a test flight, and their job was not only to fly to the International Space Station \u2014 a goal they achieved Sunday \u2014 but to assess how the rocket and spacecraft, which had never before flown humans, performed. Now that SpaceX has shown it can safely deliver people to orbit, the question became how its system, the first developed entirely by a private company to send NASA astronauts to space, compared to the rockets and spacecraft NASA had engineered before.AdvertisementSpace enthusiasts finally have the beginnings of an answer to which system is better.Clearly, SpaceX\u2019s vehicles look different. Even the astronauts\u2019 spacesuits were sleek and form-fitting departures from their clunky, at times dowdy predecessors. Inside the capsule, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and his engineers simplified the control panels, banishing the dozens of switches that made the shuttle such a complicated vehicle to fly, and instead opted for large touch screens. The Dragon capsule\u2019s chairs were inspired by those in racecars, with custom foam molds.Story continues below advertisementEven the launch tower was revamped to look modern and sleek. And for this mission, NASA decided to bring back its \u201cworm\u201d logo from the 1970s, which was painted on the side of the Falcon 9 rocket.Taken together, the changes were not only a nod to the science fiction that inspired Musk as a child but a deliberate attempt to create an aesthetic and evoke a mood.Advertisement\u201cIf you\u2019re a member of the public \u2026 you don\u2019t necessarily know that much about rocket design or how spacecraft work, but you know if it looks cool,\u201d Musk said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. \u201cAnd if it looks futuristic and, aesthetically, it seems like something new, that\u2019s how people match the perception with the reality.\u201dStory continues below advertisementForm is one thing. Function is another. And in spending nearly $3 billion in taxpayer money on the spacecraft, NASA cared far more about the latter, especially since it was the first launch of astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.So how did it fly? The reviews were overwhelmingly positive for a mission that appeared to go off without a hitch. But there were some surprises.Behnken and Hurley, both of whom had flown on the space shuttle twice, were prepared for blastoff to be an exhilarating display of brute force \u2014 nine engines firing simultaneously for a total of 1.7 million pounds of thrust, or more than five 747s combined. Waves of fire thunder out in what is basically a controlled explosion that sends up a huge cloud and a sound you feel in your chest, even three miles away.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven that, the astronauts were expecting a teeth-chattering thrill.\u201cWe were surprised a little bit at how smooth things were off the pad,\u201d Behnken said during one of several press calls after reaching the station. \u201cThe space shuttle is a pretty rough ride heading into orbit.\u201dOne of the main differences, they said, was that the shuttle had two solid rocket motors that thunder on their way to orbit. While powerful, solid motors can\u2019t be turned off once ignited. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 uses only liquid propellants, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, and the result, the astronauts said, was a relatively fluid flight.\u201cIt was a very smooth ride. You could see it on the webcast,\u201d Musk said after the launch. \u201cIt looked quite smooth. In fact, a friend of mine who is a filmmaker said, \u2018You need to put some shake into the camera to make it look more realistic.\u2019 \u201dBut when the first and second stages separated, and the second stage engine ignited, it gave them a bit of a shimmy \u2014 like the flaming engine of the Batmobile, is how Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, put it.\u201cOur expectation was as we continued with the flight into second stage that things would basically get a lot smoother than the space shuttle did,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut Dragon was huffing and puffing all the way into orbit. And so it was not quite the same \u2026 smooth ride as the space shuttle was.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother new experience came at the very beginning of the mission, when Hurley and Behnken boarded the capsule and sat there through the fueling process. During the space shuttle era, the rocket\u2019s tanks were fueled before the astronauts boarded.SpaceX uses extremely cold propellant, so the rocket needs to be loaded just before liftoff to prevent it from boiling off. SpaceX \u201csuperchills\u201d its propellant to make it denser, so more of its can be packed into the rocket, giving it more performance. It also means the astronauts can hear the fueling, a process full of grunts and hisses that makes the rocket seem like it\u2019s stirring to life beneath them.\u201cHearing the venting and the valve sounds and the little vibrations associated with that operation was a new experience for us,\u201d Behnken said.Story continues below advertisementIt was one they were prepared for because SpaceX had recorded audio of the sounds and played that for them during training exercises.Advertisement\u201cWe had heard all those sounds pretty much before, and that was extremely helpful,\u201d Behnken said.Perhaps one of the biggest surprises wasn\u2019t the noise of the liftoff, or the staging, or the fueling but rather the complete silence when the spacecraft finally did reach the station, some 19 hours after liftoff.The Dragon capsule glided in with such grace that \u201cwe didn\u2019t feel the docking. It was just so smooth,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cThat really, really surprised me.\u201d Space enthusiasts finally have the beginnings of an answer to which system is better. SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and old",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and old (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6152",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/01/spacex-launch-comparisons-space-shuttle/",
        "text": "The Falcon 9 is a slim, slick rocket \u2014 a powerful beast, for sure, that unleashes a menacing roar at liftoff that reverberates across the Florida Space Coast. But it also provides a deceptively smooth ride, at least at first, when compared with the space shuttle.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Falcon 9\u2019s second stage, though, packs a punch. That was the review of the first NASA astronauts to have flown on both Space X\u2019s Falcon 9 and its predecessor, the space shuttle, manufactured for NASA by prime contractor Rockwell International. The Falcon 9 was smooth at first, then a bit of a rumble, \u201clike driving fast over a gravel road,\u201d said astronaut Doug Hurley, who with Bob Behnken offered thoughts of the rockets\u2019 performance for reporters on Monday.Story continues below advertisementThe mission was a test flight, and their job was not only to fly to the International Space Station \u2014 a goal they achieved Sunday \u2014 but to assess how the rocket and spacecraft, which had never before flown humans, performed. Now that SpaceX has shown it can safely deliver people to orbit, the question became how its system, the first developed entirely by a private company to send NASA astronauts to space, compared to the rockets and spacecraft NASA had engineered before.AdvertisementSpace enthusiasts finally have the beginnings of an answer to which system is better.Clearly, SpaceX\u2019s vehicles look different. Even the astronauts\u2019 spacesuits were sleek and form-fitting departures from their clunky, at times dowdy predecessors. Inside the capsule, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and his engineers simplified the control panels, banishing the dozens of switches that made the shuttle such a complicated vehicle to fly, and instead opted for large touch screens. The Dragon capsule\u2019s chairs were inspired by those in racecars, with custom foam molds.Story continues below advertisementEven the launch tower was revamped to look modern and sleek. And for this mission, NASA decided to bring back its \u201cworm\u201d logo from the 1970s, which was painted on the side of the Falcon 9 rocket.Taken together, the changes were not only a nod to the science fiction that inspired Musk as a child but a deliberate attempt to create an aesthetic and evoke a mood.Advertisement\u201cIf you\u2019re a member of the public \u2026 you don\u2019t necessarily know that much about rocket design or how spacecraft work, but you know if it looks cool,\u201d Musk said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. \u201cAnd if it looks futuristic and, aesthetically, it seems like something new, that\u2019s how people match the perception with the reality.\u201dStory continues below advertisementForm is one thing. Function is another. And in spending nearly $3 billion in taxpayer money on the spacecraft, NASA cared far more about the latter, especially since it was the first launch of astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.So how did it fly? The reviews were overwhelmingly positive for a mission that appeared to go off without a hitch. But there were some surprises.Behnken and Hurley, both of whom had flown on the space shuttle twice, were prepared for blastoff to be an exhilarating display of brute force \u2014 nine engines firing simultaneously for a total of 1.7 million pounds of thrust, or more than five 747s combined. Waves of fire thunder out in what is basically a controlled explosion that sends up a huge cloud and a sound you feel in your chest, even three miles away.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven that, the astronauts were expecting a teeth-chattering thrill.\u201cWe were surprised a little bit at how smooth things were off the pad,\u201d Behnken said during one of several press calls after reaching the station. \u201cThe space shuttle is a pretty rough ride heading into orbit.\u201dOne of the main differences, they said, was that the shuttle had two solid rocket motors that thunder on their way to orbit. While powerful, solid motors can\u2019t be turned off once ignited. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 uses only liquid propellants, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, and the result, the astronauts said, was a relatively fluid flight.\u201cIt was a very smooth ride. You could see it on the webcast,\u201d Musk said after the launch. \u201cIt looked quite smooth. In fact, a friend of mine who is a filmmaker said, \u2018You need to put some shake into the camera to make it look more realistic.\u2019 \u201dBut when the first and second stages separated, and the second stage engine ignited, it gave them a bit of a shimmy \u2014 like the flaming engine of the Batmobile, is how Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, put it.\u201cOur expectation was as we continued with the flight into second stage that things would basically get a lot smoother than the space shuttle did,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut Dragon was huffing and puffing all the way into orbit. And so it was not quite the same \u2026 smooth ride as the space shuttle was.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother new experience came at the very beginning of the mission, when Hurley and Behnken boarded the capsule and sat there through the fueling process. During the space shuttle era, the rocket\u2019s tanks were fueled before the astronauts boarded.SpaceX uses extremely cold propellant, so the rocket needs to be loaded just before liftoff to prevent it from boiling off. SpaceX \u201csuperchills\u201d its propellant to make it denser, so more of its can be packed into the rocket, giving it more performance. It also means the astronauts can hear the fueling, a process full of grunts and hisses that makes the rocket seem like it\u2019s stirring to life beneath them.\u201cHearing the venting and the valve sounds and the little vibrations associated with that operation was a new experience for us,\u201d Behnken said.Story continues below advertisementIt was one they were prepared for because SpaceX had recorded audio of the sounds and played that for them during training exercises.Advertisement\u201cWe had heard all those sounds pretty much before, and that was extremely helpful,\u201d Behnken said.Perhaps one of the biggest surprises wasn\u2019t the noise of the liftoff, or the staging, or the fueling but rather the complete silence when the spacecraft finally did reach the station, some 19 hours after liftoff.The Dragon capsule glided in with such grace that \u201cwe didn\u2019t feel the docking. It was just so smooth,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cThat really, really surprised me.\u201d Space enthusiasts finally have the beginnings of an answer to which system is better. SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and old",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and old (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6153",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/01/spacex-launch-comparisons-space-shuttle/",
        "text": "The Falcon 9 is a slim, slick rocket \u2014 a powerful beast, for sure, that unleashes a menacing roar at liftoff that reverberates across the Florida Space Coast. But it also provides a deceptively smooth ride, at least at first, when compared with the space shuttle.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Falcon 9\u2019s second stage, though, packs a punch. That was the review of the first NASA astronauts to have flown on both Space X\u2019s Falcon 9 and its predecessor, the space shuttle, manufactured for NASA by prime contractor Rockwell International. The Falcon 9 was smooth at first, then a bit of a rumble, \u201clike driving fast over a gravel road,\u201d said astronaut Doug Hurley, who with Bob Behnken offered thoughts of the rockets\u2019 performance for reporters on Monday.Story continues below advertisementThe mission was a test flight, and their job was not only to fly to the International Space Station \u2014 a goal they achieved Sunday \u2014 but to assess how the rocket and spacecraft, which had never before flown humans, performed. Now that SpaceX has shown it can safely deliver people to orbit, the question became how its system, the first developed entirely by a private company to send NASA astronauts to space, compared to the rockets and spacecraft NASA had engineered before.AdvertisementSpace enthusiasts finally have the beginnings of an answer to which system is better.Clearly, SpaceX\u2019s vehicles look different. Even the astronauts\u2019 spacesuits were sleek and form-fitting departures from their clunky, at times dowdy predecessors. Inside the capsule, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and his engineers simplified the control panels, banishing the dozens of switches that made the shuttle such a complicated vehicle to fly, and instead opted for large touch screens. The Dragon capsule\u2019s chairs were inspired by those in racecars, with custom foam molds.Story continues below advertisementEven the launch tower was revamped to look modern and sleek. And for this mission, NASA decided to bring back its \u201cworm\u201d logo from the 1970s, which was painted on the side of the Falcon 9 rocket.Taken together, the changes were not only a nod to the science fiction that inspired Musk as a child but a deliberate attempt to create an aesthetic and evoke a mood.Advertisement\u201cIf you\u2019re a member of the public \u2026 you don\u2019t necessarily know that much about rocket design or how spacecraft work, but you know if it looks cool,\u201d Musk said in a recent interview with The Washington Post. \u201cAnd if it looks futuristic and, aesthetically, it seems like something new, that\u2019s how people match the perception with the reality.\u201dStory continues below advertisementForm is one thing. Function is another. And in spending nearly $3 billion in taxpayer money on the spacecraft, NASA cared far more about the latter, especially since it was the first launch of astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.So how did it fly? The reviews were overwhelmingly positive for a mission that appeared to go off without a hitch. But there were some surprises.Behnken and Hurley, both of whom had flown on the space shuttle twice, were prepared for blastoff to be an exhilarating display of brute force \u2014 nine engines firing simultaneously for a total of 1.7 million pounds of thrust, or more than five 747s combined. Waves of fire thunder out in what is basically a controlled explosion that sends up a huge cloud and a sound you feel in your chest, even three miles away.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven that, the astronauts were expecting a teeth-chattering thrill.\u201cWe were surprised a little bit at how smooth things were off the pad,\u201d Behnken said during one of several press calls after reaching the station. \u201cThe space shuttle is a pretty rough ride heading into orbit.\u201dOne of the main differences, they said, was that the shuttle had two solid rocket motors that thunder on their way to orbit. While powerful, solid motors can\u2019t be turned off once ignited. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 uses only liquid propellants, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, and the result, the astronauts said, was a relatively fluid flight.\u201cIt was a very smooth ride. You could see it on the webcast,\u201d Musk said after the launch. \u201cIt looked quite smooth. In fact, a friend of mine who is a filmmaker said, \u2018You need to put some shake into the camera to make it look more realistic.\u2019 \u201dBut when the first and second stages separated, and the second stage engine ignited, it gave them a bit of a shimmy \u2014 like the flaming engine of the Batmobile, is how Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, put it.\u201cOur expectation was as we continued with the flight into second stage that things would basically get a lot smoother than the space shuttle did,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut Dragon was huffing and puffing all the way into orbit. And so it was not quite the same \u2026 smooth ride as the space shuttle was.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother new experience came at the very beginning of the mission, when Hurley and Behnken boarded the capsule and sat there through the fueling process. During the space shuttle era, the rocket\u2019s tanks were fueled before the astronauts boarded.SpaceX uses extremely cold propellant, so the rocket needs to be loaded just before liftoff to prevent it from boiling off. SpaceX \u201csuperchills\u201d its propellant to make it denser, so more of its can be packed into the rocket, giving it more performance. It also means the astronauts can hear the fueling, a process full of grunts and hisses that makes the rocket seem like it\u2019s stirring to life beneath them.\u201cHearing the venting and the valve sounds and the little vibrations associated with that operation was a new experience for us,\u201d Behnken said.Story continues below advertisementIt was one they were prepared for because SpaceX had recorded audio of the sounds and played that for them during training exercises.Advertisement\u201cWe had heard all those sounds pretty much before, and that was extremely helpful,\u201d Behnken said.Perhaps one of the biggest surprises wasn\u2019t the noise of the liftoff, or the staging, or the fueling but rather the complete silence when the spacecraft finally did reach the station, some 19 hours after liftoff.The Dragon capsule glided in with such grace that \u201cwe didn\u2019t feel the docking. It was just so smooth,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cThat really, really surprised me.\u201d Space enthusiasts finally have the beginnings of an answer to which system is better. SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts provides a chance to compare the new and old",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Boeing problems: Another space vehicle it\u2019s building for NASA is significantly delayed (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6154",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/22/more-boeing-problems-another-space-vehicle-its-building-nasa-is-significantly-delayed/",
        "text": "The bad news for Boeing has dripped out in a constant stream, day by day.There were revelations that it didn\u2019t do enough to train pilots to a system failure in its 737-airplane line that led to a crash last year in Indonesia and then another this month in Ethiopia, killing everyone on board both flights, a total of 346 people. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen NASA\u2019s administrator said the agency is considering sidelining the massive rocket Boeing is help building because of how far behind schedule it is. And now, the agency is about to announce another major delay in a separate high-profile program: the spacecraft Boeing is building to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.Story continues below advertisementThe latest date for the first test of the Starliner capsule was to be in April, which was already pushed back repeatedly. Now that first flight \u2014 a test mission without any astronauts on board \u2014 is going to be delayed to at least August, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation.AdvertisementThat, in turn, would push the first flight with humans on board to no earlier than November, but some said the company may be forced to push the flight into 2020 if they discover more problems with the spacecraft. Reuters first reported Starliner\u2019s new schedule.The delays put pressure additional pressure on Boeing to deliver in part because its main competitor, SpaceX, which is also under contract to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the station, had its first test flight earlier this month. And it appeared to go flawlessly.NASA rocket becomes Boeing's latest headache as Trump demands moon missionThere is also pressure to get astronauts flying on the companies\u2019 spacecraft because NASA has been forced to pay Russia for rides to the space station since NASA\u2019s space shuttle was retired in 2011. Both SpaceX and Boeing have had delays, forcing NASA to look at the possibility of buying more seats from Russia at a cost of more than $80 million each.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe version of the Starliner that flies without people will be as similar as possible as the spacecraft that eventually does have humans on board, officials said. So Boeing hopes there won\u2019t be a lot of work left in between the two flights, allowing it to fly its crewed mission this year. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule has a number of issues to work through between flights, officials said, so the time in between flights could be greater, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said.\u201cI think there\u2019s going to be less time between the uncrewed vehicle for Boeing and crewed vehicle for Boeing and longer time between [flights for] SpaceX,\u201d he recently told CNBC. \u201cWhich means whoever gets to fly that first crew \u2014 we don\u2019t know right now. But I will tell you I\u2019m highly confident it will be before the end of 2019.\u201dNASA is also expected to announce soon that when Boeing does finally fly a three-member crew to the station in its first test flight with humans on board, the astronauts will stay for up to almost seven months in what NASA is calling a \u201clong-duration\u201d mission. Previously, the astronauts on the crewed test flight were only supposed to stay on the station for about two weeks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract in 2014 to build Starliner. But it has run into numerous problems. Last year, during a test of its emergency abort system, officials discovered a propellant leak that has required it to redesign valves in the system.The Government Accountability Office also found an issue with the abort system that could possibly cause it to \u201ctumble, which could pose a threat to the crews\u2019 safety.\u201d Boeing has said it is on its way to having the problem fixed.Part of the reason the company is pushing the launch date back is because there is a sensitive national security launch, scheduled for June, that will occupy the launchpad and related facilities for weeks, officials said, forcing Boeing to push into August.Story continues below advertisementThe news of the Starliner delay comes as Bridenstine said the agency was looking at sidelining its Space Launch System rocket that Boeing is helping build in an effort to speed up a mission to send a spacecraft in orbit around the moon.SLS, as the rocket is known, has also faced repeated delays, and a government watchdog recently took aim at Boeing, the prime contractor on the project, saying it has already spent $5.3 billion and is expected to burning through the remaining funds by early this year, three years ahead of schedule and without delivering a single rocket stage. The latest date for the first test of Boeing's Starliner capsule was to be in April, which was already pushed back repeatedly. Now that first flight \u2014 a test mission without any astronauts on board \u2014 is going to be delayed to at least August, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation. More Boeing problems: Another space vehicle it\u2019s building for NASA is significantly delayed",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Boeing problems: Another space vehicle it\u2019s building for NASA is significantly delayed (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6155",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/22/more-boeing-problems-another-space-vehicle-its-building-nasa-is-significantly-delayed/",
        "text": "The bad news for Boeing has dripped out in a constant stream, day by day.There were revelations that it didn\u2019t do enough to train pilots to a system failure in its 737-airplane line that led to a crash last year in Indonesia and then another this month in Ethiopia, killing everyone on board both flights, a total of 346 people. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen NASA\u2019s administrator said the agency is considering sidelining the massive rocket Boeing is help building because of how far behind schedule it is. And now, the agency is about to announce another major delay in a separate high-profile program: the spacecraft Boeing is building to fly astronauts to the International Space Station.Story continues below advertisementThe latest date for the first test of the Starliner capsule was to be in April, which was already pushed back repeatedly. Now that first flight \u2014 a test mission without any astronauts on board \u2014 is going to be delayed to at least August, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation.AdvertisementThat, in turn, would push the first flight with humans on board to no earlier than November, but some said the company may be forced to push the flight into 2020 if they discover more problems with the spacecraft. Reuters first reported Starliner\u2019s new schedule.The delays put pressure additional pressure on Boeing to deliver in part because its main competitor, SpaceX, which is also under contract to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the station, had its first test flight earlier this month. And it appeared to go flawlessly.NASA rocket becomes Boeing's latest headache as Trump demands moon missionThere is also pressure to get astronauts flying on the companies\u2019 spacecraft because NASA has been forced to pay Russia for rides to the space station since NASA\u2019s space shuttle was retired in 2011. Both SpaceX and Boeing have had delays, forcing NASA to look at the possibility of buying more seats from Russia at a cost of more than $80 million each.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe version of the Starliner that flies without people will be as similar as possible as the spacecraft that eventually does have humans on board, officials said. So Boeing hopes there won\u2019t be a lot of work left in between the two flights, allowing it to fly its crewed mission this year. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule has a number of issues to work through between flights, officials said, so the time in between flights could be greater, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said.\u201cI think there\u2019s going to be less time between the uncrewed vehicle for Boeing and crewed vehicle for Boeing and longer time between [flights for] SpaceX,\u201d he recently told CNBC. \u201cWhich means whoever gets to fly that first crew \u2014 we don\u2019t know right now. But I will tell you I\u2019m highly confident it will be before the end of 2019.\u201dNASA is also expected to announce soon that when Boeing does finally fly a three-member crew to the station in its first test flight with humans on board, the astronauts will stay for up to almost seven months in what NASA is calling a \u201clong-duration\u201d mission. Previously, the astronauts on the crewed test flight were only supposed to stay on the station for about two weeks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract in 2014 to build Starliner. But it has run into numerous problems. Last year, during a test of its emergency abort system, officials discovered a propellant leak that has required it to redesign valves in the system.The Government Accountability Office also found an issue with the abort system that could possibly cause it to \u201ctumble, which could pose a threat to the crews\u2019 safety.\u201d Boeing has said it is on its way to having the problem fixed.Part of the reason the company is pushing the launch date back is because there is a sensitive national security launch, scheduled for June, that will occupy the launchpad and related facilities for weeks, officials said, forcing Boeing to push into August.Story continues below advertisementThe news of the Starliner delay comes as Bridenstine said the agency was looking at sidelining its Space Launch System rocket that Boeing is helping build in an effort to speed up a mission to send a spacecraft in orbit around the moon.SLS, as the rocket is known, has also faced repeated delays, and a government watchdog recently took aim at Boeing, the prime contractor on the project, saying it has already spent $5.3 billion and is expected to burning through the remaining funds by early this year, three years ahead of schedule and without delivering a single rocket stage. The latest date for the first test of Boeing's Starliner capsule was to be in April, which was already pushed back repeatedly. Now that first flight \u2014 a test mission without any astronauts on board \u2014 is going to be delayed to at least August, according to two officials with knowledge of the situation. More Boeing problems: Another space vehicle it\u2019s building for NASA is significantly delayed",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6156",
        "date": "2021-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/06/small-satellites-growth-space/",
        "text": "The avalanche was a stunning disaster, 247 million cubic feet of glacial ice and snow hurtling down the Tibetan mountain range at 185 mph. Nine people and scores of animals were killed in an event that startled scientists around the world.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs they researched why the avalanche occurred with such force, a team of researchers studying climate change pored over images taken in the days and weeks before and saw ominous cracks had begun to form in the ice and snow. Then, scanning photos of a nearby glacier, they noticed similar crevasses forming, touching off a scramble to warn local authorities that it was also about to come crashing down. The images of the glaciers in 2016 came from a constellation of satellites no bigger than a shoe box, in orbit 280 miles up. Operated by San Francisco-based company Planet, the satellites, called Doves, weigh just over 10 pounds each and fly in \u201cflocks\u201d that today include 175 satellites. If one fails, the company replaces it, and as better batteries, solar arrays and cameras become available, the company updates its satellites the way Apple unveils a new iPhone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe revolution in technology that transformed personal computing, put smart speakers in homes and gave rise to the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning is also transforming space. While rockets and human exploration get most of the attention, a quiet and often overlooked transformation has taken place in the way satellites are manufactured and operated. The result is an explosion of data and imagery from orbit.Just as computers have shrunk from room-size behemoths to an iPhone that can fit in your pocket, satellites, too, have shrunk dramatically. Instead of being the size of a garbage truck, costing as much as $400 million, satellites now are often no larger than a microwave or even a loaf of bread. They cost a fraction of their predecessors, as little as $1 million or less, and can be mass-produced in factories, or in some cases a garage or college classroom.As the size and cost of satellites have come down, their numbers have grown dramatically. The number of satellites in operation more than doubled from 1,381 in 2015 to 3,371 by the end of last year, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm that tracks the industry. In 2011, there were only 39 satellites launched that weighed less than 1,322 pounds, or 600 kg, according to Bryce. By 2017, that was 338, and by last year, as SpaceX began putting up hundreds of its Starlink satellites designed to beam the Internet to rural areas, the number leaped to more than 1,200.The industry is poised to continue its rapid growth as SpaceX and others put up constellations of thousands of satellites intended to serve areas without access to broadband. The incredibly shrinking satellite has given rise to less expensive rockets designed specifically to launch batches of small satellites. And competition among the launchers continues to drive down the cost of delivering a spacecraft to orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow the industry has caught the attention of venture capitalists, who have been funding companies like Planet and others. In recent weeks, two satellite companies, Spire Global and Black Sky, have gone public through a merger known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.Companies around the globe are working to develop small satellites. AAC Clyde Space, a Sweden-based company, has launched 10 satellites, some known as \u201ccubesats,\u201d for their small four-inch dimensions that weigh just a few pounds.Like Planet, it offers \u201cspace as a service,\u201d meaning people can buy access to the data from their satellites without worrying about launching or building the spacecraft themselves.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou don\u2019t have to get engaged in how to design the satellites, follow the production, take care of the testing,\u201d said Rolf Hallencreutz, chairman of the company\u2019s board. \u201cYou tell someone, \u2018I need this kind of data.\u2019 And we provide that data. For us, it changes the game because it allows us to serve multiple customers with the same constellation.\u201dAdvertisementThe small satellite industry has also caught the attention of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that would love to have swarms of small satellites, able to launch quickly and easily replaced, peering down behind enemy lines.Planet was founded in 2010 by a trio of young scientists and engineers who were working at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in what has become a classic tech start-up story: Young guys, driven by idealism, working late on their own time and harnessing their best nerdy tendencies to build their own satellites that were smaller and cheaper.Story continues below advertisementYes, they did it in a garage in Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered. Since then, Planet has successfully launched 452 satellites and become the vanguard of the industry.Now, it has more than 500 employees, and its total active users has grown an average of 40 percent per year since 2018.The company\u2019s satellites circle the globe in carefully designed orbits that \u201cline-scan the Earth\u201d \u2014 taking precise photographs of landmasses that together create an image of the planet every day. That gives scientists and researchers a look at conditions on the ground, so they can track changes to forests, coastal areas, shipping traffic and farmland in near real-time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe images can help with border security, tracking refugees and disaster relief. Since the company has compiled a vast archive of images, stretching back years, its subscribers can visit the past, observing how it has changed \u2014 a searchable time lapse of Earth.\u201cThe pictures don\u2019t lie,\u201d said Will Marshall, co-founder and chief executive of Planet.Andreas Kaab, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo, discovered that as he was exploring what caused the devastating avalanche in Tibet. He and other scientists noticed \u201cthat the neighboring glacier seemed also to behave strangely,\u201d he said in an email. They tried to reach local authorities in Tibet, going through contacts in China, to warn them that it was also about to collapse. But it took about a day before their message got through. By then, \u201cthe glacier had already collapsed,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNobody was hurt, but the \u201ccase shows that high-resolution daily images are very important in disaster management, and they clearly have the potential for rapid early warnings.\u201dThe Amazon Conservation Association, a nonprofit, uses the satellite imagery to monitor illegal logging and gold mines in the Andean Amazon. In the past, it used traditional government satellites that took pictures \u201cevery eight days, and if it\u2019s cloudy, you have to wait another eight days,\u201d said Matt Finer, director of the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project.Those images had 30-meter resolution, which was decent but not great when you are trying to count trees. Then the European Space Agency launched a satellite with improved resolution, showing objects 10 meters across. But Planet\u2019s satellites were a welcomed improvement, three-meter resolution and images that are available daily.\u201cThis is real-time monitoring on the scale of hours or days,\u201d Finer said. \u201cA lot of times, we\u2019re looking at an image of today or yesterday.\u201dThe government data was free, and the group had to pay a subscription fee for Planet\u2019s images. But it was well worth it, Finer said. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about leaps of improvement in your visual and analytical ability,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd using some of Planet\u2019s next-generation satellites, which provide even higher resolutions, \u201cwe can see individual trees. We can see logging camps,\u201d he said. Even the blue tarps that miners put up as makeshift roofs to protect from the rain and sun can be seen.Given the high costs of satellites, traditional operators often rely on proven technology they know is reliable but may not be the most up-to-date, Marshall said.\u201cWe\u2019ve taken a different risk approach,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got more satellites coming in, and if a few of them fail, no big deal. That is what enables us to take the latest technology \u2026 and iterate fast.\u201dSmall satellites are less expensive to launch \u2014 leading to a new model of small rockets designed to be less expensive and launch on demand. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand and soon out of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, is the leader in this relatively new market.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater this year, it plans to launch a satellite the size of a microwave to the moon. The satellite would fly in the same orbit around the moon that NASA expects to use for the space station called Gateway it intends to operate there.Other rocket companies are entering fast, including Virgin Orbit, the start-up founded by Richard Branson.Instead of launching its rocket vertically from a pad, the company tethers its boosters to the wing of a 747 airplane that carries it 40,000 feet or so. The rocket is dropped, then fires its engines and is off.That gives the company the ability to launch nearly anywhere there is a runway \u2014 and that is of interest not just to scientists and conservationists who want to get satellites up quickly, but to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies as well.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first successful launch in January, Gen. Jay Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, congratulated the company on Twitter. And Will Roper, then the Air Force\u2019s top acquisition and technology official, tweeted that the capability \u201cis a big disruptor \u2014 and hopefully a deterrent \u2014 for future space conflicts. The satellite equivalent of keep an ace up your sleeve \u2026 err, plane.\u201dAdvertisementSatellites already provide missile warning, GPS, communications and reconnaissance and guide precision munitions. But the smaller and more capable they become, the more the Pentagon is interested in using them.\u201cThese small satellites are now mission-critical,\u201d said Dan Hart, the chief executive of Virgin Orbit.Another key benefit is that if one malfunctions, or is taken down by an adversary, \u201cwe can very quickly put another one up, and we can do it from anywhere on Earth,\u201d he said. Using a 747 as a launcher, the Pentagon could also do it surreptitiously.Much of the increase of satellites in orbit has been driven by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has launched more than 1,000 of its Starlink satellites in the past year or so. The company intends to put up a constellation of thousands more, each weighing about 550 pounds, that would beam the Internet to remote and rural places on the ground that are not served by broadband.Late last year, SpaceX received $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission as part of an effort to help bring Internet service to underserved communities. The awards would bring \u201cwelcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans who for too long have been on the wrong side of the digital divide,\u201d then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said at the time.Several other companies have similar plans.OneWeb, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, has more than 100 satellites in orbit and plans to launch hundreds more. It says it can build a satellite in a day instead of the weeks or months it takes for larger spacecraft. And they cost about $1 million each, compared with the $150 million to $400 million for a larger satellites that live in more distant orbits, and are able to endure for years.Amazon plans to launch a constellation it calls Kuiper that would put up some 3,200 satellites. It has until 2026 to launch half of those to keep its approval from the FCC.But it does not take millions of dollars to make and launch a satellite anymore.The Education Department is sponsoring a competition among high schools across the country to build cubesat prototypes. It recently announced five finalists whose proposed small-satellite projects would determine whether homeless encampments in California are in high-risk wildfire areas, study the different ways urban and rural areas absorb heat, and determine how a North Carolina town\u2019s population growth affects \u201cair quality, land use and temperature.\u201dAt the University of Michigan, Professor Brian Gilchrist\u2019s engineering class worked to build a small satellite that would test using the Earth\u2019s magnetic field for propulsion. If successful, it would have allowed small satellites to orbit Earth without having to carry fuel, allowing them to stay aloft for longer periods of time. It was a novel project for the class. \u201cNone of the students involved in this project had ever built a spacecraft before,\u201d Gilchrist said.The cost was about $500,000 to $600,000, paid in part by the university and NASA. Parts came from industrial mail order suppliers, including a few from Amazon, Gilchrist said.Meantime, he said, some of them are back in the lab \u201cand now are already working on ideas for the next one.\u201d The revolution in technology that transformed personal computing, put smart speakers in homes and gave rise to the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning is also transforming space. The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6157",
        "date": "2021-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/06/small-satellites-growth-space/",
        "text": "The avalanche was a stunning disaster, 247 million cubic feet of glacial ice and snow hurtling down the Tibetan mountain range at 185 mph. Nine people and scores of animals were killed in an event that startled scientists around the world.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs they researched why the avalanche occurred with such force, a team of researchers studying climate change pored over images taken in the days and weeks before and saw ominous cracks had begun to form in the ice and snow. Then, scanning photos of a nearby glacier, they noticed similar crevasses forming, touching off a scramble to warn local authorities that it was also about to come crashing down. The images of the glaciers in 2016 came from a constellation of satellites no bigger than a shoe box, in orbit 280 miles up. Operated by San Francisco-based company Planet, the satellites, called Doves, weigh just over 10 pounds each and fly in \u201cflocks\u201d that today include 175 satellites. If one fails, the company replaces it, and as better batteries, solar arrays and cameras become available, the company updates its satellites the way Apple unveils a new iPhone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe revolution in technology that transformed personal computing, put smart speakers in homes and gave rise to the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning is also transforming space. While rockets and human exploration get most of the attention, a quiet and often overlooked transformation has taken place in the way satellites are manufactured and operated. The result is an explosion of data and imagery from orbit.Just as computers have shrunk from room-size behemoths to an iPhone that can fit in your pocket, satellites, too, have shrunk dramatically. Instead of being the size of a garbage truck, costing as much as $400 million, satellites now are often no larger than a microwave or even a loaf of bread. They cost a fraction of their predecessors, as little as $1 million or less, and can be mass-produced in factories, or in some cases a garage or college classroom.As the size and cost of satellites have come down, their numbers have grown dramatically. The number of satellites in operation more than doubled from 1,381 in 2015 to 3,371 by the end of last year, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm that tracks the industry. In 2011, there were only 39 satellites launched that weighed less than 1,322 pounds, or 600 kg, according to Bryce. By 2017, that was 338, and by last year, as SpaceX began putting up hundreds of its Starlink satellites designed to beam the Internet to rural areas, the number leaped to more than 1,200.The industry is poised to continue its rapid growth as SpaceX and others put up constellations of thousands of satellites intended to serve areas without access to broadband. The incredibly shrinking satellite has given rise to less expensive rockets designed specifically to launch batches of small satellites. And competition among the launchers continues to drive down the cost of delivering a spacecraft to orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow the industry has caught the attention of venture capitalists, who have been funding companies like Planet and others. In recent weeks, two satellite companies, Spire Global and Black Sky, have gone public through a merger known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.Companies around the globe are working to develop small satellites. AAC Clyde Space, a Sweden-based company, has launched 10 satellites, some known as \u201ccubesats,\u201d for their small four-inch dimensions that weigh just a few pounds.Like Planet, it offers \u201cspace as a service,\u201d meaning people can buy access to the data from their satellites without worrying about launching or building the spacecraft themselves.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou don\u2019t have to get engaged in how to design the satellites, follow the production, take care of the testing,\u201d said Rolf Hallencreutz, chairman of the company\u2019s board. \u201cYou tell someone, \u2018I need this kind of data.\u2019 And we provide that data. For us, it changes the game because it allows us to serve multiple customers with the same constellation.\u201dAdvertisementThe small satellite industry has also caught the attention of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that would love to have swarms of small satellites, able to launch quickly and easily replaced, peering down behind enemy lines.Planet was founded in 2010 by a trio of young scientists and engineers who were working at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in what has become a classic tech start-up story: Young guys, driven by idealism, working late on their own time and harnessing their best nerdy tendencies to build their own satellites that were smaller and cheaper.Story continues below advertisementYes, they did it in a garage in Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered. Since then, Planet has successfully launched 452 satellites and become the vanguard of the industry.Now, it has more than 500 employees, and its total active users has grown an average of 40 percent per year since 2018.The company\u2019s satellites circle the globe in carefully designed orbits that \u201cline-scan the Earth\u201d \u2014 taking precise photographs of landmasses that together create an image of the planet every day. That gives scientists and researchers a look at conditions on the ground, so they can track changes to forests, coastal areas, shipping traffic and farmland in near real-time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe images can help with border security, tracking refugees and disaster relief. Since the company has compiled a vast archive of images, stretching back years, its subscribers can visit the past, observing how it has changed \u2014 a searchable time lapse of Earth.\u201cThe pictures don\u2019t lie,\u201d said Will Marshall, co-founder and chief executive of Planet.Andreas Kaab, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo, discovered that as he was exploring what caused the devastating avalanche in Tibet. He and other scientists noticed \u201cthat the neighboring glacier seemed also to behave strangely,\u201d he said in an email. They tried to reach local authorities in Tibet, going through contacts in China, to warn them that it was also about to collapse. But it took about a day before their message got through. By then, \u201cthe glacier had already collapsed,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNobody was hurt, but the \u201ccase shows that high-resolution daily images are very important in disaster management, and they clearly have the potential for rapid early warnings.\u201dThe Amazon Conservation Association, a nonprofit, uses the satellite imagery to monitor illegal logging and gold mines in the Andean Amazon. In the past, it used traditional government satellites that took pictures \u201cevery eight days, and if it\u2019s cloudy, you have to wait another eight days,\u201d said Matt Finer, director of the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project.Those images had 30-meter resolution, which was decent but not great when you are trying to count trees. Then the European Space Agency launched a satellite with improved resolution, showing objects 10 meters across. But Planet\u2019s satellites were a welcomed improvement, three-meter resolution and images that are available daily.\u201cThis is real-time monitoring on the scale of hours or days,\u201d Finer said. \u201cA lot of times, we\u2019re looking at an image of today or yesterday.\u201dThe government data was free, and the group had to pay a subscription fee for Planet\u2019s images. But it was well worth it, Finer said. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about leaps of improvement in your visual and analytical ability,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd using some of Planet\u2019s next-generation satellites, which provide even higher resolutions, \u201cwe can see individual trees. We can see logging camps,\u201d he said. Even the blue tarps that miners put up as makeshift roofs to protect from the rain and sun can be seen.Given the high costs of satellites, traditional operators often rely on proven technology they know is reliable but may not be the most up-to-date, Marshall said.\u201cWe\u2019ve taken a different risk approach,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got more satellites coming in, and if a few of them fail, no big deal. That is what enables us to take the latest technology \u2026 and iterate fast.\u201dSmall satellites are less expensive to launch \u2014 leading to a new model of small rockets designed to be less expensive and launch on demand. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand and soon out of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, is the leader in this relatively new market.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater this year, it plans to launch a satellite the size of a microwave to the moon. The satellite would fly in the same orbit around the moon that NASA expects to use for the space station called Gateway it intends to operate there.Other rocket companies are entering fast, including Virgin Orbit, the start-up founded by Richard Branson.Instead of launching its rocket vertically from a pad, the company tethers its boosters to the wing of a 747 airplane that carries it 40,000 feet or so. The rocket is dropped, then fires its engines and is off.That gives the company the ability to launch nearly anywhere there is a runway \u2014 and that is of interest not just to scientists and conservationists who want to get satellites up quickly, but to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies as well.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first successful launch in January, Gen. Jay Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, congratulated the company on Twitter. And Will Roper, then the Air Force\u2019s top acquisition and technology official, tweeted that the capability \u201cis a big disruptor \u2014 and hopefully a deterrent \u2014 for future space conflicts. The satellite equivalent of keep an ace up your sleeve \u2026 err, plane.\u201dAdvertisementSatellites already provide missile warning, GPS, communications and reconnaissance and guide precision munitions. But the smaller and more capable they become, the more the Pentagon is interested in using them.\u201cThese small satellites are now mission-critical,\u201d said Dan Hart, the chief executive of Virgin Orbit.Another key benefit is that if one malfunctions, or is taken down by an adversary, \u201cwe can very quickly put another one up, and we can do it from anywhere on Earth,\u201d he said. Using a 747 as a launcher, the Pentagon could also do it surreptitiously.Much of the increase of satellites in orbit has been driven by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has launched more than 1,000 of its Starlink satellites in the past year or so. The company intends to put up a constellation of thousands more, each weighing about 550 pounds, that would beam the Internet to remote and rural places on the ground that are not served by broadband.Late last year, SpaceX received $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission as part of an effort to help bring Internet service to underserved communities. The awards would bring \u201cwelcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans who for too long have been on the wrong side of the digital divide,\u201d then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said at the time.Several other companies have similar plans.OneWeb, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, has more than 100 satellites in orbit and plans to launch hundreds more. It says it can build a satellite in a day instead of the weeks or months it takes for larger spacecraft. And they cost about $1 million each, compared with the $150 million to $400 million for a larger satellites that live in more distant orbits, and are able to endure for years.Amazon plans to launch a constellation it calls Kuiper that would put up some 3,200 satellites. It has until 2026 to launch half of those to keep its approval from the FCC.But it does not take millions of dollars to make and launch a satellite anymore.The Education Department is sponsoring a competition among high schools across the country to build cubesat prototypes. It recently announced five finalists whose proposed small-satellite projects would determine whether homeless encampments in California are in high-risk wildfire areas, study the different ways urban and rural areas absorb heat, and determine how a North Carolina town\u2019s population growth affects \u201cair quality, land use and temperature.\u201dAt the University of Michigan, Professor Brian Gilchrist\u2019s engineering class worked to build a small satellite that would test using the Earth\u2019s magnetic field for propulsion. If successful, it would have allowed small satellites to orbit Earth without having to carry fuel, allowing them to stay aloft for longer periods of time. It was a novel project for the class. \u201cNone of the students involved in this project had ever built a spacecraft before,\u201d Gilchrist said.The cost was about $500,000 to $600,000, paid in part by the university and NASA. Parts came from industrial mail order suppliers, including a few from Amazon, Gilchrist said.Meantime, he said, some of them are back in the lab \u201cand now are already working on ideas for the next one.\u201d The revolution in technology that transformed personal computing, put smart speakers in homes and gave rise to the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning is also transforming space. The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6158",
        "date": "2021-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/06/small-satellites-growth-space/",
        "text": "The avalanche was a stunning disaster, 247 million cubic feet of glacial ice and snow hurtling down the Tibetan mountain range at 185 mph. Nine people and scores of animals were killed in an event that startled scientists around the world.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs they researched why the avalanche occurred with such force, a team of researchers studying climate change pored over images taken in the days and weeks before and saw ominous cracks had begun to form in the ice and snow. Then, scanning photos of a nearby glacier, they noticed similar crevasses forming, touching off a scramble to warn local authorities that it was also about to come crashing down. The images of the glaciers in 2016 came from a constellation of satellites no bigger than a shoe box, in orbit 280 miles up. Operated by San Francisco-based company Planet, the satellites, called Doves, weigh just over 10 pounds each and fly in \u201cflocks\u201d that today include 175 satellites. If one fails, the company replaces it, and as better batteries, solar arrays and cameras become available, the company updates its satellites the way Apple unveils a new iPhone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe revolution in technology that transformed personal computing, put smart speakers in homes and gave rise to the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning is also transforming space. While rockets and human exploration get most of the attention, a quiet and often overlooked transformation has taken place in the way satellites are manufactured and operated. The result is an explosion of data and imagery from orbit.Just as computers have shrunk from room-size behemoths to an iPhone that can fit in your pocket, satellites, too, have shrunk dramatically. Instead of being the size of a garbage truck, costing as much as $400 million, satellites now are often no larger than a microwave or even a loaf of bread. They cost a fraction of their predecessors, as little as $1 million or less, and can be mass-produced in factories, or in some cases a garage or college classroom.As the size and cost of satellites have come down, their numbers have grown dramatically. The number of satellites in operation more than doubled from 1,381 in 2015 to 3,371 by the end of last year, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm that tracks the industry. In 2011, there were only 39 satellites launched that weighed less than 1,322 pounds, or 600 kg, according to Bryce. By 2017, that was 338, and by last year, as SpaceX began putting up hundreds of its Starlink satellites designed to beam the Internet to rural areas, the number leaped to more than 1,200.The industry is poised to continue its rapid growth as SpaceX and others put up constellations of thousands of satellites intended to serve areas without access to broadband. The incredibly shrinking satellite has given rise to less expensive rockets designed specifically to launch batches of small satellites. And competition among the launchers continues to drive down the cost of delivering a spacecraft to orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow the industry has caught the attention of venture capitalists, who have been funding companies like Planet and others. In recent weeks, two satellite companies, Spire Global and Black Sky, have gone public through a merger known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.Companies around the globe are working to develop small satellites. AAC Clyde Space, a Sweden-based company, has launched 10 satellites, some known as \u201ccubesats,\u201d for their small four-inch dimensions that weigh just a few pounds.Like Planet, it offers \u201cspace as a service,\u201d meaning people can buy access to the data from their satellites without worrying about launching or building the spacecraft themselves.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou don\u2019t have to get engaged in how to design the satellites, follow the production, take care of the testing,\u201d said Rolf Hallencreutz, chairman of the company\u2019s board. \u201cYou tell someone, \u2018I need this kind of data.\u2019 And we provide that data. For us, it changes the game because it allows us to serve multiple customers with the same constellation.\u201dAdvertisementThe small satellite industry has also caught the attention of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies that would love to have swarms of small satellites, able to launch quickly and easily replaced, peering down behind enemy lines.Planet was founded in 2010 by a trio of young scientists and engineers who were working at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in what has become a classic tech start-up story: Young guys, driven by idealism, working late on their own time and harnessing their best nerdy tendencies to build their own satellites that were smaller and cheaper.Story continues below advertisementYes, they did it in a garage in Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered. Since then, Planet has successfully launched 452 satellites and become the vanguard of the industry.Now, it has more than 500 employees, and its total active users has grown an average of 40 percent per year since 2018.The company\u2019s satellites circle the globe in carefully designed orbits that \u201cline-scan the Earth\u201d \u2014 taking precise photographs of landmasses that together create an image of the planet every day. That gives scientists and researchers a look at conditions on the ground, so they can track changes to forests, coastal areas, shipping traffic and farmland in near real-time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe images can help with border security, tracking refugees and disaster relief. Since the company has compiled a vast archive of images, stretching back years, its subscribers can visit the past, observing how it has changed \u2014 a searchable time lapse of Earth.\u201cThe pictures don\u2019t lie,\u201d said Will Marshall, co-founder and chief executive of Planet.Andreas Kaab, a glaciologist at the University of Oslo, discovered that as he was exploring what caused the devastating avalanche in Tibet. He and other scientists noticed \u201cthat the neighboring glacier seemed also to behave strangely,\u201d he said in an email. They tried to reach local authorities in Tibet, going through contacts in China, to warn them that it was also about to collapse. But it took about a day before their message got through. By then, \u201cthe glacier had already collapsed,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNobody was hurt, but the \u201ccase shows that high-resolution daily images are very important in disaster management, and they clearly have the potential for rapid early warnings.\u201dThe Amazon Conservation Association, a nonprofit, uses the satellite imagery to monitor illegal logging and gold mines in the Andean Amazon. In the past, it used traditional government satellites that took pictures \u201cevery eight days, and if it\u2019s cloudy, you have to wait another eight days,\u201d said Matt Finer, director of the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project.Those images had 30-meter resolution, which was decent but not great when you are trying to count trees. Then the European Space Agency launched a satellite with improved resolution, showing objects 10 meters across. But Planet\u2019s satellites were a welcomed improvement, three-meter resolution and images that are available daily.\u201cThis is real-time monitoring on the scale of hours or days,\u201d Finer said. \u201cA lot of times, we\u2019re looking at an image of today or yesterday.\u201dThe government data was free, and the group had to pay a subscription fee for Planet\u2019s images. But it was well worth it, Finer said. \u201cYou\u2019re talking about leaps of improvement in your visual and analytical ability,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd using some of Planet\u2019s next-generation satellites, which provide even higher resolutions, \u201cwe can see individual trees. We can see logging camps,\u201d he said. Even the blue tarps that miners put up as makeshift roofs to protect from the rain and sun can be seen.Given the high costs of satellites, traditional operators often rely on proven technology they know is reliable but may not be the most up-to-date, Marshall said.\u201cWe\u2019ve taken a different risk approach,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got more satellites coming in, and if a few of them fail, no big deal. That is what enables us to take the latest technology \u2026 and iterate fast.\u201dSmall satellites are less expensive to launch \u2014 leading to a new model of small rockets designed to be less expensive and launch on demand. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand and soon out of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, is the leader in this relatively new market.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater this year, it plans to launch a satellite the size of a microwave to the moon. The satellite would fly in the same orbit around the moon that NASA expects to use for the space station called Gateway it intends to operate there.Other rocket companies are entering fast, including Virgin Orbit, the start-up founded by Richard Branson.Instead of launching its rocket vertically from a pad, the company tethers its boosters to the wing of a 747 airplane that carries it 40,000 feet or so. The rocket is dropped, then fires its engines and is off.That gives the company the ability to launch nearly anywhere there is a runway \u2014 and that is of interest not just to scientists and conservationists who want to get satellites up quickly, but to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies as well.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first successful launch in January, Gen. Jay Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, congratulated the company on Twitter. And Will Roper, then the Air Force\u2019s top acquisition and technology official, tweeted that the capability \u201cis a big disruptor \u2014 and hopefully a deterrent \u2014 for future space conflicts. The satellite equivalent of keep an ace up your sleeve \u2026 err, plane.\u201dAdvertisementSatellites already provide missile warning, GPS, communications and reconnaissance and guide precision munitions. But the smaller and more capable they become, the more the Pentagon is interested in using them.\u201cThese small satellites are now mission-critical,\u201d said Dan Hart, the chief executive of Virgin Orbit.Another key benefit is that if one malfunctions, or is taken down by an adversary, \u201cwe can very quickly put another one up, and we can do it from anywhere on Earth,\u201d he said. Using a 747 as a launcher, the Pentagon could also do it surreptitiously.Much of the increase of satellites in orbit has been driven by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has launched more than 1,000 of its Starlink satellites in the past year or so. The company intends to put up a constellation of thousands more, each weighing about 550 pounds, that would beam the Internet to remote and rural places on the ground that are not served by broadband.Late last year, SpaceX received $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission as part of an effort to help bring Internet service to underserved communities. The awards would bring \u201cwelcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans who for too long have been on the wrong side of the digital divide,\u201d then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said at the time.Several other companies have similar plans.OneWeb, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, has more than 100 satellites in orbit and plans to launch hundreds more. It says it can build a satellite in a day instead of the weeks or months it takes for larger spacecraft. And they cost about $1 million each, compared with the $150 million to $400 million for a larger satellites that live in more distant orbits, and are able to endure for years.Amazon plans to launch a constellation it calls Kuiper that would put up some 3,200 satellites. It has until 2026 to launch half of those to keep its approval from the FCC.But it does not take millions of dollars to make and launch a satellite anymore.The Education Department is sponsoring a competition among high schools across the country to build cubesat prototypes. It recently announced five finalists whose proposed small-satellite projects would determine whether homeless encampments in California are in high-risk wildfire areas, study the different ways urban and rural areas absorb heat, and determine how a North Carolina town\u2019s population growth affects \u201cair quality, land use and temperature.\u201dAt the University of Michigan, Professor Brian Gilchrist\u2019s engineering class worked to build a small satellite that would test using the Earth\u2019s magnetic field for propulsion. If successful, it would have allowed small satellites to orbit Earth without having to carry fuel, allowing them to stay aloft for longer periods of time. It was a novel project for the class. \u201cNone of the students involved in this project had ever built a spacecraft before,\u201d Gilchrist said.The cost was about $500,000 to $600,000, paid in part by the university and NASA. Parts came from industrial mail order suppliers, including a few from Amazon, Gilchrist said.Meantime, he said, some of them are back in the lab \u201cand now are already working on ideas for the next one.\u201d The revolution in technology that transformed personal computing, put smart speakers in homes and gave rise to the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning is also transforming space. The revolution in satellite technology means there are swarms of spacecraft no bigger than a loaf of bread in orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6159",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/23/nasa-killer-asteroid-redirect-science/",
        "text": "The astronauts flying again from Cape Canaveral are getting a lot of attention. So are the celebrities and wealthy entrepreneurs plunking down millions to join suborbital flights that touch the edge of space and are replayed in prime time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut don\u2019t forget about the robots. They are having a landmark year, too. Late Tuesday night, NASA embarked on another groundbreaking mission \u2014 this one designed to eventually save Earth from a killer asteroid by testing whether a spacecraft can nudge a celestial body in a way that will alter its orbit. It is the latest in a series of missions that this year have included a rover looking for signs of life on Mars, a small helicopter that continues to fly through the Red Planet\u2019s skies and the possible launch of the most powerful telescope ever to go to space, capable of looking back in time to the early days of the universe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday\u2019s launch at 10:21 p.m. Pacific time \u2014 1:21 a.m. Wednesday on the East Coast \u2014 saw a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. On its tip it carries a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that will fly 6.7 million miles, hunting a small asteroid about the size of a football stadium before going kamikaze and crashing into it at 15,000 mph, probably in September.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Kx5n6TwriC\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 24, 2021\n\nIf everything goes as planned, the impact will slow the asteroid by a fraction of a millimeter per second. That, scientists hope, will be enough that over time, in the vastness of space, it will alter the asteroid\u2019s trajectory significantly.NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away laterDimorphos, the asteroid in NASA\u2019s sights, poses no danger to Earth. But it was chosen as the target for the DART mission (that stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) by members of an elite NASA team known as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office \u2014 whose task isn\u2019t exploring space but defending Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is a \u201cfirst test of planetary defense,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, told reporters Monday. \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to learn is how to deflect a threat that would come in.\u201dThere are lots of rocks hurtling through space large enough to survive the fiery plunge through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. NASA does its best to track them, but estimates it only knows of about 40 percent of the asteroids that could pose a danger. It\u2019s working on adding more space rocks to its catalogue, and in the meantime, trying to figure out how to make sure none hit Earth.\u201cWe have not yet found any significant asteroid impact threat to Earth, but we continue to search for that sizable population we know is still to be found,\u201d Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. \u201cOur goal is to find any possible impact, years to decades in advance, so it can be deflected with a capability like DART that is possible with the technology we currently have.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said that the agency is developing a space-based infrared telescope, known as the Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission, that would launch later this decade and accelerate NASA\u2019s ability to discover hazardous asteroids.Unlike other natural disasters, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, humans could, NASA says, do something about killer asteroids.In an interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said an asteroid impact could have enormous consequences and even threaten humans\u2019 ability to live on Earth. \u201cWe know a six-mile wide asteroid hitting what is today the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula was what wiped out much of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe redirect mission follows another program that last year reached another near-Earth asteroid. After studying the Bennu asteroid for about two years, a spacecraft grabbed a sample from the surface with a robotic arm and is now on its way back to Earth. It would be the first time NASA has ever grabbed a sample from an asteroid, which could shed light on how the universe was formed.AdvertisementThis week, NASA also celebrated the 16th flight of Ingenuity, the four-pound helicopter that flew the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet earlier this year in what NASA said was a \u201cWright brothers moment.\u201d Though it was only supposed to fly a handful of times, the sprite of a chopper has kept going, to the delight of NASA engineers.Nelson said he was \u201cvery pleasantly surprised\u201d and proud of \u201cthis little helicopter that we didn\u2019t even know would fly in an atmosphere that is 1 percent of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. And now it\u2019s not only a demonstration, it\u2019s a scout.\u201dMembers of NASA's Ingenuity program shared the full video of the successful flight of the helicopter on the surface of Mars on April 19. (NASA TV)Those events occurred in a year when NASA\u2019s astronauts were launching with regularity from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. They were joined by suborbital tourism flights from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which announced Tuesday that it would add Michael Strahan, the TV personality, to the ranks of its space passengers in December. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m super excited about all the successes on the human spaceflight side,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cWe at science are huge champions for that, and we sit there glued to the TV, just the same way as everybody else.\u201d But he said that \u201cthis has been a year of science, though, in an amazing fashion.\u201dHe noted that NASA landed its Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is gearing up not only to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but first send a series of robotic spacecraft there. By the end of 2023, it intends to send the first mobile robotic mission there to analyze ice at the lunar south pole to help NASA create maps of the resource.It is also scheduled to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which would be stationed about 1 million miles from Earth and \u201cexplore every phase of cosmos history \u2014 from within our solar system, to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between,\u201d NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter years of delays, the telescope was set to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Dec. 18. But NASA has delayed that flight until at least Dec. 22 after \u201ca sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band\u201d that was securing the telescope to its spot inside the nose cone of the rocket. NASA is now investigating to make sure \u201cthe incident did not damage any components,\u201d the space agency said in a statement.Zurbuchen said they were taking every precaution to ensure the $10 billion telescope is safe before launching, and he said he hoped that \u201cin a few days we\u2019ll be in good shape.\u201d A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that next September is intended to crash into a small asteroid. NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6160",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/23/nasa-killer-asteroid-redirect-science/",
        "text": "The astronauts flying again from Cape Canaveral are getting a lot of attention. So are the celebrities and wealthy entrepreneurs plunking down millions to join suborbital flights that touch the edge of space and are replayed in prime time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut don\u2019t forget about the robots. They are having a landmark year, too. Late Tuesday night, NASA embarked on another groundbreaking mission \u2014 this one designed to eventually save Earth from a killer asteroid by testing whether a spacecraft can nudge a celestial body in a way that will alter its orbit. It is the latest in a series of missions that this year have included a rover looking for signs of life on Mars, a small helicopter that continues to fly through the Red Planet\u2019s skies and the possible launch of the most powerful telescope ever to go to space, capable of looking back in time to the early days of the universe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday\u2019s launch at 10:21 p.m. Pacific time \u2014 1:21 a.m. Wednesday on the East Coast \u2014 saw a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. On its tip it carries a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that will fly 6.7 million miles, hunting a small asteroid about the size of a football stadium before going kamikaze and crashing into it at 15,000 mph, probably in September.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Kx5n6TwriC\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 24, 2021\n\nIf everything goes as planned, the impact will slow the asteroid by a fraction of a millimeter per second. That, scientists hope, will be enough that over time, in the vastness of space, it will alter the asteroid\u2019s trajectory significantly.NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away laterDimorphos, the asteroid in NASA\u2019s sights, poses no danger to Earth. But it was chosen as the target for the DART mission (that stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) by members of an elite NASA team known as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office \u2014 whose task isn\u2019t exploring space but defending Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is a \u201cfirst test of planetary defense,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, told reporters Monday. \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to learn is how to deflect a threat that would come in.\u201dThere are lots of rocks hurtling through space large enough to survive the fiery plunge through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. NASA does its best to track them, but estimates it only knows of about 40 percent of the asteroids that could pose a danger. It\u2019s working on adding more space rocks to its catalogue, and in the meantime, trying to figure out how to make sure none hit Earth.\u201cWe have not yet found any significant asteroid impact threat to Earth, but we continue to search for that sizable population we know is still to be found,\u201d Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. \u201cOur goal is to find any possible impact, years to decades in advance, so it can be deflected with a capability like DART that is possible with the technology we currently have.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said that the agency is developing a space-based infrared telescope, known as the Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission, that would launch later this decade and accelerate NASA\u2019s ability to discover hazardous asteroids.Unlike other natural disasters, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, humans could, NASA says, do something about killer asteroids.In an interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said an asteroid impact could have enormous consequences and even threaten humans\u2019 ability to live on Earth. \u201cWe know a six-mile wide asteroid hitting what is today the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula was what wiped out much of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe redirect mission follows another program that last year reached another near-Earth asteroid. After studying the Bennu asteroid for about two years, a spacecraft grabbed a sample from the surface with a robotic arm and is now on its way back to Earth. It would be the first time NASA has ever grabbed a sample from an asteroid, which could shed light on how the universe was formed.AdvertisementThis week, NASA also celebrated the 16th flight of Ingenuity, the four-pound helicopter that flew the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet earlier this year in what NASA said was a \u201cWright brothers moment.\u201d Though it was only supposed to fly a handful of times, the sprite of a chopper has kept going, to the delight of NASA engineers.Nelson said he was \u201cvery pleasantly surprised\u201d and proud of \u201cthis little helicopter that we didn\u2019t even know would fly in an atmosphere that is 1 percent of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. And now it\u2019s not only a demonstration, it\u2019s a scout.\u201dMembers of NASA's Ingenuity program shared the full video of the successful flight of the helicopter on the surface of Mars on April 19. (NASA TV)Those events occurred in a year when NASA\u2019s astronauts were launching with regularity from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. They were joined by suborbital tourism flights from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which announced Tuesday that it would add Michael Strahan, the TV personality, to the ranks of its space passengers in December. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m super excited about all the successes on the human spaceflight side,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cWe at science are huge champions for that, and we sit there glued to the TV, just the same way as everybody else.\u201d But he said that \u201cthis has been a year of science, though, in an amazing fashion.\u201dHe noted that NASA landed its Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is gearing up not only to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but first send a series of robotic spacecraft there. By the end of 2023, it intends to send the first mobile robotic mission there to analyze ice at the lunar south pole to help NASA create maps of the resource.It is also scheduled to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which would be stationed about 1 million miles from Earth and \u201cexplore every phase of cosmos history \u2014 from within our solar system, to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between,\u201d NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter years of delays, the telescope was set to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Dec. 18. But NASA has delayed that flight until at least Dec. 22 after \u201ca sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band\u201d that was securing the telescope to its spot inside the nose cone of the rocket. NASA is now investigating to make sure \u201cthe incident did not damage any components,\u201d the space agency said in a statement.Zurbuchen said they were taking every precaution to ensure the $10 billion telescope is safe before launching, and he said he hoped that \u201cin a few days we\u2019ll be in good shape.\u201d A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that next September is intended to crash into a small asteroid. NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6161",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/23/nasa-killer-asteroid-redirect-science/",
        "text": "The astronauts flying again from Cape Canaveral are getting a lot of attention. So are the celebrities and wealthy entrepreneurs plunking down millions to join suborbital flights that touch the edge of space and are replayed in prime time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut don\u2019t forget about the robots. They are having a landmark year, too. Late Tuesday night, NASA embarked on another groundbreaking mission \u2014 this one designed to eventually save Earth from a killer asteroid by testing whether a spacecraft can nudge a celestial body in a way that will alter its orbit. It is the latest in a series of missions that this year have included a rover looking for signs of life on Mars, a small helicopter that continues to fly through the Red Planet\u2019s skies and the possible launch of the most powerful telescope ever to go to space, capable of looking back in time to the early days of the universe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday\u2019s launch at 10:21 p.m. Pacific time \u2014 1:21 a.m. Wednesday on the East Coast \u2014 saw a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. On its tip it carries a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that will fly 6.7 million miles, hunting a small asteroid about the size of a football stadium before going kamikaze and crashing into it at 15,000 mph, probably in September.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Kx5n6TwriC\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 24, 2021\n\nIf everything goes as planned, the impact will slow the asteroid by a fraction of a millimeter per second. That, scientists hope, will be enough that over time, in the vastness of space, it will alter the asteroid\u2019s trajectory significantly.NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away laterDimorphos, the asteroid in NASA\u2019s sights, poses no danger to Earth. But it was chosen as the target for the DART mission (that stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) by members of an elite NASA team known as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office \u2014 whose task isn\u2019t exploring space but defending Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is a \u201cfirst test of planetary defense,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, told reporters Monday. \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to learn is how to deflect a threat that would come in.\u201dThere are lots of rocks hurtling through space large enough to survive the fiery plunge through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. NASA does its best to track them, but estimates it only knows of about 40 percent of the asteroids that could pose a danger. It\u2019s working on adding more space rocks to its catalogue, and in the meantime, trying to figure out how to make sure none hit Earth.\u201cWe have not yet found any significant asteroid impact threat to Earth, but we continue to search for that sizable population we know is still to be found,\u201d Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. \u201cOur goal is to find any possible impact, years to decades in advance, so it can be deflected with a capability like DART that is possible with the technology we currently have.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said that the agency is developing a space-based infrared telescope, known as the Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission, that would launch later this decade and accelerate NASA\u2019s ability to discover hazardous asteroids.Unlike other natural disasters, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, humans could, NASA says, do something about killer asteroids.In an interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said an asteroid impact could have enormous consequences and even threaten humans\u2019 ability to live on Earth. \u201cWe know a six-mile wide asteroid hitting what is today the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula was what wiped out much of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe redirect mission follows another program that last year reached another near-Earth asteroid. After studying the Bennu asteroid for about two years, a spacecraft grabbed a sample from the surface with a robotic arm and is now on its way back to Earth. It would be the first time NASA has ever grabbed a sample from an asteroid, which could shed light on how the universe was formed.AdvertisementThis week, NASA also celebrated the 16th flight of Ingenuity, the four-pound helicopter that flew the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet earlier this year in what NASA said was a \u201cWright brothers moment.\u201d Though it was only supposed to fly a handful of times, the sprite of a chopper has kept going, to the delight of NASA engineers.Nelson said he was \u201cvery pleasantly surprised\u201d and proud of \u201cthis little helicopter that we didn\u2019t even know would fly in an atmosphere that is 1 percent of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. And now it\u2019s not only a demonstration, it\u2019s a scout.\u201dMembers of NASA's Ingenuity program shared the full video of the successful flight of the helicopter on the surface of Mars on April 19. (NASA TV)Those events occurred in a year when NASA\u2019s astronauts were launching with regularity from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. They were joined by suborbital tourism flights from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which announced Tuesday that it would add Michael Strahan, the TV personality, to the ranks of its space passengers in December. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m super excited about all the successes on the human spaceflight side,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cWe at science are huge champions for that, and we sit there glued to the TV, just the same way as everybody else.\u201d But he said that \u201cthis has been a year of science, though, in an amazing fashion.\u201dHe noted that NASA landed its Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is gearing up not only to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but first send a series of robotic spacecraft there. By the end of 2023, it intends to send the first mobile robotic mission there to analyze ice at the lunar south pole to help NASA create maps of the resource.It is also scheduled to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which would be stationed about 1 million miles from Earth and \u201cexplore every phase of cosmos history \u2014 from within our solar system, to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between,\u201d NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter years of delays, the telescope was set to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Dec. 18. But NASA has delayed that flight until at least Dec. 22 after \u201ca sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band\u201d that was securing the telescope to its spot inside the nose cone of the rocket. NASA is now investigating to make sure \u201cthe incident did not damage any components,\u201d the space agency said in a statement.Zurbuchen said they were taking every precaution to ensure the $10 billion telescope is safe before launching, and he said he hoped that \u201cin a few days we\u2019ll be in good shape.\u201d A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that next September is intended to crash into a small asteroid. NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6162",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/23/nasa-killer-asteroid-redirect-science/",
        "text": "The astronauts flying again from Cape Canaveral are getting a lot of attention. So are the celebrities and wealthy entrepreneurs plunking down millions to join suborbital flights that touch the edge of space and are replayed in prime time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut don\u2019t forget about the robots. They are having a landmark year, too. Late Tuesday night, NASA embarked on another groundbreaking mission \u2014 this one designed to eventually save Earth from a killer asteroid by testing whether a spacecraft can nudge a celestial body in a way that will alter its orbit. It is the latest in a series of missions that this year have included a rover looking for signs of life on Mars, a small helicopter that continues to fly through the Red Planet\u2019s skies and the possible launch of the most powerful telescope ever to go to space, capable of looking back in time to the early days of the universe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday\u2019s launch at 10:21 p.m. Pacific time \u2014 1:21 a.m. Wednesday on the East Coast \u2014 saw a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. On its tip it carries a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that will fly 6.7 million miles, hunting a small asteroid about the size of a football stadium before going kamikaze and crashing into it at 15,000 mph, probably in September.Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/Kx5n6TwriC\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 24, 2021\n\nIf everything goes as planned, the impact will slow the asteroid by a fraction of a millimeter per second. That, scientists hope, will be enough that over time, in the vastness of space, it will alter the asteroid\u2019s trajectory significantly.NASA hopes to hit an asteroid now in case we really need to knock one away laterDimorphos, the asteroid in NASA\u2019s sights, poses no danger to Earth. But it was chosen as the target for the DART mission (that stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) by members of an elite NASA team known as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office \u2014 whose task isn\u2019t exploring space but defending Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is a \u201cfirst test of planetary defense,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, told reporters Monday. \u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to learn is how to deflect a threat that would come in.\u201dThere are lots of rocks hurtling through space large enough to survive the fiery plunge through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. NASA does its best to track them, but estimates it only knows of about 40 percent of the asteroids that could pose a danger. It\u2019s working on adding more space rocks to its catalogue, and in the meantime, trying to figure out how to make sure none hit Earth.\u201cWe have not yet found any significant asteroid impact threat to Earth, but we continue to search for that sizable population we know is still to be found,\u201d Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. \u201cOur goal is to find any possible impact, years to decades in advance, so it can be deflected with a capability like DART that is possible with the technology we currently have.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said that the agency is developing a space-based infrared telescope, known as the Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission, that would launch later this decade and accelerate NASA\u2019s ability to discover hazardous asteroids.Unlike other natural disasters, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, humans could, NASA says, do something about killer asteroids.In an interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said an asteroid impact could have enormous consequences and even threaten humans\u2019 ability to live on Earth. \u201cWe know a six-mile wide asteroid hitting what is today the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula was what wiped out much of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementThe redirect mission follows another program that last year reached another near-Earth asteroid. After studying the Bennu asteroid for about two years, a spacecraft grabbed a sample from the surface with a robotic arm and is now on its way back to Earth. It would be the first time NASA has ever grabbed a sample from an asteroid, which could shed light on how the universe was formed.AdvertisementThis week, NASA also celebrated the 16th flight of Ingenuity, the four-pound helicopter that flew the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet earlier this year in what NASA said was a \u201cWright brothers moment.\u201d Though it was only supposed to fly a handful of times, the sprite of a chopper has kept going, to the delight of NASA engineers.Nelson said he was \u201cvery pleasantly surprised\u201d and proud of \u201cthis little helicopter that we didn\u2019t even know would fly in an atmosphere that is 1 percent of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. And now it\u2019s not only a demonstration, it\u2019s a scout.\u201dMembers of NASA's Ingenuity program shared the full video of the successful flight of the helicopter on the surface of Mars on April 19. (NASA TV)Those events occurred in a year when NASA\u2019s astronauts were launching with regularity from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. They were joined by suborbital tourism flights from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which announced Tuesday that it would add Michael Strahan, the TV personality, to the ranks of its space passengers in December. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m super excited about all the successes on the human spaceflight side,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cWe at science are huge champions for that, and we sit there glued to the TV, just the same way as everybody else.\u201d But he said that \u201cthis has been a year of science, though, in an amazing fashion.\u201dHe noted that NASA landed its Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is gearing up not only to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but first send a series of robotic spacecraft there. By the end of 2023, it intends to send the first mobile robotic mission there to analyze ice at the lunar south pole to help NASA create maps of the resource.It is also scheduled to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which would be stationed about 1 million miles from Earth and \u201cexplore every phase of cosmos history \u2014 from within our solar system, to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between,\u201d NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter years of delays, the telescope was set to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana on Dec. 18. But NASA has delayed that flight until at least Dec. 22 after \u201ca sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band\u201d that was securing the telescope to its spot inside the nose cone of the rocket. NASA is now investigating to make sure \u201cthe incident did not damage any components,\u201d the space agency said in a statement.Zurbuchen said they were taking every precaution to ensure the $10 billion telescope is safe before launching, and he said he hoped that \u201cin a few days we\u2019ll be in good shape.\u201d A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying a refrigerator-sized spacecraft that next September is intended to crash into a small asteroid. NASA\u2019s many science missions now include learning how to deflect killer asteroids",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s holding up the next test of SpaceX\u2019s Starship? Elon Musk blames the FAA. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6163",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/28/elon-musk-spacex-starship-faa/",
        "text": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship was on the launchpad Thursday, apparently ready to fly in the latest iteration of the spacecraft SpaceX hopes will take people to Mars. The spacecraft, known as SN9, or serial number 9, was filled with propellant, letting off plumes of steam on the launchpad, as fans waited.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut it didn\u2019t fly. Instead, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to Twitter to bash the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses space launches and is charged with protecting people and property on the ground. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe tweet revealed the tension between SpaceX\u2019s Starship program and the government\u2019s primary regulator of what gets into the air.AdvertisementStarship\u2019s most recent test flight, last month, was quite a show, with the silo-resembling spacecraft traveling several miles into the air, executing a twisting midair maneuver like a belly flop to position itself for landing, refiring its engines to attempt a soft landing, and then, in a dramatic ending, crashing to the ground in a fireball that Musk calls an RUD, or \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201d Musk called the flight \u201can awesome test.\u201d2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come.This time, SpaceX said it would live-stream Starship\u2019s flight from its facility at the southern tip of Texas to the legions of fans who faithfully follow every step of Musk\u2019s company and were hoping to see a successful landing \u2014 or another fireball.Story continues below advertisementAfter a successful launch, SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on impact during its attempted landing on Dec. 9. There was no one aboard the ship. (SpaceX)Musk has never been shy about calling out regulators or authorities he sees as unfair. He sued the Air Force over the right to compete for national security launch contracts \u2014 and secured a settlement that allowed SpaceX to do so. And after he was fined $20 million for allegedly misleading investors about his Tesla car company, he told \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d \u201cI do not respect [the Securities and Exchange Commission]. I do not respect them.\u201dAdvertisementOn Thursday, in a statement to The Washington Post, the FAA said, \u201cWe will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight.\u201dMeet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationAn official with knowledge of the FAA\u2019s thinking pushed back against Musk\u2019s allegations and said the agency had been in constant contact with SpaceX over the flight and was very close to issuing the modification to the license required for the flight.Story continues below advertisementThe agency is \u201cnot purposefully slowing the process down,\u201d said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal processes. The FAA has \u201ca responsibility to the American people and particularly those who live in the southern Texas area to make sure they are not put at undue risk.\u201dThe person said the FAA, rather, was \u201cpedaling very fast\u201d and \u201cdoing everything to speed things up to become more efficient and more effective and agile while still maintaining public safety.\u201dAdvertisementThe person said that the agency expected to have the approval ready soon and that it was already working on the license for the test flight after that.As for Musk\u2019s tweet, the person said: \u201cI don\u2019t find it helpful.\u201dSpaceX prides itself on doing what had long been considered impossible by space scientists, returning rockets to soft landings on Earth instead of ditching the boosters into the ocean, as NASA has done for decades. SpaceX now routinely lands its Falcon 9 rockets after launch.Once thought impossible, reusing rocket boosters has become routineIf the company can perfect the technology for Starship, it will be \u201ccritical to landing Starship at destinations across the solar system where prepared surfaces or runways do not exist, and returning to Earth,\u201d the company says on its website. \u201cThis capability will enable a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo on long-duration, interplanetary flights and help humanity return to the Moon and travel to Mars and beyond.\u201d SpaceX\u2019s Starship was on the launchpad Thursday, apparently ready to fly in the latest iteration of the spacecraft SpaceX hopes will take people to Mars. But it didn\u2019t fly. What\u2019s holding up the next test of SpaceX\u2019s Starship? Elon Musk blames the FAA.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s holding up the next test of SpaceX\u2019s Starship? Elon Musk blames the FAA. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6164",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/28/elon-musk-spacex-starship-faa/",
        "text": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship was on the launchpad Thursday, apparently ready to fly in the latest iteration of the spacecraft SpaceX hopes will take people to Mars. The spacecraft, known as SN9, or serial number 9, was filled with propellant, letting off plumes of steam on the launchpad, as fans waited.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut it didn\u2019t fly. Instead, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to Twitter to bash the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses space launches and is charged with protecting people and property on the ground. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe tweet revealed the tension between SpaceX\u2019s Starship program and the government\u2019s primary regulator of what gets into the air.AdvertisementStarship\u2019s most recent test flight, last month, was quite a show, with the silo-resembling spacecraft traveling several miles into the air, executing a twisting midair maneuver like a belly flop to position itself for landing, refiring its engines to attempt a soft landing, and then, in a dramatic ending, crashing to the ground in a fireball that Musk calls an RUD, or \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201d Musk called the flight \u201can awesome test.\u201d2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come.This time, SpaceX said it would live-stream Starship\u2019s flight from its facility at the southern tip of Texas to the legions of fans who faithfully follow every step of Musk\u2019s company and were hoping to see a successful landing \u2014 or another fireball.Story continues below advertisementAfter a successful launch, SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on impact during its attempted landing on Dec. 9. There was no one aboard the ship. (SpaceX)Musk has never been shy about calling out regulators or authorities he sees as unfair. He sued the Air Force over the right to compete for national security launch contracts \u2014 and secured a settlement that allowed SpaceX to do so. And after he was fined $20 million for allegedly misleading investors about his Tesla car company, he told \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d \u201cI do not respect [the Securities and Exchange Commission]. I do not respect them.\u201dAdvertisementOn Thursday, in a statement to The Washington Post, the FAA said, \u201cWe will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight.\u201dMeet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationAn official with knowledge of the FAA\u2019s thinking pushed back against Musk\u2019s allegations and said the agency had been in constant contact with SpaceX over the flight and was very close to issuing the modification to the license required for the flight.Story continues below advertisementThe agency is \u201cnot purposefully slowing the process down,\u201d said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal processes. The FAA has \u201ca responsibility to the American people and particularly those who live in the southern Texas area to make sure they are not put at undue risk.\u201dThe person said the FAA, rather, was \u201cpedaling very fast\u201d and \u201cdoing everything to speed things up to become more efficient and more effective and agile while still maintaining public safety.\u201dAdvertisementThe person said that the agency expected to have the approval ready soon and that it was already working on the license for the test flight after that.As for Musk\u2019s tweet, the person said: \u201cI don\u2019t find it helpful.\u201dSpaceX prides itself on doing what had long been considered impossible by space scientists, returning rockets to soft landings on Earth instead of ditching the boosters into the ocean, as NASA has done for decades. SpaceX now routinely lands its Falcon 9 rockets after launch.Once thought impossible, reusing rocket boosters has become routineIf the company can perfect the technology for Starship, it will be \u201ccritical to landing Starship at destinations across the solar system where prepared surfaces or runways do not exist, and returning to Earth,\u201d the company says on its website. \u201cThis capability will enable a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo on long-duration, interplanetary flights and help humanity return to the Moon and travel to Mars and beyond.\u201d SpaceX\u2019s Starship was on the launchpad Thursday, apparently ready to fly in the latest iteration of the spacecraft SpaceX hopes will take people to Mars. But it didn\u2019t fly. What\u2019s holding up the next test of SpaceX\u2019s Starship? Elon Musk blames the FAA.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s holding up the next test of SpaceX\u2019s Starship? Elon Musk blames the FAA. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6165",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/28/elon-musk-spacex-starship-faa/",
        "text": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship was on the launchpad Thursday, apparently ready to fly in the latest iteration of the spacecraft SpaceX hopes will take people to Mars. The spacecraft, known as SN9, or serial number 9, was filled with propellant, letting off plumes of steam on the launchpad, as fans waited.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut it didn\u2019t fly. Instead, SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to Twitter to bash the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses space launches and is charged with protecting people and property on the ground. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe tweet revealed the tension between SpaceX\u2019s Starship program and the government\u2019s primary regulator of what gets into the air.AdvertisementStarship\u2019s most recent test flight, last month, was quite a show, with the silo-resembling spacecraft traveling several miles into the air, executing a twisting midair maneuver like a belly flop to position itself for landing, refiring its engines to attempt a soft landing, and then, in a dramatic ending, crashing to the ground in a fireball that Musk calls an RUD, or \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201d Musk called the flight \u201can awesome test.\u201d2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come.This time, SpaceX said it would live-stream Starship\u2019s flight from its facility at the southern tip of Texas to the legions of fans who faithfully follow every step of Musk\u2019s company and were hoping to see a successful landing \u2014 or another fireball.Story continues below advertisementAfter a successful launch, SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on impact during its attempted landing on Dec. 9. There was no one aboard the ship. (SpaceX)Musk has never been shy about calling out regulators or authorities he sees as unfair. He sued the Air Force over the right to compete for national security launch contracts \u2014 and secured a settlement that allowed SpaceX to do so. And after he was fined $20 million for allegedly misleading investors about his Tesla car company, he told \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d \u201cI do not respect [the Securities and Exchange Commission]. I do not respect them.\u201dAdvertisementOn Thursday, in a statement to The Washington Post, the FAA said, \u201cWe will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight.\u201dMeet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationAn official with knowledge of the FAA\u2019s thinking pushed back against Musk\u2019s allegations and said the agency had been in constant contact with SpaceX over the flight and was very close to issuing the modification to the license required for the flight.Story continues below advertisementThe agency is \u201cnot purposefully slowing the process down,\u201d said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal processes. The FAA has \u201ca responsibility to the American people and particularly those who live in the southern Texas area to make sure they are not put at undue risk.\u201dThe person said the FAA, rather, was \u201cpedaling very fast\u201d and \u201cdoing everything to speed things up to become more efficient and more effective and agile while still maintaining public safety.\u201dAdvertisementThe person said that the agency expected to have the approval ready soon and that it was already working on the license for the test flight after that.As for Musk\u2019s tweet, the person said: \u201cI don\u2019t find it helpful.\u201dSpaceX prides itself on doing what had long been considered impossible by space scientists, returning rockets to soft landings on Earth instead of ditching the boosters into the ocean, as NASA has done for decades. SpaceX now routinely lands its Falcon 9 rockets after launch.Once thought impossible, reusing rocket boosters has become routineIf the company can perfect the technology for Starship, it will be \u201ccritical to landing Starship at destinations across the solar system where prepared surfaces or runways do not exist, and returning to Earth,\u201d the company says on its website. \u201cThis capability will enable a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo on long-duration, interplanetary flights and help humanity return to the Moon and travel to Mars and beyond.\u201d SpaceX\u2019s Starship was on the launchpad Thursday, apparently ready to fly in the latest iteration of the spacecraft SpaceX hopes will take people to Mars. But it didn\u2019t fly. What\u2019s holding up the next test of SpaceX\u2019s Starship? Elon Musk blames the FAA.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX capsule lands successfully in crucial step toward human spaceflight  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6166",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/08/homeward-bound-spacex-capsule-headed-splash-down-key-step-toward-human-spaceflight/",
        "text": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft splashed down safely in the Atlantic Friday after undocking from the International Space Station, appearing to successfully complete the first mission of the vehicle the company designed to fly humans.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere were no people on board the spacecraft, built to carry four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The nearly week-long journey culminated when the spacecraft disembarked from the station about 2:30 a.m. Friday, fired its engine to slow down, and barreled through the thickening atmosphere on its fiery return to Earth until finally splashing down into the Atlantic Ocean at 8:45 a.m. The capsule was hoisted out of the water and placed on the deck of a recovery boat shortly before 10 a.m.Crew Dragon is on SpaceX\u2019s recovery vessel\u2014completing the spacecraft\u2019s first test mission! pic.twitter.com/6K0qgnHd4O\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 8, 2019\n\nThe mission comes at a precarious time for brash billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, who has come under fire for his sometimes erratic behavior.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe reentry is one of the biggest tests of the Dragon and of SpaceX, the company founded by Musk in 2002 with the ultimate goal of flying humans to Earth\u2019s orbit and beyond. If deemed a complete success, the mission would give NASA increased confidence in one of its prime contractors and propel the space agency a step closer to restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil.Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly its astronauts. Instead, it has paid Russia for rides to the space station at an increasing price tag that now tops $80 million.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion to SpaceX and Boeing to build spacecrafts capable of carrying NASA\u2019s astronauts to the orbiting laboratory 250 miles above Earth. Since then, both companies have faced delays and setbacks. But now, SpaceX has taken a major leap forward and is poised to fly its first test mission with two NASA astronauts on board later this year.Boeing is scheduled to fly its first uncrewed mission to the station by next month at the earliest, though that date is likely to slip, officials have said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s uncrewed mission began early Saturday, when its Falcon 9 rocket blasted off in the predawn darkness from a historic launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the crew of Apollo 11 began their journey to the lunar surface.How rocket launches like SpaceX's Falcon Heavy affect air trafficOnce aloft, the SpaceX craft traveled to the space station, whizzing around Earth at 17,500 mph, catching up early the next morning. Before the mission, NASA officials had said the spacecraft\u2019s ability to dock autonomously to the station would be one of the biggest tests of the vehicle.Russia, one of NASA\u2019s key partners on the space station, initially objected, citing concerns with SpaceX\u2019s computer systems that would fly the vehicle toward the station.Story continues below advertisementBut like the launch, the docking was a success, and soon the three astronauts on board the station \u2014 NASA\u2019s Anne McClain, Oleg Kononenko of Russia, and Canada\u2019s David Saint-Jacques \u2014 were able to check out the first commercial space vehicle designed for human space flight ever to dock with the station.AdvertisementIn a call with the astronauts on board the station Wednesday, Vice President Pence said, \u201cIt was inspiring to see the launch, and it was actually more inspiring to see the docking, and to see you all open that door and float into that spacecraft knowing that we\u2019ll very soon have American astronauts arriving at the International Space Station in the same vehicle.\u201dThe successful landing is a coup for SpaceX and a relief for Musk, who said he wouldn\u2019t be able to relax until the spacecraft had landed safely. View this post on Instagram Splash down! SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft lands in the Atlantic, the culmination of its mission to the International Space Station. Next up: flying crew. A post shared by Christian Davenport (@wapo_spacegram) on Mar 8, 2019 at 6:20am PST\nMusk and his companies have been under scrutiny lately. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined him $20 million last year after it said he misled investors of his electric car company, Tesla, when he tweeted that he would take the company private. More recently, the SEC claimed he violated the terms of the settlement, which require an attorney to review tweets that could affect Tesla\u2019s stock price.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA judge in that case gave Musk until Monday to say why he should not be held in contempt for violating the terms of the settlement.Musk has also faced trouble at SpaceX. The Air Force recently announced it was reviewing the certifications it had granted SpaceX that allow to launch national security payloads. After Musk smoked marijuana during a podcast appearance, NASA announced it was conducting a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing. And Bloomberg News reported Thursday that Musk\u2019s marijuana use also prompted the Pentagon to review his security clearance.Despite the distractions, Friday\u2019s landing appeared to be another triumph for SpaceX, and validation of years of work.Story continues below advertisementLeading up to the reentry, Musk had said he was worried about whether the spacecraft would end up in an uncontrollable spin.AdvertisementThe Dragon is outfitted with abort thrusters that make the spacecraft asymmetrical, which he said \u201ccould potentially cause a roll.\u201d But he said he thought it was \u201cunlikely\u201d since the company had run \u201csimulations a thousand times.\u201dStill, he added \u201chypersonic reentry is probably my biggest concern.\"Read more:Follow The Post\u2019s coverage of the new space raceWhy NASA wants to look at flying tourists to spaceNASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil SpaceX successfully completed the last phase of a crucial test flight to prove it can fly humans to space for NASA. The company's Dragon capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean early Friday after a nearly weeklong journey in which it docked with the International Space Station. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX capsule lands successfully in crucial step toward human spaceflight ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX capsule lands successfully in crucial step toward human spaceflight  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6167",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/08/homeward-bound-spacex-capsule-headed-splash-down-key-step-toward-human-spaceflight/",
        "text": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft splashed down safely in the Atlantic Friday after undocking from the International Space Station, appearing to successfully complete the first mission of the vehicle the company designed to fly humans.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere were no people on board the spacecraft, built to carry four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The nearly week-long journey culminated when the spacecraft disembarked from the station about 2:30 a.m. Friday, fired its engine to slow down, and barreled through the thickening atmosphere on its fiery return to Earth until finally splashing down into the Atlantic Ocean at 8:45 a.m. The capsule was hoisted out of the water and placed on the deck of a recovery boat shortly before 10 a.m.Crew Dragon is on SpaceX\u2019s recovery vessel\u2014completing the spacecraft\u2019s first test mission! pic.twitter.com/6K0qgnHd4O\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 8, 2019\n\nThe mission comes at a precarious time for brash billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, who has come under fire for his sometimes erratic behavior.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe reentry is one of the biggest tests of the Dragon and of SpaceX, the company founded by Musk in 2002 with the ultimate goal of flying humans to Earth\u2019s orbit and beyond. If deemed a complete success, the mission would give NASA increased confidence in one of its prime contractors and propel the space agency a step closer to restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil.Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly its astronauts. Instead, it has paid Russia for rides to the space station at an increasing price tag that now tops $80 million.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion to SpaceX and Boeing to build spacecrafts capable of carrying NASA\u2019s astronauts to the orbiting laboratory 250 miles above Earth. Since then, both companies have faced delays and setbacks. But now, SpaceX has taken a major leap forward and is poised to fly its first test mission with two NASA astronauts on board later this year.Boeing is scheduled to fly its first uncrewed mission to the station by next month at the earliest, though that date is likely to slip, officials have said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s uncrewed mission began early Saturday, when its Falcon 9 rocket blasted off in the predawn darkness from a historic launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the crew of Apollo 11 began their journey to the lunar surface.How rocket launches like SpaceX's Falcon Heavy affect air trafficOnce aloft, the SpaceX craft traveled to the space station, whizzing around Earth at 17,500 mph, catching up early the next morning. Before the mission, NASA officials had said the spacecraft\u2019s ability to dock autonomously to the station would be one of the biggest tests of the vehicle.Russia, one of NASA\u2019s key partners on the space station, initially objected, citing concerns with SpaceX\u2019s computer systems that would fly the vehicle toward the station.Story continues below advertisementBut like the launch, the docking was a success, and soon the three astronauts on board the station \u2014 NASA\u2019s Anne McClain, Oleg Kononenko of Russia, and Canada\u2019s David Saint-Jacques \u2014 were able to check out the first commercial space vehicle designed for human space flight ever to dock with the station.AdvertisementIn a call with the astronauts on board the station Wednesday, Vice President Pence said, \u201cIt was inspiring to see the launch, and it was actually more inspiring to see the docking, and to see you all open that door and float into that spacecraft knowing that we\u2019ll very soon have American astronauts arriving at the International Space Station in the same vehicle.\u201dThe successful landing is a coup for SpaceX and a relief for Musk, who said he wouldn\u2019t be able to relax until the spacecraft had landed safely. View this post on Instagram Splash down! SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft lands in the Atlantic, the culmination of its mission to the International Space Station. Next up: flying crew. A post shared by Christian Davenport (@wapo_spacegram) on Mar 8, 2019 at 6:20am PST\nMusk and his companies have been under scrutiny lately. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined him $20 million last year after it said he misled investors of his electric car company, Tesla, when he tweeted that he would take the company private. More recently, the SEC claimed he violated the terms of the settlement, which require an attorney to review tweets that could affect Tesla\u2019s stock price.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA judge in that case gave Musk until Monday to say why he should not be held in contempt for violating the terms of the settlement.Musk has also faced trouble at SpaceX. The Air Force recently announced it was reviewing the certifications it had granted SpaceX that allow to launch national security payloads. After Musk smoked marijuana during a podcast appearance, NASA announced it was conducting a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing. And Bloomberg News reported Thursday that Musk\u2019s marijuana use also prompted the Pentagon to review his security clearance.Despite the distractions, Friday\u2019s landing appeared to be another triumph for SpaceX, and validation of years of work.Story continues below advertisementLeading up to the reentry, Musk had said he was worried about whether the spacecraft would end up in an uncontrollable spin.AdvertisementThe Dragon is outfitted with abort thrusters that make the spacecraft asymmetrical, which he said \u201ccould potentially cause a roll.\u201d But he said he thought it was \u201cunlikely\u201d since the company had run \u201csimulations a thousand times.\u201dStill, he added \u201chypersonic reentry is probably my biggest concern.\"Read more:Follow The Post\u2019s coverage of the new space raceWhy NASA wants to look at flying tourists to spaceNASA unveils the astronauts who will relaunch human space flights from U.S. soil SpaceX successfully completed the last phase of a crucial test flight to prove it can fly humans to space for NASA. The company's Dragon capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean early Friday after a nearly weeklong journey in which it docked with the International Space Station. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX capsule lands successfully in crucial step toward human spaceflight ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Resilience\u2019 capsule docks with the International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6168",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/16/spacex-crew-dragon-docking-iss-live-updates/",
        "text": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Monday night in what appeared to be a smooth mission as the spacecraft maneuvered itself autonomously in a delicate parking job some 250 miles above the surface of the Earth.\u201cExcellent job. Right down the center,\u201d Mike Hopkins, the NASA astronaut commanding the mission, said shortly after docking, which occurred at 11:01 p.m. over Idaho. While not as dramatic or visually striking as the launch, docking the spacecraft was a difficult and potentially dangerous part of the mission, one the astronauts train for extensively.Flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters and NASA mission control in Houston spent the day communicating with the astronauts on board SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, preparing them for the docking, which appeared to proceed flawlessly\u201cYesterday was about the raw power of a rocket flinging a capsule,\u201d NASA flight director Anthony Vareha wrote on Twitter Monday morning. \u201cToday I get to preside over a ballet. The delicate dance of \u2018how do you gently put this capsule at a certain spot within a few millimeters.\u2019 It\u2019s easy to throw. Catching is harder.\u2019\u201dEspecially in orbit.The space station is traveling at 17,500 mph, and circles the Earth every 90 minutes. Since its launch at 7:27 p.m. Sunday, the Dragon capsule, dubbed \u201cResilience\u201d by the crew, had been chasing it down, burning its engines to align itself. It approached slowly, passing through a series of \u201cwaypoints\u201d where controllers monitored conditions and allowed the spacecraft to proceed only if it was safe and all systems were operating correctly.On board the spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi. They ended their eight-hour sleep time shortly after noon and reported being in good spirits in the climate-controlled cabin, where the spacecraft was being kept at 75 degrees.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground.Leading up to the docking, NASA and SpaceX officials said that while the launch went well the mission was far from over.\u201cWe\u2019re not done yet. We need to keep going,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate, said during a news conference after the launch Sunday evening. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on it, and we\u2019re going to get them to the International Space Station.\u201dWhile the docking was meant to be handled by the spacecraft\u2019s computers, the crew could have taken over the controls at any time and manually fly the spacecraft. That was not necessary, however, and the Dragon docked itself without any problems.The mission is the first time a privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA to fly humans has made the trip. The May mission, when a pair of NASA astronauts spent two months on the station before coming home, was considered a test flight.This time, however, the Crew Dragon spacecraft has been certified for human flight and the mission is the first of a series under NASA\u2019s commercial crew program. The four-member crew is expected to be on board the station for about six months.What you need to knowOn Sunday, SpaceX successfully launched four astronauts in the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was unable to attend the launch in person after testing positive and negative for coronavirus.Below are the updates from the SpaceX\u2019s ISS docking.The space station is big. But there\u2019s still not enough places for everyone to sleep.Return to menuBy Christian Davenport11:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhen the crew of four from the Crew-1 mission board the International Space Station, likely early Tuesday morning Eastern time, they will bring the population of the orbiting laboratory to seven. NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov have been up there since last month.For a spacecraft, the station is large \u2014 about the size of a football field. But still, a crew of seven is going to be tight. So tight, in fact, that initially there aren\u2019t enough sleeping quarters for everyone.That\u2019s why Crew-1 mission commander Mike Hopkins has said he\u2019ll sleep in the Dragon spacecraft, dubbed \u201cResilience,\u201d as it\u2019s attached to the station.In a news conference before the launch, he said that there are plans to send an additional sleeping pod for him \u2014 a sleeping bag that\u2019s tied down to keep its occupant from floating away. \u201cBut I\u2019m not sure when it\u2019s going to arrive,\u201d he said. \u201cSo in the interim, they are exploring options of where I can sleep, including on Resilience itself.\u201dOn their way to the station after launching Sunday, the crew had an eight-hour sleep period on the Dragon and seemed to wake up refreshed.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDocking confirmedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:02 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Crew Dragon has docked with the space station, some 27 hours after launching from the Kennedy Space Center. The docking seemed to go smoothly, and now the crews are awaiting a \u201chard capture\u201d when the spacecraft\u2019s 12 hooks will secure the capsule to the station.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon spacecraft with four @Commercial_Crew astronauts aboard docked to the station at 11:01pm ET today. More... https://t.co/fZv4eNAEVf pic.twitter.com/dFLwPgBbDt\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 17, 2020\n\nThe initial \u201csoft capture\u201d occurred at 11:01 p.m. over Idaho.\u201cCrew Dragon is now at the International Space Station,\u201d NASA\u2019s Leah Cheshier said on the live broadcast streamed by NASA and SpaceX, as applause broke out at SpaceX\u2019s headquarters.Just because the Dragon has docked doesn\u2019t mean the astronauts will pop the hatch and climb right into the space station. That likely won\u2019t happen for another couple of hours, while the crews monitor to ensure the pressure between the spacecraft and the station\u2019s port is stabilized and there are no leaks.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement\u201cGo\u201d for dockingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft is a \u201cgo\u201d for docking. The news comes just a few minutes after NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the Crew-1 commander, opted to hold just 65 feet away so that the lighting conditions could approve, as the spacecraft moved from sunlight to darkness. The spacecraft is flying autonomously, but the astronauts have the ability to take over manually at any moment. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementGlover gets his astronaut pinReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:53 p.m.Link copiedLink\"All for one, Crew-1 for all!\" @Astro_illini has just given @AstroVicGlover a gold pin in honor of Victor's first time crossing the 100 km (62 mi) mark above Earth. pic.twitter.com/jtilPkWHkt\u2014 NASA (@NASA) November 16, 2020\n\nThe Crew-1 astronauts on board the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft gave a brief tour of the vehicle Monday afternoon, taking turns showing off parts of the capsule. Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission, showed off the control panels, touch screens that work even when the astronauts are in their flight suits wearing gloves.Victor Glover showed off the hatches; Shannon Walker talked about how in the spacecraft \u201cwe sort of dance around each other to try and stay out of each other\u2019s way.\u201d Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi joked that they had stowed ice cream in the refrigerator used to store scientific experiments to bring to the station.And then toward the end of the broadcast, Hopkins said he had a special surprise and gathered the crew around him.\u201cJust to give you a little history,\u201d he began, \u201cwhen you first are selected as an astronaut, and you come in for your basic training, you go through about two years of training to become an astronaut.\u201d Once that\u2019s complete, he said, each astronaut is given a silver pin.But once you go to space, astronauts are awarded a gold pin.He then pulled out a gold pin and gave it to a beaming Glover, the only member of the crew who had not been to space previously.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow Baby Yoda became a Zero-G indicatorReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:42 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon on Nov. 15 brought along a Baby Yoda as their \"zero-g indicator,\" which helps indicate when the crew is in zero gravity. (NASA)When Crew Dragon flew for the very first time, SpaceX tied a little toy stuffy of the Earth inside the crew cabin. When the capsule reached space, the stuffy would float, letting the controllers on the ground know that the spacecraft was in a weightless environment.That \u201czero gravity indicator\u201d has now become something of a tradition.On the spacecraft\u2019s first mission with a crew on board, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley picked out what they would like to see floating around in space. The result: \u201cTremor,\u201d a stuffy dinosaur.During the un-crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing stowed away an astronaut Snoopy.The zero-gravity indicator on Rosie\u2019s flight is a flying ace. #AstronautSnoopy is on board! Snoopy's space experience dates back to #Apollo50 and is rocketing into the future on the @NASA_SLS Artemis mission. pic.twitter.com/0Lea1ufSjx\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) December 20, 2019\n\nAnd so when it was the Crew-1 astronauts\u2019 turn, they knew they had a high bar to clear. Their choice: a stuffed Baby Yoda.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementGetting closerReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:23 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe four @Commercial_Crew astronauts are suited up, the @SpaceX #CrewDragon nose cone is open and they are closing in for an 11pm ET docking. https://t.co/yuOTrZ4Jut pic.twitter.com/UBvM5R6yCe\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 17, 2020\n\nThe SpaceX Crew Dragon has moved through the first checkpoint 1,300 feet below the station and is approaching the next stop, located in front of its docking port, 656 feet away.It will then get the \u201cgo\u201d from ground to enter the \u201ckeep out\u201d zone and approach the station, getting to within just 65 feet and pause before proceeding.Although this is only the third flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, it has flown the cargo variant of the spacecraft many times and has a lot of experience sidling up to the space station. There\u2019s one key difference, though. The cargo Dragon is grabbed by the station\u2019s robotic arm and then pulled into the port by a process known as \u201cberthing.\u201dThe Crew Dragon will \u201cdock,\u201d meaning it will fly itself to essentially park with the station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDocking proceeding smoothlyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:13 p.m.Link copiedLinkWatch Falcon 9 launch Crew Dragon on its first operational mission to the @space_station with astronauts on board \u2192 https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK https://t.co/Sx1UE8lgsD\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 15, 2020\n\nThe astronauts have put their spacesuits back on, conducted pressure checks and are working to move though a series of \u201cwaypoints,\u201d where they assess their program before moving on. The first waypoint was slightly more than 1,300 feet below the space station. The second is a spot in front of the station, 656 feet from the docking port.The next checkpoint would be even closer, just about 65 feet away. The docking is still scheduled for 11 p.m.At each stage, controllers on the ground will assess the spacecraft to make sure everything is operating normally before proceeding. On the station, the mission is being monitored by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, who arrived there last month with two Russian cosmonauts.The Dragon and space station are now close enough that they have clear views of each other.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA first, but not the first time SpaceX has docked with the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe mission is the first time a privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA to fly humans to space has made the trip to the space station. But SpaceX craft have made the trip before.In May in what was considered a test flight before NASA granted SpaceX its certification, SpaceX flew two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, to the station. They spent two months on the station before coming home.Photos: The historic SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug HurleyTheir reviews of the docking offer an insight to what the four astronauts aboard the Resilience are likely to feel as the station and capsule come together \u2014 nothing. They called it perhaps the biggest surprise of all.The Dragon capsule glided in with such grace that \u201cwe didn\u2019t feel the docking. It was just so smooth,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cThat really, really surprised me.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts got eight hours of sleep before they began preparing for tonight\u2019s dockingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe four astronauts on board the SpaceX capsule \u2014 Americans Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, and Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi \u2014 reported they were in good spirits when awakened shortly after noon Eastern time. The temperature was a comfortable 75 degrees in the capsule, and they had had eight hours of rest.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground, referring to the capsule by the name the crew has given it.The trip to the space station was expected to take 27 hours from the capsule\u2019s 7:27 p.m. Sunday liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Had the crew left on Saturday, as originally planned, before weather forced a postponement, the trip would have lasted just eight hours.The space station is traveling at 17,500 mph, and circles the Earth every 90 minutes. Since its launch, the Dragon capsule has been chasing the space station, firing its engines periodically to align itself for the rendezvous.The capsule will approach cautiously, passing through a series of \u201cgo-no go\u201d points where controllers will allow the spacecraft to proceed only if it is safe and all systems are operating correctly. Most of the maneuvers will be handled by the capsule\u2019s computers, though the crew can take over operations manually if necessary.Once the capsule has attached itself to the space station, it will likely take two hours or more before the doors of both the capsule and the space station are opened and the astronauts are welcomed on board the station.Glover to become first Black astronaut to live on the space station for an extended stayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThere have been astronauts living continuously aboard the International Space Station for 20 years, a milestone NASA celebrated this month.During that time, astronauts from 19 different countries have been represented on the station. But there has never been a Black astronaut who served an extended stay on the station.Until now.Victor Glover, a former Navy fighter pilot and father of four, is expected to become the first African American to live and work on the station for an extended stay. It was a bittersweet distinction, he said, too long in coming.\u201cI actually try very hard not to think a lot about it,\u201d he said at a news conference before the flight. \u201cI want to do my job very well, and I want to come back and talk to you about that after I get back home to my family safely. So, I would say let us accomplish that first and then we have something to celebrate. It\u2019s bittersweet. And I can\u2019t tell you why it\u2019s taken us this long. But again, I hope to go up there and do my job to the best of my ability. And I would love to come back and tell you stories afterwards.\u201dBlacks and African Americans account for less than 12 percent of the NASA workforce, according to the agency. They hold only about 1.3 percent of senior-level, senior scientific and professional positions and fewer than 9 percent are at the agency\u2019s top paying jobs.In the wake of George Floyd\u2019s killing while in the custody of police, Glover wrote on Twitter: \u201cMy heart is low, my head is level, and my faith is high. So much to process, if you\u2019re struggling, that\u2019s OK. I see you. I am you.\u201dLater when someone on Twitter said he should stick to space, he said: \u201cActually no. Remember who is doing space. People are. As we address extreme weather and pandemic disease, we will understand and overcome racism and bigotry so we can safely and together do space. Thanks for asking.\u201dNow, he\u2019s part of a diverse crew on board the capsule and will soon join NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov on the space station.For years, the orbiting lab has been home to all sorts of people from different backgrounds and experiences and, for the most part, they\u2019ve gotten along extremely well.\u201cWhen you think about those 20 years of the people,\u201d Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut, told The Washington Post recently, \u201cgay, straight, Muslim, Christian and Catholic, atheist, these different colors, these different lifestyles \u2014 all these people were able to come together and build something from one module to this international outpost the size of a football field without fighting, without warring. That is worthy of a peace prize.\u201dHow to spot the stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes and on clear a night can be seen from Earth. Often, it\u2019s the brightest spot in the sky and is streaking pretty fast so you usually get only a few minutes to catch a glimpse when it happens to be overhead.NASA has a website that allows you to see when it\u2019ll be flying over your community and how to sign up for alerts.It\u2019ll be visible over Washington, D.C., on Tuesday at 7:02 p.m. for one minute and on Wednesday at 6:15 p.m. for three minutes. It\u2019ll be a good time to step outside and wave to the astronauts. Following a successful Sunday launch, Dragon Crew-1\u2032s \u2018Resilience\u2019 capsule docks onto the International Space Station. It became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Resilience\u2019 capsule docks with the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Resilience\u2019 capsule docks with the International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6169",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/16/spacex-crew-dragon-docking-iss-live-updates/",
        "text": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Monday night in what appeared to be a smooth mission as the spacecraft maneuvered itself autonomously in a delicate parking job some 250 miles above the surface of the Earth.\u201cExcellent job. Right down the center,\u201d Mike Hopkins, the NASA astronaut commanding the mission, said shortly after docking, which occurred at 11:01 p.m. over Idaho. While not as dramatic or visually striking as the launch, docking the spacecraft was a difficult and potentially dangerous part of the mission, one the astronauts train for extensively.Flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters and NASA mission control in Houston spent the day communicating with the astronauts on board SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, preparing them for the docking, which appeared to proceed flawlessly\u201cYesterday was about the raw power of a rocket flinging a capsule,\u201d NASA flight director Anthony Vareha wrote on Twitter Monday morning. \u201cToday I get to preside over a ballet. The delicate dance of \u2018how do you gently put this capsule at a certain spot within a few millimeters.\u2019 It\u2019s easy to throw. Catching is harder.\u2019\u201dEspecially in orbit.The space station is traveling at 17,500 mph, and circles the Earth every 90 minutes. Since its launch at 7:27 p.m. Sunday, the Dragon capsule, dubbed \u201cResilience\u201d by the crew, had been chasing it down, burning its engines to align itself. It approached slowly, passing through a series of \u201cwaypoints\u201d where controllers monitored conditions and allowed the spacecraft to proceed only if it was safe and all systems were operating correctly.On board the spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi. They ended their eight-hour sleep time shortly after noon and reported being in good spirits in the climate-controlled cabin, where the spacecraft was being kept at 75 degrees.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground.Leading up to the docking, NASA and SpaceX officials said that while the launch went well the mission was far from over.\u201cWe\u2019re not done yet. We need to keep going,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate, said during a news conference after the launch Sunday evening. \u201cThat spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on it, and we\u2019re going to get them to the International Space Station.\u201dWhile the docking was meant to be handled by the spacecraft\u2019s computers, the crew could have taken over the controls at any time and manually fly the spacecraft. That was not necessary, however, and the Dragon docked itself without any problems.The mission is the first time a privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA to fly humans has made the trip. The May mission, when a pair of NASA astronauts spent two months on the station before coming home, was considered a test flight.This time, however, the Crew Dragon spacecraft has been certified for human flight and the mission is the first of a series under NASA\u2019s commercial crew program. The four-member crew is expected to be on board the station for about six months.What you need to knowOn Sunday, SpaceX successfully launched four astronauts in the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was unable to attend the launch in person after testing positive and negative for coronavirus.Below are the updates from the SpaceX\u2019s ISS docking.The space station is big. But there\u2019s still not enough places for everyone to sleep.Return to menuBy Christian Davenport11:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhen the crew of four from the Crew-1 mission board the International Space Station, likely early Tuesday morning Eastern time, they will bring the population of the orbiting laboratory to seven. NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov have been up there since last month.For a spacecraft, the station is large \u2014 about the size of a football field. But still, a crew of seven is going to be tight. So tight, in fact, that initially there aren\u2019t enough sleeping quarters for everyone.That\u2019s why Crew-1 mission commander Mike Hopkins has said he\u2019ll sleep in the Dragon spacecraft, dubbed \u201cResilience,\u201d as it\u2019s attached to the station.In a news conference before the launch, he said that there are plans to send an additional sleeping pod for him \u2014 a sleeping bag that\u2019s tied down to keep its occupant from floating away. \u201cBut I\u2019m not sure when it\u2019s going to arrive,\u201d he said. \u201cSo in the interim, they are exploring options of where I can sleep, including on Resilience itself.\u201dOn their way to the station after launching Sunday, the crew had an eight-hour sleep period on the Dragon and seemed to wake up refreshed.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDocking confirmedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:02 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Crew Dragon has docked with the space station, some 27 hours after launching from the Kennedy Space Center. The docking seemed to go smoothly, and now the crews are awaiting a \u201chard capture\u201d when the spacecraft\u2019s 12 hooks will secure the capsule to the station.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon spacecraft with four @Commercial_Crew astronauts aboard docked to the station at 11:01pm ET today. More... https://t.co/fZv4eNAEVf pic.twitter.com/dFLwPgBbDt\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 17, 2020\n\nThe initial \u201csoft capture\u201d occurred at 11:01 p.m. over Idaho.\u201cCrew Dragon is now at the International Space Station,\u201d NASA\u2019s Leah Cheshier said on the live broadcast streamed by NASA and SpaceX, as applause broke out at SpaceX\u2019s headquarters.Just because the Dragon has docked doesn\u2019t mean the astronauts will pop the hatch and climb right into the space station. That likely won\u2019t happen for another couple of hours, while the crews monitor to ensure the pressure between the spacecraft and the station\u2019s port is stabilized and there are no leaks.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement\u201cGo\u201d for dockingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft is a \u201cgo\u201d for docking. The news comes just a few minutes after NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the Crew-1 commander, opted to hold just 65 feet away so that the lighting conditions could approve, as the spacecraft moved from sunlight to darkness. The spacecraft is flying autonomously, but the astronauts have the ability to take over manually at any moment. AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementGlover gets his astronaut pinReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:53 p.m.Link copiedLink\"All for one, Crew-1 for all!\" @Astro_illini has just given @AstroVicGlover a gold pin in honor of Victor's first time crossing the 100 km (62 mi) mark above Earth. pic.twitter.com/jtilPkWHkt\u2014 NASA (@NASA) November 16, 2020\n\nThe Crew-1 astronauts on board the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft gave a brief tour of the vehicle Monday afternoon, taking turns showing off parts of the capsule. Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission, showed off the control panels, touch screens that work even when the astronauts are in their flight suits wearing gloves.Victor Glover showed off the hatches; Shannon Walker talked about how in the spacecraft \u201cwe sort of dance around each other to try and stay out of each other\u2019s way.\u201d Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi joked that they had stowed ice cream in the refrigerator used to store scientific experiments to bring to the station.And then toward the end of the broadcast, Hopkins said he had a special surprise and gathered the crew around him.\u201cJust to give you a little history,\u201d he began, \u201cwhen you first are selected as an astronaut, and you come in for your basic training, you go through about two years of training to become an astronaut.\u201d Once that\u2019s complete, he said, each astronaut is given a silver pin.But once you go to space, astronauts are awarded a gold pin.He then pulled out a gold pin and gave it to a beaming Glover, the only member of the crew who had not been to space previously.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow Baby Yoda became a Zero-G indicatorReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:42 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon on Nov. 15 brought along a Baby Yoda as their \"zero-g indicator,\" which helps indicate when the crew is in zero gravity. (NASA)When Crew Dragon flew for the very first time, SpaceX tied a little toy stuffy of the Earth inside the crew cabin. When the capsule reached space, the stuffy would float, letting the controllers on the ground know that the spacecraft was in a weightless environment.That \u201czero gravity indicator\u201d has now become something of a tradition.On the spacecraft\u2019s first mission with a crew on board, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley picked out what they would like to see floating around in space. The result: \u201cTremor,\u201d a stuffy dinosaur.During the un-crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing stowed away an astronaut Snoopy.The zero-gravity indicator on Rosie\u2019s flight is a flying ace. #AstronautSnoopy is on board! Snoopy's space experience dates back to #Apollo50 and is rocketing into the future on the @NASA_SLS Artemis mission. pic.twitter.com/0Lea1ufSjx\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) December 20, 2019\n\nAnd so when it was the Crew-1 astronauts\u2019 turn, they knew they had a high bar to clear. Their choice: a stuffed Baby Yoda.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementGetting closerReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:23 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe four @Commercial_Crew astronauts are suited up, the @SpaceX #CrewDragon nose cone is open and they are closing in for an 11pm ET docking. https://t.co/yuOTrZ4Jut pic.twitter.com/UBvM5R6yCe\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) November 17, 2020\n\nThe SpaceX Crew Dragon has moved through the first checkpoint 1,300 feet below the station and is approaching the next stop, located in front of its docking port, 656 feet away.It will then get the \u201cgo\u201d from ground to enter the \u201ckeep out\u201d zone and approach the station, getting to within just 65 feet and pause before proceeding.Although this is only the third flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, it has flown the cargo variant of the spacecraft many times and has a lot of experience sidling up to the space station. There\u2019s one key difference, though. The cargo Dragon is grabbed by the station\u2019s robotic arm and then pulled into the port by a process known as \u201cberthing.\u201dThe Crew Dragon will \u201cdock,\u201d meaning it will fly itself to essentially park with the station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDocking proceeding smoothlyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:13 p.m.Link copiedLinkWatch Falcon 9 launch Crew Dragon on its first operational mission to the @space_station with astronauts on board \u2192 https://t.co/bJFjLCzWdK https://t.co/Sx1UE8lgsD\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 15, 2020\n\nThe astronauts have put their spacesuits back on, conducted pressure checks and are working to move though a series of \u201cwaypoints,\u201d where they assess their program before moving on. The first waypoint was slightly more than 1,300 feet below the space station. The second is a spot in front of the station, 656 feet from the docking port.The next checkpoint would be even closer, just about 65 feet away. The docking is still scheduled for 11 p.m.At each stage, controllers on the ground will assess the spacecraft to make sure everything is operating normally before proceeding. On the station, the mission is being monitored by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, who arrived there last month with two Russian cosmonauts.The Dragon and space station are now close enough that they have clear views of each other.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA first, but not the first time SpaceX has docked with the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe mission is the first time a privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA to fly humans to space has made the trip to the space station. But SpaceX craft have made the trip before.In May in what was considered a test flight before NASA granted SpaceX its certification, SpaceX flew two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, to the station. They spent two months on the station before coming home.Photos: The historic SpaceX launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug HurleyTheir reviews of the docking offer an insight to what the four astronauts aboard the Resilience are likely to feel as the station and capsule come together \u2014 nothing. They called it perhaps the biggest surprise of all.The Dragon capsule glided in with such grace that \u201cwe didn\u2019t feel the docking. It was just so smooth,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cThat really, really surprised me.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts got eight hours of sleep before they began preparing for tonight\u2019s dockingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe four astronauts on board the SpaceX capsule \u2014 Americans Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, and Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi \u2014 reported they were in good spirits when awakened shortly after noon Eastern time. The temperature was a comfortable 75 degrees in the capsule, and they had had eight hours of rest.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground, referring to the capsule by the name the crew has given it.The trip to the space station was expected to take 27 hours from the capsule\u2019s 7:27 p.m. Sunday liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Had the crew left on Saturday, as originally planned, before weather forced a postponement, the trip would have lasted just eight hours.The space station is traveling at 17,500 mph, and circles the Earth every 90 minutes. Since its launch, the Dragon capsule has been chasing the space station, firing its engines periodically to align itself for the rendezvous.The capsule will approach cautiously, passing through a series of \u201cgo-no go\u201d points where controllers will allow the spacecraft to proceed only if it is safe and all systems are operating correctly. Most of the maneuvers will be handled by the capsule\u2019s computers, though the crew can take over operations manually if necessary.Once the capsule has attached itself to the space station, it will likely take two hours or more before the doors of both the capsule and the space station are opened and the astronauts are welcomed on board the station.Glover to become first Black astronaut to live on the space station for an extended stayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThere have been astronauts living continuously aboard the International Space Station for 20 years, a milestone NASA celebrated this month.During that time, astronauts from 19 different countries have been represented on the station. But there has never been a Black astronaut who served an extended stay on the station.Until now.Victor Glover, a former Navy fighter pilot and father of four, is expected to become the first African American to live and work on the station for an extended stay. It was a bittersweet distinction, he said, too long in coming.\u201cI actually try very hard not to think a lot about it,\u201d he said at a news conference before the flight. \u201cI want to do my job very well, and I want to come back and talk to you about that after I get back home to my family safely. So, I would say let us accomplish that first and then we have something to celebrate. It\u2019s bittersweet. And I can\u2019t tell you why it\u2019s taken us this long. But again, I hope to go up there and do my job to the best of my ability. And I would love to come back and tell you stories afterwards.\u201dBlacks and African Americans account for less than 12 percent of the NASA workforce, according to the agency. They hold only about 1.3 percent of senior-level, senior scientific and professional positions and fewer than 9 percent are at the agency\u2019s top paying jobs.In the wake of George Floyd\u2019s killing while in the custody of police, Glover wrote on Twitter: \u201cMy heart is low, my head is level, and my faith is high. So much to process, if you\u2019re struggling, that\u2019s OK. I see you. I am you.\u201dLater when someone on Twitter said he should stick to space, he said: \u201cActually no. Remember who is doing space. People are. As we address extreme weather and pandemic disease, we will understand and overcome racism and bigotry so we can safely and together do space. Thanks for asking.\u201dNow, he\u2019s part of a diverse crew on board the capsule and will soon join NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov on the space station.For years, the orbiting lab has been home to all sorts of people from different backgrounds and experiences and, for the most part, they\u2019ve gotten along extremely well.\u201cWhen you think about those 20 years of the people,\u201d Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut, told The Washington Post recently, \u201cgay, straight, Muslim, Christian and Catholic, atheist, these different colors, these different lifestyles \u2014 all these people were able to come together and build something from one module to this international outpost the size of a football field without fighting, without warring. That is worthy of a peace prize.\u201dHow to spot the stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station orbits the Earth every 90 minutes and on clear a night can be seen from Earth. Often, it\u2019s the brightest spot in the sky and is streaking pretty fast so you usually get only a few minutes to catch a glimpse when it happens to be overhead.NASA has a website that allows you to see when it\u2019ll be flying over your community and how to sign up for alerts.It\u2019ll be visible over Washington, D.C., on Tuesday at 7:02 p.m. for one minute and on Wednesday at 6:15 p.m. for three minutes. It\u2019ll be a good time to step outside and wave to the astronauts. Following a successful Sunday launch, Dragon Crew-1\u2032s \u2018Resilience\u2019 capsule docks onto the International Space Station. It became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX\u2019s \u2018Resilience\u2019 capsule docks with the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX crashes another Starship in test that was delayed over FAA concerns company violated its test license in December (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6170",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/02/spacex-test-sn9-faa-license/",
        "text": "SpaceX successfully launched one of its Starship prototype spacecraft Tuesday, but again the vehicle crashed after it hit the landing pad hard, sending an action-film-like fireball billowing into the South Texas sky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe test followed a similar one in December where SpaceX demonstrated it could light the rocket\u2019s three Raptor engines, fly it several miles high and then bring it back in a controlled descent using its aerodynamic wings. But that test mission also ended in a fiery crash that SpaceX said gave it a lot of valuable data to learn from. There was no immediate word on why the spacecraft landed hard on Tuesday.The launch came after a tussle with the Federal Aviation Administration spilled into the open. Before the December test flight, SpaceX had sought a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that would have allowed it \u201cto exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations,\u201d the agency said in a statement Tuesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut after that waiver was denied, SpaceX proceeded with the flight, violating its launch license in what aerospace and industry officials said was a potentially reckless move that could have posed serious risk to the public\u2019s safety.As a result of the violation, the FAA directed Elon Musk\u2019s company to investigate the incident and suspend operations that could affect public safety at its launch site in South Texas.Ultimately, the investigation ended, the FAA approved the company\u2019s remedies and granted it approval to attempt Tuesday\u2019s test.In its statement, the FAA did not say what precisely the violations were, or whether it had fined the company, and a spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those issues. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisementThe statement came a few days after Musk publicly chastised the FAA for getting in the company\u2019s way as it develops and tests the Starship prototype, the spacecraft SpaceX hopes to fly to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementFrustrated by the delay in getting a modification approved that would allow it to launch its next prototype, known as Serial Number 9 or SN9, Musk blasted the FAA on Twitter, saying: \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dIn response, the FAA said in a statement last week that it \u201cwill not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety. We will approve the modification only after we are satisfied that SpaceX has taken the necessary steps to comply with regulatory requirements.\u201dThe license violation was first reported by the Verge.Story continues below advertisementThe standoff with the FAA is yet another example of Musk pushing back against government regulation. He sued the Air Force over the right to compete for national security launch contracts \u2014 and secured a settlement that allowed SpaceX to do so. And after he was fined $20 million for allegedly misleading investors about his Tesla car company, he told \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d \u201cI do not respect [the Securities and Exchange Commission]. I do not respect them.\u201dAdvertisementAnd Tesla, his electric car company, sued Alameda County in California last spring for the right to reopen after it was shut down because of the coronavirus outbreak.Now, he is taking aim at the FAA, the federal agency that licenses launches but also is, as part of its mandate, supposed to support industry.Story continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s tweets were \u201cnot helpful,\u201d said a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.If the FAA approved a launch that ended with people getting hurt \u201cthen we\u2019re in a situation where we\u2019re second-guessed \u2014 did you do everything you could? And were you influenced by Elon and his fan club?\u201d the person said.After working throughout the weekend on SpaceX\u2019s license for its next flight, the FAA said on Tuesday it determined that SpaceX \u201ccomplies with all safety and related federal regulations and is authorized to conduct Starship SN9 flight operations in accordance with its launch license.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday\u2019s flight went smoothly through liftoff, as the rocket burned its engines to reach the 6.2-mile apogee. The descent looked controlled as John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, said on the company\u2019s broadcast, \u201ceverything continuing to go well in this portion of the flight.\u201dAfter the vehicle crashed, he said that \u201cwe had another great flight to the 10-kilometer apogee\u201d and that the subsonic reentry looked very good and stable.\u201d He said \u201cwe need to work on that landing a little bit.\u201d He added, \u201call told, another great [flight].\u201dSpaceX has a series of test vehicles that it is putting through the test campaign \u2014 and the next rocket, known as Serial Number 10, or SN10, has already been transported to its launchpad. It\u2019s not clear when it may fly, but Musk has moved aggressively on the development project, hoping the vehicle will reach orbit sometime this year.Gorgeous morning at Boca Chica, so excited to see SN9 take to the skies today \ud83e\udd1e although will miss the 2 starship view. Good luck to the @SpaceX team. @elonmusk @Erdayastronaut pic.twitter.com/TSOfyHW6kQ\u2014 Nick Jackson (@nqy_nik) February 2, 2021\n\nStill, if SpaceX committed a serious violation of its launch license for the previous flight, the FAA should not hesitate to sanction the company, said Jared Stout, who served as the acting chief of staff at the FAA\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Transportation and was the deputy executive secretary of the National Space Council in the Trump administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe consequences of not following the parameters of an FAA launch license can literally kill people,\u201d said Stout, who as a lobbyist has also worked for one of SpaceX\u2019s main competitors. \u201cIf the FAA is not going to enforce its regulations, why do we have the [Office of Commercial Space Transportation]? What\u2019s the point of the FAA setting parameters for these flights if launch companies don\u2019t follow them? And SpaceX seems to be the only company having this problem.\u201dThe SN8 version of Starship flew several miles high from the launch facility SpaceX has built in Boca Chica, Tex., outside of Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico. After its engines shut down, the stainless-steel spacecraft performed a \u201cbelly flop\u201d maneuver, falling horizontally through the atmosphere. Then it righted itself and reignited its engines for landing. But instead of touching down softly, it crashed, igniting a fireball that sprayed pieces of rocket shrapnel across the landing site.No one was injured, and Musk called the flight \u201can awesome test.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe crash itself did not constitute a violation of the license, and it did not cause a delay in issuing the approval for the SN9 flight, according to the person with knowledge of the situation.\u201cWe expect these to fail and as long as they fail safely, as designed, that\u2019s not an issue,\u201d the person said.It\u2019s not clear what the violation was, but some industry officials said it could be related to the altitude of the flight, or ensuring people and boats were safely out of a predetermined keep-out-zone.If SpaceX exceeded the altitude restrictions, for example, that could not only pose a hazard to aircraft in the area but people on the ground, Stout said.\u201cEven if the FAA has cleared all the airspace, there\u2019s still the potential that if they go above the altitude restriction and were to blow up, the detritus that comes down could be outside the parameters of the license,\u201d he said.Earlier Monday morning, Musk tweeted that he was \u201cOff Twitter for a while.\u201d It was not clear if that was related to his tussle with the FAA. SpaceX violated its FAA license in its last Starship test, the FAA said, but it granted a license for a new test, which occurred on Tuesday. SpaceX crashes another Starship in test that was delayed over FAA concerns company violated its test license in December",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX crashes another Starship in test that was delayed over FAA concerns company violated its test license in December (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6171",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/02/spacex-test-sn9-faa-license/",
        "text": "SpaceX successfully launched one of its Starship prototype spacecraft Tuesday, but again the vehicle crashed after it hit the landing pad hard, sending an action-film-like fireball billowing into the South Texas sky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe test followed a similar one in December where SpaceX demonstrated it could light the rocket\u2019s three Raptor engines, fly it several miles high and then bring it back in a controlled descent using its aerodynamic wings. But that test mission also ended in a fiery crash that SpaceX said gave it a lot of valuable data to learn from. There was no immediate word on why the spacecraft landed hard on Tuesday.The launch came after a tussle with the Federal Aviation Administration spilled into the open. Before the December test flight, SpaceX had sought a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that would have allowed it \u201cto exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations,\u201d the agency said in a statement Tuesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut after that waiver was denied, SpaceX proceeded with the flight, violating its launch license in what aerospace and industry officials said was a potentially reckless move that could have posed serious risk to the public\u2019s safety.As a result of the violation, the FAA directed Elon Musk\u2019s company to investigate the incident and suspend operations that could affect public safety at its launch site in South Texas.Ultimately, the investigation ended, the FAA approved the company\u2019s remedies and granted it approval to attempt Tuesday\u2019s test.In its statement, the FAA did not say what precisely the violations were, or whether it had fined the company, and a spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those issues. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisementThe statement came a few days after Musk publicly chastised the FAA for getting in the company\u2019s way as it develops and tests the Starship prototype, the spacecraft SpaceX hopes to fly to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementFrustrated by the delay in getting a modification approved that would allow it to launch its next prototype, known as Serial Number 9 or SN9, Musk blasted the FAA on Twitter, saying: \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dIn response, the FAA said in a statement last week that it \u201cwill not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety. We will approve the modification only after we are satisfied that SpaceX has taken the necessary steps to comply with regulatory requirements.\u201dThe license violation was first reported by the Verge.Story continues below advertisementThe standoff with the FAA is yet another example of Musk pushing back against government regulation. He sued the Air Force over the right to compete for national security launch contracts \u2014 and secured a settlement that allowed SpaceX to do so. And after he was fined $20 million for allegedly misleading investors about his Tesla car company, he told \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d \u201cI do not respect [the Securities and Exchange Commission]. I do not respect them.\u201dAdvertisementAnd Tesla, his electric car company, sued Alameda County in California last spring for the right to reopen after it was shut down because of the coronavirus outbreak.Now, he is taking aim at the FAA, the federal agency that licenses launches but also is, as part of its mandate, supposed to support industry.Story continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s tweets were \u201cnot helpful,\u201d said a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.If the FAA approved a launch that ended with people getting hurt \u201cthen we\u2019re in a situation where we\u2019re second-guessed \u2014 did you do everything you could? And were you influenced by Elon and his fan club?\u201d the person said.After working throughout the weekend on SpaceX\u2019s license for its next flight, the FAA said on Tuesday it determined that SpaceX \u201ccomplies with all safety and related federal regulations and is authorized to conduct Starship SN9 flight operations in accordance with its launch license.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday\u2019s flight went smoothly through liftoff, as the rocket burned its engines to reach the 6.2-mile apogee. The descent looked controlled as John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, said on the company\u2019s broadcast, \u201ceverything continuing to go well in this portion of the flight.\u201dAfter the vehicle crashed, he said that \u201cwe had another great flight to the 10-kilometer apogee\u201d and that the subsonic reentry looked very good and stable.\u201d He said \u201cwe need to work on that landing a little bit.\u201d He added, \u201call told, another great [flight].\u201dSpaceX has a series of test vehicles that it is putting through the test campaign \u2014 and the next rocket, known as Serial Number 10, or SN10, has already been transported to its launchpad. It\u2019s not clear when it may fly, but Musk has moved aggressively on the development project, hoping the vehicle will reach orbit sometime this year.Gorgeous morning at Boca Chica, so excited to see SN9 take to the skies today \ud83e\udd1e although will miss the 2 starship view. Good luck to the @SpaceX team. @elonmusk @Erdayastronaut pic.twitter.com/TSOfyHW6kQ\u2014 Nick Jackson (@nqy_nik) February 2, 2021\n\nStill, if SpaceX committed a serious violation of its launch license for the previous flight, the FAA should not hesitate to sanction the company, said Jared Stout, who served as the acting chief of staff at the FAA\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Transportation and was the deputy executive secretary of the National Space Council in the Trump administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe consequences of not following the parameters of an FAA launch license can literally kill people,\u201d said Stout, who as a lobbyist has also worked for one of SpaceX\u2019s main competitors. \u201cIf the FAA is not going to enforce its regulations, why do we have the [Office of Commercial Space Transportation]? What\u2019s the point of the FAA setting parameters for these flights if launch companies don\u2019t follow them? And SpaceX seems to be the only company having this problem.\u201dThe SN8 version of Starship flew several miles high from the launch facility SpaceX has built in Boca Chica, Tex., outside of Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico. After its engines shut down, the stainless-steel spacecraft performed a \u201cbelly flop\u201d maneuver, falling horizontally through the atmosphere. Then it righted itself and reignited its engines for landing. But instead of touching down softly, it crashed, igniting a fireball that sprayed pieces of rocket shrapnel across the landing site.No one was injured, and Musk called the flight \u201can awesome test.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe crash itself did not constitute a violation of the license, and it did not cause a delay in issuing the approval for the SN9 flight, according to the person with knowledge of the situation.\u201cWe expect these to fail and as long as they fail safely, as designed, that\u2019s not an issue,\u201d the person said.It\u2019s not clear what the violation was, but some industry officials said it could be related to the altitude of the flight, or ensuring people and boats were safely out of a predetermined keep-out-zone.If SpaceX exceeded the altitude restrictions, for example, that could not only pose a hazard to aircraft in the area but people on the ground, Stout said.\u201cEven if the FAA has cleared all the airspace, there\u2019s still the potential that if they go above the altitude restriction and were to blow up, the detritus that comes down could be outside the parameters of the license,\u201d he said.Earlier Monday morning, Musk tweeted that he was \u201cOff Twitter for a while.\u201d It was not clear if that was related to his tussle with the FAA. SpaceX violated its FAA license in its last Starship test, the FAA said, but it granted a license for a new test, which occurred on Tuesday. SpaceX crashes another Starship in test that was delayed over FAA concerns company violated its test license in December",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX crashes another Starship in test that was delayed over FAA concerns company violated its test license in December (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6172",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/02/spacex-test-sn9-faa-license/",
        "text": "SpaceX successfully launched one of its Starship prototype spacecraft Tuesday, but again the vehicle crashed after it hit the landing pad hard, sending an action-film-like fireball billowing into the South Texas sky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe test followed a similar one in December where SpaceX demonstrated it could light the rocket\u2019s three Raptor engines, fly it several miles high and then bring it back in a controlled descent using its aerodynamic wings. But that test mission also ended in a fiery crash that SpaceX said gave it a lot of valuable data to learn from. There was no immediate word on why the spacecraft landed hard on Tuesday.The launch came after a tussle with the Federal Aviation Administration spilled into the open. Before the December test flight, SpaceX had sought a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that would have allowed it \u201cto exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations,\u201d the agency said in a statement Tuesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut after that waiver was denied, SpaceX proceeded with the flight, violating its launch license in what aerospace and industry officials said was a potentially reckless move that could have posed serious risk to the public\u2019s safety.As a result of the violation, the FAA directed Elon Musk\u2019s company to investigate the incident and suspend operations that could affect public safety at its launch site in South Texas.Ultimately, the investigation ended, the FAA approved the company\u2019s remedies and granted it approval to attempt Tuesday\u2019s test.In its statement, the FAA did not say what precisely the violations were, or whether it had fined the company, and a spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those issues. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisementThe statement came a few days after Musk publicly chastised the FAA for getting in the company\u2019s way as it develops and tests the Starship prototype, the spacecraft SpaceX hopes to fly to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementFrustrated by the delay in getting a modification approved that would allow it to launch its next prototype, known as Serial Number 9 or SN9, Musk blasted the FAA on Twitter, saying: \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dIn response, the FAA said in a statement last week that it \u201cwill not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety. We will approve the modification only after we are satisfied that SpaceX has taken the necessary steps to comply with regulatory requirements.\u201dThe license violation was first reported by the Verge.Story continues below advertisementThe standoff with the FAA is yet another example of Musk pushing back against government regulation. He sued the Air Force over the right to compete for national security launch contracts \u2014 and secured a settlement that allowed SpaceX to do so. And after he was fined $20 million for allegedly misleading investors about his Tesla car company, he told \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d \u201cI do not respect [the Securities and Exchange Commission]. I do not respect them.\u201dAdvertisementAnd Tesla, his electric car company, sued Alameda County in California last spring for the right to reopen after it was shut down because of the coronavirus outbreak.Now, he is taking aim at the FAA, the federal agency that licenses launches but also is, as part of its mandate, supposed to support industry.Story continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s tweets were \u201cnot helpful,\u201d said a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.If the FAA approved a launch that ended with people getting hurt \u201cthen we\u2019re in a situation where we\u2019re second-guessed \u2014 did you do everything you could? And were you influenced by Elon and his fan club?\u201d the person said.After working throughout the weekend on SpaceX\u2019s license for its next flight, the FAA said on Tuesday it determined that SpaceX \u201ccomplies with all safety and related federal regulations and is authorized to conduct Starship SN9 flight operations in accordance with its launch license.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTuesday\u2019s flight went smoothly through liftoff, as the rocket burned its engines to reach the 6.2-mile apogee. The descent looked controlled as John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, said on the company\u2019s broadcast, \u201ceverything continuing to go well in this portion of the flight.\u201dAfter the vehicle crashed, he said that \u201cwe had another great flight to the 10-kilometer apogee\u201d and that the subsonic reentry looked very good and stable.\u201d He said \u201cwe need to work on that landing a little bit.\u201d He added, \u201call told, another great [flight].\u201dSpaceX has a series of test vehicles that it is putting through the test campaign \u2014 and the next rocket, known as Serial Number 10, or SN10, has already been transported to its launchpad. It\u2019s not clear when it may fly, but Musk has moved aggressively on the development project, hoping the vehicle will reach orbit sometime this year.Gorgeous morning at Boca Chica, so excited to see SN9 take to the skies today \ud83e\udd1e although will miss the 2 starship view. Good luck to the @SpaceX team. @elonmusk @Erdayastronaut pic.twitter.com/TSOfyHW6kQ\u2014 Nick Jackson (@nqy_nik) February 2, 2021\n\nStill, if SpaceX committed a serious violation of its launch license for the previous flight, the FAA should not hesitate to sanction the company, said Jared Stout, who served as the acting chief of staff at the FAA\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Transportation and was the deputy executive secretary of the National Space Council in the Trump administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe consequences of not following the parameters of an FAA launch license can literally kill people,\u201d said Stout, who as a lobbyist has also worked for one of SpaceX\u2019s main competitors. \u201cIf the FAA is not going to enforce its regulations, why do we have the [Office of Commercial Space Transportation]? What\u2019s the point of the FAA setting parameters for these flights if launch companies don\u2019t follow them? And SpaceX seems to be the only company having this problem.\u201dThe SN8 version of Starship flew several miles high from the launch facility SpaceX has built in Boca Chica, Tex., outside of Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico. After its engines shut down, the stainless-steel spacecraft performed a \u201cbelly flop\u201d maneuver, falling horizontally through the atmosphere. Then it righted itself and reignited its engines for landing. But instead of touching down softly, it crashed, igniting a fireball that sprayed pieces of rocket shrapnel across the landing site.No one was injured, and Musk called the flight \u201can awesome test.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe crash itself did not constitute a violation of the license, and it did not cause a delay in issuing the approval for the SN9 flight, according to the person with knowledge of the situation.\u201cWe expect these to fail and as long as they fail safely, as designed, that\u2019s not an issue,\u201d the person said.It\u2019s not clear what the violation was, but some industry officials said it could be related to the altitude of the flight, or ensuring people and boats were safely out of a predetermined keep-out-zone.If SpaceX exceeded the altitude restrictions, for example, that could not only pose a hazard to aircraft in the area but people on the ground, Stout said.\u201cEven if the FAA has cleared all the airspace, there\u2019s still the potential that if they go above the altitude restriction and were to blow up, the detritus that comes down could be outside the parameters of the license,\u201d he said.Earlier Monday morning, Musk tweeted that he was \u201cOff Twitter for a while.\u201d It was not clear if that was related to his tussle with the FAA. SpaceX violated its FAA license in its last Starship test, the FAA said, but it granted a license for a new test, which occurred on Tuesday. SpaceX crashes another Starship in test that was delayed over FAA concerns company violated its test license in December",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, another successful liftoff of Starship, another crash landing. Company vows to try again. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6173",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/02/spacex-starship-sn9-test/",
        "text": "SpaceX successfully launched one of its Starship prototype spacecraft into the South Texas sky Tuesday, but again the vehicle crashed in a fireball after it hit the landing pad hard.The test followed a similar one in December where SpaceX demonstrated it could light the rocket\u2019s three Raptor engines, fly it several miles high and then bring it back in a controlled descent using its aerodynamic wings. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Tuesday, the spacecraft flew to just over six miles, extinguished its engines and then reoriented itself in a bellyflop maneuver as it fell back toward Earth. As it reoriented itself for landing it appeared to have a problem reigniting one of its engines to slow it down for landing, and the stainless steel spacecraft hit the ground and exploded.Story continues below advertisementOn the SpaceX broadcast of the mission, John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, repeatedly reminded viewers that the flight was a test, designed to root out problems so that the company could remedy them and fly again.AdvertisementSpaceX has a series of test vehicles that it is putting through the test campaign \u2014 and the next rocket, known as Serial Number 10, or SN 10, has already been transported to its launch pad at SpaceX\u2019s launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, a hamlet near the southern tip of the state.The launch, shortly before 2:30 p.m. local time, came hours after the Federal Aviation Administration approved the flight of SN9 after concluding that the company complied \u201cwith all safety and related federal regulations.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe FAA also said that SpaceX had violated its launch license for the previous flight, after asking for a waiver, which was denied, \u201cto exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations.\u201d The FAA did not say what constituted the violation, and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementTuesday\u2019s flight went smoothly through liftoff, as the rocket burned its engines to reach the 6.2-mile apogee. The descent looked controlled as Insprucker said, \u201ceverything continuing to go well in this portion of the flight.\u201dAfter the vehicle crashed, he said \u201cwe had another great flight to the 10 km apogee\u201d and that the subsonic reentry looked very good and stable.\u201d He said \u201cwe need to work on that landing a little bit.\" He added, \u201call told, another great [flight].\u201d The test followed a similar one in December that also ended with a crash. For Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, another successful liftoff of Starship, another crash landing. Company vows to try again.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX swapping out a pair of rocket engines weeks ahead of next astronaut launch (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6174",
        "date": "2020-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/28/spacex-rocket-launch-fix/",
        "text": "SpaceX said Wednesday that it is swapping out two engines on the rocket scheduled to fly a cadre of astronauts to the International Space Station next month after clogged valves caused a last-second abort on a different Falcon 9 rocket earlier in October.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe abort of the mission for the U.S. Space Force prompted SpaceX to inspect its fleet of rockets and led to the discovery of a similar problem in two of the engines of the rocket now scheduled to take three NASA astronauts and one from Japan to the space station Nov. 14. SpaceX had delayed the launch to find the problem. NASA said it is confident that the problem has been fixed, but that there are still several data reviews to come before the launch. The agency said it would authorize SpaceX to fly the mission only if officials were confident the rocket is safe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think we see a pretty good path to get to flight, and we\u2019ll fly when we\u2019re ready,\u201d Steve Stich, the manager of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, told reporters in a news conference Wednesday. \u201cWe\u2019re certainly taking the time, and the SpaceX team is committed to flying when we\u2019re ready as well.\u201dThe mission for the Space Force was aborted just two seconds before launch after sensors detected an over pressurization inside a couple of engine nozzles.SpaceX crews could find nothing wrong with the engines on the pad, so they took them to a testing facility in Texas, where they discovered that two tiny valve lines were clogged with a lacquer-like substance used to prevent corrosion, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability.Story continues below advertisementThe problem forced the engines to start prematurely, but the rocket\u2019s computers detected the problem and forced the shutdown autonomously. SpaceX had to delay a couple of other launches recently because of mechanical issues, and Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, said on Twitter he was going to Cape Canaveral to conduct a \u201cbroad review\u201d of operations there.Advertisement\u201cNo question, rocketry is tough and requires a lot of attention to detail,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cRockets are humbling. Every day I work with them, it\u2019s always a challenge and it\u2019s always difficult. And you have to be super diligent and on your toes to get this right.\u201dSpaceX faces its toughest testIf the rocket had fired, he said, it would have been what\u2019s called a \u201chard start,\u201d which he said is \u201cnot necessarily bad. In most cases, it rattles the engine and it may cause a little bit of damage on the engines. In extreme cases, it may cause more damage to the engines. In general, you do not want that. You want a good start-up.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said that the rocket was safe \u201cthe whole time\u201d because it was \u201cheld down on the ground\u201d while the rocket\u2019s computers shut down the operation before it could launch.SpaceX\u2019s rockets will only fly, he said, \u201cwhen we know the engines are running and running well.\u201dAdvertisementThe mission on Nov. 14 would be the second time SpaceX has flown humans. The first launch, in May, was a test flight that propelled two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, for a two-month stay on the space station. That flight was deemed a success, allowing SpaceX to proceed with a flight of a full contingent of four \u2014 NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.Story continues below advertisementSince the test flight, though, SpaceX has said it noticed a bit more erosion on the heat shield in a couple of isolated areas. Speaking in September, Koenigsmann said there \u201cwas nothing to be concerned with all times. The astronauts were safe, and the vehicle was working perfectly.\u201d The heat shield is a vital component of the spacecraft that protects the crew as they plunge through the atmosphere, creating temperatures that can reach as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.SpaceX said it was also making a slight adjustment to the way it calculates the spacecraft\u2019s altitude so that the parachutes deploy at the right moment.AdvertisementKoenigsmann said it wasn\u2019t entirely clear why the company suddenly found the problem with the clogged valve after flying dozens of missions involving hundreds of engines.Story continues below advertisementThe lacquer-like substance, which he compared to nail polish, probably got clogged as it was being washed away by an outside contractor, he said. The vent that was clogged was just one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, he said, so \u201cI can see how people overlooked that.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to explain how this works for so many years, then suddenly you see it showing up in the data,\u201d he said. \u201cThe important part for us is we caught it before anything happened.\u201d SpaceX decided to make the change after the abort of a mission for the U.S. Space Force prompted SpaceX to inspect its fleet of rockets and led to the discovery of a problem in two of the engines of the rocket scheduled to take three NASA astronauts and one from Japan to the space station Nov. 14. SpaceX swapping out a pair of rocket engines weeks ahead of next astronaut launch",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX swapping out a pair of rocket engines weeks ahead of next astronaut launch (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6175",
        "date": "2020-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/28/spacex-rocket-launch-fix/",
        "text": "SpaceX said Wednesday that it is swapping out two engines on the rocket scheduled to fly a cadre of astronauts to the International Space Station next month after clogged valves caused a last-second abort on a different Falcon 9 rocket earlier in October.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe abort of the mission for the U.S. Space Force prompted SpaceX to inspect its fleet of rockets and led to the discovery of a similar problem in two of the engines of the rocket now scheduled to take three NASA astronauts and one from Japan to the space station Nov. 14. SpaceX had delayed the launch to find the problem. NASA said it is confident that the problem has been fixed, but that there are still several data reviews to come before the launch. The agency said it would authorize SpaceX to fly the mission only if officials were confident the rocket is safe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think we see a pretty good path to get to flight, and we\u2019ll fly when we\u2019re ready,\u201d Steve Stich, the manager of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, told reporters in a news conference Wednesday. \u201cWe\u2019re certainly taking the time, and the SpaceX team is committed to flying when we\u2019re ready as well.\u201dThe mission for the Space Force was aborted just two seconds before launch after sensors detected an over pressurization inside a couple of engine nozzles.SpaceX crews could find nothing wrong with the engines on the pad, so they took them to a testing facility in Texas, where they discovered that two tiny valve lines were clogged with a lacquer-like substance used to prevent corrosion, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability.Story continues below advertisementThe problem forced the engines to start prematurely, but the rocket\u2019s computers detected the problem and forced the shutdown autonomously. SpaceX had to delay a couple of other launches recently because of mechanical issues, and Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief executive, said on Twitter he was going to Cape Canaveral to conduct a \u201cbroad review\u201d of operations there.Advertisement\u201cNo question, rocketry is tough and requires a lot of attention to detail,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cRockets are humbling. Every day I work with them, it\u2019s always a challenge and it\u2019s always difficult. And you have to be super diligent and on your toes to get this right.\u201dSpaceX faces its toughest testIf the rocket had fired, he said, it would have been what\u2019s called a \u201chard start,\u201d which he said is \u201cnot necessarily bad. In most cases, it rattles the engine and it may cause a little bit of damage on the engines. In extreme cases, it may cause more damage to the engines. In general, you do not want that. You want a good start-up.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said that the rocket was safe \u201cthe whole time\u201d because it was \u201cheld down on the ground\u201d while the rocket\u2019s computers shut down the operation before it could launch.SpaceX\u2019s rockets will only fly, he said, \u201cwhen we know the engines are running and running well.\u201dAdvertisementThe mission on Nov. 14 would be the second time SpaceX has flown humans. The first launch, in May, was a test flight that propelled two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, for a two-month stay on the space station. That flight was deemed a success, allowing SpaceX to proceed with a flight of a full contingent of four \u2014 NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.Story continues below advertisementSince the test flight, though, SpaceX has said it noticed a bit more erosion on the heat shield in a couple of isolated areas. Speaking in September, Koenigsmann said there \u201cwas nothing to be concerned with all times. The astronauts were safe, and the vehicle was working perfectly.\u201d The heat shield is a vital component of the spacecraft that protects the crew as they plunge through the atmosphere, creating temperatures that can reach as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.SpaceX said it was also making a slight adjustment to the way it calculates the spacecraft\u2019s altitude so that the parachutes deploy at the right moment.AdvertisementKoenigsmann said it wasn\u2019t entirely clear why the company suddenly found the problem with the clogged valve after flying dozens of missions involving hundreds of engines.Story continues below advertisementThe lacquer-like substance, which he compared to nail polish, probably got clogged as it was being washed away by an outside contractor, he said. The vent that was clogged was just one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, he said, so \u201cI can see how people overlooked that.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to explain how this works for so many years, then suddenly you see it showing up in the data,\u201d he said. \u201cThe important part for us is we caught it before anything happened.\u201d SpaceX decided to make the change after the abort of a mission for the U.S. Space Force prompted SpaceX to inspect its fleet of rockets and led to the discovery of a problem in two of the engines of the rocket scheduled to take three NASA astronauts and one from Japan to the space station Nov. 14. SpaceX swapping out a pair of rocket engines weeks ahead of next astronaut launch",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX protests a $150 million launch contract NASA awarded to its chief rival, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6176",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/13/spacex-protests-million-launch-contract-nasa-awarded-its-chief-rival-boeing-lockheed-martin-venture/",
        "text": "SpaceX has filed a protest challenging the nearly $150 million contract that NASA recently awarded to its chief rival, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the latest salvo in an ongoing war between the companies over lucrative rocket launch contracts.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a statement, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, said it was the first time it had challenged a NASA contract. \u201cSpaceX offered a solution with extraordinarily high confidence of mission success at a price dramatically lower than the award amount,\u201d the company said in a statement to The Washington Post. \u201cSo we believe the decision to pay vastly more to Boeing and Lockheed for the same mission was therefore not in the best interest of the agency or the American taxpayers.\u201dStory continues below advertisementUnited Launch Alliance, or ULA, is the company Lockheed Martin and Boeing formed to compete for government launch contracts. It has long heralded the reliability of its Atlas V rocket and in a statement said: \u201cThis interplanetary mission has an extremely narrow launch window in order to reach all of the desired planetary bodies and accomplish the science objectives. If Lucy misses this launch window, the full mission cannot be accomplished for decades.\u201dAdvertisementNASA said that as a result of the protest it had issued a stop-work order, preventing ULA from preparing for the mission. It declined to comment further.SpaceX and ULA have been battling for years. In 2014, SpaceX filed suit against the Air Force, asserting that the company should be able to compete for the national security launch contracts that for a decade were ULA\u2019s main revenue source and for which ULA was the Pentagon\u2019s only provider.Story continues below advertisementAt the time, ULA fired back, saying that SpaceX couldn\u2019t be trusted to launch such critical satellites and that it was trying to \u201ccut corners\u201d to win the lucrative contracts.SpaceX responded by saying \u201cULA doesn\u2019t believe in competition. Monopolists never do.\u201dSpaceX settled the lawsuit with the Air Force in 2015 and eventually won the certification that would allow it to compete against ULA. Since then, it has won several contract awards and completed one mission, the launch of a GPS satellite.AdvertisementThis week, the Pentagon\u2019s inspector general\u2019s office announced it was reviewing SpaceX\u2019s certification. The office did not say what prompted the review but called the audit \u201cself-initiated.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe NASA contract was awarded to ULA last month to launch a spacecraft named Lucy to explore the Trojan asteroids around Jupiter on a journey that would take 12 years.In a news release, NASA said the asteroids are \u201cclusters of rocky bodies almost as old as the sun itself, and visiting these asteroids may help unlock the secrets of the early solar system.\u201dThe mission, to be launched in October 2021, requires a precise launch window so that the spacecraft can \u201cthrow itself out into a celestial alignment that will not occur for decades.\u201dThe SpaceX protest was filed Monday with the Government Accountability Office, which typically has 100 days to review challenges to contract awards. The contract is for a mission to study asteroids near Jupiter. Elon Musk's company escalated its war with United Launch Alliance by filing a protest, saying it \"offered a solution with extraordinarily high confidence of mission success at a price dramatically lower than the award amount.\" SpaceX protests a $150 million launch contract NASA awarded to its chief rival, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospital (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6177",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/01/spacex-st-jude-fundraising-flight/",
        "text": "SpaceX announced Monday that it would fly a crew of private citizens into orbit around the Earth, potentially by the end of the year, in a multiday mission designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement comes after the company, founded by Elon Musk in 2002 to make space more accessible, flew two crews of NASA astronauts last year, as well as an astronaut from Japan, to the International Space Station. It also plans to fly a crew of four \u2014 all private citizens \u2014 to the International Space Station early next year. The flight announced Monday would mark another significant milestone in the privatization of spaceflight, as private companies erode governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on human spaceflight. It is being funded by Jared Isaacman, the 37-year-old founder and chief executive of Shift4 Payments, a payments technology company. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot who flies commercial and military aircraft, would command the mission and is donating two of the seats to St. Jude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne is going to a yet-to-be named health-care worker at the hospital. The other seat would be raffled off, in an attempt to raise at least $200 million for St. Jude.The flight will leave from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but NASA, the U.S. government space agency, is not directly involved in planning the trip, in which the spacecraft will orbit the Earth every 90 minutes. \u201cNASA has been briefed on this and has been supportive,\u201d Musk said.It was unclear how much Isaacson was paying for the mission, but he said he is donating $100 million to St. Jude as part of the fundraising effort. \u201cWhat we aim to raise in terms of those funds and the amount of good it will do will certainly far exceed the cost of the mission itself,\u201d he said during a call with reporters.Story continues below advertisementThe mission could last between two and four days, but Musk said the flight parameters were not yet defined. \u201cYou get to go where you want to go,\u201d he said to Isaacman on the call.AdvertisementThe occupant of the fourth seat will be determined by a competition starting this month among users of Isaacson\u2019s platform. The company plans to air an ad during Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl to raise awareness about the mission and the opportunity to fly on it.Isaacson said that contestants would make a video about their business and why they should be sent to space and that the winner would be announced by an independent panel of judges.The crew, called Inspiration4, will receive astronaut training from SpaceX on the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft, the company said. It will train them on emergency preparedness and full mission simulations.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX said that the flight \u201cwill be carefully monitored at every step by SpaceX mission control\u201d and will end in a splashdown off the Florida coast.Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, has purchased a flight on SpaceX\u2019s vehicle to fly a crew of private citizens to the International Space Station as early as January. That mission is to be commanded by Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom Space.AdvertisementThe three participants on that flight \u2014 all wealthy business executives \u2014 are paying $55 million for the flight, training and costs associated with staying aboard the space station for up to eight days.Story continues below advertisementRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin also plan to fly space tourists out of the atmosphere, but on suborbital missions that would scratch the edge of space, giving paying customers a few minutes of weightlessness before coming back down. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Musk said the private astronaut missions are a \u201csteppingstone on the way toward providing access to space for all.\u201d The price initially will be \u201creal expensive,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause it\u2019s new technology. \u2026 And so we actually need people who are willing and able to pay the high prices initially in order to make it affordable in the long term for everyone.\u201dAs for his personal goals he said, \u201cI will be on a flight one day, but not this one.\u201d The flight is being financed by Jared Isaacman, the 37-year-old founder and chief executive officer of Shift4 Payments, a payments technology company, who is also donating $100 million to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospital",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospital (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6178",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/01/spacex-st-jude-fundraising-flight/",
        "text": "SpaceX announced Monday that it would fly a crew of private citizens into orbit around the Earth, potentially by the end of the year, in a multiday mission designed to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement comes after the company, founded by Elon Musk in 2002 to make space more accessible, flew two crews of NASA astronauts last year, as well as an astronaut from Japan, to the International Space Station. It also plans to fly a crew of four \u2014 all private citizens \u2014 to the International Space Station early next year. The flight announced Monday would mark another significant milestone in the privatization of spaceflight, as private companies erode governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on human spaceflight. It is being funded by Jared Isaacman, the 37-year-old founder and chief executive of Shift4 Payments, a payments technology company. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot who flies commercial and military aircraft, would command the mission and is donating two of the seats to St. Jude.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne is going to a yet-to-be named health-care worker at the hospital. The other seat would be raffled off, in an attempt to raise at least $200 million for St. Jude.The flight will leave from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but NASA, the U.S. government space agency, is not directly involved in planning the trip, in which the spacecraft will orbit the Earth every 90 minutes. \u201cNASA has been briefed on this and has been supportive,\u201d Musk said.It was unclear how much Isaacson was paying for the mission, but he said he is donating $100 million to St. Jude as part of the fundraising effort. \u201cWhat we aim to raise in terms of those funds and the amount of good it will do will certainly far exceed the cost of the mission itself,\u201d he said during a call with reporters.Story continues below advertisementThe mission could last between two and four days, but Musk said the flight parameters were not yet defined. \u201cYou get to go where you want to go,\u201d he said to Isaacman on the call.AdvertisementThe occupant of the fourth seat will be determined by a competition starting this month among users of Isaacson\u2019s platform. The company plans to air an ad during Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl to raise awareness about the mission and the opportunity to fly on it.Isaacson said that contestants would make a video about their business and why they should be sent to space and that the winner would be announced by an independent panel of judges.The crew, called Inspiration4, will receive astronaut training from SpaceX on the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft, the company said. It will train them on emergency preparedness and full mission simulations.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX said that the flight \u201cwill be carefully monitored at every step by SpaceX mission control\u201d and will end in a splashdown off the Florida coast.Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, has purchased a flight on SpaceX\u2019s vehicle to fly a crew of private citizens to the International Space Station as early as January. That mission is to be commanded by Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom Space.AdvertisementThe three participants on that flight \u2014 all wealthy business executives \u2014 are paying $55 million for the flight, training and costs associated with staying aboard the space station for up to eight days.Story continues below advertisementRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin also plan to fly space tourists out of the atmosphere, but on suborbital missions that would scratch the edge of space, giving paying customers a few minutes of weightlessness before coming back down. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Musk said the private astronaut missions are a \u201csteppingstone on the way toward providing access to space for all.\u201d The price initially will be \u201creal expensive,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause it\u2019s new technology. \u2026 And so we actually need people who are willing and able to pay the high prices initially in order to make it affordable in the long term for everyone.\u201dAs for his personal goals he said, \u201cI will be on a flight one day, but not this one.\u201d The flight is being financed by Jared Isaacman, the 37-year-old founder and chief executive officer of Shift4 Payments, a payments technology company, who is also donating $100 million to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospital",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Investors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit? (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6179",
        "date": "2021-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/05/space-finance-bubble-investors/",
        "text": "Space is hot.The billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d \u2014 Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson \u2014 have given the industry a cachet not seen since the Apollo era of the 1960s and \u201970s, with Branson and Bezos flying to the edge of space on their own spacecraft and Musk\u2019s SpaceX becoming the dominant supplier of people and cargo to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInvestors are fearful of missing out. That\u2019s turned out to be great news for the space companies hoping to get a piece of the satellite-launch business. But it\u2019s also caused analysts to warn that space is still a nascent and risky business, one rocket explosion away from disaster.Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing to an industry long viewed as too risky for serious investment. New start-ups are blossoming in an explosion reminiscent of the early days of tech, when money poured into Silicon Valley start-ups at the beginning of the Internet age. Gen. John \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, even predicted during a recent speech that investment in the commercial space sector would drive \u201ca second Golden Age of space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past decade, investors pumped $200 billion into 1,500 space companies around the world, according to an analysis done by Space Capital, a space investment firm. Investment in start-up space companies reached $7.6 billion last year, a 16 percent increase from 2019, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.\u201cThis level of investment is consistent with the 6-year trend beginning in 2015 of unprecedented levels of venture capital driven investment flowing into the space industry,\u201d the company said.That has helped drive a $447 billion global space economy that grew 4.4 percent last year, according to the Space Foundation, an advocacy group. Over the past 10 years, the space economy has grown 55 percent, according to the Foundation, which said the commercial space products and services market is valued at $219 billion.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to those investments, several space ventures have gone public over the past year through special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic space tourism company was one of the first high-profile space ventures to go public through a SPAC when it merged with a New York hedge fund in 2019. Since then, SPACs have \u201cexploded in popularity,\u201d according to a report by analysts at Avascent and Jefferies, a financial advisory firm specializing in aerospace, which found that the mergers across all industries raised $83 billion in 2020 compared to $14 billion the year before.But the stocks can be volatile. In the last couple of weeks, for example, the stocks of two space companies took hits when they suffered problems. Shares of Virgin Galactic dipped after the Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating the company after its flight, with Branson on board, went off course. The probe was first reported by the New Yorker.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstra, a start-up rocket company based outside of San Francisco, saw its stock drop after a launch attempt failed to reach orbit last month.Still, more than a dozen companies have gone public, or announced they would in recent months. They include Planet, which has built a constellation of satellites to take images of the Earth, and Astra. Rocket Lab, which has launched dozens of small satellites on its Electron rocket, started trading on the Nasdaq last month. And Virgin Orbit, which \u201cair launches\u201d a rocket designed to fly satellites by dropping it from the wing of a 747 airplane, announced that it would go public through a SPAC and that it had raised $100 million in another funding round backed by Boeing and AE Industrial Partners.International companies also are driving growth, analysts said. \u201cGoing forward, I would expect to see it becoming increasingly international,\u201d said Nickolas Boensch, a program manager at Bryce. \u201cChina, Japan, the U.K. have been huge players here, and there is something attractive to having a domestic capability.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut part of the market may be overhyped and overheated, and analysts warn that there could be a reset similar to the tech bubble in the early 2000s.\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any doubt we\u2019re in a bubble,\u201d said Greg Autry, a professor of space leadership policy and business at Arizona State University. \u201cBut that\u2019s okay. A lot of people freaked out during the e-commerce bubble. But if I had the opportunity to buy Amazon or Google at the height of that bubble, I would.\u201dBut as the Avascent analysts looked at the projected revenue for 10 companies that recently went public, the analysts warned that \u201cnot all SPACs are created equal.\u201d They noted that \u201cthere is no free lunch in capital markets. Given that SPACs offer high return opportunities, they consequently carry notable risks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementChad Anderson, the managing partner of Space Capital, agreed, saying \u201cfor the most part these should be looked at with a very skeptical eye.\u201dA lot of the companies have yet to produce any revenue, he said, and \u201cthey have these projections where they go from $15 million to magically $2 billion in revenue in two years. And you have to wonder how they\u2019re going to do that.\u201dInvestors had long shied away from investing in space \u2014 the quickest way to become a millionaire in space, one axiom went, is to start out as a billionaire.Advertisement\u201cThere was a very limited market with a handful of defense contractors on one side, and the government on the other,\u201d Anderson said.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX changed everything, he said. Musk\u2019s company showed that it could win the trust of NASA and the Pentagon, score lucrative government contracts and capture a large portion of the commercial launch market as well. Last year, for example, SpaceX captured a Pentagon contract for $316 million for launches between 2022 and 2027. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, was awarded $337 million for launches during that period.SpaceX has been a notable recipient of private investment. In 2015, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion in the company, helping it fund the satellite constellation, called Starlink, it\u2019s building to provide Internet to consumers from space.AdvertisementReplicating SpaceX\u2019s success may be difficult. Astra\u2019s attempt to reach orbit went awry last month in an awkward, I-think-I-can attempt that saw the rocket fire its engines from its launchpad in Alaska, then lurch sideways as if it were exiting the stage, and finally climb into the skies. It flew straight up for two-and-a-half minutes before spinning out wildly. Controllers on the ground terminated the flight, causing it to crash into the ocean.Story continues below advertisementBut Astra CEO Chris Kemp thinks his company, which uses a mobile launchpad, allowing the company to fly from any place it can get a license, will be successful in a market that is seeing a huge proliferation in the number of satellites flooding Earth\u2019s orbit.Over the next 10 years, more than 50,000 satellites could be launched into orbit, up from the few thousand currently in operation today, according to Analytical Graphics Inc., a company based outside Philadelphia that builds software to track spacecraft and debris in space.AdvertisementTo keep up with demand, Astra is planning to launch on an almost daily basis by 2025, Kemp said, an ambitious goal that he said is actually \u201cconservative.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s great about being a public company,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to put some things out there, and then your shareholders will judge you based on how you perform.\u201dAfter the Astra launch went awry, Kemp said that an engine shut down right after launch. But he wrote on Twitter that he was \u201cincredibly proud of our team. Space may be hard, but like this rocket, we are not giving up.\u201dAnd the 6th Astra launch vehicle goes the wrong way: pic.twitter.com/DmNKoJpZwU\u2014 Scott Manley (@DJSnM) August 28, 2021\n\nPeter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, thinks his company is well positioned, too. It\u2019s had nearly two dozen launches over the past three years from its site in New Zealand, putting more than 100 satellites in orbit for a range of customers, including NASA and the Pentagon. And it has more than $100 million in launches booked for an array of commercial and government customers. All of which gives Rocket Lab an edge over some of the other space companies looking to raise cash, Beck said.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve been the leader in this space for three years,\u201d he said. \u201cAs investors look to differentiate companies, it\u2019s pretty stark. There\u2019s a column full of zeros \u2014 zero launches, zero revenue, zero everything. And then there\u2019s a column on the Rocket Lab side that has significant numbers. So, it should be pretty obvious.\u201dWhen Tim Ellis looked to raise money for his young start-up rocket company in 2016, he pitched 90 investors over a grueling six-week period. \u201cEighty-nine said no,\u201d he recalled. \u201cOne said yes\u201d to lead the $10 million round.Last year was a different story. The investors came to Ellis and his company, Relativity Space, and he raised $500 million, a massive amount for a rocket company that\u2019s never launched a rocket. Then in June, it raked in another $650 million, a haul that it says will allow it to build a new manufacturing facility and pursue a larger rocket designed to compete with SpaceX.Relativity Space has already sold a number of flights on its Terran 1 rocket, which the company plans to launch early next year. The rocket is \u201cdefinitely the most presold rocket in history before launch both by the number of launches and total value,\u201d Ellis said.What separates Relativity from its competitors is the way it manufactures its hardware. The rockets are made entirely by a massive 3-D printer, which could open up other avenues of business for the company as well. But for now, it\u2019s focused on building rockets and disrupting the industry that has manufactured space vehicles the same way for years, he said.\u201cWe always knew that really we were building this software-driven manufacturing technology that scales without fixed tooling,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m quite convinced that is going to be the dominate force, not just in the launch industry, but in aerospace overall, which hasn\u2019t changed for 60 years. We\u2019re still building products one at a time by hand with hundreds of thousands to millions of individual parts, a very complicated supply chain, a ton of manual labor and really inefficient cost structures.\u201dAt first, it was a hard sell. Now, it\u2019s backed by some of the biggest names in the investor community, from Mark Cuban to Y Combinator, Fidelity, BlackRock and Tiger Global.Now all the company has to do is prove it\u2019s worth all that cash. Hundreds of millions of dollars now are flowing to an industry long viewed as too risky for serious investment. Investors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Investors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6180",
        "date": "2021-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/05/space-finance-bubble-investors/",
        "text": "Space is hot.The billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d \u2014 Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson \u2014 have given the industry a cachet not seen since the Apollo era of the 1960s and \u201970s, with Branson and Bezos flying to the edge of space on their own spacecraft and Musk\u2019s SpaceX becoming the dominant supplier of people and cargo to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInvestors are fearful of missing out. That\u2019s turned out to be great news for the space companies hoping to get a piece of the satellite-launch business. But it\u2019s also caused analysts to warn that space is still a nascent and risky business, one rocket explosion away from disaster.Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing to an industry long viewed as too risky for serious investment. New start-ups are blossoming in an explosion reminiscent of the early days of tech, when money poured into Silicon Valley start-ups at the beginning of the Internet age. Gen. John \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, even predicted during a recent speech that investment in the commercial space sector would drive \u201ca second Golden Age of space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOver the past decade, investors pumped $200 billion into 1,500 space companies around the world, according to an analysis done by Space Capital, a space investment firm. Investment in start-up space companies reached $7.6 billion last year, a 16 percent increase from 2019, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.\u201cThis level of investment is consistent with the 6-year trend beginning in 2015 of unprecedented levels of venture capital driven investment flowing into the space industry,\u201d the company said.That has helped drive a $447 billion global space economy that grew 4.4 percent last year, according to the Space Foundation, an advocacy group. Over the past 10 years, the space economy has grown 55 percent, according to the Foundation, which said the commercial space products and services market is valued at $219 billion.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to those investments, several space ventures have gone public over the past year through special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic space tourism company was one of the first high-profile space ventures to go public through a SPAC when it merged with a New York hedge fund in 2019. Since then, SPACs have \u201cexploded in popularity,\u201d according to a report by analysts at Avascent and Jefferies, a financial advisory firm specializing in aerospace, which found that the mergers across all industries raised $83 billion in 2020 compared to $14 billion the year before.But the stocks can be volatile. In the last couple of weeks, for example, the stocks of two space companies took hits when they suffered problems. Shares of Virgin Galactic dipped after the Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating the company after its flight, with Branson on board, went off course. The probe was first reported by the New Yorker.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstra, a start-up rocket company based outside of San Francisco, saw its stock drop after a launch attempt failed to reach orbit last month.Still, more than a dozen companies have gone public, or announced they would in recent months. They include Planet, which has built a constellation of satellites to take images of the Earth, and Astra. Rocket Lab, which has launched dozens of small satellites on its Electron rocket, started trading on the Nasdaq last month. And Virgin Orbit, which \u201cair launches\u201d a rocket designed to fly satellites by dropping it from the wing of a 747 airplane, announced that it would go public through a SPAC and that it had raised $100 million in another funding round backed by Boeing and AE Industrial Partners.International companies also are driving growth, analysts said. \u201cGoing forward, I would expect to see it becoming increasingly international,\u201d said Nickolas Boensch, a program manager at Bryce. \u201cChina, Japan, the U.K. have been huge players here, and there is something attractive to having a domestic capability.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut part of the market may be overhyped and overheated, and analysts warn that there could be a reset similar to the tech bubble in the early 2000s.\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any doubt we\u2019re in a bubble,\u201d said Greg Autry, a professor of space leadership policy and business at Arizona State University. \u201cBut that\u2019s okay. A lot of people freaked out during the e-commerce bubble. But if I had the opportunity to buy Amazon or Google at the height of that bubble, I would.\u201dBut as the Avascent analysts looked at the projected revenue for 10 companies that recently went public, the analysts warned that \u201cnot all SPACs are created equal.\u201d They noted that \u201cthere is no free lunch in capital markets. Given that SPACs offer high return opportunities, they consequently carry notable risks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementChad Anderson, the managing partner of Space Capital, agreed, saying \u201cfor the most part these should be looked at with a very skeptical eye.\u201dA lot of the companies have yet to produce any revenue, he said, and \u201cthey have these projections where they go from $15 million to magically $2 billion in revenue in two years. And you have to wonder how they\u2019re going to do that.\u201dInvestors had long shied away from investing in space \u2014 the quickest way to become a millionaire in space, one axiom went, is to start out as a billionaire.Advertisement\u201cThere was a very limited market with a handful of defense contractors on one side, and the government on the other,\u201d Anderson said.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX changed everything, he said. Musk\u2019s company showed that it could win the trust of NASA and the Pentagon, score lucrative government contracts and capture a large portion of the commercial launch market as well. Last year, for example, SpaceX captured a Pentagon contract for $316 million for launches between 2022 and 2027. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, was awarded $337 million for launches during that period.SpaceX has been a notable recipient of private investment. In 2015, Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion in the company, helping it fund the satellite constellation, called Starlink, it\u2019s building to provide Internet to consumers from space.AdvertisementReplicating SpaceX\u2019s success may be difficult. Astra\u2019s attempt to reach orbit went awry last month in an awkward, I-think-I-can attempt that saw the rocket fire its engines from its launchpad in Alaska, then lurch sideways as if it were exiting the stage, and finally climb into the skies. It flew straight up for two-and-a-half minutes before spinning out wildly. Controllers on the ground terminated the flight, causing it to crash into the ocean.Story continues below advertisementBut Astra CEO Chris Kemp thinks his company, which uses a mobile launchpad, allowing the company to fly from any place it can get a license, will be successful in a market that is seeing a huge proliferation in the number of satellites flooding Earth\u2019s orbit.Over the next 10 years, more than 50,000 satellites could be launched into orbit, up from the few thousand currently in operation today, according to Analytical Graphics Inc., a company based outside Philadelphia that builds software to track spacecraft and debris in space.AdvertisementTo keep up with demand, Astra is planning to launch on an almost daily basis by 2025, Kemp said, an ambitious goal that he said is actually \u201cconservative.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s great about being a public company,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have to put some things out there, and then your shareholders will judge you based on how you perform.\u201dAfter the Astra launch went awry, Kemp said that an engine shut down right after launch. But he wrote on Twitter that he was \u201cincredibly proud of our team. Space may be hard, but like this rocket, we are not giving up.\u201dAnd the 6th Astra launch vehicle goes the wrong way: pic.twitter.com/DmNKoJpZwU\u2014 Scott Manley (@DJSnM) August 28, 2021\n\nPeter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, thinks his company is well positioned, too. It\u2019s had nearly two dozen launches over the past three years from its site in New Zealand, putting more than 100 satellites in orbit for a range of customers, including NASA and the Pentagon. And it has more than $100 million in launches booked for an array of commercial and government customers. All of which gives Rocket Lab an edge over some of the other space companies looking to raise cash, Beck said.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve been the leader in this space for three years,\u201d he said. \u201cAs investors look to differentiate companies, it\u2019s pretty stark. There\u2019s a column full of zeros \u2014 zero launches, zero revenue, zero everything. And then there\u2019s a column on the Rocket Lab side that has significant numbers. So, it should be pretty obvious.\u201dWhen Tim Ellis looked to raise money for his young start-up rocket company in 2016, he pitched 90 investors over a grueling six-week period. \u201cEighty-nine said no,\u201d he recalled. \u201cOne said yes\u201d to lead the $10 million round.Last year was a different story. The investors came to Ellis and his company, Relativity Space, and he raised $500 million, a massive amount for a rocket company that\u2019s never launched a rocket. Then in June, it raked in another $650 million, a haul that it says will allow it to build a new manufacturing facility and pursue a larger rocket designed to compete with SpaceX.Relativity Space has already sold a number of flights on its Terran 1 rocket, which the company plans to launch early next year. The rocket is \u201cdefinitely the most presold rocket in history before launch both by the number of launches and total value,\u201d Ellis said.What separates Relativity from its competitors is the way it manufactures its hardware. The rockets are made entirely by a massive 3-D printer, which could open up other avenues of business for the company as well. But for now, it\u2019s focused on building rockets and disrupting the industry that has manufactured space vehicles the same way for years, he said.\u201cWe always knew that really we were building this software-driven manufacturing technology that scales without fixed tooling,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m quite convinced that is going to be the dominate force, not just in the launch industry, but in aerospace overall, which hasn\u2019t changed for 60 years. We\u2019re still building products one at a time by hand with hundreds of thousands to millions of individual parts, a very complicated supply chain, a ton of manual labor and really inefficient cost structures.\u201dAt first, it was a hard sell. Now, it\u2019s backed by some of the biggest names in the investor community, from Mark Cuban to Y Combinator, Fidelity, BlackRock and Tiger Global.Now all the company has to do is prove it\u2019s worth all that cash. Hundreds of millions of dollars now are flowing to an industry long viewed as too risky for serious investment. Investors are placing big bets on a growing space economy. But can they reach orbit?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6181",
        "date": "2021-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/boeingnasastarlinerdelay/",
        "text": "Several days after Boeing discovered the latest problem with its Starliner spacecraft, it removed the capsule from the rocket and returned it to the factory where engineers have been playing detective, trying to figure out what went wrong.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now, some two months after it first discovered an issue with some of the valves in the spacecraft\u2019s service module, the company still doesn\u2019t know with 100 percent certainty what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open, the latest embarrassment for a program that has suffered a series of blunders. And it\u2019s unclear when the company may attempt to launch it again. Kathy Lueders, who runs one of NASA\u2019s human exploration mission directorates, said this week that the company might even have to swap out the spacecraft\u2019s service module for a new one, which would mark a significant change. As for whether Boeing would be able to attempt another launch this year, she said, \u201cMy gut is it would probably more likely be next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing has said little publicly about the spacecraft since it was removed from the rocket. It would not make executives available to The Washington Post for this story and responded to several questions with an emailed statement. That statement said the company \u201ccontinues to work several troubleshooting efforts in parallel\u201d and that \u201cprogress is being made to eliminate potential causes.\u201d The testing \u201cis taking place both on the vehicle and in offline labs.\u201dIt also noted that Boeing would set a new launch date after its investigation was complete, saying \u201croot cause analysis and corrective action plan help us define the appropriate path back to the launchpad.\u201dBut an official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the company is nearing some final decision points in the probe and hopes to have a path forward soon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe issue came up as an issue of concern at NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel meeting on Thursday.\u201cWe got very close to launch without having identified the valve problem,\u201d said George Nield, a panel member who previously oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s office of commercial space transportation. \u201cAre there any changes to hardware inspection, testing, vehicle processing or checkout that would minimize the chances of that happening in the future?\u201dHe also said there \u201cwere some rather significant differences in how several safety issues were assessed between NASA and Boeing\u201d during the flight readiness reviews.NASA, which in 2014 awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to develop the capsule under the \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d continues to stand by Boeing. Lueders said \u201cthe team is making great progress on further troubleshooting. And I absolutely know we\u2019re going to fix this problem before we fly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s woes are compounded by the fact that the scrubbed launch was its second attempt to send the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station, without any astronauts on board, in a test flight designed to prove to NASA it could fly safely. Meanwhile, SpaceX, the other company in NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, has flown three human spaceflight missions for NASA since last year and has another scheduled for next month. It bid less for the work and was awarded a contract worth $2.6 billion.Last week, it also completed the first-ever all-civilian spaceflight to orbit, known as Inspiration4, where a crew of four spent three days in space. That flight was not part of the commercial crew program and did not involve NASA personnel.Boeing\u2019s first flight attempt, in December 2019, suffered a series of problems due to software and communications issues that prevented the spacecraft from docking with the station and forcing controllers to shoot software fixes to the capsule in midflight. On that mission, the capsule\u2019s software thought it was 11 hours later in the mission than it was. Another issue, solved on the fly, could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule upon separation. Boeing decided to redo the test flight before attempting a launch with astronauts on board, a decision that cost the company $410 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took Boeing some 18 months to fix those problems and get the capsule back on the launchpad. Leading up to the launch, John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president, said this summer that he knew how high the stakes were this time. \u201cIt is of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d he said.It didn\u2019t.Instead of launching on Aug. 3, the company wrestled with the stuck valves, at first expressing hope its engineers, working around-the-clock, could fix them on the launchpad and proceed with the launch. \u201cCautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,\u201d Vollmer said three days after engineers discovered the issue.After days of trying, Boeing could not fix the problem on the pad and decided to \u201cdestack\u201d the vehicle, by taking the capsule off the rocket and rolling it back to the factory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, Vollmer said, \u201cWe\u2019re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window. The launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety,\u201d he said.Boeing and NASA had been exploring whether the humid Florida air, or a rainstorm just before the first launch date attempt may have mixed water with the propellant\u2019s oxidizer. The interaction may have caused nitric acid to form, corroding the valves and causing them to stick.\u201cSo that is primarily what we\u2019re looking at now as the most likely cause of the issue,\u201d Vollmer said in August.The company has not put out any more updates on the cause of the problem since then. Two months after it scrubbed the Starliner's launch, Boeing isn't 100 percent certain what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open. Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6182",
        "date": "2021-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/boeingnasastarlinerdelay/",
        "text": "Several days after Boeing discovered the latest problem with its Starliner spacecraft, it removed the capsule from the rocket and returned it to the factory where engineers have been playing detective, trying to figure out what went wrong.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now, some two months after it first discovered an issue with some of the valves in the spacecraft\u2019s service module, the company still doesn\u2019t know with 100 percent certainty what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open, the latest embarrassment for a program that has suffered a series of blunders. And it\u2019s unclear when the company may attempt to launch it again. Kathy Lueders, who runs one of NASA\u2019s human exploration mission directorates, said this week that the company might even have to swap out the spacecraft\u2019s service module for a new one, which would mark a significant change. As for whether Boeing would be able to attempt another launch this year, she said, \u201cMy gut is it would probably more likely be next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing has said little publicly about the spacecraft since it was removed from the rocket. It would not make executives available to The Washington Post for this story and responded to several questions with an emailed statement. That statement said the company \u201ccontinues to work several troubleshooting efforts in parallel\u201d and that \u201cprogress is being made to eliminate potential causes.\u201d The testing \u201cis taking place both on the vehicle and in offline labs.\u201dIt also noted that Boeing would set a new launch date after its investigation was complete, saying \u201croot cause analysis and corrective action plan help us define the appropriate path back to the launchpad.\u201dBut an official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the company is nearing some final decision points in the probe and hopes to have a path forward soon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe issue came up as an issue of concern at NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel meeting on Thursday.\u201cWe got very close to launch without having identified the valve problem,\u201d said George Nield, a panel member who previously oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s office of commercial space transportation. \u201cAre there any changes to hardware inspection, testing, vehicle processing or checkout that would minimize the chances of that happening in the future?\u201dHe also said there \u201cwere some rather significant differences in how several safety issues were assessed between NASA and Boeing\u201d during the flight readiness reviews.NASA, which in 2014 awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to develop the capsule under the \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d continues to stand by Boeing. Lueders said \u201cthe team is making great progress on further troubleshooting. And I absolutely know we\u2019re going to fix this problem before we fly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s woes are compounded by the fact that the scrubbed launch was its second attempt to send the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station, without any astronauts on board, in a test flight designed to prove to NASA it could fly safely. Meanwhile, SpaceX, the other company in NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, has flown three human spaceflight missions for NASA since last year and has another scheduled for next month. It bid less for the work and was awarded a contract worth $2.6 billion.Last week, it also completed the first-ever all-civilian spaceflight to orbit, known as Inspiration4, where a crew of four spent three days in space. That flight was not part of the commercial crew program and did not involve NASA personnel.Boeing\u2019s first flight attempt, in December 2019, suffered a series of problems due to software and communications issues that prevented the spacecraft from docking with the station and forcing controllers to shoot software fixes to the capsule in midflight. On that mission, the capsule\u2019s software thought it was 11 hours later in the mission than it was. Another issue, solved on the fly, could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule upon separation. Boeing decided to redo the test flight before attempting a launch with astronauts on board, a decision that cost the company $410 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took Boeing some 18 months to fix those problems and get the capsule back on the launchpad. Leading up to the launch, John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president, said this summer that he knew how high the stakes were this time. \u201cIt is of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d he said.It didn\u2019t.Instead of launching on Aug. 3, the company wrestled with the stuck valves, at first expressing hope its engineers, working around-the-clock, could fix them on the launchpad and proceed with the launch. \u201cCautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,\u201d Vollmer said three days after engineers discovered the issue.After days of trying, Boeing could not fix the problem on the pad and decided to \u201cdestack\u201d the vehicle, by taking the capsule off the rocket and rolling it back to the factory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, Vollmer said, \u201cWe\u2019re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window. The launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety,\u201d he said.Boeing and NASA had been exploring whether the humid Florida air, or a rainstorm just before the first launch date attempt may have mixed water with the propellant\u2019s oxidizer. The interaction may have caused nitric acid to form, corroding the valves and causing them to stick.\u201cSo that is primarily what we\u2019re looking at now as the most likely cause of the issue,\u201d Vollmer said in August.The company has not put out any more updates on the cause of the problem since then. Two months after it scrubbed the Starliner's launch, Boeing isn't 100 percent certain what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open. Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6183",
        "date": "2021-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/boeingnasastarlinerdelay/",
        "text": "Several days after Boeing discovered the latest problem with its Starliner spacecraft, it removed the capsule from the rocket and returned it to the factory where engineers have been playing detective, trying to figure out what went wrong.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now, some two months after it first discovered an issue with some of the valves in the spacecraft\u2019s service module, the company still doesn\u2019t know with 100 percent certainty what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open, the latest embarrassment for a program that has suffered a series of blunders. And it\u2019s unclear when the company may attempt to launch it again. Kathy Lueders, who runs one of NASA\u2019s human exploration mission directorates, said this week that the company might even have to swap out the spacecraft\u2019s service module for a new one, which would mark a significant change. As for whether Boeing would be able to attempt another launch this year, she said, \u201cMy gut is it would probably more likely be next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing has said little publicly about the spacecraft since it was removed from the rocket. It would not make executives available to The Washington Post for this story and responded to several questions with an emailed statement. That statement said the company \u201ccontinues to work several troubleshooting efforts in parallel\u201d and that \u201cprogress is being made to eliminate potential causes.\u201d The testing \u201cis taking place both on the vehicle and in offline labs.\u201dIt also noted that Boeing would set a new launch date after its investigation was complete, saying \u201croot cause analysis and corrective action plan help us define the appropriate path back to the launchpad.\u201dBut an official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the company is nearing some final decision points in the probe and hopes to have a path forward soon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe issue came up as an issue of concern at NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel meeting on Thursday.\u201cWe got very close to launch without having identified the valve problem,\u201d said George Nield, a panel member who previously oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s office of commercial space transportation. \u201cAre there any changes to hardware inspection, testing, vehicle processing or checkout that would minimize the chances of that happening in the future?\u201dHe also said there \u201cwere some rather significant differences in how several safety issues were assessed between NASA and Boeing\u201d during the flight readiness reviews.NASA, which in 2014 awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to develop the capsule under the \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d continues to stand by Boeing. Lueders said \u201cthe team is making great progress on further troubleshooting. And I absolutely know we\u2019re going to fix this problem before we fly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s woes are compounded by the fact that the scrubbed launch was its second attempt to send the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station, without any astronauts on board, in a test flight designed to prove to NASA it could fly safely. Meanwhile, SpaceX, the other company in NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, has flown three human spaceflight missions for NASA since last year and has another scheduled for next month. It bid less for the work and was awarded a contract worth $2.6 billion.Last week, it also completed the first-ever all-civilian spaceflight to orbit, known as Inspiration4, where a crew of four spent three days in space. That flight was not part of the commercial crew program and did not involve NASA personnel.Boeing\u2019s first flight attempt, in December 2019, suffered a series of problems due to software and communications issues that prevented the spacecraft from docking with the station and forcing controllers to shoot software fixes to the capsule in midflight. On that mission, the capsule\u2019s software thought it was 11 hours later in the mission than it was. Another issue, solved on the fly, could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule upon separation. Boeing decided to redo the test flight before attempting a launch with astronauts on board, a decision that cost the company $410 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took Boeing some 18 months to fix those problems and get the capsule back on the launchpad. Leading up to the launch, John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president, said this summer that he knew how high the stakes were this time. \u201cIt is of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d he said.It didn\u2019t.Instead of launching on Aug. 3, the company wrestled with the stuck valves, at first expressing hope its engineers, working around-the-clock, could fix them on the launchpad and proceed with the launch. \u201cCautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,\u201d Vollmer said three days after engineers discovered the issue.After days of trying, Boeing could not fix the problem on the pad and decided to \u201cdestack\u201d the vehicle, by taking the capsule off the rocket and rolling it back to the factory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, Vollmer said, \u201cWe\u2019re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window. The launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety,\u201d he said.Boeing and NASA had been exploring whether the humid Florida air, or a rainstorm just before the first launch date attempt may have mixed water with the propellant\u2019s oxidizer. The interaction may have caused nitric acid to form, corroding the valves and causing them to stick.\u201cSo that is primarily what we\u2019re looking at now as the most likely cause of the issue,\u201d Vollmer said in August.The company has not put out any more updates on the cause of the problem since then. Two months after it scrubbed the Starliner's launch, Boeing isn't 100 percent certain what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open. Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6184",
        "date": "2021-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/24/boeingnasastarlinerdelay/",
        "text": "Several days after Boeing discovered the latest problem with its Starliner spacecraft, it removed the capsule from the rocket and returned it to the factory where engineers have been playing detective, trying to figure out what went wrong.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now, some two months after it first discovered an issue with some of the valves in the spacecraft\u2019s service module, the company still doesn\u2019t know with 100 percent certainty what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open, the latest embarrassment for a program that has suffered a series of blunders. And it\u2019s unclear when the company may attempt to launch it again. Kathy Lueders, who runs one of NASA\u2019s human exploration mission directorates, said this week that the company might even have to swap out the spacecraft\u2019s service module for a new one, which would mark a significant change. As for whether Boeing would be able to attempt another launch this year, she said, \u201cMy gut is it would probably more likely be next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing has said little publicly about the spacecraft since it was removed from the rocket. It would not make executives available to The Washington Post for this story and responded to several questions with an emailed statement. That statement said the company \u201ccontinues to work several troubleshooting efforts in parallel\u201d and that \u201cprogress is being made to eliminate potential causes.\u201d The testing \u201cis taking place both on the vehicle and in offline labs.\u201dIt also noted that Boeing would set a new launch date after its investigation was complete, saying \u201croot cause analysis and corrective action plan help us define the appropriate path back to the launchpad.\u201dBut an official close to the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the company is nearing some final decision points in the probe and hopes to have a path forward soon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe issue came up as an issue of concern at NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel meeting on Thursday.\u201cWe got very close to launch without having identified the valve problem,\u201d said George Nield, a panel member who previously oversaw the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s office of commercial space transportation. \u201cAre there any changes to hardware inspection, testing, vehicle processing or checkout that would minimize the chances of that happening in the future?\u201dHe also said there \u201cwere some rather significant differences in how several safety issues were assessed between NASA and Boeing\u201d during the flight readiness reviews.NASA, which in 2014 awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion contract to develop the capsule under the \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d continues to stand by Boeing. Lueders said \u201cthe team is making great progress on further troubleshooting. And I absolutely know we\u2019re going to fix this problem before we fly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s woes are compounded by the fact that the scrubbed launch was its second attempt to send the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station, without any astronauts on board, in a test flight designed to prove to NASA it could fly safely. Meanwhile, SpaceX, the other company in NASA\u2019s commercial crew program, has flown three human spaceflight missions for NASA since last year and has another scheduled for next month. It bid less for the work and was awarded a contract worth $2.6 billion.Last week, it also completed the first-ever all-civilian spaceflight to orbit, known as Inspiration4, where a crew of four spent three days in space. That flight was not part of the commercial crew program and did not involve NASA personnel.Boeing\u2019s first flight attempt, in December 2019, suffered a series of problems due to software and communications issues that prevented the spacecraft from docking with the station and forcing controllers to shoot software fixes to the capsule in midflight. On that mission, the capsule\u2019s software thought it was 11 hours later in the mission than it was. Another issue, solved on the fly, could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule upon separation. Boeing decided to redo the test flight before attempting a launch with astronauts on board, a decision that cost the company $410 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took Boeing some 18 months to fix those problems and get the capsule back on the launchpad. Leading up to the launch, John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president, said this summer that he knew how high the stakes were this time. \u201cIt is of paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d he said.It didn\u2019t.Instead of launching on Aug. 3, the company wrestled with the stuck valves, at first expressing hope its engineers, working around-the-clock, could fix them on the launchpad and proceed with the launch. \u201cCautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,\u201d Vollmer said three days after engineers discovered the issue.After days of trying, Boeing could not fix the problem on the pad and decided to \u201cdestack\u201d the vehicle, by taking the capsule off the rocket and rolling it back to the factory at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, Vollmer said, \u201cWe\u2019re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window. The launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety,\u201d he said.Boeing and NASA had been exploring whether the humid Florida air, or a rainstorm just before the first launch date attempt may have mixed water with the propellant\u2019s oxidizer. The interaction may have caused nitric acid to form, corroding the valves and causing them to stick.\u201cSo that is primarily what we\u2019re looking at now as the most likely cause of the issue,\u201d Vollmer said in August.The company has not put out any more updates on the cause of the problem since then. Two months after it scrubbed the Starliner's launch, Boeing isn't 100 percent certain what caused 13 of those valves to remain shut when they should have been open. Nearly two months after discovering a problem with its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing is still searching for answers",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space venture (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6185",
        "date": "2021-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/11/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-delays-toxic-workplace/",
        "text": "SEATTLE \u2014 In 2019, a mid-level employee at Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin had grown fed up with the company, and as he left, he wrote a long memo that he sent to Bezos, chief executive Bob Smith and other senior leaders: \u201cOur current culture is toxic to our success and many can see it spreading throughout the company.\u201d The problems at the spaceflight company were \u201csystemic,\u201d according to the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post and verified by two former employees familiar with the matter, and \u201cthe loss of trust in Blue\u2019s leadership is common.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was one of a number of warnings to Blue Origin\u2019s leadership in recent years that the company\u2019s culture had become dysfunctional, resulting in low morale and high turnover, significant delays across several major programs and a failure to successfully compete with Elon Musk\u2019s venture SpaceX, current and former employees said.The new management\u2019s \u201cauthoritarian bro culture,\u201d as one former employee put it, affected how decisions were made and permeated the institution, translating into condescending, sometimes humiliating, comments and harassment toward some women and a stagnant top-down hierarchy that frustrated many employees.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs it quickly grew from a small start-up to a large corporation with nearly 4,000 employees, Blue Origin grappled with how to improve its culture. In 2019, the company fired its head of recruiting after employees complained of sexism. A consultant retained by Blue Origin conducted a review of the company\u2019s leadership, finding that the primary challenge was Smith\u2019s ineffective, micromanaging leadership style, said two former employees, including a top executive.Bezos, who recently stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.Blue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.This account is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former Blue Origin employees and industry officials with close ties to the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. The interviews and documents obtained by The Post reveal wide-ranging employee concerns about Smith\u2019s leadership style, a bureaucracy that hampered innovation, and a lack of intervention from Bezos, who employees said was not giving the company enough attention during a crucial period.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s bad,\u201d said one former top executive. \u201cI think it\u2019s a complete lack of trust. Leadership has not engendered any trust in the employee base.\u201dAnother said: \u201cThe C-suite is out of touch with the rank-and-file pretty severely. It\u2019s very dysfunctional. It\u2019s condescending. It\u2019s demoralizing, and what happens is we can\u2019t make progress and end up with huge delays.\u201dThe company\u2019s cultural issues came to light last month when Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin\u2019s employee communications, released an essay she said was written in conjunction with 20 other current and former Blue Origin employees. It said the company \u201cturns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201d The staffers were not identified in the essay, but three of them confirmed the allegations to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post, Mary Plunkett, Blue Origin\u2019s senior vice president of human resources, said the company takes \u201call claims seriously and we have no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. Where we substantiate allegations of misconduct under our anti-harassment, anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policy we take the appropriate action \u2014 up to and including termination of employment.\u201dBlue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., has an anonymous hotline that is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week for employees, \u201cwhere any claims of this nature are registered and then investigated.\u201d She said the company also encourages workers to contact human resources or senior leadership, ensuring that \u201cthese conversations are strictly confidential and we listen to any claims with empathy and concern.\u201dBezos and Smith declined to comment for this story. Shailesh Prakash, The Post\u2019s chief information officer who also sits on Blue Origin\u2019s advisory board, declined to comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Abrams\u2019s essay was posted last month, Smith wrote in an email to the company, \u201cIt is particularly difficult and painful, for me, to hear claims being levied that attempt to characterize our entire team in a way that doesn\u2019t align with the character and capability that I see at Blue Origin every day.\u201dAfter Blue Origin was notified that this story would publish soon, Bezos on Sunday night tweeted an image of Barron\u2019s cover story from 1999 that was critical of Amazon, calling it \u201cAmazon. Bomb.\u201d\u201cListen and be open, but don\u2019t let anybody tell you who you are,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cThis was just one of the many stories telling us all the ways we were going to fail. Today, Amazon is one of the world\u2019s most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn response, Musk tweeted an emoji of a second-place medal.Advertisement*Blue Origin, like many aerospace companies, has a male-dominated culture, and several current and former female employees said they faced condescending remarks and comments about their appearance.\u201cTwo friends tried to talk me out of going to Blue because of how toxic it was,\u201d one former employee said. There were \u201clots of comments on people\u2019s bodies and appearance,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a dispiriting, chaotic experience working there. That behavior was modeled and not held accountable.\u201d Younger men new to the company started to \u201cmirror\u201d this conduct, she added.She said she reported the incidents multiple times to human resources but nothing was done.Story continues below advertisementIn 2019, the company brought in the Perkins Coie law firm to investigate Walt McCleery, its vice president of recruiting, a longtime executive at the firm whose behavior had made several women uncomfortable. One former employee told The Post that in a meeting with an outside company, McCleery turned to the executives and said: \u201cI apologize for [her] being emotional. It must be her time of the month.\u201dAdvertisementMcCleery was terminated after the investigation, according to Blue Origin. In a brief interview with The Post last week, McCleery denied the allegations and said they were \u201cnot true as far as I\u2019m concerned.\u201dAnother top executive was coached by human resources on appropriate workplace behavior after he repeatedly referred to a group of female employees as \u201cmean girls,\u201d which continued even after they complained about it to management, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. (The comments ended eventually after counseling.)Story continues below advertisementThese company problems took many new employees by surprise. One former engineer said that she was kneeling at a co-worker\u2019s desk in 2016, while they went over engineering drawings together. She said her manager, an older man, walked by and said: \u201cYou\u2019ve only been working here two weeks. You don\u2019t have to get on your knees yet.\u201dAdvertisementThe comment didn\u2019t sink in immediately, the former employee said, partly because she expected Blue Origin to be a welcoming environment.\u201cI was naive and in denial, maybe,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I thought about it later that it was obvious.\u201dNot everyone says the company culture has grown toxic. One employee who works outside the main headquarters said she has found the culture and leadership welcoming and respectful. Blue Origin\u2019s human resources team took immediate action when she reported a claim of \u201chighly inappropriate behavior\u201d from another employee earlier this year, she said.Story continues below advertisementThe company started investigating right away, and the other employee was terminated, further confirming her confidence in the company. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt like I couldn\u2019t go to our leadership for support,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt like I couldn\u2019t go to HR with a problem.\u201dAdvertisementThe company said it has not had any inquiries from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (EEOC complaints are not made public unless the agency decides to file suit.) It also has not faced any lawsuits for harassment or hostile work environment. One senior manager said: \u201cA lot of us put a lot of time into creating safe spaces for employees to share experiences and mentor each other. \u2026 We, I think, do the right thing every time we hear about a complaint. And when the claims have merit, we fire people.\u201dQuiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flightThe company also has a diversity, equity and inclusion program, set up by Smith to help the company hire more women and minorities, and help support them once hired. It has nine groups designed to help specific populations, such as veterans and different racial groups, feel welcome. One, called \u201cNew Ride,\u201d is named for Sally Ride, the first female NASA astronaut to reach space, and is intended to help \u201ccreate an authentic, inclusive, and equitable culture at Blue where LGBT+ employees and allies are empowered to become the greatest, truest version of themselves \u2014 both professionally and personally,\u201d the company said.If there is anyone who can get the company back on track, one industry official said, it\u2019s Bezos. The company is his passion, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. And now that he\u2019s been to space and stepped down from Amazon, he\u2019ll remain focused on Blue Origin: \u201cI think Blue will be a phoenix here in a couple of years because Jeff will figure it out.\u201d*When Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, it was to make real a science-fiction fantasy and to fulfill a dream of having \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d For the first couple of years, it existed as a tiny start-up, more like a think tank than a space company, that would take a \u201cstep-by-step\u201d approach to achieving its goal. For years, Bezos appeared content to move slowly and deliberately, like its mascot, the tortoise.But in 2017, Bezos brought in Smith to be the company\u2019s first CEO, taking over from Rob Meyerson, the company\u2019s president, who had been running its day-to-day operations.The selection of Smith, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas and a master\u2019s degree in business from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took many by surprise, especially because he served as a top executive at Honeywell Aerospace, a massive conglomerate with a corporate culture far different from Blue Origin\u2019s small, intimate feel.\u201cWhen he was hired, everyone was asking, \u2018Who\u2019s Bob Smith?\u2019 Nobody knew who he was,\u201d one former Blue Origin executive said.Under his leadership, the company has grown significantly, with facilities in Florida and Alabama, as it has pursued a number of ambitious projects, from building a massive rocket, called New Glenn, to a spacecraft that could land on the moon and even space stations.Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back.The problems with the corporate culture have led to problems with performance, according to current and former employees, manifesting in the growing gap between SpaceX and Blue Origin. The latest defeat came in April, when Blue Origin lost a major NASA contract to build a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon after bidding twice as much as SpaceX. It also lost out on a lucrative round of Pentagon launch contracts in 2019 that went to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.Blue Origin has yet to fly its New Glenn rocket, the massive vehicle Bezos originally vowed would reach orbit by last year. It has also suffered delays in the development of Blue Origin\u2019s BE-4 engine, which would be used, too, in the new rocket under development by ULA. Because that rocket is to be used to fly national security satellites, the delay has caused concern in the Pentagon and among some members of Congress.In late 2018, Blue Origin hired a consulting firm to assess why SpaceX was so successful and what it could do to catch up, according to multiple people. The resulting report led to a frank discussion among Blue Origin\u2019s leadership regarding problems in the company\u2019s culture, and work ethic, its lack of major customers and its presence on social media.SpaceX \u201cexpects and gets more from their employees,\u201d one executive concluded, according to minutes of a meeting to discuss the report, which were obtained by The Post. Another executive said Blue Origin \u201cis kind of lazy compared to SpaceX.\u201d Musk\u2019s venture had won several major government contracts by bidding low, another said. One executive noted: \u201cWe need an anchor [U.S. government] tenant to get us to profitability.\u201dThere have been some notable successes, however. The company completed its first human spaceflight mission in July, with Bezos onboard, a testament to the safety of the spacecraft. On Wednesday morning, it plans another spaceflight mission, this time with actor William Shatner, best known for playing Captain Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, Bezos\u2019s favorite childhood TV show.Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)In another memo obtained by The Post, an employee complained about the company moving ahead with a rocket test launch last year at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. \u201cI cannot in good conscience stand with an organization willing to consider putting its private mission ahead of the safety of the general community,\u201d the person wrote. The issue was first reported by the Verge. A Blue Origin spokesperson told the publication at the time: \u201cWe hold safety as our highest value. Period.\u201dSmith and the executives he brought in, many from legacy aerospace companies, sat in an executive suite in a new office building, isolated from the rest of the staff. While that is not unusual for many large corporations, it was off-putting for many employees at Blue Origin who had been used to their leaders sitting and mingling among them.\u201cThat wasn\u2019t appreciated,\u201d one former executive said. \u201cIt was an I\u2019m-above-you message.\u201dThis apparent aloofness persisted as the new management settled in. At a company town hall meeting, employees submitted a list of questions for Smith about the future of the company and his leadership style.When he didn\u2019t address any of them, one employee sarcastically submitted a softball, \u201cWhat\u2019s your favorite kind of ice cream?\u201dThat one, Smith took. \u201cSorbet,\u201d he said, according to multiple people at the meeting.At one point, employees said they rebelled after the company announced it would end its long-standing practice of distributing free mission patches after launches, a cut made because the company was \u201ctrying to become profitable,\u201d Abrams told The Post she was instructed to tell employees.Since the days of NASA\u2019s Apollo moon program, mission patches have been a way to commemorate spaceflight missions, and Blue Origin\u2019s employees were angry, wondering how much could they really cost. Eventually the executives relented and agreed to distribute the patches, but the incident became known as \u201cpatchgate.\u201dConcerned about the company\u2019s leadership, the head of human resources brought in an outside management consultant, who interviewed Smith and the members of his team in 2019 and concluded that Smith\u2019s micromanaging style was often ineffective, according to a former senior executive and confirmed by another person familiar with the matter.Smith bristled at the report, which was first reported by CNBC, and refused to meet on the subject again.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contractThe troubles at Blue Origin happened to correspond with a period of personal upheaval for Bezos. \u201cJeff got divorced and he was distracted,\u201d said one of the top former executives who left. \u201cBlue\u2019s workforce was going up and his net worth was going up, and there were a lot of things on his plate, like the climate fund that he wanted to do. Combined with his personal life \u2026 that gave Bob an opportunity to really turn Blue upside down. He was CEO, so Jeff gave him a lot of rope.\u201dThe people interviewed for this story said Bezos was content to let Smith run the company. And Smith, one former executive said, \u201cmade it real clear the only conduit to Jeff was him. And so there was no check and balance.\u201dWhen Bezos did come in on Wednesdays, the day he set aside for Blue Origin, the visits and their aftermath could be \u201cextremely disruptive,\u201d a former executive said. Engineers at the company would pitch him ideas, and he would say they were good ones. Then, armed with Bezos\u2019s tacit approval, they would try to make them reality.\u201cJeff may have liked the idea, but guess what? We didn\u2019t budget for it. It\u2019s not in the schedule. It\u2019s not in the design,\u201d the person said. \u201cHe just said he liked an idea.\u201dOne former machinist said he took Bezos up on his offer, made to the entire company, to approach with ideas to become more efficient. But after he pitched Bezos and returned to the factory floor, he said, \u201ctwo of my managers chewed me out and said I was going behind their backs.\u201dIn July, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon and transitioned to a role as executive chair. That month, he also flew to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. It was a profound moment for him, he said at the time, and he vowed to spend more of his time focused on Blue Origin.Over the past several months, he has and is also spending more of his own money to help the company compete, several people confirmed. He has been deeply involved in the fight over the NASA lunar lander contract that SpaceX won, those people said.\u201cHe\u2019s super jealous of SpaceX,\u201d said one industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. \u201cHe\u2019s really worried about them. That is very clear.\u201dOne of the former Blue Origin executives said that even though Blue Origin teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper on the lunar lander contract, it was no surprise that the company lost.\u201cWe can\u2019t manage ourselves,\u201d the person said. \u201cNot one of our programs is on cost and schedule. Yet you think we\u2019re going to manage Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper? It\u2019s just not going to happen.\u201dThe industry official said his advice for Bezos would be to \u201cstart over. You should be the CEO if you really want to do something, but you basically need a new executive team and a totally new culture.\u201dDavenport reported from Washington. Hamza Shaban contributed to this report. \u201cIt\u2019s condescending. It\u2019s demoralizing,\u201d said one former top executive of conditions prompting many to leave the company. Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space venture",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space venture (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6186",
        "date": "2021-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/11/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-delays-toxic-workplace/",
        "text": "SEATTLE \u2014 In 2019, a mid-level employee at Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin had grown fed up with the company, and as he left, he wrote a long memo that he sent to Bezos, chief executive Bob Smith and other senior leaders: \u201cOur current culture is toxic to our success and many can see it spreading throughout the company.\u201d The problems at the spaceflight company were \u201csystemic,\u201d according to the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post and verified by two former employees familiar with the matter, and \u201cthe loss of trust in Blue\u2019s leadership is common.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was one of a number of warnings to Blue Origin\u2019s leadership in recent years that the company\u2019s culture had become dysfunctional, resulting in low morale and high turnover, significant delays across several major programs and a failure to successfully compete with Elon Musk\u2019s venture SpaceX, current and former employees said.The new management\u2019s \u201cauthoritarian bro culture,\u201d as one former employee put it, affected how decisions were made and permeated the institution, translating into condescending, sometimes humiliating, comments and harassment toward some women and a stagnant top-down hierarchy that frustrated many employees.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs it quickly grew from a small start-up to a large corporation with nearly 4,000 employees, Blue Origin grappled with how to improve its culture. In 2019, the company fired its head of recruiting after employees complained of sexism. A consultant retained by Blue Origin conducted a review of the company\u2019s leadership, finding that the primary challenge was Smith\u2019s ineffective, micromanaging leadership style, said two former employees, including a top executive.Bezos, who recently stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.Blue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.This account is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former Blue Origin employees and industry officials with close ties to the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. The interviews and documents obtained by The Post reveal wide-ranging employee concerns about Smith\u2019s leadership style, a bureaucracy that hampered innovation, and a lack of intervention from Bezos, who employees said was not giving the company enough attention during a crucial period.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s bad,\u201d said one former top executive. \u201cI think it\u2019s a complete lack of trust. Leadership has not engendered any trust in the employee base.\u201dAnother said: \u201cThe C-suite is out of touch with the rank-and-file pretty severely. It\u2019s very dysfunctional. It\u2019s condescending. It\u2019s demoralizing, and what happens is we can\u2019t make progress and end up with huge delays.\u201dThe company\u2019s cultural issues came to light last month when Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin\u2019s employee communications, released an essay she said was written in conjunction with 20 other current and former Blue Origin employees. It said the company \u201cturns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201d The staffers were not identified in the essay, but three of them confirmed the allegations to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post, Mary Plunkett, Blue Origin\u2019s senior vice president of human resources, said the company takes \u201call claims seriously and we have no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. Where we substantiate allegations of misconduct under our anti-harassment, anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policy we take the appropriate action \u2014 up to and including termination of employment.\u201dBlue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., has an anonymous hotline that is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week for employees, \u201cwhere any claims of this nature are registered and then investigated.\u201d She said the company also encourages workers to contact human resources or senior leadership, ensuring that \u201cthese conversations are strictly confidential and we listen to any claims with empathy and concern.\u201dBezos and Smith declined to comment for this story. Shailesh Prakash, The Post\u2019s chief information officer who also sits on Blue Origin\u2019s advisory board, declined to comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Abrams\u2019s essay was posted last month, Smith wrote in an email to the company, \u201cIt is particularly difficult and painful, for me, to hear claims being levied that attempt to characterize our entire team in a way that doesn\u2019t align with the character and capability that I see at Blue Origin every day.\u201dAfter Blue Origin was notified that this story would publish soon, Bezos on Sunday night tweeted an image of Barron\u2019s cover story from 1999 that was critical of Amazon, calling it \u201cAmazon. Bomb.\u201d\u201cListen and be open, but don\u2019t let anybody tell you who you are,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cThis was just one of the many stories telling us all the ways we were going to fail. Today, Amazon is one of the world\u2019s most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn response, Musk tweeted an emoji of a second-place medal.Advertisement*Blue Origin, like many aerospace companies, has a male-dominated culture, and several current and former female employees said they faced condescending remarks and comments about their appearance.\u201cTwo friends tried to talk me out of going to Blue because of how toxic it was,\u201d one former employee said. There were \u201clots of comments on people\u2019s bodies and appearance,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a dispiriting, chaotic experience working there. That behavior was modeled and not held accountable.\u201d Younger men new to the company started to \u201cmirror\u201d this conduct, she added.She said she reported the incidents multiple times to human resources but nothing was done.Story continues below advertisementIn 2019, the company brought in the Perkins Coie law firm to investigate Walt McCleery, its vice president of recruiting, a longtime executive at the firm whose behavior had made several women uncomfortable. One former employee told The Post that in a meeting with an outside company, McCleery turned to the executives and said: \u201cI apologize for [her] being emotional. It must be her time of the month.\u201dAdvertisementMcCleery was terminated after the investigation, according to Blue Origin. In a brief interview with The Post last week, McCleery denied the allegations and said they were \u201cnot true as far as I\u2019m concerned.\u201dAnother top executive was coached by human resources on appropriate workplace behavior after he repeatedly referred to a group of female employees as \u201cmean girls,\u201d which continued even after they complained about it to management, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. (The comments ended eventually after counseling.)Story continues below advertisementThese company problems took many new employees by surprise. One former engineer said that she was kneeling at a co-worker\u2019s desk in 2016, while they went over engineering drawings together. She said her manager, an older man, walked by and said: \u201cYou\u2019ve only been working here two weeks. You don\u2019t have to get on your knees yet.\u201dAdvertisementThe comment didn\u2019t sink in immediately, the former employee said, partly because she expected Blue Origin to be a welcoming environment.\u201cI was naive and in denial, maybe,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I thought about it later that it was obvious.\u201dNot everyone says the company culture has grown toxic. One employee who works outside the main headquarters said she has found the culture and leadership welcoming and respectful. Blue Origin\u2019s human resources team took immediate action when she reported a claim of \u201chighly inappropriate behavior\u201d from another employee earlier this year, she said.Story continues below advertisementThe company started investigating right away, and the other employee was terminated, further confirming her confidence in the company. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt like I couldn\u2019t go to our leadership for support,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt like I couldn\u2019t go to HR with a problem.\u201dAdvertisementThe company said it has not had any inquiries from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (EEOC complaints are not made public unless the agency decides to file suit.) It also has not faced any lawsuits for harassment or hostile work environment. One senior manager said: \u201cA lot of us put a lot of time into creating safe spaces for employees to share experiences and mentor each other. \u2026 We, I think, do the right thing every time we hear about a complaint. And when the claims have merit, we fire people.\u201dQuiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flightThe company also has a diversity, equity and inclusion program, set up by Smith to help the company hire more women and minorities, and help support them once hired. It has nine groups designed to help specific populations, such as veterans and different racial groups, feel welcome. One, called \u201cNew Ride,\u201d is named for Sally Ride, the first female NASA astronaut to reach space, and is intended to help \u201ccreate an authentic, inclusive, and equitable culture at Blue where LGBT+ employees and allies are empowered to become the greatest, truest version of themselves \u2014 both professionally and personally,\u201d the company said.If there is anyone who can get the company back on track, one industry official said, it\u2019s Bezos. The company is his passion, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. And now that he\u2019s been to space and stepped down from Amazon, he\u2019ll remain focused on Blue Origin: \u201cI think Blue will be a phoenix here in a couple of years because Jeff will figure it out.\u201d*When Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, it was to make real a science-fiction fantasy and to fulfill a dream of having \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d For the first couple of years, it existed as a tiny start-up, more like a think tank than a space company, that would take a \u201cstep-by-step\u201d approach to achieving its goal. For years, Bezos appeared content to move slowly and deliberately, like its mascot, the tortoise.But in 2017, Bezos brought in Smith to be the company\u2019s first CEO, taking over from Rob Meyerson, the company\u2019s president, who had been running its day-to-day operations.The selection of Smith, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas and a master\u2019s degree in business from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took many by surprise, especially because he served as a top executive at Honeywell Aerospace, a massive conglomerate with a corporate culture far different from Blue Origin\u2019s small, intimate feel.\u201cWhen he was hired, everyone was asking, \u2018Who\u2019s Bob Smith?\u2019 Nobody knew who he was,\u201d one former Blue Origin executive said.Under his leadership, the company has grown significantly, with facilities in Florida and Alabama, as it has pursued a number of ambitious projects, from building a massive rocket, called New Glenn, to a spacecraft that could land on the moon and even space stations.Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back.The problems with the corporate culture have led to problems with performance, according to current and former employees, manifesting in the growing gap between SpaceX and Blue Origin. The latest defeat came in April, when Blue Origin lost a major NASA contract to build a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon after bidding twice as much as SpaceX. It also lost out on a lucrative round of Pentagon launch contracts in 2019 that went to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.Blue Origin has yet to fly its New Glenn rocket, the massive vehicle Bezos originally vowed would reach orbit by last year. It has also suffered delays in the development of Blue Origin\u2019s BE-4 engine, which would be used, too, in the new rocket under development by ULA. Because that rocket is to be used to fly national security satellites, the delay has caused concern in the Pentagon and among some members of Congress.In late 2018, Blue Origin hired a consulting firm to assess why SpaceX was so successful and what it could do to catch up, according to multiple people. The resulting report led to a frank discussion among Blue Origin\u2019s leadership regarding problems in the company\u2019s culture, and work ethic, its lack of major customers and its presence on social media.SpaceX \u201cexpects and gets more from their employees,\u201d one executive concluded, according to minutes of a meeting to discuss the report, which were obtained by The Post. Another executive said Blue Origin \u201cis kind of lazy compared to SpaceX.\u201d Musk\u2019s venture had won several major government contracts by bidding low, another said. One executive noted: \u201cWe need an anchor [U.S. government] tenant to get us to profitability.\u201dThere have been some notable successes, however. The company completed its first human spaceflight mission in July, with Bezos onboard, a testament to the safety of the spacecraft. On Wednesday morning, it plans another spaceflight mission, this time with actor William Shatner, best known for playing Captain Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, Bezos\u2019s favorite childhood TV show.Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)In another memo obtained by The Post, an employee complained about the company moving ahead with a rocket test launch last year at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. \u201cI cannot in good conscience stand with an organization willing to consider putting its private mission ahead of the safety of the general community,\u201d the person wrote. The issue was first reported by the Verge. A Blue Origin spokesperson told the publication at the time: \u201cWe hold safety as our highest value. Period.\u201dSmith and the executives he brought in, many from legacy aerospace companies, sat in an executive suite in a new office building, isolated from the rest of the staff. While that is not unusual for many large corporations, it was off-putting for many employees at Blue Origin who had been used to their leaders sitting and mingling among them.\u201cThat wasn\u2019t appreciated,\u201d one former executive said. \u201cIt was an I\u2019m-above-you message.\u201dThis apparent aloofness persisted as the new management settled in. At a company town hall meeting, employees submitted a list of questions for Smith about the future of the company and his leadership style.When he didn\u2019t address any of them, one employee sarcastically submitted a softball, \u201cWhat\u2019s your favorite kind of ice cream?\u201dThat one, Smith took. \u201cSorbet,\u201d he said, according to multiple people at the meeting.At one point, employees said they rebelled after the company announced it would end its long-standing practice of distributing free mission patches after launches, a cut made because the company was \u201ctrying to become profitable,\u201d Abrams told The Post she was instructed to tell employees.Since the days of NASA\u2019s Apollo moon program, mission patches have been a way to commemorate spaceflight missions, and Blue Origin\u2019s employees were angry, wondering how much could they really cost. Eventually the executives relented and agreed to distribute the patches, but the incident became known as \u201cpatchgate.\u201dConcerned about the company\u2019s leadership, the head of human resources brought in an outside management consultant, who interviewed Smith and the members of his team in 2019 and concluded that Smith\u2019s micromanaging style was often ineffective, according to a former senior executive and confirmed by another person familiar with the matter.Smith bristled at the report, which was first reported by CNBC, and refused to meet on the subject again.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contractThe troubles at Blue Origin happened to correspond with a period of personal upheaval for Bezos. \u201cJeff got divorced and he was distracted,\u201d said one of the top former executives who left. \u201cBlue\u2019s workforce was going up and his net worth was going up, and there were a lot of things on his plate, like the climate fund that he wanted to do. Combined with his personal life \u2026 that gave Bob an opportunity to really turn Blue upside down. He was CEO, so Jeff gave him a lot of rope.\u201dThe people interviewed for this story said Bezos was content to let Smith run the company. And Smith, one former executive said, \u201cmade it real clear the only conduit to Jeff was him. And so there was no check and balance.\u201dWhen Bezos did come in on Wednesdays, the day he set aside for Blue Origin, the visits and their aftermath could be \u201cextremely disruptive,\u201d a former executive said. Engineers at the company would pitch him ideas, and he would say they were good ones. Then, armed with Bezos\u2019s tacit approval, they would try to make them reality.\u201cJeff may have liked the idea, but guess what? We didn\u2019t budget for it. It\u2019s not in the schedule. It\u2019s not in the design,\u201d the person said. \u201cHe just said he liked an idea.\u201dOne former machinist said he took Bezos up on his offer, made to the entire company, to approach with ideas to become more efficient. But after he pitched Bezos and returned to the factory floor, he said, \u201ctwo of my managers chewed me out and said I was going behind their backs.\u201dIn July, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon and transitioned to a role as executive chair. That month, he also flew to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. It was a profound moment for him, he said at the time, and he vowed to spend more of his time focused on Blue Origin.Over the past several months, he has and is also spending more of his own money to help the company compete, several people confirmed. He has been deeply involved in the fight over the NASA lunar lander contract that SpaceX won, those people said.\u201cHe\u2019s super jealous of SpaceX,\u201d said one industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. \u201cHe\u2019s really worried about them. That is very clear.\u201dOne of the former Blue Origin executives said that even though Blue Origin teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper on the lunar lander contract, it was no surprise that the company lost.\u201cWe can\u2019t manage ourselves,\u201d the person said. \u201cNot one of our programs is on cost and schedule. Yet you think we\u2019re going to manage Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper? It\u2019s just not going to happen.\u201dThe industry official said his advice for Bezos would be to \u201cstart over. You should be the CEO if you really want to do something, but you basically need a new executive team and a totally new culture.\u201dDavenport reported from Washington. Hamza Shaban contributed to this report. \u201cIt\u2019s condescending. It\u2019s demoralizing,\u201d said one former top executive of conditions prompting many to leave the company. Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space venture",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space venture (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6187",
        "date": "2021-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/11/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-delays-toxic-workplace/",
        "text": "SEATTLE \u2014 In 2019, a mid-level employee at Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin had grown fed up with the company, and as he left, he wrote a long memo that he sent to Bezos, chief executive Bob Smith and other senior leaders: \u201cOur current culture is toxic to our success and many can see it spreading throughout the company.\u201d The problems at the spaceflight company were \u201csystemic,\u201d according to the memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post and verified by two former employees familiar with the matter, and \u201cthe loss of trust in Blue\u2019s leadership is common.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was one of a number of warnings to Blue Origin\u2019s leadership in recent years that the company\u2019s culture had become dysfunctional, resulting in low morale and high turnover, significant delays across several major programs and a failure to successfully compete with Elon Musk\u2019s venture SpaceX, current and former employees said.The new management\u2019s \u201cauthoritarian bro culture,\u201d as one former employee put it, affected how decisions were made and permeated the institution, translating into condescending, sometimes humiliating, comments and harassment toward some women and a stagnant top-down hierarchy that frustrated many employees.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs it quickly grew from a small start-up to a large corporation with nearly 4,000 employees, Blue Origin grappled with how to improve its culture. In 2019, the company fired its head of recruiting after employees complained of sexism. A consultant retained by Blue Origin conducted a review of the company\u2019s leadership, finding that the primary challenge was Smith\u2019s ineffective, micromanaging leadership style, said two former employees, including a top executive.Bezos, who recently stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.Blue Origin fired a senior executive, citing inappropriate behavior. Current and former employees say it\u2019s part of the company\u2019s toxic culture.This account is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former Blue Origin employees and industry officials with close ties to the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. The interviews and documents obtained by The Post reveal wide-ranging employee concerns about Smith\u2019s leadership style, a bureaucracy that hampered innovation, and a lack of intervention from Bezos, who employees said was not giving the company enough attention during a crucial period.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s bad,\u201d said one former top executive. \u201cI think it\u2019s a complete lack of trust. Leadership has not engendered any trust in the employee base.\u201dAnother said: \u201cThe C-suite is out of touch with the rank-and-file pretty severely. It\u2019s very dysfunctional. It\u2019s condescending. It\u2019s demoralizing, and what happens is we can\u2019t make progress and end up with huge delays.\u201dThe company\u2019s cultural issues came to light last month when Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin\u2019s employee communications, released an essay she said was written in conjunction with 20 other current and former Blue Origin employees. It said the company \u201cturns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.\u201d The staffers were not identified in the essay, but three of them confirmed the allegations to The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post, Mary Plunkett, Blue Origin\u2019s senior vice president of human resources, said the company takes \u201call claims seriously and we have no tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind. Where we substantiate allegations of misconduct under our anti-harassment, anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policy we take the appropriate action \u2014 up to and including termination of employment.\u201dBlue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., has an anonymous hotline that is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week for employees, \u201cwhere any claims of this nature are registered and then investigated.\u201d She said the company also encourages workers to contact human resources or senior leadership, ensuring that \u201cthese conversations are strictly confidential and we listen to any claims with empathy and concern.\u201dBezos and Smith declined to comment for this story. Shailesh Prakash, The Post\u2019s chief information officer who also sits on Blue Origin\u2019s advisory board, declined to comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen Abrams\u2019s essay was posted last month, Smith wrote in an email to the company, \u201cIt is particularly difficult and painful, for me, to hear claims being levied that attempt to characterize our entire team in a way that doesn\u2019t align with the character and capability that I see at Blue Origin every day.\u201dAfter Blue Origin was notified that this story would publish soon, Bezos on Sunday night tweeted an image of Barron\u2019s cover story from 1999 that was critical of Amazon, calling it \u201cAmazon. Bomb.\u201d\u201cListen and be open, but don\u2019t let anybody tell you who you are,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cThis was just one of the many stories telling us all the ways we were going to fail. Today, Amazon is one of the world\u2019s most successful companies and has revolutionized two entirely different industries.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn response, Musk tweeted an emoji of a second-place medal.Advertisement*Blue Origin, like many aerospace companies, has a male-dominated culture, and several current and former female employees said they faced condescending remarks and comments about their appearance.\u201cTwo friends tried to talk me out of going to Blue because of how toxic it was,\u201d one former employee said. There were \u201clots of comments on people\u2019s bodies and appearance,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a dispiriting, chaotic experience working there. That behavior was modeled and not held accountable.\u201d Younger men new to the company started to \u201cmirror\u201d this conduct, she added.She said she reported the incidents multiple times to human resources but nothing was done.Story continues below advertisementIn 2019, the company brought in the Perkins Coie law firm to investigate Walt McCleery, its vice president of recruiting, a longtime executive at the firm whose behavior had made several women uncomfortable. One former employee told The Post that in a meeting with an outside company, McCleery turned to the executives and said: \u201cI apologize for [her] being emotional. It must be her time of the month.\u201dAdvertisementMcCleery was terminated after the investigation, according to Blue Origin. In a brief interview with The Post last week, McCleery denied the allegations and said they were \u201cnot true as far as I\u2019m concerned.\u201dAnother top executive was coached by human resources on appropriate workplace behavior after he repeatedly referred to a group of female employees as \u201cmean girls,\u201d which continued even after they complained about it to management, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. (The comments ended eventually after counseling.)Story continues below advertisementThese company problems took many new employees by surprise. One former engineer said that she was kneeling at a co-worker\u2019s desk in 2016, while they went over engineering drawings together. She said her manager, an older man, walked by and said: \u201cYou\u2019ve only been working here two weeks. You don\u2019t have to get on your knees yet.\u201dAdvertisementThe comment didn\u2019t sink in immediately, the former employee said, partly because she expected Blue Origin to be a welcoming environment.\u201cI was naive and in denial, maybe,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I thought about it later that it was obvious.\u201dNot everyone says the company culture has grown toxic. One employee who works outside the main headquarters said she has found the culture and leadership welcoming and respectful. Blue Origin\u2019s human resources team took immediate action when she reported a claim of \u201chighly inappropriate behavior\u201d from another employee earlier this year, she said.Story continues below advertisementThe company started investigating right away, and the other employee was terminated, further confirming her confidence in the company. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt like I couldn\u2019t go to our leadership for support,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve never felt like I couldn\u2019t go to HR with a problem.\u201dAdvertisementThe company said it has not had any inquiries from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (EEOC complaints are not made public unless the agency decides to file suit.) It also has not faced any lawsuits for harassment or hostile work environment. One senior manager said: \u201cA lot of us put a lot of time into creating safe spaces for employees to share experiences and mentor each other. \u2026 We, I think, do the right thing every time we hear about a complaint. And when the claims have merit, we fire people.\u201dQuiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flightThe company also has a diversity, equity and inclusion program, set up by Smith to help the company hire more women and minorities, and help support them once hired. It has nine groups designed to help specific populations, such as veterans and different racial groups, feel welcome. One, called \u201cNew Ride,\u201d is named for Sally Ride, the first female NASA astronaut to reach space, and is intended to help \u201ccreate an authentic, inclusive, and equitable culture at Blue where LGBT+ employees and allies are empowered to become the greatest, truest version of themselves \u2014 both professionally and personally,\u201d the company said.If there is anyone who can get the company back on track, one industry official said, it\u2019s Bezos. The company is his passion, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. And now that he\u2019s been to space and stepped down from Amazon, he\u2019ll remain focused on Blue Origin: \u201cI think Blue will be a phoenix here in a couple of years because Jeff will figure it out.\u201d*When Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, it was to make real a science-fiction fantasy and to fulfill a dream of having \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d For the first couple of years, it existed as a tiny start-up, more like a think tank than a space company, that would take a \u201cstep-by-step\u201d approach to achieving its goal. For years, Bezos appeared content to move slowly and deliberately, like its mascot, the tortoise.But in 2017, Bezos brought in Smith to be the company\u2019s first CEO, taking over from Rob Meyerson, the company\u2019s president, who had been running its day-to-day operations.The selection of Smith, who has a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas and a master\u2019s degree in business from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took many by surprise, especially because he served as a top executive at Honeywell Aerospace, a massive conglomerate with a corporate culture far different from Blue Origin\u2019s small, intimate feel.\u201cWhen he was hired, everyone was asking, \u2018Who\u2019s Bob Smith?\u2019 Nobody knew who he was,\u201d one former Blue Origin executive said.Under his leadership, the company has grown significantly, with facilities in Florida and Alabama, as it has pursued a number of ambitious projects, from building a massive rocket, called New Glenn, to a spacecraft that could land on the moon and even space stations.Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back.The problems with the corporate culture have led to problems with performance, according to current and former employees, manifesting in the growing gap between SpaceX and Blue Origin. The latest defeat came in April, when Blue Origin lost a major NASA contract to build a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon after bidding twice as much as SpaceX. It also lost out on a lucrative round of Pentagon launch contracts in 2019 that went to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.Blue Origin has yet to fly its New Glenn rocket, the massive vehicle Bezos originally vowed would reach orbit by last year. It has also suffered delays in the development of Blue Origin\u2019s BE-4 engine, which would be used, too, in the new rocket under development by ULA. Because that rocket is to be used to fly national security satellites, the delay has caused concern in the Pentagon and among some members of Congress.In late 2018, Blue Origin hired a consulting firm to assess why SpaceX was so successful and what it could do to catch up, according to multiple people. The resulting report led to a frank discussion among Blue Origin\u2019s leadership regarding problems in the company\u2019s culture, and work ethic, its lack of major customers and its presence on social media.SpaceX \u201cexpects and gets more from their employees,\u201d one executive concluded, according to minutes of a meeting to discuss the report, which were obtained by The Post. Another executive said Blue Origin \u201cis kind of lazy compared to SpaceX.\u201d Musk\u2019s venture had won several major government contracts by bidding low, another said. One executive noted: \u201cWe need an anchor [U.S. government] tenant to get us to profitability.\u201dThere have been some notable successes, however. The company completed its first human spaceflight mission in July, with Bezos onboard, a testament to the safety of the spacecraft. On Wednesday morning, it plans another spaceflight mission, this time with actor William Shatner, best known for playing Captain Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, Bezos\u2019s favorite childhood TV show.Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)In another memo obtained by The Post, an employee complained about the company moving ahead with a rocket test launch last year at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. \u201cI cannot in good conscience stand with an organization willing to consider putting its private mission ahead of the safety of the general community,\u201d the person wrote. The issue was first reported by the Verge. A Blue Origin spokesperson told the publication at the time: \u201cWe hold safety as our highest value. Period.\u201dSmith and the executives he brought in, many from legacy aerospace companies, sat in an executive suite in a new office building, isolated from the rest of the staff. While that is not unusual for many large corporations, it was off-putting for many employees at Blue Origin who had been used to their leaders sitting and mingling among them.\u201cThat wasn\u2019t appreciated,\u201d one former executive said. \u201cIt was an I\u2019m-above-you message.\u201dThis apparent aloofness persisted as the new management settled in. At a company town hall meeting, employees submitted a list of questions for Smith about the future of the company and his leadership style.When he didn\u2019t address any of them, one employee sarcastically submitted a softball, \u201cWhat\u2019s your favorite kind of ice cream?\u201dThat one, Smith took. \u201cSorbet,\u201d he said, according to multiple people at the meeting.At one point, employees said they rebelled after the company announced it would end its long-standing practice of distributing free mission patches after launches, a cut made because the company was \u201ctrying to become profitable,\u201d Abrams told The Post she was instructed to tell employees.Since the days of NASA\u2019s Apollo moon program, mission patches have been a way to commemorate spaceflight missions, and Blue Origin\u2019s employees were angry, wondering how much could they really cost. Eventually the executives relented and agreed to distribute the patches, but the incident became known as \u201cpatchgate.\u201dConcerned about the company\u2019s leadership, the head of human resources brought in an outside management consultant, who interviewed Smith and the members of his team in 2019 and concluded that Smith\u2019s micromanaging style was often ineffective, according to a former senior executive and confirmed by another person familiar with the matter.Smith bristled at the report, which was first reported by CNBC, and refused to meet on the subject again.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contractThe troubles at Blue Origin happened to correspond with a period of personal upheaval for Bezos. \u201cJeff got divorced and he was distracted,\u201d said one of the top former executives who left. \u201cBlue\u2019s workforce was going up and his net worth was going up, and there were a lot of things on his plate, like the climate fund that he wanted to do. Combined with his personal life \u2026 that gave Bob an opportunity to really turn Blue upside down. He was CEO, so Jeff gave him a lot of rope.\u201dThe people interviewed for this story said Bezos was content to let Smith run the company. And Smith, one former executive said, \u201cmade it real clear the only conduit to Jeff was him. And so there was no check and balance.\u201dWhen Bezos did come in on Wednesdays, the day he set aside for Blue Origin, the visits and their aftermath could be \u201cextremely disruptive,\u201d a former executive said. Engineers at the company would pitch him ideas, and he would say they were good ones. Then, armed with Bezos\u2019s tacit approval, they would try to make them reality.\u201cJeff may have liked the idea, but guess what? We didn\u2019t budget for it. It\u2019s not in the schedule. It\u2019s not in the design,\u201d the person said. \u201cHe just said he liked an idea.\u201dOne former machinist said he took Bezos up on his offer, made to the entire company, to approach with ideas to become more efficient. But after he pitched Bezos and returned to the factory floor, he said, \u201ctwo of my managers chewed me out and said I was going behind their backs.\u201dIn July, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon and transitioned to a role as executive chair. That month, he also flew to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight mission. It was a profound moment for him, he said at the time, and he vowed to spend more of his time focused on Blue Origin.Over the past several months, he has and is also spending more of his own money to help the company compete, several people confirmed. He has been deeply involved in the fight over the NASA lunar lander contract that SpaceX won, those people said.\u201cHe\u2019s super jealous of SpaceX,\u201d said one industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. \u201cHe\u2019s really worried about them. That is very clear.\u201dOne of the former Blue Origin executives said that even though Blue Origin teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper on the lunar lander contract, it was no surprise that the company lost.\u201cWe can\u2019t manage ourselves,\u201d the person said. \u201cNot one of our programs is on cost and schedule. Yet you think we\u2019re going to manage Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper? It\u2019s just not going to happen.\u201dThe industry official said his advice for Bezos would be to \u201cstart over. You should be the CEO if you really want to do something, but you basically need a new executive team and a totally new culture.\u201dDavenport reported from Washington. Hamza Shaban contributed to this report. \u201cIt\u2019s condescending. It\u2019s demoralizing,\u201d said one former top executive of conditions prompting many to leave the company. Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional \u2018bro culture\u2019 led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos\u2019s space venture",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian thruster misfire led to a \u2018tug of war\u2019 at the International Space Station as crew sought to regain control (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6188",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/30/boeing-starliner-launch-rescheduled/",
        "text": "Russian officials on Friday blamed a \u201csoftware failure\u201d for the unexpected chain of events that on Thursday sent the International Space Station into a spin and forced the postponement of Boeing\u2019s long-awaited relaunch of its uncrewed Starliner space capsule.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe earliest time now for the relaunch, a repeat of a failed December 2019 test mission, is 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, but officials said they were still studying the impact of Thursday\u2019s events before setting a time. The soccer-field-sized space station had completed about one-eighth of a turn on its axis when ground controllers regained control. NASA officials said they believed the unexpected movement had not physically damaged the station.Story continues below advertisementA Russian statement quoting Vladimir Solovyov, the flight director of the space station\u2019s Russian segment, called what took place \u201csome modification of the orientation of the complex as a whole.\u201d Joel Montalbano, leader of NASA\u2019s International Space Station program, said the mishap didn\u2019t put anyone\u2019s life in danger.AdvertisementStill, one expert not involved in the mission said what happened \u201cwasn\u2019t a benign event.\u201d\u201cOn some level, they\u2019re in danger all the time they\u2019re in space,\u201d said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He said that a 45-degree reorientation shouldn\u2019t be a safety issue since the space station is designed to rotate 180 degrees. But other factors could be concerning.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not the rolling around that\u2019s the problem, it\u2019s the speed at which you do it,\u201d McDowell said. \u201cAnd when you\u2019re trying to compensate for thrusters on one end by applying forces at a different end, you\u2019re putting bending forces on the joints. It wasn\u2019t a benign event.\u201dNASA officials at the space station\u2019s control center in Houston said the disruption occurred shortly after a Russian lab module, Nauka, had docked with the station early Thursday. The module unexpectedly fired its thrusters, which shifted the multi-ton station 45 degrees outside its typical orientation.AdvertisementPersonnel aboard the space station launched other thrusters as a counterbalance. This led to a \u201ctug of war\u201d between the ISS, a soccer-field-sized operation, and Nauka, a 42-foot research facility. The incident caused ground controllers to lose communication with astronauts onboard twice, once for four minutes and again for seven minutes. And the turmoil continued until Nauka used up its fuel supplies. The space station was out of position for 47 minutes, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementThe Russian statement gave this account: \u201cDue to a short-term software failure, a direct command was mistakenly implemented to turn on the module\u2019s engines for withdrawal, which led to some modification of the orientation of the complex as a whole.\u201d\u201cAt the moment, the station is in its normal orientation, all the ISS and the multipurpose laboratory module systems are operating normally,\u201d the Russian statement said Friday. \u201cThe crew is now busy balancing the pressure in the Nauka module. This is a rather lengthy procedure.\u201dBoeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launchAdvertisementThe fallout from the thruster debacle threw Boeing\u2019s uncrewed Starliner launch off schedule.GAO denies Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s lunar lander award to SpaceXThe uncrewed demonstration flight would mark a redo attempt by Boeing to kick-start a commercial astronaut business.Story continues below advertisementDelaying the mission gives the space station team time to \u201censure the station will be ready for Starliner\u2019s arrival,\u201d NASA said in a statement Friday.Starliner\u2019s road to the ISS has been a $5 billion, multiyear journey plagued more recently by software issues, a management shuffling, a failed first launch attempt and a NASA probe. Nauka\u2019s journey to the space station was riddled with 10 years of setbacks, including funding issues and technical problems.If the coast is clear on Tuesday, Starliner will travel more than 200 miles and arrive at the space station within 24 hours. It will come back to Earth after a few days carrying cargo for NASA. If successful, the feat will prove to the space agency that Boeing\u2019s spacecraft is fit to ferry astronauts back and forth.Boeing and NASA say the capsule and its corresponding rocket \u201care in a safe, flight-ready configuration and do not require any near-term servicing.\u201dBoeing hopes to proceed with crewed missions by the end of the year. An unusual occurrence at the International Space Station sparked by the newly-docked Russian Nauka aircraft caused Boeing and NASA to reschedule Starliner's relaunch. Russian thruster misfire led to a \u2018tug of war\u2019 at the International Space Station as crew sought to regain control",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian thruster misfire led to a \u2018tug of war\u2019 at the International Space Station as crew sought to regain control (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6189",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/30/boeing-starliner-launch-rescheduled/",
        "text": "Russian officials on Friday blamed a \u201csoftware failure\u201d for the unexpected chain of events that on Thursday sent the International Space Station into a spin and forced the postponement of Boeing\u2019s long-awaited relaunch of its uncrewed Starliner space capsule.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe earliest time now for the relaunch, a repeat of a failed December 2019 test mission, is 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, but officials said they were still studying the impact of Thursday\u2019s events before setting a time. The soccer-field-sized space station had completed about one-eighth of a turn on its axis when ground controllers regained control. NASA officials said they believed the unexpected movement had not physically damaged the station.Story continues below advertisementA Russian statement quoting Vladimir Solovyov, the flight director of the space station\u2019s Russian segment, called what took place \u201csome modification of the orientation of the complex as a whole.\u201d Joel Montalbano, leader of NASA\u2019s International Space Station program, said the mishap didn\u2019t put anyone\u2019s life in danger.AdvertisementStill, one expert not involved in the mission said what happened \u201cwasn\u2019t a benign event.\u201d\u201cOn some level, they\u2019re in danger all the time they\u2019re in space,\u201d said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He said that a 45-degree reorientation shouldn\u2019t be a safety issue since the space station is designed to rotate 180 degrees. But other factors could be concerning.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not the rolling around that\u2019s the problem, it\u2019s the speed at which you do it,\u201d McDowell said. \u201cAnd when you\u2019re trying to compensate for thrusters on one end by applying forces at a different end, you\u2019re putting bending forces on the joints. It wasn\u2019t a benign event.\u201dNASA officials at the space station\u2019s control center in Houston said the disruption occurred shortly after a Russian lab module, Nauka, had docked with the station early Thursday. The module unexpectedly fired its thrusters, which shifted the multi-ton station 45 degrees outside its typical orientation.AdvertisementPersonnel aboard the space station launched other thrusters as a counterbalance. This led to a \u201ctug of war\u201d between the ISS, a soccer-field-sized operation, and Nauka, a 42-foot research facility. The incident caused ground controllers to lose communication with astronauts onboard twice, once for four minutes and again for seven minutes. And the turmoil continued until Nauka used up its fuel supplies. The space station was out of position for 47 minutes, NASA said.Story continues below advertisementThe Russian statement gave this account: \u201cDue to a short-term software failure, a direct command was mistakenly implemented to turn on the module\u2019s engines for withdrawal, which led to some modification of the orientation of the complex as a whole.\u201d\u201cAt the moment, the station is in its normal orientation, all the ISS and the multipurpose laboratory module systems are operating normally,\u201d the Russian statement said Friday. \u201cThe crew is now busy balancing the pressure in the Nauka module. This is a rather lengthy procedure.\u201dBoeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launchAdvertisementThe fallout from the thruster debacle threw Boeing\u2019s uncrewed Starliner launch off schedule.GAO denies Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s lunar lander award to SpaceXThe uncrewed demonstration flight would mark a redo attempt by Boeing to kick-start a commercial astronaut business.Story continues below advertisementDelaying the mission gives the space station team time to \u201censure the station will be ready for Starliner\u2019s arrival,\u201d NASA said in a statement Friday.Starliner\u2019s road to the ISS has been a $5 billion, multiyear journey plagued more recently by software issues, a management shuffling, a failed first launch attempt and a NASA probe. Nauka\u2019s journey to the space station was riddled with 10 years of setbacks, including funding issues and technical problems.If the coast is clear on Tuesday, Starliner will travel more than 200 miles and arrive at the space station within 24 hours. It will come back to Earth after a few days carrying cargo for NASA. If successful, the feat will prove to the space agency that Boeing\u2019s spacecraft is fit to ferry astronauts back and forth.Boeing and NASA say the capsule and its corresponding rocket \u201care in a safe, flight-ready configuration and do not require any near-term servicing.\u201dBoeing hopes to proceed with crewed missions by the end of the year. An unusual occurrence at the International Space Station sparked by the newly-docked Russian Nauka aircraft caused Boeing and NASA to reschedule Starliner's relaunch. Russian thruster misfire led to a \u2018tug of war\u2019 at the International Space Station as crew sought to regain control",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6190",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/18/nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "President Biden is expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be the next administrator of NASA, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.If approved by the Senate, Nelson would be the second consecutive NASA chief to come from Congress and would give NASA a leader with close ties to the Oval Office. Nelson was a key Biden supporter during the presidential campaign and has a long personal relationship with the president. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement could come as early as Friday, according to the people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the official announcement. The White House is strongly considering Pamela Melroy, a former NASA astronaut and a retired Air Force colonel, as deputy administrator, but that decision is not yet final, officials said.The challenges former Sen. Bill Nelson will face if confirmed as NASA administratorNelson flew in the space shuttle in 1986 and oversaw NASA\u2019s space programs while in Congress. He is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about space and NASA, an agency he has long cherished. But the choice is disappointing to many who were hopeful that the next NASA administrator would be a woman, the first to serve in the agency\u2019s top position.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson, a Democrat from Florida, has long been an advocate for space \u2014 a rarity among members of Congress. NASA and its contractors have been an important source of jobs in Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center is located. Huge crowds have flocked to the state for decades to watch launches.While in the Senate, Nelson was a staunch supporter of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the troubled heavy-lift rocket that Congress mandated after the Obama administration canceled a previous rocket and spacecraft program, called Constellation, that was way over budget and behind schedule. Like its predecessor, the SLS rocket is years behind schedule and overbudget and has yet to fly.That stance has made proponents of the commercialization of space wary at a time when NASA has embraced the expanding capabilities of the private sector. NASA relies on SpaceX, for example, to fly its astronauts to and from the International Space Station under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program and is looking to the private sector to help its quest to return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Nelson, 78, is a well-known champion for NASA, many were hoping for a new generation of leadership to carry the agency into a new era. \u201cIt\u2019s time for a female administrator,\u201d tweeted Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program manager who was the flight director for 40 missions. \u201cPlenty of qualified candidates.\u201dBut since then the commercial sector has gone a long way toward changing the minds of officials who were once skeptical, and people close to Nelson have said he is enthusiastic about the promise of the commercial industry.The nomination comes at a critical time for NASA. It recently landed the Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is pushing to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission landed there in 1972. A key test of the SLS system is scheduled Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration supports the effort, known as Artemis, continuing a Trump administration program that Nelson would now oversee.As a key member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees NASA, Nelson took aim at President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, arguing that Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, was not qualified in part because of his political ties.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent, and is a skilled executive,\u201d he said during Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing. \u201cThis committee has heard me say many times: NASA is not political. The leader of NASA should not be political. The leader of NASA should not be bipartisan; the leader of NASA should be nonpartisan.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Bridenstine was confirmed by a narrow party-line vote, he worked diligently with Democrats and Republicans alike. And he appointed Nelson to a NASA advisory committee, calling him a \u201ctrue champion for human spaceflight.\u201dIn 1986, as NASA was gearing up to fly civilians in the space shuttle \u2014 first a teacher, then a journalist \u2014 Nelson, then a member of the House, was able to fly first, joining the crew of NASA astronauts. Among them was Charlie Bolden, whom Nelson later pushed to become administrator, rejecting other names floated by the Obama administration.Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, said the choice of Nelson was \u201can ironic turn of events considering he blocked President Obama\u2019s top nominees for the job in 2009 and then led the congressional effort that dismantled the Obama-Biden strategy and proposed budget, created the Space Launch System, reinstated Orion and cut funding for technology and commercial crew.\u201dShe added that Nelson will need to understand why the SLS rocket \u201chas cost so much more than projected.\u201d But she said he \u201chas already had more influence on NASA than anyone in recent memory, so he has plenty of experience and should be able to hit the ground running.\u201dGiven his deep ties in Congress and his long interest in space, Nelson is expected to be confirmed. Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, is a friend of President Biden, and he has long been an advocate for space exploration. Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6191",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/18/nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "President Biden is expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be the next administrator of NASA, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.If approved by the Senate, Nelson would be the second consecutive NASA chief to come from Congress and would give NASA a leader with close ties to the Oval Office. Nelson was a key Biden supporter during the presidential campaign and has a long personal relationship with the president. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement could come as early as Friday, according to the people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the official announcement. The White House is strongly considering Pamela Melroy, a former NASA astronaut and a retired Air Force colonel, as deputy administrator, but that decision is not yet final, officials said.The challenges former Sen. Bill Nelson will face if confirmed as NASA administratorNelson flew in the space shuttle in 1986 and oversaw NASA\u2019s space programs while in Congress. He is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about space and NASA, an agency he has long cherished. But the choice is disappointing to many who were hopeful that the next NASA administrator would be a woman, the first to serve in the agency\u2019s top position.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson, a Democrat from Florida, has long been an advocate for space \u2014 a rarity among members of Congress. NASA and its contractors have been an important source of jobs in Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center is located. Huge crowds have flocked to the state for decades to watch launches.While in the Senate, Nelson was a staunch supporter of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the troubled heavy-lift rocket that Congress mandated after the Obama administration canceled a previous rocket and spacecraft program, called Constellation, that was way over budget and behind schedule. Like its predecessor, the SLS rocket is years behind schedule and overbudget and has yet to fly.That stance has made proponents of the commercialization of space wary at a time when NASA has embraced the expanding capabilities of the private sector. NASA relies on SpaceX, for example, to fly its astronauts to and from the International Space Station under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program and is looking to the private sector to help its quest to return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Nelson, 78, is a well-known champion for NASA, many were hoping for a new generation of leadership to carry the agency into a new era. \u201cIt\u2019s time for a female administrator,\u201d tweeted Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program manager who was the flight director for 40 missions. \u201cPlenty of qualified candidates.\u201dBut since then the commercial sector has gone a long way toward changing the minds of officials who were once skeptical, and people close to Nelson have said he is enthusiastic about the promise of the commercial industry.The nomination comes at a critical time for NASA. It recently landed the Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is pushing to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission landed there in 1972. A key test of the SLS system is scheduled Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration supports the effort, known as Artemis, continuing a Trump administration program that Nelson would now oversee.As a key member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees NASA, Nelson took aim at President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, arguing that Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, was not qualified in part because of his political ties.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent, and is a skilled executive,\u201d he said during Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing. \u201cThis committee has heard me say many times: NASA is not political. The leader of NASA should not be political. The leader of NASA should not be bipartisan; the leader of NASA should be nonpartisan.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Bridenstine was confirmed by a narrow party-line vote, he worked diligently with Democrats and Republicans alike. And he appointed Nelson to a NASA advisory committee, calling him a \u201ctrue champion for human spaceflight.\u201dIn 1986, as NASA was gearing up to fly civilians in the space shuttle \u2014 first a teacher, then a journalist \u2014 Nelson, then a member of the House, was able to fly first, joining the crew of NASA astronauts. Among them was Charlie Bolden, whom Nelson later pushed to become administrator, rejecting other names floated by the Obama administration.Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, said the choice of Nelson was \u201can ironic turn of events considering he blocked President Obama\u2019s top nominees for the job in 2009 and then led the congressional effort that dismantled the Obama-Biden strategy and proposed budget, created the Space Launch System, reinstated Orion and cut funding for technology and commercial crew.\u201dShe added that Nelson will need to understand why the SLS rocket \u201chas cost so much more than projected.\u201d But she said he \u201chas already had more influence on NASA than anyone in recent memory, so he has plenty of experience and should be able to hit the ground running.\u201dGiven his deep ties in Congress and his long interest in space, Nelson is expected to be confirmed. Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, is a friend of President Biden, and he has long been an advocate for space exploration. Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6192",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/18/nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "President Biden is expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be the next administrator of NASA, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.If approved by the Senate, Nelson would be the second consecutive NASA chief to come from Congress and would give NASA a leader with close ties to the Oval Office. Nelson was a key Biden supporter during the presidential campaign and has a long personal relationship with the president. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement could come as early as Friday, according to the people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the official announcement. The White House is strongly considering Pamela Melroy, a former NASA astronaut and a retired Air Force colonel, as deputy administrator, but that decision is not yet final, officials said.The challenges former Sen. Bill Nelson will face if confirmed as NASA administratorNelson flew in the space shuttle in 1986 and oversaw NASA\u2019s space programs while in Congress. He is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about space and NASA, an agency he has long cherished. But the choice is disappointing to many who were hopeful that the next NASA administrator would be a woman, the first to serve in the agency\u2019s top position.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson, a Democrat from Florida, has long been an advocate for space \u2014 a rarity among members of Congress. NASA and its contractors have been an important source of jobs in Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center is located. Huge crowds have flocked to the state for decades to watch launches.While in the Senate, Nelson was a staunch supporter of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the troubled heavy-lift rocket that Congress mandated after the Obama administration canceled a previous rocket and spacecraft program, called Constellation, that was way over budget and behind schedule. Like its predecessor, the SLS rocket is years behind schedule and overbudget and has yet to fly.That stance has made proponents of the commercialization of space wary at a time when NASA has embraced the expanding capabilities of the private sector. NASA relies on SpaceX, for example, to fly its astronauts to and from the International Space Station under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program and is looking to the private sector to help its quest to return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Nelson, 78, is a well-known champion for NASA, many were hoping for a new generation of leadership to carry the agency into a new era. \u201cIt\u2019s time for a female administrator,\u201d tweeted Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program manager who was the flight director for 40 missions. \u201cPlenty of qualified candidates.\u201dBut since then the commercial sector has gone a long way toward changing the minds of officials who were once skeptical, and people close to Nelson have said he is enthusiastic about the promise of the commercial industry.The nomination comes at a critical time for NASA. It recently landed the Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is pushing to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission landed there in 1972. A key test of the SLS system is scheduled Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration supports the effort, known as Artemis, continuing a Trump administration program that Nelson would now oversee.As a key member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees NASA, Nelson took aim at President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, arguing that Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, was not qualified in part because of his political ties.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent, and is a skilled executive,\u201d he said during Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing. \u201cThis committee has heard me say many times: NASA is not political. The leader of NASA should not be political. The leader of NASA should not be bipartisan; the leader of NASA should be nonpartisan.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Bridenstine was confirmed by a narrow party-line vote, he worked diligently with Democrats and Republicans alike. And he appointed Nelson to a NASA advisory committee, calling him a \u201ctrue champion for human spaceflight.\u201dIn 1986, as NASA was gearing up to fly civilians in the space shuttle \u2014 first a teacher, then a journalist \u2014 Nelson, then a member of the House, was able to fly first, joining the crew of NASA astronauts. Among them was Charlie Bolden, whom Nelson later pushed to become administrator, rejecting other names floated by the Obama administration.Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, said the choice of Nelson was \u201can ironic turn of events considering he blocked President Obama\u2019s top nominees for the job in 2009 and then led the congressional effort that dismantled the Obama-Biden strategy and proposed budget, created the Space Launch System, reinstated Orion and cut funding for technology and commercial crew.\u201dShe added that Nelson will need to understand why the SLS rocket \u201chas cost so much more than projected.\u201d But she said he \u201chas already had more influence on NASA than anyone in recent memory, so he has plenty of experience and should be able to hit the ground running.\u201dGiven his deep ties in Congress and his long interest in space, Nelson is expected to be confirmed. Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, is a friend of President Biden, and he has long been an advocate for space exploration. Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6193",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/18/nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "President Biden is expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be the next administrator of NASA, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.If approved by the Senate, Nelson would be the second consecutive NASA chief to come from Congress and would give NASA a leader with close ties to the Oval Office. Nelson was a key Biden supporter during the presidential campaign and has a long personal relationship with the president. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement could come as early as Friday, according to the people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the official announcement. The White House is strongly considering Pamela Melroy, a former NASA astronaut and a retired Air Force colonel, as deputy administrator, but that decision is not yet final, officials said.The challenges former Sen. Bill Nelson will face if confirmed as NASA administratorNelson flew in the space shuttle in 1986 and oversaw NASA\u2019s space programs while in Congress. He is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about space and NASA, an agency he has long cherished. But the choice is disappointing to many who were hopeful that the next NASA administrator would be a woman, the first to serve in the agency\u2019s top position.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson, a Democrat from Florida, has long been an advocate for space \u2014 a rarity among members of Congress. NASA and its contractors have been an important source of jobs in Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center is located. Huge crowds have flocked to the state for decades to watch launches.While in the Senate, Nelson was a staunch supporter of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the troubled heavy-lift rocket that Congress mandated after the Obama administration canceled a previous rocket and spacecraft program, called Constellation, that was way over budget and behind schedule. Like its predecessor, the SLS rocket is years behind schedule and overbudget and has yet to fly.That stance has made proponents of the commercialization of space wary at a time when NASA has embraced the expanding capabilities of the private sector. NASA relies on SpaceX, for example, to fly its astronauts to and from the International Space Station under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program and is looking to the private sector to help its quest to return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Nelson, 78, is a well-known champion for NASA, many were hoping for a new generation of leadership to carry the agency into a new era. \u201cIt\u2019s time for a female administrator,\u201d tweeted Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program manager who was the flight director for 40 missions. \u201cPlenty of qualified candidates.\u201dBut since then the commercial sector has gone a long way toward changing the minds of officials who were once skeptical, and people close to Nelson have said he is enthusiastic about the promise of the commercial industry.The nomination comes at a critical time for NASA. It recently landed the Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is pushing to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission landed there in 1972. A key test of the SLS system is scheduled Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration supports the effort, known as Artemis, continuing a Trump administration program that Nelson would now oversee.As a key member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees NASA, Nelson took aim at President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, arguing that Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, was not qualified in part because of his political ties.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent, and is a skilled executive,\u201d he said during Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing. \u201cThis committee has heard me say many times: NASA is not political. The leader of NASA should not be political. The leader of NASA should not be bipartisan; the leader of NASA should be nonpartisan.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Bridenstine was confirmed by a narrow party-line vote, he worked diligently with Democrats and Republicans alike. And he appointed Nelson to a NASA advisory committee, calling him a \u201ctrue champion for human spaceflight.\u201dIn 1986, as NASA was gearing up to fly civilians in the space shuttle \u2014 first a teacher, then a journalist \u2014 Nelson, then a member of the House, was able to fly first, joining the crew of NASA astronauts. Among them was Charlie Bolden, whom Nelson later pushed to become administrator, rejecting other names floated by the Obama administration.Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, said the choice of Nelson was \u201can ironic turn of events considering he blocked President Obama\u2019s top nominees for the job in 2009 and then led the congressional effort that dismantled the Obama-Biden strategy and proposed budget, created the Space Launch System, reinstated Orion and cut funding for technology and commercial crew.\u201dShe added that Nelson will need to understand why the SLS rocket \u201chas cost so much more than projected.\u201d But she said he \u201chas already had more influence on NASA than anyone in recent memory, so he has plenty of experience and should be able to hit the ground running.\u201dGiven his deep ties in Congress and his long interest in space, Nelson is expected to be confirmed. Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, is a friend of President Biden, and he has long been an advocate for space exploration. Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6194",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/18/nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "President Biden is expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be the next administrator of NASA, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.If approved by the Senate, Nelson would be the second consecutive NASA chief to come from Congress and would give NASA a leader with close ties to the Oval Office. Nelson was a key Biden supporter during the presidential campaign and has a long personal relationship with the president. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement could come as early as Friday, according to the people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of the official announcement. The White House is strongly considering Pamela Melroy, a former NASA astronaut and a retired Air Force colonel, as deputy administrator, but that decision is not yet final, officials said.The challenges former Sen. Bill Nelson will face if confirmed as NASA administratorNelson flew in the space shuttle in 1986 and oversaw NASA\u2019s space programs while in Congress. He is knowledgeable and enthusiastic about space and NASA, an agency he has long cherished. But the choice is disappointing to many who were hopeful that the next NASA administrator would be a woman, the first to serve in the agency\u2019s top position.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson, a Democrat from Florida, has long been an advocate for space \u2014 a rarity among members of Congress. NASA and its contractors have been an important source of jobs in Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center is located. Huge crowds have flocked to the state for decades to watch launches.While in the Senate, Nelson was a staunch supporter of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the troubled heavy-lift rocket that Congress mandated after the Obama administration canceled a previous rocket and spacecraft program, called Constellation, that was way over budget and behind schedule. Like its predecessor, the SLS rocket is years behind schedule and overbudget and has yet to fly.That stance has made proponents of the commercialization of space wary at a time when NASA has embraced the expanding capabilities of the private sector. NASA relies on SpaceX, for example, to fly its astronauts to and from the International Space Station under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program and is looking to the private sector to help its quest to return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Nelson, 78, is a well-known champion for NASA, many were hoping for a new generation of leadership to carry the agency into a new era. \u201cIt\u2019s time for a female administrator,\u201d tweeted Wayne Hale, a former NASA space shuttle program manager who was the flight director for 40 missions. \u201cPlenty of qualified candidates.\u201dBut since then the commercial sector has gone a long way toward changing the minds of officials who were once skeptical, and people close to Nelson have said he is enthusiastic about the promise of the commercial industry.The nomination comes at a critical time for NASA. It recently landed the Perseverance rover on Mars, and it is pushing to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission landed there in 1972. A key test of the SLS system is scheduled Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration supports the effort, known as Artemis, continuing a Trump administration program that Nelson would now oversee.As a key member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which oversees NASA, Nelson took aim at President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, arguing that Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, was not qualified in part because of his political ties.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent, and is a skilled executive,\u201d he said during Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing. \u201cThis committee has heard me say many times: NASA is not political. The leader of NASA should not be political. The leader of NASA should not be bipartisan; the leader of NASA should be nonpartisan.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter Bridenstine was confirmed by a narrow party-line vote, he worked diligently with Democrats and Republicans alike. And he appointed Nelson to a NASA advisory committee, calling him a \u201ctrue champion for human spaceflight.\u201dIn 1986, as NASA was gearing up to fly civilians in the space shuttle \u2014 first a teacher, then a journalist \u2014 Nelson, then a member of the House, was able to fly first, joining the crew of NASA astronauts. Among them was Charlie Bolden, whom Nelson later pushed to become administrator, rejecting other names floated by the Obama administration.Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, said the choice of Nelson was \u201can ironic turn of events considering he blocked President Obama\u2019s top nominees for the job in 2009 and then led the congressional effort that dismantled the Obama-Biden strategy and proposed budget, created the Space Launch System, reinstated Orion and cut funding for technology and commercial crew.\u201dShe added that Nelson will need to understand why the SLS rocket \u201chas cost so much more than projected.\u201d But she said he \u201chas already had more influence on NASA than anyone in recent memory, so he has plenty of experience and should be able to hit the ground running.\u201dGiven his deep ties in Congress and his long interest in space, Nelson is expected to be confirmed. Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, is a friend of President Biden, and he has long been an advocate for space exploration. Biden expected to nominate former senator Bill Nelson to be NASA administrator",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6195",
        "date": "2020-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/spacex-boeing-rivalry-launch/",
        "text": "One was a venerable giant with a legacy in aerospace that stretched back more than 100 years and a role in every major moment in NASA\u2019s history. The other was a relative upstart that in its early days was derided as little more than a delusional billionaire\u2019s fantasy and that critics said was building its rockets out of wax and rubber bands. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNo one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. Some members of Congress even wondered why NASA would bother awarding contracts to two companies to build capsules to fly astronauts to the International Space Station under NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. Just let Boeing do it.But from all appearances, SpaceX has won the competition. The Wednesday launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard would not only be the first crewed launch to orbit by a private corporation but also a major upset in a new kind of space race. During the Apollo era, NASA was driven to the moon by a Cold War space race with the Soviet Union, but today companies are reprising the roles of nations in competitions that NASA hopes will help it recapture some of the achievement of a bygone era. Assuming the launch is a success, it will mark the end of the era in which only government-owned spacecraft achieved such feats and represent another major step in the privatization of space. That SpaceX is making that transition and not Boeing emphasizes the dramatic nature of the change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPublicly, the companies downplay any tension. But the competition has grown bitter over the years, particularly as SpaceX went from a rich man\u2019s folly no one took seriously to a disrupter that transformed the aerospace industry.In the beginning, SpaceX was largely dismissed as a long shot that would never achieve much. \u201cOne industry veteran told me, \u2018You know their rockets are put together with rubber bands and sealing wax,\u2019 \u201d recalled Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator who pushed the agency to outsource human spaceflight to the private sector. \u201d \u2018It\u2019s not real. It won\u2019t fly.\u2019 \u201dWhen the contracts for the Commercial Crew Program were awarded in 2014, Boeing received the lion\u2019s share, slightly more than 60 percent of the $6.8 billion NASA awarded, getting $4.2 billion compared to the $2.6 billion SpaceX received for the same amount of work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPerhaps that was understandable. SpaceX was considered a risky bet, a wild card whose brash impatience and embrace of failure clashed with the agency\u2019s more conservative bent. Top executives urged SpaceX employees to be \u201cmouthy,\u201d to disregard traditional chains of command, a trait embodied by Musk that made it seem like a rebellious teenager compared to Boeing\u2019s father figure of the aerospace industry.\u201cThe Hill and big industry and most of the leadership at NASA thought the answer was give the money to Boeing and let them do it,\u201d Garver said. \u201cChange is hard in a bureaucracy. And Eisenhower had it right with the military industrial base \u2014 they are not going to let it go easily. And human spaceflight is the holy grail.\u201dBut when it came to the task of flying astronauts, SpaceX perhaps had an edge. Since 2012, it has been flying cargo and supplies to the space station, giving it lots of practice in hoisting spacecraft to orbit and having them meet up and dock with the station. Its Falcon 9 rocket now has a lot of heritage, flying missions not just for NASA but for the commercial sector.It also was perhaps better suited to perform under the strict limitations of NASA\u2019s \u201cfirm-fixed price\u201d contract, one that forces contractors to be efficient. That\u2019s long been one of SpaceX\u2019s trademarks; it reuses not only its rockets but in the early days it repurposed all sorts of materials, even a 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank that an employee found scrapped at an old abandoned Cape Canaveral launch site.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe had to be super scrappy,\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post. \u201cIf we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years, we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: Those were our two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, make them work.\u201dBoeing, by contrast, was used to the cost-plus contracts often used on big government programs, such as its Space Launch System rocket, that allowed for greater expenditures and longer timelines.Still, building a spacecraft designed to fly humans is an enormous challenge, and both companies suffered setbacks and delays that pushed back the original launch date from 2017. SpaceX had two Falcon 9 rockets explode, and it struggled with the parachute system that slows the spacecraft down as it flies back to Earth. Last year, its Dragon capsule was completely destroyed during a test of its emergency abort system. Since then, however, SpaceX has discovered the root causes of all problems and fixed them, NASA says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing, meanwhile, has continued to struggle. Late last year, its test flight without any astronauts onboard its Starliner spacecraft went terribly awry from the moment it reached orbit. The spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers were off by 11 hours, making the autonomous spacecraft think it was in a different part of the mission. Controllers on the ground had trouble communicating with it.Later, the company discovered another software glitch \u2014 one that would have affected the separation of the crew module from the service module. As a result, Boeing will re-fly the test mission, a flight it says would probably happen toward the end of this year, meaning its first launch with crew wouldn\u2019t happen until 2021.Inside the company, officials were embarrassed by the setback \u2014 another bit of bad news that followed the fatal crashes of two 737 Max airplanes. It also triggered a role reversal. Boeing, once the trusted partner, was now under renewed scrutiny by NASA, which said it had been lax in its oversight of the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA also said that after initially giving Boeing a pass, the agency would perform a full safety review of the company, as it did with SpaceX after Musk was seen taking a puff of marijuana on a podcast streamed on the Internet.One industry official said executives inside Boeing \u201ccan\u2019t accept\u201d SpaceX is flying people first. \u201cPeople are annoyed by Elon \u2014 how does this guy who smokes pot beat us?\u201d said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person was not authorized to speak publicly. \u201cWe have a lot of humble pie to eat here.\u201dMusk once told The Post that SpaceX was able to rise because the big aerospace companies didn\u2019t think it would ever amount to anything.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey screwed themselves because they were just arrogant and complacent,\u201d he said. \u201cLook, Boeing doesn\u2019t get out of bed for less than $1 billion.\u201dBoeing\u2019s response was just as combative: \u201cAt the turn of the 21st Century, before Musk entered the space business, Boeing was building the International Space Station with NASA, where we\u2019ve kept astronauts safe and continuously on orbit. \u2026 While others talk about aspirations and hopes, we actually do things in space and will deliver on our commitment to America\u2019s journey to Mars. That\u2019s what we get out of bed for.\u201dFlights to the International Space Station weren\u2019t the only place where Musk took on Boeing. In 2014, he also took on United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, that had held a virtual monopoly on Pentagon launch contracts for nearly a decade.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk sued the Air Force for the right to compete for contracts, a risky move that annoyed some in the Pentagon. Musk also made a stink over the fact that the ULA used a rocket engine manufactured by Russia.\u201cLockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they\u2019ve certainly tried to stomp on us,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cI think we have a shot at prevailing. But we\u2019re certainly a small up-and-comer going against giants.\u201dUltimately, though, he settled with the Air Force, was able to compete and since then has won a handful of Pentagon launches.More recently, Boeing and SpaceX sparred over the Commercial Crew Program when a NASA inspector general report found that the average cost of Boeing\u2019s Starliner would be $90 million per astronaut, compared with $55 million a seat on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis doesn\u2019t seem right,\u201d Musk wrote on Twitter, adding: \u201cMeaning not fair that Boeing gets so much more for the same thing.\u201dBoeing pushed back hard against the report, saying, \u201cIt is a fact that our competitor received a contract years earlier to develop a cargo vehicle that later served as the basis for their crew offering. Boeing did all the development under the Commercial Crew contract under a more compressed, shorter schedule.\u201dRecently, when NASA announced it had awarded a contract for $1.79 billion to Aerojet Rocketdyne for 18 RS-25 engines for the core stage of the massive Space Launch System rocket Boeing is building for NASA, Musk lamented the cost.\u201cSLS makes me feel sad,\u201d he tweeted.Last month, SpaceX notched another victory when it was chosen to be among the three companies awarded preliminary contracts to develop a spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon.Boeing was not among them.But when Boeing\u2019s Starliner was in trouble after it reached space late last year, Musk\u2019s tone was markedly different. Having suffered through several failed missions, he added a touch of empathy.\u201cOrbit is hard,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cBest wishes for landing & swift recovery to next mission.\u201d Wednesday's scheduled launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard would be not only the first crewed launch to orbit by a private corporation, but also a major upset in a new kind of space race. No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6196",
        "date": "2020-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/spacex-boeing-rivalry-launch/",
        "text": "One was a venerable giant with a legacy in aerospace that stretched back more than 100 years and a role in every major moment in NASA\u2019s history. The other was a relative upstart that in its early days was derided as little more than a delusional billionaire\u2019s fantasy and that critics said was building its rockets out of wax and rubber bands. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNo one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. Some members of Congress even wondered why NASA would bother awarding contracts to two companies to build capsules to fly astronauts to the International Space Station under NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. Just let Boeing do it.But from all appearances, SpaceX has won the competition. The Wednesday launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard would not only be the first crewed launch to orbit by a private corporation but also a major upset in a new kind of space race. During the Apollo era, NASA was driven to the moon by a Cold War space race with the Soviet Union, but today companies are reprising the roles of nations in competitions that NASA hopes will help it recapture some of the achievement of a bygone era. Assuming the launch is a success, it will mark the end of the era in which only government-owned spacecraft achieved such feats and represent another major step in the privatization of space. That SpaceX is making that transition and not Boeing emphasizes the dramatic nature of the change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPublicly, the companies downplay any tension. But the competition has grown bitter over the years, particularly as SpaceX went from a rich man\u2019s folly no one took seriously to a disrupter that transformed the aerospace industry.In the beginning, SpaceX was largely dismissed as a long shot that would never achieve much. \u201cOne industry veteran told me, \u2018You know their rockets are put together with rubber bands and sealing wax,\u2019 \u201d recalled Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator who pushed the agency to outsource human spaceflight to the private sector. \u201d \u2018It\u2019s not real. It won\u2019t fly.\u2019 \u201dWhen the contracts for the Commercial Crew Program were awarded in 2014, Boeing received the lion\u2019s share, slightly more than 60 percent of the $6.8 billion NASA awarded, getting $4.2 billion compared to the $2.6 billion SpaceX received for the same amount of work.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPerhaps that was understandable. SpaceX was considered a risky bet, a wild card whose brash impatience and embrace of failure clashed with the agency\u2019s more conservative bent. Top executives urged SpaceX employees to be \u201cmouthy,\u201d to disregard traditional chains of command, a trait embodied by Musk that made it seem like a rebellious teenager compared to Boeing\u2019s father figure of the aerospace industry.\u201cThe Hill and big industry and most of the leadership at NASA thought the answer was give the money to Boeing and let them do it,\u201d Garver said. \u201cChange is hard in a bureaucracy. And Eisenhower had it right with the military industrial base \u2014 they are not going to let it go easily. And human spaceflight is the holy grail.\u201dBut when it came to the task of flying astronauts, SpaceX perhaps had an edge. Since 2012, it has been flying cargo and supplies to the space station, giving it lots of practice in hoisting spacecraft to orbit and having them meet up and dock with the station. Its Falcon 9 rocket now has a lot of heritage, flying missions not just for NASA but for the commercial sector.It also was perhaps better suited to perform under the strict limitations of NASA\u2019s \u201cfirm-fixed price\u201d contract, one that forces contractors to be efficient. That\u2019s long been one of SpaceX\u2019s trademarks; it reuses not only its rockets but in the early days it repurposed all sorts of materials, even a 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank that an employee found scrapped at an old abandoned Cape Canaveral launch site.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe had to be super scrappy,\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post. \u201cIf we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years, we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: Those were our two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, make them work.\u201dBoeing, by contrast, was used to the cost-plus contracts often used on big government programs, such as its Space Launch System rocket, that allowed for greater expenditures and longer timelines.Still, building a spacecraft designed to fly humans is an enormous challenge, and both companies suffered setbacks and delays that pushed back the original launch date from 2017. SpaceX had two Falcon 9 rockets explode, and it struggled with the parachute system that slows the spacecraft down as it flies back to Earth. Last year, its Dragon capsule was completely destroyed during a test of its emergency abort system. Since then, however, SpaceX has discovered the root causes of all problems and fixed them, NASA says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing, meanwhile, has continued to struggle. Late last year, its test flight without any astronauts onboard its Starliner spacecraft went terribly awry from the moment it reached orbit. The spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers were off by 11 hours, making the autonomous spacecraft think it was in a different part of the mission. Controllers on the ground had trouble communicating with it.Later, the company discovered another software glitch \u2014 one that would have affected the separation of the crew module from the service module. As a result, Boeing will re-fly the test mission, a flight it says would probably happen toward the end of this year, meaning its first launch with crew wouldn\u2019t happen until 2021.Inside the company, officials were embarrassed by the setback \u2014 another bit of bad news that followed the fatal crashes of two 737 Max airplanes. It also triggered a role reversal. Boeing, once the trusted partner, was now under renewed scrutiny by NASA, which said it had been lax in its oversight of the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA also said that after initially giving Boeing a pass, the agency would perform a full safety review of the company, as it did with SpaceX after Musk was seen taking a puff of marijuana on a podcast streamed on the Internet.One industry official said executives inside Boeing \u201ccan\u2019t accept\u201d SpaceX is flying people first. \u201cPeople are annoyed by Elon \u2014 how does this guy who smokes pot beat us?\u201d said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person was not authorized to speak publicly. \u201cWe have a lot of humble pie to eat here.\u201dMusk once told The Post that SpaceX was able to rise because the big aerospace companies didn\u2019t think it would ever amount to anything.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey screwed themselves because they were just arrogant and complacent,\u201d he said. \u201cLook, Boeing doesn\u2019t get out of bed for less than $1 billion.\u201dBoeing\u2019s response was just as combative: \u201cAt the turn of the 21st Century, before Musk entered the space business, Boeing was building the International Space Station with NASA, where we\u2019ve kept astronauts safe and continuously on orbit. \u2026 While others talk about aspirations and hopes, we actually do things in space and will deliver on our commitment to America\u2019s journey to Mars. That\u2019s what we get out of bed for.\u201dFlights to the International Space Station weren\u2019t the only place where Musk took on Boeing. In 2014, he also took on United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, that had held a virtual monopoly on Pentagon launch contracts for nearly a decade.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk sued the Air Force for the right to compete for contracts, a risky move that annoyed some in the Pentagon. Musk also made a stink over the fact that the ULA used a rocket engine manufactured by Russia.\u201cLockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they\u2019ve certainly tried to stomp on us,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cI think we have a shot at prevailing. But we\u2019re certainly a small up-and-comer going against giants.\u201dUltimately, though, he settled with the Air Force, was able to compete and since then has won a handful of Pentagon launches.More recently, Boeing and SpaceX sparred over the Commercial Crew Program when a NASA inspector general report found that the average cost of Boeing\u2019s Starliner would be $90 million per astronaut, compared with $55 million a seat on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis doesn\u2019t seem right,\u201d Musk wrote on Twitter, adding: \u201cMeaning not fair that Boeing gets so much more for the same thing.\u201dBoeing pushed back hard against the report, saying, \u201cIt is a fact that our competitor received a contract years earlier to develop a cargo vehicle that later served as the basis for their crew offering. Boeing did all the development under the Commercial Crew contract under a more compressed, shorter schedule.\u201dRecently, when NASA announced it had awarded a contract for $1.79 billion to Aerojet Rocketdyne for 18 RS-25 engines for the core stage of the massive Space Launch System rocket Boeing is building for NASA, Musk lamented the cost.\u201cSLS makes me feel sad,\u201d he tweeted.Last month, SpaceX notched another victory when it was chosen to be among the three companies awarded preliminary contracts to develop a spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon.Boeing was not among them.But when Boeing\u2019s Starliner was in trouble after it reached space late last year, Musk\u2019s tone was markedly different. Having suffered through several failed missions, he added a touch of empathy.\u201cOrbit is hard,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cBest wishes for landing & swift recovery to next mission.\u201d Wednesday's scheduled launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard would be not only the first crewed launch to orbit by a private corporation, but also a major upset in a new kind of space race. No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6197",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/02/spacex-private-space-plans/",
        "text": "One day, Elon Musk has said, he would like human spaceflight to be as routine as commercial airline travel, with regular flights through the atmosphere ferrying astronauts around the solar system.That day is not here yet \u2014 not even close.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after Sunday\u2019s flawless return of four astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the company has made space travel look easy, at least for one flight, and even had some fun with it. After NASA Crew-1 astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover along with Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi splashed down in a pinpoint landing at 2:56 a.m., just south of Panama City, SpaceX\u2019s ground controller said: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth. For those of you enrolled in our frequent-flier program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo which Hopkins replied: \u201cWe\u2019ll take those miles. Are they transferrable?\u201dAdvertisementNot yet.But SpaceX will take a significant step forward in human spaceflight with its next mission, flying what would be the first all-civilian crew in a flight scheduled for September that would orbit Earth for a few days. Called Inspiration4, the flight is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, an accomplished jet pilot, but by no means a professional astronaut.SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of MexicoNor are the other members of the crew: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant; Sian Proctor, a teacher and communicator; and Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. Isaacman set up the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and held what amounted to a sweepstakes competition for two of the seats.Story continues below advertisementWhen NASA decided to outsource human spaceflight missions to the space station years ago under its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, it had hoped that the missions would become successful enough that ordinary citizens would one day be able to fly.Advertisement\u201cThis was really our goal when we set up commercial crew,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate, said in a briefing early Sunday. \u201cHonestly, we\u2019re very excited to see it kind of taking off.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX senior adviser for flight reliability, said Sunday\u2019s splashdown gives the company confidence that it could fly civilians with some regularity.\u201cI think going forward we\u2019re ready for this important step,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re ready for the first private astronaut mission. I think the first mission in particular is a very special mission.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s not the only one on the books.After the Inspiration4 flight, SpaceX is planning another flight of NASA astronauts that would also include Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany, in October. Then, in January, it would keep the pace going with another launch of civilians in a mission that this time would go to the space station.AdvertisementThe flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is working to build a commercial space station. It is being led by Axiom Vice President Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut. Joining him on the mission to spend about a week on the space station is a trio of billionaires who are paying $55 million each for the trip.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationDespite the successful splashdown Sunday, NASA and SpaceX can\u2019t get complacent or ahead of themselves, Lueders said. Spaceflight may get romanticized in popular culture, but in reality, it remains a very dangerous and risky endeavor that requires an enormous amount of work and diligence.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s touchdown was the completion of SpaceX\u2019s first full-duration mission. And although it has now flown two sets of astronauts to the space station \u2014 and returned them safely \u2014 it still has a lot to prove.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re still at the beginning steps of continuing to make this look easy,\u201d she said. \u201cBut this is only our first full operational mission. So we need to keep having missions look like this. \u2026 But it is very exciting that we\u2019re starting to lay in the foundations for these key capabilities.\u201dSpaceX also recently won a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to develop the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon \u2014 an award that is being challenged by the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementBut before it looks ahead to that, SpaceX was content Sunday to revel in the successful splashdown.The capsule undocked from the space station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, then completed a series of milestones that officials said were picture-perfect, such as firing its engines to plunge the spacecraft into the atmosphere and jettisoning its trunk to expose the heat shield, which protected the astronauts against temperatures that reached 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementA set of smaller drogue parachutes deployed to slow and stabilize the vehicle as it fell through the atmosphere, and the four massive main chutes unfurled before the soft touchdown.SpaceX was able to get the Dragon spacecraft out of the water and onto the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes. And the crew was able to exit the vehicle less than an hour after splashing down in what NASA and SpaceX called a flawless flight.\u201cIt looked more like a racecar pit stop than anything else,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cEverybody was at the right spot and did the right thing. And then, obviously, the weather was great.\u201dcorrectionA previous version of this article misspelled the names of Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Tom Marshburn. This version has been corrected. SpaceX's next mission involves sending private citizens to orbit in a step toward space tourism. With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6198",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/02/spacex-private-space-plans/",
        "text": "One day, Elon Musk has said, he would like human spaceflight to be as routine as commercial airline travel, with regular flights through the atmosphere ferrying astronauts around the solar system.That day is not here yet \u2014 not even close.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after Sunday\u2019s flawless return of four astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the company has made space travel look easy, at least for one flight, and even had some fun with it. After NASA Crew-1 astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover along with Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi splashed down in a pinpoint landing at 2:56 a.m., just south of Panama City, SpaceX\u2019s ground controller said: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth. For those of you enrolled in our frequent-flier program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo which Hopkins replied: \u201cWe\u2019ll take those miles. Are they transferrable?\u201dAdvertisementNot yet.But SpaceX will take a significant step forward in human spaceflight with its next mission, flying what would be the first all-civilian crew in a flight scheduled for September that would orbit Earth for a few days. Called Inspiration4, the flight is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, an accomplished jet pilot, but by no means a professional astronaut.SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of MexicoNor are the other members of the crew: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant; Sian Proctor, a teacher and communicator; and Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. Isaacman set up the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and held what amounted to a sweepstakes competition for two of the seats.Story continues below advertisementWhen NASA decided to outsource human spaceflight missions to the space station years ago under its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, it had hoped that the missions would become successful enough that ordinary citizens would one day be able to fly.Advertisement\u201cThis was really our goal when we set up commercial crew,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate, said in a briefing early Sunday. \u201cHonestly, we\u2019re very excited to see it kind of taking off.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX senior adviser for flight reliability, said Sunday\u2019s splashdown gives the company confidence that it could fly civilians with some regularity.\u201cI think going forward we\u2019re ready for this important step,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re ready for the first private astronaut mission. I think the first mission in particular is a very special mission.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s not the only one on the books.After the Inspiration4 flight, SpaceX is planning another flight of NASA astronauts that would also include Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany, in October. Then, in January, it would keep the pace going with another launch of civilians in a mission that this time would go to the space station.AdvertisementThe flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is working to build a commercial space station. It is being led by Axiom Vice President Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut. Joining him on the mission to spend about a week on the space station is a trio of billionaires who are paying $55 million each for the trip.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationDespite the successful splashdown Sunday, NASA and SpaceX can\u2019t get complacent or ahead of themselves, Lueders said. Spaceflight may get romanticized in popular culture, but in reality, it remains a very dangerous and risky endeavor that requires an enormous amount of work and diligence.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s touchdown was the completion of SpaceX\u2019s first full-duration mission. And although it has now flown two sets of astronauts to the space station \u2014 and returned them safely \u2014 it still has a lot to prove.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re still at the beginning steps of continuing to make this look easy,\u201d she said. \u201cBut this is only our first full operational mission. So we need to keep having missions look like this. \u2026 But it is very exciting that we\u2019re starting to lay in the foundations for these key capabilities.\u201dSpaceX also recently won a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to develop the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon \u2014 an award that is being challenged by the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementBut before it looks ahead to that, SpaceX was content Sunday to revel in the successful splashdown.The capsule undocked from the space station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, then completed a series of milestones that officials said were picture-perfect, such as firing its engines to plunge the spacecraft into the atmosphere and jettisoning its trunk to expose the heat shield, which protected the astronauts against temperatures that reached 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementA set of smaller drogue parachutes deployed to slow and stabilize the vehicle as it fell through the atmosphere, and the four massive main chutes unfurled before the soft touchdown.SpaceX was able to get the Dragon spacecraft out of the water and onto the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes. And the crew was able to exit the vehicle less than an hour after splashing down in what NASA and SpaceX called a flawless flight.\u201cIt looked more like a racecar pit stop than anything else,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cEverybody was at the right spot and did the right thing. And then, obviously, the weather was great.\u201dcorrectionA previous version of this article misspelled the names of Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Tom Marshburn. This version has been corrected. SpaceX's next mission involves sending private citizens to orbit in a step toward space tourism. With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6199",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/02/spacex-private-space-plans/",
        "text": "One day, Elon Musk has said, he would like human spaceflight to be as routine as commercial airline travel, with regular flights through the atmosphere ferrying astronauts around the solar system.That day is not here yet \u2014 not even close.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after Sunday\u2019s flawless return of four astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the company has made space travel look easy, at least for one flight, and even had some fun with it. After NASA Crew-1 astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover along with Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi splashed down in a pinpoint landing at 2:56 a.m., just south of Panama City, SpaceX\u2019s ground controller said: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth. For those of you enrolled in our frequent-flier program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo which Hopkins replied: \u201cWe\u2019ll take those miles. Are they transferrable?\u201dAdvertisementNot yet.But SpaceX will take a significant step forward in human spaceflight with its next mission, flying what would be the first all-civilian crew in a flight scheduled for September that would orbit Earth for a few days. Called Inspiration4, the flight is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, an accomplished jet pilot, but by no means a professional astronaut.SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of MexicoNor are the other members of the crew: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant; Sian Proctor, a teacher and communicator; and Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. Isaacman set up the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and held what amounted to a sweepstakes competition for two of the seats.Story continues below advertisementWhen NASA decided to outsource human spaceflight missions to the space station years ago under its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, it had hoped that the missions would become successful enough that ordinary citizens would one day be able to fly.Advertisement\u201cThis was really our goal when we set up commercial crew,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate, said in a briefing early Sunday. \u201cHonestly, we\u2019re very excited to see it kind of taking off.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX senior adviser for flight reliability, said Sunday\u2019s splashdown gives the company confidence that it could fly civilians with some regularity.\u201cI think going forward we\u2019re ready for this important step,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re ready for the first private astronaut mission. I think the first mission in particular is a very special mission.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s not the only one on the books.After the Inspiration4 flight, SpaceX is planning another flight of NASA astronauts that would also include Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany, in October. Then, in January, it would keep the pace going with another launch of civilians in a mission that this time would go to the space station.AdvertisementThe flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is working to build a commercial space station. It is being led by Axiom Vice President Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut. Joining him on the mission to spend about a week on the space station is a trio of billionaires who are paying $55 million each for the trip.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationDespite the successful splashdown Sunday, NASA and SpaceX can\u2019t get complacent or ahead of themselves, Lueders said. Spaceflight may get romanticized in popular culture, but in reality, it remains a very dangerous and risky endeavor that requires an enormous amount of work and diligence.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s touchdown was the completion of SpaceX\u2019s first full-duration mission. And although it has now flown two sets of astronauts to the space station \u2014 and returned them safely \u2014 it still has a lot to prove.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re still at the beginning steps of continuing to make this look easy,\u201d she said. \u201cBut this is only our first full operational mission. So we need to keep having missions look like this. \u2026 But it is very exciting that we\u2019re starting to lay in the foundations for these key capabilities.\u201dSpaceX also recently won a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to develop the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon \u2014 an award that is being challenged by the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementBut before it looks ahead to that, SpaceX was content Sunday to revel in the successful splashdown.The capsule undocked from the space station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, then completed a series of milestones that officials said were picture-perfect, such as firing its engines to plunge the spacecraft into the atmosphere and jettisoning its trunk to expose the heat shield, which protected the astronauts against temperatures that reached 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementA set of smaller drogue parachutes deployed to slow and stabilize the vehicle as it fell through the atmosphere, and the four massive main chutes unfurled before the soft touchdown.SpaceX was able to get the Dragon spacecraft out of the water and onto the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes. And the crew was able to exit the vehicle less than an hour after splashing down in what NASA and SpaceX called a flawless flight.\u201cIt looked more like a racecar pit stop than anything else,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cEverybody was at the right spot and did the right thing. And then, obviously, the weather was great.\u201dcorrectionA previous version of this article misspelled the names of Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Tom Marshburn. This version has been corrected. SpaceX's next mission involves sending private citizens to orbit in a step toward space tourism. With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6200",
        "date": "2021-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/02/spacex-private-space-plans/",
        "text": "One day, Elon Musk has said, he would like human spaceflight to be as routine as commercial airline travel, with regular flights through the atmosphere ferrying astronauts around the solar system.That day is not here yet \u2014 not even close.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after Sunday\u2019s flawless return of four astronauts to a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, the company has made space travel look easy, at least for one flight, and even had some fun with it. After NASA Crew-1 astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover along with Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi splashed down in a pinpoint landing at 2:56 a.m., just south of Panama City, SpaceX\u2019s ground controller said: \u201cWe welcome you back to planet Earth. For those of you enrolled in our frequent-flier program, you\u2019ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTo which Hopkins replied: \u201cWe\u2019ll take those miles. Are they transferrable?\u201dAdvertisementNot yet.But SpaceX will take a significant step forward in human spaceflight with its next mission, flying what would be the first all-civilian crew in a flight scheduled for September that would orbit Earth for a few days. Called Inspiration4, the flight is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, an accomplished jet pilot, but by no means a professional astronaut.SpaceX Crew-1 NASA astronauts splash down in the Gulf of MexicoNor are the other members of the crew: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant; Sian Proctor, a teacher and communicator; and Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. Isaacman set up the mission as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and held what amounted to a sweepstakes competition for two of the seats.Story continues below advertisementWhen NASA decided to outsource human spaceflight missions to the space station years ago under its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, it had hoped that the missions would become successful enough that ordinary citizens would one day be able to fly.Advertisement\u201cThis was really our goal when we set up commercial crew,\u201d Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate, said in a briefing early Sunday. \u201cHonestly, we\u2019re very excited to see it kind of taking off.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX senior adviser for flight reliability, said Sunday\u2019s splashdown gives the company confidence that it could fly civilians with some regularity.\u201cI think going forward we\u2019re ready for this important step,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re ready for the first private astronaut mission. I think the first mission in particular is a very special mission.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s not the only one on the books.After the Inspiration4 flight, SpaceX is planning another flight of NASA astronauts that would also include Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany, in October. Then, in January, it would keep the pace going with another launch of civilians in a mission that this time would go to the space station.AdvertisementThe flight is being organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is working to build a commercial space station. It is being led by Axiom Vice President Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut. Joining him on the mission to spend about a week on the space station is a trio of billionaires who are paying $55 million each for the trip.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationDespite the successful splashdown Sunday, NASA and SpaceX can\u2019t get complacent or ahead of themselves, Lueders said. Spaceflight may get romanticized in popular culture, but in reality, it remains a very dangerous and risky endeavor that requires an enormous amount of work and diligence.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s touchdown was the completion of SpaceX\u2019s first full-duration mission. And although it has now flown two sets of astronauts to the space station \u2014 and returned them safely \u2014 it still has a lot to prove.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re still at the beginning steps of continuing to make this look easy,\u201d she said. \u201cBut this is only our first full operational mission. So we need to keep having missions look like this. \u2026 But it is very exciting that we\u2019re starting to lay in the foundations for these key capabilities.\u201dSpaceX also recently won a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to develop the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to the surface of the moon \u2014 an award that is being challenged by the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementBut before it looks ahead to that, SpaceX was content Sunday to revel in the successful splashdown.The capsule undocked from the space station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday, then completed a series of milestones that officials said were picture-perfect, such as firing its engines to plunge the spacecraft into the atmosphere and jettisoning its trunk to expose the heat shield, which protected the astronauts against temperatures that reached 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementA set of smaller drogue parachutes deployed to slow and stabilize the vehicle as it fell through the atmosphere, and the four massive main chutes unfurled before the soft touchdown.SpaceX was able to get the Dragon spacecraft out of the water and onto the deck of the recovery ship in less than 30 minutes. And the crew was able to exit the vehicle less than an hour after splashing down in what NASA and SpaceX called a flawless flight.\u201cIt looked more like a racecar pit stop than anything else,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cEverybody was at the right spot and did the right thing. And then, obviously, the weather was great.\u201dcorrectionA previous version of this article misspelled the names of Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Tom Marshburn. This version has been corrected. SpaceX's next mission involves sending private citizens to orbit in a step toward space tourism. With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to space ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s moonshot: The next giant leap or another empty promise? (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6201",
        "date": "2019-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/05/trumps-moonshot-next-giant-leap-or-another-empty-promise/",
        "text": "On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, President George H.W. Bush called for a return to the lunar surface, affirming in 1989 that \u201cit is humanity\u2019s destiny to strive, to seek, to find.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSince then, other presidents have called for NASA to send astronauts to the moon or Mars with soaring rhetoric that was never matched by the resources or political resolve to make such promises come true. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it is the Trump administration\u2019s turn. Last month, Vice President Pence echoed John F. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cbecause-it-is-hard\u201d speech, saying it is \u201ctime for us to make the next \u2018giant leap\u2019 \u201d and directing NASA to land humans on the moon within five years \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe announcement \u2014 which moved up a lunar landing by at least four years \u2014 caught many at NASA by surprise and left an agency starved of funding for such missions with a severe case of whiplash, scrambling to figure out how it would meet the latest White House mandate within its reduced budget.AdvertisementNASA officials also face a major test of their agency\u2019s effectiveness: Is this another empty promise by an administration nostalgic for the triumph of Apollo and looking to make a splash while in office, or can NASA somehow pull off what would be an audacious step just in time for the presidential election?Already, there are signs that the White House\u2019s plan is running into fierce head winds.Story continues below advertisementAt a hearing Tuesday, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, blasted Pence\u2019s speech for lacking any details of how NASA would achieve what she called a \u201ccrash program\u201d or what it would cost.\u201cWe need specifics, not rhetoric,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause rhetoric that is not backed up by a concrete plan and believable cost estimates is just hot air. And hot air may be helpful in ballooning, but it won\u2019t get us to the moon or Mars.\u201dAdvertisementBefore Pence\u2019s speech, NASA was hoping to get human beings to the moon by 2028, at the earliest. The White House\u2019s own budget request, released a few weeks ago, was geared toward a crewed lunar landing by the end of the next decade, which many in NASA\u2019s leadership considered a more reasonable goal. But the White House suddenly shifted course and decided that timeline was too long \u2014 and would fall outside of Trump\u2019s second term, should he be reelected.Story continues below advertisementOthers, too, had been critical of the 2028 date, including former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who called a moon visit that late not \u201cworthy of being on the table. Such a date does not demonstrate that the United States is a leader in anything.\u201dThe White House had made clear to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine within the last few weeks that it wanted NASA to move faster and tasked him with making it happen by 2024. He told administration officials he could do it. \u201cThey\u2019ve been consistent in their desire to accelerate,\u201d he said in a brief interview after he testified before the congressional hearing Tuesday.AdvertisementBut in a sign of how quickly he is having to pivot, his written testimony for the hearing cited the old timeline, vowing to \u201cland humans on the moon within a decade,\u201d not the five years the White House wanted.Story continues below advertisementDuring the hearing, however, it became clear NASA is scrambling to accelerate the moon mission. Bridenstine said the plan was \u201cin flux\u201d and would require additional funding. He pledged to come back with an amendment to NASA\u2019s budget request later this month, but he wouldn\u2019t or couldn\u2019t say how much more NASA would need.\u201cMy concern is: What does the plan look like, and what is the reality?\u201d Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the subcommittee on space, said in an interview. She said she was also concerned that \u201cschedule pressure doesn\u2019t overcome safety, and the real issues we\u2019re going to have to address.\u201dAdvertisementMajor technical challenges also lie ahead. The rocket NASA plans to use to launch astronauts to the moon is so far behind, and so far over budget, that last month Bridenstine threatened to sideline it in its first mission in favor of commercial rockets instead.Story continues below advertisementThat touched off a fury in Congress, especially from Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee, and the rest of the Alabama delegation, where NASA\u2019s program office for the rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), is largely based.Bridenstine quickly backtracked, recommitting to SLS as the best option, and said that Boeing, the rocket\u2019s main contractor, would look to dramatically speed up development.It\u2019s not just the rocket that needs to get back on track. NASA\u2019s current moon mission plans call for the construction of a station that would orbit the moon on a permanent basis. Astronauts would stop at the station, known as the Gateway, before traveling on special landers to the lunar surface \u2014 an ambitious technological advance that didn\u2019t exist when Apollo astronauts landed there a half-century ago after a three-day direct journey.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe problem for NASA is that none of this architecture has been built or is even under contract. And without a budget or assurances from Congress that the program would be funded, many fear that the White House is setting the agency up for yet another letdown.\u201cIt does at first glance appear to be what we\u2019ve been through before, with presidents making a bold speech without it getting backed up with resources,\u201d said Wayne Hale, the former manager of NASA\u2019s space shuttle program who now serves as a consultant. \u201cWhere are the resources? We\u2019re waiting to see what gets proposed in the budget.\u201dTodd Harrison, a defense and space analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said now that the Trump administration has put its stamp on the program, other White Houses may be quick to discard it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBefore you know it, there will be a change in administration, and a new NASA administrator will come in and say, \u2018Whatever these guys were doing is all wrong.\u2019 That\u2019s what history over the past 30 years has told us is likely to happen,\u201d he said.There is deep skepticism within NASA, as well. To assuage concerns, Bridenstine held a town hall Monday and took questions from employees. One referenced how different presidents keep pointing NASA to different missions \u2014 the moon, then Mars, then back to the moon \u2014 while none gets achieved.\u201cWhat steps do you plan to take to reduce the programmatic whiplash that keeps us from actually accomplishing any of these grand plans?\u201d one employee asked.Story continues below advertisementOthers, though, find the new sense of urgency invigorating \u2014 and just what an aging bureaucracy like NASA needs. Trump reconstituted the National Space Council to set U.S. space policy, and he has pushed for the establishment of a Space Force, a new military branch dedicated to helping the U.S. fight adversaries in space.AdvertisementPence has dedicated more time to space than any other top White House official since the Kennedy administration. His passion is real, associates have said, and so is his belief that the agency can land humans on the moon by 2024.In his March 26 speech, Pence cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as China and Russia, vying for the water at the moon\u2019s south pole, which could be used not just to sustain human life but also as rocket fuel to push farther into the solar system. Water, as many have said, is the oil of the solar system.\u201cIt\u2019s not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d Pence said. \u201cWe\u2019re also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dOver the years, critics have lambasted NASA for losing the boldness that defined it during its early days, dampened by a pair of space shuttle disasters that killed 14 astronauts. In 1969, NASA sent men to the moon, 250,000 miles away. Today, its astronauts go to the International Space Station, 250 miles away. And because NASA hasn\u2019t had the ability to fly humans to space since the nation\u2019s space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, its astronauts fly on Russian rockets at a cost of more than $80 million a seat.AdvertisementChina, meanwhile, has emerged as a rival in space. Earlier this year, it became the first nation to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. It plans to send another uncrewed mission to the moon later this year. In the process, Pence said in his speech, China has \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent space-faring nation.\"Part of what\u2019s driving the push to the moon is an unproven dream that a lucrative business could be built by mining it for precious metals just below its surface. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said that lunar mining could help fuel a trillion-dollar space economy.Homer Hickam, the author and longtime NASA engineer who serves as an adviser to the space council, said the agency should seize the opportunity.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t happen that often that the vice president, or someone at that level, is so interested in NASA and spaceflight,\u201d he said. Since President George H.W. Bush called for a return to the moon in 1989 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, several presidents have called for NASA to send astronauts to the moon or Mars with soaring rhetoric that\u2019s never been matched by the resources or political resolve to make such promises come true. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it is the Trump administration\u2019s turn. Trump\u2019s moonshot: The next giant leap or another empty promise?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s moonshot: The next giant leap or another empty promise? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6202",
        "date": "2019-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/05/trumps-moonshot-next-giant-leap-or-another-empty-promise/",
        "text": "On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, President George H.W. Bush called for a return to the lunar surface, affirming in 1989 that \u201cit is humanity\u2019s destiny to strive, to seek, to find.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSince then, other presidents have called for NASA to send astronauts to the moon or Mars with soaring rhetoric that was never matched by the resources or political resolve to make such promises come true. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it is the Trump administration\u2019s turn. Last month, Vice President Pence echoed John F. Kennedy\u2019s \u201cbecause-it-is-hard\u201d speech, saying it is \u201ctime for us to make the next \u2018giant leap\u2019 \u201d and directing NASA to land humans on the moon within five years \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe announcement \u2014 which moved up a lunar landing by at least four years \u2014 caught many at NASA by surprise and left an agency starved of funding for such missions with a severe case of whiplash, scrambling to figure out how it would meet the latest White House mandate within its reduced budget.AdvertisementNASA officials also face a major test of their agency\u2019s effectiveness: Is this another empty promise by an administration nostalgic for the triumph of Apollo and looking to make a splash while in office, or can NASA somehow pull off what would be an audacious step just in time for the presidential election?Already, there are signs that the White House\u2019s plan is running into fierce head winds.Story continues below advertisementAt a hearing Tuesday, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, blasted Pence\u2019s speech for lacking any details of how NASA would achieve what she called a \u201ccrash program\u201d or what it would cost.\u201cWe need specifics, not rhetoric,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause rhetoric that is not backed up by a concrete plan and believable cost estimates is just hot air. And hot air may be helpful in ballooning, but it won\u2019t get us to the moon or Mars.\u201dAdvertisementBefore Pence\u2019s speech, NASA was hoping to get human beings to the moon by 2028, at the earliest. The White House\u2019s own budget request, released a few weeks ago, was geared toward a crewed lunar landing by the end of the next decade, which many in NASA\u2019s leadership considered a more reasonable goal. But the White House suddenly shifted course and decided that timeline was too long \u2014 and would fall outside of Trump\u2019s second term, should he be reelected.Story continues below advertisementOthers, too, had been critical of the 2028 date, including former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who called a moon visit that late not \u201cworthy of being on the table. Such a date does not demonstrate that the United States is a leader in anything.\u201dThe White House had made clear to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine within the last few weeks that it wanted NASA to move faster and tasked him with making it happen by 2024. He told administration officials he could do it. \u201cThey\u2019ve been consistent in their desire to accelerate,\u201d he said in a brief interview after he testified before the congressional hearing Tuesday.AdvertisementBut in a sign of how quickly he is having to pivot, his written testimony for the hearing cited the old timeline, vowing to \u201cland humans on the moon within a decade,\u201d not the five years the White House wanted.Story continues below advertisementDuring the hearing, however, it became clear NASA is scrambling to accelerate the moon mission. Bridenstine said the plan was \u201cin flux\u201d and would require additional funding. He pledged to come back with an amendment to NASA\u2019s budget request later this month, but he wouldn\u2019t or couldn\u2019t say how much more NASA would need.\u201cMy concern is: What does the plan look like, and what is the reality?\u201d Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the subcommittee on space, said in an interview. She said she was also concerned that \u201cschedule pressure doesn\u2019t overcome safety, and the real issues we\u2019re going to have to address.\u201dAdvertisementMajor technical challenges also lie ahead. The rocket NASA plans to use to launch astronauts to the moon is so far behind, and so far over budget, that last month Bridenstine threatened to sideline it in its first mission in favor of commercial rockets instead.Story continues below advertisementThat touched off a fury in Congress, especially from Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee, and the rest of the Alabama delegation, where NASA\u2019s program office for the rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), is largely based.Bridenstine quickly backtracked, recommitting to SLS as the best option, and said that Boeing, the rocket\u2019s main contractor, would look to dramatically speed up development.It\u2019s not just the rocket that needs to get back on track. NASA\u2019s current moon mission plans call for the construction of a station that would orbit the moon on a permanent basis. Astronauts would stop at the station, known as the Gateway, before traveling on special landers to the lunar surface \u2014 an ambitious technological advance that didn\u2019t exist when Apollo astronauts landed there a half-century ago after a three-day direct journey.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe problem for NASA is that none of this architecture has been built or is even under contract. And without a budget or assurances from Congress that the program would be funded, many fear that the White House is setting the agency up for yet another letdown.\u201cIt does at first glance appear to be what we\u2019ve been through before, with presidents making a bold speech without it getting backed up with resources,\u201d said Wayne Hale, the former manager of NASA\u2019s space shuttle program who now serves as a consultant. \u201cWhere are the resources? We\u2019re waiting to see what gets proposed in the budget.\u201dTodd Harrison, a defense and space analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said now that the Trump administration has put its stamp on the program, other White Houses may be quick to discard it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBefore you know it, there will be a change in administration, and a new NASA administrator will come in and say, \u2018Whatever these guys were doing is all wrong.\u2019 That\u2019s what history over the past 30 years has told us is likely to happen,\u201d he said.There is deep skepticism within NASA, as well. To assuage concerns, Bridenstine held a town hall Monday and took questions from employees. One referenced how different presidents keep pointing NASA to different missions \u2014 the moon, then Mars, then back to the moon \u2014 while none gets achieved.\u201cWhat steps do you plan to take to reduce the programmatic whiplash that keeps us from actually accomplishing any of these grand plans?\u201d one employee asked.Story continues below advertisementOthers, though, find the new sense of urgency invigorating \u2014 and just what an aging bureaucracy like NASA needs. Trump reconstituted the National Space Council to set U.S. space policy, and he has pushed for the establishment of a Space Force, a new military branch dedicated to helping the U.S. fight adversaries in space.AdvertisementPence has dedicated more time to space than any other top White House official since the Kennedy administration. His passion is real, associates have said, and so is his belief that the agency can land humans on the moon by 2024.In his March 26 speech, Pence cast the mission as part of a new space race against superpowers such as China and Russia, vying for the water at the moon\u2019s south pole, which could be used not just to sustain human life but also as rocket fuel to push farther into the solar system. Water, as many have said, is the oil of the solar system.\u201cIt\u2019s not just competition against our adversaries,\u201d Pence said. \u201cWe\u2019re also racing against our worst enemy: complacency.\u201dOver the years, critics have lambasted NASA for losing the boldness that defined it during its early days, dampened by a pair of space shuttle disasters that killed 14 astronauts. In 1969, NASA sent men to the moon, 250,000 miles away. Today, its astronauts go to the International Space Station, 250 miles away. And because NASA hasn\u2019t had the ability to fly humans to space since the nation\u2019s space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, its astronauts fly on Russian rockets at a cost of more than $80 million a seat.AdvertisementChina, meanwhile, has emerged as a rival in space. Earlier this year, it became the first nation to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. It plans to send another uncrewed mission to the moon later this year. In the process, Pence said in his speech, China has \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent space-faring nation.\"Part of what\u2019s driving the push to the moon is an unproven dream that a lucrative business could be built by mining it for precious metals just below its surface. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has said that lunar mining could help fuel a trillion-dollar space economy.Homer Hickam, the author and longtime NASA engineer who serves as an adviser to the space council, said the agency should seize the opportunity.\u201cIt doesn\u2019t happen that often that the vice president, or someone at that level, is so interested in NASA and spaceflight,\u201d he said. Since President George H.W. Bush called for a return to the moon in 1989 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, several presidents have called for NASA to send astronauts to the moon or Mars with soaring rhetoric that\u2019s never been matched by the resources or political resolve to make such promises come true. Now, on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it is the Trump administration\u2019s turn. Trump\u2019s moonshot: The next giant leap or another empty promise?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dragon capsule achieves orbit, heads towards space station  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6203",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/30/spacex-nasa-launch-live-updates/",
        "text": "Now: Follow live coverage of the Dragon capsule, now known as \u2018Endeavour\u2019, docking with the International Space Station.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The United States opened a new chapter in its grand adventure in space Saturday, when a SpaceX rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center, carrying two astronauts to orbit from United States soil for the first time in nearly a decade. It was a historic moment for SpaceX, which became the first private corporation to launch people into orbit, and for NASA, which has struggled to regain its footing after retiring the Space Shuttle in 2011, leaving the U.S. no option but to rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to space for as much as $90 million a seat.Both President Trump and Vice President Pence, the chair of the National Space Council, were in attendance to mark a new era of space flight.Photos of SpaceX's Dragon Capsule launchThe flight was the the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts.For SpaceX, it was the climax of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when Elon Musk founded a space company with the goal of traveling to Mars.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. from pad 39A, the historic site from which the crew of Apollo 11 left for the moon, after a seamless countdown where the primary concern was inclement weather that on Wednesday had forced a postponement of the first launch attempt.The Crew Dragon capsule, which separated from the booster on time 12 minutes into the flight, is expected to dock with the International Space Station shortly after 10 a.m. Sunday.On board the spacecraft are two of NASA\u2019s most experienced space travelers, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, both former military pilots who previously had each flown two missions on the Space Shuttle. But their ride to space this time was on a vastly different spacecraft, a fully autonomous, next-generation capsule outfitted with Tesla-like touchscreens and temperature controls that allow astronauts to keep the cabin at between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.The launch came 3,250 days after the last shuttle mission blasted off.Hurley, a retired Marine Corps Colonel, was a crew member on that last shuttle mission, which took off in July 2011, also from pad 39A. It was the end of the shuttle\u2019s 30-year life span, and a devastating blow to an agency that suddenly had no way to fly its astronauts anywhere.Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley: The astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsuleDespite repeated warnings by NASA to stay home because of the coronavirus, fans lined the beaches to watch a historic moment, but the space agency drastically limited attendance at the Kennedy Space Center.Sunday\u2019s docking will be handled autonomously by the spacecraft, though Hurley and Behnken have the ability to take over the controls manually if needed.The mission, known as Demo-2, was a test flight designed to ensure the rocket and spacecraft can fly humans safely. Once complete, NASA and SpaceX would review the data and certify the spacecraft for additional missions that would regularly fly as many as four astronauts to the space station and back.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX, worth $6.8 billion combined, to design and build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station. Previously, it had hired the private sector to fly cargo and supplies there. But outsourcing human space flight to companies was considered a risky and even reckless move in some quarters, even among NASA\u2019s leadership. Along the way there had been a number of stumbles that delayed the first flights from 2017.Boeing, the aerospace behemoth that had been by NASA\u2019s side since the dawn of the Space Age, was considered the favorite to fly first. But it stumbled when the test flight of its Starliner spacecraft encountered trouble almost immediately upon reaching orbit. Boeing and NASA officials scrambled to fix software problems that prevented the spacecraft from reaching the space station and instead ending the mission early.SpaceX also ran into a series of problems. In 2015, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a cargo resupply flight to the station. The next one, another rocket blew up, this time on the launch pad before an engine test. Then, last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft blew up during a test of its abort engines.But it has since investigated and remedied those failures to NASA\u2019s satisfaction, and in the days leading up to the launch, the space agency praised the company many in the agency once looked upon skeptically.Next stop for SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule: the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:44 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are on their way to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, but still have quite a way to journey.Forty-nine minutes after launch, or at roughly 4:30 p.m., Hurley, Behnken and SpaceX flight engineers performed checks on Dragon\u2019s Draco thrusters, adjust the spacecraft\u2019s trajectory and begin an engine burn to align orbits with the International Space Station. Then the astronauts will get some well-earned rest, something NASA and SpaceX officials said was a priority given the high stress Hurley and Behnken have lived under since entering preflight quarantine more than two weeks ago.Nine hours later, or after 1 a.m., Sunday, Dragon will burn its thrusters once more to better steer toward the space station, then perform two more burns almost two hours later.Just before 10 a.m., Sunday, almost 18 hours after launch, Dragon will approach within 400 meters of the space station and begin an intricate docking steps. The spacecraft is supposed to perform those maneuvers autonomously, though Hurley and Behnken can step in to pilot the vessel if something goes wrong.It takes about an hour for Dragon to advance from 400 meters to 20 meters from the space station, where it will stay for five minutes and prepare for docking. Another five minutes later, 19 hours and six minutes after launch, or just after 10:29 a.m., Sunday, Dragon will dock with the International Space Station, and Hurley and Behnken will climb aboard.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX launch a success as Dragon capsule separates from Falcon 9 rocketReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA\u2019s first human space launch in nearly a decade is a success. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard, separated from the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s second stage booster and entered a stable low-Earth orbit on its way to meeting the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 booster lands successfullyReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe first booster of the Falcon 9 rocket lands on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. (The Washington Post)The first booster of the Falcon 9 rocket has successfully landed on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, a positive sign as the rocket\u2019s second-stage booster and Crew Dragon capsule continue their launch trajectory into orbit and toward the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 first-stage booster separatesReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:29 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe first booster of the Falcon 9 rocket has successfully detached. In several minutes, it should autonomously guide itself to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.Crew Dragon has separated from Falcon 9\u2019s second stage and is on its way to the International Space Station with @Astro_Behnken and @AstroDoug! Autonomous docking at the @Space_Station will occur at ~10:30 a.m. EDT tomorrow, May 31 pic.twitter.com/bSZ6yZP2bD\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 30, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX rocket lifts off, beginning harrowing trip to orbitReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX's Crew Dragon lifted off May 30 in its first test flight to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on board. (The Washington Post)SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket booster has ignited and lifted off from Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A in Cape Canaveral Fla.The liftoff does not constitute a successful mission, and instead begins a harrowing 12 minutes until the Crew Dragon capsule enters a stable orbit. In that time, the space craft must successfully detach from both of the Falcon 9\u2019s rocket boosters, the first of which is supposed to land itself on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.Dragon\u2019s journey is far from complete. It has 19 hours to go until it will meet the International Space Station in orbit. The capsule must dock with the space station in an intricate, computer-controlled dance and allow astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to safely enter the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon prepares final checks for liftoffReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX officials are conducting final stage checks at the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon rocket prepares for liftoff at 3:22 p.m.NASA officials have indicated that the weather appears to amenable for flight, and SpaceX flight technicians have readied the spacecraft for flight without a hitch, even moving slightly ahead of schedule.Within the final 15 minutes before liftoff, Falcon 9 will chill its engines prior to launch and power will transition internally to the Dragon capsule away from the rocket\u2019s support structure.At one minute before launch, the command flight computer will begin its final prelaunch checks and the rocket propellant tanks will pressurize.Forty-five seconds before launch, SpaceX launch director Mike Taylor will verify a go for launch and just three seconds before launch, the engine controller commands engine ignition sequence to start.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump has arrived at Kennedy Space CenterReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump arrived at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., just before 3 p.m. Vice President Pence, chairman of the National Space Council, and second lady Karen Pence are also set to attend the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon launch. First lady Melania Trump was scheduled to attend, but stayed behind in Washington.Trump has made human spaceflight a priority of his first term. He turned the Air Force\u2019s Space Command into the Space Force, its own branch of the military, and has pushed NASA to conduct a lunar landing mission by 2024 as a steppingstone to a mission to Mars.Pence has said the U.S. will return to the moon \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dKennedy Space Center.37 minutes to go before the @SpaceX launch. pic.twitter.com/eGdji2K5DY\u2014 J\u00e9r\u00f4me Cartillier (@jcartillier) May 30, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement Launch director says weather is clear for goReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow2:43 p.m.Link copiedLinkRadar shows weather has cleared around the launch site and NASA announced at 2:35 p.m. that weather for liftoff is \u2018go\u2019.Lightning and tall cumulus clouds which had earlier been in the vicinity of the launch pad have departed.However, storms are lingering about 15 miles west of Cape Canaveral, along Interstate 95. Should these drift east, the launch could still be aborted. According to NASA, the chance of weather preventing launch is still 30 percent, but that\u2019s a 20 percent improvement over the morning forecast assessment.230p: Radar shows conditions have cleared around Cape Canaveral for #SpaceX launch but storms just 10-15 miles west along I95, drifting east. Tough call! pic.twitter.com/DDFeUwPWcM\u2014 Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) May 30, 2020\n\nFrom 2:05 p.m.Showers and storms continue sweeping across the Space Coast. As of 1:45 p.m., the launch was no-go due to weather, according to NASA. However, the storm activity might exit the region by 2:30 p.m. or a little after, and conditions might improve enough to allow launch at 3:22 p.m.At 2 p.m., weather radar showed numerous showers and storms around Cape Canaveral extending west about 15 miles, to near Interstate 95.The latest weather report from NASA television indicated ground and upper level winds are \u201cgo\u201d for launch but that electric fields, lightning and cumulus clouds in the vicinity of the launch pad violate launch criteria. A weather briefing one hour before launch will update this assessment.If all of the storm activity can clear the Space Coast before 3 p.m., and new storms don\u2019t form behind it, the launch could happen. But it won\u2019t be enough for storms to simply exit Cape Canaveral. The launch could be aborted if any of a dozen weather rules are violated for various cloud, wind and precipitation scenarios, including the presence of tall clouds that trigger lightning within 10 nautical miles of the launch pad.This will likely go down to the wire.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew launch window would be Sunday if flight is again postponed. But weather now is good.Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkIf weather postpones the flight again, the next available potential launch time is Sunday at 3 p.m., though the weather may not be any better. The Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron predicts a 40-percent chance of bad weather. Future launch opportunities are Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.The flight has an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period during which the International Space Station is lined up with the rocket\u2019s flight trajectory. Any delay would cause the rocket to miss its desired flight path and not rendezvous with the station. So the launch must be on time.SpaceX officials authorize fueling rocket, arming of emergency abort systemReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX Launch Director Mike Taylor authorized flight engineers to begin loading propellants into the Falcon 9 boosters and Crew Dragon capsule at 2:29 p.m. Fuel for the Falcon 9 includes liquid oxygen, often called LOX, and RP-1, a refined, rocket-grade kerosene.Liquid oxygen has begun loading into the rocket. We are inching closer to liftoff at 3:22pm ET. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/VrTCLi9JD2\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 30, 2020\n\nIn moments, the crew access arm will retract from the spacecraft and SpaceX will arm Dragon\u2019s launch escape system. Dragon can autonomously detect any signs of trouble with either stage of Falcon 9\u2019s rocket boosters and shoot itself away to safety, like a cork popping out of a bottle of champagne.SpaceX successfully tested the abort system with an unmanned Dragon in January. The Falcon 9 booster was destroyed during the test flight, as expected, and Dragon, using built-in SuperDraco thrusters, glided away safely and landed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.Coronavirus remains a concern, even as launch approachesReturn to menuBy Lori Rozsa1:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkAs NASA TV lived streamed the preparations for the Space X launch, coronavirus concerns were on display in the masks that NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and others wore.Both astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, have tested negative for coronavirus exposure. \u201cAnd they\u2019ve been in quarantine for more than 14 days,\u201d NASA spokeswoman Megan Sumner said, referring to the standard pre-launch quarantine for astronauts.The two men were applauded as they were driven to the launchpad. Among those cheering were NASA employees who are taking advantage of free coronavirus testing from a Florida department of health COVID-19 mobile testing lab.Trump boards Air Force One en route to rocket launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump boarded Air Force One shortly after 1:30 p.m., to fly to Cape Canaveral to watch the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon launch at Kennedy Space Center.Trump and Vice President Pence visited Cape Canaveral on Wednesday for the first attempt at the launch, but bad weather forced officials to scrub the plans.Speaking to reporters Saturday at Joint Base Andrews before stepping aboard the airplane, he said there was a \u201c50/50 chance\" the rocket would launch Saturday, citing uncertain weather forecasts.President @realDonaldTrump is en route to Kennedy Space Center to view the planned @NASA and @SpaceX rocket launch. pic.twitter.com/g29eIUlSim\u2014 The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 30, 2020\n\n\u201cThe weather is very delicate,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s very amazing. So we\u2019re going over and we\u2019ll be back in a little while. We want to watch the rocket launch. NASA\u2019s come a long way. It was dead as a door nail, but now it\u2019s the most vibrant place in the world for that, so I look forward to it.\u201dBehind the scenes as FAA prepares for Space X launchReturn to menuBy Lori Aratani1:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkFrom a command center in Warrenton, Va., a special team at the Federal Aviation Administration will be keeping a close watch on the historic launch of the first astronauts from U.S. soil in almost a decade. Two NASA astronauts are headed to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 booster.With a growing number of companies seeking to commercialize space travel, the FAA has focused on developing new systems for more efficiently managing airspace. In the past, the agency may have had to close airspace for days around a launch site in preparation. Today while those closures may last only hours, they still can prove disruptive to air traffic. The FAA\u2019s air traffic controllers coordinate up to 43,000 flights in the U.S. a day. At any given time, there can be 5,000 aircraft in the skies.A FAA program known as the Space Data Integrator (SDI), however, seeks to integrate commercial air traffic with commercial space traffic by allowing air traffic controllers to see rockets just as they do airplanes. The shift would mean the agency could monitor traffic with great accuracy, potentially reducing the length of time that airspace must be closed off for space launches.Read moreClouds and storms building near Space Coast, but chance they clear by launchReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow1:18 p.m.Link copiedLinkHmmmmm #spacex #nasa #Demo2 pic.twitter.com/dOGzgx9tOv\u2014 Christian Davenport (@wapodavenport) May 30, 2020\n\nClouds were gathering in Cape Canaveral and weather radar at 1 p.m. showed numerous showers and storms approaching the Space Coast from the west.The storm activity, less than 10 miles from Cape Canaveral, is likely to sweep across the Space Coast over the next hour or so. Brief heavy downpours and gusty winds will accompany these storms.It\u2019s possible that, in the wake of these storms, there could be a calm period that coincides with the 3:22 p.m. launch. In fact, some high-resolution forecast models show a pause or lessening in the storms after 3 p.m.However, additional storms could also fire after this initial round and any tall clouds with strong electric fields in the vicinity could scrub the launch.In a 1 p.m. interview on NASA television, administrator Jim Bridenstine, who was briefed on weather earlier in the day, said, \u201cThe question is what time do the thunderstorms go away?\u201dHe continued, \u201cWe\u2019re hoping that the weather will hold up. The trend is better today than it was Wednesday. A historic moment for SpaceX, which became the first private corporation to launch people into orbit. Dragon capsule achieves orbit, heads towards space station ",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dragon capsule achieves orbit, heads towards space station  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6204",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/30/spacex-nasa-launch-live-updates/",
        "text": "Now: Follow live coverage of the Dragon capsule, now known as \u2018Endeavour\u2019, docking with the International Space Station.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The United States opened a new chapter in its grand adventure in space Saturday, when a SpaceX rocket blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center, carrying two astronauts to orbit from United States soil for the first time in nearly a decade. It was a historic moment for SpaceX, which became the first private corporation to launch people into orbit, and for NASA, which has struggled to regain its footing after retiring the Space Shuttle in 2011, leaving the U.S. no option but to rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to space for as much as $90 million a seat.Both President Trump and Vice President Pence, the chair of the National Space Council, were in attendance to mark a new era of space flight.Photos of SpaceX's Dragon Capsule launchThe flight was the the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts.For SpaceX, it was the climax of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when Elon Musk founded a space company with the goal of traveling to Mars.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:22 p.m. from pad 39A, the historic site from which the crew of Apollo 11 left for the moon, after a seamless countdown where the primary concern was inclement weather that on Wednesday had forced a postponement of the first launch attempt.The Crew Dragon capsule, which separated from the booster on time 12 minutes into the flight, is expected to dock with the International Space Station shortly after 10 a.m. Sunday.On board the spacecraft are two of NASA\u2019s most experienced space travelers, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, both former military pilots who previously had each flown two missions on the Space Shuttle. But their ride to space this time was on a vastly different spacecraft, a fully autonomous, next-generation capsule outfitted with Tesla-like touchscreens and temperature controls that allow astronauts to keep the cabin at between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.The launch came 3,250 days after the last shuttle mission blasted off.Hurley, a retired Marine Corps Colonel, was a crew member on that last shuttle mission, which took off in July 2011, also from pad 39A. It was the end of the shuttle\u2019s 30-year life span, and a devastating blow to an agency that suddenly had no way to fly its astronauts anywhere.Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley: The astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsuleDespite repeated warnings by NASA to stay home because of the coronavirus, fans lined the beaches to watch a historic moment, but the space agency drastically limited attendance at the Kennedy Space Center.Sunday\u2019s docking will be handled autonomously by the spacecraft, though Hurley and Behnken have the ability to take over the controls manually if needed.The mission, known as Demo-2, was a test flight designed to ensure the rocket and spacecraft can fly humans safely. Once complete, NASA and SpaceX would review the data and certify the spacecraft for additional missions that would regularly fly as many as four astronauts to the space station and back.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX, worth $6.8 billion combined, to design and build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station. Previously, it had hired the private sector to fly cargo and supplies there. But outsourcing human space flight to companies was considered a risky and even reckless move in some quarters, even among NASA\u2019s leadership. Along the way there had been a number of stumbles that delayed the first flights from 2017.Boeing, the aerospace behemoth that had been by NASA\u2019s side since the dawn of the Space Age, was considered the favorite to fly first. But it stumbled when the test flight of its Starliner spacecraft encountered trouble almost immediately upon reaching orbit. Boeing and NASA officials scrambled to fix software problems that prevented the spacecraft from reaching the space station and instead ending the mission early.SpaceX also ran into a series of problems. In 2015, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a cargo resupply flight to the station. The next one, another rocket blew up, this time on the launch pad before an engine test. Then, last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft blew up during a test of its abort engines.But it has since investigated and remedied those failures to NASA\u2019s satisfaction, and in the days leading up to the launch, the space agency praised the company many in the agency once looked upon skeptically.Next stop for SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule: the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:44 p.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are on their way to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, but still have quite a way to journey.Forty-nine minutes after launch, or at roughly 4:30 p.m., Hurley, Behnken and SpaceX flight engineers performed checks on Dragon\u2019s Draco thrusters, adjust the spacecraft\u2019s trajectory and begin an engine burn to align orbits with the International Space Station. Then the astronauts will get some well-earned rest, something NASA and SpaceX officials said was a priority given the high stress Hurley and Behnken have lived under since entering preflight quarantine more than two weeks ago.Nine hours later, or after 1 a.m., Sunday, Dragon will burn its thrusters once more to better steer toward the space station, then perform two more burns almost two hours later.Just before 10 a.m., Sunday, almost 18 hours after launch, Dragon will approach within 400 meters of the space station and begin an intricate docking steps. The spacecraft is supposed to perform those maneuvers autonomously, though Hurley and Behnken can step in to pilot the vessel if something goes wrong.It takes about an hour for Dragon to advance from 400 meters to 20 meters from the space station, where it will stay for five minutes and prepare for docking. Another five minutes later, 19 hours and six minutes after launch, or just after 10:29 a.m., Sunday, Dragon will dock with the International Space Station, and Hurley and Behnken will climb aboard.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX launch a success as Dragon capsule separates from Falcon 9 rocketReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:38 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA\u2019s first human space launch in nearly a decade is a success. SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard, separated from the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s second stage booster and entered a stable low-Earth orbit on its way to meeting the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 booster lands successfullyReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe first booster of the Falcon 9 rocket lands on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. (The Washington Post)The first booster of the Falcon 9 rocket has successfully landed on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, a positive sign as the rocket\u2019s second-stage booster and Crew Dragon capsule continue their launch trajectory into orbit and toward the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFalcon 9 first-stage booster separatesReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:29 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe first booster of the Falcon 9 rocket has successfully detached. In several minutes, it should autonomously guide itself to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.Crew Dragon has separated from Falcon 9\u2019s second stage and is on its way to the International Space Station with @Astro_Behnken and @AstroDoug! Autonomous docking at the @Space_Station will occur at ~10:30 a.m. EDT tomorrow, May 31 pic.twitter.com/bSZ6yZP2bD\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 30, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX rocket lifts off, beginning harrowing trip to orbitReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX's Crew Dragon lifted off May 30 in its first test flight to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on board. (The Washington Post)SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket booster has ignited and lifted off from Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A in Cape Canaveral Fla.The liftoff does not constitute a successful mission, and instead begins a harrowing 12 minutes until the Crew Dragon capsule enters a stable orbit. In that time, the space craft must successfully detach from both of the Falcon 9\u2019s rocket boosters, the first of which is supposed to land itself on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.Dragon\u2019s journey is far from complete. It has 19 hours to go until it will meet the International Space Station in orbit. The capsule must dock with the space station in an intricate, computer-controlled dance and allow astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to safely enter the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon prepares final checks for liftoffReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX officials are conducting final stage checks at the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon rocket prepares for liftoff at 3:22 p.m.NASA officials have indicated that the weather appears to amenable for flight, and SpaceX flight technicians have readied the spacecraft for flight without a hitch, even moving slightly ahead of schedule.Within the final 15 minutes before liftoff, Falcon 9 will chill its engines prior to launch and power will transition internally to the Dragon capsule away from the rocket\u2019s support structure.At one minute before launch, the command flight computer will begin its final prelaunch checks and the rocket propellant tanks will pressurize.Forty-five seconds before launch, SpaceX launch director Mike Taylor will verify a go for launch and just three seconds before launch, the engine controller commands engine ignition sequence to start.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump has arrived at Kennedy Space CenterReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump arrived at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., just before 3 p.m. Vice President Pence, chairman of the National Space Council, and second lady Karen Pence are also set to attend the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon launch. First lady Melania Trump was scheduled to attend, but stayed behind in Washington.Trump has made human spaceflight a priority of his first term. He turned the Air Force\u2019s Space Command into the Space Force, its own branch of the military, and has pushed NASA to conduct a lunar landing mission by 2024 as a steppingstone to a mission to Mars.Pence has said the U.S. will return to the moon \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dKennedy Space Center.37 minutes to go before the @SpaceX launch. pic.twitter.com/eGdji2K5DY\u2014 J\u00e9r\u00f4me Cartillier (@jcartillier) May 30, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement Launch director says weather is clear for goReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow2:43 p.m.Link copiedLinkRadar shows weather has cleared around the launch site and NASA announced at 2:35 p.m. that weather for liftoff is \u2018go\u2019.Lightning and tall cumulus clouds which had earlier been in the vicinity of the launch pad have departed.However, storms are lingering about 15 miles west of Cape Canaveral, along Interstate 95. Should these drift east, the launch could still be aborted. According to NASA, the chance of weather preventing launch is still 30 percent, but that\u2019s a 20 percent improvement over the morning forecast assessment.230p: Radar shows conditions have cleared around Cape Canaveral for #SpaceX launch but storms just 10-15 miles west along I95, drifting east. Tough call! pic.twitter.com/DDFeUwPWcM\u2014 Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) May 30, 2020\n\nFrom 2:05 p.m.Showers and storms continue sweeping across the Space Coast. As of 1:45 p.m., the launch was no-go due to weather, according to NASA. However, the storm activity might exit the region by 2:30 p.m. or a little after, and conditions might improve enough to allow launch at 3:22 p.m.At 2 p.m., weather radar showed numerous showers and storms around Cape Canaveral extending west about 15 miles, to near Interstate 95.The latest weather report from NASA television indicated ground and upper level winds are \u201cgo\u201d for launch but that electric fields, lightning and cumulus clouds in the vicinity of the launch pad violate launch criteria. A weather briefing one hour before launch will update this assessment.If all of the storm activity can clear the Space Coast before 3 p.m., and new storms don\u2019t form behind it, the launch could happen. But it won\u2019t be enough for storms to simply exit Cape Canaveral. The launch could be aborted if any of a dozen weather rules are violated for various cloud, wind and precipitation scenarios, including the presence of tall clouds that trigger lightning within 10 nautical miles of the launch pad.This will likely go down to the wire.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementNew launch window would be Sunday if flight is again postponed. But weather now is good.Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:41 p.m.Link copiedLinkIf weather postpones the flight again, the next available potential launch time is Sunday at 3 p.m., though the weather may not be any better. The Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron predicts a 40-percent chance of bad weather. Future launch opportunities are Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.The flight has an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period during which the International Space Station is lined up with the rocket\u2019s flight trajectory. Any delay would cause the rocket to miss its desired flight path and not rendezvous with the station. So the launch must be on time.SpaceX officials authorize fueling rocket, arming of emergency abort systemReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX Launch Director Mike Taylor authorized flight engineers to begin loading propellants into the Falcon 9 boosters and Crew Dragon capsule at 2:29 p.m. Fuel for the Falcon 9 includes liquid oxygen, often called LOX, and RP-1, a refined, rocket-grade kerosene.Liquid oxygen has begun loading into the rocket. We are inching closer to liftoff at 3:22pm ET. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/VrTCLi9JD2\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 30, 2020\n\nIn moments, the crew access arm will retract from the spacecraft and SpaceX will arm Dragon\u2019s launch escape system. Dragon can autonomously detect any signs of trouble with either stage of Falcon 9\u2019s rocket boosters and shoot itself away to safety, like a cork popping out of a bottle of champagne.SpaceX successfully tested the abort system with an unmanned Dragon in January. The Falcon 9 booster was destroyed during the test flight, as expected, and Dragon, using built-in SuperDraco thrusters, glided away safely and landed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.Coronavirus remains a concern, even as launch approachesReturn to menuBy Lori Rozsa1:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkAs NASA TV lived streamed the preparations for the Space X launch, coronavirus concerns were on display in the masks that NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and others wore.Both astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, have tested negative for coronavirus exposure. \u201cAnd they\u2019ve been in quarantine for more than 14 days,\u201d NASA spokeswoman Megan Sumner said, referring to the standard pre-launch quarantine for astronauts.The two men were applauded as they were driven to the launchpad. Among those cheering were NASA employees who are taking advantage of free coronavirus testing from a Florida department of health COVID-19 mobile testing lab.Trump boards Air Force One en route to rocket launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump boarded Air Force One shortly after 1:30 p.m., to fly to Cape Canaveral to watch the Falcon 9 Crew Dragon launch at Kennedy Space Center.Trump and Vice President Pence visited Cape Canaveral on Wednesday for the first attempt at the launch, but bad weather forced officials to scrub the plans.Speaking to reporters Saturday at Joint Base Andrews before stepping aboard the airplane, he said there was a \u201c50/50 chance\" the rocket would launch Saturday, citing uncertain weather forecasts.President @realDonaldTrump is en route to Kennedy Space Center to view the planned @NASA and @SpaceX rocket launch. pic.twitter.com/g29eIUlSim\u2014 The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 30, 2020\n\n\u201cThe weather is very delicate,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s very amazing. So we\u2019re going over and we\u2019ll be back in a little while. We want to watch the rocket launch. NASA\u2019s come a long way. It was dead as a door nail, but now it\u2019s the most vibrant place in the world for that, so I look forward to it.\u201dBehind the scenes as FAA prepares for Space X launchReturn to menuBy Lori Aratani1:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkFrom a command center in Warrenton, Va., a special team at the Federal Aviation Administration will be keeping a close watch on the historic launch of the first astronauts from U.S. soil in almost a decade. Two NASA astronauts are headed to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 booster.With a growing number of companies seeking to commercialize space travel, the FAA has focused on developing new systems for more efficiently managing airspace. In the past, the agency may have had to close airspace for days around a launch site in preparation. Today while those closures may last only hours, they still can prove disruptive to air traffic. The FAA\u2019s air traffic controllers coordinate up to 43,000 flights in the U.S. a day. At any given time, there can be 5,000 aircraft in the skies.A FAA program known as the Space Data Integrator (SDI), however, seeks to integrate commercial air traffic with commercial space traffic by allowing air traffic controllers to see rockets just as they do airplanes. The shift would mean the agency could monitor traffic with great accuracy, potentially reducing the length of time that airspace must be closed off for space launches.Read moreClouds and storms building near Space Coast, but chance they clear by launchReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow1:18 p.m.Link copiedLinkHmmmmm #spacex #nasa #Demo2 pic.twitter.com/dOGzgx9tOv\u2014 Christian Davenport (@wapodavenport) May 30, 2020\n\nClouds were gathering in Cape Canaveral and weather radar at 1 p.m. showed numerous showers and storms approaching the Space Coast from the west.The storm activity, less than 10 miles from Cape Canaveral, is likely to sweep across the Space Coast over the next hour or so. Brief heavy downpours and gusty winds will accompany these storms.It\u2019s possible that, in the wake of these storms, there could be a calm period that coincides with the 3:22 p.m. launch. In fact, some high-resolution forecast models show a pause or lessening in the storms after 3 p.m.However, additional storms could also fire after this initial round and any tall clouds with strong electric fields in the vicinity could scrub the launch.In a 1 p.m. interview on NASA television, administrator Jim Bridenstine, who was briefed on weather earlier in the day, said, \u201cThe question is what time do the thunderstorms go away?\u201dHe continued, \u201cWe\u2019re hoping that the weather will hold up. The trend is better today than it was Wednesday. A historic moment for SpaceX, which became the first private corporation to launch people into orbit. Dragon capsule achieves orbit, heads towards space station ",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6205",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/13/inspiration4-spacex-civlian-space-flight/",
        "text": "None of the crew has ever been to space before. Not the spacecraft\u2019s commander, a high school dropout. Not the pilot of the mission. The medical officer is a childhood cancer survivor who has a prosthetic in her leg. The fourth crew member lucked into the seat after a friend backed out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis unorthodox mix of would-be explorers, all strangers until just a few months ago, from different walks of life, will make history as early as Wednesday evening as the first all-civilian group of astronauts. Their mission is scheduled to last longer than John Glenn\u2019s Mercury mission and to soar higher than nearly every human spaceflight since the Apollo era. And for this flight, NASA is just a bystander.If all goes to plan, the Inspiration4 flight will lift off shortly after 8:02 p.m. and will usher in a new era of human space exploration. It is yet another sign of the growth of the commercial space industry and the rapid erosion of governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the rocket will blast off from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the space agency that put men on the moon and helped build a space station that has orbited Earth for two decades won\u2019t be involved in what will be the first fully commercial spaceflight to orbit Earth.You are now free to move about the cosmos...if you can afford itThe first ever launch into Earth's orbit with only civilians aboard is expected to take off on Sept. 15, led by e-commerce chief executive Jared Isaacman. (Reuters)The rocket and autonomous spacecraft are owned and operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA. The endeavor is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, not the government. The soon-to-be astronauts have trained for months, not years. And they did it at SpaceX\u2019s facilities in Hawthorne, Calif., instead of Houston, where for decades NASA\u2019s astronauts have endured a gauntlet of tests and training before being allowed to board a rocket to space.Two of the Inspiration4 crew were chosen by winning a sweepstakes that was publicized through a commercial that ran during the Super Bowl this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile several private citizens have launched to orbit before, they have always had professional astronauts to guide them, or take over in the event of an emergency. Not on this flight. The crew of Inspiration4 will be on its own, spending three days inside SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a big SUV.\u201cThe flight marks a transition in human spaceflight from public to private,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute and a space historian. \u201cIt\u2019s like somebody going out and renting a self-steering yacht and sailing off into space.\u201dIt is a mission far more daring, and dangerous, than the recent suborbital space tourism missions that billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos recently flew. Those barely scratched the edge of space before falling back to Earth after spending just a few minutes in a weightless environment and traveling about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew will reach orbit, traveling at 17,500 mph, or nearly Mach 23, and circling the globe every 90 minutes. They\u2019ll also reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station, higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth orbit except for Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966.\u201cIt should afford the Inspiration4 crew a truly inspiring view \u2014 one only rivaled by two Gemini crews and the 24 Apollo moon-bound astronauts,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, the editor of CollectSpace.com, a space history news site.The purpose of the flight, at least in part, goes to the essence of exploration \u2014 to show it can be done. To prove that a group of nonprofessional astronauts can board a private spacecraft and blast off into orbit for three days. And to prove that a private company can ferry them safely to and from orbit, as if they were crossing the Atlantic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight, which is also the subject of a series airing on Netflix, has been designed to raise money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman, 38, who has not disclosed how much he paid for the mission, kicked off the campaign with a $100 million donation and is hoping to raise as much as double that.A high school dropout who started his company at age 16, Isaacman became a billionaire with Shift4 Payments, a payments processing behemoth. He\u2019s a lifelong aviation enthusiast who started flying at an early age and soon grew from piloting Cessnas to jets to even fighter jets. He\u2019s competed in aerial acrobatic competitions and founded Draken International, which provides fighter jet training for the military and defense industry customers.The first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod put in her leg, which would make her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen told she was chosen for the mission, she asked, \u201cAre we going to the moon?\u201dThe other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.To prepare for the flight, the Inspiration4 crew flew on a Zero-G plane, which flies in parabolic arcs that create weightlessness for a few minutes at a time. They spent time in a centrifuge to get accustomed to the excessive gravitational forces they\u2019ll experience during the flight. And to bond, they went on a camping trip on Mount Rainier. \u201cWe are going to work on getting comfortable being uncomfortable,\u201d Isaacman said before the climb.And they have spent many hours at SpaceX headquarters going over emergency procedures and familiarizing themselves with the controls of the spacecraft.But if all goes well, the Dragon spacecraft will fly itself. The cargo version has been doing that for years, autonomously meeting and docking with the International Space Station before coming back to Earth. And the Crew Dragon version has now flown three sets of astronauts to the station. During the first test flight with a crew onboard, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took the controls to test them out. But for the most part, the vehicle has flown unpiloted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew is not the first non-government-trained group of people to go to space, of course. In the early days of the space shuttle, NASA expected to fly so frequently that it would be able to accommodate ordinary people. It decided that first a teacher should fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jake Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.Finally, in 1986, NASA flew the teacher it had selected, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. She quickly became an inspiration to school kids across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.Story continues below advertisementBut she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.AdvertisementIn the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft because NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there. A Houston-based company known as Axiom Space has seized the opportunity and booked a private astronaut flight to the space station, coming as soon as January.On those missions, the customers, who are paying about $55 million each for about a week\u2019s stay on the station, would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut to help guide them and serve as a commander.Story continues below advertisementThe flights all mark an important new chapter in the history of human spaceflight, said Alan Ladwig, who ran NASA\u2019s spaceflight participant program in the 1980s and wrote about the history of private spaceflight in the book \u201cSee You in Orbit?\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important because finally after almost 70 years of discussion of how it wouldn\u2019t be long before we could all fly in space, it is finally happening for civilians,\u201d he said.For now, though, it remains something only the very wealthy or lucky can do. Even the suborbital tourists missions that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company and Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic offer are pricey. One person paid $28 million in an auction to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket, though regular ticket prices have not been announced. Virgin Galactic is charging $450,000 a seat.But the Inspiration4 mission is of particular importance because three of the crew members are not wealthy, Ladwig said.\u201cThey\u2019re not billionaires,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are people that could be our neighbors, people you went to school with, people you work with. And for them to get this opportunity is pretty fantastic.\u201d None of the crew has been to space before. They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6206",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/13/inspiration4-spacex-civlian-space-flight/",
        "text": "None of the crew has ever been to space before. Not the spacecraft\u2019s commander, a high school dropout. Not the pilot of the mission. The medical officer is a childhood cancer survivor who has a prosthetic in her leg. The fourth crew member lucked into the seat after a friend backed out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis unorthodox mix of would-be explorers, all strangers until just a few months ago, from different walks of life, will make history as early as Wednesday evening as the first all-civilian group of astronauts. Their mission is scheduled to last longer than John Glenn\u2019s Mercury mission and to soar higher than nearly every human spaceflight since the Apollo era. And for this flight, NASA is just a bystander.If all goes to plan, the Inspiration4 flight will lift off shortly after 8:02 p.m. and will usher in a new era of human space exploration. It is yet another sign of the growth of the commercial space industry and the rapid erosion of governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the rocket will blast off from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the space agency that put men on the moon and helped build a space station that has orbited Earth for two decades won\u2019t be involved in what will be the first fully commercial spaceflight to orbit Earth.You are now free to move about the cosmos...if you can afford itThe first ever launch into Earth's orbit with only civilians aboard is expected to take off on Sept. 15, led by e-commerce chief executive Jared Isaacman. (Reuters)The rocket and autonomous spacecraft are owned and operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA. The endeavor is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, not the government. The soon-to-be astronauts have trained for months, not years. And they did it at SpaceX\u2019s facilities in Hawthorne, Calif., instead of Houston, where for decades NASA\u2019s astronauts have endured a gauntlet of tests and training before being allowed to board a rocket to space.Two of the Inspiration4 crew were chosen by winning a sweepstakes that was publicized through a commercial that ran during the Super Bowl this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile several private citizens have launched to orbit before, they have always had professional astronauts to guide them, or take over in the event of an emergency. Not on this flight. The crew of Inspiration4 will be on its own, spending three days inside SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a big SUV.\u201cThe flight marks a transition in human spaceflight from public to private,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute and a space historian. \u201cIt\u2019s like somebody going out and renting a self-steering yacht and sailing off into space.\u201dIt is a mission far more daring, and dangerous, than the recent suborbital space tourism missions that billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos recently flew. Those barely scratched the edge of space before falling back to Earth after spending just a few minutes in a weightless environment and traveling about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew will reach orbit, traveling at 17,500 mph, or nearly Mach 23, and circling the globe every 90 minutes. They\u2019ll also reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station, higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth orbit except for Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966.\u201cIt should afford the Inspiration4 crew a truly inspiring view \u2014 one only rivaled by two Gemini crews and the 24 Apollo moon-bound astronauts,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, the editor of CollectSpace.com, a space history news site.The purpose of the flight, at least in part, goes to the essence of exploration \u2014 to show it can be done. To prove that a group of nonprofessional astronauts can board a private spacecraft and blast off into orbit for three days. And to prove that a private company can ferry them safely to and from orbit, as if they were crossing the Atlantic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight, which is also the subject of a series airing on Netflix, has been designed to raise money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman, 38, who has not disclosed how much he paid for the mission, kicked off the campaign with a $100 million donation and is hoping to raise as much as double that.A high school dropout who started his company at age 16, Isaacman became a billionaire with Shift4 Payments, a payments processing behemoth. He\u2019s a lifelong aviation enthusiast who started flying at an early age and soon grew from piloting Cessnas to jets to even fighter jets. He\u2019s competed in aerial acrobatic competitions and founded Draken International, which provides fighter jet training for the military and defense industry customers.The first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod put in her leg, which would make her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen told she was chosen for the mission, she asked, \u201cAre we going to the moon?\u201dThe other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.To prepare for the flight, the Inspiration4 crew flew on a Zero-G plane, which flies in parabolic arcs that create weightlessness for a few minutes at a time. They spent time in a centrifuge to get accustomed to the excessive gravitational forces they\u2019ll experience during the flight. And to bond, they went on a camping trip on Mount Rainier. \u201cWe are going to work on getting comfortable being uncomfortable,\u201d Isaacman said before the climb.And they have spent many hours at SpaceX headquarters going over emergency procedures and familiarizing themselves with the controls of the spacecraft.But if all goes well, the Dragon spacecraft will fly itself. The cargo version has been doing that for years, autonomously meeting and docking with the International Space Station before coming back to Earth. And the Crew Dragon version has now flown three sets of astronauts to the station. During the first test flight with a crew onboard, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took the controls to test them out. But for the most part, the vehicle has flown unpiloted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew is not the first non-government-trained group of people to go to space, of course. In the early days of the space shuttle, NASA expected to fly so frequently that it would be able to accommodate ordinary people. It decided that first a teacher should fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jake Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.Finally, in 1986, NASA flew the teacher it had selected, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. She quickly became an inspiration to school kids across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.Story continues below advertisementBut she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.AdvertisementIn the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft because NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there. A Houston-based company known as Axiom Space has seized the opportunity and booked a private astronaut flight to the space station, coming as soon as January.On those missions, the customers, who are paying about $55 million each for about a week\u2019s stay on the station, would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut to help guide them and serve as a commander.Story continues below advertisementThe flights all mark an important new chapter in the history of human spaceflight, said Alan Ladwig, who ran NASA\u2019s spaceflight participant program in the 1980s and wrote about the history of private spaceflight in the book \u201cSee You in Orbit?\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important because finally after almost 70 years of discussion of how it wouldn\u2019t be long before we could all fly in space, it is finally happening for civilians,\u201d he said.For now, though, it remains something only the very wealthy or lucky can do. Even the suborbital tourists missions that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company and Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic offer are pricey. One person paid $28 million in an auction to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket, though regular ticket prices have not been announced. Virgin Galactic is charging $450,000 a seat.But the Inspiration4 mission is of particular importance because three of the crew members are not wealthy, Ladwig said.\u201cThey\u2019re not billionaires,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are people that could be our neighbors, people you went to school with, people you work with. And for them to get this opportunity is pretty fantastic.\u201d None of the crew has been to space before. They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6207",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/13/inspiration4-spacex-civlian-space-flight/",
        "text": "None of the crew has ever been to space before. Not the spacecraft\u2019s commander, a high school dropout. Not the pilot of the mission. The medical officer is a childhood cancer survivor who has a prosthetic in her leg. The fourth crew member lucked into the seat after a friend backed out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis unorthodox mix of would-be explorers, all strangers until just a few months ago, from different walks of life, will make history as early as Wednesday evening as the first all-civilian group of astronauts. Their mission is scheduled to last longer than John Glenn\u2019s Mercury mission and to soar higher than nearly every human spaceflight since the Apollo era. And for this flight, NASA is just a bystander.If all goes to plan, the Inspiration4 flight will lift off shortly after 8:02 p.m. and will usher in a new era of human space exploration. It is yet another sign of the growth of the commercial space industry and the rapid erosion of governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the rocket will blast off from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the space agency that put men on the moon and helped build a space station that has orbited Earth for two decades won\u2019t be involved in what will be the first fully commercial spaceflight to orbit Earth.You are now free to move about the cosmos...if you can afford itThe first ever launch into Earth's orbit with only civilians aboard is expected to take off on Sept. 15, led by e-commerce chief executive Jared Isaacman. (Reuters)The rocket and autonomous spacecraft are owned and operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA. The endeavor is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, not the government. The soon-to-be astronauts have trained for months, not years. And they did it at SpaceX\u2019s facilities in Hawthorne, Calif., instead of Houston, where for decades NASA\u2019s astronauts have endured a gauntlet of tests and training before being allowed to board a rocket to space.Two of the Inspiration4 crew were chosen by winning a sweepstakes that was publicized through a commercial that ran during the Super Bowl this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile several private citizens have launched to orbit before, they have always had professional astronauts to guide them, or take over in the event of an emergency. Not on this flight. The crew of Inspiration4 will be on its own, spending three days inside SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a big SUV.\u201cThe flight marks a transition in human spaceflight from public to private,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute and a space historian. \u201cIt\u2019s like somebody going out and renting a self-steering yacht and sailing off into space.\u201dIt is a mission far more daring, and dangerous, than the recent suborbital space tourism missions that billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos recently flew. Those barely scratched the edge of space before falling back to Earth after spending just a few minutes in a weightless environment and traveling about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew will reach orbit, traveling at 17,500 mph, or nearly Mach 23, and circling the globe every 90 minutes. They\u2019ll also reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station, higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth orbit except for Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966.\u201cIt should afford the Inspiration4 crew a truly inspiring view \u2014 one only rivaled by two Gemini crews and the 24 Apollo moon-bound astronauts,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, the editor of CollectSpace.com, a space history news site.The purpose of the flight, at least in part, goes to the essence of exploration \u2014 to show it can be done. To prove that a group of nonprofessional astronauts can board a private spacecraft and blast off into orbit for three days. And to prove that a private company can ferry them safely to and from orbit, as if they were crossing the Atlantic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight, which is also the subject of a series airing on Netflix, has been designed to raise money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman, 38, who has not disclosed how much he paid for the mission, kicked off the campaign with a $100 million donation and is hoping to raise as much as double that.A high school dropout who started his company at age 16, Isaacman became a billionaire with Shift4 Payments, a payments processing behemoth. He\u2019s a lifelong aviation enthusiast who started flying at an early age and soon grew from piloting Cessnas to jets to even fighter jets. He\u2019s competed in aerial acrobatic competitions and founded Draken International, which provides fighter jet training for the military and defense industry customers.The first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod put in her leg, which would make her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen told she was chosen for the mission, she asked, \u201cAre we going to the moon?\u201dThe other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.To prepare for the flight, the Inspiration4 crew flew on a Zero-G plane, which flies in parabolic arcs that create weightlessness for a few minutes at a time. They spent time in a centrifuge to get accustomed to the excessive gravitational forces they\u2019ll experience during the flight. And to bond, they went on a camping trip on Mount Rainier. \u201cWe are going to work on getting comfortable being uncomfortable,\u201d Isaacman said before the climb.And they have spent many hours at SpaceX headquarters going over emergency procedures and familiarizing themselves with the controls of the spacecraft.But if all goes well, the Dragon spacecraft will fly itself. The cargo version has been doing that for years, autonomously meeting and docking with the International Space Station before coming back to Earth. And the Crew Dragon version has now flown three sets of astronauts to the station. During the first test flight with a crew onboard, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took the controls to test them out. But for the most part, the vehicle has flown unpiloted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew is not the first non-government-trained group of people to go to space, of course. In the early days of the space shuttle, NASA expected to fly so frequently that it would be able to accommodate ordinary people. It decided that first a teacher should fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jake Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.Finally, in 1986, NASA flew the teacher it had selected, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. She quickly became an inspiration to school kids across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.Story continues below advertisementBut she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.AdvertisementIn the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft because NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there. A Houston-based company known as Axiom Space has seized the opportunity and booked a private astronaut flight to the space station, coming as soon as January.On those missions, the customers, who are paying about $55 million each for about a week\u2019s stay on the station, would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut to help guide them and serve as a commander.Story continues below advertisementThe flights all mark an important new chapter in the history of human spaceflight, said Alan Ladwig, who ran NASA\u2019s spaceflight participant program in the 1980s and wrote about the history of private spaceflight in the book \u201cSee You in Orbit?\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important because finally after almost 70 years of discussion of how it wouldn\u2019t be long before we could all fly in space, it is finally happening for civilians,\u201d he said.For now, though, it remains something only the very wealthy or lucky can do. Even the suborbital tourists missions that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company and Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic offer are pricey. One person paid $28 million in an auction to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket, though regular ticket prices have not been announced. Virgin Galactic is charging $450,000 a seat.But the Inspiration4 mission is of particular importance because three of the crew members are not wealthy, Ladwig said.\u201cThey\u2019re not billionaires,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are people that could be our neighbors, people you went to school with, people you work with. And for them to get this opportunity is pretty fantastic.\u201d None of the crew has been to space before. They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6208",
        "date": "2021-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/13/inspiration4-spacex-civlian-space-flight/",
        "text": "None of the crew has ever been to space before. Not the spacecraft\u2019s commander, a high school dropout. Not the pilot of the mission. The medical officer is a childhood cancer survivor who has a prosthetic in her leg. The fourth crew member lucked into the seat after a friend backed out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis unorthodox mix of would-be explorers, all strangers until just a few months ago, from different walks of life, will make history as early as Wednesday evening as the first all-civilian group of astronauts. Their mission is scheduled to last longer than John Glenn\u2019s Mercury mission and to soar higher than nearly every human spaceflight since the Apollo era. And for this flight, NASA is just a bystander.If all goes to plan, the Inspiration4 flight will lift off shortly after 8:02 p.m. and will usher in a new era of human space exploration. It is yet another sign of the growth of the commercial space industry and the rapid erosion of governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on spaceflight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the rocket will blast off from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, the space agency that put men on the moon and helped build a space station that has orbited Earth for two decades won\u2019t be involved in what will be the first fully commercial spaceflight to orbit Earth.You are now free to move about the cosmos...if you can afford itThe first ever launch into Earth's orbit with only civilians aboard is expected to take off on Sept. 15, led by e-commerce chief executive Jared Isaacman. (Reuters)The rocket and autonomous spacecraft are owned and operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, not NASA. The endeavor is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, not the government. The soon-to-be astronauts have trained for months, not years. And they did it at SpaceX\u2019s facilities in Hawthorne, Calif., instead of Houston, where for decades NASA\u2019s astronauts have endured a gauntlet of tests and training before being allowed to board a rocket to space.Two of the Inspiration4 crew were chosen by winning a sweepstakes that was publicized through a commercial that ran during the Super Bowl this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile several private citizens have launched to orbit before, they have always had professional astronauts to guide them, or take over in the event of an emergency. Not on this flight. The crew of Inspiration4 will be on its own, spending three days inside SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a big SUV.\u201cThe flight marks a transition in human spaceflight from public to private,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute and a space historian. \u201cIt\u2019s like somebody going out and renting a self-steering yacht and sailing off into space.\u201dIt is a mission far more daring, and dangerous, than the recent suborbital space tourism missions that billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos recently flew. Those barely scratched the edge of space before falling back to Earth after spending just a few minutes in a weightless environment and traveling about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew will reach orbit, traveling at 17,500 mph, or nearly Mach 23, and circling the globe every 90 minutes. They\u2019ll also reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station, higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth orbit except for Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966.\u201cIt should afford the Inspiration4 crew a truly inspiring view \u2014 one only rivaled by two Gemini crews and the 24 Apollo moon-bound astronauts,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, the editor of CollectSpace.com, a space history news site.The purpose of the flight, at least in part, goes to the essence of exploration \u2014 to show it can be done. To prove that a group of nonprofessional astronauts can board a private spacecraft and blast off into orbit for three days. And to prove that a private company can ferry them safely to and from orbit, as if they were crossing the Atlantic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight, which is also the subject of a series airing on Netflix, has been designed to raise money for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Isaacman, 38, who has not disclosed how much he paid for the mission, kicked off the campaign with a $100 million donation and is hoping to raise as much as double that.A high school dropout who started his company at age 16, Isaacman became a billionaire with Shift4 Payments, a payments processing behemoth. He\u2019s a lifelong aviation enthusiast who started flying at an early age and soon grew from piloting Cessnas to jets to even fighter jets. He\u2019s competed in aerial acrobatic competitions and founded Draken International, which provides fighter jet training for the military and defense industry customers.The first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod put in her leg, which would make her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen told she was chosen for the mission, she asked, \u201cAre we going to the moon?\u201dThe other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.To prepare for the flight, the Inspiration4 crew flew on a Zero-G plane, which flies in parabolic arcs that create weightlessness for a few minutes at a time. They spent time in a centrifuge to get accustomed to the excessive gravitational forces they\u2019ll experience during the flight. And to bond, they went on a camping trip on Mount Rainier. \u201cWe are going to work on getting comfortable being uncomfortable,\u201d Isaacman said before the climb.And they have spent many hours at SpaceX headquarters going over emergency procedures and familiarizing themselves with the controls of the spacecraft.But if all goes well, the Dragon spacecraft will fly itself. The cargo version has been doing that for years, autonomously meeting and docking with the International Space Station before coming back to Earth. And the Crew Dragon version has now flown three sets of astronauts to the station. During the first test flight with a crew onboard, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley took the controls to test them out. But for the most part, the vehicle has flown unpiloted.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Inspiration4 crew is not the first non-government-trained group of people to go to space, of course. In the early days of the space shuttle, NASA expected to fly so frequently that it would be able to accommodate ordinary people. It decided that first a teacher should fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jake Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.Finally, in 1986, NASA flew the teacher it had selected, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. She quickly became an inspiration to school kids across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.Story continues below advertisementBut she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.AdvertisementIn the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft because NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there. A Houston-based company known as Axiom Space has seized the opportunity and booked a private astronaut flight to the space station, coming as soon as January.On those missions, the customers, who are paying about $55 million each for about a week\u2019s stay on the station, would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut to help guide them and serve as a commander.Story continues below advertisementThe flights all mark an important new chapter in the history of human spaceflight, said Alan Ladwig, who ran NASA\u2019s spaceflight participant program in the 1980s and wrote about the history of private spaceflight in the book \u201cSee You in Orbit?\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important because finally after almost 70 years of discussion of how it wouldn\u2019t be long before we could all fly in space, it is finally happening for civilians,\u201d he said.For now, though, it remains something only the very wealthy or lucky can do. Even the suborbital tourists missions that Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company and Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic offer are pricey. One person paid $28 million in an auction to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket, though regular ticket prices have not been announced. Virgin Galactic is charging $450,000 a seat.But the Inspiration4 mission is of particular importance because three of the crew members are not wealthy, Ladwig said.\u201cThey\u2019re not billionaires,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are people that could be our neighbors, people you went to school with, people you work with. And for them to get this opportunity is pretty fantastic.\u201d None of the crew has been to space before. They \u2018could be our neighbors,\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. SpaceX gets ready to fly the Inspiration4 crew.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1 (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6209",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/spacex-nasas-crew-2-docking-live-updates/",
        "text": "Nearly 24 hours after its on-time liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, the first goal of its journey.In a delicate dance, the spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s docking ports and parked itself. The maneuvers were directed completely by the spacecraft\u2019s computers. Controllers on the ground and the astronauts on board the capsule and the station monitored closely, but the computers were in control. The two crafts were then locked together by a dozen hooks. The astronauts then ensured that the seal between spacecraft and station was tight and that the air pressure inside the spacecraft and the station was the same. Then they opened the hatch and crossed into the station.Here\u2019s what to know:For the third time in a year, SpaceX on Friday launched astronauts to the station.The astronauts were due to dock with the station at 5:10 a.m. but arrived two minutes early. The astronauts are expected to enter the station about two and a half hours later.The launch was initially postponed after high winds along the flight path.It took the Dragon spacecraft almost 24 hours to catch up to the space station, which is traveling 17,500 mph at an altitude of about 240 miles.Astronauts board the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Crew-2 astronauts have boarded the International Space Station, floating through the hatch to a warm welcome from their fellow astronauts on the orbiting laboratory.First through the hatch was Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, followed by Thomas Pesquet of France, then NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough. They then gathered snugly around the hatch opening for a formal welcome ceremony.\u201cLet the Tetris game of fitting 11 crew members into a single frame begin,\u201d NASA commentator Gary Jordon said during a live broadcast of the event.The crew is scheduled to stay on board the station for six months performing science experiments and station upgrades.\"Endeavour arriving!\" Welcome to the @Space_Station, Crew-2! Their arrival means there are now 11 humans aboard our orbiting laboratory, a number not seen since the space shuttle era. Hugs abound. pic.twitter.com/uSwW3JFl6K\u2014 NASA (@NASA) April 24, 2021\n\n\u201cIt is awesome to see the 11 of you on station,\u201d acting NASA Administration Steve Jurczyk said, congratulating the crew on a safe mission that had lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida the day before.McArthur, whose husband and fellow NASA astronaut Bob Behnken flew to the station on the same spacecraft last year, said that the crew is \u201cjust so excited to be here. ... We\u2019re ready to get to work. There\u2019s a lot of great science that I know we\u2019re going to be doing.\"AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs Crew-2 arrives, Crew-1 prepares to go homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA started its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the plan was to create a regular transportation system to the International Space Station, with multiple flights a year, as had existed during the space shuttle program.Now, once again, NASA has it. SpaceX has flown three human spaceflight missions to the station. The latest, known as Crew-2, docked Saturday morning. Now that those four astronauts have arrived, the Crew-1 astronauts, who arrived at the station in November, are preparing to fly home after a six-month stay.First, they\u2019ll hand over operation of the station to their new crew mates, helping them get up to speed with everything that\u2019s happening. Then on Wednesday, the Crew-1 astronauts are scheduled to get back into their spacecraft for the fiery journey home through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes well, the crew, comprised of NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, would undock from the station and splashdown off the coast of Florida at about 12:35 p.m.SpaceX\u2019s next mission to the station, Crew-3, is scheduled for the fall.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s the future of the space station?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is a magnificent ship, one that now has two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft attached to it. As long as a football field, it will soon have 11 astronauts on board as it orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes.The space station has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years. But it has shown signs of aging, and Russia has recently said it could abandon the program by 2025. The United States is currently committed to the station through 2024, though Congress is expected to extend the station\u2019s life for several years later.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Now NASA is working on what comes next. It\u2019s not interested in building another expensive, government-funded station. Rather the plan for now is to have commercial space stations that would be developed in partnership with the space agency.Axiom Space, among others, is in the process of designing successors to the ISS. But those projects are still in the early stages and will need time \u2014 and money \u2014 to succeed. What happens next isn\u2019t known. But it will pose one of the biggest challenges for former Sen. Bill Nelson, president Biden\u2019s pick to become NASA administrator, once he is confirmed.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:09 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Saturday at 5:08 a.m. Eastern, nearly 24 hours after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and two minutes ahead of schedule.The autonomous spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s ports and parked itself in a delicate maneuver watched closely by controllers on the ground and astronauts on board the station. It was expected to take about 15 minutes for the docking sequence to be completed. On board the spacecraft are NASA astronauts Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough, France\u2019s Thomas Pesquet and Japan\u2019s Akihiko\u202fHoshide.The astronauts will check to ensure that the seal is tight and that the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. Then, at approximately 7:15 a.m. Eastern, they are expected to open the hatch and board the station, where seven other astronauts are waiting to greet them.Docking confirmed \u2013 second time at the @space_station for this Dragon pic.twitter.com/JLC9wOjRFT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nA welcome ceremony is expected at about 7:30 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-3 mission is expected in the fall, but isn\u2019t the only flight SpaceX has planned Return to menuBy Christian Davenport4:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, are four private citizens: Haley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer, who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The Inspiration4 crew watches as Falcon 9 and Dragon lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida with Crew-2!The next crewed launch of Dragon will launch these four commercial astronauts in September. pic.twitter.com/KPU5xWSBWd\u2014 Inspiration4 (@inspiration4x) April 23, 2021\n\nThe group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis is the second time this space capsule has docked with the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:25 a.m.Link copiedLinkFriday\u2019s launch was the first time NASA has approved SpaceX\u2019s reuse of equipment that had previously flown. The Falcon 9 booster that launched had flown before and the capsule, dubbed Endeavour, was the first SpaceX spacecraft to carry human beings to space.Dragon remains on track to autonomously dock with the @space_station at ~5:10 a.m. EDT pic.twitter.com/eyftZphCET\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nIt docked with the space station on May 31, 2020, with two astronauts onboard, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who flew aboard what was considered a test flight to make sure the craft functioned as expected.That journey took Endeavour 22 hours to reach the space station, slightly less than the 23\u00bd hours Endeavour is expected to have traveled on its current trip.There\u2019s another overlap between the current mission and its first one: astronaut Megan McArthur, one of the four aboard Endeavour this time, is married to Behnken and was assigned to the same seat in the capsule that he had occupied.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementIt\u2019s getting crowded on the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:15 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will bring the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.That means the astronauts will have to make do, sleeping wherever they can find a spot \u2014 even on the ceiling, since in the weightless environment of space there is no up or down.The rendezvous phase is complete and cameras have spotted the @SpaceX #CrewDragon as it nears the space station for a 5:10am ET docking today. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/rrY0QOOfHC\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 24, 2021\n\nAfter arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the station\u2019s current commander, also faced tight conditions. He ended up sleeping in the Dragon capsule that had carried him there. The capsule was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth on Wednesday, with splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.It\u2019s not just astronaut accommodations that are crowded. Boeing, the other company that has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the space station, says it\u2019s ready to fly a test of its long-delayed capsule as early as May. But because there\u2019s no place to park it, Boeing says it doesn\u2019t expect to undertake the test until August or September.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement SpaceX Endeavour capsule docked with the International Space Station. The mission's Crew-2 was greeting by the outgoing Crew-1. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6210",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/spacex-nasas-crew-2-docking-live-updates/",
        "text": "Nearly 24 hours after its on-time liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, the first goal of its journey.In a delicate dance, the spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s docking ports and parked itself. The maneuvers were directed completely by the spacecraft\u2019s computers. Controllers on the ground and the astronauts on board the capsule and the station monitored closely, but the computers were in control. The two crafts were then locked together by a dozen hooks. The astronauts then ensured that the seal between spacecraft and station was tight and that the air pressure inside the spacecraft and the station was the same. Then they opened the hatch and crossed into the station.Here\u2019s what to know:For the third time in a year, SpaceX on Friday launched astronauts to the station.The astronauts were due to dock with the station at 5:10 a.m. but arrived two minutes early. The astronauts are expected to enter the station about two and a half hours later.The launch was initially postponed after high winds along the flight path.It took the Dragon spacecraft almost 24 hours to catch up to the space station, which is traveling 17,500 mph at an altitude of about 240 miles.Astronauts board the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Crew-2 astronauts have boarded the International Space Station, floating through the hatch to a warm welcome from their fellow astronauts on the orbiting laboratory.First through the hatch was Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, followed by Thomas Pesquet of France, then NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough. They then gathered snugly around the hatch opening for a formal welcome ceremony.\u201cLet the Tetris game of fitting 11 crew members into a single frame begin,\u201d NASA commentator Gary Jordon said during a live broadcast of the event.The crew is scheduled to stay on board the station for six months performing science experiments and station upgrades.\"Endeavour arriving!\" Welcome to the @Space_Station, Crew-2! Their arrival means there are now 11 humans aboard our orbiting laboratory, a number not seen since the space shuttle era. Hugs abound. pic.twitter.com/uSwW3JFl6K\u2014 NASA (@NASA) April 24, 2021\n\n\u201cIt is awesome to see the 11 of you on station,\u201d acting NASA Administration Steve Jurczyk said, congratulating the crew on a safe mission that had lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida the day before.McArthur, whose husband and fellow NASA astronaut Bob Behnken flew to the station on the same spacecraft last year, said that the crew is \u201cjust so excited to be here. ... We\u2019re ready to get to work. There\u2019s a lot of great science that I know we\u2019re going to be doing.\"AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs Crew-2 arrives, Crew-1 prepares to go homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA started its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the plan was to create a regular transportation system to the International Space Station, with multiple flights a year, as had existed during the space shuttle program.Now, once again, NASA has it. SpaceX has flown three human spaceflight missions to the station. The latest, known as Crew-2, docked Saturday morning. Now that those four astronauts have arrived, the Crew-1 astronauts, who arrived at the station in November, are preparing to fly home after a six-month stay.First, they\u2019ll hand over operation of the station to their new crew mates, helping them get up to speed with everything that\u2019s happening. Then on Wednesday, the Crew-1 astronauts are scheduled to get back into their spacecraft for the fiery journey home through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes well, the crew, comprised of NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, would undock from the station and splashdown off the coast of Florida at about 12:35 p.m.SpaceX\u2019s next mission to the station, Crew-3, is scheduled for the fall.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s the future of the space station?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is a magnificent ship, one that now has two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft attached to it. As long as a football field, it will soon have 11 astronauts on board as it orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes.The space station has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years. But it has shown signs of aging, and Russia has recently said it could abandon the program by 2025. The United States is currently committed to the station through 2024, though Congress is expected to extend the station\u2019s life for several years later.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Now NASA is working on what comes next. It\u2019s not interested in building another expensive, government-funded station. Rather the plan for now is to have commercial space stations that would be developed in partnership with the space agency.Axiom Space, among others, is in the process of designing successors to the ISS. But those projects are still in the early stages and will need time \u2014 and money \u2014 to succeed. What happens next isn\u2019t known. But it will pose one of the biggest challenges for former Sen. Bill Nelson, president Biden\u2019s pick to become NASA administrator, once he is confirmed.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:09 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Saturday at 5:08 a.m. Eastern, nearly 24 hours after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and two minutes ahead of schedule.The autonomous spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s ports and parked itself in a delicate maneuver watched closely by controllers on the ground and astronauts on board the station. It was expected to take about 15 minutes for the docking sequence to be completed. On board the spacecraft are NASA astronauts Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough, France\u2019s Thomas Pesquet and Japan\u2019s Akihiko\u202fHoshide.The astronauts will check to ensure that the seal is tight and that the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. Then, at approximately 7:15 a.m. Eastern, they are expected to open the hatch and board the station, where seven other astronauts are waiting to greet them.Docking confirmed \u2013 second time at the @space_station for this Dragon pic.twitter.com/JLC9wOjRFT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nA welcome ceremony is expected at about 7:30 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-3 mission is expected in the fall, but isn\u2019t the only flight SpaceX has planned Return to menuBy Christian Davenport4:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, are four private citizens: Haley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer, who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The Inspiration4 crew watches as Falcon 9 and Dragon lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida with Crew-2!The next crewed launch of Dragon will launch these four commercial astronauts in September. pic.twitter.com/KPU5xWSBWd\u2014 Inspiration4 (@inspiration4x) April 23, 2021\n\nThe group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis is the second time this space capsule has docked with the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:25 a.m.Link copiedLinkFriday\u2019s launch was the first time NASA has approved SpaceX\u2019s reuse of equipment that had previously flown. The Falcon 9 booster that launched had flown before and the capsule, dubbed Endeavour, was the first SpaceX spacecraft to carry human beings to space.Dragon remains on track to autonomously dock with the @space_station at ~5:10 a.m. EDT pic.twitter.com/eyftZphCET\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nIt docked with the space station on May 31, 2020, with two astronauts onboard, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who flew aboard what was considered a test flight to make sure the craft functioned as expected.That journey took Endeavour 22 hours to reach the space station, slightly less than the 23\u00bd hours Endeavour is expected to have traveled on its current trip.There\u2019s another overlap between the current mission and its first one: astronaut Megan McArthur, one of the four aboard Endeavour this time, is married to Behnken and was assigned to the same seat in the capsule that he had occupied.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementIt\u2019s getting crowded on the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:15 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will bring the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.That means the astronauts will have to make do, sleeping wherever they can find a spot \u2014 even on the ceiling, since in the weightless environment of space there is no up or down.The rendezvous phase is complete and cameras have spotted the @SpaceX #CrewDragon as it nears the space station for a 5:10am ET docking today. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/rrY0QOOfHC\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 24, 2021\n\nAfter arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the station\u2019s current commander, also faced tight conditions. He ended up sleeping in the Dragon capsule that had carried him there. The capsule was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth on Wednesday, with splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.It\u2019s not just astronaut accommodations that are crowded. Boeing, the other company that has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the space station, says it\u2019s ready to fly a test of its long-delayed capsule as early as May. But because there\u2019s no place to park it, Boeing says it doesn\u2019t expect to undertake the test until August or September.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement SpaceX Endeavour capsule docked with the International Space Station. The mission's Crew-2 was greeting by the outgoing Crew-1. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6211",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/spacex-nasas-crew-2-docking-live-updates/",
        "text": "Nearly 24 hours after its on-time liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, the first goal of its journey.In a delicate dance, the spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s docking ports and parked itself. The maneuvers were directed completely by the spacecraft\u2019s computers. Controllers on the ground and the astronauts on board the capsule and the station monitored closely, but the computers were in control. The two crafts were then locked together by a dozen hooks. The astronauts then ensured that the seal between spacecraft and station was tight and that the air pressure inside the spacecraft and the station was the same. Then they opened the hatch and crossed into the station.Here\u2019s what to know:For the third time in a year, SpaceX on Friday launched astronauts to the station.The astronauts were due to dock with the station at 5:10 a.m. but arrived two minutes early. The astronauts are expected to enter the station about two and a half hours later.The launch was initially postponed after high winds along the flight path.It took the Dragon spacecraft almost 24 hours to catch up to the space station, which is traveling 17,500 mph at an altitude of about 240 miles.Astronauts board the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Crew-2 astronauts have boarded the International Space Station, floating through the hatch to a warm welcome from their fellow astronauts on the orbiting laboratory.First through the hatch was Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, followed by Thomas Pesquet of France, then NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough. They then gathered snugly around the hatch opening for a formal welcome ceremony.\u201cLet the Tetris game of fitting 11 crew members into a single frame begin,\u201d NASA commentator Gary Jordon said during a live broadcast of the event.The crew is scheduled to stay on board the station for six months performing science experiments and station upgrades.\"Endeavour arriving!\" Welcome to the @Space_Station, Crew-2! Their arrival means there are now 11 humans aboard our orbiting laboratory, a number not seen since the space shuttle era. Hugs abound. pic.twitter.com/uSwW3JFl6K\u2014 NASA (@NASA) April 24, 2021\n\n\u201cIt is awesome to see the 11 of you on station,\u201d acting NASA Administration Steve Jurczyk said, congratulating the crew on a safe mission that had lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida the day before.McArthur, whose husband and fellow NASA astronaut Bob Behnken flew to the station on the same spacecraft last year, said that the crew is \u201cjust so excited to be here. ... We\u2019re ready to get to work. There\u2019s a lot of great science that I know we\u2019re going to be doing.\"AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs Crew-2 arrives, Crew-1 prepares to go homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA started its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the plan was to create a regular transportation system to the International Space Station, with multiple flights a year, as had existed during the space shuttle program.Now, once again, NASA has it. SpaceX has flown three human spaceflight missions to the station. The latest, known as Crew-2, docked Saturday morning. Now that those four astronauts have arrived, the Crew-1 astronauts, who arrived at the station in November, are preparing to fly home after a six-month stay.First, they\u2019ll hand over operation of the station to their new crew mates, helping them get up to speed with everything that\u2019s happening. Then on Wednesday, the Crew-1 astronauts are scheduled to get back into their spacecraft for the fiery journey home through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes well, the crew, comprised of NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, would undock from the station and splashdown off the coast of Florida at about 12:35 p.m.SpaceX\u2019s next mission to the station, Crew-3, is scheduled for the fall.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s the future of the space station?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is a magnificent ship, one that now has two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft attached to it. As long as a football field, it will soon have 11 astronauts on board as it orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes.The space station has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years. But it has shown signs of aging, and Russia has recently said it could abandon the program by 2025. The United States is currently committed to the station through 2024, though Congress is expected to extend the station\u2019s life for several years later.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Now NASA is working on what comes next. It\u2019s not interested in building another expensive, government-funded station. Rather the plan for now is to have commercial space stations that would be developed in partnership with the space agency.Axiom Space, among others, is in the process of designing successors to the ISS. But those projects are still in the early stages and will need time \u2014 and money \u2014 to succeed. What happens next isn\u2019t known. But it will pose one of the biggest challenges for former Sen. Bill Nelson, president Biden\u2019s pick to become NASA administrator, once he is confirmed.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:09 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Saturday at 5:08 a.m. Eastern, nearly 24 hours after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and two minutes ahead of schedule.The autonomous spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s ports and parked itself in a delicate maneuver watched closely by controllers on the ground and astronauts on board the station. It was expected to take about 15 minutes for the docking sequence to be completed. On board the spacecraft are NASA astronauts Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough, France\u2019s Thomas Pesquet and Japan\u2019s Akihiko\u202fHoshide.The astronauts will check to ensure that the seal is tight and that the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. Then, at approximately 7:15 a.m. Eastern, they are expected to open the hatch and board the station, where seven other astronauts are waiting to greet them.Docking confirmed \u2013 second time at the @space_station for this Dragon pic.twitter.com/JLC9wOjRFT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nA welcome ceremony is expected at about 7:30 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-3 mission is expected in the fall, but isn\u2019t the only flight SpaceX has planned Return to menuBy Christian Davenport4:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, are four private citizens: Haley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer, who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The Inspiration4 crew watches as Falcon 9 and Dragon lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida with Crew-2!The next crewed launch of Dragon will launch these four commercial astronauts in September. pic.twitter.com/KPU5xWSBWd\u2014 Inspiration4 (@inspiration4x) April 23, 2021\n\nThe group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis is the second time this space capsule has docked with the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:25 a.m.Link copiedLinkFriday\u2019s launch was the first time NASA has approved SpaceX\u2019s reuse of equipment that had previously flown. The Falcon 9 booster that launched had flown before and the capsule, dubbed Endeavour, was the first SpaceX spacecraft to carry human beings to space.Dragon remains on track to autonomously dock with the @space_station at ~5:10 a.m. EDT pic.twitter.com/eyftZphCET\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nIt docked with the space station on May 31, 2020, with two astronauts onboard, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who flew aboard what was considered a test flight to make sure the craft functioned as expected.That journey took Endeavour 22 hours to reach the space station, slightly less than the 23\u00bd hours Endeavour is expected to have traveled on its current trip.There\u2019s another overlap between the current mission and its first one: astronaut Megan McArthur, one of the four aboard Endeavour this time, is married to Behnken and was assigned to the same seat in the capsule that he had occupied.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementIt\u2019s getting crowded on the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:15 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will bring the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.That means the astronauts will have to make do, sleeping wherever they can find a spot \u2014 even on the ceiling, since in the weightless environment of space there is no up or down.The rendezvous phase is complete and cameras have spotted the @SpaceX #CrewDragon as it nears the space station for a 5:10am ET docking today. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/rrY0QOOfHC\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 24, 2021\n\nAfter arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the station\u2019s current commander, also faced tight conditions. He ended up sleeping in the Dragon capsule that had carried him there. The capsule was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth on Wednesday, with splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.It\u2019s not just astronaut accommodations that are crowded. Boeing, the other company that has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the space station, says it\u2019s ready to fly a test of its long-delayed capsule as early as May. But because there\u2019s no place to park it, Boeing says it doesn\u2019t expect to undertake the test until August or September.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement SpaceX Endeavour capsule docked with the International Space Station. The mission's Crew-2 was greeting by the outgoing Crew-1. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6212",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/spacex-nasas-crew-2-docking-live-updates/",
        "text": "Nearly 24 hours after its on-time liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, the first goal of its journey.In a delicate dance, the spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s docking ports and parked itself. The maneuvers were directed completely by the spacecraft\u2019s computers. Controllers on the ground and the astronauts on board the capsule and the station monitored closely, but the computers were in control. The two crafts were then locked together by a dozen hooks. The astronauts then ensured that the seal between spacecraft and station was tight and that the air pressure inside the spacecraft and the station was the same. Then they opened the hatch and crossed into the station.Here\u2019s what to know:For the third time in a year, SpaceX on Friday launched astronauts to the station.The astronauts were due to dock with the station at 5:10 a.m. but arrived two minutes early. The astronauts are expected to enter the station about two and a half hours later.The launch was initially postponed after high winds along the flight path.It took the Dragon spacecraft almost 24 hours to catch up to the space station, which is traveling 17,500 mph at an altitude of about 240 miles.Astronauts board the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Crew-2 astronauts have boarded the International Space Station, floating through the hatch to a warm welcome from their fellow astronauts on the orbiting laboratory.First through the hatch was Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, followed by Thomas Pesquet of France, then NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough. They then gathered snugly around the hatch opening for a formal welcome ceremony.\u201cLet the Tetris game of fitting 11 crew members into a single frame begin,\u201d NASA commentator Gary Jordon said during a live broadcast of the event.The crew is scheduled to stay on board the station for six months performing science experiments and station upgrades.\"Endeavour arriving!\" Welcome to the @Space_Station, Crew-2! Their arrival means there are now 11 humans aboard our orbiting laboratory, a number not seen since the space shuttle era. Hugs abound. pic.twitter.com/uSwW3JFl6K\u2014 NASA (@NASA) April 24, 2021\n\n\u201cIt is awesome to see the 11 of you on station,\u201d acting NASA Administration Steve Jurczyk said, congratulating the crew on a safe mission that had lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida the day before.McArthur, whose husband and fellow NASA astronaut Bob Behnken flew to the station on the same spacecraft last year, said that the crew is \u201cjust so excited to be here. ... We\u2019re ready to get to work. There\u2019s a lot of great science that I know we\u2019re going to be doing.\"AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs Crew-2 arrives, Crew-1 prepares to go homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA started its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the plan was to create a regular transportation system to the International Space Station, with multiple flights a year, as had existed during the space shuttle program.Now, once again, NASA has it. SpaceX has flown three human spaceflight missions to the station. The latest, known as Crew-2, docked Saturday morning. Now that those four astronauts have arrived, the Crew-1 astronauts, who arrived at the station in November, are preparing to fly home after a six-month stay.First, they\u2019ll hand over operation of the station to their new crew mates, helping them get up to speed with everything that\u2019s happening. Then on Wednesday, the Crew-1 astronauts are scheduled to get back into their spacecraft for the fiery journey home through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes well, the crew, comprised of NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, would undock from the station and splashdown off the coast of Florida at about 12:35 p.m.SpaceX\u2019s next mission to the station, Crew-3, is scheduled for the fall.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s the future of the space station?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is a magnificent ship, one that now has two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft attached to it. As long as a football field, it will soon have 11 astronauts on board as it orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes.The space station has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years. But it has shown signs of aging, and Russia has recently said it could abandon the program by 2025. The United States is currently committed to the station through 2024, though Congress is expected to extend the station\u2019s life for several years later.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Now NASA is working on what comes next. It\u2019s not interested in building another expensive, government-funded station. Rather the plan for now is to have commercial space stations that would be developed in partnership with the space agency.Axiom Space, among others, is in the process of designing successors to the ISS. But those projects are still in the early stages and will need time \u2014 and money \u2014 to succeed. What happens next isn\u2019t known. But it will pose one of the biggest challenges for former Sen. Bill Nelson, president Biden\u2019s pick to become NASA administrator, once he is confirmed.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:09 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Saturday at 5:08 a.m. Eastern, nearly 24 hours after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and two minutes ahead of schedule.The autonomous spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s ports and parked itself in a delicate maneuver watched closely by controllers on the ground and astronauts on board the station. It was expected to take about 15 minutes for the docking sequence to be completed. On board the spacecraft are NASA astronauts Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough, France\u2019s Thomas Pesquet and Japan\u2019s Akihiko\u202fHoshide.The astronauts will check to ensure that the seal is tight and that the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. Then, at approximately 7:15 a.m. Eastern, they are expected to open the hatch and board the station, where seven other astronauts are waiting to greet them.Docking confirmed \u2013 second time at the @space_station for this Dragon pic.twitter.com/JLC9wOjRFT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nA welcome ceremony is expected at about 7:30 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-3 mission is expected in the fall, but isn\u2019t the only flight SpaceX has planned Return to menuBy Christian Davenport4:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, are four private citizens: Haley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer, who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The Inspiration4 crew watches as Falcon 9 and Dragon lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida with Crew-2!The next crewed launch of Dragon will launch these four commercial astronauts in September. pic.twitter.com/KPU5xWSBWd\u2014 Inspiration4 (@inspiration4x) April 23, 2021\n\nThe group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis is the second time this space capsule has docked with the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:25 a.m.Link copiedLinkFriday\u2019s launch was the first time NASA has approved SpaceX\u2019s reuse of equipment that had previously flown. The Falcon 9 booster that launched had flown before and the capsule, dubbed Endeavour, was the first SpaceX spacecraft to carry human beings to space.Dragon remains on track to autonomously dock with the @space_station at ~5:10 a.m. EDT pic.twitter.com/eyftZphCET\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nIt docked with the space station on May 31, 2020, with two astronauts onboard, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who flew aboard what was considered a test flight to make sure the craft functioned as expected.That journey took Endeavour 22 hours to reach the space station, slightly less than the 23\u00bd hours Endeavour is expected to have traveled on its current trip.There\u2019s another overlap between the current mission and its first one: astronaut Megan McArthur, one of the four aboard Endeavour this time, is married to Behnken and was assigned to the same seat in the capsule that he had occupied.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementIt\u2019s getting crowded on the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:15 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will bring the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.That means the astronauts will have to make do, sleeping wherever they can find a spot \u2014 even on the ceiling, since in the weightless environment of space there is no up or down.The rendezvous phase is complete and cameras have spotted the @SpaceX #CrewDragon as it nears the space station for a 5:10am ET docking today. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/rrY0QOOfHC\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 24, 2021\n\nAfter arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the station\u2019s current commander, also faced tight conditions. He ended up sleeping in the Dragon capsule that had carried him there. The capsule was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth on Wednesday, with splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.It\u2019s not just astronaut accommodations that are crowded. Boeing, the other company that has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the space station, says it\u2019s ready to fly a test of its long-delayed capsule as early as May. But because there\u2019s no place to park it, Boeing says it doesn\u2019t expect to undertake the test until August or September.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement SpaceX Endeavour capsule docked with the International Space Station. The mission's Crew-2 was greeting by the outgoing Crew-1. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6213",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/spacex-nasas-crew-2-docking-live-updates/",
        "text": "Nearly 24 hours after its on-time liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station, the first goal of its journey.In a delicate dance, the spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s docking ports and parked itself. The maneuvers were directed completely by the spacecraft\u2019s computers. Controllers on the ground and the astronauts on board the capsule and the station monitored closely, but the computers were in control. The two crafts were then locked together by a dozen hooks. The astronauts then ensured that the seal between spacecraft and station was tight and that the air pressure inside the spacecraft and the station was the same. Then they opened the hatch and crossed into the station.Here\u2019s what to know:For the third time in a year, SpaceX on Friday launched astronauts to the station.The astronauts were due to dock with the station at 5:10 a.m. but arrived two minutes early. The astronauts are expected to enter the station about two and a half hours later.The launch was initially postponed after high winds along the flight path.It took the Dragon spacecraft almost 24 hours to catch up to the space station, which is traveling 17,500 mph at an altitude of about 240 miles.Astronauts board the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:59 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Crew-2 astronauts have boarded the International Space Station, floating through the hatch to a warm welcome from their fellow astronauts on the orbiting laboratory.First through the hatch was Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, followed by Thomas Pesquet of France, then NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough. They then gathered snugly around the hatch opening for a formal welcome ceremony.\u201cLet the Tetris game of fitting 11 crew members into a single frame begin,\u201d NASA commentator Gary Jordon said during a live broadcast of the event.The crew is scheduled to stay on board the station for six months performing science experiments and station upgrades.\"Endeavour arriving!\" Welcome to the @Space_Station, Crew-2! Their arrival means there are now 11 humans aboard our orbiting laboratory, a number not seen since the space shuttle era. Hugs abound. pic.twitter.com/uSwW3JFl6K\u2014 NASA (@NASA) April 24, 2021\n\n\u201cIt is awesome to see the 11 of you on station,\u201d acting NASA Administration Steve Jurczyk said, congratulating the crew on a safe mission that had lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida the day before.McArthur, whose husband and fellow NASA astronaut Bob Behnken flew to the station on the same spacecraft last year, said that the crew is \u201cjust so excited to be here. ... We\u2019re ready to get to work. There\u2019s a lot of great science that I know we\u2019re going to be doing.\"AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAs Crew-2 arrives, Crew-1 prepares to go homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA started its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, the plan was to create a regular transportation system to the International Space Station, with multiple flights a year, as had existed during the space shuttle program.Now, once again, NASA has it. SpaceX has flown three human spaceflight missions to the station. The latest, known as Crew-2, docked Saturday morning. Now that those four astronauts have arrived, the Crew-1 astronauts, who arrived at the station in November, are preparing to fly home after a six-month stay.First, they\u2019ll hand over operation of the station to their new crew mates, helping them get up to speed with everything that\u2019s happening. Then on Wednesday, the Crew-1 astronauts are scheduled to get back into their spacecraft for the fiery journey home through Earth\u2019s atmosphere. If all goes well, the crew, comprised of NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japan\u2019s Soichi Noguchi, would undock from the station and splashdown off the coast of Florida at about 12:35 p.m.SpaceX\u2019s next mission to the station, Crew-3, is scheduled for the fall.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat\u2019s the future of the space station?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport6:30 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is a magnificent ship, one that now has two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft attached to it. As long as a football field, it will soon have 11 astronauts on board as it orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes.The space station has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years. But it has shown signs of aging, and Russia has recently said it could abandon the program by 2025. The United States is currently committed to the station through 2024, though Congress is expected to extend the station\u2019s life for several years later.The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?Now NASA is working on what comes next. It\u2019s not interested in building another expensive, government-funded station. Rather the plan for now is to have commercial space stations that would be developed in partnership with the space agency.Axiom Space, among others, is in the process of designing successors to the ISS. But those projects are still in the early stages and will need time \u2014 and money \u2014 to succeed. What happens next isn\u2019t known. But it will pose one of the biggest challenges for former Sen. Bill Nelson, president Biden\u2019s pick to become NASA administrator, once he is confirmed.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:09 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docked with the International Space Station Saturday at 5:08 a.m. Eastern, nearly 24 hours after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and two minutes ahead of schedule.The autonomous spacecraft aligned itself with one of the station\u2019s ports and parked itself in a delicate maneuver watched closely by controllers on the ground and astronauts on board the station. It was expected to take about 15 minutes for the docking sequence to be completed. On board the spacecraft are NASA astronauts Megan McArthur, Shane Kimbrough, France\u2019s Thomas Pesquet and Japan\u2019s Akihiko\u202fHoshide.The astronauts will check to ensure that the seal is tight and that the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. Then, at approximately 7:15 a.m. Eastern, they are expected to open the hatch and board the station, where seven other astronauts are waiting to greet them.Docking confirmed \u2013 second time at the @space_station for this Dragon pic.twitter.com/JLC9wOjRFT\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nA welcome ceremony is expected at about 7:30 a.m.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrew-3 mission is expected in the fall, but isn\u2019t the only flight SpaceX has planned Return to menuBy Christian Davenport4:45 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, are four private citizens: Haley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer, who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The Inspiration4 crew watches as Falcon 9 and Dragon lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida with Crew-2!The next crewed launch of Dragon will launch these four commercial astronauts in September. pic.twitter.com/KPU5xWSBWd\u2014 Inspiration4 (@inspiration4x) April 23, 2021\n\nThe group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis is the second time this space capsule has docked with the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:25 a.m.Link copiedLinkFriday\u2019s launch was the first time NASA has approved SpaceX\u2019s reuse of equipment that had previously flown. The Falcon 9 booster that launched had flown before and the capsule, dubbed Endeavour, was the first SpaceX spacecraft to carry human beings to space.Dragon remains on track to autonomously dock with the @space_station at ~5:10 a.m. EDT pic.twitter.com/eyftZphCET\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 24, 2021\n\nIt docked with the space station on May 31, 2020, with two astronauts onboard, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who flew aboard what was considered a test flight to make sure the craft functioned as expected.That journey took Endeavour 22 hours to reach the space station, slightly less than the 23\u00bd hours Endeavour is expected to have traveled on its current trip.There\u2019s another overlap between the current mission and its first one: astronaut Megan McArthur, one of the four aboard Endeavour this time, is married to Behnken and was assigned to the same seat in the capsule that he had occupied.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementIt\u2019s getting crowded on the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport4:15 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will bring the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.That means the astronauts will have to make do, sleeping wherever they can find a spot \u2014 even on the ceiling, since in the weightless environment of space there is no up or down.The rendezvous phase is complete and cameras have spotted the @SpaceX #CrewDragon as it nears the space station for a 5:10am ET docking today. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/rrY0QOOfHC\u2014 International Space Station (@Space_Station) April 24, 2021\n\nAfter arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the station\u2019s current commander, also faced tight conditions. He ended up sleeping in the Dragon capsule that had carried him there. The capsule was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth on Wednesday, with splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.It\u2019s not just astronaut accommodations that are crowded. Boeing, the other company that has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the space station, says it\u2019s ready to fly a test of its long-delayed capsule as early as May. But because there\u2019s no place to park it, Boeing says it doesn\u2019t expect to undertake the test until August or September.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisement SpaceX Endeavour capsule docked with the International Space Station. The mission's Crew-2 was greeting by the outgoing Crew-1. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft docks with International Space Station, Crew-2 is greeted by Crew-1",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6214",
        "date": "2020-10-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/31/nasa-sls-moon-rocket/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s newest moon rocket is powered not only by four RS-25 engines that, combined, unleash 2 million pounds of thrust, but by two solid fuel side boosters that burn six tons of propellant a second at such enormous temperatures that during a recent test fire in the Utah desert, the flames turned sand to glass. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen it launches, NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket, a towering 322-foot behemoth \u2014 taller than the Statue of Liberty \u2014 would be the most powerful rocket ever flown, eclipsing both the Saturn V that flew astronauts to the moon and SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy, which has launched commercial and national security satellites as well as founder Elon Musk\u2019s Tesla Roadster on a trip to Mars.But as NASA moves toward the SLS\u2019s first flight, putting the Orion spacecraft in orbit around the moon, it\u2019s not the rocket\u2019s engines that concern officials but the software that will control everything the rocket does, from setting its trajectory to opening individual valves to open and close.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComputing power has become as critical to rockets as the brute force that lifts them out of Earth\u2019s atmosphere, especially rockets like the SLS, which is really an amalgamation of parts built by a variety of manufacturers: Boeing builds the rocket\u2019s \u201ccore stage,\u201d the main part of the vehicle. Lockheed Martin builds the Orion spacecraft. Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman are responsible for the RS-25 engines and the side boosters, respectively. And the United Launch Alliance handles the upper stage.All of those components need to work together for a mission to be successful. But NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) recently said it was concerned about the disjointed way the complicated system was being developed and tested.At an ASAP meeting last month, Paul Hill, a member of the panel and a former flight and mission operations director at the agency, said the \u201cpanel has great concern about the end-to-end integrated test capability and plans, especially for flight software.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead of one comprehensive avionics and software test to mimic flight, he said, there is \u201cinstead multiple and separate labs; emulators and simulations are being used to test subsets of the software.\u201d\u201cAs much as possible, flight systems should be developed for success, with the goal to test like you fly. In the same way that NASA\u2019s operations teams train the way you fly and fly the way you train,\u201d Hill said.Also troubling to the safety panel was that NASA and its contractors appeared not to have taken \u201cadvantage of the lessons learned\u201d from the botched flight last year of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which suffered a pair of software errors that prevented it from docking with the International Space Station as planned and forced controllers to cut the mission short.Story continues below advertisementNASA has since said that it did a poor job of overseeing Boeing on the Starliner program and has since vowed to have more rigorous reviews of its work, especially its software testing.AdvertisementThe SLS software concerns are the latest red flags for a program that has struggled to overcome cost overruns and setbacks. A slew of government watchdog reports over the years have painted a troubling picture of mismanagement.Three years ago, the NASA inspector general reported in an audit that NASA had spent more than $15 billion on SLS, the Orion spacecraft and their associated ground systems between 2012 and 2016. It estimated the total would reach $23 billion.Story continues below advertisementThe report chided Boeing, the main contractor, which it said \u201cconsistently underestimated the scope of the work to be performed and thus the size and skills of the workforce required.\u201dAnother report, by the Government Accountability Office last year, found that despite Boeing\u2019s poor performance, NASA continued to pay it tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d for scoring high on evaluations.AdvertisementNASA says now that the program is finally on track, with the vehicle undergoing a series of rigorous tests known as the \u201cGreen Run\u201d at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi that will culminate with a \u201chot fire\u201d \u2014 the ignition and eight-minute burn of its engines scheduled for later this year.Story continues below advertisementThen it would be moved to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ahead of its first launch, scheduled for late 2021. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said \u201call of the elements that we need for a successful 2024 moon landing are underway as part of the agency\u2019s Artemis program. And we\u2019re moving rapidly to achieve that goal\u201d \u2014 a dramatic White House-ordered acceleration of the original timetable that foresaw a moon landing in 2028.For that deadline to be achieved, however, the flight software has to work perfectly. The first test is expected to come late next year, when the SLS would fly for the first time in the Artemis I mission, putting the Orion spacecraft without any crews on board in orbit around the moonAdvertisement\u201cWhen it all comes down to it, flight software is the functional integration piece of the rocket,\u201d Dan Mitchell, NASA\u2019s senior technical leader for SLS avionics and software engineering, said in an interview. \u201cThe rocket doesn\u2019t fly without flight software. The software commands all the valves and the engines. It takes readings of all the parameters inside the vehicle, the navigation and position information and uses all that information to control the fight.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere was perhaps no better illustration of the significant role software plays in space flight, and how flaws in the coding can have severe consequences, than Starliner\u2019s test flight.Shortly after it reached orbit, the spacecraft, which had no astronauts on board, ran into trouble because the spacecraft\u2019s flight computers were 11 hours off. With the spacecraft thinking it was at an entirely different point in the mission, it attempted to correct its course, burning precious fuel and forcing controllers to end the mission early without completing the main goal: docking with the International Space Station. Controllers later found another software problem that could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule after separation, potentially endangering astronauts, if any had been on board.AdvertisementBoeing was able to diagnose the problem, send up a software fix and ultimately bring the spacecraft down safely. Later, Boeing said its testing of the software was deeply flawed, allowing the two problems to go undetected in the spacecraft\u2019s one million lines of code. It was an admission reminiscent of the software problems that plagued its 737 Max airplane, which suffered two crashes that killed 346 people combined and remains grounded worldwide.Story continues below advertisementBoeing officials have said that during the test flight, the Starliner was pulling its time from the rocket. During testing, officials were mainly focused on making sure the two vehicles were communicating correctly, but cut short the test so that it never uncovered that the spacecraft was reading the wrong time.If the test had continued, \u201cwe would have caught it,\u201d John Mulholland said earlier this year, when he was the Starliner program manager for Boeing. He\u2019s since transferred to Boeing\u2019s space station program.AdvertisementDuring the software test for the service module separation, Boeing didn\u2019t use the actual hardware but rather an \u201cemulator,\u201d a computer system designed to mimic the service module. The problem was the emulator had the wrong thruster configuration programmed in at the time of the test, Mulholland said.Story continues below advertisementNASA officials in charge of the SLS program said they are confident the testing protocols for the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft are far more robust. For starters, the program is set up differently. Boeing owns and operates the Starliner spacecraft and uses it to perform a service for NASA \u2014 namely flying its astronauts to the space station.On the SLS program, by contrast, NASA owns and will operate the rocket, and is responsible for all the integrated testing.Mitchell, the NASA senior technical leader, said the SLS team took the Starliner mishap \u201cto heart.\u201d As a result, they spent four days testing the various interfaces between the SLS and Orion, he said. \u201cWe methodically walked through requirement by requirement. ... It was a very, very detailed and fruitful interaction that we had across all the interfaces,\u201d he said.AdvertisementThe review turned up one issue with how the rocket\u2019s second stage interpreted data from the first stage, he said, but that \u201chas been determined to be a benign issue\u201d that doesn\u2019t require any modifications at this time.NASA pushed back on the safety panel\u2019s findings, saying in a statement that \u201call software, hardware, and combination for every phase of the Artemis I mission is thoroughly tested and evaluated to ensure that it meets NASA\u2019s strict safety requirements and is fully qualified for human spaceflight.\u201dThe agency and its contractors are \u201cconducting integrated end-to-end testing for the software, hardware, avionics and integrated systems needed to fly Artemis missions,\u201d it said.Once the vehicle is moved to the Kennedy Space Center, testing will continue with a \u201ccountdown demonstration and wet dress rehearsal [by fueling the rocket] with the rocket, spacecraft, and ground systems prior to the Artemis I launch.\u201d Speaking to reporters in October, John Shannon, a Boeing vice president who oversees the SLS program, said the core stage holds \u201cthe brains\u201d of the rocket, the avionics, flight computers and \u201cthe systems to control the vehicle.\u201dBut he said the company\u2019s portion of software development and testing was limited to what\u2019s called the \u201cstage controller,\u201d or \u201cground software that commands the vehicle itself.\u201dShannon said the systems have been \u201ccompleted, tested in integration facilities at [NASA\u2019s] Marshall Space Flight Center. We\u2019ve had independent verification and validation on it to show that it works well with the flight software and the stand controller software. And it\u2019s all all ready to go.\u201dAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Fla., on Aug. 2, completing the first manned mission of NASA\u2019s commercial crew. (NASA) As NASA moves towards the SLS\u2019s first flight, putting the Orion spacecraft in orbit around the moon, there are concerns not with the rocket\u2019s engines but rather with the computer software embedded in all its systems. NASA\u2019s new rocket would be the most powerful ever. But it\u2019s the software that has some officials worried.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA will shoot rocket at asteroid to test \u2018planetary defense\u2019 strategy (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6215",
        "date": "2021-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/06/nasa-asteroid-dart-dimorphos/",
        "text": "NASA will launch a spacecraft next month to hit an asteroid \u2014 on purpose \u2014 to change its path, testing for the first time a method of \u201cplanetary defense,\u201d the agency announced Tuesday.The launch of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will occur at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time on Nov. 24, NASA said. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, about 50 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA is targeting a pair of asteroids that orbit the sun and occasionally come close to Earth. The asteroids don\u2019t come close enough to pose a threat, NASA says, but their proximity makes them a prime candidate for the test of a technique that could someday prevent a \u201chazardous asteroid from striking Earth.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure that a rock from space doesn\u2019t send us back to the Stone Age,\u201d Thomas Statler, a NASA scientist, said on the agency\u2019s podcast.We really need to figure out how to stop a killer asteroid, scientists sayThe larger of the two asteroids, Didymos, is about a half-mile across in size, with a smaller \u201cmoonlet,\u201d called Dimorphos, orbiting it. Dimorphos, about 500 feet in size, is \u201cmore typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth,\u201d according to NASA.AdvertisementDimorphos is \u201cnot necessarily the asteroid that\u2019s going to cause [a] devastating effect on Earth,\u201d Statler said. Rather, the launch is a \u201ctest to make sure that we have the capabilities for that asteroid in the future, if there is one.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe DART mission is aiming to hit Dimorphos at a speed of nearly 15,000 miles per hour with the goal of changing its orbit \u201cby a fraction of 1 percent\u201d \u2014 a small but significant enough change that scientists will be able to observe it from telescopes on Earth.If NASA were to detect an asteroid that poses a risk to Earth \u2014 Statler said the agency is not aware of such a risk over the next hundred years \u2014 it would attempt to hit it and change its course, rather than destroy it altogether.The DART spacecraft will detach from the SpaceX rocket and cruise in space for more than a year before it hits Dimorphos sometime late September next year, a time when the pair of asteroids will be close enough to Earth \u2014 11 million kilometers \u2014 that scientists will be able to see them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe interaction will be recorded by a 31-pound Italian satellite launching from the spacecraft.Although the collision isn\u2019t immediately stopping an Earth-shattering asteroid, it is a mission of \u201chistorical proportions,\u201d Statler said.It will be \u201cthe first time that humanity has actually changed something in space,\u201d he said.\u201cWe\u2019ve left footprints and tire tracks and things like that,\u201d Statler added, \u201cbut this will be the first time humanity has changed a celestial motion.\u201dMore reading:An asteroid could destroy humanity like it did dinosaurs. A Hopkins team has a plan to save the world.NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizesSpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbitNASA has a new challenge to reaching the moon by 2024: Its $1 billion spacesuit program NASA\u2019s DART experiment aims to stop future asteroids from hitting Earth. NASA will shoot rocket at asteroid to test \u2018planetary defense\u2019 strategy",
        "author": "Bryan Pietsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA will shoot rocket at asteroid to test \u2018planetary defense\u2019 strategy (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6216",
        "date": "2021-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/06/nasa-asteroid-dart-dimorphos/",
        "text": "NASA will launch a spacecraft next month to hit an asteroid \u2014 on purpose \u2014 to change its path, testing for the first time a method of \u201cplanetary defense,\u201d the agency announced Tuesday.The launch of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will occur at 1:20 a.m. Eastern time on Nov. 24, NASA said. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be launched from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, about 50 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA is targeting a pair of asteroids that orbit the sun and occasionally come close to Earth. The asteroids don\u2019t come close enough to pose a threat, NASA says, but their proximity makes them a prime candidate for the test of a technique that could someday prevent a \u201chazardous asteroid from striking Earth.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure that a rock from space doesn\u2019t send us back to the Stone Age,\u201d Thomas Statler, a NASA scientist, said on the agency\u2019s podcast.We really need to figure out how to stop a killer asteroid, scientists sayThe larger of the two asteroids, Didymos, is about a half-mile across in size, with a smaller \u201cmoonlet,\u201d called Dimorphos, orbiting it. Dimorphos, about 500 feet in size, is \u201cmore typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth,\u201d according to NASA.AdvertisementDimorphos is \u201cnot necessarily the asteroid that\u2019s going to cause [a] devastating effect on Earth,\u201d Statler said. Rather, the launch is a \u201ctest to make sure that we have the capabilities for that asteroid in the future, if there is one.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe DART mission is aiming to hit Dimorphos at a speed of nearly 15,000 miles per hour with the goal of changing its orbit \u201cby a fraction of 1 percent\u201d \u2014 a small but significant enough change that scientists will be able to observe it from telescopes on Earth.If NASA were to detect an asteroid that poses a risk to Earth \u2014 Statler said the agency is not aware of such a risk over the next hundred years \u2014 it would attempt to hit it and change its course, rather than destroy it altogether.The DART spacecraft will detach from the SpaceX rocket and cruise in space for more than a year before it hits Dimorphos sometime late September next year, a time when the pair of asteroids will be close enough to Earth \u2014 11 million kilometers \u2014 that scientists will be able to see them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe interaction will be recorded by a 31-pound Italian satellite launching from the spacecraft.Although the collision isn\u2019t immediately stopping an Earth-shattering asteroid, it is a mission of \u201chistorical proportions,\u201d Statler said.It will be \u201cthe first time that humanity has actually changed something in space,\u201d he said.\u201cWe\u2019ve left footprints and tire tracks and things like that,\u201d Statler added, \u201cbut this will be the first time humanity has changed a celestial motion.\u201dMore reading:An asteroid could destroy humanity like it did dinosaurs. A Hopkins team has a plan to save the world.NASA looks to a future that includes flights to the moon and Mars as it reorganizesSpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbitNASA has a new challenge to reaching the moon by 2024: Its $1 billion spacesuit program NASA\u2019s DART experiment aims to stop future asteroids from hitting Earth. NASA will shoot rocket at asteroid to test \u2018planetary defense\u2019 strategy",
        "author": "Bryan Pietsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6217",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/19/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter-mars/",
        "text": "NASA successfully flew its four-pound helicopter from the surface of Mars early Monday in the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet, a feat that NASA officials compared to the Wright brothers\u2019 first flight in 1903.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt about 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the surface of the Red Planet. It reached an altitude of about 10 feet, where it hovered, buffeted ever so slightly by the wind, turned 96 degrees and then came softly back to the Martian surface in an autonomous flight that lasted just about 30 seconds, the space agency said. Inside the flight operations center at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers broke into applause when confirmation of the flight arrived, more than three hours after the flight, in a data burst that traveled 178 million miles to Earth through a complex communications network \u2014 from the helicopter, to the rover, to a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, to NASA\u2019s massive international Deep Space Network of antennae and, finally, to JPL.A red-letter day on the Red Planet! #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/Qow8JwhYEo\u2014 NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 19, 2021\n\nThe atmosphere in the room turned almost giddy when a still photo from the helicopter captured its shadow on the ground, followed by video of the aircraft\u2019s flight, taken from the nearby Mars rover Perseverance.\u201cWe can now say we\u2019ve flown a rotorcraft on another planet,\u201d MiMi Aung, NASA\u2019s Ingenuity program manager, told the occupants of the flight control room, all masked to protect against the coronavirus. \u201cWe together flew on Mars. We together have our Wright brothers moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added: \u201cWe don\u2019t know from history what Orville and Wilbur [Wright] did after their first successful flight. But I imagine the two brothers hugged each other. Well, you know, I\u2019m hugging you virtually.\u201dScientists say the successful test, which they called \u201ca flawless flight,\u201d could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. Engineers are already thinking about future aircraft, as heavy as 50 pounds or more, that could carry science experiments years in the future, NASA officials said.\u201cIt opens up new doors,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. A helicopter can fly over craters and other areas not accessible by rovers, he said. And being able to \u201cscout ahead is just absolutely critical.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMichael Watkins, the director of NASA\u2019s JPL, said that having eyes in the sky gives \u201cus the third dimension. It freed us from the surface now forever in planetary exploration.\u201dTo make the brief flight, Ingenuity\u2019s technology had to overcome Mars\u2019s super-thin atmosphere \u2014 just 1 percent the density of Earth\u2019s \u2014 which makes it more difficult for the helicopters\u2019 blades, spinning at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, to generate lift.It was a triumphant add-on to the main part of NASA\u2019s latest Mars mission \u2014 the Perseverance rover, a car-size vehicle that is set to explore a crater that once held water and could yield clues to the history of the planet and whether life ever existed there. Deciding to build a helicopter that could fly on Mars was a project years in the making and one that was the result of \u201cfinding that right line between crazy and innovative,\u201d Zurbuchen said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity, with four spindly legs and a solar panel and costing about $80 million, made the long journey to Mars tucked in the rover\u2019s undercarriage.As a tribute to the Wright brothers, Ingenuity has a postage-size bit of fabric from the brothers\u2019 aircraft, known as the Flyer, attached to a cable under the solar panel.If all goes according to plan, the helicopter could make as many as four more flights in coming weeks, each one more ambitious than the last. The second, for example, would fly slightly higher, to 16 feet, and then horizontally for a little bit before coming back to the landing site. \u201cWe want to push it to the limit,\u201d Aung said.Aung told her team to celebrate, to enjoy the moment, but added: \u201cThis is just a first flight. Let\u2019s get back to work and have more flights.\u201d The next flight, she said later, would come \u201cin the next few days.\u201dThe flight was originally scheduled to occur last week. But a problem halted a test of the helicopter\u2019s rotors, and the flight was delayed as engineers diagnosed and then fixed the issue. While expressing confidence, engineers acknowledged before the flight that anything so difficult and audacious could easily run into problems.\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything we can to make it a success, but we also know that we may have to scrub and try again,\u201d Aung wrote in a blog on NASA\u2019s website before the flight. \u201cIn engineering, there is always uncertainty, but this is what makes working on advanced technology so exciting and rewarding.\u201d Scientists say the successful test could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6218",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/19/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter-mars/",
        "text": "NASA successfully flew its four-pound helicopter from the surface of Mars early Monday in the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet, a feat that NASA officials compared to the Wright brothers\u2019 first flight in 1903.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt about 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the surface of the Red Planet. It reached an altitude of about 10 feet, where it hovered, buffeted ever so slightly by the wind, turned 96 degrees and then came softly back to the Martian surface in an autonomous flight that lasted just about 30 seconds, the space agency said. Inside the flight operations center at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers broke into applause when confirmation of the flight arrived, more than three hours after the flight, in a data burst that traveled 178 million miles to Earth through a complex communications network \u2014 from the helicopter, to the rover, to a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, to NASA\u2019s massive international Deep Space Network of antennae and, finally, to JPL.A red-letter day on the Red Planet! #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/Qow8JwhYEo\u2014 NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 19, 2021\n\nThe atmosphere in the room turned almost giddy when a still photo from the helicopter captured its shadow on the ground, followed by video of the aircraft\u2019s flight, taken from the nearby Mars rover Perseverance.\u201cWe can now say we\u2019ve flown a rotorcraft on another planet,\u201d MiMi Aung, NASA\u2019s Ingenuity program manager, told the occupants of the flight control room, all masked to protect against the coronavirus. \u201cWe together flew on Mars. We together have our Wright brothers moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added: \u201cWe don\u2019t know from history what Orville and Wilbur [Wright] did after their first successful flight. But I imagine the two brothers hugged each other. Well, you know, I\u2019m hugging you virtually.\u201dScientists say the successful test, which they called \u201ca flawless flight,\u201d could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. Engineers are already thinking about future aircraft, as heavy as 50 pounds or more, that could carry science experiments years in the future, NASA officials said.\u201cIt opens up new doors,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. A helicopter can fly over craters and other areas not accessible by rovers, he said. And being able to \u201cscout ahead is just absolutely critical.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMichael Watkins, the director of NASA\u2019s JPL, said that having eyes in the sky gives \u201cus the third dimension. It freed us from the surface now forever in planetary exploration.\u201dTo make the brief flight, Ingenuity\u2019s technology had to overcome Mars\u2019s super-thin atmosphere \u2014 just 1 percent the density of Earth\u2019s \u2014 which makes it more difficult for the helicopters\u2019 blades, spinning at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, to generate lift.It was a triumphant add-on to the main part of NASA\u2019s latest Mars mission \u2014 the Perseverance rover, a car-size vehicle that is set to explore a crater that once held water and could yield clues to the history of the planet and whether life ever existed there. Deciding to build a helicopter that could fly on Mars was a project years in the making and one that was the result of \u201cfinding that right line between crazy and innovative,\u201d Zurbuchen said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity, with four spindly legs and a solar panel and costing about $80 million, made the long journey to Mars tucked in the rover\u2019s undercarriage.As a tribute to the Wright brothers, Ingenuity has a postage-size bit of fabric from the brothers\u2019 aircraft, known as the Flyer, attached to a cable under the solar panel.If all goes according to plan, the helicopter could make as many as four more flights in coming weeks, each one more ambitious than the last. The second, for example, would fly slightly higher, to 16 feet, and then horizontally for a little bit before coming back to the landing site. \u201cWe want to push it to the limit,\u201d Aung said.Aung told her team to celebrate, to enjoy the moment, but added: \u201cThis is just a first flight. Let\u2019s get back to work and have more flights.\u201d The next flight, she said later, would come \u201cin the next few days.\u201dThe flight was originally scheduled to occur last week. But a problem halted a test of the helicopter\u2019s rotors, and the flight was delayed as engineers diagnosed and then fixed the issue. While expressing confidence, engineers acknowledged before the flight that anything so difficult and audacious could easily run into problems.\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything we can to make it a success, but we also know that we may have to scrub and try again,\u201d Aung wrote in a blog on NASA\u2019s website before the flight. \u201cIn engineering, there is always uncertainty, but this is what makes working on advanced technology so exciting and rewarding.\u201d Scientists say the successful test could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6219",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/19/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter-mars/",
        "text": "NASA successfully flew its four-pound helicopter from the surface of Mars early Monday in the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet, a feat that NASA officials compared to the Wright brothers\u2019 first flight in 1903.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt about 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the surface of the Red Planet. It reached an altitude of about 10 feet, where it hovered, buffeted ever so slightly by the wind, turned 96 degrees and then came softly back to the Martian surface in an autonomous flight that lasted just about 30 seconds, the space agency said. Inside the flight operations center at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers broke into applause when confirmation of the flight arrived, more than three hours after the flight, in a data burst that traveled 178 million miles to Earth through a complex communications network \u2014 from the helicopter, to the rover, to a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, to NASA\u2019s massive international Deep Space Network of antennae and, finally, to JPL.A red-letter day on the Red Planet! #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/Qow8JwhYEo\u2014 NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 19, 2021\n\nThe atmosphere in the room turned almost giddy when a still photo from the helicopter captured its shadow on the ground, followed by video of the aircraft\u2019s flight, taken from the nearby Mars rover Perseverance.\u201cWe can now say we\u2019ve flown a rotorcraft on another planet,\u201d MiMi Aung, NASA\u2019s Ingenuity program manager, told the occupants of the flight control room, all masked to protect against the coronavirus. \u201cWe together flew on Mars. We together have our Wright brothers moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added: \u201cWe don\u2019t know from history what Orville and Wilbur [Wright] did after their first successful flight. But I imagine the two brothers hugged each other. Well, you know, I\u2019m hugging you virtually.\u201dScientists say the successful test, which they called \u201ca flawless flight,\u201d could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. Engineers are already thinking about future aircraft, as heavy as 50 pounds or more, that could carry science experiments years in the future, NASA officials said.\u201cIt opens up new doors,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. A helicopter can fly over craters and other areas not accessible by rovers, he said. And being able to \u201cscout ahead is just absolutely critical.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMichael Watkins, the director of NASA\u2019s JPL, said that having eyes in the sky gives \u201cus the third dimension. It freed us from the surface now forever in planetary exploration.\u201dTo make the brief flight, Ingenuity\u2019s technology had to overcome Mars\u2019s super-thin atmosphere \u2014 just 1 percent the density of Earth\u2019s \u2014 which makes it more difficult for the helicopters\u2019 blades, spinning at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, to generate lift.It was a triumphant add-on to the main part of NASA\u2019s latest Mars mission \u2014 the Perseverance rover, a car-size vehicle that is set to explore a crater that once held water and could yield clues to the history of the planet and whether life ever existed there. Deciding to build a helicopter that could fly on Mars was a project years in the making and one that was the result of \u201cfinding that right line between crazy and innovative,\u201d Zurbuchen said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity, with four spindly legs and a solar panel and costing about $80 million, made the long journey to Mars tucked in the rover\u2019s undercarriage.As a tribute to the Wright brothers, Ingenuity has a postage-size bit of fabric from the brothers\u2019 aircraft, known as the Flyer, attached to a cable under the solar panel.If all goes according to plan, the helicopter could make as many as four more flights in coming weeks, each one more ambitious than the last. The second, for example, would fly slightly higher, to 16 feet, and then horizontally for a little bit before coming back to the landing site. \u201cWe want to push it to the limit,\u201d Aung said.Aung told her team to celebrate, to enjoy the moment, but added: \u201cThis is just a first flight. Let\u2019s get back to work and have more flights.\u201d The next flight, she said later, would come \u201cin the next few days.\u201dThe flight was originally scheduled to occur last week. But a problem halted a test of the helicopter\u2019s rotors, and the flight was delayed as engineers diagnosed and then fixed the issue. While expressing confidence, engineers acknowledged before the flight that anything so difficult and audacious could easily run into problems.\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything we can to make it a success, but we also know that we may have to scrub and try again,\u201d Aung wrote in a blog on NASA\u2019s website before the flight. \u201cIn engineering, there is always uncertainty, but this is what makes working on advanced technology so exciting and rewarding.\u201d Scientists say the successful test could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6220",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/19/nasa-ingenuity-helicopter-mars/",
        "text": "NASA successfully flew its four-pound helicopter from the surface of Mars early Monday in the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet, a feat that NASA officials compared to the Wright brothers\u2019 first flight in 1903.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt about 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the surface of the Red Planet. It reached an altitude of about 10 feet, where it hovered, buffeted ever so slightly by the wind, turned 96 degrees and then came softly back to the Martian surface in an autonomous flight that lasted just about 30 seconds, the space agency said. Inside the flight operations center at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers broke into applause when confirmation of the flight arrived, more than three hours after the flight, in a data burst that traveled 178 million miles to Earth through a complex communications network \u2014 from the helicopter, to the rover, to a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, to NASA\u2019s massive international Deep Space Network of antennae and, finally, to JPL.A red-letter day on the Red Planet! #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/Qow8JwhYEo\u2014 NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 19, 2021\n\nThe atmosphere in the room turned almost giddy when a still photo from the helicopter captured its shadow on the ground, followed by video of the aircraft\u2019s flight, taken from the nearby Mars rover Perseverance.\u201cWe can now say we\u2019ve flown a rotorcraft on another planet,\u201d MiMi Aung, NASA\u2019s Ingenuity program manager, told the occupants of the flight control room, all masked to protect against the coronavirus. \u201cWe together flew on Mars. We together have our Wright brothers moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added: \u201cWe don\u2019t know from history what Orville and Wilbur [Wright] did after their first successful flight. But I imagine the two brothers hugged each other. Well, you know, I\u2019m hugging you virtually.\u201dScientists say the successful test, which they called \u201ca flawless flight,\u201d could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. Engineers are already thinking about future aircraft, as heavy as 50 pounds or more, that could carry science experiments years in the future, NASA officials said.\u201cIt opens up new doors,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. A helicopter can fly over craters and other areas not accessible by rovers, he said. And being able to \u201cscout ahead is just absolutely critical.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMichael Watkins, the director of NASA\u2019s JPL, said that having eyes in the sky gives \u201cus the third dimension. It freed us from the surface now forever in planetary exploration.\u201dTo make the brief flight, Ingenuity\u2019s technology had to overcome Mars\u2019s super-thin atmosphere \u2014 just 1 percent the density of Earth\u2019s \u2014 which makes it more difficult for the helicopters\u2019 blades, spinning at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, to generate lift.It was a triumphant add-on to the main part of NASA\u2019s latest Mars mission \u2014 the Perseverance rover, a car-size vehicle that is set to explore a crater that once held water and could yield clues to the history of the planet and whether life ever existed there. Deciding to build a helicopter that could fly on Mars was a project years in the making and one that was the result of \u201cfinding that right line between crazy and innovative,\u201d Zurbuchen said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity, with four spindly legs and a solar panel and costing about $80 million, made the long journey to Mars tucked in the rover\u2019s undercarriage.As a tribute to the Wright brothers, Ingenuity has a postage-size bit of fabric from the brothers\u2019 aircraft, known as the Flyer, attached to a cable under the solar panel.If all goes according to plan, the helicopter could make as many as four more flights in coming weeks, each one more ambitious than the last. The second, for example, would fly slightly higher, to 16 feet, and then horizontally for a little bit before coming back to the landing site. \u201cWe want to push it to the limit,\u201d Aung said.Aung told her team to celebrate, to enjoy the moment, but added: \u201cThis is just a first flight. Let\u2019s get back to work and have more flights.\u201d The next flight, she said later, would come \u201cin the next few days.\u201dThe flight was originally scheduled to occur last week. But a problem halted a test of the helicopter\u2019s rotors, and the flight was delayed as engineers diagnosed and then fixed the issue. While expressing confidence, engineers acknowledged before the flight that anything so difficult and audacious could easily run into problems.\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything we can to make it a success, but we also know that we may have to scrub and try again,\u201d Aung wrote in a blog on NASA\u2019s website before the flight. \u201cIn engineering, there is always uncertainty, but this is what makes working on advanced technology so exciting and rewarding.\u201d Scientists say the successful test could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, the first time an aircraft has flown on another planet",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6221",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/22/mars-video-perseverance-landing-hd/",
        "text": "NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in high-speed video.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the short clip, several cameras mounted at various points on the spacecraft chronicle the descent of the Perseverance rover as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere, deploys its parachute and jettisons its heat shield. The red, dusty Martian atmosphere comes into view as the rover gets closer to the surface. Individual rocks can be seen, as well as entire craters, as the autonomous spacecraft guides its way to a flat landing site. Then, a whirlwind of dust, as the descent stage fires its engines and lowers the rover onto the surface with cables.Story continues below advertisementNASA also released a slip of sound recorded on the Red Planet, a small whoosh \u2014 a gust of wind traveling at five meters per second, or about 11 miles per hour, NASA estimated.Listen to NASA's 18-second clip of Martian wind (make sure your volume is set high)The sounds and the video \u201care the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate.AdvertisementDocumenting the landing, one of the most perilous parts of the mission, known as the \u201cseven minutes of terror,\u201d was not central to the spacecraft\u2019s primary goal of searching for signs of ancient, microbial life on Mars.But it was a way to inspire future generations of explorers, NASA said, as well as give engineers feedback on how the spacecraft operated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have taken everyone along with us on our journeys across the solar system to the rings of Saturn, looking back at the pale blue dot and incredible panoramas on the surface of Mars,\u201d said Michael Watkins, director of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cThis is the first time we\u2019ve been able to actually capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on Mars. And these are pretty cool videos. And we will learn something, by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos, but a lot of it is also to bring you along on our journey.\u201dAdvertisementBecause the atmospheric conditions are so different on Mars, NASA\u2019s engineers can\u2019t test the landing systems on Earth. \u201cSo this is the first time we\u2019ve had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to express just how emotional and how exciting it was for everybody.\u201dNASA had put together compelling animations of the landing that showed the spacecraft hurtling through the Martian atmosphere, then deploying its parachute and finally skycrane lowering the rover to the surface. In 2012, it stitched together 297 small images taken during the last 2\u00bd minutes of the Curiosity rover\u2019s landing on Mars. Curiosity also has sent back photos it has taken of itself on Mars\u2019s barren landscape.Story continues below advertisementBut those pale in comparison to what NASA released Monday.AdvertisementVideo coverage has long been part of space travel. But with today\u2019s technology, NASA and the growing commercial space sector are giving space exploration a Hollywood-like feel that is a giant leap from the flickering grainy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong\u2019s first step on the moon five decades ago.For its next human lunar exploration mission, called Artemis, NASA is looking for a vast improvement: footage that will bring people along for the ride inside the capsule as well as on the surface.It has put out a solicitation to partners \u201cwho will use innovative technologies, imagery applications and approaches\u201d so that the \u201cpublic can experience different segments\u201d of the missions, including \u201c \u2018riding along\u2019 with the crew in Orion on their journey to the area around the Moon; visual exploration of the lunar surface; and on the return to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe space agency is looking to use everything from 360-degree cameras, virtual reality, 4K and ultra high-definition cameras, \u201crobotic \u2018third-person\u2019 views\u201d and other concepts that would deliver \u201ca uniquely-engaging spaceflight experience.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been especially adept at using compelling video to tell the story of its journey \u2014 both the successes and failures. Videos posted to its YouTube channel have millions of views, helping it build an enormous fan base, which regularly tunes in to launches in a way not seen since the early days of the Space Age.Its videos have showcased major milestones, such as NASA\u2019s first human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle fleet was retired, the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket, the landings of first-stage boosters, even how it catches the fairings, or nose cones, of its rockets on boats with giant nets like a center fielder nabbing a pop fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIts videos of the flights of its Starship prototypes are enormously popular. They showcase not only the short test flights of the Starship spacecraft that Musk says will ultimately take people to the moon and Mars, but its crash landings that end in fireballs as the company figures out how best to get them back to Earth safely.It even put together a compilation video from the early days of its Falcon 9 rocket test landings, when they too often ended up exploding as they came crashing to the ground. That video, \u201cHow Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster,\u201d set to the marching band tune used in Monty Python\u2019s \u201cFlying Circus,\u201d had 25 million views.After a successful launch, SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on impact during its attempted landing on Dec. 9. There was no one aboard the ship. (SpaceX)NASA and SpaceX even won an Emmy in 2019 for their joint broadcast of a test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe cameras are commercially available and were purchased by NASA from FLIR Systems, which has its corporate headquarters in Arlington, Va. \u201cOur cameras are designed for operation on Earth, and not built to operate in outer space,\u201d said Sadiq Panjwani, a vice president at the company. They had never been subjected to the extreme temperatures on Mars, or the high gravity forces the spacecraft experiences or heat it is exposed to while landing.\u201cSo we were quite thrilled that NASA put them to the test,\u201d he said.The video of the Perseverance landing gave engineers valuable feedback that showed, for the most part, the systems worked perfectly. But the footage showed there was a problem with one of the springs that helps jettison the heat shield.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s no danger to the spacecraft here, but it\u2019s something we didn\u2019t expect and something we wouldn\u2019t have seen if we didn\u2019t have this camera system to show us what was going on,\u201d said Al Chen, NASA\u2019s lead engineer for the entry, descent and landing systems.AdvertisementThe footage will be studied by scientists and engineers for years, NASA officials said. The parachute deployment will help scientists understand the atmosphere, the way the dust and gravel scattered during the landing could hold clues to the Martian landscape.\u201cTo watch that video today was super emotional,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and a former NASA chief scientist. \u201cTo be able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet is stunning. It\u2019s such an achievement.\u201d NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in video. Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6222",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/22/mars-video-perseverance-landing-hd/",
        "text": "NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in high-speed video.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the short clip, several cameras mounted at various points on the spacecraft chronicle the descent of the Perseverance rover as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere, deploys its parachute and jettisons its heat shield. The red, dusty Martian atmosphere comes into view as the rover gets closer to the surface. Individual rocks can be seen, as well as entire craters, as the autonomous spacecraft guides its way to a flat landing site. Then, a whirlwind of dust, as the descent stage fires its engines and lowers the rover onto the surface with cables.Story continues below advertisementNASA also released a slip of sound recorded on the Red Planet, a small whoosh \u2014 a gust of wind traveling at five meters per second, or about 11 miles per hour, NASA estimated.Listen to NASA's 18-second clip of Martian wind (make sure your volume is set high)The sounds and the video \u201care the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate.AdvertisementDocumenting the landing, one of the most perilous parts of the mission, known as the \u201cseven minutes of terror,\u201d was not central to the spacecraft\u2019s primary goal of searching for signs of ancient, microbial life on Mars.But it was a way to inspire future generations of explorers, NASA said, as well as give engineers feedback on how the spacecraft operated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have taken everyone along with us on our journeys across the solar system to the rings of Saturn, looking back at the pale blue dot and incredible panoramas on the surface of Mars,\u201d said Michael Watkins, director of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cThis is the first time we\u2019ve been able to actually capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on Mars. And these are pretty cool videos. And we will learn something, by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos, but a lot of it is also to bring you along on our journey.\u201dAdvertisementBecause the atmospheric conditions are so different on Mars, NASA\u2019s engineers can\u2019t test the landing systems on Earth. \u201cSo this is the first time we\u2019ve had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to express just how emotional and how exciting it was for everybody.\u201dNASA had put together compelling animations of the landing that showed the spacecraft hurtling through the Martian atmosphere, then deploying its parachute and finally skycrane lowering the rover to the surface. In 2012, it stitched together 297 small images taken during the last 2\u00bd minutes of the Curiosity rover\u2019s landing on Mars. Curiosity also has sent back photos it has taken of itself on Mars\u2019s barren landscape.Story continues below advertisementBut those pale in comparison to what NASA released Monday.AdvertisementVideo coverage has long been part of space travel. But with today\u2019s technology, NASA and the growing commercial space sector are giving space exploration a Hollywood-like feel that is a giant leap from the flickering grainy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong\u2019s first step on the moon five decades ago.For its next human lunar exploration mission, called Artemis, NASA is looking for a vast improvement: footage that will bring people along for the ride inside the capsule as well as on the surface.It has put out a solicitation to partners \u201cwho will use innovative technologies, imagery applications and approaches\u201d so that the \u201cpublic can experience different segments\u201d of the missions, including \u201c \u2018riding along\u2019 with the crew in Orion on their journey to the area around the Moon; visual exploration of the lunar surface; and on the return to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe space agency is looking to use everything from 360-degree cameras, virtual reality, 4K and ultra high-definition cameras, \u201crobotic \u2018third-person\u2019 views\u201d and other concepts that would deliver \u201ca uniquely-engaging spaceflight experience.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been especially adept at using compelling video to tell the story of its journey \u2014 both the successes and failures. Videos posted to its YouTube channel have millions of views, helping it build an enormous fan base, which regularly tunes in to launches in a way not seen since the early days of the Space Age.Its videos have showcased major milestones, such as NASA\u2019s first human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle fleet was retired, the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket, the landings of first-stage boosters, even how it catches the fairings, or nose cones, of its rockets on boats with giant nets like a center fielder nabbing a pop fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIts videos of the flights of its Starship prototypes are enormously popular. They showcase not only the short test flights of the Starship spacecraft that Musk says will ultimately take people to the moon and Mars, but its crash landings that end in fireballs as the company figures out how best to get them back to Earth safely.It even put together a compilation video from the early days of its Falcon 9 rocket test landings, when they too often ended up exploding as they came crashing to the ground. That video, \u201cHow Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster,\u201d set to the marching band tune used in Monty Python\u2019s \u201cFlying Circus,\u201d had 25 million views.After a successful launch, SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on impact during its attempted landing on Dec. 9. There was no one aboard the ship. (SpaceX)NASA and SpaceX even won an Emmy in 2019 for their joint broadcast of a test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe cameras are commercially available and were purchased by NASA from FLIR Systems, which has its corporate headquarters in Arlington, Va. \u201cOur cameras are designed for operation on Earth, and not built to operate in outer space,\u201d said Sadiq Panjwani, a vice president at the company. They had never been subjected to the extreme temperatures on Mars, or the high gravity forces the spacecraft experiences or heat it is exposed to while landing.\u201cSo we were quite thrilled that NASA put them to the test,\u201d he said.The video of the Perseverance landing gave engineers valuable feedback that showed, for the most part, the systems worked perfectly. But the footage showed there was a problem with one of the springs that helps jettison the heat shield.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s no danger to the spacecraft here, but it\u2019s something we didn\u2019t expect and something we wouldn\u2019t have seen if we didn\u2019t have this camera system to show us what was going on,\u201d said Al Chen, NASA\u2019s lead engineer for the entry, descent and landing systems.AdvertisementThe footage will be studied by scientists and engineers for years, NASA officials said. The parachute deployment will help scientists understand the atmosphere, the way the dust and gravel scattered during the landing could hold clues to the Martian landscape.\u201cTo watch that video today was super emotional,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and a former NASA chief scientist. \u201cTo be able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet is stunning. It\u2019s such an achievement.\u201d NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in video. Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6223",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/22/mars-video-perseverance-landing-hd/",
        "text": "NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in high-speed video.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the short clip, several cameras mounted at various points on the spacecraft chronicle the descent of the Perseverance rover as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere, deploys its parachute and jettisons its heat shield. The red, dusty Martian atmosphere comes into view as the rover gets closer to the surface. Individual rocks can be seen, as well as entire craters, as the autonomous spacecraft guides its way to a flat landing site. Then, a whirlwind of dust, as the descent stage fires its engines and lowers the rover onto the surface with cables.Story continues below advertisementNASA also released a slip of sound recorded on the Red Planet, a small whoosh \u2014 a gust of wind traveling at five meters per second, or about 11 miles per hour, NASA estimated.Listen to NASA's 18-second clip of Martian wind (make sure your volume is set high)The sounds and the video \u201care the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate.AdvertisementDocumenting the landing, one of the most perilous parts of the mission, known as the \u201cseven minutes of terror,\u201d was not central to the spacecraft\u2019s primary goal of searching for signs of ancient, microbial life on Mars.But it was a way to inspire future generations of explorers, NASA said, as well as give engineers feedback on how the spacecraft operated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have taken everyone along with us on our journeys across the solar system to the rings of Saturn, looking back at the pale blue dot and incredible panoramas on the surface of Mars,\u201d said Michael Watkins, director of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cThis is the first time we\u2019ve been able to actually capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on Mars. And these are pretty cool videos. And we will learn something, by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos, but a lot of it is also to bring you along on our journey.\u201dAdvertisementBecause the atmospheric conditions are so different on Mars, NASA\u2019s engineers can\u2019t test the landing systems on Earth. \u201cSo this is the first time we\u2019ve had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to express just how emotional and how exciting it was for everybody.\u201dNASA had put together compelling animations of the landing that showed the spacecraft hurtling through the Martian atmosphere, then deploying its parachute and finally skycrane lowering the rover to the surface. In 2012, it stitched together 297 small images taken during the last 2\u00bd minutes of the Curiosity rover\u2019s landing on Mars. Curiosity also has sent back photos it has taken of itself on Mars\u2019s barren landscape.Story continues below advertisementBut those pale in comparison to what NASA released Monday.AdvertisementVideo coverage has long been part of space travel. But with today\u2019s technology, NASA and the growing commercial space sector are giving space exploration a Hollywood-like feel that is a giant leap from the flickering grainy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong\u2019s first step on the moon five decades ago.For its next human lunar exploration mission, called Artemis, NASA is looking for a vast improvement: footage that will bring people along for the ride inside the capsule as well as on the surface.It has put out a solicitation to partners \u201cwho will use innovative technologies, imagery applications and approaches\u201d so that the \u201cpublic can experience different segments\u201d of the missions, including \u201c \u2018riding along\u2019 with the crew in Orion on their journey to the area around the Moon; visual exploration of the lunar surface; and on the return to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe space agency is looking to use everything from 360-degree cameras, virtual reality, 4K and ultra high-definition cameras, \u201crobotic \u2018third-person\u2019 views\u201d and other concepts that would deliver \u201ca uniquely-engaging spaceflight experience.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been especially adept at using compelling video to tell the story of its journey \u2014 both the successes and failures. Videos posted to its YouTube channel have millions of views, helping it build an enormous fan base, which regularly tunes in to launches in a way not seen since the early days of the Space Age.Its videos have showcased major milestones, such as NASA\u2019s first human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle fleet was retired, the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket, the landings of first-stage boosters, even how it catches the fairings, or nose cones, of its rockets on boats with giant nets like a center fielder nabbing a pop fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIts videos of the flights of its Starship prototypes are enormously popular. They showcase not only the short test flights of the Starship spacecraft that Musk says will ultimately take people to the moon and Mars, but its crash landings that end in fireballs as the company figures out how best to get them back to Earth safely.It even put together a compilation video from the early days of its Falcon 9 rocket test landings, when they too often ended up exploding as they came crashing to the ground. That video, \u201cHow Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster,\u201d set to the marching band tune used in Monty Python\u2019s \u201cFlying Circus,\u201d had 25 million views.After a successful launch, SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on impact during its attempted landing on Dec. 9. There was no one aboard the ship. (SpaceX)NASA and SpaceX even won an Emmy in 2019 for their joint broadcast of a test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe cameras are commercially available and were purchased by NASA from FLIR Systems, which has its corporate headquarters in Arlington, Va. \u201cOur cameras are designed for operation on Earth, and not built to operate in outer space,\u201d said Sadiq Panjwani, a vice president at the company. They had never been subjected to the extreme temperatures on Mars, or the high gravity forces the spacecraft experiences or heat it is exposed to while landing.\u201cSo we were quite thrilled that NASA put them to the test,\u201d he said.The video of the Perseverance landing gave engineers valuable feedback that showed, for the most part, the systems worked perfectly. But the footage showed there was a problem with one of the springs that helps jettison the heat shield.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s no danger to the spacecraft here, but it\u2019s something we didn\u2019t expect and something we wouldn\u2019t have seen if we didn\u2019t have this camera system to show us what was going on,\u201d said Al Chen, NASA\u2019s lead engineer for the entry, descent and landing systems.AdvertisementThe footage will be studied by scientists and engineers for years, NASA officials said. The parachute deployment will help scientists understand the atmosphere, the way the dust and gravel scattered during the landing could hold clues to the Martian landscape.\u201cTo watch that video today was super emotional,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and a former NASA chief scientist. \u201cTo be able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet is stunning. It\u2019s such an achievement.\u201d NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in video. Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6224",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/22/mars-video-perseverance-landing-hd/",
        "text": "NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in high-speed video.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the short clip, several cameras mounted at various points on the spacecraft chronicle the descent of the Perseverance rover as it plunges through the Martian atmosphere, deploys its parachute and jettisons its heat shield. The red, dusty Martian atmosphere comes into view as the rover gets closer to the surface. Individual rocks can be seen, as well as entire craters, as the autonomous spacecraft guides its way to a flat landing site. Then, a whirlwind of dust, as the descent stage fires its engines and lowers the rover onto the surface with cables.Story continues below advertisementNASA also released a slip of sound recorded on the Red Planet, a small whoosh \u2014 a gust of wind traveling at five meters per second, or about 11 miles per hour, NASA estimated.Listen to NASA's 18-second clip of Martian wind (make sure your volume is set high)The sounds and the video \u201care the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate.AdvertisementDocumenting the landing, one of the most perilous parts of the mission, known as the \u201cseven minutes of terror,\u201d was not central to the spacecraft\u2019s primary goal of searching for signs of ancient, microbial life on Mars.But it was a way to inspire future generations of explorers, NASA said, as well as give engineers feedback on how the spacecraft operated.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have taken everyone along with us on our journeys across the solar system to the rings of Saturn, looking back at the pale blue dot and incredible panoramas on the surface of Mars,\u201d said Michael Watkins, director of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cThis is the first time we\u2019ve been able to actually capture an event like the landing of a spacecraft on Mars. And these are pretty cool videos. And we will learn something, by looking at the performance of the vehicle in these videos, but a lot of it is also to bring you along on our journey.\u201dAdvertisementBecause the atmospheric conditions are so different on Mars, NASA\u2019s engineers can\u2019t test the landing systems on Earth. \u201cSo this is the first time we\u2019ve had a chance as engineers to actually see what we designed,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to express just how emotional and how exciting it was for everybody.\u201dNASA had put together compelling animations of the landing that showed the spacecraft hurtling through the Martian atmosphere, then deploying its parachute and finally skycrane lowering the rover to the surface. In 2012, it stitched together 297 small images taken during the last 2\u00bd minutes of the Curiosity rover\u2019s landing on Mars. Curiosity also has sent back photos it has taken of itself on Mars\u2019s barren landscape.Story continues below advertisementBut those pale in comparison to what NASA released Monday.AdvertisementVideo coverage has long been part of space travel. But with today\u2019s technology, NASA and the growing commercial space sector are giving space exploration a Hollywood-like feel that is a giant leap from the flickering grainy black-and-white footage of Neil Armstrong\u2019s first step on the moon five decades ago.For its next human lunar exploration mission, called Artemis, NASA is looking for a vast improvement: footage that will bring people along for the ride inside the capsule as well as on the surface.It has put out a solicitation to partners \u201cwho will use innovative technologies, imagery applications and approaches\u201d so that the \u201cpublic can experience different segments\u201d of the missions, including \u201c \u2018riding along\u2019 with the crew in Orion on their journey to the area around the Moon; visual exploration of the lunar surface; and on the return to Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe space agency is looking to use everything from 360-degree cameras, virtual reality, 4K and ultra high-definition cameras, \u201crobotic \u2018third-person\u2019 views\u201d and other concepts that would deliver \u201ca uniquely-engaging spaceflight experience.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has been especially adept at using compelling video to tell the story of its journey \u2014 both the successes and failures. Videos posted to its YouTube channel have millions of views, helping it build an enormous fan base, which regularly tunes in to launches in a way not seen since the early days of the Space Age.Its videos have showcased major milestones, such as NASA\u2019s first human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle fleet was retired, the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket, the landings of first-stage boosters, even how it catches the fairings, or nose cones, of its rockets on boats with giant nets like a center fielder nabbing a pop fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIts videos of the flights of its Starship prototypes are enormously popular. They showcase not only the short test flights of the Starship spacecraft that Musk says will ultimately take people to the moon and Mars, but its crash landings that end in fireballs as the company figures out how best to get them back to Earth safely.It even put together a compilation video from the early days of its Falcon 9 rocket test landings, when they too often ended up exploding as they came crashing to the ground. That video, \u201cHow Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster,\u201d set to the marching band tune used in Monty Python\u2019s \u201cFlying Circus,\u201d had 25 million views.After a successful launch, SpaceX's Starship rocket exploded on impact during its attempted landing on Dec. 9. There was no one aboard the ship. (SpaceX)NASA and SpaceX even won an Emmy in 2019 for their joint broadcast of a test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe cameras are commercially available and were purchased by NASA from FLIR Systems, which has its corporate headquarters in Arlington, Va. \u201cOur cameras are designed for operation on Earth, and not built to operate in outer space,\u201d said Sadiq Panjwani, a vice president at the company. They had never been subjected to the extreme temperatures on Mars, or the high gravity forces the spacecraft experiences or heat it is exposed to while landing.\u201cSo we were quite thrilled that NASA put them to the test,\u201d he said.The video of the Perseverance landing gave engineers valuable feedback that showed, for the most part, the systems worked perfectly. But the footage showed there was a problem with one of the springs that helps jettison the heat shield.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s no danger to the spacecraft here, but it\u2019s something we didn\u2019t expect and something we wouldn\u2019t have seen if we didn\u2019t have this camera system to show us what was going on,\u201d said Al Chen, NASA\u2019s lead engineer for the entry, descent and landing systems.AdvertisementThe footage will be studied by scientists and engineers for years, NASA officials said. The parachute deployment will help scientists understand the atmosphere, the way the dust and gravel scattered during the landing could hold clues to the Martian landscape.\u201cTo watch that video today was super emotional,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum and a former NASA chief scientist. \u201cTo be able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet is stunning. It\u2019s such an achievement.\u201d NASA on Monday released stunning, high-definition footage of its car-size rover landing on the Martian surface last week, the first time that a spacecraft\u2019s landing on Mars has been recorded in video. Watch NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars in HD",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6225",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/16/nasa-lunar-lander-contract-spacex/",
        "text": "NASA on Friday selected Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to build spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission.The award to SpaceX for the \u201chuman landing system\u201d was a stunning announcement that marked another major victory for the hard-charging company that vaults it to the top tier of the nation\u2019s aerospace companies and solidifies it as one of the space agency\u2019s most trusted partners. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn winning the $2.9 billion contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which had formed what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d by partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. SpaceX also won over Dynetics, a defense contractor based in Huntsville, Ala. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementNASA had originally chosen all three companies for the initial phase of the contract, and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In other major programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and to ensure it has redundancy in case one can\u2019t deliver.AdvertisementIn a document explaining NASA\u2019s rationale for picking SpaceX obtained by The Washington Post, NASA said it wanted \u201cto preserve a competitive environment at this stage of the HLS Program.\u201d But it added that \u201cNASA\u2019s current fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX updated its payment schedule so that it now fits \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dBut in moving ahead with SpaceX alone, it sent a message that it fully trusts the growing company to fly its astronauts for its signature human exploration program \u2014 Artemis, a campaign to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAs the first human lunar lander in 50 years, this innovative human landing system will be a hallmark in space exploration history,\u201d Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar lander program manager, said during a news briefing announcing the award. \u201cNASA\u2019s Apollo program captured the world\u2019s attention, demonstrated the power of America\u2019s vision and technology, and can-do spirit. And we expect Artemis will similarly inspire great achievements, innovation and scientific discoveries. We\u2019re confident in NASA\u2019s partnership with SpaceX to help us achieve the Artemis mission.\u201dAdvertisementVideo shows SpaceX's Starship SN10 prototype successfully launch and return to a soft landing on March 3. (SpaceX)Over the past several years, SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002 with the goal of eventually flying humans to Mars, has completely upended the space industry, moving through fast, and at times fiery test campaigns that have unsettled traditional industry officials but also ignited new waves of enthusiasm not seen since the early days of the Space Age.When Musk first started the company, even he didn\u2019t think it would succeed. In 2008, after three test flights of its Falcon 1 rocket failed to reach orbit, he was nearly out of money. But the next test was successful, and NASA awarded the company a modest contract that kept it afloat.Story continues below advertisementIn the years since, SpaceX has flown cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and then, astronauts, overcoming skeptics who said human spaceflight should never be outsourced to the private sector, and certainly not to a company as green \u2014 and brash \u2014 as SpaceX.AdvertisementIn 2015, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a mission for NASA flying cargo to the station. Another exploded on the launchpad ahead of an engine test in 2016. And after Musk smoked pot on a podcast broadcast on the Internet, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine ordered a safety review of the entire company.But despite the setbacks, SpaceX has achieved enormous success \u2014 flying astronauts safely and dominating the launch market, while lowering the cost and dramatically increasing the number of flights.Story continues below advertisementFor the Artemis program, SpaceX bid its reusable Starship spacecraft, which is being designed to fly large numbers of people into deep space and land on celestial bodies as well as back on Earth.On Twitter, the company said it is \u201chumbled to help @NASAArtemis usher in a new era of human space exploration.\u201d In a statement, Blue Origin said its \u201cNational Team doesn\u2019t have very much information yet. We are looking to learn more about the selection.\u201d Dynetics did not respond to requests for comment.AdvertisementThe company has been putting its Starship spacecraft through a fast-paced test campaign at its facility in South Texas, launching prototypes without any people on board several miles up in the air, then flying them back to a landing site.Story continues below advertisementSo far, all the test vehicles have crash-landed in a series of fireballs that triggered investigations overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration. But the company is expected to try again soon with a test vehicle that Musk has said is outfitted with several upgrades. And it hopes to be able to fly the spacecraft to orbit this year.SpaceX was one of two providers hired by NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. It flew two missions with astronauts last year and its next mission scheduled to launch on Thursday. Boeing, the other company hired to ferry crews to the station and back, has stumbled badly and has yet to fly a test mission with astronauts.AdvertisementThat experience shows why NASA is best served by having at least two providers on major programs, officials said, and the pressure will be on SpaceX to perform. According to the document explaining the decision, SpaceX\u2019s bid \u201cwas the lowest among the offerors by a wide margin.\u201d NASA also liked Starship\u2019s ability to ferry a lot of cargo to and from the surface of the moon as well, which it said \u201chas the potential to greatly improve scientific operations.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile the contract will cover the first human landing, Watson-Morgan said NASA \u201cwill also begin work immediately on a follow-up competition\u201d to \u201cprovide regularly recurring services to the lunar surface that will enable these crewed missions on sustainable basis.\u201dThe Artemis program began under the administration of former president Donald Trump but has been embraced by the Biden administration, though the White House is reconsidering the timeline. Trump had ordered that astronauts land on the moon by 2024, a schedule the White House now says is under review as NASA works to develop its rockets and spacecraft. It is also working with Congress to get the funding it needs.AdvertisementFor this fiscal year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the effort \u2014 well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 timeline.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this month, the Biden administration proposed a $24.7 billion budget for NASA, a 6.3 percent increase that included an additional $325 million for the Artemis program.Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk praised the request and said it \u201csupports the development of capabilities for sustainable, long-duration human exploration beyond Earth, and eventually to Mars.\u201dPreviously NASA vowed that it would land a woman on the moon as part of the first Artemis lunar landing. But in his statement, Jurczyk said the agency would also include the \u201cfirst person of color\u201d as part of the program.The White House recently nominated former Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) to lead the agency. His confirmation hearing is scheduled for next week, and he is expected to win confirmation easily. During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for space exploration, and he flew on the space shuttle in 1986 as a member of the House. If confirmed, he has said he would push to get the funding the Artemis program needs, as the agency reassesses the timeline for returning astronauts to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso on Friday, the White House said it would nominate former NASA astronaut Pamela Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel, to be the space agency\u2019s deputy administrator.The contracts for the lunar landers come a year after NASA awarded three initial contracts to Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX.In awarding those contracts, NASA said Blue Origin and its team was furthest along and awarded it the largest contract, $579 million. Dynetics, which is partnering with the Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million, and SpaceX won $135 million.The defeat is a huge blow to Blue Origin, and to Bezos, who has long been fascinated by the moon and has for years wanted to be part of the effort to return there. He has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon when he was 5 years old was \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him.Blue Origin has been pitching its landing system, known as Blue Moon, since 2017, and Bezos has said he would invest in it heavily himself. In 2019, Bezos said that the program is \u201cso ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201d The contract marks another major victory for the hard-charging company that vaults it to the top tier of the nation\u2019s aerospace companies and solidifies it as one of the space agency\u2019s most trusted partners. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6226",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/16/nasa-lunar-lander-contract-spacex/",
        "text": "NASA on Friday selected Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to build spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission.The award to SpaceX for the \u201chuman landing system\u201d was a stunning announcement that marked another major victory for the hard-charging company that vaults it to the top tier of the nation\u2019s aerospace companies and solidifies it as one of the space agency\u2019s most trusted partners. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn winning the $2.9 billion contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which had formed what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d by partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. SpaceX also won over Dynetics, a defense contractor based in Huntsville, Ala. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementNASA had originally chosen all three companies for the initial phase of the contract, and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In other major programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and to ensure it has redundancy in case one can\u2019t deliver.AdvertisementIn a document explaining NASA\u2019s rationale for picking SpaceX obtained by The Washington Post, NASA said it wanted \u201cto preserve a competitive environment at this stage of the HLS Program.\u201d But it added that \u201cNASA\u2019s current fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX updated its payment schedule so that it now fits \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dBut in moving ahead with SpaceX alone, it sent a message that it fully trusts the growing company to fly its astronauts for its signature human exploration program \u2014 Artemis, a campaign to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAs the first human lunar lander in 50 years, this innovative human landing system will be a hallmark in space exploration history,\u201d Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar lander program manager, said during a news briefing announcing the award. \u201cNASA\u2019s Apollo program captured the world\u2019s attention, demonstrated the power of America\u2019s vision and technology, and can-do spirit. And we expect Artemis will similarly inspire great achievements, innovation and scientific discoveries. We\u2019re confident in NASA\u2019s partnership with SpaceX to help us achieve the Artemis mission.\u201dAdvertisementVideo shows SpaceX's Starship SN10 prototype successfully launch and return to a soft landing on March 3. (SpaceX)Over the past several years, SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002 with the goal of eventually flying humans to Mars, has completely upended the space industry, moving through fast, and at times fiery test campaigns that have unsettled traditional industry officials but also ignited new waves of enthusiasm not seen since the early days of the Space Age.When Musk first started the company, even he didn\u2019t think it would succeed. In 2008, after three test flights of its Falcon 1 rocket failed to reach orbit, he was nearly out of money. But the next test was successful, and NASA awarded the company a modest contract that kept it afloat.Story continues below advertisementIn the years since, SpaceX has flown cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and then, astronauts, overcoming skeptics who said human spaceflight should never be outsourced to the private sector, and certainly not to a company as green \u2014 and brash \u2014 as SpaceX.AdvertisementIn 2015, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a mission for NASA flying cargo to the station. Another exploded on the launchpad ahead of an engine test in 2016. And after Musk smoked pot on a podcast broadcast on the Internet, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine ordered a safety review of the entire company.But despite the setbacks, SpaceX has achieved enormous success \u2014 flying astronauts safely and dominating the launch market, while lowering the cost and dramatically increasing the number of flights.Story continues below advertisementFor the Artemis program, SpaceX bid its reusable Starship spacecraft, which is being designed to fly large numbers of people into deep space and land on celestial bodies as well as back on Earth.On Twitter, the company said it is \u201chumbled to help @NASAArtemis usher in a new era of human space exploration.\u201d In a statement, Blue Origin said its \u201cNational Team doesn\u2019t have very much information yet. We are looking to learn more about the selection.\u201d Dynetics did not respond to requests for comment.AdvertisementThe company has been putting its Starship spacecraft through a fast-paced test campaign at its facility in South Texas, launching prototypes without any people on board several miles up in the air, then flying them back to a landing site.Story continues below advertisementSo far, all the test vehicles have crash-landed in a series of fireballs that triggered investigations overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration. But the company is expected to try again soon with a test vehicle that Musk has said is outfitted with several upgrades. And it hopes to be able to fly the spacecraft to orbit this year.SpaceX was one of two providers hired by NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. It flew two missions with astronauts last year and its next mission scheduled to launch on Thursday. Boeing, the other company hired to ferry crews to the station and back, has stumbled badly and has yet to fly a test mission with astronauts.AdvertisementThat experience shows why NASA is best served by having at least two providers on major programs, officials said, and the pressure will be on SpaceX to perform. According to the document explaining the decision, SpaceX\u2019s bid \u201cwas the lowest among the offerors by a wide margin.\u201d NASA also liked Starship\u2019s ability to ferry a lot of cargo to and from the surface of the moon as well, which it said \u201chas the potential to greatly improve scientific operations.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile the contract will cover the first human landing, Watson-Morgan said NASA \u201cwill also begin work immediately on a follow-up competition\u201d to \u201cprovide regularly recurring services to the lunar surface that will enable these crewed missions on sustainable basis.\u201dThe Artemis program began under the administration of former president Donald Trump but has been embraced by the Biden administration, though the White House is reconsidering the timeline. Trump had ordered that astronauts land on the moon by 2024, a schedule the White House now says is under review as NASA works to develop its rockets and spacecraft. It is also working with Congress to get the funding it needs.AdvertisementFor this fiscal year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the effort \u2014 well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 timeline.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this month, the Biden administration proposed a $24.7 billion budget for NASA, a 6.3 percent increase that included an additional $325 million for the Artemis program.Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk praised the request and said it \u201csupports the development of capabilities for sustainable, long-duration human exploration beyond Earth, and eventually to Mars.\u201dPreviously NASA vowed that it would land a woman on the moon as part of the first Artemis lunar landing. But in his statement, Jurczyk said the agency would also include the \u201cfirst person of color\u201d as part of the program.The White House recently nominated former Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) to lead the agency. His confirmation hearing is scheduled for next week, and he is expected to win confirmation easily. During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for space exploration, and he flew on the space shuttle in 1986 as a member of the House. If confirmed, he has said he would push to get the funding the Artemis program needs, as the agency reassesses the timeline for returning astronauts to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso on Friday, the White House said it would nominate former NASA astronaut Pamela Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel, to be the space agency\u2019s deputy administrator.The contracts for the lunar landers come a year after NASA awarded three initial contracts to Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX.In awarding those contracts, NASA said Blue Origin and its team was furthest along and awarded it the largest contract, $579 million. Dynetics, which is partnering with the Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million, and SpaceX won $135 million.The defeat is a huge blow to Blue Origin, and to Bezos, who has long been fascinated by the moon and has for years wanted to be part of the effort to return there. He has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon when he was 5 years old was \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him.Blue Origin has been pitching its landing system, known as Blue Moon, since 2017, and Bezos has said he would invest in it heavily himself. In 2019, Bezos said that the program is \u201cso ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201d The contract marks another major victory for the hard-charging company that vaults it to the top tier of the nation\u2019s aerospace companies and solidifies it as one of the space agency\u2019s most trusted partners. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6227",
        "date": "2021-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/16/nasa-lunar-lander-contract-spacex/",
        "text": "NASA on Friday selected Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to build spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission.The award to SpaceX for the \u201chuman landing system\u201d was a stunning announcement that marked another major victory for the hard-charging company that vaults it to the top tier of the nation\u2019s aerospace companies and solidifies it as one of the space agency\u2019s most trusted partners. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn winning the $2.9 billion contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which had formed what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d by partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. SpaceX also won over Dynetics, a defense contractor based in Huntsville, Ala. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementNASA had originally chosen all three companies for the initial phase of the contract, and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In other major programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and to ensure it has redundancy in case one can\u2019t deliver.AdvertisementIn a document explaining NASA\u2019s rationale for picking SpaceX obtained by The Washington Post, NASA said it wanted \u201cto preserve a competitive environment at this stage of the HLS Program.\u201d But it added that \u201cNASA\u2019s current fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX updated its payment schedule so that it now fits \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dBut in moving ahead with SpaceX alone, it sent a message that it fully trusts the growing company to fly its astronauts for its signature human exploration program \u2014 Artemis, a campaign to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAs the first human lunar lander in 50 years, this innovative human landing system will be a hallmark in space exploration history,\u201d Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar lander program manager, said during a news briefing announcing the award. \u201cNASA\u2019s Apollo program captured the world\u2019s attention, demonstrated the power of America\u2019s vision and technology, and can-do spirit. And we expect Artemis will similarly inspire great achievements, innovation and scientific discoveries. We\u2019re confident in NASA\u2019s partnership with SpaceX to help us achieve the Artemis mission.\u201dAdvertisementVideo shows SpaceX's Starship SN10 prototype successfully launch and return to a soft landing on March 3. (SpaceX)Over the past several years, SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002 with the goal of eventually flying humans to Mars, has completely upended the space industry, moving through fast, and at times fiery test campaigns that have unsettled traditional industry officials but also ignited new waves of enthusiasm not seen since the early days of the Space Age.When Musk first started the company, even he didn\u2019t think it would succeed. In 2008, after three test flights of its Falcon 1 rocket failed to reach orbit, he was nearly out of money. But the next test was successful, and NASA awarded the company a modest contract that kept it afloat.Story continues below advertisementIn the years since, SpaceX has flown cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and then, astronauts, overcoming skeptics who said human spaceflight should never be outsourced to the private sector, and certainly not to a company as green \u2014 and brash \u2014 as SpaceX.AdvertisementIn 2015, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a mission for NASA flying cargo to the station. Another exploded on the launchpad ahead of an engine test in 2016. And after Musk smoked pot on a podcast broadcast on the Internet, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine ordered a safety review of the entire company.But despite the setbacks, SpaceX has achieved enormous success \u2014 flying astronauts safely and dominating the launch market, while lowering the cost and dramatically increasing the number of flights.Story continues below advertisementFor the Artemis program, SpaceX bid its reusable Starship spacecraft, which is being designed to fly large numbers of people into deep space and land on celestial bodies as well as back on Earth.On Twitter, the company said it is \u201chumbled to help @NASAArtemis usher in a new era of human space exploration.\u201d In a statement, Blue Origin said its \u201cNational Team doesn\u2019t have very much information yet. We are looking to learn more about the selection.\u201d Dynetics did not respond to requests for comment.AdvertisementThe company has been putting its Starship spacecraft through a fast-paced test campaign at its facility in South Texas, launching prototypes without any people on board several miles up in the air, then flying them back to a landing site.Story continues below advertisementSo far, all the test vehicles have crash-landed in a series of fireballs that triggered investigations overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration. But the company is expected to try again soon with a test vehicle that Musk has said is outfitted with several upgrades. And it hopes to be able to fly the spacecraft to orbit this year.SpaceX was one of two providers hired by NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. It flew two missions with astronauts last year and its next mission scheduled to launch on Thursday. Boeing, the other company hired to ferry crews to the station and back, has stumbled badly and has yet to fly a test mission with astronauts.AdvertisementThat experience shows why NASA is best served by having at least two providers on major programs, officials said, and the pressure will be on SpaceX to perform. According to the document explaining the decision, SpaceX\u2019s bid \u201cwas the lowest among the offerors by a wide margin.\u201d NASA also liked Starship\u2019s ability to ferry a lot of cargo to and from the surface of the moon as well, which it said \u201chas the potential to greatly improve scientific operations.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile the contract will cover the first human landing, Watson-Morgan said NASA \u201cwill also begin work immediately on a follow-up competition\u201d to \u201cprovide regularly recurring services to the lunar surface that will enable these crewed missions on sustainable basis.\u201dThe Artemis program began under the administration of former president Donald Trump but has been embraced by the Biden administration, though the White House is reconsidering the timeline. Trump had ordered that astronauts land on the moon by 2024, a schedule the White House now says is under review as NASA works to develop its rockets and spacecraft. It is also working with Congress to get the funding it needs.AdvertisementFor this fiscal year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the effort \u2014 well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 timeline.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this month, the Biden administration proposed a $24.7 billion budget for NASA, a 6.3 percent increase that included an additional $325 million for the Artemis program.Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk praised the request and said it \u201csupports the development of capabilities for sustainable, long-duration human exploration beyond Earth, and eventually to Mars.\u201dPreviously NASA vowed that it would land a woman on the moon as part of the first Artemis lunar landing. But in his statement, Jurczyk said the agency would also include the \u201cfirst person of color\u201d as part of the program.The White House recently nominated former Florida Sen. Bill Nelson (D) to lead the agency. His confirmation hearing is scheduled for next week, and he is expected to win confirmation easily. During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for space exploration, and he flew on the space shuttle in 1986 as a member of the House. If confirmed, he has said he would push to get the funding the Artemis program needs, as the agency reassesses the timeline for returning astronauts to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso on Friday, the White House said it would nominate former NASA astronaut Pamela Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel, to be the space agency\u2019s deputy administrator.The contracts for the lunar landers come a year after NASA awarded three initial contracts to Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX.In awarding those contracts, NASA said Blue Origin and its team was furthest along and awarded it the largest contract, $579 million. Dynetics, which is partnering with the Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million, and SpaceX won $135 million.The defeat is a huge blow to Blue Origin, and to Bezos, who has long been fascinated by the moon and has for years wanted to be part of the effort to return there. He has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon when he was 5 years old was \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him.Blue Origin has been pitching its landing system, known as Blue Moon, since 2017, and Bezos has said he would invest in it heavily himself. In 2019, Bezos said that the program is \u201cso ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201d The contract marks another major victory for the hard-charging company that vaults it to the top tier of the nation\u2019s aerospace companies and solidifies it as one of the space agency\u2019s most trusted partners. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA spacecraft touches an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth in agency\u2019s first sample return attempt (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6228",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/20/nasa-grab-rocks-from-bennu-asteroid/",
        "text": "NASA high-fived an asteroid for the first time Tuesday evening in a daring mission to better understand the origins of the universe.A passenger bus-sized spacecraft, designed and built by Lockheed Martin, lowered itself to the surface of the asteroid Bennu, some 200 million miles from Earth. It touched the rocky surface with a robotic arm that emitted a charge of nitrogen to stir up and capture pebbles and dust on the surface. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightShortly after NASA got word from the spacecraft that its arm had touched down safely, Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the mission, said he felt \u201ctranscendental, I mean I can\u2019t believe we actually pulled this off. ... History was made tonight.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft backed away safely, officials said, with what NASA hopes will be the largest extraterrestrial haul since the Apollo era \u2014 a sample of up to two kilograms that scientists will study for years to come once the spacecraft returns to Earth in 2023. But NASA won\u2019t know for sure how much material it collected for a few days. \u201cWe have some work to do to determine how much sample that we have collected,\u201d Lauretta said.AdvertisementIf successful, the mission would be the first time NASA has ever taken a sample from one of the estimated 1 million asteroids in our solar system, which scientists believe could shed light on how the universe was formed and how water ended up on Earth.As big as the Empire State Building, Bennu looks like a giant, spinning walnut that\u2019s more than 4.5 billion years old and believed to be laden with a trove of scientific riches, including carbon and water locked inside clay materials.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThese asteroids are really relics of the earliest material that formed the planets in the solar system,\u201d Lori Glaze, NASA\u2019s planetary science division director, told reporters Monday. \u201cThey hold the key information to unlocking our understanding of how the solar system formed, and how it evolved over time.\u201dNASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That's even harder than it sounds.The mission began in 2016, when an Atlas V rocket launched the OSIRIS-REx (which stands for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft from Cape Canaveral. It arrived at Bennu two years later, and soon scientists realized the asteroid was different in one key respect than they had anticipated: It was far rockier, making landing and sample extraction far more difficult.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not the sandy beach we all hoped we would see initially,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. Instead: \u201cRocks on rocks on rocks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA and Lockheed Martin spent two years studying the surface, hunting for the best place to touch down as well as studying the asteroid.\u201cExploration and surprise have a lot in common,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cAnd this was no exception.\u201dUltimately, the team settled on a crater called Nightingale about the size of a tennis court where there is material that could be extracted by the spacecraft\u2019s arm.While it would be a first for NASA, two Japanese spacecraft, Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, have collected asteroid samples, with the second mission to return to Earth later this year. Those were relatively small samples, compared with what NASA hopes to collect. But Glaze said the countries are working together, \u201cexchanging portions of each other\u2019s samples so that we can maximize the science.\u201dScientists are also interested in Bennu because it is one of a family of asteroids that \u201cpresent a hazard to the Earth,\u201d as Ellen Stofan, director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, put it in a NASA broadcast.Scientists estimate there is a 1 in 2,700 chance it could hit Earth sometime between the years 2175 and 2199. That could change, but NASA said it is keeping a close eye on it. For the first time, NASA will attempt to collect a sample from an asteroid with the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. A NASA spacecraft touches an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth in agency\u2019s first sample return attempt",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA spacecraft touches an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth in agency\u2019s first sample return attempt (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6229",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/20/nasa-grab-rocks-from-bennu-asteroid/",
        "text": "NASA high-fived an asteroid for the first time Tuesday evening in a daring mission to better understand the origins of the universe.A passenger bus-sized spacecraft, designed and built by Lockheed Martin, lowered itself to the surface of the asteroid Bennu, some 200 million miles from Earth. It touched the rocky surface with a robotic arm that emitted a charge of nitrogen to stir up and capture pebbles and dust on the surface. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightShortly after NASA got word from the spacecraft that its arm had touched down safely, Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the mission, said he felt \u201ctranscendental, I mean I can\u2019t believe we actually pulled this off. ... History was made tonight.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft backed away safely, officials said, with what NASA hopes will be the largest extraterrestrial haul since the Apollo era \u2014 a sample of up to two kilograms that scientists will study for years to come once the spacecraft returns to Earth in 2023. But NASA won\u2019t know for sure how much material it collected for a few days. \u201cWe have some work to do to determine how much sample that we have collected,\u201d Lauretta said.AdvertisementIf successful, the mission would be the first time NASA has ever taken a sample from one of the estimated 1 million asteroids in our solar system, which scientists believe could shed light on how the universe was formed and how water ended up on Earth.As big as the Empire State Building, Bennu looks like a giant, spinning walnut that\u2019s more than 4.5 billion years old and believed to be laden with a trove of scientific riches, including carbon and water locked inside clay materials.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThese asteroids are really relics of the earliest material that formed the planets in the solar system,\u201d Lori Glaze, NASA\u2019s planetary science division director, told reporters Monday. \u201cThey hold the key information to unlocking our understanding of how the solar system formed, and how it evolved over time.\u201dNASA is about to grab a piece of an asteroid. That's even harder than it sounds.The mission began in 2016, when an Atlas V rocket launched the OSIRIS-REx (which stands for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft from Cape Canaveral. It arrived at Bennu two years later, and soon scientists realized the asteroid was different in one key respect than they had anticipated: It was far rockier, making landing and sample extraction far more difficult.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not the sandy beach we all hoped we would see initially,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. Instead: \u201cRocks on rocks on rocks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA and Lockheed Martin spent two years studying the surface, hunting for the best place to touch down as well as studying the asteroid.\u201cExploration and surprise have a lot in common,\u201d Zurbuchen said. \u201cAnd this was no exception.\u201dUltimately, the team settled on a crater called Nightingale about the size of a tennis court where there is material that could be extracted by the spacecraft\u2019s arm.While it would be a first for NASA, two Japanese spacecraft, Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, have collected asteroid samples, with the second mission to return to Earth later this year. Those were relatively small samples, compared with what NASA hopes to collect. But Glaze said the countries are working together, \u201cexchanging portions of each other\u2019s samples so that we can maximize the science.\u201dScientists are also interested in Bennu because it is one of a family of asteroids that \u201cpresent a hazard to the Earth,\u201d as Ellen Stofan, director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, put it in a NASA broadcast.Scientists estimate there is a 1 in 2,700 chance it could hit Earth sometime between the years 2175 and 2199. That could change, but NASA said it is keeping a close eye on it. For the first time, NASA will attempt to collect a sample from an asteroid with the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. A NASA spacecraft touches an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth in agency\u2019s first sample return attempt",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule suffered a second software glitch during December test flight (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6230",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/06/boeings-starliner-space-capsule-suffered-second-software-glitch-during-december-test-flight/",
        "text": "NASA has decided to reverse itself and conduct a full safety review of Boeing, one of its longest and most trusted contractors, NASA safety officials said Thursday.News of the safety review came as it was revealed that a December test flight that failed to make it to the International Space Station went even more awry than previously known. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA safety officials said Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule suffered a second software problem, forcing Boeing officials to scramble to fix what could have caused what one official called a \u201ccatastrophic spacecraft failure.\u201dAs the capsule, which had no astronauts on board, was getting ready to reenter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere and land, operators on the ground noticed a software problem that would have fired the wrong thrusters during separation of what\u2019s known as the service module from the crew module, according to officials with knowledge of the mishap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe concern was that if the wrong thrusters fired, there was a possibility the service module could collide with the crew module, potentially sending it off course. During a public meeting of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Paul Hill, a former director of NASA mission operations for human spaceflight, said that could have had dire consequences.Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space station\u201cWhile this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected, it would have led to erroneous thruster firings and uncontrolled motion during [service module] separation for de-orbit, with the potential for a catastrophic spacecraft failure,\u201d Hill said, according to SpaceNews.The Starliner\u2019s mission to travel to the International Space Station already had been canceled mid-flight when an earlier glitch kept the spacecraft\u2019s rocket engine from firing in time to put it on a path to rendezvous with the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMembers of the safety review team said at their quarterly meeting Thursday that NASA had agreed to perform a full-fledged review of Boeing\u2019s safety culture. The decision had been made before the December test, said a senior NASA official who was not authorized to comment publicly. What prompted that decision was unknown.In 2018, NASA ordered safety reviews of both Boeing and SpaceX, the other company hired by NASA to fly crews to the space station. The probes were prompted after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was seen taking a puff from a marijuana cigarette. But while SpaceX underwent a full review, Boeing underwent a far more limited audit, The Post reported last year.At the time, NASA officials said they had a lot of confidence in Boeing and saw SpaceX as a relatively untested newcomer that some thought should not be trusted with the lives of NASA\u2019s astronauts. \u201cBoeing didn\u2019t do anything to trigger a deeper dive,\u201d one senior official said at the time. SpaceX charged NASA $5 million to perform its assessment; officials said Boeing was asking for as much as $25 million.Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationSpaceX has had its share of problems, including a spacecraft that exploded during a test of its abort engines last year. But it also successfully completed its test flight to the space station without astronauts. Last month, its test of its in-flight abort system was also deemed a success, and the company now seems poised to fly crews to the space station within months.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe panel\u2019s assessment of the status of SpaceX is that NASA is at a point where there is not a question of whether they will be flying crew in the near term, but when, and under what risk conditions,\u201d said Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, according to SpaceNews.Boeing\u2019s recent woes forced NASA to rethink its decision to give it a pass on the full safety review. The space agency is also now planning a more invasive investigation of the company, which has been reeling since crashes of two of its 737 Max airplanes killed 346 people.In a statement, Boeing said the \u201cerror in the software would have resulted in an incorrect thruster separation and disposal burn. What would have resulted from that is unclear.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter it discovered the computer problem during its December test flight, Boeing sent a software patch to the spacecraft that fixed it. The service module separated cleanly and the crew module touched down in what officials later called \u201can absolute bull\u2019s eye\u201d landing two days later.AdvertisementNASA and Boeing are investigating and still have offered no explanation for the other software problem that forced the company to cancel its planned mission to the space station shortly after liftoff and bring the spacecraft back to Earth a week ahead of schedule. Shortly after the spacecraft was hoisted into orbit on Dec. 21, the thrusters that should have propelled the spacecraft on a trajectory to the International Space Station failed to fire. Officials blamed the problem on the spacecraft\u2019s internal clock, which was off by 11 hours.In its statement, Boeing said members of the independent review team think \u201cthey found [the] root cause and provided a number of recommendations and corrective actions.\u201d The company did not say what the cause or remedies were.After mishap with Boeing spacecraft, NASA faces a dilemmaNASA has since launched two investigations. One, along with Boeing, would examine what caused the timing issue and figure out how to fix it before flying people on the Starliner for the first time.In the second, NASA is looking into whether it needs to require Boeing to redo the test flight without astronauts before allowing the company to fly NASA astronauts. Those investigations are ongoing, officials have said.In case it does have to re-fly the mission, Boeing has set aside $410 million to do so and to fix any issues that arise during the investigations. The problem could have caused a \u2018catastrophic\u2019 failure but was fixed in flight. But NASA now will require the company to undergo a full safety review. Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule suffered a second software glitch during December test flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule suffered a second software glitch during December test flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6231",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/06/boeings-starliner-space-capsule-suffered-second-software-glitch-during-december-test-flight/",
        "text": "NASA has decided to reverse itself and conduct a full safety review of Boeing, one of its longest and most trusted contractors, NASA safety officials said Thursday.News of the safety review came as it was revealed that a December test flight that failed to make it to the International Space Station went even more awry than previously known. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA safety officials said Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule suffered a second software problem, forcing Boeing officials to scramble to fix what could have caused what one official called a \u201ccatastrophic spacecraft failure.\u201dAs the capsule, which had no astronauts on board, was getting ready to reenter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere and land, operators on the ground noticed a software problem that would have fired the wrong thrusters during separation of what\u2019s known as the service module from the crew module, according to officials with knowledge of the mishap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe concern was that if the wrong thrusters fired, there was a possibility the service module could collide with the crew module, potentially sending it off course. During a public meeting of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Paul Hill, a former director of NASA mission operations for human spaceflight, said that could have had dire consequences.Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space station\u201cWhile this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected, it would have led to erroneous thruster firings and uncontrolled motion during [service module] separation for de-orbit, with the potential for a catastrophic spacecraft failure,\u201d Hill said, according to SpaceNews.The Starliner\u2019s mission to travel to the International Space Station already had been canceled mid-flight when an earlier glitch kept the spacecraft\u2019s rocket engine from firing in time to put it on a path to rendezvous with the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMembers of the safety review team said at their quarterly meeting Thursday that NASA had agreed to perform a full-fledged review of Boeing\u2019s safety culture. The decision had been made before the December test, said a senior NASA official who was not authorized to comment publicly. What prompted that decision was unknown.In 2018, NASA ordered safety reviews of both Boeing and SpaceX, the other company hired by NASA to fly crews to the space station. The probes were prompted after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was seen taking a puff from a marijuana cigarette. But while SpaceX underwent a full review, Boeing underwent a far more limited audit, The Post reported last year.At the time, NASA officials said they had a lot of confidence in Boeing and saw SpaceX as a relatively untested newcomer that some thought should not be trusted with the lives of NASA\u2019s astronauts. \u201cBoeing didn\u2019t do anything to trigger a deeper dive,\u201d one senior official said at the time. SpaceX charged NASA $5 million to perform its assessment; officials said Boeing was asking for as much as $25 million.Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationSpaceX has had its share of problems, including a spacecraft that exploded during a test of its abort engines last year. But it also successfully completed its test flight to the space station without astronauts. Last month, its test of its in-flight abort system was also deemed a success, and the company now seems poised to fly crews to the space station within months.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe panel\u2019s assessment of the status of SpaceX is that NASA is at a point where there is not a question of whether they will be flying crew in the near term, but when, and under what risk conditions,\u201d said Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, according to SpaceNews.Boeing\u2019s recent woes forced NASA to rethink its decision to give it a pass on the full safety review. The space agency is also now planning a more invasive investigation of the company, which has been reeling since crashes of two of its 737 Max airplanes killed 346 people.In a statement, Boeing said the \u201cerror in the software would have resulted in an incorrect thruster separation and disposal burn. What would have resulted from that is unclear.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter it discovered the computer problem during its December test flight, Boeing sent a software patch to the spacecraft that fixed it. The service module separated cleanly and the crew module touched down in what officials later called \u201can absolute bull\u2019s eye\u201d landing two days later.AdvertisementNASA and Boeing are investigating and still have offered no explanation for the other software problem that forced the company to cancel its planned mission to the space station shortly after liftoff and bring the spacecraft back to Earth a week ahead of schedule. Shortly after the spacecraft was hoisted into orbit on Dec. 21, the thrusters that should have propelled the spacecraft on a trajectory to the International Space Station failed to fire. Officials blamed the problem on the spacecraft\u2019s internal clock, which was off by 11 hours.In its statement, Boeing said members of the independent review team think \u201cthey found [the] root cause and provided a number of recommendations and corrective actions.\u201d The company did not say what the cause or remedies were.After mishap with Boeing spacecraft, NASA faces a dilemmaNASA has since launched two investigations. One, along with Boeing, would examine what caused the timing issue and figure out how to fix it before flying people on the Starliner for the first time.In the second, NASA is looking into whether it needs to require Boeing to redo the test flight without astronauts before allowing the company to fly NASA astronauts. Those investigations are ongoing, officials have said.In case it does have to re-fly the mission, Boeing has set aside $410 million to do so and to fix any issues that arise during the investigations. The problem could have caused a \u2018catastrophic\u2019 failure but was fixed in flight. But NASA now will require the company to undergo a full safety review. Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule suffered a second software glitch during December test flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule suffered a second software glitch during December test flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6232",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/06/boeings-starliner-space-capsule-suffered-second-software-glitch-during-december-test-flight/",
        "text": "NASA has decided to reverse itself and conduct a full safety review of Boeing, one of its longest and most trusted contractors, NASA safety officials said Thursday.News of the safety review came as it was revealed that a December test flight that failed to make it to the International Space Station went even more awry than previously known. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA safety officials said Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule suffered a second software problem, forcing Boeing officials to scramble to fix what could have caused what one official called a \u201ccatastrophic spacecraft failure.\u201dAs the capsule, which had no astronauts on board, was getting ready to reenter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere and land, operators on the ground noticed a software problem that would have fired the wrong thrusters during separation of what\u2019s known as the service module from the crew module, according to officials with knowledge of the mishap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe concern was that if the wrong thrusters fired, there was a possibility the service module could collide with the crew module, potentially sending it off course. During a public meeting of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Paul Hill, a former director of NASA mission operations for human spaceflight, said that could have had dire consequences.Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space station\u201cWhile this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected, it would have led to erroneous thruster firings and uncontrolled motion during [service module] separation for de-orbit, with the potential for a catastrophic spacecraft failure,\u201d Hill said, according to SpaceNews.The Starliner\u2019s mission to travel to the International Space Station already had been canceled mid-flight when an earlier glitch kept the spacecraft\u2019s rocket engine from firing in time to put it on a path to rendezvous with the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMembers of the safety review team said at their quarterly meeting Thursday that NASA had agreed to perform a full-fledged review of Boeing\u2019s safety culture. The decision had been made before the December test, said a senior NASA official who was not authorized to comment publicly. What prompted that decision was unknown.In 2018, NASA ordered safety reviews of both Boeing and SpaceX, the other company hired by NASA to fly crews to the space station. The probes were prompted after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was seen taking a puff from a marijuana cigarette. But while SpaceX underwent a full review, Boeing underwent a far more limited audit, The Post reported last year.At the time, NASA officials said they had a lot of confidence in Boeing and saw SpaceX as a relatively untested newcomer that some thought should not be trusted with the lives of NASA\u2019s astronauts. \u201cBoeing didn\u2019t do anything to trigger a deeper dive,\u201d one senior official said at the time. SpaceX charged NASA $5 million to perform its assessment; officials said Boeing was asking for as much as $25 million.Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationSpaceX has had its share of problems, including a spacecraft that exploded during a test of its abort engines last year. But it also successfully completed its test flight to the space station without astronauts. Last month, its test of its in-flight abort system was also deemed a success, and the company now seems poised to fly crews to the space station within months.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe panel\u2019s assessment of the status of SpaceX is that NASA is at a point where there is not a question of whether they will be flying crew in the near term, but when, and under what risk conditions,\u201d said Patricia Sanders, chair of the panel, according to SpaceNews.Boeing\u2019s recent woes forced NASA to rethink its decision to give it a pass on the full safety review. The space agency is also now planning a more invasive investigation of the company, which has been reeling since crashes of two of its 737 Max airplanes killed 346 people.In a statement, Boeing said the \u201cerror in the software would have resulted in an incorrect thruster separation and disposal burn. What would have resulted from that is unclear.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAfter it discovered the computer problem during its December test flight, Boeing sent a software patch to the spacecraft that fixed it. The service module separated cleanly and the crew module touched down in what officials later called \u201can absolute bull\u2019s eye\u201d landing two days later.AdvertisementNASA and Boeing are investigating and still have offered no explanation for the other software problem that forced the company to cancel its planned mission to the space station shortly after liftoff and bring the spacecraft back to Earth a week ahead of schedule. Shortly after the spacecraft was hoisted into orbit on Dec. 21, the thrusters that should have propelled the spacecraft on a trajectory to the International Space Station failed to fire. Officials blamed the problem on the spacecraft\u2019s internal clock, which was off by 11 hours.In its statement, Boeing said members of the independent review team think \u201cthey found [the] root cause and provided a number of recommendations and corrective actions.\u201d The company did not say what the cause or remedies were.After mishap with Boeing spacecraft, NASA faces a dilemmaNASA has since launched two investigations. One, along with Boeing, would examine what caused the timing issue and figure out how to fix it before flying people on the Starliner for the first time.In the second, NASA is looking into whether it needs to require Boeing to redo the test flight without astronauts before allowing the company to fly NASA astronauts. Those investigations are ongoing, officials have said.In case it does have to re-fly the mission, Boeing has set aside $410 million to do so and to fix any issues that arise during the investigations. The problem could have caused a \u2018catastrophic\u2019 failure but was fixed in flight. But NASA now will require the company to undergo a full safety review. Boeing\u2019s Starliner space capsule suffered a second software glitch during December test flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6233",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/06/nasa-astronaut-christina-koch/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Christina Koch\u2019s historic tour aboard the International Space Station came to a triumphant end Thursday when the spacecraft carrying her and two colleagues touched down on a snowy patch of earth at 4:12 a.m. Eastern time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHaving set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days, Koch was all smiles and thumbs up as she was hoisted from the spacecraft, and NASA celebrated her feat as another in a string of recent achievements by female astronauts. \u201cShe definitely looks glad to be home,\u201d NASA\u2019s Brandi Dean said on a live broadcast of the return.But she wasn\u2019t home, at least not all the way. Koch, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of Russia, had landed in remote and frozen desert in the middle of Kazakhstan, some 7,000 miles from Houston, the headquarters of America\u2019s human space program and the place where most of the U.S. astronaut corps live.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, America\u2019s astronauts have been taking off and landing from that barren landscape in Kazakhstan, not far from the site of an infamous Soviet-era Gulag labor camp and remote enough that locals show up, as they did Thursday, on horseback to see a charred thimble-shaped Soyuz spacecraft implanted in the ground, like a surreal relic of some science fiction flick.Since the Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, NASA has paid Russia for rides to the International Space Station, at more than $80 million a seat. The astronauts launch on Russian rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and return in a Soyuz spacecraft, the landing of which can feel like \u201ca car accident that ended in multiple rollovers,\u201d as former astronaut Scott Kelly wrote in his memoir \u201cEndurance.\u201d But NASA hopes soon to return human spaceflight to American soil, and celebrate the next chapter of exploration from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral, the birthplace of the American Space Age. Both Boeing and SpaceX are under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft to fly the space agency\u2019s astronauts, and NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a phone interview Thursday that the first flight with astronauts on board is only \u201cmonths away.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is true that landing in Kazakhstan is not the most convenient for American astronauts,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it is also true that we will continue to keep the partnership even after we\u2019re launching from American soil.\u201dKoch\u2019s long stay in space broke a record set in 2017 by Peggy Whitson, who spent 288 days in space on a single mission, and came within two weeks of the record for a single spaceflight by an American, 340 days, set by Kelly in 2016. Whitson still holds the record for the total days in space by any NASA astronaut, at 665.At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agencyBridenstine said there had been some consideration of extending Koch\u2019s mission so that it would break Kelly\u2019s record. But Bridenstine said he deferred to the operators of the space station, who decided \u201cit was in the best interest of the program to follow this schedule and optimize use of the space station. ... We love breaking records, but we don\u2019t have to break records for the sake of breaking records.\u201dKoch, a scientist from North Carolina, joined the astronaut corps in 2013, the first class in NASA\u2019s history that had as many women as men. Her time in space came at an important moment for NASA, which is going to great lengths to highlight women\u2019s contributions to exploration.Under a program dubbed Artemis for the twin sister of Apollo, the space agency is preparing to send \u201cthe next man and the first woman\u201d to the moon by as early as 2024, as Bridenstine frequently says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn October, Koch and Jessica Meir performed the first all-female spacewalk when they stepped outside the space station to repair a faulty battery charger. In all, Koch performed six spacewalks, including three with Meir, spending a total of 42 hours and 15 minutes outside the station.Whitson, who retired from the agency in 2018, said she was pleased to see her single-spaceflight record fall.\u201cI am always happy that we at NASA are breaking records,\u201d she said in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cThat means we\u2019re moving forward. I think it\u2019s good. It\u2019s a sign of progress. I love it.\u201dBut for all the high-profile milestones and record-breaking achievements, women remain an overwhelming minority at NASA and in the aerospace industry as a whole. They make up only about a third of NASA\u2019s workforce. They constitute just 28 percent of senior executive leadership positions and 16 percent of senior scientific employees, according to a survey compiled by the agency.Three of the six members of the International Space Station departed on Feb. 5 to return to Earth. (The Washington Post)\u201cIt\u2019s great to see how quickly Peggy\u2019s record got broken,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, a former chief scientist at NASA who now runs the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThat means women are really contributing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added that women still \u201chave a long way to go. And the fact that\u2019s taken so long to get to this point, and that we have not had an African American woman walk in space, shows the underrepresenting of groups is still there.\u201dKoch has said she is aware of the significance of her feats, particularly the all-female spacewalk with Meir and how the pair served as a motivation to others looking to follow in their footsteps.\u201cWe caught each other\u2019s eye and we knew that we were really honored with this opportunity to inspire so many,\u201d she said in an interview published on NASA\u2019s website. \u201cJust hearing our voices talk to Mission Control, knowing two female voices had never been on the [communication] loops, solving those problems outside \u2014 it was really a special feeling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementShe also weighed in on a debate about the use of the word \u201cmanned\u201d in the aerospace community.AdvertisementNASA no longer officially uses the term and updated its style guide to say that \u201call references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic as opposed to manned or unmanned).\u201d But it is still used in common parlance and in news articles.\u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,\u201d she said in a NASA interview from the space station. \u201cEven though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an email to The Post, Kelly said he thought Koch\u2019s record was \u201cgreat,\u201d adding that \u201c328 days is a long time. Anything over about a month is long. Congratulations Christina and welcome home. Great job! Enjoy planet Earth!\u201dThe achievement comes as NASA this year is celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, some 240 miles above Earth. During her stay, Koch participated in a number of scientific experiments, including on mustard greens, combustion, bio-printing and kidney diseases.AdvertisementStofan said it is important to have women participate in long-duration flights in Earth orbit, in preparation for long human journeys into deep space.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen we send humans to Mars, we need data on the long-term effects of space on the human body,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we know there are differences between how men and women react to space.\u201dBefore her return, Koch said she was looking forward to being back in nature.\u201cOh, how I miss the wind on my face, the feeling of raindrops, sand on my feet and the sound of surf crashing on Galveston Beach,\u201d she said.She is also looking forward to eating with forks and knives again.\u201cOn orbit, we eat with a spoon,\u201d she said. \u201cOne spoon \u2014 328 days with the same spoon.\u201d The astronaut spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station, which has been occupied continuously for 20 years. Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6234",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/06/nasa-astronaut-christina-koch/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Christina Koch\u2019s historic tour aboard the International Space Station came to a triumphant end Thursday when the spacecraft carrying her and two colleagues touched down on a snowy patch of earth at 4:12 a.m. Eastern time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHaving set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days, Koch was all smiles and thumbs up as she was hoisted from the spacecraft, and NASA celebrated her feat as another in a string of recent achievements by female astronauts. \u201cShe definitely looks glad to be home,\u201d NASA\u2019s Brandi Dean said on a live broadcast of the return.But she wasn\u2019t home, at least not all the way. Koch, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of Russia, had landed in remote and frozen desert in the middle of Kazakhstan, some 7,000 miles from Houston, the headquarters of America\u2019s human space program and the place where most of the U.S. astronaut corps live.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, America\u2019s astronauts have been taking off and landing from that barren landscape in Kazakhstan, not far from the site of an infamous Soviet-era Gulag labor camp and remote enough that locals show up, as they did Thursday, on horseback to see a charred thimble-shaped Soyuz spacecraft implanted in the ground, like a surreal relic of some science fiction flick.Since the Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, NASA has paid Russia for rides to the International Space Station, at more than $80 million a seat. The astronauts launch on Russian rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and return in a Soyuz spacecraft, the landing of which can feel like \u201ca car accident that ended in multiple rollovers,\u201d as former astronaut Scott Kelly wrote in his memoir \u201cEndurance.\u201d But NASA hopes soon to return human spaceflight to American soil, and celebrate the next chapter of exploration from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral, the birthplace of the American Space Age. Both Boeing and SpaceX are under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft to fly the space agency\u2019s astronauts, and NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a phone interview Thursday that the first flight with astronauts on board is only \u201cmonths away.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is true that landing in Kazakhstan is not the most convenient for American astronauts,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it is also true that we will continue to keep the partnership even after we\u2019re launching from American soil.\u201dKoch\u2019s long stay in space broke a record set in 2017 by Peggy Whitson, who spent 288 days in space on a single mission, and came within two weeks of the record for a single spaceflight by an American, 340 days, set by Kelly in 2016. Whitson still holds the record for the total days in space by any NASA astronaut, at 665.At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agencyBridenstine said there had been some consideration of extending Koch\u2019s mission so that it would break Kelly\u2019s record. But Bridenstine said he deferred to the operators of the space station, who decided \u201cit was in the best interest of the program to follow this schedule and optimize use of the space station. ... We love breaking records, but we don\u2019t have to break records for the sake of breaking records.\u201dKoch, a scientist from North Carolina, joined the astronaut corps in 2013, the first class in NASA\u2019s history that had as many women as men. Her time in space came at an important moment for NASA, which is going to great lengths to highlight women\u2019s contributions to exploration.Under a program dubbed Artemis for the twin sister of Apollo, the space agency is preparing to send \u201cthe next man and the first woman\u201d to the moon by as early as 2024, as Bridenstine frequently says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn October, Koch and Jessica Meir performed the first all-female spacewalk when they stepped outside the space station to repair a faulty battery charger. In all, Koch performed six spacewalks, including three with Meir, spending a total of 42 hours and 15 minutes outside the station.Whitson, who retired from the agency in 2018, said she was pleased to see her single-spaceflight record fall.\u201cI am always happy that we at NASA are breaking records,\u201d she said in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cThat means we\u2019re moving forward. I think it\u2019s good. It\u2019s a sign of progress. I love it.\u201dBut for all the high-profile milestones and record-breaking achievements, women remain an overwhelming minority at NASA and in the aerospace industry as a whole. They make up only about a third of NASA\u2019s workforce. They constitute just 28 percent of senior executive leadership positions and 16 percent of senior scientific employees, according to a survey compiled by the agency.Three of the six members of the International Space Station departed on Feb. 5 to return to Earth. (The Washington Post)\u201cIt\u2019s great to see how quickly Peggy\u2019s record got broken,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, a former chief scientist at NASA who now runs the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThat means women are really contributing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added that women still \u201chave a long way to go. And the fact that\u2019s taken so long to get to this point, and that we have not had an African American woman walk in space, shows the underrepresenting of groups is still there.\u201dKoch has said she is aware of the significance of her feats, particularly the all-female spacewalk with Meir and how the pair served as a motivation to others looking to follow in their footsteps.\u201cWe caught each other\u2019s eye and we knew that we were really honored with this opportunity to inspire so many,\u201d she said in an interview published on NASA\u2019s website. \u201cJust hearing our voices talk to Mission Control, knowing two female voices had never been on the [communication] loops, solving those problems outside \u2014 it was really a special feeling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementShe also weighed in on a debate about the use of the word \u201cmanned\u201d in the aerospace community.AdvertisementNASA no longer officially uses the term and updated its style guide to say that \u201call references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic as opposed to manned or unmanned).\u201d But it is still used in common parlance and in news articles.\u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,\u201d she said in a NASA interview from the space station. \u201cEven though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an email to The Post, Kelly said he thought Koch\u2019s record was \u201cgreat,\u201d adding that \u201c328 days is a long time. Anything over about a month is long. Congratulations Christina and welcome home. Great job! Enjoy planet Earth!\u201dThe achievement comes as NASA this year is celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, some 240 miles above Earth. During her stay, Koch participated in a number of scientific experiments, including on mustard greens, combustion, bio-printing and kidney diseases.AdvertisementStofan said it is important to have women participate in long-duration flights in Earth orbit, in preparation for long human journeys into deep space.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen we send humans to Mars, we need data on the long-term effects of space on the human body,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we know there are differences between how men and women react to space.\u201dBefore her return, Koch said she was looking forward to being back in nature.\u201cOh, how I miss the wind on my face, the feeling of raindrops, sand on my feet and the sound of surf crashing on Galveston Beach,\u201d she said.She is also looking forward to eating with forks and knives again.\u201cOn orbit, we eat with a spoon,\u201d she said. \u201cOne spoon \u2014 328 days with the same spoon.\u201d The astronaut spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station, which has been occupied continuously for 20 years. Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6235",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/06/nasa-astronaut-christina-koch/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Christina Koch\u2019s historic tour aboard the International Space Station came to a triumphant end Thursday when the spacecraft carrying her and two colleagues touched down on a snowy patch of earth at 4:12 a.m. Eastern time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHaving set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days, Koch was all smiles and thumbs up as she was hoisted from the spacecraft, and NASA celebrated her feat as another in a string of recent achievements by female astronauts. \u201cShe definitely looks glad to be home,\u201d NASA\u2019s Brandi Dean said on a live broadcast of the return.But she wasn\u2019t home, at least not all the way. Koch, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of Russia, had landed in remote and frozen desert in the middle of Kazakhstan, some 7,000 miles from Houston, the headquarters of America\u2019s human space program and the place where most of the U.S. astronaut corps live.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, America\u2019s astronauts have been taking off and landing from that barren landscape in Kazakhstan, not far from the site of an infamous Soviet-era Gulag labor camp and remote enough that locals show up, as they did Thursday, on horseback to see a charred thimble-shaped Soyuz spacecraft implanted in the ground, like a surreal relic of some science fiction flick.Since the Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, NASA has paid Russia for rides to the International Space Station, at more than $80 million a seat. The astronauts launch on Russian rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and return in a Soyuz spacecraft, the landing of which can feel like \u201ca car accident that ended in multiple rollovers,\u201d as former astronaut Scott Kelly wrote in his memoir \u201cEndurance.\u201d But NASA hopes soon to return human spaceflight to American soil, and celebrate the next chapter of exploration from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral, the birthplace of the American Space Age. Both Boeing and SpaceX are under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft to fly the space agency\u2019s astronauts, and NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a phone interview Thursday that the first flight with astronauts on board is only \u201cmonths away.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is true that landing in Kazakhstan is not the most convenient for American astronauts,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it is also true that we will continue to keep the partnership even after we\u2019re launching from American soil.\u201dKoch\u2019s long stay in space broke a record set in 2017 by Peggy Whitson, who spent 288 days in space on a single mission, and came within two weeks of the record for a single spaceflight by an American, 340 days, set by Kelly in 2016. Whitson still holds the record for the total days in space by any NASA astronaut, at 665.At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agencyBridenstine said there had been some consideration of extending Koch\u2019s mission so that it would break Kelly\u2019s record. But Bridenstine said he deferred to the operators of the space station, who decided \u201cit was in the best interest of the program to follow this schedule and optimize use of the space station. ... We love breaking records, but we don\u2019t have to break records for the sake of breaking records.\u201dKoch, a scientist from North Carolina, joined the astronaut corps in 2013, the first class in NASA\u2019s history that had as many women as men. Her time in space came at an important moment for NASA, which is going to great lengths to highlight women\u2019s contributions to exploration.Under a program dubbed Artemis for the twin sister of Apollo, the space agency is preparing to send \u201cthe next man and the first woman\u201d to the moon by as early as 2024, as Bridenstine frequently says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn October, Koch and Jessica Meir performed the first all-female spacewalk when they stepped outside the space station to repair a faulty battery charger. In all, Koch performed six spacewalks, including three with Meir, spending a total of 42 hours and 15 minutes outside the station.Whitson, who retired from the agency in 2018, said she was pleased to see her single-spaceflight record fall.\u201cI am always happy that we at NASA are breaking records,\u201d she said in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cThat means we\u2019re moving forward. I think it\u2019s good. It\u2019s a sign of progress. I love it.\u201dBut for all the high-profile milestones and record-breaking achievements, women remain an overwhelming minority at NASA and in the aerospace industry as a whole. They make up only about a third of NASA\u2019s workforce. They constitute just 28 percent of senior executive leadership positions and 16 percent of senior scientific employees, according to a survey compiled by the agency.Three of the six members of the International Space Station departed on Feb. 5 to return to Earth. (The Washington Post)\u201cIt\u2019s great to see how quickly Peggy\u2019s record got broken,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, a former chief scientist at NASA who now runs the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThat means women are really contributing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added that women still \u201chave a long way to go. And the fact that\u2019s taken so long to get to this point, and that we have not had an African American woman walk in space, shows the underrepresenting of groups is still there.\u201dKoch has said she is aware of the significance of her feats, particularly the all-female spacewalk with Meir and how the pair served as a motivation to others looking to follow in their footsteps.\u201cWe caught each other\u2019s eye and we knew that we were really honored with this opportunity to inspire so many,\u201d she said in an interview published on NASA\u2019s website. \u201cJust hearing our voices talk to Mission Control, knowing two female voices had never been on the [communication] loops, solving those problems outside \u2014 it was really a special feeling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementShe also weighed in on a debate about the use of the word \u201cmanned\u201d in the aerospace community.AdvertisementNASA no longer officially uses the term and updated its style guide to say that \u201call references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic as opposed to manned or unmanned).\u201d But it is still used in common parlance and in news articles.\u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,\u201d she said in a NASA interview from the space station. \u201cEven though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an email to The Post, Kelly said he thought Koch\u2019s record was \u201cgreat,\u201d adding that \u201c328 days is a long time. Anything over about a month is long. Congratulations Christina and welcome home. Great job! Enjoy planet Earth!\u201dThe achievement comes as NASA this year is celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, some 240 miles above Earth. During her stay, Koch participated in a number of scientific experiments, including on mustard greens, combustion, bio-printing and kidney diseases.AdvertisementStofan said it is important to have women participate in long-duration flights in Earth orbit, in preparation for long human journeys into deep space.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen we send humans to Mars, we need data on the long-term effects of space on the human body,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we know there are differences between how men and women react to space.\u201dBefore her return, Koch said she was looking forward to being back in nature.\u201cOh, how I miss the wind on my face, the feeling of raindrops, sand on my feet and the sound of surf crashing on Galveston Beach,\u201d she said.She is also looking forward to eating with forks and knives again.\u201cOn orbit, we eat with a spoon,\u201d she said. \u201cOne spoon \u2014 328 days with the same spoon.\u201d The astronaut spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station, which has been occupied continuously for 20 years. Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6236",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/06/nasa-astronaut-christina-koch/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Christina Koch\u2019s historic tour aboard the International Space Station came to a triumphant end Thursday when the spacecraft carrying her and two colleagues touched down on a snowy patch of earth at 4:12 a.m. Eastern time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHaving set the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days, Koch was all smiles and thumbs up as she was hoisted from the spacecraft, and NASA celebrated her feat as another in a string of recent achievements by female astronauts. \u201cShe definitely looks glad to be home,\u201d NASA\u2019s Brandi Dean said on a live broadcast of the return.But she wasn\u2019t home, at least not all the way. Koch, along with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of Russia, had landed in remote and frozen desert in the middle of Kazakhstan, some 7,000 miles from Houston, the headquarters of America\u2019s human space program and the place where most of the U.S. astronaut corps live.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, America\u2019s astronauts have been taking off and landing from that barren landscape in Kazakhstan, not far from the site of an infamous Soviet-era Gulag labor camp and remote enough that locals show up, as they did Thursday, on horseback to see a charred thimble-shaped Soyuz spacecraft implanted in the ground, like a surreal relic of some science fiction flick.Since the Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, NASA has paid Russia for rides to the International Space Station, at more than $80 million a seat. The astronauts launch on Russian rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and return in a Soyuz spacecraft, the landing of which can feel like \u201ca car accident that ended in multiple rollovers,\u201d as former astronaut Scott Kelly wrote in his memoir \u201cEndurance.\u201d But NASA hopes soon to return human spaceflight to American soil, and celebrate the next chapter of exploration from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral, the birthplace of the American Space Age. Both Boeing and SpaceX are under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft to fly the space agency\u2019s astronauts, and NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a phone interview Thursday that the first flight with astronauts on board is only \u201cmonths away.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is true that landing in Kazakhstan is not the most convenient for American astronauts,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it is also true that we will continue to keep the partnership even after we\u2019re launching from American soil.\u201dKoch\u2019s long stay in space broke a record set in 2017 by Peggy Whitson, who spent 288 days in space on a single mission, and came within two weeks of the record for a single spaceflight by an American, 340 days, set by Kelly in 2016. Whitson still holds the record for the total days in space by any NASA astronaut, at 665.At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agencyBridenstine said there had been some consideration of extending Koch\u2019s mission so that it would break Kelly\u2019s record. But Bridenstine said he deferred to the operators of the space station, who decided \u201cit was in the best interest of the program to follow this schedule and optimize use of the space station. ... We love breaking records, but we don\u2019t have to break records for the sake of breaking records.\u201dKoch, a scientist from North Carolina, joined the astronaut corps in 2013, the first class in NASA\u2019s history that had as many women as men. Her time in space came at an important moment for NASA, which is going to great lengths to highlight women\u2019s contributions to exploration.Under a program dubbed Artemis for the twin sister of Apollo, the space agency is preparing to send \u201cthe next man and the first woman\u201d to the moon by as early as 2024, as Bridenstine frequently says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn October, Koch and Jessica Meir performed the first all-female spacewalk when they stepped outside the space station to repair a faulty battery charger. In all, Koch performed six spacewalks, including three with Meir, spending a total of 42 hours and 15 minutes outside the station.Whitson, who retired from the agency in 2018, said she was pleased to see her single-spaceflight record fall.\u201cI am always happy that we at NASA are breaking records,\u201d she said in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cThat means we\u2019re moving forward. I think it\u2019s good. It\u2019s a sign of progress. I love it.\u201dBut for all the high-profile milestones and record-breaking achievements, women remain an overwhelming minority at NASA and in the aerospace industry as a whole. They make up only about a third of NASA\u2019s workforce. They constitute just 28 percent of senior executive leadership positions and 16 percent of senior scientific employees, according to a survey compiled by the agency.Three of the six members of the International Space Station departed on Feb. 5 to return to Earth. (The Washington Post)\u201cIt\u2019s great to see how quickly Peggy\u2019s record got broken,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, a former chief scientist at NASA who now runs the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. \u201cThat means women are really contributing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe added that women still \u201chave a long way to go. And the fact that\u2019s taken so long to get to this point, and that we have not had an African American woman walk in space, shows the underrepresenting of groups is still there.\u201dKoch has said she is aware of the significance of her feats, particularly the all-female spacewalk with Meir and how the pair served as a motivation to others looking to follow in their footsteps.\u201cWe caught each other\u2019s eye and we knew that we were really honored with this opportunity to inspire so many,\u201d she said in an interview published on NASA\u2019s website. \u201cJust hearing our voices talk to Mission Control, knowing two female voices had never been on the [communication] loops, solving those problems outside \u2014 it was really a special feeling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementShe also weighed in on a debate about the use of the word \u201cmanned\u201d in the aerospace community.AdvertisementNASA no longer officially uses the term and updated its style guide to say that \u201call references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic as opposed to manned or unmanned).\u201d But it is still used in common parlance and in news articles.\u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,\u201d she said in a NASA interview from the space station. \u201cEven though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an email to The Post, Kelly said he thought Koch\u2019s record was \u201cgreat,\u201d adding that \u201c328 days is a long time. Anything over about a month is long. Congratulations Christina and welcome home. Great job! Enjoy planet Earth!\u201dThe achievement comes as NASA this year is celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, some 240 miles above Earth. During her stay, Koch participated in a number of scientific experiments, including on mustard greens, combustion, bio-printing and kidney diseases.AdvertisementStofan said it is important to have women participate in long-duration flights in Earth orbit, in preparation for long human journeys into deep space.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen we send humans to Mars, we need data on the long-term effects of space on the human body,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we know there are differences between how men and women react to space.\u201dBefore her return, Koch said she was looking forward to being back in nature.\u201cOh, how I miss the wind on my face, the feeling of raindrops, sand on my feet and the sound of surf crashing on Galveston Beach,\u201d she said.She is also looking forward to eating with forks and knives again.\u201cOn orbit, we eat with a spoon,\u201d she said. \u201cOne spoon \u2014 328 days with the same spoon.\u201d The astronaut spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station, which has been occupied continuously for 20 years. Astronaut Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking stay on International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019 (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6237",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/11/nasa-is-sending-rover-moon-prospect-water-help-astronauts-live-off-land/",
        "text": "NASA announced Thursday it is hiring a private company to send a golf-cart-size rover to the surface of the moon in 2023 that would roam the lunar south pole in search of water.The move comes as the space agency is ramping up its effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a schedule that is considered a long shot by many. But the landing of NASA\u2019s VIPER rover would be a significant step toward that goal, helping the space agency decide what regions astronauts should explore and how much life-sustaining water there is beneath the lunar surface, NASA officials said. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA awarded the contract, worth nearly $200 million, to Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company, as part of a program to hire private-sector companies to deliver cargo and science experiments to the lunar surface. Unlike the Apollo missions, where astronauts visited the moon and then returned home, NASA is now working toward creating a permanent presence there under a program it calls Artemis, complete with systems that would help astronauts \u201clive off the land.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe delivery service \u201cis going to provide a steady cadence of payloads and instruments to maximize science at the moon and to advance exploration technology,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. \u201cAn important part of this work is to find out where the water is on the moon and how much of it there is.\u201dThe contract is another sign of how the space agency is continuing to outsource major efforts of its exploration program to the private sector. For years, it has relied on a pair of private companies, SpaceX and now Northrop Grumman, to bring cargo and supplies to the International Space Station. Last month, SpaceX also launched two NASA astronauts to the station for the first flight of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.\u201cCommercial partners are changing the landscape of space exploration, and VIPER is going to be a big boost to our efforts to send the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 through the Artemis program,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.For years, the moon was believed to be bone dry. But a decade ago, NASA discovered that water in the form of ice exists, especially in the permanently shadowed craters of the south pole of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe discovery was heralded as a breakthrough that is significant for further exploration. Water not only is important to sustain life as a liquid to drink, but when broken into its components \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 it also could be used as air to breathe.Those elements could also be used as rocket fuel, allowing for exploration further into space, including to Mars, officials hope.VIPER, an acronym for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is a 1,000-pound rover that would roam over an area of several miles for about 100 days, officials said. It would be outfitted with sensors capable of detecting ice below the surface and a drill able to excavate samples as deep as one meter (a little over three feet) down. It also could determine the composition and concentration of the water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe need to know how deep it is,\u201d said Clive Neal, professor of civil and environmental engineering at earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. \u201cWe don\u2019t know it\u2019s in the top layer or if it\u2019s deep in the soil or the regolith [rocky layer]. We need that ground truth.\u201d He said VIPER\u2019s discoveries would help determine where NASA should set up \u201cbase camps in terms of being close to resources like life support and rocket fuel.\"Discovering water on the moon is not just a scientific breakthrough. It also could help open up economic markets in deep space by essentially turning the moon into a gas station in space.\u201cThe discovery of water ice at the poles is potentially a massive breakthrough for commercial opportunities in space because we can turn that water into rocket fuel,\u201d said John Thornton, Astrobotic\u2019s CEO. \u201cThe moon can become a destination for refueling our spacecraft to explore the moon and maybe even go further into space.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article said the VIPER rover could excavate samples as deep as one kilometer. It can reach samples up to one meter deep. NASA awarded the contract, worth nearly $200 million, to a Pittsburgh-based company as part of a program to hire private-sector companies to deliver cargo and science experiments to the lunar surface. NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6238",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/11/nasa-is-sending-rover-moon-prospect-water-help-astronauts-live-off-land/",
        "text": "NASA announced Thursday it is hiring a private company to send a golf-cart-size rover to the surface of the moon in 2023 that would roam the lunar south pole in search of water.The move comes as the space agency is ramping up its effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a schedule that is considered a long shot by many. But the landing of NASA\u2019s VIPER rover would be a significant step toward that goal, helping the space agency decide what regions astronauts should explore and how much life-sustaining water there is beneath the lunar surface, NASA officials said. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA awarded the contract, worth nearly $200 million, to Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company, as part of a program to hire private-sector companies to deliver cargo and science experiments to the lunar surface. Unlike the Apollo missions, where astronauts visited the moon and then returned home, NASA is now working toward creating a permanent presence there under a program it calls Artemis, complete with systems that would help astronauts \u201clive off the land.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe delivery service \u201cis going to provide a steady cadence of payloads and instruments to maximize science at the moon and to advance exploration technology,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. \u201cAn important part of this work is to find out where the water is on the moon and how much of it there is.\u201dThe contract is another sign of how the space agency is continuing to outsource major efforts of its exploration program to the private sector. For years, it has relied on a pair of private companies, SpaceX and now Northrop Grumman, to bring cargo and supplies to the International Space Station. Last month, SpaceX also launched two NASA astronauts to the station for the first flight of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.\u201cCommercial partners are changing the landscape of space exploration, and VIPER is going to be a big boost to our efforts to send the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 through the Artemis program,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.For years, the moon was believed to be bone dry. But a decade ago, NASA discovered that water in the form of ice exists, especially in the permanently shadowed craters of the south pole of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe discovery was heralded as a breakthrough that is significant for further exploration. Water not only is important to sustain life as a liquid to drink, but when broken into its components \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 it also could be used as air to breathe.Those elements could also be used as rocket fuel, allowing for exploration further into space, including to Mars, officials hope.VIPER, an acronym for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is a 1,000-pound rover that would roam over an area of several miles for about 100 days, officials said. It would be outfitted with sensors capable of detecting ice below the surface and a drill able to excavate samples as deep as one meter (a little over three feet) down. It also could determine the composition and concentration of the water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe need to know how deep it is,\u201d said Clive Neal, professor of civil and environmental engineering at earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. \u201cWe don\u2019t know it\u2019s in the top layer or if it\u2019s deep in the soil or the regolith [rocky layer]. We need that ground truth.\u201d He said VIPER\u2019s discoveries would help determine where NASA should set up \u201cbase camps in terms of being close to resources like life support and rocket fuel.\"Discovering water on the moon is not just a scientific breakthrough. It also could help open up economic markets in deep space by essentially turning the moon into a gas station in space.\u201cThe discovery of water ice at the poles is potentially a massive breakthrough for commercial opportunities in space because we can turn that water into rocket fuel,\u201d said John Thornton, Astrobotic\u2019s CEO. \u201cThe moon can become a destination for refueling our spacecraft to explore the moon and maybe even go further into space.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article said the VIPER rover could excavate samples as deep as one kilometer. It can reach samples up to one meter deep. NASA awarded the contract, worth nearly $200 million, to a Pittsburgh-based company as part of a program to hire private-sector companies to deliver cargo and science experiments to the lunar surface. NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6239",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/11/nasa-is-sending-rover-moon-prospect-water-help-astronauts-live-off-land/",
        "text": "NASA announced Thursday it is hiring a private company to send a golf-cart-size rover to the surface of the moon in 2023 that would roam the lunar south pole in search of water.The move comes as the space agency is ramping up its effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, a schedule that is considered a long shot by many. But the landing of NASA\u2019s VIPER rover would be a significant step toward that goal, helping the space agency decide what regions astronauts should explore and how much life-sustaining water there is beneath the lunar surface, NASA officials said. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA awarded the contract, worth nearly $200 million, to Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company, as part of a program to hire private-sector companies to deliver cargo and science experiments to the lunar surface. Unlike the Apollo missions, where astronauts visited the moon and then returned home, NASA is now working toward creating a permanent presence there under a program it calls Artemis, complete with systems that would help astronauts \u201clive off the land.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe delivery service \u201cis going to provide a steady cadence of payloads and instruments to maximize science at the moon and to advance exploration technology,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate. \u201cAn important part of this work is to find out where the water is on the moon and how much of it there is.\u201dThe contract is another sign of how the space agency is continuing to outsource major efforts of its exploration program to the private sector. For years, it has relied on a pair of private companies, SpaceX and now Northrop Grumman, to bring cargo and supplies to the International Space Station. Last month, SpaceX also launched two NASA astronauts to the station for the first flight of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.\u201cCommercial partners are changing the landscape of space exploration, and VIPER is going to be a big boost to our efforts to send the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 through the Artemis program,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.For years, the moon was believed to be bone dry. But a decade ago, NASA discovered that water in the form of ice exists, especially in the permanently shadowed craters of the south pole of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe discovery was heralded as a breakthrough that is significant for further exploration. Water not only is important to sustain life as a liquid to drink, but when broken into its components \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 it also could be used as air to breathe.Those elements could also be used as rocket fuel, allowing for exploration further into space, including to Mars, officials hope.VIPER, an acronym for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is a 1,000-pound rover that would roam over an area of several miles for about 100 days, officials said. It would be outfitted with sensors capable of detecting ice below the surface and a drill able to excavate samples as deep as one meter (a little over three feet) down. It also could determine the composition and concentration of the water.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe need to know how deep it is,\u201d said Clive Neal, professor of civil and environmental engineering at earth sciences at the University of Notre Dame. \u201cWe don\u2019t know it\u2019s in the top layer or if it\u2019s deep in the soil or the regolith [rocky layer]. We need that ground truth.\u201d He said VIPER\u2019s discoveries would help determine where NASA should set up \u201cbase camps in terms of being close to resources like life support and rocket fuel.\"Discovering water on the moon is not just a scientific breakthrough. It also could help open up economic markets in deep space by essentially turning the moon into a gas station in space.\u201cThe discovery of water ice at the poles is potentially a massive breakthrough for commercial opportunities in space because we can turn that water into rocket fuel,\u201d said John Thornton, Astrobotic\u2019s CEO. \u201cThe moon can become a destination for refueling our spacecraft to explore the moon and maybe even go further into space.\u201dCorrection: A previous version of this article said the VIPER rover could excavate samples as deep as one kilometer. It can reach samples up to one meter deep. NASA awarded the contract, worth nearly $200 million, to a Pittsburgh-based company as part of a program to hire private-sector companies to deliver cargo and science experiments to the lunar surface. NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket problem prompts NASA and SpaceX to delay next launch of astronauts (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6240",
        "date": "2020-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/10/spacex-falcon-rocket-delay/",
        "text": "NASA announced Saturday that SpaceX\u2019s next mission flying astronauts to the International Space Station will be delayed until early or mid-November after the company experienced a problem with the first stage of a booster rocket during a recent launch.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a blog post, the agency said that the extra time would allow \u201cSpaceX to complete hardware testing and data reviews\u201d of an issue with an engine gas generator. NASA said it has \u201cfull insight into the company\u2019s launch and testing data.\u201d \u201cWe have a strong working relationship with our SpaceX partner,\u201d Kathy Lueders, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s human exploration and operations mission directorate, said in the post. \u201cWith the high cadence of missions SpaceX performs, it really gives us incredible insight into this commercial system and helps us make informed decisions about the status of our missions. The teams are actively working this finding on the engines, and we should be a lot smarter within the coming week.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX declined to comment.Earlier this month, after the company had to delay a couple of launches because of mechanical issues, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, said on Twitter he was going to Cape Canaveral to conduct a \u201cbroad review\u201d of operations there.NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule splash down in the Gulf of MexicoThe mission, which had previously been scheduled for Oct. 31, would launch NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker, Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to the space station for a stay of about six months.It would be SpaceX\u2019s first operational mission of flying full crews for extended stays after it successfully completed a shorter test mission with two astronauts in August to verify the performance of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.Story continues below advertisementNASA and SpaceX said that test mission, from launch, to docking to splashdown, went flawlessly. But since then SpaceX said that it had redesigned a portion of the capsule\u2019s heat shield after noticing what Hans Koeigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and reliability, said was \u201ca little more erosion than we wanted to see.\u201d The erosion was in a few small areas where the crew capsule joins the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is discarded before the spacecraft slams into the atmosphere.AdvertisementThe friction between the thickening air and the speeding spacecraft generates temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and engulf the capsule in a fireball. The heat shield covers the bottom of the spacecraft and keeps the crew safe.Speaking to reporters recently, Koenigsmann stressed that there \u201cwas nothing to be concerned with at all times. The astronauts were safe, and the vehicle was working perfectly.\"Flying astronauts has always been risky. No wonder NASA and SpaceX are on edge.Earlier this month, SpaceX scrubbed a pair of launches late in the countdown, prompting Musk\u2019s plans for \"a broad review of launch site, propulsion, structures, avionics & regulatory constraints this weekend.\u201d He added that he would make a trip to Cape Canaveral \u201cto review hardware in person.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA launch on Oct. 2 of a GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force was scrubbed two seconds before liftoff after what Musk described as an \u201cunexpected pressure rise in the turbomachinery gas generator,\u201d which helps power the rocket\u2019s Merlin engines.AdvertisementA day earlier, SpaceX scrubbed a launch of its Starlink satellites with 18 seconds to go in the count because of a problem with a ground sensor. After scrubbing the Starlink mission, SpaceX bounced back and launched the batch of 60 satellites on Tuesday. Still, SpaceX\u2019s goal is to launch much more frequently, and Musk said on Twitter recently that: \u201cWe will need to make a lot of improvements to have a chance of completing 48 launches next year!\u201dThe GPS launch has not yet been rescheduled.Story continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has flown more than 90 times, the most of any U.S. rocket currently in operation and is considered a reliable workhorse. NASA uses it to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station and has certified it for human spaceflight as well.But it has had problems. In 2015, a rocket carrying cargo to the station exploded some two minutes into flight after a steel strut failed, causing helium to overpressurize a second stage liquid oxygen tank. Then, in 2016, another exploded while being fueled on the launch pad ahead of an engine test after a helium tank buckled.AdvertisementLast year, the company lost its Dragon spacecraft in an explosion ahead of an engine test fire. NASA and SpaceX investigated all three incidents and eventually cleared SpaceX to fly again.Noguchi, a veteran of the three space missions, recently told reporters that it is important \"to be diligent and don\u2019t be complacent. We have to ask the right questions at the right time to make sure the space vehicle is safe enough. Of course we trust the system. But as a crew we have to persuade ourselves that this vehicle is safe to fly.\u201d The delay of the Oct. 31 launch of a crew to the International Space Station is intended to let SpaceX review the causes for a problem that was detected during a launch earlier this month. Rocket problem prompts NASA and SpaceX to delay next launch of astronauts",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket problem prompts NASA and SpaceX to delay next launch of astronauts (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6241",
        "date": "2020-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/10/spacex-falcon-rocket-delay/",
        "text": "NASA announced Saturday that SpaceX\u2019s next mission flying astronauts to the International Space Station will be delayed until early or mid-November after the company experienced a problem with the first stage of a booster rocket during a recent launch.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a blog post, the agency said that the extra time would allow \u201cSpaceX to complete hardware testing and data reviews\u201d of an issue with an engine gas generator. NASA said it has \u201cfull insight into the company\u2019s launch and testing data.\u201d \u201cWe have a strong working relationship with our SpaceX partner,\u201d Kathy Lueders, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s human exploration and operations mission directorate, said in the post. \u201cWith the high cadence of missions SpaceX performs, it really gives us incredible insight into this commercial system and helps us make informed decisions about the status of our missions. The teams are actively working this finding on the engines, and we should be a lot smarter within the coming week.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX declined to comment.Earlier this month, after the company had to delay a couple of launches because of mechanical issues, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, said on Twitter he was going to Cape Canaveral to conduct a \u201cbroad review\u201d of operations there.NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule splash down in the Gulf of MexicoThe mission, which had previously been scheduled for Oct. 31, would launch NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker, Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to the space station for a stay of about six months.It would be SpaceX\u2019s first operational mission of flying full crews for extended stays after it successfully completed a shorter test mission with two astronauts in August to verify the performance of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.Story continues below advertisementNASA and SpaceX said that test mission, from launch, to docking to splashdown, went flawlessly. But since then SpaceX said that it had redesigned a portion of the capsule\u2019s heat shield after noticing what Hans Koeigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and reliability, said was \u201ca little more erosion than we wanted to see.\u201d The erosion was in a few small areas where the crew capsule joins the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is discarded before the spacecraft slams into the atmosphere.AdvertisementThe friction between the thickening air and the speeding spacecraft generates temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and engulf the capsule in a fireball. The heat shield covers the bottom of the spacecraft and keeps the crew safe.Speaking to reporters recently, Koenigsmann stressed that there \u201cwas nothing to be concerned with at all times. The astronauts were safe, and the vehicle was working perfectly.\"Flying astronauts has always been risky. No wonder NASA and SpaceX are on edge.Earlier this month, SpaceX scrubbed a pair of launches late in the countdown, prompting Musk\u2019s plans for \"a broad review of launch site, propulsion, structures, avionics & regulatory constraints this weekend.\u201d He added that he would make a trip to Cape Canaveral \u201cto review hardware in person.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA launch on Oct. 2 of a GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force was scrubbed two seconds before liftoff after what Musk described as an \u201cunexpected pressure rise in the turbomachinery gas generator,\u201d which helps power the rocket\u2019s Merlin engines.AdvertisementA day earlier, SpaceX scrubbed a launch of its Starlink satellites with 18 seconds to go in the count because of a problem with a ground sensor. After scrubbing the Starlink mission, SpaceX bounced back and launched the batch of 60 satellites on Tuesday. Still, SpaceX\u2019s goal is to launch much more frequently, and Musk said on Twitter recently that: \u201cWe will need to make a lot of improvements to have a chance of completing 48 launches next year!\u201dThe GPS launch has not yet been rescheduled.Story continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has flown more than 90 times, the most of any U.S. rocket currently in operation and is considered a reliable workhorse. NASA uses it to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station and has certified it for human spaceflight as well.But it has had problems. In 2015, a rocket carrying cargo to the station exploded some two minutes into flight after a steel strut failed, causing helium to overpressurize a second stage liquid oxygen tank. Then, in 2016, another exploded while being fueled on the launch pad ahead of an engine test after a helium tank buckled.AdvertisementLast year, the company lost its Dragon spacecraft in an explosion ahead of an engine test fire. NASA and SpaceX investigated all three incidents and eventually cleared SpaceX to fly again.Noguchi, a veteran of the three space missions, recently told reporters that it is important \"to be diligent and don\u2019t be complacent. We have to ask the right questions at the right time to make sure the space vehicle is safe enough. Of course we trust the system. But as a crew we have to persuade ourselves that this vehicle is safe to fly.\u201d The delay of the Oct. 31 launch of a crew to the International Space Station is intended to let SpaceX review the causes for a problem that was detected during a launch earlier this month. Rocket problem prompts NASA and SpaceX to delay next launch of astronauts",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket problem prompts NASA and SpaceX to delay next launch of astronauts (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6242",
        "date": "2020-10-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/10/spacex-falcon-rocket-delay/",
        "text": "NASA announced Saturday that SpaceX\u2019s next mission flying astronauts to the International Space Station will be delayed until early or mid-November after the company experienced a problem with the first stage of a booster rocket during a recent launch.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a blog post, the agency said that the extra time would allow \u201cSpaceX to complete hardware testing and data reviews\u201d of an issue with an engine gas generator. NASA said it has \u201cfull insight into the company\u2019s launch and testing data.\u201d \u201cWe have a strong working relationship with our SpaceX partner,\u201d Kathy Lueders, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s human exploration and operations mission directorate, said in the post. \u201cWith the high cadence of missions SpaceX performs, it really gives us incredible insight into this commercial system and helps us make informed decisions about the status of our missions. The teams are actively working this finding on the engines, and we should be a lot smarter within the coming week.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX declined to comment.Earlier this month, after the company had to delay a couple of launches because of mechanical issues, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, said on Twitter he was going to Cape Canaveral to conduct a \u201cbroad review\u201d of operations there.NASA astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule splash down in the Gulf of MexicoThe mission, which had previously been scheduled for Oct. 31, would launch NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker, Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi to the space station for a stay of about six months.It would be SpaceX\u2019s first operational mission of flying full crews for extended stays after it successfully completed a shorter test mission with two astronauts in August to verify the performance of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.Story continues below advertisementNASA and SpaceX said that test mission, from launch, to docking to splashdown, went flawlessly. But since then SpaceX said that it had redesigned a portion of the capsule\u2019s heat shield after noticing what Hans Koeigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and reliability, said was \u201ca little more erosion than we wanted to see.\u201d The erosion was in a few small areas where the crew capsule joins the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is discarded before the spacecraft slams into the atmosphere.AdvertisementThe friction between the thickening air and the speeding spacecraft generates temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit and engulf the capsule in a fireball. The heat shield covers the bottom of the spacecraft and keeps the crew safe.Speaking to reporters recently, Koenigsmann stressed that there \u201cwas nothing to be concerned with at all times. The astronauts were safe, and the vehicle was working perfectly.\"Flying astronauts has always been risky. No wonder NASA and SpaceX are on edge.Earlier this month, SpaceX scrubbed a pair of launches late in the countdown, prompting Musk\u2019s plans for \"a broad review of launch site, propulsion, structures, avionics & regulatory constraints this weekend.\u201d He added that he would make a trip to Cape Canaveral \u201cto review hardware in person.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA launch on Oct. 2 of a GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force was scrubbed two seconds before liftoff after what Musk described as an \u201cunexpected pressure rise in the turbomachinery gas generator,\u201d which helps power the rocket\u2019s Merlin engines.AdvertisementA day earlier, SpaceX scrubbed a launch of its Starlink satellites with 18 seconds to go in the count because of a problem with a ground sensor. After scrubbing the Starlink mission, SpaceX bounced back and launched the batch of 60 satellites on Tuesday. Still, SpaceX\u2019s goal is to launch much more frequently, and Musk said on Twitter recently that: \u201cWe will need to make a lot of improvements to have a chance of completing 48 launches next year!\u201dThe GPS launch has not yet been rescheduled.Story continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has flown more than 90 times, the most of any U.S. rocket currently in operation and is considered a reliable workhorse. NASA uses it to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station and has certified it for human spaceflight as well.But it has had problems. In 2015, a rocket carrying cargo to the station exploded some two minutes into flight after a steel strut failed, causing helium to overpressurize a second stage liquid oxygen tank. Then, in 2016, another exploded while being fueled on the launch pad ahead of an engine test after a helium tank buckled.AdvertisementLast year, the company lost its Dragon spacecraft in an explosion ahead of an engine test fire. NASA and SpaceX investigated all three incidents and eventually cleared SpaceX to fly again.Noguchi, a veteran of the three space missions, recently told reporters that it is important \"to be diligent and don\u2019t be complacent. We have to ask the right questions at the right time to make sure the space vehicle is safe enough. Of course we trust the system. But as a crew we have to persuade ourselves that this vehicle is safe to fly.\u201d The delay of the Oct. 31 launch of a crew to the International Space Station is intended to let SpaceX review the causes for a problem that was detected during a launch earlier this month. Rocket problem prompts NASA and SpaceX to delay next launch of astronauts",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA and SpaceX are go for historic launch (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6243",
        "date": "2020-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/22/nasa-spacex-are-go-historic-launch/",
        "text": "NASA and SpaceX are go for launch.NASA announced Friday that an exhaustive \u201cflight readiness review\u201d of Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch of a SpaceX rocket with two NASA astronauts aboard had determined that the mission could proceed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe launch, a test flight to the International Space Station, is now set for Wednesday at 4:33 p.m. from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes well, it would be the first launch of NASA astronauts to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle program was retired nearly a decade ago, and it would be the first time a private company had boosted people to orbit. Since the shuttle was retired, NASA has had to rely on Russia to get its astronauts to the station.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere are no significant issues, I am happy to report,\" Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator who chaired the review, told a news conference. \"In the end, it was a very, very clean review.\u201dAdvertisementThe review, which began Thursday and resumed Friday morning, was one of the last hurdles to be cleared before the launch. On Friday afternoon, SpaceX successfully fired the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket for a short test to ensure they were operating correctly. On Saturday, astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will suit up and go through the prelaunch procedures one last time. A final launch readiness review will be held on Monday.The launch still could be delayed by weather or any number of last-minute mechanical glitches. Saturday morning, the Space Force\u2019s weather office at Cape Canaveral predicted a 60 percent chance weather would prevent a launch.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to stay vigilant over the next few days,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program.She added that \u201cwe are trying to identify any risks that are out there, and continue to look at risk, and buy them down. But we also can\u2019t fool ourselves, human spaceflight is really, really tough.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThere'll be lots more data, lots more reviews in the next few days,\u201d said Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew and mission management. \u201cThere will be constant vigilance and watching of the data and observations as we go through the mission.\u201dOfficials from NASA and SpaceX said part of the review focused on the safety of the parachutes that would deploy and slow the Dragon spacecraft as it drops through the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, bringing the astronauts home. SpaceX had been working to qualify a new design of the parachute systems that NASA said it is now comfortable with.Story continues below advertisementBehnken and Hurley have been in quarantine for more than a week, a normal procedure for astronauts going to space. But NASA and SpaceX have said they have been taking additional precautions because of the coronavirus pandemic. At a news briefing Friday, Hurley said he and Behnken have been tested for the coronavirus twice and \u201crumor has it we might be tested again before we go.\u201dThe pair would join Chris Cassidy, the lone NASA astronaut on board the station, and two Russian counterparts.\u201cHe likes solitude,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cBut it was very obvious that he is ready for some human interaction with us.\u201d The exhaustive review took nearly two days as teams of engineers from NASA and SpaceX reviewed every aspect of the upcoming launch. NASA and SpaceX are go for historic launch",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happen (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6244",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/13/white-house-is-such-hurry-get-moon-that-nasa-is-considering-sidelining-its-major-rocket-make-it-happen/",
        "text": "NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Wednesday that the agency is considering bypassing the long-delayed rocket it\u2019s been building for years for its upcoming mission to the moon, instead considering commercial alternatives.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that comes to fruition, it would mark a radical change from the way NASA had planned to return to the moon and would be a blow to the Space Launch System, involving a gigantic rocket that a government watchdog recently warned could cost as much as $9 billion. Bridenstine\u2019s comments, coming during a Senate committee hearing, show how NASA and the White House are getting frustrated with the slow pace of progress. The National Space Council, headed by Vice President Pence, has made a return to the moon a top priority, and officials have said the administration would like it to happen before the 2020 presidential election.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Space Launch System was supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft in an uncrewed mission in orbit the moon no later than June 2020. But Bridenstine said the agency had recently been informed that there was going to be yet another schedule delay in what\u2019s known as Exploration Mission-1, or EM-1.\u201cI think we as an agency need to stick to our commitments,\u201d he said in a response to a question from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). \u201cSir, if we tell you and others that we\u2019re going to launch in June of 2020 around the moon, which is what EM-1 is, I think we should launch around the moon in June of 2020. And I think it can be done. We as an agency need to consider all options to accomplish that objective.\u201dThe announcement was a blow for Boeing, one of the prime contractors on the SLS rocket, as it was facing serious repercussions in the wake of the crashes involving its 737 Max 8 airplane. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s SLS rocket has repeatedly suffered schedule delays and cost overruns. In a scathing report last year, NASA\u2019s inspector general found that the SLS program would require a massive amount of additional funding that could double the cost of the project to nearly $9 billion.It found that Boeing had already spent $5.3 billion and was expected to burn through the rest of its budget three years ahead of time and without delivering a single rocket stage.Bridenstine went out of his way to say NASA was not abandoning the rocket, praising it as \u201cthe largest rocket that\u2019s ever been built in American history\u201d and saying it remains \u201ca critical capability\u201d for the U.S. space program.Story continues below advertisementBut the delays have forced the agency to look at using other rockets available. There are two that meet that criteria, officials said, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Delta IV Heavy and SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy.AdvertisementTo meet the 2020 timeline, Bridenstine said, the agency was looking at changing the mission profile. Instead of launching Orion on a trajectory straight to the moon, it would look at the possibility of flying it to orbit around the Earth. Then, on a second rocket, NASA would launch a propulsion module. The Orion spacecraft would dock with it, and the propulsion module would shoot Orion to the moon.Bridenstine did not address how NASA would pay for those launches. And he said there is a major hurdle: Orion does not have the ability to dock in space.\u201cBetween now and June of 2020 we would have to make that a reality,\u201d he said. It would mark a radical change from the way NASA had planned to return to the moon and would be a blow to the Space Launch System. The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happen",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happen (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6245",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/13/white-house-is-such-hurry-get-moon-that-nasa-is-considering-sidelining-its-major-rocket-make-it-happen/",
        "text": "NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Wednesday that the agency is considering bypassing the long-delayed rocket it\u2019s been building for years for its upcoming mission to the moon, instead considering commercial alternatives.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that comes to fruition, it would mark a radical change from the way NASA had planned to return to the moon and would be a blow to the Space Launch System, involving a gigantic rocket that a government watchdog recently warned could cost as much as $9 billion. Bridenstine\u2019s comments, coming during a Senate committee hearing, show how NASA and the White House are getting frustrated with the slow pace of progress. The National Space Council, headed by Vice President Pence, has made a return to the moon a top priority, and officials have said the administration would like it to happen before the 2020 presidential election.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Space Launch System was supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft in an uncrewed mission in orbit the moon no later than June 2020. But Bridenstine said the agency had recently been informed that there was going to be yet another schedule delay in what\u2019s known as Exploration Mission-1, or EM-1.\u201cI think we as an agency need to stick to our commitments,\u201d he said in a response to a question from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). \u201cSir, if we tell you and others that we\u2019re going to launch in June of 2020 around the moon, which is what EM-1 is, I think we should launch around the moon in June of 2020. And I think it can be done. We as an agency need to consider all options to accomplish that objective.\u201dThe announcement was a blow for Boeing, one of the prime contractors on the SLS rocket, as it was facing serious repercussions in the wake of the crashes involving its 737 Max 8 airplane. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s SLS rocket has repeatedly suffered schedule delays and cost overruns. In a scathing report last year, NASA\u2019s inspector general found that the SLS program would require a massive amount of additional funding that could double the cost of the project to nearly $9 billion.It found that Boeing had already spent $5.3 billion and was expected to burn through the rest of its budget three years ahead of time and without delivering a single rocket stage.Bridenstine went out of his way to say NASA was not abandoning the rocket, praising it as \u201cthe largest rocket that\u2019s ever been built in American history\u201d and saying it remains \u201ca critical capability\u201d for the U.S. space program.Story continues below advertisementBut the delays have forced the agency to look at using other rockets available. There are two that meet that criteria, officials said, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Delta IV Heavy and SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy.AdvertisementTo meet the 2020 timeline, Bridenstine said, the agency was looking at changing the mission profile. Instead of launching Orion on a trajectory straight to the moon, it would look at the possibility of flying it to orbit around the Earth. Then, on a second rocket, NASA would launch a propulsion module. The Orion spacecraft would dock with it, and the propulsion module would shoot Orion to the moon.Bridenstine did not address how NASA would pay for those launches. And he said there is a major hurdle: Orion does not have the ability to dock in space.\u201cBetween now and June of 2020 we would have to make that a reality,\u201d he said. It would mark a radical change from the way NASA had planned to return to the moon and would be a blow to the Space Launch System. The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happen",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happen (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6246",
        "date": "2019-03-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/13/white-house-is-such-hurry-get-moon-that-nasa-is-considering-sidelining-its-major-rocket-make-it-happen/",
        "text": "NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Wednesday that the agency is considering bypassing the long-delayed rocket it\u2019s been building for years for its upcoming mission to the moon, instead considering commercial alternatives.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that comes to fruition, it would mark a radical change from the way NASA had planned to return to the moon and would be a blow to the Space Launch System, involving a gigantic rocket that a government watchdog recently warned could cost as much as $9 billion. Bridenstine\u2019s comments, coming during a Senate committee hearing, show how NASA and the White House are getting frustrated with the slow pace of progress. The National Space Council, headed by Vice President Pence, has made a return to the moon a top priority, and officials have said the administration would like it to happen before the 2020 presidential election.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Space Launch System was supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft in an uncrewed mission in orbit the moon no later than June 2020. But Bridenstine said the agency had recently been informed that there was going to be yet another schedule delay in what\u2019s known as Exploration Mission-1, or EM-1.\u201cI think we as an agency need to stick to our commitments,\u201d he said in a response to a question from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). \u201cSir, if we tell you and others that we\u2019re going to launch in June of 2020 around the moon, which is what EM-1 is, I think we should launch around the moon in June of 2020. And I think it can be done. We as an agency need to consider all options to accomplish that objective.\u201dThe announcement was a blow for Boeing, one of the prime contractors on the SLS rocket, as it was facing serious repercussions in the wake of the crashes involving its 737 Max 8 airplane. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s SLS rocket has repeatedly suffered schedule delays and cost overruns. In a scathing report last year, NASA\u2019s inspector general found that the SLS program would require a massive amount of additional funding that could double the cost of the project to nearly $9 billion.It found that Boeing had already spent $5.3 billion and was expected to burn through the rest of its budget three years ahead of time and without delivering a single rocket stage.Bridenstine went out of his way to say NASA was not abandoning the rocket, praising it as \u201cthe largest rocket that\u2019s ever been built in American history\u201d and saying it remains \u201ca critical capability\u201d for the U.S. space program.Story continues below advertisementBut the delays have forced the agency to look at using other rockets available. There are two that meet that criteria, officials said, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Delta IV Heavy and SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy.AdvertisementTo meet the 2020 timeline, Bridenstine said, the agency was looking at changing the mission profile. Instead of launching Orion on a trajectory straight to the moon, it would look at the possibility of flying it to orbit around the Earth. Then, on a second rocket, NASA would launch a propulsion module. The Orion spacecraft would dock with it, and the propulsion module would shoot Orion to the moon.Bridenstine did not address how NASA would pay for those launches. And he said there is a major hurdle: Orion does not have the ability to dock in space.\u201cBetween now and June of 2020 we would have to make that a reality,\u201d he said. It would mark a radical change from the way NASA had planned to return to the moon and would be a blow to the Space Launch System. The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happen",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is scrambling to meet the White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6247",
        "date": "2019-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/01/nasa-is-scrambling-meet-white-house-mandate-return-astronauts-moon-by/",
        "text": "NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Monday that the agency will need additional funding to meet a White House mandate to land people on the moon by 2024. But he did not say how much more money NASA would need or provide any specific details of how it plans to accomplish the mission. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpeaking at a town hall meeting at NASA headquarters, Bridenstine made it clear NASA was scrambling to figure out how to get to the lunar surface before the presidential election in 2024. He said he was fully aware that past administrations have set bold goals to explore the moon or Mars, only to pull them back as Congress fails to provide funding or a new administration comes in and cancels previous plans.During the presidency of George W. Bush, NASA was directed to go to the moon. Under Barack Obama, reaching an asteroid and Mars were the missions. Now, under President Trump, it\u2019s the moon again. Many in the space community compare that record to the scene in the cartoon strip \u201cPeanuts\u201d when Lucy pulls the football away just as Charlie Brown is about to kick it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI hear the comment all the time about Lucy and the football,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not Lucy and the football. In the executive branch, people are very serious, we are going to the moon and going fast.\u201dBridenstine\u2019s comments came several days after Vice President Pence called for NASA to return to the moon within five years, an ambitious goal that took many at NASA by surprise. In a speech before the National Space Council last week, Pence said that the agency needed to have a much greater sense of urgency. He took aim at Boeing and other NASA contractors building the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which is supposed to be used in the moon missions but is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon missionPence also fired a salvo at NASA itself, saying if it can\u2019t get astronauts to the lunar surface in five years \u201cwe need to change the agency, not the mission.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe questions NASA employees posted on the agency\u2019s website ahead of the town hall gave voice to the skepticism that has reigned since Pence voiced his new goal. Under the previous plan, NASA was looking at sending people to the moon by 2028. Moving it up by four years came as a shock.\u201cPlease explain in detail what \u2018We\u2019ll change the Agency, not the mission\u2019 entails,\u201d one employee wrote. \u201cAccelerating our return to the moon is an unfunded mandate,\" asked another. \"How will we do it without gutting our other important missions?\u201dBridenstine offered few specifics during his Monday presentation. He said the agency planned to use what\u2019s known as a Gateway, a sort of space station that would be placed in orbit around the moon. But the agency has yet to award a contract to build it. It also does not have the landing craft needed to carry astronauts from the Gateway to the lunar surface and back again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is also struggling with its moon rocket, the SLS. Frustrated with the constant delays, Bridenstine told a Senate hearing last month that he would look at using other, commercial rockets for the upcoming test flight of the Orion spacecraft that would ultimately be used to fly astronauts to the lunar Gateway.The program to build NASA\u2019s moon rocket could double in price to $9 billion, IG saysBut the possibility of sidelining NASA\u2019s main rocket, the construction of which provides thousands of jobs in many congressional districts, led to a withering backlash from Congress, and Bridenstine has since backtracked, saying it just was not technically feasible to use commercial rockets for the mission. Bridenstine told the town hall Monday that he was confident that the White House would push for additional funding since returning to the moon was a mandate \u201cfrom the top.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to need additional means,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone can take this level of commitment seriously unless there are additional means.\u201dAdvertisementBut the White House\u2019s budget request of $21 billion for NASA for next year is $480 million less than what Congress appropriated in this year\u2019s spending plan.Still, Bridenstine said he was confident the agency would achieve the White House\u2019s goal, whatever the difficulties. \u201cI\u2019m not suggesting there are not holes here,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reality is we\u2019re moving quickly, and we\u2019re looking at all options. There is nothing off the table.\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Monday that the agency will need additional funding to meet a White House mandate to land people on the moon by 2024. NASA is scrambling to meet the White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Citing China threat, NASA says moon landing now will come in 2025 (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6248",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/09/nasa-moon-artemis-spacex-china/",
        "text": "NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday for the first time that the Trump-era goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024, a timeline initially embraced by the Biden administration, is no longer feasible and that a human landing would be pushed \u201clikely to no earlier than 2025.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe blamed a series of events for forcing the revision of the Artemis schedule, which many in the space industry had said was overly ambitious given the difficulties of getting humans into deep space. Dealing with the pandemic was a major driver of the delay, Nelson said in a call with reporters, as were unrealistic budgets under the Trump administration. The legal challenges filed by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which prevented NASA from working with SpaceX on the contract it had won to build the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface, delayed work by seven months, he said.But now that Blue Origin\u2019s latest challenge was struck down by a federal court, NASA is moving ahead with SpaceX to resume work as quickly as possible. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first flight of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System rocket with the Orion spacecraft on top of it is on track for the first part of next year, Nelson said, possibly as early as February. That mission, known as Artemis I, would put Orion, without any astronauts on board, in orbit around the moon.The next mission, Artemis II, is now scheduled for May 2024, more than a year later than originally scheduled, he said. That flight would be similar to Artemis I but would have astronauts on board, in what would be the first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo program.The landing with humans would come sometime in 2025, but NASA officials said the timing would depend on the success of the previous test flights as well as SpaceX\u2019s development of the Starship spacecraft that would meet up with Orion in lunar orbit and ferry the astronauts to the surface of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven the immense technical challenges, the new vehicles NASA and the space industry are developing and congressional reluctance, it is possible 2025 also is not feasible.To meet that timeline, Nelson said that the estimated cost of developing the Orion program, beginning in 2012 and running through the first crewed mission, would grow from $6.7 billion to $9.3 billion. NASA officials said the increase was driven by changing requirements as well as delays caused by the pandemic.As soon as Blue Origin\u2019s lawsuit was thrown out, Nelson said he was on the phone with Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, to discuss the lunar lander for the first time in months. \u201cWe both underscored the importance of returning to the moon as quickly and safely as possible,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementTo meet the timeline, however, Nelson said the agency would require significant spending increases, and it is unclear how amenable Congress would be to appropriate the additional $5.7 billion over six years that Nelson said the agency would need.Advertisement\u201cAll these ambitious plans are contingent on funding,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I'm going to continue to fight for sustained funding.\u201dHe maintained that the United States needed to get to the moon and fast, casting the program as a Cold War-like space race, only this time against China instead of the Soviet Union. Having landed a rover on Mars and a robotic spacecraft on the far side of the moon, China has big ambitions in space, he said. It is also building a space station in low Earth orbit and is working toward a human landing on the moon, as well.\u201cWe have every reason to believe that we have a competitor, a very aggressive competitor, in the Chinese,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cIt\u2019s the position of NASA and, I believe, the United States government that we want to be first back on the moon. \u2026 And we are getting geared up to go.\u201d Now that Blue Origin\u2019s latest challenge was struck down by a federal court, NASA is moving ahead with SpaceX to resume work as quickly as possible, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. Citing China threat, NASA says moon landing now will come in 2025",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Citing China threat, NASA says moon landing now will come in 2025 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6249",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/09/nasa-moon-artemis-spacex-china/",
        "text": "NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Tuesday for the first time that the Trump-era goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024, a timeline initially embraced by the Biden administration, is no longer feasible and that a human landing would be pushed \u201clikely to no earlier than 2025.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe blamed a series of events for forcing the revision of the Artemis schedule, which many in the space industry had said was overly ambitious given the difficulties of getting humans into deep space. Dealing with the pandemic was a major driver of the delay, Nelson said in a call with reporters, as were unrealistic budgets under the Trump administration. The legal challenges filed by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, which prevented NASA from working with SpaceX on the contract it had won to build the spacecraft that would ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface, delayed work by seven months, he said.But now that Blue Origin\u2019s latest challenge was struck down by a federal court, NASA is moving ahead with SpaceX to resume work as quickly as possible. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first flight of NASA\u2019s massive Space Launch System rocket with the Orion spacecraft on top of it is on track for the first part of next year, Nelson said, possibly as early as February. That mission, known as Artemis I, would put Orion, without any astronauts on board, in orbit around the moon.The next mission, Artemis II, is now scheduled for May 2024, more than a year later than originally scheduled, he said. That flight would be similar to Artemis I but would have astronauts on board, in what would be the first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo program.The landing with humans would come sometime in 2025, but NASA officials said the timing would depend on the success of the previous test flights as well as SpaceX\u2019s development of the Starship spacecraft that would meet up with Orion in lunar orbit and ferry the astronauts to the surface of the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven the immense technical challenges, the new vehicles NASA and the space industry are developing and congressional reluctance, it is possible 2025 also is not feasible.To meet that timeline, Nelson said that the estimated cost of developing the Orion program, beginning in 2012 and running through the first crewed mission, would grow from $6.7 billion to $9.3 billion. NASA officials said the increase was driven by changing requirements as well as delays caused by the pandemic.As soon as Blue Origin\u2019s lawsuit was thrown out, Nelson said he was on the phone with Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, to discuss the lunar lander for the first time in months. \u201cWe both underscored the importance of returning to the moon as quickly and safely as possible,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementTo meet the timeline, however, Nelson said the agency would require significant spending increases, and it is unclear how amenable Congress would be to appropriate the additional $5.7 billion over six years that Nelson said the agency would need.Advertisement\u201cAll these ambitious plans are contingent on funding,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I'm going to continue to fight for sustained funding.\u201dHe maintained that the United States needed to get to the moon and fast, casting the program as a Cold War-like space race, only this time against China instead of the Soviet Union. Having landed a rover on Mars and a robotic spacecraft on the far side of the moon, China has big ambitions in space, he said. It is also building a space station in low Earth orbit and is working toward a human landing on the moon, as well.\u201cWe have every reason to believe that we have a competitor, a very aggressive competitor, in the Chinese,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cIt\u2019s the position of NASA and, I believe, the United States government that we want to be first back on the moon. \u2026 And we are getting geared up to go.\u201d Now that Blue Origin\u2019s latest challenge was struck down by a federal court, NASA is moving ahead with SpaceX to resume work as quickly as possible, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. Citing China threat, NASA says moon landing now will come in 2025",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Citing debris threat, NASA abruptly calls off a spacewalk (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6250",
        "date": "2021-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/30/nasa-spacewalk-debris-russia-satellite/",
        "text": "NASA abruptly called off a spacewalk shortly before it was set to begin Tuesday morning after receiving a notification that debris could threaten the astronauts outside the International Space Station.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe notice came just two weeks after Russia fired a missile that destroyed a dead satellite, polluting low Earth orbit with more than 1,500 pieces of debris that forced the astronauts and cosmonauts to evacuate the space station and board their spacecraft in case they had to flee. NASA did not say whether Russia\u2019s satellite strike was the cause of the debris that forced the agency to cancel the spacewalk. But ever since the incident, officials across the globe have condemned it as a wantonly reckless act that could threaten not only the space station but dozens of critical satellites in orbit.Trouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this yearNASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron had been scheduled to step outside the orbiting laboratory at about 7:10 a.m. Eastern time to replace an antenna system. But on Monday evening, NASA received notification of the debris. And in a statement early Tuesday, it said: \u201cDue to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the spacewalk until more information is available. The space station schedule and operations are able to easily accommodate the delay of the spacewalk.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater on Tuesday, the agency said that the spacewalk had been rescheduled to Thursday.In orbit, the space station and debris travel at about 17,500 mph. At that speed, even a small piece of debris can cause enormous damage. If the debris hit and breached the hull of the station, it could force the astronauts to abandon it and head for home, possibly leaving the $100 billion station without any people on board for the first time in 20 years.After the missile strike, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called it \u201coutrageous\u201d and \u201cunconscionable,\u201d and said it was \u201cinexplicable\u201d that the Russians would do such a \u201creckless\u201d and \u201cdangerous\u201d act that endangered the lives of not only Americans on the station but Russians, as well.Story continues below advertisementThe canceled spacewalk comes a day before Vice President Harris is set to oversee the first meeting of the National Space Council under the Biden administration. In a letter Monday, leading members of the Senate Commerce Committee, Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.); Roger Wicker (Miss.), the panel\u2019s top Republican; John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.); and Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.), urged Harris to take action to ensure the viability of low Earth orbit.Companies flood Earth\u2019s orbit with satellites, but no one\u2019s directing traffic\u201cThis recent debris-generating catastrophe raises concerns about maintaining the long-term sustainability of the space environment,\u201d they wrote. \u201cWe request that, at the upcoming National Space Council meeting, you advocate for aligning space sustainability priorities and activities across the Federal Government and work to develop international dialogue on norms of responsible behavior in space.\u201dAdvertisementIn a separate letter Monday to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, the senators urged her to act more urgently to address the issue of space traffic management. \u201cGiven the economic and national security importance of consistent access to the space environment, this test provides a stark reminder that the United States must strengthen its capabilities to monitor and respond to space debris.\u201dIn an email, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, said it was not clear whether the debris from the Russia missile strike threatened the astronauts. He added: \u201cThere are plenty more [pieces] that haven\u2019t been catalogued yet.\u201d It was not clear where the debris came from. Citing debris threat, NASA abruptly calls off a spacewalk",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6251",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/15/with-more-chances-fly-space-than-ever-before-us-astronauts-are-still-unsure-how-they-get-picked/",
        "text": "Like its overachieving predecessors, full of doctorates and service medals, the newest class of NASA astronauts has its share of decorated military officers and esteemed scientists \u2014 even a Navy SEAL who got his medical degree from Harvard. Previous classes may have had John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. But the class of 2020 has Jonny Kim, who \u201ccould kill you and bring you back to life. And do it in space,\u201d as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said earlier this year at a graduation ceremony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChosen from a pool of 18,000 applicants, the most ever in NASA\u2019s history, Kim\u2019s class has opportunities unlike any before it \u2014 the ability to fly on two new commercially developed spacecraft designed to go to the International Space Station, as well as a third capsule intended to take astronauts to the moon.It is a significant change from the previous decade, when, after the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the only way to space was by hitching a ride on a Russian rocket that blasted off from a desolate launchpad in Kazakhstan \u2014 so far away that many Americans didn\u2019t realize NASA\u2019s astronauts were still flying to space routinely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow there is an array of flying options coming to fruition, all launching from Cape Canaveral, that could provide astronauts a variety of flight opportunities not seen in decades. There\u2019s SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which in May became the first spacecraft to launch NASA astronauts from United States soil in nearly a decade. Boeing is also working to get its Starliner capsule ready, with a first crewed flight set for sometime next year. And NASA hopes Lockheed Martin\u2019s Orion spacecraft will fly astronauts on a trip around the moon by 2023.All of which means it\u2019s an exciting time to be an astronaut, especially as the highly coveted assignments for the 48-member NASA astronaut corps in Houston are being handed out. It\u2019s also a chance for NASA to showcase its astronauts and attempt to rekindle the national enthusiasm they once inspired. In the decades since Apollo, when astronauts were household names and revered as heroes, they are now largely anonymous.Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator and a former member of Congress, has led a campaign of sorts to highlight this new generation of astronauts. He\u2019s pushed for astronauts to be able to appear in commercials, even on cereal boxes. That, in turn, would not only raise the agency\u2019s profile in popular culture, but also in Congress at a time when NASA is lobbying reluctant members for the money it needs to return humans to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I\u2019d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,\u201d Bridenstine said in 2018.The last few months have seen a flurry of activity. In May, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first Americans to fly to orbit from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. That test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft opened the door for the first operational mission, scheduled for next month. That flight will feature a crew of four, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.In August, shortly after the return of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, NASA announced that Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough were assigned to SpaceX\u2019s second operational mission, sometime next year. Then a few weeks later, Jeanette Epps was tapped to fly on Boeing\u2019s yet-to-be-flown Starliner. Still to come, in the biggest assignment since Apollo: the crews for the first flights to the moon in about 50 years.But how the assignments get made remains a mysterious process, cloaked in secrecy. As it has from the days of Mercury and Apollo, the astronaut office doesn\u2019t talk much about how it decides who gets to fly or why. When it comes to crew assignments, NASA acts more like the NSA \u2014 the National Security Agency, the clandestine intelligence agency that some say stands for \u201cNever Say Anything.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe process is mysterious on the inside, too,\u201d Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut, said in an interview. \u201cIn the astronaut office we used to say that the only thing more mysterious than being selected to a crew was how you got selected to be an astronaut in the first place.\u201dNo one knows that better than Epps, who had been selected to fly on the Russian Soyuz in a mission that would have made her the first African American to spend an extended period of time on the International Space Station, though six have visited the orbiting laboratory.But in 2018, Epps was suddenly pulled from the mission and replaced by Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor, a fellow astronaut. Rumors swirled \u2014 was it because Epps was Black? Was there a conflict with her Russian counterparts? Even Epps, a former technical intelligence officer at the CIA, was baffled about the move, saying months later, \u201cI\u2019m not sure of the reasons myself.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA number of factors are considered when making flight assignments,\u201d a spokesperson for NASA said at the time. \u201cThese decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn\u2019t provide information.\u201dBut Epps is getting a second shot, this time on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which still needs to be certified by NASA for human flight. Again, there was no explanation for the decision when it was announced last month. Just a terse news release from the Johnson Space Center in Houston that she would join NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada on the mission.\u201cThey keep it very close hold,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, who flew three space shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut and now heads Sierra Nevada Corp.\u2019s space systems business. \u201cYou usually have no idea you\u2019re being considered for a mission.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe selection usually comes as a sudden, and joyous, surprise: \u201cIt can be anywhere anytime,\u201d Kavandi said.In the late 1990s, Kavandi was speaking at an elementary school and \u201cknee-deep in kindergartners\u201d when suddenly she was summoned to the principal\u2019s office to take an urgent phone call from the head of the astronaut office. Filled with dread, she knew this could not be good and girded herself for what was to come.\u201cI just wanted you to know you\u2019ve been assigned to the mission,\u201d she was told.When former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino was chosen for his first flight assignment, a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002, Steve Smith, the deputy chief astronaut, knew the Friday before but was sworn to secrecy until Monday. The pair were friends and neighbors, with kids the same age, and they spent the weekend together.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaturday was Massimino\u2019s birthday, but still Smith couldn\u2019t say a word. So Monday morning at 7:30 a.m., Smith showed up on his neighbor\u2019s front door \u201cand handed me an illustrated children\u2019s book about the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201d\u201cWhat the heck is this for?\u201d Massimino said, according to his memoir, \u201cSpaceman.\u201d\u201cI think you better read up on this,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBecause you\u2019re going to Hubble.\u201dMassimino\u2019s next mission assignment was just as surprising. He and a fellow astronaut were meeting with Steve Lindsey, then the newly appointed head of the astronaut office, to discuss another upcoming mission to the Hubble telescope. The astronauts looked confused as he talked about the particulars, so he stopped and said, \u201cYou do know you\u2019re on it, right?\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere are a few reasons the astronaut office remains so mum about the flight assignments. It\u2019s a personnel decision, and a highly public one, with big egos on the line. But there are also lots of outside influences that would like to exert force over the astronaut office \u2014 including Capitol Hill.AdvertisementThe reticence stems in part \u201cto avoid politics influencing the selection process,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, a space historian and journalist who edits the website CollectSpace.com. \u201cIt could be an opportunity for senators wanting to see their home state astronauts fly.\u201dThere also have been rivalries between the branches of the military that have sent officers to the astronaut corps. And the astronaut office prizes teamwork over individuality. The leadership in Houston strives to remain evenhanded and fair among a few dozen of the most ambitious individuals on the planet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey want to avoid rivalry within the astronaut office itself, which would not be healthy for what is supposed to be a team working together to achieve a common goal,\u201d Pearlman said.Capabilities matter, and so does experience. And the chief astronaut, who is primarily responsible for the decision, looks at a variety of factors, the most important of which is: \u201cWhat is going to make the mission most successful,\u201d said Peggy Whitson, who was chief astronaut from 2009 to 2012, a position now held by Pat Forrester.AdvertisementThe International Space Station is a sort of flying Gilligan\u2019s Island, where everyone has to get along and bring their own individual expertise. If the mission calls for a lot of repairs, you want good space walkers. If there is a lot of science to be done, you want astronauts adept at, say, researching rodents or growing human tissue.\u201cIt gets very complex,\u201d Whitson said. \u201cThere are other factors as well: When\u2019s the last time the person flew? Whose turn is it to fly? Because you want to spread the wealth as much as possible.\u201dWhen it came to the inaugural flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, NASA chose two of its best, Behnken and Hurley. Both are veteran astronauts and former military pilots, whom the agency knew would stay cool in case anything went awry. For future missions, it\u2019s assembling more diverse teams, pairing rookies with seasoned astronauts, scientists with military pilots to give crews a broad expertise.NASA has long looked for a \u201cmix of specialties and backgrounds so that everyone would educate each other with the best of what they knew,\u201d said Michael Cassutt, who has written biographies of Deke Slayton and George Abbey, both NASA legends who spent years selecting astronauts for missions.The evaluation is rigorous, the training intense and the stakes are high because NASA is \u201cabout to give you responsibility for a multibillion-dollar vehicle where errors can be fatal.\u201dBridenstine has said that the agency would send the \u201cnext man and the first woman\u201d to walk on the moon by 2024, an accelerated timeline dictated by the White House. It appears unlikely that the agency will be able to meet that deadline, but it is pressing ahead and plans to send astronauts on a trip to orbit the moon by 2023, as part of its Artemis program.That has had a public relations benefit as well that Bridenstine, in his quest to sell Congress on the White House\u2019s moon plan, has used to woo members, especially Democrats. When he pitched Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at an event last year, he got this reaction: \u201cI look forward to a woman astronaut landing on the moon,\u201d Eshoo said.\u201cAs far as having a woman step foot on the moon, our hopes are riding on you, Jim.\u201dThe selection of the astronauts for those missions would be the most anticipated crew assignments since the Apollo-era 50 years ago. But it will be different in one key respect, Bridenstine said: He would like to see the missions showcase an astronaut corps that is far more diverse than those of the 1960s and \u201970s.\u201cWhen we do select the corps of astronauts that will be flying, they must be reflective of the nation as a whole,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s about inspiration. We want every single person to be able to see themselves doing what these American heroes are doing.\u201d Mystery has always surrounded the process of choosing who gets a mission As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6252",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/15/with-more-chances-fly-space-than-ever-before-us-astronauts-are-still-unsure-how-they-get-picked/",
        "text": "Like its overachieving predecessors, full of doctorates and service medals, the newest class of NASA astronauts has its share of decorated military officers and esteemed scientists \u2014 even a Navy SEAL who got his medical degree from Harvard. Previous classes may have had John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. But the class of 2020 has Jonny Kim, who \u201ccould kill you and bring you back to life. And do it in space,\u201d as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said earlier this year at a graduation ceremony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChosen from a pool of 18,000 applicants, the most ever in NASA\u2019s history, Kim\u2019s class has opportunities unlike any before it \u2014 the ability to fly on two new commercially developed spacecraft designed to go to the International Space Station, as well as a third capsule intended to take astronauts to the moon.It is a significant change from the previous decade, when, after the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the only way to space was by hitching a ride on a Russian rocket that blasted off from a desolate launchpad in Kazakhstan \u2014 so far away that many Americans didn\u2019t realize NASA\u2019s astronauts were still flying to space routinely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow there is an array of flying options coming to fruition, all launching from Cape Canaveral, that could provide astronauts a variety of flight opportunities not seen in decades. There\u2019s SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which in May became the first spacecraft to launch NASA astronauts from United States soil in nearly a decade. Boeing is also working to get its Starliner capsule ready, with a first crewed flight set for sometime next year. And NASA hopes Lockheed Martin\u2019s Orion spacecraft will fly astronauts on a trip around the moon by 2023.All of which means it\u2019s an exciting time to be an astronaut, especially as the highly coveted assignments for the 48-member NASA astronaut corps in Houston are being handed out. It\u2019s also a chance for NASA to showcase its astronauts and attempt to rekindle the national enthusiasm they once inspired. In the decades since Apollo, when astronauts were household names and revered as heroes, they are now largely anonymous.Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator and a former member of Congress, has led a campaign of sorts to highlight this new generation of astronauts. He\u2019s pushed for astronauts to be able to appear in commercials, even on cereal boxes. That, in turn, would not only raise the agency\u2019s profile in popular culture, but also in Congress at a time when NASA is lobbying reluctant members for the money it needs to return humans to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I\u2019d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,\u201d Bridenstine said in 2018.The last few months have seen a flurry of activity. In May, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first Americans to fly to orbit from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. That test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft opened the door for the first operational mission, scheduled for next month. That flight will feature a crew of four, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.In August, shortly after the return of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, NASA announced that Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough were assigned to SpaceX\u2019s second operational mission, sometime next year. Then a few weeks later, Jeanette Epps was tapped to fly on Boeing\u2019s yet-to-be-flown Starliner. Still to come, in the biggest assignment since Apollo: the crews for the first flights to the moon in about 50 years.But how the assignments get made remains a mysterious process, cloaked in secrecy. As it has from the days of Mercury and Apollo, the astronaut office doesn\u2019t talk much about how it decides who gets to fly or why. When it comes to crew assignments, NASA acts more like the NSA \u2014 the National Security Agency, the clandestine intelligence agency that some say stands for \u201cNever Say Anything.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe process is mysterious on the inside, too,\u201d Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut, said in an interview. \u201cIn the astronaut office we used to say that the only thing more mysterious than being selected to a crew was how you got selected to be an astronaut in the first place.\u201dNo one knows that better than Epps, who had been selected to fly on the Russian Soyuz in a mission that would have made her the first African American to spend an extended period of time on the International Space Station, though six have visited the orbiting laboratory.But in 2018, Epps was suddenly pulled from the mission and replaced by Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor, a fellow astronaut. Rumors swirled \u2014 was it because Epps was Black? Was there a conflict with her Russian counterparts? Even Epps, a former technical intelligence officer at the CIA, was baffled about the move, saying months later, \u201cI\u2019m not sure of the reasons myself.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA number of factors are considered when making flight assignments,\u201d a spokesperson for NASA said at the time. \u201cThese decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn\u2019t provide information.\u201dBut Epps is getting a second shot, this time on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which still needs to be certified by NASA for human flight. Again, there was no explanation for the decision when it was announced last month. Just a terse news release from the Johnson Space Center in Houston that she would join NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada on the mission.\u201cThey keep it very close hold,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, who flew three space shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut and now heads Sierra Nevada Corp.\u2019s space systems business. \u201cYou usually have no idea you\u2019re being considered for a mission.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe selection usually comes as a sudden, and joyous, surprise: \u201cIt can be anywhere anytime,\u201d Kavandi said.In the late 1990s, Kavandi was speaking at an elementary school and \u201cknee-deep in kindergartners\u201d when suddenly she was summoned to the principal\u2019s office to take an urgent phone call from the head of the astronaut office. Filled with dread, she knew this could not be good and girded herself for what was to come.\u201cI just wanted you to know you\u2019ve been assigned to the mission,\u201d she was told.When former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino was chosen for his first flight assignment, a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002, Steve Smith, the deputy chief astronaut, knew the Friday before but was sworn to secrecy until Monday. The pair were friends and neighbors, with kids the same age, and they spent the weekend together.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaturday was Massimino\u2019s birthday, but still Smith couldn\u2019t say a word. So Monday morning at 7:30 a.m., Smith showed up on his neighbor\u2019s front door \u201cand handed me an illustrated children\u2019s book about the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201d\u201cWhat the heck is this for?\u201d Massimino said, according to his memoir, \u201cSpaceman.\u201d\u201cI think you better read up on this,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBecause you\u2019re going to Hubble.\u201dMassimino\u2019s next mission assignment was just as surprising. He and a fellow astronaut were meeting with Steve Lindsey, then the newly appointed head of the astronaut office, to discuss another upcoming mission to the Hubble telescope. The astronauts looked confused as he talked about the particulars, so he stopped and said, \u201cYou do know you\u2019re on it, right?\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere are a few reasons the astronaut office remains so mum about the flight assignments. It\u2019s a personnel decision, and a highly public one, with big egos on the line. But there are also lots of outside influences that would like to exert force over the astronaut office \u2014 including Capitol Hill.AdvertisementThe reticence stems in part \u201cto avoid politics influencing the selection process,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, a space historian and journalist who edits the website CollectSpace.com. \u201cIt could be an opportunity for senators wanting to see their home state astronauts fly.\u201dThere also have been rivalries between the branches of the military that have sent officers to the astronaut corps. And the astronaut office prizes teamwork over individuality. The leadership in Houston strives to remain evenhanded and fair among a few dozen of the most ambitious individuals on the planet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey want to avoid rivalry within the astronaut office itself, which would not be healthy for what is supposed to be a team working together to achieve a common goal,\u201d Pearlman said.Capabilities matter, and so does experience. And the chief astronaut, who is primarily responsible for the decision, looks at a variety of factors, the most important of which is: \u201cWhat is going to make the mission most successful,\u201d said Peggy Whitson, who was chief astronaut from 2009 to 2012, a position now held by Pat Forrester.AdvertisementThe International Space Station is a sort of flying Gilligan\u2019s Island, where everyone has to get along and bring their own individual expertise. If the mission calls for a lot of repairs, you want good space walkers. If there is a lot of science to be done, you want astronauts adept at, say, researching rodents or growing human tissue.\u201cIt gets very complex,\u201d Whitson said. \u201cThere are other factors as well: When\u2019s the last time the person flew? Whose turn is it to fly? Because you want to spread the wealth as much as possible.\u201dWhen it came to the inaugural flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, NASA chose two of its best, Behnken and Hurley. Both are veteran astronauts and former military pilots, whom the agency knew would stay cool in case anything went awry. For future missions, it\u2019s assembling more diverse teams, pairing rookies with seasoned astronauts, scientists with military pilots to give crews a broad expertise.NASA has long looked for a \u201cmix of specialties and backgrounds so that everyone would educate each other with the best of what they knew,\u201d said Michael Cassutt, who has written biographies of Deke Slayton and George Abbey, both NASA legends who spent years selecting astronauts for missions.The evaluation is rigorous, the training intense and the stakes are high because NASA is \u201cabout to give you responsibility for a multibillion-dollar vehicle where errors can be fatal.\u201dBridenstine has said that the agency would send the \u201cnext man and the first woman\u201d to walk on the moon by 2024, an accelerated timeline dictated by the White House. It appears unlikely that the agency will be able to meet that deadline, but it is pressing ahead and plans to send astronauts on a trip to orbit the moon by 2023, as part of its Artemis program.That has had a public relations benefit as well that Bridenstine, in his quest to sell Congress on the White House\u2019s moon plan, has used to woo members, especially Democrats. When he pitched Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at an event last year, he got this reaction: \u201cI look forward to a woman astronaut landing on the moon,\u201d Eshoo said.\u201cAs far as having a woman step foot on the moon, our hopes are riding on you, Jim.\u201dThe selection of the astronauts for those missions would be the most anticipated crew assignments since the Apollo-era 50 years ago. But it will be different in one key respect, Bridenstine said: He would like to see the missions showcase an astronaut corps that is far more diverse than those of the 1960s and \u201970s.\u201cWhen we do select the corps of astronauts that will be flying, they must be reflective of the nation as a whole,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s about inspiration. We want every single person to be able to see themselves doing what these American heroes are doing.\u201d Mystery has always surrounded the process of choosing who gets a mission As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6253",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/15/with-more-chances-fly-space-than-ever-before-us-astronauts-are-still-unsure-how-they-get-picked/",
        "text": "Like its overachieving predecessors, full of doctorates and service medals, the newest class of NASA astronauts has its share of decorated military officers and esteemed scientists \u2014 even a Navy SEAL who got his medical degree from Harvard. Previous classes may have had John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. But the class of 2020 has Jonny Kim, who \u201ccould kill you and bring you back to life. And do it in space,\u201d as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said earlier this year at a graduation ceremony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChosen from a pool of 18,000 applicants, the most ever in NASA\u2019s history, Kim\u2019s class has opportunities unlike any before it \u2014 the ability to fly on two new commercially developed spacecraft designed to go to the International Space Station, as well as a third capsule intended to take astronauts to the moon.It is a significant change from the previous decade, when, after the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the only way to space was by hitching a ride on a Russian rocket that blasted off from a desolate launchpad in Kazakhstan \u2014 so far away that many Americans didn\u2019t realize NASA\u2019s astronauts were still flying to space routinely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow there is an array of flying options coming to fruition, all launching from Cape Canaveral, that could provide astronauts a variety of flight opportunities not seen in decades. There\u2019s SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which in May became the first spacecraft to launch NASA astronauts from United States soil in nearly a decade. Boeing is also working to get its Starliner capsule ready, with a first crewed flight set for sometime next year. And NASA hopes Lockheed Martin\u2019s Orion spacecraft will fly astronauts on a trip around the moon by 2023.All of which means it\u2019s an exciting time to be an astronaut, especially as the highly coveted assignments for the 48-member NASA astronaut corps in Houston are being handed out. It\u2019s also a chance for NASA to showcase its astronauts and attempt to rekindle the national enthusiasm they once inspired. In the decades since Apollo, when astronauts were household names and revered as heroes, they are now largely anonymous.Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator and a former member of Congress, has led a campaign of sorts to highlight this new generation of astronauts. He\u2019s pushed for astronauts to be able to appear in commercials, even on cereal boxes. That, in turn, would not only raise the agency\u2019s profile in popular culture, but also in Congress at a time when NASA is lobbying reluctant members for the money it needs to return humans to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I\u2019d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,\u201d Bridenstine said in 2018.The last few months have seen a flurry of activity. In May, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first Americans to fly to orbit from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. That test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft opened the door for the first operational mission, scheduled for next month. That flight will feature a crew of four, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.In August, shortly after the return of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, NASA announced that Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough were assigned to SpaceX\u2019s second operational mission, sometime next year. Then a few weeks later, Jeanette Epps was tapped to fly on Boeing\u2019s yet-to-be-flown Starliner. Still to come, in the biggest assignment since Apollo: the crews for the first flights to the moon in about 50 years.But how the assignments get made remains a mysterious process, cloaked in secrecy. As it has from the days of Mercury and Apollo, the astronaut office doesn\u2019t talk much about how it decides who gets to fly or why. When it comes to crew assignments, NASA acts more like the NSA \u2014 the National Security Agency, the clandestine intelligence agency that some say stands for \u201cNever Say Anything.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe process is mysterious on the inside, too,\u201d Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut, said in an interview. \u201cIn the astronaut office we used to say that the only thing more mysterious than being selected to a crew was how you got selected to be an astronaut in the first place.\u201dNo one knows that better than Epps, who had been selected to fly on the Russian Soyuz in a mission that would have made her the first African American to spend an extended period of time on the International Space Station, though six have visited the orbiting laboratory.But in 2018, Epps was suddenly pulled from the mission and replaced by Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor, a fellow astronaut. Rumors swirled \u2014 was it because Epps was Black? Was there a conflict with her Russian counterparts? Even Epps, a former technical intelligence officer at the CIA, was baffled about the move, saying months later, \u201cI\u2019m not sure of the reasons myself.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA number of factors are considered when making flight assignments,\u201d a spokesperson for NASA said at the time. \u201cThese decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn\u2019t provide information.\u201dBut Epps is getting a second shot, this time on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which still needs to be certified by NASA for human flight. Again, there was no explanation for the decision when it was announced last month. Just a terse news release from the Johnson Space Center in Houston that she would join NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada on the mission.\u201cThey keep it very close hold,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, who flew three space shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut and now heads Sierra Nevada Corp.\u2019s space systems business. \u201cYou usually have no idea you\u2019re being considered for a mission.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe selection usually comes as a sudden, and joyous, surprise: \u201cIt can be anywhere anytime,\u201d Kavandi said.In the late 1990s, Kavandi was speaking at an elementary school and \u201cknee-deep in kindergartners\u201d when suddenly she was summoned to the principal\u2019s office to take an urgent phone call from the head of the astronaut office. Filled with dread, she knew this could not be good and girded herself for what was to come.\u201cI just wanted you to know you\u2019ve been assigned to the mission,\u201d she was told.When former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino was chosen for his first flight assignment, a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002, Steve Smith, the deputy chief astronaut, knew the Friday before but was sworn to secrecy until Monday. The pair were friends and neighbors, with kids the same age, and they spent the weekend together.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaturday was Massimino\u2019s birthday, but still Smith couldn\u2019t say a word. So Monday morning at 7:30 a.m., Smith showed up on his neighbor\u2019s front door \u201cand handed me an illustrated children\u2019s book about the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201d\u201cWhat the heck is this for?\u201d Massimino said, according to his memoir, \u201cSpaceman.\u201d\u201cI think you better read up on this,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBecause you\u2019re going to Hubble.\u201dMassimino\u2019s next mission assignment was just as surprising. He and a fellow astronaut were meeting with Steve Lindsey, then the newly appointed head of the astronaut office, to discuss another upcoming mission to the Hubble telescope. The astronauts looked confused as he talked about the particulars, so he stopped and said, \u201cYou do know you\u2019re on it, right?\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere are a few reasons the astronaut office remains so mum about the flight assignments. It\u2019s a personnel decision, and a highly public one, with big egos on the line. But there are also lots of outside influences that would like to exert force over the astronaut office \u2014 including Capitol Hill.AdvertisementThe reticence stems in part \u201cto avoid politics influencing the selection process,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, a space historian and journalist who edits the website CollectSpace.com. \u201cIt could be an opportunity for senators wanting to see their home state astronauts fly.\u201dThere also have been rivalries between the branches of the military that have sent officers to the astronaut corps. And the astronaut office prizes teamwork over individuality. The leadership in Houston strives to remain evenhanded and fair among a few dozen of the most ambitious individuals on the planet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey want to avoid rivalry within the astronaut office itself, which would not be healthy for what is supposed to be a team working together to achieve a common goal,\u201d Pearlman said.Capabilities matter, and so does experience. And the chief astronaut, who is primarily responsible for the decision, looks at a variety of factors, the most important of which is: \u201cWhat is going to make the mission most successful,\u201d said Peggy Whitson, who was chief astronaut from 2009 to 2012, a position now held by Pat Forrester.AdvertisementThe International Space Station is a sort of flying Gilligan\u2019s Island, where everyone has to get along and bring their own individual expertise. If the mission calls for a lot of repairs, you want good space walkers. If there is a lot of science to be done, you want astronauts adept at, say, researching rodents or growing human tissue.\u201cIt gets very complex,\u201d Whitson said. \u201cThere are other factors as well: When\u2019s the last time the person flew? Whose turn is it to fly? Because you want to spread the wealth as much as possible.\u201dWhen it came to the inaugural flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, NASA chose two of its best, Behnken and Hurley. Both are veteran astronauts and former military pilots, whom the agency knew would stay cool in case anything went awry. For future missions, it\u2019s assembling more diverse teams, pairing rookies with seasoned astronauts, scientists with military pilots to give crews a broad expertise.NASA has long looked for a \u201cmix of specialties and backgrounds so that everyone would educate each other with the best of what they knew,\u201d said Michael Cassutt, who has written biographies of Deke Slayton and George Abbey, both NASA legends who spent years selecting astronauts for missions.The evaluation is rigorous, the training intense and the stakes are high because NASA is \u201cabout to give you responsibility for a multibillion-dollar vehicle where errors can be fatal.\u201dBridenstine has said that the agency would send the \u201cnext man and the first woman\u201d to walk on the moon by 2024, an accelerated timeline dictated by the White House. It appears unlikely that the agency will be able to meet that deadline, but it is pressing ahead and plans to send astronauts on a trip to orbit the moon by 2023, as part of its Artemis program.That has had a public relations benefit as well that Bridenstine, in his quest to sell Congress on the White House\u2019s moon plan, has used to woo members, especially Democrats. When he pitched Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at an event last year, he got this reaction: \u201cI look forward to a woman astronaut landing on the moon,\u201d Eshoo said.\u201cAs far as having a woman step foot on the moon, our hopes are riding on you, Jim.\u201dThe selection of the astronauts for those missions would be the most anticipated crew assignments since the Apollo-era 50 years ago. But it will be different in one key respect, Bridenstine said: He would like to see the missions showcase an astronaut corps that is far more diverse than those of the 1960s and \u201970s.\u201cWhen we do select the corps of astronauts that will be flying, they must be reflective of the nation as a whole,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s about inspiration. We want every single person to be able to see themselves doing what these American heroes are doing.\u201d Mystery has always surrounded the process of choosing who gets a mission As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6254",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/15/with-more-chances-fly-space-than-ever-before-us-astronauts-are-still-unsure-how-they-get-picked/",
        "text": "Like its overachieving predecessors, full of doctorates and service medals, the newest class of NASA astronauts has its share of decorated military officers and esteemed scientists \u2014 even a Navy SEAL who got his medical degree from Harvard. Previous classes may have had John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. But the class of 2020 has Jonny Kim, who \u201ccould kill you and bring you back to life. And do it in space,\u201d as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said earlier this year at a graduation ceremony. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChosen from a pool of 18,000 applicants, the most ever in NASA\u2019s history, Kim\u2019s class has opportunities unlike any before it \u2014 the ability to fly on two new commercially developed spacecraft designed to go to the International Space Station, as well as a third capsule intended to take astronauts to the moon.It is a significant change from the previous decade, when, after the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the only way to space was by hitching a ride on a Russian rocket that blasted off from a desolate launchpad in Kazakhstan \u2014 so far away that many Americans didn\u2019t realize NASA\u2019s astronauts were still flying to space routinely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow there is an array of flying options coming to fruition, all launching from Cape Canaveral, that could provide astronauts a variety of flight opportunities not seen in decades. There\u2019s SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which in May became the first spacecraft to launch NASA astronauts from United States soil in nearly a decade. Boeing is also working to get its Starliner capsule ready, with a first crewed flight set for sometime next year. And NASA hopes Lockheed Martin\u2019s Orion spacecraft will fly astronauts on a trip around the moon by 2023.All of which means it\u2019s an exciting time to be an astronaut, especially as the highly coveted assignments for the 48-member NASA astronaut corps in Houston are being handed out. It\u2019s also a chance for NASA to showcase its astronauts and attempt to rekindle the national enthusiasm they once inspired. In the decades since Apollo, when astronauts were household names and revered as heroes, they are now largely anonymous.Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator and a former member of Congress, has led a campaign of sorts to highlight this new generation of astronauts. He\u2019s pushed for astronauts to be able to appear in commercials, even on cereal boxes. That, in turn, would not only raise the agency\u2019s profile in popular culture, but also in Congress at a time when NASA is lobbying reluctant members for the money it needs to return humans to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I\u2019d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,\u201d Bridenstine said in 2018.The last few months have seen a flurry of activity. In May, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first Americans to fly to orbit from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. That test flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft opened the door for the first operational mission, scheduled for next month. That flight will feature a crew of four, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi.In August, shortly after the return of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, NASA announced that Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough were assigned to SpaceX\u2019s second operational mission, sometime next year. Then a few weeks later, Jeanette Epps was tapped to fly on Boeing\u2019s yet-to-be-flown Starliner. Still to come, in the biggest assignment since Apollo: the crews for the first flights to the moon in about 50 years.But how the assignments get made remains a mysterious process, cloaked in secrecy. As it has from the days of Mercury and Apollo, the astronaut office doesn\u2019t talk much about how it decides who gets to fly or why. When it comes to crew assignments, NASA acts more like the NSA \u2014 the National Security Agency, the clandestine intelligence agency that some say stands for \u201cNever Say Anything.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe process is mysterious on the inside, too,\u201d Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut, said in an interview. \u201cIn the astronaut office we used to say that the only thing more mysterious than being selected to a crew was how you got selected to be an astronaut in the first place.\u201dNo one knows that better than Epps, who had been selected to fly on the Russian Soyuz in a mission that would have made her the first African American to spend an extended period of time on the International Space Station, though six have visited the orbiting laboratory.But in 2018, Epps was suddenly pulled from the mission and replaced by Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor, a fellow astronaut. Rumors swirled \u2014 was it because Epps was Black? Was there a conflict with her Russian counterparts? Even Epps, a former technical intelligence officer at the CIA, was baffled about the move, saying months later, \u201cI\u2019m not sure of the reasons myself.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA number of factors are considered when making flight assignments,\u201d a spokesperson for NASA said at the time. \u201cThese decisions are personnel matters for which NASA doesn\u2019t provide information.\u201dBut Epps is getting a second shot, this time on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, which still needs to be certified by NASA for human flight. Again, there was no explanation for the decision when it was announced last month. Just a terse news release from the Johnson Space Center in Houston that she would join NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Josh Cassada on the mission.\u201cThey keep it very close hold,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, who flew three space shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut and now heads Sierra Nevada Corp.\u2019s space systems business. \u201cYou usually have no idea you\u2019re being considered for a mission.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe selection usually comes as a sudden, and joyous, surprise: \u201cIt can be anywhere anytime,\u201d Kavandi said.In the late 1990s, Kavandi was speaking at an elementary school and \u201cknee-deep in kindergartners\u201d when suddenly she was summoned to the principal\u2019s office to take an urgent phone call from the head of the astronaut office. Filled with dread, she knew this could not be good and girded herself for what was to come.\u201cI just wanted you to know you\u2019ve been assigned to the mission,\u201d she was told.When former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino was chosen for his first flight assignment, a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002, Steve Smith, the deputy chief astronaut, knew the Friday before but was sworn to secrecy until Monday. The pair were friends and neighbors, with kids the same age, and they spent the weekend together.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaturday was Massimino\u2019s birthday, but still Smith couldn\u2019t say a word. So Monday morning at 7:30 a.m., Smith showed up on his neighbor\u2019s front door \u201cand handed me an illustrated children\u2019s book about the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201d\u201cWhat the heck is this for?\u201d Massimino said, according to his memoir, \u201cSpaceman.\u201d\u201cI think you better read up on this,\u201d Smith said. \u201cBecause you\u2019re going to Hubble.\u201dMassimino\u2019s next mission assignment was just as surprising. He and a fellow astronaut were meeting with Steve Lindsey, then the newly appointed head of the astronaut office, to discuss another upcoming mission to the Hubble telescope. The astronauts looked confused as he talked about the particulars, so he stopped and said, \u201cYou do know you\u2019re on it, right?\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere are a few reasons the astronaut office remains so mum about the flight assignments. It\u2019s a personnel decision, and a highly public one, with big egos on the line. But there are also lots of outside influences that would like to exert force over the astronaut office \u2014 including Capitol Hill.AdvertisementThe reticence stems in part \u201cto avoid politics influencing the selection process,\u201d said Robert Pearlman, a space historian and journalist who edits the website CollectSpace.com. \u201cIt could be an opportunity for senators wanting to see their home state astronauts fly.\u201dThere also have been rivalries between the branches of the military that have sent officers to the astronaut corps. And the astronaut office prizes teamwork over individuality. The leadership in Houston strives to remain evenhanded and fair among a few dozen of the most ambitious individuals on the planet.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey want to avoid rivalry within the astronaut office itself, which would not be healthy for what is supposed to be a team working together to achieve a common goal,\u201d Pearlman said.Capabilities matter, and so does experience. And the chief astronaut, who is primarily responsible for the decision, looks at a variety of factors, the most important of which is: \u201cWhat is going to make the mission most successful,\u201d said Peggy Whitson, who was chief astronaut from 2009 to 2012, a position now held by Pat Forrester.AdvertisementThe International Space Station is a sort of flying Gilligan\u2019s Island, where everyone has to get along and bring their own individual expertise. If the mission calls for a lot of repairs, you want good space walkers. If there is a lot of science to be done, you want astronauts adept at, say, researching rodents or growing human tissue.\u201cIt gets very complex,\u201d Whitson said. \u201cThere are other factors as well: When\u2019s the last time the person flew? Whose turn is it to fly? Because you want to spread the wealth as much as possible.\u201dWhen it came to the inaugural flight of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon, NASA chose two of its best, Behnken and Hurley. Both are veteran astronauts and former military pilots, whom the agency knew would stay cool in case anything went awry. For future missions, it\u2019s assembling more diverse teams, pairing rookies with seasoned astronauts, scientists with military pilots to give crews a broad expertise.NASA has long looked for a \u201cmix of specialties and backgrounds so that everyone would educate each other with the best of what they knew,\u201d said Michael Cassutt, who has written biographies of Deke Slayton and George Abbey, both NASA legends who spent years selecting astronauts for missions.The evaluation is rigorous, the training intense and the stakes are high because NASA is \u201cabout to give you responsibility for a multibillion-dollar vehicle where errors can be fatal.\u201dBridenstine has said that the agency would send the \u201cnext man and the first woman\u201d to walk on the moon by 2024, an accelerated timeline dictated by the White House. It appears unlikely that the agency will be able to meet that deadline, but it is pressing ahead and plans to send astronauts on a trip to orbit the moon by 2023, as part of its Artemis program.That has had a public relations benefit as well that Bridenstine, in his quest to sell Congress on the White House\u2019s moon plan, has used to woo members, especially Democrats. When he pitched Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at an event last year, he got this reaction: \u201cI look forward to a woman astronaut landing on the moon,\u201d Eshoo said.\u201cAs far as having a woman step foot on the moon, our hopes are riding on you, Jim.\u201dThe selection of the astronauts for those missions would be the most anticipated crew assignments since the Apollo-era 50 years ago. But it will be different in one key respect, Bridenstine said: He would like to see the missions showcase an astronaut corps that is far more diverse than those of the 1960s and \u201970s.\u201cWhen we do select the corps of astronauts that will be flying, they must be reflective of the nation as a whole,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s about inspiration. We want every single person to be able to see themselves doing what these American heroes are doing.\u201d Mystery has always surrounded the process of choosing who gets a mission As the possibility of going to space grows, U.S. astronauts still don\u2019t know how they get picked to fly",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range. Mission to include first-ever helicopter exploration.  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6255",
        "date": "2020-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/17/mars-rover-nasa-launch/",
        "text": "Landing a spacecraft on Mars is hard enough. Doing it during a global pandemic makes the hair-raising task \u2014 \u201cterror\u201d is a word often associated with Mars landings \u2014 even more difficult. But NASA is pushing ahead with its plans to send a rover to Mars and remains on track to launch the spacecraft next month from Cape Canaveral, Fla., officials said Wednesday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen again, NASA is facing a tight deadline.Mars and Earth are only on the same side of the sun every 26 months, meaning NASA has a limited window to launch the spacecraft to the Red Planet. Storing the spacecraft and waiting another two years for the next opportunity could have cost \u201chalf a billion dollars,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a news briefing Wednesday, so the space agency made the mission a high priority, despite the coronavirus pandemic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the difficulties of working amid the virus, officials said they have made significant progress on what they called one of the most ambitious and significant robotic programs the space agency has tackled in years.Dubbed \u201cPerseverance,\u201d the SUV-size rover would embark on a $2.7 billion exploration mission to search for ancient signs of life on Mars and begin the first leg of an attempt to bring samples from the Red Planet back to Earth. Over the course of a mission that is expected to last some two years on the surface, the rover would also study the planet\u2019s climate and geology and help pave the way for human exploration, NASA said.The spacecraft also will be carrying a small helicopter, called \u201cIngenuity,\u201d which would become the first rotorcraft to fly on another planet.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes well, the spacecraft would lift off on an Atlas V rocket from the Florida Space Coast on July 20 and land on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. For the landing site, NASA has chosen a crater called Jezero, the site of an ancient lake as well as a delta, where there are rocks that date back 4 billion years. Perseverance is expected to scour the area, drilling for samples and signs of habitable conditions and even signs of ancient microbial life.Advertisement\u201cThe rover will study the record that is preserved in layers of rock on the surface of Mars \u2026 that could have proved evidence of the chemical building blocks of life,\u201d said Lori Glaze, the director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division.The rover would stockpile the samples on the Martian surface, to be picked up on a subsequent mission, to launch to Mars in 2026, for return to Earth. That would be a first, Glaze said.Story continues below advertisementScientists have studied samples of meteorites that have come from Mars, but \u201cit\u2019s not the same as getting an actual sample of pristine Mars rock and soil to study,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd now we\u2019re at a point where we can begin to attempt his amazing feat.\u201dWith six wheels designed to handle the rugged Martian terrain, Perseverance in many ways looks like Curiosity, one of its predecessors on Mars. But it\u2019s a \u201cnew vehicle with new capabilities,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the Perseverance deputy program manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.AdvertisementThe spacecraft would be outfitted with a more powerful computer that would help guide it to the surface and help it avoid hazardous areas, such as rock piles. It would also have high-resolution cameras to record the landing.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe should be able to watch this big parachute inflate supersonically,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cWe should be able to watch the rover deploy and touch down on the surface. And this is going to be very exciting \u2014 the first time that we have ever been able to see a spacecraft land on another planet.\u201dNASA said it hopes the mission will pave the way for an eventual human mission to the Red Planet. It is aggressively pursuing a return to the moon under its Artemis program, which aims to have astronauts there by 2024. NASA ultimately would like to operate a space station in lunar orbit known as the Gateway that could become a jumping off point for Mars.AdvertisementIn addition to probing for signs of ancient life on and below the Martian surface, the Perseverance mission would also take to the skies. The Ingenuity helicopter would attempt to fly \u2014 an exceedingly difficult task given that the \u201catmosphere on Mars is only one percent the density that we have here on Earth,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cTrying to control a system like this under those conditions is not easy.\u201dNASA said it hopes to get at least three flights from the helicopter, but it stressed that it was purely a technology demonstration mission and that it would take each one as they come.It\u2019s possible, though, that the rover might be able to zoom in and snap a photograph of the helicopter hovering above the planet\u2019s red soil. Mars and Earth are only on the same side of the sun every 26 months, meaning NASA has a limited window to launch the spacecraft to the Red Planet. NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range. Mission to include first-ever helicopter exploration. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range. Mission to include first-ever helicopter exploration.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6256",
        "date": "2020-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/17/mars-rover-nasa-launch/",
        "text": "Landing a spacecraft on Mars is hard enough. Doing it during a global pandemic makes the hair-raising task \u2014 \u201cterror\u201d is a word often associated with Mars landings \u2014 even more difficult. But NASA is pushing ahead with its plans to send a rover to Mars and remains on track to launch the spacecraft next month from Cape Canaveral, Fla., officials said Wednesday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen again, NASA is facing a tight deadline.Mars and Earth are only on the same side of the sun every 26 months, meaning NASA has a limited window to launch the spacecraft to the Red Planet. Storing the spacecraft and waiting another two years for the next opportunity could have cost \u201chalf a billion dollars,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a news briefing Wednesday, so the space agency made the mission a high priority, despite the coronavirus pandemic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the difficulties of working amid the virus, officials said they have made significant progress on what they called one of the most ambitious and significant robotic programs the space agency has tackled in years.Dubbed \u201cPerseverance,\u201d the SUV-size rover would embark on a $2.7 billion exploration mission to search for ancient signs of life on Mars and begin the first leg of an attempt to bring samples from the Red Planet back to Earth. Over the course of a mission that is expected to last some two years on the surface, the rover would also study the planet\u2019s climate and geology and help pave the way for human exploration, NASA said.The spacecraft also will be carrying a small helicopter, called \u201cIngenuity,\u201d which would become the first rotorcraft to fly on another planet.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes well, the spacecraft would lift off on an Atlas V rocket from the Florida Space Coast on July 20 and land on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. For the landing site, NASA has chosen a crater called Jezero, the site of an ancient lake as well as a delta, where there are rocks that date back 4 billion years. Perseverance is expected to scour the area, drilling for samples and signs of habitable conditions and even signs of ancient microbial life.Advertisement\u201cThe rover will study the record that is preserved in layers of rock on the surface of Mars \u2026 that could have proved evidence of the chemical building blocks of life,\u201d said Lori Glaze, the director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division.The rover would stockpile the samples on the Martian surface, to be picked up on a subsequent mission, to launch to Mars in 2026, for return to Earth. That would be a first, Glaze said.Story continues below advertisementScientists have studied samples of meteorites that have come from Mars, but \u201cit\u2019s not the same as getting an actual sample of pristine Mars rock and soil to study,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd now we\u2019re at a point where we can begin to attempt his amazing feat.\u201dWith six wheels designed to handle the rugged Martian terrain, Perseverance in many ways looks like Curiosity, one of its predecessors on Mars. But it\u2019s a \u201cnew vehicle with new capabilities,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the Perseverance deputy program manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.AdvertisementThe spacecraft would be outfitted with a more powerful computer that would help guide it to the surface and help it avoid hazardous areas, such as rock piles. It would also have high-resolution cameras to record the landing.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe should be able to watch this big parachute inflate supersonically,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cWe should be able to watch the rover deploy and touch down on the surface. And this is going to be very exciting \u2014 the first time that we have ever been able to see a spacecraft land on another planet.\u201dNASA said it hopes the mission will pave the way for an eventual human mission to the Red Planet. It is aggressively pursuing a return to the moon under its Artemis program, which aims to have astronauts there by 2024. NASA ultimately would like to operate a space station in lunar orbit known as the Gateway that could become a jumping off point for Mars.AdvertisementIn addition to probing for signs of ancient life on and below the Martian surface, the Perseverance mission would also take to the skies. The Ingenuity helicopter would attempt to fly \u2014 an exceedingly difficult task given that the \u201catmosphere on Mars is only one percent the density that we have here on Earth,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cTrying to control a system like this under those conditions is not easy.\u201dNASA said it hopes to get at least three flights from the helicopter, but it stressed that it was purely a technology demonstration mission and that it would take each one as they come.It\u2019s possible, though, that the rover might be able to zoom in and snap a photograph of the helicopter hovering above the planet\u2019s red soil. Mars and Earth are only on the same side of the sun every 26 months, meaning NASA has a limited window to launch the spacecraft to the Red Planet. NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range. Mission to include first-ever helicopter exploration. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range. Mission to include first-ever helicopter exploration.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6257",
        "date": "2020-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/17/mars-rover-nasa-launch/",
        "text": "Landing a spacecraft on Mars is hard enough. Doing it during a global pandemic makes the hair-raising task \u2014 \u201cterror\u201d is a word often associated with Mars landings \u2014 even more difficult. But NASA is pushing ahead with its plans to send a rover to Mars and remains on track to launch the spacecraft next month from Cape Canaveral, Fla., officials said Wednesday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen again, NASA is facing a tight deadline.Mars and Earth are only on the same side of the sun every 26 months, meaning NASA has a limited window to launch the spacecraft to the Red Planet. Storing the spacecraft and waiting another two years for the next opportunity could have cost \u201chalf a billion dollars,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a news briefing Wednesday, so the space agency made the mission a high priority, despite the coronavirus pandemic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the difficulties of working amid the virus, officials said they have made significant progress on what they called one of the most ambitious and significant robotic programs the space agency has tackled in years.Dubbed \u201cPerseverance,\u201d the SUV-size rover would embark on a $2.7 billion exploration mission to search for ancient signs of life on Mars and begin the first leg of an attempt to bring samples from the Red Planet back to Earth. Over the course of a mission that is expected to last some two years on the surface, the rover would also study the planet\u2019s climate and geology and help pave the way for human exploration, NASA said.The spacecraft also will be carrying a small helicopter, called \u201cIngenuity,\u201d which would become the first rotorcraft to fly on another planet.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes well, the spacecraft would lift off on an Atlas V rocket from the Florida Space Coast on July 20 and land on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. For the landing site, NASA has chosen a crater called Jezero, the site of an ancient lake as well as a delta, where there are rocks that date back 4 billion years. Perseverance is expected to scour the area, drilling for samples and signs of habitable conditions and even signs of ancient microbial life.Advertisement\u201cThe rover will study the record that is preserved in layers of rock on the surface of Mars \u2026 that could have proved evidence of the chemical building blocks of life,\u201d said Lori Glaze, the director of NASA\u2019s Planetary Science Division.The rover would stockpile the samples on the Martian surface, to be picked up on a subsequent mission, to launch to Mars in 2026, for return to Earth. That would be a first, Glaze said.Story continues below advertisementScientists have studied samples of meteorites that have come from Mars, but \u201cit\u2019s not the same as getting an actual sample of pristine Mars rock and soil to study,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd now we\u2019re at a point where we can begin to attempt his amazing feat.\u201dWith six wheels designed to handle the rugged Martian terrain, Perseverance in many ways looks like Curiosity, one of its predecessors on Mars. But it\u2019s a \u201cnew vehicle with new capabilities,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the Perseverance deputy program manager at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.AdvertisementThe spacecraft would be outfitted with a more powerful computer that would help guide it to the surface and help it avoid hazardous areas, such as rock piles. It would also have high-resolution cameras to record the landing.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe should be able to watch this big parachute inflate supersonically,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cWe should be able to watch the rover deploy and touch down on the surface. And this is going to be very exciting \u2014 the first time that we have ever been able to see a spacecraft land on another planet.\u201dNASA said it hopes the mission will pave the way for an eventual human mission to the Red Planet. It is aggressively pursuing a return to the moon under its Artemis program, which aims to have astronauts there by 2024. NASA ultimately would like to operate a space station in lunar orbit known as the Gateway that could become a jumping off point for Mars.AdvertisementIn addition to probing for signs of ancient life on and below the Martian surface, the Perseverance mission would also take to the skies. The Ingenuity helicopter would attempt to fly \u2014 an exceedingly difficult task given that the \u201catmosphere on Mars is only one percent the density that we have here on Earth,\u201d Wallace said. \u201cTrying to control a system like this under those conditions is not easy.\u201dNASA said it hopes to get at least three flights from the helicopter, but it stressed that it was purely a technology demonstration mission and that it would take each one as they come.It\u2019s possible, though, that the rover might be able to zoom in and snap a photograph of the helicopter hovering above the planet\u2019s red soil. Mars and Earth are only on the same side of the sun every 26 months, meaning NASA has a limited window to launch the spacecraft to the Red Planet. NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range. Mission to include first-ever helicopter exploration. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6258",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/18/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-future/",
        "text": "KENT, Wash. \u2014 Now it\u2019s Jeff Bezos\u2019s turn.On Tuesday, 11 days after Richard Branson flew to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane, Bezos is set to blast off through the atmosphere on his company\u2019s rocket from his remote ranch in West Texas.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLike Branson, Bezos is a lifelong space enthusiast. And like Branson, he founded his company, Blue Origin, with the intent of starting a space tourism business that would dramatically expand the roster of astronauts, from about 570 today to several thousand in the years to come. But Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) has ambitions much larger than sending customers to the edge of space, where they would enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin \u2014 \u201cblue\u201d for the \u201cpale blue dot\u201d that is Earth, \u201corigin\u201d for where humanity began \u2014 is developing a new, massive rocket, a lunar lander designed to return astronauts to the moon and even space stations in Earth orbit, all with the goal of enabling a future where \u201cmillions of people are living and working in space.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Bezos\u2019s participation on his company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is a significant step toward that goal, a coming-of-age moment for what has been an obscure and quiet enigma of a company and an unusually high-profile showcase of what Bezos has said is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also be something of a public statement at a time when many in the space industry have lamented Blue Origin\u2019s plodding, at times fitful progress.The company has been thoroughly eclipsed by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has moved faster and more adeptly. SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts to orbit, and it won the NASA contract to fly them to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin was also upstaged by Branson, who beat Bezos to space earlier this month. And when asked if there was a race on CNBC, Branson cheekily responded, \u201cJeff who?\u201dIn a rare interview at Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters outside Seattle, however, company officials said that years of behind-the-scenes preparation has set them up for a significant new chapter that many expect will be bolstered by renewed interest from Bezos, who is expected to spend more time at the company now that he has stepped down as CEO of Amazon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s launch would touch off a series of increasingly frequent human spaceflight missions on its New Shepard rocket that would fly space tourists on quick, suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere just past the edge of space.Joining Bezos will be his brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who dreamed of going to space during the Mercury era; and an 18-year-old from the Netherlands who got the seat after the winner of a $28 million auction bowed out of the first flight because of a scheduling conflict. The auction gave the company a long list of potential customers, some willing to pay millions of dollars for the chance to ride to the edge of space in a capsule whose developers boast it has the largest windows ever sent to space.If Tuesday\u2019s launch is successful, the company plans two more human spaceflights by the end of this year, according to Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, Bob Smith, and \u201cmore than half a dozen next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd the company hopes \u201cto be getting to an every-two-weeks kind of cadence very soon,\u201d he said.At first, Blue Origin will be offering seats on the early flights to the top bidders at a premium that could reach \u201ctens of millions of dollars of sales,\u201d Smith said. Eventually, it would offer a lower \u201ccatalogue\u201d price to the public, he said.In addition to its space tourism business, Blue Origin is pursuing other major projects, including developing a larger rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of flying to orbit, a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon, and even a space station. It has rehabbed a historic launch site at Cape Canaveral, building a massive manufacturing campus nearby and another one in Huntsville, Ala. The company is grown to nearly 4,000 employees, and is finally, it appears, ready to carve out a niche in an industry full of big egos and flamboyant personalities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of what we do looks like how Jeff runs companies,\u201d Smith said. \u201cYou build momentum over time. And if you look at our history, it was in large part trying to figure out how do you actually go build that capability and then go scale that capability.\u201dEven though Blue Origin is privately held, that pattern is somewhat similar to Amazon, which took seven years to post its first quarterly profit and nine years before its first profitable year. Both companies have adopted an ethos of looking to the long term over immediate gains, and both can be extremely reticent.\u201cOne of the reasons we are methodical and quiet is that we don\u2019t have to say much,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe want to make sure that our results actually speak for themselves. We want to be humble. We want to be trusted. We want to be somebody who actually speaks more with what we have done.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has been a long road to get to this point, and in the meantime SpaceX has jumped to a massive lead that may be difficult to overcome.Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, initially as a sort of think tank dedicated to studying the best way to get to space. Bezos and a small, hand-selected cohort, all of whom had the title, \u201cmember, technical staff,\u201d looked at all sorts of alternatives to chemically fueled rockets, including at one point, using a giant bullwhip to fling payloads to orbit.It ultimately decided that rockets, not slingshots, were the best way to go \u2014 but they needed to be reusable. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets ended up ditching in the ocean after reaching space, never to be used again. And so Bezos, like Musk, set out to develop rocket boosters that could fly back to Earth, land with precision and then fly again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket grew out of that program, and it flew and landed for the first time in November 2015, a month ahead of SpaceX. But SpaceX\u2019s landing of its Falcon 9 rocket was a far more difficult feat because the rocket is much more powerful and goes all the way to orbit. Still, Bezos told The Post at the time that the landing \u201cwas one of the greatest moments of my life. I was misty-eyed.\u201d But he said the company would continue to meticulously test it to make sure it was safe for human spaceflight.\u201cWe will fly the vehicle autonomously many, many times through a very methodical test program and that\u2019ll take probably a couple of years,\u201d he said at the time.It\u2019s taken a lot longer than that. But the test campaign needed to be thorough, especially if they were going to be flying people, officials here said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe didn\u2019t take any shortcuts,\u201d Smith said.In all, the company has flown 15 test flights of its New Shepard vehicle, \u201cgradually stepping up and expanding the envelope, pushing the vehicle in flight test to its design limits,\u201d Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview.The company tested the capsule\u2019s emergency escape system on the ground and twice during flight. During one test, they simulated a parachute failure so that the spacecraft landed under two instead of three.In addition to the flight tests, there has been all sorts of work behind the scenes, Lai said.\u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg \u2014 the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where when we do the flight tests we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe company\u2019s standard \u201cis not to fly professional astronauts who are knowingly taking a high degree of risk,\u201d he said. \u201cOur standard is to fly anybody for a space tourism mission and for them not actually to take any substantive risk.\u201dInternally, he said, the questions the engineers ask each other are simple: \u201cWhether it\u2019s safe enough to put our children on it. And I would be confident today putting my own kids on this vehicle.\u201dThat\u2019s why few at the company were surprised when Bezos announced that he would be on the first flight and bring his brother. It was a statement, they said, not just about his enthusiasm for exploration but a vote of confidence in the engineering team.\u201cHe, more than anybody else, has been through all the technical details of the system and has been there through all the major decision points, including the testing program and all the data coming out of it,\u201d said Ariane Cornell, the company\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales. \u201cSo I\u2019m not surprised at all that he said, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s go.\u2019 I mean, it\u2019s really been his dream, like a lot of us, to fly to space since he was a little kid.\u201dBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969, which he has said was a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. As a kid, he had a penchant for Star Trek and science fiction. And at Princeton University, he was president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. While working for a hedge fund in New York before founding Amazon, he bid on space artifacts from the Soviet Union at a Sotheby\u2019s auction but was outspent by Ross Perot.He is so enthusiastic about the history of space that in 2013, he funded a mission that recovered, from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the F-1 engines that were used in the Saturn V rocket that boosted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He even chose the date of his launch, July 20, to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.The New Shepard vehicle is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. The next rocket, which would be capable of reaching orbit, is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. And the company has named the Airstream trailers where its space tourism customers would stay after not only Mercury 7 astronauts \u2014 Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and Gordo Cooper \u2014 but also members of the Mercury 13, women who went through the same screening and testing as the first group of NASA astronauts but were never selected to fly: Jerrie Cobb, Myrtle Cagle, Rhea Woltman and Wally Funk.(Bezos has a particular affinity for Airstream trailers. His grandparents were members of an Airstream trailer group, who hitched their campers to their cars and traveled the country.)Bezos invited Funk to join him and his brother on the flight, and she enthusiastically accepted, hugging Bezos in a viselike embrace. Funk, who has spent 19,600 hours flying all sorts of aircraft, would break the record for the oldest person in space. John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the shuttle in 1998 as a U.S. senator.Blue Origin doesn\u2019t conduct physicals to make sure their customers are fit enough for the ride. But the company does \u201crecommend that they visit with their doctor,\u201d said Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance. \u201cWe give them a list of the things that they\u2019ll be exposed to and we\u2019d like them to discuss with their doctor.\u201dDuring the 10-minute flight on New Shepard, passengers will experience about 3 G\u2019s, or three times the force of gravity, for a couple of minutes going up and 5 G\u2019s for a few seconds on the descent. That should not be a problem for most.\u201cOur short space flight is closer to an airline flight than a trip aboard, say, the space shuttle,\u201d he said.And Funk said she\u2019s ecstatic about flying with Bezos. \u201cI like to do things no one has ever done,\u201d she said in an Instagram post. Jeff Bezos has said Blue Origin is \"the most important work I am doing.\" Tuesday, he'll launch to space on the company's New Shepard rocket. Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6259",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/18/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-future/",
        "text": "KENT, Wash. \u2014 Now it\u2019s Jeff Bezos\u2019s turn.On Tuesday, 11 days after Richard Branson flew to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane, Bezos is set to blast off through the atmosphere on his company\u2019s rocket from his remote ranch in West Texas.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLike Branson, Bezos is a lifelong space enthusiast. And like Branson, he founded his company, Blue Origin, with the intent of starting a space tourism business that would dramatically expand the roster of astronauts, from about 570 today to several thousand in the years to come. But Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) has ambitions much larger than sending customers to the edge of space, where they would enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin \u2014 \u201cblue\u201d for the \u201cpale blue dot\u201d that is Earth, \u201corigin\u201d for where humanity began \u2014 is developing a new, massive rocket, a lunar lander designed to return astronauts to the moon and even space stations in Earth orbit, all with the goal of enabling a future where \u201cmillions of people are living and working in space.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Bezos\u2019s participation on his company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is a significant step toward that goal, a coming-of-age moment for what has been an obscure and quiet enigma of a company and an unusually high-profile showcase of what Bezos has said is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also be something of a public statement at a time when many in the space industry have lamented Blue Origin\u2019s plodding, at times fitful progress.The company has been thoroughly eclipsed by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has moved faster and more adeptly. SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts to orbit, and it won the NASA contract to fly them to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin was also upstaged by Branson, who beat Bezos to space earlier this month. And when asked if there was a race on CNBC, Branson cheekily responded, \u201cJeff who?\u201dIn a rare interview at Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters outside Seattle, however, company officials said that years of behind-the-scenes preparation has set them up for a significant new chapter that many expect will be bolstered by renewed interest from Bezos, who is expected to spend more time at the company now that he has stepped down as CEO of Amazon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s launch would touch off a series of increasingly frequent human spaceflight missions on its New Shepard rocket that would fly space tourists on quick, suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere just past the edge of space.Joining Bezos will be his brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who dreamed of going to space during the Mercury era; and an 18-year-old from the Netherlands who got the seat after the winner of a $28 million auction bowed out of the first flight because of a scheduling conflict. The auction gave the company a long list of potential customers, some willing to pay millions of dollars for the chance to ride to the edge of space in a capsule whose developers boast it has the largest windows ever sent to space.If Tuesday\u2019s launch is successful, the company plans two more human spaceflights by the end of this year, according to Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, Bob Smith, and \u201cmore than half a dozen next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd the company hopes \u201cto be getting to an every-two-weeks kind of cadence very soon,\u201d he said.At first, Blue Origin will be offering seats on the early flights to the top bidders at a premium that could reach \u201ctens of millions of dollars of sales,\u201d Smith said. Eventually, it would offer a lower \u201ccatalogue\u201d price to the public, he said.In addition to its space tourism business, Blue Origin is pursuing other major projects, including developing a larger rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of flying to orbit, a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon, and even a space station. It has rehabbed a historic launch site at Cape Canaveral, building a massive manufacturing campus nearby and another one in Huntsville, Ala. The company is grown to nearly 4,000 employees, and is finally, it appears, ready to carve out a niche in an industry full of big egos and flamboyant personalities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of what we do looks like how Jeff runs companies,\u201d Smith said. \u201cYou build momentum over time. And if you look at our history, it was in large part trying to figure out how do you actually go build that capability and then go scale that capability.\u201dEven though Blue Origin is privately held, that pattern is somewhat similar to Amazon, which took seven years to post its first quarterly profit and nine years before its first profitable year. Both companies have adopted an ethos of looking to the long term over immediate gains, and both can be extremely reticent.\u201cOne of the reasons we are methodical and quiet is that we don\u2019t have to say much,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe want to make sure that our results actually speak for themselves. We want to be humble. We want to be trusted. We want to be somebody who actually speaks more with what we have done.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has been a long road to get to this point, and in the meantime SpaceX has jumped to a massive lead that may be difficult to overcome.Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, initially as a sort of think tank dedicated to studying the best way to get to space. Bezos and a small, hand-selected cohort, all of whom had the title, \u201cmember, technical staff,\u201d looked at all sorts of alternatives to chemically fueled rockets, including at one point, using a giant bullwhip to fling payloads to orbit.It ultimately decided that rockets, not slingshots, were the best way to go \u2014 but they needed to be reusable. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets ended up ditching in the ocean after reaching space, never to be used again. And so Bezos, like Musk, set out to develop rocket boosters that could fly back to Earth, land with precision and then fly again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket grew out of that program, and it flew and landed for the first time in November 2015, a month ahead of SpaceX. But SpaceX\u2019s landing of its Falcon 9 rocket was a far more difficult feat because the rocket is much more powerful and goes all the way to orbit. Still, Bezos told The Post at the time that the landing \u201cwas one of the greatest moments of my life. I was misty-eyed.\u201d But he said the company would continue to meticulously test it to make sure it was safe for human spaceflight.\u201cWe will fly the vehicle autonomously many, many times through a very methodical test program and that\u2019ll take probably a couple of years,\u201d he said at the time.It\u2019s taken a lot longer than that. But the test campaign needed to be thorough, especially if they were going to be flying people, officials here said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe didn\u2019t take any shortcuts,\u201d Smith said.In all, the company has flown 15 test flights of its New Shepard vehicle, \u201cgradually stepping up and expanding the envelope, pushing the vehicle in flight test to its design limits,\u201d Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview.The company tested the capsule\u2019s emergency escape system on the ground and twice during flight. During one test, they simulated a parachute failure so that the spacecraft landed under two instead of three.In addition to the flight tests, there has been all sorts of work behind the scenes, Lai said.\u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg \u2014 the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where when we do the flight tests we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe company\u2019s standard \u201cis not to fly professional astronauts who are knowingly taking a high degree of risk,\u201d he said. \u201cOur standard is to fly anybody for a space tourism mission and for them not actually to take any substantive risk.\u201dInternally, he said, the questions the engineers ask each other are simple: \u201cWhether it\u2019s safe enough to put our children on it. And I would be confident today putting my own kids on this vehicle.\u201dThat\u2019s why few at the company were surprised when Bezos announced that he would be on the first flight and bring his brother. It was a statement, they said, not just about his enthusiasm for exploration but a vote of confidence in the engineering team.\u201cHe, more than anybody else, has been through all the technical details of the system and has been there through all the major decision points, including the testing program and all the data coming out of it,\u201d said Ariane Cornell, the company\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales. \u201cSo I\u2019m not surprised at all that he said, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s go.\u2019 I mean, it\u2019s really been his dream, like a lot of us, to fly to space since he was a little kid.\u201dBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969, which he has said was a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. As a kid, he had a penchant for Star Trek and science fiction. And at Princeton University, he was president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. While working for a hedge fund in New York before founding Amazon, he bid on space artifacts from the Soviet Union at a Sotheby\u2019s auction but was outspent by Ross Perot.He is so enthusiastic about the history of space that in 2013, he funded a mission that recovered, from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the F-1 engines that were used in the Saturn V rocket that boosted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He even chose the date of his launch, July 20, to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.The New Shepard vehicle is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. The next rocket, which would be capable of reaching orbit, is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. And the company has named the Airstream trailers where its space tourism customers would stay after not only Mercury 7 astronauts \u2014 Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and Gordo Cooper \u2014 but also members of the Mercury 13, women who went through the same screening and testing as the first group of NASA astronauts but were never selected to fly: Jerrie Cobb, Myrtle Cagle, Rhea Woltman and Wally Funk.(Bezos has a particular affinity for Airstream trailers. His grandparents were members of an Airstream trailer group, who hitched their campers to their cars and traveled the country.)Bezos invited Funk to join him and his brother on the flight, and she enthusiastically accepted, hugging Bezos in a viselike embrace. Funk, who has spent 19,600 hours flying all sorts of aircraft, would break the record for the oldest person in space. John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the shuttle in 1998 as a U.S. senator.Blue Origin doesn\u2019t conduct physicals to make sure their customers are fit enough for the ride. But the company does \u201crecommend that they visit with their doctor,\u201d said Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance. \u201cWe give them a list of the things that they\u2019ll be exposed to and we\u2019d like them to discuss with their doctor.\u201dDuring the 10-minute flight on New Shepard, passengers will experience about 3 G\u2019s, or three times the force of gravity, for a couple of minutes going up and 5 G\u2019s for a few seconds on the descent. That should not be a problem for most.\u201cOur short space flight is closer to an airline flight than a trip aboard, say, the space shuttle,\u201d he said.And Funk said she\u2019s ecstatic about flying with Bezos. \u201cI like to do things no one has ever done,\u201d she said in an Instagram post. Jeff Bezos has said Blue Origin is \"the most important work I am doing.\" Tuesday, he'll launch to space on the company's New Shepard rocket. Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6260",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/18/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-future/",
        "text": "KENT, Wash. \u2014 Now it\u2019s Jeff Bezos\u2019s turn.On Tuesday, 11 days after Richard Branson flew to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane, Bezos is set to blast off through the atmosphere on his company\u2019s rocket from his remote ranch in West Texas.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLike Branson, Bezos is a lifelong space enthusiast. And like Branson, he founded his company, Blue Origin, with the intent of starting a space tourism business that would dramatically expand the roster of astronauts, from about 570 today to several thousand in the years to come. But Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) has ambitions much larger than sending customers to the edge of space, where they would enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin \u2014 \u201cblue\u201d for the \u201cpale blue dot\u201d that is Earth, \u201corigin\u201d for where humanity began \u2014 is developing a new, massive rocket, a lunar lander designed to return astronauts to the moon and even space stations in Earth orbit, all with the goal of enabling a future where \u201cmillions of people are living and working in space.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Bezos\u2019s participation on his company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is a significant step toward that goal, a coming-of-age moment for what has been an obscure and quiet enigma of a company and an unusually high-profile showcase of what Bezos has said is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also be something of a public statement at a time when many in the space industry have lamented Blue Origin\u2019s plodding, at times fitful progress.The company has been thoroughly eclipsed by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has moved faster and more adeptly. SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts to orbit, and it won the NASA contract to fly them to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin was also upstaged by Branson, who beat Bezos to space earlier this month. And when asked if there was a race on CNBC, Branson cheekily responded, \u201cJeff who?\u201dIn a rare interview at Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters outside Seattle, however, company officials said that years of behind-the-scenes preparation has set them up for a significant new chapter that many expect will be bolstered by renewed interest from Bezos, who is expected to spend more time at the company now that he has stepped down as CEO of Amazon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s launch would touch off a series of increasingly frequent human spaceflight missions on its New Shepard rocket that would fly space tourists on quick, suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere just past the edge of space.Joining Bezos will be his brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who dreamed of going to space during the Mercury era; and an 18-year-old from the Netherlands who got the seat after the winner of a $28 million auction bowed out of the first flight because of a scheduling conflict. The auction gave the company a long list of potential customers, some willing to pay millions of dollars for the chance to ride to the edge of space in a capsule whose developers boast it has the largest windows ever sent to space.If Tuesday\u2019s launch is successful, the company plans two more human spaceflights by the end of this year, according to Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, Bob Smith, and \u201cmore than half a dozen next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd the company hopes \u201cto be getting to an every-two-weeks kind of cadence very soon,\u201d he said.At first, Blue Origin will be offering seats on the early flights to the top bidders at a premium that could reach \u201ctens of millions of dollars of sales,\u201d Smith said. Eventually, it would offer a lower \u201ccatalogue\u201d price to the public, he said.In addition to its space tourism business, Blue Origin is pursuing other major projects, including developing a larger rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of flying to orbit, a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon, and even a space station. It has rehabbed a historic launch site at Cape Canaveral, building a massive manufacturing campus nearby and another one in Huntsville, Ala. The company is grown to nearly 4,000 employees, and is finally, it appears, ready to carve out a niche in an industry full of big egos and flamboyant personalities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of what we do looks like how Jeff runs companies,\u201d Smith said. \u201cYou build momentum over time. And if you look at our history, it was in large part trying to figure out how do you actually go build that capability and then go scale that capability.\u201dEven though Blue Origin is privately held, that pattern is somewhat similar to Amazon, which took seven years to post its first quarterly profit and nine years before its first profitable year. Both companies have adopted an ethos of looking to the long term over immediate gains, and both can be extremely reticent.\u201cOne of the reasons we are methodical and quiet is that we don\u2019t have to say much,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe want to make sure that our results actually speak for themselves. We want to be humble. We want to be trusted. We want to be somebody who actually speaks more with what we have done.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has been a long road to get to this point, and in the meantime SpaceX has jumped to a massive lead that may be difficult to overcome.Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, initially as a sort of think tank dedicated to studying the best way to get to space. Bezos and a small, hand-selected cohort, all of whom had the title, \u201cmember, technical staff,\u201d looked at all sorts of alternatives to chemically fueled rockets, including at one point, using a giant bullwhip to fling payloads to orbit.It ultimately decided that rockets, not slingshots, were the best way to go \u2014 but they needed to be reusable. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets ended up ditching in the ocean after reaching space, never to be used again. And so Bezos, like Musk, set out to develop rocket boosters that could fly back to Earth, land with precision and then fly again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket grew out of that program, and it flew and landed for the first time in November 2015, a month ahead of SpaceX. But SpaceX\u2019s landing of its Falcon 9 rocket was a far more difficult feat because the rocket is much more powerful and goes all the way to orbit. Still, Bezos told The Post at the time that the landing \u201cwas one of the greatest moments of my life. I was misty-eyed.\u201d But he said the company would continue to meticulously test it to make sure it was safe for human spaceflight.\u201cWe will fly the vehicle autonomously many, many times through a very methodical test program and that\u2019ll take probably a couple of years,\u201d he said at the time.It\u2019s taken a lot longer than that. But the test campaign needed to be thorough, especially if they were going to be flying people, officials here said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe didn\u2019t take any shortcuts,\u201d Smith said.In all, the company has flown 15 test flights of its New Shepard vehicle, \u201cgradually stepping up and expanding the envelope, pushing the vehicle in flight test to its design limits,\u201d Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview.The company tested the capsule\u2019s emergency escape system on the ground and twice during flight. During one test, they simulated a parachute failure so that the spacecraft landed under two instead of three.In addition to the flight tests, there has been all sorts of work behind the scenes, Lai said.\u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg \u2014 the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where when we do the flight tests we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe company\u2019s standard \u201cis not to fly professional astronauts who are knowingly taking a high degree of risk,\u201d he said. \u201cOur standard is to fly anybody for a space tourism mission and for them not actually to take any substantive risk.\u201dInternally, he said, the questions the engineers ask each other are simple: \u201cWhether it\u2019s safe enough to put our children on it. And I would be confident today putting my own kids on this vehicle.\u201dThat\u2019s why few at the company were surprised when Bezos announced that he would be on the first flight and bring his brother. It was a statement, they said, not just about his enthusiasm for exploration but a vote of confidence in the engineering team.\u201cHe, more than anybody else, has been through all the technical details of the system and has been there through all the major decision points, including the testing program and all the data coming out of it,\u201d said Ariane Cornell, the company\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales. \u201cSo I\u2019m not surprised at all that he said, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s go.\u2019 I mean, it\u2019s really been his dream, like a lot of us, to fly to space since he was a little kid.\u201dBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969, which he has said was a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. As a kid, he had a penchant for Star Trek and science fiction. And at Princeton University, he was president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. While working for a hedge fund in New York before founding Amazon, he bid on space artifacts from the Soviet Union at a Sotheby\u2019s auction but was outspent by Ross Perot.He is so enthusiastic about the history of space that in 2013, he funded a mission that recovered, from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the F-1 engines that were used in the Saturn V rocket that boosted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He even chose the date of his launch, July 20, to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.The New Shepard vehicle is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. The next rocket, which would be capable of reaching orbit, is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. And the company has named the Airstream trailers where its space tourism customers would stay after not only Mercury 7 astronauts \u2014 Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and Gordo Cooper \u2014 but also members of the Mercury 13, women who went through the same screening and testing as the first group of NASA astronauts but were never selected to fly: Jerrie Cobb, Myrtle Cagle, Rhea Woltman and Wally Funk.(Bezos has a particular affinity for Airstream trailers. His grandparents were members of an Airstream trailer group, who hitched their campers to their cars and traveled the country.)Bezos invited Funk to join him and his brother on the flight, and she enthusiastically accepted, hugging Bezos in a viselike embrace. Funk, who has spent 19,600 hours flying all sorts of aircraft, would break the record for the oldest person in space. John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the shuttle in 1998 as a U.S. senator.Blue Origin doesn\u2019t conduct physicals to make sure their customers are fit enough for the ride. But the company does \u201crecommend that they visit with their doctor,\u201d said Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance. \u201cWe give them a list of the things that they\u2019ll be exposed to and we\u2019d like them to discuss with their doctor.\u201dDuring the 10-minute flight on New Shepard, passengers will experience about 3 G\u2019s, or three times the force of gravity, for a couple of minutes going up and 5 G\u2019s for a few seconds on the descent. That should not be a problem for most.\u201cOur short space flight is closer to an airline flight than a trip aboard, say, the space shuttle,\u201d he said.And Funk said she\u2019s ecstatic about flying with Bezos. \u201cI like to do things no one has ever done,\u201d she said in an Instagram post. Jeff Bezos has said Blue Origin is \"the most important work I am doing.\" Tuesday, he'll launch to space on the company's New Shepard rocket. Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6261",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/18/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-future/",
        "text": "KENT, Wash. \u2014 Now it\u2019s Jeff Bezos\u2019s turn.On Tuesday, 11 days after Richard Branson flew to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane, Bezos is set to blast off through the atmosphere on his company\u2019s rocket from his remote ranch in West Texas.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLike Branson, Bezos is a lifelong space enthusiast. And like Branson, he founded his company, Blue Origin, with the intent of starting a space tourism business that would dramatically expand the roster of astronauts, from about 570 today to several thousand in the years to come. But Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) has ambitions much larger than sending customers to the edge of space, where they would enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin \u2014 \u201cblue\u201d for the \u201cpale blue dot\u201d that is Earth, \u201corigin\u201d for where humanity began \u2014 is developing a new, massive rocket, a lunar lander designed to return astronauts to the moon and even space stations in Earth orbit, all with the goal of enabling a future where \u201cmillions of people are living and working in space.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Bezos\u2019s participation on his company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is a significant step toward that goal, a coming-of-age moment for what has been an obscure and quiet enigma of a company and an unusually high-profile showcase of what Bezos has said is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also be something of a public statement at a time when many in the space industry have lamented Blue Origin\u2019s plodding, at times fitful progress.The company has been thoroughly eclipsed by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has moved faster and more adeptly. SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts to orbit, and it won the NASA contract to fly them to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin was also upstaged by Branson, who beat Bezos to space earlier this month. And when asked if there was a race on CNBC, Branson cheekily responded, \u201cJeff who?\u201dIn a rare interview at Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters outside Seattle, however, company officials said that years of behind-the-scenes preparation has set them up for a significant new chapter that many expect will be bolstered by renewed interest from Bezos, who is expected to spend more time at the company now that he has stepped down as CEO of Amazon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s launch would touch off a series of increasingly frequent human spaceflight missions on its New Shepard rocket that would fly space tourists on quick, suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere just past the edge of space.Joining Bezos will be his brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who dreamed of going to space during the Mercury era; and an 18-year-old from the Netherlands who got the seat after the winner of a $28 million auction bowed out of the first flight because of a scheduling conflict. The auction gave the company a long list of potential customers, some willing to pay millions of dollars for the chance to ride to the edge of space in a capsule whose developers boast it has the largest windows ever sent to space.If Tuesday\u2019s launch is successful, the company plans two more human spaceflights by the end of this year, according to Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, Bob Smith, and \u201cmore than half a dozen next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd the company hopes \u201cto be getting to an every-two-weeks kind of cadence very soon,\u201d he said.At first, Blue Origin will be offering seats on the early flights to the top bidders at a premium that could reach \u201ctens of millions of dollars of sales,\u201d Smith said. Eventually, it would offer a lower \u201ccatalogue\u201d price to the public, he said.In addition to its space tourism business, Blue Origin is pursuing other major projects, including developing a larger rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of flying to orbit, a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon, and even a space station. It has rehabbed a historic launch site at Cape Canaveral, building a massive manufacturing campus nearby and another one in Huntsville, Ala. The company is grown to nearly 4,000 employees, and is finally, it appears, ready to carve out a niche in an industry full of big egos and flamboyant personalities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of what we do looks like how Jeff runs companies,\u201d Smith said. \u201cYou build momentum over time. And if you look at our history, it was in large part trying to figure out how do you actually go build that capability and then go scale that capability.\u201dEven though Blue Origin is privately held, that pattern is somewhat similar to Amazon, which took seven years to post its first quarterly profit and nine years before its first profitable year. Both companies have adopted an ethos of looking to the long term over immediate gains, and both can be extremely reticent.\u201cOne of the reasons we are methodical and quiet is that we don\u2019t have to say much,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe want to make sure that our results actually speak for themselves. We want to be humble. We want to be trusted. We want to be somebody who actually speaks more with what we have done.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has been a long road to get to this point, and in the meantime SpaceX has jumped to a massive lead that may be difficult to overcome.Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, initially as a sort of think tank dedicated to studying the best way to get to space. Bezos and a small, hand-selected cohort, all of whom had the title, \u201cmember, technical staff,\u201d looked at all sorts of alternatives to chemically fueled rockets, including at one point, using a giant bullwhip to fling payloads to orbit.It ultimately decided that rockets, not slingshots, were the best way to go \u2014 but they needed to be reusable. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets ended up ditching in the ocean after reaching space, never to be used again. And so Bezos, like Musk, set out to develop rocket boosters that could fly back to Earth, land with precision and then fly again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket grew out of that program, and it flew and landed for the first time in November 2015, a month ahead of SpaceX. But SpaceX\u2019s landing of its Falcon 9 rocket was a far more difficult feat because the rocket is much more powerful and goes all the way to orbit. Still, Bezos told The Post at the time that the landing \u201cwas one of the greatest moments of my life. I was misty-eyed.\u201d But he said the company would continue to meticulously test it to make sure it was safe for human spaceflight.\u201cWe will fly the vehicle autonomously many, many times through a very methodical test program and that\u2019ll take probably a couple of years,\u201d he said at the time.It\u2019s taken a lot longer than that. But the test campaign needed to be thorough, especially if they were going to be flying people, officials here said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe didn\u2019t take any shortcuts,\u201d Smith said.In all, the company has flown 15 test flights of its New Shepard vehicle, \u201cgradually stepping up and expanding the envelope, pushing the vehicle in flight test to its design limits,\u201d Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview.The company tested the capsule\u2019s emergency escape system on the ground and twice during flight. During one test, they simulated a parachute failure so that the spacecraft landed under two instead of three.In addition to the flight tests, there has been all sorts of work behind the scenes, Lai said.\u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg \u2014 the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where when we do the flight tests we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe company\u2019s standard \u201cis not to fly professional astronauts who are knowingly taking a high degree of risk,\u201d he said. \u201cOur standard is to fly anybody for a space tourism mission and for them not actually to take any substantive risk.\u201dInternally, he said, the questions the engineers ask each other are simple: \u201cWhether it\u2019s safe enough to put our children on it. And I would be confident today putting my own kids on this vehicle.\u201dThat\u2019s why few at the company were surprised when Bezos announced that he would be on the first flight and bring his brother. It was a statement, they said, not just about his enthusiasm for exploration but a vote of confidence in the engineering team.\u201cHe, more than anybody else, has been through all the technical details of the system and has been there through all the major decision points, including the testing program and all the data coming out of it,\u201d said Ariane Cornell, the company\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales. \u201cSo I\u2019m not surprised at all that he said, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s go.\u2019 I mean, it\u2019s really been his dream, like a lot of us, to fly to space since he was a little kid.\u201dBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969, which he has said was a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. As a kid, he had a penchant for Star Trek and science fiction. And at Princeton University, he was president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. While working for a hedge fund in New York before founding Amazon, he bid on space artifacts from the Soviet Union at a Sotheby\u2019s auction but was outspent by Ross Perot.He is so enthusiastic about the history of space that in 2013, he funded a mission that recovered, from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the F-1 engines that were used in the Saturn V rocket that boosted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He even chose the date of his launch, July 20, to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.The New Shepard vehicle is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. The next rocket, which would be capable of reaching orbit, is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. And the company has named the Airstream trailers where its space tourism customers would stay after not only Mercury 7 astronauts \u2014 Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and Gordo Cooper \u2014 but also members of the Mercury 13, women who went through the same screening and testing as the first group of NASA astronauts but were never selected to fly: Jerrie Cobb, Myrtle Cagle, Rhea Woltman and Wally Funk.(Bezos has a particular affinity for Airstream trailers. His grandparents were members of an Airstream trailer group, who hitched their campers to their cars and traveled the country.)Bezos invited Funk to join him and his brother on the flight, and she enthusiastically accepted, hugging Bezos in a viselike embrace. Funk, who has spent 19,600 hours flying all sorts of aircraft, would break the record for the oldest person in space. John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the shuttle in 1998 as a U.S. senator.Blue Origin doesn\u2019t conduct physicals to make sure their customers are fit enough for the ride. But the company does \u201crecommend that they visit with their doctor,\u201d said Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance. \u201cWe give them a list of the things that they\u2019ll be exposed to and we\u2019d like them to discuss with their doctor.\u201dDuring the 10-minute flight on New Shepard, passengers will experience about 3 G\u2019s, or three times the force of gravity, for a couple of minutes going up and 5 G\u2019s for a few seconds on the descent. That should not be a problem for most.\u201cOur short space flight is closer to an airline flight than a trip aboard, say, the space shuttle,\u201d he said.And Funk said she\u2019s ecstatic about flying with Bezos. \u201cI like to do things no one has ever done,\u201d she said in an Instagram post. Jeff Bezos has said Blue Origin is \"the most important work I am doing.\" Tuesday, he'll launch to space on the company's New Shepard rocket. Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6262",
        "date": "2021-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/18/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-future/",
        "text": "KENT, Wash. \u2014 Now it\u2019s Jeff Bezos\u2019s turn.On Tuesday, 11 days after Richard Branson flew to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket plane, Bezos is set to blast off through the atmosphere on his company\u2019s rocket from his remote ranch in West Texas.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLike Branson, Bezos is a lifelong space enthusiast. And like Branson, he founded his company, Blue Origin, with the intent of starting a space tourism business that would dramatically expand the roster of astronauts, from about 570 today to several thousand in the years to come. But Bezos (who owns The Washington Post) has ambitions much larger than sending customers to the edge of space, where they would enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness. Blue Origin \u2014 \u201cblue\u201d for the \u201cpale blue dot\u201d that is Earth, \u201corigin\u201d for where humanity began \u2014 is developing a new, massive rocket, a lunar lander designed to return astronauts to the moon and even space stations in Earth orbit, all with the goal of enabling a future where \u201cmillions of people are living and working in space.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Bezos\u2019s participation on his company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is a significant step toward that goal, a coming-of-age moment for what has been an obscure and quiet enigma of a company and an unusually high-profile showcase of what Bezos has said is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also be something of a public statement at a time when many in the space industry have lamented Blue Origin\u2019s plodding, at times fitful progress.The company has been thoroughly eclipsed by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has moved faster and more adeptly. SpaceX is already flying NASA astronauts to orbit, and it won the NASA contract to fly them to the surface of the moon.Blue Origin was also upstaged by Branson, who beat Bezos to space earlier this month. And when asked if there was a race on CNBC, Branson cheekily responded, \u201cJeff who?\u201dIn a rare interview at Blue Origin\u2019s headquarters outside Seattle, however, company officials said that years of behind-the-scenes preparation has set them up for a significant new chapter that many expect will be bolstered by renewed interest from Bezos, who is expected to spend more time at the company now that he has stepped down as CEO of Amazon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos\u2019s launch would touch off a series of increasingly frequent human spaceflight missions on its New Shepard rocket that would fly space tourists on quick, suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere just past the edge of space.Joining Bezos will be his brother, Mark; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who dreamed of going to space during the Mercury era; and an 18-year-old from the Netherlands who got the seat after the winner of a $28 million auction bowed out of the first flight because of a scheduling conflict. The auction gave the company a long list of potential customers, some willing to pay millions of dollars for the chance to ride to the edge of space in a capsule whose developers boast it has the largest windows ever sent to space.If Tuesday\u2019s launch is successful, the company plans two more human spaceflights by the end of this year, according to Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, Bob Smith, and \u201cmore than half a dozen next year.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd the company hopes \u201cto be getting to an every-two-weeks kind of cadence very soon,\u201d he said.At first, Blue Origin will be offering seats on the early flights to the top bidders at a premium that could reach \u201ctens of millions of dollars of sales,\u201d Smith said. Eventually, it would offer a lower \u201ccatalogue\u201d price to the public, he said.In addition to its space tourism business, Blue Origin is pursuing other major projects, including developing a larger rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of flying to orbit, a spacecraft designed to land astronauts on the moon, and even a space station. It has rehabbed a historic launch site at Cape Canaveral, building a massive manufacturing campus nearby and another one in Huntsville, Ala. The company is grown to nearly 4,000 employees, and is finally, it appears, ready to carve out a niche in an industry full of big egos and flamboyant personalities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA lot of what we do looks like how Jeff runs companies,\u201d Smith said. \u201cYou build momentum over time. And if you look at our history, it was in large part trying to figure out how do you actually go build that capability and then go scale that capability.\u201dEven though Blue Origin is privately held, that pattern is somewhat similar to Amazon, which took seven years to post its first quarterly profit and nine years before its first profitable year. Both companies have adopted an ethos of looking to the long term over immediate gains, and both can be extremely reticent.\u201cOne of the reasons we are methodical and quiet is that we don\u2019t have to say much,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe want to make sure that our results actually speak for themselves. We want to be humble. We want to be trusted. We want to be somebody who actually speaks more with what we have done.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has been a long road to get to this point, and in the meantime SpaceX has jumped to a massive lead that may be difficult to overcome.Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, initially as a sort of think tank dedicated to studying the best way to get to space. Bezos and a small, hand-selected cohort, all of whom had the title, \u201cmember, technical staff,\u201d looked at all sorts of alternatives to chemically fueled rockets, including at one point, using a giant bullwhip to fling payloads to orbit.It ultimately decided that rockets, not slingshots, were the best way to go \u2014 but they needed to be reusable. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets ended up ditching in the ocean after reaching space, never to be used again. And so Bezos, like Musk, set out to develop rocket boosters that could fly back to Earth, land with precision and then fly again.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket grew out of that program, and it flew and landed for the first time in November 2015, a month ahead of SpaceX. But SpaceX\u2019s landing of its Falcon 9 rocket was a far more difficult feat because the rocket is much more powerful and goes all the way to orbit. Still, Bezos told The Post at the time that the landing \u201cwas one of the greatest moments of my life. I was misty-eyed.\u201d But he said the company would continue to meticulously test it to make sure it was safe for human spaceflight.\u201cWe will fly the vehicle autonomously many, many times through a very methodical test program and that\u2019ll take probably a couple of years,\u201d he said at the time.It\u2019s taken a lot longer than that. But the test campaign needed to be thorough, especially if they were going to be flying people, officials here said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe didn\u2019t take any shortcuts,\u201d Smith said.In all, the company has flown 15 test flights of its New Shepard vehicle, \u201cgradually stepping up and expanding the envelope, pushing the vehicle in flight test to its design limits,\u201d Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview.The company tested the capsule\u2019s emergency escape system on the ground and twice during flight. During one test, they simulated a parachute failure so that the spacecraft landed under two instead of three.In addition to the flight tests, there has been all sorts of work behind the scenes, Lai said.\u201cThe flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg \u2014 the part that floats above the water that people can see,\u201d he said. \u201cWe test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where when we do the flight tests we\u2019re actually pretty confident it\u2019s going to work.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.\u201cAs an engineer you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,\u201d Lai said. \u201cThere are always going to be things that you wonder, \u2018Well, what if I forgot about this?\u2019 But in terms of going into this flight, I\u2019m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.\u201dThe company\u2019s standard \u201cis not to fly professional astronauts who are knowingly taking a high degree of risk,\u201d he said. \u201cOur standard is to fly anybody for a space tourism mission and for them not actually to take any substantive risk.\u201dInternally, he said, the questions the engineers ask each other are simple: \u201cWhether it\u2019s safe enough to put our children on it. And I would be confident today putting my own kids on this vehicle.\u201dThat\u2019s why few at the company were surprised when Bezos announced that he would be on the first flight and bring his brother. It was a statement, they said, not just about his enthusiasm for exploration but a vote of confidence in the engineering team.\u201cHe, more than anybody else, has been through all the technical details of the system and has been there through all the major decision points, including the testing program and all the data coming out of it,\u201d said Ariane Cornell, the company\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales. \u201cSo I\u2019m not surprised at all that he said, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s go.\u2019 I mean, it\u2019s really been his dream, like a lot of us, to fly to space since he was a little kid.\u201dBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in 1969, which he has said was a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. As a kid, he had a penchant for Star Trek and science fiction. And at Princeton University, he was president of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. While working for a hedge fund in New York before founding Amazon, he bid on space artifacts from the Soviet Union at a Sotheby\u2019s auction but was outspent by Ross Perot.He is so enthusiastic about the history of space that in 2013, he funded a mission that recovered, from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the F-1 engines that were used in the Saturn V rocket that boosted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. He even chose the date of his launch, July 20, to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.The New Shepard vehicle is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. The next rocket, which would be capable of reaching orbit, is named for John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. And the company has named the Airstream trailers where its space tourism customers would stay after not only Mercury 7 astronauts \u2014 Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton and Gordo Cooper \u2014 but also members of the Mercury 13, women who went through the same screening and testing as the first group of NASA astronauts but were never selected to fly: Jerrie Cobb, Myrtle Cagle, Rhea Woltman and Wally Funk.(Bezos has a particular affinity for Airstream trailers. His grandparents were members of an Airstream trailer group, who hitched their campers to their cars and traveled the country.)Bezos invited Funk to join him and his brother on the flight, and she enthusiastically accepted, hugging Bezos in a viselike embrace. Funk, who has spent 19,600 hours flying all sorts of aircraft, would break the record for the oldest person in space. John Glenn was 77 when he flew on the shuttle in 1998 as a U.S. senator.Blue Origin doesn\u2019t conduct physicals to make sure their customers are fit enough for the ride. But the company does \u201crecommend that they visit with their doctor,\u201d said Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is Blue Origin\u2019s chief of mission assurance. \u201cWe give them a list of the things that they\u2019ll be exposed to and we\u2019d like them to discuss with their doctor.\u201dDuring the 10-minute flight on New Shepard, passengers will experience about 3 G\u2019s, or three times the force of gravity, for a couple of minutes going up and 5 G\u2019s for a few seconds on the descent. That should not be a problem for most.\u201cOur short space flight is closer to an airline flight than a trip aboard, say, the space shuttle,\u201d he said.And Funk said she\u2019s ecstatic about flying with Bezos. \u201cI like to do things no one has ever done,\u201d she said in an Instagram post. Jeff Bezos has said Blue Origin is \"the most important work I am doing.\" Tuesday, he'll launch to space on the company's New Shepard rocket. Quiet and secretive Blue Origin hopes to start new chapter with Jeff Bezos\u2019s space flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday\u2019s test flight a \u2018critical first step.\u2019 (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6263",
        "date": "2019-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/01/nasa-needs-spacex-prove-it-can-fly-astronauts-safely-saturdays-test-flight-is-called-crucial-step/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The Securities and Exchange Commission is all over him. The Air Force inspector general is auditing his launch certifications. And even NASA, one of his most ardent supporters, is reviewing the safety culture at SpaceX after Elon Musk smoked a joint on a podcast.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that weren\u2019t enough pressure, the billionaire entrepreneur is facing one of the most crucial moments in SpaceX\u2019s history early Saturday, when the spacecraft designed to carry humans is scheduled to lift off from a storied launch site here. Although the Dragon spacecraft won\u2019t be carrying astronauts \u2014 only a mannequin named \u201cRipley\u201d with sensors and about 400 pounds of cargo \u2014 the flight will mark a significant step toward the restoration of human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired nearly eight years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe heat isn\u2019t just on SpaceX and Musk, who has drawn scrutiny from the SEC over his leadership of his electric car company, Tesla, but on NASA, as well. Years ago, it placed a bold bet on the private sector and outsourced human spaceflight to the International Space Station to two companies: SpaceX and Boeing. The companies won the contracts, worth a combined $6.8 billion, in 2014.Since then, both companies have faced setbacks and delays as they struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety requirements. But now NASA says they are poised at long last to make their first flights with humans this year \u2014 a timeline many in the industry believe may be optimistic given the immense challenge.Since the space shuttle retired in 2011, NASA has had to purchase seats on a Russian spacecraft, the Soyuz. Those seats runs out by the end of this year, so if SpaceX and Boeing\u2019s spacecraft are not ready, NASA would have to purchase additional seats or face the prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the space station, in which the United States has invested about $100 billion.Pentagon watchdog to review SpaceX certification to launch national security satellitesWith so much at stake, SpaceX\u2019s launch, scheduled for 2:49 a.m. Saturday, \u201cis an absolutely critical first step,\u201d William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, said during a news briefing last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor SpaceX, a successful flight would mark a crucial next step in its quest to make routine human spaceflight possible. And it would be another triumph for a company that improbably upended the launch industry by pulling off such feats as landing and reusing rocket boosters, usually discarded after each use.A failure, however, would be devastating. Two SpaceX rockets have exploded: one in 2015 while flying cargo to the space station and another on the launchpad in 2016 ahead of an engine test fire. The company has bounced back from those failures and flown nearly 70 successful missions. But recently the Air Force inspector general announced it is reviewing the certifications granted to SpaceX that allow the company to fly national security missions, a key source of revenue.NASA officials said that although they are confident about the flight, and have signed off on it after multiple flight reviews, SpaceX must still address several technical issues before flying people later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX also said it is ready. The company has done \u201can incredible amount of testing to make sure that everything is safe and ready to go,\u201d Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, told reporters Thursday.Still, the company has a lot of work to do before it flies humans, officials said.NASA and SpaceX are still studying the pressure vessels inside the rocket\u2019s second-stage fuel tank that led to an explosion in 2016, before an engine test firing. NASA\u2019s Gerstenmaier said last week that the teams have completed a statistical analysis of the problem.Now, he said, NASA and SpaceX are examining the \u201cphysics behind\u201d the possible source of ignition when fibers around the tank break free and generate heat.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSo now we're going back and we're proving to ourselves that this breaking is so unlikely that it's not going to be a concern to cause the ignition event and cause the problem moving forward,\u201d he said.Companies in the Cosmos: How billionaires and entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageGerstenmaier said thrusters on the spacecraft can also \"break free and liberate and come out\u201d if they get too cold. He said that although the problem can be prevented by keeping the propellant \u201cat a certain temperature,\u201d SpaceX may need to redesign that part, as well.AdvertisementHe said finding technical challenges was a typical part of the testing process to see how the spacecraft operates and fix any problems before flying people.Overall, he said the vehicle is in \u201cvery, very good shape.\"Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m very comfortable with where we\u2019re headed with this flight. I fully expect we\u2019re going to learn something on this flight. I guarantee you everything will not work exactly right. And that\u2019s cool. ... We want to maximize our learning so we can get the stuff ready so when we put crew on, we\u2019re ready to go do a real crew mission,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.SpaceX flies its Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo and supplies to the station. During those missions, which don\u2019t have people on board, the spacecraft sidles up to the station and is captured by a robotic arm operated by one of the astronauts aboard the station.AdvertisementFor this mission, the spacecraft will dock with the station autonomously, like a self-driving car pulling into a parking spot, except the space station travels at 17,500 mph in orbit, circling the globe every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe need to make sure that it can safely go rendezvous and dock with the space station and then undock safely and not pose a hazard to the International Space Station,\u201d Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said last week.NASA officials said last week that the Russians, who are partners on the station, raised a concern about SpaceX\u2019s docking software. But it has since been resolved, officials said Thursday.SpaceX designed its Dragon spacecraft, a sleek capsule with three windows that sits on top of the Falcon 9 rocket, with human flight in mind from the beginning. It is equipped with eight engines that allow it to fly away from the rocket in the case of an emergency \u2014 a capability the space shuttle did not have.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mannequin on board for Saturday\u2019s flight is named \u201cRipley,\u201d for Ellen Ripley, the character in the movie \u201cAlien\u201d played by Sigourney Weaver. She is outfitted in a SpaceX space suit equipped with sensors to monitor the condition of the crew cabin and the forces that the flight puts on the body.Safety is SpaceX\u2019s top priority, company officials have repeatedly said. But when Musk was seen smoking marijuana on a podcast, it worried NASA\u2019s leadership, which decided to conduct a safety review of both SpaceX and Boeing.NASA launches safety review after Elon Musk smokes pot during a videotaped podcast\u201cWe need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut on a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview late last year.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has been upgraded over the years to make it \u201cthe most reliable rocket ever built,\u201d Musk said during a press call last year. I hope fate does not punish me for those words, but that is unequivocally the intent.\u201dMusk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of ultimately sending humans to Mars, is well aware of the difficulties of space flight. \u201cThere could be a thousand things that could go right, and one thing that goes wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reason it is so hard to make an orbital rocket work is that your passing grade is 100 percent.\u201d SpaceX will launch an uncrewed rocket from the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday, an important test for NASA and the company. It comes at a time when controversy is swirling around company founder Elon Musk. NASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday\u2019s test flight a \u2018critical first step.\u2019",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday\u2019s test flight a \u2018critical first step.\u2019 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6264",
        "date": "2019-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/01/nasa-needs-spacex-prove-it-can-fly-astronauts-safely-saturdays-test-flight-is-called-crucial-step/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The Securities and Exchange Commission is all over him. The Air Force inspector general is auditing his launch certifications. And even NASA, one of his most ardent supporters, is reviewing the safety culture at SpaceX after Elon Musk smoked a joint on a podcast.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that weren\u2019t enough pressure, the billionaire entrepreneur is facing one of the most crucial moments in SpaceX\u2019s history early Saturday, when the spacecraft designed to carry humans is scheduled to lift off from a storied launch site here. Although the Dragon spacecraft won\u2019t be carrying astronauts \u2014 only a mannequin named \u201cRipley\u201d with sensors and about 400 pounds of cargo \u2014 the flight will mark a significant step toward the restoration of human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired nearly eight years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe heat isn\u2019t just on SpaceX and Musk, who has drawn scrutiny from the SEC over his leadership of his electric car company, Tesla, but on NASA, as well. Years ago, it placed a bold bet on the private sector and outsourced human spaceflight to the International Space Station to two companies: SpaceX and Boeing. The companies won the contracts, worth a combined $6.8 billion, in 2014.Since then, both companies have faced setbacks and delays as they struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety requirements. But now NASA says they are poised at long last to make their first flights with humans this year \u2014 a timeline many in the industry believe may be optimistic given the immense challenge.Since the space shuttle retired in 2011, NASA has had to purchase seats on a Russian spacecraft, the Soyuz. Those seats runs out by the end of this year, so if SpaceX and Boeing\u2019s spacecraft are not ready, NASA would have to purchase additional seats or face the prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the space station, in which the United States has invested about $100 billion.Pentagon watchdog to review SpaceX certification to launch national security satellitesWith so much at stake, SpaceX\u2019s launch, scheduled for 2:49 a.m. Saturday, \u201cis an absolutely critical first step,\u201d William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, said during a news briefing last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor SpaceX, a successful flight would mark a crucial next step in its quest to make routine human spaceflight possible. And it would be another triumph for a company that improbably upended the launch industry by pulling off such feats as landing and reusing rocket boosters, usually discarded after each use.A failure, however, would be devastating. Two SpaceX rockets have exploded: one in 2015 while flying cargo to the space station and another on the launchpad in 2016 ahead of an engine test fire. The company has bounced back from those failures and flown nearly 70 successful missions. But recently the Air Force inspector general announced it is reviewing the certifications granted to SpaceX that allow the company to fly national security missions, a key source of revenue.NASA officials said that although they are confident about the flight, and have signed off on it after multiple flight reviews, SpaceX must still address several technical issues before flying people later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX also said it is ready. The company has done \u201can incredible amount of testing to make sure that everything is safe and ready to go,\u201d Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, told reporters Thursday.Still, the company has a lot of work to do before it flies humans, officials said.NASA and SpaceX are still studying the pressure vessels inside the rocket\u2019s second-stage fuel tank that led to an explosion in 2016, before an engine test firing. NASA\u2019s Gerstenmaier said last week that the teams have completed a statistical analysis of the problem.Now, he said, NASA and SpaceX are examining the \u201cphysics behind\u201d the possible source of ignition when fibers around the tank break free and generate heat.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSo now we're going back and we're proving to ourselves that this breaking is so unlikely that it's not going to be a concern to cause the ignition event and cause the problem moving forward,\u201d he said.Companies in the Cosmos: How billionaires and entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageGerstenmaier said thrusters on the spacecraft can also \"break free and liberate and come out\u201d if they get too cold. He said that although the problem can be prevented by keeping the propellant \u201cat a certain temperature,\u201d SpaceX may need to redesign that part, as well.AdvertisementHe said finding technical challenges was a typical part of the testing process to see how the spacecraft operates and fix any problems before flying people.Overall, he said the vehicle is in \u201cvery, very good shape.\"Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m very comfortable with where we\u2019re headed with this flight. I fully expect we\u2019re going to learn something on this flight. I guarantee you everything will not work exactly right. And that\u2019s cool. ... We want to maximize our learning so we can get the stuff ready so when we put crew on, we\u2019re ready to go do a real crew mission,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.SpaceX flies its Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo and supplies to the station. During those missions, which don\u2019t have people on board, the spacecraft sidles up to the station and is captured by a robotic arm operated by one of the astronauts aboard the station.AdvertisementFor this mission, the spacecraft will dock with the station autonomously, like a self-driving car pulling into a parking spot, except the space station travels at 17,500 mph in orbit, circling the globe every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe need to make sure that it can safely go rendezvous and dock with the space station and then undock safely and not pose a hazard to the International Space Station,\u201d Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said last week.NASA officials said last week that the Russians, who are partners on the station, raised a concern about SpaceX\u2019s docking software. But it has since been resolved, officials said Thursday.SpaceX designed its Dragon spacecraft, a sleek capsule with three windows that sits on top of the Falcon 9 rocket, with human flight in mind from the beginning. It is equipped with eight engines that allow it to fly away from the rocket in the case of an emergency \u2014 a capability the space shuttle did not have.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mannequin on board for Saturday\u2019s flight is named \u201cRipley,\u201d for Ellen Ripley, the character in the movie \u201cAlien\u201d played by Sigourney Weaver. She is outfitted in a SpaceX space suit equipped with sensors to monitor the condition of the crew cabin and the forces that the flight puts on the body.Safety is SpaceX\u2019s top priority, company officials have repeatedly said. But when Musk was seen smoking marijuana on a podcast, it worried NASA\u2019s leadership, which decided to conduct a safety review of both SpaceX and Boeing.NASA launches safety review after Elon Musk smokes pot during a videotaped podcast\u201cWe need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut on a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview late last year.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has been upgraded over the years to make it \u201cthe most reliable rocket ever built,\u201d Musk said during a press call last year. I hope fate does not punish me for those words, but that is unequivocally the intent.\u201dMusk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of ultimately sending humans to Mars, is well aware of the difficulties of space flight. \u201cThere could be a thousand things that could go right, and one thing that goes wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reason it is so hard to make an orbital rocket work is that your passing grade is 100 percent.\u201d SpaceX will launch an uncrewed rocket from the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday, an important test for NASA and the company. It comes at a time when controversy is swirling around company founder Elon Musk. NASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday\u2019s test flight a \u2018critical first step.\u2019",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday\u2019s test flight a \u2018critical first step.\u2019 (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6265",
        "date": "2019-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/01/nasa-needs-spacex-prove-it-can-fly-astronauts-safely-saturdays-test-flight-is-called-crucial-step/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 The Securities and Exchange Commission is all over him. The Air Force inspector general is auditing his launch certifications. And even NASA, one of his most ardent supporters, is reviewing the safety culture at SpaceX after Elon Musk smoked a joint on a podcast.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that weren\u2019t enough pressure, the billionaire entrepreneur is facing one of the most crucial moments in SpaceX\u2019s history early Saturday, when the spacecraft designed to carry humans is scheduled to lift off from a storied launch site here. Although the Dragon spacecraft won\u2019t be carrying astronauts \u2014 only a mannequin named \u201cRipley\u201d with sensors and about 400 pounds of cargo \u2014 the flight will mark a significant step toward the restoration of human spaceflight from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired nearly eight years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe heat isn\u2019t just on SpaceX and Musk, who has drawn scrutiny from the SEC over his leadership of his electric car company, Tesla, but on NASA, as well. Years ago, it placed a bold bet on the private sector and outsourced human spaceflight to the International Space Station to two companies: SpaceX and Boeing. The companies won the contracts, worth a combined $6.8 billion, in 2014.Since then, both companies have faced setbacks and delays as they struggled to meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety requirements. But now NASA says they are poised at long last to make their first flights with humans this year \u2014 a timeline many in the industry believe may be optimistic given the immense challenge.Since the space shuttle retired in 2011, NASA has had to purchase seats on a Russian spacecraft, the Soyuz. Those seats runs out by the end of this year, so if SpaceX and Boeing\u2019s spacecraft are not ready, NASA would have to purchase additional seats or face the prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the space station, in which the United States has invested about $100 billion.Pentagon watchdog to review SpaceX certification to launch national security satellitesWith so much at stake, SpaceX\u2019s launch, scheduled for 2:49 a.m. Saturday, \u201cis an absolutely critical first step,\u201d William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, said during a news briefing last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor SpaceX, a successful flight would mark a crucial next step in its quest to make routine human spaceflight possible. And it would be another triumph for a company that improbably upended the launch industry by pulling off such feats as landing and reusing rocket boosters, usually discarded after each use.A failure, however, would be devastating. Two SpaceX rockets have exploded: one in 2015 while flying cargo to the space station and another on the launchpad in 2016 ahead of an engine test fire. The company has bounced back from those failures and flown nearly 70 successful missions. But recently the Air Force inspector general announced it is reviewing the certifications granted to SpaceX that allow the company to fly national security missions, a key source of revenue.NASA officials said that although they are confident about the flight, and have signed off on it after multiple flight reviews, SpaceX must still address several technical issues before flying people later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX also said it is ready. The company has done \u201can incredible amount of testing to make sure that everything is safe and ready to go,\u201d Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, told reporters Thursday.Still, the company has a lot of work to do before it flies humans, officials said.NASA and SpaceX are still studying the pressure vessels inside the rocket\u2019s second-stage fuel tank that led to an explosion in 2016, before an engine test firing. NASA\u2019s Gerstenmaier said last week that the teams have completed a statistical analysis of the problem.Now, he said, NASA and SpaceX are examining the \u201cphysics behind\u201d the possible source of ignition when fibers around the tank break free and generate heat.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSo now we're going back and we're proving to ourselves that this breaking is so unlikely that it's not going to be a concern to cause the ignition event and cause the problem moving forward,\u201d he said.Companies in the Cosmos: How billionaires and entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageGerstenmaier said thrusters on the spacecraft can also \"break free and liberate and come out\u201d if they get too cold. He said that although the problem can be prevented by keeping the propellant \u201cat a certain temperature,\u201d SpaceX may need to redesign that part, as well.AdvertisementHe said finding technical challenges was a typical part of the testing process to see how the spacecraft operates and fix any problems before flying people.Overall, he said the vehicle is in \u201cvery, very good shape.\"Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m very comfortable with where we\u2019re headed with this flight. I fully expect we\u2019re going to learn something on this flight. I guarantee you everything will not work exactly right. And that\u2019s cool. ... We want to maximize our learning so we can get the stuff ready so when we put crew on, we\u2019re ready to go do a real crew mission,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.SpaceX flies its Dragon spacecraft to deliver cargo and supplies to the station. During those missions, which don\u2019t have people on board, the spacecraft sidles up to the station and is captured by a robotic arm operated by one of the astronauts aboard the station.AdvertisementFor this mission, the spacecraft will dock with the station autonomously, like a self-driving car pulling into a parking spot, except the space station travels at 17,500 mph in orbit, circling the globe every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe need to make sure that it can safely go rendezvous and dock with the space station and then undock safely and not pose a hazard to the International Space Station,\u201d Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said last week.NASA officials said last week that the Russians, who are partners on the station, raised a concern about SpaceX\u2019s docking software. But it has since been resolved, officials said Thursday.SpaceX designed its Dragon spacecraft, a sleek capsule with three windows that sits on top of the Falcon 9 rocket, with human flight in mind from the beginning. It is equipped with eight engines that allow it to fly away from the rocket in the case of an emergency \u2014 a capability the space shuttle did not have.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mannequin on board for Saturday\u2019s flight is named \u201cRipley,\u201d for Ellen Ripley, the character in the movie \u201cAlien\u201d played by Sigourney Weaver. She is outfitted in a SpaceX space suit equipped with sensors to monitor the condition of the crew cabin and the forces that the flight puts on the body.Safety is SpaceX\u2019s top priority, company officials have repeatedly said. But when Musk was seen smoking marijuana on a podcast, it worried NASA\u2019s leadership, which decided to conduct a safety review of both SpaceX and Boeing.NASA launches safety review after Elon Musk smokes pot during a videotaped podcast\u201cWe need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut on a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview late last year.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has been upgraded over the years to make it \u201cthe most reliable rocket ever built,\u201d Musk said during a press call last year. I hope fate does not punish me for those words, but that is unequivocally the intent.\u201dMusk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of ultimately sending humans to Mars, is well aware of the difficulties of space flight. \u201cThere could be a thousand things that could go right, and one thing that goes wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reason it is so hard to make an orbital rocket work is that your passing grade is 100 percent.\u201d SpaceX will launch an uncrewed rocket from the Kennedy Space Center early Saturday, an important test for NASA and the company. It comes at a time when controversy is swirling around company founder Elon Musk. NASA needs SpaceX to prove it can fly astronauts safely. Saturday\u2019s test flight a \u2018critical first step.\u2019",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Elon Musk went from sleeping in the factory to being on the cusp of launching a crew into space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6266",
        "date": "2020-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/21/how-elon-musk-went-sleeping-factory-being-cusp-launching-crew-into-space/",
        "text": "Just over a year ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission had launched an investigation into Elon Musk after he tweeted that he planned to take Tesla private. He was facing criticism, and a defamation lawsuit, for calling a Thai-cave rescuer a \u201cpedo guy\u201d and \u201cchild rapist.\u201d And when Musk took a hit off a joint during an Internet broadcast, it triggered a safety review from NASA that was concerned the billionaire maverick was going off the rails. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now Musk is on a roll, literally dancing his way forward past a thicket of controversies. Tesla\u2019s stock price has quadrupled, and the company\u2019s market value now is greater than GM\u2019s and Ford\u2019s combined. A jury acquitted him in the defamation suit. And SpaceX is on the cusp of its first human spaceflight, having just completed what Musk called \u201ca picture-perfect\u201d test flight.President Trump even compared him recently to Thomas Edison, calling him \u201cone of our great geniuses.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost notable for some is that Musk, known for taking to Twitter to tout his successes and lash out at his critics, has demonstrated restraint. He hasn\u2019t tweeted any sensitive numbers about the publicly traded Tesla, and he kept silent after NASA pronounced the software in Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule \u2014 SpaceX\u2019s competitor for sending people into space \u2014 so flawed that more than a million lines of code must be meticulously reviewed, a process that could take months.Elon Musk: Tweet that cost $20 million was \u2018worth it\u2019People who follow Musk closely say they\u2019ve noticed the change. Rebukes by regulators and the serious responsibility of sending astronauts to space, now weeks away, have humbled him, they say. Both Tesla and SpaceX declined to comment.\u201cElon\u2019s not dealing like he\u2019s under the vise anymore, and he is acting more reasonable,\u201d said Gene Munster, managing partner of analyst firm Loup Ventures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t challenges ahead. Tesla is launching its new crossover SUV in the first quarter, and new vehicles in the past have become a production stumbling block. Tesla also revealed last week that it\u2019s again under investigation by the SEC.And though he may have been humbled, he remains unfiltered. He recently danced onstage in China, performing what some dubbed a strip tease, shrugging his hoodie off and then throwing it. He told a recent SpaceX event on the rushed timeline to build a rocket he hopes will get to Mars: \u201cMy new thing is management by rhyming: If the schedule is long, it\u2019s wrong; if it\u2019s tight, it\u2019s right.\u201d He also recently released a song that climbed the charts on Spotify after he tweeted to his 30 million followers a shot of himself jamming to the beat.The track\u2019s title also served as a four-word manifesto: \u201cDon\u2019t Doubt Ur Vibe.\u201dPayoff after a painful yearMusk\u2019s relentless focus on Tesla, in particular, has begun to pay off. Musk\u2019s goal of injecting electric cars into the mainstream is becoming reality, and Wall Street has begun to accept that. The company\u2019s stock has long been besieged by short sellers, gambling that the company won\u2019t achieve its goals. But the short sellers are reeling, prompting headlines such as this recent one in the Wall Street Journal: \u201cDetroit Falters as Tesla Excites.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are still things they need to work through,\u201d said Munster. \u201cIt\u2019s still going to be bumpy. But as far as the core concept \u2014 \u2018Will Tesla make it or not make it?\u2019 \u2014 that question has now been decided. Tesla is going to be around for decades.\u201dMusk, who was bullied as a child in South Africa and made his way to North America as a teenager, has always had a combative streak that often pitted him against the establishment. He took on the credit card industry with PayPal, where he was CEO until he was ousted in 2000. He remained the company\u2019s largest shareholder, however, and pocketed $165 million when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. He founded SpaceX in 2001 and disrupted the military-industrial complex that for years had a strong hold over America\u2019s space industry. His investment in Tesla didn\u2019t come until 2004, when he was named the company\u2019s chairman of the board. He became CEO in 2008. Forbes estimates his net worth at more than $43 billion.The low point for Musk came during the summer of 2018. A slate of top executives had left Tesla, which had been struggling and laying off employees in droves. The company was having difficulty delivering on its rosy production promises, and Musk said on Twitter that the company had graduated from one nightmare to another \u2014 \u201cfrom production hell to delivery logistics hell.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe lamented to the New York Times that August in an interview that, \u201cThis past year has been the most difficult and painful year of my career. It was excruciating.\u201dThe company was struggling to achieve its goal of delivering 5,000 Model 3 cars per week.Tesla never truly delivered on the core marketing component of the Model 3 \u2014 that it would be a $35,000 car, making it affordable to the masses. While a model costing that price was available briefly last year, it was pulled from Tesla\u2019s traditional online sales hub and moved to special order status.Musk had long been turning attention \u2014 some said too much attention \u2014 to the intricacies of the company\u2019s product lineup and assembly line. And he made decisions in haste, axing products on impulse without embarking on market research.Story continues below advertisement\u201cGet it off the website now,\u201d he said, after one executive presented what he saw as a compelling case.AdvertisementWhen the company failed to meet its output for Model X SUVs because the falcon-wing doors were so hard to fit, \u201cElon moved into the factory for two weeks,\u201d said a former Tesla executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters. \u201cHe was sleeping in a sleeping bag \u2014 real-time triaging cars at the end of the line trying to get to the root cause of what the issues were. It was wild.\u201dMusk also got hands-on when the company was facing a lag because of paint. \u201cElon wasn\u2019t satisfied,\u201d the former executive said, \u201cand so he took over the paint shop. He ran the paint shop for two weeks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHis agony was compounded by a self-inflicted wound \u2014 when he took to Twitter to announce that he intended to take Tesla private at $420 a share.\u201cFunding secured,\u201d he wrote on Aug. 7, 2018, in a pronouncement that shocked investors and sparked an SEC investigation that resulted in a lawsuit accusing him of misleading investors and seeking to bar him from running any public company.AdvertisementMusk ended up settling soon afterward, paying a $20 million fine and agreeing to step down as Tesla\u2019s chairman for three years.Late in 2018, it was officials on the ninth floor of NASA headquarters who were fuming over his behavior. Musk had recently puffed a joint while appearing on Joe Rogan\u2019s show and took a sip of whiskey \u2014 not the sort of conduct NASA is used to seeing from the heads of their prime contractors.Story continues below advertisementIn this case, NASA was relying on Musk\u2019s SpaceX to build a spacecraft capable of flying its astronauts to the International Space Station. And NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a teetotaling conservative Republican and former congressman from Oklahoma, didn\u2019t appreciate the message it sent.He ordered a safety review of the company and publicly chastised Musk, saying that \u201cculture and leadership start at the top. Anything that would result in some questioning the culture of safety, we need to fix immediately.\u201dBoeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationSpaceX went to great lengths to show that it prioritizes safety over all else. And in March of last year, it successfully flew its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station and back, a feat that seemed to erase any concerns from Bridenstine, who crowed after the 2:49 a.m. launch that SpaceX had helped put NASA on the \u201cprecipice of launching American astronauts in American rockets from American soil.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpeaking at the predawn news conference, Musk said he \u201cwas emotionally exhausted\u201d and that the flight was \u201csuper stressful,\u201d and the culmination of \u201can incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice.\u201dThe high didn't last long.A month later, that same spacecraft blew up during a test of its emergency abort system, sending an ominous cloud of orange smoke wafting into the Florida sky.Greater stability at TeslaAt Tesla, everything started to stabilize once Musk had a new team he could trust to deliver in 2019.Gone were the days when Musk moved into the manufacturing plant, overseeing mundane elements of production personally, such as the Model X production, the company\u2019s paint shop and later the Model 3\u2019s lagging due to overemphasis on automation.Finally, he began to delegate, more and more, becoming more comfortable after the revolving door of executives finally left him with a team he could trust, former officials and close observers said.AdvertisementThe Model 3 line was ramping up and meeting delivery goals. Tesla opened a factory to produce cars in China. The stock started rising. And Musk did a dance \u2014 arms pumping, jacket tossed to the side \u2014 at an event in Shanghai celebrating the first car deliveries in China that went viral and symbolized the sudden turnaround.Still, there are many perils ahead.Musk faces serious questions about core pieces of Tesla\u2019s business model that could send the company back to its near-constant volatility over the last few years, which saw the company\u2019s stock dip to a low of $177 as recently as June. Even earlier this month, the stock rose nearly 14 percent to $887 before falling 17 percent the next day. On Friday, it closed at $901 a share.One of Musk\u2019s biggest tests will be the first deliveries of its new Model Y crossover. Tesla has faced questions about demand now that a $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicle purchases has expired. Musk acknowledged the challenges on a call with analysts last month, though it was not demand that concerned him. \u201cWe are worried about production, [making] sure we get that production ramp going and reach volume production as soon as possible,\u201d he said.It\u2019s also not out of the regulatory line of fire. Tesla revealed earlier this month that the SEC had subpoenaed the company seeking records concerning \u201ccertain financial data and contracts including Tesla\u2019s regular financing arrangements\u201d in December, just as the agency closed the investigation into Musk\u2019s tweets. The company separately revealed that the Department of Justice was seeking documents on Musk\u2019s communications about taking the company private and Model 3 production. It also faces probes by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into safety regarding both its Autopilot assistant and alleged battery fires.And then there\u2019s the question of whether Musk can safely fly astronauts \u2014 a feat SpaceX hasn\u2019t yet tried. That test is likely to come this spring, when SpaceX is expected to fly two NASA astronauts, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, to the International Space Station.SpaceX completes key test of its Dragon capsule. Its first human spaceflight might come in spring.In January, SpaceX nailed a test flight that showed off the capsule\u2019s emergency abort system, paving the way for the first flight with crews on board. Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who worked at SpaceX for years and still serves as a consultant, said Musk and the people at SpaceX know \u201cto never believe things are going to be as great as they are during the highs, and not as low during the lows.\u201dStill, he said, the abort-system test \u201cwas a huge morale boost\u201d that fired up Musk and his whole team.It showed. Hours after the flight, Musk, who turns 49 in June, was loose and in a good mood, holding forth before a gaggle of reporters at the Kennedy Space Center. One of them urged him to show off his dance moves, as he had done in Shanghai when Tesla opened a factory there.But he demurred, saying maybe he would consider it once he had flown astronauts safely. \u201cI\u2019m not your dancing puppet!\u201d he said, laughing.CORRECTION: An earlier version incorrectly stated that Elon Musk was investigated after tweeting that he intended to take Tesla public. The tweet said he planned to take the publicly traded company private. In addition, a previous version of this story said the company\u2019s stock hit a record low of $177 last June. That share price was not a record low.Tesla's stock surges, sending short-sellers scrambling In a span of two years, Musk has practically reversed his fortunes from the days when he was dogged by constant regulatory scrutiny and questions over his ability to lead Tesla and SpaceX How Elon Musk went from sleeping in the factory to being on the cusp of launching a crew into space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6267",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/26/jeff-bezos-challenges-nasa-moon-contract-award-elon-musks-spacex/",
        "text": "Just over a week after it lost out on a high-profile and lucrative contract to build the next spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin filed a protest over NASA\u2019s decision, saying it was flawed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build the lunar lander, a huge victory that surprised many in the space industry. Blue Origin had vigorously pursued the contract, building what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to compete for it. It won the largest award in the initial round and was seen by many as the team to beat for what NASA calls the Human Landing System. The selection of SpaceX as the only contract recipient was a huge blow to Blue Origin and an embarrassment for Bezos, who was personally involved in the project and has talked openly about his lifelong fascination with the moon. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, the company said that \u201cNASA has executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute. In NASA\u2019s own words, it has made a \u2018high risk\u2019 selection. Their decision eliminates opportunities for competition, significantly narrows the supply base, and not only delays, but also endangers America\u2019s return to the Moon.\u201dDynetics, a defense contractor that had also submitted a bid for the contract, said it had filed a protest as well. The Alabama-based subsidiary of Leidos said in a statement that it \u201chas issues and concerns with several aspects of the acquisition process as well as elements of NASA\u2019s technical evaluation.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moonNASA said it had hoped to award two contracts to ensure competition and redundancy in case one of the providers faltered. But it said it did not have the funding from Congress to pay for two contracts and is pushing to return astronauts to the moon quickly, for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt said SpaceX\u2019s contract was for the first lunar landing only and that there would be additional competitions for future missions. At his confirmation hearing last week, former senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), President Biden\u2019s pick for NASA administrator, said he endorsed that approach.\u201cCompetition is always good,\u201d he said.Blue Origin\u2019s bid, the protest said, was $6 billion, or more than double SpaceX\u2019s. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, told the New York Times that he objected to the fact that NASA allowed SpaceX to update its payment schedule so that it fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201d\u201cWe didn\u2019t get a chance to revise, and that\u2019s fundamentally unfair,\u201d Smith told the Times.Story continues below advertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dAdvertisementNASA declined to comment \u201cdue to the pending litigation.\u201dIn a statement to The Post, Musk, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials, said: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn making the award earlier this month, NASA officials hailed it as a watershed moment that would allow the space agency to put the first woman and first person of color on the moon. \u201cAs the first human lunar lander in 50 years, this innovative human landing system will be a hallmark in space exploration history,\u201d said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar-lander program manager.AdvertisementBezos and Musk have battled over government resources before. In 2013, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision to allow SpaceX to use Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Given the fact that Blue Origin did not have a rocket capable of getting to orbit or flying people, Musk said the protest was ridiculous, and Blue Origin lost the challenge.And he did not think Blue Origin had much of a chance of creating a human-rated rocket anytime soon. \u201cI think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct,\u201d he told SpaceNews at the time.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX recently launched its third human spaceflight mission from 39A. Blue Origin recently said New Glenn, the big orbital rocket it has been working on for years, would be delayed another year.In response to the news, Musk wrote on Twitter: \u201cCan\u2019t get it up (to orbit) lol.\u201dAdvertisementBezos has long been enthralled by the moon and has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon when he was 5 years old was \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him.Blue Origin has been pitching its landing system, known as Blue Moon, since 2017, and Bezos, often described as the world\u2019s richest man, has said he would invest in it heavily himself. In 2019, Bezos said that the program is \u201cso ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201dCORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Bezos had stepped down as Amazon CEO. Bezos announced in February that he would assume the title of executive chairman, but that change will not take place until the third quarter of 2021. Blue Origin said NASA had inappropriately allowed SpaceX to revise its pricing. Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6268",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/26/jeff-bezos-challenges-nasa-moon-contract-award-elon-musks-spacex/",
        "text": "Just over a week after it lost out on a high-profile and lucrative contract to build the next spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin filed a protest over NASA\u2019s decision, saying it was flawed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build the lunar lander, a huge victory that surprised many in the space industry. Blue Origin had vigorously pursued the contract, building what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to compete for it. It won the largest award in the initial round and was seen by many as the team to beat for what NASA calls the Human Landing System. The selection of SpaceX as the only contract recipient was a huge blow to Blue Origin and an embarrassment for Bezos, who was personally involved in the project and has talked openly about his lifelong fascination with the moon. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, the company said that \u201cNASA has executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute. In NASA\u2019s own words, it has made a \u2018high risk\u2019 selection. Their decision eliminates opportunities for competition, significantly narrows the supply base, and not only delays, but also endangers America\u2019s return to the Moon.\u201dDynetics, a defense contractor that had also submitted a bid for the contract, said it had filed a protest as well. The Alabama-based subsidiary of Leidos said in a statement that it \u201chas issues and concerns with several aspects of the acquisition process as well as elements of NASA\u2019s technical evaluation.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moonNASA said it had hoped to award two contracts to ensure competition and redundancy in case one of the providers faltered. But it said it did not have the funding from Congress to pay for two contracts and is pushing to return astronauts to the moon quickly, for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt said SpaceX\u2019s contract was for the first lunar landing only and that there would be additional competitions for future missions. At his confirmation hearing last week, former senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), President Biden\u2019s pick for NASA administrator, said he endorsed that approach.\u201cCompetition is always good,\u201d he said.Blue Origin\u2019s bid, the protest said, was $6 billion, or more than double SpaceX\u2019s. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, told the New York Times that he objected to the fact that NASA allowed SpaceX to update its payment schedule so that it fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201d\u201cWe didn\u2019t get a chance to revise, and that\u2019s fundamentally unfair,\u201d Smith told the Times.Story continues below advertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dAdvertisementNASA declined to comment \u201cdue to the pending litigation.\u201dIn a statement to The Post, Musk, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials, said: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn making the award earlier this month, NASA officials hailed it as a watershed moment that would allow the space agency to put the first woman and first person of color on the moon. \u201cAs the first human lunar lander in 50 years, this innovative human landing system will be a hallmark in space exploration history,\u201d said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar-lander program manager.AdvertisementBezos and Musk have battled over government resources before. In 2013, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision to allow SpaceX to use Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Given the fact that Blue Origin did not have a rocket capable of getting to orbit or flying people, Musk said the protest was ridiculous, and Blue Origin lost the challenge.And he did not think Blue Origin had much of a chance of creating a human-rated rocket anytime soon. \u201cI think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct,\u201d he told SpaceNews at the time.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX recently launched its third human spaceflight mission from 39A. Blue Origin recently said New Glenn, the big orbital rocket it has been working on for years, would be delayed another year.In response to the news, Musk wrote on Twitter: \u201cCan\u2019t get it up (to orbit) lol.\u201dAdvertisementBezos has long been enthralled by the moon and has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon when he was 5 years old was \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him.Blue Origin has been pitching its landing system, known as Blue Moon, since 2017, and Bezos, often described as the world\u2019s richest man, has said he would invest in it heavily himself. In 2019, Bezos said that the program is \u201cso ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201dCORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Bezos had stepped down as Amazon CEO. Bezos announced in February that he would assume the title of executive chairman, but that change will not take place until the third quarter of 2021. Blue Origin said NASA had inappropriately allowed SpaceX to revise its pricing. Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6269",
        "date": "2021-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/26/jeff-bezos-challenges-nasa-moon-contract-award-elon-musks-spacex/",
        "text": "Just over a week after it lost out on a high-profile and lucrative contract to build the next spacecraft that would land astronauts on the moon, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin filed a protest over NASA\u2019s decision, saying it was flawed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build the lunar lander, a huge victory that surprised many in the space industry. Blue Origin had vigorously pursued the contract, building what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, to compete for it. It won the largest award in the initial round and was seen by many as the team to beat for what NASA calls the Human Landing System. The selection of SpaceX as the only contract recipient was a huge blow to Blue Origin and an embarrassment for Bezos, who was personally involved in the project and has talked openly about his lifelong fascination with the moon. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, the company said that \u201cNASA has executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute. In NASA\u2019s own words, it has made a \u2018high risk\u2019 selection. Their decision eliminates opportunities for competition, significantly narrows the supply base, and not only delays, but also endangers America\u2019s return to the Moon.\u201dDynetics, a defense contractor that had also submitted a bid for the contract, said it had filed a protest as well. The Alabama-based subsidiary of Leidos said in a statement that it \u201chas issues and concerns with several aspects of the acquisition process as well as elements of NASA\u2019s technical evaluation.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX wins contract to develop spacecraft to land astronauts on the moonNASA said it had hoped to award two contracts to ensure competition and redundancy in case one of the providers faltered. But it said it did not have the funding from Congress to pay for two contracts and is pushing to return astronauts to the moon quickly, for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt said SpaceX\u2019s contract was for the first lunar landing only and that there would be additional competitions for future missions. At his confirmation hearing last week, former senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), President Biden\u2019s pick for NASA administrator, said he endorsed that approach.\u201cCompetition is always good,\u201d he said.Blue Origin\u2019s bid, the protest said, was $6 billion, or more than double SpaceX\u2019s. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, told the New York Times that he objected to the fact that NASA allowed SpaceX to update its payment schedule so that it fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201d\u201cWe didn\u2019t get a chance to revise, and that\u2019s fundamentally unfair,\u201d Smith told the Times.Story continues below advertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dAdvertisementNASA declined to comment \u201cdue to the pending litigation.\u201dIn a statement to The Post, Musk, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials, said: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn making the award earlier this month, NASA officials hailed it as a watershed moment that would allow the space agency to put the first woman and first person of color on the moon. \u201cAs the first human lunar lander in 50 years, this innovative human landing system will be a hallmark in space exploration history,\u201d said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar-lander program manager.AdvertisementBezos and Musk have battled over government resources before. In 2013, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision to allow SpaceX to use Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. Given the fact that Blue Origin did not have a rocket capable of getting to orbit or flying people, Musk said the protest was ridiculous, and Blue Origin lost the challenge.And he did not think Blue Origin had much of a chance of creating a human-rated rocket anytime soon. \u201cI think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct,\u201d he told SpaceNews at the time.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX recently launched its third human spaceflight mission from 39A. Blue Origin recently said New Glenn, the big orbital rocket it has been working on for years, would be delayed another year.In response to the news, Musk wrote on Twitter: \u201cCan\u2019t get it up (to orbit) lol.\u201dAdvertisementBezos has long been enthralled by the moon and has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon when he was 5 years old was \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him.Blue Origin has been pitching its landing system, known as Blue Moon, since 2017, and Bezos, often described as the world\u2019s richest man, has said he would invest in it heavily himself. In 2019, Bezos said that the program is \u201cso ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201dCORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Bezos had stepped down as Amazon CEO. Bezos announced in February that he would assume the title of executive chairman, but that change will not take place until the third quarter of 2021. Blue Origin said NASA had inappropriately allowed SpaceX to revise its pricing. Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandate (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6270",
        "date": "2019-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-team-up-with-aerospace-giants-help-meet-trumps-moon-mandate/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, the secretive space company he\u2019s been running for nearly two decades, is teaming up with a trio of aerospace industry heavyweights in an attempt to build a lunar landing system to meet the White House\u2019s audacious goal of returning humans to the surface of the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe team, which includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, plans to submit a bid to NASA for what many consider to be the most challenging component of a lunar landing: the spacecraft capable of getting humans safely to and from the lunar surface. (Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.)Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington Tuesday morning, Bezos called it a \u201cnational team for a national priority. .... This is the kind of thing that\u2019s so ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, the White House dramatically sped up NASA\u2019s moon program by calling for the space agency to get humans there by 2024 \u2014 not 2028, as had been originally planned. That accelerated timeline for what NASA calls its Artemis program has been criticized as unrealistic, but the companies said that with their combined expertise and heritage, they could meet the deadline.\u201cWe recognize that this project and the time frame that the nation is calling for is ambitious, very ambitious,\u201d said Brent Sherwood, Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of advanced development programs. \u201cAnd so we\u2019ve pulled together the best in the industry to make this happen with our partner, NASA.\u201dNASA has not announced what the contract for the lunar lander would be worth, saying it first needs to see what sorts of offerings it gets from industry before coming up with a price.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin first pitched NASA on a lunar lander it calls Blue Moon in 2017, and in May, Bezos unveiled a life-size mock-up of the spacecraft in Washington. Getting to the moon has long been a priority for Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of dramatically lowering the cost of spaceflight and helping humanity spread farther into the solar system.He has said that Blue Origin is the \u201cmost important work that I\u2019m doing,\u201d and he has lauded the White House\u2019s plan to return to the moon quickly.Trump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.\u201cIt\u2019s the right thing to do,\u201d Bezos said in May. He said the company could help meet the 2024 mandate because it started development of the lunar lander three years ago.Story continues below advertisementBut the White House\u2019s lunar ambitions have run into a roadblock in Congress, where Democrats in particular are skeptical. While NASA has requested an additional $1.6 billion in funding for the program for next year\u2019s budget, it has yet to release a price tag for the entire, multiyear plan, estimated to cost between $20 billion and $30 billion.Advertisement\u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon in 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so,\u201d Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said in a recent statement to The Post.Given the vast difficulties with landing on the moon, even Ken Bowersox, NASA\u2019s acting head of human exploration, said it seemed unlikely that NASA could meet the 2024 deadline.Story continues below advertisementWhile it is good to have \u201can aggressive goal,\u201d he said during a congressional hearing last month that he \u201cwouldn\u2019t bet my oldest child\u2019s upcoming birthday present or anything like that.\u201d NASA last week announced that Doug Loverro, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, would take over the head of human exploration position.As part of its plan to get astronauts to the moon for the first human landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, NASA plans to build an outpost called the Gateway, which would stay in orbit around the moon. Astronauts would first fly to the Gateway, and then be transported to the lunar surface by the landing system, which would also have a spacecraft known as an \u201cascent vehicle\u201d capable of transporting them back to the Gateway.Blue Origin would build a lander capable of transporting several metric tons to the lunar surface. Lockheed Martin, which is already developing the Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts from Earth to the Gateway, would build the ascent crew vehicle to fly them to and from the surface of the moon. Northrop Grumman would build a transfer vehicle that would station the lander in low lunar orbit. And Draper would work on the guidance and navigation systems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile the team is formidable, it appears to have competition. Boeing said it also would bid for the human lander. And Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is developing a next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, that it says could also take people to the lunar surface. Though it hasn\u2019t said whether it intends to bid on the lunar lander contract, a spokesman said the company\u2019s spacecraft and rocket \u201care integral to accelerating NASA\u2019s lunar and Mars plans.\u201dTo meet the goal for Artemis, NASA has been trying to speed up its procurement process. Blue Origin said that, if it were awarded the contract, work on the program could start as soon as January. But Congress would need to provide the funding for the years to come, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been spending an enormous amount of time meeting with lawmakers, hoping to win support.\u201cThe obstacles are not really technical challenges,\u201d Blue Origin\u2019s Sherwood said. \u201cIt depends on the speed of the procurement and the budget behind it.\u201dRead More:NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress.Pence calls for NASA to land astronauts on the moon within five years.An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up an Amazon-like delivery service for the moon The secretive space company has formed a partnership with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to build a lunar landing system. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandate",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandate (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6271",
        "date": "2019-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-team-up-with-aerospace-giants-help-meet-trumps-moon-mandate/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, the secretive space company he\u2019s been running for nearly two decades, is teaming up with a trio of aerospace industry heavyweights in an attempt to build a lunar landing system to meet the White House\u2019s audacious goal of returning humans to the surface of the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe team, which includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, plans to submit a bid to NASA for what many consider to be the most challenging component of a lunar landing: the spacecraft capable of getting humans safely to and from the lunar surface. (Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.)Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington Tuesday morning, Bezos called it a \u201cnational team for a national priority. .... This is the kind of thing that\u2019s so ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, the White House dramatically sped up NASA\u2019s moon program by calling for the space agency to get humans there by 2024 \u2014 not 2028, as had been originally planned. That accelerated timeline for what NASA calls its Artemis program has been criticized as unrealistic, but the companies said that with their combined expertise and heritage, they could meet the deadline.\u201cWe recognize that this project and the time frame that the nation is calling for is ambitious, very ambitious,\u201d said Brent Sherwood, Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of advanced development programs. \u201cAnd so we\u2019ve pulled together the best in the industry to make this happen with our partner, NASA.\u201dNASA has not announced what the contract for the lunar lander would be worth, saying it first needs to see what sorts of offerings it gets from industry before coming up with a price.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin first pitched NASA on a lunar lander it calls Blue Moon in 2017, and in May, Bezos unveiled a life-size mock-up of the spacecraft in Washington. Getting to the moon has long been a priority for Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of dramatically lowering the cost of spaceflight and helping humanity spread farther into the solar system.He has said that Blue Origin is the \u201cmost important work that I\u2019m doing,\u201d and he has lauded the White House\u2019s plan to return to the moon quickly.Trump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.\u201cIt\u2019s the right thing to do,\u201d Bezos said in May. He said the company could help meet the 2024 mandate because it started development of the lunar lander three years ago.Story continues below advertisementBut the White House\u2019s lunar ambitions have run into a roadblock in Congress, where Democrats in particular are skeptical. While NASA has requested an additional $1.6 billion in funding for the program for next year\u2019s budget, it has yet to release a price tag for the entire, multiyear plan, estimated to cost between $20 billion and $30 billion.Advertisement\u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon in 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so,\u201d Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said in a recent statement to The Post.Given the vast difficulties with landing on the moon, even Ken Bowersox, NASA\u2019s acting head of human exploration, said it seemed unlikely that NASA could meet the 2024 deadline.Story continues below advertisementWhile it is good to have \u201can aggressive goal,\u201d he said during a congressional hearing last month that he \u201cwouldn\u2019t bet my oldest child\u2019s upcoming birthday present or anything like that.\u201d NASA last week announced that Doug Loverro, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy, would take over the head of human exploration position.As part of its plan to get astronauts to the moon for the first human landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, NASA plans to build an outpost called the Gateway, which would stay in orbit around the moon. Astronauts would first fly to the Gateway, and then be transported to the lunar surface by the landing system, which would also have a spacecraft known as an \u201cascent vehicle\u201d capable of transporting them back to the Gateway.Blue Origin would build a lander capable of transporting several metric tons to the lunar surface. Lockheed Martin, which is already developing the Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts from Earth to the Gateway, would build the ascent crew vehicle to fly them to and from the surface of the moon. Northrop Grumman would build a transfer vehicle that would station the lander in low lunar orbit. And Draper would work on the guidance and navigation systems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile the team is formidable, it appears to have competition. Boeing said it also would bid for the human lander. And Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is developing a next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, that it says could also take people to the lunar surface. Though it hasn\u2019t said whether it intends to bid on the lunar lander contract, a spokesman said the company\u2019s spacecraft and rocket \u201care integral to accelerating NASA\u2019s lunar and Mars plans.\u201dTo meet the goal for Artemis, NASA has been trying to speed up its procurement process. Blue Origin said that, if it were awarded the contract, work on the program could start as soon as January. But Congress would need to provide the funding for the years to come, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been spending an enormous amount of time meeting with lawmakers, hoping to win support.\u201cThe obstacles are not really technical challenges,\u201d Blue Origin\u2019s Sherwood said. \u201cIt depends on the speed of the procurement and the budget behind it.\u201dRead More:NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress.Pence calls for NASA to land astronauts on the moon within five years.An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up an Amazon-like delivery service for the moon The secretive space company has formed a partnership with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to build a lunar landing system. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandate",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6272",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/16/blue-origin-spacex-rivalry-lawsuit-nasa/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company on Monday pressed its campaign to receive a slice of NASA\u2019s lucrative lunar lander contract, filing a suit in federal court in an attempt to force NASA to fund a second spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe suit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims, comes about two weeks after the Government Accountability Office rebuffed Blue Origin\u2019s protest of the NASA decision to award the $2.9 billion contract to develop the Human Landing System solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The suit filed Monday was under seal. But in a statement, Blue Origin said it is \u201can attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System. We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe contract is one of the most significant NASA programs in some time and has been a target for Blue Origin for years. In 2017, before there was even a formal request for proposals, the company pitched NASA on a lunar lander for cargo. At the time, Bezos told The Washington Post that he would invest a significant amount of his personal fortune to fund the spacecraft.Blue Origin subsequently teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, bulwarks of the American defense system, to bid for the program. And last year NASA awarded the Blue Origin-led team the biggest award in the initial phase of contracts. Blue Origin received $579 million; Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor, was awarded $253 million; and SpaceX received $135 million.But in April, NASA selected a single winner, SpaceX, to develop the spacecraft for what would be the first human landing on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Given the funding for the initial round, the award was considered a major upset.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was also a surprise, since NASA had said it wanted to fund two companies\u2019 spacecraft. But it said it did not have enough money to pay for two lunar lander programs, and GAO ruled it was justified in offering the single contract. NASA has maintained that it would open competition for future moon landings. In a statement, NASA said it is reviewing the case and that is \u201ccommitted to the Artemis program and the nation\u2019s global leadership in space exploration.\" It added that the space agency will \"provide an update on the way forward for returning to the Moon as quickly and as safely as possible under Artemis.\u201dSpaceX has proved itself to be one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners, flying three crews of astronauts to the International Space Station, for example, when the other participant in that program, Boeing, has stumbled badly. And its bid for the lunar landing contract was half of Blue Origin\u2019s $6 billion offering.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince then, Blue Origin has tried every lever at its disposal \u2014 lobbying Congress, filing the suits and waging a public relations war \u2014 to overturn the SpaceX award. Blue Origin has claimed that SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft that would become the lunar lander is an \u201cimmensely complex and high risk\u201d path for NASA to take since it would involve as many as 16 flights to fully fuel the spacecraft for a lunar landing.Many in the space community have bristled at that bare-knuckles approach, especially since it was aimed at SpaceX, which has won legions of fans for its success in creating a reliable transportation network to space. For years, SpaceX has ferried cargo and supplies to the space station, and more recently astronauts. It has moved quickly on Starship\u2019s development, even landing the vehicle on a recent test flight that went some six miles high.Blue Origin, by contrast, has never flown to orbit, and the engines it is developing for that rocket, known as New Glenn, are behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has pushed against Blue Origin\u2019s claims about Starship\u2019s complexity, writing on Twitter that \u201c16 flights is extremely unlikely.\u201d The maximum he said would be eight flights \u2014 and it could be as few as four \u2014 to fill the 1,200-ton tanks of the Starship version designed for the moon.\u201cHowever, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & and has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our won ship) over 20 times.\u201dHe also tweeted an unflattering photo of a mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s lander being set up at a conference, writing, \u201cSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing.\u201dSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing \u2026 pic.twitter.com/qAn8Y6i5Ys\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2021\n\nThere is already some concern among members of Congress that NASA is funding companies run by billionaires, and Bezos\u2019s attempt to force more funding for his company is not a good look, said Lori Garver, who served as deputy NASA administrator during the Barack Obama administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d she said. \u201cIt causes a negative backlash that we need to move beyond.\u201dEarlier this year, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), where Blue Origin is headquartered, introduced legislation that calls for NASA to fund another lunar lander. But so far Congress has not appropriated any additional funds.Last month, Bezos wrote an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson that said Blue Origin would make up for the funding shortfall that prevented NASA from awarding two contracts. Bezos offered to waive up to $2 billion in development costs over the next two years \u201cto get the program back on track right now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA has not responded publicly to the offer, however, and has moved ahead with working with SpaceX on its Starship program, paying it a first installment of $300 million soon after the GAO rendered its decision, which lifted an automatic stay imposed by the protest. But there is no automatic stay in the Court of Federal Claims, said Alan Chvotkin, a contracts attorney with the firm Nichols Lui. Blue Origin has asked for an injunction to block further NASA spending on the contract, a spokesperson for NASA said. The Justice Department is expected to object on NASA\u2019s behalf. Blue Origin's bare-knuckles approach to its rivalry with SpaceX rubs many in the space community the wrong way. \u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d said a former senior NASA official. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6273",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/16/blue-origin-spacex-rivalry-lawsuit-nasa/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company on Monday pressed its campaign to receive a slice of NASA\u2019s lucrative lunar lander contract, filing a suit in federal court in an attempt to force NASA to fund a second spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe suit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims, comes about two weeks after the Government Accountability Office rebuffed Blue Origin\u2019s protest of the NASA decision to award the $2.9 billion contract to develop the Human Landing System solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The suit filed Monday was under seal. But in a statement, Blue Origin said it is \u201can attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System. We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe contract is one of the most significant NASA programs in some time and has been a target for Blue Origin for years. In 2017, before there was even a formal request for proposals, the company pitched NASA on a lunar lander for cargo. At the time, Bezos told The Washington Post that he would invest a significant amount of his personal fortune to fund the spacecraft.Blue Origin subsequently teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, bulwarks of the American defense system, to bid for the program. And last year NASA awarded the Blue Origin-led team the biggest award in the initial phase of contracts. Blue Origin received $579 million; Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor, was awarded $253 million; and SpaceX received $135 million.But in April, NASA selected a single winner, SpaceX, to develop the spacecraft for what would be the first human landing on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Given the funding for the initial round, the award was considered a major upset.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was also a surprise, since NASA had said it wanted to fund two companies\u2019 spacecraft. But it said it did not have enough money to pay for two lunar lander programs, and GAO ruled it was justified in offering the single contract. NASA has maintained that it would open competition for future moon landings. In a statement, NASA said it is reviewing the case and that is \u201ccommitted to the Artemis program and the nation\u2019s global leadership in space exploration.\" It added that the space agency will \"provide an update on the way forward for returning to the Moon as quickly and as safely as possible under Artemis.\u201dSpaceX has proved itself to be one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners, flying three crews of astronauts to the International Space Station, for example, when the other participant in that program, Boeing, has stumbled badly. And its bid for the lunar landing contract was half of Blue Origin\u2019s $6 billion offering.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince then, Blue Origin has tried every lever at its disposal \u2014 lobbying Congress, filing the suits and waging a public relations war \u2014 to overturn the SpaceX award. Blue Origin has claimed that SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft that would become the lunar lander is an \u201cimmensely complex and high risk\u201d path for NASA to take since it would involve as many as 16 flights to fully fuel the spacecraft for a lunar landing.Many in the space community have bristled at that bare-knuckles approach, especially since it was aimed at SpaceX, which has won legions of fans for its success in creating a reliable transportation network to space. For years, SpaceX has ferried cargo and supplies to the space station, and more recently astronauts. It has moved quickly on Starship\u2019s development, even landing the vehicle on a recent test flight that went some six miles high.Blue Origin, by contrast, has never flown to orbit, and the engines it is developing for that rocket, known as New Glenn, are behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has pushed against Blue Origin\u2019s claims about Starship\u2019s complexity, writing on Twitter that \u201c16 flights is extremely unlikely.\u201d The maximum he said would be eight flights \u2014 and it could be as few as four \u2014 to fill the 1,200-ton tanks of the Starship version designed for the moon.\u201cHowever, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & and has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our won ship) over 20 times.\u201dHe also tweeted an unflattering photo of a mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s lander being set up at a conference, writing, \u201cSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing.\u201dSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing \u2026 pic.twitter.com/qAn8Y6i5Ys\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2021\n\nThere is already some concern among members of Congress that NASA is funding companies run by billionaires, and Bezos\u2019s attempt to force more funding for his company is not a good look, said Lori Garver, who served as deputy NASA administrator during the Barack Obama administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d she said. \u201cIt causes a negative backlash that we need to move beyond.\u201dEarlier this year, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), where Blue Origin is headquartered, introduced legislation that calls for NASA to fund another lunar lander. But so far Congress has not appropriated any additional funds.Last month, Bezos wrote an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson that said Blue Origin would make up for the funding shortfall that prevented NASA from awarding two contracts. Bezos offered to waive up to $2 billion in development costs over the next two years \u201cto get the program back on track right now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA has not responded publicly to the offer, however, and has moved ahead with working with SpaceX on its Starship program, paying it a first installment of $300 million soon after the GAO rendered its decision, which lifted an automatic stay imposed by the protest. But there is no automatic stay in the Court of Federal Claims, said Alan Chvotkin, a contracts attorney with the firm Nichols Lui. Blue Origin has asked for an injunction to block further NASA spending on the contract, a spokesperson for NASA said. The Justice Department is expected to object on NASA\u2019s behalf. Blue Origin's bare-knuckles approach to its rivalry with SpaceX rubs many in the space community the wrong way. \u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d said a former senior NASA official. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6274",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/16/blue-origin-spacex-rivalry-lawsuit-nasa/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company on Monday pressed its campaign to receive a slice of NASA\u2019s lucrative lunar lander contract, filing a suit in federal court in an attempt to force NASA to fund a second spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe suit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims, comes about two weeks after the Government Accountability Office rebuffed Blue Origin\u2019s protest of the NASA decision to award the $2.9 billion contract to develop the Human Landing System solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The suit filed Monday was under seal. But in a statement, Blue Origin said it is \u201can attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System. We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe contract is one of the most significant NASA programs in some time and has been a target for Blue Origin for years. In 2017, before there was even a formal request for proposals, the company pitched NASA on a lunar lander for cargo. At the time, Bezos told The Washington Post that he would invest a significant amount of his personal fortune to fund the spacecraft.Blue Origin subsequently teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, bulwarks of the American defense system, to bid for the program. And last year NASA awarded the Blue Origin-led team the biggest award in the initial phase of contracts. Blue Origin received $579 million; Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor, was awarded $253 million; and SpaceX received $135 million.But in April, NASA selected a single winner, SpaceX, to develop the spacecraft for what would be the first human landing on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Given the funding for the initial round, the award was considered a major upset.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was also a surprise, since NASA had said it wanted to fund two companies\u2019 spacecraft. But it said it did not have enough money to pay for two lunar lander programs, and GAO ruled it was justified in offering the single contract. NASA has maintained that it would open competition for future moon landings. In a statement, NASA said it is reviewing the case and that is \u201ccommitted to the Artemis program and the nation\u2019s global leadership in space exploration.\" It added that the space agency will \"provide an update on the way forward for returning to the Moon as quickly and as safely as possible under Artemis.\u201dSpaceX has proved itself to be one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners, flying three crews of astronauts to the International Space Station, for example, when the other participant in that program, Boeing, has stumbled badly. And its bid for the lunar landing contract was half of Blue Origin\u2019s $6 billion offering.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince then, Blue Origin has tried every lever at its disposal \u2014 lobbying Congress, filing the suits and waging a public relations war \u2014 to overturn the SpaceX award. Blue Origin has claimed that SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft that would become the lunar lander is an \u201cimmensely complex and high risk\u201d path for NASA to take since it would involve as many as 16 flights to fully fuel the spacecraft for a lunar landing.Many in the space community have bristled at that bare-knuckles approach, especially since it was aimed at SpaceX, which has won legions of fans for its success in creating a reliable transportation network to space. For years, SpaceX has ferried cargo and supplies to the space station, and more recently astronauts. It has moved quickly on Starship\u2019s development, even landing the vehicle on a recent test flight that went some six miles high.Blue Origin, by contrast, has never flown to orbit, and the engines it is developing for that rocket, known as New Glenn, are behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has pushed against Blue Origin\u2019s claims about Starship\u2019s complexity, writing on Twitter that \u201c16 flights is extremely unlikely.\u201d The maximum he said would be eight flights \u2014 and it could be as few as four \u2014 to fill the 1,200-ton tanks of the Starship version designed for the moon.\u201cHowever, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & and has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our won ship) over 20 times.\u201dHe also tweeted an unflattering photo of a mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s lander being set up at a conference, writing, \u201cSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing.\u201dSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing \u2026 pic.twitter.com/qAn8Y6i5Ys\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2021\n\nThere is already some concern among members of Congress that NASA is funding companies run by billionaires, and Bezos\u2019s attempt to force more funding for his company is not a good look, said Lori Garver, who served as deputy NASA administrator during the Barack Obama administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d she said. \u201cIt causes a negative backlash that we need to move beyond.\u201dEarlier this year, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), where Blue Origin is headquartered, introduced legislation that calls for NASA to fund another lunar lander. But so far Congress has not appropriated any additional funds.Last month, Bezos wrote an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson that said Blue Origin would make up for the funding shortfall that prevented NASA from awarding two contracts. Bezos offered to waive up to $2 billion in development costs over the next two years \u201cto get the program back on track right now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA has not responded publicly to the offer, however, and has moved ahead with working with SpaceX on its Starship program, paying it a first installment of $300 million soon after the GAO rendered its decision, which lifted an automatic stay imposed by the protest. But there is no automatic stay in the Court of Federal Claims, said Alan Chvotkin, a contracts attorney with the firm Nichols Lui. Blue Origin has asked for an injunction to block further NASA spending on the contract, a spokesperson for NASA said. The Justice Department is expected to object on NASA\u2019s behalf. Blue Origin's bare-knuckles approach to its rivalry with SpaceX rubs many in the space community the wrong way. \u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d said a former senior NASA official. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6275",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/16/blue-origin-spacex-rivalry-lawsuit-nasa/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company on Monday pressed its campaign to receive a slice of NASA\u2019s lucrative lunar lander contract, filing a suit in federal court in an attempt to force NASA to fund a second spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe suit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims, comes about two weeks after the Government Accountability Office rebuffed Blue Origin\u2019s protest of the NASA decision to award the $2.9 billion contract to develop the Human Landing System solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The suit filed Monday was under seal. But in a statement, Blue Origin said it is \u201can attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System. We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe contract is one of the most significant NASA programs in some time and has been a target for Blue Origin for years. In 2017, before there was even a formal request for proposals, the company pitched NASA on a lunar lander for cargo. At the time, Bezos told The Washington Post that he would invest a significant amount of his personal fortune to fund the spacecraft.Blue Origin subsequently teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, bulwarks of the American defense system, to bid for the program. And last year NASA awarded the Blue Origin-led team the biggest award in the initial phase of contracts. Blue Origin received $579 million; Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor, was awarded $253 million; and SpaceX received $135 million.But in April, NASA selected a single winner, SpaceX, to develop the spacecraft for what would be the first human landing on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Given the funding for the initial round, the award was considered a major upset.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was also a surprise, since NASA had said it wanted to fund two companies\u2019 spacecraft. But it said it did not have enough money to pay for two lunar lander programs, and GAO ruled it was justified in offering the single contract. NASA has maintained that it would open competition for future moon landings. In a statement, NASA said it is reviewing the case and that is \u201ccommitted to the Artemis program and the nation\u2019s global leadership in space exploration.\" It added that the space agency will \"provide an update on the way forward for returning to the Moon as quickly and as safely as possible under Artemis.\u201dSpaceX has proved itself to be one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners, flying three crews of astronauts to the International Space Station, for example, when the other participant in that program, Boeing, has stumbled badly. And its bid for the lunar landing contract was half of Blue Origin\u2019s $6 billion offering.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince then, Blue Origin has tried every lever at its disposal \u2014 lobbying Congress, filing the suits and waging a public relations war \u2014 to overturn the SpaceX award. Blue Origin has claimed that SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft that would become the lunar lander is an \u201cimmensely complex and high risk\u201d path for NASA to take since it would involve as many as 16 flights to fully fuel the spacecraft for a lunar landing.Many in the space community have bristled at that bare-knuckles approach, especially since it was aimed at SpaceX, which has won legions of fans for its success in creating a reliable transportation network to space. For years, SpaceX has ferried cargo and supplies to the space station, and more recently astronauts. It has moved quickly on Starship\u2019s development, even landing the vehicle on a recent test flight that went some six miles high.Blue Origin, by contrast, has never flown to orbit, and the engines it is developing for that rocket, known as New Glenn, are behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has pushed against Blue Origin\u2019s claims about Starship\u2019s complexity, writing on Twitter that \u201c16 flights is extremely unlikely.\u201d The maximum he said would be eight flights \u2014 and it could be as few as four \u2014 to fill the 1,200-ton tanks of the Starship version designed for the moon.\u201cHowever, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & and has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our won ship) over 20 times.\u201dHe also tweeted an unflattering photo of a mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s lander being set up at a conference, writing, \u201cSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing.\u201dSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing \u2026 pic.twitter.com/qAn8Y6i5Ys\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2021\n\nThere is already some concern among members of Congress that NASA is funding companies run by billionaires, and Bezos\u2019s attempt to force more funding for his company is not a good look, said Lori Garver, who served as deputy NASA administrator during the Barack Obama administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d she said. \u201cIt causes a negative backlash that we need to move beyond.\u201dEarlier this year, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), where Blue Origin is headquartered, introduced legislation that calls for NASA to fund another lunar lander. But so far Congress has not appropriated any additional funds.Last month, Bezos wrote an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson that said Blue Origin would make up for the funding shortfall that prevented NASA from awarding two contracts. Bezos offered to waive up to $2 billion in development costs over the next two years \u201cto get the program back on track right now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA has not responded publicly to the offer, however, and has moved ahead with working with SpaceX on its Starship program, paying it a first installment of $300 million soon after the GAO rendered its decision, which lifted an automatic stay imposed by the protest. But there is no automatic stay in the Court of Federal Claims, said Alan Chvotkin, a contracts attorney with the firm Nichols Lui. Blue Origin has asked for an injunction to block further NASA spending on the contract, a spokesperson for NASA said. The Justice Department is expected to object on NASA\u2019s behalf. Blue Origin's bare-knuckles approach to its rivalry with SpaceX rubs many in the space community the wrong way. \u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d said a former senior NASA official. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6276",
        "date": "2021-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/16/blue-origin-spacex-rivalry-lawsuit-nasa/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company on Monday pressed its campaign to receive a slice of NASA\u2019s lucrative lunar lander contract, filing a suit in federal court in an attempt to force NASA to fund a second spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe suit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims, comes about two weeks after the Government Accountability Office rebuffed Blue Origin\u2019s protest of the NASA decision to award the $2.9 billion contract to develop the Human Landing System solely to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The suit filed Monday was under seal. But in a statement, Blue Origin said it is \u201can attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System. We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe contract is one of the most significant NASA programs in some time and has been a target for Blue Origin for years. In 2017, before there was even a formal request for proposals, the company pitched NASA on a lunar lander for cargo. At the time, Bezos told The Washington Post that he would invest a significant amount of his personal fortune to fund the spacecraft.Blue Origin subsequently teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, bulwarks of the American defense system, to bid for the program. And last year NASA awarded the Blue Origin-led team the biggest award in the initial phase of contracts. Blue Origin received $579 million; Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor, was awarded $253 million; and SpaceX received $135 million.But in April, NASA selected a single winner, SpaceX, to develop the spacecraft for what would be the first human landing on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Given the funding for the initial round, the award was considered a major upset.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was also a surprise, since NASA had said it wanted to fund two companies\u2019 spacecraft. But it said it did not have enough money to pay for two lunar lander programs, and GAO ruled it was justified in offering the single contract. NASA has maintained that it would open competition for future moon landings. In a statement, NASA said it is reviewing the case and that is \u201ccommitted to the Artemis program and the nation\u2019s global leadership in space exploration.\" It added that the space agency will \"provide an update on the way forward for returning to the Moon as quickly and as safely as possible under Artemis.\u201dSpaceX has proved itself to be one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners, flying three crews of astronauts to the International Space Station, for example, when the other participant in that program, Boeing, has stumbled badly. And its bid for the lunar landing contract was half of Blue Origin\u2019s $6 billion offering.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince then, Blue Origin has tried every lever at its disposal \u2014 lobbying Congress, filing the suits and waging a public relations war \u2014 to overturn the SpaceX award. Blue Origin has claimed that SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft that would become the lunar lander is an \u201cimmensely complex and high risk\u201d path for NASA to take since it would involve as many as 16 flights to fully fuel the spacecraft for a lunar landing.Many in the space community have bristled at that bare-knuckles approach, especially since it was aimed at SpaceX, which has won legions of fans for its success in creating a reliable transportation network to space. For years, SpaceX has ferried cargo and supplies to the space station, and more recently astronauts. It has moved quickly on Starship\u2019s development, even landing the vehicle on a recent test flight that went some six miles high.Blue Origin, by contrast, has never flown to orbit, and the engines it is developing for that rocket, known as New Glenn, are behind schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk has pushed against Blue Origin\u2019s claims about Starship\u2019s complexity, writing on Twitter that \u201c16 flights is extremely unlikely.\u201d The maximum he said would be eight flights \u2014 and it could be as few as four \u2014 to fill the 1,200-ton tanks of the Starship version designed for the moon.\u201cHowever, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & and has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our won ship) over 20 times.\u201dHe also tweeted an unflattering photo of a mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s lander being set up at a conference, writing, \u201cSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing.\u201dSomehow, this wasn\u2019t convincing \u2026 pic.twitter.com/qAn8Y6i5Ys\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2021\n\nThere is already some concern among members of Congress that NASA is funding companies run by billionaires, and Bezos\u2019s attempt to force more funding for his company is not a good look, said Lori Garver, who served as deputy NASA administrator during the Barack Obama administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d she said. \u201cIt causes a negative backlash that we need to move beyond.\u201dEarlier this year, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), where Blue Origin is headquartered, introduced legislation that calls for NASA to fund another lunar lander. But so far Congress has not appropriated any additional funds.Last month, Bezos wrote an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson that said Blue Origin would make up for the funding shortfall that prevented NASA from awarding two contracts. Bezos offered to waive up to $2 billion in development costs over the next two years \u201cto get the program back on track right now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA has not responded publicly to the offer, however, and has moved ahead with working with SpaceX on its Starship program, paying it a first installment of $300 million soon after the GAO rendered its decision, which lifted an automatic stay imposed by the protest. But there is no automatic stay in the Court of Federal Claims, said Alan Chvotkin, a contracts attorney with the firm Nichols Lui. Blue Origin has asked for an injunction to block further NASA spending on the contract, a spokesperson for NASA said. The Justice Department is expected to object on NASA\u2019s behalf. Blue Origin's bare-knuckles approach to its rivalry with SpaceX rubs many in the space community the wrong way. \u201cIn the realm of battling billionaires in space, nobody gets the higher ground by fighting,\u201d said a former senior NASA official. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin files suit in federal court as it pursues a campaign to win a slice of NASA moon contract",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6277",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/11/blue-origin-bezos-strahan-shepard/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people.The launch capped a historic year for space exploration and marked the 13th human spaceflight mission this year \u2014 more than any other year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn board the New Shepard spacecraft were four paying customers and two guests \u2014 Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and Michael Strahan, the former NFL football star turned TV personality. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)After the flight, Churchley compared her experience to her father\u2019s, telling Bezos in comments broadcast on a live stream that unlike her father, who was working for his entire suborbital flight and remained strapped into his seat, she got to really enjoy the her time in space, floating around in zero gravity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI went along for the ride,\u201d she said.Strahan also was effusive, calling the experience \u201cunreal.\u201d \u201cThat was beyond,\u201d he said, telling Bezos he wanted to do it again.\u201cYou\u2019ll have to pay for the next one,\u201d Bezos responded.The autonomous flight lifted off at 42 seconds after 10 a.m. Eastern time and reached an altitude of 66.5 miles before returning to a soft landing in the West Texas desert. Total flight time was 10 minutes and 13 seconds. (For comparison, Alan Shepard\u2019s 1961 flight reached 116.5 miles above sea level and lasted 15 minutes and 28 seconds.)The flight was further affirmation that Blue Origin is building a robust space tourism business capable of regularly taking paying customers higher than 60 miles, where many believe the edge of space begins. Next year, Blue Origin is planning to fly more than six times, or every other month, creating a regular cadence of spaceflights.Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant.The flights are relatively short, suborbital jaunts that shoot straight up into space, where the passengers get a few minutes of weightlessness and see the Earth from above. Still, they can be transformative.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilliam Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain Kirk on Star Trek, rhapsodized about the view after his flight in October, telling Bezos that he was \u201cso filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this.\u201dPassengers aboard Saturday\u2019s flight also included Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor, and Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space. After their capsule touched down in the desert, they were also emotional, laughing and cheering.The flight came during a year in which a large number of private citizens have gone to space. Blue Origin has now flown 14 people. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic also flew two suborbital test flights this year, one with a pair of pilots, the other with two pilots and a crew of four that included Branson.SpaceX also flew four private citizens in orbit for three days in September in what was called the Inspiration4 mission. Russia flew an actress and film producer to the International Space Station this fall, and this past week it launched a Japanese billionaire and his assistant to the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this month, Blue Origin won a NASA contract worth $130 million to develop the design of a space station that would ultimately replace the International Space Station. NASA also awarded contracts to two other companies: Nanoracks, for $160 million, and Northrop Grumman, for $125.6 million.But Blue Origin has also struggled with its larger vehicle, dubbed New Glenn, which has yet to fly and has been delayed by technical challenges. It also lost out to SpaceX on a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972. Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6278",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/11/blue-origin-bezos-strahan-shepard/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people.The launch capped a historic year for space exploration and marked the 13th human spaceflight mission this year \u2014 more than any other year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn board the New Shepard spacecraft were four paying customers and two guests \u2014 Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and Michael Strahan, the former NFL football star turned TV personality. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)After the flight, Churchley compared her experience to her father\u2019s, telling Bezos in comments broadcast on a live stream that unlike her father, who was working for his entire suborbital flight and remained strapped into his seat, she got to really enjoy the her time in space, floating around in zero gravity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI went along for the ride,\u201d she said.Strahan also was effusive, calling the experience \u201cunreal.\u201d \u201cThat was beyond,\u201d he said, telling Bezos he wanted to do it again.\u201cYou\u2019ll have to pay for the next one,\u201d Bezos responded.The autonomous flight lifted off at 42 seconds after 10 a.m. Eastern time and reached an altitude of 66.5 miles before returning to a soft landing in the West Texas desert. Total flight time was 10 minutes and 13 seconds. (For comparison, Alan Shepard\u2019s 1961 flight reached 116.5 miles above sea level and lasted 15 minutes and 28 seconds.)The flight was further affirmation that Blue Origin is building a robust space tourism business capable of regularly taking paying customers higher than 60 miles, where many believe the edge of space begins. Next year, Blue Origin is planning to fly more than six times, or every other month, creating a regular cadence of spaceflights.Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant.The flights are relatively short, suborbital jaunts that shoot straight up into space, where the passengers get a few minutes of weightlessness and see the Earth from above. Still, they can be transformative.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilliam Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain Kirk on Star Trek, rhapsodized about the view after his flight in October, telling Bezos that he was \u201cso filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this.\u201dPassengers aboard Saturday\u2019s flight also included Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor, and Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space. After their capsule touched down in the desert, they were also emotional, laughing and cheering.The flight came during a year in which a large number of private citizens have gone to space. Blue Origin has now flown 14 people. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic also flew two suborbital test flights this year, one with a pair of pilots, the other with two pilots and a crew of four that included Branson.SpaceX also flew four private citizens in orbit for three days in September in what was called the Inspiration4 mission. Russia flew an actress and film producer to the International Space Station this fall, and this past week it launched a Japanese billionaire and his assistant to the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this month, Blue Origin won a NASA contract worth $130 million to develop the design of a space station that would ultimately replace the International Space Station. NASA also awarded contracts to two other companies: Nanoracks, for $160 million, and Northrop Grumman, for $125.6 million.But Blue Origin has also struggled with its larger vehicle, dubbed New Glenn, which has yet to fly and has been delayed by technical challenges. It also lost out to SpaceX on a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972. Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6279",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/11/blue-origin-bezos-strahan-shepard/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people.The launch capped a historic year for space exploration and marked the 13th human spaceflight mission this year \u2014 more than any other year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn board the New Shepard spacecraft were four paying customers and two guests \u2014 Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and Michael Strahan, the former NFL football star turned TV personality. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)After the flight, Churchley compared her experience to her father\u2019s, telling Bezos in comments broadcast on a live stream that unlike her father, who was working for his entire suborbital flight and remained strapped into his seat, she got to really enjoy the her time in space, floating around in zero gravity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI went along for the ride,\u201d she said.Strahan also was effusive, calling the experience \u201cunreal.\u201d \u201cThat was beyond,\u201d he said, telling Bezos he wanted to do it again.\u201cYou\u2019ll have to pay for the next one,\u201d Bezos responded.The autonomous flight lifted off at 42 seconds after 10 a.m. Eastern time and reached an altitude of 66.5 miles before returning to a soft landing in the West Texas desert. Total flight time was 10 minutes and 13 seconds. (For comparison, Alan Shepard\u2019s 1961 flight reached 116.5 miles above sea level and lasted 15 minutes and 28 seconds.)The flight was further affirmation that Blue Origin is building a robust space tourism business capable of regularly taking paying customers higher than 60 miles, where many believe the edge of space begins. Next year, Blue Origin is planning to fly more than six times, or every other month, creating a regular cadence of spaceflights.Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant.The flights are relatively short, suborbital jaunts that shoot straight up into space, where the passengers get a few minutes of weightlessness and see the Earth from above. Still, they can be transformative.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilliam Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain Kirk on Star Trek, rhapsodized about the view after his flight in October, telling Bezos that he was \u201cso filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this.\u201dPassengers aboard Saturday\u2019s flight also included Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor, and Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space. After their capsule touched down in the desert, they were also emotional, laughing and cheering.The flight came during a year in which a large number of private citizens have gone to space. Blue Origin has now flown 14 people. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic also flew two suborbital test flights this year, one with a pair of pilots, the other with two pilots and a crew of four that included Branson.SpaceX also flew four private citizens in orbit for three days in September in what was called the Inspiration4 mission. Russia flew an actress and film producer to the International Space Station this fall, and this past week it launched a Japanese billionaire and his assistant to the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this month, Blue Origin won a NASA contract worth $130 million to develop the design of a space station that would ultimately replace the International Space Station. NASA also awarded contracts to two other companies: Nanoracks, for $160 million, and Northrop Grumman, for $125.6 million.But Blue Origin has also struggled with its larger vehicle, dubbed New Glenn, which has yet to fly and has been delayed by technical challenges. It also lost out to SpaceX on a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972. Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6280",
        "date": "2021-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/11/blue-origin-bezos-strahan-shepard/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people.The launch capped a historic year for space exploration and marked the 13th human spaceflight mission this year \u2014 more than any other year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn board the New Shepard spacecraft were four paying customers and two guests \u2014 Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and Michael Strahan, the former NFL football star turned TV personality. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)After the flight, Churchley compared her experience to her father\u2019s, telling Bezos in comments broadcast on a live stream that unlike her father, who was working for his entire suborbital flight and remained strapped into his seat, she got to really enjoy the her time in space, floating around in zero gravity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI went along for the ride,\u201d she said.Strahan also was effusive, calling the experience \u201cunreal.\u201d \u201cThat was beyond,\u201d he said, telling Bezos he wanted to do it again.\u201cYou\u2019ll have to pay for the next one,\u201d Bezos responded.The autonomous flight lifted off at 42 seconds after 10 a.m. Eastern time and reached an altitude of 66.5 miles before returning to a soft landing in the West Texas desert. Total flight time was 10 minutes and 13 seconds. (For comparison, Alan Shepard\u2019s 1961 flight reached 116.5 miles above sea level and lasted 15 minutes and 28 seconds.)The flight was further affirmation that Blue Origin is building a robust space tourism business capable of regularly taking paying customers higher than 60 miles, where many believe the edge of space begins. Next year, Blue Origin is planning to fly more than six times, or every other month, creating a regular cadence of spaceflights.Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant.The flights are relatively short, suborbital jaunts that shoot straight up into space, where the passengers get a few minutes of weightlessness and see the Earth from above. Still, they can be transformative.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilliam Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain Kirk on Star Trek, rhapsodized about the view after his flight in October, telling Bezos that he was \u201cso filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this.\u201dPassengers aboard Saturday\u2019s flight also included Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor, and Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space. After their capsule touched down in the desert, they were also emotional, laughing and cheering.The flight came during a year in which a large number of private citizens have gone to space. Blue Origin has now flown 14 people. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic also flew two suborbital test flights this year, one with a pair of pilots, the other with two pilots and a crew of four that included Branson.SpaceX also flew four private citizens in orbit for three days in September in what was called the Inspiration4 mission. Russia flew an actress and film producer to the International Space Station this fall, and this past week it launched a Japanese billionaire and his assistant to the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this month, Blue Origin won a NASA contract worth $130 million to develop the design of a space station that would ultimately replace the International Space Station. NASA also awarded contracts to two other companies: Nanoracks, for $160 million, and Northrop Grumman, for $125.6 million.But Blue Origin has also struggled with its larger vehicle, dubbed New Glenn, which has yet to fly and has been delayed by technical challenges. It also lost out to SpaceX on a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972. Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin sent another crew to space on Saturday, the company\u2019s third human spaceflight and the first with a full contingent of six people. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sends TV\u2019s Michael Strahan and five others to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "GAO denies Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s lunar lander award to SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6281",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/30/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-nasa-gao-lunar-lander/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn one of the most significant NASA contracts in years failed Friday, dealing his space company another setback in its quest to land astronauts on the moon.Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor that also lost out on the contract, had argued in protests filed with the Government Accountability Office that NASA had erred when it awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to use its next-generation Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had said that it ran a thorough competition for what is known as the Human Landing System and that SpaceX not only had the best technical solution, but its bid also was by far the lowest. In its ruling, the GAO rejected Blue Origin\u2019s arguments that the space agency had overlooked the company\u2019s attributes, writing in a news release that it concluded \u201cthat NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt said NASA\u2019s \u201cevaluation of all three proposals was reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation and the announcement\u2019s terms.\u201dAt the time of the award, NASA officials said that they had initially intended to award two contracts to foster competition as well as to have a backup in case one of the contractors faltered. The agency awarded only one contract, however, because it did not have the funding from Congress, and it was able to do that only after SpaceX updated its payment schedule to fit NASA\u2019s budget.Even though Blue Origin\u2019s bid was $6 billion, or twice SpaceX\u2019s, Bezos has since tried to remedy the budget shortfall as part of a broad effort to force NASA to select a second company. In an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson this week, he wrote that if NASA awarded the company a lunar lander contract, Blue Origin would continue to fund the development of a test flight of its spacecraft to low Earth orbit and waive up to $2 billion in payments over the next two years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the letter, he continued to criticize NASA\u2019s selection process and argued that having two providers was vital: \u201cWithout competition, NASA\u2019s short-term and long-term lunar ambitions will be delayed, will ultimately cost more, and won\u2019t serve the national interest.\u201d And he touted the capabilities of the team Blue Origin had assembled, which includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.NASA has said that after the next human landing on the moon, the first since the last Apollo mission in 1972, it will hold additional competitions for future moon landings as part of its Artemis program. But Bezos said the program \u201cwon\u2019t create true competition because it is rushed, it is unfunded, and it provides a multiyear head-start to the one funded, single-source supplier.\u201dOn Friday, Blue Origin said in a statement that it would continue to press for NASA to award a second contract. \u201cWe\u2019ve been encouraged by actions in Congress to add a second provider and appropriate additional resources to NASA\u2019s pursuit to return Americans to the Moon,\u201d the statement said. \"The Human Landing System program needs to have competition now instead of later \u2014 that\u2019s the best solution for NASA and the best solution for our country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLanding astronauts on the moon is a personal passion for Bezos, who has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin step onto the moon in 1969 ignited in him a lifelong interest in space. He picked the anniversary of that Apollo 11 mission, July 20, to fly on his company\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on a suborbital trip to space and back. And now that he has stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, he has said he will devote more time and energy to Blue Origin, which has lagged far behind SpaceX.But just hours after touching down in a successful flight, he created controversy by thanking \u201cevery Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dThat was widely regarded as a tone-deaf statement, and it elicited ire from detractors, including U.S. Rep. Nydia M. Vel\u00e1zquez (D-N.Y.) who on Twitter linked to an article about how much Amazon employees are paid and wrote, \u201cWhile Jeff Bezos is all over the news for paying to go to space, let\u2019s not forget the reality he has created here on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder the Trump administration, the goal was to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. Nelson, the NASA administrator, has also embraced that timeline. But the space agency has been conducting an internal review about what is feasible, given the amount of funding it has from Congress.In a statement Friday, NASA said the GAO\u2019s \u201cdecision enables NASA to award the contract that will ultimately result in the first crewed demonstration landing on the surface of the moon under NASA\u2019s Artemis plan. Importantly, the GAO\u2019s decision will allow NASA and SpaceX to establish a timeline for the first crewed landing on the Moon in more than 50 years.\u201d GAO said NASA\u2019s decision to award the contract to SpaceX \u201cwas reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation and the announcement\u2019s terms.\u201d GAO denies Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s lunar lander award to SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "GAO denies Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s lunar lander award to SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6282",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/30/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-nasa-gao-lunar-lander/",
        "text": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn one of the most significant NASA contracts in years failed Friday, dealing his space company another setback in its quest to land astronauts on the moon.Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor that also lost out on the contract, had argued in protests filed with the Government Accountability Office that NASA had erred when it awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to use its next-generation Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had said that it ran a thorough competition for what is known as the Human Landing System and that SpaceX not only had the best technical solution, but its bid also was by far the lowest. In its ruling, the GAO rejected Blue Origin\u2019s arguments that the space agency had overlooked the company\u2019s attributes, writing in a news release that it concluded \u201cthat NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt said NASA\u2019s \u201cevaluation of all three proposals was reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation and the announcement\u2019s terms.\u201dAt the time of the award, NASA officials said that they had initially intended to award two contracts to foster competition as well as to have a backup in case one of the contractors faltered. The agency awarded only one contract, however, because it did not have the funding from Congress, and it was able to do that only after SpaceX updated its payment schedule to fit NASA\u2019s budget.Even though Blue Origin\u2019s bid was $6 billion, or twice SpaceX\u2019s, Bezos has since tried to remedy the budget shortfall as part of a broad effort to force NASA to select a second company. In an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson this week, he wrote that if NASA awarded the company a lunar lander contract, Blue Origin would continue to fund the development of a test flight of its spacecraft to low Earth orbit and waive up to $2 billion in payments over the next two years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the letter, he continued to criticize NASA\u2019s selection process and argued that having two providers was vital: \u201cWithout competition, NASA\u2019s short-term and long-term lunar ambitions will be delayed, will ultimately cost more, and won\u2019t serve the national interest.\u201d And he touted the capabilities of the team Blue Origin had assembled, which includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.NASA has said that after the next human landing on the moon, the first since the last Apollo mission in 1972, it will hold additional competitions for future moon landings as part of its Artemis program. But Bezos said the program \u201cwon\u2019t create true competition because it is rushed, it is unfunded, and it provides a multiyear head-start to the one funded, single-source supplier.\u201dOn Friday, Blue Origin said in a statement that it would continue to press for NASA to award a second contract. \u201cWe\u2019ve been encouraged by actions in Congress to add a second provider and appropriate additional resources to NASA\u2019s pursuit to return Americans to the Moon,\u201d the statement said. \"The Human Landing System program needs to have competition now instead of later \u2014 that\u2019s the best solution for NASA and the best solution for our country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLanding astronauts on the moon is a personal passion for Bezos, who has said that watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin step onto the moon in 1969 ignited in him a lifelong interest in space. He picked the anniversary of that Apollo 11 mission, July 20, to fly on his company\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft on a suborbital trip to space and back. And now that he has stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, he has said he will devote more time and energy to Blue Origin, which has lagged far behind SpaceX.But just hours after touching down in a successful flight, he created controversy by thanking \u201cevery Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.\u201dThat was widely regarded as a tone-deaf statement, and it elicited ire from detractors, including U.S. Rep. Nydia M. Vel\u00e1zquez (D-N.Y.) who on Twitter linked to an article about how much Amazon employees are paid and wrote, \u201cWhile Jeff Bezos is all over the news for paying to go to space, let\u2019s not forget the reality he has created here on Earth.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder the Trump administration, the goal was to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024. Nelson, the NASA administrator, has also embraced that timeline. But the space agency has been conducting an internal review about what is feasible, given the amount of funding it has from Congress.In a statement Friday, NASA said the GAO\u2019s \u201cdecision enables NASA to award the contract that will ultimately result in the first crewed demonstration landing on the surface of the moon under NASA\u2019s Artemis plan. Importantly, the GAO\u2019s decision will allow NASA and SpaceX to establish a timeline for the first crewed landing on the Moon in more than 50 years.\u201d GAO said NASA\u2019s decision to award the contract to SpaceX \u201cwas reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation and the announcement\u2019s terms.\u201d GAO denies Jeff Bezos\u2019s attempt to overturn NASA\u2019s lunar lander award to SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk win contracts for spacecraft to land NASA astronauts on the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6283",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/jeff-bezos-elon-musk-win-contracts-spacecraft-land-nasa-astronauts-moon/",
        "text": "It's been seven years since astronauts launched from American soil, now NASA has hired SpaceX and Boeing to restore launch capabilities to the U.S. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)NASA on Thursday awarded three companies contracts to build spacecraft capable of landing humans on the moon, sparking a new space race that NASA hopes will propel the United States back to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBlue Origin, the space outfit owned by Jeff Bezos; Dynetics, a subsidiary of Leidos, a Reston, Va.-based information technology firm; and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX won contracts, giving NASA three options that would compete against each other as NASA scrambles to meet an ambitious White House mandate to put humans on the moon by 2024. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Boeing, typically among NASA\u2019s key contractors but whose space program has experienced multiple setbacks and delays, also submitted a bid but was not selected.Story continues below advertisementIn an interview with The Washington Post, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he remains confident NASA will be able to meet the 2024 deadline, even though the first flight of the Space Launch System, the Boeing-built rocket that would launch astronauts to the moon, will be pushed back again, this time to November 2021.AdvertisementStill, the announcement of contracts for the landers \u2014 the first lunar spacecraft contracts NASA has awarded since the 1960s\u2019 Apollo era \u2014 is a significant step toward getting the U.S. crews to the moon quickly and building what NASA hopes will become a permanent presence on the moon\u2019s surface.A lunar landing is \u201cstarting to feel very, very real,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s very exciting. There have been lots of attempts to go back to the moon since 1972, but none have materialized.\u201d Story continues below advertisementTrump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.It\u2019s not clear yet, however, that NASA\u2019s latest effort, dubbed \u201cArtemis\u201d after the twin sister of Apollo, will materialize, either.To give itself a better shot at pulling off the feat by 2024, NASA has changed its plans. Initially NASA was going to fly its astronauts to an outpost in orbit around the moon, known as the Gateway. From there, they would descend to the lunar surface. But now NASA says that while it remains committed to the Gateway for the long term, it will likely not use it for the next moon landing.AdvertisementInstead it intends to fly astronauts in the Orion spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, to lunar orbit, where it would meet up and dock with the lander, which would take them to the moon\u2019s surface. Still, NASA officials said, the plan could change.Story continues below advertisementFor a moon landing to become a reality, however, NASA and the White House must sell their plan to a skeptical Congress, which has not yet signed off on a program projected to cost $35 billion through 2024. NASA and Boeing, the prime contractor on the SLS program, also must make significant progress on the rocket. A recent Government Accountability Office report said that despite years of development, the rocket \u201cmay develop leaks when it is filled with fuel.\u201d Another recent report, by the agency\u2019s inspector general, said the total cost of the SLS, Orion spacecraft and associated ground systems could be as much as $50 billion.Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationNASA also is struggling to get to the moon under a drastically expedited timeline. Initially it was planning to land humans on the moon by 2028. But Vice President Pence last year directed the space agency to do it by 2024 \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d AdvertisementDespite the many challenges, the plan is attainable, Douglas Loverro, NASA\u2019s head of human spaceflight, said in an interview.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a first giant step, but it\u2019s only the first step,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have so much work ahead of us. Now the hard part begins. And it\u2019s going to take the best of NASA and the best of industry to get there.\u201d NASA officials declined to comment on Boeing\u2019s absence from the list. The loss for the aerospace behemoth comes as it has struggled not only with the SLS rocket, but with the Starliner spacecraft it is developing to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. A recent test mission without crews onboard went so badly that the company decided to refly the flight.Government watchdog says cost of NASA rocket continues to riseFor Blue Origin, the contract award is a major victory. Founded in 2000 by Bezos, the company has for years been urging the space agency to return to the moon, specifically the south pole, where scientists have discovered water in the form of ice.Blue has been pitching its lander, called Blue Moon, since 2017, and Bezos has said he would invest heavily in it himself. Last year, Blue Origin announced it was teaming up on the project with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper \u2014 \u201ca national team for a national priority,\u201d Bezos said. \u201cThis is the kind of thing that\u2019s so ambitious that it needs to be done with partners. This is the only way to get back to the moon fast. We\u2019re not going back to the moon to visit. We\u2019re going back to the moon to stay.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, said at a news conference that the effort would \u201chumbly stand on the shoulders of Apollo. \u2026 I know I speak for many on our team that going to the moon is the reason why we got into this business, and we couldn\u2019t be more excited about that.\" NASA said that Blue Origin was furthest along with its project and awarded it the largest award, $579 million. Dynetics, which has paired with the Sierra Nevada Corp., would receive $253 million and scored the highest marks, according to NASA\u2019s source selection document. SpaceX, which bid its Starship spacecraft, won $135 million. The contracts are for the first stage of the program and would last through February 2021. After that, NASA could decide whether to proceed with all three partners or chose two of the three.Elon Musk\u2019s improbable Mars quest runs through a border town concerned with more than getting to spaceThe award was the latest in a string of wins for SpaceX, which is poised to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station on May 27. NASA had previously awarded SpaceX a contract, worth as much as $7 billion, to resupply the Gateway with cargo.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the news conference Musk said the announcement would ultimately help move humanity into deep space. \u201cI think we\u2019ve got potential for an incredibly exciting future in space, with a base on the moon and ultimately sending people and having a self-sustaining city on Mars,\u201d he said.While the Gateway likely won\u2019t be used for the next lunar landing, Bridenstine said the agency is \u201c100 percent committed to the Gateway. That being said, we are also committed to going as fast as possible.\u201d Bridenstine said SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket could be used to launch the habitat and power and propulsion elements of an orbiting space station after they are assembled on the ground.Story continues below advertisementThough the astronauts would only be on the surface of the moon for a number of days, as in Apollo, the goal would be to study the region around the moon\u2019s south pole to help NASA set up a permanent presence there. NASA is particularly interested in the ice discovered in the perpetually shadowed craters, and how it could be used to sustain life and even be converted into rocket fuel.\u201cI view this as learning to fly to the moon again and learning the right way so we can do it again and again,\u201d Loverro said. \u201cThis is not a flash in the pan. It is the first step of many steps we\u2019re going to take there.\u201d Dynetics also won a contract that NASA hopes will get humans to the lunar surface by 2024. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk win contracts for spacecraft to land NASA astronauts on the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA sets a date for historic SpaceX launch, the first flight of NASA crews from U.S. in nearly a decade (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6284",
        "date": "2020-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/17/spacex-nasa-crewed-flight-date/",
        "text": "It\u2019s been nearly 10 years since NASA astronauts launched from U.S. soil \u2014 a long, ignominious streak that\u2019s been compounded by delays and technical challenges.But finally, the space agency on Friday set the date for when it will fly its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast again: May 27. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile the date could change \u2014 in spaceflight they often do \u2014 the announcement marks a significant milestone in NASA\u2019s winding, at times tortuous, journey to regain its human-spaceflight wings since it retired the space shuttle in 2011.Space shuttle Atlantis\u2019s liftoff on July 8, 2011, marked the end of the space shuttle era after 135 missions. (The Washington Post)This time, though, the launch will be markedly different from any other in the history of the space agency. Unlike Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the space shuttle era, the rocket will be owned and operated not by NASA, but by a private company \u2014 SpaceX, the hard-charging commercial space company founded by Elon Musk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor all the company\u2019s triumphs, and its experience flying cargo to the International Space Station for NASA, it has never flown a human into space, a significant and dangerous challenge. NASA has spent years working with the California-based company to ensure its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft can safely deliver astronauts to orbit. And the flight would be the culmination of years of work, which has at times seen setbacks and delays.How to survive the coronavirus quarantine, according to astronautsWith a successful launch, SpaceX would accomplish an upset over its rival, Boeing, which also is under contract to fly NASA crews to the space station as part of the agency\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201d Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered significant setbacks during a test flight without astronauts in December that prevented it from docking with the station and prompted an investigation by NASA.That investigation uncovered numerous flaws, and Boeing recently agreed to refly the mission without astronauts on board before proceeding to a crewed flight. With the reflight to be likely toward the end of this year, a crewed Boeing flight is thought unlikely until next year. The company, reeling from the 737 Max crisis and the corornavirus pandemic, has set aside $410 million to pay for the costs of the investigation and the additional test flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2014, NASA awarded a total of $6.8 billion in contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, which won the larger share of the pot, $4.2 billion, while SpaceX got $2.6 billion for the same work. Last year, SpaceX successfully flew its Dragon to the station, paving the way for a crewed flight.In an interview with The Washington Post last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the agency needed to push on with the launch, despite the coronavirus pandemic, to maintain an American presence on the space station, which has been continuously occupied for 20 years.The space station represents \u201ca $100 billion investment by the American taxpayer,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a symbol of diplomacy and cooperation that is important not just for our country but the whole world. It\u2019s mission essential.\"Story continues below advertisementA successful flight would propel SpaceX into rare company, with the United States, Russia and China the only countries who have flown humans to orbit. And it would end NASA\u2019s dependence on Russia to fly its astronauts.AdvertisementOnce NASA retired the space shuttle and lost the ability to fly humans, it became dependent on Russia to launch its missions. And Russia began raising the prices it charged for the service \u2014 from $21.3 million a seat in 2006 to almost $82 million a seat by 2015, an increase of nearly 300 percent.On Twitter Friday, Musk said SpaceX, which he founded in 2002 with the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars, has made \u201cgood progress, but 18 years to launch our first humans is a long time. Technology must advance faster or there will be no city on the red planet in our lifetime.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor the upcoming SpaceX mission, NASA has assigned two of its most experienced astronauts: Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. Both are married to astronauts. Both have been to space multiple times. Both are former military test pilots.AdvertisementIf all goes to plan, they\u2019ll lift off at 4:32 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s pad 39A, the historic starting point for many Apollo and shuttle missions. Hurley\u2019s presence would mark a bookending for NASA, since he was on the last shuttle mission, which lifted off from 39A in 2011.Listen to Moonrise: The Post's latest podcast reveals the true story of why the U.S. first went to the moonSpaceX\u2019s launch comes at an important time for NASA, which has been scrambling to ensure that it keeps a presence on the International Space Station. On Friday, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan returned to Earth, leaving Chris Cassidy as the lone American on the station with two Russian cosmonauts.The Washington Post's Christian Davenport spoke to astronauts on the International Space Station to hear how they cope with living together in a small space. (Christian Davenport/The Washington Post)It\u2019s unclear how long Behnken and Hurley will remain aboard the station. Initially, their mission was expected to be a short stay. But because of the setbacks and delays, suffered by both SpaceX and Boeing, their mission will be extended.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceNASA said that the Dragon spacecraft can remain in orbit for 110 days and noted that the \u201cspecific mission duration will be determined once on station based on the readiness of the next commercial crew launch.\u201d The space agency on Friday set the date for when SpaceX will fly its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast again: May 27. NASA sets a date for historic SpaceX launch, the first flight of NASA crews from U.S. in nearly a decade",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA sets a date for historic SpaceX launch, the first flight of NASA crews from U.S. in nearly a decade (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6285",
        "date": "2020-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/17/spacex-nasa-crewed-flight-date/",
        "text": "It\u2019s been nearly 10 years since NASA astronauts launched from U.S. soil \u2014 a long, ignominious streak that\u2019s been compounded by delays and technical challenges.But finally, the space agency on Friday set the date for when it will fly its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast again: May 27. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile the date could change \u2014 in spaceflight they often do \u2014 the announcement marks a significant milestone in NASA\u2019s winding, at times tortuous, journey to regain its human-spaceflight wings since it retired the space shuttle in 2011.Space shuttle Atlantis\u2019s liftoff on July 8, 2011, marked the end of the space shuttle era after 135 missions. (The Washington Post)This time, though, the launch will be markedly different from any other in the history of the space agency. Unlike Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the space shuttle era, the rocket will be owned and operated not by NASA, but by a private company \u2014 SpaceX, the hard-charging commercial space company founded by Elon Musk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor all the company\u2019s triumphs, and its experience flying cargo to the International Space Station for NASA, it has never flown a human into space, a significant and dangerous challenge. NASA has spent years working with the California-based company to ensure its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft can safely deliver astronauts to orbit. And the flight would be the culmination of years of work, which has at times seen setbacks and delays.How to survive the coronavirus quarantine, according to astronautsWith a successful launch, SpaceX would accomplish an upset over its rival, Boeing, which also is under contract to fly NASA crews to the space station as part of the agency\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201d Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered significant setbacks during a test flight without astronauts in December that prevented it from docking with the station and prompted an investigation by NASA.That investigation uncovered numerous flaws, and Boeing recently agreed to refly the mission without astronauts on board before proceeding to a crewed flight. With the reflight to be likely toward the end of this year, a crewed Boeing flight is thought unlikely until next year. The company, reeling from the 737 Max crisis and the corornavirus pandemic, has set aside $410 million to pay for the costs of the investigation and the additional test flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2014, NASA awarded a total of $6.8 billion in contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, which won the larger share of the pot, $4.2 billion, while SpaceX got $2.6 billion for the same work. Last year, SpaceX successfully flew its Dragon to the station, paving the way for a crewed flight.In an interview with The Washington Post last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the agency needed to push on with the launch, despite the coronavirus pandemic, to maintain an American presence on the space station, which has been continuously occupied for 20 years.The space station represents \u201ca $100 billion investment by the American taxpayer,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a symbol of diplomacy and cooperation that is important not just for our country but the whole world. It\u2019s mission essential.\"Story continues below advertisementA successful flight would propel SpaceX into rare company, with the United States, Russia and China the only countries who have flown humans to orbit. And it would end NASA\u2019s dependence on Russia to fly its astronauts.AdvertisementOnce NASA retired the space shuttle and lost the ability to fly humans, it became dependent on Russia to launch its missions. And Russia began raising the prices it charged for the service \u2014 from $21.3 million a seat in 2006 to almost $82 million a seat by 2015, an increase of nearly 300 percent.On Twitter Friday, Musk said SpaceX, which he founded in 2002 with the ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars, has made \u201cgood progress, but 18 years to launch our first humans is a long time. Technology must advance faster or there will be no city on the red planet in our lifetime.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor the upcoming SpaceX mission, NASA has assigned two of its most experienced astronauts: Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. Both are married to astronauts. Both have been to space multiple times. Both are former military test pilots.AdvertisementIf all goes to plan, they\u2019ll lift off at 4:32 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s pad 39A, the historic starting point for many Apollo and shuttle missions. Hurley\u2019s presence would mark a bookending for NASA, since he was on the last shuttle mission, which lifted off from 39A in 2011.Listen to Moonrise: The Post's latest podcast reveals the true story of why the U.S. first went to the moonSpaceX\u2019s launch comes at an important time for NASA, which has been scrambling to ensure that it keeps a presence on the International Space Station. On Friday, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan returned to Earth, leaving Chris Cassidy as the lone American on the station with two Russian cosmonauts.The Washington Post's Christian Davenport spoke to astronauts on the International Space Station to hear how they cope with living together in a small space. (Christian Davenport/The Washington Post)It\u2019s unclear how long Behnken and Hurley will remain aboard the station. Initially, their mission was expected to be a short stay. But because of the setbacks and delays, suffered by both SpaceX and Boeing, their mission will be extended.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceNASA said that the Dragon spacecraft can remain in orbit for 110 days and noted that the \u201cspecific mission duration will be determined once on station based on the readiness of the next commercial crew launch.\u201d The space agency on Friday set the date for when SpaceX will fly its astronauts from the Florida Space Coast again: May 27. NASA sets a date for historic SpaceX launch, the first flight of NASA crews from U.S. in nearly a decade",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6286",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/nasa-allow-private-citizens-fly-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It was a dizzying day for NASA. First, the agency announced a plan to allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station and stay for the tidy sum of $35,000 per night. This news flash, representing a major change in policy for NASA, was soon overshadowed by a tweet from President Trump that called into question his own administration\u2019s much-publicized goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201dIt is unclear if Trump was unhappy with the current NASA plan or was expressing exasperation at the pace of human exploration of deep space. Trump\u2019s confusing language about the moon being part of Mars plausibly referred to NASA\u2019s framing of the moon plan as part of a longer-term goal of exploring Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration\u2019s decision to send astronauts back to the moon followed a unanimous recommendation to do so by the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, in October 2017. This is a strategic pivot for NASA, which, under President Barack Obama, developed plans to create a space station of sorts in lunar orbit but did not plan to repeat the Apollo-era achievement of landing astronauts. That had been the goal of NASA under President George W. Bush, but Obama killed the program.Now, NASA has pivoted again to the moon \u2014 and Trump had hyped the plan on several occasions. NASA initially aimed for a landing in 2028, but earlier this year Pence, citing Trump\u2019s wishes, ordered the agency to get there by 2024. That would potentially be before the end of a second Trump term.Trump\u2019s confusing tweet came just hours after NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, warned that the biggest challenge to the moon plan was not technological but rather the \u201cpolitical risk.\u201d Speaking at the International Space Development Conference in Arlington, Bridenstine said, according to SpaceNews, \u201cHow do we retire the political risk? We go faster. We accelerate the program. The longer it drags out, the more risk there is we\u2019re going to get diverted into something else.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine late Friday offered no pushback to his boss, instead echoing \u2013 and interpreting \u2013 Trump\u2019s tweet. \u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d Bridenstine wrote on Twitter. He added a shout-out to NASA\u2019s robotic missions: \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dA White House official said late Friday that the administration\u2019s goal \u201chas always been to get to Mars\u201d and that the moon 2024 plan would enable the United States to reach Mars \u201croughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.\u201dThe big news of the day was supposed to be the new commercial opportunities at NASA. The agency wants to open the International Space Station to more commercial interests, including filming advertisements. While NASA touted the plan as a way to help fund its ambitious plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as it tries to build a sustainable economy in space, it\u2019s unclear how much the agency stands to make under the new policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s announcement is a significant change for the agency, which has had a long-standing prohibition against allowing tourists on the station. Russia, however, has allowed several private astronauts on the station.Under the NASA plan, as many as two private citizen missions per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year.Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s chief financial officer, estimated the cost per trip would be about $50 million a seat. But the cost and arrangements would be left to SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies NASA has hired to fly crews to the station. They would keep that money and also have to make sure that private astronauts \u201cmeet NASA\u2019s medical standards and the training and certification procedures\u201d for crew members.Companies in the Cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceWhile onboard the station, NASA would charge people for food, storage and communication, a cost that would come to about $35,000 a night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d DeWit said.In addition, NASA would charge companies as much as $18,000 per kilogram for a round trip to and from the station. It also would charge for astronauts\u2019 time: $17,500 an hour.Still, that is not likely to make a dent in the massive costs required to get people to the surface of the moon.\u201cThis is smart policy move by NASA in that it engages a broader range of industry and increases visibility for space and the space station,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cThat said, the revenues generated from tourism and filming are likely to yield more good public relations than financial returns.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating office of SpaceX, said in a statement that the company \"was founded with the goal of helping humanity become a spacefaring civilization. We are looking forward to working with NASA and other commercial partners as we open up low Earth orbit to an exciting new chapter of human exploration.\u201dAdvertisementSpace Adventures, a Virginia-based company that has helped several private citizens get to the station on Russian rockets, has a contract with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. A spokesman said the company has not yet determined a price.Right now, commercial activity on the station is largely limited to science experiments. \u201cWe have no idea what kinds of creativity and literally out-of-the-world ideas can come from private industry,\u201d Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, said during a news conference.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back with help from SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginGerstenmaier acknowledged that the policy changes were a risky bet that may not produce results immediately.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEconomic market development takes a long time; transitions take a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is the very beginning.\u201dThe announcement comes as the agency is trying to return humans to the moon by 2024, a mission that officials said would require significant additional funding.AdvertisementNASA has already amended its budget request for next year to ask for an addition $1.6 billion, and has said that it would need significantly more money in the years to come to have any chance at pulling off such an ambitious plan.There is a long history of businesses going to space to market their products. In 1999, Pizza Hut paid to paint its logo on a Russian rocket. In the mid-1990s, an Israeli milk company filmed a commercial on the space station Mir, and a pair of Russian cosmonauts even appeared on QVC to sell a pen able to write in a weightless environment.Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon missionBridenstine has said he wanted to raise the profile of the agency\u2019s astronauts by allowing them to appear in commercials and on cereal boxes. But that was met by pushback from critics who said it would violate government ethics regulations that prohibit government officials, even astronauts, from using public office for private gain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the proposal unveiled Friday, NASA astronauts\u2019 participation in such activity would be limited to commercial activities \u201cwith ties to microgravity, NASA\u2019s mission or sustaining a low-Earth-orbit economy.\" They would be prohibited from appearing in advertisements, for example, and NASA said it would continue its policy of not endorsing any particular brand.Traditionally, NASA has steadfastly stayed away from that \u2014 even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.Private astronauts, however, would be free to conduct a wider range of commercial activity as long as it meets a list of requirements, such as not endangering the crew and ensuring it doesn\u2019t reflect unfavorably on NASA.Fact Check: What is the moon?NASA\u2019s new directive would also allow a private module to be attached to the station to be used for commercial activities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA is entering an era of finical exploration where we need to discover what the different commercial activities are that could sustain a presence in low Earth orbit,\u201d said Mike Gold, the vice president of civil space for Maxar Technologies who also served on a NASA advisory committee.Richard Garriott, an entrepreneur whose father was a NASA astronaut, traveled to the space station as a private astronaut in 2008 on a Russian rocket. At the time, NASA was so opposed to his trip that it tried to prohibit him from entering the U.S. segment of the space station. \u201cI was basically banned,\u201d he said in a recent interview.Ultimately, though, it was up to the commander of the space station to make that call, and so he was allowed after all.John Wagner contributed to this report. Under the NASA plan, as many as two private astronauts per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year. NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6287",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/nasa-allow-private-citizens-fly-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It was a dizzying day for NASA. First, the agency announced a plan to allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station and stay for the tidy sum of $35,000 per night. This news flash, representing a major change in policy for NASA, was soon overshadowed by a tweet from President Trump that called into question his own administration\u2019s much-publicized goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201dIt is unclear if Trump was unhappy with the current NASA plan or was expressing exasperation at the pace of human exploration of deep space. Trump\u2019s confusing language about the moon being part of Mars plausibly referred to NASA\u2019s framing of the moon plan as part of a longer-term goal of exploring Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration\u2019s decision to send astronauts back to the moon followed a unanimous recommendation to do so by the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, in October 2017. This is a strategic pivot for NASA, which, under President Barack Obama, developed plans to create a space station of sorts in lunar orbit but did not plan to repeat the Apollo-era achievement of landing astronauts. That had been the goal of NASA under President George W. Bush, but Obama killed the program.Now, NASA has pivoted again to the moon \u2014 and Trump had hyped the plan on several occasions. NASA initially aimed for a landing in 2028, but earlier this year Pence, citing Trump\u2019s wishes, ordered the agency to get there by 2024. That would potentially be before the end of a second Trump term.Trump\u2019s confusing tweet came just hours after NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, warned that the biggest challenge to the moon plan was not technological but rather the \u201cpolitical risk.\u201d Speaking at the International Space Development Conference in Arlington, Bridenstine said, according to SpaceNews, \u201cHow do we retire the political risk? We go faster. We accelerate the program. The longer it drags out, the more risk there is we\u2019re going to get diverted into something else.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine late Friday offered no pushback to his boss, instead echoing \u2013 and interpreting \u2013 Trump\u2019s tweet. \u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d Bridenstine wrote on Twitter. He added a shout-out to NASA\u2019s robotic missions: \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dA White House official said late Friday that the administration\u2019s goal \u201chas always been to get to Mars\u201d and that the moon 2024 plan would enable the United States to reach Mars \u201croughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.\u201dThe big news of the day was supposed to be the new commercial opportunities at NASA. The agency wants to open the International Space Station to more commercial interests, including filming advertisements. While NASA touted the plan as a way to help fund its ambitious plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as it tries to build a sustainable economy in space, it\u2019s unclear how much the agency stands to make under the new policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s announcement is a significant change for the agency, which has had a long-standing prohibition against allowing tourists on the station. Russia, however, has allowed several private astronauts on the station.Under the NASA plan, as many as two private citizen missions per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year.Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s chief financial officer, estimated the cost per trip would be about $50 million a seat. But the cost and arrangements would be left to SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies NASA has hired to fly crews to the station. They would keep that money and also have to make sure that private astronauts \u201cmeet NASA\u2019s medical standards and the training and certification procedures\u201d for crew members.Companies in the Cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceWhile onboard the station, NASA would charge people for food, storage and communication, a cost that would come to about $35,000 a night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d DeWit said.In addition, NASA would charge companies as much as $18,000 per kilogram for a round trip to and from the station. It also would charge for astronauts\u2019 time: $17,500 an hour.Still, that is not likely to make a dent in the massive costs required to get people to the surface of the moon.\u201cThis is smart policy move by NASA in that it engages a broader range of industry and increases visibility for space and the space station,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cThat said, the revenues generated from tourism and filming are likely to yield more good public relations than financial returns.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating office of SpaceX, said in a statement that the company \"was founded with the goal of helping humanity become a spacefaring civilization. We are looking forward to working with NASA and other commercial partners as we open up low Earth orbit to an exciting new chapter of human exploration.\u201dAdvertisementSpace Adventures, a Virginia-based company that has helped several private citizens get to the station on Russian rockets, has a contract with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. A spokesman said the company has not yet determined a price.Right now, commercial activity on the station is largely limited to science experiments. \u201cWe have no idea what kinds of creativity and literally out-of-the-world ideas can come from private industry,\u201d Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, said during a news conference.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back with help from SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginGerstenmaier acknowledged that the policy changes were a risky bet that may not produce results immediately.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEconomic market development takes a long time; transitions take a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is the very beginning.\u201dThe announcement comes as the agency is trying to return humans to the moon by 2024, a mission that officials said would require significant additional funding.AdvertisementNASA has already amended its budget request for next year to ask for an addition $1.6 billion, and has said that it would need significantly more money in the years to come to have any chance at pulling off such an ambitious plan.There is a long history of businesses going to space to market their products. In 1999, Pizza Hut paid to paint its logo on a Russian rocket. In the mid-1990s, an Israeli milk company filmed a commercial on the space station Mir, and a pair of Russian cosmonauts even appeared on QVC to sell a pen able to write in a weightless environment.Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon missionBridenstine has said he wanted to raise the profile of the agency\u2019s astronauts by allowing them to appear in commercials and on cereal boxes. But that was met by pushback from critics who said it would violate government ethics regulations that prohibit government officials, even astronauts, from using public office for private gain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the proposal unveiled Friday, NASA astronauts\u2019 participation in such activity would be limited to commercial activities \u201cwith ties to microgravity, NASA\u2019s mission or sustaining a low-Earth-orbit economy.\" They would be prohibited from appearing in advertisements, for example, and NASA said it would continue its policy of not endorsing any particular brand.Traditionally, NASA has steadfastly stayed away from that \u2014 even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.Private astronauts, however, would be free to conduct a wider range of commercial activity as long as it meets a list of requirements, such as not endangering the crew and ensuring it doesn\u2019t reflect unfavorably on NASA.Fact Check: What is the moon?NASA\u2019s new directive would also allow a private module to be attached to the station to be used for commercial activities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA is entering an era of finical exploration where we need to discover what the different commercial activities are that could sustain a presence in low Earth orbit,\u201d said Mike Gold, the vice president of civil space for Maxar Technologies who also served on a NASA advisory committee.Richard Garriott, an entrepreneur whose father was a NASA astronaut, traveled to the space station as a private astronaut in 2008 on a Russian rocket. At the time, NASA was so opposed to his trip that it tried to prohibit him from entering the U.S. segment of the space station. \u201cI was basically banned,\u201d he said in a recent interview.Ultimately, though, it was up to the commander of the space station to make that call, and so he was allowed after all.John Wagner contributed to this report. Under the NASA plan, as many as two private astronauts per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year. NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6288",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/nasa-allow-private-citizens-fly-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It was a dizzying day for NASA. First, the agency announced a plan to allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station and stay for the tidy sum of $35,000 per night. This news flash, representing a major change in policy for NASA, was soon overshadowed by a tweet from President Trump that called into question his own administration\u2019s much-publicized goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201dIt is unclear if Trump was unhappy with the current NASA plan or was expressing exasperation at the pace of human exploration of deep space. Trump\u2019s confusing language about the moon being part of Mars plausibly referred to NASA\u2019s framing of the moon plan as part of a longer-term goal of exploring Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration\u2019s decision to send astronauts back to the moon followed a unanimous recommendation to do so by the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, in October 2017. This is a strategic pivot for NASA, which, under President Barack Obama, developed plans to create a space station of sorts in lunar orbit but did not plan to repeat the Apollo-era achievement of landing astronauts. That had been the goal of NASA under President George W. Bush, but Obama killed the program.Now, NASA has pivoted again to the moon \u2014 and Trump had hyped the plan on several occasions. NASA initially aimed for a landing in 2028, but earlier this year Pence, citing Trump\u2019s wishes, ordered the agency to get there by 2024. That would potentially be before the end of a second Trump term.Trump\u2019s confusing tweet came just hours after NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, warned that the biggest challenge to the moon plan was not technological but rather the \u201cpolitical risk.\u201d Speaking at the International Space Development Conference in Arlington, Bridenstine said, according to SpaceNews, \u201cHow do we retire the political risk? We go faster. We accelerate the program. The longer it drags out, the more risk there is we\u2019re going to get diverted into something else.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine late Friday offered no pushback to his boss, instead echoing \u2013 and interpreting \u2013 Trump\u2019s tweet. \u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d Bridenstine wrote on Twitter. He added a shout-out to NASA\u2019s robotic missions: \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dA White House official said late Friday that the administration\u2019s goal \u201chas always been to get to Mars\u201d and that the moon 2024 plan would enable the United States to reach Mars \u201croughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.\u201dThe big news of the day was supposed to be the new commercial opportunities at NASA. The agency wants to open the International Space Station to more commercial interests, including filming advertisements. While NASA touted the plan as a way to help fund its ambitious plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as it tries to build a sustainable economy in space, it\u2019s unclear how much the agency stands to make under the new policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s announcement is a significant change for the agency, which has had a long-standing prohibition against allowing tourists on the station. Russia, however, has allowed several private astronauts on the station.Under the NASA plan, as many as two private citizen missions per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year.Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s chief financial officer, estimated the cost per trip would be about $50 million a seat. But the cost and arrangements would be left to SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies NASA has hired to fly crews to the station. They would keep that money and also have to make sure that private astronauts \u201cmeet NASA\u2019s medical standards and the training and certification procedures\u201d for crew members.Companies in the Cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceWhile onboard the station, NASA would charge people for food, storage and communication, a cost that would come to about $35,000 a night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d DeWit said.In addition, NASA would charge companies as much as $18,000 per kilogram for a round trip to and from the station. It also would charge for astronauts\u2019 time: $17,500 an hour.Still, that is not likely to make a dent in the massive costs required to get people to the surface of the moon.\u201cThis is smart policy move by NASA in that it engages a broader range of industry and increases visibility for space and the space station,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cThat said, the revenues generated from tourism and filming are likely to yield more good public relations than financial returns.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating office of SpaceX, said in a statement that the company \"was founded with the goal of helping humanity become a spacefaring civilization. We are looking forward to working with NASA and other commercial partners as we open up low Earth orbit to an exciting new chapter of human exploration.\u201dAdvertisementSpace Adventures, a Virginia-based company that has helped several private citizens get to the station on Russian rockets, has a contract with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. A spokesman said the company has not yet determined a price.Right now, commercial activity on the station is largely limited to science experiments. \u201cWe have no idea what kinds of creativity and literally out-of-the-world ideas can come from private industry,\u201d Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, said during a news conference.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back with help from SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginGerstenmaier acknowledged that the policy changes were a risky bet that may not produce results immediately.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEconomic market development takes a long time; transitions take a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is the very beginning.\u201dThe announcement comes as the agency is trying to return humans to the moon by 2024, a mission that officials said would require significant additional funding.AdvertisementNASA has already amended its budget request for next year to ask for an addition $1.6 billion, and has said that it would need significantly more money in the years to come to have any chance at pulling off such an ambitious plan.There is a long history of businesses going to space to market their products. In 1999, Pizza Hut paid to paint its logo on a Russian rocket. In the mid-1990s, an Israeli milk company filmed a commercial on the space station Mir, and a pair of Russian cosmonauts even appeared on QVC to sell a pen able to write in a weightless environment.Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon missionBridenstine has said he wanted to raise the profile of the agency\u2019s astronauts by allowing them to appear in commercials and on cereal boxes. But that was met by pushback from critics who said it would violate government ethics regulations that prohibit government officials, even astronauts, from using public office for private gain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the proposal unveiled Friday, NASA astronauts\u2019 participation in such activity would be limited to commercial activities \u201cwith ties to microgravity, NASA\u2019s mission or sustaining a low-Earth-orbit economy.\" They would be prohibited from appearing in advertisements, for example, and NASA said it would continue its policy of not endorsing any particular brand.Traditionally, NASA has steadfastly stayed away from that \u2014 even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.Private astronauts, however, would be free to conduct a wider range of commercial activity as long as it meets a list of requirements, such as not endangering the crew and ensuring it doesn\u2019t reflect unfavorably on NASA.Fact Check: What is the moon?NASA\u2019s new directive would also allow a private module to be attached to the station to be used for commercial activities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA is entering an era of finical exploration where we need to discover what the different commercial activities are that could sustain a presence in low Earth orbit,\u201d said Mike Gold, the vice president of civil space for Maxar Technologies who also served on a NASA advisory committee.Richard Garriott, an entrepreneur whose father was a NASA astronaut, traveled to the space station as a private astronaut in 2008 on a Russian rocket. At the time, NASA was so opposed to his trip that it tried to prohibit him from entering the U.S. segment of the space station. \u201cI was basically banned,\u201d he said in a recent interview.Ultimately, though, it was up to the commander of the space station to make that call, and so he was allowed after all.John Wagner contributed to this report. Under the NASA plan, as many as two private astronauts per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year. NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6289",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/nasa-allow-private-citizens-fly-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It was a dizzying day for NASA. First, the agency announced a plan to allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station and stay for the tidy sum of $35,000 per night. This news flash, representing a major change in policy for NASA, was soon overshadowed by a tweet from President Trump that called into question his own administration\u2019s much-publicized goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201dIt is unclear if Trump was unhappy with the current NASA plan or was expressing exasperation at the pace of human exploration of deep space. Trump\u2019s confusing language about the moon being part of Mars plausibly referred to NASA\u2019s framing of the moon plan as part of a longer-term goal of exploring Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration\u2019s decision to send astronauts back to the moon followed a unanimous recommendation to do so by the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, in October 2017. This is a strategic pivot for NASA, which, under President Barack Obama, developed plans to create a space station of sorts in lunar orbit but did not plan to repeat the Apollo-era achievement of landing astronauts. That had been the goal of NASA under President George W. Bush, but Obama killed the program.Now, NASA has pivoted again to the moon \u2014 and Trump had hyped the plan on several occasions. NASA initially aimed for a landing in 2028, but earlier this year Pence, citing Trump\u2019s wishes, ordered the agency to get there by 2024. That would potentially be before the end of a second Trump term.Trump\u2019s confusing tweet came just hours after NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, warned that the biggest challenge to the moon plan was not technological but rather the \u201cpolitical risk.\u201d Speaking at the International Space Development Conference in Arlington, Bridenstine said, according to SpaceNews, \u201cHow do we retire the political risk? We go faster. We accelerate the program. The longer it drags out, the more risk there is we\u2019re going to get diverted into something else.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine late Friday offered no pushback to his boss, instead echoing \u2013 and interpreting \u2013 Trump\u2019s tweet. \u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d Bridenstine wrote on Twitter. He added a shout-out to NASA\u2019s robotic missions: \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dA White House official said late Friday that the administration\u2019s goal \u201chas always been to get to Mars\u201d and that the moon 2024 plan would enable the United States to reach Mars \u201croughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.\u201dThe big news of the day was supposed to be the new commercial opportunities at NASA. The agency wants to open the International Space Station to more commercial interests, including filming advertisements. While NASA touted the plan as a way to help fund its ambitious plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as it tries to build a sustainable economy in space, it\u2019s unclear how much the agency stands to make under the new policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s announcement is a significant change for the agency, which has had a long-standing prohibition against allowing tourists on the station. Russia, however, has allowed several private astronauts on the station.Under the NASA plan, as many as two private citizen missions per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year.Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s chief financial officer, estimated the cost per trip would be about $50 million a seat. But the cost and arrangements would be left to SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies NASA has hired to fly crews to the station. They would keep that money and also have to make sure that private astronauts \u201cmeet NASA\u2019s medical standards and the training and certification procedures\u201d for crew members.Companies in the Cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceWhile onboard the station, NASA would charge people for food, storage and communication, a cost that would come to about $35,000 a night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d DeWit said.In addition, NASA would charge companies as much as $18,000 per kilogram for a round trip to and from the station. It also would charge for astronauts\u2019 time: $17,500 an hour.Still, that is not likely to make a dent in the massive costs required to get people to the surface of the moon.\u201cThis is smart policy move by NASA in that it engages a broader range of industry and increases visibility for space and the space station,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cThat said, the revenues generated from tourism and filming are likely to yield more good public relations than financial returns.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating office of SpaceX, said in a statement that the company \"was founded with the goal of helping humanity become a spacefaring civilization. We are looking forward to working with NASA and other commercial partners as we open up low Earth orbit to an exciting new chapter of human exploration.\u201dAdvertisementSpace Adventures, a Virginia-based company that has helped several private citizens get to the station on Russian rockets, has a contract with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. A spokesman said the company has not yet determined a price.Right now, commercial activity on the station is largely limited to science experiments. \u201cWe have no idea what kinds of creativity and literally out-of-the-world ideas can come from private industry,\u201d Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, said during a news conference.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back with help from SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginGerstenmaier acknowledged that the policy changes were a risky bet that may not produce results immediately.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEconomic market development takes a long time; transitions take a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is the very beginning.\u201dThe announcement comes as the agency is trying to return humans to the moon by 2024, a mission that officials said would require significant additional funding.AdvertisementNASA has already amended its budget request for next year to ask for an addition $1.6 billion, and has said that it would need significantly more money in the years to come to have any chance at pulling off such an ambitious plan.There is a long history of businesses going to space to market their products. In 1999, Pizza Hut paid to paint its logo on a Russian rocket. In the mid-1990s, an Israeli milk company filmed a commercial on the space station Mir, and a pair of Russian cosmonauts even appeared on QVC to sell a pen able to write in a weightless environment.Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon missionBridenstine has said he wanted to raise the profile of the agency\u2019s astronauts by allowing them to appear in commercials and on cereal boxes. But that was met by pushback from critics who said it would violate government ethics regulations that prohibit government officials, even astronauts, from using public office for private gain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the proposal unveiled Friday, NASA astronauts\u2019 participation in such activity would be limited to commercial activities \u201cwith ties to microgravity, NASA\u2019s mission or sustaining a low-Earth-orbit economy.\" They would be prohibited from appearing in advertisements, for example, and NASA said it would continue its policy of not endorsing any particular brand.Traditionally, NASA has steadfastly stayed away from that \u2014 even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.Private astronauts, however, would be free to conduct a wider range of commercial activity as long as it meets a list of requirements, such as not endangering the crew and ensuring it doesn\u2019t reflect unfavorably on NASA.Fact Check: What is the moon?NASA\u2019s new directive would also allow a private module to be attached to the station to be used for commercial activities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA is entering an era of finical exploration where we need to discover what the different commercial activities are that could sustain a presence in low Earth orbit,\u201d said Mike Gold, the vice president of civil space for Maxar Technologies who also served on a NASA advisory committee.Richard Garriott, an entrepreneur whose father was a NASA astronaut, traveled to the space station as a private astronaut in 2008 on a Russian rocket. At the time, NASA was so opposed to his trip that it tried to prohibit him from entering the U.S. segment of the space station. \u201cI was basically banned,\u201d he said in a recent interview.Ultimately, though, it was up to the commander of the space station to make that call, and so he was allowed after all.John Wagner contributed to this report. Under the NASA plan, as many as two private astronauts per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year. NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6290",
        "date": "2019-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/07/nasa-allow-private-citizens-fly-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It was a dizzying day for NASA. First, the agency announced a plan to allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station and stay for the tidy sum of $35,000 per night. This news flash, representing a major change in policy for NASA, was soon overshadowed by a tweet from President Trump that called into question his own administration\u2019s much-publicized goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon \u2014 We did that 50 years ago,\u201d Trump said on Twitter. \u201cThey should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!\u201dIt is unclear if Trump was unhappy with the current NASA plan or was expressing exasperation at the pace of human exploration of deep space. Trump\u2019s confusing language about the moon being part of Mars plausibly referred to NASA\u2019s framing of the moon plan as part of a longer-term goal of exploring Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration\u2019s decision to send astronauts back to the moon followed a unanimous recommendation to do so by the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence, in October 2017. This is a strategic pivot for NASA, which, under President Barack Obama, developed plans to create a space station of sorts in lunar orbit but did not plan to repeat the Apollo-era achievement of landing astronauts. That had been the goal of NASA under President George W. Bush, but Obama killed the program.Now, NASA has pivoted again to the moon \u2014 and Trump had hyped the plan on several occasions. NASA initially aimed for a landing in 2028, but earlier this year Pence, citing Trump\u2019s wishes, ordered the agency to get there by 2024. That would potentially be before the end of a second Trump term.Trump\u2019s confusing tweet came just hours after NASA\u2019s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, warned that the biggest challenge to the moon plan was not technological but rather the \u201cpolitical risk.\u201d Speaking at the International Space Development Conference in Arlington, Bridenstine said, according to SpaceNews, \u201cHow do we retire the political risk? We go faster. We accelerate the program. The longer it drags out, the more risk there is we\u2019re going to get diverted into something else.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBridenstine late Friday offered no pushback to his boss, instead echoing \u2013 and interpreting \u2013 Trump\u2019s tweet. \u201cAs @POTUS said, @NASA is using the Moon to send humans to Mars!\u201d Bridenstine wrote on Twitter. He added a shout-out to NASA\u2019s robotic missions: \u201cRight now, @MarsCuriosity and @NASAInSight are on Mars and will soon be joined by the Mars 2020 rover and the Mars helicopter.\u201dA White House official said late Friday that the administration\u2019s goal \u201chas always been to get to Mars\u201d and that the moon 2024 plan would enable the United States to reach Mars \u201croughly a decade after creating a sustainable presence on the lunar surface.\u201dThe big news of the day was supposed to be the new commercial opportunities at NASA. The agency wants to open the International Space Station to more commercial interests, including filming advertisements. While NASA touted the plan as a way to help fund its ambitious plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as it tries to build a sustainable economy in space, it\u2019s unclear how much the agency stands to make under the new policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s announcement is a significant change for the agency, which has had a long-standing prohibition against allowing tourists on the station. Russia, however, has allowed several private astronauts on the station.Under the NASA plan, as many as two private citizen missions per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year.Jeff DeWit, NASA\u2019s chief financial officer, estimated the cost per trip would be about $50 million a seat. But the cost and arrangements would be left to SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies NASA has hired to fly crews to the station. They would keep that money and also have to make sure that private astronauts \u201cmeet NASA\u2019s medical standards and the training and certification procedures\u201d for crew members.Companies in the Cosmos: Companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are leading a new space raceWhile onboard the station, NASA would charge people for food, storage and communication, a cost that would come to about $35,000 a night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut it won\u2019t come with any Hilton or Marriott points,\u201d DeWit said.In addition, NASA would charge companies as much as $18,000 per kilogram for a round trip to and from the station. It also would charge for astronauts\u2019 time: $17,500 an hour.Still, that is not likely to make a dent in the massive costs required to get people to the surface of the moon.\u201cThis is smart policy move by NASA in that it engages a broader range of industry and increases visibility for space and the space station,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cThat said, the revenues generated from tourism and filming are likely to yield more good public relations than financial returns.\u201dStory continues below advertisementGwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating office of SpaceX, said in a statement that the company \"was founded with the goal of helping humanity become a spacefaring civilization. We are looking forward to working with NASA and other commercial partners as we open up low Earth orbit to an exciting new chapter of human exploration.\u201dAdvertisementSpace Adventures, a Virginia-based company that has helped several private citizens get to the station on Russian rockets, has a contract with Boeing to help sell seats aboard its spacecraft. A spokesman said the company has not yet determined a price.Right now, commercial activity on the station is largely limited to science experiments. \u201cWe have no idea what kinds of creativity and literally out-of-the-world ideas can come from private industry,\u201d Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, said during a news conference.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back with help from SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginGerstenmaier acknowledged that the policy changes were a risky bet that may not produce results immediately.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEconomic market development takes a long time; transitions take a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is the very beginning.\u201dThe announcement comes as the agency is trying to return humans to the moon by 2024, a mission that officials said would require significant additional funding.AdvertisementNASA has already amended its budget request for next year to ask for an addition $1.6 billion, and has said that it would need significantly more money in the years to come to have any chance at pulling off such an ambitious plan.There is a long history of businesses going to space to market their products. In 1999, Pizza Hut paid to paint its logo on a Russian rocket. In the mid-1990s, an Israeli milk company filmed a commercial on the space station Mir, and a pair of Russian cosmonauts even appeared on QVC to sell a pen able to write in a weightless environment.Trump wants an additional $1.6 billion for NASA\u2019s audacious moon missionBridenstine has said he wanted to raise the profile of the agency\u2019s astronauts by allowing them to appear in commercials and on cereal boxes. But that was met by pushback from critics who said it would violate government ethics regulations that prohibit government officials, even astronauts, from using public office for private gain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the proposal unveiled Friday, NASA astronauts\u2019 participation in such activity would be limited to commercial activities \u201cwith ties to microgravity, NASA\u2019s mission or sustaining a low-Earth-orbit economy.\" They would be prohibited from appearing in advertisements, for example, and NASA said it would continue its policy of not endorsing any particular brand.Traditionally, NASA has steadfastly stayed away from that \u2014 even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.Private astronauts, however, would be free to conduct a wider range of commercial activity as long as it meets a list of requirements, such as not endangering the crew and ensuring it doesn\u2019t reflect unfavorably on NASA.Fact Check: What is the moon?NASA\u2019s new directive would also allow a private module to be attached to the station to be used for commercial activities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA is entering an era of finical exploration where we need to discover what the different commercial activities are that could sustain a presence in low Earth orbit,\u201d said Mike Gold, the vice president of civil space for Maxar Technologies who also served on a NASA advisory committee.Richard Garriott, an entrepreneur whose father was a NASA astronaut, traveled to the space station as a private astronaut in 2008 on a Russian rocket. At the time, NASA was so opposed to his trip that it tried to prohibit him from entering the U.S. segment of the space station. \u201cI was basically banned,\u201d he said in a recent interview.Ultimately, though, it was up to the commander of the space station to make that call, and so he was allowed after all.John Wagner contributed to this report. Under the NASA plan, as many as two private astronauts per year could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days, with the first mission coming as early as next year. NASA invites tourists to space station, while a Trump tweet casts doubt on his own administration\u2019s moon plan ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump pushed for a moon landing in 2024. It\u2019s not going to happen. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6291",
        "date": "2021-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/13/trump-nasa-moon-2024/",
        "text": "It started with a soaring speech at the National Space Council by Vice President Pence that laid out an ambitious if improbable goal: NASA astronauts would return to the surface of the moon and do it by 2024. Pence\u2019s declaration in 2019 that NASA would accelerate its schedule by four years made big headlines and sent shock waves through NASA and the space industry as he pledged that the agency would meet the mandate \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, as the Trump administration departs in defeat, it is clear that the 2024 deadline will not be met, and was likely never an achievable goal, despite having the backing of the White House and a massive lobbying effort by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.To meet the White House\u2019s mandate, which moved up the moon landing from 2028, Bridenstine had said that the agency would need $3.3 billion in next year\u2019s budget to build the first spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon since the Apollo era of the 1960s. With Pence\u2019s backing, he crisscrossed the country and the halls of Congress, urging lawmakers to support the agency\u2019s Artemis mission, which, as he pledged in his campaign-like stump speech, would put the \u201cnext man and first woman on the moon.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCongress came through \u2014 but with $850 million, well short of the full request. And so now, the 2024 goal will not be met.\u201cIn order to make the 2024 goal, everything in the sequence leading up to it had to go right,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. \u201cAnd in programs like this, that doesn\u2019t usually happen.\u201dThe 2024 deadline has \u201cbeen dead for a while, I\u2019m not sure it was ever alive,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was what we call in the trade an aspirational goal.\u201d Still, he said the effort has galvanized an agency that has not returned to the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972 and has only recently resumed flying astronauts from American soil to Earth orbit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt energized NASA and its contractors to put more intensity into what they were doing,\u201d Logsdon said.AdvertisementBridenstine, whose leadership inspired an online fan club, was praised for his work to build bipartisan support for Artemis. And unlike other unfulfilled promises of the Trump administration \u2014 a border wall that didn\u2019t get fully built or the failure to replace the Affordable Care Act with a viable alternative \u2014 the effort to return astronauts to the moon is likely to continue under the Biden administration, Republicans and Democrats say, though on a different timeline.Amid a tumultuous election, rioting at the Capitol and a deadly pandemic, Biden has said nothing about his plans for the space program. The transition team has not yet announced who it would nominate for administrator, though Democrats have said it is likely to be the first woman to ever occupy the position. Under Biden, the agency will focus more on Earth science, party officials said, and note that its party platform says, \u201cWe support NASA\u2019s work to return Americans to the moon and go beyond the Mars, taking the next step in exploring our solar system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Bridenstine, who will step down from NASA on Jan. 20, would not declare the 2024 deadline dead quite yet, though he did say that given the shortfall in funding, NASA \u201cis going to have to go back to the drawing board.\u201dAdvertisementStill, the Artemis program \u201cis on solid footing. It is absolutely true that we didn\u2019t get every dollar we requested, and that will make us reevaluate what the plan ultimately looks like,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the fact that in the midst of a very challenging year, Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate said we want to fund a human landing system at $850 million \u2014 that\u2019s a solid victory.\u201dIn addition to lobbying lawmakers, Bridenstine has successfully courted several international partners in the effort, such as Japan, Australia and Canada, which are committing resources and signing a document known as the Artemis Accords that governs behavior on and around the moon. A broad international coalition, such as the one that governs the International Space Station, will provide continuity from one administration to the next, said Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director, who now chairs an advisory committee.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis administration has very smartly instituted the Artemis Accords, which binds us with other nations,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that I think is going to continue to motivate the administration that follows to carry on that project.\u201dAdvertisementNASA has also highlighted the astronauts who would fly on the Artemis missions \u2014 giving a face to the program and a hint of who the first woman to walk on the moon might be. But there are still numerous challenges that the Biden administration will inherit.The Space Launch System, NASA\u2019s massive rocket that would fly astronauts to the moon, has never flown. And while it has in recent months made significant progress, it has over the years suffered many setbacks and delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns. If all goes well at a major test of its engines Saturday, the rocket\u2019s first flight, known as Artemis I, is expected to come late this year, propelling the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, in a mission around the moon. If the test is successful, NASA would then work to put a crew of astronauts in orbit around the moon for Artemis II, before the Artemis III landing.Story continues below advertisementGiven that the Space Launch System is a massive, complex rocket, the most powerful ever built, and has never flown before, the current schedule may be very optimistic.Advertisement\u201cNASA announces, without any kind of doubt, that Artemis I, II and III are going to go off without a hitch. If you look at SLS, it is a very complicated rocket,\u201d said Homer Hickam, the author and a member of the National Space Council\u2019s advisory committee. \u201cThe odds are it\u2019s not going to work perfectly on the first launch. And if it doesn\u2019t work perfectly, are you really going to put a crew on the second time?\u201dNASA has already awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts to three companies for the initial development of spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the lunar surface. A team led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper won $579 million, the biggest amount. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Dynetics, which teamed with Sierra Nevada Corp., was awarded $253 million, and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX got $135 million.Story continues below advertisementThose contracts run out in February, and the second phase, in which NASA is expected to eliminate at least one of the bidders and continue with the others, would come shortly afterward. But some fear that will be delayed, as Democrats take office and assess NASA\u2019s programs.AdvertisementBridenstine said that delays could hinder the momentum the program has and that he hoped that would not happen.\u201cI don\u2019t think that would be in the interest of the agency or the program,\u201d he said. \u201cI haven\u2019t heard that\u2019s what they\u2019re planning to do. But the goal is to go fast. That\u2019s how you create a program that\u2019s successful.\u201dEven if the contracts aren\u2019t delayed, he said the agency is going to have to reassess the 2024 timeline: \u201cI think it\u2019s important to give the team time to assess what the future might look like.\u201d Biden will likely keep NASA\u2019s Artemis program, but on a different timeline. Trump pushed for a moon landing in 2024. It\u2019s not going to happen.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump pushed for a moon landing in 2024. It\u2019s not going to happen. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6292",
        "date": "2021-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/13/trump-nasa-moon-2024/",
        "text": "It started with a soaring speech at the National Space Council by Vice President Pence that laid out an ambitious if improbable goal: NASA astronauts would return to the surface of the moon and do it by 2024. Pence\u2019s declaration in 2019 that NASA would accelerate its schedule by four years made big headlines and sent shock waves through NASA and the space industry as he pledged that the agency would meet the mandate \u201cby any means necessary.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, as the Trump administration departs in defeat, it is clear that the 2024 deadline will not be met, and was likely never an achievable goal, despite having the backing of the White House and a massive lobbying effort by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.To meet the White House\u2019s mandate, which moved up the moon landing from 2028, Bridenstine had said that the agency would need $3.3 billion in next year\u2019s budget to build the first spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon since the Apollo era of the 1960s. With Pence\u2019s backing, he crisscrossed the country and the halls of Congress, urging lawmakers to support the agency\u2019s Artemis mission, which, as he pledged in his campaign-like stump speech, would put the \u201cnext man and first woman on the moon.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCongress came through \u2014 but with $850 million, well short of the full request. And so now, the 2024 goal will not be met.\u201cIn order to make the 2024 goal, everything in the sequence leading up to it had to go right,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. \u201cAnd in programs like this, that doesn\u2019t usually happen.\u201dThe 2024 deadline has \u201cbeen dead for a while, I\u2019m not sure it was ever alive,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was what we call in the trade an aspirational goal.\u201d Still, he said the effort has galvanized an agency that has not returned to the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972 and has only recently resumed flying astronauts from American soil to Earth orbit.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt energized NASA and its contractors to put more intensity into what they were doing,\u201d Logsdon said.AdvertisementBridenstine, whose leadership inspired an online fan club, was praised for his work to build bipartisan support for Artemis. And unlike other unfulfilled promises of the Trump administration \u2014 a border wall that didn\u2019t get fully built or the failure to replace the Affordable Care Act with a viable alternative \u2014 the effort to return astronauts to the moon is likely to continue under the Biden administration, Republicans and Democrats say, though on a different timeline.Amid a tumultuous election, rioting at the Capitol and a deadly pandemic, Biden has said nothing about his plans for the space program. The transition team has not yet announced who it would nominate for administrator, though Democrats have said it is likely to be the first woman to ever occupy the position. Under Biden, the agency will focus more on Earth science, party officials said, and note that its party platform says, \u201cWe support NASA\u2019s work to return Americans to the moon and go beyond the Mars, taking the next step in exploring our solar system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Bridenstine, who will step down from NASA on Jan. 20, would not declare the 2024 deadline dead quite yet, though he did say that given the shortfall in funding, NASA \u201cis going to have to go back to the drawing board.\u201dAdvertisementStill, the Artemis program \u201cis on solid footing. It is absolutely true that we didn\u2019t get every dollar we requested, and that will make us reevaluate what the plan ultimately looks like,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the fact that in the midst of a very challenging year, Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate said we want to fund a human landing system at $850 million \u2014 that\u2019s a solid victory.\u201dIn addition to lobbying lawmakers, Bridenstine has successfully courted several international partners in the effort, such as Japan, Australia and Canada, which are committing resources and signing a document known as the Artemis Accords that governs behavior on and around the moon. A broad international coalition, such as the one that governs the International Space Station, will provide continuity from one administration to the next, said Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director, who now chairs an advisory committee.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis administration has very smartly instituted the Artemis Accords, which binds us with other nations,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that I think is going to continue to motivate the administration that follows to carry on that project.\u201dAdvertisementNASA has also highlighted the astronauts who would fly on the Artemis missions \u2014 giving a face to the program and a hint of who the first woman to walk on the moon might be. But there are still numerous challenges that the Biden administration will inherit.The Space Launch System, NASA\u2019s massive rocket that would fly astronauts to the moon, has never flown. And while it has in recent months made significant progress, it has over the years suffered many setbacks and delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns. If all goes well at a major test of its engines Saturday, the rocket\u2019s first flight, known as Artemis I, is expected to come late this year, propelling the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, in a mission around the moon. If the test is successful, NASA would then work to put a crew of astronauts in orbit around the moon for Artemis II, before the Artemis III landing.Story continues below advertisementGiven that the Space Launch System is a massive, complex rocket, the most powerful ever built, and has never flown before, the current schedule may be very optimistic.Advertisement\u201cNASA announces, without any kind of doubt, that Artemis I, II and III are going to go off without a hitch. If you look at SLS, it is a very complicated rocket,\u201d said Homer Hickam, the author and a member of the National Space Council\u2019s advisory committee. \u201cThe odds are it\u2019s not going to work perfectly on the first launch. And if it doesn\u2019t work perfectly, are you really going to put a crew on the second time?\u201dNASA has already awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts to three companies for the initial development of spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the lunar surface. A team led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper won $579 million, the biggest amount. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Dynetics, which teamed with Sierra Nevada Corp., was awarded $253 million, and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX got $135 million.Story continues below advertisementThose contracts run out in February, and the second phase, in which NASA is expected to eliminate at least one of the bidders and continue with the others, would come shortly afterward. But some fear that will be delayed, as Democrats take office and assess NASA\u2019s programs.AdvertisementBridenstine said that delays could hinder the momentum the program has and that he hoped that would not happen.\u201cI don\u2019t think that would be in the interest of the agency or the program,\u201d he said. \u201cI haven\u2019t heard that\u2019s what they\u2019re planning to do. But the goal is to go fast. That\u2019s how you create a program that\u2019s successful.\u201dEven if the contracts aren\u2019t delayed, he said the agency is going to have to reassess the 2024 timeline: \u201cI think it\u2019s important to give the team time to assess what the future might look like.\u201d Biden will likely keep NASA\u2019s Artemis program, but on a different timeline. Trump pushed for a moon landing in 2024. It\u2019s not going to happen.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA and SpaceX prepare to fly another crew to the space station, engineers are fixing a leaky toilet on the spacecraft (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6293",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/29/spacex-nasa-crew-3-launch-space-station-iss/",
        "text": "It seems like everyone is doing it. An 82-year-old aviator, an 18-year-old student, an artist, a billionaire, a celebrity actor, all resplendent in their shiny, new space suits, preening in spectacles aired on prime time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the wake of a series of space tourism missions that has sent more private citizens to space this year than professional astronauts, it\u2019s as if going to space has become routine. It\u2019s not. Gravity remains a tremendous force to overcome. Rockets are still powered by thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellants. And the vacuum of space is as harsh and dangerous as ever.As NASA and SpaceX prepare to send their fourth crew of astronauts to the International Space Station, the teams are driving home that message, saying they are prepared but daunted by what they know is a tremendously risky endeavor. And along the way they have faced a series of challenges, including a leaky toilet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf all goes to plan, three NASA astronauts and a European astronaut will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:10 a.m. Wednesday. (The mission was originally scheduled to launch at 2:21 a.m. Sunday, but NASA announced Saturday it was postponing the flight because of high winds and heavy seas in the abort areas.)The mission would be the third time Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has launched a full contingent of astronauts to the station, in addition to some two dozen cargo missions and a test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts in May 2020. It also flew a crew of private citizens for three days in orbit last month in what was known as the Inspiration4 mission.Despite the regular cadence of flights, officials at NASA and SpaceX say they are still very much in the learning stages and know that small problems on a rocket fueled with thousands of gallons of combustible propellants can lead to big problems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe just have to continue to really be responsible and really be thoughtful,\u201d Holly Ridings, NASA chief flight director, said during a preflight news conference this week. \u201cWe have this great partnership with SpaceX, and we\u2019ve done this a couple of times now \u2014 not enough to really say we\u2019re good at it.\u201d The fact is, she said, \u201cwe\u2019re still learning a lot.\u201dAfter every flight, engineers scour the rocket and the spacecraft, looking for weaknesses that could be made stronger, studying ways to make the spacecraft safer and better.Over the course of the program that has led to a number of changes, from new parachutes that slow down the capsule for a water landing, to reinforcements to the heat shield. Now, SpaceX has been giving its attention to another part of the Dragon capsule: the toilet.Story continues below advertisementOn SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission there was a problem with the toilet. After the spacecraft landed, engineers studied it and discovered that a tube that funnels urine into a storage tank had become unglued, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during the news conference.Advertisement\u201cIt had no impact on Inspiration4 at all,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really even notice it, the crew didn\u2019t notice it, until we got the vehicle back and we looked under the floor and we saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor.\u201dSpaceX engineers fixed the problem by welding the tube in place. But there was some concern the problem could plague the Dragon capsule used in an earlier flight that is currently attached to the space station and set to fly a quartet of astronauts home next month.Story continues below advertisementGerstenmaier said there was a concern that a compound known as oxone, used to remove ammonia from urine, could cause corrosion in the vehicle. As a result, he said, crews on the ground \u201cdid extensive tests where we took aluminum samples, and we placed an oxone-urine mixture on them. And then we put them in a chamber that mimics the humidity and temperature conditions onboard [the] space station.\u201dAdvertisementThe corrosion, he said, was limited because of the low-humidity environment, and the aluminum alloy used in the spacecraft is resistant to corrosion. Still, he said, engineers \u201cwill double-check things, we\u2019ll triple-check some things \u2026 and we\u2019ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.\u201dThe toilet issue is an example, officials from NASA and SpaceX said, of the benefits of being able to reuse the hardware, inspect it and improve it for future missions.\u201cWhat we\u2019re looking for is tiny clues or tiny imperfections,\u201d said Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager. \u201cYou really just try to dig into all those sorts of things and try to understand those and then improve things and fly safely.\u201dThe astronauts set to blast off Wednesday and spend 22 hours in the capsule before docking with the station said they were glad the toilet was fixed and that NASA and SpaceX continue to study the rocket and spacecraft after each flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have complete confidence,\u201d said NASA astronaut Raja Chari, who is the commander of this weekend\u2019s mission. \u201cSpaceX, as they have in the past, has been amazingly quick and reactive. When they find something, they immediately come up with a fix and move out on implementation.\u201dThe crew is vastly different in experience than many of the people who have recently been flying to space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin have been flying private citizens on suborbital trips to the edge of space and back. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) A Russian actress and movie producer recently returned after shooting scenes for a movie on the station. SpaceX flew the crew of Inspiration4, a mission funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, and the company has more private astronaut missions planned as well.The astronauts on the upcoming mission, known as Crew-3, by contrast, are highly trained professionals.Chari, an Air Force colonel and a test pilot, will be joined on the Crew-3 flight by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. As NASA and SpaceX prepare to send their fourth crew of astronauts to the International Space Station, they are driving home the message that space flight remains a tremendously risky endeavor. As NASA and SpaceX prepare to fly another crew to the space station, engineers are fixing a leaky toilet on the spacecraft",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA and SpaceX prepare to fly another crew to the space station, engineers are fixing a leaky toilet on the spacecraft (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6294",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/29/spacex-nasa-crew-3-launch-space-station-iss/",
        "text": "It seems like everyone is doing it. An 82-year-old aviator, an 18-year-old student, an artist, a billionaire, a celebrity actor, all resplendent in their shiny, new space suits, preening in spectacles aired on prime time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the wake of a series of space tourism missions that has sent more private citizens to space this year than professional astronauts, it\u2019s as if going to space has become routine. It\u2019s not. Gravity remains a tremendous force to overcome. Rockets are still powered by thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellants. And the vacuum of space is as harsh and dangerous as ever.As NASA and SpaceX prepare to send their fourth crew of astronauts to the International Space Station, the teams are driving home that message, saying they are prepared but daunted by what they know is a tremendously risky endeavor. And along the way they have faced a series of challenges, including a leaky toilet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf all goes to plan, three NASA astronauts and a European astronaut will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:10 a.m. Wednesday. (The mission was originally scheduled to launch at 2:21 a.m. Sunday, but NASA announced Saturday it was postponing the flight because of high winds and heavy seas in the abort areas.)The mission would be the third time Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has launched a full contingent of astronauts to the station, in addition to some two dozen cargo missions and a test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts in May 2020. It also flew a crew of private citizens for three days in orbit last month in what was known as the Inspiration4 mission.Despite the regular cadence of flights, officials at NASA and SpaceX say they are still very much in the learning stages and know that small problems on a rocket fueled with thousands of gallons of combustible propellants can lead to big problems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe just have to continue to really be responsible and really be thoughtful,\u201d Holly Ridings, NASA chief flight director, said during a preflight news conference this week. \u201cWe have this great partnership with SpaceX, and we\u2019ve done this a couple of times now \u2014 not enough to really say we\u2019re good at it.\u201d The fact is, she said, \u201cwe\u2019re still learning a lot.\u201dAfter every flight, engineers scour the rocket and the spacecraft, looking for weaknesses that could be made stronger, studying ways to make the spacecraft safer and better.Over the course of the program that has led to a number of changes, from new parachutes that slow down the capsule for a water landing, to reinforcements to the heat shield. Now, SpaceX has been giving its attention to another part of the Dragon capsule: the toilet.Story continues below advertisementOn SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission there was a problem with the toilet. After the spacecraft landed, engineers studied it and discovered that a tube that funnels urine into a storage tank had become unglued, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during the news conference.Advertisement\u201cIt had no impact on Inspiration4 at all,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really even notice it, the crew didn\u2019t notice it, until we got the vehicle back and we looked under the floor and we saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor.\u201dSpaceX engineers fixed the problem by welding the tube in place. But there was some concern the problem could plague the Dragon capsule used in an earlier flight that is currently attached to the space station and set to fly a quartet of astronauts home next month.Story continues below advertisementGerstenmaier said there was a concern that a compound known as oxone, used to remove ammonia from urine, could cause corrosion in the vehicle. As a result, he said, crews on the ground \u201cdid extensive tests where we took aluminum samples, and we placed an oxone-urine mixture on them. And then we put them in a chamber that mimics the humidity and temperature conditions onboard [the] space station.\u201dAdvertisementThe corrosion, he said, was limited because of the low-humidity environment, and the aluminum alloy used in the spacecraft is resistant to corrosion. Still, he said, engineers \u201cwill double-check things, we\u2019ll triple-check some things \u2026 and we\u2019ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.\u201dThe toilet issue is an example, officials from NASA and SpaceX said, of the benefits of being able to reuse the hardware, inspect it and improve it for future missions.\u201cWhat we\u2019re looking for is tiny clues or tiny imperfections,\u201d said Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager. \u201cYou really just try to dig into all those sorts of things and try to understand those and then improve things and fly safely.\u201dThe astronauts set to blast off Wednesday and spend 22 hours in the capsule before docking with the station said they were glad the toilet was fixed and that NASA and SpaceX continue to study the rocket and spacecraft after each flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have complete confidence,\u201d said NASA astronaut Raja Chari, who is the commander of this weekend\u2019s mission. \u201cSpaceX, as they have in the past, has been amazingly quick and reactive. When they find something, they immediately come up with a fix and move out on implementation.\u201dThe crew is vastly different in experience than many of the people who have recently been flying to space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin have been flying private citizens on suborbital trips to the edge of space and back. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) A Russian actress and movie producer recently returned after shooting scenes for a movie on the station. SpaceX flew the crew of Inspiration4, a mission funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, and the company has more private astronaut missions planned as well.The astronauts on the upcoming mission, known as Crew-3, by contrast, are highly trained professionals.Chari, an Air Force colonel and a test pilot, will be joined on the Crew-3 flight by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. As NASA and SpaceX prepare to send their fourth crew of astronauts to the International Space Station, they are driving home the message that space flight remains a tremendously risky endeavor. As NASA and SpaceX prepare to fly another crew to the space station, engineers are fixing a leaky toilet on the spacecraft",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA and SpaceX prepare to fly another crew to the space station, engineers are fixing a leaky toilet on the spacecraft (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6295",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/29/spacex-nasa-crew-3-launch-space-station-iss/",
        "text": "It seems like everyone is doing it. An 82-year-old aviator, an 18-year-old student, an artist, a billionaire, a celebrity actor, all resplendent in their shiny, new space suits, preening in spectacles aired on prime time.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the wake of a series of space tourism missions that has sent more private citizens to space this year than professional astronauts, it\u2019s as if going to space has become routine. It\u2019s not. Gravity remains a tremendous force to overcome. Rockets are still powered by thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellants. And the vacuum of space is as harsh and dangerous as ever.As NASA and SpaceX prepare to send their fourth crew of astronauts to the International Space Station, the teams are driving home that message, saying they are prepared but daunted by what they know is a tremendously risky endeavor. And along the way they have faced a series of challenges, including a leaky toilet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf all goes to plan, three NASA astronauts and a European astronaut will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:10 a.m. Wednesday. (The mission was originally scheduled to launch at 2:21 a.m. Sunday, but NASA announced Saturday it was postponing the flight because of high winds and heavy seas in the abort areas.)The mission would be the third time Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has launched a full contingent of astronauts to the station, in addition to some two dozen cargo missions and a test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts in May 2020. It also flew a crew of private citizens for three days in orbit last month in what was known as the Inspiration4 mission.Despite the regular cadence of flights, officials at NASA and SpaceX say they are still very much in the learning stages and know that small problems on a rocket fueled with thousands of gallons of combustible propellants can lead to big problems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe just have to continue to really be responsible and really be thoughtful,\u201d Holly Ridings, NASA chief flight director, said during a preflight news conference this week. \u201cWe have this great partnership with SpaceX, and we\u2019ve done this a couple of times now \u2014 not enough to really say we\u2019re good at it.\u201d The fact is, she said, \u201cwe\u2019re still learning a lot.\u201dAfter every flight, engineers scour the rocket and the spacecraft, looking for weaknesses that could be made stronger, studying ways to make the spacecraft safer and better.Over the course of the program that has led to a number of changes, from new parachutes that slow down the capsule for a water landing, to reinforcements to the heat shield. Now, SpaceX has been giving its attention to another part of the Dragon capsule: the toilet.Story continues below advertisementOn SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission there was a problem with the toilet. After the spacecraft landed, engineers studied it and discovered that a tube that funnels urine into a storage tank had become unglued, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during the news conference.Advertisement\u201cIt had no impact on Inspiration4 at all,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really even notice it, the crew didn\u2019t notice it, until we got the vehicle back and we looked under the floor and we saw the fact that there was contamination underneath the floor.\u201dSpaceX engineers fixed the problem by welding the tube in place. But there was some concern the problem could plague the Dragon capsule used in an earlier flight that is currently attached to the space station and set to fly a quartet of astronauts home next month.Story continues below advertisementGerstenmaier said there was a concern that a compound known as oxone, used to remove ammonia from urine, could cause corrosion in the vehicle. As a result, he said, crews on the ground \u201cdid extensive tests where we took aluminum samples, and we placed an oxone-urine mixture on them. And then we put them in a chamber that mimics the humidity and temperature conditions onboard [the] space station.\u201dAdvertisementThe corrosion, he said, was limited because of the low-humidity environment, and the aluminum alloy used in the spacecraft is resistant to corrosion. Still, he said, engineers \u201cwill double-check things, we\u2019ll triple-check some things \u2026 and we\u2019ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.\u201dThe toilet issue is an example, officials from NASA and SpaceX said, of the benefits of being able to reuse the hardware, inspect it and improve it for future missions.\u201cWhat we\u2019re looking for is tiny clues or tiny imperfections,\u201d said Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager. \u201cYou really just try to dig into all those sorts of things and try to understand those and then improve things and fly safely.\u201dThe astronauts set to blast off Wednesday and spend 22 hours in the capsule before docking with the station said they were glad the toilet was fixed and that NASA and SpaceX continue to study the rocket and spacecraft after each flight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have complete confidence,\u201d said NASA astronaut Raja Chari, who is the commander of this weekend\u2019s mission. \u201cSpaceX, as they have in the past, has been amazingly quick and reactive. When they find something, they immediately come up with a fix and move out on implementation.\u201dThe crew is vastly different in experience than many of the people who have recently been flying to space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin have been flying private citizens on suborbital trips to the edge of space and back. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) A Russian actress and movie producer recently returned after shooting scenes for a movie on the station. SpaceX flew the crew of Inspiration4, a mission funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, and the company has more private astronaut missions planned as well.The astronauts on the upcoming mission, known as Crew-3, by contrast, are highly trained professionals.Chari, an Air Force colonel and a test pilot, will be joined on the Crew-3 flight by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. As NASA and SpaceX prepare to send their fourth crew of astronauts to the International Space Station, they are driving home the message that space flight remains a tremendously risky endeavor. As NASA and SpaceX prepare to fly another crew to the space station, engineers are fixing a leaky toilet on the spacecraft",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX failure dims NASA\u2019s hope for a quick U.S. return to launching its own astronauts into space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6296",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/25/spacex-failure-dims-nasas-hope-quick-us-return-launching-its-own-astronauts-into-space/",
        "text": "It seemed like things were going so well.SpaceX had pulled off an impressive launch of its Dragon spacecraft, which then docked with the International Space Station autonomously, like a car parallel parking on its own.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen it returned with a splash down in the Atlantic Ocean last month, NASA heralded the mission as a success, one that put the space agency a step closer to having its astronauts fly again from U.S. soil after an eight-year hiatus. But since then, NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, a bold bet by the agency to outsource human space flight to a pair of corporations, has suffered setbacks that have caused significant delays. On Saturday, something went dramatically wrong with SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule when it failed during an engine test, sending a massive cloud of smoke over Cape Canaveral, Fla. Boeing \u2014 the other company under contract to fly crews to the space station \u2014 also recently announced it would delay its first test launch by several months, as it continues to struggle with the development of its spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow many believe both companies \u2014 which won contracts worth nearly $7 billion combined to fly astronauts to the station \u2014 may be forced to push their first flights with crews into next year, three years later than initially anticipated.The setbacks forced NASA recently to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft for about $170 million total. Those will ensure that the agency doesn\u2019t have to face the embarrassing prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion.\u201cPast experience has shown the difficulties associated with achieving first flights on time in the final year of development,\u201d the agency said in a solicitation announcing the intent to purchase the additional seats. \u201cTypically, problems will be discovered during these test flights.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX and NASA are at the beginning stages of investigating what caused SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule to fail Saturday during a test fire of the engines designed to propel the spacecraft away from the rocket booster in the event of an emergency.Neither have released much information about what happened, the extent of the damage or what impact it will have on SpaceX\u2019s schedule. On Thursday, during a meeting of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Patricia Sanders, the chair of the committee, said it would take time to determine what happened, as investigators examine the data and establish a timeline of what went wrong.SpaceX crew capsuke suffers failure that sends a cloud of smoke over Florida Space CoastBut even before the failure, SpaceX still \u201chad a large body of work yet to be completed\u201d before it could fly crews, said Sandra Magnus, a former NASA astronaut who also serves of the safety advisory panel. She said it was too early to speculate what impact the failure would have. SpaceX is leading the investigation, with NASA\u2019s support.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA has full insight into the results of the mishap investigation,\u201d NASA said in a statement. Investigators are \u201creviewing all of the data collected during the test, including high speed imagery and detailed spacecraft telemetry data and will include analysis of the recovered hardware from the test. We have full confidence in the SpaceX and NASA team working the investigation to determine the cause of the mishap and design updates should they be required.\u201dLast year, Boeing also faced a significant setback when during a test of the emergency abort system of its capsule, it discovered a propellant leak. It is currently planning to fly a test mission without anyone on board in August and a mission with crews by the end of the year. But NASA warned that both dates are tentative, and that it would extend astronauts\u2019 mission on the space station from several days to as long as several months in order to ensure an American presence on the station.Despite Saturday\u2019s setback, SpaceX still plans to fly a different version of its Dragon spacecraft \u2014 one designed to carry cargo, not people \u2014 on a resupply mission to the space station next week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, NASA is facing delays of its own. Nearly six months ago, the agency confirmed it was conducting a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing that was designed to evaluate the culture of the workplaces after SpaceX founder Elon Musk was seen smoking marijuana on a podcast streamed on the Internet.But that review has yet to begin because the agency is still working on the required contract modifications, NASA spokesman Joshua Finch said. He said the goal is \u201cto complete the safety assessment prior to flight tests with a crew.\u201dThe review is expected to take months and involve hundreds of interviews to examine \u201ceverything and anything that could impact safety\u201d as the companies prepare to fly human beings, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration, said in an interview last year, announcing the probe. What happened on Saturday during a test of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is still under investigation. But a series of setbacks already had forced NASA to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft to make sure the U.S. has an American astronaut on board the international space station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion. SpaceX failure dims NASA\u2019s hope for a quick U.S. return to launching its own astronauts into space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX failure dims NASA\u2019s hope for a quick U.S. return to launching its own astronauts into space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6297",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/25/spacex-failure-dims-nasas-hope-quick-us-return-launching-its-own-astronauts-into-space/",
        "text": "It seemed like things were going so well.SpaceX had pulled off an impressive launch of its Dragon spacecraft, which then docked with the International Space Station autonomously, like a car parallel parking on its own.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen it returned with a splash down in the Atlantic Ocean last month, NASA heralded the mission as a success, one that put the space agency a step closer to having its astronauts fly again from U.S. soil after an eight-year hiatus. But since then, NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, a bold bet by the agency to outsource human space flight to a pair of corporations, has suffered setbacks that have caused significant delays. On Saturday, something went dramatically wrong with SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule when it failed during an engine test, sending a massive cloud of smoke over Cape Canaveral, Fla. Boeing \u2014 the other company under contract to fly crews to the space station \u2014 also recently announced it would delay its first test launch by several months, as it continues to struggle with the development of its spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow many believe both companies \u2014 which won contracts worth nearly $7 billion combined to fly astronauts to the station \u2014 may be forced to push their first flights with crews into next year, three years later than initially anticipated.The setbacks forced NASA recently to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft for about $170 million total. Those will ensure that the agency doesn\u2019t have to face the embarrassing prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion.\u201cPast experience has shown the difficulties associated with achieving first flights on time in the final year of development,\u201d the agency said in a solicitation announcing the intent to purchase the additional seats. \u201cTypically, problems will be discovered during these test flights.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX and NASA are at the beginning stages of investigating what caused SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule to fail Saturday during a test fire of the engines designed to propel the spacecraft away from the rocket booster in the event of an emergency.Neither have released much information about what happened, the extent of the damage or what impact it will have on SpaceX\u2019s schedule. On Thursday, during a meeting of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Patricia Sanders, the chair of the committee, said it would take time to determine what happened, as investigators examine the data and establish a timeline of what went wrong.SpaceX crew capsuke suffers failure that sends a cloud of smoke over Florida Space CoastBut even before the failure, SpaceX still \u201chad a large body of work yet to be completed\u201d before it could fly crews, said Sandra Magnus, a former NASA astronaut who also serves of the safety advisory panel. She said it was too early to speculate what impact the failure would have. SpaceX is leading the investigation, with NASA\u2019s support.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA has full insight into the results of the mishap investigation,\u201d NASA said in a statement. Investigators are \u201creviewing all of the data collected during the test, including high speed imagery and detailed spacecraft telemetry data and will include analysis of the recovered hardware from the test. We have full confidence in the SpaceX and NASA team working the investigation to determine the cause of the mishap and design updates should they be required.\u201dLast year, Boeing also faced a significant setback when during a test of the emergency abort system of its capsule, it discovered a propellant leak. It is currently planning to fly a test mission without anyone on board in August and a mission with crews by the end of the year. But NASA warned that both dates are tentative, and that it would extend astronauts\u2019 mission on the space station from several days to as long as several months in order to ensure an American presence on the station.Despite Saturday\u2019s setback, SpaceX still plans to fly a different version of its Dragon spacecraft \u2014 one designed to carry cargo, not people \u2014 on a resupply mission to the space station next week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, NASA is facing delays of its own. Nearly six months ago, the agency confirmed it was conducting a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing that was designed to evaluate the culture of the workplaces after SpaceX founder Elon Musk was seen smoking marijuana on a podcast streamed on the Internet.But that review has yet to begin because the agency is still working on the required contract modifications, NASA spokesman Joshua Finch said. He said the goal is \u201cto complete the safety assessment prior to flight tests with a crew.\u201dThe review is expected to take months and involve hundreds of interviews to examine \u201ceverything and anything that could impact safety\u201d as the companies prepare to fly human beings, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration, said in an interview last year, announcing the probe. What happened on Saturday during a test of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is still under investigation. But a series of setbacks already had forced NASA to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft to make sure the U.S. has an American astronaut on board the international space station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion. SpaceX failure dims NASA\u2019s hope for a quick U.S. return to launching its own astronauts into space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX failure dims NASA\u2019s hope for a quick U.S. return to launching its own astronauts into space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6298",
        "date": "2019-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/25/spacex-failure-dims-nasas-hope-quick-us-return-launching-its-own-astronauts-into-space/",
        "text": "It seemed like things were going so well.SpaceX had pulled off an impressive launch of its Dragon spacecraft, which then docked with the International Space Station autonomously, like a car parallel parking on its own.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen it returned with a splash down in the Atlantic Ocean last month, NASA heralded the mission as a success, one that put the space agency a step closer to having its astronauts fly again from U.S. soil after an eight-year hiatus. But since then, NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, a bold bet by the agency to outsource human space flight to a pair of corporations, has suffered setbacks that have caused significant delays. On Saturday, something went dramatically wrong with SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule when it failed during an engine test, sending a massive cloud of smoke over Cape Canaveral, Fla. Boeing \u2014 the other company under contract to fly crews to the space station \u2014 also recently announced it would delay its first test launch by several months, as it continues to struggle with the development of its spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow many believe both companies \u2014 which won contracts worth nearly $7 billion combined to fly astronauts to the station \u2014 may be forced to push their first flights with crews into next year, three years later than initially anticipated.The setbacks forced NASA recently to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft for about $170 million total. Those will ensure that the agency doesn\u2019t have to face the embarrassing prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion.\u201cPast experience has shown the difficulties associated with achieving first flights on time in the final year of development,\u201d the agency said in a solicitation announcing the intent to purchase the additional seats. \u201cTypically, problems will be discovered during these test flights.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX and NASA are at the beginning stages of investigating what caused SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule to fail Saturday during a test fire of the engines designed to propel the spacecraft away from the rocket booster in the event of an emergency.Neither have released much information about what happened, the extent of the damage or what impact it will have on SpaceX\u2019s schedule. On Thursday, during a meeting of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, Patricia Sanders, the chair of the committee, said it would take time to determine what happened, as investigators examine the data and establish a timeline of what went wrong.SpaceX crew capsuke suffers failure that sends a cloud of smoke over Florida Space CoastBut even before the failure, SpaceX still \u201chad a large body of work yet to be completed\u201d before it could fly crews, said Sandra Magnus, a former NASA astronaut who also serves of the safety advisory panel. She said it was too early to speculate what impact the failure would have. SpaceX is leading the investigation, with NASA\u2019s support.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNASA has full insight into the results of the mishap investigation,\u201d NASA said in a statement. Investigators are \u201creviewing all of the data collected during the test, including high speed imagery and detailed spacecraft telemetry data and will include analysis of the recovered hardware from the test. We have full confidence in the SpaceX and NASA team working the investigation to determine the cause of the mishap and design updates should they be required.\u201dLast year, Boeing also faced a significant setback when during a test of the emergency abort system of its capsule, it discovered a propellant leak. It is currently planning to fly a test mission without anyone on board in August and a mission with crews by the end of the year. But NASA warned that both dates are tentative, and that it would extend astronauts\u2019 mission on the space station from several days to as long as several months in order to ensure an American presence on the station.Despite Saturday\u2019s setback, SpaceX still plans to fly a different version of its Dragon spacecraft \u2014 one designed to carry cargo, not people \u2014 on a resupply mission to the space station next week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, NASA is facing delays of its own. Nearly six months ago, the agency confirmed it was conducting a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing that was designed to evaluate the culture of the workplaces after SpaceX founder Elon Musk was seen smoking marijuana on a podcast streamed on the Internet.But that review has yet to begin because the agency is still working on the required contract modifications, NASA spokesman Joshua Finch said. He said the goal is \u201cto complete the safety assessment prior to flight tests with a crew.\u201dThe review is expected to take months and involve hundreds of interviews to examine \u201ceverything and anything that could impact safety\u201d as the companies prepare to fly human beings, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration, said in an interview last year, announcing the probe. What happened on Saturday during a test of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is still under investigation. But a series of setbacks already had forced NASA to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft to make sure the U.S. has an American astronaut on board the international space station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion. SpaceX failure dims NASA\u2019s hope for a quick U.S. return to launching its own astronauts into space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time? (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6299",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/23/space-station-replace-biden/",
        "text": "It has good bones, as the real estate agents would say. Sleeps six, or more. Upgraded bathroom. Gym. Indoor garden. Parking for as many as eight visitor vehicles. And you can\u2019t beat the location \u2014 240 miles high with superb views of Earth: Truly all the best low Earth orbit has to offer! WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is already shopping for a new spread for its astronauts.The space agency is confident Congress and its international partners will agree to extend the station\u2019s life beyond 2024, when it is currently set to expire. On Friday, the Senate passed a NASA authorization bill that would extend it to 2030. But space is harsh, the station is aging and at some point it will have to come down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat comes next, though, isn\u2019t certain.Under President Trump, NASA has been scrambling to return astronauts to the moon under an accelerated timeline. But the first big test the incoming Biden administration will face in space could very well be the future of the space station. If it\u2019s retired without a backup, NASA would face an \u201cexistential challenge,\u201d as one top space agency official put it, with no place for its astronauts to go.There are several companies working to develop a commercial space station, looking at a range of options that vary: a modern version of the ISS, a station with modules that inflate like balloons, and one that would refurbish discarded rocket stages that are floating around in orbit.Story continues below advertisementBut while those options show promise, they are still unproven and years from hitting the market.AdvertisementAs a result, NASA has been increasingly concerned it could have a gap in low Earth orbit that would be even more consequential than the ignominious period after the space shuttle fleet was retired that left the space agency with no way to launch its astronauts to space from U.S. soil. Instead, NASA was forced to rely on the Russians for rides to space, at a price that grew to as much as $90 million a seat, before Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX restored human spaceflight for NASA earlier this year.NASA celebrates 20 years of astronauts living continuously on the International Space StationEven if the station is extended, NASA needs to be working now on its replacement, officials said. It took years to get the ISS up and running. The concept was born in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan announced the United States would put a station, eventually dubbed Freedom, in orbit. But after different administrations and design changes, the first segments weren\u2019t launched until 1998. Since then, NASA has invested more than $100 billion in the facility, which receives more than $3 billion annually from NASA.Story continues below advertisementPrivately run stations would also need time to build their business cases, signing foreign governments as tenants, working with companies and universities that want to do research in space, and wealthy tourists who would pay millions of dollars to visit.AdvertisementWhile NASA and the private sector work toward developing commercial habitats, China is building its own space station that it hopes to launch within a couple of years and is recruiting countries around the world as partners. The United States would not be one of them, however, since NASA is effectively barred by law from partnering with China in space.\u201cI think it would be a tragedy if, after all of this time and all of this effort, we were to abandon low Earth orbit and cede that territory,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate panel earlier this year.Story continues below advertisementThe ISS still does have some good years left, officials said. \u201cWe\u2019re good from an engineering standpoint,\u201d Joel Montalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re cleared through 2028.\u201dBoeing, which is paid $225 million per year as the prime contractor supporting space station operations, said it could stay in orbit for even longer.Advertisement\u201cThe ISS is incredibly healthy, with life capability well beyond 2030,\u201d said John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s ISS program manager. He said the U.S. and Russia recently completed a life extension study \u201cand all the hardware has been cleared to a minimum of 2030. That\u2019s a real testament to the design and the maintenance that\u2019s been done on it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRecently, the station got new lithium-ion batteries that \u201care less than half the size of the original batteries and produce twice the power,\u201d Mulholland said. The power upgrade also doubled the speed at which the station\u2019s crew can send data from science experiments back to Earth.Over the years, the station\u2019s water recovery system has improved to the point where today, 95 percent of the water used for drinking and cooking is recycled, Montalbano said. The communications systems have also been upgraded, as have life support systems like carbon dioxide removal.Still, like a house that needs repairs, things break. Since a leaky roof could have dire consequences in space, and no plumbers or electricians are going to make a house call, astronauts are trained to repair the toilet or plug leaks. But even a tiny leak hissing air into the vacuum of space is a threat, and astronauts spent weeks recently searching for one in the Russian segment of the station before patching it. It was tiny: \u201cThink of the size of two grains of salt is what we had to find,\u201d Montalbano said.The Senate\u2019s vote Friday gave a significant boost toward extending the station, though not as of yet, the money required to do so. Many in the space industry think the extension would be supported by the Biden administration and the House, where a bill that would extend it to 2028 has been introduced. It\u2019s unclear, though, whether Russia would want to continue, and getting the station\u2019s other partners on board would take time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the Commerce Department targeted Russian firms because of ties with the country\u2019s military, the head of the Russian space agency earlier this month lashed out and said the move would threaten relations between the U.S. and Russia in space: \u201cThese sanctions are harmful, because they will create additional obstacles and irritations in such an important cooperation between Russians and Americans in space, in particular, on the ISS,\u201d Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter.Wary of a gap, Bridenstine has increasingly been sounding the alarm, urging Congress to fully fund its requests to build a commercial presence in Earth orbit that would include private stations.Last year, NASA requested $150 million as part of its plan, but Congress granted just a tenth of that. For the fiscal 2021 budget, NASA requested the same amount but will receive just $17 million, sparking a new round of warnings: \u201cISS won\u2019t last forever & incentivizing the private sector to begin follow-on capabilities are needed now,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator in the Obama administration. \u201cThis concept isn\u2019t hard, have we learned nothing in the last 10 years?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s critically important for the United States to have access to low Earth orbit with humans so they can live and work and do science and discovery in the microgravity of space,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cThat should be a national priority. There is a reality that we all have to accept, which is at some point in the future we have to focus on what comes after the ISS.\u201dSome have been critical of the Trump administration for not doing more to prevent a gap. While the White House has been focused on returning astronauts to the moon, the future of the space station has received relatively little attention, said Jeffrey Manber, the CEO of NanoRacks, which is seeking to build its own small space stations.\u201cWhat troubles me is this administration is walking out the door having done very little to prevent a space station gap,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the space shuttle, NASA decided it did not need to own and operate its own rockets and spacecraft but could instead rely on the private sector to ferry its astronauts to space. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts. It took six years for SpaceX to have its first flight with humans. Boeing has yet to fly its first crewed mission.Developing a private space station could take just as long, industry officials said, which is why NASA and the private sector need to get moving now.\u201cIt\u2019s very apparent to everybody that when the ISS comes to the end of its life, we\u2019re not going to replace it with another $100 billion station,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cThe transition needs to be to commercial space stations. Not just one, but multiple.\u201dThere are several companies NASA is hoping will help it continue the U.S.\u2019s presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementAxiom Space, a Houston-based company, is working toward building a commercial space station that would be a modern version of the ISS with some key upgrades.\u201cWhen you look at the shell you go, \u2018Wow, that looks just like the same old space station.\u2019 But after that, pretty much everything will be dramatically different,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s president and CEO.The ISS has some key components located on the outside of its station, meaning astronauts have to perform risky spacewalks to, say, swap out batteries. On the Axiom station, those would all be located inside. It would also have \u201cthe largest window observatory ever constructed for space,\u201d and an interior designed by French architect Philippe Starck.The company has a contract with NASA to attach at least one privately developed module to the ISS by 2024, which could potentially allow the crew capacity on the station to grow.Suffredini, who previously served as the ISS program manager for NASA, said he is not concerned about a gap. Rather, he said, he\u2019s more concerned about ensuring a transition from a government station to a commercial one that gives his potential customers confidence.\u201cI\u2019m more concerned that we drive ourselves to keep ISS on orbit too long,\u201d he said. \u201cThe negative impact is investors start to worry about is ISS ever going to leave?\u201dThe Sierra Nevada Corp. also is working to build a commercial station. But instead of a station with metal structures, it would be made of a Kevlar-like material that would inflate, making it easier to get more space station volume into orbit with fewer rocket launches.The company says it could get its first modules into space within five or six years and is confident that there will be enough demand to make it financially feasible.\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward at the projected market out there, and it just looks incredibly bright,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut who serves as the company\u2019s senior vice president for space systems. \u201cThere\u2019s so much interest in space right now, in the commercialization of space and the potential out there for everything from manufacturing to tourism to research laboratories to observatories.\u201dNanoRacks is also interested in developing commercial stations. But instead of launching them from Earth, the company wants to take discarded rocket stages that are already in orbit and transform them into stations designed for research.\u201cWe need to make the investment now to understand how we can develop cost-efficient free fliers and, just as important, to continue to grow the market for customers,\u201d Manber said.Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company, is also interested in building habitats, and recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it read. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201d After hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is shopping for a new place for its astronauts. The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6300",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/23/space-station-replace-biden/",
        "text": "It has good bones, as the real estate agents would say. Sleeps six, or more. Upgraded bathroom. Gym. Indoor garden. Parking for as many as eight visitor vehicles. And you can\u2019t beat the location \u2014 240 miles high with superb views of Earth: Truly all the best low Earth orbit has to offer! WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is already shopping for a new spread for its astronauts.The space agency is confident Congress and its international partners will agree to extend the station\u2019s life beyond 2024, when it is currently set to expire. On Friday, the Senate passed a NASA authorization bill that would extend it to 2030. But space is harsh, the station is aging and at some point it will have to come down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat comes next, though, isn\u2019t certain.Under President Trump, NASA has been scrambling to return astronauts to the moon under an accelerated timeline. But the first big test the incoming Biden administration will face in space could very well be the future of the space station. If it\u2019s retired without a backup, NASA would face an \u201cexistential challenge,\u201d as one top space agency official put it, with no place for its astronauts to go.There are several companies working to develop a commercial space station, looking at a range of options that vary: a modern version of the ISS, a station with modules that inflate like balloons, and one that would refurbish discarded rocket stages that are floating around in orbit.Story continues below advertisementBut while those options show promise, they are still unproven and years from hitting the market.AdvertisementAs a result, NASA has been increasingly concerned it could have a gap in low Earth orbit that would be even more consequential than the ignominious period after the space shuttle fleet was retired that left the space agency with no way to launch its astronauts to space from U.S. soil. Instead, NASA was forced to rely on the Russians for rides to space, at a price that grew to as much as $90 million a seat, before Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX restored human spaceflight for NASA earlier this year.NASA celebrates 20 years of astronauts living continuously on the International Space StationEven if the station is extended, NASA needs to be working now on its replacement, officials said. It took years to get the ISS up and running. The concept was born in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan announced the United States would put a station, eventually dubbed Freedom, in orbit. But after different administrations and design changes, the first segments weren\u2019t launched until 1998. Since then, NASA has invested more than $100 billion in the facility, which receives more than $3 billion annually from NASA.Story continues below advertisementPrivately run stations would also need time to build their business cases, signing foreign governments as tenants, working with companies and universities that want to do research in space, and wealthy tourists who would pay millions of dollars to visit.AdvertisementWhile NASA and the private sector work toward developing commercial habitats, China is building its own space station that it hopes to launch within a couple of years and is recruiting countries around the world as partners. The United States would not be one of them, however, since NASA is effectively barred by law from partnering with China in space.\u201cI think it would be a tragedy if, after all of this time and all of this effort, we were to abandon low Earth orbit and cede that territory,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate panel earlier this year.Story continues below advertisementThe ISS still does have some good years left, officials said. \u201cWe\u2019re good from an engineering standpoint,\u201d Joel Montalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re cleared through 2028.\u201dBoeing, which is paid $225 million per year as the prime contractor supporting space station operations, said it could stay in orbit for even longer.Advertisement\u201cThe ISS is incredibly healthy, with life capability well beyond 2030,\u201d said John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s ISS program manager. He said the U.S. and Russia recently completed a life extension study \u201cand all the hardware has been cleared to a minimum of 2030. That\u2019s a real testament to the design and the maintenance that\u2019s been done on it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRecently, the station got new lithium-ion batteries that \u201care less than half the size of the original batteries and produce twice the power,\u201d Mulholland said. The power upgrade also doubled the speed at which the station\u2019s crew can send data from science experiments back to Earth.Over the years, the station\u2019s water recovery system has improved to the point where today, 95 percent of the water used for drinking and cooking is recycled, Montalbano said. The communications systems have also been upgraded, as have life support systems like carbon dioxide removal.Still, like a house that needs repairs, things break. Since a leaky roof could have dire consequences in space, and no plumbers or electricians are going to make a house call, astronauts are trained to repair the toilet or plug leaks. But even a tiny leak hissing air into the vacuum of space is a threat, and astronauts spent weeks recently searching for one in the Russian segment of the station before patching it. It was tiny: \u201cThink of the size of two grains of salt is what we had to find,\u201d Montalbano said.The Senate\u2019s vote Friday gave a significant boost toward extending the station, though not as of yet, the money required to do so. Many in the space industry think the extension would be supported by the Biden administration and the House, where a bill that would extend it to 2028 has been introduced. It\u2019s unclear, though, whether Russia would want to continue, and getting the station\u2019s other partners on board would take time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the Commerce Department targeted Russian firms because of ties with the country\u2019s military, the head of the Russian space agency earlier this month lashed out and said the move would threaten relations between the U.S. and Russia in space: \u201cThese sanctions are harmful, because they will create additional obstacles and irritations in such an important cooperation between Russians and Americans in space, in particular, on the ISS,\u201d Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter.Wary of a gap, Bridenstine has increasingly been sounding the alarm, urging Congress to fully fund its requests to build a commercial presence in Earth orbit that would include private stations.Last year, NASA requested $150 million as part of its plan, but Congress granted just a tenth of that. For the fiscal 2021 budget, NASA requested the same amount but will receive just $17 million, sparking a new round of warnings: \u201cISS won\u2019t last forever & incentivizing the private sector to begin follow-on capabilities are needed now,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator in the Obama administration. \u201cThis concept isn\u2019t hard, have we learned nothing in the last 10 years?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s critically important for the United States to have access to low Earth orbit with humans so they can live and work and do science and discovery in the microgravity of space,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cThat should be a national priority. There is a reality that we all have to accept, which is at some point in the future we have to focus on what comes after the ISS.\u201dSome have been critical of the Trump administration for not doing more to prevent a gap. While the White House has been focused on returning astronauts to the moon, the future of the space station has received relatively little attention, said Jeffrey Manber, the CEO of NanoRacks, which is seeking to build its own small space stations.\u201cWhat troubles me is this administration is walking out the door having done very little to prevent a space station gap,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the space shuttle, NASA decided it did not need to own and operate its own rockets and spacecraft but could instead rely on the private sector to ferry its astronauts to space. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts. It took six years for SpaceX to have its first flight with humans. Boeing has yet to fly its first crewed mission.Developing a private space station could take just as long, industry officials said, which is why NASA and the private sector need to get moving now.\u201cIt\u2019s very apparent to everybody that when the ISS comes to the end of its life, we\u2019re not going to replace it with another $100 billion station,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cThe transition needs to be to commercial space stations. Not just one, but multiple.\u201dThere are several companies NASA is hoping will help it continue the U.S.\u2019s presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementAxiom Space, a Houston-based company, is working toward building a commercial space station that would be a modern version of the ISS with some key upgrades.\u201cWhen you look at the shell you go, \u2018Wow, that looks just like the same old space station.\u2019 But after that, pretty much everything will be dramatically different,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s president and CEO.The ISS has some key components located on the outside of its station, meaning astronauts have to perform risky spacewalks to, say, swap out batteries. On the Axiom station, those would all be located inside. It would also have \u201cthe largest window observatory ever constructed for space,\u201d and an interior designed by French architect Philippe Starck.The company has a contract with NASA to attach at least one privately developed module to the ISS by 2024, which could potentially allow the crew capacity on the station to grow.Suffredini, who previously served as the ISS program manager for NASA, said he is not concerned about a gap. Rather, he said, he\u2019s more concerned about ensuring a transition from a government station to a commercial one that gives his potential customers confidence.\u201cI\u2019m more concerned that we drive ourselves to keep ISS on orbit too long,\u201d he said. \u201cThe negative impact is investors start to worry about is ISS ever going to leave?\u201dThe Sierra Nevada Corp. also is working to build a commercial station. But instead of a station with metal structures, it would be made of a Kevlar-like material that would inflate, making it easier to get more space station volume into orbit with fewer rocket launches.The company says it could get its first modules into space within five or six years and is confident that there will be enough demand to make it financially feasible.\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward at the projected market out there, and it just looks incredibly bright,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut who serves as the company\u2019s senior vice president for space systems. \u201cThere\u2019s so much interest in space right now, in the commercialization of space and the potential out there for everything from manufacturing to tourism to research laboratories to observatories.\u201dNanoRacks is also interested in developing commercial stations. But instead of launching them from Earth, the company wants to take discarded rocket stages that are already in orbit and transform them into stations designed for research.\u201cWe need to make the investment now to understand how we can develop cost-efficient free fliers and, just as important, to continue to grow the market for customers,\u201d Manber said.Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company, is also interested in building habitats, and recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it read. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201d After hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is shopping for a new place for its astronauts. The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6301",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/23/space-station-replace-biden/",
        "text": "It has good bones, as the real estate agents would say. Sleeps six, or more. Upgraded bathroom. Gym. Indoor garden. Parking for as many as eight visitor vehicles. And you can\u2019t beat the location \u2014 240 miles high with superb views of Earth: Truly all the best low Earth orbit has to offer! WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is already shopping for a new spread for its astronauts.The space agency is confident Congress and its international partners will agree to extend the station\u2019s life beyond 2024, when it is currently set to expire. On Friday, the Senate passed a NASA authorization bill that would extend it to 2030. But space is harsh, the station is aging and at some point it will have to come down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat comes next, though, isn\u2019t certain.Under President Trump, NASA has been scrambling to return astronauts to the moon under an accelerated timeline. But the first big test the incoming Biden administration will face in space could very well be the future of the space station. If it\u2019s retired without a backup, NASA would face an \u201cexistential challenge,\u201d as one top space agency official put it, with no place for its astronauts to go.There are several companies working to develop a commercial space station, looking at a range of options that vary: a modern version of the ISS, a station with modules that inflate like balloons, and one that would refurbish discarded rocket stages that are floating around in orbit.Story continues below advertisementBut while those options show promise, they are still unproven and years from hitting the market.AdvertisementAs a result, NASA has been increasingly concerned it could have a gap in low Earth orbit that would be even more consequential than the ignominious period after the space shuttle fleet was retired that left the space agency with no way to launch its astronauts to space from U.S. soil. Instead, NASA was forced to rely on the Russians for rides to space, at a price that grew to as much as $90 million a seat, before Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX restored human spaceflight for NASA earlier this year.NASA celebrates 20 years of astronauts living continuously on the International Space StationEven if the station is extended, NASA needs to be working now on its replacement, officials said. It took years to get the ISS up and running. The concept was born in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan announced the United States would put a station, eventually dubbed Freedom, in orbit. But after different administrations and design changes, the first segments weren\u2019t launched until 1998. Since then, NASA has invested more than $100 billion in the facility, which receives more than $3 billion annually from NASA.Story continues below advertisementPrivately run stations would also need time to build their business cases, signing foreign governments as tenants, working with companies and universities that want to do research in space, and wealthy tourists who would pay millions of dollars to visit.AdvertisementWhile NASA and the private sector work toward developing commercial habitats, China is building its own space station that it hopes to launch within a couple of years and is recruiting countries around the world as partners. The United States would not be one of them, however, since NASA is effectively barred by law from partnering with China in space.\u201cI think it would be a tragedy if, after all of this time and all of this effort, we were to abandon low Earth orbit and cede that territory,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate panel earlier this year.Story continues below advertisementThe ISS still does have some good years left, officials said. \u201cWe\u2019re good from an engineering standpoint,\u201d Joel Montalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re cleared through 2028.\u201dBoeing, which is paid $225 million per year as the prime contractor supporting space station operations, said it could stay in orbit for even longer.Advertisement\u201cThe ISS is incredibly healthy, with life capability well beyond 2030,\u201d said John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s ISS program manager. He said the U.S. and Russia recently completed a life extension study \u201cand all the hardware has been cleared to a minimum of 2030. That\u2019s a real testament to the design and the maintenance that\u2019s been done on it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRecently, the station got new lithium-ion batteries that \u201care less than half the size of the original batteries and produce twice the power,\u201d Mulholland said. The power upgrade also doubled the speed at which the station\u2019s crew can send data from science experiments back to Earth.Over the years, the station\u2019s water recovery system has improved to the point where today, 95 percent of the water used for drinking and cooking is recycled, Montalbano said. The communications systems have also been upgraded, as have life support systems like carbon dioxide removal.Still, like a house that needs repairs, things break. Since a leaky roof could have dire consequences in space, and no plumbers or electricians are going to make a house call, astronauts are trained to repair the toilet or plug leaks. But even a tiny leak hissing air into the vacuum of space is a threat, and astronauts spent weeks recently searching for one in the Russian segment of the station before patching it. It was tiny: \u201cThink of the size of two grains of salt is what we had to find,\u201d Montalbano said.The Senate\u2019s vote Friday gave a significant boost toward extending the station, though not as of yet, the money required to do so. Many in the space industry think the extension would be supported by the Biden administration and the House, where a bill that would extend it to 2028 has been introduced. It\u2019s unclear, though, whether Russia would want to continue, and getting the station\u2019s other partners on board would take time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the Commerce Department targeted Russian firms because of ties with the country\u2019s military, the head of the Russian space agency earlier this month lashed out and said the move would threaten relations between the U.S. and Russia in space: \u201cThese sanctions are harmful, because they will create additional obstacles and irritations in such an important cooperation between Russians and Americans in space, in particular, on the ISS,\u201d Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter.Wary of a gap, Bridenstine has increasingly been sounding the alarm, urging Congress to fully fund its requests to build a commercial presence in Earth orbit that would include private stations.Last year, NASA requested $150 million as part of its plan, but Congress granted just a tenth of that. For the fiscal 2021 budget, NASA requested the same amount but will receive just $17 million, sparking a new round of warnings: \u201cISS won\u2019t last forever & incentivizing the private sector to begin follow-on capabilities are needed now,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator in the Obama administration. \u201cThis concept isn\u2019t hard, have we learned nothing in the last 10 years?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s critically important for the United States to have access to low Earth orbit with humans so they can live and work and do science and discovery in the microgravity of space,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cThat should be a national priority. There is a reality that we all have to accept, which is at some point in the future we have to focus on what comes after the ISS.\u201dSome have been critical of the Trump administration for not doing more to prevent a gap. While the White House has been focused on returning astronauts to the moon, the future of the space station has received relatively little attention, said Jeffrey Manber, the CEO of NanoRacks, which is seeking to build its own small space stations.\u201cWhat troubles me is this administration is walking out the door having done very little to prevent a space station gap,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the space shuttle, NASA decided it did not need to own and operate its own rockets and spacecraft but could instead rely on the private sector to ferry its astronauts to space. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts. It took six years for SpaceX to have its first flight with humans. Boeing has yet to fly its first crewed mission.Developing a private space station could take just as long, industry officials said, which is why NASA and the private sector need to get moving now.\u201cIt\u2019s very apparent to everybody that when the ISS comes to the end of its life, we\u2019re not going to replace it with another $100 billion station,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cThe transition needs to be to commercial space stations. Not just one, but multiple.\u201dThere are several companies NASA is hoping will help it continue the U.S.\u2019s presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementAxiom Space, a Houston-based company, is working toward building a commercial space station that would be a modern version of the ISS with some key upgrades.\u201cWhen you look at the shell you go, \u2018Wow, that looks just like the same old space station.\u2019 But after that, pretty much everything will be dramatically different,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s president and CEO.The ISS has some key components located on the outside of its station, meaning astronauts have to perform risky spacewalks to, say, swap out batteries. On the Axiom station, those would all be located inside. It would also have \u201cthe largest window observatory ever constructed for space,\u201d and an interior designed by French architect Philippe Starck.The company has a contract with NASA to attach at least one privately developed module to the ISS by 2024, which could potentially allow the crew capacity on the station to grow.Suffredini, who previously served as the ISS program manager for NASA, said he is not concerned about a gap. Rather, he said, he\u2019s more concerned about ensuring a transition from a government station to a commercial one that gives his potential customers confidence.\u201cI\u2019m more concerned that we drive ourselves to keep ISS on orbit too long,\u201d he said. \u201cThe negative impact is investors start to worry about is ISS ever going to leave?\u201dThe Sierra Nevada Corp. also is working to build a commercial station. But instead of a station with metal structures, it would be made of a Kevlar-like material that would inflate, making it easier to get more space station volume into orbit with fewer rocket launches.The company says it could get its first modules into space within five or six years and is confident that there will be enough demand to make it financially feasible.\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward at the projected market out there, and it just looks incredibly bright,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut who serves as the company\u2019s senior vice president for space systems. \u201cThere\u2019s so much interest in space right now, in the commercialization of space and the potential out there for everything from manufacturing to tourism to research laboratories to observatories.\u201dNanoRacks is also interested in developing commercial stations. But instead of launching them from Earth, the company wants to take discarded rocket stages that are already in orbit and transform them into stations designed for research.\u201cWe need to make the investment now to understand how we can develop cost-efficient free fliers and, just as important, to continue to grow the market for customers,\u201d Manber said.Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company, is also interested in building habitats, and recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it read. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201d After hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is shopping for a new place for its astronauts. The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6302",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/23/space-station-replace-biden/",
        "text": "It has good bones, as the real estate agents would say. Sleeps six, or more. Upgraded bathroom. Gym. Indoor garden. Parking for as many as eight visitor vehicles. And you can\u2019t beat the location \u2014 240 miles high with superb views of Earth: Truly all the best low Earth orbit has to offer! WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is already shopping for a new spread for its astronauts.The space agency is confident Congress and its international partners will agree to extend the station\u2019s life beyond 2024, when it is currently set to expire. On Friday, the Senate passed a NASA authorization bill that would extend it to 2030. But space is harsh, the station is aging and at some point it will have to come down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat comes next, though, isn\u2019t certain.Under President Trump, NASA has been scrambling to return astronauts to the moon under an accelerated timeline. But the first big test the incoming Biden administration will face in space could very well be the future of the space station. If it\u2019s retired without a backup, NASA would face an \u201cexistential challenge,\u201d as one top space agency official put it, with no place for its astronauts to go.There are several companies working to develop a commercial space station, looking at a range of options that vary: a modern version of the ISS, a station with modules that inflate like balloons, and one that would refurbish discarded rocket stages that are floating around in orbit.Story continues below advertisementBut while those options show promise, they are still unproven and years from hitting the market.AdvertisementAs a result, NASA has been increasingly concerned it could have a gap in low Earth orbit that would be even more consequential than the ignominious period after the space shuttle fleet was retired that left the space agency with no way to launch its astronauts to space from U.S. soil. Instead, NASA was forced to rely on the Russians for rides to space, at a price that grew to as much as $90 million a seat, before Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX restored human spaceflight for NASA earlier this year.NASA celebrates 20 years of astronauts living continuously on the International Space StationEven if the station is extended, NASA needs to be working now on its replacement, officials said. It took years to get the ISS up and running. The concept was born in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan announced the United States would put a station, eventually dubbed Freedom, in orbit. But after different administrations and design changes, the first segments weren\u2019t launched until 1998. Since then, NASA has invested more than $100 billion in the facility, which receives more than $3 billion annually from NASA.Story continues below advertisementPrivately run stations would also need time to build their business cases, signing foreign governments as tenants, working with companies and universities that want to do research in space, and wealthy tourists who would pay millions of dollars to visit.AdvertisementWhile NASA and the private sector work toward developing commercial habitats, China is building its own space station that it hopes to launch within a couple of years and is recruiting countries around the world as partners. The United States would not be one of them, however, since NASA is effectively barred by law from partnering with China in space.\u201cI think it would be a tragedy if, after all of this time and all of this effort, we were to abandon low Earth orbit and cede that territory,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate panel earlier this year.Story continues below advertisementThe ISS still does have some good years left, officials said. \u201cWe\u2019re good from an engineering standpoint,\u201d Joel Montalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re cleared through 2028.\u201dBoeing, which is paid $225 million per year as the prime contractor supporting space station operations, said it could stay in orbit for even longer.Advertisement\u201cThe ISS is incredibly healthy, with life capability well beyond 2030,\u201d said John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s ISS program manager. He said the U.S. and Russia recently completed a life extension study \u201cand all the hardware has been cleared to a minimum of 2030. That\u2019s a real testament to the design and the maintenance that\u2019s been done on it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRecently, the station got new lithium-ion batteries that \u201care less than half the size of the original batteries and produce twice the power,\u201d Mulholland said. The power upgrade also doubled the speed at which the station\u2019s crew can send data from science experiments back to Earth.Over the years, the station\u2019s water recovery system has improved to the point where today, 95 percent of the water used for drinking and cooking is recycled, Montalbano said. The communications systems have also been upgraded, as have life support systems like carbon dioxide removal.Still, like a house that needs repairs, things break. Since a leaky roof could have dire consequences in space, and no plumbers or electricians are going to make a house call, astronauts are trained to repair the toilet or plug leaks. But even a tiny leak hissing air into the vacuum of space is a threat, and astronauts spent weeks recently searching for one in the Russian segment of the station before patching it. It was tiny: \u201cThink of the size of two grains of salt is what we had to find,\u201d Montalbano said.The Senate\u2019s vote Friday gave a significant boost toward extending the station, though not as of yet, the money required to do so. Many in the space industry think the extension would be supported by the Biden administration and the House, where a bill that would extend it to 2028 has been introduced. It\u2019s unclear, though, whether Russia would want to continue, and getting the station\u2019s other partners on board would take time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the Commerce Department targeted Russian firms because of ties with the country\u2019s military, the head of the Russian space agency earlier this month lashed out and said the move would threaten relations between the U.S. and Russia in space: \u201cThese sanctions are harmful, because they will create additional obstacles and irritations in such an important cooperation between Russians and Americans in space, in particular, on the ISS,\u201d Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter.Wary of a gap, Bridenstine has increasingly been sounding the alarm, urging Congress to fully fund its requests to build a commercial presence in Earth orbit that would include private stations.Last year, NASA requested $150 million as part of its plan, but Congress granted just a tenth of that. For the fiscal 2021 budget, NASA requested the same amount but will receive just $17 million, sparking a new round of warnings: \u201cISS won\u2019t last forever & incentivizing the private sector to begin follow-on capabilities are needed now,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator in the Obama administration. \u201cThis concept isn\u2019t hard, have we learned nothing in the last 10 years?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s critically important for the United States to have access to low Earth orbit with humans so they can live and work and do science and discovery in the microgravity of space,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cThat should be a national priority. There is a reality that we all have to accept, which is at some point in the future we have to focus on what comes after the ISS.\u201dSome have been critical of the Trump administration for not doing more to prevent a gap. While the White House has been focused on returning astronauts to the moon, the future of the space station has received relatively little attention, said Jeffrey Manber, the CEO of NanoRacks, which is seeking to build its own small space stations.\u201cWhat troubles me is this administration is walking out the door having done very little to prevent a space station gap,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the space shuttle, NASA decided it did not need to own and operate its own rockets and spacecraft but could instead rely on the private sector to ferry its astronauts to space. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts. It took six years for SpaceX to have its first flight with humans. Boeing has yet to fly its first crewed mission.Developing a private space station could take just as long, industry officials said, which is why NASA and the private sector need to get moving now.\u201cIt\u2019s very apparent to everybody that when the ISS comes to the end of its life, we\u2019re not going to replace it with another $100 billion station,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cThe transition needs to be to commercial space stations. Not just one, but multiple.\u201dThere are several companies NASA is hoping will help it continue the U.S.\u2019s presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementAxiom Space, a Houston-based company, is working toward building a commercial space station that would be a modern version of the ISS with some key upgrades.\u201cWhen you look at the shell you go, \u2018Wow, that looks just like the same old space station.\u2019 But after that, pretty much everything will be dramatically different,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s president and CEO.The ISS has some key components located on the outside of its station, meaning astronauts have to perform risky spacewalks to, say, swap out batteries. On the Axiom station, those would all be located inside. It would also have \u201cthe largest window observatory ever constructed for space,\u201d and an interior designed by French architect Philippe Starck.The company has a contract with NASA to attach at least one privately developed module to the ISS by 2024, which could potentially allow the crew capacity on the station to grow.Suffredini, who previously served as the ISS program manager for NASA, said he is not concerned about a gap. Rather, he said, he\u2019s more concerned about ensuring a transition from a government station to a commercial one that gives his potential customers confidence.\u201cI\u2019m more concerned that we drive ourselves to keep ISS on orbit too long,\u201d he said. \u201cThe negative impact is investors start to worry about is ISS ever going to leave?\u201dThe Sierra Nevada Corp. also is working to build a commercial station. But instead of a station with metal structures, it would be made of a Kevlar-like material that would inflate, making it easier to get more space station volume into orbit with fewer rocket launches.The company says it could get its first modules into space within five or six years and is confident that there will be enough demand to make it financially feasible.\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward at the projected market out there, and it just looks incredibly bright,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut who serves as the company\u2019s senior vice president for space systems. \u201cThere\u2019s so much interest in space right now, in the commercialization of space and the potential out there for everything from manufacturing to tourism to research laboratories to observatories.\u201dNanoRacks is also interested in developing commercial stations. But instead of launching them from Earth, the company wants to take discarded rocket stages that are already in orbit and transform them into stations designed for research.\u201cWe need to make the investment now to understand how we can develop cost-efficient free fliers and, just as important, to continue to grow the market for customers,\u201d Manber said.Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company, is also interested in building habitats, and recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it read. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201d After hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is shopping for a new place for its astronauts. The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6303",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/23/space-station-replace-biden/",
        "text": "It has good bones, as the real estate agents would say. Sleeps six, or more. Upgraded bathroom. Gym. Indoor garden. Parking for as many as eight visitor vehicles. And you can\u2019t beat the location \u2014 240 miles high with superb views of Earth: Truly all the best low Earth orbit has to offer! WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut after hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is already shopping for a new spread for its astronauts.The space agency is confident Congress and its international partners will agree to extend the station\u2019s life beyond 2024, when it is currently set to expire. On Friday, the Senate passed a NASA authorization bill that would extend it to 2030. But space is harsh, the station is aging and at some point it will have to come down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat comes next, though, isn\u2019t certain.Under President Trump, NASA has been scrambling to return astronauts to the moon under an accelerated timeline. But the first big test the incoming Biden administration will face in space could very well be the future of the space station. If it\u2019s retired without a backup, NASA would face an \u201cexistential challenge,\u201d as one top space agency official put it, with no place for its astronauts to go.There are several companies working to develop a commercial space station, looking at a range of options that vary: a modern version of the ISS, a station with modules that inflate like balloons, and one that would refurbish discarded rocket stages that are floating around in orbit.Story continues below advertisementBut while those options show promise, they are still unproven and years from hitting the market.AdvertisementAs a result, NASA has been increasingly concerned it could have a gap in low Earth orbit that would be even more consequential than the ignominious period after the space shuttle fleet was retired that left the space agency with no way to launch its astronauts to space from U.S. soil. Instead, NASA was forced to rely on the Russians for rides to space, at a price that grew to as much as $90 million a seat, before Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX restored human spaceflight for NASA earlier this year.NASA celebrates 20 years of astronauts living continuously on the International Space StationEven if the station is extended, NASA needs to be working now on its replacement, officials said. It took years to get the ISS up and running. The concept was born in 1984, when President Ronald Reagan announced the United States would put a station, eventually dubbed Freedom, in orbit. But after different administrations and design changes, the first segments weren\u2019t launched until 1998. Since then, NASA has invested more than $100 billion in the facility, which receives more than $3 billion annually from NASA.Story continues below advertisementPrivately run stations would also need time to build their business cases, signing foreign governments as tenants, working with companies and universities that want to do research in space, and wealthy tourists who would pay millions of dollars to visit.AdvertisementWhile NASA and the private sector work toward developing commercial habitats, China is building its own space station that it hopes to launch within a couple of years and is recruiting countries around the world as partners. The United States would not be one of them, however, since NASA is effectively barred by law from partnering with China in space.\u201cI think it would be a tragedy if, after all of this time and all of this effort, we were to abandon low Earth orbit and cede that territory,\u201d NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told a Senate panel earlier this year.Story continues below advertisementThe ISS still does have some good years left, officials said. \u201cWe\u2019re good from an engineering standpoint,\u201d Joel Montalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re cleared through 2028.\u201dBoeing, which is paid $225 million per year as the prime contractor supporting space station operations, said it could stay in orbit for even longer.Advertisement\u201cThe ISS is incredibly healthy, with life capability well beyond 2030,\u201d said John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s ISS program manager. He said the U.S. and Russia recently completed a life extension study \u201cand all the hardware has been cleared to a minimum of 2030. That\u2019s a real testament to the design and the maintenance that\u2019s been done on it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRecently, the station got new lithium-ion batteries that \u201care less than half the size of the original batteries and produce twice the power,\u201d Mulholland said. The power upgrade also doubled the speed at which the station\u2019s crew can send data from science experiments back to Earth.Over the years, the station\u2019s water recovery system has improved to the point where today, 95 percent of the water used for drinking and cooking is recycled, Montalbano said. The communications systems have also been upgraded, as have life support systems like carbon dioxide removal.Still, like a house that needs repairs, things break. Since a leaky roof could have dire consequences in space, and no plumbers or electricians are going to make a house call, astronauts are trained to repair the toilet or plug leaks. But even a tiny leak hissing air into the vacuum of space is a threat, and astronauts spent weeks recently searching for one in the Russian segment of the station before patching it. It was tiny: \u201cThink of the size of two grains of salt is what we had to find,\u201d Montalbano said.The Senate\u2019s vote Friday gave a significant boost toward extending the station, though not as of yet, the money required to do so. Many in the space industry think the extension would be supported by the Biden administration and the House, where a bill that would extend it to 2028 has been introduced. It\u2019s unclear, though, whether Russia would want to continue, and getting the station\u2019s other partners on board would take time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the Commerce Department targeted Russian firms because of ties with the country\u2019s military, the head of the Russian space agency earlier this month lashed out and said the move would threaten relations between the U.S. and Russia in space: \u201cThese sanctions are harmful, because they will create additional obstacles and irritations in such an important cooperation between Russians and Americans in space, in particular, on the ISS,\u201d Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter.Wary of a gap, Bridenstine has increasingly been sounding the alarm, urging Congress to fully fund its requests to build a commercial presence in Earth orbit that would include private stations.Last year, NASA requested $150 million as part of its plan, but Congress granted just a tenth of that. For the fiscal 2021 budget, NASA requested the same amount but will receive just $17 million, sparking a new round of warnings: \u201cISS won\u2019t last forever & incentivizing the private sector to begin follow-on capabilities are needed now,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA deputy administrator in the Obama administration. \u201cThis concept isn\u2019t hard, have we learned nothing in the last 10 years?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s critically important for the United States to have access to low Earth orbit with humans so they can live and work and do science and discovery in the microgravity of space,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cThat should be a national priority. There is a reality that we all have to accept, which is at some point in the future we have to focus on what comes after the ISS.\u201dSome have been critical of the Trump administration for not doing more to prevent a gap. While the White House has been focused on returning astronauts to the moon, the future of the space station has received relatively little attention, said Jeffrey Manber, the CEO of NanoRacks, which is seeking to build its own small space stations.\u201cWhat troubles me is this administration is walking out the door having done very little to prevent a space station gap,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the space shuttle, NASA decided it did not need to own and operate its own rockets and spacecraft but could instead rely on the private sector to ferry its astronauts to space. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts. It took six years for SpaceX to have its first flight with humans. Boeing has yet to fly its first crewed mission.Developing a private space station could take just as long, industry officials said, which is why NASA and the private sector need to get moving now.\u201cIt\u2019s very apparent to everybody that when the ISS comes to the end of its life, we\u2019re not going to replace it with another $100 billion station,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cThe transition needs to be to commercial space stations. Not just one, but multiple.\u201dThere are several companies NASA is hoping will help it continue the U.S.\u2019s presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementAxiom Space, a Houston-based company, is working toward building a commercial space station that would be a modern version of the ISS with some key upgrades.\u201cWhen you look at the shell you go, \u2018Wow, that looks just like the same old space station.\u2019 But after that, pretty much everything will be dramatically different,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s president and CEO.The ISS has some key components located on the outside of its station, meaning astronauts have to perform risky spacewalks to, say, swap out batteries. On the Axiom station, those would all be located inside. It would also have \u201cthe largest window observatory ever constructed for space,\u201d and an interior designed by French architect Philippe Starck.The company has a contract with NASA to attach at least one privately developed module to the ISS by 2024, which could potentially allow the crew capacity on the station to grow.Suffredini, who previously served as the ISS program manager for NASA, said he is not concerned about a gap. Rather, he said, he\u2019s more concerned about ensuring a transition from a government station to a commercial one that gives his potential customers confidence.\u201cI\u2019m more concerned that we drive ourselves to keep ISS on orbit too long,\u201d he said. \u201cThe negative impact is investors start to worry about is ISS ever going to leave?\u201dThe Sierra Nevada Corp. also is working to build a commercial station. But instead of a station with metal structures, it would be made of a Kevlar-like material that would inflate, making it easier to get more space station volume into orbit with fewer rocket launches.The company says it could get its first modules into space within five or six years and is confident that there will be enough demand to make it financially feasible.\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward at the projected market out there, and it just looks incredibly bright,\u201d said Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut who serves as the company\u2019s senior vice president for space systems. \u201cThere\u2019s so much interest in space right now, in the commercialization of space and the potential out there for everything from manufacturing to tourism to research laboratories to observatories.\u201dNanoRacks is also interested in developing commercial stations. But instead of launching them from Earth, the company wants to take discarded rocket stages that are already in orbit and transform them into stations designed for research.\u201cWe need to make the investment now to understand how we can develop cost-efficient free fliers and, just as important, to continue to grow the market for customers,\u201d Manber said.Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company, is also interested in building habitats, and recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it read. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201d After hosting a rotating cast of astronauts for more than 20 years straight, the International Space Station is showing its age \u2014 it sprung another tiny leak last month \u2014 and NASA is shopping for a new place for its astronauts. The International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there forever. Will privately run, commercial replacements be ready in time?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A rocket booster and a dead satellite avoided a collision Thursday, illustrating the \u2018ticking time bomb\u2019 of space debris (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6304",
        "date": "2020-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/15/space-collision-might-happen-thursday/",
        "text": "It appears that a dead Soviet satellite narrowly missed a Chinese rocket stage Thursday night as they sped hundreds of miles above the Earth\u2019s surface, another in a series of close calls for junk whizzing around in orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThroughout the space community there was widespread concern over a worst-case scenario \u2014 that shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern the objects would collide, creating a massive debris field, adding even more pollution to space that could last decades, according to LeoLabs, a California-based company that tracks debris for satellite companies. If that happened, the collision could have produced thousands of pieces of space debris, the most since an active communications satellite operated by Iridium and a dead Russian satellite crashed into each other in 2009 some 500 miles over Siberia. But shortly before 10 p.m. LeoLabs reported that there appeared to be no collision. The company\u2019s radar showed the rocket stage intact with \u201cno signs of debris.\u201d It added that there was \u201cno indication of collision.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to a couple thousand operational satellites, there is a lot of trash in space \u2014 spent satellites and old rocket boosters, the flotsam of previous collisions and military maneuvers, such as when China shot down a dead satellite with a missile in 2007.The more junk in space, the greater the possibility of additional collisions, which in turn would produce even more debris, further exacerbating a problem that is growing worse.1/ This event continues to be very high risk and will likely stay this way through the time of closest approach. Our system generates new conjunction reports 6-8x per day on this event with new observation data each time. pic.twitter.com/d3tRbcV2P0\u2014 LeoLabs, Inc. (@LeoLabs_Space) October 14, 2020\n\n\u201cEvery week we see close approaches, where derelict satellites, rocket bodies, are passing within 100 meters of each other,\u201d said Daniel Ceperley, LeoLabs\u2019 founder and CEO. \u201cThis isn\u2019t like this happens once a year. This happens multiple times a week. It\u2019s sort of a ticking time bomb that\u2019s just out there in space.\u201dThousands more satellites could soon be launched to space. Can the federal government keep up?He said the chance of a collision was less than 10 percent but added \u201cthat\u2019s extremely high for the space industry. At one in 10,000, a satellite operator will move their satellite. At one in 1,000, it\u2019s is considered an emergency.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo far this year, the International Space Station has had to maneuver three times to avoid debris, NASA said. Speaking at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing recently, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine lamented the growing problem and said in addition to the times the station has had to maneuver there \u201cwere three potential [collisions] that made us very nervous.\u201dThe challenge, he said, is \u201cwe don\u2019t have as a nation, or even as a world, a robust architecture for how we\u2019re going to integrate all of these capabilities into this small space. And it\u2019s becoming more and more of a problem.\u201dThe concerns come as companies such as SpaceX and Amazon are vying to launch thousands of satellites to low Earth orbit where they would beam the Internet to rural and underserved communities. Over the next 10 years, more than 50,000 satellites could be launched, according to Analytical Graphics Inc., a company based outside of Philadelphia that also tracks spacecraft and debris. The Pentagon tracks about 22,000 pieces of debris larger than about four inches, but scientists say there are nearly 1 million larger than half an inch. With all the debris floating around in orbit, AGI estimates that there could be as many as 404 collision and 17 million close calls in the most congested orbits over the next decade.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat is fueling a push in some quarters, including the White House, for a civilian agency, namely the Commerce Department to take over the job of tracking debris and issuing warnings. But that effort has moved slowly, while some in Congress favor the Federal Aviation Administration instead.In the meantime, the problem isn\u2019t going away.The two objects hurtling toward each other Thursday evening were fairly large \u2014 the combined mass is more than 6,000 pounds, according to LeoLabs. With each traveling some 17,000 mph, a collision would have been catastrophic, and there was nothing anybody could do to push them off course.\u201cNeither object is maneuverable, so there is nothing to do but watch,\u201d said Todd Harrison, the director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cAt an altitude of more than [600 miles], the debris will linger for many decades.\u201d If it happens, the collision would likely produce thousands of pieces of space debris, the most since an active communications satellite operated by Iridium and a dead Russian satellite crashed into each other in 2009. A rocket booster and a dead satellite avoided a collision Thursday, illustrating the \u2018ticking time bomb\u2019 of space debris",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA finds \u2018fundamental\u2019 software problems in Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6305",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/07/boeing-starliner-software-problems/",
        "text": "Investigators probing the botched flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December have found widespread and \u201cfundamental\u201d problems with the company\u2019s software that could have led to a disastrous outcome more grievous than previously known, the agency said Friday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing is now reviewing all 1 million lines of code in the capsule\u2019s computer systems, officials said. How long that review will take is uncertain, Boeing officials said. The discovery of widespread software problems in the Starliner spacecraft is reminiscent of the issues that surfaced in the aftermath of the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max airplanes that killed 346 people and led to the plane\u2019s grounding since early last year. Doug Loverro, the head of human exploration for NASA, said he could not speak to what, if any, connection there might be between the Starliner\u2019s software problems and the issues with the 737 Max.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut he said the discovery of widespread issues with the Starliner software indicated \u201cwe have a real breakdown of the software process.\u201d\"We don\u2019t know how many software errors we have \u2014 if we have just two or many hundreds,\u201d Loverro said. In an interview, he added that the \u201cbottom line is that industry is very bad at doing software.\u201d Boeing, he said, very well may have had \u201ca good program, but it was not executed correctly.\u201dSpeaking in unusually blunt language, NASA officials also acknowledged that the space agency had failed to properly police Boeing\u2019s work and that the checks that were supposed to discover such problems failed repeatedly.No astronauts were aboard the Starliner capsule during its test flight in December, but the software malfunctions could have caused what a safety official called a \u201ccatastrophic spacecraft failure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the days after the flight, NASA and Boeing officials repeatedly sought to emphasize the things that went right with the mission, even though the spacecraft failed to dock with the space station, one of its main objectives.But speaking Friday, a day after a NASA safety advisory panel warned that the problems were far more severe than previously known, they acknowledged the severity of the issues would require a wholesale review of Boeing, its safety procedures and the way NASA oversees Boeing\u2019s work as it prepares to fly humans to space for the first time since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.Officials at NASA and Boeing said they were able to fix the problems that plagued the maiden flight of the Starliner, which landed safely two days after it lifted off from Cape Canaveral. But they said there were multiple failures along the way that, if not caught in the nick of time, could have led to a disastrous outcome.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post Friday, NASA pointed the finger at Boeing, saying, \u201cthere were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects.\u201d It added that those problems could have had serious consequences and \u201cled to risk of spacecraft loss.\u201dDuring the call, however, Loverro said that NASA had failed as well in policing a contractor that many have said has grown too cozy with the agency.\u201cNASA oversight was insufficient \u2014 that\u2019s obvious,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we recognize that.\u201dInitially, Boeing said that a software issue caused the spacecraft\u2019s timer to be off by 11 hours. That, in turn, meant the thrusters that were to put the Starliner on a trajectory to the space station failed to fire.Story continues below advertisementThe timing issue was caused because the spacecraft\u2019s computer system was supposed to sync with that of the rocket booster \u2014 but only after the countdown to launch began. For some reason, however, the two computers synced before the countdown, resulting in the error, said Jim Chilton, the head of Boeing\u2019s space division.AdvertisementThe revelation this week of yet another software problem indicates the issue was not an isolated one.After discovering the issue with the timer, Boeing officials \u201cwent hunting\u201d for any other software problems while the Starliner was in flight, Chilton said.They found one \u2014 a big one that Chilton said would have gone undiscovered if they had not had the earlier problem.Story continues below advertisementIn the second case, the issue would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire during the separation of what\u2019s known as the service module from the crew module. Company officials grew concerned that if the wrong thrusters fired the two capsules could have collided, leading to an array of significant problems, from damaging the capsule\u2019s heat shield, to sending it tumbling off course.While it was not clear what exactly would have happened, \u201cnothing good could come from those two spacecraft bumping,\u201d Chilton said.AdvertisementBoeing officials were able to quickly come up with a software patch, beam it up to the spacecraft, which prevented the wrong thrusters from firing. The spacecraft then landed safely the next day.Story continues below advertisementNASA has repeatedly said it has been working side-by-side with both Boeing and SpaceX, the other company under contract to develop a spacecraft to carry humans into space, to ensure their spacecrafts meet requirements and are safe to fly. But a series of problems have plagued the $6.8 billion program, which is now three years behind schedule.Last year, during the test of the Starliner\u2019s abort motors, one of the main parachutes failed to deploy because a pin was not properly secured to a smaller drag chute. The pin was underneath a protective sheath and out of sight. Boeing has said it intends in the future to verify that the pin is secure by pulling on it.AdvertisementNASA announced this week that it plans to reverse itself and conduct a more thorough review of Boeing\u2019s safety culture. In 2018, NASA announced it was launching \u201cinvasive\u201d probes of both Boeing and SpaceX. The reviews were prompted after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took a puff of marijuana on a show streamed on the Internet. NASA confirmed it had proceeded with a full review of SpaceX, but that it had decided to perform a far more limited review of Boeing, which it had worked alongside for decades.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, NASA officials said that while they had been planning on a full review of Boeing even before the flight, that review took on a greater sense of urgency after the mission was marred by the software problems.Investigators have identified the cause of the problems and have a sense of how to fix them, NASA said. But the agency said it was \u201cstill too early for us to definitely share\u201d the causes and corrections. Still, it said that investigators have identified 11 remedies that will need to be implemented.It is unclear whether NASA will force Boeing to redo the test flight without astronauts before allowing crews to fly on Starliner.The agency said it hopes to have an answer on that within a few weeks. Boeing is now reviewing all 1 million lines of code in the capsule\u2019s computer systems, officials said. How long that review will take is uncertain. NASA finds \u2018fundamental\u2019 software problems in Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA finds \u2018fundamental\u2019 software problems in Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6306",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/07/boeing-starliner-software-problems/",
        "text": "Investigators probing the botched flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft in December have found widespread and \u201cfundamental\u201d problems with the company\u2019s software that could have led to a disastrous outcome more grievous than previously known, the agency said Friday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing is now reviewing all 1 million lines of code in the capsule\u2019s computer systems, officials said. How long that review will take is uncertain, Boeing officials said. The discovery of widespread software problems in the Starliner spacecraft is reminiscent of the issues that surfaced in the aftermath of the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max airplanes that killed 346 people and led to the plane\u2019s grounding since early last year. Doug Loverro, the head of human exploration for NASA, said he could not speak to what, if any, connection there might be between the Starliner\u2019s software problems and the issues with the 737 Max.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut he said the discovery of widespread issues with the Starliner software indicated \u201cwe have a real breakdown of the software process.\u201d\"We don\u2019t know how many software errors we have \u2014 if we have just two or many hundreds,\u201d Loverro said. In an interview, he added that the \u201cbottom line is that industry is very bad at doing software.\u201d Boeing, he said, very well may have had \u201ca good program, but it was not executed correctly.\u201dSpeaking in unusually blunt language, NASA officials also acknowledged that the space agency had failed to properly police Boeing\u2019s work and that the checks that were supposed to discover such problems failed repeatedly.No astronauts were aboard the Starliner capsule during its test flight in December, but the software malfunctions could have caused what a safety official called a \u201ccatastrophic spacecraft failure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the days after the flight, NASA and Boeing officials repeatedly sought to emphasize the things that went right with the mission, even though the spacecraft failed to dock with the space station, one of its main objectives.But speaking Friday, a day after a NASA safety advisory panel warned that the problems were far more severe than previously known, they acknowledged the severity of the issues would require a wholesale review of Boeing, its safety procedures and the way NASA oversees Boeing\u2019s work as it prepares to fly humans to space for the first time since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.Officials at NASA and Boeing said they were able to fix the problems that plagued the maiden flight of the Starliner, which landed safely two days after it lifted off from Cape Canaveral. But they said there were multiple failures along the way that, if not caught in the nick of time, could have led to a disastrous outcome.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post Friday, NASA pointed the finger at Boeing, saying, \u201cthere were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects.\u201d It added that those problems could have had serious consequences and \u201cled to risk of spacecraft loss.\u201dDuring the call, however, Loverro said that NASA had failed as well in policing a contractor that many have said has grown too cozy with the agency.\u201cNASA oversight was insufficient \u2014 that\u2019s obvious,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we recognize that.\u201dInitially, Boeing said that a software issue caused the spacecraft\u2019s timer to be off by 11 hours. That, in turn, meant the thrusters that were to put the Starliner on a trajectory to the space station failed to fire.Story continues below advertisementThe timing issue was caused because the spacecraft\u2019s computer system was supposed to sync with that of the rocket booster \u2014 but only after the countdown to launch began. For some reason, however, the two computers synced before the countdown, resulting in the error, said Jim Chilton, the head of Boeing\u2019s space division.AdvertisementThe revelation this week of yet another software problem indicates the issue was not an isolated one.After discovering the issue with the timer, Boeing officials \u201cwent hunting\u201d for any other software problems while the Starliner was in flight, Chilton said.They found one \u2014 a big one that Chilton said would have gone undiscovered if they had not had the earlier problem.Story continues below advertisementIn the second case, the issue would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire during the separation of what\u2019s known as the service module from the crew module. Company officials grew concerned that if the wrong thrusters fired the two capsules could have collided, leading to an array of significant problems, from damaging the capsule\u2019s heat shield, to sending it tumbling off course.While it was not clear what exactly would have happened, \u201cnothing good could come from those two spacecraft bumping,\u201d Chilton said.AdvertisementBoeing officials were able to quickly come up with a software patch, beam it up to the spacecraft, which prevented the wrong thrusters from firing. The spacecraft then landed safely the next day.Story continues below advertisementNASA has repeatedly said it has been working side-by-side with both Boeing and SpaceX, the other company under contract to develop a spacecraft to carry humans into space, to ensure their spacecrafts meet requirements and are safe to fly. But a series of problems have plagued the $6.8 billion program, which is now three years behind schedule.Last year, during the test of the Starliner\u2019s abort motors, one of the main parachutes failed to deploy because a pin was not properly secured to a smaller drag chute. The pin was underneath a protective sheath and out of sight. Boeing has said it intends in the future to verify that the pin is secure by pulling on it.AdvertisementNASA announced this week that it plans to reverse itself and conduct a more thorough review of Boeing\u2019s safety culture. In 2018, NASA announced it was launching \u201cinvasive\u201d probes of both Boeing and SpaceX. The reviews were prompted after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took a puff of marijuana on a show streamed on the Internet. NASA confirmed it had proceeded with a full review of SpaceX, but that it had decided to perform a far more limited review of Boeing, which it had worked alongside for decades.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, NASA officials said that while they had been planning on a full review of Boeing even before the flight, that review took on a greater sense of urgency after the mission was marred by the software problems.Investigators have identified the cause of the problems and have a sense of how to fix them, NASA said. But the agency said it was \u201cstill too early for us to definitely share\u201d the causes and corrections. Still, it said that investigators have identified 11 remedies that will need to be implemented.It is unclear whether NASA will force Boeing to redo the test flight without astronauts before allowing crews to fly on Starliner.The agency said it hopes to have an answer on that within a few weeks. Boeing is now reviewing all 1 million lines of code in the capsule\u2019s computer systems, officials said. How long that review will take is uncertain. NASA finds \u2018fundamental\u2019 software problems in Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6307",
        "date": "2019-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/09/trump-wants-return-moon-jeff-bezos-is-among-those-vying-help/",
        "text": "In the six weeks since Vice President Pence announced a crash program to get humans to the moon within five years, the White House has provided no details on how it would achieve that and no cost estimates.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rocket NASA wants to use to get there has suffered years of delays and is billions over budget, and NASA lacks the space suits necessary for astronauts to walk on the moon. But the growing space industry has sensed an opportunity in the White House\u2019s passion for space, and on Thursday, Jeff Bezos made his pitch to join the effort.In an hour-long speech in Washington\u2019s convention center, Bezos unveiled a life-size mock-up of the lander his company, Blue Origin, is developing to ferry cargo and supplies to the surface of the moon in advance of a human landing. And he made an emotional case for humanity to expand out into the cosmos, a passion he has held since he was a child and has called the most important work he is doing today. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos lauded the White House\u2019s goal of getting humans to the lunar surface quickly.\u201cI love this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the right thing to do. For those of you doing the arithmetic at home, that\u2019s 2024. And we can help meet that timeline, but only because we started three years ago. It\u2019s time to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay.\u201dCompanies in the Cosmos: Billionaire entrepreneurs and companies are defining a new space ageBezos did not say what the lander, called \u201cBlue Moon,\u201d would cost or when it would be ready to fly. He did not take questions after the speech.Bezos\u2019s speech comes at a time when NASA is scrambling to meet a White House mandate to speed up the agency\u2019s plans to get humans to the surface of the moon for the first time since 1972. Pence tasked NASA with achieving the goal \u201cby any means necessary\u201d and promised it would receive the resources needed to pull off such a bold mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut in the weeks since then, members of Congress have grown increasingly skeptical. Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, accused the administration of speeding up the timeline for political purposes since it would come amid the 2024 presidential campaign.Today, our founder shared our vision to go to space to benefit Earth. We must return to the Moon\u2014this time to stay. We\u2019re ready to support @NASA in getting there by 2024 with #bluemoon. pic.twitter.com/UqQyMa9Zcn\u2014 Blue Origin (@blueorigin) May 9, 2019\n\nAt a hearing Wednesday, Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, also weighed in. Horn said although she supported \u201cthe desire to invigorate our human exploration efforts,\u201d she blasted the administration, saying, \u201cthe lack of planning, evident so far, is no way to run our nation\u2019s human space exploration program.\u201dShe said the mandate to land humans on the moon by 2024 instead of 2028, as was previously planned, \u201cleft NASA in a tizzy \u2014 scrambling to develop a plan and hastening to pull together a budget amendment that still has not been delivered to Congress, and upending groundwork with international partners on future exploration goals.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMark Sirangelo, a special adviser to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, said at the hearing that answers would be forthcoming. \u201cWe understand the delay is frustrating,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this is a big challenge, and we want to get it right.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for space tourismThe White House\u2019s mandate comes with a twist that makes the already complicated feat far more difficult.Instead of just going to the lunar surface and coming home, as the Apollo program did in the late 1960s and early \u201970s, NASA intends to build an outpost that would stay in orbit around the moon. Astronauts would fly first to that outpost, known as the Gateway, and then fly on spacecraft to the lunar surface and back.Story continues below advertisementAlthough no contracts have been awarded for any parts of the Gateway, several companies have made pitches to build various elements of it. Recently Lockheed Martin, Boeing, the Sierra Nevada Corporation and others have said they could help meet the White House\u2019s 2024 timeline.Advertisement\u201cWe need to be bending metal next year, which means tooling already has to be in house,\u201d said Rob Chambers, Lockheed\u2019s director of human spaceflight strategy, said recently. \u201cAnd I hope somebody ordered a bunch of aluminum.\u201dIn his speech, Bezos said a larger variant of Blue Moon could also carry a separate spacecraft that could be used to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface. But he provided few details about when it would be ready and how many people it could transport.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine, the NASA administrator, has said the agency wants to land on the moon\u2019s South Pole, near Shackleton Crater, where there is water ice. Water is key for sustaining human life, but its elements, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used as rocket propellant. So the moon is seen by many as a gas station in space. The moon\u2019s south pole also has near continuous sunlight, allowing for solar energy.AdvertisementBezos first pitched NASA two years ago when he detailed plans to build the lunar lander for cargo and urged the space agency to focus on exploring the lunar surface.NASA wants to get to the moon as fast as possible but other countries are racing there tooAt the time, Bezos told The Post he was ready to invest his own money \u201calongside NASA to make it happen.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBezos spent the first part of his speech outlining his long-term vision, in which one day, as he\u2019s often said, there will be \u201cmillions of people are living and working in space.\u201d The Earth\u2019s resources are limited, while the population and its appetite for energy, continue to grow. The answer, he said is to go out into the cosmos and exploit the limitless resources there.\u201cThere is no Plan B,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to save this planet.\u201dBezos is an acolyte of the late futurist and Princeton University physics professor Gerard O\u2019Neill, whose vision was to build massive colonies in space that could house thousands of people at once in conditions similar to those on Earth \u2014 but better.\u201cThese are really pleasant places to live,\u201d Bezos said, showing a rendering. \u201cThis is Maui on its best day all year long. No rain. No storms. No earthquakes.\u201d Bezos unveiled a life-size mock-up of the lander his company, Blue Origin, is developing to ferry cargo and supplies to the surface of the moon, and he made an emotional case for humanity to expand out into the cosmos, a cause he has called the most important work he is doing today. Trump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6308",
        "date": "2019-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/09/trump-wants-return-moon-jeff-bezos-is-among-those-vying-help/",
        "text": "In the six weeks since Vice President Pence announced a crash program to get humans to the moon within five years, the White House has provided no details on how it would achieve that and no cost estimates.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rocket NASA wants to use to get there has suffered years of delays and is billions over budget, and NASA lacks the space suits necessary for astronauts to walk on the moon. But the growing space industry has sensed an opportunity in the White House\u2019s passion for space, and on Thursday, Jeff Bezos made his pitch to join the effort.In an hour-long speech in Washington\u2019s convention center, Bezos unveiled a life-size mock-up of the lander his company, Blue Origin, is developing to ferry cargo and supplies to the surface of the moon in advance of a human landing. And he made an emotional case for humanity to expand out into the cosmos, a passion he has held since he was a child and has called the most important work he is doing today. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos lauded the White House\u2019s goal of getting humans to the lunar surface quickly.\u201cI love this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the right thing to do. For those of you doing the arithmetic at home, that\u2019s 2024. And we can help meet that timeline, but only because we started three years ago. It\u2019s time to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay.\u201dCompanies in the Cosmos: Billionaire entrepreneurs and companies are defining a new space ageBezos did not say what the lander, called \u201cBlue Moon,\u201d would cost or when it would be ready to fly. He did not take questions after the speech.Bezos\u2019s speech comes at a time when NASA is scrambling to meet a White House mandate to speed up the agency\u2019s plans to get humans to the surface of the moon for the first time since 1972. Pence tasked NASA with achieving the goal \u201cby any means necessary\u201d and promised it would receive the resources needed to pull off such a bold mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut in the weeks since then, members of Congress have grown increasingly skeptical. Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, accused the administration of speeding up the timeline for political purposes since it would come amid the 2024 presidential campaign.Today, our founder shared our vision to go to space to benefit Earth. We must return to the Moon\u2014this time to stay. We\u2019re ready to support @NASA in getting there by 2024 with #bluemoon. pic.twitter.com/UqQyMa9Zcn\u2014 Blue Origin (@blueorigin) May 9, 2019\n\nAt a hearing Wednesday, Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, also weighed in. Horn said although she supported \u201cthe desire to invigorate our human exploration efforts,\u201d she blasted the administration, saying, \u201cthe lack of planning, evident so far, is no way to run our nation\u2019s human space exploration program.\u201dShe said the mandate to land humans on the moon by 2024 instead of 2028, as was previously planned, \u201cleft NASA in a tizzy \u2014 scrambling to develop a plan and hastening to pull together a budget amendment that still has not been delivered to Congress, and upending groundwork with international partners on future exploration goals.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMark Sirangelo, a special adviser to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, said at the hearing that answers would be forthcoming. \u201cWe understand the delay is frustrating,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this is a big challenge, and we want to get it right.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for space tourismThe White House\u2019s mandate comes with a twist that makes the already complicated feat far more difficult.Instead of just going to the lunar surface and coming home, as the Apollo program did in the late 1960s and early \u201970s, NASA intends to build an outpost that would stay in orbit around the moon. Astronauts would fly first to that outpost, known as the Gateway, and then fly on spacecraft to the lunar surface and back.Story continues below advertisementAlthough no contracts have been awarded for any parts of the Gateway, several companies have made pitches to build various elements of it. Recently Lockheed Martin, Boeing, the Sierra Nevada Corporation and others have said they could help meet the White House\u2019s 2024 timeline.Advertisement\u201cWe need to be bending metal next year, which means tooling already has to be in house,\u201d said Rob Chambers, Lockheed\u2019s director of human spaceflight strategy, said recently. \u201cAnd I hope somebody ordered a bunch of aluminum.\u201dIn his speech, Bezos said a larger variant of Blue Moon could also carry a separate spacecraft that could be used to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface. But he provided few details about when it would be ready and how many people it could transport.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine, the NASA administrator, has said the agency wants to land on the moon\u2019s South Pole, near Shackleton Crater, where there is water ice. Water is key for sustaining human life, but its elements, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used as rocket propellant. So the moon is seen by many as a gas station in space. The moon\u2019s south pole also has near continuous sunlight, allowing for solar energy.AdvertisementBezos first pitched NASA two years ago when he detailed plans to build the lunar lander for cargo and urged the space agency to focus on exploring the lunar surface.NASA wants to get to the moon as fast as possible but other countries are racing there tooAt the time, Bezos told The Post he was ready to invest his own money \u201calongside NASA to make it happen.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBezos spent the first part of his speech outlining his long-term vision, in which one day, as he\u2019s often said, there will be \u201cmillions of people are living and working in space.\u201d The Earth\u2019s resources are limited, while the population and its appetite for energy, continue to grow. The answer, he said is to go out into the cosmos and exploit the limitless resources there.\u201cThere is no Plan B,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to save this planet.\u201dBezos is an acolyte of the late futurist and Princeton University physics professor Gerard O\u2019Neill, whose vision was to build massive colonies in space that could house thousands of people at once in conditions similar to those on Earth \u2014 but better.\u201cThese are really pleasant places to live,\u201d Bezos said, showing a rendering. \u201cThis is Maui on its best day all year long. No rain. No storms. No earthquakes.\u201d Bezos unveiled a life-size mock-up of the lander his company, Blue Origin, is developing to ferry cargo and supplies to the surface of the moon, and he made an emotional case for humanity to expand out into the cosmos, a cause he has called the most important work he is doing today. Trump wants to return to the moon. Jeff Bezos is among those vying to help.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA shows it\u2019s lost confidence in Boeing\u2019s ability to police its own work on Starliner space capsule (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6309",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/06/nasa-shows-its-lost-confidence-boeings-ability-police-its-own-work-starliner-space-capsule/",
        "text": "In the days and weeks after Boeing\u2019s test flight of its new spacecraft went awry, the company and NASA went to great lengths to highlight the positives of the mission \u2014 how, as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine had said, \u201ca lot of things went right.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMore than two months after the test mission was cut short by what Boeing and NASA now acknowledge were potentially catastrophic software errors, the space agency is being far more blunt about the poor performance of one of its most trusted contractors and dictating the steps Boeing must take to fix the serious problems that have been uncovered. In a call with reporters Friday, NASA officials said an independent investigation of the marred test flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft has produced 61 corrective actions and identified 49 gaps in Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. A decision on whether Boeing will be allowed to proceed with flying astronauts or have to redo the test mission without humans on board may be months away, they said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission,\u201d said Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and mission operations. \u201cSo clearly this was a close call.\u201d Boeing, along with another company, SpaceX, is under contract to build a spacecraft to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the space agency\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. NASA hasn\u2019t had the ability to fly astronauts since the space shuttle was retired in 2011 and has faced delays and setbacks in its attempt to fly humans again from U.S. soil.Given that lives are on the line, Loverro added: \u201cI want to make sure everybody understands that we at NASA are talking this very seriously. \u2026 And we\u2019re going to make sure that at the end of the day, we can fly astronauts safely on Starliner.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe test of Boeing\u2019s Starliner ran into trouble almost from the moment it was hoisted into space shortly before Christmas. The spacecraft\u2019s internal clock was off by 11 hours, a significant software problem that went undiscovered because Boeing\u2019s preflight testing was cut short and used a faulty computer simulator.While Starliner was in flight, Boeing uncovered another software problem that should have been unearthed by testing on the ground \u2014 one that could have caused the service module to crash into the crew module before the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere.\u201cIt\u2019s important to remember we went into this flight \u2026 with a test plan,\u201d said Jim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch. \u201cWe had all agreed to that plan, and we executed the plan. And it wasn\u2019t good enough.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a result, NASA now plans on embedding some of its software experts with Boeing\u2019s team to oversee its work and testing more rigorously. Examples of corrective actions include fully testing all outcomes of the software instead of just the most likely ones as well as strengthening oversight of the software teams.\u201cWe had delegated too much authority to the software board to approve changes,\u201d Loverro said, referring to the engineering team reviewing software processes.Meanwhile, NASA\u2019s probe of Boeing and its processes continues, as the space agency tries to figure out when it will allow Boeing to try again.\u201cWe\u2019ll evaluate the results of their work,\u201d Loverro said. \u201cAnd we\u2019ll be in a position to decide whether we need another test flight or not. We are still a ways away from that. And I can\u2019t even tell you what the schedule is for making that decision because it\u2019s very dependent upon what we see as Boeing\u2019s corrective action plan.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChilton said Boeing has no \u201cintent to avoid [another test flight]. We stand ready to do it.\u201d A repeat of the test would come at an enormous cost for a program that already is unusually rigid and governed by a \u201cfirmed fixed-price cost\u201d contract. In case it does have to repeat the test, Boeing has taken a $410 million charge, it said during its most recent earnings call.Boeing has been under enormous financial strain since the grounding of its 737 Max airplane fleet after two fatal crashes killed a total of 346 people. Both the Max and Starliner failures were tied to software problems, and Chilton said Friday that the issues discovered during the Starliner investigation have been shared with the commercial airplane division.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCertainly we have what we consider a strong, and in fact we are strengthening our central and core engineering organizations both around software and other things,\u201d he said. \u201cThese learnings have been fed to those teams and I know are being applied across our enterprise. I\u2019m not aware of anything common or relevant to the 737 Max out of this.\u201d The call with NASA came as House investigators Friday released a damning report concluding that the mistakes on the 737 Max were a result of \u201ctechnical design failures, lack of transparency with both regulators and customers and efforts to obfuscate information about the operation of the aircraft.\u201d In the initial days and weeks after Boeing\u2019s test flight of its new spacecraft went awry, the company and NASA went to great lengths to highlight the positives of the mission. But more than two months after the failed flight, the space agency is being far more blunt about the poor performance of one of its most trusted contractors. NASA shows it\u2019s lost confidence in Boeing\u2019s ability to police its own work on Starliner space capsule",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA shows it\u2019s lost confidence in Boeing\u2019s ability to police its own work on Starliner space capsule (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6310",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/06/nasa-shows-its-lost-confidence-boeings-ability-police-its-own-work-starliner-space-capsule/",
        "text": "In the days and weeks after Boeing\u2019s test flight of its new spacecraft went awry, the company and NASA went to great lengths to highlight the positives of the mission \u2014 how, as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine had said, \u201ca lot of things went right.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMore than two months after the test mission was cut short by what Boeing and NASA now acknowledge were potentially catastrophic software errors, the space agency is being far more blunt about the poor performance of one of its most trusted contractors and dictating the steps Boeing must take to fix the serious problems that have been uncovered. In a call with reporters Friday, NASA officials said an independent investigation of the marred test flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft has produced 61 corrective actions and identified 49 gaps in Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. A decision on whether Boeing will be allowed to proceed with flying astronauts or have to redo the test mission without humans on board may be months away, they said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission,\u201d said Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and mission operations. \u201cSo clearly this was a close call.\u201d Boeing, along with another company, SpaceX, is under contract to build a spacecraft to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the space agency\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. NASA hasn\u2019t had the ability to fly astronauts since the space shuttle was retired in 2011 and has faced delays and setbacks in its attempt to fly humans again from U.S. soil.Given that lives are on the line, Loverro added: \u201cI want to make sure everybody understands that we at NASA are talking this very seriously. \u2026 And we\u2019re going to make sure that at the end of the day, we can fly astronauts safely on Starliner.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe test of Boeing\u2019s Starliner ran into trouble almost from the moment it was hoisted into space shortly before Christmas. The spacecraft\u2019s internal clock was off by 11 hours, a significant software problem that went undiscovered because Boeing\u2019s preflight testing was cut short and used a faulty computer simulator.While Starliner was in flight, Boeing uncovered another software problem that should have been unearthed by testing on the ground \u2014 one that could have caused the service module to crash into the crew module before the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere.\u201cIt\u2019s important to remember we went into this flight \u2026 with a test plan,\u201d said Jim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch. \u201cWe had all agreed to that plan, and we executed the plan. And it wasn\u2019t good enough.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a result, NASA now plans on embedding some of its software experts with Boeing\u2019s team to oversee its work and testing more rigorously. Examples of corrective actions include fully testing all outcomes of the software instead of just the most likely ones as well as strengthening oversight of the software teams.\u201cWe had delegated too much authority to the software board to approve changes,\u201d Loverro said, referring to the engineering team reviewing software processes.Meanwhile, NASA\u2019s probe of Boeing and its processes continues, as the space agency tries to figure out when it will allow Boeing to try again.\u201cWe\u2019ll evaluate the results of their work,\u201d Loverro said. \u201cAnd we\u2019ll be in a position to decide whether we need another test flight or not. We are still a ways away from that. And I can\u2019t even tell you what the schedule is for making that decision because it\u2019s very dependent upon what we see as Boeing\u2019s corrective action plan.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChilton said Boeing has no \u201cintent to avoid [another test flight]. We stand ready to do it.\u201d A repeat of the test would come at an enormous cost for a program that already is unusually rigid and governed by a \u201cfirmed fixed-price cost\u201d contract. In case it does have to repeat the test, Boeing has taken a $410 million charge, it said during its most recent earnings call.Boeing has been under enormous financial strain since the grounding of its 737 Max airplane fleet after two fatal crashes killed a total of 346 people. Both the Max and Starliner failures were tied to software problems, and Chilton said Friday that the issues discovered during the Starliner investigation have been shared with the commercial airplane division.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCertainly we have what we consider a strong, and in fact we are strengthening our central and core engineering organizations both around software and other things,\u201d he said. \u201cThese learnings have been fed to those teams and I know are being applied across our enterprise. I\u2019m not aware of anything common or relevant to the 737 Max out of this.\u201d The call with NASA came as House investigators Friday released a damning report concluding that the mistakes on the 737 Max were a result of \u201ctechnical design failures, lack of transparency with both regulators and customers and efforts to obfuscate information about the operation of the aircraft.\u201d In the initial days and weeks after Boeing\u2019s test flight of its new spacecraft went awry, the company and NASA went to great lengths to highlight the positives of the mission. But more than two months after the failed flight, the space agency is being far more blunt about the poor performance of one of its most trusted contractors. NASA shows it\u2019s lost confidence in Boeing\u2019s ability to police its own work on Starliner space capsule",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA shows it\u2019s lost confidence in Boeing\u2019s ability to police its own work on Starliner space capsule (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6311",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/03/06/nasa-shows-its-lost-confidence-boeings-ability-police-its-own-work-starliner-space-capsule/",
        "text": "In the days and weeks after Boeing\u2019s test flight of its new spacecraft went awry, the company and NASA went to great lengths to highlight the positives of the mission \u2014 how, as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine had said, \u201ca lot of things went right.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMore than two months after the test mission was cut short by what Boeing and NASA now acknowledge were potentially catastrophic software errors, the space agency is being far more blunt about the poor performance of one of its most trusted contractors and dictating the steps Boeing must take to fix the serious problems that have been uncovered. In a call with reporters Friday, NASA officials said an independent investigation of the marred test flight of Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft has produced 61 corrective actions and identified 49 gaps in Boeing\u2019s testing procedures. A decision on whether Boeing will be allowed to proceed with flying astronauts or have to redo the test mission without humans on board may be months away, they said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission,\u201d said Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and mission operations. \u201cSo clearly this was a close call.\u201d Boeing, along with another company, SpaceX, is under contract to build a spacecraft to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the space agency\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. NASA hasn\u2019t had the ability to fly astronauts since the space shuttle was retired in 2011 and has faced delays and setbacks in its attempt to fly humans again from U.S. soil.Given that lives are on the line, Loverro added: \u201cI want to make sure everybody understands that we at NASA are talking this very seriously. \u2026 And we\u2019re going to make sure that at the end of the day, we can fly astronauts safely on Starliner.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe test of Boeing\u2019s Starliner ran into trouble almost from the moment it was hoisted into space shortly before Christmas. The spacecraft\u2019s internal clock was off by 11 hours, a significant software problem that went undiscovered because Boeing\u2019s preflight testing was cut short and used a faulty computer simulator.While Starliner was in flight, Boeing uncovered another software problem that should have been unearthed by testing on the ground \u2014 one that could have caused the service module to crash into the crew module before the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere.\u201cIt\u2019s important to remember we went into this flight \u2026 with a test plan,\u201d said Jim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch. \u201cWe had all agreed to that plan, and we executed the plan. And it wasn\u2019t good enough.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a result, NASA now plans on embedding some of its software experts with Boeing\u2019s team to oversee its work and testing more rigorously. Examples of corrective actions include fully testing all outcomes of the software instead of just the most likely ones as well as strengthening oversight of the software teams.\u201cWe had delegated too much authority to the software board to approve changes,\u201d Loverro said, referring to the engineering team reviewing software processes.Meanwhile, NASA\u2019s probe of Boeing and its processes continues, as the space agency tries to figure out when it will allow Boeing to try again.\u201cWe\u2019ll evaluate the results of their work,\u201d Loverro said. \u201cAnd we\u2019ll be in a position to decide whether we need another test flight or not. We are still a ways away from that. And I can\u2019t even tell you what the schedule is for making that decision because it\u2019s very dependent upon what we see as Boeing\u2019s corrective action plan.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChilton said Boeing has no \u201cintent to avoid [another test flight]. We stand ready to do it.\u201d A repeat of the test would come at an enormous cost for a program that already is unusually rigid and governed by a \u201cfirmed fixed-price cost\u201d contract. In case it does have to repeat the test, Boeing has taken a $410 million charge, it said during its most recent earnings call.Boeing has been under enormous financial strain since the grounding of its 737 Max airplane fleet after two fatal crashes killed a total of 346 people. Both the Max and Starliner failures were tied to software problems, and Chilton said Friday that the issues discovered during the Starliner investigation have been shared with the commercial airplane division.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCertainly we have what we consider a strong, and in fact we are strengthening our central and core engineering organizations both around software and other things,\u201d he said. \u201cThese learnings have been fed to those teams and I know are being applied across our enterprise. I\u2019m not aware of anything common or relevant to the 737 Max out of this.\u201d The call with NASA came as House investigators Friday released a damning report concluding that the mistakes on the 737 Max were a result of \u201ctechnical design failures, lack of transparency with both regulators and customers and efforts to obfuscate information about the operation of the aircraft.\u201d In the initial days and weeks after Boeing\u2019s test flight of its new spacecraft went awry, the company and NASA went to great lengths to highlight the positives of the mission. But more than two months after the failed flight, the space agency is being far more blunt about the poor performance of one of its most trusted contractors. NASA shows it\u2019s lost confidence in Boeing\u2019s ability to police its own work on Starliner space capsule",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6312",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/10/bezos-strahan-blue-origin-space-flight-record-year/",
        "text": "In one of the most remarkable years for human spaceflight, 2021 has seen flights in numbers that rival 1985, when NASA flew the space shuttle nine times and held on to hope that it would usher in an era of private citizens joining professional astronauts in orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat vision all but disappeared in January 1986 when the Challenger blew up on launch with teacher Christa McAuliffe on board. But this year, 35 years after that tragedy, a trio of private companies \u2014 SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic \u2014 and the space agencies of Russia and China have combined to make the dream of private space travel seem closer, at least for the well-to-do. Together, the flights took a diverse array of people outside the atmosphere, toppling a number of records and establishing some firsts, including the oldest and youngest people to go to space, the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk, the first space flight entirely comprising private citizens, and even the first feature film to be made in space, a feat undertaken by a Russian actress and film producer.Michael Strahan's flight to space lasted just over 10 minutes.On Wednesday morning, a Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off from the Baikonur launch center in Kazakhstan carrying a Russian cosmonaut, Alexander Misurkin, and a pair of civilian passengers, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano. Several hours later, their spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about 12 days. The mission is the eighth private-citizen trip to the space station arranged by Space Adventures, a Vienna, Va.-based company, which works with the Russian space agency.You are now free to move about the cosmos ... if you can afford itAnd Saturday morning, Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, ferried six tourists to space from its West Texas launch site. That group included Michael Strahan, the former National Football League player turned morning TV personality. The trip, which was postponed from Thursday because of high winds, was a suborbital ride that lasted slightly more than 10 minutes, but it was Blue Origin\u2019s third human spaceflight this year, with the company hoping next year to launch paying customers about once every other month. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaturday\u2019s launch was the 13th human spaceflight of the year, two more than in 1985, when NASA carried out those nine shuttle flights, and the Russian Soyuz vehicle carried astronauts on two launches.All of those flights reached orbit, while several of the flights this year barely scratched the edge of space in relatively short suborbital jaunts.Still, this year is \u201cthe busiest year in human spaceflight,\u201d Jennifer Levasseur, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re entering a new phase of activity that we\u2019ve never, frankly, seen before. And it creates a lot of excitement.\u201dSaturday\u2019s Blue Origin flight also carried Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor; Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space; and Laura Shepard Churchley, a daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space.Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house.Earlier this year, Blue Origin flew the youngest person to reach space, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. That flight, in July, also carried Bezos and his brother, Mark, as well as Wally Funk, an aviation enthusiast, who, at 82, became the oldest person to fly to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHer record didn\u2019t last long. Just three months later, William Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain Kirk on the 1960s-era \u201cStar Trek\u201d TV series, flew in Blue Origin\u2019s capsule at age 90.Virgin Galactic also flew two human space flights this year, including one with its founder, Richard Branson. Dave Mackay served as a pilot on both flights, allowing him to reach space twice in one year.In addition to launching two crews of professional astronauts from NASA and other countries\u2019 space agencies, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in September launched four private citizens, who spent three days orbiting Earth in the Dragon spacecraft as part of a mission dubbed Inspiration4.Story continues below advertisementChina, which is building a space station in low Earth orbit, flew two crewed missions this year, and Russia has flown three, including the flight this week.AdvertisementThe flurry of activity is reminiscent of 1985, Levasseur said, a time when NASA was optimistic that it would fly dozens of times a year, carrying all sorts of people to space.\u201cNASA was still ambitious enough to try to get multiple flights a year and seek the frequency they had promised,\u201d she said.In 1985, Jake Garn, then a U.S. senator from Utah, flew on the shuttle. He was followed in 1986 by Bill Nelson, then a congressman from Florida and now the NASA administrator. NASA had plans to fly a teacher, then a journalist and possibly an artist next. But the Challenger explosion ended that idea.Story continues below advertisementIt also provides a warning to the current providers of space travel \u2014 don\u2019t take your current success for granted. By the time of the disaster, NASA had flown the shuttle more than two dozen times. And subsequent investigations found that the leadership had grown complacent and ignored warnings from engineers who tried to stop the flight fearing the freezing temperatures could degrade critical components \u2014 as ultimately was determined to have been the case.Advertisement\u201cI think there\u2019s definitely something to be learned from the past and that is the issue of complacency,\u201d Levasseur said. \u201cPeople were focused on scheduling and the overarching goals of the program and did not focus on the details.\u201dWhile NASA and the private space companies would like to get to a routine flight cadence, she said that is still a ways away.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNone of this is routine,\u201d she warned. \u201cSo despite the fact that we can increase frequency, we shouldn\u2019t interpret that as being anywhere close to being routine.\u201dOn Twitter, Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and the space shuttle program manager, made a similar point, noting that while 1985 was a very busy year, \u201c1986 was expected to be busier. But we pushed too hard and had disaster. Let\u2019s hope 2022 stays safe no matter how busy it becomes.\u201d Saturday\u2019s launch of six people to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft will be the 13th human spaceflight of the year, the most ever since 1985. Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6313",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/10/bezos-strahan-blue-origin-space-flight-record-year/",
        "text": "In one of the most remarkable years for human spaceflight, 2021 has seen flights in numbers that rival 1985, when NASA flew the space shuttle nine times and held on to hope that it would usher in an era of private citizens joining professional astronauts in orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat vision all but disappeared in January 1986 when the Challenger blew up on launch with teacher Christa McAuliffe on board. But this year, 35 years after that tragedy, a trio of private companies \u2014 SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic \u2014 and the space agencies of Russia and China have combined to make the dream of private space travel seem closer, at least for the well-to-do. Together, the flights took a diverse array of people outside the atmosphere, toppling a number of records and establishing some firsts, including the oldest and youngest people to go to space, the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk, the first space flight entirely comprising private citizens, and even the first feature film to be made in space, a feat undertaken by a Russian actress and film producer.Michael Strahan's flight to space lasted just over 10 minutes.On Wednesday morning, a Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off from the Baikonur launch center in Kazakhstan carrying a Russian cosmonaut, Alexander Misurkin, and a pair of civilian passengers, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano. Several hours later, their spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about 12 days. The mission is the eighth private-citizen trip to the space station arranged by Space Adventures, a Vienna, Va.-based company, which works with the Russian space agency.You are now free to move about the cosmos ... if you can afford itAnd Saturday morning, Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, ferried six tourists to space from its West Texas launch site. That group included Michael Strahan, the former National Football League player turned morning TV personality. The trip, which was postponed from Thursday because of high winds, was a suborbital ride that lasted slightly more than 10 minutes, but it was Blue Origin\u2019s third human spaceflight this year, with the company hoping next year to launch paying customers about once every other month. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaturday\u2019s launch was the 13th human spaceflight of the year, two more than in 1985, when NASA carried out those nine shuttle flights, and the Russian Soyuz vehicle carried astronauts on two launches.All of those flights reached orbit, while several of the flights this year barely scratched the edge of space in relatively short suborbital jaunts.Still, this year is \u201cthe busiest year in human spaceflight,\u201d Jennifer Levasseur, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re entering a new phase of activity that we\u2019ve never, frankly, seen before. And it creates a lot of excitement.\u201dSaturday\u2019s Blue Origin flight also carried Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor; Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space; and Laura Shepard Churchley, a daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space.Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house.Earlier this year, Blue Origin flew the youngest person to reach space, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. That flight, in July, also carried Bezos and his brother, Mark, as well as Wally Funk, an aviation enthusiast, who, at 82, became the oldest person to fly to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHer record didn\u2019t last long. Just three months later, William Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain Kirk on the 1960s-era \u201cStar Trek\u201d TV series, flew in Blue Origin\u2019s capsule at age 90.Virgin Galactic also flew two human space flights this year, including one with its founder, Richard Branson. Dave Mackay served as a pilot on both flights, allowing him to reach space twice in one year.In addition to launching two crews of professional astronauts from NASA and other countries\u2019 space agencies, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in September launched four private citizens, who spent three days orbiting Earth in the Dragon spacecraft as part of a mission dubbed Inspiration4.Story continues below advertisementChina, which is building a space station in low Earth orbit, flew two crewed missions this year, and Russia has flown three, including the flight this week.AdvertisementThe flurry of activity is reminiscent of 1985, Levasseur said, a time when NASA was optimistic that it would fly dozens of times a year, carrying all sorts of people to space.\u201cNASA was still ambitious enough to try to get multiple flights a year and seek the frequency they had promised,\u201d she said.In 1985, Jake Garn, then a U.S. senator from Utah, flew on the shuttle. He was followed in 1986 by Bill Nelson, then a congressman from Florida and now the NASA administrator. NASA had plans to fly a teacher, then a journalist and possibly an artist next. But the Challenger explosion ended that idea.Story continues below advertisementIt also provides a warning to the current providers of space travel \u2014 don\u2019t take your current success for granted. By the time of the disaster, NASA had flown the shuttle more than two dozen times. And subsequent investigations found that the leadership had grown complacent and ignored warnings from engineers who tried to stop the flight fearing the freezing temperatures could degrade critical components \u2014 as ultimately was determined to have been the case.Advertisement\u201cI think there\u2019s definitely something to be learned from the past and that is the issue of complacency,\u201d Levasseur said. \u201cPeople were focused on scheduling and the overarching goals of the program and did not focus on the details.\u201dWhile NASA and the private space companies would like to get to a routine flight cadence, she said that is still a ways away.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNone of this is routine,\u201d she warned. \u201cSo despite the fact that we can increase frequency, we shouldn\u2019t interpret that as being anywhere close to being routine.\u201dOn Twitter, Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and the space shuttle program manager, made a similar point, noting that while 1985 was a very busy year, \u201c1986 was expected to be busier. But we pushed too hard and had disaster. Let\u2019s hope 2022 stays safe no matter how busy it becomes.\u201d Saturday\u2019s launch of six people to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft will be the 13th human spaceflight of the year, the most ever since 1985. Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6314",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/10/bezos-strahan-blue-origin-space-flight-record-year/",
        "text": "In one of the most remarkable years for human spaceflight, 2021 has seen flights in numbers that rival 1985, when NASA flew the space shuttle nine times and held on to hope that it would usher in an era of private citizens joining professional astronauts in orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat vision all but disappeared in January 1986 when the Challenger blew up on launch with teacher Christa McAuliffe on board. But this year, 35 years after that tragedy, a trio of private companies \u2014 SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic \u2014 and the space agencies of Russia and China have combined to make the dream of private space travel seem closer, at least for the well-to-do. Together, the flights took a diverse array of people outside the atmosphere, toppling a number of records and establishing some firsts, including the oldest and youngest people to go to space, the first Chinese woman to perform a spacewalk, the first space flight entirely comprising private citizens, and even the first feature film to be made in space, a feat undertaken by a Russian actress and film producer.Michael Strahan's flight to space lasted just over 10 minutes.On Wednesday morning, a Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off from the Baikonur launch center in Kazakhstan carrying a Russian cosmonaut, Alexander Misurkin, and a pair of civilian passengers, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano. Several hours later, their spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about 12 days. The mission is the eighth private-citizen trip to the space station arranged by Space Adventures, a Vienna, Va.-based company, which works with the Russian space agency.You are now free to move about the cosmos ... if you can afford itAnd Saturday morning, Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, ferried six tourists to space from its West Texas launch site. That group included Michael Strahan, the former National Football League player turned morning TV personality. The trip, which was postponed from Thursday because of high winds, was a suborbital ride that lasted slightly more than 10 minutes, but it was Blue Origin\u2019s third human spaceflight this year, with the company hoping next year to launch paying customers about once every other month. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSaturday\u2019s launch was the 13th human spaceflight of the year, two more than in 1985, when NASA carried out those nine shuttle flights, and the Russian Soyuz vehicle carried astronauts on two launches.All of those flights reached orbit, while several of the flights this year barely scratched the edge of space in relatively short suborbital jaunts.Still, this year is \u201cthe busiest year in human spaceflight,\u201d Jennifer Levasseur, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re entering a new phase of activity that we\u2019ve never, frankly, seen before. And it creates a lot of excitement.\u201dSaturday\u2019s Blue Origin flight also carried Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of space exploration firm Voyager Space; Evan Dick, an investor; Lane and Cameron Bess, the first parent-child pair to fly to space; and Laura Shepard Churchley, a daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space.Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house.Earlier this year, Blue Origin flew the youngest person to reach space, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands. That flight, in July, also carried Bezos and his brother, Mark, as well as Wally Funk, an aviation enthusiast, who, at 82, became the oldest person to fly to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHer record didn\u2019t last long. Just three months later, William Shatner, the actor who portrayed Captain Kirk on the 1960s-era \u201cStar Trek\u201d TV series, flew in Blue Origin\u2019s capsule at age 90.Virgin Galactic also flew two human space flights this year, including one with its founder, Richard Branson. Dave Mackay served as a pilot on both flights, allowing him to reach space twice in one year.In addition to launching two crews of professional astronauts from NASA and other countries\u2019 space agencies, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in September launched four private citizens, who spent three days orbiting Earth in the Dragon spacecraft as part of a mission dubbed Inspiration4.Story continues below advertisementChina, which is building a space station in low Earth orbit, flew two crewed missions this year, and Russia has flown three, including the flight this week.AdvertisementThe flurry of activity is reminiscent of 1985, Levasseur said, a time when NASA was optimistic that it would fly dozens of times a year, carrying all sorts of people to space.\u201cNASA was still ambitious enough to try to get multiple flights a year and seek the frequency they had promised,\u201d she said.In 1985, Jake Garn, then a U.S. senator from Utah, flew on the shuttle. He was followed in 1986 by Bill Nelson, then a congressman from Florida and now the NASA administrator. NASA had plans to fly a teacher, then a journalist and possibly an artist next. But the Challenger explosion ended that idea.Story continues below advertisementIt also provides a warning to the current providers of space travel \u2014 don\u2019t take your current success for granted. By the time of the disaster, NASA had flown the shuttle more than two dozen times. And subsequent investigations found that the leadership had grown complacent and ignored warnings from engineers who tried to stop the flight fearing the freezing temperatures could degrade critical components \u2014 as ultimately was determined to have been the case.Advertisement\u201cI think there\u2019s definitely something to be learned from the past and that is the issue of complacency,\u201d Levasseur said. \u201cPeople were focused on scheduling and the overarching goals of the program and did not focus on the details.\u201dWhile NASA and the private space companies would like to get to a routine flight cadence, she said that is still a ways away.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNone of this is routine,\u201d she warned. \u201cSo despite the fact that we can increase frequency, we shouldn\u2019t interpret that as being anywhere close to being routine.\u201dOn Twitter, Wayne Hale, a former NASA flight director and the space shuttle program manager, made a similar point, noting that while 1985 was a very busy year, \u201c1986 was expected to be busier. But we pushed too hard and had disaster. Let\u2019s hope 2022 stays safe no matter how busy it becomes.\u201d Saturday\u2019s launch of six people to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft will be the 13th human spaceflight of the year, the most ever since 1985. Jeff Bezos is sending Michael Strahan to space. But that\u2019s not what makes this flight significant.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Biden administration has set out to dismantle Trump\u2019s legacy, except in one area: Space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6315",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/02/biden-space-artemis-moon-trump/",
        "text": "In his first two weeks in office, President Biden wasted no time dismantling wide swaths of Donald Trump\u2019s legacy, revoking more than 30 orders signed by his predecessor while rejoining the Paris climate accord, ending the ban on travel from some Muslim-majority countries and halting construction on a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut there is one area of the former president\u2019s policy that Biden has embraced: space.The White House has announced support for two of Trump\u2019s signature initiatives \u2014 the Artemis program, NASA\u2019s effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and the Space Force, the sixth branch of the armed services.The endorsement of the Artemis program means it will become the first major deep-space human exploration effort with funding to survive a change in presidents since Apollo, after several fitful efforts to send astronauts back to the moon and beyond ultimately went nowhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor decades, presidential administrations have pointed NASA at varying targets \u2014 the moon, Mars, even an asteroid \u2014 only to have the programs stall or be killed by new occupants of the White House. That has frustrated proponents of space exploration, tarnished NASA\u2019s reputation and spawned lamentations that the Space Age\u2019s golden era of the 1960s and \u201970s will never be re-created.The Trump administration embraced exploration and directed NASA to speed up its moon campaign, directing it to land another man, and the first woman, on the lunar surface by 2024. Despite its lobbying campaign, the White House did not receive the full funding, some $3.3 billion, it said it needed to meet that goal. But for the first time since Apollo, Congress last year appropriated nearly $1 billion for a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Last month, when asked about the program, White House press secretary Jen Psaki initially said she did not know what the Biden administration\u2019s stance was. The next day she said the administration wholeheartedly embraced the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m very excited about it now to tell my daughter all about it,\u201d she said. \u201cSo for those of you who have not been following it as closely, through the Artemis program, the United States government will work with industry and international partners to send astronauts to the surface of moon \u2014 another man and a woman to the moon, which is very exciting \u2014 conduct new and exciting science, prepare for future missions to Mars and demonstrate America\u2019s values.\u201dThat position stands in stark contrast with those of previous administrations. During the presidency of George W. Bush, NASA was directed to go to the moon. Under Barack Obama, reaching an asteroid and Mars was the goal. Under Trump, it became the moon again.The Apollo program was an aberration, successful in part because of the Cold War space race with the Soviet Union and in part because it became an untouchable program after President John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination. It became, as John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute, put it, \u201ca memorial to a fallen young president.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough many in the space community thought the Trump administration\u2019s goal to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 was impossible and politically motivated, it gave the program momentum. And many at NASA were worried that the Biden administration, which said virtually nothing about space during the campaign, would change course again, continuing a record often compared to the scene in the cartoon strip \u201cPeanuts\u201d when Lucy pulls the football away just as Charlie Brown is about to kick it.Since coming into office, however, Biden has shown an interest in space. He installed a moon rock in the Oval Office, and the White House published a video of him watching NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars last month. Afterward Biden called to congratulate Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, who has spent more than 30 years at the space agency.Over the weekend, the White House released a video of Vice President Harris chatting with NASA astronaut Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to live for an extended time aboard the International Space Station.Madame Vice President, welcome to the International @Space_Station! https://t.co/LeysR4ltYi\u2014 Victor Glover (@AstroVicGlover) February 27, 2021\n\nIt is unclear whether the Biden administration will keep the National Space Council, which was resurrected by Trump and led, with great fanfare, by Vice President Mike Pence. The Biden administration has elevated the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a Cabinet-level agency, and many think it could become the coordinating body for space policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is also unclear when the Biden administration will name a nominee for NASA administrator. Recently, Psaki said she could not confirm reports that former senator Bill Nelson of Florida was in the running or provide a timeline for when the White House might name someone, saying the question was \u201can interesting one.\u201dWhoever the administrator is, that person will be overseeing what has now become the first moon program with significant funding since the Apollo era. For that, NASA \u2014 accustomed to lurching in a different direction every time there is a national election \u2014 is grateful.\u201cWe\u2019re so appreciative that the administration early on came out in support of Artemis, clearly and unambiguously,\u201d Jurczyk said. \u201cKeeping Artemis moving forward is not only important to NASA, but it\u2019s important to our commercial partners. \u2026 And it\u2019s really important to our international partners.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the Biden administration\u2019s endorsement of the Artemis program doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t put its own stamp on it.NASA has created what Jurczyk called \u201can internal NASA team\u201d to \u201ctake an independent look at the planning and provide feedback\u201d to the agency\u2019s leadership.The 2024 goal \u201cmay no longer be feasible,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was high-risk to start with, and it\u2019s certainly high-risk now. So we need to take a look at it and lay out the most efficient and effective path forward for Artemis.\u201dThere is support in Congress.\u201cI clearly want to keep building on what we\u2019ve done already,\u201d Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), the new chair of the House Science subcommittee on space and aeronautics, said in an interview. \u201cThe 2024 goal may have been a reach, so let\u2019s see what we can do to get our moon landing back on track.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd last month, 11 Democratic senators, including Colorado\u2019s John Hickenlooper, the new head of Senate Commerce subcommittee on science and space, wrote to Biden, urging him to continue funding for the Artemis program.\u201cMajor space exploration efforts have faced disruption as administrations have changed and priorities shifted,\u201d the letter read. \u201cIt is now time for stability if the nation is to make progress on these initiatives. NASA has made significant progress through the Artemis Program and we strongly believe that those efforts should continue.\u201d With the new president\u2019s support, the Artemis program to land astronauts on the moon will continue. The Biden administration has set out to dismantle Trump\u2019s legacy, except in one area: Space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Biden administration has set out to dismantle Trump\u2019s legacy, except in one area: Space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6316",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/02/biden-space-artemis-moon-trump/",
        "text": "In his first two weeks in office, President Biden wasted no time dismantling wide swaths of Donald Trump\u2019s legacy, revoking more than 30 orders signed by his predecessor while rejoining the Paris climate accord, ending the ban on travel from some Muslim-majority countries and halting construction on a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut there is one area of the former president\u2019s policy that Biden has embraced: space.The White House has announced support for two of Trump\u2019s signature initiatives \u2014 the Artemis program, NASA\u2019s effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and the Space Force, the sixth branch of the armed services.The endorsement of the Artemis program means it will become the first major deep-space human exploration effort with funding to survive a change in presidents since Apollo, after several fitful efforts to send astronauts back to the moon and beyond ultimately went nowhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor decades, presidential administrations have pointed NASA at varying targets \u2014 the moon, Mars, even an asteroid \u2014 only to have the programs stall or be killed by new occupants of the White House. That has frustrated proponents of space exploration, tarnished NASA\u2019s reputation and spawned lamentations that the Space Age\u2019s golden era of the 1960s and \u201970s will never be re-created.The Trump administration embraced exploration and directed NASA to speed up its moon campaign, directing it to land another man, and the first woman, on the lunar surface by 2024. Despite its lobbying campaign, the White House did not receive the full funding, some $3.3 billion, it said it needed to meet that goal. But for the first time since Apollo, Congress last year appropriated nearly $1 billion for a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Last month, when asked about the program, White House press secretary Jen Psaki initially said she did not know what the Biden administration\u2019s stance was. The next day she said the administration wholeheartedly embraced the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m very excited about it now to tell my daughter all about it,\u201d she said. \u201cSo for those of you who have not been following it as closely, through the Artemis program, the United States government will work with industry and international partners to send astronauts to the surface of moon \u2014 another man and a woman to the moon, which is very exciting \u2014 conduct new and exciting science, prepare for future missions to Mars and demonstrate America\u2019s values.\u201dThat position stands in stark contrast with those of previous administrations. During the presidency of George W. Bush, NASA was directed to go to the moon. Under Barack Obama, reaching an asteroid and Mars was the goal. Under Trump, it became the moon again.The Apollo program was an aberration, successful in part because of the Cold War space race with the Soviet Union and in part because it became an untouchable program after President John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination. It became, as John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute, put it, \u201ca memorial to a fallen young president.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough many in the space community thought the Trump administration\u2019s goal to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 was impossible and politically motivated, it gave the program momentum. And many at NASA were worried that the Biden administration, which said virtually nothing about space during the campaign, would change course again, continuing a record often compared to the scene in the cartoon strip \u201cPeanuts\u201d when Lucy pulls the football away just as Charlie Brown is about to kick it.Since coming into office, however, Biden has shown an interest in space. He installed a moon rock in the Oval Office, and the White House published a video of him watching NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars last month. Afterward Biden called to congratulate Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, who has spent more than 30 years at the space agency.Over the weekend, the White House released a video of Vice President Harris chatting with NASA astronaut Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to live for an extended time aboard the International Space Station.Madame Vice President, welcome to the International @Space_Station! https://t.co/LeysR4ltYi\u2014 Victor Glover (@AstroVicGlover) February 27, 2021\n\nIt is unclear whether the Biden administration will keep the National Space Council, which was resurrected by Trump and led, with great fanfare, by Vice President Mike Pence. The Biden administration has elevated the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a Cabinet-level agency, and many think it could become the coordinating body for space policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is also unclear when the Biden administration will name a nominee for NASA administrator. Recently, Psaki said she could not confirm reports that former senator Bill Nelson of Florida was in the running or provide a timeline for when the White House might name someone, saying the question was \u201can interesting one.\u201dWhoever the administrator is, that person will be overseeing what has now become the first moon program with significant funding since the Apollo era. For that, NASA \u2014 accustomed to lurching in a different direction every time there is a national election \u2014 is grateful.\u201cWe\u2019re so appreciative that the administration early on came out in support of Artemis, clearly and unambiguously,\u201d Jurczyk said. \u201cKeeping Artemis moving forward is not only important to NASA, but it\u2019s important to our commercial partners. \u2026 And it\u2019s really important to our international partners.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the Biden administration\u2019s endorsement of the Artemis program doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t put its own stamp on it.NASA has created what Jurczyk called \u201can internal NASA team\u201d to \u201ctake an independent look at the planning and provide feedback\u201d to the agency\u2019s leadership.The 2024 goal \u201cmay no longer be feasible,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was high-risk to start with, and it\u2019s certainly high-risk now. So we need to take a look at it and lay out the most efficient and effective path forward for Artemis.\u201dThere is support in Congress.\u201cI clearly want to keep building on what we\u2019ve done already,\u201d Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), the new chair of the House Science subcommittee on space and aeronautics, said in an interview. \u201cThe 2024 goal may have been a reach, so let\u2019s see what we can do to get our moon landing back on track.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd last month, 11 Democratic senators, including Colorado\u2019s John Hickenlooper, the new head of Senate Commerce subcommittee on science and space, wrote to Biden, urging him to continue funding for the Artemis program.\u201cMajor space exploration efforts have faced disruption as administrations have changed and priorities shifted,\u201d the letter read. \u201cIt is now time for stability if the nation is to make progress on these initiatives. NASA has made significant progress through the Artemis Program and we strongly believe that those efforts should continue.\u201d With the new president\u2019s support, the Artemis program to land astronauts on the moon will continue. The Biden administration has set out to dismantle Trump\u2019s legacy, except in one area: Space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Biden administration has set out to dismantle Trump\u2019s legacy, except in one area: Space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6317",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/02/biden-space-artemis-moon-trump/",
        "text": "In his first two weeks in office, President Biden wasted no time dismantling wide swaths of Donald Trump\u2019s legacy, revoking more than 30 orders signed by his predecessor while rejoining the Paris climate accord, ending the ban on travel from some Muslim-majority countries and halting construction on a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut there is one area of the former president\u2019s policy that Biden has embraced: space.The White House has announced support for two of Trump\u2019s signature initiatives \u2014 the Artemis program, NASA\u2019s effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and the Space Force, the sixth branch of the armed services.The endorsement of the Artemis program means it will become the first major deep-space human exploration effort with funding to survive a change in presidents since Apollo, after several fitful efforts to send astronauts back to the moon and beyond ultimately went nowhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor decades, presidential administrations have pointed NASA at varying targets \u2014 the moon, Mars, even an asteroid \u2014 only to have the programs stall or be killed by new occupants of the White House. That has frustrated proponents of space exploration, tarnished NASA\u2019s reputation and spawned lamentations that the Space Age\u2019s golden era of the 1960s and \u201970s will never be re-created.The Trump administration embraced exploration and directed NASA to speed up its moon campaign, directing it to land another man, and the first woman, on the lunar surface by 2024. Despite its lobbying campaign, the White House did not receive the full funding, some $3.3 billion, it said it needed to meet that goal. But for the first time since Apollo, Congress last year appropriated nearly $1 billion for a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Last month, when asked about the program, White House press secretary Jen Psaki initially said she did not know what the Biden administration\u2019s stance was. The next day she said the administration wholeheartedly embraced the program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m very excited about it now to tell my daughter all about it,\u201d she said. \u201cSo for those of you who have not been following it as closely, through the Artemis program, the United States government will work with industry and international partners to send astronauts to the surface of moon \u2014 another man and a woman to the moon, which is very exciting \u2014 conduct new and exciting science, prepare for future missions to Mars and demonstrate America\u2019s values.\u201dThat position stands in stark contrast with those of previous administrations. During the presidency of George W. Bush, NASA was directed to go to the moon. Under Barack Obama, reaching an asteroid and Mars was the goal. Under Trump, it became the moon again.The Apollo program was an aberration, successful in part because of the Cold War space race with the Soviet Union and in part because it became an untouchable program after President John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination. It became, as John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute, put it, \u201ca memorial to a fallen young president.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough many in the space community thought the Trump administration\u2019s goal to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 was impossible and politically motivated, it gave the program momentum. And many at NASA were worried that the Biden administration, which said virtually nothing about space during the campaign, would change course again, continuing a record often compared to the scene in the cartoon strip \u201cPeanuts\u201d when Lucy pulls the football away just as Charlie Brown is about to kick it.Since coming into office, however, Biden has shown an interest in space. He installed a moon rock in the Oval Office, and the White House published a video of him watching NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landing on Mars last month. Afterward Biden called to congratulate Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, who has spent more than 30 years at the space agency.Over the weekend, the White House released a video of Vice President Harris chatting with NASA astronaut Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to live for an extended time aboard the International Space Station.Madame Vice President, welcome to the International @Space_Station! https://t.co/LeysR4ltYi\u2014 Victor Glover (@AstroVicGlover) February 27, 2021\n\nIt is unclear whether the Biden administration will keep the National Space Council, which was resurrected by Trump and led, with great fanfare, by Vice President Mike Pence. The Biden administration has elevated the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a Cabinet-level agency, and many think it could become the coordinating body for space policy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is also unclear when the Biden administration will name a nominee for NASA administrator. Recently, Psaki said she could not confirm reports that former senator Bill Nelson of Florida was in the running or provide a timeline for when the White House might name someone, saying the question was \u201can interesting one.\u201dWhoever the administrator is, that person will be overseeing what has now become the first moon program with significant funding since the Apollo era. For that, NASA \u2014 accustomed to lurching in a different direction every time there is a national election \u2014 is grateful.\u201cWe\u2019re so appreciative that the administration early on came out in support of Artemis, clearly and unambiguously,\u201d Jurczyk said. \u201cKeeping Artemis moving forward is not only important to NASA, but it\u2019s important to our commercial partners. \u2026 And it\u2019s really important to our international partners.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the Biden administration\u2019s endorsement of the Artemis program doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t put its own stamp on it.NASA has created what Jurczyk called \u201can internal NASA team\u201d to \u201ctake an independent look at the planning and provide feedback\u201d to the agency\u2019s leadership.The 2024 goal \u201cmay no longer be feasible,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was high-risk to start with, and it\u2019s certainly high-risk now. So we need to take a look at it and lay out the most efficient and effective path forward for Artemis.\u201dThere is support in Congress.\u201cI clearly want to keep building on what we\u2019ve done already,\u201d Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), the new chair of the House Science subcommittee on space and aeronautics, said in an interview. \u201cThe 2024 goal may have been a reach, so let\u2019s see what we can do to get our moon landing back on track.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd last month, 11 Democratic senators, including Colorado\u2019s John Hickenlooper, the new head of Senate Commerce subcommittee on science and space, wrote to Biden, urging him to continue funding for the Artemis program.\u201cMajor space exploration efforts have faced disruption as administrations have changed and priorities shifted,\u201d the letter read. \u201cIt is now time for stability if the nation is to make progress on these initiatives. NASA has made significant progress through the Artemis Program and we strongly believe that those efforts should continue.\u201d With the new president\u2019s support, the Artemis program to land astronauts on the moon will continue. The Biden administration has set out to dismantle Trump\u2019s legacy, except in one area: Space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6318",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/17/china-space-race-nasa/",
        "text": "In an effort to galvanize NASA\u2019s return to the moon, then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2019 sought to re-create the 1960s Cold War space race, when the United States beat the Soviet Union to the lunar surface. But this time the role of rival was played not by the U.S.S.R., but by China, which Pence warned was trying \u201cto seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s spacefaring nation.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBill Nelson, President Biden\u2019s new NASA administrator, has carried on that hawkish rhetoric, casting China as \u201ca very aggressive competitor\u201d that has big ambitions in space and is challenging America\u2019s leadership. \u201cWatch the Chinese,\u201d he recently warned.Nelson\u2019s strategy, like the Trump administration\u2019s, is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. It\u2019s a scenario that got a boost Thursday when China launched the first group of astronauts to its nascent space station for what is expected to be a three-month stay \u2014 the longest duration space mission ever by a Chinese crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome doubt the wisdom of Nelson\u2019s approach, however.\u201cMaking the Chinese space station out to be such a serious threat is a mistake as it plays into China\u2019s own political goals,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank whose mission statement calls for the promotion of \u201cideas and actions to achieve the secure, sustainable, and peaceful uses of space benefiting Earth and all its peoples.\u201d\u201cChina is trying to use its space station to show that it, too, is a space power, and these constant allusions to a space race and concerns about the threat posed by their space station are reinforcing that message,\u201d Weeden said. Thursday\u2019s launch, he said, was \u201can important achievement, but it does not mean China has equaled, let alone surpassed, the U.S.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCooperation with China in space is not on the horizon. NASA, which landed men on the moon in 1969 and has had crew living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years, has been barred by law since 2011 from partnering with China \u2014 no Chinese astronaut has ever been aboard the International Space Station, which has been host to astronauts from nearly 20 nations. There is no prospect of that changing anytime soon in a Washington where China is seen as a fierce competitor in a wide range of technological endeavors, from quantum computers to the rollout of 5G.That is especially true for space, because the technologies used in space also are used for national defense, said Scott Kennedy, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cThese deep concerns about China as a military competitor forestalls cooperation in dual-use technologies, and there are no technologies used in space that aren\u2019t dual-use,\u201d he said. U.S. and Chinese cooperation in space, he said, would require the kind of detente that the United States and Soviet Union achieved toward the end of the Cold War. \u201cBut we are very far from that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space agency has shown remarkable progress on its path to becoming a preeminent spacefaring power. In 2019, it landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a first. Last month, it became only the second country, after the United States, to land a rover on Mars. Earlier this week, China and Russia announced plans to build an international base on the moon. And then came Thursday\u2019s launch.About six hours after that launch, the astronauts docked with China\u2019s Tiangong space station.In a statement, Nelson congratulated China \u201con the successful launch of crew to their space station! I look forward to the scientific discoveries to come.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut, like the Trump administration before him, Nelson has sought to leverage China\u2019s space ambitions as a way to get Congress to fund NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon, while the space agency works to build an international coalition of its own.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceNASA had been planning to fly astronauts to the moon by 2028. But the Trump administration sought to accelerate that, mandating the space agency do it by 2024, a highly aggressive timetable that few thought possible. Under the Biden administration, NASA is reviewing the lunar program, dubbed Artemis, but Nelson has embraced it and its aggressive timeline. And he has spent his first few weeks as NASA administrator picking up where his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine, left off: lobbying Congress for the funds to make it happen.AdvertisementNelson\u2019s strategy, in part, is to cast China as a competitor.Story continues below advertisementSpeaking before House appropriators last month, Nelson said that China was seeking to land humans on the moon in the 2020s. That, he said, should motivate Congress to give NASA more money for its Artemis program as it seeks to develop a spacecraft, known as the Human Landing System, that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. In addition to the Artemis program, Nelson also has called for the life of the International Space Station, which has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years, to be extended to 2030.Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the lunar lander, well short of NASA\u2019s $3.3 billion request. In its request for funding in this year\u2019s budget, NASA has requested $1.2 billion for the lander, but the program is tied up in litigation.AdvertisementMeanwhile, Nelson has said he hopes Congress gives NASA the money it needs to compete. China\u2019s lunar ambitions \u201cshould tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get on our Human Landing System program going, vigorously, and NASA can\u2019t do it alone,\u201d he said during the House hearing.Story continues below advertisementAt another point in the hearing, he held up a photograph for the committee of the Zhurong rover that landed on Mars last month. \u201cI want you to see this photograph,\u201d he said, adding that it was a part of China\u2019s goal to eclipse the United States in space.The United States has had a proliferation of human space successes recently. Over the past year, SpaceX flew three human spaceflight missions for NASA. Boeing also hopes to fly one by the end of this year. And Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are continuing development of their suborbital space tourism programs.AdvertisementA key part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program is stalled, however.After NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract in April to use its Starship spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor, protested the award with the Government Accountability Office. That has forced NASA to put a hold on the contract. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Congress passed a bill that would require NASA to award two lunar lander contracts for future lunar missions. But it\u2019s not clear that the $10 billion authorized to fund the contracts will get appropriated by Congress.A recent bright spot for the program, though, is NASA\u2019s much-beleaguered Space Launch System rocket, which would send NASA astronauts to the moon. After years of delays, it successfully completed a full-duration engine test. The 212-foot core stage of the rocket was shipped to the Kennedy Space Center, where it has been mated with its side solid rocket boosters. Nelson has repeatedly said it could fly for the first time this year in a trip that would propel the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, on an autonomous trip around the moon.AdvertisementNASA also is building an international coalition to support the lunar mission and create norms of behavior in space. Signatories to the Artemis Accords would be able to partner with NASA in its lunar exploration program but would be required to adhere to a set of standards including the public release of scientific data. The program began in 2020 under the Trump administration but has been continued under Biden. Earlier this week, Nelson welcomed Brazil as the newest signatory.Story continues below advertisementChina, meanwhile, also is seeking international collaboration for the moon. Earlier this week, it announced an International Lunar Research Station, a joint program with Russia. In a statement, the two countries\u2019 space agencies said they \u201cjointly invite all interested international partners to cooperate and contribute more for the peaceful exploration and use of [the] moon in the interests of all humankind, adhering to the principle of equality, openness and integrity.\u201d The strategy is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6319",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/17/china-space-race-nasa/",
        "text": "In an effort to galvanize NASA\u2019s return to the moon, then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2019 sought to re-create the 1960s Cold War space race, when the United States beat the Soviet Union to the lunar surface. But this time the role of rival was played not by the U.S.S.R., but by China, which Pence warned was trying \u201cto seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s spacefaring nation.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBill Nelson, President Biden\u2019s new NASA administrator, has carried on that hawkish rhetoric, casting China as \u201ca very aggressive competitor\u201d that has big ambitions in space and is challenging America\u2019s leadership. \u201cWatch the Chinese,\u201d he recently warned.Nelson\u2019s strategy, like the Trump administration\u2019s, is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. It\u2019s a scenario that got a boost Thursday when China launched the first group of astronauts to its nascent space station for what is expected to be a three-month stay \u2014 the longest duration space mission ever by a Chinese crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome doubt the wisdom of Nelson\u2019s approach, however.\u201cMaking the Chinese space station out to be such a serious threat is a mistake as it plays into China\u2019s own political goals,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank whose mission statement calls for the promotion of \u201cideas and actions to achieve the secure, sustainable, and peaceful uses of space benefiting Earth and all its peoples.\u201d\u201cChina is trying to use its space station to show that it, too, is a space power, and these constant allusions to a space race and concerns about the threat posed by their space station are reinforcing that message,\u201d Weeden said. Thursday\u2019s launch, he said, was \u201can important achievement, but it does not mean China has equaled, let alone surpassed, the U.S.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCooperation with China in space is not on the horizon. NASA, which landed men on the moon in 1969 and has had crew living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years, has been barred by law since 2011 from partnering with China \u2014 no Chinese astronaut has ever been aboard the International Space Station, which has been host to astronauts from nearly 20 nations. There is no prospect of that changing anytime soon in a Washington where China is seen as a fierce competitor in a wide range of technological endeavors, from quantum computers to the rollout of 5G.That is especially true for space, because the technologies used in space also are used for national defense, said Scott Kennedy, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cThese deep concerns about China as a military competitor forestalls cooperation in dual-use technologies, and there are no technologies used in space that aren\u2019t dual-use,\u201d he said. U.S. and Chinese cooperation in space, he said, would require the kind of detente that the United States and Soviet Union achieved toward the end of the Cold War. \u201cBut we are very far from that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space agency has shown remarkable progress on its path to becoming a preeminent spacefaring power. In 2019, it landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a first. Last month, it became only the second country, after the United States, to land a rover on Mars. Earlier this week, China and Russia announced plans to build an international base on the moon. And then came Thursday\u2019s launch.About six hours after that launch, the astronauts docked with China\u2019s Tiangong space station.In a statement, Nelson congratulated China \u201con the successful launch of crew to their space station! I look forward to the scientific discoveries to come.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut, like the Trump administration before him, Nelson has sought to leverage China\u2019s space ambitions as a way to get Congress to fund NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon, while the space agency works to build an international coalition of its own.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceNASA had been planning to fly astronauts to the moon by 2028. But the Trump administration sought to accelerate that, mandating the space agency do it by 2024, a highly aggressive timetable that few thought possible. Under the Biden administration, NASA is reviewing the lunar program, dubbed Artemis, but Nelson has embraced it and its aggressive timeline. And he has spent his first few weeks as NASA administrator picking up where his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine, left off: lobbying Congress for the funds to make it happen.AdvertisementNelson\u2019s strategy, in part, is to cast China as a competitor.Story continues below advertisementSpeaking before House appropriators last month, Nelson said that China was seeking to land humans on the moon in the 2020s. That, he said, should motivate Congress to give NASA more money for its Artemis program as it seeks to develop a spacecraft, known as the Human Landing System, that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. In addition to the Artemis program, Nelson also has called for the life of the International Space Station, which has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years, to be extended to 2030.Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the lunar lander, well short of NASA\u2019s $3.3 billion request. In its request for funding in this year\u2019s budget, NASA has requested $1.2 billion for the lander, but the program is tied up in litigation.AdvertisementMeanwhile, Nelson has said he hopes Congress gives NASA the money it needs to compete. China\u2019s lunar ambitions \u201cshould tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get on our Human Landing System program going, vigorously, and NASA can\u2019t do it alone,\u201d he said during the House hearing.Story continues below advertisementAt another point in the hearing, he held up a photograph for the committee of the Zhurong rover that landed on Mars last month. \u201cI want you to see this photograph,\u201d he said, adding that it was a part of China\u2019s goal to eclipse the United States in space.The United States has had a proliferation of human space successes recently. Over the past year, SpaceX flew three human spaceflight missions for NASA. Boeing also hopes to fly one by the end of this year. And Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are continuing development of their suborbital space tourism programs.AdvertisementA key part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program is stalled, however.After NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract in April to use its Starship spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor, protested the award with the Government Accountability Office. That has forced NASA to put a hold on the contract. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Congress passed a bill that would require NASA to award two lunar lander contracts for future lunar missions. But it\u2019s not clear that the $10 billion authorized to fund the contracts will get appropriated by Congress.A recent bright spot for the program, though, is NASA\u2019s much-beleaguered Space Launch System rocket, which would send NASA astronauts to the moon. After years of delays, it successfully completed a full-duration engine test. The 212-foot core stage of the rocket was shipped to the Kennedy Space Center, where it has been mated with its side solid rocket boosters. Nelson has repeatedly said it could fly for the first time this year in a trip that would propel the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, on an autonomous trip around the moon.AdvertisementNASA also is building an international coalition to support the lunar mission and create norms of behavior in space. Signatories to the Artemis Accords would be able to partner with NASA in its lunar exploration program but would be required to adhere to a set of standards including the public release of scientific data. The program began in 2020 under the Trump administration but has been continued under Biden. Earlier this week, Nelson welcomed Brazil as the newest signatory.Story continues below advertisementChina, meanwhile, also is seeking international collaboration for the moon. Earlier this week, it announced an International Lunar Research Station, a joint program with Russia. In a statement, the two countries\u2019 space agencies said they \u201cjointly invite all interested international partners to cooperate and contribute more for the peaceful exploration and use of [the] moon in the interests of all humankind, adhering to the principle of equality, openness and integrity.\u201d The strategy is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6320",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/17/china-space-race-nasa/",
        "text": "In an effort to galvanize NASA\u2019s return to the moon, then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2019 sought to re-create the 1960s Cold War space race, when the United States beat the Soviet Union to the lunar surface. But this time the role of rival was played not by the U.S.S.R., but by China, which Pence warned was trying \u201cto seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s spacefaring nation.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBill Nelson, President Biden\u2019s new NASA administrator, has carried on that hawkish rhetoric, casting China as \u201ca very aggressive competitor\u201d that has big ambitions in space and is challenging America\u2019s leadership. \u201cWatch the Chinese,\u201d he recently warned.Nelson\u2019s strategy, like the Trump administration\u2019s, is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. It\u2019s a scenario that got a boost Thursday when China launched the first group of astronauts to its nascent space station for what is expected to be a three-month stay \u2014 the longest duration space mission ever by a Chinese crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome doubt the wisdom of Nelson\u2019s approach, however.\u201cMaking the Chinese space station out to be such a serious threat is a mistake as it plays into China\u2019s own political goals,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank whose mission statement calls for the promotion of \u201cideas and actions to achieve the secure, sustainable, and peaceful uses of space benefiting Earth and all its peoples.\u201d\u201cChina is trying to use its space station to show that it, too, is a space power, and these constant allusions to a space race and concerns about the threat posed by their space station are reinforcing that message,\u201d Weeden said. Thursday\u2019s launch, he said, was \u201can important achievement, but it does not mean China has equaled, let alone surpassed, the U.S.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCooperation with China in space is not on the horizon. NASA, which landed men on the moon in 1969 and has had crew living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years, has been barred by law since 2011 from partnering with China \u2014 no Chinese astronaut has ever been aboard the International Space Station, which has been host to astronauts from nearly 20 nations. There is no prospect of that changing anytime soon in a Washington where China is seen as a fierce competitor in a wide range of technological endeavors, from quantum computers to the rollout of 5G.That is especially true for space, because the technologies used in space also are used for national defense, said Scott Kennedy, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cThese deep concerns about China as a military competitor forestalls cooperation in dual-use technologies, and there are no technologies used in space that aren\u2019t dual-use,\u201d he said. U.S. and Chinese cooperation in space, he said, would require the kind of detente that the United States and Soviet Union achieved toward the end of the Cold War. \u201cBut we are very far from that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space agency has shown remarkable progress on its path to becoming a preeminent spacefaring power. In 2019, it landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a first. Last month, it became only the second country, after the United States, to land a rover on Mars. Earlier this week, China and Russia announced plans to build an international base on the moon. And then came Thursday\u2019s launch.About six hours after that launch, the astronauts docked with China\u2019s Tiangong space station.In a statement, Nelson congratulated China \u201con the successful launch of crew to their space station! I look forward to the scientific discoveries to come.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut, like the Trump administration before him, Nelson has sought to leverage China\u2019s space ambitions as a way to get Congress to fund NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon, while the space agency works to build an international coalition of its own.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceNASA had been planning to fly astronauts to the moon by 2028. But the Trump administration sought to accelerate that, mandating the space agency do it by 2024, a highly aggressive timetable that few thought possible. Under the Biden administration, NASA is reviewing the lunar program, dubbed Artemis, but Nelson has embraced it and its aggressive timeline. And he has spent his first few weeks as NASA administrator picking up where his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine, left off: lobbying Congress for the funds to make it happen.AdvertisementNelson\u2019s strategy, in part, is to cast China as a competitor.Story continues below advertisementSpeaking before House appropriators last month, Nelson said that China was seeking to land humans on the moon in the 2020s. That, he said, should motivate Congress to give NASA more money for its Artemis program as it seeks to develop a spacecraft, known as the Human Landing System, that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. In addition to the Artemis program, Nelson also has called for the life of the International Space Station, which has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years, to be extended to 2030.Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the lunar lander, well short of NASA\u2019s $3.3 billion request. In its request for funding in this year\u2019s budget, NASA has requested $1.2 billion for the lander, but the program is tied up in litigation.AdvertisementMeanwhile, Nelson has said he hopes Congress gives NASA the money it needs to compete. China\u2019s lunar ambitions \u201cshould tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get on our Human Landing System program going, vigorously, and NASA can\u2019t do it alone,\u201d he said during the House hearing.Story continues below advertisementAt another point in the hearing, he held up a photograph for the committee of the Zhurong rover that landed on Mars last month. \u201cI want you to see this photograph,\u201d he said, adding that it was a part of China\u2019s goal to eclipse the United States in space.The United States has had a proliferation of human space successes recently. Over the past year, SpaceX flew three human spaceflight missions for NASA. Boeing also hopes to fly one by the end of this year. And Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are continuing development of their suborbital space tourism programs.AdvertisementA key part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program is stalled, however.After NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract in April to use its Starship spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor, protested the award with the Government Accountability Office. That has forced NASA to put a hold on the contract. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Congress passed a bill that would require NASA to award two lunar lander contracts for future lunar missions. But it\u2019s not clear that the $10 billion authorized to fund the contracts will get appropriated by Congress.A recent bright spot for the program, though, is NASA\u2019s much-beleaguered Space Launch System rocket, which would send NASA astronauts to the moon. After years of delays, it successfully completed a full-duration engine test. The 212-foot core stage of the rocket was shipped to the Kennedy Space Center, where it has been mated with its side solid rocket boosters. Nelson has repeatedly said it could fly for the first time this year in a trip that would propel the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, on an autonomous trip around the moon.AdvertisementNASA also is building an international coalition to support the lunar mission and create norms of behavior in space. Signatories to the Artemis Accords would be able to partner with NASA in its lunar exploration program but would be required to adhere to a set of standards including the public release of scientific data. The program began in 2020 under the Trump administration but has been continued under Biden. Earlier this week, Nelson welcomed Brazil as the newest signatory.Story continues below advertisementChina, meanwhile, also is seeking international collaboration for the moon. Earlier this week, it announced an International Lunar Research Station, a joint program with Russia. In a statement, the two countries\u2019 space agencies said they \u201cjointly invite all interested international partners to cooperate and contribute more for the peaceful exploration and use of [the] moon in the interests of all humankind, adhering to the principle of equality, openness and integrity.\u201d The strategy is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6321",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/17/china-space-race-nasa/",
        "text": "In an effort to galvanize NASA\u2019s return to the moon, then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2019 sought to re-create the 1960s Cold War space race, when the United States beat the Soviet Union to the lunar surface. But this time the role of rival was played not by the U.S.S.R., but by China, which Pence warned was trying \u201cto seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s spacefaring nation.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBill Nelson, President Biden\u2019s new NASA administrator, has carried on that hawkish rhetoric, casting China as \u201ca very aggressive competitor\u201d that has big ambitions in space and is challenging America\u2019s leadership. \u201cWatch the Chinese,\u201d he recently warned.Nelson\u2019s strategy, like the Trump administration\u2019s, is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. It\u2019s a scenario that got a boost Thursday when China launched the first group of astronauts to its nascent space station for what is expected to be a three-month stay \u2014 the longest duration space mission ever by a Chinese crew.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome doubt the wisdom of Nelson\u2019s approach, however.\u201cMaking the Chinese space station out to be such a serious threat is a mistake as it plays into China\u2019s own political goals,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank whose mission statement calls for the promotion of \u201cideas and actions to achieve the secure, sustainable, and peaceful uses of space benefiting Earth and all its peoples.\u201d\u201cChina is trying to use its space station to show that it, too, is a space power, and these constant allusions to a space race and concerns about the threat posed by their space station are reinforcing that message,\u201d Weeden said. Thursday\u2019s launch, he said, was \u201can important achievement, but it does not mean China has equaled, let alone surpassed, the U.S.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCooperation with China in space is not on the horizon. NASA, which landed men on the moon in 1969 and has had crew living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years, has been barred by law since 2011 from partnering with China \u2014 no Chinese astronaut has ever been aboard the International Space Station, which has been host to astronauts from nearly 20 nations. There is no prospect of that changing anytime soon in a Washington where China is seen as a fierce competitor in a wide range of technological endeavors, from quantum computers to the rollout of 5G.That is especially true for space, because the technologies used in space also are used for national defense, said Scott Kennedy, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cThese deep concerns about China as a military competitor forestalls cooperation in dual-use technologies, and there are no technologies used in space that aren\u2019t dual-use,\u201d he said. U.S. and Chinese cooperation in space, he said, would require the kind of detente that the United States and Soviet Union achieved toward the end of the Cold War. \u201cBut we are very far from that.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChina\u2019s space agency has shown remarkable progress on its path to becoming a preeminent spacefaring power. In 2019, it landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a first. Last month, it became only the second country, after the United States, to land a rover on Mars. Earlier this week, China and Russia announced plans to build an international base on the moon. And then came Thursday\u2019s launch.About six hours after that launch, the astronauts docked with China\u2019s Tiangong space station.In a statement, Nelson congratulated China \u201con the successful launch of crew to their space station! I look forward to the scientific discoveries to come.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut, like the Trump administration before him, Nelson has sought to leverage China\u2019s space ambitions as a way to get Congress to fund NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon, while the space agency works to build an international coalition of its own.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceNASA had been planning to fly astronauts to the moon by 2028. But the Trump administration sought to accelerate that, mandating the space agency do it by 2024, a highly aggressive timetable that few thought possible. Under the Biden administration, NASA is reviewing the lunar program, dubbed Artemis, but Nelson has embraced it and its aggressive timeline. And he has spent his first few weeks as NASA administrator picking up where his predecessor, Jim Bridenstine, left off: lobbying Congress for the funds to make it happen.AdvertisementNelson\u2019s strategy, in part, is to cast China as a competitor.Story continues below advertisementSpeaking before House appropriators last month, Nelson said that China was seeking to land humans on the moon in the 2020s. That, he said, should motivate Congress to give NASA more money for its Artemis program as it seeks to develop a spacecraft, known as the Human Landing System, that would ferry astronauts to the lunar surface. In addition to the Artemis program, Nelson also has called for the life of the International Space Station, which has had humans living on it continuously for more than 20 years, to be extended to 2030.Last year, Congress appropriated $850 million for the lunar lander, well short of NASA\u2019s $3.3 billion request. In its request for funding in this year\u2019s budget, NASA has requested $1.2 billion for the lander, but the program is tied up in litigation.AdvertisementMeanwhile, Nelson has said he hopes Congress gives NASA the money it needs to compete. China\u2019s lunar ambitions \u201cshould tell us something about our need to get off our duff and get on our Human Landing System program going, vigorously, and NASA can\u2019t do it alone,\u201d he said during the House hearing.Story continues below advertisementAt another point in the hearing, he held up a photograph for the committee of the Zhurong rover that landed on Mars last month. \u201cI want you to see this photograph,\u201d he said, adding that it was a part of China\u2019s goal to eclipse the United States in space.The United States has had a proliferation of human space successes recently. Over the past year, SpaceX flew three human spaceflight missions for NASA. Boeing also hopes to fly one by the end of this year. And Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are continuing development of their suborbital space tourism programs.AdvertisementA key part of NASA\u2019s Artemis program is stalled, however.After NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion contract in April to use its Starship spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, a defense contractor, protested the award with the Government Accountability Office. That has forced NASA to put a hold on the contract. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Congress passed a bill that would require NASA to award two lunar lander contracts for future lunar missions. But it\u2019s not clear that the $10 billion authorized to fund the contracts will get appropriated by Congress.A recent bright spot for the program, though, is NASA\u2019s much-beleaguered Space Launch System rocket, which would send NASA astronauts to the moon. After years of delays, it successfully completed a full-duration engine test. The 212-foot core stage of the rocket was shipped to the Kennedy Space Center, where it has been mated with its side solid rocket boosters. Nelson has repeatedly said it could fly for the first time this year in a trip that would propel the Orion spacecraft, without any astronauts on board, on an autonomous trip around the moon.AdvertisementNASA also is building an international coalition to support the lunar mission and create norms of behavior in space. Signatories to the Artemis Accords would be able to partner with NASA in its lunar exploration program but would be required to adhere to a set of standards including the public release of scientific data. The program began in 2020 under the Trump administration but has been continued under Biden. Earlier this week, Nelson welcomed Brazil as the newest signatory.Story continues below advertisementChina, meanwhile, also is seeking international collaboration for the moon. Earlier this week, it announced an International Lunar Research Station, a joint program with Russia. In a statement, the two countries\u2019 space agencies said they \u201cjointly invite all interested international partners to cooperate and contribute more for the peaceful exploration and use of [the] moon in the interests of all humankind, adhering to the principle of equality, openness and integrity.\u201d The strategy is to cast China as a competitor racing not only to the moon, but for leadership in space more broadly. As China\u2019s space ambitions grow, NASA tells Congress it needs more money to compete",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6322",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-moon-rivalry/",
        "text": "In a flier distributed on Capitol Hill last week, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX warned that legislation now being considered would reward \u201cJeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out\u201d that would tie up NASA\u2019s moon plans and hand \u201cspace leadership to China.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company countered quickly and forcefully. \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie,\u201d it said of each of the allegations in SpaceX\u2019s paper, adding: \u201cWhat is Elon Musk afraid of ... a little competition?\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The dueling documents are the latest point of tension in a long-simmering rivalry between two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men, billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d who have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Musk and Bezos have fought over a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center, battled over a patent related to landing rockets and argued over which of them actually pulled off that feat first.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s SpaceX and Bezos\u2019s Amazon also are competing to put thousands of satellites in orbit that could beam Internet signals to ground stations on Earth.Now they are warring over another prize \u2014 landing the first astronauts on the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission visited there in 1972.Last month, SpaceX won a coveted NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would ferry NASA astronauts to and from the surface of the moon as part of the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. It was a stunning victory \u2014 one virtually no one outside NASA had anticipated, especially since Blue Origin and its \u201cnational team\u201d of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper had finished first in the initial round of contracts. In the final round for the first mission to the moon, however, SpaceX beat out not only Blue Origin but also another bidder, Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlmost immediately, both losing companies cried foul and filed protests with the Government Accountability Office, arguing the procurement was flawed. But Blue Origin went a step further, lobbying Congress to make the case that NASA should award two contracts for what is known as the Human Landing System (HLS).Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, came to Blue Origin\u2019s aid by tacking language to another bill, now known as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, requiring NASA to award a second contract and saying Congress should spend $10 billion to fund both.The amendment was advanced out of the committee and is heading to a vote in the Senate. To become law, it still must also pass the House, and appropriators would still need to allocate the $10 billion in funding \u2014 a tall ask in the middle of a pandemic. The wrangling continued in recent days, when the bill was revised to say the NASA administrator could not \u201cmodify, terminate or rescind\u201d SpaceX\u2019s contract.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Cantwell\u2019s amendment shows Bezos\u2019s growing influence in the nation\u2019s capital. Employees of Amazon represent one of Cantwell\u2019s biggest sources of donations during her time in the Senate. Cantwell represents Washington state, home to Amazon and Blue Origin.In recent years, Blue Origin also has given its operation in the nation\u2019s capital more muscle. It spent nearly $2 million in lobbying last year, up from a little more than $400,000 in 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks spending. The company\u2019s political action committee has amped up its donations as well, spending $320,000 in 2020, up from $22,000 in 2016.The amendment quickly became another point of contention. SpaceX struck first: \u201cThe Cantwell Amendment undermines the federal government procurement process, rewards Jeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out, and will throw NASA\u2019s Artemis program into years of litigation,\u201d its flier said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBlue Origin and its contractors lost the HLS competition after proposing an inferior solution at more than double the price of the winning bid,\u201d it said. It added that even though SpaceX won the competition, the amendment \u201ccreates what is effectively a sole-source [award] to Blue Origin without competition in violation of the Competition in Contracting Act.\u201dThe flier noted that Blue Origin had received hundreds of millions of dollars in awards from NASA and the Pentagon for preliminary contracts but that the government \u201chas chosen not to proceed with Blue Origin after every major development contract.\u201dBezos\u2019s company \u201chas not produced a single rocket or spacecraft capable of reaching orbit,\u201d SpaceX said. That was a point Musk amplified on Twitter, saying the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201dBlue Origin punched back with a flier of its own for lawmakers. \u201cElon Musk repeatedly talks about the value of competition, but when it comes to NASA\u2019s Human Landing System (HLS) program, he wants it all to himself,\u201d it said. And it noted that Musk had sued the Air Force for the right to compete against the United Launch Alliance for Pentagon launch contracts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company called SpaceX\u2019s charge that the amendment is an earmark for Blue Origin a \u201clie\u201d and said the amendment would allow two teams to build landers. \u201cTwo providers promote competition that ensures greater safety and mission success through a dissimilar redundancy in approaches, while at the same time also controlling costs,\u201d the flier said.It alleged that NASA\u2019s selection process \u201cwas different for each bidder\u201d and that SpaceX was allowed to \u201cre-price\u201d its bid \u201cbased on new budget information supplied by NASA that was not provided to the other bidders.\u201dNASA\u2019s bias for SpaceX did not end there, Blue Origin said. In its GAO protest, Blue Origin accused the space agency of incorrectly downgrading several of its technical designs that the agency \u201chas previously reviewed, approved, and accepted.\u201d It added that by picking just SpaceX, \u201cNASA risks the nation\u2019s return to the moon entirely on SpaceX\u2019s ability to deliver its proposed solution \u2014 Starship and the new Super Heavy booster \u2014 despite the \u2018immense complexity\u2019 and \u2018high risk\u2019 NASA itself documented\u201d in the selection document.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has said it wanted to award two contracts but had the money only for one. Initially, NASA said the \u201ccurrent fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX was allowed to update the payment schedule for its $2.9 billion bid so that it would fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dNASA noted that SpaceX\u2019s new payment schedule \u201cdid not propose an overall price reduction\u201d and that SpaceX \u201cwas prohibited from changing content within its technical and management proposals.\u201d SpaceX also scored higher than Blue Origin on its \u201cmanagement rating,\u201d according to NASA.Musk and Bezos founded their space exploration companies at about the same time \u2014 Blue Origin in 2000, SpaceX in 2002. But SpaceX has moved much faster and has accomplished much more. It first flew a rocket to orbit in 2008, then won lucrative contracts from NASA and the Pentagon. NASA relies on the company to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and since last year SpaceX has launched three missions with astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.Blue Origin has moved at a slower pace, mimicking its mascot, the tortoise. While it has flown its New Shepard vehicle to space 15 times and is getting ready to fly its first mission with humans, the rocket does not reach orbit; rather it touches the edge of space some 65 miles up and then falls back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter losing out on a lucrative Pentagon contract, the company said the first flight of its massive New Glenn rocket, which would be capable of delivering payloads to orbit, would be postponed until late next year. Originally, Bezos had said it would fly by 2020.Bezos has said he will step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, and many in the space community, including Musk, have said they hope he focuses more of his attention on Blue Origin.Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, took a shot at Blue Origin\u2019s slow progress at a conference in 2019.\u201cI think engineers think better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time, with very few resources, not when you have 20 years,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a motivation or a drive there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit has been a point of tension between the companies. In 2013, when SpaceX was in talks to lease Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center from NASA, Blue Origin stepped in to say it wanted a shot to compete for the pad.That incensed Musk, who pointed out that Blue Origin had yet to fly a rocket to orbit. Musk said in an email to SpaceNews, \u201cIf they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA\u2019s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs.\u201dBut he added, \u201cFrankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin received a patent for landing rocket boosters on ships at sea \u2014 a feat SpaceX had been working to perfect and others had conceived of as well. SpaceX challenged the patent and won, and in an interview with The Post at the time, Musk said that \u201ctrying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin landed one of its New Shepard vehicles, and Bezos on Twitter called it the \u201crarest of beasts \u2014 a used rocket.\u201d\u201cNot quite \u2018rarest,\u2019\u201d Musk tweeted in reply, pointing to the fact that SpaceX had previously launched test rockets a few hundred feet into the air and landed them.The next month, when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, Bezos tweeted, \u201cWelcome to the club!\u201d Musk took it as a jab, since the Falcon 9 rocket is far more powerful than New Shepard and returned to Earth from delivering a payload to orbit.Musk made another statement earlier this month, when SpaceX for the first time landed one of its Starship prototypes. It was the first flight of the vehicle it intends to use to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the moon since SpaceX won the contract \u2014 a sign of its seriousness with developing real flight hardware.It intends to make another statement when it attempts to re-fly the vehicle, a test flight that Musk recently said could come \u201csoon.\u201d It also intends to fly Starship to orbit later this year. The world\u2019s two wealthiest men have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Now they are in a bitter fight over landing on the lunar surface. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6323",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-moon-rivalry/",
        "text": "In a flier distributed on Capitol Hill last week, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX warned that legislation now being considered would reward \u201cJeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out\u201d that would tie up NASA\u2019s moon plans and hand \u201cspace leadership to China.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company countered quickly and forcefully. \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie,\u201d it said of each of the allegations in SpaceX\u2019s paper, adding: \u201cWhat is Elon Musk afraid of ... a little competition?\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The dueling documents are the latest point of tension in a long-simmering rivalry between two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men, billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d who have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Musk and Bezos have fought over a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center, battled over a patent related to landing rockets and argued over which of them actually pulled off that feat first.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s SpaceX and Bezos\u2019s Amazon also are competing to put thousands of satellites in orbit that could beam Internet signals to ground stations on Earth.Now they are warring over another prize \u2014 landing the first astronauts on the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission visited there in 1972.Last month, SpaceX won a coveted NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would ferry NASA astronauts to and from the surface of the moon as part of the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. It was a stunning victory \u2014 one virtually no one outside NASA had anticipated, especially since Blue Origin and its \u201cnational team\u201d of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper had finished first in the initial round of contracts. In the final round for the first mission to the moon, however, SpaceX beat out not only Blue Origin but also another bidder, Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlmost immediately, both losing companies cried foul and filed protests with the Government Accountability Office, arguing the procurement was flawed. But Blue Origin went a step further, lobbying Congress to make the case that NASA should award two contracts for what is known as the Human Landing System (HLS).Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, came to Blue Origin\u2019s aid by tacking language to another bill, now known as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, requiring NASA to award a second contract and saying Congress should spend $10 billion to fund both.The amendment was advanced out of the committee and is heading to a vote in the Senate. To become law, it still must also pass the House, and appropriators would still need to allocate the $10 billion in funding \u2014 a tall ask in the middle of a pandemic. The wrangling continued in recent days, when the bill was revised to say the NASA administrator could not \u201cmodify, terminate or rescind\u201d SpaceX\u2019s contract.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Cantwell\u2019s amendment shows Bezos\u2019s growing influence in the nation\u2019s capital. Employees of Amazon represent one of Cantwell\u2019s biggest sources of donations during her time in the Senate. Cantwell represents Washington state, home to Amazon and Blue Origin.In recent years, Blue Origin also has given its operation in the nation\u2019s capital more muscle. It spent nearly $2 million in lobbying last year, up from a little more than $400,000 in 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks spending. The company\u2019s political action committee has amped up its donations as well, spending $320,000 in 2020, up from $22,000 in 2016.The amendment quickly became another point of contention. SpaceX struck first: \u201cThe Cantwell Amendment undermines the federal government procurement process, rewards Jeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out, and will throw NASA\u2019s Artemis program into years of litigation,\u201d its flier said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBlue Origin and its contractors lost the HLS competition after proposing an inferior solution at more than double the price of the winning bid,\u201d it said. It added that even though SpaceX won the competition, the amendment \u201ccreates what is effectively a sole-source [award] to Blue Origin without competition in violation of the Competition in Contracting Act.\u201dThe flier noted that Blue Origin had received hundreds of millions of dollars in awards from NASA and the Pentagon for preliminary contracts but that the government \u201chas chosen not to proceed with Blue Origin after every major development contract.\u201dBezos\u2019s company \u201chas not produced a single rocket or spacecraft capable of reaching orbit,\u201d SpaceX said. That was a point Musk amplified on Twitter, saying the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201dBlue Origin punched back with a flier of its own for lawmakers. \u201cElon Musk repeatedly talks about the value of competition, but when it comes to NASA\u2019s Human Landing System (HLS) program, he wants it all to himself,\u201d it said. And it noted that Musk had sued the Air Force for the right to compete against the United Launch Alliance for Pentagon launch contracts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company called SpaceX\u2019s charge that the amendment is an earmark for Blue Origin a \u201clie\u201d and said the amendment would allow two teams to build landers. \u201cTwo providers promote competition that ensures greater safety and mission success through a dissimilar redundancy in approaches, while at the same time also controlling costs,\u201d the flier said.It alleged that NASA\u2019s selection process \u201cwas different for each bidder\u201d and that SpaceX was allowed to \u201cre-price\u201d its bid \u201cbased on new budget information supplied by NASA that was not provided to the other bidders.\u201dNASA\u2019s bias for SpaceX did not end there, Blue Origin said. In its GAO protest, Blue Origin accused the space agency of incorrectly downgrading several of its technical designs that the agency \u201chas previously reviewed, approved, and accepted.\u201d It added that by picking just SpaceX, \u201cNASA risks the nation\u2019s return to the moon entirely on SpaceX\u2019s ability to deliver its proposed solution \u2014 Starship and the new Super Heavy booster \u2014 despite the \u2018immense complexity\u2019 and \u2018high risk\u2019 NASA itself documented\u201d in the selection document.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has said it wanted to award two contracts but had the money only for one. Initially, NASA said the \u201ccurrent fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX was allowed to update the payment schedule for its $2.9 billion bid so that it would fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dNASA noted that SpaceX\u2019s new payment schedule \u201cdid not propose an overall price reduction\u201d and that SpaceX \u201cwas prohibited from changing content within its technical and management proposals.\u201d SpaceX also scored higher than Blue Origin on its \u201cmanagement rating,\u201d according to NASA.Musk and Bezos founded their space exploration companies at about the same time \u2014 Blue Origin in 2000, SpaceX in 2002. But SpaceX has moved much faster and has accomplished much more. It first flew a rocket to orbit in 2008, then won lucrative contracts from NASA and the Pentagon. NASA relies on the company to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and since last year SpaceX has launched three missions with astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.Blue Origin has moved at a slower pace, mimicking its mascot, the tortoise. While it has flown its New Shepard vehicle to space 15 times and is getting ready to fly its first mission with humans, the rocket does not reach orbit; rather it touches the edge of space some 65 miles up and then falls back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter losing out on a lucrative Pentagon contract, the company said the first flight of its massive New Glenn rocket, which would be capable of delivering payloads to orbit, would be postponed until late next year. Originally, Bezos had said it would fly by 2020.Bezos has said he will step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, and many in the space community, including Musk, have said they hope he focuses more of his attention on Blue Origin.Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, took a shot at Blue Origin\u2019s slow progress at a conference in 2019.\u201cI think engineers think better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time, with very few resources, not when you have 20 years,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a motivation or a drive there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit has been a point of tension between the companies. In 2013, when SpaceX was in talks to lease Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center from NASA, Blue Origin stepped in to say it wanted a shot to compete for the pad.That incensed Musk, who pointed out that Blue Origin had yet to fly a rocket to orbit. Musk said in an email to SpaceNews, \u201cIf they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA\u2019s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs.\u201dBut he added, \u201cFrankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin received a patent for landing rocket boosters on ships at sea \u2014 a feat SpaceX had been working to perfect and others had conceived of as well. SpaceX challenged the patent and won, and in an interview with The Post at the time, Musk said that \u201ctrying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin landed one of its New Shepard vehicles, and Bezos on Twitter called it the \u201crarest of beasts \u2014 a used rocket.\u201d\u201cNot quite \u2018rarest,\u2019\u201d Musk tweeted in reply, pointing to the fact that SpaceX had previously launched test rockets a few hundred feet into the air and landed them.The next month, when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, Bezos tweeted, \u201cWelcome to the club!\u201d Musk took it as a jab, since the Falcon 9 rocket is far more powerful than New Shepard and returned to Earth from delivering a payload to orbit.Musk made another statement earlier this month, when SpaceX for the first time landed one of its Starship prototypes. It was the first flight of the vehicle it intends to use to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the moon since SpaceX won the contract \u2014 a sign of its seriousness with developing real flight hardware.It intends to make another statement when it attempts to re-fly the vehicle, a test flight that Musk recently said could come \u201csoon.\u201d It also intends to fly Starship to orbit later this year. The world\u2019s two wealthiest men have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Now they are in a bitter fight over landing on the lunar surface. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6324",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-moon-rivalry/",
        "text": "In a flier distributed on Capitol Hill last week, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX warned that legislation now being considered would reward \u201cJeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out\u201d that would tie up NASA\u2019s moon plans and hand \u201cspace leadership to China.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company countered quickly and forcefully. \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie,\u201d it said of each of the allegations in SpaceX\u2019s paper, adding: \u201cWhat is Elon Musk afraid of ... a little competition?\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The dueling documents are the latest point of tension in a long-simmering rivalry between two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men, billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d who have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Musk and Bezos have fought over a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center, battled over a patent related to landing rockets and argued over which of them actually pulled off that feat first.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s SpaceX and Bezos\u2019s Amazon also are competing to put thousands of satellites in orbit that could beam Internet signals to ground stations on Earth.Now they are warring over another prize \u2014 landing the first astronauts on the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission visited there in 1972.Last month, SpaceX won a coveted NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would ferry NASA astronauts to and from the surface of the moon as part of the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. It was a stunning victory \u2014 one virtually no one outside NASA had anticipated, especially since Blue Origin and its \u201cnational team\u201d of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper had finished first in the initial round of contracts. In the final round for the first mission to the moon, however, SpaceX beat out not only Blue Origin but also another bidder, Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlmost immediately, both losing companies cried foul and filed protests with the Government Accountability Office, arguing the procurement was flawed. But Blue Origin went a step further, lobbying Congress to make the case that NASA should award two contracts for what is known as the Human Landing System (HLS).Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, came to Blue Origin\u2019s aid by tacking language to another bill, now known as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, requiring NASA to award a second contract and saying Congress should spend $10 billion to fund both.The amendment was advanced out of the committee and is heading to a vote in the Senate. To become law, it still must also pass the House, and appropriators would still need to allocate the $10 billion in funding \u2014 a tall ask in the middle of a pandemic. The wrangling continued in recent days, when the bill was revised to say the NASA administrator could not \u201cmodify, terminate or rescind\u201d SpaceX\u2019s contract.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Cantwell\u2019s amendment shows Bezos\u2019s growing influence in the nation\u2019s capital. Employees of Amazon represent one of Cantwell\u2019s biggest sources of donations during her time in the Senate. Cantwell represents Washington state, home to Amazon and Blue Origin.In recent years, Blue Origin also has given its operation in the nation\u2019s capital more muscle. It spent nearly $2 million in lobbying last year, up from a little more than $400,000 in 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks spending. The company\u2019s political action committee has amped up its donations as well, spending $320,000 in 2020, up from $22,000 in 2016.The amendment quickly became another point of contention. SpaceX struck first: \u201cThe Cantwell Amendment undermines the federal government procurement process, rewards Jeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out, and will throw NASA\u2019s Artemis program into years of litigation,\u201d its flier said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBlue Origin and its contractors lost the HLS competition after proposing an inferior solution at more than double the price of the winning bid,\u201d it said. It added that even though SpaceX won the competition, the amendment \u201ccreates what is effectively a sole-source [award] to Blue Origin without competition in violation of the Competition in Contracting Act.\u201dThe flier noted that Blue Origin had received hundreds of millions of dollars in awards from NASA and the Pentagon for preliminary contracts but that the government \u201chas chosen not to proceed with Blue Origin after every major development contract.\u201dBezos\u2019s company \u201chas not produced a single rocket or spacecraft capable of reaching orbit,\u201d SpaceX said. That was a point Musk amplified on Twitter, saying the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201dBlue Origin punched back with a flier of its own for lawmakers. \u201cElon Musk repeatedly talks about the value of competition, but when it comes to NASA\u2019s Human Landing System (HLS) program, he wants it all to himself,\u201d it said. And it noted that Musk had sued the Air Force for the right to compete against the United Launch Alliance for Pentagon launch contracts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company called SpaceX\u2019s charge that the amendment is an earmark for Blue Origin a \u201clie\u201d and said the amendment would allow two teams to build landers. \u201cTwo providers promote competition that ensures greater safety and mission success through a dissimilar redundancy in approaches, while at the same time also controlling costs,\u201d the flier said.It alleged that NASA\u2019s selection process \u201cwas different for each bidder\u201d and that SpaceX was allowed to \u201cre-price\u201d its bid \u201cbased on new budget information supplied by NASA that was not provided to the other bidders.\u201dNASA\u2019s bias for SpaceX did not end there, Blue Origin said. In its GAO protest, Blue Origin accused the space agency of incorrectly downgrading several of its technical designs that the agency \u201chas previously reviewed, approved, and accepted.\u201d It added that by picking just SpaceX, \u201cNASA risks the nation\u2019s return to the moon entirely on SpaceX\u2019s ability to deliver its proposed solution \u2014 Starship and the new Super Heavy booster \u2014 despite the \u2018immense complexity\u2019 and \u2018high risk\u2019 NASA itself documented\u201d in the selection document.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has said it wanted to award two contracts but had the money only for one. Initially, NASA said the \u201ccurrent fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX was allowed to update the payment schedule for its $2.9 billion bid so that it would fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dNASA noted that SpaceX\u2019s new payment schedule \u201cdid not propose an overall price reduction\u201d and that SpaceX \u201cwas prohibited from changing content within its technical and management proposals.\u201d SpaceX also scored higher than Blue Origin on its \u201cmanagement rating,\u201d according to NASA.Musk and Bezos founded their space exploration companies at about the same time \u2014 Blue Origin in 2000, SpaceX in 2002. But SpaceX has moved much faster and has accomplished much more. It first flew a rocket to orbit in 2008, then won lucrative contracts from NASA and the Pentagon. NASA relies on the company to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and since last year SpaceX has launched three missions with astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.Blue Origin has moved at a slower pace, mimicking its mascot, the tortoise. While it has flown its New Shepard vehicle to space 15 times and is getting ready to fly its first mission with humans, the rocket does not reach orbit; rather it touches the edge of space some 65 miles up and then falls back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter losing out on a lucrative Pentagon contract, the company said the first flight of its massive New Glenn rocket, which would be capable of delivering payloads to orbit, would be postponed until late next year. Originally, Bezos had said it would fly by 2020.Bezos has said he will step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, and many in the space community, including Musk, have said they hope he focuses more of his attention on Blue Origin.Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, took a shot at Blue Origin\u2019s slow progress at a conference in 2019.\u201cI think engineers think better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time, with very few resources, not when you have 20 years,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a motivation or a drive there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit has been a point of tension between the companies. In 2013, when SpaceX was in talks to lease Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center from NASA, Blue Origin stepped in to say it wanted a shot to compete for the pad.That incensed Musk, who pointed out that Blue Origin had yet to fly a rocket to orbit. Musk said in an email to SpaceNews, \u201cIf they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA\u2019s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs.\u201dBut he added, \u201cFrankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin received a patent for landing rocket boosters on ships at sea \u2014 a feat SpaceX had been working to perfect and others had conceived of as well. SpaceX challenged the patent and won, and in an interview with The Post at the time, Musk said that \u201ctrying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin landed one of its New Shepard vehicles, and Bezos on Twitter called it the \u201crarest of beasts \u2014 a used rocket.\u201d\u201cNot quite \u2018rarest,\u2019\u201d Musk tweeted in reply, pointing to the fact that SpaceX had previously launched test rockets a few hundred feet into the air and landed them.The next month, when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, Bezos tweeted, \u201cWelcome to the club!\u201d Musk took it as a jab, since the Falcon 9 rocket is far more powerful than New Shepard and returned to Earth from delivering a payload to orbit.Musk made another statement earlier this month, when SpaceX for the first time landed one of its Starship prototypes. It was the first flight of the vehicle it intends to use to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the moon since SpaceX won the contract \u2014 a sign of its seriousness with developing real flight hardware.It intends to make another statement when it attempts to re-fly the vehicle, a test flight that Musk recently said could come \u201csoon.\u201d It also intends to fly Starship to orbit later this year. The world\u2019s two wealthiest men have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Now they are in a bitter fight over landing on the lunar surface. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6325",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-moon-rivalry/",
        "text": "In a flier distributed on Capitol Hill last week, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX warned that legislation now being considered would reward \u201cJeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out\u201d that would tie up NASA\u2019s moon plans and hand \u201cspace leadership to China.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company countered quickly and forcefully. \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie,\u201d it said of each of the allegations in SpaceX\u2019s paper, adding: \u201cWhat is Elon Musk afraid of ... a little competition?\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The dueling documents are the latest point of tension in a long-simmering rivalry between two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men, billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d who have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Musk and Bezos have fought over a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center, battled over a patent related to landing rockets and argued over which of them actually pulled off that feat first.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s SpaceX and Bezos\u2019s Amazon also are competing to put thousands of satellites in orbit that could beam Internet signals to ground stations on Earth.Now they are warring over another prize \u2014 landing the first astronauts on the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission visited there in 1972.Last month, SpaceX won a coveted NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would ferry NASA astronauts to and from the surface of the moon as part of the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. It was a stunning victory \u2014 one virtually no one outside NASA had anticipated, especially since Blue Origin and its \u201cnational team\u201d of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper had finished first in the initial round of contracts. In the final round for the first mission to the moon, however, SpaceX beat out not only Blue Origin but also another bidder, Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlmost immediately, both losing companies cried foul and filed protests with the Government Accountability Office, arguing the procurement was flawed. But Blue Origin went a step further, lobbying Congress to make the case that NASA should award two contracts for what is known as the Human Landing System (HLS).Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, came to Blue Origin\u2019s aid by tacking language to another bill, now known as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, requiring NASA to award a second contract and saying Congress should spend $10 billion to fund both.The amendment was advanced out of the committee and is heading to a vote in the Senate. To become law, it still must also pass the House, and appropriators would still need to allocate the $10 billion in funding \u2014 a tall ask in the middle of a pandemic. The wrangling continued in recent days, when the bill was revised to say the NASA administrator could not \u201cmodify, terminate or rescind\u201d SpaceX\u2019s contract.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Cantwell\u2019s amendment shows Bezos\u2019s growing influence in the nation\u2019s capital. Employees of Amazon represent one of Cantwell\u2019s biggest sources of donations during her time in the Senate. Cantwell represents Washington state, home to Amazon and Blue Origin.In recent years, Blue Origin also has given its operation in the nation\u2019s capital more muscle. It spent nearly $2 million in lobbying last year, up from a little more than $400,000 in 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks spending. The company\u2019s political action committee has amped up its donations as well, spending $320,000 in 2020, up from $22,000 in 2016.The amendment quickly became another point of contention. SpaceX struck first: \u201cThe Cantwell Amendment undermines the federal government procurement process, rewards Jeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out, and will throw NASA\u2019s Artemis program into years of litigation,\u201d its flier said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBlue Origin and its contractors lost the HLS competition after proposing an inferior solution at more than double the price of the winning bid,\u201d it said. It added that even though SpaceX won the competition, the amendment \u201ccreates what is effectively a sole-source [award] to Blue Origin without competition in violation of the Competition in Contracting Act.\u201dThe flier noted that Blue Origin had received hundreds of millions of dollars in awards from NASA and the Pentagon for preliminary contracts but that the government \u201chas chosen not to proceed with Blue Origin after every major development contract.\u201dBezos\u2019s company \u201chas not produced a single rocket or spacecraft capable of reaching orbit,\u201d SpaceX said. That was a point Musk amplified on Twitter, saying the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201dBlue Origin punched back with a flier of its own for lawmakers. \u201cElon Musk repeatedly talks about the value of competition, but when it comes to NASA\u2019s Human Landing System (HLS) program, he wants it all to himself,\u201d it said. And it noted that Musk had sued the Air Force for the right to compete against the United Launch Alliance for Pentagon launch contracts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company called SpaceX\u2019s charge that the amendment is an earmark for Blue Origin a \u201clie\u201d and said the amendment would allow two teams to build landers. \u201cTwo providers promote competition that ensures greater safety and mission success through a dissimilar redundancy in approaches, while at the same time also controlling costs,\u201d the flier said.It alleged that NASA\u2019s selection process \u201cwas different for each bidder\u201d and that SpaceX was allowed to \u201cre-price\u201d its bid \u201cbased on new budget information supplied by NASA that was not provided to the other bidders.\u201dNASA\u2019s bias for SpaceX did not end there, Blue Origin said. In its GAO protest, Blue Origin accused the space agency of incorrectly downgrading several of its technical designs that the agency \u201chas previously reviewed, approved, and accepted.\u201d It added that by picking just SpaceX, \u201cNASA risks the nation\u2019s return to the moon entirely on SpaceX\u2019s ability to deliver its proposed solution \u2014 Starship and the new Super Heavy booster \u2014 despite the \u2018immense complexity\u2019 and \u2018high risk\u2019 NASA itself documented\u201d in the selection document.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has said it wanted to award two contracts but had the money only for one. Initially, NASA said the \u201ccurrent fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX was allowed to update the payment schedule for its $2.9 billion bid so that it would fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dNASA noted that SpaceX\u2019s new payment schedule \u201cdid not propose an overall price reduction\u201d and that SpaceX \u201cwas prohibited from changing content within its technical and management proposals.\u201d SpaceX also scored higher than Blue Origin on its \u201cmanagement rating,\u201d according to NASA.Musk and Bezos founded their space exploration companies at about the same time \u2014 Blue Origin in 2000, SpaceX in 2002. But SpaceX has moved much faster and has accomplished much more. It first flew a rocket to orbit in 2008, then won lucrative contracts from NASA and the Pentagon. NASA relies on the company to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and since last year SpaceX has launched three missions with astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.Blue Origin has moved at a slower pace, mimicking its mascot, the tortoise. While it has flown its New Shepard vehicle to space 15 times and is getting ready to fly its first mission with humans, the rocket does not reach orbit; rather it touches the edge of space some 65 miles up and then falls back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter losing out on a lucrative Pentagon contract, the company said the first flight of its massive New Glenn rocket, which would be capable of delivering payloads to orbit, would be postponed until late next year. Originally, Bezos had said it would fly by 2020.Bezos has said he will step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, and many in the space community, including Musk, have said they hope he focuses more of his attention on Blue Origin.Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, took a shot at Blue Origin\u2019s slow progress at a conference in 2019.\u201cI think engineers think better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time, with very few resources, not when you have 20 years,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a motivation or a drive there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit has been a point of tension between the companies. In 2013, when SpaceX was in talks to lease Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center from NASA, Blue Origin stepped in to say it wanted a shot to compete for the pad.That incensed Musk, who pointed out that Blue Origin had yet to fly a rocket to orbit. Musk said in an email to SpaceNews, \u201cIf they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA\u2019s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs.\u201dBut he added, \u201cFrankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin received a patent for landing rocket boosters on ships at sea \u2014 a feat SpaceX had been working to perfect and others had conceived of as well. SpaceX challenged the patent and won, and in an interview with The Post at the time, Musk said that \u201ctrying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin landed one of its New Shepard vehicles, and Bezos on Twitter called it the \u201crarest of beasts \u2014 a used rocket.\u201d\u201cNot quite \u2018rarest,\u2019\u201d Musk tweeted in reply, pointing to the fact that SpaceX had previously launched test rockets a few hundred feet into the air and landed them.The next month, when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, Bezos tweeted, \u201cWelcome to the club!\u201d Musk took it as a jab, since the Falcon 9 rocket is far more powerful than New Shepard and returned to Earth from delivering a payload to orbit.Musk made another statement earlier this month, when SpaceX for the first time landed one of its Starship prototypes. It was the first flight of the vehicle it intends to use to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the moon since SpaceX won the contract \u2014 a sign of its seriousness with developing real flight hardware.It intends to make another statement when it attempts to re-fly the vehicle, a test flight that Musk recently said could come \u201csoon.\u201d It also intends to fly Starship to orbit later this year. The world\u2019s two wealthiest men have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Now they are in a bitter fight over landing on the lunar surface. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6326",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/elon-musk-jeff-bezos-moon-rivalry/",
        "text": "In a flier distributed on Capitol Hill last week, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX warned that legislation now being considered would reward \u201cJeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out\u201d that would tie up NASA\u2019s moon plans and hand \u201cspace leadership to China.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company countered quickly and forcefully. \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie.\u201d \u201cLie,\u201d it said of each of the allegations in SpaceX\u2019s paper, adding: \u201cWhat is Elon Musk afraid of ... a little competition?\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The dueling documents are the latest point of tension in a long-simmering rivalry between two of the world\u2019s wealthiest men, billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d who have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Musk and Bezos have fought over a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center, battled over a patent related to landing rockets and argued over which of them actually pulled off that feat first.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk\u2019s SpaceX and Bezos\u2019s Amazon also are competing to put thousands of satellites in orbit that could beam Internet signals to ground stations on Earth.Now they are warring over another prize \u2014 landing the first astronauts on the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission visited there in 1972.Last month, SpaceX won a coveted NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would ferry NASA astronauts to and from the surface of the moon as part of the space agency\u2019s Artemis program. It was a stunning victory \u2014 one virtually no one outside NASA had anticipated, especially since Blue Origin and its \u201cnational team\u201d of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper had finished first in the initial round of contracts. In the final round for the first mission to the moon, however, SpaceX beat out not only Blue Origin but also another bidder, Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlmost immediately, both losing companies cried foul and filed protests with the Government Accountability Office, arguing the procurement was flawed. But Blue Origin went a step further, lobbying Congress to make the case that NASA should award two contracts for what is known as the Human Landing System (HLS).Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, came to Blue Origin\u2019s aid by tacking language to another bill, now known as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, requiring NASA to award a second contract and saying Congress should spend $10 billion to fund both.The amendment was advanced out of the committee and is heading to a vote in the Senate. To become law, it still must also pass the House, and appropriators would still need to allocate the $10 billion in funding \u2014 a tall ask in the middle of a pandemic. The wrangling continued in recent days, when the bill was revised to say the NASA administrator could not \u201cmodify, terminate or rescind\u201d SpaceX\u2019s contract.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, Cantwell\u2019s amendment shows Bezos\u2019s growing influence in the nation\u2019s capital. Employees of Amazon represent one of Cantwell\u2019s biggest sources of donations during her time in the Senate. Cantwell represents Washington state, home to Amazon and Blue Origin.In recent years, Blue Origin also has given its operation in the nation\u2019s capital more muscle. It spent nearly $2 million in lobbying last year, up from a little more than $400,000 in 2015, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks spending. The company\u2019s political action committee has amped up its donations as well, spending $320,000 in 2020, up from $22,000 in 2016.The amendment quickly became another point of contention. SpaceX struck first: \u201cThe Cantwell Amendment undermines the federal government procurement process, rewards Jeff Bezos with a $10 billion sole-source hand-out, and will throw NASA\u2019s Artemis program into years of litigation,\u201d its flier said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBlue Origin and its contractors lost the HLS competition after proposing an inferior solution at more than double the price of the winning bid,\u201d it said. It added that even though SpaceX won the competition, the amendment \u201ccreates what is effectively a sole-source [award] to Blue Origin without competition in violation of the Competition in Contracting Act.\u201dThe flier noted that Blue Origin had received hundreds of millions of dollars in awards from NASA and the Pentagon for preliminary contracts but that the government \u201chas chosen not to proceed with Blue Origin after every major development contract.\u201dBezos\u2019s company \u201chas not produced a single rocket or spacecraft capable of reaching orbit,\u201d SpaceX said. That was a point Musk amplified on Twitter, saying the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201dBlue Origin punched back with a flier of its own for lawmakers. \u201cElon Musk repeatedly talks about the value of competition, but when it comes to NASA\u2019s Human Landing System (HLS) program, he wants it all to himself,\u201d it said. And it noted that Musk had sued the Air Force for the right to compete against the United Launch Alliance for Pentagon launch contracts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company called SpaceX\u2019s charge that the amendment is an earmark for Blue Origin a \u201clie\u201d and said the amendment would allow two teams to build landers. \u201cTwo providers promote competition that ensures greater safety and mission success through a dissimilar redundancy in approaches, while at the same time also controlling costs,\u201d the flier said.It alleged that NASA\u2019s selection process \u201cwas different for each bidder\u201d and that SpaceX was allowed to \u201cre-price\u201d its bid \u201cbased on new budget information supplied by NASA that was not provided to the other bidders.\u201dNASA\u2019s bias for SpaceX did not end there, Blue Origin said. In its GAO protest, Blue Origin accused the space agency of incorrectly downgrading several of its technical designs that the agency \u201chas previously reviewed, approved, and accepted.\u201d It added that by picking just SpaceX, \u201cNASA risks the nation\u2019s return to the moon entirely on SpaceX\u2019s ability to deliver its proposed solution \u2014 Starship and the new Super Heavy booster \u2014 despite the \u2018immense complexity\u2019 and \u2018high risk\u2019 NASA itself documented\u201d in the selection document.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has said it wanted to award two contracts but had the money only for one. Initially, NASA said the \u201ccurrent fiscal year budget did not support even a single [contract] award.\u201d As a result, SpaceX was allowed to update the payment schedule for its $2.9 billion bid so that it would fit \u201cwithin NASA\u2019s current budget.\u201dNASA noted that SpaceX\u2019s new payment schedule \u201cdid not propose an overall price reduction\u201d and that SpaceX \u201cwas prohibited from changing content within its technical and management proposals.\u201d SpaceX also scored higher than Blue Origin on its \u201cmanagement rating,\u201d according to NASA.Musk and Bezos founded their space exploration companies at about the same time \u2014 Blue Origin in 2000, SpaceX in 2002. But SpaceX has moved much faster and has accomplished much more. It first flew a rocket to orbit in 2008, then won lucrative contracts from NASA and the Pentagon. NASA relies on the company to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, and since last year SpaceX has launched three missions with astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.Blue Origin has moved at a slower pace, mimicking its mascot, the tortoise. While it has flown its New Shepard vehicle to space 15 times and is getting ready to fly its first mission with humans, the rocket does not reach orbit; rather it touches the edge of space some 65 miles up and then falls back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter losing out on a lucrative Pentagon contract, the company said the first flight of its massive New Glenn rocket, which would be capable of delivering payloads to orbit, would be postponed until late next year. Originally, Bezos had said it would fly by 2020.Bezos has said he will step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, and many in the space community, including Musk, have said they hope he focuses more of his attention on Blue Origin.Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, took a shot at Blue Origin\u2019s slow progress at a conference in 2019.\u201cI think engineers think better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time, with very few resources, not when you have 20 years,\u201d Shotwell said. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a motivation or a drive there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting to orbit has been a point of tension between the companies. In 2013, when SpaceX was in talks to lease Launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center from NASA, Blue Origin stepped in to say it wanted a shot to compete for the pad.That incensed Musk, who pointed out that Blue Origin had yet to fly a rocket to orbit. Musk said in an email to SpaceNews, \u201cIf they do somehow show up in the next 5 years with a vehicle qualified to NASA\u2019s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs.\u201dBut he added, \u201cFrankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin received a patent for landing rocket boosters on ships at sea \u2014 a feat SpaceX had been working to perfect and others had conceived of as well. SpaceX challenged the patent and won, and in an interview with The Post at the time, Musk said that \u201ctrying to patent something that people have been discussing for half a century is obviously ridiculous.\u201dThe following year, Blue Origin landed one of its New Shepard vehicles, and Bezos on Twitter called it the \u201crarest of beasts \u2014 a used rocket.\u201d\u201cNot quite \u2018rarest,\u2019\u201d Musk tweeted in reply, pointing to the fact that SpaceX had previously launched test rockets a few hundred feet into the air and landed them.The next month, when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, Bezos tweeted, \u201cWelcome to the club!\u201d Musk took it as a jab, since the Falcon 9 rocket is far more powerful than New Shepard and returned to Earth from delivering a payload to orbit.Musk made another statement earlier this month, when SpaceX for the first time landed one of its Starship prototypes. It was the first flight of the vehicle it intends to use to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the moon since SpaceX won the contract \u2014 a sign of its seriousness with developing real flight hardware.It intends to make another statement when it attempts to re-fly the vehicle, a test flight that Musk recently said could come \u201csoon.\u201d It also intends to fly Starship to orbit later this year. The world\u2019s two wealthiest men have sparred on and off for years in their quest to privatize human space exploration. Now they are in a bitter fight over landing on the lunar surface. The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up? (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6327",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/23/satellites-collisions-tracking-space/",
        "text": "In a bold move two years ago, the White House issued a directive that would make the Commerce Department a traffic cop in space, giving it the authority to establish rules of the road for the rapidly growing number of satellites in orbit in hopes that it will prevent collisions that destroy millions of dollars\u2019 worth of hardware and leave behind dangerous clouds of debris. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech, Vice President Pence hailed the effort, saying \u201cPresident Trump knows that a stable and orderly space environment is critical to the strength of our economy and the resilience of our national security systems.\u201dBut since then, the directive, known as Space Policy Directive-3, has gone nowhere, mired in a Washington bureaucratic battle over which agency would be best suited for the mission. The Trump administration argues that the Commerce Department is best placed to foster the growing commercial space industry \u2014 including satellite servicing, manufacturing, space tourism and more \u2014 while taking advantage of new technology to track items in orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members of Congress think, however, that the responsibility should go to the Federal Aviation Administration instead, extending that agency\u2019s jurisdiction from the skies to space.The impasse has left the Pentagon with tracking space debris and satellites as well as warning governments and private companies around the world of potential collisions, as it has done for years. It\u2019s a job it doesn\u2019t want \u2014 and that the White House doesn\u2019t want it to have.It\u2019s not clear when, or if, the logjam will break.A spokesman for the National Space Council said fully funding the Office of Space Commerce \u201cremains a top priority\u201d to \u201caddress the emerging growth of large constellations in low Earth orbit and lay the foundation for management of future space traffic.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOthers are less optimistic that such an office will be established.Advertisement\u201cThe odds of getting legislation introduced this year, in an election year, on a topic of low political priority, were slim to begin with,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. \u201cAnd then we had a pandemic.\u201dAs the debate drags on, the number of satellites being launched to orbit continues to grow dramatically, raising the possibility of more collisions and more debris that in turn would threaten other satellites that are used for missile warnings, GPS, television, communications and more.At least four companies are moving ahead with plans to put up constellations of thousands of satellites that would beam the Internet to the estimated 4 billion people without access to broadband. Over the next 10 years, more than 50,000 satellites could be launched into orbit, up from the few thousand currently in operation today, according to Analytical Graphics Inc., or AGI, a company based outside Philadelphia that builds software to track spacecraft and debris in space. That\u2019s in addition to the junk floating around there. The Pentagon tracks about 22,000 pieces of debris larger than about four inches, but scientists say there are nearly 1 million larger than half an inch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAGI estimates that over the next 10 years, there could be as many as 404 collisions and 17 million close calls in the most congested orbits. Tracking all those objects and issuing warnings is too much for the Pentagon to handle \u2014 and outside its primary task of defending the nation. A civilian agency could be more adept in keeping up with the demand and better at communicating with private companies as well as foreign governments, some experts believe, though the Pentagon would continue to monitor space activity.\u201cIt\u2019s easier for the Department of Commerce to leverage commercial or other modern technology than it is for the Pentagon,\u201d Weeden said. He called the Pentagon\u2019s current tracking system \u201cantiquated.\u201d\u201cIt was a great system 30 years ago, and it did the job it was designed to do,\u201d Paul Graziani, AGI\u2019s CEO, said in an interview. \u201cHowever, the problem has moved on over the decades to be a much more difficult problem than the system was designed to handle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX has won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put 12,000 small satellites into orbit as part of its Starlink Internet constellation. Already it has launched 540, making it one of the largest satellite operators in the world, officials said, with more satellites in space than even China.Companies currently need to demonstrate that their individual satellites won\u2019t cause collisions to win FCC approval, Weeden said, but some experts want additional regulations that would extend to the constellations as a whole.Amazon, meanwhile, also has plans to deploy a large constellation as part of a program it calls Kuiper. The FCC on Thursday approved Amazon\u2019s plan to put up 3,236 satellites, and the company said it would invest $10 billion in the effort. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA project of this scale requires significant effort and resources, and, due to the nature of LEO constellations, it is not the kind of initiative that can start small,\u201d Amazon said in a statement. \"You have to commit.\u201dAnother company, OneWeb, intends to launch hundreds of satellites for broadband service, despite a bankruptcy filing that led to its acquisition by the British government and an Indian company.With all that activity, analysts say the U.S. government needs to move fast if it is going to be able to keep up and establish policies for the rest of the world to follow.\u201cA collision between two satellites could have a catastrophic impact on the space environment for centuries to come,\u201d FCC chairman Ajit Pai said recently.Story continues below advertisementIn April, the FCC, which over the past year has approved some 13,000 new satellites for launch, updated its rules governing orbital debris for the first time since 2004. Satellite applicants must now provide numerical values for the risk of collision and demonstrate how their satellites will be disposed of at the end of their missions, as well as make upgrades to design that would help avoid collisions.AdvertisementWhile the rule updates are a good step forward, \u201cthere is still more we need to do,\u201d FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in April. The commission considered tightening a rule that allows a satellite to stay in orbit for up to 25 years after its mission ends, a time frame that many think is far too long. But ultimately, the commission did not make any changes.\u201cThis rule simply does not make sense in today\u2019s orbital environment,\u201d Rosenworcel said.Story continues below advertisementDebris begets more debris, and collisions, officials say, are inevitable and can inflict serious damage. In orbit, objects travel at immense speed \u2014 the International Space Station, for example, whizzes around Earth at 17,500 mph. So even something the size of a peanut can do tremendous harm.Though outfitted with material intended to protect against debris strikes, the space station from time to time has had to maneuver to avoid getting hit. There even have been a few close calls in which ground controllers didn\u2019t have time to move the station out of the way. In those cases, the astronauts had to evacuate the station and seek refuge in a docked spacecraft in case a collision caused the station to depressurize.AdvertisementIn one of the most congested areas, about 430 to 560 miles high, \u201cthere is enough human-generated orbital debris \u2026 to create more debris even if no new satellites were launched,\u201d Weeden told a congressional committee this year.Story continues below advertisementCatastrophic collisions could occur between every five to seven years, he said.The first-ever satellite crash happened in 2009, when a dead Russian satellite collided with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, creating almost 2,000 pieces of debris at least four inches in diameter and thousands more smaller pieces. Much of the debris will remain in orbit for years to come, each a threat to other spacecraft.This year, two dead satellites nearly collided. If they had, it would have created yet another field of debris that could have threatened other satellites. And with more satellites being launched, the chance of more close calls and collisions will only rise.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to see an even steeper exponential growth in the number of close calls,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an aerospace analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cWe cannot afford to have more collisions because it produces long-lasting debris that ultimately could limit our ability to use this part of space. It could have far-reaching economic consequences as well as strategic consequences if we screw up that area of space we use for security.\u201dOne of the reasons the Trump administration moved so aggressively to form the Space Force, the newest branch of the military, was to defend U.S. assets in space, which are used for reconnaissance, guiding precision munitions and communications. But the Space Force doesn\u2019t want to be in the business of warning companies and governments every time one of their satellites comes uncomfortably close to another.\u201cThey don\u2019t want to be in the business of doing warnings for everyone on the world,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a military function.\u201dTo transfer that authority to the Commerce Department, as the Trump administration called for two years ago, Congress would have to allocate funds and give the agency the authorization to do so.SpaceX, however, is moving quickly and says it could begin offering Internet service from its Starlink constellation in the United States in Canada this year, while \u201crapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.\"In a discussion with reporters late last year, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said that Starlink will be able to serve remote areas that fiber hasn\u2019t reached.\u201cDoes anyone like their Internet?\u201d she said. \u201cAnyone? Anyone? Nope. Anybody paying less than like 80 bucks a month for crappy \u2026 service? No. Okay, there we go. That\u2019s why we\u2019re going to be successful.\u201dThe company has said that it has taken steps to ensure its new satellites won\u2019t exacerbate the debris problem. The satellites are outfitted with thrusters and can \u201cautonomously perform maneuvers to avoid collisions with space debris and other spacecraft,\u201d the company said. \u201cThis capability reduces human error, allowing for a more reliable approach to collision avoidance.\u201dAt the end of their lives, the satellites would take themselves out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. And if those propulsion systems don\u2019t work, they\u2019ll automatically fall out of orbit within one to five years, the company said, significantly faster than the 25 years allowed now. The number of satellites in space is expected to balloon as private companies launch hundreds of new ones, raising the issue of which federal agency should track them. Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6328",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/23/satellites-collisions-tracking-space/",
        "text": "In a bold move two years ago, the White House issued a directive that would make the Commerce Department a traffic cop in space, giving it the authority to establish rules of the road for the rapidly growing number of satellites in orbit in hopes that it will prevent collisions that destroy millions of dollars\u2019 worth of hardware and leave behind dangerous clouds of debris. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech, Vice President Pence hailed the effort, saying \u201cPresident Trump knows that a stable and orderly space environment is critical to the strength of our economy and the resilience of our national security systems.\u201dBut since then, the directive, known as Space Policy Directive-3, has gone nowhere, mired in a Washington bureaucratic battle over which agency would be best suited for the mission. The Trump administration argues that the Commerce Department is best placed to foster the growing commercial space industry \u2014 including satellite servicing, manufacturing, space tourism and more \u2014 while taking advantage of new technology to track items in orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members of Congress think, however, that the responsibility should go to the Federal Aviation Administration instead, extending that agency\u2019s jurisdiction from the skies to space.The impasse has left the Pentagon with tracking space debris and satellites as well as warning governments and private companies around the world of potential collisions, as it has done for years. It\u2019s a job it doesn\u2019t want \u2014 and that the White House doesn\u2019t want it to have.It\u2019s not clear when, or if, the logjam will break.A spokesman for the National Space Council said fully funding the Office of Space Commerce \u201cremains a top priority\u201d to \u201caddress the emerging growth of large constellations in low Earth orbit and lay the foundation for management of future space traffic.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOthers are less optimistic that such an office will be established.Advertisement\u201cThe odds of getting legislation introduced this year, in an election year, on a topic of low political priority, were slim to begin with,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. \u201cAnd then we had a pandemic.\u201dAs the debate drags on, the number of satellites being launched to orbit continues to grow dramatically, raising the possibility of more collisions and more debris that in turn would threaten other satellites that are used for missile warnings, GPS, television, communications and more.At least four companies are moving ahead with plans to put up constellations of thousands of satellites that would beam the Internet to the estimated 4 billion people without access to broadband. Over the next 10 years, more than 50,000 satellites could be launched into orbit, up from the few thousand currently in operation today, according to Analytical Graphics Inc., or AGI, a company based outside Philadelphia that builds software to track spacecraft and debris in space. That\u2019s in addition to the junk floating around there. The Pentagon tracks about 22,000 pieces of debris larger than about four inches, but scientists say there are nearly 1 million larger than half an inch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAGI estimates that over the next 10 years, there could be as many as 404 collisions and 17 million close calls in the most congested orbits. Tracking all those objects and issuing warnings is too much for the Pentagon to handle \u2014 and outside its primary task of defending the nation. A civilian agency could be more adept in keeping up with the demand and better at communicating with private companies as well as foreign governments, some experts believe, though the Pentagon would continue to monitor space activity.\u201cIt\u2019s easier for the Department of Commerce to leverage commercial or other modern technology than it is for the Pentagon,\u201d Weeden said. He called the Pentagon\u2019s current tracking system \u201cantiquated.\u201d\u201cIt was a great system 30 years ago, and it did the job it was designed to do,\u201d Paul Graziani, AGI\u2019s CEO, said in an interview. \u201cHowever, the problem has moved on over the decades to be a much more difficult problem than the system was designed to handle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX has won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put 12,000 small satellites into orbit as part of its Starlink Internet constellation. Already it has launched 540, making it one of the largest satellite operators in the world, officials said, with more satellites in space than even China.Companies currently need to demonstrate that their individual satellites won\u2019t cause collisions to win FCC approval, Weeden said, but some experts want additional regulations that would extend to the constellations as a whole.Amazon, meanwhile, also has plans to deploy a large constellation as part of a program it calls Kuiper. The FCC on Thursday approved Amazon\u2019s plan to put up 3,236 satellites, and the company said it would invest $10 billion in the effort. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA project of this scale requires significant effort and resources, and, due to the nature of LEO constellations, it is not the kind of initiative that can start small,\u201d Amazon said in a statement. \"You have to commit.\u201dAnother company, OneWeb, intends to launch hundreds of satellites for broadband service, despite a bankruptcy filing that led to its acquisition by the British government and an Indian company.With all that activity, analysts say the U.S. government needs to move fast if it is going to be able to keep up and establish policies for the rest of the world to follow.\u201cA collision between two satellites could have a catastrophic impact on the space environment for centuries to come,\u201d FCC chairman Ajit Pai said recently.Story continues below advertisementIn April, the FCC, which over the past year has approved some 13,000 new satellites for launch, updated its rules governing orbital debris for the first time since 2004. Satellite applicants must now provide numerical values for the risk of collision and demonstrate how their satellites will be disposed of at the end of their missions, as well as make upgrades to design that would help avoid collisions.AdvertisementWhile the rule updates are a good step forward, \u201cthere is still more we need to do,\u201d FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in April. The commission considered tightening a rule that allows a satellite to stay in orbit for up to 25 years after its mission ends, a time frame that many think is far too long. But ultimately, the commission did not make any changes.\u201cThis rule simply does not make sense in today\u2019s orbital environment,\u201d Rosenworcel said.Story continues below advertisementDebris begets more debris, and collisions, officials say, are inevitable and can inflict serious damage. In orbit, objects travel at immense speed \u2014 the International Space Station, for example, whizzes around Earth at 17,500 mph. So even something the size of a peanut can do tremendous harm.Though outfitted with material intended to protect against debris strikes, the space station from time to time has had to maneuver to avoid getting hit. There even have been a few close calls in which ground controllers didn\u2019t have time to move the station out of the way. In those cases, the astronauts had to evacuate the station and seek refuge in a docked spacecraft in case a collision caused the station to depressurize.AdvertisementIn one of the most congested areas, about 430 to 560 miles high, \u201cthere is enough human-generated orbital debris \u2026 to create more debris even if no new satellites were launched,\u201d Weeden told a congressional committee this year.Story continues below advertisementCatastrophic collisions could occur between every five to seven years, he said.The first-ever satellite crash happened in 2009, when a dead Russian satellite collided with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, creating almost 2,000 pieces of debris at least four inches in diameter and thousands more smaller pieces. Much of the debris will remain in orbit for years to come, each a threat to other spacecraft.This year, two dead satellites nearly collided. If they had, it would have created yet another field of debris that could have threatened other satellites. And with more satellites being launched, the chance of more close calls and collisions will only rise.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to see an even steeper exponential growth in the number of close calls,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an aerospace analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cWe cannot afford to have more collisions because it produces long-lasting debris that ultimately could limit our ability to use this part of space. It could have far-reaching economic consequences as well as strategic consequences if we screw up that area of space we use for security.\u201dOne of the reasons the Trump administration moved so aggressively to form the Space Force, the newest branch of the military, was to defend U.S. assets in space, which are used for reconnaissance, guiding precision munitions and communications. But the Space Force doesn\u2019t want to be in the business of warning companies and governments every time one of their satellites comes uncomfortably close to another.\u201cThey don\u2019t want to be in the business of doing warnings for everyone on the world,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a military function.\u201dTo transfer that authority to the Commerce Department, as the Trump administration called for two years ago, Congress would have to allocate funds and give the agency the authorization to do so.SpaceX, however, is moving quickly and says it could begin offering Internet service from its Starlink constellation in the United States in Canada this year, while \u201crapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.\"In a discussion with reporters late last year, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said that Starlink will be able to serve remote areas that fiber hasn\u2019t reached.\u201cDoes anyone like their Internet?\u201d she said. \u201cAnyone? Anyone? Nope. Anybody paying less than like 80 bucks a month for crappy \u2026 service? No. Okay, there we go. That\u2019s why we\u2019re going to be successful.\u201dThe company has said that it has taken steps to ensure its new satellites won\u2019t exacerbate the debris problem. The satellites are outfitted with thrusters and can \u201cautonomously perform maneuvers to avoid collisions with space debris and other spacecraft,\u201d the company said. \u201cThis capability reduces human error, allowing for a more reliable approach to collision avoidance.\u201dAt the end of their lives, the satellites would take themselves out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. And if those propulsion systems don\u2019t work, they\u2019ll automatically fall out of orbit within one to five years, the company said, significantly faster than the 25 years allowed now. The number of satellites in space is expected to balloon as private companies launch hundreds of new ones, raising the issue of which federal agency should track them. Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6329",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/23/satellites-collisions-tracking-space/",
        "text": "In a bold move two years ago, the White House issued a directive that would make the Commerce Department a traffic cop in space, giving it the authority to establish rules of the road for the rapidly growing number of satellites in orbit in hopes that it will prevent collisions that destroy millions of dollars\u2019 worth of hardware and leave behind dangerous clouds of debris. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech, Vice President Pence hailed the effort, saying \u201cPresident Trump knows that a stable and orderly space environment is critical to the strength of our economy and the resilience of our national security systems.\u201dBut since then, the directive, known as Space Policy Directive-3, has gone nowhere, mired in a Washington bureaucratic battle over which agency would be best suited for the mission. The Trump administration argues that the Commerce Department is best placed to foster the growing commercial space industry \u2014 including satellite servicing, manufacturing, space tourism and more \u2014 while taking advantage of new technology to track items in orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members of Congress think, however, that the responsibility should go to the Federal Aviation Administration instead, extending that agency\u2019s jurisdiction from the skies to space.The impasse has left the Pentagon with tracking space debris and satellites as well as warning governments and private companies around the world of potential collisions, as it has done for years. It\u2019s a job it doesn\u2019t want \u2014 and that the White House doesn\u2019t want it to have.It\u2019s not clear when, or if, the logjam will break.A spokesman for the National Space Council said fully funding the Office of Space Commerce \u201cremains a top priority\u201d to \u201caddress the emerging growth of large constellations in low Earth orbit and lay the foundation for management of future space traffic.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOthers are less optimistic that such an office will be established.Advertisement\u201cThe odds of getting legislation introduced this year, in an election year, on a topic of low political priority, were slim to begin with,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. \u201cAnd then we had a pandemic.\u201dAs the debate drags on, the number of satellites being launched to orbit continues to grow dramatically, raising the possibility of more collisions and more debris that in turn would threaten other satellites that are used for missile warnings, GPS, television, communications and more.At least four companies are moving ahead with plans to put up constellations of thousands of satellites that would beam the Internet to the estimated 4 billion people without access to broadband. Over the next 10 years, more than 50,000 satellites could be launched into orbit, up from the few thousand currently in operation today, according to Analytical Graphics Inc., or AGI, a company based outside Philadelphia that builds software to track spacecraft and debris in space. That\u2019s in addition to the junk floating around there. The Pentagon tracks about 22,000 pieces of debris larger than about four inches, but scientists say there are nearly 1 million larger than half an inch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAGI estimates that over the next 10 years, there could be as many as 404 collisions and 17 million close calls in the most congested orbits. Tracking all those objects and issuing warnings is too much for the Pentagon to handle \u2014 and outside its primary task of defending the nation. A civilian agency could be more adept in keeping up with the demand and better at communicating with private companies as well as foreign governments, some experts believe, though the Pentagon would continue to monitor space activity.\u201cIt\u2019s easier for the Department of Commerce to leverage commercial or other modern technology than it is for the Pentagon,\u201d Weeden said. He called the Pentagon\u2019s current tracking system \u201cantiquated.\u201d\u201cIt was a great system 30 years ago, and it did the job it was designed to do,\u201d Paul Graziani, AGI\u2019s CEO, said in an interview. \u201cHowever, the problem has moved on over the decades to be a much more difficult problem than the system was designed to handle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX has won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put 12,000 small satellites into orbit as part of its Starlink Internet constellation. Already it has launched 540, making it one of the largest satellite operators in the world, officials said, with more satellites in space than even China.Companies currently need to demonstrate that their individual satellites won\u2019t cause collisions to win FCC approval, Weeden said, but some experts want additional regulations that would extend to the constellations as a whole.Amazon, meanwhile, also has plans to deploy a large constellation as part of a program it calls Kuiper. The FCC on Thursday approved Amazon\u2019s plan to put up 3,236 satellites, and the company said it would invest $10 billion in the effort. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA project of this scale requires significant effort and resources, and, due to the nature of LEO constellations, it is not the kind of initiative that can start small,\u201d Amazon said in a statement. \"You have to commit.\u201dAnother company, OneWeb, intends to launch hundreds of satellites for broadband service, despite a bankruptcy filing that led to its acquisition by the British government and an Indian company.With all that activity, analysts say the U.S. government needs to move fast if it is going to be able to keep up and establish policies for the rest of the world to follow.\u201cA collision between two satellites could have a catastrophic impact on the space environment for centuries to come,\u201d FCC chairman Ajit Pai said recently.Story continues below advertisementIn April, the FCC, which over the past year has approved some 13,000 new satellites for launch, updated its rules governing orbital debris for the first time since 2004. Satellite applicants must now provide numerical values for the risk of collision and demonstrate how their satellites will be disposed of at the end of their missions, as well as make upgrades to design that would help avoid collisions.AdvertisementWhile the rule updates are a good step forward, \u201cthere is still more we need to do,\u201d FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in April. The commission considered tightening a rule that allows a satellite to stay in orbit for up to 25 years after its mission ends, a time frame that many think is far too long. But ultimately, the commission did not make any changes.\u201cThis rule simply does not make sense in today\u2019s orbital environment,\u201d Rosenworcel said.Story continues below advertisementDebris begets more debris, and collisions, officials say, are inevitable and can inflict serious damage. In orbit, objects travel at immense speed \u2014 the International Space Station, for example, whizzes around Earth at 17,500 mph. So even something the size of a peanut can do tremendous harm.Though outfitted with material intended to protect against debris strikes, the space station from time to time has had to maneuver to avoid getting hit. There even have been a few close calls in which ground controllers didn\u2019t have time to move the station out of the way. In those cases, the astronauts had to evacuate the station and seek refuge in a docked spacecraft in case a collision caused the station to depressurize.AdvertisementIn one of the most congested areas, about 430 to 560 miles high, \u201cthere is enough human-generated orbital debris \u2026 to create more debris even if no new satellites were launched,\u201d Weeden told a congressional committee this year.Story continues below advertisementCatastrophic collisions could occur between every five to seven years, he said.The first-ever satellite crash happened in 2009, when a dead Russian satellite collided with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, creating almost 2,000 pieces of debris at least four inches in diameter and thousands more smaller pieces. Much of the debris will remain in orbit for years to come, each a threat to other spacecraft.This year, two dead satellites nearly collided. If they had, it would have created yet another field of debris that could have threatened other satellites. And with more satellites being launched, the chance of more close calls and collisions will only rise.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to see an even steeper exponential growth in the number of close calls,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an aerospace analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cWe cannot afford to have more collisions because it produces long-lasting debris that ultimately could limit our ability to use this part of space. It could have far-reaching economic consequences as well as strategic consequences if we screw up that area of space we use for security.\u201dOne of the reasons the Trump administration moved so aggressively to form the Space Force, the newest branch of the military, was to defend U.S. assets in space, which are used for reconnaissance, guiding precision munitions and communications. But the Space Force doesn\u2019t want to be in the business of warning companies and governments every time one of their satellites comes uncomfortably close to another.\u201cThey don\u2019t want to be in the business of doing warnings for everyone on the world,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cThat\u2019s not a military function.\u201dTo transfer that authority to the Commerce Department, as the Trump administration called for two years ago, Congress would have to allocate funds and give the agency the authorization to do so.SpaceX, however, is moving quickly and says it could begin offering Internet service from its Starlink constellation in the United States in Canada this year, while \u201crapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.\"In a discussion with reporters late last year, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said that Starlink will be able to serve remote areas that fiber hasn\u2019t reached.\u201cDoes anyone like their Internet?\u201d she said. \u201cAnyone? Anyone? Nope. Anybody paying less than like 80 bucks a month for crappy \u2026 service? No. Okay, there we go. That\u2019s why we\u2019re going to be successful.\u201dThe company has said that it has taken steps to ensure its new satellites won\u2019t exacerbate the debris problem. The satellites are outfitted with thrusters and can \u201cautonomously perform maneuvers to avoid collisions with space debris and other spacecraft,\u201d the company said. \u201cThis capability reduces human error, allowing for a more reliable approach to collision avoidance.\u201dAt the end of their lives, the satellites would take themselves out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. And if those propulsion systems don\u2019t work, they\u2019ll automatically fall out of orbit within one to five years, the company said, significantly faster than the 25 years allowed now. The number of satellites in space is expected to balloon as private companies launch hundreds of new ones, raising the issue of which federal agency should track them. Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lifelong space enthusiast becomes latest civilian to buy his way into space   (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6330",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/25/axiomspaceprivateastronautmission/",
        "text": "He\u2019s sky-dived or base-jumped some 3,000 times. An avid cyclist, he hang glides, white-water kayaks and flies jets in airshows.Now John Shoffner is preparing to go to space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs the latest wealthy entrepreneur to book passage to the International Space Station, Shoffner is scheduled to fly alongside veteran NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson in the second half of next year. The flight would mark the second mission arranged by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is training private citizens to become astronauts and flying them to the space station on SpaceX rockets and spacecraft.The company hopes to fly private missions about every six or seven months, and is working toward its first flight in January, when three billionaires, who are paying $55 million each, will spend about a week on the station. They\u2019ll be accompanied by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAxiom would not disclose what Shoffner has paid.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThat flight is one of several private astronaut missions coming to fruition in the months ahead. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded Shift4 Payments, is funding an all-civilian flight to space that would raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Instead of flying to the station, the SpaceX Dragon capsule would stay in orbit for a few days before coming back to Earth.After that, Russia is planning to fly two civilian missions to the space station. First, a Russian actress and director would launch to the station in October to film scenes for a movie. Then, in December, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his production assistant Yozo Hirano are scheduled to fly to the station, where they would film segments for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel. Maezawa has also chartered a flight on SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft that would orbit the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is unclear who might join Whitson and Shoffner on their mission. An Axiom spokesman said that would be revealed at a later date. But recently, the Discovery Channel announced it was hosting a competition for a seat on a future Axiom mission to the space station. Former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine also said last year that Tom Cruise was working with the company to shoot scenes for a movie on the station.Shoffner said he is a lifelong space fan who dreamed of being an astronaut when he was a kid and got his pilot\u2019s license when he was 17. Now, he flies in airshows and also races sportscars.He founded Dura-Line Corp. and developed materials and methods for the placement of fiber-optic cable, with operations in more than a dozen countries.Story continues below advertisementWhen the opportunity to go to space came along, he jumped at it.Advertisement\u201cMy activities in life have, I think, prepared me for this mentally and physically. I\u2019m ready to go.\u201dAs a NASA astronaut, Whitson broke all sorts of records. She spent 665 days in space, more than any other American; she was the first female commander of the International Space Station and the first woman to serve as chief astronaut; and the first person to hold that position who hadn\u2019t served in the military.She completed 10 spacewalks, more than any other female astronaut. And when she retired in 2018, she figured she had spent enough time in space. \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure I would ever get to fly again,\u201d she said. John Shoffner, who made his fortune laying fiber-optic cable, will be accompanied by the most-decorated American female astronaut on a flight scheduled for next year Lifelong space enthusiast becomes latest civilian to buy his way into space  ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lifelong space enthusiast becomes latest civilian to buy his way into space   (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6331",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/25/axiomspaceprivateastronautmission/",
        "text": "He\u2019s sky-dived or base-jumped some 3,000 times. An avid cyclist, he hang glides, white-water kayaks and flies jets in airshows.Now John Shoffner is preparing to go to space.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs the latest wealthy entrepreneur to book passage to the International Space Station, Shoffner is scheduled to fly alongside veteran NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson in the second half of next year. The flight would mark the second mission arranged by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that is training private citizens to become astronauts and flying them to the space station on SpaceX rockets and spacecraft.The company hopes to fly private missions about every six or seven months, and is working toward its first flight in January, when three billionaires, who are paying $55 million each, will spend about a week on the station. They\u2019ll be accompanied by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAxiom would not disclose what Shoffner has paid.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThat flight is one of several private astronaut missions coming to fruition in the months ahead. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded Shift4 Payments, is funding an all-civilian flight to space that would raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Instead of flying to the station, the SpaceX Dragon capsule would stay in orbit for a few days before coming back to Earth.After that, Russia is planning to fly two civilian missions to the space station. First, a Russian actress and director would launch to the station in October to film scenes for a movie. Then, in December, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his production assistant Yozo Hirano are scheduled to fly to the station, where they would film segments for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel. Maezawa has also chartered a flight on SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft that would orbit the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is unclear who might join Whitson and Shoffner on their mission. An Axiom spokesman said that would be revealed at a later date. But recently, the Discovery Channel announced it was hosting a competition for a seat on a future Axiom mission to the space station. Former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine also said last year that Tom Cruise was working with the company to shoot scenes for a movie on the station.Shoffner said he is a lifelong space fan who dreamed of being an astronaut when he was a kid and got his pilot\u2019s license when he was 17. Now, he flies in airshows and also races sportscars.He founded Dura-Line Corp. and developed materials and methods for the placement of fiber-optic cable, with operations in more than a dozen countries.Story continues below advertisementWhen the opportunity to go to space came along, he jumped at it.Advertisement\u201cMy activities in life have, I think, prepared me for this mentally and physically. I\u2019m ready to go.\u201dAs a NASA astronaut, Whitson broke all sorts of records. She spent 665 days in space, more than any other American; she was the first female commander of the International Space Station and the first woman to serve as chief astronaut; and the first person to hold that position who hadn\u2019t served in the military.She completed 10 spacewalks, more than any other female astronaut. And when she retired in 2018, she figured she had spent enough time in space. \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure I would ever get to fly again,\u201d she said. John Shoffner, who made his fortune laying fiber-optic cable, will be accompanied by the most-decorated American female astronaut on a flight scheduled for next year Lifelong space enthusiast becomes latest civilian to buy his way into space  ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6332",
        "date": "2019-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/24/nasa-is-trying-land-moon-biggest-challenge-might-be-congress/",
        "text": "He\u2019s no longer in Congress, but Jim Bridenstine is in full campaign mode. On the road. Glad-handing. Posing for photos. He\u2019s got his stump speech down, a shiny new logo and the support of the White House.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma who is now the NASA administrator, is seeking not support at the ballot box but votes in Congress for what could become one of the boldest human exploration endeavors NASA has undertaken in decades \u2014 the first return to the moon since the end of the Apollo era. Ever since the White House dramatically accelerated NASA\u2019s lunar mission this spring, mandating the agency get people there by 2024 instead of 2028 as previously planned, Bridenstine has been under enormous pressure to meet a goal many think impossible. His orders are not only to deliver a long-shot moon-landing coup, but also to inject a heavy dose of Trumpian impatience into an agency the White House thinks has become too bureaucratic and risk averse.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo drum up support and the financial resources needed for what NASA calls its Artemis program, after the twin sister of Apollo, Bridenstine spent much of the summer touring the country in a 10-city swing like a one-man rock band.Now that Congress is back in session, Bridenstine has made repeated pilgrimages to Capitol Hill, where he\u2019s continued to sing his refrain to committee chairs and backbenchers alike, seeking votes for funding in every corridor for a program that would, as he repeatedly says, \u201csend the next man and the first woman to the surface of the moon.\u201dIn all, he\u2019s visited with 30 members of Congress or their staffs, selling Republicans and Democrats on the moon program and, perhaps more important, the additional $1.6 billion in funding the White House has asked for in next year\u2019s budget.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a small down payment for a program estimated to cost between $20 billion and $30 billion, and a crucial test for an administrator seeking to carry out the White House\u2019s wishes. If he can\u2019t get the initial $1.6 billion, well, as the space adage goes: no bucks, no Buck Rogers.\u201cHe\u2019s really selling, as he needs to,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. \u201cIf they can\u2019t get [the $1.6 billion,] they\u2019re not going anywhere by 2024.\u201dPence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five yearsThe technical challenge of landing on the moon is hard enough. Recently, spacecraft from India and Israel tried and failed \u2014 and neither of them were carrying people. Given the enormous difficulties of landing softly on another celestial body, even Ken Bowersox, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, recently told a congressional hearing that he was doubtful the agency could meet the 2024 deadline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it is good to have \u201can aggressive goal,\u201d he said, he \u201cwouldn\u2019t bet my oldest child\u2019s upcoming birthday present or anything like that.\u201dBut Bridenstine knows that before NASA builds the rockets, spacecraft and lunar landers needed for the mission, the agency must clear the political roadblocks that are every bit as daunting as the vacuum of space. While members of Congress love to say they support NASA \u2014 as they do lowering crime or boosting national security \u2014 getting them to increase the agency\u2019s budget is another story. Traditionally, space does not equal votes in elections. And getting Democrats to support a project that, if successful, could be a legacy for the Trump administration is going to be a tough sell.Thank you @RepCartwright for spending time with me today to discuss @NASA\u2019s #Artemis program. I\u2019m committed to working in a bipartisan manner to achieve the goals of Artemis. Thank you for your support! pic.twitter.com/EZYl0RVpXA\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 11, 2019\n\nSome key lawmakers are already on record as skeptical of, if not hostile to, the proposal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon in 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so,\u201d Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said in a statement.At a recent congressional hearing about deep space exploration, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, blasted the way the administration has rolled out the program.For NASA contractors, lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit close to home\u201cRhetoric about American leadership in space and advancing the role of women in spaceflight is all well and good,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it is not a substitute for a well-planned, well-managed, well-funded and well-executed exploration program. To date, Congress has not been given a credible basis for believing the president\u2019s moon program satisfied any of those criteria.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut like any good salesman, Bridenstine has pressed ahead, outwardly optimistic and undeterred, one congressional district at a time.In August, he kept up a punishing travel schedule. On the 16th, he visited the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama with a trio of Republicans: Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (Ala.), Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Rep. Scott DesJarlais (Tenn.). On the 22nd, he was in Ohio with Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, and Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican. On the 26th, he was at the NASA Ames Research Center in California with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, both Democrats. Two days later, it was the University of New Hampshire with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D); then the University of Iowa with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R) and Rep. David Loebsack (D).The goal, Bridenstine said in an interview, is to \u201ceducate and, in some cases, even inspire the right actions that will enable us to get where we all desire to go.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s also to showcase how institutions in certain congressional districts are contributing to the program, which is something members of Congress can take credit for on the campaign trail. It\u2019s the moon as political currency, which Bridenstine, who served a little over two terms in Congress, knows as well as anyone.During his confirmation process, Bridenstine was criticized for being a politician instead of a scientist or engineer, as many NASA administrators had been.\u201cMaybe it\u2019s a university in their district,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s their industry that helps NASA. I think it really changes the dynamic to where they can see the direct impact to programs like this and how it affects their constituents and how it benefits the country as a whole.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlong the way, Bridenstine has helped forge some unlikely alliances.AdvertisementAt the Ames Research Center, he appeared to win Pelosi's endorsement. During a speech, she turned to Bridenstine and said, \u201cAs far as having a woman step foot on the moon, our hopes are riding on you.\u201dThat triggered a rare tweet of support for Pelosi from Vice President Pence, the chair of the National Space Council: \u201cGreat to see @SpeakerPelosi join us in supporting Artemis, which will land the first American woman on the Moon by 2024! Thank you @NASA for all of your hard work!\u201dBut Pelosi is not satisfied with the way the Trump administration has pursued the goal. \u201cOf course, the Speaker supports women having an equal opportunity to go to the moon and pioneer new frontiers,\u201d Drew Hammill, Pelosi\u2019s deputy chief of staff, said in an email. \"But NASA has failed to provide Congress with what we need to evaluate the Administration\u2019s proposal. Congress needs answers.\u201dGreat to see @SpeakerPelosi join us in supporting Artemis, which will land the first American woman on the Moon by 2024! Thank you @NASA for all of your hard work! https://t.co/GJGa1OGQTJ\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) August 29, 2019\n\nIn a statement, Eshoo said that while she wanted more detail about the ultimate cost and timeline, she, too, was generally supportive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cArtemis has the potential to captivate the country by landing the first woman on the Moon and develop the technology necessary to live and work on another world, and I\u2019m especially proud that the NASA Ames Center in my District will be integral to the mission\u2019s success,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve spoken with Administrator Bridenstine about Artemis on several occasions, and I\u2019m optimistic we can land a woman on the Moon in a handful of years.\u201dHe also has a key ally in Rep. Kay Granger (Tex.), the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. She recently met with Bridenstine to discuss the program and said in an interview that the \u201cchances are good\u201d for getting the funding it needs. She\u2019s joining the administrator in selling the program to members of Congress, she said, because \u201cmany of them are just not aware of it.\u201dThrilled to give @RepKayGranger of Texas the very first #Artemis lapel pin! Rep. Granger is leading the effort to build bipartisan support for Artemis with women in Congress. pic.twitter.com/7ggjmvN8xb\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 11, 2019\n\nStill, it\u2019s clear NASA and the White House have a lot of work to do \u2014 especially with giving Congress a detailed budget of what the entire program is going to cost.\u201cThe truth is, without a lot more detailed information, it would be difficult to support in absolute terms the administration\u2019s plans for Artemis,\u201d said Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA.Even supporters such as Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), a key member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said NASA has a ways to go to build up support.\u201cI\u2019ve yet to see the numbers for a five-year plan,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cI want to be able to strongly make the case for acceleration for Artemis, for moving forward with landing a woman on the moon. But for me to convince my colleagues, I need information I don\u2019t yet have.\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been lobbying hard for the Artemis program. NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6333",
        "date": "2019-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/24/nasa-is-trying-land-moon-biggest-challenge-might-be-congress/",
        "text": "He\u2019s no longer in Congress, but Jim Bridenstine is in full campaign mode. On the road. Glad-handing. Posing for photos. He\u2019s got his stump speech down, a shiny new logo and the support of the White House.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma who is now the NASA administrator, is seeking not support at the ballot box but votes in Congress for what could become one of the boldest human exploration endeavors NASA has undertaken in decades \u2014 the first return to the moon since the end of the Apollo era. Ever since the White House dramatically accelerated NASA\u2019s lunar mission this spring, mandating the agency get people there by 2024 instead of 2028 as previously planned, Bridenstine has been under enormous pressure to meet a goal many think impossible. His orders are not only to deliver a long-shot moon-landing coup, but also to inject a heavy dose of Trumpian impatience into an agency the White House thinks has become too bureaucratic and risk averse.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo drum up support and the financial resources needed for what NASA calls its Artemis program, after the twin sister of Apollo, Bridenstine spent much of the summer touring the country in a 10-city swing like a one-man rock band.Now that Congress is back in session, Bridenstine has made repeated pilgrimages to Capitol Hill, where he\u2019s continued to sing his refrain to committee chairs and backbenchers alike, seeking votes for funding in every corridor for a program that would, as he repeatedly says, \u201csend the next man and the first woman to the surface of the moon.\u201dIn all, he\u2019s visited with 30 members of Congress or their staffs, selling Republicans and Democrats on the moon program and, perhaps more important, the additional $1.6 billion in funding the White House has asked for in next year\u2019s budget.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a small down payment for a program estimated to cost between $20 billion and $30 billion, and a crucial test for an administrator seeking to carry out the White House\u2019s wishes. If he can\u2019t get the initial $1.6 billion, well, as the space adage goes: no bucks, no Buck Rogers.\u201cHe\u2019s really selling, as he needs to,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. \u201cIf they can\u2019t get [the $1.6 billion,] they\u2019re not going anywhere by 2024.\u201dPence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five yearsThe technical challenge of landing on the moon is hard enough. Recently, spacecraft from India and Israel tried and failed \u2014 and neither of them were carrying people. Given the enormous difficulties of landing softly on another celestial body, even Ken Bowersox, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, recently told a congressional hearing that he was doubtful the agency could meet the 2024 deadline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it is good to have \u201can aggressive goal,\u201d he said, he \u201cwouldn\u2019t bet my oldest child\u2019s upcoming birthday present or anything like that.\u201dBut Bridenstine knows that before NASA builds the rockets, spacecraft and lunar landers needed for the mission, the agency must clear the political roadblocks that are every bit as daunting as the vacuum of space. While members of Congress love to say they support NASA \u2014 as they do lowering crime or boosting national security \u2014 getting them to increase the agency\u2019s budget is another story. Traditionally, space does not equal votes in elections. And getting Democrats to support a project that, if successful, could be a legacy for the Trump administration is going to be a tough sell.Thank you @RepCartwright for spending time with me today to discuss @NASA\u2019s #Artemis program. I\u2019m committed to working in a bipartisan manner to achieve the goals of Artemis. Thank you for your support! pic.twitter.com/EZYl0RVpXA\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 11, 2019\n\nSome key lawmakers are already on record as skeptical of, if not hostile to, the proposal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon in 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so,\u201d Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said in a statement.At a recent congressional hearing about deep space exploration, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, blasted the way the administration has rolled out the program.For NASA contractors, lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit close to home\u201cRhetoric about American leadership in space and advancing the role of women in spaceflight is all well and good,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it is not a substitute for a well-planned, well-managed, well-funded and well-executed exploration program. To date, Congress has not been given a credible basis for believing the president\u2019s moon program satisfied any of those criteria.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut like any good salesman, Bridenstine has pressed ahead, outwardly optimistic and undeterred, one congressional district at a time.In August, he kept up a punishing travel schedule. On the 16th, he visited the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama with a trio of Republicans: Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (Ala.), Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Rep. Scott DesJarlais (Tenn.). On the 22nd, he was in Ohio with Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, and Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican. On the 26th, he was at the NASA Ames Research Center in California with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, both Democrats. Two days later, it was the University of New Hampshire with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D); then the University of Iowa with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R) and Rep. David Loebsack (D).The goal, Bridenstine said in an interview, is to \u201ceducate and, in some cases, even inspire the right actions that will enable us to get where we all desire to go.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s also to showcase how institutions in certain congressional districts are contributing to the program, which is something members of Congress can take credit for on the campaign trail. It\u2019s the moon as political currency, which Bridenstine, who served a little over two terms in Congress, knows as well as anyone.During his confirmation process, Bridenstine was criticized for being a politician instead of a scientist or engineer, as many NASA administrators had been.\u201cMaybe it\u2019s a university in their district,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s their industry that helps NASA. I think it really changes the dynamic to where they can see the direct impact to programs like this and how it affects their constituents and how it benefits the country as a whole.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlong the way, Bridenstine has helped forge some unlikely alliances.AdvertisementAt the Ames Research Center, he appeared to win Pelosi's endorsement. During a speech, she turned to Bridenstine and said, \u201cAs far as having a woman step foot on the moon, our hopes are riding on you.\u201dThat triggered a rare tweet of support for Pelosi from Vice President Pence, the chair of the National Space Council: \u201cGreat to see @SpeakerPelosi join us in supporting Artemis, which will land the first American woman on the Moon by 2024! Thank you @NASA for all of your hard work!\u201dBut Pelosi is not satisfied with the way the Trump administration has pursued the goal. \u201cOf course, the Speaker supports women having an equal opportunity to go to the moon and pioneer new frontiers,\u201d Drew Hammill, Pelosi\u2019s deputy chief of staff, said in an email. \"But NASA has failed to provide Congress with what we need to evaluate the Administration\u2019s proposal. Congress needs answers.\u201dGreat to see @SpeakerPelosi join us in supporting Artemis, which will land the first American woman on the Moon by 2024! Thank you @NASA for all of your hard work! https://t.co/GJGa1OGQTJ\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) August 29, 2019\n\nIn a statement, Eshoo said that while she wanted more detail about the ultimate cost and timeline, she, too, was generally supportive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cArtemis has the potential to captivate the country by landing the first woman on the Moon and develop the technology necessary to live and work on another world, and I\u2019m especially proud that the NASA Ames Center in my District will be integral to the mission\u2019s success,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve spoken with Administrator Bridenstine about Artemis on several occasions, and I\u2019m optimistic we can land a woman on the Moon in a handful of years.\u201dHe also has a key ally in Rep. Kay Granger (Tex.), the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. She recently met with Bridenstine to discuss the program and said in an interview that the \u201cchances are good\u201d for getting the funding it needs. She\u2019s joining the administrator in selling the program to members of Congress, she said, because \u201cmany of them are just not aware of it.\u201dThrilled to give @RepKayGranger of Texas the very first #Artemis lapel pin! Rep. Granger is leading the effort to build bipartisan support for Artemis with women in Congress. pic.twitter.com/7ggjmvN8xb\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 11, 2019\n\nStill, it\u2019s clear NASA and the White House have a lot of work to do \u2014 especially with giving Congress a detailed budget of what the entire program is going to cost.\u201cThe truth is, without a lot more detailed information, it would be difficult to support in absolute terms the administration\u2019s plans for Artemis,\u201d said Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA.Even supporters such as Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), a key member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said NASA has a ways to go to build up support.\u201cI\u2019ve yet to see the numbers for a five-year plan,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cI want to be able to strongly make the case for acceleration for Artemis, for moving forward with landing a woman on the moon. But for me to convince my colleagues, I need information I don\u2019t yet have.\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been lobbying hard for the Artemis program. NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6334",
        "date": "2019-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/24/nasa-is-trying-land-moon-biggest-challenge-might-be-congress/",
        "text": "He\u2019s no longer in Congress, but Jim Bridenstine is in full campaign mode. On the road. Glad-handing. Posing for photos. He\u2019s got his stump speech down, a shiny new logo and the support of the White House.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBridenstine, a Republican from Oklahoma who is now the NASA administrator, is seeking not support at the ballot box but votes in Congress for what could become one of the boldest human exploration endeavors NASA has undertaken in decades \u2014 the first return to the moon since the end of the Apollo era. Ever since the White House dramatically accelerated NASA\u2019s lunar mission this spring, mandating the agency get people there by 2024 instead of 2028 as previously planned, Bridenstine has been under enormous pressure to meet a goal many think impossible. His orders are not only to deliver a long-shot moon-landing coup, but also to inject a heavy dose of Trumpian impatience into an agency the White House thinks has become too bureaucratic and risk averse.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo drum up support and the financial resources needed for what NASA calls its Artemis program, after the twin sister of Apollo, Bridenstine spent much of the summer touring the country in a 10-city swing like a one-man rock band.Now that Congress is back in session, Bridenstine has made repeated pilgrimages to Capitol Hill, where he\u2019s continued to sing his refrain to committee chairs and backbenchers alike, seeking votes for funding in every corridor for a program that would, as he repeatedly says, \u201csend the next man and the first woman to the surface of the moon.\u201dIn all, he\u2019s visited with 30 members of Congress or their staffs, selling Republicans and Democrats on the moon program and, perhaps more important, the additional $1.6 billion in funding the White House has asked for in next year\u2019s budget.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a small down payment for a program estimated to cost between $20 billion and $30 billion, and a crucial test for an administrator seeking to carry out the White House\u2019s wishes. If he can\u2019t get the initial $1.6 billion, well, as the space adage goes: no bucks, no Buck Rogers.\u201cHe\u2019s really selling, as he needs to,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. \u201cIf they can\u2019t get [the $1.6 billion,] they\u2019re not going anywhere by 2024.\u201dPence calls for NASA to send humans to the moon within five yearsThe technical challenge of landing on the moon is hard enough. Recently, spacecraft from India and Israel tried and failed \u2014 and neither of them were carrying people. Given the enormous difficulties of landing softly on another celestial body, even Ken Bowersox, NASA\u2019s head of human exploration, recently told a congressional hearing that he was doubtful the agency could meet the 2024 deadline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile it is good to have \u201can aggressive goal,\u201d he said, he \u201cwouldn\u2019t bet my oldest child\u2019s upcoming birthday present or anything like that.\u201dBut Bridenstine knows that before NASA builds the rockets, spacecraft and lunar landers needed for the mission, the agency must clear the political roadblocks that are every bit as daunting as the vacuum of space. While members of Congress love to say they support NASA \u2014 as they do lowering crime or boosting national security \u2014 getting them to increase the agency\u2019s budget is another story. Traditionally, space does not equal votes in elections. And getting Democrats to support a project that, if successful, could be a legacy for the Trump administration is going to be a tough sell.Thank you @RepCartwright for spending time with me today to discuss @NASA\u2019s #Artemis program. I\u2019m committed to working in a bipartisan manner to achieve the goals of Artemis. Thank you for your support! pic.twitter.com/EZYl0RVpXA\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 11, 2019\n\nSome key lawmakers are already on record as skeptical of, if not hostile to, the proposal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon in 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so,\u201d Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said in a statement.At a recent congressional hearing about deep space exploration, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), the chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, blasted the way the administration has rolled out the program.For NASA contractors, lunar landing failures by Israel and India hit close to home\u201cRhetoric about American leadership in space and advancing the role of women in spaceflight is all well and good,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it is not a substitute for a well-planned, well-managed, well-funded and well-executed exploration program. To date, Congress has not been given a credible basis for believing the president\u2019s moon program satisfied any of those criteria.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut like any good salesman, Bridenstine has pressed ahead, outwardly optimistic and undeterred, one congressional district at a time.In August, he kept up a punishing travel schedule. On the 16th, he visited the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama with a trio of Republicans: Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (Ala.), Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Rep. Scott DesJarlais (Tenn.). On the 22nd, he was in Ohio with Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, and Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican. On the 26th, he was at the NASA Ames Research Center in California with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, both Democrats. Two days later, it was the University of New Hampshire with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D); then the University of Iowa with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R) and Rep. David Loebsack (D).The goal, Bridenstine said in an interview, is to \u201ceducate and, in some cases, even inspire the right actions that will enable us to get where we all desire to go.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s also to showcase how institutions in certain congressional districts are contributing to the program, which is something members of Congress can take credit for on the campaign trail. It\u2019s the moon as political currency, which Bridenstine, who served a little over two terms in Congress, knows as well as anyone.During his confirmation process, Bridenstine was criticized for being a politician instead of a scientist or engineer, as many NASA administrators had been.\u201cMaybe it\u2019s a university in their district,\u201d he said. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s their industry that helps NASA. I think it really changes the dynamic to where they can see the direct impact to programs like this and how it affects their constituents and how it benefits the country as a whole.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlong the way, Bridenstine has helped forge some unlikely alliances.AdvertisementAt the Ames Research Center, he appeared to win Pelosi's endorsement. During a speech, she turned to Bridenstine and said, \u201cAs far as having a woman step foot on the moon, our hopes are riding on you.\u201dThat triggered a rare tweet of support for Pelosi from Vice President Pence, the chair of the National Space Council: \u201cGreat to see @SpeakerPelosi join us in supporting Artemis, which will land the first American woman on the Moon by 2024! Thank you @NASA for all of your hard work!\u201dBut Pelosi is not satisfied with the way the Trump administration has pursued the goal. \u201cOf course, the Speaker supports women having an equal opportunity to go to the moon and pioneer new frontiers,\u201d Drew Hammill, Pelosi\u2019s deputy chief of staff, said in an email. \"But NASA has failed to provide Congress with what we need to evaluate the Administration\u2019s proposal. Congress needs answers.\u201dGreat to see @SpeakerPelosi join us in supporting Artemis, which will land the first American woman on the Moon by 2024! Thank you @NASA for all of your hard work! https://t.co/GJGa1OGQTJ\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) August 29, 2019\n\nIn a statement, Eshoo said that while she wanted more detail about the ultimate cost and timeline, she, too, was generally supportive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cArtemis has the potential to captivate the country by landing the first woman on the Moon and develop the technology necessary to live and work on another world, and I\u2019m especially proud that the NASA Ames Center in my District will be integral to the mission\u2019s success,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve spoken with Administrator Bridenstine about Artemis on several occasions, and I\u2019m optimistic we can land a woman on the Moon in a handful of years.\u201dHe also has a key ally in Rep. Kay Granger (Tex.), the ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee. She recently met with Bridenstine to discuss the program and said in an interview that the \u201cchances are good\u201d for getting the funding it needs. She\u2019s joining the administrator in selling the program to members of Congress, she said, because \u201cmany of them are just not aware of it.\u201dThrilled to give @RepKayGranger of Texas the very first #Artemis lapel pin! Rep. Granger is leading the effort to build bipartisan support for Artemis with women in Congress. pic.twitter.com/7ggjmvN8xb\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 11, 2019\n\nStill, it\u2019s clear NASA and the White House have a lot of work to do \u2014 especially with giving Congress a detailed budget of what the entire program is going to cost.\u201cThe truth is, without a lot more detailed information, it would be difficult to support in absolute terms the administration\u2019s plans for Artemis,\u201d said Rep. Matthew Cartwright (D-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA.Even supporters such as Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), a key member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said NASA has a ways to go to build up support.\u201cI\u2019ve yet to see the numbers for a five-year plan,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cI want to be able to strongly make the case for acceleration for Artemis, for moving forward with landing a woman on the moon. But for me to convince my colleagues, I need information I don\u2019t yet have.\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been lobbying hard for the Artemis program. NASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on the space station discuss SpaceX\u2019s rocket, sleeping quarters and Baby Yoda (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6335",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/19/nasa-spacex-crew-news-conference/",
        "text": "He had flown on the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz. And now after flying the SpaceX Dragon capsule, Soichi Noguchi is only the third person, after John Young and Wally Schirra, to travel to orbit in three different vehicles.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAsked Thursday how the three compared, Noguchi didn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cFor the record, Dragon is the best,\u201d the Japanese astronaut said. \u201cShort answer.\u201d During their first news conference since arriving at the International Space Station on Monday night, the astronauts who blasted off Sunday evening said their escape from Earth\u2019s gravity was a thrilling ride atop a spacecraft that on the ground appeared restless, grunting and vibrating before being unleashed into the skies, a fury of nine engines churning through thousands of gallons of propellant.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou can just tell it wants to get off the ground,\u201d mission commander Mike Hopkins said. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely ready to go, and it just leaped off the pad. It was amazing.\u201dAdvertisementThe mission followed a test flight in May that ended NASA\u2019s long, ignominious absence from human spaceflight since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. With that successful mission, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the station for two months, NASA then proceeded with the Crew-1 flight, making the Dragon capsule the first privately owned and privately operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.The crew of four \u2014 NASA astronauts Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Noguchi \u2014 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday evening, and arrived at the station about 27 hours later. They\u2019re scheduled to spend six months on the orbiting laboratory conducting science experiments, including one, proposed by Michigan high school students, that will examine how spaceflight affects brain function.Story continues below advertisementOn Monday, the Dragon docked itself autonomously with the station, while it orbited Earth at 17,500 mph, and the astronauts sat by, monitoring the spacecraft but staying off the controls.AdvertisementAsked whether it was difficult to be hands off, Glover, a Navy fighter pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, including 24 combat missions, said that \u201cit wasn\u2019t an issue.\u201d\u201cThe rocket, the Falcon 9, performed superbly, the way it was supposed to,\u201d he said. \u201cDragon performed superb.\u201dThe crew joined NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who arrived at the station last month. Now with seven occupants, the football-field-size station is a bit cozy \u2014 but not, Rubins said, crowded.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is busy in a great way,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s energy up here. We\u2019ve got people zooming by.\u201dWith seven people on board and only six sleeping quarters, Hopkins is bunking down in the Dragon capsule, making it one of the most expensive space bedrooms ever.AdvertisementAs commander of the mission, he said, \u201cit just felt right that that\u2019s where I was supposed to go. We talked about it as a crew a little bit. And everybody would be willing to sleep wherever. You\u2019re in space, and so you\u2019re not going to complain. \u2026 Overall, I think it\u2019s going to work. It\u2019s a roomy vehicle.\u201dHe said he was being careful, though, to make sure he didn\u2019t do anything to damage the vehicle as he floats in and out. \u201cIt\u2019s what\u2019s going to get us home, and so I want to make sure I don\u2019t do anything to compromise that while I\u2019m sleeping in there.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFollowing a long spaceflight tradition, the crew brought up a \u201czero-G indicator,\u201d something that would float to let the astronauts know they had escaped gravity. On this flight, it was a Baby Yoda doll, chosen in an attempt to provide a bit of levity during a tumultuous year, rocked by a pandemic, civil unrest and a polarizing election.\u201cWhen you see him,\u201d Hopkins said of the Baby Yoda bobbing around in space, \u201cit\u2019s hard not to smile.\u201d During their first news conference since arriving at the International Space Station, the astronauts who blasted off Sunday said their escape from Earth\u2019s gravity was a thrilling ride atop a spacecraft that on the ground appeared restless, grunting and vibrating before being unleashed into the skies. Astronauts on the space station discuss SpaceX\u2019s rocket, sleeping quarters and Baby Yoda",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on the space station discuss SpaceX\u2019s rocket, sleeping quarters and Baby Yoda (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6336",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/19/nasa-spacex-crew-news-conference/",
        "text": "He had flown on the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz. And now after flying the SpaceX Dragon capsule, Soichi Noguchi is only the third person, after John Young and Wally Schirra, to travel to orbit in three different vehicles.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAsked Thursday how the three compared, Noguchi didn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cFor the record, Dragon is the best,\u201d the Japanese astronaut said. \u201cShort answer.\u201d During their first news conference since arriving at the International Space Station on Monday night, the astronauts who blasted off Sunday evening said their escape from Earth\u2019s gravity was a thrilling ride atop a spacecraft that on the ground appeared restless, grunting and vibrating before being unleashed into the skies, a fury of nine engines churning through thousands of gallons of propellant.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou can just tell it wants to get off the ground,\u201d mission commander Mike Hopkins said. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely ready to go, and it just leaped off the pad. It was amazing.\u201dAdvertisementThe mission followed a test flight in May that ended NASA\u2019s long, ignominious absence from human spaceflight since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. With that successful mission, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the station for two months, NASA then proceeded with the Crew-1 flight, making the Dragon capsule the first privately owned and privately operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.The crew of four \u2014 NASA astronauts Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Noguchi \u2014 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday evening, and arrived at the station about 27 hours later. They\u2019re scheduled to spend six months on the orbiting laboratory conducting science experiments, including one, proposed by Michigan high school students, that will examine how spaceflight affects brain function.Story continues below advertisementOn Monday, the Dragon docked itself autonomously with the station, while it orbited Earth at 17,500 mph, and the astronauts sat by, monitoring the spacecraft but staying off the controls.AdvertisementAsked whether it was difficult to be hands off, Glover, a Navy fighter pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, including 24 combat missions, said that \u201cit wasn\u2019t an issue.\u201d\u201cThe rocket, the Falcon 9, performed superbly, the way it was supposed to,\u201d he said. \u201cDragon performed superb.\u201dThe crew joined NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who arrived at the station last month. Now with seven occupants, the football-field-size station is a bit cozy \u2014 but not, Rubins said, crowded.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is busy in a great way,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s energy up here. We\u2019ve got people zooming by.\u201dWith seven people on board and only six sleeping quarters, Hopkins is bunking down in the Dragon capsule, making it one of the most expensive space bedrooms ever.AdvertisementAs commander of the mission, he said, \u201cit just felt right that that\u2019s where I was supposed to go. We talked about it as a crew a little bit. And everybody would be willing to sleep wherever. You\u2019re in space, and so you\u2019re not going to complain. \u2026 Overall, I think it\u2019s going to work. It\u2019s a roomy vehicle.\u201dHe said he was being careful, though, to make sure he didn\u2019t do anything to damage the vehicle as he floats in and out. \u201cIt\u2019s what\u2019s going to get us home, and so I want to make sure I don\u2019t do anything to compromise that while I\u2019m sleeping in there.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFollowing a long spaceflight tradition, the crew brought up a \u201czero-G indicator,\u201d something that would float to let the astronauts know they had escaped gravity. On this flight, it was a Baby Yoda doll, chosen in an attempt to provide a bit of levity during a tumultuous year, rocked by a pandemic, civil unrest and a polarizing election.\u201cWhen you see him,\u201d Hopkins said of the Baby Yoda bobbing around in space, \u201cit\u2019s hard not to smile.\u201d During their first news conference since arriving at the International Space Station, the astronauts who blasted off Sunday said their escape from Earth\u2019s gravity was a thrilling ride atop a spacecraft that on the ground appeared restless, grunting and vibrating before being unleashed into the skies. Astronauts on the space station discuss SpaceX\u2019s rocket, sleeping quarters and Baby Yoda",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts on the space station discuss SpaceX\u2019s rocket, sleeping quarters and Baby Yoda (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6337",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/19/nasa-spacex-crew-news-conference/",
        "text": "He had flown on the space shuttle and the Russian Soyuz. And now after flying the SpaceX Dragon capsule, Soichi Noguchi is only the third person, after John Young and Wally Schirra, to travel to orbit in three different vehicles.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAsked Thursday how the three compared, Noguchi didn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cFor the record, Dragon is the best,\u201d the Japanese astronaut said. \u201cShort answer.\u201d During their first news conference since arriving at the International Space Station on Monday night, the astronauts who blasted off Sunday evening said their escape from Earth\u2019s gravity was a thrilling ride atop a spacecraft that on the ground appeared restless, grunting and vibrating before being unleashed into the skies, a fury of nine engines churning through thousands of gallons of propellant.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYou can just tell it wants to get off the ground,\u201d mission commander Mike Hopkins said. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely ready to go, and it just leaped off the pad. It was amazing.\u201dAdvertisementThe mission followed a test flight in May that ended NASA\u2019s long, ignominious absence from human spaceflight since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. With that successful mission, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the station for two months, NASA then proceeded with the Crew-1 flight, making the Dragon capsule the first privately owned and privately operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.The crew of four \u2014 NASA astronauts Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Noguchi \u2014 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday evening, and arrived at the station about 27 hours later. They\u2019re scheduled to spend six months on the orbiting laboratory conducting science experiments, including one, proposed by Michigan high school students, that will examine how spaceflight affects brain function.Story continues below advertisementOn Monday, the Dragon docked itself autonomously with the station, while it orbited Earth at 17,500 mph, and the astronauts sat by, monitoring the spacecraft but staying off the controls.AdvertisementAsked whether it was difficult to be hands off, Glover, a Navy fighter pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, including 24 combat missions, said that \u201cit wasn\u2019t an issue.\u201d\u201cThe rocket, the Falcon 9, performed superbly, the way it was supposed to,\u201d he said. \u201cDragon performed superb.\u201dThe crew joined NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who arrived at the station last month. Now with seven occupants, the football-field-size station is a bit cozy \u2014 but not, Rubins said, crowded.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is busy in a great way,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s energy up here. We\u2019ve got people zooming by.\u201dWith seven people on board and only six sleeping quarters, Hopkins is bunking down in the Dragon capsule, making it one of the most expensive space bedrooms ever.AdvertisementAs commander of the mission, he said, \u201cit just felt right that that\u2019s where I was supposed to go. We talked about it as a crew a little bit. And everybody would be willing to sleep wherever. You\u2019re in space, and so you\u2019re not going to complain. \u2026 Overall, I think it\u2019s going to work. It\u2019s a roomy vehicle.\u201dHe said he was being careful, though, to make sure he didn\u2019t do anything to damage the vehicle as he floats in and out. \u201cIt\u2019s what\u2019s going to get us home, and so I want to make sure I don\u2019t do anything to compromise that while I\u2019m sleeping in there.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFollowing a long spaceflight tradition, the crew brought up a \u201czero-G indicator,\u201d something that would float to let the astronauts know they had escaped gravity. On this flight, it was a Baby Yoda doll, chosen in an attempt to provide a bit of levity during a tumultuous year, rocked by a pandemic, civil unrest and a polarizing election.\u201cWhen you see him,\u201d Hopkins said of the Baby Yoda bobbing around in space, \u201cit\u2019s hard not to smile.\u201d During their first news conference since arriving at the International Space Station, the astronauts who blasted off Sunday said their escape from Earth\u2019s gravity was a thrilling ride atop a spacecraft that on the ground appeared restless, grunting and vibrating before being unleashed into the skies. Astronauts on the space station discuss SpaceX\u2019s rocket, sleeping quarters and Baby Yoda",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA administrator visits SpaceX in bid to ease tension in their relationship (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6338",
        "date": "2019-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/11/nasa-administrator-visits-spacex-bid-ease-tension-their-relationship/",
        "text": "HAWTHORNE, Calif. \u2014 NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stopped by SpaceX\u2019s headquarters here Thursday. He toured the factory with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, took a spin in a spacecraft simulator, then met with the media afterward, smiling for the cameras.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut this was no social visit.He came, he said in an interview afterward, to get a detailed briefing on the progress of one of the highest-profile programs the space agency has going \u2014 the construction of a capsule that would help NASA restore human spaceflight from American soil after an eight-year hiatus \u2014 and to make a public statement that he would hold contractors accountable, after several key programs have suffered years of schedule delays and cost overruns. Story continues below advertisementIt was a long scheduled visit, but one that suddenly had a different dynamic after Bridenstine publicly chastised SpaceX as it was preparing to unveil a next-generation spacecraft known as Starship to take people to the moon and Mars. At the time, Bridenstine was frustrated that the company appeared to be spending a lot of time and energy on developing Starship, when it was behind on building the capsule to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station under what\u2019s known as the \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201dAdvertisementOn Twitter, Bridenstine took a shot at the company, saying NASA \u201cexpects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It\u2019s time to deliver.\u201dIt was an unusual move for an administrator to call out a single company at a time when the agency has so many programs, including a gigantic rocket that NASA is building, suffering significant problems. But in an interview after the tour, Bridenstine said that he is confident now that SpaceX is focused on the task at hand.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI think probably a couple of weeks ago we were not on the same page,\u201d he said of NASA and SpaceX. \u201cBut now we are 100 percent.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t the first time Bridenstine was miffed at the company and its chief executive. Last year, he ordered a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing, the other company under contract to fly astronauts to the station. Those assessments, which are underway, were prompted by Musk\u2019s taking a puff of marijuana while appearing on a show broadcast on the Internet.Advertisement\u201cIf I see something that\u2019s inappropriate, the key concern to me is what is the culture that led to that inappropriateness,\u201d he told The Post then. \u201cAs an agency, we\u2019re not just leading ourselves, but our contractors as well. We need to show the American public that when we put an astronaut on a rocket, they\u2019ll be safe.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn Thursday, he said he was interested in making progress, not friends, and wouldn\u2019t mind ruffling feathers.\u201cI don\u2019t know that bonding with the CEO of a corporation that is a contractor to NASA is something I would be interested in doing now,\u201d he said. \u201cAt this point I have a fiduciary responsibility to the American taxpayer.\u201dIn 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to SpaceX and Boeing to design spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station.AdvertisementThe program has suffered a series of setbacks and delays \u2014 as well as restricted funding from Congress that has delayed the first flights, originally scheduled for 2017.Story continues below advertisementLast year, during a test of its abort system, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a propellant leak after four of eight valves failed to close properly. The investigation and remediation efforts resulted in a one-year delay, according to the Government Accountability Office.Boeing hopes to fly its capsule later this year in a test flight without humans, ahead of flights with crews next year.SpaceX has already successfully completed its test flight without crews on board. But shortly after the flight, its Dragon capsule exploded as the company was testing the engines of its emergency abort system.Talking to reporters after the event, Musk said the company has fixed what caused the explosion and that the point of a development program was to discover problems before flying astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf there\u2019s a test program and nothing happens in that test program, I would say it\u2019s insufficiently rigorous,\u201d he said. \u201cIf there hasn\u2019t been hardware that\u2019s blown up on a test stand, I don\u2019t think you\u2019ve tested it hard enough. You\u2019ve got to push the envelope.\u201dHe also pointed out that the spacecraft that was destroyed was the same one that had successfully docked with the space station in the test flight. \u201cIf people had been on board,\u201d he said, \u201cthey would have returned safely.\u201dHe said that SpaceX is committed to making sure \u201cwe\u2019ve done everything possible to ensure the astronauts will be safe. Only at that point will we launch.\u201d And he said that developing the Dragon spacecraft \u201cis absolutely the overwhelming priority\u201d and that the company has \u201ca lot of people working super hard\u201d to make it happen.Still, it\u2019s clear the company has a way to go before that day. It\u2019s working on a new parachute design that will have to undergo more testing. It also has to test the spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system during a launch.In the end, Bridenstine said he has confidence in the company.\u201cWe will make it,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a big deal for our country. We can\u2019t get it wrong.\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine stopped by SpaceX\u2019s headquarters here Thursday. He toured the factory with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, took a spin in a spacecraft simulator, then met with the media afterward, smiling for the cameras. But this was no social visit. NASA administrator visits SpaceX in bid to ease tension in their relationship",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "OneWeb wants to rebuild the Internet in space, connecting billions not on the Web. Can it succeed? (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6339",
        "date": "2019-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/27/oneweb-wants-rebuild-internet-space-connecting-billions-not-web-can-it-succeed/",
        "text": "Greg Wyler was visiting the satellite operations center, located improbably in a Tysons, Va., high-rise, to pump up the team, to tell them the moment has come. Smiling and radiating a childlike energy, Wyler gushed earlier this month that the system they\u2019ve built is \u201camazing,\u201d that they are \u201cgoing to democratize space.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s a huge step forward for space, a step forward for the world,\u201d he said to applause.After years, Wyler\u2019s dream to beam the Internet from space to remote corners of the world is finally here, he said. On Wednesday afternoon, the first six of his company\u2019s satellites were launched from a remote launch site in French Guiana, a key step toward building out a constellation that could eventually reach nearly 2,000.Story continues below advertisementIf Wyler\u2019s plans are successful, what he and his fellow executives at OneWeb envision is nothing short of revolutionary: becoming one of the world\u2019s largest providers of Internet service by building the architecture in space, allowing the billions without access to WiFi to finally use the Web. Wyler founded the British-based company in 2012.Advertisement\u201cThe ultimate goal is to connect every school in the world, and bridge the digital divide,\u201d Wyler said in an interview after his pep talk. \u201cWe\u2019re bringing connectivity and enabling it for people around the world, and in rural populations.\u201dIf successful, remote areas all over the world, from Alaska to Africa, that are out of reach of fiber optic cables could suddenly join the world of Google and YouTube, a feat Wyler and others believe could be transformative.Story continues below advertisementBut building the backbone of the Internet in orbit is no easy task. Others have tried to put up constellations of communications satellites, only to fail spectacularly. The enormous cost is only outmatched by the risks of putting up hundreds of spacecraft in orbit.There are plenty of business school case studies of past failure, such as Teledesic, a company funded by Bill Gates in the mid-1990s, wireless executive Craig McCaw and a Saudi prince that failed after costs soared into the billions. Attempts by Iridium and Globalstar, which both ended up in bankruptcy, also illustrate how difficult the endeavor can be.SpaceX founder files with government to provide Internet service from space\u201cOneWeb\u2019s concept of ubiquitous global broad band is deeply compelling,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, the chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting company. \u201cHowever, the underlying business case for OneWeb is still highly uncertain, and I\u2019ve not yet seen a persuasive plan that fully closes.\u201dThe key question, she said: \u201cCan they deliver a product that competes and wins?\u201dEven if OneWeb can meet the technical challenges, get the regulatory approvals and break into the market, or expand it, there are others gunning to do the same thing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNamely, Elon Musk.His rocket company, SpaceX, is also vying to put up a constellation of satellites, known as Starlink, a project that it has been unusually quiet about. Late last year, the Federal Communications Commission granted SpaceX permission to put up its huge constellation, which could eventually have as many as 12,000 satellites. SpaceX is raising $500 million for the project, and in 2015, received a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity.Wyler, who founded another satellite company, called O3b, said he was \u201cmindful of failure.\u201d But ever the optimist, he said his team was \u201csuper focused on success.\u201dTechnology has improved since past failed attempts, as has demand in a growing digital economy. And the investment money has poured in. Over the years, OneWeb has won the support of several major investors, including a partnership with Airbus, as well as investments from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Group, Coca-Cola, SoftBank, Qualcomm and others. Wyler won\u2019t say precisely how much the company has raised but that it\u2019s \u201cwell over $2 billion. The interest level is at an all-time high because all of a sudden it\u2019s real.\u201dCompanies in the Cosmos: How companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageOneWeb\u2019s constellation would be made up of relatively small satellites, about the size of a refrigerator, that would zoom around the Earth connecting to stations on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company has ground-based antennas installed in several countries, including Italy, Canada and Norway, and plans to launch satellites on a monthly basis starting later in the year. It also stresses that it has the spectrum it needs for its mission.Despite the risks, the constellations have the support of Ajit Pai, chairman of the FCC.\u201cSatellite technology can help Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach,\u201d he said in a statement last year. \u201cAnd it can offer more competition where terrestrial Internet access is already available.\u201dAnd while the ultimate goal is driven by altruism \u2014 the desire to bridge the digital divide within a decade \u2014 there is a robust business case to make, Wyler said. The Internet in space would allow for better connectivity on airplanes and ships. Businesses with major distribution centers around the world could better manage their shipments.\u201cThere are big industries to service,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you look at it from a purely financial viewpoint, and you say, \u2018Okay, we have 7, 8 trillion dollars\u2019 worth of economy that is not participating because half the world is not on the grid. They could trade with us. They could be buying our goods.' \u201d On Wednesday, OneWeb plans to launch the first six satellites from a remote launch site in French Guiana, a key step toward building out a constellation that could eventually reach nearly 2,000 satellites. OneWeb wants to rebuild the Internet in space, connecting billions not on the Web. Can it succeed?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "OneWeb wants to rebuild the Internet in space, connecting billions not on the Web. Can it succeed? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6340",
        "date": "2019-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/27/oneweb-wants-rebuild-internet-space-connecting-billions-not-web-can-it-succeed/",
        "text": "Greg Wyler was visiting the satellite operations center, located improbably in a Tysons, Va., high-rise, to pump up the team, to tell them the moment has come. Smiling and radiating a childlike energy, Wyler gushed earlier this month that the system they\u2019ve built is \u201camazing,\u201d that they are \u201cgoing to democratize space.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s a huge step forward for space, a step forward for the world,\u201d he said to applause.After years, Wyler\u2019s dream to beam the Internet from space to remote corners of the world is finally here, he said. On Wednesday afternoon, the first six of his company\u2019s satellites were launched from a remote launch site in French Guiana, a key step toward building out a constellation that could eventually reach nearly 2,000.Story continues below advertisementIf Wyler\u2019s plans are successful, what he and his fellow executives at OneWeb envision is nothing short of revolutionary: becoming one of the world\u2019s largest providers of Internet service by building the architecture in space, allowing the billions without access to WiFi to finally use the Web. Wyler founded the British-based company in 2012.Advertisement\u201cThe ultimate goal is to connect every school in the world, and bridge the digital divide,\u201d Wyler said in an interview after his pep talk. \u201cWe\u2019re bringing connectivity and enabling it for people around the world, and in rural populations.\u201dIf successful, remote areas all over the world, from Alaska to Africa, that are out of reach of fiber optic cables could suddenly join the world of Google and YouTube, a feat Wyler and others believe could be transformative.Story continues below advertisementBut building the backbone of the Internet in orbit is no easy task. Others have tried to put up constellations of communications satellites, only to fail spectacularly. The enormous cost is only outmatched by the risks of putting up hundreds of spacecraft in orbit.There are plenty of business school case studies of past failure, such as Teledesic, a company funded by Bill Gates in the mid-1990s, wireless executive Craig McCaw and a Saudi prince that failed after costs soared into the billions. Attempts by Iridium and Globalstar, which both ended up in bankruptcy, also illustrate how difficult the endeavor can be.SpaceX founder files with government to provide Internet service from space\u201cOneWeb\u2019s concept of ubiquitous global broad band is deeply compelling,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, the chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting company. \u201cHowever, the underlying business case for OneWeb is still highly uncertain, and I\u2019ve not yet seen a persuasive plan that fully closes.\u201dThe key question, she said: \u201cCan they deliver a product that competes and wins?\u201dEven if OneWeb can meet the technical challenges, get the regulatory approvals and break into the market, or expand it, there are others gunning to do the same thing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNamely, Elon Musk.His rocket company, SpaceX, is also vying to put up a constellation of satellites, known as Starlink, a project that it has been unusually quiet about. Late last year, the Federal Communications Commission granted SpaceX permission to put up its huge constellation, which could eventually have as many as 12,000 satellites. SpaceX is raising $500 million for the project, and in 2015, received a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity.Wyler, who founded another satellite company, called O3b, said he was \u201cmindful of failure.\u201d But ever the optimist, he said his team was \u201csuper focused on success.\u201dTechnology has improved since past failed attempts, as has demand in a growing digital economy. And the investment money has poured in. Over the years, OneWeb has won the support of several major investors, including a partnership with Airbus, as well as investments from Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Group, Coca-Cola, SoftBank, Qualcomm and others. Wyler won\u2019t say precisely how much the company has raised but that it\u2019s \u201cwell over $2 billion. The interest level is at an all-time high because all of a sudden it\u2019s real.\u201dCompanies in the Cosmos: How companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageOneWeb\u2019s constellation would be made up of relatively small satellites, about the size of a refrigerator, that would zoom around the Earth connecting to stations on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company has ground-based antennas installed in several countries, including Italy, Canada and Norway, and plans to launch satellites on a monthly basis starting later in the year. It also stresses that it has the spectrum it needs for its mission.Despite the risks, the constellations have the support of Ajit Pai, chairman of the FCC.\u201cSatellite technology can help Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach,\u201d he said in a statement last year. \u201cAnd it can offer more competition where terrestrial Internet access is already available.\u201dAnd while the ultimate goal is driven by altruism \u2014 the desire to bridge the digital divide within a decade \u2014 there is a robust business case to make, Wyler said. The Internet in space would allow for better connectivity on airplanes and ships. Businesses with major distribution centers around the world could better manage their shipments.\u201cThere are big industries to service,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you look at it from a purely financial viewpoint, and you say, \u2018Okay, we have 7, 8 trillion dollars\u2019 worth of economy that is not participating because half the world is not on the grid. They could trade with us. They could be buying our goods.' \u201d On Wednesday, OneWeb plans to launch the first six satellites from a remote launch site in French Guiana, a key step toward building out a constellation that could eventually reach nearly 2,000 satellites. OneWeb wants to rebuild the Internet in space, connecting billions not on the Web. Can it succeed?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and Boeing continue to struggle with spacecraft designs, as watchdog raises safety concerns (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6341",
        "date": "2019-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/20/spacex-boeing-continue-struggle-with-spacecraft-designs-watchdog-raises-safety-concerns/",
        "text": "Getting astronauts to the International Space Station was supposed to become routine, so much so that NASA hired a pair of contractors to provide a taxi-like service to low Earth orbit. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on the hard stuff \u2014 deep space exploration to the moon and Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut four years after awarding the contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to Boeing and SpaceX, the agency still can\u2019t fly astronauts, a capability it lost when the space shuttle was retired in 2011.A new report from a government watchdog paints a grim picture of the program, as both companies \u201ccontinue to experience delays\u201d in developing their spacecraft and are two years behind schedule. The situation was made worse when SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft exploded during an engine test in April, sending a thick plume of smoke wafting over the Florida coastline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX still has not determined what caused the failure during a test of abort engines designed to carry the spacecraft away from the rocket in an emergency. The investigation is continuing, and the company had no update Thursday about the cause or what effect it would have on the company\u2019s schedule. But NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine recently told reporters there is \u201cno doubt the schedule will change\u201d as a result of the failure.Boeing has had problems as well. Last year, during a test of its abort system, it had a propellant leak after four of eight valves failed to close properly. The investigation and remediation efforts resulted in a one-year delay, according to the Government Accountability Office, which released the report Thursday. But the system has since been tested successfully, the company said.The GAO said Boeing also has a problem with its Starliner capsule generating debris when it separates from its service module, which could \u201cdamage the spacecraft\u201d and force the company \u201cto explore a possible redesign.\u201d But the company said it has already fixed that problem.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn response to the report, Boeing said it was \u201cprogressing toward the first Starliner launch this summer. Safety remains our number one priority, and we\u2019re focused on performing a safe, successful uncrewed orbital flight test.\u201dThe report also highlighted a \u201csafety risk\u201d with the Atlas V rocket Boeing plans to use to launch its Starliner spacecraft. During a launch last year, the rocket\u2019s engine position during liftoff \u201cdeviated from commands,\u201d the GAO said.Despite the problem, \u201cthe mission was a complete success, and the payload reached the intended orbit,\u201d the United Launch Alliance, which operates the Atlas V rocket, said in a statement. \u201cSubsequently, we conducted a thorough technical review of the deviation and have incorporated corrective actions on future flights to reduce the risk of a recurrence.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to the problem with its Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX continues to work on a pressure vessel that sits inside one of its rocket\u2019s fuel tanks and caused one of its rockets to explode in 2016. SpaceX has tested it extensively, the report said, and has flown it multiple times successfully.Still, the GAO said NASA \u201cwill need to determine whether to accept the risk associated with this technical issue prior to SpaceX\u2019s crewed test flight.\u201dSince the space shuttle retired eight years ago, NASA has been forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to the space station. Over time, Russia has continued to raise the price, and now charges NASA more than $80 million a seat. Recently, the delays forced NASA to buy two more seats on the Russian spacecraft to ensure that the United States would continue to have a presence on the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn response to the report, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said both companies have made \u201csteady progress.\u201d In March, SpaceX flew its Dragon capsule without astronauts on board in a test flight to the space station. Gerstenmaier called the flight, the first autonomous docking of a U.S. spacecraft to the station, \u201cextremely successful.\u201dBut then the next month, the same spacecraft exploded during the engine test. Speaking to reporters in May, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of mission assurance, said the point of tests was to discover problems so they can be fixed before flight. Despite the setback, it has continued to fly missions, including one with the cargo variant of its Dragon spacecraft, and plans to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the Air Force on Monday.\u201cWe will take the lessons learned from this, and I\u2019m convinced this will help up to ensure that Crew Dragon is one of the safest human space flight vehicles ever built,\u201d Koenigsmann said.On Wednesday, Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing\u2019s chief executive, expressed confidence in Starliner, saying it would fly an uncrewed mission to the station this summer and complete a flight with crews by the end of the year \u2014 a timeline many industry officials think is overly optimistic. Investigators are still trying to determine what caused SpaceX\u2019s capsule to explode during a test. SpaceX and Boeing continue to struggle with spacecraft designs, as watchdog raises safety concerns",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and Boeing continue to struggle with spacecraft designs, as watchdog raises safety concerns (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6342",
        "date": "2019-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/20/spacex-boeing-continue-struggle-with-spacecraft-designs-watchdog-raises-safety-concerns/",
        "text": "Getting astronauts to the International Space Station was supposed to become routine, so much so that NASA hired a pair of contractors to provide a taxi-like service to low Earth orbit. That, in turn, would allow NASA to focus on the hard stuff \u2014 deep space exploration to the moon and Mars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut four years after awarding the contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to Boeing and SpaceX, the agency still can\u2019t fly astronauts, a capability it lost when the space shuttle was retired in 2011.A new report from a government watchdog paints a grim picture of the program, as both companies \u201ccontinue to experience delays\u201d in developing their spacecraft and are two years behind schedule. The situation was made worse when SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft exploded during an engine test in April, sending a thick plume of smoke wafting over the Florida coastline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX still has not determined what caused the failure during a test of abort engines designed to carry the spacecraft away from the rocket in an emergency. The investigation is continuing, and the company had no update Thursday about the cause or what effect it would have on the company\u2019s schedule. But NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine recently told reporters there is \u201cno doubt the schedule will change\u201d as a result of the failure.Boeing has had problems as well. Last year, during a test of its abort system, it had a propellant leak after four of eight valves failed to close properly. The investigation and remediation efforts resulted in a one-year delay, according to the Government Accountability Office, which released the report Thursday. But the system has since been tested successfully, the company said.The GAO said Boeing also has a problem with its Starliner capsule generating debris when it separates from its service module, which could \u201cdamage the spacecraft\u201d and force the company \u201cto explore a possible redesign.\u201d But the company said it has already fixed that problem.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn response to the report, Boeing said it was \u201cprogressing toward the first Starliner launch this summer. Safety remains our number one priority, and we\u2019re focused on performing a safe, successful uncrewed orbital flight test.\u201dThe report also highlighted a \u201csafety risk\u201d with the Atlas V rocket Boeing plans to use to launch its Starliner spacecraft. During a launch last year, the rocket\u2019s engine position during liftoff \u201cdeviated from commands,\u201d the GAO said.Despite the problem, \u201cthe mission was a complete success, and the payload reached the intended orbit,\u201d the United Launch Alliance, which operates the Atlas V rocket, said in a statement. \u201cSubsequently, we conducted a thorough technical review of the deviation and have incorporated corrective actions on future flights to reduce the risk of a recurrence.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to the problem with its Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX continues to work on a pressure vessel that sits inside one of its rocket\u2019s fuel tanks and caused one of its rockets to explode in 2016. SpaceX has tested it extensively, the report said, and has flown it multiple times successfully.Still, the GAO said NASA \u201cwill need to determine whether to accept the risk associated with this technical issue prior to SpaceX\u2019s crewed test flight.\u201dSince the space shuttle retired eight years ago, NASA has been forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to the space station. Over time, Russia has continued to raise the price, and now charges NASA more than $80 million a seat. Recently, the delays forced NASA to buy two more seats on the Russian spacecraft to ensure that the United States would continue to have a presence on the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn response to the report, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said both companies have made \u201csteady progress.\u201d In March, SpaceX flew its Dragon capsule without astronauts on board in a test flight to the space station. Gerstenmaier called the flight, the first autonomous docking of a U.S. spacecraft to the station, \u201cextremely successful.\u201dBut then the next month, the same spacecraft exploded during the engine test. Speaking to reporters in May, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of mission assurance, said the point of tests was to discover problems so they can be fixed before flight. Despite the setback, it has continued to fly missions, including one with the cargo variant of its Dragon spacecraft, and plans to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the Air Force on Monday.\u201cWe will take the lessons learned from this, and I\u2019m convinced this will help up to ensure that Crew Dragon is one of the safest human space flight vehicles ever built,\u201d Koenigsmann said.On Wednesday, Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing\u2019s chief executive, expressed confidence in Starliner, saying it would fly an uncrewed mission to the station this summer and complete a flight with crews by the end of the year \u2014 a timeline many industry officials think is overly optimistic. Investigators are still trying to determine what caused SpaceX\u2019s capsule to explode during a test. SpaceX and Boeing continue to struggle with spacecraft designs, as watchdog raises safety concerns",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6343",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/10/spacex-launch-crew-3/",
        "text": "Four more astronauts blasted into orbit Wednesday, continuing a historic year of human spaceflight in which a diverse array of people have flown on several different spacecraft to varying parts of the increasingly popular neighborhood just outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 9:03 p.m. Eastern time, carrying a crew of four, including three NASA astronauts and one European, on what is expected to be a 22-hour journey to the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about six months. The launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was the fifth time that SpaceX has flown humans to orbit and the fourth time it has done so under its contract with NASA. In September, it flew four civilians in what was called the Inspiration4 mission \u2014 a three-day flight in the SpaceX Dragon capsule that circled the globe every 90 minutes.The launch came less than 48 hours after SpaceX had returned the previous astronaut crew from the space station to a picture-perfect splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 evidence that SpaceX is gaining prowess in multiple aspects of its role as NASA\u2019s primary way to transport goods and people to the space station. The back-to-back flights marked \u201cthe shortest turnaround between a splashdown and a launch in human spaceflight history,\u201d according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs.After reaching orbit, NASA astronaut Raja Chari told mission control that, \u201cit was a great ride. Better than we expected.\u201dThe SpaceX launch director told the crew, which will continue the mission on Veterans Day: \u201cIt was a pleasure to be part of this mission with you. Enjoy your holiday amongst the stars. We\u2019ll be waving as you fly by.\u201dThe flight comes as a number of companies are working to fly private citizens to space \u2014 from the actor William Shatner, 90, who became the oldest person to reach the edge of space, to Oliver Daemen, a student from the Netherlands, who at 18 became the youngest.Wednesday\u2019s launch, dubbed Crew-3, is commanded by Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space. He was joined by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. It is also Barron\u2019s and Maurer\u2019s first trip to space.The three rookies became the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. The list of space travelers is growing in part because of the efforts of Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which take paying customers just past the edge of space in suborbital trips that fly up and then fall back down to Earth.Russia continues to fly astronauts on its Soyuz spacecraft and recently said that it would allow its cosmonauts to fly on SpaceX Dragon capsules. China also is flying humans and recently sent up a crew of three to the space station it is assembling in Earth orbit. And NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft is scheduled to launch early next year without any astronauts onboard on a trip that would go around the moon in preparation for a human landing, perhaps as soon as 2025 under a new schedule NASA announced on Tuesday.Meanwhile, Boeing is working to develop a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the space station as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program. But its program has suffered through all sorts of problems and delays. On a test flight without astronauts at the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered a software problem that forced controllers to truncate the mission and forgo a docking with the station.Boeing decided to redo the test flight and take a charge of $410 million.Then over the summer, the Starliner capsule suffered another problem ahead of that do-over, this time with valves that remained stuck in the service module. The flight never got off, and Boeing said last month that it would take another charge, this time of $185 million, to cover the costs of the delay.During a news conference last month, John Vollmer, Boeing\u2019s program manager for the commercial crew program, declined to say how much the problem would cost the company. But he said \u201cNASA would not bear any responsibility for those costs that are within scope of our contract. \u2026 So, we\u2019re not expecting any charge to the government from that side.\u201d He added that the company would not back away from the program as a result of the additional costs. \u201cWe are 100 percent committed to fulfilling our contract with the government, and we intend to do that,\u201d he said.As it continues to solidify its status as NASA\u2019s premier human spaceflight partner, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is also working toward flying more private citizens. It has a mission commissioned by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, set to take three civilians and a former NASA astronaut, who would serve as their guide, to the space station for about a week.As those efforts continue, many believe the ranks of space farers will increase dramatically.\u201cSix hundred in 60 years, it makes for 10 people per year,\u201d Maurer said during a preflight news conference. \u201cBut I think in the next few years, we\u2019ll see an exponential rise. Now we\u2019re entering the era for commercial spaceflight.\u201dBefore SpaceX flew its first test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts last year, the space agency had spent nearly a decade after the space shuttle was retired paying for seats on the Russia Soyuz.Today, with SpaceX, \u201cthere are more flight opportunities\u201d for NASA astronauts, said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and a professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s school of engineering. \u201cOne of the positive impacts is fewer people having to train over in Russia. That was a major strain and stress on families.\u201dThe Crew-3 mission is slated to dock with the space station at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. While onboard the orbiting laboratory, the astronauts will be conducting what NASA says is \u201cnew and exciting scientific research in areas such as materials science, health technologies, and plant science to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit life on Earth.\u201dIn a press briefing after the launch Wednesday, Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said called it a \u201cperfect launch.\u201d\u201cThe crew is doing great and were in great spirits prior to launch and are in great spirits on orbit,\u201d he said.Here\u2019s what you need to knowAboard the capsule are NASA astronauts Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space; Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, who is also making her first trip to space; Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, another space rookie who is an engineer from Germany.The capsule is a new addition to SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon fleet and has never flown to space before. It\u2019s been named Endurance.One critical adjustment has been to this spacecraft: a tube that carries urine to a storage tank has been welded in place. The change was made after technicians discovered on another spacecraft that the tube had pulled away from the tank, allowing urine to collect under the spacecraft\u2019s floor.Dragon has separated and is on its way to the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has separated from the second stage and is now on its own flying the four astronauts to the International Space Station. It will take the spacecraft about 22 hours to reach the station, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h. It appears that all of the initial stages of the flight have gone well so far.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe first stage booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe reusable Falcon 9 booster has landed on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean. While not a crucial part of the mission, SpaceX flies its boosters back to Earth so that they can be reused. Before SpaceX developed the technology, first stage boosters typically fell into the ocean, never to be used again.The ship will come back to Port Canaveral in Florida, where crews will recover the booster and refurbish it to get it ready for another flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Falcon 9 rocket carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as European astronaut Matthias Maurer has lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes well, the second stage should separate and ignite its engine while the first stage flies back to land on an autonomous ship at sea.About 12 minutes after liftoff, the Dragon spacecraft should separate from the second stage to begin its journey to the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAbout five minutes to go to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe countdown is entering its final stages, and everything continues to proceed toward launch. The Dragon spacecraft will transition to internal power, as the flight computers perform the last preflight checks. A launch at 9:03 p.m. seems all but certain.\u201cEverything is still looking good for launch of Falcon 9 and Dragon,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s John Insprucker said on the live broadcast.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s next human spaceflight mission won\u2019t have any NASA astronauts on boardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has a $2.6 billion contract with NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. But its next scheduled flight after this one is a private one that will carry four private citizens to orbit in February.The mission has been put together by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, which has booked three passengers, each of whom paid $55 million each for the trip. They\u2019ll spend eight days on the station.The trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.That flight will be SpaceX\u2019s second flight with private citizens. In September, SpaceX flew a crew of four in orbit around the Earth for three days. That mission, known as Inspiration4, was funded by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who participated in the flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX keeping up a relentless paceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDriven by Elon Musk, SpaceX has kept up a torrid pace for years, which is one of the reasons it has been so successful \u2014 even if many employees get burned out and leave.This week is yet another example of how quickly the company moves.On Monday, it flew four astronauts home from the International Space Station on a more than eight-hour journey that saw them plunge through the atmosphere and generate temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico at 10:33 p.m. Eastern time.Now, less than 48 hours later, the company is gearing up to launch its next crew to the station.\u201cWe know it\u2019s another intense period,\u201d said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability. The teams \u201chave been working pretty hard. But they\u2019re going to get some time off here to rest up a little bit. \u2026 We\u2019ll be rested. We\u2019ll be ready. We\u2019ve done the detailed data review. I don\u2019t consider this rushed. If we felt we needed more time, we would have asked NASA for a little bit more time to go ahead and delay and move things.\u201dTop leaders at SpaceX and NASA have been overseeing the flight, he said, and the bottom line is that they would not fly if they didn\u2019t think they could do so safely.\u201cWe went through to make sure we are doing everything possible to make sure that Crew-3 is safe,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we saw something else we needed to do, any of our folks could say we need to take a break and we could stand down and stop.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPropellant load has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX is now fueling the Falcon 9 rocket with rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, one of the last major milestones before launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for the rocket to be loaded with propellant, another sign that the mission is proceeding swiftly to launch at 9:03 p.m. Eastern. The crew access arm has also retracted, and crews will arm the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system, which is designed to jettison the astronauts away from the booster in the event of an emergency.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSetting a Spaceflight RecordReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhen the Crew-3 astronauts board the space station, they\u2019ll join two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov as well as NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.In September, NASA announced that Vande Hei and Dubrov were having their stay on the station extended until March 2022, stretching their time aboard to nearly a year. The space agency didn\u2019t say how long the mission would last. But Vande Hei wrote on Twitter that it would last about 353 days, which would break the all-time duration record by an American astronaut. The record for longest single spaceflight is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days on the station.Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel, wrote that the extended stay was \u201ca possibility that I was prepared for from the beginning. The opportunity to experience this with wonderful crewmates while contributing to science and future exploration is exciting!\u201dVande Hei was selected by NASA to be an astronaut in 2009 and previously served as a \u201ccapsule communicator,\u201d the person in mission control who speaks with the astronauts while they are in space. He previously flew to space on the Russian Soyuz in 2018.Slowly inflating parachute not seen as a problem for this flightReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe launch of the Crew-3 astronauts came just two days after their counterparts on the previous Crew-2 mission returned from the space station. Even though one of the four main parachutes inflated at a slower rate than the others, the flight home was \u201cflawless,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said in a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cWe really don\u2019t see any issues proceeding into the launch.\u201dThe teams looked in detail at the parachute issue \u2014 in which the fourth chute opened 75 seconds after the other three \u2014 and concluded it was not a cause for concern and should not force a delay for the Crew-3 launch. When there is a configuration of four parachutes, it is not unusual to have one lag behind, said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability.\u201cIt performed essentially the way it was designed to perform,\u201d he said. He also noted that, \u201cwe can land with three parachutes if we have to.\u201dHe said the recovery teams pulled the parachutes out of the water after splashdown and flew them by helicopter to SpaceX\u2019s facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla. There, they were inspected \u201cwith a NASA team and a SpaceX team to make sure that there was nothing in that parachute that we didn\u2019t understand.\u201dSpaceX also reached out to the \u201cparachute vendor to make sure that they were comfortable with where we\u2019re going,\u201d he said, adding that they also reviewed the manufacturing records of these parachutes to make sure everything was in order.\u201cWe\u2019ve done an extremely thorough review, and everything looks like we\u2019re in a good place to go fly,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.Being able to recover the vehicle and inspect it \u201cis really a gift for us. We\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly in space. And the way to do that safely is you\u2019d keep looking at the data and you learn from each and every flight.\u201dWhy SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket with the astronauts onboardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkTraditionally in human spaceflight, ground crews fueled the rocket before the astronauts arrived. This was how it was done with the space shuttle and before.But SpaceX does it differently.It loads the astronauts first, and then begins fueling the rocket. Initially, this concerned many in the space community, including members of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Advisory Board, who feared that handling highly combustible propellants while the astronauts sat on top of the rocket was a risky prospect.Those concerns were exacerbated in 2016 when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. But since then, SpaceX has followed this fueling regimen many times successfully, and NASA has signed off on the procedure, known informally as \u201cload and go.\u201dThe reason SpaceX fuels its rocket right before flight is because it supercools its liquid oxygen, bringing it down to minus-340 degrees Fahrenheit. The colder the propellant is, the denser it is, allowing SpaceX to pack more of it into the rocket, and that, in turn, allows for greater performance. As the rocket is being fueled it is engulfed by steam clouds that form as the propellants boils off.SpaceX needs the additional propellant because it not only lights its rocket engines at liftoff, but again as the first stage booster heads back to Earth for a landing so that it can be reused again.The hatch is closed; weather looking goodReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkSupport crews have closed the hatch of the Dragon spacecraft, another important milestone on the way to launch. The crews spent a fair amount of time inspecting the seal around the hatch, making sure there were no leaks.Meanwhile, a storm passed over Cape Canaveral earlier this evening. But it has since passed, officials have said, and the weather officer has confirmed that the range is currently go for launch.Space station changed course this afternoon to miss Chinese debris in its pathReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:20 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt about 3 p.m. Wednesday, NASA ground controllers maneuvered the space station to avoid a piece of debris hurtling through space.The maneuver \u201cwill have no impact to the launch time,\u201d Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, told reporters during a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cIt\u2019s something that the SpaceX team can easily accommodate and they\u2019re planning. And we\u2019re working closely with the flight control teams to make sure that that work is done.\u201dDodging debris has become routine for the space station, which orbits at about 240 miles above the Earth. Space is increasingly polluted with spent satellites and the detritus of past collisions. And traveling at some 17,500 mph, debris can pose a serious threat to the astronauts on board the station. Even small pieces can hit with enormous force, and so controllers on the ground are always on the lookout.The piece of debris that\u2019s coming uncomfortably close to the space station originated with a 2007 incident when China blew up a dead weather satellite, part of a test to demonstrate its ability to take out satellites on orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. The missile strike created a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces, which according to the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, is \u201cthe largest ever tracked, and much of it will remain in orbit for decades, posing a significant collision threat to other space objects in low Earth orbit.\u201dMcDowell wrote on Twitter that more than 2,700 pieces of debris from the test remain in orbit today and that this would be at least the third time the space station has had to move to avoid debris from the China satellite strike.Meet the CrewReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s third operational human spaceflight mission to the space station has a full contingent of four astronauts, three from NASA and one representing the European Space Agency.The mission is being commanded by NASA astronaut Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot, who is making his first trip to space. He is joined by another rookie, Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, and Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle Endeavour and once on the Russia Soyuz.European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany, is also on board for his first spaceflight.The three rookies will become the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. SpaceX  launches Crew-3 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center for docking with the space station Thursday evening. SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6344",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/10/spacex-launch-crew-3/",
        "text": "Four more astronauts blasted into orbit Wednesday, continuing a historic year of human spaceflight in which a diverse array of people have flown on several different spacecraft to varying parts of the increasingly popular neighborhood just outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 9:03 p.m. Eastern time, carrying a crew of four, including three NASA astronauts and one European, on what is expected to be a 22-hour journey to the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about six months. The launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was the fifth time that SpaceX has flown humans to orbit and the fourth time it has done so under its contract with NASA. In September, it flew four civilians in what was called the Inspiration4 mission \u2014 a three-day flight in the SpaceX Dragon capsule that circled the globe every 90 minutes.The launch came less than 48 hours after SpaceX had returned the previous astronaut crew from the space station to a picture-perfect splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 evidence that SpaceX is gaining prowess in multiple aspects of its role as NASA\u2019s primary way to transport goods and people to the space station. The back-to-back flights marked \u201cthe shortest turnaround between a splashdown and a launch in human spaceflight history,\u201d according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs.After reaching orbit, NASA astronaut Raja Chari told mission control that, \u201cit was a great ride. Better than we expected.\u201dThe SpaceX launch director told the crew, which will continue the mission on Veterans Day: \u201cIt was a pleasure to be part of this mission with you. Enjoy your holiday amongst the stars. We\u2019ll be waving as you fly by.\u201dThe flight comes as a number of companies are working to fly private citizens to space \u2014 from the actor William Shatner, 90, who became the oldest person to reach the edge of space, to Oliver Daemen, a student from the Netherlands, who at 18 became the youngest.Wednesday\u2019s launch, dubbed Crew-3, is commanded by Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space. He was joined by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. It is also Barron\u2019s and Maurer\u2019s first trip to space.The three rookies became the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. The list of space travelers is growing in part because of the efforts of Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which take paying customers just past the edge of space in suborbital trips that fly up and then fall back down to Earth.Russia continues to fly astronauts on its Soyuz spacecraft and recently said that it would allow its cosmonauts to fly on SpaceX Dragon capsules. China also is flying humans and recently sent up a crew of three to the space station it is assembling in Earth orbit. And NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft is scheduled to launch early next year without any astronauts onboard on a trip that would go around the moon in preparation for a human landing, perhaps as soon as 2025 under a new schedule NASA announced on Tuesday.Meanwhile, Boeing is working to develop a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the space station as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program. But its program has suffered through all sorts of problems and delays. On a test flight without astronauts at the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered a software problem that forced controllers to truncate the mission and forgo a docking with the station.Boeing decided to redo the test flight and take a charge of $410 million.Then over the summer, the Starliner capsule suffered another problem ahead of that do-over, this time with valves that remained stuck in the service module. The flight never got off, and Boeing said last month that it would take another charge, this time of $185 million, to cover the costs of the delay.During a news conference last month, John Vollmer, Boeing\u2019s program manager for the commercial crew program, declined to say how much the problem would cost the company. But he said \u201cNASA would not bear any responsibility for those costs that are within scope of our contract. \u2026 So, we\u2019re not expecting any charge to the government from that side.\u201d He added that the company would not back away from the program as a result of the additional costs. \u201cWe are 100 percent committed to fulfilling our contract with the government, and we intend to do that,\u201d he said.As it continues to solidify its status as NASA\u2019s premier human spaceflight partner, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is also working toward flying more private citizens. It has a mission commissioned by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, set to take three civilians and a former NASA astronaut, who would serve as their guide, to the space station for about a week.As those efforts continue, many believe the ranks of space farers will increase dramatically.\u201cSix hundred in 60 years, it makes for 10 people per year,\u201d Maurer said during a preflight news conference. \u201cBut I think in the next few years, we\u2019ll see an exponential rise. Now we\u2019re entering the era for commercial spaceflight.\u201dBefore SpaceX flew its first test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts last year, the space agency had spent nearly a decade after the space shuttle was retired paying for seats on the Russia Soyuz.Today, with SpaceX, \u201cthere are more flight opportunities\u201d for NASA astronauts, said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and a professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s school of engineering. \u201cOne of the positive impacts is fewer people having to train over in Russia. That was a major strain and stress on families.\u201dThe Crew-3 mission is slated to dock with the space station at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. While onboard the orbiting laboratory, the astronauts will be conducting what NASA says is \u201cnew and exciting scientific research in areas such as materials science, health technologies, and plant science to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit life on Earth.\u201dIn a press briefing after the launch Wednesday, Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said called it a \u201cperfect launch.\u201d\u201cThe crew is doing great and were in great spirits prior to launch and are in great spirits on orbit,\u201d he said.Here\u2019s what you need to knowAboard the capsule are NASA astronauts Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space; Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, who is also making her first trip to space; Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, another space rookie who is an engineer from Germany.The capsule is a new addition to SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon fleet and has never flown to space before. It\u2019s been named Endurance.One critical adjustment has been to this spacecraft: a tube that carries urine to a storage tank has been welded in place. The change was made after technicians discovered on another spacecraft that the tube had pulled away from the tank, allowing urine to collect under the spacecraft\u2019s floor.Dragon has separated and is on its way to the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has separated from the second stage and is now on its own flying the four astronauts to the International Space Station. It will take the spacecraft about 22 hours to reach the station, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h. It appears that all of the initial stages of the flight have gone well so far.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe first stage booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe reusable Falcon 9 booster has landed on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean. While not a crucial part of the mission, SpaceX flies its boosters back to Earth so that they can be reused. Before SpaceX developed the technology, first stage boosters typically fell into the ocean, never to be used again.The ship will come back to Port Canaveral in Florida, where crews will recover the booster and refurbish it to get it ready for another flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Falcon 9 rocket carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as European astronaut Matthias Maurer has lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes well, the second stage should separate and ignite its engine while the first stage flies back to land on an autonomous ship at sea.About 12 minutes after liftoff, the Dragon spacecraft should separate from the second stage to begin its journey to the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAbout five minutes to go to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe countdown is entering its final stages, and everything continues to proceed toward launch. The Dragon spacecraft will transition to internal power, as the flight computers perform the last preflight checks. A launch at 9:03 p.m. seems all but certain.\u201cEverything is still looking good for launch of Falcon 9 and Dragon,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s John Insprucker said on the live broadcast.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s next human spaceflight mission won\u2019t have any NASA astronauts on boardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has a $2.6 billion contract with NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. But its next scheduled flight after this one is a private one that will carry four private citizens to orbit in February.The mission has been put together by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, which has booked three passengers, each of whom paid $55 million each for the trip. They\u2019ll spend eight days on the station.The trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.That flight will be SpaceX\u2019s second flight with private citizens. In September, SpaceX flew a crew of four in orbit around the Earth for three days. That mission, known as Inspiration4, was funded by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who participated in the flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX keeping up a relentless paceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDriven by Elon Musk, SpaceX has kept up a torrid pace for years, which is one of the reasons it has been so successful \u2014 even if many employees get burned out and leave.This week is yet another example of how quickly the company moves.On Monday, it flew four astronauts home from the International Space Station on a more than eight-hour journey that saw them plunge through the atmosphere and generate temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico at 10:33 p.m. Eastern time.Now, less than 48 hours later, the company is gearing up to launch its next crew to the station.\u201cWe know it\u2019s another intense period,\u201d said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability. The teams \u201chave been working pretty hard. But they\u2019re going to get some time off here to rest up a little bit. \u2026 We\u2019ll be rested. We\u2019ll be ready. We\u2019ve done the detailed data review. I don\u2019t consider this rushed. If we felt we needed more time, we would have asked NASA for a little bit more time to go ahead and delay and move things.\u201dTop leaders at SpaceX and NASA have been overseeing the flight, he said, and the bottom line is that they would not fly if they didn\u2019t think they could do so safely.\u201cWe went through to make sure we are doing everything possible to make sure that Crew-3 is safe,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we saw something else we needed to do, any of our folks could say we need to take a break and we could stand down and stop.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPropellant load has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX is now fueling the Falcon 9 rocket with rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, one of the last major milestones before launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for the rocket to be loaded with propellant, another sign that the mission is proceeding swiftly to launch at 9:03 p.m. Eastern. The crew access arm has also retracted, and crews will arm the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system, which is designed to jettison the astronauts away from the booster in the event of an emergency.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSetting a Spaceflight RecordReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhen the Crew-3 astronauts board the space station, they\u2019ll join two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov as well as NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.In September, NASA announced that Vande Hei and Dubrov were having their stay on the station extended until March 2022, stretching their time aboard to nearly a year. The space agency didn\u2019t say how long the mission would last. But Vande Hei wrote on Twitter that it would last about 353 days, which would break the all-time duration record by an American astronaut. The record for longest single spaceflight is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days on the station.Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel, wrote that the extended stay was \u201ca possibility that I was prepared for from the beginning. The opportunity to experience this with wonderful crewmates while contributing to science and future exploration is exciting!\u201dVande Hei was selected by NASA to be an astronaut in 2009 and previously served as a \u201ccapsule communicator,\u201d the person in mission control who speaks with the astronauts while they are in space. He previously flew to space on the Russian Soyuz in 2018.Slowly inflating parachute not seen as a problem for this flightReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe launch of the Crew-3 astronauts came just two days after their counterparts on the previous Crew-2 mission returned from the space station. Even though one of the four main parachutes inflated at a slower rate than the others, the flight home was \u201cflawless,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said in a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cWe really don\u2019t see any issues proceeding into the launch.\u201dThe teams looked in detail at the parachute issue \u2014 in which the fourth chute opened 75 seconds after the other three \u2014 and concluded it was not a cause for concern and should not force a delay for the Crew-3 launch. When there is a configuration of four parachutes, it is not unusual to have one lag behind, said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability.\u201cIt performed essentially the way it was designed to perform,\u201d he said. He also noted that, \u201cwe can land with three parachutes if we have to.\u201dHe said the recovery teams pulled the parachutes out of the water after splashdown and flew them by helicopter to SpaceX\u2019s facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla. There, they were inspected \u201cwith a NASA team and a SpaceX team to make sure that there was nothing in that parachute that we didn\u2019t understand.\u201dSpaceX also reached out to the \u201cparachute vendor to make sure that they were comfortable with where we\u2019re going,\u201d he said, adding that they also reviewed the manufacturing records of these parachutes to make sure everything was in order.\u201cWe\u2019ve done an extremely thorough review, and everything looks like we\u2019re in a good place to go fly,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.Being able to recover the vehicle and inspect it \u201cis really a gift for us. We\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly in space. And the way to do that safely is you\u2019d keep looking at the data and you learn from each and every flight.\u201dWhy SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket with the astronauts onboardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkTraditionally in human spaceflight, ground crews fueled the rocket before the astronauts arrived. This was how it was done with the space shuttle and before.But SpaceX does it differently.It loads the astronauts first, and then begins fueling the rocket. Initially, this concerned many in the space community, including members of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Advisory Board, who feared that handling highly combustible propellants while the astronauts sat on top of the rocket was a risky prospect.Those concerns were exacerbated in 2016 when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. But since then, SpaceX has followed this fueling regimen many times successfully, and NASA has signed off on the procedure, known informally as \u201cload and go.\u201dThe reason SpaceX fuels its rocket right before flight is because it supercools its liquid oxygen, bringing it down to minus-340 degrees Fahrenheit. The colder the propellant is, the denser it is, allowing SpaceX to pack more of it into the rocket, and that, in turn, allows for greater performance. As the rocket is being fueled it is engulfed by steam clouds that form as the propellants boils off.SpaceX needs the additional propellant because it not only lights its rocket engines at liftoff, but again as the first stage booster heads back to Earth for a landing so that it can be reused again.The hatch is closed; weather looking goodReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkSupport crews have closed the hatch of the Dragon spacecraft, another important milestone on the way to launch. The crews spent a fair amount of time inspecting the seal around the hatch, making sure there were no leaks.Meanwhile, a storm passed over Cape Canaveral earlier this evening. But it has since passed, officials have said, and the weather officer has confirmed that the range is currently go for launch.Space station changed course this afternoon to miss Chinese debris in its pathReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:20 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt about 3 p.m. Wednesday, NASA ground controllers maneuvered the space station to avoid a piece of debris hurtling through space.The maneuver \u201cwill have no impact to the launch time,\u201d Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, told reporters during a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cIt\u2019s something that the SpaceX team can easily accommodate and they\u2019re planning. And we\u2019re working closely with the flight control teams to make sure that that work is done.\u201dDodging debris has become routine for the space station, which orbits at about 240 miles above the Earth. Space is increasingly polluted with spent satellites and the detritus of past collisions. And traveling at some 17,500 mph, debris can pose a serious threat to the astronauts on board the station. Even small pieces can hit with enormous force, and so controllers on the ground are always on the lookout.The piece of debris that\u2019s coming uncomfortably close to the space station originated with a 2007 incident when China blew up a dead weather satellite, part of a test to demonstrate its ability to take out satellites on orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. The missile strike created a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces, which according to the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, is \u201cthe largest ever tracked, and much of it will remain in orbit for decades, posing a significant collision threat to other space objects in low Earth orbit.\u201dMcDowell wrote on Twitter that more than 2,700 pieces of debris from the test remain in orbit today and that this would be at least the third time the space station has had to move to avoid debris from the China satellite strike.Meet the CrewReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s third operational human spaceflight mission to the space station has a full contingent of four astronauts, three from NASA and one representing the European Space Agency.The mission is being commanded by NASA astronaut Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot, who is making his first trip to space. He is joined by another rookie, Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, and Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle Endeavour and once on the Russia Soyuz.European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany, is also on board for his first spaceflight.The three rookies will become the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. SpaceX  launches Crew-3 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center for docking with the space station Thursday evening. SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6345",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/10/spacex-launch-crew-3/",
        "text": "Four more astronauts blasted into orbit Wednesday, continuing a historic year of human spaceflight in which a diverse array of people have flown on several different spacecraft to varying parts of the increasingly popular neighborhood just outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 9:03 p.m. Eastern time, carrying a crew of four, including three NASA astronauts and one European, on what is expected to be a 22-hour journey to the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about six months. The launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was the fifth time that SpaceX has flown humans to orbit and the fourth time it has done so under its contract with NASA. In September, it flew four civilians in what was called the Inspiration4 mission \u2014 a three-day flight in the SpaceX Dragon capsule that circled the globe every 90 minutes.The launch came less than 48 hours after SpaceX had returned the previous astronaut crew from the space station to a picture-perfect splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 evidence that SpaceX is gaining prowess in multiple aspects of its role as NASA\u2019s primary way to transport goods and people to the space station. The back-to-back flights marked \u201cthe shortest turnaround between a splashdown and a launch in human spaceflight history,\u201d according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs.After reaching orbit, NASA astronaut Raja Chari told mission control that, \u201cit was a great ride. Better than we expected.\u201dThe SpaceX launch director told the crew, which will continue the mission on Veterans Day: \u201cIt was a pleasure to be part of this mission with you. Enjoy your holiday amongst the stars. We\u2019ll be waving as you fly by.\u201dThe flight comes as a number of companies are working to fly private citizens to space \u2014 from the actor William Shatner, 90, who became the oldest person to reach the edge of space, to Oliver Daemen, a student from the Netherlands, who at 18 became the youngest.Wednesday\u2019s launch, dubbed Crew-3, is commanded by Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space. He was joined by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. It is also Barron\u2019s and Maurer\u2019s first trip to space.The three rookies became the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. The list of space travelers is growing in part because of the efforts of Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which take paying customers just past the edge of space in suborbital trips that fly up and then fall back down to Earth.Russia continues to fly astronauts on its Soyuz spacecraft and recently said that it would allow its cosmonauts to fly on SpaceX Dragon capsules. China also is flying humans and recently sent up a crew of three to the space station it is assembling in Earth orbit. And NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft is scheduled to launch early next year without any astronauts onboard on a trip that would go around the moon in preparation for a human landing, perhaps as soon as 2025 under a new schedule NASA announced on Tuesday.Meanwhile, Boeing is working to develop a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the space station as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program. But its program has suffered through all sorts of problems and delays. On a test flight without astronauts at the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered a software problem that forced controllers to truncate the mission and forgo a docking with the station.Boeing decided to redo the test flight and take a charge of $410 million.Then over the summer, the Starliner capsule suffered another problem ahead of that do-over, this time with valves that remained stuck in the service module. The flight never got off, and Boeing said last month that it would take another charge, this time of $185 million, to cover the costs of the delay.During a news conference last month, John Vollmer, Boeing\u2019s program manager for the commercial crew program, declined to say how much the problem would cost the company. But he said \u201cNASA would not bear any responsibility for those costs that are within scope of our contract. \u2026 So, we\u2019re not expecting any charge to the government from that side.\u201d He added that the company would not back away from the program as a result of the additional costs. \u201cWe are 100 percent committed to fulfilling our contract with the government, and we intend to do that,\u201d he said.As it continues to solidify its status as NASA\u2019s premier human spaceflight partner, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is also working toward flying more private citizens. It has a mission commissioned by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, set to take three civilians and a former NASA astronaut, who would serve as their guide, to the space station for about a week.As those efforts continue, many believe the ranks of space farers will increase dramatically.\u201cSix hundred in 60 years, it makes for 10 people per year,\u201d Maurer said during a preflight news conference. \u201cBut I think in the next few years, we\u2019ll see an exponential rise. Now we\u2019re entering the era for commercial spaceflight.\u201dBefore SpaceX flew its first test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts last year, the space agency had spent nearly a decade after the space shuttle was retired paying for seats on the Russia Soyuz.Today, with SpaceX, \u201cthere are more flight opportunities\u201d for NASA astronauts, said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and a professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s school of engineering. \u201cOne of the positive impacts is fewer people having to train over in Russia. That was a major strain and stress on families.\u201dThe Crew-3 mission is slated to dock with the space station at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. While onboard the orbiting laboratory, the astronauts will be conducting what NASA says is \u201cnew and exciting scientific research in areas such as materials science, health technologies, and plant science to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit life on Earth.\u201dIn a press briefing after the launch Wednesday, Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said called it a \u201cperfect launch.\u201d\u201cThe crew is doing great and were in great spirits prior to launch and are in great spirits on orbit,\u201d he said.Here\u2019s what you need to knowAboard the capsule are NASA astronauts Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space; Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, who is also making her first trip to space; Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, another space rookie who is an engineer from Germany.The capsule is a new addition to SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon fleet and has never flown to space before. It\u2019s been named Endurance.One critical adjustment has been to this spacecraft: a tube that carries urine to a storage tank has been welded in place. The change was made after technicians discovered on another spacecraft that the tube had pulled away from the tank, allowing urine to collect under the spacecraft\u2019s floor.Dragon has separated and is on its way to the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has separated from the second stage and is now on its own flying the four astronauts to the International Space Station. It will take the spacecraft about 22 hours to reach the station, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h. It appears that all of the initial stages of the flight have gone well so far.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe first stage booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe reusable Falcon 9 booster has landed on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean. While not a crucial part of the mission, SpaceX flies its boosters back to Earth so that they can be reused. Before SpaceX developed the technology, first stage boosters typically fell into the ocean, never to be used again.The ship will come back to Port Canaveral in Florida, where crews will recover the booster and refurbish it to get it ready for another flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Falcon 9 rocket carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as European astronaut Matthias Maurer has lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes well, the second stage should separate and ignite its engine while the first stage flies back to land on an autonomous ship at sea.About 12 minutes after liftoff, the Dragon spacecraft should separate from the second stage to begin its journey to the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAbout five minutes to go to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe countdown is entering its final stages, and everything continues to proceed toward launch. The Dragon spacecraft will transition to internal power, as the flight computers perform the last preflight checks. A launch at 9:03 p.m. seems all but certain.\u201cEverything is still looking good for launch of Falcon 9 and Dragon,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s John Insprucker said on the live broadcast.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s next human spaceflight mission won\u2019t have any NASA astronauts on boardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has a $2.6 billion contract with NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. But its next scheduled flight after this one is a private one that will carry four private citizens to orbit in February.The mission has been put together by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, which has booked three passengers, each of whom paid $55 million each for the trip. They\u2019ll spend eight days on the station.The trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.That flight will be SpaceX\u2019s second flight with private citizens. In September, SpaceX flew a crew of four in orbit around the Earth for three days. That mission, known as Inspiration4, was funded by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who participated in the flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX keeping up a relentless paceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDriven by Elon Musk, SpaceX has kept up a torrid pace for years, which is one of the reasons it has been so successful \u2014 even if many employees get burned out and leave.This week is yet another example of how quickly the company moves.On Monday, it flew four astronauts home from the International Space Station on a more than eight-hour journey that saw them plunge through the atmosphere and generate temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico at 10:33 p.m. Eastern time.Now, less than 48 hours later, the company is gearing up to launch its next crew to the station.\u201cWe know it\u2019s another intense period,\u201d said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability. The teams \u201chave been working pretty hard. But they\u2019re going to get some time off here to rest up a little bit. \u2026 We\u2019ll be rested. We\u2019ll be ready. We\u2019ve done the detailed data review. I don\u2019t consider this rushed. If we felt we needed more time, we would have asked NASA for a little bit more time to go ahead and delay and move things.\u201dTop leaders at SpaceX and NASA have been overseeing the flight, he said, and the bottom line is that they would not fly if they didn\u2019t think they could do so safely.\u201cWe went through to make sure we are doing everything possible to make sure that Crew-3 is safe,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we saw something else we needed to do, any of our folks could say we need to take a break and we could stand down and stop.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPropellant load has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX is now fueling the Falcon 9 rocket with rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, one of the last major milestones before launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for the rocket to be loaded with propellant, another sign that the mission is proceeding swiftly to launch at 9:03 p.m. Eastern. The crew access arm has also retracted, and crews will arm the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system, which is designed to jettison the astronauts away from the booster in the event of an emergency.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSetting a Spaceflight RecordReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhen the Crew-3 astronauts board the space station, they\u2019ll join two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov as well as NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.In September, NASA announced that Vande Hei and Dubrov were having their stay on the station extended until March 2022, stretching their time aboard to nearly a year. The space agency didn\u2019t say how long the mission would last. But Vande Hei wrote on Twitter that it would last about 353 days, which would break the all-time duration record by an American astronaut. The record for longest single spaceflight is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days on the station.Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel, wrote that the extended stay was \u201ca possibility that I was prepared for from the beginning. The opportunity to experience this with wonderful crewmates while contributing to science and future exploration is exciting!\u201dVande Hei was selected by NASA to be an astronaut in 2009 and previously served as a \u201ccapsule communicator,\u201d the person in mission control who speaks with the astronauts while they are in space. He previously flew to space on the Russian Soyuz in 2018.Slowly inflating parachute not seen as a problem for this flightReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe launch of the Crew-3 astronauts came just two days after their counterparts on the previous Crew-2 mission returned from the space station. Even though one of the four main parachutes inflated at a slower rate than the others, the flight home was \u201cflawless,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said in a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cWe really don\u2019t see any issues proceeding into the launch.\u201dThe teams looked in detail at the parachute issue \u2014 in which the fourth chute opened 75 seconds after the other three \u2014 and concluded it was not a cause for concern and should not force a delay for the Crew-3 launch. When there is a configuration of four parachutes, it is not unusual to have one lag behind, said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability.\u201cIt performed essentially the way it was designed to perform,\u201d he said. He also noted that, \u201cwe can land with three parachutes if we have to.\u201dHe said the recovery teams pulled the parachutes out of the water after splashdown and flew them by helicopter to SpaceX\u2019s facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla. There, they were inspected \u201cwith a NASA team and a SpaceX team to make sure that there was nothing in that parachute that we didn\u2019t understand.\u201dSpaceX also reached out to the \u201cparachute vendor to make sure that they were comfortable with where we\u2019re going,\u201d he said, adding that they also reviewed the manufacturing records of these parachutes to make sure everything was in order.\u201cWe\u2019ve done an extremely thorough review, and everything looks like we\u2019re in a good place to go fly,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.Being able to recover the vehicle and inspect it \u201cis really a gift for us. We\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly in space. And the way to do that safely is you\u2019d keep looking at the data and you learn from each and every flight.\u201dWhy SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket with the astronauts onboardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkTraditionally in human spaceflight, ground crews fueled the rocket before the astronauts arrived. This was how it was done with the space shuttle and before.But SpaceX does it differently.It loads the astronauts first, and then begins fueling the rocket. Initially, this concerned many in the space community, including members of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Advisory Board, who feared that handling highly combustible propellants while the astronauts sat on top of the rocket was a risky prospect.Those concerns were exacerbated in 2016 when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. But since then, SpaceX has followed this fueling regimen many times successfully, and NASA has signed off on the procedure, known informally as \u201cload and go.\u201dThe reason SpaceX fuels its rocket right before flight is because it supercools its liquid oxygen, bringing it down to minus-340 degrees Fahrenheit. The colder the propellant is, the denser it is, allowing SpaceX to pack more of it into the rocket, and that, in turn, allows for greater performance. As the rocket is being fueled it is engulfed by steam clouds that form as the propellants boils off.SpaceX needs the additional propellant because it not only lights its rocket engines at liftoff, but again as the first stage booster heads back to Earth for a landing so that it can be reused again.The hatch is closed; weather looking goodReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkSupport crews have closed the hatch of the Dragon spacecraft, another important milestone on the way to launch. The crews spent a fair amount of time inspecting the seal around the hatch, making sure there were no leaks.Meanwhile, a storm passed over Cape Canaveral earlier this evening. But it has since passed, officials have said, and the weather officer has confirmed that the range is currently go for launch.Space station changed course this afternoon to miss Chinese debris in its pathReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:20 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt about 3 p.m. Wednesday, NASA ground controllers maneuvered the space station to avoid a piece of debris hurtling through space.The maneuver \u201cwill have no impact to the launch time,\u201d Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, told reporters during a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cIt\u2019s something that the SpaceX team can easily accommodate and they\u2019re planning. And we\u2019re working closely with the flight control teams to make sure that that work is done.\u201dDodging debris has become routine for the space station, which orbits at about 240 miles above the Earth. Space is increasingly polluted with spent satellites and the detritus of past collisions. And traveling at some 17,500 mph, debris can pose a serious threat to the astronauts on board the station. Even small pieces can hit with enormous force, and so controllers on the ground are always on the lookout.The piece of debris that\u2019s coming uncomfortably close to the space station originated with a 2007 incident when China blew up a dead weather satellite, part of a test to demonstrate its ability to take out satellites on orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. The missile strike created a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces, which according to the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, is \u201cthe largest ever tracked, and much of it will remain in orbit for decades, posing a significant collision threat to other space objects in low Earth orbit.\u201dMcDowell wrote on Twitter that more than 2,700 pieces of debris from the test remain in orbit today and that this would be at least the third time the space station has had to move to avoid debris from the China satellite strike.Meet the CrewReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s third operational human spaceflight mission to the space station has a full contingent of four astronauts, three from NASA and one representing the European Space Agency.The mission is being commanded by NASA astronaut Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot, who is making his first trip to space. He is joined by another rookie, Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, and Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle Endeavour and once on the Russia Soyuz.European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany, is also on board for his first spaceflight.The three rookies will become the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. SpaceX  launches Crew-3 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center for docking with the space station Thursday evening. SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6346",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/10/spacex-launch-crew-3/",
        "text": "Four more astronauts blasted into orbit Wednesday, continuing a historic year of human spaceflight in which a diverse array of people have flown on several different spacecraft to varying parts of the increasingly popular neighborhood just outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 9:03 p.m. Eastern time, carrying a crew of four, including three NASA astronauts and one European, on what is expected to be a 22-hour journey to the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about six months. The launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was the fifth time that SpaceX has flown humans to orbit and the fourth time it has done so under its contract with NASA. In September, it flew four civilians in what was called the Inspiration4 mission \u2014 a three-day flight in the SpaceX Dragon capsule that circled the globe every 90 minutes.The launch came less than 48 hours after SpaceX had returned the previous astronaut crew from the space station to a picture-perfect splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 evidence that SpaceX is gaining prowess in multiple aspects of its role as NASA\u2019s primary way to transport goods and people to the space station. The back-to-back flights marked \u201cthe shortest turnaround between a splashdown and a launch in human spaceflight history,\u201d according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs.After reaching orbit, NASA astronaut Raja Chari told mission control that, \u201cit was a great ride. Better than we expected.\u201dThe SpaceX launch director told the crew, which will continue the mission on Veterans Day: \u201cIt was a pleasure to be part of this mission with you. Enjoy your holiday amongst the stars. We\u2019ll be waving as you fly by.\u201dThe flight comes as a number of companies are working to fly private citizens to space \u2014 from the actor William Shatner, 90, who became the oldest person to reach the edge of space, to Oliver Daemen, a student from the Netherlands, who at 18 became the youngest.Wednesday\u2019s launch, dubbed Crew-3, is commanded by Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space. He was joined by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. It is also Barron\u2019s and Maurer\u2019s first trip to space.The three rookies became the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. The list of space travelers is growing in part because of the efforts of Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which take paying customers just past the edge of space in suborbital trips that fly up and then fall back down to Earth.Russia continues to fly astronauts on its Soyuz spacecraft and recently said that it would allow its cosmonauts to fly on SpaceX Dragon capsules. China also is flying humans and recently sent up a crew of three to the space station it is assembling in Earth orbit. And NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft is scheduled to launch early next year without any astronauts onboard on a trip that would go around the moon in preparation for a human landing, perhaps as soon as 2025 under a new schedule NASA announced on Tuesday.Meanwhile, Boeing is working to develop a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the space station as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program. But its program has suffered through all sorts of problems and delays. On a test flight without astronauts at the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered a software problem that forced controllers to truncate the mission and forgo a docking with the station.Boeing decided to redo the test flight and take a charge of $410 million.Then over the summer, the Starliner capsule suffered another problem ahead of that do-over, this time with valves that remained stuck in the service module. The flight never got off, and Boeing said last month that it would take another charge, this time of $185 million, to cover the costs of the delay.During a news conference last month, John Vollmer, Boeing\u2019s program manager for the commercial crew program, declined to say how much the problem would cost the company. But he said \u201cNASA would not bear any responsibility for those costs that are within scope of our contract. \u2026 So, we\u2019re not expecting any charge to the government from that side.\u201d He added that the company would not back away from the program as a result of the additional costs. \u201cWe are 100 percent committed to fulfilling our contract with the government, and we intend to do that,\u201d he said.As it continues to solidify its status as NASA\u2019s premier human spaceflight partner, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is also working toward flying more private citizens. It has a mission commissioned by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, set to take three civilians and a former NASA astronaut, who would serve as their guide, to the space station for about a week.As those efforts continue, many believe the ranks of space farers will increase dramatically.\u201cSix hundred in 60 years, it makes for 10 people per year,\u201d Maurer said during a preflight news conference. \u201cBut I think in the next few years, we\u2019ll see an exponential rise. Now we\u2019re entering the era for commercial spaceflight.\u201dBefore SpaceX flew its first test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts last year, the space agency had spent nearly a decade after the space shuttle was retired paying for seats on the Russia Soyuz.Today, with SpaceX, \u201cthere are more flight opportunities\u201d for NASA astronauts, said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and a professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s school of engineering. \u201cOne of the positive impacts is fewer people having to train over in Russia. That was a major strain and stress on families.\u201dThe Crew-3 mission is slated to dock with the space station at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. While onboard the orbiting laboratory, the astronauts will be conducting what NASA says is \u201cnew and exciting scientific research in areas such as materials science, health technologies, and plant science to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit life on Earth.\u201dIn a press briefing after the launch Wednesday, Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said called it a \u201cperfect launch.\u201d\u201cThe crew is doing great and were in great spirits prior to launch and are in great spirits on orbit,\u201d he said.Here\u2019s what you need to knowAboard the capsule are NASA astronauts Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space; Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, who is also making her first trip to space; Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, another space rookie who is an engineer from Germany.The capsule is a new addition to SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon fleet and has never flown to space before. It\u2019s been named Endurance.One critical adjustment has been to this spacecraft: a tube that carries urine to a storage tank has been welded in place. The change was made after technicians discovered on another spacecraft that the tube had pulled away from the tank, allowing urine to collect under the spacecraft\u2019s floor.Dragon has separated and is on its way to the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has separated from the second stage and is now on its own flying the four astronauts to the International Space Station. It will take the spacecraft about 22 hours to reach the station, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h. It appears that all of the initial stages of the flight have gone well so far.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe first stage booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe reusable Falcon 9 booster has landed on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean. While not a crucial part of the mission, SpaceX flies its boosters back to Earth so that they can be reused. Before SpaceX developed the technology, first stage boosters typically fell into the ocean, never to be used again.The ship will come back to Port Canaveral in Florida, where crews will recover the booster and refurbish it to get it ready for another flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Falcon 9 rocket carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as European astronaut Matthias Maurer has lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes well, the second stage should separate and ignite its engine while the first stage flies back to land on an autonomous ship at sea.About 12 minutes after liftoff, the Dragon spacecraft should separate from the second stage to begin its journey to the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAbout five minutes to go to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe countdown is entering its final stages, and everything continues to proceed toward launch. The Dragon spacecraft will transition to internal power, as the flight computers perform the last preflight checks. A launch at 9:03 p.m. seems all but certain.\u201cEverything is still looking good for launch of Falcon 9 and Dragon,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s John Insprucker said on the live broadcast.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s next human spaceflight mission won\u2019t have any NASA astronauts on boardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has a $2.6 billion contract with NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. But its next scheduled flight after this one is a private one that will carry four private citizens to orbit in February.The mission has been put together by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, which has booked three passengers, each of whom paid $55 million each for the trip. They\u2019ll spend eight days on the station.The trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.That flight will be SpaceX\u2019s second flight with private citizens. In September, SpaceX flew a crew of four in orbit around the Earth for three days. That mission, known as Inspiration4, was funded by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who participated in the flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX keeping up a relentless paceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDriven by Elon Musk, SpaceX has kept up a torrid pace for years, which is one of the reasons it has been so successful \u2014 even if many employees get burned out and leave.This week is yet another example of how quickly the company moves.On Monday, it flew four astronauts home from the International Space Station on a more than eight-hour journey that saw them plunge through the atmosphere and generate temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico at 10:33 p.m. Eastern time.Now, less than 48 hours later, the company is gearing up to launch its next crew to the station.\u201cWe know it\u2019s another intense period,\u201d said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability. The teams \u201chave been working pretty hard. But they\u2019re going to get some time off here to rest up a little bit. \u2026 We\u2019ll be rested. We\u2019ll be ready. We\u2019ve done the detailed data review. I don\u2019t consider this rushed. If we felt we needed more time, we would have asked NASA for a little bit more time to go ahead and delay and move things.\u201dTop leaders at SpaceX and NASA have been overseeing the flight, he said, and the bottom line is that they would not fly if they didn\u2019t think they could do so safely.\u201cWe went through to make sure we are doing everything possible to make sure that Crew-3 is safe,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we saw something else we needed to do, any of our folks could say we need to take a break and we could stand down and stop.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPropellant load has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX is now fueling the Falcon 9 rocket with rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, one of the last major milestones before launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for the rocket to be loaded with propellant, another sign that the mission is proceeding swiftly to launch at 9:03 p.m. Eastern. The crew access arm has also retracted, and crews will arm the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system, which is designed to jettison the astronauts away from the booster in the event of an emergency.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSetting a Spaceflight RecordReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhen the Crew-3 astronauts board the space station, they\u2019ll join two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov as well as NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.In September, NASA announced that Vande Hei and Dubrov were having their stay on the station extended until March 2022, stretching their time aboard to nearly a year. The space agency didn\u2019t say how long the mission would last. But Vande Hei wrote on Twitter that it would last about 353 days, which would break the all-time duration record by an American astronaut. The record for longest single spaceflight is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days on the station.Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel, wrote that the extended stay was \u201ca possibility that I was prepared for from the beginning. The opportunity to experience this with wonderful crewmates while contributing to science and future exploration is exciting!\u201dVande Hei was selected by NASA to be an astronaut in 2009 and previously served as a \u201ccapsule communicator,\u201d the person in mission control who speaks with the astronauts while they are in space. He previously flew to space on the Russian Soyuz in 2018.Slowly inflating parachute not seen as a problem for this flightReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe launch of the Crew-3 astronauts came just two days after their counterparts on the previous Crew-2 mission returned from the space station. Even though one of the four main parachutes inflated at a slower rate than the others, the flight home was \u201cflawless,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said in a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cWe really don\u2019t see any issues proceeding into the launch.\u201dThe teams looked in detail at the parachute issue \u2014 in which the fourth chute opened 75 seconds after the other three \u2014 and concluded it was not a cause for concern and should not force a delay for the Crew-3 launch. When there is a configuration of four parachutes, it is not unusual to have one lag behind, said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability.\u201cIt performed essentially the way it was designed to perform,\u201d he said. He also noted that, \u201cwe can land with three parachutes if we have to.\u201dHe said the recovery teams pulled the parachutes out of the water after splashdown and flew them by helicopter to SpaceX\u2019s facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla. There, they were inspected \u201cwith a NASA team and a SpaceX team to make sure that there was nothing in that parachute that we didn\u2019t understand.\u201dSpaceX also reached out to the \u201cparachute vendor to make sure that they were comfortable with where we\u2019re going,\u201d he said, adding that they also reviewed the manufacturing records of these parachutes to make sure everything was in order.\u201cWe\u2019ve done an extremely thorough review, and everything looks like we\u2019re in a good place to go fly,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.Being able to recover the vehicle and inspect it \u201cis really a gift for us. We\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly in space. And the way to do that safely is you\u2019d keep looking at the data and you learn from each and every flight.\u201dWhy SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket with the astronauts onboardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkTraditionally in human spaceflight, ground crews fueled the rocket before the astronauts arrived. This was how it was done with the space shuttle and before.But SpaceX does it differently.It loads the astronauts first, and then begins fueling the rocket. Initially, this concerned many in the space community, including members of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Advisory Board, who feared that handling highly combustible propellants while the astronauts sat on top of the rocket was a risky prospect.Those concerns were exacerbated in 2016 when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. But since then, SpaceX has followed this fueling regimen many times successfully, and NASA has signed off on the procedure, known informally as \u201cload and go.\u201dThe reason SpaceX fuels its rocket right before flight is because it supercools its liquid oxygen, bringing it down to minus-340 degrees Fahrenheit. The colder the propellant is, the denser it is, allowing SpaceX to pack more of it into the rocket, and that, in turn, allows for greater performance. As the rocket is being fueled it is engulfed by steam clouds that form as the propellants boils off.SpaceX needs the additional propellant because it not only lights its rocket engines at liftoff, but again as the first stage booster heads back to Earth for a landing so that it can be reused again.The hatch is closed; weather looking goodReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkSupport crews have closed the hatch of the Dragon spacecraft, another important milestone on the way to launch. The crews spent a fair amount of time inspecting the seal around the hatch, making sure there were no leaks.Meanwhile, a storm passed over Cape Canaveral earlier this evening. But it has since passed, officials have said, and the weather officer has confirmed that the range is currently go for launch.Space station changed course this afternoon to miss Chinese debris in its pathReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:20 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt about 3 p.m. Wednesday, NASA ground controllers maneuvered the space station to avoid a piece of debris hurtling through space.The maneuver \u201cwill have no impact to the launch time,\u201d Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, told reporters during a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cIt\u2019s something that the SpaceX team can easily accommodate and they\u2019re planning. And we\u2019re working closely with the flight control teams to make sure that that work is done.\u201dDodging debris has become routine for the space station, which orbits at about 240 miles above the Earth. Space is increasingly polluted with spent satellites and the detritus of past collisions. And traveling at some 17,500 mph, debris can pose a serious threat to the astronauts on board the station. Even small pieces can hit with enormous force, and so controllers on the ground are always on the lookout.The piece of debris that\u2019s coming uncomfortably close to the space station originated with a 2007 incident when China blew up a dead weather satellite, part of a test to demonstrate its ability to take out satellites on orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. The missile strike created a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces, which according to the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, is \u201cthe largest ever tracked, and much of it will remain in orbit for decades, posing a significant collision threat to other space objects in low Earth orbit.\u201dMcDowell wrote on Twitter that more than 2,700 pieces of debris from the test remain in orbit today and that this would be at least the third time the space station has had to move to avoid debris from the China satellite strike.Meet the CrewReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s third operational human spaceflight mission to the space station has a full contingent of four astronauts, three from NASA and one representing the European Space Agency.The mission is being commanded by NASA astronaut Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot, who is making his first trip to space. He is joined by another rookie, Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, and Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle Endeavour and once on the Russia Soyuz.European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany, is also on board for his first spaceflight.The three rookies will become the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. SpaceX  launches Crew-3 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center for docking with the space station Thursday evening. SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6347",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/10/spacex-launch-crew-3/",
        "text": "Four more astronauts blasted into orbit Wednesday, continuing a historic year of human spaceflight in which a diverse array of people have flown on several different spacecraft to varying parts of the increasingly popular neighborhood just outside Earth\u2019s atmosphere.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 9:03 p.m. Eastern time, carrying a crew of four, including three NASA astronauts and one European, on what is expected to be a 22-hour journey to the International Space Station, where they are to stay for about six months. The launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was the fifth time that SpaceX has flown humans to orbit and the fourth time it has done so under its contract with NASA. In September, it flew four civilians in what was called the Inspiration4 mission \u2014 a three-day flight in the SpaceX Dragon capsule that circled the globe every 90 minutes.The launch came less than 48 hours after SpaceX had returned the previous astronaut crew from the space station to a picture-perfect splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico \u2014 evidence that SpaceX is gaining prowess in multiple aspects of its role as NASA\u2019s primary way to transport goods and people to the space station. The back-to-back flights marked \u201cthe shortest turnaround between a splashdown and a launch in human spaceflight history,\u201d according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs.After reaching orbit, NASA astronaut Raja Chari told mission control that, \u201cit was a great ride. Better than we expected.\u201dThe SpaceX launch director told the crew, which will continue the mission on Veterans Day: \u201cIt was a pleasure to be part of this mission with you. Enjoy your holiday amongst the stars. We\u2019ll be waving as you fly by.\u201dThe flight comes as a number of companies are working to fly private citizens to space \u2014 from the actor William Shatner, 90, who became the oldest person to reach the edge of space, to Oliver Daemen, a student from the Netherlands, who at 18 became the youngest.Wednesday\u2019s launch, dubbed Crew-3, is commanded by Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space. He was joined by Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany. It is also Barron\u2019s and Maurer\u2019s first trip to space.The three rookies became the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. The list of space travelers is growing in part because of the efforts of Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which take paying customers just past the edge of space in suborbital trips that fly up and then fall back down to Earth.Russia continues to fly astronauts on its Soyuz spacecraft and recently said that it would allow its cosmonauts to fly on SpaceX Dragon capsules. China also is flying humans and recently sent up a crew of three to the space station it is assembling in Earth orbit. And NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft is scheduled to launch early next year without any astronauts onboard on a trip that would go around the moon in preparation for a human landing, perhaps as soon as 2025 under a new schedule NASA announced on Tuesday.Meanwhile, Boeing is working to develop a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the space station as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program. But its program has suffered through all sorts of problems and delays. On a test flight without astronauts at the end of 2019, the spacecraft suffered a software problem that forced controllers to truncate the mission and forgo a docking with the station.Boeing decided to redo the test flight and take a charge of $410 million.Then over the summer, the Starliner capsule suffered another problem ahead of that do-over, this time with valves that remained stuck in the service module. The flight never got off, and Boeing said last month that it would take another charge, this time of $185 million, to cover the costs of the delay.During a news conference last month, John Vollmer, Boeing\u2019s program manager for the commercial crew program, declined to say how much the problem would cost the company. But he said \u201cNASA would not bear any responsibility for those costs that are within scope of our contract. \u2026 So, we\u2019re not expecting any charge to the government from that side.\u201d He added that the company would not back away from the program as a result of the additional costs. \u201cWe are 100 percent committed to fulfilling our contract with the government, and we intend to do that,\u201d he said.As it continues to solidify its status as NASA\u2019s premier human spaceflight partner, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is also working toward flying more private citizens. It has a mission commissioned by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, set to take three civilians and a former NASA astronaut, who would serve as their guide, to the space station for about a week.As those efforts continue, many believe the ranks of space farers will increase dramatically.\u201cSix hundred in 60 years, it makes for 10 people per year,\u201d Maurer said during a preflight news conference. \u201cBut I think in the next few years, we\u2019ll see an exponential rise. Now we\u2019re entering the era for commercial spaceflight.\u201dBefore SpaceX flew its first test flight with a pair of NASA astronauts last year, the space agency had spent nearly a decade after the space shuttle was retired paying for seats on the Russia Soyuz.Today, with SpaceX, \u201cthere are more flight opportunities\u201d for NASA astronauts, said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut and a professor at the University of Southern California\u2019s school of engineering. \u201cOne of the positive impacts is fewer people having to train over in Russia. That was a major strain and stress on families.\u201dThe Crew-3 mission is slated to dock with the space station at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. While onboard the orbiting laboratory, the astronauts will be conducting what NASA says is \u201cnew and exciting scientific research in areas such as materials science, health technologies, and plant science to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit life on Earth.\u201dIn a press briefing after the launch Wednesday, Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager said called it a \u201cperfect launch.\u201d\u201cThe crew is doing great and were in great spirits prior to launch and are in great spirits on orbit,\u201d he said.Here\u2019s what you need to knowAboard the capsule are NASA astronauts Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot who is making his first trip to space; Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, who is also making her first trip to space; Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle and once on the Russia Soyuz, and European astronaut Matthias Maurer, another space rookie who is an engineer from Germany.The capsule is a new addition to SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon fleet and has never flown to space before. It\u2019s been named Endurance.One critical adjustment has been to this spacecraft: a tube that carries urine to a storage tank has been welded in place. The change was made after technicians discovered on another spacecraft that the tube had pulled away from the tank, allowing urine to collect under the spacecraft\u2019s floor.Dragon has separated and is on its way to the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has separated from the second stage and is now on its own flying the four astronauts to the International Space Station. It will take the spacecraft about 22 hours to reach the station, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 m.p.h. It appears that all of the initial stages of the flight have gone well so far.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe first stage booster has landedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:14 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe reusable Falcon 9 booster has landed on an autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean. While not a crucial part of the mission, SpaceX flies its boosters back to Earth so that they can be reused. Before SpaceX developed the technology, first stage boosters typically fell into the ocean, never to be used again.The ship will come back to Port Canaveral in Florida, where crews will recover the booster and refurbish it to get it ready for another flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Falcon 9 rocket carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as European astronaut Matthias Maurer has lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes well, the second stage should separate and ignite its engine while the first stage flies back to land on an autonomous ship at sea.About 12 minutes after liftoff, the Dragon spacecraft should separate from the second stage to begin its journey to the International Space Station.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAbout five minutes to go to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:59 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe countdown is entering its final stages, and everything continues to proceed toward launch. The Dragon spacecraft will transition to internal power, as the flight computers perform the last preflight checks. A launch at 9:03 p.m. seems all but certain.\u201cEverything is still looking good for launch of Falcon 9 and Dragon,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s John Insprucker said on the live broadcast.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s next human spaceflight mission won\u2019t have any NASA astronauts on boardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX has a $2.6 billion contract with NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. But its next scheduled flight after this one is a private one that will carry four private citizens to orbit in February.The mission has been put together by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, which has booked three passengers, each of whom paid $55 million each for the trip. They\u2019ll spend eight days on the station.The trio \u2014 Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot \u2014 will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.Accompanying them will be Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space. L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission\u2019s commander.That flight will be SpaceX\u2019s second flight with private citizens. In September, SpaceX flew a crew of four in orbit around the Earth for three days. That mission, known as Inspiration4, was funded by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who participated in the flight.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX keeping up a relentless paceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkDriven by Elon Musk, SpaceX has kept up a torrid pace for years, which is one of the reasons it has been so successful \u2014 even if many employees get burned out and leave.This week is yet another example of how quickly the company moves.On Monday, it flew four astronauts home from the International Space Station on a more than eight-hour journey that saw them plunge through the atmosphere and generate temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico at 10:33 p.m. Eastern time.Now, less than 48 hours later, the company is gearing up to launch its next crew to the station.\u201cWe know it\u2019s another intense period,\u201d said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability. The teams \u201chave been working pretty hard. But they\u2019re going to get some time off here to rest up a little bit. \u2026 We\u2019ll be rested. We\u2019ll be ready. We\u2019ve done the detailed data review. I don\u2019t consider this rushed. If we felt we needed more time, we would have asked NASA for a little bit more time to go ahead and delay and move things.\u201dTop leaders at SpaceX and NASA have been overseeing the flight, he said, and the bottom line is that they would not fly if they didn\u2019t think they could do so safely.\u201cWe went through to make sure we are doing everything possible to make sure that Crew-3 is safe,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we saw something else we needed to do, any of our folks could say we need to take a break and we could stand down and stop.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPropellant load has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX is now fueling the Falcon 9 rocket with rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, one of the last major milestones before launch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for the rocket to be loaded with propellant, another sign that the mission is proceeding swiftly to launch at 9:03 p.m. Eastern. The crew access arm has also retracted, and crews will arm the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s emergency abort system, which is designed to jettison the astronauts away from the booster in the event of an emergency.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSetting a Spaceflight RecordReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhen the Crew-3 astronauts board the space station, they\u2019ll join two Russian cosmonauts, Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov as well as NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.In September, NASA announced that Vande Hei and Dubrov were having their stay on the station extended until March 2022, stretching their time aboard to nearly a year. The space agency didn\u2019t say how long the mission would last. But Vande Hei wrote on Twitter that it would last about 353 days, which would break the all-time duration record by an American astronaut. The record for longest single spaceflight is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days on the station.Vande Hei, a retired Army colonel, wrote that the extended stay was \u201ca possibility that I was prepared for from the beginning. The opportunity to experience this with wonderful crewmates while contributing to science and future exploration is exciting!\u201dVande Hei was selected by NASA to be an astronaut in 2009 and previously served as a \u201ccapsule communicator,\u201d the person in mission control who speaks with the astronauts while they are in space. He previously flew to space on the Russian Soyuz in 2018.Slowly inflating parachute not seen as a problem for this flightReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:10 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe launch of the Crew-3 astronauts came just two days after their counterparts on the previous Crew-2 mission returned from the space station. Even though one of the four main parachutes inflated at a slower rate than the others, the flight home was \u201cflawless,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said in a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cWe really don\u2019t see any issues proceeding into the launch.\u201dThe teams looked in detail at the parachute issue \u2014 in which the fourth chute opened 75 seconds after the other three \u2014 and concluded it was not a cause for concern and should not force a delay for the Crew-3 launch. When there is a configuration of four parachutes, it is not unusual to have one lag behind, said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability.\u201cIt performed essentially the way it was designed to perform,\u201d he said. He also noted that, \u201cwe can land with three parachutes if we have to.\u201dHe said the recovery teams pulled the parachutes out of the water after splashdown and flew them by helicopter to SpaceX\u2019s facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla. There, they were inspected \u201cwith a NASA team and a SpaceX team to make sure that there was nothing in that parachute that we didn\u2019t understand.\u201dSpaceX also reached out to the \u201cparachute vendor to make sure that they were comfortable with where we\u2019re going,\u201d he said, adding that they also reviewed the manufacturing records of these parachutes to make sure everything was in order.\u201cWe\u2019ve done an extremely thorough review, and everything looks like we\u2019re in a good place to go fly,\u201d Gerstenmaier said.Being able to recover the vehicle and inspect it \u201cis really a gift for us. We\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly in space. And the way to do that safely is you\u2019d keep looking at the data and you learn from each and every flight.\u201dWhy SpaceX fuels its Falcon 9 rocket with the astronauts onboardReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkTraditionally in human spaceflight, ground crews fueled the rocket before the astronauts arrived. This was how it was done with the space shuttle and before.But SpaceX does it differently.It loads the astronauts first, and then begins fueling the rocket. Initially, this concerned many in the space community, including members of NASA\u2019s Aerospace Advisory Board, who feared that handling highly combustible propellants while the astronauts sat on top of the rocket was a risky prospect.Those concerns were exacerbated in 2016 when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test. But since then, SpaceX has followed this fueling regimen many times successfully, and NASA has signed off on the procedure, known informally as \u201cload and go.\u201dThe reason SpaceX fuels its rocket right before flight is because it supercools its liquid oxygen, bringing it down to minus-340 degrees Fahrenheit. The colder the propellant is, the denser it is, allowing SpaceX to pack more of it into the rocket, and that, in turn, allows for greater performance. As the rocket is being fueled it is engulfed by steam clouds that form as the propellants boils off.SpaceX needs the additional propellant because it not only lights its rocket engines at liftoff, but again as the first stage booster heads back to Earth for a landing so that it can be reused again.The hatch is closed; weather looking goodReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkSupport crews have closed the hatch of the Dragon spacecraft, another important milestone on the way to launch. The crews spent a fair amount of time inspecting the seal around the hatch, making sure there were no leaks.Meanwhile, a storm passed over Cape Canaveral earlier this evening. But it has since passed, officials have said, and the weather officer has confirmed that the range is currently go for launch.Space station changed course this afternoon to miss Chinese debris in its pathReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:20 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt about 3 p.m. Wednesday, NASA ground controllers maneuvered the space station to avoid a piece of debris hurtling through space.The maneuver \u201cwill have no impact to the launch time,\u201d Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station program manager, told reporters during a briefing Tuesday night. \u201cIt\u2019s something that the SpaceX team can easily accommodate and they\u2019re planning. And we\u2019re working closely with the flight control teams to make sure that that work is done.\u201dDodging debris has become routine for the space station, which orbits at about 240 miles above the Earth. Space is increasingly polluted with spent satellites and the detritus of past collisions. And traveling at some 17,500 mph, debris can pose a serious threat to the astronauts on board the station. Even small pieces can hit with enormous force, and so controllers on the ground are always on the lookout.The piece of debris that\u2019s coming uncomfortably close to the space station originated with a 2007 incident when China blew up a dead weather satellite, part of a test to demonstrate its ability to take out satellites on orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. The missile strike created a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces, which according to the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, is \u201cthe largest ever tracked, and much of it will remain in orbit for decades, posing a significant collision threat to other space objects in low Earth orbit.\u201dMcDowell wrote on Twitter that more than 2,700 pieces of debris from the test remain in orbit today and that this would be at least the third time the space station has had to move to avoid debris from the China satellite strike.Meet the CrewReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:00 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX\u2019s third operational human spaceflight mission to the space station has a full contingent of four astronauts, three from NASA and one representing the European Space Agency.The mission is being commanded by NASA astronaut Raja Chari, an Air Force colonel and test pilot, who is making his first trip to space. He is joined by another rookie, Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who served on a nuclear submarine, and Tom Marshburn, a physician who has flown to space twice before, once on the space shuttle Endeavour and once on the Russia Soyuz.European astronaut Matthias Maurer, an engineer from Germany, is also on board for his first spaceflight.The three rookies will become the 599th, 600th and 601st people to fly past the 50-mile edge of space, NASA said. SpaceX  launches Crew-3 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center for docking with the space station Thursday evening. SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space Station ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6348",
        "date": "2021-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/21/bill-nelson-moon-landing-confirmation/",
        "text": "Former senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), President Biden\u2019s pick to be NASA Administrator, said during his confirmation hearing Wednesday that he would push to land the astronauts on the moon as soon as possible, carrying on the key space policy program of the Trump administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNelson said the ambitious moon program, dubbed Artemis, transcends politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201d Nelson was one of three Biden administration nominees who appeared simultaneously before members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in a hearing notable for an often head-snapping switch among topics. The other nominees were Lina Khan, who has been named to be a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and Leslie Kiernan, who Biden has tapped as general counsel of the Department of Commerce.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA longtime advocate of space exploration who flew on the space shuttle in 1986, Nelson, 78, is expected to win confirmation handily and was praised by senators on both side of the aisle. During her opening remarks, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said Nelson\u2019s \u201creputation as a tireless advocate for the space program is well deserved. And at this moment NASA needs a great advocate that we all can be confident in.\u201dBut she also said she was concerned about the $2.9 billion contract NASA awarded last week to SpaceX to build a spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon. In winning the contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which is based in Seattle in Cantwell\u2019s home state, and Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)She said she was concerned that the contract went to a single company instead of two, which NASA had said it wanted to promote competition and ensure there is a backup in case one of the companies runs into trouble.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d\"I have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract,\u201d she said.Nelson said that he would, adding that \u201ccompetition is always good.\u201dNASA officials said they did not have enough money from Congress to fund two contracts and decided to proceed with the SpaceX award for the first lunar landing. The agency would, however, \u201cbegin work immediately on a follow-up competition\u201d to \u201cprovide regularly recurring services to the lunar surface that will enable these crewed missions on sustainable basis,\u201d NASA\u2019s Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar lander program manager, said last week.Story continues below advertisementNelson said he supported that, but Cantwell indicated she was not satisfied, saying: \"I think there needs to be redundancy. And it has to be clear this process can\u2019t be redundancy later, it has to be redundancy now.\u201dAdvertisementShe vowed to follow up with Nelson.Blue Origin had pushed hard for the contract and had put together what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper for its proposal. Blue Origin was the biggest recipient of money under the initial phase of the contract, awarded last year, winning $579 million. It has not said whether it would attempt to challenge the contract awarded to SpaceX last week.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said it awarded a single contract in part to move quickly. And Nelson said he believed it was still possible for astronauts to land on the lunar surface by 2024 \u2014 meeting an arbitrary deadline set by the Trump administration.But top officials in the agency have said privately it is not feasible and publicly that it is highly unlikely. The Space Launch System rocket that would be used to launch the astronauts has been repeatedly delayed, and Congress has appropriated only a fraction of the funds NASA says it needs to meet the deadline. And recently the NASA Inspector General said in a report that NASA \u201cfaces significant challenges\u201d that would make its plan to \u201cland astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024 highly unlikely.\u201dAdvertisementKhan, Biden\u2019s FTC nominee, signaled in her testimony that she would bring an aggressive approach to regulating tech giants. That would mark a major reversal from the Obama era, when the agency took a largely hands-off approach to big mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector.Lina Khan\u2019s nomination hearing signals a new era of tough antitrust enforcement for the tech industryKhan told senators that in the past few years, evidence has come to light that the Obama administration \u201cmissed opportunities\u201d for enforcement actions against big tech, and she said the FTC has to be \u201cmuch more vigilant\u201d about vetting acquisitions by major companies such as Facebook and Google.Story continues below advertisementKhan faced some tough questions from Republicans who wondered about her level of experience and whether her previous work for a House committee probing tech companies\u2019 possible antitrust violations would require her to recuse herself from key decisions. But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) seemed to offer an endorsement in comments urging the FTC to do more to regulate big tech. \u201cI look forward to working with you,\" he said. Nelson said the ambitious moon program, dubbed Artemis, transcends politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201d Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6349",
        "date": "2021-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/21/bill-nelson-moon-landing-confirmation/",
        "text": "Former senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), President Biden\u2019s pick to be NASA Administrator, said during his confirmation hearing Wednesday that he would push to land the astronauts on the moon as soon as possible, carrying on the key space policy program of the Trump administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNelson said the ambitious moon program, dubbed Artemis, transcends politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201d Nelson was one of three Biden administration nominees who appeared simultaneously before members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in a hearing notable for an often head-snapping switch among topics. The other nominees were Lina Khan, who has been named to be a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and Leslie Kiernan, who Biden has tapped as general counsel of the Department of Commerce.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA longtime advocate of space exploration who flew on the space shuttle in 1986, Nelson, 78, is expected to win confirmation handily and was praised by senators on both side of the aisle. During her opening remarks, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said Nelson\u2019s \u201creputation as a tireless advocate for the space program is well deserved. And at this moment NASA needs a great advocate that we all can be confident in.\u201dBut she also said she was concerned about the $2.9 billion contract NASA awarded last week to SpaceX to build a spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon. In winning the contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which is based in Seattle in Cantwell\u2019s home state, and Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)She said she was concerned that the contract went to a single company instead of two, which NASA had said it wanted to promote competition and ensure there is a backup in case one of the companies runs into trouble.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d\"I have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract,\u201d she said.Nelson said that he would, adding that \u201ccompetition is always good.\u201dNASA officials said they did not have enough money from Congress to fund two contracts and decided to proceed with the SpaceX award for the first lunar landing. The agency would, however, \u201cbegin work immediately on a follow-up competition\u201d to \u201cprovide regularly recurring services to the lunar surface that will enable these crewed missions on sustainable basis,\u201d NASA\u2019s Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar lander program manager, said last week.Story continues below advertisementNelson said he supported that, but Cantwell indicated she was not satisfied, saying: \"I think there needs to be redundancy. And it has to be clear this process can\u2019t be redundancy later, it has to be redundancy now.\u201dAdvertisementShe vowed to follow up with Nelson.Blue Origin had pushed hard for the contract and had put together what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper for its proposal. Blue Origin was the biggest recipient of money under the initial phase of the contract, awarded last year, winning $579 million. It has not said whether it would attempt to challenge the contract awarded to SpaceX last week.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said it awarded a single contract in part to move quickly. And Nelson said he believed it was still possible for astronauts to land on the lunar surface by 2024 \u2014 meeting an arbitrary deadline set by the Trump administration.But top officials in the agency have said privately it is not feasible and publicly that it is highly unlikely. The Space Launch System rocket that would be used to launch the astronauts has been repeatedly delayed, and Congress has appropriated only a fraction of the funds NASA says it needs to meet the deadline. And recently the NASA Inspector General said in a report that NASA \u201cfaces significant challenges\u201d that would make its plan to \u201cland astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024 highly unlikely.\u201dAdvertisementKhan, Biden\u2019s FTC nominee, signaled in her testimony that she would bring an aggressive approach to regulating tech giants. That would mark a major reversal from the Obama era, when the agency took a largely hands-off approach to big mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector.Lina Khan\u2019s nomination hearing signals a new era of tough antitrust enforcement for the tech industryKhan told senators that in the past few years, evidence has come to light that the Obama administration \u201cmissed opportunities\u201d for enforcement actions against big tech, and she said the FTC has to be \u201cmuch more vigilant\u201d about vetting acquisitions by major companies such as Facebook and Google.Story continues below advertisementKhan faced some tough questions from Republicans who wondered about her level of experience and whether her previous work for a House committee probing tech companies\u2019 possible antitrust violations would require her to recuse herself from key decisions. But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) seemed to offer an endorsement in comments urging the FTC to do more to regulate big tech. \u201cI look forward to working with you,\" he said. Nelson said the ambitious moon program, dubbed Artemis, transcends politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201d Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6350",
        "date": "2021-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/21/bill-nelson-moon-landing-confirmation/",
        "text": "Former senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), President Biden\u2019s pick to be NASA Administrator, said during his confirmation hearing Wednesday that he would push to land the astronauts on the moon as soon as possible, carrying on the key space policy program of the Trump administration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNelson said the ambitious moon program, dubbed Artemis, transcends politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201d Nelson was one of three Biden administration nominees who appeared simultaneously before members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in a hearing notable for an often head-snapping switch among topics. The other nominees were Lina Khan, who has been named to be a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and Leslie Kiernan, who Biden has tapped as general counsel of the Department of Commerce.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA longtime advocate of space exploration who flew on the space shuttle in 1986, Nelson, 78, is expected to win confirmation handily and was praised by senators on both side of the aisle. During her opening remarks, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said Nelson\u2019s \u201creputation as a tireless advocate for the space program is well deserved. And at this moment NASA needs a great advocate that we all can be confident in.\u201dBut she also said she was concerned about the $2.9 billion contract NASA awarded last week to SpaceX to build a spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon. In winning the contract, SpaceX beat out Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which is based in Seattle in Cantwell\u2019s home state, and Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)She said she was concerned that the contract went to a single company instead of two, which NASA had said it wanted to promote competition and ensure there is a backup in case one of the companies runs into trouble.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d\"I have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract,\u201d she said.Nelson said that he would, adding that \u201ccompetition is always good.\u201dNASA officials said they did not have enough money from Congress to fund two contracts and decided to proceed with the SpaceX award for the first lunar landing. The agency would, however, \u201cbegin work immediately on a follow-up competition\u201d to \u201cprovide regularly recurring services to the lunar surface that will enable these crewed missions on sustainable basis,\u201d NASA\u2019s Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA\u2019s lunar lander program manager, said last week.Story continues below advertisementNelson said he supported that, but Cantwell indicated she was not satisfied, saying: \"I think there needs to be redundancy. And it has to be clear this process can\u2019t be redundancy later, it has to be redundancy now.\u201dAdvertisementShe vowed to follow up with Nelson.Blue Origin had pushed hard for the contract and had put together what it called a \u201cnational team\u201d that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper for its proposal. Blue Origin was the biggest recipient of money under the initial phase of the contract, awarded last year, winning $579 million. It has not said whether it would attempt to challenge the contract awarded to SpaceX last week.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said it awarded a single contract in part to move quickly. And Nelson said he believed it was still possible for astronauts to land on the lunar surface by 2024 \u2014 meeting an arbitrary deadline set by the Trump administration.But top officials in the agency have said privately it is not feasible and publicly that it is highly unlikely. The Space Launch System rocket that would be used to launch the astronauts has been repeatedly delayed, and Congress has appropriated only a fraction of the funds NASA says it needs to meet the deadline. And recently the NASA Inspector General said in a report that NASA \u201cfaces significant challenges\u201d that would make its plan to \u201cland astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2024 highly unlikely.\u201dAdvertisementKhan, Biden\u2019s FTC nominee, signaled in her testimony that she would bring an aggressive approach to regulating tech giants. That would mark a major reversal from the Obama era, when the agency took a largely hands-off approach to big mergers and acquisitions in the tech sector.Lina Khan\u2019s nomination hearing signals a new era of tough antitrust enforcement for the tech industryKhan told senators that in the past few years, evidence has come to light that the Obama administration \u201cmissed opportunities\u201d for enforcement actions against big tech, and she said the FTC has to be \u201cmuch more vigilant\u201d about vetting acquisitions by major companies such as Facebook and Google.Story continues below advertisementKhan faced some tough questions from Republicans who wondered about her level of experience and whether her previous work for a House committee probing tech companies\u2019 possible antitrust violations would require her to recuse herself from key decisions. But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) seemed to offer an endorsement in comments urging the FTC to do more to regulate big tech. \u201cI look forward to working with you,\" he said. Nelson said the ambitious moon program, dubbed Artemis, transcends politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201d Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 years (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6351",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/02/nasa-venus-space-mission/",
        "text": "For years, Mars has been all the rage at NASA. The space agency sent a series of rovers there, including Perseverance, a car-sized vehicle that landed earlier this year with a small helicopter attached to it. The space agency has been focused as well on the moon and has vowed to return astronauts there in coming years for the first time since 1972. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut on Wednesday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency would set its sights on a world that has not received much attention in decades: Venus, the fiery mystery of a planet that is Earth\u2019s closest planetary neighbor. In an address at NASA headquarters, Nelson said the agency would send not one but two missions there in an effort hailed by scientists as long overdue.NASA has not sent a probe to Venus in more than 30 years, despite its relative proximity and the belief among many that studying what takes place there might help scientists better understand Earth. Though Venus is \u201chot, hellish and unforgiving\u201d in NASA\u2019s words, it has \u201cso many characteristics similar to ours.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson said the missions would study \u201chow Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface. \u2026 We hope these missions will further our understanding of how Earth evolved and why it\u2019s habitable when others in our solar system are not.\u201dTo investigate how Venus evolved, NASA said it is funding two missions. One, dubbed DAVINCI Plus, would send a probe plunging through the planet\u2019s dense atmosphere to understand why it is, as NASA said, \u201ca runaway hothouse compared to the Earth\u2019s.\u201d The mission\u2019s name is an acronym for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging Plus.The mission would also study whether the planet ever had an ocean and take high-resolution images of the surface in an effort to understand if it is made up of plates that shift over eons similar to the makeup of Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second mission is called VERITAS and would map Venus\u2019s topography with radar to chart its elevations and map infrared emissions to study rock types. VERITAS stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy.\u201cIt\u2019s astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,\u201d said Tom Wagner, a scientist at the space agency who was involved in picking the missions. \u201cIt will be as if we rediscovered the planet.\u201dThe Venus missions were chosen among a group of finalists that also included a mission that would have explored Jupiter\u2019s moon, Io. Another would have studied Triton, an active icy moon of Neptune.Story continues below advertisementBut Venus, which Nelson said was \u201can emerging area of research for NASA,\u201d won the day. NASA said it would award contracts of approximately $500 million for each of the Venus missions, and that they would launch in the 2028-2030 time frame. Lockheed Martin would design, build and operate both spacecraft, the company said.AdvertisementThe Soviet Union was intensely interested in Venus, sending more than 30 spacecraft to fly by or land on the planet between 1961 and 1985, according to a timeline posted on the NASA website. NASA, which sent probes into the Venusian atmosphere in 1978, last dispatched a spacecraft to Venus in 1989. That craft, Magellan, orbited the planet for four years, mapping it before plunging into the atmosphere and burning up. Venus is Earth\u2019s closet planetary neighbor. NASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 years (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6352",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/02/nasa-venus-space-mission/",
        "text": "For years, Mars has been all the rage at NASA. The space agency sent a series of rovers there, including Perseverance, a car-sized vehicle that landed earlier this year with a small helicopter attached to it. The space agency has been focused as well on the moon and has vowed to return astronauts there in coming years for the first time since 1972. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut on Wednesday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency would set its sights on a world that has not received much attention in decades: Venus, the fiery mystery of a planet that is Earth\u2019s closest planetary neighbor. In an address at NASA headquarters, Nelson said the agency would send not one but two missions there in an effort hailed by scientists as long overdue.NASA has not sent a probe to Venus in more than 30 years, despite its relative proximity and the belief among many that studying what takes place there might help scientists better understand Earth. Though Venus is \u201chot, hellish and unforgiving\u201d in NASA\u2019s words, it has \u201cso many characteristics similar to ours.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson said the missions would study \u201chow Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface. \u2026 We hope these missions will further our understanding of how Earth evolved and why it\u2019s habitable when others in our solar system are not.\u201dTo investigate how Venus evolved, NASA said it is funding two missions. One, dubbed DAVINCI Plus, would send a probe plunging through the planet\u2019s dense atmosphere to understand why it is, as NASA said, \u201ca runaway hothouse compared to the Earth\u2019s.\u201d The mission\u2019s name is an acronym for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging Plus.The mission would also study whether the planet ever had an ocean and take high-resolution images of the surface in an effort to understand if it is made up of plates that shift over eons similar to the makeup of Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second mission is called VERITAS and would map Venus\u2019s topography with radar to chart its elevations and map infrared emissions to study rock types. VERITAS stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy.\u201cIt\u2019s astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,\u201d said Tom Wagner, a scientist at the space agency who was involved in picking the missions. \u201cIt will be as if we rediscovered the planet.\u201dThe Venus missions were chosen among a group of finalists that also included a mission that would have explored Jupiter\u2019s moon, Io. Another would have studied Triton, an active icy moon of Neptune.Story continues below advertisementBut Venus, which Nelson said was \u201can emerging area of research for NASA,\u201d won the day. NASA said it would award contracts of approximately $500 million for each of the Venus missions, and that they would launch in the 2028-2030 time frame. Lockheed Martin would design, build and operate both spacecraft, the company said.AdvertisementThe Soviet Union was intensely interested in Venus, sending more than 30 spacecraft to fly by or land on the planet between 1961 and 1985, according to a timeline posted on the NASA website. NASA, which sent probes into the Venusian atmosphere in 1978, last dispatched a spacecraft to Venus in 1989. That craft, Magellan, orbited the planet for four years, mapping it before plunging into the atmosphere and burning up. Venus is Earth\u2019s closet planetary neighbor. NASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 years (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6353",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/02/nasa-venus-space-mission/",
        "text": "For years, Mars has been all the rage at NASA. The space agency sent a series of rovers there, including Perseverance, a car-sized vehicle that landed earlier this year with a small helicopter attached to it. The space agency has been focused as well on the moon and has vowed to return astronauts there in coming years for the first time since 1972. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut on Wednesday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency would set its sights on a world that has not received much attention in decades: Venus, the fiery mystery of a planet that is Earth\u2019s closest planetary neighbor. In an address at NASA headquarters, Nelson said the agency would send not one but two missions there in an effort hailed by scientists as long overdue.NASA has not sent a probe to Venus in more than 30 years, despite its relative proximity and the belief among many that studying what takes place there might help scientists better understand Earth. Though Venus is \u201chot, hellish and unforgiving\u201d in NASA\u2019s words, it has \u201cso many characteristics similar to ours.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson said the missions would study \u201chow Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface. \u2026 We hope these missions will further our understanding of how Earth evolved and why it\u2019s habitable when others in our solar system are not.\u201dTo investigate how Venus evolved, NASA said it is funding two missions. One, dubbed DAVINCI Plus, would send a probe plunging through the planet\u2019s dense atmosphere to understand why it is, as NASA said, \u201ca runaway hothouse compared to the Earth\u2019s.\u201d The mission\u2019s name is an acronym for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging Plus.The mission would also study whether the planet ever had an ocean and take high-resolution images of the surface in an effort to understand if it is made up of plates that shift over eons similar to the makeup of Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe second mission is called VERITAS and would map Venus\u2019s topography with radar to chart its elevations and map infrared emissions to study rock types. VERITAS stands for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy.\u201cIt\u2019s astounding how little we know about Venus, but the combined results of these missions will tell us about the planet from the clouds in its sky through the volcanoes on its surface all the way down to its very core,\u201d said Tom Wagner, a scientist at the space agency who was involved in picking the missions. \u201cIt will be as if we rediscovered the planet.\u201dThe Venus missions were chosen among a group of finalists that also included a mission that would have explored Jupiter\u2019s moon, Io. Another would have studied Triton, an active icy moon of Neptune.Story continues below advertisementBut Venus, which Nelson said was \u201can emerging area of research for NASA,\u201d won the day. NASA said it would award contracts of approximately $500 million for each of the Venus missions, and that they would launch in the 2028-2030 time frame. Lockheed Martin would design, build and operate both spacecraft, the company said.AdvertisementThe Soviet Union was intensely interested in Venus, sending more than 30 spacecraft to fly by or land on the planet between 1961 and 1985, according to a timeline posted on the NASA website. NASA, which sent probes into the Venusian atmosphere in 1978, last dispatched a spacecraft to Venus in 1989. That craft, Magellan, orbited the planet for four years, mapping it before plunging into the atmosphere and burning up. Venus is Earth\u2019s closet planetary neighbor. NASA targets Venus with plans to send its first probes there in more than 30 years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6354",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/10/musk-bezos-space-rivalry/",
        "text": "For years, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have sparred over the performance of their rockets and space companies in a simmering feud that flared during a fight over who could use a NASA launchpad and which company was the first to successfully land a rocket.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now the two billionaires, among the world\u2019s richest men, are waging an increasingly bitter battle that pits two enormous business empires in clashes that are playing out in the courts, the Federal Communications Commission and the halls of Congress in what\u2019s become one of the greatest business rivalries in a generation. What began as a fight between Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company over a major NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon now also encompasses a race to build an Internet satellite service in space.Story continues below advertisementThat fight has become especially bare-knuckled and personal. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementFor the past couple of years, SpaceX has been launching a constellation of satellites that could reach well into the thousands, intended to beam Internet signals to Earth. Amazon has a similar plan with a program it calls Kuiper, which has yet to launch a satellite.On Aug. 25, Amazon challenged a SpaceX application to the FCC to modify its plan, saying the modification would violate the FCC\u2019s rules. Six days later, SpaceX responded. It didn\u2019t mince words.Openly dismissive of Amazon\u2019s technical ability, SpaceX accused the company of trying to delay SpaceX\u2019s efforts to make up for its own failures. Amazon\u2019s track record, SpaceX said, \u201camply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Wednesday, Amazon fired back, accusing Musk of openly defying lawful regulations time and again. \u201cThe conduct of SpaceX and other Musk-led companies makes their view plain: rules are for other people, and those who insist upon or even simply request compliance are deserving of derision and ad hominem attacks,\u201d Amazon said in its filing with the agency.On Thursday, SpaceX filed anew. \u201cAnother week, another objection from Amazon against a competitor, yet still no sign of progress on Amazon\u2019s own long-rumored satellite system,\u201d its letter to the FCC began.The first ever launch into Earth's orbit with only civilians aboard is expected to take off on Sept. 15, led by e-commerce chief executive Jared Isaacman. (Reuters)For decades, American enterprise has been built on fierce competition between titans of industry, from the days of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller more than a century ago. Now Musk and Bezos are writing a new chapter focused on space \u2014 a sector romanticized by popular culture and nostalgia for the 1960s Apollo era but that has emerged in recent years as one of the most exciting industries with the potential for enormous growth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth Bezos and Musk portray their space ambitions as a way to help humanity \u2014 by creating a city on Mars, as Musk would like, or building colonies in Earth\u2019s orbit, as Bezos envisions. But space is also a huge business opportunity, said Margaret O\u2019Mara, a professor at the University of Washington and author of \u201cThe Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,\u201d a history of the technology era.\u201cThey\u2019re not public servants, they\u2019re businesspeople,\u201d she said. \u201cSpace is a passion for both of these billionaires, but it also is a growing industry and there is a lot of money to be made in it.\u201dThe companies are well aware that their rivalry is playing out in real time, over social media, in an era when Silicon Valley executives are often watched as closely as Hollywood actors. They are competing against a backdrop that has given rise to the \u201ccelebrity-driven business leader,\u201d O\u2019Mara said, and Musk in particular has been adept at \u201ccreating a very loyal fan base\u201d with a Twitter following of nearly 60 million and an appearance this year on \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201dHosting Saturday Night Live on May 8, Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk poked fun at himself in an episode airing on the eve of Mother's Day. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)\u201cIt\u2019s a reflection of the moment we\u2019re in with this incredible power that rests with this handful of extraordinarily rich people,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor all their differences, Musk and Bezos have charted similar paths in building their empires. Both possess a preternatural ability to upend entire industries with innovative new products, an ability to see deep into the future and the fortitude to stay true to their beliefs, defying doubters and shrugging off short-term losses for long-term gains.At PayPal, Musk helped disrupt the credit card industry and transform how American consumers pay for goods and services. At Tesla, he has taken on the entire automobile industry and revolutionized the electric car market. SpaceX fought the military-industrial complex that for decades had dominated space and has become NASA\u2019s preferred launch partner.With Amazon, Bezos first upended traditional bookstores, then all of retail as he turned the company into a behemoth \u201ceverything store.\u201d And Amazon Web Services changed the way companies store their data.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, in the second act of their illustrious careers, Musk and Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in July but remains its executive chairman, are bound together over a series of ventures that could define their legacies.For now, Musk is well ahead in virtually every area.SpaceX has dispatched three teams of astronauts to the International Space Station and on Tuesday is scheduled to launch a crew of civilian astronauts on a three-day trip orbiting Earth. Blue Origin has launched a single suborbital mission to space that lasted just over 10 minutes.SpaceX already has launched nearly 2,000 Starlink satellites to orbit, bringing the company close to pulling off Musk\u2019s riskiest and most daring venture: providing Internet service from space. Recently, Musk wrote on Twitter that his company has shipped 100,000 ground terminals for the system and is serving 14 countries. Last year, the FCC announced it was awarding SpaceX $886 million to help serve hundreds of thousands of customers in the United States, part of a $9.2 billion effort to increase broadband access.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon has its own plan to flood Earth orbit with satellites that would beam the Internet to the ground. But it has yet to launch a single satellite.The modification SpaceX want to make to its FCC license and that Amazon is now challenging would add some 30,000 satellites in two configurations. One would be launched on its next-generation Starship rocket; the other would be flown on its workhorse Falcon 9.Amazon argues that under the FCC regulations, SpaceX must present a single design for its system. It argues that the two configurations \u201carranges these satellites along very different orbital parameters. SpaceX\u2019s novel approach of applying for two mutually exclusive configurations is at odds with both the Commission\u2019s rules and public policy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSpaceX called that a \u201cdelay tactic\u201d and said it was \u201ca continuation of efforts by the Amazon family of companies to hinder competitors to compensate for Amazon\u2019s failure to make progress of its own.\u201dAdvertisementOn Twitter, Musk took that a step further, misspelling Bezos\u2019s name and writing that it \u201cturns out Besos retired to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX.\u201dAmazon\u2019s scathing response Wednesday took aim at SpaceX and Musk himself, pointing to a list of transgressions that Amazon argued showed a pattern of behavior that should make regulators leery.It noted that SpaceX launched a Starship prototype without approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and that it kept its Tesla assembly plant open during the coronavirus pandemic in defiance of local health officials.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn SpaceX\u2019s playbook, there is no need to grapple with rules \u2014 those apply only to others,\u201d the Amazon filing concluded.SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment on Amazon\u2019s filing, though it did send a letter to the FCC.AdvertisementIn addition to the fight over the satellite constellations, Bezos, through Blue Origin, is also waging war over the contract NASA awarded to SpaceX to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon. Blue Origin appealed NASA\u2019s decision to the Government Accountability Office, which rejected Blue Origin\u2019s arguments and ruled in NASA\u2019s favor.Then, Blue Origin filed suit in the Court of Federal Claims, arguing that NASA erred in its award. It also has sent papers taunting SpaceX to Capitol Hill staffers, saying, \u201cWhat is Elon Musk afraid of \u2026 a little competition?\u201dThe company is arguing that NASA allowed SpaceX to waive many of its flight readiness reviews \u2014 meetings designed to ensure mission success. That means SpaceX\u2019s proposal was not in compliance with NASA\u2019s solicitation, Megan Mitchell, Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of government relations, said in an interview. She added that it also raised \u201ca pretty big safety issue,\u201d especially because SpaceX would need multiple launches to refuel its rocket in orbit to reach the moon.\u201cThe idea that you would take an entirely new architecture with all new technologies like on orbit refueling and fuel depots and say, no, we\u2019re going to eliminate it \u2026 that is essentially a waiver of the material requirement that NASA put in the solicitation originally,\u201d she said.Tying up the procurement in litigation has had consequences. NASA was prohibited from working on the contract while the GAO reviewed the case, and the space agency has agreed that it will also discontinue work until Nov. 1 while the federal court case continues. That could further delay NASA\u2019s signature human spaceflight program that recently had a kind of momentum not seen in years.The suits have also angered SpaceX, which in a memo to Capitol Hill staffers pointed out that Blue Origin \u201chas not produced a single rocket or spacecraft capable of reaching orbit.\u201d Musk crudely amplified the point on Twitter, writing the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201dHe also tweeted an photo of a deflated mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s lunar lander that he captioned, \u201csomehow this wasn\u2019t convincing.\u201dIn a statement to The Post in April, Musk pointed out that Blue Origin\u2019s bid was $6 billion, more than twice what SpaceX had bid.\u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dThe fight signifies how companies have taken the place of nations in the battle for space primacy. SpaceX, Amazon and Blue Origin are reprising the roles of the United States and the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Space Age. That rivalry drove NASA to put astronauts on the moon. This one could, too, once it gets out of court.But it also shows how space has become just like any other business, and the fight to orbit is like any other coldblooded capitalist slugfest, whether it be Coke and Pepsi, Avis and Hertz, or Microsoft and Apple.\u201cIt reflects the movement of the space sector from something special to, well, like everything else,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. \u201cWhere people compete, companies compete. It\u2019s like the KFC ad where Colonel Sanders says McDonald\u2019s making a chicken sandwich is none of their business.\u201d What began as a fight over a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon has become especially bare-knuckled and personal. Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6355",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/10/musk-bezos-space-rivalry/",
        "text": "For years, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have sparred over the performance of their rockets and space companies in a simmering feud that flared during a fight over who could use a NASA launchpad and which company was the first to successfully land a rocket.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now the two billionaires, among the world\u2019s richest men, are waging an increasingly bitter battle that pits two enormous business empires in clashes that are playing out in the courts, the Federal Communications Commission and the halls of Congress in what\u2019s become one of the greatest business rivalries in a generation. What began as a fight between Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company over a major NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon now also encompasses a race to build an Internet satellite service in space.Story continues below advertisementThat fight has become especially bare-knuckled and personal. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementFor the past couple of years, SpaceX has been launching a constellation of satellites that could reach well into the thousands, intended to beam Internet signals to Earth. Amazon has a similar plan with a program it calls Kuiper, which has yet to launch a satellite.On Aug. 25, Amazon challenged a SpaceX application to the FCC to modify its plan, saying the modification would violate the FCC\u2019s rules. Six days later, SpaceX responded. It didn\u2019t mince words.Openly dismissive of Amazon\u2019s technical ability, SpaceX accused the company of trying to delay SpaceX\u2019s efforts to make up for its own failures. Amazon\u2019s track record, SpaceX said, \u201camply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Wednesday, Amazon fired back, accusing Musk of openly defying lawful regulations time and again. \u201cThe conduct of SpaceX and other Musk-led companies makes their view plain: rules are for other people, and those who insist upon or even simply request compliance are deserving of derision and ad hominem attacks,\u201d Amazon said in its filing with the agency.On Thursday, SpaceX filed anew. \u201cAnother week, another objection from Amazon against a competitor, yet still no sign of progress on Amazon\u2019s own long-rumored satellite system,\u201d its letter to the FCC began.The first ever launch into Earth's orbit with only civilians aboard is expected to take off on Sept. 15, led by e-commerce chief executive Jared Isaacman. (Reuters)For decades, American enterprise has been built on fierce competition between titans of industry, from the days of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller more than a century ago. Now Musk and Bezos are writing a new chapter focused on space \u2014 a sector romanticized by popular culture and nostalgia for the 1960s Apollo era but that has emerged in recent years as one of the most exciting industries with the potential for enormous growth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth Bezos and Musk portray their space ambitions as a way to help humanity \u2014 by creating a city on Mars, as Musk would like, or building colonies in Earth\u2019s orbit, as Bezos envisions. But space is also a huge business opportunity, said Margaret O\u2019Mara, a professor at the University of Washington and author of \u201cThe Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America,\u201d a history of the technology era.\u201cThey\u2019re not public servants, they\u2019re businesspeople,\u201d she said. \u201cSpace is a passion for both of these billionaires, but it also is a growing industry and there is a lot of money to be made in it.\u201dThe companies are well aware that their rivalry is playing out in real time, over social media, in an era when Silicon Valley executives are often watched as closely as Hollywood actors. They are competing against a backdrop that has given rise to the \u201ccelebrity-driven business leader,\u201d O\u2019Mara said, and Musk in particular has been adept at \u201ccreating a very loyal fan base\u201d with a Twitter following of nearly 60 million and an appearance this year on \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201dHosting Saturday Night Live on May 8, Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk poked fun at himself in an episode airing on the eve of Mother's Day. (Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)\u201cIt\u2019s a reflection of the moment we\u2019re in with this incredible power that rests with this handful of extraordinarily rich people,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor all their differences, Musk and Bezos have charted similar paths in building their empires. Both possess a preternatural ability to upend entire industries with innovative new products, an ability to see deep into the future and the fortitude to stay true to their beliefs, defying doubters and shrugging off short-term losses for long-term gains.At PayPal, Musk helped disrupt the credit card industry and transform how American consumers pay for goods and services. At Tesla, he has taken on the entire automobile industry and revolutionized the electric car market. SpaceX fought the military-industrial complex that for decades had dominated space and has become NASA\u2019s preferred launch partner.With Amazon, Bezos first upended traditional bookstores, then all of retail as he turned the company into a behemoth \u201ceverything store.\u201d And Amazon Web Services changed the way companies store their data.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, in the second act of their illustrious careers, Musk and Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in July but remains its executive chairman, are bound together over a series of ventures that could define their legacies.For now, Musk is well ahead in virtually every area.SpaceX has dispatched three teams of astronauts to the International Space Station and on Tuesday is scheduled to launch a crew of civilian astronauts on a three-day trip orbiting Earth. Blue Origin has launched a single suborbital mission to space that lasted just over 10 minutes.SpaceX already has launched nearly 2,000 Starlink satellites to orbit, bringing the company close to pulling off Musk\u2019s riskiest and most daring venture: providing Internet service from space. Recently, Musk wrote on Twitter that his company has shipped 100,000 ground terminals for the system and is serving 14 countries. Last year, the FCC announced it was awarding SpaceX $886 million to help serve hundreds of thousands of customers in the United States, part of a $9.2 billion effort to increase broadband access.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon has its own plan to flood Earth orbit with satellites that would beam the Internet to the ground. But it has yet to launch a single satellite.The modification SpaceX want to make to its FCC license and that Amazon is now challenging would add some 30,000 satellites in two configurations. One would be launched on its next-generation Starship rocket; the other would be flown on its workhorse Falcon 9.Amazon argues that under the FCC regulations, SpaceX must present a single design for its system. It argues that the two configurations \u201carranges these satellites along very different orbital parameters. SpaceX\u2019s novel approach of applying for two mutually exclusive configurations is at odds with both the Commission\u2019s rules and public policy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSpaceX called that a \u201cdelay tactic\u201d and said it was \u201ca continuation of efforts by the Amazon family of companies to hinder competitors to compensate for Amazon\u2019s failure to make progress of its own.\u201dAdvertisementOn Twitter, Musk took that a step further, misspelling Bezos\u2019s name and writing that it \u201cturns out Besos retired to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX.\u201dAmazon\u2019s scathing response Wednesday took aim at SpaceX and Musk himself, pointing to a list of transgressions that Amazon argued showed a pattern of behavior that should make regulators leery.It noted that SpaceX launched a Starship prototype without approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and that it kept its Tesla assembly plant open during the coronavirus pandemic in defiance of local health officials.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn SpaceX\u2019s playbook, there is no need to grapple with rules \u2014 those apply only to others,\u201d the Amazon filing concluded.SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment on Amazon\u2019s filing, though it did send a letter to the FCC.AdvertisementIn addition to the fight over the satellite constellations, Bezos, through Blue Origin, is also waging war over the contract NASA awarded to SpaceX to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon. Blue Origin appealed NASA\u2019s decision to the Government Accountability Office, which rejected Blue Origin\u2019s arguments and ruled in NASA\u2019s favor.Then, Blue Origin filed suit in the Court of Federal Claims, arguing that NASA erred in its award. It also has sent papers taunting SpaceX to Capitol Hill staffers, saying, \u201cWhat is Elon Musk afraid of \u2026 a little competition?\u201dThe company is arguing that NASA allowed SpaceX to waive many of its flight readiness reviews \u2014 meetings designed to ensure mission success. That means SpaceX\u2019s proposal was not in compliance with NASA\u2019s solicitation, Megan Mitchell, Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of government relations, said in an interview. She added that it also raised \u201ca pretty big safety issue,\u201d especially because SpaceX would need multiple launches to refuel its rocket in orbit to reach the moon.\u201cThe idea that you would take an entirely new architecture with all new technologies like on orbit refueling and fuel depots and say, no, we\u2019re going to eliminate it \u2026 that is essentially a waiver of the material requirement that NASA put in the solicitation originally,\u201d she said.Tying up the procurement in litigation has had consequences. NASA was prohibited from working on the contract while the GAO reviewed the case, and the space agency has agreed that it will also discontinue work until Nov. 1 while the federal court case continues. That could further delay NASA\u2019s signature human spaceflight program that recently had a kind of momentum not seen in years.The suits have also angered SpaceX, which in a memo to Capitol Hill staffers pointed out that Blue Origin \u201chas not produced a single rocket or spacecraft capable of reaching orbit.\u201d Musk crudely amplified the point on Twitter, writing the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201dHe also tweeted an photo of a deflated mock-up of Blue Origin\u2019s lunar lander that he captioned, \u201csomehow this wasn\u2019t convincing.\u201dIn a statement to The Post in April, Musk pointed out that Blue Origin\u2019s bid was $6 billion, more than twice what SpaceX had bid.\u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dThe fight signifies how companies have taken the place of nations in the battle for space primacy. SpaceX, Amazon and Blue Origin are reprising the roles of the United States and the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Space Age. That rivalry drove NASA to put astronauts on the moon. This one could, too, once it gets out of court.But it also shows how space has become just like any other business, and the fight to orbit is like any other coldblooded capitalist slugfest, whether it be Coke and Pepsi, Avis and Hertz, or Microsoft and Apple.\u201cIt reflects the movement of the space sector from something special to, well, like everything else,\u201d said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute. \u201cWhere people compete, companies compete. It\u2019s like the KFC ad where Colonel Sanders says McDonald\u2019s making a chicken sandwich is none of their business.\u201d What began as a fight over a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon has become especially bare-knuckled and personal. Elon Musk is dominating the space race. Jeff Bezos is trying to fight back.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6356",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/12/cantwell-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-nasa/",
        "text": "For the past couple of years, top NASA officials have lobbied Congress to give the space agency enough money so that it could land the next astronauts on the moon by 2024. To meet that goal, NASA requested $3.3 billion for this year to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying the first humans to the lunar surface since the Apollo era. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, despite an intense lobbying campaign led by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, Congress appropriated $850 million \u2014 a sizable amount but only a fraction of what NASA said it needed.Now, it seems Jeff Bezos may be having more luck pulling money out of Congress for NASA\u2019s moon mission than the space agency itself has had.Story continues below advertisementWith the limited funding, NASA said it could afford to pay for only a single company to build its lunar lander and last month it awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX the contract. As a result, Bezos\u2019s space venture, Blue Origin, lost out after bidding $6 billion, or twice what SpaceX had said it would charge. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAlong with Dynetics, the defense contractor that also lost out on the contract, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency \u201cexecuted a flawed acquisition.\u201d It also took to Capitol Hill, lobbying its allies in Congress to force NASA to come up with the additional money and make a second award.On Wednesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington state, where Blue Origin is headquartered, came through, introducing legislation that calls for NASA to do just that. The legislation, which passed as an amendment to another bill, would authorize but not appropriate an additional $10 billion to the Artemis program through fiscal 2026. It also calls for NASA to pick a second winner for the contract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the Senate Commerce Committee recognized the importance of competition in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System program,\" Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cContinued competition will safeguard America\u2019s space industrial base and get America back to the Moon as quickly as possible.\u201dAdvertisementAlmost as soon as the contract was awarded to SpaceX, Cantwell, the chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said she was concerned about having only a single provider for the program. During Bill Nelson\u2019s confirmation hearing to become NASA administrator last month, she pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d She added, \u201cI have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract.\u201dHer legislation would still need to pass the full Senate and the House, and the money would still need to be approved by appropriators. But it represents an important first step and shows Bezos\u2019s influence in Washington.Story continues below advertisementReturning to the moon is a lifelong dream of his. Bezos has called watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him. Blue Origin first pitched NASA on a lunar lander in 2017, long before NASA opened an official competition for the program. Losing out on the contract was a huge blow for Bezos and Blue Origin, which vowed to fight back.AdvertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dFor its bid, Blue Origin had formed what it called the \u201cnational team,\u201d partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. Teaming up with such aerospace heavyweights gives Blue Origin political heft and lobbying strength. The team is a \u201cmix of new and established aerospace companies spread out all across the country,\u201d said Casey Dreier, senior space adviser at the Planetary Society, which lobbies on behalf of human space exploration. \u201cI don\u2019t think we should discount the fact that Lockheed Martin is on the team, as well.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA declined to comment, and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Earlier, Musk pointed out on Twitter that Blue Origin had yet to launch a rocket to orbit and said that the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201d Later in a statement to The Washington Post he said, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon this year, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dAdvertisementHaving two winners had been NASA\u2019s intent from the start. NASA had chosen all three companies, Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX, for the initial phase of the contract and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In the initial round, Blue Origin won the biggest award: $579 million. Dynetics, which had partnered with Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million. SpaceX won the smallest amount, just $135 million.In other major human spaceflight programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and ensure it has redundancy in case one company falters. NASA chose two companies for its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, SpaceX and Boeing, to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. Many initially thought Boeing would fly first. But it ran into technical problems with its Starliner spacecraft and still hasn\u2019t flown crew. SpaceX, by contrast, flew its first mission with astronauts last year and has flown two more since.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said that SpaceX\u2019s contract is only for the first mission with astronauts to the moon and that it would set up a competition for additional flights there. That is something Nelson, who was sworn in as NASA administrator last week, has said he would make a top priority.Advertisement\u201cWhat I have to do is to try to get the Congress to come up with the funds so that you can have a vigorous competition for all the other flights,\u201d he said in an interview Monday. Alan Chvotkin, a partner at Nichols Liu, a law firm that deals with government contracting, said NASA could easily add another winner to the program, noting the procurement was set up from the beginning to have more than one award.\u201cThis would not be the first time Congress has engaged in trying to structure a procurement without picking a winner,\u201d he said. \u201cAwarding to one doesn\u2019t foreclose awarding to a second.\u201dThe protest before the GAO, however, could upend the acquisition if it rules that NASA made a significant error during the procurement. But protests do not have a high success rate. Sen. Maria Cantwell proposed spending an additional $10 billion on NASA's moon program in a move that calls on the space agency to select a second company to build a lunar lander. Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6357",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/12/cantwell-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-nasa/",
        "text": "For the past couple of years, top NASA officials have lobbied Congress to give the space agency enough money so that it could land the next astronauts on the moon by 2024. To meet that goal, NASA requested $3.3 billion for this year to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying the first humans to the lunar surface since the Apollo era. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, despite an intense lobbying campaign led by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, Congress appropriated $850 million \u2014 a sizable amount but only a fraction of what NASA said it needed.Now, it seems Jeff Bezos may be having more luck pulling money out of Congress for NASA\u2019s moon mission than the space agency itself has had.Story continues below advertisementWith the limited funding, NASA said it could afford to pay for only a single company to build its lunar lander and last month it awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX the contract. As a result, Bezos\u2019s space venture, Blue Origin, lost out after bidding $6 billion, or twice what SpaceX had said it would charge. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAlong with Dynetics, the defense contractor that also lost out on the contract, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency \u201cexecuted a flawed acquisition.\u201d It also took to Capitol Hill, lobbying its allies in Congress to force NASA to come up with the additional money and make a second award.On Wednesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington state, where Blue Origin is headquartered, came through, introducing legislation that calls for NASA to do just that. The legislation, which passed as an amendment to another bill, would authorize but not appropriate an additional $10 billion to the Artemis program through fiscal 2026. It also calls for NASA to pick a second winner for the contract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the Senate Commerce Committee recognized the importance of competition in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System program,\" Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cContinued competition will safeguard America\u2019s space industrial base and get America back to the Moon as quickly as possible.\u201dAdvertisementAlmost as soon as the contract was awarded to SpaceX, Cantwell, the chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said she was concerned about having only a single provider for the program. During Bill Nelson\u2019s confirmation hearing to become NASA administrator last month, she pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d She added, \u201cI have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract.\u201dHer legislation would still need to pass the full Senate and the House, and the money would still need to be approved by appropriators. But it represents an important first step and shows Bezos\u2019s influence in Washington.Story continues below advertisementReturning to the moon is a lifelong dream of his. Bezos has called watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him. Blue Origin first pitched NASA on a lunar lander in 2017, long before NASA opened an official competition for the program. Losing out on the contract was a huge blow for Bezos and Blue Origin, which vowed to fight back.AdvertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dFor its bid, Blue Origin had formed what it called the \u201cnational team,\u201d partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. Teaming up with such aerospace heavyweights gives Blue Origin political heft and lobbying strength. The team is a \u201cmix of new and established aerospace companies spread out all across the country,\u201d said Casey Dreier, senior space adviser at the Planetary Society, which lobbies on behalf of human space exploration. \u201cI don\u2019t think we should discount the fact that Lockheed Martin is on the team, as well.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA declined to comment, and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Earlier, Musk pointed out on Twitter that Blue Origin had yet to launch a rocket to orbit and said that the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201d Later in a statement to The Washington Post he said, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon this year, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dAdvertisementHaving two winners had been NASA\u2019s intent from the start. NASA had chosen all three companies, Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX, for the initial phase of the contract and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In the initial round, Blue Origin won the biggest award: $579 million. Dynetics, which had partnered with Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million. SpaceX won the smallest amount, just $135 million.In other major human spaceflight programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and ensure it has redundancy in case one company falters. NASA chose two companies for its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, SpaceX and Boeing, to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. Many initially thought Boeing would fly first. But it ran into technical problems with its Starliner spacecraft and still hasn\u2019t flown crew. SpaceX, by contrast, flew its first mission with astronauts last year and has flown two more since.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said that SpaceX\u2019s contract is only for the first mission with astronauts to the moon and that it would set up a competition for additional flights there. That is something Nelson, who was sworn in as NASA administrator last week, has said he would make a top priority.Advertisement\u201cWhat I have to do is to try to get the Congress to come up with the funds so that you can have a vigorous competition for all the other flights,\u201d he said in an interview Monday. Alan Chvotkin, a partner at Nichols Liu, a law firm that deals with government contracting, said NASA could easily add another winner to the program, noting the procurement was set up from the beginning to have more than one award.\u201cThis would not be the first time Congress has engaged in trying to structure a procurement without picking a winner,\u201d he said. \u201cAwarding to one doesn\u2019t foreclose awarding to a second.\u201dThe protest before the GAO, however, could upend the acquisition if it rules that NASA made a significant error during the procurement. But protests do not have a high success rate. Sen. Maria Cantwell proposed spending an additional $10 billion on NASA's moon program in a move that calls on the space agency to select a second company to build a lunar lander. Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6358",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/12/cantwell-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-nasa/",
        "text": "For the past couple of years, top NASA officials have lobbied Congress to give the space agency enough money so that it could land the next astronauts on the moon by 2024. To meet that goal, NASA requested $3.3 billion for this year to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying the first humans to the lunar surface since the Apollo era. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, despite an intense lobbying campaign led by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, Congress appropriated $850 million \u2014 a sizable amount but only a fraction of what NASA said it needed.Now, it seems Jeff Bezos may be having more luck pulling money out of Congress for NASA\u2019s moon mission than the space agency itself has had.Story continues below advertisementWith the limited funding, NASA said it could afford to pay for only a single company to build its lunar lander and last month it awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX the contract. As a result, Bezos\u2019s space venture, Blue Origin, lost out after bidding $6 billion, or twice what SpaceX had said it would charge. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAlong with Dynetics, the defense contractor that also lost out on the contract, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency \u201cexecuted a flawed acquisition.\u201d It also took to Capitol Hill, lobbying its allies in Congress to force NASA to come up with the additional money and make a second award.On Wednesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington state, where Blue Origin is headquartered, came through, introducing legislation that calls for NASA to do just that. The legislation, which passed as an amendment to another bill, would authorize but not appropriate an additional $10 billion to the Artemis program through fiscal 2026. It also calls for NASA to pick a second winner for the contract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the Senate Commerce Committee recognized the importance of competition in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System program,\" Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cContinued competition will safeguard America\u2019s space industrial base and get America back to the Moon as quickly as possible.\u201dAdvertisementAlmost as soon as the contract was awarded to SpaceX, Cantwell, the chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said she was concerned about having only a single provider for the program. During Bill Nelson\u2019s confirmation hearing to become NASA administrator last month, she pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d She added, \u201cI have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract.\u201dHer legislation would still need to pass the full Senate and the House, and the money would still need to be approved by appropriators. But it represents an important first step and shows Bezos\u2019s influence in Washington.Story continues below advertisementReturning to the moon is a lifelong dream of his. Bezos has called watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him. Blue Origin first pitched NASA on a lunar lander in 2017, long before NASA opened an official competition for the program. Losing out on the contract was a huge blow for Bezos and Blue Origin, which vowed to fight back.AdvertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dFor its bid, Blue Origin had formed what it called the \u201cnational team,\u201d partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. Teaming up with such aerospace heavyweights gives Blue Origin political heft and lobbying strength. The team is a \u201cmix of new and established aerospace companies spread out all across the country,\u201d said Casey Dreier, senior space adviser at the Planetary Society, which lobbies on behalf of human space exploration. \u201cI don\u2019t think we should discount the fact that Lockheed Martin is on the team, as well.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA declined to comment, and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Earlier, Musk pointed out on Twitter that Blue Origin had yet to launch a rocket to orbit and said that the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201d Later in a statement to The Washington Post he said, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon this year, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dAdvertisementHaving two winners had been NASA\u2019s intent from the start. NASA had chosen all three companies, Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX, for the initial phase of the contract and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In the initial round, Blue Origin won the biggest award: $579 million. Dynetics, which had partnered with Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million. SpaceX won the smallest amount, just $135 million.In other major human spaceflight programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and ensure it has redundancy in case one company falters. NASA chose two companies for its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, SpaceX and Boeing, to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. Many initially thought Boeing would fly first. But it ran into technical problems with its Starliner spacecraft and still hasn\u2019t flown crew. SpaceX, by contrast, flew its first mission with astronauts last year and has flown two more since.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said that SpaceX\u2019s contract is only for the first mission with astronauts to the moon and that it would set up a competition for additional flights there. That is something Nelson, who was sworn in as NASA administrator last week, has said he would make a top priority.Advertisement\u201cWhat I have to do is to try to get the Congress to come up with the funds so that you can have a vigorous competition for all the other flights,\u201d he said in an interview Monday. Alan Chvotkin, a partner at Nichols Liu, a law firm that deals with government contracting, said NASA could easily add another winner to the program, noting the procurement was set up from the beginning to have more than one award.\u201cThis would not be the first time Congress has engaged in trying to structure a procurement without picking a winner,\u201d he said. \u201cAwarding to one doesn\u2019t foreclose awarding to a second.\u201dThe protest before the GAO, however, could upend the acquisition if it rules that NASA made a significant error during the procurement. But protests do not have a high success rate. Sen. Maria Cantwell proposed spending an additional $10 billion on NASA's moon program in a move that calls on the space agency to select a second company to build a lunar lander. Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6359",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/12/cantwell-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-nasa/",
        "text": "For the past couple of years, top NASA officials have lobbied Congress to give the space agency enough money so that it could land the next astronauts on the moon by 2024. To meet that goal, NASA requested $3.3 billion for this year to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying the first humans to the lunar surface since the Apollo era. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, despite an intense lobbying campaign led by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, Congress appropriated $850 million \u2014 a sizable amount but only a fraction of what NASA said it needed.Now, it seems Jeff Bezos may be having more luck pulling money out of Congress for NASA\u2019s moon mission than the space agency itself has had.Story continues below advertisementWith the limited funding, NASA said it could afford to pay for only a single company to build its lunar lander and last month it awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX the contract. As a result, Bezos\u2019s space venture, Blue Origin, lost out after bidding $6 billion, or twice what SpaceX had said it would charge. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAlong with Dynetics, the defense contractor that also lost out on the contract, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency \u201cexecuted a flawed acquisition.\u201d It also took to Capitol Hill, lobbying its allies in Congress to force NASA to come up with the additional money and make a second award.On Wednesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington state, where Blue Origin is headquartered, came through, introducing legislation that calls for NASA to do just that. The legislation, which passed as an amendment to another bill, would authorize but not appropriate an additional $10 billion to the Artemis program through fiscal 2026. It also calls for NASA to pick a second winner for the contract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the Senate Commerce Committee recognized the importance of competition in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System program,\" Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cContinued competition will safeguard America\u2019s space industrial base and get America back to the Moon as quickly as possible.\u201dAdvertisementAlmost as soon as the contract was awarded to SpaceX, Cantwell, the chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said she was concerned about having only a single provider for the program. During Bill Nelson\u2019s confirmation hearing to become NASA administrator last month, she pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d She added, \u201cI have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract.\u201dHer legislation would still need to pass the full Senate and the House, and the money would still need to be approved by appropriators. But it represents an important first step and shows Bezos\u2019s influence in Washington.Story continues below advertisementReturning to the moon is a lifelong dream of his. Bezos has called watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him. Blue Origin first pitched NASA on a lunar lander in 2017, long before NASA opened an official competition for the program. Losing out on the contract was a huge blow for Bezos and Blue Origin, which vowed to fight back.AdvertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dFor its bid, Blue Origin had formed what it called the \u201cnational team,\u201d partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. Teaming up with such aerospace heavyweights gives Blue Origin political heft and lobbying strength. The team is a \u201cmix of new and established aerospace companies spread out all across the country,\u201d said Casey Dreier, senior space adviser at the Planetary Society, which lobbies on behalf of human space exploration. \u201cI don\u2019t think we should discount the fact that Lockheed Martin is on the team, as well.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA declined to comment, and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Earlier, Musk pointed out on Twitter that Blue Origin had yet to launch a rocket to orbit and said that the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201d Later in a statement to The Washington Post he said, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon this year, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dAdvertisementHaving two winners had been NASA\u2019s intent from the start. NASA had chosen all three companies, Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX, for the initial phase of the contract and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In the initial round, Blue Origin won the biggest award: $579 million. Dynetics, which had partnered with Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million. SpaceX won the smallest amount, just $135 million.In other major human spaceflight programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and ensure it has redundancy in case one company falters. NASA chose two companies for its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, SpaceX and Boeing, to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. Many initially thought Boeing would fly first. But it ran into technical problems with its Starliner spacecraft and still hasn\u2019t flown crew. SpaceX, by contrast, flew its first mission with astronauts last year and has flown two more since.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said that SpaceX\u2019s contract is only for the first mission with astronauts to the moon and that it would set up a competition for additional flights there. That is something Nelson, who was sworn in as NASA administrator last week, has said he would make a top priority.Advertisement\u201cWhat I have to do is to try to get the Congress to come up with the funds so that you can have a vigorous competition for all the other flights,\u201d he said in an interview Monday. Alan Chvotkin, a partner at Nichols Liu, a law firm that deals with government contracting, said NASA could easily add another winner to the program, noting the procurement was set up from the beginning to have more than one award.\u201cThis would not be the first time Congress has engaged in trying to structure a procurement without picking a winner,\u201d he said. \u201cAwarding to one doesn\u2019t foreclose awarding to a second.\u201dThe protest before the GAO, however, could upend the acquisition if it rules that NASA made a significant error during the procurement. But protests do not have a high success rate. Sen. Maria Cantwell proposed spending an additional $10 billion on NASA's moon program in a move that calls on the space agency to select a second company to build a lunar lander. Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6360",
        "date": "2021-05-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/12/cantwell-blue-origin-jeff-bezos-nasa/",
        "text": "For the past couple of years, top NASA officials have lobbied Congress to give the space agency enough money so that it could land the next astronauts on the moon by 2024. To meet that goal, NASA requested $3.3 billion for this year to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying the first humans to the lunar surface since the Apollo era. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInstead, despite an intense lobbying campaign led by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, Congress appropriated $850 million \u2014 a sizable amount but only a fraction of what NASA said it needed.Now, it seems Jeff Bezos may be having more luck pulling money out of Congress for NASA\u2019s moon mission than the space agency itself has had.Story continues below advertisementWith the limited funding, NASA said it could afford to pay for only a single company to build its lunar lander and last month it awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX the contract. As a result, Bezos\u2019s space venture, Blue Origin, lost out after bidding $6 billion, or twice what SpaceX had said it would charge. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAlong with Dynetics, the defense contractor that also lost out on the contract, Blue Origin protested NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency \u201cexecuted a flawed acquisition.\u201d It also took to Capitol Hill, lobbying its allies in Congress to force NASA to come up with the additional money and make a second award.On Wednesday, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) of Washington state, where Blue Origin is headquartered, came through, introducing legislation that calls for NASA to do just that. The legislation, which passed as an amendment to another bill, would authorize but not appropriate an additional $10 billion to the Artemis program through fiscal 2026. It also calls for NASA to pick a second winner for the contract.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re pleased that the Senate Commerce Committee recognized the importance of competition in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System program,\" Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cContinued competition will safeguard America\u2019s space industrial base and get America back to the Moon as quickly as possible.\u201dAdvertisementAlmost as soon as the contract was awarded to SpaceX, Cantwell, the chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said she was concerned about having only a single provider for the program. During Bill Nelson\u2019s confirmation hearing to become NASA administrator last month, she pressed Nelson to \u201ccommit to rapidly providing Congress with a plan for assuring that kind of resiliency out of the human lander program.\u201d She added, \u201cI have to say I was surprised last week about the human landing system development contract.\u201dHer legislation would still need to pass the full Senate and the House, and the money would still need to be approved by appropriators. But it represents an important first step and shows Bezos\u2019s influence in Washington.Story continues below advertisementReturning to the moon is a lifelong dream of his. Bezos has called watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon \u201ca seminal moment\u201d for him. Blue Origin first pitched NASA on a lunar lander in 2017, long before NASA opened an official competition for the program. Losing out on the contract was a huge blow for Bezos and Blue Origin, which vowed to fight back.AdvertisementIn the protest, filed with the Government Accountability Office, the company said that NASA failed to allow the competitors \u201cto meaningfully compete for an award when the Agency\u2019s requirements changed due to its undisclosed, perceived shortfall of funding for the multi-year program lifecycle.\u201d It also alleged that NASA \u201cchanged the weight accorded to evaluation factors to make price (cost to the Government) the most important factor because of perceived funding limitations.\u201dFor its bid, Blue Origin had formed what it called the \u201cnational team,\u201d partnering with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. Teaming up with such aerospace heavyweights gives Blue Origin political heft and lobbying strength. The team is a \u201cmix of new and established aerospace companies spread out all across the country,\u201d said Casey Dreier, senior space adviser at the Planetary Society, which lobbies on behalf of human space exploration. \u201cI don\u2019t think we should discount the fact that Lockheed Martin is on the team, as well.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA declined to comment, and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Earlier, Musk pointed out on Twitter that Blue Origin had yet to launch a rocket to orbit and said that the company \u201ccan\u2019t get it up (to orbit).\u201d Later in a statement to The Washington Post he said, using Blue Origin\u2019s initials: \u201cThe BO bid was just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos, who is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon this year, should be more involved in Blue Origin. \u201cI think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dAdvertisementHaving two winners had been NASA\u2019s intent from the start. NASA had chosen all three companies, Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX, for the initial phase of the contract and was expected to choose two of them to build the lunar lander. In the initial round, Blue Origin won the biggest award: $579 million. Dynetics, which had partnered with Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million. SpaceX won the smallest amount, just $135 million.In other major human spaceflight programs, NASA has chosen multiple providers to foster competition and ensure it has redundancy in case one company falters. NASA chose two companies for its \u201ccommercial crew\u201d program, SpaceX and Boeing, to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. Many initially thought Boeing would fly first. But it ran into technical problems with its Starliner spacecraft and still hasn\u2019t flown crew. SpaceX, by contrast, flew its first mission with astronauts last year and has flown two more since.Story continues below advertisementNASA has said that SpaceX\u2019s contract is only for the first mission with astronauts to the moon and that it would set up a competition for additional flights there. That is something Nelson, who was sworn in as NASA administrator last week, has said he would make a top priority.Advertisement\u201cWhat I have to do is to try to get the Congress to come up with the funds so that you can have a vigorous competition for all the other flights,\u201d he said in an interview Monday. Alan Chvotkin, a partner at Nichols Liu, a law firm that deals with government contracting, said NASA could easily add another winner to the program, noting the procurement was set up from the beginning to have more than one award.\u201cThis would not be the first time Congress has engaged in trying to structure a procurement without picking a winner,\u201d he said. \u201cAwarding to one doesn\u2019t foreclose awarding to a second.\u201dThe protest before the GAO, however, could upend the acquisition if it rules that NASA made a significant error during the procurement. But protests do not have a high success rate. Sen. Maria Cantwell proposed spending an additional $10 billion on NASA's moon program in a move that calls on the space agency to select a second company to build a lunar lander. Blue Origin\u2019s loss to SpaceX on the lunar lander contract may get Congress to do something it hadn\u2019t done before: Give NASA extra money",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6361",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/13/jeff-bezos-secretive-space-venture-launches-rocket-edge-space-first-time-months/",
        "text": "For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company on Tuesday flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. The successful flight came after a more than two-week delay and was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space, bringing it another step closer to one day ferrying paying customers there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the suborbital launch won\u2019t quiet critics who say Blue Origin is plodding along with the short-legged lethargy of its bashful mascot, the tortoise, only rarely poking its head out of its shell.For all its accomplishments, the company Bezos founded 20 years ago still has not reached orbit. It hasn\u2019t flown a single human. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon launch contract. And its goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d seems as distant as ever. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s motto is \u201cgradatim ferociter,\u201d or, loosely, \u201cstep-by-step, ferociously.\u201d But even its competitors have lamented that it could use a little less \u201cgradatim\u201d and a little more \u201cferociter.\u201d\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dBezos would take issue with that. Space is his lifelong passion, from the moment he watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon as a 5-year-old. As a child, he devoured science fiction and named his dog Kamala after a Star Trek character. Then, as now, he rhapsodizes about a future in which humans live in massive habitats in orbit and mine asteroids.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the engines that powered the Saturn V rockets that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The crew included Bezos and several members of his family, including his parents, who endured rough seas but ultimately recovered several pieces that are on exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He\u2019s motivated to the tune of investing $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, which he said \u201cis the most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dThe evidence of that is on display at Cape Canaveral. Across from the Kennedy Center Visitors complex, Blue Origin is building a massive rocket manufacturing campus, several city blocks long. It is renovating a historic launchpad for the 300-foot-tall rocket it\u2019s building called New Glenn.And it is focused, perhaps most of all, on developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the moon\u2019s surface. Along with partners Lockheed Martin, Draper and Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin is building a lunar lander that it hopes NASA will use in its return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn August, Blue Origin delivered a full-scale mock-up of the spacecraft to NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center for testing and astronaut training. Last month, the lander cleared its first major development milestone, called a \u201csystems requirement review,\u201d a key step that allows the companies to move forward with the lander\u2019s design.The activity comes as Blue Origin is readying for human flight on New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It is an arduous process that has slowed development. The timeline also has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. During a broadcast of Tuesday\u2019s mission, Joel Eby, Blue Origin\u2019s creative director, said the company has been \u201cworking very hard to verify the system and have just a couple more flights before we start to put humans on board.\u201d Tuesday\u2019s flight, the first of New Shepard since December, had no passengers but did carry 12 payloads about 66 miles high, just past the edge of space, including a system, developed by NASA, designed to help spacecraft land precisely on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sensors, computers and a laser system known as lidar would \u201cwork together to determine a spacecraft\u2019s location and speed as it approaches the moon, enabling a vehicle to land autonomously on the lunar surface within 100 meters of a designated point,\u201d Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cThe technologies could allow future missions \u2014 both crewed and robotic \u2014 to target landing sites that weren\u2019t possible during the Apollo missions, such as regions with varied terrain near craters.\u201dBob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said during the broadcast that the sensors will give NASA a \u201cgreat understanding of how we do precision landing on the moon. This is something different than what we\u2019ve had in Apollo, where they didn\u2019t have those technologies. Now we can land very closely and position things, all in one area.\u201dFrom launch to touchdown, the flight lasted just over 10 minutes and would have given passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and views of the Earth from space. Blue Origin hopes to fly paying customers soon, although the timeline has been delayed repeatedly, and the company has not said how much it would charge for the experience. (Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which has flown humans to space twice in test flights, and hopes to start flying customers next year, has charged as much as $250,000.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is clear, though, that behind the scenes, Blue Origin is thinking well beyond suborbital space tourism. In addition to its work on the lunar lander, it is looking to build space stations in Earth orbit as well.The company recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d \u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it reads. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201dIn other words, it reads: \u201cYou will directly impact the history of human spaceflight.\u201d For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. It was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6362",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/13/jeff-bezos-secretive-space-venture-launches-rocket-edge-space-first-time-months/",
        "text": "For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company on Tuesday flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. The successful flight came after a more than two-week delay and was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space, bringing it another step closer to one day ferrying paying customers there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the suborbital launch won\u2019t quiet critics who say Blue Origin is plodding along with the short-legged lethargy of its bashful mascot, the tortoise, only rarely poking its head out of its shell.For all its accomplishments, the company Bezos founded 20 years ago still has not reached orbit. It hasn\u2019t flown a single human. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon launch contract. And its goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d seems as distant as ever. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s motto is \u201cgradatim ferociter,\u201d or, loosely, \u201cstep-by-step, ferociously.\u201d But even its competitors have lamented that it could use a little less \u201cgradatim\u201d and a little more \u201cferociter.\u201d\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dBezos would take issue with that. Space is his lifelong passion, from the moment he watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon as a 5-year-old. As a child, he devoured science fiction and named his dog Kamala after a Star Trek character. Then, as now, he rhapsodizes about a future in which humans live in massive habitats in orbit and mine asteroids.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the engines that powered the Saturn V rockets that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The crew included Bezos and several members of his family, including his parents, who endured rough seas but ultimately recovered several pieces that are on exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He\u2019s motivated to the tune of investing $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, which he said \u201cis the most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dThe evidence of that is on display at Cape Canaveral. Across from the Kennedy Center Visitors complex, Blue Origin is building a massive rocket manufacturing campus, several city blocks long. It is renovating a historic launchpad for the 300-foot-tall rocket it\u2019s building called New Glenn.And it is focused, perhaps most of all, on developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the moon\u2019s surface. Along with partners Lockheed Martin, Draper and Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin is building a lunar lander that it hopes NASA will use in its return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn August, Blue Origin delivered a full-scale mock-up of the spacecraft to NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center for testing and astronaut training. Last month, the lander cleared its first major development milestone, called a \u201csystems requirement review,\u201d a key step that allows the companies to move forward with the lander\u2019s design.The activity comes as Blue Origin is readying for human flight on New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It is an arduous process that has slowed development. The timeline also has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. During a broadcast of Tuesday\u2019s mission, Joel Eby, Blue Origin\u2019s creative director, said the company has been \u201cworking very hard to verify the system and have just a couple more flights before we start to put humans on board.\u201d Tuesday\u2019s flight, the first of New Shepard since December, had no passengers but did carry 12 payloads about 66 miles high, just past the edge of space, including a system, developed by NASA, designed to help spacecraft land precisely on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sensors, computers and a laser system known as lidar would \u201cwork together to determine a spacecraft\u2019s location and speed as it approaches the moon, enabling a vehicle to land autonomously on the lunar surface within 100 meters of a designated point,\u201d Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cThe technologies could allow future missions \u2014 both crewed and robotic \u2014 to target landing sites that weren\u2019t possible during the Apollo missions, such as regions with varied terrain near craters.\u201dBob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said during the broadcast that the sensors will give NASA a \u201cgreat understanding of how we do precision landing on the moon. This is something different than what we\u2019ve had in Apollo, where they didn\u2019t have those technologies. Now we can land very closely and position things, all in one area.\u201dFrom launch to touchdown, the flight lasted just over 10 minutes and would have given passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and views of the Earth from space. Blue Origin hopes to fly paying customers soon, although the timeline has been delayed repeatedly, and the company has not said how much it would charge for the experience. (Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which has flown humans to space twice in test flights, and hopes to start flying customers next year, has charged as much as $250,000.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is clear, though, that behind the scenes, Blue Origin is thinking well beyond suborbital space tourism. In addition to its work on the lunar lander, it is looking to build space stations in Earth orbit as well.The company recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d \u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it reads. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201dIn other words, it reads: \u201cYou will directly impact the history of human spaceflight.\u201d For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. It was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6363",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/13/jeff-bezos-secretive-space-venture-launches-rocket-edge-space-first-time-months/",
        "text": "For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company on Tuesday flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. The successful flight came after a more than two-week delay and was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space, bringing it another step closer to one day ferrying paying customers there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the suborbital launch won\u2019t quiet critics who say Blue Origin is plodding along with the short-legged lethargy of its bashful mascot, the tortoise, only rarely poking its head out of its shell.For all its accomplishments, the company Bezos founded 20 years ago still has not reached orbit. It hasn\u2019t flown a single human. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon launch contract. And its goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d seems as distant as ever. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s motto is \u201cgradatim ferociter,\u201d or, loosely, \u201cstep-by-step, ferociously.\u201d But even its competitors have lamented that it could use a little less \u201cgradatim\u201d and a little more \u201cferociter.\u201d\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dBezos would take issue with that. Space is his lifelong passion, from the moment he watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon as a 5-year-old. As a child, he devoured science fiction and named his dog Kamala after a Star Trek character. Then, as now, he rhapsodizes about a future in which humans live in massive habitats in orbit and mine asteroids.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the engines that powered the Saturn V rockets that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The crew included Bezos and several members of his family, including his parents, who endured rough seas but ultimately recovered several pieces that are on exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He\u2019s motivated to the tune of investing $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, which he said \u201cis the most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dThe evidence of that is on display at Cape Canaveral. Across from the Kennedy Center Visitors complex, Blue Origin is building a massive rocket manufacturing campus, several city blocks long. It is renovating a historic launchpad for the 300-foot-tall rocket it\u2019s building called New Glenn.And it is focused, perhaps most of all, on developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the moon\u2019s surface. Along with partners Lockheed Martin, Draper and Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin is building a lunar lander that it hopes NASA will use in its return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn August, Blue Origin delivered a full-scale mock-up of the spacecraft to NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center for testing and astronaut training. Last month, the lander cleared its first major development milestone, called a \u201csystems requirement review,\u201d a key step that allows the companies to move forward with the lander\u2019s design.The activity comes as Blue Origin is readying for human flight on New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It is an arduous process that has slowed development. The timeline also has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. During a broadcast of Tuesday\u2019s mission, Joel Eby, Blue Origin\u2019s creative director, said the company has been \u201cworking very hard to verify the system and have just a couple more flights before we start to put humans on board.\u201d Tuesday\u2019s flight, the first of New Shepard since December, had no passengers but did carry 12 payloads about 66 miles high, just past the edge of space, including a system, developed by NASA, designed to help spacecraft land precisely on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sensors, computers and a laser system known as lidar would \u201cwork together to determine a spacecraft\u2019s location and speed as it approaches the moon, enabling a vehicle to land autonomously on the lunar surface within 100 meters of a designated point,\u201d Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cThe technologies could allow future missions \u2014 both crewed and robotic \u2014 to target landing sites that weren\u2019t possible during the Apollo missions, such as regions with varied terrain near craters.\u201dBob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said during the broadcast that the sensors will give NASA a \u201cgreat understanding of how we do precision landing on the moon. This is something different than what we\u2019ve had in Apollo, where they didn\u2019t have those technologies. Now we can land very closely and position things, all in one area.\u201dFrom launch to touchdown, the flight lasted just over 10 minutes and would have given passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and views of the Earth from space. Blue Origin hopes to fly paying customers soon, although the timeline has been delayed repeatedly, and the company has not said how much it would charge for the experience. (Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which has flown humans to space twice in test flights, and hopes to start flying customers next year, has charged as much as $250,000.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is clear, though, that behind the scenes, Blue Origin is thinking well beyond suborbital space tourism. In addition to its work on the lunar lander, it is looking to build space stations in Earth orbit as well.The company recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d \u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it reads. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201dIn other words, it reads: \u201cYou will directly impact the history of human spaceflight.\u201d For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. It was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6364",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/13/jeff-bezos-secretive-space-venture-launches-rocket-edge-space-first-time-months/",
        "text": "For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company on Tuesday flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. The successful flight came after a more than two-week delay and was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space, bringing it another step closer to one day ferrying paying customers there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the suborbital launch won\u2019t quiet critics who say Blue Origin is plodding along with the short-legged lethargy of its bashful mascot, the tortoise, only rarely poking its head out of its shell.For all its accomplishments, the company Bezos founded 20 years ago still has not reached orbit. It hasn\u2019t flown a single human. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon launch contract. And its goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d seems as distant as ever. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s motto is \u201cgradatim ferociter,\u201d or, loosely, \u201cstep-by-step, ferociously.\u201d But even its competitors have lamented that it could use a little less \u201cgradatim\u201d and a little more \u201cferociter.\u201d\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dBezos would take issue with that. Space is his lifelong passion, from the moment he watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon as a 5-year-old. As a child, he devoured science fiction and named his dog Kamala after a Star Trek character. Then, as now, he rhapsodizes about a future in which humans live in massive habitats in orbit and mine asteroids.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the engines that powered the Saturn V rockets that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The crew included Bezos and several members of his family, including his parents, who endured rough seas but ultimately recovered several pieces that are on exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He\u2019s motivated to the tune of investing $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, which he said \u201cis the most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dThe evidence of that is on display at Cape Canaveral. Across from the Kennedy Center Visitors complex, Blue Origin is building a massive rocket manufacturing campus, several city blocks long. It is renovating a historic launchpad for the 300-foot-tall rocket it\u2019s building called New Glenn.And it is focused, perhaps most of all, on developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the moon\u2019s surface. Along with partners Lockheed Martin, Draper and Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin is building a lunar lander that it hopes NASA will use in its return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn August, Blue Origin delivered a full-scale mock-up of the spacecraft to NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center for testing and astronaut training. Last month, the lander cleared its first major development milestone, called a \u201csystems requirement review,\u201d a key step that allows the companies to move forward with the lander\u2019s design.The activity comes as Blue Origin is readying for human flight on New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It is an arduous process that has slowed development. The timeline also has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. During a broadcast of Tuesday\u2019s mission, Joel Eby, Blue Origin\u2019s creative director, said the company has been \u201cworking very hard to verify the system and have just a couple more flights before we start to put humans on board.\u201d Tuesday\u2019s flight, the first of New Shepard since December, had no passengers but did carry 12 payloads about 66 miles high, just past the edge of space, including a system, developed by NASA, designed to help spacecraft land precisely on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sensors, computers and a laser system known as lidar would \u201cwork together to determine a spacecraft\u2019s location and speed as it approaches the moon, enabling a vehicle to land autonomously on the lunar surface within 100 meters of a designated point,\u201d Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cThe technologies could allow future missions \u2014 both crewed and robotic \u2014 to target landing sites that weren\u2019t possible during the Apollo missions, such as regions with varied terrain near craters.\u201dBob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said during the broadcast that the sensors will give NASA a \u201cgreat understanding of how we do precision landing on the moon. This is something different than what we\u2019ve had in Apollo, where they didn\u2019t have those technologies. Now we can land very closely and position things, all in one area.\u201dFrom launch to touchdown, the flight lasted just over 10 minutes and would have given passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and views of the Earth from space. Blue Origin hopes to fly paying customers soon, although the timeline has been delayed repeatedly, and the company has not said how much it would charge for the experience. (Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which has flown humans to space twice in test flights, and hopes to start flying customers next year, has charged as much as $250,000.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is clear, though, that behind the scenes, Blue Origin is thinking well beyond suborbital space tourism. In addition to its work on the lunar lander, it is looking to build space stations in Earth orbit as well.The company recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d \u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it reads. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201dIn other words, it reads: \u201cYou will directly impact the history of human spaceflight.\u201d For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. It was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6365",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/13/jeff-bezos-secretive-space-venture-launches-rocket-edge-space-first-time-months/",
        "text": "For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company on Tuesday flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. The successful flight came after a more than two-week delay and was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space, bringing it another step closer to one day ferrying paying customers there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the suborbital launch won\u2019t quiet critics who say Blue Origin is plodding along with the short-legged lethargy of its bashful mascot, the tortoise, only rarely poking its head out of its shell.For all its accomplishments, the company Bezos founded 20 years ago still has not reached orbit. It hasn\u2019t flown a single human. It recently lost out on a major Pentagon launch contract. And its goal of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space\u201d seems as distant as ever. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s motto is \u201cgradatim ferociter,\u201d or, loosely, \u201cstep-by-step, ferociously.\u201d But even its competitors have lamented that it could use a little less \u201cgradatim\u201d and a little more \u201cferociter.\u201d\u201cEngineers do better when they\u2019re pushed hardest to do great things in a very short period of time with very few resources. I think that\u2019s when you do great work. Not when you have 20 years,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference last year. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s the motivation or the drive there.\u201dBezos would take issue with that. Space is his lifelong passion, from the moment he watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon as a 5-year-old. As a child, he devoured science fiction and named his dog Kamala after a Star Trek character. Then, as now, he rhapsodizes about a future in which humans live in massive habitats in orbit and mine asteroids.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2013, he funded an expedition to recover the engines that powered the Saturn V rockets that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The crew included Bezos and several members of his family, including his parents, who endured rough seas but ultimately recovered several pieces that are on exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Flight.He\u2019s motivated to the tune of investing $1 billion a year in Blue Origin, which he said \u201cis the most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201dThe evidence of that is on display at Cape Canaveral. Across from the Kennedy Center Visitors complex, Blue Origin is building a massive rocket manufacturing campus, several city blocks long. It is renovating a historic launchpad for the 300-foot-tall rocket it\u2019s building called New Glenn.And it is focused, perhaps most of all, on developing a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the moon\u2019s surface. Along with partners Lockheed Martin, Draper and Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin is building a lunar lander that it hopes NASA will use in its return to the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn August, Blue Origin delivered a full-scale mock-up of the spacecraft to NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center for testing and astronaut training. Last month, the lander cleared its first major development milestone, called a \u201csystems requirement review,\u201d a key step that allows the companies to move forward with the lander\u2019s design.The activity comes as Blue Origin is readying for human flight on New Shepard, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It is an arduous process that has slowed development. The timeline also has been hampered by the coronavirus pandemic. During a broadcast of Tuesday\u2019s mission, Joel Eby, Blue Origin\u2019s creative director, said the company has been \u201cworking very hard to verify the system and have just a couple more flights before we start to put humans on board.\u201d Tuesday\u2019s flight, the first of New Shepard since December, had no passengers but did carry 12 payloads about 66 miles high, just past the edge of space, including a system, developed by NASA, designed to help spacecraft land precisely on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sensors, computers and a laser system known as lidar would \u201cwork together to determine a spacecraft\u2019s location and speed as it approaches the moon, enabling a vehicle to land autonomously on the lunar surface within 100 meters of a designated point,\u201d Blue Origin said in a statement. \u201cThe technologies could allow future missions \u2014 both crewed and robotic \u2014 to target landing sites that weren\u2019t possible during the Apollo missions, such as regions with varied terrain near craters.\u201dBob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s chief executive, said during the broadcast that the sensors will give NASA a \u201cgreat understanding of how we do precision landing on the moon. This is something different than what we\u2019ve had in Apollo, where they didn\u2019t have those technologies. Now we can land very closely and position things, all in one area.\u201dFrom launch to touchdown, the flight lasted just over 10 minutes and would have given passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and views of the Earth from space. Blue Origin hopes to fly paying customers soon, although the timeline has been delayed repeatedly, and the company has not said how much it would charge for the experience. (Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, which has flown humans to space twice in test flights, and hopes to start flying customers next year, has charged as much as $250,000.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is clear, though, that behind the scenes, Blue Origin is thinking well beyond suborbital space tourism. In addition to its work on the lunar lander, it is looking to build space stations in Earth orbit as well.The company recently posted a job opening for an \u201cOrbital Habitat Formulation Lead.\u201d \u201cTo develop Blue Origin\u2019s vision of millions of people living and working in space, humanity will require places for them to live and work: space destination systems in which value-creating economic activity can occur,\u201d it reads. The space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) would go beyond the International Space Station to support \u201ca robust LEO economy\u201d and be \u201cfundamentally different from the \u2018exploration\u2019 habitats designed for small, professional trained crews in deep space.\u201dIn other words, it reads: \u201cYou will directly impact the history of human spaceflight.\u201d For the first time in 10 months, Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space company flew a rocket to the edge of space from its remote launch site in West Texas. It was Blue Origin\u2019s 13th trip to space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s secretive space venture launches a rocket to the edge of space for the first time in months",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tensions with Russia are now spilling into space, complicating International Space Station partnership (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6366",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/21/us-russia-space-station-tension/",
        "text": "For more than 20 years, the International Space Station has served not just as an orbiting laboratory for science but as a vehicle for diplomacy, hosting astronauts from 19 different countries who work side-by-side in space when, in some cases, their leaders could not get along on the ground.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe size of a football field and hurtling through space at 17,500 mph, the station has been a symbol of collaboration through wars and turmoil, and is, to many in the space community, worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize to recognize it as \u201cthe largest international peacetime endeavor in human history,\u201d as Dylan Taylor, a longtime space entrepreneur, argued in a 2020 blog post. But the fragile coalition that has kept the space station going all these years is fraying, as tensions between Russia and the United States, the two main partners on the station, grow to levels not seen in years. And while the countries have kept their alliance on the station going despite geopolitical tensions, the fence that has kept the station and civil space endeavors walled off from other problems is beginning to erode.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of which are complicating efforts to extend the life of the station and keep the partnership going.The space station \u201cmight be a high-water mark for U.S.-Russia relations,\u201d said Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and the executive secretary of the National Space Council during the Trump administration. \u201cBut it\u2019s not invulnerable \u2026 If we were to start over today, we would not have the Russians as partners on the station. That was done in another, more hopeful, era.\u201dToday, Russia and the United States are at odds over several issues, including Russia\u2019s possible invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration has also leveled sanctions on Russian leaders for the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader and one of Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s most outspoken critics. It also has sanctioned Russia for its interference in U.S. elections as well as punishing Russian companies for supporting Russian hackers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo make matters worse, Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force\u2019s first vice chief of space operations, recently told The Post that Russia and China are constantly attacking U.S. satellites a number of ways, including lasers, jammers and cyber breaches.\u201cThe threats are really growing and expanding every single day,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s really an evolution of activity that\u2019s been happening for a long time.\u201dThe tensions have breached the sanctity of the countries\u2019 civil space efforts, which traditionally have been walled off from military and political skirmishes.Last month, Russia fired a missile that destroyed one of its dead weather satellites, creating a massive field of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that threatened the space station. After the test, NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had to huddle in their spacecraft, waiting to see if the station was hit and if they would have to abandon it for home.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe missile strike was roundly condemned by members of the Biden administration.\u201cBy blasting debris across space, this irresponsible act endangered the satellites of other nations, as well as astronauts in the International Space Station,\u201d Vice President Harris, who serves as the chair of the National Space Council, said earlier this month.NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called it \u201creckless and dangerous\u201d and said he was \u201coutraged by this irresponsible and destabilizing action.\u201d He added that the attack was an act of the military and that he believed members of the Russian space agency \u201cdidn\u2019t know anything about this. And they\u2019re probably just as appalled as we are.\u201dStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, Ars Technica reported that Russian officials accused NASA astronaut Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor of drilling a hole in the space station during a personal crisis. After the article was published, top NASA officials came to her defense. \u201cWe stand behind Serena and her professional conduct,\u201d Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s associate administrator of the space operations mission directorate wrote on Twitter. \u201cWe do not believe there is any credibility to these accusations.\u201dAdvertisementThe tensions will complicate plans to extend the life of the space station, which after more than 20 years in the vacuum of space, is showing signs of age. Congress is expected to extend the life of the station to 2030, and NASA is looking ahead to what would replace it. Instead of building a government-owned and operated station, NASA instead wants to help commercial companies develop stations of their own that it could then use.This month, NASA awarded three contracts, worth $415.6 million combined, to Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman, to begin development of commercial stations. But it\u2019s not clear when those would be ready.Story continues below advertisementTo avoid a gap in the meantime, NASA needs to keep the ISS going. But Russia\u2019s actions are making that complicated.The idea for international collaboration had been around for years but finally was approved in 1993 as part of an effort to boost ties with Russia and its President Boris Yeltsin. At the time, The Washington Post reported that the Clinton administration \u201cpainted the Russian partnership as a historic opportunity to beat swords into plowshares, or more literally to convert the deadly missiles of the Cold War into peaceful long haul trucking for the orbital facility.\u201dAdvertisementThe ISS was \u201cthe product of a fairly unique moment in time when the U.S. government was looking to change the relationship it had with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. The station was born \u201cfor foreign policy reasons and to keep Soviet scientists and engineers working on space instead of selling their services to the highest bidder. It\u2019s clear those conditions have changed.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe tension also fueled in part by the fact that NASA no longer needs to pay Russia to transport its astronauts to the space station. After NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, Russia significantly jacked up the price for launches to the station, reaching as high as about $85 million a seat and creating a steady revenue stream for the struggling space agency.But along came Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Under contract from NASA, it has restored human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the space agency last year, ending its dependency on Russia. That Weeden, said, has further destabilized the relationship.Advertisement\u201cSpaceX has broken that monopoly,\u201d he said. \u201cThe U.S. doesn\u2019t need Russia to get to the space station anymore, And SpaceX is eating into, if not destroying Russia\u2019s commercial space launch business. So Russia feels like it is under quite a bit of threat from SpaceX.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRussia has also indicated it is willing to partner with China, which has begun to assemble a space station of its own in Earth\u2019s orbit. But unlike the partnership with the United States on the ISS, Russia would likely not be an equal partner on the Chinese station, officials have said.As for extending the life of the ISS, Weeden said, \u201cpolitically, that\u2019s going to be very difficult to do after what\u2019s happened over the past several years.\u201dDespite the turmoil on the ground, there continues to be strong cooperation among the astronauts and cosmonauts engineers and technical leaders, who have long put politics aside. \u201cWe trust them and operate day-in, day-out with them,\u201d Pace said. American astronauts study Russian and work and live for long stretches in Russia, coming away with an understanding of the culture and respect for their counterparts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRemaining bound together through the space program will ensure that the two countries share the same interests and work together to keep the astronauts and cosmonauts who live together on the space station alive. Russia recently announced that it would send a cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, to fly on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft next year. A NASA astronaut is expected to fly on a Russian Soyuz rocket next year as well.In a statement to The Post, Nelson said NASA wants the partnership with Russia to continue.\u201cFor more than 20 years, NASA astronauts and Roscosmos cosmonauts have lived and worked together on the International Space Station \u2014 a success story that has yielded countless discoveries and enabled research not possible on Earth,\u201d the statement said. \u201cThat\u2019s the power of space \u2014 to unite nations for the benefit of humanity \u2014 and NASA is committed to continuing our very effective ISS partnership.\u201dAdvertisementHaving the Russians tied to the station is a good thing for future relations in space, said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cIf anything, Russia conducting the [antisatellite missile] test is more reason to keep them on the station with us,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they\u2019re going to be creating thousands of pieces of debris, threatening the station, I\u2019d like to have some of their cosmonauts bearing the risk. If they\u2019re not, then Russia has even less reason to be a good actor in space.\u201d The fragile coalition that has kept the space station going all these years is fraying as tensions between Russia and the United States, the two main partners on the station, grow to levels not seen in years. Tensions with Russia are now spilling into space, complicating International Space Station partnership",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tensions with Russia are now spilling into space, complicating International Space Station partnership (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6367",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/21/us-russia-space-station-tension/",
        "text": "For more than 20 years, the International Space Station has served not just as an orbiting laboratory for science but as a vehicle for diplomacy, hosting astronauts from 19 different countries who work side-by-side in space when, in some cases, their leaders could not get along on the ground.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe size of a football field and hurtling through space at 17,500 mph, the station has been a symbol of collaboration through wars and turmoil, and is, to many in the space community, worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize to recognize it as \u201cthe largest international peacetime endeavor in human history,\u201d as Dylan Taylor, a longtime space entrepreneur, argued in a 2020 blog post. But the fragile coalition that has kept the space station going all these years is fraying, as tensions between Russia and the United States, the two main partners on the station, grow to levels not seen in years. And while the countries have kept their alliance on the station going despite geopolitical tensions, the fence that has kept the station and civil space endeavors walled off from other problems is beginning to erode.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of which are complicating efforts to extend the life of the station and keep the partnership going.The space station \u201cmight be a high-water mark for U.S.-Russia relations,\u201d said Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and the executive secretary of the National Space Council during the Trump administration. \u201cBut it\u2019s not invulnerable \u2026 If we were to start over today, we would not have the Russians as partners on the station. That was done in another, more hopeful, era.\u201dToday, Russia and the United States are at odds over several issues, including Russia\u2019s possible invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration has also leveled sanctions on Russian leaders for the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader and one of Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s most outspoken critics. It also has sanctioned Russia for its interference in U.S. elections as well as punishing Russian companies for supporting Russian hackers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo make matters worse, Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force\u2019s first vice chief of space operations, recently told The Post that Russia and China are constantly attacking U.S. satellites a number of ways, including lasers, jammers and cyber breaches.\u201cThe threats are really growing and expanding every single day,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s really an evolution of activity that\u2019s been happening for a long time.\u201dThe tensions have breached the sanctity of the countries\u2019 civil space efforts, which traditionally have been walled off from military and political skirmishes.Last month, Russia fired a missile that destroyed one of its dead weather satellites, creating a massive field of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that threatened the space station. After the test, NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had to huddle in their spacecraft, waiting to see if the station was hit and if they would have to abandon it for home.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe missile strike was roundly condemned by members of the Biden administration.\u201cBy blasting debris across space, this irresponsible act endangered the satellites of other nations, as well as astronauts in the International Space Station,\u201d Vice President Harris, who serves as the chair of the National Space Council, said earlier this month.NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called it \u201creckless and dangerous\u201d and said he was \u201coutraged by this irresponsible and destabilizing action.\u201d He added that the attack was an act of the military and that he believed members of the Russian space agency \u201cdidn\u2019t know anything about this. And they\u2019re probably just as appalled as we are.\u201dStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, Ars Technica reported that Russian officials accused NASA astronaut Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor of drilling a hole in the space station during a personal crisis. After the article was published, top NASA officials came to her defense. \u201cWe stand behind Serena and her professional conduct,\u201d Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s associate administrator of the space operations mission directorate wrote on Twitter. \u201cWe do not believe there is any credibility to these accusations.\u201dAdvertisementThe tensions will complicate plans to extend the life of the space station, which after more than 20 years in the vacuum of space, is showing signs of age. Congress is expected to extend the life of the station to 2030, and NASA is looking ahead to what would replace it. Instead of building a government-owned and operated station, NASA instead wants to help commercial companies develop stations of their own that it could then use.This month, NASA awarded three contracts, worth $415.6 million combined, to Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman, to begin development of commercial stations. But it\u2019s not clear when those would be ready.Story continues below advertisementTo avoid a gap in the meantime, NASA needs to keep the ISS going. But Russia\u2019s actions are making that complicated.The idea for international collaboration had been around for years but finally was approved in 1993 as part of an effort to boost ties with Russia and its President Boris Yeltsin. At the time, The Washington Post reported that the Clinton administration \u201cpainted the Russian partnership as a historic opportunity to beat swords into plowshares, or more literally to convert the deadly missiles of the Cold War into peaceful long haul trucking for the orbital facility.\u201dAdvertisementThe ISS was \u201cthe product of a fairly unique moment in time when the U.S. government was looking to change the relationship it had with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. The station was born \u201cfor foreign policy reasons and to keep Soviet scientists and engineers working on space instead of selling their services to the highest bidder. It\u2019s clear those conditions have changed.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe tension also fueled in part by the fact that NASA no longer needs to pay Russia to transport its astronauts to the space station. After NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, Russia significantly jacked up the price for launches to the station, reaching as high as about $85 million a seat and creating a steady revenue stream for the struggling space agency.But along came Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Under contract from NASA, it has restored human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the space agency last year, ending its dependency on Russia. That Weeden, said, has further destabilized the relationship.Advertisement\u201cSpaceX has broken that monopoly,\u201d he said. \u201cThe U.S. doesn\u2019t need Russia to get to the space station anymore, And SpaceX is eating into, if not destroying Russia\u2019s commercial space launch business. So Russia feels like it is under quite a bit of threat from SpaceX.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRussia has also indicated it is willing to partner with China, which has begun to assemble a space station of its own in Earth\u2019s orbit. But unlike the partnership with the United States on the ISS, Russia would likely not be an equal partner on the Chinese station, officials have said.As for extending the life of the ISS, Weeden said, \u201cpolitically, that\u2019s going to be very difficult to do after what\u2019s happened over the past several years.\u201dDespite the turmoil on the ground, there continues to be strong cooperation among the astronauts and cosmonauts engineers and technical leaders, who have long put politics aside. \u201cWe trust them and operate day-in, day-out with them,\u201d Pace said. American astronauts study Russian and work and live for long stretches in Russia, coming away with an understanding of the culture and respect for their counterparts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRemaining bound together through the space program will ensure that the two countries share the same interests and work together to keep the astronauts and cosmonauts who live together on the space station alive. Russia recently announced that it would send a cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, to fly on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft next year. A NASA astronaut is expected to fly on a Russian Soyuz rocket next year as well.In a statement to The Post, Nelson said NASA wants the partnership with Russia to continue.\u201cFor more than 20 years, NASA astronauts and Roscosmos cosmonauts have lived and worked together on the International Space Station \u2014 a success story that has yielded countless discoveries and enabled research not possible on Earth,\u201d the statement said. \u201cThat\u2019s the power of space \u2014 to unite nations for the benefit of humanity \u2014 and NASA is committed to continuing our very effective ISS partnership.\u201dAdvertisementHaving the Russians tied to the station is a good thing for future relations in space, said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cIf anything, Russia conducting the [antisatellite missile] test is more reason to keep them on the station with us,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they\u2019re going to be creating thousands of pieces of debris, threatening the station, I\u2019d like to have some of their cosmonauts bearing the risk. If they\u2019re not, then Russia has even less reason to be a good actor in space.\u201d The fragile coalition that has kept the space station going all these years is fraying as tensions between Russia and the United States, the two main partners on the station, grow to levels not seen in years. Tensions with Russia are now spilling into space, complicating International Space Station partnership",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tensions with Russia are now spilling into space, complicating International Space Station partnership (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6368",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/21/us-russia-space-station-tension/",
        "text": "For more than 20 years, the International Space Station has served not just as an orbiting laboratory for science but as a vehicle for diplomacy, hosting astronauts from 19 different countries who work side-by-side in space when, in some cases, their leaders could not get along on the ground.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe size of a football field and hurtling through space at 17,500 mph, the station has been a symbol of collaboration through wars and turmoil, and is, to many in the space community, worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize to recognize it as \u201cthe largest international peacetime endeavor in human history,\u201d as Dylan Taylor, a longtime space entrepreneur, argued in a 2020 blog post. But the fragile coalition that has kept the space station going all these years is fraying, as tensions between Russia and the United States, the two main partners on the station, grow to levels not seen in years. And while the countries have kept their alliance on the station going despite geopolitical tensions, the fence that has kept the station and civil space endeavors walled off from other problems is beginning to erode.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of which are complicating efforts to extend the life of the station and keep the partnership going.The space station \u201cmight be a high-water mark for U.S.-Russia relations,\u201d said Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and the executive secretary of the National Space Council during the Trump administration. \u201cBut it\u2019s not invulnerable \u2026 If we were to start over today, we would not have the Russians as partners on the station. That was done in another, more hopeful, era.\u201dToday, Russia and the United States are at odds over several issues, including Russia\u2019s possible invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration has also leveled sanctions on Russian leaders for the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader and one of Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s most outspoken critics. It also has sanctioned Russia for its interference in U.S. elections as well as punishing Russian companies for supporting Russian hackers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo make matters worse, Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force\u2019s first vice chief of space operations, recently told The Post that Russia and China are constantly attacking U.S. satellites a number of ways, including lasers, jammers and cyber breaches.\u201cThe threats are really growing and expanding every single day,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s really an evolution of activity that\u2019s been happening for a long time.\u201dThe tensions have breached the sanctity of the countries\u2019 civil space efforts, which traditionally have been walled off from military and political skirmishes.Last month, Russia fired a missile that destroyed one of its dead weather satellites, creating a massive field of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that threatened the space station. After the test, NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had to huddle in their spacecraft, waiting to see if the station was hit and if they would have to abandon it for home.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe missile strike was roundly condemned by members of the Biden administration.\u201cBy blasting debris across space, this irresponsible act endangered the satellites of other nations, as well as astronauts in the International Space Station,\u201d Vice President Harris, who serves as the chair of the National Space Council, said earlier this month.NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called it \u201creckless and dangerous\u201d and said he was \u201coutraged by this irresponsible and destabilizing action.\u201d He added that the attack was an act of the military and that he believed members of the Russian space agency \u201cdidn\u2019t know anything about this. And they\u2019re probably just as appalled as we are.\u201dStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, Ars Technica reported that Russian officials accused NASA astronaut Serena Au\u00f1\u00f3n-Chancellor of drilling a hole in the space station during a personal crisis. After the article was published, top NASA officials came to her defense. \u201cWe stand behind Serena and her professional conduct,\u201d Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s associate administrator of the space operations mission directorate wrote on Twitter. \u201cWe do not believe there is any credibility to these accusations.\u201dAdvertisementThe tensions will complicate plans to extend the life of the space station, which after more than 20 years in the vacuum of space, is showing signs of age. Congress is expected to extend the life of the station to 2030, and NASA is looking ahead to what would replace it. Instead of building a government-owned and operated station, NASA instead wants to help commercial companies develop stations of their own that it could then use.This month, NASA awarded three contracts, worth $415.6 million combined, to Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman, to begin development of commercial stations. But it\u2019s not clear when those would be ready.Story continues below advertisementTo avoid a gap in the meantime, NASA needs to keep the ISS going. But Russia\u2019s actions are making that complicated.The idea for international collaboration had been around for years but finally was approved in 1993 as part of an effort to boost ties with Russia and its President Boris Yeltsin. At the time, The Washington Post reported that the Clinton administration \u201cpainted the Russian partnership as a historic opportunity to beat swords into plowshares, or more literally to convert the deadly missiles of the Cold War into peaceful long haul trucking for the orbital facility.\u201dAdvertisementThe ISS was \u201cthe product of a fairly unique moment in time when the U.S. government was looking to change the relationship it had with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank. The station was born \u201cfor foreign policy reasons and to keep Soviet scientists and engineers working on space instead of selling their services to the highest bidder. It\u2019s clear those conditions have changed.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe tension also fueled in part by the fact that NASA no longer needs to pay Russia to transport its astronauts to the space station. After NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, Russia significantly jacked up the price for launches to the station, reaching as high as about $85 million a seat and creating a steady revenue stream for the struggling space agency.But along came Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. Under contract from NASA, it has restored human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the space agency last year, ending its dependency on Russia. That Weeden, said, has further destabilized the relationship.Advertisement\u201cSpaceX has broken that monopoly,\u201d he said. \u201cThe U.S. doesn\u2019t need Russia to get to the space station anymore, And SpaceX is eating into, if not destroying Russia\u2019s commercial space launch business. So Russia feels like it is under quite a bit of threat from SpaceX.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRussia has also indicated it is willing to partner with China, which has begun to assemble a space station of its own in Earth\u2019s orbit. But unlike the partnership with the United States on the ISS, Russia would likely not be an equal partner on the Chinese station, officials have said.As for extending the life of the ISS, Weeden said, \u201cpolitically, that\u2019s going to be very difficult to do after what\u2019s happened over the past several years.\u201dDespite the turmoil on the ground, there continues to be strong cooperation among the astronauts and cosmonauts engineers and technical leaders, who have long put politics aside. \u201cWe trust them and operate day-in, day-out with them,\u201d Pace said. American astronauts study Russian and work and live for long stretches in Russia, coming away with an understanding of the culture and respect for their counterparts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRemaining bound together through the space program will ensure that the two countries share the same interests and work together to keep the astronauts and cosmonauts who live together on the space station alive. Russia recently announced that it would send a cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, to fly on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft next year. A NASA astronaut is expected to fly on a Russian Soyuz rocket next year as well.In a statement to The Post, Nelson said NASA wants the partnership with Russia to continue.\u201cFor more than 20 years, NASA astronauts and Roscosmos cosmonauts have lived and worked together on the International Space Station \u2014 a success story that has yielded countless discoveries and enabled research not possible on Earth,\u201d the statement said. \u201cThat\u2019s the power of space \u2014 to unite nations for the benefit of humanity \u2014 and NASA is committed to continuing our very effective ISS partnership.\u201dAdvertisementHaving the Russians tied to the station is a good thing for future relations in space, said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cIf anything, Russia conducting the [antisatellite missile] test is more reason to keep them on the station with us,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they\u2019re going to be creating thousands of pieces of debris, threatening the station, I\u2019d like to have some of their cosmonauts bearing the risk. If they\u2019re not, then Russia has even less reason to be a good actor in space.\u201d The fragile coalition that has kept the space station going all these years is fraying as tensions between Russia and the United States, the two main partners on the station, grow to levels not seen in years. Tensions with Russia are now spilling into space, complicating International Space Station partnership",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has been touting Trump\u2019s moon plan for nearly a year. Now it faces its first real test in Congress.  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6369",
        "date": "2020-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/28/nasa-has-been-touting-trumps-moon-plan-nearly-year-now-it-faces-its-first-real-test-congress/",
        "text": "For almost a year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been scrambling to meet a White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. He spent the summer wooing members of Congress for funding and brought in a marketing executive to help sell the public on the effort, which the agency has branded \u201cArtemis,\u201d after the twin sister of Apollo. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now he is facing the toughest challenge yet. On Wednesday, the House space subcommittee is scheduled to begin consideration of a bill that flatly rejects the 2024 timeline and would, if enacted, order the agency to place priority on traveling to Mars over the moon. The bill calls for the lunar deadline to be pushed back to 2028, NASA\u2019s original plan before Vice President Pence last year called for the agency to speed things up.While NASA had been planning on building an outpost on and around the moon, the House bill would direct the agency to focus instead on developing the technologies to put astronauts in orbit around Mars by 2033. Instead of serving as a staging point for the moon, as NASA intends, the lunar space station, known as Gateway, would exist to test technologies in deep space needed for Mars under the House bill.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt also would favor traditional contractors, such as Boeing, which is building NASA a massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System, that it says could be used to send astronauts directly to the surface of the moon \u2014 bypassing the outpost that NASA wants to build in lunar orbit. Instead of having the private sector build a lunar lander that NASA could then use to send astronauts to the moon, the bill would require NASA to \u201chave full ownership\u201d of the spacecraft.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandateIt also would dictate that the lander be integrated with an upper stage being built by Boeing for its SLS rocket. But NASA has said for months that it does not think the upper stage would be ready in time and has asked that funding for the upper stage be deferred.The proposal has split the space community and elicited a pointed, but measured, response from Bridenstine, a Republican former member of Congress who finds himself in the precarious position of having to balance the will of Congress against the Trump administration\u2019s 2024 mandate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post Monday, Bridenstine wrote he was \u201cconcerned that the bill imposes some significant constraints on our approach to lunar exploration.\u201d In particular, he wrote that \u201cwe are concerned that the bill\u2019s approach to developing a human lander system as fully government-owned and directed would be ineffective. The approach established by the bill would inhibit our ability to develop a flexible architecture that takes advantage of the full array of national capabilities \u2014 government and private sector \u2014 to accomplish national goals.\u201d The Planetary Society, the space nonprofit group founded by Carl Sagan and led by chief executive Bill Nye, said the bill \u201cwould disrupt and delay a planned return of U.S. astronauts to deep space.\u201d It urged Congress to get out of the way and give NASA \u201cthe flexibility to best implement its efforts at the moon and beyond.\u201d And it recommended that the committee \u201cremove the provisions restricting activities and limiting competition for exploration capabilities.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bill has not yet emerged from committee and will probably be modified, perhaps significantly, before it does. \u201cThe chances of this passing in its current form are virtually zero,\u201d said John Logsdon, a space historian who serves as a professor emeritus at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute.But it demonstrates how precarious even NASA\u2019s most-trumpeted plans can be and why the agency has been unable to return astronauts to the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Several presidents have proposed grand missions to the moon and Mars in the years since, only to see those efforts come up short, whether because of a lack of congressional buy-in or a change in administrations. When he was president, George W. Bush proposed going to the moon. Under Obama, NASA changed course after he said, \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before,\u201d and instead directed NASA to go to an asteroid and then to Mars.Under Trump, the White House gave NASA another case of whiplash when it directed the agency to focus again on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne can reasonably question, after 40 years of trying without success, whether the government really wants to sponsor human exploration,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cWhy we haven\u2019t been back to the moon is because those in the country with the power to provide the resources to do that have not agreed on a way to go forward.\u201d Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industryThe Trump administration put the power of the White House behind the effort in a way not seen in years. Pence, the head of the reconstituted National Space Council, has given several high-profile speeches on space. To fund the Artemis moon program, NASA is expected to soon lay out a five-year spending plan to cover a program that is estimated to cost about $30 billion. To meet that goal, next year\u2019s NASA budget is expected to increase significantly over the current $22 billion.House members have said they are skeptical of the plan and that they need to see a detailed timeline and funding plan before they would vote to put money behind it. In an interview Tuesday , Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, said NASA has yet to lay out its plan in any detail or how it would pay for it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA program as ambitious as getting to the moon or Mars \u201crequires a clear and unambiguous plan, and we\u2019re still waiting for it,\u201d she said. Mars has been the ultimate destination for years, she said, and the bill \u201csets a clear goal for NASA to get us there in the quickest and most efficient way possible.\u201d She added that many different contractors would be involved in the effort, and the program would not favor any. But, she said, NASA should own the technology behind any lunar lander it uses to get astronauts to the surface \u201cbecause this would be a national program and it\u2019s in the nation\u2019s interests to ensure we own the technology. NASA should have strong insight and oversight from day one.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Washington Post last year, Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said, \u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon by 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so.\u201d AdvertisementStill, some think NASA and Congress will ultimately be able to find common ground. The Senate\u2019s version of the bill is more in line with NASA\u2019s plans, and the White House is making it a priority.\u201cThere\u2019s more momentum behind Artemis than there had been in the past 40 years with all the prior initiatives,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cAnd I think if there isn\u2019t disruption of the current plan, we\u2019re liable to actually stumble our way through an eventual return.\u201d Story continues below advertisement\u201cI would like to think that there\u2019s enough bipartisan support around both sides of Congress to get a bill taken care of,\u201d said Dan Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. \u201cBut it\u2019s going to be a struggle.\u201d The legislation is a steppingstone, he said, that has at least some bipartisan support. It was sponsored by two Democrats, Horn and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.), the chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, along with Republicans Brian Babin (Tex.) and Frank D. Lucas (Okla.). On Wednesday, the House space subcommittee begins consideration of a bill that flatly rejects the Trump administration's space priorities and directs NASA to prioritize travel to Mars over returning to the moon. NASA has been touting Trump\u2019s moon plan for nearly a year. Now it faces its first real test in Congress. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has been touting Trump\u2019s moon plan for nearly a year. Now it faces its first real test in Congress.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6370",
        "date": "2020-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/28/nasa-has-been-touting-trumps-moon-plan-nearly-year-now-it-faces-its-first-real-test-congress/",
        "text": "For almost a year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been scrambling to meet a White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. He spent the summer wooing members of Congress for funding and brought in a marketing executive to help sell the public on the effort, which the agency has branded \u201cArtemis,\u201d after the twin sister of Apollo. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now he is facing the toughest challenge yet. On Wednesday, the House space subcommittee is scheduled to begin consideration of a bill that flatly rejects the 2024 timeline and would, if enacted, order the agency to place priority on traveling to Mars over the moon. The bill calls for the lunar deadline to be pushed back to 2028, NASA\u2019s original plan before Vice President Pence last year called for the agency to speed things up.While NASA had been planning on building an outpost on and around the moon, the House bill would direct the agency to focus instead on developing the technologies to put astronauts in orbit around Mars by 2033. Instead of serving as a staging point for the moon, as NASA intends, the lunar space station, known as Gateway, would exist to test technologies in deep space needed for Mars under the House bill.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt also would favor traditional contractors, such as Boeing, which is building NASA a massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System, that it says could be used to send astronauts directly to the surface of the moon \u2014 bypassing the outpost that NASA wants to build in lunar orbit. Instead of having the private sector build a lunar lander that NASA could then use to send astronauts to the moon, the bill would require NASA to \u201chave full ownership\u201d of the spacecraft.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandateIt also would dictate that the lander be integrated with an upper stage being built by Boeing for its SLS rocket. But NASA has said for months that it does not think the upper stage would be ready in time and has asked that funding for the upper stage be deferred.The proposal has split the space community and elicited a pointed, but measured, response from Bridenstine, a Republican former member of Congress who finds himself in the precarious position of having to balance the will of Congress against the Trump administration\u2019s 2024 mandate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post Monday, Bridenstine wrote he was \u201cconcerned that the bill imposes some significant constraints on our approach to lunar exploration.\u201d In particular, he wrote that \u201cwe are concerned that the bill\u2019s approach to developing a human lander system as fully government-owned and directed would be ineffective. The approach established by the bill would inhibit our ability to develop a flexible architecture that takes advantage of the full array of national capabilities \u2014 government and private sector \u2014 to accomplish national goals.\u201d The Planetary Society, the space nonprofit group founded by Carl Sagan and led by chief executive Bill Nye, said the bill \u201cwould disrupt and delay a planned return of U.S. astronauts to deep space.\u201d It urged Congress to get out of the way and give NASA \u201cthe flexibility to best implement its efforts at the moon and beyond.\u201d And it recommended that the committee \u201cremove the provisions restricting activities and limiting competition for exploration capabilities.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bill has not yet emerged from committee and will probably be modified, perhaps significantly, before it does. \u201cThe chances of this passing in its current form are virtually zero,\u201d said John Logsdon, a space historian who serves as a professor emeritus at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute.But it demonstrates how precarious even NASA\u2019s most-trumpeted plans can be and why the agency has been unable to return astronauts to the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Several presidents have proposed grand missions to the moon and Mars in the years since, only to see those efforts come up short, whether because of a lack of congressional buy-in or a change in administrations. When he was president, George W. Bush proposed going to the moon. Under Obama, NASA changed course after he said, \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before,\u201d and instead directed NASA to go to an asteroid and then to Mars.Under Trump, the White House gave NASA another case of whiplash when it directed the agency to focus again on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne can reasonably question, after 40 years of trying without success, whether the government really wants to sponsor human exploration,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cWhy we haven\u2019t been back to the moon is because those in the country with the power to provide the resources to do that have not agreed on a way to go forward.\u201d Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industryThe Trump administration put the power of the White House behind the effort in a way not seen in years. Pence, the head of the reconstituted National Space Council, has given several high-profile speeches on space. To fund the Artemis moon program, NASA is expected to soon lay out a five-year spending plan to cover a program that is estimated to cost about $30 billion. To meet that goal, next year\u2019s NASA budget is expected to increase significantly over the current $22 billion.House members have said they are skeptical of the plan and that they need to see a detailed timeline and funding plan before they would vote to put money behind it. In an interview Tuesday , Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, said NASA has yet to lay out its plan in any detail or how it would pay for it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA program as ambitious as getting to the moon or Mars \u201crequires a clear and unambiguous plan, and we\u2019re still waiting for it,\u201d she said. Mars has been the ultimate destination for years, she said, and the bill \u201csets a clear goal for NASA to get us there in the quickest and most efficient way possible.\u201d She added that many different contractors would be involved in the effort, and the program would not favor any. But, she said, NASA should own the technology behind any lunar lander it uses to get astronauts to the surface \u201cbecause this would be a national program and it\u2019s in the nation\u2019s interests to ensure we own the technology. NASA should have strong insight and oversight from day one.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Washington Post last year, Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said, \u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon by 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so.\u201d AdvertisementStill, some think NASA and Congress will ultimately be able to find common ground. The Senate\u2019s version of the bill is more in line with NASA\u2019s plans, and the White House is making it a priority.\u201cThere\u2019s more momentum behind Artemis than there had been in the past 40 years with all the prior initiatives,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cAnd I think if there isn\u2019t disruption of the current plan, we\u2019re liable to actually stumble our way through an eventual return.\u201d Story continues below advertisement\u201cI would like to think that there\u2019s enough bipartisan support around both sides of Congress to get a bill taken care of,\u201d said Dan Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. \u201cBut it\u2019s going to be a struggle.\u201d The legislation is a steppingstone, he said, that has at least some bipartisan support. It was sponsored by two Democrats, Horn and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.), the chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, along with Republicans Brian Babin (Tex.) and Frank D. Lucas (Okla.). On Wednesday, the House space subcommittee begins consideration of a bill that flatly rejects the Trump administration's space priorities and directs NASA to prioritize travel to Mars over returning to the moon. NASA has been touting Trump\u2019s moon plan for nearly a year. Now it faces its first real test in Congress. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has been touting Trump\u2019s moon plan for nearly a year. Now it faces its first real test in Congress.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6371",
        "date": "2020-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/28/nasa-has-been-touting-trumps-moon-plan-nearly-year-now-it-faces-its-first-real-test-congress/",
        "text": "For almost a year, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has been scrambling to meet a White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. He spent the summer wooing members of Congress for funding and brought in a marketing executive to help sell the public on the effort, which the agency has branded \u201cArtemis,\u201d after the twin sister of Apollo. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now he is facing the toughest challenge yet. On Wednesday, the House space subcommittee is scheduled to begin consideration of a bill that flatly rejects the 2024 timeline and would, if enacted, order the agency to place priority on traveling to Mars over the moon. The bill calls for the lunar deadline to be pushed back to 2028, NASA\u2019s original plan before Vice President Pence last year called for the agency to speed things up.While NASA had been planning on building an outpost on and around the moon, the House bill would direct the agency to focus instead on developing the technologies to put astronauts in orbit around Mars by 2033. Instead of serving as a staging point for the moon, as NASA intends, the lunar space station, known as Gateway, would exist to test technologies in deep space needed for Mars under the House bill.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt also would favor traditional contractors, such as Boeing, which is building NASA a massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System, that it says could be used to send astronauts directly to the surface of the moon \u2014 bypassing the outpost that NASA wants to build in lunar orbit. Instead of having the private sector build a lunar lander that NASA could then use to send astronauts to the moon, the bill would require NASA to \u201chave full ownership\u201d of the spacecraft.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandateIt also would dictate that the lander be integrated with an upper stage being built by Boeing for its SLS rocket. But NASA has said for months that it does not think the upper stage would be ready in time and has asked that funding for the upper stage be deferred.The proposal has split the space community and elicited a pointed, but measured, response from Bridenstine, a Republican former member of Congress who finds himself in the precarious position of having to balance the will of Congress against the Trump administration\u2019s 2024 mandate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post Monday, Bridenstine wrote he was \u201cconcerned that the bill imposes some significant constraints on our approach to lunar exploration.\u201d In particular, he wrote that \u201cwe are concerned that the bill\u2019s approach to developing a human lander system as fully government-owned and directed would be ineffective. The approach established by the bill would inhibit our ability to develop a flexible architecture that takes advantage of the full array of national capabilities \u2014 government and private sector \u2014 to accomplish national goals.\u201d The Planetary Society, the space nonprofit group founded by Carl Sagan and led by chief executive Bill Nye, said the bill \u201cwould disrupt and delay a planned return of U.S. astronauts to deep space.\u201d It urged Congress to get out of the way and give NASA \u201cthe flexibility to best implement its efforts at the moon and beyond.\u201d And it recommended that the committee \u201cremove the provisions restricting activities and limiting competition for exploration capabilities.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bill has not yet emerged from committee and will probably be modified, perhaps significantly, before it does. \u201cThe chances of this passing in its current form are virtually zero,\u201d said John Logsdon, a space historian who serves as a professor emeritus at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute.But it demonstrates how precarious even NASA\u2019s most-trumpeted plans can be and why the agency has been unable to return astronauts to the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Several presidents have proposed grand missions to the moon and Mars in the years since, only to see those efforts come up short, whether because of a lack of congressional buy-in or a change in administrations. When he was president, George W. Bush proposed going to the moon. Under Obama, NASA changed course after he said, \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before,\u201d and instead directed NASA to go to an asteroid and then to Mars.Under Trump, the White House gave NASA another case of whiplash when it directed the agency to focus again on the moon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne can reasonably question, after 40 years of trying without success, whether the government really wants to sponsor human exploration,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cWhy we haven\u2019t been back to the moon is because those in the country with the power to provide the resources to do that have not agreed on a way to go forward.\u201d Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industryThe Trump administration put the power of the White House behind the effort in a way not seen in years. Pence, the head of the reconstituted National Space Council, has given several high-profile speeches on space. To fund the Artemis moon program, NASA is expected to soon lay out a five-year spending plan to cover a program that is estimated to cost about $30 billion. To meet that goal, next year\u2019s NASA budget is expected to increase significantly over the current $22 billion.House members have said they are skeptical of the plan and that they need to see a detailed timeline and funding plan before they would vote to put money behind it. In an interview Tuesday , Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, said NASA has yet to lay out its plan in any detail or how it would pay for it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA program as ambitious as getting to the moon or Mars \u201crequires a clear and unambiguous plan, and we\u2019re still waiting for it,\u201d she said. Mars has been the ultimate destination for years, she said, and the bill \u201csets a clear goal for NASA to get us there in the quickest and most efficient way possible.\u201d She added that many different contractors would be involved in the effort, and the program would not favor any. But, she said, NASA should own the technology behind any lunar lander it uses to get astronauts to the surface \u201cbecause this would be a national program and it\u2019s in the nation\u2019s interests to ensure we own the technology. NASA should have strong insight and oversight from day one.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Washington Post last year, Rep. Jos\u00e9 E. Serrano (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said, \u201cThe President has decided to play politics with the Artemis program by seeking to speed up plans to send humans back to the moon by 2024 instead of 2028 without a strong justification for doing so.\u201d AdvertisementStill, some think NASA and Congress will ultimately be able to find common ground. The Senate\u2019s version of the bill is more in line with NASA\u2019s plans, and the White House is making it a priority.\u201cThere\u2019s more momentum behind Artemis than there had been in the past 40 years with all the prior initiatives,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cAnd I think if there isn\u2019t disruption of the current plan, we\u2019re liable to actually stumble our way through an eventual return.\u201d Story continues below advertisement\u201cI would like to think that there\u2019s enough bipartisan support around both sides of Congress to get a bill taken care of,\u201d said Dan Dumbacher, the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. \u201cBut it\u2019s going to be a struggle.\u201d The legislation is a steppingstone, he said, that has at least some bipartisan support. It was sponsored by two Democrats, Horn and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.), the chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, along with Republicans Brian Babin (Tex.) and Frank D. Lucas (Okla.). On Wednesday, the House space subcommittee begins consideration of a bill that flatly rejects the Trump administration's space priorities and directs NASA to prioritize travel to Mars over returning to the moon. NASA has been touting Trump\u2019s moon plan for nearly a year. Now it faces its first real test in Congress. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket launch is scrubbed due to weather   (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6372",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/spacex-launch-live-updates/",
        "text": "Follow our live coverage of the SpaceX NASA launch hereThe long-anticipated launch of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, with two Americans on board, was scrubbed after weather forecasters predicted that clouds the rocket would have had to fly through violated rules NASA has drawn to avoid lightning strikes.Watch live coverage of the SpaceX launch with The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey, Christian Davenport and Joel Achenbach, featuring an exclusive interview with Elon Musk and guest appearances by Suni Williams, former NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and Pam Melroy, as well as Ellen Stofan, the Director of the Smithsonian\u2019s Air & Space Museum. The beginning of NASA\u2019s next chapter of space exploration will have to wait until the weekend. Space officials Wednesday postponed the launch of a crewed SpaceX rocket en route to the International Space Station because of problematic weather around Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla., and a tropical storm brewing off the coast of the Carolinas. The early components of Tropical Storm Bertha had battered the Florida Panhandle over the weekend and parked over coastal areas of North and South Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving the risk of isolated thunderstorms or pockets of clouds hovering around the rocket\u2019s launch site.With lightning seen in the area 17 minutes before the scheduled 4:33 p.m., launch time, the flight\u2019s weather officer made the call to \u201cscrub\u201d the flight. The Crew Dragon\u2019s mission, known as Demo-2, operated under an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period during which the International Space Station is lined up with the rocket\u2019s flight trajectory. Any sort of delay would cause the rocket to miss that period.The mission\u2019s next launch window is scheduled for Saturday at 3:22 p.m., from historic launchpad 39A, the same facility that launched the first astronauts to the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969.Capital Weather Gang: Weather scrubs SpaceX launchThe flight would have culminated years of work and the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts. For SpaceX, it was the crescendo of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when founder and chief executive Elon Musk set out to start a space company.Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are both former military pilots who previously had each flown two missions on the space shuttle. Once the spacecraft is launched, it is scheduled to travel to the space station, 240 miles above the Earth. That journey is expected to take about 18 hours. But their ride to space this time will be on a vastly different spacecraft: a fully autonomous, next-generation capsule outfitted with Tesla-like touch screens and temperature controls that allow astronauts to keep the cabin at between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.Even with a successful launch, their mission is far from complete. The spacecraft needs to catch up with the space station and match the altitude of the laboratory, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 mph, and dock with it in a risky and carefully choreographed dance.Meet the astronauts about to fly in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon CapsuleThe mission is a test flight designed to ensure the rocket and spacecraft can fly humans safely. Once complete, NASA and SpaceX will review the data and certify the spacecraft for additional missions that would regularly fly as many as four astronauts to the space station and back.Below are the updates from Wednesday\u2019s almost-launch.SpaceX launch scrubbed due to lightningReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:29 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA\u2019s next chapter will have to wait. Officials postponed the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 booster 17 minutes before the scheduled launch time because of lightning near Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla.Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken began protocols to \u201cscrub\u201d the launch, siphoning the propellants out of the rocket boosters and powering down the space craft. The Dragon mission operates under an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period of time during which atmospheric conditions are amenable for flight.With remnants of Tropical Storm Bertha in the area, those conditions could not be met, officials concluded. The next launch window is Saturday at 3:22 p.m.Weather conditions caused the violation of multiple launch conditions, including nearby thunderstorms that were causing lightning strikes to hit a few miles off the coast of the launch site. Conditions were improving as the launch neared, but flight engineers ran out of time before skies would have cleared enough to permit a safe launch.Weather forecasters work to ensure that the spacecraft would have a low risk of being struck by lightning during its launch and would not be subjected to strong air currents contained in cumulus clouds and the top of thunderstorms, known as anvil clouds.The technical violation has to do with electrical fields at and above the launch pad, and the Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which forecasts for launch activities, has specialized instruments to monitor such conditions.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on May 27 discussed SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch, which was postponed to May 30 due to inclement weather. (NASA)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFueling continues on SpaceX flight as questionable weather swirlsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA began fueling the Falcon 9 booster at Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A just before 4 p.m., a major positive step toward launching the rocket and astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley as prohibitive weather swirls in the area.Propellants are loaded into the two booster components of the Falcon 9 roughly an hour before launch time, slated for 4:33 p.m. But weather conditions continued to appear problematic downrange.The Crew Dragon mission is operating on an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\" or a very narrow period under which conditions are amiable for a launch. Any delay would likely cause the mission to miss the window and force NASA to postpone the flight until another instantaneous launch window at 3:22 p.m.Officials are following lightning in the area, a prohibitive condition.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump, Pence forgo protective masks at SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump and Vice President Pence did not wear protective face masks while touring NASA facilities Wednesday before the planned launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station.Trump and Pence, joined by first lady Melania Trump and second lady Karen Pence, inspected NASA crew quarters and the Artemis moon-orbiting capsule just after 3 p.m. at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. NASA officials and flight technicians around them wore protective face masks and practiced social distancing during those tours.Spotted wearing a mask at the Kennedy Space Center: Ivanka pic.twitter.com/ShsG4Ksdgn\u2014 Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) May 27, 2020\n\nThe vice president wore a surgical mask earlier in the day when he greeted astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after they donned their flight suits and drove to historic launchpad 39A. Pence offered well wishes and spoke briefly with their families.Germ control is a major priority during crewed space missions even without a global pandemic. Behnken and Hurley quarantined at their homes and at the Johnson Space Center in Houston beginning May 15 so as to not take any pathogens into space with them.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk takes full advantage of Dragon launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk also founded electric carmaker Tesla, and on Wednesday he made sure both of his companies\u2019 products were on display.When astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley traveled to the launchpad Wednesday, they made the trip in Tesla Model X vehicles.It wasn\u2019t the first time Musk had highlighted a Tesla connection with SpaceX launches. For the first launch of the Falcon Heavy booster, the more advanced sibling of the Falcon 9 rocket powering Wednesday\u2019s Crew Dragon mission, it carried a special payload: a ruby red Tesla convertible.Musk put a mannequin in the Tesla roadster and blasted it off with Falcon Heavy, sending the automobile into orbit.It was a bit of marketing to go along with SpaceX\u2019s brash announcement to the rest of the aerospace industry that it had arrived.\u201cLockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they\u2019ve certainly tried to stomp on us,\u201d Musk once said. \u201cI think we have a shot at prevailing. But we\u2019re certainly a small up-and-comer going against giants.\u201dMusk hasn\u2019t shied away from using this launch to market both SpaceX and Tesla. The space company\u2019s logo and trademarks are featured prominently throughout the launch site. The flight technicians assisting astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are wearing SpaceX-branded gear from head to toe. Even the astronauts\u2019 flight suits include prominent SpaceX word marks.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPresident Trump arrives at Kennedy Space CenterReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump and first lady Melania deplaned at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 27, planning to witness a historic SpaceX launch. (The Washington Post)President Trump has already gotten a good look at the Crew Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 booster.Air Force One flew by historic launchpad 39A just before 3 p.m. and landed moments later. Trump and first lady Melania Trump were greeted by Bob Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center, among others, after landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Trumps are scheduled to tour NASA crew quarters and the Artemis capsule, built for a trip around the moon, at Kennedy Space Center.Great shot of Air Force One flying over Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. https://t.co/7jj9TtCy3U#LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/LrNxGw9ibR\u2014 Dan Linden (@DanLinden) May 27, 2020\n\nThe Trumps will also receive a briefing on the Crew Dragon\u2019s mission, called Demo-2, and the president will speak after the launch.Vice President Pence arrived in Florida in advance and had been exchanging pleasantries with the astronauts\u2019 families when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley emerged and spoke with their families. Pence flashed a thumbs up as the astronauts got inside a white Tesla with a NASA logo on the sides.The Demo-2 mission and the first manned launch of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program will mark the culmination of an effort started by former president Barack Obama.But a successful launch would be a moment of triumph for the Trump administration, which boasts it is \u201crenewing American leadership in space,\u201d and it would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads. If something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.For Trump and NASA, the stakes are enormous for upcoming flight with crewTo this White House, space holds a special place \u2014 as a frontier to explore, a domain that\u2019s been militarized and an opportunity for economic expansion. It has moved aggressively on all fronts, reconstituting the National Space Council with Pence as its chair, speeding up efforts to return to the moon, standing up the new Space Force military branch, and slashing regulations while promoting the growth of a commercial space industry.Pence has declared American astronauts would reach the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX rocket set to launch from historic territoryReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkCrew Dragon will launch from what many in the aerospace industry consider hallowed ground: Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A.That was the starting point for Apollo moon missions and space shuttle launches, including the Apollo 11 flight that took astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969.SpaceX leased the rights to use the facility in 2014, and it\u2019s become the company\u2019s beachhead for testing the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as its Crew Dragon spacecraft that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station. \u201cThere\u2019s no more sacred real estate in the space community than that launchpad we\u2019ll be flying from,\u201d SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk told The Washington Post.If Wednesday\u2019s launch is successful, the United States once again will have the ability to launch people to the International Space Station; since the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, American astronauts have had to ride Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the station.Launchpad 39A will also be the future home of SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft, which is designed for voyages to the moon.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementForecasters closely eyeing radar imagery as thunderstorms pass through Cape CanaveralReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkA report from NASA television early Wednesday afternoon was optimistic about the weather, noting favorable upper atmosphere conditions for launch as well as few concerns about air or ocean conditions downstream of the launch site.The major outstanding issue was whether thunderstorms might pass through or come close to the launch area later in the afternoon.Launch decisions could be made up to 30 minutes before launch. At 12:22 p.m. Wednesday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted the mission was moving forward but weather was being monitored. At 2:05 p.m., weather radar showed showers and thunderstorms, some containing lightning and heavy rain, approaching the Space Coast from the west. A special marine warning was in effect until 3:30 p.m. for coastal waters for heavy showers and storms with wind gusts potentially topping 39 mph.A tornado warning was even in effect until 2:15 p.m. in north central Brevard County, about 20 miles north of Cape Canaveral. There is a possibility this storm activity will leave the Space Coast by 3 or 3:30 p.m. and that the heaviest of these storms will pass just north of Cape Canaveral. However, some pop-up storms still could follow in the wake of this initial line. While high-resolution forecast models had simulated numerous late afternoon thunderstorms near Cape Canaveral in the morning, early afternoon simulations predicted more somewhat spottier storm activity around the launch time at 4:33 p.m.Read more updates on the weather here.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTom Cruise teaming with NASA to film a movie aboard the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage and Christian Davenport2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkAs \u201cMaverick\u201d in the film \u201cTop Gun,\u201d actor Tom Cruise famously said he had \u201cthe need \u2014 the need for speed.\u201dNow he\u2019s going to get it.NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed Tuesday that the space agency is working with Cruise to film a movie aboard the International Space Station, which whizzes around in Earth orbit at 17,500 mph.In a tweet, Bridenstine wrote that \u201cNASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA\u2019s ambitious plans a reality.\u201d\u201cIf we can get Tom Cruise to inspire elementary kids to join the Navy and be a pilot, why can\u2019t we get Tom Cruise to inspire the next Elon Musk?\u201d Bridenstine said Wednesday. \u201cThat\u2019s what we need, a new generation of many Elon Musks, and that\u2019s what this launch is about today.\u201dAdded Musk of a Cruise flick filmed in space: \u201cI\u2019d watch that movie.\u201dA NASA spokesman declined to comment further.The announcement comes as NASA is working to open up the orbiting laboratory to more commercial interests, and as SpaceX is on the cusp of flying NASA astronauts there from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Last year, Bridenstine said the space agency would change its policy prohibiting paying tourists to fly to the space station. Over the years, Russia flew several private citizens there, who reportedly paid millions of dollars for the experience.Under NASA\u2019s plan, paying customers could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days at a cost of $35,000 a day.SpaceX and Boeing, the companies working to develop spacecraft capable of flying crews to the station, have been encouraged to fly private citizens as well. Neither has said how much they would charge for the rides, but estimates have ranged as high as $50 million.Earlier this year, SpaceX announced it would fly three space tourists to the International Space Station for Axiom Space, a company vying to build a commercial space station.Bridenstine has pushed to commercialize low Earth orbit, creating more economic interests in space. He has floated the idea of shooting advertisements on the space station and even selling naming rights to rockets and spacecraft the way professional sports stadiums do.He\u2019s tirelessly pushed to raise NASA\u2019s profile in popular culture, trying to relax rules of astronauts appearing in commercials, for example.\u201cI\u2019d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I\u2019d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cI\u2019d like to see, maybe one day, NASA astronauts on the cover of a cereal box, embedded into the American culture.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts board Dragon capsule, conduct systems checks; hatch is closedReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe hatch on the Dragon capsule has closed.Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley entered the Crew Dragon capsule just before 2 p.m., roughly two and a half hours before the scheduled launch.LIVE NOW: History is about to be made. Watch as @NASA_Astronauts #LaunchAmerica to the @Space_Station from American soil for the first time in nine years: https://t.co/U1COQzFy4v https://t.co/U1COQzFy4v\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 27, 2020\n\nSpaceX technicians helped the astronauts board the vessel \u2014 a process called \u201cingress\u201d \u2014 and strap their custom-fit flight suits into the two center seats of the cabin. Those flight suits plug into Dragon via an \u201cumbilical\u201d chord that controls the garments\u2019 function. The astronauts\u2019 communication lines, heating and cooling air supply and pressurization components are all governed through that input.Before snapping their helmets closed during a systems check, Hurley cleaned his glasses; Behnken tightened the straps around his shoulders.Almost 20 minutes after boarding, the seats in the cabin reclined to give Behnken and Hurley a view of the touch screen instruments of the spacecraft. The Dragon capsule is autonomous, but the astronauts can take control of the vessel if something goes wrong.The latest weather updates as launch nearsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage and Jason Samenow2:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkA report from NASA TV early Wednesday afternoon was optimistic about weather conditions noting favorable upper atmosphere conditions for the launch of the Crew Dragon capsule and few concerns about air or ocean conditions downstream of the launch site. The outstanding issue is whether thunderstorms might pass through or come close to the launch area later in the afternoon.Scientists and weather experts are keeping a close eye on the remnants of a storm system that could force NASA to postpone Wednesday\u2019s history-making launch to Saturday or Sunday.Forecasters said a storm system that battered the Florida panhandle over the weekend and threatened flooding in coastal areas of the Carolinas on Wednesday could leave isolated thunderstorms or pockets of cumulus or anvil clouds hovering around the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center.Thunderstorms are forecast to erupt along a convergence zone over the Florida Peninsula on Wednesday afternoon as sea breezes from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean meet.Read more With two veteran NASA astronauts, the postponed effort would have been the first human launch to orbit from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and also the first time a private company has performed the feat. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket launch is scrubbed due to weather  ",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket launch is scrubbed due to weather   (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6373",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/spacex-launch-live-updates/",
        "text": "Follow our live coverage of the SpaceX NASA launch hereThe long-anticipated launch of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, with two Americans on board, was scrubbed after weather forecasters predicted that clouds the rocket would have had to fly through violated rules NASA has drawn to avoid lightning strikes.Watch live coverage of the SpaceX launch with The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey, Christian Davenport and Joel Achenbach, featuring an exclusive interview with Elon Musk and guest appearances by Suni Williams, former NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and Pam Melroy, as well as Ellen Stofan, the Director of the Smithsonian\u2019s Air & Space Museum. The beginning of NASA\u2019s next chapter of space exploration will have to wait until the weekend. Space officials Wednesday postponed the launch of a crewed SpaceX rocket en route to the International Space Station because of problematic weather around Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla., and a tropical storm brewing off the coast of the Carolinas. The early components of Tropical Storm Bertha had battered the Florida Panhandle over the weekend and parked over coastal areas of North and South Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving the risk of isolated thunderstorms or pockets of clouds hovering around the rocket\u2019s launch site.With lightning seen in the area 17 minutes before the scheduled 4:33 p.m., launch time, the flight\u2019s weather officer made the call to \u201cscrub\u201d the flight. The Crew Dragon\u2019s mission, known as Demo-2, operated under an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period during which the International Space Station is lined up with the rocket\u2019s flight trajectory. Any sort of delay would cause the rocket to miss that period.The mission\u2019s next launch window is scheduled for Saturday at 3:22 p.m., from historic launchpad 39A, the same facility that launched the first astronauts to the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969.Capital Weather Gang: Weather scrubs SpaceX launchThe flight would have culminated years of work and the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts. For SpaceX, it was the crescendo of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when founder and chief executive Elon Musk set out to start a space company.Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are both former military pilots who previously had each flown two missions on the space shuttle. Once the spacecraft is launched, it is scheduled to travel to the space station, 240 miles above the Earth. That journey is expected to take about 18 hours. But their ride to space this time will be on a vastly different spacecraft: a fully autonomous, next-generation capsule outfitted with Tesla-like touch screens and temperature controls that allow astronauts to keep the cabin at between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.Even with a successful launch, their mission is far from complete. The spacecraft needs to catch up with the space station and match the altitude of the laboratory, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 mph, and dock with it in a risky and carefully choreographed dance.Meet the astronauts about to fly in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon CapsuleThe mission is a test flight designed to ensure the rocket and spacecraft can fly humans safely. Once complete, NASA and SpaceX will review the data and certify the spacecraft for additional missions that would regularly fly as many as four astronauts to the space station and back.Below are the updates from Wednesday\u2019s almost-launch.SpaceX launch scrubbed due to lightningReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:29 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA\u2019s next chapter will have to wait. Officials postponed the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 booster 17 minutes before the scheduled launch time because of lightning near Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla.Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken began protocols to \u201cscrub\u201d the launch, siphoning the propellants out of the rocket boosters and powering down the space craft. The Dragon mission operates under an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period of time during which atmospheric conditions are amenable for flight.With remnants of Tropical Storm Bertha in the area, those conditions could not be met, officials concluded. The next launch window is Saturday at 3:22 p.m.Weather conditions caused the violation of multiple launch conditions, including nearby thunderstorms that were causing lightning strikes to hit a few miles off the coast of the launch site. Conditions were improving as the launch neared, but flight engineers ran out of time before skies would have cleared enough to permit a safe launch.Weather forecasters work to ensure that the spacecraft would have a low risk of being struck by lightning during its launch and would not be subjected to strong air currents contained in cumulus clouds and the top of thunderstorms, known as anvil clouds.The technical violation has to do with electrical fields at and above the launch pad, and the Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which forecasts for launch activities, has specialized instruments to monitor such conditions.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on May 27 discussed SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch, which was postponed to May 30 due to inclement weather. (NASA)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFueling continues on SpaceX flight as questionable weather swirlsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA began fueling the Falcon 9 booster at Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A just before 4 p.m., a major positive step toward launching the rocket and astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley as prohibitive weather swirls in the area.Propellants are loaded into the two booster components of the Falcon 9 roughly an hour before launch time, slated for 4:33 p.m. But weather conditions continued to appear problematic downrange.The Crew Dragon mission is operating on an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\" or a very narrow period under which conditions are amiable for a launch. Any delay would likely cause the mission to miss the window and force NASA to postpone the flight until another instantaneous launch window at 3:22 p.m.Officials are following lightning in the area, a prohibitive condition.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump, Pence forgo protective masks at SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump and Vice President Pence did not wear protective face masks while touring NASA facilities Wednesday before the planned launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station.Trump and Pence, joined by first lady Melania Trump and second lady Karen Pence, inspected NASA crew quarters and the Artemis moon-orbiting capsule just after 3 p.m. at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. NASA officials and flight technicians around them wore protective face masks and practiced social distancing during those tours.Spotted wearing a mask at the Kennedy Space Center: Ivanka pic.twitter.com/ShsG4Ksdgn\u2014 Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) May 27, 2020\n\nThe vice president wore a surgical mask earlier in the day when he greeted astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after they donned their flight suits and drove to historic launchpad 39A. Pence offered well wishes and spoke briefly with their families.Germ control is a major priority during crewed space missions even without a global pandemic. Behnken and Hurley quarantined at their homes and at the Johnson Space Center in Houston beginning May 15 so as to not take any pathogens into space with them.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk takes full advantage of Dragon launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk also founded electric carmaker Tesla, and on Wednesday he made sure both of his companies\u2019 products were on display.When astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley traveled to the launchpad Wednesday, they made the trip in Tesla Model X vehicles.It wasn\u2019t the first time Musk had highlighted a Tesla connection with SpaceX launches. For the first launch of the Falcon Heavy booster, the more advanced sibling of the Falcon 9 rocket powering Wednesday\u2019s Crew Dragon mission, it carried a special payload: a ruby red Tesla convertible.Musk put a mannequin in the Tesla roadster and blasted it off with Falcon Heavy, sending the automobile into orbit.It was a bit of marketing to go along with SpaceX\u2019s brash announcement to the rest of the aerospace industry that it had arrived.\u201cLockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they\u2019ve certainly tried to stomp on us,\u201d Musk once said. \u201cI think we have a shot at prevailing. But we\u2019re certainly a small up-and-comer going against giants.\u201dMusk hasn\u2019t shied away from using this launch to market both SpaceX and Tesla. The space company\u2019s logo and trademarks are featured prominently throughout the launch site. The flight technicians assisting astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are wearing SpaceX-branded gear from head to toe. Even the astronauts\u2019 flight suits include prominent SpaceX word marks.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPresident Trump arrives at Kennedy Space CenterReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump and first lady Melania deplaned at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 27, planning to witness a historic SpaceX launch. (The Washington Post)President Trump has already gotten a good look at the Crew Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 booster.Air Force One flew by historic launchpad 39A just before 3 p.m. and landed moments later. Trump and first lady Melania Trump were greeted by Bob Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center, among others, after landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Trumps are scheduled to tour NASA crew quarters and the Artemis capsule, built for a trip around the moon, at Kennedy Space Center.Great shot of Air Force One flying over Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. https://t.co/7jj9TtCy3U#LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/LrNxGw9ibR\u2014 Dan Linden (@DanLinden) May 27, 2020\n\nThe Trumps will also receive a briefing on the Crew Dragon\u2019s mission, called Demo-2, and the president will speak after the launch.Vice President Pence arrived in Florida in advance and had been exchanging pleasantries with the astronauts\u2019 families when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley emerged and spoke with their families. Pence flashed a thumbs up as the astronauts got inside a white Tesla with a NASA logo on the sides.The Demo-2 mission and the first manned launch of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program will mark the culmination of an effort started by former president Barack Obama.But a successful launch would be a moment of triumph for the Trump administration, which boasts it is \u201crenewing American leadership in space,\u201d and it would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads. If something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.For Trump and NASA, the stakes are enormous for upcoming flight with crewTo this White House, space holds a special place \u2014 as a frontier to explore, a domain that\u2019s been militarized and an opportunity for economic expansion. It has moved aggressively on all fronts, reconstituting the National Space Council with Pence as its chair, speeding up efforts to return to the moon, standing up the new Space Force military branch, and slashing regulations while promoting the growth of a commercial space industry.Pence has declared American astronauts would reach the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX rocket set to launch from historic territoryReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkCrew Dragon will launch from what many in the aerospace industry consider hallowed ground: Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A.That was the starting point for Apollo moon missions and space shuttle launches, including the Apollo 11 flight that took astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969.SpaceX leased the rights to use the facility in 2014, and it\u2019s become the company\u2019s beachhead for testing the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as its Crew Dragon spacecraft that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station. \u201cThere\u2019s no more sacred real estate in the space community than that launchpad we\u2019ll be flying from,\u201d SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk told The Washington Post.If Wednesday\u2019s launch is successful, the United States once again will have the ability to launch people to the International Space Station; since the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, American astronauts have had to ride Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the station.Launchpad 39A will also be the future home of SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft, which is designed for voyages to the moon.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementForecasters closely eyeing radar imagery as thunderstorms pass through Cape CanaveralReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkA report from NASA television early Wednesday afternoon was optimistic about the weather, noting favorable upper atmosphere conditions for launch as well as few concerns about air or ocean conditions downstream of the launch site.The major outstanding issue was whether thunderstorms might pass through or come close to the launch area later in the afternoon.Launch decisions could be made up to 30 minutes before launch. At 12:22 p.m. Wednesday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted the mission was moving forward but weather was being monitored. At 2:05 p.m., weather radar showed showers and thunderstorms, some containing lightning and heavy rain, approaching the Space Coast from the west. A special marine warning was in effect until 3:30 p.m. for coastal waters for heavy showers and storms with wind gusts potentially topping 39 mph.A tornado warning was even in effect until 2:15 p.m. in north central Brevard County, about 20 miles north of Cape Canaveral. There is a possibility this storm activity will leave the Space Coast by 3 or 3:30 p.m. and that the heaviest of these storms will pass just north of Cape Canaveral. However, some pop-up storms still could follow in the wake of this initial line. While high-resolution forecast models had simulated numerous late afternoon thunderstorms near Cape Canaveral in the morning, early afternoon simulations predicted more somewhat spottier storm activity around the launch time at 4:33 p.m.Read more updates on the weather here.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTom Cruise teaming with NASA to film a movie aboard the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage and Christian Davenport2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkAs \u201cMaverick\u201d in the film \u201cTop Gun,\u201d actor Tom Cruise famously said he had \u201cthe need \u2014 the need for speed.\u201dNow he\u2019s going to get it.NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed Tuesday that the space agency is working with Cruise to film a movie aboard the International Space Station, which whizzes around in Earth orbit at 17,500 mph.In a tweet, Bridenstine wrote that \u201cNASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA\u2019s ambitious plans a reality.\u201d\u201cIf we can get Tom Cruise to inspire elementary kids to join the Navy and be a pilot, why can\u2019t we get Tom Cruise to inspire the next Elon Musk?\u201d Bridenstine said Wednesday. \u201cThat\u2019s what we need, a new generation of many Elon Musks, and that\u2019s what this launch is about today.\u201dAdded Musk of a Cruise flick filmed in space: \u201cI\u2019d watch that movie.\u201dA NASA spokesman declined to comment further.The announcement comes as NASA is working to open up the orbiting laboratory to more commercial interests, and as SpaceX is on the cusp of flying NASA astronauts there from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Last year, Bridenstine said the space agency would change its policy prohibiting paying tourists to fly to the space station. Over the years, Russia flew several private citizens there, who reportedly paid millions of dollars for the experience.Under NASA\u2019s plan, paying customers could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days at a cost of $35,000 a day.SpaceX and Boeing, the companies working to develop spacecraft capable of flying crews to the station, have been encouraged to fly private citizens as well. Neither has said how much they would charge for the rides, but estimates have ranged as high as $50 million.Earlier this year, SpaceX announced it would fly three space tourists to the International Space Station for Axiom Space, a company vying to build a commercial space station.Bridenstine has pushed to commercialize low Earth orbit, creating more economic interests in space. He has floated the idea of shooting advertisements on the space station and even selling naming rights to rockets and spacecraft the way professional sports stadiums do.He\u2019s tirelessly pushed to raise NASA\u2019s profile in popular culture, trying to relax rules of astronauts appearing in commercials, for example.\u201cI\u2019d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I\u2019d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cI\u2019d like to see, maybe one day, NASA astronauts on the cover of a cereal box, embedded into the American culture.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts board Dragon capsule, conduct systems checks; hatch is closedReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe hatch on the Dragon capsule has closed.Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley entered the Crew Dragon capsule just before 2 p.m., roughly two and a half hours before the scheduled launch.LIVE NOW: History is about to be made. Watch as @NASA_Astronauts #LaunchAmerica to the @Space_Station from American soil for the first time in nine years: https://t.co/U1COQzFy4v https://t.co/U1COQzFy4v\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 27, 2020\n\nSpaceX technicians helped the astronauts board the vessel \u2014 a process called \u201cingress\u201d \u2014 and strap their custom-fit flight suits into the two center seats of the cabin. Those flight suits plug into Dragon via an \u201cumbilical\u201d chord that controls the garments\u2019 function. The astronauts\u2019 communication lines, heating and cooling air supply and pressurization components are all governed through that input.Before snapping their helmets closed during a systems check, Hurley cleaned his glasses; Behnken tightened the straps around his shoulders.Almost 20 minutes after boarding, the seats in the cabin reclined to give Behnken and Hurley a view of the touch screen instruments of the spacecraft. The Dragon capsule is autonomous, but the astronauts can take control of the vessel if something goes wrong.The latest weather updates as launch nearsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage and Jason Samenow2:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkA report from NASA TV early Wednesday afternoon was optimistic about weather conditions noting favorable upper atmosphere conditions for the launch of the Crew Dragon capsule and few concerns about air or ocean conditions downstream of the launch site. The outstanding issue is whether thunderstorms might pass through or come close to the launch area later in the afternoon.Scientists and weather experts are keeping a close eye on the remnants of a storm system that could force NASA to postpone Wednesday\u2019s history-making launch to Saturday or Sunday.Forecasters said a storm system that battered the Florida panhandle over the weekend and threatened flooding in coastal areas of the Carolinas on Wednesday could leave isolated thunderstorms or pockets of cumulus or anvil clouds hovering around the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center.Thunderstorms are forecast to erupt along a convergence zone over the Florida Peninsula on Wednesday afternoon as sea breezes from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean meet.Read more With two veteran NASA astronauts, the postponed effort would have been the first human launch to orbit from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and also the first time a private company has performed the feat. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket launch is scrubbed due to weather  ",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket launch is scrubbed due to weather   (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6374",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/spacex-launch-live-updates/",
        "text": "Follow our live coverage of the SpaceX NASA launch hereThe long-anticipated launch of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, with two Americans on board, was scrubbed after weather forecasters predicted that clouds the rocket would have had to fly through violated rules NASA has drawn to avoid lightning strikes.Watch live coverage of the SpaceX launch with The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey, Christian Davenport and Joel Achenbach, featuring an exclusive interview with Elon Musk and guest appearances by Suni Williams, former NASA astronauts Scott Kelly and Pam Melroy, as well as Ellen Stofan, the Director of the Smithsonian\u2019s Air & Space Museum. The beginning of NASA\u2019s next chapter of space exploration will have to wait until the weekend. Space officials Wednesday postponed the launch of a crewed SpaceX rocket en route to the International Space Station because of problematic weather around Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla., and a tropical storm brewing off the coast of the Carolinas. The early components of Tropical Storm Bertha had battered the Florida Panhandle over the weekend and parked over coastal areas of North and South Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving the risk of isolated thunderstorms or pockets of clouds hovering around the rocket\u2019s launch site.With lightning seen in the area 17 minutes before the scheduled 4:33 p.m., launch time, the flight\u2019s weather officer made the call to \u201cscrub\u201d the flight. The Crew Dragon\u2019s mission, known as Demo-2, operated under an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period during which the International Space Station is lined up with the rocket\u2019s flight trajectory. Any sort of delay would cause the rocket to miss that period.The mission\u2019s next launch window is scheduled for Saturday at 3:22 p.m., from historic launchpad 39A, the same facility that launched the first astronauts to the moon aboard Apollo 11 in 1969.Capital Weather Gang: Weather scrubs SpaceX launchThe flight would have culminated years of work and the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts. For SpaceX, it was the crescendo of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when founder and chief executive Elon Musk set out to start a space company.Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are both former military pilots who previously had each flown two missions on the space shuttle. Once the spacecraft is launched, it is scheduled to travel to the space station, 240 miles above the Earth. That journey is expected to take about 18 hours. But their ride to space this time will be on a vastly different spacecraft: a fully autonomous, next-generation capsule outfitted with Tesla-like touch screens and temperature controls that allow astronauts to keep the cabin at between 65 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit.Even with a successful launch, their mission is far from complete. The spacecraft needs to catch up with the space station and match the altitude of the laboratory, which orbits the Earth at 17,500 mph, and dock with it in a risky and carefully choreographed dance.Meet the astronauts about to fly in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon CapsuleThe mission is a test flight designed to ensure the rocket and spacecraft can fly humans safely. Once complete, NASA and SpaceX will review the data and certify the spacecraft for additional missions that would regularly fly as many as four astronauts to the space station and back.Below are the updates from Wednesday\u2019s almost-launch.SpaceX launch scrubbed due to lightningReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:29 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA\u2019s next chapter will have to wait. Officials postponed the launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 booster 17 minutes before the scheduled launch time because of lightning near Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla.Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken began protocols to \u201cscrub\u201d the launch, siphoning the propellants out of the rocket boosters and powering down the space craft. The Dragon mission operates under an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\u201d or a narrow period of time during which atmospheric conditions are amenable for flight.With remnants of Tropical Storm Bertha in the area, those conditions could not be met, officials concluded. The next launch window is Saturday at 3:22 p.m.Weather conditions caused the violation of multiple launch conditions, including nearby thunderstorms that were causing lightning strikes to hit a few miles off the coast of the launch site. Conditions were improving as the launch neared, but flight engineers ran out of time before skies would have cleared enough to permit a safe launch.Weather forecasters work to ensure that the spacecraft would have a low risk of being struck by lightning during its launch and would not be subjected to strong air currents contained in cumulus clouds and the top of thunderstorms, known as anvil clouds.The technical violation has to do with electrical fields at and above the launch pad, and the Air Force\u2019s 45th Weather Squadron, which forecasts for launch activities, has specialized instruments to monitor such conditions.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on May 27 discussed SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch, which was postponed to May 30 due to inclement weather. (NASA)AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFueling continues on SpaceX flight as questionable weather swirlsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA began fueling the Falcon 9 booster at Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A just before 4 p.m., a major positive step toward launching the rocket and astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley as prohibitive weather swirls in the area.Propellants are loaded into the two booster components of the Falcon 9 roughly an hour before launch time, slated for 4:33 p.m. But weather conditions continued to appear problematic downrange.The Crew Dragon mission is operating on an \u201cinstantaneous launch window,\" or a very narrow period under which conditions are amiable for a launch. Any delay would likely cause the mission to miss the window and force NASA to postpone the flight until another instantaneous launch window at 3:22 p.m.Officials are following lightning in the area, a prohibitive condition.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump, Pence forgo protective masks at SpaceX launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:11 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump and Vice President Pence did not wear protective face masks while touring NASA facilities Wednesday before the planned launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station.Trump and Pence, joined by first lady Melania Trump and second lady Karen Pence, inspected NASA crew quarters and the Artemis moon-orbiting capsule just after 3 p.m. at the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. NASA officials and flight technicians around them wore protective face masks and practiced social distancing during those tours.Spotted wearing a mask at the Kennedy Space Center: Ivanka pic.twitter.com/ShsG4Ksdgn\u2014 Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) May 27, 2020\n\nThe vice president wore a surgical mask earlier in the day when he greeted astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after they donned their flight suits and drove to historic launchpad 39A. Pence offered well wishes and spoke briefly with their families.Germ control is a major priority during crewed space missions even without a global pandemic. Behnken and Hurley quarantined at their homes and at the Johnson Space Center in Houston beginning May 15 so as to not take any pathogens into space with them.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk takes full advantage of Dragon launchReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage4:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk also founded electric carmaker Tesla, and on Wednesday he made sure both of his companies\u2019 products were on display.When astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley traveled to the launchpad Wednesday, they made the trip in Tesla Model X vehicles.It wasn\u2019t the first time Musk had highlighted a Tesla connection with SpaceX launches. For the first launch of the Falcon Heavy booster, the more advanced sibling of the Falcon 9 rocket powering Wednesday\u2019s Crew Dragon mission, it carried a special payload: a ruby red Tesla convertible.Musk put a mannequin in the Tesla roadster and blasted it off with Falcon Heavy, sending the automobile into orbit.It was a bit of marketing to go along with SpaceX\u2019s brash announcement to the rest of the aerospace industry that it had arrived.\u201cLockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they\u2019ve certainly tried to stomp on us,\u201d Musk once said. \u201cI think we have a shot at prevailing. But we\u2019re certainly a small up-and-comer going against giants.\u201dMusk hasn\u2019t shied away from using this launch to market both SpaceX and Tesla. The space company\u2019s logo and trademarks are featured prominently throughout the launch site. The flight technicians assisting astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are wearing SpaceX-branded gear from head to toe. Even the astronauts\u2019 flight suits include prominent SpaceX word marks.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementPresident Trump arrives at Kennedy Space CenterReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Trump and first lady Melania deplaned at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 27, planning to witness a historic SpaceX launch. (The Washington Post)President Trump has already gotten a good look at the Crew Dragon capsule and the Falcon 9 booster.Air Force One flew by historic launchpad 39A just before 3 p.m. and landed moments later. Trump and first lady Melania Trump were greeted by Bob Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center, among others, after landing at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Trumps are scheduled to tour NASA crew quarters and the Artemis capsule, built for a trip around the moon, at Kennedy Space Center.Great shot of Air Force One flying over Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. https://t.co/7jj9TtCy3U#LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/LrNxGw9ibR\u2014 Dan Linden (@DanLinden) May 27, 2020\n\nThe Trumps will also receive a briefing on the Crew Dragon\u2019s mission, called Demo-2, and the president will speak after the launch.Vice President Pence arrived in Florida in advance and had been exchanging pleasantries with the astronauts\u2019 families when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley emerged and spoke with their families. Pence flashed a thumbs up as the astronauts got inside a white Tesla with a NASA logo on the sides.The Demo-2 mission and the first manned launch of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program will mark the culmination of an effort started by former president Barack Obama.But a successful launch would be a moment of triumph for the Trump administration, which boasts it is \u201crenewing American leadership in space,\u201d and it would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads. If something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.For Trump and NASA, the stakes are enormous for upcoming flight with crewTo this White House, space holds a special place \u2014 as a frontier to explore, a domain that\u2019s been militarized and an opportunity for economic expansion. It has moved aggressively on all fronts, reconstituting the National Space Council with Pence as its chair, speeding up efforts to return to the moon, standing up the new Space Force military branch, and slashing regulations while promoting the growth of a commercial space industry.Pence has declared American astronauts would reach the lunar surface \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX rocket set to launch from historic territoryReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage3:15 p.m.Link copiedLinkCrew Dragon will launch from what many in the aerospace industry consider hallowed ground: Kennedy Space Center launchpad 39A.That was the starting point for Apollo moon missions and space shuttle launches, including the Apollo 11 flight that took astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969.SpaceX leased the rights to use the facility in 2014, and it\u2019s become the company\u2019s beachhead for testing the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets as well as its Crew Dragon spacecraft that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station. \u201cThere\u2019s no more sacred real estate in the space community than that launchpad we\u2019ll be flying from,\u201d SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk told The Washington Post.If Wednesday\u2019s launch is successful, the United States once again will have the ability to launch people to the International Space Station; since the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, American astronauts have had to ride Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the station.Launchpad 39A will also be the future home of SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft, which is designed for voyages to the moon.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementForecasters closely eyeing radar imagery as thunderstorms pass through Cape CanaveralReturn to menuBy Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkA report from NASA television early Wednesday afternoon was optimistic about the weather, noting favorable upper atmosphere conditions for launch as well as few concerns about air or ocean conditions downstream of the launch site.The major outstanding issue was whether thunderstorms might pass through or come close to the launch area later in the afternoon.Launch decisions could be made up to 30 minutes before launch. At 12:22 p.m. Wednesday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted the mission was moving forward but weather was being monitored. At 2:05 p.m., weather radar showed showers and thunderstorms, some containing lightning and heavy rain, approaching the Space Coast from the west. A special marine warning was in effect until 3:30 p.m. for coastal waters for heavy showers and storms with wind gusts potentially topping 39 mph.A tornado warning was even in effect until 2:15 p.m. in north central Brevard County, about 20 miles north of Cape Canaveral. There is a possibility this storm activity will leave the Space Coast by 3 or 3:30 p.m. and that the heaviest of these storms will pass just north of Cape Canaveral. However, some pop-up storms still could follow in the wake of this initial line. While high-resolution forecast models had simulated numerous late afternoon thunderstorms near Cape Canaveral in the morning, early afternoon simulations predicted more somewhat spottier storm activity around the launch time at 4:33 p.m.Read more updates on the weather here.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTom Cruise teaming with NASA to film a movie aboard the International Space StationReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage and Christian Davenport2:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkAs \u201cMaverick\u201d in the film \u201cTop Gun,\u201d actor Tom Cruise famously said he had \u201cthe need \u2014 the need for speed.\u201dNow he\u2019s going to get it.NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed Tuesday that the space agency is working with Cruise to film a movie aboard the International Space Station, which whizzes around in Earth orbit at 17,500 mph.In a tweet, Bridenstine wrote that \u201cNASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA\u2019s ambitious plans a reality.\u201d\u201cIf we can get Tom Cruise to inspire elementary kids to join the Navy and be a pilot, why can\u2019t we get Tom Cruise to inspire the next Elon Musk?\u201d Bridenstine said Wednesday. \u201cThat\u2019s what we need, a new generation of many Elon Musks, and that\u2019s what this launch is about today.\u201dAdded Musk of a Cruise flick filmed in space: \u201cI\u2019d watch that movie.\u201dA NASA spokesman declined to comment further.The announcement comes as NASA is working to open up the orbiting laboratory to more commercial interests, and as SpaceX is on the cusp of flying NASA astronauts there from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Last year, Bridenstine said the space agency would change its policy prohibiting paying tourists to fly to the space station. Over the years, Russia flew several private citizens there, who reportedly paid millions of dollars for the experience.Under NASA\u2019s plan, paying customers could fly to the station and stay for up to 30 days at a cost of $35,000 a day.SpaceX and Boeing, the companies working to develop spacecraft capable of flying crews to the station, have been encouraged to fly private citizens as well. Neither has said how much they would charge for the rides, but estimates have ranged as high as $50 million.Earlier this year, SpaceX announced it would fly three space tourists to the International Space Station for Axiom Space, a company vying to build a commercial space station.Bridenstine has pushed to commercialize low Earth orbit, creating more economic interests in space. He has floated the idea of shooting advertisements on the space station and even selling naming rights to rockets and spacecraft the way professional sports stadiums do.He\u2019s tirelessly pushed to raise NASA\u2019s profile in popular culture, trying to relax rules of astronauts appearing in commercials, for example.\u201cI\u2019d like to see kids growing up, instead of maybe wanting to be like a professional sports star, I\u2019d like to see them grow up wanting to be a NASA astronaut, or a NASA scientist,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cI\u2019d like to see, maybe one day, NASA astronauts on the cover of a cereal box, embedded into the American culture.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts board Dragon capsule, conduct systems checks; hatch is closedReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe hatch on the Dragon capsule has closed.Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley entered the Crew Dragon capsule just before 2 p.m., roughly two and a half hours before the scheduled launch.LIVE NOW: History is about to be made. Watch as @NASA_Astronauts #LaunchAmerica to the @Space_Station from American soil for the first time in nine years: https://t.co/U1COQzFy4v https://t.co/U1COQzFy4v\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 27, 2020\n\nSpaceX technicians helped the astronauts board the vessel \u2014 a process called \u201cingress\u201d \u2014 and strap their custom-fit flight suits into the two center seats of the cabin. Those flight suits plug into Dragon via an \u201cumbilical\u201d chord that controls the garments\u2019 function. The astronauts\u2019 communication lines, heating and cooling air supply and pressurization components are all governed through that input.Before snapping their helmets closed during a systems check, Hurley cleaned his glasses; Behnken tightened the straps around his shoulders.Almost 20 minutes after boarding, the seats in the cabin reclined to give Behnken and Hurley a view of the touch screen instruments of the spacecraft. The Dragon capsule is autonomous, but the astronauts can take control of the vessel if something goes wrong.The latest weather updates as launch nearsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage and Jason Samenow2:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkA report from NASA TV early Wednesday afternoon was optimistic about weather conditions noting favorable upper atmosphere conditions for the launch of the Crew Dragon capsule and few concerns about air or ocean conditions downstream of the launch site. The outstanding issue is whether thunderstorms might pass through or come close to the launch area later in the afternoon.Scientists and weather experts are keeping a close eye on the remnants of a storm system that could force NASA to postpone Wednesday\u2019s history-making launch to Saturday or Sunday.Forecasters said a storm system that battered the Florida panhandle over the weekend and threatened flooding in coastal areas of the Carolinas on Wednesday could leave isolated thunderstorms or pockets of cumulus or anvil clouds hovering around the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center.Thunderstorms are forecast to erupt along a convergence zone over the Florida Peninsula on Wednesday afternoon as sea breezes from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean meet.Read more With two veteran NASA astronauts, the postponed effort would have been the first human launch to orbit from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and also the first time a private company has performed the feat. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket launch is scrubbed due to weather  ",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditions offshore  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6375",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/13/elon-musk-spacex-coronavirus-launch/",
        "text": "Follow live coverage of the SpaceX launch here.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX launched a pair of NASA astronauts into space in a kick-the-tires test flight designed to wring out any problems with its Crew Dragon spacecraft and the rocket that would propel it to space on a two-month mission to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow that NASA has deemed that mission a success, from launch to docking to splashdown, SpaceX is moving ahead with what it hopes will be regular flights to the space station carrying full contingents of astronauts for extended stays. The first of those \u201coperational\u201d flights, as NASA calls them, is scheduled for this weekend, with four space travelers \u2014 three from the United States and one from Japan \u2014 aboard. But there is nothing routine about it.Story continues below advertisementThat was made clear Friday, when the mission\u2019s planned Saturday launch was thrown into doubt after Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, tweeted that he had twice tested positive for the coronavirus, but also had tested negative the same day. He said he had been feeling unwell the past few days: \u201cMild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days. Right now, no symptoms, although I did take NyQuil.\u201dAdvertisementBut the news left SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine whether Musk had come in contact with anyone who might have had access to the astronauts. On Friday afternoon, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post that contact tracing showed that \u201cno mission essential personnel has been in touch with Elon Musk,\u201d news Bridenstine called \u201cvery, very positive.\u201d\u201cSo there should be no impact on the mission,\u201d he added. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHours later, however, the launch was moved to Sunday after weather forecasters determined that conditions offshore were likely to be too rough to allow the recovery of the vehicle\u2019s booster. This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight with astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for the spring of 2021. That would mark the first time NASA allowed a flight of crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.AdvertisementThe launch is now scheduled for 7:27 p.m. Sunday.Flying humans to space is a risky and difficult endeavor that, as SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said, requires \u201ca million things to go right\u201d for a successful launch, \u201cand only one thing has to go wrong to have a particularly bad day.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSpeaking to reporters earlier this week, Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, said that every time he comes to the Kennedy Space Center he visits a grove of trees planted to commemorate the lives lost when the shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff. The trees remind him of the responsibility the company has.\u201cWe hold the lives of people in our hands as we transport them into space,\u201d he said. The Crew Dragon stays attached to the station \u201cto be a lifeboat if they need it, and then we bring them home to their families. And that is really important. We ask our teams to read the accident reports of the previous accidents that have happened to take those lessons to heart as well.\u201dAdvertisementRockets and spacecraft are complex machines, operating under extraordinary circumstances \u2014 propellants that are extremely cold, ignited to generate a massive amount of thrust \u2014 and filled with thousands of parts that need to work perfectly.Story continues below advertisementTo get to this point, SpaceX has had to overcome a series of failures. Its Falcon 9 rocket has exploded twice \u2014 once in 2015 during a cargo resupply mission to the space station, then in 2016 while being fueled ahead of an engine test fire. Then last year, its Dragon capsule exploded during a test of its abort engines.\u201cWe\u2019re transitioning from a test flight to operational flights,\u201d Bridenstine said Sunday during a ceremony to welcome the astronauts to the Kennedy Space Center. \u201cMake no mistake, every flight is a test flight when it comes to space travel. But it\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementSpaceX got another reminder of how tricky rockets can be when during a launch for the U.S. Space Force last month the rocket\u2019s sensors noticed a problem and autonomously aborted the flight with just two seconds to go on the countdown clock.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX later discovered the problem was that a little bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves. During a news conference last month, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said that if the rocket had fired, it would have been what\u2019s called a \u201chard start,\u201d which he said was \u201cnot necessarily bad. In most cases, it rattles the engine and it may cause a little bit of damage on the engines. In extreme cases, it may cause more damage to the engines. In general, you do not want that. You want a good start-up.\u201dHe said that the rocket was safe \u201cthe whole time\u201d because it was \u201cheld down on the ground\u201d while the rocket\u2019s computers shut down the operation before it could launch.AdvertisementStill, SpaceX swapped out two of the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket that will be used to fly this weekend\u2019s Crew-1 mission and ran another series of tests to ensure they were working properly.Story continues below advertisementAfter the test flight, SpaceX also noticed a little more erosion than expected on the capsule\u2019s heat shield, which protects the astronauts as they fly back to Earth through the atmosphere. SpaceX decided to reinforce those areas, and NASA has since approved the changes.Those technical challenges serve as additional reminders of how a rocket as tall as a 23-story building could be tripped up by small components, some no bigger than an insect.\u201cNo question, rocketry is tough and requires a lot of attention to detail,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cRockets are humbling. Every day I work with them, it\u2019s always a challenge, and it\u2019s always difficult. And you just have to be super diligent and on your toes to get this right.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe problem with the engine and the heat shield posed no danger to the astronauts, officials have said repeatedly. And NASA this week said that after years of work it had certified SpaceX to fly crews to space, the first time a commercial company has held that responsibility.The message from NASA to SpaceX is: \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate. \u201cYou\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dBut human spaceflight is still a risky endeavor, with all sorts of hurdles that need to be cleared before flying to the space station is even close to being routine.Story continues below advertisementUnlike the space shuttle, which had no abort capability, the Crew Dragon is equipped with emergency escape engines that can pull the capsule away from the rocket in case anything goes wrong. The spacecraft would then land somewhere in the Atlantic, and rescue crews from the Defense Department and ManTech, a defense contractor, will be standing by up and down the East Coast to recover the crew.AdvertisementThe chances of an abort are low. \u201cBut we have to plan for the worst case,\u201d said Mike McClure, a ManTech program manager who used to command the Air Force\u2019s rescue detachment. \u201cAnd the worst case that we are preparing for is if the spacecraft has to come down and splashes down in the deep open.\u201dAmid the pandemic, the crew, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, and their families have been in lockdown for weeks. And NASA said it has taken extra precaution to ensure they are not exposed.\u201cIt\u2019s not only to protect us,\u201d Hopkins said during a news conference Monday. \u201cBut also to protect the entire team \u2014 the trainers, the people that are building the vehicles, the people that are sitting in the control rooms, all of that. It has taken a special effort to protect everybody.\u201d There is nothing routine about space travel, something made clear Friday when the mission was thrown into doubt after Elon Musk tweeted that he had tested positive for the coronavirus twice and negative twice. NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditions offshore ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditions offshore  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6376",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/13/elon-musk-spacex-coronavirus-launch/",
        "text": "Follow live coverage of the SpaceX launch here.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX launched a pair of NASA astronauts into space in a kick-the-tires test flight designed to wring out any problems with its Crew Dragon spacecraft and the rocket that would propel it to space on a two-month mission to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow that NASA has deemed that mission a success, from launch to docking to splashdown, SpaceX is moving ahead with what it hopes will be regular flights to the space station carrying full contingents of astronauts for extended stays. The first of those \u201coperational\u201d flights, as NASA calls them, is scheduled for this weekend, with four space travelers \u2014 three from the United States and one from Japan \u2014 aboard. But there is nothing routine about it.Story continues below advertisementThat was made clear Friday, when the mission\u2019s planned Saturday launch was thrown into doubt after Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, tweeted that he had twice tested positive for the coronavirus, but also had tested negative the same day. He said he had been feeling unwell the past few days: \u201cMild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days. Right now, no symptoms, although I did take NyQuil.\u201dAdvertisementBut the news left SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine whether Musk had come in contact with anyone who might have had access to the astronauts. On Friday afternoon, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post that contact tracing showed that \u201cno mission essential personnel has been in touch with Elon Musk,\u201d news Bridenstine called \u201cvery, very positive.\u201d\u201cSo there should be no impact on the mission,\u201d he added. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHours later, however, the launch was moved to Sunday after weather forecasters determined that conditions offshore were likely to be too rough to allow the recovery of the vehicle\u2019s booster. This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight with astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for the spring of 2021. That would mark the first time NASA allowed a flight of crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.AdvertisementThe launch is now scheduled for 7:27 p.m. Sunday.Flying humans to space is a risky and difficult endeavor that, as SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said, requires \u201ca million things to go right\u201d for a successful launch, \u201cand only one thing has to go wrong to have a particularly bad day.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSpeaking to reporters earlier this week, Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, said that every time he comes to the Kennedy Space Center he visits a grove of trees planted to commemorate the lives lost when the shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff. The trees remind him of the responsibility the company has.\u201cWe hold the lives of people in our hands as we transport them into space,\u201d he said. The Crew Dragon stays attached to the station \u201cto be a lifeboat if they need it, and then we bring them home to their families. And that is really important. We ask our teams to read the accident reports of the previous accidents that have happened to take those lessons to heart as well.\u201dAdvertisementRockets and spacecraft are complex machines, operating under extraordinary circumstances \u2014 propellants that are extremely cold, ignited to generate a massive amount of thrust \u2014 and filled with thousands of parts that need to work perfectly.Story continues below advertisementTo get to this point, SpaceX has had to overcome a series of failures. Its Falcon 9 rocket has exploded twice \u2014 once in 2015 during a cargo resupply mission to the space station, then in 2016 while being fueled ahead of an engine test fire. Then last year, its Dragon capsule exploded during a test of its abort engines.\u201cWe\u2019re transitioning from a test flight to operational flights,\u201d Bridenstine said Sunday during a ceremony to welcome the astronauts to the Kennedy Space Center. \u201cMake no mistake, every flight is a test flight when it comes to space travel. But it\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementSpaceX got another reminder of how tricky rockets can be when during a launch for the U.S. Space Force last month the rocket\u2019s sensors noticed a problem and autonomously aborted the flight with just two seconds to go on the countdown clock.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX later discovered the problem was that a little bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves. During a news conference last month, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said that if the rocket had fired, it would have been what\u2019s called a \u201chard start,\u201d which he said was \u201cnot necessarily bad. In most cases, it rattles the engine and it may cause a little bit of damage on the engines. In extreme cases, it may cause more damage to the engines. In general, you do not want that. You want a good start-up.\u201dHe said that the rocket was safe \u201cthe whole time\u201d because it was \u201cheld down on the ground\u201d while the rocket\u2019s computers shut down the operation before it could launch.AdvertisementStill, SpaceX swapped out two of the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket that will be used to fly this weekend\u2019s Crew-1 mission and ran another series of tests to ensure they were working properly.Story continues below advertisementAfter the test flight, SpaceX also noticed a little more erosion than expected on the capsule\u2019s heat shield, which protects the astronauts as they fly back to Earth through the atmosphere. SpaceX decided to reinforce those areas, and NASA has since approved the changes.Those technical challenges serve as additional reminders of how a rocket as tall as a 23-story building could be tripped up by small components, some no bigger than an insect.\u201cNo question, rocketry is tough and requires a lot of attention to detail,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cRockets are humbling. Every day I work with them, it\u2019s always a challenge, and it\u2019s always difficult. And you just have to be super diligent and on your toes to get this right.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe problem with the engine and the heat shield posed no danger to the astronauts, officials have said repeatedly. And NASA this week said that after years of work it had certified SpaceX to fly crews to space, the first time a commercial company has held that responsibility.The message from NASA to SpaceX is: \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate. \u201cYou\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dBut human spaceflight is still a risky endeavor, with all sorts of hurdles that need to be cleared before flying to the space station is even close to being routine.Story continues below advertisementUnlike the space shuttle, which had no abort capability, the Crew Dragon is equipped with emergency escape engines that can pull the capsule away from the rocket in case anything goes wrong. The spacecraft would then land somewhere in the Atlantic, and rescue crews from the Defense Department and ManTech, a defense contractor, will be standing by up and down the East Coast to recover the crew.AdvertisementThe chances of an abort are low. \u201cBut we have to plan for the worst case,\u201d said Mike McClure, a ManTech program manager who used to command the Air Force\u2019s rescue detachment. \u201cAnd the worst case that we are preparing for is if the spacecraft has to come down and splashes down in the deep open.\u201dAmid the pandemic, the crew, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, and their families have been in lockdown for weeks. And NASA said it has taken extra precaution to ensure they are not exposed.\u201cIt\u2019s not only to protect us,\u201d Hopkins said during a news conference Monday. \u201cBut also to protect the entire team \u2014 the trainers, the people that are building the vehicles, the people that are sitting in the control rooms, all of that. It has taken a special effort to protect everybody.\u201d There is nothing routine about space travel, something made clear Friday when the mission was thrown into doubt after Elon Musk tweeted that he had tested positive for the coronavirus twice and negative twice. NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditions offshore ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditions offshore  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6377",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/13/elon-musk-spacex-coronavirus-launch/",
        "text": "Follow live coverage of the SpaceX launch here.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 In May, SpaceX launched a pair of NASA astronauts into space in a kick-the-tires test flight designed to wring out any problems with its Crew Dragon spacecraft and the rocket that would propel it to space on a two-month mission to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow that NASA has deemed that mission a success, from launch to docking to splashdown, SpaceX is moving ahead with what it hopes will be regular flights to the space station carrying full contingents of astronauts for extended stays. The first of those \u201coperational\u201d flights, as NASA calls them, is scheduled for this weekend, with four space travelers \u2014 three from the United States and one from Japan \u2014 aboard. But there is nothing routine about it.Story continues below advertisementThat was made clear Friday, when the mission\u2019s planned Saturday launch was thrown into doubt after Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, tweeted that he had twice tested positive for the coronavirus, but also had tested negative the same day. He said he had been feeling unwell the past few days: \u201cMild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days. Right now, no symptoms, although I did take NyQuil.\u201dAdvertisementBut the news left SpaceX and NASA scrambling to determine whether Musk had come in contact with anyone who might have had access to the astronauts. On Friday afternoon, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told The Washington Post that contact tracing showed that \u201cno mission essential personnel has been in touch with Elon Musk,\u201d news Bridenstine called \u201cvery, very positive.\u201d\u201cSo there should be no impact on the mission,\u201d he added. \u201cI think we\u2019re in good shape, and we\u2019re looking forward to a good launch.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHours later, however, the launch was moved to Sunday after weather forecasters determined that conditions offshore were likely to be too rough to allow the recovery of the vehicle\u2019s booster. This booster is particularly important because SpaceX intends to use it for its next flight with astronauts, the Crew-2 mission, now scheduled for the spring of 2021. That would mark the first time NASA allowed a flight of crew to launch on a booster that had flown previously.AdvertisementThe launch is now scheduled for 7:27 p.m. Sunday.Flying humans to space is a risky and difficult endeavor that, as SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said, requires \u201ca million things to go right\u201d for a successful launch, \u201cand only one thing has to go wrong to have a particularly bad day.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSpeaking to reporters earlier this week, Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s director of crew mission management, said that every time he comes to the Kennedy Space Center he visits a grove of trees planted to commemorate the lives lost when the shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff. The trees remind him of the responsibility the company has.\u201cWe hold the lives of people in our hands as we transport them into space,\u201d he said. The Crew Dragon stays attached to the station \u201cto be a lifeboat if they need it, and then we bring them home to their families. And that is really important. We ask our teams to read the accident reports of the previous accidents that have happened to take those lessons to heart as well.\u201dAdvertisementRockets and spacecraft are complex machines, operating under extraordinary circumstances \u2014 propellants that are extremely cold, ignited to generate a massive amount of thrust \u2014 and filled with thousands of parts that need to work perfectly.Story continues below advertisementTo get to this point, SpaceX has had to overcome a series of failures. Its Falcon 9 rocket has exploded twice \u2014 once in 2015 during a cargo resupply mission to the space station, then in 2016 while being fueled ahead of an engine test fire. Then last year, its Dragon capsule exploded during a test of its abort engines.\u201cWe\u2019re transitioning from a test flight to operational flights,\u201d Bridenstine said Sunday during a ceremony to welcome the astronauts to the Kennedy Space Center. \u201cMake no mistake, every flight is a test flight when it comes to space travel. But it\u2019s also true that we need to routinely be able to go to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementSpaceX got another reminder of how tricky rockets can be when during a launch for the U.S. Space Force last month the rocket\u2019s sensors noticed a problem and autonomously aborted the flight with just two seconds to go on the countdown clock.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX later discovered the problem was that a little bit of lacquer, used to prevent corrosion before being cleaned off, was getting stuck in tiny vent holes in some of its engine valves. During a news conference last month, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said that if the rocket had fired, it would have been what\u2019s called a \u201chard start,\u201d which he said was \u201cnot necessarily bad. In most cases, it rattles the engine and it may cause a little bit of damage on the engines. In extreme cases, it may cause more damage to the engines. In general, you do not want that. You want a good start-up.\u201dHe said that the rocket was safe \u201cthe whole time\u201d because it was \u201cheld down on the ground\u201d while the rocket\u2019s computers shut down the operation before it could launch.AdvertisementStill, SpaceX swapped out two of the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket that will be used to fly this weekend\u2019s Crew-1 mission and ran another series of tests to ensure they were working properly.Story continues below advertisementAfter the test flight, SpaceX also noticed a little more erosion than expected on the capsule\u2019s heat shield, which protects the astronauts as they fly back to Earth through the atmosphere. SpaceX decided to reinforce those areas, and NASA has since approved the changes.Those technical challenges serve as additional reminders of how a rocket as tall as a 23-story building could be tripped up by small components, some no bigger than an insect.\u201cNo question, rocketry is tough and requires a lot of attention to detail,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cRockets are humbling. Every day I work with them, it\u2019s always a challenge, and it\u2019s always difficult. And you just have to be super diligent and on your toes to get this right.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe problem with the engine and the heat shield posed no danger to the astronauts, officials have said repeatedly. And NASA this week said that after years of work it had certified SpaceX to fly crews to space, the first time a commercial company has held that responsibility.The message from NASA to SpaceX is: \u201cYou can safely fly our crew members to and from the International Space Station,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations mission directorate. \u201cYou\u2019ve shown us the data, and we trust you to do that. There\u2019s a big trust factor here. This is a big step for us.\u201dBut human spaceflight is still a risky endeavor, with all sorts of hurdles that need to be cleared before flying to the space station is even close to being routine.Story continues below advertisementUnlike the space shuttle, which had no abort capability, the Crew Dragon is equipped with emergency escape engines that can pull the capsule away from the rocket in case anything goes wrong. The spacecraft would then land somewhere in the Atlantic, and rescue crews from the Defense Department and ManTech, a defense contractor, will be standing by up and down the East Coast to recover the crew.AdvertisementThe chances of an abort are low. \u201cBut we have to plan for the worst case,\u201d said Mike McClure, a ManTech program manager who used to command the Air Force\u2019s rescue detachment. \u201cAnd the worst case that we are preparing for is if the spacecraft has to come down and splashes down in the deep open.\u201dAmid the pandemic, the crew, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, and their families have been in lockdown for weeks. And NASA said it has taken extra precaution to ensure they are not exposed.\u201cIt\u2019s not only to protect us,\u201d Hopkins said during a news conference Monday. \u201cBut also to protect the entire team \u2014 the trainers, the people that are building the vehicles, the people that are sitting in the control rooms, all of that. It has taken a special effort to protect everybody.\u201d There is nothing routine about space travel, something made clear Friday when the mission was thrown into doubt after Elon Musk tweeted that he had tested positive for the coronavirus twice and negative twice. NASA moves SpaceX launch to Sunday because of poor weather conditions offshore ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6378",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/26/another-front-tensions-between-us-china-space/",
        "text": "Fifty years after the United States proved its dominance of space by beating the Soviet Union to landing humans on the moon, the country is confronting the cosmic ambitions of another superpower: China.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina didn\u2019t launch an astronaut into space until 2003 \u2014 more than 40 years after the United States and the Soviet Union did. It has since developed its space program at a torrid pace, even as the United States has become dependent on Russia to maintain a presence on the International Space Station. NASA hasn\u2019t sent another soul to the lunar surface since 1972. But earlier this year, China made history when it became the first nation to land an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a feat it hailed as opening \u201ca new chapter in humanity\u2019s exploration of the moon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA and its contractors are still struggling to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to space, eight years after the last space shuttle landed at the Kennedy Space Center. Meanwhile, China has developed a monster rocket and last year launched more rockets than any other country on Earth, though none with people on board.AdvertisementAnd while NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years.China plans to send another spacecraft to the moon this year. It also has set its sights on the same remote swath of lunar real estate the United States is rushing to reach: the moon\u2019s south pole, where water from ice could prove not only life sustaining, but might also provide the ingredients \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 for propellant to send rockets to other destinations. Though barren, gray and lifeless, it offers a key steppingstone to deeper space exploration and enormous prestige to whoever gets there first.Story continues below advertisementThe United States and China aren\u2019t the only countries eyeing the lunar south pole. On Monday, India launched its Chandrayaan spacecraft on mission there. If successful, India would become the fourth country, after the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China to soft land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.AdvertisementThe United States has noticed China\u2019s ambitions, which have touched off a debate over how to respond and what China\u2019s intentions really are at a time when space is seen as a critical warfighting domain.The Trump administration and hawkish conservatives have cast the competition as a power struggle with enormous consequences \u2014 the moon as the cosmic equivalent of the South China Sea, where China has expanded a military presence that is of concern to the Pentagon.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this year, the White House announced NASA would dramatically speed up its own mission to return to the moon, initially planned for 2028, but now, at the direction of Vice President Pence, moved up to 2024.\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d he said in a speech in March calling for the shortened timeline. China\u2019s landing on the far side of the moon \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementU.S. officials fear the Chinese advance in space.\u201cLooking at Chinese behavior in other shared domains \u2014 the South China Sea, cyberspace \u2014 they\u2019ve given us pause for concern,\u201d Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in an interview. \u201cAnd so looking out in space, it\u2019s hard to imagine that they will behave any better than they\u2019d behaved in other areas where they felt that their national interests are at stake.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNewt Gingrich, the former House speaker who proposed a moon base during his presidential bid in 2012, said China is \u201cgoing to rapidly become the only country that can compete with us for the moon and Mars.\u201d\u201cThey want to prove they are our technological superior,\u201d he said. If China can get \u201cto the south pole before we do, there\u2019s a very real possibility we will find it impossible to operate there.\u201dAdvertisementChina has demonstrated growing military capabilities in space. In 2007, it took out a dead weather satellite with a missile, putting the United States and others on notice that the national security satellites they have in orbit \u2014 used for missile defense, precision-guided munitions and spying \u2014 were vulnerable.\u201cChina views space as the soft underbelly of the U.S. military,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.But he and others think it is wrong to assume China\u2019s activities in space put it and the United States in a warlike race for a single goal. Rather, some analysts said, the countries are engaged in a long-term power competition for national pride and technological development.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s rover is a \u201cscience experiment,\u201d said Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of international relations who focuses on space at the University of Leicester. \u201cIt\u2019s not a Dr. Evil laser.\u201dAdvertisementThe notion that the United States has to stake its claim in space or else \u201cwe\u2019re going to lose to China\u201d is \u201cabsurd,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank that focuses on space. He added that some are \u201ctrying to prop up the China threat as rationale for their own policy goals.\u201dInstead of competing in space, many think the United States should partner with China on civil space exploration and science missions, as it does with Russia, another potential adversary. That was made more difficult in 2011, with the passage of a provision written by former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that requires NASA to get congressional approval before partnering with China, as well as having the FBI certify that the cooperation would not jeopardize national security.Story continues below advertisementWolf\u2019s intent was to keep China from stealing secrets and technology, but it hasn\u2019t slowed China\u2019s progress, officials said.Advertisement\u201cOur policy of excluding China from human spaceflight and exploration missions to the moon and beyond has not slowed its rise as a space power,\u201d Harrison said during a hearing earlier this year of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. \u201cWorse, it may create an incentive for China to build an alternative coalition for space exploration that could undermine our traditional leadership role in this arena.\u201dFrom the Apollo lunar landings on, no other country has matched NASA\u2019s space record. It has sent probes to every planet in the solar system. It has landed robots on Mars eight times. Last month, it announced it would fly a car-sized quadcopter to Saturn\u2019s moon, Titan, which scientists think could yield clues to life on other planets.Story continues below advertisementBut NASA has lost some of the prestige and swagger it had 50 years ago during the Apollo era, when the agency was the envy of the world, an inspiration and the embodiment of the American can-do ethos. No humans have returned to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. Since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, NASA has not had the ability to fly astronauts anywhere. Instead, it pays Russia for rides to the space station at a cost of more than $80 million a seat.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to Boeing and SpaceX for the development of spacecraft that could once again fly humans to space from U.S. soil. Both companies have suffered setbacks and delays, including SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule exploding during a test. It\u2019s also not clear whether either will be able to fly people this year.China has faced problems as well. In 2017, its new rocket, the Long March 5, suffered a failure shortly after liftoff. There are also reports that it has suffered more recent setbacks, delaying its more ambitious missions. China also does not have the heritage in space that the United States has built up over years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, \u201cfrom a standing start in 2000, they\u2019ve come an enormous way, and with a great deal of speed,\u201d said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the National Space Council under President George H.W. Bush.And unlike the United States, which under different presidential administrations has directed NASA to shoot for the moon, then Mars, then the moon again, China has remained steadfast about its goals and what it wants to achieve.Sending a rover to the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth was a giant leap for the Chinese program. Landing there is made extraordinarily difficult because controllers on Earth can\u2019t communicate with the spacecraft with a direct radio signal, a problem the Chinese overcame with a relay satellite.China is planning another mission to the lunar surface later this year that would bring back rock samples. It eventually wants to build a base at the lunar south pole for the same reason NASA does: water.AdvertisementThere is ice in the craters at the pole and near continuous sunlight that could be used for solar power. The water can be used not only for sustaining life, but its components, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a \u201cgas station in space,\u201d as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has called it. That, in turn, would allow for exploration deeper into the solar system.Ross has pushed to cut regulations to allow the space economy to \u201cignite steady economic growth in the industry,\u201d which he said could reach $1 trillion by 2040.The quest for resources and the possible economic benefits of space \u2014 though many think they are years or decades away \u2014 has also motivated the Chinese, analysts said.The Chinese have \u201cwoken up to the possibility that space is not just for exploration, but can tremendously benefit the economic development and national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an author and analyst who studies China\u2019s space program. \u201cThis is due to the fact that scientists point out trillions of dollars of resources to be had in space, including the lunar surface and asteroids. This is serious business for China.\u201dIn 2014, China for the first time allowed non-state-owned companies to launch rockets, she said, as part of a push to harness the innovation of the private sector and to help it compete in the way companies like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX have helped to push NASA. And on Thursday iSpace said it became the first private Chinese company to launch a rocket to orbit.\u201cChina has watched keenly and with respect the success of U.S. space entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin,\u201d she said. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)China\u2019s plan to assemble its own space station comes as the United States debates what to do with the International Space Station, which is showing its age. Last year, the White House announced a plan to cut off direct funding for the station by 2025 and to turn over portions of it to the commercial sector. That plan has not yet materialized, and there are efforts in Congress to extend the life of the station.But the future of the station, and the United States\u2019s role in low Earth orbit, is uncertain.\u201cWe don\u2019t want to abandon low Earth orbit to, say, a Chinese station,\u201d Pace, of the National Space Council, said. \u201cWe want to continue human presence and experimentation in low Earth orbit. We\u2019re not going to build another million-pound facility, as station is. So what are we going to do? Going forward we\u2019d like to keep the partnership together, and after the space station. But what does that look like?\u201dSome fear a future where the ascendant Chinese space program becomes the only alternative.\u201cThe optics could be really bad if the International Space Station is coming back into the atmosphere in a ball of flames while the Chinese are putting theirs up there,\u201d Weeden said. \u201cThat could be a huge problem politically.\u201d NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, whereas China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years. Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6379",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/26/another-front-tensions-between-us-china-space/",
        "text": "Fifty years after the United States proved its dominance of space by beating the Soviet Union to landing humans on the moon, the country is confronting the cosmic ambitions of another superpower: China.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina didn\u2019t launch an astronaut into space until 2003 \u2014 more than 40 years after the United States and the Soviet Union did. It has since developed its space program at a torrid pace, even as the United States has become dependent on Russia to maintain a presence on the International Space Station. NASA hasn\u2019t sent another soul to the lunar surface since 1972. But earlier this year, China made history when it became the first nation to land an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a feat it hailed as opening \u201ca new chapter in humanity\u2019s exploration of the moon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA and its contractors are still struggling to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to space, eight years after the last space shuttle landed at the Kennedy Space Center. Meanwhile, China has developed a monster rocket and last year launched more rockets than any other country on Earth, though none with people on board.AdvertisementAnd while NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years.China plans to send another spacecraft to the moon this year. It also has set its sights on the same remote swath of lunar real estate the United States is rushing to reach: the moon\u2019s south pole, where water from ice could prove not only life sustaining, but might also provide the ingredients \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 for propellant to send rockets to other destinations. Though barren, gray and lifeless, it offers a key steppingstone to deeper space exploration and enormous prestige to whoever gets there first.Story continues below advertisementThe United States and China aren\u2019t the only countries eyeing the lunar south pole. On Monday, India launched its Chandrayaan spacecraft on mission there. If successful, India would become the fourth country, after the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China to soft land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.AdvertisementThe United States has noticed China\u2019s ambitions, which have touched off a debate over how to respond and what China\u2019s intentions really are at a time when space is seen as a critical warfighting domain.The Trump administration and hawkish conservatives have cast the competition as a power struggle with enormous consequences \u2014 the moon as the cosmic equivalent of the South China Sea, where China has expanded a military presence that is of concern to the Pentagon.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this year, the White House announced NASA would dramatically speed up its own mission to return to the moon, initially planned for 2028, but now, at the direction of Vice President Pence, moved up to 2024.\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d he said in a speech in March calling for the shortened timeline. China\u2019s landing on the far side of the moon \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementU.S. officials fear the Chinese advance in space.\u201cLooking at Chinese behavior in other shared domains \u2014 the South China Sea, cyberspace \u2014 they\u2019ve given us pause for concern,\u201d Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in an interview. \u201cAnd so looking out in space, it\u2019s hard to imagine that they will behave any better than they\u2019d behaved in other areas where they felt that their national interests are at stake.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNewt Gingrich, the former House speaker who proposed a moon base during his presidential bid in 2012, said China is \u201cgoing to rapidly become the only country that can compete with us for the moon and Mars.\u201d\u201cThey want to prove they are our technological superior,\u201d he said. If China can get \u201cto the south pole before we do, there\u2019s a very real possibility we will find it impossible to operate there.\u201dAdvertisementChina has demonstrated growing military capabilities in space. In 2007, it took out a dead weather satellite with a missile, putting the United States and others on notice that the national security satellites they have in orbit \u2014 used for missile defense, precision-guided munitions and spying \u2014 were vulnerable.\u201cChina views space as the soft underbelly of the U.S. military,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.But he and others think it is wrong to assume China\u2019s activities in space put it and the United States in a warlike race for a single goal. Rather, some analysts said, the countries are engaged in a long-term power competition for national pride and technological development.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s rover is a \u201cscience experiment,\u201d said Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of international relations who focuses on space at the University of Leicester. \u201cIt\u2019s not a Dr. Evil laser.\u201dAdvertisementThe notion that the United States has to stake its claim in space or else \u201cwe\u2019re going to lose to China\u201d is \u201cabsurd,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank that focuses on space. He added that some are \u201ctrying to prop up the China threat as rationale for their own policy goals.\u201dInstead of competing in space, many think the United States should partner with China on civil space exploration and science missions, as it does with Russia, another potential adversary. That was made more difficult in 2011, with the passage of a provision written by former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that requires NASA to get congressional approval before partnering with China, as well as having the FBI certify that the cooperation would not jeopardize national security.Story continues below advertisementWolf\u2019s intent was to keep China from stealing secrets and technology, but it hasn\u2019t slowed China\u2019s progress, officials said.Advertisement\u201cOur policy of excluding China from human spaceflight and exploration missions to the moon and beyond has not slowed its rise as a space power,\u201d Harrison said during a hearing earlier this year of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. \u201cWorse, it may create an incentive for China to build an alternative coalition for space exploration that could undermine our traditional leadership role in this arena.\u201dFrom the Apollo lunar landings on, no other country has matched NASA\u2019s space record. It has sent probes to every planet in the solar system. It has landed robots on Mars eight times. Last month, it announced it would fly a car-sized quadcopter to Saturn\u2019s moon, Titan, which scientists think could yield clues to life on other planets.Story continues below advertisementBut NASA has lost some of the prestige and swagger it had 50 years ago during the Apollo era, when the agency was the envy of the world, an inspiration and the embodiment of the American can-do ethos. No humans have returned to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. Since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, NASA has not had the ability to fly astronauts anywhere. Instead, it pays Russia for rides to the space station at a cost of more than $80 million a seat.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to Boeing and SpaceX for the development of spacecraft that could once again fly humans to space from U.S. soil. Both companies have suffered setbacks and delays, including SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule exploding during a test. It\u2019s also not clear whether either will be able to fly people this year.China has faced problems as well. In 2017, its new rocket, the Long March 5, suffered a failure shortly after liftoff. There are also reports that it has suffered more recent setbacks, delaying its more ambitious missions. China also does not have the heritage in space that the United States has built up over years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, \u201cfrom a standing start in 2000, they\u2019ve come an enormous way, and with a great deal of speed,\u201d said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the National Space Council under President George H.W. Bush.And unlike the United States, which under different presidential administrations has directed NASA to shoot for the moon, then Mars, then the moon again, China has remained steadfast about its goals and what it wants to achieve.Sending a rover to the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth was a giant leap for the Chinese program. Landing there is made extraordinarily difficult because controllers on Earth can\u2019t communicate with the spacecraft with a direct radio signal, a problem the Chinese overcame with a relay satellite.China is planning another mission to the lunar surface later this year that would bring back rock samples. It eventually wants to build a base at the lunar south pole for the same reason NASA does: water.AdvertisementThere is ice in the craters at the pole and near continuous sunlight that could be used for solar power. The water can be used not only for sustaining life, but its components, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a \u201cgas station in space,\u201d as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has called it. That, in turn, would allow for exploration deeper into the solar system.Ross has pushed to cut regulations to allow the space economy to \u201cignite steady economic growth in the industry,\u201d which he said could reach $1 trillion by 2040.The quest for resources and the possible economic benefits of space \u2014 though many think they are years or decades away \u2014 has also motivated the Chinese, analysts said.The Chinese have \u201cwoken up to the possibility that space is not just for exploration, but can tremendously benefit the economic development and national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an author and analyst who studies China\u2019s space program. \u201cThis is due to the fact that scientists point out trillions of dollars of resources to be had in space, including the lunar surface and asteroids. This is serious business for China.\u201dIn 2014, China for the first time allowed non-state-owned companies to launch rockets, she said, as part of a push to harness the innovation of the private sector and to help it compete in the way companies like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX have helped to push NASA. And on Thursday iSpace said it became the first private Chinese company to launch a rocket to orbit.\u201cChina has watched keenly and with respect the success of U.S. space entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin,\u201d she said. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)China\u2019s plan to assemble its own space station comes as the United States debates what to do with the International Space Station, which is showing its age. Last year, the White House announced a plan to cut off direct funding for the station by 2025 and to turn over portions of it to the commercial sector. That plan has not yet materialized, and there are efforts in Congress to extend the life of the station.But the future of the station, and the United States\u2019s role in low Earth orbit, is uncertain.\u201cWe don\u2019t want to abandon low Earth orbit to, say, a Chinese station,\u201d Pace, of the National Space Council, said. \u201cWe want to continue human presence and experimentation in low Earth orbit. We\u2019re not going to build another million-pound facility, as station is. So what are we going to do? Going forward we\u2019d like to keep the partnership together, and after the space station. But what does that look like?\u201dSome fear a future where the ascendant Chinese space program becomes the only alternative.\u201cThe optics could be really bad if the International Space Station is coming back into the atmosphere in a ball of flames while the Chinese are putting theirs up there,\u201d Weeden said. \u201cThat could be a huge problem politically.\u201d NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, whereas China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years. Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6380",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/26/another-front-tensions-between-us-china-space/",
        "text": "Fifty years after the United States proved its dominance of space by beating the Soviet Union to landing humans on the moon, the country is confronting the cosmic ambitions of another superpower: China.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina didn\u2019t launch an astronaut into space until 2003 \u2014 more than 40 years after the United States and the Soviet Union did. It has since developed its space program at a torrid pace, even as the United States has become dependent on Russia to maintain a presence on the International Space Station. NASA hasn\u2019t sent another soul to the lunar surface since 1972. But earlier this year, China made history when it became the first nation to land an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a feat it hailed as opening \u201ca new chapter in humanity\u2019s exploration of the moon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA and its contractors are still struggling to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to space, eight years after the last space shuttle landed at the Kennedy Space Center. Meanwhile, China has developed a monster rocket and last year launched more rockets than any other country on Earth, though none with people on board.AdvertisementAnd while NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years.China plans to send another spacecraft to the moon this year. It also has set its sights on the same remote swath of lunar real estate the United States is rushing to reach: the moon\u2019s south pole, where water from ice could prove not only life sustaining, but might also provide the ingredients \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 for propellant to send rockets to other destinations. Though barren, gray and lifeless, it offers a key steppingstone to deeper space exploration and enormous prestige to whoever gets there first.Story continues below advertisementThe United States and China aren\u2019t the only countries eyeing the lunar south pole. On Monday, India launched its Chandrayaan spacecraft on mission there. If successful, India would become the fourth country, after the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China to soft land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.AdvertisementThe United States has noticed China\u2019s ambitions, which have touched off a debate over how to respond and what China\u2019s intentions really are at a time when space is seen as a critical warfighting domain.The Trump administration and hawkish conservatives have cast the competition as a power struggle with enormous consequences \u2014 the moon as the cosmic equivalent of the South China Sea, where China has expanded a military presence that is of concern to the Pentagon.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this year, the White House announced NASA would dramatically speed up its own mission to return to the moon, initially planned for 2028, but now, at the direction of Vice President Pence, moved up to 2024.\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d he said in a speech in March calling for the shortened timeline. China\u2019s landing on the far side of the moon \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementU.S. officials fear the Chinese advance in space.\u201cLooking at Chinese behavior in other shared domains \u2014 the South China Sea, cyberspace \u2014 they\u2019ve given us pause for concern,\u201d Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in an interview. \u201cAnd so looking out in space, it\u2019s hard to imagine that they will behave any better than they\u2019d behaved in other areas where they felt that their national interests are at stake.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNewt Gingrich, the former House speaker who proposed a moon base during his presidential bid in 2012, said China is \u201cgoing to rapidly become the only country that can compete with us for the moon and Mars.\u201d\u201cThey want to prove they are our technological superior,\u201d he said. If China can get \u201cto the south pole before we do, there\u2019s a very real possibility we will find it impossible to operate there.\u201dAdvertisementChina has demonstrated growing military capabilities in space. In 2007, it took out a dead weather satellite with a missile, putting the United States and others on notice that the national security satellites they have in orbit \u2014 used for missile defense, precision-guided munitions and spying \u2014 were vulnerable.\u201cChina views space as the soft underbelly of the U.S. military,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.But he and others think it is wrong to assume China\u2019s activities in space put it and the United States in a warlike race for a single goal. Rather, some analysts said, the countries are engaged in a long-term power competition for national pride and technological development.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s rover is a \u201cscience experiment,\u201d said Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of international relations who focuses on space at the University of Leicester. \u201cIt\u2019s not a Dr. Evil laser.\u201dAdvertisementThe notion that the United States has to stake its claim in space or else \u201cwe\u2019re going to lose to China\u201d is \u201cabsurd,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank that focuses on space. He added that some are \u201ctrying to prop up the China threat as rationale for their own policy goals.\u201dInstead of competing in space, many think the United States should partner with China on civil space exploration and science missions, as it does with Russia, another potential adversary. That was made more difficult in 2011, with the passage of a provision written by former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that requires NASA to get congressional approval before partnering with China, as well as having the FBI certify that the cooperation would not jeopardize national security.Story continues below advertisementWolf\u2019s intent was to keep China from stealing secrets and technology, but it hasn\u2019t slowed China\u2019s progress, officials said.Advertisement\u201cOur policy of excluding China from human spaceflight and exploration missions to the moon and beyond has not slowed its rise as a space power,\u201d Harrison said during a hearing earlier this year of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. \u201cWorse, it may create an incentive for China to build an alternative coalition for space exploration that could undermine our traditional leadership role in this arena.\u201dFrom the Apollo lunar landings on, no other country has matched NASA\u2019s space record. It has sent probes to every planet in the solar system. It has landed robots on Mars eight times. Last month, it announced it would fly a car-sized quadcopter to Saturn\u2019s moon, Titan, which scientists think could yield clues to life on other planets.Story continues below advertisementBut NASA has lost some of the prestige and swagger it had 50 years ago during the Apollo era, when the agency was the envy of the world, an inspiration and the embodiment of the American can-do ethos. No humans have returned to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. Since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, NASA has not had the ability to fly astronauts anywhere. Instead, it pays Russia for rides to the space station at a cost of more than $80 million a seat.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to Boeing and SpaceX for the development of spacecraft that could once again fly humans to space from U.S. soil. Both companies have suffered setbacks and delays, including SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule exploding during a test. It\u2019s also not clear whether either will be able to fly people this year.China has faced problems as well. In 2017, its new rocket, the Long March 5, suffered a failure shortly after liftoff. There are also reports that it has suffered more recent setbacks, delaying its more ambitious missions. China also does not have the heritage in space that the United States has built up over years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, \u201cfrom a standing start in 2000, they\u2019ve come an enormous way, and with a great deal of speed,\u201d said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the National Space Council under President George H.W. Bush.And unlike the United States, which under different presidential administrations has directed NASA to shoot for the moon, then Mars, then the moon again, China has remained steadfast about its goals and what it wants to achieve.Sending a rover to the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth was a giant leap for the Chinese program. Landing there is made extraordinarily difficult because controllers on Earth can\u2019t communicate with the spacecraft with a direct radio signal, a problem the Chinese overcame with a relay satellite.China is planning another mission to the lunar surface later this year that would bring back rock samples. It eventually wants to build a base at the lunar south pole for the same reason NASA does: water.AdvertisementThere is ice in the craters at the pole and near continuous sunlight that could be used for solar power. The water can be used not only for sustaining life, but its components, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a \u201cgas station in space,\u201d as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has called it. That, in turn, would allow for exploration deeper into the solar system.Ross has pushed to cut regulations to allow the space economy to \u201cignite steady economic growth in the industry,\u201d which he said could reach $1 trillion by 2040.The quest for resources and the possible economic benefits of space \u2014 though many think they are years or decades away \u2014 has also motivated the Chinese, analysts said.The Chinese have \u201cwoken up to the possibility that space is not just for exploration, but can tremendously benefit the economic development and national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an author and analyst who studies China\u2019s space program. \u201cThis is due to the fact that scientists point out trillions of dollars of resources to be had in space, including the lunar surface and asteroids. This is serious business for China.\u201dIn 2014, China for the first time allowed non-state-owned companies to launch rockets, she said, as part of a push to harness the innovation of the private sector and to help it compete in the way companies like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX have helped to push NASA. And on Thursday iSpace said it became the first private Chinese company to launch a rocket to orbit.\u201cChina has watched keenly and with respect the success of U.S. space entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin,\u201d she said. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)China\u2019s plan to assemble its own space station comes as the United States debates what to do with the International Space Station, which is showing its age. Last year, the White House announced a plan to cut off direct funding for the station by 2025 and to turn over portions of it to the commercial sector. That plan has not yet materialized, and there are efforts in Congress to extend the life of the station.But the future of the station, and the United States\u2019s role in low Earth orbit, is uncertain.\u201cWe don\u2019t want to abandon low Earth orbit to, say, a Chinese station,\u201d Pace, of the National Space Council, said. \u201cWe want to continue human presence and experimentation in low Earth orbit. We\u2019re not going to build another million-pound facility, as station is. So what are we going to do? Going forward we\u2019d like to keep the partnership together, and after the space station. But what does that look like?\u201dSome fear a future where the ascendant Chinese space program becomes the only alternative.\u201cThe optics could be really bad if the International Space Station is coming back into the atmosphere in a ball of flames while the Chinese are putting theirs up there,\u201d Weeden said. \u201cThat could be a huge problem politically.\u201d NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, whereas China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years. Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6381",
        "date": "2019-07-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/26/another-front-tensions-between-us-china-space/",
        "text": "Fifty years after the United States proved its dominance of space by beating the Soviet Union to landing humans on the moon, the country is confronting the cosmic ambitions of another superpower: China.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina didn\u2019t launch an astronaut into space until 2003 \u2014 more than 40 years after the United States and the Soviet Union did. It has since developed its space program at a torrid pace, even as the United States has become dependent on Russia to maintain a presence on the International Space Station. NASA hasn\u2019t sent another soul to the lunar surface since 1972. But earlier this year, China made history when it became the first nation to land an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a feat it hailed as opening \u201ca new chapter in humanity\u2019s exploration of the moon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA and its contractors are still struggling to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to space, eight years after the last space shuttle landed at the Kennedy Space Center. Meanwhile, China has developed a monster rocket and last year launched more rockets than any other country on Earth, though none with people on board.AdvertisementAnd while NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years.China plans to send another spacecraft to the moon this year. It also has set its sights on the same remote swath of lunar real estate the United States is rushing to reach: the moon\u2019s south pole, where water from ice could prove not only life sustaining, but might also provide the ingredients \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 for propellant to send rockets to other destinations. Though barren, gray and lifeless, it offers a key steppingstone to deeper space exploration and enormous prestige to whoever gets there first.Story continues below advertisementThe United States and China aren\u2019t the only countries eyeing the lunar south pole. On Monday, India launched its Chandrayaan spacecraft on mission there. If successful, India would become the fourth country, after the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China to soft land a spacecraft on the lunar surface.AdvertisementThe United States has noticed China\u2019s ambitions, which have touched off a debate over how to respond and what China\u2019s intentions really are at a time when space is seen as a critical warfighting domain.The Trump administration and hawkish conservatives have cast the competition as a power struggle with enormous consequences \u2014 the moon as the cosmic equivalent of the South China Sea, where China has expanded a military presence that is of concern to the Pentagon.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this year, the White House announced NASA would dramatically speed up its own mission to return to the moon, initially planned for 2028, but now, at the direction of Vice President Pence, moved up to 2024.\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d he said in a speech in March calling for the shortened timeline. China\u2019s landing on the far side of the moon \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementU.S. officials fear the Chinese advance in space.\u201cLooking at Chinese behavior in other shared domains \u2014 the South China Sea, cyberspace \u2014 they\u2019ve given us pause for concern,\u201d Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in an interview. \u201cAnd so looking out in space, it\u2019s hard to imagine that they will behave any better than they\u2019d behaved in other areas where they felt that their national interests are at stake.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNewt Gingrich, the former House speaker who proposed a moon base during his presidential bid in 2012, said China is \u201cgoing to rapidly become the only country that can compete with us for the moon and Mars.\u201d\u201cThey want to prove they are our technological superior,\u201d he said. If China can get \u201cto the south pole before we do, there\u2019s a very real possibility we will find it impossible to operate there.\u201dAdvertisementChina has demonstrated growing military capabilities in space. In 2007, it took out a dead weather satellite with a missile, putting the United States and others on notice that the national security satellites they have in orbit \u2014 used for missile defense, precision-guided munitions and spying \u2014 were vulnerable.\u201cChina views space as the soft underbelly of the U.S. military,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.But he and others think it is wrong to assume China\u2019s activities in space put it and the United States in a warlike race for a single goal. Rather, some analysts said, the countries are engaged in a long-term power competition for national pride and technological development.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s rover is a \u201cscience experiment,\u201d said Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of international relations who focuses on space at the University of Leicester. \u201cIt\u2019s not a Dr. Evil laser.\u201dAdvertisementThe notion that the United States has to stake its claim in space or else \u201cwe\u2019re going to lose to China\u201d is \u201cabsurd,\u201d said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank that focuses on space. He added that some are \u201ctrying to prop up the China threat as rationale for their own policy goals.\u201dInstead of competing in space, many think the United States should partner with China on civil space exploration and science missions, as it does with Russia, another potential adversary. That was made more difficult in 2011, with the passage of a provision written by former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that requires NASA to get congressional approval before partnering with China, as well as having the FBI certify that the cooperation would not jeopardize national security.Story continues below advertisementWolf\u2019s intent was to keep China from stealing secrets and technology, but it hasn\u2019t slowed China\u2019s progress, officials said.Advertisement\u201cOur policy of excluding China from human spaceflight and exploration missions to the moon and beyond has not slowed its rise as a space power,\u201d Harrison said during a hearing earlier this year of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. \u201cWorse, it may create an incentive for China to build an alternative coalition for space exploration that could undermine our traditional leadership role in this arena.\u201dFrom the Apollo lunar landings on, no other country has matched NASA\u2019s space record. It has sent probes to every planet in the solar system. It has landed robots on Mars eight times. Last month, it announced it would fly a car-sized quadcopter to Saturn\u2019s moon, Titan, which scientists think could yield clues to life on other planets.Story continues below advertisementBut NASA has lost some of the prestige and swagger it had 50 years ago during the Apollo era, when the agency was the envy of the world, an inspiration and the embodiment of the American can-do ethos. No humans have returned to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. Since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, NASA has not had the ability to fly astronauts anywhere. Instead, it pays Russia for rides to the space station at a cost of more than $80 million a seat.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to Boeing and SpaceX for the development of spacecraft that could once again fly humans to space from U.S. soil. Both companies have suffered setbacks and delays, including SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule exploding during a test. It\u2019s also not clear whether either will be able to fly people this year.China has faced problems as well. In 2017, its new rocket, the Long March 5, suffered a failure shortly after liftoff. There are also reports that it has suffered more recent setbacks, delaying its more ambitious missions. China also does not have the heritage in space that the United States has built up over years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, \u201cfrom a standing start in 2000, they\u2019ve come an enormous way, and with a great deal of speed,\u201d said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the National Space Council under President George H.W. Bush.And unlike the United States, which under different presidential administrations has directed NASA to shoot for the moon, then Mars, then the moon again, China has remained steadfast about its goals and what it wants to achieve.Sending a rover to the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth was a giant leap for the Chinese program. Landing there is made extraordinarily difficult because controllers on Earth can\u2019t communicate with the spacecraft with a direct radio signal, a problem the Chinese overcame with a relay satellite.China is planning another mission to the lunar surface later this year that would bring back rock samples. It eventually wants to build a base at the lunar south pole for the same reason NASA does: water.AdvertisementThere is ice in the craters at the pole and near continuous sunlight that could be used for solar power. The water can be used not only for sustaining life, but its components, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a \u201cgas station in space,\u201d as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has called it. That, in turn, would allow for exploration deeper into the solar system.Ross has pushed to cut regulations to allow the space economy to \u201cignite steady economic growth in the industry,\u201d which he said could reach $1 trillion by 2040.The quest for resources and the possible economic benefits of space \u2014 though many think they are years or decades away \u2014 has also motivated the Chinese, analysts said.The Chinese have \u201cwoken up to the possibility that space is not just for exploration, but can tremendously benefit the economic development and national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an author and analyst who studies China\u2019s space program. \u201cThis is due to the fact that scientists point out trillions of dollars of resources to be had in space, including the lunar surface and asteroids. This is serious business for China.\u201dIn 2014, China for the first time allowed non-state-owned companies to launch rockets, she said, as part of a push to harness the innovation of the private sector and to help it compete in the way companies like Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX have helped to push NASA. And on Thursday iSpace said it became the first private Chinese company to launch a rocket to orbit.\u201cChina has watched keenly and with respect the success of U.S. space entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin,\u201d she said. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)China\u2019s plan to assemble its own space station comes as the United States debates what to do with the International Space Station, which is showing its age. Last year, the White House announced a plan to cut off direct funding for the station by 2025 and to turn over portions of it to the commercial sector. That plan has not yet materialized, and there are efforts in Congress to extend the life of the station.But the future of the station, and the United States\u2019s role in low Earth orbit, is uncertain.\u201cWe don\u2019t want to abandon low Earth orbit to, say, a Chinese station,\u201d Pace, of the National Space Council, said. \u201cWe want to continue human presence and experimentation in low Earth orbit. We\u2019re not going to build another million-pound facility, as station is. So what are we going to do? Going forward we\u2019d like to keep the partnership together, and after the space station. But what does that look like?\u201dSome fear a future where the ascendant Chinese space program becomes the only alternative.\u201cThe optics could be really bad if the International Space Station is coming back into the atmosphere in a ball of flames while the Chinese are putting theirs up there,\u201d Weeden said. \u201cThat could be a huge problem politically.\u201d NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, whereas China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years. Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship program, more smoke, fire and shrapnel (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6382",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/30/elon-musk-spacex-starship-sn11/",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s latest attempt to land the prototype of a rocket that he hopes will someday fly people to the moon and Mars exploded Tuesday, sending debris crashing to the ground in the latest fiery setback in a test campaign designed to push the limits.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe SpaceX Starship spacecraft lifted off from its launchpad in South Texas around 9 a.m. Eastern time in dense fog and cruised to an altitude of about six miles under the power of three engines. As it had done previously, the rocket prototype then shut off its engines, flipped horizontally and started falling back to Earth. The spacecraft, dubbed Serial Number 11, or SN11, was supposed to then reorient itself, restart its engines and touch down softly on a landing pad. But at some point, the vehicle blew up, and John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, said the company \u201clost all the data from the vehicle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added, for viewers watching a frozen image of the spacecraft\u2019s engines on the screen: \u201cStarship 11 is not coming back. Don\u2019t wait for the landing.\u201dOn a webcast provided by NASAspaceflight.com, a space news website that carries the Starship flights, debris could be seen crashing down. And SpaceX CEO Musk tweeted, \u201cAt least the crater is in the right place!\u201d He added that \u201ca high production rate solves many ills,\u201d meaning the next prototype should be ready before too long and the company would try again.To ensure people\u2019s safety in the event of an explosion, the Federal Aviation Administration requires SpaceX to evacuate the nearby village and keep people miles away from the launch and landing site. Nearby roads are closed, and local law enforcement officials help secure a wide safety zone around the area. There were no reports of injuries.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe landing attempt was SpaceX\u2019s fourth try since December, when a series of Starships launched successfully, fell back toward the landing site, but exploded on the ground. The test campaign is designed to push the limits and gather a lot of data quickly so the company can iterate and try again.Musk has said he wants Starship to reach orbit by the end of this year. NASA has awarded SpaceX a $135 million contract to help develop Starship so that it might fly astronauts to the moon as part of its Artemis program.The flight came days after Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), chairman of the aviation subcommittee, wrote in a letter that they were concerned about \u201cthe pressure exerted on the FAA during high profile launches. While the commercial space transportation sector is crucial to our Nation\u2019s future, at no point should a commercial space launch jeopardize public safety.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey were referring to a tweet by Musk in January, when he took aim at the FAA, saying it moves too slowly and is too bureaucratic.\u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dIn December, SpaceX had sought a waiver from the FAA that would have allowed it \u201cto exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations,\u201d the agency said at the time.The waiver was denied, but SpaceX proceeded with the flight anyway, violating its launch license and, industry officials said, potentially putting the public at risk.Story continues below advertisementThe FAA directed SpaceX to conduct an internal investigation. But in the letter to Steve Dickson, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, DeFazio and Larsen wrote they were \u201cdisappointed that the FAA declined to conduct an independent review of the event and, to the best of our knowledge, has not pursued any form of enforcement action.\u201dAdvertisementThey urged the agency to \u201cresist any potential undue influence on launch safety decision-making\u201d and \u201cestablish explicitly a strict policy to deal with violations of FAA launch and reentry licenses, which must include full enforcement of agency regulations and civil penalties.\u201dThree previous Starship prototypes exploded in massive fireballs that sent smoke billowing into the air. In December, SN8 crash landed in what Musk called an \u201cawesome test.\u201d But that touched off the tussle with the FAA.Story continues below advertisementAfter the FAA approved SpaceX\u2019s remedies, it granted the company approval to launch again. That flight, of Starship SN9, also hit hard and exploded.Still, it was \u201canother great flight,\u201d Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, said during a broadcast of the event. But, he added, \u201cwe need to work on that landing a little bit.\u201dAdvertisementA month later, SpaceX was at it again, this time with SN10. This time, it reached its apogee, or highest point, of about six miles, shut off its engines and fell gracefully in a \u201cbelly flop\u201d or horizontal position. Then, shortly before reaching the ground, it flipped back to vertical and fired its engines. It landed, bounced, but appeared to stick the landing \u2014 at least for a while.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThird time\u2019s a charm, as the saying goes,\u201d Insprucker said on the broadcast. \u201cA beautiful soft landing on the landing pad.\u201dBut the vehicle was visibly leaning, and after a little more than eight minutes, it exploded.After all of the explosions, the FAA, which is charged with promoting the space industry but also protecting people and property on the ground, oversaw investigations with SpaceX.The investigation into the SN10 \u201cmishap,\u201d as the FAA calls it, remains open, the agency said Friday. But it found \u201cno public safety concerns in the preliminary SN10 mishap report that would preclude further launches,\u201d so SpaceX was cleared to proceed with the flight test Friday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the commercial space industry grows and embraces a culture of testing to failure and then iterating quickly to remedy errors, the FAA has been busy. So far, it has investigated six mishaps this fiscal year, Dickson said this week. That includes the Starship crashes, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that missed its landing site on an autonomous boat in the ocean, as well as an aborted flight from Virgin Galactic and a launch in Alaska by start-up space company Astra that just missed making orbit in December.Some of the mishaps \u201cended in spectacular fireballs and went viral on social media,\u201d Dickson said. \u201cBut all six of these were successful failures because we were able to protect public safety.\u201d Serial Number 11, or SN11, launched successfully and was reorienting itself for landing when it blew up. For Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship program, more smoke, fire and shrapnel",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship program, more smoke, fire and shrapnel (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6383",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/30/elon-musk-spacex-starship-sn11/",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s latest attempt to land the prototype of a rocket that he hopes will someday fly people to the moon and Mars exploded Tuesday, sending debris crashing to the ground in the latest fiery setback in a test campaign designed to push the limits.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe SpaceX Starship spacecraft lifted off from its launchpad in South Texas around 9 a.m. Eastern time in dense fog and cruised to an altitude of about six miles under the power of three engines. As it had done previously, the rocket prototype then shut off its engines, flipped horizontally and started falling back to Earth. The spacecraft, dubbed Serial Number 11, or SN11, was supposed to then reorient itself, restart its engines and touch down softly on a landing pad. But at some point, the vehicle blew up, and John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, said the company \u201clost all the data from the vehicle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added, for viewers watching a frozen image of the spacecraft\u2019s engines on the screen: \u201cStarship 11 is not coming back. Don\u2019t wait for the landing.\u201dOn a webcast provided by NASAspaceflight.com, a space news website that carries the Starship flights, debris could be seen crashing down. And SpaceX CEO Musk tweeted, \u201cAt least the crater is in the right place!\u201d He added that \u201ca high production rate solves many ills,\u201d meaning the next prototype should be ready before too long and the company would try again.To ensure people\u2019s safety in the event of an explosion, the Federal Aviation Administration requires SpaceX to evacuate the nearby village and keep people miles away from the launch and landing site. Nearby roads are closed, and local law enforcement officials help secure a wide safety zone around the area. There were no reports of injuries.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe landing attempt was SpaceX\u2019s fourth try since December, when a series of Starships launched successfully, fell back toward the landing site, but exploded on the ground. The test campaign is designed to push the limits and gather a lot of data quickly so the company can iterate and try again.Musk has said he wants Starship to reach orbit by the end of this year. NASA has awarded SpaceX a $135 million contract to help develop Starship so that it might fly astronauts to the moon as part of its Artemis program.The flight came days after Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), chairman of the aviation subcommittee, wrote in a letter that they were concerned about \u201cthe pressure exerted on the FAA during high profile launches. While the commercial space transportation sector is crucial to our Nation\u2019s future, at no point should a commercial space launch jeopardize public safety.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThey were referring to a tweet by Musk in January, when he took aim at the FAA, saying it moves too slowly and is too bureaucratic.\u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dIn December, SpaceX had sought a waiver from the FAA that would have allowed it \u201cto exceed the maximum public risk allowed by federal safety regulations,\u201d the agency said at the time.The waiver was denied, but SpaceX proceeded with the flight anyway, violating its launch license and, industry officials said, potentially putting the public at risk.Story continues below advertisementThe FAA directed SpaceX to conduct an internal investigation. But in the letter to Steve Dickson, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, DeFazio and Larsen wrote they were \u201cdisappointed that the FAA declined to conduct an independent review of the event and, to the best of our knowledge, has not pursued any form of enforcement action.\u201dAdvertisementThey urged the agency to \u201cresist any potential undue influence on launch safety decision-making\u201d and \u201cestablish explicitly a strict policy to deal with violations of FAA launch and reentry licenses, which must include full enforcement of agency regulations and civil penalties.\u201dThree previous Starship prototypes exploded in massive fireballs that sent smoke billowing into the air. In December, SN8 crash landed in what Musk called an \u201cawesome test.\u201d But that touched off the tussle with the FAA.Story continues below advertisementAfter the FAA approved SpaceX\u2019s remedies, it granted the company approval to launch again. That flight, of Starship SN9, also hit hard and exploded.Still, it was \u201canother great flight,\u201d Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer, said during a broadcast of the event. But, he added, \u201cwe need to work on that landing a little bit.\u201dAdvertisementA month later, SpaceX was at it again, this time with SN10. This time, it reached its apogee, or highest point, of about six miles, shut off its engines and fell gracefully in a \u201cbelly flop\u201d or horizontal position. Then, shortly before reaching the ground, it flipped back to vertical and fired its engines. It landed, bounced, but appeared to stick the landing \u2014 at least for a while.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThird time\u2019s a charm, as the saying goes,\u201d Insprucker said on the broadcast. \u201cA beautiful soft landing on the landing pad.\u201dBut the vehicle was visibly leaning, and after a little more than eight minutes, it exploded.After all of the explosions, the FAA, which is charged with promoting the space industry but also protecting people and property on the ground, oversaw investigations with SpaceX.The investigation into the SN10 \u201cmishap,\u201d as the FAA calls it, remains open, the agency said Friday. But it found \u201cno public safety concerns in the preliminary SN10 mishap report that would preclude further launches,\u201d so SpaceX was cleared to proceed with the flight test Friday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the commercial space industry grows and embraces a culture of testing to failure and then iterating quickly to remedy errors, the FAA has been busy. So far, it has investigated six mishaps this fiscal year, Dickson said this week. That includes the Starship crashes, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that missed its landing site on an autonomous boat in the ocean, as well as an aborted flight from Virgin Galactic and a launch in Alaska by start-up space company Astra that just missed making orbit in December.Some of the mishaps \u201cended in spectacular fireballs and went viral on social media,\u201d Dickson said. \u201cBut all six of these were successful failures because we were able to protect public safety.\u201d Serial Number 11, or SN11, launched successfully and was reorienting itself for landing when it blew up. For Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Starship program, more smoke, fire and shrapnel",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing making slow progress toward fixing software problems that plagued its 2019 Starliner test (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6384",
        "date": "2020-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/28/boeing-nasa-starliner-test/",
        "text": "Eight months after its spacecraft suffered problems that forced Boeing to cut short a key test flight, the company is in the \u201cfinal stages\u201d of correcting the software problems that plagued the mission, NASA said in a news release Friday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing has completed 75 percent of the 80 corrective actions that NASA and Boeing identified after investigating the test mission late last year that went awry from the moment the craft reached space. Earlier this year, Boeing said it would repeat the test flight, in which its Starliner spacecraft was to have flown to the International Space Station without astronauts. That flight would be no earlier than December, a full year after the failure. But it could slip into January, officials have said.Story continues below advertisementThe time it is taking to resolve the problems is an indication of how serious they were and also of how cautiously Boeing is proceeding before trying to fly the Starliner capsule again. Advertisement\u201cOur software team has carefully and deliberately reviewed years\u2019 worth of flight code to complete our most recent major test milestone,\" John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president who manages its \u201ccommercial crew program,\" said in a statement to The Post. \"I couldn\u2019t be more proud of the Starliner team\u2019s focus on mission assurance and crew safety as we proceed to our next flight test.\u201d Along with SpaceX, Boeing is under contract as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d to develop and build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. But before NASA allows Boeing to fly crews, it has to prove the spacecraft is safe and reliable, which was the aim of the mission without astronauts in December.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.As soon as the Starliner reached space, it encountered setbacks. The clock in its onboard computer was 11 hours off, causing the computer to think it was at an entirely different point in the mission. Controllers on the ground also had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd as they worked to remedy the timing problem, they discovered another software glitch that might have caused the service-module portion of the craft to collide with the crew capsule on separation. They were able to beam up a fix for that problem, however, and the capsule landed safely two days after lifting off.The Starliner did not, however, complete one of the key objectives of the mission: docking with the space station.Since then, NASA engineers have been embedded with Boeing engineers to ensure that the corrective work is done properly, NASA officials have said. Boeing and NASA flight control teams have also completed a simulation of the launch of the spacecraft through to docking with the station, and it has \u201cadditional mission simulations on the horizon as the teams fine-tune flight rules and procedures,\u201d NASA said in the news release.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX, by contrast, is months ahead with the development of its Dragon capsule. Last year, it successfully completed an uncrewed test flight. Then in May, it launched Dragon from the Kennedy Space Center and safely delivered NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station.The pair stayed on the station for two months and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 2, completing the first flight of NASA astronauts from American soil since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. SpaceX is working toward flying its first operational mission on Oct. 23, which would carry three NASA astronauts and one Japanese astronaut for a six-month stay on the station.Another crewed mission is being planned for spring.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Boeing, the longtime aerospace industry behemoth, has lagged well behind its competitor; its first mission with crews is not expected before June at the earliest. But Boeing must first complete a successful test flight without astronauts.Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationNASA officials have said they were too lax in overseeing Boeing\u2019s software development.Advertisement\u201cPerhaps we didn\u2019t have as many people embedded in that process as we should have,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said at a news conference last month.Because SpaceX had used a newer, \u201cnontraditional approach\u201d in developing its software, NASA had more closely focused on that company\u2019s process, he said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen one provider has a newer approach than another, it\u2019s often natural for a human being to spend more time on that newer approach,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd maybe we didn\u2019t quite take the time we needed with the more traditional approach.\u201dNASA appears confident that Boeing will be able to resolve its problems and move toward flying astronauts. NASA announced this week that American astronaut Jeanette Epps, who was abruptly pulled from a space mission two years ago without explanation, would fly on the first operational Boeing mission.As of now, that flight is scheduled for December 2021. Boeing has completed 75 percent of  80 corrective actions needed after a test of its Starliner spacecraft went awry last year. Boeing making slow progress toward fixing software problems that plagued its 2019 Starliner test",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing making slow progress toward fixing software problems that plagued its 2019 Starliner test (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6385",
        "date": "2020-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/28/boeing-nasa-starliner-test/",
        "text": "Eight months after its spacecraft suffered problems that forced Boeing to cut short a key test flight, the company is in the \u201cfinal stages\u201d of correcting the software problems that plagued the mission, NASA said in a news release Friday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing has completed 75 percent of the 80 corrective actions that NASA and Boeing identified after investigating the test mission late last year that went awry from the moment the craft reached space. Earlier this year, Boeing said it would repeat the test flight, in which its Starliner spacecraft was to have flown to the International Space Station without astronauts. That flight would be no earlier than December, a full year after the failure. But it could slip into January, officials have said.Story continues below advertisementThe time it is taking to resolve the problems is an indication of how serious they were and also of how cautiously Boeing is proceeding before trying to fly the Starliner capsule again. Advertisement\u201cOur software team has carefully and deliberately reviewed years\u2019 worth of flight code to complete our most recent major test milestone,\" John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president who manages its \u201ccommercial crew program,\" said in a statement to The Post. \"I couldn\u2019t be more proud of the Starliner team\u2019s focus on mission assurance and crew safety as we proceed to our next flight test.\u201d Along with SpaceX, Boeing is under contract as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d to develop and build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. But before NASA allows Boeing to fly crews, it has to prove the spacecraft is safe and reliable, which was the aim of the mission without astronauts in December.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.As soon as the Starliner reached space, it encountered setbacks. The clock in its onboard computer was 11 hours off, causing the computer to think it was at an entirely different point in the mission. Controllers on the ground also had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd as they worked to remedy the timing problem, they discovered another software glitch that might have caused the service-module portion of the craft to collide with the crew capsule on separation. They were able to beam up a fix for that problem, however, and the capsule landed safely two days after lifting off.The Starliner did not, however, complete one of the key objectives of the mission: docking with the space station.Since then, NASA engineers have been embedded with Boeing engineers to ensure that the corrective work is done properly, NASA officials have said. Boeing and NASA flight control teams have also completed a simulation of the launch of the spacecraft through to docking with the station, and it has \u201cadditional mission simulations on the horizon as the teams fine-tune flight rules and procedures,\u201d NASA said in the news release.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX, by contrast, is months ahead with the development of its Dragon capsule. Last year, it successfully completed an uncrewed test flight. Then in May, it launched Dragon from the Kennedy Space Center and safely delivered NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station.The pair stayed on the station for two months and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 2, completing the first flight of NASA astronauts from American soil since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. SpaceX is working toward flying its first operational mission on Oct. 23, which would carry three NASA astronauts and one Japanese astronaut for a six-month stay on the station.Another crewed mission is being planned for spring.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Boeing, the longtime aerospace industry behemoth, has lagged well behind its competitor; its first mission with crews is not expected before June at the earliest. But Boeing must first complete a successful test flight without astronauts.Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationNASA officials have said they were too lax in overseeing Boeing\u2019s software development.Advertisement\u201cPerhaps we didn\u2019t have as many people embedded in that process as we should have,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said at a news conference last month.Because SpaceX had used a newer, \u201cnontraditional approach\u201d in developing its software, NASA had more closely focused on that company\u2019s process, he said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen one provider has a newer approach than another, it\u2019s often natural for a human being to spend more time on that newer approach,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd maybe we didn\u2019t quite take the time we needed with the more traditional approach.\u201dNASA appears confident that Boeing will be able to resolve its problems and move toward flying astronauts. NASA announced this week that American astronaut Jeanette Epps, who was abruptly pulled from a space mission two years ago without explanation, would fly on the first operational Boeing mission.As of now, that flight is scheduled for December 2021. Boeing has completed 75 percent of  80 corrective actions needed after a test of its Starliner spacecraft went awry last year. Boeing making slow progress toward fixing software problems that plagued its 2019 Starliner test",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing making slow progress toward fixing software problems that plagued its 2019 Starliner test (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6386",
        "date": "2020-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/28/boeing-nasa-starliner-test/",
        "text": "Eight months after its spacecraft suffered problems that forced Boeing to cut short a key test flight, the company is in the \u201cfinal stages\u201d of correcting the software problems that plagued the mission, NASA said in a news release Friday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing has completed 75 percent of the 80 corrective actions that NASA and Boeing identified after investigating the test mission late last year that went awry from the moment the craft reached space. Earlier this year, Boeing said it would repeat the test flight, in which its Starliner spacecraft was to have flown to the International Space Station without astronauts. That flight would be no earlier than December, a full year after the failure. But it could slip into January, officials have said.Story continues below advertisementThe time it is taking to resolve the problems is an indication of how serious they were and also of how cautiously Boeing is proceeding before trying to fly the Starliner capsule again. Advertisement\u201cOur software team has carefully and deliberately reviewed years\u2019 worth of flight code to complete our most recent major test milestone,\" John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president who manages its \u201ccommercial crew program,\" said in a statement to The Post. \"I couldn\u2019t be more proud of the Starliner team\u2019s focus on mission assurance and crew safety as we proceed to our next flight test.\u201d Along with SpaceX, Boeing is under contract as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d to develop and build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to and from the space station. But before NASA allows Boeing to fly crews, it has to prove the spacecraft is safe and reliable, which was the aim of the mission without astronauts in December.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.As soon as the Starliner reached space, it encountered setbacks. The clock in its onboard computer was 11 hours off, causing the computer to think it was at an entirely different point in the mission. Controllers on the ground also had difficulty communicating with the spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd as they worked to remedy the timing problem, they discovered another software glitch that might have caused the service-module portion of the craft to collide with the crew capsule on separation. They were able to beam up a fix for that problem, however, and the capsule landed safely two days after lifting off.The Starliner did not, however, complete one of the key objectives of the mission: docking with the space station.Since then, NASA engineers have been embedded with Boeing engineers to ensure that the corrective work is done properly, NASA officials have said. Boeing and NASA flight control teams have also completed a simulation of the launch of the spacecraft through to docking with the station, and it has \u201cadditional mission simulations on the horizon as the teams fine-tune flight rules and procedures,\u201d NASA said in the news release.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX, by contrast, is months ahead with the development of its Dragon capsule. Last year, it successfully completed an uncrewed test flight. Then in May, it launched Dragon from the Kennedy Space Center and safely delivered NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station.The pair stayed on the station for two months and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 2, completing the first flight of NASA astronauts from American soil since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. SpaceX is working toward flying its first operational mission on Oct. 23, which would carry three NASA astronauts and one Japanese astronaut for a six-month stay on the station.Another crewed mission is being planned for spring.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Boeing, the longtime aerospace industry behemoth, has lagged well behind its competitor; its first mission with crews is not expected before June at the earliest. But Boeing must first complete a successful test flight without astronauts.Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationNASA officials have said they were too lax in overseeing Boeing\u2019s software development.Advertisement\u201cPerhaps we didn\u2019t have as many people embedded in that process as we should have,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said at a news conference last month.Because SpaceX had used a newer, \u201cnontraditional approach\u201d in developing its software, NASA had more closely focused on that company\u2019s process, he said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen one provider has a newer approach than another, it\u2019s often natural for a human being to spend more time on that newer approach,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd maybe we didn\u2019t quite take the time we needed with the more traditional approach.\u201dNASA appears confident that Boeing will be able to resolve its problems and move toward flying astronauts. NASA announced this week that American astronaut Jeanette Epps, who was abruptly pulled from a space mission two years ago without explanation, would fly on the first operational Boeing mission.As of now, that flight is scheduled for December 2021. Boeing has completed 75 percent of  80 corrective actions needed after a test of its Starliner spacecraft went awry last year. Boeing making slow progress toward fixing software problems that plagued its 2019 Starliner test",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6387",
        "date": "2020-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/04/spacex-astronauts-splashdown-newsconference/",
        "text": "Dragon roared on the way down.As it plunged into the atmosphere Sunday on its way back to Earth from the International Space Station, the spacecraft \u201creally came alive,\u201d NASA astronaut Bob Behnken said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t sound like a machine; it sounds like an animal.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe thrusters were firing. Heat was building up outside the capsule, eventually rising to 3,500 degrees, engulfing the spacecraft in flames that quickly charred the once pearly white exterior, and clouded the windows. But inside the capsule, Behnken and fellow astronaut Doug Hurley were calm and comfortable, during what was a \u201cflawless\u201d mission, they said Tuesday during their first news conference since they completed their test flight.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe atmosphere starts to make noise, you can hear that rumble outside the vehicle and as the vehicle tries to control you feel a little bit of that, that shimmy in your body,\u201d Behnken said.AdvertisementStill, the pair were \u201creally, really comfortable coming through the atmosphere, even though it felt like we were inside of an animal,\u201d he said.\u201cThe vehicle was rock solid,\u201d Hurley said.The landing in the Gulf of Mexico, 39 miles southeast of Pensacola, Fla., was the dramatic end to a historic mission that had begun two months earlier, when Behnken and Hurley launched from the Kennedy Space Center to the space station. It was the first launch of NASA astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. It was also the first time a private company flew humans to orbit.Story continues below advertisementAlong with Boeing, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is under contract to design spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Hurley and Behken said SpaceX\u2019s Dragon is a heck of a vehicle that endured a fiery, high-stakes ride that went from 17,500 mph some 240 miles high in orbit to bobbing in the sea.The next Americans in spaceOne of the most significant events of the return came when the trunk, the unpressurized module that is covered on one half by solar arrays, separated from the capsule. Then it fired its thrusters for the \u201cde-orbit\u201d burn, which put the spacecraft on a trajectory to land. And finally the parachute deployments, culminating a series of events that came with surprising speed. And some force.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAll the separation events, from the trunk separation through the parachute firings, were very much like getting hit in the back of a chair with a baseball bat, you know just a crack,\u201d Behnken said.Once they were safely in the water, recovery crews descended quickly on the vehicle to make sure it was safe. But so did a flotilla of civilian boaters, who came uncomfortably close to the spacecraft, which was still loaded with propellant.SpaceX and NASA said they need to do a better job of keeping people at bay next time.But inside the spacecraft, Behnken and Hurley had no idea that they had been greeted by a small navy of gawkers because their windows were so charred. \u201cYou could basically tell that it was daylight but very little else,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cSo we didn\u2019t really see anything clearly out the windows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, they pulled out the satellite phone they had on board and tested it to make sure it worked.The first call was to the flight director console at NASA\u2019s mission control center in Houston.\u201cHi, this is Bob and Doug,\u201d they said. \u201cWe're in the ocean.\u201d\u201cYeah, I can see that,\u201d Anthony Vareha, the flight director recalled on Twitter. After the call ended, his colleague suggested he should have said, \u201cOh, crap, was splashdown supposed to be today?\u201dBy then, Hurley and Behnken were calling their wives, both of whom are also astronauts.\u201cAs all folks know that have gone through this, as a family member, you\u2019re kind of helpless, until you hear the voice of your loved one on the other end,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cAnd this was a great chance to reassure them that we were in the water. We were okay.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWithin about 30 minutes, they were on the deck of the recovery ship. They were helicoptered to shore, where an airplane, and a pizza dinner, were waiting for them.AdvertisementSoon, they were home in Houston, ready to resume life on Earth as husbands and fathers. For Behnken, that includes getting his 6-year-old son the puppy he promised him.But first they have to have a little heart-to-heart chat about the duties involved.His son has to \u201cshow me that he\u2019s ready to take on that responsibility,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cOtherwise, it\u2019ll be my dog instead of his.\u201dRead More:Photos and video: See some of the best moments from the iconic liftoff.Companies in the Cosmos: Read how companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new Space Age.Story continues below advertisementBob Behnken and Doug Hurley: Meet the astronauts about to fly SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Capsule.How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D.Listen to Moonrise: Our newest podcast tells a tale of nuclear brinkmanship, backroom politics, and science fiction.Living in space: Read stories from 50 astronauts who describe what it\u2019s really like to live in space.The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing: No one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley talk about their plunge through the Earth's atmosphere to a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6388",
        "date": "2020-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/04/spacex-astronauts-splashdown-newsconference/",
        "text": "Dragon roared on the way down.As it plunged into the atmosphere Sunday on its way back to Earth from the International Space Station, the spacecraft \u201creally came alive,\u201d NASA astronaut Bob Behnken said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t sound like a machine; it sounds like an animal.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe thrusters were firing. Heat was building up outside the capsule, eventually rising to 3,500 degrees, engulfing the spacecraft in flames that quickly charred the once pearly white exterior, and clouded the windows. But inside the capsule, Behnken and fellow astronaut Doug Hurley were calm and comfortable, during what was a \u201cflawless\u201d mission, they said Tuesday during their first news conference since they completed their test flight.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe atmosphere starts to make noise, you can hear that rumble outside the vehicle and as the vehicle tries to control you feel a little bit of that, that shimmy in your body,\u201d Behnken said.AdvertisementStill, the pair were \u201creally, really comfortable coming through the atmosphere, even though it felt like we were inside of an animal,\u201d he said.\u201cThe vehicle was rock solid,\u201d Hurley said.The landing in the Gulf of Mexico, 39 miles southeast of Pensacola, Fla., was the dramatic end to a historic mission that had begun two months earlier, when Behnken and Hurley launched from the Kennedy Space Center to the space station. It was the first launch of NASA astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. It was also the first time a private company flew humans to orbit.Story continues below advertisementAlong with Boeing, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is under contract to design spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Hurley and Behken said SpaceX\u2019s Dragon is a heck of a vehicle that endured a fiery, high-stakes ride that went from 17,500 mph some 240 miles high in orbit to bobbing in the sea.The next Americans in spaceOne of the most significant events of the return came when the trunk, the unpressurized module that is covered on one half by solar arrays, separated from the capsule. Then it fired its thrusters for the \u201cde-orbit\u201d burn, which put the spacecraft on a trajectory to land. And finally the parachute deployments, culminating a series of events that came with surprising speed. And some force.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAll the separation events, from the trunk separation through the parachute firings, were very much like getting hit in the back of a chair with a baseball bat, you know just a crack,\u201d Behnken said.Once they were safely in the water, recovery crews descended quickly on the vehicle to make sure it was safe. But so did a flotilla of civilian boaters, who came uncomfortably close to the spacecraft, which was still loaded with propellant.SpaceX and NASA said they need to do a better job of keeping people at bay next time.But inside the spacecraft, Behnken and Hurley had no idea that they had been greeted by a small navy of gawkers because their windows were so charred. \u201cYou could basically tell that it was daylight but very little else,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cSo we didn\u2019t really see anything clearly out the windows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, they pulled out the satellite phone they had on board and tested it to make sure it worked.The first call was to the flight director console at NASA\u2019s mission control center in Houston.\u201cHi, this is Bob and Doug,\u201d they said. \u201cWe're in the ocean.\u201d\u201cYeah, I can see that,\u201d Anthony Vareha, the flight director recalled on Twitter. After the call ended, his colleague suggested he should have said, \u201cOh, crap, was splashdown supposed to be today?\u201dBy then, Hurley and Behnken were calling their wives, both of whom are also astronauts.\u201cAs all folks know that have gone through this, as a family member, you\u2019re kind of helpless, until you hear the voice of your loved one on the other end,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cAnd this was a great chance to reassure them that we were in the water. We were okay.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWithin about 30 minutes, they were on the deck of the recovery ship. They were helicoptered to shore, where an airplane, and a pizza dinner, were waiting for them.AdvertisementSoon, they were home in Houston, ready to resume life on Earth as husbands and fathers. For Behnken, that includes getting his 6-year-old son the puppy he promised him.But first they have to have a little heart-to-heart chat about the duties involved.His son has to \u201cshow me that he\u2019s ready to take on that responsibility,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cOtherwise, it\u2019ll be my dog instead of his.\u201dRead More:Photos and video: See some of the best moments from the iconic liftoff.Companies in the Cosmos: Read how companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new Space Age.Story continues below advertisementBob Behnken and Doug Hurley: Meet the astronauts about to fly SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Capsule.How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D.Listen to Moonrise: Our newest podcast tells a tale of nuclear brinkmanship, backroom politics, and science fiction.Living in space: Read stories from 50 astronauts who describe what it\u2019s really like to live in space.The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing: No one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley talk about their plunge through the Earth's atmosphere to a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6389",
        "date": "2020-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/04/spacex-astronauts-splashdown-newsconference/",
        "text": "Dragon roared on the way down.As it plunged into the atmosphere Sunday on its way back to Earth from the International Space Station, the spacecraft \u201creally came alive,\u201d NASA astronaut Bob Behnken said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t sound like a machine; it sounds like an animal.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe thrusters were firing. Heat was building up outside the capsule, eventually rising to 3,500 degrees, engulfing the spacecraft in flames that quickly charred the once pearly white exterior, and clouded the windows. But inside the capsule, Behnken and fellow astronaut Doug Hurley were calm and comfortable, during what was a \u201cflawless\u201d mission, they said Tuesday during their first news conference since they completed their test flight.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe atmosphere starts to make noise, you can hear that rumble outside the vehicle and as the vehicle tries to control you feel a little bit of that, that shimmy in your body,\u201d Behnken said.AdvertisementStill, the pair were \u201creally, really comfortable coming through the atmosphere, even though it felt like we were inside of an animal,\u201d he said.\u201cThe vehicle was rock solid,\u201d Hurley said.The landing in the Gulf of Mexico, 39 miles southeast of Pensacola, Fla., was the dramatic end to a historic mission that had begun two months earlier, when Behnken and Hurley launched from the Kennedy Space Center to the space station. It was the first launch of NASA astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. It was also the first time a private company flew humans to orbit.Story continues below advertisementAlong with Boeing, SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk, is under contract to design spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.Hurley and Behken said SpaceX\u2019s Dragon is a heck of a vehicle that endured a fiery, high-stakes ride that went from 17,500 mph some 240 miles high in orbit to bobbing in the sea.The next Americans in spaceOne of the most significant events of the return came when the trunk, the unpressurized module that is covered on one half by solar arrays, separated from the capsule. Then it fired its thrusters for the \u201cde-orbit\u201d burn, which put the spacecraft on a trajectory to land. And finally the parachute deployments, culminating a series of events that came with surprising speed. And some force.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAll the separation events, from the trunk separation through the parachute firings, were very much like getting hit in the back of a chair with a baseball bat, you know just a crack,\u201d Behnken said.Once they were safely in the water, recovery crews descended quickly on the vehicle to make sure it was safe. But so did a flotilla of civilian boaters, who came uncomfortably close to the spacecraft, which was still loaded with propellant.SpaceX and NASA said they need to do a better job of keeping people at bay next time.But inside the spacecraft, Behnken and Hurley had no idea that they had been greeted by a small navy of gawkers because their windows were so charred. \u201cYou could basically tell that it was daylight but very little else,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cSo we didn\u2019t really see anything clearly out the windows.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, they pulled out the satellite phone they had on board and tested it to make sure it worked.The first call was to the flight director console at NASA\u2019s mission control center in Houston.\u201cHi, this is Bob and Doug,\u201d they said. \u201cWe're in the ocean.\u201d\u201cYeah, I can see that,\u201d Anthony Vareha, the flight director recalled on Twitter. After the call ended, his colleague suggested he should have said, \u201cOh, crap, was splashdown supposed to be today?\u201dBy then, Hurley and Behnken were calling their wives, both of whom are also astronauts.\u201cAs all folks know that have gone through this, as a family member, you\u2019re kind of helpless, until you hear the voice of your loved one on the other end,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cAnd this was a great chance to reassure them that we were in the water. We were okay.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWithin about 30 minutes, they were on the deck of the recovery ship. They were helicoptered to shore, where an airplane, and a pizza dinner, were waiting for them.AdvertisementSoon, they were home in Houston, ready to resume life on Earth as husbands and fathers. For Behnken, that includes getting his 6-year-old son the puppy he promised him.But first they have to have a little heart-to-heart chat about the duties involved.His son has to \u201cshow me that he\u2019s ready to take on that responsibility,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cOtherwise, it\u2019ll be my dog instead of his.\u201dRead More:Photos and video: See some of the best moments from the iconic liftoff.Companies in the Cosmos: Read how companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new Space Age.Story continues below advertisementBob Behnken and Doug Hurley: Meet the astronauts about to fly SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Capsule.How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D.Listen to Moonrise: Our newest podcast tells a tale of nuclear brinkmanship, backroom politics, and science fiction.Living in space: Read stories from 50 astronauts who describe what it\u2019s really like to live in space.The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing: No one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley talk about their plunge through the Earth's atmosphere to a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Elon Musk\u2019s spacecraft roared like \u2018an animal.\u2019 But astronauts say the SpaceX Dragon flew flawlessly.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s human spaceflight chief resigns a week before the first launch of astronauts in a decade (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6390",
        "date": "2020-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/19/nasas-human-spaceflight-chief-resigns-week-before-first-launch-astronauts-decade/",
        "text": "Douglas Loverro, the head of human spaceflight for NASA, abruptly resigned on Monday, after six months on the job and days before the agency is scheduled to launch astronauts for the first time since the space shuttle retired in 2011.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLoverro\u2019s resignation comes at a critical time \u2014 two days before he was to lead a critical \u201claunch readiness review\u201d meeting that would determine whether SpaceX should proceed to launch two NASA astronauts on a test mission to the International Space Station. A longtime Pentagon official, Loverro was seen as a calm and immensely capable executive who would not only help the agency restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, but also push NASA to meet a White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.Story continues below advertisementTwo people with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the personnel matter said his resignation was spurred when Loverro broke a rule during NASA\u2019s recent procurement of a spacecraft capable of landing humans on the moon.AdvertisementIn an email he wrote to top NASA officials that was obtained by The Washington Post, Loverro wrote that NASA\u2019s mission \u201cis certainly not easy, nor for the faint of heart, and risk-taking is part of the job description.\u201dHe wrote that he took \u201ca risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission. Now, over the balance of time, it is clear that I made a mistake in that choice for which I alone must bear the consequences.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Loverro declined to discuss the exact details of why he resigned.\u201cIt had nothing to do with commercial crew,\u201d he said. \u201cIt had to do with moving fast on Artemis, and I don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that.\u201d Artemis is NASA\u2019s program to return people to the moon.Last month, NASA awarded three contracts, worth nearly $1 billion combined, to a team led by Blue Origin, a team led by Dynetics and to SpaceX. (Blue Origin is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementLoverro said there were \u201cno sour grapes\u201d and that he holds \u201cNASA in great respect. I hope they can continue on everything they started and will follow through on their plans.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn May 27, SpaceX is scheduled to launch two NASA astronauts on a test flight of the Dragon spacecraft to the space station. In a statement Tuesday, NASA indicated the launch would proceed without delay.\u201cNext week will mark the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight with the launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station,\u201d the agency said. \u201cThis test flight will be a historic and momentous occasion that will see the return of human spaceflight to our country, and the incredible dedication by the men and women of NASA is what has made this mission possible.\u201dThe statement did not say what led to Loverro\u2019s resignation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier in the day, Vice President Pence praised NASA for \u201crenewing American leadership in space\u201d and said he was looking forward to the launch. He and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine gave no indication of the shakeup.The news sent shock waves through the space community, and there were concerns over whether NASA should proceed with the launch in the wake of such a tumultuous development.In a statement to The Post, Bridenstine said he had \"full confidence\u201d in Kathy Lueders, the NASA Commercial Crew Program manager. He added that the agency\u2019s \u201cleadership, SpaceX and NASA\u2019s team of engineers and experienced human spaceflight professionals have reviewed the Commercial Crew Program regularly for years.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSteve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator, will chair the readiness review meeting on Thursday. Loverro said he thought \u201cit was absolutely safe to proceed.\u201d He added he had \u201c100 percent faith\u201d in Jurczyk. \u201cI would trust him with every ounce of that mission\u2019s performance.\u201dNASA said that Ken Bowersox, currently the deputy associate administrator for human exploration, would take over Loverro\u2019s job in an acting capacity. Bowersox previously held the position after Bridenstine demoted William Gerstenmaier, a NASA veteran who later resigned and now works for SpaceX. The staff shakeup comes after NASA awarded contracts for lunar lander spacecraft. NASA\u2019s human spaceflight chief resigns a week before the first launch of astronauts in a decade",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s human spaceflight chief resigns a week before the first launch of astronauts in a decade (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6391",
        "date": "2020-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/19/nasas-human-spaceflight-chief-resigns-week-before-first-launch-astronauts-decade/",
        "text": "Douglas Loverro, the head of human spaceflight for NASA, abruptly resigned on Monday, after six months on the job and days before the agency is scheduled to launch astronauts for the first time since the space shuttle retired in 2011.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLoverro\u2019s resignation comes at a critical time \u2014 two days before he was to lead a critical \u201claunch readiness review\u201d meeting that would determine whether SpaceX should proceed to launch two NASA astronauts on a test mission to the International Space Station. A longtime Pentagon official, Loverro was seen as a calm and immensely capable executive who would not only help the agency restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, but also push NASA to meet a White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.Story continues below advertisementTwo people with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the personnel matter said his resignation was spurred when Loverro broke a rule during NASA\u2019s recent procurement of a spacecraft capable of landing humans on the moon.AdvertisementIn an email he wrote to top NASA officials that was obtained by The Washington Post, Loverro wrote that NASA\u2019s mission \u201cis certainly not easy, nor for the faint of heart, and risk-taking is part of the job description.\u201dHe wrote that he took \u201ca risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission. Now, over the balance of time, it is clear that I made a mistake in that choice for which I alone must bear the consequences.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Loverro declined to discuss the exact details of why he resigned.\u201cIt had nothing to do with commercial crew,\u201d he said. \u201cIt had to do with moving fast on Artemis, and I don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that.\u201d Artemis is NASA\u2019s program to return people to the moon.Last month, NASA awarded three contracts, worth nearly $1 billion combined, to a team led by Blue Origin, a team led by Dynetics and to SpaceX. (Blue Origin is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementLoverro said there were \u201cno sour grapes\u201d and that he holds \u201cNASA in great respect. I hope they can continue on everything they started and will follow through on their plans.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn May 27, SpaceX is scheduled to launch two NASA astronauts on a test flight of the Dragon spacecraft to the space station. In a statement Tuesday, NASA indicated the launch would proceed without delay.\u201cNext week will mark the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight with the launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station,\u201d the agency said. \u201cThis test flight will be a historic and momentous occasion that will see the return of human spaceflight to our country, and the incredible dedication by the men and women of NASA is what has made this mission possible.\u201dThe statement did not say what led to Loverro\u2019s resignation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier in the day, Vice President Pence praised NASA for \u201crenewing American leadership in space\u201d and said he was looking forward to the launch. He and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine gave no indication of the shakeup.The news sent shock waves through the space community, and there were concerns over whether NASA should proceed with the launch in the wake of such a tumultuous development.In a statement to The Post, Bridenstine said he had \"full confidence\u201d in Kathy Lueders, the NASA Commercial Crew Program manager. He added that the agency\u2019s \u201cleadership, SpaceX and NASA\u2019s team of engineers and experienced human spaceflight professionals have reviewed the Commercial Crew Program regularly for years.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSteve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator, will chair the readiness review meeting on Thursday. Loverro said he thought \u201cit was absolutely safe to proceed.\u201d He added he had \u201c100 percent faith\u201d in Jurczyk. \u201cI would trust him with every ounce of that mission\u2019s performance.\u201dNASA said that Ken Bowersox, currently the deputy associate administrator for human exploration, would take over Loverro\u2019s job in an acting capacity. Bowersox previously held the position after Bridenstine demoted William Gerstenmaier, a NASA veteran who later resigned and now works for SpaceX. The staff shakeup comes after NASA awarded contracts for lunar lander spacecraft. NASA\u2019s human spaceflight chief resigns a week before the first launch of astronauts in a decade",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s human spaceflight chief resigns a week before the first launch of astronauts in a decade (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6392",
        "date": "2020-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/19/nasas-human-spaceflight-chief-resigns-week-before-first-launch-astronauts-decade/",
        "text": "Douglas Loverro, the head of human spaceflight for NASA, abruptly resigned on Monday, after six months on the job and days before the agency is scheduled to launch astronauts for the first time since the space shuttle retired in 2011.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLoverro\u2019s resignation comes at a critical time \u2014 two days before he was to lead a critical \u201claunch readiness review\u201d meeting that would determine whether SpaceX should proceed to launch two NASA astronauts on a test mission to the International Space Station. A longtime Pentagon official, Loverro was seen as a calm and immensely capable executive who would not only help the agency restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, but also push NASA to meet a White House mandate to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.Story continues below advertisementTwo people with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the personnel matter said his resignation was spurred when Loverro broke a rule during NASA\u2019s recent procurement of a spacecraft capable of landing humans on the moon.AdvertisementIn an email he wrote to top NASA officials that was obtained by The Washington Post, Loverro wrote that NASA\u2019s mission \u201cis certainly not easy, nor for the faint of heart, and risk-taking is part of the job description.\u201dHe wrote that he took \u201ca risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission. Now, over the balance of time, it is clear that I made a mistake in that choice for which I alone must bear the consequences.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Loverro declined to discuss the exact details of why he resigned.\u201cIt had nothing to do with commercial crew,\u201d he said. \u201cIt had to do with moving fast on Artemis, and I don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that.\u201d Artemis is NASA\u2019s program to return people to the moon.Last month, NASA awarded three contracts, worth nearly $1 billion combined, to a team led by Blue Origin, a team led by Dynetics and to SpaceX. (Blue Origin is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementLoverro said there were \u201cno sour grapes\u201d and that he holds \u201cNASA in great respect. I hope they can continue on everything they started and will follow through on their plans.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOn May 27, SpaceX is scheduled to launch two NASA astronauts on a test flight of the Dragon spacecraft to the space station. In a statement Tuesday, NASA indicated the launch would proceed without delay.\u201cNext week will mark the beginning of a new era in human spaceflight with the launch of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station,\u201d the agency said. \u201cThis test flight will be a historic and momentous occasion that will see the return of human spaceflight to our country, and the incredible dedication by the men and women of NASA is what has made this mission possible.\u201dThe statement did not say what led to Loverro\u2019s resignation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier in the day, Vice President Pence praised NASA for \u201crenewing American leadership in space\u201d and said he was looking forward to the launch. He and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine gave no indication of the shakeup.The news sent shock waves through the space community, and there were concerns over whether NASA should proceed with the launch in the wake of such a tumultuous development.In a statement to The Post, Bridenstine said he had \"full confidence\u201d in Kathy Lueders, the NASA Commercial Crew Program manager. He added that the agency\u2019s \u201cleadership, SpaceX and NASA\u2019s team of engineers and experienced human spaceflight professionals have reviewed the Commercial Crew Program regularly for years.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSteve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s associate administrator, will chair the readiness review meeting on Thursday. Loverro said he thought \u201cit was absolutely safe to proceed.\u201d He added he had \u201c100 percent faith\u201d in Jurczyk. \u201cI would trust him with every ounce of that mission\u2019s performance.\u201dNASA said that Ken Bowersox, currently the deputy associate administrator for human exploration, would take over Loverro\u2019s job in an acting capacity. Bowersox previously held the position after Bridenstine demoted William Gerstenmaier, a NASA veteran who later resigned and now works for SpaceX. The staff shakeup comes after NASA awarded contracts for lunar lander spacecraft. NASA\u2019s human spaceflight chief resigns a week before the first launch of astronauts in a decade",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Even astronauts get ornery: Coronavirus advice from those who have endured social distancing in the extreme (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6393",
        "date": "2020-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/16/astronauts-quarantine-advice-coronavirus/",
        "text": "Don\u2019t count the days.Tallying them, like etches on a prison wall, will only serve as a reminder of how interminable the coronavirus quarantine is, how insufferably abnormal, each mind-numbing day building unmercifully into a contagion of its own.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI have no idea how many days I\u2019ve been in quarantine. None,\u201d said Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent 340 days in space, the record for the longest single spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut. \u201cI don\u2019t think about it. I just think, this is my reality. This is my mission. And it will someday be over.\u201d Today, instead of being confined on the International Space Station with a handful of crewmates, he\u2019s restricted to his 1,200-square-foot, two-bedrooms-with-den apartment in Houston with his wife. But his philosophy is the same, as is his strict adherence to routine, laid out daily on a shared Google calendar. He sets his alarm for 7 a.m., eats breakfast, \u201cthen work goes to noon, and then lunch, and then work, and then physical training, then plan for the next day, then dinner, then free time.\u201dAstronauts have a lot to teach us about how to survive the great covid-19 lockdown of 2020. So do explorers and scientists. And the researchers who study them say their experiences \u2014 confined in a spacecraft in orbit, a ship at sea or an outpost in Antarctica \u2014 can shed light on how we can best navigate an unsettling time that in its darkest moments can feel like an unjust incarceration.Since the outbreak hit the United States, astronauts have been eagerly offering up their wisdom, urging those of us not used to forced isolation and social distancing to exercise, stay productive and be positive, find creative outlets, revel in nature, stick to a schedule, reach out to loved ones, and reconnect with old friends.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut don\u2019t count the days, at least according to Kelly. In space, like now, he assiduously tried to will himself into a tolerable ignorance despite repeated reminders of milestones \u2014 100 days to go! \u2014 from ground controllers and crewmates.\u201cDrove me crazy,\u201d he said.NASA has long been interested in human interactions among astronauts, especially as it looks toward long-duration spaceflight, when people could be cooped up together for long periods. Between 2003 and 2016, it selected astronauts to keep journals that would then be analyzed. The project was led by Jack Stuster, a psychologist and anthropologist who had researched the behavior of explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton, who had led long-duration missions to remote corners of the Earth, and wrote a book about it titled, \u201cBold Endeavors.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter reading the astronauts\u2019 diaries, he concluded that they \u201cshare an unusually well-developed sense of self-awareness.\u201d Which came as a bit of a surprise.He had read \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d by Tom Wolfe, about John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7, and so Stuster had thought astronauts \u201ctended to be overly confident and certainly unwilling to admit to possessing flaws or normal human frailties.\u201d But instead, social distancing for long periods in orbit revealed that even NASA\u2019s finest were endearingly human, prone to bouts of brooding and pity parties like the rest of us. The alchemy behind the \u201cright stuff\u201d has long been misunderstood, it turns out \u2014 teaching NASA to go lighter on the bravado and heavier on the patience and compassion.\u201cWhat a day it has been,\u201d one astronaut confessed into the assigned diary. (All the participants did so under the agreement that their journals would remain anonymous.) \u201cToday started with urinating in the bag so that set the tone for everything.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think I do need to get out of here. Living in close quarters with people over a long period of time, definitely even things that normally wouldn't bother you much at all can bother you after a while,\u201d wrote another. \u201cThat can drive anybody crazy.\u201d\u201cI could tell there was some stress in the air because there were a couple very short tempered exchanges between us this morning,\u201d wrote another.50 astronauts in their own wordsOn his longest spaceflight, former NASA astronaut Terry Virts spent 200 days on the space station. \u201cThat\u2019s a long time,\u201d he said. Long enough to know that a small annoyance \u201cis like a pebble in your shoe. If it\u2019s a couple days, it doesn\u2019t matter. But over a long time, that pebble is going to start to cause problems. So you have to talk things through, which is not always fun and comfortable.\u201dStory continues below advertisement(In that case, let the record reflect that this reporter may have left a half-eaten banana out amid the clean dishes drying on the kitchen counter. This not only posed a sanitary issue, but the reporter should have remembered that his wife absolutely cannot stand even the smell of bananas. He apologizes.)AdvertisementStuster said there are similarities between coronavirus quarantine and a long sea voyage gone awry. (While he\u2019s never studied the particular anthropology and pathos of cruise ships, they might be fertile ground for inquiry as the pandemic leaves many stranded at sea.) In 1898, an exploration team locked in Antarctic ice suffered through the winter by holding beauty contests of illustrations of women ripped from magazines in the ship\u2019s library and got exercise by taking what they called a \u201cmadhouse promenade\u201d on the ice around the ship.\u201cThey had senses of humor back then,\u201d Stuster said.Story continues below advertisementTo prepare for long-duration spaceflight, NASA has been working with the University of Hawaii, which has been simulating Mars missions by confining small groups at remote outposts for months at a time to study how they interact.AdvertisementOne of the coping mechanisms crews developed was to celebrate everything \u2014 breaking up the mundane with holiday-like events that turned half birthdays and even National Hot Dog Day into parties to look forward to.\u201cAnything they can do to make a day special,\u201d said Kimberly Binsted, a professor at the University of Hawaii and the principal investigator of the Mars simulation project.Today, during the novel coronavirus pandemic, chefs are leading lessons on how people in quarantine can cook what\u2019s in their pantry. And newspapers, such as this one, are running stories like: \u201cMaking yogurt at home is easier than you think.\u201d Or: \u201cIt\u2019s time to relax and figure out how to mix a drink with what you have.\"Story continues below advertisementWhen Binsted was on a mission in the Arctic, one of her crewmates from Quebec was getting homesick. So one Sunday, they made him poutine, or their best approximation of the French Canadian dish, given what they had.Advertisement\u201cIt took forever because we didn\u2019t have potatoes, so we had to reconstitute these scalloped potatoes from a box and fry those,\u201d she said. \u201cWe made cheese from dehydrated milk, and eventually presented him something which was only slightly like poutine.\u201dBinsted insists the hydrated, reconstituted vaguely poutine-esque concoction, awful as it sounds, was actually tasty.Recently during \u201cYuri\u2019s Night,\u201d a celebration to commemorate Yuri Gagarin becoming the first person in space, Kelly had a video conversation broadcast on the Internet with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead about space, isolation and music. Weir had spent years on the road touring, and Kelly asked Weir what advice he had for those in quarantine.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFile off the edges,\u201d Weir responded. \u201cBecause if you have rough edges, there are going to be some scars.\u201dAdvertisementMusic, Kelly added, is also important. On the space station, the crews would get together for dinner on Friday and Saturday, and he would play music on his iPad.\u201cI have pretty eclectic taste, from classical to rap,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d often bring Coldplay, Pink Floyd, sometimes the Dead. The cosmonauts loved whatever I brought to those dinners. But I\u2019m curious \u2014 if you were on the space station right now on a Saturday night, what album would you want to play?\u201d\u201cProbably it would be Miles Davis\u2019s \u2018Kind of Blue,\u2019 \u201d Weir said. \u201cEveryone loves that, from the first notes of the first song, \u2018So What.\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a track that starts slow, disorganized, then builds out a theme \u2014 bass, piano, drums and then that trumpet, both plaintive and celebratory, the kind of tune you can listen to over and over and still hear something new. An anthem for a quarantine.AdvertisementIsolation blurs the lines between monotony and boredom, solitude and isolation, loneliness and being alone. But the distinctions are important. No one knew that better than Michael Collins and Al Worden, two NASA astronauts during the Apollo moon missions who stayed behind in orbit around the moon while their crewmates walked on the lunar surface.Throughout their careers, both were asked whether they were lonely.\u201cYou can be lonely anywhere,\u201d Worden told The Post in an interview last year before his death. \u201cI can be lonely right in the middle of town. Being alone means there\u2019s no one else around. Now I know I was alone in lunar orbit for three days, but I was not ever lonely.\u201dLikewise, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin pranced on the surface of the moon, and Collins flew on the far side out of radio contact with Earth, he thought, \u201cI am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.\u201d For those keeping score, he wrote, that would be \u201cthree billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one \u2014 plus God knows what \u2014 on this side.\u201dFormer NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was the only American not on Earth during the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and endured his own version of isolation. Traveling in the space station some 250 miles high, he could see the column of smoke rising from New York City, where the twin towers had been hit. A former naval aviator, he snapped into action, taking photos and relaying what he was seeing to the ground in case another attack was being planned. Still, he felt a disorienting sense of detachment, compounded by dread and helplessness.\u201cIt was a feeling of isolation and frustration that we couldn\u2019t do more to help the people down on Earth,\u201d he said.Wernher von Braun, the legendary NASA engineer known as the father of the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket, wrote in the 1950s that on a lengthy trip to Mars, even \u201clittle mannerisms \u2014 the way a man cracks his knuckles, blows his nose, the way he grins, talks or gestures \u2014 create tension and hatred which could lead to murder.\u201dIn one of his astronaut studies, Stuster concluded that \u201csuch a grim outcome is unlikely.\u201dAnd indeed, last week, NASA\u2019s crew on the space station seemed to be getting along quite well. During an interview with reporters they were gracious and friendly and even ended with a synchronized, weightless backflip, arms locked together.Still, Jessica Meir, who had been on the station since September, said it was \u201cquite surreal for us to see this whole situation unfolding on the planet below.\u201dFrom space, she said, there were no visible signs of the turmoil the pandemic is causing.\u201cWe can tell you that the Earth still looks stunning as always from up here,\u201d she said.Chris Cassidy had just arrived for this third trip to space. Normally, astronauts spend two weeks in quarantine before launching to avoid bringing bugs to the space station. He knew that was going to be the case again for this flight.What he didn\u2019t know, he said, was that \u201cthe whole rest of the world was going to join us.\u201d Astronauts have a lot to teach us about how to survive the great covid-19 lockdown of 2020. So do explorers and scientists. Even astronauts get ornery: Coronavirus advice from those who have endured social distancing in the extreme",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Even astronauts get ornery: Coronavirus advice from those who have endured social distancing in the extreme (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6394",
        "date": "2020-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/16/astronauts-quarantine-advice-coronavirus/",
        "text": "Don\u2019t count the days.Tallying them, like etches on a prison wall, will only serve as a reminder of how interminable the coronavirus quarantine is, how insufferably abnormal, each mind-numbing day building unmercifully into a contagion of its own.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI have no idea how many days I\u2019ve been in quarantine. None,\u201d said Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent 340 days in space, the record for the longest single spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut. \u201cI don\u2019t think about it. I just think, this is my reality. This is my mission. And it will someday be over.\u201d Today, instead of being confined on the International Space Station with a handful of crewmates, he\u2019s restricted to his 1,200-square-foot, two-bedrooms-with-den apartment in Houston with his wife. But his philosophy is the same, as is his strict adherence to routine, laid out daily on a shared Google calendar. He sets his alarm for 7 a.m., eats breakfast, \u201cthen work goes to noon, and then lunch, and then work, and then physical training, then plan for the next day, then dinner, then free time.\u201dAstronauts have a lot to teach us about how to survive the great covid-19 lockdown of 2020. So do explorers and scientists. And the researchers who study them say their experiences \u2014 confined in a spacecraft in orbit, a ship at sea or an outpost in Antarctica \u2014 can shed light on how we can best navigate an unsettling time that in its darkest moments can feel like an unjust incarceration.Since the outbreak hit the United States, astronauts have been eagerly offering up their wisdom, urging those of us not used to forced isolation and social distancing to exercise, stay productive and be positive, find creative outlets, revel in nature, stick to a schedule, reach out to loved ones, and reconnect with old friends.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut don\u2019t count the days, at least according to Kelly. In space, like now, he assiduously tried to will himself into a tolerable ignorance despite repeated reminders of milestones \u2014 100 days to go! \u2014 from ground controllers and crewmates.\u201cDrove me crazy,\u201d he said.NASA has long been interested in human interactions among astronauts, especially as it looks toward long-duration spaceflight, when people could be cooped up together for long periods. Between 2003 and 2016, it selected astronauts to keep journals that would then be analyzed. The project was led by Jack Stuster, a psychologist and anthropologist who had researched the behavior of explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton, who had led long-duration missions to remote corners of the Earth, and wrote a book about it titled, \u201cBold Endeavors.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter reading the astronauts\u2019 diaries, he concluded that they \u201cshare an unusually well-developed sense of self-awareness.\u201d Which came as a bit of a surprise.He had read \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d by Tom Wolfe, about John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7, and so Stuster had thought astronauts \u201ctended to be overly confident and certainly unwilling to admit to possessing flaws or normal human frailties.\u201d But instead, social distancing for long periods in orbit revealed that even NASA\u2019s finest were endearingly human, prone to bouts of brooding and pity parties like the rest of us. The alchemy behind the \u201cright stuff\u201d has long been misunderstood, it turns out \u2014 teaching NASA to go lighter on the bravado and heavier on the patience and compassion.\u201cWhat a day it has been,\u201d one astronaut confessed into the assigned diary. (All the participants did so under the agreement that their journals would remain anonymous.) \u201cToday started with urinating in the bag so that set the tone for everything.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think I do need to get out of here. Living in close quarters with people over a long period of time, definitely even things that normally wouldn't bother you much at all can bother you after a while,\u201d wrote another. \u201cThat can drive anybody crazy.\u201d\u201cI could tell there was some stress in the air because there were a couple very short tempered exchanges between us this morning,\u201d wrote another.50 astronauts in their own wordsOn his longest spaceflight, former NASA astronaut Terry Virts spent 200 days on the space station. \u201cThat\u2019s a long time,\u201d he said. Long enough to know that a small annoyance \u201cis like a pebble in your shoe. If it\u2019s a couple days, it doesn\u2019t matter. But over a long time, that pebble is going to start to cause problems. So you have to talk things through, which is not always fun and comfortable.\u201dStory continues below advertisement(In that case, let the record reflect that this reporter may have left a half-eaten banana out amid the clean dishes drying on the kitchen counter. This not only posed a sanitary issue, but the reporter should have remembered that his wife absolutely cannot stand even the smell of bananas. He apologizes.)AdvertisementStuster said there are similarities between coronavirus quarantine and a long sea voyage gone awry. (While he\u2019s never studied the particular anthropology and pathos of cruise ships, they might be fertile ground for inquiry as the pandemic leaves many stranded at sea.) In 1898, an exploration team locked in Antarctic ice suffered through the winter by holding beauty contests of illustrations of women ripped from magazines in the ship\u2019s library and got exercise by taking what they called a \u201cmadhouse promenade\u201d on the ice around the ship.\u201cThey had senses of humor back then,\u201d Stuster said.Story continues below advertisementTo prepare for long-duration spaceflight, NASA has been working with the University of Hawaii, which has been simulating Mars missions by confining small groups at remote outposts for months at a time to study how they interact.AdvertisementOne of the coping mechanisms crews developed was to celebrate everything \u2014 breaking up the mundane with holiday-like events that turned half birthdays and even National Hot Dog Day into parties to look forward to.\u201cAnything they can do to make a day special,\u201d said Kimberly Binsted, a professor at the University of Hawaii and the principal investigator of the Mars simulation project.Today, during the novel coronavirus pandemic, chefs are leading lessons on how people in quarantine can cook what\u2019s in their pantry. And newspapers, such as this one, are running stories like: \u201cMaking yogurt at home is easier than you think.\u201d Or: \u201cIt\u2019s time to relax and figure out how to mix a drink with what you have.\"Story continues below advertisementWhen Binsted was on a mission in the Arctic, one of her crewmates from Quebec was getting homesick. So one Sunday, they made him poutine, or their best approximation of the French Canadian dish, given what they had.Advertisement\u201cIt took forever because we didn\u2019t have potatoes, so we had to reconstitute these scalloped potatoes from a box and fry those,\u201d she said. \u201cWe made cheese from dehydrated milk, and eventually presented him something which was only slightly like poutine.\u201dBinsted insists the hydrated, reconstituted vaguely poutine-esque concoction, awful as it sounds, was actually tasty.Recently during \u201cYuri\u2019s Night,\u201d a celebration to commemorate Yuri Gagarin becoming the first person in space, Kelly had a video conversation broadcast on the Internet with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead about space, isolation and music. Weir had spent years on the road touring, and Kelly asked Weir what advice he had for those in quarantine.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFile off the edges,\u201d Weir responded. \u201cBecause if you have rough edges, there are going to be some scars.\u201dAdvertisementMusic, Kelly added, is also important. On the space station, the crews would get together for dinner on Friday and Saturday, and he would play music on his iPad.\u201cI have pretty eclectic taste, from classical to rap,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d often bring Coldplay, Pink Floyd, sometimes the Dead. The cosmonauts loved whatever I brought to those dinners. But I\u2019m curious \u2014 if you were on the space station right now on a Saturday night, what album would you want to play?\u201d\u201cProbably it would be Miles Davis\u2019s \u2018Kind of Blue,\u2019 \u201d Weir said. \u201cEveryone loves that, from the first notes of the first song, \u2018So What.\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a track that starts slow, disorganized, then builds out a theme \u2014 bass, piano, drums and then that trumpet, both plaintive and celebratory, the kind of tune you can listen to over and over and still hear something new. An anthem for a quarantine.AdvertisementIsolation blurs the lines between monotony and boredom, solitude and isolation, loneliness and being alone. But the distinctions are important. No one knew that better than Michael Collins and Al Worden, two NASA astronauts during the Apollo moon missions who stayed behind in orbit around the moon while their crewmates walked on the lunar surface.Throughout their careers, both were asked whether they were lonely.\u201cYou can be lonely anywhere,\u201d Worden told The Post in an interview last year before his death. \u201cI can be lonely right in the middle of town. Being alone means there\u2019s no one else around. Now I know I was alone in lunar orbit for three days, but I was not ever lonely.\u201dLikewise, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin pranced on the surface of the moon, and Collins flew on the far side out of radio contact with Earth, he thought, \u201cI am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.\u201d For those keeping score, he wrote, that would be \u201cthree billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one \u2014 plus God knows what \u2014 on this side.\u201dFormer NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was the only American not on Earth during the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and endured his own version of isolation. Traveling in the space station some 250 miles high, he could see the column of smoke rising from New York City, where the twin towers had been hit. A former naval aviator, he snapped into action, taking photos and relaying what he was seeing to the ground in case another attack was being planned. Still, he felt a disorienting sense of detachment, compounded by dread and helplessness.\u201cIt was a feeling of isolation and frustration that we couldn\u2019t do more to help the people down on Earth,\u201d he said.Wernher von Braun, the legendary NASA engineer known as the father of the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket, wrote in the 1950s that on a lengthy trip to Mars, even \u201clittle mannerisms \u2014 the way a man cracks his knuckles, blows his nose, the way he grins, talks or gestures \u2014 create tension and hatred which could lead to murder.\u201dIn one of his astronaut studies, Stuster concluded that \u201csuch a grim outcome is unlikely.\u201dAnd indeed, last week, NASA\u2019s crew on the space station seemed to be getting along quite well. During an interview with reporters they were gracious and friendly and even ended with a synchronized, weightless backflip, arms locked together.Still, Jessica Meir, who had been on the station since September, said it was \u201cquite surreal for us to see this whole situation unfolding on the planet below.\u201dFrom space, she said, there were no visible signs of the turmoil the pandemic is causing.\u201cWe can tell you that the Earth still looks stunning as always from up here,\u201d she said.Chris Cassidy had just arrived for this third trip to space. Normally, astronauts spend two weeks in quarantine before launching to avoid bringing bugs to the space station. He knew that was going to be the case again for this flight.What he didn\u2019t know, he said, was that \u201cthe whole rest of the world was going to join us.\u201d Astronauts have a lot to teach us about how to survive the great covid-19 lockdown of 2020. So do explorers and scientists. Even astronauts get ornery: Coronavirus advice from those who have endured social distancing in the extreme",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Even astronauts get ornery: Coronavirus advice from those who have endured social distancing in the extreme (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6395",
        "date": "2020-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/16/astronauts-quarantine-advice-coronavirus/",
        "text": "Don\u2019t count the days.Tallying them, like etches on a prison wall, will only serve as a reminder of how interminable the coronavirus quarantine is, how insufferably abnormal, each mind-numbing day building unmercifully into a contagion of its own.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI have no idea how many days I\u2019ve been in quarantine. None,\u201d said Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent 340 days in space, the record for the longest single spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut. \u201cI don\u2019t think about it. I just think, this is my reality. This is my mission. And it will someday be over.\u201d Today, instead of being confined on the International Space Station with a handful of crewmates, he\u2019s restricted to his 1,200-square-foot, two-bedrooms-with-den apartment in Houston with his wife. But his philosophy is the same, as is his strict adherence to routine, laid out daily on a shared Google calendar. He sets his alarm for 7 a.m., eats breakfast, \u201cthen work goes to noon, and then lunch, and then work, and then physical training, then plan for the next day, then dinner, then free time.\u201dAstronauts have a lot to teach us about how to survive the great covid-19 lockdown of 2020. So do explorers and scientists. And the researchers who study them say their experiences \u2014 confined in a spacecraft in orbit, a ship at sea or an outpost in Antarctica \u2014 can shed light on how we can best navigate an unsettling time that in its darkest moments can feel like an unjust incarceration.Since the outbreak hit the United States, astronauts have been eagerly offering up their wisdom, urging those of us not used to forced isolation and social distancing to exercise, stay productive and be positive, find creative outlets, revel in nature, stick to a schedule, reach out to loved ones, and reconnect with old friends.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut don\u2019t count the days, at least according to Kelly. In space, like now, he assiduously tried to will himself into a tolerable ignorance despite repeated reminders of milestones \u2014 100 days to go! \u2014 from ground controllers and crewmates.\u201cDrove me crazy,\u201d he said.NASA has long been interested in human interactions among astronauts, especially as it looks toward long-duration spaceflight, when people could be cooped up together for long periods. Between 2003 and 2016, it selected astronauts to keep journals that would then be analyzed. The project was led by Jack Stuster, a psychologist and anthropologist who had researched the behavior of explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton, who had led long-duration missions to remote corners of the Earth, and wrote a book about it titled, \u201cBold Endeavors.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter reading the astronauts\u2019 diaries, he concluded that they \u201cshare an unusually well-developed sense of self-awareness.\u201d Which came as a bit of a surprise.He had read \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d by Tom Wolfe, about John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7, and so Stuster had thought astronauts \u201ctended to be overly confident and certainly unwilling to admit to possessing flaws or normal human frailties.\u201d But instead, social distancing for long periods in orbit revealed that even NASA\u2019s finest were endearingly human, prone to bouts of brooding and pity parties like the rest of us. The alchemy behind the \u201cright stuff\u201d has long been misunderstood, it turns out \u2014 teaching NASA to go lighter on the bravado and heavier on the patience and compassion.\u201cWhat a day it has been,\u201d one astronaut confessed into the assigned diary. (All the participants did so under the agreement that their journals would remain anonymous.) \u201cToday started with urinating in the bag so that set the tone for everything.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think I do need to get out of here. Living in close quarters with people over a long period of time, definitely even things that normally wouldn't bother you much at all can bother you after a while,\u201d wrote another. \u201cThat can drive anybody crazy.\u201d\u201cI could tell there was some stress in the air because there were a couple very short tempered exchanges between us this morning,\u201d wrote another.50 astronauts in their own wordsOn his longest spaceflight, former NASA astronaut Terry Virts spent 200 days on the space station. \u201cThat\u2019s a long time,\u201d he said. Long enough to know that a small annoyance \u201cis like a pebble in your shoe. If it\u2019s a couple days, it doesn\u2019t matter. But over a long time, that pebble is going to start to cause problems. So you have to talk things through, which is not always fun and comfortable.\u201dStory continues below advertisement(In that case, let the record reflect that this reporter may have left a half-eaten banana out amid the clean dishes drying on the kitchen counter. This not only posed a sanitary issue, but the reporter should have remembered that his wife absolutely cannot stand even the smell of bananas. He apologizes.)AdvertisementStuster said there are similarities between coronavirus quarantine and a long sea voyage gone awry. (While he\u2019s never studied the particular anthropology and pathos of cruise ships, they might be fertile ground for inquiry as the pandemic leaves many stranded at sea.) In 1898, an exploration team locked in Antarctic ice suffered through the winter by holding beauty contests of illustrations of women ripped from magazines in the ship\u2019s library and got exercise by taking what they called a \u201cmadhouse promenade\u201d on the ice around the ship.\u201cThey had senses of humor back then,\u201d Stuster said.Story continues below advertisementTo prepare for long-duration spaceflight, NASA has been working with the University of Hawaii, which has been simulating Mars missions by confining small groups at remote outposts for months at a time to study how they interact.AdvertisementOne of the coping mechanisms crews developed was to celebrate everything \u2014 breaking up the mundane with holiday-like events that turned half birthdays and even National Hot Dog Day into parties to look forward to.\u201cAnything they can do to make a day special,\u201d said Kimberly Binsted, a professor at the University of Hawaii and the principal investigator of the Mars simulation project.Today, during the novel coronavirus pandemic, chefs are leading lessons on how people in quarantine can cook what\u2019s in their pantry. And newspapers, such as this one, are running stories like: \u201cMaking yogurt at home is easier than you think.\u201d Or: \u201cIt\u2019s time to relax and figure out how to mix a drink with what you have.\"Story continues below advertisementWhen Binsted was on a mission in the Arctic, one of her crewmates from Quebec was getting homesick. So one Sunday, they made him poutine, or their best approximation of the French Canadian dish, given what they had.Advertisement\u201cIt took forever because we didn\u2019t have potatoes, so we had to reconstitute these scalloped potatoes from a box and fry those,\u201d she said. \u201cWe made cheese from dehydrated milk, and eventually presented him something which was only slightly like poutine.\u201dBinsted insists the hydrated, reconstituted vaguely poutine-esque concoction, awful as it sounds, was actually tasty.Recently during \u201cYuri\u2019s Night,\u201d a celebration to commemorate Yuri Gagarin becoming the first person in space, Kelly had a video conversation broadcast on the Internet with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead about space, isolation and music. Weir had spent years on the road touring, and Kelly asked Weir what advice he had for those in quarantine.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFile off the edges,\u201d Weir responded. \u201cBecause if you have rough edges, there are going to be some scars.\u201dAdvertisementMusic, Kelly added, is also important. On the space station, the crews would get together for dinner on Friday and Saturday, and he would play music on his iPad.\u201cI have pretty eclectic taste, from classical to rap,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d often bring Coldplay, Pink Floyd, sometimes the Dead. The cosmonauts loved whatever I brought to those dinners. But I\u2019m curious \u2014 if you were on the space station right now on a Saturday night, what album would you want to play?\u201d\u201cProbably it would be Miles Davis\u2019s \u2018Kind of Blue,\u2019 \u201d Weir said. \u201cEveryone loves that, from the first notes of the first song, \u2018So What.\u2019 \u201dStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a track that starts slow, disorganized, then builds out a theme \u2014 bass, piano, drums and then that trumpet, both plaintive and celebratory, the kind of tune you can listen to over and over and still hear something new. An anthem for a quarantine.AdvertisementIsolation blurs the lines between monotony and boredom, solitude and isolation, loneliness and being alone. But the distinctions are important. No one knew that better than Michael Collins and Al Worden, two NASA astronauts during the Apollo moon missions who stayed behind in orbit around the moon while their crewmates walked on the lunar surface.Throughout their careers, both were asked whether they were lonely.\u201cYou can be lonely anywhere,\u201d Worden told The Post in an interview last year before his death. \u201cI can be lonely right in the middle of town. Being alone means there\u2019s no one else around. Now I know I was alone in lunar orbit for three days, but I was not ever lonely.\u201dLikewise, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin pranced on the surface of the moon, and Collins flew on the far side out of radio contact with Earth, he thought, \u201cI am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.\u201d For those keeping score, he wrote, that would be \u201cthree billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one \u2014 plus God knows what \u2014 on this side.\u201dFormer NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was the only American not on Earth during the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and endured his own version of isolation. Traveling in the space station some 250 miles high, he could see the column of smoke rising from New York City, where the twin towers had been hit. A former naval aviator, he snapped into action, taking photos and relaying what he was seeing to the ground in case another attack was being planned. Still, he felt a disorienting sense of detachment, compounded by dread and helplessness.\u201cIt was a feeling of isolation and frustration that we couldn\u2019t do more to help the people down on Earth,\u201d he said.Wernher von Braun, the legendary NASA engineer known as the father of the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket, wrote in the 1950s that on a lengthy trip to Mars, even \u201clittle mannerisms \u2014 the way a man cracks his knuckles, blows his nose, the way he grins, talks or gestures \u2014 create tension and hatred which could lead to murder.\u201dIn one of his astronaut studies, Stuster concluded that \u201csuch a grim outcome is unlikely.\u201dAnd indeed, last week, NASA\u2019s crew on the space station seemed to be getting along quite well. During an interview with reporters they were gracious and friendly and even ended with a synchronized, weightless backflip, arms locked together.Still, Jessica Meir, who had been on the station since September, said it was \u201cquite surreal for us to see this whole situation unfolding on the planet below.\u201dFrom space, she said, there were no visible signs of the turmoil the pandemic is causing.\u201cWe can tell you that the Earth still looks stunning as always from up here,\u201d she said.Chris Cassidy had just arrived for this third trip to space. Normally, astronauts spend two weeks in quarantine before launching to avoid bringing bugs to the space station. He knew that was going to be the case again for this flight.What he didn\u2019t know, he said, was that \u201cthe whole rest of the world was going to join us.\u201d Astronauts have a lot to teach us about how to survive the great covid-19 lockdown of 2020. So do explorers and scientists. Even astronauts get ornery: Coronavirus advice from those who have endured social distancing in the extreme",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Top Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6396",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/23/top-chinese-official-misses-space-conference-amid-us-china-tensions/",
        "text": "Diplomatic tensions between China and the United States continued to climb Wednesday, when Chinese officials accused the United States of having \u201cweaponized\u201d the visa process after a top Chinese official was unable attend a major international space conference being held in Washington.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry told reporters in Beijing that Wu Yanhua, the deputy head of the China National Space Administration, was not able to obtain a visa, and therefore was not able to attend, according to the Associated Press. In a statement released Thursday morning, State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said the U.S. \u201crejects the Chinese Foreign Ministry\u2019s unfounded and baseless characterization of U.S. visa policies toward China. We cannot discuss individual visa cases since visa records are confidential under U.S. law, but we can confirm that the Chinese delegation is in attendance at the conference.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview with The Washington Post, Vincent Boles, the co-chair of the local organizing committee for the conference, known as the International Astronautical Congress, said organizers had been working with officials from China for two years to make sure their officials would be able to navigate the various bureaucracies needed to receive the proper clearances.Working with the U.S. State Department, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), which also helped organize the conference, reached out to Chinese officials very early in the process, asking them to submit the names of officials who would want to attend, said Daniel Dumbacher, the institute\u2019s executive director.Knowing how difficult gaining the visas would be, the group followed up repeatedly, but China did not forward the first group of names until late spring, some six months after the AIAA local organizing committee had asked for them. And the last group of names did not arrive until just a few weeks ago, Dumbacher said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the delays, the organizers said that a top Chinese official, Tian Yulong, and a delegation of five staff members were granted visas and planned to arrive for the conference on Wednesday, according to an email reviewed by The Post that was sent to conference organizers by Chinese officials.\u201cWe work very hard to ensure the international involvement, participation and flavor of the International Astronautical Congress,\u201d Dumbacher said. The group \u201ctook these requests very seriously. We took the challenge very seriously.\"Boles said that the delay was caused when the conference received required paperwork \u201cextremely, extremely late. And, of course, that puts [the State Department] in the bind of trying to administer visas.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe group also worked with Russia, the local organizers said, and Sergei Krikalev, executive director of piloted spaceflights at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, is attending the conference. More than 60 Chinese citizens were also in attendance, Dumbacher said. Having representation from as many countries as possible is a core value of the conference and is a way to showcase how space often transcends geopolitical tensions, according to organizers.Advertisement\u201cThe United States recognizes the importance of space cooperation and has encouraged very broad participation and attendance at this year\u2019s IAC,\u201d said Ortagus, the State Department spokesperson. She noted that the U.S. mission to China has issued more than 1.3 million visas in the last fiscal year, and that the U.S.'s offices in China \u201care some of the largest visa issuing posts in the world.\u201dThe tension comes as the United States increasingly sees space as a war-fighting domain and is trying to stand up a Space Force to stem advances by potential adversaries such as China and Russia. In a speech earlier this year, Vice President Pence called for NASA to dramatically speed up its plan to return astronauts to the moon, casting it as part of a great-power competition with China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first, in January.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d Pence said in a speech in March. China\u2019s lunar efforts \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, told The Post that U.S. officials are wary of cooperating with China in space the way they do with other nations, including Russia, which flies NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201cLooking at Chinese behavior in other shared domains \u2014 the South China Sea, cyberspace \u2014 they\u2019ve given us pause for concern,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so looking out in space, it\u2019s hard to imagine that they will behave any better than they\u2019d behaved in other areas where they felt that their national interests are at stake.\u201dEarlier this month, the Trump administration said it would restrict visas for Chinese nationals suspected of being involved in human rights abuses of Uighur Muslims and other minorities. China condemned the move, saying it \u201cviolates the basic norms governing international relations,\u201d CNN reported.Ambassador, defending new rules, says China has obstructed U.S. diplomats\u2019 work for decadesThe absence of top officials from the China National Space Administration was noted at the conference, particularly at a panel where the heads of the space agencies from India, Russia, Japan, Canada, Europe and the United States gathered on Monday. In the conference program, Yanhua was listed as \u201cinvited.\u201dAsked about the reported absence of the Chinese space agency leaders, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, \u201cI know we invited them, and I was anticipating them being here.\u201dStaff Writer Carol Morello contributed to this report.This story has been updated. Diplomatic tensions between China and the United States continued to climb Wednesday, when Chinese officials accused the U.S. of having \u201cweaponized\u201d the visa process after a top Chinese official was unable attend a major international space conference currently being held in Washington. Top Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Top Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6397",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/23/top-chinese-official-misses-space-conference-amid-us-china-tensions/",
        "text": "Diplomatic tensions between China and the United States continued to climb Wednesday, when Chinese officials accused the United States of having \u201cweaponized\u201d the visa process after a top Chinese official was unable attend a major international space conference being held in Washington.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry told reporters in Beijing that Wu Yanhua, the deputy head of the China National Space Administration, was not able to obtain a visa, and therefore was not able to attend, according to the Associated Press. In a statement released Thursday morning, State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said the U.S. \u201crejects the Chinese Foreign Ministry\u2019s unfounded and baseless characterization of U.S. visa policies toward China. We cannot discuss individual visa cases since visa records are confidential under U.S. law, but we can confirm that the Chinese delegation is in attendance at the conference.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview with The Washington Post, Vincent Boles, the co-chair of the local organizing committee for the conference, known as the International Astronautical Congress, said organizers had been working with officials from China for two years to make sure their officials would be able to navigate the various bureaucracies needed to receive the proper clearances.Working with the U.S. State Department, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), which also helped organize the conference, reached out to Chinese officials very early in the process, asking them to submit the names of officials who would want to attend, said Daniel Dumbacher, the institute\u2019s executive director.Knowing how difficult gaining the visas would be, the group followed up repeatedly, but China did not forward the first group of names until late spring, some six months after the AIAA local organizing committee had asked for them. And the last group of names did not arrive until just a few weeks ago, Dumbacher said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the delays, the organizers said that a top Chinese official, Tian Yulong, and a delegation of five staff members were granted visas and planned to arrive for the conference on Wednesday, according to an email reviewed by The Post that was sent to conference organizers by Chinese officials.\u201cWe work very hard to ensure the international involvement, participation and flavor of the International Astronautical Congress,\u201d Dumbacher said. The group \u201ctook these requests very seriously. We took the challenge very seriously.\"Boles said that the delay was caused when the conference received required paperwork \u201cextremely, extremely late. And, of course, that puts [the State Department] in the bind of trying to administer visas.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe group also worked with Russia, the local organizers said, and Sergei Krikalev, executive director of piloted spaceflights at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, is attending the conference. More than 60 Chinese citizens were also in attendance, Dumbacher said. Having representation from as many countries as possible is a core value of the conference and is a way to showcase how space often transcends geopolitical tensions, according to organizers.Advertisement\u201cThe United States recognizes the importance of space cooperation and has encouraged very broad participation and attendance at this year\u2019s IAC,\u201d said Ortagus, the State Department spokesperson. She noted that the U.S. mission to China has issued more than 1.3 million visas in the last fiscal year, and that the U.S.'s offices in China \u201care some of the largest visa issuing posts in the world.\u201dThe tension comes as the United States increasingly sees space as a war-fighting domain and is trying to stand up a Space Force to stem advances by potential adversaries such as China and Russia. In a speech earlier this year, Vice President Pence called for NASA to dramatically speed up its plan to return astronauts to the moon, casting it as part of a great-power competition with China, which landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first, in January.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d Pence said in a speech in March. China\u2019s lunar efforts \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent spacefaring nation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, told The Post that U.S. officials are wary of cooperating with China in space the way they do with other nations, including Russia, which flies NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201cLooking at Chinese behavior in other shared domains \u2014 the South China Sea, cyberspace \u2014 they\u2019ve given us pause for concern,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so looking out in space, it\u2019s hard to imagine that they will behave any better than they\u2019d behaved in other areas where they felt that their national interests are at stake.\u201dEarlier this month, the Trump administration said it would restrict visas for Chinese nationals suspected of being involved in human rights abuses of Uighur Muslims and other minorities. China condemned the move, saying it \u201cviolates the basic norms governing international relations,\u201d CNN reported.Ambassador, defending new rules, says China has obstructed U.S. diplomats\u2019 work for decadesThe absence of top officials from the China National Space Administration was noted at the conference, particularly at a panel where the heads of the space agencies from India, Russia, Japan, Canada, Europe and the United States gathered on Monday. In the conference program, Yanhua was listed as \u201cinvited.\u201dAsked about the reported absence of the Chinese space agency leaders, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, \u201cI know we invited them, and I was anticipating them being here.\u201dStaff Writer Carol Morello contributed to this report.This story has been updated. Diplomatic tensions between China and the United States continued to climb Wednesday, when Chinese officials accused the U.S. of having \u201cweaponized\u201d the visa process after a top Chinese official was unable attend a major international space conference currently being held in Washington. Top Chinese official misses space conference amid U.S.-China tensions",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX and NASA still plan to fly astronauts home this weekend, but Hurricane Isaias could complicate landing (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6398",
        "date": "2020-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/31/spacex-astronauts-return-weather/",
        "text": "Despite Hurricane Isaias targeting the east coast of Florida this weekend, NASA and SpaceX are continuing with plans to return a pair of American astronauts from the International Space Station, hoping Isaias will miss at least some of the seven designated landing sites arrayed on either side of the Florida peninsula. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf all goes according to plan, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will climb aboard their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and undock from the station at about 7:34 p.m. Saturday and splashdown at about 2:42 p.m. Sunday, either in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.Speaking to reporters from the space station Friday morning, the astronauts said they were watching the weather closely. \u201cWe won\u2019t leave the space station without some good landing opportunities in front of us, good splashdown weather in front of us,\u201d Behnken said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the storm predicted to churn up Florida\u2019s Atlantic coast Sunday, just as the astronauts would be headed home, officials said that a Gulf landing would be more likely if they do proceed with a landing attempt. SpaceX has identified two landing sites off the Florida Panhandle near Panama City and Pensacola that could be targeted.Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program, wrote on Twitter Friday that the teams \u201chave decided to move forward\u201d with the splashdown Sunday, but that they would \u201ccontinue to monitor weather.\u201d NASA has said it and SpaceX would make a decision on a primary landing site about six hours before the undocking.There\u2019s no rush to bring the crew home, however, especially since it would be the first time NASA astronauts have splashed down at sea since Apollo-Soyuz, the joint U.S.-Soviet mission, in 1975.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft can stay on the space station for up to about 120 days, and is only about halfway through that time frame. \u201cThe systems on Dragon are doing very well,\u201d Steve Stich, NASA\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said earlier this week. \u201cThe spacecraft is very healthy.\u201dHe said the spacecraft was inspected using a robotic arm, and a team of engineers from NASA and SpaceX looked at the data. The \u201cresults were very favorable,\u201d Stich said. \u201cThere were no areas on the vehicle that were of any concern for reentry.\u201dHe said flight controllers would be patient for the most opportune moment, calm seas and gentle winds, ideally under 10 mph, before committing to a return.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have plenty of opportunities here in August, and we're in no hurry to come home,\u201d he said.Behnken and Hurley, both veteran astronauts, said they were looking forward to getting home, but would be patient.Advertisement\u201cWe don\u2019t control the weather and we know we can stay up here longer,\" Behnken said. \"There\u2019s more chow. And I know the space station program has got more work we can do.\u201dThe spacecraft has three days\u2019 worth of \u201cconsumables,\u201d oxygen, food and water, in case the spacecraft undocks but then needs to stay in orbit before committing to a return, officials said.Behnken and Hurley lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center on May 30, the first flight of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. It also marked the first time a private company flew astronauts to orbit. Along with Boeing, SpaceX is under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft capable of flying people to the station. And this mission, known as Demo-2, is designed to test the Dragon spacecraft to ensure it operates properly before NASA allows the company to fly operational missions of astronauts to the station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLike the launch, the return journey is a perilous one. The spacecraft will be traveling 17,500 mph and hit the atmosphere with such force that flames will engulf the capsule, testing the heat shield. As it gets closer to Earth, two drogue parachutes will deploy, and then four main chutes are to guide the spacecraft down to the sea, where rescue crews will be standing by.In the case of an emergency, Air Force search and rescue teams as well as contractors from ManTech, a private security company, will be on standby with C-17 cargo aircraft to deploy to either the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Another team is posted in Hawaii to respond if the mission goes way off course and lands in the Pacific.\"If the spacecraft comes down where it is supposed to, in the condition expected, then SpaceX is 100 percent responsible for the recovery of the crew and the spacecraft,\u201d said Mike McClure, a ManTech program manager who used to command the Air Force\u2019s rescue detachment. \u201cIf, however, the spacecraft lands someplace else, or the condition of the spacecraft and the crew drives SpaceX or NASA to request [Department of Defense] assistance, then our team will spring into action.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the many challenges of a water landing, Hurley and Behnken said they were not concerned.\u201cSplashdown is closer than it was the last time we were asked questions about it,\u201d Behnken said. \u201cBut I still don\u2019t feel nervous about it. Really, we\u2019re focused on the things that we\u2019ll need to do to be as safe as possible as we come back.\u201dIt\u2019ll be a fairly long flight, some 18 hours between undocking and splashdown. And the astronauts will be busy monitoring the capsule\u2019s systems, making sure everything is on track and operating properly.But they\u2019ll also have some time to get some rest.\u201cWe\u2019ll spend a good share of that sleeping,\u201d Hurley said.Read More: Story continues below advertisementPhotos and video: See some of the best moments from the iconic liftoff.Companies in the Cosmos: Read how companies and billionaire entrepreneurs are defining a new Space Age.AdvertisementBob Behnken and Doug Hurley: Meet the astronauts about to fly SpaceX\u2019s Dragon Capsule.How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D.Listen to Moonrise: Our newest podcast tells a tale of nuclear brinkmanship, backroom politics, and science fiction.Living in space: Read stories from 50 astronauts who describe what it\u2019s really like to live in space.The rivalry between SpaceX and Boeing: No one thought Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX would ever beat Boeing to space. If all goes according to plan, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will climb aboard their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, and undock from the station at about 7:34 p.m. Saturday and splashdown at about 2:42 p.m. Sunday. SpaceX and NASA still plan to fly astronauts home this weekend, but Hurricane Isaias could complicate landing",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration push (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6399",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/01/china-spacecraft-lands-on-moon/",
        "text": "China landed a spacecraft on the moon Tuesday on a mission to mine rocks and soil and return them to Earth, the latest in a series of lunar missions demonstrating the country\u2019s emergence as a force in space exploration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe landing, without a crew aboard, was China\u2019s third on the lunar surface since 2013 and came almost two years after China pulled off a historic first \u2014 landing a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. And it comes as NASA is gearing up to send a series of scientific missions, and astronauts, to the lunar surface. If China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 mission succeeds, it would mark the first time a nation has retrieved samples from the moon since the United States and Soviet Union did it several decades ago. The mission, which includes a lander, an ascent vehicle, a service capsule and a return capsule, was launched Nov. 23 on China\u2019s powerful Long March-5 rocket.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChinese state media reported Tuesday that the probe \u201csuccessfully landed\u201d at its targeted site, an area called Oceanus Procellarum. China did not immediately announce any other details about the landing.On the lunar surface, the probe is expected to dig about seven feet deep, collecting as much as 4.5 pounds of rocks and lunar soil into the ascent vehicle, which would then meet up with the service capsule in lunar orbit and return to Earth.Once the material is back on Earth, scientists would be able to calculate its age and examine it to determine its composition.On Twitter, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate, congratulated China. \u201cThis is no easy task,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhen the samples collected on the Moon are returned to Earth, we hope everyone will benefit from being able to study this precious cargo that could advance the international science community.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs part of its lunar exploration mission, NASA has been working to get countries around the world to adopt what it calls the Artemis Accords, a legal framework that would govern behavior in space and on celestial bodies such as the moon. The accords are named for NASA\u2019s current lunar program, Artemis.The rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources and create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space, while sharing their scientific discoveries.Several countries have signed on to the bilateral agreements, which NASA says builds on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. But NASA is essentially prohibited from partnering with China in space activities, and China is not among the signatories.Story continues below advertisementThe Trump administration and conservatives have cast China\u2019s ambitions as setting up a power struggle in space. During a speech last year, Vice President Pence directed NASA to dramatically speed up its mission to return astronauts to the moon, initially planned for 2028 but now aiming for 2024. Pence described a new space race reminiscent of the Cold War drive to the moon under the Apollo program.Advertisement\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d he said in the speech. China\u2019s landing on the far side of the moon, he said, \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent space-faring nation.\u201dThe incoming Biden administration has said little publicly about its plans for NASA and space exploration, but several Democrats have said it plans to keep the Artemis mission, though on a timeline they said was more realistic. The landing of the uncrewed spacecraft was China\u2019s third on the lunar surface since 2013 and came almost two years after China pulled off a historic first \u2014 landing a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. China lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration push",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "China lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration push (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6400",
        "date": "2020-12-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/01/china-spacecraft-lands-on-moon/",
        "text": "China landed a spacecraft on the moon Tuesday on a mission to mine rocks and soil and return them to Earth, the latest in a series of lunar missions demonstrating the country\u2019s emergence as a force in space exploration.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe landing, without a crew aboard, was China\u2019s third on the lunar surface since 2013 and came almost two years after China pulled off a historic first \u2014 landing a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. And it comes as NASA is gearing up to send a series of scientific missions, and astronauts, to the lunar surface. If China\u2019s Chang\u2019e-5 mission succeeds, it would mark the first time a nation has retrieved samples from the moon since the United States and Soviet Union did it several decades ago. The mission, which includes a lander, an ascent vehicle, a service capsule and a return capsule, was launched Nov. 23 on China\u2019s powerful Long March-5 rocket.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChinese state media reported Tuesday that the probe \u201csuccessfully landed\u201d at its targeted site, an area called Oceanus Procellarum. China did not immediately announce any other details about the landing.On the lunar surface, the probe is expected to dig about seven feet deep, collecting as much as 4.5 pounds of rocks and lunar soil into the ascent vehicle, which would then meet up with the service capsule in lunar orbit and return to Earth.Once the material is back on Earth, scientists would be able to calculate its age and examine it to determine its composition.On Twitter, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for the science mission directorate, congratulated China. \u201cThis is no easy task,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhen the samples collected on the Moon are returned to Earth, we hope everyone will benefit from being able to study this precious cargo that could advance the international science community.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs part of its lunar exploration mission, NASA has been working to get countries around the world to adopt what it calls the Artemis Accords, a legal framework that would govern behavior in space and on celestial bodies such as the moon. The accords are named for NASA\u2019s current lunar program, Artemis.The rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources and create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space, while sharing their scientific discoveries.Several countries have signed on to the bilateral agreements, which NASA says builds on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. But NASA is essentially prohibited from partnering with China in space activities, and China is not among the signatories.Story continues below advertisementThe Trump administration and conservatives have cast China\u2019s ambitions as setting up a power struggle in space. During a speech last year, Vice President Pence directed NASA to dramatically speed up its mission to return astronauts to the moon, initially planned for 2028 but now aiming for 2024. Pence described a new space race reminiscent of the Cold War drive to the moon under the Apollo program.Advertisement\u201cMake no mistake about it: We\u2019re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,\u201d he said in the speech. China\u2019s landing on the far side of the moon, he said, \u201crevealed their ambition to seize the strategic high ground and become the world\u2019s preeminent space-faring nation.\u201dThe incoming Biden administration has said little publicly about its plans for NASA and space exploration, but several Democrats have said it plans to keep the Artemis mission, though on a timeline they said was more realistic. The landing of the uncrewed spacecraft was China\u2019s third on the lunar surface since 2013 and came almost two years after China pulled off a historic first \u2014 landing a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. China lands a spacecraft on moon for third time, continuing ambitious exploration push",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6401",
        "date": "2020-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/30/elon-musk-spacex-pull-off-another-feat-few-thought-possible/",
        "text": "Cape Canaveral, Fla. \u2014 The goal was always to fly humans. So even when SpaceX built a spacecraft designed to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station \u2014 but not astronauts \u2014 the designers added a curious feature designed to make a point: a window.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInside SpaceX, that window became a symbol of its larger ambitions and a reminder to its workforce that human spaceflight was the ultimate goal, the reason Elon Musk started the company to begin with, as it works to eventually get people to Mars. Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has achieved remarkable feats few thought possible. It was able to design rockets that not only propelled their payloads to orbit, but landed back on Earth to be reused.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.It launched the Falcon Heavy, a monster of a rocket with three boosters and 27 engines. It opened up the Pentagon\u2019s launch market, which for a decade had been dominated by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut for all the successes over the years, and all the hype the company has generated along the way, it had never flown a single person.Until Saturday.At 3:22 p.m., SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from the same launchpad that sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969. On board were two of NASA\u2019s finest, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, a pair of friends whose job was to test the systems of the Dragon spacecraft.On May 30, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule separated from the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s second stage booster and entered a stable low-Earth orbit. (The Washington Post)While the launch was delayed on Wednesday because of bad weather, Saturday\u2019s flight went off without a hitch on a steamy Florida afternoon, and the spacecraft achieved orbit, sending Behnken and Hurley on a trip to catch up to the International Space Station, whizzing around the globe at 17,500 mph.Story continues below advertisementWith the successful flight, SpaceX now joins rarefied company. Only three nations have sent humans to orbit. And while NASA has for years relied on contractors to build the rockets and spacecraft that have flown its astronauts, this launch was done under an unusual arrangement. Under what NASA calls its \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d it is relying on two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, to design and build spacecraft to ferry its astronauts to the space station.AdvertisementWhile NASA oversees the program and has deep insight into the rockets and spacecraft, the companies own and operate the hardware, not NASA.For NASA, the launch was validation that the private sector could handle the immense burden of human spaceflight \u2014 an endeavor many, even those inside the space agency, believed never should have been outsourced to the private sector.Story continues below advertisementFor SpaceX, it is a tremendous victory, and it now becomes the first private company to fly people to orbit. (Virgin Galactic, the venture founded by Richard Branson, has twice flown people to the very edge of space and back, in up-and-down suborbital flights.)During a post-launch news conference, Musk was emotional, his voice catching.\u201cI\u2019m really overcome with emotion, and it\u2019s really hard to talk,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have not yet docked, and of course we need to bring them back safely. So it\u2019s a lot of work to do. But it\u2019s just incredible.\u201dAdvertisementHe said that on Wednesday, when the launch was scrubbed due to bad weather, his adrenaline was running at \u201c100 percent.\u201d But then when the flight didn\u2019t go off \u201cit went to zero. I collapsed and slept the longest I had in probably a year.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBy Saturday, the feeling had changed dramatically. Musk felt calm and relaxed, ready to go, even though the skies were threatening again.\u201cI didn\u2019t feel nervous. I felt like it was going to work,\u201d he said.Initially, Musk only gave SpaceX a 10 percent chance of succeeding as a company. And as for the people who doubted SpaceX, Musk said he thought their \u201cprobability assessment was correct. Fortunately, fate smiled upon us and brought us to this day.\u201dThe goal now is to make human spaceflight routine. Saturday\u2019s mission was a test flight, the first flight of the Dragon spacecraft with humans on board. And SpaceX will focus on Sunday\u2019s docking with the space station, and then eventually ensuring Behnken and Hurley come back safely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s hoping to fly another mission with astronauts to the station by Aug. 30, though officials have said that date is tentative and will likely change.Beyond flying humans to the station in low Earth orbit at about 240 miles high, SpaceX ultimately wants to fly people to the moon, some 240,000 miles away. It recently won a contract from NASA to build a spacecraft capable of landing humans on the lunar surface.Ultimately, though, Musk wants to send humans to Mars, a hugely ambitious goal.To do that, the company is working on a next-generation spacecraft, known as Starship, that ultimately SpaceX hopes would be able to fly dozens of people to deep space.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, the day before achieving its historic flight with astronauts, a Starship prototype blew up on the test stand at the company\u2019s facility in Boca Chica, Tex. It was a huge explosion, sending a fireball into the sky, that was reminiscent of the failed attempts of SpaceX\u2019s early days, when three of its Falcon 1 rockets failed to reach orbit.At the time, many looked at those failures as evidence that SpaceX would never be successful, let alone be able to fly people to orbit.But SpaceX pressed on, undeterred. Initially, Musk says, he only gave SpaceX a 10 percent chance of succeeding as a company. \u201cFortunately, fate smiled up on us and brought us to this day,\u201d he tells a post-launch conference. Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6402",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/23/spacex-launches-nasas-crew-2-orbit-its-third-human-spaceflight-less-than-year/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX successfully launched another crew of astronauts to the International Space Station in a predawn liftoff Friday that marked the company\u2019s third human spaceflight in less than a year and plans for several more in the months to come.The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here at 5:49 a.m., beginning a day-long journey to the space station, where the crew of four astronauts will join seven others now aboard the orbiting laboratory. Flying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The flight represents another step in SpaceX\u2019s metamorphosis from a fringe start-up born nearly 20 years ago that many, including its founder, Elon Musk, thought was unlikely to succeed to an aerospace juggernaut that is fast becoming one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners.Currently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status. SpaceX last week became the only company awarded a NASA contract to develop a lunar lander.In a post-flight news conference, Musk said that now with three launches under SpaceX\u2019s belt, his nervousness has eased a bit \u2014 but not much.\u201cI suppose it does get a little bit easier, but it\u2019s still extremely intense,\u201d he said. \u201cI usually can\u2019t sleep the night before a launch, and that was true the night before this one, so I haven\u2019t had much sleep. But fortunately we have a great team.\u201dHe added that \u201cit\u2019s hard to believe that we\u2019re here doing this, quite frankly. It feels like a dream.\u201dIn a live broadcast from the capsule while flying over South Africa a couple hours into the flight, the crew said the launch was spectacular as it lifted off in darkness but quickly found the rising sun in the east. The rocket\u2019s plume could be seen up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and even in the DC area.\u201cThe ride was really awesome,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for any better. There may have been some hooting and giggling up here while all that was going on.\u201dFriday\u2019s flight was the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to use a previously flown rocket and spacecraft in a human spaceflight, a significant milestone for the company, which Musk founded with the goal of driving down the cost of space exploration.The Dragon capsule was the same one used in SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, a test flight with two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, that lifted off last May. Behnken and McArthur are married \u2014 and during her flight Friday, McArthur was assigned to the same seat her husband occupied last year. \u201cThat certainly adds a little something special to the mission,\u201d she said.Lifting off under an orange tail of fire with a roar that reverberated across the Florida Space Coast, the crew of four is expected to take nearly a full day to reach the space station, with docking scheduled for 5:10 a.m. Saturday. Once there, the astronauts will spend about six months performing science experiments.About 10 minutes after launch, the first stage returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea, allowing SpaceX to reuse it for a future mission.SpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, will be three private citizens: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.The Crew-2 mission initially was set for Thursday, but it was delayed by high winds.The arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will expand the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.But the astronauts make do. After arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins also faced tight conditions and knew he\u2019d have to hunt for a place to bunk since sleeping quarters were full. He ended up using the Dragon, which was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth next week. In February, that group surpassed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the 84-day milestone set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.If all goes well, Crew-1 will splash down in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico shortly after noon on Wednesday, ending a six-month stay on the station.SpaceX\u2019s monopoly on launching American astronauts from U.S. soil will probably last into next year. Boeing, the other company under contract to fly NASA astronauts to the station, is expecting to do a no-crew test flight of its Starliner capsule in August or September, but a mission with astronauts is not expected before early 2022.NASA also paid Russia about $80 million a seat to take American astronauts to the space station from a space center in Kazakhstan. But now that SpaceX is flying people, and Boeing could start doing the same next year, the agency plans to swap seats with the Russians. SpaceX's third human spaceflight in less than a year is comprised of an international group of astronauts and comes as the company plans several more, including two made up of private citizens. SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6403",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/23/spacex-launches-nasas-crew-2-orbit-its-third-human-spaceflight-less-than-year/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX successfully launched another crew of astronauts to the International Space Station in a predawn liftoff Friday that marked the company\u2019s third human spaceflight in less than a year and plans for several more in the months to come.The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here at 5:49 a.m., beginning a day-long journey to the space station, where the crew of four astronauts will join seven others now aboard the orbiting laboratory. Flying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The flight represents another step in SpaceX\u2019s metamorphosis from a fringe start-up born nearly 20 years ago that many, including its founder, Elon Musk, thought was unlikely to succeed to an aerospace juggernaut that is fast becoming one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners.Currently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status. SpaceX last week became the only company awarded a NASA contract to develop a lunar lander.In a post-flight news conference, Musk said that now with three launches under SpaceX\u2019s belt, his nervousness has eased a bit \u2014 but not much.\u201cI suppose it does get a little bit easier, but it\u2019s still extremely intense,\u201d he said. \u201cI usually can\u2019t sleep the night before a launch, and that was true the night before this one, so I haven\u2019t had much sleep. But fortunately we have a great team.\u201dHe added that \u201cit\u2019s hard to believe that we\u2019re here doing this, quite frankly. It feels like a dream.\u201dIn a live broadcast from the capsule while flying over South Africa a couple hours into the flight, the crew said the launch was spectacular as it lifted off in darkness but quickly found the rising sun in the east. The rocket\u2019s plume could be seen up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and even in the DC area.\u201cThe ride was really awesome,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for any better. There may have been some hooting and giggling up here while all that was going on.\u201dFriday\u2019s flight was the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to use a previously flown rocket and spacecraft in a human spaceflight, a significant milestone for the company, which Musk founded with the goal of driving down the cost of space exploration.The Dragon capsule was the same one used in SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, a test flight with two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, that lifted off last May. Behnken and McArthur are married \u2014 and during her flight Friday, McArthur was assigned to the same seat her husband occupied last year. \u201cThat certainly adds a little something special to the mission,\u201d she said.Lifting off under an orange tail of fire with a roar that reverberated across the Florida Space Coast, the crew of four is expected to take nearly a full day to reach the space station, with docking scheduled for 5:10 a.m. Saturday. Once there, the astronauts will spend about six months performing science experiments.About 10 minutes after launch, the first stage returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea, allowing SpaceX to reuse it for a future mission.SpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, will be three private citizens: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.The Crew-2 mission initially was set for Thursday, but it was delayed by high winds.The arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will expand the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.But the astronauts make do. After arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins also faced tight conditions and knew he\u2019d have to hunt for a place to bunk since sleeping quarters were full. He ended up using the Dragon, which was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth next week. In February, that group surpassed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the 84-day milestone set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.If all goes well, Crew-1 will splash down in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico shortly after noon on Wednesday, ending a six-month stay on the station.SpaceX\u2019s monopoly on launching American astronauts from U.S. soil will probably last into next year. Boeing, the other company under contract to fly NASA astronauts to the station, is expecting to do a no-crew test flight of its Starliner capsule in August or September, but a mission with astronauts is not expected before early 2022.NASA also paid Russia about $80 million a seat to take American astronauts to the space station from a space center in Kazakhstan. But now that SpaceX is flying people, and Boeing could start doing the same next year, the agency plans to swap seats with the Russians. SpaceX's third human spaceflight in less than a year is comprised of an international group of astronauts and comes as the company plans several more, including two made up of private citizens. SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6404",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/23/spacex-launches-nasas-crew-2-orbit-its-third-human-spaceflight-less-than-year/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX successfully launched another crew of astronauts to the International Space Station in a predawn liftoff Friday that marked the company\u2019s third human spaceflight in less than a year and plans for several more in the months to come.The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here at 5:49 a.m., beginning a day-long journey to the space station, where the crew of four astronauts will join seven others now aboard the orbiting laboratory. Flying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The flight represents another step in SpaceX\u2019s metamorphosis from a fringe start-up born nearly 20 years ago that many, including its founder, Elon Musk, thought was unlikely to succeed to an aerospace juggernaut that is fast becoming one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners.Currently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status. SpaceX last week became the only company awarded a NASA contract to develop a lunar lander.In a post-flight news conference, Musk said that now with three launches under SpaceX\u2019s belt, his nervousness has eased a bit \u2014 but not much.\u201cI suppose it does get a little bit easier, but it\u2019s still extremely intense,\u201d he said. \u201cI usually can\u2019t sleep the night before a launch, and that was true the night before this one, so I haven\u2019t had much sleep. But fortunately we have a great team.\u201dHe added that \u201cit\u2019s hard to believe that we\u2019re here doing this, quite frankly. It feels like a dream.\u201dIn a live broadcast from the capsule while flying over South Africa a couple hours into the flight, the crew said the launch was spectacular as it lifted off in darkness but quickly found the rising sun in the east. The rocket\u2019s plume could be seen up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and even in the DC area.\u201cThe ride was really awesome,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for any better. There may have been some hooting and giggling up here while all that was going on.\u201dFriday\u2019s flight was the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to use a previously flown rocket and spacecraft in a human spaceflight, a significant milestone for the company, which Musk founded with the goal of driving down the cost of space exploration.The Dragon capsule was the same one used in SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, a test flight with two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, that lifted off last May. Behnken and McArthur are married \u2014 and during her flight Friday, McArthur was assigned to the same seat her husband occupied last year. \u201cThat certainly adds a little something special to the mission,\u201d she said.Lifting off under an orange tail of fire with a roar that reverberated across the Florida Space Coast, the crew of four is expected to take nearly a full day to reach the space station, with docking scheduled for 5:10 a.m. Saturday. Once there, the astronauts will spend about six months performing science experiments.About 10 minutes after launch, the first stage returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea, allowing SpaceX to reuse it for a future mission.SpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, will be three private citizens: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.The Crew-2 mission initially was set for Thursday, but it was delayed by high winds.The arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will expand the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.But the astronauts make do. After arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins also faced tight conditions and knew he\u2019d have to hunt for a place to bunk since sleeping quarters were full. He ended up using the Dragon, which was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth next week. In February, that group surpassed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the 84-day milestone set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.If all goes well, Crew-1 will splash down in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico shortly after noon on Wednesday, ending a six-month stay on the station.SpaceX\u2019s monopoly on launching American astronauts from U.S. soil will probably last into next year. Boeing, the other company under contract to fly NASA astronauts to the station, is expecting to do a no-crew test flight of its Starliner capsule in August or September, but a mission with astronauts is not expected before early 2022.NASA also paid Russia about $80 million a seat to take American astronauts to the space station from a space center in Kazakhstan. But now that SpaceX is flying people, and Boeing could start doing the same next year, the agency plans to swap seats with the Russians. SpaceX's third human spaceflight in less than a year is comprised of an international group of astronauts and comes as the company plans several more, including two made up of private citizens. SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6405",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/23/spacex-launches-nasas-crew-2-orbit-its-third-human-spaceflight-less-than-year/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX successfully launched another crew of astronauts to the International Space Station in a predawn liftoff Friday that marked the company\u2019s third human spaceflight in less than a year and plans for several more in the months to come.The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here at 5:49 a.m., beginning a day-long journey to the space station, where the crew of four astronauts will join seven others now aboard the orbiting laboratory. Flying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The flight represents another step in SpaceX\u2019s metamorphosis from a fringe start-up born nearly 20 years ago that many, including its founder, Elon Musk, thought was unlikely to succeed to an aerospace juggernaut that is fast becoming one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners.Currently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status. SpaceX last week became the only company awarded a NASA contract to develop a lunar lander.In a post-flight news conference, Musk said that now with three launches under SpaceX\u2019s belt, his nervousness has eased a bit \u2014 but not much.\u201cI suppose it does get a little bit easier, but it\u2019s still extremely intense,\u201d he said. \u201cI usually can\u2019t sleep the night before a launch, and that was true the night before this one, so I haven\u2019t had much sleep. But fortunately we have a great team.\u201dHe added that \u201cit\u2019s hard to believe that we\u2019re here doing this, quite frankly. It feels like a dream.\u201dIn a live broadcast from the capsule while flying over South Africa a couple hours into the flight, the crew said the launch was spectacular as it lifted off in darkness but quickly found the rising sun in the east. The rocket\u2019s plume could be seen up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and even in the DC area.\u201cThe ride was really awesome,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t have asked for any better. There may have been some hooting and giggling up here while all that was going on.\u201dFriday\u2019s flight was the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to use a previously flown rocket and spacecraft in a human spaceflight, a significant milestone for the company, which Musk founded with the goal of driving down the cost of space exploration.The Dragon capsule was the same one used in SpaceX\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, a test flight with two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, that lifted off last May. Behnken and McArthur are married \u2014 and during her flight Friday, McArthur was assigned to the same seat her husband occupied last year. \u201cThat certainly adds a little something special to the mission,\u201d she said.Lifting off under an orange tail of fire with a roar that reverberated across the Florida Space Coast, the crew of four is expected to take nearly a full day to reach the space station, with docking scheduled for 5:10 a.m. Saturday. Once there, the astronauts will spend about six months performing science experiments.About 10 minutes after launch, the first stage returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea, allowing SpaceX to reuse it for a future mission.SpaceX has two more astronaut missions planned for this year \u2014 the Crew-3 mission to the space station for NASA this fall, and a mission to fly a group of four private astronauts that could come as early as September and become the first all-civilian space mission.That flight, known as Inspiration4, is being funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has made it a fundraising effort for the St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. Joining Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, will be three private citizens: Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude who as a child was treated for bone cancer there; Sian Proctor, a scientist who won her seat in a competition by building an online store using Isaacman\u2019s platform; and Chris Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin engineer who was picked at random as part of a hospital fundraising sweepstakes.The group is scheduled to spend a few days orbiting Earth inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule.SpaceX also is planning to launch another crew of private citizens early next year in a mission organized by Axiom Space, a Houston-based company. That group, three billionaires who are paying $55 million each, would be joined by former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, who is now a vice president at Axiom. The crew would spend about a week at the space station before returning to Earth.The Crew-2 mission initially was set for Thursday, but it was delayed by high winds.The arrival of Crew-2 at the space station will expand the station\u2019s population to 11, nearly twice the six people that are normally there at a time.But the astronauts make do. After arriving at the space station in November, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins also faced tight conditions and knew he\u2019d have to hunt for a place to bunk since sleeping quarters were full. He ended up using the Dragon, which was connected to the station.The space station will be crowded for only a few days, however, since Hopkins\u2019s group of astronauts, known as Crew-1, is scheduled to return to Earth next week. In February, that group surpassed the record for the most days in space by a crew launched on a U.S. spacecraft, surpassing the 84-day milestone set by the Skylab 4 crew in 1974.If all goes well, Crew-1 will splash down in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico shortly after noon on Wednesday, ending a six-month stay on the station.SpaceX\u2019s monopoly on launching American astronauts from U.S. soil will probably last into next year. Boeing, the other company under contract to fly NASA astronauts to the station, is expecting to do a no-crew test flight of its Starliner capsule in August or September, but a mission with astronauts is not expected before early 2022.NASA also paid Russia about $80 million a seat to take American astronauts to the space station from a space center in Kazakhstan. But now that SpaceX is flying people, and Boeing could start doing the same next year, the agency plans to swap seats with the Russians. SpaceX's third human spaceflight in less than a year is comprised of an international group of astronauts and comes as the company plans several more, including two made up of private citizens. SpaceX launches NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flying astronauts has always been risky. No wonder NASA and SpaceX are on edge.  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6406",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/26/spacex-launch-risk-weather/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Spaceflight is a dangerous enterprise. That unrelenting reality underlies every decision as NASA and SpaceX near the hour when they\u2019ll strap two veteran astronauts into a spacecraft that will mark not only the first human launch to orbit from U.S. soil in nearly a decade but also the first time a private company has performed the feat. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat mission, scheduled for 4:33 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, is being celebrated as a historic moment for NASA and the nation. It\u2019s also an enormously risky endeavor whose failure could be a major setback for a growing commercial space industry and a devastating blow to SpaceX, which has upended the traditional aerospace pecking order.That\u2019s among the reasons that weather now looms as the most likely obstacle to an on-time launch. It has been rainy and overcast here the last few days with low thick clouds that unveiled a stunning rainbow Tuesday morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut forecasters at Patrick Air Force Base still predicted a 40 percent chance that weather would force a postponement of Wednesday\u2019s launch, an improvement from Monday\u2019s 60 percent, but still casting doubt on the schedule. And conditions at Cape Canaveral may not be the only reason for cancellation: Forecasters are watching developments all along the East Coast, where the Dragon capsule might have to ditch in the case of an emergency abort.From diving to zip lining to flying, The Washington Post goes behind the scenes with American astronauts training for a new era in human space flight. (Eric Maierson/The Washington Post)Fear of lightning also could force a postponement under complex NASA rules that prohibit a launch if the spacecraft is going to fly within 10 nautical miles of storm clouds that might generate an electrical discharge. Rockets tearing through such clouds can cause a lightning strike, as happened during Apollo 12 when the Saturn V rocket was hit twice, causing damage to some nonessential components. The crew was still able to complete its mission to the moon.NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine emphasized at a news conference Tuesday his concerns for the safety of the two astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, and said the expected presence of President Trump and Vice President Pence would not increase pressure to launch if conditions are not right.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe want people to be able to feel free to say, \u2018No,\u2019 and not feel any pressure to launch,\u201d he said, adding that he had texted Hurley and Behnken on Monday and told them, \u201cIf you want me to stop this for any reason, say so.\u201dThere is no way to exaggerate the inherent risk involved any time people are placed atop a rocket filled with thousands of gallons of highly volatile propellants. The danger is compounded by the fact that SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft has never flown humans before.In an interview, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, called the launch a \u201ccrucial step. Can\u2019t mess it up.\u201dHe said he was optimistic. \u201cThe probability of success, you know, knock on wood, I think is high,\" he said. \"But it it is not 100 percent. And so we\u2019re just doing everything we can to think of, any possible way, to improve the probability of success, because this would be a big setback if something were to go wrong.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPaul Hill, a member of NASA\u2019s safety advisory panel and the former director of mission operations at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, warned that human factors can lead to mistakes.\u201cNow is the time to be on alert for \u2018go\u2019 fever,\u201d he said after the panel\u2019s recent quarterly meeting. \u201cSo much work has gone into being this close to launch, it can be difficult to resist the pressure to accept some risk or trivialize some concern with less rigor.\u201dNo one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.For all of NASA\u2019s accomplishments, human spaceflight remains a relatively rare and exceedingly dangerous enterprise. Since John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, NASA has launched a total of 164 spacecraft with astronauts to orbit, an average of fewer than three a year.Story continues below advertisementTwo ended in disaster \u2014 the Columbia and Challenger shuttle flights that killed 14. And many others narrowly escaped harrowing calamities, like the Apollo 12 lightning strike or the oxygen tank rupture that threw the Apollo 13 mission into chaos.Maiden flights of spacecraft with humans on board are the scariest. When the space shuttle flew for the first time in 1981, for example, officials estimated the chance of losing the crew was somewhere between 1 in 500 to 1 in 5,000. Later, after NASA had flown the shuttle many times, it found that first flight was far riskier than originally thought \u2014 the chance of death was actually 1 in 12.There are many key differences between the shuttle\u2019s first flight and the upcoming launch of what\u2019s known as NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. The spacecraft and rocket are owned and operated by a private firm, SpaceX, not NASA. The technology has advanced a great deal since the shuttle days; SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule is outfitted with modern touch screens and safety measures, such as an abort system, not available on the shuttle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd while the space shuttle\u2019s first flight had crews on board, Dragon last year completed what NASA said was a flawless test mission without crews to the International Space Station that returned to Earth safely. Flying astronauts to the station may be a new feat, but SpaceX has flown 21 cargo and supply missions to the station since 2012 in the uncrewed version of the Dragon spacecraft. That\u2019s given the company plenty of practice sending spacecraft to orbit, and then chasing down the station and attaching to it as it orbits the Earth at 17,500 mph.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has also proved to be a reliable work horse that is closing on 100 launches. But spaceflight is governed by unforgiving physics, requiring extraordinary amounts of energy to escape gravity. Launching a rocket is like detonating a bomb, but with the blast controlled so it flows in a single direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve done everything we can to make sure that the rocket is safe and the spacecraft is safe,\" Musk said in the interview. \"But the risk is never zero when you\u2019re going 25 times the speed of sound, and you\u2019re circling the Earth every 90 minutes. It\u2019s a speed that\u2019s difficult for people to even comprehend.\u201dThe mission would also be the first time since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz flight, when Russian and American spacecraft docked in orbit, that NASA astronauts would return to Earth by landing in the ocean, rather than on land. Water landings have their own risk, such as when Gus Grissom nearly drowned in 1961, after his capsule filled with water and eventually sank.The space shuttle landed on a runway, and since its retirement in 2011, NASA astronauts have been flying in Russian Soyuz spacecraft that land on the steppe in Kazakhstan. But there have been hair-raising moments with the Soyuz as well. In 2018, one of the side boosters failed to separate properly and slammed into the rocket, triggering the emergency abort system, which sent NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian counterpart, Alexey Ovchinin, on a harrowing ride to the edge of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you do this business, you\u2019re going to get your nose bloodied some,\u201d said Gerry Griffin, who served as a NASA flight director during the Apollo era. \u201cHopefully, you don\u2019t kill anybody. But if you do it long enough and fly enough vehicles, you\u2019re going to have a failure.\u201dNo one knows the risks inherent in human spaceflight better than Behnken and Hurley. Since they were assigned to the Commercial Crew mission in 2015, they\u2019ve spent thousands of hours training for the flight and are confident, especially since Dragon has a robust abort system.SpaceX completes key test of its Dragon capsule\u201cNow, I will add that it is the first flight with crew,\u201d Hurley said during a recent news conference. \u201cIt\u2019s the second flight of the vehicle. So the statistics will tell you that\u2019s riskier than, say, the 15th flight or the 20th flight of the vehicle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, he said he was \u201cconfident in both the SpaceX and NASA teams. We\u2019ve looked at all the stuff that we need to look at. And when we\u2019re ready to launch, we\u2019ll go do it.\u201dFor the SpaceX founder, getting NASA astronauts to the International Space Station is just a first step. Elon Musk has the moon and Mars in his sights. (The Washington Post)The whole point of this test flight is to put the spacecraft through its paces and wring out any problems before NASA certifies it for the operational missions the agency hopes will ferry crews to the space station and back for years to come.Boeing, the other company NASA is paying to develop a new vehicle to fly its astronauts, suffered troubling setbacks late last year during the test flight of its Starliner spacecraft. No astronauts were on board, but the spacecraft encountered trouble almost immediately upon reaching orbit. The onboard computer was 11 hours off, making the spacecraft think it was at a different part of the mission than it actually was.AdvertisementCrews on the ground scrambled, and then discovered a second software problem that would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire during the spacecraft\u2019s return to Earth, when what\u2019s known as the service module was to separate from the crew module.Controllers on the ground discovered the problem while the spacecraft was in orbit and were able to correct it. Had they not, however, it could have damaged the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield or sent the crew module tumbling off course.Since then, NASA officials have said they should have been better at holding Boeing accountable to the agency\u2019s rigorous safety standards. And they are confident that after years of working closely together to deliver cargo and supplies to the station and now crew, NASA and SpaceX won\u2019t encounter any such problems on the upcoming mission.But there are always concerns about the unexpected and the overlooked.The space shuttle Challenger exploded on a chilly January day in 1986 after an \u201cO-ring\u201d joint failed amid unheeded warnings about launching in cold weather. In 2003, Columbia disintegrated as it was reentering Earth\u2019s atmosphere after a piece of foam became dislodged during the launch and damaged heat-resistant tiles on the wing. A subsequent investigation found a \u201cbroken safety culture\u201d at the space agency.In the past several years, NASA and SpaceX have led investigations into a trio of failures. In 2015, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying supplies to the station exploded during flight after the failure of a strut designed to withstand 10,000 pounds of force buckled at 2,000. A year later, another rocket blew up on the launchpad after the failure of a pressure vessel in the second-stage liquid-oxygen tank. And last year, during a test of the abort system, the Dragon spacecraft exploded because of a leaky valve. SpaceX also has struggled with the parachute system that would guide the spacecraft to a soft landing as it returns to Earth.No one was injured in any of those failures. NASA and SpaceX said they have investigated all the problems, fixed them and are now ready to launch humans.\u201cThis endeavor is the culmination of not only years and years of experience, or time and work, but hundreds of thousands of hours of tireless effort to bring us here,\u201d said Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s Commercial Crew Program manager. \u201cAnd it\u2019s all focused on the safety and reliability of the system.\u201dHe said that the mission was a \u201csacred honor\u201d and that the company would do everything possible to fly the astronauts \u201cto the space station and safely bring them back home to their families. Fundamentally, this is what SpaceX was founded for.\u201dOutside experts agree the teams have prepared as best they could.\u201cI would say the risk is acceptable. But it\u2019s not zero. Spaceflight is inherently dangerous, so there is always risk,\u201d said Wayne Hale, the former manager of NASA\u2019s shuttle program. \u201cBut I think that all the appropriate checks appear to have been done. I think appropriate measures have been taken and having an uncrewed test flight was a big step.\u201dThat said, everyone will be holding their breath the moment the countdown ticks to liftoff.\u201cI think we\u2019re all very appropriately nervous,\u201d Reed said.Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman contributed to this report. Forecasters at Patrick Air Force Base are predicting a 40 percent chance that weather would force a postponement of Wednesday\u2019s launch, an improvement from Monday\u2019s 60 percent, but still casting doubt on the schedule. Flying astronauts has always been risky. No wonder NASA and SpaceX are on edge. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flying astronauts has always been risky. No wonder NASA and SpaceX are on edge.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6407",
        "date": "2020-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/26/spacex-launch-risk-weather/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Spaceflight is a dangerous enterprise. That unrelenting reality underlies every decision as NASA and SpaceX near the hour when they\u2019ll strap two veteran astronauts into a spacecraft that will mark not only the first human launch to orbit from U.S. soil in nearly a decade but also the first time a private company has performed the feat. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat mission, scheduled for 4:33 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, is being celebrated as a historic moment for NASA and the nation. It\u2019s also an enormously risky endeavor whose failure could be a major setback for a growing commercial space industry and a devastating blow to SpaceX, which has upended the traditional aerospace pecking order.That\u2019s among the reasons that weather now looms as the most likely obstacle to an on-time launch. It has been rainy and overcast here the last few days with low thick clouds that unveiled a stunning rainbow Tuesday morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut forecasters at Patrick Air Force Base still predicted a 40 percent chance that weather would force a postponement of Wednesday\u2019s launch, an improvement from Monday\u2019s 60 percent, but still casting doubt on the schedule. And conditions at Cape Canaveral may not be the only reason for cancellation: Forecasters are watching developments all along the East Coast, where the Dragon capsule might have to ditch in the case of an emergency abort.From diving to zip lining to flying, The Washington Post goes behind the scenes with American astronauts training for a new era in human space flight. (Eric Maierson/The Washington Post)Fear of lightning also could force a postponement under complex NASA rules that prohibit a launch if the spacecraft is going to fly within 10 nautical miles of storm clouds that might generate an electrical discharge. Rockets tearing through such clouds can cause a lightning strike, as happened during Apollo 12 when the Saturn V rocket was hit twice, causing damage to some nonessential components. The crew was still able to complete its mission to the moon.NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine emphasized at a news conference Tuesday his concerns for the safety of the two astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, and said the expected presence of President Trump and Vice President Pence would not increase pressure to launch if conditions are not right.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe want people to be able to feel free to say, \u2018No,\u2019 and not feel any pressure to launch,\u201d he said, adding that he had texted Hurley and Behnken on Monday and told them, \u201cIf you want me to stop this for any reason, say so.\u201dThere is no way to exaggerate the inherent risk involved any time people are placed atop a rocket filled with thousands of gallons of highly volatile propellants. The danger is compounded by the fact that SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft has never flown humans before.In an interview, Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, called the launch a \u201ccrucial step. Can\u2019t mess it up.\u201dHe said he was optimistic. \u201cThe probability of success, you know, knock on wood, I think is high,\" he said. \"But it it is not 100 percent. And so we\u2019re just doing everything we can to think of, any possible way, to improve the probability of success, because this would be a big setback if something were to go wrong.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPaul Hill, a member of NASA\u2019s safety advisory panel and the former director of mission operations at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, warned that human factors can lead to mistakes.\u201cNow is the time to be on alert for \u2018go\u2019 fever,\u201d he said after the panel\u2019s recent quarterly meeting. \u201cSo much work has gone into being this close to launch, it can be difficult to resist the pressure to accept some risk or trivialize some concern with less rigor.\u201dNo one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.For all of NASA\u2019s accomplishments, human spaceflight remains a relatively rare and exceedingly dangerous enterprise. Since John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, NASA has launched a total of 164 spacecraft with astronauts to orbit, an average of fewer than three a year.Story continues below advertisementTwo ended in disaster \u2014 the Columbia and Challenger shuttle flights that killed 14. And many others narrowly escaped harrowing calamities, like the Apollo 12 lightning strike or the oxygen tank rupture that threw the Apollo 13 mission into chaos.Maiden flights of spacecraft with humans on board are the scariest. When the space shuttle flew for the first time in 1981, for example, officials estimated the chance of losing the crew was somewhere between 1 in 500 to 1 in 5,000. Later, after NASA had flown the shuttle many times, it found that first flight was far riskier than originally thought \u2014 the chance of death was actually 1 in 12.There are many key differences between the shuttle\u2019s first flight and the upcoming launch of what\u2019s known as NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. The spacecraft and rocket are owned and operated by a private firm, SpaceX, not NASA. The technology has advanced a great deal since the shuttle days; SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule is outfitted with modern touch screens and safety measures, such as an abort system, not available on the shuttle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd while the space shuttle\u2019s first flight had crews on board, Dragon last year completed what NASA said was a flawless test mission without crews to the International Space Station that returned to Earth safely. Flying astronauts to the station may be a new feat, but SpaceX has flown 21 cargo and supply missions to the station since 2012 in the uncrewed version of the Dragon spacecraft. That\u2019s given the company plenty of practice sending spacecraft to orbit, and then chasing down the station and attaching to it as it orbits the Earth at 17,500 mph.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket has also proved to be a reliable work horse that is closing on 100 launches. But spaceflight is governed by unforgiving physics, requiring extraordinary amounts of energy to escape gravity. Launching a rocket is like detonating a bomb, but with the blast controlled so it flows in a single direction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve done everything we can to make sure that the rocket is safe and the spacecraft is safe,\" Musk said in the interview. \"But the risk is never zero when you\u2019re going 25 times the speed of sound, and you\u2019re circling the Earth every 90 minutes. It\u2019s a speed that\u2019s difficult for people to even comprehend.\u201dThe mission would also be the first time since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz flight, when Russian and American spacecraft docked in orbit, that NASA astronauts would return to Earth by landing in the ocean, rather than on land. Water landings have their own risk, such as when Gus Grissom nearly drowned in 1961, after his capsule filled with water and eventually sank.The space shuttle landed on a runway, and since its retirement in 2011, NASA astronauts have been flying in Russian Soyuz spacecraft that land on the steppe in Kazakhstan. But there have been hair-raising moments with the Soyuz as well. In 2018, one of the side boosters failed to separate properly and slammed into the rocket, triggering the emergency abort system, which sent NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian counterpart, Alexey Ovchinin, on a harrowing ride to the edge of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you do this business, you\u2019re going to get your nose bloodied some,\u201d said Gerry Griffin, who served as a NASA flight director during the Apollo era. \u201cHopefully, you don\u2019t kill anybody. But if you do it long enough and fly enough vehicles, you\u2019re going to have a failure.\u201dNo one knows the risks inherent in human spaceflight better than Behnken and Hurley. Since they were assigned to the Commercial Crew mission in 2015, they\u2019ve spent thousands of hours training for the flight and are confident, especially since Dragon has a robust abort system.SpaceX completes key test of its Dragon capsule\u201cNow, I will add that it is the first flight with crew,\u201d Hurley said during a recent news conference. \u201cIt\u2019s the second flight of the vehicle. So the statistics will tell you that\u2019s riskier than, say, the 15th flight or the 20th flight of the vehicle.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, he said he was \u201cconfident in both the SpaceX and NASA teams. We\u2019ve looked at all the stuff that we need to look at. And when we\u2019re ready to launch, we\u2019ll go do it.\u201dFor the SpaceX founder, getting NASA astronauts to the International Space Station is just a first step. Elon Musk has the moon and Mars in his sights. (The Washington Post)The whole point of this test flight is to put the spacecraft through its paces and wring out any problems before NASA certifies it for the operational missions the agency hopes will ferry crews to the space station and back for years to come.Boeing, the other company NASA is paying to develop a new vehicle to fly its astronauts, suffered troubling setbacks late last year during the test flight of its Starliner spacecraft. No astronauts were on board, but the spacecraft encountered trouble almost immediately upon reaching orbit. The onboard computer was 11 hours off, making the spacecraft think it was at a different part of the mission than it actually was.AdvertisementCrews on the ground scrambled, and then discovered a second software problem that would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire during the spacecraft\u2019s return to Earth, when what\u2019s known as the service module was to separate from the crew module.Controllers on the ground discovered the problem while the spacecraft was in orbit and were able to correct it. Had they not, however, it could have damaged the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield or sent the crew module tumbling off course.Since then, NASA officials have said they should have been better at holding Boeing accountable to the agency\u2019s rigorous safety standards. And they are confident that after years of working closely together to deliver cargo and supplies to the station and now crew, NASA and SpaceX won\u2019t encounter any such problems on the upcoming mission.But there are always concerns about the unexpected and the overlooked.The space shuttle Challenger exploded on a chilly January day in 1986 after an \u201cO-ring\u201d joint failed amid unheeded warnings about launching in cold weather. In 2003, Columbia disintegrated as it was reentering Earth\u2019s atmosphere after a piece of foam became dislodged during the launch and damaged heat-resistant tiles on the wing. A subsequent investigation found a \u201cbroken safety culture\u201d at the space agency.In the past several years, NASA and SpaceX have led investigations into a trio of failures. In 2015, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying supplies to the station exploded during flight after the failure of a strut designed to withstand 10,000 pounds of force buckled at 2,000. A year later, another rocket blew up on the launchpad after the failure of a pressure vessel in the second-stage liquid-oxygen tank. And last year, during a test of the abort system, the Dragon spacecraft exploded because of a leaky valve. SpaceX also has struggled with the parachute system that would guide the spacecraft to a soft landing as it returns to Earth.No one was injured in any of those failures. NASA and SpaceX said they have investigated all the problems, fixed them and are now ready to launch humans.\u201cThis endeavor is the culmination of not only years and years of experience, or time and work, but hundreds of thousands of hours of tireless effort to bring us here,\u201d said Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s Commercial Crew Program manager. \u201cAnd it\u2019s all focused on the safety and reliability of the system.\u201dHe said that the mission was a \u201csacred honor\u201d and that the company would do everything possible to fly the astronauts \u201cto the space station and safely bring them back home to their families. Fundamentally, this is what SpaceX was founded for.\u201dOutside experts agree the teams have prepared as best they could.\u201cI would say the risk is acceptable. But it\u2019s not zero. Spaceflight is inherently dangerous, so there is always risk,\u201d said Wayne Hale, the former manager of NASA\u2019s shuttle program. \u201cBut I think that all the appropriate checks appear to have been done. I think appropriate measures have been taken and having an uncrewed test flight was a big step.\u201dThat said, everyone will be holding their breath the moment the countdown ticks to liftoff.\u201cI think we\u2019re all very appropriately nervous,\u201d Reed said.Jason Samenow and Andrew Freedman contributed to this report. Forecasters at Patrick Air Force Base are predicting a 40 percent chance that weather would force a postponement of Wednesday\u2019s launch, an improvement from Monday\u2019s 60 percent, but still casting doubt on the schedule. Flying astronauts has always been risky. No wonder NASA and SpaceX are on edge. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6408",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/15/spacex-launch-civilian-flight/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Four amateur astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here Wednesday evening, making history by becoming the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit in a fully commercial mission operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and paid for by a billionaire entrepreneur.The launch, dubbed Inspiration4, was the first step in what is planned to be an audacious three-day journey in orbit around Earth by a group of people who just months ago didn\u2019t know each other and didn\u2019t expect to fly to space. Just before launch, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire businessman who financed the trip and is its commander, urged action. \u201cInspiration4 is go for launch,\" he said. \"Punch it, SpaceX.\u201dUpon reaching orbit, Isaacman said, \u201cThe door is opening now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible.\u201dSpaceX confirmed late Wednesday that the spacecraft had hit an altitude of about 363 miles, exceeding the intended orbit of just under 360 miles.The flight marks a new expansion in the growth of the commercial space industry and another leap forward by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has vowed to open the cosmos to ordinary people, not just professionals trained by the government, in a quest ultimately to land humans on Mars.Civilians have in the past joined professional astronauts on trips to the International Space Station. And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin are working to fly paying customers on suborbital flights that would touch the edge of space before falling back to Earth. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)But never before has a crew made up entirely of civilians reached orbit \u2014 two of whom won their seats through a competition and sweepstakes.\u2018They could be your neighbors\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. Meet the Inspiration4 crew.Isaacman, a 38-year-old father of two, made his fortune by founding Shift4 Payments, a payments processing company. He is an accomplished pilot who flies fighter jets in aerobatic competitions. He paid an undisclosed sum for the mission, though he told Axios it was less than $200 million, and turned it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.His first pick to accompany him on the flight was Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot who is also an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won a competition by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. In it Proctor, who was a finalist for the NASA astronaut program in 2009, read a poem calling for what she called a J.E.D.I. future, which she described as Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.In a briefing for reporters before the launch, she said she was honored to be the fourth African-American woman to go to space and the first to serve as the pilot of a mission.\u201cIt means that I have this opportunity to not only accomplish my dream, but also inspire the next generation of women of color and girls of color and really get them to think about reaching for the stars,\u201d she said.Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially selected for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski, who works at Lockheed Martin and served in the Air Force.The Falcon 9 rocket that propelled the crew into space and the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will be their home until they splash down off the coast of Florida are owned and operated by SpaceX, not NASA. But the space agency has over the years invested heavily in the system, awarding SpaceX billions of dollars of contracts over the years so that the company could fly cargo and its astronauts to the station.For this mission, however, NASA was merely a bystander.The Falcon 9 lifted off at 8:02 p.m. from iconic pad 39 A, which SpaceX leases from NASA and was host to the Apollo 11 moon launch as well as many space shuttle launches.The rocket crackled and roared as it streaked through the darkening sky, reverberating across a Florida Space Coast that is witnessing a resurgence of launches, reminiscent of the early days of the space program, when astronauts like John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong took to the skies.The crew of the Inspiration4 mission stands in stark contrast to those men \u2014 all white, all trained by the military and then chosen by NASA for their bravery and aptitude for the \u201cright stuff.\u201dThe Inspiration4 crew looks more like a slice of America, from different walks of life, of different ages and with different experiences, whose voyage to space was as much happenstance as design.With this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits. The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.In a Netflix series documenting the mission, Isaacman and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt the preflight press briefing, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones it has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can \u2026. Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dBut the flight won\u2019t be easy.Even professionally trained astronauts suffer from \u201cspace sickness\u201d once they reach orbit, finding the weightless environment so disorienting many throw up. And while the crew has been trained in emergency procedures, it\u2019s not clear how they\u2019ll react if something goes wrong \u2014 whether they\u2019ll be cool in the moment, or panic.Though the launch went well, the crew still has three days inside a cramped spacecraft, where they\u2019ll live, sleep and even go to the bathroom in proximity to each other. Then there\u2019s the return. To get home, the spacecraft will have to slam back through the atmosphere, generating extreme temperatures that will engulf the capsule in a fireball.In an interview last year, Musk acknowledged the risks anytime you put people on top of a rocket loaded with thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellant.\u201cIt\u2019s a scary thing to be launching people,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve done everything we can to make sure that the rocket is safe and the spacecraft is safe. But the risk is never zero when you\u2019re going 25 times the speed of sound, and you\u2019re circling the Earth every 90 minutes.\u201dBut if they are able to successfully complete the mission, it would go down as a historic flight and demonstrate that there is a growing business in space.The flight precedes other private astronaut missions that are planned. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, is chartering flights for customers who are paying around $55 million for a little over a week on the space station. But on those missions, the private astronauts would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut.Ultimately, SpaceX and other companies hope the prices will come down and that space will be open not only to the super wealthy \u2014 or lucky. Isaacman said that the Inspiration4 mission, then, is a first step in that direction.\u201cIt\u2019s just getting started,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is just the beginning.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe launch was on time at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. Because this mission isn\u2019t docking with the International Space Station, SpaceX didn\u2019t have to launch at a precise time and had set aside a five-hour window for the launch. The mission is scheduled to last three days before returning to a water landing in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.None of the four crew members has been to space previously. The sponsor of the trip, and the commanding officer, is Jared Isaacman, 38, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, who dropped out of high school to start his own business and is a trained pilot. How much he\u2019s paid SpaceX for the trip hasn\u2019t been made public.The mission was conceived as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children Research Hospital, to which Isaacman donated $100 million.The crew went through five months of training at SpaceX\u2019s facility in Hawthorne, Calif., but it\u2019s unlikely they\u2019ll have to intervene to control the spacecraft during the three days they\u2019ll be circling the globe. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule is designed to operate completely autonomously and has flown many times to and docked with the International Space Station without any crew at all.Another first for Elon Musk and SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkElon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a simple, but ambitious, goal: to get humans to Mars. Since then, the company has moved quickly in a step-by-step approach, first being able to fly rockets to orbit, then reusing them and then flying people.Its first mission with humans on board came last year, when it flew a pair of veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station. Since then, it has flown two more crews of NASA astronauts with international colleagues, all of them highly trained, government astronauts. And it has another flight for NASA scheduled on Oct. 31.But Musk\u2019s goal is to open space up to all sorts of people \u2014 not just astronauts chosen and trained by the government. The Inspiration4 mission, then, is a huge step toward that goal.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon has separated and is now in orbitReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:12 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the crew of the Inspiration4 mission has separated from the rocket\u2019s second stage and is now flying on its own in orbit. The spacecraft will fire its thrusters later to put itself in a higher orbit. If all goes to plan, Dragon will reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than both the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew has lifted off from historic launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis flight pushes SpaceX\u2019s limitsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:53 p.m.Link copiedLinkWith this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits.The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. In a Netflix series documenting the mission, the trip\u2019s sponsor, Jared Isaacman, and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt a preflight press briefing Tuesday, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones SpaceX has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can. ... Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHere come the private astronautsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX now dominates both the public and private launch business.After Inspiration4, SpaceX has a more traditional launch for NASA in which it will fly three NASA astronauts, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, to the space station \u2014 as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.But it intends to stay in the private astronaut flight business for some time.Working with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, SpaceX is planning to fly a crew of four to the International Space Station, where they would spend a little more than a week. Led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, the crew members have paid $55 million each for the trip. They are Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik, a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli air force fighter pilot.After their flight, the company will fly John Shoffner, the founder of Dura-Line, a developer of materials and methods for laying fiber-optic cable, with operations in more than a dozen countries. He\u2019ll be accompanied by Peggy Whitson, a NASA veteran who spent 665 days in space, more than any other American. She was the first female commander of the International Space Station and the first woman to serve as chief astronaut before her retirement. Their flight is tentatively scheduled for fall of 2022.SpaceX is also planning to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew chosen through an application process, who\u2019ll fly on a trip around the moon on the company\u2019s still-under-development Starship spacecraft. The flight is tentatively scheduled for 2023, but it\u2019s not clear whether Starship will be ready by then.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere are they going?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkUnlike previous missions with private astronauts on board, the Inspiration4 crew will not visit the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory. Instead, the crew will stay inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a large SUV, whizzing in orbit around the Earth at 17,500 mph.If all goes according to plan, they\u2019ll fly higher than the space station and even higher than the Hubble Space Telescope. If they reach their planned altitude of about 360 miles, they\u2019ll have gone higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth\u2019s orbit except Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966, according to Robert Pearlman, the editor of collectSPACE.com, a space history news site.And they\u2019ll have an added bonus. In addition to the windows of the capsule SpaceX is attaching a clear dome at the top that the astronauts will be able to stick their heads into and get an unobscured view of the solar system.Normally that space is where the docking mechanism is for the spacecraft. But since Dragon is not docking with the space station, SpaceX put the dome in instead.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat the crew will be doing while in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkNo doubt the crew will spend a lot of time looking out the window, participating in what astronauts call Earth-gazing. They also should have fantastic views of the solar system.In a preflight briefing on Tuesday, Chris Sembroski said he was looking forward to bonding with his crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s going to be fun,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like an extended camping trip, like you\u2019re in a camper van with some of your closest friends for three days. You\u2019re allowed to sleep in sleeping bags at night just like any other camping trip.\u201d Though he said they would need to be careful not to \u201cfloat into each other in the middle of the night.\u201dThe crew will also be conducting science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space health at Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance, and scan organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA short history of space tourismReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission may be the first time a spaceflight crew is comprised entirely of civilians \u2014 nongovernment astronauts. But there has been a long history of ordinary citizens going to space. In fact, that was NASA\u2019s goal at the beginning of the space shuttle era \u2014 to fly regular people on a routine basis.First a teacher would fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jack Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.In 1986, NASA flew the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. After her selection, she\u2019d quickly become an inspiration to school children across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.But she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.In the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft, since NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for engineers to begin loading propellant, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, a significant milestone that means things are progressing toward a launch. If all goes well, the launch could go within 45 minutes from the beginning of the loading sequence.What\u2019s the difference between Inspiration4 and the flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission marks a turning point in the idea of space tourism, but it is far more daring and dangerous than the rides Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are selling to the public.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket will propel the Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will spin around the Earth so fast, at 17,500 mph, that it will circle the globe every 90 minutes. The crew intends to stay in space for three days before coming back to Earth and splashing down either in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.Branson\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s flights are suborbital, meaning the rockets carries the crew straight up to scratch the edge of space, before falling back to Earth. The spacecraft never reaches orbit, instead spending just a few minutes out of the atmosphere, where the crew gets just a few minutes of weightlessness.Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceStill, they\u2019ll be high enough to experience the wonders of space \u2014 to see the curvature of the Earth, the thin line of the atmosphere, land masses without borders and a dark sky full of stars even in daytime.The four people aboard Inspiration4, however, will be five times as high and weightless not for minutes but days. They\u2019ll be able to drink in views of Earth and the stars for hours and see multiple sunrises and sunsets every day.What\u2019s NASA\u2019s role in this?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission is a purely commercial mission. The rocket and spacecraft are operated by a private company, SpaceX. Mission control is at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Everyone there works for SpaceX.The flight was paid for by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur.For this launch, NASA is little more than a bystander.There is nothing routine about space flightNot that it\u2019s had no role in developing SpaceX. NASA has invested heavily in SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft with billions of dollars in federal contracts to develop them to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station.NASA also leases SpaceX launchpad 39A, the historic site from which the rocket will blast off. In the space world, 39A is sacred ground, the site where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off to the moon in 1969. It\u2019s also where many of the space shuttles launched.Now it\u2019s home to the first all-civilian crew launch.This capsule has been to space beforeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon capsule that will carry the Inspiration4 crew to space has been there before. It was the vehicle used for SpaceX\u2019s first operational human spaceflight mission for NASA in November.On that flight, the capsule flew three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, on a trip to the International Space Station.The astronauts dubbed the spacecraft \u201cResilience,\u201d and said after the flight that it provided a nice ride to and from the station.The crew spent about 27 hours inside the spacecraft as they made their way to the station, and reported that they were able to get some rest and were comfortable inside the climate-controlled cabin, which was kept at 75 degrees.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground at the time.And after they returned to Earth after a six-month stay, Hopkins said he was grateful to the NASA and SpaceX teams that developed the spacecraft.\u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said the spacecraft went through no major changes or upgrades since that flight, except for one. It now has a large clear window poking up through the top, where the docking adapter would normally go. Since the mission isn\u2019t going to the station, the adapter wasn\u2019t needed.\u201cThe cupola is the main change that we made,\u201d Reed said. \u201cOtherwise it\u2019s the same, very safe Dragon that we\u2019re flying right now for NASA crews.\u201dMeet the crew of the historic Inspiration4 missionReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the mission, Jared Isaacman, is a high school dropout turned billionaire entrepreneur and a hardcore aviation enthusiast who flies fighter jets but has never been to space before.His company, Shift4 Payments, helped transform the way establishments process payments, and he has used the money he made from that to fund the first all-civilian flight to space. It\u2019s not clear how much he paid for the flight, but it\u2019s certainly in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more than $100 million.Married and a father of two daughters, he lives in New York City. He pledged to make the flight more than just a joyride for himself and a few others, turning it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and donating the first $100 million himself.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itThe first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot, artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 proceeding to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew arrived at launchpad 39A shortly before 5 p.m., took in views of the Florida Space Coast and then took an elevator to the top of the launch tower and boarded the Dragon spacecraft. They strapped in and checked to make sure the communications system worked.Shortly after 6 p.m., SpaceX technicians closed the hatch to the spacecraft.Engineers continued to monitor the health of the rocket and the weather, both of which were cooperating.\u201cAll looking good for an on-time launch,\u201d John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer said during the broadcast of the mission. \u201cFalcon 9 looking good. Dragon looking good.\u201dIf all goes to plan, the rocket will blast off at 8:02 p.m. But SpaceX has a five-hour launch window in case there are any delays. Four amateur astronauts were lifted into orbit precisely on time in another triumph for Elon Musk\u2019s space company. SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6409",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/15/spacex-launch-civilian-flight/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Four amateur astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here Wednesday evening, making history by becoming the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit in a fully commercial mission operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and paid for by a billionaire entrepreneur.The launch, dubbed Inspiration4, was the first step in what is planned to be an audacious three-day journey in orbit around Earth by a group of people who just months ago didn\u2019t know each other and didn\u2019t expect to fly to space. Just before launch, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire businessman who financed the trip and is its commander, urged action. \u201cInspiration4 is go for launch,\" he said. \"Punch it, SpaceX.\u201dUpon reaching orbit, Isaacman said, \u201cThe door is opening now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible.\u201dSpaceX confirmed late Wednesday that the spacecraft had hit an altitude of about 363 miles, exceeding the intended orbit of just under 360 miles.The flight marks a new expansion in the growth of the commercial space industry and another leap forward by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has vowed to open the cosmos to ordinary people, not just professionals trained by the government, in a quest ultimately to land humans on Mars.Civilians have in the past joined professional astronauts on trips to the International Space Station. And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin are working to fly paying customers on suborbital flights that would touch the edge of space before falling back to Earth. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)But never before has a crew made up entirely of civilians reached orbit \u2014 two of whom won their seats through a competition and sweepstakes.\u2018They could be your neighbors\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. Meet the Inspiration4 crew.Isaacman, a 38-year-old father of two, made his fortune by founding Shift4 Payments, a payments processing company. He is an accomplished pilot who flies fighter jets in aerobatic competitions. He paid an undisclosed sum for the mission, though he told Axios it was less than $200 million, and turned it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.His first pick to accompany him on the flight was Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot who is also an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won a competition by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. In it Proctor, who was a finalist for the NASA astronaut program in 2009, read a poem calling for what she called a J.E.D.I. future, which she described as Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.In a briefing for reporters before the launch, she said she was honored to be the fourth African-American woman to go to space and the first to serve as the pilot of a mission.\u201cIt means that I have this opportunity to not only accomplish my dream, but also inspire the next generation of women of color and girls of color and really get them to think about reaching for the stars,\u201d she said.Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially selected for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski, who works at Lockheed Martin and served in the Air Force.The Falcon 9 rocket that propelled the crew into space and the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will be their home until they splash down off the coast of Florida are owned and operated by SpaceX, not NASA. But the space agency has over the years invested heavily in the system, awarding SpaceX billions of dollars of contracts over the years so that the company could fly cargo and its astronauts to the station.For this mission, however, NASA was merely a bystander.The Falcon 9 lifted off at 8:02 p.m. from iconic pad 39 A, which SpaceX leases from NASA and was host to the Apollo 11 moon launch as well as many space shuttle launches.The rocket crackled and roared as it streaked through the darkening sky, reverberating across a Florida Space Coast that is witnessing a resurgence of launches, reminiscent of the early days of the space program, when astronauts like John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong took to the skies.The crew of the Inspiration4 mission stands in stark contrast to those men \u2014 all white, all trained by the military and then chosen by NASA for their bravery and aptitude for the \u201cright stuff.\u201dThe Inspiration4 crew looks more like a slice of America, from different walks of life, of different ages and with different experiences, whose voyage to space was as much happenstance as design.With this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits. The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.In a Netflix series documenting the mission, Isaacman and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt the preflight press briefing, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones it has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can \u2026. Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dBut the flight won\u2019t be easy.Even professionally trained astronauts suffer from \u201cspace sickness\u201d once they reach orbit, finding the weightless environment so disorienting many throw up. And while the crew has been trained in emergency procedures, it\u2019s not clear how they\u2019ll react if something goes wrong \u2014 whether they\u2019ll be cool in the moment, or panic.Though the launch went well, the crew still has three days inside a cramped spacecraft, where they\u2019ll live, sleep and even go to the bathroom in proximity to each other. Then there\u2019s the return. To get home, the spacecraft will have to slam back through the atmosphere, generating extreme temperatures that will engulf the capsule in a fireball.In an interview last year, Musk acknowledged the risks anytime you put people on top of a rocket loaded with thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellant.\u201cIt\u2019s a scary thing to be launching people,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve done everything we can to make sure that the rocket is safe and the spacecraft is safe. But the risk is never zero when you\u2019re going 25 times the speed of sound, and you\u2019re circling the Earth every 90 minutes.\u201dBut if they are able to successfully complete the mission, it would go down as a historic flight and demonstrate that there is a growing business in space.The flight precedes other private astronaut missions that are planned. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, is chartering flights for customers who are paying around $55 million for a little over a week on the space station. But on those missions, the private astronauts would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut.Ultimately, SpaceX and other companies hope the prices will come down and that space will be open not only to the super wealthy \u2014 or lucky. Isaacman said that the Inspiration4 mission, then, is a first step in that direction.\u201cIt\u2019s just getting started,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is just the beginning.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe launch was on time at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. Because this mission isn\u2019t docking with the International Space Station, SpaceX didn\u2019t have to launch at a precise time and had set aside a five-hour window for the launch. The mission is scheduled to last three days before returning to a water landing in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.None of the four crew members has been to space previously. The sponsor of the trip, and the commanding officer, is Jared Isaacman, 38, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, who dropped out of high school to start his own business and is a trained pilot. How much he\u2019s paid SpaceX for the trip hasn\u2019t been made public.The mission was conceived as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children Research Hospital, to which Isaacman donated $100 million.The crew went through five months of training at SpaceX\u2019s facility in Hawthorne, Calif., but it\u2019s unlikely they\u2019ll have to intervene to control the spacecraft during the three days they\u2019ll be circling the globe. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule is designed to operate completely autonomously and has flown many times to and docked with the International Space Station without any crew at all.Another first for Elon Musk and SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkElon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a simple, but ambitious, goal: to get humans to Mars. Since then, the company has moved quickly in a step-by-step approach, first being able to fly rockets to orbit, then reusing them and then flying people.Its first mission with humans on board came last year, when it flew a pair of veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station. Since then, it has flown two more crews of NASA astronauts with international colleagues, all of them highly trained, government astronauts. And it has another flight for NASA scheduled on Oct. 31.But Musk\u2019s goal is to open space up to all sorts of people \u2014 not just astronauts chosen and trained by the government. The Inspiration4 mission, then, is a huge step toward that goal.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon has separated and is now in orbitReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:12 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the crew of the Inspiration4 mission has separated from the rocket\u2019s second stage and is now flying on its own in orbit. The spacecraft will fire its thrusters later to put itself in a higher orbit. If all goes to plan, Dragon will reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than both the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew has lifted off from historic launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis flight pushes SpaceX\u2019s limitsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:53 p.m.Link copiedLinkWith this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits.The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. In a Netflix series documenting the mission, the trip\u2019s sponsor, Jared Isaacman, and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt a preflight press briefing Tuesday, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones SpaceX has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can. ... Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHere come the private astronautsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX now dominates both the public and private launch business.After Inspiration4, SpaceX has a more traditional launch for NASA in which it will fly three NASA astronauts, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, to the space station \u2014 as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.But it intends to stay in the private astronaut flight business for some time.Working with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, SpaceX is planning to fly a crew of four to the International Space Station, where they would spend a little more than a week. Led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, the crew members have paid $55 million each for the trip. They are Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik, a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli air force fighter pilot.After their flight, the company will fly John Shoffner, the founder of Dura-Line, a developer of materials and methods for laying fiber-optic cable, with operations in more than a dozen countries. He\u2019ll be accompanied by Peggy Whitson, a NASA veteran who spent 665 days in space, more than any other American. She was the first female commander of the International Space Station and the first woman to serve as chief astronaut before her retirement. Their flight is tentatively scheduled for fall of 2022.SpaceX is also planning to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew chosen through an application process, who\u2019ll fly on a trip around the moon on the company\u2019s still-under-development Starship spacecraft. The flight is tentatively scheduled for 2023, but it\u2019s not clear whether Starship will be ready by then.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere are they going?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkUnlike previous missions with private astronauts on board, the Inspiration4 crew will not visit the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory. Instead, the crew will stay inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a large SUV, whizzing in orbit around the Earth at 17,500 mph.If all goes according to plan, they\u2019ll fly higher than the space station and even higher than the Hubble Space Telescope. If they reach their planned altitude of about 360 miles, they\u2019ll have gone higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth\u2019s orbit except Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966, according to Robert Pearlman, the editor of collectSPACE.com, a space history news site.And they\u2019ll have an added bonus. In addition to the windows of the capsule SpaceX is attaching a clear dome at the top that the astronauts will be able to stick their heads into and get an unobscured view of the solar system.Normally that space is where the docking mechanism is for the spacecraft. But since Dragon is not docking with the space station, SpaceX put the dome in instead.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat the crew will be doing while in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkNo doubt the crew will spend a lot of time looking out the window, participating in what astronauts call Earth-gazing. They also should have fantastic views of the solar system.In a preflight briefing on Tuesday, Chris Sembroski said he was looking forward to bonding with his crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s going to be fun,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like an extended camping trip, like you\u2019re in a camper van with some of your closest friends for three days. You\u2019re allowed to sleep in sleeping bags at night just like any other camping trip.\u201d Though he said they would need to be careful not to \u201cfloat into each other in the middle of the night.\u201dThe crew will also be conducting science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space health at Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance, and scan organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA short history of space tourismReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission may be the first time a spaceflight crew is comprised entirely of civilians \u2014 nongovernment astronauts. But there has been a long history of ordinary citizens going to space. In fact, that was NASA\u2019s goal at the beginning of the space shuttle era \u2014 to fly regular people on a routine basis.First a teacher would fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jack Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.In 1986, NASA flew the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. After her selection, she\u2019d quickly become an inspiration to school children across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.But she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.In the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft, since NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for engineers to begin loading propellant, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, a significant milestone that means things are progressing toward a launch. If all goes well, the launch could go within 45 minutes from the beginning of the loading sequence.What\u2019s the difference between Inspiration4 and the flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission marks a turning point in the idea of space tourism, but it is far more daring and dangerous than the rides Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are selling to the public.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket will propel the Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will spin around the Earth so fast, at 17,500 mph, that it will circle the globe every 90 minutes. The crew intends to stay in space for three days before coming back to Earth and splashing down either in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.Branson\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s flights are suborbital, meaning the rockets carries the crew straight up to scratch the edge of space, before falling back to Earth. The spacecraft never reaches orbit, instead spending just a few minutes out of the atmosphere, where the crew gets just a few minutes of weightlessness.Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceStill, they\u2019ll be high enough to experience the wonders of space \u2014 to see the curvature of the Earth, the thin line of the atmosphere, land masses without borders and a dark sky full of stars even in daytime.The four people aboard Inspiration4, however, will be five times as high and weightless not for minutes but days. They\u2019ll be able to drink in views of Earth and the stars for hours and see multiple sunrises and sunsets every day.What\u2019s NASA\u2019s role in this?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission is a purely commercial mission. The rocket and spacecraft are operated by a private company, SpaceX. Mission control is at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Everyone there works for SpaceX.The flight was paid for by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur.For this launch, NASA is little more than a bystander.There is nothing routine about space flightNot that it\u2019s had no role in developing SpaceX. NASA has invested heavily in SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft with billions of dollars in federal contracts to develop them to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station.NASA also leases SpaceX launchpad 39A, the historic site from which the rocket will blast off. In the space world, 39A is sacred ground, the site where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off to the moon in 1969. It\u2019s also where many of the space shuttles launched.Now it\u2019s home to the first all-civilian crew launch.This capsule has been to space beforeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon capsule that will carry the Inspiration4 crew to space has been there before. It was the vehicle used for SpaceX\u2019s first operational human spaceflight mission for NASA in November.On that flight, the capsule flew three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, on a trip to the International Space Station.The astronauts dubbed the spacecraft \u201cResilience,\u201d and said after the flight that it provided a nice ride to and from the station.The crew spent about 27 hours inside the spacecraft as they made their way to the station, and reported that they were able to get some rest and were comfortable inside the climate-controlled cabin, which was kept at 75 degrees.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground at the time.And after they returned to Earth after a six-month stay, Hopkins said he was grateful to the NASA and SpaceX teams that developed the spacecraft.\u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said the spacecraft went through no major changes or upgrades since that flight, except for one. It now has a large clear window poking up through the top, where the docking adapter would normally go. Since the mission isn\u2019t going to the station, the adapter wasn\u2019t needed.\u201cThe cupola is the main change that we made,\u201d Reed said. \u201cOtherwise it\u2019s the same, very safe Dragon that we\u2019re flying right now for NASA crews.\u201dMeet the crew of the historic Inspiration4 missionReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the mission, Jared Isaacman, is a high school dropout turned billionaire entrepreneur and a hardcore aviation enthusiast who flies fighter jets but has never been to space before.His company, Shift4 Payments, helped transform the way establishments process payments, and he has used the money he made from that to fund the first all-civilian flight to space. It\u2019s not clear how much he paid for the flight, but it\u2019s certainly in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more than $100 million.Married and a father of two daughters, he lives in New York City. He pledged to make the flight more than just a joyride for himself and a few others, turning it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and donating the first $100 million himself.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itThe first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot, artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 proceeding to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew arrived at launchpad 39A shortly before 5 p.m., took in views of the Florida Space Coast and then took an elevator to the top of the launch tower and boarded the Dragon spacecraft. They strapped in and checked to make sure the communications system worked.Shortly after 6 p.m., SpaceX technicians closed the hatch to the spacecraft.Engineers continued to monitor the health of the rocket and the weather, both of which were cooperating.\u201cAll looking good for an on-time launch,\u201d John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer said during the broadcast of the mission. \u201cFalcon 9 looking good. Dragon looking good.\u201dIf all goes to plan, the rocket will blast off at 8:02 p.m. But SpaceX has a five-hour launch window in case there are any delays. Four amateur astronauts were lifted into orbit precisely on time in another triumph for Elon Musk\u2019s space company. SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6410",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/15/spacex-launch-civilian-flight/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Four amateur astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here Wednesday evening, making history by becoming the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit in a fully commercial mission operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and paid for by a billionaire entrepreneur.The launch, dubbed Inspiration4, was the first step in what is planned to be an audacious three-day journey in orbit around Earth by a group of people who just months ago didn\u2019t know each other and didn\u2019t expect to fly to space. Just before launch, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire businessman who financed the trip and is its commander, urged action. \u201cInspiration4 is go for launch,\" he said. \"Punch it, SpaceX.\u201dUpon reaching orbit, Isaacman said, \u201cThe door is opening now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible.\u201dSpaceX confirmed late Wednesday that the spacecraft had hit an altitude of about 363 miles, exceeding the intended orbit of just under 360 miles.The flight marks a new expansion in the growth of the commercial space industry and another leap forward by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has vowed to open the cosmos to ordinary people, not just professionals trained by the government, in a quest ultimately to land humans on Mars.Civilians have in the past joined professional astronauts on trips to the International Space Station. And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin are working to fly paying customers on suborbital flights that would touch the edge of space before falling back to Earth. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)But never before has a crew made up entirely of civilians reached orbit \u2014 two of whom won their seats through a competition and sweepstakes.\u2018They could be your neighbors\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. Meet the Inspiration4 crew.Isaacman, a 38-year-old father of two, made his fortune by founding Shift4 Payments, a payments processing company. He is an accomplished pilot who flies fighter jets in aerobatic competitions. He paid an undisclosed sum for the mission, though he told Axios it was less than $200 million, and turned it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.His first pick to accompany him on the flight was Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot who is also an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won a competition by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. In it Proctor, who was a finalist for the NASA astronaut program in 2009, read a poem calling for what she called a J.E.D.I. future, which she described as Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.In a briefing for reporters before the launch, she said she was honored to be the fourth African-American woman to go to space and the first to serve as the pilot of a mission.\u201cIt means that I have this opportunity to not only accomplish my dream, but also inspire the next generation of women of color and girls of color and really get them to think about reaching for the stars,\u201d she said.Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially selected for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski, who works at Lockheed Martin and served in the Air Force.The Falcon 9 rocket that propelled the crew into space and the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will be their home until they splash down off the coast of Florida are owned and operated by SpaceX, not NASA. But the space agency has over the years invested heavily in the system, awarding SpaceX billions of dollars of contracts over the years so that the company could fly cargo and its astronauts to the station.For this mission, however, NASA was merely a bystander.The Falcon 9 lifted off at 8:02 p.m. from iconic pad 39 A, which SpaceX leases from NASA and was host to the Apollo 11 moon launch as well as many space shuttle launches.The rocket crackled and roared as it streaked through the darkening sky, reverberating across a Florida Space Coast that is witnessing a resurgence of launches, reminiscent of the early days of the space program, when astronauts like John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong took to the skies.The crew of the Inspiration4 mission stands in stark contrast to those men \u2014 all white, all trained by the military and then chosen by NASA for their bravery and aptitude for the \u201cright stuff.\u201dThe Inspiration4 crew looks more like a slice of America, from different walks of life, of different ages and with different experiences, whose voyage to space was as much happenstance as design.With this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits. The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.In a Netflix series documenting the mission, Isaacman and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt the preflight press briefing, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones it has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can \u2026. Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dBut the flight won\u2019t be easy.Even professionally trained astronauts suffer from \u201cspace sickness\u201d once they reach orbit, finding the weightless environment so disorienting many throw up. And while the crew has been trained in emergency procedures, it\u2019s not clear how they\u2019ll react if something goes wrong \u2014 whether they\u2019ll be cool in the moment, or panic.Though the launch went well, the crew still has three days inside a cramped spacecraft, where they\u2019ll live, sleep and even go to the bathroom in proximity to each other. Then there\u2019s the return. To get home, the spacecraft will have to slam back through the atmosphere, generating extreme temperatures that will engulf the capsule in a fireball.In an interview last year, Musk acknowledged the risks anytime you put people on top of a rocket loaded with thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellant.\u201cIt\u2019s a scary thing to be launching people,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve done everything we can to make sure that the rocket is safe and the spacecraft is safe. But the risk is never zero when you\u2019re going 25 times the speed of sound, and you\u2019re circling the Earth every 90 minutes.\u201dBut if they are able to successfully complete the mission, it would go down as a historic flight and demonstrate that there is a growing business in space.The flight precedes other private astronaut missions that are planned. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, is chartering flights for customers who are paying around $55 million for a little over a week on the space station. But on those missions, the private astronauts would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut.Ultimately, SpaceX and other companies hope the prices will come down and that space will be open not only to the super wealthy \u2014 or lucky. Isaacman said that the Inspiration4 mission, then, is a first step in that direction.\u201cIt\u2019s just getting started,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is just the beginning.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe launch was on time at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. Because this mission isn\u2019t docking with the International Space Station, SpaceX didn\u2019t have to launch at a precise time and had set aside a five-hour window for the launch. The mission is scheduled to last three days before returning to a water landing in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.None of the four crew members has been to space previously. The sponsor of the trip, and the commanding officer, is Jared Isaacman, 38, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, who dropped out of high school to start his own business and is a trained pilot. How much he\u2019s paid SpaceX for the trip hasn\u2019t been made public.The mission was conceived as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children Research Hospital, to which Isaacman donated $100 million.The crew went through five months of training at SpaceX\u2019s facility in Hawthorne, Calif., but it\u2019s unlikely they\u2019ll have to intervene to control the spacecraft during the three days they\u2019ll be circling the globe. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule is designed to operate completely autonomously and has flown many times to and docked with the International Space Station without any crew at all.Another first for Elon Musk and SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkElon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a simple, but ambitious, goal: to get humans to Mars. Since then, the company has moved quickly in a step-by-step approach, first being able to fly rockets to orbit, then reusing them and then flying people.Its first mission with humans on board came last year, when it flew a pair of veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station. Since then, it has flown two more crews of NASA astronauts with international colleagues, all of them highly trained, government astronauts. And it has another flight for NASA scheduled on Oct. 31.But Musk\u2019s goal is to open space up to all sorts of people \u2014 not just astronauts chosen and trained by the government. The Inspiration4 mission, then, is a huge step toward that goal.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon has separated and is now in orbitReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:12 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the crew of the Inspiration4 mission has separated from the rocket\u2019s second stage and is now flying on its own in orbit. The spacecraft will fire its thrusters later to put itself in a higher orbit. If all goes to plan, Dragon will reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than both the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew has lifted off from historic launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis flight pushes SpaceX\u2019s limitsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:53 p.m.Link copiedLinkWith this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits.The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. In a Netflix series documenting the mission, the trip\u2019s sponsor, Jared Isaacman, and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt a preflight press briefing Tuesday, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones SpaceX has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can. ... Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHere come the private astronautsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX now dominates both the public and private launch business.After Inspiration4, SpaceX has a more traditional launch for NASA in which it will fly three NASA astronauts, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, to the space station \u2014 as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.But it intends to stay in the private astronaut flight business for some time.Working with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, SpaceX is planning to fly a crew of four to the International Space Station, where they would spend a little more than a week. Led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, the crew members have paid $55 million each for the trip. They are Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik, a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli air force fighter pilot.After their flight, the company will fly John Shoffner, the founder of Dura-Line, a developer of materials and methods for laying fiber-optic cable, with operations in more than a dozen countries. He\u2019ll be accompanied by Peggy Whitson, a NASA veteran who spent 665 days in space, more than any other American. She was the first female commander of the International Space Station and the first woman to serve as chief astronaut before her retirement. Their flight is tentatively scheduled for fall of 2022.SpaceX is also planning to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew chosen through an application process, who\u2019ll fly on a trip around the moon on the company\u2019s still-under-development Starship spacecraft. The flight is tentatively scheduled for 2023, but it\u2019s not clear whether Starship will be ready by then.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere are they going?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkUnlike previous missions with private astronauts on board, the Inspiration4 crew will not visit the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory. Instead, the crew will stay inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a large SUV, whizzing in orbit around the Earth at 17,500 mph.If all goes according to plan, they\u2019ll fly higher than the space station and even higher than the Hubble Space Telescope. If they reach their planned altitude of about 360 miles, they\u2019ll have gone higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth\u2019s orbit except Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966, according to Robert Pearlman, the editor of collectSPACE.com, a space history news site.And they\u2019ll have an added bonus. In addition to the windows of the capsule SpaceX is attaching a clear dome at the top that the astronauts will be able to stick their heads into and get an unobscured view of the solar system.Normally that space is where the docking mechanism is for the spacecraft. But since Dragon is not docking with the space station, SpaceX put the dome in instead.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat the crew will be doing while in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkNo doubt the crew will spend a lot of time looking out the window, participating in what astronauts call Earth-gazing. They also should have fantastic views of the solar system.In a preflight briefing on Tuesday, Chris Sembroski said he was looking forward to bonding with his crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s going to be fun,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like an extended camping trip, like you\u2019re in a camper van with some of your closest friends for three days. You\u2019re allowed to sleep in sleeping bags at night just like any other camping trip.\u201d Though he said they would need to be careful not to \u201cfloat into each other in the middle of the night.\u201dThe crew will also be conducting science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space health at Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance, and scan organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA short history of space tourismReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission may be the first time a spaceflight crew is comprised entirely of civilians \u2014 nongovernment astronauts. But there has been a long history of ordinary citizens going to space. In fact, that was NASA\u2019s goal at the beginning of the space shuttle era \u2014 to fly regular people on a routine basis.First a teacher would fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jack Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.In 1986, NASA flew the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. After her selection, she\u2019d quickly become an inspiration to school children across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.But she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.In the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft, since NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for engineers to begin loading propellant, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, a significant milestone that means things are progressing toward a launch. If all goes well, the launch could go within 45 minutes from the beginning of the loading sequence.What\u2019s the difference between Inspiration4 and the flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission marks a turning point in the idea of space tourism, but it is far more daring and dangerous than the rides Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are selling to the public.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket will propel the Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will spin around the Earth so fast, at 17,500 mph, that it will circle the globe every 90 minutes. The crew intends to stay in space for three days before coming back to Earth and splashing down either in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.Branson\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s flights are suborbital, meaning the rockets carries the crew straight up to scratch the edge of space, before falling back to Earth. The spacecraft never reaches orbit, instead spending just a few minutes out of the atmosphere, where the crew gets just a few minutes of weightlessness.Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceStill, they\u2019ll be high enough to experience the wonders of space \u2014 to see the curvature of the Earth, the thin line of the atmosphere, land masses without borders and a dark sky full of stars even in daytime.The four people aboard Inspiration4, however, will be five times as high and weightless not for minutes but days. They\u2019ll be able to drink in views of Earth and the stars for hours and see multiple sunrises and sunsets every day.What\u2019s NASA\u2019s role in this?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission is a purely commercial mission. The rocket and spacecraft are operated by a private company, SpaceX. Mission control is at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Everyone there works for SpaceX.The flight was paid for by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur.For this launch, NASA is little more than a bystander.There is nothing routine about space flightNot that it\u2019s had no role in developing SpaceX. NASA has invested heavily in SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft with billions of dollars in federal contracts to develop them to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station.NASA also leases SpaceX launchpad 39A, the historic site from which the rocket will blast off. In the space world, 39A is sacred ground, the site where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off to the moon in 1969. It\u2019s also where many of the space shuttles launched.Now it\u2019s home to the first all-civilian crew launch.This capsule has been to space beforeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon capsule that will carry the Inspiration4 crew to space has been there before. It was the vehicle used for SpaceX\u2019s first operational human spaceflight mission for NASA in November.On that flight, the capsule flew three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, on a trip to the International Space Station.The astronauts dubbed the spacecraft \u201cResilience,\u201d and said after the flight that it provided a nice ride to and from the station.The crew spent about 27 hours inside the spacecraft as they made their way to the station, and reported that they were able to get some rest and were comfortable inside the climate-controlled cabin, which was kept at 75 degrees.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground at the time.And after they returned to Earth after a six-month stay, Hopkins said he was grateful to the NASA and SpaceX teams that developed the spacecraft.\u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said the spacecraft went through no major changes or upgrades since that flight, except for one. It now has a large clear window poking up through the top, where the docking adapter would normally go. Since the mission isn\u2019t going to the station, the adapter wasn\u2019t needed.\u201cThe cupola is the main change that we made,\u201d Reed said. \u201cOtherwise it\u2019s the same, very safe Dragon that we\u2019re flying right now for NASA crews.\u201dMeet the crew of the historic Inspiration4 missionReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the mission, Jared Isaacman, is a high school dropout turned billionaire entrepreneur and a hardcore aviation enthusiast who flies fighter jets but has never been to space before.His company, Shift4 Payments, helped transform the way establishments process payments, and he has used the money he made from that to fund the first all-civilian flight to space. It\u2019s not clear how much he paid for the flight, but it\u2019s certainly in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more than $100 million.Married and a father of two daughters, he lives in New York City. He pledged to make the flight more than just a joyride for himself and a few others, turning it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and donating the first $100 million himself.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itThe first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot, artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 proceeding to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew arrived at launchpad 39A shortly before 5 p.m., took in views of the Florida Space Coast and then took an elevator to the top of the launch tower and boarded the Dragon spacecraft. They strapped in and checked to make sure the communications system worked.Shortly after 6 p.m., SpaceX technicians closed the hatch to the spacecraft.Engineers continued to monitor the health of the rocket and the weather, both of which were cooperating.\u201cAll looking good for an on-time launch,\u201d John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer said during the broadcast of the mission. \u201cFalcon 9 looking good. Dragon looking good.\u201dIf all goes to plan, the rocket will blast off at 8:02 p.m. But SpaceX has a five-hour launch window in case there are any delays. Four amateur astronauts were lifted into orbit precisely on time in another triumph for Elon Musk\u2019s space company. SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6411",
        "date": "2021-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/15/spacex-launch-civilian-flight/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Four amateur astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here Wednesday evening, making history by becoming the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit in a fully commercial mission operated by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and paid for by a billionaire entrepreneur.The launch, dubbed Inspiration4, was the first step in what is planned to be an audacious three-day journey in orbit around Earth by a group of people who just months ago didn\u2019t know each other and didn\u2019t expect to fly to space. Just before launch, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire businessman who financed the trip and is its commander, urged action. \u201cInspiration4 is go for launch,\" he said. \"Punch it, SpaceX.\u201dUpon reaching orbit, Isaacman said, \u201cThe door is opening now, and it\u2019s pretty incredible.\u201dSpaceX confirmed late Wednesday that the spacecraft had hit an altitude of about 363 miles, exceeding the intended orbit of just under 360 miles.The flight marks a new expansion in the growth of the commercial space industry and another leap forward by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has vowed to open the cosmos to ordinary people, not just professionals trained by the government, in a quest ultimately to land humans on Mars.Civilians have in the past joined professional astronauts on trips to the International Space Station. And Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin are working to fly paying customers on suborbital flights that would touch the edge of space before falling back to Earth. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)But never before has a crew made up entirely of civilians reached orbit \u2014 two of whom won their seats through a competition and sweepstakes.\u2018They could be your neighbors\u2019 and they\u2019re going to space. Meet the Inspiration4 crew.Isaacman, a 38-year-old father of two, made his fortune by founding Shift4 Payments, a payments processing company. He is an accomplished pilot who flies fighter jets in aerobatic competitions. He paid an undisclosed sum for the mission, though he told Axios it was less than $200 million, and turned it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.His first pick to accompany him on the flight was Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot who is also an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won a competition by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. In it Proctor, who was a finalist for the NASA astronaut program in 2009, read a poem calling for what she called a J.E.D.I. future, which she described as Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.In a briefing for reporters before the launch, she said she was honored to be the fourth African-American woman to go to space and the first to serve as the pilot of a mission.\u201cIt means that I have this opportunity to not only accomplish my dream, but also inspire the next generation of women of color and girls of color and really get them to think about reaching for the stars,\u201d she said.Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially selected for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski, who works at Lockheed Martin and served in the Air Force.The Falcon 9 rocket that propelled the crew into space and the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will be their home until they splash down off the coast of Florida are owned and operated by SpaceX, not NASA. But the space agency has over the years invested heavily in the system, awarding SpaceX billions of dollars of contracts over the years so that the company could fly cargo and its astronauts to the station.For this mission, however, NASA was merely a bystander.The Falcon 9 lifted off at 8:02 p.m. from iconic pad 39 A, which SpaceX leases from NASA and was host to the Apollo 11 moon launch as well as many space shuttle launches.The rocket crackled and roared as it streaked through the darkening sky, reverberating across a Florida Space Coast that is witnessing a resurgence of launches, reminiscent of the early days of the space program, when astronauts like John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong took to the skies.The crew of the Inspiration4 mission stands in stark contrast to those men \u2014 all white, all trained by the military and then chosen by NASA for their bravery and aptitude for the \u201cright stuff.\u201dThe Inspiration4 crew looks more like a slice of America, from different walks of life, of different ages and with different experiences, whose voyage to space was as much happenstance as design.With this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits. The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.In a Netflix series documenting the mission, Isaacman and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt the preflight press briefing, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones it has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can \u2026. Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dBut the flight won\u2019t be easy.Even professionally trained astronauts suffer from \u201cspace sickness\u201d once they reach orbit, finding the weightless environment so disorienting many throw up. And while the crew has been trained in emergency procedures, it\u2019s not clear how they\u2019ll react if something goes wrong \u2014 whether they\u2019ll be cool in the moment, or panic.Though the launch went well, the crew still has three days inside a cramped spacecraft, where they\u2019ll live, sleep and even go to the bathroom in proximity to each other. Then there\u2019s the return. To get home, the spacecraft will have to slam back through the atmosphere, generating extreme temperatures that will engulf the capsule in a fireball.In an interview last year, Musk acknowledged the risks anytime you put people on top of a rocket loaded with thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellant.\u201cIt\u2019s a scary thing to be launching people,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ve done everything we can to make sure that the rocket is safe and the spacecraft is safe. But the risk is never zero when you\u2019re going 25 times the speed of sound, and you\u2019re circling the Earth every 90 minutes.\u201dBut if they are able to successfully complete the mission, it would go down as a historic flight and demonstrate that there is a growing business in space.The flight precedes other private astronaut missions that are planned. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, is chartering flights for customers who are paying around $55 million for a little over a week on the space station. But on those missions, the private astronauts would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut.Ultimately, SpaceX and other companies hope the prices will come down and that space will be open not only to the super wealthy \u2014 or lucky. Isaacman said that the Inspiration4 mission, then, is a first step in that direction.\u201cIt\u2019s just getting started,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is just the beginning.\u201dHere\u2019s what to knowThe launch was on time at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. Because this mission isn\u2019t docking with the International Space Station, SpaceX didn\u2019t have to launch at a precise time and had set aside a five-hour window for the launch. The mission is scheduled to last three days before returning to a water landing in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.None of the four crew members has been to space previously. The sponsor of the trip, and the commanding officer, is Jared Isaacman, 38, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, who dropped out of high school to start his own business and is a trained pilot. How much he\u2019s paid SpaceX for the trip hasn\u2019t been made public.The mission was conceived as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children Research Hospital, to which Isaacman donated $100 million.The crew went through five months of training at SpaceX\u2019s facility in Hawthorne, Calif., but it\u2019s unlikely they\u2019ll have to intervene to control the spacecraft during the three days they\u2019ll be circling the globe. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule is designed to operate completely autonomously and has flown many times to and docked with the International Space Station without any crew at all.Another first for Elon Musk and SpaceXReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkElon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a simple, but ambitious, goal: to get humans to Mars. Since then, the company has moved quickly in a step-by-step approach, first being able to fly rockets to orbit, then reusing them and then flying people.Its first mission with humans on board came last year, when it flew a pair of veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station. Since then, it has flown two more crews of NASA astronauts with international colleagues, all of them highly trained, government astronauts. And it has another flight for NASA scheduled on Oct. 31.But Musk\u2019s goal is to open space up to all sorts of people \u2014 not just astronauts chosen and trained by the government. The Inspiration4 mission, then, is a huge step toward that goal.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon has separated and is now in orbitReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:12 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the crew of the Inspiration4 mission has separated from the rocket\u2019s second stage and is now flying on its own in orbit. The spacecraft will fire its thrusters later to put itself in a higher orbit. If all goes to plan, Dragon will reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than both the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementLiftoffReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew has lifted off from historic launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThis flight pushes SpaceX\u2019s limitsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:53 p.m.Link copiedLinkWith this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits.The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. In a Netflix series documenting the mission, the trip\u2019s sponsor, Jared Isaacman, and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, \u201cintuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.\u201d But he added that it \u201cwill start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I\u2019m not aware of in other subsystems.\u201dAnother employee warned, \u201cYeah, it\u2019s not one particular thing, it\u2019s just opening Pandora\u2019s box.\u201dAt a preflight press briefing Tuesday, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. \u201cIf we\u2019re going to go to the moon again, and we\u2019re going to go to Mars and beyond we\u2019ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,\u201d he said.Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.\u201cUltimately it\u2019s about safety and reliability,\u201d he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones SpaceX has been flying for NASA, \u201cthat\u2019s not to say that you can\u2019t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can. ... Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we\u2019d fly safely.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHere come the private astronautsReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:45 p.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX now dominates both the public and private launch business.After Inspiration4, SpaceX has a more traditional launch for NASA in which it will fly three NASA astronauts, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, to the space station \u2014 as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.But it intends to stay in the private astronaut flight business for some time.Working with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, SpaceX is planning to fly a crew of four to the International Space Station, where they would spend a little more than a week. Led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, the crew members have paid $55 million each for the trip. They are Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik, a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli air force fighter pilot.After their flight, the company will fly John Shoffner, the founder of Dura-Line, a developer of materials and methods for laying fiber-optic cable, with operations in more than a dozen countries. He\u2019ll be accompanied by Peggy Whitson, a NASA veteran who spent 665 days in space, more than any other American. She was the first female commander of the International Space Station and the first woman to serve as chief astronaut before her retirement. Their flight is tentatively scheduled for fall of 2022.SpaceX is also planning to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew chosen through an application process, who\u2019ll fly on a trip around the moon on the company\u2019s still-under-development Starship spacecraft. The flight is tentatively scheduled for 2023, but it\u2019s not clear whether Starship will be ready by then.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere are they going?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:35 p.m.Link copiedLinkUnlike previous missions with private astronauts on board, the Inspiration4 crew will not visit the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory. Instead, the crew will stay inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a large SUV, whizzing in orbit around the Earth at 17,500 mph.If all goes according to plan, they\u2019ll fly higher than the space station and even higher than the Hubble Space Telescope. If they reach their planned altitude of about 360 miles, they\u2019ll have gone higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth\u2019s orbit except Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966, according to Robert Pearlman, the editor of collectSPACE.com, a space history news site.And they\u2019ll have an added bonus. In addition to the windows of the capsule SpaceX is attaching a clear dome at the top that the astronauts will be able to stick their heads into and get an unobscured view of the solar system.Normally that space is where the docking mechanism is for the spacecraft. But since Dragon is not docking with the space station, SpaceX put the dome in instead.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat the crew will be doing while in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkNo doubt the crew will spend a lot of time looking out the window, participating in what astronauts call Earth-gazing. They also should have fantastic views of the solar system.In a preflight briefing on Tuesday, Chris Sembroski said he was looking forward to bonding with his crew members.\u201cIt\u2019s going to be fun,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like an extended camping trip, like you\u2019re in a camper van with some of your closest friends for three days. You\u2019re allowed to sleep in sleeping bags at night just like any other camping trip.\u201d Though he said they would need to be careful not to \u201cfloat into each other in the middle of the night.\u201dThe crew will also be conducting science experiments designed to \u201cincrease humanity\u2019s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,\u201d according to a news release.SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space health at Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance, and scan organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementA short history of space tourismReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission may be the first time a spaceflight crew is comprised entirely of civilians \u2014 nongovernment astronauts. But there has been a long history of ordinary citizens going to space. In fact, that was NASA\u2019s goal at the beginning of the space shuttle era \u2014 to fly regular people on a routine basis.First a teacher would fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jack Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.In 1986, NASA flew the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. After her selection, she\u2019d quickly become an inspiration to school children across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.But she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its \u201cspaceflight participant program\u201d and never flew the journalist or the artist.In the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft, since NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX is go for propellant loadReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport7:19 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX launch director has called for engineers to begin loading propellant, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, a significant milestone that means things are progressing toward a launch. If all goes well, the launch could go within 45 minutes from the beginning of the loading sequence.What\u2019s the difference between Inspiration4 and the flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission marks a turning point in the idea of space tourism, but it is far more daring and dangerous than the rides Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are selling to the public.SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket will propel the Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will spin around the Earth so fast, at 17,500 mph, that it will circle the globe every 90 minutes. The crew intends to stay in space for three days before coming back to Earth and splashing down either in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.Branson\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s flights are suborbital, meaning the rockets carries the crew straight up to scratch the edge of space, before falling back to Earth. The spacecraft never reaches orbit, instead spending just a few minutes out of the atmosphere, where the crew gets just a few minutes of weightlessness.Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to spaceStill, they\u2019ll be high enough to experience the wonders of space \u2014 to see the curvature of the Earth, the thin line of the atmosphere, land masses without borders and a dark sky full of stars even in daytime.The four people aboard Inspiration4, however, will be five times as high and weightless not for minutes but days. They\u2019ll be able to drink in views of Earth and the stars for hours and see multiple sunrises and sunsets every day.What\u2019s NASA\u2019s role in this?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport7:03 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Inspiration4 mission is a purely commercial mission. The rocket and spacecraft are operated by a private company, SpaceX. Mission control is at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Everyone there works for SpaceX.The flight was paid for by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur.For this launch, NASA is little more than a bystander.There is nothing routine about space flightNot that it\u2019s had no role in developing SpaceX. NASA has invested heavily in SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft with billions of dollars in federal contracts to develop them to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station.NASA also leases SpaceX launchpad 39A, the historic site from which the rocket will blast off. In the space world, 39A is sacred ground, the site where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off to the moon in 1969. It\u2019s also where many of the space shuttles launched.Now it\u2019s home to the first all-civilian crew launch.This capsule has been to space beforeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon capsule that will carry the Inspiration4 crew to space has been there before. It was the vehicle used for SpaceX\u2019s first operational human spaceflight mission for NASA in November.On that flight, the capsule flew three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, on a trip to the International Space Station.The astronauts dubbed the spacecraft \u201cResilience,\u201d and said after the flight that it provided a nice ride to and from the station.The crew spent about 27 hours inside the spacecraft as they made their way to the station, and reported that they were able to get some rest and were comfortable inside the climate-controlled cabin, which was kept at 75 degrees.\u201cIt was a very nice night on board Resilience,\u201d Hopkins told the ground at the time.And after they returned to Earth after a six-month stay, Hopkins said he was grateful to the NASA and SpaceX teams that developed the spacecraft.\u201cI want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y\u2019all are changing the world. Congratulations. It\u2019s great to be back.\u201dBenji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said the spacecraft went through no major changes or upgrades since that flight, except for one. It now has a large clear window poking up through the top, where the docking adapter would normally go. Since the mission isn\u2019t going to the station, the adapter wasn\u2019t needed.\u201cThe cupola is the main change that we made,\u201d Reed said. \u201cOtherwise it\u2019s the same, very safe Dragon that we\u2019re flying right now for NASA crews.\u201dMeet the crew of the historic Inspiration4 missionReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:54 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe commander of the mission, Jared Isaacman, is a high school dropout turned billionaire entrepreneur and a hardcore aviation enthusiast who flies fighter jets but has never been to space before.His company, Shift4 Payments, helped transform the way establishments process payments, and he has used the money he made from that to fund the first all-civilian flight to space. It\u2019s not clear how much he paid for the flight, but it\u2019s certainly in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more than $100 million.Married and a father of two daughters, he lives in New York City. He pledged to make the flight more than just a joyride for himself and a few others, turning it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital and donating the first $100 million himself.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itThe first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot, artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4\u2032s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 proceeding to launchReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport6:52 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew arrived at launchpad 39A shortly before 5 p.m., took in views of the Florida Space Coast and then took an elevator to the top of the launch tower and boarded the Dragon spacecraft. They strapped in and checked to make sure the communications system worked.Shortly after 6 p.m., SpaceX technicians closed the hatch to the spacecraft.Engineers continued to monitor the health of the rocket and the weather, both of which were cooperating.\u201cAll looking good for an on-time launch,\u201d John Insprucker, SpaceX\u2019s principal integration engineer said during the broadcast of the mission. \u201cFalcon 9 looking good. Dragon looking good.\u201dIf all goes to plan, the rocket will blast off at 8:02 p.m. But SpaceX has a five-hour launch window in case there are any delays. Four amateur astronauts were lifted into orbit precisely on time in another triumph for Elon Musk\u2019s space company. SpaceX makes history by launching Inspiration4, first all-civilian crew, to orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX completes key test of its Dragon capsule. Its first human spaceflight might come in spring. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6412",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/19/spacexemergencyabortttest/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX moved Sunday to within months of restoring NASA\u2019s ability to launch people into space, successfully completing a key test of the emergency abort system of the spacecraft it is developing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has been unable to send humans to space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, but with SpaceX\u2019s test, the agency said it could be sometime this spring when astronauts again would be lifting off from the same historic stretch of coastline here that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon. Such an outcome would augur a new era of space exploration, one driven by private industry as well as NASA. Sunday\u2019s successful test marked the culmination of years of work by SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002 with the goal of flying humans routinely out of the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a press conference after the mission, Musk said he was \u201csuper fired up\" and said the mission was a significant and \u201csurreal\u201d milestone.\u201cI can\u2019t believe we\u2019ve gotten this far,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. I think that\u2019s super exciting.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the company, and the progress it has made, but said the coming weeks and months would be crucial.\u201cMake no mistake there\u2019s a lot left to do,\u201d he said, noting there were significant parachute tests yet to come and that the teams still needed to review the data from Sunday\u2019s so-called in-flight abort test.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s test began shortly after a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from a launch site here at 10:30 a.m. amid concerns that heavy winds and incoming clouds would scrub the mission. But nearly 90 seconds after the booster blasted off, the engines of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft ignited, shooting the capsule off like a champagne cork at more than twice the speed of sound, while the booster came apart midflight in a fiery spectacle miles above the Florida Space Coast.AdvertisementThe capsule landed softly in the Atlantic Ocean nine minutes after liftoff, floating down under a quartet of parachutes, completing a test designed to show that the astronauts would be flown to safety if there ever were a problem with the rocket.\u201cIt looks like a great test,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s John Insprucker said during the live broadcast, as cheering broke out at SpaceX headquarters in California.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft capable of flying humans to the space station, a bold bet by the agency to outsource human spaceflight to the private sector. Since then, both companies\u2019 progress has been hampered by technical problems and funding issues that have delayed the first flights with crews by years. And the agency has been forced to continue to rely on Russia for rides to the space station at a cost of as much as $84 million a seat.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLast spring, a Dragon capsule exploded during a test of its abort engines. The company blamed a faulty valve that caused a propellant leak. It has also struggled with its parachutes, but SpaceX has moved to a new design that seemed to work well Sunday.Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew program manager, said the agency was \u201cvery, very happy with the flawless execution\u201d of the parachutes.Boeing also has had problems with its Starliner spacecraft. During a test of its abort system last year, one of its three main parachutes failed to deploy. And a test of its Starliner capsule in December was cut short when a software problem prevented the spacecraft from docking with the space station as intended.Sunday\u2019s test was the last major hurdle SpaceX needed to pass before being allowed to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts in what\u2019s known as the Commercial Crew Program. The company hopes to fly its first mission with astronauts within a few months, but first it needs to analyze the data from the mission and go through safety checks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk said the test was \u201cpicture perfect,\u201d with the spacecraft shooting about a mile away from the disabled booster \u201cin a matter of seconds.\" But even with that extreme acceleration, he said, the vehicle experienced forces only about three-and-a-half times gravity, far less than the seven Gs that a Russian Soyuz spacecraft endured when it experienced a real abort in late 2018.The test also represented another significant step by a growing commercial space industry that is trying to end governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on space activities. Bridenstine said he welcomed the new dynamic since it would help NASA in the future, and even at one point made a pitch for private astronauts to sign up to fly with SpaceX.\u201cWe\u2019re on the cusp of commercializing low-Earth orbit,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to see large amount of activities involving humans in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s unclear when Boeing might fly its first mission with crews. The company is still investigating what caused its onboard computer to be 11 hours off, a problem that prevented its engines from firing. NASA has said it is looking into whether it should force the company to fly another test mission without crews before allowing astronauts on board.In a recent blog post, Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said that even though docking with the space station is part of Boeing\u2019s contract, that requirement could be waived.\u201cAlthough docking was planned, it may not have to be accomplished prior to the crew demonstration,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBoeing would need NASA\u2019s approval to proceed with a test with astronauts on board.\u201dLueders said during a briefing last week that SpaceX still has a few tests of its parachute system to complete. If they go well, she said, the company could conceivably launch its first mission with astronauts in March.In the press briefing Sunday, Musk said that the first flight would actually be a little bit later, but sometime in the second quarter of this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTo be back in the saddle again, and to be launching frequently again is something that matters to America and to people world-wide,\u201d Musk said.Veteran NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, who would be on SpaceX\u2019s first test mission with people, said they were pleased with the outcome of the test. Both are married to other astronauts and have children, and said the successful test gave them confidence that they\u2019d be safe in case anything went wrong.\u201cOur families were certainly watching from back home,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cObviously they are keenly interested.\u201dThey added that their guest lists for their upcoming flight were due Friday.  SpaceX completes key test of its Dragon capsule. Its first human spaceflight might come in spring.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX completes key test of its Dragon capsule. Its first human spaceflight might come in spring. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6413",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/19/spacexemergencyabortttest/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX moved Sunday to within months of restoring NASA\u2019s ability to launch people into space, successfully completing a key test of the emergency abort system of the spacecraft it is developing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has been unable to send humans to space since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, but with SpaceX\u2019s test, the agency said it could be sometime this spring when astronauts again would be lifting off from the same historic stretch of coastline here that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon. Such an outcome would augur a new era of space exploration, one driven by private industry as well as NASA. Sunday\u2019s successful test marked the culmination of years of work by SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002 with the goal of flying humans routinely out of the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a press conference after the mission, Musk said he was \u201csuper fired up\" and said the mission was a significant and \u201csurreal\u201d milestone.\u201cI can\u2019t believe we\u2019ve gotten this far,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. I think that\u2019s super exciting.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the company, and the progress it has made, but said the coming weeks and months would be crucial.\u201cMake no mistake there\u2019s a lot left to do,\u201d he said, noting there were significant parachute tests yet to come and that the teams still needed to review the data from Sunday\u2019s so-called in-flight abort test.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s test began shortly after a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from a launch site here at 10:30 a.m. amid concerns that heavy winds and incoming clouds would scrub the mission. But nearly 90 seconds after the booster blasted off, the engines of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft ignited, shooting the capsule off like a champagne cork at more than twice the speed of sound, while the booster came apart midflight in a fiery spectacle miles above the Florida Space Coast.AdvertisementThe capsule landed softly in the Atlantic Ocean nine minutes after liftoff, floating down under a quartet of parachutes, completing a test designed to show that the astronauts would be flown to safety if there ever were a problem with the rocket.\u201cIt looks like a great test,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s John Insprucker said during the live broadcast, as cheering broke out at SpaceX headquarters in California.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop spacecraft capable of flying humans to the space station, a bold bet by the agency to outsource human spaceflight to the private sector. Since then, both companies\u2019 progress has been hampered by technical problems and funding issues that have delayed the first flights with crews by years. And the agency has been forced to continue to rely on Russia for rides to the space station at a cost of as much as $84 million a seat.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLast spring, a Dragon capsule exploded during a test of its abort engines. The company blamed a faulty valve that caused a propellant leak. It has also struggled with its parachutes, but SpaceX has moved to a new design that seemed to work well Sunday.Kathy Lueders, NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew program manager, said the agency was \u201cvery, very happy with the flawless execution\u201d of the parachutes.Boeing also has had problems with its Starliner spacecraft. During a test of its abort system last year, one of its three main parachutes failed to deploy. And a test of its Starliner capsule in December was cut short when a software problem prevented the spacecraft from docking with the space station as intended.Sunday\u2019s test was the last major hurdle SpaceX needed to pass before being allowed to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts in what\u2019s known as the Commercial Crew Program. The company hopes to fly its first mission with astronauts within a few months, but first it needs to analyze the data from the mission and go through safety checks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk said the test was \u201cpicture perfect,\u201d with the spacecraft shooting about a mile away from the disabled booster \u201cin a matter of seconds.\" But even with that extreme acceleration, he said, the vehicle experienced forces only about three-and-a-half times gravity, far less than the seven Gs that a Russian Soyuz spacecraft endured when it experienced a real abort in late 2018.The test also represented another significant step by a growing commercial space industry that is trying to end governments\u2019 long-held monopoly on space activities. Bridenstine said he welcomed the new dynamic since it would help NASA in the future, and even at one point made a pitch for private astronauts to sign up to fly with SpaceX.\u201cWe\u2019re on the cusp of commercializing low-Earth orbit,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to see large amount of activities involving humans in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s unclear when Boeing might fly its first mission with crews. The company is still investigating what caused its onboard computer to be 11 hours off, a problem that prevented its engines from firing. NASA has said it is looking into whether it should force the company to fly another test mission without crews before allowing astronauts on board.In a recent blog post, Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said that even though docking with the space station is part of Boeing\u2019s contract, that requirement could be waived.\u201cAlthough docking was planned, it may not have to be accomplished prior to the crew demonstration,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBoeing would need NASA\u2019s approval to proceed with a test with astronauts on board.\u201dLueders said during a briefing last week that SpaceX still has a few tests of its parachute system to complete. If they go well, she said, the company could conceivably launch its first mission with astronauts in March.In the press briefing Sunday, Musk said that the first flight would actually be a little bit later, but sometime in the second quarter of this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTo be back in the saddle again, and to be launching frequently again is something that matters to America and to people world-wide,\u201d Musk said.Veteran NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, who would be on SpaceX\u2019s first test mission with people, said they were pleased with the outcome of the test. Both are married to other astronauts and have children, and said the successful test gave them confidence that they\u2019d be safe in case anything went wrong.\u201cOur families were certainly watching from back home,\u201d Hurley said. \u201cObviously they are keenly interested.\u201dThey added that their guest lists for their upcoming flight were due Friday.  SpaceX completes key test of its Dragon capsule. Its first human spaceflight might come in spring.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space station (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6414",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/20/boeing-starliner-launch/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Boeing, still reeling from the crashes of two passenger jets that killed 346 people and led to the worldwide grounding of its most popular aircraft, suffered another major setback Friday when the craft it is designing to fly NASA astronauts to space failed to achieve the correct orbit, forcing the cancellation of its planned mission to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOfficials said they were investigating what caused the Starliner capsule\u2019s main engine not to fire as scheduled to push it onto a path to rendezvous with the space station. But suspicion immediately fell on the capsule\u2019s software, which was directing the spacecraft\u2019s operations after launch.No one was aboard the spacecraft and no one was hurt, but the problem reignited questions about Boeing\u2019s procedures as NASA seeks to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil. No American has flown into space from the United States since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in an email to The Washington Post that there is \u201cno direct comparison\u201d between the Starliner\u2019s failure on Friday and the two deadly crashes of 737 Max airliners, which were blamed on a software program called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. Spaceflight software development \u201cutilizes different approaches and people due to the unique mission demands and conditions,\u201d Johndroe said.Companies in the cosmos: the new space raceBut questions are sure to arise around whether Boeing\u2019s divisions might share approaches to design, testing and evaluation that could result in shared problems with software, said Todd Curtis, an aviation safety analyst for the website AirSafe.com and a former Boeing engineer.\u201cAlthough they are different divisions, they are the same company, and they are in these spaces where assets from one part of the company can be used in a completely different part of the company,\u201d Curtis said. He recalled that during his time in the commercial plane division, he was sometimes called on to help out with issues in the military aviation division.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey can be working off shared documentation, shared procedures, or shared staff, or other shared resources used in different parts of the company,\u201d he said. \u201cEven though this is a space story today, 737 Max\u2019s problems are in the back of people\u2019s minds.\u201dLoren Thompson, a defense analyst who works with Boeing as well as some of its competitors, suggested Boeing\u2019s problems with the 737 Max would inevitably affect Boeing\u2019s other businesses.\u201cOne thing that has allowed Boeing to take risks on the defense and space side is robust cash flow from their jetliner business,\u201d Thompson said. \u201cNow that that has been impaired, they may have to pull in their horns from taking risks.\"Story continues below advertisementBoeing shares have tumbled 22 percent since the second crash of a 737 Max in March, erasing about $52 billion of its market value. The stock price fell more than 1.6 percent Friday, closing at $328 a share.AdvertisementThe failure of the Starliner capsule to achieve the correct orbit came after what appeared to be a flawless on-time liftoff at 6:36 a.m. Friday. The Atlas V rocket, operated by the United Launch Alliance, took off just before dawn. After a few minutes, the first engine cut off, the second stage took over, and finally the spacecraft was flying freely. At 31 minutes after launch, the Starliner\u2019s main engine was supposed to ignite. It did not.Boeing and NASA officials said they were gathering details about what went wrong and why, as they seek to bring the spacecraft back to the ground, most likely Sunday in New Mexico. The original plan had been for the craft to dock with the space station on Saturday, deliver holiday presents and supplies, and return to Earth on Dec. 28.Story continues below advertisementOfficials painted a complicated picture of multiple miscues aboard the craft: In addition to the failure of the spacecraft\u2019s computer to fire the engine to push it into the correct orbit, a timer aboard the spacecraft mistakenly thought that \u201corbital insertion burn\u201d had taken place and ordered other thrusters to fire to keep the spacecraft on a straight and true trajectory.AdvertisementBy the time the crews on the ground figured out what was wrong and sent corrective instructions to the spacecraft, it had burned through so much fuel that officials decided they would need to abort the mission to the station and bring the spacecraft down.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a news conference Friday that the failure would not have been life-threatening had astronauts been onboard. He said that had the spacecraft been crewed, the mission might have been saved. \u201cThey are trained to deal with a situation where the automation is not working according to plan,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine praised the quick thinking and professionalism of Boeing as it struggled to deal with a troubling situation. He and others said finding problems was the precise reason for the test program. On Thursday, he said he had complete confidence in Boeing.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re very comfortable with Boeing as a company,\u201d he said. \u201cLook at the history that Boeing has delivered on behalf of the United States of America. There is a lot of history here. There is a lot of capability here.\u201dHe added that NASA\u2019s engineers had been \u201cembedded side by side with Boeing\u2019s engineers\u201d and that \u201cevery piece of this spacecraft is being certified by NASA.\u201dThe failure of the Starliner capsule comes at one of the darkest moments in Boeing\u2019s more than 100-year history. The 737 Max remains grounded, nine months after the plane\u2019s second crash in Ethiopia, and a fix first promised by April has yet to be approved as more problems have come to light. Boeing\u2019s chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, was stripped of his title as chairman. One member of Congress, incensed over the problems with the 737 Max, accused the company of building \u201cflying coffins.\u201dBoeing Starliner launch comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversyOn Monday, Boeing announced it would halt production of the troubled airplane beginning in January, a hit to its bottom line that could send ripples across the U.S. economy. Southwest Airlines, the largest customer for the 737 Max, announced Tuesday it would not plan to fly the planes until April, and on Friday, United Airlines said it was pulling 737 Max jets from its flight schedules until June 4.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe won\u2019t put our customers and employees on that plane until regulators make their own independent assessment that it is safe to do so,\u201d United spokesman Frank Benenati said in an email.United has 14 737 Max jets in its fleet and is waiting on delivery of an additional 16, Benenati said.Boeing also has suffered a number of problems with its Starliner spacecraft, originally scheduled to fly crews into space in 2017.Last year, it discovered a propellant leak during a test of the capsule\u2019s abort motor. The company fixed that problem, it said. But then last month, during a test of its abort systems, one of the three parachutes failed to deploy, apparently because someone had failed to hook the main chute to a drag chute that pulls it from the capsule.Story continues below advertisementSince the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the space agency has relied on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the space station, about 240 miles above Earth. Those seats cost about $84 million each.AdvertisementIn 2014, Boeing and SpaceX won contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft designed to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil.In March, SpaceX successfully flew its Dragon spacecraft without crews to the space station, and it is hoping to complete a test of its emergency abort system in January.SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronautsBefore Friday\u2019s launch, Bridenstine was bullish about the progress both companies were making and optimistic about the future.\u201cWe\u2019re moving into a new era,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cWe are going to launch American astronauts, on American rockets, from American soil for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles.\u201d The first flight with astronauts aboard, he said, would take place \u201cin the first part of next year.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOfficials on Friday could not say what the next steps will be.AdvertisementJim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch, said the company will focus on finding the \u201croot cause of the failure\u201d but said \u201cwe don\u2019t know why\u201d the timer misfired. \u201cThe spacecraft was not on the timer we expected it to be on,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was a surprise.\u201dIt was unclear whether NASA would require Boeing to fly another test mission without crews onboard before allowing its astronauts to fly in the Starliner. Bridenstine said he wouldn\u2019t rule out a mission with crews onboard, pointing out that the space shuttle had been piloted by astronauts, not computers.A statement from Vice President Pence, the Trump administration\u2019s point on crewed spaceflight, suggested the failure will not disrupt NASA\u2019s schedule to fly Americans from U.S. soil next year. The statement said Pence had been briefed by Bridenstine, who assured him that \u201cNASA will continue to test and improve, in order to return American astronauts to space on American rockets in 2020.\u201d NASA says that the spacecraft is stable after the engine did not fire as expected and that the agency is assessing its next move. Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6415",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/20/boeing-starliner-launch/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Boeing, still reeling from the crashes of two passenger jets that killed 346 people and led to the worldwide grounding of its most popular aircraft, suffered another major setback Friday when the craft it is designing to fly NASA astronauts to space failed to achieve the correct orbit, forcing the cancellation of its planned mission to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOfficials said they were investigating what caused the Starliner capsule\u2019s main engine not to fire as scheduled to push it onto a path to rendezvous with the space station. But suspicion immediately fell on the capsule\u2019s software, which was directing the spacecraft\u2019s operations after launch.No one was aboard the spacecraft and no one was hurt, but the problem reignited questions about Boeing\u2019s procedures as NASA seeks to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil. No American has flown into space from the United States since the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in an email to The Washington Post that there is \u201cno direct comparison\u201d between the Starliner\u2019s failure on Friday and the two deadly crashes of 737 Max airliners, which were blamed on a software program called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS. Spaceflight software development \u201cutilizes different approaches and people due to the unique mission demands and conditions,\u201d Johndroe said.Companies in the cosmos: the new space raceBut questions are sure to arise around whether Boeing\u2019s divisions might share approaches to design, testing and evaluation that could result in shared problems with software, said Todd Curtis, an aviation safety analyst for the website AirSafe.com and a former Boeing engineer.\u201cAlthough they are different divisions, they are the same company, and they are in these spaces where assets from one part of the company can be used in a completely different part of the company,\u201d Curtis said. He recalled that during his time in the commercial plane division, he was sometimes called on to help out with issues in the military aviation division.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey can be working off shared documentation, shared procedures, or shared staff, or other shared resources used in different parts of the company,\u201d he said. \u201cEven though this is a space story today, 737 Max\u2019s problems are in the back of people\u2019s minds.\u201dLoren Thompson, a defense analyst who works with Boeing as well as some of its competitors, suggested Boeing\u2019s problems with the 737 Max would inevitably affect Boeing\u2019s other businesses.\u201cOne thing that has allowed Boeing to take risks on the defense and space side is robust cash flow from their jetliner business,\u201d Thompson said. \u201cNow that that has been impaired, they may have to pull in their horns from taking risks.\"Story continues below advertisementBoeing shares have tumbled 22 percent since the second crash of a 737 Max in March, erasing about $52 billion of its market value. The stock price fell more than 1.6 percent Friday, closing at $328 a share.AdvertisementThe failure of the Starliner capsule to achieve the correct orbit came after what appeared to be a flawless on-time liftoff at 6:36 a.m. Friday. The Atlas V rocket, operated by the United Launch Alliance, took off just before dawn. After a few minutes, the first engine cut off, the second stage took over, and finally the spacecraft was flying freely. At 31 minutes after launch, the Starliner\u2019s main engine was supposed to ignite. It did not.Boeing and NASA officials said they were gathering details about what went wrong and why, as they seek to bring the spacecraft back to the ground, most likely Sunday in New Mexico. The original plan had been for the craft to dock with the space station on Saturday, deliver holiday presents and supplies, and return to Earth on Dec. 28.Story continues below advertisementOfficials painted a complicated picture of multiple miscues aboard the craft: In addition to the failure of the spacecraft\u2019s computer to fire the engine to push it into the correct orbit, a timer aboard the spacecraft mistakenly thought that \u201corbital insertion burn\u201d had taken place and ordered other thrusters to fire to keep the spacecraft on a straight and true trajectory.AdvertisementBy the time the crews on the ground figured out what was wrong and sent corrective instructions to the spacecraft, it had burned through so much fuel that officials decided they would need to abort the mission to the station and bring the spacecraft down.NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a news conference Friday that the failure would not have been life-threatening had astronauts been onboard. He said that had the spacecraft been crewed, the mission might have been saved. \u201cThey are trained to deal with a situation where the automation is not working according to plan,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine praised the quick thinking and professionalism of Boeing as it struggled to deal with a troubling situation. He and others said finding problems was the precise reason for the test program. On Thursday, he said he had complete confidence in Boeing.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re very comfortable with Boeing as a company,\u201d he said. \u201cLook at the history that Boeing has delivered on behalf of the United States of America. There is a lot of history here. There is a lot of capability here.\u201dHe added that NASA\u2019s engineers had been \u201cembedded side by side with Boeing\u2019s engineers\u201d and that \u201cevery piece of this spacecraft is being certified by NASA.\u201dThe failure of the Starliner capsule comes at one of the darkest moments in Boeing\u2019s more than 100-year history. The 737 Max remains grounded, nine months after the plane\u2019s second crash in Ethiopia, and a fix first promised by April has yet to be approved as more problems have come to light. Boeing\u2019s chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, was stripped of his title as chairman. One member of Congress, incensed over the problems with the 737 Max, accused the company of building \u201cflying coffins.\u201dBoeing Starliner launch comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversyOn Monday, Boeing announced it would halt production of the troubled airplane beginning in January, a hit to its bottom line that could send ripples across the U.S. economy. Southwest Airlines, the largest customer for the 737 Max, announced Tuesday it would not plan to fly the planes until April, and on Friday, United Airlines said it was pulling 737 Max jets from its flight schedules until June 4.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe won\u2019t put our customers and employees on that plane until regulators make their own independent assessment that it is safe to do so,\u201d United spokesman Frank Benenati said in an email.United has 14 737 Max jets in its fleet and is waiting on delivery of an additional 16, Benenati said.Boeing also has suffered a number of problems with its Starliner spacecraft, originally scheduled to fly crews into space in 2017.Last year, it discovered a propellant leak during a test of the capsule\u2019s abort motor. The company fixed that problem, it said. But then last month, during a test of its abort systems, one of the three parachutes failed to deploy, apparently because someone had failed to hook the main chute to a drag chute that pulls it from the capsule.Story continues below advertisementSince the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the space agency has relied on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the space station, about 240 miles above Earth. Those seats cost about $84 million each.AdvertisementIn 2014, Boeing and SpaceX won contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft designed to restore human spaceflight from U.S. soil.In March, SpaceX successfully flew its Dragon spacecraft without crews to the space station, and it is hoping to complete a test of its emergency abort system in January.SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronautsBefore Friday\u2019s launch, Bridenstine was bullish about the progress both companies were making and optimistic about the future.\u201cWe\u2019re moving into a new era,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cWe are going to launch American astronauts, on American rockets, from American soil for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles.\u201d The first flight with astronauts aboard, he said, would take place \u201cin the first part of next year.\u201dStory continues below advertisementOfficials on Friday could not say what the next steps will be.AdvertisementJim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch, said the company will focus on finding the \u201croot cause of the failure\u201d but said \u201cwe don\u2019t know why\u201d the timer misfired. \u201cThe spacecraft was not on the timer we expected it to be on,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was a surprise.\u201dIt was unclear whether NASA would require Boeing to fly another test mission without crews onboard before allowing its astronauts to fly in the Starliner. Bridenstine said he wouldn\u2019t rule out a mission with crews onboard, pointing out that the space shuttle had been piloted by astronauts, not computers.A statement from Vice President Pence, the Trump administration\u2019s point on crewed spaceflight, suggested the failure will not disrupt NASA\u2019s schedule to fly Americans from U.S. soil next year. The statement said Pence had been briefed by Bridenstine, who assured him that \u201cNASA will continue to test and improve, in order to return American astronauts to space on American rockets in 2020.\u201d NASA says that the spacecraft is stable after the engine did not fire as expected and that the agency is assessing its next move. Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner launch on Friday comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversy (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6416",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/18/amid-max-crisis-boeing-faces-key-test-its-spacecraft-designed-fly-nasas-astronauts/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Boeing has been under siege for months after two of its 737 Max aircraft plummeted from the sky killing 346 people. Members of Congress are accusing the industry stalwart of putting profits over safety. A whistleblower testified that schedule pressure created a \u201cfactory in chaos.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEven Jim Chilton\u2019s part of the company \u2014 the space division \u2014 was the subject of a searing watchdog report last month that found it had received hundreds of millions of dollars in \u201cunnecessary\u201d payments stemming from an unusually cozy relationship with NASA. For Boeing, the timing of the report couldn\u2019t have been worse, coming as it was preparing to fly a key test of the Starliner space capsule designed to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station. That launch is now scheduled for 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and while no astronauts will be on board, the first launch of NASA\u2019s new spacecraft has taken on a far greater importance for Boeing than just a test. It\u2019s a shot at a bit of redemption.Boeing will halt 737 Max production in January as FAA reviews software fixA successful launch would be a moment of triumph amid the tumult that has dogged the company the past year and the news this week that it will halt production on its troubled 737 Max airplane in January, a decision that could not only harm Boeing\u2019s bottom line but also send shock waves through the economy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFriday\u2019s launch also comes as Boeing, long one of the major dominant players in space, now faces increased competition from a growing space industry, including from rivals such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)So in the face of the critical report from NASA\u2019s inspector general last month, Chilton, a soft-spoken engineer who has risen through the ranks during a 35-year career at Boeing, fired off an email to his staff.Southwest will cancel thousands of flights as Boeing 737 Max\u2019s fate remains uncertainHe reminded the team that it was building on a heritage that stretched to the dawn of the Space Age: \u201cWe have been part of every NASA human spaceflight from \u2014 from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo to the space shuttle and [the International Space Station] \u2014 and we\u2019re proud to continue that unwavering partnership.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd he issued an emotional call to arms, both defending the company and its workforce while also pushing back against critics and competitors. The email, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, is part of a broader strategy inside Boeing to fight back aggressively that includes a radio ad playing in Washington touting the flight, saying it \u201cis paving the way for the new age of space exploration.\u201d\u201cLet\u2019s not allow this inaccurate report or the critical media coverage it\u2019s generating to become a distraction,\u201d Chilton wrote. \u201cOur Starliner teammates have put their hearts and souls into developing a spacecraft that we can all be proud of, and they need all the support they can get from our broader space and launch team in the countdown to first flight.\u201dIf successful, the flight would be a critical step toward helping NASA restore human spaceflight from United States soil. Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly people to space. Instead, it has needed to pay Russia as much as $84 million a seat to take its astronauts to the space station about 240 miles above Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2014, NASA embarked on a risky experiment, awarding contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft capable of human spaceflight. As part of what\u2019s called the \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d NASA awarded Boeing $4.2 billion and SpaceX $2.6 billion to build capsules capable of flying at least four NASA astronauts.Companies in the cosmos: the new space raceThe first flights with people on board were originally scheduled for 2017, but both companies have suffered delays and setbacks. In March, SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon capsule to the space station and returned it successfully. But weeks later the spacecraft exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines, a problem the company says is now fixed.Boeing also has had a host of problems \u2014 from a propellant leak last year to a problem with its parachute system during a test of its abort engine last month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it says it is on track, and now NASA hopes the launches with humans will happen sometime next year.\u201cI\u2019m happy to announce we\u2019re go for launch,\u201d NASA Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard told reporters last week.At a news briefing on Tuesday, John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said \u201cthe spacecraft is in really good shape\u201d and that the company was \u201clooking forward to a short and successful mission.\u201dIf all goes well Friday, the first flight with people, which is scheduled for sometime next year, will carry into space two NASA astronauts, Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke, as well as Chris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Boeing.\u201cWe consider this a dress rehearsal for the first flights with crew members on board,\" said Pat Forrester, the chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut office. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anybody in the office, as they\u2019ve gone about their work, who hasn\u2019t thought about Chris and Nicole and Mike.\u201d Boeing's Starliner space capsule is scheduled to make its first flight at 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and although no astronauts will be on board, it's a must-succeed test for Boeing, besieged by questions over its 737 Max aircraft. Boeing Starliner launch on Friday comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversy",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner launch on Friday comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversy (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6417",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/18/amid-max-crisis-boeing-faces-key-test-its-spacecraft-designed-fly-nasas-astronauts/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Boeing has been under siege for months after two of its 737 Max aircraft plummeted from the sky killing 346 people. Members of Congress are accusing the industry stalwart of putting profits over safety. A whistleblower testified that schedule pressure created a \u201cfactory in chaos.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEven Jim Chilton\u2019s part of the company \u2014 the space division \u2014 was the subject of a searing watchdog report last month that found it had received hundreds of millions of dollars in \u201cunnecessary\u201d payments stemming from an unusually cozy relationship with NASA. For Boeing, the timing of the report couldn\u2019t have been worse, coming as it was preparing to fly a key test of the Starliner space capsule designed to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station. That launch is now scheduled for 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and while no astronauts will be on board, the first launch of NASA\u2019s new spacecraft has taken on a far greater importance for Boeing than just a test. It\u2019s a shot at a bit of redemption.Boeing will halt 737 Max production in January as FAA reviews software fixA successful launch would be a moment of triumph amid the tumult that has dogged the company the past year and the news this week that it will halt production on its troubled 737 Max airplane in January, a decision that could not only harm Boeing\u2019s bottom line but also send shock waves through the economy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFriday\u2019s launch also comes as Boeing, long one of the major dominant players in space, now faces increased competition from a growing space industry, including from rivals such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)So in the face of the critical report from NASA\u2019s inspector general last month, Chilton, a soft-spoken engineer who has risen through the ranks during a 35-year career at Boeing, fired off an email to his staff.Southwest will cancel thousands of flights as Boeing 737 Max\u2019s fate remains uncertainHe reminded the team that it was building on a heritage that stretched to the dawn of the Space Age: \u201cWe have been part of every NASA human spaceflight from \u2014 from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo to the space shuttle and [the International Space Station] \u2014 and we\u2019re proud to continue that unwavering partnership.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd he issued an emotional call to arms, both defending the company and its workforce while also pushing back against critics and competitors. The email, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, is part of a broader strategy inside Boeing to fight back aggressively that includes a radio ad playing in Washington touting the flight, saying it \u201cis paving the way for the new age of space exploration.\u201d\u201cLet\u2019s not allow this inaccurate report or the critical media coverage it\u2019s generating to become a distraction,\u201d Chilton wrote. \u201cOur Starliner teammates have put their hearts and souls into developing a spacecraft that we can all be proud of, and they need all the support they can get from our broader space and launch team in the countdown to first flight.\u201dIf successful, the flight would be a critical step toward helping NASA restore human spaceflight from United States soil. Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly people to space. Instead, it has needed to pay Russia as much as $84 million a seat to take its astronauts to the space station about 240 miles above Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2014, NASA embarked on a risky experiment, awarding contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft capable of human spaceflight. As part of what\u2019s called the \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d NASA awarded Boeing $4.2 billion and SpaceX $2.6 billion to build capsules capable of flying at least four NASA astronauts.Companies in the cosmos: the new space raceThe first flights with people on board were originally scheduled for 2017, but both companies have suffered delays and setbacks. In March, SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon capsule to the space station and returned it successfully. But weeks later the spacecraft exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines, a problem the company says is now fixed.Boeing also has had a host of problems \u2014 from a propellant leak last year to a problem with its parachute system during a test of its abort engine last month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it says it is on track, and now NASA hopes the launches with humans will happen sometime next year.\u201cI\u2019m happy to announce we\u2019re go for launch,\u201d NASA Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard told reporters last week.At a news briefing on Tuesday, John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said \u201cthe spacecraft is in really good shape\u201d and that the company was \u201clooking forward to a short and successful mission.\u201dIf all goes well Friday, the first flight with people, which is scheduled for sometime next year, will carry into space two NASA astronauts, Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke, as well as Chris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Boeing.\u201cWe consider this a dress rehearsal for the first flights with crew members on board,\" said Pat Forrester, the chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut office. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anybody in the office, as they\u2019ve gone about their work, who hasn\u2019t thought about Chris and Nicole and Mike.\u201d Boeing's Starliner space capsule is scheduled to make its first flight at 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and although no astronauts will be on board, it's a must-succeed test for Boeing, besieged by questions over its 737 Max aircraft. Boeing Starliner launch on Friday comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversy",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing Starliner launch on Friday comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversy (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6418",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/18/amid-max-crisis-boeing-faces-key-test-its-spacecraft-designed-fly-nasas-astronauts/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Boeing has been under siege for months after two of its 737 Max aircraft plummeted from the sky killing 346 people. Members of Congress are accusing the industry stalwart of putting profits over safety. A whistleblower testified that schedule pressure created a \u201cfactory in chaos.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEven Jim Chilton\u2019s part of the company \u2014 the space division \u2014 was the subject of a searing watchdog report last month that found it had received hundreds of millions of dollars in \u201cunnecessary\u201d payments stemming from an unusually cozy relationship with NASA. For Boeing, the timing of the report couldn\u2019t have been worse, coming as it was preparing to fly a key test of the Starliner space capsule designed to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station. That launch is now scheduled for 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and while no astronauts will be on board, the first launch of NASA\u2019s new spacecraft has taken on a far greater importance for Boeing than just a test. It\u2019s a shot at a bit of redemption.Boeing will halt 737 Max production in January as FAA reviews software fixA successful launch would be a moment of triumph amid the tumult that has dogged the company the past year and the news this week that it will halt production on its troubled 737 Max airplane in January, a decision that could not only harm Boeing\u2019s bottom line but also send shock waves through the economy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFriday\u2019s launch also comes as Boeing, long one of the major dominant players in space, now faces increased competition from a growing space industry, including from rivals such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)So in the face of the critical report from NASA\u2019s inspector general last month, Chilton, a soft-spoken engineer who has risen through the ranks during a 35-year career at Boeing, fired off an email to his staff.Southwest will cancel thousands of flights as Boeing 737 Max\u2019s fate remains uncertainHe reminded the team that it was building on a heritage that stretched to the dawn of the Space Age: \u201cWe have been part of every NASA human spaceflight from \u2014 from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo to the space shuttle and [the International Space Station] \u2014 and we\u2019re proud to continue that unwavering partnership.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd he issued an emotional call to arms, both defending the company and its workforce while also pushing back against critics and competitors. The email, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, is part of a broader strategy inside Boeing to fight back aggressively that includes a radio ad playing in Washington touting the flight, saying it \u201cis paving the way for the new age of space exploration.\u201d\u201cLet\u2019s not allow this inaccurate report or the critical media coverage it\u2019s generating to become a distraction,\u201d Chilton wrote. \u201cOur Starliner teammates have put their hearts and souls into developing a spacecraft that we can all be proud of, and they need all the support they can get from our broader space and launch team in the countdown to first flight.\u201dIf successful, the flight would be a critical step toward helping NASA restore human spaceflight from United States soil. Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly people to space. Instead, it has needed to pay Russia as much as $84 million a seat to take its astronauts to the space station about 240 miles above Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2014, NASA embarked on a risky experiment, awarding contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft capable of human spaceflight. As part of what\u2019s called the \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d NASA awarded Boeing $4.2 billion and SpaceX $2.6 billion to build capsules capable of flying at least four NASA astronauts.Companies in the cosmos: the new space raceThe first flights with people on board were originally scheduled for 2017, but both companies have suffered delays and setbacks. In March, SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon capsule to the space station and returned it successfully. But weeks later the spacecraft exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines, a problem the company says is now fixed.Boeing also has had a host of problems \u2014 from a propellant leak last year to a problem with its parachute system during a test of its abort engine last month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it says it is on track, and now NASA hopes the launches with humans will happen sometime next year.\u201cI\u2019m happy to announce we\u2019re go for launch,\u201d NASA Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard told reporters last week.At a news briefing on Tuesday, John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program manager, said \u201cthe spacecraft is in really good shape\u201d and that the company was \u201clooking forward to a short and successful mission.\u201dIf all goes well Friday, the first flight with people, which is scheduled for sometime next year, will carry into space two NASA astronauts, Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke, as well as Chris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Boeing.\u201cWe consider this a dress rehearsal for the first flights with crew members on board,\" said Pat Forrester, the chief of NASA\u2019s astronaut office. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anybody in the office, as they\u2019ve gone about their work, who hasn\u2019t thought about Chris and Nicole and Mike.\u201d Boeing's Starliner space capsule is scheduled to make its first flight at 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and although no astronauts will be on board, it's a must-succeed test for Boeing, besieged by questions over its 737 Max aircraft. Boeing Starliner launch on Friday comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversy",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing spacecraft lands safely in New Mexico desert, a successful end to a flawed test mission (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6419",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/22/boeing-spacecraft-lands-safely-new-mexico-desert-successful-end-flawed-test-mission/",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft landed softly in the New Mexico desert Sunday morning, successfully finishing a flawed test mission that went awry shortly after the capsule reached space.Floating under three parachutes, the spacecraft, which was carrying no astronauts, touched down in the predawn darkness at 7:58 a.m. Eastern time at the White Sands Missile Range. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing and NASA celebrated the return of Starliner as a triumph, the first time an American capsule built to send human beings to orbit touched down on land instead of in the ocean.\u201cThere\u2019s no point of sending people to space if you can\u2019t bring them home safely,\u201d Boeing spokesman Josh Barrett said during Internet coverage of the landing.Story continues below advertisementAt a news conference after the landing, Jim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch, said: \u201cToday couldn\u2019t have gone any better. \u2026 We are just as pleased as we can be with the design.\u201dAdvertisementThe soft landing capped a mission that had suffered a significant failure when the spacecraft\u2019s timing system prevented it from performing a key test objective: reaching the International Space Station and docking with the flying laboratory in orbit at 17,500 mph. NASA and Boeing officials said that now that they have recovered the spacecraft, they will investigate what went wrong and why.Boeing Starliner launchChilton said Sunday that the timer was significantly off \u2014 an 11-hour discrepancy between what the spacecraft\u2019s internal clock was reading and what the actual time was. He did not say what could account for such a big difference. A Boeing spokesman said the company is still \u201cdiving into the data\u201d to figure out what went wrong.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMake no mistake, this did not go according to plan in every way that we would have hoped,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at the news conference. But he added that the mission still achieved a number of key objectives, including the landing, which he said was \u201can absolute bull's eye. \u2026 Overall we learned a lot, but there\u2019s a lot more learning left to do.\"AdvertisementNASA is relying on Boeing and SpaceX to design and build spacecraft capable of flying its astronauts to the space station. Before they undertake missions with NASA astronauts on board, both companies are to fly uncrewed missions to test how their capsules operate in space.SpaceX completed a successful flight without astronauts on board in March. But a month later its Dragon spacecraft exploded during a test firing of its emergency abort system engines. The company says it has since fixed that problem and is hoping to perform a test of the abort system in-flight next month.Boeing Starliner launch comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversyBoeing\u2019s mission got off to a good start, when Starliner launched successfully early Friday morning on an Atlas V rocket, operated by the United Launch Alliance, from Cape Canaveral on Florida\u2019s Space Coast.Story continues below advertisementBut when the spacecraft was released, a problem with its timing system caused the engines not to fire as expected. That put the spacecraft in the wrong orbit, where it was between communications satellites. Because it was in the wrong location, its antennae were unable to receive commands from the ground to correct the error, Chilton said.AdvertisementAs the spacecraft struggled to put itself on the correct flight path, it fired a series of thrusters that burned up fuel, and NASA and Boeing decided that the spacecraft should not attempt to dock with the station.Starliner had been scheduled to spend about a week attached to the space station but instead was forced to come home early. Early Sunday morning, Starliner fired its engines once again, this time to slow it down to reenter the atmosphere. The spacecraft slammed into the atmosphere at about 25 times the speed of sound. Its heat shield withstood 3,000-degree temperatures, as the spacecraft was engulfed in a fireball generated by high-speed friction with the increasingly dense atmosphere.Nearing Earth, the spacecraft deployed its parachutes \u2014 another key test since the company had struggled with the system previously \u2014 and touched down softly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the landing, Chilton said that the company was optimistic but that re-entries and landings \u201care not for the faint of heart.\u201d The spacecraft was able to successfully perform a number of key tests, he said, that Boeing and NASA officials hope will help pave the way for a flight with crews on board.It\u2019s not clear, however, if NASA will require the company to fly another test flight without crews before allowing its astronauts on board. NASA and Boeing officials said that it was too early to say and that they needed to first review all of the data from the flight.SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronautsChilton said that if the company did have to fly another test flight without astronauts, it would delay the program by \u201cthree months, minimum.\u201dBridenstine, the NASA administrator, said the problems the spacecraft suffered at the beginning of its flight will require additional scrutiny.\u201cThat gives us reason to think we need to go back and look at a lot of different things,\u201d he said. The Starliner capsule\u2019s soft landing in the desert Sunday morning was a first, but the reason for the failure of its main engine to fire and place it on a path to rendezvous with the International Space Station awaits further investigation. Boeing spacecraft lands safely in New Mexico desert, a successful end to a flawed test mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing spacecraft lands safely in New Mexico desert, a successful end to a flawed test mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6420",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/22/boeing-spacecraft-lands-safely-new-mexico-desert-successful-end-flawed-test-mission/",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft landed softly in the New Mexico desert Sunday morning, successfully finishing a flawed test mission that went awry shortly after the capsule reached space.Floating under three parachutes, the spacecraft, which was carrying no astronauts, touched down in the predawn darkness at 7:58 a.m. Eastern time at the White Sands Missile Range. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing and NASA celebrated the return of Starliner as a triumph, the first time an American capsule built to send human beings to orbit touched down on land instead of in the ocean.\u201cThere\u2019s no point of sending people to space if you can\u2019t bring them home safely,\u201d Boeing spokesman Josh Barrett said during Internet coverage of the landing.Story continues below advertisementAt a news conference after the landing, Jim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s senior vice president for space and launch, said: \u201cToday couldn\u2019t have gone any better. \u2026 We are just as pleased as we can be with the design.\u201dAdvertisementThe soft landing capped a mission that had suffered a significant failure when the spacecraft\u2019s timing system prevented it from performing a key test objective: reaching the International Space Station and docking with the flying laboratory in orbit at 17,500 mph. NASA and Boeing officials said that now that they have recovered the spacecraft, they will investigate what went wrong and why.Boeing Starliner launchChilton said Sunday that the timer was significantly off \u2014 an 11-hour discrepancy between what the spacecraft\u2019s internal clock was reading and what the actual time was. He did not say what could account for such a big difference. A Boeing spokesman said the company is still \u201cdiving into the data\u201d to figure out what went wrong.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMake no mistake, this did not go according to plan in every way that we would have hoped,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at the news conference. But he added that the mission still achieved a number of key objectives, including the landing, which he said was \u201can absolute bull's eye. \u2026 Overall we learned a lot, but there\u2019s a lot more learning left to do.\"AdvertisementNASA is relying on Boeing and SpaceX to design and build spacecraft capable of flying its astronauts to the space station. Before they undertake missions with NASA astronauts on board, both companies are to fly uncrewed missions to test how their capsules operate in space.SpaceX completed a successful flight without astronauts on board in March. But a month later its Dragon spacecraft exploded during a test firing of its emergency abort system engines. The company says it has since fixed that problem and is hoping to perform a test of the abort system in-flight next month.Boeing Starliner launch comes at critical time for company amid 737 Max controversyBoeing\u2019s mission got off to a good start, when Starliner launched successfully early Friday morning on an Atlas V rocket, operated by the United Launch Alliance, from Cape Canaveral on Florida\u2019s Space Coast.Story continues below advertisementBut when the spacecraft was released, a problem with its timing system caused the engines not to fire as expected. That put the spacecraft in the wrong orbit, where it was between communications satellites. Because it was in the wrong location, its antennae were unable to receive commands from the ground to correct the error, Chilton said.AdvertisementAs the spacecraft struggled to put itself on the correct flight path, it fired a series of thrusters that burned up fuel, and NASA and Boeing decided that the spacecraft should not attempt to dock with the station.Starliner had been scheduled to spend about a week attached to the space station but instead was forced to come home early. Early Sunday morning, Starliner fired its engines once again, this time to slow it down to reenter the atmosphere. The spacecraft slammed into the atmosphere at about 25 times the speed of sound. Its heat shield withstood 3,000-degree temperatures, as the spacecraft was engulfed in a fireball generated by high-speed friction with the increasingly dense atmosphere.Nearing Earth, the spacecraft deployed its parachutes \u2014 another key test since the company had struggled with the system previously \u2014 and touched down softly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the landing, Chilton said that the company was optimistic but that re-entries and landings \u201care not for the faint of heart.\u201d The spacecraft was able to successfully perform a number of key tests, he said, that Boeing and NASA officials hope will help pave the way for a flight with crews on board.It\u2019s not clear, however, if NASA will require the company to fly another test flight without crews before allowing its astronauts on board. NASA and Boeing officials said that it was too early to say and that they needed to first review all of the data from the flight.SpaceX successfully launches spacecraft designed for astronautsChilton said that if the company did have to fly another test flight without astronauts, it would delay the program by \u201cthree months, minimum.\u201dBridenstine, the NASA administrator, said the problems the spacecraft suffered at the beginning of its flight will require additional scrutiny.\u201cThat gives us reason to think we need to go back and look at a lot of different things,\u201d he said. The Starliner capsule\u2019s soft landing in the desert Sunday morning was a first, but the reason for the failure of its main engine to fire and place it on a path to rendezvous with the International Space Station awaits further investigation. Boeing spacecraft lands safely in New Mexico desert, a successful end to a flawed test mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "No new launch date set for Boeing\u2019s Starliner after valve issue scrubs flight (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6421",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/03/boeing-starliner-launch-delay/",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner can\u2019t catch a break.Tuesday was supposed to be a chance for the embattled company to show the world what it has been working on for the past 18 months since its first failed attempt to launch a gumdrop-shaped capsule to the International Space Station.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, that\u2019s not happening. And it\u2019s not clear when it will. \u201cWe\u2019re not proceeding with #Starliner launch tomorrow,\u201d Boeing said in a tweet late Tuesday, hours after the company said it discovered an \u201cunexpected valve\u201d problem that stopped liftoff from occurring as scheduled early in the afternoon.Boeing engineers spent the rest of the day ruling out \u201ca number of potential causes, including software.\u201d However, \u201cadditional time is needed to complete the assessment,\u201d the aerospace giant said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to let the data lead our work,\u201d John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program, said in a statement. \u201cOur team has worked diligently to ensure the safety and success of this mission, and we will not launch until our vehicle is performing nominally and our teams are confident it is ready to fly.\u201dAdvertisementThe valve issue is with Starliner, not its corresponding Atlas V rocket developed by the United Launch Alliance. \u201cAtlas and the pad are fine,\u201d tweeted Tory Bruno, president and CEO of ULA. Earlier in the day, mission teams detected indications that not all valves were in the proper configuration needed for launch.For Boeing, it was an embarrassing delay. The company had already waited more than 19 months for Tuesday\u2019s launch, a redo of a December 2019 test flight that failed when, after a successful liftoff, a software issue sent the capsule into the wrong orbit and forced Boeing to call it back home.Story continues below advertisementSince then, Boeing has spent at least $410 million to make software corrections. NASA also played a more hands-on role to get the space taxi in shape.Boeing pointedly noted Tuesday night that it had \u201cruled out software as a cause\u201d for Starliner\u2019s latest setback.AdvertisementIn the months since that failed mission, SpaceX, Boeing\u2019s rival and the other company under contract with NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, has made three successful crewed flights.Boeing was hoping to kick off Orbital Flight Test 2 at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday. The capsule and rocket were poised to blast off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The area is known for sudden changes in weather, but conditions looked promising for Tuesday.Story continues below advertisementAn hour before the launch cancellation was announced, ULA said weather in the area was \u201cacceptable with no threat of lightning for the Blue Team\u2019s entrance into the launchpad and for their work.\u201dWe're confirming today's #Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 launch is scrubbed. More details soon.\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) August 3, 2021\n\nThe scrubbed launch attempt comes just days after a Russian lab module, Nauka, caused chaos at the space station, delaying Starliner\u2019s previous relaunch date set for Friday. The Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters, which spun the space station outside its typical orientation.AdvertisementNASA pushed back Boeing\u2019s launch to Tuesday to investigate.The Starliner mission is supposed to be a demonstration flight to show NASA that the capsule is ready to transport people to and from the space station. It is unclear when this will happen. Boeing previously had said it hopes to transport astronauts later this year.Story continues below advertisementUpon its eventual liftoff, Starliner will take a day-long trip to the space station carrying cargo and supplies for NASA. It will then return to Earth to prepare for future missions, if things go according to plan.\u201cWe\u2019re disappointed with today\u2019s outcome and the need to reschedule our Starliner launch,\u201d Vollmer said in a statement. \u201cHuman spaceflight is a complex, precise and unforgiving endeavor, and Boeing and NASA teams will take the time they need to ensure the safety and integrity of the spacecraft and the achievement of our mission objectives.\u201d NASA, Boeing and United Launch Alliance (ULA) have scrubbed the Aug. 3 launch attempt of the agency\u2019s Orbital Flight Test-2 to the International Space Station. No new launch date set for Boeing\u2019s Starliner after valve issue scrubs flight",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "No new launch date set for Boeing\u2019s Starliner after valve issue scrubs flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6422",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/03/boeing-starliner-launch-delay/",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner can\u2019t catch a break.Tuesday was supposed to be a chance for the embattled company to show the world what it has been working on for the past 18 months since its first failed attempt to launch a gumdrop-shaped capsule to the International Space Station.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWell, that\u2019s not happening. And it\u2019s not clear when it will. \u201cWe\u2019re not proceeding with #Starliner launch tomorrow,\u201d Boeing said in a tweet late Tuesday, hours after the company said it discovered an \u201cunexpected valve\u201d problem that stopped liftoff from occurring as scheduled early in the afternoon.Boeing engineers spent the rest of the day ruling out \u201ca number of potential causes, including software.\u201d However, \u201cadditional time is needed to complete the assessment,\u201d the aerospace giant said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re going to let the data lead our work,\u201d John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program, said in a statement. \u201cOur team has worked diligently to ensure the safety and success of this mission, and we will not launch until our vehicle is performing nominally and our teams are confident it is ready to fly.\u201dAdvertisementThe valve issue is with Starliner, not its corresponding Atlas V rocket developed by the United Launch Alliance. \u201cAtlas and the pad are fine,\u201d tweeted Tory Bruno, president and CEO of ULA. Earlier in the day, mission teams detected indications that not all valves were in the proper configuration needed for launch.For Boeing, it was an embarrassing delay. The company had already waited more than 19 months for Tuesday\u2019s launch, a redo of a December 2019 test flight that failed when, after a successful liftoff, a software issue sent the capsule into the wrong orbit and forced Boeing to call it back home.Story continues below advertisementSince then, Boeing has spent at least $410 million to make software corrections. NASA also played a more hands-on role to get the space taxi in shape.Boeing pointedly noted Tuesday night that it had \u201cruled out software as a cause\u201d for Starliner\u2019s latest setback.AdvertisementIn the months since that failed mission, SpaceX, Boeing\u2019s rival and the other company under contract with NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, has made three successful crewed flights.Boeing was hoping to kick off Orbital Flight Test 2 at 1:20 p.m. Tuesday. The capsule and rocket were poised to blast off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The area is known for sudden changes in weather, but conditions looked promising for Tuesday.Story continues below advertisementAn hour before the launch cancellation was announced, ULA said weather in the area was \u201cacceptable with no threat of lightning for the Blue Team\u2019s entrance into the launchpad and for their work.\u201dWe're confirming today's #Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 launch is scrubbed. More details soon.\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) August 3, 2021\n\nThe scrubbed launch attempt comes just days after a Russian lab module, Nauka, caused chaos at the space station, delaying Starliner\u2019s previous relaunch date set for Friday. The Russian module unexpectedly fired its thrusters, which spun the space station outside its typical orientation.AdvertisementNASA pushed back Boeing\u2019s launch to Tuesday to investigate.The Starliner mission is supposed to be a demonstration flight to show NASA that the capsule is ready to transport people to and from the space station. It is unclear when this will happen. Boeing previously had said it hopes to transport astronauts later this year.Story continues below advertisementUpon its eventual liftoff, Starliner will take a day-long trip to the space station carrying cargo and supplies for NASA. It will then return to Earth to prepare for future missions, if things go according to plan.\u201cWe\u2019re disappointed with today\u2019s outcome and the need to reschedule our Starliner launch,\u201d Vollmer said in a statement. \u201cHuman spaceflight is a complex, precise and unforgiving endeavor, and Boeing and NASA teams will take the time they need to ensure the safety and integrity of the spacecraft and the achievement of our mission objectives.\u201d NASA, Boeing and United Launch Alliance (ULA) have scrubbed the Aug. 3 launch attempt of the agency\u2019s Orbital Flight Test-2 to the International Space Station. No new launch date set for Boeing\u2019s Starliner after valve issue scrubs flight",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitted its bid. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6423",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/nasa-boeing-lunar-lander-probe/",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s bid to build a spacecraft capable of flying NASA astronauts to the moon didn\u2019t meet NASA\u2019s requirements, and the company was going to lose out on a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut NASA was worried that the corporate giant would protest the contract award, potentially holding it up for months at a time when the space agency was trying to meet a White House mandate to get astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. So in February, Doug Loverro, then the head of NASA\u2019s human exploration directorate, called Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch division, to explain that the company was going to lose the contract and to inquire whether it would file a challenge, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.Story continues below advertisementThat call, which occurred during a period when the agency was to have no contact with any of the bidders, is now the subject of investigations by the NASA inspector general and the Justice Department into the integrity of the procurement, according to multiple people. It also led NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to force Loverro to abruptly resign in May.AdvertisementBoeing did not protest the award of the lunar lander contract \u2014 which was awarded on April 30 to three bidders for a total of nearly $1 billion: a team led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin; the defense contractor Dynetics; and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)SpaceX successfully launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Nov. 15, the second time a private company has sent astronauts into space. (NASA via AP)But it did something that NASA officials found just as alarming: After Loverro told Chilton that Boeing would not win the award, the company attempted to revise and resubmit its bid. That last-ditch effort to win one of the contracts was so unusual, given that the time for bids had passed, that members of the NASA committee considering the award feared it may amount to a violation of procurement regulations. They alerted the agency\u2019s inspector general, who in turn referred the matter to the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney\u2019s office in the District of Columbia has impaneled a grand jury and is investigating, officials said.Story continues below advertisementThe Post previously reported that Boeing tried to revise its bid after the call between Loverro and Chilton, but this is the first time the substance of their conversation has been reported.AdvertisementIt\u2019s unclear who else at NASA knew about the conversation between Loverro and Chilton, or whether anyone directed Loverro to ask Boeing whether it would protest.In his resignation letter, Loverro wrote that he took \u201ca risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission. Now, over the balance of time, it is clear that I made a mistake in that choice for which I alone must bear the consequences.\u201dIn an interview in spring, Loverro said he was trying to speed up NASA\u2019s lunar program, known as Artemis, as many were already doubting whether NASA could meet the White House\u2019s new 2024 deadline. \u201cIt had to do with moving fast on Artemis, and I don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that,\u201d he said. Loverro was an adviser to the procurement selection committee but didn\u2019t have final say into the awards.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoverro would not comment on the record for this article. Boeing declined to comment.NASA referred to a previous statement that said the procurement for the lunar spacecraft, known as the Human Landing System (HLS), was handled properly and is proceeding with the program. \u201cThe agency is confident in the integrity of the HLS procurement,\u201d it has said. \u201cMr. Loverro was not the selection official, and his resignation has no impact on the performance of these HLS contracts.\u201dTypically, violations of the Procurement Integrity Act are situations where contractors receive inside information they use to their benefit to win a contract. In this case, Boeing still didn\u2019t win the contract \u2014 its revised bid arrived well after the submission deadline \u2014 but \u201cthere are rules and processes that shouldn\u2019t be taken lightly,\u201d said Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBoeing should have known better,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they tried to use that info to revise their bid, they could equally be on the hook for a Procurement Integrity Act violation because they were trying to use it for their benefit.\u201dPOGO has catalogued 80 instances of Boeing misconduct since 1995, resulting in nearly $1.5 billion in fines. The highest-profile case involved Air Force contracting officer Darleen Druyun, who steered contracts to Boeing and received a lucrative job at the company, as did her daughter and son-in-law. She was sentenced to nine months in prison. Michael Sears, then Boeing\u2019s chief financial officer, received a four-month prison sentence after admitting he gave her the job in exchange for inside information.The loss of the lunar lander contract was another embarrassment for Boeing, which has been a NASA partner since the dawn of the Space Age. The company was once so trusted that NASA initially gave Boeing only a limited review of its safety culture while forcing its rival SpaceX to go through a comprehensive audit after Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, took a hit of marijuana on a podcast broadcast on the Internet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut at the end of last year, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered multiple software problems during a test flight without astronauts on board that forced the company to redo the mission. It also has been reeling since the fatal crashes of two 737 Max airplanes that killed a total of 346 people.Its stumble on the lunar lander contract opened the door for other companies. A team led by Blue Origin, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, won an initial contract worth $579 million. Dynetics, which teamed up with the Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million, and SpaceX won $135 million.In addition to Boeing, another company, Vivace Corp. of San Antonio, was eliminated early in the source selection process, according to NASA\u2019s source selection document. But it doesn\u2019t say why the companies\u2019 bids were rejected. Vivace did not respond to requests for comment.Last month the agency said that all three winning companies completed a key milestone that establishes the designs, schedules and plans to have their vehicles certified by NASA for human spaceflight.The agency has said it plans to select two of the vehicles in the coming months to continue development.Spencer Hsu contributed to this report. A NASA official asked a Boeing executive if Boeing was going to contest the bid loss. It didn't. Instead, it resubmitted the bid, a move so unusual that NASA officials told the agency's inspector general, who then referred the matter to the Justice Department. A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitted its bid.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitted its bid. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6424",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/nasa-boeing-lunar-lander-probe/",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s bid to build a spacecraft capable of flying NASA astronauts to the moon didn\u2019t meet NASA\u2019s requirements, and the company was going to lose out on a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut NASA was worried that the corporate giant would protest the contract award, potentially holding it up for months at a time when the space agency was trying to meet a White House mandate to get astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. So in February, Doug Loverro, then the head of NASA\u2019s human exploration directorate, called Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch division, to explain that the company was going to lose the contract and to inquire whether it would file a challenge, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.Story continues below advertisementThat call, which occurred during a period when the agency was to have no contact with any of the bidders, is now the subject of investigations by the NASA inspector general and the Justice Department into the integrity of the procurement, according to multiple people. It also led NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to force Loverro to abruptly resign in May.AdvertisementBoeing did not protest the award of the lunar lander contract \u2014 which was awarded on April 30 to three bidders for a total of nearly $1 billion: a team led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin; the defense contractor Dynetics; and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)SpaceX successfully launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Nov. 15, the second time a private company has sent astronauts into space. (NASA via AP)But it did something that NASA officials found just as alarming: After Loverro told Chilton that Boeing would not win the award, the company attempted to revise and resubmit its bid. That last-ditch effort to win one of the contracts was so unusual, given that the time for bids had passed, that members of the NASA committee considering the award feared it may amount to a violation of procurement regulations. They alerted the agency\u2019s inspector general, who in turn referred the matter to the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney\u2019s office in the District of Columbia has impaneled a grand jury and is investigating, officials said.Story continues below advertisementThe Post previously reported that Boeing tried to revise its bid after the call between Loverro and Chilton, but this is the first time the substance of their conversation has been reported.AdvertisementIt\u2019s unclear who else at NASA knew about the conversation between Loverro and Chilton, or whether anyone directed Loverro to ask Boeing whether it would protest.In his resignation letter, Loverro wrote that he took \u201ca risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission. Now, over the balance of time, it is clear that I made a mistake in that choice for which I alone must bear the consequences.\u201dIn an interview in spring, Loverro said he was trying to speed up NASA\u2019s lunar program, known as Artemis, as many were already doubting whether NASA could meet the White House\u2019s new 2024 deadline. \u201cIt had to do with moving fast on Artemis, and I don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that,\u201d he said. Loverro was an adviser to the procurement selection committee but didn\u2019t have final say into the awards.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoverro would not comment on the record for this article. Boeing declined to comment.NASA referred to a previous statement that said the procurement for the lunar spacecraft, known as the Human Landing System (HLS), was handled properly and is proceeding with the program. \u201cThe agency is confident in the integrity of the HLS procurement,\u201d it has said. \u201cMr. Loverro was not the selection official, and his resignation has no impact on the performance of these HLS contracts.\u201dTypically, violations of the Procurement Integrity Act are situations where contractors receive inside information they use to their benefit to win a contract. In this case, Boeing still didn\u2019t win the contract \u2014 its revised bid arrived well after the submission deadline \u2014 but \u201cthere are rules and processes that shouldn\u2019t be taken lightly,\u201d said Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBoeing should have known better,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they tried to use that info to revise their bid, they could equally be on the hook for a Procurement Integrity Act violation because they were trying to use it for their benefit.\u201dPOGO has catalogued 80 instances of Boeing misconduct since 1995, resulting in nearly $1.5 billion in fines. The highest-profile case involved Air Force contracting officer Darleen Druyun, who steered contracts to Boeing and received a lucrative job at the company, as did her daughter and son-in-law. She was sentenced to nine months in prison. Michael Sears, then Boeing\u2019s chief financial officer, received a four-month prison sentence after admitting he gave her the job in exchange for inside information.The loss of the lunar lander contract was another embarrassment for Boeing, which has been a NASA partner since the dawn of the Space Age. The company was once so trusted that NASA initially gave Boeing only a limited review of its safety culture while forcing its rival SpaceX to go through a comprehensive audit after Elon Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder and CEO, took a hit of marijuana on a podcast broadcast on the Internet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut at the end of last year, Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered multiple software problems during a test flight without astronauts on board that forced the company to redo the mission. It also has been reeling since the fatal crashes of two 737 Max airplanes that killed a total of 346 people.Its stumble on the lunar lander contract opened the door for other companies. A team led by Blue Origin, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, won an initial contract worth $579 million. Dynetics, which teamed up with the Sierra Nevada Corp., received $253 million, and SpaceX won $135 million.In addition to Boeing, another company, Vivace Corp. of San Antonio, was eliminated early in the source selection process, according to NASA\u2019s source selection document. But it doesn\u2019t say why the companies\u2019 bids were rejected. Vivace did not respond to requests for comment.Last month the agency said that all three winning companies completed a key milestone that establishes the designs, schedules and plans to have their vehicles certified by NASA for human spaceflight.The agency has said it plans to select two of the vehicles in the coming months to continue development.Spencer Hsu contributed to this report. A NASA official asked a Boeing executive if Boeing was going to contest the bid loss. It didn't. Instead, it resubmitted the bid, a move so unusual that NASA officials told the agency's inspector general, who then referred the matter to the Justice Department. A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitted its bid.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing to move Starliner from launchpad as it searches for what went wrong (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6425",
        "date": "2021-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/04/boeing-starliner-valve-relaunch/",
        "text": "Boeing will move its Starliner capsule from its launchpad in Florida on Thursday back to the building where it was stacked aboard the rocket that was to carry it to space, Boeing officials said late Wednesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe decision to return the spacecraft and its Atlas V booster to what\u2019s known as the vehicle integration facility (VIF) came after NASA and Boeing investigators were unable to determine what had caused a sensor to indicate that a valve on the vehicle wasn\u2019t in the proper position, forcing officials to cancel its long-awaited launch Tuesday, the company said. Boeing said inspections of the vehicle would continue in the facility. It gave no timetable for how long those inspections might take or whether they would require separating the capsule from its booster or disassembling the spacecraft. Others familiar with spacecraft engineering suggested it would undergo a lengthy inspection period that could keep it grounded for several weeks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBoeing is working to understand unexpected valve position indications in the Service Module propulsion system that led the company to scrub yesterday\u2019s launch attempt early in the countdown,\u201d Boeing said in a statement.Boeing said \u201ctroubleshooting of the valves while the Starliner and Atlas V were on the launchpad has ruled out a number of potential causes, including software.\u201d It also said \u201cthe severe storm that occurred on Monday also appears to be an unlikely cause, but the team will closely inspect for water or electrical damage while the spacecraft is in the VIF.\u201d\u201cThe team is steadfast in its commitment to identify root cause and determine next steps,\u201d the statement said, quoting John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. \u201cDeveloping solutions in a disciplined manner and letting the data drive our planning is critical and the team is working to ensure our spacecraft flies when ready.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Thursday, Boeing tweeted that the move had taken place.#Starliner and #AtlasV are in @ulalaunch's Vertical Integration Facility. Our team is prepping to power on the spacecraft, a process that takes several hours. This will enable the team to send commands to the Starliner and receive data real-time.More: https://t.co/UR2j0VE9PN pic.twitter.com/hL78FT8z3I\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) August 5, 2021\n\nA lengthy investigation could add to what has already been a humiliating chain of events for Boeing.Starliner\u2019s first test flight, in December 2019, ended when a software problem put the capsule in a wrong orbit and forced ground controllers to bring it home without reaching the International Space Station. Boeing then rewrote the capsule\u2019s software, taking 80 \u201ccorrective actions\u201d and waiting for a launch window that aligned with available docking space at the space station.In the ensuing 19 months, Boeing\u2019s rival, SpaceX, delivered three astronaut crews to the station.No new launch date set for Boeing\u2019s Starliner after valve issue scrubs flightNASA declined to say when the next available launch window might come. \u201cNASA and Boeing will look for the next available opportunity after resolution of the issue,\u201d a NASA spokesperson said via email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s a slim chance the problem could be fixed this week, according to aerospace engineers not affiliated with Boeing or NASA.But what\u2019s more likely is a weeks-long delay as teams attempt to locate the source of the problem before beginning the multistep process of fixing it, putting the pieces back together and running safety tests.Boeing attributed the scrubbed mission to \u201cindications that not all valves were in the proper configuration needed for launch.\u201dBoeing revealed little about the valves except that they were located in the spacecraft\u2019s service module, the rear portion of the spacecraft that contains its propulsion system and is jettisoned before the capsule returns to Earth.Story continues below advertisementThe valves in question may be used to help guide the spacecraft in the right direction in space, according to Sven Bil\u00e9n, a professor of aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University.Advertisement\u201cIf your car is misaligned, you\u2019ll be constantly pulling on the steering wheel to get it straight,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a spacecraft, it wouldn\u2019t maneuver the way that you expect it to. You risk not getting to the space station, or it burns up in the atmosphere coming back because it wasn\u2019t oriented the right way.\u201dBased on the information released by Boeing, it seems like a complex issue to solve, Bil\u00e9n said.\u201cIf the valve is broken, if they have to pull it out and replace it, you\u2019re talking weeks at a minimum,\u201d Bil\u00e9n said. \u201cIf it\u2019s a sensor issue, and it\u2019s easy to replace,\u201d a relaunch could happen sooner. But there may be a concern that \u201cthe same issue is on other valves,\u201d he added.Story continues below advertisementBoeing was originally scheduled to repeat its December 2019 test flight last Friday, but that retest was postponed after a misfire of thrusters on a Russian module attached to the International Space Station sent the space station into a barrel roll. NASA officials rescheduled that flight for Tuesday to give it time to be certain the incident, which NASA said caused the space station to roll over one and a half times, hadn\u2019t damaged key components.AdvertisementBoeing cannot simply relaunch Starliner whenever it wants. NASA determines safe mission dates and times based on a blend of factors, including the launch site availability, room to dock at the International Space Station, weather and orbital needs.\u201cA low Earth mission with specific timing needs must lift off at the right time to slip into the same orbit as its target,\u201d NASA says on its website. The space agency also has a SpaceX trip to the space station set for later this month and a big mission to study asteroids associated with Jupiter no earlier than Oct. 16.For Boeing, relaunching Starliner is critical. NASA has paid the company more than $4 billion for developing the capsule and flights, and any repairs now are added to the company\u2019s expenses. Boeing\u2019s next Starliner launch attempt is up in the air after a valve in the capsule\u2019s control system led to a delay. Boeing to move Starliner from launchpad as it searches for what went wrong",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing to move Starliner from launchpad as it searches for what went wrong (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6426",
        "date": "2021-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/04/boeing-starliner-valve-relaunch/",
        "text": "Boeing will move its Starliner capsule from its launchpad in Florida on Thursday back to the building where it was stacked aboard the rocket that was to carry it to space, Boeing officials said late Wednesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe decision to return the spacecraft and its Atlas V booster to what\u2019s known as the vehicle integration facility (VIF) came after NASA and Boeing investigators were unable to determine what had caused a sensor to indicate that a valve on the vehicle wasn\u2019t in the proper position, forcing officials to cancel its long-awaited launch Tuesday, the company said. Boeing said inspections of the vehicle would continue in the facility. It gave no timetable for how long those inspections might take or whether they would require separating the capsule from its booster or disassembling the spacecraft. Others familiar with spacecraft engineering suggested it would undergo a lengthy inspection period that could keep it grounded for several weeks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBoeing is working to understand unexpected valve position indications in the Service Module propulsion system that led the company to scrub yesterday\u2019s launch attempt early in the countdown,\u201d Boeing said in a statement.Boeing said \u201ctroubleshooting of the valves while the Starliner and Atlas V were on the launchpad has ruled out a number of potential causes, including software.\u201d It also said \u201cthe severe storm that occurred on Monday also appears to be an unlikely cause, but the team will closely inspect for water or electrical damage while the spacecraft is in the VIF.\u201d\u201cThe team is steadfast in its commitment to identify root cause and determine next steps,\u201d the statement said, quoting John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing\u2019s Commercial Crew Program. \u201cDeveloping solutions in a disciplined manner and letting the data drive our planning is critical and the team is working to ensure our spacecraft flies when ready.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Thursday, Boeing tweeted that the move had taken place.#Starliner and #AtlasV are in @ulalaunch's Vertical Integration Facility. Our team is prepping to power on the spacecraft, a process that takes several hours. This will enable the team to send commands to the Starliner and receive data real-time.More: https://t.co/UR2j0VE9PN pic.twitter.com/hL78FT8z3I\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) August 5, 2021\n\nA lengthy investigation could add to what has already been a humiliating chain of events for Boeing.Starliner\u2019s first test flight, in December 2019, ended when a software problem put the capsule in a wrong orbit and forced ground controllers to bring it home without reaching the International Space Station. Boeing then rewrote the capsule\u2019s software, taking 80 \u201ccorrective actions\u201d and waiting for a launch window that aligned with available docking space at the space station.In the ensuing 19 months, Boeing\u2019s rival, SpaceX, delivered three astronaut crews to the station.No new launch date set for Boeing\u2019s Starliner after valve issue scrubs flightNASA declined to say when the next available launch window might come. \u201cNASA and Boeing will look for the next available opportunity after resolution of the issue,\u201d a NASA spokesperson said via email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s a slim chance the problem could be fixed this week, according to aerospace engineers not affiliated with Boeing or NASA.But what\u2019s more likely is a weeks-long delay as teams attempt to locate the source of the problem before beginning the multistep process of fixing it, putting the pieces back together and running safety tests.Boeing attributed the scrubbed mission to \u201cindications that not all valves were in the proper configuration needed for launch.\u201dBoeing revealed little about the valves except that they were located in the spacecraft\u2019s service module, the rear portion of the spacecraft that contains its propulsion system and is jettisoned before the capsule returns to Earth.Story continues below advertisementThe valves in question may be used to help guide the spacecraft in the right direction in space, according to Sven Bil\u00e9n, a professor of aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University.Advertisement\u201cIf your car is misaligned, you\u2019ll be constantly pulling on the steering wheel to get it straight,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a spacecraft, it wouldn\u2019t maneuver the way that you expect it to. You risk not getting to the space station, or it burns up in the atmosphere coming back because it wasn\u2019t oriented the right way.\u201dBased on the information released by Boeing, it seems like a complex issue to solve, Bil\u00e9n said.\u201cIf the valve is broken, if they have to pull it out and replace it, you\u2019re talking weeks at a minimum,\u201d Bil\u00e9n said. \u201cIf it\u2019s a sensor issue, and it\u2019s easy to replace,\u201d a relaunch could happen sooner. But there may be a concern that \u201cthe same issue is on other valves,\u201d he added.Story continues below advertisementBoeing was originally scheduled to repeat its December 2019 test flight last Friday, but that retest was postponed after a misfire of thrusters on a Russian module attached to the International Space Station sent the space station into a barrel roll. NASA officials rescheduled that flight for Tuesday to give it time to be certain the incident, which NASA said caused the space station to roll over one and a half times, hadn\u2019t damaged key components.AdvertisementBoeing cannot simply relaunch Starliner whenever it wants. NASA determines safe mission dates and times based on a blend of factors, including the launch site availability, room to dock at the International Space Station, weather and orbital needs.\u201cA low Earth mission with specific timing needs must lift off at the right time to slip into the same orbit as its target,\u201d NASA says on its website. The space agency also has a SpaceX trip to the space station set for later this month and a big mission to study asteroids associated with Jupiter no earlier than Oct. 16.For Boeing, relaunching Starliner is critical. NASA has paid the company more than $4 billion for developing the capsule and flights, and any repairs now are added to the company\u2019s expenses. Boeing\u2019s next Starliner launch attempt is up in the air after a valve in the capsule\u2019s control system led to a delay. Boeing to move Starliner from launchpad as it searches for what went wrong",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "As it prepares to launch astronauts, Boeing plans to move space headquarters from Arlington to Florida (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6427",
        "date": "2019-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/19/it-prepares-launch-astronauts-boeing-plans-move-space-headquarters-arlington-florida/",
        "text": "Boeing will move its space headquarters from Arlington, Va., to the Florida Space Coast as it pursues a number of rocket and spacecraft programs, including one that would launch astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle retired in 2011.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Wednesday, Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing\u2019s chief executive officer, said the move was precipitated by the renewed energy of the U.S. space program, which could see several major milestones in the coming years. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen this much energy in the space program in several decades,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is an exciting time.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe did not say how many people would be involved in the move, which he called a \u201cmajor transition.\u201d A spokesman later said the total number would be \u201csmall\u201d and include Jim Chilton, Boeing\u2019s space and launch senior vice president, members of his executive team and support staff.AdvertisementThe announcement comes as the Trump administration is aiming to return humans to the moon by 2024. Boeing is building the rocket, the Space Launch System, that NASA plans to use to get to the moon. On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing report that said the rocket may not be ready to fly until June 2021. But Muilenburg praised the project and the progress it has made and vowed that it would launch for the first time, sending a spacecraft without crew into orbit around the moon, next year.The company is also preparing to fly NASA astronauts on its Starliner spacecraft, which has been under development for a number of years. Muilenburg said the first flight of the spacecraft without astronauts would take place this summer and the first flight with crews by the end of the year \u2014 a timeline many industry officials think is ambitious.Boeing is also working to develop a spacecraft it calls the Phantom Express, which it hopes would be able to fly to orbit 10 times in 10 days. Boeing will move its space headquarters from Arlington, Va., to the Florida Space Coast as it pursues a number of rocket and spacecraft programs, including one that would launch astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle retired in 2011. As it prepares to launch astronauts, Boeing plans to move space headquarters from Arlington to Florida",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6428",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/22/nasa-rocket-becomes-boeings-latest-headache-trump-demands-moon-mission/",
        "text": "Boeing senior executives arrived at NASA headquarters two weeks ago for what they knew would be a tense meeting. The rocket they\u2019ve been building for NASA was behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Worse yet, there was no way it was going to be ready for a scheduled maiden launch in June 2020. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne estimate had the rocket launch as late as November 2021, and NASA\u2019s leaders were furious, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about sensitive negotiations. President Trump and Vice President Pence wanted NASA to pull off something big and bold with human spaceflight before the 2020 election: sending a crewless capsule around the moon in a precursor to an eventual return of American astronauts to the lunar surface.But the latest delays would push the flight well past the election.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not doing this,\u201d a dismayed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the Boeing team. \u201cWe\u2019re going to create an alternative solution. All options are on the table.\u201dThis meeting, reported here for the first time, is the backstory to Bridenstine\u2019s March 13 bombshell dropped during testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. He said that although NASA still steadfastly supports the massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the agency would consider sidelining it and instead using commercially available rockets for the mission known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).Bridenstine\u2019s comments at the Senate hearing touched off a political maelstrom \u2014 angering Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee and SLS\u2019s chief benefactor. Critics say the latest machinations are yet another example of how political pressures have sustained the lucrative rocket program for years, as it has maintained Congressional support no matter how high the costs or lengthy the delays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the space world, Bridenstine\u2019s announcement set off shock waves. It not only signaled a potentially radical change in NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon, but was a major blow to NASA\u2019s flagship rocket program and its main contractor, Boeing. The announcement came as the company has been under scrutiny for the way it has handled the crashes of two of its commercial airplanes that killed 346 people.Bridenstine\u2019s announcement prompted critics of the program to question whether NASA truly needs a government-owned heavy-lift rocket. The private sector is already producing such rockets. And although they are not as powerful as the SLS, they\u2019re cheaper to fly, with reusable boosters.Trump\u2019s latest budget request states that a commercial rocket, not the SLS as previously planned, would be used to send a robotic probe to Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe request also says commercial rockets would be used to put up a new outpost in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. Bridenstine testified last week that commercial rockets also could send astronauts to the Gateway \u2014 another presumed SLS function. And NASA has abandoned a much-derided mission to haul an asteroid to lunar orbit to be inspected by astronauts launched via the SLS.\u201cThis is a rocket that has been looking for a mission,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA\u2019s deputy administrator under President Barack Obama.For years, Boeing has long faced criticism for its handling of the program. Last year, a report from the NASA inspector general was withering in its criticism of the company, saying it already has spent $5.3 billion and is expected to burn through the remaining money by early this year, three years too soon, without delivering a single rocket stage. The report said problems at Boeing have led to a 2\u00bd-year delay and $4 billion in cost overruns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBoeing officials have consistently underestimated the scope of the work to be performed and thus the size and skills of the workforce required,\u201d the report stated.John Shannon, Boeing\u2019s SLS program manager, said the company acknowledges widespread problems but recently has shown progress.\u201cWe\u2019re late and I completely own that, but we are dialed in now and the team is producing extremely well,\u201d Shannon said. \u201cI have high confidence that we\u2019re going to come out with an amazing capability by the end of the year, and I can\u2019t wait to get to that point.\u201dCompanies in the cosmos: The new space raceIn 2017, the agency\u2019s watchdog reported in an audit that NASA had spent more than $15 billion on SLS, Orion, and the ground systems needed between 2012 and 2016. And it estimated that the total would reach up to $23 billion.Story continues below advertisementConstruction of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft is spread out so that every state has jobs connected to the program. In all, SLS supports about 25,000 jobs nationwide, with a total economic impact of $4.7 billion, according to NASA.AdvertisementThat has helped the rocket win support among members of Congress, but also has fueled critics who have dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201d In addition to primary contractor Boeing, key contractors are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance.No state has benefited more than Shelby\u2019s state, Alabama, home to NASA\u2019s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The program has created about 13,000 jobs and has pumped $2.4 billion into the state\u2019s economy.Story continues below advertisementSo when the NASA administrator floated the idea of sidelining the rocket, Shelby released a statement saying: \u201cWhile I agree that the delay in the SLS launch schedule is unacceptable, I firmly believe that SLS should launch the Orion.\u201dPrivately, his aides angrily chastised NASA officials.The next day, Bridenstine reiterated his support for the SLS program in a blog post, saying the agency is \u201ccommitted to building and flying SLS.\u201d The day after that, he tweeted: \u201cGood news: The @NASA and Boeing teams are working overtime to accelerate the launch schedule of @NASA_SLS.\u201dAdvertisement\u2018Over budget ... and unexecutable\u2019The SLS was born in the ashes of an earlier rocket program. Called Constellation, the program emerged under President George W. Bush and would send Americans back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. One element of the plan was the creation of a new, heavy-lift rocket, the Ares V, a modern successor to the Saturn V. It would hurl a new capsule, Orion, to the moon.Story continues below advertisementWhen Obama entered office, the Constellation program was struggling, and administration officials called it \u201cover budget, behind schedule, off course and \u2018unexecutable.\u2019 \u201dObama killed Constellation in 2010, and directed NASA to aim for an asteroid and Mars instead of the moon. But the move once again angered Shelby, whose state is home to the Marshall Spaceflight Center, where much of the work on Constellation would have been based.Advertisement\"The president\u2019s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cIf this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be an agency of pipe dreams and fairy talks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlthough the administration terminated the moon plan, it found it politically impossible to kill all of the projects already pouring billions of dollars into coffers of major aerospace contractors.A quartet of powerful senators who have NASA space bases in their states \u2014 Shelby, Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) \u2014 protected the heavy-lift rocket as well as the Orion capsule. They pushed through legislation mandating construction of a heavy-lift rocket and even dictating how it would be designed, including the use of legacy space shuttle hardware.The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happenWith Constellation\u2019s moon mission canceled, the precise purpose \u2014 the actual destinations \u2014 of the SLS and Orion became murky. The SLS clearly existed to launch Orion. But to where?Throughout this process, the big rocket and Orion have crawled toward completion. NASA has been spending more than $3 billion a year on SLS and Orion. Both programs have faced delays.The SLS has taken so long to build that it arguably is technologically obsolete, industry officials say. Much of the hardware is derived from the space shuttle, developed in the 1970s.AdvertisementMeanwhile, a vibrant commercial launch industry, with Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman, is facing competition from relatively new entrants such as SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos (who owns The Washington Post). SpaceX has disrupted the launch industry by building largely reusable rockets and selling them at a discount: $62 million for its Falcon 9 and as low as $90 million for its Falcon Heavy.By contrast, NASA officials have said that each launch of the SLS, a far more powerful rocket, would cost about $1 billion.Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, said that, if nothing else, these programs have delivered jobs to aerospace companies and NASA centers.\u201cGiven that the purpose was to employ people and keep existing contracts going \u2014 they have delivered,\u201d she said in an email.Deep space aspirationsSince he was narrowly confirmed as NASA administrator a year ago, Bridenstine has been a steadfast supporter of SLS, a commitment he reiterated at the Senate hearing last week. He praised SLS and said it remains \u201ca critical capability\u201d for the U.S. space program.The SLS is supposed to be the backbone of NASA\u2019s deep space aspirations. But it still hasn\u2019t flown, and the Trump administration is in a hurry to get to the moon.At the Senate hearing last week, Bridenstine said NASA wanted to stick to its plan to launch no later than June 2020.\u201cSir, if we tell you and others that we\u2019re going to launch in June of 2020 around the moon ... I think it can be done. We as an agency need to consider all options to accomplish that objective,\" he said.To meet the 2020 timeline, Bridenstine said the agency was looking at changing the mission profile, bypassing SLS for a pair of commercial rockets. Instead of launching Orion on a trajectory straight to the moon, it would look at the possibility of flying it to orbit the Earth. Then, on a second commercial rocket, NASA would launch a propulsion module. The Orion spacecraft would dock with it, and the propulsion module would shoot Orion to the moon.Bridenstine\u2019s blog post calls that option \u201cnot optimum or sustainable\u201d and says having two rockets involved \u201cadds complexity and risk that is undesirable.\u201dBoeing has said it is examining how to speed up work on SLS, including bypassing a months-long test program for the rocket\u2019s first stage that was to occur at the Stennis Space Center and shipping it directly to the Kennedy Space Center.Earlier this month, Jody Singer, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, acknowledged that the program was having challenges and that its maiden launch would need to be delayed, according to SpaceNews.That didn\u2019t faze Shelby, who introduced Singer at the luncheon.\u201cAs chairman of the appropriations committee, I have more than a passing interest in what NASA does,\" he said, according to the news site. \"And I have a little parochial interest, too, in what they do in Huntsville, Alabama. Jody, you keep doing what you\u2019re doing. We\u2019ll keep funding you.\u201d Agency head dismayed by new delay, but \u201cSenate Launch System\u201d has strong political support. NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6429",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/22/nasa-rocket-becomes-boeings-latest-headache-trump-demands-moon-mission/",
        "text": "Boeing senior executives arrived at NASA headquarters two weeks ago for what they knew would be a tense meeting. The rocket they\u2019ve been building for NASA was behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Worse yet, there was no way it was going to be ready for a scheduled maiden launch in June 2020. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne estimate had the rocket launch as late as November 2021, and NASA\u2019s leaders were furious, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about sensitive negotiations. President Trump and Vice President Pence wanted NASA to pull off something big and bold with human spaceflight before the 2020 election: sending a crewless capsule around the moon in a precursor to an eventual return of American astronauts to the lunar surface.But the latest delays would push the flight well past the election.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not doing this,\u201d a dismayed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the Boeing team. \u201cWe\u2019re going to create an alternative solution. All options are on the table.\u201dThis meeting, reported here for the first time, is the backstory to Bridenstine\u2019s March 13 bombshell dropped during testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. He said that although NASA still steadfastly supports the massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the agency would consider sidelining it and instead using commercially available rockets for the mission known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).Bridenstine\u2019s comments at the Senate hearing touched off a political maelstrom \u2014 angering Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee and SLS\u2019s chief benefactor. Critics say the latest machinations are yet another example of how political pressures have sustained the lucrative rocket program for years, as it has maintained Congressional support no matter how high the costs or lengthy the delays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the space world, Bridenstine\u2019s announcement set off shock waves. It not only signaled a potentially radical change in NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon, but was a major blow to NASA\u2019s flagship rocket program and its main contractor, Boeing. The announcement came as the company has been under scrutiny for the way it has handled the crashes of two of its commercial airplanes that killed 346 people.Bridenstine\u2019s announcement prompted critics of the program to question whether NASA truly needs a government-owned heavy-lift rocket. The private sector is already producing such rockets. And although they are not as powerful as the SLS, they\u2019re cheaper to fly, with reusable boosters.Trump\u2019s latest budget request states that a commercial rocket, not the SLS as previously planned, would be used to send a robotic probe to Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe request also says commercial rockets would be used to put up a new outpost in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. Bridenstine testified last week that commercial rockets also could send astronauts to the Gateway \u2014 another presumed SLS function. And NASA has abandoned a much-derided mission to haul an asteroid to lunar orbit to be inspected by astronauts launched via the SLS.\u201cThis is a rocket that has been looking for a mission,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA\u2019s deputy administrator under President Barack Obama.For years, Boeing has long faced criticism for its handling of the program. Last year, a report from the NASA inspector general was withering in its criticism of the company, saying it already has spent $5.3 billion and is expected to burn through the remaining money by early this year, three years too soon, without delivering a single rocket stage. The report said problems at Boeing have led to a 2\u00bd-year delay and $4 billion in cost overruns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBoeing officials have consistently underestimated the scope of the work to be performed and thus the size and skills of the workforce required,\u201d the report stated.John Shannon, Boeing\u2019s SLS program manager, said the company acknowledges widespread problems but recently has shown progress.\u201cWe\u2019re late and I completely own that, but we are dialed in now and the team is producing extremely well,\u201d Shannon said. \u201cI have high confidence that we\u2019re going to come out with an amazing capability by the end of the year, and I can\u2019t wait to get to that point.\u201dCompanies in the cosmos: The new space raceIn 2017, the agency\u2019s watchdog reported in an audit that NASA had spent more than $15 billion on SLS, Orion, and the ground systems needed between 2012 and 2016. And it estimated that the total would reach up to $23 billion.Story continues below advertisementConstruction of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft is spread out so that every state has jobs connected to the program. In all, SLS supports about 25,000 jobs nationwide, with a total economic impact of $4.7 billion, according to NASA.AdvertisementThat has helped the rocket win support among members of Congress, but also has fueled critics who have dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201d In addition to primary contractor Boeing, key contractors are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance.No state has benefited more than Shelby\u2019s state, Alabama, home to NASA\u2019s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The program has created about 13,000 jobs and has pumped $2.4 billion into the state\u2019s economy.Story continues below advertisementSo when the NASA administrator floated the idea of sidelining the rocket, Shelby released a statement saying: \u201cWhile I agree that the delay in the SLS launch schedule is unacceptable, I firmly believe that SLS should launch the Orion.\u201dPrivately, his aides angrily chastised NASA officials.The next day, Bridenstine reiterated his support for the SLS program in a blog post, saying the agency is \u201ccommitted to building and flying SLS.\u201d The day after that, he tweeted: \u201cGood news: The @NASA and Boeing teams are working overtime to accelerate the launch schedule of @NASA_SLS.\u201dAdvertisement\u2018Over budget ... and unexecutable\u2019The SLS was born in the ashes of an earlier rocket program. Called Constellation, the program emerged under President George W. Bush and would send Americans back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. One element of the plan was the creation of a new, heavy-lift rocket, the Ares V, a modern successor to the Saturn V. It would hurl a new capsule, Orion, to the moon.Story continues below advertisementWhen Obama entered office, the Constellation program was struggling, and administration officials called it \u201cover budget, behind schedule, off course and \u2018unexecutable.\u2019 \u201dObama killed Constellation in 2010, and directed NASA to aim for an asteroid and Mars instead of the moon. But the move once again angered Shelby, whose state is home to the Marshall Spaceflight Center, where much of the work on Constellation would have been based.Advertisement\"The president\u2019s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cIf this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be an agency of pipe dreams and fairy talks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlthough the administration terminated the moon plan, it found it politically impossible to kill all of the projects already pouring billions of dollars into coffers of major aerospace contractors.A quartet of powerful senators who have NASA space bases in their states \u2014 Shelby, Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) \u2014 protected the heavy-lift rocket as well as the Orion capsule. They pushed through legislation mandating construction of a heavy-lift rocket and even dictating how it would be designed, including the use of legacy space shuttle hardware.The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happenWith Constellation\u2019s moon mission canceled, the precise purpose \u2014 the actual destinations \u2014 of the SLS and Orion became murky. The SLS clearly existed to launch Orion. But to where?Throughout this process, the big rocket and Orion have crawled toward completion. NASA has been spending more than $3 billion a year on SLS and Orion. Both programs have faced delays.The SLS has taken so long to build that it arguably is technologically obsolete, industry officials say. Much of the hardware is derived from the space shuttle, developed in the 1970s.AdvertisementMeanwhile, a vibrant commercial launch industry, with Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman, is facing competition from relatively new entrants such as SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos (who owns The Washington Post). SpaceX has disrupted the launch industry by building largely reusable rockets and selling them at a discount: $62 million for its Falcon 9 and as low as $90 million for its Falcon Heavy.By contrast, NASA officials have said that each launch of the SLS, a far more powerful rocket, would cost about $1 billion.Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, said that, if nothing else, these programs have delivered jobs to aerospace companies and NASA centers.\u201cGiven that the purpose was to employ people and keep existing contracts going \u2014 they have delivered,\u201d she said in an email.Deep space aspirationsSince he was narrowly confirmed as NASA administrator a year ago, Bridenstine has been a steadfast supporter of SLS, a commitment he reiterated at the Senate hearing last week. He praised SLS and said it remains \u201ca critical capability\u201d for the U.S. space program.The SLS is supposed to be the backbone of NASA\u2019s deep space aspirations. But it still hasn\u2019t flown, and the Trump administration is in a hurry to get to the moon.At the Senate hearing last week, Bridenstine said NASA wanted to stick to its plan to launch no later than June 2020.\u201cSir, if we tell you and others that we\u2019re going to launch in June of 2020 around the moon ... I think it can be done. We as an agency need to consider all options to accomplish that objective,\" he said.To meet the 2020 timeline, Bridenstine said the agency was looking at changing the mission profile, bypassing SLS for a pair of commercial rockets. Instead of launching Orion on a trajectory straight to the moon, it would look at the possibility of flying it to orbit the Earth. Then, on a second commercial rocket, NASA would launch a propulsion module. The Orion spacecraft would dock with it, and the propulsion module would shoot Orion to the moon.Bridenstine\u2019s blog post calls that option \u201cnot optimum or sustainable\u201d and says having two rockets involved \u201cadds complexity and risk that is undesirable.\u201dBoeing has said it is examining how to speed up work on SLS, including bypassing a months-long test program for the rocket\u2019s first stage that was to occur at the Stennis Space Center and shipping it directly to the Kennedy Space Center.Earlier this month, Jody Singer, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, acknowledged that the program was having challenges and that its maiden launch would need to be delayed, according to SpaceNews.That didn\u2019t faze Shelby, who introduced Singer at the luncheon.\u201cAs chairman of the appropriations committee, I have more than a passing interest in what NASA does,\" he said, according to the news site. \"And I have a little parochial interest, too, in what they do in Huntsville, Alabama. Jody, you keep doing what you\u2019re doing. We\u2019ll keep funding you.\u201d Agency head dismayed by new delay, but \u201cSenate Launch System\u201d has strong political support. NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6430",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/22/nasa-rocket-becomes-boeings-latest-headache-trump-demands-moon-mission/",
        "text": "Boeing senior executives arrived at NASA headquarters two weeks ago for what they knew would be a tense meeting. The rocket they\u2019ve been building for NASA was behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Worse yet, there was no way it was going to be ready for a scheduled maiden launch in June 2020. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOne estimate had the rocket launch as late as November 2021, and NASA\u2019s leaders were furious, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about sensitive negotiations. President Trump and Vice President Pence wanted NASA to pull off something big and bold with human spaceflight before the 2020 election: sending a crewless capsule around the moon in a precursor to an eventual return of American astronauts to the lunar surface.But the latest delays would push the flight well past the election.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not doing this,\u201d a dismayed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the Boeing team. \u201cWe\u2019re going to create an alternative solution. All options are on the table.\u201dThis meeting, reported here for the first time, is the backstory to Bridenstine\u2019s March 13 bombshell dropped during testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. He said that although NASA still steadfastly supports the massive rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the agency would consider sidelining it and instead using commercially available rockets for the mission known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1).Bridenstine\u2019s comments at the Senate hearing touched off a political maelstrom \u2014 angering Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee and SLS\u2019s chief benefactor. Critics say the latest machinations are yet another example of how political pressures have sustained the lucrative rocket program for years, as it has maintained Congressional support no matter how high the costs or lengthy the delays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the space world, Bridenstine\u2019s announcement set off shock waves. It not only signaled a potentially radical change in NASA\u2019s plans to return to the moon, but was a major blow to NASA\u2019s flagship rocket program and its main contractor, Boeing. The announcement came as the company has been under scrutiny for the way it has handled the crashes of two of its commercial airplanes that killed 346 people.Bridenstine\u2019s announcement prompted critics of the program to question whether NASA truly needs a government-owned heavy-lift rocket. The private sector is already producing such rockets. And although they are not as powerful as the SLS, they\u2019re cheaper to fly, with reusable boosters.Trump\u2019s latest budget request states that a commercial rocket, not the SLS as previously planned, would be used to send a robotic probe to Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe request also says commercial rockets would be used to put up a new outpost in lunar orbit, called the Gateway. Bridenstine testified last week that commercial rockets also could send astronauts to the Gateway \u2014 another presumed SLS function. And NASA has abandoned a much-derided mission to haul an asteroid to lunar orbit to be inspected by astronauts launched via the SLS.\u201cThis is a rocket that has been looking for a mission,\u201d said Lori Garver, who served as NASA\u2019s deputy administrator under President Barack Obama.For years, Boeing has long faced criticism for its handling of the program. Last year, a report from the NASA inspector general was withering in its criticism of the company, saying it already has spent $5.3 billion and is expected to burn through the remaining money by early this year, three years too soon, without delivering a single rocket stage. The report said problems at Boeing have led to a 2\u00bd-year delay and $4 billion in cost overruns.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBoeing officials have consistently underestimated the scope of the work to be performed and thus the size and skills of the workforce required,\u201d the report stated.John Shannon, Boeing\u2019s SLS program manager, said the company acknowledges widespread problems but recently has shown progress.\u201cWe\u2019re late and I completely own that, but we are dialed in now and the team is producing extremely well,\u201d Shannon said. \u201cI have high confidence that we\u2019re going to come out with an amazing capability by the end of the year, and I can\u2019t wait to get to that point.\u201dCompanies in the cosmos: The new space raceIn 2017, the agency\u2019s watchdog reported in an audit that NASA had spent more than $15 billion on SLS, Orion, and the ground systems needed between 2012 and 2016. And it estimated that the total would reach up to $23 billion.Story continues below advertisementConstruction of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft is spread out so that every state has jobs connected to the program. In all, SLS supports about 25,000 jobs nationwide, with a total economic impact of $4.7 billion, according to NASA.AdvertisementThat has helped the rocket win support among members of Congress, but also has fueled critics who have dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201d In addition to primary contractor Boeing, key contractors are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman and the United Launch Alliance.No state has benefited more than Shelby\u2019s state, Alabama, home to NASA\u2019s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The program has created about 13,000 jobs and has pumped $2.4 billion into the state\u2019s economy.Story continues below advertisementSo when the NASA administrator floated the idea of sidelining the rocket, Shelby released a statement saying: \u201cWhile I agree that the delay in the SLS launch schedule is unacceptable, I firmly believe that SLS should launch the Orion.\u201dPrivately, his aides angrily chastised NASA officials.The next day, Bridenstine reiterated his support for the SLS program in a blog post, saying the agency is \u201ccommitted to building and flying SLS.\u201d The day after that, he tweeted: \u201cGood news: The @NASA and Boeing teams are working overtime to accelerate the launch schedule of @NASA_SLS.\u201dAdvertisement\u2018Over budget ... and unexecutable\u2019The SLS was born in the ashes of an earlier rocket program. Called Constellation, the program emerged under President George W. Bush and would send Americans back to the moon, and eventually to Mars. One element of the plan was the creation of a new, heavy-lift rocket, the Ares V, a modern successor to the Saturn V. It would hurl a new capsule, Orion, to the moon.Story continues below advertisementWhen Obama entered office, the Constellation program was struggling, and administration officials called it \u201cover budget, behind schedule, off course and \u2018unexecutable.\u2019 \u201dObama killed Constellation in 2010, and directed NASA to aim for an asteroid and Mars instead of the moon. But the move once again angered Shelby, whose state is home to the Marshall Spaceflight Center, where much of the work on Constellation would have been based.Advertisement\"The president\u2019s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cIf this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be an agency of pipe dreams and fairy talks.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAlthough the administration terminated the moon plan, it found it politically impossible to kill all of the projects already pouring billions of dollars into coffers of major aerospace contractors.A quartet of powerful senators who have NASA space bases in their states \u2014 Shelby, Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) \u2014 protected the heavy-lift rocket as well as the Orion capsule. They pushed through legislation mandating construction of a heavy-lift rocket and even dictating how it would be designed, including the use of legacy space shuttle hardware.The White House is in such a hurry to get to the moon that NASA is considering sidelining its major rocket to make it happenWith Constellation\u2019s moon mission canceled, the precise purpose \u2014 the actual destinations \u2014 of the SLS and Orion became murky. The SLS clearly existed to launch Orion. But to where?Throughout this process, the big rocket and Orion have crawled toward completion. NASA has been spending more than $3 billion a year on SLS and Orion. Both programs have faced delays.The SLS has taken so long to build that it arguably is technologically obsolete, industry officials say. Much of the hardware is derived from the space shuttle, developed in the 1970s.AdvertisementMeanwhile, a vibrant commercial launch industry, with Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman, is facing competition from relatively new entrants such as SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos (who owns The Washington Post). SpaceX has disrupted the launch industry by building largely reusable rockets and selling them at a discount: $62 million for its Falcon 9 and as low as $90 million for its Falcon Heavy.By contrast, NASA officials have said that each launch of the SLS, a far more powerful rocket, would cost about $1 billion.Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, said that, if nothing else, these programs have delivered jobs to aerospace companies and NASA centers.\u201cGiven that the purpose was to employ people and keep existing contracts going \u2014 they have delivered,\u201d she said in an email.Deep space aspirationsSince he was narrowly confirmed as NASA administrator a year ago, Bridenstine has been a steadfast supporter of SLS, a commitment he reiterated at the Senate hearing last week. He praised SLS and said it remains \u201ca critical capability\u201d for the U.S. space program.The SLS is supposed to be the backbone of NASA\u2019s deep space aspirations. But it still hasn\u2019t flown, and the Trump administration is in a hurry to get to the moon.At the Senate hearing last week, Bridenstine said NASA wanted to stick to its plan to launch no later than June 2020.\u201cSir, if we tell you and others that we\u2019re going to launch in June of 2020 around the moon ... I think it can be done. We as an agency need to consider all options to accomplish that objective,\" he said.To meet the 2020 timeline, Bridenstine said the agency was looking at changing the mission profile, bypassing SLS for a pair of commercial rockets. Instead of launching Orion on a trajectory straight to the moon, it would look at the possibility of flying it to orbit the Earth. Then, on a second commercial rocket, NASA would launch a propulsion module. The Orion spacecraft would dock with it, and the propulsion module would shoot Orion to the moon.Bridenstine\u2019s blog post calls that option \u201cnot optimum or sustainable\u201d and says having two rockets involved \u201cadds complexity and risk that is undesirable.\u201dBoeing has said it is examining how to speed up work on SLS, including bypassing a months-long test program for the rocket\u2019s first stage that was to occur at the Stennis Space Center and shipping it directly to the Kennedy Space Center.Earlier this month, Jody Singer, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, acknowledged that the program was having challenges and that its maiden launch would need to be delayed, according to SpaceNews.That didn\u2019t faze Shelby, who introduced Singer at the luncheon.\u201cAs chairman of the appropriations committee, I have more than a passing interest in what NASA does,\" he said, according to the news site. \"And I have a little parochial interest, too, in what they do in Huntsville, Alabama. Jody, you keep doing what you\u2019re doing. We\u2019ll keep funding you.\u201d Agency head dismayed by new delay, but \u201cSenate Launch System\u201d has strong political support. NASA rocket becomes Boeing\u2019s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "13 valves failed to open on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, a more widespread problem than previously reported (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6431",
        "date": "2021-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/09/boeing-starliner-launch-delay-valves/",
        "text": "Boeing said Monday that the problem that scrubbed the launch of its Starliner spacecraft last week was caused when 13 valves in its propulsion system failed to properly open during a preflight test, a more widespread issue than was previously known.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOver the weekend, engineers were able to open seven of those valves and restore them to working order, the company said, and it is still hopeful that it could launch the test flight by the end of the month. But Boeing still does not know what caused the problem, which forced yet another delay in a program that has been plagued by serious issues for years. Boeing is developing Starliner under a contract with NASA to fly the space agency\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the other company that holds the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d contract, has now flown three human spaceflight missions to the space station, but Boeing has struggled with its program and has lagged far behind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore it flies a test mission with astronauts, Boeing must first launch an uncrewed mission that would demonstrate that the autonomous spacecraft is able to meet up with the station in orbit, dock, survive the vacuum of space, and then fly back to Earth safely. Once those milestones are achieved, NASA would then green light a flight with astronauts on board.Boeing\u2019s first attempt at the uncrewed mission, in December 2019, went horribly awry because of a software malfunction that prevented the spacecraft from docking with the station. That touched off an investigation by NASA, which said it needed to more rigorously oversee Boeing\u2019s work.But after being forced to stand down for a year and a half, Boeing had said it had fixed those problems and was finally ready to fly.Story continues below advertisementBoeing had been planning to redo the mission on July 30. But the launch was delayed after a Russian module docked with the station but then inadvertently fired its thrusters, sending the station into a harrowing spin.AdvertisementThe Starliner launch was rescheduled to Aug. 3, but Boeing and NASA announced that it would be delayed after it discovered \u201cunexpected valve position indications in the propulsion system.\u201d At the time, Boeing said the problem was detected after electrical storms passed over Cape Canaveral the day before the launch, leaving open the possibility that a lightning strike could have been the cause of the problem.Officials at NASA, however, were skeptical that lightning had any effect, and Boeing backed away from the claim, saying in a statement on Aug. 4 that the storm \u201cappears to be an unlikely cause.\u201d But it said it \u201cwill look closely for water or electrical damage,\u201d during vehicle inspections.Story continues below advertisementThe spacecraft is still mounted on the top of the Atlas V rocket, which is operated by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Tory Bruno, ULA\u2019s CEO, has said repeatedly that the problem is with the spacecraft, not the rocket.AdvertisementIn a tweet last week, Boeing thanked a number of its partners, including Aerojet Rocketdyne \u201cfor supplying and supporting the propulsion system being evaluated.\u201d Aerojet Rocketdyne, which is being acquired by Lockheed Martin, declined to comment on the tweet or what role, if any, it has had in the problem.The valves are an important part of the spacecraft\u2019s ability to fly. They connect to thrusters that allow the capsule to abort in an emergency, and they also help the spacecraft maneuver while in orbit.#Starliner teams restored functionality to more propulsion system valves this weekend. Work continues at the @ulalaunch Vertical Integration Facility on the remaining affected valves.Learn more and get updates on the team\u2019s progress: https://t.co/HsH3wz5Qfb pic.twitter.com/WhRDiK8aCi\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) August 9, 2021\n\nTo investigate the issue, the rocket with the capsule on top was rolled off the launchpad into a structure nearby, known as the Vertical Integration Facility, where engineers have been investigating why the valves did not open and how best to get them working again.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, John Vollmer, Boeing\u2019s vice president and Starliner program manager, expressed confidence that his engineers would be able to fix the problem. \u201cCautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,\u201d he said in a statement.AdvertisementOver the weekend, the team made \u201cpositive progress,\u201d a spokesperson said Monday, allowing the company to continue to plan for a launch this month.The company has found \u201cno signs of damage or external corrosion,\u201d Boeing said in a statement Monday. \u201cTest teams are now applying mechanical, electrical and thermal techniques to prompt the valves open.\u201d As a result, more than half of the valves \u201care now operating as designed,\u201d it said, and work would continue on the others \u201cin the days ahead.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post, NASA said that \u201cif all valve functionality can be restored and root cause identified, NASA will work with Boeing to determine a path to flight for the important uncrewed mission to the space station.\u201d The earliest opportunity would come in mid-August, it said.But Boeing still does not know what caused the valves to remain closed when they needed to be in the open position, and it is unclear how long determining that would take. As a result, some in the aerospace industry are skeptical the company could launch this month.If Starliner does not launch in the coming weeks, it could be delayed months because of traffic at the space station, including a SpaceX cargo launch that would occupy the docking port Boeing would use for Starliner. Boeing still does not know what caused the problem, which forced yet another delay in a program that has been plagued by serious issues for years. 13 valves failed to open on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, a more widespread problem than previously reported",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "13 valves failed to open on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, a more widespread problem than previously reported (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6432",
        "date": "2021-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/09/boeing-starliner-launch-delay-valves/",
        "text": "Boeing said Monday that the problem that scrubbed the launch of its Starliner spacecraft last week was caused when 13 valves in its propulsion system failed to properly open during a preflight test, a more widespread issue than was previously known.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOver the weekend, engineers were able to open seven of those valves and restore them to working order, the company said, and it is still hopeful that it could launch the test flight by the end of the month. But Boeing still does not know what caused the problem, which forced yet another delay in a program that has been plagued by serious issues for years. Boeing is developing Starliner under a contract with NASA to fly the space agency\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the other company that holds the \u201ccommercial crew\u201d contract, has now flown three human spaceflight missions to the space station, but Boeing has struggled with its program and has lagged far behind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore it flies a test mission with astronauts, Boeing must first launch an uncrewed mission that would demonstrate that the autonomous spacecraft is able to meet up with the station in orbit, dock, survive the vacuum of space, and then fly back to Earth safely. Once those milestones are achieved, NASA would then green light a flight with astronauts on board.Boeing\u2019s first attempt at the uncrewed mission, in December 2019, went horribly awry because of a software malfunction that prevented the spacecraft from docking with the station. That touched off an investigation by NASA, which said it needed to more rigorously oversee Boeing\u2019s work.But after being forced to stand down for a year and a half, Boeing had said it had fixed those problems and was finally ready to fly.Story continues below advertisementBoeing had been planning to redo the mission on July 30. But the launch was delayed after a Russian module docked with the station but then inadvertently fired its thrusters, sending the station into a harrowing spin.AdvertisementThe Starliner launch was rescheduled to Aug. 3, but Boeing and NASA announced that it would be delayed after it discovered \u201cunexpected valve position indications in the propulsion system.\u201d At the time, Boeing said the problem was detected after electrical storms passed over Cape Canaveral the day before the launch, leaving open the possibility that a lightning strike could have been the cause of the problem.Officials at NASA, however, were skeptical that lightning had any effect, and Boeing backed away from the claim, saying in a statement on Aug. 4 that the storm \u201cappears to be an unlikely cause.\u201d But it said it \u201cwill look closely for water or electrical damage,\u201d during vehicle inspections.Story continues below advertisementThe spacecraft is still mounted on the top of the Atlas V rocket, which is operated by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Tory Bruno, ULA\u2019s CEO, has said repeatedly that the problem is with the spacecraft, not the rocket.AdvertisementIn a tweet last week, Boeing thanked a number of its partners, including Aerojet Rocketdyne \u201cfor supplying and supporting the propulsion system being evaluated.\u201d Aerojet Rocketdyne, which is being acquired by Lockheed Martin, declined to comment on the tweet or what role, if any, it has had in the problem.The valves are an important part of the spacecraft\u2019s ability to fly. They connect to thrusters that allow the capsule to abort in an emergency, and they also help the spacecraft maneuver while in orbit.#Starliner teams restored functionality to more propulsion system valves this weekend. Work continues at the @ulalaunch Vertical Integration Facility on the remaining affected valves.Learn more and get updates on the team\u2019s progress: https://t.co/HsH3wz5Qfb pic.twitter.com/WhRDiK8aCi\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) August 9, 2021\n\nTo investigate the issue, the rocket with the capsule on top was rolled off the launchpad into a structure nearby, known as the Vertical Integration Facility, where engineers have been investigating why the valves did not open and how best to get them working again.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, John Vollmer, Boeing\u2019s vice president and Starliner program manager, expressed confidence that his engineers would be able to fix the problem. \u201cCautiously optimistic is a good way to describe how the team is feeling,\u201d he said in a statement.AdvertisementOver the weekend, the team made \u201cpositive progress,\u201d a spokesperson said Monday, allowing the company to continue to plan for a launch this month.The company has found \u201cno signs of damage or external corrosion,\u201d Boeing said in a statement Monday. \u201cTest teams are now applying mechanical, electrical and thermal techniques to prompt the valves open.\u201d As a result, more than half of the valves \u201care now operating as designed,\u201d it said, and work would continue on the others \u201cin the days ahead.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post, NASA said that \u201cif all valve functionality can be restored and root cause identified, NASA will work with Boeing to determine a path to flight for the important uncrewed mission to the space station.\u201d The earliest opportunity would come in mid-August, it said.But Boeing still does not know what caused the valves to remain closed when they needed to be in the open position, and it is unclear how long determining that would take. As a result, some in the aerospace industry are skeptical the company could launch this month.If Starliner does not launch in the coming weeks, it could be delayed months because of traffic at the space station, including a SpaceX cargo launch that would occupy the docking port Boeing would use for Starliner. Boeing still does not know what caused the problem, which forced yet another delay in a program that has been plagued by serious issues for years. 13 valves failed to open on Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, a more widespread problem than previously reported",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner to go back to factory for repairs, probably causing another major delay for troubled program (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6433",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/13/boeing-destack-starliner-delay/",
        "text": "Boeing said Friday that it will remove its Starliner spacecraft from atop of a rocket to fix valves that have remained stuck, a decision that will probably force yet another months-long delay in its do-over of a test flight without astronauts aboard.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEngineers have been trying since Aug. 3 to fix the problem, one in a series of significant issues that has plagued Boeing\u2019s troubled spacecraft program and become another symbol of the company\u2019s woes in the wake of the 737 Max scandal. Boeing had been hoping to restore functionality to the valves and get a launch off to the International Space Station this month under its contract with NASA. But the decision to move the spacecraft into the factory means the issue is a troublesome one. Because of other missions to the space station, a rescheduled launch might not happen until next year.Boeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launchIn 2014, NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX contracts to develop a spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the space station. Boeing received the majority of the money, $4.2 billion, and was expected to fly first. But it has run into a series of delays and setbacks, and last year SpaceX became the first company to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station in what is known as NASA\u2019s commercial crew program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing had been hoping to fly astronauts by the end of this year. But it must first complete a test flight without anyone on board to demonstrate the autonomous spacecraft can catch up with the station in orbit, dock with it and return safely to Earth. So far, it has struggled with that mission.The company botched its first attempt in December 2019, when Starliner suffered a major software breakdown that forced controllers on the ground to end the mission before the spacecraft could dock with the station.After 18 months, the spacecraft was finally mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket and rolled out to the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in July last month, for what Boeing hoped would be a triumphant return to flight after its previously attempt went so horribly awry.Story continues below advertisementBut hours before the scheduled launch on Aug. 3, Boeing engineers discovered that 13 valves in the service module\u2019s propulsion system were stuck in the closed position when they should have been open. Crews scrambled to fix the problem and moved the spacecraft and rocket to a nearby assembly building, where technicians were able to reopen nine.AdvertisementThe company had held out hope that it would be able to get the launch off this month but conceded on Friday that it would not be possible.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.\u201cWe\u2019re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window,\u201d John Vollmer, vice president and program manager for Boeing\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, said in a briefing with reporters. \u201cThe launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety.\u201d He added that the company is \u201cdetermined to get the spacecraft back and ready to fly at the next available opportunity.\u201d Story continues below advertisementWhen that might be is unclear. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that operates the Atlas V rocket used to launch Starliner, has a launch scheduled for October to fly a NASA spacecraft to research asteroids associated with Jupiter. That will tie up the launchpad, forcing a wait.AdvertisementThe space station also has a heavy schedule planned through the end of the year. SpaceX is scheduled to fly a cargo resupply mission to the station at the end of this month that would occupy the docking port that Boeing was planning to use. It also has another flight with NASA astronauts scheduled for the end of October.Boeing and NASA officials said they were focusing on fixing the problem and then would determine when they might try to launch again.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s pretty early to speculate on where the flight might end up,\u201d said Steve Stich, the manager of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program. \u201cWe really need to get the vehicle back into the factory and get our hands on some valves and then figure out what the problem is and how to correct it.\u201d Boeing and NASA are exploring whether the cause of the problem was moisture from Florida\u2019s humid air interacting with a chemical that helps the rocket fuel burn. The resulting mixture damaged the valves and kept them from opening, officials theorize.Advertisement\u201cThat interaction, we believe, created some nitric acid,\u201d Vollmer said. \u201cAnd that nitric acid resulted in some corrosion, which resulted in stiction of those valves. So that is primarily what we\u2019re looking at right now, as the most likely cause for the issue.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIt was unclear whether the company would need to redesign the valves or whether \u201cit\u2019s just some preventative measures that we need to take,\u201d Vollmer said. He added that the company would work with its partner, Aerojet Rocketdyne, on solving the problem. A spokesman for Aerojet declined to comment.Vollmer added that the valve system worked fine in the weeks leading up to moving the spacecraft out of the climate-controlled factory to the launchpad. He said there had been no issues with the valves in the December 2019 flight, and \u201cno changes, either to the valves or the methodology with how we operate them.\u201dAdvertisementIn 2018, Boeing had a problem with valves in its launch abort system that failed to close properly and resulted in a fuel leak. The company said it had since remedied that issue, and Stich said Friday that it was in a separate system that operates differently and was \u201ctotally unrelated to what we saw\u201d with the most recent problem.Story continues below advertisementStarliner had another issue in 2019, this time with its parachutes during a test of its launch abort system. One of the three main chutes failed to deploy because a pin wasn\u2019t securely fastened to a smaller, pilot chute that was meant to pull out the larger, main chute. Engineers overlooked it because the pin was hidden beneath a protective sheath but said that on future flights they would go over the connection manually.Then in December 2019, when it first attempted the flight test without crew on board, the spacecraft ran into trouble as soon as it reached orbit. A software problem made the computer think it was at an entirely different part of the mission and as a result started firing its thrusters to put itself in the orientation it thought it should be in.AdvertisementControllers on the ground had trouble communicating with the spacecraft, and by the time they were finally able to get a software patch to the flight computers, the spacecraft had burned through too much fuel to dock with the station.Story continues below advertisementEngineers also discovered a second software problem that could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule, a potentially very dangerous situation that NASA officials said could have caused a loss of the vehicle. Controllers were able to fix that issue while the spacecraft was in orbit, and it landed safely two days after launching.Boeing spent more than a year-and-a-half preparing for its do-over flight, a mission that it said would cost the company $410 million. In the days leading up to the flight, it said it was confident that the craft was ready to fly again and that it hoped to be able to launch astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementNow, all of that is on hold again. And Vollmer could not say what the additional delay would cost the company, or who ultimately would pay for it.\u201cI would tell you we\u2019re a little sad,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations. \u201cBut I want to emphasize that this is another example of why these demo flights are so very important.\u201d\u201cThese are the kinds of things you want to find on the ground.\u201d Boeing engineers have been trying since Aug. 3 to fix a problem with 13 valves that forced the cancellation of a launch that was a do-over for a failed mission 19 months ago. Boeing\u2019s Starliner to go back to factory for repairs, probably causing another major delay for troubled program",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner to go back to factory for repairs, probably causing another major delay for troubled program (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6434",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/13/boeing-destack-starliner-delay/",
        "text": "Boeing said Friday that it will remove its Starliner spacecraft from atop of a rocket to fix valves that have remained stuck, a decision that will probably force yet another months-long delay in its do-over of a test flight without astronauts aboard.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEngineers have been trying since Aug. 3 to fix the problem, one in a series of significant issues that has plagued Boeing\u2019s troubled spacecraft program and become another symbol of the company\u2019s woes in the wake of the 737 Max scandal. Boeing had been hoping to restore functionality to the valves and get a launch off to the International Space Station this month under its contract with NASA. But the decision to move the spacecraft into the factory means the issue is a troublesome one. Because of other missions to the space station, a rescheduled launch might not happen until next year.Boeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launchIn 2014, NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX contracts to develop a spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the space station. Boeing received the majority of the money, $4.2 billion, and was expected to fly first. But it has run into a series of delays and setbacks, and last year SpaceX became the first company to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station in what is known as NASA\u2019s commercial crew program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing had been hoping to fly astronauts by the end of this year. But it must first complete a test flight without anyone on board to demonstrate the autonomous spacecraft can catch up with the station in orbit, dock with it and return safely to Earth. So far, it has struggled with that mission.The company botched its first attempt in December 2019, when Starliner suffered a major software breakdown that forced controllers on the ground to end the mission before the spacecraft could dock with the station.After 18 months, the spacecraft was finally mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket and rolled out to the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in July last month, for what Boeing hoped would be a triumphant return to flight after its previously attempt went so horribly awry.Story continues below advertisementBut hours before the scheduled launch on Aug. 3, Boeing engineers discovered that 13 valves in the service module\u2019s propulsion system were stuck in the closed position when they should have been open. Crews scrambled to fix the problem and moved the spacecraft and rocket to a nearby assembly building, where technicians were able to reopen nine.AdvertisementThe company had held out hope that it would be able to get the launch off this month but conceded on Friday that it would not be possible.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.\u201cWe\u2019re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window,\u201d John Vollmer, vice president and program manager for Boeing\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, said in a briefing with reporters. \u201cThe launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety.\u201d He added that the company is \u201cdetermined to get the spacecraft back and ready to fly at the next available opportunity.\u201d Story continues below advertisementWhen that might be is unclear. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that operates the Atlas V rocket used to launch Starliner, has a launch scheduled for October to fly a NASA spacecraft to research asteroids associated with Jupiter. That will tie up the launchpad, forcing a wait.AdvertisementThe space station also has a heavy schedule planned through the end of the year. SpaceX is scheduled to fly a cargo resupply mission to the station at the end of this month that would occupy the docking port that Boeing was planning to use. It also has another flight with NASA astronauts scheduled for the end of October.Boeing and NASA officials said they were focusing on fixing the problem and then would determine when they might try to launch again.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s pretty early to speculate on where the flight might end up,\u201d said Steve Stich, the manager of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program. \u201cWe really need to get the vehicle back into the factory and get our hands on some valves and then figure out what the problem is and how to correct it.\u201d Boeing and NASA are exploring whether the cause of the problem was moisture from Florida\u2019s humid air interacting with a chemical that helps the rocket fuel burn. The resulting mixture damaged the valves and kept them from opening, officials theorize.Advertisement\u201cThat interaction, we believe, created some nitric acid,\u201d Vollmer said. \u201cAnd that nitric acid resulted in some corrosion, which resulted in stiction of those valves. So that is primarily what we\u2019re looking at right now, as the most likely cause for the issue.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIt was unclear whether the company would need to redesign the valves or whether \u201cit\u2019s just some preventative measures that we need to take,\u201d Vollmer said. He added that the company would work with its partner, Aerojet Rocketdyne, on solving the problem. A spokesman for Aerojet declined to comment.Vollmer added that the valve system worked fine in the weeks leading up to moving the spacecraft out of the climate-controlled factory to the launchpad. He said there had been no issues with the valves in the December 2019 flight, and \u201cno changes, either to the valves or the methodology with how we operate them.\u201dAdvertisementIn 2018, Boeing had a problem with valves in its launch abort system that failed to close properly and resulted in a fuel leak. The company said it had since remedied that issue, and Stich said Friday that it was in a separate system that operates differently and was \u201ctotally unrelated to what we saw\u201d with the most recent problem.Story continues below advertisementStarliner had another issue in 2019, this time with its parachutes during a test of its launch abort system. One of the three main chutes failed to deploy because a pin wasn\u2019t securely fastened to a smaller, pilot chute that was meant to pull out the larger, main chute. Engineers overlooked it because the pin was hidden beneath a protective sheath but said that on future flights they would go over the connection manually.Then in December 2019, when it first attempted the flight test without crew on board, the spacecraft ran into trouble as soon as it reached orbit. A software problem made the computer think it was at an entirely different part of the mission and as a result started firing its thrusters to put itself in the orientation it thought it should be in.AdvertisementControllers on the ground had trouble communicating with the spacecraft, and by the time they were finally able to get a software patch to the flight computers, the spacecraft had burned through too much fuel to dock with the station.Story continues below advertisementEngineers also discovered a second software problem that could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule, a potentially very dangerous situation that NASA officials said could have caused a loss of the vehicle. Controllers were able to fix that issue while the spacecraft was in orbit, and it landed safely two days after launching.Boeing spent more than a year-and-a-half preparing for its do-over flight, a mission that it said would cost the company $410 million. In the days leading up to the flight, it said it was confident that the craft was ready to fly again and that it hoped to be able to launch astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementNow, all of that is on hold again. And Vollmer could not say what the additional delay would cost the company, or who ultimately would pay for it.\u201cI would tell you we\u2019re a little sad,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations. \u201cBut I want to emphasize that this is another example of why these demo flights are so very important.\u201d\u201cThese are the kinds of things you want to find on the ground.\u201d Boeing engineers have been trying since Aug. 3 to fix a problem with 13 valves that forced the cancellation of a launch that was a do-over for a failed mission 19 months ago. Boeing\u2019s Starliner to go back to factory for repairs, probably causing another major delay for troubled program",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner to go back to factory for repairs, probably causing another major delay for troubled program (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6435",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/13/boeing-destack-starliner-delay/",
        "text": "Boeing said Friday that it will remove its Starliner spacecraft from atop of a rocket to fix valves that have remained stuck, a decision that will probably force yet another months-long delay in its do-over of a test flight without astronauts aboard.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEngineers have been trying since Aug. 3 to fix the problem, one in a series of significant issues that has plagued Boeing\u2019s troubled spacecraft program and become another symbol of the company\u2019s woes in the wake of the 737 Max scandal. Boeing had been hoping to restore functionality to the valves and get a launch off to the International Space Station this month under its contract with NASA. But the decision to move the spacecraft into the factory means the issue is a troublesome one. Because of other missions to the space station, a rescheduled launch might not happen until next year.Boeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launchIn 2014, NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX contracts to develop a spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the space station. Boeing received the majority of the money, $4.2 billion, and was expected to fly first. But it has run into a series of delays and setbacks, and last year SpaceX became the first company to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station in what is known as NASA\u2019s commercial crew program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing had been hoping to fly astronauts by the end of this year. But it must first complete a test flight without anyone on board to demonstrate the autonomous spacecraft can catch up with the station in orbit, dock with it and return safely to Earth. So far, it has struggled with that mission.The company botched its first attempt in December 2019, when Starliner suffered a major software breakdown that forced controllers on the ground to end the mission before the spacecraft could dock with the station.After 18 months, the spacecraft was finally mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket and rolled out to the launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in July last month, for what Boeing hoped would be a triumphant return to flight after its previously attempt went so horribly awry.Story continues below advertisementBut hours before the scheduled launch on Aug. 3, Boeing engineers discovered that 13 valves in the service module\u2019s propulsion system were stuck in the closed position when they should have been open. Crews scrambled to fix the problem and moved the spacecraft and rocket to a nearby assembly building, where technicians were able to reopen nine.AdvertisementThe company had held out hope that it would be able to get the launch off this month but conceded on Friday that it would not be possible.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.\u201cWe\u2019re obviously disappointed that we were unable to get these issues resolved in time to make this launch window,\u201d John Vollmer, vice president and program manager for Boeing\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, said in a briefing with reporters. \u201cThe launch window, while important to us, was not the driver. The driver was safety.\u201d He added that the company is \u201cdetermined to get the spacecraft back and ready to fly at the next available opportunity.\u201d Story continues below advertisementWhen that might be is unclear. The United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that operates the Atlas V rocket used to launch Starliner, has a launch scheduled for October to fly a NASA spacecraft to research asteroids associated with Jupiter. That will tie up the launchpad, forcing a wait.AdvertisementThe space station also has a heavy schedule planned through the end of the year. SpaceX is scheduled to fly a cargo resupply mission to the station at the end of this month that would occupy the docking port that Boeing was planning to use. It also has another flight with NASA astronauts scheduled for the end of October.Boeing and NASA officials said they were focusing on fixing the problem and then would determine when they might try to launch again.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s pretty early to speculate on where the flight might end up,\u201d said Steve Stich, the manager of NASA\u2019s commercial crew program. \u201cWe really need to get the vehicle back into the factory and get our hands on some valves and then figure out what the problem is and how to correct it.\u201d Boeing and NASA are exploring whether the cause of the problem was moisture from Florida\u2019s humid air interacting with a chemical that helps the rocket fuel burn. The resulting mixture damaged the valves and kept them from opening, officials theorize.Advertisement\u201cThat interaction, we believe, created some nitric acid,\u201d Vollmer said. \u201cAnd that nitric acid resulted in some corrosion, which resulted in stiction of those valves. So that is primarily what we\u2019re looking at right now, as the most likely cause for the issue.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIt was unclear whether the company would need to redesign the valves or whether \u201cit\u2019s just some preventative measures that we need to take,\u201d Vollmer said. He added that the company would work with its partner, Aerojet Rocketdyne, on solving the problem. A spokesman for Aerojet declined to comment.Vollmer added that the valve system worked fine in the weeks leading up to moving the spacecraft out of the climate-controlled factory to the launchpad. He said there had been no issues with the valves in the December 2019 flight, and \u201cno changes, either to the valves or the methodology with how we operate them.\u201dAdvertisementIn 2018, Boeing had a problem with valves in its launch abort system that failed to close properly and resulted in a fuel leak. The company said it had since remedied that issue, and Stich said Friday that it was in a separate system that operates differently and was \u201ctotally unrelated to what we saw\u201d with the most recent problem.Story continues below advertisementStarliner had another issue in 2019, this time with its parachutes during a test of its launch abort system. One of the three main chutes failed to deploy because a pin wasn\u2019t securely fastened to a smaller, pilot chute that was meant to pull out the larger, main chute. Engineers overlooked it because the pin was hidden beneath a protective sheath but said that on future flights they would go over the connection manually.Then in December 2019, when it first attempted the flight test without crew on board, the spacecraft ran into trouble as soon as it reached orbit. A software problem made the computer think it was at an entirely different part of the mission and as a result started firing its thrusters to put itself in the orientation it thought it should be in.AdvertisementControllers on the ground had trouble communicating with the spacecraft, and by the time they were finally able to get a software patch to the flight computers, the spacecraft had burned through too much fuel to dock with the station.Story continues below advertisementEngineers also discovered a second software problem that could have caused the service module to collide with the crew capsule, a potentially very dangerous situation that NASA officials said could have caused a loss of the vehicle. Controllers were able to fix that issue while the spacecraft was in orbit, and it landed safely two days after launching.Boeing spent more than a year-and-a-half preparing for its do-over flight, a mission that it said would cost the company $410 million. In the days leading up to the flight, it said it was confident that the craft was ready to fly again and that it hoped to be able to launch astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementNow, all of that is on hold again. And Vollmer could not say what the additional delay would cost the company, or who ultimately would pay for it.\u201cI would tell you we\u2019re a little sad,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations. \u201cBut I want to emphasize that this is another example of why these demo flights are so very important.\u201d\u201cThese are the kinds of things you want to find on the ground.\u201d Boeing engineers have been trying since Aug. 3 to fix a problem with 13 valves that forced the cancellation of a launch that was a do-over for a failed mission 19 months ago. Boeing\u2019s Starliner to go back to factory for repairs, probably causing another major delay for troubled program",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing declares spacecraft abort system test a success, despite the failure of one parachute (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6436",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/04/boeing-declares-spacecraft-abort-system-test-success-despite-failure-one-parachute/",
        "text": "Boeing on Monday morning declared successful its test of the emergency abort system for the spacecraft it\u2019s developing to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, even though only two of the three main parachutes deployed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe test, at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, was a long-anticipated milestone for a company that has been under fire for two fatal plane crashes that killed 346 people. The test of the system was intended to demonstrate that the Starliner spacecraft could carry astronauts to safety in case something were to go wrong with the rocket.Sitting on a test stand, the capsule fired its abort engines at 9:15 a.m. Eastern time, sending the capsule hurtling through the air to more than 4,000 feet. The capsule was to hit 650 mph in five seconds. While one of its main parachutes appeared to malfunction, two deployed and the spacecraft landed safely in the desert about a little over a minute later.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing officials said they have built in redundancy to the spacecraft, and having two of three parachutes deploy was good enough. \u201cThe test team and spacecraft performed flawlessly,\u201d John Mulholland, Boeing\u2019s Starliner program manager said in a statement. \u201cEmergency scenario testing is very complex, and today our team validated that the spacecraft will keep our crew safe in the unlikely event of an abort.\u201dBoeing spokesman Todd Blecher said the company will review the data from the test \u201cto determine how all of the systems performed, including the parachute deployment sequence.\u201d He characterized the parachute problem as \u201ca deployment anomaly, not a parachute failure.\u201dAlthough designed with three parachutes, two chutes opening successfully is acceptable for the test parameters and crew safety. pic.twitter.com/fru36SUMwM\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) November 4, 2019\n\nChris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut who works at Boeing as its director of crew and mission systems, said the test went \u201cpretty much the way I had envisioned.\u201d Mike Fincke, a NASA astronaut slated to fly on the first mission with crews, said it shows Boeing is \u201ccommitted to safety, and we are really looking forward to flying.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe test came just days after Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing\u2019s chief executive, was grilled by members of Congress over the problems the company has had with its 737 Max airplanes, which resulted in two crashes, killing 346 people.The scandal has engulfed the company and tarnished its reputation \u2014 one member of Congress during the hearings last week accused Boeing of building \u201cflying coffins\u201d \u2014 and so it needed the test Monday to go perfectly.While not perfect, having two parachutes working is \u201cacceptable\u201d to meeting the test objectives, Boeing spokesperson Jessica Landa said during the broadcast. Initially, Boeing did not intend to live-stream the event, but NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine insisted, writing on Twitter that he wanted \u201ctransparency for the taxpayer.\u201dThank you to @BoeingSpace. At my request, Monday\u2019s @Commercial_Crew Starliner pad abort test will be broadcast live. Transparency for the taxpayer. pic.twitter.com/yBEXA86mKh\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) October 31, 2019\n\nBoeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX are under contract from NASA to build spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station. The first flights were supposed to take place in 2017, but both companies have suffered problems and delays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has been unable to fly astronauts anywhere since the space shuttle was retired in 2011 and relies on Russia to launch its rockets to space. The delays have forced NASA to negotiate buying additional seats on Russian rockets at a cost of more than $80 million each.Last year, Boeing, which is being paid $4.8 billion by NASA under what is known as the commercial crew program, suffered a major setback during a test of its abort engines when four of eight valves failed to close properly, allowing propellant to leak. The investigation and efforts to fix the problem resulted in a one-year delay, according to the Government Accountability Office. But the system has since been tested successfully, the company said.The company hopes it will never have to use the abort system. But last year, a Russian Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian counterpart Alexey Ovchinin, suffered a failure when one of the side boosters did not separate properly and slammed into the rocket. That triggered the abort system, which gave Hague and Ovchinin a wild ride to the edge of space, but ultimately they landed safely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing\u2019s next major milestone is a test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, without anyone on board, to the space station. In that test, the spacecraft would dock autonomously to the station while traveling 17,500 mph in orbit. The flight is scheduled for Dec. 17.NASA hopes that Boeing and SpaceX, which completed its test flight to the station without crews earlier this year, will be able to fly astronauts to space sometime next year. Test appeared to go well even though only two of three main 'chutes deployed Boeing declares spacecraft abort system test a success, despite the failure of one parachute",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launch (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6437",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/29/boeing-starliner-iss-second-try/",
        "text": "Boeing isn\u2019t in the clear just yet.The aerospace conglomerate issued a surprisingly positive earnings report on Wednesday revealing that it turned a quarterly profit for the first time in nearly two years. The numbers, lifted by an increase in domestic travel and defense sales, were a bright spot in what had been a business slump following two 737 Max plane crashes, production delays and high-profile aircraft software issues. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the real test will come soon enough when the legacy aircraft manufacturer launches an unmanned space capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) in a make-or-break do-over mission. Failure would put a large chunk of the company\u2019s revenue and reputation in jeopardy. The redo launch attempt was initially set for Friday, but NASA and Boeing pushed it back due to an unexpected hiccup at the space station Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCurrently, launch teams are assessing the next available opportunity,\u201d NASA and Boeing said in a joint statement.\u2018Tug of war\u2019 at the International Space Station as crew sought to regain controlBoeing\u2019s first Starliner flight mission in 2019 was a flop. The autonomous capsule was supposed to fly to the space station carrying cargo for NASA and return to earth in a modern-day act of aviation prowess. However, the capsule\u2019s software sent it on a confusing turn. It never made it to the space station and was called back to Earth for Boeing to make software adjustments, which took over a year.The fallout from the capsule calamity allowed Elon Musk\u2019s scrappy upstart SpaceX to leave Boeing in the stardust, with three manned missions to the ISS under its belt before Boeing has made even one. Now, Boeing is trying to regain its reputation as an engineering powerhouse. Failing now would do irreparable damage to its reputation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s your second chance, so the expectation is that you will do better. If you don\u2019t, then the big question becomes why,\u201d said Ronald Epstein, aerospace analyst for Bank of America. \u201cThat would be a big public blow to their engineering rank.\u201dSelf-driving cars confront a daunting new challenge: New York City streetsBoeing officials are well aware of the stakes. \u201cIt is paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president who oversees the program, told reporters last week after NASA cleared the company to fly.For decades following the Cold War, Boeing was known for its engineering excellence with its mastery showing up in innovative bombers and other military planes. Somewhere a shift happened, and those years of technical know-how fell under question after two fatal 737 crashes in 2019. Then a software problem on Starliner put an onboard clock off by 11 hours, leading the computer to think it was at an entirely different point in the mission, which caused the spacecraft to fire its engines incorrectly and waste fuel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat followed was a firestorm of business issues, including a NASA probe into the failed attempt. NASA gets some of the blame too. The space agency took a more hands-off approach when examining Boeing leading up to the launch. Meanwhile, NASA undertook a full safety review of SpaceX, sparked after the company\u2019s chief executive was seen smoking marijuana during an interview streamed on the Internet.Nevertheless, the Starliner screw-up put NASA\u2019s relationship with Boeing to the test. One software problem was found and fixed midflight. Another, potentially more hazardous glitch was discovered once the capsule landed in the New Mexico desert. NASA and Boeing undertook a joint investigation to figure out why the mistakes happened. It contributed to the firing of its CEO, Dennis Muilenberg, and after the flawed flight, the company also replaced its Starliner program manager with a new executive.Eighty software tweaks later, NASA said Boeing could try again. But this time it\u2019s on Boeing\u2019s dime.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring Starliner\u2019s first flight, ground controllers had a hard time communicating with the capsule after it veered between communications satellites.\"We found that the communications (were) not as robust as we would have desired on our first flight. So we spent some effort, modifying that code,\u201d said Vollmer in a news conference Tuesday. \u201cThere were numerous other changes made to flight software.\u201dThose changes included tweaks to cancel out interfering frequencies from cellphones on Earth and ways to point the capsule away from potentially noisy interference, according to Boeing commercial astronaut Chris Ferguson.Boeing\u2019s woes have been further exacerbated by the success of SpaceX, the other company under contract with NASA to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts to the space station. When the contracts were awarded in 2014, most everyone in the aerospace industry expected Boeing to fly crews first. But SpaceX won that race last year, when it successfully flew two NASA astronauts in a test flight to the station. Since then, it has flown two more missions, each with four astronauts, earning it a spot as one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners.Billionaires can now escape earth\u2019s gravity, but not its regulatorsFixing Starliner hasn\u2019t been cheap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing initially built its seven-passenger capsule under a $4.5 billion NASA commercial crew contract. The software adjustments made over the past 18 months cost the company at least $410 million, according to Boeing\u2019s earnings report.While that\u2019s a just a drop in the bucket for a firm valued at $135 billion, another hiccup might cause NASA and others to reconsider doing business with the company in the future.Boeing hired a former SpaceX engineer, Jinnah Hosein, to get its software up to snuff \u201cacross the enterprise.\u201d Vollmer said Hosein offered input on software changes and attended monthly software reviews leading up to the second launch. One \u201cbig difference,\u201d Vollmer said, from before was that Boeing keenly focused on integrating software and hardware throughout the redevelopment process, \u201cnot just software as a discipline alone.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother round of similar software issues might run Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars, while a more disastrous fall from space would take Boeing back to square one. And a crisis situation of that magnitude could reverberate through the rest of its noncommercial division, representing 40 percent of Boeing\u2019s revenue from April through June, or roughly $6.8 billion of $16.9 billion the company took in.\u201cFrom a financial perspective, they\u2019d survive another near miss. But reputationally, it\u2019s already been one bad story after the other \u2014 well over and beyond what you\u2019d typically expect from a normal aerospace and defense company,\u201d said Burkett Huey, an analyst for the research firm Morningstar.Analysts also suggest that a second round of issues would raise questions about Boeing\u2019s hiring, internal engineering culture and priorities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCommercial aviation and defense require a level of engineering that\u2019s pretty serious. If you\u2019re having a shortage in your engineering ranks, that has broader implications beyond one little space program,\u201d Epstein said.There\u2019s always a chance for liftoff to be rescheduled. Boeing initially set up an instantaneous launch window for Friday, meaning there wasn\u2019t much wiggle room. The space agency previously set Aug. 3 and 4 and back up launch dates, but it\u2019s unclear whether liftoff will happen then either.Unpredictable afternoon thunderstorms are common this time of year at NASA\u2019s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where Starliner is poised to eventually launch.Story continues below advertisementOn Thursday morning, Boeing said there\u2019s a 50 percent chance that weather would cause it to change the launch date. The weather has already slowed down the prelaunch process. Crews were set to move the capsule atop its rocket from the hangar to a launch site on Wednesday, but the transition was delayed due to an Internet outage and inclement weather.Advertisement\u201cStorms roll in, so Starliner didn\u2019t roll out,\u201d Boeing tweeted Wednesday evening.Storms rolled in, so Starliner didn\u2019t roll out. #Starliner and #AtlasV are safe in the @ulalaunch Vertical Integration Facility and ready to roll tomorrow morning. pic.twitter.com/Pc7LO1oDZ3\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) July 29, 2021\n\nThe rollout of the Starliner spacecraft and Atlas V did happen early Thursday. But not long after, there was an unexpected problem on the ISS that sent the orbiting outpost 45-degrees outside its typical orientation, according to ISS Mission Control in Houston.The station\u2019s sudden movement was caused after thrusters on Russia\u2019s Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module inadvertently fired off. Officials haven\u2019t figured out why that happened, but the station is \u201cback in normal attitude and orientation,\u201d according to ISS. Still, the incident led officials to postpone the launch.When it does launch, Starliner is supposed to transport about 475 pounds of cargo to the station someday soon, and the voyage should take about 24 hours. NASA says the capsule will remain docked for five to 10 days, and will return with about 575 pounds of cargo.Boeing has said it hopes to proceed with a crewed flight later this year. Boeing\u2019s first Starliner flight mission in 2019 was a flop.  Friday's re-do is a make-or-break chance to show Boeing can still be a major participant in the U.S. commercial crew program. Boeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launch",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launch (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6438",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/29/boeing-starliner-iss-second-try/",
        "text": "Boeing isn\u2019t in the clear just yet.The aerospace conglomerate issued a surprisingly positive earnings report on Wednesday revealing that it turned a quarterly profit for the first time in nearly two years. The numbers, lifted by an increase in domestic travel and defense sales, were a bright spot in what had been a business slump following two 737 Max plane crashes, production delays and high-profile aircraft software issues. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the real test will come soon enough when the legacy aircraft manufacturer launches an unmanned space capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) in a make-or-break do-over mission. Failure would put a large chunk of the company\u2019s revenue and reputation in jeopardy. The redo launch attempt was initially set for Friday, but NASA and Boeing pushed it back due to an unexpected hiccup at the space station Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCurrently, launch teams are assessing the next available opportunity,\u201d NASA and Boeing said in a joint statement.\u2018Tug of war\u2019 at the International Space Station as crew sought to regain controlBoeing\u2019s first Starliner flight mission in 2019 was a flop. The autonomous capsule was supposed to fly to the space station carrying cargo for NASA and return to earth in a modern-day act of aviation prowess. However, the capsule\u2019s software sent it on a confusing turn. It never made it to the space station and was called back to Earth for Boeing to make software adjustments, which took over a year.The fallout from the capsule calamity allowed Elon Musk\u2019s scrappy upstart SpaceX to leave Boeing in the stardust, with three manned missions to the ISS under its belt before Boeing has made even one. Now, Boeing is trying to regain its reputation as an engineering powerhouse. Failing now would do irreparable damage to its reputation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s your second chance, so the expectation is that you will do better. If you don\u2019t, then the big question becomes why,\u201d said Ronald Epstein, aerospace analyst for Bank of America. \u201cThat would be a big public blow to their engineering rank.\u201dSelf-driving cars confront a daunting new challenge: New York City streetsBoeing officials are well aware of the stakes. \u201cIt is paramount importance that we have a successful flight,\u201d John Vollmer, a Boeing vice president who oversees the program, told reporters last week after NASA cleared the company to fly.For decades following the Cold War, Boeing was known for its engineering excellence with its mastery showing up in innovative bombers and other military planes. Somewhere a shift happened, and those years of technical know-how fell under question after two fatal 737 crashes in 2019. Then a software problem on Starliner put an onboard clock off by 11 hours, leading the computer to think it was at an entirely different point in the mission, which caused the spacecraft to fire its engines incorrectly and waste fuel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat followed was a firestorm of business issues, including a NASA probe into the failed attempt. NASA gets some of the blame too. The space agency took a more hands-off approach when examining Boeing leading up to the launch. Meanwhile, NASA undertook a full safety review of SpaceX, sparked after the company\u2019s chief executive was seen smoking marijuana during an interview streamed on the Internet.Nevertheless, the Starliner screw-up put NASA\u2019s relationship with Boeing to the test. One software problem was found and fixed midflight. Another, potentially more hazardous glitch was discovered once the capsule landed in the New Mexico desert. NASA and Boeing undertook a joint investigation to figure out why the mistakes happened. It contributed to the firing of its CEO, Dennis Muilenberg, and after the flawed flight, the company also replaced its Starliner program manager with a new executive.Eighty software tweaks later, NASA said Boeing could try again. But this time it\u2019s on Boeing\u2019s dime.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring Starliner\u2019s first flight, ground controllers had a hard time communicating with the capsule after it veered between communications satellites.\"We found that the communications (were) not as robust as we would have desired on our first flight. So we spent some effort, modifying that code,\u201d said Vollmer in a news conference Tuesday. \u201cThere were numerous other changes made to flight software.\u201dThose changes included tweaks to cancel out interfering frequencies from cellphones on Earth and ways to point the capsule away from potentially noisy interference, according to Boeing commercial astronaut Chris Ferguson.Boeing\u2019s woes have been further exacerbated by the success of SpaceX, the other company under contract with NASA to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts to the space station. When the contracts were awarded in 2014, most everyone in the aerospace industry expected Boeing to fly crews first. But SpaceX won that race last year, when it successfully flew two NASA astronauts in a test flight to the station. Since then, it has flown two more missions, each with four astronauts, earning it a spot as one of NASA\u2019s most trusted partners.Billionaires can now escape earth\u2019s gravity, but not its regulatorsFixing Starliner hasn\u2019t been cheap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing initially built its seven-passenger capsule under a $4.5 billion NASA commercial crew contract. The software adjustments made over the past 18 months cost the company at least $410 million, according to Boeing\u2019s earnings report.While that\u2019s a just a drop in the bucket for a firm valued at $135 billion, another hiccup might cause NASA and others to reconsider doing business with the company in the future.Boeing hired a former SpaceX engineer, Jinnah Hosein, to get its software up to snuff \u201cacross the enterprise.\u201d Vollmer said Hosein offered input on software changes and attended monthly software reviews leading up to the second launch. One \u201cbig difference,\u201d Vollmer said, from before was that Boeing keenly focused on integrating software and hardware throughout the redevelopment process, \u201cnot just software as a discipline alone.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother round of similar software issues might run Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars, while a more disastrous fall from space would take Boeing back to square one. And a crisis situation of that magnitude could reverberate through the rest of its noncommercial division, representing 40 percent of Boeing\u2019s revenue from April through June, or roughly $6.8 billion of $16.9 billion the company took in.\u201cFrom a financial perspective, they\u2019d survive another near miss. But reputationally, it\u2019s already been one bad story after the other \u2014 well over and beyond what you\u2019d typically expect from a normal aerospace and defense company,\u201d said Burkett Huey, an analyst for the research firm Morningstar.Analysts also suggest that a second round of issues would raise questions about Boeing\u2019s hiring, internal engineering culture and priorities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCommercial aviation and defense require a level of engineering that\u2019s pretty serious. If you\u2019re having a shortage in your engineering ranks, that has broader implications beyond one little space program,\u201d Epstein said.There\u2019s always a chance for liftoff to be rescheduled. Boeing initially set up an instantaneous launch window for Friday, meaning there wasn\u2019t much wiggle room. The space agency previously set Aug. 3 and 4 and back up launch dates, but it\u2019s unclear whether liftoff will happen then either.Unpredictable afternoon thunderstorms are common this time of year at NASA\u2019s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where Starliner is poised to eventually launch.Story continues below advertisementOn Thursday morning, Boeing said there\u2019s a 50 percent chance that weather would cause it to change the launch date. The weather has already slowed down the prelaunch process. Crews were set to move the capsule atop its rocket from the hangar to a launch site on Wednesday, but the transition was delayed due to an Internet outage and inclement weather.Advertisement\u201cStorms roll in, so Starliner didn\u2019t roll out,\u201d Boeing tweeted Wednesday evening.Storms rolled in, so Starliner didn\u2019t roll out. #Starliner and #AtlasV are safe in the @ulalaunch Vertical Integration Facility and ready to roll tomorrow morning. pic.twitter.com/Pc7LO1oDZ3\u2014 Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) July 29, 2021\n\nThe rollout of the Starliner spacecraft and Atlas V did happen early Thursday. But not long after, there was an unexpected problem on the ISS that sent the orbiting outpost 45-degrees outside its typical orientation, according to ISS Mission Control in Houston.The station\u2019s sudden movement was caused after thrusters on Russia\u2019s Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module inadvertently fired off. Officials haven\u2019t figured out why that happened, but the station is \u201cback in normal attitude and orientation,\u201d according to ISS. Still, the incident led officials to postpone the launch.When it does launch, Starliner is supposed to transport about 475 pounds of cargo to the station someday soon, and the voyage should take about 24 hours. NASA says the capsule will remain docked for five to 10 days, and will return with about 575 pounds of cargo.Boeing has said it hopes to proceed with a crewed flight later this year. Boeing\u2019s first Starliner flight mission in 2019 was a flop.  Friday's re-do is a make-or-break chance to show Boeing can still be a major participant in the U.S. commercial crew program. Boeing\u2019s engineering prowess faces a test: Its Starliner do-over launch",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "After botched test flight, Boeing will refly its Starliner spacecraft for NASA (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6439",
        "date": "2020-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/06/boeing-starliner-test-repeat/",
        "text": "Boeing has agreed to repeat the test flight of its Starliner space capsule, a decision that sets its crewed space ambitions back by months and makes it likely SpaceX will win the race to return NASA\u2019s astronauts to space from United States soil.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement comes after the initial flight late last year was marred by software glitches that prevented the capsule from reaching the International Space Station. The repeat flight likely will occur sometime in October or November, meaning the company probably won\u2019t fly a mission with astronauts on board this year, according to a person familiar with the plans but not authorized to speak publicly. SpaceX is scheduled to make the first crewed flight of its Dragon capsule next month.Story continues below advertisementRepeating the mission and investigating other problems with Starliner is an expensive proposition: Earlier this year, Boeing said it was taking a $410 million charge to offset the cost.NASA finds \u2018fundamental\u2019 software problems in Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraftThe maiden mission of the Starliner spacecraft \u2014 a test demonstration without crews on board \u2014 went awry shortly after lift off from Cape Canaveral in December. Since then, NASA and Boeing have revealed that there were several problems, including a timing issue with the spacecraft\u2019s computer that was 11 hours off.AdvertisementGiven the importance of the launches \u2014 to fly NASA astronauts for the first time since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011 \u2014 Boeing did not want to take any chances, the official said, especially given the crisis it endured when two of its 737 Max airplanes crashed killing 346 people.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe last thing you want is to have crews on board and have something go wrong,\u201d the official said.It was unclear how much NASA influenced Boeing\u2019s decision to refly the mission. The move was portrayed as a Boeing recommendation to NASA, which the space agency approved. In a statement, the space agency said it \u201chas accepted the proposal to fly the mission again and will work side-by-side with Boeing to resume flight tests.\u201dIf Boeing had proposed moving directly to a crewed mission, NASA said it \u201cwould have completed a detailed review and analysis of the proposal to determine the feasibility of the plan.\u201dHow Elon Musk went from sleeping in the factory to being on the cusp of launching a crew into spaceShortly after The Post published this story, Boeing confirmed it would repeat the mission without crews, which \u201cwill allow us to complete all flight test objectives and evaluate the performance of the second Starliner vehicle at no cost to the taxpayer. We will then proceed to the tremendous responsibility and privilege of flying astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt said it is \u201ccommitted to the safety of the men and women who design, build and ultimately will fly on the Starliner just as we have on every crewed mission to space.\u201dWhen NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, in 2014 to Boeing and SpaceX, Boeing was viewed as the industry stalwart that would likely earn the honor of restoring human spaceflight to American soil for NASA. But since then, SpaceX, which also flies cargo to the space station and was recently awarded a contract to resupply the outpost NASA wants to put in orbit around the moon, has become a force in the space industry long dominated by traditional contractors. Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationSpaceX is proceeding swiftly with its program. And after flying a successful mission without astronauts on board to the station last year, it is currently planning a flight with crews as early as May.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing had hoped to fly crews this year, but in addition to the timing issue, the company has said it encountered a software problem that would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire during the craft\u2019s return to Earth, when what\u2019s known as the service module separates from the crew module.Controllers on the ground discovered the problem while the spacecraft was in orbit, and were able to correct it. Had they not, however, it could have led to an array of significant problems, from damaging the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield to sending it tumbling off course.In damning report, watchdog paints troubling picture of relationship between NASA and BoeingNASA and Boeing initially played down the significance of the spacecraft\u2019s woes, and held out hope that Boeing would be able to proceed with a flight with astronauts this year. But as the company and space agency uncovered more problems, NASA grew more pointed in its criticism of one of its most trusted contractors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, NASA said in a blog post that \u201cthere were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects. It added that those problems would have had serious consequences and \u201cled to risk of spacecraft loss.\u201dAs a result, Boeing is now reviewing all 1 million lines of code on the spacecraft \u2014 a lengthy and expensive process.Last month, SpaceX announced a problem leading up to the test of its spacecraft\u2019s parachute system. A capsule-shaped device designed to simulate the weight and mass of the spacecraft became unstable as it was being hoisted aloft by a helicopter. Out of an abundance of caution, the pilot released the test device, destroying it.But officials said they didn\u2019t think the setback would delay the company\u2019s progress. And a crewed launch remains scheduled for next month. The repeat is expected to come in October or November, meaning Boeing won\u2019t meet its goal of a  flight with crews this year After botched test flight, Boeing will refly its Starliner spacecraft for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "After botched test flight, Boeing will refly its Starliner spacecraft for NASA (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6440",
        "date": "2020-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/06/boeing-starliner-test-repeat/",
        "text": "Boeing has agreed to repeat the test flight of its Starliner space capsule, a decision that sets its crewed space ambitions back by months and makes it likely SpaceX will win the race to return NASA\u2019s astronauts to space from United States soil.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe announcement comes after the initial flight late last year was marred by software glitches that prevented the capsule from reaching the International Space Station. The repeat flight likely will occur sometime in October or November, meaning the company probably won\u2019t fly a mission with astronauts on board this year, according to a person familiar with the plans but not authorized to speak publicly. SpaceX is scheduled to make the first crewed flight of its Dragon capsule next month.Story continues below advertisementRepeating the mission and investigating other problems with Starliner is an expensive proposition: Earlier this year, Boeing said it was taking a $410 million charge to offset the cost.NASA finds \u2018fundamental\u2019 software problems in Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraftThe maiden mission of the Starliner spacecraft \u2014 a test demonstration without crews on board \u2014 went awry shortly after lift off from Cape Canaveral in December. Since then, NASA and Boeing have revealed that there were several problems, including a timing issue with the spacecraft\u2019s computer that was 11 hours off.AdvertisementGiven the importance of the launches \u2014 to fly NASA astronauts for the first time since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011 \u2014 Boeing did not want to take any chances, the official said, especially given the crisis it endured when two of its 737 Max airplanes crashed killing 346 people.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe last thing you want is to have crews on board and have something go wrong,\u201d the official said.It was unclear how much NASA influenced Boeing\u2019s decision to refly the mission. The move was portrayed as a Boeing recommendation to NASA, which the space agency approved. In a statement, the space agency said it \u201chas accepted the proposal to fly the mission again and will work side-by-side with Boeing to resume flight tests.\u201dIf Boeing had proposed moving directly to a crewed mission, NASA said it \u201cwould have completed a detailed review and analysis of the proposal to determine the feasibility of the plan.\u201dHow Elon Musk went from sleeping in the factory to being on the cusp of launching a crew into spaceShortly after The Post published this story, Boeing confirmed it would repeat the mission without crews, which \u201cwill allow us to complete all flight test objectives and evaluate the performance of the second Starliner vehicle at no cost to the taxpayer. We will then proceed to the tremendous responsibility and privilege of flying astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt said it is \u201ccommitted to the safety of the men and women who design, build and ultimately will fly on the Starliner just as we have on every crewed mission to space.\u201dWhen NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, in 2014 to Boeing and SpaceX, Boeing was viewed as the industry stalwart that would likely earn the honor of restoring human spaceflight to American soil for NASA. But since then, SpaceX, which also flies cargo to the space station and was recently awarded a contract to resupply the outpost NASA wants to put in orbit around the moon, has become a force in the space industry long dominated by traditional contractors. Boeing faced only \u2018limited\u2019 safety review from NASA, while SpaceX got a full examinationSpaceX is proceeding swiftly with its program. And after flying a successful mission without astronauts on board to the station last year, it is currently planning a flight with crews as early as May.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing had hoped to fly crews this year, but in addition to the timing issue, the company has said it encountered a software problem that would have caused the wrong thrusters to fire during the craft\u2019s return to Earth, when what\u2019s known as the service module separates from the crew module.Controllers on the ground discovered the problem while the spacecraft was in orbit, and were able to correct it. Had they not, however, it could have led to an array of significant problems, from damaging the spacecraft\u2019s heat shield to sending it tumbling off course.In damning report, watchdog paints troubling picture of relationship between NASA and BoeingNASA and Boeing initially played down the significance of the spacecraft\u2019s woes, and held out hope that Boeing would be able to proceed with a flight with astronauts this year. But as the company and space agency uncovered more problems, NASA grew more pointed in its criticism of one of its most trusted contractors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this year, NASA said in a blog post that \u201cthere were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects. It added that those problems would have had serious consequences and \u201cled to risk of spacecraft loss.\u201dAs a result, Boeing is now reviewing all 1 million lines of code on the spacecraft \u2014 a lengthy and expensive process.Last month, SpaceX announced a problem leading up to the test of its spacecraft\u2019s parachute system. A capsule-shaped device designed to simulate the weight and mass of the spacecraft became unstable as it was being hoisted aloft by a helicopter. Out of an abundance of caution, the pilot released the test device, destroying it.But officials said they didn\u2019t think the setback would delay the company\u2019s progress. And a crewed launch remains scheduled for next month. The repeat is expected to come in October or November, meaning Boeing won\u2019t meet its goal of a  flight with crews this year After botched test flight, Boeing will refly its Starliner spacecraft for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing admits it failed to test the Starliner spacecraft adequately before its maiden flight (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6441",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/28/boeing-admits-starliner-testing-flaws/",
        "text": "Boeing acknowledged Friday that its procedures for testing the Starliner spacecraft\u2019s systems ahead of its marred maiden flight in December were seriously flawed and that it now plans to revamp them as it scrambles to reassure NASA that one of its longest and most trusted contractors is up to the task of flying astronauts into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the most comprehensive comments to date on what went wrong during Boeing\u2019s test mission \u2014 an autonomous flight without astronauts \u2014 to the International Space Station, John Mulholland, the manager of Boeing\u2019s Starliner program, said the company had cut short a key test of the craft\u2019s software, failed to test a critical system against crucial hardware, and instead used a flawed computer system to conduct the test. It was a stunning admission from the world\u2019s largest aerospace company, which has been beset with questions about the software aboard its 737 Max aircraft. That software is being blamed for two fatal crashes that killed 346 people and led to the global grounding of the aircraft nearly a year ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMulholland said that in addition to reviewing all 1 million lines of software code on the spacecraft, Boeing will revamp the way it tests its systems before they are put into service.\u201cFrom a hindsight standpoint, it\u2019s very easy to see what we should have done because we uncovered an error,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I really don\u2019t want anyone to have the impression that this team tried to take shortcuts. They didn\u2019t. They did an abundance of testing. And in certain areas obviously we have some gaps to fill.\u201dWith the flight of its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing had hoped to show that it was getting close to flying NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station as part of the agency\u2019s multi-billion-dollar \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201d But instead, the mission became another in a series of significant setbacks for the beleaguered company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Starliner spacecraft encountered problems almost immediately after reaching space when its onboard computer, with its time miscalibrated by 11 hours, failed to fire the thrusters that would send the craft on a path to the space station. While aloft, the spacecraft struggled to communicate with the ground. By the time controllers could figure out what went wrong, the spacecraft had burned too much fuel, preventing it from docking with the station, one of its primary objectives.When Boeing officials discovered a software issue had caused the timing problem, they immediately began to hunt for other potential problems. It found a big one: another issue that would have fired the wrong thrusters during the separation of the service module and the crew module.Boeing was able to quickly diagnose that problem and send a software patch to the spacecraft. The spacecraft then landed safely in the New Mexico desert several days ahead of schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is investigating the mishap and expects to release more results of its probe next week. The space agency is still mulling whether to require Boeing to fly another test mission without astronauts or to proceed to a flight with three people on boardDoug Loverro, NASA\u2019s head of human spaceflight, said earlier this month that Boeing\u2019s problems were a \u201cfundamental\u201d and widespread \u201cbreakdown of the software process.\u201d\u201cWe don\u2019t know how many software errors we have \u2014 if we have just two or many hundreds,\u201d he said.He said the company needed to make its testing procedures more robust. And in a blog post, NASA said \u201cthere were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects.\u201d It added that the problems could have had serious consequences and \u201cled to spacecraft loss.\u201dNASA finds 'fundamental' problems in Boeing's Starliner spacecraftSpeaking to reporters on Friday, Mulholland said that the company has been looking \u201cto see if we have any other coding anomalies we need to fix. We haven\u2019t found any yet.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile many things went right during the mission, from its heatshield to environmental controls to the landing, he said the company knew \u201cwe need to do our part to rebuild trust with our customer.\u201dOn the timing issue, he said the clock on the spacecraft was pulling its time from the rocket. During tests of the software in the laboratory, the crews were primarily concerned with making sure the two vehicles were communicating correctly. The testing team proved there were no communication issues, but it cut the test short so it never uncovered that the spacecraft was reading the wrong time.\u201cUnfortunately, the run was stopped after we separated from the launch vehicle,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementIf the test had continued, \u201cwe would have caught it.\u201dBoeing also had a breakdown in the testing of another key milestone in the flight \u2014 the moment when the service module was to separate from the crew module just prior to re-entry into the atmosphere. At the same time the test of the software was supposed to happen, Boeing had simultaneously scheduled a \u201chot fire\u201d test of the module\u2019s thrusters. As a result, the actual service module hardware was at another location for that test. To test the software, then, Boeing officials used an \u201cemulator,\u201d a computer system used to mimic the service module.AdvertisementThe problem was the emulator had the wrong thruster configuration programmed in.Story continues below advertisementMulholland said the problems with the tests were \u201cdefinitely not a matter of cost. Cost has never been in any way a key factor in any of our decisions on how we need to test our systems. The team thought it was more logical to break these mission phases into chunks and to do a lot of testing in those smaller chunks.\u201dIn the future, he said, Boeing would continue to test the systems in smaller chunks but then also perform longer tests to simulate the moment from launch to docking at the space station, and then from release to landing.\u201cThis is a tough business,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a game of inches. And so you had a highly talented, very dedicated team that made that error. And going forward we just need to make sure we have the discipline that it won\u2019t happen again.\u201d The company cut a key test short and used faulty software, setbacks that led to a flawed mission Boeing admits it failed to test the Starliner spacecraft adequately before its maiden flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing admits it failed to test the Starliner spacecraft adequately before its maiden flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6442",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/28/boeing-admits-starliner-testing-flaws/",
        "text": "Boeing acknowledged Friday that its procedures for testing the Starliner spacecraft\u2019s systems ahead of its marred maiden flight in December were seriously flawed and that it now plans to revamp them as it scrambles to reassure NASA that one of its longest and most trusted contractors is up to the task of flying astronauts into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the most comprehensive comments to date on what went wrong during Boeing\u2019s test mission \u2014 an autonomous flight without astronauts \u2014 to the International Space Station, John Mulholland, the manager of Boeing\u2019s Starliner program, said the company had cut short a key test of the craft\u2019s software, failed to test a critical system against crucial hardware, and instead used a flawed computer system to conduct the test. It was a stunning admission from the world\u2019s largest aerospace company, which has been beset with questions about the software aboard its 737 Max aircraft. That software is being blamed for two fatal crashes that killed 346 people and led to the global grounding of the aircraft nearly a year ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMulholland said that in addition to reviewing all 1 million lines of software code on the spacecraft, Boeing will revamp the way it tests its systems before they are put into service.\u201cFrom a hindsight standpoint, it\u2019s very easy to see what we should have done because we uncovered an error,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I really don\u2019t want anyone to have the impression that this team tried to take shortcuts. They didn\u2019t. They did an abundance of testing. And in certain areas obviously we have some gaps to fill.\u201dWith the flight of its Starliner spacecraft, Boeing had hoped to show that it was getting close to flying NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station as part of the agency\u2019s multi-billion-dollar \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201d But instead, the mission became another in a series of significant setbacks for the beleaguered company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Starliner spacecraft encountered problems almost immediately after reaching space when its onboard computer, with its time miscalibrated by 11 hours, failed to fire the thrusters that would send the craft on a path to the space station. While aloft, the spacecraft struggled to communicate with the ground. By the time controllers could figure out what went wrong, the spacecraft had burned too much fuel, preventing it from docking with the station, one of its primary objectives.When Boeing officials discovered a software issue had caused the timing problem, they immediately began to hunt for other potential problems. It found a big one: another issue that would have fired the wrong thrusters during the separation of the service module and the crew module.Boeing was able to quickly diagnose that problem and send a software patch to the spacecraft. The spacecraft then landed safely in the New Mexico desert several days ahead of schedule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is investigating the mishap and expects to release more results of its probe next week. The space agency is still mulling whether to require Boeing to fly another test mission without astronauts or to proceed to a flight with three people on boardDoug Loverro, NASA\u2019s head of human spaceflight, said earlier this month that Boeing\u2019s problems were a \u201cfundamental\u201d and widespread \u201cbreakdown of the software process.\u201d\u201cWe don\u2019t know how many software errors we have \u2014 if we have just two or many hundreds,\u201d he said.He said the company needed to make its testing procedures more robust. And in a blog post, NASA said \u201cthere were numerous instances where the Boeing software quality processes either should have or could have uncovered the defects.\u201d It added that the problems could have had serious consequences and \u201cled to spacecraft loss.\u201dNASA finds 'fundamental' problems in Boeing's Starliner spacecraftSpeaking to reporters on Friday, Mulholland said that the company has been looking \u201cto see if we have any other coding anomalies we need to fix. We haven\u2019t found any yet.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile many things went right during the mission, from its heatshield to environmental controls to the landing, he said the company knew \u201cwe need to do our part to rebuild trust with our customer.\u201dOn the timing issue, he said the clock on the spacecraft was pulling its time from the rocket. During tests of the software in the laboratory, the crews were primarily concerned with making sure the two vehicles were communicating correctly. The testing team proved there were no communication issues, but it cut the test short so it never uncovered that the spacecraft was reading the wrong time.\u201cUnfortunately, the run was stopped after we separated from the launch vehicle,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementIf the test had continued, \u201cwe would have caught it.\u201dBoeing also had a breakdown in the testing of another key milestone in the flight \u2014 the moment when the service module was to separate from the crew module just prior to re-entry into the atmosphere. At the same time the test of the software was supposed to happen, Boeing had simultaneously scheduled a \u201chot fire\u201d test of the module\u2019s thrusters. As a result, the actual service module hardware was at another location for that test. To test the software, then, Boeing officials used an \u201cemulator,\u201d a computer system used to mimic the service module.AdvertisementThe problem was the emulator had the wrong thruster configuration programmed in.Story continues below advertisementMulholland said the problems with the tests were \u201cdefinitely not a matter of cost. Cost has never been in any way a key factor in any of our decisions on how we need to test our systems. The team thought it was more logical to break these mission phases into chunks and to do a lot of testing in those smaller chunks.\u201dIn the future, he said, Boeing would continue to test the systems in smaller chunks but then also perform longer tests to simulate the moment from launch to docking at the space station, and then from release to landing.\u201cThis is a tough business,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a game of inches. And so you had a highly talented, very dedicated team that made that error. And going forward we just need to make sure we have the discipline that it won\u2019t happen again.\u201d The company cut a key test short and used faulty software, setbacks that led to a flawed mission Boeing admits it failed to test the Starliner spacecraft adequately before its maiden flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6443",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-auction/",
        "text": "Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, said Wednesday that it will fly people to the edge of space for the first time this summer and that one of the seats will go to the winner of an online auction intended to raise money for its nonprofit foundation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its autonomous New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to the edge of space 15 times through what it said was \u201ca meticulous and incremental flight program to test its multiple redundant safety systems.\u201d It added: \u201cNow, it\u2019s time for astronauts to climb onboard.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch, from the company\u2019s sprawling facility in West Texas, is scheduled for July 20 \u2014 the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And the announcement came on the 60th anniversary of Alan Shepard\u2019s spaceflight \u2014 the first time an American reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s rocket and spacecraft are named for Shepard and would follow a suborbital flight trajectory somewhat similar to his mission in 1961. Instead of reaching orbit, the New Shepard rocket propels the spacecraft to an altitude of about 65 miles, just past what\u2019s known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, or the edge of space, before the spacecraft falls back to Earth. In all, the flight lasts about 10 minutes, with just a few minutes in the weightless environment of space.Still, the company says the experience would be transformative.In the years since Shepard\u2019s flight, the company said, \u201cfewer than 600 astronauts have been to space above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n Line to see the borderless Earth and the thin limb of our atmosphere. They all say this experience changes them.\u201dAstronauts in their own words: What going to space is really likeCrew members would be able to gaze out of \u201cthe largest windows that have ever flown in space,\u201d Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales, said in a media briefing. \u201cPerfect from which to gaze out to the see the beautiful stars and the colors of Earth popping back at you.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProceeds from the online auction would benefit Blue Origin\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which seeks to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math \u201cand help invent the future of life in space.\u201d Sealed online bidding opened Wednesday, with the live online auction set for June 12.Cornell would not say what the company will charge for tickets for regular flights to space or who the other crew members will be. When asked specifically about Bezos, she declined to comment on when or whether he will go to space, saying only: \u201cBut obviously if he does, the world will know.\u201dVirgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by Richard Branson, has charged as much as $250,000 for tickets on its suborbital spaceplane. But it has recently said that the prices will increase once the company reopens sales. It already has flown two missions to the edge of space and back with crews on board. It plans another crewed flight this month ahead of Branson\u2019s first flight later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf Blue Origin can fly people successfully, it will join the ranks of a growing number of human spaceflight companies. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has now flown three human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station for NASA and has two flights of private citizens scheduled, including one later this year in which two seats were also raffled off to members of the public.Boeing also is under contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the space station and hopes to fly its first crewed mission by the end of the year or early next year.Blue Origin has larger ambitions in space as well. It is working to develop a much larger rocket, known as New Glenn, capable of getting to orbit. It also bid for the NASA contract to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the surface of the moon. It lost that contract to SpaceX but is protesting the decision. The company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6444",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-auction/",
        "text": "Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, said Wednesday that it will fly people to the edge of space for the first time this summer and that one of the seats will go to the winner of an online auction intended to raise money for its nonprofit foundation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its autonomous New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to the edge of space 15 times through what it said was \u201ca meticulous and incremental flight program to test its multiple redundant safety systems.\u201d It added: \u201cNow, it\u2019s time for astronauts to climb onboard.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch, from the company\u2019s sprawling facility in West Texas, is scheduled for July 20 \u2014 the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And the announcement came on the 60th anniversary of Alan Shepard\u2019s spaceflight \u2014 the first time an American reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s rocket and spacecraft are named for Shepard and would follow a suborbital flight trajectory somewhat similar to his mission in 1961. Instead of reaching orbit, the New Shepard rocket propels the spacecraft to an altitude of about 65 miles, just past what\u2019s known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, or the edge of space, before the spacecraft falls back to Earth. In all, the flight lasts about 10 minutes, with just a few minutes in the weightless environment of space.Still, the company says the experience would be transformative.In the years since Shepard\u2019s flight, the company said, \u201cfewer than 600 astronauts have been to space above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n Line to see the borderless Earth and the thin limb of our atmosphere. They all say this experience changes them.\u201dAstronauts in their own words: What going to space is really likeCrew members would be able to gaze out of \u201cthe largest windows that have ever flown in space,\u201d Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales, said in a media briefing. \u201cPerfect from which to gaze out to the see the beautiful stars and the colors of Earth popping back at you.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProceeds from the online auction would benefit Blue Origin\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which seeks to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math \u201cand help invent the future of life in space.\u201d Sealed online bidding opened Wednesday, with the live online auction set for June 12.Cornell would not say what the company will charge for tickets for regular flights to space or who the other crew members will be. When asked specifically about Bezos, she declined to comment on when or whether he will go to space, saying only: \u201cBut obviously if he does, the world will know.\u201dVirgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by Richard Branson, has charged as much as $250,000 for tickets on its suborbital spaceplane. But it has recently said that the prices will increase once the company reopens sales. It already has flown two missions to the edge of space and back with crews on board. It plans another crewed flight this month ahead of Branson\u2019s first flight later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf Blue Origin can fly people successfully, it will join the ranks of a growing number of human spaceflight companies. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has now flown three human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station for NASA and has two flights of private citizens scheduled, including one later this year in which two seats were also raffled off to members of the public.Boeing also is under contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the space station and hopes to fly its first crewed mission by the end of the year or early next year.Blue Origin has larger ambitions in space as well. It is working to develop a much larger rocket, known as New Glenn, capable of getting to orbit. It also bid for the NASA contract to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the surface of the moon. It lost that contract to SpaceX but is protesting the decision. The company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6445",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-auction/",
        "text": "Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, said Wednesday that it will fly people to the edge of space for the first time this summer and that one of the seats will go to the winner of an online auction intended to raise money for its nonprofit foundation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its autonomous New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to the edge of space 15 times through what it said was \u201ca meticulous and incremental flight program to test its multiple redundant safety systems.\u201d It added: \u201cNow, it\u2019s time for astronauts to climb onboard.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch, from the company\u2019s sprawling facility in West Texas, is scheduled for July 20 \u2014 the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And the announcement came on the 60th anniversary of Alan Shepard\u2019s spaceflight \u2014 the first time an American reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s rocket and spacecraft are named for Shepard and would follow a suborbital flight trajectory somewhat similar to his mission in 1961. Instead of reaching orbit, the New Shepard rocket propels the spacecraft to an altitude of about 65 miles, just past what\u2019s known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, or the edge of space, before the spacecraft falls back to Earth. In all, the flight lasts about 10 minutes, with just a few minutes in the weightless environment of space.Still, the company says the experience would be transformative.In the years since Shepard\u2019s flight, the company said, \u201cfewer than 600 astronauts have been to space above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n Line to see the borderless Earth and the thin limb of our atmosphere. They all say this experience changes them.\u201dAstronauts in their own words: What going to space is really likeCrew members would be able to gaze out of \u201cthe largest windows that have ever flown in space,\u201d Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales, said in a media briefing. \u201cPerfect from which to gaze out to the see the beautiful stars and the colors of Earth popping back at you.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProceeds from the online auction would benefit Blue Origin\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which seeks to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math \u201cand help invent the future of life in space.\u201d Sealed online bidding opened Wednesday, with the live online auction set for June 12.Cornell would not say what the company will charge for tickets for regular flights to space or who the other crew members will be. When asked specifically about Bezos, she declined to comment on when or whether he will go to space, saying only: \u201cBut obviously if he does, the world will know.\u201dVirgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by Richard Branson, has charged as much as $250,000 for tickets on its suborbital spaceplane. But it has recently said that the prices will increase once the company reopens sales. It already has flown two missions to the edge of space and back with crews on board. It plans another crewed flight this month ahead of Branson\u2019s first flight later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf Blue Origin can fly people successfully, it will join the ranks of a growing number of human spaceflight companies. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has now flown three human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station for NASA and has two flights of private citizens scheduled, including one later this year in which two seats were also raffled off to members of the public.Boeing also is under contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the space station and hopes to fly its first crewed mission by the end of the year or early next year.Blue Origin has larger ambitions in space as well. It is working to develop a much larger rocket, known as New Glenn, capable of getting to orbit. It also bid for the NASA contract to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the surface of the moon. It lost that contract to SpaceX but is protesting the decision. The company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6446",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-auction/",
        "text": "Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, said Wednesday that it will fly people to the edge of space for the first time this summer and that one of the seats will go to the winner of an online auction intended to raise money for its nonprofit foundation. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its autonomous New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to the edge of space 15 times through what it said was \u201ca meticulous and incremental flight program to test its multiple redundant safety systems.\u201d It added: \u201cNow, it\u2019s time for astronauts to climb onboard.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The launch, from the company\u2019s sprawling facility in West Texas, is scheduled for July 20 \u2014 the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And the announcement came on the 60th anniversary of Alan Shepard\u2019s spaceflight \u2014 the first time an American reached space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s rocket and spacecraft are named for Shepard and would follow a suborbital flight trajectory somewhat similar to his mission in 1961. Instead of reaching orbit, the New Shepard rocket propels the spacecraft to an altitude of about 65 miles, just past what\u2019s known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, or the edge of space, before the spacecraft falls back to Earth. In all, the flight lasts about 10 minutes, with just a few minutes in the weightless environment of space.Still, the company says the experience would be transformative.In the years since Shepard\u2019s flight, the company said, \u201cfewer than 600 astronauts have been to space above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n Line to see the borderless Earth and the thin limb of our atmosphere. They all say this experience changes them.\u201dAstronauts in their own words: What going to space is really likeCrew members would be able to gaze out of \u201cthe largest windows that have ever flown in space,\u201d Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin\u2019s director of astronaut and orbital sales, said in a media briefing. \u201cPerfect from which to gaze out to the see the beautiful stars and the colors of Earth popping back at you.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProceeds from the online auction would benefit Blue Origin\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which seeks to inspire young people to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math \u201cand help invent the future of life in space.\u201d Sealed online bidding opened Wednesday, with the live online auction set for June 12.Cornell would not say what the company will charge for tickets for regular flights to space or who the other crew members will be. When asked specifically about Bezos, she declined to comment on when or whether he will go to space, saying only: \u201cBut obviously if he does, the world will know.\u201dVirgin Galactic, a space tourism company founded by Richard Branson, has charged as much as $250,000 for tickets on its suborbital spaceplane. But it has recently said that the prices will increase once the company reopens sales. It already has flown two missions to the edge of space and back with crews on board. It plans another crewed flight this month ahead of Branson\u2019s first flight later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf Blue Origin can fly people successfully, it will join the ranks of a growing number of human spaceflight companies. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has now flown three human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station for NASA and has two flights of private citizens scheduled, including one later this year in which two seats were also raffled off to members of the public.Boeing also is under contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the space station and hopes to fly its first crewed mission by the end of the year or early next year.Blue Origin has larger ambitions in space as well. It is working to develop a much larger rocket, known as New Glenn, capable of getting to orbit. It also bid for the NASA contract to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the surface of the moon. It lost that contract to SpaceX but is protesting the decision. The company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin will auction a trip to space to the highest bidder",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing, NASA clash over push for Congress to fund new stage for moon rocket  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6447",
        "date": "2019-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/11/boeing-nasa-clash-over-boeings-push-congress-fund-new-stage-its-moon-rocket/",
        "text": "At a ceremony this week at NASA\u2019s New Orleans assembly plant where Boeing is building what will be the most powerful rocket ever to fly, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine cheered the \u201cbeautiful, beautiful\u201d progress its prime contractor had made on the gigantic and much maligned project. He declared the troubles that have long plagued the development of the rocket\u2019s main section to be in the past. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat he did not mention was the fight brewing behind the scenes over Boeing\u2019s effort to force NASA to fast-track the company\u2019s next offering: a new, enhanced second stage that would give the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket dramatically more oomph than even the mighty Saturn V that sent astronauts to the moon during the Apollo era. Developing the second stage would create another potential financial windfall for Boeing.NASA, already stung by delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns in the SLS program, is openly opposed to speeding up development of the upper stage. Having spent $34 billion so far on SLS, the Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft and the associated ground systems, a cost that NASA\u2019s inspector general said would grow to $50 billion by 2024, NASA wants to slow down work on a project it fears will suffer the same fate as the SLS main stage: More cost overruns. More delays. No moon landings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s budget request for next year was clear about its intentions. Citing \u201cdelays and performance issues,\u201d the \u201cfinal design efforts\u201d on the version of the rocket that would use what\u2019s known as the Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS, are to be \u201cdeferred\u201d so that Boeing, the program\u2019s prime contractor, can remain focused on completing the core section of the SLS rocket. That, NASA has said, is key to meeting a White House mandate to return people to the moon by 2024, a program NASA calls Artemis.In an interview, Bridenstine said that while the upper stage will be a great asset for NASA some day, he said \u201cany plan that requires an EUS to be ready by 2024 is a plan that reduces the probability of success. It\u2019s just not going to be ready.\u201dWhile Boeing said its top priority is delivering the rocket\u2019s core stage, it is also pushing aggressively for additional resources, lobbying Congress and trying to win public support.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s an effort that demonstrates how the industry stalwart, facing one of the darkest moments in its more than 100-year history after two commercial airline crashes killed 346 people, still wields enormous power, not only over how billions of dollars of taxpayer money is spent but also in shaping national policy \u2014 in this case how, when and whether the space agency returns humans to the moon.Companies in the cosmos: The new space raceBut tensions over the upper stage have spilled into the open in a rare public disagreement between NASA and one of its biggest contractors. On Tuesday, after Boeing was contacted by The Washington Post for this story, the company published a blog post saying it was \u201caccelerating work on a powerful new upper stage,\u201d and said \u201cNASA expects to fly the EUS\u201d for its lunar landing mission, known as Artemis III.That elicited a strong response from Bridenstine, who told The Post in a statement, \u201cNASA believes that there is tremendous value in the Exploration Upper Stage, but no one at NASA believes it will be available by Artemis III.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, government watchdogs have sounded the alarm over Boeing\u2019s management of the SLS program. Boeing is under what\u2019s known as a cost-plus contract, which covers allowed expenses but also ensures a profit for the contractor. Boeing\u2019s contract also has an incentive fee through which it has been awarded tens of millions of dollars despite the poor performance.Given that history, Boeing\u2019s efforts on the upper stage have rubbed some in NASA the wrong way.\u201cAll of our contractors lobby Congress to achieve what is in their best interest even though it may not be in the best interest of the nation,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cThis is another example of that. My job as NASA administrator is to make sure we do what\u2019s right for the country, and for the taxpayer.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSo far, Congress has appropriated several hundred million dollars for the upper stage, which is still in the development phase. Boeing says it can be ready in time for a 2024 moon landing \u2014 if it\u2019s given more money, though it has not said exactly how much.AdvertisementNASA\u2019s Artemis plan is a far cry from the Apollo program, where 12 astronauts walked on the lunar surface, leaving flags and footprints behind. The last mission was in 1972, and no one has been back since then despite attempts by various administrations.Under President Trump, who has made space a priority, NASA plans to create a permanent presence on and around the moon, allowing for more science and deeper exploration of the solar system.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis time when we go to the moon, we\u2019re going to stay, with a purpose of learning how to live and work on another world so we can take that knowledge and information to Mars,\u201d Bridenstine said during the event in New Orleans.To achieve that goal, NASA plans to build a mini space station that would orbit the moon, known as the Gateway, which Bridenstine has called \u201cthe cornerstone\u201d of the agency\u2019s lunar plans. The Gateway would allow NASA to access a key region of the moon \u2014 the South Pole, where there is water in the form of ice in the permanently shadowed craters.AdvertisementWater, of course, is \u201clife support,\u201d as Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s air to breathe. It\u2019s water to drink. But it\u2019s also, if you can imagine, rocket fuel.\u201d Its components \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 can be used as propellant, turning the moon, then, into a gas station in space.Story continues below advertisementThe Gateway, Bridenstine said, \u201cis going to enable us to do more science than ever before.\u201dBecause the Gateway would be outfitted with a robust communications system, it could assist in harnessing data from science experiments. One in particular, he said, would look deep into space from the far side of the moon. Normally, the mission would cost about $500 million, he said. But with the Gateway \u201cwe\u2019re going to have a communication architecture at the moon and we don\u2019t have to launch these large aperture antennas for communications, we can get high throughput data down to Earth quickly. All of a sudden, that mission goes from $500 million down to $90 million.\u201dHow to dress for spaceBut Boeing has another plan: Go directly to the surface of the moon. But that\u2019s possible only if it has the enhanced upper stage ready in time, which is one of the reasons the company is pushing so hard to have Congress fund it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Gateway is a far more complex endeavor, requiring launches of multiple rockets, and the in-orbit assembly of the various components of the station. Going direct is simpler, leading to a higher probability of success, the company argues. Boeing says its plan wouldn\u2019t eliminate Gateway, just give NASA a backup in case the Gateway isn\u2019t ready.\u201cYou don\u2019t want to be ready to go to the moon, but waiting for Gateway,\u201d Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch division, said in an interview. NASA, however, is struggling to get Congress to fund the Artemis program and the lunar landers that would ferry astronauts from the Gateway to the moon\u2019s surface. Bridenstine has crisscrossed the country meeting with members, trying to sell the plan and get bipartisan support. But so far his efforts have been met with skepticism.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing, however, is having success on Capitol Hill.For years, SLS\u2019s chief benefactor has been Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), the powerful Republican Appropriations Committee chairman who has unabashedly championed the program for the benefits it has brought to his home state, where the program is based. Over the past five years, Boeing has been one of his top campaign contributors, pumping more than $121,000 into his coffers, according to opensecrets.org.A spokesperson for Shelby said he remains supportive of the upper stage and pointed to the hundreds of millions in past funding, including $300 million for the program in next year\u2019s Senate bill, as evidence of his backing.But it\u2019s not just Alabama. Construction of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft is spread out so that every state has jobs connected to the program. In all, NASA says it supports about 25,000 jobs across the country, with a total economic impact of $4.7 billion.AdvertisementIn the Senate version of the NASA authorization bill for next year, lawmakers included language dictating that the agency \u201ccontinue development\u201d of the upper stage so that it could be ready for the third flight of the SLS, or Artemis III, which would be in time to land humans on the moon by 2024.While there is no House version of the bill, or an appropriation, Boeing\u2019s early success at pushing a compliant Congress to mandate the new upper stage for the third flight, instead of a later one, as is now planned, could upend NASA\u2019s lunar landing plans and put Boeing in the position of redirecting policy that had been set by NASA\u2019s leaders, engineers and scientists who have something other than profits as their priorities.To meet the White House\u2019s 2024 lunar landing date, NASA has been trying to build a broad coalition of companies, and has said repeatedly that everyone needs to pull together to help make the moon mission possible by 2024.Listen: Moonrise podcast\u201cWhen we have one contractor trying to dictate policy that benefits them over the others, it puts the whole program at risk,\u201d said one senior NASA official on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.In 2017, NASA grew frustrated with the progress of the upper stage and looked at awarding the contract to another bidder. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin submitted a proposal to build an upper stage, but was rebuffed. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) In October, NASA issued a justification to award a sole source contract to Boeing. But since contract negotiations continue, the agency wouldn\u2019t say what the value would be.While the fight over the upper stage plays out, NASA and Boeing have said they have made tremendous progress with the SLS core. Earlier this month, all four RS-25 engines were mated to the base of the rocket, which is about to be shipped for a key test, known as the \u201cgreen run,\u201d which would simulate a launch, testing three flight computers and more than 50 avionic units, navigation and control systems.If all goes well, NASA hopes the rocket will be ready to launch the Orion spacecraft, without people, on a test flight around the moon sometime in 2021.The team \u201chas hit its stride,\u201d said Chilton, the Boeing senior vice president. Boeing says NASA needs the stage. But NASA worries it\u2019ll distract Boeing from getting the main rocket up and flying. Boeing, NASA clash over push for Congress to fund new stage for moon rocket ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing, NASA clash over push for Congress to fund new stage for moon rocket  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6448",
        "date": "2019-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/11/boeing-nasa-clash-over-boeings-push-congress-fund-new-stage-its-moon-rocket/",
        "text": "At a ceremony this week at NASA\u2019s New Orleans assembly plant where Boeing is building what will be the most powerful rocket ever to fly, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine cheered the \u201cbeautiful, beautiful\u201d progress its prime contractor had made on the gigantic and much maligned project. He declared the troubles that have long plagued the development of the rocket\u2019s main section to be in the past. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat he did not mention was the fight brewing behind the scenes over Boeing\u2019s effort to force NASA to fast-track the company\u2019s next offering: a new, enhanced second stage that would give the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket dramatically more oomph than even the mighty Saturn V that sent astronauts to the moon during the Apollo era. Developing the second stage would create another potential financial windfall for Boeing.NASA, already stung by delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns in the SLS program, is openly opposed to speeding up development of the upper stage. Having spent $34 billion so far on SLS, the Lockheed Martin-built Orion spacecraft and the associated ground systems, a cost that NASA\u2019s inspector general said would grow to $50 billion by 2024, NASA wants to slow down work on a project it fears will suffer the same fate as the SLS main stage: More cost overruns. More delays. No moon landings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s budget request for next year was clear about its intentions. Citing \u201cdelays and performance issues,\u201d the \u201cfinal design efforts\u201d on the version of the rocket that would use what\u2019s known as the Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS, are to be \u201cdeferred\u201d so that Boeing, the program\u2019s prime contractor, can remain focused on completing the core section of the SLS rocket. That, NASA has said, is key to meeting a White House mandate to return people to the moon by 2024, a program NASA calls Artemis.In an interview, Bridenstine said that while the upper stage will be a great asset for NASA some day, he said \u201cany plan that requires an EUS to be ready by 2024 is a plan that reduces the probability of success. It\u2019s just not going to be ready.\u201dWhile Boeing said its top priority is delivering the rocket\u2019s core stage, it is also pushing aggressively for additional resources, lobbying Congress and trying to win public support.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s an effort that demonstrates how the industry stalwart, facing one of the darkest moments in its more than 100-year history after two commercial airline crashes killed 346 people, still wields enormous power, not only over how billions of dollars of taxpayer money is spent but also in shaping national policy \u2014 in this case how, when and whether the space agency returns humans to the moon.Companies in the cosmos: The new space raceBut tensions over the upper stage have spilled into the open in a rare public disagreement between NASA and one of its biggest contractors. On Tuesday, after Boeing was contacted by The Washington Post for this story, the company published a blog post saying it was \u201caccelerating work on a powerful new upper stage,\u201d and said \u201cNASA expects to fly the EUS\u201d for its lunar landing mission, known as Artemis III.That elicited a strong response from Bridenstine, who told The Post in a statement, \u201cNASA believes that there is tremendous value in the Exploration Upper Stage, but no one at NASA believes it will be available by Artemis III.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor years, government watchdogs have sounded the alarm over Boeing\u2019s management of the SLS program. Boeing is under what\u2019s known as a cost-plus contract, which covers allowed expenses but also ensures a profit for the contractor. Boeing\u2019s contract also has an incentive fee through which it has been awarded tens of millions of dollars despite the poor performance.Given that history, Boeing\u2019s efforts on the upper stage have rubbed some in NASA the wrong way.\u201cAll of our contractors lobby Congress to achieve what is in their best interest even though it may not be in the best interest of the nation,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview. \u201cThis is another example of that. My job as NASA administrator is to make sure we do what\u2019s right for the country, and for the taxpayer.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSo far, Congress has appropriated several hundred million dollars for the upper stage, which is still in the development phase. Boeing says it can be ready in time for a 2024 moon landing \u2014 if it\u2019s given more money, though it has not said exactly how much.AdvertisementNASA\u2019s Artemis plan is a far cry from the Apollo program, where 12 astronauts walked on the lunar surface, leaving flags and footprints behind. The last mission was in 1972, and no one has been back since then despite attempts by various administrations.Under President Trump, who has made space a priority, NASA plans to create a permanent presence on and around the moon, allowing for more science and deeper exploration of the solar system.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis time when we go to the moon, we\u2019re going to stay, with a purpose of learning how to live and work on another world so we can take that knowledge and information to Mars,\u201d Bridenstine said during the event in New Orleans.To achieve that goal, NASA plans to build a mini space station that would orbit the moon, known as the Gateway, which Bridenstine has called \u201cthe cornerstone\u201d of the agency\u2019s lunar plans. The Gateway would allow NASA to access a key region of the moon \u2014 the South Pole, where there is water in the form of ice in the permanently shadowed craters.AdvertisementWater, of course, is \u201clife support,\u201d as Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s air to breathe. It\u2019s water to drink. But it\u2019s also, if you can imagine, rocket fuel.\u201d Its components \u2014 hydrogen and oxygen \u2014 can be used as propellant, turning the moon, then, into a gas station in space.Story continues below advertisementThe Gateway, Bridenstine said, \u201cis going to enable us to do more science than ever before.\u201dBecause the Gateway would be outfitted with a robust communications system, it could assist in harnessing data from science experiments. One in particular, he said, would look deep into space from the far side of the moon. Normally, the mission would cost about $500 million, he said. But with the Gateway \u201cwe\u2019re going to have a communication architecture at the moon and we don\u2019t have to launch these large aperture antennas for communications, we can get high throughput data down to Earth quickly. All of a sudden, that mission goes from $500 million down to $90 million.\u201dHow to dress for spaceBut Boeing has another plan: Go directly to the surface of the moon. But that\u2019s possible only if it has the enhanced upper stage ready in time, which is one of the reasons the company is pushing so hard to have Congress fund it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Gateway is a far more complex endeavor, requiring launches of multiple rockets, and the in-orbit assembly of the various components of the station. Going direct is simpler, leading to a higher probability of success, the company argues. Boeing says its plan wouldn\u2019t eliminate Gateway, just give NASA a backup in case the Gateway isn\u2019t ready.\u201cYou don\u2019t want to be ready to go to the moon, but waiting for Gateway,\u201d Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch division, said in an interview. NASA, however, is struggling to get Congress to fund the Artemis program and the lunar landers that would ferry astronauts from the Gateway to the moon\u2019s surface. Bridenstine has crisscrossed the country meeting with members, trying to sell the plan and get bipartisan support. But so far his efforts have been met with skepticism.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing, however, is having success on Capitol Hill.For years, SLS\u2019s chief benefactor has been Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), the powerful Republican Appropriations Committee chairman who has unabashedly championed the program for the benefits it has brought to his home state, where the program is based. Over the past five years, Boeing has been one of his top campaign contributors, pumping more than $121,000 into his coffers, according to opensecrets.org.A spokesperson for Shelby said he remains supportive of the upper stage and pointed to the hundreds of millions in past funding, including $300 million for the program in next year\u2019s Senate bill, as evidence of his backing.But it\u2019s not just Alabama. Construction of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft is spread out so that every state has jobs connected to the program. In all, NASA says it supports about 25,000 jobs across the country, with a total economic impact of $4.7 billion.AdvertisementIn the Senate version of the NASA authorization bill for next year, lawmakers included language dictating that the agency \u201ccontinue development\u201d of the upper stage so that it could be ready for the third flight of the SLS, or Artemis III, which would be in time to land humans on the moon by 2024.While there is no House version of the bill, or an appropriation, Boeing\u2019s early success at pushing a compliant Congress to mandate the new upper stage for the third flight, instead of a later one, as is now planned, could upend NASA\u2019s lunar landing plans and put Boeing in the position of redirecting policy that had been set by NASA\u2019s leaders, engineers and scientists who have something other than profits as their priorities.To meet the White House\u2019s 2024 lunar landing date, NASA has been trying to build a broad coalition of companies, and has said repeatedly that everyone needs to pull together to help make the moon mission possible by 2024.Listen: Moonrise podcast\u201cWhen we have one contractor trying to dictate policy that benefits them over the others, it puts the whole program at risk,\u201d said one senior NASA official on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.In 2017, NASA grew frustrated with the progress of the upper stage and looked at awarding the contract to another bidder. Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin submitted a proposal to build an upper stage, but was rebuffed. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) In October, NASA issued a justification to award a sole source contract to Boeing. But since contract negotiations continue, the agency wouldn\u2019t say what the value would be.While the fight over the upper stage plays out, NASA and Boeing have said they have made tremendous progress with the SLS core. Earlier this month, all four RS-25 engines were mated to the base of the rocket, which is about to be shipped for a key test, known as the \u201cgreen run,\u201d which would simulate a launch, testing three flight computers and more than 50 avionic units, navigation and control systems.If all goes well, NASA hopes the rocket will be ready to launch the Orion spacecraft, without people, on a test flight around the moon sometime in 2021.The team \u201chas hit its stride,\u201d said Chilton, the Boeing senior vice president. Boeing says NASA needs the stage. But NASA worries it\u2019ll distract Boeing from getting the main rocket up and flying. Boeing, NASA clash over push for Congress to fund new stage for moon rocket ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, major league baseball stood still (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6449",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/07/17/when-apollo-landed-moon-major-league-baseball-stood-still/",
        "text": "At 4:17 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Mike Epstein stood 90 feet from home plate and some 238,000 miles from the moon.With the Washington Senators and New York Yankees tied at 2 in the eighth inning of their series finale at Yankee Stadium, Epstein, a Bronx native, had one thing on his mind. It wasn\u2019t Apollo 11\u2032s lunar descent. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI wasn\u2019t concerned with it,\u201d Epstein, now 76, said from his home outside Denver last month. \u201cI was concerned about scoring a run.\u201dAn estimated 650 million watched Neil Armstrong take man\u2019s first step on the moon more than six hours later, but during the lunar landing, 32,933 were in the stands at Yankee Stadium on the Sunday before the all-star break. Ken McMullen dug in against Jack Aker with Epstein on third, a man on first and no outs. Most scheduled sports programs were preempted by coverage of Apollo 11\u2032s progress, but Washington\u2019s WWDC Radio carried the Senators-Yankees game with short reports on the moon mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe 1-1 pitch to McMullen, swung on, hit foul down the third base side,\u201d intoned WWDC play-by-play man Rex Barney, the former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher. \u201cOne ball, two strikes now.\u201dBEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.As the umpires, according to prior arrangements, waved their arms and stopped play, an urgent voice came over the radio: \u201cHere is a bulletin from WWDC News, Apollo 11 is 100 feet from the surface of the moon. We now switch live to the manned spacecraft center.\u201dSimilar interruptions took place on radio stations and at stadiums across major league baseball as the sport paused to direct everyone\u2019s attention toward the moon. At Montreal\u2019s Jarry Park, the Mets and Expos took an extended break between games of their doubleheader so the 27,356 in attendance could listen to coverage of the landing over the stadium\u2019s public address system. In Chicago, Comiskey Park\u2019s exploding scoreboard shot sparks when the lunar module touched down, which happened to coincide with Walt Williams\u2019s infield single to lead off the bottom of the seventh inning. And the Yankees-Senators game was stopped for four minutes to celebrate the accomplishment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBarney was reading out-of-town scores when WWDC returned to coverage from Yankee Stadium, where public address announcer Bob Sheppard was sharing the historic news with the crowd.\u201cLadies and gentleman, your attention please,\u201d Sheppard said. \u201cYou will be happy to know that the Apollo 11 has landed safely on the moon.\"50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the 'moon hoax'The cheers from the crowd drowned out the final two words of Sheppard\u2019s announcement, but the message displayed on the scoreboard in right-center field was loud and clear: \u201cTHEYRE ON THE MOON.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m sure you heard it in the background,\u201d Barney said. \u201cThe announcement and the game being paused, Apollo 11 has landed safely on the moon. That\u2019s what the cheering and applause was for. They\u2019re on the moon right now. And it\u2019s a standing ovation, very inspiring, and I\u2019ll tell you one thing, sitting here and broadcasting this game, and watching the players, I think there\u2019s only one thing going through everyone\u2019s mind. .\u2009.\u2009. As I sit here and I have been all weekend long, really, and I think my thoughts along with everyone else has just been of those people that are on the moon. They\u2019re there, right now.\"\"They're On The Moon\" - Yankee Stadium fans are notified that Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin have landed safely on the lunar surface! (July 20, 1969) #MLB #Yankees #Apollo11 #History pic.twitter.com/rJA99768cI\u2014 Baseball by BSmile (@BSmile) July 20, 2018\n\nThe cheering at Yankee Stadium continued for about 45 seconds, according to the New York Times, as thousands of children waved the Hillerich & Bradsby Co. Louisville Sluggers they received on bat day.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOn the field, the players seemed confused, or impatient,\u201d Leonard Koppett wrote in the Times. \u201cMost did not turn toward the scoreboard. Finally, the announcer could be understood, and he asked the crowd for a moment of silent prayer for the safe return of the astronauts.\u201dAfter a few seconds of silence, a recording of \u201cAmerica the Beautiful\u201d played over the Yankee Stadium loudspeaker. The crowd sang and then cheered some more.\u201cI guess it\u2019s tough, I know it is for everyone \u2014 ballplayers and fans alike \u2014 to keep their mind on what\u2019s going on,\u201d Barney said.\u201cTo be honest, it wasn\u2019t a big deal for me,\u201d Epstein said in a phone interview. \u201c . . . I remember I did look up toward right field and I said, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s really neat.' Outside of that, I was a baseball player, and my intent was to score that run from third base.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAker, then a 29-year-old reliever for the Yankees, was more focused on the goings-on on Earth, too.\u201cIt was something strange,\u201d Aker, 79, recalled in a phone interview. \u201cWe\u2019d never done something like that before. I just walked off the mound and stood around. I didn\u2019t go to the dugout or anything. I stayed on the field. I wasn\u2019t that interested in it. When you\u2019re pitching and you\u2019re concentrating on that inning, you don\u2019t want anything that cuts into your concentration.\u201dIf the ballplayers weren\u2019t concerned, the reaction to the historic moment was far different in the stands.Like many kids fascinated by the Space Age, 13-year-old Mark Polansky had followed Apollo 11\u2032s mission with great interest since it launched from Kennedy Space Center four days earlier. Polansky, who grew up in New Jersey, spent parts of most summers living in Manhattan and going to Yankees and Mets games with his grandmother and two aunts, all of them rabid sports fans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t remember a darn thing about the game,\u201d Polansky said in a phone interview. \u201cI would\u2019ve had to have looked to see who the Yankees played that day, let alone who was on the team, but I do remember where we sat. We sat on the mezzanine, behind home plate, somewhere in that area.\u201dPolansky also remembers Sheppard\u2019s distinctive voice interrupting play in the eighth, and the crowd singing \u201cAmerica the Beautiful.\u201d It was an inspiring moment for a man who, 32 years later in February 2001, piloted space shuttle Atlantis for mission STS-98.\u201cI couldn\u2019t tell you if there were 5,000 or 50,000 people there, but whoever was there, they went wild,\u201d Polansky said. \u201cIt was the proverbial everyone being united for a moment and sharing a common thing. And then the game went back to being played.\u201dAfter the roughly four-minute stoppage, McMullen hit a grounder to third baseman Bobby Cox, who threw home to nail Epstein for the first out. Aker hit Hank Allen with a pitch to load the bases before getting Ed Brinkman to ground into an inning-ending double play. The Yankees walked off the Senators an hour later on Gene Michael\u2019s RBI single to score Roy White in the 11th inning. Aker, who pitched four scoreless innings in relief, earned the win in the Yankees\u2019 3-2 victory.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEpstein has fond memories of childhood trips to Yankee Stadium with his uncle Irving, of being mesmerized by the green grass amid a concrete jungle. He hit his first major league home run there June 5, 1967, in his first game with Washington after being traded from the Orioles. That, he said, was a bigger moment in his career than standing on third base when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.\u201cIt was in the newspapers every day, but it wasn\u2019t something to me that was going to impact my life,\u201d said Epstein, who hit a career-high 30 home runs for the Senators in 1969 and played five more seasons in the big leagues with the A\u2019s, Rangers and Angels. After receiving a letter of endorsement from his former manager in Washington \u2014 Hall of Famer Ted Williams \u2014 while working as a roving instructor in the Milwaukee Brewers\u2019 minor league system, Epstein founded a hitting school that his son, Jake, still operates.\u201cThe more time that went by, the bigger deal it became for the players,\u201d Aker said. \u201cWe probably talked more about it a week later than we did on the day it happened. It\u2019s something that I certainly remember now, especially when I see replays of TV and books and such.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPolansky went back to his grandmother\u2019s house after the game.\u201cLike everybody else in the entire world, we watched them actually come down the ladder and step on the moon that night,\u201d he said. \u201cI do remember after we walked on the moon saying, \u2018Gosh, I really want to do this and I want to be the first guy that lands on Mars,\u2019 because I loved exploration, and this just cemented the deal.\"Aker watched Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon that night, too, but his memories of another historic moment during his playing career are much more vivid. On April 8, 1974, Aker was standing in the home bullpen at Atlanta\u2019s Fulton-County Stadium when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth\u2019s career home run record.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBefore that game, we had decided instead of fighting over the ball, we would each spread out and take a portion of the bullpen,\u201d Aker recalled. \u201cWe spread out before he hit, but when the ball was on the way to the bullpen, Tommy House broke our little rule. He left his area and came over to where the ball was coming down, and he grabbed the ball.\u201dPolansky was finishing his senior year of high school when Aaron hit his 715th career home run. That fall, he enrolled at Purdue University and met Gene Cernan, who, two years earlier, became the last person to set foot on the moon. Polansky said his encounter with Cernan \u2014 as part of a small, informal gathering \u2014 convinced him that he wanted to become an astronaut.AdvertisementAfter his maiden space flight aboard Atlantis, Polansky made two more trips out of Earth\u2019s atmosphere as commander of STS-116 Discovery in December 2006 and of STS-127 Endeavour in July 2009.\u201cMy running joke is this month we\u2019re celebrating the 10th anniversary of my last flight,\u201d he said.The Yankees will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing Saturday. Polansky, who lives in Houston, said the team invited him to participate in a pregame ceremony, but he will be on a previously planned European vacation with his wife and children.Fellow former astronaut Mike Massimino will throw the ceremonial first pitch to Aker, who didn\u2019t fully appreciate the magnitude of the event when he stood on the mound exactly 50 years ago.\u201cIt wasn\u2019t until the next day when the papers came out that I realized, \u2018Holy cow, this is a real moment in history,\u2019 \u201d Aker said. \u201cI didn\u2019t enjoy it the way I should have.\u201dRead more from The Post:Life in space: Stories from 50 astronauts, in their own words\u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 missionHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds The moon landing stopped a Yankees-Senators game in the middle of an at-bat. Fans went wild, but players wanted to get back to the game. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, major league baseball stood still",
        "author": "Scott Allen"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, major league baseball stood still (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6450",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/07/17/when-apollo-landed-moon-major-league-baseball-stood-still/",
        "text": "At 4:17 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969, Mike Epstein stood 90 feet from home plate and some 238,000 miles from the moon.With the Washington Senators and New York Yankees tied at 2 in the eighth inning of their series finale at Yankee Stadium, Epstein, a Bronx native, had one thing on his mind. It wasn\u2019t Apollo 11\u2032s lunar descent. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI wasn\u2019t concerned with it,\u201d Epstein, now 76, said from his home outside Denver last month. \u201cI was concerned about scoring a run.\u201dAn estimated 650 million watched Neil Armstrong take man\u2019s first step on the moon more than six hours later, but during the lunar landing, 32,933 were in the stands at Yankee Stadium on the Sunday before the all-star break. Ken McMullen dug in against Jack Aker with Epstein on third, a man on first and no outs. Most scheduled sports programs were preempted by coverage of Apollo 11\u2032s progress, but Washington\u2019s WWDC Radio carried the Senators-Yankees game with short reports on the moon mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe 1-1 pitch to McMullen, swung on, hit foul down the third base side,\u201d intoned WWDC play-by-play man Rex Barney, the former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher. \u201cOne ball, two strikes now.\u201dBEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.As the umpires, according to prior arrangements, waved their arms and stopped play, an urgent voice came over the radio: \u201cHere is a bulletin from WWDC News, Apollo 11 is 100 feet from the surface of the moon. We now switch live to the manned spacecraft center.\u201dSimilar interruptions took place on radio stations and at stadiums across major league baseball as the sport paused to direct everyone\u2019s attention toward the moon. At Montreal\u2019s Jarry Park, the Mets and Expos took an extended break between games of their doubleheader so the 27,356 in attendance could listen to coverage of the landing over the stadium\u2019s public address system. In Chicago, Comiskey Park\u2019s exploding scoreboard shot sparks when the lunar module touched down, which happened to coincide with Walt Williams\u2019s infield single to lead off the bottom of the seventh inning. And the Yankees-Senators game was stopped for four minutes to celebrate the accomplishment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBarney was reading out-of-town scores when WWDC returned to coverage from Yankee Stadium, where public address announcer Bob Sheppard was sharing the historic news with the crowd.\u201cLadies and gentleman, your attention please,\u201d Sheppard said. \u201cYou will be happy to know that the Apollo 11 has landed safely on the moon.\"50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the 'moon hoax'The cheers from the crowd drowned out the final two words of Sheppard\u2019s announcement, but the message displayed on the scoreboard in right-center field was loud and clear: \u201cTHEYRE ON THE MOON.\u201d\u201cI\u2019m sure you heard it in the background,\u201d Barney said. \u201cThe announcement and the game being paused, Apollo 11 has landed safely on the moon. That\u2019s what the cheering and applause was for. They\u2019re on the moon right now. And it\u2019s a standing ovation, very inspiring, and I\u2019ll tell you one thing, sitting here and broadcasting this game, and watching the players, I think there\u2019s only one thing going through everyone\u2019s mind. .\u2009.\u2009. As I sit here and I have been all weekend long, really, and I think my thoughts along with everyone else has just been of those people that are on the moon. They\u2019re there, right now.\"\"They're On The Moon\" - Yankee Stadium fans are notified that Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin have landed safely on the lunar surface! (July 20, 1969) #MLB #Yankees #Apollo11 #History pic.twitter.com/rJA99768cI\u2014 Baseball by BSmile (@BSmile) July 20, 2018\n\nThe cheering at Yankee Stadium continued for about 45 seconds, according to the New York Times, as thousands of children waved the Hillerich & Bradsby Co. Louisville Sluggers they received on bat day.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOn the field, the players seemed confused, or impatient,\u201d Leonard Koppett wrote in the Times. \u201cMost did not turn toward the scoreboard. Finally, the announcer could be understood, and he asked the crowd for a moment of silent prayer for the safe return of the astronauts.\u201dAfter a few seconds of silence, a recording of \u201cAmerica the Beautiful\u201d played over the Yankee Stadium loudspeaker. The crowd sang and then cheered some more.\u201cI guess it\u2019s tough, I know it is for everyone \u2014 ballplayers and fans alike \u2014 to keep their mind on what\u2019s going on,\u201d Barney said.\u201cTo be honest, it wasn\u2019t a big deal for me,\u201d Epstein said in a phone interview. \u201c . . . I remember I did look up toward right field and I said, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s really neat.' Outside of that, I was a baseball player, and my intent was to score that run from third base.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAker, then a 29-year-old reliever for the Yankees, was more focused on the goings-on on Earth, too.\u201cIt was something strange,\u201d Aker, 79, recalled in a phone interview. \u201cWe\u2019d never done something like that before. I just walked off the mound and stood around. I didn\u2019t go to the dugout or anything. I stayed on the field. I wasn\u2019t that interested in it. When you\u2019re pitching and you\u2019re concentrating on that inning, you don\u2019t want anything that cuts into your concentration.\u201dIf the ballplayers weren\u2019t concerned, the reaction to the historic moment was far different in the stands.Like many kids fascinated by the Space Age, 13-year-old Mark Polansky had followed Apollo 11\u2032s mission with great interest since it launched from Kennedy Space Center four days earlier. Polansky, who grew up in New Jersey, spent parts of most summers living in Manhattan and going to Yankees and Mets games with his grandmother and two aunts, all of them rabid sports fans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t remember a darn thing about the game,\u201d Polansky said in a phone interview. \u201cI would\u2019ve had to have looked to see who the Yankees played that day, let alone who was on the team, but I do remember where we sat. We sat on the mezzanine, behind home plate, somewhere in that area.\u201dPolansky also remembers Sheppard\u2019s distinctive voice interrupting play in the eighth, and the crowd singing \u201cAmerica the Beautiful.\u201d It was an inspiring moment for a man who, 32 years later in February 2001, piloted space shuttle Atlantis for mission STS-98.\u201cI couldn\u2019t tell you if there were 5,000 or 50,000 people there, but whoever was there, they went wild,\u201d Polansky said. \u201cIt was the proverbial everyone being united for a moment and sharing a common thing. And then the game went back to being played.\u201dAfter the roughly four-minute stoppage, McMullen hit a grounder to third baseman Bobby Cox, who threw home to nail Epstein for the first out. Aker hit Hank Allen with a pitch to load the bases before getting Ed Brinkman to ground into an inning-ending double play. The Yankees walked off the Senators an hour later on Gene Michael\u2019s RBI single to score Roy White in the 11th inning. Aker, who pitched four scoreless innings in relief, earned the win in the Yankees\u2019 3-2 victory.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEpstein has fond memories of childhood trips to Yankee Stadium with his uncle Irving, of being mesmerized by the green grass amid a concrete jungle. He hit his first major league home run there June 5, 1967, in his first game with Washington after being traded from the Orioles. That, he said, was a bigger moment in his career than standing on third base when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.\u201cIt was in the newspapers every day, but it wasn\u2019t something to me that was going to impact my life,\u201d said Epstein, who hit a career-high 30 home runs for the Senators in 1969 and played five more seasons in the big leagues with the A\u2019s, Rangers and Angels. After receiving a letter of endorsement from his former manager in Washington \u2014 Hall of Famer Ted Williams \u2014 while working as a roving instructor in the Milwaukee Brewers\u2019 minor league system, Epstein founded a hitting school that his son, Jake, still operates.\u201cThe more time that went by, the bigger deal it became for the players,\u201d Aker said. \u201cWe probably talked more about it a week later than we did on the day it happened. It\u2019s something that I certainly remember now, especially when I see replays of TV and books and such.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPolansky went back to his grandmother\u2019s house after the game.\u201cLike everybody else in the entire world, we watched them actually come down the ladder and step on the moon that night,\u201d he said. \u201cI do remember after we walked on the moon saying, \u2018Gosh, I really want to do this and I want to be the first guy that lands on Mars,\u2019 because I loved exploration, and this just cemented the deal.\"Aker watched Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon that night, too, but his memories of another historic moment during his playing career are much more vivid. On April 8, 1974, Aker was standing in the home bullpen at Atlanta\u2019s Fulton-County Stadium when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth\u2019s career home run record.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBefore that game, we had decided instead of fighting over the ball, we would each spread out and take a portion of the bullpen,\u201d Aker recalled. \u201cWe spread out before he hit, but when the ball was on the way to the bullpen, Tommy House broke our little rule. He left his area and came over to where the ball was coming down, and he grabbed the ball.\u201dPolansky was finishing his senior year of high school when Aaron hit his 715th career home run. That fall, he enrolled at Purdue University and met Gene Cernan, who, two years earlier, became the last person to set foot on the moon. Polansky said his encounter with Cernan \u2014 as part of a small, informal gathering \u2014 convinced him that he wanted to become an astronaut.AdvertisementAfter his maiden space flight aboard Atlantis, Polansky made two more trips out of Earth\u2019s atmosphere as commander of STS-116 Discovery in December 2006 and of STS-127 Endeavour in July 2009.\u201cMy running joke is this month we\u2019re celebrating the 10th anniversary of my last flight,\u201d he said.The Yankees will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing Saturday. Polansky, who lives in Houston, said the team invited him to participate in a pregame ceremony, but he will be on a previously planned European vacation with his wife and children.Fellow former astronaut Mike Massimino will throw the ceremonial first pitch to Aker, who didn\u2019t fully appreciate the magnitude of the event when he stood on the mound exactly 50 years ago.\u201cIt wasn\u2019t until the next day when the papers came out that I realized, \u2018Holy cow, this is a real moment in history,\u2019 \u201d Aker said. \u201cI didn\u2019t enjoy it the way I should have.\u201dRead more from The Post:Life in space: Stories from 50 astronauts, in their own words\u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 revisits historic Apollo 11 missionHow did NASA put men on the moon? One harrowing step at a time.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worlds The moon landing stopped a Yankees-Senators game in the middle of an at-bat. Fans went wild, but players wanted to get back to the game. When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, major league baseball stood still",
        "author": "Scott Allen"
    },
    {
        "title": "After mishap with Boeing spacecraft, NASA faces a dilemma (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6451",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/09/after-mishap-with-boeing-spacecraft-nasa-faces-dilemma/",
        "text": "As it probes why Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a flight test last month that forced the cancellation of its planned docking with the International Space Station, NASA faces a high-stakes dilemma: Should the space agency require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight or allow the next flight to proceed, as originally planned, with astronauts aboard? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe answer could have significant ramifications for the agency \u2014 and put astronauts\u2019 lives on the line \u2014 at a time when NASA is struggling to resume human spaceflight from the United States, years after the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.Forcing Boeing to redo the test flight without anyone aboard would be costly, possibly requiring the embattled company, already struggling from the consequences of two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airplane, to spend tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate that its new spacecraft is capable of meeting the space station in orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if NASA moved ahead with the crewed flight and something went wrong that put the astronauts in danger, the agency would come under withering criticism that could plague it for years.For now, NASA is moving cautiously. It has formed an independent team with Boeing to examine what went wrong with the Starliner during last month\u2019s test flight. NASA also is reviewing data to help it determine whether the capsule achieved enough objectives during its truncated flight to assure NASA that its astronauts will be safe.Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space stationOn Dec. 20, an Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., delivering the Starliner into space. But soon after it was on its own, the Starliner suffered a software problem \u2014 its onboard clock was 11 hours off. As a result, the engines that would have put it on a trajectory to the space station failed to fire, even while other thrusters, designed to keep the capsule stable, did fire, expending precious fuel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing officials regained control of the spacecraft and were able to complete several objectives, including maneuvering the capsule, having it communicate with the space station and deploying the docking system to see whether it would work in a real scenario. But the spacecraft had consumed too much fuel to make it to the space station, and officials canceled that part of the mission.Two days after it launched, the Starliner landed safely in the New Mexico desert, days ahead of schedule, and officials from NASA and Boeing went out of their way to highlight the things that went well during the mission.\u201cWe\u2019re all very excited that a whole lot of things did go right \u2014 went very, very well, as a matter of fact,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said after the landing. \u201cIn fact, you could argue that some of the hardest parts of this mission have now been proven to be very capable.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut he said the teams would have to figure out what went wrong before allowing crews aboard. Docking with the space station is a delicate endeavor and a key part of the program, which is designed to give NASA a way to get its astronauts there and back safely.\u201cI\u2019m not saying we\u2019re going to do it. But I\u2019m not ruling it out, either,\u201d Bridenstine said of proceeding with a crewed flight. \u201cRemember, when we had space shuttles, every single one of those missions was crewed from Day One. The very first time we launched space shuttle it had people on board. \u2026 These are not things that are new to NASA. But I want to make sure we understand what the challenges were and get those fixed and make sure there\u2019s not some larger, systemic problem.\u201d Getting NASA\u2019s astronauts flying from American soil again is a huge priority for the agency \u2014 and the White House. Bridenstine said that in the 48 hours after the mishap, he spoke three times with Vice President Pence, who heads the National Space Council.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post, Bridenstine said that the investigation to determine what caused the timing malfunction could take about two months and that a separate determination on whether Boeing would have to re-fly the test mission should be competed in several weeks.Some industry officials said they think Boeing already has a clear sense of what happened and will be able to fix it without much difficulty.\u201cActually what happened and how to fix it is pretty straightforward, and already almost done,\u201d said Wayne Hale, a former manager of NASA\u2019s space shuttle program who now serves as a consultant to many aerospace companies, including Boeing. \u201cThe question is \u2014 is there anything else out there?\u201d Another industry official who was not authorized to comment publicly said it is unlikely the setback will be a \u201cshowstopper.\u201d If NASA does force Boeing to perform another test flight, it is not clear who would have to pay the tens of millions of dollars such a mission would cost.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s contract with Boeing is a \u201cfixed-price contract,\u201d meaning the payments to Boeing are contingent on hitting certain milestones and the amount of those payments should not change. Boeing\u2019s contract with NASA specifically says it \u201cshall include an uncrewed orbital test flight\u201d to the International Space Station that demonstrates \u201cautomated rendezvous and proximity operations and docking with the ISS, assuming ISS approval.\u201d NASA has said that Boeing proposed the uncrewed test flight as a \u201cway to meet NASA\u2019s mission and safety requirements.\u201d As a result, the docking became part of the contract, NASA said. But in his blog post, Bridenstine said it was possible that requirement could be waived. \u201cAlthough docking was planned, it may not have to be accomplished prior to the crew demonstration,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBoeing would need NASA\u2019s approval to proceed with a flight test with astronauts on board.\u201d Bridenstine did not say who would be required to pay if NASA ordered the additional uncrewed test flight, an issue that remains unsettled. \u201cAny contractual implications would be informed by the in-depth review and analysis of the data obtained from the company\u2019s uncrewed Orbital Flight Test,\u201d NASA spokesman Joshua Finch said in an email. \u201cNASA and Boeing would determine what additional data is required and the optimal approach for obtaining it. We expect this process to take several weeks.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA officials have said that if astronauts had been aboard Boeing\u2019s spacecraft last month, they could have taken manual control of the spacecraft and flown it safely to the space station. \u201cYou could almost say that it might have been better if there had been a crew on board,\u201d Hale said.For the first flight with crews, NASA has chosen a pair of former military test pilots, astronauts Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke. Joining them would be former NASA astronaut Chris Ferguson, who now works for Boeing. Between them, Fincke and Ferguson have been to space six times, and the trio has years of experience flying all sorts of military aircraft.\u201cYou couldn\u2019t have a better crew for the mission,\u201d Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year in space during a 2015-2016 mission, said in an interview. \u201cTheir capability to fly this flight is not in question. \u2026 It wouldn\u2019t surprise me at all if they flew the next flight with people on it.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLast year, SpaceX, the other company contracted by NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, successfully docked its Dragon crew spacecraft with the station. The company\u2019s cargo spacecraft has visited the space station about 20 times since 2012, delivering experiments and supplies. SpaceX is scheduled to test the Dragon crew craft\u2019s emergency abort system this month and hopes to fly astronauts within a few months.NASA knows how difficult and dangerous human spaceflight is. In 1986, it lost the crew of space shuttle Challenger, and seven astronauts were killed in 2003 when Columbia came apart before landing. Calculating the risks is particularly difficult on a new spacecraft such as the Starliner. After Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a test last month, the space agency has to decide whether to require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight or allow the next planned flight to proceed with astronauts aboard. After mishap with Boeing spacecraft, NASA faces a dilemma",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "After mishap with Boeing spacecraft, NASA faces a dilemma (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6452",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/09/after-mishap-with-boeing-spacecraft-nasa-faces-dilemma/",
        "text": "As it probes why Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a flight test last month that forced the cancellation of its planned docking with the International Space Station, NASA faces a high-stakes dilemma: Should the space agency require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight or allow the next flight to proceed, as originally planned, with astronauts aboard? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe answer could have significant ramifications for the agency \u2014 and put astronauts\u2019 lives on the line \u2014 at a time when NASA is struggling to resume human spaceflight from the United States, years after the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011.Forcing Boeing to redo the test flight without anyone aboard would be costly, possibly requiring the embattled company, already struggling from the consequences of two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airplane, to spend tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate that its new spacecraft is capable of meeting the space station in orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut if NASA moved ahead with the crewed flight and something went wrong that put the astronauts in danger, the agency would come under withering criticism that could plague it for years.For now, NASA is moving cautiously. It has formed an independent team with Boeing to examine what went wrong with the Starliner during last month\u2019s test flight. NASA also is reviewing data to help it determine whether the capsule achieved enough objectives during its truncated flight to assure NASA that its astronauts will be safe.Possible software issue forces NASA to cancel Boeing Starliner\u2019s attempt to dock with space stationOn Dec. 20, an Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., delivering the Starliner into space. But soon after it was on its own, the Starliner suffered a software problem \u2014 its onboard clock was 11 hours off. As a result, the engines that would have put it on a trajectory to the space station failed to fire, even while other thrusters, designed to keep the capsule stable, did fire, expending precious fuel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing officials regained control of the spacecraft and were able to complete several objectives, including maneuvering the capsule, having it communicate with the space station and deploying the docking system to see whether it would work in a real scenario. But the spacecraft had consumed too much fuel to make it to the space station, and officials canceled that part of the mission.Two days after it launched, the Starliner landed safely in the New Mexico desert, days ahead of schedule, and officials from NASA and Boeing went out of their way to highlight the things that went well during the mission.\u201cWe\u2019re all very excited that a whole lot of things did go right \u2014 went very, very well, as a matter of fact,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said after the landing. \u201cIn fact, you could argue that some of the hardest parts of this mission have now been proven to be very capable.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut he said the teams would have to figure out what went wrong before allowing crews aboard. Docking with the space station is a delicate endeavor and a key part of the program, which is designed to give NASA a way to get its astronauts there and back safely.\u201cI\u2019m not saying we\u2019re going to do it. But I\u2019m not ruling it out, either,\u201d Bridenstine said of proceeding with a crewed flight. \u201cRemember, when we had space shuttles, every single one of those missions was crewed from Day One. The very first time we launched space shuttle it had people on board. \u2026 These are not things that are new to NASA. But I want to make sure we understand what the challenges were and get those fixed and make sure there\u2019s not some larger, systemic problem.\u201d Getting NASA\u2019s astronauts flying from American soil again is a huge priority for the agency \u2014 and the White House. Bridenstine said that in the 48 hours after the mishap, he spoke three times with Vice President Pence, who heads the National Space Council.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a blog post, Bridenstine said that the investigation to determine what caused the timing malfunction could take about two months and that a separate determination on whether Boeing would have to re-fly the test mission should be competed in several weeks.Some industry officials said they think Boeing already has a clear sense of what happened and will be able to fix it without much difficulty.\u201cActually what happened and how to fix it is pretty straightforward, and already almost done,\u201d said Wayne Hale, a former manager of NASA\u2019s space shuttle program who now serves as a consultant to many aerospace companies, including Boeing. \u201cThe question is \u2014 is there anything else out there?\u201d Another industry official who was not authorized to comment publicly said it is unlikely the setback will be a \u201cshowstopper.\u201d If NASA does force Boeing to perform another test flight, it is not clear who would have to pay the tens of millions of dollars such a mission would cost.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s contract with Boeing is a \u201cfixed-price contract,\u201d meaning the payments to Boeing are contingent on hitting certain milestones and the amount of those payments should not change. Boeing\u2019s contract with NASA specifically says it \u201cshall include an uncrewed orbital test flight\u201d to the International Space Station that demonstrates \u201cautomated rendezvous and proximity operations and docking with the ISS, assuming ISS approval.\u201d NASA has said that Boeing proposed the uncrewed test flight as a \u201cway to meet NASA\u2019s mission and safety requirements.\u201d As a result, the docking became part of the contract, NASA said. But in his blog post, Bridenstine said it was possible that requirement could be waived. \u201cAlthough docking was planned, it may not have to be accomplished prior to the crew demonstration,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBoeing would need NASA\u2019s approval to proceed with a flight test with astronauts on board.\u201d Bridenstine did not say who would be required to pay if NASA ordered the additional uncrewed test flight, an issue that remains unsettled. \u201cAny contractual implications would be informed by the in-depth review and analysis of the data obtained from the company\u2019s uncrewed Orbital Flight Test,\u201d NASA spokesman Joshua Finch said in an email. \u201cNASA and Boeing would determine what additional data is required and the optimal approach for obtaining it. We expect this process to take several weeks.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA officials have said that if astronauts had been aboard Boeing\u2019s spacecraft last month, they could have taken manual control of the spacecraft and flown it safely to the space station. \u201cYou could almost say that it might have been better if there had been a crew on board,\u201d Hale said.For the first flight with crews, NASA has chosen a pair of former military test pilots, astronauts Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke. Joining them would be former NASA astronaut Chris Ferguson, who now works for Boeing. Between them, Fincke and Ferguson have been to space six times, and the trio has years of experience flying all sorts of military aircraft.\u201cYou couldn\u2019t have a better crew for the mission,\u201d Scott Kelly, the former NASA astronaut who spent nearly a year in space during a 2015-2016 mission, said in an interview. \u201cTheir capability to fly this flight is not in question. \u2026 It wouldn\u2019t surprise me at all if they flew the next flight with people on it.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLast year, SpaceX, the other company contracted by NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, successfully docked its Dragon crew spacecraft with the station. The company\u2019s cargo spacecraft has visited the space station about 20 times since 2012, delivering experiments and supplies. SpaceX is scheduled to test the Dragon crew craft\u2019s emergency abort system this month and hopes to fly astronauts within a few months.NASA knows how difficult and dangerous human spaceflight is. In 1986, it lost the crew of space shuttle Challenger, and seven astronauts were killed in 2003 when Columbia came apart before landing. Calculating the risks is particularly difficult on a new spacecraft such as the Starliner. After Boeing\u2019s Starliner spacecraft suffered a serious setback during a test last month, the space agency has to decide whether to require the company to repeat the uncrewed test flight or allow the next planned flight to proceed with astronauts aboard. After mishap with Boeing spacecraft, NASA faces a dilemma",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX is reinforcing heat shield of its Dragon spacecraft ahead of planned October flight (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6453",
        "date": "2020-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/29/spacex-heat-shield-reinforcement/",
        "text": "As it prepares for its second human spaceflight mission next month, SpaceX has redesigned a small portion of its spacecraft\u2019s heat shield in addition to making a few other refinements to the Dragon capsule.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter a successful test flight that ended when NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 2, the company noticed \u201ca little more erosion than we wanted to see\u201d in a few areas of the capsule\u2019s heat shield, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during a press call this week. He said there \u201cwas nothing to be concerned with at all times. The astronauts were safe, and the vehicle was working perfectly.\u201d The heat shield is a vital component of the spacecraft that protects the astronauts as they plunge through the thickening atmosphere, creating temperatures that reach as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, the news of the heat shield redesign was concerning to some. \u201cIt\u2019s probably just me \u2014 a product of the dark days I lived through \u2014 but I get shivers when a hear that human spacecraft heatshield showed unexpected degraded performance and requires \u2018minor\u2019 modification,\u201d former Space Shuttle flight director Wayne Hale wrote on Twitter, recalling the tragedy of the Columbia, which came apart during reentry. \u201cYes, that gives me shivers. Be thorough. Do good work.\u201dIn addition to reinforcing the part of the heat shield, Koenigsmann said the company is refining how it measures the capsule\u2019s altitude as it returns to Earth. During the August test flight, the drogue parachutes deployed at a slightly lower altitude than the company expected, but still well within safety parameters, he said.Finally, SpaceX and NASA are working with the Coast Guard to create a 10-mile \u201ckeep-out zone\u201d around the spacecraft once its splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the test mission, recreational boats swarmed the vehicle, still loaded with volatile propellant, after it landed in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a safety hazard. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have more boats on the next go-round, and make sure that the area is really clear of any other boats,\u201d Koenigsmann said.The test mission saw Hurley and Behnken spend two months on the International Space Station before their return. Now SpaceX is scheduled to launch a crew of four astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one Japanese \u2014 in the wee hours of Oct. 31. It would be the first operational flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft and the first time the company has flown four people at once on what will be a long-duration mission to the station, lasting six months.NASA said it is close to granting SpaceX the final certification that would pave the way for the company to fly astronauts to the space station on a regular basis under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA leaders on Tuesday expressed confidence in the company, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, which also flies cargo and supplies to the station. As those missions continue, SpaceX will have one of its spacecraft docked at the station continuously for the next 14 months, another demonstration of the company\u2019s ability.\u201cThis really is a new era for us as a company and for commercial space in general,\u201d said Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s commercial crew program manager.The problem with the heat shield was in a few small areas where the crew capsule joins the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is jettisoned before reentering the atmosphere. Officials noticed more erosion than expected during post-flight inspections. \u201cOkay, we should probably reinforce the heat shield in this particular area,\u201d Koenigsmann said they decided.The astronauts slated to fly next month said they were not concerned.\u201cThere is an amazing team that has been brought together to work this issue,\u201d NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission, said Tuesday. \u201cAnd we are confident in this team, and their ability to find the right solutions.\u201d The heat shield showed more erosion than expected on the Dragon capsule that returned from the International Space Station in August. SpaceX is reinforcing heat shield of its Dragon spacecraft ahead of planned October flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX is reinforcing heat shield of its Dragon spacecraft ahead of planned October flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6454",
        "date": "2020-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/29/spacex-heat-shield-reinforcement/",
        "text": "As it prepares for its second human spaceflight mission next month, SpaceX has redesigned a small portion of its spacecraft\u2019s heat shield in addition to making a few other refinements to the Dragon capsule.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter a successful test flight that ended when NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 2, the company noticed \u201ca little more erosion than we wanted to see\u201d in a few areas of the capsule\u2019s heat shield, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during a press call this week. He said there \u201cwas nothing to be concerned with at all times. The astronauts were safe, and the vehicle was working perfectly.\u201d The heat shield is a vital component of the spacecraft that protects the astronauts as they plunge through the thickening atmosphere, creating temperatures that reach as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, the news of the heat shield redesign was concerning to some. \u201cIt\u2019s probably just me \u2014 a product of the dark days I lived through \u2014 but I get shivers when a hear that human spacecraft heatshield showed unexpected degraded performance and requires \u2018minor\u2019 modification,\u201d former Space Shuttle flight director Wayne Hale wrote on Twitter, recalling the tragedy of the Columbia, which came apart during reentry. \u201cYes, that gives me shivers. Be thorough. Do good work.\u201dIn addition to reinforcing the part of the heat shield, Koenigsmann said the company is refining how it measures the capsule\u2019s altitude as it returns to Earth. During the August test flight, the drogue parachutes deployed at a slightly lower altitude than the company expected, but still well within safety parameters, he said.Finally, SpaceX and NASA are working with the Coast Guard to create a 10-mile \u201ckeep-out zone\u201d around the spacecraft once its splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the test mission, recreational boats swarmed the vehicle, still loaded with volatile propellant, after it landed in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a safety hazard. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have more boats on the next go-round, and make sure that the area is really clear of any other boats,\u201d Koenigsmann said.The test mission saw Hurley and Behnken spend two months on the International Space Station before their return. Now SpaceX is scheduled to launch a crew of four astronauts \u2014 three Americans and one Japanese \u2014 in the wee hours of Oct. 31. It would be the first operational flight of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft and the first time the company has flown four people at once on what will be a long-duration mission to the station, lasting six months.NASA said it is close to granting SpaceX the final certification that would pave the way for the company to fly astronauts to the space station on a regular basis under NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA leaders on Tuesday expressed confidence in the company, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, which also flies cargo and supplies to the station. As those missions continue, SpaceX will have one of its spacecraft docked at the station continuously for the next 14 months, another demonstration of the company\u2019s ability.\u201cThis really is a new era for us as a company and for commercial space in general,\u201d said Benji Reed, SpaceX\u2019s commercial crew program manager.The problem with the heat shield was in a few small areas where the crew capsule joins the spacecraft\u2019s trunk, an unpressurized cargo hold that is jettisoned before reentering the atmosphere. Officials noticed more erosion than expected during post-flight inspections. \u201cOkay, we should probably reinforce the heat shield in this particular area,\u201d Koenigsmann said they decided.The astronauts slated to fly next month said they were not concerned.\u201cThere is an amazing team that has been brought together to work this issue,\u201d NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, the commander of the mission, said Tuesday. \u201cAnd we are confident in this team, and their ability to find the right solutions.\u201d The heat shield showed more erosion than expected on the Dragon capsule that returned from the International Space Station in August. SpaceX is reinforcing heat shield of its Dragon spacecraft ahead of planned October flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s corporate astronaut pulls himself from key test flight, citing family commitments (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6455",
        "date": "2020-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/nasa-boeing-ferguson-astronaut/",
        "text": "As a former NASA astronaut, he flew to space three times and was poised to make history as the first private citizen to fly to orbit on a commercially operated rocket. But Chris Ferguson, now a Boeing employee, announced on Wednesday he was pulling himself from the first crewed mission of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn an interview, Ferguson said that after 26 years in the Navy, where he served as a fighter pilot, then as a NASA astronaut and now as a Boeing executive, his career has put a strain on his family and forced him to be away repeatedly. Going to space next year for an extended stay on the International Space Station would force him to miss \u201ca lot of key family events. \u2026 The year 2021 is shaping up so far as one that I should not be off the planet.\u201dNASA said he would be replaced by Barry \u201cButch\u201d Wilmore, a veteran NASA astronaut who has flown to space twice and has been training on the Starliner spacecraft. He would join NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Michael Fincke, who had previously been assigned to the mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing hopes to launch a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft with the three astronauts no earlier than June of next year, after suffering a setbacks and delays that pushed it from its original flight date in 2017. A test mission in December of the spacecraft without any crews on board went awry when the onboard computer was 11 hours off, thinking the spacecraft was at a wrong point in the mission.Crews on the ground were able to fix the software problem, but the mission was cut short. The spacecraft never docked with the space station as intended. Boeing said it would re-fly the mission in December or January, delaying the first flight with astronauts on board until mid-2021.In the interview, Ferguson said he did not want to discuss the impact the delay had on his decision to step down. And he said it had nothing to do with the Starliner\u2019s problems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI am passionately attached to this program. I have been dedicated from the very beginning. I absolutely love this team,\u201d he said. \u201cI enjoy being a part of it, and I have full confidence it\u2019s going to be a robust and reliable vehicle for decades to come. This is no way a reflection of my belief in the vehicle.\u201dBut he did say the delay of the flight into 2021 forced him to make a gut-wrenching decision: fly as planned, or miss some important events, including a family wedding, scheduled for next year.\u201cIt was one of the more challenging life decisions I had to make,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt involved a little bit of staring in the mirror and saying, \u2018Do I really need to do this?\u2019 \u201dThe company astronautHad he flown, Ferguson would have become the world\u2019s first \u201ccorporate astronaut,\u201d flying not under the NASA banner but as a Boeing employee who helped design and build the capsule from scratch. Boeing had hoped his presence on the mission would not only serve as a hands-on guide to the spacecraft, but also open up a new era of human spaceflight, where private citizens go to space alongside professionally trained astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has ended a prohibition against allowing civilians to fly on American rockets to the space station. Now Boeing and SpaceX, the other company under contract to fly people to the space station, have been working to sign up wealthy individuals who would pay tens of millions of dollars for trips to orbit.Ferguson was seen as a symbol of that progress. He served as the commander of the very last space shuttle mission in 2011 and hoped to restore human spaceflight to United States soil for NASA.But after Boeing stumbled badly, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX took the lead, and in May flew the first mission with astronauts to the space station since the shuttle retired.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHaving followed this vehicle along from the time it was just sketches on a drawing pad, to being able to sit in the real thing, but not being able to take it all the way, that\u2019s going to smart a bit,\u201d he said.But he said he would be in mission control for the flight and that he would \u201clive vicariously through this new crew.\u201dHe held out the possibility that he might find a way to return to orbit on the Starliner: \u201cI\u2019m staying with Boeing so I\u2019m not going anywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m just not going to space next year.\u201d Chris Ferguson, a onetime space shuttle astronaut and now a Boeing employee, announced on Wednesday that he was pulling himself from the first crewed mission of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft. Boeing\u2019s corporate astronaut pulls himself from key test flight, citing family commitments",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s corporate astronaut pulls himself from key test flight, citing family commitments (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6456",
        "date": "2020-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/nasa-boeing-ferguson-astronaut/",
        "text": "As a former NASA astronaut, he flew to space three times and was poised to make history as the first private citizen to fly to orbit on a commercially operated rocket. But Chris Ferguson, now a Boeing employee, announced on Wednesday he was pulling himself from the first crewed mission of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn an interview, Ferguson said that after 26 years in the Navy, where he served as a fighter pilot, then as a NASA astronaut and now as a Boeing executive, his career has put a strain on his family and forced him to be away repeatedly. Going to space next year for an extended stay on the International Space Station would force him to miss \u201ca lot of key family events. \u2026 The year 2021 is shaping up so far as one that I should not be off the planet.\u201dNASA said he would be replaced by Barry \u201cButch\u201d Wilmore, a veteran NASA astronaut who has flown to space twice and has been training on the Starliner spacecraft. He would join NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Michael Fincke, who had previously been assigned to the mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing hopes to launch a test flight of its Starliner spacecraft with the three astronauts no earlier than June of next year, after suffering a setbacks and delays that pushed it from its original flight date in 2017. A test mission in December of the spacecraft without any crews on board went awry when the onboard computer was 11 hours off, thinking the spacecraft was at a wrong point in the mission.Crews on the ground were able to fix the software problem, but the mission was cut short. The spacecraft never docked with the space station as intended. Boeing said it would re-fly the mission in December or January, delaying the first flight with astronauts on board until mid-2021.In the interview, Ferguson said he did not want to discuss the impact the delay had on his decision to step down. And he said it had nothing to do with the Starliner\u2019s problems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI am passionately attached to this program. I have been dedicated from the very beginning. I absolutely love this team,\u201d he said. \u201cI enjoy being a part of it, and I have full confidence it\u2019s going to be a robust and reliable vehicle for decades to come. This is no way a reflection of my belief in the vehicle.\u201dBut he did say the delay of the flight into 2021 forced him to make a gut-wrenching decision: fly as planned, or miss some important events, including a family wedding, scheduled for next year.\u201cIt was one of the more challenging life decisions I had to make,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt involved a little bit of staring in the mirror and saying, \u2018Do I really need to do this?\u2019 \u201dThe company astronautHad he flown, Ferguson would have become the world\u2019s first \u201ccorporate astronaut,\u201d flying not under the NASA banner but as a Boeing employee who helped design and build the capsule from scratch. Boeing had hoped his presence on the mission would not only serve as a hands-on guide to the spacecraft, but also open up a new era of human spaceflight, where private citizens go to space alongside professionally trained astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has ended a prohibition against allowing civilians to fly on American rockets to the space station. Now Boeing and SpaceX, the other company under contract to fly people to the space station, have been working to sign up wealthy individuals who would pay tens of millions of dollars for trips to orbit.Ferguson was seen as a symbol of that progress. He served as the commander of the very last space shuttle mission in 2011 and hoped to restore human spaceflight to United States soil for NASA.But after Boeing stumbled badly, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX took the lead, and in May flew the first mission with astronauts to the space station since the shuttle retired.Story continues below advertisement\u201cHaving followed this vehicle along from the time it was just sketches on a drawing pad, to being able to sit in the real thing, but not being able to take it all the way, that\u2019s going to smart a bit,\u201d he said.But he said he would be in mission control for the flight and that he would \u201clive vicariously through this new crew.\u201dHe held out the possibility that he might find a way to return to orbit on the Starliner: \u201cI\u2019m staying with Boeing so I\u2019m not going anywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m just not going to space next year.\u201d Chris Ferguson, a onetime space shuttle astronaut and now a Boeing employee, announced on Wednesday that he was pulling himself from the first crewed mission of the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft. Boeing\u2019s corporate astronaut pulls himself from key test flight, citing family commitments",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX blames faulty valve for Dragon spacecraft explosion (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6457",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/15/spacex-blames-faulty-valve-dragon-spacecraft-explosion/",
        "text": "An investigation into what caused the SpaceX capsule to blow up in April during an engine test has pinpointed a faulty valve that caused a propellant leak, a company official said Monday.The valve is being replaced by a disc that would eliminate the possibility of such a leak, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability. But he called the finding \u201cpreliminary\u201d said the investigation into the cause of the explosion that sent a plume of smoke wafting over the Florida space coast is continuing. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe did not rule out a flight with crew by the end of the year, a goal it had been pushing toward for months, but said that had now grown \u201cincreasingly difficult.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe want to make sure we find all the corrective actions,\u201d he said.SpaceX is designing the Dragon spacecraft to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. In March, it completed a successful test flight, sending the spacecraft, without anyone on board, to the station. It docked autonomously and then flew back to Earth again, safely landing in the Atlantic ocean. With that key milestone completed, the company seemed to be making progress toward a flight with astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementBut then in April it tested the engines that are designed to propel the spacecraft \u2014 and the astronauts in it \u2014 safely away from the rocket booster in the event of an emergency. The test did not go well. The spacecraft exploded after the leak into an internal pressure system, leaving NASA and SpaceX with another setback in a program that has seen several.Story continues below advertisementLast year, Boeing also had a propellant leak in the emergency abort system of its spacecraft. The company has said that it has since fixed the problem.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth nearly $7 billion combined to the two companies, but both have suffered a series of setbacks and delays. NASA is hoping they\u2019ll be ready to fly soon since the agency has been forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to space since the Space Shuttle was retired eight years ago.AdvertisementThe setbacks forced NASA recently to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft for about $170 million total. Those will ensure that the agency doesn\u2019t have to face the embarrassing prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion.Story continues below advertisementNASA hopes the abort system never has to be used. But the service it provides is vital and could save astronauts\u2019 lives. The agency got a reminder of this late last year when a Russian spacecraft carrying an suffered a failure when its booster failed to separate properly. The spacecraft\u2019s abort system kicked in, sending NASA Astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian counterpart Alexey Ovchinin on a wild ride to the edge of space, but they ended up landing safely.In a call with reporters Monday, Koenigsmann and Kathy Lueders, the manager of the so-called commercial crew program for NASA, said the point of doing such tests on the ground is to make sure all of the systems are working properly before they start flying astronauts.Advertisement\u201cWhat we have now is definitely the safer approach,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really expect this to be a problem, but that\u2019s what you learn when you test.\u201dStory continues below advertisementLueders said the explosion was \u201cin a lot of ways a gift for us because it was a test on the ground.\u201dNo one was injured during the explosion, officials said. SpaceX has been leading the investigation into it alongside NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.The valve is being replaced with a more robust disc that would require a high-pressure kick to blast it open, thus preventing any leaks, Koenigsmann said.He said he was \u201coptimistic\u201d about the remedy and the ability to carry on, especially since the company had already been building the spacecraft for future missions. But he hedged when asked if the company would be able to fly this year.\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s impossible,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s getting increasingly difficult.\u201d He added: \u201cWe\u2019ll fly when we\u2019re ready. Problem can be fixed, but chance of sending a crew into space this year \u2018increasingly difficult\u2019  SpaceX blames faulty valve for Dragon spacecraft explosion",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX blames faulty valve for Dragon spacecraft explosion (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6458",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/15/spacex-blames-faulty-valve-dragon-spacecraft-explosion/",
        "text": "An investigation into what caused the SpaceX capsule to blow up in April during an engine test has pinpointed a faulty valve that caused a propellant leak, a company official said Monday.The valve is being replaced by a disc that would eliminate the possibility of such a leak, said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability. But he called the finding \u201cpreliminary\u201d said the investigation into the cause of the explosion that sent a plume of smoke wafting over the Florida space coast is continuing. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe did not rule out a flight with crew by the end of the year, a goal it had been pushing toward for months, but said that had now grown \u201cincreasingly difficult.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe want to make sure we find all the corrective actions,\u201d he said.SpaceX is designing the Dragon spacecraft to ferry NASA\u2019s astronauts to and from the International Space Station. In March, it completed a successful test flight, sending the spacecraft, without anyone on board, to the station. It docked autonomously and then flew back to Earth again, safely landing in the Atlantic ocean. With that key milestone completed, the company seemed to be making progress toward a flight with astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementBut then in April it tested the engines that are designed to propel the spacecraft \u2014 and the astronauts in it \u2014 safely away from the rocket booster in the event of an emergency. The test did not go well. The spacecraft exploded after the leak into an internal pressure system, leaving NASA and SpaceX with another setback in a program that has seen several.Story continues below advertisementLast year, Boeing also had a propellant leak in the emergency abort system of its spacecraft. The company has said that it has since fixed the problem.In 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth nearly $7 billion combined to the two companies, but both have suffered a series of setbacks and delays. NASA is hoping they\u2019ll be ready to fly soon since the agency has been forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to space since the Space Shuttle was retired eight years ago.AdvertisementThe setbacks forced NASA recently to purchase two more seats on Russian spacecraft for about $170 million total. Those will ensure that the agency doesn\u2019t have to face the embarrassing prospect of not having an American astronaut on board the station \u2014 the orbiting laboratory that has cost American taxpayers about $100 billion.Story continues below advertisementNASA hopes the abort system never has to be used. But the service it provides is vital and could save astronauts\u2019 lives. The agency got a reminder of this late last year when a Russian spacecraft carrying an suffered a failure when its booster failed to separate properly. The spacecraft\u2019s abort system kicked in, sending NASA Astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian counterpart Alexey Ovchinin on a wild ride to the edge of space, but they ended up landing safely.In a call with reporters Monday, Koenigsmann and Kathy Lueders, the manager of the so-called commercial crew program for NASA, said the point of doing such tests on the ground is to make sure all of the systems are working properly before they start flying astronauts.Advertisement\u201cWhat we have now is definitely the safer approach,\u201d Koenigsmann said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really expect this to be a problem, but that\u2019s what you learn when you test.\u201dStory continues below advertisementLueders said the explosion was \u201cin a lot of ways a gift for us because it was a test on the ground.\u201dNo one was injured during the explosion, officials said. SpaceX has been leading the investigation into it alongside NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.The valve is being replaced with a more robust disc that would require a high-pressure kick to blast it open, thus preventing any leaks, Koenigsmann said.He said he was \u201coptimistic\u201d about the remedy and the ability to carry on, especially since the company had already been building the spacecraft for future missions. But he hedged when asked if the company would be able to fly this year.\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s impossible,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s getting increasingly difficult.\u201d He added: \u201cWe\u2019ll fly when we\u2019re ready. Problem can be fixed, but chance of sending a crew into space this year \u2018increasingly difficult\u2019  SpaceX blames faulty valve for Dragon spacecraft explosion",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going? (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6459",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/03/spacex-nasa-what-next/",
        "text": "After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll.It\u2019s basking in the successful completion Sunday of the first crewed space mission launched from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and the launch last week of a new rover to Mars. It\u2019s already planning its next astronaut launch, perhaps as soon as next month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe question now is: Can it maintain its mojo?NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is hoping to capitalize on the moment, seeking to leverage the recent triumphs and the run of good news they\u2019ve generated into support for NASA\u2019s expansive new budget requests. He made that clear at an event in Houston Sunday evening where he welcomed NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley home and said their exploits were proof that NASA does great things. It could do more, if only Congress would agree, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhat I\u2019m asking our members of Congress to do is look at what we\u2019ve done with what we have,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if you fund us at our budget request level, we will be on the moon. . . . The next step is we\u2019re going to the moon and then onto Mars. This is about momentum. It starts today, and it finishes when we put an American flag on Mars.\u201dIn an interview Monday, he said the agency was only getting started, reeling off a series of major missions to come that he hopes will galvanize interest in space and congressional support. Next year, the space agency is planning to fly its Orion spacecraft on a trip around the moon without astronauts, as well as two robotic missions to deliver science experiments to the lunar surface. If all goes well, it would also launch the $9.8 billion James Webb telescope in 2021, and the first-ever mission to Jupiter\u2019s Trojan asteroids.But the coronavirus pandemic could impact all of those schedules. And the funding for NASA\u2019s flagship mission, the Artemis program that would return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, is mired in a political debate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House has requested $25.2 billion for NASA next year, a significant increase that would help fund Artemis. NASA had originally planned to send astronauts there by 2028, but the White House directed the space agency to accelerate its plans, landing instead by 2024. To meet that ambitious deadline, NASA would need significantly more resources \u2014 an estimated $35 billion over the next several years.\u201cThe budget request is big,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if we\u2019re gong to do big things, we need to have a budget that matches.\u201d Or, as people in the space industry say, \u201cno bucks, no Buck Rogers.\u201dCongress, however, is skeptical.The House last week largely rebuffed the White House\u2019s spending plan, passing a spending bill with only $22.6 billion for NASA, a far cry from the White House request. The Senate has yet to take up the measure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members, particularly Democrats, have voiced skepticism for months.\u201cRhetoric about American leadership in space and advancing the role of women in spaceflight is all well and good,\u201d Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the chair of the House Science Committee, said last year. \u201cBut it is not a substitute for a well-planned, well-managed, well-funded and well-executed exploration program.\u201dBridenstine has long said that politics have hampered the agency more than technical setbacks. And as a former member of Congress, he has been in campaign mode for months to get the funding from his former colleagues.\u201cWe have proven that if you give us the resources, we can deliver,\u201d he said Sunday.Story continues below advertisementBut the hurdles the agency faces are not just budgetary or political. NASA has had troubling problems with some of its major programs that have sowed doubt about its ability to perform. The key is whether the SpaceX success will allow detractors to look past those problems.AdvertisementFor years, NASA has struggled with delays and cost overruns on its Space Launch System, a new rocket that Boeing is building as the lead contractor for NASA that would be the most powerful ever constructed. It\u2019s the rocket that would eventually fly astronauts to the moon. The James Webb telescope has also been beset by cost overruns and delays.But the SLS rocket has never flown, and NASA is only now, many years behind schedule, conducting the tests that would culminate later this year with \u201chot fire,\u201d when engineers will ignite the rocket\u2019s four RS-25 engines for up to eight minutes and generate 1.6 million pounds of thrust.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s NASA, however, that will ultimately own and operate the rocket, a vastly different model from the partnership it has with SpaceX to send astronauts to the space station. SpaceX owns and operates the hardware, not NASA, which hires SpaceX for rides to the station.AdvertisementBoeing, the prime contractor for the SLS, is the other company hired to fly astronauts to the space station, and it has stumbled badly in that mission, botching a test flight last year. Now it will refly that uncrewed test later this year, and isn\u2019t expected to be approved for a crewed test flight till next year. NASA has conceded it did a poor job of supervising Boeing\u2019s software development, the key reason for Boeing\u2019s failed test.Bridenstine\u2019s strategy in part has been to embrace the star power of the emerging commercial space industry, and the billionaires who are fueling the next chapter of space exploration. At Sunday\u2019s ceremony, Bridenstine was joined by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX.Story continues below advertisementLast year, as the company\u2019s progress was delayed, Bridenstine took a swipe at it, writing on Twitter that \u201cit\u2019s time to deliver.\u201d But on Sunday he praised Musk, saying \u201cI want to tell you, Elon, you responded absolutely magnificently and you have, in fact, delivered.\u201dAdvertisementFor his part, Musk echoed Bridenstine\u2019s goals for space exploration. He called the successful mission to fly Hurley and Behnken to the space station and back \u201ca new era in space flight, a new era in space exploration where we\u2019re going to go to the moon. We\u2019re going to have a base on the moon. We can send people to Mars and make life multi-planetary.\u201dIn the meantime, SpaceX is charging ahead with its partnership with NASA. The space agency has already named the crew of SpaceX\u2019s next mission, a quartet of astronauts in what would mark the first operational mission of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The crews have nearly completed their training.\u201cWe\u2019re ready,\u201d NASA astronaut Victor Glover said Sunday. \u201cWe\u2019re ready to go to the space station. . . . It\u2019s just a great time to be at NASA.\u201d After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll. NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6460",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/03/spacex-nasa-what-next/",
        "text": "After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll.It\u2019s basking in the successful completion Sunday of the first crewed space mission launched from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and the launch last week of a new rover to Mars. It\u2019s already planning its next astronaut launch, perhaps as soon as next month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe question now is: Can it maintain its mojo?NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is hoping to capitalize on the moment, seeking to leverage the recent triumphs and the run of good news they\u2019ve generated into support for NASA\u2019s expansive new budget requests. He made that clear at an event in Houston Sunday evening where he welcomed NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley home and said their exploits were proof that NASA does great things. It could do more, if only Congress would agree, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhat I\u2019m asking our members of Congress to do is look at what we\u2019ve done with what we have,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if you fund us at our budget request level, we will be on the moon. . . . The next step is we\u2019re going to the moon and then onto Mars. This is about momentum. It starts today, and it finishes when we put an American flag on Mars.\u201dIn an interview Monday, he said the agency was only getting started, reeling off a series of major missions to come that he hopes will galvanize interest in space and congressional support. Next year, the space agency is planning to fly its Orion spacecraft on a trip around the moon without astronauts, as well as two robotic missions to deliver science experiments to the lunar surface. If all goes well, it would also launch the $9.8 billion James Webb telescope in 2021, and the first-ever mission to Jupiter\u2019s Trojan asteroids.But the coronavirus pandemic could impact all of those schedules. And the funding for NASA\u2019s flagship mission, the Artemis program that would return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, is mired in a political debate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House has requested $25.2 billion for NASA next year, a significant increase that would help fund Artemis. NASA had originally planned to send astronauts there by 2028, but the White House directed the space agency to accelerate its plans, landing instead by 2024. To meet that ambitious deadline, NASA would need significantly more resources \u2014 an estimated $35 billion over the next several years.\u201cThe budget request is big,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if we\u2019re gong to do big things, we need to have a budget that matches.\u201d Or, as people in the space industry say, \u201cno bucks, no Buck Rogers.\u201dCongress, however, is skeptical.The House last week largely rebuffed the White House\u2019s spending plan, passing a spending bill with only $22.6 billion for NASA, a far cry from the White House request. The Senate has yet to take up the measure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members, particularly Democrats, have voiced skepticism for months.\u201cRhetoric about American leadership in space and advancing the role of women in spaceflight is all well and good,\u201d Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the chair of the House Science Committee, said last year. \u201cBut it is not a substitute for a well-planned, well-managed, well-funded and well-executed exploration program.\u201dBridenstine has long said that politics have hampered the agency more than technical setbacks. And as a former member of Congress, he has been in campaign mode for months to get the funding from his former colleagues.\u201cWe have proven that if you give us the resources, we can deliver,\u201d he said Sunday.Story continues below advertisementBut the hurdles the agency faces are not just budgetary or political. NASA has had troubling problems with some of its major programs that have sowed doubt about its ability to perform. The key is whether the SpaceX success will allow detractors to look past those problems.AdvertisementFor years, NASA has struggled with delays and cost overruns on its Space Launch System, a new rocket that Boeing is building as the lead contractor for NASA that would be the most powerful ever constructed. It\u2019s the rocket that would eventually fly astronauts to the moon. The James Webb telescope has also been beset by cost overruns and delays.But the SLS rocket has never flown, and NASA is only now, many years behind schedule, conducting the tests that would culminate later this year with \u201chot fire,\u201d when engineers will ignite the rocket\u2019s four RS-25 engines for up to eight minutes and generate 1.6 million pounds of thrust.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s NASA, however, that will ultimately own and operate the rocket, a vastly different model from the partnership it has with SpaceX to send astronauts to the space station. SpaceX owns and operates the hardware, not NASA, which hires SpaceX for rides to the station.AdvertisementBoeing, the prime contractor for the SLS, is the other company hired to fly astronauts to the space station, and it has stumbled badly in that mission, botching a test flight last year. Now it will refly that uncrewed test later this year, and isn\u2019t expected to be approved for a crewed test flight till next year. NASA has conceded it did a poor job of supervising Boeing\u2019s software development, the key reason for Boeing\u2019s failed test.Bridenstine\u2019s strategy in part has been to embrace the star power of the emerging commercial space industry, and the billionaires who are fueling the next chapter of space exploration. At Sunday\u2019s ceremony, Bridenstine was joined by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX.Story continues below advertisementLast year, as the company\u2019s progress was delayed, Bridenstine took a swipe at it, writing on Twitter that \u201cit\u2019s time to deliver.\u201d But on Sunday he praised Musk, saying \u201cI want to tell you, Elon, you responded absolutely magnificently and you have, in fact, delivered.\u201dAdvertisementFor his part, Musk echoed Bridenstine\u2019s goals for space exploration. He called the successful mission to fly Hurley and Behnken to the space station and back \u201ca new era in space flight, a new era in space exploration where we\u2019re going to go to the moon. We\u2019re going to have a base on the moon. We can send people to Mars and make life multi-planetary.\u201dIn the meantime, SpaceX is charging ahead with its partnership with NASA. The space agency has already named the crew of SpaceX\u2019s next mission, a quartet of astronauts in what would mark the first operational mission of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The crews have nearly completed their training.\u201cWe\u2019re ready,\u201d NASA astronaut Victor Glover said Sunday. \u201cWe\u2019re ready to go to the space station. . . . It\u2019s just a great time to be at NASA.\u201d After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll. NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6461",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/03/spacex-nasa-what-next/",
        "text": "After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll.It\u2019s basking in the successful completion Sunday of the first crewed space mission launched from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and the launch last week of a new rover to Mars. It\u2019s already planning its next astronaut launch, perhaps as soon as next month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe question now is: Can it maintain its mojo?NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is hoping to capitalize on the moment, seeking to leverage the recent triumphs and the run of good news they\u2019ve generated into support for NASA\u2019s expansive new budget requests. He made that clear at an event in Houston Sunday evening where he welcomed NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley home and said their exploits were proof that NASA does great things. It could do more, if only Congress would agree, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhat I\u2019m asking our members of Congress to do is look at what we\u2019ve done with what we have,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if you fund us at our budget request level, we will be on the moon. . . . The next step is we\u2019re going to the moon and then onto Mars. This is about momentum. It starts today, and it finishes when we put an American flag on Mars.\u201dIn an interview Monday, he said the agency was only getting started, reeling off a series of major missions to come that he hopes will galvanize interest in space and congressional support. Next year, the space agency is planning to fly its Orion spacecraft on a trip around the moon without astronauts, as well as two robotic missions to deliver science experiments to the lunar surface. If all goes well, it would also launch the $9.8 billion James Webb telescope in 2021, and the first-ever mission to Jupiter\u2019s Trojan asteroids.But the coronavirus pandemic could impact all of those schedules. And the funding for NASA\u2019s flagship mission, the Artemis program that would return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, is mired in a political debate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House has requested $25.2 billion for NASA next year, a significant increase that would help fund Artemis. NASA had originally planned to send astronauts there by 2028, but the White House directed the space agency to accelerate its plans, landing instead by 2024. To meet that ambitious deadline, NASA would need significantly more resources \u2014 an estimated $35 billion over the next several years.\u201cThe budget request is big,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if we\u2019re gong to do big things, we need to have a budget that matches.\u201d Or, as people in the space industry say, \u201cno bucks, no Buck Rogers.\u201dCongress, however, is skeptical.The House last week largely rebuffed the White House\u2019s spending plan, passing a spending bill with only $22.6 billion for NASA, a far cry from the White House request. The Senate has yet to take up the measure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members, particularly Democrats, have voiced skepticism for months.\u201cRhetoric about American leadership in space and advancing the role of women in spaceflight is all well and good,\u201d Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the chair of the House Science Committee, said last year. \u201cBut it is not a substitute for a well-planned, well-managed, well-funded and well-executed exploration program.\u201dBridenstine has long said that politics have hampered the agency more than technical setbacks. And as a former member of Congress, he has been in campaign mode for months to get the funding from his former colleagues.\u201cWe have proven that if you give us the resources, we can deliver,\u201d he said Sunday.Story continues below advertisementBut the hurdles the agency faces are not just budgetary or political. NASA has had troubling problems with some of its major programs that have sowed doubt about its ability to perform. The key is whether the SpaceX success will allow detractors to look past those problems.AdvertisementFor years, NASA has struggled with delays and cost overruns on its Space Launch System, a new rocket that Boeing is building as the lead contractor for NASA that would be the most powerful ever constructed. It\u2019s the rocket that would eventually fly astronauts to the moon. The James Webb telescope has also been beset by cost overruns and delays.But the SLS rocket has never flown, and NASA is only now, many years behind schedule, conducting the tests that would culminate later this year with \u201chot fire,\u201d when engineers will ignite the rocket\u2019s four RS-25 engines for up to eight minutes and generate 1.6 million pounds of thrust.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s NASA, however, that will ultimately own and operate the rocket, a vastly different model from the partnership it has with SpaceX to send astronauts to the space station. SpaceX owns and operates the hardware, not NASA, which hires SpaceX for rides to the station.AdvertisementBoeing, the prime contractor for the SLS, is the other company hired to fly astronauts to the space station, and it has stumbled badly in that mission, botching a test flight last year. Now it will refly that uncrewed test later this year, and isn\u2019t expected to be approved for a crewed test flight till next year. NASA has conceded it did a poor job of supervising Boeing\u2019s software development, the key reason for Boeing\u2019s failed test.Bridenstine\u2019s strategy in part has been to embrace the star power of the emerging commercial space industry, and the billionaires who are fueling the next chapter of space exploration. At Sunday\u2019s ceremony, Bridenstine was joined by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX.Story continues below advertisementLast year, as the company\u2019s progress was delayed, Bridenstine took a swipe at it, writing on Twitter that \u201cit\u2019s time to deliver.\u201d But on Sunday he praised Musk, saying \u201cI want to tell you, Elon, you responded absolutely magnificently and you have, in fact, delivered.\u201dAdvertisementFor his part, Musk echoed Bridenstine\u2019s goals for space exploration. He called the successful mission to fly Hurley and Behnken to the space station and back \u201ca new era in space flight, a new era in space exploration where we\u2019re going to go to the moon. We\u2019re going to have a base on the moon. We can send people to Mars and make life multi-planetary.\u201dIn the meantime, SpaceX is charging ahead with its partnership with NASA. The space agency has already named the crew of SpaceX\u2019s next mission, a quartet of astronauts in what would mark the first operational mission of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The crews have nearly completed their training.\u201cWe\u2019re ready,\u201d NASA astronaut Victor Glover said Sunday. \u201cWe\u2019re ready to go to the space station. . . . It\u2019s just a great time to be at NASA.\u201d After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll. NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6462",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/03/spacex-nasa-what-next/",
        "text": "After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll.It\u2019s basking in the successful completion Sunday of the first crewed space mission launched from U.S. soil in nearly a decade and the launch last week of a new rover to Mars. It\u2019s already planning its next astronaut launch, perhaps as soon as next month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe question now is: Can it maintain its mojo?NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is hoping to capitalize on the moment, seeking to leverage the recent triumphs and the run of good news they\u2019ve generated into support for NASA\u2019s expansive new budget requests. He made that clear at an event in Houston Sunday evening where he welcomed NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley home and said their exploits were proof that NASA does great things. It could do more, if only Congress would agree, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhat I\u2019m asking our members of Congress to do is look at what we\u2019ve done with what we have,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if you fund us at our budget request level, we will be on the moon. . . . The next step is we\u2019re going to the moon and then onto Mars. This is about momentum. It starts today, and it finishes when we put an American flag on Mars.\u201dIn an interview Monday, he said the agency was only getting started, reeling off a series of major missions to come that he hopes will galvanize interest in space and congressional support. Next year, the space agency is planning to fly its Orion spacecraft on a trip around the moon without astronauts, as well as two robotic missions to deliver science experiments to the lunar surface. If all goes well, it would also launch the $9.8 billion James Webb telescope in 2021, and the first-ever mission to Jupiter\u2019s Trojan asteroids.But the coronavirus pandemic could impact all of those schedules. And the funding for NASA\u2019s flagship mission, the Artemis program that would return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, is mired in a political debate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House has requested $25.2 billion for NASA next year, a significant increase that would help fund Artemis. NASA had originally planned to send astronauts there by 2028, but the White House directed the space agency to accelerate its plans, landing instead by 2024. To meet that ambitious deadline, NASA would need significantly more resources \u2014 an estimated $35 billion over the next several years.\u201cThe budget request is big,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if we\u2019re gong to do big things, we need to have a budget that matches.\u201d Or, as people in the space industry say, \u201cno bucks, no Buck Rogers.\u201dCongress, however, is skeptical.The House last week largely rebuffed the White House\u2019s spending plan, passing a spending bill with only $22.6 billion for NASA, a far cry from the White House request. The Senate has yet to take up the measure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members, particularly Democrats, have voiced skepticism for months.\u201cRhetoric about American leadership in space and advancing the role of women in spaceflight is all well and good,\u201d Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the chair of the House Science Committee, said last year. \u201cBut it is not a substitute for a well-planned, well-managed, well-funded and well-executed exploration program.\u201dBridenstine has long said that politics have hampered the agency more than technical setbacks. And as a former member of Congress, he has been in campaign mode for months to get the funding from his former colleagues.\u201cWe have proven that if you give us the resources, we can deliver,\u201d he said Sunday.Story continues below advertisementBut the hurdles the agency faces are not just budgetary or political. NASA has had troubling problems with some of its major programs that have sowed doubt about its ability to perform. The key is whether the SpaceX success will allow detractors to look past those problems.AdvertisementFor years, NASA has struggled with delays and cost overruns on its Space Launch System, a new rocket that Boeing is building as the lead contractor for NASA that would be the most powerful ever constructed. It\u2019s the rocket that would eventually fly astronauts to the moon. The James Webb telescope has also been beset by cost overruns and delays.But the SLS rocket has never flown, and NASA is only now, many years behind schedule, conducting the tests that would culminate later this year with \u201chot fire,\u201d when engineers will ignite the rocket\u2019s four RS-25 engines for up to eight minutes and generate 1.6 million pounds of thrust.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s NASA, however, that will ultimately own and operate the rocket, a vastly different model from the partnership it has with SpaceX to send astronauts to the space station. SpaceX owns and operates the hardware, not NASA, which hires SpaceX for rides to the station.AdvertisementBoeing, the prime contractor for the SLS, is the other company hired to fly astronauts to the space station, and it has stumbled badly in that mission, botching a test flight last year. Now it will refly that uncrewed test later this year, and isn\u2019t expected to be approved for a crewed test flight till next year. NASA has conceded it did a poor job of supervising Boeing\u2019s software development, the key reason for Boeing\u2019s failed test.Bridenstine\u2019s strategy in part has been to embrace the star power of the emerging commercial space industry, and the billionaires who are fueling the next chapter of space exploration. At Sunday\u2019s ceremony, Bridenstine was joined by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX.Story continues below advertisementLast year, as the company\u2019s progress was delayed, Bridenstine took a swipe at it, writing on Twitter that \u201cit\u2019s time to deliver.\u201d But on Sunday he praised Musk, saying \u201cI want to tell you, Elon, you responded absolutely magnificently and you have, in fact, delivered.\u201dAdvertisementFor his part, Musk echoed Bridenstine\u2019s goals for space exploration. He called the successful mission to fly Hurley and Behnken to the space station and back \u201ca new era in space flight, a new era in space exploration where we\u2019re going to go to the moon. We\u2019re going to have a base on the moon. We can send people to Mars and make life multi-planetary.\u201dIn the meantime, SpaceX is charging ahead with its partnership with NASA. The space agency has already named the crew of SpaceX\u2019s next mission, a quartet of astronauts in what would mark the first operational mission of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The crews have nearly completed their training.\u201cWe\u2019re ready,\u201d NASA astronaut Victor Glover said Sunday. \u201cWe\u2019re ready to go to the space station. . . . It\u2019s just a great time to be at NASA.\u201d After years in which NASA seemed like an afterthought in the national consciousness and was at the back of the line when the federal budget was allocated, the space agency appears to be on a roll. NASA is on an epic roll. But can it keep the momentum going?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing tried to amend bid after guidance from NASA official, raising concerns it received inside information (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6463",
        "date": "2020-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/20/nasa-boeing-bid-probe/",
        "text": "After a top NASA official improperly contacted a senior Boeing executive about a bid to win a contract potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the company attempted to amend its proposal past the deadline for doing so, according to people with knowledge of the matter.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat raised alarm bells inside the space agency, where officials were concerned that Boeing was attempting to take advantage of inside information. Ultimately, the matter was referred to NASA\u2019s inspector general office, and NASA\u2019s leadership last month forced Doug Loverro to resign from his position as the associate administrator of NASA\u2019s human spaceflight directorate. Boeing did not win one of the lucrative contracts to build a system capable of landing astronauts on the moon. But the inspector general investigation could be another headache for a company under fire for having an unusually cozy relationship with federal regulators, especially if it identifies wrongdoing on the part of Boeing senior executives. The company already is reeling from two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airplanes that killed a total of 346 people and from the bungled test flight in December of its Starliner space capsule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA person with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation said: \u201cI can tell you with 100 percent confidence that no laws were broken. What we are talking about are conversations that occurred outside the normal dictated channels but didn\u2019t violate the sanctity of the procurement process.\u201dThe conversation at the root of the investigation was between Loverro and Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch division, putting one of the company\u2019s top executives in the middle of the probe, according to multiple people familiar with what took place.The investigation into Loverro\u2019s interactions with Boeing was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. But Chilton\u2019s involvement and Boeing\u2019s actions after Loverro spoke with him had not previously been known.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe probe is separate from a previously announced audit into NASA\u2019s acquisition strategy for the program, called Artemis, to return to the moon. After its investigations, which can take months, the inspector general refers findings either to the Justice Department for prosecution or to NASA\u2019s leadership for administrative action.The inspector general declined to comment, as did Boeing. Chilton also declined to comment.On May 30, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule separated from the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s second stage booster and entered a stable low-Earth orbit. (The Washington Post)NASA officials have stressed that the agency has gone to great lengths to ensure the integrity of the contract awards, worth $1 billion combined, that went to teams led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, as well as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIn his resignation letter, Loverro, a longtime public servant who spent many years at the Pentagon before coming to NASA, wrote that he took \u201ca risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission. Now, over the balance of time, it is clear that I made a mistake in that choice for which I alone must bear the consequences.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview with The Post last month, Loverro said he was trying to speed up the Artemis moon program to meet a White House mandate to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.\u201cIt had to do with moving fast on Artemis, and I don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementLoverro declined to comment on the record for this story.According to a congressional aide with knowledge of the matter, NASA procurement officials grew concerned earlier this year when Boeing contacted the agency, saying it wanted to change parts of its bid for the lunar lander contract. Not only was it late in the process, but the specificity of Boeing\u2019s proposed changes raised \u201cred flags\u201d inside NASA that the company had received inside information improperly.NASA officials wondered, \u201cHow did they know to raise this issue or try to fix this issue?\u201d according to the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce it became aware of Loverro\u2019s actions, NASA\u2019s leadership moved quickly, officials said, forcing him out, even though the timing was terrible \u2014 coming just days before the first launch of NASA astronauts from United States soil in nearly a decade.But the probe is also focusing on Boeing, officials said.\u201cThis certainly goes both ways. It\u2019s one thing to have a mistake that violated the Integrity in Procurement Act,\u201d the aide said. \u201cIt\u2019s another if the company took that information and acted on it.\u201dThe investigation comes as Boeing continues to face fallout over its handling of the two 737 Max crashes. Boeing has been accused of downplaying the dangers and having a too cozy relationship with regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration. A congressional report released this year accused Boeing of having a \u201cculture of concealment.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIts space program has also taken a hit. The company has been under fire for the performance of its Space Launch System rocket, which is years behind schedule and billions over budget. Its Starliner spacecraft, designed to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, suffered problems during a test flight without crews on board last year, forcing the company to schedule to re-fly the mission at a cost of $410 million. That retest is likely to come later this year.On April 30, NASA awarded three contracts for the Human Landing System (HLS), worth nearly $1 billion combined, to three companies to build landing systems capable to taking astronauts to the lunar surface.A team led by Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper won the largest award, $579 million. Longtime NASA contractor Dynetics, which paired with the Sierra Nevada Corp., received a $253 million contract. Musk\u2019s SpaceX won $135 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFederal procurement regulations encourage the government to communicate with contractors about their bids to help agencies get the products and services that best fit their requirements.\u201cThe question becomes when is it okay to have those discussions, and more importantly, whether you have to have the exact same discussions with all potential bidders,\u201d said David Berteau, the president and chief executive of the Professional Services Council, a trade group that represents federal contractors.NASA has gone to great lengths to ensure the contracts were awarded properly.\u201cThe agency is confident in the integrity of the HLS procurement,\u201d NASA said in a statement to The Post. \u201cMr. Loverro was not the selection official, and his resignation has no impact on the performance of these HLS contracts.\u201dNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has declined to discuss Loverro\u2019s departure from the agency, saying it was a \u201cpersonnel issue.\u201d He recently appointed Kathy Lueders, a NASA veteran, as Loverro\u2019s replacement, praising her as someone with \u201cthe right set of skills and the right leadership qualities to take our agency deeper into the solar system.\u201d After a top NASA official improperly contacted a senior Boeing executive about its bid to win a contract potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Boeing tried to change its bid, alarming NASA officials. Boeing tried to amend bid after guidance from NASA official, raising concerns it received inside information",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX crew capsule suffers failure that sends a cloud of smoke over Florida Space Coast (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6464",
        "date": "2019-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/21/spacex-crew-capsule-suffers-failure-that-sends-cloud-smoke-over-fla-space-coast/",
        "text": "A SpaceX capsule designed to ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station suffered a failure during an engine test Saturday afternoon that sent a billowing plume of smoke into the air over Cape Canaveral, Fla.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNo one was injured, and it was not clear what caused the accident or how serious it was. In a statement, the company said the failure occurred as it was conducting \u201ca series of engine tests.\u201d The initial tests were \u201ccompleted successfully, but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand.\u201d The failure comes at a critical time for the California-based company founded by Elon Musk. It hopes to fly astronauts to the space station as soon as this year as part of NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201d And it comes ahead of tests of the capsule\u2019s escape system, which is designed to jettison the spacecraft away from its rocket in the event of an emergency. Now both of those could be delayed as the company investigates what went wrong.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe engines that failed Saturday are part of that abort system. Reports from local media outlets showed a large reddish cloud of smoke that, according to Florida Today, \u201ccould be seen for miles.\u201d\u201cEnsuring that our systems meet rigorous safety standards and detecting anomalies like this prior to flight are the main reasons why we test,\u201d SpaceX said in its statement. \u201cOur teams are investigating and working closely with our NASA partners.\u201dIn a statement on Twitter, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, \u201cThis is why we test. We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward with our commercial crew program.\u201dEarlier this year, SpaceX conducted a successful uncrewed test flight of its spacecraft, known as Crew Dragon, which flew to the space station, docked and then returned home. The setback comes as the company is preparing to fly NASA astronauts for the first time. SpaceX crew capsule suffers failure that sends a cloud of smoke over Florida Space Coast",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX rocket booster misses its landing (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6465",
        "date": "2020-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/17/spacex-rocket-booster-misses-its-landing/",
        "text": "A rocket booster that SpaceX hoped would make its 50th successful landing after launch on Monday missed the autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean where it was supposed to come down, the company said during an Internet broadcast.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor decades, rocket boosters had been ditched into the ocean after propelling their payloads to orbit. But SpaceX has sought to change that dynamic by developing a rocket that could not only blast off to space, but then autonomously reorient itself and fly back to Earth, touching down with pinpoint precision. Monday\u2019s launch went off smoothly, the company said, and its booster fell back through the atmosphere, slowing itself down by refiring its engine. But a camera on board the floating platform, known as an autonomous spaceport droneship, showed that the booster did not touch down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe clearly did not make the landing this time,\u201d Lauren Lyons, a SpaceX engineer, said during the live broadcast. SpaceX had successfully landed its booster 49 times previously.The launch from Cape Canaveral delivered 60 satellites that the company hopes will become part of a constellation of thousands in low Earth orbit that are intended to beam the Internet to remote corners of the world not served by broadband. The satellites deployed as expected, the company said.With Monday\u2019s launch, SpaceX has now launched 300 small satellites that are part of what it calls its Starlink constellation, as the company hopes to transform itself into an Internet service provider. Companies such as OneWeb and Amazon also plan to launch constellations of their own, raising fears about possible collisions in space as Earth orbit becomes crowded with many new spacecraft. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Monday\u2019s launch at 10:05 a.m. was the fourth flight of the booster in the past year. It was not immediately clear why the landing did not go as planned. Monday\u2019s launch went off smoothly, the company said, and its booster fell back through the atmosphere, slowing itself down by refiring its engine. But a camera on board the floating platform, known as an autonomous spaceport droneship, showed that the booster did not touch down. SpaceX rocket booster misses its landing",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX rocket booster misses its landing (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6466",
        "date": "2020-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/17/spacex-rocket-booster-misses-its-landing/",
        "text": "A rocket booster that SpaceX hoped would make its 50th successful landing after launch on Monday missed the autonomous ship in the Atlantic Ocean where it was supposed to come down, the company said during an Internet broadcast.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor decades, rocket boosters had been ditched into the ocean after propelling their payloads to orbit. But SpaceX has sought to change that dynamic by developing a rocket that could not only blast off to space, but then autonomously reorient itself and fly back to Earth, touching down with pinpoint precision. Monday\u2019s launch went off smoothly, the company said, and its booster fell back through the atmosphere, slowing itself down by refiring its engine. But a camera on board the floating platform, known as an autonomous spaceport droneship, showed that the booster did not touch down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe clearly did not make the landing this time,\u201d Lauren Lyons, a SpaceX engineer, said during the live broadcast. SpaceX had successfully landed its booster 49 times previously.The launch from Cape Canaveral delivered 60 satellites that the company hopes will become part of a constellation of thousands in low Earth orbit that are intended to beam the Internet to remote corners of the world not served by broadband. The satellites deployed as expected, the company said.With Monday\u2019s launch, SpaceX has now launched 300 small satellites that are part of what it calls its Starlink constellation, as the company hopes to transform itself into an Internet service provider. Companies such as OneWeb and Amazon also plan to launch constellations of their own, raising fears about possible collisions in space as Earth orbit becomes crowded with many new spacecraft. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Monday\u2019s launch at 10:05 a.m. was the fourth flight of the booster in the past year. It was not immediately clear why the landing did not go as planned. Monday\u2019s launch went off smoothly, the company said, and its booster fell back through the atmosphere, slowing itself down by refiring its engine. But a camera on board the floating platform, known as an autonomous spaceport droneship, showed that the booster did not touch down. SpaceX rocket booster misses its landing",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "In damning report, watchdog paints troubling picture of relationship between NASA and Boeing  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6467",
        "date": "2019-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/14/damning-report-watchdog-paints-troubling-picture-relationship-between-nasa-boeing/",
        "text": "A report released Thursday by NASA\u2019s inspector general paints a damning picture of the space agency\u2019s relationship with Boeing, one of its top contractors, saying NASA \u201coverpaid\u201d Boeing by hundreds of millions of dollars in what the report deemed \u201cunnecessary\u201d payments for a \u201cfirm-fixed-price\u201d contract.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA agreed to pay the company an additional $287.2 million as part of Boeing\u2019s multibillion-dollar contract to develop a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station to help it speed up the company\u2019s launch schedule. But the payment could have been easily avoided \u201cthrough simple changes to the flight manifest,\u201d NASA\u2019s inspector general wrote in the report. In making the payments, NASA officials also didn\u2019t take into account that Boeing had acquired several seats on a Russian spacecraft that it was planning to sell to NASA, something that would have helped fill the perceived gap in flights. Five days after NASA awarded Boeing the additional $287 million, Boeing proposed selling NASA up to five seats on the Russian Soyuz for $373.5 million, according to the IG\u2019s report.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA also didn\u2019t ask SpaceX, the other company under contract by NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station, whether it could speed up the development of its spacecraft and help fill the gap.Both Boeing and SpaceX have suffered serious technical problems in what\u2019s known as NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d that have delayed the first flights with human crews by two years.Boeing, the IG said, found a way to capitalize on that delay. NASA \u201cessentially paid Boeing higher prices to address a schedule slippage caused by Boeing\u2019s 13-month delay\u201d in completing a key design milestone. But the IG said that the \u201cadditional compensation was unnecessary\u201d given that the risk of a gap between flights was \u201cminimal.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIt also said NASA officials felt they needed to meet Boeing\u2019s demands for additional compensation because \u201cthey believed that due to financial considerations, Boeing could not continue as a commercial crew provider unless the contractor received the higher prices.\u201d AdvertisementIn a letter to the IG, the agency said it \u201cstrongly disagrees with the OIG\u2019s characterization that NASA \u2018overpaid\u2019 for Boeing [flights] or that the final agreed-to prices were \u2018unnecessary,\u2019 \u2018not justified,\u2019 \u2018unreasonable\u2019 or \u2018higher\u2019 than some hypothetical lower amount.\u201d The agency said that \u201cthere is no evidence to support the conclusion that Boeing would have agreed to lower prices.\u201d And it said the prices were reviewed and approved by numerous NASA officials and resulted in a 29-page justification memo. A NASA spokesman declined to release the letter, saying it was proprietary. He also noted that the IG \u201cdid not recommend recovery of any of the questioned costs.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, Boeing defended the additional payments, saying it is \u201ctaking significantly more upfront financial risk and is already helping NASA with critical decisions key to optimizing future [space station] operations. Doing so under the structure of the original contract would have increased cost and schedule uncertainty and would have limited NASA\u2019s flexibility in mission planning.\u201d AdvertisementIn 2014, NASA awarded contracts \u2014 $4.2 billion to Boeing; $2.6 billion to SpaceX \u2014 as part of an effort to restore NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program and bring launches back to U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Without a way to fly its astronauts to space, NASA has had to pay Russia as much as about $84 million a seat for rides to the space station. But the IG report questioned the rationale for the Boeing contract, finding that the first flights on Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule would cost $90 million a seat, slightly more than what Russia charges. Rides on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule would cost about $55 million per seat, the IG found.Story continues below advertisementThe report was more bad news for Boeing, which has been engulfed in scandal since the crashes of two of its 737 Max jets killed 346 people. Dennis Muilenburg, its chief executive, was stripped of his title as chairman, and the months-long grounding of the passenger jets cost the company $5.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter. Criticism has been withering on Capitol Hill.Thursday\u2019s IG report came a day after another report highlighted the struggles of another of Boeing\u2019s big projects for NASA \u2014 the development of the Space Launch System rocket, which has yet to fly but NASA is hoping to use to fly astronauts to the moon. According to that report, the SLS rocket, the Orion crew capsule that would fly on top of it, and related ground systems has so far cost the agency $34 billion, a number that is projected to grow to $50 billion by 2024.The report comes just days after Boeing conducted a test of the Starliner\u2019s abort system, which would ferry the crew to safety in the case of an emergency. Boeing and NASA deemed the test a success despite the fact that one of the three main parachutes failed to deploy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing officials said that two were sufficient to land the spacecraft softly and safely, and it quickly identified the cause of the failure: a pin attached to a smaller parachute that was to pull out the larger main chute was not secured properly, a human error. The pin was underneath a protective sheath and out of sight.In the future, Boeing officials pledged to test that the link was secure by tugging on it.SpaceX has also had problems with its spacecraft. In April, the vehicle was destroyed during a test of its abort engines. But the company this week completed the same test and it appeared to go well.SpaceX also has had serious problems with its parachutes. The same month that its Dragon capsule exploded on the test stand, the company conducted a drop test in which three parachutes failed to deploy, \u201cresulting the loss of the test sled,\u201d the IG found.Since then the company said it has completed 14 tests of a new parachute design.During a speech at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center on Thursday afternoon, Vice President Pence sounded an upbeat note, saying the agency would be launching \u201cAmerican astronauts on American rockets from American soil\u201d by spring. NASA agreed to pay the company an additional $287.2 million as part of Boeing\u2019s multi-billion-dollar contract to develop a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station to help it speed up the company\u2019s launch schedule. But the payment could have been easily avoided \u201cthrough simple changes to the flight manifest,\u201d NASA\u2019s Inspector General wrote in the report. In damning report, watchdog paints troubling picture of relationship between NASA and Boeing ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "In damning report, watchdog paints troubling picture of relationship between NASA and Boeing  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6468",
        "date": "2019-11-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/14/damning-report-watchdog-paints-troubling-picture-relationship-between-nasa-boeing/",
        "text": "A report released Thursday by NASA\u2019s inspector general paints a damning picture of the space agency\u2019s relationship with Boeing, one of its top contractors, saying NASA \u201coverpaid\u201d Boeing by hundreds of millions of dollars in what the report deemed \u201cunnecessary\u201d payments for a \u201cfirm-fixed-price\u201d contract.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA agreed to pay the company an additional $287.2 million as part of Boeing\u2019s multibillion-dollar contract to develop a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station to help it speed up the company\u2019s launch schedule. But the payment could have been easily avoided \u201cthrough simple changes to the flight manifest,\u201d NASA\u2019s inspector general wrote in the report. In making the payments, NASA officials also didn\u2019t take into account that Boeing had acquired several seats on a Russian spacecraft that it was planning to sell to NASA, something that would have helped fill the perceived gap in flights. Five days after NASA awarded Boeing the additional $287 million, Boeing proposed selling NASA up to five seats on the Russian Soyuz for $373.5 million, according to the IG\u2019s report.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA also didn\u2019t ask SpaceX, the other company under contract by NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station, whether it could speed up the development of its spacecraft and help fill the gap.Both Boeing and SpaceX have suffered serious technical problems in what\u2019s known as NASA\u2019s \u201ccommercial crew program\u201d that have delayed the first flights with human crews by two years.Boeing, the IG said, found a way to capitalize on that delay. NASA \u201cessentially paid Boeing higher prices to address a schedule slippage caused by Boeing\u2019s 13-month delay\u201d in completing a key design milestone. But the IG said that the \u201cadditional compensation was unnecessary\u201d given that the risk of a gap between flights was \u201cminimal.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIt also said NASA officials felt they needed to meet Boeing\u2019s demands for additional compensation because \u201cthey believed that due to financial considerations, Boeing could not continue as a commercial crew provider unless the contractor received the higher prices.\u201d AdvertisementIn a letter to the IG, the agency said it \u201cstrongly disagrees with the OIG\u2019s characterization that NASA \u2018overpaid\u2019 for Boeing [flights] or that the final agreed-to prices were \u2018unnecessary,\u2019 \u2018not justified,\u2019 \u2018unreasonable\u2019 or \u2018higher\u2019 than some hypothetical lower amount.\u201d The agency said that \u201cthere is no evidence to support the conclusion that Boeing would have agreed to lower prices.\u201d And it said the prices were reviewed and approved by numerous NASA officials and resulted in a 29-page justification memo. A NASA spokesman declined to release the letter, saying it was proprietary. He also noted that the IG \u201cdid not recommend recovery of any of the questioned costs.\u201d Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, Boeing defended the additional payments, saying it is \u201ctaking significantly more upfront financial risk and is already helping NASA with critical decisions key to optimizing future [space station] operations. Doing so under the structure of the original contract would have increased cost and schedule uncertainty and would have limited NASA\u2019s flexibility in mission planning.\u201d AdvertisementIn 2014, NASA awarded contracts \u2014 $4.2 billion to Boeing; $2.6 billion to SpaceX \u2014 as part of an effort to restore NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program and bring launches back to U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Without a way to fly its astronauts to space, NASA has had to pay Russia as much as about $84 million a seat for rides to the space station. But the IG report questioned the rationale for the Boeing contract, finding that the first flights on Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule would cost $90 million a seat, slightly more than what Russia charges. Rides on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule would cost about $55 million per seat, the IG found.Story continues below advertisementThe report was more bad news for Boeing, which has been engulfed in scandal since the crashes of two of its 737 Max jets killed 346 people. Dennis Muilenburg, its chief executive, was stripped of his title as chairman, and the months-long grounding of the passenger jets cost the company $5.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter. Criticism has been withering on Capitol Hill.Thursday\u2019s IG report came a day after another report highlighted the struggles of another of Boeing\u2019s big projects for NASA \u2014 the development of the Space Launch System rocket, which has yet to fly but NASA is hoping to use to fly astronauts to the moon. According to that report, the SLS rocket, the Orion crew capsule that would fly on top of it, and related ground systems has so far cost the agency $34 billion, a number that is projected to grow to $50 billion by 2024.The report comes just days after Boeing conducted a test of the Starliner\u2019s abort system, which would ferry the crew to safety in the case of an emergency. Boeing and NASA deemed the test a success despite the fact that one of the three main parachutes failed to deploy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing officials said that two were sufficient to land the spacecraft softly and safely, and it quickly identified the cause of the failure: a pin attached to a smaller parachute that was to pull out the larger main chute was not secured properly, a human error. The pin was underneath a protective sheath and out of sight.In the future, Boeing officials pledged to test that the link was secure by tugging on it.SpaceX has also had problems with its spacecraft. In April, the vehicle was destroyed during a test of its abort engines. But the company this week completed the same test and it appeared to go well.SpaceX also has had serious problems with its parachutes. The same month that its Dragon capsule exploded on the test stand, the company conducted a drop test in which three parachutes failed to deploy, \u201cresulting the loss of the test sled,\u201d the IG found.Since then the company said it has completed 14 tests of a new parachute design.During a speech at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center on Thursday afternoon, Vice President Pence sounded an upbeat note, saying the agency would be launching \u201cAmerican astronauts on American rockets from American soil\u201d by spring. NASA agreed to pay the company an additional $287.2 million as part of Boeing\u2019s multi-billion-dollar contract to develop a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station to help it speed up the company\u2019s launch schedule. But the payment could have been easily avoided \u201cthrough simple changes to the flight manifest,\u201d NASA\u2019s Inspector General wrote in the report. In damning report, watchdog paints troubling picture of relationship between NASA and Boeing ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Starship launches successfully but lands hard, explodes in what SpaceX calls an \u2018awesome test\u2019 (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6469",
        "date": "2020-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/09/sapcex-starship-explodes-on-landing/",
        "text": "A prototype of the massive spacecraft Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is building to take people to the moon and Mars exploded upon landing Wednesday after a seemingly successful launch and flight. Still, the company called it \u201can awesome test,\u201d and Musk said the company \u201cgot all the data we needed.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Starship rocket has been Musk\u2019s passion for years, a vehicle that has gone through multiple design changes as SpaceX has worked to develop a craft that could eventually fly people to deep space. Before the test flight, SpaceX cautioned that there will probably be setbacks during the ongoing development of the vehicle. And before Wednesday\u2019s flight, it said that \u201cwith a test such as this, success is not measured by completion of specific objectives but rather how much we can learn, which will inform the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStarship, made of stainless steel, with aerodynamic flaps to help control its trajectory, was supposed to fly to an altitude of nearly eight miles, then fall back through the atmosphere in a belly-flop position before reorienting itself, reigniting its engine and touching down softly.It appeared to complete all of those milestones, except for the landing, which sent a fireball and a plume of smoke over the Gulf Coast. No one was on board and no one was injured.After the flight, Musk tweeted that it was a \u201csuccessful ascent\u201d and that the vehicle performed well. There was low pressure during the landing, \u201ccausing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD,\u201d he wrote, using an acronym for \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cEven reaching apogee would\u2019ve been great, so controlling all way to putting the crater in the right spot was epic!!\u201d he wrote adding: \u201cMars, here we come!\u201dAdvertisementIn various presentations over the years, Musk has championed the need for a massive, heavy-lift spacecraft that could refuel in space and be fully reusable. At times, Musk has given grandiose presentations of the rocket and his plans to one day build a city on Mars.During an interview with The Washington Post in 2016, when Musk was calling Starship the \u201cMars Colonial Transporter,\u201d he said his goal was \u201chaving an architecture that would enable the creation of a self-sustaining city on Mars with the objective of being a multi-planet species and a true space-faring civilization and one day being out there among the stars.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe journey would be \u201cdangerous and probably people will die \u2014 and they\u2019ll know that,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then they\u2019ll pave the way, and ultimately it will be very safe to go to Mars, and it will be comfortable. But that will be many years in the future.\u201dAdvertisementIn a blog post before the flight, SpaceX said it was hoping to test a number of systems, including the vehicle\u2019s three Raptor engines, which burn methane and liquid oxygen, as well as how it behaves in the upper atmosphere.Instead of attempting to fly straight to orbit, SpaceX has been taking an incremental approach with Starship, flying to progressively higher altitudes and then landing the vehicle on a site near the launchpad.Story continues below advertisementDespite knowing the test could fail, or end in a fireball, it still broadcast the flight, and scores of people lined the waterfront near South Padre Island, Tex., to watch.The spacecraft that flew Wednesday was the eighth prototype SpaceX has built, and it says it has two more ready for the next steps in the test campaign. Musk has said he\u2019d like the vehicle to make it to orbit by next year.AdvertisementWhile many in the space industry are skeptical of Starship\u2019s prospects, NASA has invested $135 million in the vehicle as part of its Artemis program to return astronauts to the moon. People in the industry were also skeptical when NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, saying human spaceflight should never be outsourced to the private sector and to a company as unproven as SpaceX.In May, SpaceX successfully launched a pair of NASA astronauts to orbit and brought them home safely two months later. Over the summer, NASA certified the company for regular crewed flights to the station, and it completed another mission last month. Starship was supposed to fly to an altitude of nearly eight miles, then fall back through the atmosphere in a belly-flop position before reorienting itself, reigniting its engine and touching down softly. It appeared to complete all of those milestones, except for the landing. Elon Musk\u2019s Starship launches successfully but lands hard, explodes in what SpaceX calls an \u2018awesome test\u2019",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA probe that \u2018touched the sun\u2019 for first time could help people better understand the solar system (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6470",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/15/nasa-touches-sun-spacecraft-parker/",
        "text": "A NASA spacecraft became the first to \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d scientists announced Tuesday \u2014 a long-awaited milestone and a potential giant leap in understanding the sun\u2019s influence on the solar system.The Parker Solar Probe successfully flew through the sun\u2019s corona, or upper atmosphere, in April to sample particles and its magnetic fields, according to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings were also announced Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor centuries, humanity has only been able to observe this atmosphere from afar,\u201d Nicola Fox, director of NASA\u2019s heliophysics division, said at a news conference. \u201cNow \u2026 we have finally arrived. Humanity has touched the sun.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft, launched three years ago in an effort to study the sun and its dangers, will help scientists uncover significant and unknown information about Earth\u2019s closest star, including how the flow of the sun\u2019s particles can influence the planet. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, which looks at how discoveries in one scientific discipline are connected to other areas of study, said in a statement that the Parker Solar Probe\u2019s success in \u201ctouching the sun\u201d was \u201ca monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cNot only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun\u2019s evolution and [its] impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe,\u201d Zurbuchen said. A NASA spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday. Justin Kasper, the study\u2019s lead author and deputy chief technology officer at BWX Technologies, told The Washington Post that \u201ctouching\u201d the sun with a probe, a long-sought mission, was \u201cvery exciting.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt feels like visiting a planet for the first time,\u201d said Kasper, who is also a professor at the University of Michigan. \u201cThat was the sense of excitement we got.\u201dThe spacecraft\u2019s brush with the sun is the culmination of a mission more than 60 years in the making. Scientists have long tried to get a close look at the sun, the source of Earth\u2019s light and heat, as well as solar storms that could disrupt satellites and fry electric grids.AdvertisementAfter the nation\u2019s top scientists in 1958 compiled a list of missions that they thought NASA, then a brand-new space agency, should pursue, dreams such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the twin Voyager spacecraft and the Apollo program all eventually became realities. But the goal of reaching the sun remained elusive.Story continues below advertisementThe challenges of touching the sun are well-documented. The Earth\u2019s closest star does not have a solid surface and is described in one NASA video as \u201ca giant ball of hot plasma that\u2019s held together by its own gravity.\u201d The material from the sun helps form the star\u2019s atmosphere, the corona, an area significantly hotter than the actual surface of the star. The corona is about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit at its hottest point, compared with the surface of the sun at around 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of those hot and fast particles from the corona end up gushing into space as solar wind.\u201cBy the time it reaches Earth, 93 million miles away, the solar wind is an unrelenting headwind of particles and magnetic fields,\u201d NASA noted.AdvertisementExperts have long struggled to predict space weather events because of the ferocious environment around the sun. Scientists have also tried to learn more about the boundary called the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface, which marks the end of the solar atmosphere and the beginning of the solar wind.Story continues below advertisementIn August 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe on its journey to the sun in hopes of learning more about space weather, one of Earth\u2019s biggest natural threats. Although the Parker probe discovered in 2019 that switchbacks, or magnetic zigzag structures in the solar wind, were close to the sun, much remained unknown about how and where they formed.The Parker Solar Probe was launched on Aug. 12 in a mission to venture closer to the Sun than ever before. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)Then, on April 28, the Parker Solar Probe crossed the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface for the first time and finally entered the solar atmosphere on its eighth flyby of the sun. Data from the spacecraft showed that it encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions of the corona at around 8.1 million miles above the solar surface, according to NASA.Advertisement\u201cThis is a dream come true,\u201d Nour Raouafi, the project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, told NASA. \u201cOne of the major goals for the Parker Solar Probe mission is to fly through the solar corona \u2014 and we are doing that now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor the first time, NASA said, the spacecraft \u201cfound itself in a region where the magnetic fields were strong enough to dominate the movement of particles there.\u201dAlthough it would take months to confirm the data, Kasper said, the conditions discovered by the Parker Solar Probe were definitive proof that the spacecraft had passed the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface and entered the solar atmosphere.\u201cIt was probably July of this year where we were like, \u2018This is real. It indeed crossed into the sun\u2019s atmosphere for about five hours,\u2019\u201d Kasper said. \u201cWe had been smiling and trying to keep our mouths shut until we were sure.\u201dAdvertisementThe successful flyby will not be the last, as the spacecraft is expected to fly through the corona next month. Fox said in a statement that \u201ctouching\u201d the sun and future missions signal how \u201cthe opportunity for new discoveries is boundless.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m excited to see what Parker finds as it repeatedly passes through the corona in the years to come,\u201d Fox said.As Parker takes closer passes by the sun, it is likely to reveal more information on solar phenomena and help people understand and forecast the kind of \u201cextreme space weather events that can disrupt telecommunications and damage satellites around Earth,\u201d according to NASA.Kasper said he remained stunned months later about what it could mean for understanding the solar system.\u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll really process that we crossed over into the sun\u2019s atmosphere,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019ll probably be a while before it sinks in.\u201dSarah Kaplan and Ben Guarino contributed to this report.Read more:Air Force discharges 27 service members in first apparent dismissals over vaccine refusalAn alleged rioter bragged about drinking beer inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI arrested him this week.Plumber who found cash and checks in toilet wall of Joel Osteen\u2019s church is rewarded $20,000 \u201cHumanity has touched the sun,\u201d Nicola Fox, division director for NASA\u2019s Heliophysics Division, said in announcing that the Parker Solar Probe entered the sun's atmosphere earlier this year, a groundbreaking accomplishment for scientists. NASA probe that \u2018touched the sun\u2019 for first time could help people better understand the solar system",
        "author": "Timothy Bella"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA probe that \u2018touched the sun\u2019 for first time could help people better understand the solar system (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6471",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/15/nasa-touches-sun-spacecraft-parker/",
        "text": "A NASA spacecraft became the first to \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d scientists announced Tuesday \u2014 a long-awaited milestone and a potential giant leap in understanding the sun\u2019s influence on the solar system.The Parker Solar Probe successfully flew through the sun\u2019s corona, or upper atmosphere, in April to sample particles and its magnetic fields, according to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings were also announced Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor centuries, humanity has only been able to observe this atmosphere from afar,\u201d Nicola Fox, director of NASA\u2019s heliophysics division, said at a news conference. \u201cNow \u2026 we have finally arrived. Humanity has touched the sun.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft, launched three years ago in an effort to study the sun and its dangers, will help scientists uncover significant and unknown information about Earth\u2019s closest star, including how the flow of the sun\u2019s particles can influence the planet. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, which looks at how discoveries in one scientific discipline are connected to other areas of study, said in a statement that the Parker Solar Probe\u2019s success in \u201ctouching the sun\u201d was \u201ca monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cNot only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun\u2019s evolution and [its] impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe,\u201d Zurbuchen said. A NASA spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday. Justin Kasper, the study\u2019s lead author and deputy chief technology officer at BWX Technologies, told The Washington Post that \u201ctouching\u201d the sun with a probe, a long-sought mission, was \u201cvery exciting.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt feels like visiting a planet for the first time,\u201d said Kasper, who is also a professor at the University of Michigan. \u201cThat was the sense of excitement we got.\u201dThe spacecraft\u2019s brush with the sun is the culmination of a mission more than 60 years in the making. Scientists have long tried to get a close look at the sun, the source of Earth\u2019s light and heat, as well as solar storms that could disrupt satellites and fry electric grids.AdvertisementAfter the nation\u2019s top scientists in 1958 compiled a list of missions that they thought NASA, then a brand-new space agency, should pursue, dreams such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the twin Voyager spacecraft and the Apollo program all eventually became realities. But the goal of reaching the sun remained elusive.Story continues below advertisementThe challenges of touching the sun are well-documented. The Earth\u2019s closest star does not have a solid surface and is described in one NASA video as \u201ca giant ball of hot plasma that\u2019s held together by its own gravity.\u201d The material from the sun helps form the star\u2019s atmosphere, the corona, an area significantly hotter than the actual surface of the star. The corona is about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit at its hottest point, compared with the surface of the sun at around 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of those hot and fast particles from the corona end up gushing into space as solar wind.\u201cBy the time it reaches Earth, 93 million miles away, the solar wind is an unrelenting headwind of particles and magnetic fields,\u201d NASA noted.AdvertisementExperts have long struggled to predict space weather events because of the ferocious environment around the sun. Scientists have also tried to learn more about the boundary called the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface, which marks the end of the solar atmosphere and the beginning of the solar wind.Story continues below advertisementIn August 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe on its journey to the sun in hopes of learning more about space weather, one of Earth\u2019s biggest natural threats. Although the Parker probe discovered in 2019 that switchbacks, or magnetic zigzag structures in the solar wind, were close to the sun, much remained unknown about how and where they formed.The Parker Solar Probe was launched on Aug. 12 in a mission to venture closer to the Sun than ever before. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)Then, on April 28, the Parker Solar Probe crossed the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface for the first time and finally entered the solar atmosphere on its eighth flyby of the sun. Data from the spacecraft showed that it encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions of the corona at around 8.1 million miles above the solar surface, according to NASA.Advertisement\u201cThis is a dream come true,\u201d Nour Raouafi, the project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, told NASA. \u201cOne of the major goals for the Parker Solar Probe mission is to fly through the solar corona \u2014 and we are doing that now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor the first time, NASA said, the spacecraft \u201cfound itself in a region where the magnetic fields were strong enough to dominate the movement of particles there.\u201dAlthough it would take months to confirm the data, Kasper said, the conditions discovered by the Parker Solar Probe were definitive proof that the spacecraft had passed the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface and entered the solar atmosphere.\u201cIt was probably July of this year where we were like, \u2018This is real. It indeed crossed into the sun\u2019s atmosphere for about five hours,\u2019\u201d Kasper said. \u201cWe had been smiling and trying to keep our mouths shut until we were sure.\u201dAdvertisementThe successful flyby will not be the last, as the spacecraft is expected to fly through the corona next month. Fox said in a statement that \u201ctouching\u201d the sun and future missions signal how \u201cthe opportunity for new discoveries is boundless.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m excited to see what Parker finds as it repeatedly passes through the corona in the years to come,\u201d Fox said.As Parker takes closer passes by the sun, it is likely to reveal more information on solar phenomena and help people understand and forecast the kind of \u201cextreme space weather events that can disrupt telecommunications and damage satellites around Earth,\u201d according to NASA.Kasper said he remained stunned months later about what it could mean for understanding the solar system.\u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll really process that we crossed over into the sun\u2019s atmosphere,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019ll probably be a while before it sinks in.\u201dSarah Kaplan and Ben Guarino contributed to this report.Read more:Air Force discharges 27 service members in first apparent dismissals over vaccine refusalAn alleged rioter bragged about drinking beer inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI arrested him this week.Plumber who found cash and checks in toilet wall of Joel Osteen\u2019s church is rewarded $20,000 \u201cHumanity has touched the sun,\u201d Nicola Fox, division director for NASA\u2019s Heliophysics Division, said in announcing that the Parker Solar Probe entered the sun's atmosphere earlier this year, a groundbreaking accomplishment for scientists. NASA probe that \u2018touched the sun\u2019 for first time could help people better understand the solar system",
        "author": "Timothy Bella"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA probe that \u2018touched the sun\u2019 for first time could help people better understand the solar system (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6472",
        "date": "2021-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/15/nasa-touches-sun-spacecraft-parker/",
        "text": "A NASA spacecraft became the first to \u201ctouch the sun,\u201d scientists announced Tuesday \u2014 a long-awaited milestone and a potential giant leap in understanding the sun\u2019s influence on the solar system.The Parker Solar Probe successfully flew through the sun\u2019s corona, or upper atmosphere, in April to sample particles and its magnetic fields, according to research published in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings were also announced Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cFor centuries, humanity has only been able to observe this atmosphere from afar,\u201d Nicola Fox, director of NASA\u2019s heliophysics division, said at a news conference. \u201cNow \u2026 we have finally arrived. Humanity has touched the sun.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe spacecraft, launched three years ago in an effort to study the sun and its dangers, will help scientists uncover significant and unknown information about Earth\u2019s closest star, including how the flow of the sun\u2019s particles can influence the planet. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, which looks at how discoveries in one scientific discipline are connected to other areas of study, said in a statement that the Parker Solar Probe\u2019s success in \u201ctouching the sun\u201d was \u201ca monumental moment for solar science and a truly remarkable feat.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cNot only does this milestone provide us with deeper insights into our Sun\u2019s evolution and [its] impacts on our solar system, but everything we learn about our own star also teaches us more about stars in the rest of the universe,\u201d Zurbuchen said. A NASA spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday. Justin Kasper, the study\u2019s lead author and deputy chief technology officer at BWX Technologies, told The Washington Post that \u201ctouching\u201d the sun with a probe, a long-sought mission, was \u201cvery exciting.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt feels like visiting a planet for the first time,\u201d said Kasper, who is also a professor at the University of Michigan. \u201cThat was the sense of excitement we got.\u201dThe spacecraft\u2019s brush with the sun is the culmination of a mission more than 60 years in the making. Scientists have long tried to get a close look at the sun, the source of Earth\u2019s light and heat, as well as solar storms that could disrupt satellites and fry electric grids.AdvertisementAfter the nation\u2019s top scientists in 1958 compiled a list of missions that they thought NASA, then a brand-new space agency, should pursue, dreams such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the twin Voyager spacecraft and the Apollo program all eventually became realities. But the goal of reaching the sun remained elusive.Story continues below advertisementThe challenges of touching the sun are well-documented. The Earth\u2019s closest star does not have a solid surface and is described in one NASA video as \u201ca giant ball of hot plasma that\u2019s held together by its own gravity.\u201d The material from the sun helps form the star\u2019s atmosphere, the corona, an area significantly hotter than the actual surface of the star. The corona is about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit at its hottest point, compared with the surface of the sun at around 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit. Some of those hot and fast particles from the corona end up gushing into space as solar wind.\u201cBy the time it reaches Earth, 93 million miles away, the solar wind is an unrelenting headwind of particles and magnetic fields,\u201d NASA noted.AdvertisementExperts have long struggled to predict space weather events because of the ferocious environment around the sun. Scientists have also tried to learn more about the boundary called the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface, which marks the end of the solar atmosphere and the beginning of the solar wind.Story continues below advertisementIn August 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe on its journey to the sun in hopes of learning more about space weather, one of Earth\u2019s biggest natural threats. Although the Parker probe discovered in 2019 that switchbacks, or magnetic zigzag structures in the solar wind, were close to the sun, much remained unknown about how and where they formed.The Parker Solar Probe was launched on Aug. 12 in a mission to venture closer to the Sun than ever before. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)Then, on April 28, the Parker Solar Probe crossed the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface for the first time and finally entered the solar atmosphere on its eighth flyby of the sun. Data from the spacecraft showed that it encountered the specific magnetic and particle conditions of the corona at around 8.1 million miles above the solar surface, according to NASA.Advertisement\u201cThis is a dream come true,\u201d Nour Raouafi, the project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, told NASA. \u201cOne of the major goals for the Parker Solar Probe mission is to fly through the solar corona \u2014 and we are doing that now.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor the first time, NASA said, the spacecraft \u201cfound itself in a region where the magnetic fields were strong enough to dominate the movement of particles there.\u201dAlthough it would take months to confirm the data, Kasper said, the conditions discovered by the Parker Solar Probe were definitive proof that the spacecraft had passed the Alfv\u00e9n critical surface and entered the solar atmosphere.\u201cIt was probably July of this year where we were like, \u2018This is real. It indeed crossed into the sun\u2019s atmosphere for about five hours,\u2019\u201d Kasper said. \u201cWe had been smiling and trying to keep our mouths shut until we were sure.\u201dAdvertisementThe successful flyby will not be the last, as the spacecraft is expected to fly through the corona next month. Fox said in a statement that \u201ctouching\u201d the sun and future missions signal how \u201cthe opportunity for new discoveries is boundless.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m excited to see what Parker finds as it repeatedly passes through the corona in the years to come,\u201d Fox said.As Parker takes closer passes by the sun, it is likely to reveal more information on solar phenomena and help people understand and forecast the kind of \u201cextreme space weather events that can disrupt telecommunications and damage satellites around Earth,\u201d according to NASA.Kasper said he remained stunned months later about what it could mean for understanding the solar system.\u201cI don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll really process that we crossed over into the sun\u2019s atmosphere,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019ll probably be a while before it sinks in.\u201dSarah Kaplan and Ben Guarino contributed to this report.Read more:Air Force discharges 27 service members in first apparent dismissals over vaccine refusalAn alleged rioter bragged about drinking beer inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI arrested him this week.Plumber who found cash and checks in toilet wall of Joel Osteen\u2019s church is rewarded $20,000 \u201cHumanity has touched the sun,\u201d Nicola Fox, division director for NASA\u2019s Heliophysics Division, said in announcing that the Parker Solar Probe entered the sun's atmosphere earlier this year, a groundbreaking accomplishment for scientists. NASA probe that \u2018touched the sun\u2019 for first time could help people better understand the solar system",
        "author": "Timothy Bella"
    },
    {
        "title": "Federal judge rules against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in lunar lander suit, allowing NASA to proceed with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6473",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/04/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-lawsuit/",
        "text": "A federal judge on Thursday ruled against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in its lawsuit that sought to overturn the NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.The decision, which was sealed, means NASA could soon proceed to work with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the winner of the high-profile procurement, as it seeks to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt is another setback in Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to force NASA to award more than one lunar lander contract. The company had previously protested NASA\u2019s decision to the Government Accountability Office, but it too denied the company\u2019s claims that the space agency erred in its decision.Story continues below advertisementIn April, NASA awarded the contract to SpaceX in a decision that stunned many in the space agency since Blue Origin had put together a so-called \u201cnational team,\u201d composed of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. It had won the most money in the first phase of the contract, and Bezos had taken a personal interest in the program.AdvertisementIn April, however, NASA selected SpaceX and its Starship spacecraft bid of $2.9 billion \u2014 half what Blue Origin had proposed charging for the so-called Human Landing System.In a statement Thursday, Blue Origin said its suit \u201chighlighted the important safety issues with the Human Landing System procurement process that must still be addressed. Returning astronauts safely to the Moon through NASA\u2019s public-private partnership model requires an unprejudiced procurement process alongside sound policy that incorporates redundant systems and promotes competition.\"Story continues below advertisementOn Twitter, Bezos wrote it was \u201cnot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract.\u201dNASA said Thursday it would resume work with SpaceX \u201cas soon as possible.\u201d It added that it is working with a number of companies \u201cto bolster competition and commercial readiness for crewed transportation to the lunar surface.\u201d And it said there will be additional opportunities in the future \u201cto partner with NASA in establishing a long-term human presence at the Moon under the agency\u2019s Artemis program, including a call in 2022 to U.S. industry for recurring crewed lunar landing services.\u201dAdvertisementIn the past, Musk has said Blue Origin\u2019s lawsuits were a distraction and that the company needed to focus on its own programs, particularly getting its New Glenn rocket to reach orbit.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post earlier this year, Musk said Blue\u2019s bid \u201cwas just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos \u201cneeds to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dWhile the case was tied up in the Court of Federal Claims, NASA agreed to stop work on the contract, a pause that some feared could further delay its effort to get back to the moon under its Artemis program.The space agency has said it hopes to get astronauts there by as soon 2024, an ambitious milestone that won\u2019t be met in all likelihood. In recent months, however, it has made significant progress with the massive Space Launch System rocket that would launch them there. It has stacked the Orion spacecraft on top of the rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the entire vehicle is expected to head to the launchpad for tests early next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf those go well, the first launch of the SLS rocket could come as soon as February. That mission, known as Artemis I, would send the Orion capsule, without any astronauts on board, in orbit around the moon. If successful, the next flight would fly a similar trajectory, but with crew on board. That would set up the landing mission.For that to happen, though, SpaceX\u2019s Starship would need to be ready. Musk has said it could be ready for its first orbital test flight this year. But the company first needs approval to launch from its facility in South Texas from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is currently performing an environmental review. It\u2019s another setback in Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to force NASA to award more than one lunar lander contract. Federal judge rules against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in lunar lander suit, allowing NASA to proceed with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Federal judge rules against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in lunar lander suit, allowing NASA to proceed with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6474",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/04/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-lawsuit/",
        "text": "A federal judge on Thursday ruled against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in its lawsuit that sought to overturn the NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.The decision, which was sealed, means NASA could soon proceed to work with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the winner of the high-profile procurement, as it seeks to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt is another setback in Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to force NASA to award more than one lunar lander contract. The company had previously protested NASA\u2019s decision to the Government Accountability Office, but it too denied the company\u2019s claims that the space agency erred in its decision.Story continues below advertisementIn April, NASA awarded the contract to SpaceX in a decision that stunned many in the space agency since Blue Origin had put together a so-called \u201cnational team,\u201d composed of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. It had won the most money in the first phase of the contract, and Bezos had taken a personal interest in the program.AdvertisementIn April, however, NASA selected SpaceX and its Starship spacecraft bid of $2.9 billion \u2014 half what Blue Origin had proposed charging for the so-called Human Landing System.In a statement Thursday, Blue Origin said its suit \u201chighlighted the important safety issues with the Human Landing System procurement process that must still be addressed. Returning astronauts safely to the Moon through NASA\u2019s public-private partnership model requires an unprejudiced procurement process alongside sound policy that incorporates redundant systems and promotes competition.\"Story continues below advertisementOn Twitter, Bezos wrote it was \u201cnot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract.\u201dNASA said Thursday it would resume work with SpaceX \u201cas soon as possible.\u201d It added that it is working with a number of companies \u201cto bolster competition and commercial readiness for crewed transportation to the lunar surface.\u201d And it said there will be additional opportunities in the future \u201cto partner with NASA in establishing a long-term human presence at the Moon under the agency\u2019s Artemis program, including a call in 2022 to U.S. industry for recurring crewed lunar landing services.\u201dAdvertisementIn the past, Musk has said Blue Origin\u2019s lawsuits were a distraction and that the company needed to focus on its own programs, particularly getting its New Glenn rocket to reach orbit.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post earlier this year, Musk said Blue\u2019s bid \u201cwas just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos \u201cneeds to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dWhile the case was tied up in the Court of Federal Claims, NASA agreed to stop work on the contract, a pause that some feared could further delay its effort to get back to the moon under its Artemis program.The space agency has said it hopes to get astronauts there by as soon 2024, an ambitious milestone that won\u2019t be met in all likelihood. In recent months, however, it has made significant progress with the massive Space Launch System rocket that would launch them there. It has stacked the Orion spacecraft on top of the rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the entire vehicle is expected to head to the launchpad for tests early next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf those go well, the first launch of the SLS rocket could come as soon as February. That mission, known as Artemis I, would send the Orion capsule, without any astronauts on board, in orbit around the moon. If successful, the next flight would fly a similar trajectory, but with crew on board. That would set up the landing mission.For that to happen, though, SpaceX\u2019s Starship would need to be ready. Musk has said it could be ready for its first orbital test flight this year. But the company first needs approval to launch from its facility in South Texas from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is currently performing an environmental review. It\u2019s another setback in Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to force NASA to award more than one lunar lander contract. Federal judge rules against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in lunar lander suit, allowing NASA to proceed with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Federal judge rules against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in lunar lander suit, allowing NASA to proceed with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6475",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/04/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-lawsuit/",
        "text": "A federal judge on Thursday ruled against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in its lawsuit that sought to overturn the NASA contract to build a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.The decision, which was sealed, means NASA could soon proceed to work with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the winner of the high-profile procurement, as it seeks to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt is another setback in Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to force NASA to award more than one lunar lander contract. The company had previously protested NASA\u2019s decision to the Government Accountability Office, but it too denied the company\u2019s claims that the space agency erred in its decision.Story continues below advertisementIn April, NASA awarded the contract to SpaceX in a decision that stunned many in the space agency since Blue Origin had put together a so-called \u201cnational team,\u201d composed of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. It had won the most money in the first phase of the contract, and Bezos had taken a personal interest in the program.AdvertisementIn April, however, NASA selected SpaceX and its Starship spacecraft bid of $2.9 billion \u2014 half what Blue Origin had proposed charging for the so-called Human Landing System.In a statement Thursday, Blue Origin said its suit \u201chighlighted the important safety issues with the Human Landing System procurement process that must still be addressed. Returning astronauts safely to the Moon through NASA\u2019s public-private partnership model requires an unprejudiced procurement process alongside sound policy that incorporates redundant systems and promotes competition.\"Story continues below advertisementOn Twitter, Bezos wrote it was \u201cnot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract.\u201dNASA said Thursday it would resume work with SpaceX \u201cas soon as possible.\u201d It added that it is working with a number of companies \u201cto bolster competition and commercial readiness for crewed transportation to the lunar surface.\u201d And it said there will be additional opportunities in the future \u201cto partner with NASA in establishing a long-term human presence at the Moon under the agency\u2019s Artemis program, including a call in 2022 to U.S. industry for recurring crewed lunar landing services.\u201dAdvertisementIn the past, Musk has said Blue Origin\u2019s lawsuits were a distraction and that the company needed to focus on its own programs, particularly getting its New Glenn rocket to reach orbit.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post earlier this year, Musk said Blue\u2019s bid \u201cwas just way too high. Double that of SpaceX and SpaceX has much more hardware progress.\u201d He added that Bezos \u201cneeds to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.\u201dWhile the case was tied up in the Court of Federal Claims, NASA agreed to stop work on the contract, a pause that some feared could further delay its effort to get back to the moon under its Artemis program.The space agency has said it hopes to get astronauts there by as soon 2024, an ambitious milestone that won\u2019t be met in all likelihood. In recent months, however, it has made significant progress with the massive Space Launch System rocket that would launch them there. It has stacked the Orion spacecraft on top of the rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the entire vehicle is expected to head to the launchpad for tests early next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf those go well, the first launch of the SLS rocket could come as soon as February. That mission, known as Artemis I, would send the Orion capsule, without any astronauts on board, in orbit around the moon. If successful, the next flight would fly a similar trajectory, but with crew on board. That would set up the landing mission.For that to happen, though, SpaceX\u2019s Starship would need to be ready. Musk has said it could be ready for its first orbital test flight this year. But the company first needs approval to launch from its facility in South Texas from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is currently performing an environmental review. It\u2019s another setback in Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to force NASA to award more than one lunar lander contract. Federal judge rules against Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin in lunar lander suit, allowing NASA to proceed with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6476",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/moon-mining-contracts-named/",
        "text": "A dollar may not buy much these days, not even a cup of coffee. But apparently it\u2019s enough to buy a small sample of rocks and soil from the moon.NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. In one case, a company called Lunar Outpost bid $1 for the work, a price NASA jumped at after deciding the Colorado-based robotics firm had the technical ability to deliver. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cYou\u2019d be surprised at what a dollar can buy you in space,\u201d Mike Gold, NASA\u2019s acting associate administrator for international and interagency relations, said in a call with reporters.But the modest financial incentives are not the driver of the program. Nor to a large extent is the actual lunar soil. NASA is asking for only small amounts \u2014 between 50 and 500 grams (or 1.8 ounces to about 18 ounces). While there would be scientific benefits to the mission, it\u2019s really a technology development program, allowing companies to practice extracting resources from the lunar surface and then selling them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also establish a legal precedent that would pave the way for companies to mine celestial bodies in an effort blessed by the U.S. government to help build a sustainable presence on the moon and elsewhere.To do that, NASA says it needs its astronauts, like the western pioneers, to \u201clive off the land,\u201d using the resources in space instead of hauling them from Earth. The moon, for example, has plenty of water in the form of ice. That\u2019s not only key to sustaining human life, but the hydrogen and oxygen in water could also be used as rocket fuel, making the moon a potential gas station in space that could help explorers reach farther into the solar system.Asteroids also have significant resources, particularly precious metals that could be used for in-space manufacturing. While the prospect of large mining and manufacturing facilities in orbit is still many years away, NASA wants to use the mining program as a small step toward that goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is now trying to return astronauts to the moon under its Artemis program for the first time since 1972. Unlike its predecessor, Apollo, where the astronauts visited the lunar surface for a short while before coming home, the Artemis program would create a permanent presence on and around the moon.\u201cThe ability to extract and utilize space resources is the key to achieving this objective of sustainability,\u201d Gold said. \u201cWe must learn to generate our own water, air and even fuel. Living off the land will enable ambitious exploration activities that will result in awe-inspiring science and unprecedented discoveries.\u201dIn 2015, then-President Barack Obama signed a law that allowed private companies the right to own the resources they mined in space. Under the program announced Thursday, NASA said the materials would be transferred from the private companies to NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe effort would not violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, NASA officials have said, which prohibits nations from claiming sovereignty over a celestial body. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine previously likened the policy to the rules governing the seas.\u201cWe do believe we can extract and utilize the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,\u201d he said earlier this year.As part of its lunar exploration mission, NASA has been working to get countries around the world to adopt what it calls the Artemis Accords, a legal framework that would govern behavior in space and on celestial bodies such as the moon.The rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources and create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space, while sharing their scientific discoveries.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mining announcement came during the same week that China landed a spacecraft on the moon, extracted resources and then lifted off from the lunar surface in an effort to return the sample to Earth.Instead of developing and sustaining a big government sample-return mission, NASA is taking another approach by partnering with the private sector. \u201cIf you step back and think about how really amazing it is that NASA can essentially piggyback on the private-sector space capabilities to perform this mission, it would not have been possible 10 years ago,\u201d said Phil McAlister, the director of NASA\u2019s commercial spaceflight division.In addition to Lunar Outpost, the other companies chosen for NASA\u2019s program are: ispace Japan and Europe, which would each charge $5,000 for the material; and Masten Space Systems of California, would charge $15,000.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of the companies would already be on the moon, according to NASA, conducting other missions. McAlister said Lunar Outpost would be ferried to the moon by the lunar lander known as Blue Moon being developed by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The company later clarified that it was looking at a number of landers to get it to the lunar surface, and not just Blue Origin\u2019s. The ispace companies would fly on a Japanese lander, McAlister said, and Masten, already part of another NASA lunar contract, would use its own Masten XL-1 lander. NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6477",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/moon-mining-contracts-named/",
        "text": "A dollar may not buy much these days, not even a cup of coffee. But apparently it\u2019s enough to buy a small sample of rocks and soil from the moon.NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. In one case, a company called Lunar Outpost bid $1 for the work, a price NASA jumped at after deciding the Colorado-based robotics firm had the technical ability to deliver. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cYou\u2019d be surprised at what a dollar can buy you in space,\u201d Mike Gold, NASA\u2019s acting associate administrator for international and interagency relations, said in a call with reporters.But the modest financial incentives are not the driver of the program. Nor to a large extent is the actual lunar soil. NASA is asking for only small amounts \u2014 between 50 and 500 grams (or 1.8 ounces to about 18 ounces). While there would be scientific benefits to the mission, it\u2019s really a technology development program, allowing companies to practice extracting resources from the lunar surface and then selling them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also establish a legal precedent that would pave the way for companies to mine celestial bodies in an effort blessed by the U.S. government to help build a sustainable presence on the moon and elsewhere.To do that, NASA says it needs its astronauts, like the western pioneers, to \u201clive off the land,\u201d using the resources in space instead of hauling them from Earth. The moon, for example, has plenty of water in the form of ice. That\u2019s not only key to sustaining human life, but the hydrogen and oxygen in water could also be used as rocket fuel, making the moon a potential gas station in space that could help explorers reach farther into the solar system.Asteroids also have significant resources, particularly precious metals that could be used for in-space manufacturing. While the prospect of large mining and manufacturing facilities in orbit is still many years away, NASA wants to use the mining program as a small step toward that goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is now trying to return astronauts to the moon under its Artemis program for the first time since 1972. Unlike its predecessor, Apollo, where the astronauts visited the lunar surface for a short while before coming home, the Artemis program would create a permanent presence on and around the moon.\u201cThe ability to extract and utilize space resources is the key to achieving this objective of sustainability,\u201d Gold said. \u201cWe must learn to generate our own water, air and even fuel. Living off the land will enable ambitious exploration activities that will result in awe-inspiring science and unprecedented discoveries.\u201dIn 2015, then-President Barack Obama signed a law that allowed private companies the right to own the resources they mined in space. Under the program announced Thursday, NASA said the materials would be transferred from the private companies to NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe effort would not violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, NASA officials have said, which prohibits nations from claiming sovereignty over a celestial body. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine previously likened the policy to the rules governing the seas.\u201cWe do believe we can extract and utilize the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,\u201d he said earlier this year.As part of its lunar exploration mission, NASA has been working to get countries around the world to adopt what it calls the Artemis Accords, a legal framework that would govern behavior in space and on celestial bodies such as the moon.The rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources and create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space, while sharing their scientific discoveries.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mining announcement came during the same week that China landed a spacecraft on the moon, extracted resources and then lifted off from the lunar surface in an effort to return the sample to Earth.Instead of developing and sustaining a big government sample-return mission, NASA is taking another approach by partnering with the private sector. \u201cIf you step back and think about how really amazing it is that NASA can essentially piggyback on the private-sector space capabilities to perform this mission, it would not have been possible 10 years ago,\u201d said Phil McAlister, the director of NASA\u2019s commercial spaceflight division.In addition to Lunar Outpost, the other companies chosen for NASA\u2019s program are: ispace Japan and Europe, which would each charge $5,000 for the material; and Masten Space Systems of California, would charge $15,000.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of the companies would already be on the moon, according to NASA, conducting other missions. McAlister said Lunar Outpost would be ferried to the moon by the lunar lander known as Blue Moon being developed by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The company later clarified that it was looking at a number of landers to get it to the lunar surface, and not just Blue Origin\u2019s. The ispace companies would fly on a Japanese lander, McAlister said, and Masten, already part of another NASA lunar contract, would use its own Masten XL-1 lander. NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6478",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/moon-mining-contracts-named/",
        "text": "A dollar may not buy much these days, not even a cup of coffee. But apparently it\u2019s enough to buy a small sample of rocks and soil from the moon.NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. In one case, a company called Lunar Outpost bid $1 for the work, a price NASA jumped at after deciding the Colorado-based robotics firm had the technical ability to deliver. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cYou\u2019d be surprised at what a dollar can buy you in space,\u201d Mike Gold, NASA\u2019s acting associate administrator for international and interagency relations, said in a call with reporters.But the modest financial incentives are not the driver of the program. Nor to a large extent is the actual lunar soil. NASA is asking for only small amounts \u2014 between 50 and 500 grams (or 1.8 ounces to about 18 ounces). While there would be scientific benefits to the mission, it\u2019s really a technology development program, allowing companies to practice extracting resources from the lunar surface and then selling them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also establish a legal precedent that would pave the way for companies to mine celestial bodies in an effort blessed by the U.S. government to help build a sustainable presence on the moon and elsewhere.To do that, NASA says it needs its astronauts, like the western pioneers, to \u201clive off the land,\u201d using the resources in space instead of hauling them from Earth. The moon, for example, has plenty of water in the form of ice. That\u2019s not only key to sustaining human life, but the hydrogen and oxygen in water could also be used as rocket fuel, making the moon a potential gas station in space that could help explorers reach farther into the solar system.Asteroids also have significant resources, particularly precious metals that could be used for in-space manufacturing. While the prospect of large mining and manufacturing facilities in orbit is still many years away, NASA wants to use the mining program as a small step toward that goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is now trying to return astronauts to the moon under its Artemis program for the first time since 1972. Unlike its predecessor, Apollo, where the astronauts visited the lunar surface for a short while before coming home, the Artemis program would create a permanent presence on and around the moon.\u201cThe ability to extract and utilize space resources is the key to achieving this objective of sustainability,\u201d Gold said. \u201cWe must learn to generate our own water, air and even fuel. Living off the land will enable ambitious exploration activities that will result in awe-inspiring science and unprecedented discoveries.\u201dIn 2015, then-President Barack Obama signed a law that allowed private companies the right to own the resources they mined in space. Under the program announced Thursday, NASA said the materials would be transferred from the private companies to NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe effort would not violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, NASA officials have said, which prohibits nations from claiming sovereignty over a celestial body. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine previously likened the policy to the rules governing the seas.\u201cWe do believe we can extract and utilize the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,\u201d he said earlier this year.As part of its lunar exploration mission, NASA has been working to get countries around the world to adopt what it calls the Artemis Accords, a legal framework that would govern behavior in space and on celestial bodies such as the moon.The rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources and create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space, while sharing their scientific discoveries.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mining announcement came during the same week that China landed a spacecraft on the moon, extracted resources and then lifted off from the lunar surface in an effort to return the sample to Earth.Instead of developing and sustaining a big government sample-return mission, NASA is taking another approach by partnering with the private sector. \u201cIf you step back and think about how really amazing it is that NASA can essentially piggyback on the private-sector space capabilities to perform this mission, it would not have been possible 10 years ago,\u201d said Phil McAlister, the director of NASA\u2019s commercial spaceflight division.In addition to Lunar Outpost, the other companies chosen for NASA\u2019s program are: ispace Japan and Europe, which would each charge $5,000 for the material; and Masten Space Systems of California, would charge $15,000.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of the companies would already be on the moon, according to NASA, conducting other missions. McAlister said Lunar Outpost would be ferried to the moon by the lunar lander known as Blue Moon being developed by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The company later clarified that it was looking at a number of landers to get it to the lunar surface, and not just Blue Origin\u2019s. The ispace companies would fly on a Japanese lander, McAlister said, and Masten, already part of another NASA lunar contract, would use its own Masten XL-1 lander. NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6479",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/moon-mining-contracts-named/",
        "text": "A dollar may not buy much these days, not even a cup of coffee. But apparently it\u2019s enough to buy a small sample of rocks and soil from the moon.NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. In one case, a company called Lunar Outpost bid $1 for the work, a price NASA jumped at after deciding the Colorado-based robotics firm had the technical ability to deliver. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cYou\u2019d be surprised at what a dollar can buy you in space,\u201d Mike Gold, NASA\u2019s acting associate administrator for international and interagency relations, said in a call with reporters.But the modest financial incentives are not the driver of the program. Nor to a large extent is the actual lunar soil. NASA is asking for only small amounts \u2014 between 50 and 500 grams (or 1.8 ounces to about 18 ounces). While there would be scientific benefits to the mission, it\u2019s really a technology development program, allowing companies to practice extracting resources from the lunar surface and then selling them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt would also establish a legal precedent that would pave the way for companies to mine celestial bodies in an effort blessed by the U.S. government to help build a sustainable presence on the moon and elsewhere.To do that, NASA says it needs its astronauts, like the western pioneers, to \u201clive off the land,\u201d using the resources in space instead of hauling them from Earth. The moon, for example, has plenty of water in the form of ice. That\u2019s not only key to sustaining human life, but the hydrogen and oxygen in water could also be used as rocket fuel, making the moon a potential gas station in space that could help explorers reach farther into the solar system.Asteroids also have significant resources, particularly precious metals that could be used for in-space manufacturing. While the prospect of large mining and manufacturing facilities in orbit is still many years away, NASA wants to use the mining program as a small step toward that goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is now trying to return astronauts to the moon under its Artemis program for the first time since 1972. Unlike its predecessor, Apollo, where the astronauts visited the lunar surface for a short while before coming home, the Artemis program would create a permanent presence on and around the moon.\u201cThe ability to extract and utilize space resources is the key to achieving this objective of sustainability,\u201d Gold said. \u201cWe must learn to generate our own water, air and even fuel. Living off the land will enable ambitious exploration activities that will result in awe-inspiring science and unprecedented discoveries.\u201dIn 2015, then-President Barack Obama signed a law that allowed private companies the right to own the resources they mined in space. Under the program announced Thursday, NASA said the materials would be transferred from the private companies to NASA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe effort would not violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, NASA officials have said, which prohibits nations from claiming sovereignty over a celestial body. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine previously likened the policy to the rules governing the seas.\u201cWe do believe we can extract and utilize the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,\u201d he said earlier this year.As part of its lunar exploration mission, NASA has been working to get countries around the world to adopt what it calls the Artemis Accords, a legal framework that would govern behavior in space and on celestial bodies such as the moon.The rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources and create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space, while sharing their scientific discoveries.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mining announcement came during the same week that China landed a spacecraft on the moon, extracted resources and then lifted off from the lunar surface in an effort to return the sample to Earth.Instead of developing and sustaining a big government sample-return mission, NASA is taking another approach by partnering with the private sector. \u201cIf you step back and think about how really amazing it is that NASA can essentially piggyback on the private-sector space capabilities to perform this mission, it would not have been possible 10 years ago,\u201d said Phil McAlister, the director of NASA\u2019s commercial spaceflight division.In addition to Lunar Outpost, the other companies chosen for NASA\u2019s program are: ispace Japan and Europe, which would each charge $5,000 for the material; and Masten Space Systems of California, would charge $15,000.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of the companies would already be on the moon, according to NASA, conducting other missions. McAlister said Lunar Outpost would be ferried to the moon by the lunar lander known as Blue Moon being developed by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The company later clarified that it was looking at a number of landers to get it to the lunar surface, and not just Blue Origin\u2019s. The ispace companies would fly on a Japanese lander, McAlister said, and Masten, already part of another NASA lunar contract, would use its own Masten XL-1 lander. NASA announced Thursday that several companies had won contracts to mine the moon and turn over small samples to the space agency for a small fee. A dollar can\u2019t buy you a cup of coffee but that\u2019s what NASA intends to pay for some moon rocks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6480",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/07/jeff-bezos-space-blue-origin/",
        "text": "A couple of weeks after Jeff Bezos officially steps down as CEO of Amazon, he\u2019ll leap into something more mythic: riding to the edge of space aboard one of his own rockets, alongside his brother, in a flight that would fulfill a lifelong dream.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plan is that Bezos, his brother, Mark, and the winner of an online auction for Blue Origin\u2019s nonprofit foundation will be on the New Shepard on July 20 when it lifts off for a suborbital flight, the first time the spacecraft will carry passengers. The date is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The flight will mark a significant milestone for Blue Origin, which lags behind Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in the competition for billions of dollars in NASA and Pentagon contracts and which flies a more powerful rocket capable of taking people and supplies into orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will also mark a moment when the long promised arrival of space tourism seems to be drawing closer and a major transition for Bezos, inevitably raising questions about the risk to him and to Amazon. Space travel remains a dangerous undertaking, though the requirements for future private passengers are nowhere near what the public is accustomed to connecting with space travel.\u201cEver since I was five years old, I\u2019ve dreamed of traveling to space,\u201d Bezos said in an Instagram post Monday. \u201cOn July 20, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend. #Gradatim Ferociter.\u201dGraditum ferociter is Blue Origin\u2019s motto, a Latin phrase that Bezos translates to mean \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Unlike NASA astronauts, Bezos and his fellow passengers won\u2019t undergo any of the rigorous training that for so long has characterized space travel. Blue Origin warns that passengers must climb seven flights of stairs to reach the capsule and that they must also be able to sit for 90 minutes without access to a bathroom. But with all functions of the flight commanded by computers, the passengers won\u2019t be called on to take the controls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight would make Bezos the first of the billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d to go to space. Neither Musk nor Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson have ridden on their companies\u2019 rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos has long been fascinated with space. An avid science fiction reader and big \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan as a child, he has called watching the Apollo 11 moon landing a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, even though he was just five years old at the time. He even chose \u201cGoddard\u201d as the middle name for one of his sons after Robert Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry.The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.Blue Origin, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to space 15 times, without passengers. Last month, Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic completed its third human spaceflight, and Branson, who will turn 71 on July 18, has said he hopes to fly later this year. In an interview with The Washington Post after the flight, he said he was actively preparing for the mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201dOn Twitter Monday, Branson congratulated Bezos and said the two companies \u201care opening up access to Space \u2014 how extraordinary!\u201dBezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and in recent years has said it is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d The goal of the company is to build the infrastructure to give humanity access to space more routinely and reliably and to allow for \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe has said that his \u201csingular focus is people in space. I want people in space.\u201dThe New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who became the first American to go to space in 1961. Like that first suborbital flight, New Shepard shoots straight up, flying past 60 miles to reach the edge of space before falling back to Earth. The flight takes about 10 minutes in all, with a few minutes of weightlessness in space.As many as six people can fit inside the New Shepard crew cabin, each with their own seat and window \u2014 the largest window ever flown to space. The spacecraft, which launches from a site outside Van Horn, Tex., is outfitted with handrails to assist during the few minutes of weightless. Once in space, the spacecraft will use its thrusters to rotate, so passengers get 360-degree views that the company says \u201cwill change how you see the world.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin has not yet said how much it would charge for individual tickets. Virgin Galactic had charged as much as $250,000 before closing sales. When Virgin Galactic restarts sales later this year, some analysts have predicted the price will be closer to $500,000.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierWhile some have derided space tourism flights for the rich, Bezos has defended them, saying they are a good way for the company to practice flying and that a lot of new technologies have grown out of entertainment \u2014 such as how video games helped boost computing power.\u201cTourism often leads to new technologies,\u201d he said during a forum at The Post in 2016. \u201cAnd then those new technologies often circle back around and get used in very important, utilitarian ways.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn rules for the online auction now underway to chose the third member of the crew, which is set to culminate Saturday, Blue Origin said passengers must be able to endure three times the force of gravity for two minutes during the ascent, and five-and-a-half times the force of gravity for a few seconds during descent.AdvertisementParticipants must also be between 5 feet and 6-feet-4-inches tall and weigh between 110 and 223 pounds.To earn a license from the Federal Aviation Administration, Blue Origin must show how it protects people and property on the ground. But the safety of the passengers is governed by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, similar to skydiving and bungee jumping: Passengers simply need to acknowledge the considerable risks of the venture before blasting off.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalMusk, who has often been critical of Blue Origin\u2019s progress, did not comment immediately on Bezos\u2019s plans. SpaceX recently beat out Blue Origin for a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon. Blue Origin, which had teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, is protesting the award through the Government Accountability Office.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post about that contract, Musk said Blue Origin\u2019s bid, which was twice that of SpaceX, was \u201cway too high.\u201dHe added that Bezos \u201cneeds to run BO full-time for it to be successful,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cFrankly, I hope he does.\u201dThe auction for the third seat on the Blue Origin flight is intended to raise money for Club for the Future, the company\u2019s nonprofit, which is geared toward encouraging students to pursue careers in science, technology engineering and math.On July 5, Bezos will step down as chief executive of Amazon (he will stay on as executive chairman). Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener did not respond to a question about whether Bezos had sought permission from Amazon\u2019s board for the flight.Bezos has used billions in Amazon shares to fund Blue Origin ventures.\u201cI wasn\u2019t even expecting him to say that he was going to be on the first flight,\u201d Bezos\u2019s brother Mark said in the Instagram video. \u201cWhat a remarkable opportunity, not only to have this adventure but to do it with my best friend.\u201dJay Greene contributed from Seattle. The billionaire says he and his brother will be aboard the New Shepard when it takes flight July 20 \u2014 roughly two weeks after he steps down as CEO of Amazon. Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6481",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/07/jeff-bezos-space-blue-origin/",
        "text": "A couple of weeks after Jeff Bezos officially steps down as CEO of Amazon, he\u2019ll leap into something more mythic: riding to the edge of space aboard one of his own rockets, alongside his brother, in a flight that would fulfill a lifelong dream.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plan is that Bezos, his brother, Mark, and the winner of an online auction for Blue Origin\u2019s nonprofit foundation will be on the New Shepard on July 20 when it lifts off for a suborbital flight, the first time the spacecraft will carry passengers. The date is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The flight will mark a significant milestone for Blue Origin, which lags behind Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in the competition for billions of dollars in NASA and Pentagon contracts and which flies a more powerful rocket capable of taking people and supplies into orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will also mark a moment when the long promised arrival of space tourism seems to be drawing closer and a major transition for Bezos, inevitably raising questions about the risk to him and to Amazon. Space travel remains a dangerous undertaking, though the requirements for future private passengers are nowhere near what the public is accustomed to connecting with space travel.\u201cEver since I was five years old, I\u2019ve dreamed of traveling to space,\u201d Bezos said in an Instagram post Monday. \u201cOn July 20, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend. #Gradatim Ferociter.\u201dGraditum ferociter is Blue Origin\u2019s motto, a Latin phrase that Bezos translates to mean \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Unlike NASA astronauts, Bezos and his fellow passengers won\u2019t undergo any of the rigorous training that for so long has characterized space travel. Blue Origin warns that passengers must climb seven flights of stairs to reach the capsule and that they must also be able to sit for 90 minutes without access to a bathroom. But with all functions of the flight commanded by computers, the passengers won\u2019t be called on to take the controls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight would make Bezos the first of the billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d to go to space. Neither Musk nor Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson have ridden on their companies\u2019 rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos has long been fascinated with space. An avid science fiction reader and big \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan as a child, he has called watching the Apollo 11 moon landing a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, even though he was just five years old at the time. He even chose \u201cGoddard\u201d as the middle name for one of his sons after Robert Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry.The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.Blue Origin, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to space 15 times, without passengers. Last month, Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic completed its third human spaceflight, and Branson, who will turn 71 on July 18, has said he hopes to fly later this year. In an interview with The Washington Post after the flight, he said he was actively preparing for the mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201dOn Twitter Monday, Branson congratulated Bezos and said the two companies \u201care opening up access to Space \u2014 how extraordinary!\u201dBezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and in recent years has said it is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d The goal of the company is to build the infrastructure to give humanity access to space more routinely and reliably and to allow for \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe has said that his \u201csingular focus is people in space. I want people in space.\u201dThe New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who became the first American to go to space in 1961. Like that first suborbital flight, New Shepard shoots straight up, flying past 60 miles to reach the edge of space before falling back to Earth. The flight takes about 10 minutes in all, with a few minutes of weightlessness in space.As many as six people can fit inside the New Shepard crew cabin, each with their own seat and window \u2014 the largest window ever flown to space. The spacecraft, which launches from a site outside Van Horn, Tex., is outfitted with handrails to assist during the few minutes of weightless. Once in space, the spacecraft will use its thrusters to rotate, so passengers get 360-degree views that the company says \u201cwill change how you see the world.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin has not yet said how much it would charge for individual tickets. Virgin Galactic had charged as much as $250,000 before closing sales. When Virgin Galactic restarts sales later this year, some analysts have predicted the price will be closer to $500,000.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierWhile some have derided space tourism flights for the rich, Bezos has defended them, saying they are a good way for the company to practice flying and that a lot of new technologies have grown out of entertainment \u2014 such as how video games helped boost computing power.\u201cTourism often leads to new technologies,\u201d he said during a forum at The Post in 2016. \u201cAnd then those new technologies often circle back around and get used in very important, utilitarian ways.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn rules for the online auction now underway to chose the third member of the crew, which is set to culminate Saturday, Blue Origin said passengers must be able to endure three times the force of gravity for two minutes during the ascent, and five-and-a-half times the force of gravity for a few seconds during descent.AdvertisementParticipants must also be between 5 feet and 6-feet-4-inches tall and weigh between 110 and 223 pounds.To earn a license from the Federal Aviation Administration, Blue Origin must show how it protects people and property on the ground. But the safety of the passengers is governed by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, similar to skydiving and bungee jumping: Passengers simply need to acknowledge the considerable risks of the venture before blasting off.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalMusk, who has often been critical of Blue Origin\u2019s progress, did not comment immediately on Bezos\u2019s plans. SpaceX recently beat out Blue Origin for a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon. Blue Origin, which had teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, is protesting the award through the Government Accountability Office.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post about that contract, Musk said Blue Origin\u2019s bid, which was twice that of SpaceX, was \u201cway too high.\u201dHe added that Bezos \u201cneeds to run BO full-time for it to be successful,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cFrankly, I hope he does.\u201dThe auction for the third seat on the Blue Origin flight is intended to raise money for Club for the Future, the company\u2019s nonprofit, which is geared toward encouraging students to pursue careers in science, technology engineering and math.On July 5, Bezos will step down as chief executive of Amazon (he will stay on as executive chairman). Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener did not respond to a question about whether Bezos had sought permission from Amazon\u2019s board for the flight.Bezos has used billions in Amazon shares to fund Blue Origin ventures.\u201cI wasn\u2019t even expecting him to say that he was going to be on the first flight,\u201d Bezos\u2019s brother Mark said in the Instagram video. \u201cWhat a remarkable opportunity, not only to have this adventure but to do it with my best friend.\u201dJay Greene contributed from Seattle. The billionaire says he and his brother will be aboard the New Shepard when it takes flight July 20 \u2014 roughly two weeks after he steps down as CEO of Amazon. Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6482",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/07/jeff-bezos-space-blue-origin/",
        "text": "A couple of weeks after Jeff Bezos officially steps down as CEO of Amazon, he\u2019ll leap into something more mythic: riding to the edge of space aboard one of his own rockets, alongside his brother, in a flight that would fulfill a lifelong dream.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plan is that Bezos, his brother, Mark, and the winner of an online auction for Blue Origin\u2019s nonprofit foundation will be on the New Shepard on July 20 when it lifts off for a suborbital flight, the first time the spacecraft will carry passengers. The date is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The flight will mark a significant milestone for Blue Origin, which lags behind Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in the competition for billions of dollars in NASA and Pentagon contracts and which flies a more powerful rocket capable of taking people and supplies into orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will also mark a moment when the long promised arrival of space tourism seems to be drawing closer and a major transition for Bezos, inevitably raising questions about the risk to him and to Amazon. Space travel remains a dangerous undertaking, though the requirements for future private passengers are nowhere near what the public is accustomed to connecting with space travel.\u201cEver since I was five years old, I\u2019ve dreamed of traveling to space,\u201d Bezos said in an Instagram post Monday. \u201cOn July 20, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend. #Gradatim Ferociter.\u201dGraditum ferociter is Blue Origin\u2019s motto, a Latin phrase that Bezos translates to mean \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Unlike NASA astronauts, Bezos and his fellow passengers won\u2019t undergo any of the rigorous training that for so long has characterized space travel. Blue Origin warns that passengers must climb seven flights of stairs to reach the capsule and that they must also be able to sit for 90 minutes without access to a bathroom. But with all functions of the flight commanded by computers, the passengers won\u2019t be called on to take the controls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight would make Bezos the first of the billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d to go to space. Neither Musk nor Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson have ridden on their companies\u2019 rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos has long been fascinated with space. An avid science fiction reader and big \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan as a child, he has called watching the Apollo 11 moon landing a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, even though he was just five years old at the time. He even chose \u201cGoddard\u201d as the middle name for one of his sons after Robert Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry.The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.Blue Origin, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to space 15 times, without passengers. Last month, Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic completed its third human spaceflight, and Branson, who will turn 71 on July 18, has said he hopes to fly later this year. In an interview with The Washington Post after the flight, he said he was actively preparing for the mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201dOn Twitter Monday, Branson congratulated Bezos and said the two companies \u201care opening up access to Space \u2014 how extraordinary!\u201dBezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and in recent years has said it is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d The goal of the company is to build the infrastructure to give humanity access to space more routinely and reliably and to allow for \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe has said that his \u201csingular focus is people in space. I want people in space.\u201dThe New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who became the first American to go to space in 1961. Like that first suborbital flight, New Shepard shoots straight up, flying past 60 miles to reach the edge of space before falling back to Earth. The flight takes about 10 minutes in all, with a few minutes of weightlessness in space.As many as six people can fit inside the New Shepard crew cabin, each with their own seat and window \u2014 the largest window ever flown to space. The spacecraft, which launches from a site outside Van Horn, Tex., is outfitted with handrails to assist during the few minutes of weightless. Once in space, the spacecraft will use its thrusters to rotate, so passengers get 360-degree views that the company says \u201cwill change how you see the world.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin has not yet said how much it would charge for individual tickets. Virgin Galactic had charged as much as $250,000 before closing sales. When Virgin Galactic restarts sales later this year, some analysts have predicted the price will be closer to $500,000.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierWhile some have derided space tourism flights for the rich, Bezos has defended them, saying they are a good way for the company to practice flying and that a lot of new technologies have grown out of entertainment \u2014 such as how video games helped boost computing power.\u201cTourism often leads to new technologies,\u201d he said during a forum at The Post in 2016. \u201cAnd then those new technologies often circle back around and get used in very important, utilitarian ways.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn rules for the online auction now underway to chose the third member of the crew, which is set to culminate Saturday, Blue Origin said passengers must be able to endure three times the force of gravity for two minutes during the ascent, and five-and-a-half times the force of gravity for a few seconds during descent.AdvertisementParticipants must also be between 5 feet and 6-feet-4-inches tall and weigh between 110 and 223 pounds.To earn a license from the Federal Aviation Administration, Blue Origin must show how it protects people and property on the ground. But the safety of the passengers is governed by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, similar to skydiving and bungee jumping: Passengers simply need to acknowledge the considerable risks of the venture before blasting off.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalMusk, who has often been critical of Blue Origin\u2019s progress, did not comment immediately on Bezos\u2019s plans. SpaceX recently beat out Blue Origin for a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon. Blue Origin, which had teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, is protesting the award through the Government Accountability Office.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post about that contract, Musk said Blue Origin\u2019s bid, which was twice that of SpaceX, was \u201cway too high.\u201dHe added that Bezos \u201cneeds to run BO full-time for it to be successful,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cFrankly, I hope he does.\u201dThe auction for the third seat on the Blue Origin flight is intended to raise money for Club for the Future, the company\u2019s nonprofit, which is geared toward encouraging students to pursue careers in science, technology engineering and math.On July 5, Bezos will step down as chief executive of Amazon (he will stay on as executive chairman). Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener did not respond to a question about whether Bezos had sought permission from Amazon\u2019s board for the flight.Bezos has used billions in Amazon shares to fund Blue Origin ventures.\u201cI wasn\u2019t even expecting him to say that he was going to be on the first flight,\u201d Bezos\u2019s brother Mark said in the Instagram video. \u201cWhat a remarkable opportunity, not only to have this adventure but to do it with my best friend.\u201dJay Greene contributed from Seattle. The billionaire says he and his brother will be aboard the New Shepard when it takes flight July 20 \u2014 roughly two weeks after he steps down as CEO of Amazon. Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6483",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/07/jeff-bezos-space-blue-origin/",
        "text": "A couple of weeks after Jeff Bezos officially steps down as CEO of Amazon, he\u2019ll leap into something more mythic: riding to the edge of space aboard one of his own rockets, alongside his brother, in a flight that would fulfill a lifelong dream.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe plan is that Bezos, his brother, Mark, and the winner of an online auction for Blue Origin\u2019s nonprofit foundation will be on the New Shepard on July 20 when it lifts off for a suborbital flight, the first time the spacecraft will carry passengers. The date is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The flight will mark a significant milestone for Blue Origin, which lags behind Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in the competition for billions of dollars in NASA and Pentagon contracts and which flies a more powerful rocket capable of taking people and supplies into orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will also mark a moment when the long promised arrival of space tourism seems to be drawing closer and a major transition for Bezos, inevitably raising questions about the risk to him and to Amazon. Space travel remains a dangerous undertaking, though the requirements for future private passengers are nowhere near what the public is accustomed to connecting with space travel.\u201cEver since I was five years old, I\u2019ve dreamed of traveling to space,\u201d Bezos said in an Instagram post Monday. \u201cOn July 20, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend. #Gradatim Ferociter.\u201dGraditum ferociter is Blue Origin\u2019s motto, a Latin phrase that Bezos translates to mean \u201cstep by step, ferociously.\u201dIn a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)Unlike NASA astronauts, Bezos and his fellow passengers won\u2019t undergo any of the rigorous training that for so long has characterized space travel. Blue Origin warns that passengers must climb seven flights of stairs to reach the capsule and that they must also be able to sit for 90 minutes without access to a bathroom. But with all functions of the flight commanded by computers, the passengers won\u2019t be called on to take the controls.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight would make Bezos the first of the billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d to go to space. Neither Musk nor Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson have ridden on their companies\u2019 rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos has long been fascinated with space. An avid science fiction reader and big \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan as a child, he has called watching the Apollo 11 moon landing a \u201cseminal\u201d moment for him, even though he was just five years old at the time. He even chose \u201cGoddard\u201d as the middle name for one of his sons after Robert Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry.The rivalry between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos already was intense. Now it\u2019s extending to the moon.Blue Origin, based outside Seattle, has successfully flown its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft to space 15 times, without passengers. Last month, Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic completed its third human spaceflight, and Branson, who will turn 71 on July 18, has said he hopes to fly later this year. In an interview with The Washington Post after the flight, he said he was actively preparing for the mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201dOn Twitter Monday, Branson congratulated Bezos and said the two companies \u201care opening up access to Space \u2014 how extraordinary!\u201dBezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and in recent years has said it is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d The goal of the company is to build the infrastructure to give humanity access to space more routinely and reliably and to allow for \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe has said that his \u201csingular focus is people in space. I want people in space.\u201dThe New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who became the first American to go to space in 1961. Like that first suborbital flight, New Shepard shoots straight up, flying past 60 miles to reach the edge of space before falling back to Earth. The flight takes about 10 minutes in all, with a few minutes of weightlessness in space.As many as six people can fit inside the New Shepard crew cabin, each with their own seat and window \u2014 the largest window ever flown to space. The spacecraft, which launches from a site outside Van Horn, Tex., is outfitted with handrails to assist during the few minutes of weightless. Once in space, the spacecraft will use its thrusters to rotate, so passengers get 360-degree views that the company says \u201cwill change how you see the world.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin has not yet said how much it would charge for individual tickets. Virgin Galactic had charged as much as $250,000 before closing sales. When Virgin Galactic restarts sales later this year, some analysts have predicted the price will be closer to $500,000.As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontierWhile some have derided space tourism flights for the rich, Bezos has defended them, saying they are a good way for the company to practice flying and that a lot of new technologies have grown out of entertainment \u2014 such as how video games helped boost computing power.\u201cTourism often leads to new technologies,\u201d he said during a forum at The Post in 2016. \u201cAnd then those new technologies often circle back around and get used in very important, utilitarian ways.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn rules for the online auction now underway to chose the third member of the crew, which is set to culminate Saturday, Blue Origin said passengers must be able to endure three times the force of gravity for two minutes during the ascent, and five-and-a-half times the force of gravity for a few seconds during descent.AdvertisementParticipants must also be between 5 feet and 6-feet-4-inches tall and weigh between 110 and 223 pounds.To earn a license from the Federal Aviation Administration, Blue Origin must show how it protects people and property on the ground. But the safety of the passengers is governed by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, similar to skydiving and bungee jumping: Passengers simply need to acknowledge the considerable risks of the venture before blasting off.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalMusk, who has often been critical of Blue Origin\u2019s progress, did not comment immediately on Bezos\u2019s plans. SpaceX recently beat out Blue Origin for a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the moon. Blue Origin, which had teamed up with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, is protesting the award through the Government Accountability Office.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a statement to The Post about that contract, Musk said Blue Origin\u2019s bid, which was twice that of SpaceX, was \u201cway too high.\u201dHe added that Bezos \u201cneeds to run BO full-time for it to be successful,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cFrankly, I hope he does.\u201dThe auction for the third seat on the Blue Origin flight is intended to raise money for Club for the Future, the company\u2019s nonprofit, which is geared toward encouraging students to pursue careers in science, technology engineering and math.On July 5, Bezos will step down as chief executive of Amazon (he will stay on as executive chairman). Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener did not respond to a question about whether Bezos had sought permission from Amazon\u2019s board for the flight.Bezos has used billions in Amazon shares to fund Blue Origin ventures.\u201cI wasn\u2019t even expecting him to say that he was going to be on the first flight,\u201d Bezos\u2019s brother Mark said in the Instagram video. \u201cWhat a remarkable opportunity, not only to have this adventure but to do it with my best friend.\u201dJay Greene contributed from Seattle. The billionaire says he and his brother will be aboard the New Shepard when it takes flight July 20 \u2014 roughly two weeks after he steps down as CEO of Amazon. Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6484",
        "date": "2019-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/02/how-much-does-ticket-space-cost-meet-people-ready-fly/",
        "text": "When Lori Fraleigh unwrapped the present her husband had given her for her 38th birthday, she found a curious surprise: a model of a spaceship. It was cool, sure, but a toy would be better suited for her young children, then 5 and 1, not her.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen she noticed the ticket. It took Fraleigh, a Silicon Valley executive, a moment to realize what her husband had purchased for her: a trip to space with Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic. \u201cI went through a lot of crazy emotions, like, \u2018Did you really buy this?\u2019 \u201d she recalled of the moment in 2011. \u201c \u2018Do we still have enough money to remodel the kitchen?\u2019 \u201d Today, her children are 13 and 9. The kitchen remodel has long since been completed. But Fraleigh is still waiting for her trip to space.Story continues below advertisementFor years, Branson has been pushing a quixotic vision for the future, where his spacecraft would ferry passengers off Earth as frequently as airplanes. But for all the talk about a new Space Age full of citizen astronauts, the journey has been fitful, and filled with setbacks, including the death of a test pilot in 2014 after a harrowing crash.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut now, 15 years after Branson founded Virgin Galactic, space tourism could be tantalizingly close to becoming a reality. The company has flown to the edge of space twice and says its first paying customers could reach space next year. Another space venture, Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos almost 20 years ago, hopes to conduct its first test flight with people this year, though it hasn\u2019t announced prices or sold any tickets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAnd NASA recently announced that it would allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station on spacecraft built by SpaceX and Boeing.Story continues below advertisementWhich means that Fraleigh may soon finally get her five minutes of weightlessness, a view that promises to be spectacular and a test to see if she has the right stuff.Fraleigh has dreamed of being an astronaut since she was a kid and has solid space geek credentials, including having attended Space Camp as a teenager.What\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesBut she didn\u2019t think she could become a NASA astronaut and instead became a tech executive in Silicon Valley, a career that meant her family could absorb Virgin Galactic\u2019s charge ($200,000 per ticket in 2011) without financial hardship. A mother who spends weekends ferrying her children to soccer, baseball and music lessons, she doesn\u2019t look like a thrill seeker. The most adventurous thing she\u2019s done? Driving a go-cart in college, and \u201cI\u2019ve been on some hikes up in Lake Tahoe that were on the strenuous side.\u201dNow she\u2019s preparing for a ride in Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, a sleek spaceplane with a rocket motor strong enough to send two pilots and as many as six passengers more than 50 miles high, where the Federal Aviation Administration says the edge of space begins. The spaceship is tethered to the belly of a large, twin-fuselage airplane that carries it to an altitude of about 40,000 feet. Then SpaceShipTwo is released, fires its engine and rockets off through the atmosphere.For decades, people have dreamed of such adventures. After the Apollo missions, Pan Am started a waiting list for tickets to the moon that by 1971 stretched 90,000 names long. Famed CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite signed up, as did future president Ronald Reagan. Later, in the 1970s and early 1980s, NASA was so convinced that the space shuttle would, as the name implied, offer regular service to Earth orbit that a committee was formed to sort out the sticky problem of how to choose the first private citizens to fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor today\u2019s space companies, it\u2019s anyone willing \u2014 and wealthy enough \u2014 to pay the steep cost.NASA said it would cost $35,000 a night for stays on the ISS, and the price to get there is estimated to be $50 million. Virgin Galactic has said it may in the short term raise the price of its tickets, which today cost $250,000.Despite the high costs, Virgin Galactic expects high demand from the wealthy. While it completes the testing phase of the spacecraft this year, the company projects flying 66 paying customers in 2020, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year. By 2023, when it expects to fly 1,562 paying passengers on 270 flights, it plans to have nearly $600 million in annual revenue. Earlier this year, Virgin Galactic announced it would go public by merging with a New York investment firm, a move that Branson said would \u201copen space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, 600 people have signed up for what Virgin Galactic describes as a transformative experience of seeing Earth from space, what astronauts call the \u201coverview effect.\u201d That\u2019s more people than have been to space since 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.Second thoughts?Craig Wichner, who runs Farmland LP, an organic farmland investment fund in San Francisco, has been waiting for the opportunity for more than a decade. In 2008, he plunked down several thousand dollars as a deposit to ride on Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo with a bunch of friends who thought it\u2019d make a great adventure.\u201cWho wants to do this with me?\u201d a pal said at the time.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYep, I\u2019m there,\u201d Wichner responded.But it wasn\u2019t just the adventure that attracted Wichner; it was the opportunity to help push humanity out of the atmosphere, he said. Buying a ticket was like casting a vote for Branson\u2019s spacefaring vision of the future \u2014 \u201cmy way of actually supporting his mission, his dream and helping advance humanity.\u201dAdvertisementIn the years since, the dream has unfurled slowly as Virgin Galactic learned that building a spacecraft was not as easy as initially thought. But the repeated delays had an upside. They allowed Wichner to meet many of the other \u201cfuture astronauts\u201d who\u2019d signed up with Virgin Galactic, space enthusiasts from 60 countries who now form a sort of exclusive fraternity. They meet occasionally, bonding over the prospect of a wild adventure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just this wonderful, eclectic mix of people from all around the world,\u201d Wichner said.Now, as the company gets closer to flying and his number may soon be called, there are other factors to consider. Weighing on Wichner is the realization that spaceflight is dangerous. In 2014, during a test flight, the spacecraft came apart, killing Michael Alsbury, one of the test pilots and a father of two.AdvertisementWichner\u2019s reaction to the crash was \u201ca general sadness at the cost.\u201d But he was also inspired by the company\u2019s perseverance, \u201cthe unwavering commitment to just keep moving forward,\u201d he said.Now, however, the opinions of his own children, ages 13 and 8, matter. They\u2019re old enough to understand the consequences of failure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSometimes they\u2019re excited about me going into space, and sometimes they\u2019re scared,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s not worth doing if they\u2019re scared.\u201dNASA\u2019s first ordinary citizen astronautsNASA\u2019s leaders were convinced that the space shuttle could turn ordinary citizens into astronauts and set about trying to decide which private citizens should go first.\u201cSpace flight belongs to the public; they pay for it,\u201d reads a NASA memo from 1982. \u201cTherefore NASA\u2019s objective has been to maintain the openness of the program and to invite the public to participate to the extent possible. Now a new opportunity has emerged. With the advent of the Shuttle, people need no longer participate vicariously but may participate directly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, NASA Administrator James Beggs \u201cwas being barraged by people wanting to fly,\u201d said Alan Ladwig, who ran what NASA called its \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cHe was getting all these VIPs and reporters calling him and saying they wanted to fly.\"The singer John Denver was among those keen to go. He lobbied NASA for a ride, touting that he was an airplane pilot and an amateur astronomer who kept in shape by running four to five miles a day.\u201cIf given the opportunity, I would go tomorrow,\u201d he said at a Senate hearing about flying private citizens on the shuttle.In 1984, NASA surveyed artists about the prospect of a writer or painter going to space and got this response from Maya Angelou, the award-winning poet, according to a Chicago Tribune article from the time:\u201cAs poets over the centuries concentrated on Grecian urns, nightingales, ravens and romantic love, I am certain that poets in the future will focus on the configuration of planets, stars, weightlessness and the discovery of our universe.\u201dUltimately, NASA decided to take people who could communicate the experience to others. First a teacher, then a journalist. NASA leaders \u201cfelt astronauts weren\u2019t the greatest storytellers,\u201d Ladwig said. \u201cSome of which was true, some not so true. A lot of them were miffed that people criticized their communication ability.\u201dAdvertisementBut first came a pair of powerful politicians.Jake Garn, a Republican senator from Utah who headed the appropriations subcommittee that oversaw NASA\u2019s budget, pushed to go, saying it was his obligation to \u201ckick the tires\u201d of NASA\u2019s newest spacecraft. Less than a year later, Bill Nelson, then a Democratic congressman representing the Florida Space Coast, hitched a ride. There were also many non-NASA astronauts known as payload specialists who worked on specific projects in space and often had a particular technical expertise.The White House, though, was looking forward to the flight of another civilian, Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, who had been selected out of 11,000 applicants to fly on space shuttle Challenger in 1986. And NASA was deep in the process of picking the next civilian to fly \u2014 a journalist \u2014 when on Jan. 28, 1986, the Challenger\u2019s booster exploded, killing McAuliffe and the other six astronauts on board. The shuttle would stay grounded for more than 2\u00bd years and never achieve the frequency of flight NASA leaders had initially envisioned, averaging fewer than five flights a year.No journalist ever flew. And the dreams of opening the shuttle to the general public were deferred.Preparing for flightWhile NASA shied away from flying private citizens after the explosion, the private sector kept pursuing it. In 2004, a venture backed by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, made history when it flew the first private vehicle to the edge of space to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize.AdvertisementThe flights were heralded as a new Space Age, one where the private sector would end the government\u2019s monopoly on space. But while the SpaceShipOne flights were successful, they were also harrowing; in one, the navigation system went awry and the pilot had to fly blind; in another, the spacecraft spun like a top all the way to space.Worried that someone would die in his spacecraft, Allen sold the rights to the technology to Branson, who set off to build the bigger, more robust SpaceShipTwo. And after the X Prize, Congress took notice, growing concerned over what they saw as dangerously loose regulations governing the industry. Former congressman James Oberstar, of Minnesota, criticized the FAA as having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait until someone dies, then regulate.\u201dThe industry pushed back, saying burdensome rules would stifle a growing industry just as it was getting started, and, backed by the FAA, was able to keep the regulations relatively lax. So today, space tourism, like bungee jumping or skydiving, is governed under an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard: Passengers acknowledge they understand the considerable risks, and zoom, off they\u2019ll go to space. And to secure a launch license from the FAA, the companies have only to demonstrate how they will protect people and property on the ground in the event of a crash.Late last year, two pilots flew Branson\u2019s SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space. Though it did not go into orbit, it was the first launch of a spacecraft with humans from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Then, in February, Virgin Galactic repeated the feat, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, whose job is to prepare Virgin\u2019s customers for their rides to space. For her, the trip was \u201cmind-blowing,\u201d as if \u201cthe sands of time of your life have stopped for a moment.\u201dNow that Virgin Galactic is getting closer to flying customers, Moses is starting to prepare them to make sure they get the most from the experience. \u201cThe one question I ask every one of our customers long before training is what do you most want to get out of your spaceflight?\u201d she said. Some \u201cwant to do somersaults,\u201d others want \u201ca Zen, private experience.\u201d Others are flying \u201cto honor someone. . . . It\u2019s an amazing variety.\u201dBut she knows some will have concerns. Part of her job is to allay them, so participants \u201carrive ready to savor your space experience,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you are concerned about any aspect of the flight, that\u2019s what we\u2019ll walk through and just explain it.\u201dDee Chester, a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher from Newport Beach, Calif., bought her ticket in 2017, when she came into her inheritance. She said she has no hesitation about going and can\u2019t wait for when her \u201clittle nose prints are on every window\u201d of the spacecraft. \u201cI want to do the Superman pose, and look at the Earth and see the very thin bands of the atmosphere. I just hope I\u2019m not crying and miss it all because it\u2019s a big wet blur.\u201dNow that his day of flying is getting closer, Wichner is getting excited, as well. But he still needs to have the frank conversation with his children, who remain wary.\u201cIt\u2019ll happen naturally, and I think they\u2019ll be fine with me going,\u201d he said.Until they are, he won\u2019t commit, leaving the future uncertain: \u201cI don\u2019t know that I\u2019m actually going to go.\u201dRead more:How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D Moonrise: Uncover the real origin story behind the United States\u2019 decision to go to the moonFollow The Post\u2019s coverage of space After years of waiting, Virgin Galactic is close to flying tourists to the edge of space. How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6485",
        "date": "2019-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/02/how-much-does-ticket-space-cost-meet-people-ready-fly/",
        "text": "When Lori Fraleigh unwrapped the present her husband had given her for her 38th birthday, she found a curious surprise: a model of a spaceship. It was cool, sure, but a toy would be better suited for her young children, then 5 and 1, not her.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen she noticed the ticket. It took Fraleigh, a Silicon Valley executive, a moment to realize what her husband had purchased for her: a trip to space with Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic. \u201cI went through a lot of crazy emotions, like, \u2018Did you really buy this?\u2019 \u201d she recalled of the moment in 2011. \u201c \u2018Do we still have enough money to remodel the kitchen?\u2019 \u201d Today, her children are 13 and 9. The kitchen remodel has long since been completed. But Fraleigh is still waiting for her trip to space.Story continues below advertisementFor years, Branson has been pushing a quixotic vision for the future, where his spacecraft would ferry passengers off Earth as frequently as airplanes. But for all the talk about a new Space Age full of citizen astronauts, the journey has been fitful, and filled with setbacks, including the death of a test pilot in 2014 after a harrowing crash.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut now, 15 years after Branson founded Virgin Galactic, space tourism could be tantalizingly close to becoming a reality. The company has flown to the edge of space twice and says its first paying customers could reach space next year. Another space venture, Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos almost 20 years ago, hopes to conduct its first test flight with people this year, though it hasn\u2019t announced prices or sold any tickets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAnd NASA recently announced that it would allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station on spacecraft built by SpaceX and Boeing.Story continues below advertisementWhich means that Fraleigh may soon finally get her five minutes of weightlessness, a view that promises to be spectacular and a test to see if she has the right stuff.Fraleigh has dreamed of being an astronaut since she was a kid and has solid space geek credentials, including having attended Space Camp as a teenager.What\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesBut she didn\u2019t think she could become a NASA astronaut and instead became a tech executive in Silicon Valley, a career that meant her family could absorb Virgin Galactic\u2019s charge ($200,000 per ticket in 2011) without financial hardship. A mother who spends weekends ferrying her children to soccer, baseball and music lessons, she doesn\u2019t look like a thrill seeker. The most adventurous thing she\u2019s done? Driving a go-cart in college, and \u201cI\u2019ve been on some hikes up in Lake Tahoe that were on the strenuous side.\u201dNow she\u2019s preparing for a ride in Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, a sleek spaceplane with a rocket motor strong enough to send two pilots and as many as six passengers more than 50 miles high, where the Federal Aviation Administration says the edge of space begins. The spaceship is tethered to the belly of a large, twin-fuselage airplane that carries it to an altitude of about 40,000 feet. Then SpaceShipTwo is released, fires its engine and rockets off through the atmosphere.For decades, people have dreamed of such adventures. After the Apollo missions, Pan Am started a waiting list for tickets to the moon that by 1971 stretched 90,000 names long. Famed CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite signed up, as did future president Ronald Reagan. Later, in the 1970s and early 1980s, NASA was so convinced that the space shuttle would, as the name implied, offer regular service to Earth orbit that a committee was formed to sort out the sticky problem of how to choose the first private citizens to fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor today\u2019s space companies, it\u2019s anyone willing \u2014 and wealthy enough \u2014 to pay the steep cost.NASA said it would cost $35,000 a night for stays on the ISS, and the price to get there is estimated to be $50 million. Virgin Galactic has said it may in the short term raise the price of its tickets, which today cost $250,000.Despite the high costs, Virgin Galactic expects high demand from the wealthy. While it completes the testing phase of the spacecraft this year, the company projects flying 66 paying customers in 2020, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year. By 2023, when it expects to fly 1,562 paying passengers on 270 flights, it plans to have nearly $600 million in annual revenue. Earlier this year, Virgin Galactic announced it would go public by merging with a New York investment firm, a move that Branson said would \u201copen space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, 600 people have signed up for what Virgin Galactic describes as a transformative experience of seeing Earth from space, what astronauts call the \u201coverview effect.\u201d That\u2019s more people than have been to space since 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.Second thoughts?Craig Wichner, who runs Farmland LP, an organic farmland investment fund in San Francisco, has been waiting for the opportunity for more than a decade. In 2008, he plunked down several thousand dollars as a deposit to ride on Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo with a bunch of friends who thought it\u2019d make a great adventure.\u201cWho wants to do this with me?\u201d a pal said at the time.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYep, I\u2019m there,\u201d Wichner responded.But it wasn\u2019t just the adventure that attracted Wichner; it was the opportunity to help push humanity out of the atmosphere, he said. Buying a ticket was like casting a vote for Branson\u2019s spacefaring vision of the future \u2014 \u201cmy way of actually supporting his mission, his dream and helping advance humanity.\u201dAdvertisementIn the years since, the dream has unfurled slowly as Virgin Galactic learned that building a spacecraft was not as easy as initially thought. But the repeated delays had an upside. They allowed Wichner to meet many of the other \u201cfuture astronauts\u201d who\u2019d signed up with Virgin Galactic, space enthusiasts from 60 countries who now form a sort of exclusive fraternity. They meet occasionally, bonding over the prospect of a wild adventure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just this wonderful, eclectic mix of people from all around the world,\u201d Wichner said.Now, as the company gets closer to flying and his number may soon be called, there are other factors to consider. Weighing on Wichner is the realization that spaceflight is dangerous. In 2014, during a test flight, the spacecraft came apart, killing Michael Alsbury, one of the test pilots and a father of two.AdvertisementWichner\u2019s reaction to the crash was \u201ca general sadness at the cost.\u201d But he was also inspired by the company\u2019s perseverance, \u201cthe unwavering commitment to just keep moving forward,\u201d he said.Now, however, the opinions of his own children, ages 13 and 8, matter. They\u2019re old enough to understand the consequences of failure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSometimes they\u2019re excited about me going into space, and sometimes they\u2019re scared,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s not worth doing if they\u2019re scared.\u201dNASA\u2019s first ordinary citizen astronautsNASA\u2019s leaders were convinced that the space shuttle could turn ordinary citizens into astronauts and set about trying to decide which private citizens should go first.\u201cSpace flight belongs to the public; they pay for it,\u201d reads a NASA memo from 1982. \u201cTherefore NASA\u2019s objective has been to maintain the openness of the program and to invite the public to participate to the extent possible. Now a new opportunity has emerged. With the advent of the Shuttle, people need no longer participate vicariously but may participate directly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, NASA Administrator James Beggs \u201cwas being barraged by people wanting to fly,\u201d said Alan Ladwig, who ran what NASA called its \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cHe was getting all these VIPs and reporters calling him and saying they wanted to fly.\"The singer John Denver was among those keen to go. He lobbied NASA for a ride, touting that he was an airplane pilot and an amateur astronomer who kept in shape by running four to five miles a day.\u201cIf given the opportunity, I would go tomorrow,\u201d he said at a Senate hearing about flying private citizens on the shuttle.In 1984, NASA surveyed artists about the prospect of a writer or painter going to space and got this response from Maya Angelou, the award-winning poet, according to a Chicago Tribune article from the time:\u201cAs poets over the centuries concentrated on Grecian urns, nightingales, ravens and romantic love, I am certain that poets in the future will focus on the configuration of planets, stars, weightlessness and the discovery of our universe.\u201dUltimately, NASA decided to take people who could communicate the experience to others. First a teacher, then a journalist. NASA leaders \u201cfelt astronauts weren\u2019t the greatest storytellers,\u201d Ladwig said. \u201cSome of which was true, some not so true. A lot of them were miffed that people criticized their communication ability.\u201dAdvertisementBut first came a pair of powerful politicians.Jake Garn, a Republican senator from Utah who headed the appropriations subcommittee that oversaw NASA\u2019s budget, pushed to go, saying it was his obligation to \u201ckick the tires\u201d of NASA\u2019s newest spacecraft. Less than a year later, Bill Nelson, then a Democratic congressman representing the Florida Space Coast, hitched a ride. There were also many non-NASA astronauts known as payload specialists who worked on specific projects in space and often had a particular technical expertise.The White House, though, was looking forward to the flight of another civilian, Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, who had been selected out of 11,000 applicants to fly on space shuttle Challenger in 1986. And NASA was deep in the process of picking the next civilian to fly \u2014 a journalist \u2014 when on Jan. 28, 1986, the Challenger\u2019s booster exploded, killing McAuliffe and the other six astronauts on board. The shuttle would stay grounded for more than 2\u00bd years and never achieve the frequency of flight NASA leaders had initially envisioned, averaging fewer than five flights a year.No journalist ever flew. And the dreams of opening the shuttle to the general public were deferred.Preparing for flightWhile NASA shied away from flying private citizens after the explosion, the private sector kept pursuing it. In 2004, a venture backed by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, made history when it flew the first private vehicle to the edge of space to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize.AdvertisementThe flights were heralded as a new Space Age, one where the private sector would end the government\u2019s monopoly on space. But while the SpaceShipOne flights were successful, they were also harrowing; in one, the navigation system went awry and the pilot had to fly blind; in another, the spacecraft spun like a top all the way to space.Worried that someone would die in his spacecraft, Allen sold the rights to the technology to Branson, who set off to build the bigger, more robust SpaceShipTwo. And after the X Prize, Congress took notice, growing concerned over what they saw as dangerously loose regulations governing the industry. Former congressman James Oberstar, of Minnesota, criticized the FAA as having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait until someone dies, then regulate.\u201dThe industry pushed back, saying burdensome rules would stifle a growing industry just as it was getting started, and, backed by the FAA, was able to keep the regulations relatively lax. So today, space tourism, like bungee jumping or skydiving, is governed under an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard: Passengers acknowledge they understand the considerable risks, and zoom, off they\u2019ll go to space. And to secure a launch license from the FAA, the companies have only to demonstrate how they will protect people and property on the ground in the event of a crash.Late last year, two pilots flew Branson\u2019s SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space. Though it did not go into orbit, it was the first launch of a spacecraft with humans from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Then, in February, Virgin Galactic repeated the feat, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, whose job is to prepare Virgin\u2019s customers for their rides to space. For her, the trip was \u201cmind-blowing,\u201d as if \u201cthe sands of time of your life have stopped for a moment.\u201dNow that Virgin Galactic is getting closer to flying customers, Moses is starting to prepare them to make sure they get the most from the experience. \u201cThe one question I ask every one of our customers long before training is what do you most want to get out of your spaceflight?\u201d she said. Some \u201cwant to do somersaults,\u201d others want \u201ca Zen, private experience.\u201d Others are flying \u201cto honor someone. . . . It\u2019s an amazing variety.\u201dBut she knows some will have concerns. Part of her job is to allay them, so participants \u201carrive ready to savor your space experience,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you are concerned about any aspect of the flight, that\u2019s what we\u2019ll walk through and just explain it.\u201dDee Chester, a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher from Newport Beach, Calif., bought her ticket in 2017, when she came into her inheritance. She said she has no hesitation about going and can\u2019t wait for when her \u201clittle nose prints are on every window\u201d of the spacecraft. \u201cI want to do the Superman pose, and look at the Earth and see the very thin bands of the atmosphere. I just hope I\u2019m not crying and miss it all because it\u2019s a big wet blur.\u201dNow that his day of flying is getting closer, Wichner is getting excited, as well. But he still needs to have the frank conversation with his children, who remain wary.\u201cIt\u2019ll happen naturally, and I think they\u2019ll be fine with me going,\u201d he said.Until they are, he won\u2019t commit, leaving the future uncertain: \u201cI don\u2019t know that I\u2019m actually going to go.\u201dRead more:How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D Moonrise: Uncover the real origin story behind the United States\u2019 decision to go to the moonFollow The Post\u2019s coverage of space After years of waiting, Virgin Galactic is close to flying tourists to the edge of space. How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6486",
        "date": "2019-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/02/how-much-does-ticket-space-cost-meet-people-ready-fly/",
        "text": "When Lori Fraleigh unwrapped the present her husband had given her for her 38th birthday, she found a curious surprise: a model of a spaceship. It was cool, sure, but a toy would be better suited for her young children, then 5 and 1, not her.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen she noticed the ticket. It took Fraleigh, a Silicon Valley executive, a moment to realize what her husband had purchased for her: a trip to space with Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic. \u201cI went through a lot of crazy emotions, like, \u2018Did you really buy this?\u2019 \u201d she recalled of the moment in 2011. \u201c \u2018Do we still have enough money to remodel the kitchen?\u2019 \u201d Today, her children are 13 and 9. The kitchen remodel has long since been completed. But Fraleigh is still waiting for her trip to space.Story continues below advertisementFor years, Branson has been pushing a quixotic vision for the future, where his spacecraft would ferry passengers off Earth as frequently as airplanes. But for all the talk about a new Space Age full of citizen astronauts, the journey has been fitful, and filled with setbacks, including the death of a test pilot in 2014 after a harrowing crash.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut now, 15 years after Branson founded Virgin Galactic, space tourism could be tantalizingly close to becoming a reality. The company has flown to the edge of space twice and says its first paying customers could reach space next year. Another space venture, Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos almost 20 years ago, hopes to conduct its first test flight with people this year, though it hasn\u2019t announced prices or sold any tickets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAnd NASA recently announced that it would allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station on spacecraft built by SpaceX and Boeing.Story continues below advertisementWhich means that Fraleigh may soon finally get her five minutes of weightlessness, a view that promises to be spectacular and a test to see if she has the right stuff.Fraleigh has dreamed of being an astronaut since she was a kid and has solid space geek credentials, including having attended Space Camp as a teenager.What\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesBut she didn\u2019t think she could become a NASA astronaut and instead became a tech executive in Silicon Valley, a career that meant her family could absorb Virgin Galactic\u2019s charge ($200,000 per ticket in 2011) without financial hardship. A mother who spends weekends ferrying her children to soccer, baseball and music lessons, she doesn\u2019t look like a thrill seeker. The most adventurous thing she\u2019s done? Driving a go-cart in college, and \u201cI\u2019ve been on some hikes up in Lake Tahoe that were on the strenuous side.\u201dNow she\u2019s preparing for a ride in Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, a sleek spaceplane with a rocket motor strong enough to send two pilots and as many as six passengers more than 50 miles high, where the Federal Aviation Administration says the edge of space begins. The spaceship is tethered to the belly of a large, twin-fuselage airplane that carries it to an altitude of about 40,000 feet. Then SpaceShipTwo is released, fires its engine and rockets off through the atmosphere.For decades, people have dreamed of such adventures. After the Apollo missions, Pan Am started a waiting list for tickets to the moon that by 1971 stretched 90,000 names long. Famed CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite signed up, as did future president Ronald Reagan. Later, in the 1970s and early 1980s, NASA was so convinced that the space shuttle would, as the name implied, offer regular service to Earth orbit that a committee was formed to sort out the sticky problem of how to choose the first private citizens to fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor today\u2019s space companies, it\u2019s anyone willing \u2014 and wealthy enough \u2014 to pay the steep cost.NASA said it would cost $35,000 a night for stays on the ISS, and the price to get there is estimated to be $50 million. Virgin Galactic has said it may in the short term raise the price of its tickets, which today cost $250,000.Despite the high costs, Virgin Galactic expects high demand from the wealthy. While it completes the testing phase of the spacecraft this year, the company projects flying 66 paying customers in 2020, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year. By 2023, when it expects to fly 1,562 paying passengers on 270 flights, it plans to have nearly $600 million in annual revenue. Earlier this year, Virgin Galactic announced it would go public by merging with a New York investment firm, a move that Branson said would \u201copen space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, 600 people have signed up for what Virgin Galactic describes as a transformative experience of seeing Earth from space, what astronauts call the \u201coverview effect.\u201d That\u2019s more people than have been to space since 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.Second thoughts?Craig Wichner, who runs Farmland LP, an organic farmland investment fund in San Francisco, has been waiting for the opportunity for more than a decade. In 2008, he plunked down several thousand dollars as a deposit to ride on Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo with a bunch of friends who thought it\u2019d make a great adventure.\u201cWho wants to do this with me?\u201d a pal said at the time.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYep, I\u2019m there,\u201d Wichner responded.But it wasn\u2019t just the adventure that attracted Wichner; it was the opportunity to help push humanity out of the atmosphere, he said. Buying a ticket was like casting a vote for Branson\u2019s spacefaring vision of the future \u2014 \u201cmy way of actually supporting his mission, his dream and helping advance humanity.\u201dAdvertisementIn the years since, the dream has unfurled slowly as Virgin Galactic learned that building a spacecraft was not as easy as initially thought. But the repeated delays had an upside. They allowed Wichner to meet many of the other \u201cfuture astronauts\u201d who\u2019d signed up with Virgin Galactic, space enthusiasts from 60 countries who now form a sort of exclusive fraternity. They meet occasionally, bonding over the prospect of a wild adventure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just this wonderful, eclectic mix of people from all around the world,\u201d Wichner said.Now, as the company gets closer to flying and his number may soon be called, there are other factors to consider. Weighing on Wichner is the realization that spaceflight is dangerous. In 2014, during a test flight, the spacecraft came apart, killing Michael Alsbury, one of the test pilots and a father of two.AdvertisementWichner\u2019s reaction to the crash was \u201ca general sadness at the cost.\u201d But he was also inspired by the company\u2019s perseverance, \u201cthe unwavering commitment to just keep moving forward,\u201d he said.Now, however, the opinions of his own children, ages 13 and 8, matter. They\u2019re old enough to understand the consequences of failure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSometimes they\u2019re excited about me going into space, and sometimes they\u2019re scared,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s not worth doing if they\u2019re scared.\u201dNASA\u2019s first ordinary citizen astronautsNASA\u2019s leaders were convinced that the space shuttle could turn ordinary citizens into astronauts and set about trying to decide which private citizens should go first.\u201cSpace flight belongs to the public; they pay for it,\u201d reads a NASA memo from 1982. \u201cTherefore NASA\u2019s objective has been to maintain the openness of the program and to invite the public to participate to the extent possible. Now a new opportunity has emerged. With the advent of the Shuttle, people need no longer participate vicariously but may participate directly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, NASA Administrator James Beggs \u201cwas being barraged by people wanting to fly,\u201d said Alan Ladwig, who ran what NASA called its \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cHe was getting all these VIPs and reporters calling him and saying they wanted to fly.\"The singer John Denver was among those keen to go. He lobbied NASA for a ride, touting that he was an airplane pilot and an amateur astronomer who kept in shape by running four to five miles a day.\u201cIf given the opportunity, I would go tomorrow,\u201d he said at a Senate hearing about flying private citizens on the shuttle.In 1984, NASA surveyed artists about the prospect of a writer or painter going to space and got this response from Maya Angelou, the award-winning poet, according to a Chicago Tribune article from the time:\u201cAs poets over the centuries concentrated on Grecian urns, nightingales, ravens and romantic love, I am certain that poets in the future will focus on the configuration of planets, stars, weightlessness and the discovery of our universe.\u201dUltimately, NASA decided to take people who could communicate the experience to others. First a teacher, then a journalist. NASA leaders \u201cfelt astronauts weren\u2019t the greatest storytellers,\u201d Ladwig said. \u201cSome of which was true, some not so true. A lot of them were miffed that people criticized their communication ability.\u201dAdvertisementBut first came a pair of powerful politicians.Jake Garn, a Republican senator from Utah who headed the appropriations subcommittee that oversaw NASA\u2019s budget, pushed to go, saying it was his obligation to \u201ckick the tires\u201d of NASA\u2019s newest spacecraft. Less than a year later, Bill Nelson, then a Democratic congressman representing the Florida Space Coast, hitched a ride. There were also many non-NASA astronauts known as payload specialists who worked on specific projects in space and often had a particular technical expertise.The White House, though, was looking forward to the flight of another civilian, Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, who had been selected out of 11,000 applicants to fly on space shuttle Challenger in 1986. And NASA was deep in the process of picking the next civilian to fly \u2014 a journalist \u2014 when on Jan. 28, 1986, the Challenger\u2019s booster exploded, killing McAuliffe and the other six astronauts on board. The shuttle would stay grounded for more than 2\u00bd years and never achieve the frequency of flight NASA leaders had initially envisioned, averaging fewer than five flights a year.No journalist ever flew. And the dreams of opening the shuttle to the general public were deferred.Preparing for flightWhile NASA shied away from flying private citizens after the explosion, the private sector kept pursuing it. In 2004, a venture backed by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, made history when it flew the first private vehicle to the edge of space to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize.AdvertisementThe flights were heralded as a new Space Age, one where the private sector would end the government\u2019s monopoly on space. But while the SpaceShipOne flights were successful, they were also harrowing; in one, the navigation system went awry and the pilot had to fly blind; in another, the spacecraft spun like a top all the way to space.Worried that someone would die in his spacecraft, Allen sold the rights to the technology to Branson, who set off to build the bigger, more robust SpaceShipTwo. And after the X Prize, Congress took notice, growing concerned over what they saw as dangerously loose regulations governing the industry. Former congressman James Oberstar, of Minnesota, criticized the FAA as having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait until someone dies, then regulate.\u201dThe industry pushed back, saying burdensome rules would stifle a growing industry just as it was getting started, and, backed by the FAA, was able to keep the regulations relatively lax. So today, space tourism, like bungee jumping or skydiving, is governed under an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard: Passengers acknowledge they understand the considerable risks, and zoom, off they\u2019ll go to space. And to secure a launch license from the FAA, the companies have only to demonstrate how they will protect people and property on the ground in the event of a crash.Late last year, two pilots flew Branson\u2019s SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space. Though it did not go into orbit, it was the first launch of a spacecraft with humans from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Then, in February, Virgin Galactic repeated the feat, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, whose job is to prepare Virgin\u2019s customers for their rides to space. For her, the trip was \u201cmind-blowing,\u201d as if \u201cthe sands of time of your life have stopped for a moment.\u201dNow that Virgin Galactic is getting closer to flying customers, Moses is starting to prepare them to make sure they get the most from the experience. \u201cThe one question I ask every one of our customers long before training is what do you most want to get out of your spaceflight?\u201d she said. Some \u201cwant to do somersaults,\u201d others want \u201ca Zen, private experience.\u201d Others are flying \u201cto honor someone. . . . It\u2019s an amazing variety.\u201dBut she knows some will have concerns. Part of her job is to allay them, so participants \u201carrive ready to savor your space experience,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you are concerned about any aspect of the flight, that\u2019s what we\u2019ll walk through and just explain it.\u201dDee Chester, a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher from Newport Beach, Calif., bought her ticket in 2017, when she came into her inheritance. She said she has no hesitation about going and can\u2019t wait for when her \u201clittle nose prints are on every window\u201d of the spacecraft. \u201cI want to do the Superman pose, and look at the Earth and see the very thin bands of the atmosphere. I just hope I\u2019m not crying and miss it all because it\u2019s a big wet blur.\u201dNow that his day of flying is getting closer, Wichner is getting excited, as well. But he still needs to have the frank conversation with his children, who remain wary.\u201cIt\u2019ll happen naturally, and I think they\u2019ll be fine with me going,\u201d he said.Until they are, he won\u2019t commit, leaving the future uncertain: \u201cI don\u2019t know that I\u2019m actually going to go.\u201dRead more:How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D Moonrise: Uncover the real origin story behind the United States\u2019 decision to go to the moonFollow The Post\u2019s coverage of space After years of waiting, Virgin Galactic is close to flying tourists to the edge of space. How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6487",
        "date": "2019-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/02/how-much-does-ticket-space-cost-meet-people-ready-fly/",
        "text": "When Lori Fraleigh unwrapped the present her husband had given her for her 38th birthday, she found a curious surprise: a model of a spaceship. It was cool, sure, but a toy would be better suited for her young children, then 5 and 1, not her.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThen she noticed the ticket. It took Fraleigh, a Silicon Valley executive, a moment to realize what her husband had purchased for her: a trip to space with Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic. \u201cI went through a lot of crazy emotions, like, \u2018Did you really buy this?\u2019 \u201d she recalled of the moment in 2011. \u201c \u2018Do we still have enough money to remodel the kitchen?\u2019 \u201d Today, her children are 13 and 9. The kitchen remodel has long since been completed. But Fraleigh is still waiting for her trip to space.Story continues below advertisementFor years, Branson has been pushing a quixotic vision for the future, where his spacecraft would ferry passengers off Earth as frequently as airplanes. But for all the talk about a new Space Age full of citizen astronauts, the journey has been fitful, and filled with setbacks, including the death of a test pilot in 2014 after a harrowing crash.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut now, 15 years after Branson founded Virgin Galactic, space tourism could be tantalizingly close to becoming a reality. The company has flown to the edge of space twice and says its first paying customers could reach space next year. Another space venture, Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos almost 20 years ago, hopes to conduct its first test flight with people this year, though it hasn\u2019t announced prices or sold any tickets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementAnd NASA recently announced that it would allow private citizens to fly to the International Space Station on spacecraft built by SpaceX and Boeing.Story continues below advertisementWhich means that Fraleigh may soon finally get her five minutes of weightlessness, a view that promises to be spectacular and a test to see if she has the right stuff.Fraleigh has dreamed of being an astronaut since she was a kid and has solid space geek credentials, including having attended Space Camp as a teenager.What\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesBut she didn\u2019t think she could become a NASA astronaut and instead became a tech executive in Silicon Valley, a career that meant her family could absorb Virgin Galactic\u2019s charge ($200,000 per ticket in 2011) without financial hardship. A mother who spends weekends ferrying her children to soccer, baseball and music lessons, she doesn\u2019t look like a thrill seeker. The most adventurous thing she\u2019s done? Driving a go-cart in college, and \u201cI\u2019ve been on some hikes up in Lake Tahoe that were on the strenuous side.\u201dNow she\u2019s preparing for a ride in Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, a sleek spaceplane with a rocket motor strong enough to send two pilots and as many as six passengers more than 50 miles high, where the Federal Aviation Administration says the edge of space begins. The spaceship is tethered to the belly of a large, twin-fuselage airplane that carries it to an altitude of about 40,000 feet. Then SpaceShipTwo is released, fires its engine and rockets off through the atmosphere.For decades, people have dreamed of such adventures. After the Apollo missions, Pan Am started a waiting list for tickets to the moon that by 1971 stretched 90,000 names long. Famed CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite signed up, as did future president Ronald Reagan. Later, in the 1970s and early 1980s, NASA was so convinced that the space shuttle would, as the name implied, offer regular service to Earth orbit that a committee was formed to sort out the sticky problem of how to choose the first private citizens to fly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor today\u2019s space companies, it\u2019s anyone willing \u2014 and wealthy enough \u2014 to pay the steep cost.NASA said it would cost $35,000 a night for stays on the ISS, and the price to get there is estimated to be $50 million. Virgin Galactic has said it may in the short term raise the price of its tickets, which today cost $250,000.Despite the high costs, Virgin Galactic expects high demand from the wealthy. While it completes the testing phase of the spacecraft this year, the company projects flying 66 paying customers in 2020, more than 700 in 2021 and nearly 1,000 the following year. By 2023, when it expects to fly 1,562 paying passengers on 270 flights, it plans to have nearly $600 million in annual revenue. Earlier this year, Virgin Galactic announced it would go public by merging with a New York investment firm, a move that Branson said would \u201copen space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlready, 600 people have signed up for what Virgin Galactic describes as a transformative experience of seeing Earth from space, what astronauts call the \u201coverview effect.\u201d That\u2019s more people than have been to space since 1961, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.Second thoughts?Craig Wichner, who runs Farmland LP, an organic farmland investment fund in San Francisco, has been waiting for the opportunity for more than a decade. In 2008, he plunked down several thousand dollars as a deposit to ride on Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo with a bunch of friends who thought it\u2019d make a great adventure.\u201cWho wants to do this with me?\u201d a pal said at the time.Story continues below advertisement\u201cYep, I\u2019m there,\u201d Wichner responded.But it wasn\u2019t just the adventure that attracted Wichner; it was the opportunity to help push humanity out of the atmosphere, he said. Buying a ticket was like casting a vote for Branson\u2019s spacefaring vision of the future \u2014 \u201cmy way of actually supporting his mission, his dream and helping advance humanity.\u201dAdvertisementIn the years since, the dream has unfurled slowly as Virgin Galactic learned that building a spacecraft was not as easy as initially thought. But the repeated delays had an upside. They allowed Wichner to meet many of the other \u201cfuture astronauts\u201d who\u2019d signed up with Virgin Galactic, space enthusiasts from 60 countries who now form a sort of exclusive fraternity. They meet occasionally, bonding over the prospect of a wild adventure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was just this wonderful, eclectic mix of people from all around the world,\u201d Wichner said.Now, as the company gets closer to flying and his number may soon be called, there are other factors to consider. Weighing on Wichner is the realization that spaceflight is dangerous. In 2014, during a test flight, the spacecraft came apart, killing Michael Alsbury, one of the test pilots and a father of two.AdvertisementWichner\u2019s reaction to the crash was \u201ca general sadness at the cost.\u201d But he was also inspired by the company\u2019s perseverance, \u201cthe unwavering commitment to just keep moving forward,\u201d he said.Now, however, the opinions of his own children, ages 13 and 8, matter. They\u2019re old enough to understand the consequences of failure.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSometimes they\u2019re excited about me going into space, and sometimes they\u2019re scared,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so it\u2019s not worth doing if they\u2019re scared.\u201dNASA\u2019s first ordinary citizen astronautsNASA\u2019s leaders were convinced that the space shuttle could turn ordinary citizens into astronauts and set about trying to decide which private citizens should go first.\u201cSpace flight belongs to the public; they pay for it,\u201d reads a NASA memo from 1982. \u201cTherefore NASA\u2019s objective has been to maintain the openness of the program and to invite the public to participate to the extent possible. Now a new opportunity has emerged. With the advent of the Shuttle, people need no longer participate vicariously but may participate directly.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the time, NASA Administrator James Beggs \u201cwas being barraged by people wanting to fly,\u201d said Alan Ladwig, who ran what NASA called its \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cHe was getting all these VIPs and reporters calling him and saying they wanted to fly.\"The singer John Denver was among those keen to go. He lobbied NASA for a ride, touting that he was an airplane pilot and an amateur astronomer who kept in shape by running four to five miles a day.\u201cIf given the opportunity, I would go tomorrow,\u201d he said at a Senate hearing about flying private citizens on the shuttle.In 1984, NASA surveyed artists about the prospect of a writer or painter going to space and got this response from Maya Angelou, the award-winning poet, according to a Chicago Tribune article from the time:\u201cAs poets over the centuries concentrated on Grecian urns, nightingales, ravens and romantic love, I am certain that poets in the future will focus on the configuration of planets, stars, weightlessness and the discovery of our universe.\u201dUltimately, NASA decided to take people who could communicate the experience to others. First a teacher, then a journalist. NASA leaders \u201cfelt astronauts weren\u2019t the greatest storytellers,\u201d Ladwig said. \u201cSome of which was true, some not so true. A lot of them were miffed that people criticized their communication ability.\u201dAdvertisementBut first came a pair of powerful politicians.Jake Garn, a Republican senator from Utah who headed the appropriations subcommittee that oversaw NASA\u2019s budget, pushed to go, saying it was his obligation to \u201ckick the tires\u201d of NASA\u2019s newest spacecraft. Less than a year later, Bill Nelson, then a Democratic congressman representing the Florida Space Coast, hitched a ride. There were also many non-NASA astronauts known as payload specialists who worked on specific projects in space and often had a particular technical expertise.The White House, though, was looking forward to the flight of another civilian, Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, who had been selected out of 11,000 applicants to fly on space shuttle Challenger in 1986. And NASA was deep in the process of picking the next civilian to fly \u2014 a journalist \u2014 when on Jan. 28, 1986, the Challenger\u2019s booster exploded, killing McAuliffe and the other six astronauts on board. The shuttle would stay grounded for more than 2\u00bd years and never achieve the frequency of flight NASA leaders had initially envisioned, averaging fewer than five flights a year.No journalist ever flew. And the dreams of opening the shuttle to the general public were deferred.Preparing for flightWhile NASA shied away from flying private citizens after the explosion, the private sector kept pursuing it. In 2004, a venture backed by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, made history when it flew the first private vehicle to the edge of space to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize.AdvertisementThe flights were heralded as a new Space Age, one where the private sector would end the government\u2019s monopoly on space. But while the SpaceShipOne flights were successful, they were also harrowing; in one, the navigation system went awry and the pilot had to fly blind; in another, the spacecraft spun like a top all the way to space.Worried that someone would die in his spacecraft, Allen sold the rights to the technology to Branson, who set off to build the bigger, more robust SpaceShipTwo. And after the X Prize, Congress took notice, growing concerned over what they saw as dangerously loose regulations governing the industry. Former congressman James Oberstar, of Minnesota, criticized the FAA as having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait until someone dies, then regulate.\u201dThe industry pushed back, saying burdensome rules would stifle a growing industry just as it was getting started, and, backed by the FAA, was able to keep the regulations relatively lax. So today, space tourism, like bungee jumping or skydiving, is governed under an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard: Passengers acknowledge they understand the considerable risks, and zoom, off they\u2019ll go to space. And to secure a launch license from the FAA, the companies have only to demonstrate how they will protect people and property on the ground in the event of a crash.Late last year, two pilots flew Branson\u2019s SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space. Though it did not go into orbit, it was the first launch of a spacecraft with humans from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Then, in February, Virgin Galactic repeated the feat, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, whose job is to prepare Virgin\u2019s customers for their rides to space. For her, the trip was \u201cmind-blowing,\u201d as if \u201cthe sands of time of your life have stopped for a moment.\u201dNow that Virgin Galactic is getting closer to flying customers, Moses is starting to prepare them to make sure they get the most from the experience. \u201cThe one question I ask every one of our customers long before training is what do you most want to get out of your spaceflight?\u201d she said. Some \u201cwant to do somersaults,\u201d others want \u201ca Zen, private experience.\u201d Others are flying \u201cto honor someone. . . . It\u2019s an amazing variety.\u201dBut she knows some will have concerns. Part of her job is to allay them, so participants \u201carrive ready to savor your space experience,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you are concerned about any aspect of the flight, that\u2019s what we\u2019ll walk through and just explain it.\u201dDee Chester, a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher from Newport Beach, Calif., bought her ticket in 2017, when she came into her inheritance. She said she has no hesitation about going and can\u2019t wait for when her \u201clittle nose prints are on every window\u201d of the spacecraft. \u201cI want to do the Superman pose, and look at the Earth and see the very thin bands of the atmosphere. I just hope I\u2019m not crying and miss it all because it\u2019s a big wet blur.\u201dNow that his day of flying is getting closer, Wichner is getting excited, as well. But he still needs to have the frank conversation with his children, who remain wary.\u201cIt\u2019ll happen naturally, and I think they\u2019ll be fine with me going,\u201d he said.Until they are, he won\u2019t commit, leaving the future uncertain: \u201cI don\u2019t know that I\u2019m actually going to go.\u201dRead more:How to dress for space: Explore five iconic spacesuits in 3-D Moonrise: Uncover the real origin story behind the United States\u2019 decision to go to the moonFollow The Post\u2019s coverage of space After years of waiting, Virgin Galactic is close to flying tourists to the edge of space. How much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6488",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-dare-devil/",
        "text": "When he crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon in 1991, Richard Branson ended up so far off course that instead of touching down in Southern California, he crash landed on a frozen lake in Canada.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis balloon ride across the Atlantic four years earlier had been just as perilous, forcing Branson to bail out by jumping into the sea after writing a farewell note to his family in case he didn\u2019t survive. Over the years, the brash British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany \u2014 from attempting a powerboat speed record across the English Channel in seas so choppy it \u201cwas like being strapped to the blade of a vast pneumatic drill,\u201d as he wrote in his memoir; to dressing up as a bride to launch his ultimately unsuccessful foray into the wedding gown industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, the one-man publicity circus, as he has been called, is preparing for what would be the biggest stunt of all: A rollicking ride to the edge of space in the spaceplane developed by Virgin Galactic, the venture he founded in 2004 that he vowed would become the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic announced this week that Stephen Colbert would host the live-stream broadcast of the event, now scheduled for Sunday, though weather and last-minute technical problems could force a delay. And the company also intends to use Branson\u2019s flight as a catalyst to reopen ticket sales for its space tourism business. It had previously cost $250,000 for the flight, which would allow passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But when the tickets go back on sale, the price is expected to jump to about $500,000, according to analysts.Like Branson\u2019s previous exploits, the flight from Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport America in New Mexico will be as much theater as adventure, designed to sell tickets as well as to celebrate the commercialization of human space exploration. But that is to be expected from the man who made his start by signing the Sex Pistols to his record label and who\u2019s lived by the motto, \u201cscrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dVirgin Galactic's Quest for SpaceLast week, Branson \u2014 who\u2019ll turn 71 July 18 \u2014 ensured his spaceflight attempt would get even more publicity when he announced that he would accelerate the test flight schedule Virgin Galactic had previously announced so that he could fly earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company had planned to fly a test flight with four crew members in the cabin, and then fly Branson. But after Jeff Bezos announced he would fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft to the edge of space on July 20, Branson jumped the line and said he would board Virgin Galactic\u2019s next space flight and \u2014 conditions permitting \u2014 beat Bezos by nine days.Richard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)In making the announcement, Branson simultaneously reveled in the attention it generated while downplaying any competition. He told The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, \u201cI completely understand why the press would write that.\u201d He added that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dStory continues below advertisementBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which prides itself on being quiet, letting its actions speak for themselves and focusing on its customers instead of its competitors. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles above sea level, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.AdvertisementOn Twitter Friday, Blue Origin pressed that point again and took a swipe at its competitor, saying Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane doesn\u2019t have an escape system, and that it has only reached its maximum altitude three times, compared to 15 for Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule. The company also pointed out that its windows were larger, providing a better view, and it alleged that Virgin Galactic\u2019s hybrid rocket engine is far more harmful to the environment.Whether it was to beat Bezos or not, the change in the test flight schedule has concerned many in the spaceflight community who said they hoped Virgin Galactic wasn\u2019t sacrificing safety for speed.Story continues below advertisementWayne Hale, a former NASA flight director who was the space shuttle program manager and has extensively discussed the risks inherent in human spaceflight, wrote on Twitter: \u201cTalk about schedule pressure! Hope nobody cuts any corners.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview last week, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier, said the company had done just the opposite, undertaking a thorough review of its third human spaceflight mission in May.\u201cWe hit all of our test objectives,\u201d he said. \u201cWe took the time to do the studies, and it was an excellent success. That means we\u2019re ready for the next flights in our test program.\u201dGiven that the last test flight went so well, he said the company decided that Branson could choose to stay on his original flight or move up one. \u201cGuess which one he chose?\u201d Colglazier said.Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin GalacticBranson also has said that he\u2019s confident the vehicle is safe and that he\u2019s looking forward to the experience. \u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dUnlike traditional rockets that launch vertically from launchpads, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity, as it is called, is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which carries it to about 45,000 feet. The spaceplane is then released, the pilots fire its engines, and it goes screaming up through the sky until it reaches the edge of space. It then reorients itself, falls back toward Earth and glides to a runway landing.It\u2019s a system originally designed by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft builder, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the threshold of space. That spacecraft carried just one person, though, the pilot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has two pilots as well as a crew of four, and Branson\u2019s flight would be the first time the company has attempted a spaceflight with all six seats filled.To get to this point, Branson and Virgin Galactic have traveled a long way, an up-and-down journey filled with setbacks and delays as well as triumphs.After years of technical problems that delayed commercial flights \u2014 which Branson had once hoped would happen as early as 2007 \u2014 the company seemed to be making real progress in 2014. But late that year, the spacecraft came apart during a test flight when one of the pilots prematurely unlocked a device designed to reorient the spacecraft once it is in space. One of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, who was 39 and had two young children, was killed in the accident, and the other, Peter Siebold, suffered serious injuries after parachuting to the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Transportation Safety Board blamed the catastrophe on human error but also said the design was flawed. After the accident, Virgin Galactic took over full control of the test program and design, which had been overseen by Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary.Shaken, Branson considered giving up, saying human spaceflight was too difficult and dangerous. But in the end, he decided that the risk was worth it and that the company would bounce back, stronger and more resilient.The company made some safety enhancements to the ship, and in late 2018 made it to space for the first time. Branson, watching from the side of the runway, broke into tears when the announcer said the spacecraft had passed 50 miles above sea level. The company did it again in 2019, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, the company\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, on board.The third flight was delayed while the company made more safety enhancements \u2014 a seal running along a wing stabilizer had come undone during the previous flight. The company moved operations from California to New Mexico, went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted another flight in December of last year, but it was aborted just as the engine fired when electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system caused the engine to shut down. The company said it resolved the issue and completed its third human spaceflight mission in May.That opened the door for Branson to go. And if all goes well, the company plans to begin commercial operations as well, flying the 600 or so people who have put down significant deposits and, in some cases, have been waiting years to go.Branson said he was very much looking forward to \u201clooking straight back down at the Earth through those windows.\u201dHe added that \u201cwe\u2019ll finally be able to get our long-suffering customers up there and give them a chance to go as well.\u201d Over the years, the brash, British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany. Sunday's planned flight to the edge of space may be the most audacious. Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6489",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-dare-devil/",
        "text": "When he crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon in 1991, Richard Branson ended up so far off course that instead of touching down in Southern California, he crash landed on a frozen lake in Canada.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis balloon ride across the Atlantic four years earlier had been just as perilous, forcing Branson to bail out by jumping into the sea after writing a farewell note to his family in case he didn\u2019t survive. Over the years, the brash British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany \u2014 from attempting a powerboat speed record across the English Channel in seas so choppy it \u201cwas like being strapped to the blade of a vast pneumatic drill,\u201d as he wrote in his memoir; to dressing up as a bride to launch his ultimately unsuccessful foray into the wedding gown industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, the one-man publicity circus, as he has been called, is preparing for what would be the biggest stunt of all: A rollicking ride to the edge of space in the spaceplane developed by Virgin Galactic, the venture he founded in 2004 that he vowed would become the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic announced this week that Stephen Colbert would host the live-stream broadcast of the event, now scheduled for Sunday, though weather and last-minute technical problems could force a delay. And the company also intends to use Branson\u2019s flight as a catalyst to reopen ticket sales for its space tourism business. It had previously cost $250,000 for the flight, which would allow passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But when the tickets go back on sale, the price is expected to jump to about $500,000, according to analysts.Like Branson\u2019s previous exploits, the flight from Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport America in New Mexico will be as much theater as adventure, designed to sell tickets as well as to celebrate the commercialization of human space exploration. But that is to be expected from the man who made his start by signing the Sex Pistols to his record label and who\u2019s lived by the motto, \u201cscrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dVirgin Galactic's Quest for SpaceLast week, Branson \u2014 who\u2019ll turn 71 July 18 \u2014 ensured his spaceflight attempt would get even more publicity when he announced that he would accelerate the test flight schedule Virgin Galactic had previously announced so that he could fly earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company had planned to fly a test flight with four crew members in the cabin, and then fly Branson. But after Jeff Bezos announced he would fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft to the edge of space on July 20, Branson jumped the line and said he would board Virgin Galactic\u2019s next space flight and \u2014 conditions permitting \u2014 beat Bezos by nine days.Richard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)In making the announcement, Branson simultaneously reveled in the attention it generated while downplaying any competition. He told The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, \u201cI completely understand why the press would write that.\u201d He added that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dStory continues below advertisementBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which prides itself on being quiet, letting its actions speak for themselves and focusing on its customers instead of its competitors. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles above sea level, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.AdvertisementOn Twitter Friday, Blue Origin pressed that point again and took a swipe at its competitor, saying Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane doesn\u2019t have an escape system, and that it has only reached its maximum altitude three times, compared to 15 for Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule. The company also pointed out that its windows were larger, providing a better view, and it alleged that Virgin Galactic\u2019s hybrid rocket engine is far more harmful to the environment.Whether it was to beat Bezos or not, the change in the test flight schedule has concerned many in the spaceflight community who said they hoped Virgin Galactic wasn\u2019t sacrificing safety for speed.Story continues below advertisementWayne Hale, a former NASA flight director who was the space shuttle program manager and has extensively discussed the risks inherent in human spaceflight, wrote on Twitter: \u201cTalk about schedule pressure! Hope nobody cuts any corners.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview last week, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier, said the company had done just the opposite, undertaking a thorough review of its third human spaceflight mission in May.\u201cWe hit all of our test objectives,\u201d he said. \u201cWe took the time to do the studies, and it was an excellent success. That means we\u2019re ready for the next flights in our test program.\u201dGiven that the last test flight went so well, he said the company decided that Branson could choose to stay on his original flight or move up one. \u201cGuess which one he chose?\u201d Colglazier said.Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin GalacticBranson also has said that he\u2019s confident the vehicle is safe and that he\u2019s looking forward to the experience. \u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dUnlike traditional rockets that launch vertically from launchpads, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity, as it is called, is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which carries it to about 45,000 feet. The spaceplane is then released, the pilots fire its engines, and it goes screaming up through the sky until it reaches the edge of space. It then reorients itself, falls back toward Earth and glides to a runway landing.It\u2019s a system originally designed by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft builder, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the threshold of space. That spacecraft carried just one person, though, the pilot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has two pilots as well as a crew of four, and Branson\u2019s flight would be the first time the company has attempted a spaceflight with all six seats filled.To get to this point, Branson and Virgin Galactic have traveled a long way, an up-and-down journey filled with setbacks and delays as well as triumphs.After years of technical problems that delayed commercial flights \u2014 which Branson had once hoped would happen as early as 2007 \u2014 the company seemed to be making real progress in 2014. But late that year, the spacecraft came apart during a test flight when one of the pilots prematurely unlocked a device designed to reorient the spacecraft once it is in space. One of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, who was 39 and had two young children, was killed in the accident, and the other, Peter Siebold, suffered serious injuries after parachuting to the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Transportation Safety Board blamed the catastrophe on human error but also said the design was flawed. After the accident, Virgin Galactic took over full control of the test program and design, which had been overseen by Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary.Shaken, Branson considered giving up, saying human spaceflight was too difficult and dangerous. But in the end, he decided that the risk was worth it and that the company would bounce back, stronger and more resilient.The company made some safety enhancements to the ship, and in late 2018 made it to space for the first time. Branson, watching from the side of the runway, broke into tears when the announcer said the spacecraft had passed 50 miles above sea level. The company did it again in 2019, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, the company\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, on board.The third flight was delayed while the company made more safety enhancements \u2014 a seal running along a wing stabilizer had come undone during the previous flight. The company moved operations from California to New Mexico, went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted another flight in December of last year, but it was aborted just as the engine fired when electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system caused the engine to shut down. The company said it resolved the issue and completed its third human spaceflight mission in May.That opened the door for Branson to go. And if all goes well, the company plans to begin commercial operations as well, flying the 600 or so people who have put down significant deposits and, in some cases, have been waiting years to go.Branson said he was very much looking forward to \u201clooking straight back down at the Earth through those windows.\u201dHe added that \u201cwe\u2019ll finally be able to get our long-suffering customers up there and give them a chance to go as well.\u201d Over the years, the brash, British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany. Sunday's planned flight to the edge of space may be the most audacious. Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6490",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-dare-devil/",
        "text": "When he crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon in 1991, Richard Branson ended up so far off course that instead of touching down in Southern California, he crash landed on a frozen lake in Canada.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis balloon ride across the Atlantic four years earlier had been just as perilous, forcing Branson to bail out by jumping into the sea after writing a farewell note to his family in case he didn\u2019t survive. Over the years, the brash British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany \u2014 from attempting a powerboat speed record across the English Channel in seas so choppy it \u201cwas like being strapped to the blade of a vast pneumatic drill,\u201d as he wrote in his memoir; to dressing up as a bride to launch his ultimately unsuccessful foray into the wedding gown industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, the one-man publicity circus, as he has been called, is preparing for what would be the biggest stunt of all: A rollicking ride to the edge of space in the spaceplane developed by Virgin Galactic, the venture he founded in 2004 that he vowed would become the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic announced this week that Stephen Colbert would host the live-stream broadcast of the event, now scheduled for Sunday, though weather and last-minute technical problems could force a delay. And the company also intends to use Branson\u2019s flight as a catalyst to reopen ticket sales for its space tourism business. It had previously cost $250,000 for the flight, which would allow passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But when the tickets go back on sale, the price is expected to jump to about $500,000, according to analysts.Like Branson\u2019s previous exploits, the flight from Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport America in New Mexico will be as much theater as adventure, designed to sell tickets as well as to celebrate the commercialization of human space exploration. But that is to be expected from the man who made his start by signing the Sex Pistols to his record label and who\u2019s lived by the motto, \u201cscrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dVirgin Galactic's Quest for SpaceLast week, Branson \u2014 who\u2019ll turn 71 July 18 \u2014 ensured his spaceflight attempt would get even more publicity when he announced that he would accelerate the test flight schedule Virgin Galactic had previously announced so that he could fly earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company had planned to fly a test flight with four crew members in the cabin, and then fly Branson. But after Jeff Bezos announced he would fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft to the edge of space on July 20, Branson jumped the line and said he would board Virgin Galactic\u2019s next space flight and \u2014 conditions permitting \u2014 beat Bezos by nine days.Richard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)In making the announcement, Branson simultaneously reveled in the attention it generated while downplaying any competition. He told The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, \u201cI completely understand why the press would write that.\u201d He added that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dStory continues below advertisementBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which prides itself on being quiet, letting its actions speak for themselves and focusing on its customers instead of its competitors. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles above sea level, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.AdvertisementOn Twitter Friday, Blue Origin pressed that point again and took a swipe at its competitor, saying Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane doesn\u2019t have an escape system, and that it has only reached its maximum altitude three times, compared to 15 for Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule. The company also pointed out that its windows were larger, providing a better view, and it alleged that Virgin Galactic\u2019s hybrid rocket engine is far more harmful to the environment.Whether it was to beat Bezos or not, the change in the test flight schedule has concerned many in the spaceflight community who said they hoped Virgin Galactic wasn\u2019t sacrificing safety for speed.Story continues below advertisementWayne Hale, a former NASA flight director who was the space shuttle program manager and has extensively discussed the risks inherent in human spaceflight, wrote on Twitter: \u201cTalk about schedule pressure! Hope nobody cuts any corners.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview last week, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier, said the company had done just the opposite, undertaking a thorough review of its third human spaceflight mission in May.\u201cWe hit all of our test objectives,\u201d he said. \u201cWe took the time to do the studies, and it was an excellent success. That means we\u2019re ready for the next flights in our test program.\u201dGiven that the last test flight went so well, he said the company decided that Branson could choose to stay on his original flight or move up one. \u201cGuess which one he chose?\u201d Colglazier said.Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin GalacticBranson also has said that he\u2019s confident the vehicle is safe and that he\u2019s looking forward to the experience. \u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dUnlike traditional rockets that launch vertically from launchpads, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity, as it is called, is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which carries it to about 45,000 feet. The spaceplane is then released, the pilots fire its engines, and it goes screaming up through the sky until it reaches the edge of space. It then reorients itself, falls back toward Earth and glides to a runway landing.It\u2019s a system originally designed by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft builder, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the threshold of space. That spacecraft carried just one person, though, the pilot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has two pilots as well as a crew of four, and Branson\u2019s flight would be the first time the company has attempted a spaceflight with all six seats filled.To get to this point, Branson and Virgin Galactic have traveled a long way, an up-and-down journey filled with setbacks and delays as well as triumphs.After years of technical problems that delayed commercial flights \u2014 which Branson had once hoped would happen as early as 2007 \u2014 the company seemed to be making real progress in 2014. But late that year, the spacecraft came apart during a test flight when one of the pilots prematurely unlocked a device designed to reorient the spacecraft once it is in space. One of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, who was 39 and had two young children, was killed in the accident, and the other, Peter Siebold, suffered serious injuries after parachuting to the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Transportation Safety Board blamed the catastrophe on human error but also said the design was flawed. After the accident, Virgin Galactic took over full control of the test program and design, which had been overseen by Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary.Shaken, Branson considered giving up, saying human spaceflight was too difficult and dangerous. But in the end, he decided that the risk was worth it and that the company would bounce back, stronger and more resilient.The company made some safety enhancements to the ship, and in late 2018 made it to space for the first time. Branson, watching from the side of the runway, broke into tears when the announcer said the spacecraft had passed 50 miles above sea level. The company did it again in 2019, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, the company\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, on board.The third flight was delayed while the company made more safety enhancements \u2014 a seal running along a wing stabilizer had come undone during the previous flight. The company moved operations from California to New Mexico, went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted another flight in December of last year, but it was aborted just as the engine fired when electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system caused the engine to shut down. The company said it resolved the issue and completed its third human spaceflight mission in May.That opened the door for Branson to go. And if all goes well, the company plans to begin commercial operations as well, flying the 600 or so people who have put down significant deposits and, in some cases, have been waiting years to go.Branson said he was very much looking forward to \u201clooking straight back down at the Earth through those windows.\u201dHe added that \u201cwe\u2019ll finally be able to get our long-suffering customers up there and give them a chance to go as well.\u201d Over the years, the brash, British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany. Sunday's planned flight to the edge of space may be the most audacious. Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6491",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-dare-devil/",
        "text": "When he crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon in 1991, Richard Branson ended up so far off course that instead of touching down in Southern California, he crash landed on a frozen lake in Canada.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis balloon ride across the Atlantic four years earlier had been just as perilous, forcing Branson to bail out by jumping into the sea after writing a farewell note to his family in case he didn\u2019t survive. Over the years, the brash British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany \u2014 from attempting a powerboat speed record across the English Channel in seas so choppy it \u201cwas like being strapped to the blade of a vast pneumatic drill,\u201d as he wrote in his memoir; to dressing up as a bride to launch his ultimately unsuccessful foray into the wedding gown industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, the one-man publicity circus, as he has been called, is preparing for what would be the biggest stunt of all: A rollicking ride to the edge of space in the spaceplane developed by Virgin Galactic, the venture he founded in 2004 that he vowed would become the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic announced this week that Stephen Colbert would host the live-stream broadcast of the event, now scheduled for Sunday, though weather and last-minute technical problems could force a delay. And the company also intends to use Branson\u2019s flight as a catalyst to reopen ticket sales for its space tourism business. It had previously cost $250,000 for the flight, which would allow passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But when the tickets go back on sale, the price is expected to jump to about $500,000, according to analysts.Like Branson\u2019s previous exploits, the flight from Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport America in New Mexico will be as much theater as adventure, designed to sell tickets as well as to celebrate the commercialization of human space exploration. But that is to be expected from the man who made his start by signing the Sex Pistols to his record label and who\u2019s lived by the motto, \u201cscrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dVirgin Galactic's Quest for SpaceLast week, Branson \u2014 who\u2019ll turn 71 July 18 \u2014 ensured his spaceflight attempt would get even more publicity when he announced that he would accelerate the test flight schedule Virgin Galactic had previously announced so that he could fly earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company had planned to fly a test flight with four crew members in the cabin, and then fly Branson. But after Jeff Bezos announced he would fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft to the edge of space on July 20, Branson jumped the line and said he would board Virgin Galactic\u2019s next space flight and \u2014 conditions permitting \u2014 beat Bezos by nine days.Richard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)In making the announcement, Branson simultaneously reveled in the attention it generated while downplaying any competition. He told The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, \u201cI completely understand why the press would write that.\u201d He added that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dStory continues below advertisementBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which prides itself on being quiet, letting its actions speak for themselves and focusing on its customers instead of its competitors. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles above sea level, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.AdvertisementOn Twitter Friday, Blue Origin pressed that point again and took a swipe at its competitor, saying Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane doesn\u2019t have an escape system, and that it has only reached its maximum altitude three times, compared to 15 for Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule. The company also pointed out that its windows were larger, providing a better view, and it alleged that Virgin Galactic\u2019s hybrid rocket engine is far more harmful to the environment.Whether it was to beat Bezos or not, the change in the test flight schedule has concerned many in the spaceflight community who said they hoped Virgin Galactic wasn\u2019t sacrificing safety for speed.Story continues below advertisementWayne Hale, a former NASA flight director who was the space shuttle program manager and has extensively discussed the risks inherent in human spaceflight, wrote on Twitter: \u201cTalk about schedule pressure! Hope nobody cuts any corners.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview last week, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier, said the company had done just the opposite, undertaking a thorough review of its third human spaceflight mission in May.\u201cWe hit all of our test objectives,\u201d he said. \u201cWe took the time to do the studies, and it was an excellent success. That means we\u2019re ready for the next flights in our test program.\u201dGiven that the last test flight went so well, he said the company decided that Branson could choose to stay on his original flight or move up one. \u201cGuess which one he chose?\u201d Colglazier said.Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin GalacticBranson also has said that he\u2019s confident the vehicle is safe and that he\u2019s looking forward to the experience. \u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dUnlike traditional rockets that launch vertically from launchpads, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity, as it is called, is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which carries it to about 45,000 feet. The spaceplane is then released, the pilots fire its engines, and it goes screaming up through the sky until it reaches the edge of space. It then reorients itself, falls back toward Earth and glides to a runway landing.It\u2019s a system originally designed by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft builder, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the threshold of space. That spacecraft carried just one person, though, the pilot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has two pilots as well as a crew of four, and Branson\u2019s flight would be the first time the company has attempted a spaceflight with all six seats filled.To get to this point, Branson and Virgin Galactic have traveled a long way, an up-and-down journey filled with setbacks and delays as well as triumphs.After years of technical problems that delayed commercial flights \u2014 which Branson had once hoped would happen as early as 2007 \u2014 the company seemed to be making real progress in 2014. But late that year, the spacecraft came apart during a test flight when one of the pilots prematurely unlocked a device designed to reorient the spacecraft once it is in space. One of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, who was 39 and had two young children, was killed in the accident, and the other, Peter Siebold, suffered serious injuries after parachuting to the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Transportation Safety Board blamed the catastrophe on human error but also said the design was flawed. After the accident, Virgin Galactic took over full control of the test program and design, which had been overseen by Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary.Shaken, Branson considered giving up, saying human spaceflight was too difficult and dangerous. But in the end, he decided that the risk was worth it and that the company would bounce back, stronger and more resilient.The company made some safety enhancements to the ship, and in late 2018 made it to space for the first time. Branson, watching from the side of the runway, broke into tears when the announcer said the spacecraft had passed 50 miles above sea level. The company did it again in 2019, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, the company\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, on board.The third flight was delayed while the company made more safety enhancements \u2014 a seal running along a wing stabilizer had come undone during the previous flight. The company moved operations from California to New Mexico, went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted another flight in December of last year, but it was aborted just as the engine fired when electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system caused the engine to shut down. The company said it resolved the issue and completed its third human spaceflight mission in May.That opened the door for Branson to go. And if all goes well, the company plans to begin commercial operations as well, flying the 600 or so people who have put down significant deposits and, in some cases, have been waiting years to go.Branson said he was very much looking forward to \u201clooking straight back down at the Earth through those windows.\u201dHe added that \u201cwe\u2019ll finally be able to get our long-suffering customers up there and give them a chance to go as well.\u201d Over the years, the brash, British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany. Sunday's planned flight to the edge of space may be the most audacious. Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6492",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-dare-devil/",
        "text": "When he crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon in 1991, Richard Branson ended up so far off course that instead of touching down in Southern California, he crash landed on a frozen lake in Canada.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis balloon ride across the Atlantic four years earlier had been just as perilous, forcing Branson to bail out by jumping into the sea after writing a farewell note to his family in case he didn\u2019t survive. Over the years, the brash British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany \u2014 from attempting a powerboat speed record across the English Channel in seas so choppy it \u201cwas like being strapped to the blade of a vast pneumatic drill,\u201d as he wrote in his memoir; to dressing up as a bride to launch his ultimately unsuccessful foray into the wedding gown industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, the one-man publicity circus, as he has been called, is preparing for what would be the biggest stunt of all: A rollicking ride to the edge of space in the spaceplane developed by Virgin Galactic, the venture he founded in 2004 that he vowed would become the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic announced this week that Stephen Colbert would host the live-stream broadcast of the event, now scheduled for Sunday, though weather and last-minute technical problems could force a delay. And the company also intends to use Branson\u2019s flight as a catalyst to reopen ticket sales for its space tourism business. It had previously cost $250,000 for the flight, which would allow passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But when the tickets go back on sale, the price is expected to jump to about $500,000, according to analysts.Like Branson\u2019s previous exploits, the flight from Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport America in New Mexico will be as much theater as adventure, designed to sell tickets as well as to celebrate the commercialization of human space exploration. But that is to be expected from the man who made his start by signing the Sex Pistols to his record label and who\u2019s lived by the motto, \u201cscrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dVirgin Galactic's Quest for SpaceLast week, Branson \u2014 who\u2019ll turn 71 July 18 \u2014 ensured his spaceflight attempt would get even more publicity when he announced that he would accelerate the test flight schedule Virgin Galactic had previously announced so that he could fly earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company had planned to fly a test flight with four crew members in the cabin, and then fly Branson. But after Jeff Bezos announced he would fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft to the edge of space on July 20, Branson jumped the line and said he would board Virgin Galactic\u2019s next space flight and \u2014 conditions permitting \u2014 beat Bezos by nine days.Richard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)In making the announcement, Branson simultaneously reveled in the attention it generated while downplaying any competition. He told The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, \u201cI completely understand why the press would write that.\u201d He added that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dStory continues below advertisementBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which prides itself on being quiet, letting its actions speak for themselves and focusing on its customers instead of its competitors. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles above sea level, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.AdvertisementOn Twitter Friday, Blue Origin pressed that point again and took a swipe at its competitor, saying Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane doesn\u2019t have an escape system, and that it has only reached its maximum altitude three times, compared to 15 for Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule. The company also pointed out that its windows were larger, providing a better view, and it alleged that Virgin Galactic\u2019s hybrid rocket engine is far more harmful to the environment.Whether it was to beat Bezos or not, the change in the test flight schedule has concerned many in the spaceflight community who said they hoped Virgin Galactic wasn\u2019t sacrificing safety for speed.Story continues below advertisementWayne Hale, a former NASA flight director who was the space shuttle program manager and has extensively discussed the risks inherent in human spaceflight, wrote on Twitter: \u201cTalk about schedule pressure! Hope nobody cuts any corners.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview last week, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier, said the company had done just the opposite, undertaking a thorough review of its third human spaceflight mission in May.\u201cWe hit all of our test objectives,\u201d he said. \u201cWe took the time to do the studies, and it was an excellent success. That means we\u2019re ready for the next flights in our test program.\u201dGiven that the last test flight went so well, he said the company decided that Branson could choose to stay on his original flight or move up one. \u201cGuess which one he chose?\u201d Colglazier said.Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin GalacticBranson also has said that he\u2019s confident the vehicle is safe and that he\u2019s looking forward to the experience. \u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dUnlike traditional rockets that launch vertically from launchpads, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity, as it is called, is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which carries it to about 45,000 feet. The spaceplane is then released, the pilots fire its engines, and it goes screaming up through the sky until it reaches the edge of space. It then reorients itself, falls back toward Earth and glides to a runway landing.It\u2019s a system originally designed by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft builder, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the threshold of space. That spacecraft carried just one person, though, the pilot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has two pilots as well as a crew of four, and Branson\u2019s flight would be the first time the company has attempted a spaceflight with all six seats filled.To get to this point, Branson and Virgin Galactic have traveled a long way, an up-and-down journey filled with setbacks and delays as well as triumphs.After years of technical problems that delayed commercial flights \u2014 which Branson had once hoped would happen as early as 2007 \u2014 the company seemed to be making real progress in 2014. But late that year, the spacecraft came apart during a test flight when one of the pilots prematurely unlocked a device designed to reorient the spacecraft once it is in space. One of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, who was 39 and had two young children, was killed in the accident, and the other, Peter Siebold, suffered serious injuries after parachuting to the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Transportation Safety Board blamed the catastrophe on human error but also said the design was flawed. After the accident, Virgin Galactic took over full control of the test program and design, which had been overseen by Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary.Shaken, Branson considered giving up, saying human spaceflight was too difficult and dangerous. But in the end, he decided that the risk was worth it and that the company would bounce back, stronger and more resilient.The company made some safety enhancements to the ship, and in late 2018 made it to space for the first time. Branson, watching from the side of the runway, broke into tears when the announcer said the spacecraft had passed 50 miles above sea level. The company did it again in 2019, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, the company\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, on board.The third flight was delayed while the company made more safety enhancements \u2014 a seal running along a wing stabilizer had come undone during the previous flight. The company moved operations from California to New Mexico, went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted another flight in December of last year, but it was aborted just as the engine fired when electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system caused the engine to shut down. The company said it resolved the issue and completed its third human spaceflight mission in May.That opened the door for Branson to go. And if all goes well, the company plans to begin commercial operations as well, flying the 600 or so people who have put down significant deposits and, in some cases, have been waiting years to go.Branson said he was very much looking forward to \u201clooking straight back down at the Earth through those windows.\u201dHe added that \u201cwe\u2019ll finally be able to get our long-suffering customers up there and give them a chance to go as well.\u201d Over the years, the brash, British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany. Sunday's planned flight to the edge of space may be the most audacious. Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6493",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/09/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-dare-devil/",
        "text": "When he crossed the Pacific Ocean in a hot-air balloon in 1991, Richard Branson ended up so far off course that instead of touching down in Southern California, he crash landed on a frozen lake in Canada.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis balloon ride across the Atlantic four years earlier had been just as perilous, forcing Branson to bail out by jumping into the sea after writing a farewell note to his family in case he didn\u2019t survive. Over the years, the brash British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany \u2014 from attempting a powerboat speed record across the English Channel in seas so choppy it \u201cwas like being strapped to the blade of a vast pneumatic drill,\u201d as he wrote in his memoir; to dressing up as a bride to launch his ultimately unsuccessful foray into the wedding gown industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, the one-man publicity circus, as he has been called, is preparing for what would be the biggest stunt of all: A rollicking ride to the edge of space in the spaceplane developed by Virgin Galactic, the venture he founded in 2004 that he vowed would become the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic announced this week that Stephen Colbert would host the live-stream broadcast of the event, now scheduled for Sunday, though weather and last-minute technical problems could force a delay. And the company also intends to use Branson\u2019s flight as a catalyst to reopen ticket sales for its space tourism business. It had previously cost $250,000 for the flight, which would allow passengers to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. But when the tickets go back on sale, the price is expected to jump to about $500,000, according to analysts.Like Branson\u2019s previous exploits, the flight from Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceport America in New Mexico will be as much theater as adventure, designed to sell tickets as well as to celebrate the commercialization of human space exploration. But that is to be expected from the man who made his start by signing the Sex Pistols to his record label and who\u2019s lived by the motto, \u201cscrew it, let\u2019s do it.\u201dVirgin Galactic's Quest for SpaceLast week, Branson \u2014 who\u2019ll turn 71 July 18 \u2014 ensured his spaceflight attempt would get even more publicity when he announced that he would accelerate the test flight schedule Virgin Galactic had previously announced so that he could fly earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company had planned to fly a test flight with four crew members in the cabin, and then fly Branson. But after Jeff Bezos announced he would fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft to the edge of space on July 20, Branson jumped the line and said he would board Virgin Galactic\u2019s next space flight and \u2014 conditions permitting \u2014 beat Bezos by nine days.Richard Branson first projected it would take tourists to space starting in 2007. After over a decade of delays the company may be close to getting there. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post)In making the announcement, Branson simultaneously reveled in the attention it generated while downplaying any competition. He told The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, \u201cI completely understand why the press would write that.\u201d He added that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dStory continues below advertisementBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which prides itself on being quiet, letting its actions speak for themselves and focusing on its customers instead of its competitors. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles above sea level, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.AdvertisementOn Twitter Friday, Blue Origin pressed that point again and took a swipe at its competitor, saying Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane doesn\u2019t have an escape system, and that it has only reached its maximum altitude three times, compared to 15 for Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule. The company also pointed out that its windows were larger, providing a better view, and it alleged that Virgin Galactic\u2019s hybrid rocket engine is far more harmful to the environment.Whether it was to beat Bezos or not, the change in the test flight schedule has concerned many in the spaceflight community who said they hoped Virgin Galactic wasn\u2019t sacrificing safety for speed.Story continues below advertisementWayne Hale, a former NASA flight director who was the space shuttle program manager and has extensively discussed the risks inherent in human spaceflight, wrote on Twitter: \u201cTalk about schedule pressure! Hope nobody cuts any corners.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview last week, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier, said the company had done just the opposite, undertaking a thorough review of its third human spaceflight mission in May.\u201cWe hit all of our test objectives,\u201d he said. \u201cWe took the time to do the studies, and it was an excellent success. That means we\u2019re ready for the next flights in our test program.\u201dGiven that the last test flight went so well, he said the company decided that Branson could choose to stay on his original flight or move up one. \u201cGuess which one he chose?\u201d Colglazier said.Meet the people ready to fly on Virgin GalacticBranson also has said that he\u2019s confident the vehicle is safe and that he\u2019s looking forward to the experience. \u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dUnlike traditional rockets that launch vertically from launchpads, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity, as it is called, is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which carries it to about 45,000 feet. The spaceplane is then released, the pilots fire its engines, and it goes screaming up through the sky until it reaches the edge of space. It then reorients itself, falls back toward Earth and glides to a runway landing.It\u2019s a system originally designed by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft builder, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first commercial spacecraft to reach the threshold of space. That spacecraft carried just one person, though, the pilot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has two pilots as well as a crew of four, and Branson\u2019s flight would be the first time the company has attempted a spaceflight with all six seats filled.To get to this point, Branson and Virgin Galactic have traveled a long way, an up-and-down journey filled with setbacks and delays as well as triumphs.After years of technical problems that delayed commercial flights \u2014 which Branson had once hoped would happen as early as 2007 \u2014 the company seemed to be making real progress in 2014. But late that year, the spacecraft came apart during a test flight when one of the pilots prematurely unlocked a device designed to reorient the spacecraft once it is in space. One of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, who was 39 and had two young children, was killed in the accident, and the other, Peter Siebold, suffered serious injuries after parachuting to the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe National Transportation Safety Board blamed the catastrophe on human error but also said the design was flawed. After the accident, Virgin Galactic took over full control of the test program and design, which had been overseen by Scaled Composites, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary.Shaken, Branson considered giving up, saying human spaceflight was too difficult and dangerous. But in the end, he decided that the risk was worth it and that the company would bounce back, stronger and more resilient.The company made some safety enhancements to the ship, and in late 2018 made it to space for the first time. Branson, watching from the side of the runway, broke into tears when the announcer said the spacecraft had passed 50 miles above sea level. The company did it again in 2019, this time with a crew member, Beth Moses, the company\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, on board.The third flight was delayed while the company made more safety enhancements \u2014 a seal running along a wing stabilizer had come undone during the previous flight. The company moved operations from California to New Mexico, went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted another flight in December of last year, but it was aborted just as the engine fired when electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system caused the engine to shut down. The company said it resolved the issue and completed its third human spaceflight mission in May.That opened the door for Branson to go. And if all goes well, the company plans to begin commercial operations as well, flying the 600 or so people who have put down significant deposits and, in some cases, have been waiting years to go.Branson said he was very much looking forward to \u201clooking straight back down at the Earth through those windows.\u201dHe added that \u201cwe\u2019ll finally be able to get our long-suffering customers up there and give them a chance to go as well.\u201d Over the years, the brash, British billionaire has embarked on all sorts of wild adventures, from the dangerously ill-conceived to the merely zany. Sunday's planned flight to the edge of space may be the most audacious. Richard Branson prepares to take his daredevil act to space with Virgin Galactic ... and beat Jeff Bezos",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6494",
        "date": "2020-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/30/2021-space-events-plan/",
        "text": "We all know that 2020 was a no-good, horrible, fearful, tumultuous year that will be remembered for the coronavirus pandemic and the polarizing election. But for space enthusiasts, it was actually quite a good year, providing bits of promising news amid the bleak headlines of disease, economic hardship and protests. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX launched astronauts to the International Space Station twice. NASA launched a rover to Mars and snagged a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away.2021 has potential for even more good news. Here\u2019s just some of what could happen in the new year.SPACEXAfter two successful flights carrying astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX is set to do it again this year. Crew-2, its second fully operational mission, is scheduled to launch a quartet of astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the spring. Then, in the fall, the company is set to launch Crew-3.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot since the space shuttle has NASA had routine flights to the space station from U.S. soil. If all goes well, SpaceX will become the shuttle\u2019s successor, filling a major gap in America\u2019s spaceflight program in a coming-of-age moment for what was once a spunky start-up.Late in the year, SpaceX also is planning to fly a mission for Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that has purchased a trip to the International Space Station for a crew of four. Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom, would accompany three private citizens for the mission, among them Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli former fighter pilot. Axiom is expected to announce the other two tourists sometime in the future.Flying humans on its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft is only part of what\u2019s on tap for SpaceX. The company continues to test its Starship spacecraft, a next-generation vehicle that looks like a flying grain silo but, Musk hopes, will one day fly people to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA hopes it will be successful. The space agency is investing $135 million in Starship as part of its attempt to return astronauts to the moon. Musk, whose timelines are usually wildly ambitious, has said he hopes the spacecraft will be able to achieve orbit in 2021.Starship landing flip maneuver pic.twitter.com/QuD9HwZ9CX\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 10, 2020\n\nThe company is also pressing ahead with another outrageously difficult project \u2014 a plan to flood Earth orbit with thousands of satellites that would beam Internet signals to ground stations, connecting rural areas to broadband.Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?In 2020, SpaceX took some major strides toward that goal and has already launched more than 16 batches of the satellites, allowing it to begin a pilot program. More are scheduled to be hoisted in 2021, marking SpaceX\u2019s transformation from a purely rocket company to an Internet service provider after being awarded $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission for the endeavor.BOEINGBoeing spent much of 2020 working to fix the software on its Starliner spacecraft, which ran into trouble as soon as it reached space during an uncrewed test flight at the end of 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s now working to redo the test mission \u2014 no astronauts on board \u2014 at the end of March.Given its past problems, Boeing\u2019s upcoming test flight has to be successful. The company holds a contract from NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station. But before the space agency will allow its astronauts on Boeing\u2019s spacecraft, the company has to prove it can fly safely on its own. Another failure will do more damage to a company reeling from a string of failures, including the two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airplane that killed 346 people.Boeing is well aware of this, which is why it\u2019s been proceeding so deliberately. The mission patch for the flight, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) has a special touch \u2014 the image of a fingerprint.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt represents those who are in the factory each day building the spacecraft as well as those who have had a hand in designing, testing, coding and training so we can get OFT-2 right,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cAt a macro level, the thumbprint represents how deeply personal this mission is to Boeing, as human spaceflight has been and always will be a part of our company\u2019s DNA.\u201dAdvertisementIf all goes well, the company would move to the next step \u2014 flying a test mission with three NASA astronauts that could come by the end of the year.ARTEMISThe hallmark of the Trump administration\u2019s space policy has been a return to the moon for the first time since the astronauts of Apollo 17 landed there in 1972. The White House directed NASA to speed up the timeline for a lunar landing to 2024, from 2028, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former member of Congress, lobbied his former colleagues hard for funding for the program, which has been dubbed Artemis.Story continues below advertisementThough Congress has approved $850 million for next year for the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the lunar surface, it\u2019s well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 deadline.It\u2019s not clear what the incoming Biden administration will do with the program. Most Democrats in the space community say new officials will keep the program but put it on a more realistic timeline.AdvertisementThe schedule will be driven by engineering and technology as much as politics, though. As of now, NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket is supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft without astronauts on board by the end of 2021, in what would be the first flight of the Artemis program. If all goes well, Orion would orbit the moon, testing its systems before coming home.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not clear, though, that the rocket will be ready. For years, it has suffered delay after delay, with billions of dollars in cost overruns. Government watchdogs have criticized Boeing, the prime contractor, for poor performance and NASA for lax oversight.When it does fly, the SLS is certain to be a sight. The rocket would be the most powerful ever, with four RS-25 engines used by the space shuttle and two side solid rocket motor boosters taller than the Statue of Liberty. NASA and Boeing say they are getting close to flying, but the rocket still needs to pass the final parts of the testing campaign known as the \u201cgreen run,\u201d which would culminate with the firing of its engines while clamped down to the launchpad.AdvertisementBut given the problems, past and present, it\u2019s far from certain that 2021 will be the year it finally takes off.RICHARD BRANSONHe\u2019s crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific in hot-air balloons, once almost dying off the coast of Ireland, another time crashing in the Canadian Arctic instead of Southern California, the intended destination. He broke the record for the fastest time crossing the Atlantic in a boat and once got stranded in Algeria during an attempt to circle the globe in a balloon.Story continues below advertisementIn 2021, at age 70, Richard Branson may face his most daunting adventure yet: a trip to the edge of space in his suborbital spaceplane. It\u2019s been his quest since he founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, and after delays and setbacks the company is tantalizingly close to flying paying passengers.Its sporty spaceplane has made it to space twice, once with a pair of pilots, then again with an additional crew member. In December, the company aborted a test flight after its onboard computer that monitors the rocket engines lost connection.AdvertisementVirgin Galactic now says it will repeat that test flight, then fly another, and then it will finally be Branson\u2019s turn. If all goes well, Virgin Galactic would then turn its attention to flying the hundreds of people who have paid as much as $250,000 for a trip to space.Thread: our CEO, Michael Colglazier, on today\u2019s flight test. Today\u2019s flight landed beautifully, with pilots, planes, and spaceship safe, secure, and in excellent shape \u2014 the foundation of every successful mission! Our flight today did not reach space as we had been planning. pic.twitter.com/pqfUAtp6UH\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December 12, 2020\n\nBranson has another venture that may reach a significant milestone in 2021. In January, Virgin Orbit, its rocket company, is planning another test flight of its LauncherOne rocket after a failed test a few months ago when the main engine shut down prematurely.Story continues below advertisementLike Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship, the rocket is tethered to a mother ship, in this case a 747, that takes it to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. There, the rocket is released, fires its engine and zooms through the atmosphere.VirginOrbit is one of a host of small rocket companies that could reach orbit in 2021. Relativity Space, which 3-D prints its rockets, is planning a launch, as is Astra, which nearly missed orbit from its launch site in Alaska. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand, is planning a flight from its pad on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore, as well.Virginia has a rocket launch site, and it\u2019s about to grow with the most successful startup since SpaceXJEFF BEZOSBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in what he has said was a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. He has said Blue Origin, his space company, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d 2021 could be a breakout year for the company, which was founded 20 years ago. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is planning its first flight with humans on board its New Shepard spacecraft in the coming year. Like Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, it\u2019s designed to travel to the edge of space and back \u2014 not to orbit. But unlike Virgin, it has not yet opened up sales or announced ticket prices.NS-13 was a total success. 7th consecutive successful trip to space and back for this particular vehicle, 12 customer payloads including @NASA's lunar landing demo, and tens of thousands postcards from @ClubforFuture. Replay the #NewShepard mission: https://t.co/NP7XDzxJXi\u2014 Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 13, 2020\n\nIt also hopes to fly for the first time in 2021 its New Glenn rocket, a massive vehicle powered by seven BE-4 engines. Earlier this year, NASA announced that the rocket would be eligible to bid for launch contracts, a vote of confidence for the company.The BE-4 would also power the new rocket being designed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Vulcan Centaur, as it is called, is scheduled to fly toward the end of the year, Tory Bruno, ULA\u2019s chief executive, told reporters recently.That mission would be a historic one, carrying a robotic spacecraft manufactured by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, to land on the moon as part of a NASA program. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft launched from U.S. soil to land on the moon since the Apollo era.MARS AND BEYONDOn Feb. 18, NASA once again will try to pull off the daring feat of landing a spacecraft on Mars, when the Perseverance rover is set to touch down.The rover would explore the Jezero crater near the Mars equator where a lake once existed. That is the ideal place to search for signs of ancient microbial life, scientists say. The rover will collect rocks and soil samples that would one day be returned to Earth.I\u2019m less than two months away from the big day. My #CountdownToMars ends Feb. 18. See what it takes to land on Mars with this mission trailer.Landing Toolkit: https://t.co/pDEv4DLsW7 pic.twitter.com/AL2R88lXJR\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 21, 2020\n\nNASA has also included a drone helicopter called Ingenuity on the mission, in a test of whether it can fly in the thin Martian atmosphere, 99 percent less dense than Earth\u2019s.\u201cThe Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth\u2019s atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft,\u201d said H\u00e5vard Grip, Ingenuity\u2019s chief pilot at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cWith Ingenuity, we\u2019re trying to do the same for Mars.\u201dFinally, NASA\u2019s James Webb telescope is scheduled to launch in October after years of struggles and cost overruns that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Once in space, the telescope would be able to look back in time to see the oldest light in the universe, the formation of galaxies and planets beyond our solar system.\u201cWebb is the world\u2019s most complex space observatory and our top science priority, and we\u2019ve worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, said this year. 2020 was a good year for space exploration. 2021 could be better. 2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6495",
        "date": "2020-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/30/2021-space-events-plan/",
        "text": "We all know that 2020 was a no-good, horrible, fearful, tumultuous year that will be remembered for the coronavirus pandemic and the polarizing election. But for space enthusiasts, it was actually quite a good year, providing bits of promising news amid the bleak headlines of disease, economic hardship and protests. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX launched astronauts to the International Space Station twice. NASA launched a rover to Mars and snagged a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away.2021 has potential for even more good news. Here\u2019s just some of what could happen in the new year.SPACEXAfter two successful flights carrying astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX is set to do it again this year. Crew-2, its second fully operational mission, is scheduled to launch a quartet of astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the spring. Then, in the fall, the company is set to launch Crew-3.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot since the space shuttle has NASA had routine flights to the space station from U.S. soil. If all goes well, SpaceX will become the shuttle\u2019s successor, filling a major gap in America\u2019s spaceflight program in a coming-of-age moment for what was once a spunky start-up.Late in the year, SpaceX also is planning to fly a mission for Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that has purchased a trip to the International Space Station for a crew of four. Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom, would accompany three private citizens for the mission, among them Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli former fighter pilot. Axiom is expected to announce the other two tourists sometime in the future.Flying humans on its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft is only part of what\u2019s on tap for SpaceX. The company continues to test its Starship spacecraft, a next-generation vehicle that looks like a flying grain silo but, Musk hopes, will one day fly people to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA hopes it will be successful. The space agency is investing $135 million in Starship as part of its attempt to return astronauts to the moon. Musk, whose timelines are usually wildly ambitious, has said he hopes the spacecraft will be able to achieve orbit in 2021.Starship landing flip maneuver pic.twitter.com/QuD9HwZ9CX\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 10, 2020\n\nThe company is also pressing ahead with another outrageously difficult project \u2014 a plan to flood Earth orbit with thousands of satellites that would beam Internet signals to ground stations, connecting rural areas to broadband.Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?In 2020, SpaceX took some major strides toward that goal and has already launched more than 16 batches of the satellites, allowing it to begin a pilot program. More are scheduled to be hoisted in 2021, marking SpaceX\u2019s transformation from a purely rocket company to an Internet service provider after being awarded $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission for the endeavor.BOEINGBoeing spent much of 2020 working to fix the software on its Starliner spacecraft, which ran into trouble as soon as it reached space during an uncrewed test flight at the end of 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s now working to redo the test mission \u2014 no astronauts on board \u2014 at the end of March.Given its past problems, Boeing\u2019s upcoming test flight has to be successful. The company holds a contract from NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station. But before the space agency will allow its astronauts on Boeing\u2019s spacecraft, the company has to prove it can fly safely on its own. Another failure will do more damage to a company reeling from a string of failures, including the two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airplane that killed 346 people.Boeing is well aware of this, which is why it\u2019s been proceeding so deliberately. The mission patch for the flight, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) has a special touch \u2014 the image of a fingerprint.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt represents those who are in the factory each day building the spacecraft as well as those who have had a hand in designing, testing, coding and training so we can get OFT-2 right,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cAt a macro level, the thumbprint represents how deeply personal this mission is to Boeing, as human spaceflight has been and always will be a part of our company\u2019s DNA.\u201dAdvertisementIf all goes well, the company would move to the next step \u2014 flying a test mission with three NASA astronauts that could come by the end of the year.ARTEMISThe hallmark of the Trump administration\u2019s space policy has been a return to the moon for the first time since the astronauts of Apollo 17 landed there in 1972. The White House directed NASA to speed up the timeline for a lunar landing to 2024, from 2028, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former member of Congress, lobbied his former colleagues hard for funding for the program, which has been dubbed Artemis.Story continues below advertisementThough Congress has approved $850 million for next year for the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the lunar surface, it\u2019s well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 deadline.It\u2019s not clear what the incoming Biden administration will do with the program. Most Democrats in the space community say new officials will keep the program but put it on a more realistic timeline.AdvertisementThe schedule will be driven by engineering and technology as much as politics, though. As of now, NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket is supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft without astronauts on board by the end of 2021, in what would be the first flight of the Artemis program. If all goes well, Orion would orbit the moon, testing its systems before coming home.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not clear, though, that the rocket will be ready. For years, it has suffered delay after delay, with billions of dollars in cost overruns. Government watchdogs have criticized Boeing, the prime contractor, for poor performance and NASA for lax oversight.When it does fly, the SLS is certain to be a sight. The rocket would be the most powerful ever, with four RS-25 engines used by the space shuttle and two side solid rocket motor boosters taller than the Statue of Liberty. NASA and Boeing say they are getting close to flying, but the rocket still needs to pass the final parts of the testing campaign known as the \u201cgreen run,\u201d which would culminate with the firing of its engines while clamped down to the launchpad.AdvertisementBut given the problems, past and present, it\u2019s far from certain that 2021 will be the year it finally takes off.RICHARD BRANSONHe\u2019s crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific in hot-air balloons, once almost dying off the coast of Ireland, another time crashing in the Canadian Arctic instead of Southern California, the intended destination. He broke the record for the fastest time crossing the Atlantic in a boat and once got stranded in Algeria during an attempt to circle the globe in a balloon.Story continues below advertisementIn 2021, at age 70, Richard Branson may face his most daunting adventure yet: a trip to the edge of space in his suborbital spaceplane. It\u2019s been his quest since he founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, and after delays and setbacks the company is tantalizingly close to flying paying passengers.Its sporty spaceplane has made it to space twice, once with a pair of pilots, then again with an additional crew member. In December, the company aborted a test flight after its onboard computer that monitors the rocket engines lost connection.AdvertisementVirgin Galactic now says it will repeat that test flight, then fly another, and then it will finally be Branson\u2019s turn. If all goes well, Virgin Galactic would then turn its attention to flying the hundreds of people who have paid as much as $250,000 for a trip to space.Thread: our CEO, Michael Colglazier, on today\u2019s flight test. Today\u2019s flight landed beautifully, with pilots, planes, and spaceship safe, secure, and in excellent shape \u2014 the foundation of every successful mission! Our flight today did not reach space as we had been planning. pic.twitter.com/pqfUAtp6UH\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December 12, 2020\n\nBranson has another venture that may reach a significant milestone in 2021. In January, Virgin Orbit, its rocket company, is planning another test flight of its LauncherOne rocket after a failed test a few months ago when the main engine shut down prematurely.Story continues below advertisementLike Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship, the rocket is tethered to a mother ship, in this case a 747, that takes it to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. There, the rocket is released, fires its engine and zooms through the atmosphere.VirginOrbit is one of a host of small rocket companies that could reach orbit in 2021. Relativity Space, which 3-D prints its rockets, is planning a launch, as is Astra, which nearly missed orbit from its launch site in Alaska. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand, is planning a flight from its pad on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore, as well.Virginia has a rocket launch site, and it\u2019s about to grow with the most successful startup since SpaceXJEFF BEZOSBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in what he has said was a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. He has said Blue Origin, his space company, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d 2021 could be a breakout year for the company, which was founded 20 years ago. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is planning its first flight with humans on board its New Shepard spacecraft in the coming year. Like Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, it\u2019s designed to travel to the edge of space and back \u2014 not to orbit. But unlike Virgin, it has not yet opened up sales or announced ticket prices.NS-13 was a total success. 7th consecutive successful trip to space and back for this particular vehicle, 12 customer payloads including @NASA's lunar landing demo, and tens of thousands postcards from @ClubforFuture. Replay the #NewShepard mission: https://t.co/NP7XDzxJXi\u2014 Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 13, 2020\n\nIt also hopes to fly for the first time in 2021 its New Glenn rocket, a massive vehicle powered by seven BE-4 engines. Earlier this year, NASA announced that the rocket would be eligible to bid for launch contracts, a vote of confidence for the company.The BE-4 would also power the new rocket being designed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Vulcan Centaur, as it is called, is scheduled to fly toward the end of the year, Tory Bruno, ULA\u2019s chief executive, told reporters recently.That mission would be a historic one, carrying a robotic spacecraft manufactured by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, to land on the moon as part of a NASA program. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft launched from U.S. soil to land on the moon since the Apollo era.MARS AND BEYONDOn Feb. 18, NASA once again will try to pull off the daring feat of landing a spacecraft on Mars, when the Perseverance rover is set to touch down.The rover would explore the Jezero crater near the Mars equator where a lake once existed. That is the ideal place to search for signs of ancient microbial life, scientists say. The rover will collect rocks and soil samples that would one day be returned to Earth.I\u2019m less than two months away from the big day. My #CountdownToMars ends Feb. 18. See what it takes to land on Mars with this mission trailer.Landing Toolkit: https://t.co/pDEv4DLsW7 pic.twitter.com/AL2R88lXJR\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 21, 2020\n\nNASA has also included a drone helicopter called Ingenuity on the mission, in a test of whether it can fly in the thin Martian atmosphere, 99 percent less dense than Earth\u2019s.\u201cThe Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth\u2019s atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft,\u201d said H\u00e5vard Grip, Ingenuity\u2019s chief pilot at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cWith Ingenuity, we\u2019re trying to do the same for Mars.\u201dFinally, NASA\u2019s James Webb telescope is scheduled to launch in October after years of struggles and cost overruns that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Once in space, the telescope would be able to look back in time to see the oldest light in the universe, the formation of galaxies and planets beyond our solar system.\u201cWebb is the world\u2019s most complex space observatory and our top science priority, and we\u2019ve worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, said this year. 2020 was a good year for space exploration. 2021 could be better. 2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6496",
        "date": "2020-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/30/2021-space-events-plan/",
        "text": "We all know that 2020 was a no-good, horrible, fearful, tumultuous year that will be remembered for the coronavirus pandemic and the polarizing election. But for space enthusiasts, it was actually quite a good year, providing bits of promising news amid the bleak headlines of disease, economic hardship and protests. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX launched astronauts to the International Space Station twice. NASA launched a rover to Mars and snagged a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away.2021 has potential for even more good news. Here\u2019s just some of what could happen in the new year.SPACEXAfter two successful flights carrying astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX is set to do it again this year. Crew-2, its second fully operational mission, is scheduled to launch a quartet of astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the spring. Then, in the fall, the company is set to launch Crew-3.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot since the space shuttle has NASA had routine flights to the space station from U.S. soil. If all goes well, SpaceX will become the shuttle\u2019s successor, filling a major gap in America\u2019s spaceflight program in a coming-of-age moment for what was once a spunky start-up.Late in the year, SpaceX also is planning to fly a mission for Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that has purchased a trip to the International Space Station for a crew of four. Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom, would accompany three private citizens for the mission, among them Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli former fighter pilot. Axiom is expected to announce the other two tourists sometime in the future.Flying humans on its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft is only part of what\u2019s on tap for SpaceX. The company continues to test its Starship spacecraft, a next-generation vehicle that looks like a flying grain silo but, Musk hopes, will one day fly people to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA hopes it will be successful. The space agency is investing $135 million in Starship as part of its attempt to return astronauts to the moon. Musk, whose timelines are usually wildly ambitious, has said he hopes the spacecraft will be able to achieve orbit in 2021.Starship landing flip maneuver pic.twitter.com/QuD9HwZ9CX\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 10, 2020\n\nThe company is also pressing ahead with another outrageously difficult project \u2014 a plan to flood Earth orbit with thousands of satellites that would beam Internet signals to ground stations, connecting rural areas to broadband.Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?In 2020, SpaceX took some major strides toward that goal and has already launched more than 16 batches of the satellites, allowing it to begin a pilot program. More are scheduled to be hoisted in 2021, marking SpaceX\u2019s transformation from a purely rocket company to an Internet service provider after being awarded $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission for the endeavor.BOEINGBoeing spent much of 2020 working to fix the software on its Starliner spacecraft, which ran into trouble as soon as it reached space during an uncrewed test flight at the end of 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s now working to redo the test mission \u2014 no astronauts on board \u2014 at the end of March.Given its past problems, Boeing\u2019s upcoming test flight has to be successful. The company holds a contract from NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station. But before the space agency will allow its astronauts on Boeing\u2019s spacecraft, the company has to prove it can fly safely on its own. Another failure will do more damage to a company reeling from a string of failures, including the two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airplane that killed 346 people.Boeing is well aware of this, which is why it\u2019s been proceeding so deliberately. The mission patch for the flight, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) has a special touch \u2014 the image of a fingerprint.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt represents those who are in the factory each day building the spacecraft as well as those who have had a hand in designing, testing, coding and training so we can get OFT-2 right,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cAt a macro level, the thumbprint represents how deeply personal this mission is to Boeing, as human spaceflight has been and always will be a part of our company\u2019s DNA.\u201dAdvertisementIf all goes well, the company would move to the next step \u2014 flying a test mission with three NASA astronauts that could come by the end of the year.ARTEMISThe hallmark of the Trump administration\u2019s space policy has been a return to the moon for the first time since the astronauts of Apollo 17 landed there in 1972. The White House directed NASA to speed up the timeline for a lunar landing to 2024, from 2028, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former member of Congress, lobbied his former colleagues hard for funding for the program, which has been dubbed Artemis.Story continues below advertisementThough Congress has approved $850 million for next year for the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the lunar surface, it\u2019s well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 deadline.It\u2019s not clear what the incoming Biden administration will do with the program. Most Democrats in the space community say new officials will keep the program but put it on a more realistic timeline.AdvertisementThe schedule will be driven by engineering and technology as much as politics, though. As of now, NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket is supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft without astronauts on board by the end of 2021, in what would be the first flight of the Artemis program. If all goes well, Orion would orbit the moon, testing its systems before coming home.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not clear, though, that the rocket will be ready. For years, it has suffered delay after delay, with billions of dollars in cost overruns. Government watchdogs have criticized Boeing, the prime contractor, for poor performance and NASA for lax oversight.When it does fly, the SLS is certain to be a sight. The rocket would be the most powerful ever, with four RS-25 engines used by the space shuttle and two side solid rocket motor boosters taller than the Statue of Liberty. NASA and Boeing say they are getting close to flying, but the rocket still needs to pass the final parts of the testing campaign known as the \u201cgreen run,\u201d which would culminate with the firing of its engines while clamped down to the launchpad.AdvertisementBut given the problems, past and present, it\u2019s far from certain that 2021 will be the year it finally takes off.RICHARD BRANSONHe\u2019s crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific in hot-air balloons, once almost dying off the coast of Ireland, another time crashing in the Canadian Arctic instead of Southern California, the intended destination. He broke the record for the fastest time crossing the Atlantic in a boat and once got stranded in Algeria during an attempt to circle the globe in a balloon.Story continues below advertisementIn 2021, at age 70, Richard Branson may face his most daunting adventure yet: a trip to the edge of space in his suborbital spaceplane. It\u2019s been his quest since he founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, and after delays and setbacks the company is tantalizingly close to flying paying passengers.Its sporty spaceplane has made it to space twice, once with a pair of pilots, then again with an additional crew member. In December, the company aborted a test flight after its onboard computer that monitors the rocket engines lost connection.AdvertisementVirgin Galactic now says it will repeat that test flight, then fly another, and then it will finally be Branson\u2019s turn. If all goes well, Virgin Galactic would then turn its attention to flying the hundreds of people who have paid as much as $250,000 for a trip to space.Thread: our CEO, Michael Colglazier, on today\u2019s flight test. Today\u2019s flight landed beautifully, with pilots, planes, and spaceship safe, secure, and in excellent shape \u2014 the foundation of every successful mission! Our flight today did not reach space as we had been planning. pic.twitter.com/pqfUAtp6UH\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December 12, 2020\n\nBranson has another venture that may reach a significant milestone in 2021. In January, Virgin Orbit, its rocket company, is planning another test flight of its LauncherOne rocket after a failed test a few months ago when the main engine shut down prematurely.Story continues below advertisementLike Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship, the rocket is tethered to a mother ship, in this case a 747, that takes it to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. There, the rocket is released, fires its engine and zooms through the atmosphere.VirginOrbit is one of a host of small rocket companies that could reach orbit in 2021. Relativity Space, which 3-D prints its rockets, is planning a launch, as is Astra, which nearly missed orbit from its launch site in Alaska. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand, is planning a flight from its pad on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore, as well.Virginia has a rocket launch site, and it\u2019s about to grow with the most successful startup since SpaceXJEFF BEZOSBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in what he has said was a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. He has said Blue Origin, his space company, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d 2021 could be a breakout year for the company, which was founded 20 years ago. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is planning its first flight with humans on board its New Shepard spacecraft in the coming year. Like Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, it\u2019s designed to travel to the edge of space and back \u2014 not to orbit. But unlike Virgin, it has not yet opened up sales or announced ticket prices.NS-13 was a total success. 7th consecutive successful trip to space and back for this particular vehicle, 12 customer payloads including @NASA's lunar landing demo, and tens of thousands postcards from @ClubforFuture. Replay the #NewShepard mission: https://t.co/NP7XDzxJXi\u2014 Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 13, 2020\n\nIt also hopes to fly for the first time in 2021 its New Glenn rocket, a massive vehicle powered by seven BE-4 engines. Earlier this year, NASA announced that the rocket would be eligible to bid for launch contracts, a vote of confidence for the company.The BE-4 would also power the new rocket being designed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Vulcan Centaur, as it is called, is scheduled to fly toward the end of the year, Tory Bruno, ULA\u2019s chief executive, told reporters recently.That mission would be a historic one, carrying a robotic spacecraft manufactured by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, to land on the moon as part of a NASA program. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft launched from U.S. soil to land on the moon since the Apollo era.MARS AND BEYONDOn Feb. 18, NASA once again will try to pull off the daring feat of landing a spacecraft on Mars, when the Perseverance rover is set to touch down.The rover would explore the Jezero crater near the Mars equator where a lake once existed. That is the ideal place to search for signs of ancient microbial life, scientists say. The rover will collect rocks and soil samples that would one day be returned to Earth.I\u2019m less than two months away from the big day. My #CountdownToMars ends Feb. 18. See what it takes to land on Mars with this mission trailer.Landing Toolkit: https://t.co/pDEv4DLsW7 pic.twitter.com/AL2R88lXJR\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 21, 2020\n\nNASA has also included a drone helicopter called Ingenuity on the mission, in a test of whether it can fly in the thin Martian atmosphere, 99 percent less dense than Earth\u2019s.\u201cThe Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth\u2019s atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft,\u201d said H\u00e5vard Grip, Ingenuity\u2019s chief pilot at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cWith Ingenuity, we\u2019re trying to do the same for Mars.\u201dFinally, NASA\u2019s James Webb telescope is scheduled to launch in October after years of struggles and cost overruns that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Once in space, the telescope would be able to look back in time to see the oldest light in the universe, the formation of galaxies and planets beyond our solar system.\u201cWebb is the world\u2019s most complex space observatory and our top science priority, and we\u2019ve worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, said this year. 2020 was a good year for space exploration. 2021 could be better. 2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6497",
        "date": "2020-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/30/2021-space-events-plan/",
        "text": "We all know that 2020 was a no-good, horrible, fearful, tumultuous year that will be remembered for the coronavirus pandemic and the polarizing election. But for space enthusiasts, it was actually quite a good year, providing bits of promising news amid the bleak headlines of disease, economic hardship and protests. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX launched astronauts to the International Space Station twice. NASA launched a rover to Mars and snagged a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away.2021 has potential for even more good news. Here\u2019s just some of what could happen in the new year.SPACEXAfter two successful flights carrying astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX is set to do it again this year. Crew-2, its second fully operational mission, is scheduled to launch a quartet of astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the spring. Then, in the fall, the company is set to launch Crew-3.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot since the space shuttle has NASA had routine flights to the space station from U.S. soil. If all goes well, SpaceX will become the shuttle\u2019s successor, filling a major gap in America\u2019s spaceflight program in a coming-of-age moment for what was once a spunky start-up.Late in the year, SpaceX also is planning to fly a mission for Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that has purchased a trip to the International Space Station for a crew of four. Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom, would accompany three private citizens for the mission, among them Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli former fighter pilot. Axiom is expected to announce the other two tourists sometime in the future.Flying humans on its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft is only part of what\u2019s on tap for SpaceX. The company continues to test its Starship spacecraft, a next-generation vehicle that looks like a flying grain silo but, Musk hopes, will one day fly people to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA hopes it will be successful. The space agency is investing $135 million in Starship as part of its attempt to return astronauts to the moon. Musk, whose timelines are usually wildly ambitious, has said he hopes the spacecraft will be able to achieve orbit in 2021.Starship landing flip maneuver pic.twitter.com/QuD9HwZ9CX\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 10, 2020\n\nThe company is also pressing ahead with another outrageously difficult project \u2014 a plan to flood Earth orbit with thousands of satellites that would beam Internet signals to ground stations, connecting rural areas to broadband.Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?In 2020, SpaceX took some major strides toward that goal and has already launched more than 16 batches of the satellites, allowing it to begin a pilot program. More are scheduled to be hoisted in 2021, marking SpaceX\u2019s transformation from a purely rocket company to an Internet service provider after being awarded $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission for the endeavor.BOEINGBoeing spent much of 2020 working to fix the software on its Starliner spacecraft, which ran into trouble as soon as it reached space during an uncrewed test flight at the end of 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s now working to redo the test mission \u2014 no astronauts on board \u2014 at the end of March.Given its past problems, Boeing\u2019s upcoming test flight has to be successful. The company holds a contract from NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station. But before the space agency will allow its astronauts on Boeing\u2019s spacecraft, the company has to prove it can fly safely on its own. Another failure will do more damage to a company reeling from a string of failures, including the two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airplane that killed 346 people.Boeing is well aware of this, which is why it\u2019s been proceeding so deliberately. The mission patch for the flight, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) has a special touch \u2014 the image of a fingerprint.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt represents those who are in the factory each day building the spacecraft as well as those who have had a hand in designing, testing, coding and training so we can get OFT-2 right,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cAt a macro level, the thumbprint represents how deeply personal this mission is to Boeing, as human spaceflight has been and always will be a part of our company\u2019s DNA.\u201dAdvertisementIf all goes well, the company would move to the next step \u2014 flying a test mission with three NASA astronauts that could come by the end of the year.ARTEMISThe hallmark of the Trump administration\u2019s space policy has been a return to the moon for the first time since the astronauts of Apollo 17 landed there in 1972. The White House directed NASA to speed up the timeline for a lunar landing to 2024, from 2028, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former member of Congress, lobbied his former colleagues hard for funding for the program, which has been dubbed Artemis.Story continues below advertisementThough Congress has approved $850 million for next year for the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the lunar surface, it\u2019s well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 deadline.It\u2019s not clear what the incoming Biden administration will do with the program. Most Democrats in the space community say new officials will keep the program but put it on a more realistic timeline.AdvertisementThe schedule will be driven by engineering and technology as much as politics, though. As of now, NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket is supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft without astronauts on board by the end of 2021, in what would be the first flight of the Artemis program. If all goes well, Orion would orbit the moon, testing its systems before coming home.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not clear, though, that the rocket will be ready. For years, it has suffered delay after delay, with billions of dollars in cost overruns. Government watchdogs have criticized Boeing, the prime contractor, for poor performance and NASA for lax oversight.When it does fly, the SLS is certain to be a sight. The rocket would be the most powerful ever, with four RS-25 engines used by the space shuttle and two side solid rocket motor boosters taller than the Statue of Liberty. NASA and Boeing say they are getting close to flying, but the rocket still needs to pass the final parts of the testing campaign known as the \u201cgreen run,\u201d which would culminate with the firing of its engines while clamped down to the launchpad.AdvertisementBut given the problems, past and present, it\u2019s far from certain that 2021 will be the year it finally takes off.RICHARD BRANSONHe\u2019s crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific in hot-air balloons, once almost dying off the coast of Ireland, another time crashing in the Canadian Arctic instead of Southern California, the intended destination. He broke the record for the fastest time crossing the Atlantic in a boat and once got stranded in Algeria during an attempt to circle the globe in a balloon.Story continues below advertisementIn 2021, at age 70, Richard Branson may face his most daunting adventure yet: a trip to the edge of space in his suborbital spaceplane. It\u2019s been his quest since he founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, and after delays and setbacks the company is tantalizingly close to flying paying passengers.Its sporty spaceplane has made it to space twice, once with a pair of pilots, then again with an additional crew member. In December, the company aborted a test flight after its onboard computer that monitors the rocket engines lost connection.AdvertisementVirgin Galactic now says it will repeat that test flight, then fly another, and then it will finally be Branson\u2019s turn. If all goes well, Virgin Galactic would then turn its attention to flying the hundreds of people who have paid as much as $250,000 for a trip to space.Thread: our CEO, Michael Colglazier, on today\u2019s flight test. Today\u2019s flight landed beautifully, with pilots, planes, and spaceship safe, secure, and in excellent shape \u2014 the foundation of every successful mission! Our flight today did not reach space as we had been planning. pic.twitter.com/pqfUAtp6UH\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December 12, 2020\n\nBranson has another venture that may reach a significant milestone in 2021. In January, Virgin Orbit, its rocket company, is planning another test flight of its LauncherOne rocket after a failed test a few months ago when the main engine shut down prematurely.Story continues below advertisementLike Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship, the rocket is tethered to a mother ship, in this case a 747, that takes it to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. There, the rocket is released, fires its engine and zooms through the atmosphere.VirginOrbit is one of a host of small rocket companies that could reach orbit in 2021. Relativity Space, which 3-D prints its rockets, is planning a launch, as is Astra, which nearly missed orbit from its launch site in Alaska. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand, is planning a flight from its pad on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore, as well.Virginia has a rocket launch site, and it\u2019s about to grow with the most successful startup since SpaceXJEFF BEZOSBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in what he has said was a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. He has said Blue Origin, his space company, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d 2021 could be a breakout year for the company, which was founded 20 years ago. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is planning its first flight with humans on board its New Shepard spacecraft in the coming year. Like Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, it\u2019s designed to travel to the edge of space and back \u2014 not to orbit. But unlike Virgin, it has not yet opened up sales or announced ticket prices.NS-13 was a total success. 7th consecutive successful trip to space and back for this particular vehicle, 12 customer payloads including @NASA's lunar landing demo, and tens of thousands postcards from @ClubforFuture. Replay the #NewShepard mission: https://t.co/NP7XDzxJXi\u2014 Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 13, 2020\n\nIt also hopes to fly for the first time in 2021 its New Glenn rocket, a massive vehicle powered by seven BE-4 engines. Earlier this year, NASA announced that the rocket would be eligible to bid for launch contracts, a vote of confidence for the company.The BE-4 would also power the new rocket being designed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Vulcan Centaur, as it is called, is scheduled to fly toward the end of the year, Tory Bruno, ULA\u2019s chief executive, told reporters recently.That mission would be a historic one, carrying a robotic spacecraft manufactured by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, to land on the moon as part of a NASA program. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft launched from U.S. soil to land on the moon since the Apollo era.MARS AND BEYONDOn Feb. 18, NASA once again will try to pull off the daring feat of landing a spacecraft on Mars, when the Perseverance rover is set to touch down.The rover would explore the Jezero crater near the Mars equator where a lake once existed. That is the ideal place to search for signs of ancient microbial life, scientists say. The rover will collect rocks and soil samples that would one day be returned to Earth.I\u2019m less than two months away from the big day. My #CountdownToMars ends Feb. 18. See what it takes to land on Mars with this mission trailer.Landing Toolkit: https://t.co/pDEv4DLsW7 pic.twitter.com/AL2R88lXJR\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 21, 2020\n\nNASA has also included a drone helicopter called Ingenuity on the mission, in a test of whether it can fly in the thin Martian atmosphere, 99 percent less dense than Earth\u2019s.\u201cThe Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth\u2019s atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft,\u201d said H\u00e5vard Grip, Ingenuity\u2019s chief pilot at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cWith Ingenuity, we\u2019re trying to do the same for Mars.\u201dFinally, NASA\u2019s James Webb telescope is scheduled to launch in October after years of struggles and cost overruns that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Once in space, the telescope would be able to look back in time to see the oldest light in the universe, the formation of galaxies and planets beyond our solar system.\u201cWebb is the world\u2019s most complex space observatory and our top science priority, and we\u2019ve worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, said this year. 2020 was a good year for space exploration. 2021 could be better. 2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6498",
        "date": "2020-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/30/2021-space-events-plan/",
        "text": "We all know that 2020 was a no-good, horrible, fearful, tumultuous year that will be remembered for the coronavirus pandemic and the polarizing election. But for space enthusiasts, it was actually quite a good year, providing bits of promising news amid the bleak headlines of disease, economic hardship and protests. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX launched astronauts to the International Space Station twice. NASA launched a rover to Mars and snagged a sample from an asteroid 200 million miles away.2021 has potential for even more good news. Here\u2019s just some of what could happen in the new year.SPACEXAfter two successful flights carrying astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX is set to do it again this year. Crew-2, its second fully operational mission, is scheduled to launch a quartet of astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the spring. Then, in the fall, the company is set to launch Crew-3.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot since the space shuttle has NASA had routine flights to the space station from U.S. soil. If all goes well, SpaceX will become the shuttle\u2019s successor, filling a major gap in America\u2019s spaceflight program in a coming-of-age moment for what was once a spunky start-up.Late in the year, SpaceX also is planning to fly a mission for Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that has purchased a trip to the International Space Station for a crew of four. Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda, a former NASA astronaut who now works for Axiom, would accompany three private citizens for the mission, among them Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli former fighter pilot. Axiom is expected to announce the other two tourists sometime in the future.Flying humans on its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft is only part of what\u2019s on tap for SpaceX. The company continues to test its Starship spacecraft, a next-generation vehicle that looks like a flying grain silo but, Musk hopes, will one day fly people to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA hopes it will be successful. The space agency is investing $135 million in Starship as part of its attempt to return astronauts to the moon. Musk, whose timelines are usually wildly ambitious, has said he hopes the spacecraft will be able to achieve orbit in 2021.Starship landing flip maneuver pic.twitter.com/QuD9HwZ9CX\u2014 SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 10, 2020\n\nThe company is also pressing ahead with another outrageously difficult project \u2014 a plan to flood Earth orbit with thousands of satellites that would beam Internet signals to ground stations, connecting rural areas to broadband.Thousands more satellites could soon be launched into space. Can the federal government keep up?In 2020, SpaceX took some major strides toward that goal and has already launched more than 16 batches of the satellites, allowing it to begin a pilot program. More are scheduled to be hoisted in 2021, marking SpaceX\u2019s transformation from a purely rocket company to an Internet service provider after being awarded $886 million from the Federal Communications Commission for the endeavor.BOEINGBoeing spent much of 2020 working to fix the software on its Starliner spacecraft, which ran into trouble as soon as it reached space during an uncrewed test flight at the end of 2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s now working to redo the test mission \u2014 no astronauts on board \u2014 at the end of March.Given its past problems, Boeing\u2019s upcoming test flight has to be successful. The company holds a contract from NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station. But before the space agency will allow its astronauts on Boeing\u2019s spacecraft, the company has to prove it can fly safely on its own. Another failure will do more damage to a company reeling from a string of failures, including the two fatal crashes of its 737 Max airplane that killed 346 people.Boeing is well aware of this, which is why it\u2019s been proceeding so deliberately. The mission patch for the flight, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) has a special touch \u2014 the image of a fingerprint.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt represents those who are in the factory each day building the spacecraft as well as those who have had a hand in designing, testing, coding and training so we can get OFT-2 right,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cAt a macro level, the thumbprint represents how deeply personal this mission is to Boeing, as human spaceflight has been and always will be a part of our company\u2019s DNA.\u201dAdvertisementIf all goes well, the company would move to the next step \u2014 flying a test mission with three NASA astronauts that could come by the end of the year.ARTEMISThe hallmark of the Trump administration\u2019s space policy has been a return to the moon for the first time since the astronauts of Apollo 17 landed there in 1972. The White House directed NASA to speed up the timeline for a lunar landing to 2024, from 2028, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former member of Congress, lobbied his former colleagues hard for funding for the program, which has been dubbed Artemis.Story continues below advertisementThough Congress has approved $850 million for next year for the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the lunar surface, it\u2019s well short of the $3.3 billion NASA said it needed to meet the 2024 deadline.It\u2019s not clear what the incoming Biden administration will do with the program. Most Democrats in the space community say new officials will keep the program but put it on a more realistic timeline.AdvertisementThe schedule will be driven by engineering and technology as much as politics, though. As of now, NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket is supposed to launch the Orion spacecraft without astronauts on board by the end of 2021, in what would be the first flight of the Artemis program. If all goes well, Orion would orbit the moon, testing its systems before coming home.Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not clear, though, that the rocket will be ready. For years, it has suffered delay after delay, with billions of dollars in cost overruns. Government watchdogs have criticized Boeing, the prime contractor, for poor performance and NASA for lax oversight.When it does fly, the SLS is certain to be a sight. The rocket would be the most powerful ever, with four RS-25 engines used by the space shuttle and two side solid rocket motor boosters taller than the Statue of Liberty. NASA and Boeing say they are getting close to flying, but the rocket still needs to pass the final parts of the testing campaign known as the \u201cgreen run,\u201d which would culminate with the firing of its engines while clamped down to the launchpad.AdvertisementBut given the problems, past and present, it\u2019s far from certain that 2021 will be the year it finally takes off.RICHARD BRANSONHe\u2019s crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific in hot-air balloons, once almost dying off the coast of Ireland, another time crashing in the Canadian Arctic instead of Southern California, the intended destination. He broke the record for the fastest time crossing the Atlantic in a boat and once got stranded in Algeria during an attempt to circle the globe in a balloon.Story continues below advertisementIn 2021, at age 70, Richard Branson may face his most daunting adventure yet: a trip to the edge of space in his suborbital spaceplane. It\u2019s been his quest since he founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, and after delays and setbacks the company is tantalizingly close to flying paying passengers.Its sporty spaceplane has made it to space twice, once with a pair of pilots, then again with an additional crew member. In December, the company aborted a test flight after its onboard computer that monitors the rocket engines lost connection.AdvertisementVirgin Galactic now says it will repeat that test flight, then fly another, and then it will finally be Branson\u2019s turn. If all goes well, Virgin Galactic would then turn its attention to flying the hundreds of people who have paid as much as $250,000 for a trip to space.Thread: our CEO, Michael Colglazier, on today\u2019s flight test. Today\u2019s flight landed beautifully, with pilots, planes, and spaceship safe, secure, and in excellent shape \u2014 the foundation of every successful mission! Our flight today did not reach space as we had been planning. pic.twitter.com/pqfUAtp6UH\u2014 Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December 12, 2020\n\nBranson has another venture that may reach a significant milestone in 2021. In January, Virgin Orbit, its rocket company, is planning another test flight of its LauncherOne rocket after a failed test a few months ago when the main engine shut down prematurely.Story continues below advertisementLike Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceship, the rocket is tethered to a mother ship, in this case a 747, that takes it to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. There, the rocket is released, fires its engine and zooms through the atmosphere.VirginOrbit is one of a host of small rocket companies that could reach orbit in 2021. Relativity Space, which 3-D prints its rockets, is planning a launch, as is Astra, which nearly missed orbit from its launch site in Alaska. Rocket Lab, which launches out of New Zealand, is planning a flight from its pad on Wallops Island, on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore, as well.Virginia has a rocket launch site, and it\u2019s about to grow with the most successful startup since SpaceXJEFF BEZOSBezos was 5 years old when he watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon in what he has said was a \u201cseminal moment\u201d for him, touching off a lifelong passion for space. He has said Blue Origin, his space company, is \u201cthe most important work I\u2019m doing.\u201d 2021 could be a breakout year for the company, which was founded 20 years ago. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is planning its first flight with humans on board its New Shepard spacecraft in the coming year. Like Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo, it\u2019s designed to travel to the edge of space and back \u2014 not to orbit. But unlike Virgin, it has not yet opened up sales or announced ticket prices.NS-13 was a total success. 7th consecutive successful trip to space and back for this particular vehicle, 12 customer payloads including @NASA's lunar landing demo, and tens of thousands postcards from @ClubforFuture. Replay the #NewShepard mission: https://t.co/NP7XDzxJXi\u2014 Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 13, 2020\n\nIt also hopes to fly for the first time in 2021 its New Glenn rocket, a massive vehicle powered by seven BE-4 engines. Earlier this year, NASA announced that the rocket would be eligible to bid for launch contracts, a vote of confidence for the company.The BE-4 would also power the new rocket being designed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Vulcan Centaur, as it is called, is scheduled to fly toward the end of the year, Tory Bruno, ULA\u2019s chief executive, told reporters recently.That mission would be a historic one, carrying a robotic spacecraft manufactured by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, to land on the moon as part of a NASA program. If successful, it would be the first spacecraft launched from U.S. soil to land on the moon since the Apollo era.MARS AND BEYONDOn Feb. 18, NASA once again will try to pull off the daring feat of landing a spacecraft on Mars, when the Perseverance rover is set to touch down.The rover would explore the Jezero crater near the Mars equator where a lake once existed. That is the ideal place to search for signs of ancient microbial life, scientists say. The rover will collect rocks and soil samples that would one day be returned to Earth.I\u2019m less than two months away from the big day. My #CountdownToMars ends Feb. 18. See what it takes to land on Mars with this mission trailer.Landing Toolkit: https://t.co/pDEv4DLsW7 pic.twitter.com/AL2R88lXJR\u2014 NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 21, 2020\n\nNASA has also included a drone helicopter called Ingenuity on the mission, in a test of whether it can fly in the thin Martian atmosphere, 99 percent less dense than Earth\u2019s.\u201cThe Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth\u2019s atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft,\u201d said H\u00e5vard Grip, Ingenuity\u2019s chief pilot at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cWith Ingenuity, we\u2019re trying to do the same for Mars.\u201dFinally, NASA\u2019s James Webb telescope is scheduled to launch in October after years of struggles and cost overruns that pushed the program\u2019s price tag to nearly $10 billion.Once in space, the telescope would be able to look back in time to see the oldest light in the universe, the formation of galaxies and planets beyond our solar system.\u201cWebb is the world\u2019s most complex space observatory and our top science priority, and we\u2019ve worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate, said this year. 2020 was a good year for space exploration. 2021 could be better. 2021 could be a huge year for space. Here\u2019s what\u2019s to come from NASA, Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6499",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/23/space-tourism-faa-regulation/",
        "text": "Want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and hope the parachute opens? Be our guest. Or try bungee jumping? Sure, go for it. And, yes, feel free to strap yourself into that roller coaster and loop-de-loop until you turn green.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd, now, if you\u2019re a real adrenaline junkie, you are welcome to board a spacecraft and blast out of the atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness. If you can afford it \u2014 a big if, given the steep prices. No one is going to stop you. No local government ordinance. No state law. Not even the Federal Aviation Administration, which ensures only that the people and property on the ground are protected. Space tourists fly at their own risk.Story continues below advertisementBut now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some members of Congress say it may be time to revisit the FAA\u2019s rules and more closely regulate the commercial space industry. In the next year or so, more than a dozen private citizens are scheduled to launch on commercial spacecraft, opening up a new destination for the wealthy and laying the foundation for an industry that analysts say could be worth $8 billion by 2030.AdvertisementRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are working toward flying paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital flights, while Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is gearing up to fly civilian astronauts to orbit in much more daring missions. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos is set to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight, scheduled for July 20. And Branson is also looking to fly soon as well, perhaps even before Bezos, although Virgin Galactic has not confirmed that.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)How to regulate those flights is now getting more attention and creating tension between a growing commercial spaceflight industry, which says that overly burdensome rules will ruin its tremendous progress, and some members of Congress, who say that it is time to oversee space travel more in line with the way commercial aviation is regulated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the FAA requires launch companies to protect people and property on the ground, the passengers are governed only by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, meaning they have to sign a waiver and be made aware of the risks, much like skydivers and bungee jumpers. According to the FAA\u2019s rules, passengers must be made aware, for example, that \u201cthe United States government has not certified the launch vehicle and any reentry vehicle as safe for carrying flight crew or spaceflight participants.\u201dThe industry says it is in a \u201clearning period,\u201d where it is experimenting with new kinds of rockets and spacecraft, and so relatively loose federal oversight and self-regulation are justified while the companies grow and develop new technologies. Regulations that would govern requirements for passengers, how pilots are trained, and the way spacecraft are designed and manufactured would harm an industry that is learning to grow and innovate, advocates say.Companies such as SpaceX have shown real progress \u2014 for example, restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade last year \u2014 and a crackdown would hamper its ability to innovate, according to the industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut some say the time has come for stricter regulation.With the congressionally mandated learning period in place until 2023, \u201cthat means despite commercial human spaceflight and space tourism soon expected to become emerging markets, the FAA\u2019s hands will be tied,\u201d Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said at a hearing last week. \u201cThey won\u2019t be able to regulate for the safety of the flying public. And you know I have serious concerns that some parts of the industry are talking about yet another extension of the \u2018learning period.\u2019 \u201dDeFazio is also taking aim at the FAA\u2019s dual mandate to both regulate and promote the space industry, which he said is a conflict of interest that could endanger the public. The FAA, he said in an interview, \u201cshould not be promoting commercial space. NASA can promote commercial space. The Commerce Department can promote commercial space. The FAA\u2019s job is to regulate in the public interest.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDeFazio, who spearheaded the effort to do away with the FAA promoting the commercial aviation industry after a Valujet crash in 1996 killed all 110 people on board, said at the hearing that scandals such as Boeing\u2019s 737 Max problems show what happens when regulators get too close to industry.\u201cThe concern is like when the FAA starts talking about Boeing as a customer, and we find undue influence over the inspectors,\u201d he said. \u201cWe find managers overruling people who found critical problems with the Maxes, and subsequently people died.\u201dLeading Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee disagree. In a letter last week to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Reps. Frank D. Lucas (Okla.) and Brian Babin (Tex.), whose district is outside of Houston, wrote that \u201cadditional regulation at this point would stifle innovation, export technology, talent, and tax dollars overseas, and undermine American leadership in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, argues that space is not air travel, a mature industry that it points out has \u201cwell over a century of technological development and 95 years of federal safety regulation.\u201d The FAA started regulating commercial aviation in the wake of World War I when a surplus of military airplanes was suddenly available for commercial use. The commercial space industry, advocates say, is different and only just beginning to show the kind of growth that many had hoped would come years earlier.SpaceX, for example, flew its first human spaceflight mission for NASA last year, and since then has completed two more. Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has flown people to space successfully three times, after a crash in 2014 that killed one of the pilots. And Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has sent 15 capsules into space, although none of them have carried people.\u201cCongress gave the commercial spaceflight industry an extended period to innovate new approaches to human spaceflight without being preemptively regulated,\u201d Karina Drees, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in a statement to The Post. The \u201clearning period\u201d is good for both industry and the FAA \u201cby enabling industry to design the world\u2019s leading space technologies without asking [the FAA] to write regulations absent relevant data.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRegulating commercial spaceflight first got Congress\u2019s attention in 2004, after a competition called the Ansari X Prize to be the first nongovernment entity to send a crew to space. The $10 million prize was won by SpaceShipOne, whose construction was financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. One congressman at the time accused the FAA of having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait till someone dies, then regulate.\u201d But the industry got the backing of Marion Blakey, then the FAA\u2019s administrator, who argued that the business of space and the \u201castropreneurs,\u201d as she called them, needed time and freedom to develop.Since then, the commercial human spaceflight industry has not really taken off, and Congress granted extensions to the learning period. As a result, the industry says, it has developed new technologies and is on the cusp of taking people to space on a regular basis.Given the ability to pursue new technologies, the industry has produced an array of vehicles \u2014 capsules that land on the ground or at sea; rockets that boost their payloads to orbit then fly back to Earth and land; rockets and a spaceplane that take off not from a launchpad but are dropped from carrier airplanes and then ignite their engines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe commercial space transportation industry in the United States is thriving at an unprecedented rate,\u201d said Wayne Monteith, the FAA\u2019s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He said the number of licensed launches has grown 400 percent over the past five years \u2014 from an average of one licensed launch every five weeks to one every five days. He said that although the agency is focused on safety, it views itself \u201cas a gateway, not a hurdle, a conduit for safe progress, not red tape that keeps progress sitting on the launchpad.\u201dStill, there has been tension. Musk complained on Twitter earlier this year that despite its efforts, the FAA was too burdensome when it came to regulating the test program SpaceX had developed for its Starship spacecraft. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dThe FAA opened an investigation after SpaceX launched a prototype spacecraft without authorization. But since then, the company has been in compliance, Monteith said at the hearing. \u201cWe would not have cleared them to start flight operations again had I not been confident that they had modified their procedures effectively and addressed the safety culture issues that we saw,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSafety, he said, was the FAA\u2019s main priority, a sentiment the industry says it shares as well.\u201cOur company\u2019s North Star is and always will be safety, a mind-set that we know is shared throughout the commercial space sector,\u201d Mike Moses, the president of Virgin Galactic, testified at the House hearing last week.The regulations currently in place \u201chave led the way for this explosive growth without compromising safety or innovation,\u201d he said. \u201cNow is the time to build on that solid foundation to ensure continued success, particularly as we now look to taking humans to space.\u201dWayne Hale, who was a senior executive at NASA when the space shuttle Columbia came apart in 2003, agrees, and said there should be different standards for purely commercial space missions and those funded by the government.\u201cNASA is using the taxpayers\u2019 money and sending people as part of their job to go to space,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, there\u2019s a different kind of moral imperative there than if you want to go to Brazil and zip-line through the forest. It\u2019s your own money and your own life and we ought to, within reason, let people do what they want to do.\u201d Now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some in Congress say it may be time for  the FAA to more closely regulate the commercial space industry. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6500",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/23/space-tourism-faa-regulation/",
        "text": "Want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and hope the parachute opens? Be our guest. Or try bungee jumping? Sure, go for it. And, yes, feel free to strap yourself into that roller coaster and loop-de-loop until you turn green.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd, now, if you\u2019re a real adrenaline junkie, you are welcome to board a spacecraft and blast out of the atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness. If you can afford it \u2014 a big if, given the steep prices. No one is going to stop you. No local government ordinance. No state law. Not even the Federal Aviation Administration, which ensures only that the people and property on the ground are protected. Space tourists fly at their own risk.Story continues below advertisementBut now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some members of Congress say it may be time to revisit the FAA\u2019s rules and more closely regulate the commercial space industry. In the next year or so, more than a dozen private citizens are scheduled to launch on commercial spacecraft, opening up a new destination for the wealthy and laying the foundation for an industry that analysts say could be worth $8 billion by 2030.AdvertisementRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are working toward flying paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital flights, while Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is gearing up to fly civilian astronauts to orbit in much more daring missions. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos is set to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight, scheduled for July 20. And Branson is also looking to fly soon as well, perhaps even before Bezos, although Virgin Galactic has not confirmed that.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)How to regulate those flights is now getting more attention and creating tension between a growing commercial spaceflight industry, which says that overly burdensome rules will ruin its tremendous progress, and some members of Congress, who say that it is time to oversee space travel more in line with the way commercial aviation is regulated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the FAA requires launch companies to protect people and property on the ground, the passengers are governed only by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, meaning they have to sign a waiver and be made aware of the risks, much like skydivers and bungee jumpers. According to the FAA\u2019s rules, passengers must be made aware, for example, that \u201cthe United States government has not certified the launch vehicle and any reentry vehicle as safe for carrying flight crew or spaceflight participants.\u201dThe industry says it is in a \u201clearning period,\u201d where it is experimenting with new kinds of rockets and spacecraft, and so relatively loose federal oversight and self-regulation are justified while the companies grow and develop new technologies. Regulations that would govern requirements for passengers, how pilots are trained, and the way spacecraft are designed and manufactured would harm an industry that is learning to grow and innovate, advocates say.Companies such as SpaceX have shown real progress \u2014 for example, restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade last year \u2014 and a crackdown would hamper its ability to innovate, according to the industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut some say the time has come for stricter regulation.With the congressionally mandated learning period in place until 2023, \u201cthat means despite commercial human spaceflight and space tourism soon expected to become emerging markets, the FAA\u2019s hands will be tied,\u201d Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said at a hearing last week. \u201cThey won\u2019t be able to regulate for the safety of the flying public. And you know I have serious concerns that some parts of the industry are talking about yet another extension of the \u2018learning period.\u2019 \u201dDeFazio is also taking aim at the FAA\u2019s dual mandate to both regulate and promote the space industry, which he said is a conflict of interest that could endanger the public. The FAA, he said in an interview, \u201cshould not be promoting commercial space. NASA can promote commercial space. The Commerce Department can promote commercial space. The FAA\u2019s job is to regulate in the public interest.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDeFazio, who spearheaded the effort to do away with the FAA promoting the commercial aviation industry after a Valujet crash in 1996 killed all 110 people on board, said at the hearing that scandals such as Boeing\u2019s 737 Max problems show what happens when regulators get too close to industry.\u201cThe concern is like when the FAA starts talking about Boeing as a customer, and we find undue influence over the inspectors,\u201d he said. \u201cWe find managers overruling people who found critical problems with the Maxes, and subsequently people died.\u201dLeading Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee disagree. In a letter last week to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Reps. Frank D. Lucas (Okla.) and Brian Babin (Tex.), whose district is outside of Houston, wrote that \u201cadditional regulation at this point would stifle innovation, export technology, talent, and tax dollars overseas, and undermine American leadership in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, argues that space is not air travel, a mature industry that it points out has \u201cwell over a century of technological development and 95 years of federal safety regulation.\u201d The FAA started regulating commercial aviation in the wake of World War I when a surplus of military airplanes was suddenly available for commercial use. The commercial space industry, advocates say, is different and only just beginning to show the kind of growth that many had hoped would come years earlier.SpaceX, for example, flew its first human spaceflight mission for NASA last year, and since then has completed two more. Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has flown people to space successfully three times, after a crash in 2014 that killed one of the pilots. And Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has sent 15 capsules into space, although none of them have carried people.\u201cCongress gave the commercial spaceflight industry an extended period to innovate new approaches to human spaceflight without being preemptively regulated,\u201d Karina Drees, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in a statement to The Post. The \u201clearning period\u201d is good for both industry and the FAA \u201cby enabling industry to design the world\u2019s leading space technologies without asking [the FAA] to write regulations absent relevant data.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRegulating commercial spaceflight first got Congress\u2019s attention in 2004, after a competition called the Ansari X Prize to be the first nongovernment entity to send a crew to space. The $10 million prize was won by SpaceShipOne, whose construction was financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. One congressman at the time accused the FAA of having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait till someone dies, then regulate.\u201d But the industry got the backing of Marion Blakey, then the FAA\u2019s administrator, who argued that the business of space and the \u201castropreneurs,\u201d as she called them, needed time and freedom to develop.Since then, the commercial human spaceflight industry has not really taken off, and Congress granted extensions to the learning period. As a result, the industry says, it has developed new technologies and is on the cusp of taking people to space on a regular basis.Given the ability to pursue new technologies, the industry has produced an array of vehicles \u2014 capsules that land on the ground or at sea; rockets that boost their payloads to orbit then fly back to Earth and land; rockets and a spaceplane that take off not from a launchpad but are dropped from carrier airplanes and then ignite their engines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe commercial space transportation industry in the United States is thriving at an unprecedented rate,\u201d said Wayne Monteith, the FAA\u2019s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He said the number of licensed launches has grown 400 percent over the past five years \u2014 from an average of one licensed launch every five weeks to one every five days. He said that although the agency is focused on safety, it views itself \u201cas a gateway, not a hurdle, a conduit for safe progress, not red tape that keeps progress sitting on the launchpad.\u201dStill, there has been tension. Musk complained on Twitter earlier this year that despite its efforts, the FAA was too burdensome when it came to regulating the test program SpaceX had developed for its Starship spacecraft. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dThe FAA opened an investigation after SpaceX launched a prototype spacecraft without authorization. But since then, the company has been in compliance, Monteith said at the hearing. \u201cWe would not have cleared them to start flight operations again had I not been confident that they had modified their procedures effectively and addressed the safety culture issues that we saw,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSafety, he said, was the FAA\u2019s main priority, a sentiment the industry says it shares as well.\u201cOur company\u2019s North Star is and always will be safety, a mind-set that we know is shared throughout the commercial space sector,\u201d Mike Moses, the president of Virgin Galactic, testified at the House hearing last week.The regulations currently in place \u201chave led the way for this explosive growth without compromising safety or innovation,\u201d he said. \u201cNow is the time to build on that solid foundation to ensure continued success, particularly as we now look to taking humans to space.\u201dWayne Hale, who was a senior executive at NASA when the space shuttle Columbia came apart in 2003, agrees, and said there should be different standards for purely commercial space missions and those funded by the government.\u201cNASA is using the taxpayers\u2019 money and sending people as part of their job to go to space,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, there\u2019s a different kind of moral imperative there than if you want to go to Brazil and zip-line through the forest. It\u2019s your own money and your own life and we ought to, within reason, let people do what they want to do.\u201d Now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some in Congress say it may be time for  the FAA to more closely regulate the commercial space industry. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6501",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/23/space-tourism-faa-regulation/",
        "text": "Want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and hope the parachute opens? Be our guest. Or try bungee jumping? Sure, go for it. And, yes, feel free to strap yourself into that roller coaster and loop-de-loop until you turn green.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd, now, if you\u2019re a real adrenaline junkie, you are welcome to board a spacecraft and blast out of the atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness. If you can afford it \u2014 a big if, given the steep prices. No one is going to stop you. No local government ordinance. No state law. Not even the Federal Aviation Administration, which ensures only that the people and property on the ground are protected. Space tourists fly at their own risk.Story continues below advertisementBut now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some members of Congress say it may be time to revisit the FAA\u2019s rules and more closely regulate the commercial space industry. In the next year or so, more than a dozen private citizens are scheduled to launch on commercial spacecraft, opening up a new destination for the wealthy and laying the foundation for an industry that analysts say could be worth $8 billion by 2030.AdvertisementRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are working toward flying paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital flights, while Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is gearing up to fly civilian astronauts to orbit in much more daring missions. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos is set to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight, scheduled for July 20. And Branson is also looking to fly soon as well, perhaps even before Bezos, although Virgin Galactic has not confirmed that.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)How to regulate those flights is now getting more attention and creating tension between a growing commercial spaceflight industry, which says that overly burdensome rules will ruin its tremendous progress, and some members of Congress, who say that it is time to oversee space travel more in line with the way commercial aviation is regulated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the FAA requires launch companies to protect people and property on the ground, the passengers are governed only by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, meaning they have to sign a waiver and be made aware of the risks, much like skydivers and bungee jumpers. According to the FAA\u2019s rules, passengers must be made aware, for example, that \u201cthe United States government has not certified the launch vehicle and any reentry vehicle as safe for carrying flight crew or spaceflight participants.\u201dThe industry says it is in a \u201clearning period,\u201d where it is experimenting with new kinds of rockets and spacecraft, and so relatively loose federal oversight and self-regulation are justified while the companies grow and develop new technologies. Regulations that would govern requirements for passengers, how pilots are trained, and the way spacecraft are designed and manufactured would harm an industry that is learning to grow and innovate, advocates say.Companies such as SpaceX have shown real progress \u2014 for example, restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade last year \u2014 and a crackdown would hamper its ability to innovate, according to the industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut some say the time has come for stricter regulation.With the congressionally mandated learning period in place until 2023, \u201cthat means despite commercial human spaceflight and space tourism soon expected to become emerging markets, the FAA\u2019s hands will be tied,\u201d Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said at a hearing last week. \u201cThey won\u2019t be able to regulate for the safety of the flying public. And you know I have serious concerns that some parts of the industry are talking about yet another extension of the \u2018learning period.\u2019 \u201dDeFazio is also taking aim at the FAA\u2019s dual mandate to both regulate and promote the space industry, which he said is a conflict of interest that could endanger the public. The FAA, he said in an interview, \u201cshould not be promoting commercial space. NASA can promote commercial space. The Commerce Department can promote commercial space. The FAA\u2019s job is to regulate in the public interest.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDeFazio, who spearheaded the effort to do away with the FAA promoting the commercial aviation industry after a Valujet crash in 1996 killed all 110 people on board, said at the hearing that scandals such as Boeing\u2019s 737 Max problems show what happens when regulators get too close to industry.\u201cThe concern is like when the FAA starts talking about Boeing as a customer, and we find undue influence over the inspectors,\u201d he said. \u201cWe find managers overruling people who found critical problems with the Maxes, and subsequently people died.\u201dLeading Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee disagree. In a letter last week to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Reps. Frank D. Lucas (Okla.) and Brian Babin (Tex.), whose district is outside of Houston, wrote that \u201cadditional regulation at this point would stifle innovation, export technology, talent, and tax dollars overseas, and undermine American leadership in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, argues that space is not air travel, a mature industry that it points out has \u201cwell over a century of technological development and 95 years of federal safety regulation.\u201d The FAA started regulating commercial aviation in the wake of World War I when a surplus of military airplanes was suddenly available for commercial use. The commercial space industry, advocates say, is different and only just beginning to show the kind of growth that many had hoped would come years earlier.SpaceX, for example, flew its first human spaceflight mission for NASA last year, and since then has completed two more. Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has flown people to space successfully three times, after a crash in 2014 that killed one of the pilots. And Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has sent 15 capsules into space, although none of them have carried people.\u201cCongress gave the commercial spaceflight industry an extended period to innovate new approaches to human spaceflight without being preemptively regulated,\u201d Karina Drees, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in a statement to The Post. The \u201clearning period\u201d is good for both industry and the FAA \u201cby enabling industry to design the world\u2019s leading space technologies without asking [the FAA] to write regulations absent relevant data.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRegulating commercial spaceflight first got Congress\u2019s attention in 2004, after a competition called the Ansari X Prize to be the first nongovernment entity to send a crew to space. The $10 million prize was won by SpaceShipOne, whose construction was financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. One congressman at the time accused the FAA of having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait till someone dies, then regulate.\u201d But the industry got the backing of Marion Blakey, then the FAA\u2019s administrator, who argued that the business of space and the \u201castropreneurs,\u201d as she called them, needed time and freedom to develop.Since then, the commercial human spaceflight industry has not really taken off, and Congress granted extensions to the learning period. As a result, the industry says, it has developed new technologies and is on the cusp of taking people to space on a regular basis.Given the ability to pursue new technologies, the industry has produced an array of vehicles \u2014 capsules that land on the ground or at sea; rockets that boost their payloads to orbit then fly back to Earth and land; rockets and a spaceplane that take off not from a launchpad but are dropped from carrier airplanes and then ignite their engines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe commercial space transportation industry in the United States is thriving at an unprecedented rate,\u201d said Wayne Monteith, the FAA\u2019s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He said the number of licensed launches has grown 400 percent over the past five years \u2014 from an average of one licensed launch every five weeks to one every five days. He said that although the agency is focused on safety, it views itself \u201cas a gateway, not a hurdle, a conduit for safe progress, not red tape that keeps progress sitting on the launchpad.\u201dStill, there has been tension. Musk complained on Twitter earlier this year that despite its efforts, the FAA was too burdensome when it came to regulating the test program SpaceX had developed for its Starship spacecraft. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dThe FAA opened an investigation after SpaceX launched a prototype spacecraft without authorization. But since then, the company has been in compliance, Monteith said at the hearing. \u201cWe would not have cleared them to start flight operations again had I not been confident that they had modified their procedures effectively and addressed the safety culture issues that we saw,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSafety, he said, was the FAA\u2019s main priority, a sentiment the industry says it shares as well.\u201cOur company\u2019s North Star is and always will be safety, a mind-set that we know is shared throughout the commercial space sector,\u201d Mike Moses, the president of Virgin Galactic, testified at the House hearing last week.The regulations currently in place \u201chave led the way for this explosive growth without compromising safety or innovation,\u201d he said. \u201cNow is the time to build on that solid foundation to ensure continued success, particularly as we now look to taking humans to space.\u201dWayne Hale, who was a senior executive at NASA when the space shuttle Columbia came apart in 2003, agrees, and said there should be different standards for purely commercial space missions and those funded by the government.\u201cNASA is using the taxpayers\u2019 money and sending people as part of their job to go to space,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, there\u2019s a different kind of moral imperative there than if you want to go to Brazil and zip-line through the forest. It\u2019s your own money and your own life and we ought to, within reason, let people do what they want to do.\u201d Now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some in Congress say it may be time for  the FAA to more closely regulate the commercial space industry. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6502",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/23/space-tourism-faa-regulation/",
        "text": "Want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and hope the parachute opens? Be our guest. Or try bungee jumping? Sure, go for it. And, yes, feel free to strap yourself into that roller coaster and loop-de-loop until you turn green.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd, now, if you\u2019re a real adrenaline junkie, you are welcome to board a spacecraft and blast out of the atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness. If you can afford it \u2014 a big if, given the steep prices. No one is going to stop you. No local government ordinance. No state law. Not even the Federal Aviation Administration, which ensures only that the people and property on the ground are protected. Space tourists fly at their own risk.Story continues below advertisementBut now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some members of Congress say it may be time to revisit the FAA\u2019s rules and more closely regulate the commercial space industry. In the next year or so, more than a dozen private citizens are scheduled to launch on commercial spacecraft, opening up a new destination for the wealthy and laying the foundation for an industry that analysts say could be worth $8 billion by 2030.AdvertisementRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are working toward flying paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital flights, while Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is gearing up to fly civilian astronauts to orbit in much more daring missions. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos is set to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight, scheduled for July 20. And Branson is also looking to fly soon as well, perhaps even before Bezos, although Virgin Galactic has not confirmed that.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)How to regulate those flights is now getting more attention and creating tension between a growing commercial spaceflight industry, which says that overly burdensome rules will ruin its tremendous progress, and some members of Congress, who say that it is time to oversee space travel more in line with the way commercial aviation is regulated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the FAA requires launch companies to protect people and property on the ground, the passengers are governed only by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, meaning they have to sign a waiver and be made aware of the risks, much like skydivers and bungee jumpers. According to the FAA\u2019s rules, passengers must be made aware, for example, that \u201cthe United States government has not certified the launch vehicle and any reentry vehicle as safe for carrying flight crew or spaceflight participants.\u201dThe industry says it is in a \u201clearning period,\u201d where it is experimenting with new kinds of rockets and spacecraft, and so relatively loose federal oversight and self-regulation are justified while the companies grow and develop new technologies. Regulations that would govern requirements for passengers, how pilots are trained, and the way spacecraft are designed and manufactured would harm an industry that is learning to grow and innovate, advocates say.Companies such as SpaceX have shown real progress \u2014 for example, restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade last year \u2014 and a crackdown would hamper its ability to innovate, according to the industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut some say the time has come for stricter regulation.With the congressionally mandated learning period in place until 2023, \u201cthat means despite commercial human spaceflight and space tourism soon expected to become emerging markets, the FAA\u2019s hands will be tied,\u201d Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said at a hearing last week. \u201cThey won\u2019t be able to regulate for the safety of the flying public. And you know I have serious concerns that some parts of the industry are talking about yet another extension of the \u2018learning period.\u2019 \u201dDeFazio is also taking aim at the FAA\u2019s dual mandate to both regulate and promote the space industry, which he said is a conflict of interest that could endanger the public. The FAA, he said in an interview, \u201cshould not be promoting commercial space. NASA can promote commercial space. The Commerce Department can promote commercial space. The FAA\u2019s job is to regulate in the public interest.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDeFazio, who spearheaded the effort to do away with the FAA promoting the commercial aviation industry after a Valujet crash in 1996 killed all 110 people on board, said at the hearing that scandals such as Boeing\u2019s 737 Max problems show what happens when regulators get too close to industry.\u201cThe concern is like when the FAA starts talking about Boeing as a customer, and we find undue influence over the inspectors,\u201d he said. \u201cWe find managers overruling people who found critical problems with the Maxes, and subsequently people died.\u201dLeading Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee disagree. In a letter last week to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Reps. Frank D. Lucas (Okla.) and Brian Babin (Tex.), whose district is outside of Houston, wrote that \u201cadditional regulation at this point would stifle innovation, export technology, talent, and tax dollars overseas, and undermine American leadership in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, argues that space is not air travel, a mature industry that it points out has \u201cwell over a century of technological development and 95 years of federal safety regulation.\u201d The FAA started regulating commercial aviation in the wake of World War I when a surplus of military airplanes was suddenly available for commercial use. The commercial space industry, advocates say, is different and only just beginning to show the kind of growth that many had hoped would come years earlier.SpaceX, for example, flew its first human spaceflight mission for NASA last year, and since then has completed two more. Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has flown people to space successfully three times, after a crash in 2014 that killed one of the pilots. And Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has sent 15 capsules into space, although none of them have carried people.\u201cCongress gave the commercial spaceflight industry an extended period to innovate new approaches to human spaceflight without being preemptively regulated,\u201d Karina Drees, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in a statement to The Post. The \u201clearning period\u201d is good for both industry and the FAA \u201cby enabling industry to design the world\u2019s leading space technologies without asking [the FAA] to write regulations absent relevant data.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRegulating commercial spaceflight first got Congress\u2019s attention in 2004, after a competition called the Ansari X Prize to be the first nongovernment entity to send a crew to space. The $10 million prize was won by SpaceShipOne, whose construction was financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. One congressman at the time accused the FAA of having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait till someone dies, then regulate.\u201d But the industry got the backing of Marion Blakey, then the FAA\u2019s administrator, who argued that the business of space and the \u201castropreneurs,\u201d as she called them, needed time and freedom to develop.Since then, the commercial human spaceflight industry has not really taken off, and Congress granted extensions to the learning period. As a result, the industry says, it has developed new technologies and is on the cusp of taking people to space on a regular basis.Given the ability to pursue new technologies, the industry has produced an array of vehicles \u2014 capsules that land on the ground or at sea; rockets that boost their payloads to orbit then fly back to Earth and land; rockets and a spaceplane that take off not from a launchpad but are dropped from carrier airplanes and then ignite their engines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe commercial space transportation industry in the United States is thriving at an unprecedented rate,\u201d said Wayne Monteith, the FAA\u2019s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He said the number of licensed launches has grown 400 percent over the past five years \u2014 from an average of one licensed launch every five weeks to one every five days. He said that although the agency is focused on safety, it views itself \u201cas a gateway, not a hurdle, a conduit for safe progress, not red tape that keeps progress sitting on the launchpad.\u201dStill, there has been tension. Musk complained on Twitter earlier this year that despite its efforts, the FAA was too burdensome when it came to regulating the test program SpaceX had developed for its Starship spacecraft. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dThe FAA opened an investigation after SpaceX launched a prototype spacecraft without authorization. But since then, the company has been in compliance, Monteith said at the hearing. \u201cWe would not have cleared them to start flight operations again had I not been confident that they had modified their procedures effectively and addressed the safety culture issues that we saw,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSafety, he said, was the FAA\u2019s main priority, a sentiment the industry says it shares as well.\u201cOur company\u2019s North Star is and always will be safety, a mind-set that we know is shared throughout the commercial space sector,\u201d Mike Moses, the president of Virgin Galactic, testified at the House hearing last week.The regulations currently in place \u201chave led the way for this explosive growth without compromising safety or innovation,\u201d he said. \u201cNow is the time to build on that solid foundation to ensure continued success, particularly as we now look to taking humans to space.\u201dWayne Hale, who was a senior executive at NASA when the space shuttle Columbia came apart in 2003, agrees, and said there should be different standards for purely commercial space missions and those funded by the government.\u201cNASA is using the taxpayers\u2019 money and sending people as part of their job to go to space,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, there\u2019s a different kind of moral imperative there than if you want to go to Brazil and zip-line through the forest. It\u2019s your own money and your own life and we ought to, within reason, let people do what they want to do.\u201d Now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some in Congress say it may be time for  the FAA to more closely regulate the commercial space industry. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6503",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/23/space-tourism-faa-regulation/",
        "text": "Want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane and hope the parachute opens? Be our guest. Or try bungee jumping? Sure, go for it. And, yes, feel free to strap yourself into that roller coaster and loop-de-loop until you turn green.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd, now, if you\u2019re a real adrenaline junkie, you are welcome to board a spacecraft and blast out of the atmosphere for a few minutes of weightlessness. If you can afford it \u2014 a big if, given the steep prices. No one is going to stop you. No local government ordinance. No state law. Not even the Federal Aviation Administration, which ensures only that the people and property on the ground are protected. Space tourists fly at their own risk.Story continues below advertisementBut now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some members of Congress say it may be time to revisit the FAA\u2019s rules and more closely regulate the commercial space industry. In the next year or so, more than a dozen private citizens are scheduled to launch on commercial spacecraft, opening up a new destination for the wealthy and laying the foundation for an industry that analysts say could be worth $8 billion by 2030.AdvertisementRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin are working toward flying paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital flights, while Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is gearing up to fly civilian astronauts to orbit in much more daring missions. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Bezos is set to fly on Blue Origin\u2019s first human spaceflight, scheduled for July 20. And Branson is also looking to fly soon as well, perhaps even before Bezos, although Virgin Galactic has not confirmed that.In a video produced for Blue Origin, founder Jeff Bezos talks his planned July 20 trip to space as part of the company's first crewed spaceflight. (Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos via Storyful)How to regulate those flights is now getting more attention and creating tension between a growing commercial spaceflight industry, which says that overly burdensome rules will ruin its tremendous progress, and some members of Congress, who say that it is time to oversee space travel more in line with the way commercial aviation is regulated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the FAA requires launch companies to protect people and property on the ground, the passengers are governed only by an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard, meaning they have to sign a waiver and be made aware of the risks, much like skydivers and bungee jumpers. According to the FAA\u2019s rules, passengers must be made aware, for example, that \u201cthe United States government has not certified the launch vehicle and any reentry vehicle as safe for carrying flight crew or spaceflight participants.\u201dThe industry says it is in a \u201clearning period,\u201d where it is experimenting with new kinds of rockets and spacecraft, and so relatively loose federal oversight and self-regulation are justified while the companies grow and develop new technologies. Regulations that would govern requirements for passengers, how pilots are trained, and the way spacecraft are designed and manufactured would harm an industry that is learning to grow and innovate, advocates say.Companies such as SpaceX have shown real progress \u2014 for example, restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade last year \u2014 and a crackdown would hamper its ability to innovate, according to the industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut some say the time has come for stricter regulation.With the congressionally mandated learning period in place until 2023, \u201cthat means despite commercial human spaceflight and space tourism soon expected to become emerging markets, the FAA\u2019s hands will be tied,\u201d Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said at a hearing last week. \u201cThey won\u2019t be able to regulate for the safety of the flying public. And you know I have serious concerns that some parts of the industry are talking about yet another extension of the \u2018learning period.\u2019 \u201dDeFazio is also taking aim at the FAA\u2019s dual mandate to both regulate and promote the space industry, which he said is a conflict of interest that could endanger the public. The FAA, he said in an interview, \u201cshould not be promoting commercial space. NASA can promote commercial space. The Commerce Department can promote commercial space. The FAA\u2019s job is to regulate in the public interest.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDeFazio, who spearheaded the effort to do away with the FAA promoting the commercial aviation industry after a Valujet crash in 1996 killed all 110 people on board, said at the hearing that scandals such as Boeing\u2019s 737 Max problems show what happens when regulators get too close to industry.\u201cThe concern is like when the FAA starts talking about Boeing as a customer, and we find undue influence over the inspectors,\u201d he said. \u201cWe find managers overruling people who found critical problems with the Maxes, and subsequently people died.\u201dLeading Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee disagree. In a letter last week to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Reps. Frank D. Lucas (Okla.) and Brian Babin (Tex.), whose district is outside of Houston, wrote that \u201cadditional regulation at this point would stifle innovation, export technology, talent, and tax dollars overseas, and undermine American leadership in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group, argues that space is not air travel, a mature industry that it points out has \u201cwell over a century of technological development and 95 years of federal safety regulation.\u201d The FAA started regulating commercial aviation in the wake of World War I when a surplus of military airplanes was suddenly available for commercial use. The commercial space industry, advocates say, is different and only just beginning to show the kind of growth that many had hoped would come years earlier.SpaceX, for example, flew its first human spaceflight mission for NASA last year, and since then has completed two more. Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic has flown people to space successfully three times, after a crash in 2014 that killed one of the pilots. And Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has sent 15 capsules into space, although none of them have carried people.\u201cCongress gave the commercial spaceflight industry an extended period to innovate new approaches to human spaceflight without being preemptively regulated,\u201d Karina Drees, the president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said in a statement to The Post. The \u201clearning period\u201d is good for both industry and the FAA \u201cby enabling industry to design the world\u2019s leading space technologies without asking [the FAA] to write regulations absent relevant data.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRegulating commercial spaceflight first got Congress\u2019s attention in 2004, after a competition called the Ansari X Prize to be the first nongovernment entity to send a crew to space. The $10 million prize was won by SpaceShipOne, whose construction was financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. One congressman at the time accused the FAA of having a \u201ctombstone mentality \u2014 wait till someone dies, then regulate.\u201d But the industry got the backing of Marion Blakey, then the FAA\u2019s administrator, who argued that the business of space and the \u201castropreneurs,\u201d as she called them, needed time and freedom to develop.Since then, the commercial human spaceflight industry has not really taken off, and Congress granted extensions to the learning period. As a result, the industry says, it has developed new technologies and is on the cusp of taking people to space on a regular basis.Given the ability to pursue new technologies, the industry has produced an array of vehicles \u2014 capsules that land on the ground or at sea; rockets that boost their payloads to orbit then fly back to Earth and land; rockets and a spaceplane that take off not from a launchpad but are dropped from carrier airplanes and then ignite their engines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe commercial space transportation industry in the United States is thriving at an unprecedented rate,\u201d said Wayne Monteith, the FAA\u2019s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He said the number of licensed launches has grown 400 percent over the past five years \u2014 from an average of one licensed launch every five weeks to one every five days. He said that although the agency is focused on safety, it views itself \u201cas a gateway, not a hurdle, a conduit for safe progress, not red tape that keeps progress sitting on the launchpad.\u201dStill, there has been tension. Musk complained on Twitter earlier this year that despite its efforts, the FAA was too burdensome when it came to regulating the test program SpaceX had developed for its Starship spacecraft. \u201cUnlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cTheir rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.\u201dThe FAA opened an investigation after SpaceX launched a prototype spacecraft without authorization. But since then, the company has been in compliance, Monteith said at the hearing. \u201cWe would not have cleared them to start flight operations again had I not been confident that they had modified their procedures effectively and addressed the safety culture issues that we saw,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSafety, he said, was the FAA\u2019s main priority, a sentiment the industry says it shares as well.\u201cOur company\u2019s North Star is and always will be safety, a mind-set that we know is shared throughout the commercial space sector,\u201d Mike Moses, the president of Virgin Galactic, testified at the House hearing last week.The regulations currently in place \u201chave led the way for this explosive growth without compromising safety or innovation,\u201d he said. \u201cNow is the time to build on that solid foundation to ensure continued success, particularly as we now look to taking humans to space.\u201dWayne Hale, who was a senior executive at NASA when the space shuttle Columbia came apart in 2003, agrees, and said there should be different standards for purely commercial space missions and those funded by the government.\u201cNASA is using the taxpayers\u2019 money and sending people as part of their job to go to space,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, there\u2019s a different kind of moral imperative there than if you want to go to Brazil and zip-line through the forest. It\u2019s your own money and your own life and we ought to, within reason, let people do what they want to do.\u201d Now that several companies are signing up wealthy people for flights to space, some in Congress say it may be time for  the FAA to more closely regulate the commercial space industry. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone? ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next? (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6504",
        "date": "2020-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/01/space-station-20-years-anniversary/",
        "text": "The small but persistent air leak was getting worse. Not life-threatening, NASA said, not by any means. But if you\u2019re on a spaceship, in orbit 250 miles above Earth, any leak is bad.The astronauts on board had isolated it to the Russian section of the International Space Station. But after several weeks, they still couldn\u2019t find the precise location of the tiny hole. Then last month, one of the cosmonauts did a little detective work, opening up a tea bag and, in the weightless environment of space, watching the leaves gently float toward the tiny breach, carried by the air flow slowly hissing out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. The batteries need to be replaced. It has to dodge micrometeorites \u2014 this year alone the station has had to maneuver three times to avoid getting hit. And sometimes it does get tagged, like the time in 2016 when a piece of space debris cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite the inherent dangers of space, the airless void, the radiation, the bits of debris shooting around in orbit several times faster than a speeding bullet, astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years.On Nov. 2, 2000, NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and his Russian counterparts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became the first crew to live and work on the station for an extended period, starting a streak that continues today. This month, NASA is celebrating the anniversary and the work that comes from the orbiting laboratory, science experiments that include beginning to 3-D print human organs, growing protein crystals and studying the effects of space on the human body.For years, the station has been not just one of humanity\u2019s greatest engineering feats \u2014 atop the architectural pantheon with the pyramids \u2014 but also a way for nations to forge unlikely alliances, while astronauts learned to live and work in space, and to prepare for extended missions to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut as the station continues to show its age, there is concern about what comes next and whether the United States will find itself in a position similar to 2011, when it retired its fleet of space shuttles without a backup ready. That left the space agency dependent on Russia to fly its astronauts to space until SpaceX ended an ignominious chapter earlier this year with the launch of its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program.Crew members from the first operational commercial mission to space, due to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, spoke on Nov. 8. (Reuters)Now the concern is that the station will one day need to come down \u2014 in what would be a carefully coordinated but spectacular crash into the ocean \u2014 before its successor is ready.Life in space: 50 astronauts in their own wordsNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in recent weeks has been sounding the alarm, telling Congress it needed to better fund the efforts and plan for the future.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe think about Apollo era, and as much as we loved it, it came to an end,\u201d he said during a recent Senate hearing. \u201cWe had a gap of about eight years before Space Shuttle. And then after Space Shuttle retired, we had another gap of about eight years before Commercial Crew. We want to make sure that there is no gap in low Earth orbit for the United States of America.\u201dAdvertisementThe next station used by U.S. astronauts likely won\u2019t be owned and operated by NASA but, rather, by a company like Axiom, which is constructing a commercial space station that it says would build on the ISS\u2019s legacy but cost less to assemble and be easier to maintain.On the outside, it would look a lot like the ISS, with habitation modules, solar arrays and docking ports. But the inside would be dramatically different, with the \u201clargest window observatory ever constructed for space.\u201dIn 2020, casting a ballot from space may be easier than casting one on Earth\u201cWe want the customers to have this great, comfortable, luxurious feel,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s co-founder, who led NASA\u2019s ISS program for a decade. \u201cWe\u2019re even looking at how we cook food on orbit \u2026 to make the food a little more tasty.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe interior is being designed by Philippe Starck, the French architect and designer, known for working on a wide range of projects, from furniture to yachts to corporate headquarters. His vision for the Axiom station is to \u201ccreate a nest, a comfortable and friendly egg, which would feature materials and colors stemmed from a fetal universe.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, a far cry from the ISS.Even if it wasn\u2019t designed by Starck, though, the ISS is magnificent, maybe even something of a miracle, a giant erector set assembled in orbit.\u201cThe space station is by far, I would say orders of magnitude, the most audacious construction project in space we\u2019ve ever contemplated,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao. \u201cAnd we actually pulled it off.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs if the vacuum of space didn\u2019t present enough challenges, \u201cwe were doing it with people who spoke different languages, had different national cultures and different political priorities,\u201d said Pam Melroy, a former NASA astronaut.\u201cAnybody can go see a launch and be inspired by the rocket,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I wish people could actually see the station for real in person because it's just an amazing engineering feat. It looks like a work of modern art in space as you get close to it.\u201dAdvertisementFrom the ground, it\u2019s not bad, either.NASA has a service called \u201cspot the station,\u201d where sky watchers can enter their email and location to be notified when the lab will fly overhead. On a clear sky, it\u2019s often the brightest spot in the sky, streaking like a spark on a long, flowing arc toward the horizon at 17,500 mph and lapping Earth every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisementPhotographers with quick trigger fingers sometimes catch it in silhouette, its giant solar arrays looking like the wings of some sci-fi spaceship.But for all the romanticism of spaceflight, the reality is that space exploration is a difficult and potentially deadly endeavor that requires resourcefulness and dedication by the astronauts and teams of experts in mission control monitoring the systems around-the-clock, every day.\u201cI mean, it may sound crazy, but it turns out it\u2019s really difficult to design and build a reliable life-support system,\u201d Chiao said. \u201cYou know, on both the Russian side and the American side, our life-support systems are always breaking down, always needing work, always needing spare parts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it\u2019s not air or ammonia leaks, or dodging space debris, there are sometimes problems with the plumbing.Like the time Chiao and his crew mates noticed \u201cthe most horrible smell you can imagine,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd we were like, \u2018What could that be?\u2019 And we\u2019re lifting up panels and looking behind panels. And then we lifted up the panels near the toilet, and these horrible green globules started coming out of the panel. And: \u2018Oh, my goodness.\u2019 \u201dIn September, NASA announced that it was sending a new toilet to the station. \u201cBoldly Go!\u201d read the headline on the news release. The cost of the newly designed toilet was $23 million, and it\u2019s smaller and lighter and better suited for women, while able to recycle more urine into drinking water. (Actual astronaut joke: \u201cToday\u2019s coffee is tomorrow\u2019s coffee!\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ISS is a laboratory where researchers get the rare opportunity to remove the one variable always present on Earth: gravity.\u201cThe ability to take away a variable is how science moves forward,\u201d said Eugene Boland, the chief scientist at Techshot, an Indiana research company. \u201cAnd so having a station for 20 years without the effect of continuous gravity is kind of one of those like mind-blowing experiences. As a scientist, that, you know, is that shiny new tool that most scientists will never see in their tool box.\u201dIf you 3-D print an organ on the ground, gravity collapses it like a souffle, so scientists have to reinforce, say, the walls of a heart\u2019s chamber. But then scientists started thinking about the weightless environment of space: \u201cWhat if we didn\u2019t have to add extra scaffolding to hold open cavities like you would have in an organ like the heart?\" Boland said. What if things stood on their own \u201cbecause there is no gravity\"?AdvertisementSome of the best research has been on the human body. Scott Kelly spent nearly a year in space, and researchers have been studying how he compares with his twin brother, Mark, for years. Scott Kelly had several physiological and chromosomal changes during his time in space, such as changes in his gene expression, and his telomeres, which protect the ends of chromosomes, lengthened in space.But the station is also a grand experiment itself, a study in human dynamics: What happens when you bring together representatives of many different countries, shoot them up into orbit and study them like lab rats to see how they get along?At first no one was sure how this was going to work out \u2014 Russians and French, Japanese and Germans, men, women, Black, White \u2014 a rotating cast of different languages and cultures stuffed together for months at a time on a spaceship no bigger than a football field.Twenty years on, the results are encouraging, with the space station not just a laboratory but also a tool of diplomacy. It\u2019s a revelation that \u201ckind of surprised people, me included,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda. \u201cThere are some significant tensions, especially between the U.S. and Russia right now. But in the space world, we\u2019ve got to get along somehow.\u201dAstronauts learn each other\u2019s languages and cultures. They often make sure to eat meals together, share music and stories. And so alongside science and exploration, international relations may be the legacy of the station \u2014 and some are pushing it for a Nobel Peace Prize.\u201cWhen you think about those 20 years of the people,\u201d said Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut, \u201cgay, straight, Muslim, Christian and Catholic, atheist, these different colors, these different lifestyles \u2014 all these people were able to come together and build something from one module to this international outpost the size of a football field without fighting, without warring. That is worthy of a peace prize.\u201dNot long after arriving on the space station 20 years ago, two members of the very first crew found themselves by one of the windows, taking a moment to watch Earth go by.They were two highly trained military officers, Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s Air Force. In another life, they were trained to kill each other.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201dNow, though, they were astronauts, not military officers, up on the space station looking down at an Earth without borders that, from their perspective, seemed peaceful. The space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. But astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years. Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6505",
        "date": "2020-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/01/space-station-20-years-anniversary/",
        "text": "The small but persistent air leak was getting worse. Not life-threatening, NASA said, not by any means. But if you\u2019re on a spaceship, in orbit 250 miles above Earth, any leak is bad.The astronauts on board had isolated it to the Russian section of the International Space Station. But after several weeks, they still couldn\u2019t find the precise location of the tiny hole. Then last month, one of the cosmonauts did a little detective work, opening up a tea bag and, in the weightless environment of space, watching the leaves gently float toward the tiny breach, carried by the air flow slowly hissing out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. The batteries need to be replaced. It has to dodge micrometeorites \u2014 this year alone the station has had to maneuver three times to avoid getting hit. And sometimes it does get tagged, like the time in 2016 when a piece of space debris cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite the inherent dangers of space, the airless void, the radiation, the bits of debris shooting around in orbit several times faster than a speeding bullet, astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years.On Nov. 2, 2000, NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and his Russian counterparts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became the first crew to live and work on the station for an extended period, starting a streak that continues today. This month, NASA is celebrating the anniversary and the work that comes from the orbiting laboratory, science experiments that include beginning to 3-D print human organs, growing protein crystals and studying the effects of space on the human body.For years, the station has been not just one of humanity\u2019s greatest engineering feats \u2014 atop the architectural pantheon with the pyramids \u2014 but also a way for nations to forge unlikely alliances, while astronauts learned to live and work in space, and to prepare for extended missions to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut as the station continues to show its age, there is concern about what comes next and whether the United States will find itself in a position similar to 2011, when it retired its fleet of space shuttles without a backup ready. That left the space agency dependent on Russia to fly its astronauts to space until SpaceX ended an ignominious chapter earlier this year with the launch of its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program.Crew members from the first operational commercial mission to space, due to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, spoke on Nov. 8. (Reuters)Now the concern is that the station will one day need to come down \u2014 in what would be a carefully coordinated but spectacular crash into the ocean \u2014 before its successor is ready.Life in space: 50 astronauts in their own wordsNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in recent weeks has been sounding the alarm, telling Congress it needed to better fund the efforts and plan for the future.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe think about Apollo era, and as much as we loved it, it came to an end,\u201d he said during a recent Senate hearing. \u201cWe had a gap of about eight years before Space Shuttle. And then after Space Shuttle retired, we had another gap of about eight years before Commercial Crew. We want to make sure that there is no gap in low Earth orbit for the United States of America.\u201dAdvertisementThe next station used by U.S. astronauts likely won\u2019t be owned and operated by NASA but, rather, by a company like Axiom, which is constructing a commercial space station that it says would build on the ISS\u2019s legacy but cost less to assemble and be easier to maintain.On the outside, it would look a lot like the ISS, with habitation modules, solar arrays and docking ports. But the inside would be dramatically different, with the \u201clargest window observatory ever constructed for space.\u201dIn 2020, casting a ballot from space may be easier than casting one on Earth\u201cWe want the customers to have this great, comfortable, luxurious feel,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s co-founder, who led NASA\u2019s ISS program for a decade. \u201cWe\u2019re even looking at how we cook food on orbit \u2026 to make the food a little more tasty.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe interior is being designed by Philippe Starck, the French architect and designer, known for working on a wide range of projects, from furniture to yachts to corporate headquarters. His vision for the Axiom station is to \u201ccreate a nest, a comfortable and friendly egg, which would feature materials and colors stemmed from a fetal universe.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, a far cry from the ISS.Even if it wasn\u2019t designed by Starck, though, the ISS is magnificent, maybe even something of a miracle, a giant erector set assembled in orbit.\u201cThe space station is by far, I would say orders of magnitude, the most audacious construction project in space we\u2019ve ever contemplated,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao. \u201cAnd we actually pulled it off.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs if the vacuum of space didn\u2019t present enough challenges, \u201cwe were doing it with people who spoke different languages, had different national cultures and different political priorities,\u201d said Pam Melroy, a former NASA astronaut.\u201cAnybody can go see a launch and be inspired by the rocket,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I wish people could actually see the station for real in person because it's just an amazing engineering feat. It looks like a work of modern art in space as you get close to it.\u201dAdvertisementFrom the ground, it\u2019s not bad, either.NASA has a service called \u201cspot the station,\u201d where sky watchers can enter their email and location to be notified when the lab will fly overhead. On a clear sky, it\u2019s often the brightest spot in the sky, streaking like a spark on a long, flowing arc toward the horizon at 17,500 mph and lapping Earth every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisementPhotographers with quick trigger fingers sometimes catch it in silhouette, its giant solar arrays looking like the wings of some sci-fi spaceship.But for all the romanticism of spaceflight, the reality is that space exploration is a difficult and potentially deadly endeavor that requires resourcefulness and dedication by the astronauts and teams of experts in mission control monitoring the systems around-the-clock, every day.\u201cI mean, it may sound crazy, but it turns out it\u2019s really difficult to design and build a reliable life-support system,\u201d Chiao said. \u201cYou know, on both the Russian side and the American side, our life-support systems are always breaking down, always needing work, always needing spare parts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it\u2019s not air or ammonia leaks, or dodging space debris, there are sometimes problems with the plumbing.Like the time Chiao and his crew mates noticed \u201cthe most horrible smell you can imagine,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd we were like, \u2018What could that be?\u2019 And we\u2019re lifting up panels and looking behind panels. And then we lifted up the panels near the toilet, and these horrible green globules started coming out of the panel. And: \u2018Oh, my goodness.\u2019 \u201dIn September, NASA announced that it was sending a new toilet to the station. \u201cBoldly Go!\u201d read the headline on the news release. The cost of the newly designed toilet was $23 million, and it\u2019s smaller and lighter and better suited for women, while able to recycle more urine into drinking water. (Actual astronaut joke: \u201cToday\u2019s coffee is tomorrow\u2019s coffee!\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ISS is a laboratory where researchers get the rare opportunity to remove the one variable always present on Earth: gravity.\u201cThe ability to take away a variable is how science moves forward,\u201d said Eugene Boland, the chief scientist at Techshot, an Indiana research company. \u201cAnd so having a station for 20 years without the effect of continuous gravity is kind of one of those like mind-blowing experiences. As a scientist, that, you know, is that shiny new tool that most scientists will never see in their tool box.\u201dIf you 3-D print an organ on the ground, gravity collapses it like a souffle, so scientists have to reinforce, say, the walls of a heart\u2019s chamber. But then scientists started thinking about the weightless environment of space: \u201cWhat if we didn\u2019t have to add extra scaffolding to hold open cavities like you would have in an organ like the heart?\" Boland said. What if things stood on their own \u201cbecause there is no gravity\"?AdvertisementSome of the best research has been on the human body. Scott Kelly spent nearly a year in space, and researchers have been studying how he compares with his twin brother, Mark, for years. Scott Kelly had several physiological and chromosomal changes during his time in space, such as changes in his gene expression, and his telomeres, which protect the ends of chromosomes, lengthened in space.But the station is also a grand experiment itself, a study in human dynamics: What happens when you bring together representatives of many different countries, shoot them up into orbit and study them like lab rats to see how they get along?At first no one was sure how this was going to work out \u2014 Russians and French, Japanese and Germans, men, women, Black, White \u2014 a rotating cast of different languages and cultures stuffed together for months at a time on a spaceship no bigger than a football field.Twenty years on, the results are encouraging, with the space station not just a laboratory but also a tool of diplomacy. It\u2019s a revelation that \u201ckind of surprised people, me included,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda. \u201cThere are some significant tensions, especially between the U.S. and Russia right now. But in the space world, we\u2019ve got to get along somehow.\u201dAstronauts learn each other\u2019s languages and cultures. They often make sure to eat meals together, share music and stories. And so alongside science and exploration, international relations may be the legacy of the station \u2014 and some are pushing it for a Nobel Peace Prize.\u201cWhen you think about those 20 years of the people,\u201d said Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut, \u201cgay, straight, Muslim, Christian and Catholic, atheist, these different colors, these different lifestyles \u2014 all these people were able to come together and build something from one module to this international outpost the size of a football field without fighting, without warring. That is worthy of a peace prize.\u201dNot long after arriving on the space station 20 years ago, two members of the very first crew found themselves by one of the windows, taking a moment to watch Earth go by.They were two highly trained military officers, Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s Air Force. In another life, they were trained to kill each other.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201dNow, though, they were astronauts, not military officers, up on the space station looking down at an Earth without borders that, from their perspective, seemed peaceful. The space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. But astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years. Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6506",
        "date": "2020-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/01/space-station-20-years-anniversary/",
        "text": "The small but persistent air leak was getting worse. Not life-threatening, NASA said, not by any means. But if you\u2019re on a spaceship, in orbit 250 miles above Earth, any leak is bad.The astronauts on board had isolated it to the Russian section of the International Space Station. But after several weeks, they still couldn\u2019t find the precise location of the tiny hole. Then last month, one of the cosmonauts did a little detective work, opening up a tea bag and, in the weightless environment of space, watching the leaves gently float toward the tiny breach, carried by the air flow slowly hissing out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. The batteries need to be replaced. It has to dodge micrometeorites \u2014 this year alone the station has had to maneuver three times to avoid getting hit. And sometimes it does get tagged, like the time in 2016 when a piece of space debris cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite the inherent dangers of space, the airless void, the radiation, the bits of debris shooting around in orbit several times faster than a speeding bullet, astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years.On Nov. 2, 2000, NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and his Russian counterparts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became the first crew to live and work on the station for an extended period, starting a streak that continues today. This month, NASA is celebrating the anniversary and the work that comes from the orbiting laboratory, science experiments that include beginning to 3-D print human organs, growing protein crystals and studying the effects of space on the human body.For years, the station has been not just one of humanity\u2019s greatest engineering feats \u2014 atop the architectural pantheon with the pyramids \u2014 but also a way for nations to forge unlikely alliances, while astronauts learned to live and work in space, and to prepare for extended missions to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut as the station continues to show its age, there is concern about what comes next and whether the United States will find itself in a position similar to 2011, when it retired its fleet of space shuttles without a backup ready. That left the space agency dependent on Russia to fly its astronauts to space until SpaceX ended an ignominious chapter earlier this year with the launch of its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program.Crew members from the first operational commercial mission to space, due to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, spoke on Nov. 8. (Reuters)Now the concern is that the station will one day need to come down \u2014 in what would be a carefully coordinated but spectacular crash into the ocean \u2014 before its successor is ready.Life in space: 50 astronauts in their own wordsNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in recent weeks has been sounding the alarm, telling Congress it needed to better fund the efforts and plan for the future.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe think about Apollo era, and as much as we loved it, it came to an end,\u201d he said during a recent Senate hearing. \u201cWe had a gap of about eight years before Space Shuttle. And then after Space Shuttle retired, we had another gap of about eight years before Commercial Crew. We want to make sure that there is no gap in low Earth orbit for the United States of America.\u201dAdvertisementThe next station used by U.S. astronauts likely won\u2019t be owned and operated by NASA but, rather, by a company like Axiom, which is constructing a commercial space station that it says would build on the ISS\u2019s legacy but cost less to assemble and be easier to maintain.On the outside, it would look a lot like the ISS, with habitation modules, solar arrays and docking ports. But the inside would be dramatically different, with the \u201clargest window observatory ever constructed for space.\u201dIn 2020, casting a ballot from space may be easier than casting one on Earth\u201cWe want the customers to have this great, comfortable, luxurious feel,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s co-founder, who led NASA\u2019s ISS program for a decade. \u201cWe\u2019re even looking at how we cook food on orbit \u2026 to make the food a little more tasty.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe interior is being designed by Philippe Starck, the French architect and designer, known for working on a wide range of projects, from furniture to yachts to corporate headquarters. His vision for the Axiom station is to \u201ccreate a nest, a comfortable and friendly egg, which would feature materials and colors stemmed from a fetal universe.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, a far cry from the ISS.Even if it wasn\u2019t designed by Starck, though, the ISS is magnificent, maybe even something of a miracle, a giant erector set assembled in orbit.\u201cThe space station is by far, I would say orders of magnitude, the most audacious construction project in space we\u2019ve ever contemplated,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao. \u201cAnd we actually pulled it off.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs if the vacuum of space didn\u2019t present enough challenges, \u201cwe were doing it with people who spoke different languages, had different national cultures and different political priorities,\u201d said Pam Melroy, a former NASA astronaut.\u201cAnybody can go see a launch and be inspired by the rocket,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I wish people could actually see the station for real in person because it's just an amazing engineering feat. It looks like a work of modern art in space as you get close to it.\u201dAdvertisementFrom the ground, it\u2019s not bad, either.NASA has a service called \u201cspot the station,\u201d where sky watchers can enter their email and location to be notified when the lab will fly overhead. On a clear sky, it\u2019s often the brightest spot in the sky, streaking like a spark on a long, flowing arc toward the horizon at 17,500 mph and lapping Earth every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisementPhotographers with quick trigger fingers sometimes catch it in silhouette, its giant solar arrays looking like the wings of some sci-fi spaceship.But for all the romanticism of spaceflight, the reality is that space exploration is a difficult and potentially deadly endeavor that requires resourcefulness and dedication by the astronauts and teams of experts in mission control monitoring the systems around-the-clock, every day.\u201cI mean, it may sound crazy, but it turns out it\u2019s really difficult to design and build a reliable life-support system,\u201d Chiao said. \u201cYou know, on both the Russian side and the American side, our life-support systems are always breaking down, always needing work, always needing spare parts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it\u2019s not air or ammonia leaks, or dodging space debris, there are sometimes problems with the plumbing.Like the time Chiao and his crew mates noticed \u201cthe most horrible smell you can imagine,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd we were like, \u2018What could that be?\u2019 And we\u2019re lifting up panels and looking behind panels. And then we lifted up the panels near the toilet, and these horrible green globules started coming out of the panel. And: \u2018Oh, my goodness.\u2019 \u201dIn September, NASA announced that it was sending a new toilet to the station. \u201cBoldly Go!\u201d read the headline on the news release. The cost of the newly designed toilet was $23 million, and it\u2019s smaller and lighter and better suited for women, while able to recycle more urine into drinking water. (Actual astronaut joke: \u201cToday\u2019s coffee is tomorrow\u2019s coffee!\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ISS is a laboratory where researchers get the rare opportunity to remove the one variable always present on Earth: gravity.\u201cThe ability to take away a variable is how science moves forward,\u201d said Eugene Boland, the chief scientist at Techshot, an Indiana research company. \u201cAnd so having a station for 20 years without the effect of continuous gravity is kind of one of those like mind-blowing experiences. As a scientist, that, you know, is that shiny new tool that most scientists will never see in their tool box.\u201dIf you 3-D print an organ on the ground, gravity collapses it like a souffle, so scientists have to reinforce, say, the walls of a heart\u2019s chamber. But then scientists started thinking about the weightless environment of space: \u201cWhat if we didn\u2019t have to add extra scaffolding to hold open cavities like you would have in an organ like the heart?\" Boland said. What if things stood on their own \u201cbecause there is no gravity\"?AdvertisementSome of the best research has been on the human body. Scott Kelly spent nearly a year in space, and researchers have been studying how he compares with his twin brother, Mark, for years. Scott Kelly had several physiological and chromosomal changes during his time in space, such as changes in his gene expression, and his telomeres, which protect the ends of chromosomes, lengthened in space.But the station is also a grand experiment itself, a study in human dynamics: What happens when you bring together representatives of many different countries, shoot them up into orbit and study them like lab rats to see how they get along?At first no one was sure how this was going to work out \u2014 Russians and French, Japanese and Germans, men, women, Black, White \u2014 a rotating cast of different languages and cultures stuffed together for months at a time on a spaceship no bigger than a football field.Twenty years on, the results are encouraging, with the space station not just a laboratory but also a tool of diplomacy. It\u2019s a revelation that \u201ckind of surprised people, me included,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda. \u201cThere are some significant tensions, especially between the U.S. and Russia right now. But in the space world, we\u2019ve got to get along somehow.\u201dAstronauts learn each other\u2019s languages and cultures. They often make sure to eat meals together, share music and stories. And so alongside science and exploration, international relations may be the legacy of the station \u2014 and some are pushing it for a Nobel Peace Prize.\u201cWhen you think about those 20 years of the people,\u201d said Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut, \u201cgay, straight, Muslim, Christian and Catholic, atheist, these different colors, these different lifestyles \u2014 all these people were able to come together and build something from one module to this international outpost the size of a football field without fighting, without warring. That is worthy of a peace prize.\u201dNot long after arriving on the space station 20 years ago, two members of the very first crew found themselves by one of the windows, taking a moment to watch Earth go by.They were two highly trained military officers, Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s Air Force. In another life, they were trained to kill each other.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201dNow, though, they were astronauts, not military officers, up on the space station looking down at an Earth without borders that, from their perspective, seemed peaceful. The space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. But astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years. Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6507",
        "date": "2020-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/01/space-station-20-years-anniversary/",
        "text": "The small but persistent air leak was getting worse. Not life-threatening, NASA said, not by any means. But if you\u2019re on a spaceship, in orbit 250 miles above Earth, any leak is bad.The astronauts on board had isolated it to the Russian section of the International Space Station. But after several weeks, they still couldn\u2019t find the precise location of the tiny hole. Then last month, one of the cosmonauts did a little detective work, opening up a tea bag and, in the weightless environment of space, watching the leaves gently float toward the tiny breach, carried by the air flow slowly hissing out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. The batteries need to be replaced. It has to dodge micrometeorites \u2014 this year alone the station has had to maneuver three times to avoid getting hit. And sometimes it does get tagged, like the time in 2016 when a piece of space debris cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite the inherent dangers of space, the airless void, the radiation, the bits of debris shooting around in orbit several times faster than a speeding bullet, astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years.On Nov. 2, 2000, NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and his Russian counterparts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became the first crew to live and work on the station for an extended period, starting a streak that continues today. This month, NASA is celebrating the anniversary and the work that comes from the orbiting laboratory, science experiments that include beginning to 3-D print human organs, growing protein crystals and studying the effects of space on the human body.For years, the station has been not just one of humanity\u2019s greatest engineering feats \u2014 atop the architectural pantheon with the pyramids \u2014 but also a way for nations to forge unlikely alliances, while astronauts learned to live and work in space, and to prepare for extended missions to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut as the station continues to show its age, there is concern about what comes next and whether the United States will find itself in a position similar to 2011, when it retired its fleet of space shuttles without a backup ready. That left the space agency dependent on Russia to fly its astronauts to space until SpaceX ended an ignominious chapter earlier this year with the launch of its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program.Crew members from the first operational commercial mission to space, due to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, spoke on Nov. 8. (Reuters)Now the concern is that the station will one day need to come down \u2014 in what would be a carefully coordinated but spectacular crash into the ocean \u2014 before its successor is ready.Life in space: 50 astronauts in their own wordsNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in recent weeks has been sounding the alarm, telling Congress it needed to better fund the efforts and plan for the future.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe think about Apollo era, and as much as we loved it, it came to an end,\u201d he said during a recent Senate hearing. \u201cWe had a gap of about eight years before Space Shuttle. And then after Space Shuttle retired, we had another gap of about eight years before Commercial Crew. We want to make sure that there is no gap in low Earth orbit for the United States of America.\u201dAdvertisementThe next station used by U.S. astronauts likely won\u2019t be owned and operated by NASA but, rather, by a company like Axiom, which is constructing a commercial space station that it says would build on the ISS\u2019s legacy but cost less to assemble and be easier to maintain.On the outside, it would look a lot like the ISS, with habitation modules, solar arrays and docking ports. But the inside would be dramatically different, with the \u201clargest window observatory ever constructed for space.\u201dIn 2020, casting a ballot from space may be easier than casting one on Earth\u201cWe want the customers to have this great, comfortable, luxurious feel,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s co-founder, who led NASA\u2019s ISS program for a decade. \u201cWe\u2019re even looking at how we cook food on orbit \u2026 to make the food a little more tasty.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe interior is being designed by Philippe Starck, the French architect and designer, known for working on a wide range of projects, from furniture to yachts to corporate headquarters. His vision for the Axiom station is to \u201ccreate a nest, a comfortable and friendly egg, which would feature materials and colors stemmed from a fetal universe.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, a far cry from the ISS.Even if it wasn\u2019t designed by Starck, though, the ISS is magnificent, maybe even something of a miracle, a giant erector set assembled in orbit.\u201cThe space station is by far, I would say orders of magnitude, the most audacious construction project in space we\u2019ve ever contemplated,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao. \u201cAnd we actually pulled it off.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs if the vacuum of space didn\u2019t present enough challenges, \u201cwe were doing it with people who spoke different languages, had different national cultures and different political priorities,\u201d said Pam Melroy, a former NASA astronaut.\u201cAnybody can go see a launch and be inspired by the rocket,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I wish people could actually see the station for real in person because it's just an amazing engineering feat. It looks like a work of modern art in space as you get close to it.\u201dAdvertisementFrom the ground, it\u2019s not bad, either.NASA has a service called \u201cspot the station,\u201d where sky watchers can enter their email and location to be notified when the lab will fly overhead. On a clear sky, it\u2019s often the brightest spot in the sky, streaking like a spark on a long, flowing arc toward the horizon at 17,500 mph and lapping Earth every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisementPhotographers with quick trigger fingers sometimes catch it in silhouette, its giant solar arrays looking like the wings of some sci-fi spaceship.But for all the romanticism of spaceflight, the reality is that space exploration is a difficult and potentially deadly endeavor that requires resourcefulness and dedication by the astronauts and teams of experts in mission control monitoring the systems around-the-clock, every day.\u201cI mean, it may sound crazy, but it turns out it\u2019s really difficult to design and build a reliable life-support system,\u201d Chiao said. \u201cYou know, on both the Russian side and the American side, our life-support systems are always breaking down, always needing work, always needing spare parts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it\u2019s not air or ammonia leaks, or dodging space debris, there are sometimes problems with the plumbing.Like the time Chiao and his crew mates noticed \u201cthe most horrible smell you can imagine,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd we were like, \u2018What could that be?\u2019 And we\u2019re lifting up panels and looking behind panels. And then we lifted up the panels near the toilet, and these horrible green globules started coming out of the panel. And: \u2018Oh, my goodness.\u2019 \u201dIn September, NASA announced that it was sending a new toilet to the station. \u201cBoldly Go!\u201d read the headline on the news release. The cost of the newly designed toilet was $23 million, and it\u2019s smaller and lighter and better suited for women, while able to recycle more urine into drinking water. (Actual astronaut joke: \u201cToday\u2019s coffee is tomorrow\u2019s coffee!\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ISS is a laboratory where researchers get the rare opportunity to remove the one variable always present on Earth: gravity.\u201cThe ability to take away a variable is how science moves forward,\u201d said Eugene Boland, the chief scientist at Techshot, an Indiana research company. \u201cAnd so having a station for 20 years without the effect of continuous gravity is kind of one of those like mind-blowing experiences. As a scientist, that, you know, is that shiny new tool that most scientists will never see in their tool box.\u201dIf you 3-D print an organ on the ground, gravity collapses it like a souffle, so scientists have to reinforce, say, the walls of a heart\u2019s chamber. But then scientists started thinking about the weightless environment of space: \u201cWhat if we didn\u2019t have to add extra scaffolding to hold open cavities like you would have in an organ like the heart?\" Boland said. What if things stood on their own \u201cbecause there is no gravity\"?AdvertisementSome of the best research has been on the human body. Scott Kelly spent nearly a year in space, and researchers have been studying how he compares with his twin brother, Mark, for years. Scott Kelly had several physiological and chromosomal changes during his time in space, such as changes in his gene expression, and his telomeres, which protect the ends of chromosomes, lengthened in space.But the station is also a grand experiment itself, a study in human dynamics: What happens when you bring together representatives of many different countries, shoot them up into orbit and study them like lab rats to see how they get along?At first no one was sure how this was going to work out \u2014 Russians and French, Japanese and Germans, men, women, Black, White \u2014 a rotating cast of different languages and cultures stuffed together for months at a time on a spaceship no bigger than a football field.Twenty years on, the results are encouraging, with the space station not just a laboratory but also a tool of diplomacy. It\u2019s a revelation that \u201ckind of surprised people, me included,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda. \u201cThere are some significant tensions, especially between the U.S. and Russia right now. But in the space world, we\u2019ve got to get along somehow.\u201dAstronauts learn each other\u2019s languages and cultures. They often make sure to eat meals together, share music and stories. And so alongside science and exploration, international relations may be the legacy of the station \u2014 and some are pushing it for a Nobel Peace Prize.\u201cWhen you think about those 20 years of the people,\u201d said Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut, \u201cgay, straight, Muslim, Christian and Catholic, atheist, these different colors, these different lifestyles \u2014 all these people were able to come together and build something from one module to this international outpost the size of a football field without fighting, without warring. That is worthy of a peace prize.\u201dNot long after arriving on the space station 20 years ago, two members of the very first crew found themselves by one of the windows, taking a moment to watch Earth go by.They were two highly trained military officers, Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s Air Force. In another life, they were trained to kill each other.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201dNow, though, they were astronauts, not military officers, up on the space station looking down at an Earth without borders that, from their perspective, seemed peaceful. The space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. But astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years. Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next? (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6508",
        "date": "2020-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/01/space-station-20-years-anniversary/",
        "text": "The small but persistent air leak was getting worse. Not life-threatening, NASA said, not by any means. But if you\u2019re on a spaceship, in orbit 250 miles above Earth, any leak is bad.The astronauts on board had isolated it to the Russian section of the International Space Station. But after several weeks, they still couldn\u2019t find the precise location of the tiny hole. Then last month, one of the cosmonauts did a little detective work, opening up a tea bag and, in the weightless environment of space, watching the leaves gently float toward the tiny breach, carried by the air flow slowly hissing out. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. The batteries need to be replaced. It has to dodge micrometeorites \u2014 this year alone the station has had to maneuver three times to avoid getting hit. And sometimes it does get tagged, like the time in 2016 when a piece of space debris cracked a window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite the inherent dangers of space, the airless void, the radiation, the bits of debris shooting around in orbit several times faster than a speeding bullet, astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years.On Nov. 2, 2000, NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and his Russian counterparts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev became the first crew to live and work on the station for an extended period, starting a streak that continues today. This month, NASA is celebrating the anniversary and the work that comes from the orbiting laboratory, science experiments that include beginning to 3-D print human organs, growing protein crystals and studying the effects of space on the human body.For years, the station has been not just one of humanity\u2019s greatest engineering feats \u2014 atop the architectural pantheon with the pyramids \u2014 but also a way for nations to forge unlikely alliances, while astronauts learned to live and work in space, and to prepare for extended missions to the moon and Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut as the station continues to show its age, there is concern about what comes next and whether the United States will find itself in a position similar to 2011, when it retired its fleet of space shuttles without a backup ready. That left the space agency dependent on Russia to fly its astronauts to space until SpaceX ended an ignominious chapter earlier this year with the launch of its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program.Crew members from the first operational commercial mission to space, due to fly SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, spoke on Nov. 8. (Reuters)Now the concern is that the station will one day need to come down \u2014 in what would be a carefully coordinated but spectacular crash into the ocean \u2014 before its successor is ready.Life in space: 50 astronauts in their own wordsNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in recent weeks has been sounding the alarm, telling Congress it needed to better fund the efforts and plan for the future.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe think about Apollo era, and as much as we loved it, it came to an end,\u201d he said during a recent Senate hearing. \u201cWe had a gap of about eight years before Space Shuttle. And then after Space Shuttle retired, we had another gap of about eight years before Commercial Crew. We want to make sure that there is no gap in low Earth orbit for the United States of America.\u201dAdvertisementThe next station used by U.S. astronauts likely won\u2019t be owned and operated by NASA but, rather, by a company like Axiom, which is constructing a commercial space station that it says would build on the ISS\u2019s legacy but cost less to assemble and be easier to maintain.On the outside, it would look a lot like the ISS, with habitation modules, solar arrays and docking ports. But the inside would be dramatically different, with the \u201clargest window observatory ever constructed for space.\u201dIn 2020, casting a ballot from space may be easier than casting one on Earth\u201cWe want the customers to have this great, comfortable, luxurious feel,\u201d said Mike Suffredini, Axiom\u2019s co-founder, who led NASA\u2019s ISS program for a decade. \u201cWe\u2019re even looking at how we cook food on orbit \u2026 to make the food a little more tasty.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe interior is being designed by Philippe Starck, the French architect and designer, known for working on a wide range of projects, from furniture to yachts to corporate headquarters. His vision for the Axiom station is to \u201ccreate a nest, a comfortable and friendly egg, which would feature materials and colors stemmed from a fetal universe.\u201dAdvertisementIn other words, a far cry from the ISS.Even if it wasn\u2019t designed by Starck, though, the ISS is magnificent, maybe even something of a miracle, a giant erector set assembled in orbit.\u201cThe space station is by far, I would say orders of magnitude, the most audacious construction project in space we\u2019ve ever contemplated,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao. \u201cAnd we actually pulled it off.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAs if the vacuum of space didn\u2019t present enough challenges, \u201cwe were doing it with people who spoke different languages, had different national cultures and different political priorities,\u201d said Pam Melroy, a former NASA astronaut.\u201cAnybody can go see a launch and be inspired by the rocket,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I wish people could actually see the station for real in person because it's just an amazing engineering feat. It looks like a work of modern art in space as you get close to it.\u201dAdvertisementFrom the ground, it\u2019s not bad, either.NASA has a service called \u201cspot the station,\u201d where sky watchers can enter their email and location to be notified when the lab will fly overhead. On a clear sky, it\u2019s often the brightest spot in the sky, streaking like a spark on a long, flowing arc toward the horizon at 17,500 mph and lapping Earth every 90 minutes.Story continues below advertisementPhotographers with quick trigger fingers sometimes catch it in silhouette, its giant solar arrays looking like the wings of some sci-fi spaceship.But for all the romanticism of spaceflight, the reality is that space exploration is a difficult and potentially deadly endeavor that requires resourcefulness and dedication by the astronauts and teams of experts in mission control monitoring the systems around-the-clock, every day.\u201cI mean, it may sound crazy, but it turns out it\u2019s really difficult to design and build a reliable life-support system,\u201d Chiao said. \u201cYou know, on both the Russian side and the American side, our life-support systems are always breaking down, always needing work, always needing spare parts.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf it\u2019s not air or ammonia leaks, or dodging space debris, there are sometimes problems with the plumbing.Like the time Chiao and his crew mates noticed \u201cthe most horrible smell you can imagine,\u201d he recalled. \u201cAnd we were like, \u2018What could that be?\u2019 And we\u2019re lifting up panels and looking behind panels. And then we lifted up the panels near the toilet, and these horrible green globules started coming out of the panel. And: \u2018Oh, my goodness.\u2019 \u201dIn September, NASA announced that it was sending a new toilet to the station. \u201cBoldly Go!\u201d read the headline on the news release. The cost of the newly designed toilet was $23 million, and it\u2019s smaller and lighter and better suited for women, while able to recycle more urine into drinking water. (Actual astronaut joke: \u201cToday\u2019s coffee is tomorrow\u2019s coffee!\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ISS is a laboratory where researchers get the rare opportunity to remove the one variable always present on Earth: gravity.\u201cThe ability to take away a variable is how science moves forward,\u201d said Eugene Boland, the chief scientist at Techshot, an Indiana research company. \u201cAnd so having a station for 20 years without the effect of continuous gravity is kind of one of those like mind-blowing experiences. As a scientist, that, you know, is that shiny new tool that most scientists will never see in their tool box.\u201dIf you 3-D print an organ on the ground, gravity collapses it like a souffle, so scientists have to reinforce, say, the walls of a heart\u2019s chamber. But then scientists started thinking about the weightless environment of space: \u201cWhat if we didn\u2019t have to add extra scaffolding to hold open cavities like you would have in an organ like the heart?\" Boland said. What if things stood on their own \u201cbecause there is no gravity\"?AdvertisementSome of the best research has been on the human body. Scott Kelly spent nearly a year in space, and researchers have been studying how he compares with his twin brother, Mark, for years. Scott Kelly had several physiological and chromosomal changes during his time in space, such as changes in his gene expression, and his telomeres, which protect the ends of chromosomes, lengthened in space.But the station is also a grand experiment itself, a study in human dynamics: What happens when you bring together representatives of many different countries, shoot them up into orbit and study them like lab rats to see how they get along?At first no one was sure how this was going to work out \u2014 Russians and French, Japanese and Germans, men, women, Black, White \u2014 a rotating cast of different languages and cultures stuffed together for months at a time on a spaceship no bigger than a football field.Twenty years on, the results are encouraging, with the space station not just a laboratory but also a tool of diplomacy. It\u2019s a revelation that \u201ckind of surprised people, me included,\u201d said former NASA astronaut Michael L\u00f3pez-Alegr\u00eda. \u201cThere are some significant tensions, especially between the U.S. and Russia right now. But in the space world, we\u2019ve got to get along somehow.\u201dAstronauts learn each other\u2019s languages and cultures. They often make sure to eat meals together, share music and stories. And so alongside science and exploration, international relations may be the legacy of the station \u2014 and some are pushing it for a Nobel Peace Prize.\u201cWhen you think about those 20 years of the people,\u201d said Leland Melvin, a former NASA astronaut, \u201cgay, straight, Muslim, Christian and Catholic, atheist, these different colors, these different lifestyles \u2014 all these people were able to come together and build something from one module to this international outpost the size of a football field without fighting, without warring. That is worthy of a peace prize.\u201dNot long after arriving on the space station 20 years ago, two members of the very first crew found themselves by one of the windows, taking a moment to watch Earth go by.They were two highly trained military officers, Bill Shepherd, a U.S. Navy SEAL, and Yuri Gidzenko, a fighter pilot from the Soviet Union\u2019s Air Force. In another life, they were trained to kill each other.When they passed over one of Gidzenko\u2019s military posts, he pointed it out to Shepherd. \u201cI was stationed here,\u201d Shepherd recalled him saying during a recent virtual reunion to commemorate the 20th anniversary.The world turned, and \u201chalf an orbit later,\u201d it was Shepherd\u2019s turn: \u201cI was a Navy SEAL, and we were here, here and here.\u201dNow, though, they were astronauts, not military officers, up on the space station looking down at an Earth without borders that, from their perspective, seemed peaceful. The space station is old. It leaks from time to time, requiring patches like the ones the astronauts installed last month. The toilet breaks. But astronauts have somehow managed to live aboard the outpost continuously for 20 years. Humans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6509",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/25/nasa-space-future-private/",
        "text": "The four astronauts who will fly on a SpaceX mission by the end of the year will be a bunch of private citizens with no space experience. One\u2019s a billionaire funding the mission; another is a health care provider. The third will be selected at random through a sweepstakes, and the last seat will go to the winner of a competition. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the new Space Age, you can buy a ticket to orbit \u2014 no need to have been a fighter pilot in the military or to compete against thousands of other overachievers for a coveted spot in NASA\u2019s astronaut corps.In fact, for this mission, the first composed entirely of private citizens, NASA is little more than a bystander. It does not own or operate the rocket that will blast the astronauts into space or the capsule they will live in for the few days they are scheduled to circle Earth every 90 minutes. NASA has no say in selecting the astronauts, and it will not train or outfit them \u2014 that will all be done by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe money to pay for the flight also will not come from NASA \u2014 or any other government account. The cost of the project is being borne by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has set it up as a fundraiser for St. Jude\u2019s Research Hospital and a promotional device for his business, Shift4Shop, which helps businesses set up websites and process payments.This is the new look of human space exploration as government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space travel continues to erode, redefining not only who owns the vehicles that carry people to space, but also the very nature of what an astronaut is and who gets to be one.And it comes as NASA confronts some of the largest changes it has faced since it was founded in 1958 when the United States\u2019 world standing was challenged by the Soviet Union\u2019s surprise launch of the first Sputnik into orbit. Now it is NASA\u2019s unrivaled primacy in human spaceflight that is under challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThanks to NASA\u2019s investments and guidance, the private space sector has grown tremendously \u2014 no entity more than SpaceX, which according to CNBC is now worth $74 billion. The commercial space industry is taking on ever more roles and responsibilities \u2014 flying not just cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, but even NASA\u2019s astronauts there. The private sector will launch some of the major components of the space station NASA wants to build in orbit around the moon, and private companies are developing the spacecraft that will fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA, which for decades has set the pace for the American space project, with an uncertain role, a development NASA\u2019s Safety Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warns could have consequences for years to come.The growth of companies like SpaceX has \"tremendous upside potential \u2014 and are accompanied by equally tremendous challenges for managing the risk of human space exploration,\u201d it said in its annual report, released last month. \u201cNASA leadership in human space exploration is still preeminent, but the agency\u2019s role is evolving with critical implications for how risk and safety will be managed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo far, NASA has done well \u201cas it shifts from principally executing its programs and missions to commercially acquiring significant key elements and services,\u201d it said. But as the agency continues to evolve, \u201cNASA must make some strategically critical decisions, based on deliberate and thorough consideration, that are necessary because of their momentous consequences for the future of human space exploration and, in particular, for the management of the attendant risks.\u201dIn an interview, Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said the agency is well aware of how its identity and role are changing, and he likened the agency\u2019s role to how the U.S. government fostered the commercial aviation industry in the early 20th century.NASA\u2019s predecessor, NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, \u201cdid research, technology development to initially support defense \u2026 but also later on supporting a burgeoning commercial aircraft industry and aviation industry,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that may be how we evolve, moving forward on the space side. We\u2019re going to do the research and the technology development and be the enablers for continuing to support the commercial space sector.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has not ceded all ground. It still leads major exploration and science programs that no company could match. Last week, for example, it landed a rover the size of a car on Mars, hitting a precise landing target after traveling nearly 300 million miles. Later this year, it is scheduled to launch the James Webb telescope, which is designed to look back in time to the origins of the universe. And it also recently snagged a sample of rocks and soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth to return them to Earth for study.\u201cNASA works,\" Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after the Perseverance landed safely on Mars. \u201cWhen we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\u201d\"NASA works. When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\"@NASAJPL chief engineer and landing veteran Rob Manning celebrates #NASAPersevere's successful #CountdownToMars: pic.twitter.com/Bo74pC4xLO\u2014 NASA (@NASA) February 18, 2021\n\nThose big, daring, push-the-envelope missions is where NASA\u2019s future lies, agency and industry officials agree. Not in looking for financial gain, but blazing the trail and opening new frontiers, and then allowing private industry to take over in the way homesteaders expanded into the West.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin NASA, there is still some resistance to that paradigm shift. \u201cNASA feels like that\u2019s our domain,\u201d said Phil McAlister, NASA\u2019s director of commercial spaceflight. \u201cAnd my response is, the solar system is a big place. We at NASA should always be doing the next thing, the thing where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.\u201dJan Worner, the outgoing general director of the European Space Agency, agrees. \u201cI believe space agencies have to change,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIf you are fixed permanently to the same thing that you did in the past, you will lose.\u201dBut NASA officials are concerned that much of the future workforce is going to be attracted to a growing number of commercial companies doing amazing things. There is Planet, for example, which is putting up constellations of small satellites that take an image of Earth every day. Or Relativity Space, which is 3-D printing entire rockets. Or Axiom Space, which is building a commercial space station. Or Astrobotic, which intends to land a spacecraft on the moon later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA faces, then, is an urgent one: \u201cHow do you maintain that NASA technical expertise?\u201d Jurczyk said.The agency does not know.\u201cIt may mean people are hiring more midcareer from industry or having people come to NASA, then go to industry, and come back. Or a different model where maybe you\u2019re not coming to NASA and staying for your 35-, 40-year career,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re still thinking through that.\u201dThe workforce predicament was not on NASA\u2019s mind when it embarked on this road in 2006. That is when it awarded relatively small contracts to see whether the private sector could develop spacecraft capable of taking cargo to the International Space Station. At the time, SpaceX, which won an award, was largely unknown and on the verge of bankruptcy, with just one successful flight to orbit for its Falcon 1 rocket after three failures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOutside of what Musk once called \u201cthe weird rebels within NASA,\u201d few thought the program would work. It was not taken seriously by the mainstream aerospace industry or even by NASA\u2019s leadership.\u201cLet\u2019s just give these annoying commercial people enough money so that they can fail, and we can say, \u2018That was dumb. We don\u2019t have to do that again,'\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post.But it did work. And now NASA is relying on the private sector not only to deliver supplies and science experiments to the surface of the moon, but also its most precious cargo \u2014 its astronauts \u2014 there. Turning over human spaceflight to the private sector was a line many thought NASA would never cross. But last year, SpaceX successfully flew two crewed missions to the space station, and Boeing, the other company with the human spaceflight contract, is hoping to fly its first later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has been eager to build on that success and hire private-sector companies to build and operate the spacecraft that would take astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.And while NASA\u2019s flagship rocket, the Space Launch System, would be used to fly astronauts to the moon and be the most powerful ever built, it has suffered all sorts of cost overruns and technical delays. A test of its engines that was supposed to last as long as eight minutes was cut short after just one because of a technical problem. And the redo of the test was recently postponed by NASA, which said it was looking into a problem with one of the valves.Recently, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the rocket would reach $27 billion through 2025. That enormous cost has outraged critics of the space program, who have derided the effort as little more than a jobs program for select congressional districts and dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201dRecently, the Bloomberg editorial board called for the Biden administration to \u201cscrap the Space Launch System,\u201d asking, \u201cWhy is the U.S. government building a space rocket?\u201d\u201cNo doubt, the era of government spacefaring had its glories,\u201d the editorial read. \u201cBut space is now a $424 billion business, with U.S. companies at its forefront. The new administration should embrace this revolution \u2014 and bring the power of private enterprise to bear in crossing the next cosmic frontier.\u201dSome high-level NASA officials, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have indicated that if the commercial sector can develop lower-cost alternatives, the space agency would have no choice but to consider those instead. NASA has already shifted one major mission from SLS \u2014 recently it announced that a commercial rocket, and not SLS, as Congress had mandated for years, would launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft that would study Jupiter\u2019s moon.That alone would save NASA \u201cover $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket,\u201d according to NASA\u2019s fiscal year 2021 budget request.NASA has always relied on contractors to build its hardware \u2014 from the Apollo lunar module built by Grumman to the space shuttle, built largely by North American Rockwell. But NASA defined the precise requirements, took ownership of the spacecraft and operated them. That is not the case with many of its programs today. It works alongside the companies to validate their rockets and spacecraft and ensure they meet the agency\u2019s safety standards. But the hardware and the launch procedures remain in private hands.The private astronaut mission, dubbed Inspiration4, marks the next iteration in this transition. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Shift4Shop, a payments technology company, paid an undisclosed sum for the SpaceX flight. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot, will occupy one of the four seats. Another will go to Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The third is to be raffled off as part of a fundraising effort for the hospital. And the fourth seat will go to the winner of a competition among entrepreneurs who use Shift4Shop\u2019s platform. Isaacman has donated $100 million to St. Jude and hopes the fundraising effort will match that.\u201cWe will, of course, coordinate this with NASA,\u201d Musk said on a call with reporters earlier this month to discuss the mission. \u201cNASA has been briefed on this and is supportive.\u201dBut it will be SpaceX and the crew that will determine the flight parameters and training requirements, not NASA. \u201cWherever you want to go, we\u2019ll take you there,\u201d Musk said to Isaacman on the call.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThat mission will be followed by a second flight made up entirely of civilians \u2014 three wealthy business executives, who are each paying $55 million, in addition to the commander, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom. Instead of spending a few days inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which has about as much interior room as a large SUV, they will fly to the International Space Station. They will spend eight days there before flying back.Ultimately, Axiom\u2019s goal is even bigger \u2014 to build a space station of its own. The ISS is getting old and will need to come down at some point. NASA has said that it would eventually get out of the space station business \u2014 and outsource that to the private sector as well. Axiom is one of the leading candidates to build the successor.If Axiom is successful, it could then proceed to its ultimate goal: charter missions of private citizens, flying on private rockets to a private space station with little to no involvement from NASA.Those flights would join the suborbital tourism flights to the edge of space that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin hope to provide, as early as this year. That would mark the culmination of the long-held dream of opening space to the masses, and build on the first flight of private citizens to space \u2014 the flight of SpaceShipOne, a piloted space plane, in 2004.After that flight, the space plane\u2019s designer, Burt Rutan, held up a sign that he hoped would portend a new space age, one where human spaceflight was not dependent on NASA.\u201cSpaceShipOne,\" it read. \u201cGovernment Zero.\u201d Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA with an uncertain role. As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6510",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/25/nasa-space-future-private/",
        "text": "The four astronauts who will fly on a SpaceX mission by the end of the year will be a bunch of private citizens with no space experience. One\u2019s a billionaire funding the mission; another is a health care provider. The third will be selected at random through a sweepstakes, and the last seat will go to the winner of a competition. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the new Space Age, you can buy a ticket to orbit \u2014 no need to have been a fighter pilot in the military or to compete against thousands of other overachievers for a coveted spot in NASA\u2019s astronaut corps.In fact, for this mission, the first composed entirely of private citizens, NASA is little more than a bystander. It does not own or operate the rocket that will blast the astronauts into space or the capsule they will live in for the few days they are scheduled to circle Earth every 90 minutes. NASA has no say in selecting the astronauts, and it will not train or outfit them \u2014 that will all be done by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe money to pay for the flight also will not come from NASA \u2014 or any other government account. The cost of the project is being borne by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has set it up as a fundraiser for St. Jude\u2019s Research Hospital and a promotional device for his business, Shift4Shop, which helps businesses set up websites and process payments.This is the new look of human space exploration as government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space travel continues to erode, redefining not only who owns the vehicles that carry people to space, but also the very nature of what an astronaut is and who gets to be one.And it comes as NASA confronts some of the largest changes it has faced since it was founded in 1958 when the United States\u2019 world standing was challenged by the Soviet Union\u2019s surprise launch of the first Sputnik into orbit. Now it is NASA\u2019s unrivaled primacy in human spaceflight that is under challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThanks to NASA\u2019s investments and guidance, the private space sector has grown tremendously \u2014 no entity more than SpaceX, which according to CNBC is now worth $74 billion. The commercial space industry is taking on ever more roles and responsibilities \u2014 flying not just cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, but even NASA\u2019s astronauts there. The private sector will launch some of the major components of the space station NASA wants to build in orbit around the moon, and private companies are developing the spacecraft that will fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA, which for decades has set the pace for the American space project, with an uncertain role, a development NASA\u2019s Safety Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warns could have consequences for years to come.The growth of companies like SpaceX has \"tremendous upside potential \u2014 and are accompanied by equally tremendous challenges for managing the risk of human space exploration,\u201d it said in its annual report, released last month. \u201cNASA leadership in human space exploration is still preeminent, but the agency\u2019s role is evolving with critical implications for how risk and safety will be managed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo far, NASA has done well \u201cas it shifts from principally executing its programs and missions to commercially acquiring significant key elements and services,\u201d it said. But as the agency continues to evolve, \u201cNASA must make some strategically critical decisions, based on deliberate and thorough consideration, that are necessary because of their momentous consequences for the future of human space exploration and, in particular, for the management of the attendant risks.\u201dIn an interview, Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said the agency is well aware of how its identity and role are changing, and he likened the agency\u2019s role to how the U.S. government fostered the commercial aviation industry in the early 20th century.NASA\u2019s predecessor, NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, \u201cdid research, technology development to initially support defense \u2026 but also later on supporting a burgeoning commercial aircraft industry and aviation industry,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that may be how we evolve, moving forward on the space side. We\u2019re going to do the research and the technology development and be the enablers for continuing to support the commercial space sector.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has not ceded all ground. It still leads major exploration and science programs that no company could match. Last week, for example, it landed a rover the size of a car on Mars, hitting a precise landing target after traveling nearly 300 million miles. Later this year, it is scheduled to launch the James Webb telescope, which is designed to look back in time to the origins of the universe. And it also recently snagged a sample of rocks and soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth to return them to Earth for study.\u201cNASA works,\" Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after the Perseverance landed safely on Mars. \u201cWhen we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\u201d\"NASA works. When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\"@NASAJPL chief engineer and landing veteran Rob Manning celebrates #NASAPersevere's successful #CountdownToMars: pic.twitter.com/Bo74pC4xLO\u2014 NASA (@NASA) February 18, 2021\n\nThose big, daring, push-the-envelope missions is where NASA\u2019s future lies, agency and industry officials agree. Not in looking for financial gain, but blazing the trail and opening new frontiers, and then allowing private industry to take over in the way homesteaders expanded into the West.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin NASA, there is still some resistance to that paradigm shift. \u201cNASA feels like that\u2019s our domain,\u201d said Phil McAlister, NASA\u2019s director of commercial spaceflight. \u201cAnd my response is, the solar system is a big place. We at NASA should always be doing the next thing, the thing where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.\u201dJan Worner, the outgoing general director of the European Space Agency, agrees. \u201cI believe space agencies have to change,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIf you are fixed permanently to the same thing that you did in the past, you will lose.\u201dBut NASA officials are concerned that much of the future workforce is going to be attracted to a growing number of commercial companies doing amazing things. There is Planet, for example, which is putting up constellations of small satellites that take an image of Earth every day. Or Relativity Space, which is 3-D printing entire rockets. Or Axiom Space, which is building a commercial space station. Or Astrobotic, which intends to land a spacecraft on the moon later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA faces, then, is an urgent one: \u201cHow do you maintain that NASA technical expertise?\u201d Jurczyk said.The agency does not know.\u201cIt may mean people are hiring more midcareer from industry or having people come to NASA, then go to industry, and come back. Or a different model where maybe you\u2019re not coming to NASA and staying for your 35-, 40-year career,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re still thinking through that.\u201dThe workforce predicament was not on NASA\u2019s mind when it embarked on this road in 2006. That is when it awarded relatively small contracts to see whether the private sector could develop spacecraft capable of taking cargo to the International Space Station. At the time, SpaceX, which won an award, was largely unknown and on the verge of bankruptcy, with just one successful flight to orbit for its Falcon 1 rocket after three failures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOutside of what Musk once called \u201cthe weird rebels within NASA,\u201d few thought the program would work. It was not taken seriously by the mainstream aerospace industry or even by NASA\u2019s leadership.\u201cLet\u2019s just give these annoying commercial people enough money so that they can fail, and we can say, \u2018That was dumb. We don\u2019t have to do that again,'\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post.But it did work. And now NASA is relying on the private sector not only to deliver supplies and science experiments to the surface of the moon, but also its most precious cargo \u2014 its astronauts \u2014 there. Turning over human spaceflight to the private sector was a line many thought NASA would never cross. But last year, SpaceX successfully flew two crewed missions to the space station, and Boeing, the other company with the human spaceflight contract, is hoping to fly its first later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has been eager to build on that success and hire private-sector companies to build and operate the spacecraft that would take astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.And while NASA\u2019s flagship rocket, the Space Launch System, would be used to fly astronauts to the moon and be the most powerful ever built, it has suffered all sorts of cost overruns and technical delays. A test of its engines that was supposed to last as long as eight minutes was cut short after just one because of a technical problem. And the redo of the test was recently postponed by NASA, which said it was looking into a problem with one of the valves.Recently, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the rocket would reach $27 billion through 2025. That enormous cost has outraged critics of the space program, who have derided the effort as little more than a jobs program for select congressional districts and dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201dRecently, the Bloomberg editorial board called for the Biden administration to \u201cscrap the Space Launch System,\u201d asking, \u201cWhy is the U.S. government building a space rocket?\u201d\u201cNo doubt, the era of government spacefaring had its glories,\u201d the editorial read. \u201cBut space is now a $424 billion business, with U.S. companies at its forefront. The new administration should embrace this revolution \u2014 and bring the power of private enterprise to bear in crossing the next cosmic frontier.\u201dSome high-level NASA officials, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have indicated that if the commercial sector can develop lower-cost alternatives, the space agency would have no choice but to consider those instead. NASA has already shifted one major mission from SLS \u2014 recently it announced that a commercial rocket, and not SLS, as Congress had mandated for years, would launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft that would study Jupiter\u2019s moon.That alone would save NASA \u201cover $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket,\u201d according to NASA\u2019s fiscal year 2021 budget request.NASA has always relied on contractors to build its hardware \u2014 from the Apollo lunar module built by Grumman to the space shuttle, built largely by North American Rockwell. But NASA defined the precise requirements, took ownership of the spacecraft and operated them. That is not the case with many of its programs today. It works alongside the companies to validate their rockets and spacecraft and ensure they meet the agency\u2019s safety standards. But the hardware and the launch procedures remain in private hands.The private astronaut mission, dubbed Inspiration4, marks the next iteration in this transition. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Shift4Shop, a payments technology company, paid an undisclosed sum for the SpaceX flight. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot, will occupy one of the four seats. Another will go to Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The third is to be raffled off as part of a fundraising effort for the hospital. And the fourth seat will go to the winner of a competition among entrepreneurs who use Shift4Shop\u2019s platform. Isaacman has donated $100 million to St. Jude and hopes the fundraising effort will match that.\u201cWe will, of course, coordinate this with NASA,\u201d Musk said on a call with reporters earlier this month to discuss the mission. \u201cNASA has been briefed on this and is supportive.\u201dBut it will be SpaceX and the crew that will determine the flight parameters and training requirements, not NASA. \u201cWherever you want to go, we\u2019ll take you there,\u201d Musk said to Isaacman on the call.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThat mission will be followed by a second flight made up entirely of civilians \u2014 three wealthy business executives, who are each paying $55 million, in addition to the commander, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom. Instead of spending a few days inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which has about as much interior room as a large SUV, they will fly to the International Space Station. They will spend eight days there before flying back.Ultimately, Axiom\u2019s goal is even bigger \u2014 to build a space station of its own. The ISS is getting old and will need to come down at some point. NASA has said that it would eventually get out of the space station business \u2014 and outsource that to the private sector as well. Axiom is one of the leading candidates to build the successor.If Axiom is successful, it could then proceed to its ultimate goal: charter missions of private citizens, flying on private rockets to a private space station with little to no involvement from NASA.Those flights would join the suborbital tourism flights to the edge of space that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin hope to provide, as early as this year. That would mark the culmination of the long-held dream of opening space to the masses, and build on the first flight of private citizens to space \u2014 the flight of SpaceShipOne, a piloted space plane, in 2004.After that flight, the space plane\u2019s designer, Burt Rutan, held up a sign that he hoped would portend a new space age, one where human spaceflight was not dependent on NASA.\u201cSpaceShipOne,\" it read. \u201cGovernment Zero.\u201d Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA with an uncertain role. As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6511",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/25/nasa-space-future-private/",
        "text": "The four astronauts who will fly on a SpaceX mission by the end of the year will be a bunch of private citizens with no space experience. One\u2019s a billionaire funding the mission; another is a health care provider. The third will be selected at random through a sweepstakes, and the last seat will go to the winner of a competition. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the new Space Age, you can buy a ticket to orbit \u2014 no need to have been a fighter pilot in the military or to compete against thousands of other overachievers for a coveted spot in NASA\u2019s astronaut corps.In fact, for this mission, the first composed entirely of private citizens, NASA is little more than a bystander. It does not own or operate the rocket that will blast the astronauts into space or the capsule they will live in for the few days they are scheduled to circle Earth every 90 minutes. NASA has no say in selecting the astronauts, and it will not train or outfit them \u2014 that will all be done by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe money to pay for the flight also will not come from NASA \u2014 or any other government account. The cost of the project is being borne by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has set it up as a fundraiser for St. Jude\u2019s Research Hospital and a promotional device for his business, Shift4Shop, which helps businesses set up websites and process payments.This is the new look of human space exploration as government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space travel continues to erode, redefining not only who owns the vehicles that carry people to space, but also the very nature of what an astronaut is and who gets to be one.And it comes as NASA confronts some of the largest changes it has faced since it was founded in 1958 when the United States\u2019 world standing was challenged by the Soviet Union\u2019s surprise launch of the first Sputnik into orbit. Now it is NASA\u2019s unrivaled primacy in human spaceflight that is under challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThanks to NASA\u2019s investments and guidance, the private space sector has grown tremendously \u2014 no entity more than SpaceX, which according to CNBC is now worth $74 billion. The commercial space industry is taking on ever more roles and responsibilities \u2014 flying not just cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, but even NASA\u2019s astronauts there. The private sector will launch some of the major components of the space station NASA wants to build in orbit around the moon, and private companies are developing the spacecraft that will fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA, which for decades has set the pace for the American space project, with an uncertain role, a development NASA\u2019s Safety Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warns could have consequences for years to come.The growth of companies like SpaceX has \"tremendous upside potential \u2014 and are accompanied by equally tremendous challenges for managing the risk of human space exploration,\u201d it said in its annual report, released last month. \u201cNASA leadership in human space exploration is still preeminent, but the agency\u2019s role is evolving with critical implications for how risk and safety will be managed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo far, NASA has done well \u201cas it shifts from principally executing its programs and missions to commercially acquiring significant key elements and services,\u201d it said. But as the agency continues to evolve, \u201cNASA must make some strategically critical decisions, based on deliberate and thorough consideration, that are necessary because of their momentous consequences for the future of human space exploration and, in particular, for the management of the attendant risks.\u201dIn an interview, Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said the agency is well aware of how its identity and role are changing, and he likened the agency\u2019s role to how the U.S. government fostered the commercial aviation industry in the early 20th century.NASA\u2019s predecessor, NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, \u201cdid research, technology development to initially support defense \u2026 but also later on supporting a burgeoning commercial aircraft industry and aviation industry,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that may be how we evolve, moving forward on the space side. We\u2019re going to do the research and the technology development and be the enablers for continuing to support the commercial space sector.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has not ceded all ground. It still leads major exploration and science programs that no company could match. Last week, for example, it landed a rover the size of a car on Mars, hitting a precise landing target after traveling nearly 300 million miles. Later this year, it is scheduled to launch the James Webb telescope, which is designed to look back in time to the origins of the universe. And it also recently snagged a sample of rocks and soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth to return them to Earth for study.\u201cNASA works,\" Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after the Perseverance landed safely on Mars. \u201cWhen we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\u201d\"NASA works. When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\"@NASAJPL chief engineer and landing veteran Rob Manning celebrates #NASAPersevere's successful #CountdownToMars: pic.twitter.com/Bo74pC4xLO\u2014 NASA (@NASA) February 18, 2021\n\nThose big, daring, push-the-envelope missions is where NASA\u2019s future lies, agency and industry officials agree. Not in looking for financial gain, but blazing the trail and opening new frontiers, and then allowing private industry to take over in the way homesteaders expanded into the West.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin NASA, there is still some resistance to that paradigm shift. \u201cNASA feels like that\u2019s our domain,\u201d said Phil McAlister, NASA\u2019s director of commercial spaceflight. \u201cAnd my response is, the solar system is a big place. We at NASA should always be doing the next thing, the thing where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.\u201dJan Worner, the outgoing general director of the European Space Agency, agrees. \u201cI believe space agencies have to change,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIf you are fixed permanently to the same thing that you did in the past, you will lose.\u201dBut NASA officials are concerned that much of the future workforce is going to be attracted to a growing number of commercial companies doing amazing things. There is Planet, for example, which is putting up constellations of small satellites that take an image of Earth every day. Or Relativity Space, which is 3-D printing entire rockets. Or Axiom Space, which is building a commercial space station. Or Astrobotic, which intends to land a spacecraft on the moon later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA faces, then, is an urgent one: \u201cHow do you maintain that NASA technical expertise?\u201d Jurczyk said.The agency does not know.\u201cIt may mean people are hiring more midcareer from industry or having people come to NASA, then go to industry, and come back. Or a different model where maybe you\u2019re not coming to NASA and staying for your 35-, 40-year career,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re still thinking through that.\u201dThe workforce predicament was not on NASA\u2019s mind when it embarked on this road in 2006. That is when it awarded relatively small contracts to see whether the private sector could develop spacecraft capable of taking cargo to the International Space Station. At the time, SpaceX, which won an award, was largely unknown and on the verge of bankruptcy, with just one successful flight to orbit for its Falcon 1 rocket after three failures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOutside of what Musk once called \u201cthe weird rebels within NASA,\u201d few thought the program would work. It was not taken seriously by the mainstream aerospace industry or even by NASA\u2019s leadership.\u201cLet\u2019s just give these annoying commercial people enough money so that they can fail, and we can say, \u2018That was dumb. We don\u2019t have to do that again,'\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post.But it did work. And now NASA is relying on the private sector not only to deliver supplies and science experiments to the surface of the moon, but also its most precious cargo \u2014 its astronauts \u2014 there. Turning over human spaceflight to the private sector was a line many thought NASA would never cross. But last year, SpaceX successfully flew two crewed missions to the space station, and Boeing, the other company with the human spaceflight contract, is hoping to fly its first later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has been eager to build on that success and hire private-sector companies to build and operate the spacecraft that would take astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.And while NASA\u2019s flagship rocket, the Space Launch System, would be used to fly astronauts to the moon and be the most powerful ever built, it has suffered all sorts of cost overruns and technical delays. A test of its engines that was supposed to last as long as eight minutes was cut short after just one because of a technical problem. And the redo of the test was recently postponed by NASA, which said it was looking into a problem with one of the valves.Recently, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the rocket would reach $27 billion through 2025. That enormous cost has outraged critics of the space program, who have derided the effort as little more than a jobs program for select congressional districts and dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201dRecently, the Bloomberg editorial board called for the Biden administration to \u201cscrap the Space Launch System,\u201d asking, \u201cWhy is the U.S. government building a space rocket?\u201d\u201cNo doubt, the era of government spacefaring had its glories,\u201d the editorial read. \u201cBut space is now a $424 billion business, with U.S. companies at its forefront. The new administration should embrace this revolution \u2014 and bring the power of private enterprise to bear in crossing the next cosmic frontier.\u201dSome high-level NASA officials, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have indicated that if the commercial sector can develop lower-cost alternatives, the space agency would have no choice but to consider those instead. NASA has already shifted one major mission from SLS \u2014 recently it announced that a commercial rocket, and not SLS, as Congress had mandated for years, would launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft that would study Jupiter\u2019s moon.That alone would save NASA \u201cover $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket,\u201d according to NASA\u2019s fiscal year 2021 budget request.NASA has always relied on contractors to build its hardware \u2014 from the Apollo lunar module built by Grumman to the space shuttle, built largely by North American Rockwell. But NASA defined the precise requirements, took ownership of the spacecraft and operated them. That is not the case with many of its programs today. It works alongside the companies to validate their rockets and spacecraft and ensure they meet the agency\u2019s safety standards. But the hardware and the launch procedures remain in private hands.The private astronaut mission, dubbed Inspiration4, marks the next iteration in this transition. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Shift4Shop, a payments technology company, paid an undisclosed sum for the SpaceX flight. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot, will occupy one of the four seats. Another will go to Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The third is to be raffled off as part of a fundraising effort for the hospital. And the fourth seat will go to the winner of a competition among entrepreneurs who use Shift4Shop\u2019s platform. Isaacman has donated $100 million to St. Jude and hopes the fundraising effort will match that.\u201cWe will, of course, coordinate this with NASA,\u201d Musk said on a call with reporters earlier this month to discuss the mission. \u201cNASA has been briefed on this and is supportive.\u201dBut it will be SpaceX and the crew that will determine the flight parameters and training requirements, not NASA. \u201cWherever you want to go, we\u2019ll take you there,\u201d Musk said to Isaacman on the call.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThat mission will be followed by a second flight made up entirely of civilians \u2014 three wealthy business executives, who are each paying $55 million, in addition to the commander, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom. Instead of spending a few days inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which has about as much interior room as a large SUV, they will fly to the International Space Station. They will spend eight days there before flying back.Ultimately, Axiom\u2019s goal is even bigger \u2014 to build a space station of its own. The ISS is getting old and will need to come down at some point. NASA has said that it would eventually get out of the space station business \u2014 and outsource that to the private sector as well. Axiom is one of the leading candidates to build the successor.If Axiom is successful, it could then proceed to its ultimate goal: charter missions of private citizens, flying on private rockets to a private space station with little to no involvement from NASA.Those flights would join the suborbital tourism flights to the edge of space that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin hope to provide, as early as this year. That would mark the culmination of the long-held dream of opening space to the masses, and build on the first flight of private citizens to space \u2014 the flight of SpaceShipOne, a piloted space plane, in 2004.After that flight, the space plane\u2019s designer, Burt Rutan, held up a sign that he hoped would portend a new space age, one where human spaceflight was not dependent on NASA.\u201cSpaceShipOne,\" it read. \u201cGovernment Zero.\u201d Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA with an uncertain role. As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6512",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/25/nasa-space-future-private/",
        "text": "The four astronauts who will fly on a SpaceX mission by the end of the year will be a bunch of private citizens with no space experience. One\u2019s a billionaire funding the mission; another is a health care provider. The third will be selected at random through a sweepstakes, and the last seat will go to the winner of a competition. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the new Space Age, you can buy a ticket to orbit \u2014 no need to have been a fighter pilot in the military or to compete against thousands of other overachievers for a coveted spot in NASA\u2019s astronaut corps.In fact, for this mission, the first composed entirely of private citizens, NASA is little more than a bystander. It does not own or operate the rocket that will blast the astronauts into space or the capsule they will live in for the few days they are scheduled to circle Earth every 90 minutes. NASA has no say in selecting the astronauts, and it will not train or outfit them \u2014 that will all be done by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe money to pay for the flight also will not come from NASA \u2014 or any other government account. The cost of the project is being borne by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has set it up as a fundraiser for St. Jude\u2019s Research Hospital and a promotional device for his business, Shift4Shop, which helps businesses set up websites and process payments.This is the new look of human space exploration as government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space travel continues to erode, redefining not only who owns the vehicles that carry people to space, but also the very nature of what an astronaut is and who gets to be one.And it comes as NASA confronts some of the largest changes it has faced since it was founded in 1958 when the United States\u2019 world standing was challenged by the Soviet Union\u2019s surprise launch of the first Sputnik into orbit. Now it is NASA\u2019s unrivaled primacy in human spaceflight that is under challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThanks to NASA\u2019s investments and guidance, the private space sector has grown tremendously \u2014 no entity more than SpaceX, which according to CNBC is now worth $74 billion. The commercial space industry is taking on ever more roles and responsibilities \u2014 flying not just cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, but even NASA\u2019s astronauts there. The private sector will launch some of the major components of the space station NASA wants to build in orbit around the moon, and private companies are developing the spacecraft that will fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA, which for decades has set the pace for the American space project, with an uncertain role, a development NASA\u2019s Safety Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warns could have consequences for years to come.The growth of companies like SpaceX has \"tremendous upside potential \u2014 and are accompanied by equally tremendous challenges for managing the risk of human space exploration,\u201d it said in its annual report, released last month. \u201cNASA leadership in human space exploration is still preeminent, but the agency\u2019s role is evolving with critical implications for how risk and safety will be managed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo far, NASA has done well \u201cas it shifts from principally executing its programs and missions to commercially acquiring significant key elements and services,\u201d it said. But as the agency continues to evolve, \u201cNASA must make some strategically critical decisions, based on deliberate and thorough consideration, that are necessary because of their momentous consequences for the future of human space exploration and, in particular, for the management of the attendant risks.\u201dIn an interview, Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said the agency is well aware of how its identity and role are changing, and he likened the agency\u2019s role to how the U.S. government fostered the commercial aviation industry in the early 20th century.NASA\u2019s predecessor, NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, \u201cdid research, technology development to initially support defense \u2026 but also later on supporting a burgeoning commercial aircraft industry and aviation industry,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that may be how we evolve, moving forward on the space side. We\u2019re going to do the research and the technology development and be the enablers for continuing to support the commercial space sector.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has not ceded all ground. It still leads major exploration and science programs that no company could match. Last week, for example, it landed a rover the size of a car on Mars, hitting a precise landing target after traveling nearly 300 million miles. Later this year, it is scheduled to launch the James Webb telescope, which is designed to look back in time to the origins of the universe. And it also recently snagged a sample of rocks and soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth to return them to Earth for study.\u201cNASA works,\" Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after the Perseverance landed safely on Mars. \u201cWhen we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\u201d\"NASA works. When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\"@NASAJPL chief engineer and landing veteran Rob Manning celebrates #NASAPersevere's successful #CountdownToMars: pic.twitter.com/Bo74pC4xLO\u2014 NASA (@NASA) February 18, 2021\n\nThose big, daring, push-the-envelope missions is where NASA\u2019s future lies, agency and industry officials agree. Not in looking for financial gain, but blazing the trail and opening new frontiers, and then allowing private industry to take over in the way homesteaders expanded into the West.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin NASA, there is still some resistance to that paradigm shift. \u201cNASA feels like that\u2019s our domain,\u201d said Phil McAlister, NASA\u2019s director of commercial spaceflight. \u201cAnd my response is, the solar system is a big place. We at NASA should always be doing the next thing, the thing where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.\u201dJan Worner, the outgoing general director of the European Space Agency, agrees. \u201cI believe space agencies have to change,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIf you are fixed permanently to the same thing that you did in the past, you will lose.\u201dBut NASA officials are concerned that much of the future workforce is going to be attracted to a growing number of commercial companies doing amazing things. There is Planet, for example, which is putting up constellations of small satellites that take an image of Earth every day. Or Relativity Space, which is 3-D printing entire rockets. Or Axiom Space, which is building a commercial space station. Or Astrobotic, which intends to land a spacecraft on the moon later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA faces, then, is an urgent one: \u201cHow do you maintain that NASA technical expertise?\u201d Jurczyk said.The agency does not know.\u201cIt may mean people are hiring more midcareer from industry or having people come to NASA, then go to industry, and come back. Or a different model where maybe you\u2019re not coming to NASA and staying for your 35-, 40-year career,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re still thinking through that.\u201dThe workforce predicament was not on NASA\u2019s mind when it embarked on this road in 2006. That is when it awarded relatively small contracts to see whether the private sector could develop spacecraft capable of taking cargo to the International Space Station. At the time, SpaceX, which won an award, was largely unknown and on the verge of bankruptcy, with just one successful flight to orbit for its Falcon 1 rocket after three failures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOutside of what Musk once called \u201cthe weird rebels within NASA,\u201d few thought the program would work. It was not taken seriously by the mainstream aerospace industry or even by NASA\u2019s leadership.\u201cLet\u2019s just give these annoying commercial people enough money so that they can fail, and we can say, \u2018That was dumb. We don\u2019t have to do that again,'\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post.But it did work. And now NASA is relying on the private sector not only to deliver supplies and science experiments to the surface of the moon, but also its most precious cargo \u2014 its astronauts \u2014 there. Turning over human spaceflight to the private sector was a line many thought NASA would never cross. But last year, SpaceX successfully flew two crewed missions to the space station, and Boeing, the other company with the human spaceflight contract, is hoping to fly its first later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has been eager to build on that success and hire private-sector companies to build and operate the spacecraft that would take astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.And while NASA\u2019s flagship rocket, the Space Launch System, would be used to fly astronauts to the moon and be the most powerful ever built, it has suffered all sorts of cost overruns and technical delays. A test of its engines that was supposed to last as long as eight minutes was cut short after just one because of a technical problem. And the redo of the test was recently postponed by NASA, which said it was looking into a problem with one of the valves.Recently, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the rocket would reach $27 billion through 2025. That enormous cost has outraged critics of the space program, who have derided the effort as little more than a jobs program for select congressional districts and dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201dRecently, the Bloomberg editorial board called for the Biden administration to \u201cscrap the Space Launch System,\u201d asking, \u201cWhy is the U.S. government building a space rocket?\u201d\u201cNo doubt, the era of government spacefaring had its glories,\u201d the editorial read. \u201cBut space is now a $424 billion business, with U.S. companies at its forefront. The new administration should embrace this revolution \u2014 and bring the power of private enterprise to bear in crossing the next cosmic frontier.\u201dSome high-level NASA officials, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have indicated that if the commercial sector can develop lower-cost alternatives, the space agency would have no choice but to consider those instead. NASA has already shifted one major mission from SLS \u2014 recently it announced that a commercial rocket, and not SLS, as Congress had mandated for years, would launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft that would study Jupiter\u2019s moon.That alone would save NASA \u201cover $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket,\u201d according to NASA\u2019s fiscal year 2021 budget request.NASA has always relied on contractors to build its hardware \u2014 from the Apollo lunar module built by Grumman to the space shuttle, built largely by North American Rockwell. But NASA defined the precise requirements, took ownership of the spacecraft and operated them. That is not the case with many of its programs today. It works alongside the companies to validate their rockets and spacecraft and ensure they meet the agency\u2019s safety standards. But the hardware and the launch procedures remain in private hands.The private astronaut mission, dubbed Inspiration4, marks the next iteration in this transition. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Shift4Shop, a payments technology company, paid an undisclosed sum for the SpaceX flight. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot, will occupy one of the four seats. Another will go to Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The third is to be raffled off as part of a fundraising effort for the hospital. And the fourth seat will go to the winner of a competition among entrepreneurs who use Shift4Shop\u2019s platform. Isaacman has donated $100 million to St. Jude and hopes the fundraising effort will match that.\u201cWe will, of course, coordinate this with NASA,\u201d Musk said on a call with reporters earlier this month to discuss the mission. \u201cNASA has been briefed on this and is supportive.\u201dBut it will be SpaceX and the crew that will determine the flight parameters and training requirements, not NASA. \u201cWherever you want to go, we\u2019ll take you there,\u201d Musk said to Isaacman on the call.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThat mission will be followed by a second flight made up entirely of civilians \u2014 three wealthy business executives, who are each paying $55 million, in addition to the commander, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom. Instead of spending a few days inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which has about as much interior room as a large SUV, they will fly to the International Space Station. They will spend eight days there before flying back.Ultimately, Axiom\u2019s goal is even bigger \u2014 to build a space station of its own. The ISS is getting old and will need to come down at some point. NASA has said that it would eventually get out of the space station business \u2014 and outsource that to the private sector as well. Axiom is one of the leading candidates to build the successor.If Axiom is successful, it could then proceed to its ultimate goal: charter missions of private citizens, flying on private rockets to a private space station with little to no involvement from NASA.Those flights would join the suborbital tourism flights to the edge of space that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin hope to provide, as early as this year. That would mark the culmination of the long-held dream of opening space to the masses, and build on the first flight of private citizens to space \u2014 the flight of SpaceShipOne, a piloted space plane, in 2004.After that flight, the space plane\u2019s designer, Burt Rutan, held up a sign that he hoped would portend a new space age, one where human spaceflight was not dependent on NASA.\u201cSpaceShipOne,\" it read. \u201cGovernment Zero.\u201d Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA with an uncertain role. As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6513",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/25/nasa-space-future-private/",
        "text": "The four astronauts who will fly on a SpaceX mission by the end of the year will be a bunch of private citizens with no space experience. One\u2019s a billionaire funding the mission; another is a health care provider. The third will be selected at random through a sweepstakes, and the last seat will go to the winner of a competition. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn the new Space Age, you can buy a ticket to orbit \u2014 no need to have been a fighter pilot in the military or to compete against thousands of other overachievers for a coveted spot in NASA\u2019s astronaut corps.In fact, for this mission, the first composed entirely of private citizens, NASA is little more than a bystander. It does not own or operate the rocket that will blast the astronauts into space or the capsule they will live in for the few days they are scheduled to circle Earth every 90 minutes. NASA has no say in selecting the astronauts, and it will not train or outfit them \u2014 that will all be done by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe money to pay for the flight also will not come from NASA \u2014 or any other government account. The cost of the project is being borne by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has set it up as a fundraiser for St. Jude\u2019s Research Hospital and a promotional device for his business, Shift4Shop, which helps businesses set up websites and process payments.This is the new look of human space exploration as government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space travel continues to erode, redefining not only who owns the vehicles that carry people to space, but also the very nature of what an astronaut is and who gets to be one.And it comes as NASA confronts some of the largest changes it has faced since it was founded in 1958 when the United States\u2019 world standing was challenged by the Soviet Union\u2019s surprise launch of the first Sputnik into orbit. Now it is NASA\u2019s unrivaled primacy in human spaceflight that is under challenge.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThanks to NASA\u2019s investments and guidance, the private space sector has grown tremendously \u2014 no entity more than SpaceX, which according to CNBC is now worth $74 billion. The commercial space industry is taking on ever more roles and responsibilities \u2014 flying not just cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, but even NASA\u2019s astronauts there. The private sector will launch some of the major components of the space station NASA wants to build in orbit around the moon, and private companies are developing the spacecraft that will fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA, which for decades has set the pace for the American space project, with an uncertain role, a development NASA\u2019s Safety Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warns could have consequences for years to come.The growth of companies like SpaceX has \"tremendous upside potential \u2014 and are accompanied by equally tremendous challenges for managing the risk of human space exploration,\u201d it said in its annual report, released last month. \u201cNASA leadership in human space exploration is still preeminent, but the agency\u2019s role is evolving with critical implications for how risk and safety will be managed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo far, NASA has done well \u201cas it shifts from principally executing its programs and missions to commercially acquiring significant key elements and services,\u201d it said. But as the agency continues to evolve, \u201cNASA must make some strategically critical decisions, based on deliberate and thorough consideration, that are necessary because of their momentous consequences for the future of human space exploration and, in particular, for the management of the attendant risks.\u201dIn an interview, Steve Jurczyk, NASA\u2019s acting administrator, said the agency is well aware of how its identity and role are changing, and he likened the agency\u2019s role to how the U.S. government fostered the commercial aviation industry in the early 20th century.NASA\u2019s predecessor, NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, \u201cdid research, technology development to initially support defense \u2026 but also later on supporting a burgeoning commercial aircraft industry and aviation industry,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that may be how we evolve, moving forward on the space side. We\u2019re going to do the research and the technology development and be the enablers for continuing to support the commercial space sector.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has not ceded all ground. It still leads major exploration and science programs that no company could match. Last week, for example, it landed a rover the size of a car on Mars, hitting a precise landing target after traveling nearly 300 million miles. Later this year, it is scheduled to launch the James Webb telescope, which is designed to look back in time to the origins of the universe. And it also recently snagged a sample of rocks and soil from an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth to return them to Earth for study.\u201cNASA works,\" Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after the Perseverance landed safely on Mars. \u201cWhen we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\u201d\"NASA works. When we put our arms together and our hands together and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does.\"@NASAJPL chief engineer and landing veteran Rob Manning celebrates #NASAPersevere's successful #CountdownToMars: pic.twitter.com/Bo74pC4xLO\u2014 NASA (@NASA) February 18, 2021\n\nThose big, daring, push-the-envelope missions is where NASA\u2019s future lies, agency and industry officials agree. Not in looking for financial gain, but blazing the trail and opening new frontiers, and then allowing private industry to take over in the way homesteaders expanded into the West.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithin NASA, there is still some resistance to that paradigm shift. \u201cNASA feels like that\u2019s our domain,\u201d said Phil McAlister, NASA\u2019s director of commercial spaceflight. \u201cAnd my response is, the solar system is a big place. We at NASA should always be doing the next thing, the thing where the profit motive is not as evident and where the barriers to entry are still too high for the private sector to really make a compelling business case.\u201dJan Worner, the outgoing general director of the European Space Agency, agrees. \u201cI believe space agencies have to change,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIf you are fixed permanently to the same thing that you did in the past, you will lose.\u201dBut NASA officials are concerned that much of the future workforce is going to be attracted to a growing number of commercial companies doing amazing things. There is Planet, for example, which is putting up constellations of small satellites that take an image of Earth every day. Or Relativity Space, which is 3-D printing entire rockets. Or Axiom Space, which is building a commercial space station. Or Astrobotic, which intends to land a spacecraft on the moon later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA faces, then, is an urgent one: \u201cHow do you maintain that NASA technical expertise?\u201d Jurczyk said.The agency does not know.\u201cIt may mean people are hiring more midcareer from industry or having people come to NASA, then go to industry, and come back. Or a different model where maybe you\u2019re not coming to NASA and staying for your 35-, 40-year career,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re still thinking through that.\u201dThe workforce predicament was not on NASA\u2019s mind when it embarked on this road in 2006. That is when it awarded relatively small contracts to see whether the private sector could develop spacecraft capable of taking cargo to the International Space Station. At the time, SpaceX, which won an award, was largely unknown and on the verge of bankruptcy, with just one successful flight to orbit for its Falcon 1 rocket after three failures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOutside of what Musk once called \u201cthe weird rebels within NASA,\u201d few thought the program would work. It was not taken seriously by the mainstream aerospace industry or even by NASA\u2019s leadership.\u201cLet\u2019s just give these annoying commercial people enough money so that they can fail, and we can say, \u2018That was dumb. We don\u2019t have to do that again,'\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post.But it did work. And now NASA is relying on the private sector not only to deliver supplies and science experiments to the surface of the moon, but also its most precious cargo \u2014 its astronauts \u2014 there. Turning over human spaceflight to the private sector was a line many thought NASA would never cross. But last year, SpaceX successfully flew two crewed missions to the space station, and Boeing, the other company with the human spaceflight contract, is hoping to fly its first later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has been eager to build on that success and hire private-sector companies to build and operate the spacecraft that would take astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.And while NASA\u2019s flagship rocket, the Space Launch System, would be used to fly astronauts to the moon and be the most powerful ever built, it has suffered all sorts of cost overruns and technical delays. A test of its engines that was supposed to last as long as eight minutes was cut short after just one because of a technical problem. And the redo of the test was recently postponed by NASA, which said it was looking into a problem with one of the valves.Recently, the NASA inspector general said the total cost of the rocket would reach $27 billion through 2025. That enormous cost has outraged critics of the space program, who have derided the effort as little more than a jobs program for select congressional districts and dubbed it the \u201cSenate Launch System.\u201dRecently, the Bloomberg editorial board called for the Biden administration to \u201cscrap the Space Launch System,\u201d asking, \u201cWhy is the U.S. government building a space rocket?\u201d\u201cNo doubt, the era of government spacefaring had its glories,\u201d the editorial read. \u201cBut space is now a $424 billion business, with U.S. companies at its forefront. The new administration should embrace this revolution \u2014 and bring the power of private enterprise to bear in crossing the next cosmic frontier.\u201dSome high-level NASA officials, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, have indicated that if the commercial sector can develop lower-cost alternatives, the space agency would have no choice but to consider those instead. NASA has already shifted one major mission from SLS \u2014 recently it announced that a commercial rocket, and not SLS, as Congress had mandated for years, would launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft that would study Jupiter\u2019s moon.That alone would save NASA \u201cover $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket,\u201d according to NASA\u2019s fiscal year 2021 budget request.NASA has always relied on contractors to build its hardware \u2014 from the Apollo lunar module built by Grumman to the space shuttle, built largely by North American Rockwell. But NASA defined the precise requirements, took ownership of the spacecraft and operated them. That is not the case with many of its programs today. It works alongside the companies to validate their rockets and spacecraft and ensure they meet the agency\u2019s safety standards. But the hardware and the launch procedures remain in private hands.The private astronaut mission, dubbed Inspiration4, marks the next iteration in this transition. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Shift4Shop, a payments technology company, paid an undisclosed sum for the SpaceX flight. Isaacman, an accomplished pilot, will occupy one of the four seats. Another will go to Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. The third is to be raffled off as part of a fundraising effort for the hospital. And the fourth seat will go to the winner of a competition among entrepreneurs who use Shift4Shop\u2019s platform. Isaacman has donated $100 million to St. Jude and hopes the fundraising effort will match that.\u201cWe will, of course, coordinate this with NASA,\u201d Musk said on a call with reporters earlier this month to discuss the mission. \u201cNASA has been briefed on this and is supportive.\u201dBut it will be SpaceX and the crew that will determine the flight parameters and training requirements, not NASA. \u201cWherever you want to go, we\u2019ll take you there,\u201d Musk said to Isaacman on the call.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThat mission will be followed by a second flight made up entirely of civilians \u2014 three wealthy business executives, who are each paying $55 million, in addition to the commander, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who now serves as a vice president at Axiom. Instead of spending a few days inside SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft, which has about as much interior room as a large SUV, they will fly to the International Space Station. They will spend eight days there before flying back.Ultimately, Axiom\u2019s goal is even bigger \u2014 to build a space station of its own. The ISS is getting old and will need to come down at some point. NASA has said that it would eventually get out of the space station business \u2014 and outsource that to the private sector as well. Axiom is one of the leading candidates to build the successor.If Axiom is successful, it could then proceed to its ultimate goal: charter missions of private citizens, flying on private rockets to a private space station with little to no involvement from NASA.Those flights would join the suborbital tourism flights to the edge of space that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin hope to provide, as early as this year. That would mark the culmination of the long-held dream of opening space to the masses, and build on the first flight of private citizens to space \u2014 the flight of SpaceShipOne, a piloted space plane, in 2004.After that flight, the space plane\u2019s designer, Burt Rutan, held up a sign that he hoped would portend a new space age, one where human spaceflight was not dependent on NASA.\u201cSpaceShipOne,\" it read. \u201cGovernment Zero.\u201d Space enthusiasts, including NASA, see enormous benefit in the shift \u2014 a new era of space exploration that will usher in a more capable and efficient space industry. But the changing dynamic also has left NASA with an uncertain role. As private companies erode government\u2019s hold on space travel, NASA looks to open a new frontier",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6514",
        "date": "2019-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/07/two-virgin-galactic-pilots-who-flew-richard-bransons-spaceplane-edge-space-earn-astronaut-wings/",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration awarded two Virgin Galactic pilots commercial astronaut wings Thursday, after a spacecraft piloted by Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow hit an altitude of 51.4 miles in a daring test flight over the Mojave Desert in December.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight heralded a new era in human spaceflight and was a coup for the company founded by Richard Branson more than 14 years ago. Branson has said his goal at the time \u2014 one day flying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 could be realized this year. Speaking Thursday at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Branson called the flight \u201ca moment of historical significance, a moment of inspiration and of optimism for the future.\u201d He added that after years of trying, \u201cwe are finally at the dawn of a new age of space exploration.\u201d Companies in the cosmos: entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn presenting the decoration, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said the achievement encapsulates \u201can era of innovation that historians may one day call the rocket renaissance.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ceremony came as a number of companies are working to fly humans to space this year. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX are also preparing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station as early as this year.Unlike those companies, which launch rockets that take off vertically, Virgin Galactic flies a winged vehicle with a powerful rocket motor called SpaceShipTwo. It is hoisted aloft while tethered to the belly of a mother ship. Then, at about 40,000 feet, it is released. The pilot fires the motor and steers the spacecraft near-vertical as it barrels through the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s almost instantaneous,\u201d Stucky said in an interview before the ceremony. \u201cBut it\u2019s very smooth . . . a very sharp, quick acceleration. It\u2019s like a catapult launch. You\u2019re immediately accelerating. You\u2019re pinned back in the seat.\u201d AdvertisementOn Dec. 13, Stucky fired the motor, and soon the spacecraft was traveling at a top speed of Mach 2.9, or nearly three times the speed of sound. On the ground, a few hundred people watched anxiously, their necks craned to the sky.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceMany had been standing in the same spot during a similar test flight in 2014, when the spacecraft came apart midflight, killing pilot Michael Alsbury in an accident that led to a federal investigation and set the program back years.Story continues below advertisementThis time, though, the flight was a success. The crowd on the ground cheered as the announcer called out the altitude. Branson and his son embraced. And on the descent, Stucky pulled a triumphant barrel roll that was part of the flight profile, designed to test the spacecraft.\u201cA flight is not a flight unless you fly upside down,\u201d Stucky said in the interview.AdvertisementBranson has said that after the flight he shed tears of joy and relief that his pilots landed safely.\u201cTest flights have always got a risk element. It\u2019s the most difficult time for a space line,\u201d Branson said an interview. As for Stucky and Sturckow, he said: \u201cThey were incredibly brave.\u201d Story continues below advertisementFor Stucky, the space flight was a climax of a long career. As a military test pilot, he flew the SR-71 Blackbird, a supersonic jet used by the military to fly high and fast over enemy territory. For Sturckow, a former Marine Corps test pilot who flew combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War, it was his fifth trip to space. As a NASA astronaut, he flew four shuttle missions.The last time the FAA issued astronaut wings was in 2004, to Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, who flew SpaceShipOne, the predecessor to Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane. The first privately backed vehicle to make it past the edge of space, it now hangs in the National Air and Space Museum next to the Spirit of St. Louis.AdvertisementLater Thursday, at a ceremony at the National Air and Space Museum, Virgin Galactic donated the rocket motor used in the December flight. It will join SpaceShipOne in the museum\u2019s collection and \u201chelp us tell the story of this moment of aerospace history,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the museum\u2019s director.Story continues below advertisementIt will ultimately become part of an exhibit called the \u201cFuture of Spaceflight,\u201d to open in 2024 that Stofan said will chronicle \u201ca new generation of explorers and innovators.\u201d Virgin\u2019s flight was the first time humans had reached the edge of space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. And it was the first commercial vehicle \u2014 that is, built without government money \u2014 designed to reach space with passengers.The company has said it has about 700 people signed up for suborbital space trips, which today cost $250,000 per ticket. Branson has said he hopes to start flying passengers by this year from Spaceport America in New Mexico.AdvertisementWhile the vehicle did not make it to 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, which many consider the altitude where space begins, it did cross the 50-mile threshold, which is recognized by the U.S. government. In the 1960s, the Air Force awarded astronaut wings to the pilots in the X-15 program who flew the aircraft 50 miles or higher.Read more:Virgin Galactic reaches space, taking a step closer to sending tourists thereVirgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceVirgin Galactic is on the cusp of reaching space. But where does space begin? The pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Mark \"Forger\" Stucky, were honored Thursday by the FAA for flying SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of just over 50 miles in December. Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6515",
        "date": "2019-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/07/two-virgin-galactic-pilots-who-flew-richard-bransons-spaceplane-edge-space-earn-astronaut-wings/",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration awarded two Virgin Galactic pilots commercial astronaut wings Thursday, after a spacecraft piloted by Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow hit an altitude of 51.4 miles in a daring test flight over the Mojave Desert in December.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight heralded a new era in human spaceflight and was a coup for the company founded by Richard Branson more than 14 years ago. Branson has said his goal at the time \u2014 one day flying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 could be realized this year. Speaking Thursday at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Branson called the flight \u201ca moment of historical significance, a moment of inspiration and of optimism for the future.\u201d He added that after years of trying, \u201cwe are finally at the dawn of a new age of space exploration.\u201d Companies in the cosmos: entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn presenting the decoration, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said the achievement encapsulates \u201can era of innovation that historians may one day call the rocket renaissance.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ceremony came as a number of companies are working to fly humans to space this year. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX are also preparing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station as early as this year.Unlike those companies, which launch rockets that take off vertically, Virgin Galactic flies a winged vehicle with a powerful rocket motor called SpaceShipTwo. It is hoisted aloft while tethered to the belly of a mother ship. Then, at about 40,000 feet, it is released. The pilot fires the motor and steers the spacecraft near-vertical as it barrels through the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s almost instantaneous,\u201d Stucky said in an interview before the ceremony. \u201cBut it\u2019s very smooth . . . a very sharp, quick acceleration. It\u2019s like a catapult launch. You\u2019re immediately accelerating. You\u2019re pinned back in the seat.\u201d AdvertisementOn Dec. 13, Stucky fired the motor, and soon the spacecraft was traveling at a top speed of Mach 2.9, or nearly three times the speed of sound. On the ground, a few hundred people watched anxiously, their necks craned to the sky.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceMany had been standing in the same spot during a similar test flight in 2014, when the spacecraft came apart midflight, killing pilot Michael Alsbury in an accident that led to a federal investigation and set the program back years.Story continues below advertisementThis time, though, the flight was a success. The crowd on the ground cheered as the announcer called out the altitude. Branson and his son embraced. And on the descent, Stucky pulled a triumphant barrel roll that was part of the flight profile, designed to test the spacecraft.\u201cA flight is not a flight unless you fly upside down,\u201d Stucky said in the interview.AdvertisementBranson has said that after the flight he shed tears of joy and relief that his pilots landed safely.\u201cTest flights have always got a risk element. It\u2019s the most difficult time for a space line,\u201d Branson said an interview. As for Stucky and Sturckow, he said: \u201cThey were incredibly brave.\u201d Story continues below advertisementFor Stucky, the space flight was a climax of a long career. As a military test pilot, he flew the SR-71 Blackbird, a supersonic jet used by the military to fly high and fast over enemy territory. For Sturckow, a former Marine Corps test pilot who flew combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War, it was his fifth trip to space. As a NASA astronaut, he flew four shuttle missions.The last time the FAA issued astronaut wings was in 2004, to Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, who flew SpaceShipOne, the predecessor to Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane. The first privately backed vehicle to make it past the edge of space, it now hangs in the National Air and Space Museum next to the Spirit of St. Louis.AdvertisementLater Thursday, at a ceremony at the National Air and Space Museum, Virgin Galactic donated the rocket motor used in the December flight. It will join SpaceShipOne in the museum\u2019s collection and \u201chelp us tell the story of this moment of aerospace history,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the museum\u2019s director.Story continues below advertisementIt will ultimately become part of an exhibit called the \u201cFuture of Spaceflight,\u201d to open in 2024 that Stofan said will chronicle \u201ca new generation of explorers and innovators.\u201d Virgin\u2019s flight was the first time humans had reached the edge of space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. And it was the first commercial vehicle \u2014 that is, built without government money \u2014 designed to reach space with passengers.The company has said it has about 700 people signed up for suborbital space trips, which today cost $250,000 per ticket. Branson has said he hopes to start flying passengers by this year from Spaceport America in New Mexico.AdvertisementWhile the vehicle did not make it to 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, which many consider the altitude where space begins, it did cross the 50-mile threshold, which is recognized by the U.S. government. In the 1960s, the Air Force awarded astronaut wings to the pilots in the X-15 program who flew the aircraft 50 miles or higher.Read more:Virgin Galactic reaches space, taking a step closer to sending tourists thereVirgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceVirgin Galactic is on the cusp of reaching space. But where does space begin? The pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Mark \"Forger\" Stucky, were honored Thursday by the FAA for flying SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of just over 50 miles in December. Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6516",
        "date": "2019-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/07/two-virgin-galactic-pilots-who-flew-richard-bransons-spaceplane-edge-space-earn-astronaut-wings/",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration awarded two Virgin Galactic pilots commercial astronaut wings Thursday, after a spacecraft piloted by Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow hit an altitude of 51.4 miles in a daring test flight over the Mojave Desert in December.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight heralded a new era in human spaceflight and was a coup for the company founded by Richard Branson more than 14 years ago. Branson has said his goal at the time \u2014 one day flying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 could be realized this year. Speaking Thursday at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Branson called the flight \u201ca moment of historical significance, a moment of inspiration and of optimism for the future.\u201d He added that after years of trying, \u201cwe are finally at the dawn of a new age of space exploration.\u201d Companies in the cosmos: entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn presenting the decoration, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said the achievement encapsulates \u201can era of innovation that historians may one day call the rocket renaissance.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ceremony came as a number of companies are working to fly humans to space this year. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX are also preparing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station as early as this year.Unlike those companies, which launch rockets that take off vertically, Virgin Galactic flies a winged vehicle with a powerful rocket motor called SpaceShipTwo. It is hoisted aloft while tethered to the belly of a mother ship. Then, at about 40,000 feet, it is released. The pilot fires the motor and steers the spacecraft near-vertical as it barrels through the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s almost instantaneous,\u201d Stucky said in an interview before the ceremony. \u201cBut it\u2019s very smooth . . . a very sharp, quick acceleration. It\u2019s like a catapult launch. You\u2019re immediately accelerating. You\u2019re pinned back in the seat.\u201d AdvertisementOn Dec. 13, Stucky fired the motor, and soon the spacecraft was traveling at a top speed of Mach 2.9, or nearly three times the speed of sound. On the ground, a few hundred people watched anxiously, their necks craned to the sky.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceMany had been standing in the same spot during a similar test flight in 2014, when the spacecraft came apart midflight, killing pilot Michael Alsbury in an accident that led to a federal investigation and set the program back years.Story continues below advertisementThis time, though, the flight was a success. The crowd on the ground cheered as the announcer called out the altitude. Branson and his son embraced. And on the descent, Stucky pulled a triumphant barrel roll that was part of the flight profile, designed to test the spacecraft.\u201cA flight is not a flight unless you fly upside down,\u201d Stucky said in the interview.AdvertisementBranson has said that after the flight he shed tears of joy and relief that his pilots landed safely.\u201cTest flights have always got a risk element. It\u2019s the most difficult time for a space line,\u201d Branson said an interview. As for Stucky and Sturckow, he said: \u201cThey were incredibly brave.\u201d Story continues below advertisementFor Stucky, the space flight was a climax of a long career. As a military test pilot, he flew the SR-71 Blackbird, a supersonic jet used by the military to fly high and fast over enemy territory. For Sturckow, a former Marine Corps test pilot who flew combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War, it was his fifth trip to space. As a NASA astronaut, he flew four shuttle missions.The last time the FAA issued astronaut wings was in 2004, to Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, who flew SpaceShipOne, the predecessor to Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane. The first privately backed vehicle to make it past the edge of space, it now hangs in the National Air and Space Museum next to the Spirit of St. Louis.AdvertisementLater Thursday, at a ceremony at the National Air and Space Museum, Virgin Galactic donated the rocket motor used in the December flight. It will join SpaceShipOne in the museum\u2019s collection and \u201chelp us tell the story of this moment of aerospace history,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the museum\u2019s director.Story continues below advertisementIt will ultimately become part of an exhibit called the \u201cFuture of Spaceflight,\u201d to open in 2024 that Stofan said will chronicle \u201ca new generation of explorers and innovators.\u201d Virgin\u2019s flight was the first time humans had reached the edge of space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. And it was the first commercial vehicle \u2014 that is, built without government money \u2014 designed to reach space with passengers.The company has said it has about 700 people signed up for suborbital space trips, which today cost $250,000 per ticket. Branson has said he hopes to start flying passengers by this year from Spaceport America in New Mexico.AdvertisementWhile the vehicle did not make it to 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, which many consider the altitude where space begins, it did cross the 50-mile threshold, which is recognized by the U.S. government. In the 1960s, the Air Force awarded astronaut wings to the pilots in the X-15 program who flew the aircraft 50 miles or higher.Read more:Virgin Galactic reaches space, taking a step closer to sending tourists thereVirgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceVirgin Galactic is on the cusp of reaching space. But where does space begin? The pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Mark \"Forger\" Stucky, were honored Thursday by the FAA for flying SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of just over 50 miles in December. Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6517",
        "date": "2019-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/02/07/two-virgin-galactic-pilots-who-flew-richard-bransons-spaceplane-edge-space-earn-astronaut-wings/",
        "text": "The Federal Aviation Administration awarded two Virgin Galactic pilots commercial astronaut wings Thursday, after a spacecraft piloted by Mark \u201cForger\u201d Stucky and C.J. Sturckow hit an altitude of 51.4 miles in a daring test flight over the Mojave Desert in December.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight heralded a new era in human spaceflight and was a coup for the company founded by Richard Branson more than 14 years ago. Branson has said his goal at the time \u2014 one day flying tourists to the edge of space and back \u2014 could be realized this year. Speaking Thursday at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Branson called the flight \u201ca moment of historical significance, a moment of inspiration and of optimism for the future.\u201d He added that after years of trying, \u201cwe are finally at the dawn of a new age of space exploration.\u201d Companies in the cosmos: entrepreneurs are defining a new space ageIn presenting the decoration, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said the achievement encapsulates \u201can era of innovation that historians may one day call the rocket renaissance.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ceremony came as a number of companies are working to fly humans to space this year. Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital jaunts through the atmosphere. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX are also preparing to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the International Space Station as early as this year.Unlike those companies, which launch rockets that take off vertically, Virgin Galactic flies a winged vehicle with a powerful rocket motor called SpaceShipTwo. It is hoisted aloft while tethered to the belly of a mother ship. Then, at about 40,000 feet, it is released. The pilot fires the motor and steers the spacecraft near-vertical as it barrels through the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s almost instantaneous,\u201d Stucky said in an interview before the ceremony. \u201cBut it\u2019s very smooth . . . a very sharp, quick acceleration. It\u2019s like a catapult launch. You\u2019re immediately accelerating. You\u2019re pinned back in the seat.\u201d AdvertisementOn Dec. 13, Stucky fired the motor, and soon the spacecraft was traveling at a top speed of Mach 2.9, or nearly three times the speed of sound. On the ground, a few hundred people watched anxiously, their necks craned to the sky.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceMany had been standing in the same spot during a similar test flight in 2014, when the spacecraft came apart midflight, killing pilot Michael Alsbury in an accident that led to a federal investigation and set the program back years.Story continues below advertisementThis time, though, the flight was a success. The crowd on the ground cheered as the announcer called out the altitude. Branson and his son embraced. And on the descent, Stucky pulled a triumphant barrel roll that was part of the flight profile, designed to test the spacecraft.\u201cA flight is not a flight unless you fly upside down,\u201d Stucky said in the interview.AdvertisementBranson has said that after the flight he shed tears of joy and relief that his pilots landed safely.\u201cTest flights have always got a risk element. It\u2019s the most difficult time for a space line,\u201d Branson said an interview. As for Stucky and Sturckow, he said: \u201cThey were incredibly brave.\u201d Story continues below advertisementFor Stucky, the space flight was a climax of a long career. As a military test pilot, he flew the SR-71 Blackbird, a supersonic jet used by the military to fly high and fast over enemy territory. For Sturckow, a former Marine Corps test pilot who flew combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War, it was his fifth trip to space. As a NASA astronaut, he flew four shuttle missions.The last time the FAA issued astronaut wings was in 2004, to Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie, who flew SpaceShipOne, the predecessor to Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane. The first privately backed vehicle to make it past the edge of space, it now hangs in the National Air and Space Museum next to the Spirit of St. Louis.AdvertisementLater Thursday, at a ceremony at the National Air and Space Museum, Virgin Galactic donated the rocket motor used in the December flight. It will join SpaceShipOne in the museum\u2019s collection and \u201chelp us tell the story of this moment of aerospace history,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the museum\u2019s director.Story continues below advertisementIt will ultimately become part of an exhibit called the \u201cFuture of Spaceflight,\u201d to open in 2024 that Stofan said will chronicle \u201ca new generation of explorers and innovators.\u201d Virgin\u2019s flight was the first time humans had reached the edge of space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. And it was the first commercial vehicle \u2014 that is, built without government money \u2014 designed to reach space with passengers.The company has said it has about 700 people signed up for suborbital space trips, which today cost $250,000 per ticket. Branson has said he hopes to start flying passengers by this year from Spaceport America in New Mexico.AdvertisementWhile the vehicle did not make it to 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, which many consider the altitude where space begins, it did cross the 50-mile threshold, which is recognized by the U.S. government. In the 1960s, the Air Force awarded astronaut wings to the pilots in the X-15 program who flew the aircraft 50 miles or higher.Read more:Virgin Galactic reaches space, taking a step closer to sending tourists thereVirgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceVirgin Galactic is on the cusp of reaching space. But where does space begin? The pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Mark \"Forger\" Stucky, were honored Thursday by the FAA for flying SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of just over 50 miles in December. Two Virgin Galactic pilots who flew Richard Branson\u2019s aircraft to the edge of space earn astronaut wings",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6518",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/01/branson-bezos-space-race/",
        "text": "The billionaire space race is heating up.Richard Branson is set to get his long-awaited trip to space as early as July 11, flying on a suborbital mission that would allow him to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Jeff Bezos, who is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft nine days later.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBranson had been scheduled to go on a later flight but is now set to be the first of the billionaire space entrepreneurs to blast out of the atmosphere. Wally Funk was supposed to go to space 60 years ago. Now she\u2019s going with Jeff Bezos.In a statement announcing the mission, the company said Branson would be joined in the cabin by three Virgin Galactic employees who would evaluate the \u201ccabin environment, seat comfort, the weightless experience, and the views of Earth that the spaceship delivers \u2014 all to ensure every moment of the astronaut\u2019s journey maximizes the wonder and awe created by space travel.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong those employees is Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, who flew to space on the company\u2019s second spaceflight mission. Virgin Galactic\u2019s plane, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, has reached space on three occasions, and this would be the first time it will have flown a crew of four.In an interview, Branson said he was \u201cincredibly excited\u201d and that moving up his flight was \u201chonestly not\u201d intended to best Bezos.\u201cI completely understand why the press would write that,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBezos, who owns The Washington Post, recently said he would fly on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. And on Thursday his space company, Blue Origin, announced he would be joined by Wally Funk, a member of the \u201cMercury 13,\u201d a group of women privately tested and trained by a team of aviation medical experts for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth Branson\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s flights will travel on suborbital trajectories that will just scratch the edge of space and give passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. Wishing Branson well, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith nevertheless sounded a note of one-upmanship in his reaction to Branson\u2019s plans: \u201cThey\u2019re not flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The reference is to the different distances the two spacecraft are designed to travel. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule flies to an altitude of 100 kilometers or 62 miles, the so-called K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, which some experts say is where space begins. Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane flies beyond 50 miles, above which the Federal Aviation Administration defines as space.Story continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic recently received approval from the FAA that allows it to fly commercial passengers, paving the way for Branson to join the crew. In May, the company flew another test flight that went so well that the company felt it was safe to allow Branson to fly as part of the crew.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dVirgin Galactic, which Branson founded in 2004, has some 600 people signed up for flights \u2014 one of them Funk \u2014 and is expected to reopen sales around the time of Branson\u2019s flight. The company had charged $250,000, but that price will increase. The company has not said what it would charge, but analysts have said it could be as much as $500,000.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin has not announced ticket prices either. But it recently auctioned off a seat for $28 million for its first spaceflight mission. The company has yet not announced who the winner is.Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?Virgin Galactic flies out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. Unlike a traditional rocket, Virgin\u2019s spacecraft is carried aloft to some 45,000 feet by a mother plane. The spacecraft is then dropped, and the pilots ignite its engines and fly the craft almost straight up.AdvertisementIn addition to Branson and Moses, Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, and Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, would join the flight.Story continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s CEO, Michael Colglazier, said in an interview that the crew \u201care going to open the door for the rest of us to find a way to access space in the future.\u201dHe said the company did a thorough safety review and determined that the previous test flight met all its objectives, meaning the company could move Branson up to its next test flight instead of the one to follow.\u201cIt really gave us a choice as to whether Richard would prefer to fly on the first or the second,\u201d Colglazier said. \u201cAnd guess which one he chose?\u201dBranson said that after waiting to go to space for 17 years, he was most looking forward to seeing Earth from a distance, and allowing his customers, some of whom have been waiting for years, to go as well.\u201cI truly believe that space belongs to all of us,\u201d Branson said in a statement. \u201cAfter 17 years of research, engineering and innovation, the new commercial space industry is poised to open the universe to humankind and change the world for good. It\u2019s one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it\u2019s another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality.\u201d Branson announced Thursday he'll be aboard his company's space plane on its next test, scheduled for July 11. Bezos is scheduled to fly aboard his New Shepard on July 20. Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6519",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/01/branson-bezos-space-race/",
        "text": "The billionaire space race is heating up.Richard Branson is set to get his long-awaited trip to space as early as July 11, flying on a suborbital mission that would allow him to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Jeff Bezos, who is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft nine days later.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBranson had been scheduled to go on a later flight but is now set to be the first of the billionaire space entrepreneurs to blast out of the atmosphere. Wally Funk was supposed to go to space 60 years ago. Now she\u2019s going with Jeff Bezos.In a statement announcing the mission, the company said Branson would be joined in the cabin by three Virgin Galactic employees who would evaluate the \u201ccabin environment, seat comfort, the weightless experience, and the views of Earth that the spaceship delivers \u2014 all to ensure every moment of the astronaut\u2019s journey maximizes the wonder and awe created by space travel.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong those employees is Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, who flew to space on the company\u2019s second spaceflight mission. Virgin Galactic\u2019s plane, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, has reached space on three occasions, and this would be the first time it will have flown a crew of four.In an interview, Branson said he was \u201cincredibly excited\u201d and that moving up his flight was \u201chonestly not\u201d intended to best Bezos.\u201cI completely understand why the press would write that,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBezos, who owns The Washington Post, recently said he would fly on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. And on Thursday his space company, Blue Origin, announced he would be joined by Wally Funk, a member of the \u201cMercury 13,\u201d a group of women privately tested and trained by a team of aviation medical experts for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth Branson\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s flights will travel on suborbital trajectories that will just scratch the edge of space and give passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. Wishing Branson well, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith nevertheless sounded a note of one-upmanship in his reaction to Branson\u2019s plans: \u201cThey\u2019re not flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The reference is to the different distances the two spacecraft are designed to travel. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule flies to an altitude of 100 kilometers or 62 miles, the so-called K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, which some experts say is where space begins. Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane flies beyond 50 miles, above which the Federal Aviation Administration defines as space.Story continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic recently received approval from the FAA that allows it to fly commercial passengers, paving the way for Branson to join the crew. In May, the company flew another test flight that went so well that the company felt it was safe to allow Branson to fly as part of the crew.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dVirgin Galactic, which Branson founded in 2004, has some 600 people signed up for flights \u2014 one of them Funk \u2014 and is expected to reopen sales around the time of Branson\u2019s flight. The company had charged $250,000, but that price will increase. The company has not said what it would charge, but analysts have said it could be as much as $500,000.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin has not announced ticket prices either. But it recently auctioned off a seat for $28 million for its first spaceflight mission. The company has yet not announced who the winner is.Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?Virgin Galactic flies out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. Unlike a traditional rocket, Virgin\u2019s spacecraft is carried aloft to some 45,000 feet by a mother plane. The spacecraft is then dropped, and the pilots ignite its engines and fly the craft almost straight up.AdvertisementIn addition to Branson and Moses, Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, and Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, would join the flight.Story continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s CEO, Michael Colglazier, said in an interview that the crew \u201care going to open the door for the rest of us to find a way to access space in the future.\u201dHe said the company did a thorough safety review and determined that the previous test flight met all its objectives, meaning the company could move Branson up to its next test flight instead of the one to follow.\u201cIt really gave us a choice as to whether Richard would prefer to fly on the first or the second,\u201d Colglazier said. \u201cAnd guess which one he chose?\u201dBranson said that after waiting to go to space for 17 years, he was most looking forward to seeing Earth from a distance, and allowing his customers, some of whom have been waiting for years, to go as well.\u201cI truly believe that space belongs to all of us,\u201d Branson said in a statement. \u201cAfter 17 years of research, engineering and innovation, the new commercial space industry is poised to open the universe to humankind and change the world for good. It\u2019s one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it\u2019s another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality.\u201d Branson announced Thursday he'll be aboard his company's space plane on its next test, scheduled for July 11. Bezos is scheduled to fly aboard his New Shepard on July 20. Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6520",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/01/branson-bezos-space-race/",
        "text": "The billionaire space race is heating up.Richard Branson is set to get his long-awaited trip to space as early as July 11, flying on a suborbital mission that would allow him to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Jeff Bezos, who is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s spacecraft nine days later.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBranson had been scheduled to go on a later flight but is now set to be the first of the billionaire space entrepreneurs to blast out of the atmosphere. Wally Funk was supposed to go to space 60 years ago. Now she\u2019s going with Jeff Bezos.In a statement announcing the mission, the company said Branson would be joined in the cabin by three Virgin Galactic employees who would evaluate the \u201ccabin environment, seat comfort, the weightless experience, and the views of Earth that the spaceship delivers \u2014 all to ensure every moment of the astronaut\u2019s journey maximizes the wonder and awe created by space travel.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmong those employees is Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, who flew to space on the company\u2019s second spaceflight mission. Virgin Galactic\u2019s plane, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, has reached space on three occasions, and this would be the first time it will have flown a crew of four.In an interview, Branson said he was \u201cincredibly excited\u201d and that moving up his flight was \u201chonestly not\u201d intended to best Bezos.\u201cI completely understand why the press would write that,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBezos, who owns The Washington Post, recently said he would fly on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. And on Thursday his space company, Blue Origin, announced he would be joined by Wally Funk, a member of the \u201cMercury 13,\u201d a group of women privately tested and trained by a team of aviation medical experts for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth Branson\u2019s and Bezos\u2019s flights will travel on suborbital trajectories that will just scratch the edge of space and give passengers a few minutes of weightlessness. Wishing Branson well, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith nevertheless sounded a note of one-upmanship in his reaction to Branson\u2019s plans: \u201cThey\u2019re not flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The reference is to the different distances the two spacecraft are designed to travel. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule flies to an altitude of 100 kilometers or 62 miles, the so-called K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, which some experts say is where space begins. Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceplane flies beyond 50 miles, above which the Federal Aviation Administration defines as space.Story continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic recently received approval from the FAA that allows it to fly commercial passengers, paving the way for Branson to join the crew. In May, the company flew another test flight that went so well that the company felt it was safe to allow Branson to fly as part of the crew.Advertisement\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dVirgin Galactic, which Branson founded in 2004, has some 600 people signed up for flights \u2014 one of them Funk \u2014 and is expected to reopen sales around the time of Branson\u2019s flight. The company had charged $250,000, but that price will increase. The company has not said what it would charge, but analysts have said it could be as much as $500,000.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin has not announced ticket prices either. But it recently auctioned off a seat for $28 million for its first spaceflight mission. The company has yet not announced who the winner is.Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos will fly to space at their own risk. Does that make it right for everyone?Virgin Galactic flies out of Spaceport America in New Mexico. Unlike a traditional rocket, Virgin\u2019s spacecraft is carried aloft to some 45,000 feet by a mother plane. The spacecraft is then dropped, and the pilots ignite its engines and fly the craft almost straight up.AdvertisementIn addition to Branson and Moses, Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, and Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, would join the flight.Story continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s CEO, Michael Colglazier, said in an interview that the crew \u201care going to open the door for the rest of us to find a way to access space in the future.\u201dHe said the company did a thorough safety review and determined that the previous test flight met all its objectives, meaning the company could move Branson up to its next test flight instead of the one to follow.\u201cIt really gave us a choice as to whether Richard would prefer to fly on the first or the second,\u201d Colglazier said. \u201cAnd guess which one he chose?\u201dBranson said that after waiting to go to space for 17 years, he was most looking forward to seeing Earth from a distance, and allowing his customers, some of whom have been waiting for years, to go as well.\u201cI truly believe that space belongs to all of us,\u201d Branson said in a statement. \u201cAfter 17 years of research, engineering and innovation, the new commercial space industry is poised to open the universe to humankind and change the world for good. It\u2019s one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it\u2019s another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality.\u201d Branson announced Thursday he'll be aboard his company's space plane on its next test, scheduled for July 11. Bezos is scheduled to fly aboard his New Shepard on July 20. Billionaires\u2019 race to space: Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin\u2019s Bezos to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6521",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/",
        "text": "SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico \u2014 Richard Branson completed a daring, barnstorming flight to the edge of space Sunday, rocketing through the atmosphere in the spaceplane he\u2019d been yearning to ride for nearly 20 years.The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness before the vehicle they were traveling in, SpaceShipTwo Unity, glided back to Earth and a landing on the runway at Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility here in the New Mexico desert. It was SpaceShipTwo\u2019s fourth trip to the edge of space since 2018, and Virgin Galactic, the company Branson founded in 2004, says it will soon start flying paying customers regularly on similar jaunts, opening a new era in human space exploration.Several companies in the growing commercial space industry, including Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, have developed spacecraft designed to allow private citizens, and not just NASA trained military fighter pilots and scientists, to earn the title of \u201castronaut.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Virgin Galactic seemed intent on making it clear that this was not a traditional NASA launch. Instead of a stoic countdown, there was a party-like atmosphere along the tarmac, a scene as much a spectacle as a space launch that even included a musical guest, Khalid, who debuted a new song during a performance here. The company\u2019s live broadcast of the flight was hosted by comedian and late-night host Stephen Colbert, and Musk was on hand to watch Branson and the crew take off.Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity takes off tethered to the belly of a mother ship. On Sunday, the mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo, lifted off from the tarmac here shortly after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, delayed by about 90 minutes because high winds overnight had kept the ground crew from rolling it out of the hangar. The spaceship was released at about 11:25 a.m. Eastern time, the pilots ignited the engine and the spacecraft shot almost straight up as it thundered toward space.The flight reached its apogee at 282,000 feet \u2014 53.41 miles \u2014 where the passengers were able to unstrap and experience weightlessness. The spacecraft then fell back to earth and a landing at 11:39 Eastern time.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn board were pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, both of whom had flown to space on previous flights. Joining Branson in the crew compartment were Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs, Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, and Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor. Moses, who is married to Mike Moses, the company\u2019s president, flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission, in 2019.Branson had originally been scheduled to fly aboard a flight scheduled for later this summer or early fall. But after the company successfully made it to space in May, he grew impatient.\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dIn a press conference after the flight, he said he wasn\u2019t nervous about the trip. \u201cWe have nearly 1,000 of the best engineers in the world\u201d who pored over every inch of the spacecraft, he said. His only concern, he said, was the possibility of a delay. \"The only thing I was worried about was some tiny little something that would get in the way, something that would stop us from getting into space.\u201dHe called the experience \u201cjust magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\" And added that, \u201chaving flown to space, I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dBritish billionaire Richard Branson, three crewmates and two pilots rode to the edge of space on July 11 before safely descending and landing in New Mexico. (Reuters)By moving up his flight, he was able to beat Bezos to space by nine days. Bezos, who recently stepped down as Amazon\u2019s CEO, is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s suborbital New Shepard capsule on July 20.Branson has repeatedly denied that he was in a race with Bezos and said in the interview that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, the altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.On Saturday, however, Bezos wished Branson luck in a post on Instagram. \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cBest of luck!\u201dBranson would now be eligible for his wings, fulfilling a dream he has had since he founded Virgin Galactic, lured by the romance of space travel and the possibility of commercializing an endeavor that had been monopolized by governments.One of the first major steps on that path was the 2004 Ansari X Prize, a $10 million competition to put a commercial vehicle into space for the first time. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft had funded an effort, led by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft designer, to build what was called SpaceShipOne. Branson fell in love with the ship, purchased the rights to the technology and was able to slap a Virgin logo on the spacecraft as it won the prize.Watching the spacecraft take off, Branson turned to Allen and said, according to Allen\u2019s memoir, \u201cPaul, isn\u2019t this better than the best sex you ever had?\u201dBranson then turned his attention to creating the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d and vowed that within a matter of years passengers would soon be flying to space on a regular basis.Virgin Galactic set off to build SpaceShipTwo, which would be far larger and more powerful vehicle than its predecessor. But the program quickly ran into technical problems. And in 2014, it suffered an accident midflight that killed one of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, and severely injured the other, Peter Siebold, who parachuted to the ground. Branson considered giving up on his quest, but ultimately decided that the risk was worth it and carried on, vowing to learn from the accident and build a safer and more robust spaceship.The company finally made it to space in December 2018, and again a few weeks later, in early 2019. It then moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America, the gleaming $220 million facility funded by taxpayers. In 2019, the company announced it would go public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.Then, in May, it reached space for the third time in a flight with two pilots, and, after consulting with the company\u2019s engineers, Branson decided that he would be on the next flight.The flight comes amid a flurry of spaceflight activity that taken together amounts to a renaissance for human exploration.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itJust over a year ago, no one had flown to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, a long, ignominious drought that ended when Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station.Since then, SpaceX has flown two more human spaceflight missions. Boeing, which is also under contract from NASA to transport the agency\u2019s astronauts to and from the station, hopes to fly people in the months to come.SpaceX plans to fly a mission dubbed Inspiration4 in September. Financed by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, a group of four civilians would spend three days or so orbiting the Earth in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule. Axiom Space, a firm based in Houston, is arranging trips for very wealthy groups of people to spend a week on the space station. A voyage that costs some $55 million.In addition to the flight on July 20, Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has two more flights planned for this year and more than half a dozen next year.In all, that would culminate to an era of spaceflight like the barnstormers in the early days of aviation. But whether it is successful depends on whether the industry can continue to fly people reliably and safely.After the flight, Branson was greeted by his three-year-old granddaughter, who said, \u201cPapa gone to the moon. Papa gone to the moon.\u201dBranson let it slide. \u201cI\u2019m not going to disillusion her,\u201d he said.Richard Branson revels in a postflight ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:53 p.m.Link copiedLink\u201cSir Richard Branson, astronaut.\u201dWith those words, Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, pinned astronaut wings to Richard Branson\u2019s flight suit Sunday shortly after Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo landed safely back at Spaceport America in New Mexico.Speaking to the crowd, Branson said, \u201cthe whole thing was just magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\u201dHe said his goal when he founded the company in 2004 was to \u201cturn the dream of space travel into a reality for my grandchildren\u201d and for future generations. And he added that \u201chaving flown to space I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementRichard Branson\u2019s other space companyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism venture, may get most of the attention, but he has another company \u2014 Virgin Orbit \u2014 that has steadily been making progress and is part of a movement to launch constellations of small satellites to orbit.Virgin Orbit hopes to be a disruptive force in the launch market by offering a small, 70-foot long, two-stage rocket suited to take advantage of satellite technology that is drastically shrinking in size and lowering costs. Unlike traditional rockets that blast off vertically from launchpads, Virgin Orbit\u2019s LauncherOne rocket is air launched \u2014 carried aloft by a Boeing 747, then released midair to fires its engine and shoot into orbit.The rocket is able to hoist payloads of a few hundred pounds, which could carry satellites that would range in size from a big refrigerator to a toaster oven, the company has said.So far, it has had two successful launches, including one last month, when it delivered seven customer satellites to their intended orbit. In all, the company has launched 17, and is \u201clooking forward to growing that number tremendously as we push to ramp up our flight cadence in the coming months,\u201d Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, said in a statement.The company is pursuing a number of customers, but one in particular, the Pentagon, has been paying particularly close attention. The ability to quickly put up a satellite is a capability U.S. national security agencies have long sought after, and being able to use a 747 that only needs a runway to take off is particularly attractive, officials have said.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first launch, Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, wrote on Twitter: \u201cCongratulations to the Virgin Orbit Team!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo has landed back on the runway at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:39 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has touched down on the runway at Spaceport America just about 15 minutes after it was released from its mothership and thundered to the edge of space, completing a daring flight that Richard Branson has dreamed of for years.A crowd gathered along the tarmac cheered when they saw the shiny, white spaceplane come back after what appears to be a successful mission. In addition to Branson, Virgin Galactic employees Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses were on board the test flight, which was piloted by Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci.The company hopes the mission will pave the way for future flights of paying customers. It has some 600 people who have put down significant deposits and are waiting to fly. It also is expected to soon reopen sales for tickets, which had cost $250,000 but are now expected to be more expensive, perhaps as much as $500,000.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has reached the edge of spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:32 a.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity spaceplane reached the edge of space, flying to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The vehicle is carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and three employees and has two pilots at the controls. After reaching its apogee, or high point, it reoriented itself and is falling back toward Earth, gliding to a runway landing.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo Unity has been releasedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has been released from its mothership.If all goes according to plan, it should fly past 50 miles high, then glide back to Earth for a landing on the runway at Spaceport America. Total flight time, from release to landing, is estimated to be 15 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow Virgin Galactic was founded nearly two decades agoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn 2004, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, won the Ansari X Prize, by sending the first commercially developed spacecraft past what is known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized threshold that says space begins at 100 kilometers, about 62 miles, above the Earth\u2019s surface.At the time, Richard Branson was fascinated with the idea of private space travel and was thinking of starting a space company of his own. And when he saw SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that legendary aviation designer Burt Rutan developed for Allen, he was smitten.Allen was growing nervous about the dangers of human spaceflight and agreed to sell Branson the rights to the technology. Branson quickly slapped a Virgin logo on the spacecraft and set out to make it more robust. SpaceShipOne, which hangs in the National Air and Space Museum, was a relatively small and nimble spaceplane that flew with a single pilot each time it went to space.But Branson had something bigger and more ambitious in mind \u2014 creating the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline,\u201d as he called it. And Virgin Galactic set out to build a larger craft capable of flying six passengers with two pilots. For now, however, the company is flying just four people in addition to the pilots. And it flies past 50 miles, not 62.SpaceShipTwo, as it is called, has reached that 50-mile altitude three times before today\u2019s flight, allowing Branson to fly and fulfill the dream he had nearly 20 years ago.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe billionaire space race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos grows bitterReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos was supposed to go to space first.His company Blue Origin announced that he would join the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20. The date was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And Bezos invited his brother, Mark, to join him. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Branson was not about to be outdone, however. While he was initially scheduled to go on a later flight, he jumped ahead and decided to join the flight scheduled to fly Sunday, which is nine days before Bezos\u2019 flight. He has denied that he and Bezos are in a race, telling The Post recently that it was \u201cjust an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about the rivalry on CNBC, Branson couldn\u2019t help himself and said, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBlue Origin, normally quiet and secretive, has punched back, releasing a chart comparing a flight in its New Shepard capsule to the Virgin Galactic experience. In it, Blue Origin points out that its capsule flies above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized boundary for space at 100 kilometers or around 62 miles high. Virgin Galactic, by contrast, flies just above 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration issues astronaut wings for crew members.Blue Origin also pointed out that its windows are bigger, that it launches with a more traditional rocket and capsule instead of an air-launch via a spaceplane and has an emergency escape system. It also charges that Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket engine is worse for the environment.Nicola Pecile, a test pilot for Virgin Galactic, on Twitter called the dispute about which altitude is more worthy \u201cso childish that it is getting really embarrassing to watch.\u201d He noted that flying above 100,000 feet, about 18 miles, \u201cis already so complicated that anyone doing so should deserve a special recognition.\u201dHe added that if there had ever been a competition between the two companies, it ended in December 2018 when Virgin Galactic first flew to space. He added that Blue Origin \u201chas flown only mannequins so far.\u201dThe tweets were later deleted.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere does outer space begin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThere is no line in the upper reaches of the atmosphere indicating where space begins. It\u2019s not like the ocean or a river bank where on one side you are dry and on the other wet. And there is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law.The atmosphere gradually gets less and less dense, gravity\u2019s pull eventually weakens, and the debate over where space begins has churned for decades.It\u2019s getting another look now as a pair of companies, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin compete to fly paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital trajectories. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin touts that it flies past the Karman line, named for Theodore Von Karman, a Hungarian-American engineer and scientist who studied aeronautics and astronautics. That boundary is at 100 kilometers, or 62 miles.Blue Origin chose that altitude, Bezos has said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dBlue Origin likes to point out that Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t quite reach that altitude, even though that was its original intent. But as its spacecraft got heavier, Virgin Galactic decided it would fly four passengers, not six, as originally intended, and it would fly only past 50 miles, instead of 62.But the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes 50 miles high as space and awards astronaut wings to people who\u2019ve reached that altitude. That includes Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, as well as the pilots from the Air Force and NASA who flew the X-15 jet to that altitude during the 1950s.The 50-mile, 80-kilometer threshold qualifies as space for Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist, as well. In a paper, he argued that \u201cpractical evidence suggests that the 80 km line is a reasonable boundary.\u201dSatellites can survive for days and weeks in orbit at that altitude. But once the low point of the orbit drops below that threshold a satellite would fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. \u201cThe satellite does not survive more than one orbit,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo, carried by a mothership, has lifted offReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:41 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has taken off. The spaceplane, carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three company employees, Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses, lifted off from a runway here in a mission that they hope will take them to the edge of space.The spaceplane is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which will \u201cair launch\u201d the vehicle to space.Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity: not the traditional way to launch into spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:02 a.m.Link copiedLinkSince the dawn of the Space Age, astronauts made it to the stars by strapping into a spacecraft sitting on top of \u2014 or, in the case of the space shuttle \u2014 beside massive rocket boosters that propelled them out of the atmosphere.Virgin Galactic takes a different approach. Instead of launching vertically from a pad, it air-launches its vehicle. The spacecraft, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, is tethered to the belly of a twin fuselage airplane that carries it aloft to about 45,000 feet. There, the spaceship is released, the pilots fire its engines and steer it on an almost perfectly vertical trajectory into the sky.To reorient itself for reentry, the spacecraft has what is known as a \u201cfeather\u201d \u2014 the wings of the spacecraft essentially fold up and, as the company says on its website, \u201cprovides stability during re-entry to the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u201d\u201cDuring this phase of spaceflight the vehicle acts like a shuttlecock or birdie, orienting the ship to the proper re-entry attitude,\u201d Virgin Galactic says. \u201cThis orientation creates high drag, which slows SpaceShipTwo down quickly while high in the atmosphere. This also allows the thermal loads generated from re-entering the atmosphere to spread evenly over the surface area of the vehicle rather than concentrating on a few small points.\u201dOnce back into the atmosphere, the wings are lowered back into position, and the pilots glide the spaceplane for a touchdown on the runway.SpaceShipTwo is not the only vehicle to be air-launched from a mother ship to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The X-15, operated by the U.S. Air Force and NASA, flew during test flights in the 1960s. But it didn\u2019t have a cabin as modern as SpaceShipTwo, with plenty of windows for Earth gazing.Meet the crew flying Virgin Galactic todayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson will be on board. That everyone knows. But the rest of the crew is an interesting mix of Virgin Galactic employees, with an array of backgrounds and experiences.Dave Mackay, the chief pilot, is from Scotland and has flown to space twice previously. He served in the Royal Air Force for 16 years and has flown 140 different types of aircraft. After the military, he flew for Virgin Atlantic, Branson\u2019s commercial airline, and then joined Virgin Galactic.Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci is the flight\u2019s co-pilot. He\u2019s a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission.In the cabin with Branson will be Beth Moses, whose Virgin Galactic job is chief astronaut instructor. She flew with Masucci on the February 2019 flight. In an interview with The Post after her flight, she said, \u201cIt blows your mind. We flew on a perfectly clear day. A lot of snow on the mountain tops. Earth was wearing her diamonds that day.\u201dWhen the company starts flying paying customers, Moses\u2019 job will be to prepare them for the experience. She is married to Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president.Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, is a graduate of Purdue University who previously worked at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an association that promotes the commercial space industry. While flying, she said she would be assessing what it would be like for researchers and scientists to perform their experiments in space.\u201cThis is an incredible opportunity to get people from different backgrounds, different geographies, different communities into space,\u201d she said in a video on Twitter.The sixth person aboard the flight will be Colin Bennett, Virgin Galactic\u2019s lead operations engineer. His task is to evaluate procedures in the crew cabin during the spaceplane\u2019s powered ascent through the atmosphere as well as when the crew is in a weightless environment.Richard Branson, showman and daredevil, hopes to use his spaceflight to drive ticket salesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 a.m.Link copiedLinkHuman spaceflight is an inherently risky endeavor. Astronauts, like soldiers going into combat, know \u2014 or should \u2014 that they are putting their lives on the line.\u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities,\u201d Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut wrote in a Washington Post op-ed days after space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all seven on board.Despite the risks, he wrote that \u201cwe tend to pooh-pooh danger, and if you go into the VIP stands before a space launch there is a carefree, holiday atmosphere, like being at the company picnic. Ride one of the beasts and you get a different perspective.\u201dThe spaceplane that Richard Branson is set to fly is nothing like the beast Collins flew with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Saturn V moon rocket was far more powerful than the spaceplane that will barely get Branson to the edge of space. But it is dangerous nonetheless, despite the festive atmosphere Branson is building at Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility in the New Mexico desert.Stephen Colbert, the late-night TV show host and space fan, is anchoring Virgin Galactic\u2019s live broadcast of the flight. The musician Khalid will be at Spaceport America, and will release his new single \u201cNew Normal\u201d after the launch. Celebrity FORs (Friends of Richard) are expected to be on hand as well, ready to party and celebrate a triumph. Elon Musk is there.Branson, the showman CEO who has turned death-defying exploits into a form of self-promotion and marketing, plans to use his flight to launch Virgin Galactic\u2019s ticket sales. After being dormant for some time, the company plans to reopen sales \u2014 with prices that could be an estimated $500,000.That is, as long as Sunday\u2019s flight is completed safely.The crew has arrived at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew for Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceflight has arrived at Spaceport America ahead of the flight. In a Twitter post, Richard Branson can be seen cycling up to the facility and being greeted by his fellow crew mates, who are already in their spacesuits.\u201cYou\u2019re late, come on, get suited up,\u201d says Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor. They are expected to board SpaceShipTwoUnity a little before 10 a.m. Eastern time.It\u2019s a beautiful day to go to space. We\u2019ve arrived at @Spaceport_NM. Get ready to watch LIVE at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST https://t.co/PcvGTmA661 #Unity22 pic.twitter.com/4KjGPpjz0M\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nElon Musk is at Spaceport America to cheer on Richard BransonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson has added a photo of himself with a barefoot Elon Musk to his Twitter feed.\u201cBig day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready,\u201d he said in the accompanying text.Big day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready. Watch #Unity22 launch and livestream TODAY at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST.@virgingalactic @elonmusk https://t.co/1313b4RAKI pic.twitter.com/FRQqrQEbH8\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nBranson is scheduled to fly to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s spacecraft later Sunday morning.On Twitter Saturday, Musk wrote to Branson: \u201cWill see you there to wish you the best.\u201dBranson responded by saying, \u201cThanks for being so typically supportive and such a good friend, Elon. Great to be opening up space for all \u2014 safe travels and see you at Spaceport America!\u201d\u201cGodspeed!\u201d Musk tweeted Sunday.Jeff Bezos, another of the billionaire \u201cspace barons,\u201d also said he hoped Branson had a good launch, writing on Instagram: \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!\u201d Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, is scheduled to fly to space on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule July 20 and is not expected to be present to witness Branson\u2019s trip. The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness. Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6522",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/",
        "text": "SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico \u2014 Richard Branson completed a daring, barnstorming flight to the edge of space Sunday, rocketing through the atmosphere in the spaceplane he\u2019d been yearning to ride for nearly 20 years.The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness before the vehicle they were traveling in, SpaceShipTwo Unity, glided back to Earth and a landing on the runway at Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility here in the New Mexico desert. It was SpaceShipTwo\u2019s fourth trip to the edge of space since 2018, and Virgin Galactic, the company Branson founded in 2004, says it will soon start flying paying customers regularly on similar jaunts, opening a new era in human space exploration.Several companies in the growing commercial space industry, including Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, have developed spacecraft designed to allow private citizens, and not just NASA trained military fighter pilots and scientists, to earn the title of \u201castronaut.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Virgin Galactic seemed intent on making it clear that this was not a traditional NASA launch. Instead of a stoic countdown, there was a party-like atmosphere along the tarmac, a scene as much a spectacle as a space launch that even included a musical guest, Khalid, who debuted a new song during a performance here. The company\u2019s live broadcast of the flight was hosted by comedian and late-night host Stephen Colbert, and Musk was on hand to watch Branson and the crew take off.Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity takes off tethered to the belly of a mother ship. On Sunday, the mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo, lifted off from the tarmac here shortly after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, delayed by about 90 minutes because high winds overnight had kept the ground crew from rolling it out of the hangar. The spaceship was released at about 11:25 a.m. Eastern time, the pilots ignited the engine and the spacecraft shot almost straight up as it thundered toward space.The flight reached its apogee at 282,000 feet \u2014 53.41 miles \u2014 where the passengers were able to unstrap and experience weightlessness. The spacecraft then fell back to earth and a landing at 11:39 Eastern time.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn board were pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, both of whom had flown to space on previous flights. Joining Branson in the crew compartment were Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs, Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, and Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor. Moses, who is married to Mike Moses, the company\u2019s president, flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission, in 2019.Branson had originally been scheduled to fly aboard a flight scheduled for later this summer or early fall. But after the company successfully made it to space in May, he grew impatient.\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dIn a press conference after the flight, he said he wasn\u2019t nervous about the trip. \u201cWe have nearly 1,000 of the best engineers in the world\u201d who pored over every inch of the spacecraft, he said. His only concern, he said, was the possibility of a delay. \"The only thing I was worried about was some tiny little something that would get in the way, something that would stop us from getting into space.\u201dHe called the experience \u201cjust magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\" And added that, \u201chaving flown to space, I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dBritish billionaire Richard Branson, three crewmates and two pilots rode to the edge of space on July 11 before safely descending and landing in New Mexico. (Reuters)By moving up his flight, he was able to beat Bezos to space by nine days. Bezos, who recently stepped down as Amazon\u2019s CEO, is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s suborbital New Shepard capsule on July 20.Branson has repeatedly denied that he was in a race with Bezos and said in the interview that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, the altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.On Saturday, however, Bezos wished Branson luck in a post on Instagram. \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cBest of luck!\u201dBranson would now be eligible for his wings, fulfilling a dream he has had since he founded Virgin Galactic, lured by the romance of space travel and the possibility of commercializing an endeavor that had been monopolized by governments.One of the first major steps on that path was the 2004 Ansari X Prize, a $10 million competition to put a commercial vehicle into space for the first time. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft had funded an effort, led by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft designer, to build what was called SpaceShipOne. Branson fell in love with the ship, purchased the rights to the technology and was able to slap a Virgin logo on the spacecraft as it won the prize.Watching the spacecraft take off, Branson turned to Allen and said, according to Allen\u2019s memoir, \u201cPaul, isn\u2019t this better than the best sex you ever had?\u201dBranson then turned his attention to creating the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d and vowed that within a matter of years passengers would soon be flying to space on a regular basis.Virgin Galactic set off to build SpaceShipTwo, which would be far larger and more powerful vehicle than its predecessor. But the program quickly ran into technical problems. And in 2014, it suffered an accident midflight that killed one of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, and severely injured the other, Peter Siebold, who parachuted to the ground. Branson considered giving up on his quest, but ultimately decided that the risk was worth it and carried on, vowing to learn from the accident and build a safer and more robust spaceship.The company finally made it to space in December 2018, and again a few weeks later, in early 2019. It then moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America, the gleaming $220 million facility funded by taxpayers. In 2019, the company announced it would go public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.Then, in May, it reached space for the third time in a flight with two pilots, and, after consulting with the company\u2019s engineers, Branson decided that he would be on the next flight.The flight comes amid a flurry of spaceflight activity that taken together amounts to a renaissance for human exploration.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itJust over a year ago, no one had flown to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, a long, ignominious drought that ended when Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station.Since then, SpaceX has flown two more human spaceflight missions. Boeing, which is also under contract from NASA to transport the agency\u2019s astronauts to and from the station, hopes to fly people in the months to come.SpaceX plans to fly a mission dubbed Inspiration4 in September. Financed by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, a group of four civilians would spend three days or so orbiting the Earth in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule. Axiom Space, a firm based in Houston, is arranging trips for very wealthy groups of people to spend a week on the space station. A voyage that costs some $55 million.In addition to the flight on July 20, Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has two more flights planned for this year and more than half a dozen next year.In all, that would culminate to an era of spaceflight like the barnstormers in the early days of aviation. But whether it is successful depends on whether the industry can continue to fly people reliably and safely.After the flight, Branson was greeted by his three-year-old granddaughter, who said, \u201cPapa gone to the moon. Papa gone to the moon.\u201dBranson let it slide. \u201cI\u2019m not going to disillusion her,\u201d he said.Richard Branson revels in a postflight ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:53 p.m.Link copiedLink\u201cSir Richard Branson, astronaut.\u201dWith those words, Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, pinned astronaut wings to Richard Branson\u2019s flight suit Sunday shortly after Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo landed safely back at Spaceport America in New Mexico.Speaking to the crowd, Branson said, \u201cthe whole thing was just magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\u201dHe said his goal when he founded the company in 2004 was to \u201cturn the dream of space travel into a reality for my grandchildren\u201d and for future generations. And he added that \u201chaving flown to space I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementRichard Branson\u2019s other space companyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism venture, may get most of the attention, but he has another company \u2014 Virgin Orbit \u2014 that has steadily been making progress and is part of a movement to launch constellations of small satellites to orbit.Virgin Orbit hopes to be a disruptive force in the launch market by offering a small, 70-foot long, two-stage rocket suited to take advantage of satellite technology that is drastically shrinking in size and lowering costs. Unlike traditional rockets that blast off vertically from launchpads, Virgin Orbit\u2019s LauncherOne rocket is air launched \u2014 carried aloft by a Boeing 747, then released midair to fires its engine and shoot into orbit.The rocket is able to hoist payloads of a few hundred pounds, which could carry satellites that would range in size from a big refrigerator to a toaster oven, the company has said.So far, it has had two successful launches, including one last month, when it delivered seven customer satellites to their intended orbit. In all, the company has launched 17, and is \u201clooking forward to growing that number tremendously as we push to ramp up our flight cadence in the coming months,\u201d Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, said in a statement.The company is pursuing a number of customers, but one in particular, the Pentagon, has been paying particularly close attention. The ability to quickly put up a satellite is a capability U.S. national security agencies have long sought after, and being able to use a 747 that only needs a runway to take off is particularly attractive, officials have said.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first launch, Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, wrote on Twitter: \u201cCongratulations to the Virgin Orbit Team!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo has landed back on the runway at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:39 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has touched down on the runway at Spaceport America just about 15 minutes after it was released from its mothership and thundered to the edge of space, completing a daring flight that Richard Branson has dreamed of for years.A crowd gathered along the tarmac cheered when they saw the shiny, white spaceplane come back after what appears to be a successful mission. In addition to Branson, Virgin Galactic employees Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses were on board the test flight, which was piloted by Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci.The company hopes the mission will pave the way for future flights of paying customers. It has some 600 people who have put down significant deposits and are waiting to fly. It also is expected to soon reopen sales for tickets, which had cost $250,000 but are now expected to be more expensive, perhaps as much as $500,000.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has reached the edge of spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:32 a.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity spaceplane reached the edge of space, flying to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The vehicle is carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and three employees and has two pilots at the controls. After reaching its apogee, or high point, it reoriented itself and is falling back toward Earth, gliding to a runway landing.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo Unity has been releasedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has been released from its mothership.If all goes according to plan, it should fly past 50 miles high, then glide back to Earth for a landing on the runway at Spaceport America. Total flight time, from release to landing, is estimated to be 15 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow Virgin Galactic was founded nearly two decades agoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn 2004, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, won the Ansari X Prize, by sending the first commercially developed spacecraft past what is known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized threshold that says space begins at 100 kilometers, about 62 miles, above the Earth\u2019s surface.At the time, Richard Branson was fascinated with the idea of private space travel and was thinking of starting a space company of his own. And when he saw SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that legendary aviation designer Burt Rutan developed for Allen, he was smitten.Allen was growing nervous about the dangers of human spaceflight and agreed to sell Branson the rights to the technology. Branson quickly slapped a Virgin logo on the spacecraft and set out to make it more robust. SpaceShipOne, which hangs in the National Air and Space Museum, was a relatively small and nimble spaceplane that flew with a single pilot each time it went to space.But Branson had something bigger and more ambitious in mind \u2014 creating the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline,\u201d as he called it. And Virgin Galactic set out to build a larger craft capable of flying six passengers with two pilots. For now, however, the company is flying just four people in addition to the pilots. And it flies past 50 miles, not 62.SpaceShipTwo, as it is called, has reached that 50-mile altitude three times before today\u2019s flight, allowing Branson to fly and fulfill the dream he had nearly 20 years ago.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe billionaire space race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos grows bitterReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos was supposed to go to space first.His company Blue Origin announced that he would join the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20. The date was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And Bezos invited his brother, Mark, to join him. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Branson was not about to be outdone, however. While he was initially scheduled to go on a later flight, he jumped ahead and decided to join the flight scheduled to fly Sunday, which is nine days before Bezos\u2019 flight. He has denied that he and Bezos are in a race, telling The Post recently that it was \u201cjust an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about the rivalry on CNBC, Branson couldn\u2019t help himself and said, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBlue Origin, normally quiet and secretive, has punched back, releasing a chart comparing a flight in its New Shepard capsule to the Virgin Galactic experience. In it, Blue Origin points out that its capsule flies above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized boundary for space at 100 kilometers or around 62 miles high. Virgin Galactic, by contrast, flies just above 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration issues astronaut wings for crew members.Blue Origin also pointed out that its windows are bigger, that it launches with a more traditional rocket and capsule instead of an air-launch via a spaceplane and has an emergency escape system. It also charges that Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket engine is worse for the environment.Nicola Pecile, a test pilot for Virgin Galactic, on Twitter called the dispute about which altitude is more worthy \u201cso childish that it is getting really embarrassing to watch.\u201d He noted that flying above 100,000 feet, about 18 miles, \u201cis already so complicated that anyone doing so should deserve a special recognition.\u201dHe added that if there had ever been a competition between the two companies, it ended in December 2018 when Virgin Galactic first flew to space. He added that Blue Origin \u201chas flown only mannequins so far.\u201dThe tweets were later deleted.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere does outer space begin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThere is no line in the upper reaches of the atmosphere indicating where space begins. It\u2019s not like the ocean or a river bank where on one side you are dry and on the other wet. And there is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law.The atmosphere gradually gets less and less dense, gravity\u2019s pull eventually weakens, and the debate over where space begins has churned for decades.It\u2019s getting another look now as a pair of companies, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin compete to fly paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital trajectories. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin touts that it flies past the Karman line, named for Theodore Von Karman, a Hungarian-American engineer and scientist who studied aeronautics and astronautics. That boundary is at 100 kilometers, or 62 miles.Blue Origin chose that altitude, Bezos has said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dBlue Origin likes to point out that Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t quite reach that altitude, even though that was its original intent. But as its spacecraft got heavier, Virgin Galactic decided it would fly four passengers, not six, as originally intended, and it would fly only past 50 miles, instead of 62.But the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes 50 miles high as space and awards astronaut wings to people who\u2019ve reached that altitude. That includes Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, as well as the pilots from the Air Force and NASA who flew the X-15 jet to that altitude during the 1950s.The 50-mile, 80-kilometer threshold qualifies as space for Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist, as well. In a paper, he argued that \u201cpractical evidence suggests that the 80 km line is a reasonable boundary.\u201dSatellites can survive for days and weeks in orbit at that altitude. But once the low point of the orbit drops below that threshold a satellite would fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. \u201cThe satellite does not survive more than one orbit,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo, carried by a mothership, has lifted offReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:41 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has taken off. The spaceplane, carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three company employees, Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses, lifted off from a runway here in a mission that they hope will take them to the edge of space.The spaceplane is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which will \u201cair launch\u201d the vehicle to space.Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity: not the traditional way to launch into spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:02 a.m.Link copiedLinkSince the dawn of the Space Age, astronauts made it to the stars by strapping into a spacecraft sitting on top of \u2014 or, in the case of the space shuttle \u2014 beside massive rocket boosters that propelled them out of the atmosphere.Virgin Galactic takes a different approach. Instead of launching vertically from a pad, it air-launches its vehicle. The spacecraft, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, is tethered to the belly of a twin fuselage airplane that carries it aloft to about 45,000 feet. There, the spaceship is released, the pilots fire its engines and steer it on an almost perfectly vertical trajectory into the sky.To reorient itself for reentry, the spacecraft has what is known as a \u201cfeather\u201d \u2014 the wings of the spacecraft essentially fold up and, as the company says on its website, \u201cprovides stability during re-entry to the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u201d\u201cDuring this phase of spaceflight the vehicle acts like a shuttlecock or birdie, orienting the ship to the proper re-entry attitude,\u201d Virgin Galactic says. \u201cThis orientation creates high drag, which slows SpaceShipTwo down quickly while high in the atmosphere. This also allows the thermal loads generated from re-entering the atmosphere to spread evenly over the surface area of the vehicle rather than concentrating on a few small points.\u201dOnce back into the atmosphere, the wings are lowered back into position, and the pilots glide the spaceplane for a touchdown on the runway.SpaceShipTwo is not the only vehicle to be air-launched from a mother ship to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The X-15, operated by the U.S. Air Force and NASA, flew during test flights in the 1960s. But it didn\u2019t have a cabin as modern as SpaceShipTwo, with plenty of windows for Earth gazing.Meet the crew flying Virgin Galactic todayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson will be on board. That everyone knows. But the rest of the crew is an interesting mix of Virgin Galactic employees, with an array of backgrounds and experiences.Dave Mackay, the chief pilot, is from Scotland and has flown to space twice previously. He served in the Royal Air Force for 16 years and has flown 140 different types of aircraft. After the military, he flew for Virgin Atlantic, Branson\u2019s commercial airline, and then joined Virgin Galactic.Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci is the flight\u2019s co-pilot. He\u2019s a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission.In the cabin with Branson will be Beth Moses, whose Virgin Galactic job is chief astronaut instructor. She flew with Masucci on the February 2019 flight. In an interview with The Post after her flight, she said, \u201cIt blows your mind. We flew on a perfectly clear day. A lot of snow on the mountain tops. Earth was wearing her diamonds that day.\u201dWhen the company starts flying paying customers, Moses\u2019 job will be to prepare them for the experience. She is married to Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president.Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, is a graduate of Purdue University who previously worked at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an association that promotes the commercial space industry. While flying, she said she would be assessing what it would be like for researchers and scientists to perform their experiments in space.\u201cThis is an incredible opportunity to get people from different backgrounds, different geographies, different communities into space,\u201d she said in a video on Twitter.The sixth person aboard the flight will be Colin Bennett, Virgin Galactic\u2019s lead operations engineer. His task is to evaluate procedures in the crew cabin during the spaceplane\u2019s powered ascent through the atmosphere as well as when the crew is in a weightless environment.Richard Branson, showman and daredevil, hopes to use his spaceflight to drive ticket salesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 a.m.Link copiedLinkHuman spaceflight is an inherently risky endeavor. Astronauts, like soldiers going into combat, know \u2014 or should \u2014 that they are putting their lives on the line.\u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities,\u201d Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut wrote in a Washington Post op-ed days after space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all seven on board.Despite the risks, he wrote that \u201cwe tend to pooh-pooh danger, and if you go into the VIP stands before a space launch there is a carefree, holiday atmosphere, like being at the company picnic. Ride one of the beasts and you get a different perspective.\u201dThe spaceplane that Richard Branson is set to fly is nothing like the beast Collins flew with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Saturn V moon rocket was far more powerful than the spaceplane that will barely get Branson to the edge of space. But it is dangerous nonetheless, despite the festive atmosphere Branson is building at Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility in the New Mexico desert.Stephen Colbert, the late-night TV show host and space fan, is anchoring Virgin Galactic\u2019s live broadcast of the flight. The musician Khalid will be at Spaceport America, and will release his new single \u201cNew Normal\u201d after the launch. Celebrity FORs (Friends of Richard) are expected to be on hand as well, ready to party and celebrate a triumph. Elon Musk is there.Branson, the showman CEO who has turned death-defying exploits into a form of self-promotion and marketing, plans to use his flight to launch Virgin Galactic\u2019s ticket sales. After being dormant for some time, the company plans to reopen sales \u2014 with prices that could be an estimated $500,000.That is, as long as Sunday\u2019s flight is completed safely.The crew has arrived at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew for Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceflight has arrived at Spaceport America ahead of the flight. In a Twitter post, Richard Branson can be seen cycling up to the facility and being greeted by his fellow crew mates, who are already in their spacesuits.\u201cYou\u2019re late, come on, get suited up,\u201d says Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor. They are expected to board SpaceShipTwoUnity a little before 10 a.m. Eastern time.It\u2019s a beautiful day to go to space. We\u2019ve arrived at @Spaceport_NM. Get ready to watch LIVE at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST https://t.co/PcvGTmA661 #Unity22 pic.twitter.com/4KjGPpjz0M\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nElon Musk is at Spaceport America to cheer on Richard BransonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson has added a photo of himself with a barefoot Elon Musk to his Twitter feed.\u201cBig day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready,\u201d he said in the accompanying text.Big day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready. Watch #Unity22 launch and livestream TODAY at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST.@virgingalactic @elonmusk https://t.co/1313b4RAKI pic.twitter.com/FRQqrQEbH8\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nBranson is scheduled to fly to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s spacecraft later Sunday morning.On Twitter Saturday, Musk wrote to Branson: \u201cWill see you there to wish you the best.\u201dBranson responded by saying, \u201cThanks for being so typically supportive and such a good friend, Elon. Great to be opening up space for all \u2014 safe travels and see you at Spaceport America!\u201d\u201cGodspeed!\u201d Musk tweeted Sunday.Jeff Bezos, another of the billionaire \u201cspace barons,\u201d also said he hoped Branson had a good launch, writing on Instagram: \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!\u201d Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, is scheduled to fly to space on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule July 20 and is not expected to be present to witness Branson\u2019s trip. The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness. Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6523",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/",
        "text": "SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico \u2014 Richard Branson completed a daring, barnstorming flight to the edge of space Sunday, rocketing through the atmosphere in the spaceplane he\u2019d been yearning to ride for nearly 20 years.The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness before the vehicle they were traveling in, SpaceShipTwo Unity, glided back to Earth and a landing on the runway at Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility here in the New Mexico desert. It was SpaceShipTwo\u2019s fourth trip to the edge of space since 2018, and Virgin Galactic, the company Branson founded in 2004, says it will soon start flying paying customers regularly on similar jaunts, opening a new era in human space exploration.Several companies in the growing commercial space industry, including Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, have developed spacecraft designed to allow private citizens, and not just NASA trained military fighter pilots and scientists, to earn the title of \u201castronaut.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Virgin Galactic seemed intent on making it clear that this was not a traditional NASA launch. Instead of a stoic countdown, there was a party-like atmosphere along the tarmac, a scene as much a spectacle as a space launch that even included a musical guest, Khalid, who debuted a new song during a performance here. The company\u2019s live broadcast of the flight was hosted by comedian and late-night host Stephen Colbert, and Musk was on hand to watch Branson and the crew take off.Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity takes off tethered to the belly of a mother ship. On Sunday, the mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo, lifted off from the tarmac here shortly after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, delayed by about 90 minutes because high winds overnight had kept the ground crew from rolling it out of the hangar. The spaceship was released at about 11:25 a.m. Eastern time, the pilots ignited the engine and the spacecraft shot almost straight up as it thundered toward space.The flight reached its apogee at 282,000 feet \u2014 53.41 miles \u2014 where the passengers were able to unstrap and experience weightlessness. The spacecraft then fell back to earth and a landing at 11:39 Eastern time.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn board were pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, both of whom had flown to space on previous flights. Joining Branson in the crew compartment were Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs, Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, and Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor. Moses, who is married to Mike Moses, the company\u2019s president, flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission, in 2019.Branson had originally been scheduled to fly aboard a flight scheduled for later this summer or early fall. But after the company successfully made it to space in May, he grew impatient.\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dIn a press conference after the flight, he said he wasn\u2019t nervous about the trip. \u201cWe have nearly 1,000 of the best engineers in the world\u201d who pored over every inch of the spacecraft, he said. His only concern, he said, was the possibility of a delay. \"The only thing I was worried about was some tiny little something that would get in the way, something that would stop us from getting into space.\u201dHe called the experience \u201cjust magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\" And added that, \u201chaving flown to space, I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dBritish billionaire Richard Branson, three crewmates and two pilots rode to the edge of space on July 11 before safely descending and landing in New Mexico. (Reuters)By moving up his flight, he was able to beat Bezos to space by nine days. Bezos, who recently stepped down as Amazon\u2019s CEO, is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s suborbital New Shepard capsule on July 20.Branson has repeatedly denied that he was in a race with Bezos and said in the interview that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, the altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.On Saturday, however, Bezos wished Branson luck in a post on Instagram. \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cBest of luck!\u201dBranson would now be eligible for his wings, fulfilling a dream he has had since he founded Virgin Galactic, lured by the romance of space travel and the possibility of commercializing an endeavor that had been monopolized by governments.One of the first major steps on that path was the 2004 Ansari X Prize, a $10 million competition to put a commercial vehicle into space for the first time. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft had funded an effort, led by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft designer, to build what was called SpaceShipOne. Branson fell in love with the ship, purchased the rights to the technology and was able to slap a Virgin logo on the spacecraft as it won the prize.Watching the spacecraft take off, Branson turned to Allen and said, according to Allen\u2019s memoir, \u201cPaul, isn\u2019t this better than the best sex you ever had?\u201dBranson then turned his attention to creating the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d and vowed that within a matter of years passengers would soon be flying to space on a regular basis.Virgin Galactic set off to build SpaceShipTwo, which would be far larger and more powerful vehicle than its predecessor. But the program quickly ran into technical problems. And in 2014, it suffered an accident midflight that killed one of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, and severely injured the other, Peter Siebold, who parachuted to the ground. Branson considered giving up on his quest, but ultimately decided that the risk was worth it and carried on, vowing to learn from the accident and build a safer and more robust spaceship.The company finally made it to space in December 2018, and again a few weeks later, in early 2019. It then moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America, the gleaming $220 million facility funded by taxpayers. In 2019, the company announced it would go public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.Then, in May, it reached space for the third time in a flight with two pilots, and, after consulting with the company\u2019s engineers, Branson decided that he would be on the next flight.The flight comes amid a flurry of spaceflight activity that taken together amounts to a renaissance for human exploration.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itJust over a year ago, no one had flown to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, a long, ignominious drought that ended when Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station.Since then, SpaceX has flown two more human spaceflight missions. Boeing, which is also under contract from NASA to transport the agency\u2019s astronauts to and from the station, hopes to fly people in the months to come.SpaceX plans to fly a mission dubbed Inspiration4 in September. Financed by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, a group of four civilians would spend three days or so orbiting the Earth in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule. Axiom Space, a firm based in Houston, is arranging trips for very wealthy groups of people to spend a week on the space station. A voyage that costs some $55 million.In addition to the flight on July 20, Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has two more flights planned for this year and more than half a dozen next year.In all, that would culminate to an era of spaceflight like the barnstormers in the early days of aviation. But whether it is successful depends on whether the industry can continue to fly people reliably and safely.After the flight, Branson was greeted by his three-year-old granddaughter, who said, \u201cPapa gone to the moon. Papa gone to the moon.\u201dBranson let it slide. \u201cI\u2019m not going to disillusion her,\u201d he said.Richard Branson revels in a postflight ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:53 p.m.Link copiedLink\u201cSir Richard Branson, astronaut.\u201dWith those words, Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, pinned astronaut wings to Richard Branson\u2019s flight suit Sunday shortly after Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo landed safely back at Spaceport America in New Mexico.Speaking to the crowd, Branson said, \u201cthe whole thing was just magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\u201dHe said his goal when he founded the company in 2004 was to \u201cturn the dream of space travel into a reality for my grandchildren\u201d and for future generations. And he added that \u201chaving flown to space I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementRichard Branson\u2019s other space companyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism venture, may get most of the attention, but he has another company \u2014 Virgin Orbit \u2014 that has steadily been making progress and is part of a movement to launch constellations of small satellites to orbit.Virgin Orbit hopes to be a disruptive force in the launch market by offering a small, 70-foot long, two-stage rocket suited to take advantage of satellite technology that is drastically shrinking in size and lowering costs. Unlike traditional rockets that blast off vertically from launchpads, Virgin Orbit\u2019s LauncherOne rocket is air launched \u2014 carried aloft by a Boeing 747, then released midair to fires its engine and shoot into orbit.The rocket is able to hoist payloads of a few hundred pounds, which could carry satellites that would range in size from a big refrigerator to a toaster oven, the company has said.So far, it has had two successful launches, including one last month, when it delivered seven customer satellites to their intended orbit. In all, the company has launched 17, and is \u201clooking forward to growing that number tremendously as we push to ramp up our flight cadence in the coming months,\u201d Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, said in a statement.The company is pursuing a number of customers, but one in particular, the Pentagon, has been paying particularly close attention. The ability to quickly put up a satellite is a capability U.S. national security agencies have long sought after, and being able to use a 747 that only needs a runway to take off is particularly attractive, officials have said.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first launch, Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, wrote on Twitter: \u201cCongratulations to the Virgin Orbit Team!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo has landed back on the runway at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:39 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has touched down on the runway at Spaceport America just about 15 minutes after it was released from its mothership and thundered to the edge of space, completing a daring flight that Richard Branson has dreamed of for years.A crowd gathered along the tarmac cheered when they saw the shiny, white spaceplane come back after what appears to be a successful mission. In addition to Branson, Virgin Galactic employees Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses were on board the test flight, which was piloted by Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci.The company hopes the mission will pave the way for future flights of paying customers. It has some 600 people who have put down significant deposits and are waiting to fly. It also is expected to soon reopen sales for tickets, which had cost $250,000 but are now expected to be more expensive, perhaps as much as $500,000.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has reached the edge of spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:32 a.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity spaceplane reached the edge of space, flying to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The vehicle is carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and three employees and has two pilots at the controls. After reaching its apogee, or high point, it reoriented itself and is falling back toward Earth, gliding to a runway landing.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo Unity has been releasedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has been released from its mothership.If all goes according to plan, it should fly past 50 miles high, then glide back to Earth for a landing on the runway at Spaceport America. Total flight time, from release to landing, is estimated to be 15 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow Virgin Galactic was founded nearly two decades agoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn 2004, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, won the Ansari X Prize, by sending the first commercially developed spacecraft past what is known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized threshold that says space begins at 100 kilometers, about 62 miles, above the Earth\u2019s surface.At the time, Richard Branson was fascinated with the idea of private space travel and was thinking of starting a space company of his own. And when he saw SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that legendary aviation designer Burt Rutan developed for Allen, he was smitten.Allen was growing nervous about the dangers of human spaceflight and agreed to sell Branson the rights to the technology. Branson quickly slapped a Virgin logo on the spacecraft and set out to make it more robust. SpaceShipOne, which hangs in the National Air and Space Museum, was a relatively small and nimble spaceplane that flew with a single pilot each time it went to space.But Branson had something bigger and more ambitious in mind \u2014 creating the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline,\u201d as he called it. And Virgin Galactic set out to build a larger craft capable of flying six passengers with two pilots. For now, however, the company is flying just four people in addition to the pilots. And it flies past 50 miles, not 62.SpaceShipTwo, as it is called, has reached that 50-mile altitude three times before today\u2019s flight, allowing Branson to fly and fulfill the dream he had nearly 20 years ago.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe billionaire space race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos grows bitterReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos was supposed to go to space first.His company Blue Origin announced that he would join the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20. The date was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And Bezos invited his brother, Mark, to join him. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Branson was not about to be outdone, however. While he was initially scheduled to go on a later flight, he jumped ahead and decided to join the flight scheduled to fly Sunday, which is nine days before Bezos\u2019 flight. He has denied that he and Bezos are in a race, telling The Post recently that it was \u201cjust an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about the rivalry on CNBC, Branson couldn\u2019t help himself and said, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBlue Origin, normally quiet and secretive, has punched back, releasing a chart comparing a flight in its New Shepard capsule to the Virgin Galactic experience. In it, Blue Origin points out that its capsule flies above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized boundary for space at 100 kilometers or around 62 miles high. Virgin Galactic, by contrast, flies just above 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration issues astronaut wings for crew members.Blue Origin also pointed out that its windows are bigger, that it launches with a more traditional rocket and capsule instead of an air-launch via a spaceplane and has an emergency escape system. It also charges that Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket engine is worse for the environment.Nicola Pecile, a test pilot for Virgin Galactic, on Twitter called the dispute about which altitude is more worthy \u201cso childish that it is getting really embarrassing to watch.\u201d He noted that flying above 100,000 feet, about 18 miles, \u201cis already so complicated that anyone doing so should deserve a special recognition.\u201dHe added that if there had ever been a competition between the two companies, it ended in December 2018 when Virgin Galactic first flew to space. He added that Blue Origin \u201chas flown only mannequins so far.\u201dThe tweets were later deleted.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere does outer space begin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThere is no line in the upper reaches of the atmosphere indicating where space begins. It\u2019s not like the ocean or a river bank where on one side you are dry and on the other wet. And there is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law.The atmosphere gradually gets less and less dense, gravity\u2019s pull eventually weakens, and the debate over where space begins has churned for decades.It\u2019s getting another look now as a pair of companies, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin compete to fly paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital trajectories. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin touts that it flies past the Karman line, named for Theodore Von Karman, a Hungarian-American engineer and scientist who studied aeronautics and astronautics. That boundary is at 100 kilometers, or 62 miles.Blue Origin chose that altitude, Bezos has said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dBlue Origin likes to point out that Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t quite reach that altitude, even though that was its original intent. But as its spacecraft got heavier, Virgin Galactic decided it would fly four passengers, not six, as originally intended, and it would fly only past 50 miles, instead of 62.But the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes 50 miles high as space and awards astronaut wings to people who\u2019ve reached that altitude. That includes Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, as well as the pilots from the Air Force and NASA who flew the X-15 jet to that altitude during the 1950s.The 50-mile, 80-kilometer threshold qualifies as space for Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist, as well. In a paper, he argued that \u201cpractical evidence suggests that the 80 km line is a reasonable boundary.\u201dSatellites can survive for days and weeks in orbit at that altitude. But once the low point of the orbit drops below that threshold a satellite would fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. \u201cThe satellite does not survive more than one orbit,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo, carried by a mothership, has lifted offReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:41 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has taken off. The spaceplane, carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three company employees, Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses, lifted off from a runway here in a mission that they hope will take them to the edge of space.The spaceplane is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which will \u201cair launch\u201d the vehicle to space.Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity: not the traditional way to launch into spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:02 a.m.Link copiedLinkSince the dawn of the Space Age, astronauts made it to the stars by strapping into a spacecraft sitting on top of \u2014 or, in the case of the space shuttle \u2014 beside massive rocket boosters that propelled them out of the atmosphere.Virgin Galactic takes a different approach. Instead of launching vertically from a pad, it air-launches its vehicle. The spacecraft, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, is tethered to the belly of a twin fuselage airplane that carries it aloft to about 45,000 feet. There, the spaceship is released, the pilots fire its engines and steer it on an almost perfectly vertical trajectory into the sky.To reorient itself for reentry, the spacecraft has what is known as a \u201cfeather\u201d \u2014 the wings of the spacecraft essentially fold up and, as the company says on its website, \u201cprovides stability during re-entry to the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u201d\u201cDuring this phase of spaceflight the vehicle acts like a shuttlecock or birdie, orienting the ship to the proper re-entry attitude,\u201d Virgin Galactic says. \u201cThis orientation creates high drag, which slows SpaceShipTwo down quickly while high in the atmosphere. This also allows the thermal loads generated from re-entering the atmosphere to spread evenly over the surface area of the vehicle rather than concentrating on a few small points.\u201dOnce back into the atmosphere, the wings are lowered back into position, and the pilots glide the spaceplane for a touchdown on the runway.SpaceShipTwo is not the only vehicle to be air-launched from a mother ship to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The X-15, operated by the U.S. Air Force and NASA, flew during test flights in the 1960s. But it didn\u2019t have a cabin as modern as SpaceShipTwo, with plenty of windows for Earth gazing.Meet the crew flying Virgin Galactic todayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson will be on board. That everyone knows. But the rest of the crew is an interesting mix of Virgin Galactic employees, with an array of backgrounds and experiences.Dave Mackay, the chief pilot, is from Scotland and has flown to space twice previously. He served in the Royal Air Force for 16 years and has flown 140 different types of aircraft. After the military, he flew for Virgin Atlantic, Branson\u2019s commercial airline, and then joined Virgin Galactic.Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci is the flight\u2019s co-pilot. He\u2019s a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission.In the cabin with Branson will be Beth Moses, whose Virgin Galactic job is chief astronaut instructor. She flew with Masucci on the February 2019 flight. In an interview with The Post after her flight, she said, \u201cIt blows your mind. We flew on a perfectly clear day. A lot of snow on the mountain tops. Earth was wearing her diamonds that day.\u201dWhen the company starts flying paying customers, Moses\u2019 job will be to prepare them for the experience. She is married to Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president.Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, is a graduate of Purdue University who previously worked at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an association that promotes the commercial space industry. While flying, she said she would be assessing what it would be like for researchers and scientists to perform their experiments in space.\u201cThis is an incredible opportunity to get people from different backgrounds, different geographies, different communities into space,\u201d she said in a video on Twitter.The sixth person aboard the flight will be Colin Bennett, Virgin Galactic\u2019s lead operations engineer. His task is to evaluate procedures in the crew cabin during the spaceplane\u2019s powered ascent through the atmosphere as well as when the crew is in a weightless environment.Richard Branson, showman and daredevil, hopes to use his spaceflight to drive ticket salesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 a.m.Link copiedLinkHuman spaceflight is an inherently risky endeavor. Astronauts, like soldiers going into combat, know \u2014 or should \u2014 that they are putting their lives on the line.\u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities,\u201d Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut wrote in a Washington Post op-ed days after space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all seven on board.Despite the risks, he wrote that \u201cwe tend to pooh-pooh danger, and if you go into the VIP stands before a space launch there is a carefree, holiday atmosphere, like being at the company picnic. Ride one of the beasts and you get a different perspective.\u201dThe spaceplane that Richard Branson is set to fly is nothing like the beast Collins flew with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Saturn V moon rocket was far more powerful than the spaceplane that will barely get Branson to the edge of space. But it is dangerous nonetheless, despite the festive atmosphere Branson is building at Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility in the New Mexico desert.Stephen Colbert, the late-night TV show host and space fan, is anchoring Virgin Galactic\u2019s live broadcast of the flight. The musician Khalid will be at Spaceport America, and will release his new single \u201cNew Normal\u201d after the launch. Celebrity FORs (Friends of Richard) are expected to be on hand as well, ready to party and celebrate a triumph. Elon Musk is there.Branson, the showman CEO who has turned death-defying exploits into a form of self-promotion and marketing, plans to use his flight to launch Virgin Galactic\u2019s ticket sales. After being dormant for some time, the company plans to reopen sales \u2014 with prices that could be an estimated $500,000.That is, as long as Sunday\u2019s flight is completed safely.The crew has arrived at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew for Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceflight has arrived at Spaceport America ahead of the flight. In a Twitter post, Richard Branson can be seen cycling up to the facility and being greeted by his fellow crew mates, who are already in their spacesuits.\u201cYou\u2019re late, come on, get suited up,\u201d says Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor. They are expected to board SpaceShipTwoUnity a little before 10 a.m. Eastern time.It\u2019s a beautiful day to go to space. We\u2019ve arrived at @Spaceport_NM. Get ready to watch LIVE at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST https://t.co/PcvGTmA661 #Unity22 pic.twitter.com/4KjGPpjz0M\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nElon Musk is at Spaceport America to cheer on Richard BransonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson has added a photo of himself with a barefoot Elon Musk to his Twitter feed.\u201cBig day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready,\u201d he said in the accompanying text.Big day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready. Watch #Unity22 launch and livestream TODAY at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST.@virgingalactic @elonmusk https://t.co/1313b4RAKI pic.twitter.com/FRQqrQEbH8\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nBranson is scheduled to fly to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s spacecraft later Sunday morning.On Twitter Saturday, Musk wrote to Branson: \u201cWill see you there to wish you the best.\u201dBranson responded by saying, \u201cThanks for being so typically supportive and such a good friend, Elon. Great to be opening up space for all \u2014 safe travels and see you at Spaceport America!\u201d\u201cGodspeed!\u201d Musk tweeted Sunday.Jeff Bezos, another of the billionaire \u201cspace barons,\u201d also said he hoped Branson had a good launch, writing on Instagram: \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!\u201d Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, is scheduled to fly to space on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule July 20 and is not expected to be present to witness Branson\u2019s trip. The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness. Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6524",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/",
        "text": "SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico \u2014 Richard Branson completed a daring, barnstorming flight to the edge of space Sunday, rocketing through the atmosphere in the spaceplane he\u2019d been yearning to ride for nearly 20 years.The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness before the vehicle they were traveling in, SpaceShipTwo Unity, glided back to Earth and a landing on the runway at Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility here in the New Mexico desert. It was SpaceShipTwo\u2019s fourth trip to the edge of space since 2018, and Virgin Galactic, the company Branson founded in 2004, says it will soon start flying paying customers regularly on similar jaunts, opening a new era in human space exploration.Several companies in the growing commercial space industry, including Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, have developed spacecraft designed to allow private citizens, and not just NASA trained military fighter pilots and scientists, to earn the title of \u201castronaut.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Virgin Galactic seemed intent on making it clear that this was not a traditional NASA launch. Instead of a stoic countdown, there was a party-like atmosphere along the tarmac, a scene as much a spectacle as a space launch that even included a musical guest, Khalid, who debuted a new song during a performance here. The company\u2019s live broadcast of the flight was hosted by comedian and late-night host Stephen Colbert, and Musk was on hand to watch Branson and the crew take off.Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity takes off tethered to the belly of a mother ship. On Sunday, the mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo, lifted off from the tarmac here shortly after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, delayed by about 90 minutes because high winds overnight had kept the ground crew from rolling it out of the hangar. The spaceship was released at about 11:25 a.m. Eastern time, the pilots ignited the engine and the spacecraft shot almost straight up as it thundered toward space.The flight reached its apogee at 282,000 feet \u2014 53.41 miles \u2014 where the passengers were able to unstrap and experience weightlessness. The spacecraft then fell back to earth and a landing at 11:39 Eastern time.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn board were pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, both of whom had flown to space on previous flights. Joining Branson in the crew compartment were Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs, Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, and Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor. Moses, who is married to Mike Moses, the company\u2019s president, flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission, in 2019.Branson had originally been scheduled to fly aboard a flight scheduled for later this summer or early fall. But after the company successfully made it to space in May, he grew impatient.\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dIn a press conference after the flight, he said he wasn\u2019t nervous about the trip. \u201cWe have nearly 1,000 of the best engineers in the world\u201d who pored over every inch of the spacecraft, he said. His only concern, he said, was the possibility of a delay. \"The only thing I was worried about was some tiny little something that would get in the way, something that would stop us from getting into space.\u201dHe called the experience \u201cjust magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\" And added that, \u201chaving flown to space, I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dBritish billionaire Richard Branson, three crewmates and two pilots rode to the edge of space on July 11 before safely descending and landing in New Mexico. (Reuters)By moving up his flight, he was able to beat Bezos to space by nine days. Bezos, who recently stepped down as Amazon\u2019s CEO, is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s suborbital New Shepard capsule on July 20.Branson has repeatedly denied that he was in a race with Bezos and said in the interview that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, the altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.On Saturday, however, Bezos wished Branson luck in a post on Instagram. \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cBest of luck!\u201dBranson would now be eligible for his wings, fulfilling a dream he has had since he founded Virgin Galactic, lured by the romance of space travel and the possibility of commercializing an endeavor that had been monopolized by governments.One of the first major steps on that path was the 2004 Ansari X Prize, a $10 million competition to put a commercial vehicle into space for the first time. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft had funded an effort, led by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft designer, to build what was called SpaceShipOne. Branson fell in love with the ship, purchased the rights to the technology and was able to slap a Virgin logo on the spacecraft as it won the prize.Watching the spacecraft take off, Branson turned to Allen and said, according to Allen\u2019s memoir, \u201cPaul, isn\u2019t this better than the best sex you ever had?\u201dBranson then turned his attention to creating the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d and vowed that within a matter of years passengers would soon be flying to space on a regular basis.Virgin Galactic set off to build SpaceShipTwo, which would be far larger and more powerful vehicle than its predecessor. But the program quickly ran into technical problems. And in 2014, it suffered an accident midflight that killed one of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, and severely injured the other, Peter Siebold, who parachuted to the ground. Branson considered giving up on his quest, but ultimately decided that the risk was worth it and carried on, vowing to learn from the accident and build a safer and more robust spaceship.The company finally made it to space in December 2018, and again a few weeks later, in early 2019. It then moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America, the gleaming $220 million facility funded by taxpayers. In 2019, the company announced it would go public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.Then, in May, it reached space for the third time in a flight with two pilots, and, after consulting with the company\u2019s engineers, Branson decided that he would be on the next flight.The flight comes amid a flurry of spaceflight activity that taken together amounts to a renaissance for human exploration.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itJust over a year ago, no one had flown to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, a long, ignominious drought that ended when Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station.Since then, SpaceX has flown two more human spaceflight missions. Boeing, which is also under contract from NASA to transport the agency\u2019s astronauts to and from the station, hopes to fly people in the months to come.SpaceX plans to fly a mission dubbed Inspiration4 in September. Financed by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, a group of four civilians would spend three days or so orbiting the Earth in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule. Axiom Space, a firm based in Houston, is arranging trips for very wealthy groups of people to spend a week on the space station. A voyage that costs some $55 million.In addition to the flight on July 20, Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has two more flights planned for this year and more than half a dozen next year.In all, that would culminate to an era of spaceflight like the barnstormers in the early days of aviation. But whether it is successful depends on whether the industry can continue to fly people reliably and safely.After the flight, Branson was greeted by his three-year-old granddaughter, who said, \u201cPapa gone to the moon. Papa gone to the moon.\u201dBranson let it slide. \u201cI\u2019m not going to disillusion her,\u201d he said.Richard Branson revels in a postflight ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:53 p.m.Link copiedLink\u201cSir Richard Branson, astronaut.\u201dWith those words, Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, pinned astronaut wings to Richard Branson\u2019s flight suit Sunday shortly after Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo landed safely back at Spaceport America in New Mexico.Speaking to the crowd, Branson said, \u201cthe whole thing was just magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\u201dHe said his goal when he founded the company in 2004 was to \u201cturn the dream of space travel into a reality for my grandchildren\u201d and for future generations. And he added that \u201chaving flown to space I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementRichard Branson\u2019s other space companyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism venture, may get most of the attention, but he has another company \u2014 Virgin Orbit \u2014 that has steadily been making progress and is part of a movement to launch constellations of small satellites to orbit.Virgin Orbit hopes to be a disruptive force in the launch market by offering a small, 70-foot long, two-stage rocket suited to take advantage of satellite technology that is drastically shrinking in size and lowering costs. Unlike traditional rockets that blast off vertically from launchpads, Virgin Orbit\u2019s LauncherOne rocket is air launched \u2014 carried aloft by a Boeing 747, then released midair to fires its engine and shoot into orbit.The rocket is able to hoist payloads of a few hundred pounds, which could carry satellites that would range in size from a big refrigerator to a toaster oven, the company has said.So far, it has had two successful launches, including one last month, when it delivered seven customer satellites to their intended orbit. In all, the company has launched 17, and is \u201clooking forward to growing that number tremendously as we push to ramp up our flight cadence in the coming months,\u201d Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, said in a statement.The company is pursuing a number of customers, but one in particular, the Pentagon, has been paying particularly close attention. The ability to quickly put up a satellite is a capability U.S. national security agencies have long sought after, and being able to use a 747 that only needs a runway to take off is particularly attractive, officials have said.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first launch, Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, wrote on Twitter: \u201cCongratulations to the Virgin Orbit Team!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo has landed back on the runway at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:39 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has touched down on the runway at Spaceport America just about 15 minutes after it was released from its mothership and thundered to the edge of space, completing a daring flight that Richard Branson has dreamed of for years.A crowd gathered along the tarmac cheered when they saw the shiny, white spaceplane come back after what appears to be a successful mission. In addition to Branson, Virgin Galactic employees Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses were on board the test flight, which was piloted by Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci.The company hopes the mission will pave the way for future flights of paying customers. It has some 600 people who have put down significant deposits and are waiting to fly. It also is expected to soon reopen sales for tickets, which had cost $250,000 but are now expected to be more expensive, perhaps as much as $500,000.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has reached the edge of spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:32 a.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity spaceplane reached the edge of space, flying to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The vehicle is carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and three employees and has two pilots at the controls. After reaching its apogee, or high point, it reoriented itself and is falling back toward Earth, gliding to a runway landing.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo Unity has been releasedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has been released from its mothership.If all goes according to plan, it should fly past 50 miles high, then glide back to Earth for a landing on the runway at Spaceport America. Total flight time, from release to landing, is estimated to be 15 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow Virgin Galactic was founded nearly two decades agoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn 2004, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, won the Ansari X Prize, by sending the first commercially developed spacecraft past what is known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized threshold that says space begins at 100 kilometers, about 62 miles, above the Earth\u2019s surface.At the time, Richard Branson was fascinated with the idea of private space travel and was thinking of starting a space company of his own. And when he saw SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that legendary aviation designer Burt Rutan developed for Allen, he was smitten.Allen was growing nervous about the dangers of human spaceflight and agreed to sell Branson the rights to the technology. Branson quickly slapped a Virgin logo on the spacecraft and set out to make it more robust. SpaceShipOne, which hangs in the National Air and Space Museum, was a relatively small and nimble spaceplane that flew with a single pilot each time it went to space.But Branson had something bigger and more ambitious in mind \u2014 creating the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline,\u201d as he called it. And Virgin Galactic set out to build a larger craft capable of flying six passengers with two pilots. For now, however, the company is flying just four people in addition to the pilots. And it flies past 50 miles, not 62.SpaceShipTwo, as it is called, has reached that 50-mile altitude three times before today\u2019s flight, allowing Branson to fly and fulfill the dream he had nearly 20 years ago.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe billionaire space race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos grows bitterReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos was supposed to go to space first.His company Blue Origin announced that he would join the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20. The date was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And Bezos invited his brother, Mark, to join him. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Branson was not about to be outdone, however. While he was initially scheduled to go on a later flight, he jumped ahead and decided to join the flight scheduled to fly Sunday, which is nine days before Bezos\u2019 flight. He has denied that he and Bezos are in a race, telling The Post recently that it was \u201cjust an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about the rivalry on CNBC, Branson couldn\u2019t help himself and said, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBlue Origin, normally quiet and secretive, has punched back, releasing a chart comparing a flight in its New Shepard capsule to the Virgin Galactic experience. In it, Blue Origin points out that its capsule flies above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized boundary for space at 100 kilometers or around 62 miles high. Virgin Galactic, by contrast, flies just above 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration issues astronaut wings for crew members.Blue Origin also pointed out that its windows are bigger, that it launches with a more traditional rocket and capsule instead of an air-launch via a spaceplane and has an emergency escape system. It also charges that Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket engine is worse for the environment.Nicola Pecile, a test pilot for Virgin Galactic, on Twitter called the dispute about which altitude is more worthy \u201cso childish that it is getting really embarrassing to watch.\u201d He noted that flying above 100,000 feet, about 18 miles, \u201cis already so complicated that anyone doing so should deserve a special recognition.\u201dHe added that if there had ever been a competition between the two companies, it ended in December 2018 when Virgin Galactic first flew to space. He added that Blue Origin \u201chas flown only mannequins so far.\u201dThe tweets were later deleted.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere does outer space begin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThere is no line in the upper reaches of the atmosphere indicating where space begins. It\u2019s not like the ocean or a river bank where on one side you are dry and on the other wet. And there is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law.The atmosphere gradually gets less and less dense, gravity\u2019s pull eventually weakens, and the debate over where space begins has churned for decades.It\u2019s getting another look now as a pair of companies, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin compete to fly paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital trajectories. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin touts that it flies past the Karman line, named for Theodore Von Karman, a Hungarian-American engineer and scientist who studied aeronautics and astronautics. That boundary is at 100 kilometers, or 62 miles.Blue Origin chose that altitude, Bezos has said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dBlue Origin likes to point out that Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t quite reach that altitude, even though that was its original intent. But as its spacecraft got heavier, Virgin Galactic decided it would fly four passengers, not six, as originally intended, and it would fly only past 50 miles, instead of 62.But the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes 50 miles high as space and awards astronaut wings to people who\u2019ve reached that altitude. That includes Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, as well as the pilots from the Air Force and NASA who flew the X-15 jet to that altitude during the 1950s.The 50-mile, 80-kilometer threshold qualifies as space for Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist, as well. In a paper, he argued that \u201cpractical evidence suggests that the 80 km line is a reasonable boundary.\u201dSatellites can survive for days and weeks in orbit at that altitude. But once the low point of the orbit drops below that threshold a satellite would fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. \u201cThe satellite does not survive more than one orbit,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo, carried by a mothership, has lifted offReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:41 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has taken off. The spaceplane, carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three company employees, Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses, lifted off from a runway here in a mission that they hope will take them to the edge of space.The spaceplane is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which will \u201cair launch\u201d the vehicle to space.Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity: not the traditional way to launch into spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:02 a.m.Link copiedLinkSince the dawn of the Space Age, astronauts made it to the stars by strapping into a spacecraft sitting on top of \u2014 or, in the case of the space shuttle \u2014 beside massive rocket boosters that propelled them out of the atmosphere.Virgin Galactic takes a different approach. Instead of launching vertically from a pad, it air-launches its vehicle. The spacecraft, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, is tethered to the belly of a twin fuselage airplane that carries it aloft to about 45,000 feet. There, the spaceship is released, the pilots fire its engines and steer it on an almost perfectly vertical trajectory into the sky.To reorient itself for reentry, the spacecraft has what is known as a \u201cfeather\u201d \u2014 the wings of the spacecraft essentially fold up and, as the company says on its website, \u201cprovides stability during re-entry to the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u201d\u201cDuring this phase of spaceflight the vehicle acts like a shuttlecock or birdie, orienting the ship to the proper re-entry attitude,\u201d Virgin Galactic says. \u201cThis orientation creates high drag, which slows SpaceShipTwo down quickly while high in the atmosphere. This also allows the thermal loads generated from re-entering the atmosphere to spread evenly over the surface area of the vehicle rather than concentrating on a few small points.\u201dOnce back into the atmosphere, the wings are lowered back into position, and the pilots glide the spaceplane for a touchdown on the runway.SpaceShipTwo is not the only vehicle to be air-launched from a mother ship to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The X-15, operated by the U.S. Air Force and NASA, flew during test flights in the 1960s. But it didn\u2019t have a cabin as modern as SpaceShipTwo, with plenty of windows for Earth gazing.Meet the crew flying Virgin Galactic todayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson will be on board. That everyone knows. But the rest of the crew is an interesting mix of Virgin Galactic employees, with an array of backgrounds and experiences.Dave Mackay, the chief pilot, is from Scotland and has flown to space twice previously. He served in the Royal Air Force for 16 years and has flown 140 different types of aircraft. After the military, he flew for Virgin Atlantic, Branson\u2019s commercial airline, and then joined Virgin Galactic.Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci is the flight\u2019s co-pilot. He\u2019s a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission.In the cabin with Branson will be Beth Moses, whose Virgin Galactic job is chief astronaut instructor. She flew with Masucci on the February 2019 flight. In an interview with The Post after her flight, she said, \u201cIt blows your mind. We flew on a perfectly clear day. A lot of snow on the mountain tops. Earth was wearing her diamonds that day.\u201dWhen the company starts flying paying customers, Moses\u2019 job will be to prepare them for the experience. She is married to Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president.Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, is a graduate of Purdue University who previously worked at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an association that promotes the commercial space industry. While flying, she said she would be assessing what it would be like for researchers and scientists to perform their experiments in space.\u201cThis is an incredible opportunity to get people from different backgrounds, different geographies, different communities into space,\u201d she said in a video on Twitter.The sixth person aboard the flight will be Colin Bennett, Virgin Galactic\u2019s lead operations engineer. His task is to evaluate procedures in the crew cabin during the spaceplane\u2019s powered ascent through the atmosphere as well as when the crew is in a weightless environment.Richard Branson, showman and daredevil, hopes to use his spaceflight to drive ticket salesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 a.m.Link copiedLinkHuman spaceflight is an inherently risky endeavor. Astronauts, like soldiers going into combat, know \u2014 or should \u2014 that they are putting their lives on the line.\u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities,\u201d Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut wrote in a Washington Post op-ed days after space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all seven on board.Despite the risks, he wrote that \u201cwe tend to pooh-pooh danger, and if you go into the VIP stands before a space launch there is a carefree, holiday atmosphere, like being at the company picnic. Ride one of the beasts and you get a different perspective.\u201dThe spaceplane that Richard Branson is set to fly is nothing like the beast Collins flew with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Saturn V moon rocket was far more powerful than the spaceplane that will barely get Branson to the edge of space. But it is dangerous nonetheless, despite the festive atmosphere Branson is building at Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility in the New Mexico desert.Stephen Colbert, the late-night TV show host and space fan, is anchoring Virgin Galactic\u2019s live broadcast of the flight. The musician Khalid will be at Spaceport America, and will release his new single \u201cNew Normal\u201d after the launch. Celebrity FORs (Friends of Richard) are expected to be on hand as well, ready to party and celebrate a triumph. Elon Musk is there.Branson, the showman CEO who has turned death-defying exploits into a form of self-promotion and marketing, plans to use his flight to launch Virgin Galactic\u2019s ticket sales. After being dormant for some time, the company plans to reopen sales \u2014 with prices that could be an estimated $500,000.That is, as long as Sunday\u2019s flight is completed safely.The crew has arrived at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew for Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceflight has arrived at Spaceport America ahead of the flight. In a Twitter post, Richard Branson can be seen cycling up to the facility and being greeted by his fellow crew mates, who are already in their spacesuits.\u201cYou\u2019re late, come on, get suited up,\u201d says Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor. They are expected to board SpaceShipTwoUnity a little before 10 a.m. Eastern time.It\u2019s a beautiful day to go to space. We\u2019ve arrived at @Spaceport_NM. Get ready to watch LIVE at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST https://t.co/PcvGTmA661 #Unity22 pic.twitter.com/4KjGPpjz0M\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nElon Musk is at Spaceport America to cheer on Richard BransonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson has added a photo of himself with a barefoot Elon Musk to his Twitter feed.\u201cBig day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready,\u201d he said in the accompanying text.Big day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready. Watch #Unity22 launch and livestream TODAY at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST.@virgingalactic @elonmusk https://t.co/1313b4RAKI pic.twitter.com/FRQqrQEbH8\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nBranson is scheduled to fly to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s spacecraft later Sunday morning.On Twitter Saturday, Musk wrote to Branson: \u201cWill see you there to wish you the best.\u201dBranson responded by saying, \u201cThanks for being so typically supportive and such a good friend, Elon. Great to be opening up space for all \u2014 safe travels and see you at Spaceport America!\u201d\u201cGodspeed!\u201d Musk tweeted Sunday.Jeff Bezos, another of the billionaire \u201cspace barons,\u201d also said he hoped Branson had a good launch, writing on Instagram: \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!\u201d Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, is scheduled to fly to space on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule July 20 and is not expected to be present to witness Branson\u2019s trip. The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness. Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6525",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/",
        "text": "SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico \u2014 Richard Branson completed a daring, barnstorming flight to the edge of space Sunday, rocketing through the atmosphere in the spaceplane he\u2019d been yearning to ride for nearly 20 years.The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness before the vehicle they were traveling in, SpaceShipTwo Unity, glided back to Earth and a landing on the runway at Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility here in the New Mexico desert. It was SpaceShipTwo\u2019s fourth trip to the edge of space since 2018, and Virgin Galactic, the company Branson founded in 2004, says it will soon start flying paying customers regularly on similar jaunts, opening a new era in human space exploration.Several companies in the growing commercial space industry, including Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, have developed spacecraft designed to allow private citizens, and not just NASA trained military fighter pilots and scientists, to earn the title of \u201castronaut.\u201d (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Billionaire Richard Branson on July 11 flew more than 50 miles above the New Mexico desert in the vehicle\u2019s first fully crewed test flight to the edge of space. (Reuters)Virgin Galactic seemed intent on making it clear that this was not a traditional NASA launch. Instead of a stoic countdown, there was a party-like atmosphere along the tarmac, a scene as much a spectacle as a space launch that even included a musical guest, Khalid, who debuted a new song during a performance here. The company\u2019s live broadcast of the flight was hosted by comedian and late-night host Stephen Colbert, and Musk was on hand to watch Branson and the crew take off.Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity takes off tethered to the belly of a mother ship. On Sunday, the mother ship, known as WhiteKnightTwo, lifted off from the tarmac here shortly after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, delayed by about 90 minutes because high winds overnight had kept the ground crew from rolling it out of the hangar. The spaceship was released at about 11:25 a.m. Eastern time, the pilots ignited the engine and the spacecraft shot almost straight up as it thundered toward space.The flight reached its apogee at 282,000 feet \u2014 53.41 miles \u2014 where the passengers were able to unstrap and experience weightlessness. The spacecraft then fell back to earth and a landing at 11:39 Eastern time.Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for spaceOn board were pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, both of whom had flown to space on previous flights. Joining Branson in the crew compartment were Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs, Colin Bennett, the company\u2019s lead operations engineer, and Beth Moses, its chief astronaut instructor. Moses, who is married to Mike Moses, the company\u2019s president, flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission, in 2019.Branson had originally been scheduled to fly aboard a flight scheduled for later this summer or early fall. But after the company successfully made it to space in May, he grew impatient.\u201cI\u2019ve been itching to go, and they said they wanted somebody to properly test the astronaut experience,\u201d Branson said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cAnd I was damned if I was going to let anyone take that seat.\u201dIn a press conference after the flight, he said he wasn\u2019t nervous about the trip. \u201cWe have nearly 1,000 of the best engineers in the world\u201d who pored over every inch of the spacecraft, he said. His only concern, he said, was the possibility of a delay. \"The only thing I was worried about was some tiny little something that would get in the way, something that would stop us from getting into space.\u201dHe called the experience \u201cjust magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\" And added that, \u201chaving flown to space, I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dBritish billionaire Richard Branson, three crewmates and two pilots rode to the edge of space on July 11 before safely descending and landing in New Mexico. (Reuters)By moving up his flight, he was able to beat Bezos to space by nine days. Bezos, who recently stepped down as Amazon\u2019s CEO, is scheduled to fly on his company\u2019s suborbital New Shepard capsule on July 20.Branson has repeatedly denied that he was in a race with Bezos and said in the interview that it was just \u201can incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about a rivalry with Bezos on CNBC, he couldn\u2019t help himself, saying, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBranson\u2019s antics elicited a strong response from Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, issued a statement last week wishing Branson well but also pointing out that Virgin Galactic is \u201cnot flying above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, and it\u2019s a very different experience.\u201d The K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, at 100 km or 62 miles, is an internationally recognized threshold for where space begins. Virgin Galactic flies to just over 50 miles, the altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration will award crew members astronaut wings.On Saturday, however, Bezos wished Branson luck in a post on Instagram. \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cBest of luck!\u201dBranson would now be eligible for his wings, fulfilling a dream he has had since he founded Virgin Galactic, lured by the romance of space travel and the possibility of commercializing an endeavor that had been monopolized by governments.One of the first major steps on that path was the 2004 Ansari X Prize, a $10 million competition to put a commercial vehicle into space for the first time. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft had funded an effort, led by Burt Rutan, the legendary aircraft designer, to build what was called SpaceShipOne. Branson fell in love with the ship, purchased the rights to the technology and was able to slap a Virgin logo on the spacecraft as it won the prize.Watching the spacecraft take off, Branson turned to Allen and said, according to Allen\u2019s memoir, \u201cPaul, isn\u2019t this better than the best sex you ever had?\u201dBranson then turned his attention to creating the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d and vowed that within a matter of years passengers would soon be flying to space on a regular basis.Virgin Galactic set off to build SpaceShipTwo, which would be far larger and more powerful vehicle than its predecessor. But the program quickly ran into technical problems. And in 2014, it suffered an accident midflight that killed one of the pilots, Michael Alsbury, and severely injured the other, Peter Siebold, who parachuted to the ground. Branson considered giving up on his quest, but ultimately decided that the risk was worth it and carried on, vowing to learn from the accident and build a safer and more robust spaceship.The company finally made it to space in December 2018, and again a few weeks later, in early 2019. It then moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America, the gleaming $220 million facility funded by taxpayers. In 2019, the company announced it would go public through a merger with a New York investment firm and hired a new CEO and leadership team.Then, in May, it reached space for the third time in a flight with two pilots, and, after consulting with the company\u2019s engineers, Branson decided that he would be on the next flight.The flight comes amid a flurry of spaceflight activity that taken together amounts to a renaissance for human exploration.You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford itJust over a year ago, no one had flown to space from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, a long, ignominious drought that ended when Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX flew a pair of NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station.Since then, SpaceX has flown two more human spaceflight missions. Boeing, which is also under contract from NASA to transport the agency\u2019s astronauts to and from the station, hopes to fly people in the months to come.SpaceX plans to fly a mission dubbed Inspiration4 in September. Financed by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, a group of four civilians would spend three days or so orbiting the Earth in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule. Axiom Space, a firm based in Houston, is arranging trips for very wealthy groups of people to spend a week on the space station. A voyage that costs some $55 million.In addition to the flight on July 20, Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has two more flights planned for this year and more than half a dozen next year.In all, that would culminate to an era of spaceflight like the barnstormers in the early days of aviation. But whether it is successful depends on whether the industry can continue to fly people reliably and safely.After the flight, Branson was greeted by his three-year-old granddaughter, who said, \u201cPapa gone to the moon. Papa gone to the moon.\u201dBranson let it slide. \u201cI\u2019m not going to disillusion her,\u201d he said.Richard Branson revels in a postflight ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:53 p.m.Link copiedLink\u201cSir Richard Branson, astronaut.\u201dWith those words, Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, pinned astronaut wings to Richard Branson\u2019s flight suit Sunday shortly after Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo landed safely back at Spaceport America in New Mexico.Speaking to the crowd, Branson said, \u201cthe whole thing was just magical\u2026. I\u2019m just taking it all in.\u201dHe said his goal when he founded the company in 2004 was to \u201cturn the dream of space travel into a reality for my grandchildren\u201d and for future generations. And he added that \u201chaving flown to space I can see more clearly how Virgin Galactic is the spaceline for Earth.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementRichard Branson\u2019s other space companyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:05 p.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism venture, may get most of the attention, but he has another company \u2014 Virgin Orbit \u2014 that has steadily been making progress and is part of a movement to launch constellations of small satellites to orbit.Virgin Orbit hopes to be a disruptive force in the launch market by offering a small, 70-foot long, two-stage rocket suited to take advantage of satellite technology that is drastically shrinking in size and lowering costs. Unlike traditional rockets that blast off vertically from launchpads, Virgin Orbit\u2019s LauncherOne rocket is air launched \u2014 carried aloft by a Boeing 747, then released midair to fires its engine and shoot into orbit.The rocket is able to hoist payloads of a few hundred pounds, which could carry satellites that would range in size from a big refrigerator to a toaster oven, the company has said.So far, it has had two successful launches, including one last month, when it delivered seven customer satellites to their intended orbit. In all, the company has launched 17, and is \u201clooking forward to growing that number tremendously as we push to ramp up our flight cadence in the coming months,\u201d Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s CEO, said in a statement.The company is pursuing a number of customers, but one in particular, the Pentagon, has been paying particularly close attention. The ability to quickly put up a satellite is a capability U.S. national security agencies have long sought after, and being able to use a 747 that only needs a runway to take off is particularly attractive, officials have said.After Virgin Orbit\u2019s first launch, Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond, the Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, wrote on Twitter: \u201cCongratulations to the Virgin Orbit Team!\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo has landed back on the runway at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:39 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has touched down on the runway at Spaceport America just about 15 minutes after it was released from its mothership and thundered to the edge of space, completing a daring flight that Richard Branson has dreamed of for years.A crowd gathered along the tarmac cheered when they saw the shiny, white spaceplane come back after what appears to be a successful mission. In addition to Branson, Virgin Galactic employees Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses were on board the test flight, which was piloted by Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci.The company hopes the mission will pave the way for future flights of paying customers. It has some 600 people who have put down significant deposits and are waiting to fly. It also is expected to soon reopen sales for tickets, which had cost $250,000 but are now expected to be more expensive, perhaps as much as $500,000.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo has reached the edge of spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:32 a.m.Link copiedLinkVirgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity spaceplane reached the edge of space, flying to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The vehicle is carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and three employees and has two pilots at the controls. After reaching its apogee, or high point, it reoriented itself and is falling back toward Earth, gliding to a runway landing.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo Unity has been releasedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:24 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has been released from its mothership.If all goes according to plan, it should fly past 50 miles high, then glide back to Earth for a landing on the runway at Spaceport America. Total flight time, from release to landing, is estimated to be 15 minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementHow Virgin Galactic was founded nearly two decades agoReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:06 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn 2004, Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, won the Ansari X Prize, by sending the first commercially developed spacecraft past what is known as the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized threshold that says space begins at 100 kilometers, about 62 miles, above the Earth\u2019s surface.At the time, Richard Branson was fascinated with the idea of private space travel and was thinking of starting a space company of his own. And when he saw SpaceShipOne, the vehicle that legendary aviation designer Burt Rutan developed for Allen, he was smitten.Allen was growing nervous about the dangers of human spaceflight and agreed to sell Branson the rights to the technology. Branson quickly slapped a Virgin logo on the spacecraft and set out to make it more robust. SpaceShipOne, which hangs in the National Air and Space Museum, was a relatively small and nimble spaceplane that flew with a single pilot each time it went to space.But Branson had something bigger and more ambitious in mind \u2014 creating the world\u2019s first \u201ccommercial spaceline,\u201d as he called it. And Virgin Galactic set out to build a larger craft capable of flying six passengers with two pilots. For now, however, the company is flying just four people in addition to the pilots. And it flies past 50 miles, not 62.SpaceShipTwo, as it is called, has reached that 50-mile altitude three times before today\u2019s flight, allowing Branson to fly and fulfill the dream he had nearly 20 years ago.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementThe billionaire space race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos grows bitterReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:57 a.m.Link copiedLinkJeff Bezos was supposed to go to space first.His company Blue Origin announced that he would join the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20. The date was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. And Bezos invited his brother, Mark, to join him. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Branson was not about to be outdone, however. While he was initially scheduled to go on a later flight, he jumped ahead and decided to join the flight scheduled to fly Sunday, which is nine days before Bezos\u2019 flight. He has denied that he and Bezos are in a race, telling The Post recently that it was \u201cjust an incredible, wonderful coincidence that we\u2019re going up in the same month.\u201dBut when asked about the rivalry on CNBC, Branson couldn\u2019t help himself and said, \u201cJeff who?\u201dBlue Origin, normally quiet and secretive, has punched back, releasing a chart comparing a flight in its New Shepard capsule to the Virgin Galactic experience. In it, Blue Origin points out that its capsule flies above the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line, an internationally recognized boundary for space at 100 kilometers or around 62 miles high. Virgin Galactic, by contrast, flies just above 50 miles, an altitude at which the Federal Aviation Administration issues astronaut wings for crew members.Blue Origin also pointed out that its windows are bigger, that it launches with a more traditional rocket and capsule instead of an air-launch via a spaceplane and has an emergency escape system. It also charges that Virgin Galactic\u2019s rocket engine is worse for the environment.Nicola Pecile, a test pilot for Virgin Galactic, on Twitter called the dispute about which altitude is more worthy \u201cso childish that it is getting really embarrassing to watch.\u201d He noted that flying above 100,000 feet, about 18 miles, \u201cis already so complicated that anyone doing so should deserve a special recognition.\u201dHe added that if there had ever been a competition between the two companies, it ended in December 2018 when Virgin Galactic first flew to space. He added that Blue Origin \u201chas flown only mannequins so far.\u201dThe tweets were later deleted.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhere does outer space begin?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:46 a.m.Link copiedLinkThere is no line in the upper reaches of the atmosphere indicating where space begins. It\u2019s not like the ocean or a river bank where on one side you are dry and on the other wet. And there is no precise definition of where space officially begins in international law.The atmosphere gradually gets less and less dense, gravity\u2019s pull eventually weakens, and the debate over where space begins has churned for decades.It\u2019s getting another look now as a pair of companies, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin compete to fly paying customers to the edge of space and back on suborbital trajectories. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin touts that it flies past the Karman line, named for Theodore Von Karman, a Hungarian-American engineer and scientist who studied aeronautics and astronautics. That boundary is at 100 kilometers, or 62 miles.Blue Origin chose that altitude, Bezos has said, \u201cbecause we didn\u2019t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you\u2019re an astronaut or not.\u201dBlue Origin likes to point out that Virgin Galactic doesn\u2019t quite reach that altitude, even though that was its original intent. But as its spacecraft got heavier, Virgin Galactic decided it would fly four passengers, not six, as originally intended, and it would fly only past 50 miles, instead of 62.But the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes 50 miles high as space and awards astronaut wings to people who\u2019ve reached that altitude. That includes Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, as well as the pilots from the Air Force and NASA who flew the X-15 jet to that altitude during the 1950s.The 50-mile, 80-kilometer threshold qualifies as space for Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist, as well. In a paper, he argued that \u201cpractical evidence suggests that the 80 km line is a reasonable boundary.\u201dSatellites can survive for days and weeks in orbit at that altitude. But once the low point of the orbit drops below that threshold a satellite would fall back into the atmosphere and burn up. \u201cThe satellite does not survive more than one orbit,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceShipTwo, carried by a mothership, has lifted offReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:41 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceShipTwo Unity has taken off. The spaceplane, carrying Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and three company employees, Sirisha Bandla, Colin Bennett and Beth Moses, lifted off from a runway here in a mission that they hope will take them to the edge of space.The spaceplane is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which will \u201cair launch\u201d the vehicle to space.Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo Unity: not the traditional way to launch into spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:02 a.m.Link copiedLinkSince the dawn of the Space Age, astronauts made it to the stars by strapping into a spacecraft sitting on top of \u2014 or, in the case of the space shuttle \u2014 beside massive rocket boosters that propelled them out of the atmosphere.Virgin Galactic takes a different approach. Instead of launching vertically from a pad, it air-launches its vehicle. The spacecraft, known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, is tethered to the belly of a twin fuselage airplane that carries it aloft to about 45,000 feet. There, the spaceship is released, the pilots fire its engines and steer it on an almost perfectly vertical trajectory into the sky.To reorient itself for reentry, the spacecraft has what is known as a \u201cfeather\u201d \u2014 the wings of the spacecraft essentially fold up and, as the company says on its website, \u201cprovides stability during re-entry to the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u201d\u201cDuring this phase of spaceflight the vehicle acts like a shuttlecock or birdie, orienting the ship to the proper re-entry attitude,\u201d Virgin Galactic says. \u201cThis orientation creates high drag, which slows SpaceShipTwo down quickly while high in the atmosphere. This also allows the thermal loads generated from re-entering the atmosphere to spread evenly over the surface area of the vehicle rather than concentrating on a few small points.\u201dOnce back into the atmosphere, the wings are lowered back into position, and the pilots glide the spaceplane for a touchdown on the runway.SpaceShipTwo is not the only vehicle to be air-launched from a mother ship to an altitude of more than 50 miles. The X-15, operated by the U.S. Air Force and NASA, flew during test flights in the 1960s. But it didn\u2019t have a cabin as modern as SpaceShipTwo, with plenty of windows for Earth gazing.Meet the crew flying Virgin Galactic todayReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson will be on board. That everyone knows. But the rest of the crew is an interesting mix of Virgin Galactic employees, with an array of backgrounds and experiences.Dave Mackay, the chief pilot, is from Scotland and has flown to space twice previously. He served in the Royal Air Force for 16 years and has flown 140 different types of aircraft. After the military, he flew for Virgin Atlantic, Branson\u2019s commercial airline, and then joined Virgin Galactic.Michael \u201cSooch\u201d Masucci is the flight\u2019s co-pilot. He\u2019s a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who flew on Virgin Galactic\u2019s second spaceflight mission.In the cabin with Branson will be Beth Moses, whose Virgin Galactic job is chief astronaut instructor. She flew with Masucci on the February 2019 flight. In an interview with The Post after her flight, she said, \u201cIt blows your mind. We flew on a perfectly clear day. A lot of snow on the mountain tops. Earth was wearing her diamonds that day.\u201dWhen the company starts flying paying customers, Moses\u2019 job will be to prepare them for the experience. She is married to Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president.Sirisha Bandla, Virgin Galactic\u2019s vice president of government affairs and research operations, is a graduate of Purdue University who previously worked at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an association that promotes the commercial space industry. While flying, she said she would be assessing what it would be like for researchers and scientists to perform their experiments in space.\u201cThis is an incredible opportunity to get people from different backgrounds, different geographies, different communities into space,\u201d she said in a video on Twitter.The sixth person aboard the flight will be Colin Bennett, Virgin Galactic\u2019s lead operations engineer. His task is to evaluate procedures in the crew cabin during the spaceplane\u2019s powered ascent through the atmosphere as well as when the crew is in a weightless environment.Richard Branson, showman and daredevil, hopes to use his spaceflight to drive ticket salesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 a.m.Link copiedLinkHuman spaceflight is an inherently risky endeavor. Astronauts, like soldiers going into combat, know \u2014 or should \u2014 that they are putting their lives on the line.\u201cAnyone who has lived with large rocket engines understands that their awesome power is produced by machinery churning away at very high temperatures, pressures and velocities,\u201d Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut wrote in a Washington Post op-ed days after space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all seven on board.Despite the risks, he wrote that \u201cwe tend to pooh-pooh danger, and if you go into the VIP stands before a space launch there is a carefree, holiday atmosphere, like being at the company picnic. Ride one of the beasts and you get a different perspective.\u201dThe spaceplane that Richard Branson is set to fly is nothing like the beast Collins flew with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Saturn V moon rocket was far more powerful than the spaceplane that will barely get Branson to the edge of space. But it is dangerous nonetheless, despite the festive atmosphere Branson is building at Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility in the New Mexico desert.Stephen Colbert, the late-night TV show host and space fan, is anchoring Virgin Galactic\u2019s live broadcast of the flight. The musician Khalid will be at Spaceport America, and will release his new single \u201cNew Normal\u201d after the launch. Celebrity FORs (Friends of Richard) are expected to be on hand as well, ready to party and celebrate a triumph. Elon Musk is there.Branson, the showman CEO who has turned death-defying exploits into a form of self-promotion and marketing, plans to use his flight to launch Virgin Galactic\u2019s ticket sales. After being dormant for some time, the company plans to reopen sales \u2014 with prices that could be an estimated $500,000.That is, as long as Sunday\u2019s flight is completed safely.The crew has arrived at Spaceport AmericaReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:12 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe crew for Virgin Galactic\u2019s spaceflight has arrived at Spaceport America ahead of the flight. In a Twitter post, Richard Branson can be seen cycling up to the facility and being greeted by his fellow crew mates, who are already in their spacesuits.\u201cYou\u2019re late, come on, get suited up,\u201d says Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief astronaut instructor. They are expected to board SpaceShipTwoUnity a little before 10 a.m. Eastern time.It\u2019s a beautiful day to go to space. We\u2019ve arrived at @Spaceport_NM. Get ready to watch LIVE at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST https://t.co/PcvGTmA661 #Unity22 pic.twitter.com/4KjGPpjz0M\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nElon Musk is at Spaceport America to cheer on Richard BransonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport8:38 a.m.Link copiedLinkRichard Branson has added a photo of himself with a barefoot Elon Musk to his Twitter feed.\u201cBig day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready,\u201d he said in the accompanying text.Big day ahead. Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready. Watch #Unity22 launch and livestream TODAY at 7:30 am PT | 10:30 am ET | 3:30 pm BST.@virgingalactic @elonmusk https://t.co/1313b4RAKI pic.twitter.com/FRQqrQEbH8\u2014 Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 11, 2021\n\nBranson is scheduled to fly to space on Virgin Galactic\u2019s spacecraft later Sunday morning.On Twitter Saturday, Musk wrote to Branson: \u201cWill see you there to wish you the best.\u201dBranson responded by saying, \u201cThanks for being so typically supportive and such a good friend, Elon. Great to be opening up space for all \u2014 safe travels and see you at Spaceport America!\u201d\u201cGodspeed!\u201d Musk tweeted Sunday.Jeff Bezos, another of the billionaire \u201cspace barons,\u201d also said he hoped Branson had a good launch, writing on Instagram: \u201cWishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!\u201d Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, is scheduled to fly to space on Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard space capsule July 20 and is not expected to be present to witness Branson\u2019s trip. The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness. Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic crew are safely back from space, ushering in a new era",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6526",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/01/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-test-book/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic had just had its second successful flight to the edge of space, a daring mission that it said put it one step closer to finally flying tourists and making it the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut when the ground crew wheeled the suborbital spacecraft back into the hangar, company officials discovered that a seal running along a stabilizer on the wing designed to keep the space plane flying straight had come undone \u2014 a potentially serious safety hazard. \u201cThe structural integrity of the entire stabilizer was compromised,\u201d Todd Ericson, a test pilot who also served as a vice president for safety and test, said, according to a soon-to-be-published book. \u201cI don\u2019t know how we didn\u2019t lose the vehicle and kill three people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis previously unreported account of the flight in February 2019 is contained in \u201cTest Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut\u201d by New Yorker magazine journalist Nicholas Schmidle, who spent almost four years embedded with the company. The book\u2019s publisher, Henry Holt and Co., sent an advance copy to The Washington Post. The book is scheduled for release May 4.AdvertisementThe damage to the seal is a reminder of the perils inherent to human spaceflight, an endeavor long dominated by governments but now being taken over by private companies racing to lure paying customers and investors. The transition has been, at times, tumultuous, as private companies suffer failures with potentially serious consequences but don\u2019t always report them publicly.And the regulations governing private space companies are relatively loose \u2014 the Federal Aviation Administration ensures the safety of people and property on the ground, but there is merely an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard for the passengers, who need only acknowledge the risks as if they were skydiving or bungee jumping.Story continues below advertisementIn the book, Schmidle wrote that the \u201cseal had disbonded on the way up, as the pressure increased with nowhere to vent,\u201d ultimately leaving a \u201cwide gap running along the trailing edge of the right h-stab,\u201d or horizontal stabilizer. When Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president, missions and safety, saw the gap, \u201che felt his stomach drop,\u201d Schmidle reported. Moses\u2019s wife, Beth Moses, Virgin\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, had been on the flight.AdvertisementAfter the flight, the company hired an outside aviation expert, Dennis O\u2019Donoghue, to conduct a safety review of the program, and he spent weeks interviewing company officials and poring over records, according to the book. After a month, O\u2019Donoghue, who had served as a test pilot in the Marine Corps and at NASA and also had worked at Boeing, submitted his report. The company, which has signed up more than 600 people for flights that cost as much as $250,000, has refused to make it public.Virgin Galactic \u201ctried to keep the h-stab problem quiet, worried that it might spook customers,\u201d Schmidle wrote. That stance concerned Ericson, a former military test pilot who had served as the safety chief at the Air Force Test Flight Center before coming to Virgin Galactic in December 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis should have been a Come-to-Jesus Moment, not the kind of thing you brush under the rug,\u201d Ericson said, according to the book. Ericson informed the company in June 2019 that he was stepping down as vice president of safety, which concerned George Whitesides, then the company\u2019s CEO, who Schmidle wrote was suddenly faced with the prospect that \u201chis vice president of safety was resigning because he\u2019d lost confidence in the safety regime.\u201dAdvertisementEricson filled a different position at the company, vice president of special projects, until October 2020.In an interview Monday, Moses, the Virgin Galactic president, said that while the company did \u201cdiscover physical damage\u201d to the stabilizer, there \u201cwas no noticeable effect in flight with the pilots or mission control. No one noticed that issue in real time. There was no impact on the flying qualities.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the problem occurred when thermal protection coating was applied incorrectly and ended up blocking vents intended to allow air inside the stabilizer to escape as the atmospheric pressure decreased outside the craft as it flew higher.\u201cThe design of the h-stab wasn\u2019t really an issue there,\u201d Moses said. \u201cIt was an error that occurred in processing on the ground. Clearly a problem, right? Not something that should be allowed to happen and something we clearly needed to address.\u201dAdvertisementThe company had already started implementing an updated design on the stabilizer for its second spaceship, he said. And the fact that the spacecraft performed well during the 2019 flight despite traveling faster than the speed of sound to space and back \u201cclearly showed some of the resilience of the structure, that it held together.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the company immediately notified board members and shareholders as well as the FAA and \u201ckept them apprised regularly of what we were finding, as well as the corrective actions.\u201dAt the moment the problem was discovered the teams were concerned, even emotional. \u201cThe reaction is, \u2018Wow, what was that? How could that happen?\u2019\u201d he said. But investigating the issue and finding the problem \u201cgives us pretty high confidence in our design and our performance on the changes we made since,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn 2014, Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, came apart, killing one of the pilots during a test flight, after he prematurely unlocked the system designed to reorient the spacecraft and position it to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The National Transportation Safety Board found that Scaled Composites, the company hired by Virgin to build and test the vehicle, failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human error that caused the death.Story continues below advertisementAfter the crash, Virgin Galactic took over manufacturing and testing itself. It has repeatedly vowed that it was thoroughly testing its vehicle and would not fly until it was safe.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut after the 2019 flight, Schmidle reported that Ericson \u201chad concluded that members of the maintenance team were \u2018pencil whipping\u2019 inspections \u2014 signing for inspections that were not conducted properly.\u201d The inspectors, Schmidle wrote, not only failed to notice that the vents were blocked, causing the seal on the stabilizer to rupture, \u201cbut also missed a bag of screws taped to the inside of the h-stab.\u201dAdvertisementHe recommended firing the head of maintenance, but Moses refused.Story continues below advertisementAfter the February 2019 flight, Virgin Galactic grounded the vehicle and began redesigning the stabilizer and hired a contractor to \u201cbuild a new one from scratch, out of metal,\u201d Schmidle reported, instead of the composite carbon fiber used previously.Unlike traditional rockets that take off vertically from a launchpad, Virgin Galactic launches its spacecraft from a mother ship, which carries the spacecraft to an altitude of more than 40,000 feet. The spaceship is released, the pilots fire the motor and it shoots off to the edge of space before gliding back to Earth.The company first passed the 50-mile edge-of-space threshold in December 2018 with two test pilots. It repeated the feat in February 2019, this time with Beth Moses aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince the investigation, the company has flown two glide flights after it moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to Spaceport America, the taxpayer-funded facility built for the company in New Mexico.Last month, it attempted what was supposed to be a powered test flight to space. But the flight was aborted after the onboard computer that monitors the propulsion system lost connection. That halted the ignition of the motor, and the pilots safely glided the spaceship back to the runway.On Monday, the company announced that its next test flight could come as early as Feb. 13. The test objectives include \u201cassessing the upgraded horizontal stabilizers and flight controls during the boost phase of the flight,\u201d the company said in a statement.While the company hopes to fly paying customers to space this year, it is still in the test phase of its program, Moses said, a time to discover and fix problems.\u201cWe thoroughly inspect the vehicle, updating our analysis; we update and critique our performance and make sure we\u2019re happy with the results before we go to those next flights,\u201d he said. \u201cWe take our time and make sure things are right.\u201d Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company says it has fixed the problems and is scheduled to return to space this month Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6527",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/01/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-test-book/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic had just had its second successful flight to the edge of space, a daring mission that it said put it one step closer to finally flying tourists and making it the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut when the ground crew wheeled the suborbital spacecraft back into the hangar, company officials discovered that a seal running along a stabilizer on the wing designed to keep the space plane flying straight had come undone \u2014 a potentially serious safety hazard. \u201cThe structural integrity of the entire stabilizer was compromised,\u201d Todd Ericson, a test pilot who also served as a vice president for safety and test, said, according to a soon-to-be-published book. \u201cI don\u2019t know how we didn\u2019t lose the vehicle and kill three people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis previously unreported account of the flight in February 2019 is contained in \u201cTest Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut\u201d by New Yorker magazine journalist Nicholas Schmidle, who spent almost four years embedded with the company. The book\u2019s publisher, Henry Holt and Co., sent an advance copy to The Washington Post. The book is scheduled for release May 4.AdvertisementThe damage to the seal is a reminder of the perils inherent to human spaceflight, an endeavor long dominated by governments but now being taken over by private companies racing to lure paying customers and investors. The transition has been, at times, tumultuous, as private companies suffer failures with potentially serious consequences but don\u2019t always report them publicly.And the regulations governing private space companies are relatively loose \u2014 the Federal Aviation Administration ensures the safety of people and property on the ground, but there is merely an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard for the passengers, who need only acknowledge the risks as if they were skydiving or bungee jumping.Story continues below advertisementIn the book, Schmidle wrote that the \u201cseal had disbonded on the way up, as the pressure increased with nowhere to vent,\u201d ultimately leaving a \u201cwide gap running along the trailing edge of the right h-stab,\u201d or horizontal stabilizer. When Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president, missions and safety, saw the gap, \u201che felt his stomach drop,\u201d Schmidle reported. Moses\u2019s wife, Beth Moses, Virgin\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, had been on the flight.AdvertisementAfter the flight, the company hired an outside aviation expert, Dennis O\u2019Donoghue, to conduct a safety review of the program, and he spent weeks interviewing company officials and poring over records, according to the book. After a month, O\u2019Donoghue, who had served as a test pilot in the Marine Corps and at NASA and also had worked at Boeing, submitted his report. The company, which has signed up more than 600 people for flights that cost as much as $250,000, has refused to make it public.Virgin Galactic \u201ctried to keep the h-stab problem quiet, worried that it might spook customers,\u201d Schmidle wrote. That stance concerned Ericson, a former military test pilot who had served as the safety chief at the Air Force Test Flight Center before coming to Virgin Galactic in December 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis should have been a Come-to-Jesus Moment, not the kind of thing you brush under the rug,\u201d Ericson said, according to the book. Ericson informed the company in June 2019 that he was stepping down as vice president of safety, which concerned George Whitesides, then the company\u2019s CEO, who Schmidle wrote was suddenly faced with the prospect that \u201chis vice president of safety was resigning because he\u2019d lost confidence in the safety regime.\u201dAdvertisementEricson filled a different position at the company, vice president of special projects, until October 2020.In an interview Monday, Moses, the Virgin Galactic president, said that while the company did \u201cdiscover physical damage\u201d to the stabilizer, there \u201cwas no noticeable effect in flight with the pilots or mission control. No one noticed that issue in real time. There was no impact on the flying qualities.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the problem occurred when thermal protection coating was applied incorrectly and ended up blocking vents intended to allow air inside the stabilizer to escape as the atmospheric pressure decreased outside the craft as it flew higher.\u201cThe design of the h-stab wasn\u2019t really an issue there,\u201d Moses said. \u201cIt was an error that occurred in processing on the ground. Clearly a problem, right? Not something that should be allowed to happen and something we clearly needed to address.\u201dAdvertisementThe company had already started implementing an updated design on the stabilizer for its second spaceship, he said. And the fact that the spacecraft performed well during the 2019 flight despite traveling faster than the speed of sound to space and back \u201cclearly showed some of the resilience of the structure, that it held together.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the company immediately notified board members and shareholders as well as the FAA and \u201ckept them apprised regularly of what we were finding, as well as the corrective actions.\u201dAt the moment the problem was discovered the teams were concerned, even emotional. \u201cThe reaction is, \u2018Wow, what was that? How could that happen?\u2019\u201d he said. But investigating the issue and finding the problem \u201cgives us pretty high confidence in our design and our performance on the changes we made since,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn 2014, Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, came apart, killing one of the pilots during a test flight, after he prematurely unlocked the system designed to reorient the spacecraft and position it to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The National Transportation Safety Board found that Scaled Composites, the company hired by Virgin to build and test the vehicle, failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human error that caused the death.Story continues below advertisementAfter the crash, Virgin Galactic took over manufacturing and testing itself. It has repeatedly vowed that it was thoroughly testing its vehicle and would not fly until it was safe.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut after the 2019 flight, Schmidle reported that Ericson \u201chad concluded that members of the maintenance team were \u2018pencil whipping\u2019 inspections \u2014 signing for inspections that were not conducted properly.\u201d The inspectors, Schmidle wrote, not only failed to notice that the vents were blocked, causing the seal on the stabilizer to rupture, \u201cbut also missed a bag of screws taped to the inside of the h-stab.\u201dAdvertisementHe recommended firing the head of maintenance, but Moses refused.Story continues below advertisementAfter the February 2019 flight, Virgin Galactic grounded the vehicle and began redesigning the stabilizer and hired a contractor to \u201cbuild a new one from scratch, out of metal,\u201d Schmidle reported, instead of the composite carbon fiber used previously.Unlike traditional rockets that take off vertically from a launchpad, Virgin Galactic launches its spacecraft from a mother ship, which carries the spacecraft to an altitude of more than 40,000 feet. The spaceship is released, the pilots fire the motor and it shoots off to the edge of space before gliding back to Earth.The company first passed the 50-mile edge-of-space threshold in December 2018 with two test pilots. It repeated the feat in February 2019, this time with Beth Moses aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince the investigation, the company has flown two glide flights after it moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to Spaceport America, the taxpayer-funded facility built for the company in New Mexico.Last month, it attempted what was supposed to be a powered test flight to space. But the flight was aborted after the onboard computer that monitors the propulsion system lost connection. That halted the ignition of the motor, and the pilots safely glided the spaceship back to the runway.On Monday, the company announced that its next test flight could come as early as Feb. 13. The test objectives include \u201cassessing the upgraded horizontal stabilizers and flight controls during the boost phase of the flight,\u201d the company said in a statement.While the company hopes to fly paying customers to space this year, it is still in the test phase of its program, Moses said, a time to discover and fix problems.\u201cWe thoroughly inspect the vehicle, updating our analysis; we update and critique our performance and make sure we\u2019re happy with the results before we go to those next flights,\u201d he said. \u201cWe take our time and make sure things are right.\u201d Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company says it has fixed the problems and is scheduled to return to space this month Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6528",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/01/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-test-book/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic had just had its second successful flight to the edge of space, a daring mission that it said put it one step closer to finally flying tourists and making it the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut when the ground crew wheeled the suborbital spacecraft back into the hangar, company officials discovered that a seal running along a stabilizer on the wing designed to keep the space plane flying straight had come undone \u2014 a potentially serious safety hazard. \u201cThe structural integrity of the entire stabilizer was compromised,\u201d Todd Ericson, a test pilot who also served as a vice president for safety and test, said, according to a soon-to-be-published book. \u201cI don\u2019t know how we didn\u2019t lose the vehicle and kill three people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis previously unreported account of the flight in February 2019 is contained in \u201cTest Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut\u201d by New Yorker magazine journalist Nicholas Schmidle, who spent almost four years embedded with the company. The book\u2019s publisher, Henry Holt and Co., sent an advance copy to The Washington Post. The book is scheduled for release May 4.AdvertisementThe damage to the seal is a reminder of the perils inherent to human spaceflight, an endeavor long dominated by governments but now being taken over by private companies racing to lure paying customers and investors. The transition has been, at times, tumultuous, as private companies suffer failures with potentially serious consequences but don\u2019t always report them publicly.And the regulations governing private space companies are relatively loose \u2014 the Federal Aviation Administration ensures the safety of people and property on the ground, but there is merely an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard for the passengers, who need only acknowledge the risks as if they were skydiving or bungee jumping.Story continues below advertisementIn the book, Schmidle wrote that the \u201cseal had disbonded on the way up, as the pressure increased with nowhere to vent,\u201d ultimately leaving a \u201cwide gap running along the trailing edge of the right h-stab,\u201d or horizontal stabilizer. When Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president, missions and safety, saw the gap, \u201che felt his stomach drop,\u201d Schmidle reported. Moses\u2019s wife, Beth Moses, Virgin\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, had been on the flight.AdvertisementAfter the flight, the company hired an outside aviation expert, Dennis O\u2019Donoghue, to conduct a safety review of the program, and he spent weeks interviewing company officials and poring over records, according to the book. After a month, O\u2019Donoghue, who had served as a test pilot in the Marine Corps and at NASA and also had worked at Boeing, submitted his report. The company, which has signed up more than 600 people for flights that cost as much as $250,000, has refused to make it public.Virgin Galactic \u201ctried to keep the h-stab problem quiet, worried that it might spook customers,\u201d Schmidle wrote. That stance concerned Ericson, a former military test pilot who had served as the safety chief at the Air Force Test Flight Center before coming to Virgin Galactic in December 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis should have been a Come-to-Jesus Moment, not the kind of thing you brush under the rug,\u201d Ericson said, according to the book. Ericson informed the company in June 2019 that he was stepping down as vice president of safety, which concerned George Whitesides, then the company\u2019s CEO, who Schmidle wrote was suddenly faced with the prospect that \u201chis vice president of safety was resigning because he\u2019d lost confidence in the safety regime.\u201dAdvertisementEricson filled a different position at the company, vice president of special projects, until October 2020.In an interview Monday, Moses, the Virgin Galactic president, said that while the company did \u201cdiscover physical damage\u201d to the stabilizer, there \u201cwas no noticeable effect in flight with the pilots or mission control. No one noticed that issue in real time. There was no impact on the flying qualities.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the problem occurred when thermal protection coating was applied incorrectly and ended up blocking vents intended to allow air inside the stabilizer to escape as the atmospheric pressure decreased outside the craft as it flew higher.\u201cThe design of the h-stab wasn\u2019t really an issue there,\u201d Moses said. \u201cIt was an error that occurred in processing on the ground. Clearly a problem, right? Not something that should be allowed to happen and something we clearly needed to address.\u201dAdvertisementThe company had already started implementing an updated design on the stabilizer for its second spaceship, he said. And the fact that the spacecraft performed well during the 2019 flight despite traveling faster than the speed of sound to space and back \u201cclearly showed some of the resilience of the structure, that it held together.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the company immediately notified board members and shareholders as well as the FAA and \u201ckept them apprised regularly of what we were finding, as well as the corrective actions.\u201dAt the moment the problem was discovered the teams were concerned, even emotional. \u201cThe reaction is, \u2018Wow, what was that? How could that happen?\u2019\u201d he said. But investigating the issue and finding the problem \u201cgives us pretty high confidence in our design and our performance on the changes we made since,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn 2014, Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, came apart, killing one of the pilots during a test flight, after he prematurely unlocked the system designed to reorient the spacecraft and position it to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The National Transportation Safety Board found that Scaled Composites, the company hired by Virgin to build and test the vehicle, failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human error that caused the death.Story continues below advertisementAfter the crash, Virgin Galactic took over manufacturing and testing itself. It has repeatedly vowed that it was thoroughly testing its vehicle and would not fly until it was safe.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut after the 2019 flight, Schmidle reported that Ericson \u201chad concluded that members of the maintenance team were \u2018pencil whipping\u2019 inspections \u2014 signing for inspections that were not conducted properly.\u201d The inspectors, Schmidle wrote, not only failed to notice that the vents were blocked, causing the seal on the stabilizer to rupture, \u201cbut also missed a bag of screws taped to the inside of the h-stab.\u201dAdvertisementHe recommended firing the head of maintenance, but Moses refused.Story continues below advertisementAfter the February 2019 flight, Virgin Galactic grounded the vehicle and began redesigning the stabilizer and hired a contractor to \u201cbuild a new one from scratch, out of metal,\u201d Schmidle reported, instead of the composite carbon fiber used previously.Unlike traditional rockets that take off vertically from a launchpad, Virgin Galactic launches its spacecraft from a mother ship, which carries the spacecraft to an altitude of more than 40,000 feet. The spaceship is released, the pilots fire the motor and it shoots off to the edge of space before gliding back to Earth.The company first passed the 50-mile edge-of-space threshold in December 2018 with two test pilots. It repeated the feat in February 2019, this time with Beth Moses aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince the investigation, the company has flown two glide flights after it moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to Spaceport America, the taxpayer-funded facility built for the company in New Mexico.Last month, it attempted what was supposed to be a powered test flight to space. But the flight was aborted after the onboard computer that monitors the propulsion system lost connection. That halted the ignition of the motor, and the pilots safely glided the spaceship back to the runway.On Monday, the company announced that its next test flight could come as early as Feb. 13. The test objectives include \u201cassessing the upgraded horizontal stabilizers and flight controls during the boost phase of the flight,\u201d the company said in a statement.While the company hopes to fly paying customers to space this year, it is still in the test phase of its program, Moses said, a time to discover and fix problems.\u201cWe thoroughly inspect the vehicle, updating our analysis; we update and critique our performance and make sure we\u2019re happy with the results before we go to those next flights,\u201d he said. \u201cWe take our time and make sure things are right.\u201d Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company says it has fixed the problems and is scheduled to return to space this month Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6529",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/01/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-test-book/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic had just had its second successful flight to the edge of space, a daring mission that it said put it one step closer to finally flying tourists and making it the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut when the ground crew wheeled the suborbital spacecraft back into the hangar, company officials discovered that a seal running along a stabilizer on the wing designed to keep the space plane flying straight had come undone \u2014 a potentially serious safety hazard. \u201cThe structural integrity of the entire stabilizer was compromised,\u201d Todd Ericson, a test pilot who also served as a vice president for safety and test, said, according to a soon-to-be-published book. \u201cI don\u2019t know how we didn\u2019t lose the vehicle and kill three people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis previously unreported account of the flight in February 2019 is contained in \u201cTest Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut\u201d by New Yorker magazine journalist Nicholas Schmidle, who spent almost four years embedded with the company. The book\u2019s publisher, Henry Holt and Co., sent an advance copy to The Washington Post. The book is scheduled for release May 4.AdvertisementThe damage to the seal is a reminder of the perils inherent to human spaceflight, an endeavor long dominated by governments but now being taken over by private companies racing to lure paying customers and investors. The transition has been, at times, tumultuous, as private companies suffer failures with potentially serious consequences but don\u2019t always report them publicly.And the regulations governing private space companies are relatively loose \u2014 the Federal Aviation Administration ensures the safety of people and property on the ground, but there is merely an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard for the passengers, who need only acknowledge the risks as if they were skydiving or bungee jumping.Story continues below advertisementIn the book, Schmidle wrote that the \u201cseal had disbonded on the way up, as the pressure increased with nowhere to vent,\u201d ultimately leaving a \u201cwide gap running along the trailing edge of the right h-stab,\u201d or horizontal stabilizer. When Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president, missions and safety, saw the gap, \u201che felt his stomach drop,\u201d Schmidle reported. Moses\u2019s wife, Beth Moses, Virgin\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, had been on the flight.AdvertisementAfter the flight, the company hired an outside aviation expert, Dennis O\u2019Donoghue, to conduct a safety review of the program, and he spent weeks interviewing company officials and poring over records, according to the book. After a month, O\u2019Donoghue, who had served as a test pilot in the Marine Corps and at NASA and also had worked at Boeing, submitted his report. The company, which has signed up more than 600 people for flights that cost as much as $250,000, has refused to make it public.Virgin Galactic \u201ctried to keep the h-stab problem quiet, worried that it might spook customers,\u201d Schmidle wrote. That stance concerned Ericson, a former military test pilot who had served as the safety chief at the Air Force Test Flight Center before coming to Virgin Galactic in December 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis should have been a Come-to-Jesus Moment, not the kind of thing you brush under the rug,\u201d Ericson said, according to the book. Ericson informed the company in June 2019 that he was stepping down as vice president of safety, which concerned George Whitesides, then the company\u2019s CEO, who Schmidle wrote was suddenly faced with the prospect that \u201chis vice president of safety was resigning because he\u2019d lost confidence in the safety regime.\u201dAdvertisementEricson filled a different position at the company, vice president of special projects, until October 2020.In an interview Monday, Moses, the Virgin Galactic president, said that while the company did \u201cdiscover physical damage\u201d to the stabilizer, there \u201cwas no noticeable effect in flight with the pilots or mission control. No one noticed that issue in real time. There was no impact on the flying qualities.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the problem occurred when thermal protection coating was applied incorrectly and ended up blocking vents intended to allow air inside the stabilizer to escape as the atmospheric pressure decreased outside the craft as it flew higher.\u201cThe design of the h-stab wasn\u2019t really an issue there,\u201d Moses said. \u201cIt was an error that occurred in processing on the ground. Clearly a problem, right? Not something that should be allowed to happen and something we clearly needed to address.\u201dAdvertisementThe company had already started implementing an updated design on the stabilizer for its second spaceship, he said. And the fact that the spacecraft performed well during the 2019 flight despite traveling faster than the speed of sound to space and back \u201cclearly showed some of the resilience of the structure, that it held together.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the company immediately notified board members and shareholders as well as the FAA and \u201ckept them apprised regularly of what we were finding, as well as the corrective actions.\u201dAt the moment the problem was discovered the teams were concerned, even emotional. \u201cThe reaction is, \u2018Wow, what was that? How could that happen?\u2019\u201d he said. But investigating the issue and finding the problem \u201cgives us pretty high confidence in our design and our performance on the changes we made since,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn 2014, Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, came apart, killing one of the pilots during a test flight, after he prematurely unlocked the system designed to reorient the spacecraft and position it to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The National Transportation Safety Board found that Scaled Composites, the company hired by Virgin to build and test the vehicle, failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human error that caused the death.Story continues below advertisementAfter the crash, Virgin Galactic took over manufacturing and testing itself. It has repeatedly vowed that it was thoroughly testing its vehicle and would not fly until it was safe.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut after the 2019 flight, Schmidle reported that Ericson \u201chad concluded that members of the maintenance team were \u2018pencil whipping\u2019 inspections \u2014 signing for inspections that were not conducted properly.\u201d The inspectors, Schmidle wrote, not only failed to notice that the vents were blocked, causing the seal on the stabilizer to rupture, \u201cbut also missed a bag of screws taped to the inside of the h-stab.\u201dAdvertisementHe recommended firing the head of maintenance, but Moses refused.Story continues below advertisementAfter the February 2019 flight, Virgin Galactic grounded the vehicle and began redesigning the stabilizer and hired a contractor to \u201cbuild a new one from scratch, out of metal,\u201d Schmidle reported, instead of the composite carbon fiber used previously.Unlike traditional rockets that take off vertically from a launchpad, Virgin Galactic launches its spacecraft from a mother ship, which carries the spacecraft to an altitude of more than 40,000 feet. The spaceship is released, the pilots fire the motor and it shoots off to the edge of space before gliding back to Earth.The company first passed the 50-mile edge-of-space threshold in December 2018 with two test pilots. It repeated the feat in February 2019, this time with Beth Moses aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince the investigation, the company has flown two glide flights after it moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to Spaceport America, the taxpayer-funded facility built for the company in New Mexico.Last month, it attempted what was supposed to be a powered test flight to space. But the flight was aborted after the onboard computer that monitors the propulsion system lost connection. That halted the ignition of the motor, and the pilots safely glided the spaceship back to the runway.On Monday, the company announced that its next test flight could come as early as Feb. 13. The test objectives include \u201cassessing the upgraded horizontal stabilizers and flight controls during the boost phase of the flight,\u201d the company said in a statement.While the company hopes to fly paying customers to space this year, it is still in the test phase of its program, Moses said, a time to discover and fix problems.\u201cWe thoroughly inspect the vehicle, updating our analysis; we update and critique our performance and make sure we\u2019re happy with the results before we go to those next flights,\u201d he said. \u201cWe take our time and make sure things are right.\u201d Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company says it has fixed the problems and is scheduled to return to space this month Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6530",
        "date": "2021-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/01/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-test-book/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic had just had its second successful flight to the edge of space, a daring mission that it said put it one step closer to finally flying tourists and making it the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut when the ground crew wheeled the suborbital spacecraft back into the hangar, company officials discovered that a seal running along a stabilizer on the wing designed to keep the space plane flying straight had come undone \u2014 a potentially serious safety hazard. \u201cThe structural integrity of the entire stabilizer was compromised,\u201d Todd Ericson, a test pilot who also served as a vice president for safety and test, said, according to a soon-to-be-published book. \u201cI don\u2019t know how we didn\u2019t lose the vehicle and kill three people.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThis previously unreported account of the flight in February 2019 is contained in \u201cTest Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut\u201d by New Yorker magazine journalist Nicholas Schmidle, who spent almost four years embedded with the company. The book\u2019s publisher, Henry Holt and Co., sent an advance copy to The Washington Post. The book is scheduled for release May 4.AdvertisementThe damage to the seal is a reminder of the perils inherent to human spaceflight, an endeavor long dominated by governments but now being taken over by private companies racing to lure paying customers and investors. The transition has been, at times, tumultuous, as private companies suffer failures with potentially serious consequences but don\u2019t always report them publicly.And the regulations governing private space companies are relatively loose \u2014 the Federal Aviation Administration ensures the safety of people and property on the ground, but there is merely an \u201cinformed consent\u201d standard for the passengers, who need only acknowledge the risks as if they were skydiving or bungee jumping.Story continues below advertisementIn the book, Schmidle wrote that the \u201cseal had disbonded on the way up, as the pressure increased with nowhere to vent,\u201d ultimately leaving a \u201cwide gap running along the trailing edge of the right h-stab,\u201d or horizontal stabilizer. When Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic\u2019s president, missions and safety, saw the gap, \u201che felt his stomach drop,\u201d Schmidle reported. Moses\u2019s wife, Beth Moses, Virgin\u2019s chief astronaut instructor, had been on the flight.AdvertisementAfter the flight, the company hired an outside aviation expert, Dennis O\u2019Donoghue, to conduct a safety review of the program, and he spent weeks interviewing company officials and poring over records, according to the book. After a month, O\u2019Donoghue, who had served as a test pilot in the Marine Corps and at NASA and also had worked at Boeing, submitted his report. The company, which has signed up more than 600 people for flights that cost as much as $250,000, has refused to make it public.Virgin Galactic \u201ctried to keep the h-stab problem quiet, worried that it might spook customers,\u201d Schmidle wrote. That stance concerned Ericson, a former military test pilot who had served as the safety chief at the Air Force Test Flight Center before coming to Virgin Galactic in December 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis should have been a Come-to-Jesus Moment, not the kind of thing you brush under the rug,\u201d Ericson said, according to the book. Ericson informed the company in June 2019 that he was stepping down as vice president of safety, which concerned George Whitesides, then the company\u2019s CEO, who Schmidle wrote was suddenly faced with the prospect that \u201chis vice president of safety was resigning because he\u2019d lost confidence in the safety regime.\u201dAdvertisementEricson filled a different position at the company, vice president of special projects, until October 2020.In an interview Monday, Moses, the Virgin Galactic president, said that while the company did \u201cdiscover physical damage\u201d to the stabilizer, there \u201cwas no noticeable effect in flight with the pilots or mission control. No one noticed that issue in real time. There was no impact on the flying qualities.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the problem occurred when thermal protection coating was applied incorrectly and ended up blocking vents intended to allow air inside the stabilizer to escape as the atmospheric pressure decreased outside the craft as it flew higher.\u201cThe design of the h-stab wasn\u2019t really an issue there,\u201d Moses said. \u201cIt was an error that occurred in processing on the ground. Clearly a problem, right? Not something that should be allowed to happen and something we clearly needed to address.\u201dAdvertisementThe company had already started implementing an updated design on the stabilizer for its second spaceship, he said. And the fact that the spacecraft performed well during the 2019 flight despite traveling faster than the speed of sound to space and back \u201cclearly showed some of the resilience of the structure, that it held together.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added that the company immediately notified board members and shareholders as well as the FAA and \u201ckept them apprised regularly of what we were finding, as well as the corrective actions.\u201dAt the moment the problem was discovered the teams were concerned, even emotional. \u201cThe reaction is, \u2018Wow, what was that? How could that happen?\u2019\u201d he said. But investigating the issue and finding the problem \u201cgives us pretty high confidence in our design and our performance on the changes we made since,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn 2014, Virgin Galactic\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, came apart, killing one of the pilots during a test flight, after he prematurely unlocked the system designed to reorient the spacecraft and position it to reenter Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The National Transportation Safety Board found that Scaled Composites, the company hired by Virgin to build and test the vehicle, failed to properly train its pilots and did not implement basic safeguards to prevent the human error that caused the death.Story continues below advertisementAfter the crash, Virgin Galactic took over manufacturing and testing itself. It has repeatedly vowed that it was thoroughly testing its vehicle and would not fly until it was safe.Virgin Galactic's quest for spaceBut after the 2019 flight, Schmidle reported that Ericson \u201chad concluded that members of the maintenance team were \u2018pencil whipping\u2019 inspections \u2014 signing for inspections that were not conducted properly.\u201d The inspectors, Schmidle wrote, not only failed to notice that the vents were blocked, causing the seal on the stabilizer to rupture, \u201cbut also missed a bag of screws taped to the inside of the h-stab.\u201dAdvertisementHe recommended firing the head of maintenance, but Moses refused.Story continues below advertisementAfter the February 2019 flight, Virgin Galactic grounded the vehicle and began redesigning the stabilizer and hired a contractor to \u201cbuild a new one from scratch, out of metal,\u201d Schmidle reported, instead of the composite carbon fiber used previously.Unlike traditional rockets that take off vertically from a launchpad, Virgin Galactic launches its spacecraft from a mother ship, which carries the spacecraft to an altitude of more than 40,000 feet. The spaceship is released, the pilots fire the motor and it shoots off to the edge of space before gliding back to Earth.The company first passed the 50-mile edge-of-space threshold in December 2018 with two test pilots. It repeated the feat in February 2019, this time with Beth Moses aboard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince the investigation, the company has flown two glide flights after it moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to Spaceport America, the taxpayer-funded facility built for the company in New Mexico.Last month, it attempted what was supposed to be a powered test flight to space. But the flight was aborted after the onboard computer that monitors the propulsion system lost connection. That halted the ignition of the motor, and the pilots safely glided the spaceship back to the runway.On Monday, the company announced that its next test flight could come as early as Feb. 13. The test objectives include \u201cassessing the upgraded horizontal stabilizers and flight controls during the boost phase of the flight,\u201d the company said in a statement.While the company hopes to fly paying customers to space this year, it is still in the test phase of its program, Moses said, a time to discover and fix problems.\u201cWe thoroughly inspect the vehicle, updating our analysis; we update and critique our performance and make sure we\u2019re happy with the results before we go to those next flights,\u201d he said. \u201cWe take our time and make sure things are right.\u201d Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company says it has fixed the problems and is scheduled to return to space this month Virgin Galactic ordered safety probe after wing of spacecraft was damaged during 2019 flight, book says",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic is finally moving to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America for tourist flights to space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6531",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/10/virgin-galactic-is-finally-moving-new-mexicos-spaceport-america-tourist-flights-space/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic announced Friday that after years of waiting and delays, it will finally move its operations to Spaceport America, the launch site in rural New Mexico that bills itself as \u201cthe world\u2019s first purpose-built commercial spaceport.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor years the spaceport, which cost New Mexico taxpayers $220 million to build, waited for its anchor tenant to arrive. It stood as a symbol for the uncertain future of whether private companies would one day be able to fly ordinary people to space. The architectural marvel sat largely empty and inactive as Virgin struggled to build a spacecraft that could safely and reliably ferry people to the edge of space. But after two successful flights through the upper limits of the atmosphere, Virgin said it is now ready to move its operations from Mojave, Calif. \u2014 where it has built and tested SpaceShipTwo \u2014 to New Mexico.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company has some 700 people who have signed up to pay as much as $250,000 for tickets to be flown from the New Mexico base to the edge of space, more than 50 miles high.In an interview with The Washington Post, Branson hailed the move as a crucial moment for the company as it hits what he called the \u201chomestretch\u201d of testing before taking the first passengers later this year.\u201cEverybody is on a high at Virgin Galactic,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a good time for space, generally.\u201dBranson plans to be on the first operational flight, but it\u2019s unclear when exactly that will take place as the company moves through the final phases of its testing program.Branson has been trying to get people to space for nearly 15 years. Then in 2014, the company\u2019s spacecraft came apart, killing the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury. The company rebounded, vowed to make its spacecraft safer and in December finally reached its elusive goal when two test pilots flew SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 51.4 miles, crossing the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s definition of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt pulled off the feat again in February, this time flying with another pair of test pilots and a crew member, Beth Moses. The Federal Aviation Administration awarded all five members of the flights with commercial astronaut wings.Those flights gave the company confidence to begin the move to New Mexico as it begins its quest, as Branson said Friday, \u201cto open up and democratize space.\u201dIn the interview, he said it is important that his flight take off from Spaceport America, a stunning landmark settled into the New Mexico desert. Despite the repeated delays, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said she was always confident Virgin would eventually move into the spaceport.\u201cGood things are worth waiting for,\u201d she said in an interview. After two successful flights through the upper limits of the atmosphere, Virgin Galactic says it is ready to move its operations from Mojave, Calif., where it has built and tested SpaceShipTwo, to New Mexico. Virgin Galactic is finally moving to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America for tourist flights to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic is finally moving to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America for tourist flights to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6532",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/10/virgin-galactic-is-finally-moving-new-mexicos-spaceport-america-tourist-flights-space/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic announced Friday that after years of waiting and delays, it will finally move its operations to Spaceport America, the launch site in rural New Mexico that bills itself as \u201cthe world\u2019s first purpose-built commercial spaceport.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor years the spaceport, which cost New Mexico taxpayers $220 million to build, waited for its anchor tenant to arrive. It stood as a symbol for the uncertain future of whether private companies would one day be able to fly ordinary people to space. The architectural marvel sat largely empty and inactive as Virgin struggled to build a spacecraft that could safely and reliably ferry people to the edge of space. But after two successful flights through the upper limits of the atmosphere, Virgin said it is now ready to move its operations from Mojave, Calif. \u2014 where it has built and tested SpaceShipTwo \u2014 to New Mexico.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company has some 700 people who have signed up to pay as much as $250,000 for tickets to be flown from the New Mexico base to the edge of space, more than 50 miles high.In an interview with The Washington Post, Branson hailed the move as a crucial moment for the company as it hits what he called the \u201chomestretch\u201d of testing before taking the first passengers later this year.\u201cEverybody is on a high at Virgin Galactic,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a good time for space, generally.\u201dBranson plans to be on the first operational flight, but it\u2019s unclear when exactly that will take place as the company moves through the final phases of its testing program.Branson has been trying to get people to space for nearly 15 years. Then in 2014, the company\u2019s spacecraft came apart, killing the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury. The company rebounded, vowed to make its spacecraft safer and in December finally reached its elusive goal when two test pilots flew SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 51.4 miles, crossing the Federal Aviation Administration\u2019s definition of space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt pulled off the feat again in February, this time flying with another pair of test pilots and a crew member, Beth Moses. The Federal Aviation Administration awarded all five members of the flights with commercial astronaut wings.Those flights gave the company confidence to begin the move to New Mexico as it begins its quest, as Branson said Friday, \u201cto open up and democratize space.\u201dIn the interview, he said it is important that his flight take off from Spaceport America, a stunning landmark settled into the New Mexico desert. Despite the repeated delays, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said she was always confident Virgin would eventually move into the spaceport.\u201cGood things are worth waiting for,\u201d she said in an interview. After two successful flights through the upper limits of the atmosphere, Virgin Galactic says it is ready to move its operations from Mojave, Calif., where it has built and tested SpaceShipTwo, to New Mexico. Virgin Galactic is finally moving to New Mexico\u2019s Spaceport America for tourist flights to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6533",
        "date": "2021-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/22/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-flight/",
        "text": "Richard Branson is getting closer to his trip to space.For years, the British billionaire has dreamed of developing a spacecraft that could fly paying customers to the edge of space and back. And now, after a third successful mission out of the atmosphere Saturday morning, his company Virgin Galactic has said he could get his chance later this year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Saturday, Virgin Galactic said on Twitter that a pair of its pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Dave Mackay, fired the engine of the space plane known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, pointed the nose toward the skies over New Mexico and roared to a height of 55 miles, past the threshold at which the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes that a person has reached space. The spacecraft then fell back toward Earth, as the pilots guided it to the tarmac of Spaceport America, which the company says will be home to its space tourism business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview after the flight, Branson, who watched from the flight line, called the flight \u201celectric.\u201d\u201cThe whole thing went exactly as predicted,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was elegant, it was beautiful. We had all the lots of family and friends and relatives here.\u201dHe added that there was also a sense of relief that the pilots landed safely. \u201cObviously in these early days of test flights, you\u2019re relieved as much as excited. But it was just one of those magical days.\u201dThe flight marked a significant milestone for Virgin Galactic and could pave the way for the 600 customers who have put down deposits on tickets to finally get the chance to fly after waiting years for the opportunity.Story continues below advertisementThe successful mission comes at a critical time. Branson\u2019s venture is facing competition from Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which is also working to fly paying passengers on suborbital trips to the edge of space. After flying 15 successful missions on its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft, Blue Origin recently announced it would fly people for the first time on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is auctioning off a seat on that trip and the proceeds would benefit the company\u2019s nonprofit, Club for the Future, which encourages young people to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. The highest bid as of Saturday morning was $2.8 million, but the company expects that to go up during a live auction on June 12.Blue Origin has not said what it would charge for seats. In the past, Virgin has charged as much as $250,000, but it has said that ticket prices are likely to increase, at least in the short term.Saturday\u2019s flight was the first time Virgin Galactic has reached space in more than two years. In that time the company moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico. It also went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and appointed a new chief executive, Michael Colglazier, a former executive at Disney who is working to expand the company\u2019s operations worldwide as well as build a fleet of spacecraft.His vision is in line with \u201cthe roots of this company \u2014 to open space up,\u201d Colglazier said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cIt may not happen in the first year, it may not be the fifth year. But 10 years from now, 15 years from now this is going to be a normalized thing, and everyone should be aspiring to go to space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s last flight attempt, in December, was aborted just as the engine fired. The company said the abort was triggered by electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system that caused the motor to shut down. The pilots then flew the vehicle back to the ground safely. That issue had been resolved, the company said, before Saturday\u2019s flight.In an interview after the flight, Colglazier said it represented \u201ca great, confident step forward.\u201d The company still has to process the data and inspect the vehicle before moving ahead to the next flight. But Colglazier said the company is \u201cincredibly excited with what happened. It was a flawless flight.\u201dThe company has said that if all goes to plan, it would continue the testing program with another flight, this time with two pilots and four company employees on board to test out the cabin. Branson would fly on the flight after that, which the company is planning for later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson has dreamed of going to space for years and founded Virgin Galactic, what he calls the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline,\u201d in 2004. When the company first reached space with a pair of pilots in 2018, Branson was on the flight line with his son watching. When commentators announced that the spacecraft had reached space, he wept openly.In the interview Saturday, he said he\u2019s been actively preparing for his spaceflight.\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201d On Saturday, Virgin Galactic reported on its Twitter feed that a pair of its pilots had flown to space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6534",
        "date": "2021-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/22/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-flight/",
        "text": "Richard Branson is getting closer to his trip to space.For years, the British billionaire has dreamed of developing a spacecraft that could fly paying customers to the edge of space and back. And now, after a third successful mission out of the atmosphere Saturday morning, his company Virgin Galactic has said he could get his chance later this year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Saturday, Virgin Galactic said on Twitter that a pair of its pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Dave Mackay, fired the engine of the space plane known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, pointed the nose toward the skies over New Mexico and roared to a height of 55 miles, past the threshold at which the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes that a person has reached space. The spacecraft then fell back toward Earth, as the pilots guided it to the tarmac of Spaceport America, which the company says will be home to its space tourism business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview after the flight, Branson, who watched from the flight line, called the flight \u201celectric.\u201d\u201cThe whole thing went exactly as predicted,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was elegant, it was beautiful. We had all the lots of family and friends and relatives here.\u201dHe added that there was also a sense of relief that the pilots landed safely. \u201cObviously in these early days of test flights, you\u2019re relieved as much as excited. But it was just one of those magical days.\u201dThe flight marked a significant milestone for Virgin Galactic and could pave the way for the 600 customers who have put down deposits on tickets to finally get the chance to fly after waiting years for the opportunity.Story continues below advertisementThe successful mission comes at a critical time. Branson\u2019s venture is facing competition from Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which is also working to fly paying passengers on suborbital trips to the edge of space. After flying 15 successful missions on its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft, Blue Origin recently announced it would fly people for the first time on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is auctioning off a seat on that trip and the proceeds would benefit the company\u2019s nonprofit, Club for the Future, which encourages young people to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. The highest bid as of Saturday morning was $2.8 million, but the company expects that to go up during a live auction on June 12.Blue Origin has not said what it would charge for seats. In the past, Virgin has charged as much as $250,000, but it has said that ticket prices are likely to increase, at least in the short term.Saturday\u2019s flight was the first time Virgin Galactic has reached space in more than two years. In that time the company moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico. It also went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and appointed a new chief executive, Michael Colglazier, a former executive at Disney who is working to expand the company\u2019s operations worldwide as well as build a fleet of spacecraft.His vision is in line with \u201cthe roots of this company \u2014 to open space up,\u201d Colglazier said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cIt may not happen in the first year, it may not be the fifth year. But 10 years from now, 15 years from now this is going to be a normalized thing, and everyone should be aspiring to go to space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s last flight attempt, in December, was aborted just as the engine fired. The company said the abort was triggered by electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system that caused the motor to shut down. The pilots then flew the vehicle back to the ground safely. That issue had been resolved, the company said, before Saturday\u2019s flight.In an interview after the flight, Colglazier said it represented \u201ca great, confident step forward.\u201d The company still has to process the data and inspect the vehicle before moving ahead to the next flight. But Colglazier said the company is \u201cincredibly excited with what happened. It was a flawless flight.\u201dThe company has said that if all goes to plan, it would continue the testing program with another flight, this time with two pilots and four company employees on board to test out the cabin. Branson would fly on the flight after that, which the company is planning for later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson has dreamed of going to space for years and founded Virgin Galactic, what he calls the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline,\u201d in 2004. When the company first reached space with a pair of pilots in 2018, Branson was on the flight line with his son watching. When commentators announced that the spacecraft had reached space, he wept openly.In the interview Saturday, he said he\u2019s been actively preparing for his spaceflight.\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201d On Saturday, Virgin Galactic reported on its Twitter feed that a pair of its pilots had flown to space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6535",
        "date": "2021-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/22/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-flight/",
        "text": "Richard Branson is getting closer to his trip to space.For years, the British billionaire has dreamed of developing a spacecraft that could fly paying customers to the edge of space and back. And now, after a third successful mission out of the atmosphere Saturday morning, his company Virgin Galactic has said he could get his chance later this year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Saturday, Virgin Galactic said on Twitter that a pair of its pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Dave Mackay, fired the engine of the space plane known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, pointed the nose toward the skies over New Mexico and roared to a height of 55 miles, past the threshold at which the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes that a person has reached space. The spacecraft then fell back toward Earth, as the pilots guided it to the tarmac of Spaceport America, which the company says will be home to its space tourism business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview after the flight, Branson, who watched from the flight line, called the flight \u201celectric.\u201d\u201cThe whole thing went exactly as predicted,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was elegant, it was beautiful. We had all the lots of family and friends and relatives here.\u201dHe added that there was also a sense of relief that the pilots landed safely. \u201cObviously in these early days of test flights, you\u2019re relieved as much as excited. But it was just one of those magical days.\u201dThe flight marked a significant milestone for Virgin Galactic and could pave the way for the 600 customers who have put down deposits on tickets to finally get the chance to fly after waiting years for the opportunity.Story continues below advertisementThe successful mission comes at a critical time. Branson\u2019s venture is facing competition from Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which is also working to fly paying passengers on suborbital trips to the edge of space. After flying 15 successful missions on its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft, Blue Origin recently announced it would fly people for the first time on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is auctioning off a seat on that trip and the proceeds would benefit the company\u2019s nonprofit, Club for the Future, which encourages young people to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. The highest bid as of Saturday morning was $2.8 million, but the company expects that to go up during a live auction on June 12.Blue Origin has not said what it would charge for seats. In the past, Virgin has charged as much as $250,000, but it has said that ticket prices are likely to increase, at least in the short term.Saturday\u2019s flight was the first time Virgin Galactic has reached space in more than two years. In that time the company moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico. It also went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and appointed a new chief executive, Michael Colglazier, a former executive at Disney who is working to expand the company\u2019s operations worldwide as well as build a fleet of spacecraft.His vision is in line with \u201cthe roots of this company \u2014 to open space up,\u201d Colglazier said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cIt may not happen in the first year, it may not be the fifth year. But 10 years from now, 15 years from now this is going to be a normalized thing, and everyone should be aspiring to go to space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s last flight attempt, in December, was aborted just as the engine fired. The company said the abort was triggered by electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system that caused the motor to shut down. The pilots then flew the vehicle back to the ground safely. That issue had been resolved, the company said, before Saturday\u2019s flight.In an interview after the flight, Colglazier said it represented \u201ca great, confident step forward.\u201d The company still has to process the data and inspect the vehicle before moving ahead to the next flight. But Colglazier said the company is \u201cincredibly excited with what happened. It was a flawless flight.\u201dThe company has said that if all goes to plan, it would continue the testing program with another flight, this time with two pilots and four company employees on board to test out the cabin. Branson would fly on the flight after that, which the company is planning for later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson has dreamed of going to space for years and founded Virgin Galactic, what he calls the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline,\u201d in 2004. When the company first reached space with a pair of pilots in 2018, Branson was on the flight line with his son watching. When commentators announced that the spacecraft had reached space, he wept openly.In the interview Saturday, he said he\u2019s been actively preparing for his spaceflight.\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201d On Saturday, Virgin Galactic reported on its Twitter feed that a pair of its pilots had flown to space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6536",
        "date": "2021-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/22/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-space-flight/",
        "text": "Richard Branson is getting closer to his trip to space.For years, the British billionaire has dreamed of developing a spacecraft that could fly paying customers to the edge of space and back. And now, after a third successful mission out of the atmosphere Saturday morning, his company Virgin Galactic has said he could get his chance later this year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Saturday, Virgin Galactic said on Twitter that a pair of its pilots, C.J. Sturckow and Dave Mackay, fired the engine of the space plane known as SpaceShipTwo Unity, pointed the nose toward the skies over New Mexico and roared to a height of 55 miles, past the threshold at which the Federal Aviation Administration recognizes that a person has reached space. The spacecraft then fell back toward Earth, as the pilots guided it to the tarmac of Spaceport America, which the company says will be home to its space tourism business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview after the flight, Branson, who watched from the flight line, called the flight \u201celectric.\u201d\u201cThe whole thing went exactly as predicted,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was elegant, it was beautiful. We had all the lots of family and friends and relatives here.\u201dHe added that there was also a sense of relief that the pilots landed safely. \u201cObviously in these early days of test flights, you\u2019re relieved as much as excited. But it was just one of those magical days.\u201dThe flight marked a significant milestone for Virgin Galactic and could pave the way for the 600 customers who have put down deposits on tickets to finally get the chance to fly after waiting years for the opportunity.Story continues below advertisementThe successful mission comes at a critical time. Branson\u2019s venture is facing competition from Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which is also working to fly paying passengers on suborbital trips to the edge of space. After flying 15 successful missions on its New Shepard rocket and spacecraft, Blue Origin recently announced it would fly people for the first time on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBlue Origin is auctioning off a seat on that trip and the proceeds would benefit the company\u2019s nonprofit, Club for the Future, which encourages young people to enter the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. The highest bid as of Saturday morning was $2.8 million, but the company expects that to go up during a live auction on June 12.Blue Origin has not said what it would charge for seats. In the past, Virgin has charged as much as $250,000, but it has said that ticket prices are likely to increase, at least in the short term.Saturday\u2019s flight was the first time Virgin Galactic has reached space in more than two years. In that time the company moved its operations from Mojave, Calif., to New Mexico. It also went public through a merger with a New York investment firm and appointed a new chief executive, Michael Colglazier, a former executive at Disney who is working to expand the company\u2019s operations worldwide as well as build a fleet of spacecraft.His vision is in line with \u201cthe roots of this company \u2014 to open space up,\u201d Colglazier said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cIt may not happen in the first year, it may not be the fifth year. But 10 years from now, 15 years from now this is going to be a normalized thing, and everyone should be aspiring to go to space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company\u2019s last flight attempt, in December, was aborted just as the engine fired. The company said the abort was triggered by electromagnetic interference from a flight computer system that caused the motor to shut down. The pilots then flew the vehicle back to the ground safely. That issue had been resolved, the company said, before Saturday\u2019s flight.In an interview after the flight, Colglazier said it represented \u201ca great, confident step forward.\u201d The company still has to process the data and inspect the vehicle before moving ahead to the next flight. But Colglazier said the company is \u201cincredibly excited with what happened. It was a flawless flight.\u201dThe company has said that if all goes to plan, it would continue the testing program with another flight, this time with two pilots and four company employees on board to test out the cabin. Branson would fly on the flight after that, which the company is planning for later this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson has dreamed of going to space for years and founded Virgin Galactic, what he calls the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline,\u201d in 2004. When the company first reached space with a pair of pilots in 2018, Branson was on the flight line with his son watching. When commentators announced that the spacecraft had reached space, he wept openly.In the interview Saturday, he said he\u2019s been actively preparing for his spaceflight.\u201cOne good thing about covid is it enabled me to get as fit as I\u2019ve felt since I was in my 20s,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s great to be able to really work on getting your body fit for spaceflight, and I\u2019m going to enjoy every single minute of it.\u201d On Saturday, Virgin Galactic reported on its Twitter feed that a pair of its pilots had flown to space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic reports reaching space for the third time",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6537",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/28/virgin-galactic-space-tourism/",
        "text": "Nine months after Richard Branson\u2019s space venture, Virgin Galactic, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the company has a new CEO, plucked from the top ranks of Disney. The space tourism company has settled into its new home, a futuristic building known as Spaceport America that rises in the New Mexico desert like a mirage and features an \u201castronaut lounge.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe one-piece blue jumpsuits have been designed for its customers by Under Armour, and Virgin Galactic\u2019s new chairman recently said the company is within \u201cspitting distance\u201d of beginning to fly the 600 or so people who have put down as much as $250,000 for joyrides to the edge of space and back.On Tuesday, the company reached another milestone, showing off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots, outfitted with custom seats, plenty of windows and 16 cameras to record all manner of weightless somersaults for the ultimate social media boasting.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis cabin has been designed specifically to allow thousands of people like you and me to achieve the dream of spaceflight safely \u2014 and that is incredibly exciting,\u201d Branson said in a statement.Since Branson founded the company in 2004, Virgin Galactic has carried on through a series of delays and setbacks, including a fatal accident in 2014 that killed a pilot. But now, after successfully flying people to space twice, it says it is poised to finally claim the mantle of \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceAfter years of design and testing the engineering and technology behind a spaceplane that would travel Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, Virgin Galactic now needs to show its investors, customers and the public at large that Branson\u2019s quixotic dream can indeed become a truly profitable venture, capable of reliably flying passengers to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementToward that end, it has taken some significant steps recently, including its announcement a year ago that it would merge with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm, and go public.Virgin Galactic said the move would give it the capital it needs to expand its fleet of spaceships and move into markets around the globe. Late last year, it also announced that Boeing would invest $20 million in the company to help develop technologies that would allow for high-speed transportation to ferry passengers across the globe faster than the speed of sound and possibly through space.While Virgin has been working toward beginning commercial operations, it has posted a net loss of $133 million over the past two quarters. But as of the end of March it had cash and equivalents of $419 million, some 600 \u201cfuture astronauts,\u201d representing $80 million in revenue. Another 400 potential customers have put down $1,000 in refundable deposits, giving them the first chance of buying tickets when they go back on sale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital flights to the edge of space. While its reusable New Shepard rocket has reached space numerous times, the company has yet to fly humans, and it has not announced ticket prices. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic made another dramatic move when it announced that Michael Colglazier would become CEO, replacing George Whitesides, who has spent a decade at the company as it grew from 30 employees to more than 900 and becomes Chief Space Officer, perhaps the most original title in corporate America. He will focus on developing new spaceflight technologies.Colglazier comes to Virgin Galactic after 30 years at Disney, where he served as president and manager of Disney Parks International and as president of the Disneyland Resort.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDisney and Virgin share a common commitment to world-class service, incredible innovational delivering unique, unforgettable experiences,\u201d he said in a recent call with analysts.But Space Mountain this is not.Virgin\u2019s goal is to open up space to the masses, realizing Branson\u2019s goal of turning ordinary people, or at least those able to afford the steep ticket price, into astronauts, championing the transformative experience of seeing the Earth from a distance.Now that it is getting closer to achieving those first flights \u2014 Branson has said he hopes to fly before the end of the year \u2014 it showed off the interior of its crew cabin Tuesday.The experience begins at Spaceport America, where passengers will board the spaceship. Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo is \u201cair launched.\u201d It is tethered to the belly of a twin-fuselage airplane that escorts it to an altitude of about 45,000 feet. There, it releases the spaceship, which fires its rocket motor, and shoots almost straight up to an altitude of more than 50 miles. It then falls back to Earth and glides to the runway like an airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInside the cabin, there are six passenger seats, custom-fitted to their bodies, each with two dedicated windows for star and Earth gazing. Virgin Galactic had wanted to unveil the cabin with a big ceremony, inviting VIPs, the media, customers and investors. But because of the coronavirus, it developed a presentation on virtual reality that allows users to visit the runway at Spaceport America, meet Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, walk around inside the spacecraft and even blast off to space. It also released an app that allows users to tour the cabin and explore the features of the spacecraft and flight experience.The cabin has mood lighting and handholds around the windows to help passengers when they reach space, unbuckle their seat belts and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. At the end of the cabin, there is even a giant mirror that the company says \u201callows astronauts to view themselves weightless while illuminated by the natural brightness of the Earth.\u201d Each seatback has a digital screen that displays flight data.\u201cIt was really designed with a lot of care to keep the focus on planet Earth and weightlessness,\u201d Whitesides said in an interview. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have a lot of garish designs on the walls or anything like that. It was all very conscious design decisions to make sure that the focus of attention was the windows, and really what is behind the windows.\u201d On Tuesday, Virgin Galactic showed off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots that is scheduled to carry its first paying passengers perhaps by the end of the year. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6538",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/28/virgin-galactic-space-tourism/",
        "text": "Nine months after Richard Branson\u2019s space venture, Virgin Galactic, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the company has a new CEO, plucked from the top ranks of Disney. The space tourism company has settled into its new home, a futuristic building known as Spaceport America that rises in the New Mexico desert like a mirage and features an \u201castronaut lounge.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe one-piece blue jumpsuits have been designed for its customers by Under Armour, and Virgin Galactic\u2019s new chairman recently said the company is within \u201cspitting distance\u201d of beginning to fly the 600 or so people who have put down as much as $250,000 for joyrides to the edge of space and back.On Tuesday, the company reached another milestone, showing off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots, outfitted with custom seats, plenty of windows and 16 cameras to record all manner of weightless somersaults for the ultimate social media boasting.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis cabin has been designed specifically to allow thousands of people like you and me to achieve the dream of spaceflight safely \u2014 and that is incredibly exciting,\u201d Branson said in a statement.Since Branson founded the company in 2004, Virgin Galactic has carried on through a series of delays and setbacks, including a fatal accident in 2014 that killed a pilot. But now, after successfully flying people to space twice, it says it is poised to finally claim the mantle of \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceAfter years of design and testing the engineering and technology behind a spaceplane that would travel Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, Virgin Galactic now needs to show its investors, customers and the public at large that Branson\u2019s quixotic dream can indeed become a truly profitable venture, capable of reliably flying passengers to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementToward that end, it has taken some significant steps recently, including its announcement a year ago that it would merge with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm, and go public.Virgin Galactic said the move would give it the capital it needs to expand its fleet of spaceships and move into markets around the globe. Late last year, it also announced that Boeing would invest $20 million in the company to help develop technologies that would allow for high-speed transportation to ferry passengers across the globe faster than the speed of sound and possibly through space.While Virgin has been working toward beginning commercial operations, it has posted a net loss of $133 million over the past two quarters. But as of the end of March it had cash and equivalents of $419 million, some 600 \u201cfuture astronauts,\u201d representing $80 million in revenue. Another 400 potential customers have put down $1,000 in refundable deposits, giving them the first chance of buying tickets when they go back on sale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital flights to the edge of space. While its reusable New Shepard rocket has reached space numerous times, the company has yet to fly humans, and it has not announced ticket prices. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic made another dramatic move when it announced that Michael Colglazier would become CEO, replacing George Whitesides, who has spent a decade at the company as it grew from 30 employees to more than 900 and becomes Chief Space Officer, perhaps the most original title in corporate America. He will focus on developing new spaceflight technologies.Colglazier comes to Virgin Galactic after 30 years at Disney, where he served as president and manager of Disney Parks International and as president of the Disneyland Resort.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDisney and Virgin share a common commitment to world-class service, incredible innovational delivering unique, unforgettable experiences,\u201d he said in a recent call with analysts.But Space Mountain this is not.Virgin\u2019s goal is to open up space to the masses, realizing Branson\u2019s goal of turning ordinary people, or at least those able to afford the steep ticket price, into astronauts, championing the transformative experience of seeing the Earth from a distance.Now that it is getting closer to achieving those first flights \u2014 Branson has said he hopes to fly before the end of the year \u2014 it showed off the interior of its crew cabin Tuesday.The experience begins at Spaceport America, where passengers will board the spaceship. Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo is \u201cair launched.\u201d It is tethered to the belly of a twin-fuselage airplane that escorts it to an altitude of about 45,000 feet. There, it releases the spaceship, which fires its rocket motor, and shoots almost straight up to an altitude of more than 50 miles. It then falls back to Earth and glides to the runway like an airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInside the cabin, there are six passenger seats, custom-fitted to their bodies, each with two dedicated windows for star and Earth gazing. Virgin Galactic had wanted to unveil the cabin with a big ceremony, inviting VIPs, the media, customers and investors. But because of the coronavirus, it developed a presentation on virtual reality that allows users to visit the runway at Spaceport America, meet Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, walk around inside the spacecraft and even blast off to space. It also released an app that allows users to tour the cabin and explore the features of the spacecraft and flight experience.The cabin has mood lighting and handholds around the windows to help passengers when they reach space, unbuckle their seat belts and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. At the end of the cabin, there is even a giant mirror that the company says \u201callows astronauts to view themselves weightless while illuminated by the natural brightness of the Earth.\u201d Each seatback has a digital screen that displays flight data.\u201cIt was really designed with a lot of care to keep the focus on planet Earth and weightlessness,\u201d Whitesides said in an interview. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have a lot of garish designs on the walls or anything like that. It was all very conscious design decisions to make sure that the focus of attention was the windows, and really what is behind the windows.\u201d On Tuesday, Virgin Galactic showed off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots that is scheduled to carry its first paying passengers perhaps by the end of the year. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6539",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/28/virgin-galactic-space-tourism/",
        "text": "Nine months after Richard Branson\u2019s space venture, Virgin Galactic, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the company has a new CEO, plucked from the top ranks of Disney. The space tourism company has settled into its new home, a futuristic building known as Spaceport America that rises in the New Mexico desert like a mirage and features an \u201castronaut lounge.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe one-piece blue jumpsuits have been designed for its customers by Under Armour, and Virgin Galactic\u2019s new chairman recently said the company is within \u201cspitting distance\u201d of beginning to fly the 600 or so people who have put down as much as $250,000 for joyrides to the edge of space and back.On Tuesday, the company reached another milestone, showing off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots, outfitted with custom seats, plenty of windows and 16 cameras to record all manner of weightless somersaults for the ultimate social media boasting.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis cabin has been designed specifically to allow thousands of people like you and me to achieve the dream of spaceflight safely \u2014 and that is incredibly exciting,\u201d Branson said in a statement.Since Branson founded the company in 2004, Virgin Galactic has carried on through a series of delays and setbacks, including a fatal accident in 2014 that killed a pilot. But now, after successfully flying people to space twice, it says it is poised to finally claim the mantle of \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceAfter years of design and testing the engineering and technology behind a spaceplane that would travel Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, Virgin Galactic now needs to show its investors, customers and the public at large that Branson\u2019s quixotic dream can indeed become a truly profitable venture, capable of reliably flying passengers to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementToward that end, it has taken some significant steps recently, including its announcement a year ago that it would merge with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm, and go public.Virgin Galactic said the move would give it the capital it needs to expand its fleet of spaceships and move into markets around the globe. Late last year, it also announced that Boeing would invest $20 million in the company to help develop technologies that would allow for high-speed transportation to ferry passengers across the globe faster than the speed of sound and possibly through space.While Virgin has been working toward beginning commercial operations, it has posted a net loss of $133 million over the past two quarters. But as of the end of March it had cash and equivalents of $419 million, some 600 \u201cfuture astronauts,\u201d representing $80 million in revenue. Another 400 potential customers have put down $1,000 in refundable deposits, giving them the first chance of buying tickets when they go back on sale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital flights to the edge of space. While its reusable New Shepard rocket has reached space numerous times, the company has yet to fly humans, and it has not announced ticket prices. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic made another dramatic move when it announced that Michael Colglazier would become CEO, replacing George Whitesides, who has spent a decade at the company as it grew from 30 employees to more than 900 and becomes Chief Space Officer, perhaps the most original title in corporate America. He will focus on developing new spaceflight technologies.Colglazier comes to Virgin Galactic after 30 years at Disney, where he served as president and manager of Disney Parks International and as president of the Disneyland Resort.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDisney and Virgin share a common commitment to world-class service, incredible innovational delivering unique, unforgettable experiences,\u201d he said in a recent call with analysts.But Space Mountain this is not.Virgin\u2019s goal is to open up space to the masses, realizing Branson\u2019s goal of turning ordinary people, or at least those able to afford the steep ticket price, into astronauts, championing the transformative experience of seeing the Earth from a distance.Now that it is getting closer to achieving those first flights \u2014 Branson has said he hopes to fly before the end of the year \u2014 it showed off the interior of its crew cabin Tuesday.The experience begins at Spaceport America, where passengers will board the spaceship. Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo is \u201cair launched.\u201d It is tethered to the belly of a twin-fuselage airplane that escorts it to an altitude of about 45,000 feet. There, it releases the spaceship, which fires its rocket motor, and shoots almost straight up to an altitude of more than 50 miles. It then falls back to Earth and glides to the runway like an airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInside the cabin, there are six passenger seats, custom-fitted to their bodies, each with two dedicated windows for star and Earth gazing. Virgin Galactic had wanted to unveil the cabin with a big ceremony, inviting VIPs, the media, customers and investors. But because of the coronavirus, it developed a presentation on virtual reality that allows users to visit the runway at Spaceport America, meet Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, walk around inside the spacecraft and even blast off to space. It also released an app that allows users to tour the cabin and explore the features of the spacecraft and flight experience.The cabin has mood lighting and handholds around the windows to help passengers when they reach space, unbuckle their seat belts and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. At the end of the cabin, there is even a giant mirror that the company says \u201callows astronauts to view themselves weightless while illuminated by the natural brightness of the Earth.\u201d Each seatback has a digital screen that displays flight data.\u201cIt was really designed with a lot of care to keep the focus on planet Earth and weightlessness,\u201d Whitesides said in an interview. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have a lot of garish designs on the walls or anything like that. It was all very conscious design decisions to make sure that the focus of attention was the windows, and really what is behind the windows.\u201d On Tuesday, Virgin Galactic showed off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots that is scheduled to carry its first paying passengers perhaps by the end of the year. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6540",
        "date": "2020-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/28/virgin-galactic-space-tourism/",
        "text": "Nine months after Richard Branson\u2019s space venture, Virgin Galactic, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the company has a new CEO, plucked from the top ranks of Disney. The space tourism company has settled into its new home, a futuristic building known as Spaceport America that rises in the New Mexico desert like a mirage and features an \u201castronaut lounge.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe one-piece blue jumpsuits have been designed for its customers by Under Armour, and Virgin Galactic\u2019s new chairman recently said the company is within \u201cspitting distance\u201d of beginning to fly the 600 or so people who have put down as much as $250,000 for joyrides to the edge of space and back.On Tuesday, the company reached another milestone, showing off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots, outfitted with custom seats, plenty of windows and 16 cameras to record all manner of weightless somersaults for the ultimate social media boasting.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis cabin has been designed specifically to allow thousands of people like you and me to achieve the dream of spaceflight safely \u2014 and that is incredibly exciting,\u201d Branson said in a statement.Since Branson founded the company in 2004, Virgin Galactic has carried on through a series of delays and setbacks, including a fatal accident in 2014 that killed a pilot. But now, after successfully flying people to space twice, it says it is poised to finally claim the mantle of \u201cthe world\u2019s first commercial spaceline.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceAfter years of design and testing the engineering and technology behind a spaceplane that would travel Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, Virgin Galactic now needs to show its investors, customers and the public at large that Branson\u2019s quixotic dream can indeed become a truly profitable venture, capable of reliably flying passengers to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementToward that end, it has taken some significant steps recently, including its announcement a year ago that it would merge with Social Capital Hedosophia, a New York investment firm, and go public.Virgin Galactic said the move would give it the capital it needs to expand its fleet of spaceships and move into markets around the globe. Late last year, it also announced that Boeing would invest $20 million in the company to help develop technologies that would allow for high-speed transportation to ferry passengers across the globe faster than the speed of sound and possibly through space.While Virgin has been working toward beginning commercial operations, it has posted a net loss of $133 million over the past two quarters. But as of the end of March it had cash and equivalents of $419 million, some 600 \u201cfuture astronauts,\u201d representing $80 million in revenue. Another 400 potential customers have put down $1,000 in refundable deposits, giving them the first chance of buying tickets when they go back on sale.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, also plans to fly paying customers on suborbital flights to the edge of space. While its reusable New Shepard rocket has reached space numerous times, the company has yet to fly humans, and it has not announced ticket prices. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Earlier this month, Virgin Galactic made another dramatic move when it announced that Michael Colglazier would become CEO, replacing George Whitesides, who has spent a decade at the company as it grew from 30 employees to more than 900 and becomes Chief Space Officer, perhaps the most original title in corporate America. He will focus on developing new spaceflight technologies.Colglazier comes to Virgin Galactic after 30 years at Disney, where he served as president and manager of Disney Parks International and as president of the Disneyland Resort.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDisney and Virgin share a common commitment to world-class service, incredible innovational delivering unique, unforgettable experiences,\u201d he said in a recent call with analysts.But Space Mountain this is not.Virgin\u2019s goal is to open up space to the masses, realizing Branson\u2019s goal of turning ordinary people, or at least those able to afford the steep ticket price, into astronauts, championing the transformative experience of seeing the Earth from a distance.Now that it is getting closer to achieving those first flights \u2014 Branson has said he hopes to fly before the end of the year \u2014 it showed off the interior of its crew cabin Tuesday.The experience begins at Spaceport America, where passengers will board the spaceship. Unlike traditional rockets that launch vertically, Virgin Galactic\u2019s SpaceShipTwo is \u201cair launched.\u201d It is tethered to the belly of a twin-fuselage airplane that escorts it to an altitude of about 45,000 feet. There, it releases the spaceship, which fires its rocket motor, and shoots almost straight up to an altitude of more than 50 miles. It then falls back to Earth and glides to the runway like an airplane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInside the cabin, there are six passenger seats, custom-fitted to their bodies, each with two dedicated windows for star and Earth gazing. Virgin Galactic had wanted to unveil the cabin with a big ceremony, inviting VIPs, the media, customers and investors. But because of the coronavirus, it developed a presentation on virtual reality that allows users to visit the runway at Spaceport America, meet Virgin Galactic\u2019s pilots, walk around inside the spacecraft and even blast off to space. It also released an app that allows users to tour the cabin and explore the features of the spacecraft and flight experience.The cabin has mood lighting and handholds around the windows to help passengers when they reach space, unbuckle their seat belts and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. At the end of the cabin, there is even a giant mirror that the company says \u201callows astronauts to view themselves weightless while illuminated by the natural brightness of the Earth.\u201d Each seatback has a digital screen that displays flight data.\u201cIt was really designed with a lot of care to keep the focus on planet Earth and weightlessness,\u201d Whitesides said in an interview. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have a lot of garish designs on the walls or anything like that. It was all very conscious design decisions to make sure that the focus of attention was the windows, and really what is behind the windows.\u201d On Tuesday, Virgin Galactic showed off the inside of the spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo, a sleek crew cabin for six passengers and two pilots that is scheduled to carry its first paying passengers perhaps by the end of the year. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6541",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/12/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-auction/",
        "text": "How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos?For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday for a seat on the first human spaceflight for Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe identity of the winner won\u2019t be made public for a couple of weeks, the company said, leading to speculation over who the mysterious bidder could be. A tech entrepreneur? A wealthy foreigner? Or maybe a want-to-be-astronaut backed by a country\u2019s government who would be the first from his or her homeland to go to space?Whoever it is, the person will get to strap into New Shepard\u2019s capsule alongside Bezos, his brother Mark and a fourth, yet-to-be-named crew member, for a rollicking ride to the edge of space that lasts all of 10 minutes. The flight is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin promises that the trip will be profound \u2014 allowing the passengers to see the Earth from a distance, view the dark sky above and marvel at the curvature of the Earth. And it will pave the way for more flights to come, as the company begins to ramp up commercial service, routinely flying paying customers out of the atmosphere.In all, nearly 7,600 bidders from 159 countries participated in the auction, driving the price to a level well beyond what some company officials had anticipated. Blue Origin flies its New Shepard capsule to an altitude of about 65 miles, where passengers can then unbuckle from their seats and experience about four minutes of weightlessness. The $28 million is about half the cost of what some private citizens are paying for a trip to the International Space Station, where they\u2019ll live and work for about a week before flying home on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The money raised in Blue Origin\u2019s auction is to go to support the company\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which encourages future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math to \u201chelp invent the future of life in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe auction comes as several companies are working toward flying a host of private astronauts. Blue Origin\u2019s chief rival in the suborbital space tourism market, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, recently completed its third human spaceflight mission.Branson was supposed to allow one more test flight before he strapped into the company\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, for his flight. But he has been desperately eager to get to space for years, and the company has left the door open to allowing him to fly earlier in an attempt to compete with Bezos.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies a much more powerful rocket, the Falcon 9, has several private astronaut missions on the manifest as well. But unlike Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, which shoot their spacecraft on ballistic trajectories that fly almost straight up before falling back down, SpaceX sends its Dragon spacecraft to orbit around the Earth at speeds of 17,500 mph.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has several trips scheduled to send passengers to the International Space Station at a cost of $55 million per seat.Blue Origin officials had said they expected bidders to pay a premium for the seat. It\u2019s the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, after 15 test flights without people on board. And flying alongside Bezos may have been an attractive prospect for some. The company has not said what it will charge the public for seats once tickets go on sale. Virgin Galactic had charged $250,000 before discontinuing sales. When they come back online later this year, the company has said they will be more expensive. It hasn\u2019t named a price, but analysts said they expected it to be about $500,000.After the auction, Blue Origin said it would begin contacting the runners up to sign them up for future flights as well. How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos? For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday. A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6542",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/12/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-auction/",
        "text": "How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos?For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday for a seat on the first human spaceflight for Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe identity of the winner won\u2019t be made public for a couple of weeks, the company said, leading to speculation over who the mysterious bidder could be. A tech entrepreneur? A wealthy foreigner? Or maybe a want-to-be-astronaut backed by a country\u2019s government who would be the first from his or her homeland to go to space?Whoever it is, the person will get to strap into New Shepard\u2019s capsule alongside Bezos, his brother Mark and a fourth, yet-to-be-named crew member, for a rollicking ride to the edge of space that lasts all of 10 minutes. The flight is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin promises that the trip will be profound \u2014 allowing the passengers to see the Earth from a distance, view the dark sky above and marvel at the curvature of the Earth. And it will pave the way for more flights to come, as the company begins to ramp up commercial service, routinely flying paying customers out of the atmosphere.In all, nearly 7,600 bidders from 159 countries participated in the auction, driving the price to a level well beyond what some company officials had anticipated. Blue Origin flies its New Shepard capsule to an altitude of about 65 miles, where passengers can then unbuckle from their seats and experience about four minutes of weightlessness. The $28 million is about half the cost of what some private citizens are paying for a trip to the International Space Station, where they\u2019ll live and work for about a week before flying home on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The money raised in Blue Origin\u2019s auction is to go to support the company\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which encourages future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math to \u201chelp invent the future of life in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe auction comes as several companies are working toward flying a host of private astronauts. Blue Origin\u2019s chief rival in the suborbital space tourism market, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, recently completed its third human spaceflight mission.Branson was supposed to allow one more test flight before he strapped into the company\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, for his flight. But he has been desperately eager to get to space for years, and the company has left the door open to allowing him to fly earlier in an attempt to compete with Bezos.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies a much more powerful rocket, the Falcon 9, has several private astronaut missions on the manifest as well. But unlike Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, which shoot their spacecraft on ballistic trajectories that fly almost straight up before falling back down, SpaceX sends its Dragon spacecraft to orbit around the Earth at speeds of 17,500 mph.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has several trips scheduled to send passengers to the International Space Station at a cost of $55 million per seat.Blue Origin officials had said they expected bidders to pay a premium for the seat. It\u2019s the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, after 15 test flights without people on board. And flying alongside Bezos may have been an attractive prospect for some. The company has not said what it will charge the public for seats once tickets go on sale. Virgin Galactic had charged $250,000 before discontinuing sales. When they come back online later this year, the company has said they will be more expensive. It hasn\u2019t named a price, but analysts said they expected it to be about $500,000.After the auction, Blue Origin said it would begin contacting the runners up to sign them up for future flights as well. How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos? For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday. A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6543",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/12/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-auction/",
        "text": "How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos?For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday for a seat on the first human spaceflight for Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe identity of the winner won\u2019t be made public for a couple of weeks, the company said, leading to speculation over who the mysterious bidder could be. A tech entrepreneur? A wealthy foreigner? Or maybe a want-to-be-astronaut backed by a country\u2019s government who would be the first from his or her homeland to go to space?Whoever it is, the person will get to strap into New Shepard\u2019s capsule alongside Bezos, his brother Mark and a fourth, yet-to-be-named crew member, for a rollicking ride to the edge of space that lasts all of 10 minutes. The flight is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin promises that the trip will be profound \u2014 allowing the passengers to see the Earth from a distance, view the dark sky above and marvel at the curvature of the Earth. And it will pave the way for more flights to come, as the company begins to ramp up commercial service, routinely flying paying customers out of the atmosphere.In all, nearly 7,600 bidders from 159 countries participated in the auction, driving the price to a level well beyond what some company officials had anticipated. Blue Origin flies its New Shepard capsule to an altitude of about 65 miles, where passengers can then unbuckle from their seats and experience about four minutes of weightlessness. The $28 million is about half the cost of what some private citizens are paying for a trip to the International Space Station, where they\u2019ll live and work for about a week before flying home on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The money raised in Blue Origin\u2019s auction is to go to support the company\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which encourages future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math to \u201chelp invent the future of life in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe auction comes as several companies are working toward flying a host of private astronauts. Blue Origin\u2019s chief rival in the suborbital space tourism market, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, recently completed its third human spaceflight mission.Branson was supposed to allow one more test flight before he strapped into the company\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, for his flight. But he has been desperately eager to get to space for years, and the company has left the door open to allowing him to fly earlier in an attempt to compete with Bezos.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies a much more powerful rocket, the Falcon 9, has several private astronaut missions on the manifest as well. But unlike Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, which shoot their spacecraft on ballistic trajectories that fly almost straight up before falling back down, SpaceX sends its Dragon spacecraft to orbit around the Earth at speeds of 17,500 mph.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has several trips scheduled to send passengers to the International Space Station at a cost of $55 million per seat.Blue Origin officials had said they expected bidders to pay a premium for the seat. It\u2019s the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, after 15 test flights without people on board. And flying alongside Bezos may have been an attractive prospect for some. The company has not said what it will charge the public for seats once tickets go on sale. Virgin Galactic had charged $250,000 before discontinuing sales. When they come back online later this year, the company has said they will be more expensive. It hasn\u2019t named a price, but analysts said they expected it to be about $500,000.After the auction, Blue Origin said it would begin contacting the runners up to sign them up for future flights as well. How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos? For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday. A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6544",
        "date": "2021-06-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/12/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-auction/",
        "text": "How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos?For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday for a seat on the first human spaceflight for Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe identity of the winner won\u2019t be made public for a couple of weeks, the company said, leading to speculation over who the mysterious bidder could be. A tech entrepreneur? A wealthy foreigner? Or maybe a want-to-be-astronaut backed by a country\u2019s government who would be the first from his or her homeland to go to space?Whoever it is, the person will get to strap into New Shepard\u2019s capsule alongside Bezos, his brother Mark and a fourth, yet-to-be-named crew member, for a rollicking ride to the edge of space that lasts all of 10 minutes. The flight is scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin promises that the trip will be profound \u2014 allowing the passengers to see the Earth from a distance, view the dark sky above and marvel at the curvature of the Earth. And it will pave the way for more flights to come, as the company begins to ramp up commercial service, routinely flying paying customers out of the atmosphere.In all, nearly 7,600 bidders from 159 countries participated in the auction, driving the price to a level well beyond what some company officials had anticipated. Blue Origin flies its New Shepard capsule to an altitude of about 65 miles, where passengers can then unbuckle from their seats and experience about four minutes of weightlessness. The $28 million is about half the cost of what some private citizens are paying for a trip to the International Space Station, where they\u2019ll live and work for about a week before flying home on SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spacecraft.The money raised in Blue Origin\u2019s auction is to go to support the company\u2019s foundation, Club for the Future, which encourages future generations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math to \u201chelp invent the future of life in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe auction comes as several companies are working toward flying a host of private astronauts. Blue Origin\u2019s chief rival in the suborbital space tourism market, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, recently completed its third human spaceflight mission.Branson was supposed to allow one more test flight before he strapped into the company\u2019s space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, for his flight. But he has been desperately eager to get to space for years, and the company has left the door open to allowing him to fly earlier in an attempt to compete with Bezos.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies a much more powerful rocket, the Falcon 9, has several private astronaut missions on the manifest as well. But unlike Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, which shoot their spacecraft on ballistic trajectories that fly almost straight up before falling back down, SpaceX sends its Dragon spacecraft to orbit around the Earth at speeds of 17,500 mph.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt has several trips scheduled to send passengers to the International Space Station at a cost of $55 million per seat.Blue Origin officials had said they expected bidders to pay a premium for the seat. It\u2019s the company\u2019s first human spaceflight mission, after 15 test flights without people on board. And flying alongside Bezos may have been an attractive prospect for some. The company has not said what it will charge the public for seats once tickets go on sale. Virgin Galactic had charged $250,000 before discontinuing sales. When they come back online later this year, the company has said they will be more expensive. It hasn\u2019t named a price, but analysts said they expected it to be about $500,000.After the auction, Blue Origin said it would begin contacting the runners up to sign them up for future flights as well. How much would you pay to go to space with Jeff Bezos? For at least one person, the answer is $28 million, an astounding sum that won a live auction Saturday. A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 million",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6545",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/08/space-tourism-wealthy-bezos-musk-branson/",
        "text": "Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. Space is quickly becoming the new destination for the wealthy, a market that analysts say could be worth billions in the years to come.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter years of delays and daunting setbacks, several companies are in various stages of signing up passengers, completing their test programs and even training what will become a new generation of astronauts. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic successfully completed its third human suborbital spaceflight test flight last month and is looking to fly paying passengers early next year. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies much more powerful rockets that send spacecraft to orbit, has private astronaut flights on its manifest that could send as many as 20 private citizens to orbit over the next few years. That\u2019s more astronauts than flew during NASA\u2019s Gemini program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Blue Origin has announced that its founder, Jeff Bezos, would be on its first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, along with his brother Mark. They are to be joined by the winner of an online auction that culminated Saturday and attracted nearly 6,000 bidders from 143 countries, all seeking to be part of a new era of space travel where wealth is as important as courage.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThe trips aren\u2019t cheap. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that arranges training and all aspects of the flights, is charging as much as $55 million for a week-long trip to the International Space Station. It has booked four such flights on SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon over the next couple of years.Blue Origin hasn\u2019t announced what it will charge for its relatively quick suborbital flights once ticket sales are live \u2014 though the auction would give it plenty of data about the potential market and a list of interested buyers for rides that the company promises will showcase startling views of Earth and glimpses of the cosmos \u201cthat will change how you see the world.\u201d Virgin Galactic was charging as much as $250,000 per seat on its SpaceShipTwo spaceplane and has a waiting list of about 600 passengers. When it reopens sales this year, the ticket price is likely to rise to about $500,000, analysts of the business say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe market has the potential to be robust, according to the analysts. In a note to investors, Ken Herbert and Austin Moeller, analysts at Canaccord Genuity, wrote the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030, with 1 million potential customers wealthy enough to afford the ticket price and willing to go.Despite delays from technical issues and a fatal crash that killed one of its pilots in 2014, \u201cwe expect a surge in orders\u201d once Virgin Galactic is selling tickets again, they said. And the company, they noted, probably will get a lot of attention when Branson flies later this year and as celebrities start to go as well. Using data from a French consulting firm, the analysts said there are 19.6 million people worldwide with a net worth greater than $1 million.\u201cWe believe that the life-changing experience and value proposition of traveling to the edge of the cosmos is like no other,\u201d they wrote. \u201cAnd there are likely many single-digit millionaires who would be willing to contribute a sizable portion of their assets to partake in a once-in-a-lifetime space odyssey.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlying from Spaceport America in the New Mexican desert, Virgin Galactic has for years been promising a luxurious experience beyond the flight itself. Virgin\u2019s astronauts would ride around the spaceport in specially designed Land Rovers, be outfitted in custom spaceflight suits tailored by UnderArmour, and be served post-flight drinks such as the \u201cGalactic Martini\u201d and the \u201cBeyond the Clouds Cocktail.\u201dRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to spaceBlue Origin has made similar promises of a wondrous experience, especially as it seeks to up the bidding for its first flight in an effort that would benefit its nonprofit, Club for the Future, which works to encourage students to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.They\u2019re not the first, though, to promise out-of-this-world rides. The Russian space agency flew seven wealthy people to space for some $20 million each during the 2000s. It is also sending up several private citizens in coming months. In October, Yulia Peresild, a Russian actress, and Klim Shipenko, a film director, are scheduled to fly alongside Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov on a trip to the space station, where they will shoot scenes for a film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen in December, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, is scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz with his production assistant, Yozo Hirano, who will document the experience on the station for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel. Previously, Maezawa had booked another flight, on SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft, in a mission that would fly him and several other applicants in orbit around the moon. But clearly eager to get to space while SpaceX works on developing Starship, he decided to take a trip to the space station with the Russians while he waits.\u201cI\u2019m so curious, \u2018what\u2019s life like in space?\u2019\u201d he said in a statement released by Space Adventures, the Virginia firm that helps book seats on Russian missions. \u201cSo I am planning to find out on my own and share with the world on my YouTube channel.\u201dHow much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.In some cases, the wealthy space travelers are opening up the frontier for others \u2014 raffling off seats or giving them away in competitions. On his trip around the moon, Maezawa had initially wanted to fly artists who would be inspired by the mission, but then he decided to pursue a TV show where he would seek a romantic partner with whom to share the flight. Now instead he\u2019s holding a competition for eight seats on the moon mission \u2014 an undertaking that, if it happens, would be the most ambitious mission civilian spaceflight ever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want people from all kinds of backgrounds to join,\u201d Maezawa said in a video released this year. He said he was looking for people who \u201cwant to help people and contribute to society. You want to take your creative activity to the next level.\u201dJared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, also held a competition for two seats on a mission, scheduled for September, that would orbit Earth in an effort to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. One went to Sian Proctor, an artist and explorer who spent more than 20 years as a science professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, the other to Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. The final seat Isaacman gave to Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at the hospital and a childhood cancer survivor.Isaacman is an accomplished pilot who flies military and commercial jets and holds a couple of speed records. But he is not a professional astronaut, and the flight he is commanding would be the first time the crew would be comprised entirely of civilians.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalRussia\u2019s paid flights in the early 2000s were an effort to raise money for its struggling space program, at a time when NASA forbade the practice, saying spaceflight was too dangerous to be opened to ordinary people.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut in 2019, NASA reversed course, throwing the doors open to the space station, at least for those who could afford it.\u201cThat\u2019s the dream, right? That space isn\u2019t just for NASA anymore, and I think that\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to do,\u201d Kathy Lueders, who heads NASA\u2019s office of human spaceflight, said at a recent briefing with reporters. \u201cOur goal is really to be able to give access to as many folks in space as much as possible, so it\u2019s kind of opening up opportunities for all of us.\u201dShe acknowledged that for now only the super wealthy, or lucky, will have an opportunity to fly to the space station, which has cost taxpayers some $100 billion. But she said the prices would probably come down as the companies fly more frequently. \u201cWe\u2019re right at the beginning of these private astronaut missions,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough at the beginning.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA does get a share of the money. Under new pricing guidelines, the agency now charges $10 million for each private astronaut mission \u2014 for crew time to support flights to the space station, mission planning and communications. It also charges other, smaller fees, including $2,000 a day per person for food.The agency has no plans to subsidize missions for ordinary people the way governments carve out affordable housing units for the working class. She said, rather, she hopes \u201cwe\u2019ll have so many customers, the price point would go down.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space stationIn the early days of the space shuttle, NASA had a different perspective. The space agency was convinced that the shuttle would fly so frequently, as many as 60 times a year, that it could fill seats with private citizens. In the early 1980s, NASA stood up a committee to determine whether that was appropriate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey went around to all the NASA human flight centers,\u201d recalled Alan Ladwig, who ended up heading NASA\u2019s \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cThey talked to astronauts, engineers. They even sent out a letter to 100 thought leaders, people from a broad range of society to comment on whether they thought this would be a good idea.\u201dThe answer was yes, he said, \u201cas long as it was for a purpose. And that purpose was communications.\u201d NASA wanted people who would be able to communicate the impact of the experience and help educate the public on it. So first a teacher would go, then a journalist and after that perhaps an artist.The teacher was Christa McAuliffe, of Concord, N.H., who was selected over thousands of other applicants in a ceremony presided over by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The decision \u201cwas pretty controversial at the time because certainly the journalists all thought they were going to go first and were quite upset that they didn\u2019t,\u201d Ladwig said.Still, by the time of McAuliffe\u2019s flight in January 1986 on the Challenger, NASA had already winnowed the list of reporters to 40 finalists, the late CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite chief among them. But after the Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing McAuliffe and the six other crew members, NASA ended the spaceflight participant program. \u201cPutting a civilian back on the shuttle was not high on anybody\u2019s priority list,\u201d Ladwig said.For all the hype and excitement about the coming private astronaut missions, spaceflight remains extraordinarily risky. And it\u2019s not clear what will happen if there is an accident on a commercial vehicle. After Virgin Galactic\u2019s fatal accident, Branson thought about shuttering the venture entirely before deciding to press on, saying opening the frontier to more people was worth the risk.Virgin Galactic has said it is confident that it has fixed the problems that caused the fatal crash. But it noted in a recent annual report that \u201cdue to the inherent risks associated with commercial spaceflight, there is the possibility that any accident or catastrophe could lead to the loss of human life or a medical emergency.\u201d Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6546",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/08/space-tourism-wealthy-bezos-musk-branson/",
        "text": "Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. Space is quickly becoming the new destination for the wealthy, a market that analysts say could be worth billions in the years to come.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter years of delays and daunting setbacks, several companies are in various stages of signing up passengers, completing their test programs and even training what will become a new generation of astronauts. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic successfully completed its third human suborbital spaceflight test flight last month and is looking to fly paying passengers early next year. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies much more powerful rockets that send spacecraft to orbit, has private astronaut flights on its manifest that could send as many as 20 private citizens to orbit over the next few years. That\u2019s more astronauts than flew during NASA\u2019s Gemini program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Blue Origin has announced that its founder, Jeff Bezos, would be on its first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, along with his brother Mark. They are to be joined by the winner of an online auction that culminated Saturday and attracted nearly 6,000 bidders from 143 countries, all seeking to be part of a new era of space travel where wealth is as important as courage.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThe trips aren\u2019t cheap. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that arranges training and all aspects of the flights, is charging as much as $55 million for a week-long trip to the International Space Station. It has booked four such flights on SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon over the next couple of years.Blue Origin hasn\u2019t announced what it will charge for its relatively quick suborbital flights once ticket sales are live \u2014 though the auction would give it plenty of data about the potential market and a list of interested buyers for rides that the company promises will showcase startling views of Earth and glimpses of the cosmos \u201cthat will change how you see the world.\u201d Virgin Galactic was charging as much as $250,000 per seat on its SpaceShipTwo spaceplane and has a waiting list of about 600 passengers. When it reopens sales this year, the ticket price is likely to rise to about $500,000, analysts of the business say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe market has the potential to be robust, according to the analysts. In a note to investors, Ken Herbert and Austin Moeller, analysts at Canaccord Genuity, wrote the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030, with 1 million potential customers wealthy enough to afford the ticket price and willing to go.Despite delays from technical issues and a fatal crash that killed one of its pilots in 2014, \u201cwe expect a surge in orders\u201d once Virgin Galactic is selling tickets again, they said. And the company, they noted, probably will get a lot of attention when Branson flies later this year and as celebrities start to go as well. Using data from a French consulting firm, the analysts said there are 19.6 million people worldwide with a net worth greater than $1 million.\u201cWe believe that the life-changing experience and value proposition of traveling to the edge of the cosmos is like no other,\u201d they wrote. \u201cAnd there are likely many single-digit millionaires who would be willing to contribute a sizable portion of their assets to partake in a once-in-a-lifetime space odyssey.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlying from Spaceport America in the New Mexican desert, Virgin Galactic has for years been promising a luxurious experience beyond the flight itself. Virgin\u2019s astronauts would ride around the spaceport in specially designed Land Rovers, be outfitted in custom spaceflight suits tailored by UnderArmour, and be served post-flight drinks such as the \u201cGalactic Martini\u201d and the \u201cBeyond the Clouds Cocktail.\u201dRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to spaceBlue Origin has made similar promises of a wondrous experience, especially as it seeks to up the bidding for its first flight in an effort that would benefit its nonprofit, Club for the Future, which works to encourage students to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.They\u2019re not the first, though, to promise out-of-this-world rides. The Russian space agency flew seven wealthy people to space for some $20 million each during the 2000s. It is also sending up several private citizens in coming months. In October, Yulia Peresild, a Russian actress, and Klim Shipenko, a film director, are scheduled to fly alongside Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov on a trip to the space station, where they will shoot scenes for a film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen in December, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, is scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz with his production assistant, Yozo Hirano, who will document the experience on the station for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel. Previously, Maezawa had booked another flight, on SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft, in a mission that would fly him and several other applicants in orbit around the moon. But clearly eager to get to space while SpaceX works on developing Starship, he decided to take a trip to the space station with the Russians while he waits.\u201cI\u2019m so curious, \u2018what\u2019s life like in space?\u2019\u201d he said in a statement released by Space Adventures, the Virginia firm that helps book seats on Russian missions. \u201cSo I am planning to find out on my own and share with the world on my YouTube channel.\u201dHow much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.In some cases, the wealthy space travelers are opening up the frontier for others \u2014 raffling off seats or giving them away in competitions. On his trip around the moon, Maezawa had initially wanted to fly artists who would be inspired by the mission, but then he decided to pursue a TV show where he would seek a romantic partner with whom to share the flight. Now instead he\u2019s holding a competition for eight seats on the moon mission \u2014 an undertaking that, if it happens, would be the most ambitious mission civilian spaceflight ever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want people from all kinds of backgrounds to join,\u201d Maezawa said in a video released this year. He said he was looking for people who \u201cwant to help people and contribute to society. You want to take your creative activity to the next level.\u201dJared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, also held a competition for two seats on a mission, scheduled for September, that would orbit Earth in an effort to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. One went to Sian Proctor, an artist and explorer who spent more than 20 years as a science professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, the other to Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. The final seat Isaacman gave to Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at the hospital and a childhood cancer survivor.Isaacman is an accomplished pilot who flies military and commercial jets and holds a couple of speed records. But he is not a professional astronaut, and the flight he is commanding would be the first time the crew would be comprised entirely of civilians.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalRussia\u2019s paid flights in the early 2000s were an effort to raise money for its struggling space program, at a time when NASA forbade the practice, saying spaceflight was too dangerous to be opened to ordinary people.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut in 2019, NASA reversed course, throwing the doors open to the space station, at least for those who could afford it.\u201cThat\u2019s the dream, right? That space isn\u2019t just for NASA anymore, and I think that\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to do,\u201d Kathy Lueders, who heads NASA\u2019s office of human spaceflight, said at a recent briefing with reporters. \u201cOur goal is really to be able to give access to as many folks in space as much as possible, so it\u2019s kind of opening up opportunities for all of us.\u201dShe acknowledged that for now only the super wealthy, or lucky, will have an opportunity to fly to the space station, which has cost taxpayers some $100 billion. But she said the prices would probably come down as the companies fly more frequently. \u201cWe\u2019re right at the beginning of these private astronaut missions,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough at the beginning.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA does get a share of the money. Under new pricing guidelines, the agency now charges $10 million for each private astronaut mission \u2014 for crew time to support flights to the space station, mission planning and communications. It also charges other, smaller fees, including $2,000 a day per person for food.The agency has no plans to subsidize missions for ordinary people the way governments carve out affordable housing units for the working class. She said, rather, she hopes \u201cwe\u2019ll have so many customers, the price point would go down.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space stationIn the early days of the space shuttle, NASA had a different perspective. The space agency was convinced that the shuttle would fly so frequently, as many as 60 times a year, that it could fill seats with private citizens. In the early 1980s, NASA stood up a committee to determine whether that was appropriate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey went around to all the NASA human flight centers,\u201d recalled Alan Ladwig, who ended up heading NASA\u2019s \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cThey talked to astronauts, engineers. They even sent out a letter to 100 thought leaders, people from a broad range of society to comment on whether they thought this would be a good idea.\u201dThe answer was yes, he said, \u201cas long as it was for a purpose. And that purpose was communications.\u201d NASA wanted people who would be able to communicate the impact of the experience and help educate the public on it. So first a teacher would go, then a journalist and after that perhaps an artist.The teacher was Christa McAuliffe, of Concord, N.H., who was selected over thousands of other applicants in a ceremony presided over by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The decision \u201cwas pretty controversial at the time because certainly the journalists all thought they were going to go first and were quite upset that they didn\u2019t,\u201d Ladwig said.Still, by the time of McAuliffe\u2019s flight in January 1986 on the Challenger, NASA had already winnowed the list of reporters to 40 finalists, the late CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite chief among them. But after the Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing McAuliffe and the six other crew members, NASA ended the spaceflight participant program. \u201cPutting a civilian back on the shuttle was not high on anybody\u2019s priority list,\u201d Ladwig said.For all the hype and excitement about the coming private astronaut missions, spaceflight remains extraordinarily risky. And it\u2019s not clear what will happen if there is an accident on a commercial vehicle. After Virgin Galactic\u2019s fatal accident, Branson thought about shuttering the venture entirely before deciding to press on, saying opening the frontier to more people was worth the risk.Virgin Galactic has said it is confident that it has fixed the problems that caused the fatal crash. But it noted in a recent annual report that \u201cdue to the inherent risks associated with commercial spaceflight, there is the possibility that any accident or catastrophe could lead to the loss of human life or a medical emergency.\u201d Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6547",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/08/space-tourism-wealthy-bezos-musk-branson/",
        "text": "Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. Space is quickly becoming the new destination for the wealthy, a market that analysts say could be worth billions in the years to come.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter years of delays and daunting setbacks, several companies are in various stages of signing up passengers, completing their test programs and even training what will become a new generation of astronauts. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic successfully completed its third human suborbital spaceflight test flight last month and is looking to fly paying passengers early next year. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies much more powerful rockets that send spacecraft to orbit, has private astronaut flights on its manifest that could send as many as 20 private citizens to orbit over the next few years. That\u2019s more astronauts than flew during NASA\u2019s Gemini program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Blue Origin has announced that its founder, Jeff Bezos, would be on its first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, along with his brother Mark. They are to be joined by the winner of an online auction that culminated Saturday and attracted nearly 6,000 bidders from 143 countries, all seeking to be part of a new era of space travel where wealth is as important as courage.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThe trips aren\u2019t cheap. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that arranges training and all aspects of the flights, is charging as much as $55 million for a week-long trip to the International Space Station. It has booked four such flights on SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon over the next couple of years.Blue Origin hasn\u2019t announced what it will charge for its relatively quick suborbital flights once ticket sales are live \u2014 though the auction would give it plenty of data about the potential market and a list of interested buyers for rides that the company promises will showcase startling views of Earth and glimpses of the cosmos \u201cthat will change how you see the world.\u201d Virgin Galactic was charging as much as $250,000 per seat on its SpaceShipTwo spaceplane and has a waiting list of about 600 passengers. When it reopens sales this year, the ticket price is likely to rise to about $500,000, analysts of the business say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe market has the potential to be robust, according to the analysts. In a note to investors, Ken Herbert and Austin Moeller, analysts at Canaccord Genuity, wrote the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030, with 1 million potential customers wealthy enough to afford the ticket price and willing to go.Despite delays from technical issues and a fatal crash that killed one of its pilots in 2014, \u201cwe expect a surge in orders\u201d once Virgin Galactic is selling tickets again, they said. And the company, they noted, probably will get a lot of attention when Branson flies later this year and as celebrities start to go as well. Using data from a French consulting firm, the analysts said there are 19.6 million people worldwide with a net worth greater than $1 million.\u201cWe believe that the life-changing experience and value proposition of traveling to the edge of the cosmos is like no other,\u201d they wrote. \u201cAnd there are likely many single-digit millionaires who would be willing to contribute a sizable portion of their assets to partake in a once-in-a-lifetime space odyssey.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlying from Spaceport America in the New Mexican desert, Virgin Galactic has for years been promising a luxurious experience beyond the flight itself. Virgin\u2019s astronauts would ride around the spaceport in specially designed Land Rovers, be outfitted in custom spaceflight suits tailored by UnderArmour, and be served post-flight drinks such as the \u201cGalactic Martini\u201d and the \u201cBeyond the Clouds Cocktail.\u201dRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to spaceBlue Origin has made similar promises of a wondrous experience, especially as it seeks to up the bidding for its first flight in an effort that would benefit its nonprofit, Club for the Future, which works to encourage students to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.They\u2019re not the first, though, to promise out-of-this-world rides. The Russian space agency flew seven wealthy people to space for some $20 million each during the 2000s. It is also sending up several private citizens in coming months. In October, Yulia Peresild, a Russian actress, and Klim Shipenko, a film director, are scheduled to fly alongside Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov on a trip to the space station, where they will shoot scenes for a film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen in December, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, is scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz with his production assistant, Yozo Hirano, who will document the experience on the station for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel. Previously, Maezawa had booked another flight, on SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft, in a mission that would fly him and several other applicants in orbit around the moon. But clearly eager to get to space while SpaceX works on developing Starship, he decided to take a trip to the space station with the Russians while he waits.\u201cI\u2019m so curious, \u2018what\u2019s life like in space?\u2019\u201d he said in a statement released by Space Adventures, the Virginia firm that helps book seats on Russian missions. \u201cSo I am planning to find out on my own and share with the world on my YouTube channel.\u201dHow much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.In some cases, the wealthy space travelers are opening up the frontier for others \u2014 raffling off seats or giving them away in competitions. On his trip around the moon, Maezawa had initially wanted to fly artists who would be inspired by the mission, but then he decided to pursue a TV show where he would seek a romantic partner with whom to share the flight. Now instead he\u2019s holding a competition for eight seats on the moon mission \u2014 an undertaking that, if it happens, would be the most ambitious mission civilian spaceflight ever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want people from all kinds of backgrounds to join,\u201d Maezawa said in a video released this year. He said he was looking for people who \u201cwant to help people and contribute to society. You want to take your creative activity to the next level.\u201dJared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, also held a competition for two seats on a mission, scheduled for September, that would orbit Earth in an effort to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. One went to Sian Proctor, an artist and explorer who spent more than 20 years as a science professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, the other to Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. The final seat Isaacman gave to Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at the hospital and a childhood cancer survivor.Isaacman is an accomplished pilot who flies military and commercial jets and holds a couple of speed records. But he is not a professional astronaut, and the flight he is commanding would be the first time the crew would be comprised entirely of civilians.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalRussia\u2019s paid flights in the early 2000s were an effort to raise money for its struggling space program, at a time when NASA forbade the practice, saying spaceflight was too dangerous to be opened to ordinary people.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut in 2019, NASA reversed course, throwing the doors open to the space station, at least for those who could afford it.\u201cThat\u2019s the dream, right? That space isn\u2019t just for NASA anymore, and I think that\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to do,\u201d Kathy Lueders, who heads NASA\u2019s office of human spaceflight, said at a recent briefing with reporters. \u201cOur goal is really to be able to give access to as many folks in space as much as possible, so it\u2019s kind of opening up opportunities for all of us.\u201dShe acknowledged that for now only the super wealthy, or lucky, will have an opportunity to fly to the space station, which has cost taxpayers some $100 billion. But she said the prices would probably come down as the companies fly more frequently. \u201cWe\u2019re right at the beginning of these private astronaut missions,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough at the beginning.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA does get a share of the money. Under new pricing guidelines, the agency now charges $10 million for each private astronaut mission \u2014 for crew time to support flights to the space station, mission planning and communications. It also charges other, smaller fees, including $2,000 a day per person for food.The agency has no plans to subsidize missions for ordinary people the way governments carve out affordable housing units for the working class. She said, rather, she hopes \u201cwe\u2019ll have so many customers, the price point would go down.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space stationIn the early days of the space shuttle, NASA had a different perspective. The space agency was convinced that the shuttle would fly so frequently, as many as 60 times a year, that it could fill seats with private citizens. In the early 1980s, NASA stood up a committee to determine whether that was appropriate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey went around to all the NASA human flight centers,\u201d recalled Alan Ladwig, who ended up heading NASA\u2019s \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cThey talked to astronauts, engineers. They even sent out a letter to 100 thought leaders, people from a broad range of society to comment on whether they thought this would be a good idea.\u201dThe answer was yes, he said, \u201cas long as it was for a purpose. And that purpose was communications.\u201d NASA wanted people who would be able to communicate the impact of the experience and help educate the public on it. So first a teacher would go, then a journalist and after that perhaps an artist.The teacher was Christa McAuliffe, of Concord, N.H., who was selected over thousands of other applicants in a ceremony presided over by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The decision \u201cwas pretty controversial at the time because certainly the journalists all thought they were going to go first and were quite upset that they didn\u2019t,\u201d Ladwig said.Still, by the time of McAuliffe\u2019s flight in January 1986 on the Challenger, NASA had already winnowed the list of reporters to 40 finalists, the late CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite chief among them. But after the Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing McAuliffe and the six other crew members, NASA ended the spaceflight participant program. \u201cPutting a civilian back on the shuttle was not high on anybody\u2019s priority list,\u201d Ladwig said.For all the hype and excitement about the coming private astronaut missions, spaceflight remains extraordinarily risky. And it\u2019s not clear what will happen if there is an accident on a commercial vehicle. After Virgin Galactic\u2019s fatal accident, Branson thought about shuttering the venture entirely before deciding to press on, saying opening the frontier to more people was worth the risk.Virgin Galactic has said it is confident that it has fixed the problems that caused the fatal crash. But it noted in a recent annual report that \u201cdue to the inherent risks associated with commercial spaceflight, there is the possibility that any accident or catastrophe could lead to the loss of human life or a medical emergency.\u201d Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6548",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/08/space-tourism-wealthy-bezos-musk-branson/",
        "text": "Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. Space is quickly becoming the new destination for the wealthy, a market that analysts say could be worth billions in the years to come.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter years of delays and daunting setbacks, several companies are in various stages of signing up passengers, completing their test programs and even training what will become a new generation of astronauts. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic successfully completed its third human suborbital spaceflight test flight last month and is looking to fly paying passengers early next year. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which flies much more powerful rockets that send spacecraft to orbit, has private astronaut flights on its manifest that could send as many as 20 private citizens to orbit over the next few years. That\u2019s more astronauts than flew during NASA\u2019s Gemini program.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd Blue Origin has announced that its founder, Jeff Bezos, would be on its first human spaceflight mission, scheduled for July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, along with his brother Mark. They are to be joined by the winner of an online auction that culminated Saturday and attracted nearly 6,000 bidders from 143 countries, all seeking to be part of a new era of space travel where wealth is as important as courage.Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space stationThe trips aren\u2019t cheap. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that arranges training and all aspects of the flights, is charging as much as $55 million for a week-long trip to the International Space Station. It has booked four such flights on SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon over the next couple of years.Blue Origin hasn\u2019t announced what it will charge for its relatively quick suborbital flights once ticket sales are live \u2014 though the auction would give it plenty of data about the potential market and a list of interested buyers for rides that the company promises will showcase startling views of Earth and glimpses of the cosmos \u201cthat will change how you see the world.\u201d Virgin Galactic was charging as much as $250,000 per seat on its SpaceShipTwo spaceplane and has a waiting list of about 600 passengers. When it reopens sales this year, the ticket price is likely to rise to about $500,000, analysts of the business say.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe market has the potential to be robust, according to the analysts. In a note to investors, Ken Herbert and Austin Moeller, analysts at Canaccord Genuity, wrote the suborbital space tourism market could be worth $8 billion by 2030, with 1 million potential customers wealthy enough to afford the ticket price and willing to go.Despite delays from technical issues and a fatal crash that killed one of its pilots in 2014, \u201cwe expect a surge in orders\u201d once Virgin Galactic is selling tickets again, they said. And the company, they noted, probably will get a lot of attention when Branson flies later this year and as celebrities start to go as well. Using data from a French consulting firm, the analysts said there are 19.6 million people worldwide with a net worth greater than $1 million.\u201cWe believe that the life-changing experience and value proposition of traveling to the edge of the cosmos is like no other,\u201d they wrote. \u201cAnd there are likely many single-digit millionaires who would be willing to contribute a sizable portion of their assets to partake in a once-in-a-lifetime space odyssey.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFlying from Spaceport America in the New Mexican desert, Virgin Galactic has for years been promising a luxurious experience beyond the flight itself. Virgin\u2019s astronauts would ride around the spaceport in specially designed Land Rovers, be outfitted in custom spaceflight suits tailored by UnderArmour, and be served post-flight drinks such as the \u201cGalactic Martini\u201d and the \u201cBeyond the Clouds Cocktail.\u201dRichard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic unveils crew cabin as it gets closer to flying tourists to spaceBlue Origin has made similar promises of a wondrous experience, especially as it seeks to up the bidding for its first flight in an effort that would benefit its nonprofit, Club for the Future, which works to encourage students to pursue careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.They\u2019re not the first, though, to promise out-of-this-world rides. The Russian space agency flew seven wealthy people to space for some $20 million each during the 2000s. It is also sending up several private citizens in coming months. In October, Yulia Peresild, a Russian actress, and Klim Shipenko, a film director, are scheduled to fly alongside Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov on a trip to the space station, where they will shoot scenes for a film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen in December, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, is scheduled to fly on the Russian Soyuz with his production assistant, Yozo Hirano, who will document the experience on the station for Maezawa\u2019s YouTube channel. Previously, Maezawa had booked another flight, on SpaceX\u2019s Starship spacecraft, in a mission that would fly him and several other applicants in orbit around the moon. But clearly eager to get to space while SpaceX works on developing Starship, he decided to take a trip to the space station with the Russians while he waits.\u201cI\u2019m so curious, \u2018what\u2019s life like in space?\u2019\u201d he said in a statement released by Space Adventures, the Virginia firm that helps book seats on Russian missions. \u201cSo I am planning to find out on my own and share with the world on my YouTube channel.\u201dHow much does a ticket to space cost? Meet the people ready to fly.In some cases, the wealthy space travelers are opening up the frontier for others \u2014 raffling off seats or giving them away in competitions. On his trip around the moon, Maezawa had initially wanted to fly artists who would be inspired by the mission, but then he decided to pursue a TV show where he would seek a romantic partner with whom to share the flight. Now instead he\u2019s holding a competition for eight seats on the moon mission \u2014 an undertaking that, if it happens, would be the most ambitious mission civilian spaceflight ever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI want people from all kinds of backgrounds to join,\u201d Maezawa said in a video released this year. He said he was looking for people who \u201cwant to help people and contribute to society. You want to take your creative activity to the next level.\u201dJared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, also held a competition for two seats on a mission, scheduled for September, that would orbit Earth in an effort to raise money for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital. One went to Sian Proctor, an artist and explorer who spent more than 20 years as a science professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, the other to Chris Sembroski, an engineer at Lockheed Martin. The final seat Isaacman gave to Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at the hospital and a childhood cancer survivor.Isaacman is an accomplished pilot who flies military and commercial jets and holds a couple of speed records. But he is not a professional astronaut, and the flight he is commanding would be the first time the crew would be comprised entirely of civilians.Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX announces a spaceflight intended to raise money for St. Jude hospitalRussia\u2019s paid flights in the early 2000s were an effort to raise money for its struggling space program, at a time when NASA forbade the practice, saying spaceflight was too dangerous to be opened to ordinary people.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut in 2019, NASA reversed course, throwing the doors open to the space station, at least for those who could afford it.\u201cThat\u2019s the dream, right? That space isn\u2019t just for NASA anymore, and I think that\u2019s what we\u2019re trying to do,\u201d Kathy Lueders, who heads NASA\u2019s office of human spaceflight, said at a recent briefing with reporters. \u201cOur goal is really to be able to give access to as many folks in space as much as possible, so it\u2019s kind of opening up opportunities for all of us.\u201dShe acknowledged that for now only the super wealthy, or lucky, will have an opportunity to fly to the space station, which has cost taxpayers some $100 billion. But she said the prices would probably come down as the companies fly more frequently. \u201cWe\u2019re right at the beginning of these private astronaut missions,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s tough at the beginning.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA does get a share of the money. Under new pricing guidelines, the agency now charges $10 million for each private astronaut mission \u2014 for crew time to support flights to the space station, mission planning and communications. It also charges other, smaller fees, including $2,000 a day per person for food.The agency has no plans to subsidize missions for ordinary people the way governments carve out affordable housing units for the working class. She said, rather, she hopes \u201cwe\u2019ll have so many customers, the price point would go down.\u201dNASA invites tourists to space stationIn the early days of the space shuttle, NASA had a different perspective. The space agency was convinced that the shuttle would fly so frequently, as many as 60 times a year, that it could fill seats with private citizens. In the early 1980s, NASA stood up a committee to determine whether that was appropriate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey went around to all the NASA human flight centers,\u201d recalled Alan Ladwig, who ended up heading NASA\u2019s \u201cspaceflight participant program.\u201d \u201cThey talked to astronauts, engineers. They even sent out a letter to 100 thought leaders, people from a broad range of society to comment on whether they thought this would be a good idea.\u201dThe answer was yes, he said, \u201cas long as it was for a purpose. And that purpose was communications.\u201d NASA wanted people who would be able to communicate the impact of the experience and help educate the public on it. So first a teacher would go, then a journalist and after that perhaps an artist.The teacher was Christa McAuliffe, of Concord, N.H., who was selected over thousands of other applicants in a ceremony presided over by Vice President George H.W. Bush. The decision \u201cwas pretty controversial at the time because certainly the journalists all thought they were going to go first and were quite upset that they didn\u2019t,\u201d Ladwig said.Still, by the time of McAuliffe\u2019s flight in January 1986 on the Challenger, NASA had already winnowed the list of reporters to 40 finalists, the late CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite chief among them. But after the Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing McAuliffe and the six other crew members, NASA ended the spaceflight participant program. \u201cPutting a civilian back on the shuttle was not high on anybody\u2019s priority list,\u201d Ladwig said.For all the hype and excitement about the coming private astronaut missions, spaceflight remains extraordinarily risky. And it\u2019s not clear what will happen if there is an accident on a commercial vehicle. After Virgin Galactic\u2019s fatal accident, Branson thought about shuttering the venture entirely before deciding to press on, saying opening the frontier to more people was worth the risk.Virgin Galactic has said it is confident that it has fixed the problems that caused the fatal crash. But it noted in a recent annual report that \u201cdue to the inherent risks associated with commercial spaceflight, there is the possibility that any accident or catastrophe could lead to the loss of human life or a medical emergency.\u201d Forget luxury African safaris or Caribbean cruises on private chartered yachts. You are now free to move about the cosmos \u2026 if you can afford it",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA has a new challenge to reaching the moon by 2024: Its $1 billion spacesuit program (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6549",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/11/nasa-space-suits-moon-delay/",
        "text": "Ever since the White House directed NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis program, there have been all sorts of daunting challenges: The rocket the space agency would use has suffered setbacks and delays; the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the surface is not yet completed and was held up by the losing bidders; and Congress hasn\u2019t come through with the funding NASA says is necessary. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut another reason the 2024 goal may not be met is that the spacesuits needed by the astronauts to walk on the lunar surface won\u2019t be ready in time and the total development program, which ultimately will produce just two flight-ready suits, could cost more than $1 billion.The NASA Inspector General said in a report Tuesday that the suits have been delayed by almost two years because of funding shortfalls, impacts from the coronavirus pandemic and technical challenges. As a result, the government watchdog concluded that the suits would not be ready until 2025 at the earliest and that \u201ca lunar landing in late 2024 as NASA currently plans is not feasible.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has been working on next-generation spacesuits, which act as mini spaceships that protect the astronauts from the vacuum of space, for 14 years, the IG said. In 2016, NASA decided to consolidate two spacesuit designs into a single program that it would oversee. By 2017, the agency had spent $200 million and since then has spent an additional $220 million, the IG found. While it took the program in-house, parts for the suits are still supplied by 27 contractors.Going forward, the space agency plans to spend $625.2 million more, the IG said. That would bring the total for design and testing to more than $1 billion through fiscal year 2025, \u201cwhen the first two flight-ready spacesuits will be available,\u201d the IG found. In addition to those two suits, the program would produce a demonstration suit that could be used at the space station, two \u201cqualification\u201d suits for testing of the life support system while being worn, and another suit \u201cused to test the design and features of the spacesuit before astronauts wear it.\u201dThe troubles with the suit program are \u201cby no means the only factor impacting the viability of the agency\u2019s return-to-the-moon timetable,\u201d the IG said. It also said \u201csignificant delays\u201d in NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft were contributing factors. And delays related to the development of the lunar lander spacecraft \u201cwill also preclude a 2024 landing,\u201d it said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn April, NASA awarded Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX a $3 billion contract to use its Starship spacecraft to land astronauts on the surface of the moon in what\u2019s known as its Human Landing System program. But the losing bidders, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Dynetics, an Alabama-based defense contractor, protested the decision. The protests were not successful, but they did force NASA to delay executing its contract with SpaceX.The effort marks the first time NASA has led the development of a new spacesuit that can be worn in the vacuum of space in more than 40 years. The IG report noted that the spacesuits currently aboard the International Space Station \u201chave exceeded their design life by more than 25 years, necessitating costly maintenance to ensure astronaut safety.\u201dThey also don\u2019t fit all body types. In 2019, NASA astronaut Anne McClain canceled going on what would have been the first all-female spacewalk outside the space station after deciding that the spacesuit was too large for her. That touched off a wave of criticism that NASA wasn\u2019t accommodating its female astronauts in a program that had long been dominated by men.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe new suits will \u201cfeature a new design to accommodate a broader range of sizes and improve fit, comfort and mobility,\u201d the IG said. The suits will have a more mobile lower torso that will allow astronauts to walk or kneel more easily and avoid the \u201cbunny hopping\u201d that the Apollo astronauts did on the moon in the 1960s and early 1970s.In developing the new suits, the IG said, NASA, which is making them in-house, has run into several technical and design issues. Even the boots have had issues.If NASA lands on the south pole of the moon as expected, the suit and boots must be able to endure \u201cextreme temperature swings\u201d and transition from the \u201cmoderate environment\u201d of where the lander touches down to the \u201charsh environment\u201d of the permanently shadowed region at the pole.That creates a challenge, the IG said, because \u201caccess to suitable materials is limited and the technology needed to help address this challenge is still being tested.\u201dOn Twitter, Musk offered his company\u2019s services: \u201cSpaceX could do it if need be.\u201d Despite its cost, the program won't produce spacesuits for walking on the moon until 2025, an inspector general's report says. NASA has a new challenge to reaching the moon by 2024: Its $1 billion spacesuit program",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6550",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/31/spacex-nasa-docking-international-space-station/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 After blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center here Saturday afternoon, and then whizzing around the Earth at speeds that eventually hit 17,500 mph, the SpaceX spacecraft carrying two NASA astronauts docked with the International Space Station Sunday morning, completing the first leg of a historic journey. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit.It was also a test flight designed to see how the spacecraft, which had never flown humans before, performed. So far, it seems the answer is very well, but the astronauts still need to return home safely after their tour on the station ends sometime in the coming months.Photos and videos from Saturday\u2019s historic launch from Kennedy Space CenterNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the pair chosen for the mission because of their experience and expertise flying new vehicles, reported that the spacecraft was performing well.\u201cDragon\u2019s a slick vehicle,\u201d Behnken said.\u201cWe couldn\u2019t be happier about the performance,\u201d Hurley said.With their trip to the space station completed, the pair can claim victory in an epic game of capture the flag, taking possession of the American flag that was brought to the station on the last shuttle flight, and was waiting to return to Earth by the first crew to reach the station from U.S. soil.Read about the historic liftoffFor NASA, the flight was the culmination of a journey that began years ago, when the Space Shuttle program ended with no way for the space agency to send people into space. In the nine years since, NASA paid Russia as much as $90 million a seat to fly its astronauts to the space station.Ultimately, NASA decided to outsource the job of space launches to the private sector, awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, worth a combined $6.8 billion. Initially, Boeing, the industry stalwart that had been NASA\u2019s partner for generations, was considered the favorite. But its Starliner spacecraft encountered significant problems during a test mission without crews late last year and had to cut that flight short.That left SpaceX, which also had encountered problems in developing its spacecraft, in the lead to be first to launch with astronauts on board.Everything about this first crewed SpaceX mission appears to have been picture-perfect, from its on-time lieftoff at 3:22 p.m. Saturday to its rendezvous with the space station at 10:16 a.m. Eastern time Sunday. The astronauts floated into the space station at 1:22 p.m., 22 hours after they\u2019d left Florida.Video: How astronauts are preparing for a new era in American space flightHurley and Behnken, both of whom are married to fellow astronauts, seemed loose and relaxed during the journey, showing off the stuffed animals they had brought with them to show to their kids. Behnken did a weightless flip for the camera, and they carried on the tradition of naming their spacecraft, announcing they had dubbed their Dragon capsule \u201cEndeavour\u201d \u2014 the same name as the space shuttle they had both flown aboard.On Sunday morning the crew continued another longstanding NASA tradition, choosing to wake up to music. The crew of Gemini 6 started the tradition in 1965, waking up to \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones, according to a history complied by NASA historian Colin Fries.The use of music as an alarm clock continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d Fries wrote.On the final flight of the Space Shuttle, the crew chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possibleBehnken and Hurley went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m., the controllers on the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos and is about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair had been able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said.By the time they woke up, the spacecraft was already bearing down on the space station, having performed a series of \u201cburns\u201d or engine thruster firings that raised its orbit and brought them closer to the orbiting laboratory.The Dragon spacecraft flies autonomously, but the astronauts can take over the controls at any time, and they did so twice to check how the systems performed. During the broadcast from the capsule, Hurley noted that they were the first astronauts to control a spacecraft using a touchscreen.\u201cSo we got that going for us,\u201d he said.Unlike the violent force of liftoff, docking is a delicate and carefully choreographed bit of orbital ballet, requiring patience and a finesse. Inside NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston, and SpaceX\u2019s headquarters outside of Los Angeles, controllers called through a series of maneuvers that seemed to go off without a hitch, one by one.And then, at 10:16 a.m. Endeavour\u2019s slow, smooth glide to the station ended with a kiss as the station flew over China and Mongolia.\u201cWe have docking,\u201d NASA\u2019s Dan Huot said during a broadcast of the event.It took a few hours for the crews to ensure that the pressure was equalized between the space station and the Endeavour spacecraft. But then the hatch was opened and after a few more minutes, the pair floated into the station. Behnken came first, Superman style, smile beaming, into the arms of fellow astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been aboard the station since April.Hurley came next. And the three astronauts and friends embraced, along with two Russian cosmonauts, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, Bridenstine said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridenstine said, the future of the agency will lie with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch was initially scheduled for Wednesday, but was scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d Cassidy joked.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new crewmates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dBelow are the updates from the docking of SpaceX\u2019s capsule.Unclear how long astronauts will remain in spaceReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkIt could be months before the NASA astronauts who flew the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule return to Earth from the International Space Station. Or it could be as soon as the end of next month.NASA officials haven\u2019t decided how long Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will remain in space. In a May 1 mission briefing, agency leaders said they could spend as many as four months aboard the ISS or as few as five weeks.It all depends on the shape of the Endeavour capsule and when SpaceX and NASA officials feel it is again safe to fly. Hurley and Behnken\u2019s flight is a demonstration mission, officially called Demo-2, to test the spaceworthiness of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon and certify them for future crewed launches. With the demo launch complete, the two astronauts\u2019 main goal is to evaluate their spacecraft and report how well it weathered the flight and docking.Space officials also want to make progress on SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 capsule, the next Dragon capsule in line for launch.\u201cReally the decision point is, \u2018Hey, is Dragon healthy? Is the vehicle performing well, the Dragon that\u2019s on orbit?\u2019\" NASA Commercial Crew Program deputy director Steve Stich said at the briefing, via Space.com. \u201cAnd then we\u2019ll be looking ahead to that next mission, the Crew-1 flight, and looking at the vehicle readiness and trying to determine what\u2019s the smart thing to do relative to the mission duration.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts welcomed aboard the space station in emotional ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were welcomed aboard the station in an emotional ceremony Sunday afternoon after a nearly 19-hour journey that began when their Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center the day before.This is the first time in human history @NASA_Astronauts have entered the @Space_Station from a commercially-made spacecraft. @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug have finally arrived to the orbiting laboratory in @SpaceX's Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. pic.twitter.com/3t9Ogtpik4\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nIt was the first flight of NASA astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired nearly a decade ago.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, he said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridensitne said the future of the agency lay with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch initially was scheduled for Wednesday but scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d said astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new cremates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts open the hatch and board the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are now aboard the International Space Station.The pair opened the hatch of their SpaceX Dragon capsule at 1:02 p.m. Eastern time and floated into the station at 1:22 p.m. They were greeted by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April, and two Russian cosmonauts.The hatch opening completes the last major milestone of the launch that began Saturday, when the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The spacecraft docked with the station at 10:16 a.m. and the crews worked to equalize the pressure between the spacecraft and the station before opening the hatch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat living in space is really likeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkChris Cassidy, who is about to greet fellow NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on the International Space Station, is no stranger to space flight.He\u2019s a former head of the astronaut office and on his third spaceflight. He knows the particular curiosities inherent in living in a weightless environment.As he told The Post last year, in space astronauts use the tops of their feet more often than the bottoms. That\u2019s because they are constantly hooking their feet under rails, to help keep them in place.Calluses come off the bottoms of feet and grow on the top.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dHe spoke to The Post as part of a project in which Post reporters interviewed 50 astronauts about what living in space is really like. Read moreAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDear astronauts, please pick up your trashReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:42 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe first order of business for astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley before boarding the International Space Station: throw away your trash. Unless, they\u2019re hungry. They\u2019re allowed to eat first.As Behnken and Hurley prepare to climb out of their Endeavour capsule for the first time in nearly a day, their itinerary for the opening hours in their new floating apartment is pretty stacked. It includes cleaning up after themselves.\u201cPlease collect all your food and water bottle trash,\u201d SpaceX mission controller Anna Menon told them.Dear astronauts, please pick up your trash[https://t.co/djJ0BI2Twq] pic.twitter.com/Iglo5qJBnL\u2014 Jacob Bogage (@jacobbogage) May 31, 2020\n\nTrash is a bit of an issue on the ISS. Astronaut Scott Kelly described the odor on board as a mixture of antiseptic and garbage. Part of the crew\u2019s daily duties are a thorough vacuuming.Astrobiologist Kasthuri Venkateswaran studied the contents of the station\u2019s HEPA air filters and bags of vacuum dust in 2015 to see what kind of dirt and germs actually make their way up.First, a lot of skin cells.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy told The Washington Post. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dAlso, some nasty pathogens, such as Staphylococcus and Propionibacterium. They tend to settle on surfaces and get swept up in vacuum cleaners. The air on the ISS, even if it doesn\u2019t smell great, is pretty darn clean.\u201cThe ISS is a unique built environment,\u201d Venkateswaran said. \u201cPeople assume it\u2019s filthy, but it\u2019s not. It\u2019s many, many times cleaner than your bathroom at home.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWho is already on the International Space Station?Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:28 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday, they\u2019ll join ISS Expedition 63 and three people already aboard.Chris Cassidy, 50, is the lone American. He\u2019ll be in charge of helping the SpaceX Dragon capsule, now named Endeavour, dock with the space station. A retired Navy SEAL captain who served two six-month deployments in Afghanistan and two more in the Mediterranean, Cassidy was selected as an astronaut in 2004 and became the 500th person to fly in space, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2009. Hurley was that mission\u2019s pilot.Cassidy has been aboard the space station since April 9.Anatoly Ivanishin, 51, is the senior Russian cosmonaut aboard. This is his third ISS expedition. A former fighter pilot who was selected to be a cosmonaut in 2003, he launched with Cassidy to the space station on April 9.Ivan Vagner, 34, is the other cosmonaut on the ISS. He was an engineer for a Russian company that built civil and military aircraft before joining a national aerospace and defense contractor while working as an assistant flight manager for the space station. He was selected as a cosmonaut in 2010.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon makes five spaceships parked at the station. https://t.co/lLZYDJUn1N pic.twitter.com/la06vhjgOW\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) May 31, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFlight command looks into minor issue with Behnken\u2019s spacesuitReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:03 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight control engineers are investigating a minor problem with the pressurization of astronaut Bob Behnken\u2019s space suit.During one of the last suit checks, Behnken\u2019s suit reported lower pressure than prior tests. SpaceX flight control asked Behnken to check the bladder zipper heads and any exposed zipper teeth that could cause the suit to lose pressure while \u201cdoffing\u201d the suit in preparation to board the International Space Station.Behnken\u2019s suit had plenty of pressurization to remain safe, but SpaceX flight control wanted to \u201crule out potential hardware issues\u201d that could be problematic in future uses. Behnken reported back some concern with the zippers.\u201cI\u2019ve got both structural zippers on my hands lowered and I do see white teeth visible on both sides. It looks like a full white tooth,\u201d he said.\u201cIt looks like a white tooth on the leg zipper as well,\u201d he added moments later.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAwaiting hatch openingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley is docked with the International Space Station, but it will take awhile before they open the hatch and float onboard the station.The astronauts and controllers on the ground have to ensure the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. They also will be setting up an umbilical that will allow communications and power to transfer between the two.The Dragon spacecraft, now named Endeavour, docked at 10:16 a.m. Shortly after docking, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s been a real honor to be just a small part of this nine year endeavor since the last time a United States space ship docked with the International Space Station.\u201dIn Houston\u2019s mission control, flight director Zeb Scoville congratulated the crew.\u201cBravo on a magnificent moment in spaceflight history,\u201d he said, \u201cand on the start of a new journey that has changed the face of space travel in this new era of space transportation.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft docks with space station, another mission milestoneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:17 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley completed a delicate and dangerous part of its mission on May 31. (NASATV)SpaceX has completed the first part of its historic flight to the International Space Station Sunday morning, when its Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the orbiting laboratory at 10:16 a.m., a few minutes earlier than planned.Before opening the hatch and entering the station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will conduct a series of pressure and leak checks to ensure their safety. Then they will join fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the station.The docking was a delicate and dangerous part of the mission. The spacecraft chased down the space station, traveling in orbit at 17,500 mph, but then approached very slowly in a series of carefully choreographed maneuvers.The mission went smoothly, ground officials said, following a picture-perfect launch some 19 hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center.Docking confirmed! @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug officially docked to the @Space_Station at 10:16am ET: pic.twitter.com/hCM4UvbwjR\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nDo you have the right stuff?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station is an autonomous vehicle, designed to fly itself.The astronauts can, at any time, take over the controls and fly the capsule manually. During their mission this weekend, they were scheduled to do that twice to test how the spacecraft\u2019s systems work.But the most delicate part of the mission, the docking with the space station, will be done by the spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers. Still, Hurley and Behnken have spent hours in simulators running through every kind of scenario should they need to take over.Now you can see whether you have the \u201cright stuff\u201d by trying to dock the spacecraft on this simulator SpaceX has made available online.\nCrew Dragon is designed to be fully autonomous, but \n@Astro_Doug and @AstroBehnken\n can take control of the spacecraft if necessary. Simulator here \u2192 http://iss-sim.spacex.comPosted by SpaceX on Saturday, 30 May 2020Astronauts take control of capsule as docking nearsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken took control of the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule as it tiptoed its way toward the International Space Station, just after 9:30 a.m.The #SpaceX #CrewDragon is now just 220 m in front of the #ISS. The Dragon is in a hold to perform manual piloting tests. Watch docking live at https://t.co/32lSUUWWtL. #DM2 pic.twitter.com/DAxdA9CxEv\u2014 Alasdair Allan (@aallan) May 31, 2020\n\nThe spacecraft is making small \u201cattitude adjustments,\u201d or slight maneuvers to line up exactly with the docking portal on the ISS. The astronauts can command bursts of Endeavour\u2019s Draco thrusters to ease the vessel back and forth. Afterward, it will begin \u201ctransnational adjustments,\u201d traveling at speeds as gradual as 0.1 meters per second, to rotate Endeavour on its axis.The movements are part of a battery of intricate protocols to prepare the Crew Dragon to meet with the space station. Moving the final 400 meters to the space station, after starting 254 miles away on the Earth\u2019s surface, takes close to two hours, the vast majority of which is spent inside the last 220 meters while negotiating the unique physics of space. For every course correction, there is a counter-correction to halt the spacecraft\u2019s progress.Even as the ISS and Endeavour appear to be sitting still, they\u2019re both flying around the Earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:33 a.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The goal was always to fly humans. So even when SpaceX built a spacecraft to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station \u2014 but not astronauts \u2014 the designers added a curious feature to make a point: a window.Inside SpaceX, that window became a symbol of its larger ambitions and a reminder to its workforce that human spaceflight was the ultimate goal, the reason Elon Musk started the company as it works eventually to get people to Mars.Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has achieved remarkable feats few thought possible. It designed rockets that not only propelled their payloads to orbit but landed back on Earth to be reused.It launched the Falcon Heavy, a monster of a rocket with three boosters and 27 engines. It opened up the Pentagon\u2019s launch market, which for a decade had been dominated by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.But for all the successes over the years, and all the hype the company has generated along the way, it had never flown a single person.Until Saturday.With the successful flight, SpaceX joins rarefied company. Only three nations have sent humans to orbit. And while NASA has for years relied on contractors to build the rockets and spacecraft that have flown its astronauts, this launch was done under an unusual arrangement, what NASA calls its \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d in which two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, design and build spacecraft to ferry NASA astronauts to the space station.Read more.Good morning from spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:29 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn space, you rise to music.It\u2019s a NASA tradition that stretches back decades: astronauts waking to tunes piped up from the ground. The tradition began in 1965, when the wake-up song was \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones during Gemini 6, and continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d according to a history of NASA wake-up music compiled by Colin Fries, a NASA historian. \u201cSeveral crews have awakened on their final day in space to Dean Martin\u2019s popular song \u2018Going Back to Houston,\u2019\u201d Fries wrote.What does our home planet look like from @SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour? Watch as @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug take you inside the spacecraft and provide an update about our #LaunchAmerica mission: pic.twitter.com/f8b3CrSEPE\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nThe practice was continued during the space shuttle program. John Young and Robert Crippen awoke to \u201cReveille\u201d on the first shuttle mission in 1981.On the final flight of the space shuttle 30 years later, the crews chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m. Eastern time, the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair was able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit. NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6551",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/31/spacex-nasa-docking-international-space-station/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 After blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center here Saturday afternoon, and then whizzing around the Earth at speeds that eventually hit 17,500 mph, the SpaceX spacecraft carrying two NASA astronauts docked with the International Space Station Sunday morning, completing the first leg of a historic journey. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit.It was also a test flight designed to see how the spacecraft, which had never flown humans before, performed. So far, it seems the answer is very well, but the astronauts still need to return home safely after their tour on the station ends sometime in the coming months.Photos and videos from Saturday\u2019s historic launch from Kennedy Space CenterNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the pair chosen for the mission because of their experience and expertise flying new vehicles, reported that the spacecraft was performing well.\u201cDragon\u2019s a slick vehicle,\u201d Behnken said.\u201cWe couldn\u2019t be happier about the performance,\u201d Hurley said.With their trip to the space station completed, the pair can claim victory in an epic game of capture the flag, taking possession of the American flag that was brought to the station on the last shuttle flight, and was waiting to return to Earth by the first crew to reach the station from U.S. soil.Read about the historic liftoffFor NASA, the flight was the culmination of a journey that began years ago, when the Space Shuttle program ended with no way for the space agency to send people into space. In the nine years since, NASA paid Russia as much as $90 million a seat to fly its astronauts to the space station.Ultimately, NASA decided to outsource the job of space launches to the private sector, awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, worth a combined $6.8 billion. Initially, Boeing, the industry stalwart that had been NASA\u2019s partner for generations, was considered the favorite. But its Starliner spacecraft encountered significant problems during a test mission without crews late last year and had to cut that flight short.That left SpaceX, which also had encountered problems in developing its spacecraft, in the lead to be first to launch with astronauts on board.Everything about this first crewed SpaceX mission appears to have been picture-perfect, from its on-time lieftoff at 3:22 p.m. Saturday to its rendezvous with the space station at 10:16 a.m. Eastern time Sunday. The astronauts floated into the space station at 1:22 p.m., 22 hours after they\u2019d left Florida.Video: How astronauts are preparing for a new era in American space flightHurley and Behnken, both of whom are married to fellow astronauts, seemed loose and relaxed during the journey, showing off the stuffed animals they had brought with them to show to their kids. Behnken did a weightless flip for the camera, and they carried on the tradition of naming their spacecraft, announcing they had dubbed their Dragon capsule \u201cEndeavour\u201d \u2014 the same name as the space shuttle they had both flown aboard.On Sunday morning the crew continued another longstanding NASA tradition, choosing to wake up to music. The crew of Gemini 6 started the tradition in 1965, waking up to \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones, according to a history complied by NASA historian Colin Fries.The use of music as an alarm clock continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d Fries wrote.On the final flight of the Space Shuttle, the crew chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possibleBehnken and Hurley went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m., the controllers on the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos and is about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair had been able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said.By the time they woke up, the spacecraft was already bearing down on the space station, having performed a series of \u201cburns\u201d or engine thruster firings that raised its orbit and brought them closer to the orbiting laboratory.The Dragon spacecraft flies autonomously, but the astronauts can take over the controls at any time, and they did so twice to check how the systems performed. During the broadcast from the capsule, Hurley noted that they were the first astronauts to control a spacecraft using a touchscreen.\u201cSo we got that going for us,\u201d he said.Unlike the violent force of liftoff, docking is a delicate and carefully choreographed bit of orbital ballet, requiring patience and a finesse. Inside NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston, and SpaceX\u2019s headquarters outside of Los Angeles, controllers called through a series of maneuvers that seemed to go off without a hitch, one by one.And then, at 10:16 a.m. Endeavour\u2019s slow, smooth glide to the station ended with a kiss as the station flew over China and Mongolia.\u201cWe have docking,\u201d NASA\u2019s Dan Huot said during a broadcast of the event.It took a few hours for the crews to ensure that the pressure was equalized between the space station and the Endeavour spacecraft. But then the hatch was opened and after a few more minutes, the pair floated into the station. Behnken came first, Superman style, smile beaming, into the arms of fellow astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been aboard the station since April.Hurley came next. And the three astronauts and friends embraced, along with two Russian cosmonauts, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, Bridenstine said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridenstine said, the future of the agency will lie with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch was initially scheduled for Wednesday, but was scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d Cassidy joked.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new crewmates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dBelow are the updates from the docking of SpaceX\u2019s capsule.Unclear how long astronauts will remain in spaceReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkIt could be months before the NASA astronauts who flew the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule return to Earth from the International Space Station. Or it could be as soon as the end of next month.NASA officials haven\u2019t decided how long Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will remain in space. In a May 1 mission briefing, agency leaders said they could spend as many as four months aboard the ISS or as few as five weeks.It all depends on the shape of the Endeavour capsule and when SpaceX and NASA officials feel it is again safe to fly. Hurley and Behnken\u2019s flight is a demonstration mission, officially called Demo-2, to test the spaceworthiness of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon and certify them for future crewed launches. With the demo launch complete, the two astronauts\u2019 main goal is to evaluate their spacecraft and report how well it weathered the flight and docking.Space officials also want to make progress on SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 capsule, the next Dragon capsule in line for launch.\u201cReally the decision point is, \u2018Hey, is Dragon healthy? Is the vehicle performing well, the Dragon that\u2019s on orbit?\u2019\" NASA Commercial Crew Program deputy director Steve Stich said at the briefing, via Space.com. \u201cAnd then we\u2019ll be looking ahead to that next mission, the Crew-1 flight, and looking at the vehicle readiness and trying to determine what\u2019s the smart thing to do relative to the mission duration.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts welcomed aboard the space station in emotional ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were welcomed aboard the station in an emotional ceremony Sunday afternoon after a nearly 19-hour journey that began when their Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center the day before.This is the first time in human history @NASA_Astronauts have entered the @Space_Station from a commercially-made spacecraft. @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug have finally arrived to the orbiting laboratory in @SpaceX's Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. pic.twitter.com/3t9Ogtpik4\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nIt was the first flight of NASA astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired nearly a decade ago.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, he said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridensitne said the future of the agency lay with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch initially was scheduled for Wednesday but scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d said astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new cremates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts open the hatch and board the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are now aboard the International Space Station.The pair opened the hatch of their SpaceX Dragon capsule at 1:02 p.m. Eastern time and floated into the station at 1:22 p.m. They were greeted by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April, and two Russian cosmonauts.The hatch opening completes the last major milestone of the launch that began Saturday, when the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The spacecraft docked with the station at 10:16 a.m. and the crews worked to equalize the pressure between the spacecraft and the station before opening the hatch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat living in space is really likeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkChris Cassidy, who is about to greet fellow NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on the International Space Station, is no stranger to space flight.He\u2019s a former head of the astronaut office and on his third spaceflight. He knows the particular curiosities inherent in living in a weightless environment.As he told The Post last year, in space astronauts use the tops of their feet more often than the bottoms. That\u2019s because they are constantly hooking their feet under rails, to help keep them in place.Calluses come off the bottoms of feet and grow on the top.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dHe spoke to The Post as part of a project in which Post reporters interviewed 50 astronauts about what living in space is really like. Read moreAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDear astronauts, please pick up your trashReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:42 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe first order of business for astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley before boarding the International Space Station: throw away your trash. Unless, they\u2019re hungry. They\u2019re allowed to eat first.As Behnken and Hurley prepare to climb out of their Endeavour capsule for the first time in nearly a day, their itinerary for the opening hours in their new floating apartment is pretty stacked. It includes cleaning up after themselves.\u201cPlease collect all your food and water bottle trash,\u201d SpaceX mission controller Anna Menon told them.Dear astronauts, please pick up your trash[https://t.co/djJ0BI2Twq] pic.twitter.com/Iglo5qJBnL\u2014 Jacob Bogage (@jacobbogage) May 31, 2020\n\nTrash is a bit of an issue on the ISS. Astronaut Scott Kelly described the odor on board as a mixture of antiseptic and garbage. Part of the crew\u2019s daily duties are a thorough vacuuming.Astrobiologist Kasthuri Venkateswaran studied the contents of the station\u2019s HEPA air filters and bags of vacuum dust in 2015 to see what kind of dirt and germs actually make their way up.First, a lot of skin cells.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy told The Washington Post. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dAlso, some nasty pathogens, such as Staphylococcus and Propionibacterium. They tend to settle on surfaces and get swept up in vacuum cleaners. The air on the ISS, even if it doesn\u2019t smell great, is pretty darn clean.\u201cThe ISS is a unique built environment,\u201d Venkateswaran said. \u201cPeople assume it\u2019s filthy, but it\u2019s not. It\u2019s many, many times cleaner than your bathroom at home.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWho is already on the International Space Station?Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:28 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday, they\u2019ll join ISS Expedition 63 and three people already aboard.Chris Cassidy, 50, is the lone American. He\u2019ll be in charge of helping the SpaceX Dragon capsule, now named Endeavour, dock with the space station. A retired Navy SEAL captain who served two six-month deployments in Afghanistan and two more in the Mediterranean, Cassidy was selected as an astronaut in 2004 and became the 500th person to fly in space, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2009. Hurley was that mission\u2019s pilot.Cassidy has been aboard the space station since April 9.Anatoly Ivanishin, 51, is the senior Russian cosmonaut aboard. This is his third ISS expedition. A former fighter pilot who was selected to be a cosmonaut in 2003, he launched with Cassidy to the space station on April 9.Ivan Vagner, 34, is the other cosmonaut on the ISS. He was an engineer for a Russian company that built civil and military aircraft before joining a national aerospace and defense contractor while working as an assistant flight manager for the space station. He was selected as a cosmonaut in 2010.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon makes five spaceships parked at the station. https://t.co/lLZYDJUn1N pic.twitter.com/la06vhjgOW\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) May 31, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFlight command looks into minor issue with Behnken\u2019s spacesuitReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:03 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight control engineers are investigating a minor problem with the pressurization of astronaut Bob Behnken\u2019s space suit.During one of the last suit checks, Behnken\u2019s suit reported lower pressure than prior tests. SpaceX flight control asked Behnken to check the bladder zipper heads and any exposed zipper teeth that could cause the suit to lose pressure while \u201cdoffing\u201d the suit in preparation to board the International Space Station.Behnken\u2019s suit had plenty of pressurization to remain safe, but SpaceX flight control wanted to \u201crule out potential hardware issues\u201d that could be problematic in future uses. Behnken reported back some concern with the zippers.\u201cI\u2019ve got both structural zippers on my hands lowered and I do see white teeth visible on both sides. It looks like a full white tooth,\u201d he said.\u201cIt looks like a white tooth on the leg zipper as well,\u201d he added moments later.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAwaiting hatch openingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley is docked with the International Space Station, but it will take awhile before they open the hatch and float onboard the station.The astronauts and controllers on the ground have to ensure the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. They also will be setting up an umbilical that will allow communications and power to transfer between the two.The Dragon spacecraft, now named Endeavour, docked at 10:16 a.m. Shortly after docking, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s been a real honor to be just a small part of this nine year endeavor since the last time a United States space ship docked with the International Space Station.\u201dIn Houston\u2019s mission control, flight director Zeb Scoville congratulated the crew.\u201cBravo on a magnificent moment in spaceflight history,\u201d he said, \u201cand on the start of a new journey that has changed the face of space travel in this new era of space transportation.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft docks with space station, another mission milestoneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:17 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley completed a delicate and dangerous part of its mission on May 31. (NASATV)SpaceX has completed the first part of its historic flight to the International Space Station Sunday morning, when its Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the orbiting laboratory at 10:16 a.m., a few minutes earlier than planned.Before opening the hatch and entering the station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will conduct a series of pressure and leak checks to ensure their safety. Then they will join fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the station.The docking was a delicate and dangerous part of the mission. The spacecraft chased down the space station, traveling in orbit at 17,500 mph, but then approached very slowly in a series of carefully choreographed maneuvers.The mission went smoothly, ground officials said, following a picture-perfect launch some 19 hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center.Docking confirmed! @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug officially docked to the @Space_Station at 10:16am ET: pic.twitter.com/hCM4UvbwjR\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nDo you have the right stuff?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station is an autonomous vehicle, designed to fly itself.The astronauts can, at any time, take over the controls and fly the capsule manually. During their mission this weekend, they were scheduled to do that twice to test how the spacecraft\u2019s systems work.But the most delicate part of the mission, the docking with the space station, will be done by the spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers. Still, Hurley and Behnken have spent hours in simulators running through every kind of scenario should they need to take over.Now you can see whether you have the \u201cright stuff\u201d by trying to dock the spacecraft on this simulator SpaceX has made available online.\nCrew Dragon is designed to be fully autonomous, but \n@Astro_Doug and @AstroBehnken\n can take control of the spacecraft if necessary. Simulator here \u2192 http://iss-sim.spacex.comPosted by SpaceX on Saturday, 30 May 2020Astronauts take control of capsule as docking nearsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken took control of the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule as it tiptoed its way toward the International Space Station, just after 9:30 a.m.The #SpaceX #CrewDragon is now just 220 m in front of the #ISS. The Dragon is in a hold to perform manual piloting tests. Watch docking live at https://t.co/32lSUUWWtL. #DM2 pic.twitter.com/DAxdA9CxEv\u2014 Alasdair Allan (@aallan) May 31, 2020\n\nThe spacecraft is making small \u201cattitude adjustments,\u201d or slight maneuvers to line up exactly with the docking portal on the ISS. The astronauts can command bursts of Endeavour\u2019s Draco thrusters to ease the vessel back and forth. Afterward, it will begin \u201ctransnational adjustments,\u201d traveling at speeds as gradual as 0.1 meters per second, to rotate Endeavour on its axis.The movements are part of a battery of intricate protocols to prepare the Crew Dragon to meet with the space station. Moving the final 400 meters to the space station, after starting 254 miles away on the Earth\u2019s surface, takes close to two hours, the vast majority of which is spent inside the last 220 meters while negotiating the unique physics of space. For every course correction, there is a counter-correction to halt the spacecraft\u2019s progress.Even as the ISS and Endeavour appear to be sitting still, they\u2019re both flying around the Earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:33 a.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The goal was always to fly humans. So even when SpaceX built a spacecraft to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station \u2014 but not astronauts \u2014 the designers added a curious feature to make a point: a window.Inside SpaceX, that window became a symbol of its larger ambitions and a reminder to its workforce that human spaceflight was the ultimate goal, the reason Elon Musk started the company as it works eventually to get people to Mars.Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has achieved remarkable feats few thought possible. It designed rockets that not only propelled their payloads to orbit but landed back on Earth to be reused.It launched the Falcon Heavy, a monster of a rocket with three boosters and 27 engines. It opened up the Pentagon\u2019s launch market, which for a decade had been dominated by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.But for all the successes over the years, and all the hype the company has generated along the way, it had never flown a single person.Until Saturday.With the successful flight, SpaceX joins rarefied company. Only three nations have sent humans to orbit. And while NASA has for years relied on contractors to build the rockets and spacecraft that have flown its astronauts, this launch was done under an unusual arrangement, what NASA calls its \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d in which two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, design and build spacecraft to ferry NASA astronauts to the space station.Read more.Good morning from spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:29 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn space, you rise to music.It\u2019s a NASA tradition that stretches back decades: astronauts waking to tunes piped up from the ground. The tradition began in 1965, when the wake-up song was \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones during Gemini 6, and continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d according to a history of NASA wake-up music compiled by Colin Fries, a NASA historian. \u201cSeveral crews have awakened on their final day in space to Dean Martin\u2019s popular song \u2018Going Back to Houston,\u2019\u201d Fries wrote.What does our home planet look like from @SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour? Watch as @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug take you inside the spacecraft and provide an update about our #LaunchAmerica mission: pic.twitter.com/f8b3CrSEPE\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nThe practice was continued during the space shuttle program. John Young and Robert Crippen awoke to \u201cReveille\u201d on the first shuttle mission in 1981.On the final flight of the space shuttle 30 years later, the crews chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m. Eastern time, the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair was able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit. NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6552",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/31/spacex-nasa-docking-international-space-station/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 After blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center here Saturday afternoon, and then whizzing around the Earth at speeds that eventually hit 17,500 mph, the SpaceX spacecraft carrying two NASA astronauts docked with the International Space Station Sunday morning, completing the first leg of a historic journey. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit.It was also a test flight designed to see how the spacecraft, which had never flown humans before, performed. So far, it seems the answer is very well, but the astronauts still need to return home safely after their tour on the station ends sometime in the coming months.Photos and videos from Saturday\u2019s historic launch from Kennedy Space CenterNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the pair chosen for the mission because of their experience and expertise flying new vehicles, reported that the spacecraft was performing well.\u201cDragon\u2019s a slick vehicle,\u201d Behnken said.\u201cWe couldn\u2019t be happier about the performance,\u201d Hurley said.With their trip to the space station completed, the pair can claim victory in an epic game of capture the flag, taking possession of the American flag that was brought to the station on the last shuttle flight, and was waiting to return to Earth by the first crew to reach the station from U.S. soil.Read about the historic liftoffFor NASA, the flight was the culmination of a journey that began years ago, when the Space Shuttle program ended with no way for the space agency to send people into space. In the nine years since, NASA paid Russia as much as $90 million a seat to fly its astronauts to the space station.Ultimately, NASA decided to outsource the job of space launches to the private sector, awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, worth a combined $6.8 billion. Initially, Boeing, the industry stalwart that had been NASA\u2019s partner for generations, was considered the favorite. But its Starliner spacecraft encountered significant problems during a test mission without crews late last year and had to cut that flight short.That left SpaceX, which also had encountered problems in developing its spacecraft, in the lead to be first to launch with astronauts on board.Everything about this first crewed SpaceX mission appears to have been picture-perfect, from its on-time lieftoff at 3:22 p.m. Saturday to its rendezvous with the space station at 10:16 a.m. Eastern time Sunday. The astronauts floated into the space station at 1:22 p.m., 22 hours after they\u2019d left Florida.Video: How astronauts are preparing for a new era in American space flightHurley and Behnken, both of whom are married to fellow astronauts, seemed loose and relaxed during the journey, showing off the stuffed animals they had brought with them to show to their kids. Behnken did a weightless flip for the camera, and they carried on the tradition of naming their spacecraft, announcing they had dubbed their Dragon capsule \u201cEndeavour\u201d \u2014 the same name as the space shuttle they had both flown aboard.On Sunday morning the crew continued another longstanding NASA tradition, choosing to wake up to music. The crew of Gemini 6 started the tradition in 1965, waking up to \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones, according to a history complied by NASA historian Colin Fries.The use of music as an alarm clock continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d Fries wrote.On the final flight of the Space Shuttle, the crew chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possibleBehnken and Hurley went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m., the controllers on the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos and is about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair had been able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said.By the time they woke up, the spacecraft was already bearing down on the space station, having performed a series of \u201cburns\u201d or engine thruster firings that raised its orbit and brought them closer to the orbiting laboratory.The Dragon spacecraft flies autonomously, but the astronauts can take over the controls at any time, and they did so twice to check how the systems performed. During the broadcast from the capsule, Hurley noted that they were the first astronauts to control a spacecraft using a touchscreen.\u201cSo we got that going for us,\u201d he said.Unlike the violent force of liftoff, docking is a delicate and carefully choreographed bit of orbital ballet, requiring patience and a finesse. Inside NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston, and SpaceX\u2019s headquarters outside of Los Angeles, controllers called through a series of maneuvers that seemed to go off without a hitch, one by one.And then, at 10:16 a.m. Endeavour\u2019s slow, smooth glide to the station ended with a kiss as the station flew over China and Mongolia.\u201cWe have docking,\u201d NASA\u2019s Dan Huot said during a broadcast of the event.It took a few hours for the crews to ensure that the pressure was equalized between the space station and the Endeavour spacecraft. But then the hatch was opened and after a few more minutes, the pair floated into the station. Behnken came first, Superman style, smile beaming, into the arms of fellow astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been aboard the station since April.Hurley came next. And the three astronauts and friends embraced, along with two Russian cosmonauts, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, Bridenstine said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridenstine said, the future of the agency will lie with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch was initially scheduled for Wednesday, but was scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d Cassidy joked.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new crewmates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dBelow are the updates from the docking of SpaceX\u2019s capsule.Unclear how long astronauts will remain in spaceReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkIt could be months before the NASA astronauts who flew the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule return to Earth from the International Space Station. Or it could be as soon as the end of next month.NASA officials haven\u2019t decided how long Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will remain in space. In a May 1 mission briefing, agency leaders said they could spend as many as four months aboard the ISS or as few as five weeks.It all depends on the shape of the Endeavour capsule and when SpaceX and NASA officials feel it is again safe to fly. Hurley and Behnken\u2019s flight is a demonstration mission, officially called Demo-2, to test the spaceworthiness of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon and certify them for future crewed launches. With the demo launch complete, the two astronauts\u2019 main goal is to evaluate their spacecraft and report how well it weathered the flight and docking.Space officials also want to make progress on SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 capsule, the next Dragon capsule in line for launch.\u201cReally the decision point is, \u2018Hey, is Dragon healthy? Is the vehicle performing well, the Dragon that\u2019s on orbit?\u2019\" NASA Commercial Crew Program deputy director Steve Stich said at the briefing, via Space.com. \u201cAnd then we\u2019ll be looking ahead to that next mission, the Crew-1 flight, and looking at the vehicle readiness and trying to determine what\u2019s the smart thing to do relative to the mission duration.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts welcomed aboard the space station in emotional ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were welcomed aboard the station in an emotional ceremony Sunday afternoon after a nearly 19-hour journey that began when their Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center the day before.This is the first time in human history @NASA_Astronauts have entered the @Space_Station from a commercially-made spacecraft. @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug have finally arrived to the orbiting laboratory in @SpaceX's Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. pic.twitter.com/3t9Ogtpik4\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nIt was the first flight of NASA astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired nearly a decade ago.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, he said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridensitne said the future of the agency lay with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch initially was scheduled for Wednesday but scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d said astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new cremates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts open the hatch and board the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are now aboard the International Space Station.The pair opened the hatch of their SpaceX Dragon capsule at 1:02 p.m. Eastern time and floated into the station at 1:22 p.m. They were greeted by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April, and two Russian cosmonauts.The hatch opening completes the last major milestone of the launch that began Saturday, when the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The spacecraft docked with the station at 10:16 a.m. and the crews worked to equalize the pressure between the spacecraft and the station before opening the hatch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat living in space is really likeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkChris Cassidy, who is about to greet fellow NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on the International Space Station, is no stranger to space flight.He\u2019s a former head of the astronaut office and on his third spaceflight. He knows the particular curiosities inherent in living in a weightless environment.As he told The Post last year, in space astronauts use the tops of their feet more often than the bottoms. That\u2019s because they are constantly hooking their feet under rails, to help keep them in place.Calluses come off the bottoms of feet and grow on the top.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dHe spoke to The Post as part of a project in which Post reporters interviewed 50 astronauts about what living in space is really like. Read moreAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDear astronauts, please pick up your trashReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:42 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe first order of business for astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley before boarding the International Space Station: throw away your trash. Unless, they\u2019re hungry. They\u2019re allowed to eat first.As Behnken and Hurley prepare to climb out of their Endeavour capsule for the first time in nearly a day, their itinerary for the opening hours in their new floating apartment is pretty stacked. It includes cleaning up after themselves.\u201cPlease collect all your food and water bottle trash,\u201d SpaceX mission controller Anna Menon told them.Dear astronauts, please pick up your trash[https://t.co/djJ0BI2Twq] pic.twitter.com/Iglo5qJBnL\u2014 Jacob Bogage (@jacobbogage) May 31, 2020\n\nTrash is a bit of an issue on the ISS. Astronaut Scott Kelly described the odor on board as a mixture of antiseptic and garbage. Part of the crew\u2019s daily duties are a thorough vacuuming.Astrobiologist Kasthuri Venkateswaran studied the contents of the station\u2019s HEPA air filters and bags of vacuum dust in 2015 to see what kind of dirt and germs actually make their way up.First, a lot of skin cells.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy told The Washington Post. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dAlso, some nasty pathogens, such as Staphylococcus and Propionibacterium. They tend to settle on surfaces and get swept up in vacuum cleaners. The air on the ISS, even if it doesn\u2019t smell great, is pretty darn clean.\u201cThe ISS is a unique built environment,\u201d Venkateswaran said. \u201cPeople assume it\u2019s filthy, but it\u2019s not. It\u2019s many, many times cleaner than your bathroom at home.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWho is already on the International Space Station?Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:28 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday, they\u2019ll join ISS Expedition 63 and three people already aboard.Chris Cassidy, 50, is the lone American. He\u2019ll be in charge of helping the SpaceX Dragon capsule, now named Endeavour, dock with the space station. A retired Navy SEAL captain who served two six-month deployments in Afghanistan and two more in the Mediterranean, Cassidy was selected as an astronaut in 2004 and became the 500th person to fly in space, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2009. Hurley was that mission\u2019s pilot.Cassidy has been aboard the space station since April 9.Anatoly Ivanishin, 51, is the senior Russian cosmonaut aboard. This is his third ISS expedition. A former fighter pilot who was selected to be a cosmonaut in 2003, he launched with Cassidy to the space station on April 9.Ivan Vagner, 34, is the other cosmonaut on the ISS. He was an engineer for a Russian company that built civil and military aircraft before joining a national aerospace and defense contractor while working as an assistant flight manager for the space station. He was selected as a cosmonaut in 2010.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon makes five spaceships parked at the station. https://t.co/lLZYDJUn1N pic.twitter.com/la06vhjgOW\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) May 31, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFlight command looks into minor issue with Behnken\u2019s spacesuitReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:03 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight control engineers are investigating a minor problem with the pressurization of astronaut Bob Behnken\u2019s space suit.During one of the last suit checks, Behnken\u2019s suit reported lower pressure than prior tests. SpaceX flight control asked Behnken to check the bladder zipper heads and any exposed zipper teeth that could cause the suit to lose pressure while \u201cdoffing\u201d the suit in preparation to board the International Space Station.Behnken\u2019s suit had plenty of pressurization to remain safe, but SpaceX flight control wanted to \u201crule out potential hardware issues\u201d that could be problematic in future uses. Behnken reported back some concern with the zippers.\u201cI\u2019ve got both structural zippers on my hands lowered and I do see white teeth visible on both sides. It looks like a full white tooth,\u201d he said.\u201cIt looks like a white tooth on the leg zipper as well,\u201d he added moments later.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAwaiting hatch openingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley is docked with the International Space Station, but it will take awhile before they open the hatch and float onboard the station.The astronauts and controllers on the ground have to ensure the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. They also will be setting up an umbilical that will allow communications and power to transfer between the two.The Dragon spacecraft, now named Endeavour, docked at 10:16 a.m. Shortly after docking, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s been a real honor to be just a small part of this nine year endeavor since the last time a United States space ship docked with the International Space Station.\u201dIn Houston\u2019s mission control, flight director Zeb Scoville congratulated the crew.\u201cBravo on a magnificent moment in spaceflight history,\u201d he said, \u201cand on the start of a new journey that has changed the face of space travel in this new era of space transportation.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft docks with space station, another mission milestoneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:17 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley completed a delicate and dangerous part of its mission on May 31. (NASATV)SpaceX has completed the first part of its historic flight to the International Space Station Sunday morning, when its Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the orbiting laboratory at 10:16 a.m., a few minutes earlier than planned.Before opening the hatch and entering the station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will conduct a series of pressure and leak checks to ensure their safety. Then they will join fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the station.The docking was a delicate and dangerous part of the mission. The spacecraft chased down the space station, traveling in orbit at 17,500 mph, but then approached very slowly in a series of carefully choreographed maneuvers.The mission went smoothly, ground officials said, following a picture-perfect launch some 19 hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center.Docking confirmed! @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug officially docked to the @Space_Station at 10:16am ET: pic.twitter.com/hCM4UvbwjR\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nDo you have the right stuff?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station is an autonomous vehicle, designed to fly itself.The astronauts can, at any time, take over the controls and fly the capsule manually. During their mission this weekend, they were scheduled to do that twice to test how the spacecraft\u2019s systems work.But the most delicate part of the mission, the docking with the space station, will be done by the spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers. Still, Hurley and Behnken have spent hours in simulators running through every kind of scenario should they need to take over.Now you can see whether you have the \u201cright stuff\u201d by trying to dock the spacecraft on this simulator SpaceX has made available online.\nCrew Dragon is designed to be fully autonomous, but \n@Astro_Doug and @AstroBehnken\n can take control of the spacecraft if necessary. Simulator here \u2192 http://iss-sim.spacex.comPosted by SpaceX on Saturday, 30 May 2020Astronauts take control of capsule as docking nearsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken took control of the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule as it tiptoed its way toward the International Space Station, just after 9:30 a.m.The #SpaceX #CrewDragon is now just 220 m in front of the #ISS. The Dragon is in a hold to perform manual piloting tests. Watch docking live at https://t.co/32lSUUWWtL. #DM2 pic.twitter.com/DAxdA9CxEv\u2014 Alasdair Allan (@aallan) May 31, 2020\n\nThe spacecraft is making small \u201cattitude adjustments,\u201d or slight maneuvers to line up exactly with the docking portal on the ISS. The astronauts can command bursts of Endeavour\u2019s Draco thrusters to ease the vessel back and forth. Afterward, it will begin \u201ctransnational adjustments,\u201d traveling at speeds as gradual as 0.1 meters per second, to rotate Endeavour on its axis.The movements are part of a battery of intricate protocols to prepare the Crew Dragon to meet with the space station. Moving the final 400 meters to the space station, after starting 254 miles away on the Earth\u2019s surface, takes close to two hours, the vast majority of which is spent inside the last 220 meters while negotiating the unique physics of space. For every course correction, there is a counter-correction to halt the spacecraft\u2019s progress.Even as the ISS and Endeavour appear to be sitting still, they\u2019re both flying around the Earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:33 a.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The goal was always to fly humans. So even when SpaceX built a spacecraft to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station \u2014 but not astronauts \u2014 the designers added a curious feature to make a point: a window.Inside SpaceX, that window became a symbol of its larger ambitions and a reminder to its workforce that human spaceflight was the ultimate goal, the reason Elon Musk started the company as it works eventually to get people to Mars.Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has achieved remarkable feats few thought possible. It designed rockets that not only propelled their payloads to orbit but landed back on Earth to be reused.It launched the Falcon Heavy, a monster of a rocket with three boosters and 27 engines. It opened up the Pentagon\u2019s launch market, which for a decade had been dominated by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.But for all the successes over the years, and all the hype the company has generated along the way, it had never flown a single person.Until Saturday.With the successful flight, SpaceX joins rarefied company. Only three nations have sent humans to orbit. And while NASA has for years relied on contractors to build the rockets and spacecraft that have flown its astronauts, this launch was done under an unusual arrangement, what NASA calls its \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d in which two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, design and build spacecraft to ferry NASA astronauts to the space station.Read more.Good morning from spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:29 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn space, you rise to music.It\u2019s a NASA tradition that stretches back decades: astronauts waking to tunes piped up from the ground. The tradition began in 1965, when the wake-up song was \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones during Gemini 6, and continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d according to a history of NASA wake-up music compiled by Colin Fries, a NASA historian. \u201cSeveral crews have awakened on their final day in space to Dean Martin\u2019s popular song \u2018Going Back to Houston,\u2019\u201d Fries wrote.What does our home planet look like from @SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour? Watch as @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug take you inside the spacecraft and provide an update about our #LaunchAmerica mission: pic.twitter.com/f8b3CrSEPE\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nThe practice was continued during the space shuttle program. John Young and Robert Crippen awoke to \u201cReveille\u201d on the first shuttle mission in 1981.On the final flight of the space shuttle 30 years later, the crews chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m. Eastern time, the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair was able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit. NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6553",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/31/spacex-nasa-docking-international-space-station/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 After blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center here Saturday afternoon, and then whizzing around the Earth at speeds that eventually hit 17,500 mph, the SpaceX spacecraft carrying two NASA astronauts docked with the International Space Station Sunday morning, completing the first leg of a historic journey. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit.It was also a test flight designed to see how the spacecraft, which had never flown humans before, performed. So far, it seems the answer is very well, but the astronauts still need to return home safely after their tour on the station ends sometime in the coming months.Photos and videos from Saturday\u2019s historic launch from Kennedy Space CenterNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the pair chosen for the mission because of their experience and expertise flying new vehicles, reported that the spacecraft was performing well.\u201cDragon\u2019s a slick vehicle,\u201d Behnken said.\u201cWe couldn\u2019t be happier about the performance,\u201d Hurley said.With their trip to the space station completed, the pair can claim victory in an epic game of capture the flag, taking possession of the American flag that was brought to the station on the last shuttle flight, and was waiting to return to Earth by the first crew to reach the station from U.S. soil.Read about the historic liftoffFor NASA, the flight was the culmination of a journey that began years ago, when the Space Shuttle program ended with no way for the space agency to send people into space. In the nine years since, NASA paid Russia as much as $90 million a seat to fly its astronauts to the space station.Ultimately, NASA decided to outsource the job of space launches to the private sector, awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014, worth a combined $6.8 billion. Initially, Boeing, the industry stalwart that had been NASA\u2019s partner for generations, was considered the favorite. But its Starliner spacecraft encountered significant problems during a test mission without crews late last year and had to cut that flight short.That left SpaceX, which also had encountered problems in developing its spacecraft, in the lead to be first to launch with astronauts on board.Everything about this first crewed SpaceX mission appears to have been picture-perfect, from its on-time lieftoff at 3:22 p.m. Saturday to its rendezvous with the space station at 10:16 a.m. Eastern time Sunday. The astronauts floated into the space station at 1:22 p.m., 22 hours after they\u2019d left Florida.Video: How astronauts are preparing for a new era in American space flightHurley and Behnken, both of whom are married to fellow astronauts, seemed loose and relaxed during the journey, showing off the stuffed animals they had brought with them to show to their kids. Behnken did a weightless flip for the camera, and they carried on the tradition of naming their spacecraft, announcing they had dubbed their Dragon capsule \u201cEndeavour\u201d \u2014 the same name as the space shuttle they had both flown aboard.On Sunday morning the crew continued another longstanding NASA tradition, choosing to wake up to music. The crew of Gemini 6 started the tradition in 1965, waking up to \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones, according to a history complied by NASA historian Colin Fries.The use of music as an alarm clock continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d Fries wrote.On the final flight of the Space Shuttle, the crew chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possibleBehnken and Hurley went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m., the controllers on the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos and is about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair had been able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said.By the time they woke up, the spacecraft was already bearing down on the space station, having performed a series of \u201cburns\u201d or engine thruster firings that raised its orbit and brought them closer to the orbiting laboratory.The Dragon spacecraft flies autonomously, but the astronauts can take over the controls at any time, and they did so twice to check how the systems performed. During the broadcast from the capsule, Hurley noted that they were the first astronauts to control a spacecraft using a touchscreen.\u201cSo we got that going for us,\u201d he said.Unlike the violent force of liftoff, docking is a delicate and carefully choreographed bit of orbital ballet, requiring patience and a finesse. Inside NASA\u2019s mission control in Houston, and SpaceX\u2019s headquarters outside of Los Angeles, controllers called through a series of maneuvers that seemed to go off without a hitch, one by one.And then, at 10:16 a.m. Endeavour\u2019s slow, smooth glide to the station ended with a kiss as the station flew over China and Mongolia.\u201cWe have docking,\u201d NASA\u2019s Dan Huot said during a broadcast of the event.It took a few hours for the crews to ensure that the pressure was equalized between the space station and the Endeavour spacecraft. But then the hatch was opened and after a few more minutes, the pair floated into the station. Behnken came first, Superman style, smile beaming, into the arms of fellow astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been aboard the station since April.Hurley came next. And the three astronauts and friends embraced, along with two Russian cosmonauts, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, Bridenstine said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridenstine said, the future of the agency will lie with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch was initially scheduled for Wednesday, but was scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d Cassidy joked.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new crewmates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dBelow are the updates from the docking of SpaceX\u2019s capsule.Unclear how long astronauts will remain in spaceReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage2:32 p.m.Link copiedLinkIt could be months before the NASA astronauts who flew the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule return to Earth from the International Space Station. Or it could be as soon as the end of next month.NASA officials haven\u2019t decided how long Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will remain in space. In a May 1 mission briefing, agency leaders said they could spend as many as four months aboard the ISS or as few as five weeks.It all depends on the shape of the Endeavour capsule and when SpaceX and NASA officials feel it is again safe to fly. Hurley and Behnken\u2019s flight is a demonstration mission, officially called Demo-2, to test the spaceworthiness of the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon and certify them for future crewed launches. With the demo launch complete, the two astronauts\u2019 main goal is to evaluate their spacecraft and report how well it weathered the flight and docking.Space officials also want to make progress on SpaceX\u2019s Crew-1 capsule, the next Dragon capsule in line for launch.\u201cReally the decision point is, \u2018Hey, is Dragon healthy? Is the vehicle performing well, the Dragon that\u2019s on orbit?\u2019\" NASA Commercial Crew Program deputy director Steve Stich said at the briefing, via Space.com. \u201cAnd then we\u2019ll be looking ahead to that next mission, the Crew-1 flight, and looking at the vehicle readiness and trying to determine what\u2019s the smart thing to do relative to the mission duration.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts welcomed aboard the space station in emotional ceremonyReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:51 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were welcomed aboard the station in an emotional ceremony Sunday afternoon after a nearly 19-hour journey that began when their Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center the day before.This is the first time in human history @NASA_Astronauts have entered the @Space_Station from a commercially-made spacecraft. @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug have finally arrived to the orbiting laboratory in @SpaceX's Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. pic.twitter.com/3t9Ogtpik4\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nIt was the first flight of NASA astronauts from United States soil since the space shuttle was retired nearly a decade ago.Speaking during a welcome-aboard ceremony on the station, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s great to get the United States back in the crewed launch business, and we\u2019re just really glad to be on board this magnificent complex.\u201dNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine praised the pair, saying the agency is \u201cso proud of everything you have done for our country, and in fact to inspire the world.\u201dThe mission, he said, foreshadows a sea change in the way NASA will do business in space. Instead of owning and operating the spacecraft itself, Bridensitne said the future of the agency lay with partnering with the growing commercial space sector, as it has with SpaceX.\u201cThis was an amazing moment,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cAnd it represents a transition in how we do spaceflight from the United States of America.\u201dThe launch initially was scheduled for Wednesday but scrubbed because of weather. The delay meant Hurley and Behnken missed \u201cSaturday housecleaning day,\u201d said astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April.Not to worry, he said, promising to put his new cremates to work: \u201cWe\u2019ll catch up next weekend.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAstronauts open the hatch and board the space stationReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport1:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkNASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are now aboard the International Space Station.The pair opened the hatch of their SpaceX Dragon capsule at 1:02 p.m. Eastern time and floated into the station at 1:22 p.m. They were greeted by fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who has been on the station since April, and two Russian cosmonauts.The hatch opening completes the last major milestone of the launch that began Saturday, when the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The spacecraft docked with the station at 10:16 a.m. and the crews worked to equalize the pressure between the spacecraft and the station before opening the hatch.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWhat living in space is really likeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport12:48 p.m.Link copiedLinkChris Cassidy, who is about to greet fellow NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on the International Space Station, is no stranger to space flight.He\u2019s a former head of the astronaut office and on his third spaceflight. He knows the particular curiosities inherent in living in a weightless environment.As he told The Post last year, in space astronauts use the tops of their feet more often than the bottoms. That\u2019s because they are constantly hooking their feet under rails, to help keep them in place.Calluses come off the bottoms of feet and grow on the top.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dHe spoke to The Post as part of a project in which Post reporters interviewed 50 astronauts about what living in space is really like. Read moreAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDear astronauts, please pick up your trashReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:42 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe first order of business for astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley before boarding the International Space Station: throw away your trash. Unless, they\u2019re hungry. They\u2019re allowed to eat first.As Behnken and Hurley prepare to climb out of their Endeavour capsule for the first time in nearly a day, their itinerary for the opening hours in their new floating apartment is pretty stacked. It includes cleaning up after themselves.\u201cPlease collect all your food and water bottle trash,\u201d SpaceX mission controller Anna Menon told them.Dear astronauts, please pick up your trash[https://t.co/djJ0BI2Twq] pic.twitter.com/Iglo5qJBnL\u2014 Jacob Bogage (@jacobbogage) May 31, 2020\n\nTrash is a bit of an issue on the ISS. Astronaut Scott Kelly described the odor on board as a mixture of antiseptic and garbage. Part of the crew\u2019s daily duties are a thorough vacuuming.Astrobiologist Kasthuri Venkateswaran studied the contents of the station\u2019s HEPA air filters and bags of vacuum dust in 2015 to see what kind of dirt and germs actually make their way up.First, a lot of skin cells.\u201cAfter about a month or so all the skin comes off like a snake shedding its skin,\u201d NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy told The Washington Post. \u201cI remember taking my sock off one day about a month or two into the mission, and it was like an explosion of dead skin floating around me. Then I realized my feet were as soft as a baby\u2019s bottom.\u201dAlso, some nasty pathogens, such as Staphylococcus and Propionibacterium. They tend to settle on surfaces and get swept up in vacuum cleaners. The air on the ISS, even if it doesn\u2019t smell great, is pretty darn clean.\u201cThe ISS is a unique built environment,\u201d Venkateswaran said. \u201cPeople assume it\u2019s filthy, but it\u2019s not. It\u2019s many, many times cleaner than your bathroom at home.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementWho is already on the International Space Station?Return to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:28 a.m.Link copiedLinkWhen NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday, they\u2019ll join ISS Expedition 63 and three people already aboard.Chris Cassidy, 50, is the lone American. He\u2019ll be in charge of helping the SpaceX Dragon capsule, now named Endeavour, dock with the space station. A retired Navy SEAL captain who served two six-month deployments in Afghanistan and two more in the Mediterranean, Cassidy was selected as an astronaut in 2004 and became the 500th person to fly in space, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2009. Hurley was that mission\u2019s pilot.Cassidy has been aboard the space station since April 9.Anatoly Ivanishin, 51, is the senior Russian cosmonaut aboard. This is his third ISS expedition. A former fighter pilot who was selected to be a cosmonaut in 2003, he launched with Cassidy to the space station on April 9.Ivan Vagner, 34, is the other cosmonaut on the ISS. He was an engineer for a Russian company that built civil and military aircraft before joining a national aerospace and defense contractor while working as an assistant flight manager for the space station. He was selected as a cosmonaut in 2010.The @SpaceX #CrewDragon makes five spaceships parked at the station. https://t.co/lLZYDJUn1N pic.twitter.com/la06vhjgOW\u2014 Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) May 31, 2020\n\nAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFlight command looks into minor issue with Behnken\u2019s spacesuitReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage11:03 a.m.Link copiedLinkSpaceX flight control engineers are investigating a minor problem with the pressurization of astronaut Bob Behnken\u2019s space suit.During one of the last suit checks, Behnken\u2019s suit reported lower pressure than prior tests. SpaceX flight control asked Behnken to check the bladder zipper heads and any exposed zipper teeth that could cause the suit to lose pressure while \u201cdoffing\u201d the suit in preparation to board the International Space Station.Behnken\u2019s suit had plenty of pressurization to remain safe, but SpaceX flight control wanted to \u201crule out potential hardware issues\u201d that could be problematic in future uses. Behnken reported back some concern with the zippers.\u201cI\u2019ve got both structural zippers on my hands lowered and I do see white teeth visible on both sides. It looks like a full white tooth,\u201d he said.\u201cIt looks like a white tooth on the leg zipper as well,\u201d he added moments later.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementAwaiting hatch openingReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:58 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley is docked with the International Space Station, but it will take awhile before they open the hatch and float onboard the station.The astronauts and controllers on the ground have to ensure the pressure between the spacecraft and the station is equalized. They also will be setting up an umbilical that will allow communications and power to transfer between the two.The Dragon spacecraft, now named Endeavour, docked at 10:16 a.m. Shortly after docking, Hurley said, \u201cit\u2019s been a real honor to be just a small part of this nine year endeavor since the last time a United States space ship docked with the International Space Station.\u201dIn Houston\u2019s mission control, flight director Zeb Scoville congratulated the crew.\u201cBravo on a magnificent moment in spaceflight history,\u201d he said, \u201cand on the start of a new journey that has changed the face of space travel in this new era of space transportation.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSpaceX Dragon spacecraft docks with space station, another mission milestoneReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:17 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley completed a delicate and dangerous part of its mission on May 31. (NASATV)SpaceX has completed the first part of its historic flight to the International Space Station Sunday morning, when its Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the orbiting laboratory at 10:16 a.m., a few minutes earlier than planned.Before opening the hatch and entering the station, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will conduct a series of pressure and leak checks to ensure their safety. Then they will join fellow NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the station.The docking was a delicate and dangerous part of the mission. The spacecraft chased down the space station, traveling in orbit at 17,500 mph, but then approached very slowly in a series of carefully choreographed maneuvers.The mission went smoothly, ground officials said, following a picture-perfect launch some 19 hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center.Docking confirmed! @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug officially docked to the @Space_Station at 10:16am ET: pic.twitter.com/hCM4UvbwjR\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nDo you have the right stuff?Return to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 a.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station is an autonomous vehicle, designed to fly itself.The astronauts can, at any time, take over the controls and fly the capsule manually. During their mission this weekend, they were scheduled to do that twice to test how the spacecraft\u2019s systems work.But the most delicate part of the mission, the docking with the space station, will be done by the spacecraft\u2019s onboard computers. Still, Hurley and Behnken have spent hours in simulators running through every kind of scenario should they need to take over.Now you can see whether you have the \u201cright stuff\u201d by trying to dock the spacecraft on this simulator SpaceX has made available online.\nCrew Dragon is designed to be fully autonomous, but \n@Astro_Doug and @AstroBehnken\n can take control of the spacecraft if necessary. Simulator here \u2192 http://iss-sim.spacex.comPosted by SpaceX on Saturday, 30 May 2020Astronauts take control of capsule as docking nearsReturn to menuBy Jacob Bogage9:50 a.m.Link copiedLinkAstronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken took control of the Endeavour Crew Dragon capsule as it tiptoed its way toward the International Space Station, just after 9:30 a.m.The #SpaceX #CrewDragon is now just 220 m in front of the #ISS. The Dragon is in a hold to perform manual piloting tests. Watch docking live at https://t.co/32lSUUWWtL. #DM2 pic.twitter.com/DAxdA9CxEv\u2014 Alasdair Allan (@aallan) May 31, 2020\n\nThe spacecraft is making small \u201cattitude adjustments,\u201d or slight maneuvers to line up exactly with the docking portal on the ISS. The astronauts can command bursts of Endeavour\u2019s Draco thrusters to ease the vessel back and forth. Afterward, it will begin \u201ctransnational adjustments,\u201d traveling at speeds as gradual as 0.1 meters per second, to rotate Endeavour on its axis.The movements are part of a battery of intricate protocols to prepare the Crew Dragon to meet with the space station. Moving the final 400 meters to the space station, after starting 254 miles away on the Earth\u2019s surface, takes close to two hours, the vast majority of which is spent inside the last 220 meters while negotiating the unique physics of space. For every course correction, there is a counter-correction to halt the spacecraft\u2019s progress.Even as the ISS and Endeavour appear to be sitting still, they\u2019re both flying around the Earth at more than 17,000 miles per hour.Elon Musk and SpaceX pull off another feat few thought possible Return to menuBy Christian Davenport9:33 a.m.Link copiedLinkCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 The goal was always to fly humans. So even when SpaceX built a spacecraft to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station \u2014 but not astronauts \u2014 the designers added a curious feature to make a point: a window.Inside SpaceX, that window became a symbol of its larger ambitions and a reminder to its workforce that human spaceflight was the ultimate goal, the reason Elon Musk started the company as it works eventually to get people to Mars.Since its founding in 2002, SpaceX has achieved remarkable feats few thought possible. It designed rockets that not only propelled their payloads to orbit but landed back on Earth to be reused.It launched the Falcon Heavy, a monster of a rocket with three boosters and 27 engines. It opened up the Pentagon\u2019s launch market, which for a decade had been dominated by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.But for all the successes over the years, and all the hype the company has generated along the way, it had never flown a single person.Until Saturday.With the successful flight, SpaceX joins rarefied company. Only three nations have sent humans to orbit. And while NASA has for years relied on contractors to build the rockets and spacecraft that have flown its astronauts, this launch was done under an unusual arrangement, what NASA calls its \u201ccommercial crew program,\u201d in which two contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, design and build spacecraft to ferry NASA astronauts to the space station.Read more.Good morning from spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:29 a.m.Link copiedLinkIn space, you rise to music.It\u2019s a NASA tradition that stretches back decades: astronauts waking to tunes piped up from the ground. The tradition began in 1965, when the wake-up song was \u201cHello Dolly\u201d by Jack Jones during Gemini 6, and continued during the Apollo program \u201cwhen astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion,\u201d according to a history of NASA wake-up music compiled by Colin Fries, a NASA historian. \u201cSeveral crews have awakened on their final day in space to Dean Martin\u2019s popular song \u2018Going Back to Houston,\u2019\u201d Fries wrote.What does our home planet look like from @SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour? Watch as @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug take you inside the spacecraft and provide an update about our #LaunchAmerica mission: pic.twitter.com/f8b3CrSEPE\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 31, 2020\n\nThe practice was continued during the space shuttle program. John Young and Robert Crippen awoke to \u201cReveille\u201d on the first shuttle mission in 1981.On the final flight of the space shuttle 30 years later, the crews chose an eclectic mix from Elton John\u2019s \u201cRocket Man,\u201d R.E.M.\u2019s \u201cMan on the Moon,\u201d and \u201cHere Comes the Sun\u201d by the Beatles.Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the astronauts aboard SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, went in a different direction for their wake-up call Sunday. At 4:45 a.m. Eastern time, the ground played Black Sabbath\u2019s \u201cPlanet Caravan,\u201d a slow, almost mystical tune that mixes guitar and bongos about \u201ctaking a spaceship out to the stars,\u201d a band member once said.During a live broadcast from the spacecraft, Hurley said the pair was able to get some rest before the wake-up call.\u201cWe ended up sleeping just like we are right now, in our chairs, which was actually a pretty comfortable night\u2019s sleep,\u201d he said. The mission was the first time NASA astronauts had launched from United States soil since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, and it marked the first time a private company had flown astronauts to orbit. NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station after Dragon capsule successfully docks",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s improbable Mars quest runs through a border town concerned with more than getting to space (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6554",
        "date": "2019-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/30/elon-musks-improbable-mars-quest-runs-through-border-town-concerned-with-more-than-getting-space/",
        "text": "BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. \u2014 Cape Canaveral this is not.But here, down toward the coast, on a spit of land past the Border Patrol checkpoint, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, there is a spaceship being assembled off State Highway 4 just before it dead-ends into the sea. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTowering and stainless-steel shiny, it looks like a surreal sculpture amid the cactuses, yucca and relentless South Texas sun. And, because it\u2019s being built not in a factory but out in the open, it\u2019s become a roadside attraction, drawing gawkers to an area so remote that the county trucks in drinking water once a month to the few who live nearby.They\u2019re coming to see Elon Musk\u2019s latest creation, a prototype called Starship that he hopes will one day carry people by the dozens to the moon and Mars. Musk, in a presentation here Saturday, said his goal of building a \u201crapidly reusable spacecraft\u201d here would lead to the fulfillment of his ultimate goal of creating \u201ca city on Mars.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut first, he\u2019ll need to pull off another improbable feat, building a private, commercial spaceport here, in what the top local elected official called a \u201cmind-boggling\u201d juxtaposition: SpaceX, one of the hottest companies in the world, led by a Silicon Valley celebrity with nearly 29 million Twitter followers, building a rocket in a border town where nearly a third of the residents live below the poverty line.\u201cI never in a million years would have imagined it,\u201d said Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevi\u00f1o Jr.Five years ago, SpaceX started building a launchpad here, hauling in dirt by the ton, that would allow the company a measure of freedom without the restraints that come with shooting rockets off from government sites, such as Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where several other companies operate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is really going to be a new kind of spaceport that is optimized for commercial operations,\u201d Musk said during a groundbreaking ceremony in 2014. \u201cCape Canaveral and Cape Vandenberg are great launch sites, but they are military launch sites.\u201dThe company has been welcomed by local officials as a Walt Disney-like messiah that would help spark an economic revival in an area that desperately needs it. The state set aside $15.3 million to help the company build its facilities here and has bought into SpaceX\u2019s vision to transform the area into a commercial spaceport that would be sending people throughout the solar system.\u201cYou know the term \u2018visionary\u2019; they\u2019re the ones who make the world go 'round,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said.Story continues below advertisementOutside the county courthouse, the downtown here is replete with boarded-up businesses. Real estate prices are depressed. Schools are surrounded by security fences. For years, the area has been caught in an unending \u201cvicious cycle,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said, so bad that people who \u201care fortunate to get a college education or a postgraduate degree don\u2019t come back.\u201dAdvertisementWhile he knows SpaceX\u2019s presence has led to \u201cgrowing pains,\u201d he said those are merely the turbulent spasms of progress in an area that has seen very little.But now, across the water on South Padre Island, the county has spent about $31 million building new pavilions and an amphitheater that would host concerts and weddings and make a prime viewing area for rocket launches. Local officials hope for a future where residents and tourists line the beach, the way they have for years along Florida\u2019s Space Coast, cheering rockets as they tear through the sky.The comeback coast\u201cIt\u2019s exciting,\u201d said Sofia Benavides, a county commissioner who represents Boca Chica. \u201cI\u2019m 69 years old and have never been to a rocket launch. For my children and grandchildren, it\u2019s great that this is happening in their backyard.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNot everyone is cheering, though.AdvertisementA handful of residents who live next door to SpaceX\u2019s facilities recently received letters from SpaceX, which said the company\u2019s footprint in the area was going to be bigger and more disruptive than originally imagined. As a result, it was seeking to purchase their properties at three times the value determined by an appraiser hired by SpaceX. The deal was nonnegotiable, the letter said, and the company wanted an answer within two weeks, although some have received extensions.Called Boca Chica Village, the area is made up of about 30 homes within walking distance of the Gulf of Mexico, occupied mostly seasonally. Many are boarded up. A few have weeds as high as the mailboxes.The few full-time residents moved here seeking an end-of-the-road refuge. It\u2019s nothing fancy \u2014 an outpost with little more than surf and sun and spotty cell reception, where fishermen drive their trucks up on the beach. There\u2019s no running water, so the county brings in giant water tanks for residents once a month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRay Pointer discovered the area by accident in 2002. He was trying to make his way to South Padre Island, the resort town just to the north but, instead, made a wrong turn, ended up in Boca Chica and decided he had found an oasis where he would plant his flag.His neighbor Bonnie Heaton moved to Boca Chica 18 years ago from Minnesota with her husband after they retired. It was a place so desolate and tranquil she recalled the UPS delivery man once saying, \u201cI didn\u2019t know anyone lived out here.\u201d\u201cWe came across this place and never left,\u201d she said.The letter from SpaceX, then, came as a shock, one that she said felt like \u201ca hostile takeover.\u201d\u201cThe thought of a company that\u2019s going to shoot a rocket to the moon or Mars, that\u2019s exciting, that\u2019s history,\u201d she said. \u201cBut when you get to the other side of the coin, and you lose your house, it\u2019s terrifying.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRay Pointer and his wife, Maria, feel the same way. They were offered $233,000 for their home, Ray Pointer, 72, said, a figure he believes is outlandishly low. (Zillow estimates the value of their home at $103,655.)\u201cTo tell me to leave and not really compensate me is unconscionable,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not fair. It\u2019s not the right thing to do. SpaceX is better than that.\u201dWhile many of their neighbors, who don\u2019t live in Boca Chica year round, have taken the offer, they continue to try to negotiate.What does it mean to be a NASA astronaut in the celebrity space age?To Trevi\u00f1o and other local officials, moving a few residents is a small price to pay to make way for SpaceX and its starry ambitions.\u201cWe have to think big-picture,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said. \u201cAnd the fact that an individual with the vision like Elon Musk is investing his time, his money and his efforts to build his dream of launching to the moon and Mars here \u2014 it\u2019s important that we be a part of that.\u201dSpaceX chose the area because of its location and comparative desolation \u2014 you want to launch rockets near the equator and over unpopulated areas. On Saturday night, Musk was here himself, to show off the rocket his team had been working to complete and to discuss his vision of the future. As for the rocket ranch he is building, he said it would continue to grow with more buildings and increased activity that forced the company to buy out residents\u2019 property.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInitially, SpaceX had intended to launch its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from here. But as the concept for Starship began to form in his imagination, he decided to switch gears and make Boca Chica home to the new, massive rocket he hopes will take people deep into the solar system.\u201cI think there will be a lot more buildings and a lot more stuff \u2014 way more stuff than is currently here,\u201d he said. A sense of urgency to get Starship built led the company to do it in the ramshackle way it has \u2014 outside, without a factory in sight, in a barren setting fit for Star Wars that, as he wrote on Twitter earlier this month, could be labeled \u201cDroid Junkyard, Tatooine.\u201d\u201cSince it was going to take too long to build the buildings we built [Starship] outside,\u201d he said. \u201cMy new thing is management by rhyming: If the schedule is long, it\u2019s wrong; if it\u2019s tight, it\u2019s right.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost of the presentation focused on technical details, the benefits of stainless steel vs. carbon composites (\u201cI\u2019m in love with steel,\u201d he said at one point), orbital mechanics, reentry vectors (\u201cIt\u2019ll look totally nuts to see this thing land.\u201d), the importance of orbital refueling and a future where humanity is \u201cout among the stars.\u201d\u201cThe critical breakthrough that\u2019s needed for us to become a spacefaring civilization is to make space travel like air travel,\u201d Musk said. The first flight of the test vehicle \u2014 which looks as if it were born from a collaboration between Wernher von Braun, the designer of the Saturn V Apollo-era rocket, and Frank Gehry, the modernist architect \u2014 would come within a couple of months, he said, a short, suborbital hop to about 12 miles high.Saturday\u2019s presentation was the latest in a series of grand space talks that Musk\u2019s fans have lauded as visionary and critics have derided as fantasy. But for all the hype SpaceX has received, and for the myriad times Musk has talked about making humanity a \u201cmulti-planet species,\u201d it still has not flown a single human being anywhere, let alone the moon or to Mars.All the talk, then, of futuristic spaceships and deep space exploration rubbed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine the wrong way. SpaceX is preparing to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station under a contract worth $2.6 billion. SpaceX, like Boeing, the other company hired to fly astronauts to the station, is years behind schedule. And in April, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, designed to carry the crews, exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines.In a tweet Friday, Bridenstine took the bold and unusual step of firing a shot at the company, saying that while he was looking forward to SpaceX\u2019s announcement, the agency \u201cexpects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It\u2019s time to deliver.\u201dMy statement on @SpaceX's announcement tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/C67MhSeNsa\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 27, 2019\n\nIn response Saturday, Musk said that the company\u2019s \u201cresources are overwhelmingly on Falcon and Dragon,\u201d the rocket and spacecraft that would be used to fly NASA astronauts. And company officials stressed that flying NASA\u2019s astronauts is SpaceX\u2019s top priority.But Musk\u2019s focus is clearly on the next-generation spacecraft he has been envisioning for years, one that has gone through multiple iterations and is still evolving, a stubborn problem not fully solved.Meantime, Bonnie Heaton wonders where she\u2019ll go next and whether she\u2019ll ever be able to afford another place so close to the water, where during the evening, the \u201csun melts into the ocean,\u201d she said.There is one thing she knows for sure, though: \u201cI don\u2019t want to go to Mars. Let him do that.\u201d On a spit of Texas land past the Border Patrol checkpoint, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, there is a spaceship being assembled off State Highway 4 just before it dead-ends into the sea. But not everyone is cheering. Elon Musk\u2019s improbable Mars quest runs through a border town concerned with more than getting to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s improbable Mars quest runs through a border town concerned with more than getting to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6555",
        "date": "2019-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/30/elon-musks-improbable-mars-quest-runs-through-border-town-concerned-with-more-than-getting-space/",
        "text": "BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. \u2014 Cape Canaveral this is not.But here, down toward the coast, on a spit of land past the Border Patrol checkpoint, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, there is a spaceship being assembled off State Highway 4 just before it dead-ends into the sea. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTowering and stainless-steel shiny, it looks like a surreal sculpture amid the cactuses, yucca and relentless South Texas sun. And, because it\u2019s being built not in a factory but out in the open, it\u2019s become a roadside attraction, drawing gawkers to an area so remote that the county trucks in drinking water once a month to the few who live nearby.They\u2019re coming to see Elon Musk\u2019s latest creation, a prototype called Starship that he hopes will one day carry people by the dozens to the moon and Mars. Musk, in a presentation here Saturday, said his goal of building a \u201crapidly reusable spacecraft\u201d here would lead to the fulfillment of his ultimate goal of creating \u201ca city on Mars.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut first, he\u2019ll need to pull off another improbable feat, building a private, commercial spaceport here, in what the top local elected official called a \u201cmind-boggling\u201d juxtaposition: SpaceX, one of the hottest companies in the world, led by a Silicon Valley celebrity with nearly 29 million Twitter followers, building a rocket in a border town where nearly a third of the residents live below the poverty line.\u201cI never in a million years would have imagined it,\u201d said Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevi\u00f1o Jr.Five years ago, SpaceX started building a launchpad here, hauling in dirt by the ton, that would allow the company a measure of freedom without the restraints that come with shooting rockets off from government sites, such as Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where several other companies operate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is really going to be a new kind of spaceport that is optimized for commercial operations,\u201d Musk said during a groundbreaking ceremony in 2014. \u201cCape Canaveral and Cape Vandenberg are great launch sites, but they are military launch sites.\u201dThe company has been welcomed by local officials as a Walt Disney-like messiah that would help spark an economic revival in an area that desperately needs it. The state set aside $15.3 million to help the company build its facilities here and has bought into SpaceX\u2019s vision to transform the area into a commercial spaceport that would be sending people throughout the solar system.\u201cYou know the term \u2018visionary\u2019; they\u2019re the ones who make the world go 'round,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said.Story continues below advertisementOutside the county courthouse, the downtown here is replete with boarded-up businesses. Real estate prices are depressed. Schools are surrounded by security fences. For years, the area has been caught in an unending \u201cvicious cycle,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said, so bad that people who \u201care fortunate to get a college education or a postgraduate degree don\u2019t come back.\u201dAdvertisementWhile he knows SpaceX\u2019s presence has led to \u201cgrowing pains,\u201d he said those are merely the turbulent spasms of progress in an area that has seen very little.But now, across the water on South Padre Island, the county has spent about $31 million building new pavilions and an amphitheater that would host concerts and weddings and make a prime viewing area for rocket launches. Local officials hope for a future where residents and tourists line the beach, the way they have for years along Florida\u2019s Space Coast, cheering rockets as they tear through the sky.The comeback coast\u201cIt\u2019s exciting,\u201d said Sofia Benavides, a county commissioner who represents Boca Chica. \u201cI\u2019m 69 years old and have never been to a rocket launch. For my children and grandchildren, it\u2019s great that this is happening in their backyard.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNot everyone is cheering, though.AdvertisementA handful of residents who live next door to SpaceX\u2019s facilities recently received letters from SpaceX, which said the company\u2019s footprint in the area was going to be bigger and more disruptive than originally imagined. As a result, it was seeking to purchase their properties at three times the value determined by an appraiser hired by SpaceX. The deal was nonnegotiable, the letter said, and the company wanted an answer within two weeks, although some have received extensions.Called Boca Chica Village, the area is made up of about 30 homes within walking distance of the Gulf of Mexico, occupied mostly seasonally. Many are boarded up. A few have weeds as high as the mailboxes.The few full-time residents moved here seeking an end-of-the-road refuge. It\u2019s nothing fancy \u2014 an outpost with little more than surf and sun and spotty cell reception, where fishermen drive their trucks up on the beach. There\u2019s no running water, so the county brings in giant water tanks for residents once a month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRay Pointer discovered the area by accident in 2002. He was trying to make his way to South Padre Island, the resort town just to the north but, instead, made a wrong turn, ended up in Boca Chica and decided he had found an oasis where he would plant his flag.His neighbor Bonnie Heaton moved to Boca Chica 18 years ago from Minnesota with her husband after they retired. It was a place so desolate and tranquil she recalled the UPS delivery man once saying, \u201cI didn\u2019t know anyone lived out here.\u201d\u201cWe came across this place and never left,\u201d she said.The letter from SpaceX, then, came as a shock, one that she said felt like \u201ca hostile takeover.\u201d\u201cThe thought of a company that\u2019s going to shoot a rocket to the moon or Mars, that\u2019s exciting, that\u2019s history,\u201d she said. \u201cBut when you get to the other side of the coin, and you lose your house, it\u2019s terrifying.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRay Pointer and his wife, Maria, feel the same way. They were offered $233,000 for their home, Ray Pointer, 72, said, a figure he believes is outlandishly low. (Zillow estimates the value of their home at $103,655.)\u201cTo tell me to leave and not really compensate me is unconscionable,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not fair. It\u2019s not the right thing to do. SpaceX is better than that.\u201dWhile many of their neighbors, who don\u2019t live in Boca Chica year round, have taken the offer, they continue to try to negotiate.What does it mean to be a NASA astronaut in the celebrity space age?To Trevi\u00f1o and other local officials, moving a few residents is a small price to pay to make way for SpaceX and its starry ambitions.\u201cWe have to think big-picture,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said. \u201cAnd the fact that an individual with the vision like Elon Musk is investing his time, his money and his efforts to build his dream of launching to the moon and Mars here \u2014 it\u2019s important that we be a part of that.\u201dSpaceX chose the area because of its location and comparative desolation \u2014 you want to launch rockets near the equator and over unpopulated areas. On Saturday night, Musk was here himself, to show off the rocket his team had been working to complete and to discuss his vision of the future. As for the rocket ranch he is building, he said it would continue to grow with more buildings and increased activity that forced the company to buy out residents\u2019 property.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInitially, SpaceX had intended to launch its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from here. But as the concept for Starship began to form in his imagination, he decided to switch gears and make Boca Chica home to the new, massive rocket he hopes will take people deep into the solar system.\u201cI think there will be a lot more buildings and a lot more stuff \u2014 way more stuff than is currently here,\u201d he said. A sense of urgency to get Starship built led the company to do it in the ramshackle way it has \u2014 outside, without a factory in sight, in a barren setting fit for Star Wars that, as he wrote on Twitter earlier this month, could be labeled \u201cDroid Junkyard, Tatooine.\u201d\u201cSince it was going to take too long to build the buildings we built [Starship] outside,\u201d he said. \u201cMy new thing is management by rhyming: If the schedule is long, it\u2019s wrong; if it\u2019s tight, it\u2019s right.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost of the presentation focused on technical details, the benefits of stainless steel vs. carbon composites (\u201cI\u2019m in love with steel,\u201d he said at one point), orbital mechanics, reentry vectors (\u201cIt\u2019ll look totally nuts to see this thing land.\u201d), the importance of orbital refueling and a future where humanity is \u201cout among the stars.\u201d\u201cThe critical breakthrough that\u2019s needed for us to become a spacefaring civilization is to make space travel like air travel,\u201d Musk said. The first flight of the test vehicle \u2014 which looks as if it were born from a collaboration between Wernher von Braun, the designer of the Saturn V Apollo-era rocket, and Frank Gehry, the modernist architect \u2014 would come within a couple of months, he said, a short, suborbital hop to about 12 miles high.Saturday\u2019s presentation was the latest in a series of grand space talks that Musk\u2019s fans have lauded as visionary and critics have derided as fantasy. But for all the hype SpaceX has received, and for the myriad times Musk has talked about making humanity a \u201cmulti-planet species,\u201d it still has not flown a single human being anywhere, let alone the moon or to Mars.All the talk, then, of futuristic spaceships and deep space exploration rubbed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine the wrong way. SpaceX is preparing to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station under a contract worth $2.6 billion. SpaceX, like Boeing, the other company hired to fly astronauts to the station, is years behind schedule. And in April, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, designed to carry the crews, exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines.In a tweet Friday, Bridenstine took the bold and unusual step of firing a shot at the company, saying that while he was looking forward to SpaceX\u2019s announcement, the agency \u201cexpects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It\u2019s time to deliver.\u201dMy statement on @SpaceX's announcement tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/C67MhSeNsa\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 27, 2019\n\nIn response Saturday, Musk said that the company\u2019s \u201cresources are overwhelmingly on Falcon and Dragon,\u201d the rocket and spacecraft that would be used to fly NASA astronauts. And company officials stressed that flying NASA\u2019s astronauts is SpaceX\u2019s top priority.But Musk\u2019s focus is clearly on the next-generation spacecraft he has been envisioning for years, one that has gone through multiple iterations and is still evolving, a stubborn problem not fully solved.Meantime, Bonnie Heaton wonders where she\u2019ll go next and whether she\u2019ll ever be able to afford another place so close to the water, where during the evening, the \u201csun melts into the ocean,\u201d she said.There is one thing she knows for sure, though: \u201cI don\u2019t want to go to Mars. Let him do that.\u201d On a spit of Texas land past the Border Patrol checkpoint, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, there is a spaceship being assembled off State Highway 4 just before it dead-ends into the sea. But not everyone is cheering. Elon Musk\u2019s improbable Mars quest runs through a border town concerned with more than getting to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s improbable Mars quest runs through a border town concerned with more than getting to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6556",
        "date": "2019-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/30/elon-musks-improbable-mars-quest-runs-through-border-town-concerned-with-more-than-getting-space/",
        "text": "BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, Tex. \u2014 Cape Canaveral this is not.But here, down toward the coast, on a spit of land past the Border Patrol checkpoint, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, there is a spaceship being assembled off State Highway 4 just before it dead-ends into the sea. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTowering and stainless-steel shiny, it looks like a surreal sculpture amid the cactuses, yucca and relentless South Texas sun. And, because it\u2019s being built not in a factory but out in the open, it\u2019s become a roadside attraction, drawing gawkers to an area so remote that the county trucks in drinking water once a month to the few who live nearby.They\u2019re coming to see Elon Musk\u2019s latest creation, a prototype called Starship that he hopes will one day carry people by the dozens to the moon and Mars. Musk, in a presentation here Saturday, said his goal of building a \u201crapidly reusable spacecraft\u201d here would lead to the fulfillment of his ultimate goal of creating \u201ca city on Mars.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut first, he\u2019ll need to pull off another improbable feat, building a private, commercial spaceport here, in what the top local elected official called a \u201cmind-boggling\u201d juxtaposition: SpaceX, one of the hottest companies in the world, led by a Silicon Valley celebrity with nearly 29 million Twitter followers, building a rocket in a border town where nearly a third of the residents live below the poverty line.\u201cI never in a million years would have imagined it,\u201d said Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevi\u00f1o Jr.Five years ago, SpaceX started building a launchpad here, hauling in dirt by the ton, that would allow the company a measure of freedom without the restraints that come with shooting rockets off from government sites, such as Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where several other companies operate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis is really going to be a new kind of spaceport that is optimized for commercial operations,\u201d Musk said during a groundbreaking ceremony in 2014. \u201cCape Canaveral and Cape Vandenberg are great launch sites, but they are military launch sites.\u201dThe company has been welcomed by local officials as a Walt Disney-like messiah that would help spark an economic revival in an area that desperately needs it. The state set aside $15.3 million to help the company build its facilities here and has bought into SpaceX\u2019s vision to transform the area into a commercial spaceport that would be sending people throughout the solar system.\u201cYou know the term \u2018visionary\u2019; they\u2019re the ones who make the world go 'round,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said.Story continues below advertisementOutside the county courthouse, the downtown here is replete with boarded-up businesses. Real estate prices are depressed. Schools are surrounded by security fences. For years, the area has been caught in an unending \u201cvicious cycle,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said, so bad that people who \u201care fortunate to get a college education or a postgraduate degree don\u2019t come back.\u201dAdvertisementWhile he knows SpaceX\u2019s presence has led to \u201cgrowing pains,\u201d he said those are merely the turbulent spasms of progress in an area that has seen very little.But now, across the water on South Padre Island, the county has spent about $31 million building new pavilions and an amphitheater that would host concerts and weddings and make a prime viewing area for rocket launches. Local officials hope for a future where residents and tourists line the beach, the way they have for years along Florida\u2019s Space Coast, cheering rockets as they tear through the sky.The comeback coast\u201cIt\u2019s exciting,\u201d said Sofia Benavides, a county commissioner who represents Boca Chica. \u201cI\u2019m 69 years old and have never been to a rocket launch. For my children and grandchildren, it\u2019s great that this is happening in their backyard.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNot everyone is cheering, though.AdvertisementA handful of residents who live next door to SpaceX\u2019s facilities recently received letters from SpaceX, which said the company\u2019s footprint in the area was going to be bigger and more disruptive than originally imagined. As a result, it was seeking to purchase their properties at three times the value determined by an appraiser hired by SpaceX. The deal was nonnegotiable, the letter said, and the company wanted an answer within two weeks, although some have received extensions.Called Boca Chica Village, the area is made up of about 30 homes within walking distance of the Gulf of Mexico, occupied mostly seasonally. Many are boarded up. A few have weeds as high as the mailboxes.The few full-time residents moved here seeking an end-of-the-road refuge. It\u2019s nothing fancy \u2014 an outpost with little more than surf and sun and spotty cell reception, where fishermen drive their trucks up on the beach. There\u2019s no running water, so the county brings in giant water tanks for residents once a month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRay Pointer discovered the area by accident in 2002. He was trying to make his way to South Padre Island, the resort town just to the north but, instead, made a wrong turn, ended up in Boca Chica and decided he had found an oasis where he would plant his flag.His neighbor Bonnie Heaton moved to Boca Chica 18 years ago from Minnesota with her husband after they retired. It was a place so desolate and tranquil she recalled the UPS delivery man once saying, \u201cI didn\u2019t know anyone lived out here.\u201d\u201cWe came across this place and never left,\u201d she said.The letter from SpaceX, then, came as a shock, one that she said felt like \u201ca hostile takeover.\u201d\u201cThe thought of a company that\u2019s going to shoot a rocket to the moon or Mars, that\u2019s exciting, that\u2019s history,\u201d she said. \u201cBut when you get to the other side of the coin, and you lose your house, it\u2019s terrifying.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRay Pointer and his wife, Maria, feel the same way. They were offered $233,000 for their home, Ray Pointer, 72, said, a figure he believes is outlandishly low. (Zillow estimates the value of their home at $103,655.)\u201cTo tell me to leave and not really compensate me is unconscionable,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not fair. It\u2019s not the right thing to do. SpaceX is better than that.\u201dWhile many of their neighbors, who don\u2019t live in Boca Chica year round, have taken the offer, they continue to try to negotiate.What does it mean to be a NASA astronaut in the celebrity space age?To Trevi\u00f1o and other local officials, moving a few residents is a small price to pay to make way for SpaceX and its starry ambitions.\u201cWe have to think big-picture,\u201d Trevi\u00f1o said. \u201cAnd the fact that an individual with the vision like Elon Musk is investing his time, his money and his efforts to build his dream of launching to the moon and Mars here \u2014 it\u2019s important that we be a part of that.\u201dSpaceX chose the area because of its location and comparative desolation \u2014 you want to launch rockets near the equator and over unpopulated areas. On Saturday night, Musk was here himself, to show off the rocket his team had been working to complete and to discuss his vision of the future. As for the rocket ranch he is building, he said it would continue to grow with more buildings and increased activity that forced the company to buy out residents\u2019 property.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInitially, SpaceX had intended to launch its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from here. But as the concept for Starship began to form in his imagination, he decided to switch gears and make Boca Chica home to the new, massive rocket he hopes will take people deep into the solar system.\u201cI think there will be a lot more buildings and a lot more stuff \u2014 way more stuff than is currently here,\u201d he said. A sense of urgency to get Starship built led the company to do it in the ramshackle way it has \u2014 outside, without a factory in sight, in a barren setting fit for Star Wars that, as he wrote on Twitter earlier this month, could be labeled \u201cDroid Junkyard, Tatooine.\u201d\u201cSince it was going to take too long to build the buildings we built [Starship] outside,\u201d he said. \u201cMy new thing is management by rhyming: If the schedule is long, it\u2019s wrong; if it\u2019s tight, it\u2019s right.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost of the presentation focused on technical details, the benefits of stainless steel vs. carbon composites (\u201cI\u2019m in love with steel,\u201d he said at one point), orbital mechanics, reentry vectors (\u201cIt\u2019ll look totally nuts to see this thing land.\u201d), the importance of orbital refueling and a future where humanity is \u201cout among the stars.\u201d\u201cThe critical breakthrough that\u2019s needed for us to become a spacefaring civilization is to make space travel like air travel,\u201d Musk said. The first flight of the test vehicle \u2014 which looks as if it were born from a collaboration between Wernher von Braun, the designer of the Saturn V Apollo-era rocket, and Frank Gehry, the modernist architect \u2014 would come within a couple of months, he said, a short, suborbital hop to about 12 miles high.Saturday\u2019s presentation was the latest in a series of grand space talks that Musk\u2019s fans have lauded as visionary and critics have derided as fantasy. But for all the hype SpaceX has received, and for the myriad times Musk has talked about making humanity a \u201cmulti-planet species,\u201d it still has not flown a single human being anywhere, let alone the moon or to Mars.All the talk, then, of futuristic spaceships and deep space exploration rubbed NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine the wrong way. SpaceX is preparing to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station under a contract worth $2.6 billion. SpaceX, like Boeing, the other company hired to fly astronauts to the station, is years behind schedule. And in April, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, designed to carry the crews, exploded during a test of its emergency abort engines.In a tweet Friday, Bridenstine took the bold and unusual step of firing a shot at the company, saying that while he was looking forward to SpaceX\u2019s announcement, the agency \u201cexpects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It\u2019s time to deliver.\u201dMy statement on @SpaceX's announcement tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/C67MhSeNsa\u2014 Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 27, 2019\n\nIn response Saturday, Musk said that the company\u2019s \u201cresources are overwhelmingly on Falcon and Dragon,\u201d the rocket and spacecraft that would be used to fly NASA astronauts. And company officials stressed that flying NASA\u2019s astronauts is SpaceX\u2019s top priority.But Musk\u2019s focus is clearly on the next-generation spacecraft he has been envisioning for years, one that has gone through multiple iterations and is still evolving, a stubborn problem not fully solved.Meantime, Bonnie Heaton wonders where she\u2019ll go next and whether she\u2019ll ever be able to afford another place so close to the water, where during the evening, the \u201csun melts into the ocean,\u201d she said.There is one thing she knows for sure, though: \u201cI don\u2019t want to go to Mars. Let him do that.\u201d On a spit of Texas land past the Border Patrol checkpoint, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico, there is a spaceship being assembled off State Highway 4 just before it dead-ends into the sea. But not everyone is cheering. Elon Musk\u2019s improbable Mars quest runs through a border town concerned with more than getting to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon \u2014 while Apollo 11 was still there (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6557",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/19/soviets-tried-beat-apollo-they-crashed-spacecraft-moon-instead/",
        "text": "As Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface and marveled at the \u201cfine, sandy particles\u201d that crunched under his boot, he and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew were not alone.A Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, had beat them to orbit days before, circumnavigating the moon in a final Cold War showdown race to land on another celestial body and return home. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe unmanned spacecraft\u2019s mission would be an epic coup: get to the moon, scoop up rocks and jettison back toward Earth before the Americans returned with their own samples.That did not happen. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises \u2014 before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface.Story continues below advertisementNASA had worried Luna 15 would interfere with radio transmissions and present a safety risk with Apollo 11, prompting high-level officials to cross the divide in an unprecedented level of cooperation.AdvertisementIt signified something else. The competition between Apollo 11 and Luna 15 to land on the moon and return to Earth did not exactly finish when \u201cthe Eagle\u201d landed, as most believe.\u201cThe race to the moon ends when Luna 15 crashes,\u201d William P. Barry, NASA\u2019s chief historian, told The Washington Post.The Soviet exploration timeline was aggressive and, at turns, tragic. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov melted during reentry, along with the Soyuz 1 capsule in which he was riding, in 1967, all the while \u201ccursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.\u201dWhat it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from spaceIn the next year, two Soviet tortoises became the first Earth beings to circle the moon.Story continues below advertisementLuna 15\u2032s design and launch time frame was incredible for its time, Barry said. Plans were drawn up for a robot designed to land, collect samples and scurry back to Earth.AdvertisementThat was complete in about six months as the Soviets raced to preempt the United States, including an unsuccessful June launch with a mission to grab moon rocks and study the lunar gravitational field. That rocket never left orbit.On July 15, the rocket delivering Luna 15 roared toward the moon three days ahead of the Apollo 11 mission. The race had begun.\u201cI\u2019m sure that the original plan was to beat Apollo 11 back to Earth with their sample,\u201d Barry said.The launch puzzled NASA and surprised the Apollo 11 crew, who only knew about its existence en route to the moon and \u201cdid not know about Luna 15 or its goal,\u201d Armstrong said in 2009.Story continues below advertisementNo one exactly knew where it was going or how it could interfere with the three Americans heading for the same place.The moon\u2019s surface is about the size of Africa, Barry said, but orbital dynamics suggested landing spots around the moon\u2019s equator were best \u2014 potentially limiting the distance between the Columbia command module, the Eagle landing craft and Luna 15.AdvertisementThere was only one unlikely solution to all of this: get the flight details from the Soviets themselves.During the Cold War.In the midst of the moon race.And yet.Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman had met Soviet space official Academician Mstislav V. Keldysh. He later called on him to provide details on Luna 15 and assure it would not interfere with Apollo 11.Story continues below advertisementWhat came next was unprecedented in American-Soviet space relations, Barry said. Keldysh telegraphed the orbital details for Luna 15 and said it would be a safe transit for the U.S. astronauts, though he never divulged the mission details.Meanwhile, as the Apollo 11 rocketed toward the moon, Houston ground control kept the crew informed about the whereabouts of Luna 15. It had entered orbit on July 17, Houston told the crew, according to flight logs. Both spacecrafts made orbital adjustments as ground control in both nations nervously watched.Soviet engineers worried over rugged terrain of the Sea of Crises landing site, NASA has said, and delayed its planned landing for hours.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat opened the window for Apollo 11 to land. As Armstrong and Aldrin took photos, collected samples and marveled at the view of Earth, Luna 15 tumbled in orbit.The Soviets realized they were running out of time, Barry said, and a day later, on July 21, they decided to make an effort to land \u2014 which surprised British astronomers listening to Soviet transmissions. They were unaware it was designed to do so, Discover magazine reported.Luna 15 descended, cushioned by retro rockets. But its trajectory was off, sending the spacecraft careening into a mountain at 298 miles an hour, and finally, plummeting to the moonscape.It crashed about 350 miles from the U.S. landing site at 15:50 UTC \u2014 a full two hours and four minutes before the Eagle began its flight back to the Columbia module.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI say, this has really been drama of the highest order,\u201d a British astronomer said afterward.AdvertisementThe Post reported the crash the next day. \u201cThus, by a fluke of moon geography, a space flight riddle \u2018wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma\u2019 ended in an irony,\u201d Howard Simons wrote. Scientists speculated it was deliberately crashed to \u201cremove its carcass from lunar orbit,\u201d he added, which was also a method the United States practiced.With Putin\u2019s \u2018invincible\u2019 missile taunt, some hear chilling echoes of Sputnik and the Cold WarThe Soviets never fully admitted Luna 15 was an effort to beat the United States to the moon and back, Barry said, though those details emerged after the Soviet Union collapsed. And its return trajectory after the delays made it unlikely it would even beat the American mission back.Story continues below advertisementLuna 15 may have failed its mission, Barry noted, but what scientists learned from the experience became clear in the next decade.More attempts were made for a Luna mission to collect moon rocks. Five in total failed, until 1970, when Luna 16 shoveled 100 grams of dust and returned it to Earth \u2014 the first time an unmanned spacecraft did so from any nation. Later missions yielded more payloads.The bones from the doomed spacecraft may never be found, Barry said. \u201cDistinguishing a crater caused by Luna 15 and a small meteorite would be pretty hard.\u201dRead more:Life in space: 50 astronauts, in their own words50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the \u2018moon hoax\u2019The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises \u2014 all before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface. The Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon \u2014 while Apollo 11 was still there",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon \u2014 while Apollo 11 was still there (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6558",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/19/soviets-tried-beat-apollo-they-crashed-spacecraft-moon-instead/",
        "text": "As Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface and marveled at the \u201cfine, sandy particles\u201d that crunched under his boot, he and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew were not alone.A Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, had beat them to orbit days before, circumnavigating the moon in a final Cold War showdown race to land on another celestial body and return home. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe unmanned spacecraft\u2019s mission would be an epic coup: get to the moon, scoop up rocks and jettison back toward Earth before the Americans returned with their own samples.That did not happen. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises \u2014 before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface.Story continues below advertisementNASA had worried Luna 15 would interfere with radio transmissions and present a safety risk with Apollo 11, prompting high-level officials to cross the divide in an unprecedented level of cooperation.AdvertisementIt signified something else. The competition between Apollo 11 and Luna 15 to land on the moon and return to Earth did not exactly finish when \u201cthe Eagle\u201d landed, as most believe.\u201cThe race to the moon ends when Luna 15 crashes,\u201d William P. Barry, NASA\u2019s chief historian, told The Washington Post.The Soviet exploration timeline was aggressive and, at turns, tragic. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov melted during reentry, along with the Soyuz 1 capsule in which he was riding, in 1967, all the while \u201ccursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.\u201dWhat it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from spaceIn the next year, two Soviet tortoises became the first Earth beings to circle the moon.Story continues below advertisementLuna 15\u2032s design and launch time frame was incredible for its time, Barry said. Plans were drawn up for a robot designed to land, collect samples and scurry back to Earth.AdvertisementThat was complete in about six months as the Soviets raced to preempt the United States, including an unsuccessful June launch with a mission to grab moon rocks and study the lunar gravitational field. That rocket never left orbit.On July 15, the rocket delivering Luna 15 roared toward the moon three days ahead of the Apollo 11 mission. The race had begun.\u201cI\u2019m sure that the original plan was to beat Apollo 11 back to Earth with their sample,\u201d Barry said.The launch puzzled NASA and surprised the Apollo 11 crew, who only knew about its existence en route to the moon and \u201cdid not know about Luna 15 or its goal,\u201d Armstrong said in 2009.Story continues below advertisementNo one exactly knew where it was going or how it could interfere with the three Americans heading for the same place.The moon\u2019s surface is about the size of Africa, Barry said, but orbital dynamics suggested landing spots around the moon\u2019s equator were best \u2014 potentially limiting the distance between the Columbia command module, the Eagle landing craft and Luna 15.AdvertisementThere was only one unlikely solution to all of this: get the flight details from the Soviets themselves.During the Cold War.In the midst of the moon race.And yet.Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman had met Soviet space official Academician Mstislav V. Keldysh. He later called on him to provide details on Luna 15 and assure it would not interfere with Apollo 11.Story continues below advertisementWhat came next was unprecedented in American-Soviet space relations, Barry said. Keldysh telegraphed the orbital details for Luna 15 and said it would be a safe transit for the U.S. astronauts, though he never divulged the mission details.Meanwhile, as the Apollo 11 rocketed toward the moon, Houston ground control kept the crew informed about the whereabouts of Luna 15. It had entered orbit on July 17, Houston told the crew, according to flight logs. Both spacecrafts made orbital adjustments as ground control in both nations nervously watched.Soviet engineers worried over rugged terrain of the Sea of Crises landing site, NASA has said, and delayed its planned landing for hours.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat opened the window for Apollo 11 to land. As Armstrong and Aldrin took photos, collected samples and marveled at the view of Earth, Luna 15 tumbled in orbit.The Soviets realized they were running out of time, Barry said, and a day later, on July 21, they decided to make an effort to land \u2014 which surprised British astronomers listening to Soviet transmissions. They were unaware it was designed to do so, Discover magazine reported.Luna 15 descended, cushioned by retro rockets. But its trajectory was off, sending the spacecraft careening into a mountain at 298 miles an hour, and finally, plummeting to the moonscape.It crashed about 350 miles from the U.S. landing site at 15:50 UTC \u2014 a full two hours and four minutes before the Eagle began its flight back to the Columbia module.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI say, this has really been drama of the highest order,\u201d a British astronomer said afterward.AdvertisementThe Post reported the crash the next day. \u201cThus, by a fluke of moon geography, a space flight riddle \u2018wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma\u2019 ended in an irony,\u201d Howard Simons wrote. Scientists speculated it was deliberately crashed to \u201cremove its carcass from lunar orbit,\u201d he added, which was also a method the United States practiced.With Putin\u2019s \u2018invincible\u2019 missile taunt, some hear chilling echoes of Sputnik and the Cold WarThe Soviets never fully admitted Luna 15 was an effort to beat the United States to the moon and back, Barry said, though those details emerged after the Soviet Union collapsed. And its return trajectory after the delays made it unlikely it would even beat the American mission back.Story continues below advertisementLuna 15 may have failed its mission, Barry noted, but what scientists learned from the experience became clear in the next decade.More attempts were made for a Luna mission to collect moon rocks. Five in total failed, until 1970, when Luna 16 shoveled 100 grams of dust and returned it to Earth \u2014 the first time an unmanned spacecraft did so from any nation. Later missions yielded more payloads.The bones from the doomed spacecraft may never be found, Barry said. \u201cDistinguishing a crater caused by Luna 15 and a small meteorite would be pretty hard.\u201dRead more:Life in space: 50 astronauts, in their own words50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the \u2018moon hoax\u2019The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises \u2014 all before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface. The Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon \u2014 while Apollo 11 was still there",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon \u2014 while Apollo 11 was still there (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6559",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/19/soviets-tried-beat-apollo-they-crashed-spacecraft-moon-instead/",
        "text": "As Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface and marveled at the \u201cfine, sandy particles\u201d that crunched under his boot, he and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew were not alone.A Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, had beat them to orbit days before, circumnavigating the moon in a final Cold War showdown race to land on another celestial body and return home. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe unmanned spacecraft\u2019s mission would be an epic coup: get to the moon, scoop up rocks and jettison back toward Earth before the Americans returned with their own samples.That did not happen. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises \u2014 before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface.Story continues below advertisementNASA had worried Luna 15 would interfere with radio transmissions and present a safety risk with Apollo 11, prompting high-level officials to cross the divide in an unprecedented level of cooperation.AdvertisementIt signified something else. The competition between Apollo 11 and Luna 15 to land on the moon and return to Earth did not exactly finish when \u201cthe Eagle\u201d landed, as most believe.\u201cThe race to the moon ends when Luna 15 crashes,\u201d William P. Barry, NASA\u2019s chief historian, told The Washington Post.The Soviet exploration timeline was aggressive and, at turns, tragic. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov melted during reentry, along with the Soyuz 1 capsule in which he was riding, in 1967, all the while \u201ccursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.\u201dWhat it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from spaceIn the next year, two Soviet tortoises became the first Earth beings to circle the moon.Story continues below advertisementLuna 15\u2032s design and launch time frame was incredible for its time, Barry said. Plans were drawn up for a robot designed to land, collect samples and scurry back to Earth.AdvertisementThat was complete in about six months as the Soviets raced to preempt the United States, including an unsuccessful June launch with a mission to grab moon rocks and study the lunar gravitational field. That rocket never left orbit.On July 15, the rocket delivering Luna 15 roared toward the moon three days ahead of the Apollo 11 mission. The race had begun.\u201cI\u2019m sure that the original plan was to beat Apollo 11 back to Earth with their sample,\u201d Barry said.The launch puzzled NASA and surprised the Apollo 11 crew, who only knew about its existence en route to the moon and \u201cdid not know about Luna 15 or its goal,\u201d Armstrong said in 2009.Story continues below advertisementNo one exactly knew where it was going or how it could interfere with the three Americans heading for the same place.The moon\u2019s surface is about the size of Africa, Barry said, but orbital dynamics suggested landing spots around the moon\u2019s equator were best \u2014 potentially limiting the distance between the Columbia command module, the Eagle landing craft and Luna 15.AdvertisementThere was only one unlikely solution to all of this: get the flight details from the Soviets themselves.During the Cold War.In the midst of the moon race.And yet.Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman had met Soviet space official Academician Mstislav V. Keldysh. He later called on him to provide details on Luna 15 and assure it would not interfere with Apollo 11.Story continues below advertisementWhat came next was unprecedented in American-Soviet space relations, Barry said. Keldysh telegraphed the orbital details for Luna 15 and said it would be a safe transit for the U.S. astronauts, though he never divulged the mission details.Meanwhile, as the Apollo 11 rocketed toward the moon, Houston ground control kept the crew informed about the whereabouts of Luna 15. It had entered orbit on July 17, Houston told the crew, according to flight logs. Both spacecrafts made orbital adjustments as ground control in both nations nervously watched.Soviet engineers worried over rugged terrain of the Sea of Crises landing site, NASA has said, and delayed its planned landing for hours.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat opened the window for Apollo 11 to land. As Armstrong and Aldrin took photos, collected samples and marveled at the view of Earth, Luna 15 tumbled in orbit.The Soviets realized they were running out of time, Barry said, and a day later, on July 21, they decided to make an effort to land \u2014 which surprised British astronomers listening to Soviet transmissions. They were unaware it was designed to do so, Discover magazine reported.Luna 15 descended, cushioned by retro rockets. But its trajectory was off, sending the spacecraft careening into a mountain at 298 miles an hour, and finally, plummeting to the moonscape.It crashed about 350 miles from the U.S. landing site at 15:50 UTC \u2014 a full two hours and four minutes before the Eagle began its flight back to the Columbia module.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI say, this has really been drama of the highest order,\u201d a British astronomer said afterward.AdvertisementThe Post reported the crash the next day. \u201cThus, by a fluke of moon geography, a space flight riddle \u2018wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma\u2019 ended in an irony,\u201d Howard Simons wrote. Scientists speculated it was deliberately crashed to \u201cremove its carcass from lunar orbit,\u201d he added, which was also a method the United States practiced.With Putin\u2019s \u2018invincible\u2019 missile taunt, some hear chilling echoes of Sputnik and the Cold WarThe Soviets never fully admitted Luna 15 was an effort to beat the United States to the moon and back, Barry said, though those details emerged after the Soviet Union collapsed. And its return trajectory after the delays made it unlikely it would even beat the American mission back.Story continues below advertisementLuna 15 may have failed its mission, Barry noted, but what scientists learned from the experience became clear in the next decade.More attempts were made for a Luna mission to collect moon rocks. Five in total failed, until 1970, when Luna 16 shoveled 100 grams of dust and returned it to Earth \u2014 the first time an unmanned spacecraft did so from any nation. Later missions yielded more payloads.The bones from the doomed spacecraft may never be found, Barry said. \u201cDistinguishing a crater caused by Luna 15 and a small meteorite would be pretty hard.\u201dRead more:Life in space: 50 astronauts, in their own words50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the \u2018moon hoax\u2019The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises \u2014 all before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface. The Soviets crashed a spacecraft onto the moon \u2014 while Apollo 11 was still there",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million.  (WP: Space) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6560",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/22/nasa-commercial-marketing-space/",
        "text": "A year after NASA announced that it would allow companies to market products on orbit as well as open the International Space Station to private citizens, the space agency said Monday it is well on its way to transforming the orbiting lab into a commercial hub.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has five proposals from companies for commercial and marketing opportunities on the station. One of those is there, the agency said in a news release Monday. Also on Monday, Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company, announced that it has signed an agreement with NASA to identify people who might want to fly to the space station as well as prepare them for the mission, joining others that are trying to help promote private flights there.Story continues below advertisementIn January, NASA signed an agreement with KBR to help train private astronauts at NASA facilities. And NASA has an agreement with another company, Axiom Space, which has already booked a crew of four to the station in a flight that could happen as soon as the second half of next year. Separately, SpaceX has signed an agreement to send a private citizen to space.AdvertisementThe moves come as NASA is moving aggressively to leverage the growing capability of the commercial space sector, which for years has flown cargo and supplies to the space station. Last month, SpaceX became the first private company to fly NASA astronauts there.Private companies are also trying to build commercial habitats in space. And NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine recently announced on Twitter that the space agency would fly its astronauts on suborbital spacecraft, such as those being developed by Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, as part their training. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe space agency is also seeking to partner with the private sector in its return to the moon. Earlier this year, it awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts to three companies to develop spacecraft capable of taking astronauts to and from the lunar surface.AdvertisementIn a statement, NASA said that \u201cproviding expanded opportunities at the International Space Station to manufacture, market and promote commercial products and services will help catalyze and expand space exploration markets for many businesses.\u201dNASA would not say what companies have submitted marketing proposals or what the efforts entail. An agency spokesperson said NASA recognizes that it must be transparent with the public about the activities on board the station, in which taxpayers have invested more than $100 billion. But at the same time, if it unveils a companies\u2019 advertisement or marketing plan prematurely, it will reduce the incentive for those companies to use the station.Story continues below advertisementNASA also has not said who the private astronauts are that Axiom Space would send to the station. In March, the company said it had signed a contract with SpaceX to fly a \u201ccommander professionally trained by Axiom alongside three private astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\u201d The mission is set to launch as early as the second half of next year and the crew would \u201cexperience at least eight days of microgravity and views of Earth.\u201dAdvertisementBridenstine has said Axiom is working with Tom Cruise to film a movie on board the station, but the company has not confirmed that. It is expected to make an announcement on the crew members for its flight next month.NASA\u2019s promotion of the space station for private use is an abrupt about-face for the agency, which for years went to great lengths to prohibit corporate interests in space. Even as its astronauts gobbled M&Ms in space, NASA steadfastly stayed away from endorsing any particular product or company, referring instead to \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand over another.Story continues below advertisementFor years, NASA had prohibited private citizens from the station, although Russia allows it and has over the years flown several people there.The flights won\u2019t be cheap. NASA has said it would charge $35,000 a day for passengers to stay aboard the station. And the rides there could cost some $50 million, officials have estimated, though that would be determined by the two companies NASA has hired to fly astronauts to the station, SpaceX and Boeing.AdvertisementIn an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the company\u2019s astronaut training program would build on its work developing a suborbital spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo.Story continues below advertisementThe company has flown the vehicle to the edge of space twice, and it has some 600 people who have paid for trips, or put down significant deposits toward the tickets, which can cost as much as $250,000.\u201cWe put a huge amount of thought into our training program for SpaceShipTwo,\u201d he said. For the orbital flights, the company would look at \u201ccreating something that is safe, comprehensive, educational but also really fun and has a lot of style.\u201d NASA announced that it is well on its way to transforming the International Space Station into a commercial hub. Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6561",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/22/nasa-commercial-marketing-space/",
        "text": "A year after NASA announced that it would allow companies to market products on orbit as well as open the International Space Station to private citizens, the space agency said Monday it is well on its way to transforming the orbiting lab into a commercial hub.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has five proposals from companies for commercial and marketing opportunities on the station. One of those is there, the agency said in a news release Monday. Also on Monday, Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company, announced that it has signed an agreement with NASA to identify people who might want to fly to the space station as well as prepare them for the mission, joining others that are trying to help promote private flights there.Story continues below advertisementIn January, NASA signed an agreement with KBR to help train private astronauts at NASA facilities. And NASA has an agreement with another company, Axiom Space, which has already booked a crew of four to the station in a flight that could happen as soon as the second half of next year. Separately, SpaceX has signed an agreement to send a private citizen to space.AdvertisementThe moves come as NASA is moving aggressively to leverage the growing capability of the commercial space sector, which for years has flown cargo and supplies to the space station. Last month, SpaceX became the first private company to fly NASA astronauts there.Private companies are also trying to build commercial habitats in space. And NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine recently announced on Twitter that the space agency would fly its astronauts on suborbital spacecraft, such as those being developed by Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, as part their training. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe space agency is also seeking to partner with the private sector in its return to the moon. Earlier this year, it awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts to three companies to develop spacecraft capable of taking astronauts to and from the lunar surface.AdvertisementIn a statement, NASA said that \u201cproviding expanded opportunities at the International Space Station to manufacture, market and promote commercial products and services will help catalyze and expand space exploration markets for many businesses.\u201dNASA would not say what companies have submitted marketing proposals or what the efforts entail. An agency spokesperson said NASA recognizes that it must be transparent with the public about the activities on board the station, in which taxpayers have invested more than $100 billion. But at the same time, if it unveils a companies\u2019 advertisement or marketing plan prematurely, it will reduce the incentive for those companies to use the station.Story continues below advertisementNASA also has not said who the private astronauts are that Axiom Space would send to the station. In March, the company said it had signed a contract with SpaceX to fly a \u201ccommander professionally trained by Axiom alongside three private astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\u201d The mission is set to launch as early as the second half of next year and the crew would \u201cexperience at least eight days of microgravity and views of Earth.\u201dAdvertisementBridenstine has said Axiom is working with Tom Cruise to film a movie on board the station, but the company has not confirmed that. It is expected to make an announcement on the crew members for its flight next month.NASA\u2019s promotion of the space station for private use is an abrupt about-face for the agency, which for years went to great lengths to prohibit corporate interests in space. Even as its astronauts gobbled M&Ms in space, NASA steadfastly stayed away from endorsing any particular product or company, referring instead to \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand over another.Story continues below advertisementFor years, NASA had prohibited private citizens from the station, although Russia allows it and has over the years flown several people there.The flights won\u2019t be cheap. NASA has said it would charge $35,000 a day for passengers to stay aboard the station. And the rides there could cost some $50 million, officials have estimated, though that would be determined by the two companies NASA has hired to fly astronauts to the station, SpaceX and Boeing.AdvertisementIn an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the company\u2019s astronaut training program would build on its work developing a suborbital spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo.Story continues below advertisementThe company has flown the vehicle to the edge of space twice, and it has some 600 people who have paid for trips, or put down significant deposits toward the tickets, which can cost as much as $250,000.\u201cWe put a huge amount of thought into our training program for SpaceShipTwo,\u201d he said. For the orbital flights, the company would look at \u201ccreating something that is safe, comprehensive, educational but also really fun and has a lot of style.\u201d NASA announced that it is well on its way to transforming the International Space Station into a commercial hub. Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6562",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/22/nasa-commercial-marketing-space/",
        "text": "A year after NASA announced that it would allow companies to market products on orbit as well as open the International Space Station to private citizens, the space agency said Monday it is well on its way to transforming the orbiting lab into a commercial hub.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has five proposals from companies for commercial and marketing opportunities on the station. One of those is there, the agency said in a news release Monday. Also on Monday, Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company, announced that it has signed an agreement with NASA to identify people who might want to fly to the space station as well as prepare them for the mission, joining others that are trying to help promote private flights there.Story continues below advertisementIn January, NASA signed an agreement with KBR to help train private astronauts at NASA facilities. And NASA has an agreement with another company, Axiom Space, which has already booked a crew of four to the station in a flight that could happen as soon as the second half of next year. Separately, SpaceX has signed an agreement to send a private citizen to space.AdvertisementThe moves come as NASA is moving aggressively to leverage the growing capability of the commercial space sector, which for years has flown cargo and supplies to the space station. Last month, SpaceX became the first private company to fly NASA astronauts there.Private companies are also trying to build commercial habitats in space. And NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine recently announced on Twitter that the space agency would fly its astronauts on suborbital spacecraft, such as those being developed by Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, as part their training. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe space agency is also seeking to partner with the private sector in its return to the moon. Earlier this year, it awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts to three companies to develop spacecraft capable of taking astronauts to and from the lunar surface.AdvertisementIn a statement, NASA said that \u201cproviding expanded opportunities at the International Space Station to manufacture, market and promote commercial products and services will help catalyze and expand space exploration markets for many businesses.\u201dNASA would not say what companies have submitted marketing proposals or what the efforts entail. An agency spokesperson said NASA recognizes that it must be transparent with the public about the activities on board the station, in which taxpayers have invested more than $100 billion. But at the same time, if it unveils a companies\u2019 advertisement or marketing plan prematurely, it will reduce the incentive for those companies to use the station.Story continues below advertisementNASA also has not said who the private astronauts are that Axiom Space would send to the station. In March, the company said it had signed a contract with SpaceX to fly a \u201ccommander professionally trained by Axiom alongside three private astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\u201d The mission is set to launch as early as the second half of next year and the crew would \u201cexperience at least eight days of microgravity and views of Earth.\u201dAdvertisementBridenstine has said Axiom is working with Tom Cruise to film a movie on board the station, but the company has not confirmed that. It is expected to make an announcement on the crew members for its flight next month.NASA\u2019s promotion of the space station for private use is an abrupt about-face for the agency, which for years went to great lengths to prohibit corporate interests in space. Even as its astronauts gobbled M&Ms in space, NASA steadfastly stayed away from endorsing any particular product or company, referring instead to \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand over another.Story continues below advertisementFor years, NASA had prohibited private citizens from the station, although Russia allows it and has over the years flown several people there.The flights won\u2019t be cheap. NASA has said it would charge $35,000 a day for passengers to stay aboard the station. And the rides there could cost some $50 million, officials have estimated, though that would be determined by the two companies NASA has hired to fly astronauts to the station, SpaceX and Boeing.AdvertisementIn an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the company\u2019s astronaut training program would build on its work developing a suborbital spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo.Story continues below advertisementThe company has flown the vehicle to the edge of space twice, and it has some 600 people who have paid for trips, or put down significant deposits toward the tickets, which can cost as much as $250,000.\u201cWe put a huge amount of thought into our training program for SpaceShipTwo,\u201d he said. For the orbital flights, the company would look at \u201ccreating something that is safe, comprehensive, educational but also really fun and has a lot of style.\u201d NASA announced that it is well on its way to transforming the International Space Station into a commercial hub. Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million.  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6563",
        "date": "2020-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/22/nasa-commercial-marketing-space/",
        "text": "A year after NASA announced that it would allow companies to market products on orbit as well as open the International Space Station to private citizens, the space agency said Monday it is well on its way to transforming the orbiting lab into a commercial hub.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA has five proposals from companies for commercial and marketing opportunities on the station. One of those is there, the agency said in a news release Monday. Also on Monday, Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company, announced that it has signed an agreement with NASA to identify people who might want to fly to the space station as well as prepare them for the mission, joining others that are trying to help promote private flights there.Story continues below advertisementIn January, NASA signed an agreement with KBR to help train private astronauts at NASA facilities. And NASA has an agreement with another company, Axiom Space, which has already booked a crew of four to the station in a flight that could happen as soon as the second half of next year. Separately, SpaceX has signed an agreement to send a private citizen to space.AdvertisementThe moves come as NASA is moving aggressively to leverage the growing capability of the commercial space sector, which for years has flown cargo and supplies to the space station. Last month, SpaceX became the first private company to fly NASA astronauts there.Private companies are also trying to build commercial habitats in space. And NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine recently announced on Twitter that the space agency would fly its astronauts on suborbital spacecraft, such as those being developed by Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, as part their training. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe space agency is also seeking to partner with the private sector in its return to the moon. Earlier this year, it awarded nearly $1 billion in contracts to three companies to develop spacecraft capable of taking astronauts to and from the lunar surface.AdvertisementIn a statement, NASA said that \u201cproviding expanded opportunities at the International Space Station to manufacture, market and promote commercial products and services will help catalyze and expand space exploration markets for many businesses.\u201dNASA would not say what companies have submitted marketing proposals or what the efforts entail. An agency spokesperson said NASA recognizes that it must be transparent with the public about the activities on board the station, in which taxpayers have invested more than $100 billion. But at the same time, if it unveils a companies\u2019 advertisement or marketing plan prematurely, it will reduce the incentive for those companies to use the station.Story continues below advertisementNASA also has not said who the private astronauts are that Axiom Space would send to the station. In March, the company said it had signed a contract with SpaceX to fly a \u201ccommander professionally trained by Axiom alongside three private astronauts to and from the International Space Station.\u201d The mission is set to launch as early as the second half of next year and the crew would \u201cexperience at least eight days of microgravity and views of Earth.\u201dAdvertisementBridenstine has said Axiom is working with Tom Cruise to film a movie on board the station, but the company has not confirmed that. It is expected to make an announcement on the crew members for its flight next month.NASA\u2019s promotion of the space station for private use is an abrupt about-face for the agency, which for years went to great lengths to prohibit corporate interests in space. Even as its astronauts gobbled M&Ms in space, NASA steadfastly stayed away from endorsing any particular product or company, referring instead to \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand over another.Story continues below advertisementFor years, NASA had prohibited private citizens from the station, although Russia allows it and has over the years flown several people there.The flights won\u2019t be cheap. NASA has said it would charge $35,000 a day for passengers to stay aboard the station. And the rides there could cost some $50 million, officials have estimated, though that would be determined by the two companies NASA has hired to fly astronauts to the station, SpaceX and Boeing.AdvertisementIn an interview, George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive, said the company\u2019s astronaut training program would build on its work developing a suborbital spacecraft it calls SpaceShipTwo.Story continues below advertisementThe company has flown the vehicle to the edge of space twice, and it has some 600 people who have paid for trips, or put down significant deposits toward the tickets, which can cost as much as $250,000.\u201cWe put a huge amount of thought into our training program for SpaceShipTwo,\u201d he said. For the orbital flights, the company would look at \u201ccreating something that is safe, comprehensive, educational but also really fun and has a lot of style.\u201d NASA announced that it is well on its way to transforming the International Space Station into a commercial hub. Yes, NASA would be happy to have you aboard the space station. But it\u2019ll cost some $50 million. ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic aborts test in its third human spaceflight attempt (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6564",
        "date": "2020-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/12/virgin-galactic-test-new-mexico/",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic aborted its third attempt to reach the edge of space on Saturday after the engine of its space plane ignited for about a second and then went out. The vehicle then glided back safely to the runway, and the pilots were reported to be in good health.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was the first test from the company\u2019s new home at Spaceport America, a taxpayer-funded, modern mirage of a building in the New Mexico desert from which the company hopes to routinely fly space tourists starting next year. A successful flight would have brought the company, founded by Richard Branson in an effort to open space to the masses, a step closer to flying Branson himself to the edge of space, followed by the line of people who have paid as much as $250,000 for the chance to fly on a suborbital mission, see the Earth from space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Twitter, the company said that the \u201cignition sequence for the rocket motor did not complete. Vehicle and crew are in great shape. We have several motors ready at Spaceport America. We will check the vehicle and be back to flight soon.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceInstead of operating a traditional rocket that launches vertically from a launchpad, Virgin Galactic takes a different approach. It flies a space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, that is tethered to the belly of a twin fuselage mother ship. On Saturday, the pair took off from the runway at Spaceport America at about 8:24 a.m. Mountain time and flew to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. Then about 45 minutes later, the space ship was released, and the pilots ignited the rocket motor. There was a bright flash, but then it went out and the crew flew back down.Two pilots were on board, Dave Mackay, a Scottish-born pilot who served in the Royal Air Force, and C.J. Sturckow, a retired Marine Corps colonel and NASA astronaut who flew four space shuttle missions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic first reached space almost two years ago to the day in a flight that marked the first human spaceflight from United States soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011. Then in February 2019 it reached space again with a crew member, Beth Moses, whose title is chief astronaut instructor, in addition to the two pilots.The company doesn\u2019t reach orbit, rather it flies straight up and down, hitting an altitude of more than 50 miles, the threshold of where space begins, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The engine of the space plane ignited briefly, then went out. The vehicle glided back safely to the runway, and the pilots were reported to be in good health. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic aborts test in its third human spaceflight attempt",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic aborts test in its third human spaceflight attempt (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6565",
        "date": "2020-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/12/virgin-galactic-test-new-mexico/",
        "text": "Virgin Galactic aborted its third attempt to reach the edge of space on Saturday after the engine of its space plane ignited for about a second and then went out. The vehicle then glided back safely to the runway, and the pilots were reported to be in good health.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was the first test from the company\u2019s new home at Spaceport America, a taxpayer-funded, modern mirage of a building in the New Mexico desert from which the company hopes to routinely fly space tourists starting next year. A successful flight would have brought the company, founded by Richard Branson in an effort to open space to the masses, a step closer to flying Branson himself to the edge of space, followed by the line of people who have paid as much as $250,000 for the chance to fly on a suborbital mission, see the Earth from space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn Twitter, the company said that the \u201cignition sequence for the rocket motor did not complete. Vehicle and crew are in great shape. We have several motors ready at Spaceport America. We will check the vehicle and be back to flight soon.\u201dVirgin Galactic's quest for spaceInstead of operating a traditional rocket that launches vertically from a launchpad, Virgin Galactic takes a different approach. It flies a space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo, that is tethered to the belly of a twin fuselage mother ship. On Saturday, the pair took off from the runway at Spaceport America at about 8:24 a.m. Mountain time and flew to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. Then about 45 minutes later, the space ship was released, and the pilots ignited the rocket motor. There was a bright flash, but then it went out and the crew flew back down.Two pilots were on board, Dave Mackay, a Scottish-born pilot who served in the Royal Air Force, and C.J. Sturckow, a retired Marine Corps colonel and NASA astronaut who flew four space shuttle missions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic first reached space almost two years ago to the day in a flight that marked the first human spaceflight from United States soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011. Then in February 2019 it reached space again with a crew member, Beth Moses, whose title is chief astronaut instructor, in addition to the two pilots.The company doesn\u2019t reach orbit, rather it flies straight up and down, hitting an altitude of more than 50 miles, the threshold of where space begins, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The engine of the space plane ignited briefly, then went out. The vehicle glided back safely to the runway, and the pilots were reported to be in good health. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic aborts test in its third human spaceflight attempt",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6566",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/18/what-its-like-serve-afghanistan-navy-seal-then-see-it-space/",
        "text": "The International Space Station zooms through orbit, skimming above the Earth\u2019s surface so fast that it rounds the planet every 90 minutes \u2014 giving crew members dominion to look at just about any wonder of the world.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNavy Capt. Chris Cassidy\u2019s eyes were drawn to the sun-scorched dunes of Afghanistan\u2019s Helmand province. Cassidy\u2019s platoon of SEALs carved positions to sleep in the sand over Christmas 2001, just a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His men flushed out hardened al-Qaeda fighters through claustrophobic cave routes. The SEALs got so close to some, Cassidy said, that abandoned bedrolls were still warm with body heat.Then, more than a decade later, as Cassidy orbited 250 miles above the Earth, he knew where to find the familiar mountain foothills melting into sand.\u201cIt made me send a few emails to my former teammates and say, \u2018Hey, just looking out the window and saw that sea of dunes,\u2019 \u201c he said in a phone interview. \u201cIt made me think back to those days.\u201dFive current and former astronauts who served in three wars said combat played a significant role in their trajectory to the space program \u2014 where they became perhaps unlikely evangelists in the fight to protect a fragile planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has long relied on the deep bench of service members and veterans. But less considered are astronauts who have experienced the extreme ends of the humanity spectrum: the life-altering brutality of war, then the peaceful and scientific exploration of space\u2019s infinite potential.Out of 350 astronauts NASA has selected, about 60 men and women have deployed under combat orders or awarded decorations denoting wartime service, according to an analysis of NASA biographies by The Washington Post.The vast majority were fighter pilots. A handful were infantry officers and helicopter pilots closer to the fight. At least two received Purple Hearts for combat wounds. Other biographies were unclear about deployments.Story continues below advertisementWar can leave an indelible mark on its combatants and completely upend conceptions of life, death and mankind\u2019s place in the world.AdvertisementThe same thing happens in space, though in a more peaceful way. The overview effect is the phenomenon of the emotional tumult and startling realization that Earth is a fragile spaceship, or a \u201ctiny pea, pretty and blue,\u201d as Neil Armstrong said after returning from the moon.Reading \u2018Slaughterhouse-Five\u2019 in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war\u201cI never was a big crunchy tree-hugger kind of person,\u201d Cassidy said. But both epiphanies collided for him when his eyes locked on Afghanistan from behind a telephoto lens in 2013 aboard a six-month mission on the ISS.Troops on the ground, he said, \u201care down there are probably still doing the same things we were doing in 2001, and I got to imagine the overall scheme of things hasn't changed that much,\u201d Cassidy said he thought at the time.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBut it made me think: When you look down at Earth from above, you don\u2019t see borders, you don\u2019t see names of countries . . . you just see this big blob of blue and brown and green and white clouds. It made me feel a little bit more introspective about conflict than when I was a sledgehammer-wielding 25-year-old.\u201dCombat prepared Army Lt. Col. Anne McClain, who flew missions over Iraq in an OH-58 Kiowa recon and fire support helicopter, for the dangerous reality of strapping to a rocket and heading to orbit.Her wartime assignment proved deadly. She agonized over how leaders could better protect soldiers when she attended funerals for comrades killed in action.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not an experience I would wish on anyone, but it\u2019s experience we bring to the table,\u201d McClain said in an interview days after she returned June 25 from 204 days in space.The space program has closely tracked the country\u2019s wars, which have churned out some of its most notable astronauts. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, shot down two MiGs in the Korean War, where Armstrong also flew combat missions before the Apollo 11 mission. John Glenn, the first American in orbit, served in World War II and the Korean War.Two of the astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion, Francis \u201cDick\u201d Scobee and Michael J. Smith, were Vietnam veterans.Story continues below advertisementAnother Vietnam veteran, retired Marine Col. Robert Springer, slipped through dense jungle beyond friendly lines to direct helicopter fire and air support on Viet Cong insurgents in 1968 and 1969. He also flew missions in an F-4 Phantom and medevac missions in a Huey helicopter.Sometimes he carried the dead.Saigon fell, but Vietnam stayed with him. He said combat was a formative laboratory to hone a job executed under extraordinary duress.Advertisement\u201cIt gave me a different perspective,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen the worst of it from combat, and the best of it, and what we\u2019re doing in the space program bringing benefits to mankind.\u201dSpace has also given combat veterans a different view of their own war.For most soldiers, the overhead view of a war zone is flattened into drone feeds or laminated maps. When McClain flew gun runs to support troops on the ground, she referred to highways and roads renamed to simple English words.But from the ISS, McClain had a much different view of the area. She could see the damage of powerful floods that swept through Iraq.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFrom space, you can see the water coming in. You can see what people are dealing with down there,\u201d she said.The overview effect for McClain was one of desperate urgency to preserve the planet, she said. \u201cI want to shake people\u2019s shoulders and say \u2018No, listen, we are all in it together.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementNavy Cmdr. G. Reid Wiseman, who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and later served as a flight engineer aboard the ISS, had a similar realization after combing over the borderless globe to find Kandahar.\u201cIt changes you,\u201d he said, to see the entire planet. \u201cThe Earth is alive and it is powerful. And when it gets tired of us, it will fix that.\u201dHow to dress for spaceBut war has prepared other astronauts for a grim task.Story continues below advertisementCol. James Buchli led infantry Marines in Vietnam and received the Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds. He later entered the astronaut program.After two shuttle missions, Buchli stopped training for a moment to watch the Challenger launch. It disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight.NASA scrambled to figure out how to handle the families of seven crew members who had watched their loved ones die.AdvertisementHe presented administrators with an idea. He knew casualty notification officers helped families of slain Marines navigate anguish that began with a white-gloved knock on the door.\u201cThe families needed to know more than what they saw on TV,\u201d Buchli said.He spent the next year and a half helping those families. Then he went back to space.Read more:Life in space: 50 astronauts, in their own words50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the \u2018moon hoax\u2019The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. Veterans turned astronauts said going to space changed their perspective of their wars \u2014 and their planet. What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from space",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6567",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/18/what-its-like-serve-afghanistan-navy-seal-then-see-it-space/",
        "text": "The International Space Station zooms through orbit, skimming above the Earth\u2019s surface so fast that it rounds the planet every 90 minutes \u2014 giving crew members dominion to look at just about any wonder of the world.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNavy Capt. Chris Cassidy\u2019s eyes were drawn to the sun-scorched dunes of Afghanistan\u2019s Helmand province. Cassidy\u2019s platoon of SEALs carved positions to sleep in the sand over Christmas 2001, just a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His men flushed out hardened al-Qaeda fighters through claustrophobic cave routes. The SEALs got so close to some, Cassidy said, that abandoned bedrolls were still warm with body heat.Then, more than a decade later, as Cassidy orbited 250 miles above the Earth, he knew where to find the familiar mountain foothills melting into sand.\u201cIt made me send a few emails to my former teammates and say, \u2018Hey, just looking out the window and saw that sea of dunes,\u2019 \u201c he said in a phone interview. \u201cIt made me think back to those days.\u201dFive current and former astronauts who served in three wars said combat played a significant role in their trajectory to the space program \u2014 where they became perhaps unlikely evangelists in the fight to protect a fragile planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has long relied on the deep bench of service members and veterans. But less considered are astronauts who have experienced the extreme ends of the humanity spectrum: the life-altering brutality of war, then the peaceful and scientific exploration of space\u2019s infinite potential.Out of 350 astronauts NASA has selected, about 60 men and women have deployed under combat orders or awarded decorations denoting wartime service, according to an analysis of NASA biographies by The Washington Post.The vast majority were fighter pilots. A handful were infantry officers and helicopter pilots closer to the fight. At least two received Purple Hearts for combat wounds. Other biographies were unclear about deployments.Story continues below advertisementWar can leave an indelible mark on its combatants and completely upend conceptions of life, death and mankind\u2019s place in the world.AdvertisementThe same thing happens in space, though in a more peaceful way. The overview effect is the phenomenon of the emotional tumult and startling realization that Earth is a fragile spaceship, or a \u201ctiny pea, pretty and blue,\u201d as Neil Armstrong said after returning from the moon.Reading \u2018Slaughterhouse-Five\u2019 in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war\u201cI never was a big crunchy tree-hugger kind of person,\u201d Cassidy said. But both epiphanies collided for him when his eyes locked on Afghanistan from behind a telephoto lens in 2013 aboard a six-month mission on the ISS.Troops on the ground, he said, \u201care down there are probably still doing the same things we were doing in 2001, and I got to imagine the overall scheme of things hasn't changed that much,\u201d Cassidy said he thought at the time.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBut it made me think: When you look down at Earth from above, you don\u2019t see borders, you don\u2019t see names of countries . . . you just see this big blob of blue and brown and green and white clouds. It made me feel a little bit more introspective about conflict than when I was a sledgehammer-wielding 25-year-old.\u201dCombat prepared Army Lt. Col. Anne McClain, who flew missions over Iraq in an OH-58 Kiowa recon and fire support helicopter, for the dangerous reality of strapping to a rocket and heading to orbit.Her wartime assignment proved deadly. She agonized over how leaders could better protect soldiers when she attended funerals for comrades killed in action.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not an experience I would wish on anyone, but it\u2019s experience we bring to the table,\u201d McClain said in an interview days after she returned June 25 from 204 days in space.The space program has closely tracked the country\u2019s wars, which have churned out some of its most notable astronauts. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, shot down two MiGs in the Korean War, where Armstrong also flew combat missions before the Apollo 11 mission. John Glenn, the first American in orbit, served in World War II and the Korean War.Two of the astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion, Francis \u201cDick\u201d Scobee and Michael J. Smith, were Vietnam veterans.Story continues below advertisementAnother Vietnam veteran, retired Marine Col. Robert Springer, slipped through dense jungle beyond friendly lines to direct helicopter fire and air support on Viet Cong insurgents in 1968 and 1969. He also flew missions in an F-4 Phantom and medevac missions in a Huey helicopter.Sometimes he carried the dead.Saigon fell, but Vietnam stayed with him. He said combat was a formative laboratory to hone a job executed under extraordinary duress.Advertisement\u201cIt gave me a different perspective,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen the worst of it from combat, and the best of it, and what we\u2019re doing in the space program bringing benefits to mankind.\u201dSpace has also given combat veterans a different view of their own war.For most soldiers, the overhead view of a war zone is flattened into drone feeds or laminated maps. When McClain flew gun runs to support troops on the ground, she referred to highways and roads renamed to simple English words.But from the ISS, McClain had a much different view of the area. She could see the damage of powerful floods that swept through Iraq.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFrom space, you can see the water coming in. You can see what people are dealing with down there,\u201d she said.The overview effect for McClain was one of desperate urgency to preserve the planet, she said. \u201cI want to shake people\u2019s shoulders and say \u2018No, listen, we are all in it together.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementNavy Cmdr. G. Reid Wiseman, who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and later served as a flight engineer aboard the ISS, had a similar realization after combing over the borderless globe to find Kandahar.\u201cIt changes you,\u201d he said, to see the entire planet. \u201cThe Earth is alive and it is powerful. And when it gets tired of us, it will fix that.\u201dHow to dress for spaceBut war has prepared other astronauts for a grim task.Story continues below advertisementCol. James Buchli led infantry Marines in Vietnam and received the Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds. He later entered the astronaut program.After two shuttle missions, Buchli stopped training for a moment to watch the Challenger launch. It disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight.NASA scrambled to figure out how to handle the families of seven crew members who had watched their loved ones die.AdvertisementHe presented administrators with an idea. He knew casualty notification officers helped families of slain Marines navigate anguish that began with a white-gloved knock on the door.\u201cThe families needed to know more than what they saw on TV,\u201d Buchli said.He spent the next year and a half helping those families. Then he went back to space.Read more:Life in space: 50 astronauts, in their own words50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the \u2018moon hoax\u2019The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. Veterans turned astronauts said going to space changed their perspective of their wars \u2014 and their planet. What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from space",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6568",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/18/what-its-like-serve-afghanistan-navy-seal-then-see-it-space/",
        "text": "The International Space Station zooms through orbit, skimming above the Earth\u2019s surface so fast that it rounds the planet every 90 minutes \u2014 giving crew members dominion to look at just about any wonder of the world.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNavy Capt. Chris Cassidy\u2019s eyes were drawn to the sun-scorched dunes of Afghanistan\u2019s Helmand province. Cassidy\u2019s platoon of SEALs carved positions to sleep in the sand over Christmas 2001, just a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His men flushed out hardened al-Qaeda fighters through claustrophobic cave routes. The SEALs got so close to some, Cassidy said, that abandoned bedrolls were still warm with body heat.Then, more than a decade later, as Cassidy orbited 250 miles above the Earth, he knew where to find the familiar mountain foothills melting into sand.\u201cIt made me send a few emails to my former teammates and say, \u2018Hey, just looking out the window and saw that sea of dunes,\u2019 \u201c he said in a phone interview. \u201cIt made me think back to those days.\u201dFive current and former astronauts who served in three wars said combat played a significant role in their trajectory to the space program \u2014 where they became perhaps unlikely evangelists in the fight to protect a fragile planet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has long relied on the deep bench of service members and veterans. But less considered are astronauts who have experienced the extreme ends of the humanity spectrum: the life-altering brutality of war, then the peaceful and scientific exploration of space\u2019s infinite potential.Out of 350 astronauts NASA has selected, about 60 men and women have deployed under combat orders or awarded decorations denoting wartime service, according to an analysis of NASA biographies by The Washington Post.The vast majority were fighter pilots. A handful were infantry officers and helicopter pilots closer to the fight. At least two received Purple Hearts for combat wounds. Other biographies were unclear about deployments.Story continues below advertisementWar can leave an indelible mark on its combatants and completely upend conceptions of life, death and mankind\u2019s place in the world.AdvertisementThe same thing happens in space, though in a more peaceful way. The overview effect is the phenomenon of the emotional tumult and startling realization that Earth is a fragile spaceship, or a \u201ctiny pea, pretty and blue,\u201d as Neil Armstrong said after returning from the moon.Reading \u2018Slaughterhouse-Five\u2019 in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war\u201cI never was a big crunchy tree-hugger kind of person,\u201d Cassidy said. But both epiphanies collided for him when his eyes locked on Afghanistan from behind a telephoto lens in 2013 aboard a six-month mission on the ISS.Troops on the ground, he said, \u201care down there are probably still doing the same things we were doing in 2001, and I got to imagine the overall scheme of things hasn't changed that much,\u201d Cassidy said he thought at the time.Story continues below advertisement\u201cBut it made me think: When you look down at Earth from above, you don\u2019t see borders, you don\u2019t see names of countries . . . you just see this big blob of blue and brown and green and white clouds. It made me feel a little bit more introspective about conflict than when I was a sledgehammer-wielding 25-year-old.\u201dCombat prepared Army Lt. Col. Anne McClain, who flew missions over Iraq in an OH-58 Kiowa recon and fire support helicopter, for the dangerous reality of strapping to a rocket and heading to orbit.Her wartime assignment proved deadly. She agonized over how leaders could better protect soldiers when she attended funerals for comrades killed in action.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not an experience I would wish on anyone, but it\u2019s experience we bring to the table,\u201d McClain said in an interview days after she returned June 25 from 204 days in space.The space program has closely tracked the country\u2019s wars, which have churned out some of its most notable astronauts. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, shot down two MiGs in the Korean War, where Armstrong also flew combat missions before the Apollo 11 mission. John Glenn, the first American in orbit, served in World War II and the Korean War.Two of the astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion, Francis \u201cDick\u201d Scobee and Michael J. Smith, were Vietnam veterans.Story continues below advertisementAnother Vietnam veteran, retired Marine Col. Robert Springer, slipped through dense jungle beyond friendly lines to direct helicopter fire and air support on Viet Cong insurgents in 1968 and 1969. He also flew missions in an F-4 Phantom and medevac missions in a Huey helicopter.Sometimes he carried the dead.Saigon fell, but Vietnam stayed with him. He said combat was a formative laboratory to hone a job executed under extraordinary duress.Advertisement\u201cIt gave me a different perspective,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen the worst of it from combat, and the best of it, and what we\u2019re doing in the space program bringing benefits to mankind.\u201dSpace has also given combat veterans a different view of their own war.For most soldiers, the overhead view of a war zone is flattened into drone feeds or laminated maps. When McClain flew gun runs to support troops on the ground, she referred to highways and roads renamed to simple English words.But from the ISS, McClain had a much different view of the area. She could see the damage of powerful floods that swept through Iraq.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFrom space, you can see the water coming in. You can see what people are dealing with down there,\u201d she said.The overview effect for McClain was one of desperate urgency to preserve the planet, she said. \u201cI want to shake people\u2019s shoulders and say \u2018No, listen, we are all in it together.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementNavy Cmdr. G. Reid Wiseman, who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and later served as a flight engineer aboard the ISS, had a similar realization after combing over the borderless globe to find Kandahar.\u201cIt changes you,\u201d he said, to see the entire planet. \u201cThe Earth is alive and it is powerful. And when it gets tired of us, it will fix that.\u201dHow to dress for spaceBut war has prepared other astronauts for a grim task.Story continues below advertisementCol. James Buchli led infantry Marines in Vietnam and received the Purple Heart for shrapnel wounds. He later entered the astronaut program.After two shuttle missions, Buchli stopped training for a moment to watch the Challenger launch. It disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight.NASA scrambled to figure out how to handle the families of seven crew members who had watched their loved ones die.AdvertisementHe presented administrators with an idea. He knew casualty notification officers helped families of slain Marines navigate anguish that began with a white-gloved knock on the door.\u201cThe families needed to know more than what they saw on TV,\u201d Buchli said.He spent the next year and a half helping those families. Then he went back to space.Read more:Life in space: 50 astronauts, in their own words50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the \u2018moon hoax\u2019The most stirring photo from the Apollo mission wasn\u2019t of the moon. It was of the Earth. Veterans turned astronauts said going to space changed their perspective of their wars \u2014 and their planet. What it\u2019s like to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL \u2014 and then see it from space",
        "author": "Alex Horton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s budget would bolster NASA\u2019s plan to return humans to the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6569",
        "date": "2020-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/10/trumps-budget-would-bolster-nasas-plan-return-humans-moon/",
        "text": "When Vice President Pence called for NASA to speed up its plan to get astronauts to the moon by 2024, instead of 2028 as originally planned, many derided the directive as fantasy. Other administrations had laid out grand plans for America\u2019s adventure in space, but few funded them.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd no one has been to the lunar surface since 1972. But on Monday the White House proposed an ambitious plan that would give the space agency significant spending boosts over several years, stretching spending from about $19 billion when President Trump came into office to $28.6 billion by fiscal 2023. NASA officials also for the first time provided a total cost for the program to land astronauts on the moon, known as Artemis, placing it at $35 billion through 2024. Although the White House\u2019s goal still faces many significant hurdles \u2014 in navigating both the vacuum of space and the equally treacherous halls of Congress \u2014 the pressure is on NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who said during a speech Monday, \u201cIt is up to us to deliver.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace exploration has been a major priority for the Trump administration, which reconstituted the National Space Council and directed NASA to dramatically speed up its moon program. And it shows in its budget proposal, which Bridenstine called \u201cone of the strongest budgets in NASA history.\u201d The spending plan for next year calls for a total budget of $25.2 billion, a nearly $3 billion increase over the current $22.6 billion. The increase is the first step toward meeting the White House mandate to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024 as part of the Artemis program. The White House plans to continue the increases through fiscal 2023.One of the next big steps is awarding the contract for a lunar lander system, which is expected in the coming months. Several companies are vying for the contract, including Boeing, SpaceX and a team led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor next year, the White House plans include $3.4 billion for a lunar lander system \u2014 \u201cthe first time we\u2019ve had direct funding for a human landing system since Apollo,\u201d Bridenstine said.It also includes nearly $2.3 billion for the Space Launch System rocket, being built in large part by Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, and $1.4 billion for the Lockheed Martin-built Orion crew capsule. NASA plans to use those vehicles to get astronauts to the moon.The SLS rocket has suffered several years of costly setbacks and delays. But Monday, Bridenstine said it had made significant progress and called it \u201cAmerica\u2019s rocket\u201d that will serve as the \u201cfoundation of our 21st-century space exploration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementStill, the budget request shows just how expensive the rocket is. The spending plan calls for NASA to look at other commercially available rockets to launch a mission as early as 2024 to explore Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa. Doing so would save the agency \u201cover $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket,\u201d the budget request says.AdvertisementIf all goes according to plan, NASA\u2019s Artemis program calls for the first launch of the SLS rocket with the Orion capsule for a mission around the moon without crews in 2021. The following year, astronauts would be on board Orion to orbit the moon, with the goal of landing on the surface by 2024.Instead of going straight to the surface, however, the astronauts would first stop at an outpost known as the Gateway in orbit around the moon. They would then fly to and from the lunar surface in the landing vehicles. The budget would allocate more than $700 million for activities on the surface of the moon, such as mining, which would allow astronauts to \u201clive off the land.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe program, however, has met stiff resistance in Congress, especially in the Democratic-controlled House. Recently, the House Science subcommittee on space and aeronautics voted out a bill that directs NASA to land on the moon by 2028, not 2024, and spend most of its energy and resources on a mission to put astronauts in orbit around Mars by 2033.AdvertisementMembers of Congress are likely to be dismissive of provisions in the White House budget that would cut funding for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), a key astrophysics mission for NASA. In the past, the White House has tried to defund the program, only to be reversed by Congress.The White House plan would also cut funding for NASA\u2019s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Engagement.Story continues below advertisementSen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), the chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said it was \u201cencouraging to see a proposed budget that supports returning American astronauts to the moon. I remain eager to receive sufficient budget details to match our ambitious human exploration goals.\u201d He added that he was \u201cdisappointed the budget would cut STEM education, which plays a vital role in making certain we have the talent to achieve our mission.\u201d The White House proposal would increase NASA spending from about $19 billion when Trump came into office to $28.6 billion by fiscal 2023. Trump\u2019s budget would bolster NASA\u2019s plan to return humans to the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s budget would bolster NASA\u2019s plan to return humans to the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6570",
        "date": "2020-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/10/trumps-budget-would-bolster-nasas-plan-return-humans-moon/",
        "text": "When Vice President Pence called for NASA to speed up its plan to get astronauts to the moon by 2024, instead of 2028 as originally planned, many derided the directive as fantasy. Other administrations had laid out grand plans for America\u2019s adventure in space, but few funded them.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd no one has been to the lunar surface since 1972. But on Monday the White House proposed an ambitious plan that would give the space agency significant spending boosts over several years, stretching spending from about $19 billion when President Trump came into office to $28.6 billion by fiscal 2023. NASA officials also for the first time provided a total cost for the program to land astronauts on the moon, known as Artemis, placing it at $35 billion through 2024. Although the White House\u2019s goal still faces many significant hurdles \u2014 in navigating both the vacuum of space and the equally treacherous halls of Congress \u2014 the pressure is on NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who said during a speech Monday, \u201cIt is up to us to deliver.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace exploration has been a major priority for the Trump administration, which reconstituted the National Space Council and directed NASA to dramatically speed up its moon program. And it shows in its budget proposal, which Bridenstine called \u201cone of the strongest budgets in NASA history.\u201d The spending plan for next year calls for a total budget of $25.2 billion, a nearly $3 billion increase over the current $22.6 billion. The increase is the first step toward meeting the White House mandate to return humans to the lunar surface by 2024 as part of the Artemis program. The White House plans to continue the increases through fiscal 2023.One of the next big steps is awarding the contract for a lunar lander system, which is expected in the coming months. Several companies are vying for the contract, including Boeing, SpaceX and a team led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin that includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor next year, the White House plans include $3.4 billion for a lunar lander system \u2014 \u201cthe first time we\u2019ve had direct funding for a human landing system since Apollo,\u201d Bridenstine said.It also includes nearly $2.3 billion for the Space Launch System rocket, being built in large part by Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, and $1.4 billion for the Lockheed Martin-built Orion crew capsule. NASA plans to use those vehicles to get astronauts to the moon.The SLS rocket has suffered several years of costly setbacks and delays. But Monday, Bridenstine said it had made significant progress and called it \u201cAmerica\u2019s rocket\u201d that will serve as the \u201cfoundation of our 21st-century space exploration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementStill, the budget request shows just how expensive the rocket is. The spending plan calls for NASA to look at other commercially available rockets to launch a mission as early as 2024 to explore Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa. Doing so would save the agency \u201cover $1.5 billion compared to using an SLS rocket,\u201d the budget request says.AdvertisementIf all goes according to plan, NASA\u2019s Artemis program calls for the first launch of the SLS rocket with the Orion capsule for a mission around the moon without crews in 2021. The following year, astronauts would be on board Orion to orbit the moon, with the goal of landing on the surface by 2024.Instead of going straight to the surface, however, the astronauts would first stop at an outpost known as the Gateway in orbit around the moon. They would then fly to and from the lunar surface in the landing vehicles. The budget would allocate more than $700 million for activities on the surface of the moon, such as mining, which would allow astronauts to \u201clive off the land.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe program, however, has met stiff resistance in Congress, especially in the Democratic-controlled House. Recently, the House Science subcommittee on space and aeronautics voted out a bill that directs NASA to land on the moon by 2028, not 2024, and spend most of its energy and resources on a mission to put astronauts in orbit around Mars by 2033.AdvertisementMembers of Congress are likely to be dismissive of provisions in the White House budget that would cut funding for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), a key astrophysics mission for NASA. In the past, the White House has tried to defund the program, only to be reversed by Congress.The White House plan would also cut funding for NASA\u2019s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Engagement.Story continues below advertisementSen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), the chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA, said it was \u201cencouraging to see a proposed budget that supports returning American astronauts to the moon. I remain eager to receive sufficient budget details to match our ambitious human exploration goals.\u201d He added that he was \u201cdisappointed the budget would cut STEM education, which plays a vital role in making certain we have the talent to achieve our mission.\u201d The White House proposal would increase NASA spending from about $19 billion when Trump came into office to $28.6 billion by fiscal 2023. Trump\u2019s budget would bolster NASA\u2019s plan to return humans to the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to land its 50th Falcon 9 booster (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6571",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/elon-musks-spacex-is-about-land-its-50th-falcon-9-booster/",
        "text": "The effort to return booster rockets to Earth had been tried and had failed several times; it turns out landing a rocket back on Earth safely is pretty difficult. So Elon Musk was not deluding himself in 2014 when he calculated the odds that his company, SpaceX, would eventually get it right: \u201cnot great \u2014 perhaps 50 percent, at best.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd then they did. Just before Christmas 2015, a Falcon 9 booster became the first rocket to deliver a payload to orbit, reorient itself, fly back through the atmosphere, find its landing spot \u2014 in that case, a pad on the coast at Cape Canaveral \u2014 and touch down softly.Since then, SpaceX has done it again and again, so many times that Musk has achieved his goal, normalizing a feat once thought impossible. Now SpaceX is on the verge of its 50th landing in a launch now scheduled for Sunday, a milestone celebrated within the company and the larger space industry, which has come to agree that ditching rocket boosters into the ocean \u2014 the practice for decades \u2014 is an expensive waste of a perfectly good vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe got there much faster than I ever thought we would,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who worked at SpaceX for years and now serves as a consultant. \u201cJust over four years \u2014 that is really remarkable, the fact that it has become routine in four years. It\u2019s still not routine to me. I get excited. I still get goose bumps.\u201dFor years, rocket boosters propelled their payloads to space, then separated and fell back to Earth, splashing down into the ocean. To Musk and others who pursued the dream of landing the rockets as a way to make space more accessible, that was like throwing away the airplane after a trip from New York to Los Angeles.\u201cFor us to really open up access to space, we have to have full and rapid reusability,\u201d Musk has said.Story continues below advertisementPrecisely how much money SpaceX saves is hard to say. As a privately held company, it doesn\u2019t release precise dollar amounts. But it sells each Falcon 9 launch for about $62 million, and the overwhelming cost of each launch is in the booster, which houses nine engines. The propellant, Musk has said, is a fraction of the cost, about $200,000 or so.AdvertisementThe space shuttle was reusable as well, but it took an army of workers to get it ready for the next flight, and it never achieved the kind of efficiency initially envisioned. \u201cThe key isn\u2019t just to make it reusable,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cIf you have to completely rebuild it every time, your economic advantage is going to erode. I can tell you achieving that economically affordable reusability is key, and we\u2019ve done that.\u201dJeff Bezos agrees. His space company, Blue Origin, has landed a series of New Shepard boosters as well \u2014 but those go up to scratch the very edge of space before falling back down on trips that don\u2019t orbit the Earth. It plans to recover its more powerful New Glenn rocket, however, in much the same way SpaceX does. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has talked about recovering not the entire booster, but popping out the most valuable part \u2014 the engines \u2014 and catching them with a grappling hook as they fall back to Earth under a parachute. And Rocket Lab had initially said it wouldn\u2019t try to reuse its small rockets but has since reversed course.Advertisement\u201cSpaceX\u2019s technical validation of reusable rockets has opened new horizons for the launch sector while inciting the firm\u2019s competitors to invest in technological innovation as a means to fight market share erosion,\u201d Maxime Puteaux and Alexandre Najjar, consultants at Euroconsult, wrote in a recent SpaceNews op-ed.SpaceX has also gotten better at refurbishing the rockets faster between flights. While the first booster took a year to relaunch, SpaceX flew one last year after just 82 days, and the rocket it plans to fly on Sunday\u2019s mission had a still faster turnaround \u2014 only about 60 days between its last launch and its next one, the company said.SpaceX makes history by flying a \u201cflight proven\u201d rocketSpaceX doesn\u2019t just land on land. It lands on a robot ship at sea it calls an \u201cautonomous spaceport drone ship.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s quite a tiny target. It\u2019s like trying to land on a postage stamp there,\u201d Musk said in 2016. \u201cIt\u2019s like a carrier landing versus a land landing.\u201dAdvertisementBringing the rocket home is \u201csupremely difficult,\u201d Reisman said. The rocket and the drone ship essentially work to meet up in the exact same spot in the ocean, and the booster has to be constantly decelerating and get as close to zero velocity as it can at the precise moment it is touching down. It also needs to be able to survive high temperatures as it screams back through the atmosphere.For a few years, SpaceX struggled as one booster after the other crashed and burned. It happened so frequently the company came up with a term for it \u2014 \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201dWhen SpaceX finally pulled off a drone ship landing in 2016, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, tweeted their congratulations. \u201cOpens the imagination to what is possible,\u201d Hadfield wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen-President Obama also weighed in, writing, \u201cIt\u2019s because of innovators like you & NASA that America continues to lead in space exploration.\u201dPresident Trump has been enamored of the landings as well. Musk \u201cdoes good at rockets, too, by the way,\u201d he told CNBC recently. \u201cI never saw where the engines come down with no wings, no anything, and they\u2019re landing. I said, \u2018I\u2019ve never seen that before.\u2019\u2009\u201dSpaceX now has not just one landing pad at Cape Canaveral, but two \u2014 one for each of the side boosters that fly on its Falcon Heavy rocket, which come down in tandem.Having mastered the art of recovering boosters, SpaceX is now going after another part of the rocket \u2014 the nose cone, or fairing, which sits atop the rocket and protects the satellite being launched. The company has a couple of ships with giant nets affixed to them that try to position themselves under the fairing as it falls from space under a parachute. So far, it has caught three.In 2017, Musk said the fairings cost about $6 million each \u2014 not a lot in the context of a rocket, but not chump change, either.\u201cAt one point, we\u2019re, like, debating, \u2018Should we try to recover it or not?\u2019\u2009\u201d Musk said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Guys, imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it\u2019s going to smash in the ocean. Would you try to recover that?\u2019 Yes. Yes, you would.\u201d Once thought impossible, SpaceX is on the verge of its 50th landing of a booster rocket after launch, a milestone that has helped convince the space industry that ditching rocket boosters into the ocean, the practice for decades, is an expensive waste of a perfectly good vehicle. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to land its 50th Falcon 9 booster",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to land its 50th Falcon 9 booster (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6572",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/elon-musks-spacex-is-about-land-its-50th-falcon-9-booster/",
        "text": "The effort to return booster rockets to Earth had been tried and had failed several times; it turns out landing a rocket back on Earth safely is pretty difficult. So Elon Musk was not deluding himself in 2014 when he calculated the odds that his company, SpaceX, would eventually get it right: \u201cnot great \u2014 perhaps 50 percent, at best.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd then they did. Just before Christmas 2015, a Falcon 9 booster became the first rocket to deliver a payload to orbit, reorient itself, fly back through the atmosphere, find its landing spot \u2014 in that case, a pad on the coast at Cape Canaveral \u2014 and touch down softly.Since then, SpaceX has done it again and again, so many times that Musk has achieved his goal, normalizing a feat once thought impossible. Now SpaceX is on the verge of its 50th landing in a launch now scheduled for Sunday, a milestone celebrated within the company and the larger space industry, which has come to agree that ditching rocket boosters into the ocean \u2014 the practice for decades \u2014 is an expensive waste of a perfectly good vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe got there much faster than I ever thought we would,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who worked at SpaceX for years and now serves as a consultant. \u201cJust over four years \u2014 that is really remarkable, the fact that it has become routine in four years. It\u2019s still not routine to me. I get excited. I still get goose bumps.\u201dFor years, rocket boosters propelled their payloads to space, then separated and fell back to Earth, splashing down into the ocean. To Musk and others who pursued the dream of landing the rockets as a way to make space more accessible, that was like throwing away the airplane after a trip from New York to Los Angeles.\u201cFor us to really open up access to space, we have to have full and rapid reusability,\u201d Musk has said.Story continues below advertisementPrecisely how much money SpaceX saves is hard to say. As a privately held company, it doesn\u2019t release precise dollar amounts. But it sells each Falcon 9 launch for about $62 million, and the overwhelming cost of each launch is in the booster, which houses nine engines. The propellant, Musk has said, is a fraction of the cost, about $200,000 or so.AdvertisementThe space shuttle was reusable as well, but it took an army of workers to get it ready for the next flight, and it never achieved the kind of efficiency initially envisioned. \u201cThe key isn\u2019t just to make it reusable,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cIf you have to completely rebuild it every time, your economic advantage is going to erode. I can tell you achieving that economically affordable reusability is key, and we\u2019ve done that.\u201dJeff Bezos agrees. His space company, Blue Origin, has landed a series of New Shepard boosters as well \u2014 but those go up to scratch the very edge of space before falling back down on trips that don\u2019t orbit the Earth. It plans to recover its more powerful New Glenn rocket, however, in much the same way SpaceX does. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has talked about recovering not the entire booster, but popping out the most valuable part \u2014 the engines \u2014 and catching them with a grappling hook as they fall back to Earth under a parachute. And Rocket Lab had initially said it wouldn\u2019t try to reuse its small rockets but has since reversed course.Advertisement\u201cSpaceX\u2019s technical validation of reusable rockets has opened new horizons for the launch sector while inciting the firm\u2019s competitors to invest in technological innovation as a means to fight market share erosion,\u201d Maxime Puteaux and Alexandre Najjar, consultants at Euroconsult, wrote in a recent SpaceNews op-ed.SpaceX has also gotten better at refurbishing the rockets faster between flights. While the first booster took a year to relaunch, SpaceX flew one last year after just 82 days, and the rocket it plans to fly on Sunday\u2019s mission had a still faster turnaround \u2014 only about 60 days between its last launch and its next one, the company said.SpaceX makes history by flying a \u201cflight proven\u201d rocketSpaceX doesn\u2019t just land on land. It lands on a robot ship at sea it calls an \u201cautonomous spaceport drone ship.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s quite a tiny target. It\u2019s like trying to land on a postage stamp there,\u201d Musk said in 2016. \u201cIt\u2019s like a carrier landing versus a land landing.\u201dAdvertisementBringing the rocket home is \u201csupremely difficult,\u201d Reisman said. The rocket and the drone ship essentially work to meet up in the exact same spot in the ocean, and the booster has to be constantly decelerating and get as close to zero velocity as it can at the precise moment it is touching down. It also needs to be able to survive high temperatures as it screams back through the atmosphere.For a few years, SpaceX struggled as one booster after the other crashed and burned. It happened so frequently the company came up with a term for it \u2014 \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201dWhen SpaceX finally pulled off a drone ship landing in 2016, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, tweeted their congratulations. \u201cOpens the imagination to what is possible,\u201d Hadfield wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen-President Obama also weighed in, writing, \u201cIt\u2019s because of innovators like you & NASA that America continues to lead in space exploration.\u201dPresident Trump has been enamored of the landings as well. Musk \u201cdoes good at rockets, too, by the way,\u201d he told CNBC recently. \u201cI never saw where the engines come down with no wings, no anything, and they\u2019re landing. I said, \u2018I\u2019ve never seen that before.\u2019\u2009\u201dSpaceX now has not just one landing pad at Cape Canaveral, but two \u2014 one for each of the side boosters that fly on its Falcon Heavy rocket, which come down in tandem.Having mastered the art of recovering boosters, SpaceX is now going after another part of the rocket \u2014 the nose cone, or fairing, which sits atop the rocket and protects the satellite being launched. The company has a couple of ships with giant nets affixed to them that try to position themselves under the fairing as it falls from space under a parachute. So far, it has caught three.In 2017, Musk said the fairings cost about $6 million each \u2014 not a lot in the context of a rocket, but not chump change, either.\u201cAt one point, we\u2019re, like, debating, \u2018Should we try to recover it or not?\u2019\u2009\u201d Musk said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Guys, imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it\u2019s going to smash in the ocean. Would you try to recover that?\u2019 Yes. Yes, you would.\u201d Once thought impossible, SpaceX is on the verge of its 50th landing of a booster rocket after launch, a milestone that has helped convince the space industry that ditching rocket boosters into the ocean, the practice for decades, is an expensive waste of a perfectly good vehicle. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to land its 50th Falcon 9 booster",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to land its 50th Falcon 9 booster (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6573",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/elon-musks-spacex-is-about-land-its-50th-falcon-9-booster/",
        "text": "The effort to return booster rockets to Earth had been tried and had failed several times; it turns out landing a rocket back on Earth safely is pretty difficult. So Elon Musk was not deluding himself in 2014 when he calculated the odds that his company, SpaceX, would eventually get it right: \u201cnot great \u2014 perhaps 50 percent, at best.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd then they did. Just before Christmas 2015, a Falcon 9 booster became the first rocket to deliver a payload to orbit, reorient itself, fly back through the atmosphere, find its landing spot \u2014 in that case, a pad on the coast at Cape Canaveral \u2014 and touch down softly.Since then, SpaceX has done it again and again, so many times that Musk has achieved his goal, normalizing a feat once thought impossible. Now SpaceX is on the verge of its 50th landing in a launch now scheduled for Sunday, a milestone celebrated within the company and the larger space industry, which has come to agree that ditching rocket boosters into the ocean \u2014 the practice for decades \u2014 is an expensive waste of a perfectly good vehicle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe got there much faster than I ever thought we would,\u201d said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who worked at SpaceX for years and now serves as a consultant. \u201cJust over four years \u2014 that is really remarkable, the fact that it has become routine in four years. It\u2019s still not routine to me. I get excited. I still get goose bumps.\u201dFor years, rocket boosters propelled their payloads to space, then separated and fell back to Earth, splashing down into the ocean. To Musk and others who pursued the dream of landing the rockets as a way to make space more accessible, that was like throwing away the airplane after a trip from New York to Los Angeles.\u201cFor us to really open up access to space, we have to have full and rapid reusability,\u201d Musk has said.Story continues below advertisementPrecisely how much money SpaceX saves is hard to say. As a privately held company, it doesn\u2019t release precise dollar amounts. But it sells each Falcon 9 launch for about $62 million, and the overwhelming cost of each launch is in the booster, which houses nine engines. The propellant, Musk has said, is a fraction of the cost, about $200,000 or so.AdvertisementThe space shuttle was reusable as well, but it took an army of workers to get it ready for the next flight, and it never achieved the kind of efficiency initially envisioned. \u201cThe key isn\u2019t just to make it reusable,\u201d Reisman said. \u201cIf you have to completely rebuild it every time, your economic advantage is going to erode. I can tell you achieving that economically affordable reusability is key, and we\u2019ve done that.\u201dJeff Bezos agrees. His space company, Blue Origin, has landed a series of New Shepard boosters as well \u2014 but those go up to scratch the very edge of space before falling back down on trips that don\u2019t orbit the Earth. It plans to recover its more powerful New Glenn rocket, however, in much the same way SpaceX does. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has talked about recovering not the entire booster, but popping out the most valuable part \u2014 the engines \u2014 and catching them with a grappling hook as they fall back to Earth under a parachute. And Rocket Lab had initially said it wouldn\u2019t try to reuse its small rockets but has since reversed course.Advertisement\u201cSpaceX\u2019s technical validation of reusable rockets has opened new horizons for the launch sector while inciting the firm\u2019s competitors to invest in technological innovation as a means to fight market share erosion,\u201d Maxime Puteaux and Alexandre Najjar, consultants at Euroconsult, wrote in a recent SpaceNews op-ed.SpaceX has also gotten better at refurbishing the rockets faster between flights. While the first booster took a year to relaunch, SpaceX flew one last year after just 82 days, and the rocket it plans to fly on Sunday\u2019s mission had a still faster turnaround \u2014 only about 60 days between its last launch and its next one, the company said.SpaceX makes history by flying a \u201cflight proven\u201d rocketSpaceX doesn\u2019t just land on land. It lands on a robot ship at sea it calls an \u201cautonomous spaceport drone ship.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s quite a tiny target. It\u2019s like trying to land on a postage stamp there,\u201d Musk said in 2016. \u201cIt\u2019s like a carrier landing versus a land landing.\u201dAdvertisementBringing the rocket home is \u201csupremely difficult,\u201d Reisman said. The rocket and the drone ship essentially work to meet up in the exact same spot in the ocean, and the booster has to be constantly decelerating and get as close to zero velocity as it can at the precise moment it is touching down. It also needs to be able to survive high temperatures as it screams back through the atmosphere.For a few years, SpaceX struggled as one booster after the other crashed and burned. It happened so frequently the company came up with a term for it \u2014 \u201crapid unscheduled disassembly.\u201dWhen SpaceX finally pulled off a drone ship landing in 2016, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, tweeted their congratulations. \u201cOpens the imagination to what is possible,\u201d Hadfield wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen-President Obama also weighed in, writing, \u201cIt\u2019s because of innovators like you & NASA that America continues to lead in space exploration.\u201dPresident Trump has been enamored of the landings as well. Musk \u201cdoes good at rockets, too, by the way,\u201d he told CNBC recently. \u201cI never saw where the engines come down with no wings, no anything, and they\u2019re landing. I said, \u2018I\u2019ve never seen that before.\u2019\u2009\u201dSpaceX now has not just one landing pad at Cape Canaveral, but two \u2014 one for each of the side boosters that fly on its Falcon Heavy rocket, which come down in tandem.Having mastered the art of recovering boosters, SpaceX is now going after another part of the rocket \u2014 the nose cone, or fairing, which sits atop the rocket and protects the satellite being launched. The company has a couple of ships with giant nets affixed to them that try to position themselves under the fairing as it falls from space under a parachute. So far, it has caught three.In 2017, Musk said the fairings cost about $6 million each \u2014 not a lot in the context of a rocket, but not chump change, either.\u201cAt one point, we\u2019re, like, debating, \u2018Should we try to recover it or not?\u2019\u2009\u201d Musk said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Guys, imagine you had $6 million in cash in a palette flying through the air, and it\u2019s going to smash in the ocean. Would you try to recover that?\u2019 Yes. Yes, you would.\u201d Once thought impossible, SpaceX is on the verge of its 50th landing of a booster rocket after launch, a milestone that has helped convince the space industry that ditching rocket boosters into the ocean, the practice for decades, is an expensive waste of a perfectly good vehicle. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is about to land its 50th Falcon 9 booster",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amid tension with Russia, Biden administration wants to extend the life of the International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6574",
        "date": "2021-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/31/nasa-space-station-extension-russia/",
        "text": "The Biden administration wants to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2030, keeping it aloft despite mounting tensions with Russia, its main partner on the orbiting laboratory.The announcement by NASA on Friday comes a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that any new sanctions stemming from the growing crisis in Ukraine could lead to \u201ca complete rupture of relations.\u201d And last month, Russia fired a missile that destroyed an inactive weather satellite and created a large field of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that threatened the space station as well as a host of other satellites. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile the act was condemned by the Biden administration, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called it \u201creckless and dangerous,\u201d Nelson also said the attack was an act of the Russian military that surprised the Russian space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey\u2019re probably just as appalled as we are,\u201d Nelson said in an interview with The Washington Post at the time.Tensions with Russia are now spilling into spaceDespite those tensions, the White House and NASA want to keep its alliance with its international partners \u2014 and particularly Russia \u2014 going on the space station, a relationship that has traditionally been walled off from geopolitical turmoil on Earth.Earlier this year, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, told CNN that it was committed to the station. \u201cThis is a family, where a divorce within a station is not possible,\u201d he said.In a statement to The Post on Friday, Nelson said the station had become a long-standing tool of diplomacy as well as science that needed to be continued. In addition to Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe are partners in the station in what NASA has called \u201cthe most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.\u201dTrouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year\u201cThe International Space Station is a beacon of peaceful international scientific collaboration and for more than 20 years has returned enormous scientific, educational and technological developments to benefit humanity,\u201d Nelson said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House\u2019s support for the ISS extension comes as China is assembling its own space station in Earth\u2019s orbit. Nelson has called China a \u201cvery aggressive competitor.\u201d He recently warned: \u201cWatch the Chinese.\u201dThe International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there foreverIn the statement Friday, he said that: \u201cAs more and more nations are active in space, it\u2019s more important than ever that the United States continues to lead the world in growing international alliances and modeling rules and norms for the peaceful and responsible use of space.\u201dCurrently, Congress has approved funding the station through 2024 and is expected to approve additional funds through 2030.Despite the support to keep the station going, it\u2019s not clear that the station itself will last that long. It has sprung leaks and been taken on a couple of wild rides due to errant thruster firings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is looking to the private sector to replace the station. In October, it awarded three contracts worth a total of $415.6 million to develop commercial space habitats.The companies, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman, all have said that their stations would be ready by the end of the decade. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) If they\u2019re not, however, NASA could lose the foothold it has held in low Earth orbit for more than 20 years. The announcement by NASA Friday comes a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that any new sanctions stemming from the growing crisis in Ukraine could lead to \u201ca complete rupture of relations.\u201d Amid tension with Russia, Biden administration wants to extend the life of the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amid tension with Russia, Biden administration wants to extend the life of the International Space Station (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6575",
        "date": "2021-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/31/nasa-space-station-extension-russia/",
        "text": "The Biden administration wants to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2030, keeping it aloft despite mounting tensions with Russia, its main partner on the orbiting laboratory.The announcement by NASA on Friday comes a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that any new sanctions stemming from the growing crisis in Ukraine could lead to \u201ca complete rupture of relations.\u201d And last month, Russia fired a missile that destroyed an inactive weather satellite and created a large field of more than 1,500 pieces of debris that threatened the space station as well as a host of other satellites. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile the act was condemned by the Biden administration, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson called it \u201creckless and dangerous,\u201d Nelson also said the attack was an act of the Russian military that surprised the Russian space agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey\u2019re probably just as appalled as we are,\u201d Nelson said in an interview with The Washington Post at the time.Tensions with Russia are now spilling into spaceDespite those tensions, the White House and NASA want to keep its alliance with its international partners \u2014 and particularly Russia \u2014 going on the space station, a relationship that has traditionally been walled off from geopolitical turmoil on Earth.Earlier this year, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, told CNN that it was committed to the station. \u201cThis is a family, where a divorce within a station is not possible,\u201d he said.In a statement to The Post on Friday, Nelson said the station had become a long-standing tool of diplomacy as well as science that needed to be continued. In addition to Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe are partners in the station in what NASA has called \u201cthe most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.\u201dTrouble aboard the space station sent astronauts fleeing for safety for the second time this year\u201cThe International Space Station is a beacon of peaceful international scientific collaboration and for more than 20 years has returned enormous scientific, educational and technological developments to benefit humanity,\u201d Nelson said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House\u2019s support for the ISS extension comes as China is assembling its own space station in Earth\u2019s orbit. Nelson has called China a \u201cvery aggressive competitor.\u201d He recently warned: \u201cWatch the Chinese.\u201dThe International Space Station can\u2019t stay up there foreverIn the statement Friday, he said that: \u201cAs more and more nations are active in space, it\u2019s more important than ever that the United States continues to lead the world in growing international alliances and modeling rules and norms for the peaceful and responsible use of space.\u201dCurrently, Congress has approved funding the station through 2024 and is expected to approve additional funds through 2030.Despite the support to keep the station going, it\u2019s not clear that the station itself will last that long. It has sprung leaks and been taken on a couple of wild rides due to errant thruster firings.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA is looking to the private sector to replace the station. In October, it awarded three contracts worth a total of $415.6 million to develop commercial space habitats.The companies, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman, all have said that their stations would be ready by the end of the decade. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) If they\u2019re not, however, NASA could lose the foothold it has held in low Earth orbit for more than 20 years. The announcement by NASA Friday comes a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that any new sanctions stemming from the growing crisis in Ukraine could lead to \u201ca complete rupture of relations.\u201d Amid tension with Russia, Biden administration wants to extend the life of the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going to space for fun? You should be taxed, lawmaker says. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6576",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/23/lawmaker-tax-space-flights/",
        "text": "Space tourists \u2014 and the companies that ferry them \u2014 should pay taxes on their flights, said a U.S. lawmaker proposing one.\u201cSpace exploration isn\u2019t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy,\u201d said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) in a statement announcing his plans to introduce the new tax.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cJust as normal Americans pay taxes when they buy airline tickets, billionaires who fly into space to produce nothing of scientific value should do the same, and then some,\u201d he said Tuesday. Blumenauer, who represents part of Portland and its suburbs, announced his plans on the same day Jeff Bezos and three others launched into space on a rocket developed by his space company, Blue Origin. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementOne of the seats on the flight had been purchased at auction for $28 million, but the passenger, who has asked to remain anonymous, canceled over \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201d The 18-year-old son of a private-equity fund founder who had purchased a seat on an upcoming flight took the empty spot.AdvertisementBlue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of tickets for seats on future flights, Bezos said this week. Virgin Galactic, one of Blue Origin\u2019s competitors whose founder, Richard Branson, went to space days before Bezos, has been selling tickets to space for $250,000. Analysts expect the price could double.The SPACE Tax Act \u2014 or Securing Protections Against Carbon Emissions \u2014 proposed by Blumenauer would include a per-passenger tax, but also an excise tax based on how far into space the flight goes. One tier of the tax would apply to flights that go 50 to 80 miles above Earth\u2019s surface, and a second tier would \u201clevy a significantly higher\u201d tax on flights that travel more than 80 miles above Earth.Story continues below advertisementThe Blue Origin flight this week went about 66.5 miles above Earth, and the Virgin Galactic flight went about 50 miles. Both flights were what is deemed \u201csuborbital,\u201d reaching only the edge of space, but achieved zero-gravity \u2014 Bezos was seen on video floating Skittles into the mouths of his fellow passengers.AdvertisementBlumenauer\u2019s office said in a statement that the member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee is especially concerned about the environmental impact of sending humans into space, especially if there is no scientific gain. \u201cI\u2019m not opposed to this type of space innovation. However, things that are done purely for tourism or entertainment, and that don\u2019t have a scientific purpose, should in turn support the public good,\u201d the lawmaker said.NASA flights for research purposes would be exempt, Blumenauer said, and flights carrying some passengers working on behalf of NASA would have a proportional exemption. SpaceX, another private space company, owned by Elon Musk, ferried a crew of NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in April.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment.AdvertisementThe proposed tax is the latest example of the widespread rebuke that Bezos and Branson have faced from progressives over their plans for space tourism, as many critics have argued that money and resources used toward the effort could be put to better use on Earth.The trips were also derided by some as an example of extreme wealth in the hands of billionaires. Bezos, the world\u2019s richest man, was criticized for thanking Amazon employees and customers after landing this week, telling them, \u201cyou guys paid for all this.\u201d Rep. Earl Blumenauer wants passengers and businesses to be taxed for commercial flights to space that aren't for scientific purposes. Going to space for fun? You should be taxed, lawmaker says.",
        "author": "Bryan Pietsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going to space for fun? You should be taxed, lawmaker says. (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6577",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/23/lawmaker-tax-space-flights/",
        "text": "Space tourists \u2014 and the companies that ferry them \u2014 should pay taxes on their flights, said a U.S. lawmaker proposing one.\u201cSpace exploration isn\u2019t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy,\u201d said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) in a statement announcing his plans to introduce the new tax.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cJust as normal Americans pay taxes when they buy airline tickets, billionaires who fly into space to produce nothing of scientific value should do the same, and then some,\u201d he said Tuesday. Blumenauer, who represents part of Portland and its suburbs, announced his plans on the same day Jeff Bezos and three others launched into space on a rocket developed by his space company, Blue Origin. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementOne of the seats on the flight had been purchased at auction for $28 million, but the passenger, who has asked to remain anonymous, canceled over \u201cscheduling conflicts.\u201d The 18-year-old son of a private-equity fund founder who had purchased a seat on an upcoming flight took the empty spot.AdvertisementBlue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of tickets for seats on future flights, Bezos said this week. Virgin Galactic, one of Blue Origin\u2019s competitors whose founder, Richard Branson, went to space days before Bezos, has been selling tickets to space for $250,000. Analysts expect the price could double.The SPACE Tax Act \u2014 or Securing Protections Against Carbon Emissions \u2014 proposed by Blumenauer would include a per-passenger tax, but also an excise tax based on how far into space the flight goes. One tier of the tax would apply to flights that go 50 to 80 miles above Earth\u2019s surface, and a second tier would \u201clevy a significantly higher\u201d tax on flights that travel more than 80 miles above Earth.Story continues below advertisementThe Blue Origin flight this week went about 66.5 miles above Earth, and the Virgin Galactic flight went about 50 miles. Both flights were what is deemed \u201csuborbital,\u201d reaching only the edge of space, but achieved zero-gravity \u2014 Bezos was seen on video floating Skittles into the mouths of his fellow passengers.AdvertisementBlumenauer\u2019s office said in a statement that the member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee is especially concerned about the environmental impact of sending humans into space, especially if there is no scientific gain. \u201cI\u2019m not opposed to this type of space innovation. However, things that are done purely for tourism or entertainment, and that don\u2019t have a scientific purpose, should in turn support the public good,\u201d the lawmaker said.NASA flights for research purposes would be exempt, Blumenauer said, and flights carrying some passengers working on behalf of NASA would have a proportional exemption. SpaceX, another private space company, owned by Elon Musk, ferried a crew of NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in April.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment.AdvertisementThe proposed tax is the latest example of the widespread rebuke that Bezos and Branson have faced from progressives over their plans for space tourism, as many critics have argued that money and resources used toward the effort could be put to better use on Earth.The trips were also derided by some as an example of extreme wealth in the hands of billionaires. Bezos, the world\u2019s richest man, was criticized for thanking Amazon employees and customers after landing this week, telling them, \u201cyou guys paid for all this.\u201d Rep. Earl Blumenauer wants passengers and businesses to be taxed for commercial flights to space that aren't for scientific purposes. Going to space for fun? You should be taxed, lawmaker says.",
        "author": "Bryan Pietsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Great books about the space race (WP: Space) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6578",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/23/great-books-about-space-race/",
        "text": "Over the course of creating The Washington Post\u2019s \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, there were many books I found incredibly useful for my reporting. As we wrap up the narrative audio series, I thought I\u2019d share my recommended reading list with podcast listeners who are eager to learn more.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast chronicled the race to the moon, weaving together stories of science fiction\u2019s influence, Cold War nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and backroom politics in the White House and on Capitol Hill over the 1950s and \u201860s. This is of course only a partial list of the great space-race books out there. What are some of your favorites? Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments section for other titles you would recommend to interested readers.Story continues below advertisementListen to the podcast here:Advertisement\"Moonrise\": The real origin story behind America's decision to go to the moonAnd check out these books that served as great resources:\u201cA Man on the Moon,\u201d by Andrew ChaikinAndrew Chaikin interviewed nearly every astronaut to make a journey to the moon, and in this book he retells the story of Apollo missions with intimate detail.\u201cAmerican Moonshot,\u201d by Douglas BrinkleyPresidential historian Douglas Brinkley turns his focus to John F. Kennedy\u2019s decision to go to the moon in this newly published biography.\u201cApollo 13,\u201d by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey KlugerWhile the Apollo 13 mission took place after the main events covered in the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, I still found it useful to read astronaut Jim Lovell\u2019s account of his training, as he was also part of the Apollo 8 mission, the first human trip to the moon.\u201cApollo in the Age of Aquarius,\u201d by Neil MaherNeil Maher, who appeared as a guest on Episode 11 of the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, examines how the Apollo program intersected \u2014 sometimes collaborating, sometimes colliding \u2014 with social movements of the 1960s, including women\u2019s rights, civil rights, the environmental movement and protests against the Vietnam War.\u201cApollo to the Moon,\u201d by Teasel Muir-HarmonyThis is a guide to artifacts from the Apollo missions, which each reveal unique stories about the space race. Teasel Muir-Harmony is the curator of the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Apollo collection. She also appeared as an expert on \u201cMoonrise\u201d and was hugely helpful in furthering my understanding of the geopolitics of the Apollo story.\u201cAstounding,\u201d by Alec Nevala-LeeThis book has fascinating details about the golden age of science fiction, particularly the lives and careers of sci-fi creators John Campbell, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. In addition to using this book as a font of information for \u201cMoonrise,\u201d I interviewed author Alec Nevala-Lee about his science fiction expertise for several of the podcast episodes.\u201cFrom the Earth to the Moon,\u201d by Jules VerneThis novel, originally published in 1865 by French author Jules Verne, is considered one of the first science fiction depictions of launching humans on a rocket to the moon. It inspired a generation of rocket designers and sci-fi readers to dream of space travel.\u201cJohn F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,\u201d by John M. LogsdonSpace historian John Logsdon pulls together a detailed account of John F. Kennedy\u2019s Apollo decision and its lasting effects on U.S. space policy.\u201cMaster of the Senate\u201d and \u201cThe Passage of Power,\u201d by Robert A. CaroThese two biographies in Robert Caro\u2019s massive (and ongoing) series about Lyndon B. Johnson were extremely useful in constructing an image of Johnson\u2019s role in shaping U.S. space policy, from Sputnik through Apollo.\u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex,\u201d by Margaret WeitekampMargaret Weitekamp, a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast. This book of hers looks at the first program that attempted to put women in space in the 1950s and \u203260s, telling the interwoven story of the U.S. space program and the women\u2019s rights movement.\u201cRocket Men,\u201d by Robert KursonThis is a great account of the Apollo 8 mission, the first time humans flew all the way to the moon. We tell a (much abbreviated!) version of the Apollo 8 story in episode 11 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cRockets and People \u2014 Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War,\u201d by Boris ChertokBoris Chertok worked under Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev, and this volume of his autobiography gives a rich firsthand account of Korolev\u2019s final days, as chronicled in \u201cMoonrise\u201d Episode 10.\u201cRocket Ship Galileo,\u201d by Robert A. HeinleinThis young-adult fantasy book about a trip to the moon served as the basis for the film \u201cDestination Moon,\u201d one of the earliest Hollywood depictions of space travel. The influence of such works on popular culture \u2014 and, subsequently, U.S. space policy \u2014 is explored in Episode 6 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cSpace and the American Imagination,\u201d by Howard McCurdyHoward McCurdy is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University, and he appeared regularly on the podcast. This book in many ways has a similar aim to \u201cMoonrise\u201d \u2014 it examines the way fictional imagery in popular culture shaped real policy decisions involving the space program.\u201cSpaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership,\u201d by Roger Launius and Howard McCurdyBoth Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy were frequent guests on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, and their book is a collection of essays on the intersection between presidential politics and space policy. It illuminates patterns and differences among the many American presidents who had a hand in shaping U.S. space goals.\u201cThe Age of Eisenhower,\u201d by William I. HitchcockWilliam Hitchcock\u2019s biography of Dwight Eisenhower was instrumental for me when I was creating the presidential podcast, and I found myself rereading several chapters of it for \u201cMoonrise\u201d to better understand Eisenhower\u2019s thinking on Sputnik and the United States\u2019 military interests in space.\u201cThe Left Hand of Darkness,\u201d by Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin was the first woman to win the prestigious Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards. This novel of hers, published in 1969 \u2014 the same year as the Apollo 11 moon landing \u2014 is an example of science fiction\u2019s use of space settings as laboratories for exploring social and cultural dynamics on Earth.\u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare,\u201d by Asif SiddiqiAsif Siddiqi is one of the foremost experts on Soviet space history. His book \u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare\u201d showcases his meticulous research into the early Soviet space program. Particularly useful for me in making \u201cMoonrise\u201d were his detailed accounts of Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev\u2019s role throughout so much of the space race.\u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d by Tom WolfeWhile astronauts are far from the main characters of \u201cMoonrise,\u201d this classic Tom Wolfe nonfiction work is a great jumping-off point for understanding NASA\u2019s culture in the 1960s.\u201cThe Smithsonian History of Space Exploration,\u201d by Roger LauniusRoger Launius appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, sharing his expertise across a wide array of space-history topics. In this massive book, he gives a thorough overview of all things space \u2014 from ancient studies of the stars to future projects to explore them.\u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d by Christian DavenportChristian Davenport is a colleague of mine at The Washington Post who covers NASA and the private space industry. He was a great help throughout my reporting process, and his book provides a really informative and engaging look at the figures leading, and financing, space exploration today.\u201cVon Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War,\u201d by Michael J. NeufeldMichael Neufeld is a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, and his biography paints a complex, nuanced portrait of German-turned-American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Neufeld was a guest on several \u201cMoonrise\u201d episodes, particularly contributing his expertise on von Braun\u2019s Nazi past and his story of coming to the United States after World War II. Loved the \"Moonrise\" podcast? Here's a reading list for brushing up on space history. Great books about the space race",
        "author": "Lillian Cunningham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Great books about the space race (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6579",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/23/great-books-about-space-race/",
        "text": "Over the course of creating The Washington Post\u2019s \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, there were many books I found incredibly useful for my reporting. As we wrap up the narrative audio series, I thought I\u2019d share my recommended reading list with podcast listeners who are eager to learn more.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast chronicled the race to the moon, weaving together stories of science fiction\u2019s influence, Cold War nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and backroom politics in the White House and on Capitol Hill over the 1950s and \u201860s. This is of course only a partial list of the great space-race books out there. What are some of your favorites? Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments section for other titles you would recommend to interested readers.Story continues below advertisementListen to the podcast here:Advertisement\"Moonrise\": The real origin story behind America's decision to go to the moonAnd check out these books that served as great resources:\u201cA Man on the Moon,\u201d by Andrew ChaikinAndrew Chaikin interviewed nearly every astronaut to make a journey to the moon, and in this book he retells the story of Apollo missions with intimate detail.\u201cAmerican Moonshot,\u201d by Douglas BrinkleyPresidential historian Douglas Brinkley turns his focus to John F. Kennedy\u2019s decision to go to the moon in this newly published biography.\u201cApollo 13,\u201d by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey KlugerWhile the Apollo 13 mission took place after the main events covered in the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, I still found it useful to read astronaut Jim Lovell\u2019s account of his training, as he was also part of the Apollo 8 mission, the first human trip to the moon.\u201cApollo in the Age of Aquarius,\u201d by Neil MaherNeil Maher, who appeared as a guest on Episode 11 of the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, examines how the Apollo program intersected \u2014 sometimes collaborating, sometimes colliding \u2014 with social movements of the 1960s, including women\u2019s rights, civil rights, the environmental movement and protests against the Vietnam War.\u201cApollo to the Moon,\u201d by Teasel Muir-HarmonyThis is a guide to artifacts from the Apollo missions, which each reveal unique stories about the space race. Teasel Muir-Harmony is the curator of the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Apollo collection. She also appeared as an expert on \u201cMoonrise\u201d and was hugely helpful in furthering my understanding of the geopolitics of the Apollo story.\u201cAstounding,\u201d by Alec Nevala-LeeThis book has fascinating details about the golden age of science fiction, particularly the lives and careers of sci-fi creators John Campbell, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. In addition to using this book as a font of information for \u201cMoonrise,\u201d I interviewed author Alec Nevala-Lee about his science fiction expertise for several of the podcast episodes.\u201cFrom the Earth to the Moon,\u201d by Jules VerneThis novel, originally published in 1865 by French author Jules Verne, is considered one of the first science fiction depictions of launching humans on a rocket to the moon. It inspired a generation of rocket designers and sci-fi readers to dream of space travel.\u201cJohn F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,\u201d by John M. LogsdonSpace historian John Logsdon pulls together a detailed account of John F. Kennedy\u2019s Apollo decision and its lasting effects on U.S. space policy.\u201cMaster of the Senate\u201d and \u201cThe Passage of Power,\u201d by Robert A. CaroThese two biographies in Robert Caro\u2019s massive (and ongoing) series about Lyndon B. Johnson were extremely useful in constructing an image of Johnson\u2019s role in shaping U.S. space policy, from Sputnik through Apollo.\u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex,\u201d by Margaret WeitekampMargaret Weitekamp, a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast. This book of hers looks at the first program that attempted to put women in space in the 1950s and \u203260s, telling the interwoven story of the U.S. space program and the women\u2019s rights movement.\u201cRocket Men,\u201d by Robert KursonThis is a great account of the Apollo 8 mission, the first time humans flew all the way to the moon. We tell a (much abbreviated!) version of the Apollo 8 story in episode 11 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cRockets and People \u2014 Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War,\u201d by Boris ChertokBoris Chertok worked under Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev, and this volume of his autobiography gives a rich firsthand account of Korolev\u2019s final days, as chronicled in \u201cMoonrise\u201d Episode 10.\u201cRocket Ship Galileo,\u201d by Robert A. HeinleinThis young-adult fantasy book about a trip to the moon served as the basis for the film \u201cDestination Moon,\u201d one of the earliest Hollywood depictions of space travel. The influence of such works on popular culture \u2014 and, subsequently, U.S. space policy \u2014 is explored in Episode 6 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cSpace and the American Imagination,\u201d by Howard McCurdyHoward McCurdy is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University, and he appeared regularly on the podcast. This book in many ways has a similar aim to \u201cMoonrise\u201d \u2014 it examines the way fictional imagery in popular culture shaped real policy decisions involving the space program.\u201cSpaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership,\u201d by Roger Launius and Howard McCurdyBoth Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy were frequent guests on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, and their book is a collection of essays on the intersection between presidential politics and space policy. It illuminates patterns and differences among the many American presidents who had a hand in shaping U.S. space goals.\u201cThe Age of Eisenhower,\u201d by William I. HitchcockWilliam Hitchcock\u2019s biography of Dwight Eisenhower was instrumental for me when I was creating the presidential podcast, and I found myself rereading several chapters of it for \u201cMoonrise\u201d to better understand Eisenhower\u2019s thinking on Sputnik and the United States\u2019 military interests in space.\u201cThe Left Hand of Darkness,\u201d by Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin was the first woman to win the prestigious Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards. This novel of hers, published in 1969 \u2014 the same year as the Apollo 11 moon landing \u2014 is an example of science fiction\u2019s use of space settings as laboratories for exploring social and cultural dynamics on Earth.\u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare,\u201d by Asif SiddiqiAsif Siddiqi is one of the foremost experts on Soviet space history. His book \u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare\u201d showcases his meticulous research into the early Soviet space program. Particularly useful for me in making \u201cMoonrise\u201d were his detailed accounts of Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev\u2019s role throughout so much of the space race.\u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d by Tom WolfeWhile astronauts are far from the main characters of \u201cMoonrise,\u201d this classic Tom Wolfe nonfiction work is a great jumping-off point for understanding NASA\u2019s culture in the 1960s.\u201cThe Smithsonian History of Space Exploration,\u201d by Roger LauniusRoger Launius appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, sharing his expertise across a wide array of space-history topics. In this massive book, he gives a thorough overview of all things space \u2014 from ancient studies of the stars to future projects to explore them.\u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d by Christian DavenportChristian Davenport is a colleague of mine at The Washington Post who covers NASA and the private space industry. He was a great help throughout my reporting process, and his book provides a really informative and engaging look at the figures leading, and financing, space exploration today.\u201cVon Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War,\u201d by Michael J. NeufeldMichael Neufeld is a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, and his biography paints a complex, nuanced portrait of German-turned-American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Neufeld was a guest on several \u201cMoonrise\u201d episodes, particularly contributing his expertise on von Braun\u2019s Nazi past and his story of coming to the United States after World War II. Loved the \"Moonrise\" podcast? Here's a reading list for brushing up on space history. Great books about the space race",
        "author": "Lillian Cunningham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Great books about the space race (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6580",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/23/great-books-about-space-race/",
        "text": "Over the course of creating The Washington Post\u2019s \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, there were many books I found incredibly useful for my reporting. As we wrap up the narrative audio series, I thought I\u2019d share my recommended reading list with podcast listeners who are eager to learn more.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast chronicled the race to the moon, weaving together stories of science fiction\u2019s influence, Cold War nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and backroom politics in the White House and on Capitol Hill over the 1950s and \u201860s. This is of course only a partial list of the great space-race books out there. What are some of your favorites? Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments section for other titles you would recommend to interested readers.Story continues below advertisementListen to the podcast here:Advertisement\"Moonrise\": The real origin story behind America's decision to go to the moonAnd check out these books that served as great resources:\u201cA Man on the Moon,\u201d by Andrew ChaikinAndrew Chaikin interviewed nearly every astronaut to make a journey to the moon, and in this book he retells the story of Apollo missions with intimate detail.\u201cAmerican Moonshot,\u201d by Douglas BrinkleyPresidential historian Douglas Brinkley turns his focus to John F. Kennedy\u2019s decision to go to the moon in this newly published biography.\u201cApollo 13,\u201d by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey KlugerWhile the Apollo 13 mission took place after the main events covered in the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, I still found it useful to read astronaut Jim Lovell\u2019s account of his training, as he was also part of the Apollo 8 mission, the first human trip to the moon.\u201cApollo in the Age of Aquarius,\u201d by Neil MaherNeil Maher, who appeared as a guest on Episode 11 of the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, examines how the Apollo program intersected \u2014 sometimes collaborating, sometimes colliding \u2014 with social movements of the 1960s, including women\u2019s rights, civil rights, the environmental movement and protests against the Vietnam War.\u201cApollo to the Moon,\u201d by Teasel Muir-HarmonyThis is a guide to artifacts from the Apollo missions, which each reveal unique stories about the space race. Teasel Muir-Harmony is the curator of the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Apollo collection. She also appeared as an expert on \u201cMoonrise\u201d and was hugely helpful in furthering my understanding of the geopolitics of the Apollo story.\u201cAstounding,\u201d by Alec Nevala-LeeThis book has fascinating details about the golden age of science fiction, particularly the lives and careers of sci-fi creators John Campbell, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. In addition to using this book as a font of information for \u201cMoonrise,\u201d I interviewed author Alec Nevala-Lee about his science fiction expertise for several of the podcast episodes.\u201cFrom the Earth to the Moon,\u201d by Jules VerneThis novel, originally published in 1865 by French author Jules Verne, is considered one of the first science fiction depictions of launching humans on a rocket to the moon. It inspired a generation of rocket designers and sci-fi readers to dream of space travel.\u201cJohn F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,\u201d by John M. LogsdonSpace historian John Logsdon pulls together a detailed account of John F. Kennedy\u2019s Apollo decision and its lasting effects on U.S. space policy.\u201cMaster of the Senate\u201d and \u201cThe Passage of Power,\u201d by Robert A. CaroThese two biographies in Robert Caro\u2019s massive (and ongoing) series about Lyndon B. Johnson were extremely useful in constructing an image of Johnson\u2019s role in shaping U.S. space policy, from Sputnik through Apollo.\u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex,\u201d by Margaret WeitekampMargaret Weitekamp, a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast. This book of hers looks at the first program that attempted to put women in space in the 1950s and \u203260s, telling the interwoven story of the U.S. space program and the women\u2019s rights movement.\u201cRocket Men,\u201d by Robert KursonThis is a great account of the Apollo 8 mission, the first time humans flew all the way to the moon. We tell a (much abbreviated!) version of the Apollo 8 story in episode 11 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cRockets and People \u2014 Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War,\u201d by Boris ChertokBoris Chertok worked under Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev, and this volume of his autobiography gives a rich firsthand account of Korolev\u2019s final days, as chronicled in \u201cMoonrise\u201d Episode 10.\u201cRocket Ship Galileo,\u201d by Robert A. HeinleinThis young-adult fantasy book about a trip to the moon served as the basis for the film \u201cDestination Moon,\u201d one of the earliest Hollywood depictions of space travel. The influence of such works on popular culture \u2014 and, subsequently, U.S. space policy \u2014 is explored in Episode 6 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cSpace and the American Imagination,\u201d by Howard McCurdyHoward McCurdy is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University, and he appeared regularly on the podcast. This book in many ways has a similar aim to \u201cMoonrise\u201d \u2014 it examines the way fictional imagery in popular culture shaped real policy decisions involving the space program.\u201cSpaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership,\u201d by Roger Launius and Howard McCurdyBoth Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy were frequent guests on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, and their book is a collection of essays on the intersection between presidential politics and space policy. It illuminates patterns and differences among the many American presidents who had a hand in shaping U.S. space goals.\u201cThe Age of Eisenhower,\u201d by William I. HitchcockWilliam Hitchcock\u2019s biography of Dwight Eisenhower was instrumental for me when I was creating the presidential podcast, and I found myself rereading several chapters of it for \u201cMoonrise\u201d to better understand Eisenhower\u2019s thinking on Sputnik and the United States\u2019 military interests in space.\u201cThe Left Hand of Darkness,\u201d by Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin was the first woman to win the prestigious Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards. This novel of hers, published in 1969 \u2014 the same year as the Apollo 11 moon landing \u2014 is an example of science fiction\u2019s use of space settings as laboratories for exploring social and cultural dynamics on Earth.\u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare,\u201d by Asif SiddiqiAsif Siddiqi is one of the foremost experts on Soviet space history. His book \u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare\u201d showcases his meticulous research into the early Soviet space program. Particularly useful for me in making \u201cMoonrise\u201d were his detailed accounts of Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev\u2019s role throughout so much of the space race.\u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d by Tom WolfeWhile astronauts are far from the main characters of \u201cMoonrise,\u201d this classic Tom Wolfe nonfiction work is a great jumping-off point for understanding NASA\u2019s culture in the 1960s.\u201cThe Smithsonian History of Space Exploration,\u201d by Roger LauniusRoger Launius appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, sharing his expertise across a wide array of space-history topics. In this massive book, he gives a thorough overview of all things space \u2014 from ancient studies of the stars to future projects to explore them.\u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d by Christian DavenportChristian Davenport is a colleague of mine at The Washington Post who covers NASA and the private space industry. He was a great help throughout my reporting process, and his book provides a really informative and engaging look at the figures leading, and financing, space exploration today.\u201cVon Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War,\u201d by Michael J. NeufeldMichael Neufeld is a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, and his biography paints a complex, nuanced portrait of German-turned-American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Neufeld was a guest on several \u201cMoonrise\u201d episodes, particularly contributing his expertise on von Braun\u2019s Nazi past and his story of coming to the United States after World War II. Loved the \"Moonrise\" podcast? Here's a reading list for brushing up on space history. Great books about the space race",
        "author": "Lillian Cunningham"
    },
    {
        "title": "Great books about the space race (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6581",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/23/great-books-about-space-race/",
        "text": "Over the course of creating The Washington Post\u2019s \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, there were many books I found incredibly useful for my reporting. As we wrap up the narrative audio series, I thought I\u2019d share my recommended reading list with podcast listeners who are eager to learn more.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast chronicled the race to the moon, weaving together stories of science fiction\u2019s influence, Cold War nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union, and backroom politics in the White House and on Capitol Hill over the 1950s and \u201860s. This is of course only a partial list of the great space-race books out there. What are some of your favorites? Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments section for other titles you would recommend to interested readers.Story continues below advertisementListen to the podcast here:Advertisement\"Moonrise\": The real origin story behind America's decision to go to the moonAnd check out these books that served as great resources:\u201cA Man on the Moon,\u201d by Andrew ChaikinAndrew Chaikin interviewed nearly every astronaut to make a journey to the moon, and in this book he retells the story of Apollo missions with intimate detail.\u201cAmerican Moonshot,\u201d by Douglas BrinkleyPresidential historian Douglas Brinkley turns his focus to John F. Kennedy\u2019s decision to go to the moon in this newly published biography.\u201cApollo 13,\u201d by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey KlugerWhile the Apollo 13 mission took place after the main events covered in the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, I still found it useful to read astronaut Jim Lovell\u2019s account of his training, as he was also part of the Apollo 8 mission, the first human trip to the moon.\u201cApollo in the Age of Aquarius,\u201d by Neil MaherNeil Maher, who appeared as a guest on Episode 11 of the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, examines how the Apollo program intersected \u2014 sometimes collaborating, sometimes colliding \u2014 with social movements of the 1960s, including women\u2019s rights, civil rights, the environmental movement and protests against the Vietnam War.\u201cApollo to the Moon,\u201d by Teasel Muir-HarmonyThis is a guide to artifacts from the Apollo missions, which each reveal unique stories about the space race. Teasel Muir-Harmony is the curator of the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Apollo collection. She also appeared as an expert on \u201cMoonrise\u201d and was hugely helpful in furthering my understanding of the geopolitics of the Apollo story.\u201cAstounding,\u201d by Alec Nevala-LeeThis book has fascinating details about the golden age of science fiction, particularly the lives and careers of sci-fi creators John Campbell, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. In addition to using this book as a font of information for \u201cMoonrise,\u201d I interviewed author Alec Nevala-Lee about his science fiction expertise for several of the podcast episodes.\u201cFrom the Earth to the Moon,\u201d by Jules VerneThis novel, originally published in 1865 by French author Jules Verne, is considered one of the first science fiction depictions of launching humans on a rocket to the moon. It inspired a generation of rocket designers and sci-fi readers to dream of space travel.\u201cJohn F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,\u201d by John M. LogsdonSpace historian John Logsdon pulls together a detailed account of John F. Kennedy\u2019s Apollo decision and its lasting effects on U.S. space policy.\u201cMaster of the Senate\u201d and \u201cThe Passage of Power,\u201d by Robert A. CaroThese two biographies in Robert Caro\u2019s massive (and ongoing) series about Lyndon B. Johnson were extremely useful in constructing an image of Johnson\u2019s role in shaping U.S. space policy, from Sputnik through Apollo.\u201cRight Stuff, Wrong Sex,\u201d by Margaret WeitekampMargaret Weitekamp, a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast. This book of hers looks at the first program that attempted to put women in space in the 1950s and \u203260s, telling the interwoven story of the U.S. space program and the women\u2019s rights movement.\u201cRocket Men,\u201d by Robert KursonThis is a great account of the Apollo 8 mission, the first time humans flew all the way to the moon. We tell a (much abbreviated!) version of the Apollo 8 story in episode 11 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cRockets and People \u2014 Volume III: Hot Days of the Cold War,\u201d by Boris ChertokBoris Chertok worked under Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev, and this volume of his autobiography gives a rich firsthand account of Korolev\u2019s final days, as chronicled in \u201cMoonrise\u201d Episode 10.\u201cRocket Ship Galileo,\u201d by Robert A. HeinleinThis young-adult fantasy book about a trip to the moon served as the basis for the film \u201cDestination Moon,\u201d one of the earliest Hollywood depictions of space travel. The influence of such works on popular culture \u2014 and, subsequently, U.S. space policy \u2014 is explored in Episode 6 of \u201cMoonrise.\u201d\u201cSpace and the American Imagination,\u201d by Howard McCurdyHoward McCurdy is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University, and he appeared regularly on the podcast. This book in many ways has a similar aim to \u201cMoonrise\u201d \u2014 it examines the way fictional imagery in popular culture shaped real policy decisions involving the space program.\u201cSpaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership,\u201d by Roger Launius and Howard McCurdyBoth Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy were frequent guests on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, and their book is a collection of essays on the intersection between presidential politics and space policy. It illuminates patterns and differences among the many American presidents who had a hand in shaping U.S. space goals.\u201cThe Age of Eisenhower,\u201d by William I. HitchcockWilliam Hitchcock\u2019s biography of Dwight Eisenhower was instrumental for me when I was creating the presidential podcast, and I found myself rereading several chapters of it for \u201cMoonrise\u201d to better understand Eisenhower\u2019s thinking on Sputnik and the United States\u2019 military interests in space.\u201cThe Left Hand of Darkness,\u201d by Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin was the first woman to win the prestigious Hugo and Nebula science fiction awards. This novel of hers, published in 1969 \u2014 the same year as the Apollo 11 moon landing \u2014 is an example of science fiction\u2019s use of space settings as laboratories for exploring social and cultural dynamics on Earth.\u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare,\u201d by Asif SiddiqiAsif Siddiqi is one of the foremost experts on Soviet space history. His book \u201cThe Red Rockets\u2019 Glare\u201d showcases his meticulous research into the early Soviet space program. Particularly useful for me in making \u201cMoonrise\u201d were his detailed accounts of Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev\u2019s role throughout so much of the space race.\u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d by Tom WolfeWhile astronauts are far from the main characters of \u201cMoonrise,\u201d this classic Tom Wolfe nonfiction work is a great jumping-off point for understanding NASA\u2019s culture in the 1960s.\u201cThe Smithsonian History of Space Exploration,\u201d by Roger LauniusRoger Launius appeared regularly on the \u201cMoonrise\u201d podcast, sharing his expertise across a wide array of space-history topics. In this massive book, he gives a thorough overview of all things space \u2014 from ancient studies of the stars to future projects to explore them.\u201cThe Space Barons,\u201d by Christian DavenportChristian Davenport is a colleague of mine at The Washington Post who covers NASA and the private space industry. He was a great help throughout my reporting process, and his book provides a really informative and engaging look at the figures leading, and financing, space exploration today.\u201cVon Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War,\u201d by Michael J. NeufeldMichael Neufeld is a historian with the National Air and Space Museum, and his biography paints a complex, nuanced portrait of German-turned-American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. Neufeld was a guest on several \u201cMoonrise\u201d episodes, particularly contributing his expertise on von Braun\u2019s Nazi past and his story of coming to the United States after World War II. Loved the \"Moonrise\" podcast? Here's a reading list for brushing up on space history. Great books about the space race",
        "author": "Lillian Cunningham"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA unveils new rules to guide behavior in space and on the lunar surface (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6582",
        "date": "2020-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/15/moon-rules-nasa-artemis/",
        "text": "NASA on Friday unveiled a legal framework that would govern the behavior of countries and companies in space and on the moon, including the creation of \u201csafety zones\u201d around sites where mining and exploration would take place on the lunar surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe United States has long held that nations and companies should be allowed to extract and use resources on the moon. The new legal framework, known as the Artemis Accords, comes as the U.S. space agency works to return people to the lunar surface by 2024. NASA would make signing the accords a requirement for allied countries to participate in its lunar exploration program. The proposal, some aspects of which were first reported by Reuters, would \u201cin no way change the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,\u201d which prohibits nations from laying claim to the moon and other celestial bodies, said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRather, the series of principles would follow the tenets of the treaty and \u201cpromote peaceful purposes\u201d that would allow nations \u201cto participate safely in outer space,\u201d Bridenstine said in an interview.The White House is proposing an international agreement governing mining and commerce on the moon. (Reuters)The accords already have run into resistance from the head of Russia\u2019s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, who called them an invasion that would lead to another \u201cIraq or Afghanistan.\u201dNASA said it would be \u201cpremature to release\u201d the accords ahead of sharing them with allied nations. But a copy obtained by The Washington Post said parties would be required to publicly release \u201cthe extent and general nature of operations taking place within\u201d the safety zones \u201cwhile taking into account appropriate protection of business confidential, national security, and export controlled information.\u201dStory continues below advertisementParties would also agree to use the zones \u201cin a manner that encourages scientific discovery, technology demonstration, as well as the safe and efficient extraction and utilization of space resources.\u201d They would also be required to publicly reveal \u201cthe extent and general nature of operations taking place within\u201d the zones.AdvertisementThe introduction of the accords comes as NASA is pushing to meet a White House mandate to return humans to the moon for the first time since 1972 under what it is calling the Artemis program. NASA is planning to establish a permanent presence in lunar orbit and on the surface. It is specifically interested in the moon\u2019s south pole where there is water in the form of ice.Still, NASA is hopeful that Russia, its longtime partner on the International Space Station, would be a signatory, Bridenstine said. The accords are just being rolled out, he said, and NASA would work with Russia, as well as many other countries.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe encourage Russia to be a part of the Artemis accords,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cAnd we think it would be good for all the world to agree to the right approach to peacefully explore space.\u201dNASA is trying to land on the moon. The biggest challenge might be Congress.China, which last year landed a rover on the far side of the moon, also wants to reach the lunar south pole. NASA must get congressional approval before partnering with China in space, and that would make their participation in the accords difficult. Bridenstine said NASA would \u201cfollow the law, 100 percent.\" But he said that setting a standard of behavior could help influence the way countries operate in space even if they are not signatories.AdvertisementIn pushing for the accords, Bridenstine pointed to a spent Chinese rocket stage that plummeted to Earth this week, making it one of the largest uncontrolled objects to fall from low Earth orbit in nearly 30 years. Villages in West Africa found what they believe to be debris from the rocket. But Bridenstine said had the stage re-entered the atmosphere earlier \u201cit could have hit New York.\"Story continues below advertisement\u201cI can think of no better example of why we need the Artemis Accords,\u201d he said. \"It\u2019s vital for the U.S. to lead and establish norms of behavior against such irresponsible activities. Space exploration should inspire hope and wonder, not fear and danger.\u201dBrian Weeden, the director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation and who had been briefed on the accords, said the creation of safety zones around mining sites would not lead to nation\u2019s claiming control of lunar territory. \u201cThese zones do not establish ownership,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is more about establishing safety and coordination, and that is really important.\u201dAdvertisementThe size and scope of those sites would depend on the activity taking place, said Mike Gold, the acting associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Office of International and Interagency Relations, who had a role in drafting the accords.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe want to avoid conflict, we want to encourage communication,\u201d Gold said. \u201cIt\u2019s important for America to lead not just in technology but in policy, and that\u2019s what the Artemis Accords are. It\u2019s the U.S. laying out principals that will not only benefit NASA and its allies, but the whole world.\u201dThe accords follow a law passed in 2015 that allows companies the rights to resources they extract from the moon.The accords would require signatories to adhere to principles, laid out by the United States, that would help provide a framework for acceptable behavior in space.AdvertisementSignatories would have to agree, for example, to help provide emergency assistance in the case of an injured astronaut. They would also agree to protect historic sites, such as the Apollo 11 landing area, and share scientific data.\u201cIf you\u2019re a country and you want to participate in the Artemis program back to the moon, this is the agreement you have to sign,\u201d Weeden said. \u201cThe U.S. is using these accords to promulgate some specific norms of behavior with regard to space activity.\u201d The move comes as NASA is scrambling to return to the moon by 2024. NASA unveils new rules to guide behavior in space and on the lunar surface",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space: The final legal frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6583",
        "date": "2019-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/31/space-final-legal-frontier/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Anne McClain was accused last week of what may be the first crime committed in space.Former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden filed an identify-theft report with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging McClain, her estranged wife, accessed her bank account without permission from the International Space Station, where she is stationed on a six-month mission. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to the New York Times, McClain admitted to logging into the account from space, but claimed it was routine and blamed the allegations on the couple\u2019s bitter separation and ongoing custody battle.The incident is still being investigated, but it raised questions about how the law applies in space.Story continues below advertisementThe International Space Station is governed by a treaty called the Intergovernmental Agreement on Space Station Cooperation, signed by all five entities involved in the ISS \u2014 Russia, Japan, Europe, Canada and the United States. When a crime is committed on the ISS, it states that the country whose national was involved has criminal jurisdiction, unless people from other countries were affected.AdvertisementBecause McClain\u2019s actions \u2014 whether criminal or not \u2014 affected only U.S. citizens, it falls entirely under U.S. law.But what if the crime involved a civilian staying in a space hotel and, instead of going into a computer, she stole another guest\u2019s watch, whose laws would apply then? In the soon-to-be era of space tourism and routine travel, criminal jurisdiction is just one of many complex legal issues arising.Story continues below advertisementHere\u2019s a breakdown of space law, how it affects our day-to-day lives, and several things you wouldn\u2019t have known space law experts are thinking about.Really, we\u2019re dependent on space.When we think of space, we think of rovers going to Mars and Apollo landings. We don\u2019t think about the mundane, everyday things: telecommunication, transmission of information, GPS location services and tracking transponders in the air and sea.Advertisement\u201cWe take it for granted. We think of the milestones,\u201d said Andrea Harrington, associate professor at the Air Command and Staff College at Air University, but we use space every day. (Her views do not reflect the position of the Air Force or U.S. government.)Story continues below advertisementTelecommunication, GPS navigation and timing technology satellites are in space. Without them, financial institutions wouldn\u2019t be able to function. People wouldn\u2019t be able to make banking transactions or withdraw money from ATMs. We would lose any space-based weather forecasting and satellite-based television and Internet. Travel by air and sea transponders would be down; Instagram wouldn\u2019t work on some phones; and there would be no Sirius XM radio. Some hospital systems need satellite integration to function, too.When there\u2019s a hurricane, earthquake or other disaster, Harrington said that multiple countries with remote-sensing satellites \u2014 including the U.S., Japan, South Africa, Russia and the European Union \u2014 are part of a disaster charter. Whomever had a satellite passing over the disaster-ridden region before, after and during the event has agreed to share data to mitigate damage, saving lives and property.Yes, space law is a thing. (And it doesn\u2019t involve real estate or aliens.)Space law is a collection of domestic and international agreements and guidelines that govern issues like space exploration, military and weapons use, and liability for damage. It also involves other fields of law, from criminal, commercial and insurance law to property and environmental law.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are four space-related treaties that the U.S. is a party to: the Outer Space Treaty, the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention and the Return and Rescue Agreement.The Outer Space Treaty \u2014 or as some call it, \u201cthe Magna Carta of Space\u201d \u2014 is a 50-year-old agreement that outlines how to peacefully explore space.\u201cAll space-faring states are parties to the Outer Space Treaty,\u201d Charles Stotler, associate director of the University of Mississippi\u2019s air and space law program told The Washington Post. It includes 109 nations, with more joining regularly.The U.N.-approved document is the foundation of international space law. Its guiding principle is that space exploration should be a peaceful initiative and all nations should have free access to space. The Outer Space Treaty covers things like how to hold nations responsible for their space actions and rules to avoid polluting our solar system. It also addresses fair use of outer space and prohibits any nation from \u201cappropriation of outer space, including celestial bodies.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow to interpret that clause has become contentious as the commercialization of space expands. Stotler said that countries have differing interpretations \u2014 to some, it means no country can own territory in space, but others have applied it to ownership of anything, including extracted resources, absent an international agreement.The Registration Convention requires registration with the United Nations before sending something to space and the Liability Convention states that a nation is liable for damage if its space object harms someone else\u2019s. Under the Return and Rescue Agreement, if a party stumbles upon an astronaut in need, it must rescue him or her.Militarization of spaceAfter more than three decades enmeshed in space law, Jakhu warned of several other issues that have become increasingly dangerous: the militarization of space, exploitation of natural resources and space debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe biggest changes have been the development of technology and business and the militarization of space,\u201d Ram Jakhu, former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law, told The Post in a phone interview Thursday. \u201cThe problems have increased significantly but the law has not kept pace with that.\u201dOn Thursday, President Trump announced the establishment of the U.S. military\u2019s Space Command. Jakhu explained that, like the U.S., Russia and China are building space forces, and \u201conce you have a dedicated force, you\u2019re preparing for war.\u201d\u201cThese are issues with lack of law,\u201d he said. \u201cThings are going to be worse in the future because the number of actors and activities will increase \u2014 and they should increase. Space offers tremendous benefits. We just need to keep up with the technology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementArticle 4 of the Outer Space Treaty addresses military use. It says that the moon and other celestial bodies must be used \u201cexclusively for peaceful purposes.\u201dAdvertisementAccording to Harrington, the language doesn\u2019t inherently prohibit military activity.\u201cPart of the problem is that most space objects are dual-use,\u201d she said. Anything that can closely approach another space object, like the space shuttle sent to service the Hubble, also has the potential to be used as a weapon.The \u201cpeaceful purposes\u201d limitation doesn\u2019t apply to deep space activity, she said. There, the bar is exclusively on nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. There\u2019s no prohibition on things like setting up military bases, conducting weapons testing, or bringing weapons into space, so long as they aren\u2019t weapons of mass destruction and comply with other Outer Space Treaty requirements.Space debrisAnother major concern voiced by many experts in the field was the increase in space debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese pieces of left-behind, man-made objects lead to in-orbit collisions. They can be as large as a motorcycle and as small as a tool lost by an astronaut, and move around at fatal speeds, threatening people, space stations, and satellites that impact global commerce, commercial and military missions.Debris, which will multiply as the exploration and uses of space increase, has been created accidentally and deliberately. Every collision, breakup or fragmentation creates additional debris.For example, China launched a missile to strike down one of its aging satellites in 2007; the collision caused thousands of new pieces of debris.If debris causes damage or loss of life on the earth\u2019s surface, the liability is on the launching state, said Matthew Schaefer, co-director of University of Nebraska College of Law\u2019s Space, Cyber and Telecommunications program. But if the harm happens in space, he explained, it becomes murkier.Advertisement\u201cIf it\u2019s in outer space, it\u2019s a fault-based standard,\u201d which is difficult to assess, Schaefer said. (Among other things, the debris\u2019 origin would need to be known and it would need to be big enough to track.)As of March, there were 2,062 satellites orbiting Earth, more than 40 percent of which belonged to the United States. The nation\u2019s overwhelming dependency on its space assets places it at a greater risk of space debris \u2014 deliberate or accidental.A look into the futureThere\u2019s a commercial burst underway due to new technology, lower-cost access to space, and new business models, Schaefer said, and as traditional space activities are revolutionized, new and complex legal issues crop up.Although the Outer Space Treaty says no nation may appropriate territory anywhere in space, it\u2019s silent to individuals and corporate entities.Companies are already building models for space hotels, and soon we\u2019re going to have commercial entities landing on and mining the moon. Space travel and tourism create a pressing need for legislation to ensure that private companies comply with the minimal OST obligations, Schaefer said, adding that liability issues will become particularly relevant as suborbital flights begin in the next 12 to 18 months.China is planning to put the first space-based solar-power satellite into orbit and Harrington said the FCC has received applications for thousands of new satellites for utilities like space-based Internet services.And then others, like Michelle Hanlon, associate director of the University of Mississippi School of Law\u2019s air and space law program, are debating what human rights are needed in space.The population of humans in space is going to continue to grow, Hanlon told The Post.\u201cThere\u2019s no Declaration of Human Rights that says humans have a right to oxygen or right to an open line of communication back to earth,\u201d she said. \u201cThings have to evolve to protect humans in space.\u201dRead moreCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space raceA secretive space drone just broke its own orbit record, and almost no one knows what it\u2019s doingAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceSpacewalking astronauts add parking spot to space station Human presence in space is growing, and so is the strange and varied field of space law. Space: The final legal frontier",
        "author": "Deanna Paul"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space: The final legal frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6584",
        "date": "2019-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/31/space-final-legal-frontier/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Anne McClain was accused last week of what may be the first crime committed in space.Former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden filed an identify-theft report with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging McClain, her estranged wife, accessed her bank account without permission from the International Space Station, where she is stationed on a six-month mission. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to the New York Times, McClain admitted to logging into the account from space, but claimed it was routine and blamed the allegations on the couple\u2019s bitter separation and ongoing custody battle.The incident is still being investigated, but it raised questions about how the law applies in space.Story continues below advertisementThe International Space Station is governed by a treaty called the Intergovernmental Agreement on Space Station Cooperation, signed by all five entities involved in the ISS \u2014 Russia, Japan, Europe, Canada and the United States. When a crime is committed on the ISS, it states that the country whose national was involved has criminal jurisdiction, unless people from other countries were affected.AdvertisementBecause McClain\u2019s actions \u2014 whether criminal or not \u2014 affected only U.S. citizens, it falls entirely under U.S. law.But what if the crime involved a civilian staying in a space hotel and, instead of going into a computer, she stole another guest\u2019s watch, whose laws would apply then? In the soon-to-be era of space tourism and routine travel, criminal jurisdiction is just one of many complex legal issues arising.Story continues below advertisementHere\u2019s a breakdown of space law, how it affects our day-to-day lives, and several things you wouldn\u2019t have known space law experts are thinking about.Really, we\u2019re dependent on space.When we think of space, we think of rovers going to Mars and Apollo landings. We don\u2019t think about the mundane, everyday things: telecommunication, transmission of information, GPS location services and tracking transponders in the air and sea.Advertisement\u201cWe take it for granted. We think of the milestones,\u201d said Andrea Harrington, associate professor at the Air Command and Staff College at Air University, but we use space every day. (Her views do not reflect the position of the Air Force or U.S. government.)Story continues below advertisementTelecommunication, GPS navigation and timing technology satellites are in space. Without them, financial institutions wouldn\u2019t be able to function. People wouldn\u2019t be able to make banking transactions or withdraw money from ATMs. We would lose any space-based weather forecasting and satellite-based television and Internet. Travel by air and sea transponders would be down; Instagram wouldn\u2019t work on some phones; and there would be no Sirius XM radio. Some hospital systems need satellite integration to function, too.When there\u2019s a hurricane, earthquake or other disaster, Harrington said that multiple countries with remote-sensing satellites \u2014 including the U.S., Japan, South Africa, Russia and the European Union \u2014 are part of a disaster charter. Whomever had a satellite passing over the disaster-ridden region before, after and during the event has agreed to share data to mitigate damage, saving lives and property.Yes, space law is a thing. (And it doesn\u2019t involve real estate or aliens.)Space law is a collection of domestic and international agreements and guidelines that govern issues like space exploration, military and weapons use, and liability for damage. It also involves other fields of law, from criminal, commercial and insurance law to property and environmental law.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are four space-related treaties that the U.S. is a party to: the Outer Space Treaty, the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention and the Return and Rescue Agreement.The Outer Space Treaty \u2014 or as some call it, \u201cthe Magna Carta of Space\u201d \u2014 is a 50-year-old agreement that outlines how to peacefully explore space.\u201cAll space-faring states are parties to the Outer Space Treaty,\u201d Charles Stotler, associate director of the University of Mississippi\u2019s air and space law program told The Washington Post. It includes 109 nations, with more joining regularly.The U.N.-approved document is the foundation of international space law. Its guiding principle is that space exploration should be a peaceful initiative and all nations should have free access to space. The Outer Space Treaty covers things like how to hold nations responsible for their space actions and rules to avoid polluting our solar system. It also addresses fair use of outer space and prohibits any nation from \u201cappropriation of outer space, including celestial bodies.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow to interpret that clause has become contentious as the commercialization of space expands. Stotler said that countries have differing interpretations \u2014 to some, it means no country can own territory in space, but others have applied it to ownership of anything, including extracted resources, absent an international agreement.The Registration Convention requires registration with the United Nations before sending something to space and the Liability Convention states that a nation is liable for damage if its space object harms someone else\u2019s. Under the Return and Rescue Agreement, if a party stumbles upon an astronaut in need, it must rescue him or her.Militarization of spaceAfter more than three decades enmeshed in space law, Jakhu warned of several other issues that have become increasingly dangerous: the militarization of space, exploitation of natural resources and space debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe biggest changes have been the development of technology and business and the militarization of space,\u201d Ram Jakhu, former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law, told The Post in a phone interview Thursday. \u201cThe problems have increased significantly but the law has not kept pace with that.\u201dOn Thursday, President Trump announced the establishment of the U.S. military\u2019s Space Command. Jakhu explained that, like the U.S., Russia and China are building space forces, and \u201conce you have a dedicated force, you\u2019re preparing for war.\u201d\u201cThese are issues with lack of law,\u201d he said. \u201cThings are going to be worse in the future because the number of actors and activities will increase \u2014 and they should increase. Space offers tremendous benefits. We just need to keep up with the technology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementArticle 4 of the Outer Space Treaty addresses military use. It says that the moon and other celestial bodies must be used \u201cexclusively for peaceful purposes.\u201dAdvertisementAccording to Harrington, the language doesn\u2019t inherently prohibit military activity.\u201cPart of the problem is that most space objects are dual-use,\u201d she said. Anything that can closely approach another space object, like the space shuttle sent to service the Hubble, also has the potential to be used as a weapon.The \u201cpeaceful purposes\u201d limitation doesn\u2019t apply to deep space activity, she said. There, the bar is exclusively on nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. There\u2019s no prohibition on things like setting up military bases, conducting weapons testing, or bringing weapons into space, so long as they aren\u2019t weapons of mass destruction and comply with other Outer Space Treaty requirements.Space debrisAnother major concern voiced by many experts in the field was the increase in space debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese pieces of left-behind, man-made objects lead to in-orbit collisions. They can be as large as a motorcycle and as small as a tool lost by an astronaut, and move around at fatal speeds, threatening people, space stations, and satellites that impact global commerce, commercial and military missions.Debris, which will multiply as the exploration and uses of space increase, has been created accidentally and deliberately. Every collision, breakup or fragmentation creates additional debris.For example, China launched a missile to strike down one of its aging satellites in 2007; the collision caused thousands of new pieces of debris.If debris causes damage or loss of life on the earth\u2019s surface, the liability is on the launching state, said Matthew Schaefer, co-director of University of Nebraska College of Law\u2019s Space, Cyber and Telecommunications program. But if the harm happens in space, he explained, it becomes murkier.Advertisement\u201cIf it\u2019s in outer space, it\u2019s a fault-based standard,\u201d which is difficult to assess, Schaefer said. (Among other things, the debris\u2019 origin would need to be known and it would need to be big enough to track.)As of March, there were 2,062 satellites orbiting Earth, more than 40 percent of which belonged to the United States. The nation\u2019s overwhelming dependency on its space assets places it at a greater risk of space debris \u2014 deliberate or accidental.A look into the futureThere\u2019s a commercial burst underway due to new technology, lower-cost access to space, and new business models, Schaefer said, and as traditional space activities are revolutionized, new and complex legal issues crop up.Although the Outer Space Treaty says no nation may appropriate territory anywhere in space, it\u2019s silent to individuals and corporate entities.Companies are already building models for space hotels, and soon we\u2019re going to have commercial entities landing on and mining the moon. Space travel and tourism create a pressing need for legislation to ensure that private companies comply with the minimal OST obligations, Schaefer said, adding that liability issues will become particularly relevant as suborbital flights begin in the next 12 to 18 months.China is planning to put the first space-based solar-power satellite into orbit and Harrington said the FCC has received applications for thousands of new satellites for utilities like space-based Internet services.And then others, like Michelle Hanlon, associate director of the University of Mississippi School of Law\u2019s air and space law program, are debating what human rights are needed in space.The population of humans in space is going to continue to grow, Hanlon told The Post.\u201cThere\u2019s no Declaration of Human Rights that says humans have a right to oxygen or right to an open line of communication back to earth,\u201d she said. \u201cThings have to evolve to protect humans in space.\u201dRead moreCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space raceA secretive space drone just broke its own orbit record, and almost no one knows what it\u2019s doingAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceSpacewalking astronauts add parking spot to space station Human presence in space is growing, and so is the strange and varied field of space law. Space: The final legal frontier",
        "author": "Deanna Paul"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space: The final legal frontier (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6585",
        "date": "2019-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/31/space-final-legal-frontier/",
        "text": "NASA astronaut Anne McClain was accused last week of what may be the first crime committed in space.Former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden filed an identify-theft report with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging McClain, her estranged wife, accessed her bank account without permission from the International Space Station, where she is stationed on a six-month mission. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to the New York Times, McClain admitted to logging into the account from space, but claimed it was routine and blamed the allegations on the couple\u2019s bitter separation and ongoing custody battle.The incident is still being investigated, but it raised questions about how the law applies in space.Story continues below advertisementThe International Space Station is governed by a treaty called the Intergovernmental Agreement on Space Station Cooperation, signed by all five entities involved in the ISS \u2014 Russia, Japan, Europe, Canada and the United States. When a crime is committed on the ISS, it states that the country whose national was involved has criminal jurisdiction, unless people from other countries were affected.AdvertisementBecause McClain\u2019s actions \u2014 whether criminal or not \u2014 affected only U.S. citizens, it falls entirely under U.S. law.But what if the crime involved a civilian staying in a space hotel and, instead of going into a computer, she stole another guest\u2019s watch, whose laws would apply then? In the soon-to-be era of space tourism and routine travel, criminal jurisdiction is just one of many complex legal issues arising.Story continues below advertisementHere\u2019s a breakdown of space law, how it affects our day-to-day lives, and several things you wouldn\u2019t have known space law experts are thinking about.Really, we\u2019re dependent on space.When we think of space, we think of rovers going to Mars and Apollo landings. We don\u2019t think about the mundane, everyday things: telecommunication, transmission of information, GPS location services and tracking transponders in the air and sea.Advertisement\u201cWe take it for granted. We think of the milestones,\u201d said Andrea Harrington, associate professor at the Air Command and Staff College at Air University, but we use space every day. (Her views do not reflect the position of the Air Force or U.S. government.)Story continues below advertisementTelecommunication, GPS navigation and timing technology satellites are in space. Without them, financial institutions wouldn\u2019t be able to function. People wouldn\u2019t be able to make banking transactions or withdraw money from ATMs. We would lose any space-based weather forecasting and satellite-based television and Internet. Travel by air and sea transponders would be down; Instagram wouldn\u2019t work on some phones; and there would be no Sirius XM radio. Some hospital systems need satellite integration to function, too.When there\u2019s a hurricane, earthquake or other disaster, Harrington said that multiple countries with remote-sensing satellites \u2014 including the U.S., Japan, South Africa, Russia and the European Union \u2014 are part of a disaster charter. Whomever had a satellite passing over the disaster-ridden region before, after and during the event has agreed to share data to mitigate damage, saving lives and property.Yes, space law is a thing. (And it doesn\u2019t involve real estate or aliens.)Space law is a collection of domestic and international agreements and guidelines that govern issues like space exploration, military and weapons use, and liability for damage. It also involves other fields of law, from criminal, commercial and insurance law to property and environmental law.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are four space-related treaties that the U.S. is a party to: the Outer Space Treaty, the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention and the Return and Rescue Agreement.The Outer Space Treaty \u2014 or as some call it, \u201cthe Magna Carta of Space\u201d \u2014 is a 50-year-old agreement that outlines how to peacefully explore space.\u201cAll space-faring states are parties to the Outer Space Treaty,\u201d Charles Stotler, associate director of the University of Mississippi\u2019s air and space law program told The Washington Post. It includes 109 nations, with more joining regularly.The U.N.-approved document is the foundation of international space law. Its guiding principle is that space exploration should be a peaceful initiative and all nations should have free access to space. The Outer Space Treaty covers things like how to hold nations responsible for their space actions and rules to avoid polluting our solar system. It also addresses fair use of outer space and prohibits any nation from \u201cappropriation of outer space, including celestial bodies.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow to interpret that clause has become contentious as the commercialization of space expands. Stotler said that countries have differing interpretations \u2014 to some, it means no country can own territory in space, but others have applied it to ownership of anything, including extracted resources, absent an international agreement.The Registration Convention requires registration with the United Nations before sending something to space and the Liability Convention states that a nation is liable for damage if its space object harms someone else\u2019s. Under the Return and Rescue Agreement, if a party stumbles upon an astronaut in need, it must rescue him or her.Militarization of spaceAfter more than three decades enmeshed in space law, Jakhu warned of several other issues that have become increasingly dangerous: the militarization of space, exploitation of natural resources and space debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe biggest changes have been the development of technology and business and the militarization of space,\u201d Ram Jakhu, former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law, told The Post in a phone interview Thursday. \u201cThe problems have increased significantly but the law has not kept pace with that.\u201dOn Thursday, President Trump announced the establishment of the U.S. military\u2019s Space Command. Jakhu explained that, like the U.S., Russia and China are building space forces, and \u201conce you have a dedicated force, you\u2019re preparing for war.\u201d\u201cThese are issues with lack of law,\u201d he said. \u201cThings are going to be worse in the future because the number of actors and activities will increase \u2014 and they should increase. Space offers tremendous benefits. We just need to keep up with the technology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementArticle 4 of the Outer Space Treaty addresses military use. It says that the moon and other celestial bodies must be used \u201cexclusively for peaceful purposes.\u201dAdvertisementAccording to Harrington, the language doesn\u2019t inherently prohibit military activity.\u201cPart of the problem is that most space objects are dual-use,\u201d she said. Anything that can closely approach another space object, like the space shuttle sent to service the Hubble, also has the potential to be used as a weapon.The \u201cpeaceful purposes\u201d limitation doesn\u2019t apply to deep space activity, she said. There, the bar is exclusively on nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. There\u2019s no prohibition on things like setting up military bases, conducting weapons testing, or bringing weapons into space, so long as they aren\u2019t weapons of mass destruction and comply with other Outer Space Treaty requirements.Space debrisAnother major concern voiced by many experts in the field was the increase in space debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThese pieces of left-behind, man-made objects lead to in-orbit collisions. They can be as large as a motorcycle and as small as a tool lost by an astronaut, and move around at fatal speeds, threatening people, space stations, and satellites that impact global commerce, commercial and military missions.Debris, which will multiply as the exploration and uses of space increase, has been created accidentally and deliberately. Every collision, breakup or fragmentation creates additional debris.For example, China launched a missile to strike down one of its aging satellites in 2007; the collision caused thousands of new pieces of debris.If debris causes damage or loss of life on the earth\u2019s surface, the liability is on the launching state, said Matthew Schaefer, co-director of University of Nebraska College of Law\u2019s Space, Cyber and Telecommunications program. But if the harm happens in space, he explained, it becomes murkier.Advertisement\u201cIf it\u2019s in outer space, it\u2019s a fault-based standard,\u201d which is difficult to assess, Schaefer said. (Among other things, the debris\u2019 origin would need to be known and it would need to be big enough to track.)As of March, there were 2,062 satellites orbiting Earth, more than 40 percent of which belonged to the United States. The nation\u2019s overwhelming dependency on its space assets places it at a greater risk of space debris \u2014 deliberate or accidental.A look into the futureThere\u2019s a commercial burst underway due to new technology, lower-cost access to space, and new business models, Schaefer said, and as traditional space activities are revolutionized, new and complex legal issues crop up.Although the Outer Space Treaty says no nation may appropriate territory anywhere in space, it\u2019s silent to individuals and corporate entities.Companies are already building models for space hotels, and soon we\u2019re going to have commercial entities landing on and mining the moon. Space travel and tourism create a pressing need for legislation to ensure that private companies comply with the minimal OST obligations, Schaefer said, adding that liability issues will become particularly relevant as suborbital flights begin in the next 12 to 18 months.China is planning to put the first space-based solar-power satellite into orbit and Harrington said the FCC has received applications for thousands of new satellites for utilities like space-based Internet services.And then others, like Michelle Hanlon, associate director of the University of Mississippi School of Law\u2019s air and space law program, are debating what human rights are needed in space.The population of humans in space is going to continue to grow, Hanlon told The Post.\u201cThere\u2019s no Declaration of Human Rights that says humans have a right to oxygen or right to an open line of communication back to earth,\u201d she said. \u201cThings have to evolve to protect humans in space.\u201dRead moreCompanies in the Cosmos: The new space raceA secretive space drone just broke its own orbit record, and almost no one knows what it\u2019s doingAnother front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: SpaceSpacewalking astronauts add parking spot to space station Human presence in space is growing, and so is the strange and varied field of space law. Space: The final legal frontier",
        "author": "Deanna Paul"
    },
    {
        "title": "How you too can experience weightlessness without having to go to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6586",
        "date": "2021-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/zero-g-weightless-space-tourism/",
        "text": "correctionAn earlier version of this story misstated what the gravity is on Mars and on the moon compared with Earth. This version has been corrected.Take that, Richard Branson. Take that, Jeff Bezos and William Shatner and all the suborbital space tourists who have been blasting off Earth in recent weeks for a few minutes of weightlessness. You all floated around your cabins for three minutes or so. Four, tops. I got more than seven minutes total of zero gravity recently and never even went to space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI did the flips, flew arms wide like Superman, did the Spider-Man crawl along the ceiling, all in an airplane with a couple dozen others as part of a flight organized by Zero Gravity Corp. (Zero-G) that flew out of Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia earlier this month.For years, the company has been able to create an experience for customers that mimics the weightless experience of going to space by flying in parabolic arcs. The plane flies up on a pitched ascent, and then crests over like a roller coaster into a steep dive that allows passengers to float for about 30 seconds at a time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a hollowed-out cabin of a 727 jet, with padding all around, your body rises involuntarily, and you float, effortlessly, as if you were a molecule in a state of matter that suddenly went from a solid to freewheeling gas, pinging around with abandon.Like the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, my fellow passengers and I did flips, caught floating candy in our mouths and chased droplets of water. Again and again, the world went topsy-turvy, the ceiling where the floor used to be and vice versa. Long hair unleashed wildly, as if electrocuted.It was as close an approximation of going to space as most of us will ever get \u2014 and for a fraction of the cost, though it\u2019s still an expensive joyride. The price of the Zero-G flights is $7,500, compared with the $450,000 that Virgin Galactic charges for its flights. And while Blue Origin hasn\u2019t named a ticket price yet, it auctioned off one seat for $28 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs with flying with Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company or Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, the preparation is minimal, and virtually anyone can go. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Stephen Hawking, the late famed physicist who had Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, flew on a Zero-G flight in 2007. And earlier this month, a nonprofit called AstroAccess chartered a Zero-G flight for an array of people with disabilities.The first rule, at least the one I paid the most attention to, was how not to get sick. Throwing up is bad enough, but doing it when it might float around an airplane was unthinkable.On the ascent, we lay on our backs, allowing the pressure to build, as the pilots pitched the plane up and we felt almost two Gs, or two times the force of gravity on our bodies. At that moment, our instructors warned, it\u2019s best to pick out a spot on the ceiling and focus on it and remain still. If you do feel sick, \u201cit\u2019s better to let somebody know early,\u201d said Andrew Humphreys, Zero-G\u2019s director of program operations. The instructors on board have ginger gum, mints, \u201ca whole bunch of things to make you feel a little bit better.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd \u201cget some food in you,\u201d which will help settle the stomach. For good measure, they hand out Dramamine (which I took) and barf bags, which we dutifully stashed into an easily accessible pocket of our one-piece flight suits, just in case.Another bit of advice about how to behave without gravity: \u201cDon\u2019t jump.\u201d On Earth, most of us can only jump a couple of feet. Up there, you jump and you hit the ceiling \u2014 hard. \u201cSo take it easy,\u201d Humphreys said. And especially take it easy at first. \u201cYou\u2019re not suddenly a gymnast,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you haven\u2019t done a flip in I don\u2019t know how long, don\u2019t do it right away. Save that for the end.\u201dFinally, they said, don\u2019t swim. The closest experience to being in zero-G is being in the water, and so people tend to try to swim. \u201cBut that\u2019s not going to help you because there\u2019s nothing that you have any resistance against,\u201d Humphreys said. Without gravity, swimming is flailing, and flailing while floating is dangerous. \u201cYou are now just a kicking, swinging object, and you don\u2019t want to run into anyone,\u201d Humphreys said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI was nervous as we boarded the plane \u2014 about throwing up, mostly, but maybe also taking a Karate Kid chop to the face. But I was also excited. As a reporter for The Post, I cover space and have spoken with lots of astronauts, all of whom rhapsodized about space and flying in weightlessness.\u201cGravity sucks. It\u2019s horrible,\u201d former NASA astronaut Sandy Magnus once told me. Going to space, she said, changed her perception of gravity. Without it, she felt free. But then she came home from space and was aware of gravity in a way she had never been before. It was like, \u201cWhat the heck is this?\u201d she said. \u201cI can\u2019t believe we live in this all the time. I mean, it\u2019s just horrid.\u201dSo what would that be like to not have that force pressing down, I wondered. What would it be like to be free?Story continues below advertisementAt first, not that much different \u2014 but that\u2019s because the pilots made a gentle arc, one that mimics Mars\u2019s gravity, or about one-third of Earth\u2019s. On the next parabola, the pilots went slightly steeper, this time to replicate gravity on the moon, or about one-sixth of what we experience on Earth. As the plane crested downward, we hopped like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and did one-handed push-ups, another baby step toward true weightlessness.AdvertisementAnd then it came. I was lying on my back, religious about remaining fixated on a spot on the ceiling, hoping that I wouldn\u2019t get sick. I could feel the Gs building in my chest, and then we crested the wave and suddenly my body lifted from the ground. It\u2019s unclear whether I pushed off or just somehow levitated, but I was floating.At first the feeling was disorienting, even a bit frightening. Suspended in midair, I did exactly what the instructors told me not to: I swam. My arms went into doggy-paddle overdrive. My legs fluttered wildly. But this did nothing, and although I was aware it was ridiculous, it took me a few seconds to get control of myself and stop. Finally, I was still and without anything to hold on to or push off of, so I gently meandered, like a feather or a particle of dust, until the plane pulled out of its descent, leveled off and I was back on the floor, staring at a spot on the ceiling.Story continues below advertisementEach time we did a parabola, I got a little bit better, more adventurous, my endeavors only sometimes thwarted by running into others. We were like free-floating molecules, bouncing not just off the walls and ceiling but also each other. Yes, I did take a foot to the head. (Or maybe it was an elbow?) I also once got a blinding face full of blond, curly hair. And a couple of times, I had to scramble at the last second as gravity reasserted itself to avoid coming down squarely on someone else.AdvertisementFor me, the flight was fun and liberating. For Sawyer Rosenstein, it was, as he told me, \u201csurreal.\u201d The 27-year-old news producer flew on the flight chartered by AstroAccess, which included a dozen people, some of whom, like him, use a wheelchair and others with vision or hearing impairments. Leading up to the flight, a couple of weeks after mine, he was thinking about the wonders of floating and flying, the freeing effects of weightlessness.But what happened on his first parabola was unexpected. His head and torso floated up, and his legs acted like a pendulum and stayed down, meaning he was upright.\u201cI realized for the first time in 15 years I was standing,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was surreal to say the least. \u2026 When it happened it took me by surprise, and I just shouted, \u2018Oh my God, I\u2019m standing.\u2019\u201dLike me, he became more adventurous with each parabola. \u201cThe ceiling and I became very friendly with each other,\u201d he told me. \u201cI found myself up there a lot.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeither of us, it turned out, got sick. I was queasy a few times, breaking into a mild sweat that fogged my glasses. Rosenstein was a bit, too, as he reoriented to gravity: \u201cMy body went, \u2018Whoa, you sat up way too fast.\u2019\u201dStill, for both of us the trip was well worth it. But it left us wondering what must it be like to actually go to space, and if we would ever get the chance. Astronauts say weightlessness is a delight, but the real value of space exploration is in the view from above.We may have had more time floating weightlessly, but Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek, had the view and was absolutely awed by it. \u201cWhat you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,\u201d he told Bezos after the trip to the edge of space. \u201cI\u2019m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope I maintain what I feel now. I don\u2019t want to lose it.\u201dHere\u2019s to hoping, then, that our flight on the Zero-G airplane is just one small step in a much longer journey. Expensive suborbital space flights aren't the only way to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. How you too can experience weightlessness without having to go to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "How you too can experience weightlessness without having to go to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6587",
        "date": "2021-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/28/zero-g-weightless-space-tourism/",
        "text": "correctionAn earlier version of this story misstated what the gravity is on Mars and on the moon compared with Earth. This version has been corrected.Take that, Richard Branson. Take that, Jeff Bezos and William Shatner and all the suborbital space tourists who have been blasting off Earth in recent weeks for a few minutes of weightlessness. You all floated around your cabins for three minutes or so. Four, tops. I got more than seven minutes total of zero gravity recently and never even went to space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI did the flips, flew arms wide like Superman, did the Spider-Man crawl along the ceiling, all in an airplane with a couple dozen others as part of a flight organized by Zero Gravity Corp. (Zero-G) that flew out of Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia earlier this month.For years, the company has been able to create an experience for customers that mimics the weightless experience of going to space by flying in parabolic arcs. The plane flies up on a pitched ascent, and then crests over like a roller coaster into a steep dive that allows passengers to float for about 30 seconds at a time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a hollowed-out cabin of a 727 jet, with padding all around, your body rises involuntarily, and you float, effortlessly, as if you were a molecule in a state of matter that suddenly went from a solid to freewheeling gas, pinging around with abandon.Like the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, my fellow passengers and I did flips, caught floating candy in our mouths and chased droplets of water. Again and again, the world went topsy-turvy, the ceiling where the floor used to be and vice versa. Long hair unleashed wildly, as if electrocuted.It was as close an approximation of going to space as most of us will ever get \u2014 and for a fraction of the cost, though it\u2019s still an expensive joyride. The price of the Zero-G flights is $7,500, compared with the $450,000 that Virgin Galactic charges for its flights. And while Blue Origin hasn\u2019t named a ticket price yet, it auctioned off one seat for $28 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs with flying with Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company or Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, the preparation is minimal, and virtually anyone can go. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Stephen Hawking, the late famed physicist who had Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease, flew on a Zero-G flight in 2007. And earlier this month, a nonprofit called AstroAccess chartered a Zero-G flight for an array of people with disabilities.The first rule, at least the one I paid the most attention to, was how not to get sick. Throwing up is bad enough, but doing it when it might float around an airplane was unthinkable.On the ascent, we lay on our backs, allowing the pressure to build, as the pilots pitched the plane up and we felt almost two Gs, or two times the force of gravity on our bodies. At that moment, our instructors warned, it\u2019s best to pick out a spot on the ceiling and focus on it and remain still. If you do feel sick, \u201cit\u2019s better to let somebody know early,\u201d said Andrew Humphreys, Zero-G\u2019s director of program operations. The instructors on board have ginger gum, mints, \u201ca whole bunch of things to make you feel a little bit better.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd \u201cget some food in you,\u201d which will help settle the stomach. For good measure, they hand out Dramamine (which I took) and barf bags, which we dutifully stashed into an easily accessible pocket of our one-piece flight suits, just in case.Another bit of advice about how to behave without gravity: \u201cDon\u2019t jump.\u201d On Earth, most of us can only jump a couple of feet. Up there, you jump and you hit the ceiling \u2014 hard. \u201cSo take it easy,\u201d Humphreys said. And especially take it easy at first. \u201cYou\u2019re not suddenly a gymnast,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you haven\u2019t done a flip in I don\u2019t know how long, don\u2019t do it right away. Save that for the end.\u201dFinally, they said, don\u2019t swim. The closest experience to being in zero-G is being in the water, and so people tend to try to swim. \u201cBut that\u2019s not going to help you because there\u2019s nothing that you have any resistance against,\u201d Humphreys said. Without gravity, swimming is flailing, and flailing while floating is dangerous. \u201cYou are now just a kicking, swinging object, and you don\u2019t want to run into anyone,\u201d Humphreys said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI was nervous as we boarded the plane \u2014 about throwing up, mostly, but maybe also taking a Karate Kid chop to the face. But I was also excited. As a reporter for The Post, I cover space and have spoken with lots of astronauts, all of whom rhapsodized about space and flying in weightlessness.\u201cGravity sucks. It\u2019s horrible,\u201d former NASA astronaut Sandy Magnus once told me. Going to space, she said, changed her perception of gravity. Without it, she felt free. But then she came home from space and was aware of gravity in a way she had never been before. It was like, \u201cWhat the heck is this?\u201d she said. \u201cI can\u2019t believe we live in this all the time. I mean, it\u2019s just horrid.\u201dSo what would that be like to not have that force pressing down, I wondered. What would it be like to be free?Story continues below advertisementAt first, not that much different \u2014 but that\u2019s because the pilots made a gentle arc, one that mimics Mars\u2019s gravity, or about one-third of Earth\u2019s. On the next parabola, the pilots went slightly steeper, this time to replicate gravity on the moon, or about one-sixth of what we experience on Earth. As the plane crested downward, we hopped like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and did one-handed push-ups, another baby step toward true weightlessness.AdvertisementAnd then it came. I was lying on my back, religious about remaining fixated on a spot on the ceiling, hoping that I wouldn\u2019t get sick. I could feel the Gs building in my chest, and then we crested the wave and suddenly my body lifted from the ground. It\u2019s unclear whether I pushed off or just somehow levitated, but I was floating.At first the feeling was disorienting, even a bit frightening. Suspended in midair, I did exactly what the instructors told me not to: I swam. My arms went into doggy-paddle overdrive. My legs fluttered wildly. But this did nothing, and although I was aware it was ridiculous, it took me a few seconds to get control of myself and stop. Finally, I was still and without anything to hold on to or push off of, so I gently meandered, like a feather or a particle of dust, until the plane pulled out of its descent, leveled off and I was back on the floor, staring at a spot on the ceiling.Story continues below advertisementEach time we did a parabola, I got a little bit better, more adventurous, my endeavors only sometimes thwarted by running into others. We were like free-floating molecules, bouncing not just off the walls and ceiling but also each other. Yes, I did take a foot to the head. (Or maybe it was an elbow?) I also once got a blinding face full of blond, curly hair. And a couple of times, I had to scramble at the last second as gravity reasserted itself to avoid coming down squarely on someone else.AdvertisementFor me, the flight was fun and liberating. For Sawyer Rosenstein, it was, as he told me, \u201csurreal.\u201d The 27-year-old news producer flew on the flight chartered by AstroAccess, which included a dozen people, some of whom, like him, use a wheelchair and others with vision or hearing impairments. Leading up to the flight, a couple of weeks after mine, he was thinking about the wonders of floating and flying, the freeing effects of weightlessness.But what happened on his first parabola was unexpected. His head and torso floated up, and his legs acted like a pendulum and stayed down, meaning he was upright.\u201cI realized for the first time in 15 years I was standing,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was surreal to say the least. \u2026 When it happened it took me by surprise, and I just shouted, \u2018Oh my God, I\u2019m standing.\u2019\u201dLike me, he became more adventurous with each parabola. \u201cThe ceiling and I became very friendly with each other,\u201d he told me. \u201cI found myself up there a lot.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeither of us, it turned out, got sick. I was queasy a few times, breaking into a mild sweat that fogged my glasses. Rosenstein was a bit, too, as he reoriented to gravity: \u201cMy body went, \u2018Whoa, you sat up way too fast.\u2019\u201dStill, for both of us the trip was well worth it. But it left us wondering what must it be like to actually go to space, and if we would ever get the chance. Astronauts say weightlessness is a delight, but the real value of space exploration is in the view from above.We may have had more time floating weightlessly, but Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on Star Trek, had the view and was absolutely awed by it. \u201cWhat you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,\u201d he told Bezos after the trip to the edge of space. \u201cI\u2019m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this. I hope I maintain what I feel now. I don\u2019t want to lose it.\u201dHere\u2019s to hoping, then, that our flight on the Zero-G airplane is just one small step in a much longer journey. Expensive suborbital space flights aren't the only way to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. How you too can experience weightlessness without having to go to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6588",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/26/nasa-was-year-woman-yet-women-still-are-big-minority-space-agency/",
        "text": "At NASA, 2019 could be called the year of the woman. In October, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir completed the first all-female spacewalk. Koch also is on her way toward 328 days aboard the International Space Station \u2014 the longest single space mission by a woman.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, NASA is planning a lunar mission called \u201cArtemis,\u201d named after the twin sister of Apollo, which, the agency says, would put \u201cthe next man and the first woman on the moon\u201d by 2024. The aerospace industry also boasts an unprecedented number of women in high-ranking positions, including Leanne Caret, who leads Boeing\u2019s defense and space division and Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX. But for all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and in the wider industry. Women make up only about a third of NASA\u2019s workforce. They comprise just 28 percent of senior executive leadership positions and are only 16 percent of senior scientific employees, according to a survey done by the agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the aerospace industry, only 24 percent of employees are women, and there has been little change in years, according to a study done by Aviation Week.For many, another example of how far the agency has to go came just a few weeks ago when NASA announced its \u201chonor awards,\u201d what it calls its \u201chighest form of recognition\u201d to employees and contractors.In total, 42 people were honored. All but two were men.\u201cWe haven\u2019t moved very much in the last 30 years in overall diversity,\u201d said Mary Lynne Dittmar, the president and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry group. \u201cAerospace is still heavily male and white, and we\u2019re not moving very quickly.\u201dThough perhaps not as overt as the early days of the space agency, when women were \u201chidden figures,\u201d sexism persists in an industry long dominated by white men. That has led women to leave science and engineering jobs at rates higher than their male counterparts. Women still struggle to get a foothold in the industry and often find themselves the only women in meetings dominated by men. Or being asked to fetch coffee. Or being called \u201choney.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s Dr. Honey to you, and the coffee machine is down the hall and to the right,\u201d is how Dittmar, who has worked in senior positions at Boeing and as an adviser to NASA, responds.\u201cFrankly, those attitudes have gotten better but they haven\u2019t completely gone away,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum who previously served as NASA\u2019s chief scientist. \u201cTo pretend they have does not help us understand why women get paid 80 cents on the dollar and are still only making up 16 to 30 percent of the workforce.\"While the aerospace industry hasn\u2019t been swept up in the recent #MeToo movement, it has over the years been hit by the occasional high-profile scandal. In 2012, Lockheed Martin\u2019s incoming CEO was forced out because of an affair with a subordinate, and in 2010, Boeing settled a pair of lawsuits filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging sex discrimination.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn one, two female engineers said they were subjected to sexist remarks and then suffered retaliation when they complained. In the other, a female employee alleged her male counterparts harassed her and broke her tools, making it harder for her to do her job.The employee reported the behavior, the EEOC said at the time, \u201cbut the company did nothing to address it. As a result, the harassment continued.\u201dAt NASA, which has about 17,000 employees, there were 62 EEOC complaints last year, 27 of which were on the basis of sex, according to agency statistics.While that is not a large number, EEOC spokeswoman Christine Nazer said \u201cit can be [a] difficult decision for individuals to come forward to file a charge of discrimination with the EEOC. Employees often fear retaliation such as being fired or demoted if they assert their legal rights. Indeed, retaliation is the most frequently filed charge with the EEOC.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMajor corporations such as Boeing and Lockheed say they go to great lengths to ensure all employees are welcomed and they have robust programs to prevent harassment and to protect those who do report it.Women in the industry acknowledge some improvement in the way they are treated, but cultural change has been slow. Even a term such as \u201cmanned spaceflight\u201d continues to be controversial.In the early 2000s, NASA\u2019s style guide was updated to include a section urging that \u201call references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic, as opposed to manned or unmanned).\u201dThe word \u201cmanned\u201d should only be used, the style guide said, when referring to any \u201chistorical program name or official title that included \u2018manned.\u2019\u201dStory continues below advertisementDuring an interview with reporters from the International Space Station about the first all-female spacewalk, Koch said she was happy to see the term fading from use. \u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,\u201d she said. \u201cEven though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants.\u201dAdvertisementBut debate still surrounds it. In October, a chat board for members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) hosted a spirited discussion of the term, with some arguing that \u201cmanned\u201d refers to all humans and, as one put it, \u201cthe word itself has nothing to do with gender.\u201dLori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, wrote on the message board that \u201cif we want to encourage women or non-conforming genders to be a part of our next grand adventure, it would serve us well to remove \u2018manned\u2019 from our lexicon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAIAA Executive Director Dan Dumbacher responded on the board that the institute \u201cprefers to use \u2018crewed\u2019 or \u2018human\u2019 rather than \u2018manned\u2019 when referring to space travel in our publications and on AIAA.org. Increasing the diversity of the aerospace community and the future workforce has been \u2014 and continues to be \u2014 a mission priority for AIAA.\u201dAdvertisementThe debate became so heated that ultimately the organization decided to shut down the discussion board, asking members to write statements \u201cwith empathy and respect for your fellow members.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t until 1978, nearly two decades after John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury Seven had been chosen to go to space, that NASA selected its first female astronauts \u2014 six of a class of 35. One of those was Sally Ride, who five years later would become the first American woman in space.Story continues below advertisementKathy Sullivan was a part of that class and said NASA was welcoming to the women. \u201cVery open and evenhanded,\u201d she said. Then again, \u201cwalking in the door of NASA with the title of astronaut is like walking around the Navy with the title of admiral.\u201dIf they were accepted inside NASA, the rest of society was adjusting.A reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times posed what he conceded \u201cmay seem like a male chauvinist pig question\u201d when he asked about Shannon Lucid\u2019s fitness for space given that she \u201chas three children and from her age I gather that the children are rather young.\u201dAdvertisementDid NASA give any consideration \u201cto her responsibilities to her children versus her responsibilities to the program?\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf I gave you a one-word answer to Shannon Lucid\u2019s family situation, the answer is, \u2018none,\u2019 Chris Kraft, the legendary NASA flight director, responded.Rather, he said \u201cthe most rewarding thing was that we found that there are a large number of very highly qualified women in the United States that can make the qualifications that we set out as astronauts.\u201dStill, there were some embarrassing moments, as the male-dominated agency adjusted to the presence of women.Before her first flight, the engineers asked Ride how many tampons she would need for her week-long mission.\u201cIs 100 the right number?\u201d they asked, according to her biographer, Ann Friedman.\u201cThat would not be the right number,\u201d she responded.In many ways, the NASA astronaut class of 2013 was typical: full of overachievers, the best of the best, chosen from more than 6,000 applicants. The group of eight all had the right stuff, and more \u2014 six military officers, two scientists.AdvertisementTypical except for one detail: For the first time, there were as many women as men.Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, said the agency is making great strides in hiring and promoting women, and he pointed out that three of the agency\u2019s four science mission directorates now are led by women.\u201cWe\u2019re making significant progress in this area and have been for a number of years,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not done. There\u2019s a lot more to do.\u201d And he said events like the all-female spacewalk last month are \u201cwhat inspires tomorrow\u2019s astronauts, and we want tomorrow\u2019s astronauts to represent all of America.\u201dIt\u2019s not just at NASA. Several major aerospace firms have women in top leadership positions. Marillyn Hewson is the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne\u2019s CEO is Eileen Drake.But for more women to get to the C-suite, many think that more opportunities should be available to women earlier in life. That\u2019s why Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, started a fellowship for undergraduate women that places them at aerospace companies across the country.\u201cIt\u2019s important to support them, not just through mentorship, but get them actual jobs,\u201d she said.The program has graduated 114 women over three years, creating a support group of women who can talk about the difficulties of breaking into an industry where women have long been a minority and faced discrimination.When Stofan became head of the National Air and Space Museum, she saw it as not only a \u201csymbolic\u201d opportunity but also as a chance to showcase women in aerospace. \u201cWhose stories are we telling in the museum?\u201d she asked, shortly after starting the job, and decided to highlight the contributions of Margaret Hamilton, who worked on computer guidance systems during Apollo, and Katherine Johnson, one of the African American women whose work on the Mercury program was told in the film \u201cHidden Figures.\u201dStofan also oversees a summer camp for middle school girls at the museum called \u201cShe Can.\u201dWomen are still an overwhelming minority in many university engineering programs, something that remains a drag on female employment in the industry. Harvey Mudd College in California has been working for more than 15 years to attract women to its science, math and engineering programs, where they now represent nearly 50 percent of the enrollment. One of the biggest steps in that effort was to hire female professors.\u201cPeople always talk about how representation matters,\u201d said Nancy Lape, an engineering professor who is the interim chair of the engineering department. \u201cI think this is one of those cases. So right away, when students come into our program, they see women, and they see women in leadership positions.\u201dMuch of the work focuses not just on lectures but also on hands-on learning \u2014 students get into a pool with an underwater robot for their introductory course \u2014 which she said has been shown to reduce learning gaps between the general student population and underrepresented groups.Professors also encourage teamwork among students, which can help women and minorities \u201cget a chance to really feel like they belong.\u201dFemale participation also has been on the rise at Space Camp, where adults and children go to learn about space, aviation and robotics at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. When it started 37 years ago, 32 percent of Space Camp attendees were women. Today, women are 42 percent.\u201cThat\u2019s a little bit of a slow climb over 37 years,\u201d said Deborah Barnhart, the camp\u2019s director. \u201cI hope it doesn\u2019t take us another 37 years to get to 52 percent, but that\u2019s where we should be.\u201d The camp works with the Girl Scouts to make space-related badges attendees can earn.It also highlights the accomplishments of its graduates, who include Koch, the NASA astronaut on the space station. One of 12 women serving in the astronaut corps, she could be chosen by NASA to be the first woman to walk on the moon and become a Neil Armstrong for a new generation.\u201cThe idea of having the honor of being the first woman to walk on the moon is almost too great to fathom,\u201d she told reporters, speaking from the space station. \u201cOf course it would be a dream of mine and has been my entire life. But for now I\u2019ll settle for knowing that I\u2019ll probably at least know the first woman to walk on the moon.\u201cHint. Hint,\u201d she added, poking Meir, who was floating beside her. For all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and the industry more broadly. At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6589",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/26/nasa-was-year-woman-yet-women-still-are-big-minority-space-agency/",
        "text": "At NASA, 2019 could be called the year of the woman. In October, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir completed the first all-female spacewalk. Koch also is on her way toward 328 days aboard the International Space Station \u2014 the longest single space mission by a woman.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, NASA is planning a lunar mission called \u201cArtemis,\u201d named after the twin sister of Apollo, which, the agency says, would put \u201cthe next man and the first woman on the moon\u201d by 2024. The aerospace industry also boasts an unprecedented number of women in high-ranking positions, including Leanne Caret, who leads Boeing\u2019s defense and space division and Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX. But for all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and in the wider industry. Women make up only about a third of NASA\u2019s workforce. They comprise just 28 percent of senior executive leadership positions and are only 16 percent of senior scientific employees, according to a survey done by the agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the aerospace industry, only 24 percent of employees are women, and there has been little change in years, according to a study done by Aviation Week.For many, another example of how far the agency has to go came just a few weeks ago when NASA announced its \u201chonor awards,\u201d what it calls its \u201chighest form of recognition\u201d to employees and contractors.In total, 42 people were honored. All but two were men.\u201cWe haven\u2019t moved very much in the last 30 years in overall diversity,\u201d said Mary Lynne Dittmar, the president and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry group. \u201cAerospace is still heavily male and white, and we\u2019re not moving very quickly.\u201dThough perhaps not as overt as the early days of the space agency, when women were \u201chidden figures,\u201d sexism persists in an industry long dominated by white men. That has led women to leave science and engineering jobs at rates higher than their male counterparts. Women still struggle to get a foothold in the industry and often find themselves the only women in meetings dominated by men. Or being asked to fetch coffee. Or being called \u201choney.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s Dr. Honey to you, and the coffee machine is down the hall and to the right,\u201d is how Dittmar, who has worked in senior positions at Boeing and as an adviser to NASA, responds.\u201cFrankly, those attitudes have gotten better but they haven\u2019t completely gone away,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum who previously served as NASA\u2019s chief scientist. \u201cTo pretend they have does not help us understand why women get paid 80 cents on the dollar and are still only making up 16 to 30 percent of the workforce.\"While the aerospace industry hasn\u2019t been swept up in the recent #MeToo movement, it has over the years been hit by the occasional high-profile scandal. In 2012, Lockheed Martin\u2019s incoming CEO was forced out because of an affair with a subordinate, and in 2010, Boeing settled a pair of lawsuits filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging sex discrimination.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn one, two female engineers said they were subjected to sexist remarks and then suffered retaliation when they complained. In the other, a female employee alleged her male counterparts harassed her and broke her tools, making it harder for her to do her job.The employee reported the behavior, the EEOC said at the time, \u201cbut the company did nothing to address it. As a result, the harassment continued.\u201dAt NASA, which has about 17,000 employees, there were 62 EEOC complaints last year, 27 of which were on the basis of sex, according to agency statistics.While that is not a large number, EEOC spokeswoman Christine Nazer said \u201cit can be [a] difficult decision for individuals to come forward to file a charge of discrimination with the EEOC. Employees often fear retaliation such as being fired or demoted if they assert their legal rights. Indeed, retaliation is the most frequently filed charge with the EEOC.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMajor corporations such as Boeing and Lockheed say they go to great lengths to ensure all employees are welcomed and they have robust programs to prevent harassment and to protect those who do report it.Women in the industry acknowledge some improvement in the way they are treated, but cultural change has been slow. Even a term such as \u201cmanned spaceflight\u201d continues to be controversial.In the early 2000s, NASA\u2019s style guide was updated to include a section urging that \u201call references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic, as opposed to manned or unmanned).\u201dThe word \u201cmanned\u201d should only be used, the style guide said, when referring to any \u201chistorical program name or official title that included \u2018manned.\u2019\u201dStory continues below advertisementDuring an interview with reporters from the International Space Station about the first all-female spacewalk, Koch said she was happy to see the term fading from use. \u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,\u201d she said. \u201cEven though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants.\u201dAdvertisementBut debate still surrounds it. In October, a chat board for members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) hosted a spirited discussion of the term, with some arguing that \u201cmanned\u201d refers to all humans and, as one put it, \u201cthe word itself has nothing to do with gender.\u201dLori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, wrote on the message board that \u201cif we want to encourage women or non-conforming genders to be a part of our next grand adventure, it would serve us well to remove \u2018manned\u2019 from our lexicon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAIAA Executive Director Dan Dumbacher responded on the board that the institute \u201cprefers to use \u2018crewed\u2019 or \u2018human\u2019 rather than \u2018manned\u2019 when referring to space travel in our publications and on AIAA.org. Increasing the diversity of the aerospace community and the future workforce has been \u2014 and continues to be \u2014 a mission priority for AIAA.\u201dAdvertisementThe debate became so heated that ultimately the organization decided to shut down the discussion board, asking members to write statements \u201cwith empathy and respect for your fellow members.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t until 1978, nearly two decades after John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury Seven had been chosen to go to space, that NASA selected its first female astronauts \u2014 six of a class of 35. One of those was Sally Ride, who five years later would become the first American woman in space.Story continues below advertisementKathy Sullivan was a part of that class and said NASA was welcoming to the women. \u201cVery open and evenhanded,\u201d she said. Then again, \u201cwalking in the door of NASA with the title of astronaut is like walking around the Navy with the title of admiral.\u201dIf they were accepted inside NASA, the rest of society was adjusting.A reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times posed what he conceded \u201cmay seem like a male chauvinist pig question\u201d when he asked about Shannon Lucid\u2019s fitness for space given that she \u201chas three children and from her age I gather that the children are rather young.\u201dAdvertisementDid NASA give any consideration \u201cto her responsibilities to her children versus her responsibilities to the program?\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf I gave you a one-word answer to Shannon Lucid\u2019s family situation, the answer is, \u2018none,\u2019 Chris Kraft, the legendary NASA flight director, responded.Rather, he said \u201cthe most rewarding thing was that we found that there are a large number of very highly qualified women in the United States that can make the qualifications that we set out as astronauts.\u201dStill, there were some embarrassing moments, as the male-dominated agency adjusted to the presence of women.Before her first flight, the engineers asked Ride how many tampons she would need for her week-long mission.\u201cIs 100 the right number?\u201d they asked, according to her biographer, Ann Friedman.\u201cThat would not be the right number,\u201d she responded.In many ways, the NASA astronaut class of 2013 was typical: full of overachievers, the best of the best, chosen from more than 6,000 applicants. The group of eight all had the right stuff, and more \u2014 six military officers, two scientists.AdvertisementTypical except for one detail: For the first time, there were as many women as men.Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, said the agency is making great strides in hiring and promoting women, and he pointed out that three of the agency\u2019s four science mission directorates now are led by women.\u201cWe\u2019re making significant progress in this area and have been for a number of years,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not done. There\u2019s a lot more to do.\u201d And he said events like the all-female spacewalk last month are \u201cwhat inspires tomorrow\u2019s astronauts, and we want tomorrow\u2019s astronauts to represent all of America.\u201dIt\u2019s not just at NASA. Several major aerospace firms have women in top leadership positions. Marillyn Hewson is the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne\u2019s CEO is Eileen Drake.But for more women to get to the C-suite, many think that more opportunities should be available to women earlier in life. That\u2019s why Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, started a fellowship for undergraduate women that places them at aerospace companies across the country.\u201cIt\u2019s important to support them, not just through mentorship, but get them actual jobs,\u201d she said.The program has graduated 114 women over three years, creating a support group of women who can talk about the difficulties of breaking into an industry where women have long been a minority and faced discrimination.When Stofan became head of the National Air and Space Museum, she saw it as not only a \u201csymbolic\u201d opportunity but also as a chance to showcase women in aerospace. \u201cWhose stories are we telling in the museum?\u201d she asked, shortly after starting the job, and decided to highlight the contributions of Margaret Hamilton, who worked on computer guidance systems during Apollo, and Katherine Johnson, one of the African American women whose work on the Mercury program was told in the film \u201cHidden Figures.\u201dStofan also oversees a summer camp for middle school girls at the museum called \u201cShe Can.\u201dWomen are still an overwhelming minority in many university engineering programs, something that remains a drag on female employment in the industry. Harvey Mudd College in California has been working for more than 15 years to attract women to its science, math and engineering programs, where they now represent nearly 50 percent of the enrollment. One of the biggest steps in that effort was to hire female professors.\u201cPeople always talk about how representation matters,\u201d said Nancy Lape, an engineering professor who is the interim chair of the engineering department. \u201cI think this is one of those cases. So right away, when students come into our program, they see women, and they see women in leadership positions.\u201dMuch of the work focuses not just on lectures but also on hands-on learning \u2014 students get into a pool with an underwater robot for their introductory course \u2014 which she said has been shown to reduce learning gaps between the general student population and underrepresented groups.Professors also encourage teamwork among students, which can help women and minorities \u201cget a chance to really feel like they belong.\u201dFemale participation also has been on the rise at Space Camp, where adults and children go to learn about space, aviation and robotics at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. When it started 37 years ago, 32 percent of Space Camp attendees were women. Today, women are 42 percent.\u201cThat\u2019s a little bit of a slow climb over 37 years,\u201d said Deborah Barnhart, the camp\u2019s director. \u201cI hope it doesn\u2019t take us another 37 years to get to 52 percent, but that\u2019s where we should be.\u201d The camp works with the Girl Scouts to make space-related badges attendees can earn.It also highlights the accomplishments of its graduates, who include Koch, the NASA astronaut on the space station. One of 12 women serving in the astronaut corps, she could be chosen by NASA to be the first woman to walk on the moon and become a Neil Armstrong for a new generation.\u201cThe idea of having the honor of being the first woman to walk on the moon is almost too great to fathom,\u201d she told reporters, speaking from the space station. \u201cOf course it would be a dream of mine and has been my entire life. But for now I\u2019ll settle for knowing that I\u2019ll probably at least know the first woman to walk on the moon.\u201cHint. Hint,\u201d she added, poking Meir, who was floating beside her. For all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and the industry more broadly. At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6590",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/26/nasa-was-year-woman-yet-women-still-are-big-minority-space-agency/",
        "text": "At NASA, 2019 could be called the year of the woman. In October, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir completed the first all-female spacewalk. Koch also is on her way toward 328 days aboard the International Space Station \u2014 the longest single space mission by a woman.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMeanwhile, NASA is planning a lunar mission called \u201cArtemis,\u201d named after the twin sister of Apollo, which, the agency says, would put \u201cthe next man and the first woman on the moon\u201d by 2024. The aerospace industry also boasts an unprecedented number of women in high-ranking positions, including Leanne Caret, who leads Boeing\u2019s defense and space division and Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX. But for all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and in the wider industry. Women make up only about a third of NASA\u2019s workforce. They comprise just 28 percent of senior executive leadership positions and are only 16 percent of senior scientific employees, according to a survey done by the agency.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the aerospace industry, only 24 percent of employees are women, and there has been little change in years, according to a study done by Aviation Week.For many, another example of how far the agency has to go came just a few weeks ago when NASA announced its \u201chonor awards,\u201d what it calls its \u201chighest form of recognition\u201d to employees and contractors.In total, 42 people were honored. All but two were men.\u201cWe haven\u2019t moved very much in the last 30 years in overall diversity,\u201d said Mary Lynne Dittmar, the president and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry group. \u201cAerospace is still heavily male and white, and we\u2019re not moving very quickly.\u201dThough perhaps not as overt as the early days of the space agency, when women were \u201chidden figures,\u201d sexism persists in an industry long dominated by white men. That has led women to leave science and engineering jobs at rates higher than their male counterparts. Women still struggle to get a foothold in the industry and often find themselves the only women in meetings dominated by men. Or being asked to fetch coffee. Or being called \u201choney.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s Dr. Honey to you, and the coffee machine is down the hall and to the right,\u201d is how Dittmar, who has worked in senior positions at Boeing and as an adviser to NASA, responds.\u201cFrankly, those attitudes have gotten better but they haven\u2019t completely gone away,\u201d said Ellen Stofan, the head of the National Air and Space Museum who previously served as NASA\u2019s chief scientist. \u201cTo pretend they have does not help us understand why women get paid 80 cents on the dollar and are still only making up 16 to 30 percent of the workforce.\"While the aerospace industry hasn\u2019t been swept up in the recent #MeToo movement, it has over the years been hit by the occasional high-profile scandal. In 2012, Lockheed Martin\u2019s incoming CEO was forced out because of an affair with a subordinate, and in 2010, Boeing settled a pair of lawsuits filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging sex discrimination.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn one, two female engineers said they were subjected to sexist remarks and then suffered retaliation when they complained. In the other, a female employee alleged her male counterparts harassed her and broke her tools, making it harder for her to do her job.The employee reported the behavior, the EEOC said at the time, \u201cbut the company did nothing to address it. As a result, the harassment continued.\u201dAt NASA, which has about 17,000 employees, there were 62 EEOC complaints last year, 27 of which were on the basis of sex, according to agency statistics.While that is not a large number, EEOC spokeswoman Christine Nazer said \u201cit can be [a] difficult decision for individuals to come forward to file a charge of discrimination with the EEOC. Employees often fear retaliation such as being fired or demoted if they assert their legal rights. Indeed, retaliation is the most frequently filed charge with the EEOC.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMajor corporations such as Boeing and Lockheed say they go to great lengths to ensure all employees are welcomed and they have robust programs to prevent harassment and to protect those who do report it.Women in the industry acknowledge some improvement in the way they are treated, but cultural change has been slow. Even a term such as \u201cmanned spaceflight\u201d continues to be controversial.In the early 2000s, NASA\u2019s style guide was updated to include a section urging that \u201call references to the space program should be non-gender specific (e.g. human, piloted, unpiloted, robotic, as opposed to manned or unmanned).\u201dThe word \u201cmanned\u201d should only be used, the style guide said, when referring to any \u201chistorical program name or official title that included \u2018manned.\u2019\u201dStory continues below advertisementDuring an interview with reporters from the International Space Station about the first all-female spacewalk, Koch said she was happy to see the term fading from use. \u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see that in the last several years, a lot of that language has been replaced,\u201d she said. \u201cEven though that language is meant to represent all of humanity, it does conjure up images of men being the main participants.\u201dAdvertisementBut debate still surrounds it. In October, a chat board for members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) hosted a spirited discussion of the term, with some arguing that \u201cmanned\u201d refers to all humans and, as one put it, \u201cthe word itself has nothing to do with gender.\u201dLori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, wrote on the message board that \u201cif we want to encourage women or non-conforming genders to be a part of our next grand adventure, it would serve us well to remove \u2018manned\u2019 from our lexicon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAIAA Executive Director Dan Dumbacher responded on the board that the institute \u201cprefers to use \u2018crewed\u2019 or \u2018human\u2019 rather than \u2018manned\u2019 when referring to space travel in our publications and on AIAA.org. Increasing the diversity of the aerospace community and the future workforce has been \u2014 and continues to be \u2014 a mission priority for AIAA.\u201dAdvertisementThe debate became so heated that ultimately the organization decided to shut down the discussion board, asking members to write statements \u201cwith empathy and respect for your fellow members.\u201dIt wasn\u2019t until 1978, nearly two decades after John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury Seven had been chosen to go to space, that NASA selected its first female astronauts \u2014 six of a class of 35. One of those was Sally Ride, who five years later would become the first American woman in space.Story continues below advertisementKathy Sullivan was a part of that class and said NASA was welcoming to the women. \u201cVery open and evenhanded,\u201d she said. Then again, \u201cwalking in the door of NASA with the title of astronaut is like walking around the Navy with the title of admiral.\u201dIf they were accepted inside NASA, the rest of society was adjusting.A reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times posed what he conceded \u201cmay seem like a male chauvinist pig question\u201d when he asked about Shannon Lucid\u2019s fitness for space given that she \u201chas three children and from her age I gather that the children are rather young.\u201dAdvertisementDid NASA give any consideration \u201cto her responsibilities to her children versus her responsibilities to the program?\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf I gave you a one-word answer to Shannon Lucid\u2019s family situation, the answer is, \u2018none,\u2019 Chris Kraft, the legendary NASA flight director, responded.Rather, he said \u201cthe most rewarding thing was that we found that there are a large number of very highly qualified women in the United States that can make the qualifications that we set out as astronauts.\u201dStill, there were some embarrassing moments, as the male-dominated agency adjusted to the presence of women.Before her first flight, the engineers asked Ride how many tampons she would need for her week-long mission.\u201cIs 100 the right number?\u201d they asked, according to her biographer, Ann Friedman.\u201cThat would not be the right number,\u201d she responded.In many ways, the NASA astronaut class of 2013 was typical: full of overachievers, the best of the best, chosen from more than 6,000 applicants. The group of eight all had the right stuff, and more \u2014 six military officers, two scientists.AdvertisementTypical except for one detail: For the first time, there were as many women as men.Jim Bridenstine, NASA\u2019s administrator, said the agency is making great strides in hiring and promoting women, and he pointed out that three of the agency\u2019s four science mission directorates now are led by women.\u201cWe\u2019re making significant progress in this area and have been for a number of years,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not done. There\u2019s a lot more to do.\u201d And he said events like the all-female spacewalk last month are \u201cwhat inspires tomorrow\u2019s astronauts, and we want tomorrow\u2019s astronauts to represent all of America.\u201dIt\u2019s not just at NASA. Several major aerospace firms have women in top leadership positions. Marillyn Hewson is the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, and Aerojet Rocketdyne\u2019s CEO is Eileen Drake.But for more women to get to the C-suite, many think that more opportunities should be available to women earlier in life. That\u2019s why Garver, the former NASA deputy administrator, started a fellowship for undergraduate women that places them at aerospace companies across the country.\u201cIt\u2019s important to support them, not just through mentorship, but get them actual jobs,\u201d she said.The program has graduated 114 women over three years, creating a support group of women who can talk about the difficulties of breaking into an industry where women have long been a minority and faced discrimination.When Stofan became head of the National Air and Space Museum, she saw it as not only a \u201csymbolic\u201d opportunity but also as a chance to showcase women in aerospace. \u201cWhose stories are we telling in the museum?\u201d she asked, shortly after starting the job, and decided to highlight the contributions of Margaret Hamilton, who worked on computer guidance systems during Apollo, and Katherine Johnson, one of the African American women whose work on the Mercury program was told in the film \u201cHidden Figures.\u201dStofan also oversees a summer camp for middle school girls at the museum called \u201cShe Can.\u201dWomen are still an overwhelming minority in many university engineering programs, something that remains a drag on female employment in the industry. Harvey Mudd College in California has been working for more than 15 years to attract women to its science, math and engineering programs, where they now represent nearly 50 percent of the enrollment. One of the biggest steps in that effort was to hire female professors.\u201cPeople always talk about how representation matters,\u201d said Nancy Lape, an engineering professor who is the interim chair of the engineering department. \u201cI think this is one of those cases. So right away, when students come into our program, they see women, and they see women in leadership positions.\u201dMuch of the work focuses not just on lectures but also on hands-on learning \u2014 students get into a pool with an underwater robot for their introductory course \u2014 which she said has been shown to reduce learning gaps between the general student population and underrepresented groups.Professors also encourage teamwork among students, which can help women and minorities \u201cget a chance to really feel like they belong.\u201dFemale participation also has been on the rise at Space Camp, where adults and children go to learn about space, aviation and robotics at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. When it started 37 years ago, 32 percent of Space Camp attendees were women. Today, women are 42 percent.\u201cThat\u2019s a little bit of a slow climb over 37 years,\u201d said Deborah Barnhart, the camp\u2019s director. \u201cI hope it doesn\u2019t take us another 37 years to get to 52 percent, but that\u2019s where we should be.\u201d The camp works with the Girl Scouts to make space-related badges attendees can earn.It also highlights the accomplishments of its graduates, who include Koch, the NASA astronaut on the space station. One of 12 women serving in the astronaut corps, she could be chosen by NASA to be the first woman to walk on the moon and become a Neil Armstrong for a new generation.\u201cThe idea of having the honor of being the first woman to walk on the moon is almost too great to fathom,\u201d she told reporters, speaking from the space station. \u201cOf course it would be a dream of mine and has been my entire life. But for now I\u2019ll settle for knowing that I\u2019ll probably at least know the first woman to walk on the moon.\u201cHint. Hint,\u201d she added, poking Meir, who was floating beside her. For all the high-profile appointments and record-breaking feats, women remain an overwhelming minority among the rank and file at NASA and the industry more broadly. At NASA, 2019 was the year of the woman, yet women still are a big minority at the space agency",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Debris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean near Maldives, China reports (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6591",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/08/china-rocket-landing/",
        "text": "Parts from a Chinese Long March rocket fell into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, China\u2019s Manned Space Engineering Office reported late Saturday night, ending days of international speculation over whether plummeting rocket debris might be scattered over a populated area.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere were no immediate reports of damage from falling debris. Videos on social media showed the 22-ton Long March 5B, which had been drifting uncontrolled in low orbit for days, blazing a trail of light over the Arabian Peninsula as it burned up during descent. The Chinese agency said it reentered the Earth\u2019s atmosphere at 10:24 p.m. Eastern time before finally landing at 72.47 degrees east and 2.65 degrees north, a location in the ocean southwest of the Maldivian capital Mal\u00e9.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe vast majority of components was ablated and destroyed during reentry into the atmosphere,\u201d the Chinese agency said.AdvertisementThe Space-Track project said in a tweet: \u201cEveryone else following the #LongMarch5B reentry can relax. The rocket is down.\u201dAt around 100 feet tall and weighing about 22 metric tons, the rocket stage is one of the largest objects to ever reenter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere on an uncontrolled trajectory.The rocket\u2019s reentry had prompted international concern about where it might land. Scientists said the risk to humans was astronomically low, but it was not impossible for it to land in a populated area.In a statement Sunday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized China for \u201cfailing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris\u201d and called on space-faring nations to minimize the risk to humans and properties with their space missions.Story continues below advertisementBefore Sunday, the European Space Agency had predicted a \u201crisk zone\u201d that encompassed much of the world, including nearly all of the Americas, all of Africa and Australia, parts of Asia and European countries such as Italy and Greece.The Pentagon is tracking a Chinese rocket booster as it falls back to EarthChina has been criticized for its handling of the rocket booster, which was launched into space on April 29 to ferry the first module of the Tianhe space station. China did not design the mission so the used booster would have a controlled reentry into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere over a predetermined remote area or ocean.AdvertisementAstrophysicists described China\u2019s decision as potentially hazardous corner-cutting. \u201cThere\u2019s clearly a significant chance that it\u2019s going to come down on land,\u201d Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told CNN on Saturday.Story continues below advertisementChina\u2019s state media, however, has reacted angrily to the international scrutiny, saying its launch was being unfairly maligned. State media slammed U.S. media outlets for covering China\u2019s \u201cout-of-control space junk,\u201d in contrast with a recent SpaceX rocket that also left parts falling into farmland in the western United States.China says out-of-control space rocket booster probably won\u2019t cause any harmChinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin defended China\u2019s recent mission design as \u201cstandard international practice,\u201d saying at a news conference this week that \u201cChina is always committed to the peaceful use of outer space,\u201d according to state media.AdvertisementThe size of the Long March rocket made its reentry more unpredictable than others. Most satellites and other man-made objects are small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. But the Long March booster is much larger, which raised concern that pieces could survive and hit the ground.Story continues below advertisementThe rocket\u2019s tumbling motion as it passed through the mesosphere, an outer layer of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, had also made calculations of its speed tricky to project.Space has been a point of national pride for China, which is expected to run the only operational space station after the retirement of the International Space Station in the next four years. The country, which has spoken of putting people back on the moon, has completed a flurry of successful lunar and Mars missions in recent years.But China\u2019s burgeoning space program has contributed to the growing problem of space debris. The Secure World Foundation, a think tank, said that China in 2007 \u201ccreated a cloud of more than 3,000 pieces of space debris\u201d after the country shot down a dead satellite with a missile.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the first flight of the Long March 5B rocket last year, the booster passed over populated portions of Earth before pieces of debris landed in Africa. Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator at the time, slammed the Chinese space agency for the booster\u2019s return, saying the event \u201ccould have been extremely dangerous.\u201dMatthew Cappucci and Christian Davenport contributed to this report.Read more:China says out-of-control space rocket booster probably won\u2019t cause any harmThe Pentagon is tracking a Chinese rocket booster as it falls back to Earth There were no immediate reports of damage from falling debris. Debris from Chinese space rocket booster lands in Indian Ocean near Maldives, China reports",
        "author": "Timothy Bella"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA cuts short first \u2018hot-fire\u2019 test of its massive moon rocket, already plagued by delays and cost overruns (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6592",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/nasa-sls-test-moon-rocket-boeing/",
        "text": "NASA fired the four engines of its towering Space Launch System rocket for the first time Saturday after a decade of development, but the engines were cut off well short of the intended duration, a sign that something went wrong.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had been hoping to fire the four RS-25 rocket engines for eight minutes, but officials ended the test after about 60 seconds. It was not immediately clear what went wrong or what effect that would have on NASA\u2019s schedule. Space agency officials had hoped the rocket would fly for the first time by the end of this year but that now appears to be uncertain as the reasons for the early shutdown remain unknown. \u201cWe got lots of data that we\u2019re going to go through and be able to sort through and get to a point where we can make determinations as to whether or not launching in 2021 is a possibility or not,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a briefing hours after the test.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the test, officials had said they would need the engines to fire for at least four minutes to get all the data they needed to consider the test a success. At the briefing, NASA officials acknowledged that that threshold had not been met and that they didn\u2019t yet know what caused the problem, or how long it would take to fix.John Honeycutt, the SLS rocket program manager, confirmed there was an \u201cMCF\u201d reading, or a \u201cmajor component failure,\u201d a potentially significant issue. But he said, \u201cI don\u2019t know much more about that than you do. ... Any parameter that went awry on the rocket could send that failure ID.\u201dHe said it was unclear whether the problem was related to the rocket\u2019s hardware, software or a faulty sensor. \u201cI think we need to do our due diligence and go look at the data that we\u2019ve collected,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe test was supposed to simulate a full-duration launch, with the core stage \u2014 the main part of the rocket \u2014 clamped down on a test stand at NASA\u2019s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss. The ignition was successful, but the engines ran for just over a minute before they shut down.Trump pushed for a moon landing in 2024. It\u2019s not going to happen.During the briefing, Honeycutt said controllers saw a \u201cflash\u201d around one of the engines just before the shutdown but said he didn\u2019t have any information about what caused the flash or if it caused any damage to the engine.The truncated test is another setback for a program that for years has suffered all sorts of problems, delays and more than $1 billion in cost overruns. It\u2019s also yet another stumble by Boeing, the prime contractor on the core stage. The aerospace giant has had a series of problems in its space and defense divisions in addition to the crashes of its 737 Max airplanes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrustrated with the slow pace of progress, Vice President Pence in 2019 threatened to sideline the SLS rocket, which has long been derided as a vehicle better suited for job creation than exploration. But NASA said it recently had made significant progress, and on Saturday, the agency and Boeing had hoped a successful test would place the program on course to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.\u201cThis powerful rocket is going to put us in a position to be ready to support the agency\u2019s, and the country\u2019s, deep space mission to the moon and beyond,\u201d Honeycutt had said before the test.The SLS has been described as more powerful than the mighty Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The SLS\u2019s core stage stands 212 feet tall and weighs more than 2.3 million pounds. In addition to the four RS-25 engines, it will have two solid rocket boosters strapped to the side. The avionics computers have 18 miles of cabling and more than 500 sensors. And fully fueling the rocket with 733,000 gallons of supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen requires 114 tanker trucks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe engines had previously flown on the space shuttle and have been repurposed for the SLS. Combined, the engines served in 21 shuttle missions, including one from 1998. Two of the engines were a part of the very last space shuttle mission in 2011.But the road to get to Saturday\u2019s abbreviated test has been a long one. Since the SLS program officially began in 2011, numerous government watchdog reports have catalogued a series of technical missteps, wasteful spending and lax oversight. One Government Accountability Office report found that NASA had paid Boeing tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d for scoring high on evaluations, despite poor performance.For years, critics mocked the rocket as the \u201cSenate Launch System\u201d for the jobs it creates in key congressional districts.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, several private companies are developing heavy-lift rockets of their own, which would be less expensive and use newer technology. Unlike SpaceX, which builds rockets that can fly multiple times, the first stage of the SLS, and its engines, would be discarded into the ocean after each use.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.And those engines are not cheap. Aerojet Rocketdyne, which would be acquired by Lockheed Martin in a deal set to close later this year, has a $3.5 billion contract from NASA to deliver 24 of the engines through 2029.Advertisement\u201cThe whole space ecosystem has shifted tremendously,\u201d said Andrew Aldrin, the director of the International Space University-Center for Space Entrepreneurship at Florida Tech. \u201cIs this going to be the last time we have a big government program to build a huge launch vehicle? That\u2019s a real question.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s threat to sideline the rocket was intended as a warning to Boeing that its hold on the program was not unchallengeable.\u201cWe\u2019re not committed to any one contractor. If our current contractors can\u2019t meet this objective, then we\u2019ll find ones that will,\u201d he said. \u201cIf commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets it will be.\u201dSince then, NASA and Boeing have said the program has made a lot of progress, completing a series of tests known as the \u201cGreen Run\u201d to prepare the rocket for launch. Saturday\u2019s engine test was to have been the culmination of that campaign, with the core stage scheduled to be shipped next month to the Kennedy Space Center to be integrated with the Orion crew capsule. That schedule now appears uncertain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the setback, Bridenstine, who leaves his post when the Biden administration begins on Wednesday, tried to put a positive spin on the day.\u201cI just want to say the amount of progress that we\u2019ve made here today is remarkable,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd no, this is not a failure. This is a test, and we tested today in a way that is meaningful, where we\u2019re going to learn more and more and we\u2019re gonna we\u2019re going to make adjustments, and we\u2019re gonna fly to the moon.\" There was no immediate word on why the test ended after less than two minutes. NASA cuts short first \u2018hot-fire\u2019 test of its massive moon rocket, already plagued by delays and cost overruns",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA cuts short first \u2018hot-fire\u2019 test of its massive moon rocket, already plagued by delays and cost overruns (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6593",
        "date": "2021-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/nasa-sls-test-moon-rocket-boeing/",
        "text": "NASA fired the four engines of its towering Space Launch System rocket for the first time Saturday after a decade of development, but the engines were cut off well short of the intended duration, a sign that something went wrong.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA had been hoping to fire the four RS-25 rocket engines for eight minutes, but officials ended the test after about 60 seconds. It was not immediately clear what went wrong or what effect that would have on NASA\u2019s schedule. Space agency officials had hoped the rocket would fly for the first time by the end of this year but that now appears to be uncertain as the reasons for the early shutdown remain unknown. \u201cWe got lots of data that we\u2019re going to go through and be able to sort through and get to a point where we can make determinations as to whether or not launching in 2021 is a possibility or not,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a briefing hours after the test.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBefore the test, officials had said they would need the engines to fire for at least four minutes to get all the data they needed to consider the test a success. At the briefing, NASA officials acknowledged that that threshold had not been met and that they didn\u2019t yet know what caused the problem, or how long it would take to fix.John Honeycutt, the SLS rocket program manager, confirmed there was an \u201cMCF\u201d reading, or a \u201cmajor component failure,\u201d a potentially significant issue. But he said, \u201cI don\u2019t know much more about that than you do. ... Any parameter that went awry on the rocket could send that failure ID.\u201dHe said it was unclear whether the problem was related to the rocket\u2019s hardware, software or a faulty sensor. \u201cI think we need to do our due diligence and go look at the data that we\u2019ve collected,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe test was supposed to simulate a full-duration launch, with the core stage \u2014 the main part of the rocket \u2014 clamped down on a test stand at NASA\u2019s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss. The ignition was successful, but the engines ran for just over a minute before they shut down.Trump pushed for a moon landing in 2024. It\u2019s not going to happen.During the briefing, Honeycutt said controllers saw a \u201cflash\u201d around one of the engines just before the shutdown but said he didn\u2019t have any information about what caused the flash or if it caused any damage to the engine.The truncated test is another setback for a program that for years has suffered all sorts of problems, delays and more than $1 billion in cost overruns. It\u2019s also yet another stumble by Boeing, the prime contractor on the core stage. The aerospace giant has had a series of problems in its space and defense divisions in addition to the crashes of its 737 Max airplanes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrustrated with the slow pace of progress, Vice President Pence in 2019 threatened to sideline the SLS rocket, which has long been derided as a vehicle better suited for job creation than exploration. But NASA said it recently had made significant progress, and on Saturday, the agency and Boeing had hoped a successful test would place the program on course to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972.\u201cThis powerful rocket is going to put us in a position to be ready to support the agency\u2019s, and the country\u2019s, deep space mission to the moon and beyond,\u201d Honeycutt had said before the test.The SLS has been described as more powerful than the mighty Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The SLS\u2019s core stage stands 212 feet tall and weighs more than 2.3 million pounds. In addition to the four RS-25 engines, it will have two solid rocket boosters strapped to the side. The avionics computers have 18 miles of cabling and more than 500 sensors. And fully fueling the rocket with 733,000 gallons of supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen requires 114 tanker trucks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe engines had previously flown on the space shuttle and have been repurposed for the SLS. Combined, the engines served in 21 shuttle missions, including one from 1998. Two of the engines were a part of the very last space shuttle mission in 2011.But the road to get to Saturday\u2019s abbreviated test has been a long one. Since the SLS program officially began in 2011, numerous government watchdog reports have catalogued a series of technical missteps, wasteful spending and lax oversight. One Government Accountability Office report found that NASA had paid Boeing tens of millions of dollars in \u201caward fees\u201d for scoring high on evaluations, despite poor performance.For years, critics mocked the rocket as the \u201cSenate Launch System\u201d for the jobs it creates in key congressional districts.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, several private companies are developing heavy-lift rockets of their own, which would be less expensive and use newer technology. Unlike SpaceX, which builds rockets that can fly multiple times, the first stage of the SLS, and its engines, would be discarded into the ocean after each use.No one thought SpaceX would beat Boeing. Elon Musk proved them wrong.And those engines are not cheap. Aerojet Rocketdyne, which would be acquired by Lockheed Martin in a deal set to close later this year, has a $3.5 billion contract from NASA to deliver 24 of the engines through 2029.Advertisement\u201cThe whole space ecosystem has shifted tremendously,\u201d said Andrew Aldrin, the director of the International Space University-Center for Space Entrepreneurship at Florida Tech. \u201cIs this going to be the last time we have a big government program to build a huge launch vehicle? That\u2019s a real question.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s threat to sideline the rocket was intended as a warning to Boeing that its hold on the program was not unchallengeable.\u201cWe\u2019re not committed to any one contractor. If our current contractors can\u2019t meet this objective, then we\u2019ll find ones that will,\u201d he said. \u201cIf commercial rockets are the only way to get American astronauts to the moon in the next five years, then commercial rockets it will be.\u201dSince then, NASA and Boeing have said the program has made a lot of progress, completing a series of tests known as the \u201cGreen Run\u201d to prepare the rocket for launch. Saturday\u2019s engine test was to have been the culmination of that campaign, with the core stage scheduled to be shipped next month to the Kennedy Space Center to be integrated with the Orion crew capsule. That schedule now appears uncertain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the setback, Bridenstine, who leaves his post when the Biden administration begins on Wednesday, tried to put a positive spin on the day.\u201cI just want to say the amount of progress that we\u2019ve made here today is remarkable,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd no, this is not a failure. This is a test, and we tested today in a way that is meaningful, where we\u2019re going to learn more and more and we\u2019re gonna we\u2019re going to make adjustments, and we\u2019re gonna fly to the moon.\" There was no immediate word on why the test ended after less than two minutes. NASA cuts short first \u2018hot-fire\u2019 test of its massive moon rocket, already plagued by delays and cost overruns",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Everything you need to know about going to space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6594",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/08/space-tourism-questions-answers/",
        "text": "What to knowWho can go to space?How much does a ticket to space cost?What sort of training is involved to go to space?Is space tourism new? A look at who can fly, what it costs and what sort of training is involved for space tourists. Everything you need to know about going to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Before shortened NASA SLS rocket engine test, officials predicted only a 50 percent chance of complete success (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6595",
        "date": "2021-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/19/nasa-sls-hotfire-test-artemis/",
        "text": "Heading into Saturday\u2019s much-anticipated engine test of NASA\u2019s massive moon rocket, the space agency said repeatedly it was confident the test would be successful as it worked toward the rocket\u2019s first flight by the end of this year in a quest to return astronauts to the lunar surface.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut during a private briefing Tuesday morning, industry officials said their expectations for successfully completing all the test objectives had been only \u201c50/50\u201d given the complexity of the test and the fact that the four engines had never been fired while attached to NASA\u2019s Space Launch System rocket. \u201cPublic expectations should have been set lower,\u201d according to notes of the meeting by a participant that were obtained by The Washington Post. In the end, NASA got 100 percent of the data it needed for only 15 of the 23 test objectives, after the engines fired for just 67.2 seconds instead of the full eight minutes as planned.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe truncated test has again raised questions about the SLS program, which is already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. It remains unclear how the shortened test will affect NASA\u2019s original plans to try to launch the SLS for the first time later this year. Though the program to build the rocket started 10 years ago, Saturday was the first time NASA ignited all four of the RS-25 engines while attached to the rocket\u2019s core, or primary, stage.In a blog post Tuesday, NASA said the premature end of the test came after sensors detected a problem with the hydraulic system that steers the rocket by moving the engines during flight.But that issue would not have affected an actual launch because the space agency had set \u201cintentionally conservative\u201d limits to protect the rocket while it was bolted down to the test stand, the agency said. In a news conference late Tuesday afternoon, John Honeycutt, NASA\u2019s SLS program manager, said that was in part because the core stage used in the test would be the same hardware used in flying the mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf this scenario occurred during a flight, the rocket would have continued to fly using the remaining\u201d units that power the engine movement, NASA said in the blog post.In the private briefing, officials provided more detail, saying that the movement of the engines, known as \u201cgimbaling,\u201d was \u201cmuch more vigorous\u201d than previous gimbal tests in which the engines were not ignited, according to the notes of the participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. As a result, the hydraulic pressure dropped below the limit and triggered the engine shutdown.In addition to the problem with the hydraulic system, NASA said in its blog post there was a sensor reading that indicated a \u201cmajor component failure.\u201d That was not related to the engine shutdown and involved an instrumentation problem that NASA said it would resolve \u201cbefore the next use of the core stage.\u201d Despite the sensor reading, the test continued \u201cbecause the engine control system still has sufficient redundancy to ensure safe engine operation during the test,\u201d NASA said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut in the private briefing, officials said the warning would have triggered an abort of an actual launch \u201cjust as it would have stopped a [Space] Shuttle launch,\u201d according to the briefing participant\u2019s notes. \u201cYou want to launch with full redundancy.\u201dDuring the news conference, Jeff Zotti, the RS-25 program manager for Aerojet Rocketdyne, confirmed that if the controller \u201chad detected the failed sensor before liftoff we would have paused and fixed the sensor.\u201dAfter the test, NASA officials also said they noticed a \u201cflash\u201d around one of the engines. On Tuesday, the agency said that the \u201ctemperatures in the core stage engine section were normal\u201d and that the thermal blankets used to protect the engines from the extreme heat \u201cdid their job and protected the rocket.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the private briefing, officials said there were no \u201cindications of any leaks or fire.\u201d If another test is required, it would take between three and four weeks to prepare, they said.AdvertisementDespite the truncated test, NASA said in its blog that the rocket\u2019s hardware \u201cis in excellent condition\u201d and that \u201call four engines performed as expected,\u201d reaching their \u201cfull power\u201d by producing 1.6 million pounds of thrust during the test at NASA\u2019s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.Still, the agency \u2014 and Boeing, the prime contractor on the rocket stage \u2014 continue to investigate the problems encountered during the test and have not yet decided if the test will need to be repeated or if the core stage can be shipped to the Kennedy Space Center next month as scheduled.Story continues below advertisementAfter the test on Saturday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said that despite the early shutdown, the agency \u201cgot lots of data that we\u2019re going to go through and be able to sort through and get to a point where we can make determinations as to whether or not launching in 2021 is a possibility or not.\u201dAdvertisementThe RS-25 engines are left over from the Space Shuttle program, which ended in 2011. NASA and Boeing officials had noted that to indicate engineers were very familiar with the engines and were confident the systems would perform as expected. NASA even put out a dramatic video hyping the test and the upcoming missions to the moon it would enable.\u201cWe have a lot of experience with some of this hardware and the engines being as mature as they are gives us high confidence that we can do one hot fire and be ready to go,\u201d John Shannon, Boeing\u2019s SLS program manager, had told reporters before the test. During a private briefing Tuesday morning, industry officials said their expectations for successfully completing all the test objectives had been only \u201c50/50.\u201d Before shortened NASA SLS rocket engine test, officials predicted only a 50 percent chance of complete success",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6596",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/19/nasa-relives-its-biggest-triumph-there-are-worries-it-wont-be-able-do-it-again/",
        "text": "The White House has gone heavy on the lofty rhetoric, calling its plan to return humans to the lunar surface the \u201cchallenge of our time.\u201d It has set an audacious, Kennedy-esque timeline to pull off the feat \u2014 five years \u2014 coupled with a dash of novelty: This time, a woman would leave boot prints in the moon\u2019s dusty soil. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe endeavor even has marquee branding to match that goal: Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, an unsubtle sign that NASA is attempting not only to reach the lunar surface but to recall its glory days.Now, as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House\u2019s accelerated schedule and is facing one of the biggest tests since it fulfilled President John F. Kennedy\u2019s pledge at the dawn of the Space Age to go to the moon.On July 20, 1969 the world watched as man first set foot on the moon. Here\u2019s why Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap\u201d wasn\u2019t just for mankind. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)These five 3-D spacesuits are a blast from the past and a nod to the futureFor decades, one White House after another tried and failed to create an Apollo-like program and to reinvigorate an agency that has been unable to return people to the moon since 1972 \u2014 and since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, has been unable to fly astronauts anywhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration, however, has made space a priority. It reconstituted the National Space Council, which had been dormant for nearly 25 years. It\u2019s pushing for a Space Force, a new branch of the military. Vice President Pence has given several high-profile speeches on space, including one in March in which he urged NASA to accelerate its efforts to reach the moon by 2024, instead of 2028, which was its previous plan.\u201cThat's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d See the historic moment and others including planting the American flag on the moon. (NASA)At the Space Council\u2019s first meeting, in late 2017, Pence lamented what he called the \u201cabdication of leadership in space\u201d by previous administrations and the fact that \u201cthe United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect.\u201dHe vowed \u201cto never again let America fall behind in the race for space.\u201dWhat\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesGiven the high-level focus, many think this is the best shot NASA has had in years to pull off a moon mission. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma, is a skilled and passionate salesman, but NASA faces obstacles \u2014 both technical and political \u2014 that threaten to make Artemis another in a string of lofty goals that never come to fruition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA now faces is not just whether it can meet that ambitious timeline, but whether it can get humans there again, ever. Artemis, then, is not just a race to the moon, but a test of whether NASA still has the right stuff for such ambitious human exploration missions.\u201cThe future of NASA is at stake,\u201d Mark Sirangelo, who was helping lead the Artemis effort before resigning after less than two months, said in an interview. \u201cIf NASA doesn\u2019t do the big, bold things, then what does it do?\u201dThe hurdles NASA faces are many and complicated.The rocket it plans to use to get astronauts to the moon has yet to fly and is years behind schedule, and it\u2019s unclear when it will be ready. NASA does not have a lunar lander to get astronauts to the surface or spacesuits for them to wear once they get there. The amended budget request for next year of $1.6 billion is also a drop in the bucket for the mission\u2019s estimated cost of $20 to $30 billion, which would require between $4 and $6 billion additionally a year.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceBridenstine said during a Senate hearing this week that the failure of the White House and Congress to reach a budget deal would be \u201cdevastating\u201d to the program, since it would prevent the agency from investing in the new hardware needed to meet the 2024 goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere has also been upheaval within the top levels of the agency\u2019s exploration division. Last month, Sirangelo, a longtime space industry executive, resigned after less than two months. NASA had wanted to reorganize to create a \u201cMoon to Mars Mission Directorate\u201d that Sirangelo would have led, but Congress blocked it.Last week, Bridenstine abruptly ousted William Gerstenmaier, the head of the agency\u2019s human exploration division, saying he and others grew tired of leaders who overpromised but did not deliver.Gerstenmaier served at the agency for 42 years and became an institution in his own right. Bridenstine said he is searching across the country for a top manager to take over. It\u2019s unclear when the position will be filled, the clock is ticking, and Congress is growing restless.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhere is the leadership within the organization to deliver on this goal?\u201d Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, asked during a hearing.AdvertisementShe and other members also had questions about Artemis\u2019s price tag. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult for us to approve the mission if we don\u2019t know what the ultimate cost will be to the taxpayers,\u201d she said.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back thanks to SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginBridenstine said the answer to that wouldn\u2019t come until early next year, when NASA lays out the entire multiyear cost of the program in its budget request.Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, said in an interview her concern was that as NASA rushes to meet the White House goal it doesn\u2019t compromise safety. \u201cWe don\u2019t want schedule pressure to force NASA to take undue risks,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, a political question hangs over the program: In the age of Trump, with a presidential election looming, can the nation rally around anything, let alone a risky escapade to a lifeless rock nearly 250,000 miles away that is certain to cost billions, and maybe lives, and doesn\u2019t poll well?AdvertisementFor all the recent grandiose talk about returning to the moon, the Trump administration\u2019s space plans unfolded very slowly at first.The White House didn\u2019t nominate Bridenstine to be NASA administrator until September 2017, eight months after Trump\u2019s inauguration. He wasn\u2019t confirmed until the following April, meaning the agency had been left with an acting director for the longest period in its history.Story continues below advertisementInitially, Bridenstine and NASA officials crafted a plan to return to the moon, a reversal from the Obama administration, which was focused on getting to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. When it came to the moon, NASA had \u201cbeen there before,\u201d Obama said in 2010.Under Trump, NASA\u2019s charge isn\u2019t just to get to the moon, but to go there to stay. It wants to build a permanent presence on and around the moon, and use that as a steppingstone to explore further and to reach destinations such as Mars.Who gets to go to space?Unlike the Apollo missions, where astronauts left flags and footprints and then just left, NASA intends to build an outpost in orbit around the moon. Called \u201cGateway,\u201d it would be outfitted with a propulsion element that would allow it to maneuver, a habitat for astronauts to live, and a lander and ascent vehicle that would take them to the lunar surface and back.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile getting to the moon may be a priority for the White House, it\u2019s not for the country, which remains fractured along political, cultural and class lines. While Apollo transcended those in the 1960s, it\u2019s unclear whether Artemis can now.Testifying at a recent congressional hearing, Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director for Apollo 11, said Kennedy\u2019s call for a lunar mission \u201cwas the impetus, but there was a national unity that assured our success. I believe that today in our country unity is necessary for great effort and is lacking within our country, our government, and within the space industry.\u201dIt\u2019s fallen to Bridenstine to sell the program to the nation and to Congress, but first he had to sell it to his own employees, many of whom were surprised by Pence\u2019s announcement.Story continues below advertisementDuring a town hall, he looked forward to the day \u201c50 years from now when people are celebrating the Artemis program; 50 years from now when people are celebrating the new agenda to go to the moon with the next man and the first woman, people are going to say, \u2018Look at how this has transformed and elevated the human condition.\u2019 \u201dHe\u2019s got a long way to go.During a recent hearing of a Senate subcommittee on aviation and space, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) admitted she hadn\u2019t heard of the Artemis program until very recently.\u201cPeople don\u2019t know about this,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a problem, I think.\u201d As NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House demand that it put Americans back on the moon by 2024. It's a huge test of whether the space agency still has the right stuff. As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6597",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/19/nasa-relives-its-biggest-triumph-there-are-worries-it-wont-be-able-do-it-again/",
        "text": "The White House has gone heavy on the lofty rhetoric, calling its plan to return humans to the lunar surface the \u201cchallenge of our time.\u201d It has set an audacious, Kennedy-esque timeline to pull off the feat \u2014 five years \u2014 coupled with a dash of novelty: This time, a woman would leave boot prints in the moon\u2019s dusty soil. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe endeavor even has marquee branding to match that goal: Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, an unsubtle sign that NASA is attempting not only to reach the lunar surface but to recall its glory days.Now, as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House\u2019s accelerated schedule and is facing one of the biggest tests since it fulfilled President John F. Kennedy\u2019s pledge at the dawn of the Space Age to go to the moon.On July 20, 1969 the world watched as man first set foot on the moon. Here\u2019s why Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap\u201d wasn\u2019t just for mankind. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)These five 3-D spacesuits are a blast from the past and a nod to the futureFor decades, one White House after another tried and failed to create an Apollo-like program and to reinvigorate an agency that has been unable to return people to the moon since 1972 \u2014 and since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, has been unable to fly astronauts anywhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration, however, has made space a priority. It reconstituted the National Space Council, which had been dormant for nearly 25 years. It\u2019s pushing for a Space Force, a new branch of the military. Vice President Pence has given several high-profile speeches on space, including one in March in which he urged NASA to accelerate its efforts to reach the moon by 2024, instead of 2028, which was its previous plan.\u201cThat's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d See the historic moment and others including planting the American flag on the moon. (NASA)At the Space Council\u2019s first meeting, in late 2017, Pence lamented what he called the \u201cabdication of leadership in space\u201d by previous administrations and the fact that \u201cthe United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect.\u201dHe vowed \u201cto never again let America fall behind in the race for space.\u201dWhat\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesGiven the high-level focus, many think this is the best shot NASA has had in years to pull off a moon mission. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma, is a skilled and passionate salesman, but NASA faces obstacles \u2014 both technical and political \u2014 that threaten to make Artemis another in a string of lofty goals that never come to fruition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA now faces is not just whether it can meet that ambitious timeline, but whether it can get humans there again, ever. Artemis, then, is not just a race to the moon, but a test of whether NASA still has the right stuff for such ambitious human exploration missions.\u201cThe future of NASA is at stake,\u201d Mark Sirangelo, who was helping lead the Artemis effort before resigning after less than two months, said in an interview. \u201cIf NASA doesn\u2019t do the big, bold things, then what does it do?\u201dThe hurdles NASA faces are many and complicated.The rocket it plans to use to get astronauts to the moon has yet to fly and is years behind schedule, and it\u2019s unclear when it will be ready. NASA does not have a lunar lander to get astronauts to the surface or spacesuits for them to wear once they get there. The amended budget request for next year of $1.6 billion is also a drop in the bucket for the mission\u2019s estimated cost of $20 to $30 billion, which would require between $4 and $6 billion additionally a year.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceBridenstine said during a Senate hearing this week that the failure of the White House and Congress to reach a budget deal would be \u201cdevastating\u201d to the program, since it would prevent the agency from investing in the new hardware needed to meet the 2024 goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere has also been upheaval within the top levels of the agency\u2019s exploration division. Last month, Sirangelo, a longtime space industry executive, resigned after less than two months. NASA had wanted to reorganize to create a \u201cMoon to Mars Mission Directorate\u201d that Sirangelo would have led, but Congress blocked it.Last week, Bridenstine abruptly ousted William Gerstenmaier, the head of the agency\u2019s human exploration division, saying he and others grew tired of leaders who overpromised but did not deliver.Gerstenmaier served at the agency for 42 years and became an institution in his own right. Bridenstine said he is searching across the country for a top manager to take over. It\u2019s unclear when the position will be filled, the clock is ticking, and Congress is growing restless.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhere is the leadership within the organization to deliver on this goal?\u201d Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, asked during a hearing.AdvertisementShe and other members also had questions about Artemis\u2019s price tag. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult for us to approve the mission if we don\u2019t know what the ultimate cost will be to the taxpayers,\u201d she said.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back thanks to SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginBridenstine said the answer to that wouldn\u2019t come until early next year, when NASA lays out the entire multiyear cost of the program in its budget request.Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, said in an interview her concern was that as NASA rushes to meet the White House goal it doesn\u2019t compromise safety. \u201cWe don\u2019t want schedule pressure to force NASA to take undue risks,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, a political question hangs over the program: In the age of Trump, with a presidential election looming, can the nation rally around anything, let alone a risky escapade to a lifeless rock nearly 250,000 miles away that is certain to cost billions, and maybe lives, and doesn\u2019t poll well?AdvertisementFor all the recent grandiose talk about returning to the moon, the Trump administration\u2019s space plans unfolded very slowly at first.The White House didn\u2019t nominate Bridenstine to be NASA administrator until September 2017, eight months after Trump\u2019s inauguration. He wasn\u2019t confirmed until the following April, meaning the agency had been left with an acting director for the longest period in its history.Story continues below advertisementInitially, Bridenstine and NASA officials crafted a plan to return to the moon, a reversal from the Obama administration, which was focused on getting to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. When it came to the moon, NASA had \u201cbeen there before,\u201d Obama said in 2010.Under Trump, NASA\u2019s charge isn\u2019t just to get to the moon, but to go there to stay. It wants to build a permanent presence on and around the moon, and use that as a steppingstone to explore further and to reach destinations such as Mars.Who gets to go to space?Unlike the Apollo missions, where astronauts left flags and footprints and then just left, NASA intends to build an outpost in orbit around the moon. Called \u201cGateway,\u201d it would be outfitted with a propulsion element that would allow it to maneuver, a habitat for astronauts to live, and a lander and ascent vehicle that would take them to the lunar surface and back.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile getting to the moon may be a priority for the White House, it\u2019s not for the country, which remains fractured along political, cultural and class lines. While Apollo transcended those in the 1960s, it\u2019s unclear whether Artemis can now.Testifying at a recent congressional hearing, Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director for Apollo 11, said Kennedy\u2019s call for a lunar mission \u201cwas the impetus, but there was a national unity that assured our success. I believe that today in our country unity is necessary for great effort and is lacking within our country, our government, and within the space industry.\u201dIt\u2019s fallen to Bridenstine to sell the program to the nation and to Congress, but first he had to sell it to his own employees, many of whom were surprised by Pence\u2019s announcement.Story continues below advertisementDuring a town hall, he looked forward to the day \u201c50 years from now when people are celebrating the Artemis program; 50 years from now when people are celebrating the new agenda to go to the moon with the next man and the first woman, people are going to say, \u2018Look at how this has transformed and elevated the human condition.\u2019 \u201dHe\u2019s got a long way to go.During a recent hearing of a Senate subcommittee on aviation and space, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) admitted she hadn\u2019t heard of the Artemis program until very recently.\u201cPeople don\u2019t know about this,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a problem, I think.\u201d As NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House demand that it put Americans back on the moon by 2024. It's a huge test of whether the space agency still has the right stuff. As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6598",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/19/nasa-relives-its-biggest-triumph-there-are-worries-it-wont-be-able-do-it-again/",
        "text": "The White House has gone heavy on the lofty rhetoric, calling its plan to return humans to the lunar surface the \u201cchallenge of our time.\u201d It has set an audacious, Kennedy-esque timeline to pull off the feat \u2014 five years \u2014 coupled with a dash of novelty: This time, a woman would leave boot prints in the moon\u2019s dusty soil. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe endeavor even has marquee branding to match that goal: Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, an unsubtle sign that NASA is attempting not only to reach the lunar surface but to recall its glory days.Now, as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House\u2019s accelerated schedule and is facing one of the biggest tests since it fulfilled President John F. Kennedy\u2019s pledge at the dawn of the Space Age to go to the moon.On July 20, 1969 the world watched as man first set foot on the moon. Here\u2019s why Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap\u201d wasn\u2019t just for mankind. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)These five 3-D spacesuits are a blast from the past and a nod to the futureFor decades, one White House after another tried and failed to create an Apollo-like program and to reinvigorate an agency that has been unable to return people to the moon since 1972 \u2014 and since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, has been unable to fly astronauts anywhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration, however, has made space a priority. It reconstituted the National Space Council, which had been dormant for nearly 25 years. It\u2019s pushing for a Space Force, a new branch of the military. Vice President Pence has given several high-profile speeches on space, including one in March in which he urged NASA to accelerate its efforts to reach the moon by 2024, instead of 2028, which was its previous plan.\u201cThat's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d See the historic moment and others including planting the American flag on the moon. (NASA)At the Space Council\u2019s first meeting, in late 2017, Pence lamented what he called the \u201cabdication of leadership in space\u201d by previous administrations and the fact that \u201cthe United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect.\u201dHe vowed \u201cto never again let America fall behind in the race for space.\u201dWhat\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesGiven the high-level focus, many think this is the best shot NASA has had in years to pull off a moon mission. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma, is a skilled and passionate salesman, but NASA faces obstacles \u2014 both technical and political \u2014 that threaten to make Artemis another in a string of lofty goals that never come to fruition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA now faces is not just whether it can meet that ambitious timeline, but whether it can get humans there again, ever. Artemis, then, is not just a race to the moon, but a test of whether NASA still has the right stuff for such ambitious human exploration missions.\u201cThe future of NASA is at stake,\u201d Mark Sirangelo, who was helping lead the Artemis effort before resigning after less than two months, said in an interview. \u201cIf NASA doesn\u2019t do the big, bold things, then what does it do?\u201dThe hurdles NASA faces are many and complicated.The rocket it plans to use to get astronauts to the moon has yet to fly and is years behind schedule, and it\u2019s unclear when it will be ready. NASA does not have a lunar lander to get astronauts to the surface or spacesuits for them to wear once they get there. The amended budget request for next year of $1.6 billion is also a drop in the bucket for the mission\u2019s estimated cost of $20 to $30 billion, which would require between $4 and $6 billion additionally a year.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceBridenstine said during a Senate hearing this week that the failure of the White House and Congress to reach a budget deal would be \u201cdevastating\u201d to the program, since it would prevent the agency from investing in the new hardware needed to meet the 2024 goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere has also been upheaval within the top levels of the agency\u2019s exploration division. Last month, Sirangelo, a longtime space industry executive, resigned after less than two months. NASA had wanted to reorganize to create a \u201cMoon to Mars Mission Directorate\u201d that Sirangelo would have led, but Congress blocked it.Last week, Bridenstine abruptly ousted William Gerstenmaier, the head of the agency\u2019s human exploration division, saying he and others grew tired of leaders who overpromised but did not deliver.Gerstenmaier served at the agency for 42 years and became an institution in his own right. Bridenstine said he is searching across the country for a top manager to take over. It\u2019s unclear when the position will be filled, the clock is ticking, and Congress is growing restless.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhere is the leadership within the organization to deliver on this goal?\u201d Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, asked during a hearing.AdvertisementShe and other members also had questions about Artemis\u2019s price tag. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult for us to approve the mission if we don\u2019t know what the ultimate cost will be to the taxpayers,\u201d she said.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back thanks to SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginBridenstine said the answer to that wouldn\u2019t come until early next year, when NASA lays out the entire multiyear cost of the program in its budget request.Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, said in an interview her concern was that as NASA rushes to meet the White House goal it doesn\u2019t compromise safety. \u201cWe don\u2019t want schedule pressure to force NASA to take undue risks,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, a political question hangs over the program: In the age of Trump, with a presidential election looming, can the nation rally around anything, let alone a risky escapade to a lifeless rock nearly 250,000 miles away that is certain to cost billions, and maybe lives, and doesn\u2019t poll well?AdvertisementFor all the recent grandiose talk about returning to the moon, the Trump administration\u2019s space plans unfolded very slowly at first.The White House didn\u2019t nominate Bridenstine to be NASA administrator until September 2017, eight months after Trump\u2019s inauguration. He wasn\u2019t confirmed until the following April, meaning the agency had been left with an acting director for the longest period in its history.Story continues below advertisementInitially, Bridenstine and NASA officials crafted a plan to return to the moon, a reversal from the Obama administration, which was focused on getting to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. When it came to the moon, NASA had \u201cbeen there before,\u201d Obama said in 2010.Under Trump, NASA\u2019s charge isn\u2019t just to get to the moon, but to go there to stay. It wants to build a permanent presence on and around the moon, and use that as a steppingstone to explore further and to reach destinations such as Mars.Who gets to go to space?Unlike the Apollo missions, where astronauts left flags and footprints and then just left, NASA intends to build an outpost in orbit around the moon. Called \u201cGateway,\u201d it would be outfitted with a propulsion element that would allow it to maneuver, a habitat for astronauts to live, and a lander and ascent vehicle that would take them to the lunar surface and back.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile getting to the moon may be a priority for the White House, it\u2019s not for the country, which remains fractured along political, cultural and class lines. While Apollo transcended those in the 1960s, it\u2019s unclear whether Artemis can now.Testifying at a recent congressional hearing, Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director for Apollo 11, said Kennedy\u2019s call for a lunar mission \u201cwas the impetus, but there was a national unity that assured our success. I believe that today in our country unity is necessary for great effort and is lacking within our country, our government, and within the space industry.\u201dIt\u2019s fallen to Bridenstine to sell the program to the nation and to Congress, but first he had to sell it to his own employees, many of whom were surprised by Pence\u2019s announcement.Story continues below advertisementDuring a town hall, he looked forward to the day \u201c50 years from now when people are celebrating the Artemis program; 50 years from now when people are celebrating the new agenda to go to the moon with the next man and the first woman, people are going to say, \u2018Look at how this has transformed and elevated the human condition.\u2019 \u201dHe\u2019s got a long way to go.During a recent hearing of a Senate subcommittee on aviation and space, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) admitted she hadn\u2019t heard of the Artemis program until very recently.\u201cPeople don\u2019t know about this,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a problem, I think.\u201d As NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House demand that it put Americans back on the moon by 2024. It's a huge test of whether the space agency still has the right stuff. As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6599",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/19/nasa-relives-its-biggest-triumph-there-are-worries-it-wont-be-able-do-it-again/",
        "text": "The White House has gone heavy on the lofty rhetoric, calling its plan to return humans to the lunar surface the \u201cchallenge of our time.\u201d It has set an audacious, Kennedy-esque timeline to pull off the feat \u2014 five years \u2014 coupled with a dash of novelty: This time, a woman would leave boot prints in the moon\u2019s dusty soil. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe endeavor even has marquee branding to match that goal: Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, an unsubtle sign that NASA is attempting not only to reach the lunar surface but to recall its glory days.Now, as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House\u2019s accelerated schedule and is facing one of the biggest tests since it fulfilled President John F. Kennedy\u2019s pledge at the dawn of the Space Age to go to the moon.On July 20, 1969 the world watched as man first set foot on the moon. Here\u2019s why Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u201cgiant leap\u201d wasn\u2019t just for mankind. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)These five 3-D spacesuits are a blast from the past and a nod to the futureFor decades, one White House after another tried and failed to create an Apollo-like program and to reinvigorate an agency that has been unable to return people to the moon since 1972 \u2014 and since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, has been unable to fly astronauts anywhere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration, however, has made space a priority. It reconstituted the National Space Council, which had been dormant for nearly 25 years. It\u2019s pushing for a Space Force, a new branch of the military. Vice President Pence has given several high-profile speeches on space, including one in March in which he urged NASA to accelerate its efforts to reach the moon by 2024, instead of 2028, which was its previous plan.\u201cThat's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.\u201d See the historic moment and others including planting the American flag on the moon. (NASA)At the Space Council\u2019s first meeting, in late 2017, Pence lamented what he called the \u201cabdication of leadership in space\u201d by previous administrations and the fact that \u201cthe United States has not sent an American astronaut beyond low Earth orbit in 45 years. Across the board, our space program has suffered from apathy and neglect.\u201dHe vowed \u201cto never again let America fall behind in the race for space.\u201dWhat\u2019s it really like to live in space? 50 astronauts share their storiesGiven the high-level focus, many think this is the best shot NASA has had in years to pull off a moon mission. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former Republican member of Congress from Oklahoma, is a skilled and passionate salesman, but NASA faces obstacles \u2014 both technical and political \u2014 that threaten to make Artemis another in a string of lofty goals that never come to fruition.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe question NASA now faces is not just whether it can meet that ambitious timeline, but whether it can get humans there again, ever. Artemis, then, is not just a race to the moon, but a test of whether NASA still has the right stuff for such ambitious human exploration missions.\u201cThe future of NASA is at stake,\u201d Mark Sirangelo, who was helping lead the Artemis effort before resigning after less than two months, said in an interview. \u201cIf NASA doesn\u2019t do the big, bold things, then what does it do?\u201dThe hurdles NASA faces are many and complicated.The rocket it plans to use to get astronauts to the moon has yet to fly and is years behind schedule, and it\u2019s unclear when it will be ready. NASA does not have a lunar lander to get astronauts to the surface or spacesuits for them to wear once they get there. The amended budget request for next year of $1.6 billion is also a drop in the bucket for the mission\u2019s estimated cost of $20 to $30 billion, which would require between $4 and $6 billion additionally a year.Companies in the Cosmos: The new space raceBridenstine said during a Senate hearing this week that the failure of the White House and Congress to reach a budget deal would be \u201cdevastating\u201d to the program, since it would prevent the agency from investing in the new hardware needed to meet the 2024 goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere has also been upheaval within the top levels of the agency\u2019s exploration division. Last month, Sirangelo, a longtime space industry executive, resigned after less than two months. NASA had wanted to reorganize to create a \u201cMoon to Mars Mission Directorate\u201d that Sirangelo would have led, but Congress blocked it.Last week, Bridenstine abruptly ousted William Gerstenmaier, the head of the agency\u2019s human exploration division, saying he and others grew tired of leaders who overpromised but did not deliver.Gerstenmaier served at the agency for 42 years and became an institution in his own right. Bridenstine said he is searching across the country for a top manager to take over. It\u2019s unclear when the position will be filled, the clock is ticking, and Congress is growing restless.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhere is the leadership within the organization to deliver on this goal?\u201d Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, asked during a hearing.AdvertisementShe and other members also had questions about Artemis\u2019s price tag. \u201cIt\u2019s difficult for us to approve the mission if we don\u2019t know what the ultimate cost will be to the taxpayers,\u201d she said.The Florida Space Coast is bouncing back thanks to SpaceX, Boeing and Blue OriginBridenstine said the answer to that wouldn\u2019t come until early next year, when NASA lays out the entire multiyear cost of the program in its budget request.Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the House space subcommittee, said in an interview her concern was that as NASA rushes to meet the White House goal it doesn\u2019t compromise safety. \u201cWe don\u2019t want schedule pressure to force NASA to take undue risks,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementIn the meantime, a political question hangs over the program: In the age of Trump, with a presidential election looming, can the nation rally around anything, let alone a risky escapade to a lifeless rock nearly 250,000 miles away that is certain to cost billions, and maybe lives, and doesn\u2019t poll well?AdvertisementFor all the recent grandiose talk about returning to the moon, the Trump administration\u2019s space plans unfolded very slowly at first.The White House didn\u2019t nominate Bridenstine to be NASA administrator until September 2017, eight months after Trump\u2019s inauguration. He wasn\u2019t confirmed until the following April, meaning the agency had been left with an acting director for the longest period in its history.Story continues below advertisementInitially, Bridenstine and NASA officials crafted a plan to return to the moon, a reversal from the Obama administration, which was focused on getting to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. When it came to the moon, NASA had \u201cbeen there before,\u201d Obama said in 2010.Under Trump, NASA\u2019s charge isn\u2019t just to get to the moon, but to go there to stay. It wants to build a permanent presence on and around the moon, and use that as a steppingstone to explore further and to reach destinations such as Mars.Who gets to go to space?Unlike the Apollo missions, where astronauts left flags and footprints and then just left, NASA intends to build an outpost in orbit around the moon. Called \u201cGateway,\u201d it would be outfitted with a propulsion element that would allow it to maneuver, a habitat for astronauts to live, and a lander and ascent vehicle that would take them to the lunar surface and back.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile getting to the moon may be a priority for the White House, it\u2019s not for the country, which remains fractured along political, cultural and class lines. While Apollo transcended those in the 1960s, it\u2019s unclear whether Artemis can now.Testifying at a recent congressional hearing, Gene Kranz, the NASA flight director for Apollo 11, said Kennedy\u2019s call for a lunar mission \u201cwas the impetus, but there was a national unity that assured our success. I believe that today in our country unity is necessary for great effort and is lacking within our country, our government, and within the space industry.\u201dIt\u2019s fallen to Bridenstine to sell the program to the nation and to Congress, but first he had to sell it to his own employees, many of whom were surprised by Pence\u2019s announcement.Story continues below advertisementDuring a town hall, he looked forward to the day \u201c50 years from now when people are celebrating the Artemis program; 50 years from now when people are celebrating the new agenda to go to the moon with the next man and the first woman, people are going to say, \u2018Look at how this has transformed and elevated the human condition.\u2019 \u201dHe\u2019s got a long way to go.During a recent hearing of a Senate subcommittee on aviation and space, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) admitted she hadn\u2019t heard of the Artemis program until very recently.\u201cPeople don\u2019t know about this,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is a problem, I think.\u201d As NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the agency is scrambling to meet the White House demand that it put Americans back on the moon by 2024. It's a huge test of whether the space agency still has the right stuff. As NASA relives its biggest triumph, there are worries it won\u2019t be able to do it again ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump campaign pulls ad about SpaceX launch after former astronaut calls it political propaganda  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6600",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/05/trump-campaign-nasa-ad-pulled/",
        "text": "The Trump campaign took down a video late Thursday trumpeting NASA\u2019s return to human spaceflight, after harsh criticism that it was politicizing the event and violating NASA advertising rules.The video featured Trump watching last week\u2019s launch from the Kennedy Space Center along with the slogan \u201cMake Space Great Again\u201d and historic footage from the Apollo era. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Twitter, Karen Nyberg, a former astronaut and wife of Doug Hurley, who was carried to the International Space Station by the SpaceX launch, blasted the advertisement, saying she found \u201cit disturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHurley and Bob Behnken were the first American astronauts to be lifted into orbit from American soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.AdvertisementThe event was watched by millions and provided a moment of inspiration amid protests over George Floyd\u2019s death and the fear of the global pandemic.But the ad was quickly attacked as using an event of engineering and science for political gain. But Internet posts are hard to delete forever; the ad surfaced on another YouTube page.I find it disturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong. @nasa @JimBridenstine https://t.co/cXcKHxmn6e\u2014 Karen L. Nyberg (@AstroKarenN) June 4, 2020\n\nThe ad also runs against NASA regulations that prohibit the agency from endorsing \u201ca commercial product, service or activity.\u201d\u201cAstronauts or employees who are currently employed by NASA cannot have their names, likenesses or other personality traits displayed in any advertisements or marketing material,\u201d the rules say.Story continues below advertisementThe Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.An online petition urging the campaign to remove the ad had more than 7,000 signatures by Friday. \u201cNASA and the space industry as a whole have long tried to stay out of politics, and, until this Administration, that goal was at least partly attained,\u201d the petition read.AdvertisementNASA goes to great lengths to avoid endorsing any ideology or product, even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space \u201ccandy-coated chocolates\u201d out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.But politicians have from time to time used NASA\u2019s exploits as the backdrop for their own political drama. \u201cWatching the ad, I was reminded of Richard Nixon at the time of Apollo 11,\u201d said John Logsdon, a space historian and a professor emeritus at George Washington University. \u201cHe had nothing to do with Apollo 11; he just happened to be the president when it happened. But he wrapped himself in the event. And never once mentioned Kennedy.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the early days of the Space Shuttle, two influential members of Congress scored rides. Sen. Jake Garn, a Republican from Utah, was the head of the appropriations committee that funded NASA, and leveraged his position to fly on the Shuttle, saying he \u201cneeded to kick the tires\u201d of the program his committee had been funding.AdvertisementThe Doonesbury comic strip had a field day with Garn\u2019s flight, calling it \u201cthe most extraordinary junket in the history of Congress.\u201d Opinion columnists derided the flight as a \u201cphenomenal waste of taxpayer money,\u201d and said Congress was trying to \u201cturn the space program into their own private Disneyland.\u201dMany were delighted when Garn reached orbit and immediately got sick. In Houston, astronauts developed what they called the \u201cGarn scale:\u201d 5, you were mildly sick; 1, you were puking your brains out.Story continues below advertisementThe outrage didn\u2019t deter another member of Congress, Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, who flew the following year. Trump has said he has no desire to go to space \u2014 though he did recently indicate to reporters that he would like to send a few of them there. He clearly was eager to use the successful launch as a high moment for his administration, and campaign. And when the SpaceX launch was scrubbed on its original date, he came back to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the second attempt, ready to deliver a speech touting his administration\u2019s efforts in space. Advertisement\u201cA new age of American ambition has now begun,\u201d Trump said following the launch. \u201cThose of us who saw the spectacular and unforgettable lift off this afternoon watched more than an act of history. We watched an act of heroism.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTrump has made space a priority, and has sought to increase NASA\u2019s budget significantly to fuel an attempt to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 under a dramatically expedited timeline that many think impossible. He has also reconstituted the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Pence and pushed for the formation of the Space Force.Trump bragged recently that his administration has \u201creinvigorated\u201d NASA, which he wrongly said \u201cwas dead as a door nail, but now it\u2019s very much alive.\u201dNASA began relying on the private sector for launches to the space station under President George W. Bush when it hired SpaceX and a company then called Orbital Sciences to fly cargo and supplies there. Under President Barack Obama, the space agency extended the program to hire two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to fly its astronauts in what was a controversial decision, derided by many who thought the private sector should not be entrusted with the lives of NASA\u2019s astronauts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, however, has gone out of his way to praise his predecessor, Charlie Bolden, who served as the head of the space agency under Obama.\u201cCharlie Bolden did just yeoman\u2019s work in order to get this program off the ground, get if going,\u201d he said in the days leading up to the launch. \"And here we are, all these years later, having this success.\u201dHe added that the program \u201cdemonstrates the success when you have continuity of purpose going from one administration to the next.\u201d Karen Nyberg, whose husband, Doug Hurley, is aboard the space station, said the ad used her and her son\u2019s image without her knowledge  Trump campaign pulls ad about SpaceX launch after former astronaut calls it political propaganda ",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With a huge infusion of cash, Sierra Space hopes to get its Dream Chaser spaceplane and space station off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6601",
        "date": "2021-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/19/sierra-space-investment-dream-chaser-orbital-reef/",
        "text": "The space world has a little engine that could \u2014 a small, snub-nosed space plane called Dream Chaser that looks like it could be the space shuttle\u2019s offspring. For years, it has pursued an unlikely path in its quest to reach space, facing all sorts of obstacles along the way. But it has never given up. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSierra Space, the company that is developing Dream Chaser, lost out on a major NASA contract to use it to fly people in 2014. It appealed, but lost that decision, too. Two years later, it secured a major procurement, this time to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, not humans. It\u2019s been five years, and it still hasn\u2019t flown to space, despite spending $1 billion on the program.But on Friday, Sierra Space announced it is getting a huge boost that it said would help get Dream Chaser off the ground, a $1.4 billion investment in a Series A funding round that the company says will help it fly astronauts by 2025. The investment marks the first time the Colorado-based company has brought in outside investors, and it comes as it is revamping the company to pursue a number of projects in an attempt to become a major player in the growing commercial space industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has contracts with SpaceX and Boeing to fly astronauts to the space station. SpaceX has flown several missions so far, but Boeing has faltered and may not have its first flight with crew until late next year. That could provide an opportunity for Dream Chaser to get back into the picture, and company executives have discussed the possibility with NASA.Unlike the SpaceX and Boeing capsules, which land in the sea or in the desert, Dream Chaser would land on a runway and allow scientists to access research flown down from the space station immediately. The additional money \u201cis going to be incredibly important for us to take the opportunity to accelerate our plans,\u201d said Eren Ozmen, who with her husband, Fatih Ozmen, owns Sierra Nevada Corporation, the majority owner of Sierra Space. The first cargo resupply mission to the space station is expected by the end of next year.\u201cWe are not giving up,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know us by now, we\u2019re going to double down.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlus, she said, NASA is eager to bring back a winged vehicle; the space shuttle was retired in 2011. \u201cThey really want us to bring the wings back, and they want to have the ability to bring the science to land softly on a runway,\u201d she said.\u201cBeing able to land on any commercial runway is a huge deal,\u201d she added.There are also plans to develop a variant of the vehicle to be used for national security missions, but the Ozmens would not elaborate on what that would entail.Last month, Sierra Space announced it is partnering with Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, as well as Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering and Arizona State University to build a space station called Orbital Reef that the team hopes would serve as a replacement for the International Space Station (ISS). (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSierra Space is developing the habitat module for the station, which would inflate in orbit and house as many as 12 people in three stories. It would, the companies vowed, \u201cprovide anyone with the opportunity to establish their own address on orbit.\u201dSierra and Blue Origin are not the only companies trying to build commercial space stations.NanoRacks, an aerospace venture that helps companies fly science experiments and other payloads to the ISS, announced it is partnering with its majority owner, Voyager Space, as well as Lockheed Martin to build a space station called StarLab.Despite those endeavors, some in the space industry are concerned that private industry won\u2019t have the resources to get the stations ready in time to replace the ISS, which could last through 2030 but has shown signs of age after orbiting the Earth for more than 20 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA this year requested $101 million for the program that would develop private space stations, but many in the space industry have said that is not nearly enough. Former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine recently testified to Congress that it would need to appropriate $2 billion annually for the effort.The new money for Sierra comes as investors are increasingly looking to space as an opportunity for growth after years of skepticism about an industry that had long been dominated by governments.Over the past decade, investors pumped $200 billion into 1,500 space companies around the world, according to an analysis done by Space Capital, a space investment firm. Investment in start-up space companies reached $7.6 billion last year, a 16 percent increase from 2019, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat has helped drive a $447 billion global space economy that grew 4.4 percent last year, according to the Space Foundation, an advocacy group. Over the past 10 years, the space economy has grown 55 percent, according to the foundation, which said the commercial space products and services market is valued at $219 billion.Sierra Space\u2019s investment round was led by General Atlantic, Coatue and Moore Strategic Ventures, with participation from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners, AE Industrial Partners. The funding, the company said, will help it meet its goal of flying astronauts by 2025. With a huge infusion of cash, Sierra Space hopes to get its Dream Chaser spaceplane and space station off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With a huge infusion of cash, Sierra Space hopes to get its Dream Chaser spaceplane and space station off the ground (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6602",
        "date": "2021-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/19/sierra-space-investment-dream-chaser-orbital-reef/",
        "text": "The space world has a little engine that could \u2014 a small, snub-nosed space plane called Dream Chaser that looks like it could be the space shuttle\u2019s offspring. For years, it has pursued an unlikely path in its quest to reach space, facing all sorts of obstacles along the way. But it has never given up. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSierra Space, the company that is developing Dream Chaser, lost out on a major NASA contract to use it to fly people in 2014. It appealed, but lost that decision, too. Two years later, it secured a major procurement, this time to fly cargo and supplies to the International Space Station, not humans. It\u2019s been five years, and it still hasn\u2019t flown to space, despite spending $1 billion on the program.But on Friday, Sierra Space announced it is getting a huge boost that it said would help get Dream Chaser off the ground, a $1.4 billion investment in a Series A funding round that the company says will help it fly astronauts by 2025. The investment marks the first time the Colorado-based company has brought in outside investors, and it comes as it is revamping the company to pursue a number of projects in an attempt to become a major player in the growing commercial space industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has contracts with SpaceX and Boeing to fly astronauts to the space station. SpaceX has flown several missions so far, but Boeing has faltered and may not have its first flight with crew until late next year. That could provide an opportunity for Dream Chaser to get back into the picture, and company executives have discussed the possibility with NASA.Unlike the SpaceX and Boeing capsules, which land in the sea or in the desert, Dream Chaser would land on a runway and allow scientists to access research flown down from the space station immediately. The additional money \u201cis going to be incredibly important for us to take the opportunity to accelerate our plans,\u201d said Eren Ozmen, who with her husband, Fatih Ozmen, owns Sierra Nevada Corporation, the majority owner of Sierra Space. The first cargo resupply mission to the space station is expected by the end of next year.\u201cWe are not giving up,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know us by now, we\u2019re going to double down.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlus, she said, NASA is eager to bring back a winged vehicle; the space shuttle was retired in 2011. \u201cThey really want us to bring the wings back, and they want to have the ability to bring the science to land softly on a runway,\u201d she said.\u201cBeing able to land on any commercial runway is a huge deal,\u201d she added.There are also plans to develop a variant of the vehicle to be used for national security missions, but the Ozmens would not elaborate on what that would entail.Last month, Sierra Space announced it is partnering with Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, as well as Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering and Arizona State University to build a space station called Orbital Reef that the team hopes would serve as a replacement for the International Space Station (ISS). (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSierra Space is developing the habitat module for the station, which would inflate in orbit and house as many as 12 people in three stories. It would, the companies vowed, \u201cprovide anyone with the opportunity to establish their own address on orbit.\u201dSierra and Blue Origin are not the only companies trying to build commercial space stations.NanoRacks, an aerospace venture that helps companies fly science experiments and other payloads to the ISS, announced it is partnering with its majority owner, Voyager Space, as well as Lockheed Martin to build a space station called StarLab.Despite those endeavors, some in the space industry are concerned that private industry won\u2019t have the resources to get the stations ready in time to replace the ISS, which could last through 2030 but has shown signs of age after orbiting the Earth for more than 20 years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA this year requested $101 million for the program that would develop private space stations, but many in the space industry have said that is not nearly enough. Former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine recently testified to Congress that it would need to appropriate $2 billion annually for the effort.The new money for Sierra comes as investors are increasingly looking to space as an opportunity for growth after years of skepticism about an industry that had long been dominated by governments.Over the past decade, investors pumped $200 billion into 1,500 space companies around the world, according to an analysis done by Space Capital, a space investment firm. Investment in start-up space companies reached $7.6 billion last year, a 16 percent increase from 2019, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat has helped drive a $447 billion global space economy that grew 4.4 percent last year, according to the Space Foundation, an advocacy group. Over the past 10 years, the space economy has grown 55 percent, according to the foundation, which said the commercial space products and services market is valued at $219 billion.Sierra Space\u2019s investment round was led by General Atlantic, Coatue and Moore Strategic Ventures, with participation from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners, AE Industrial Partners. The funding, the company said, will help it meet its goal of flying astronauts by 2025. With a huge infusion of cash, Sierra Space hopes to get its Dream Chaser spaceplane and space station off the ground",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump officially launches U.S. Space Command in counter to Russia, China threats (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6603",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/29/trump-officially-launches-us-space-command-counter-russia-china-threats/",
        "text": "President Trump on Thursday took a key step toward reorganizing the nation\u2019s armed forces to focus more on the threats posed in space, formally establishing the United States Space Command.In a 10-minute ceremony in the Rose Garden, Trump called the command\u2019s creation a \u201clandmark moment\u201d in protecting America\u2019s assets in space and said it would help \u201cdefend America\u2019s vital interests in space, the next warfighting domain, and I think that\u2019s pretty obvious to everybody. It\u2019s all about space.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe White House is still working toward persuading Congress to create a Space Force, which would become the sixth branch of the military and the first new one since the Air Force was created in 1947. Both the House and Senate have provisions for a Space Force in their Pentagon spending bills, but they differ on some key details, such as how the force would be organized.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn June, the Senate confirmed Air Force Gen. John Raymond as the commander of Space Command. Raymond told reporters in a briefing before the ceremony that protecting America\u2019s assets in space, including the satellites the military depends on for everything from missile defense to communications, was a critical mission of the new command.\u201cI really believe we are at strategic inflection point, where there is nothing that we do in the joint coalition force that isn\u2019t enabled by space. Zero,\u201d he said.The U.S. Space Command is the nation\u2019s 11th combatant command. Others include geographic commands, such as Central Command, Africa Command and Indo-Pacific Command, which oversee operations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, respectively, and functional commands, such as Transportation Command, which oversees logistics across the military, or Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear arsenal. Space Command is the U.S. military\u2019s first new unified combatant command since the Pentagon elevated Cyber Command to become a unified combatant command in 2018. Cyber Command was created in 2009. (A previous version of this story incorrectly said it was Africa Command.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs of Thursday, Space Command counted 287 personnel assigned to it, largely made up of those currently deployed with a unit of U.S. Strategic Command devoted to space. Raymond said the Air Force is still deciding where to locate Space Command\u2019s headquarters among six U.S. bases.The United States military has had a Space Command before. It was launched in 1985 and disestablished in 2002 as the Pentagon reorganized in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Raymond said the new version is a \u201cdifferent command built for a different environment.\u201dIn particular, he cited advances by Russia and China that have rendered space a contested domain where the United States faces threats that it didn\u2019t before, from the jamming of GPS and communications satellites to the possibility those satellites could be shot down. He cited a 2007 test in which China used a missile fired from Earth to destroy one of its own weather satellites.Fighting extraterrestrial life in outer space is not one of the new command\u2019s missions, said Stephen L. Kitay, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy.\u201cSpace Command and the United States Space Force, at the end of the day, is focused on life here on Earth, because space does impact\u2026 our way of war and our way of life,\u201d Kitay said. President Trump on Thursday took a key step toward reorganizing the nation\u2019s armed forces to focus more on the threats posed in space, formally establishing the United States Space Command, the first new combatant command created in a decade. Trump officially launches U.S. Space Command in counter to Russia, China threats",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump officially launches U.S. Space Command in counter to Russia, China threats (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6604",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/29/trump-officially-launches-us-space-command-counter-russia-china-threats/",
        "text": "President Trump on Thursday took a key step toward reorganizing the nation\u2019s armed forces to focus more on the threats posed in space, formally establishing the United States Space Command.In a 10-minute ceremony in the Rose Garden, Trump called the command\u2019s creation a \u201clandmark moment\u201d in protecting America\u2019s assets in space and said it would help \u201cdefend America\u2019s vital interests in space, the next warfighting domain, and I think that\u2019s pretty obvious to everybody. It\u2019s all about space.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe White House is still working toward persuading Congress to create a Space Force, which would become the sixth branch of the military and the first new one since the Air Force was created in 1947. Both the House and Senate have provisions for a Space Force in their Pentagon spending bills, but they differ on some key details, such as how the force would be organized.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn June, the Senate confirmed Air Force Gen. John Raymond as the commander of Space Command. Raymond told reporters in a briefing before the ceremony that protecting America\u2019s assets in space, including the satellites the military depends on for everything from missile defense to communications, was a critical mission of the new command.\u201cI really believe we are at strategic inflection point, where there is nothing that we do in the joint coalition force that isn\u2019t enabled by space. Zero,\u201d he said.The U.S. Space Command is the nation\u2019s 11th combatant command. Others include geographic commands, such as Central Command, Africa Command and Indo-Pacific Command, which oversee operations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, respectively, and functional commands, such as Transportation Command, which oversees logistics across the military, or Strategic Command, which controls the nuclear arsenal. Space Command is the U.S. military\u2019s first new unified combatant command since the Pentagon elevated Cyber Command to become a unified combatant command in 2018. Cyber Command was created in 2009. (A previous version of this story incorrectly said it was Africa Command.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs of Thursday, Space Command counted 287 personnel assigned to it, largely made up of those currently deployed with a unit of U.S. Strategic Command devoted to space. Raymond said the Air Force is still deciding where to locate Space Command\u2019s headquarters among six U.S. bases.The United States military has had a Space Command before. It was launched in 1985 and disestablished in 2002 as the Pentagon reorganized in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Raymond said the new version is a \u201cdifferent command built for a different environment.\u201dIn particular, he cited advances by Russia and China that have rendered space a contested domain where the United States faces threats that it didn\u2019t before, from the jamming of GPS and communications satellites to the possibility those satellites could be shot down. He cited a 2007 test in which China used a missile fired from Earth to destroy one of its own weather satellites.Fighting extraterrestrial life in outer space is not one of the new command\u2019s missions, said Stephen L. Kitay, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy.\u201cSpace Command and the United States Space Force, at the end of the day, is focused on life here on Earth, because space does impact\u2026 our way of war and our way of life,\u201d Kitay said. President Trump on Thursday took a key step toward reorganizing the nation\u2019s armed forces to focus more on the threats posed in space, formally establishing the United States Space Command, the first new combatant command created in a decade. Trump officially launches U.S. Space Command in counter to Russia, China threats",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA announces it\u2019s looking for companies to help mine the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6605",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/10/moon-mining-nasa-search/",
        "text": "NASA wants to mine the moon.The space agency announced Thursday it is looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface, and then sell them to NASA, as part of a technology development program that would eventually help astronauts \u201clive off the land.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a tweet, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote that the agency \u201cis buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It\u2019s time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources.\u201d The announcement is yet another step in NASA\u2019s Artemis project to set up a permanent presence on and around the moon and eventually go to Mars, where astronauts would need to be able to use the resources there.Story continues below advertisementIn a blog post, Bridenstine said the effort would fully comply with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which says that no country may lay sovereign claim to the moon or other celestial bodies.AdvertisementSpeaking during a forum put on by the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, he said the United States need help set the policies that will govern mining from celestial bodies, creating standards that exist now for oceans. \"We do believe we can extract and utilize the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,\u201d he said.And in a blog post, he said the science would be shared publicly. \u201cWhen considering such proposals, we will require that all actions be taken in a transparent fashion,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe are putting our policies into practice to fuel a new era of exploration and discovery that will benefit all of humanity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBidding for the program would be open not just to U.S. companies but international ones as well as part of an effort to \u201cencourage International support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law.\u201dNASA unveils new rules to guide behavior in space and on the lunar surfaceThe move comes a few months after NASA unveiled a legal framework, called the \u201cArtemis Accords,\u201d to govern the behavior of countries and companies on the lunar surface, including the creation of \u201csafety zones\u201d around mining and exploration sites. The accords would require signatories to publicly release \u2018the extent and general nature of operations taking place within the safety zones \u201cwhile taking into account appropriate protection of business, confidential, national security, and export controlled information.\u201dAdvertisementNASA is scrambling to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024 under an accelerated schedule mandated by the White House. But instead of going to the equatorial region of the moon that astronauts visited during the Apollo program, NASA this time wants to send them to the south pole of the moon where there is water in the form of ice in permanently shadowed craters.Story continues below advertisementWater is a valuable resource not just for life, but also, when broken into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen, for propellant for rockets, allowing exploration deeper into space.NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019Under the solicitation announced Thursday, NASA said it is looking for lunar \u201cregolith,\u201d rocks and dirt from any location on the lunar surface. The companies would be required to provide imagery of the material and the location from which it was recovered.AdvertisementNASA anticipates paying roughly between $15,000 to $25,000 for between 50 to 500 grams (1.7 ounces to about 17 ounces) of material, Bridenstine said, though companies would also be able to set prices in their bids. While there would be scientific benefits, it\u2019s also a technology development program, Bridenstine said, that would give companies practice in extracting resources from the lunar surface and then selling them. Once NASA would take possession of the material, it would determine how to get it to Earth.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to water, there could be other valuable resources there, even precious metals. \u201cWhat other resources might be there?\u201d he said. \u201cThe answer is we don\u2019t know.\u201d\u201cThe importance of this announcement is not so much the financial incentive (which is tiny) but in establishing the legal precedent that private companies can collect and sell celestial materials (with the explicit blessing of NASA/U.S. gov),\u201d Casey Dreier, a senior space policy advisor at the Planetary Society wrote on Twitter.AdvertisementClive Neal, a University of Notre Dame planetary scientist, called it a \u201cparadigm shift\u201d that would allow \u201cmore sample returns from the moon\u201d and \u201copen up lunar resources.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe program \u201cwill speed up the technology development,\u201d he said. \u201cThis puts it on the fast track, and the Administrator is driving that opportunity.\u201dNASA would pay exclusively for the regolith, and not cover the enormous expense of getting to the lunar surface, meaning that companies involved in the program would likely already be pursuing other activities there. NASA already has another program to hire companies to fly science experiments and cargo to the moon ahead of a human landing. That includes Astrobotic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp, Lockheed Martin and others. Bridenstine said he expects many of them to be interested in pursuing the mining contracts as well.AdvertisementIn 2015, President Obama signed a law allowing U.S. companies the rights to any material they mine on celestial bodies. But under the proposal announced Thursday, the companies would transfer ownership of the regolith to NASA.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space\u201cNext-generation lunar science and technology is a main objective for returning to the moon and preparing for Mars,\u201d Bridenstine wrote in the blog post.A human mission to Mars, in particular, would require the use of resources mined from the surface, a process known as in-situ utilization. That\u2019s why NASA said it must proceed \u201cwith alacrity to develop techniques and gain experience with [in-situ utilization] on the surface of the moon.\u201d In a tweet, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote that the agency \u201cis buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It\u2019s time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources.\u201d NASA announces it\u2019s looking for companies to help mine the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA announces it\u2019s looking for companies to help mine the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6606",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/10/moon-mining-nasa-search/",
        "text": "NASA wants to mine the moon.The space agency announced Thursday it is looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface, and then sell them to NASA, as part of a technology development program that would eventually help astronauts \u201clive off the land.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a tweet, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote that the agency \u201cis buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It\u2019s time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources.\u201d The announcement is yet another step in NASA\u2019s Artemis project to set up a permanent presence on and around the moon and eventually go to Mars, where astronauts would need to be able to use the resources there.Story continues below advertisementIn a blog post, Bridenstine said the effort would fully comply with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which says that no country may lay sovereign claim to the moon or other celestial bodies.AdvertisementSpeaking during a forum put on by the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, he said the United States need help set the policies that will govern mining from celestial bodies, creating standards that exist now for oceans. \"We do believe we can extract and utilize the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,\u201d he said.And in a blog post, he said the science would be shared publicly. \u201cWhen considering such proposals, we will require that all actions be taken in a transparent fashion,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe are putting our policies into practice to fuel a new era of exploration and discovery that will benefit all of humanity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBidding for the program would be open not just to U.S. companies but international ones as well as part of an effort to \u201cencourage International support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law.\u201dNASA unveils new rules to guide behavior in space and on the lunar surfaceThe move comes a few months after NASA unveiled a legal framework, called the \u201cArtemis Accords,\u201d to govern the behavior of countries and companies on the lunar surface, including the creation of \u201csafety zones\u201d around mining and exploration sites. The accords would require signatories to publicly release \u2018the extent and general nature of operations taking place within the safety zones \u201cwhile taking into account appropriate protection of business, confidential, national security, and export controlled information.\u201dAdvertisementNASA is scrambling to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024 under an accelerated schedule mandated by the White House. But instead of going to the equatorial region of the moon that astronauts visited during the Apollo program, NASA this time wants to send them to the south pole of the moon where there is water in the form of ice in permanently shadowed craters.Story continues below advertisementWater is a valuable resource not just for life, but also, when broken into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen, for propellant for rockets, allowing exploration deeper into space.NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019Under the solicitation announced Thursday, NASA said it is looking for lunar \u201cregolith,\u201d rocks and dirt from any location on the lunar surface. The companies would be required to provide imagery of the material and the location from which it was recovered.AdvertisementNASA anticipates paying roughly between $15,000 to $25,000 for between 50 to 500 grams (1.7 ounces to about 17 ounces) of material, Bridenstine said, though companies would also be able to set prices in their bids. While there would be scientific benefits, it\u2019s also a technology development program, Bridenstine said, that would give companies practice in extracting resources from the lunar surface and then selling them. Once NASA would take possession of the material, it would determine how to get it to Earth.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to water, there could be other valuable resources there, even precious metals. \u201cWhat other resources might be there?\u201d he said. \u201cThe answer is we don\u2019t know.\u201d\u201cThe importance of this announcement is not so much the financial incentive (which is tiny) but in establishing the legal precedent that private companies can collect and sell celestial materials (with the explicit blessing of NASA/U.S. gov),\u201d Casey Dreier, a senior space policy advisor at the Planetary Society wrote on Twitter.AdvertisementClive Neal, a University of Notre Dame planetary scientist, called it a \u201cparadigm shift\u201d that would allow \u201cmore sample returns from the moon\u201d and \u201copen up lunar resources.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe program \u201cwill speed up the technology development,\u201d he said. \u201cThis puts it on the fast track, and the Administrator is driving that opportunity.\u201dNASA would pay exclusively for the regolith, and not cover the enormous expense of getting to the lunar surface, meaning that companies involved in the program would likely already be pursuing other activities there. NASA already has another program to hire companies to fly science experiments and cargo to the moon ahead of a human landing. That includes Astrobotic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp, Lockheed Martin and others. Bridenstine said he expects many of them to be interested in pursuing the mining contracts as well.AdvertisementIn 2015, President Obama signed a law allowing U.S. companies the rights to any material they mine on celestial bodies. But under the proposal announced Thursday, the companies would transfer ownership of the regolith to NASA.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space\u201cNext-generation lunar science and technology is a main objective for returning to the moon and preparing for Mars,\u201d Bridenstine wrote in the blog post.A human mission to Mars, in particular, would require the use of resources mined from the surface, a process known as in-situ utilization. That\u2019s why NASA said it must proceed \u201cwith alacrity to develop techniques and gain experience with [in-situ utilization] on the surface of the moon.\u201d In a tweet, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote that the agency \u201cis buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It\u2019s time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources.\u201d NASA announces it\u2019s looking for companies to help mine the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA announces it\u2019s looking for companies to help mine the moon (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6607",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/10/moon-mining-nasa-search/",
        "text": "NASA wants to mine the moon.The space agency announced Thursday it is looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface, and then sell them to NASA, as part of a technology development program that would eventually help astronauts \u201clive off the land.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a tweet, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote that the agency \u201cis buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It\u2019s time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources.\u201d The announcement is yet another step in NASA\u2019s Artemis project to set up a permanent presence on and around the moon and eventually go to Mars, where astronauts would need to be able to use the resources there.Story continues below advertisementIn a blog post, Bridenstine said the effort would fully comply with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which says that no country may lay sovereign claim to the moon or other celestial bodies.AdvertisementSpeaking during a forum put on by the Secure World Foundation, a think tank, he said the United States need help set the policies that will govern mining from celestial bodies, creating standards that exist now for oceans. \"We do believe we can extract and utilize the resources of the moon, just as we can extract and utilize tuna from the ocean,\u201d he said.And in a blog post, he said the science would be shared publicly. \u201cWhen considering such proposals, we will require that all actions be taken in a transparent fashion,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWe are putting our policies into practice to fuel a new era of exploration and discovery that will benefit all of humanity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBidding for the program would be open not just to U.S. companies but international ones as well as part of an effort to \u201cencourage International support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law.\u201dNASA unveils new rules to guide behavior in space and on the lunar surfaceThe move comes a few months after NASA unveiled a legal framework, called the \u201cArtemis Accords,\u201d to govern the behavior of countries and companies on the lunar surface, including the creation of \u201csafety zones\u201d around mining and exploration sites. The accords would require signatories to publicly release \u2018the extent and general nature of operations taking place within the safety zones \u201cwhile taking into account appropriate protection of business, confidential, national security, and export controlled information.\u201dAdvertisementNASA is scrambling to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024 under an accelerated schedule mandated by the White House. But instead of going to the equatorial region of the moon that astronauts visited during the Apollo program, NASA this time wants to send them to the south pole of the moon where there is water in the form of ice in permanently shadowed craters.Story continues below advertisementWater is a valuable resource not just for life, but also, when broken into its component parts, hydrogen and oxygen, for propellant for rockets, allowing exploration deeper into space.NASA is sending a rover to the moon to prospect for water and help astronauts \u2018live off the land\u2019Under the solicitation announced Thursday, NASA said it is looking for lunar \u201cregolith,\u201d rocks and dirt from any location on the lunar surface. The companies would be required to provide imagery of the material and the location from which it was recovered.AdvertisementNASA anticipates paying roughly between $15,000 to $25,000 for between 50 to 500 grams (1.7 ounces to about 17 ounces) of material, Bridenstine said, though companies would also be able to set prices in their bids. While there would be scientific benefits, it\u2019s also a technology development program, Bridenstine said, that would give companies practice in extracting resources from the lunar surface and then selling them. Once NASA would take possession of the material, it would determine how to get it to Earth.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to water, there could be other valuable resources there, even precious metals. \u201cWhat other resources might be there?\u201d he said. \u201cThe answer is we don\u2019t know.\u201d\u201cThe importance of this announcement is not so much the financial incentive (which is tiny) but in establishing the legal precedent that private companies can collect and sell celestial materials (with the explicit blessing of NASA/U.S. gov),\u201d Casey Dreier, a senior space policy advisor at the Planetary Society wrote on Twitter.AdvertisementClive Neal, a University of Notre Dame planetary scientist, called it a \u201cparadigm shift\u201d that would allow \u201cmore sample returns from the moon\u201d and \u201copen up lunar resources.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe program \u201cwill speed up the technology development,\u201d he said. \u201cThis puts it on the fast track, and the Administrator is driving that opportunity.\u201dNASA would pay exclusively for the regolith, and not cover the enormous expense of getting to the lunar surface, meaning that companies involved in the program would likely already be pursuing other activities there. NASA already has another program to hire companies to fly science experiments and cargo to the moon ahead of a human landing. That includes Astrobotic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp, Lockheed Martin and others. Bridenstine said he expects many of them to be interested in pursuing the mining contracts as well.AdvertisementIn 2015, President Obama signed a law allowing U.S. companies the rights to any material they mine on celestial bodies. But under the proposal announced Thursday, the companies would transfer ownership of the regolith to NASA.Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space\u201cNext-generation lunar science and technology is a main objective for returning to the moon and preparing for Mars,\u201d Bridenstine wrote in the blog post.A human mission to Mars, in particular, would require the use of resources mined from the surface, a process known as in-situ utilization. That\u2019s why NASA said it must proceed \u201cwith alacrity to develop techniques and gain experience with [in-situ utilization] on the surface of the moon.\u201d In a tweet, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote that the agency \u201cis buying lunar soil from a commercial provider! It\u2019s time to establish the regulatory certainty to extract and trade space resources.\u201d NASA announces it\u2019s looking for companies to help mine the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seven nations join the U.S. in signing the Artemis Accords, creating a legal framework for behavior in space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6608",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/13/artemis-moon-mining-agreement-signed/",
        "text": "NASA announced Tuesday that seven nations have joined the United States in signing the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that would establish rules for the peaceful use of outer space and govern behavior on the surface of the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources, create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space and share their scientific discoveries. In an interview ahead of the announcement, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the accords are \u201cintended to create norms of behavior that all countries can agree to so that we can keep peace and prosperity moving forward in space and avoid any kind of confusion or ambiguity that can result in conflict.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the accords, first announced in May, would build on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans the use of nuclear weapons in space and prohibits nations from laying sovereign claim to the moon or other celestial bodies.Advertisement\u201cThere is nothing in the Artemis Accords that isn\u2019t enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s a forcing function to get nations to comply with the Outer Space Treaty.\u201dThe seven nations that signed are the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and Italy. It\u2019s a somewhat eclectic mix, with countries like Japan, that have long been partners on the International Space Station, joining others, such as Australia and the UAE, that have relatively new but up and coming space programs. Bridenstine said the event Tuesday was only the beginning and that other nations would soon be joining. Ultimately, he said, the U.S. would create \u201cthe biggest, most diverse coalition of nations ever in the exploration of the moon and beyond.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSigning the accords would also be a requirement for any nation wishing to partner with the U.S. in its Artemis program to return astronauts to the surface of the moon. But not all nations have reacted favorably to the agreements, or the lunar plan.AdvertisementDmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, previously compared the accords to an invasion that would lead to another \u201cIraq or Afghanistan.\u201d On Monday, during the International Astronautical Congress, a global space conference, he said Russia was not likely to participate in NASA\u2019s moon mission, which he said was \u201ctoo U.S.-centric.\u201dHe said NASA\u2019s approach to lunar exploration, which would use a station in orbit around the moon called the Gateway, differs from the cooperation between nations on the International Space Station.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe most important thing here would be to base this program on the principles of international cooperation that, which were used in order to fly ISS,\u201d he said, speaking through a translator. \u201cIf we could get back to considering making these principles as the foundation of the program then Roscomos would also consider its participation.\u201dAdvertisementBridenstine said \u201cthe Gateway uses the exact same international agreement, the IGA, that the International Space Station uses.\u201d He added that NASA has \u201cshared with with Roscosmos what we would like to do with the Gateway in terms of collaborating with them and seeing what they\u2019re interested is, and we just haven\u2019t heard back.\u201dBy law, the United States is effectively barred from cooperating with China in space. But NASA officials said that even if Russia and China are not signatories, the accords would be successful because they would create a baseline for the world to follow.Story continues below advertisement\u201cPrecedent is important,\u201d said Mike Gold, NASA\u2019s acting associate administrator for the office of international and interagency relations. \u201cBy embracing our values, along with our partners, we\u2019re creating a track record, a norm of behavior that will influence the entire world to proceed with the transparent, peaceful and safe exploration of space.\u201dAdvertisementSignatories would agree, for example, to help provide emergency assistance in the case of an injured astronaut. They would also agree to protect historic sites, such as the Apollo 11 landing area. They would also agree to be transparent about their plans for space and share scientific data.The accords would allow countries or companies to create \u201csafety zones\u201d so they could work to extract resources. NASA and China are both interested in going to the South Pole of the moon, where there is water in the form of ice in the shadows of craters.Story continues below advertisementBeing able to operate there safely, without interference, will be critical if multiple nations are vying for the same resource in the same place, he said.\u201cThe most valuable resource that I think any nation is going to be interested in is the water ice at the South Pole,\u201d he said. \u201cSo if we get to a position where there is a competition for that resource that\u2019s an area that we\u2019re going to have to deal with.\u201dAdvertisementBut he also said there was value in being open so that nations could avoid any confusion and potential conflict.\u201cWe need transparency so that people know where you\u2019re going, and what yours doing and how you intend to operate. And that includes, for example, a rover,\u201d he said. \u201cHow far is that rover going to go? What is the space within which that rover is going to operate? How do we make sure that when somebody else goes to a nearby region, they\u2019re not interfering with the rover.\u201d Seven nations have joined the United States in signing the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that would establish rules for behavior on the surface of the moon. Seven nations join the U.S. in signing the Artemis Accords, creating a legal framework for behavior in space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seven nations join the U.S. in signing the Artemis Accords, creating a legal framework for behavior in space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6609",
        "date": "2020-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/13/artemis-moon-mining-agreement-signed/",
        "text": "NASA announced Tuesday that seven nations have joined the United States in signing the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that would establish rules for the peaceful use of outer space and govern behavior on the surface of the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe rules would allow private companies to extract lunar resources, create safety zones to prevent conflict and ensure that countries act transparently about their plans in space and share their scientific discoveries. In an interview ahead of the announcement, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said the accords are \u201cintended to create norms of behavior that all countries can agree to so that we can keep peace and prosperity moving forward in space and avoid any kind of confusion or ambiguity that can result in conflict.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe said the accords, first announced in May, would build on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans the use of nuclear weapons in space and prohibits nations from laying sovereign claim to the moon or other celestial bodies.Advertisement\u201cThere is nothing in the Artemis Accords that isn\u2019t enshrined in the Outer Space Treaty,\u201d Bridenstine said. \u201cIt\u2019s a forcing function to get nations to comply with the Outer Space Treaty.\u201dThe seven nations that signed are the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and Italy. It\u2019s a somewhat eclectic mix, with countries like Japan, that have long been partners on the International Space Station, joining others, such as Australia and the UAE, that have relatively new but up and coming space programs. Bridenstine said the event Tuesday was only the beginning and that other nations would soon be joining. Ultimately, he said, the U.S. would create \u201cthe biggest, most diverse coalition of nations ever in the exploration of the moon and beyond.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSigning the accords would also be a requirement for any nation wishing to partner with the U.S. in its Artemis program to return astronauts to the surface of the moon. But not all nations have reacted favorably to the agreements, or the lunar plan.AdvertisementDmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, previously compared the accords to an invasion that would lead to another \u201cIraq or Afghanistan.\u201d On Monday, during the International Astronautical Congress, a global space conference, he said Russia was not likely to participate in NASA\u2019s moon mission, which he said was \u201ctoo U.S.-centric.\u201dHe said NASA\u2019s approach to lunar exploration, which would use a station in orbit around the moon called the Gateway, differs from the cooperation between nations on the International Space Station.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe most important thing here would be to base this program on the principles of international cooperation that, which were used in order to fly ISS,\u201d he said, speaking through a translator. \u201cIf we could get back to considering making these principles as the foundation of the program then Roscomos would also consider its participation.\u201dAdvertisementBridenstine said \u201cthe Gateway uses the exact same international agreement, the IGA, that the International Space Station uses.\u201d He added that NASA has \u201cshared with with Roscosmos what we would like to do with the Gateway in terms of collaborating with them and seeing what they\u2019re interested is, and we just haven\u2019t heard back.\u201dBy law, the United States is effectively barred from cooperating with China in space. But NASA officials said that even if Russia and China are not signatories, the accords would be successful because they would create a baseline for the world to follow.Story continues below advertisement\u201cPrecedent is important,\u201d said Mike Gold, NASA\u2019s acting associate administrator for the office of international and interagency relations. \u201cBy embracing our values, along with our partners, we\u2019re creating a track record, a norm of behavior that will influence the entire world to proceed with the transparent, peaceful and safe exploration of space.\u201dAdvertisementSignatories would agree, for example, to help provide emergency assistance in the case of an injured astronaut. They would also agree to protect historic sites, such as the Apollo 11 landing area. They would also agree to be transparent about their plans for space and share scientific data.The accords would allow countries or companies to create \u201csafety zones\u201d so they could work to extract resources. NASA and China are both interested in going to the South Pole of the moon, where there is water in the form of ice in the shadows of craters.Story continues below advertisementBeing able to operate there safely, without interference, will be critical if multiple nations are vying for the same resource in the same place, he said.\u201cThe most valuable resource that I think any nation is going to be interested in is the water ice at the South Pole,\u201d he said. \u201cSo if we get to a position where there is a competition for that resource that\u2019s an area that we\u2019re going to have to deal with.\u201dAdvertisementBut he also said there was value in being open so that nations could avoid any confusion and potential conflict.\u201cWe need transparency so that people know where you\u2019re going, and what yours doing and how you intend to operate. And that includes, for example, a rover,\u201d he said. \u201cHow far is that rover going to go? What is the space within which that rover is going to operate? How do we make sure that when somebody else goes to a nearby region, they\u2019re not interfering with the rover.\u201d Seven nations have joined the United States in signing the Artemis Accords, a series of bilateral agreements that would establish rules for behavior on the surface of the moon. Seven nations join the U.S. in signing the Artemis Accords, creating a legal framework for behavior in space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s budget proposal would give NASA one of the largest increases in years (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6610",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/07/trump-nasa-budget-proposal/",
        "text": "The White House on Monday will propose one of the largest NASA budget increases in years, as it seeks to return humans to the moon by 2024, a bold endeavor that space agency officials have said would require a significant infusion of cash.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe budget request, which would need to be approved by a reluctant Congress, would top out at more than $25 billion, with almost $3 billion to develop the vehicles necessary to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface as part of NASA\u2019s \u201cArtemis\u201d program, The Washington Post confirmed. Artemis is the agency\u2019s top priority and a key goal for the Trump administration, which has sought to reinvigorate human exploration while reigniting interest in space. The proposed increase is a sign of its seriousness, officials said, and comes after President Trump urged Congress to fully fund the program in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf approved, the budget would mark a huge bump for the agency, which has seen its spending level rise from about $19 billion during Trump\u2019s first year in office, to more than $22 billion this year.The budget proposal was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.Last year, Vice President Pence, who chairs a reconstituted National Space Council, called for NASA to dramatically accelerate its efforts to return astronauts to the moon. Originally, NASA was planning on a 2028 lunar landing, but Pence directed the agency to speed that up by four years, \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dSince then, NASA has been scrambling to award contracts for the necessary hardware, but it has had a difficult time winning congressional support. Last month, the House Science subcommittee on space and aeronautics voted out a bill that directs NASA to land on the moon by 2028, instead of 2024, and spend most of its energy and resources on an eventual mission to put astronauts in orbit around Mars by 2033.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd while NASA has said it wants to rely on a large swath of a growing space industry, the House bill would favor one company \u2014 Boeing \u2014 which is building a massive rocket to take astronauts to the moon, but has been beset by all sorts of cost overruns and delays.Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the subcommittee, has vigorously defended the bill, saying it had bipartisan support. She said NASA has yet to lay out an overall cost for the mission and that the bill \u201csets a clear goal for NASA to get us there in the quickest and most efficient way possible.\u201dThe White House budget proposal, however, shows the administration is proceeding with its plan and would like to award a contract for a lunar lander in the coming months. Several companies are vying for the contract, including Boeing, SpaceX and a team of companies led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin that also includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnlike during the Apollo program five decades ago, when astronauts flew to the surface of the moon, stayed for a little while and then returned home, NASA would like to establish a more permanent presence on and around the moon. It plans to develop an outpost in lunar orbit, known as the Gateway, to which astronauts would fly first, and from which they would be transported back and forth to the moon\u2019s surface by the landers.As part of the budget proposal to be released Monday, the administration is also expected to lay out the full cost of Artemis with a detailed plan for how it expects to achieve the 2024 deadline. The budget request, which would need to be approved by a reluctant Congress, would top out at more than $25 billion, with almost $3 billion to develop the vehicles necessary to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface as part of NASA\u2019s \u201cArtemis\u201d program. Trump\u2019s budget proposal would give NASA one of the largest increases in years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s budget proposal would give NASA one of the largest increases in years (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6611",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/07/trump-nasa-budget-proposal/",
        "text": "The White House on Monday will propose one of the largest NASA budget increases in years, as it seeks to return humans to the moon by 2024, a bold endeavor that space agency officials have said would require a significant infusion of cash.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe budget request, which would need to be approved by a reluctant Congress, would top out at more than $25 billion, with almost $3 billion to develop the vehicles necessary to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface as part of NASA\u2019s \u201cArtemis\u201d program, The Washington Post confirmed. Artemis is the agency\u2019s top priority and a key goal for the Trump administration, which has sought to reinvigorate human exploration while reigniting interest in space. The proposed increase is a sign of its seriousness, officials said, and comes after President Trump urged Congress to fully fund the program in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf approved, the budget would mark a huge bump for the agency, which has seen its spending level rise from about $19 billion during Trump\u2019s first year in office, to more than $22 billion this year.The budget proposal was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.Last year, Vice President Pence, who chairs a reconstituted National Space Council, called for NASA to dramatically accelerate its efforts to return astronauts to the moon. Originally, NASA was planning on a 2028 lunar landing, but Pence directed the agency to speed that up by four years, \u201cby any means necessary.\u201dSince then, NASA has been scrambling to award contracts for the necessary hardware, but it has had a difficult time winning congressional support. Last month, the House Science subcommittee on space and aeronautics voted out a bill that directs NASA to land on the moon by 2028, instead of 2024, and spend most of its energy and resources on an eventual mission to put astronauts in orbit around Mars by 2033.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd while NASA has said it wants to rely on a large swath of a growing space industry, the House bill would favor one company \u2014 Boeing \u2014 which is building a massive rocket to take astronauts to the moon, but has been beset by all sorts of cost overruns and delays.Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), the chair of the subcommittee, has vigorously defended the bill, saying it had bipartisan support. She said NASA has yet to lay out an overall cost for the mission and that the bill \u201csets a clear goal for NASA to get us there in the quickest and most efficient way possible.\u201dThe White House budget proposal, however, shows the administration is proceeding with its plan and would like to award a contract for a lunar lander in the coming months. Several companies are vying for the contract, including Boeing, SpaceX and a team of companies led by Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin that also includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnlike during the Apollo program five decades ago, when astronauts flew to the surface of the moon, stayed for a little while and then returned home, NASA would like to establish a more permanent presence on and around the moon. It plans to develop an outpost in lunar orbit, known as the Gateway, to which astronauts would fly first, and from which they would be transported back and forth to the moon\u2019s surface by the landers.As part of the budget proposal to be released Monday, the administration is also expected to lay out the full cost of Artemis with a detailed plan for how it expects to achieve the 2024 deadline. The budget request, which would need to be approved by a reluctant Congress, would top out at more than $25 billion, with almost $3 billion to develop the vehicles necessary to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface as part of NASA\u2019s \u201cArtemis\u201d program. Trump\u2019s budget proposal would give NASA one of the largest increases in years",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA twin astronauts study finds no flashing red lights for long spaceflight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6612",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/15/nasa-twin-astronauts-study-finds-no-flashing-red-lights-long-spaceflight/",
        "text": "Long-duration spaceflight does weird things to the human body, even at the molecular level, but so far there\u2019s no reason to think humans couldn\u2019t survive a two-and-a-half-year round-trip journey to Mars. That was the bottom-line message Friday from a NASA official and two scientists as they revealed more results from the agency\u2019s \u201cTwins Study,\u201d which examined physiological changes in astronaut Scott Kelly during his nearly year-long sojourn in space while his twin brother, Mark Kelly, stayed on Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe full report has not yet been published, but reporters got a summary at a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington. Among the highlights: Scott Kelly\u2019s bloodwork showed that his immune system quickly ramped up when he went into space, as if, at the cellular level, his body felt under attack.\u201cIt\u2019s almost as if the body\u2019s on high alert,\u201d said Christopher Mason, associate professor of computational genomics at Weill Cornell Medicine.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome of the physiological effects of microgravity have long been known, such as impaired vision, bone loss, muscle loss and disruption to the wake-sleep cycle. The new research shows changes at the cellular level, including changes in gene expression.\u201cIt\u2019s mostly really good news,\u201d Mason said. \u201cThe body has extraordinary plasticity and adaptation to being in zero gravity, at least for a year.\u201dThat was echoed by Craig Kundrot, director of NASA\u2019s space life and physical sciences division. He said so far the NASA research has found nothing that would make a Mars mission impossible. The biggest concern is radiation: Such a mission would expose astronauts to levels of radiation greater than permitted under current guidelines. That wouldn\u2019t necessarily prevent a mission, but it remains a concern.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe cautioned that the twins study has a very small study sample: two people.\u201cWe don\u2019t regard any of this as conclusive, but on the whole it\u2019s encouraging,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are no new major warning signs.\u201dNASA under President Trump has renewed its vow to put human beings on the moon again, and on Thursday produced a provisional plan that envisioned astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028 as part of an international effort that would include commercial partners. The agency says that, unlike the Apollo program, the new moon program would be sustained and not merely a \u201cflags and footprints\u201d mission.Any human mission beyond low Earth orbit presents a suite of health risks for astronauts because of the radiation in deep space. The technological challenges associated with a human mission to Mars are obvious, but the physiological challenges are potentially just as significant. Kundrot said Friday that NASA envisions a Mars mission that would require a six-month flight each way plus 18 months on the Martian surface.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch a mission might involve four to six astronauts, likely an international team. The psychological stresses of such a mission would be considerable.\u201cIt\u2019s the ICE conditions \u2014 isolated, confined, extreme,\u201d said Steve Kozlowski, a professor of organizational psychology at Michigan State University who will make a presentation at the AAAS convention on Sunday. Kozlowski has been researching technologies that could help astronauts monitor the quality of team dynamics.\u201cYou\u2019re going to be in a little tiny space, you\u2019re not going to have virtually any privacy,\u201d he said. The time delay in communication across millions of miles of space will make conversations with people back home essentially impossible, he said. \u201cYour social world is going to be you and this small group of people for a really, really long time.\"Read More:The Unsung AstronautsNASA, under Trump, has a new rocket in the works. Where\u2019s it going to go? Spaceflight changes gene expression and poses radiation hazard but NASA sees no showstoppers as it dreams of a Mars mission NASA twin astronauts study finds no flashing red lights for long spaceflight",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye just wants to smack some sense into Kyrie Irving and other flat-Earthers (WP: Sports) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6613",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/12/28/bill-nye-just-wants-to-smack-some-sense-into-kyrie-irving-and-other-flat-earthers/",
        "text": "Earlier this year, Bill Nye didn\u2019t sound very happy to have to rebut Kyrie Irving\u2019s suggestions that the Earth is flat. In a recent interview, the artist formerly (and pretty much still) known as \u201cThe Science Guy\u201d appeared ready to get physical with anyone still questioning our planet\u2019s spherical shape.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe 62-year-old Nye was speaking with Complex\u2019s\u00a0Khal and Frazier Tharpe, who\u00a0said they were \u201cconspiracy theorists\u201d and noted that there were \u201cinfluential\u201d people, such as\u00a0Irving and rapper\u00a0B.o.B., who were \u201cvery invested\u201d in flat-Earth theories. After making clear his exasperation with such people, Nye made a smacking motion with his right arm while saying, \u201cIf only there were 60 people who we could just give the whistling backhand.\u201d Cocking his arm back again, he added, \u201d \u2018Hey, you want a fresh one?\u2019 Then they\u2019d shut up, and we could move on.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince his 1990s \u201cScience Guy\u201d run, Nye has\u00a0stayed a TV personality and an advocate for science-based initiatives while remaining more than irked by Irving\u2019s flat-Earth commentary. In February, after the all-star point guard made that claim on a podcast, Nye described Irving\u2019s remarks as \u201cheartbreaking,\u201d even if the player was \u201cjoking about it.\u201dSince then, Irving has hinted that he was just\u00a0trolling everyone, but he subsequently waded into those waters again, claiming \u201cthere is no real picture of Earth.\u201d In a recent ad he directed promoting his new Nike shoes, Irving tossed in a flat-Earth\u00a0\u2026 joke? Not really a joke?Either way, Irving has said his main intention is to question things presented as \u201cuniversal truths,\u201d but Nye wasn\u2019t having it. He wondered aloud why basketball players who accept the scientific process and its benefits in other aspects of life\u00a0would be\u00a0skeptical about the Earth\u2019s shape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey think about basketball defense \u2014 complicated business,\u201d Nye said. \u201cThey think about their statistics constantly. They\u2019re constantly evaluating their shooting percentage, their field goal percentage. They get to the court early, and they dribble the ball to see which parts of the court are kind of dead compared to the lively parts, from somebody who spilled a soft drink five years ago that didn\u2019t get wiped up fast enough. Yes, they think about that.\u201cYet, they\u2019re somehow able to look at pictures of the Earth from space,\u201d he continued. \u201cThey\u2019re somehow able to accept weather forecasting from satellites. They\u2019re able to listen to CNN from the other side of the world bounced off spacecraft, and yet conclude that, since they can\u2019t see Florida from Manhattan, the world must be flat or some freaking thing.\u201dGetting more animated, Nye exclaimed, \u201cIt\u2019s just weird! It\u2019s the 21st century, people! People navigated around the world using the stars, with full knowledge that the Earth was a ball, seven or eight centuries ago. This is not a new idea, people!\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter offering his \u201cwhistling backhand\u201d comment, Nye asked, \u201cCan I say dumba\u2013? Are we taping this? My career just ended.\u201dTrying to get into a hypothetical discussion, Complex\u2019s Khal began a question with, \u201cLet\u2019s say the Earth is flat\u00a0\u2026\u201d However, he was cut off by Nye, who exclaimed, \u201cNo, it isn\u2019t!\u00a0\u2026 The Earth is not flat, people. What is wrong with you?\u201d\u201cThe dismissal of so much human knowledge is crystallized [in] this idea that the Earth might be flat. It is just saying, \u2018Everybody who came before me is a dumba\u2013,\u2019 and that\u2019s wrong,\u201d Nye said.So who wants to see Kyrie go one-on-one with The Science Guy?Read more from The Post:Oh, baby! The Pacers\u2019 Damien Wilkins got big news on the scoreboard screen during a timeout.Stephen Curry joins Barack Obama in PSA for initiative to help young men of colorKyrie Irving says he doesn\u2019t \u2018think of Christmas as a holiday\u2019When greatness becomes routine: The powerful Patriots show no signs of slowing down A notably feisty Science Guy said of flat-Earthers, \u201cIt is just saying, 'Everybody who came before me is a dumba--,' and that\u2019s wrong.\" Bill Nye just wants to smack some sense into Kyrie Irving and other flat-Earthers",
        "author": "Des Bieler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bill Nye just wants to smack some sense into Kyrie Irving and other flat-Earthers (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6614",
        "date": "2017-12-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/12/28/bill-nye-just-wants-to-smack-some-sense-into-kyrie-irving-and-other-flat-earthers/",
        "text": "Earlier this year, Bill Nye didn\u2019t sound very happy to have to rebut Kyrie Irving\u2019s suggestions that the Earth is flat. In a recent interview, the artist formerly (and pretty much still) known as \u201cThe Science Guy\u201d appeared ready to get physical with anyone still questioning our planet\u2019s spherical shape.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe 62-year-old Nye was speaking with Complex\u2019s\u00a0Khal and Frazier Tharpe, who\u00a0said they were \u201cconspiracy theorists\u201d and noted that there were \u201cinfluential\u201d people, such as\u00a0Irving and rapper\u00a0B.o.B., who were \u201cvery invested\u201d in flat-Earth theories. After making clear his exasperation with such people, Nye made a smacking motion with his right arm while saying, \u201cIf only there were 60 people who we could just give the whistling backhand.\u201d Cocking his arm back again, he added, \u201d \u2018Hey, you want a fresh one?\u2019 Then they\u2019d shut up, and we could move on.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince his 1990s \u201cScience Guy\u201d run, Nye has\u00a0stayed a TV personality and an advocate for science-based initiatives while remaining more than irked by Irving\u2019s flat-Earth commentary. In February, after the all-star point guard made that claim on a podcast, Nye described Irving\u2019s remarks as \u201cheartbreaking,\u201d even if the player was \u201cjoking about it.\u201dSince then, Irving has hinted that he was just\u00a0trolling everyone, but he subsequently waded into those waters again, claiming \u201cthere is no real picture of Earth.\u201d In a recent ad he directed promoting his new Nike shoes, Irving tossed in a flat-Earth\u00a0\u2026 joke? Not really a joke?Either way, Irving has said his main intention is to question things presented as \u201cuniversal truths,\u201d but Nye wasn\u2019t having it. He wondered aloud why basketball players who accept the scientific process and its benefits in other aspects of life\u00a0would be\u00a0skeptical about the Earth\u2019s shape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey think about basketball defense \u2014 complicated business,\u201d Nye said. \u201cThey think about their statistics constantly. They\u2019re constantly evaluating their shooting percentage, their field goal percentage. They get to the court early, and they dribble the ball to see which parts of the court are kind of dead compared to the lively parts, from somebody who spilled a soft drink five years ago that didn\u2019t get wiped up fast enough. Yes, they think about that.\u201cYet, they\u2019re somehow able to look at pictures of the Earth from space,\u201d he continued. \u201cThey\u2019re somehow able to accept weather forecasting from satellites. They\u2019re able to listen to CNN from the other side of the world bounced off spacecraft, and yet conclude that, since they can\u2019t see Florida from Manhattan, the world must be flat or some freaking thing.\u201dGetting more animated, Nye exclaimed, \u201cIt\u2019s just weird! It\u2019s the 21st century, people! People navigated around the world using the stars, with full knowledge that the Earth was a ball, seven or eight centuries ago. This is not a new idea, people!\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter offering his \u201cwhistling backhand\u201d comment, Nye asked, \u201cCan I say dumba\u2013? Are we taping this? My career just ended.\u201dTrying to get into a hypothetical discussion, Complex\u2019s Khal began a question with, \u201cLet\u2019s say the Earth is flat\u00a0\u2026\u201d However, he was cut off by Nye, who exclaimed, \u201cNo, it isn\u2019t!\u00a0\u2026 The Earth is not flat, people. What is wrong with you?\u201d\u201cThe dismissal of so much human knowledge is crystallized [in] this idea that the Earth might be flat. It is just saying, \u2018Everybody who came before me is a dumba\u2013,\u2019 and that\u2019s wrong,\u201d Nye said.So who wants to see Kyrie go one-on-one with The Science Guy?Read more from The Post:Oh, baby! The Pacers\u2019 Damien Wilkins got big news on the scoreboard screen during a timeout.Stephen Curry joins Barack Obama in PSA for initiative to help young men of colorKyrie Irving says he doesn\u2019t \u2018think of Christmas as a holiday\u2019When greatness becomes routine: The powerful Patriots show no signs of slowing down A notably feisty Science Guy said of flat-Earthers, \u201cIt is just saying, 'Everybody who came before me is a dumba--,' and that\u2019s wrong.\" Bill Nye just wants to smack some sense into Kyrie Irving and other flat-Earthers",
        "author": "Des Bieler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Justify is set as the Kentucky Derby favorite in a deep field (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6615",
        "date": "2018-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/justify-is-set-as-the-kentucky-derby-favorite-in-a-deep-field/2018/05/01/79590a42-4d68-11e8-b725-92c89fe3ca4c_story.html",
        "text": "While the eye-pleasing greenhorn Justify became the early 3-1 favorite for the 144th Kentucky Derby, nobody had cause to wail after they doled out the post positions at Churchill Downs in Louisville on Tuesday. Nobody needed to hit the Kentucky Bourbon Trail for reasons other than leisure. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJustify, the Bob Baffert trainee hoofing to prevent 136 years of Kentucky Derby history from turning into 137, will take his 3-0-0 record to the No. 7 post, which has sprinkled an ample six winners across the years, most recently Street Sense in 2007. Justify exemplified a post list benign enough that Mike Battaglia, the Derby\u2019s everlasting oddsmaker, told the audience, \u201cI made the line prior [to the posts], and I kept it. If Justify would have drawn the rail, I would have had to change it.\u201d Kentucky Derby field, odds and start time: Everything you need to knowThe dreaded rail, with eight winners overall but none since Ferdinand in 1986 and only one since Chateaugay in 1963, went to Firenze Fire, a 50-1 shot who counts among the few not fancied among this stockpiled 20-horse charge. In the Nos. 2 and 3 spots were 30-1 shots trained by Louisville native Dale Romans, Free Drop Billy and Promises Fulfilled.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJustify, meanwhile, will try that ancient riddle about winning the Kentucky Derby after not racing at age 2, something no horse has done since Apollo in 1882. Starting from No. 7, he is part of a three-wide pod of hopefuls. Good Magic, Chad Brown\u2019s Blue Grass Stakes winner whom Battaglia listed at 12-1, will go from No. 6; Audible, Todd Pletcher\u2019s Florida Derby winner at a robust 8-1, will go from No. 5. Another pod of interest will meet out in the suburbs of the gate, where the horses who drew Nos. 16, 18 and 19 all know each other personally from working for Pletcher. His four projected starters include the 6-1 third-favorite and unbeaten Arkansas Derby winner Magnum Moon (post No. 16), who will try the same I-took-my-2-year-old-year-off thing as Justify, then the 12-1 Wood Memorial winner Vino Rosso (post No. 18) and the 30-1 Louisiana Derby winner Noble Indy (post No. 19).The outside No. 20, whose only winner had to be mighty and proved so (Big Brown in 2008), will hold Combatant, a 50-1 shot that never finished worse than fourth in seven previous races, including fourth in the Arkansas Derby. Of the seven horses seen as 12-1 or better, all drew agreeable posts with the arguable exception of Vino Rosso, and even that No. 18 post carried some recent magic in the form of 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah. Of the five horses with single-digit odds, all did fine Tuesday.The Kentucky Derby means mint juleps. Here are four variations.The second-favorite would figure to bounce around the board some leading up to the race, for that is Mendelssohn, listed at 5-1 and starting from No. 14. Mendelssohn, whose Irish star Aidan O\u2019Brien trains for the global colossus Coolmore, joins a gathering line of those who have tested the Derby after taking the long-haul flights that can leave one haggard. Of course, when Mendelssohn won the UAE Derby at Dubai\u2019s spaceship of a racetrack, Meydan, on March 31, he won by so much (18\u00bd lengths) that the others appeared to be in Qatar. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet the previous UAE Derby winners to try the Kentucky Derby have fared no better than fifth, and the candidate last year, Thunder Snow, broke out of the gate, decided it wasn\u2019t his thing and stopped. In the game\u2019s eternal mystery, he recently won \u2014 and smoked \u2014 the gaudy Dubai World Cup.No entry whose previous race was overseas has won since 1971, when Canonero II had just finished third in Venezuela, which clearly should have held the Derby that year. No horse lucky enough to reside in Europe has won any Kentucky Derby.At least Mendelssohn will bring along a stash of boasts, which include his cost as a yearling ($3 million at Keeneland in Lexington in 2016) and his obvious versatility (wins on turf at the Breeders\u2019 Cup last fall in California, on synthetic at the Patton Stakes in Dundalk, Ireland, in early March, and then the debut on dirt in Dubai). AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBolt d\u2019Oro, who finished second to Justify in the Santa Anita Derby, got an 8-1 compliment from Battaglia and the No. 11 post, after four wins but no first-place finishes in any of his last three, which included an elevation to a win in the San Felipe Stakes of March 10 at Santa Anita, after a disqualification. He has jockey Victor Espinoza, the winner aboard War Emblem in 2002, California Chrome in 2014 and American Pharoah in 2015. The two of them gave chase to Justify in the Santa Anita Derby and finished just three lengths behind, something of an accomplishment given Justify\u2019s early romps.Those romps began on Feb. 18 and continued on both March 11 and April 7, all at Santa Anita for a gilded, limited r\u00e9sum\u00e9. They happened in the same winter and spring in which Magnum Moon raced on Jan. 13, Feb. 15, March 17 and April 14, two of the four at Oaklawn Park in Arkansas, making for two unbeaten colts, at least one to become once-beaten on Saturday. In the kind of curious morsel that makes the Kentucky Derby the Kentucky Derby, Battaglia lent 20-1 odds to Hofburg in the No. 9 post, better than some horses with more circumstantial evidence in the dossier. That\u2019s because Hofburg, who raced only on Sept. 2 at Saratoga and on March 3 and 31 at Gulfstream Park, the latter a second in the Florida Derby, has Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott, known for his judiciousness about entering the Derby. Where Pletcher will have had 52 starters if his four reach the starting gate, Mott has had only seven, if never better than eighth place. There were few complaints about unlucky post positions among the several expected contenders. Justify is set as the Kentucky Derby favorite in a deep field",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson wants Under Armour space suits because \u2018you ought to look good\u2019 in outer space (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6616",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/01/25/richard-branson-wants-under-armour-space-suits-because-you-ought-look-good-outer-space/",
        "text": "Under Armour is headed to space. The Baltimore-based athletic-wear company known for outfitting college football teams and NBA stars like Stephen Curry announced a partnership Thursday with commercial space firm Virgin Galactic to make astro-tourism flight suits.Please answer some questions in this short survey about professional soccer and the 2022 Men's FIFA World Cup.ArrowRightVirgin is readying to ferry civilians into suborbital space aboard SpaceShipTwo, a spaceplane that jets 50 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface, this summer. The vessel made its first successful test flight along a route similar to one envisioned for tourists in December. Under Armour will make uniforms for the captains of the spaceplane and the more than 700 passengers who have already signed up for a voyage costing $250,000 each.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf you\u2019re going to space, you ought to look good, feel good and have the experience of a lifetime,\u201d Virgin founder Richard Branson said in a phone interview. \u201cWe wanted a space suit that the 700 astronauts who signed up and hopefully the thousands more that will sign up in the future will have a unique design to the individual. We need a space suit that would make them comfortable going up to space, that would work while they are floating around and on the way back down.\u201d AdvertisementFor Under Armour, the suits present a proving ground for innovations in materials and manufacturing techniques, and make it the first major consumer retailer to design for extraterrestrial travel.\u201cThis could really showcase how we do our work at Under Armour,\u201d said Clay Dean, the company\u2019s chief innovation officer. \u201cWe might find another Stephen Curry one day or another elite athlete, but we\u2019ll never have another chance to go into space.\u201d Story continues below advertisementBeing the first apparel company in space also provides financial upside for Under Armour, said Cara Tuttle, an assistant professor of fashion design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Activewear brands such as Nike, Under Armour, Adidas and Lululemon have capitalized on recent years off growth on \u201cathleisure wear,\u201d like stylish yoga pants, or sporty-but-fashionable zip-up tops.AdvertisementBut \u201cathleisure\u201d isn\u2019t a fashion category, Tuttle said. It\u2019s a trend. And \u201cspacewear\u201d \u2014 yes, clothes for space \u2014 is a category of the future.\u201cSpace apparel is likely here to stay,\u201d she said, \u201cand it\u2019s almost like a new sport that people will be participating in.\" Story continues below advertisementAstro-tourists have a discreet set of needs that most clothes can\u2019t satisfy. SpaceShipTwo hit a top speed of Mach 2.9 while headed almost straight up, encountering incredible gravitational force. Space clothes need to keep the wearer comfortable when dealing with that kind of resistance, Dean said. They need to ensure freedom of movement while passengers are floating around in the cabin. They need to be fire retardant in case of emergency. Space gets cold; these suits should keep wearers warm.And, just as crucially, the flight suits need to look good. If a customer is going to pay $250,000 to go to space, they should look smart doing it, Dean said.AdvertisementThat\u2019s the most promising financial aspect for Under Armour, Tuttle said. The company gets to pioneer what fashion for the stars looks like, especially when NASA\u2019s flight suits have been baggy orange or blue jumpers.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAlmost as much as the plane looks, the way the people look in the uniforms when they get on the spaceplane, that\u2019s going to be the picture of space tourism,\u201d she said.The entire uniform will consist of a one-piece flight suit, shoes and a flight jacket that can be worn on the mission and back on terra firma as a fashion statement. Pilots will get a separate uniform.\u201cIt is a progressive-looking uniform,\u201d Dean said. Designs will be released in the coming weeks. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you\u2019d see people walking around in every day, but it\u2019s not going to look like something out of a movie.Advertisement\u201cThey will look the part.\u201d Branson said Virgin\u2019s next test flight is scheduled for the second week in February, though an exact date has not been set. Branson has vowed to be on Virgin\u2019s first commercial flight, which is on track for this summer.Read more from The Post:Bad handshakes, awkward nicknames and accidental porn: Report details Browns\u2019 dysfunction10-year-old\u2019s science fair project concludes: \u2018Tom Brady is indeed a cheater\u2019Tony Romo could help CBS counter Patriots Super Bowl fatigueNFL says players suffered fewer concussions during 2018 season \u201cIt is a progressive-looking uniform,\" an Under Armour executive said. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you\u2019d see people walking around in every day, but it\u2019s not going to look like something out of a movie.\" Richard Branson wants Under Armour space suits because \u2018you ought to look good\u2019 in outer space",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson wants Under Armour space suits because \u2018you ought to look good\u2019 in outer space (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6617",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/01/25/richard-branson-wants-under-armour-space-suits-because-you-ought-look-good-outer-space/",
        "text": "Under Armour is headed to space. The Baltimore-based athletic-wear company known for outfitting college football teams and NBA stars like Stephen Curry announced a partnership Thursday with commercial space firm Virgin Galactic to make astro-tourism flight suits.Please answer some questions in this short survey about professional soccer and the 2022 Men's FIFA World Cup.ArrowRightVirgin is readying to ferry civilians into suborbital space aboard SpaceShipTwo, a spaceplane that jets 50 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface, this summer. The vessel made its first successful test flight along a route similar to one envisioned for tourists in December. Under Armour will make uniforms for the captains of the spaceplane and the more than 700 passengers who have already signed up for a voyage costing $250,000 each.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf you\u2019re going to space, you ought to look good, feel good and have the experience of a lifetime,\u201d Virgin founder Richard Branson said in a phone interview. \u201cWe wanted a space suit that the 700 astronauts who signed up and hopefully the thousands more that will sign up in the future will have a unique design to the individual. We need a space suit that would make them comfortable going up to space, that would work while they are floating around and on the way back down.\u201d AdvertisementFor Under Armour, the suits present a proving ground for innovations in materials and manufacturing techniques, and make it the first major consumer retailer to design for extraterrestrial travel.\u201cThis could really showcase how we do our work at Under Armour,\u201d said Clay Dean, the company\u2019s chief innovation officer. \u201cWe might find another Stephen Curry one day or another elite athlete, but we\u2019ll never have another chance to go into space.\u201d Story continues below advertisementBeing the first apparel company in space also provides financial upside for Under Armour, said Cara Tuttle, an assistant professor of fashion design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Activewear brands such as Nike, Under Armour, Adidas and Lululemon have capitalized on recent years off growth on \u201cathleisure wear,\u201d like stylish yoga pants, or sporty-but-fashionable zip-up tops.AdvertisementBut \u201cathleisure\u201d isn\u2019t a fashion category, Tuttle said. It\u2019s a trend. And \u201cspacewear\u201d \u2014 yes, clothes for space \u2014 is a category of the future.\u201cSpace apparel is likely here to stay,\u201d she said, \u201cand it\u2019s almost like a new sport that people will be participating in.\" Story continues below advertisementAstro-tourists have a discreet set of needs that most clothes can\u2019t satisfy. SpaceShipTwo hit a top speed of Mach 2.9 while headed almost straight up, encountering incredible gravitational force. Space clothes need to keep the wearer comfortable when dealing with that kind of resistance, Dean said. They need to ensure freedom of movement while passengers are floating around in the cabin. They need to be fire retardant in case of emergency. Space gets cold; these suits should keep wearers warm.And, just as crucially, the flight suits need to look good. If a customer is going to pay $250,000 to go to space, they should look smart doing it, Dean said.AdvertisementThat\u2019s the most promising financial aspect for Under Armour, Tuttle said. The company gets to pioneer what fashion for the stars looks like, especially when NASA\u2019s flight suits have been baggy orange or blue jumpers.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAlmost as much as the plane looks, the way the people look in the uniforms when they get on the spaceplane, that\u2019s going to be the picture of space tourism,\u201d she said.The entire uniform will consist of a one-piece flight suit, shoes and a flight jacket that can be worn on the mission and back on terra firma as a fashion statement. Pilots will get a separate uniform.\u201cIt is a progressive-looking uniform,\u201d Dean said. Designs will be released in the coming weeks. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you\u2019d see people walking around in every day, but it\u2019s not going to look like something out of a movie.Advertisement\u201cThey will look the part.\u201d Branson said Virgin\u2019s next test flight is scheduled for the second week in February, though an exact date has not been set. Branson has vowed to be on Virgin\u2019s first commercial flight, which is on track for this summer.Read more from The Post:Bad handshakes, awkward nicknames and accidental porn: Report details Browns\u2019 dysfunction10-year-old\u2019s science fair project concludes: \u2018Tom Brady is indeed a cheater\u2019Tony Romo could help CBS counter Patriots Super Bowl fatigueNFL says players suffered fewer concussions during 2018 season \u201cIt is a progressive-looking uniform,\" an Under Armour executive said. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you\u2019d see people walking around in every day, but it\u2019s not going to look like something out of a movie.\" Richard Branson wants Under Armour space suits because \u2018you ought to look good\u2019 in outer space",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson wants Under Armour space suits because \u2018you ought to look good\u2019 in outer space (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6618",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/01/25/richard-branson-wants-under-armour-space-suits-because-you-ought-look-good-outer-space/",
        "text": "Under Armour is headed to space. The Baltimore-based athletic-wear company known for outfitting college football teams and NBA stars like Stephen Curry announced a partnership Thursday with commercial space firm Virgin Galactic to make astro-tourism flight suits.Please answer some questions in this short survey about professional soccer and the 2022 Men's FIFA World Cup.ArrowRightVirgin is readying to ferry civilians into suborbital space aboard SpaceShipTwo, a spaceplane that jets 50 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface, this summer. The vessel made its first successful test flight along a route similar to one envisioned for tourists in December. Under Armour will make uniforms for the captains of the spaceplane and the more than 700 passengers who have already signed up for a voyage costing $250,000 each.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf you\u2019re going to space, you ought to look good, feel good and have the experience of a lifetime,\u201d Virgin founder Richard Branson said in a phone interview. \u201cWe wanted a space suit that the 700 astronauts who signed up and hopefully the thousands more that will sign up in the future will have a unique design to the individual. We need a space suit that would make them comfortable going up to space, that would work while they are floating around and on the way back down.\u201d AdvertisementFor Under Armour, the suits present a proving ground for innovations in materials and manufacturing techniques, and make it the first major consumer retailer to design for extraterrestrial travel.\u201cThis could really showcase how we do our work at Under Armour,\u201d said Clay Dean, the company\u2019s chief innovation officer. \u201cWe might find another Stephen Curry one day or another elite athlete, but we\u2019ll never have another chance to go into space.\u201d Story continues below advertisementBeing the first apparel company in space also provides financial upside for Under Armour, said Cara Tuttle, an assistant professor of fashion design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Activewear brands such as Nike, Under Armour, Adidas and Lululemon have capitalized on recent years off growth on \u201cathleisure wear,\u201d like stylish yoga pants, or sporty-but-fashionable zip-up tops.AdvertisementBut \u201cathleisure\u201d isn\u2019t a fashion category, Tuttle said. It\u2019s a trend. And \u201cspacewear\u201d \u2014 yes, clothes for space \u2014 is a category of the future.\u201cSpace apparel is likely here to stay,\u201d she said, \u201cand it\u2019s almost like a new sport that people will be participating in.\" Story continues below advertisementAstro-tourists have a discreet set of needs that most clothes can\u2019t satisfy. SpaceShipTwo hit a top speed of Mach 2.9 while headed almost straight up, encountering incredible gravitational force. Space clothes need to keep the wearer comfortable when dealing with that kind of resistance, Dean said. They need to ensure freedom of movement while passengers are floating around in the cabin. They need to be fire retardant in case of emergency. Space gets cold; these suits should keep wearers warm.And, just as crucially, the flight suits need to look good. If a customer is going to pay $250,000 to go to space, they should look smart doing it, Dean said.AdvertisementThat\u2019s the most promising financial aspect for Under Armour, Tuttle said. The company gets to pioneer what fashion for the stars looks like, especially when NASA\u2019s flight suits have been baggy orange or blue jumpers.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAlmost as much as the plane looks, the way the people look in the uniforms when they get on the spaceplane, that\u2019s going to be the picture of space tourism,\u201d she said.The entire uniform will consist of a one-piece flight suit, shoes and a flight jacket that can be worn on the mission and back on terra firma as a fashion statement. Pilots will get a separate uniform.\u201cIt is a progressive-looking uniform,\u201d Dean said. Designs will be released in the coming weeks. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you\u2019d see people walking around in every day, but it\u2019s not going to look like something out of a movie.Advertisement\u201cThey will look the part.\u201d Branson said Virgin\u2019s next test flight is scheduled for the second week in February, though an exact date has not been set. Branson has vowed to be on Virgin\u2019s first commercial flight, which is on track for this summer.Read more from The Post:Bad handshakes, awkward nicknames and accidental porn: Report details Browns\u2019 dysfunction10-year-old\u2019s science fair project concludes: \u2018Tom Brady is indeed a cheater\u2019Tony Romo could help CBS counter Patriots Super Bowl fatigueNFL says players suffered fewer concussions during 2018 season \u201cIt is a progressive-looking uniform,\" an Under Armour executive said. \u201cIt\u2019s not something you\u2019d see people walking around in every day, but it\u2019s not going to look like something out of a movie.\" Richard Branson wants Under Armour space suits because \u2018you ought to look good\u2019 in outer space",
        "author": "Jacob Bogage"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Let\u2019s hope the coaches on the College Football Playoff committee don\u2019t vote like coaches (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6619",
        "date": "2017-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2017/11/02/lets-hope-the-coaches-on-the-college-football-playoff-committee-dont-vote-like-coaches/",
        "text": "Those dudes out there on the College Football Playoff selection committee clearly aren\u2019t slackers. They do all the hard thinking necessary for an impossible sport.Five of the 13 members \u2014 12 for the first rankings of 2017, released Tuesday, as one was sick and unable to travel \u2014 are retired coaches, and while coaches might have called the wrong play every single time for decades,\u00a0they do know how to work, beyond even the usual unhealthy American degree. They study film even of practices, a miserable existence that, alone, might justify their salaries. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s odd, then, that coaches have spent a good chunk of American history \u2014 the college football chunk \u2014 as such lazy, lousy poll voters. Just this past weekend, the weekly coaches\u2019 poll placed Miami (Fla.) at No. 6 and Notre Dame at No. 8, probably because the former is 7-0 and the latter is 7-1, even though the latter has demonstrated oodles more prowess than the former.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA worst case of coach-voting howls from 1996, yet it does relate to the committee\u2019s decision Tuesday that Georgia (8-0) could sit at No. 1, above No. 2 Alabama (8-0). Just thinking of the daunting 1996 case can make one grateful the republic survived it.Analysis: For once, the initial College Football Playoff rankings will be rightNebraska was the two-time defending national champion, and its 1995 team was inarguably the best team in the modern history of the game. (All college football arguments should contain the word \u201cinarguably.\u201d) On Saturday night, Sept. 21, 1996, No. 1 Nebraska went to Arizona State and got dominated, 19-0. Nebraska quarterback Scott Frost, who obviously would never amount to anything in football, completed 6 of 20 passes and played a supporting role in each of Arizona State\u2019s three\u00a0safeties.On Monday, Sept. 23, members of the media, able to read \u201c19-0\u201d lit up on a scoreboard, adjusted, lifting Arizona State from No. 17 to No. 6, and dropping Nebraska from No. 1 to No. 8. Coaches, however, lacked the basic reasoning skills to decipher 19-0, so they moved Arizona State from No. 22 to No. 12, while keeping Nebraska five spots ahead at No. 7. From there, for three more weeks, a one-loss Nebraska remained ahead of an unbeaten team that had crushed it. The coaches didn\u2019t even notice, their brains filled grimly with practice film.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn their laziness \u2014 which might have included having somebody else in the athletic departments do the polls for them \u2014 the coaches factored in something that has no business getting factored: reputation. The College Football Playoff selection committee, which has spent three-plus seasons as an improvement, omits reputation as best humans can. What you did last year, or 10 years ago, or in 1950, doesn\u2019t matter. This held true even in 2014 with Ohio State, despite rumblings to the contrary.The football at Alabama has been so impressive for so long that we come to think of Alabama as No. 1 as part of national identity. If the committee arrived to the meeting room in North Texas, and found little sheets with Alabama inked in at No. 1, so it could go ahead and start working on Nos. 2-25, many of us might nod and say, \u201cOf course.\u201d Of the 20 rankings the committee has spat out, Alabama has held down No. 1 in 10 of them. Half. One program. Half. Of the three playoffs thus far, Alabama has appeared in three. It\u2019s otherworldly.Before the first rankings of 2017 on Tuesday, many pundits had Alabama at No. 1, and while that wasn\u2019t even close to irrational, you had to wonder how many of them did factor in reputation. Alabama must be\u00a0the best. Further, if Alabama played Georgia this coming Saturday, Alabama inarguably would win. (All college football arguments should contain the word \u201cinarguably.\u201d)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe 13-member committee, however, deciphers nothing but nine weeks chockablock with evidence. Unlike the traditional polls, it doesn\u2019t have a preseason poll to which to adhere, with a No. 1 in August that becomes hard to dislodge if it doesn\u2019t lose. It has no September polls to structure things. It barely had any October polls this year. It doesn\u2019t even observe other polls, according to its chairman.Georgia, coming off an 8-5 season in the debut year of Kirby Smart, who spent nine seasons at Alabama alongside Nick Saban, began the year in the Associated Press poll at No. 15, making for thick climbing once the football began. Yet once the football did begin, Georgia fashioned the finer CV, by a notch.It has beaten two current top-25 teams to zero for Alabama. It beat one of those, Notre Dame, on the road, and then Notre Dame surged to No. 3 in the playoff rankings, with its own three decimations of top-25 teams. Mississippi State stands at No. 16 with its 6-2 record, but that record was spotless until it went to Georgia and took a 31-3 right mauling. Alabama\u2019s commendable turn of nonconference scheduling, against then-No. 3 Florida State in the season opener, lost its oomph with Florida State\u2019s plunge to 2-5.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s not Alabama\u2019s fault, but it has to count in a sport so imperfect.With that kind of thing, and with the stashing of unbeaten teams Wisconsin and Miami (Fla.) at Nos. 9 and 10, behind six one-loss teams with better CVs, the committee has marked a leap upward from previous methods, and a spaceship trip upward from the wasteland of 1996. This crew, with its upgraded set of voting coaches, keeps sending a message:\u00a0We\u2019re not thinking about this anymore in the same, ancient, antiquated ways.\u00a0Probably wasn\u2019t a coach who came up with that.More college football:The Turnover Chain is so Miami Hurricanes. But is their record fool\u2019s gold?Campus Cleanup: Only the luckiest people get to live in Ames, IowaFlorida decides to \u2018part ways\u2019 with coach Jim McElwain The weekly coaches' poll is full of lousy, lazy voting. And yet, the playoff selection committee, with its five former coaches, seems to have broken free of the old, antiquated ways.   Let\u2019s hope the coaches on the College Football Playoff committee don\u2019t vote like coaches",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Police say U.S. soccer star Alex Morgan appeared \u2018highly impaired\u2019 during Epcot Center dispute (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6620",
        "date": "2017-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/10/03/police-say-u-s-soccer-star-alex-morgan-and-her-friends-got-kicked-out-of-epcot-center/",
        "text": "This story has been updatedU.S. soccer star Alex Morgan and a group of friends, including Major League Soccer players Giles Barnes and Donny Toia, paid a visit to Epcot Center in Orlando on Sunday. It didn\u2019t end well.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Orange County Sheriff\u2019s Department tells TMZ that its officers kicked Morgan, Barnes, Toia and his wife, Courtney, out of the park after they began arguing with another group of people at a pub in the United Kingdom section of Epcot Center\u2019s World Showcase. In all, six people in Morgan\u2019s group were escorted by police from the park after employees reported several individuals who were \u201cimpaired and verbally aggressive,\u201d the Orlando Sentinel reports. Story continues below advertisementIt all started, according to the police report, when Barnes cut in front of another park guest at the pub, sparking an argument. Soon the police were called, and they made the following observations (per the Sentinel\u2019s reading of the report):Advertisement\u201cAs we passed Spaceship Earth, I observed several people being escorted to the front,\u201d a deputy wrote. \u201cThey were all being very loud and belligerent toward staff around guests.\u201cI observed a white female, who was later identified as Alexandria Morgan yelling, screaming and taken (sic) video and possibly pictures. She appeared to be highly impaired.\u201dThe report goes on to say a deputy heard Morgan \u201cmake a loud verbal statement\u201d that she knows the Orlando SWAT team.No charges were filed.\u201cThe Orlando City SC organization is aware of a situation that occurred at Walt Disney World\u2019s Epcot theme park earlier this week and is awaiting official communication from Disney or the Orange County Police Department,\u201d Orlando City SC, which operates both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s pro soccer teams in the city, said in a statement to the Sentinel. \u201cThe club will address the matter internally when there is a full understanding of what occurred.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMorgan apologized Wednesday on Twitter:I want to apologize for my actions that occurred over the weekend. I will learn from this make sure it does not happen again. #liveandlearn\u2014 Alex Morgan (@alexmorgan13) October 4, 2017\n\nBased on the caption of an Instagram photo Morgan posted of her and her group in front of the restaurant at the Epcot Japan pavilion, it seems as if they were going \u201cAround the World,\u201d an activity in which you visit each of the Epcot World Showcase\u2019s 11 themed areas (each representing a different country). Some people turn this into a drinking game, with one adult beverage consumed in each \u201ccountry.\u201d (It isn\u2019t clear whether Morgan\u2019s group was attempting this particular version of the challenge.)Morgan plays for the National Women\u2019s Soccer League\u2019s Orlando Pride, and she had an assist in a 3-2 road win over the North Carolina Courage the day before her visit to Epcot. The Pride\u2019s next game is Saturday against Portland Thorns FC in the NWSL semifinals, and Coach Tom Sermanni said Tuesday he expected Morgan to play, per the Sentinel.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBarnes and Toia play for Orlando City of MLS.Read more:Ben Roethlisberger calls out Antonio Brown for throwing sideline \u2018temper tantrum\u2019Mark Cuban says he is \u2018considering\u2019 a run for presidentKnicks owner James Dolan reportedly \u2018furious\u2019 at Fox Sports \u2018hopeless\u2019 ads\n\n\n\nEagles clap back at Colin Cowherd\u2019s rant about \u2018dopey\u2019 Philadelphia fans\n\n\n They reportedly got into an argument in a pub with another group of people. Police say U.S. soccer star Alex Morgan appeared \u2018highly impaired\u2019 during Epcot Center dispute",
        "author": "Matt Bonesteel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Foreign-born horses are a mystery at the Kentucky Derby, 100 years after one first won it (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6621",
        "date": "2017-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2017/05/05/foreign-born-horses-are-a-mystery-at-the-kentucky-derby-100-years-after-one-first-won-it/",
        "text": "LOUISVILLE \u2014 One hundred years ago in a dimmer era, the Louisville Courier-Journal beheld the Kentucky Derby-record throng of 35,000 and described the \u201cpretty women, ugly women and other women in pretty gowns and other gowns.\u201d A headline described \u201csplotches of khaki mingled with crowds,\u201d meaning soldiers in a world at war. Actress Edna May turned up from London and said: \u201cThe first thing that I noticed was the automobiles. There were automobiles everywhere; I saw no other conveyances.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAcross the sports page that week, Boston pitcher Babe Ruth recorded a seventh straight win, a 2-1 scrap in Detroit.When a horse named for a Persian polymath, Omar Khayy\u00e1m, stretched \u201chis fiery nostrils\u201d and then his \u201cblaze face\u201d showed in front to win the 1917 Kentucky Derby by two lengths, as wrote the Courier-Journal\u2019s Sam H. McMeekin, the equine Omar Khayy\u00e1m had done more than outrun \u201cthe greatest field that ever strove for the blue ribbon event of the Bluegrass country.\u201d Foaled in England with blood so blue that the newspaper dubbed his lineage \u201cpurple,\u201d he had become the first foreign-bred winner.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe next 99 springs would bring only three more, only one from across any ocean (Tomy Lee in 1959) and none at all since the Canadian-bred Sunny\u2019s Halo in 1983. Those items dot the statistical backdrop for the colt who sleeps this week in the Churchill Downs quarantine barn marked \u201cDETENTION BARN.\u201d For this 143rd Derby, the Ireland-bred Thunder Snow represents a whole heap of stuff: the rest of the world, the latest hope of that world\u2019s foremost stable, and some anniversaries.Kentucky Derby field, odds and analysisOne is centennial, another silver. It has been 25 years since the first Derby entry of 67-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, vice president of the United Arab Emirates and the founder of Godolphin, the stable that has swept the world outside of the Derby and owns Thunder Snow. That 1992 entry was the Kentucky-foaled French sprite Arazi, for whom Maktoum\u00a0paid $9 million to own half and whose strolls from the barn to the track that Derby week drew such throngs of followers that you would have thought he had discovered an effective anti-aging balm.The previous November in the Breeders\u2019 Cup at Churchill Downs, Arazi had given jockey Pat Valenzuela \u201ca feeling that no other horse ever has.\u201d He had caused expert hands such as those of The Washington Post\u2019s Andrew Beyer to type, \u201cNot since Secretariat\u2019s 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes [in 1973] has a racehorse delivered such an electrifying performance.\u201d He had prompted his half-owner, Allen Paulson, to answer a question about whether he had seen a better horse with, \u201cNo one has.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCrackdown on immigration worries track workers ahead of Kentucky DerbyArazi ran eighth in that Derby, and Godolphin, established in 1994, has tried here nine times since, including sporadic clusters with five entries between 1999 and 2002, two in 2009. It began with Worldly Manner in a primo spot at the top of the stretch in 1999 before an ebb to seventh, and it has continued without hitting the board. The best finish came in 2015 when Godolphin\u2019s excellent Kentucky-bred Frosted ran fourth behind American Pharoah, Firing Line and Dortmund, after prepping in the United States in the Holy Bull, Fountain of Youth and Wood Memorial.Thunder Snow\u2019s route has been more typical: He raced to here through Dubai, at Maktoum\u2019s stunning spaceship of a course, Meydan. He won the UAE 2000 Guineas on Feb. 11\u00a0and the UAE Derby on March 25. He won at 2 years old in England and France. He impressed hard-bitten railbirds with his work this week, but there\u2019s an overarching sense of we\u2019ll-believe-when-we-see. He began Friday at 20-1 odds\u00a0to win.The long shot that will win this year\u2019s Kentucky Derby\u201cLong time,\u201d Emirati trainer Saeed bin Suroor said Wednesday at his first Derby since 2009, when Regal Ransom ran eighth and Desert Party 14th. He said, \u201cIt is not easy to send a horse to the Kentucky Derby until you know the horse has something there.\u201d He said, \u201cI know it\u2019s a tough race, the best horses in the world, but our horse has class.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat horse drew post No. 2 among 20 entries in a field especially Kentucky-heavy (with 16 Kentuckians and one each from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Canada and Ireland). He just finished a trek as one of the horses flying above the world at any given moment, landing here last weekend as, like his Dubai-Derby predecessors, a mystery.In these cases, even those who know just don\u2019t know.\u201cYou don\u2019t know, really,\u201d said trainer Bob Baffert, who has won four Kentucky Derbies and three Dubai World Cups, including the one March 25 with Arrogate. \u201cYou really don\u2019t know how they\u2019re going to respond until you put them in the gate and they come out of the gate. There\u2019s always that \u2014 to me, I always feel that little bit of, like, \u2018I\u2019m not sure.\u2019 It\u2019s like, maybe, \u2018I think he\u2019s doing well. He should run well. But we\u2019re not sure.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe searched for the word before homing in: \u201cDoubt,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s always that little doubt. So anytime you ship somewhere, you might think you\u2019re doing fine, but there\u2019s always that little doubt in the back of your mind that \u2018I hope the trip didn\u2019t take more out of him.\u2019 And you don\u2019t know until it happens.\u201dAfter the half-eternal flight in the other direction, Arrogate seemed a trifle off but adapted to the heat and dirt that wreak doubt. \u201cMost turf horses, when they ship, they seem to run really consistently because grass is grass,\u201d Baffert said. \u201cBut when you go dirt-to-dirt, it\u2019s different kinds of dirt. Every dirt track is different, so that\u2019s where the doubt comes in. Because grass, it\u2019s a different story. But basically, the way we ship horses now, they get them there quicker. They know what to do. The whole key is, as long as they\u2019re drinking water. Fluids are the main key there.\u201dFor a further factor, consider the thick, howling Derby itself. \u201cDirt races, you\u2019re getting that dirt all the way around there, and a lot of horses, after a while, they just get\u201d flustered, Baffert said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen it here in the Derby. I\u2019ve seen really good horses get beat by 20 lengths. The only time you\u2019ll see it is in the Kentucky Derby. You\u2019ll see the chart, and the horse, they just quit. Because there\u2019s so many horses in there, and they\u2019re getting jostled around, and they\u2019re getting the dirt, and they\u2019re getting bumped around, and they just get all keyed up. There\u2019s so many factors involved because the big crowd, they get stirred up going there.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said, \u201cYou have to have a great horse to get it done.\u201dOmar Khayy\u00e1m, who lived until 1938, might not have been great, necessarily, training through the winter in New Orleans and Hot Springs at a time when war chased horses across the ocean but when horses didn\u2019t fly. But after jockey Charles Borel told of \u201cmuch interference\u201d and the colt being \u201cforced heavily against the fence\u201d in the backstretch, he called Omar Khayy\u00e1m \u201cundoubtedly pounds the best horse in the Derby.\u201d Should any horse ever win the Derby via Dubai, people might use the same language, though probably minus \u201cpounds\u201d as an adverb. Only three other foreign-breds have achieved what Thunder Snow, which races for the world's foremost stable, will try on Saturday. Foreign-born horses are a mystery at the Kentucky Derby, 100 years after one first won it",
        "author": "Chuck Culpepper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gonzaga was an afterthought forever, and now it\u2019s a Final Four power (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6622",
        "date": "2017-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2017/03/30/with-the-final-four-finally-here-gonzaga-looks-back-on-an-amazing-journey/",
        "text": "GLENDALE, Ariz. \u2014 In the beginning, the bulldog wore a sailor cap.In the summer of 1998, Gonzaga athletic department officials called a meeting. The entire staff came; it did not require a large room. They wanted to change how people viewed their program, and it would begin with literal visual changes. The uniforms \u2014 light blue and white \u2014 needed an update. Their mascot needed even more work. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was a full-body bulldog with a frickin\u2019 sailor hat on,\u201d Gonzaga Athletic Director Mike Roth said. \u201cIt just wasn\u2019t a look.\u201dThe snarling, spiked-collar Bulldog of Gonzaga appeared Thursday at its first Final Four, plastered on the facade of University of Phoenix Stadium, gigantic in its vividness. The logo of a small Catholic school from Spokane, having long ago become a ubiquitous presence in the upper echelon of college basketball, had made it to the side of a spaceship in the American desert.Before there was University of Phoenix Stadium, there was a farm. A future coach worked it.The Gonzaga story is unlike any other in college sports. It was an afterthought forever, and then it became a dynasty. The Bulldogs have advanced out of the West Coast Conference to the NCAA tournament 19 consecutive seasons, the last 18 under Coach Mark Few, who on Thursday was named the Associated Press coach of the year. They have appeared in the AP top 10 in eight different seasons and twice captured the No. 1 ranking. Two decades ago, they were not even a blip.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn no way, shape or form could you ever envision from that to right now,\u201d Few said. \u201cIt has changed \u2014 I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s 500 percent different.\u201dFew arrived as an assistant coach in 1990, when the Bulldogs had never made an NCAA tournament. He made $28,000 a year and lived in an apartment with two assistant coaches, one of whom was Dan Monson. One year, they all headed to the annual coaches\u2019 convention at the Final Four. They thought they were cool, and Monson left an answering machine message bragging about the trip. It turned out to be an unwanted advertisement: When they returned, everything in the apartment had been stolen.NCAA Final Four preview: Sizing up South Carolina-Gonzaga and Oregon-UNCIn 1997, Monson replaced Dan Fitzgerald as head coach. He helped convince the athletic administration to change the logos and colors to a darker shade of blue, accented by more red.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe made conscious decisions to change who we were very visually, so people would see we\u2019re not the same school that we used to be \u2014 satisfied with being .500 or finishing in the middle of the league,\u201d Roth said.In Monson\u2019s first season, Gonzaga won the West Coast Conference regular season title. It seemed a rare opportunity to make the NCAA tournament, which it had done only once, in 1995. The Bulldogs faced San Francisco and lost in an upset. It felt, to Roth, like Gonzaga may have missed its chance to make the tournament.The Bulldogs have made it every year since. How long is that, exactly? A man named Phil Mathews coached San Francisco. His son, Jordan Mathews, is now a senior point guard for Gonzaga.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI remember pictures,\u201d Jordan Mathews said. \u201cBut I don\u2019t remember it at all.\u201dFew recalled the loss fueling Gonzaga the next season, when the Bulldogs won the WCC tournament and put their school on the map. As a No. 10 seed, they stunned Minnesota, Stanford and Florida and scared eventual champion Connecticut in a region final before succumbing. (Casey Calvary\u2019s game-winner against Florida spawned announcer Gus Johnson\u2019s classic call: \u201cThe slipper stillll fits!\u201d)AdvertisementMonson resisted an offer from a major program soon after the tournament ended. In the summer, Minnesota\u2019s head coaching job suddenly opened in the wake of an academic scandal. \u201cWhen they flew the private plane out to pick him up, I said, \u2018Oh, boy. He might not come back,\u2019 \u201d Roth said.Story continues below advertisementMinnesota offered an enormous contract, \u201clight-years\u201d more than Gonzaga could, Roth said. Monson had recently married and started a family. When Monson called to inform Roth he would take the job, both men cried.\u201cHe made the right decision for himself at that time in his life,\u201d Roth said. \u201cI said then, and I say it today: We supported that decision. You can say, \u2018That\u2019s easy for you to say now, Mike, because Fewey\u2019s turned out to be pretty darned good.\u2019 \u201dMonson has no regrets about leaving: \u2018It\u2019s been a tremendous sense of pride to see what Gonzaga has done.\u201dBoth Few and Roth shared a vision to make Gonzaga into something never seen: a small, private school from out west with a national profile. \u201cI just had a belief,\u201d Few said.AdvertisementAs the tournament victories piled up, Roth had to resist suitors for Few. He took a proactive approach. Rather than waiting for larger programs to woo him, Roth would sit with Few, sometimes before the season ended, and tell him, \u201cHere\u2019s the things we\u2019re going to do to make your job better.\u201dStory continues below advertisementSoon after Few took over, Gonzaga built a new arena. In the mid-2000s, Gonzaga became the first Western team to charter every flight for road games, even before Pac-10 schools did so. Roth scheduled more games on national television. Money poured in, and Few and his assistants received raises. In the fall, a new practice facility will be built.Gonzaga gave Few reasons to stay, in a business when most would have bolted. It also got lucky in the man who happened to lead their ascension. \u201cYou probably don\u2019t want to admit it,\u201d Few said, \u201cbut at least in my case, you end up being more like your parents than you even think.\u201d Few\u2019s father served as a pastor at the same Presbyterian church in Creswell, Ore., for 54 years.Advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s probably instilled in my brain and soul and something and I didn\u2019t even realize it at the time,\u201d Few said. \u201cWhy mess with happy?\u201dStory continues below advertisementFew also considered the track Monson\u2019s career took. He lasted seven seasons at Minnesota and experienced more stress than success, reaching the NCAA tournament just one time. Long Beach State hired him in 2007, and Monson has remained there ever since, advancing once to the tournament.\u201cHe left a situation and didn\u2019t turn out,\u201d Few said, \u201cAnd then Gonzaga continued to grow and grow and grow.\u201dFew helms a program with every trapping of a powerhouse. Players gathered Wednesday night for what was ostensibly a film session, with a Nike representative as a guest speaker. The Nike official said a few words, and then informed the Bulldogs somebody else had come and wished to say a few words. Into the room walked Kobe Bryant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was probably the best time I ever had in my life,\u201d junior guard Silas Melson said.Former Gonzaga players and coaches starting pouring into Greater Phoenix later in the evening. Roth schmoozed with them. When he saw Monson, he told him, \u201cDan, thanks for helping us get this started.\u201dNobody could have envisioned what Gonzaga has become, back when the players flew commercial and the bulldog wore a funny hat.\u201cFor some people, that was a really long time ago,\u201d Roth said. \u201cFor some others of us, it seems just like yesterday.\u201d Coach Mark Few and Athletic Director Mike Roth reflect on the program's humble path to its latest achievement. Gonzaga was an afterthought forever, and now it\u2019s a Final Four power",
        "author": "Adam Kilgore"
    },
    {
        "title": "NCAA Final Four: North Carolina escapes with a 77-76 win over Oregon (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6623",
        "date": "2017-04-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2017/03/30/ncaa-final-four-preview-sizing-up-south-carolina-gonzaga-and-oregon-unc/",
        "text": "All that madness has led us here: the final weekend of the NCAA tournament. Monday night, we will have a national champion. Will it be the persistent Oregon Ducks facing Gonzaga? Or reliable North Carolina?WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBelow, we\u2019ve put together all the information you need for this weekend, and stay tuned \u2014 this story will update with all the latest and greatest from the Final Four. Carolina escapes to national championship gameTop-seeded North Carolina has two players to thank for the program\u2019s 11th appearance in a national championship game: Kennedy Meeks and Justin Jackson.The Tar Heels\u2019 big man and best scorer willed North Carolina to a sloppy, 77-76 win against No. 3-seed Oregon on Saturday night, combining to score 47 points in an otherwise ugly national semifinal.Story continues below advertisementThe ending, perhaps, was ugliest. With five seconds remaining and nursing a one-point lead over Oregon, Meeks and then Joel Berry II stepped to the free throw line and both missed their two shots. But both times, North Carolina collected the rebound, and Oregon was denied a shot at playing for its first national championship since 1939.AdvertisementMeeks and Jackson held up the team as North Carolina\u2019s many offensive threats fell away one after the other \u2014 second-leading scorer Joel Berry II had 11 points, NCAA tournament darling Luke Maye had 2, and Isaiah Hicks, 58 percent-career shooter, made just one of 12 attempted field goals. Meeks tied a career-high with 25 points and turned in 14 rebounds. Jackson had 22 points including four sharp three-pointers.On the other end, Tyler Dorsey led the Ducks with 21 points while Jordan Bell had 16 rebounds and four monstrous blocks. Oregon gave up 20 points on 16 turnovers but matched the lengthy Tar Heels on the boards, 43-43.Story continues below advertisementOregon\u2019s decision making doomed it, in part, in the second half. The Ducks committed to their perimeter game and did make a three-pointer to take it to 77-74 with less than a minute remaining, but also missed 15 attempts from beyond the arc after halftime.AdvertisementMeeks balls outNorth Carolina\u2019s big man Kennedy Meeks is driving his Tar Heels toward their 11th appearance in a national championship game. The senior has racked up 20 points, which matches his season-high, and 10 rebounds in 20 minutes. He has missed just one shot from the field and gone a perfect 2-for-2 from the free throw line. Meeks and ACC player of the year Justin Jackson (15 points) are the only players in double figures for the Tar Heels. The last 21 North Carolina points have come courtesy of that duo.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, the Oregon Ducks\u2019 first Final Four appearance in 78 years comes with a cool bit of history \u2013 the crowd of 77,162 is the largest-ever to see an Oregon basketball game.Tar Heels find themselves in time to take halftime leadNorth Carolina clawed back from an ugly start to lead Oregon 39-36 at halftime in the Tar Heels\u2019 record-setting 20th Final Four appearance.AdvertisementThe Tar Heels\u00a0had to claw back from an ugly start. Top-seeded North Carolina, owners of one of the nation\u2019s most productive offenses, had connected on just eight of 27 attempts from the floor (30 percent) and two of eight three-pointers with 6:20 left until intermission. Forward Kennedy Meeks and ACC player of the year Justin Jackson helped dig the Heels out of their hole with a 17-6 run to close the half. If there was an offensive highlight before then, it was Meeks, who ended the half with 14 points on 6-of-7 shooting.Story continues below advertisementOtherwise, Oregon\u2019s defense rattled North Carolina, despite the Ducks\u2019 nine turnovers.Oregon guard Dylan Ennis led the team with eight points and bolstered the Ducks\u2019 defense with a show on the other end of the court that included back-to-back three-pointers that put Oregon up 30-22 with just over four minutes to play. It was North Carolina\u2019s largest deficit of the tournament.Isaiah Hicks = \ud83d\udcaa\ud83c\udffe#FinalFour #GoHeels pic.twitter.com/G4ifcqozLA\u2014 NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) April 2, 2017\n\nGreat pass. Better block. #FinalFour pic.twitter.com/5HkjvIpHIJ\u2014 NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) April 2, 2017\n\nZags survive, will play for the title Monday nightAdvertisementGonzaga survived a comeback attempt from a tenacious South Carolina team to advance to the national title game 77-73 Saturday night behind a signature performance from star guard Nigel Williams-Goss and a standout game from true freshman Zach Collins.Story continues below advertisementIt was a late block from Collins that finally sealed the Bulldogs\u2019 win after Gonzaga gave up a 14-point lead with 10 minutes remaining and watched as South Carolina went on a 16-0 run to tie things up. Williams-Goss had a game-high 23 points on 9-of-16 shooting, six assists and five rebounds and is the first player to have at least 20 points, five assists and five rebounds in his Final Four debut since Duke\u2019s Kyle Singler did it in 2010. Collins had 14 points, 13 rebounds and six blocks.Gonzaga and South Carolina\u2019s first-ever meeting had all the makings of a defensive stalemate \u2014 the two teams rank first and second in the nation\u2019s adjusted defensive efficiency ratings \u2014 but instead became an offensive shootout. The Bulldogs\u2019 answered the 16-0 run with a 7-0 jaunt of their own, sparked with a Collins\u2019 three-pointer that Williams-Goss assisted.AdvertisementThe Gamecocks refused to fade quietly in their first ever Final Four appearance and got boosts from leading scorer Sindarius Thornwell, who had 15 points after an uncharacteristically quiet half, and PJ Dozier, who led four players in double figures with 17 points. Saturday\u2019s game was the first in eight contests that Thornwell, who missed a day of practice with a fever this week, did not lead his team in scoring after averaging 25.8 points through the first four games of the tournament.\u2705 Advance to title game\u2705 Get drenched\u2705 Do handstand#FinalFour #UnitedWeZag pic.twitter.com/V3ZzgrLfCU\u2014 NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) April 2, 2017\n\nWilliams-Goss comes out of Zags locker room screaming: \"They were saying we can't shoot threes! They were saying we're not battle-tested!\"\u2014 Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) April 2, 2017\n\nTide turns with South Carolina runStory continues below advertisementThere were just under 10 minutes remaining when Sindaris Thornwell announced his return with a smooth three-pointer that cut Gonzaga\u2019s lead first to six and then completely with an emphatic flex of his muscles for good measure. After coming down with a fever and missing a day of practice this week South Carolina\u2019s leading scorer hadn\u2019t been himself all game \u2013 he had just nine points before his three. Now, Thornwell is helping spur the Gamecocks\u2019 16-0 comeback run.AdvertisementThornwell had five points in the first half after averaging 25.8 points through the first four games of the tournament. South Carolina is out to a two-point lead.HERE WE GO pic.twitter.com/DLGt4kr6ZL\u2014 Southeastern Conference (@SEC) April 1, 2017\n\nZags in control at the halfStory continues below advertisementGonzaga closed out the first half of Saturday\u2019s first national semifinal with a 7-0 run that finally bought some\u00a0separation against scrappy South Carolina in the form of a 45-36 lead. The Gamecocks\u2019 top scorer, Sindarius Thornwell, went all but three minutes without a field goal and South Carolina shot just 37 percent from the floor to Gonzaga\u2019s 58 percent, yet the Gamecocks kept things close for most of the half until Zach Collins\u2019 jumper sparked the Bulldogs\u2019 late run.Gonzaga\u2019s leading scorer Nigel Williams-Goss leads all players with 12 points on 5-of-7 shooting from the floor, and did a remarkable job holding Thornwell, the SEC Player of the Year, without a basket for much of the half. The main drama came when Gonzaga\u2019s Przemek Karnowski left the game after getting poked in the eye \u2013 no foul was called \u2013 and the Zags\u00a0outscored the Gamecocks\u00a014-5 while he was sidelined.Karnowski heads to the bench after taking a hit to the face. pic.twitter.com/EpWWMDeYWD\u2014 Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) April 1, 2017\n\nKarnowski poked in the right eye. Saw eye specialist at halftime. Will return. @ZagMBB @FinalFour\u2014 Tracy Wolfson (@tracywolfson) April 1, 2017\n\nKarnowski did in fact return, and the Zags moved out to a quick double-digit lead.Karnowski is back and he looks just fine. #FinalFour pic.twitter.com/oOtVN4w3Y9\u2014 NCAA March Madness (@marchmadness) April 1, 2017\n\nEverything you need to knowAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement>> University of Phoenix Stadium is hosting the Final Four for the first time, and if its brief history as a football stadium is any indication, we could be in for some crazy games. Maybe it\u2019s something in the soil, as one former Arizona Cardinals coach who by strange coincidence grew up farming the land that became the stadium, has some perspective on.>\u00a0The snarling, spiked-collar Bulldog of Gonzaga appeared Thursday at its first Final Four, plastered on the facade of University of Phoenix Stadium, gigantic in its vividness. The logo of a small Catholic school from Spokane, having long ago become a ubiquitous presence in the upper echelon of college basketball, had made it to the side of a spaceship in the American desert.> And speaking of the origins of the Gonzaga men\u2019s basketball program, we can\u2019t forget about Dan Monson. As Adam Kilgore writes: In real life, there is no going back. Monson knows that well, and he is at complete peace with it. Even this week, as people perpetually ask him, \u201cWhy did you leave Gonzaga?\u201d Especially this week, as he cherishes the opportunity to reminisce. At another assembly of former coaches and players earlier this week, Gonzaga Athletic Director Mike Roth shook his hand and told him, \u201cDan, thanks for starting this.\u201dAdvertisementNigel Williams-Goss has been about as close to perfect as a realistic coach could hope, even if he just spent four NCAA tournament games entering Saturday\u2019s national semifinal against South Carolina shooting 31.1 percent. That\u2019s because the Gonzaga floor general, one of five finalists for the Wooden Award, is a see-the-whole-game type even among see-the-whole-game types, so that box scores both tell and hide his effects.And more>> Need an alphabetical guide to this Final Four weekend? We\u2019ve got you covered, literally, from A to Z.>> Welcome to the new underworld of Manager Games, eight teams composed of (mostly) college basketball team managers plus a sprinkling of staffers and the occasional ringer from this year\u2019s bracket.>> Miss any of last weekend\u2019s madness? From Hootie\u2019s tears of joy to Luke Maye\u2019s heroics, we\u2019ve got you covered.>> Helpful tip/humble brag: Our NCAA bracket is unlike any other. It has 30-plus years of historical data that can give you more insight on this year\u2019s field than anywhere else. Check it out. The stage is set. Monday night, we will have a national champion and it will be Gonzaga or North Carolina. NCAA Final Four: North Carolina escapes with a 77-76 win over Oregon",
        "author": "Washington Post Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Olympic snowboarders or astronauts? Team USA\u2019s outfits for PyeongChang look inspired by NASA. (WP: Sports) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6624",
        "date": "2017-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/11/02/olympic-snowboarders-or-astronauts-team-usas-outfits-for-pyeongchang-look-inspired-by-nasa/",
        "text": "One small step for man, one giant quad cork 1800 for mankind.While Team USA\u2019s Olympic snowboarders will only need to travel to PyeongChang, South Korea, to compete in next year\u2019s Games, they\u2019ll look ready to go to the moon thanks to Burton\u2019s astronaut-inspired uniforms. Unveiled Thursday, the uniforms appear predominantly white with red detailing and feature what looks to be a NASA-inspired logo. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThis is the fourth Olympic uniform that Burton and myself have had the distinct pleasure of working on,\u201d the head designer for Burton\u2019s Olympic division, Greg Dacyshyn, said in a statement. \u201cLike the previous three which had a retro inspired influence, the 2018 theme is also a heavy nod to Americana, because its main influence is the iconic suits of the United States\u2019 leading space exploration program. I have always loved the astronauts\u2019 suits, because not only do they have such a cool and amazing aesthetic, they also were designed to function under the most extreme conditions, so this gave us an incredible platform to push the innovation and technology of the garments as well. My hope is that these pieces help the athletes go where no rider has gone before.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough the clothing appears white,\u00a0it is\u00a0actually made in part with an aluminum-coated iridescent silver fabric that\u2019s used mainly in the manufacturing of audio equipment, according to Burton.\u201cThe end result is a super technical, lightweight and waterproof fabric that reflects and deflects light as well as sound,\u201d the company said.The most fun part of the uniform might be what most viewers won\u2019t see. The inside of the jackets feature sewn-in artwork in the lining, including Korean translations of phrases such as \u201cDo you speak English?\u201d and \u201cWish me luck!\u201dTeam USA may not need luck. Since 1998, when snowboarding was added to the Olympic program, the United States has fielded several top contenders, including Shaun White, Ross Powers, Kelly Clark, Hannah Teter and Kaitlyn Farrington, all of whom have won gold for the United States in the men\u2019s and women\u2019s halfpipe competitions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAdditionally, Seth Wescott has brought home two golds in the snowboard cross event, and Sage Kotsenburg and Jamie Anderson won golds at the inaugural men\u2019s and women\u2019s slopestyle events in 2014.Team USA is expected to finalize the 2018 Olympic team in January.Read more:Two Russians, including gold medalist, disqualified for doping at SochiBrazilian court revives case against Olympian Ryan LochteOlympic weightlifting class notorious for positive doping tests may get choppedSouth Korean prime minister says he hopes President Trump attends PyeongChang Olympics One small step for man, one giant quad cork 1800 for mankind.  Olympic snowboarders or astronauts? Team USA\u2019s outfits for PyeongChang look inspired by NASA.",
        "author": "Marissa Payne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Baseball\u2019s Daffy Pitch for a Combination Tampa Bay-Montreal Franchise (WSJ: Sports) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6625",
        "date": "2019-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/baseballs-daffy-pitch-for-a-combination-tampa-bay-montreal-franchise-11561128871?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=71",
        "text": "I know, right: It makes total sense. When I think \u201cTampa Bay,\u201d I immediately think \u201cMontreal,\u201d too! \n\n\nWait, what? \nThank you, baseball! Thank you for serving up the wackiest idea in sports: an underappreciated Florida franchise sharing its team with a Canadian city that lost its own baseball club, the Expos, a generation ago. \nHow is this supposed to work? Who knows! That\u2019s what baseball is asking the Rays to try to figure out.\nOne possibility being floated is the team spending the early part of the season in Tampa, and then, like a transient Canadian snowbird, packing up the Winnebago and heading north to spend the back half of summer and autumn in Montreal. \nThen there\u2019s this: If the team makes the playoffs, they\u2019ll move a third time, to Rutland, Vermont! \nOK, that\u2019s a lie. I made that up. Rutland, Vermont, is not part of this. Sorry, Rutland. \nFor the players, it sounds like there will a few headaches. You\u2019ll have to keep a place in Tampa, and a place in Montreal. If you have a family, you\u2019ll probably have to move them around a bunch. Your taxes are going to be a complete nightmare. Your kids will grow up speaking with a French-Floridian accent. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Rays are a good baseball franchise, expertly run on the field, but have never drawn the type of crowds that they deserve at Tropicana Field.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Martha Asencio Rhine/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe logic behind this seems to be: Two halves could potentially make a whole. The Rays are a good baseball franchise, expertly run on the field, but have never drawn the type of crowds that they deserve. Remember when the Rays thought a barrier to their popularity might be the \u201cDevil\u201d in their name? That was the best. \nMontreal, meanwhile, saw its Expos flee to Washington, D.C., where they became the Nationals, and now annoy everyone in the U.S. capital. \nSo the theory seems to be: If Montreal sort of loves the Expos, and Tampa sort of loves the Rays, if you smush them together, they\u2019ll make a full season of baseball love.\nI still don\u2019t completely get it. It\u2019s stupendously daffy. And yet, I kind of like it. It\u2019s one of those ideas that is so bad, it almost turns good. \nIf they did it, I think they should go really over the edge with the concept. They should have different uniforms in Tampa and Montreal. Different names, too. Maybe play a different style, with a different manager, in Florida than in Canada. Make it a border-crossing baseball A/B test. \nHow strange it is to see such out-of-the-box thinking from baseball, a fuddy-duddy sport that wants to hold a 30-year trial period before agreeing to a pitch clock. Baseball should explore all sorts of mergers, like merging the average length of a baseball game in 2019 with the average length of time a human being wants to pay attention to a sporting event in 2019, which I can assure you is nowhere near the three hours, seven minutes it takes, on average, to play a baseball game today.\nReaders of a certain age know that a shared team isn\u2019t a new innovation. Basketball\u2019s Cincinnati Royals became the Kansas City-Omaha Kings for a stretch in the early 1970s. The Expos played a chunk of their season, about 20 games, in Puerto Rico, in 2003. And the Massachusetts Patriots pretend they have something to do with Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island. \nBut Tampa Bay-Montreal is a trippy geographic proposition. If baseball wants to merge teams, it should probably start with combining the Rays and screwy Miami Marlins into a single outfit. The Rays and Marlins are the two lowest-drawing clubs in the sport; baseball in Florida may best be springtime thing, like drinking mint juleps, and thinking the Mets have a shot. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view of Olympic Stadium in Montreal during an exhibition game in 2004.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n PAUL CHIASSON/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMeanwhile, aren\u2019t there a few other clubs that would like to explore a merger? I\u2019m thinking some cold-weather teams might leap at the chance to merge with a warm-weather location. For instance, the NFL\u2019s Buffalo Bills. Have you played football in Buffalo in December? It can be\u2026not warm. \nBut what about the Buffalo-St. Barts Bills? Or the Green Bay-Barbados Packers? \nI bet you could get a lot of frozen football fingers on board with that. \nBUFFALO BILLS OWNER: Guys, I have some terrible news. We\u2019re going to have to spend the back half of the season playing our home games in St. Barts\u2026. wait, why are you guys jumping up and down and celebrating? Aren\u2019t you sad? You\u2019re going to have to buy bathing suits and sunscreen!\nFrankly, what I\u2019d love to see most of all is a franchise that straddles a pair of insufferable regions that hate each other, like New York and my hometown of Boston.\nWhat if you combined the Red Sox and Yankees into a single franchise\u2014and then shot the entire operation in a sealed tube into deep outer space, never to return. \nTalk about a perfect baseball merger. The rest of Thank you, baseball! Thank you for serving up the wackiest idea in sports: an underappreciated Florida franchise sharing its team with a Canadian city that lost its own baseball club, the Expos, a generation ago. ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "Le Mans Innovation Rolls Out of Garage 56 (NYT: Sports) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6626",
        "date": "2017-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/sports/autoracing/le-mans-innovation-rolls-out-of-garage-56.html",
        "text": "For truly madcap motoring ideas at the race, one must turn to Garage 56, which puts a concept car on the track. For truly madcap motoring ideas at the race, one must turn to Garage 56, which puts a concept car on the track. The 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race is famed for its LMP1 and LMP2 class cars, which bear a strong resemblance to horizontal spacecraft.",
        "author": "By Kate Walker"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Resurrection of American Magic (NYT: Sports) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6627",
        "date": "2021-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/sports/sailing/american-magic-americas-cup.html",
        "text": "A dramatic crash left a hole in the hull of a high-tech America\u2019s Cup yacht. A round-the-clock repair effort has brought the boat back from the dead. A dramatic crash left a hole in the hull of a high-tech America\u2019s Cup yacht. A round-the-clock repair effort has brought the boat back from the dead. AUCKLAND, New Zealand \u2014 The oblong object, 75 feet long with a pointed nose, looks more like a downed spacecraft than a sleek racing yacht.",
        "author": "By Serena Solomon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cathie Wood Extends Hot Streak With Space ETF (WSJ: Stocks) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6628",
        "date": "2021-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cathie-wood-extends-hot-hand-with-ark-space-exploration-etf-11617787802?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=33",
        "text": "Such a milestone would put the fund in rare company: The fastest ETF to reach $1 billion was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n State Street\u2019s\nSPDR Gold Trust\n\n GLD 0.31%\n\n\n fund, which hit the mark in just three days back in 2004.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThat speaks to the overall power of ARK right now,\u201d said Nate Geraci, president of ETF Store, an investment-advisory firm. \u201cAt this point, investors think anything Cathie Wood touches turns to gold.\u201d\n\nThe fund is ARK Investment Management LLC\u2019s first launch in two years and stands in contrast to the lukewarm receptions its earlier products received. ARK\u2019s flagship innovation fund, begun in 2014, took more than 3 1/2 years to reach $1 billion. Its last launch, the fintech innovation ETF in 2019, took about 21 months.\nA lot has changed for ARK, though. In the span of a year, Ms. Wood\u2019s ARK has transformed from a small, upstart manager of a handful of ETFs to one of the biggest fund managers in the U.S. The share prices of the firm\u2019s five other actively managed ETFs doubled or tripled last year on the back of surging growth stocks such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n and Roku Inc., earning Ms. Wood a cultlike following of individual investors who hang on her every tweet and video.\nBut those growth stocks are now the epicenter of a selloff that has left ARK\u2019s older funds down at least 16% from their highs earlier this year. Rather than rolling out another fund primary tied to the tech trade, ARK has tilted nearly half of its space ETF toward manufacturers including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deere\n\n DE 2.52%\n\n\n & Co., a sector of the stock market that has benefited in recent months from rising interest rates and inflation expectations.\nThe fund is different enough for investors who say they are fans of Ms. Wood but also wary of plowing more money into a faltering tech trade.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cMost of Cathie\u2019s ETFs are tech-heavy,\u201d said Tr\u00e9 Diemer, 20 years old, a student at William & Mary who said he bought a couple of thousand dollars of ARKX shares Monday. \u201cYou look at this ETF and see a lot of names she hasn\u2019t been as involved with.\u201d \nHe already owns a variety of growth stocks and has been eyeing Ms. Wood\u2019s other funds as a home for some of the money he earns from working as an emergency medical technician and running deliveries for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DoorDash Inc.\n\n\n But tech and Ms. Wood\u2019s other funds seemed overvalued, a point reinforced by the recent losses he said he sustained.\n\u201cYou can look at this almost as a reopening ETF,\u201d said Mr. Diemer, referring to underlying stocks poised to benefit most from a rebounding economy.\nNot everyone is a fan of the fund\u2019s makeup. Some took to social media, creating memes to mock ARK\u2019s decision to include Deere and other companies that appear to have no significant ties to the fund\u2019s theme of investing in space exploration and innovation. One showed a Deere tractor roving across a Mars landscape, another on the moon.\nDeere, for its part, responded with several of its own memes, including one showing a UFO beaming up a tractor. Some analysts said the inclusion of Deere is less of a stretch when considering that the company makes satellite-guided machinery.\nOther stocks included in the fund that seem at odds with its mandate include ARK\u2019s passively managed 3D-printing ETF and shares of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Meanwhile, some of the few pure-play space stocks such as the satellite and imaging company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Maxar Technologies Inc.\n\n\n didn\u2019t make the cut. Neither did Rocket Lab USA Inc. nor Astra Space Inc., two rocket makers that are merging with blank-check companies to go public.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ren Leggi,\n\n\n\n a client portfolio manager at ARK, acknowledged that the holdings are causing some confusion but said that they are all in line with the fund\u2019s mandate. \u201cWhen we\u2019re talking about space exploration and innovation, we define it as everything above ground,\u201d said Mr. Leggi.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat explains the success of Cathie Wood\u2019s latest exchange-traded fund? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe advancement of drone technology plays a big part in why several companies, including Amazon, are in the fund, said Mr. Leggi. Netflix would benefit from the rollout of satellites that enable further adoption of broadband internet for streaming, and some rocket parts are 3D-printed, he added. As for the space companies left out, Mr. Leggi said valuations of some were too rich, especially those involved with special-purpose acquisition companies, while others didn\u2019t pass their initial evaluation of whether the stock could sustain a 15% annualized return rate.\n\u201cWe still continue to track a lot of companies in case we get a market environment where there\u2019s a broader selloff and we can get in at an attractive price,\u201d Mr. Leggi Some criticize the inclusion of the tractor manufacturer Deere and other companies that appear to have no significant ties to the fund\u2019s area of focus. ",
        "author": "Michael Wursthorn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Theme ETFs Tell Stories With the Same Characters (WSJ: Streetwise) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6629",
        "date": "2021-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/theme-etfs-tell-stories-with-all-the-same-characters-11617534000?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=32",
        "text": "The latest is ARK Investment Management\u2019s Space Exploration and Innovation ETF, known as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ARKX,\n\n\n which promises to invest 80% of its assets in, naturally enough, space exploration and innovation. To be engaged in space exploration isn\u2019t quite as exciting as in the days of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n however: ARK has redefined the term to include beneficiaries of space technology, such as tractor maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deere\n\n\n & Co (satellite-guided farm machinery) and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n (more people might stream video if satellites bring fast internet to rural areas).\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI can see why ARK stretched the point. There are few pure-play space stocks.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\n is one, but\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX remains private, and aside from a handful of satellite firms, the biggest space operations are parts of other companies with far bigger core businesses, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing,\nLockheed Martin\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus.\n\n\n Star Trek fans hoping to cash in on a mission of discovery are unlikely to want Boeing\u2019s focus on passenger jets or Lockheed Martin\u2019s advanced weaponry, the prospects for which are far more important for their shares than their space divisions.\nEven the stocks of narrowly focused companies can qualify for several different themes, as investors blindly chase the latest fashionable idea.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe stock of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n 3D Systems Corp.\n\n\n is a natural for ARK\u2019s 3-D printing ETF. It is slightly surprising that this ETF\u2014and so 3D Systems\u2014should be held by ARKX, but it is true that NASA has 3-D printers on the International Space Station.\n\nBut if you\u2019re an investor in 3-D printing, is it because it will be a winner from exploring space, or a winner from robotics and artificial intelligence, as for those who bought it via the iShares Robotics and AI ETF? Perhaps you, like me, have come across 3-D printing for your kids\u2019 orthodontics, and prefer 3D Systems for its healthcare prospects\u2014in which case you\u2019ll be pleased to hear that it features in the Legal & General Healthcare Breakthrough ETF.\nIt is possible to prosper from dentistry, space and AI all at once, of course. And the multiple qualification means the shares get pushed up if any of the three themes comes into fashion. But they might also be sold off if one of the themes goes out of fashion and the ETF is dumped, surprising those who bought it for one of the other reasons.\nBigger companies can qualify for even more themes, as each division satisfies some fund manager\u2019s marketing criteria. And each theme is even less likely to be the dominant driver of its share price.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNetflix's science fiction space drama The Midnight Sky. The company is in ARK\u2019s new space-exploration ETF.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\n\nDaimler\n\n\n is an example of a stock offering something for everyone. The maker of Mercedes cars and heavy trucks qualifies for a hydrogen ETF, a battery ETF and a DWS future mobility fund, which is amusing for a firm that traces its lineage back to the 19th-century inventors of the first gasoline-powered cars. It launched its first fully electric car only in 2019 and is aiming to test hydrogen-powered heavy trucks with customers in three years. Daimler might indeed be among the winners in the next generation of vehicles, but it brings a lot of baggage to any bet on hydrogen or batteries and currently makes its money from old-fashioned internal-combustion engines.\nAs to the future of mobility, this is truly a broad bet. At least judging by the ETF, which tracks a Nasdaq index, this future involves all the companies currently making cars, along with suppliers, chip makers such as Nvidia and, umm,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook.\n\n\n At this point I can only regret that The Wall Street Journal can\u2019t print a shrug emoji.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAI is similarly broad-minded. Is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n an AI play? Certainly: It is in plenty of AI ETFs, and its executives mention AI whenever they can. What about quantum computing? Sure, it\u2019s in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n QTUM,\n\n\n the quantum computing ETF. It works on electricity distribution, too, so it features in the smart grid ETF,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GRID.\n\n\n Also cloud computing, new economy and transformational change. The result is that shareholders who want to bet on quantum computing or new power grids might be quite happy even if IBM\u2019s quantum breakthroughs go nowhere, so long as clients keep buying IBM\u2019s cloud services at a fat profit margin. But they shouldn\u2019t fool themselves that the former typewriter manufacturer is mainly a bet on quantum success or next-generation power grids.\nThe core problem here is that thematic investors want something that in many cases isn\u2019t possible: broadly diversified exposure to a new and exciting story. Where there aren\u2019t enough pure-play Rampant demand for fashionable investment themes is being satisfied by hundreds of ETFs selling the idea of battery technology, hydrogen power, 3-D printing and space exploration. The trouble is there aren\u2019t enough stocks to go around. ",
        "author": "James Mackintosh"
    },
    {
        "title": "Theme ETFs Tell Stories With the Same Characters (WSJ: Streetwise) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6630",
        "date": "2021-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/theme-etfs-tell-stories-with-all-the-same-characters-11617534000?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=33",
        "text": "The latest is ARK Investment Management\u2019s Space Exploration and Innovation ETF, known as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ARKX,\n\n\n which promises to invest 80% of its assets in, naturally enough, space exploration and innovation. To be engaged in space exploration isn\u2019t quite as exciting as in the days of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong,\n\n\n\n however: ARK has redefined the term to include beneficiaries of space technology, such as tractor maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deere\n\n\n & Co (satellite-guided farm machinery) and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix\n\n\n (more people might stream video if satellites bring fast internet to rural areas).\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI can see why ARK stretched the point. There are few pure-play space stocks.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\n\n\n is one, but\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX remains private, and aside from a handful of satellite firms, the biggest space operations are parts of other companies with far bigger core businesses, such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing,\nLockheed Martin\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus.\n\n\n Star Trek fans hoping to cash in on a mission of discovery are unlikely to want Boeing\u2019s focus on passenger jets or Lockheed Martin\u2019s advanced weaponry, the prospects for which are far more important for their shares than their space divisions.\n\n\n\n\nEven the stocks of narrowly focused companies can qualify for several different themes, as investors blindly chase the latest fashionable idea.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe stock of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n 3D Systems Corp.\n\n\n is a natural for ARK\u2019s 3-D printing ETF. It is slightly surprising that this ETF\u2014and so 3D Systems\u2014should be held by ARKX, but it is true that NASA has 3-D printers on the International Space Station.\n\nBut if you\u2019re an investor in 3-D printing, is it because it will be a winner from exploring space, or a winner from robotics and artificial intelligence, as for those who bought it via the iShares Robotics and AI ETF? Perhaps you, like me, have come across 3-D printing for your kids\u2019 orthodontics, and prefer 3D Systems for its healthcare prospects\u2014in which case you\u2019ll be pleased to hear that it features in the Legal & General Healthcare Breakthrough ETF.\nIt is possible to prosper from dentistry, space and AI all at once, of course. And the multiple qualification means the shares get pushed up if any of the three themes comes into fashion. But they might also be sold off if one of the themes goes out of fashion and the ETF is dumped, surprising those who bought it for one of the other reasons.\nBigger companies can qualify for even more themes, as each division satisfies some fund manager\u2019s marketing criteria. And each theme is even less likely to be the dominant driver of its share price.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNetflix's science fiction space drama The Midnight Sky. The company is in ARK\u2019s new space-exploration ETF.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\n\nDaimler\n\n\n is an example of a stock offering something for everyone. The maker of Mercedes cars and heavy trucks qualifies for a hydrogen ETF, a battery ETF and a DWS future mobility fund, which is amusing for a firm that traces its lineage back to the 19th-century inventors of the first gasoline-powered cars. It launched its first fully electric car only in 2019 and is aiming to test hydrogen-powered heavy trucks with customers in three years. Daimler might indeed be among the winners in the next generation of vehicles, but it brings a lot of baggage to any bet on hydrogen or batteries and currently makes its money from old-fashioned internal-combustion engines.\nAs to the future of mobility, this is truly a broad bet. At least judging by the ETF, which tracks a Nasdaq index, this future involves all the companies currently making cars, along with suppliers, chip makers such as Nvidia and, umm,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook.\n\n\n At this point I can only regret that The Wall Street Journal can\u2019t print a shrug emoji.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAI is similarly broad-minded. Is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n an AI play? Certainly: It is in plenty of AI ETFs, and its executives mention AI whenever they can. What about quantum computing? Sure, it\u2019s in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n QTUM,\n\n\n the quantum computing ETF. It works on electricity distribution, too, so it features in the smart grid ETF,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GRID.\n\n\n Also cloud computing, new economy and transformational change. The result is that shareholders who want to bet on quantum computing or new power grids might be quite happy even if IBM\u2019s quantum breakthroughs go nowhere, so long as clients keep buying IBM\u2019s cloud services at a fat profit margin. But they shouldn\u2019t fool themselves that the former typewriter manufacturer is mainly a bet on quantum success or next-generation power grids.\nThe core problem here is that thematic investors want something that in many cases isn\u2019t possible: broadly diversified exposure to a new and exciting story. Where there aren\u2019t enough pure- Rampant demand for fashionable investment themes is being satisfied by hundreds of ETFs selling the idea of battery technology, hydrogen power, 3-D printing and space exploration. The trouble is there aren\u2019t enough stocks to go around. ",
        "author": "James Mackintosh"
    },
    {
        "title": "A flight to space. A fight in the streets. Americans search high and low for hope. (WP: Style) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6631",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-flight-to-space-a-fight-in-the-streets-americans-search-high-and-low-for-hope/2020/06/01/5b1990ea-a376-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html",
        "text": "The Falcon 9 rocket pushed Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into orbit at 16,000 miles per hour. The pepper pellet that hit Darrell Hampton\u2019s face on Earth was traveling at about 1.4 percent that speed, fast enough to shatter the back of his cellphone before walloping his eye and showering his neck with an indescribable burning sensation. Up until that point, Hampton had marched peacefully with other Denver protesters Saturday afternoon, at around the same time astronauts Hurley and Behnken were flying toward the International Space Station. Then around 6 p.m., at West 14th Avenue and Lincoln Street, a masked policeman in riot gear hopped on a vehicle and, as it pulled away, casually squeezed his trigger. \u201cFirst, it was shock,\u201d says Hampton, who works in accounting. \u201cAnd then fear of \u2018What\u2019s happening to my eye right now? Am I going to be able to open it again?\u2019 I didn\u2019t feel like the guy had any reason to do that, other than he was angry.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn cities across the country, crowds had gathered to protest state violence against black Americans days after a Minneapolis man named George Floyd died after spending nearly nine minutes pinned to the pavement under a police officer\u2019s knee.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd miles above the planet, in a capsule 13 feet in diameter, Behnken was weightless. He spun around and showed a floating toy dinosaur that he\u2019d brought along at the request of his sons. \u201cWe\u2019d like to thank the American people for the opportunity today,\u201d Behnken said in video beamed back to Earth. \u201cAnd we\u2019re really proud of the entire team that was able to accomplish human spaceflight again from the Florida coast. Just a wonderful experience.\u201dOver the weekend America watched a billionaire\u2019s private company, under a $2.6 billion government contract, deliver two men into orbit with speed and elegance, and then watched its cities spasm with anger and chaos. The launch was a triumph of ingenuity and collaboration; the widespread unrest was the product of a systems failure: The recent deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor (shot by police in her Louisville home) and Ahmaud Arbery (hunted down by vigilantes in Georgia) caused the social fabric, threaded by generations of racism and frayed by the coronavirus pandemic, to catch fire and explode.The SpaceX rocket, meanwhile, took off from Cape Canaveral in a heave of fire and exhaust. Fort Lauderdale resident Rosie Nwanganga had hopped in a friend\u2019s car Saturday afternoon to drive to Cocoa Beach. After months of quarantine, it was blissful to be on a towel by the water, among smiling and excited humans, waiting for the launch. Through phones and radios, everyone could hear the technical play-by-play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt T-minus 1:48, the crowd heard that Stage 2 of the liquid-oxygen load was complete.At T-minus 0:54, the crowd heard that the flight termination system was armed.At T-minus 0:35, the crowd heard astronaut Hurley say, \u201cLet\u2019s light this candle.\u201dAnd then the Falcon 9 soared like a shooting star on a return trip. Nwanganga felt the vibration in her rib cage. Looking up, she felt exhilaration.Later, looking down at images and video on social media, she felt exhaustion.\u201cWe\u2019re so smart but we\u2019re so behind,\u201d says Nwanganga, 27. \u201cPeople are watching all over the world. They\u2019re seeing something positive, with this launch, but they\u2019re also watching us protest and have to burn places down to get attention. The United States has aced space travel but has failed in equality, and that\u2019s sad.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt the launch, phones were angled up in wonder. Elsewhere, phones were pointed outward in solidarity and suspicion. Along the barricades at Baltimore\u2019s City Hall, a chef named Denicia Baker, 26, was cleaning up bottles thrown by troublemaking white people when, according to Baker, two cops hit her with a shield and baton.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything we\u2019re supposed to be doing,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re policing ourselves. We\u2019ve policed the agitators. It was two black men that hit me. It\u2019s infuriating because no matter what we do, we\u2019re not being treated like humans. It was mind-boggling, it was traumatizing, it was frustrating \u2014 especially because I used to be in the military. They don\u2019t see that. They see my skin color and automatically meet me with brute force.\u201dOn a street in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, after one officer said \u201cLight \u2019em up,\u201d law enforcement shot projectiles at onlookers watching from their own porch. In Brooklyn, an NYPD squad car accelerated into protesters. Cars burned in Cleveland. City Hall burned in Nashville. In the White House, the president wailed on Twitter about \u201cFAKE NEWS!\u201d and \u201cLAW & ORDER!\u201d but gave no formal address to the nation. The country seemed incapable of the care and precision that delivers people to orbit.At her home in Charlotte, former astronaut Joan Higginbotham started watching the launch preparations at T-minus 20:00. She remembered the fat gloves and thousands of switches on the space shuttle Discovery, whose vintage bulk she rode into orbit in 2006 for a mission just shy of 13 days, as she looked at footage of the clean blue touch screens in the sleek SpaceX capsule. This was progress.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHigginbotham was thrilled by the exquisite liftoff from American soil. But the television in her home had been turned off most of last week. She had seen the video of George Floyd\u2019s last moments too many times. Floyd had complained he couldn\u2019t breathe and lay motionless on the ground for almost two minutes before the officer removed his knee. This was the opposite of progress.\u201cFor me, as an African American woman, it is just extremely exhausting and exasperating and it sucks the life out of me when things like this continue to happen in this day and age,\u201d Higginbotham says.Ten miles away from Higginbotham that same afternoon, in downtown Charlotte, three black men of different generations converged on an overpass of Interstate 277, above East 4th Street.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m tired of this s---!\u201d said a 45-year-old man in a white tank top. \u201cWe\u2019ve been standing around, as the older ones, taking all this bulls---! .\u2009.\u2009. Ain\u2019t nobody coming to protect us!\u201dAdvertisementA 31-year-old man named Curtis Hayes Jr. brought over a 16-year-old protester, to make a point. \u201cHe\u2019s 16!\u201d Hayes shouted at the older man.\u201cAnd they going to kill him next week,\u201d the older man said. \u201cAt this point I\u2019m ready to die for what\u2019s going on!\u201dHayes, tears streaming down his face, pivoted to the 16-year-old, gripped his rib cage, and bellowed: \u201cLet me tell you something. What you see right now is gonna happen 10 years from now. And at 26, you gonna be doing the same thing I\u2019m doing! You understand that! Ten years! You\u2019re gonna be right here, too! So what I need y\u2019all to do right now, at 16, is come up with a better way. Because how we doing it \u2014 it ain\u2019t working. He angry at 46. I\u2019m angry at 31. You angry at 16. You understand me?\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cYes, sir, I do,\u201d the teenager said.\u201cPutting yourself in harm\u2019s way,\u201d Hayes said, \u201cis not the way!\u201dVideo shared by Christina Black pic.twitter.com/gIedOF240S\u2014 robertaikiaubreylowe (@lichensarealive) May 31, 2020\n\nThe interaction was recorded and viewed tens of millions of times on Twitter and Facebook. Reached by phone Sunday afternoon, shortly after the astronauts docked with the International Space Station, Hayes explained how black people are done with waiting for progress.Advertisement\u201cI have such anger in my heart, but people of your race do not understand the hurt beneath it \u2014 they only see the anger,\u201d says Hayes, an entrepreneur. \u201cI ask for people to see the hurt. Hurt comes before anger. And my question is \u2018How much do you have to see, and how much do you have to experience, to see the hurt before the rage and the anger? .\u2009.\u2009. The world better hurry up, because right now everybody is still marching for peace, and marching for equality. But soon people will be marching in rage and revenge. And that\u2019s when we\u2019ll have a problem.\u201dThere was looting in Philadelphia and Santa Monica. Police pepper-sprayed and Tasered and flash-bombed journalists and nonviolent protesters. In Atlanta, businesses shuttered by the pandemic were totaled by vandalism. There were also moments when the gravity of the situation gave way. In Flint, Mich., a county sheriff marched with protesters. In Baltimore, at the behest of protesters, a police lieutenant recited the names of people killed by police. In D.C. and El Paso, officers took a knee to show respect to protesters.From his home in Fairfax, Va., astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi considered the video of George Floyd\u2019s death, the footage of SpaceX\u2019s launch, the images of peaceful protests joined by people of all races and even police officers. Growing up in the Deep South, Oluseyi was face down on the pavement many times. People in Athens, Ga., where he was a young researcher, hurled both epithets and projectiles at him.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can look at the current unrest and see deterioration, he says. Or you can look at it and see progress in the scale and diversity of the activism. You can look at launching two men into lower orbit as minuscule on the scale of the universe, or majestic on the scale of humanity.\u201cWhen you\u2019re trained in physics it gives you perspective,\u201d Oluseyi says. \u201cYou can shrink yourself down and you can make yourself a giant. I see this feeble species trying to go to space, and on a grand scale you ain\u2019t going nowhere. But being trapped in this gravity, and the amount of energy and science it takes to make a launch happen \u2014 it\u2019s almost miraculous. The fact that so many people, beyond the victimized community, would join in the protests \u2014 it feels like others are feeling the pain in ways they haven\u2019t before.\u201dSunday night, with five humans now on the International Space Station, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., was at his emergency operations center. Melvin Carter (D) was tired, anxious, heartbroken. He was seeing an overlap between the rage from police brutality and the fear triggered by the pandemic. Systems that are supposed to protect and nurture are instead harming and exploiting: law enforcement, the health-care system, the economy. And he sees an opportunity to build something new.\u201cEvery generation has moments that our children will call us to account for,\u201d Carter says. \u201cAnd for our parents and grandparents, we want to know where they were during Freedom Summer, or what they did after Martin Luther King was killed, or \u2018Did you answer the call after Pearl Harbor?\u2019 And I firmly believe \u2014 and I believed it before last week \u2014 that this is a moment in history that our children will call us to account for.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow might a spell in space change one\u2019s perspective on this mess? Fourteen years ago Higginbotham had a view of the Earth from 250 miles up. It wasn\u2019t the blue-marble view that the Apollo crew had, from a greater distance, but her vantage point dramatized the thin blue line of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Almost nothing separates life from the void. But that almost-nothing is everything.\u201cWe had a mini United Nations aboard the shuttle and space station,\u201d Higginbotham says. \u201cIf we could get along and come together for a common good on this tin can of a spacecraft, then how come on Earth \u2014 where there\u2019s so much more space \u2014 we can\u2019t have that same type of unification and commonality and humanity?\u201d\n\n In one historic weekend, astronauts transcended gravity and protesters took up a heavy burden. A flight to space. A fight in the streets. Americans search high and low for hope.",
        "author": "Dan Zak"
    },
    {
        "title": "A flight to space. A fight in the streets. Americans search high and low for hope. (WP: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6632",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-flight-to-space-a-fight-in-the-streets-americans-search-high-and-low-for-hope/2020/06/01/5b1990ea-a376-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html",
        "text": "The Falcon 9 rocket pushed Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into orbit at 16,000 miles per hour. The pepper pellet that hit Darrell Hampton\u2019s face on Earth was traveling at about 1.4 percent that speed, fast enough to shatter the back of his cellphone before walloping his eye and showering his neck with an indescribable burning sensation. Up until that point, Hampton had marched peacefully with other Denver protesters Saturday afternoon, at around the same time astronauts Hurley and Behnken were flying toward the International Space Station. Then around 6 p.m., at West 14th Avenue and Lincoln Street, a masked policeman in riot gear hopped on a vehicle and, as it pulled away, casually squeezed his trigger. \u201cFirst, it was shock,\u201d says Hampton, who works in accounting. \u201cAnd then fear of \u2018What\u2019s happening to my eye right now? Am I going to be able to open it again?\u2019 I didn\u2019t feel like the guy had any reason to do that, other than he was angry.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn cities across the country, crowds had gathered to protest state violence against black Americans days after a Minneapolis man named George Floyd died after spending nearly nine minutes pinned to the pavement under a police officer\u2019s knee.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd miles above the planet, in a capsule 13 feet in diameter, Behnken was weightless. He spun around and showed a floating toy dinosaur that he\u2019d brought along at the request of his sons. \u201cWe\u2019d like to thank the American people for the opportunity today,\u201d Behnken said in video beamed back to Earth. \u201cAnd we\u2019re really proud of the entire team that was able to accomplish human spaceflight again from the Florida coast. Just a wonderful experience.\u201dOver the weekend America watched a billionaire\u2019s private company, under a $2.6 billion government contract, deliver two men into orbit with speed and elegance, and then watched its cities spasm with anger and chaos. The launch was a triumph of ingenuity and collaboration; the widespread unrest was the product of a systems failure: The recent deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor (shot by police in her Louisville home) and Ahmaud Arbery (hunted down by vigilantes in Georgia) caused the social fabric, threaded by generations of racism and frayed by the coronavirus pandemic, to catch fire and explode.The SpaceX rocket, meanwhile, took off from Cape Canaveral in a heave of fire and exhaust. Fort Lauderdale resident Rosie Nwanganga had hopped in a friend\u2019s car Saturday afternoon to drive to Cocoa Beach. After months of quarantine, it was blissful to be on a towel by the water, among smiling and excited humans, waiting for the launch. Through phones and radios, everyone could hear the technical play-by-play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt T-minus 1:48, the crowd heard that Stage 2 of the liquid-oxygen load was complete.At T-minus 0:54, the crowd heard that the flight termination system was armed.At T-minus 0:35, the crowd heard astronaut Hurley say, \u201cLet\u2019s light this candle.\u201dAnd then the Falcon 9 soared like a shooting star on a return trip. Nwanganga felt the vibration in her rib cage. Looking up, she felt exhilaration.Later, looking down at images and video on social media, she felt exhaustion.\u201cWe\u2019re so smart but we\u2019re so behind,\u201d says Nwanganga, 27. \u201cPeople are watching all over the world. They\u2019re seeing something positive, with this launch, but they\u2019re also watching us protest and have to burn places down to get attention. The United States has aced space travel but has failed in equality, and that\u2019s sad.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt the launch, phones were angled up in wonder. Elsewhere, phones were pointed outward in solidarity and suspicion. Along the barricades at Baltimore\u2019s City Hall, a chef named Denicia Baker, 26, was cleaning up bottles thrown by troublemaking white people when, according to Baker, two cops hit her with a shield and baton.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything we\u2019re supposed to be doing,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re policing ourselves. We\u2019ve policed the agitators. It was two black men that hit me. It\u2019s infuriating because no matter what we do, we\u2019re not being treated like humans. It was mind-boggling, it was traumatizing, it was frustrating \u2014 especially because I used to be in the military. They don\u2019t see that. They see my skin color and automatically meet me with brute force.\u201dOn a street in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, after one officer said \u201cLight \u2019em up,\u201d law enforcement shot projectiles at onlookers watching from their own porch. In Brooklyn, an NYPD squad car accelerated into protesters. Cars burned in Cleveland. City Hall burned in Nashville. In the White House, the president wailed on Twitter about \u201cFAKE NEWS!\u201d and \u201cLAW & ORDER!\u201d but gave no formal address to the nation. The country seemed incapable of the care and precision that delivers people to orbit.At her home in Charlotte, former astronaut Joan Higginbotham started watching the launch preparations at T-minus 20:00. She remembered the fat gloves and thousands of switches on the space shuttle Discovery, whose vintage bulk she rode into orbit in 2006 for a mission just shy of 13 days, as she looked at footage of the clean blue touch screens in the sleek SpaceX capsule. This was progress.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHigginbotham was thrilled by the exquisite liftoff from American soil. But the television in her home had been turned off most of last week. She had seen the video of George Floyd\u2019s last moments too many times. Floyd had complained he couldn\u2019t breathe and lay motionless on the ground for almost two minutes before the officer removed his knee. This was the opposite of progress.\u201cFor me, as an African American woman, it is just extremely exhausting and exasperating and it sucks the life out of me when things like this continue to happen in this day and age,\u201d Higginbotham says.Ten miles away from Higginbotham that same afternoon, in downtown Charlotte, three black men of different generations converged on an overpass of Interstate 277, above East 4th Street.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m tired of this s---!\u201d said a 45-year-old man in a white tank top. \u201cWe\u2019ve been standing around, as the older ones, taking all this bulls---! .\u2009.\u2009. Ain\u2019t nobody coming to protect us!\u201dAdvertisementA 31-year-old man named Curtis Hayes Jr. brought over a 16-year-old protester, to make a point. \u201cHe\u2019s 16!\u201d Hayes shouted at the older man.\u201cAnd they going to kill him next week,\u201d the older man said. \u201cAt this point I\u2019m ready to die for what\u2019s going on!\u201dHayes, tears streaming down his face, pivoted to the 16-year-old, gripped his rib cage, and bellowed: \u201cLet me tell you something. What you see right now is gonna happen 10 years from now. And at 26, you gonna be doing the same thing I\u2019m doing! You understand that! Ten years! You\u2019re gonna be right here, too! So what I need y\u2019all to do right now, at 16, is come up with a better way. Because how we doing it \u2014 it ain\u2019t working. He angry at 46. I\u2019m angry at 31. You angry at 16. You understand me?\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cYes, sir, I do,\u201d the teenager said.\u201cPutting yourself in harm\u2019s way,\u201d Hayes said, \u201cis not the way!\u201dVideo shared by Christina Black pic.twitter.com/gIedOF240S\u2014 robertaikiaubreylowe (@lichensarealive) May 31, 2020\n\nThe interaction was recorded and viewed tens of millions of times on Twitter and Facebook. Reached by phone Sunday afternoon, shortly after the astronauts docked with the International Space Station, Hayes explained how black people are done with waiting for progress.Advertisement\u201cI have such anger in my heart, but people of your race do not understand the hurt beneath it \u2014 they only see the anger,\u201d says Hayes, an entrepreneur. \u201cI ask for people to see the hurt. Hurt comes before anger. And my question is \u2018How much do you have to see, and how much do you have to experience, to see the hurt before the rage and the anger? .\u2009.\u2009. The world better hurry up, because right now everybody is still marching for peace, and marching for equality. But soon people will be marching in rage and revenge. And that\u2019s when we\u2019ll have a problem.\u201dThere was looting in Philadelphia and Santa Monica. Police pepper-sprayed and Tasered and flash-bombed journalists and nonviolent protesters. In Atlanta, businesses shuttered by the pandemic were totaled by vandalism. There were also moments when the gravity of the situation gave way. In Flint, Mich., a county sheriff marched with protesters. In Baltimore, at the behest of protesters, a police lieutenant recited the names of people killed by police. In D.C. and El Paso, officers took a knee to show respect to protesters.From his home in Fairfax, Va., astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi considered the video of George Floyd\u2019s death, the footage of SpaceX\u2019s launch, the images of peaceful protests joined by people of all races and even police officers. Growing up in the Deep South, Oluseyi was face down on the pavement many times. People in Athens, Ga., where he was a young researcher, hurled both epithets and projectiles at him.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can look at the current unrest and see deterioration, he says. Or you can look at it and see progress in the scale and diversity of the activism. You can look at launching two men into lower orbit as minuscule on the scale of the universe, or majestic on the scale of humanity.\u201cWhen you\u2019re trained in physics it gives you perspective,\u201d Oluseyi says. \u201cYou can shrink yourself down and you can make yourself a giant. I see this feeble species trying to go to space, and on a grand scale you ain\u2019t going nowhere. But being trapped in this gravity, and the amount of energy and science it takes to make a launch happen \u2014 it\u2019s almost miraculous. The fact that so many people, beyond the victimized community, would join in the protests \u2014 it feels like others are feeling the pain in ways they haven\u2019t before.\u201dSunday night, with five humans now on the International Space Station, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., was at his emergency operations center. Melvin Carter (D) was tired, anxious, heartbroken. He was seeing an overlap between the rage from police brutality and the fear triggered by the pandemic. Systems that are supposed to protect and nurture are instead harming and exploiting: law enforcement, the health-care system, the economy. And he sees an opportunity to build something new.\u201cEvery generation has moments that our children will call us to account for,\u201d Carter says. \u201cAnd for our parents and grandparents, we want to know where they were during Freedom Summer, or what they did after Martin Luther King was killed, or \u2018Did you answer the call after Pearl Harbor?\u2019 And I firmly believe \u2014 and I believed it before last week \u2014 that this is a moment in history that our children will call us to account for.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow might a spell in space change one\u2019s perspective on this mess? Fourteen years ago Higginbotham had a view of the Earth from 250 miles up. It wasn\u2019t the blue-marble view that the Apollo crew had, from a greater distance, but her vantage point dramatized the thin blue line of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Almost nothing separates life from the void. But that almost-nothing is everything.\u201cWe had a mini United Nations aboard the shuttle and space station,\u201d Higginbotham says. \u201cIf we could get along and come together for a common good on this tin can of a spacecraft, then how come on Earth \u2014 where there\u2019s so much more space \u2014 we can\u2019t have that same type of unification and commonality and humanity?\u201d\n\n In one historic weekend, astronauts transcended gravity and protesters took up a heavy burden. A flight to space. A fight in the streets. Americans search high and low for hope.",
        "author": "Dan Zak"
    },
    {
        "title": "A flight to space. A fight in the streets. Americans search high and low for hope. (WP: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6633",
        "date": "2020-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-flight-to-space-a-fight-in-the-streets-americans-search-high-and-low-for-hope/2020/06/01/5b1990ea-a376-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html",
        "text": "The Falcon 9 rocket pushed Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into orbit at 16,000 miles per hour. The pepper pellet that hit Darrell Hampton\u2019s face on Earth was traveling at about 1.4 percent that speed, fast enough to shatter the back of his cellphone before walloping his eye and showering his neck with an indescribable burning sensation. Up until that point, Hampton had marched peacefully with other Denver protesters Saturday afternoon, at around the same time astronauts Hurley and Behnken were flying toward the International Space Station. Then around 6 p.m., at West 14th Avenue and Lincoln Street, a masked policeman in riot gear hopped on a vehicle and, as it pulled away, casually squeezed his trigger. \u201cFirst, it was shock,\u201d says Hampton, who works in accounting. \u201cAnd then fear of \u2018What\u2019s happening to my eye right now? Am I going to be able to open it again?\u2019 I didn\u2019t feel like the guy had any reason to do that, other than he was angry.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn cities across the country, crowds had gathered to protest state violence against black Americans days after a Minneapolis man named George Floyd died after spending nearly nine minutes pinned to the pavement under a police officer\u2019s knee.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd miles above the planet, in a capsule 13 feet in diameter, Behnken was weightless. He spun around and showed a floating toy dinosaur that he\u2019d brought along at the request of his sons. \u201cWe\u2019d like to thank the American people for the opportunity today,\u201d Behnken said in video beamed back to Earth. \u201cAnd we\u2019re really proud of the entire team that was able to accomplish human spaceflight again from the Florida coast. Just a wonderful experience.\u201dOver the weekend America watched a billionaire\u2019s private company, under a $2.6 billion government contract, deliver two men into orbit with speed and elegance, and then watched its cities spasm with anger and chaos. The launch was a triumph of ingenuity and collaboration; the widespread unrest was the product of a systems failure: The recent deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor (shot by police in her Louisville home) and Ahmaud Arbery (hunted down by vigilantes in Georgia) caused the social fabric, threaded by generations of racism and frayed by the coronavirus pandemic, to catch fire and explode.The SpaceX rocket, meanwhile, took off from Cape Canaveral in a heave of fire and exhaust. Fort Lauderdale resident Rosie Nwanganga had hopped in a friend\u2019s car Saturday afternoon to drive to Cocoa Beach. After months of quarantine, it was blissful to be on a towel by the water, among smiling and excited humans, waiting for the launch. Through phones and radios, everyone could hear the technical play-by-play.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt T-minus 1:48, the crowd heard that Stage 2 of the liquid-oxygen load was complete.At T-minus 0:54, the crowd heard that the flight termination system was armed.At T-minus 0:35, the crowd heard astronaut Hurley say, \u201cLet\u2019s light this candle.\u201dAnd then the Falcon 9 soared like a shooting star on a return trip. Nwanganga felt the vibration in her rib cage. Looking up, she felt exhilaration.Later, looking down at images and video on social media, she felt exhaustion.\u201cWe\u2019re so smart but we\u2019re so behind,\u201d says Nwanganga, 27. \u201cPeople are watching all over the world. They\u2019re seeing something positive, with this launch, but they\u2019re also watching us protest and have to burn places down to get attention. The United States has aced space travel but has failed in equality, and that\u2019s sad.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt the launch, phones were angled up in wonder. Elsewhere, phones were pointed outward in solidarity and suspicion. Along the barricades at Baltimore\u2019s City Hall, a chef named Denicia Baker, 26, was cleaning up bottles thrown by troublemaking white people when, according to Baker, two cops hit her with a shield and baton.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re doing everything we\u2019re supposed to be doing,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re policing ourselves. We\u2019ve policed the agitators. It was two black men that hit me. It\u2019s infuriating because no matter what we do, we\u2019re not being treated like humans. It was mind-boggling, it was traumatizing, it was frustrating \u2014 especially because I used to be in the military. They don\u2019t see that. They see my skin color and automatically meet me with brute force.\u201dOn a street in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, after one officer said \u201cLight \u2019em up,\u201d law enforcement shot projectiles at onlookers watching from their own porch. In Brooklyn, an NYPD squad car accelerated into protesters. Cars burned in Cleveland. City Hall burned in Nashville. In the White House, the president wailed on Twitter about \u201cFAKE NEWS!\u201d and \u201cLAW & ORDER!\u201d but gave no formal address to the nation. The country seemed incapable of the care and precision that delivers people to orbit.At her home in Charlotte, former astronaut Joan Higginbotham started watching the launch preparations at T-minus 20:00. She remembered the fat gloves and thousands of switches on the space shuttle Discovery, whose vintage bulk she rode into orbit in 2006 for a mission just shy of 13 days, as she looked at footage of the clean blue touch screens in the sleek SpaceX capsule. This was progress.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHigginbotham was thrilled by the exquisite liftoff from American soil. But the television in her home had been turned off most of last week. She had seen the video of George Floyd\u2019s last moments too many times. Floyd had complained he couldn\u2019t breathe and lay motionless on the ground for almost two minutes before the officer removed his knee. This was the opposite of progress.\u201cFor me, as an African American woman, it is just extremely exhausting and exasperating and it sucks the life out of me when things like this continue to happen in this day and age,\u201d Higginbotham says.Ten miles away from Higginbotham that same afternoon, in downtown Charlotte, three black men of different generations converged on an overpass of Interstate 277, above East 4th Street.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019m tired of this s---!\u201d said a 45-year-old man in a white tank top. \u201cWe\u2019ve been standing around, as the older ones, taking all this bulls---! .\u2009.\u2009. Ain\u2019t nobody coming to protect us!\u201dAdvertisementA 31-year-old man named Curtis Hayes Jr. brought over a 16-year-old protester, to make a point. \u201cHe\u2019s 16!\u201d Hayes shouted at the older man.\u201cAnd they going to kill him next week,\u201d the older man said. \u201cAt this point I\u2019m ready to die for what\u2019s going on!\u201dHayes, tears streaming down his face, pivoted to the 16-year-old, gripped his rib cage, and bellowed: \u201cLet me tell you something. What you see right now is gonna happen 10 years from now. And at 26, you gonna be doing the same thing I\u2019m doing! You understand that! Ten years! You\u2019re gonna be right here, too! So what I need y\u2019all to do right now, at 16, is come up with a better way. Because how we doing it \u2014 it ain\u2019t working. He angry at 46. I\u2019m angry at 31. You angry at 16. You understand me?\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cYes, sir, I do,\u201d the teenager said.\u201cPutting yourself in harm\u2019s way,\u201d Hayes said, \u201cis not the way!\u201dVideo shared by Christina Black pic.twitter.com/gIedOF240S\u2014 robertaikiaubreylowe (@lichensarealive) May 31, 2020\n\nThe interaction was recorded and viewed tens of millions of times on Twitter and Facebook. Reached by phone Sunday afternoon, shortly after the astronauts docked with the International Space Station, Hayes explained how black people are done with waiting for progress.Advertisement\u201cI have such anger in my heart, but people of your race do not understand the hurt beneath it \u2014 they only see the anger,\u201d says Hayes, an entrepreneur. \u201cI ask for people to see the hurt. Hurt comes before anger. And my question is \u2018How much do you have to see, and how much do you have to experience, to see the hurt before the rage and the anger? .\u2009.\u2009. The world better hurry up, because right now everybody is still marching for peace, and marching for equality. But soon people will be marching in rage and revenge. And that\u2019s when we\u2019ll have a problem.\u201dThere was looting in Philadelphia and Santa Monica. Police pepper-sprayed and Tasered and flash-bombed journalists and nonviolent protesters. In Atlanta, businesses shuttered by the pandemic were totaled by vandalism. There were also moments when the gravity of the situation gave way. In Flint, Mich., a county sheriff marched with protesters. In Baltimore, at the behest of protesters, a police lieutenant recited the names of people killed by police. In D.C. and El Paso, officers took a knee to show respect to protesters.From his home in Fairfax, Va., astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi considered the video of George Floyd\u2019s death, the footage of SpaceX\u2019s launch, the images of peaceful protests joined by people of all races and even police officers. Growing up in the Deep South, Oluseyi was face down on the pavement many times. People in Athens, Ga., where he was a young researcher, hurled both epithets and projectiles at him.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can look at the current unrest and see deterioration, he says. Or you can look at it and see progress in the scale and diversity of the activism. You can look at launching two men into lower orbit as minuscule on the scale of the universe, or majestic on the scale of humanity.\u201cWhen you\u2019re trained in physics it gives you perspective,\u201d Oluseyi says. \u201cYou can shrink yourself down and you can make yourself a giant. I see this feeble species trying to go to space, and on a grand scale you ain\u2019t going nowhere. But being trapped in this gravity, and the amount of energy and science it takes to make a launch happen \u2014 it\u2019s almost miraculous. The fact that so many people, beyond the victimized community, would join in the protests \u2014 it feels like others are feeling the pain in ways they haven\u2019t before.\u201dSunday night, with five humans now on the International Space Station, the mayor of St. Paul, Minn., was at his emergency operations center. Melvin Carter (D) was tired, anxious, heartbroken. He was seeing an overlap between the rage from police brutality and the fear triggered by the pandemic. Systems that are supposed to protect and nurture are instead harming and exploiting: law enforcement, the health-care system, the economy. And he sees an opportunity to build something new.\u201cEvery generation has moments that our children will call us to account for,\u201d Carter says. \u201cAnd for our parents and grandparents, we want to know where they were during Freedom Summer, or what they did after Martin Luther King was killed, or \u2018Did you answer the call after Pearl Harbor?\u2019 And I firmly believe \u2014 and I believed it before last week \u2014 that this is a moment in history that our children will call us to account for.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow might a spell in space change one\u2019s perspective on this mess? Fourteen years ago Higginbotham had a view of the Earth from 250 miles up. It wasn\u2019t the blue-marble view that the Apollo crew had, from a greater distance, but her vantage point dramatized the thin blue line of Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Almost nothing separates life from the void. But that almost-nothing is everything.\u201cWe had a mini United Nations aboard the shuttle and space station,\u201d Higginbotham says. \u201cIf we could get along and come together for a common good on this tin can of a spacecraft, then how come on Earth \u2014 where there\u2019s so much more space \u2014 we can\u2019t have that same type of unification and commonality and humanity?\u201d\n\n In one historic weekend, astronauts transcended gravity and protesters took up a heavy burden. A flight to space. A fight in the streets. Americans search high and low for hope.",
        "author": "Dan Zak"
    },
    {
        "title": "At the Area 51 \u2018raid,\u2019 the real alien invaders were the friends they made along the way (WP: Style) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6634",
        "date": "2019-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/at-the-area-51-raid-the-real-alien-invaders-were-the-friends-they-made-along-the-way/2019/09/24/5a99b80c-ded7-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html",
        "text": "RACHEL, Nev. \u2014 Here\u2019s what Karen Peterson remembers about the night, in 1984, when she saw a UFO:She and a friend were driving down a country road in Wisconsin when a strange light descended in front of them. They pulled over and stepped out of the car. The object was one or two stories tall and as wide as an airplane. It made no noise. It had a light that blinked like a pulse. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJust then, another pair of lights appeared: headlights from an approaching car. Karen was momentarily distracted. When she looked up again, the object was gone. Her friend told her it had disappeared straight up into the sky.Karen remembers not being scared. As they drove away, she kept looking out the back window, hoping the thing would reappear. She wanted to see it again.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s how Karen, who still lives in Wisconsin and has worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 27 years, ended up in the Nevada desert last week, one of at least 2,000 people to show up for a gathering inspired by a viral Facebook event advertising a raid of Area 51, the secretive U.S. military base known among conspiracy theorists and in popular culture as the place the government stashed alien spacecraft. (The Pentagon has acknowledged funding UFO research in general, but the U.S. government has said that Area 51 was a secret testing ground for aircraft built by humans.)AdvertisementThe visitors had come to test boundaries. More than 2 million people had RSVP\u2019d to the event, titled \u201cStorm Area 51, they can\u2019t stop all of us.\u201d The meme spread from Facebook to Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Discord and Twitter, morphing along the way. People joked about how they intended to \u201csee them aliens.\u201d The town of Rachel, Nev., which is near-ish to Area 51 but about 45 miles from the nearest gas station, braced for visitors.It wasn\u2019t totally clear how much of the whole thing was a joke \u2014 an Internet meme that got stuck somewhere in the delicate membrane that separates the online world, with its anime-inspired advice for how to sprint in a way that helps you dodge bullets (head forward, arms pointed straight back, it\u2019s called \u201cNaruto running\u201d), and real life, where Area 51 is guarded by armed military officers who probably could stop as many people as they wanted to.Story continues below advertisementAbout those Area 51 conspiracy theories \u2026Who were these people, and why had they come? Some came for the memes. Some came because they love the paranormal or were bored or wanted to sell stuff or some combination of those things. There were teen boys hawking alien T-shirts for gas money. Retired couples in RVs. A middle-aged woman with her five Australian shepherd dogs that had nosed their way into her cooler during the drive and eaten the salami. Two men with a burger truck who said they had seen a UFO on their drive from Austin. A pair of \u201cfurries\u201d (people who wear animal costumes) who spent the night in a wind-battered tent after losing track of their friends because of poor cell reception. A man in a space suit who said he had a million subscribers on YouTube. A dog in a tinfoil hat who said nothing. People in NASA T-shirts. People who insisted NASA was a \u201choax.\u201dAdvertisementAnd Karen Peterson, the Wisconsin postal worker with blue-green hair and some unfinished business.She was here to test another boundary, between the present and the past. It had been 35 years since her encounter on that country road, and she was ready to reconnect with what she saw and felt as an awestruck teenager. She belonged to Facebook groups for people who believed they\u2019d seen UFOs, which is how she learned about the Area 51 \u201craid.\u201d It happened to coincide with her 53rd birthday, so she had persuaded her best friend, Margaret LeMay, who goes by Marge, to fly to Las Vegas and then rent a minivan and drive to the desert.Story continues below advertisementWere they actually going to \u201cstorm\u201d a heavily guarded military base? Would she find out anything more about that gigantic, soundless, blinking object that had appeared to her as a teenager?AdvertisementHow real was any of this?Karen had come to see. But one thing remained the same, all these years later: She wasn\u2019t scared.Rachel, Nev., is not exactly a town. It's a smattering of homes connected by gravel and dirt roads. There's a church that has seen better days and a junkyard. Fewer than 100 people live there. It's not wealthy, but it is beautiful, surrounded by distant mountains and canyons. At night, you can see the Milky Way. During the day, you can browse the alien-themed merchandise at the Little A'Le'Inn, which sells food and cheap beer and tchotchkes to seekers who come to visit the other nearby attractions, which are perpetually closed: a pair of gates, about 40 miles apart, that mark the approaches to Area 51.Story continues below advertisementThese were the gates that the more cavalier of the Alienstock attendees were apparently meant to \u201cstorm\u201d in the early hours of Friday, Sept. 20. On Thursday, during the day, many of them went to scope out the back gate. Karen and Marge got a ride with a man who said he used to work at the base as a civilian.AdvertisementIt was obvious when they arrived that there would be no element of surprise. The scene at the back gate was merry, with law enforcement officers chatting with visitors and even helping to take pictures. A YouTuber interviewed Karen about her UFO story with a small smirk on his face. The man who gave Karen a ride chummed it up with the officers.\u2018Storm Area 51\u2019 event is mostly peaceful, but still plenty weirdAccording to the original Facebook event, the raid was scheduled between 3 and 6 a.m. the next day, but details were scant. Much had changed since the first inklings of this oddball gathering had gone viral. The man who created the Facebook event, Matty Roberts, had disavowed the whole thing, worried about causing another Fyre Festival \u2014 the infamous 2017 gathering in the Bahamas that, due to a combination of social media hype and poor planning, had turned into a fiasco.Story continues below advertisementUnlike Fyre Fest, the people who came to the Nevada desert didn\u2019t seem to expect much in the way of human comforts. Some seemed pleasantly surprised to find that there were porta-potties. Still, the prospect of any kind of coordinated overnight action at Area 51 faced organizational challenges. There was no clear leader, and Internet access in the desert was scarce. As night fell on Sept.\u00a019, people huddled around the WiFi of the closed Little A\u2019Le\u2019Inn as if it were a campfire. Plans were hatched the old-fashioned way: by word of mouth among strangers who were trying to orient themselves to this new, smaller group that they now belonged to: the ones who had shown up.AdvertisementKaren and Marge made friends with two other members of that group, Dan Ray and Michael Creber. Dan was a handsome man who made great eye contact and was open to the possibility that the Earth is flat. He said he worked part of the year as the first mate on a private yacht, ferrying wealthy people down the Eastern Seaboard, and otherwise lived in a blue van, ferrying himself around the country. His business card said \u201cAmerican refugee.\u201d Michael was a former Marine with an immaculate bright-blond mullet who said he had been researching UFOs for 20 years. His most important finding? \u201cThat they\u2019re real.\u201dUFOs are suddenly a serious news story. You can thank the guy from Blink-182 for that.Michael had a theory about what drew a lot of people to the desert. It wasn\u2019t just about manifesting Internet memes or freeing \u201cthem aliens.\u201d It also had to do with a different kind of freedom, the kind humans allow themselves. \u201cThe real reason for this,\u201d he said, grinning, \u201cis people want to party.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd so they did. Michael and Dan and Karen and Marge became neighbors. The group of new friends parked their vehicles close together so they could protect one another from the wrong kinds of weirdos. (You can\u2019t be sure who might appear in the dark or whether they come in peace.) At night, they drank and laughed and shared ideas about the government and aliens and coverups and conspiracies.AdvertisementOn that night in 1984, Karen had told her parents about the two-story craft with pulsing lights. Her mom had laughed, but her father grew serious. He told her he believed her \u2014 that he, too, had seen a UFO once, in the 1950s, while he was a soldier stationed in Japan. He felt that he couldn\u2019t tell anyone about it at the time.She had felt the same way about her own encounter until about a decade ago. Now, in the desert, Karen felt as comfortable speaking about it as ever. Everybody wanted to hear her story.Story continues below advertisementHer father passed away in 2001. They hadn\u2019t talked about her experience much after the night it happened, but it made her feel uniquely connected to him \u2014 something she didn\u2019t take for granted as one of 11 children. Karen remembered telling her dad that what she\u2019d experienced was a \u201conce-in-a-lifetime thing.\u201dAnd she remembered his response: \u201cDon\u2019t bet on it.\u201dEarly the next morning, while it was still dark, life-forms began to stir. Car lights blinked on. Whoops of laughter cut through the cold predawn air.AdvertisementAt the front gate, a pair of officers, one from the Nevada Department of Public Safety, the other from the Park Service, had spent the early hours greeting visitors as if they were trick-or-treaters. A few hundred feet away, on a hill, the headlights of an SUV pierced the dark. It belonged to the base\u2019s official military security personnel, known among tourists as the \u201ccamo dudes,\u201d who seemed to be monitoring things from afar.Story continues below advertisementThe previous day, Karen had talked with young revelers about meeting at the front gate before dawn. She had meant to set her alarm for 2:30 a.m., but it didn\u2019t take, and she overslept. She finally arrived at the front gate with Marge and Dan as the sun was beginning to rise. They were the 28th, 29th and 30th visitors of the morning, according to the officers.Was this all there was to the raid? Had they missed it?AdvertisementYes and no. There had been a \u201craid\u201d \u2014 if you could call it that \u2014 at the back gate, according to the officers. A group of maybe 50 people showed up at once. Parts of the scene would appear later online. One video showed a setting that resembled a tailgate. Mostly it was a lot of guys standing around and chuckling and chanting lewd memes about alien lust while good-natured officers patiently watched.Another video featured two men and a woman in silver bodysuits. \u201cWe\u2019re not here for photos. We\u2019re here to rescue the aliens!\u201d shouted one of the men, who was wearing blue face paint and sunglasses. The threesome lined up and Naruto-ran toward the gate, stopping short of the giant \u201cStop\u201d sign. (The officers standing guard didn\u2019t even bother to block their path.) Afterward, the woman twerked for the cameras.At the front gate, as the dawn gathered behind them, Karen and Marge commemorated their own version of the Area 51 raid, taking photos to send to their children. Karen posed in an alien mask. Then she danced and laughed and cheered and shouted up to the camo dudes: \u201cFree them aliens!\u201d She yelled that it was her birthday and that she had come all the way from Wisconsin.\u201cWe know what you\u2019re hiding in there!\u201d she shouted, joyously. \u201cCome on, free them! Woo! We\u2019re here to free the aliens!\u201dThe camo dudes did not reply.\u201cI thought there would be so many people!\u201d Karen said. \u201cThey\u2019re missing out. They\u2019re missing out.\u201dIt was an odd little postcard of a scene: Two middle-aged ladies from the Midwest and their new friend, Dan the American Refugee. They were far from 1984, far from the Internet, far from \u201cthey can\u2019t stop all of us\u201d and the burlesque that had unfolded at the back gate. But they were close to something \u2014 an experience, a feeling. She would remember this.\u201cI\u2019m so glad I came,\u201d said Karen. \u201cThis a bucket-list place. I\u2019m so happy I came. This is the best birthday a girl could ever have.\u201dShe turned to taunt the camo dudes some more, then grew quieter for a moment.\u201cI just want to see aliens,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to see them again.\u201dBut the gate wasn\u2019t going to open. Marge and Dan turned to leave. Karen lingered. The Earth had completed another rotation, and the sun bathed the desert in orange light. As celestial events go it was as routine as they come, but it was still a wonder. Karen was feeling grateful.\u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have seen the sunrise,\u201d she said, walking away from the gate, \u201cif it wasn\u2019t for the aliens.\u201d Memes, memories and a search for intelligent life in the Nevada desert. At the Area 51 \u2018raid,\u2019 the real alien invaders were the friends they made along the way",
        "author": "Hannah Jewell"
    },
    {
        "title": "The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck (WP: Style) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6635",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-hard-charging-space-program-breakthroughs-breakdowns-and-breakneck/2019/06/18/21a7438a-8152-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html",
        "text": "Back then, in the \u201960s, rocket scientists were the badass dudes of innovation. Just the title was about the highest brainiac accolade that could be conferred. As in, he\u2019s smart, but he\u2019s no rocket scientist.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs NASA worked relentlessly to fulfill John F. Kennedy\u2019s goal of landing a man on the moon by decade\u2019s end, it turned to the nation\u2019s engineers. Many of them were fresh out of school, running the gamut from mechanical to electrical engineers, because that\u2019s mostly what was taught in universities, and almost exclusively to white men. In archival Apollo 11 photos and footage, it\u2019s a \u201cWhere\u2019s Waldo?\u201d exercise to spot a woman or person of color.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t want to be politically incorrect here, but the workforce, the culture, was white male. In the firing room, we had almost 500 people and we have one female, one black guy and one Hispanic,\u201d says Ike Rigell, 96, chief engineer and deputy director of launch vehicle operations at the Kennedy Space Center in Central Florida. \u201cThat was the culture.\u201dAdvertisementBrevard County was the nation\u2019s space boom town of smart young people. Its population soared to 230,006 by 1970, a tenfold increase in two decades. NASA and its many contractors were the Google and Apple of their day \u2014 the place to be.Space travel was new \u2014 Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took his breakthrough flight only in 1961, followed weeks later by Alan Shepard \u2014 and popular culture was smitten. Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d a dystopian meditation on time, space travel and a willful computer ruled the box office in 1968.Apollo 11: Follow the coverageTelevision offered the final frontier of \u201cStar Trek,\u201d the indelible adventures of the Starship Enterprise as it roamed a galaxy in the 23rd century. \u201cI Dream of Jeannie\u201d featured a pair of Cocoa Beach astronauts and a midriff-baring genie.Story continues below advertisementRichard Nixon was newly in the White House. American military involvement in Vietnam, the war that defined the decade, was an open wound. Engineering and science students received Selective Service deferments, their fields deemed critical to the national interest. Florida NASA test team project engineer Bob Sieck, a former Air Force lieutenant, was informed that he was \u201ca national asset with responsibility on a government mission. I\u2019m just not wearing a uniform anymore.\u201dAdvertisementThe 400,000 people in the space program \u2014 the population of modern Tulsa \u2014 were engaged in a different battle, and they were spread across the country. Congress doled out money to virtually every state for \u201cthe largest civilian project ever undertaken,\u201d Charles Fishman wrote in \u201cOne Giant Leap.\u201d He calculates that \u201cevery hour of spaceflight required more than 1 million hours of work on the ground.\u201d\u201cWe were at the height of the Vietnam War, competing for dollars. The money was flowing. We had a mission. We were in a race with another country, an adversary. That was what the whole thing was about,\u201d says Jim Ogle, who worked in McDonnell Douglas\u2019s Saturn electronics division and was stationed in the firing room the July morning of the launch. \u201cRussia had beaten us into space. The decision was we had to beat them.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat year, the supersonic transport Concorde took its maiden flight from Toulouse, France, introducing the notion that mere mortals \u2014 deep-pocketed mortals \u2014 could also soon travel somewhere faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementMusic, too, gazed toward the heavens and into the future. The week of the Apollo 11 liftoff, Zager and Evans\u2019s \u201cIn the Year 2525,\u201d Blood Sweat & Tears\u2019 \u201cSpinning Wheel\u201d (\u201cWhat goes up must come down\u201d), Oliver\u2019s \u201cGood Morning Starshine\u201d (from the Broadway rock musical juggernaut \u201cHair\u201d) and Creedence Clearwater Revival\u2019s \u201cBad Moon Rising\u201d crested the Billboard chart.The space program imagined the future. Yet the community of trim haircuts, shaved chins, white shirts (with contractors\u2019 company badges emblazoned on their pockets) and pressed slacks, led by many veterans of World War II, seemed decades removed from the prevalent culture that was shaggier, angrier and sometimes stoned.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMidnight Cowboy\u201d played in the movie theaters. \u201cEasy Rider\u201d opened two days before the launch. The Stonewall riots occurred a few weeks before liftoff.Advertisement\u201cI wasn\u2019t antiwar at the time,\u201d says Parrish Nelson Hirasaki, one of the few female engineers in the space program, who worked on the heat shield in Houston. \u201cI came from a family with a lot of people in the military. It was what it was. We hadn\u2019t turned the corner that [the war] was wrong.\u201d The work environment \u201cwas much more conservative in general than the rest of the country. But not for Texas.\u201dThe mission\u2019s mantra was \u201cFailure is not an option\u201d \u2014 the title of flight director Gene Kranz\u2019s memoir. The world outside was not ignored. They watched the war when they went home at night but didn\u2019t discuss it much at work. Staff members were aware that many Americans were critical of billions being spent on space when the War on Poverty hadn\u2019t been won on Earth. But they held the conviction that what they did mattered and would alter history.Story continues below advertisementIn 1966, Frances \u201cPoppy\u201d Northcutt was hired as a \u201ccomputress,\u201d a title that sounds as though she was a female machine. She worked for TRW, an aerospace pioneer in Houston later acquired by Northrop Grumman. Still, equipment was big and slow. Computers were the size of apartments. Punch cards were fed into computers, the info arriving hours or days later, in heaps of printouts. Communication was by phone \u2014 or speakerphone for a group \u2014 and TWX, a telex machine. Hardware was assembled from woven wire and metal rings knitted with long needles, requiring weeks of work. Backup equipment was installed for nearly everything because things failed. Things failed all the time.AdvertisementWhen Northcutt was promoted after more than a year, her salary spiked to $150 a week, a raise of 60 percent. She became a return-to-Earth specialist, calculating the mission trajectory \u2014 her degree is in mathematics \u2014 and became the first woman in a technical position in Houston.More often, women were employed as secretaries. Before email, correspondence had to be typed by someone, and with multiple carbon copies.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEverything was written as if in a foreign language,\u201d says Barbara Higginbotham Ogle, a secretary and the 1,000th employee to be hired in 1966 for $5.44 an hour by Douglas Aircraft Co. in Florida. (It became McDonnell Douglas the following year). Her skills: typing at 71 cwpm (correct words per minute) and shorthand at 140 words a minute \u201cIt was a steep learning curve,\u201d she says. \u201cTyping orders for managers, we had to be perfect. No Wite-Out. When you were preparing for a launch, there was an endless amount of paper coming in.\u201dAdvertisementJudy Wyatt served as secretary to George Low, the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program in Houston. (He was named NASA deputy administrator in December 1969.) \u201cI was the early girl,\u201d says Wyatt, one of three secretaries who took dictation and typed his letters (both at 120 correct words per minute) from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.Fear that the Soviets would land on the moon first hung over the mission. In 1969, \u201cI remember Mr. Low asking Dr. Gilruth [director of Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth], \u2018What are our friends across the water doing?\u2019 meaning the Russians. And Dr. Gilruth answered, \u2018We are A-OK,\u2019 that we were cleared for launch.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWomen also served on the medical staff. \u201cAbout 30 percent of the computer programmers were women,\u201d Northcutt says, like the women heralded in \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d At higher echelons? Not so much.AdvertisementAt TRW, \u201cthere were a couple hundred men. It was very engineer-style macho. By the time of Apollo 11, people were sort of used to me,\u201d Northcutt says. \u201cI was used to being the only woman in the room.\u201d And she was in the room all the time. \u201cWe were working insane hours, seven days a week.\u201dIt was a tumultuous year of change, yet women in the space program weren\u2019t permitted to wear slacks. Northcutt and Hirasaki were in their 20s, with long hair, and favored miniskirts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere were a couple of guys who were pretty \u2018handsy.\u2019 Nobody did a thing about it,\u201d Hirasaki says. But \u201cnobody was going to mess with Poppy. They\u2019d ask her to make them coffee, and she would say, \u2018My ovaries do not uniquely qualify me to make coffee.\u2019 \u201dNorthcutt was assigned to Mission Control, working in the Mission Planning and Analysis room. Cameras pointed everywhere during testing, on multiple channels with constant chatter from engineers.Advertisement\u201cYou listened to these various channels in your headset, a challenge to tune in or tune out what you needed to hear,\u201d she says.Then Northcutt overheard chatter specifically about her.\u201cI realized that one camera was focused entirely on me,\u201d she says. Working for the space program \u201cilluminated of lot of things I didn\u2019t know about, like wage protections that discriminated against women.\u201d Later, Northcutt became a lawyer and president of the Texas chapter of the National Organization for Women.They caroused with the same intensity they brought to the workplace. Launch parties after each mission were blowouts. \u201cIt was fun,\u201d Hirasaki says, echoing the sentiment of many engineers. \u201cIt was really exciting. Everyone who wasn\u2019t in the program thought we were rock stars.\u201dShe lived in the Balboa apartment complex a couple of blocks from the Manned Spacecraft Center on Nassau Bay. Weekends were long parties. \u201cWe had hootenannies in the apartments, 30 people sitting around singing songs by the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez.\u201d She married neighbor and fellow engineer John Hirasaki, one of the few Asian Americans employed by the program. Ultimately, he was given a plum assignment as recovery engineer inside the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a converted Airstream trailer, with the flight crew and surgeon aboard the USS Hornet, 900 miles southwest of Hawaii in the North Pacific Ocean.Work, so much work, became a challenge to family life.\u201cEngineers are different,\u201d Jim Ogle says. \u201cThey worked all those hours, then came home to the garage, building a sailboat, building an airplane.\u201d Northcutt recalls that in Houston, \u201ca lot of guys had sailboats, but they worked on their boats more than they took them out sailing.\u201dWith work all-encompassing, \u201cit took a real toll on the family environment. A lot of families just didn\u2019t survive,\u201d Sieck says. \u201cIt was long hours. You finally got a Saturday off, you played golf or went fishing or had an afternoon poker party with fellow worker friends.\u201d Sunday, it was often back to work.Divorce was rampant. Especially in Florida. Cape Canaveral became the capital of kaput unions. The court was overwhelmed.In Brevard County, 1,600 divorce cases were filed each year in the late 1960s, and 1,200 granted, Judge Volie Williams told a local publication.Ike Rigell made sure that wouldn\u2019t happen to him. \u201cI left my work at the space center,\u201d he says.\u201cThat saved our marriage,\u201d says Kathryn Rigell. \u201cWhen we got him, he came home, he was daddy. He was Ike.\u201dDuring those amazing days in July, the world turned its eyes to the moon and glory showered on NASA and the space program. \u201cWe\u2019d done our job,\u201d Rigell says. \u201cThere was this tremendous feeling of elation.\u201dWithin days, layoff notices started papering Brevard County.The Earth continued to spin on its axis. The moon illuminated the night sky. Then, three weeks after splashdown, more than 400,000 young people gathered for a music festival at a dairy farm near Woodstock, N.Y.Correction: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect name for director of Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth and for Nassau Bay.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsOur moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactor The culture that put men on the moon was intense, fun, family-unfriendly, and mostly white and male. The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck",
        "author": "Karen Heller"
    },
    {
        "title": "The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck (WP: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6636",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-hard-charging-space-program-breakthroughs-breakdowns-and-breakneck/2019/06/18/21a7438a-8152-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html",
        "text": "Back then, in the \u201960s, rocket scientists were the badass dudes of innovation. Just the title was about the highest brainiac accolade that could be conferred. As in, he\u2019s smart, but he\u2019s no rocket scientist.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs NASA worked relentlessly to fulfill John F. Kennedy\u2019s goal of landing a man on the moon by decade\u2019s end, it turned to the nation\u2019s engineers. Many of them were fresh out of school, running the gamut from mechanical to electrical engineers, because that\u2019s mostly what was taught in universities, and almost exclusively to white men. In archival Apollo 11 photos and footage, it\u2019s a \u201cWhere\u2019s Waldo?\u201d exercise to spot a woman or person of color.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t want to be politically incorrect here, but the workforce, the culture, was white male. In the firing room, we had almost 500 people and we have one female, one black guy and one Hispanic,\u201d says Ike Rigell, 96, chief engineer and deputy director of launch vehicle operations at the Kennedy Space Center in Central Florida. \u201cThat was the culture.\u201dAdvertisementBrevard County was the nation\u2019s space boom town of smart young people. Its population soared to 230,006 by 1970, a tenfold increase in two decades. NASA and its many contractors were the Google and Apple of their day \u2014 the place to be.Space travel was new \u2014 Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took his breakthrough flight only in 1961, followed weeks later by Alan Shepard \u2014 and popular culture was smitten. Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d a dystopian meditation on time, space travel and a willful computer ruled the box office in 1968.Apollo 11: Follow the coverageTelevision offered the final frontier of \u201cStar Trek,\u201d the indelible adventures of the Starship Enterprise as it roamed a galaxy in the 23rd century. \u201cI Dream of Jeannie\u201d featured a pair of Cocoa Beach astronauts and a midriff-baring genie.Story continues below advertisementRichard Nixon was newly in the White House. American military involvement in Vietnam, the war that defined the decade, was an open wound. Engineering and science students received Selective Service deferments, their fields deemed critical to the national interest. Florida NASA test team project engineer Bob Sieck, a former Air Force lieutenant, was informed that he was \u201ca national asset with responsibility on a government mission. I\u2019m just not wearing a uniform anymore.\u201dAdvertisementThe 400,000 people in the space program \u2014 the population of modern Tulsa \u2014 were engaged in a different battle, and they were spread across the country. Congress doled out money to virtually every state for \u201cthe largest civilian project ever undertaken,\u201d Charles Fishman wrote in \u201cOne Giant Leap.\u201d He calculates that \u201cevery hour of spaceflight required more than 1 million hours of work on the ground.\u201d\u201cWe were at the height of the Vietnam War, competing for dollars. The money was flowing. We had a mission. We were in a race with another country, an adversary. That was what the whole thing was about,\u201d says Jim Ogle, who worked in McDonnell Douglas\u2019s Saturn electronics division and was stationed in the firing room the July morning of the launch. \u201cRussia had beaten us into space. The decision was we had to beat them.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat year, the supersonic transport Concorde took its maiden flight from Toulouse, France, introducing the notion that mere mortals \u2014 deep-pocketed mortals \u2014 could also soon travel somewhere faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementMusic, too, gazed toward the heavens and into the future. The week of the Apollo 11 liftoff, Zager and Evans\u2019s \u201cIn the Year 2525,\u201d Blood Sweat & Tears\u2019 \u201cSpinning Wheel\u201d (\u201cWhat goes up must come down\u201d), Oliver\u2019s \u201cGood Morning Starshine\u201d (from the Broadway rock musical juggernaut \u201cHair\u201d) and Creedence Clearwater Revival\u2019s \u201cBad Moon Rising\u201d crested the Billboard chart.The space program imagined the future. Yet the community of trim haircuts, shaved chins, white shirts (with contractors\u2019 company badges emblazoned on their pockets) and pressed slacks, led by many veterans of World War II, seemed decades removed from the prevalent culture that was shaggier, angrier and sometimes stoned.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMidnight Cowboy\u201d played in the movie theaters. \u201cEasy Rider\u201d opened two days before the launch. The Stonewall riots occurred a few weeks before liftoff.Advertisement\u201cI wasn\u2019t antiwar at the time,\u201d says Parrish Nelson Hirasaki, one of the few female engineers in the space program, who worked on the heat shield in Houston. \u201cI came from a family with a lot of people in the military. It was what it was. We hadn\u2019t turned the corner that [the war] was wrong.\u201d The work environment \u201cwas much more conservative in general than the rest of the country. But not for Texas.\u201dThe mission\u2019s mantra was \u201cFailure is not an option\u201d \u2014 the title of flight director Gene Kranz\u2019s memoir. The world outside was not ignored. They watched the war when they went home at night but didn\u2019t discuss it much at work. Staff members were aware that many Americans were critical of billions being spent on space when the War on Poverty hadn\u2019t been won on Earth. But they held the conviction that what they did mattered and would alter history.Story continues below advertisementIn 1966, Frances \u201cPoppy\u201d Northcutt was hired as a \u201ccomputress,\u201d a title that sounds as though she was a female machine. She worked for TRW, an aerospace pioneer in Houston later acquired by Northrop Grumman. Still, equipment was big and slow. Computers were the size of apartments. Punch cards were fed into computers, the info arriving hours or days later, in heaps of printouts. Communication was by phone \u2014 or speakerphone for a group \u2014 and TWX, a telex machine. Hardware was assembled from woven wire and metal rings knitted with long needles, requiring weeks of work. Backup equipment was installed for nearly everything because things failed. Things failed all the time.AdvertisementWhen Northcutt was promoted after more than a year, her salary spiked to $150 a week, a raise of 60 percent. She became a return-to-Earth specialist, calculating the mission trajectory \u2014 her degree is in mathematics \u2014 and became the first woman in a technical position in Houston.More often, women were employed as secretaries. Before email, correspondence had to be typed by someone, and with multiple carbon copies.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEverything was written as if in a foreign language,\u201d says Barbara Higginbotham Ogle, a secretary and the 1,000th employee to be hired in 1966 for $5.44 an hour by Douglas Aircraft Co. in Florida. (It became McDonnell Douglas the following year). Her skills: typing at 71 cwpm (correct words per minute) and shorthand at 140 words a minute \u201cIt was a steep learning curve,\u201d she says. \u201cTyping orders for managers, we had to be perfect. No Wite-Out. When you were preparing for a launch, there was an endless amount of paper coming in.\u201dAdvertisementJudy Wyatt served as secretary to George Low, the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program in Houston. (He was named NASA deputy administrator in December 1969.) \u201cI was the early girl,\u201d says Wyatt, one of three secretaries who took dictation and typed his letters (both at 120 correct words per minute) from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.Fear that the Soviets would land on the moon first hung over the mission. In 1969, \u201cI remember Mr. Low asking Dr. Gilruth [director of Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth], \u2018What are our friends across the water doing?\u2019 meaning the Russians. And Dr. Gilruth answered, \u2018We are A-OK,\u2019 that we were cleared for launch.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWomen also served on the medical staff. \u201cAbout 30 percent of the computer programmers were women,\u201d Northcutt says, like the women heralded in \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d At higher echelons? Not so much.AdvertisementAt TRW, \u201cthere were a couple hundred men. It was very engineer-style macho. By the time of Apollo 11, people were sort of used to me,\u201d Northcutt says. \u201cI was used to being the only woman in the room.\u201d And she was in the room all the time. \u201cWe were working insane hours, seven days a week.\u201dIt was a tumultuous year of change, yet women in the space program weren\u2019t permitted to wear slacks. Northcutt and Hirasaki were in their 20s, with long hair, and favored miniskirts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere were a couple of guys who were pretty \u2018handsy.\u2019 Nobody did a thing about it,\u201d Hirasaki says. But \u201cnobody was going to mess with Poppy. They\u2019d ask her to make them coffee, and she would say, \u2018My ovaries do not uniquely qualify me to make coffee.\u2019 \u201dNorthcutt was assigned to Mission Control, working in the Mission Planning and Analysis room. Cameras pointed everywhere during testing, on multiple channels with constant chatter from engineers.Advertisement\u201cYou listened to these various channels in your headset, a challenge to tune in or tune out what you needed to hear,\u201d she says.Then Northcutt overheard chatter specifically about her.\u201cI realized that one camera was focused entirely on me,\u201d she says. Working for the space program \u201cilluminated of lot of things I didn\u2019t know about, like wage protections that discriminated against women.\u201d Later, Northcutt became a lawyer and president of the Texas chapter of the National Organization for Women.They caroused with the same intensity they brought to the workplace. Launch parties after each mission were blowouts. \u201cIt was fun,\u201d Hirasaki says, echoing the sentiment of many engineers. \u201cIt was really exciting. Everyone who wasn\u2019t in the program thought we were rock stars.\u201dShe lived in the Balboa apartment complex a couple of blocks from the Manned Spacecraft Center on Nassau Bay. Weekends were long parties. \u201cWe had hootenannies in the apartments, 30 people sitting around singing songs by the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez.\u201d She married neighbor and fellow engineer John Hirasaki, one of the few Asian Americans employed by the program. Ultimately, he was given a plum assignment as recovery engineer inside the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a converted Airstream trailer, with the flight crew and surgeon aboard the USS Hornet, 900 miles southwest of Hawaii in the North Pacific Ocean.Work, so much work, became a challenge to family life.\u201cEngineers are different,\u201d Jim Ogle says. \u201cThey worked all those hours, then came home to the garage, building a sailboat, building an airplane.\u201d Northcutt recalls that in Houston, \u201ca lot of guys had sailboats, but they worked on their boats more than they took them out sailing.\u201dWith work all-encompassing, \u201cit took a real toll on the family environment. A lot of families just didn\u2019t survive,\u201d Sieck says. \u201cIt was long hours. You finally got a Saturday off, you played golf or went fishing or had an afternoon poker party with fellow worker friends.\u201d Sunday, it was often back to work.Divorce was rampant. Especially in Florida. Cape Canaveral became the capital of kaput unions. The court was overwhelmed.In Brevard County, 1,600 divorce cases were filed each year in the late 1960s, and 1,200 granted, Judge Volie Williams told a local publication.Ike Rigell made sure that wouldn\u2019t happen to him. \u201cI left my work at the space center,\u201d he says.\u201cThat saved our marriage,\u201d says Kathryn Rigell. \u201cWhen we got him, he came home, he was daddy. He was Ike.\u201dDuring those amazing days in July, the world turned its eyes to the moon and glory showered on NASA and the space program. \u201cWe\u2019d done our job,\u201d Rigell says. \u201cThere was this tremendous feeling of elation.\u201dWithin days, layoff notices started papering Brevard County.The Earth continued to spin on its axis. The moon illuminated the night sky. Then, three weeks after splashdown, more than 400,000 young people gathered for a music festival at a dairy farm near Woodstock, N.Y.Correction: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect name for director of Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth and for Nassau Bay.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsOur moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactor The culture that put men on the moon was intense, fun, family-unfriendly, and mostly white and male. The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck",
        "author": "Karen Heller"
    },
    {
        "title": "The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck (WP: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6637",
        "date": "2019-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-hard-charging-space-program-breakthroughs-breakdowns-and-breakneck/2019/06/18/21a7438a-8152-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html",
        "text": "Back then, in the \u201960s, rocket scientists were the badass dudes of innovation. Just the title was about the highest brainiac accolade that could be conferred. As in, he\u2019s smart, but he\u2019s no rocket scientist.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs NASA worked relentlessly to fulfill John F. Kennedy\u2019s goal of landing a man on the moon by decade\u2019s end, it turned to the nation\u2019s engineers. Many of them were fresh out of school, running the gamut from mechanical to electrical engineers, because that\u2019s mostly what was taught in universities, and almost exclusively to white men. In archival Apollo 11 photos and footage, it\u2019s a \u201cWhere\u2019s Waldo?\u201d exercise to spot a woman or person of color.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t want to be politically incorrect here, but the workforce, the culture, was white male. In the firing room, we had almost 500 people and we have one female, one black guy and one Hispanic,\u201d says Ike Rigell, 96, chief engineer and deputy director of launch vehicle operations at the Kennedy Space Center in Central Florida. \u201cThat was the culture.\u201dAdvertisementBrevard County was the nation\u2019s space boom town of smart young people. Its population soared to 230,006 by 1970, a tenfold increase in two decades. NASA and its many contractors were the Google and Apple of their day \u2014 the place to be.Space travel was new \u2014 Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took his breakthrough flight only in 1961, followed weeks later by Alan Shepard \u2014 and popular culture was smitten. Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d a dystopian meditation on time, space travel and a willful computer ruled the box office in 1968.Apollo 11: Follow the coverageTelevision offered the final frontier of \u201cStar Trek,\u201d the indelible adventures of the Starship Enterprise as it roamed a galaxy in the 23rd century. \u201cI Dream of Jeannie\u201d featured a pair of Cocoa Beach astronauts and a midriff-baring genie.Story continues below advertisementRichard Nixon was newly in the White House. American military involvement in Vietnam, the war that defined the decade, was an open wound. Engineering and science students received Selective Service deferments, their fields deemed critical to the national interest. Florida NASA test team project engineer Bob Sieck, a former Air Force lieutenant, was informed that he was \u201ca national asset with responsibility on a government mission. I\u2019m just not wearing a uniform anymore.\u201dAdvertisementThe 400,000 people in the space program \u2014 the population of modern Tulsa \u2014 were engaged in a different battle, and they were spread across the country. Congress doled out money to virtually every state for \u201cthe largest civilian project ever undertaken,\u201d Charles Fishman wrote in \u201cOne Giant Leap.\u201d He calculates that \u201cevery hour of spaceflight required more than 1 million hours of work on the ground.\u201d\u201cWe were at the height of the Vietnam War, competing for dollars. The money was flowing. We had a mission. We were in a race with another country, an adversary. That was what the whole thing was about,\u201d says Jim Ogle, who worked in McDonnell Douglas\u2019s Saturn electronics division and was stationed in the firing room the July morning of the launch. \u201cRussia had beaten us into space. The decision was we had to beat them.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThat year, the supersonic transport Concorde took its maiden flight from Toulouse, France, introducing the notion that mere mortals \u2014 deep-pocketed mortals \u2014 could also soon travel somewhere faster than the speed of sound.AdvertisementMusic, too, gazed toward the heavens and into the future. The week of the Apollo 11 liftoff, Zager and Evans\u2019s \u201cIn the Year 2525,\u201d Blood Sweat & Tears\u2019 \u201cSpinning Wheel\u201d (\u201cWhat goes up must come down\u201d), Oliver\u2019s \u201cGood Morning Starshine\u201d (from the Broadway rock musical juggernaut \u201cHair\u201d) and Creedence Clearwater Revival\u2019s \u201cBad Moon Rising\u201d crested the Billboard chart.The space program imagined the future. Yet the community of trim haircuts, shaved chins, white shirts (with contractors\u2019 company badges emblazoned on their pockets) and pressed slacks, led by many veterans of World War II, seemed decades removed from the prevalent culture that was shaggier, angrier and sometimes stoned.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMidnight Cowboy\u201d played in the movie theaters. \u201cEasy Rider\u201d opened two days before the launch. The Stonewall riots occurred a few weeks before liftoff.Advertisement\u201cI wasn\u2019t antiwar at the time,\u201d says Parrish Nelson Hirasaki, one of the few female engineers in the space program, who worked on the heat shield in Houston. \u201cI came from a family with a lot of people in the military. It was what it was. We hadn\u2019t turned the corner that [the war] was wrong.\u201d The work environment \u201cwas much more conservative in general than the rest of the country. But not for Texas.\u201dThe mission\u2019s mantra was \u201cFailure is not an option\u201d \u2014 the title of flight director Gene Kranz\u2019s memoir. The world outside was not ignored. They watched the war when they went home at night but didn\u2019t discuss it much at work. Staff members were aware that many Americans were critical of billions being spent on space when the War on Poverty hadn\u2019t been won on Earth. But they held the conviction that what they did mattered and would alter history.Story continues below advertisementIn 1966, Frances \u201cPoppy\u201d Northcutt was hired as a \u201ccomputress,\u201d a title that sounds as though she was a female machine. She worked for TRW, an aerospace pioneer in Houston later acquired by Northrop Grumman. Still, equipment was big and slow. Computers were the size of apartments. Punch cards were fed into computers, the info arriving hours or days later, in heaps of printouts. Communication was by phone \u2014 or speakerphone for a group \u2014 and TWX, a telex machine. Hardware was assembled from woven wire and metal rings knitted with long needles, requiring weeks of work. Backup equipment was installed for nearly everything because things failed. Things failed all the time.AdvertisementWhen Northcutt was promoted after more than a year, her salary spiked to $150 a week, a raise of 60 percent. She became a return-to-Earth specialist, calculating the mission trajectory \u2014 her degree is in mathematics \u2014 and became the first woman in a technical position in Houston.More often, women were employed as secretaries. Before email, correspondence had to be typed by someone, and with multiple carbon copies.Story continues below advertisement\u201cEverything was written as if in a foreign language,\u201d says Barbara Higginbotham Ogle, a secretary and the 1,000th employee to be hired in 1966 for $5.44 an hour by Douglas Aircraft Co. in Florida. (It became McDonnell Douglas the following year). Her skills: typing at 71 cwpm (correct words per minute) and shorthand at 140 words a minute \u201cIt was a steep learning curve,\u201d she says. \u201cTyping orders for managers, we had to be perfect. No Wite-Out. When you were preparing for a launch, there was an endless amount of paper coming in.\u201dAdvertisementJudy Wyatt served as secretary to George Low, the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program in Houston. (He was named NASA deputy administrator in December 1969.) \u201cI was the early girl,\u201d says Wyatt, one of three secretaries who took dictation and typed his letters (both at 120 correct words per minute) from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.Fear that the Soviets would land on the moon first hung over the mission. In 1969, \u201cI remember Mr. Low asking Dr. Gilruth [director of Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth], \u2018What are our friends across the water doing?\u2019 meaning the Russians. And Dr. Gilruth answered, \u2018We are A-OK,\u2019 that we were cleared for launch.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWomen also served on the medical staff. \u201cAbout 30 percent of the computer programmers were women,\u201d Northcutt says, like the women heralded in \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d At higher echelons? Not so much.AdvertisementAt TRW, \u201cthere were a couple hundred men. It was very engineer-style macho. By the time of Apollo 11, people were sort of used to me,\u201d Northcutt says. \u201cI was used to being the only woman in the room.\u201d And she was in the room all the time. \u201cWe were working insane hours, seven days a week.\u201dIt was a tumultuous year of change, yet women in the space program weren\u2019t permitted to wear slacks. Northcutt and Hirasaki were in their 20s, with long hair, and favored miniskirts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere were a couple of guys who were pretty \u2018handsy.\u2019 Nobody did a thing about it,\u201d Hirasaki says. But \u201cnobody was going to mess with Poppy. They\u2019d ask her to make them coffee, and she would say, \u2018My ovaries do not uniquely qualify me to make coffee.\u2019 \u201dNorthcutt was assigned to Mission Control, working in the Mission Planning and Analysis room. Cameras pointed everywhere during testing, on multiple channels with constant chatter from engineers.Advertisement\u201cYou listened to these various channels in your headset, a challenge to tune in or tune out what you needed to hear,\u201d she says.Then Northcutt overheard chatter specifically about her.\u201cI realized that one camera was focused entirely on me,\u201d she says. Working for the space program \u201cilluminated of lot of things I didn\u2019t know about, like wage protections that discriminated against women.\u201d Later, Northcutt became a lawyer and president of the Texas chapter of the National Organization for Women.They caroused with the same intensity they brought to the workplace. Launch parties after each mission were blowouts. \u201cIt was fun,\u201d Hirasaki says, echoing the sentiment of many engineers. \u201cIt was really exciting. Everyone who wasn\u2019t in the program thought we were rock stars.\u201dShe lived in the Balboa apartment complex a couple of blocks from the Manned Spacecraft Center on Nassau Bay. Weekends were long parties. \u201cWe had hootenannies in the apartments, 30 people sitting around singing songs by the Kingston Trio and Joan Baez.\u201d She married neighbor and fellow engineer John Hirasaki, one of the few Asian Americans employed by the program. Ultimately, he was given a plum assignment as recovery engineer inside the Mobile Quarantine Facility, a converted Airstream trailer, with the flight crew and surgeon aboard the USS Hornet, 900 miles southwest of Hawaii in the North Pacific Ocean.Work, so much work, became a challenge to family life.\u201cEngineers are different,\u201d Jim Ogle says. \u201cThey worked all those hours, then came home to the garage, building a sailboat, building an airplane.\u201d Northcutt recalls that in Houston, \u201ca lot of guys had sailboats, but they worked on their boats more than they took them out sailing.\u201dWith work all-encompassing, \u201cit took a real toll on the family environment. A lot of families just didn\u2019t survive,\u201d Sieck says. \u201cIt was long hours. You finally got a Saturday off, you played golf or went fishing or had an afternoon poker party with fellow worker friends.\u201d Sunday, it was often back to work.Divorce was rampant. Especially in Florida. Cape Canaveral became the capital of kaput unions. The court was overwhelmed.In Brevard County, 1,600 divorce cases were filed each year in the late 1960s, and 1,200 granted, Judge Volie Williams told a local publication.Ike Rigell made sure that wouldn\u2019t happen to him. \u201cI left my work at the space center,\u201d he says.\u201cThat saved our marriage,\u201d says Kathryn Rigell. \u201cWhen we got him, he came home, he was daddy. He was Ike.\u201dDuring those amazing days in July, the world turned its eyes to the moon and glory showered on NASA and the space program. \u201cWe\u2019d done our job,\u201d Rigell says. \u201cThere was this tremendous feeling of elation.\u201dWithin days, layoff notices started papering Brevard County.The Earth continued to spin on its axis. The moon illuminated the night sky. Then, three weeks after splashdown, more than 400,000 young people gathered for a music festival at a dairy farm near Woodstock, N.Y.Correction: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect name for director of Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth and for Nassau Bay.What the Space Age taught us: Earth is the best of all possible worldsOur moon \u2014 partner, protector, benefactor The culture that put men on the moon was intense, fun, family-unfriendly, and mostly white and male. The hard-charging space program: Breakthroughs, breakups and breakneck",
        "author": "Karen Heller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Harvard\u2019s top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us \u2014 and he doesn\u2019t care what his colleagues think (WP: Style) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6638",
        "date": "2019-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/harvards-top-astronomer-says-an-alien-ship-may-be-among-us--and-he-doesnt-care-what-his-colleagues-think/2019/02/04/a5d70bb0-24d5-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html",
        "text": "Editor\u2019s note:\n An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the statement North Carolina State University astrophysicist Katie Mack made to the Verge about why an astrophysicist might publish a theory he doesn\u2019t believe to be true. It has been corrected.\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCAMBRIDGE, Mass. \u2014 Before he started the whole alien spaceship thing last year, the chairman of Harvard University's astronomy department was known for public lectures on modesty. Personal modesty, which Avi Loeb said he learned growing up on a farm. And what Loeb calls \"cosmic modesty\" \u2014 the idea that it's arrogant to assume we are alone in the universe, or even a particularly special species. You can find a poster for one of these lectures in Loeb's office today, though it's a bit lost among the clutter: photos of Loeb posing under the dome of Harvard's enormous 19th-century telescope; thank-you notes from elementary-school children; a framed interview he gave the New York Times in 2014; his books on the formation of galaxies; his face, again and again \u2014 a bespectacled man in his mid-50s with a perpetually satisfied smile.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb stands beside his desk on the first morning of spring courses in a creaseless suit, stapling syllabi for his afternoon class. He points visitors to this and that on the wall. He mentions that four TV crews were in this office on the day in the fall when his spaceship theory went viral, and now five film companies are interested in making a movie about his life.A neatly handwritten page of equations sits on the desk, on the edge closest to the guest chairs.\u201cOh, this is something I did last night,\u201d Loeb says. It\u2019s a calculation, he explains, supporting his theory that an extraterrestrial spacecraft, or at least a piece of one, may at this moment be flying past the orbit of Jupiter.Story continues below advertisementSince publishing his controversial paper, Loeb has run a nearly nonstop media circuit, embracing the celebrity that comes from being perhaps the most academically distinguished E.T. enthusiast of his time \u2014 the top Harvard astronomer who suspects technology from another solar system just showed up at our door. And this, in turn, has left some of his peers nonplused \u2014 grumbling at what they see as a flimsy theory or bewildered as to why Harvard\u2019s top astronomer won\u2019t shut up about aliens.AdvertisementThe Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)What you can\u2019t call Loeb is a crank. When astronomers in Hawaii stumbled across the first known interstellar object in late 2017 \u2014 a blip of light moving so fast past the sun that it could only have come from another star \u2014 Loeb had three decades of Ivy League professorship and hundreds of astronomical publications on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9, mostly to do with the nature of black holes and early galaxies and other subjects far from any tabloid shelf.So when seemingly every astronomer on the planet was trying to figure out how the interstellar object (dubbed \u2018Oumuamua, Hawaiian for \u201cscout\u201d) got to our remote patch of Milky Way, Loeb\u2019s extraordinarily confident suggestion that it probably came from another civilization could not be easily dismissed.\u201cConsidering an artificial origin, one possibility is that \u2018Oumuamua\u201d \u2014 pronounced Oh-mooah-mooah \u2014 \u201cis a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,\u201d Loeb wrote with his colleague Shmuel Bialy in Astrophysical Journal Letters in November \u2014 thrilling E.T. enthusiasts and upsetting the fragile orbits of space academia.\"'Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it,\" tweeted Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, shortly after the paper published.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA shocking example of sensationalist, ill-motivated science,\u201d theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wrote in Forbes.North Carolina State University astrophysicist Katie Mack suggested to the Verge that Loeb was engaging in a common practice in which an astrophysicist poses a theory that they might not believe. \u201cSometimes you write a paper about something that you don\u2019t believe to be true at all, just for the purpose of putting out there,\u201d she told the publication.Most scientists besides Loeb assume \u2018Oumuamua is some sort of rock, be it an asteroid ejected from some star in meltdown hundreds of millions of years ago, or an icy comet wandering the interstellar void. But it\u2019s moving too fast for an inert rock, Loeb points out \u2014 zooming away from the sun as if something is pushing it from behind. And if it\u2019s a comet spewing jets of steam, the limited observations astronomers made of it showed no sign.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb argues that \u2018Oumuamua\u2019s behavior means it can\u2019t be, as is commonly imagined, a clump of rock shaped like a long potato, but rather an object that\u2019s very long and no more than 1 millimeter thick, perhaps like a kilometer-long obloid pancake \u2014 or a ship sail \u2014 so light and thin that sunlight is pushing it out of our solar system.And while he\u2019s not saying it\u2019s definitely aliens, he is saying he can\u2019t think of anything other than aliens that fits the data. And he\u2019s saying that all over international news.\u201cMany people expected once there would be this publicity, I would back down,\u201d Loeb says. \u201cIf someone shows me evidence to the contrary, I will immediately back down.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the meantime, he\u2019s doubling down, hosting a Reddit AMA on \u201chow the discovery of alien life in space will transform our life,\u201d and constantly emailing his \u201cfriends and colleagues\u201d with updates on all the reporters who are speaking to him.AdvertisementIn a matter of months, Loeb has become a one-man alternative to the dirge of terrestrial news.\u201cIt changes your perception on reality, just knowing that we\u2019re not alone,\u201d he says. \u201cWe are fighting on borders, on resources. .\u2009.\u2009. It would make us feel part of planet Earth as a civilization rather than individual countries voting on Brexit.\u201dSo now he is famous, styling himself as a truth-teller and risk-taker in an age of overly conservative, quiescent scientists.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe mainstream approach [is] you can sort of drink your coffee in the morning and expect what you will find later on. It\u2019s a stable lifestyle, but for me it resembles more the lifestyle of a business person rather than scientists,\u201d he says.\u201cThe worst thing that can happen to me is I would be relieved of my administrative duties, and that would give me even more time to focus on science,\u201d Loeb adds. \u201cAll the titles I have, I can dial them back. In fact, I can dial myself back to the farm.\u201dLoeb grew up in an Israeli farming village. He would sit in the hills and read philosophy books imagining the broader universe, he says, a fascination that led him into academia and all the way to 'Oumuamua.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t have a class system in my head of academia being the elite,\u201d he says, as he leads a reporter into the locked chamber of the Great Refractor \u2014 an enormous 19th-century telescope where he sometimes does photo ops. \u201cI see it as a continuation of childhood curiosity \u2014 trying to understand what the world is like.\u201dHe joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in the late 1980s (\u201cWhere Einstein used to be,\u201d he notes) and later took a junior position in Harvard\u2019s astronomy department, where \u201cfor 20 years no one had been promoted from within .\u2009.\u2009. They tenured me after three years.\u201d)As he tells it, his life story sounds like a cerebral version of \u201cForrest Gump\u201d \u2014 Loeb always single-mindedly pursuing his science and intersecting with the giants of the field, whom he regularly name-drops. Stephen Hawking had dinner at his house. Steven Spielberg once asked him for movie tips. Billionaire Yuri Milner once walked into his office and sat on the couch and asked him to help design humanity\u2019s first interstellar spaceship \u2014 which he is now doing, with a research budget of $100\u00a0million and the endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg and the late Hawking.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb mentions casually that when he was 24 years old he got a private audience with the famed physicist Freeman Dyson \u2014 and then pauses for effect beneath the 20-foot shaft of the Great Refractor, grinning until he realizes the reporter doesn\u2019t know who Freeman Dyson is.UFOs are suddenly a serious news story. You can thank the guy from Blink-182 for that.At midday, Loeb leaves the telescope and his office and descends to a bare white classroom to introduce the basics of astrophysics to a dozen new students.If he\u2019s mastered the national news interview by now, his lecture begins a bit stilted. He looks down at the table as he speaks. He asks the freshmen at this most prestigious of universities to go around the table and list their hobbies.Ten minutes later, Loeb goes off script.\u201cDid anyone hear the name \u2018Oumuamua?\u201d he asks. \u201cWhat did it mean?\u201dAlmost everyone nods, and freshman Matt Jacobsen, who came to Harvard from an Iowa farm town, volunteers quietly: \u201cThere was speculation that it was from another civilization.\u201d\u201cWho made that speculation?\u201d Loeb asks, smiling.There\u2019s an awkward silence in the room, and then Jacobsen cries, \u201cWas it you? Oh, my gosh!\u201d and the professor smiles wider.Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Steven Spielberg\u2019s name and Yuri Milner\u2019s name.Read more\n:The extraordinary life and death of the world\u2019s oldest known spider Ever since Avi Loeb\u2019s controversial paper about the object, dubbed \u2018Oumuamua, he\u2019s become a spokesman for the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. Harvard\u2019s top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us \u2014 and he doesn\u2019t care what his colleagues think",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Harvard\u2019s top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us \u2014 and he doesn\u2019t care what his colleagues think (WP: Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6639",
        "date": "2019-02-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/harvards-top-astronomer-says-an-alien-ship-may-be-among-us--and-he-doesnt-care-what-his-colleagues-think/2019/02/04/a5d70bb0-24d5-11e9-90cd-dedb0c92dc17_story.html",
        "text": "Editor\u2019s note:\n An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the statement North Carolina State University astrophysicist Katie Mack made to the Verge about why an astrophysicist might publish a theory he doesn\u2019t believe to be true. It has been corrected.\nWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCAMBRIDGE, Mass. \u2014 Before he started the whole alien spaceship thing last year, the chairman of Harvard University's astronomy department was known for public lectures on modesty. Personal modesty, which Avi Loeb said he learned growing up on a farm. And what Loeb calls \"cosmic modesty\" \u2014 the idea that it's arrogant to assume we are alone in the universe, or even a particularly special species. You can find a poster for one of these lectures in Loeb's office today, though it's a bit lost among the clutter: photos of Loeb posing under the dome of Harvard's enormous 19th-century telescope; thank-you notes from elementary-school children; a framed interview he gave the New York Times in 2014; his books on the formation of galaxies; his face, again and again \u2014 a bespectacled man in his mid-50s with a perpetually satisfied smile.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb stands beside his desk on the first morning of spring courses in a creaseless suit, stapling syllabi for his afternoon class. He points visitors to this and that on the wall. He mentions that four TV crews were in this office on the day in the fall when his spaceship theory went viral, and now five film companies are interested in making a movie about his life.A neatly handwritten page of equations sits on the desk, on the edge closest to the guest chairs.\u201cOh, this is something I did last night,\u201d Loeb says. It\u2019s a calculation, he explains, supporting his theory that an extraterrestrial spacecraft, or at least a piece of one, may at this moment be flying past the orbit of Jupiter.Story continues below advertisementSince publishing his controversial paper, Loeb has run a nearly nonstop media circuit, embracing the celebrity that comes from being perhaps the most academically distinguished E.T. enthusiast of his time \u2014 the top Harvard astronomer who suspects technology from another solar system just showed up at our door. And this, in turn, has left some of his peers nonplused \u2014 grumbling at what they see as a flimsy theory or bewildered as to why Harvard\u2019s top astronomer won\u2019t shut up about aliens.AdvertisementThe Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a 2017 admission from the government was like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)What you can\u2019t call Loeb is a crank. When astronomers in Hawaii stumbled across the first known interstellar object in late 2017 \u2014 a blip of light moving so fast past the sun that it could only have come from another star \u2014 Loeb had three decades of Ivy League professorship and hundreds of astronomical publications on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9, mostly to do with the nature of black holes and early galaxies and other subjects far from any tabloid shelf.So when seemingly every astronomer on the planet was trying to figure out how the interstellar object (dubbed \u2018Oumuamua, Hawaiian for \u201cscout\u201d) got to our remote patch of Milky Way, Loeb\u2019s extraordinarily confident suggestion that it probably came from another civilization could not be easily dismissed.\u201cConsidering an artificial origin, one possibility is that \u2018Oumuamua\u201d \u2014 pronounced Oh-mooah-mooah \u2014 \u201cis a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,\u201d Loeb wrote with his colleague Shmuel Bialy in Astrophysical Journal Letters in November \u2014 thrilling E.T. enthusiasts and upsetting the fragile orbits of space academia.\"'Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it,\" tweeted Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University, shortly after the paper published.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cA shocking example of sensationalist, ill-motivated science,\u201d theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel wrote in Forbes.North Carolina State University astrophysicist Katie Mack suggested to the Verge that Loeb was engaging in a common practice in which an astrophysicist poses a theory that they might not believe. \u201cSometimes you write a paper about something that you don\u2019t believe to be true at all, just for the purpose of putting out there,\u201d she told the publication.Most scientists besides Loeb assume \u2018Oumuamua is some sort of rock, be it an asteroid ejected from some star in meltdown hundreds of millions of years ago, or an icy comet wandering the interstellar void. But it\u2019s moving too fast for an inert rock, Loeb points out \u2014 zooming away from the sun as if something is pushing it from behind. And if it\u2019s a comet spewing jets of steam, the limited observations astronomers made of it showed no sign.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb argues that \u2018Oumuamua\u2019s behavior means it can\u2019t be, as is commonly imagined, a clump of rock shaped like a long potato, but rather an object that\u2019s very long and no more than 1 millimeter thick, perhaps like a kilometer-long obloid pancake \u2014 or a ship sail \u2014 so light and thin that sunlight is pushing it out of our solar system.And while he\u2019s not saying it\u2019s definitely aliens, he is saying he can\u2019t think of anything other than aliens that fits the data. And he\u2019s saying that all over international news.\u201cMany people expected once there would be this publicity, I would back down,\u201d Loeb says. \u201cIf someone shows me evidence to the contrary, I will immediately back down.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the meantime, he\u2019s doubling down, hosting a Reddit AMA on \u201chow the discovery of alien life in space will transform our life,\u201d and constantly emailing his \u201cfriends and colleagues\u201d with updates on all the reporters who are speaking to him.AdvertisementIn a matter of months, Loeb has become a one-man alternative to the dirge of terrestrial news.\u201cIt changes your perception on reality, just knowing that we\u2019re not alone,\u201d he says. \u201cWe are fighting on borders, on resources. .\u2009.\u2009. It would make us feel part of planet Earth as a civilization rather than individual countries voting on Brexit.\u201dSo now he is famous, styling himself as a truth-teller and risk-taker in an age of overly conservative, quiescent scientists.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe mainstream approach [is] you can sort of drink your coffee in the morning and expect what you will find later on. It\u2019s a stable lifestyle, but for me it resembles more the lifestyle of a business person rather than scientists,\u201d he says.\u201cThe worst thing that can happen to me is I would be relieved of my administrative duties, and that would give me even more time to focus on science,\u201d Loeb adds. \u201cAll the titles I have, I can dial them back. In fact, I can dial myself back to the farm.\u201dLoeb grew up in an Israeli farming village. He would sit in the hills and read philosophy books imagining the broader universe, he says, a fascination that led him into academia and all the way to 'Oumuamua.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t have a class system in my head of academia being the elite,\u201d he says, as he leads a reporter into the locked chamber of the Great Refractor \u2014 an enormous 19th-century telescope where he sometimes does photo ops. \u201cI see it as a continuation of childhood curiosity \u2014 trying to understand what the world is like.\u201dHe joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., in the late 1980s (\u201cWhere Einstein used to be,\u201d he notes) and later took a junior position in Harvard\u2019s astronomy department, where \u201cfor 20 years no one had been promoted from within .\u2009.\u2009. They tenured me after three years.\u201d)As he tells it, his life story sounds like a cerebral version of \u201cForrest Gump\u201d \u2014 Loeb always single-mindedly pursuing his science and intersecting with the giants of the field, whom he regularly name-drops. Stephen Hawking had dinner at his house. Steven Spielberg once asked him for movie tips. Billionaire Yuri Milner once walked into his office and sat on the couch and asked him to help design humanity\u2019s first interstellar spaceship \u2014 which he is now doing, with a research budget of $100\u00a0million and the endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg and the late Hawking.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLoeb mentions casually that when he was 24 years old he got a private audience with the famed physicist Freeman Dyson \u2014 and then pauses for effect beneath the 20-foot shaft of the Great Refractor, grinning until he realizes the reporter doesn\u2019t know who Freeman Dyson is.UFOs are suddenly a serious news story. You can thank the guy from Blink-182 for that.At midday, Loeb leaves the telescope and his office and descends to a bare white classroom to introduce the basics of astrophysics to a dozen new students.If he\u2019s mastered the national news interview by now, his lecture begins a bit stilted. He looks down at the table as he speaks. He asks the freshmen at this most prestigious of universities to go around the table and list their hobbies.Ten minutes later, Loeb goes off script.\u201cDid anyone hear the name \u2018Oumuamua?\u201d he asks. \u201cWhat did it mean?\u201dAlmost everyone nods, and freshman Matt Jacobsen, who came to Harvard from an Iowa farm town, volunteers quietly: \u201cThere was speculation that it was from another civilization.\u201d\u201cWho made that speculation?\u201d Loeb asks, smiling.There\u2019s an awkward silence in the room, and then Jacobsen cries, \u201cWas it you? Oh, my gosh!\u201d and the professor smiles wider.Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Steven Spielberg\u2019s name and Yuri Milner\u2019s name.Read more\n:The extraordinary life and death of the world\u2019s oldest known spider Ever since Avi Loeb\u2019s controversial paper about the object, dubbed \u2018Oumuamua, he\u2019s become a spokesman for the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. Harvard\u2019s top astronomer says an alien ship may be among us \u2014 and he doesn\u2019t care what his colleagues think",
        "author": "Avi Selk"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Snoo is a $1,500 bassinet \u2014 and a touchstone for parental judgment, anxiety and privilege (WP: Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6640",
        "date": "2021-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/snoo-millennial-parents/2021/07/12/e9fa501a-e02e-11eb-9f54-7eee10b5fcd2_story.html",
        "text": "Seven weeks after Jessica Scalia gave birth to her son James, the situation was both extremely common and completely dire. Her son was not sleeping, which meant she and her husband weren\u2019t, either.\u201cI was desperate,\u201d she says. \u201cI was willing to try anything.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo, at an ungodly hour on one particularly bad night, she made an impulse decision to rent a Snoo \u2014 a nearly $1,500 robotic bassinet that automatically soothes fussy babies with motion and white noise. She had heard about the Snoo, which uses artificial intelligence and sensors to listen for a baby\u2019s cries and rock them back to sleep, but had written off the device as overhyped. The company behind the Snoo, Happiest Baby, claimed that it could give parents an extra two hours of sleep each night, which sounded like a fantasy to Scalia. And friends who used it evangelized \u2014 and bragged \u2014 about their sleep-gifted infants.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBefore I had a baby, I [was] just like, this is ridiculous,\u201d says Scalia, who lives in Nashville. \u201cWho needs to spend this much money on a bassinet, especially when there are so many more affordable options?\u201dBy the end of the first week with the Snoo, Scalia, 29, had become a believer. James, who had previously never slept more than an hour and a half at a time, could sleep four hours at a time.Meanwhile, in Minnesota\u2019s Twin Cities, colleagues were asking Alicia House, 35, how her newborn son, Harten, was sleeping \u2014 \u201cYou know, in a sarcastic, sort of snarky way,\u201d she says. \u201cAlmost like they know in their mind, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re not sleeping, and this must be really rough.\u2019\u2009\u201dStory continues below advertisementLittle did they know, House had started Harten in the Snoo a few days after he was born. \u201cActually, really well,\u201d she\u2019d respond, delighting that this was both an unexpected answer and a truthful one.AdvertisementAnd over in Lafayette, Calif., Chelsea Azevedo, 30, found the Snoo to be so effective for her daughter, Sophie, that some nights she found herself awoken by the need to pump breast milk for her baby, who remained fast asleep.\u201cI would be so jealous of her,\u201d she says.Few other technological advancements have inspired the same level of reverence among parents, bordering on religious devotion, as the Snoo. Invented by pediatrician Harvey Karp, the Snoo automates the principles that Karp has long taught in his book, \u201cThe Happiest Baby on the Block\u201d: that babies can be prompted to sleep with stimuli that mimic the conditions of the womb, including swaddling and swinging.Story continues below advertisementBut for some parents the Snoo has become yet another vehicle for judgment, anxiety and privilege. The fancy bassinet has a way of separating even well-to-do parents into the Snoos and the Snoo-nots. The members of the former group don\u2019t help their case much when they brag about all the restful sleep they and their infants are getting every night.AdvertisementBasically, the bassinet has become an emblem of everything there is to love and lament about the millennial yuppie parenting lifestyle.Notably, the Snoo does not look like a robot. Its shape is more akin to the Scandinavian and mid-century designs that are popping up in stylish nurseries: a white, minimalist bassinet with hairpin legs that looks great on Instagram.Story continues below advertisementBut because it \u201clistens\u201d for a baby\u2019s fussing and adjusts the level of motion and sound accordingly, and pings mom and dad via an app if the fussing continues, and keeps a daily log of the baby\u2019s sleep and wake-up times, it can appear intimidatingly futuristic.\u201cMy in-laws were like, \u2018Uh, what is this thing? It looks like an alien spaceship,\u2019\u2009\u201d says Carolina Wagner, a 33-year-old new mom in Windsor, Ontario.\u201cI had to, like, soothe everyone around me,\u201d says Wagner, who assured her husband\u2019s parents that the Snoo was \u201cnot a robo-nanny.\u201dAdvertisementAt a time when people have willingly allowed the Internet of Things to take over their homes and cars and exercise routines, some people may still see child care \u2014 particularly the relationship between parents and newborns \u2014 as dicey territory for even the most benevolent-seeming technology.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a microcosm of the greater conversation that we\u2019re having about the role of technology and robots and A.I. in our lives, and how far we want to let that go,\u201d says Virginia Salo, a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt University who studies parent-child interaction, and has begun a study of the Snoo.Salo has also used the device as a parent, and found it helpful. It\u2019s possible to think of the Snoo as something more like a high-tech pacifier, rather than some ungodly combination of Mary Poppins and the HAL 9000, she says.AdvertisementKarp, the Snoo developer, suggests an even less threatening analogy. \u201cIt\u2019s like a vacuum cleaner,\u201d he says, \u201cor, you know, a blender.\u201dStory continues below advertisementKristina, a 31-year-old new mom who lives in Ottawa, says she doesn\u2019t want her friends to know she has a Snoo because her family and neighbors have been so judgmental. Some members of her family have told her Snoo users are \u201clazy\u201d and \u201ctaking the easy way out\u201d and that \u201cback in the day, we had to rock our baby to sleep.\u201d\u201cWhen it was delivered, it was on our front porch. And the neighbors saw it and didn\u2019t say anything then, but when our little one was born, they said, \u2018How is he sleeping?\u2019\u2009\u201d When Kristina told them he was sleeping well, \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Yeah, of course he is, because you\u2019re cheating.\u2019\u2009\u201d\u201cI think the judgment first stems from jealousy,\u201d says Camila Spaeth, 34, of Houston. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t afford the $1,500 price tag.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou don\u2019t have to pay that much, Spaeth points out: She bought her Snoo secondhand, on Facebook Marketplace, for $500 and plans to resell it as soon as her son, Jaxon, outgrows it.\u201cYou can pretty much spend as little as zero to 50 bucks on it, and get somewhere between four and six months out of it,\u201d she says.Alternatively, Happiest Baby will rent you a Snoo from the company for about $150 a month \u2014 rentals now account for half the Snoo population.\u201cOur goal is to have teachers and truckers and nurses,\u201d using Snoo, not just the privileged few, says Karp, who pushed back on the notion that the device is pricey.\u201cYou have a 24-hour caregiver for the cost of 16 cents an hour,\u201d Karp says. \u201cHow much of a better deal can anyone get?\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe secondhand Snoo market has become so hot that a new scam has popped up: Thieves rent a Snoo on a credit card, which they cancel, so the company can\u2019t continue to charge them the monthly rental fee. They then sell the Snoo to another set of unwitting parents, who bring it home to discover that the company has remotely disabled the device \u2014 meaning they\u2019ve just bought a very expensive motionless bassinet.AdvertisementOne hapless parent, sharing a story of a stolen Snoo on Reddit\u2019s \u201cSnooLife\u201d forum, called the company to see what could be done. \u201cI tell them my story, and the best [the company] can offer is a discount on a new one, or the same rate for a rental one,\u201d the parent wrote. \u201cBut the best part, they want their unit back.\u201d\"When these issues are brought to our attention, we work directly with customers to sort out exactly what is going on,\u201d a company spokeswoman said, encouraging people to rent directly from Happiest Baby to avoid problems.There are broader public health applications for the Snoo\u2019s technology. Poor sleep can lead to postpartum depression, and a 2020 study by a team of researchers at Penn State University found that \u201cirregular maternal sleep patterns are significant predictors of poor quality of mothering with infants at bedtime.\u201d Karp says the Snoo prevents Sudden Infant Death Syndrome by keeping babies strapped in a swaddle on their backs, the safest position. It is being studied for use in hospitals, particularly with children with health complications.AdvertisementJust as some parents worry that their children can become dependent on pacifiers, other parents worry that their children \u2014 or, really, they \u2014 could become dependent on the Snoo. Which can mean problems if the technology goes wonky on them.One Reddit post about a month ago from a frazzled parent noted that the European servers were down, and she could not connect to her app. A common question in forums is how to bring a Snoo on a plane, or where to rent one at a destination.Spaeth, the Houston mom, has a backup generator that will power her Snoo if the electricity goes out, like it did in Texas during a winter storm earlier this year.\u201cI don\u2019t know how our trip is going to go because we cannot bring the Snoo to Mexico, but I wish we could,\u201d says Azevedo, fretting about an upcoming vacation.Marissa Niemyjski, 31, talks about her Snoo as if it\u2019s another member of the family along with her daughter, Lily.\u201cWe\u2019ll be eating dinner or something and we\u2019ll hear crying on the monitor as we\u2019re watching her, and we\u2019ll say, \u2018Oh, just let the Snoo do its thing,\u2019\u2009\u201d she says. \u201cRight now, at 10 weeks, she just slept 10 hours last night.\u201dParents also can fall into unhealthy patterns obsessing over the data their Snoo collects. Some of the members of various Snoo social media groups post screenshots of their logs, either to troubleshoot \u2014 a lot of red means the baby needed plenty of soothing \u2014 or to brag about their placid, uninterrupted 10-hour sleep stints. On the SnooLife subreddit, the latter is called a \u201cSnoo Flex\u201d or sometimes a \u201cwaterfall\u201d \u2014 the shape that a blue line of perfect night sleep makes in the chart.\u201cChasing waterfalls,\u201d as Wagner calls it, can lead to anxiety.Salo, the Vanderbilt researcher, experienced something like that as a Snoo user.\u201cI would find myself checking it in the morning and having the thought process of like, \u2018Oh, this is what happened per the data, so today is going to be a good day, or a bad day,\u2019\u2009\u201d Salo says. She had to force herself to stop checking them so frequently.But the waterfalls are still aspirational. Once Wagner\u2019s daughter hit 12 hours of sleep, she says, \u201cIt really felt like I made it. I\u2019m in the club.\u201d\n\n Also, it\u2019s artificially intelligent. The Snoo is a $1,500 bassinet \u2014 and a touchstone for parental judgment, anxiety and privilege",
        "author": "Maura Judkis"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Selina to Stalin: The man behind \u2018Veep\u2019 talks satire and cynicism (WP: Style) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6641",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-selina-to-stalin-the-man-behind-veep-talks-satire-and-cynicism/2018/03/16/1f5a3c22-26f4-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html",
        "text": "Armando Iannucci likes to tell a story that may explain his take on politics: When the filmmaker\u2019s father was a teenager in Mussolini\u2019s Italy, he wrote for an anti-fascist newspaper, going on to fight, as a partisan, against \u201cil Duce\u201d and Hitler during World War II. But after emigrating to the United Kingdom, where his son would grow up, the elder Iannucci never applied for citizenship or registered to vote. Iannucci, who dropped out of doctoral studies at Oxford to become a comedian, writer and filmmaker, asked him why. After all, the son said, \u201cYou fought for democracy.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAh, democracy,\u201d Iannucci says his father replied. \u201cThe last time I voted, Mussolini got in.\u201dIt sounds like a joke from one of Iannucci\u2019s projects, which include the Oscar-nominated 2009 film \u201cIn the Loop\u201d and the award-winning TV shows \u201cThe Thick of It\u201d and \u201cVeep.\u201d But it helps to understand the 54-year-old director\u2019s worldview: \u201cJust don\u2019t think because it\u2019s democracy that bad things can\u2019t happen,\u201d Iannucci says. \u201cBecause they can.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIannucci\u2019s latest film, \u201cThe Death of Stalin,\u201d is a fact-based farce, adapted from a graphic novel and set during the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet premier\u2019s death in 1953. Starring Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin and Simon Russell Beale, it\u2019s a period piece with surprising contemporary resonance and a nasty bite.The London-based Iannucci phoned from New York, where he was promoting the darkly comic film, to talk about the challenges of speaking truth to power in an age when political reality sometimes seems to parody itself. Q: A few years ago, in an interview with John Oliver, you referred to what you do, facetiously, as \"harmless fun.\" I wonder whether \"harmful fun\" might not be a better, if oxymoronic, term for the art of the satirist.Story continues below advertisementA: I\u2019d love to know exactly what kind of harm you think I\u2019ve ever achieved. Political satire can be various things, but I\u2019ve never felt you can change, say, how people will vote.AdvertisementQ: No. For that, you need Facebook. A: [Laughing] If you want to change people\u2019s minds, you should go out and campaign. Or you should become a journalist or a lobbyist. All I\u2019ve ever tried to do is to respond when I\u2019m suspicious of something that doesn\u2019t feel right. I\u2019m looking for ways in which I can articulate that \u2014 and help articulate it for other people \u2014 by channeling various emotions: bewilderment, anger, frustration.Q: Sounds like a form of therapy.A: Laughter is healthy. We are the only animal that makes jokes. But I\u2019m also trying to show how certain things can happen. How is it that, under Stalin, lots of people who were perfectly intelligent still acted like crazies? How is it that a political leader can go into office with one set of beliefs, but seven or eight years later, their belief system turns into something else? AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: So, you see yourself as more evangelist than therapist?A: I\u2019m not trying to tell people what to believe. I\u2019m just trying to explain, through all that I\u2019ve encountered, and through my observation and my research, how these things come about.Q: Jon Stewart used to call \"The Daily Show\" fake news. Now that phrase is being used in an entirely different way.\n\nA: Fake news, in the original sense, is something that looks like it might be satire but isn\u2019t. It has the form of a joke. When we did [the public affairs parody show] \u201cThe Day Today\u201d 25 years ago, we were making things up, trying to project them as convincingly as possible. We wanted the audience to think, \u201cYeah, but this is false.\u201d What\u2019s happening now is you\u2019ve got \u201cfake news\u201d because people want you to believe it. That\u2019s changed how comedians have to approach Trump. The people who I think really have made some kind of an impact against Trump are people like John Oliver, who have got teams of researchers. Basically they\u2019re just laying out facts. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: I sense a certain ambivalence about your job.A: Yeah. I worry, because especially in the U.K., comedy acts as a safety valve. We don\u2019t go out in the street and protest, because we have a rich heritage and tradition of satire. It\u2019s that line that [comedian] Peter Cooke used to say about how he admired the comedy done in Weimar Germany and how it did so much to stop the rise of Hitler.Q: Ouch. A: In the U.K., our greatest political comedy was done in the 1980s, which also saw Margaret Thatcher win three elections. I worry whether comedy defuses the anger. My concern today is that any kind of fictional, comic version of what\u2019s going on is not as absurd as what\u2019s actually going on.Story continues below advertisementQ: \"The Death of Stalin\" is very funny, although people get tortured and shot in it. It also plays as a veiled allegory of the present moment.AdvertisementA: It\u2019s interesting that I felt I had to go all the way back to 1953 to make that point. My next film is going to be an adaptation of \u201cDavid Copperfield,\u201d which is set in 1840. And then I\u2019m doing this comedy series for HBO, which is set 40 years from now, mostly in space. It\u2019s almost, like, \u201cAnything but the present.\u201d Q: I don't think of \"Copperfield\" as political satire. Are you updating it in some way? A: No, it\u2019s not a metaphor for Brexit.Q: Tell me more about the HBO series.A: It\u2019s set in the world of space tourism. It\u2019s fundamentally about people who have nothing in common, other than that they\u2019re all in this one spaceship for a period of time, just trying to get on with each other. There\u2019s this element of, when you leave Earth, do the same rules apply? Or is it up to you to kind of create your own rules? There\u2019s a kind of a social experiment going on.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: Sounds like \"\"Futurama\" meets \"Lord of the Flies.\" A: That\u2019s one kind of extremity toward which it could go, I suppose. Yeah.Q: Where do you get your facility for language? Your politician characters wield words \u2014 from the profane to the lofty \u2014 as both blunt weapons and as sharp instruments. A: As a kid, I was always doing impressions of teachers, and I picked up very quickly on the way people spoke. I was a literature student at Oxford, and I did parodies of famous writers \u2014 Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad. It\u2019s a hyper-awareness of style, I suppose. But then, as I became more interested in politics, I became much more acutely aware of how language is abused. How people use phrases to sound like they mean one thing, when in fact they mean the opposite. Story continues below advertisementQ: All your political characters indulge in this Orwellian doublespeak.A: Orwell\u2019s essay \u201cPolitics and the English Language\u201d is all about politicians taking metaphors and then draining them of any life whatsoever. I tried to write a PhD thesis on \u201cParadise Lost\u201d and Satan. He\u2019s the great villain, but he\u2019s mesmerizing because he has these wonderful speeches \u2014 he\u2019s an orator \u2014 and he tries to change the meaning of words: \u201cmake a heav\u2019n of hell, and a hell of heav\u2019n.\u201d How can you make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell? They\u2019re the exact opposite.Q: Comedians have a kind of power, don't they? The class clown is kind of like the court jester \u2014 not on the throne, but next to it. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: You can develop a kind of status in society, especially if you\u2019re not particularly sporty or whatever. You sort of get by \u2014 people like you \u2014 because you can make jokes. But I hated it when comedians started becoming cool, which they started doing about 10 or 15 years ago. I was never cool. I always thought I can get away with not being cool by being funny. But now, f---ing hell, comedians are meant to be cool as well. Jesus, where will it end?Q: Is there a difference between humor in the United States and the United Kingdom? A: On \u201cVeep,\u201d we were all British editors and writers, and it seemed to work. I kind of feel we\u2019re much more international these days in the things we watch. If it works, it works. There\u2019s something musical about comedy. It\u2019s about rhythm. At the beginning, you write what makes you laugh, or what makes your friends laugh. If you start writing what you think might make someone else laugh, I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll write your best stuff.AdvertisementQ: \"Stalin\" isn't just about Stalin, is it?A:\n I was already thinking about doing something about a fictional contemporary dictator when the graphic novel crossed my radar. I liked the idea of the conventions of democracy that we take for granted just no longer being present. What is that like? In countries around the world today, things have been happening that are starting to undermine democracy. \u201cStalin\u201d is set in \u201c1953,\u201d but it was for contemporary reasons, as it were, that I made it. When I showed it at Sundance, a woman came up to me at the end. She was crying. I said, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d And she said, \u201cThis story has just happened in my country.\u201d She was from Zimbabwe, and Mugabe had just been deposed by the army.Q: So, for the satirist, tears are just as good as laughter? A: Absolutely. In her case, they were tears of relief: \u201cOh, God, it\u2019s over.\u201dThe Death of Stalin (R, 97 minutes). At area theaters. Writer-director Armando Iannucci has made a career out of tweaking the powerful. From Selina to Stalin: The man behind \u2018Veep\u2019 talks satire and cynicism",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Selina to Stalin: The man behind \u2018Veep\u2019 talks satire and cynicism (WP: Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6642",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-selina-to-stalin-the-man-behind-veep-talks-satire-and-cynicism/2018/03/16/1f5a3c22-26f4-11e8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html",
        "text": "Armando Iannucci likes to tell a story that may explain his take on politics: When the filmmaker\u2019s father was a teenager in Mussolini\u2019s Italy, he wrote for an anti-fascist newspaper, going on to fight, as a partisan, against \u201cil Duce\u201d and Hitler during World War II. But after emigrating to the United Kingdom, where his son would grow up, the elder Iannucci never applied for citizenship or registered to vote. Iannucci, who dropped out of doctoral studies at Oxford to become a comedian, writer and filmmaker, asked him why. After all, the son said, \u201cYou fought for democracy.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAh, democracy,\u201d Iannucci says his father replied. \u201cThe last time I voted, Mussolini got in.\u201dIt sounds like a joke from one of Iannucci\u2019s projects, which include the Oscar-nominated 2009 film \u201cIn the Loop\u201d and the award-winning TV shows \u201cThe Thick of It\u201d and \u201cVeep.\u201d But it helps to understand the 54-year-old director\u2019s worldview: \u201cJust don\u2019t think because it\u2019s democracy that bad things can\u2019t happen,\u201d Iannucci says. \u201cBecause they can.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIannucci\u2019s latest film, \u201cThe Death of Stalin,\u201d is a fact-based farce, adapted from a graphic novel and set during the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet premier\u2019s death in 1953. Starring Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin and Simon Russell Beale, it\u2019s a period piece with surprising contemporary resonance and a nasty bite.The London-based Iannucci phoned from New York, where he was promoting the darkly comic film, to talk about the challenges of speaking truth to power in an age when political reality sometimes seems to parody itself. Q: A few years ago, in an interview with John Oliver, you referred to what you do, facetiously, as \"harmless fun.\" I wonder whether \"harmful fun\" might not be a better, if oxymoronic, term for the art of the satirist.Story continues below advertisementA: I\u2019d love to know exactly what kind of harm you think I\u2019ve ever achieved. Political satire can be various things, but I\u2019ve never felt you can change, say, how people will vote.AdvertisementQ: No. For that, you need Facebook. A: [Laughing] If you want to change people\u2019s minds, you should go out and campaign. Or you should become a journalist or a lobbyist. All I\u2019ve ever tried to do is to respond when I\u2019m suspicious of something that doesn\u2019t feel right. I\u2019m looking for ways in which I can articulate that \u2014 and help articulate it for other people \u2014 by channeling various emotions: bewilderment, anger, frustration.Q: Sounds like a form of therapy.A: Laughter is healthy. We are the only animal that makes jokes. But I\u2019m also trying to show how certain things can happen. How is it that, under Stalin, lots of people who were perfectly intelligent still acted like crazies? How is it that a political leader can go into office with one set of beliefs, but seven or eight years later, their belief system turns into something else? AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: So, you see yourself as more evangelist than therapist?A: I\u2019m not trying to tell people what to believe. I\u2019m just trying to explain, through all that I\u2019ve encountered, and through my observation and my research, how these things come about.Q: Jon Stewart used to call \"The Daily Show\" fake news. Now that phrase is being used in an entirely different way.\n\nA: Fake news, in the original sense, is something that looks like it might be satire but isn\u2019t. It has the form of a joke. When we did [the public affairs parody show] \u201cThe Day Today\u201d 25 years ago, we were making things up, trying to project them as convincingly as possible. We wanted the audience to think, \u201cYeah, but this is false.\u201d What\u2019s happening now is you\u2019ve got \u201cfake news\u201d because people want you to believe it. That\u2019s changed how comedians have to approach Trump. The people who I think really have made some kind of an impact against Trump are people like John Oliver, who have got teams of researchers. Basically they\u2019re just laying out facts. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: I sense a certain ambivalence about your job.A: Yeah. I worry, because especially in the U.K., comedy acts as a safety valve. We don\u2019t go out in the street and protest, because we have a rich heritage and tradition of satire. It\u2019s that line that [comedian] Peter Cooke used to say about how he admired the comedy done in Weimar Germany and how it did so much to stop the rise of Hitler.Q: Ouch. A: In the U.K., our greatest political comedy was done in the 1980s, which also saw Margaret Thatcher win three elections. I worry whether comedy defuses the anger. My concern today is that any kind of fictional, comic version of what\u2019s going on is not as absurd as what\u2019s actually going on.Story continues below advertisementQ: \"The Death of Stalin\" is very funny, although people get tortured and shot in it. It also plays as a veiled allegory of the present moment.AdvertisementA: It\u2019s interesting that I felt I had to go all the way back to 1953 to make that point. My next film is going to be an adaptation of \u201cDavid Copperfield,\u201d which is set in 1840. And then I\u2019m doing this comedy series for HBO, which is set 40 years from now, mostly in space. It\u2019s almost, like, \u201cAnything but the present.\u201d Q: I don't think of \"Copperfield\" as political satire. Are you updating it in some way? A: No, it\u2019s not a metaphor for Brexit.Q: Tell me more about the HBO series.A: It\u2019s set in the world of space tourism. It\u2019s fundamentally about people who have nothing in common, other than that they\u2019re all in this one spaceship for a period of time, just trying to get on with each other. There\u2019s this element of, when you leave Earth, do the same rules apply? Or is it up to you to kind of create your own rules? There\u2019s a kind of a social experiment going on.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementQ: Sounds like \"\"Futurama\" meets \"Lord of the Flies.\" A: That\u2019s one kind of extremity toward which it could go, I suppose. Yeah.Q: Where do you get your facility for language? Your politician characters wield words \u2014 from the profane to the lofty \u2014 as both blunt weapons and as sharp instruments. A: As a kid, I was always doing impressions of teachers, and I picked up very quickly on the way people spoke. I was a literature student at Oxford, and I did parodies of famous writers \u2014 Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad. It\u2019s a hyper-awareness of style, I suppose. But then, as I became more interested in politics, I became much more acutely aware of how language is abused. How people use phrases to sound like they mean one thing, when in fact they mean the opposite. Story continues below advertisementQ: All your political characters indulge in this Orwellian doublespeak.A: Orwell\u2019s essay \u201cPolitics and the English Language\u201d is all about politicians taking metaphors and then draining them of any life whatsoever. I tried to write a PhD thesis on \u201cParadise Lost\u201d and Satan. He\u2019s the great villain, but he\u2019s mesmerizing because he has these wonderful speeches \u2014 he\u2019s an orator \u2014 and he tries to change the meaning of words: \u201cmake a heav\u2019n of hell, and a hell of heav\u2019n.\u201d How can you make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell? They\u2019re the exact opposite.Q: Comedians have a kind of power, don't they? The class clown is kind of like the court jester \u2014 not on the throne, but next to it. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: You can develop a kind of status in society, especially if you\u2019re not particularly sporty or whatever. You sort of get by \u2014 people like you \u2014 because you can make jokes. But I hated it when comedians started becoming cool, which they started doing about 10 or 15 years ago. I was never cool. I always thought I can get away with not being cool by being funny. But now, f---ing hell, comedians are meant to be cool as well. Jesus, where will it end?Q: Is there a difference between humor in the United States and the United Kingdom? A: On \u201cVeep,\u201d we were all British editors and writers, and it seemed to work. I kind of feel we\u2019re much more international these days in the things we watch. If it works, it works. There\u2019s something musical about comedy. It\u2019s about rhythm. At the beginning, you write what makes you laugh, or what makes your friends laugh. If you start writing what you think might make someone else laugh, I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll write your best stuff.AdvertisementQ: \"Stalin\" isn't just about Stalin, is it?A:\n I was already thinking about doing something about a fictional contemporary dictator when the graphic novel crossed my radar. I liked the idea of the conventions of democracy that we take for granted just no longer being present. What is that like? In countries around the world today, things have been happening that are starting to undermine democracy. \u201cStalin\u201d is set in \u201c1953,\u201d but it was for contemporary reasons, as it were, that I made it. When I showed it at Sundance, a woman came up to me at the end. She was crying. I said, \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong?\u201d And she said, \u201cThis story has just happened in my country.\u201d She was from Zimbabwe, and Mugabe had just been deposed by the army.Q: So, for the satirist, tears are just as good as laughter? A: Absolutely. In her case, they were tears of relief: \u201cOh, God, it\u2019s over.\u201dThe Death of Stalin (R, 97 minutes). At area theaters. Writer-director Armando Iannucci has made a career out of tweaking the powerful. From Selina to Stalin: The man behind \u2018Veep\u2019 talks satire and cynicism",
        "author": "Michael O'Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The debate format is an embarrassment. Here\u2019s how to make it better. (WP: Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6643",
        "date": "2019-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-debate-format-is-an-embarrassment-heres-how-to-make-it-better/2019/07/31/3b1b24ba-b38b-11e9-8f6c-7828e68cb15f_story.html",
        "text": "About 40 minutes after the start of Tuesday night\u2019s Democratic debate, I got an email from a Washington Post reader with this subject line: \u201cI don\u2019t care for this.\u201dHe was complaining, of course, about the Detroit debate on CNN, which he described as a reality TV show with journalists playing celebrity hosts. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith frustratingly tiny and rigidly enforced response time, outsize attention to fringe candidates and divisive questions \u2014 some of which could have been framed by the Republican National Committee \u2014 the first Detroit debate was a lost opportunity to inform the voting public.\u201cHonestly, you could catalog all journalism\u2019s faults just from watching debate moderators,\u201d tweeted Joshua Benton, who runs Harvard\u2019s Nieman Journalism Lab.Story continues below advertisementTo wit: \u201cAn obsession with conflict over explanation, forcing complex policies into soundbites, above-it-all savviness that only makes sense if you spend all your time on Politics Twitter or in DC.\u201dAdvertisementThe worst of Night 1 may have been the format itself, which started with a painfully high-octane video that managed to simultaneously evoke \u201cThe NFL Today,\u201d World Wrestling Entertainment and \u201cJeopardy!\u201d Then there was the spaceship-like set that (according to CNN\u2019s Oliver Darcy) took 100 people eight days to build and involved nine 53-foot semi-trucks.In one way, CNN\u2019s efforts were an improvement from NBC\u2019s first round of debates a couple of weeks ago \u2014 at least there was no absurd demand for a show of hands on complex policy proposals.Story continues below advertisementBut there was a major flaw: CNN\u2019s moderators, like the strictest of schoolmasters, allowed almost no actual debating as they enforced the time limitations. That ridiculous rule needs immediate reform.As I wrote after last month\u2019s NBC debate, the best decision their moderators made last month was to allow former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris the airtime for a substantive back-and-forth on race-related issues.AdvertisementWith 10 candidates onstage each night, time limits are bound to be a challenge \u2014 and yet, such strict enforcement is completely counterproductive for meaningful exchanges.To break through the noise, the candidate either had to be: (1)\u00a0spiritual author Marianne Williamson with her planetary (though undeniably correct) pronouncements about the \u201cdark psychic force of .\u2009.\u2009. collectivized hatred\u201d unleashed by President Trump; (2)\u00a0former Maryland congressman John Delaney, apparently intended to represent all things Sensibly Centrist \u2014 and therefore given far more time than he deserved.Story continues below advertisementThere\u2019s got to be a better way.I asked a few experts for suggestions to bring the debates closer to something that serves engaged citizens seeking information.Among their suggestions: No opening statements, allowing more time for substantive answers to questions, and to responses to the other candidates. Topics and questions sourced entirely from voters, which could be gathered in advance. Comparison graphics about candidates\u2019 positions offered in real time. Less conflict-oriented framing in coverage of the debates with phrases that evoke prizefighting: marquee matchups, winners and losers, and explosive faceoffs.Advertisement\u201cPolitical journalism needs to collapse the distance between politicians and the public,\u201d so whatever journalists can do to \u201cact less as gatekeepers and more as conduits for the public\u2019s agenda, the better,\u201d said Jennifer Brandel, CEO and co-founder of Hearken, which consults with newsrooms about better listening and responding to the public.Story continues below advertisementIn the digital age, technology can help in bringing in voters\u2019 voices, allowing for live audience feedback and other innovations.But other than tech\u2019s role in the overdone setting and intro video, it\u2019s not much more of a factor than it was decades ago. There are some nods to questions from viewers or voters, but they amount to little more than pallid gestures before returning to the main event: the prizefight.\u201cAs it was in 1960, the viewers [are] on one side of the mediated wall and the candidates on the other,\u201d wrote Christine Cupaiuolo, who led the Rethinking Debates project for the nonprofit Civic Hall, in a 2016 report.AdvertisementJill Miller Zimon, project director of the Ohio Debate Commission (one of four statewide debate commissions in the country), told me the current debate format not only doesn\u2019t serve the public very well, but also cheats the candidates.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWell-managed debates play a role in informing the public but they also should honor candidates stepping up and into the arena,\u201d Zimon said.The current, too-predictable setup tends to \u201cshroud the authenticity of a candidate,\u201d she said. Do we really get to know who these people are?The way questions are framed can do that, too, as pollster Matt McDermott noted on Twitter.\u201cCNN debate summarized: Why does your health care plan screw the middle class? Why are you taking health care from hard working Americans? Why are you for open borders?\u201d he wrote. \u201cImagine CNN asking in a Republican debate: \u2018Democrats want to ensure health care for all Americans. You want to kill people. Care to respond?\u2019\u200a\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLike others who would like to reform debates, Zimon calls for more innovative use of technology during the debates to deepen the conversation, for questions sourced by voters, and for less restrictive use of time limits.The networks, and the DNC, should pay heed.The debates aren\u2019t completely pointless, of course. Even in their current format, they give the public a look at the wide field of candidates and their ideas.But they should be so much better. This moment in history demands it.For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan. CNN\u2019s reality-show atmosphere and rigid response times don\u2019t serve the public \u2014 or the candidates. The debate format is an embarrassment. Here\u2019s how to make it better.",
        "author": "Margaret Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The pandemic is testing the generosity of billionaires, according to a Washington Post survey of the 50 richest Americans (WP: Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6644",
        "date": "2020-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-pandemic-is-testing-the-generosity-of-americas-billionaires-a-washington-post-survey-of-the-50-richest-americans-looks-at-who-has-given-and-who-hasnt/2020/06/01/28149f42-96d2-11ea-9f5e-56d8239bf9ad_story.html",
        "text": "America\u2019s love-hate affair with billionaires took an uncomfortable twist this spring: As the coronavirus spread across the country, both fans and critics wondered what these titans of capitalism would do to address this devastating health and economic crisis.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe answer so far: Not much, when accounting for their vast personal fortunes. A Washington Post survey of the nation\u2019s 50 wealthiest people and families, who have a collective net worth of nearly $1.6 trillion, found that their publicly announced donations amount to about $1 billion, which sounds like a lot of money but adds up to less than 0.1\u00a0percent of their combined wealth. More than half of these billionaires have publicly donated cash and a few say they have given something \u2014 money or in-kind contributions \u2014 but declined to specify how much. But almost a third have not announced any donations and declined to comment or did not reply to requests for comment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd even many of the billionaires who have announced donations to covid-19 relief efforts have given amounts that are relatively paltry when compared with the median net worth of an American household, which registers at $97,300, a number that accounts for a family\u2019s assets and subtracting debts, according to the federal Survey of Consumer Finances. To put billionaires\u2019 covid-19 giving in perspective, The Post used this figure to calculate what each of their donations would equate to for the median American donor.What the 50 richest Americans have given for covid-19 reliefOnly two billionaires have really stepped into the spotlight: Bill Gates, the dean of billionaire philanthropy, and a surprising newcomer to charitable giving: Twitter\u2019s Jack Dorsey.Gates, who had a net worth of $103 billion in April when The Post began its survey, has spearheaded an aggressive and comprehensive public campaign to mitigate and eradicate the virus, spending about $300 million to date through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation, which has give more than $50 billion in grants since its inception, \u201cis focused on investing its resources where governments can\u2019t, and corporations won\u2019t,\u201d Gates said in an interview. Gates has emerged as a vocal leader during the pandemic, using his decades of work fighting global disease as a base of knowledge to offer guidance and strategy on how to deal with the spread of the coronavirus. In terms of donations from his personal wealth, for the median American donor, Gates\u2019s giving to date equates to about $283.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis calculator puts the finances of the ultra rich into the context of everyday lifeBut the most publicly generous billionaire to date is Dorsey, who ranks 147th on the list of wealthiest Americans, according to Forbes. In early April, Dorsey pledged $1 billion of his shares in the mobile payment company Square \u2014 about 28 percent of his then-$3.6 billion net worth \u2014 to covid-19 relief and charities. For the median American, Dorsey\u2019s giving equates to more than $27,000.Dorsey, who has disbursed more than $88 million since early April and tracks his giving in an open-source spreadsheet, made the announcement in tweets: \u201cWhy now? The needs are increasingly urgent, and I want to see the impact in my lifetime. .\u2009.\u2009. I hope this inspires others to do something similar.\u201dMonths later, Dorsey\u2019s call for action by America\u2019s super-rich appears to have been largely ignored.Story continues below advertisementAmazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man in the world with a fortune of $143 billion and also the owner of The Washington Post, gave $100 million to Feeding America and up to $25 million for All in WA, a statewide relief effort in Washington. For the median American, Bezos\u2019s giving is the equivalent of donating $85. His aerospace company, Blue Origin, pledged to 3-D print face shields for front-line workers but did not disclose the value of that contribution.AdvertisementIn terms of public giving relative to his net worth, hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio, whose net worth is $18 billion, ranks as the most generous among the 50 wealthiest Americans. He has pledged more than $100 million to efforts including child care for hospital workers, food for the needy, and laptops for children of lower-income families. His giving to date, for the median American, equates to about $589.Among the richest Americans, Dalio is the exception, not the rule when it comes to giving for coronavirus relief.Story continues below advertisementHedge fund manager Steven Cohen, worth $14 billion, has donated more than $6 million to covid-19 relief efforts, or about $43 for the median American. Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke, worth $10 billion, has given $500,000 publicly to launch a covid-19 response fund, which equates to $5 for the median American. Media magnate Donald Newhouse, worth $12.5 billion, has given $1 million to the World Health Organization.Advertisement\u201cWe are humbled by the enormity of the human suffering caused by this virus and the challenge of helping so many in need,\u201d Newhouse said in a statement announcing the gift in late March.To the median American, Newhouse\u2019s gift was the equivalent of $8.Story continues below advertisementFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, worth $67 billion, personally has given $58 million for medical research and aid for the Bay Area \u2014 which equates to $84 for the median American \u2014 and his company has donated $100\u00a0million to small businesses. The Walmart Foundation donated $25 million to food banks and local community relief, but none of the five members of the Walton family on the Top 50 list \u2014 with a total net worth of nearly $200\u00a0billion \u2014 have announced any public donations. Beloved investing guru Warren Buffett lent his private jet to deliver medical supplies to New York and voiced an animated public service announcement on how to properly wash hands, but has not made any public monetary gifts related to the pandemic.AdvertisementJohn Menard Jr., worth $15\u00a0billion, is the 80-year-old founder of Menards, the Midwestern chain of home improvement stores. In March, the company publicly apologized after Michigan\u2019s attorney general accused the chain of price gouging on face masks, bleach and other cleaning supplies. Menard is among the prominent business leaders named by Trump to coronavirus economic advisory committees. Neither he nor his company have announced any coronavirus-related donations, and he declined to comment for this story.The philanthropy of the billionaire class tends to reflect their personal histories and passions. Former New York mayor and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, worth $52 billion, has donated close to $75 million \u2014 about $139 to the median American \u2014 and tweets almost every day about strategies for combating the virus \u2014 including criticism of the Trump administration's response. L.A. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, worth $62 billion, also donated $75 million to three cities \u2014 Detroit, Los Angeles, and Seattle \u2014 where he has close ties. Ballmer's giving, to the median American donor, is the equivalent of $118.Story continues below advertisementAnd what to make of Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk, worth $37 billion, who first dismissed concerns (\u201cThe coronavirus panic is dumb\u201d), then loudly announced he was giving hospitals 1,000 much-needed ventilators \u2014 which instead turned out to be airway pressure machines. Or Rupert Murdoch, worth $16 billion, whose spokesman suggested he was giving for coronavirus relief anonymously, although any such charitable giving would be uncharacteristic: In 2014, Inside Philanthropy reported that Murdoch\u2019s personal foundation hadn\u2019t made a single donation in six years. In 2016, federal tax records show, Murdoch dissolved the foundation. \u201cThere are causes that they\u2019re supporting. .\u2009.\u2009. It\u2019s just something that we\u2019re not really sharing right now,\u201d said Eric Kuo, senior vice president at the Rubenstein public relations firm, which represents the Murdoch family.Bill Gates profile: The billionaire who cried pandemicSpokespeople for some of these billionaires pointed to money given by their corporations, not personally or through foundations. A spokesman for Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman didn\u2019t disclose any personal charitable spending, but highlighted $15\u00a0million the investment firm has given to relief efforts in New York. Schwarzman is personally worth almost $17 billion. The Mars family, worth $54 billion, donated $20\u00a0million in cash and in-kind donations from their company, but have disclosed no personal giving.AdvertisementThese millions of much-needed aid are going to charities and other organizations desperately trying to help people cope with health care, job loss and other casualties of the moment. And this is likely to be a long-running issue, possibly stretching into years, so there\u2019s plenty of time for billionaires to do and give more. But, given the resources available, some critics of the richest Americans say their initial public donations have been surprisingly small in the face of this national emergency.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t mean to be uncharitable, but much of this is self-serving rubbish,\u201d wrote former labor secretary Robert Reich in a widely circulated column in the Guardian last month. \u201cThe amounts involved are tiny relative to the fortunes behind them.\u201dThe relative stinginess of some of America\u2019s wealthiest, to their critics, is particularly outrageous because the financial devastation of the pandemic, so far, appears to have spared many of them. From March through May, the fortunes of America\u2019s billionaires grew by more than $430 billion, according to a report released by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank that argues for expanded taxes for corporations and the wealthy.Advertisement\u201cBillionaires did not cause this pandemic,\u201d wrote Omar Ocampo and Chuck Collins, co-authors of the report, in a recent op-ed. \u201cBut four decades of billionaire tax cuts have increased the fragility of the public response infrastructure.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe larger question, of course, is how much any private citizen, no matter how rich, can or should do. The United States has more billionaires than any other country \u2014 about 630, depending on the undulations of the stock market \u2014 although not as many per capita as a dozen other countries, including Sweden and Ireland. And the richest Americans have staggering fortunes, especially compared with the rest of the population. But even all that money can't adequately address a global pandemic.\u201cThe level of human suffering is extraordinary,\u201d says Darrell M. West, author of \u201cBillionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust.\u201d \u201cI haven\u2019t seen a lot of effort other than Bill Gates.\u201d Even so, West explains, private donations are just a drop in the bucket. \u201cThe problem exists on such a massive scale that it\u2019s really something government is going to have to address, not private individuals. Billionaires have a lot of money, but if you\u2019re talking about spending trillions of dollars, that\u2019s a government function, not a private function.\u201dAdvertisementWhich is exactly what billionaire Carl Icahn thinks \u2014 addressing this pandemic is essentially the job of the government, but he also plans to make some personal donations to causes he believes are worthy.The corporate raider turned investor, worth about $14 billion, says he\u2019s committed to spending at least $21 million on covid-19 relief efforts, starting with a $3\u00a0million donation to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. He\u2019s also created an $18 million covid-19 relief fund overseen by his charity, the Foundation for Greater Opportunity, that has disbursed more than $3 million so far, including $2.5 million to the Robin Hood Foundation, which works to fight poverty in New York.Over the course of several phone conversations in recent weeks, Icahn \u2014 whose $21 million pledge is the equivalent of the median American donating $147 \u2014 expressed an evolving perspective on the role America\u2019s billionaires should play in covid-19 crisis relief.\u201cI think a lot of them have been giving, and have been charitable,\u201d Icahn said in April. \u201cThe government did a lot by increasing the unemployment insurance .\u2009.\u2009. a lot of people aren\u2019t that needy, because they\u2019re actually making more money to not go to work.\u201dPerspective: Why does everybody suddenly hate billionaires? Because they\u2019ve made it easy.By late May, however, his opinion had changed.\u201cThis is a time when the wealthy have to really step up, to help those in need,\u201d Icahn said. \u201cI think the wealthy should be doing a whole lot more in this country.\u201dOne thing billionaires could do more of, according to liberals, is pay taxes. The coronavirus disaster has sharpened the already contentious political debate about income inequality. Billionaires, many of whom were dismissive last year when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) suggested they pay a greater share of taxes, have argued they use their wealth to create jobs, innovate and solve problems with the efficiency of business executives, not politicians. In terms of covid-19, that has not proved to be the case.The very richest Americans now pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than they have at any time since the 1910s, according to \u201cThe Triumph of Injustice\u201d by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economics professors at University of California at Berkeley. In 1970, according to Saez and Zucman\u2019s research, the richest Americans paid more than 50 percent of their income in taxes, twice as much as working-class individuals. By 2018, following the Trump tax cuts, that figure had dropped to 23 percent, on par or less than the rate paid by steelworkers, schoolteachers and retirees.The result: The richest 1 percent in the country own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. And the super rich keep getting super richer.\u201cWhat argument can justify that billionaires should pay less than each of us, and pay less and less as they get wealthier and wealthier?\u201d Saez and Zucman wrote in their book, which published last year. \u201cWhat principle could justify such an obviously perverse situation?\u201dTen years ago, Gates and Buffett created the Giving Pledge, a promise from the richest individuals to donate at least half their wealth to philanthropic causes during their lifetimes or when they die. So far, 15 of the 50 wealthiest Americans have signed on. The pledge is a public gesture, not a binding contract, and it lets the rich decide when, how and why to give away their fortunes.Several billionaires, through spokespeople, said they only give money anonymously.\u201cThe Fidelity Foundations and the Johnson family have had a long and significant commitment to philanthropy,\u201d wrote Vincent G. Loporchio, spokesman for Fidelity Investments and its chief executive, Abigail Johnson, worth $12.5 billion. \u201cHowever, they have never sought promotion for their charitable donations; it is well known in the Boston community that the grants are anonymous.\u201dExperts in billionaires and philanthropy are skeptical of this defense, however, pointing to long-standing research that has found the most charitable Americans are the poorest \u2014 many of whom tithe as part of their faith.\u201cAmerica\u2019s wealthy do not look impressive in their generosity, as a percent of their income or wealth, compared to lower-income Americans,\u201d said Rob Reich (no relation to the former labor secretary), a political science professor at Stanford and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.If billionaires do give anonymously, there is no accountability or transparency.But, to be fair, many do give millions publicly to a variety of causes that rely on their ongoing support \u2014 education, climate change, space exploration \u2014 and have continued to do so this year. The pandemic isn\u2019t the only way to measure their giving, but it is a measure of how they contribute during a national emergency. It\u2019s not an either/or: Billionaires could give away 90 percent of their money today and still live lives of unimaginable luxury.\u201cIn general, the wealthy don\u2019t give a lot,\u201d says David Callahan, the founder of Inside Philanthropy, who calls billionaires\u2019 pandemic response \u201cshocking but not surprising.\u201d In a world where bad things happen all the time, they see no particular reason to change.Why?Billionaires, explains Callahan, historically give about 1 percent of their wealth to charity every year. A big reason they don\u2019t give more is that they think the world\u2019s problems are complicated and they\u2019re not confident of finding the best solutions \u2014 problems better addressed by the vast resources of governments rather than private individuals. \u201cThey see philanthropy\u2019s role as coming up with solutions that aren\u2019t going to be solved by government,\u201d he says. \u201cThey want to achieve some sort of structural change. Very few of these billionaire philanthropists engage in \u2018Band-Aid\u2019 philanthropy.\u201dIn short, they\u2019d rather come up with the silver bullet or the genius invention that will go down in history rather than, say, feeding hungry people.\u201cThese people don\u2019t want to do stupid philanthropy,\u201d Callahan says. \u201cThey want to do brilliant philanthropy. And they see giving money to address immediate human suffering as money down the drain. .\u2009.\u2009. These people are so anxious to be super smart and strategic and make big bets, that they don\u2019t have enough of a big heart.\u201dEditor\u2019s Note: Estimated net worth information came from the Forbes Real Time Billionaires list on April 22. Data on the median net worth of a U.S. household, which is $97,300, came from the federal Survey of Consumer Finances, using 2016 dollars to calculate the billionaires\u2019 giving in terms equivalent to the net worth of the median American donor.\n\n\n\nStaff writer Jay Greene and database editor Steven Rich contributed to this report. They\u2019re worth $1.6 trillion. They\u2019ve given a fraction of their wealth. The pandemic is testing the generosity of billionaires, according to a Washington Post survey of the 50 richest Americans",
        "author": "Roxanne Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "How director Ed Zwick is trying to keep pace with a changing Hollywood, long after his \u2018Glory\u2019 days (WP: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6645",
        "date": "2019-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-director-ed-zwick-is-trying-to-keep-pace-with-a-changing-hollywood-long-after-his-glory-days/2019/05/16/e22dcd7a-77e0-11e9-b3f5-5673edf2d127_story.html",
        "text": "The director Edward Zwick recalls a cautionary tale he constructed for himself when was 30, and a newly minted member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He joined a committee that included lions of cinema \u2014 Richard Brooks, John Frankenheimer and Paul Mazursky \u2014 who would regale Zwick and fellow newcomer Cameron Crowe with tales of their cinematic exploits. \u201cThey would tell these great wars stories, like, \u2018When Burt Lancaster and I were doing \u201cThe Train\u201d .\u2009.\u2009.\u2019\u2009\u201d Zwick recalled during a recent visit to Washington. \u201cBut I realized at a certain point that none of them were talking about what they were doing, because none of them were working. And they were pissed off. They had been marginalized too soon, and they were angry.\u201d Zwick made a vow to himself: \u201cI was not going to be that person.\u201d Now 66, Zwick has arguably reached lion status. But he has mostly made good on his promise not to be that person. In 1986, he made his feature debut with \u201cAbout Last Night,\u201d a movie about sex, love, coming of age and commitment that, along with the movies of John Hughes and Nora Ephron, epitomized an era in romantic comedy that now seems like a distant dream. With his partner Marshall Herskovitz, Zwick went on to create the groundbreaking television series \u201cThirtysomething,\u201d in which an ensemble of young, white professionals indulged looming angst about sex, love, coming-of-middle-age and marriage. The team went on to produce another generational touchstone, \u201cMy So-Called Life,\u201d and, most recently, \u201cNashville.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut throughout a steady career in TV, Zwick continued to make feature films, most notably \u201cLegends of the Fall,\u201d \u201cCourage Under Fire,\u201d \u201cThe Last Samurai\u201d and Zwick\u2019s crowning career achievement, the 1989 film \u201cGlory,\u201d which starred Denzel Washington and Matthew Broderick in a Civil War drama about an African American Union military unit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere\u2019s something resonant about the fact that \u201cGlory\u201d came out a generation ago. Since that time, Zwick has navigated breathtaking changes in cinema \u2014 as industry, art form and self-contained culture \u2014 that easily could have derailed him, and have sidelined more than a few of his contemporaries. As a filmmaker dedicated to making mid-budget, adult-oriented movies, Zwick is operating within a business model dominated by superheroes. As someone whose target audience prefers earnest, conventional narratives about socially conscious subjects, he\u2019s not eligible for indie-darling, Oscar-dark-horse status. As a white, male producer-director who has become a brand name in Hollywood, he personifies the very power structure that activists are now seeking to dismantle through more inclusive representation behind and in front of the camera.Do \u2018middle-class\u2019 movies have a future in corporate Hollywood?Which makes the fact that Zwick has a new movie in theaters as notable as a yeti sighting on a rapidly disappearing tundra. \u201cTrial by Fire\u201d stars Laura Dern and Jack O\u2019Connell as Elizabeth Gilbert and Todd Willingham, who embarked on an unlikely friendship when Willingham was on death row, convicted of arson in the fire that killed his three young daughters. Zwick had wanted to do the movie for several years before the philanthropist Alex Soros, whose interests include criminal justice reform, stepped up to finance the budget. Zwick was in Washington last week to talk to anyone who would listen about \u201cTrial by Fire,\u201d not just as a movie but as a persuasive call for the elimination of the death penalty.\u201cHad I not had somebody of the will and the political commitment of Alex Soros to help finance it, I\u2019m not sure I could have gotten it made,\u201d Zwick said of the film, which he admitted is something of an endangered species within the cinematic ecosystem. He even doubts he could get \u201cGlory\u201d made now, at least at the size, scope and production value the story demanded.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt wouldn\u2019t have been a regiment, it would have been 12 guys in the woods,\u201d he says. \u201cI might have been able to deal with some of the same themes, but scale .\u2009.\u2009. is an important part of the canvas. So how do I continue to tell stories that I\u2019m engaged by in this rapidly changing set of realities?\u201dHe thinks back on the older filmmakers whose bitterness he\u2019d witnessed as an up-and-comer \u2014 industry giants who had stumbled when the culture shifted under their feet. \u201cThey were marginalized because they wanted to keep doing the same thing again and again after the world had changed around them,\u201d he says. \u201cWhich is to say: Can I be supple while still trying to do the things that interest me?\u201dA woman fights to save a death row inmate in this fact-based but by-the-book dramaZwick has signed on to produce and direct the pilot episode of a television series called \u201cAway,\u201d in which Hilary Swank will play the first female commander of a space mission. Expressing curiosity about George Clooney\u2019s Hulu series \u201cCatch-22\u201d (\u201cbecause the movie didn\u2019t work \u2014 and that was Mike Nichols!\u201d), Zwick admits that he\u2019s been more leery of streaming series and the binge culture they\u2019ve helped create.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe nature of these shows, whether they\u2019re six or 10 or however many they do, is this kind of Dickensian narrative shape that ends with a cliffhanger that obliges you to then gorge and go to the next, and leaves you in this state of anxiety,\u201d he says. \u201cWhich is interesting. God knows it worked for Dickens. .\u2009.\u2009. But it also deprives you of something, which is a certain classical form that leads to a real catharsis and denouement, and the things that come out of a single and unique theatrical experience. And that\u2019s my sweet spot.\u201dAs for the power dynamics that are being renegotiated in Hollywood \u2014 both on- and off-screen \u2014 Zwick is philosophical. For one thing, he says, \u201cI\u2019ve been lucky enough to work with my wife [producer Liberty Godshall], who indoctrinated me long ago in the personal politics of men and women.\u201d He welcomes more female-centered narratives, which he calls an \u201cunintended consequence\u201d of heightened awareness around sexism in the movie industry. He witnessed firsthand the implosion of Nate Parker\u2019s career when the actor and director was confronted by a sexual assault accusation from his past (Zwick executive-produced Parker\u2019s directorial debut, \u201cThe Birth of a Nation\u201d). At the time, Zwick expressed regret for the young woman who had been harmed (and later took her own life), as well as for Parker\u2019s struggle to express contrition and accountability.\u201cTrial by Fire\u201d centers on the question of whether Cameron Todd Willingham really did set the fire that killed his children \u2014 a theory that\u2019s thrown increasingly into question over the course of the film. But the film doesn\u2019t shy away from portraying Willingham as a bully and an abusive husband. Through his relationship with Gilbert, this ultimate avatar of toxic masculinity manages to take responsibility for those actions through a form of the very restorative justice Dern advocated in her Golden Globes speech a year ago. \u201cOne reason why I wanted to make this movie is that it is indeed about the creation of meaning in the midst of a circumstance like that,\u201d Zwick says.Enough with naming and shaming: It\u2019s time for restorative justice in Hollywood.For his part, he adds: \u201cI would like to find some way even to talk about the subject in greater depth than I think it has been treated, [which is] the stuff of tabloid headlines and little phrases and some summary judgment at times, without due process or understanding of the complexities of circumstances of men and women. I think that would be an interesting subject, and I think there may be a way that we\u2019ll do that at some point.\u201dSounds like an Ed Zwick project, coming to a network, cable channel, streaming service \u2014 or maybe even a movie theater \u2014 near you. The kind of film that made him famous may be an endangered species, but he\u2019s determined to adapt. How director Ed Zwick is trying to keep pace with a changing Hollywood, long after his \u2018Glory\u2019 days",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Everybody had an opinion about \u2018The Hunt\u2019 before anybody saw it. That\u2019s a problem. (WP: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6646",
        "date": "2019-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/everybody-had-an-opinion-about-the-hunt-before-anybody-saw-it-thats-a-problem/2019/08/15/65b2ecfe-bea2-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html",
        "text": "In our ongoing conversations about movies, it seems the only thing missing is the movies themselves.By now everyone knows that Universal has canceled the release of \u201cThe Hunt,\u201d in which a group of \u201cdeplorables\u201d is hunted and killed by deranged elites. After the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, the studio stopped marketing the film, whose trailer featured well-heeled travelers embarking on a creepy human safari. Then Fox News and President Trump glommed on to the gathering storm, accusing \u201cThe Hunt\u201d of fomenting violence and partisan hatred \u2014 presumably unaware that the film was far more likely to skewer liberal pieties than the sensibilities of their MAGA supporters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFrom the misreading of \u201cThe Hunt\u2019s\u201d politics to Universal\u2019s cave \u2014 not to mention the dubious decision to make the film in the first place \u2014 the entire episode played like a colossal, collective self-own. (In pulling \u201cThe Hunt,\u201d the studio said \u201cnow is not the right time to release this film.\u201d Considering that they acquired the rights in 2018, when more than 300 mass shootings occurred in the United States, one wonders when they thought there was ever a right time.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt also played a bit like deja vu. Barely a year ago, another Universal film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d was being dragged by Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and other right-wing critics upset that the film, about the Apollo 11 space mission, didn\u2019t feature a shot of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting the U.S. flag on the moon. Never mind that \u201cFirst Man\u201d wound up being full of images of the flag, or that it presented the kind of stirring, patriotic story of ingenuity and courage that conservative viewers might have adored: Sight unseen, the reviews were in.Make those \u201cpre-views.\u201dToday, the forces of entertainment marketing, social media and grievance culture are increasingly colliding, with the casualty being the movies themselves. Why wait to actually see \u201cThe Irishman,\u201d Martin Scorsese\u2019s long-gestating project about Jimmy Hoffa and the mob, when you can start fact-checking it \u2014 and fact-checking the fact-checks \u2014 months before it opens? Suspicious that \u201cAdam,\u201d a Sundance film about a heterosexual teenager who passes as transgender as he embarks on an affair with a lesbian, might traffic in homophobic or anti-trans tropes? Save time and start the boycott now.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe studios often play their own self-defeating role in the cycle: Desperate to build viral awareness, they eagerly recruit movie audiences online and at fan gatherings such as Comic-Con, releasing trailers earlier and earlier to lock in eyeballs and excitement. Universal has proved particularly skilled at this strategy, masterfully engaging core audiences to make films such as \u201cTwilight\u201d and \u201cStraight Outta Compton\u201d huge hits.But harnessing social media, fan service and buzzy, hot-button controversy is a lot like riding a tiger \u2014 and as anyone can tell you who\u2019s gone viral one moment only to be canceled the next, sometimes the beast bites back.Gone are the days when people would decide to see a movie (or not), then discuss. We now discuss whether people have a right to see a movie in the first place. Heaven forfend we should be confronted with the art itself: Film has been dematerialized, reduced to a thousand points of metadata that we can argue about in the safe, self-righteous abstract.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCulture has always been weaponized, of course, and it should cause discomfort, even anger. But we\u2019ve reached a state of constant pre-outrage and hair-trigger offense, ready to strangle perceived offenders in the crib before they can succeed or fail on their own merits.Strangely enough, Universal\u2019s decision to pull \u201cThe Hunt\u201d coincided with a spate of conspiracy theories surrounding the suicide of well-connected financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein \u2014 theories that were also recklessly amplified by our Tweeter in Chief when he had finished with Hollywood.As my colleague Margaret Sullivan noted in her column on Tuesday, the best course of action for those who would be well-informed was to stay off their computers until the facts could be confirmed. \u201cIn journalism, speed kills,\u201d she wisely advised. \u201cBe skeptical. Don\u2019t spread shaky information.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA version of that sage advice applies to movies and the people who love them \u2014 and make them, and write about them. It\u2019s human nature to speculate about hotly anticipated events such as a new Scorsese movie; throw Robert De Niro and Al Pacino into the mix and the curiosity reaches a level reminiscent of the hysteria that greeted the all-female \u201cGhostbusters\u201d reboot in 2016. Of course, in that notorious case, the movie turned out to be just a modestly amusing family flick \u2014 and nowhere near as dire a desecration as its pre-viewers suggested.In her column, Sullivan called for a \u201cslow journalism\u201d movement, whereby consumers of news make the self-disciplined decision to ignore hot-button trending topics and other algorithmic manipulations in favor of waiting to get a fuller, more completely reported story.Or a fully completed, actual movie. What if fans, critics and marketers agreed on a \u201cslow movies\u201d movement, making a vow to stop feeding the content beast \u2014 whether on social media or 24/7 cable channels \u2014 with the kind of rank speculation they thrive on (and the studios welcome as free publicity)? What if we observed the simple, common-sense rule of reserving commentary on a thing until we\u2019ve actually seen it firsthand? What if we reframed film, not as disposable content or comment-fodder but as entertainment or \u2014 call me madcap \u2014 an art form?Of course, not all films are art, or even entertaining. Viewers will always be the final arbiters of those distinctions. At least if pre-viewers give them a chance. In an age of prevenge and prebuttals, meet \u201cpre-views,\u201d which are rendering movies irrelevant. Everybody had an opinion about \u2018The Hunt\u2019 before anybody saw it. That\u2019s a problem.",
        "author": "Ann Hornaday"
    },
    {
        "title": "The competition for Miss America 1984 was business as usual \u2014 until everyone got a look at Vanessa Williams (WP: Style) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6647",
        "date": "2021-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-america-history-vanessa-williams/2021/08/20/d632c09a-f892-11eb-943a-c5cf30d50e6a_story.html",
        "text": "From \u201cThere She Was: The Secret History of Miss America,\u201d \u00a9 2021 by Amy Argetsinger, to be published by One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed by permission.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI want you to know,\u201d B. Don told Dana, \u201cyou\u2019re probably not going to win.\u201dIt was the summer of 1983, and Dana Rogers had only been Miss Texas for a couple of weeks when her pageant director sat her down to give her the unvarnished truth about what was going to happen in Atlantic City in September. This was a jarringly early verdict for Dana, who, like so many Miss Texases before her, was getting a lot of buzz \u2014 a long-legged 22-year-old with a honey-colored cloud of hot-rollered curls, a gleam in her wide-set eyes and a legitimate set of blow-the-roof-off pipes.Story continues below advertisementBut who could doubt B. Don Magness, the godfather of Texas pageantry? Everyone called him B. Don, the name spelled out in diamonds on his tie clip. His day job was in public relations for the Fort Worth convention center. But his passion was for Miss Texas. Never mind that he was a balding, roly-poly 50-something in polyester trousers: His advice on wardrobe, performance, hair color and cellulite was highly coveted, and he gladly bestowed it, not just upon the women picked to represent the Lone Star State but to every aspiring Miss Collin County or Miss Humble/Kingwood who sought his counsel. It frequently came down to more hair spray: He once groused that a contestant\u2019s hairdo was \u201cso flat it looks like a cat\u2019s been sucking on it.\u201dAdvertisementIn later years, some contestants would complain about B. Don\u2019s handsiness, the social kisses that landed on the lips, the swimsuit-modeling sessions arranged in the privacy of his home. The final straw came when Life magazine quoted him calling the 1990 contestants \u201csluts.\u201d That\u2019s when he was forced out.But Dana enjoyed B. Don and treasured his guidance, which had ventured into unorthodox strategies and highly personal realms. And Dana was clearly a favorite of his. He bragged that he had discovered her in a junior pageant where, at age 15, \u201cshe had one of the most fantastic bodies I\u2019d ever seen.\u201dStory continues below advertisementB. Don was always looking ahead that way. And now he had done his research to game out the 1983 season. He was part of Miss America\u2019s permanent ruling class \u2014 the network of state directors who returned year after year to Atlantic City to wage friendly battle against each other, just with a different girl in the fight each time. (\u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d B. Don once told a weeping Miss Texas after she came in fifth. \u201cWe\u2019ll come back again and try next year.\u201d Well, he would.) Dana knew these folks compared notes. They could take the temperature of the room, parse the politics, size up a girl\u2019s prospects based on a few data points. So B. Don was just trying to break the truth to Dana gently.Advertisement\u201cMiss New York is going to win,\u201d he said. \u201cShe will be the first Black Miss America.\u201d\"For better or worse, Miss America will always be a part of me,\" Vanessa Williams once wrote. \"It doesn't define me, but it will always be a part of my story.\"Story continues below advertisementThe feeling will always be mutual.The Miss America pageant was marking its 62nd birthday that year. It was a milestone no one could have imagined when they launched the whole enterprise in 1921, a quirky little beachfront beauty contest hosted by the local business community to extend the tourist season past Labor Day. Even the name was ad hoc, the retroactive honorific they came up with for the first winner, little Margaret Gorman of Washington, D.C., when she returned to Atlantic City the following year to defend her inaugural title. \u201cMiss America\u201d \u2014 a name that would soon offer so much to parse, so much to live up to.The pageant had spent decades as a runaway hit TV show but was beginning to lose its grasp on the public imagination. Vanessa\u2019s crowning \u2014 heralded in some quarters as a breakthrough on par with Jackie Robinson integrating Major League Baseball \u2014 breathed new life into the institution. But less than a year later, she would be forced to resign over the release of old nude photos she had never intended to see the light of day \u2014 a scandal that left a dark cloud over the pageant and the handling of which is still disputed in pageant circles.It\u2019s not just about bikinis: Inside the battle for the future of Miss AmericaToday, though, as the Miss America Organization limps to its 100th anniversary next month \u2014 hobbled by the pandemic, a vastly altered entertainment landscape and years of internal conflict \u2014 Vanessa\u2019s subsequent career as an Emmy, Tony and Grammy nominated performer has become a major point of pride.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe women who crossed the pageant stage with Vanessa in September 1983 have had more than three decades to reckon with that night, that week, that year, the most momentous in Miss America history.\u201cIt was a very proud moment also for me to be a part of that,\u201d says Miss North Carolina 1983 Deneen Graham.\u201cThe best thing about that year,\u201d says Trelynda Kerr, then Miss Oklahoma, \u201cis I can say I was in the year of Vanessa Williams.\u201d\u201cThere are a lot of girls who don\u2019t ever get over not winning,\u201d says Wanda Gayle Geddie, Miss Mississippi 1983. \u201cBut perhaps it\u2019s hardest for those who actually won Miss America.\u201dPageant Week 1983 was approaching, and Miss Oklahoma was determined to arrive early. Trelynda Kerr had been waiting for this since she got into kiddie pageants at age 5. She had finally clinched the state title on her second try with a killer performance of \"Stand by Your Man.\" Miss America, she hoped, could be her springboard to a country music career.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe smart move was to get to Atlantic City on Friday, three days before the start of the competition, so you could soak up all the attention from the journalists who also showed up early. Anything to please the hometown folks and set yourself apart from the crowd. Knowing this was an upside of hailing from a serious pageant state like Oklahoma, winner of the 1967 and 1981 Miss America crowns. Trelynda\u2019s state directors had lavished $25,000 on her training and wardrobe and kept after her about staying in shape. And when they noticed the padding in her swimsuit sliding around during the Miss Oklahoma finals, they did not mince words: We cannot go to Miss America like that, they said. They paid for her to get the implants. It was just a discreet B-cup, but Trelynda was thrilled: Finally, she had the boobs to match her hips.\u201cI had always had a very flat chest, and it affected how I felt about myself,\u201d she says. \u201cAll I wanted was to be in proportion.\u201dBut Trelynda did not get to Atlantic City first. That honor was traditionally ceded to Miss Alaska, who always needed the full extra day to adjust to the time difference. This year\u2019s Miss Alaska, though, missed her connecting flight. So the small mob of journalists waiting at the Atlantic City airport for her at 9 a.m. Friday was left at loose ends until another young woman, this one traveling from Syracuse, appeared at 9:25 a.m. with five garment bags and two suitcases.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was Vanessa Williams, accidentally earning her first moment in the national spotlight just by showing up first. The Associated Press story about her arrival didn\u2019t mention that she was the first African American woman to represent the Empire State. Perhaps they didn\u2019t know. There was no Internet; the buzz going around B. Don-level pageant circles had not yet reached the beat reporters. And it certainly hadn\u2019t reached Vanessa.This was just her third pageant. Months earlier, she had been singing an old Sinatra tune in a show at Syracuse University. A board member for Miss Greater Syracuse saw her, and soon the pageant organizers were begging her to enter. When her spring musical got canceled, she figured: Why not? Three months later, she was Miss New York.How clueless was Vanessa about pageants? At her July 16 crowning in Watertown, she still thought she would get to make her off-Broadway debut in August \u2014 a dream since childhood \u2014 in the limited-run musical she had just been cast in. They quickly set her straight. She dropped out of the show and spent the next two months doing interview prep, getting fitted for sequins and waving in farm-town parades. She didn\u2019t mind. It was a brief, amusing detour from the mapped path she planned to pick up again in the fall: junior year abroad, graduation, Yale drama school, Broadway.History was being made at the Miss America pageant. There were four African American contestants, the most ever in a single year: Vanessa, Suzette Charles of New Jersey, Amy Keys of Maryland and Deneen Graham of North Carolina. Pageant folks had noticed something else about them: They were good. Maybe this could be the year the pageant would move beyond its long, uncomfortable racial history \u2014 perhaps even crown a Black winner?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor decades, race was a stubborn nonissue for Miss America \u2014 there simply weren\u2019t any Black participants, because the doors were not open to them on any level, same as in many quadrants of American society. Racism was formalized a couple of years after Lenora Slaughter, an upper-crust doyenne from heavily segregated Florida, arrived in 1935 to take over operations of the pageant. Bent on upgrading the reputation of what started as a raucous seaside swimsuit contest, she imposed age restrictions and codes of conduct \u2014 and the so-called \u201cRule Seven,\u201d which mandated that contestants \u201cbe of good health and of the white race.\u201d Even after it was lifted in the 1950s, a racial status quo lingered, thanks to a contestant pipeline that funneled through chummy small-town pageants, where organizers could set strict residency requirements or limit entry to invitation-only.In 1959, Black women won local crowns for the first time, in Sacramento and at Indiana University. Yet as of 1968, no state had sent a Black winner to Miss America. That August, three weeks before Miss America, the first Miss Black America pageant was held in Atlantic City. It was both a protest of historic exclusion and a celebration of the Black-is-beautiful movement. The wait ended a year later, when Cheryl Browne was crowned Miss Iowa 1970. It would take another decade for a Black woman to make it to the Miss America top 5. By 1983, only about a dozen African American women had ever walked the Miss America stage. While Vanessa and Suzette had been feted in their home states as \u201cfirsts,\u201d the milestone was even more profound for a North Carolinian like Deneen Graham, 19, a soft-spoken dancer from small-town North Wilkesboro.\u201cIt was a big deal,\u201d she says. \u201cYou don\u2019t realize sometimes how significant it is until you see the press the next day.\u201d She was deluged by interview requests and fan letters. But there were also threats, direct and indirect. A local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan held a rally and threatened to host a Miss White North Carolina pageant or burn a cross in her yard (neither happened).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet as the most diverse pageant in Miss America history officially got underway, the biggest story in Atlantic City was about a White woman: B. Don's protege, Miss Texas Dana Rogers.The headlines telegraphed the blossoming national scandal: Pageant hopeful admits surgery .\u2009.\u2009. Pageant entrant admits she had implants .\u2009.\u2009. Nose job for Miss Texas .\u2009.\u2009.About 10 weeks before her first attempt at the state title in 1982, B. Don had given Dana\u2019s figure a hard look.\u201cIf this is how you come to Miss Texas, you\u2019re not going to win,\u201d he said.She went on a crash diet and started working out every day. When she placed second runner-up, the consensus was that she\u2019d gotten too thin; she\u2019d lost her spark. Dana resolved to find a healthier path the next year. But she hated how skinny she looked up top; at the pageant after-party, she went to the bathroom and ripped the spongy push-up pads from her evening gown. Never again, she thought. That summer she told B. Don she wanted implants.AdvertisementWell, he said, Miss San Antonio was coming up: If she won there, maybe they would pay for her surgery? She did, and they did. And on her second try the next summer, with a bigger chest and a slightly slimmer nose, she was crowned Miss Texas.But when a People magazine reporter came to interview Dana for a story about the 1983 contenders, B. Don warned her: People would ask if she\u2019d had work done \u2014 and she should tell the truth.Later, she questioned his strategy. It was demeaning to have to talk about her implants in interview after interview, with the implication that she had done something illicit. But you just didn\u2019t disobey your pageant director, she explains.The backlash was puzzling. Twenty years after the first silicone implants helped take breast augmentation mainstream, cosmetic surgery wasn\u2019t particularly controversial anymore. But cultural critics weren\u2019t ready to let pageant girls play by these new rules. Miss America had smugly held itself to a higher standard by exalting girl-next-door \u201cnatural\u201d beauties. For a contestant to fix her appearance felt like hypocrisy, these critics seemed to think. Or worse, it was like cheating \u2014 the equivalent of a doping athlete.Dana felt an uglier undercurrent of judgment and accusation: You\u2019re not \u201creal.\u201d You\u2019re not \u201cwholesome.\u201d And yet, throughout that week in Atlantic City, one contestant after another approached her privately to say, I had it done, too. (For all the press attention Trelynda got, the secret of her surgery never leaked.)\u201cI never thought, \u2018Why aren\u2019t you telling them?\u2019\u2009\u201d Dana says. \u201cI thought, \u2018Well, don\u2019t tell a soul.\u2019\u2009\u201dBy Wednesday of pageant week, the action had moved behind the scenes, to the closed-door interviews with the judging panel. The women would perform their talents and parade in swimsuits and evening gowns on the Convention Hall stage for the same judges later \u2014 but everyone knew these seven-minute sessions were the true make-or-break.Trelynda\u2019s was a disaster. She had spent the summer brushing up on politics, but instead the judges drilled down on the depth of her religious faith. If she were hosting a party and opened the door to find Jesus standing there, they asked, what would she do? \u201cI\u2019d invite him in,\u201d she lamely replied, boggled as to what they were looking for. The clever retort only ever materializes minutes or years later: Of course, she should have asked Christ, \u201cred or white?\u201dMiss Nebraska Kristin Lowenberg, a short-haired girl from a state that never, ever, won, was tickled to find that Rod McKuen, the 1960s poet/songwriter, was one of her judges, she being the last teenager in America to still read his books.\u201cI started to have a conversation with him about poetry in the middle of my interview,\u201d she says. \u201cI had a really good time.\u201dNo such luck for Dana. She knew she was doomed when the poet hit her with a question that implied her surgery confession was a publicity stunt. On that Wednesday night, she was in the first of three groups competing in swimsuit. Walking across the stage, she noticed the judges tilting their heads for a better look at her bosom. The word on the street was that she would have won the swimsuit prize if not for their issues with cosmetic surgery. But who knows? She was up against tough competition: That night, it was Vanessa who took home the prize.It's that time\n againThere\u2019s that mountain to climb againThe challenge is thereThe prize is yours if you dare!They spilled out onto the stage in their sporty knitwear and pumps, swaying to the sounds of the Glenn Osser Orchestra, the house band of nearly 30 years, and lip-syncing one of the upbeat ditties Glenn and his wife, Edna, wrote for the production numbers every year.And you know, yes you knowYou\u2019re gonna go for it, go for it, go for it all!This was it. Finals night. The two-hour televised culmination of a competition it had taken them months or years to reach. And it all blew by in a flash.Just minutes into the show, host Gary Collins pulled an envelope from his burgundy dinner jacket: the names of the 10 finalists. For 40 other women, including Deneen Graham and Trelynda Kerr, the game was over. Trelynda was devastated. The end of a 15-year dream. And now what was she supposed to do? Today, she wishes that she had come up in pageants in the era of \u201cplatforms\u201d and service requirements. Trelynda could have used a cause back then \u2014 something to take with her beyond pageants. Years later, after realizing she was gay and drifting away from pageant circles, but then returning as a Miss Oklahoma judge in 2016, she thought, maybe this was it \u2014 maybe she could be the person who helps make Miss America LGBTQ-friendly.\u201cIt\u2019s still,\u201d Trelynda says today of her week at the Miss America pageant, \u201cthe greatest thing I\u2019ve ever done.\u201dThe top 10 were seen more than heard, and hardly seen enough, what with all the variety-show filler. When they had a rare chance to speak live, during the evening gown competition, it was in corny get-to-know-me declarations.\u201cAs a math major, I may one day design a future space shuttle!\u201d said Miss Alabama Pam Battles, in form-fitting white lace. \u201cAnd as a music major, I will also be able to supply the piped-in music!\u201dAt least the swimsuit competition was interspersed with 10-second excerpts from their interviews, another chance to hear accents and see faces in motion. Otherwise, it was a parade of pencil bodies, the hard-fought reward for the 800-calorie-a-day diets that pageant women openly bragged about in those days. The pale-skinned girls looked downright ghostly: It was the era before aggressive bronzing went mainstream, and even a Bain de Soleil tan got neutralized by the TV lights. But if the rest of their figures had wasted away, the bustlines remained solid \u2014 how did that work? The Miss Nebraska advisers, confounded by Kristin\u2019s lean, athletic figure, showed her all the tricks with padding and tape and thickly lined bra cups \u2014 because nothing, they said, absolutely nothing must show. So Kristin had been stunned to see Miss New York stroll into preliminaries in an unreinforced, civilian-grade bathing suit, her silhouetted nipples leading the way.\u201cI thought, \u2018oh my gosh, this is not going to be good!\u2019\u2009\u201d Kristin says. But apparently it was just fine.The talent portion was comparatively deep, each woman getting a full two and a half minutes of camera time. Dana took the stage in a billowing, high-neck gown \u2014 this time the focus would be on her voice, not her body \u2014 and began to sing.Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton.Old times there are not forgotten .\u2009.\u2009.Yes, Miss Texas was singing \u201cDixie.\u201d Yes, in 1983, yes, at this historic moment for Miss America. It was Elvis Presley\u2019s version \u2014 his \u201cAmerican Trilogy\u201d medley \u2014 and Dana killed it with her lusty vibrato, weepy sighs and glorious high notes. But she knew even then it was not a politically well-considered choice. \u201cWhy B. Don had me do \u2018American Trilogy,\u2019 I have no idea,\u201d she says 36 years later. \u201cI did a really good \u2018Don\u2019t Rain on my Parade,\u2019 but he hated that song.\u201d And B. Don loved Elvis.There may have been 50 young women from across the country vying to be Miss America, but they had pageant directors the age of their parents or grandparents telling them how to do it. That\u2019s why you had a 24-year-old Miss Kentucky crooning about the midlife regret of \u201cYesterday When I was Young,\u201d and Miss Missouri sawing through the bluegrass standard \u201cOrange Blossom Special.\u201d Alabama played a Gershwin piano medley, Florida sang \u201cOver the Rainbow,\u201d and Mississippi\u2019s song was straight from Tin Pan Alley.So to see Miss Nebraska in her leotard and legwarmers rolling on the floor, spinning on her bottom, cartwheeling, back-arching and skipping to one of the biggest pop hits of the year \u2014 it was different! Her state pageant director had politely hinted that singing might be safer: Dancers never won. But Kristin was a dancer, her favorite new movie was about dancing, and she wanted to have some fun. So, she did the dance, the one you\u2019d seen all that summer on MTV:What a feeling .\u2009.\u2009.I can have it all now I\u2019m dancing for my life .\u2009.\u2009.If you wanted to pump up a crowd in September 1983, you could never go wrong with \u201cFlashdance.\u201dFor singers who wanted to edge into a contemporary aesthetic without alienating the old folks, the new lodestar was Streisand. That is, if you had the chops to tackle her songs \u2014 and Suzette Charles, who performed first, turned in by far the most virtuosic performance of the night. How was this voice coming out of a 20-year-old? The only problem was the song itself: \u201cKiss Me In the Rain,\u201d a complex and less-than-indelible tune that never topped the charts.Vanessa had run into the same issue. She won Miss Syracuse with \u201cBeing Good Isn\u2019t Good Enough\u201d \u2014 another showcase for a sparkling vocalist. But Vanessa\u2019s pageant mentor urged her to switch: It was important to pick a song the judges knew. She suggested \u201cHappy Days Are Here Again\u201d \u2014 not the bouncy FDR campaign theme, but the slowed-down reinterpretation of it that Streisand debuted during her early rise to fame.So there she was, the last woman to perform. Onstage in a liquid silver gown, Vanessa stuck to the languorous Streisand tempo. But while the young Barbra had wrung some ambiguous melancholy out of the song \u2014 as if still scarred by the unhappy days \u2014 Vanessa\u2019s take was bright-eyed, triumphant and more than a little sly.This was the song of a woman enjoying her happy days, all right, and ready for more of the same. This was quite possibly as sexy as you could ever be and still win the Miss America pageant.The 10 women returned to the stage, lined up facing the audience to hear the results.Fourth runner-up: Miss Ohio Pamela Rigas.Her gracious smile betrayed just a hint of sweet relief. Pam looked more than ready to get back to law school.Third runner-up: Miss Mississippi Wanda Gayle Geddie.Wanda mustered the obligatory smile. \u201cYou were supposed to be Miss America,\u201d her mother said months later, after everything blew up, but Wanda knew better. \u201cMom,\u201d she said, \u201cif I was supposed to be Miss America, I would have been Miss America.\u201dSecond runner-up: Miss Alabama Pam Battles.At this point, Vanessa could do the math. Seven women left on the stage, and she knew the names that would definitely be called that had not yet been called. And it was an honor to come in second to Suzette Charles. .\u2009.\u2009.First runner-up: Miss New Jersey Suzette Charles.Now everyone knew \u2014 even Vanessa. Rod McKuen later claimed that the panel had fought all week over Vanessa vs. Wanda until he and another judge prevailed. And yet in that crowning moment, it would feel as though the outcome had always been inevitable. Dana, standing at the far end of the line and no longer listening for her own name, leaned forward with a grin to glimpse Vanessa\u2019s reaction a split-second before it came.When the previous year\u2019s Miss America, Debra Maffett, put the crown on her head, Vanessa could only think: There goes my junior year abroad. It took a couple minutes for her to realize that she had become the first Black Miss America, and that this would mean something to the rest of the world.\n\n As the pageant turns 100, a look back at the year one stellar Black contestant made history. The competition for Miss America 1984 was business as usual \u2014 until everyone got a look at Vanessa Williams",
        "author": "Amy Argetsinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Goodnight to Our Beautiful, Wet Blue Moon (NYT: Style) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6648",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/style/blue-moon-wet.html",
        "text": "It was the first full blue moon visible in every time zone since 1944 on Halloween. Let\u2019s learn more about the moon! It was the first full blue moon visible in every time zone since 1944 on Halloween. Let\u2019s learn more about the moon! The moon remains, perpetually and since antiquity, a source of cultural wonder. Last week, when NASA announced that it would reveal \u201can exciting new discovery\u201d about the moon in a matter of days, the internet, thirsty for distraction, went wild speculating about it. (It happened to be exciting news for space scientists \u2014 water and ice on the moon are more accessible than previously thought \u2014 but not the supernatural or extraterrestrial news many yearned for.)",
        "author": "By Sandra E. Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6649",
        "date": "2018-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/axiom-space-travel.html",
        "text": "Here comes private space travel \u2014 with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip! Here comes private space travel \u2014 with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip! HOUSTON \u2014 In an era in which privileged individuals search constantly for the next experience to obsess over and post about on social media, space truly remains the final frontier, a luxury that only the one percent of the one percent can afford. Brad Pitt and Katy Perry are among those who have reportedly plunked down $250,000 for a ride on one of Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceships, undaunted by a 2014 test flight that crashed and killed one pilot. ",
        "author": "By Sheila Marikar"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6650",
        "date": "2018-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/axiom-space-travel.html",
        "text": "Here comes private space travel \u2014 with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip! Here comes private space travel \u2014 with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip! HOUSTON \u2014 In an era in which privileged individuals search constantly for the next experience to obsess over and post about on social media, space truly remains the final frontier, a luxury that only the one percent of the one percent can afford. Brad Pitt and Katy Perry are among those who have reportedly plunked down $250,000 for a ride on one of Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceships, undaunted by a 2014 test flight that crashed and killed one pilot. ",
        "author": "By Sheila Marikar"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6651",
        "date": "2018-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/axiom-space-travel.html",
        "text": "Here comes private space travel \u2014 with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip! Here comes private space travel \u2014 with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip! HOUSTON \u2014 In an era in which privileged individuals search constantly for the next experience to obsess over and post about on social media, space truly remains the final frontier, a luxury that only the one percent of the one percent can afford. Brad Pitt and Katy Perry are among those who have reportedly plunked down $250,000 for a ride on one of Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic spaceships, undaunted by a 2014 test flight that crashed and killed one pilot. ",
        "author": "By Sheila Marikar"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year Space Got Sexy All Over Again (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6652",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/style/space-billionaires.html",
        "text": "Or at least became a place for phallic rockets paid for by billionaires. Or at least became a place for phallic rockets paid for by billionaires. Space was hard to avoid thinking about in 2021. We entered a new era of star treks, with the long-promised era of space tourism finally upon us \u2014 at least for those who are extremely well-funded. The rest of us terrestrial plebes made do with video clips and telescopes, watching the six-hour partial lunar eclipse last month, the longest in duration since the days of the Medicis.",
        "author": "By Alex Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year Space Got Sexy All Over Again (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6653",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/style/space-billionaires.html",
        "text": "Or at least became a place for phallic rockets paid for by billionaires. Or at least became a place for phallic rockets paid for by billionaires. Space was hard to avoid thinking about in 2021. We entered a new era of star treks, with the long-promised era of space tourism finally upon us \u2014 at least for those who are extremely well-funded. The rest of us terrestrial plebes made do with video clips and telescopes, watching the six-hour partial lunar eclipse last month, the longest in duration since the days of the Medicis.",
        "author": "By Alex Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | An early Facebook investor throws up his hands: We\u2019ve been \u2018Zucked.\u2019 (WP: Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6654",
        "date": "2019-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/an-early-facebook-investor-throws-up-his-hands-weve-been-zucked/2019/02/07/1e7bdfd2-2ad0-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html",
        "text": "NEW YORK \u2014 Roger McNamee wants to give Mark Zuckerberg a chance to redeem himself.Another chance, that is.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPerched on a low stage in a rehabbed industrial space in Lower Manhattan, McNamee \u2014 an early Facebook adviser \u2014 slams the way Facebook\u2019s founder does business.\u201cMove fast, break things, apologize, repeat,\u201d says McNamee, who looks boyish despite his black pinstriped suit and his 62 years. \u201cThey\u2019ve been doing it from Day One. It\u2019s culturally built in.\u201dAnd that\u2019s all a part of what he describes as the Silicon Valley way: \u201cShip the product and let the consumers find the bugs.\u201dOf course, with Facebook, the \u201cbugs\u201d have been more like democracy-destroying monsters. McNamee \u2014 a legendary venture capitalist who still owns shares of Facebook \u2014 knows this full well.Story continues below advertisementBut the pointed criticism of Zuckerberg and his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in his new book, \u201cZucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,\u201d is meant to make things better, he says.AdvertisementAnd, as McNamee told a crowd of 240 people on Wednesday evening at Betaworks, a tech incubator, he resists the idea that Zuckerberg and Sandberg should resign their posts over the company\u2019s well-known disasters: its privacy breaches, its enabling of liars and haters, its help to Russian hackers. (As a New York Times review of \u201cZucked\u201d put it: \u201cConsidering the high likelihood that Russian activity on Facebook may have tipped the 2016 election to Donald Trump, the damage is already of generational measure.\u201d)Yet McNamee still has a modicum of faith in the Facebook founder and Sandberg, his top aide, drawing a laugh with his tepid vote of confidence: \u201cI believe they are one good night\u2019s sleep from getting this.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAnd besides, he says, until Facebook\u2019s rapacious business model changes \u2014 probably only as a result of much-needed government regulation \u2014 no new leadership would make a difference anyway.AdvertisementHe writes: \u201cThe business model depends on advertising, which in turn depends on ma",
        "author": "Margaret Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Deal With Life in Long-Term Isolation (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6655",
        "date": "2020-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/style/coronavirus-tips-for-quarantine-isolation.html",
        "text": "Sure, you\u2019re not floating 250 miles above the ground, but you can still use the same tactics astronauts use to keep going. Sure, you\u2019re not floating 250 miles above the ground, but you can still use the same tactics astronauts use to keep going. Anyone else dreading winter?",
        "author": "By Tim Herrera"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Deal With Life in Long-Term Isolation (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6656",
        "date": "2020-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/style/coronavirus-tips-for-quarantine-isolation.html",
        "text": "Sure, you\u2019re not floating 250 miles above the ground, but you can still use the same tactics astronauts use to keep going. Sure, you\u2019re not floating 250 miles above the ground, but you can still use the same tactics astronauts use to keep going. Anyone else dreading winter?",
        "author": "By Tim Herrera"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Deal With Life in Long-Term Isolation (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6657",
        "date": "2020-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/style/coronavirus-tips-for-quarantine-isolation.html",
        "text": "Sure, you\u2019re not floating 250 miles above the ground, but you can still use the same tactics astronauts use to keep going. Sure, you\u2019re not floating 250 miles above the ground, but you can still use the same tactics astronauts use to keep going. Anyone else dreading winter?",
        "author": "By Tim Herrera"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Space Is the New Black\u2019 (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6658",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/style/space-is-the-new-black.html",
        "text": "The Apollo 11 anniversary is going to spur another wave of intergalactic fashion. But this time, we\u2019re on the dark side of the moon. The Apollo 11 anniversary is going to spur another wave of intergalactic fashion. But this time, we\u2019re on the dark side of the moon. In March 2017, Karl Lagerfeld, perhaps the greatest master of the viral social media moment a fashion show had ever seen, docked a rocket ship under the glass dome of the Grand Palais in Paris for his Chanel show \u2014 and then made sure, as the models strutted around it in astronaut-print frocks, that it had actual blastoff.",
        "author": "By Vanessa Friedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Space Is the New Black\u2019 (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6659",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/style/space-is-the-new-black.html",
        "text": "The Apollo 11 anniversary is going to spur another wave of intergalactic fashion. But this time, we\u2019re on the dark side of the moon. The Apollo 11 anniversary is going to spur another wave of intergalactic fashion. But this time, we\u2019re on the dark side of the moon. In March 2017, Karl Lagerfeld, perhaps the greatest master of the viral social media moment a fashion show had ever seen, docked a rocket ship under the glass dome of the Grand Palais in Paris for his Chanel show \u2014 and then made sure, as the models strutted around it in astronaut-print frocks, that it had actual blastoff.",
        "author": "By Vanessa Friedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Space Is the New Black\u2019 (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6660",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/style/space-is-the-new-black.html",
        "text": "The Apollo 11 anniversary is going to spur another wave of intergalactic fashion. But this time, we\u2019re on the dark side of the moon. The Apollo 11 anniversary is going to spur another wave of intergalactic fashion. But this time, we\u2019re on the dark side of the moon. In March 2017, Karl Lagerfeld, perhaps the greatest master of the viral social media moment a fashion show had ever seen, docked a rocket ship under the glass dome of the Grand Palais in Paris for his Chanel show \u2014 and then made sure, as the models strutted around it in astronaut-print frocks, that it had actual blastoff.",
        "author": "By Vanessa Friedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vol. 33, No. 5: Protests (WSJ: Styleandsubstance Blog) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6661",
        "date": "2020-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/vol-33-no-5-the-final-frontier-01591229159?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=15",
        "text": "Demonstrators march during a peaceful protest in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOur Standards editors stress the importance of being precise when describing peaceful protesters and those perpetrating violence. Our reporting shows many of those set on violence range from self-described anarchists to antigovernment protesters from both sides of the political spectrum, to criminal opportunists using the chaos to destroy property and steal. They are not protesting.\n\n\n\n\nIt is equally important to ensure our coverage is balanced and captures the full scope of events and perspectives, says Standards. Be judicious in using terms such as riot\u00a0and rioters\u00a0and be sure to include reporting that makes it clear our basis for using that term.\n\nGeorge Floyd was killed\nNow that the Hennepin County Medical Examiner in Minnesota has ruled George Floyd\u2019s death was a homicide, we are making sure to reflect that in our copy. We are careful to say Mr. Floyd was killed while in police custody and not use the passive \u201cthe death of Mr. Floyd\u201d or the euphemistic \u201cMr. Floyd, who died.\u201d But as we are always careful about in murder cases, it isn\u2019t accurate at this point to report that he was murdered, since that is a legal term that will require a conviction (see the \u201chomicide, murder, manslaughter\u201d entry in the stylebook).\nThe final frontier\nThere is a lot going on in the world that brings sadness, but one moment of wonder for most people in the past month was the SpaceX rocket\u2019s successful launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUp, up and finally uppercasing.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Skipper\n \n\n\n\nAnd by the time the rocket got to the International Space Station, we at The Wall Street Journal made a giant leap for our stylebook: We decided to finally go uppercase on International Space Station.\nIt was a long time coming. The Associated Press made the switch to uppercase in 2010. Why did we insist on lowercase until now? Because Journal editors considered \u201cinternational space station\u201d to be a generic label; it wasn\u2019t an official name.\u00a0 In the 1990s, we wrote about, say, the proposed international space station, and the naming convention stuck. (Well, largely. Some uppercase references sneaked in.)\nBut NASA and other official bodies have clearly made International Space Station the official name.\u00a0Our style for any second references should still be lowercase, the space station.\nWe try to avoid the acronym ISS, which isn\u2019t well-known among the public. Perhaps it will be one day, when space tourism is flourishing. The future editors of the stylebook can overrule us then.\nBaseball guide\nWe don\u2019t have the major leagues to watch, but we made two style changes that, like International Space Station, were a long time coming.\nOffseason is now rendered without the hyphen. So now: preseason, postseason, offseason. (In dictionaries, the off- prefix is used with a hyphen much more often than the other prefixes, and we are going against our Webster\u2019s New World base dictionary in switching to offseason, but it seems time to bring the seasons in line.)\nIn another ruling, baserunner and baserunning are now one word, bringing them in line with baseman. (Fun fact: Early on, baseball was spelled as two words: base ball. You will still see that old-fashioned spelling used by re-enactors who stage games in mid-1800s style.)\nRulings & reminders\n\u25cf We render antifa lowercase. As the stylebook notes, the label, which is short for antifascist, refers to a loose affiliation of far-left groups and individuals who say they believe in confronting those they consider racist, anti-Semitic or fascist, including through violence.\n\u25cf\u00a0When writing about the economy\u2019s damage, or the stock declines in February and March, be sure to distinguish between the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns. It was the lockdowns that inflicted the economic damage, or the pandemic and the lockdowns, not the pandemic per se.\n\u25cf Teleconference is the adjective as well as noun, as in teleconference arguments before the Supreme Court. (Teleconferenced is a verb.)\n\u25cf A labradoodle, lowercase, is crossbred from a Labrador retriever and a poodle. Note that only Labrador and other proper nouns are uppercase when referring to dog breeds. So:\u00a0basset hound,\u00a0Boston terrier.\n\u25cf The 2008-09 financial crisis is the term to use, not just the financial crisis, since we have had a bit of a crisis lately, as well. (And we have long avoided the gimmicky term for the 2007-09 recession of the same era, the Great Recession, except in someone\u2019s quotation.)\n\u25cf\u00a0An editor notes that we probably overuse now in the past tense. As in: Authorities were now halfway through the incubation periods. Writers do this to create drama, but we probably overdo it; in such cases describing the past in most news articles, a then reads just as well.\nHeads above the rest\n\u25cf\u00a0\u201cImagine: John Lennon\u2019s Onetime Palm Beach Home,\u201d by Candace Taylor.  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What Can Astronauts and Search-and-Rescue Squads Teach Us About Teamwork? (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6662",
        "date": "2019-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/microsoft-teams/what-can-astronauts-and-search-and-rescue-squads-teach-us-about-teamwork.html",
        "text": "Few teams work as closely as astronauts, floating through space in a cramped capsule, away from Earth for months or years at a time. Few teams work as closely as astronauts, floating through space in a cramped capsule, away from Earth for months or years at a time. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Artist Creating a New Mythology for the North Pole (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6663",
        "date": "2019-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/t-magazine/himali-singh-soin.html",
        "text": "Inspired by her own journey to the Arctic Circle, Himali Singh Soin upends traditional stories of exploration in her new commission for Frieze. Inspired by her own journey to the Arctic Circle, Himali Singh Soin upends traditional stories of exploration in her new commission for Frieze. In her sunlit live-work space overlooking Brick Lane in East London, the artist Himali Singh Soin is spinning a narrative about the farthest reaches of our planet. Singh Soin, a poet and artist from north-central India, has spent the past couple of years contemplating, among other things, the earth\u2019s polar caps. \u201cIt\u2019s a blank screen to project so much on it, it\u2019s almost asking for hyperbole and fantasy,\u201d she says. \u201cThese two spaces seem like the closest to outer space.\u201d",
        "author": "By Tess Thackara"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Artist Creating a New Mythology for the North Pole (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6664",
        "date": "2019-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/t-magazine/himali-singh-soin.html",
        "text": "Inspired by her own journey to the Arctic Circle, Himali Singh Soin upends traditional stories of exploration in her new commission for Frieze. Inspired by her own journey to the Arctic Circle, Himali Singh Soin upends traditional stories of exploration in her new commission for Frieze. In her sunlit live-work space overlooking Brick Lane in East London, the artist Himali Singh Soin is spinning a narrative about the farthest reaches of our planet. Singh Soin, a poet and artist from north-central India, has spent the past couple of years contemplating, among other things, the earth\u2019s polar caps. \u201cIt\u2019s a blank screen to project so much on it, it\u2019s almost asking for hyperbole and fantasy,\u201d she says. \u201cThese two spaces seem like the closest to outer space.\u201d",
        "author": "By Tess Thackara"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Artist Creating a New Mythology for the North Pole (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6665",
        "date": "2019-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/t-magazine/himali-singh-soin.html",
        "text": "Inspired by her own journey to the Arctic Circle, Himali Singh Soin upends traditional stories of exploration in her new commission for Frieze. Inspired by her own journey to the Arctic Circle, Himali Singh Soin upends traditional stories of exploration in her new commission for Frieze. In her sunlit live-work space overlooking Brick Lane in East London, the artist Himali Singh Soin is spinning a narrative about the farthest reaches of our planet. Singh Soin, a poet and artist from north-central India, has spent the past couple of years contemplating, among other things, the earth\u2019s polar caps. \u201cIt\u2019s a blank screen to project so much on it, it\u2019s almost asking for hyperbole and fantasy,\u201d she says. \u201cThese two spaces seem like the closest to outer space.\u201d",
        "author": "By Tess Thackara"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Actor Colman Domingo Reads T a Poem (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6666",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/t-magazine/colman-domingo-poem.html",
        "text": "The multitalented star of the new movie \u201cLucy in the Sky\u201d recites a work by Ed Bok Lee. The multitalented star of the new movie \u201cLucy in the Sky\u201d recites a work by Ed Bok Lee. The actor, writer and director Colman Domingo, 49, has always loved poetry. \u201cI grew up on poems by E.E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni and Paul Laurence Dunbar,\u201d he says. In addition to starring alongside Natalie Portman in the new film \u201cLucy in the Sky,\u201d which follows an astronaut\u2019s struggle to readjust to life on Earth after traveling into space, Domingo recently appeared on HBO\u2019s \u201cEuphoria\u201d and is a co-writer of the acclaimed \u201cSummer: Donna Summer the Musical,\u201d which is currently on tour across the U.S. When he\u2019s crafting narratives for any of his projects, whether he\u2019s in front of the camera or behind the scenes, he often returns to the words of his favorite writers. \u201cPoems influenced my love of craftsmanship in telling a story,\u201d he says, \u201cwhether in short prose or long form.\u201d The works he revisits again and again have in common \u201crich language, impeccable phrasing, soul stirring images, and wit,\u201d he says, and so it makes sense that for T\u2019s video series \u201cRead T a Poem,\u201d he chose to recite a work by the South Korean-born American writer Ed Bok Lee, whose insightful, exacting poems reflect the intimate ways globalization is transforming our culture and our lives. Domingo\u2019s selection, \u201cSummer Open Window,\u201d is from Lee\u2019s latest collection, \u201cMitochondrial Night,\u201d which uses DNA as a central theme in its lyrical exploration of genealogy, geography and time.",
        "author": "By Wilbert L. Cooper"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Artist Whose Medium Is Science (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6667",
        "date": "2020-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/t-magazine/tavares-strachan.html",
        "text": "Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. RIGHT NOW, SEVERAL hundred miles overhead, a golden urn with the face of a forgotten man is circling Earth, a passenger on a black satellite. \u201cEnoch,\u201d one of Tavares Strachan\u2019s most ambitious works of art, is a tribute to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American astronaut, who died in a supersonic jet crash in 1967 before he could reach space. In 2018, after five years of obsessive effort, Strachan managed to launch Lawrence\u2019s likeness into low orbit using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The project is just one expression of the artist\u2019s dedication to honoring the unseen and the unsung. His life\u2019s work has been a journey into the hidden machinery that determines who and what warrant remembrance.",
        "author": "By Zo\u00eb Lescaze"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Artist Whose Medium Is Science (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6668",
        "date": "2020-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/t-magazine/tavares-strachan.html",
        "text": "Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. RIGHT NOW, SEVERAL hundred miles overhead, a golden urn with the face of a forgotten man is circling Earth, a passenger on a black satellite. \u201cEnoch,\u201d one of Tavares Strachan\u2019s most ambitious works of art, is a tribute to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American astronaut, who died in a supersonic jet crash in 1967 before he could reach space. In 2018, after five years of obsessive effort, Strachan managed to launch Lawrence\u2019s likeness into low orbit using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The project is just one expression of the artist\u2019s dedication to honoring the unseen and the unsung. His life\u2019s work has been a journey into the hidden machinery that determines who and what warrant remembrance.",
        "author": "By Zo\u00eb Lescaze"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Artist Whose Medium Is Science (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6669",
        "date": "2020-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/t-magazine/tavares-strachan.html",
        "text": "Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. RIGHT NOW, SEVERAL hundred miles overhead, a golden urn with the face of a forgotten man is circling Earth, a passenger on a black satellite. \u201cEnoch,\u201d one of Tavares Strachan\u2019s most ambitious works of art, is a tribute to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American astronaut, who died in a supersonic jet crash in 1967 before he could reach space. In 2018, after five years of obsessive effort, Strachan managed to launch Lawrence\u2019s likeness into low orbit using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The project is just one expression of the artist\u2019s dedication to honoring the unseen and the unsung. His life\u2019s work has been a journey into the hidden machinery that determines who and what warrant remembrance.",
        "author": "By Zo\u00eb Lescaze"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Artist Whose Medium Is Science (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6670",
        "date": "2020-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/t-magazine/tavares-strachan.html",
        "text": "Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. Tavares Strachan is known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole and training as a cosmonaut in Russia. RIGHT NOW, SEVERAL hundred miles overhead, a golden urn with the face of a forgotten man is circling Earth, a passenger on a black satellite. \u201cEnoch,\u201d one of Tavares Strachan\u2019s most ambitious works of art, is a tribute to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African-American astronaut, who died in a supersonic jet crash in 1967 before he could reach space. In 2018, after five years of obsessive effort, Strachan managed to launch Lawrence\u2019s likeness into low orbit using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The project is just one expression of the artist\u2019s dedication to honoring the unseen and the unsung. His life\u2019s work has been a journey into the hidden machinery that determines who and what warrant remembrance.",
        "author": "By Zo\u00eb Lescaze"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos: \u2018We Must Go Back to the Moon, and This Time to Stay\u2019 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6671",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-pledges-to-expand-his-space-ventures-1527349075?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=19",
        "text": "Without divulging details about the new generations of powerful rockets, spacecraft and landing vehicles he envisions will be necessary to establish such permanent outposts, Mr. Bezos made an impassioned argument for accelerating private space travel. He said future generations won\u2019t be able to survive on earth without expanding into other parts of the solar system.\n\u201cThe alternative is stasis,\u201d he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe \u201cwill have to stop growing\u201d due to environmental and other constraints. \u201cThat\u2019s not the future that I want for my grandchildren, or my grandchildren\u2019s grandchildren.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Bezos called the efforts of his rocket company, Blue Origin LLC, \u201cthe most important work I am doing.\u201d The question-and-answer session occurred at the annual meeting of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group championing space colonies.\nA self-described space geek and lifelong reader of science-fiction novels, Mr. Bezos in the past has talked about his determination to play a big part in creating building blocks to usher in supercheap, reliable and frequent transportation beyond the atmosphere.\nLike fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the founder and head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Mr. Bezos has talked about developing the infrastructure to eventually move millions of people into space and transform launches of reusable rockets into trips as routine as airline travel.\nBut Mr. Bezos\u2019s latest comments were unusually stark in saying that to maintain economic vitality, \u201cwe will have to leave this planet\u201d and \u201cwe don\u2019t have a lot of time\u201d to map out a step-by-step approach, starting with reduced launch costs.\n\u201cIt won\u2019t be done by one company\u201d or by just the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Bezos said, but instead will require \u201cthousands of companies working in concert over many decades.\u201d\nOn a practical and political level, arguments advanced by Mr. Bezos support President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n focus of relying on public-private partnerships for space exploration, including building landing craft able to take experiments\u2014and within a few years astronauts\u2014to the lunar surface.\n\u201cWe must go back to the moon, and this time to stay,\u201d Mr. Bezos said, echoing one of the White House\u2019s principles for establishing sustainable outposts.\nEven before the Trump administration came into office, Blue Origin proposed that NASA help fund it to pursue a fledgling program designed to send robotic spacecraft to the moon. Other companies also are developing similar projects, and NASA is soliciting ideas for various sizes of landers.\nThe agency hasn\u2019t commented publicly on the specifics of Blue Origin\u2019s proposal, and on Friday Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t mention Mr. Trump\u2019s previous pointed criticism of Amazon over policies related to payment of certain local taxes.\nOn his own, Mr. Bezos has sold roughly $1 billion of Amazon stock annually to invest in Blue Origin, which hopes to start offering suborbital space tourism flights by 2019. The fast-growing, closely held company also is developing two larger rockets aimed at carrying satellites and spacecraft into earth orbit and beyond. \nNoting that for the foreseeable future, \u201cvery few people are going to want to abandon earth altogether,\u201d he said liquid-fueled rockets able to be flown 100 times or more with minimal maintenance are vital for a new and affordable transportation model.\nResponding to questions about his commitment to pursue human space travel regardless of federal support, Amazon\u2019s CEO joked that either \u201cother people will take over the vision, or I will run out of money.\u201d\nBut he ended the talk on a more serious note by reiterating his view that moon exploration is an essential step toward transporting humans to Mars and allowing them to create habitats on the Red Planet. Such gradual efforts are the only way to avoid a repeat of earlier policy mistakes, he said, which saw the Apollo astronauts land on the moon but then morphed into five decades without any more human missions there.\n\u201cI don\u2019t like to skip steps,\u201d he said, explaining that trying to take people directly to Mars would be futile. \u201cThere would be a ticker-tape parade and then 50 years of nothing.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos vowed to use his rocket startup to develop robotic rovers and perhaps human habitats on the moon\u2019s surface, even if such projects fail to win financial support from the U.S. government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos: \u2018We Must Go Back to the Moon, and This Time to Stay\u2019 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6672",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-pledges-to-expand-his-space-ventures-1527349075?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=73",
        "text": "Without divulging details about the new generations of powerful rockets, spacecraft and landing vehicles he envisions will be necessary to establish such permanent outposts, Mr. Bezos made an impassioned argument for accelerating private space travel. He said future generations won\u2019t be able to survive on earth without expanding into other parts of the solar system.\n\u201cThe alternative is stasis,\u201d he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe \u201cwill have to stop growing\u201d due to environmental and other constraints. \u201cThat\u2019s not the future that I want for my grandchildren, or my grandchildren\u2019s grandchildren.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Bezos called the efforts of his rocket company, Blue Origin LLC, \u201cthe most important work I am doing.\u201d The question-and-answer session occurred at the annual meeting of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group championing space colonies.\nA self-described space geek and lifelong reader of science-fiction novels, Mr. Bezos in the past has talked about his determination to play a big part in creating building blocks to usher in supercheap, reliable and frequent transportation beyond the atmosphere.\nLike fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the founder and head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Mr. Bezos has talked about developing the infrastructure to eventually move millions of people into space and transform launches of reusable rockets into trips as routine as airline travel.\nBut Mr. Bezos\u2019s latest comments were unusually stark in saying that to maintain economic vitality, \u201cwe will have to leave this planet\u201d and \u201cwe don\u2019t have a lot of time\u201d to map out a step-by-step approach, starting with reduced launch costs.\n\u201cIt won\u2019t be done by one company\u201d or by just the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Bezos said, but instead will require \u201cthousands of companies working in concert over many decades.\u201d\nOn a practical and political level, arguments advanced by Mr. Bezos support President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n focus of relying on public-private partnerships for space exploration, including building landing craft able to take experiments\u2014and within a few years astronauts\u2014to the lunar surface.\n\u201cWe must go back to the moon, and this time to stay,\u201d Mr. Bezos said, echoing one of the White House\u2019s principles for establishing sustainable outposts.\nEven before the Trump administration came into office, Blue Origin proposed that NASA help fund it to pursue a fledgling program designed to send robotic spacecraft to the moon. Other companies also are developing similar projects, and NASA is soliciting ideas for various sizes of landers.\nThe agency hasn\u2019t commented publicly on the specifics of Blue Origin\u2019s proposal, and on Friday Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t mention Mr. Trump\u2019s previous pointed criticism of Amazon over policies related to payment of certain local taxes.\nOn his own, Mr. Bezos has sold roughly $1 billion of Amazon stock annually to invest in Blue Origin, which hopes to start offering suborbital space tourism flights by 2019. The fast-growing, closely held company also is developing two larger rockets aimed at carrying satellites and spacecraft into earth orbit and beyond. \nNoting that for the foreseeable future, \u201cvery few people are going to want to abandon earth altogether,\u201d he said liquid-fueled rockets able to be flown 100 times or more with minimal maintenance are vital for a new and affordable transportation model.\nResponding to questions about his commitment to pursue human space travel regardless of federal support, Amazon\u2019s CEO joked that either \u201cother people will take over the vision, or I will run out of money.\u201d\nBut he ended the talk on a more serious note by reiterating his view that moon exploration is an essential step toward transporting humans to Mars and allowing them to create habitats on the Red Planet. Such gradual efforts are the only way to avoid a repeat of earlier policy mistakes, he said, which saw the Apollo astronauts land on the moon but then morphed into five decades without any more human missions there.\n\u201cI don\u2019t like to skip steps,\u201d he said, explaining that trying to take people directly to Mars would be futile. \u201cThere would be a ticker-tape parade and then 50 years of nothing.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos vowed to use his rocket startup to develop robotic rovers and perhaps human habitats on the moon\u2019s surface, even if such projects fail to win financial support from the U.S. government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos: \u2018We Must Go Back to the Moon, and This Time to Stay\u2019 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6673",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-pledges-to-expand-his-space-ventures-1527349075?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=23",
        "text": "Without divulging details about the new generations of powerful rockets, spacecraft and landing vehicles he envisions will be necessary to establish such permanent outposts, Mr. Bezos made an impassioned argument for accelerating private space travel. He said future generations won\u2019t be able to survive on earth without expanding into other parts of the solar system.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe alternative is stasis,\u201d he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe \u201cwill have to stop growing\u201d due to environmental and other constraints. \u201cThat\u2019s not the future that I want for my grandchildren, or my grandchildren\u2019s grandchildren.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Bezos called the efforts of his rocket company, Blue Origin LLC, \u201cthe most important work I am doing.\u201d The question-and-answer session occurred at the annual meeting of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group championing space colonies.\nA self-described space geek and lifelong reader of science-fiction novels, Mr. Bezos in the past has talked about his determination to play a big part in creating building blocks to usher in supercheap, reliable and frequent transportation beyond the atmosphere.\nLike fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the founder and head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Mr. Bezos has talked about developing the infrastructure to eventually move millions of people into space and transform launches of reusable rockets into trips as routine as airline travel.\nBut Mr. Bezos\u2019s latest comments were unusually stark in saying that to maintain economic vitality, \u201cwe will have to leave this planet\u201d and \u201cwe don\u2019t have a lot of time\u201d to map out a step-by-step approach, starting with reduced launch costs.\n\u201cIt won\u2019t be done by one company\u201d or by just the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Bezos said, but instead will require \u201cthousands of companies working in concert over many decades.\u201d\nOn a practical and political level, arguments advanced by Mr. Bezos support President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n focus of relying on public-private partnerships for space exploration, including building landing craft able to take experiments\u2014and within a few years astronauts\u2014to the lunar surface.\n\u201cWe must go back to the moon, and this time to stay,\u201d Mr. Bezos said, echoing one of the White House\u2019s principles for establishing sustainable outposts.\nEven before the Trump administration came into office, Blue Origin proposed that NASA help fund it to pursue a fledgling program designed to send robotic spacecraft to the moon. Other companies also are developing similar projects, and NASA is soliciting ideas for various sizes of landers.\nThe agency hasn\u2019t commented publicly on the specifics of Blue Origin\u2019s proposal, and on Friday Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t mention Mr. Trump\u2019s previous pointed criticism of Amazon over policies related to payment of certain local taxes.\nOn his own, Mr. Bezos has sold roughly $1 billion of Amazon stock annually to invest in Blue Origin, which hopes to start offering suborbital space tourism flights by 2019. The fast-growing, closely held company also is developing two larger rockets aimed at carrying satellites and spacecraft into earth orbit and beyond. \nNoting that for the foreseeable future, \u201cvery few people are going to want to abandon earth altogether,\u201d he said liquid-fueled rockets able to be flown 100 times or more with minimal maintenance are vital for a new and affordable transportation model.\nResponding to questions about his commitment to pursue human space travel regardless of federal support, Amazon\u2019s CEO joked that either \u201cother people will take over the vision, or I will run out of money.\u201d\nBut he ended the talk on a more serious note by reiterating his view that moon exploration is an essential step toward transporting humans to Mars and allowing them to create habitats on the Red Planet. Such gradual efforts are the only way to avoid a repeat of earlier policy mistakes, he said, which saw the Apollo astronauts land on the moon but then morphed into five decades without any more human missions there.\n\u201cI don\u2019t like to skip steps,\u201d he said, explaining that trying to take people directly to Mars would be futile. \u201cThere would be a ticker-tape parade and then 50 years of nothing.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos vowed to use his rocket startup to develop robotic rovers and perhaps human habitats on the moon\u2019s surface, even if such projects fail to win financial support from the U.S. government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos: \u2018We Must Go Back to the Moon, and This Time to Stay\u2019 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6674",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-pledges-to-expand-his-space-ventures-1527349075?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=75",
        "text": "Without divulging details about the new generations of powerful rockets, spacecraft and landing vehicles he envisions will be necessary to establish such permanent outposts, Mr. Bezos made an impassioned argument for accelerating private space travel. He said future generations won\u2019t be able to survive on earth without expanding into other parts of the solar system.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe alternative is stasis,\u201d he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe \u201cwill have to stop growing\u201d due to environmental and other constraints. \u201cThat\u2019s not the future that I want for my grandchildren, or my grandchildren\u2019s grandchildren.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Bezos called the efforts of his rocket company, Blue Origin LLC, \u201cthe most important work I am doing.\u201d The question-and-answer session occurred at the annual meeting of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group championing space colonies.\nA self-described space geek and lifelong reader of science-fiction novels, Mr. Bezos in the past has talked about his determination to play a big part in creating building blocks to usher in supercheap, reliable and frequent transportation beyond the atmosphere.\nLike fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the founder and head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Mr. Bezos has talked about developing the infrastructure to eventually move millions of people into space and transform launches of reusable rockets into trips as routine as airline travel.\nBut Mr. Bezos\u2019s latest comments were unusually stark in saying that to maintain economic vitality, \u201cwe will have to leave this planet\u201d and \u201cwe don\u2019t have a lot of time\u201d to map out a step-by-step approach, starting with reduced launch costs.\n\u201cIt won\u2019t be done by one company\u201d or by just the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Bezos said, but instead will require \u201cthousands of companies working in concert over many decades.\u201d\nOn a practical and political level, arguments advanced by Mr. Bezos support President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n focus of relying on public-private partnerships for space exploration, including building landing craft able to take experiments\u2014and within a few years astronauts\u2014to the lunar surface.\n\u201cWe must go back to the moon, and this time to stay,\u201d Mr. Bezos said, echoing one of the White House\u2019s principles for establishing sustainable outposts.\nEven before the Trump administration came into office, Blue Origin proposed that NASA help fund it to pursue a fledgling program designed to send robotic spacecraft to the moon. Other companies also are developing similar projects, and NASA is soliciting ideas for various sizes of landers.\nThe agency hasn\u2019t commented publicly on the specifics of Blue Origin\u2019s proposal, and on Friday Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t mention Mr. Trump\u2019s previous pointed criticism of Amazon over policies related to payment of certain local taxes.\nOn his own, Mr. Bezos has sold roughly $1 billion of Amazon stock annually to invest in Blue Origin, which hopes to start offering suborbital space tourism flights by 2019. The fast-growing, closely held company also is developing two larger rockets aimed at carrying satellites and spacecraft into earth orbit and beyond. \nNoting that for the foreseeable future, \u201cvery few people are going to want to abandon earth altogether,\u201d he said liquid-fueled rockets able to be flown 100 times or more with minimal maintenance are vital for a new and affordable transportation model.\nResponding to questions about his commitment to pursue human space travel regardless of federal support, Amazon\u2019s CEO joked that either \u201cother people will take over the vision, or I will run out of money.\u201d\nBut he ended the talk on a more serious note by reiterating his view that moon exploration is an essential step toward transporting humans to Mars and allowing them to create habitats on the Red Planet. Such gradual efforts are the only way to avoid a repeat of earlier policy mistakes, he said, which saw the Apollo astronauts land on the moon but then morphed into five decades without any more human missions there.\n\u201cI don\u2019t like to skip steps,\u201d he said, explaining that trying to take people directly to Mars would be futile. \u201cThere would be a ticker-tape parade and then 50 years of nothing.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos vowed to use his rocket startup to develop robotic rovers and perhaps human habitats on the moon\u2019s surface, even if such projects fail to win financial support from the U.S. government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos: \u2018We Must Go Back to the Moon, and This Time to Stay\u2019 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6675",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-pledges-to-expand-his-space-ventures-1527349075?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=67",
        "text": "Without divulging details about the new generations of powerful rockets, spacecraft and landing vehicles he envisions will be necessary to establish such permanent outposts, Mr. Bezos made an impassioned argument for accelerating private space travel. He said future generations won\u2019t be able to survive on earth without expanding into other parts of the solar system.\n\u201cThe alternative is stasis,\u201d he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe \u201cwill have to stop growing\u201d due to environmental and other constraints. \u201cThat\u2019s not the future that I want for my grandchildren, or my grandchildren\u2019s grandchildren.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Bezos called the efforts of his rocket company, Blue Origin LLC, \u201cthe most important work I am doing.\u201d The question-and-answer session occurred at the annual meeting of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group championing space colonies.\nA self-described space geek and lifelong reader of science-fiction novels, Mr. Bezos in the past has talked about his determination to play a big part in creating building blocks to usher in supercheap, reliable and frequent transportation beyond the atmosphere.\nLike fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the founder and head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Mr. Bezos has talked about developing the infrastructure to eventually move millions of people into space and transform launches of reusable rockets into trips as routine as airline travel.\nBut Mr. Bezos\u2019s latest comments were unusually stark in saying that to maintain economic vitality, \u201cwe will have to leave this planet\u201d and \u201cwe don\u2019t have a lot of time\u201d to map out a step-by-step approach, starting with reduced launch costs.\n\u201cIt won\u2019t be done by one company\u201d or by just the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Bezos said, but instead will require \u201cthousands of companies working in concert over many decades.\u201d\nOn a practical and political level, arguments advanced by Mr. Bezos support President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n focus of relying on public-private partnerships for space exploration, including building landing craft able to take experiments\u2014and within a few years astronauts\u2014to the lunar surface.\n\u201cWe must go back to the moon, and this time to stay,\u201d Mr. Bezos said, echoing one of the White House\u2019s principles for establishing sustainable outposts.\nEven before the Trump administration came into office, Blue Origin proposed that NASA help fund it to pursue a fledgling program designed to send robotic spacecraft to the moon. Other companies also are developing similar projects, and NASA is soliciting ideas for various sizes of landers.\nThe agency hasn\u2019t commented publicly on the specifics of Blue Origin\u2019s proposal, and on Friday Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t mention Mr. Trump\u2019s previous pointed criticism of Amazon over policies related to payment of certain local taxes.\nOn his own, Mr. Bezos has sold roughly $1 billion of Amazon stock annually to invest in Blue Origin, which hopes to start offering suborbital space tourism flights by 2019. The fast-growing, closely held company also is developing two larger rockets aimed at carrying satellites and spacecraft into earth orbit and beyond. \nNoting that for the foreseeable future, \u201cvery few people are going to want to abandon earth altogether,\u201d he said liquid-fueled rockets able to be flown 100 times or more with minimal maintenance are vital for a new and affordable transportation model.\nResponding to questions about his commitment to pursue human space travel regardless of federal support, Amazon\u2019s CEO joked that either \u201cother people will take over the vision, or I will run out of money.\u201d\nBut he ended the talk on a more serious note by reiterating his view that moon exploration is an essential step toward transporting humans to Mars and allowing them to create habitats on the Red Planet. Such gradual efforts are the only way to avoid a repeat of earlier policy mistakes, he said, which saw the Apollo astronauts land on the moon but then morphed into five decades without any more human missions there.\n\u201cI don\u2019t like to skip steps,\u201d he said, explaining that trying to take people directly to Mars would be futile. \u201cThere would be a ticker-tape parade and then 50 years of nothing.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos vowed to use his rocket startup to develop robotic rovers and perhaps human habitats on the moon\u2019s surface, even if such projects fail to win financial support from the U.S. government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos: \u2018We Must Go Back to the Moon, and This Time to Stay\u2019 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6676",
        "date": "2018-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-pledges-to-expand-his-space-ventures-1527349075?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=95",
        "text": "Without divulging details about the new generations of powerful rockets, spacecraft and landing vehicles he envisions will be necessary to establish such permanent outposts, Mr. Bezos made an impassioned argument for accelerating private space travel. He said future generations won\u2019t be able to survive on earth without expanding into other parts of the solar system.\n\u201cThe alternative is stasis,\u201d he said, adding that without space settlements, societies around the globe \u201cwill have to stop growing\u201d due to environmental and other constraints. \u201cThat\u2019s not the future that I want for my grandchildren, or my grandchildren\u2019s grandchildren.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Bezos called the efforts of his rocket company, Blue Origin LLC, \u201cthe most important work I am doing.\u201d The question-and-answer session occurred at the annual meeting of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group championing space colonies.\nA self-described space geek and lifelong reader of science-fiction novels, Mr. Bezos in the past has talked about his determination to play a big part in creating building blocks to usher in supercheap, reliable and frequent transportation beyond the atmosphere.\nLike fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the founder and head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Mr. Bezos has talked about developing the infrastructure to eventually move millions of people into space and transform launches of reusable rockets into trips as routine as airline travel.\nBut Mr. Bezos\u2019s latest comments were unusually stark in saying that to maintain economic vitality, \u201cwe will have to leave this planet\u201d and \u201cwe don\u2019t have a lot of time\u201d to map out a step-by-step approach, starting with reduced launch costs.\n\u201cIt won\u2019t be done by one company\u201d or by just the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mr. Bezos said, but instead will require \u201cthousands of companies working in concert over many decades.\u201d\nOn a practical and political level, arguments advanced by Mr. Bezos support President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n focus of relying on public-private partnerships for space exploration, including building landing craft able to take experiments\u2014and within a few years astronauts\u2014to the lunar surface.\n\u201cWe must go back to the moon, and this time to stay,\u201d Mr. Bezos said, echoing one of the White House\u2019s principles for establishing sustainable outposts.\nEven before the Trump administration came into office, Blue Origin proposed that NASA help fund it to pursue a fledgling program designed to send robotic spacecraft to the moon. Other companies also are developing similar projects, and NASA is soliciting ideas for various sizes of landers.\nThe agency hasn\u2019t commented publicly on the specifics of Blue Origin\u2019s proposal, and on Friday Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t mention Mr. Trump\u2019s previous pointed criticism of Amazon over policies related to payment of certain local taxes.\nOn his own, Mr. Bezos has sold roughly $1 billion of Amazon stock annually to invest in Blue Origin, which hopes to start offering suborbital space tourism flights by 2019. The fast-growing, closely held company also is developing two larger rockets aimed at carrying satellites and spacecraft into earth orbit and beyond. \nNoting that for the foreseeable future, \u201cvery few people are going to want to abandon earth altogether,\u201d he said liquid-fueled rockets able to be flown 100 times or more with minimal maintenance are vital for a new and affordable transportation model.\nResponding to questions about his commitment to pursue human space travel regardless of federal support, Amazon\u2019s CEO joked that either \u201cother people will take over the vision, or I will run out of money.\u201d\nBut he ended the talk on a more serious note by reiterating his view that moon exploration is an essential step toward transporting humans to Mars and allowing them to create habitats on the Red Planet. Such gradual efforts are the only way to avoid a repeat of earlier policy mistakes, he said, which saw the Apollo astronauts land on the moon but then morphed into five decades without any more human missions there.\n\u201cI don\u2019t like to skip steps,\u201d he said, explaining that trying to take people directly to Mars would be futile. \u201cThere would be a ticker-tape parade and then 50 years of nothing.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos vowed to use his rocket startup to develop robotic rovers and perhaps human habitats on the moon\u2019s surface, even if such projects fail to win financial support from the U.S. government. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Most Powerful Rocket Since Apollo Era (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6677",
        "date": "2018-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-worlds-biggest-rocket-1517950481?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=20",
        "text": "With throngs of spectators on hand, the closely held Southern California company defied industry critics by flying the world\u2019s most powerful rocket since U.S. astronauts landed on the moon almost five decades ago. \nThe 230-foot rocket, which featured 27 engines with the combined thrust of some 18\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jets, climbed into clear skies at 3:45 p.m. local time. It carried a Tesla roadster as a dummy payload and publicity stunt.\n\n\nThe launch countdown had been delayed for about two hours because of winds.\n\n\nRead More Musk Dissects Angst and Sweet Smell of Success Elon Musk Says SpaceX\u2019s New Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX \n\n\n The rocket\u2019s two side boosters shut down, then separated as expected less than three minutes into the flight. All other systems worked as designed during the ascent, apparently without any significant problems, and the cover protecting the payload separated precisely on cue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Tesla Roadster being prepped for its trip aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket. The car went up with the rocket on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elon Musk/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cEverything you could want in a test flight,\u201d said one of the narrators on the company\u2019s video of the launch. \nThe flight demonstrated that the rocket\u2019s design was able to withstand the stresses of so many engines operating simultaneously at supersonic speeds. That was considered one of the biggest hazards, along with separation of the two side boosters in space.\nThe pair of boosters returned for a vertical landing not far from the historic pad from which Apollo astronauts lifted off for lunar exploits. The central part of the rocket crashed, however, instead of landing vertically as planned on a floating platform. \nBut because the company previously pulled off some 20 similar landings by spent boosters, the single failure was more of a blemish than a significant setback to Tuesday\u2019s flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nLarge, reusable rockets such as the Falcon Heavy are ideal for deep-space transport from a cost perspective, according to Howard McCurdy, a space historian who teaches at American University. \u201cThat\u2019s where the heavy-lift design truly shines,\u201d he said before the launch.\nGiven President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n official policy of combining federal and private assets to explore the Moon, Mr. McCurdy called the SpaceX rocket \u201ca very important step in that direction.\u201d\nThe flight prompted repeated applause and cheering among SpaceX employees, particularly because Mr. Musk for months had emphasized the risks and played down the likelihood of success. Just the day before, he had said he considered chances of pulling off the demonstration flight to be roughly 50-50.\nUsing a complicated maneuver that had the dummy payload coasting through a section of space with high radiation levels for about six hours, the engine on the rocket\u2019s upper stage ignited for the third and last time to send the car into a further orbit than planned. On Twitter, Mr. Musk indicated the Tesla would reach the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.\nSpaceX has revolutionized the launch business by vertically integrating operations, slashing prices and reusing the main engines and lower stage of its existing workhorse rockets, the Falcon 9 fleet. But throughout the years, Mr. Musk has remained focused on a longer-term goal: devising mammoth rockets and spacecraft able to eventually establish colonies on Mars.\nThe Falcon Heavy was conceived around the beginning of the decade to carry both heavy payloads and people into orbit around Earth, and as a steppingstone to the next generation of rockets with enough thrust to roam the solar system. But on Monday, Mr. Musk surprised the aerospace community by disclosing that the company\u2019s current heavy-lift champion, composed of three Falcon 9 boosters, likely will be reserved for unmanned missions.\nStill, the Falcon Heavy could provide a cut-rate price to get the heaviest commercial and U.S. government payloads into orbit.\n\n\n Booster Club SpaceX's new Falcon Heavy is more powerful than any rocket currently in use, but still not as large as the Saturn V that launched astronauts to the moon. Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 10 m\u2020 3.7 m 12 m 1.7 m Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apoll Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket on its initial test flight, marking another coup for founder Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Most Powerful Rocket Since Apollo Era (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6678",
        "date": "2018-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-worlds-biggest-rocket-1517950481?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=71",
        "text": "With throngs of spectators on hand, the closely held Southern California company defied industry critics by flying the world\u2019s most powerful rocket since U.S. astronauts landed on the moon almost five decades ago. \nThe 230-foot rocket, which featured 27 engines with the combined thrust of some 18\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jets, climbed into clear skies at 3:45 p.m. local time. It carried a Tesla roadster as a dummy payload and publicity stunt.\n\n\nThe launch countdown had been delayed for about two hours because of winds.\n\n\nRead More Musk Dissects Angst and Sweet Smell of Success Elon Musk Says SpaceX\u2019s New Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX \n\n\n The rocket\u2019s two side boosters shut down, then separated as expected less than three minutes into the flight. All other systems worked as designed during the ascent, apparently without any significant problems, and the cover protecting the payload separated precisely on cue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Tesla Roadster being prepped for its trip aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket. The car went up with the rocket on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elon Musk/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cEverything you could want in a test flight,\u201d said one of the narrators on the company\u2019s video of the launch. \nThe flight demonstrated that the rocket\u2019s design was able to withstand the stresses of so many engines operating simultaneously at supersonic speeds. That was considered one of the biggest hazards, along with separation of the two side boosters in space.\nThe pair of boosters returned for a vertical landing not far from the historic pad from which Apollo astronauts lifted off for lunar exploits. The central part of the rocket crashed, however, instead of landing vertically as planned on a floating platform. \nBut because the company previously pulled off some 20 similar landings by spent boosters, the single failure was more of a blemish than a significant setback to Tuesday\u2019s flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nLarge, reusable rockets such as the Falcon Heavy are ideal for deep-space transport from a cost perspective, according to Howard McCurdy, a space historian who teaches at American University. \u201cThat\u2019s where the heavy-lift design truly shines,\u201d he said before the launch.\nGiven President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n official policy of combining federal and private assets to explore the Moon, Mr. McCurdy called the SpaceX rocket \u201ca very important step in that direction.\u201d\nThe flight prompted repeated applause and cheering among SpaceX employees, particularly because Mr. Musk for months had emphasized the risks and played down the likelihood of success. Just the day before, he had said he considered chances of pulling off the demonstration flight to be roughly 50-50.\nUsing a complicated maneuver that had the dummy payload coasting through a section of space with high radiation levels for about six hours, the engine on the rocket\u2019s upper stage ignited for the third and last time to send the car into a further orbit than planned. On Twitter, Mr. Musk indicated the Tesla would reach the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.\nSpaceX has revolutionized the launch business by vertically integrating operations, slashing prices and reusing the main engines and lower stage of its existing workhorse rockets, the Falcon 9 fleet. But throughout the years, Mr. Musk has remained focused on a longer-term goal: devising mammoth rockets and spacecraft able to eventually establish colonies on Mars.\nThe Falcon Heavy was conceived around the beginning of the decade to carry both heavy payloads and people into orbit around Earth, and as a steppingstone to the next generation of rockets with enough thrust to roam the solar system. But on Monday, Mr. Musk surprised the aerospace community by disclosing that the company\u2019s current heavy-lift champion, composed of three Falcon 9 boosters, likely will be reserved for unmanned missions.\nStill, the Falcon Heavy could provide a cut-rate price to get the heaviest commercial and U.S. government payloads into orbit.\n\n\n Booster Club SpaceX's new Falcon Heavy is more powerful than any rocket currently in use, but still not as large as the Saturn V that launched astronauts to the moon. Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 10 m\u2020 3.7 m 12 m 1.7 m Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apoll Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket on its initial test flight, marking another coup for founder Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Most Powerful Rocket Since Apollo Era (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6679",
        "date": "2018-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-worlds-biggest-rocket-1517950481?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=102",
        "text": "With throngs of spectators on hand, the closely held Southern California company defied industry critics by flying the world\u2019s most powerful rocket since U.S. astronauts landed on the moon almost five decades ago. \n\n\n\n\nThe 230-foot rocket, which featured 27 engines with the combined thrust of some 18\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jets, climbed into clear skies at 3:45 p.m. local time. It carried a Tesla roadster as a dummy payload and publicity stunt.\n\n\nThe launch countdown had been delayed for about two hours because of winds.\n\n\nRead More Musk Dissects Angst and Sweet Smell of Success Elon Musk Says SpaceX\u2019s New Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX \n\n\n The rocket\u2019s two side boosters shut down, then separated as expected less than three minutes into the flight. All other systems worked as designed during the ascent, apparently without any significant problems, and the cover protecting the payload separated precisely on cue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Tesla Roadster being prepped for its trip aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket. The car went up with the rocket on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elon Musk/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cEverything you could want in a test flight,\u201d said one of the narrators on the company\u2019s video of the launch. \nThe flight demonstrated that the rocket\u2019s design was able to withstand the stresses of so many engines operating simultaneously at supersonic speeds. That was considered one of the biggest hazards, along with separation of the two side boosters in space.\nThe pair of boosters returned for a vertical landing not far from the historic pad from which Apollo astronauts lifted off for lunar exploits. The central part of the rocket crashed, however, instead of landing vertically as planned on a floating platform. \nBut because the company previously pulled off some 20 similar landings by spent boosters, the single failure was more of a blemish than a significant setback to Tuesday\u2019s flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nLarge, reusable rockets such as the Falcon Heavy are ideal for deep-space transport from a cost perspective, according to Howard McCurdy, a space historian who teaches at American University. \u201cThat\u2019s where the heavy-lift design truly shines,\u201d he said before the launch.\nGiven President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n official policy of combining federal and private assets to explore the Moon, Mr. McCurdy called the SpaceX rocket \u201ca very important step in that direction.\u201d\nThe flight prompted repeated applause and cheering among SpaceX employees, particularly because Mr. Musk for months had emphasized the risks and played down the likelihood of success. Just the day before, he had said he considered chances of pulling off the demonstration flight to be roughly 50-50.\nUsing a complicated maneuver that had the dummy payload coasting through a section of space with high radiation levels for about six hours, the engine on the rocket\u2019s upper stage ignited for the third and last time to send the car into a further orbit than planned. On Twitter, Mr. Musk indicated the Tesla would reach the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.\nSpaceX has revolutionized the launch business by vertically integrating operations, slashing prices and reusing the main engines and lower stage of its existing workhorse rockets, the Falcon 9 fleet. But throughout the years, Mr. Musk has remained focused on a longer-term goal: devising mammoth rockets and spacecraft able to eventually establish colonies on Mars.\nThe Falcon Heavy was conceived around the beginning of the decade to carry both heavy payloads and people into orbit around Earth, and as a steppingstone to the next generation of rockets with enough thrust to roam the solar system. But on Monday, Mr. Musk surprised the aerospace community by disclosing that the company\u2019s current heavy-lift champion, composed of three Falcon 9 boosters, likely will be reserved for unmanned missions.\nStill, the Falcon Heavy could provide a cut-rate price to get the heaviest commercial and U.S. government payloads into orbit.\n\n\n Booster Club SpaceX's new Falcon Heavy is more powerful than any rocket currently in use, but still not as large as the Saturn V that launched astronauts to the moon. Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s Apollo program and to launch the Skylab space station First launched 1967 Orbital payload 130 tons* Lunar payload 50 tons* Falcon Heavy First launch scheduled for Tuesday Payload 70 tons* Falcon 9 First launched June 2010 Payload 25 tons* 70 m 111 m Falcon 1 First launched September 2008 Payload 0.5 tons* 21.3 m 10 m\u2020 3.7 m 12 m 1.7 m Saturn V Used in NASA\u2019s A Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket on its initial test flight, marking another coup for founder Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SoftBank to Invest More in OneWeb (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6680",
        "date": "2017-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-to-invest-around-500-million-more-in-oneweb-satellite-internet-venture-1512990003?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=21",
        "text": "The precise size and structure of SoftBank\u2019s additional investment could change, said the person familiar with the details and others close to the talks. But Mr. Wyler and SoftBank founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Masayoshi Son,\n\n\n\n they said, agreed in principle on the cash infusion during recent discussions, with the caveat that SoftBank\u2019s stake in OneWeb would remain less than 50%.\nWork on OneWeb\u2019s previously announced initial fleet of more than 700 small, low-altitude satellites is \u201cgenerally on schedule\u201d for launches beginning next year, starting to market service over Alaska in 2019 and expanding virtually around the globe by the end of 2020, according to Mr. Wyler. During a weekend interview, he also said deployment of roughly 900 second-generation, higher-orbiting satellites by the mid-2020s\u2014intended to create the first such large-scale, hybrid constellation on orbit\u2014is projected to increase speeds roughly fivefold to 2.5 gigabits per second.\n\n\nIn October, Mr. Wyler told the Senate Commerce Committee that OneWeb\u2019s network portends \u201ca brighter future for the nearly half of Americans with substandard internet connections, primarily in rural areas.\u201d His ultimate goal is to \u201cfully bridge the global digital divide,\u201d he told the panel, by bringing inexpensive internet links relying on light, versatile antennas to impoverished communities, schools and small businesses in developing countries.\nWith support from other investors such as Qualcomm Inc., Airbus SE and British billionaire Richard Branson, OneWeb appears to be the furthest along among a group of high-profile projects aiming to launch swarms of hundreds\u2014or even thousands\u2014of satellites at altitudes substantially below those currently used for the largest, most-advanced commercial communications spacecraft. Boeing Co. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., separately backing two proposed systems, are still seeking final regulatory approvals related to spectrum and satellite designs, according to industry officials.\nBy contrast, Mr. Wyler\u2019s project has final approval from the Federal Communications Commission to turn on domestic service within two years, barring major technical or manufacturing problems. The approval also is contingent on other conditions.\nAccording to Mr. Wyler, his team also is \u201ctrying to lead the charge\u201d in reducing orbital debris stemming from potential satellite collisions or failures. OneWeb\u2019s satellites, weighing hundreds of pounds and expected to cost less than $1 million apiece, are designed to be \u201cas high or higher in quality and reliability\u201d than much larger models costing $150 million or more, he said.\nAn early financial backer of some of the largest internet companies on both sides of the Pacific, SoftBank continues to seek synergies with mobile-phone businesses and the portfolio of assorted technology companies it has assembled over the years. SoftBank also has created the world\u2019s biggest tech investment fund, worth nearly $100 billion. The Vision Fund has been roiling the venture community with its sheer scale, lifting valuations and helping entrepreneurs bypass usual fundraising rounds.\n\n\n\n\n\nSince its official launch in May with the backing of investors such as Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund, the fund has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in companies that SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son believes will corner key technologies in a future of smarter, interconnected, and automated devices. OneWeb\u2019s satellites are geared to help serve as the backbone for those applications, Mr. Son has said.\nSoftBank, which has a 40% stake in OneWeb based on a prior investment, walked away from merger talks between its U.S. wireless carrier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sprint Corp.\n\n\n and rival T-Mobile US Inc., unwilling to relinquish control as the top shareholder of a spectrum Mr. Son believes will be valuable as everyday objects from cars to refrigerators increasingly communicate with one another.\nMr. Wyler, for his part, has long advocated the advantages of combining satellites circling the earth at different altitudes, arguing such synergies dramatically increase capacity and efficiencies. But unlike Mr. Musk\u2019s concept, he doesn\u2019t favor laser links between satellites on the grounds that such add-ons unduly increase weight and complexity.\nA spokesman for SpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company often is called, has repeatedly declined to respond to questions about details or progress of the entrepreneur\u2019s proposed satellite project.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Mayumi Negishi at mayumi.negishi@wsj.com Japan\u2019s SoftBank Group has agreed to invest roughly $500 million more in satellite broadband provider OneWeb, according to a person familiar with the details. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Mayumi Negishi"
    },
    {
        "title": "SoftBank to Invest More in OneWeb (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6681",
        "date": "2017-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-to-invest-around-500-million-more-in-oneweb-satellite-internet-venture-1512990003?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=107",
        "text": "The precise size and structure of SoftBank\u2019s additional investment could change, said the person familiar with the details and others close to the talks. But Mr. Wyler and SoftBank founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Masayoshi Son,\n\n\n\n they said, agreed in principle on the cash infusion during recent discussions, with the caveat that SoftBank\u2019s stake in OneWeb would remain less than 50%.\n\n\n\n\nWork on OneWeb\u2019s previously announced initial fleet of more than 700 small, low-altitude satellites is \u201cgenerally on schedule\u201d for launches beginning next year, starting to market service over Alaska in 2019 and expanding virtually around the globe by the end of 2020, according to Mr. Wyler. During a weekend interview, he also said deployment of roughly 900 second-generation, higher-orbiting satellites by the mid-2020s\u2014intended to create the first such large-scale, hybrid constellation on orbit\u2014is projected to increase speeds roughly fivefold to 2.5 gigabits per second.\n\n\nIn October, Mr. Wyler told the Senate Commerce Committee that OneWeb\u2019s network portends \u201ca brighter future for the nearly half of Americans with substandard internet connections, primarily in rural areas.\u201d His ultimate goal is to \u201cfully bridge the global digital divide,\u201d he told the panel, by bringing inexpensive internet links relying on light, versatile antennas to impoverished communities, schools and small businesses in developing countries.\nWith support from other investors such as Qualcomm Inc., Airbus SE and British billionaire Richard Branson, OneWeb appears to be the furthest along among a group of high-profile projects aiming to launch swarms of hundreds\u2014or even thousands\u2014of satellites at altitudes substantially below those currently used for the largest, most-advanced commercial communications spacecraft. Boeing Co. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., separately backing two proposed systems, are still seeking final regulatory approvals related to spectrum and satellite designs, according to industry officials.\nBy contrast, Mr. Wyler\u2019s project has final approval from the Federal Communications Commission to turn on domestic service within two years, barring major technical or manufacturing problems. The approval also is contingent on other conditions.\nAccording to Mr. Wyler, his team also is \u201ctrying to lead the charge\u201d in reducing orbital debris stemming from potential satellite collisions or failures. OneWeb\u2019s satellites, weighing hundreds of pounds and expected to cost less than $1 million apiece, are designed to be \u201cas high or higher in quality and reliability\u201d than much larger models costing $150 million or more, he said.\nAn early financial backer of some of the largest internet companies on both sides of the Pacific, SoftBank continues to seek synergies with mobile-phone businesses and the portfolio of assorted technology companies it has assembled over the years. SoftBank also has created the world\u2019s biggest tech investment fund, worth nearly $100 billion. The Vision Fund has been roiling the venture community with its sheer scale, lifting valuations and helping entrepreneurs bypass usual fundraising rounds.\n\n\n\n\n\nSince its official launch in May with the backing of investors such as Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund, the fund has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in companies that SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son believes will corner key technologies in a future of smarter, interconnected, and automated devices. OneWeb\u2019s satellites are geared to help serve as the backbone for those applications, Mr. Son has said.\nSoftBank, which has a 40% stake in OneWeb based on a prior investment, walked away from merger talks between its U.S. wireless carrier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sprint Corp.\n\n\n and rival T-Mobile US Inc., unwilling to relinquish control as the top shareholder of a spectrum Mr. Son believes will be valuable as everyday objects from cars to refrigerators increasingly communicate with one another.\nMr. Wyler, for his part, has long advocated the advantages of combining satellites circling the earth at different altitudes, arguing such synergies dramatically increase capacity and efficiencies. But unlike Mr. Musk\u2019s concept, he doesn\u2019t favor laser links between satellites on the grounds that such add-ons unduly increase weight and complexity.\nA spokesman for SpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s company often is called, has repeatedly declined to respond to questions about details or progress of the entrepreneur\u2019s proposed satellite project.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Mayumi Negishi at mayumi.negishi@wsj.com Japan\u2019s SoftBank Group has agreed to invest roughly $500 million more in satellite broadband provider OneWeb, according to a person familiar with the details. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Mayumi Negishi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6682",
        "date": "2020-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-readies-first-astronaut-launch-by-private-firm-11590231601?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=13",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent years trying to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.\nSpaceX\u2019s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Bob Behnken during training exercises in Hawthorne, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ashish Sharma/SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHaving a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.\n\n\nAlong those lines, Mr. Musk\u2019s team has proposed a mammoth rocket carrying a companion deep-space craft\u2014partly stainless steel and reaching some 40 stories together\u2014intended to eventually transport large numbers of passengers. So far, NASA has committed $135 million to help develop the portion that could serve as a lunar lander.\nSome longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government \u201ca customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Albrecht,\n\n\n\n a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. \u201cNASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\nSource: the companyMerrill Sherman/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Dragon capsule, featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars, has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching just past 4:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, it is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months. If all goes well on the launchpad in Florida and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly With the scheduled launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit Wednesday, Space Exploration Technologies aims to propel the U.S. into a historic new era of commercially led space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6683",
        "date": "2020-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-readies-first-astronaut-launch-by-private-firm-11590231601?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=41",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent years trying to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.\nSpaceX\u2019s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Bob Behnken during training exercises in Hawthorne, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ashish Sharma/SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHaving a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.\n\n\nAlong those lines, Mr. Musk\u2019s team has proposed a mammoth rocket carrying a companion deep-space craft\u2014partly stainless steel and reaching some 40 stories together\u2014intended to eventually transport large numbers of passengers. So far, NASA has committed $135 million to help develop the portion that could serve as a lunar lander.\nSome longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government \u201ca customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Albrecht,\n\n\n\n a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. \u201cNASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\nSource: the companyMerrill Sherman/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Dragon capsule, featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars, has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching just past 4:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, it is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months. If all goes well on the launchpad in Florida and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly With the scheduled launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit Wednesday, Space Exploration Technologies aims to propel the U.S. into a historic new era of commercially led space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6684",
        "date": "2020-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-readies-first-astronaut-launch-by-private-firm-11590231601?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=45",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent years trying to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.\nSpaceX\u2019s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Bob Behnken during training exercises in Hawthorne, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ashish Sharma/SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHaving a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.\n\n\nAlong those lines, Mr. Musk\u2019s team has proposed a mammoth rocket carrying a companion deep-space craft\u2014partly stainless steel and reaching some 40 stories together\u2014intended to eventually transport large numbers of passengers. So far, NASA has committed $135 million to help develop the portion that could serve as a lunar lander.\nSome longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government \u201ca customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Albrecht,\n\n\n\n a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. \u201cNASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\nSource: the companyMerrill Sherman/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Dragon capsule, featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars, has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching just past 4:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, it is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months. If all goes well on the launchpad in Florida and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly With the scheduled launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit Wednesday, Space Exploration Technologies aims to propel the U.S. into a historic new era of commercially led space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Readies First Astronaut Launch by Private Firm (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6685",
        "date": "2020-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-readies-first-astronaut-launch-by-private-firm-11590231601?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=54",
        "text": "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent years trying to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Bob Behnken during training exercises in Hawthorne, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ashish Sharma/SpaceX/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHaving a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.\n\n\nAlong those lines, Mr. Musk\u2019s team has proposed a mammoth rocket carrying a companion deep-space craft\u2014partly stainless steel and reaching some 40 stories together\u2014intended to eventually transport large numbers of passengers. So far, NASA has committed $135 million to help develop the portion that could serve as a lunar lander.\nSome longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government \u201ca customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Albrecht,\n\n\n\n a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. \u201cNASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people. \n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries cargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\n3-D printed\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nGloves\nwork with touchscreens\n\n\nHeel sliders attach feet to footrest\n\n\nThe\nspacecraft\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven.\n\n\n16 Draco thrusters maneuver the craft\n\n\nSolar panels\n\n\nTrunk\ncarries \ncargo \n\n\nDiameter 13 feet\n\n\nCapsule volume\nTrunk volume\t\n\n\n328 cubic feet\n1,300 cubic feet\n\n\n\nSource: the companyMerrill Sherman/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Dragon capsule, featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars, has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching just past 4:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, it is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months. If all goes well on the launchpad in Florida and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swif With the scheduled launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit Wednesday, Space Exploration Technologies aims to propel the U.S. into a historic new era of commercially led space exploration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Prepares Capsule for Humans (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6686",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-to-resume-astronaut-launches-aboard-u-s-vehicles-11551390185?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=16",
        "text": "The mission, which aims to link up with the space station, will feature a mannequin outfitted with sensors to simulate human responses and environmental changes inside the 16-foot-tall vehicle. Named Ripley after the character featured in popular \u201cAlien\u201d movies years ago, the lifelike figure will slouch among large touch screens resembling those on some car dashboards.\nThe trip will test electrical and communications equipment, as well as thrusters and even how much seats flex from acceleration forces. But after seemingly endless computer simulations and ground tests, launch officials predict that perhaps above all, the mission will prove how well the team functions in the unforgiving conditions of the heavens. \n\n\nFor America\u2019s space program and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the much-delayed flight comes after a slew of technical setbacks, ranging from problematic parachutes to balky oxygen generators to capsule leaks after splashdown.\nThe launch is more than three years late and Crew Dragon capsules don\u2019t include all the features SpaceX originally envisioned, including totally automated flight-control systems or the capability to be reused after a voyage beyond the atmosphere. NASA still has significant concerns about whether the capsule sufficiently shields astronauts from orbital debris and micrometeoroids.\nBut if successful, the predawn blastoff scheduled from launchpad 39A at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center will mark a resurgence for America\u2019s human space program, which for eight years has relied on buying rides aboard Russian rockets and capsules. The price, which has tripled in roughly a decade, now amounts to some $80 million a seat.\nSince the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet due to cost and safety concerns, the focus has been on switching to commercially developed U.S. equipment.\nBut according to NASA officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the overall cost also should take into account the loss of domestic launch options and diminished national pride.\nDepending on how many trips U.S. replacement capsules will make annually, and the number of astronauts on board, NASA estimates the price tag of Crew Dragon flights at less than $60 million a seat.\nMore broadly, the agency and White House science advisers are betting the commercial crew program, to which NASA has committed roughly $7 billion so far, will usher in a new era for U.S. space ambitions.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n is developing its own commercial vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, slated to conduct its first test flight without crew no earlier than April. Boeing and SpaceX both have crucial benchmarks to meet, including various emergency-abort tests to ensure crews can escape if a booster fails on the pad or during ascent.\n\n\n So Long, Soyuz As costs to send astronauts to space on Russia\u2019s Soyuz have risen, SpaceX and Boeing are building alternatives for NASA. Cost per seat on Soyuz NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. 80 million $ 70 60 50 The SpaceX Dragon is estimated to cost about $58 million per seat. 40 30 20 10 0 \u201908 \u201912 \u201916 2006 \u201910 \u201914 \u201918 Source: NASA \n\n\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission demonstrates hardware reliability\u2014including successfully docking with the space station and returning safely less than a week later\u2014it could help set the stage for NASA\u2019s longer-term goal of promoting commercial operations in low-earth orbit.\nAgency officials envision fostering similar public-private partnerships to create platforms around the moon, which could be jumping-off points for exploring the lunar surface and then deeper into the solar system.\nUnder that scenario, NASA \u201chas an interest in buying access to space as a service,\u201d rather than building and operating actual transportation systems, agency administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said at an aerospace-industry event last summer.\n\u201cWe will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market,\u201d he recently told The Wall Street Journal.\nIn addition, federal oversight of Crew Dragon\u2019s technical and budget issues has been less intense than for typical big-ticket NASA development projects.\nIt isn\u2019t clear which company will earn the distinction of being the first to return astronauts to space from U.S. soil, though industry officials said some internal SpaceX projections have more than two of the company\u2019s crewed flights occurring before December.\nA reduced cadre of U.S. astronauts is slated to continue flying on Russian spacecraft during the transition. And in the event neither SpaceX nor Boeing meets current timetables, NASA has taken preliminary steps to reserve a pair of extra seats on Russian capsules for 2020.\nSpace experts inside and outside the government also have questioned the wisdom of SpaceX\u2019s novel approach of loading supercooled fuel into its Falcon 9 rocket while astronauts are strapped A SpaceX flight set for early Saturday won\u2019t include crew but will test hardware reliability of the Crew Dragon capsule, as the U.S. tries to get back into the business of transporting astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Prepares Capsule for Humans (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6687",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-to-resume-astronaut-launches-aboard-u-s-vehicles-11551390185?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=61",
        "text": "The mission, which aims to link up with the space station, will feature a mannequin outfitted with sensors to simulate human responses and environmental changes inside the 16-foot-tall vehicle. Named Ripley after the character featured in popular \u201cAlien\u201d movies years ago, the lifelike figure will slouch among large touch screens resembling those on some car dashboards.\nThe trip will test electrical and communications equipment, as well as thrusters and even how much seats flex from acceleration forces. But after seemingly endless computer simulations and ground tests, launch officials predict that perhaps above all, the mission will prove how well the team functions in the unforgiving conditions of the heavens. \n\n\nFor America\u2019s space program and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the much-delayed flight comes after a slew of technical setbacks, ranging from problematic parachutes to balky oxygen generators to capsule leaks after splashdown.\nThe launch is more than three years late and Crew Dragon capsules don\u2019t include all the features SpaceX originally envisioned, including totally automated flight-control systems or the capability to be reused after a voyage beyond the atmosphere. NASA still has significant concerns about whether the capsule sufficiently shields astronauts from orbital debris and micrometeoroids.\nBut if successful, the predawn blastoff scheduled from launchpad 39A at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center will mark a resurgence for America\u2019s human space program, which for eight years has relied on buying rides aboard Russian rockets and capsules. The price, which has tripled in roughly a decade, now amounts to some $80 million a seat.\nSince the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet due to cost and safety concerns, the focus has been on switching to commercially developed U.S. equipment.\nBut according to NASA officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the overall cost also should take into account the loss of domestic launch options and diminished national pride.\nDepending on how many trips U.S. replacement capsules will make annually, and the number of astronauts on board, NASA estimates the price tag of Crew Dragon flights at less than $60 million a seat.\nMore broadly, the agency and White House science advisers are betting the commercial crew program, to which NASA has committed roughly $7 billion so far, will usher in a new era for U.S. space ambitions.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n is developing its own commercial vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, slated to conduct its first test flight without crew no earlier than April. Boeing and SpaceX both have crucial benchmarks to meet, including various emergency-abort tests to ensure crews can escape if a booster fails on the pad or during ascent.\n\n\n So Long, Soyuz As costs to send astronauts to space on Russia\u2019s Soyuz have risen, SpaceX and Boeing are building alternatives for NASA. Cost per seat on Soyuz NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. 80 million $ 70 60 50 The SpaceX Dragon is estimated to cost about $58 million per seat. 40 30 20 10 0 \u201908 \u201912 \u201916 2006 \u201910 \u201914 \u201918 Source: NASA \n\n\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission demonstrates hardware reliability\u2014including successfully docking with the space station and returning safely less than a week later\u2014it could help set the stage for NASA\u2019s longer-term goal of promoting commercial operations in low-earth orbit.\nAgency officials envision fostering similar public-private partnerships to create platforms around the moon, which could be jumping-off points for exploring the lunar surface and then deeper into the solar system.\nUnder that scenario, NASA \u201chas an interest in buying access to space as a service,\u201d rather than building and operating actual transportation systems, agency administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said at an aerospace-industry event last summer.\n\u201cWe will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market,\u201d he recently told The Wall Street Journal.\nIn addition, federal oversight of Crew Dragon\u2019s technical and budget issues has been less intense than for typical big-ticket NASA development projects.\nIt isn\u2019t clear which company will earn the distinction of being the first to return astronauts to space from U.S. soil, though industry officials said some internal SpaceX projections have more than two of the company\u2019s crewed flights occurring before December.\nA reduced cadre of U.S. astronauts is slated to continue flying on Russian spacecraft during the transition. And in the event neither SpaceX nor Boeing meets current timetables, NASA has taken preliminary steps to reserve a pair of extra seats on Russian capsules for 2020.\nSpace experts inside and outside the government also have questioned the wisdom of SpaceX\u2019s novel approach of loading supercooled fuel into its Falcon 9 rocket while astronauts are strapped A SpaceX flight set for early Saturday won\u2019t include crew but will test hardware reliability of the Crew Dragon capsule, as the U.S. tries to get back into the business of transporting astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Prepares Capsule for Humans (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6688",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-to-resume-astronaut-launches-aboard-u-s-vehicles-11551390185?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=64",
        "text": "The mission, which aims to link up with the space station, will feature a mannequin outfitted with sensors to simulate human responses and environmental changes inside the 16-foot-tall vehicle. Named Ripley after the character featured in popular \u201cAlien\u201d movies years ago, the lifelike figure will slouch among large touch screens resembling those on some car dashboards.\n\n\n\n\nThe trip will test electrical and communications equipment, as well as thrusters and even how much seats flex from acceleration forces. But after seemingly endless computer simulations and ground tests, launch officials predict that perhaps above all, the mission will prove how well the team functions in the unforgiving conditions of the heavens. \n\n\nFor America\u2019s space program and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the much-delayed flight comes after a slew of technical setbacks, ranging from problematic parachutes to balky oxygen generators to capsule leaks after splashdown.\nThe launch is more than three years late and Crew Dragon capsules don\u2019t include all the features SpaceX originally envisioned, including totally automated flight-control systems or the capability to be reused after a voyage beyond the atmosphere. NASA still has significant concerns about whether the capsule sufficiently shields astronauts from orbital debris and micrometeoroids.\nBut if successful, the predawn blastoff scheduled from launchpad 39A at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center will mark a resurgence for America\u2019s human space program, which for eight years has relied on buying rides aboard Russian rockets and capsules. The price, which has tripled in roughly a decade, now amounts to some $80 million a seat.\nSince the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet due to cost and safety concerns, the focus has been on switching to commercially developed U.S. equipment.\nBut according to NASA officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the overall cost also should take into account the loss of domestic launch options and diminished national pride.\nDepending on how many trips U.S. replacement capsules will make annually, and the number of astronauts on board, NASA estimates the price tag of Crew Dragon flights at less than $60 million a seat.\nMore broadly, the agency and White House science advisers are betting the commercial crew program, to which NASA has committed roughly $7 billion so far, will usher in a new era for U.S. space ambitions.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n BA -0.10%\n\n\n is developing its own commercial vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, slated to conduct its first test flight without crew no earlier than April. Boeing and SpaceX both have crucial benchmarks to meet, including various emergency-abort tests to ensure crews can escape if a booster fails on the pad or during ascent.\n\n\n So Long, Soyuz As costs to send astronauts to space on Russia\u2019s Soyuz have risen, SpaceX and Boeing are building alternatives for NASA. Cost per seat on Soyuz NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. 80 million $ 70 60 50 The SpaceX Dragon is estimated to cost about $58 million per seat. 40 30 20 10 0 \u201908 \u201912 \u201916 2006 \u201910 \u201914 \u201918 Source: NASA \n\n\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission demonstrates hardware reliability\u2014including successfully docking with the space station and returning safely less than a week later\u2014it could help set the stage for NASA\u2019s longer-term goal of promoting commercial operations in low-earth orbit.\nAgency officials envision fostering similar public-private partnerships to create platforms around the moon, which could be jumping-off points for exploring the lunar surface and then deeper into the solar system.\nUnder that scenario, NASA \u201chas an interest in buying access to space as a service,\u201d rather than building and operating actual transportation systems, agency administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said at an aerospace-industry event last summer.\n\u201cWe will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market,\u201d he recently told The Wall Street Journal.\nIn addition, federal oversight of Crew Dragon\u2019s technical and budget issues has been less intense than for typical big-ticket NASA development projects.\nIt isn\u2019t clear which company will earn the distinction of being the first to return astronauts to space from U.S. soil, though industry officials said some internal SpaceX projections have more than two of the company\u2019s crewed flights occurring before December.\nA reduced cadre of U.S. astronauts is slated to continue flying on Russian spacecraft during the transition. And in the event neither SpaceX nor Boeing meets current timetables, NASA has taken preliminary steps to reserve a pair of extra seats on Russian capsules for 2020.\nSpace experts inside and outside the government also have questioned the wisdom of SpaceX\u2019s novel approach of loading supercooled fuel into its Falcon 9 rocket while astronauts are strapped into seats on top of it. After extensive discussions with the company, NASA\u2019s leadership has agreed to the practice with some important caveats.\nIf Saturday\u2019s flight and subsequent crewed demonstration missions by each company go well, it is still likely to take many months before astronauts will routinely climb into a new generation of vehicles.\n\u201cI guarantee everything will not work exactly right\u201d Saturday, William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, told reporters at a briefing last week. \u201cWe want to maximize our learning.\u201d\nDuring a press briefing at the launch site Thursday, NASA officials revealed they had to resort to some last-minute negotiations to get the approval of Russia, one of the space station\u2019s main partners, for the docking activities slated for Sunday. Partners have veto power over such maneuvers.\nResponding to questions about various risks associated with the mission, NASA officials emphasized that government-SpaceX teams painstakingly analyzed overall safeguards and remaining hazards. \u201cWe understand the risks and have accepted them,\u201d said Kathy Lueders, manager of the agency\u2019s commercial crew program.\nReflecting the historic nature of the anticipated launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n head of SpaceX\u2019s flight reliability office, told reporters it promised to be the culmination of his 17 years of work developing an entirely new human-rated spacecraft. \nNASA officials talked about the gradual process of crafting compromise solutions melding the agency\u2019s historically rigid technical requirements and the company\u2019s more nimble engineering culture. Describing Crew Dragon as the aim of SpaceX from the company\u2019s inception, Mr. Koenigsmann said \u201cI\u2019m actually humbled at being at this point.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A SpaceX flight set for early Saturday won\u2019t include crew but will test hardware reliability of the Crew Dragon capsule, as the U.S. tries to get back into the business of transporting astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Prepares Capsule for Humans (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6689",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-to-resume-astronaut-launches-aboard-u-s-vehicles-11551390185?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=58",
        "text": "The mission, which aims to link up with the space station, will feature a mannequin outfitted with sensors to simulate human responses and environmental changes inside the 16-foot-tall vehicle. Named Ripley after the character featured in popular \u201cAlien\u201d movies years ago, the lifelike figure will slouch among large touch screens resembling those on some car dashboards.\nThe trip will test electrical and communications equipment, as well as thrusters and even how much seats flex from acceleration forces. But after seemingly endless computer simulations and ground tests, launch officials predict that perhaps above all, the mission will prove how well the team functions in the unforgiving conditions of the heavens. \n\n\nFor America\u2019s space program and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the much-delayed flight comes after a slew of technical setbacks, ranging from problematic parachutes to balky oxygen generators to capsule leaks after splashdown.\nThe launch is more than three years late and Crew Dragon capsules don\u2019t include all the features SpaceX originally envisioned, including totally automated flight-control systems or the capability to be reused after a voyage beyond the atmosphere. NASA still has significant concerns about whether the capsule sufficiently shields astronauts from orbital debris and micrometeoroids.\nBut if successful, the predawn blastoff scheduled from launchpad 39A at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center will mark a resurgence for America\u2019s human space program, which for eight years has relied on buying rides aboard Russian rockets and capsules. The price, which has tripled in roughly a decade, now amounts to some $80 million a seat.\nSince the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet due to cost and safety concerns, the focus has been on switching to commercially developed U.S. equipment.\nBut according to NASA officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the overall cost also should take into account the loss of domestic launch options and diminished national pride.\nDepending on how many trips U.S. replacement capsules will make annually, and the number of astronauts on board, NASA estimates the price tag of Crew Dragon flights at less than $60 million a seat.\nMore broadly, the agency and White House science advisers are betting the commercial crew program, to which NASA has committed roughly $7 billion so far, will usher in a new era for U.S. space ambitions.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n is developing its own commercial vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, slated to conduct its first test flight without crew no earlier than April. Boeing and SpaceX both have crucial benchmarks to meet, including various emergency-abort tests to ensure crews can escape if a booster fails on the pad or during ascent.\n\n\n So Long, Soyuz As costs to send astronauts to space on Russia\u2019s Soyuz have risen, SpaceX and Boeing are building alternatives for NASA. Cost per seat on Soyuz NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. 80 million $ 70 60 50 The SpaceX Dragon is estimated to cost about $58 million per seat. 40 30 20 10 0 \u201908 \u201912 \u201916 2006 \u201910 \u201914 \u201918 Source: NASA \n\n\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission demonstrates hardware reliability\u2014including successfully docking with the space station and returning safely less than a week later\u2014it could help set the stage for NASA\u2019s longer-term goal of promoting commercial operations in low-earth orbit.\nAgency officials envision fostering similar public-private partnerships to create platforms around the moon, which could be jumping-off points for exploring the lunar surface and then deeper into the solar system.\nUnder that scenario, NASA \u201chas an interest in buying access to space as a service,\u201d rather than building and operating actual transportation systems, agency administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said at an aerospace-industry event last summer.\n\u201cWe will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market,\u201d he recently told The Wall Street Journal.\nIn addition, federal oversight of Crew Dragon\u2019s technical and budget issues has been less intense than for typical big-ticket NASA development projects.\nIt isn\u2019t clear which company will earn the distinction of being the first to return astronauts to space from U.S. soil, though industry officials said some internal SpaceX projections have more than two of the company\u2019s crewed flights occurring before December.\nA reduced cadre of U.S. astronauts is slated to continue flying on Russian spacecraft during the transition. And in the event neither SpaceX nor Boeing meets current timetables, NASA has taken preliminary steps to reserve a pair of extra seats on Russian capsules for 2020.\nSpace experts inside and outside the government also have questioned the wisdom of SpaceX\u2019s novel approach of loading supercooled fuel into its Falcon 9 rocket while astronauts are strapped A SpaceX flight set for early Saturday won\u2019t include crew but will test hardware reliability of the Crew Dragon capsule, as the U.S. tries to get back into the business of transporting astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Prepares Capsule for Humans (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6690",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-to-resume-astronaut-launches-aboard-u-s-vehicles-11551390185?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=77",
        "text": "The mission, which aims to link up with the space station, will feature a mannequin outfitted with sensors to simulate human responses and environmental changes inside the 16-foot-tall vehicle. Named Ripley after the character featured in popular \u201cAlien\u201d movies years ago, the lifelike figure will slouch among large touch screens resembling those on some car dashboards.\n\n\n\n\nThe trip will test electrical and communications equipment, as well as thrusters and even how much seats flex from acceleration forces. But after seemingly endless computer simulations and ground tests, launch officials predict that perhaps above all, the mission will prove how well the team functions in the unforgiving conditions of the heavens. \n\n\nFor America\u2019s space program and SpaceX founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the much-delayed flight comes after a slew of technical setbacks, ranging from problematic parachutes to balky oxygen generators to capsule leaks after splashdown.\nThe launch is more than three years late and Crew Dragon capsules don\u2019t include all the features SpaceX originally envisioned, including totally automated flight-control systems or the capability to be reused after a voyage beyond the atmosphere. NASA still has significant concerns about whether the capsule sufficiently shields astronauts from orbital debris and micrometeoroids.\nBut if successful, the predawn blastoff scheduled from launchpad 39A at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center will mark a resurgence for America\u2019s human space program, which for eight years has relied on buying rides aboard Russian rockets and capsules. The price, which has tripled in roughly a decade, now amounts to some $80 million a seat.\nSince the National Aeronautics and Space Administration retired its space shuttle fleet due to cost and safety concerns, the focus has been on switching to commercially developed U.S. equipment.\nBut according to NASA officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the overall cost also should take into account the loss of domestic launch options and diminished national pride.\nDepending on how many trips U.S. replacement capsules will make annually, and the number of astronauts on board, NASA estimates the price tag of Crew Dragon flights at less than $60 million a seat.\nMore broadly, the agency and White House science advisers are betting the commercial crew program, to which NASA has committed roughly $7 billion so far, will usher in a new era for U.S. space ambitions.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n BA 0.22%\n\n\n is developing its own commercial vehicle, called the CST-100 Starliner, slated to conduct its first test flight without crew no earlier than April. Boeing and SpaceX both have crucial benchmarks to meet, including various emergency-abort tests to ensure crews can escape if a booster fails on the pad or during ascent.\n\n\n So Long, Soyuz As costs to send astronauts to space on Russia\u2019s Soyuz have risen, SpaceX and Boeing are building alternatives for NASA. Cost per seat on Soyuz NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011. 80 million $ 70 60 50 The SpaceX Dragon is estimated to cost about $58 million per seat. 40 30 20 10 0 \u201908 \u201912 \u201916 2006 \u201910 \u201914 \u201918 Source: NASA \n\n\nIf Saturday\u2019s mission demonstrates hardware reliability\u2014including successfully docking with the space station and returning safely less than a week later\u2014it could help set the stage for NASA\u2019s longer-term goal of promoting commercial operations in low-earth orbit.\nAgency officials envision fostering similar public-private partnerships to create platforms around the moon, which could be jumping-off points for exploring the lunar surface and then deeper into the solar system.\nUnder that scenario, NASA \u201chas an interest in buying access to space as a service,\u201d rather than building and operating actual transportation systems, agency administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said at an aerospace-industry event last summer.\n\u201cWe will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market,\u201d he recently told The Wall Street Journal.\nIn addition, federal oversight of Crew Dragon\u2019s technical and budget issues has been less intense than for typical big-ticket NASA development projects.\nIt isn\u2019t clear which company will earn the distinction of being the first to return astronauts to space from U.S. soil, though industry officials said some internal SpaceX projections have more than two of the company\u2019s crewed flights occurring before December.\nA reduced cadre of U.S. astronauts is slated to continue flying on Russian spacecraft during the transition. And in the event neither SpaceX nor Boeing meets current timetables, NASA has taken preliminary steps to reserve a pair of extra seats on Russian capsules for 2020.\nSpace experts inside and outside the government also have questioned the wisdom of SpaceX\u2019s novel approach of loading supercooled fuel into its Falcon 9 rocket while astronauts are strapp A SpaceX flight set for early Saturday won\u2019t include crew but will test hardware reliability of the Crew Dragon capsule, as the U.S. tries to get back into the business of transporting astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch Reaches Space Station in Latest NASA Mission (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6691",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-crewed-rocket-into-space-in-latest-nasa-mission-11619172378?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=8",
        "text": "The mission marks a number of firsts for SpaceX. It is the first time that two of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules will be simultaneously docked at the ISS. It is also the first time the rocket has carried two international partners, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s Akihiko Hoshide and Frenchman Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency. They join Americans Shane Kimbrough, the mission\u2019s commander, and Megan McArthur, the spacecraft\u2019s pilot. The crew will be stationed at the space station for a six-month mission.\nAnother first: Both the rocket and capsule used in Friday\u2019s launch were reused from earlier launches. The rocket was previously used in the first operational launch in November, and the capsule comes from May\u2019s test launch. The mission, code named Crew-2, originally scheduled for Thursday, had been postponed due to poor weather conditions along the flight path.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMembers of the International Space Station on Saturday welcomed the astronauts from SpaceX's Crew Dragon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left its launchpad two seconds past 5:49 a.m., providing 1.7 million pounds of thrust and accelerating the capsule across the morning sky and reaching a velocity of close to 17,000 miles an hour. Roughly 12 minutes later, the capsule safely separated from the rocket\u2019s upper stage, ground controllers said.\n\n\n\u201cI think we are at the dawn of a new era of space exploration,\u201d Mr. Musk said at a news conference after the launch. After founding SpaceX 19 years ago, Mr. Musk said he had only recently become convinced that space hardware could be successfully reused, cutting the costs of launch. \u201cThat\u2019s the gateway to the heavens,\u201d he added.\nAs the capsule entered orbit, the first stage of the rocket had successfully detached and completed its descent, landing on SpaceX\u2019s autonomous drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.\n\u201cAll I can say is it\u2019s about time,\u201d Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said of the return to regular human space flight. \u201cIt\u2019s awesome to have this regular cadence again.\u201d\nThe launch marks a significant milestone for Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the commercial spaceflight company, as it moves to prove the fundamental thesis of its strategy: that it can save on the costs of space travel by reusing the rocket and capsule components of a launch after each flight. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cWe are moving beyond \u2018showing it can be done.\u2019 This launch is the beginning of SpaceX demonstrating operational cadence and establishing commercial human spaceflight as a real, repeatable capability,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space & Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cWe are essentially witnessing the creation of a new industry, and every early success is important to its growth path.\u201d\nSpaceX, after its first full-fledged human mission in November, reiterated at the time its ambitions to launch seven Dragon capsules for NASA, including three cargo variants, over the following 15 months as it moves through a series of more regular launches.\nAnother human mission, dubbed Crew-3, is set to take place in the fall, sending another team of astronauts for a separate six-month stint on the space station. On April 28, the team from Crew-1 will undock from the orbiting ISS aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft and return to Earth in a splash-landing off the coast of Florida. They will then be picked up by one of SpaceX\u2019s recovery vessels.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft near the docking access of the International Space Station Saturday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThere have been setbacks along the way, including complex problems related to the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a failure of its emergency-escape engines that led to an uncontained explosion in 2019. No injuries were recorded in those incidents, but they pushed back the program\u2019s development.\nFriday\u2019s launch follows a lucrative win for SpaceX last week with NASA awarding Mr. Musk\u2019s closely held company a contract to build a new capsule to land astronauts on the moon. Mr. Musk\u2019s team beat out two rivals\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014for the Human Landing System moon taxi, which could be operational from as early as 2024. The contract is part of the larger Artemis program, led by NASA, to explore and develop deep space but relying more heavily on private contractors than in the past.\nThe contract adds to SpaceX\u2019s products, which now spans new rockets, space taxis and an array of satellites for commercial and military customers. The company\u2019s recent funding rounds have raised its valuation close to $100 bi Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched its third crewed rocket, delivering four more astronauts to the space station and marking the first time the company achieved the takeoff with both a pre-used capsule and rocket. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch Reaches Space Station in Latest NASA Mission (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6692",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-crewed-rocket-into-space-in-latest-nasa-mission-11619172378?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=21",
        "text": "The mission marks a number of firsts for SpaceX. It is the first time that two of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules will be simultaneously docked at the ISS. It is also the first time the rocket has carried two international partners, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s Akihiko Hoshide and Frenchman Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency. They join Americans Shane Kimbrough, the mission\u2019s commander, and Megan McArthur, the spacecraft\u2019s pilot. The crew will be stationed at the space station for a six-month mission.\nAnother first: Both the rocket and capsule used in Friday\u2019s launch were reused from earlier launches. The rocket was previously used in the first operational launch in November, and the capsule comes from May\u2019s test launch. The mission, code named Crew-2, originally scheduled for Thursday, had been postponed due to poor weather conditions along the flight path.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMembers of the International Space Station on Saturday welcomed the astronauts from SpaceX's Crew Dragon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left its launchpad two seconds past 5:49 a.m., providing 1.7 million pounds of thrust and accelerating the capsule across the morning sky and reaching a velocity of close to 17,000 miles an hour. Roughly 12 minutes later, the capsule safely separated from the rocket\u2019s upper stage, ground controllers said.\n\n\n\u201cI think we are at the dawn of a new era of space exploration,\u201d Mr. Musk said at a news conference after the launch. After founding SpaceX 19 years ago, Mr. Musk said he had only recently become convinced that space hardware could be successfully reused, cutting the costs of launch. \u201cThat\u2019s the gateway to the heavens,\u201d he added.\nAs the capsule entered orbit, the first stage of the rocket had successfully detached and completed its descent, landing on SpaceX\u2019s autonomous drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.\n\u201cAll I can say is it\u2019s about time,\u201d Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said of the return to regular human space flight. \u201cIt\u2019s awesome to have this regular cadence again.\u201d\nThe launch marks a significant milestone for Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the commercial spaceflight company, as it moves to prove the fundamental thesis of its strategy: that it can save on the costs of space travel by reusing the rocket and capsule components of a launch after each flight. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cWe are moving beyond \u2018showing it can be done.\u2019 This launch is the beginning of SpaceX demonstrating operational cadence and establishing commercial human spaceflight as a real, repeatable capability,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space & Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cWe are essentially witnessing the creation of a new industry, and every early success is important to its growth path.\u201d\nSpaceX, after its first full-fledged human mission in November, reiterated at the time its ambitions to launch seven Dragon capsules for NASA, including three cargo variants, over the following 15 months as it moves through a series of more regular launches.\nAnother human mission, dubbed Crew-3, is set to take place in the fall, sending another team of astronauts for a separate six-month stint on the space station. On April 28, the team from Crew-1 will undock from the orbiting ISS aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft and return to Earth in a splash-landing off the coast of Florida. They will then be picked up by one of SpaceX\u2019s recovery vessels.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft near the docking access of the International Space Station Saturday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThere have been setbacks along the way, including complex problems related to the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a failure of its emergency-escape engines that led to an uncontained explosion in 2019. No injuries were recorded in those incidents, but they pushed back the program\u2019s development.\nFriday\u2019s launch follows a lucrative win for SpaceX last week with NASA awarding Mr. Musk\u2019s closely held company a contract to build a new capsule to land astronauts on the moon. Mr. Musk\u2019s team beat out two rivals\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014for the Human Landing System moon taxi, which could be operational from as early as 2024. The contract is part of the larger Artemis program, led by NASA, to explore and develop deep space but relying more heavily on private contractors than in the past.\nThe contract adds to SpaceX\u2019s products, which now spans new rockets, space taxis and an array of satellites for commercial and military customers. The company\u2019s recent funding rounds have raised its valuation close to $100 bi Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched its third crewed rocket, delivering four more astronauts to the space station and marking the first time the company achieved the takeoff with both a pre-used capsule and rocket. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch Reaches Space Station in Latest NASA Mission (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6693",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-crewed-rocket-into-space-in-latest-nasa-mission-11619172378?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=31",
        "text": "The mission marks a number of firsts for SpaceX. It is the first time that two of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules will be simultaneously docked at the ISS. It is also the first time the rocket has carried two international partners, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s Akihiko Hoshide and Frenchman Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency. They join Americans Shane Kimbrough, the mission\u2019s commander, and Megan McArthur, the spacecraft\u2019s pilot. The crew will be stationed at the space station for a six-month mission.\nAnother first: Both the rocket and capsule used in Friday\u2019s launch were reused from earlier launches. The rocket was previously used in the first operational launch in November, and the capsule comes from May\u2019s test launch. The mission, code named Crew-2, originally scheduled for Thursday, had been postponed due to poor weather conditions along the flight path.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMembers of the International Space Station on Saturday welcomed the astronauts from SpaceX's Crew Dragon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left its launchpad two seconds past 5:49 a.m., providing 1.7 million pounds of thrust and accelerating the capsule across the morning sky and reaching a velocity of close to 17,000 miles an hour. Roughly 12 minutes later, the capsule safely separated from the rocket\u2019s upper stage, ground controllers said.\n\n\n\u201cI think we are at the dawn of a new era of space exploration,\u201d Mr. Musk said at a news conference after the launch. After founding SpaceX 19 years ago, Mr. Musk said he had only recently become convinced that space hardware could be successfully reused, cutting the costs of launch. \u201cThat\u2019s the gateway to the heavens,\u201d he added.\nAs the capsule entered orbit, the first stage of the rocket had successfully detached and completed its descent, landing on SpaceX\u2019s autonomous drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.\n\u201cAll I can say is it\u2019s about time,\u201d Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said of the return to regular human space flight. \u201cIt\u2019s awesome to have this regular cadence again.\u201d\nThe launch marks a significant milestone for Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the commercial spaceflight company, as it moves to prove the fundamental thesis of its strategy: that it can save on the costs of space travel by reusing the rocket and capsule components of a launch after each flight. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cWe are moving beyond \u2018showing it can be done.\u2019 This launch is the beginning of SpaceX demonstrating operational cadence and establishing commercial human spaceflight as a real, repeatable capability,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space & Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cWe are essentially witnessing the creation of a new industry, and every early success is important to its growth path.\u201d\nSpaceX, after its first full-fledged human mission in November, reiterated at the time its ambitions to launch seven Dragon capsules for NASA, including three cargo variants, over the following 15 months as it moves through a series of more regular launches.\nAnother human mission, dubbed Crew-3, is set to take place in the fall, sending another team of astronauts for a separate six-month stint on the space station. On April 28, the team from Crew-1 will undock from the orbiting ISS aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft and return to Earth in a splash-landing off the coast of Florida. They will then be picked up by one of SpaceX\u2019s recovery vessels.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft near the docking access of the International Space Station Saturday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThere have been setbacks along the way, including complex problems related to the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a failure of its emergency-escape engines that led to an uncontained explosion in 2019. No injuries were recorded in those incidents, but they pushed back the program\u2019s development.\nFriday\u2019s launch follows a lucrative win for SpaceX last week with NASA awarding Mr. Musk\u2019s closely held company a contract to build a new capsule to land astronauts on the moon. Mr. Musk\u2019s team beat out two rivals\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014for the Human Landing System moon taxi, which could be operational from as early as 2024. The contract is part of the larger Artemis program, led by NASA, to explore and develop deep space but relying more heavily on private contractors than in the past.\nThe contract adds to SpaceX\u2019s products, which now spans new rockets, space taxis and an array of satellites for commercial and military customers. The company\u2019s recent funding rounds have raised its valuation close to $100 bi Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched its third crewed rocket, delivering four more astronauts to the space station and marking the first time the company achieved the takeoff with both a pre-used capsule and rocket. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launch Reaches Space Station in Latest NASA Mission (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6694",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-crewed-rocket-into-space-in-latest-nasa-mission-11619172378?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=32",
        "text": "The mission marks a number of firsts for SpaceX. It is the first time that two of the company\u2019s Crew Dragon capsules will be simultaneously docked at the ISS. It is also the first time the rocket has carried two international partners, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s Akihiko Hoshide and Frenchman Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency. They join Americans Shane Kimbrough, the mission\u2019s commander, and Megan McArthur, the spacecraft\u2019s pilot. The crew will be stationed at the space station for a six-month mission.\n\n\n\n\nAnother first: Both the rocket and capsule used in Friday\u2019s launch were reused from earlier launches. The rocket was previously used in the first operational launch in November, and the capsule comes from May\u2019s test launch. The mission, code named Crew-2, originally scheduled for Thursday, had been postponed due to poor weather conditions along the flight path.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMembers of the International Space Station on Saturday welcomed the astronauts from SpaceX's Crew Dragon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe Falcon 9 left its launchpad two seconds past 5:49 a.m., providing 1.7 million pounds of thrust and accelerating the capsule across the morning sky and reaching a velocity of close to 17,000 miles an hour. Roughly 12 minutes later, the capsule safely separated from the rocket\u2019s upper stage, ground controllers said.\n\n\n\u201cI think we are at the dawn of a new era of space exploration,\u201d Mr. Musk said at a news conference after the launch. After founding SpaceX 19 years ago, Mr. Musk said he had only recently become convinced that space hardware could be successfully reused, cutting the costs of launch. \u201cThat\u2019s the gateway to the heavens,\u201d he added.\nAs the capsule entered orbit, the first stage of the rocket had successfully detached and completed its descent, landing on SpaceX\u2019s autonomous drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.\n\u201cAll I can say is it\u2019s about time,\u201d Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana said of the return to regular human space flight. \u201cIt\u2019s awesome to have this regular cadence again.\u201d\nThe launch marks a significant milestone for Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the commercial spaceflight company, as it moves to prove the fundamental thesis of its strategy: that it can save on the costs of space travel by reusing the rocket and capsule components of a launch after each flight. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cWe are moving beyond \u2018showing it can be done.\u2019 This launch is the beginning of SpaceX demonstrating operational cadence and establishing commercial human spaceflight as a real, repeatable capability,\u201d said Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space & Technology, a consulting firm. \u201cWe are essentially witnessing the creation of a new industry, and every early success is important to its growth path.\u201d\nSpaceX, after its first full-fledged human mission in November, reiterated at the time its ambitions to launch seven Dragon capsules for NASA, including three cargo variants, over the following 15 months as it moves through a series of more regular launches.\nAnother human mission, dubbed Crew-3, is set to take place in the fall, sending another team of astronauts for a separate six-month stint on the space station. On April 28, the team from Crew-1 will undock from the orbiting ISS aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft and return to Earth in a splash-landing off the coast of Florida. They will then be picked up by one of SpaceX\u2019s recovery vessels.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft near the docking access of the International Space Station Saturday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThere have been setbacks along the way, including complex problems related to the capsule\u2019s parachutes and a failure of its emergency-escape engines that led to an uncontained explosion in 2019. No injuries were recorded in those incidents, but they pushed back the program\u2019s development.\nFriday\u2019s launch follows a lucrative win for SpaceX last week with NASA awarding Mr. Musk\u2019s closely held company a contract to build a new capsule to land astronauts on the moon. Mr. Musk\u2019s team beat out two rivals\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and the Dynetics unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014for the Human Landing System moon taxi, which could be operational from as early as 2024. The contract is part of the larger Artemis program, led by NASA, to explore and develop deep space but relying more heavily on private contractors than in the past.\nThe contract adds to SpaceX\u2019s products, which now spans new rockets, space taxis and an array of satellites for commercial and military customers. The company\u2019s recent funding rounds have raised its valuation close to $10 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched its third crewed rocket, delivering four more astronauts to the space station and marking the first time the company achieved the takeoff with both a pre-used capsule and rocket. ",
        "author": "Benjamin Katz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bad Weather Scrubs SpaceX Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6695",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-readies-first-astronaut-launch-by-private-firm-11590580808?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=12",
        "text": "The long-awaited mission would have represented the first time a company ever flew commercially developed hardware carrying humans and linked up with the international space station. If Space Exploration Technologies Corp. eventually reaches that goal, it will mark a major shift in the country\u2019s space endeavors and the first human launch from U.S. soil since 2011. It would also represent a long-awaited milestone for NASA and a resounding achievement for SpaceX and its billionaire founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n \nThe countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had its share of suspense Wednesday, as weather forecasts hours before predicted only a 50/50 chance of acceptable conditions. The next opportunity comes Saturday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA countdown clock was stopped after the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was postponed in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gregg newton/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nRain and high-level winds pose hazards for rockets, and SpaceX staff also monitored weather conditions at dozens of sites around the world in case the astronauts had to separate from the rocket en route for an emergency descent.\n\n\nPresident Trump, while touring the space center before launch, was asked if he had a message for the astronauts. \u201cGod be with you,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a dangerous business, but they\u2019re the best there is.\u201d\nThe Crew Dragon capsule\u2014featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars\u2014has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching Saturday morning, the capsule is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingSpaceX to Send Astronauts to the ISSBetween Tesla and a new baby, you might've forgotten that Elon Musk is also working on space travel. Today, his company SpaceX is scheduled to become the first private entity to send humans to the International Space Station. Our reporter Andy Pasztor joins us to explain why this could be one small step for man - and a giant leap for commercial space travel. Kateri Jochum hosts.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top. But if things ultimately go smoothly on the launchpad and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly approve SpaceX\u2019s systems as space taxis that would ferry crews to and from orbit.\nFor the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a successful flight would represent the culmination of more than eight years of efforts to shift its approach to transporting humans beyond the atmosphere. The agency has long sought to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.\nHaving a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk, in black, is joined by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the planned launch Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nSome longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government \u201ca customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Albrecht,\n\n\n\n a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. \u201cNASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.\u201d\nBeyond the policy changes and revamped contracting arrangements, however, the sheer promise of accelerating human space exploration excites many government and industry officials. Nothing generates as much pride as adding humans to the equation. \u201cWhen you put an astronaut on top of a rocket, that changes everything,\u201d Air Force Gen. John H The company\u2019s launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit was canceled because of adverse weather, delaying a new era of corporate-driven space missions. The next attempt is expected Saturday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bad Weather Scrubs SpaceX Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6696",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-readies-first-astronaut-launch-by-private-firm-11590580808?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=44",
        "text": "The long-awaited mission would have represented the first time a company ever flew commercially developed hardware carrying humans and linked up with the international space station. If Space Exploration Technologies Corp. eventually reaches that goal, it will mark a major shift in the country\u2019s space endeavors and the first human launch from U.S. soil since 2011. It would also represent a long-awaited milestone for NASA and a resounding achievement for SpaceX and its billionaire founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n \nThe countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had its share of suspense Wednesday, as weather forecasts hours before predicted only a 50/50 chance of acceptable conditions. The next opportunity comes Saturday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA countdown clock was stopped after the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was postponed in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gregg newton/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nRain and high-level winds pose hazards for rockets, and SpaceX staff also monitored weather conditions at dozens of sites around the world in case the astronauts had to separate from the rocket en route for an emergency descent.\n\n\nPresident Trump, while touring the space center before launch, was asked if he had a message for the astronauts. \u201cGod be with you,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a dangerous business, but they\u2019re the best there is.\u201d\nThe Crew Dragon capsule\u2014featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars\u2014has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching Saturday morning, the capsule is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top. But if things ultimately go smoothly on the launchpad and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly approve SpaceX\u2019s systems as space taxis that would ferry crews to and from orbit.\nFor the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a successful flight would represent the culmination of more than eight years of efforts to shift its approach to transporting humans beyond the atmosphere. The agency has long sought to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.\nHaving a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk, in black, is joined by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the planned launch Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nSome longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government \u201ca customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Albrecht,\n\n\n\n a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. \u201cNASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.\u201d\nBeyond the policy changes and revamped contracting arrangements, however, the sheer promise of accelerating human space exploration excites many government and industry officials. Nothing generates as much pride as adding humans to the equation. \u201cWhen you put an astronaut on top of a rocket, that changes everything,\u201d Air Force Gen. John Hyten, a longtime space expert and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a White House space-policy council last week. \u201cDreams come when you start flying.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace Age\nHere is a look at the spacecraft and suit being used by the astronauts in the SpaceX launch.\n\n\n\nThe spacecraft\n\n\nThe suit\n\n\nCarries cargo and a crew of up to seven people.\n\n\nThe flame-retardant suit routes communications and cooling, and is designed to protect crew members in case the cabin depressurizes unexpectedly.\n\n\nHeight 26.7 ft. \n\n\nHearing protection\n\n\nCapsule carries a crew of up to seven\n\n\n16 Draco t The company\u2019s launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit was canceled because of adverse weather, delaying a new era of corporate-driven space missions. The next attempt is expected Saturday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bad Weather Scrubs SpaceX Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6697",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-readies-first-astronaut-launch-by-private-firm-11590580808?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=54",
        "text": "The long-awaited mission would have represented the first time a company ever flew commercially developed hardware carrying humans and linked up with the international space station. If Space Exploration Technologies Corp. eventually reaches that goal, it will mark a major shift in the country\u2019s space endeavors and the first human launch from U.S. soil since 2011. It would also represent a long-awaited milestone for NASA and a resounding achievement for SpaceX and its billionaire founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\nThe countdown at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had its share of suspense Wednesday, as weather forecasts hours before predicted only a 50/50 chance of acceptable conditions. The next opportunity comes Saturday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA countdown clock was stopped after the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was postponed in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gregg newton/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nRain and high-level winds pose hazards for rockets, and SpaceX staff also monitored weather conditions at dozens of sites around the world in case the astronauts had to separate from the rocket en route for an emergency descent.\n\n\nPresident Trump, while touring the space center before launch, was asked if he had a message for the astronauts. \u201cGod be with you,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a dangerous business, but they\u2019re the best there is.\u201d\nThe Crew Dragon capsule\u2014featuring the latest automation supplemented by touch-screen controls similar to those found on the dashboards of electric cars\u2014has suffered a series of setbacks, including balky oxygen generators, malfunctioning thrusters and problematic parachutes. After launching Saturday morning, the capsule is slated to stay at the orbiting laboratory for around two months.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingSpaceX to Send Astronauts to the ISSBetween Tesla and a new baby, you might've forgotten that Elon Musk is also working on space travel. Today, his company SpaceX is scheduled to become the first private entity to send humans to the International Space Station. Our reporter Andy Pasztor joins us to explain why this could be one small step for man - and a giant leap for commercial space travel. Kateri Jochum hosts.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s efforts to launch astronauts into orbit have suffered various delays, totaling about four years, including two catastrophic explosions of its Falcon 9 rocket and nagging safety concerns about the Dragon capsule riding on top. But if things ultimately go smoothly on the launchpad and throughout the return trip ending with a splashdown in the Atlantic, NASA hopes to swiftly approve SpaceX\u2019s systems as space taxis that would ferry crews to and from orbit.\nFor the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a successful flight would represent the culmination of more than eight years of efforts to shift its approach to transporting humans beyond the atmosphere. The agency has long sought to shift away from the lumbering process of building and designing government-owned spacecraft, and toward using public-private partnerships to develop vehicles and then pay private contractors for specific services.\nHaving a reliable American system would mean NASA astronauts no longer need to piggyback on Russian rockets and spacecraft, as they have since the aging U.S. space-shuttle fleet was retired nine years ago. Looking ahead, NASA and White House officials envision emphasizing deep-space exploration as part of a commitment to relying on similar corporate-government teams. Those would include company-led endeavors, with relatively limited federal oversight, taking astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024 and later to Mars or beyond.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk, in black, is joined by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the planned launch Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n joe skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nSome longtime NASA watchers see the current mission as a crucial steppingstone, perhaps as significant in some ways as the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s that paved the way for the Apollo moon landings. But this time, making the government \u201ca customer rather than operator is as astonishing as it is bold for NASA,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Albrecht,\n\n\n\n a former White House space adviser and retired senior industry executive. \u201cNASA will take the blame for failure and allow SpaceX to receive most of the glory of success.\u201d\nBeyond the policy changes and revamped contracting arrangements, however, the sheer promise of accelerating human space exploration excites many government and industry officials. Nothing generates as much pride as adding humans to the equation. \u201cWhen you put an astronaut on top of a rocket, that changes everything,\u201d Air Force Gen. Jo The company\u2019s launch of two NASA astronauts into orbit was canceled because of adverse weather, delaying a new era of corporate-driven space missions. The next attempt is expected Saturday. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Indicates Internet System Will Take Longer Than Anticipated (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6698",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-indicates-satellite-based-internet-system-will-take-longer-than-anticipated-1519227620?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=20",
        "text": "The initial demonstration spacecraft, about the size of compact refrigerators and designed to pave the way for affordable, high-speed internet access spanning the globe, were scheduled to blast into orbit Wednesday morning local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California\u2019s central coast. But the launch was delayed for a day because of winds.\nThe primary payload is a Spanish radar satellite, called PAZ, that will provide high-resolution radar images for commercial and government use. The presence of the two small satellites\u2014dubbed Microsat-2a and -2b\u2014have heightened media and public interest in the mission.\n\n\nEven if the two early satellites \u201cwork as planned,\u201d SpaceX said in Tuesday night\u2019s statement, \u201cwe still have considerable technical work ahead of us to design and deploy\u201d some 4,400 similar satellites. The tentative goal of starting limited service by 2020 now appears unrealistic based on that language, but the company didn\u2019t provide an alternate schedule.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThough executives refrained from making public comments or going on social media to discuss technical or programmatic details of the satellites before the launch was scrubbed, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is the company\u2019s formal name, previously filed documents with the Federal Communications Commission indicating their intended mission and orbits. Mr. Musk\u2019s team earlier told the commission that by 2020, it planned to have the first batch of roughly 800 operational satellites circling more than 680 miles above Earth, providing internet connectivity comparable to the fastest ground-based options.\nBut Tuesday\u2019s statement, which offered the most detailed progress report in years about the venture, delivered a different message: SpaceX engineers are still considering the most appropriate and cost-effective space and ground technologies to embrace, without firming up subcontractors or completing production plans.\nThe statement, for example, emphasized that technical and financial details of anticipated ground equipment for subscribers\u2014considered critical elements in any such project\u2014are still undetermined. \u201cGiven that we are just at the beginning of this work,\u201d SpaceX said, \u201cwe do not yet know what the cost will be\u201d and therefore estimates by outsiders \u201cshould be considered extremely speculative.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Wednesday, Mr. Musk posted a tweet highlighting the uncertainty surrounding his satellite initiative. \u201cIf successful,\u201d he wrote, the project \u201cwill serve least served\u201d regions and communities.\nOne industry official said the company has been working with Taconic, based in Petersburgh, N.Y., as a potential subcontractor to develop and supply circuit boards for consumer terminals, but no final decision has been made. Once there is a choice, industry officials said ramping up production likely would take several years. Spokesmen for SpaceX and Taconic declined to comment.\nThe satellite project, commonly called Starlink, was unveiled by Mr. Musk three years ago amid ambitious projections to deliver internet connections, especially to regions without such connectivity. \u201cWe\u2019re going to try to do for satellites what we\u2019ve done for rockets,\u201d Mr. Musk told Bloomberg TV. But since then, he has generally avoided publicly discussing the initiative or its status.\nSeveral rounds of FCC filings have spelled out technical details and a general timetable, but those documents don\u2019t specify engineering progress, production plans or financing strategies for a price tag initially pegged at $10 billion or more.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s president and chief operating officer, occasionally has tried to keep a lid on expectations by highlighting other company priorities, raising questions about the business case or alluding to the relatively small team of engineers assigned to Starlink.\nSkeptics have challenged the assumption of a nearly unlimited market for internet access in developing countries.\u201dThe satellite industry has way too much capacity\u201d world-wide at this juncture, meaning \u201cit\u2019s almost chaos\u201d as service providers continue to slash prices to compete with ground-based offerings, according to veteran industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Rusch.\n\n\n\n \nSpaceX\u2019s challenges are emerging as one of its main rivals, OneWeb Ltd., is pushing ahead with construction of a highly automated satellite factory in Florida and indicates it is on track to begin offering limited internet links next year. With its FCC approval in hand, an initial fleet of more than 700 OneWeb satellites is expected to start offering services over Alaska next year. Residents of the state currently have limited options to connect to the internet. The company is targeting virtually world-wide service by 2021. \nFounded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler SpaceX\u2019s proposed internet-via-space project is slated to launch two experimental satellites on Thursday, even as the company tamps down expectations such prototypes will quickly evolve into a functioning global system. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Indicates Internet System Will Take Longer Than Anticipated (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6699",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-indicates-satellite-based-internet-system-will-take-longer-than-anticipated-1519227620?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=70",
        "text": "The initial demonstration spacecraft, about the size of compact refrigerators and designed to pave the way for affordable, high-speed internet access spanning the globe, were scheduled to blast into orbit Wednesday morning local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California\u2019s central coast. But the launch was delayed for a day because of winds.\nThe primary payload is a Spanish radar satellite, called PAZ, that will provide high-resolution radar images for commercial and government use. The presence of the two small satellites\u2014dubbed Microsat-2a and -2b\u2014have heightened media and public interest in the mission.\n\n\nEven if the two early satellites \u201cwork as planned,\u201d SpaceX said in Tuesday night\u2019s statement, \u201cwe still have considerable technical work ahead of us to design and deploy\u201d some 4,400 similar satellites. The tentative goal of starting limited service by 2020 now appears unrealistic based on that language, but the company didn\u2019t provide an alternate schedule.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThough executives refrained from making public comments or going on social media to discuss technical or programmatic details of the satellites before the launch was scrubbed, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is the company\u2019s formal name, previously filed documents with the Federal Communications Commission indicating their intended mission and orbits. Mr. Musk\u2019s team earlier told the commission that by 2020, it planned to have the first batch of roughly 800 operational satellites circling more than 680 miles above Earth, providing internet connectivity comparable to the fastest ground-based options.\nBut Tuesday\u2019s statement, which offered the most detailed progress report in years about the venture, delivered a different message: SpaceX engineers are still considering the most appropriate and cost-effective space and ground technologies to embrace, without firming up subcontractors or completing production plans.\nThe statement, for example, emphasized that technical and financial details of anticipated ground equipment for subscribers\u2014considered critical elements in any such project\u2014are still undetermined. \u201cGiven that we are just at the beginning of this work,\u201d SpaceX said, \u201cwe do not yet know what the cost will be\u201d and therefore estimates by outsiders \u201cshould be considered extremely speculative.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Wednesday, Mr. Musk posted a tweet highlighting the uncertainty surrounding his satellite initiative. \u201cIf successful,\u201d he wrote, the project \u201cwill serve least served\u201d regions and communities.\nOne industry official said the company has been working with Taconic, based in Petersburgh, N.Y., as a potential subcontractor to develop and supply circuit boards for consumer terminals, but no final decision has been made. Once there is a choice, industry officials said ramping up production likely would take several years. Spokesmen for SpaceX and Taconic declined to comment.\nThe satellite project, commonly called Starlink, was unveiled by Mr. Musk three years ago amid ambitious projections to deliver internet connections, especially to regions without such connectivity. \u201cWe\u2019re going to try to do for satellites what we\u2019ve done for rockets,\u201d Mr. Musk told Bloomberg TV. But since then, he has generally avoided publicly discussing the initiative or its status.\nSeveral rounds of FCC filings have spelled out technical details and a general timetable, but those documents don\u2019t specify engineering progress, production plans or financing strategies for a price tag initially pegged at $10 billion or more.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s president and chief operating officer, occasionally has tried to keep a lid on expectations by highlighting other company priorities, raising questions about the business case or alluding to the relatively small team of engineers assigned to Starlink.\nSkeptics have challenged the assumption of a nearly unlimited market for internet access in developing countries.\u201dThe satellite industry has way too much capacity\u201d world-wide at this juncture, meaning \u201cit\u2019s almost chaos\u201d as service providers continue to slash prices to compete with ground-based offerings, according to veteran industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Rusch.\n\n\n\n \nSpaceX\u2019s challenges are emerging as one of its main rivals, OneWeb Ltd., is pushing ahead with construction of a highly automated satellite factory in Florida and indicates it is on track to begin offering limited internet links next year. With its FCC approval in hand, an initial fleet of more than 700 OneWeb satellites is expected to start offering services over Alaska next year. Residents of the state currently have limited options to connect to the internet. The company is targeting virtually world-wide service by 2021. \nFounded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler SpaceX\u2019s proposed internet-via-space project is slated to launch two experimental satellites on Thursday, even as the company tamps down expectations such prototypes will quickly evolve into a functioning global system. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Indicates Internet System Will Take Longer Than Anticipated (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6700",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-indicates-satellite-based-internet-system-will-take-longer-than-anticipated-1519227620?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=101",
        "text": "The initial demonstration spacecraft, about the size of compact refrigerators and designed to pave the way for affordable, high-speed internet access spanning the globe, were scheduled to blast into orbit Wednesday morning local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California\u2019s central coast. But the launch was delayed for a day because of winds.\n\n\n\n\nThe primary payload is a Spanish radar satellite, called PAZ, that will provide high-resolution radar images for commercial and government use. The presence of the two small satellites\u2014dubbed Microsat-2a and -2b\u2014have heightened media and public interest in the mission.\n\n\nEven if the two early satellites \u201cwork as planned,\u201d SpaceX said in Tuesday night\u2019s statement, \u201cwe still have considerable technical work ahead of us to design and deploy\u201d some 4,400 similar satellites. The tentative goal of starting limited service by 2020 now appears unrealistic based on that language, but the company didn\u2019t provide an alternate schedule.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThough executives refrained from making public comments or going on social media to discuss technical or programmatic details of the satellites before the launch was scrubbed, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is the company\u2019s formal name, previously filed documents with the Federal Communications Commission indicating their intended mission and orbits. Mr. Musk\u2019s team earlier told the commission that by 2020, it planned to have the first batch of roughly 800 operational satellites circling more than 680 miles above Earth, providing internet connectivity comparable to the fastest ground-based options.\nBut Tuesday\u2019s statement, which offered the most detailed progress report in years about the venture, delivered a different message: SpaceX engineers are still considering the most appropriate and cost-effective space and ground technologies to embrace, without firming up subcontractors or completing production plans.\nThe statement, for example, emphasized that technical and financial details of anticipated ground equipment for subscribers\u2014considered critical elements in any such project\u2014are still undetermined. \u201cGiven that we are just at the beginning of this work,\u201d SpaceX said, \u201cwe do not yet know what the cost will be\u201d and therefore estimates by outsiders \u201cshould be considered extremely speculative.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Wednesday, Mr. Musk posted a tweet highlighting the uncertainty surrounding his satellite initiative. \u201cIf successful,\u201d he wrote, the project \u201cwill serve least served\u201d regions and communities.\nOne industry official said the company has been working with Taconic, based in Petersburgh, N.Y., as a potential subcontractor to develop and supply circuit boards for consumer terminals, but no final decision has been made. Once there is a choice, industry officials said ramping up production likely would take several years. Spokesmen for SpaceX and Taconic declined to comment.\nThe satellite project, commonly called Starlink, was unveiled by Mr. Musk three years ago amid ambitious projections to deliver internet connections, especially to regions without such connectivity. \u201cWe\u2019re going to try to do for satellites what we\u2019ve done for rockets,\u201d Mr. Musk told Bloomberg TV. But since then, he has generally avoided publicly discussing the initiative or its status.\nSeveral rounds of FCC filings have spelled out technical details and a general timetable, but those documents don\u2019t specify engineering progress, production plans or financing strategies for a price tag initially pegged at $10 billion or more.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s president and chief operating officer, occasionally has tried to keep a lid on expectations by highlighting other company priorities, raising questions about the business case or alluding to the relatively small team of engineers assigned to Starlink.\nSkeptics have challenged the assumption of a nearly unlimited market for internet access in developing countries.\u201dThe satellite industry has way too much capacity\u201d world-wide at this juncture, meaning \u201cit\u2019s almost chaos\u201d as service providers continue to slash prices to compete with ground-based offerings, according to veteran industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Rusch.\n\n\n\n \nSpaceX\u2019s challenges are emerging as one of its main rivals, OneWeb Ltd., is pushing ahead with construction of a highly automated satellite factory in Florida and indicates it is on track to begin offering limited internet links next year. With its FCC approval in hand, an initial fleet of more than 700 OneWeb satellites is expected to start offering services over Alaska next year. Residents of the state currently have limited options to connect to the internet. The company is targeting virtually world-wide service by 2021. \nFounded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg W SpaceX\u2019s proposed internet-via-space project is slated to launch two experimental satellites on Thursday, even as the company tamps down expectations such prototypes will quickly evolve into a functioning global system. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Is Raising $500 Million in Funding (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6701",
        "date": "2018-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-is-raising-500-million-in-funding-11545142054?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=82",
        "text": "SpaceX and the investors have agreed on the financing terms, but the money hasn\u2019t been sent to the company yet, this person said. SpaceX could announce the deal by year-end.\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX was last valued by investors at about $28 billion in a funding round in April. The investors are paying $186 a share for new stock in the latest funding round, this person said. That is up about 10% from the $169 paid during the April fundraising, according to SpaceX data compiled by Lagniappe Labs, a private-company analytics firm.\n\n\nIncluding the current round, SpaceX has raised about $2.5 billion of equity funding, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Last month it raised $250 million via its first high-yield loan sale. \nSpaceX and Baillie Gifford both declined to comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft approaches a robotic arm for docking to the International Space Station on Dec. 8, three days after launching from Florida.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA TV/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX plans to invest in the company\u2019s nascent satellite internet service, known as Starlink, one of the people said. Initial designs call for it to be powered by a constellation of more than 4,000 satellites orbiting the earth at low altitudes. Starlink is one of two multibillion-dollar projects at the company, the other involving plans to develop the largest rocket system ever built, the Starship and its Super Heavy rocket booster. SpaceX currently makes money by launching commercial and government satellites.\nSpaceX is among several companies whose largest shareholder is Mr. Musk. Aside from Tesla, where he is CEO, Mr. Musk is the founder of brain-computer startup Neuralink and Boring Co., a tunnel-digging venture partly owned by SpaceX that was scheduled to reveal a test tunnel late Tuesday. \nThe SpaceX fundraising winds up a volatile year for Mr. Musk. Tesla experienced production problems earlier this year and was weeks away from financial failure, Mr. Musk has said. The electric-car company has since overcome some of those issues and in October reported a record quarterly profit. \nMr. Musk was also accused of securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting in August that he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured funding for such a deal, though none materialized. He settled with the SEC in September, and as part of that deal relinquished his role as Tesla chairman in November. He remains chief executive of the auto maker.\n\n\nRelated Musk\u2019s New Boring Co. Faced Questions Over SpaceX Financial Ties \n\n\nMr. Musk also drew criticism from some investors and analysts for appearing to smoke marijuana in a live online interview in September. But his erratic behavior apparently hasn\u2019t shaken the confidence of some private market investors. \nSpaceX investors are optimistic about the potential of Starlink, according to a person familiar with their thinking.\u00a0SpaceX projects the constellation could grow to more than 11,000 satellites. The largest current telecommunications constellation has 65 satellites.\nHowever, as at Tesla, Mr. Musk has a history of missing projections at SpaceX. In early 2016 SpaceX projected that it would launch 44 rockets this year, according to internal documents previously reported on by The Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, the company was scheduled to launch its 21st rocket but minutes before scheduled liftoff the launch was scrubbed for technical reasons and rescheduled for Wednesday.\nStarlink is also behind the schedule laid out by SpaceX in internal documents from fall 2015. Back then, the company projected it would have 400 satellites in orbit by the end of this year. SpaceX has launched two prototype satellites, and company officials have said the first batch of operational satellites could be put in orbit as soon as next year. \nIn 2015, SpaceX projected the internet business would require $3.5 billion of investment capital to launch the first 800 satellites and hire approximately 1,200 employees, among other costs. It projected the business would generate more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025, dwarfing revenue of about $5 billion from its core rocket business.\nSpaceX ultimately could require more than $10 billion in capital to reach its projected 11,000 satellite constellation, according to some industry estimates, while developing its heavy-lift rocket and capsule is anticipated to cost many more billions of dollars.\nThe company\u2019s rocket business has been growing steadily. It has executed 38 consecutive successful launches since a launchpad explosion in September 2016. Meantime it became the first company to return rocket boosters to earth safely and then routinely re-use them to launch subsequent payloads.\nDevelopment of the mammoth rocket and associated hardware remains an open question. Reasons range from changing designs to SpaceX\u2019s being shut out earlier this year from a U.S. Air Force competition that awarded more than $2 billion in Elon Musk\u2019s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies, is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, in a bid to help get a satellite-internet service off the ground. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler, Andy Pasztor and Rob Copeland"
    },
    {
        "title": "Microsoft Teams With SpaceX to Push Cloud Battle With Amazon Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6702",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-teams-with-elon-musks-spacex-to-push-cloud-battle-with-amazon-into-orbit-11603188007?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=11",
        "text": "Some analysts have projected that overall revenue from space-related cloud services could total about $15 billion by the end of the decade, at least several times higher than current levels.\nCompetition in the cloud between Amazon, the market leader, and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up in recent years. The pandemic has intensified the fight as companies accelerate their shift to the cloud and make vendor choices that could last for years. At the same time, military and intelligence agencies are ramping up spending on a range of space projects.\n\n\nSpace is only the latest area where the two cloud giants are going head-to-head. In June, Amazon launched a dedicated business unit focused on securing space-related contracts. Amazon already counts Maxar Technologies Inc. and Capella Space as customers, helping them manage data coming from satellites.\n\n\nMicrosoft vs. Amazon Amazon Launches Space Push to Drive Cloud-Computing Growth (June 30, 2020) Amazon Has Long Ruled the Cloud. Now It Must Fend Off Rivals (Jan. 4, 2020) Pentagon Picks Microsoft for JEDI Cloud-Computing Contract Over Amazon (Oct. 25, 2019) Amazon Foes Walmart and Microsoft Deepen Tech Partnership (July 17, 2018) \n\n\nMicrosoft\u2019s goal is to create integrated, secure networks, linking various cloud, space and ground capabilities. The system, for instance, would accumulate and analyze huge volumes of data, supporting missions such as space-debris surveillance and missile warnings and helping to control the orbits of commercial satellites.\nIn addition to working with SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Microsoft said it is in partnership with Luxembourg\u2019s SES SA, which separately operates a network of larger satellites significantly farther from earth under the brand O3b. Microsoft executives declined to disclose the size of their anticipated investment, but the initiative targets some of the fastest-growing national-security endeavors in space, sometimes harnessing artificial intelligence.\nSpaceX, which is in the process of deploying its Starlink project consisting of thousands of high-speed internet satellites intended to provide connectivity around the globe, makes a natural partner for Microsoft. A major reason is that Amazon founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is pursuing his own low-orbit satellite constellation. Mr. Bezos also owns Blue Origin, a rocket company competing with SpaceX.\nMr. Musk has sparred with Mr. Bezos before. The SpaceX chief executive who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n this year called for a break up of Amazon after the retailer rejected a book about the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon later said it had taken the action in error. \nMicrosoft has teamed before with competitors of its crosstown cloud rival. Microsoft and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart Inc.\nstruck a cloud-computing deal two years ago. And this year the software giant and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n FedEx Corp.\n\n\n struck a partnership. Months earlier, Amazon had temporarily blocked some of its vendors from using some FedEx services.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCompetition in the cloud between market-leader Amazon and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n lucy nicholson/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nAmazon\u2019s and Microsoft\u2019s steps in space come as the U.S. Defense Department is moving rapidly to embrace such sprawling constellations of smaller spacecraft for communications, surveillance and other applications. Pentagon brass have said smaller, lighter and more maneuverable satellites are essential to protect U.S. assets from potential hostile actions in space.\nMicrosoft is \u201cfocused deeply on governments and defense,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Keane,\n\n\n\n a corporate vice president. The space effort, he said, provides an opportunity \u201cto bring commercial technology and innovation to the military.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Big tech firms are investing in data centers as they compete for the $214 billion cloud computing market. WSJ explains what cloud computing is, why big tech is betting big on future contracts. (Originally Published December 2, 2019)\n \n\n\nSpaceX recently won a demonstration contract for a new generation of missile-warning satellites, which industry officials say could serve as the backbone for eventual Microsoft forays into that arena.\nThe U.S. national-security establishment also is shifting to greater cloud use. Microsoft last year beat out Amazon for a potential $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon. Amazon has challenged the decision, which has since been affirmed by the Pentagon.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com Microsoft will help connect and deploy new services using swarms of low-orbit spacecraft being proposed by SpaceX, part of an initiative targeting commercial and government space businesses that comes just months after Amazon disclosed its own space-focused effort. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Aaron Tilley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Microsoft Teams With SpaceX to Push Cloud Battle With Amazon Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6703",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-teams-with-elon-musks-spacex-to-push-cloud-battle-with-amazon-into-orbit-11603188007?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=39",
        "text": "Some analysts have projected that overall revenue from space-related cloud services could total about $15 billion by the end of the decade, at least several times higher than current levels.\nCompetition in the cloud between Amazon, the market leader, and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up in recent years. The pandemic has intensified the fight as companies accelerate their shift to the cloud and make vendor choices that could last for years. At the same time, military and intelligence agencies are ramping up spending on a range of space projects.\n\n\nSpace is only the latest area where the two cloud giants are going head-to-head. In June, Amazon launched a dedicated business unit focused on securing space-related contracts. Amazon already counts Maxar Technologies Inc. and Capella Space as customers, helping them manage data coming from satellites.\n\n\nMicrosoft vs. Amazon Amazon Launches Space Push to Drive Cloud-Computing Growth (June 30, 2020) Amazon Has Long Ruled the Cloud. Now It Must Fend Off Rivals (Jan. 4, 2020) Pentagon Picks Microsoft for JEDI Cloud-Computing Contract Over Amazon (Oct. 25, 2019) Amazon Foes Walmart and Microsoft Deepen Tech Partnership (July 17, 2018) \n\n\nMicrosoft\u2019s goal is to create integrated, secure networks, linking various cloud, space and ground capabilities. The system, for instance, would accumulate and analyze huge volumes of data, supporting missions such as space-debris surveillance and missile warnings and helping to control the orbits of commercial satellites.\nIn addition to working with SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Microsoft said it is in partnership with Luxembourg\u2019s SES SA, which separately operates a network of larger satellites significantly farther from earth under the brand O3b. Microsoft executives declined to disclose the size of their anticipated investment, but the initiative targets some of the fastest-growing national-security endeavors in space, sometimes harnessing artificial intelligence.\nSpaceX, which is in the process of deploying its Starlink project consisting of thousands of high-speed internet satellites intended to provide connectivity around the globe, makes a natural partner for Microsoft. A major reason is that Amazon founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is pursuing his own low-orbit satellite constellation. Mr. Bezos also owns Blue Origin, a rocket company competing with SpaceX.\nMr. Musk has sparred with Mr. Bezos before. The SpaceX chief executive who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n this year called for a break up of Amazon after the retailer rejected a book about the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon later said it had taken the action in error. \nMicrosoft has teamed before with competitors of its crosstown cloud rival. Microsoft and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart Inc.\nstruck a cloud-computing deal two years ago. And this year the software giant and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n FedEx Corp.\n\n\n struck a partnership. Months earlier, Amazon had temporarily blocked some of its vendors from using some FedEx services.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCompetition in the cloud between market-leader Amazon and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n lucy nicholson/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nAmazon\u2019s and Microsoft\u2019s steps in space come as the U.S. Defense Department is moving rapidly to embrace such sprawling constellations of smaller spacecraft for communications, surveillance and other applications. Pentagon brass have said smaller, lighter and more maneuverable satellites are essential to protect U.S. assets from potential hostile actions in space.\nMicrosoft is \u201cfocused deeply on governments and defense,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Keane,\n\n\n\n a corporate vice president. The space effort, he said, provides an opportunity \u201cto bring commercial technology and innovation to the military.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Big tech firms are investing in data centers as they compete for the $214 billion cloud computing market. WSJ explains what cloud computing is, why big tech is betting big on future contracts. (Originally Published December 2, 2019)\n \n\n\nSpaceX recently won a demonstration contract for a new generation of missile-warning satellites, which industry officials say could serve as the backbone for eventual Microsoft forays into that arena.\nThe U.S. national-security establishment also is shifting to greater cloud use. Microsoft last year beat out Amazon for a potential $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon. Amazon has challenged the decision, which has since been affirmed by the Pentagon.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com Microsoft will help connect and deploy new services using swarms of low-orbit spacecraft being proposed by SpaceX, part of an initiative targeting commercial and government space businesses that comes just months after Amazon disclosed its own space-focused effort. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Aaron Tilley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Microsoft Teams With SpaceX to Push Cloud Battle With Amazon Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6704",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-teams-with-elon-musks-spacex-to-push-cloud-battle-with-amazon-into-orbit-11603188007?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=45",
        "text": "Some analysts have projected that overall revenue from space-related cloud services could total about $15 billion by the end of the decade, at least several times higher than current levels.\n\n\n\n\nCompetition in the cloud between Amazon, the market leader, and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up in recent years. The pandemic has intensified the fight as companies accelerate their shift to the cloud and make vendor choices that could last for years. At the same time, military and intelligence agencies are ramping up spending on a range of space projects.\n\n\nSpace is only the latest area where the two cloud giants are going head-to-head. In June, Amazon launched a dedicated business unit focused on securing space-related contracts. Amazon already counts Maxar Technologies Inc. and Capella Space as customers, helping them manage data coming from satellites.\n\n\nMicrosoft vs. Amazon Amazon Launches Space Push to Drive Cloud-Computing Growth (June 30, 2020) Amazon Has Long Ruled the Cloud. Now It Must Fend Off Rivals (Jan. 4, 2020) Pentagon Picks Microsoft for JEDI Cloud-Computing Contract Over Amazon (Oct. 25, 2019) Amazon Foes Walmart and Microsoft Deepen Tech Partnership (July 17, 2018) \n\n\nMicrosoft\u2019s goal is to create integrated, secure networks, linking various cloud, space and ground capabilities. The system, for instance, would accumulate and analyze huge volumes of data, supporting missions such as space-debris surveillance and missile warnings and helping to control the orbits of commercial satellites.\nIn addition to working with SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Microsoft said it is in partnership with Luxembourg\u2019s SES SA, which separately operates a network of larger satellites significantly farther from earth under the brand O3b. Microsoft executives declined to disclose the size of their anticipated investment, but the initiative targets some of the fastest-growing national-security endeavors in space, sometimes harnessing artificial intelligence.\nSpaceX, which is in the process of deploying its Starlink project consisting of thousands of high-speed internet satellites intended to provide connectivity around the globe, makes a natural partner for Microsoft. A major reason is that Amazon founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n is pursuing his own low-orbit satellite constellation. Mr. Bezos also owns Blue Origin, a rocket company competing with SpaceX.\nMr. Musk has sparred with Mr. Bezos before. The SpaceX chief executive who also runs electric-vehicle maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n this year called for a break up of Amazon after the retailer rejected a book about the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon later said it had taken the action in error. \nMicrosoft has teamed before with competitors of its crosstown cloud rival. Microsoft and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart Inc.\nstruck a cloud-computing deal two years ago. And this year the software giant and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n FedEx Corp.\n\n\n struck a partnership. Months earlier, Amazon had temporarily blocked some of its vendors from using some FedEx services.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCompetition in the cloud between market-leader Amazon and No. 2 Microsoft has been heating up.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n lucy nicholson/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nAmazon\u2019s and Microsoft\u2019s steps in space come as the U.S. Defense Department is moving rapidly to embrace such sprawling constellations of smaller spacecraft for communications, surveillance and other applications. Pentagon brass have said smaller, lighter and more maneuverable satellites are essential to protect U.S. assets from potential hostile actions in space.\nMicrosoft is \u201cfocused deeply on governments and defense,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Keane,\n\n\n\n a corporate vice president. The space effort, he said, provides an opportunity \u201cto bring commercial technology and innovation to the military.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Big tech firms are investing in data centers as they compete for the $214 billion cloud computing market. WSJ explains what cloud computing is, why big tech is betting big on future contracts. (Originally Published December 2, 2019)\n \n\n\nSpaceX recently won a demonstration contract for a new generation of missile-warning satellites, which industry officials say could serve as the backbone for eventual Microsoft forays into that arena.\nThe U.S. national-security establishment also is shifting to greater cloud use. Microsoft last year beat out Amazon for a potential $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon. Amazon has challenged the decision, which has since been affirmed by the Pentagon.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com and Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com Microsoft will help connect and deploy new services using swarms of low-orbit spacecraft being proposed by SpaceX, part of an initiative targeting commercial and government space businesses that comes just months after Amazon disclosed its own space-focused effort. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Aaron Tilley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Send Supercomputer to Space (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6705",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprise-to-send-supercomputer-to-space-1502473896?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=23",
        "text": "Related NASA\u2019s Work to Head Off Battery Blazes in Space Finds Uses on Earth (July 21) NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns, Delays (May 15) House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (March 7) \n\n\nRocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp. plans to launch the supercomputer aboard its Falcon 9 rocket as part of a resupply mission.\n\u201cWe decided on a year because it\u2019s about how long it takes to get to Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Eng Lim Goh,\n\n\n\n vice president and chief technology officer at HPE\u2019s Silicon Graphics International unit. A full simulation would take about five years to include the return journey and a three-year stay on the red planet.\n\n\nToday, most of the heavy-duty computing calculations and data analysis are still run on Earth-based computers, which is fine for astronaut trips to the moon or on the international space station. But it can take up to 26 minutes to get a return signal from Earth to Mars, which may take too long in a situation where there is a system failure and astronauts need to run data analysis or a simulation to figure out the best course of action.\nEarth\u2019s atmosphere protects computers from the effects of radiation. But in space, a gradual accumulation of radiation can degrade the performance of integrated circuits until they start to run hotter, drain the battery and then fail. In other instances, random high-energy particles can cause glitches, erase data or even destroy hardware.\nTypically, computers sent to space are specially manufactured or \u201chardened\u201d so that the hardware can physically withstand higher levels of radiation.\n\u201cThat lengthy process by default means you\u2019re rarely using the latest technology,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken O\u2019Neill,\n\n\n\n director of marketing, space and aviation at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsemi Corp.\n\n\n , a company that makes radiation-hardened computing components for the aerospace industry. But that process is essential to creating reliable computers embedded in spacecraft, he said.\nResearchers at HPE want to see if commercially available hardware running specialized software can help prevent the ill effects of radiation. The idea is to use sensors and other means to detect the presence of high radiation and then lower the power consumption and the speed of the computer.\nLike a driver slowing down in a snowstorm, the reduced speeds help the computer deal with unfavorable conditions and recover from errors.\nThe Spaceborne Computer contains some of the same technology as NASA\u2019s Pleiades Supercomputer but is much smaller because it relies on the space station\u2019s solar cells for power.\nWrite to Rachael King at rachael.king@wsj.com Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is reaching for the stars, sending the first commercial supercomputer into space for a yearlong experiment that could help make possible an eventual mission to Mars. ",
        "author": "Rachael King"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Send Supercomputer to Space (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6706",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprise-to-send-supercomputer-to-space-1502473896?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=79",
        "text": "Related NASA\u2019s Work to Head Off Battery Blazes in Space Finds Uses on Earth (July 21) NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns, Delays (May 15) House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (March 7) \n\n\nRocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp. plans to launch the supercomputer aboard its Falcon 9 rocket as part of a resupply mission.\n\u201cWe decided on a year because it\u2019s about how long it takes to get to Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Eng Lim Goh,\n\n\n\n vice president and chief technology officer at HPE\u2019s Silicon Graphics International unit. A full simulation would take about five years to include the return journey and a three-year stay on the red planet.\n\n\nToday, most of the heavy-duty computing calculations and data analysis are still run on Earth-based computers, which is fine for astronaut trips to the moon or on the international space station. But it can take up to 26 minutes to get a return signal from Earth to Mars, which may take too long in a situation where there is a system failure and astronauts need to run data analysis or a simulation to figure out the best course of action.\nEarth\u2019s atmosphere protects computers from the effects of radiation. But in space, a gradual accumulation of radiation can degrade the performance of integrated circuits until they start to run hotter, drain the battery and then fail. In other instances, random high-energy particles can cause glitches, erase data or even destroy hardware.\nTypically, computers sent to space are specially manufactured or \u201chardened\u201d so that the hardware can physically withstand higher levels of radiation.\n\u201cThat lengthy process by default means you\u2019re rarely using the latest technology,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken O\u2019Neill,\n\n\n\n director of marketing, space and aviation at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsemi Corp.\n\n\n , a company that makes radiation-hardened computing components for the aerospace industry. But that process is essential to creating reliable computers embedded in spacecraft, he said.\nResearchers at HPE want to see if commercially available hardware running specialized software can help prevent the ill effects of radiation. The idea is to use sensors and other means to detect the presence of high radiation and then lower the power consumption and the speed of the computer.\nLike a driver slowing down in a snowstorm, the reduced speeds help the computer deal with unfavorable conditions and recover from errors.\nThe Spaceborne Computer contains some of the same technology as NASA\u2019s Pleiades Supercomputer but is much smaller because it relies on the space station\u2019s solar cells for power.\nWrite to Rachael King at rachael.king@wsj.com Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is reaching for the stars, sending the first commercial supercomputer into space for a yearlong experiment that could help make possible an eventual mission to Mars. ",
        "author": "Rachael King"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Send Supercomputer to Space (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6707",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprise-to-send-supercomputer-to-space-1502473896?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=89",
        "text": "Related NASA\u2019s Work to Head Off Battery Blazes in Space Finds Uses on Earth (July 21) NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns, Delays (May 15) House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (March 7) \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp. plans to launch the supercomputer aboard its Falcon 9 rocket as part of a resupply mission.\n\u201cWe decided on a year because it\u2019s about how long it takes to get to Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Eng Lim Goh,\n\n\n\n vice president and chief technology officer at HPE\u2019s Silicon Graphics International unit. A full simulation would take about five years to include the return journey and a three-year stay on the red planet.\n\n\nToday, most of the heavy-duty computing calculations and data analysis are still run on Earth-based computers, which is fine for astronaut trips to the moon or on the international space station. But it can take up to 26 minutes to get a return signal from Earth to Mars, which may take too long in a situation where there is a system failure and astronauts need to run data analysis or a simulation to figure out the best course of action.\nEarth\u2019s atmosphere protects computers from the effects of radiation. But in space, a gradual accumulation of radiation can degrade the performance of integrated circuits until they start to run hotter, drain the battery and then fail. In other instances, random high-energy particles can cause glitches, erase data or even destroy hardware.\nTypically, computers sent to space are specially manufactured or \u201chardened\u201d so that the hardware can physically withstand higher levels of radiation.\n\u201cThat lengthy process by default means you\u2019re rarely using the latest technology,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken O\u2019Neill,\n\n\n\n director of marketing, space and aviation at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsemi Corp.\n\n\n , a company that makes radiation-hardened computing components for the aerospace industry. But that process is essential to creating reliable computers embedded in spacecraft, he said.\nResearchers at HPE want to see if commercially available hardware running specialized software can help prevent the ill effects of radiation. The idea is to use sensors and other means to detect the presence of high radiation and then lower the power consumption and the speed of the computer.\nLike a driver slowing down in a snowstorm, the reduced speeds help the computer deal with unfavorable conditions and recover from errors.\nThe Spaceborne Computer contains some of the same technology as NASA\u2019s Pleiades Supercomputer but is much smaller because it relies on the space station\u2019s solar cells for power.\nWrite to Rachael King at rachael.king@wsj.com Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is reaching for the stars, sending the first commercial supercomputer into space for a yearlong experiment that could help make possible an eventual mission to Mars. ",
        "author": "Rachael King"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Send Supercomputer to Space (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6708",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hewlett-packard-enterprise-to-send-supercomputer-to-space-1502473896?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=116",
        "text": "Related NASA\u2019s Work to Head Off Battery Blazes in Space Finds Uses on Earth (July 21) NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns, Delays (May 15) House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (March 7) \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp. plans to launch the supercomputer aboard its Falcon 9 rocket as part of a resupply mission.\n\u201cWe decided on a year because it\u2019s about how long it takes to get to Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Eng Lim Goh,\n\n\n\n vice president and chief technology officer at HPE\u2019s Silicon Graphics International unit. A full simulation would take about five years to include the return journey and a three-year stay on the red planet.\n\n\nToday, most of the heavy-duty computing calculations and data analysis are still run on Earth-based computers, which is fine for astronaut trips to the moon or on the international space station. But it can take up to 26 minutes to get a return signal from Earth to Mars, which may take too long in a situation where there is a system failure and astronauts need to run data analysis or a simulation to figure out the best course of action.\nEarth\u2019s atmosphere protects computers from the effects of radiation. But in space, a gradual accumulation of radiation can degrade the performance of integrated circuits until they start to run hotter, drain the battery and then fail. In other instances, random high-energy particles can cause glitches, erase data or even destroy hardware.\nTypically, computers sent to space are specially manufactured or \u201chardened\u201d so that the hardware can physically withstand higher levels of radiation.\n\u201cThat lengthy process by default means you\u2019re rarely using the latest technology,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken O\u2019Neill,\n\n\n\n director of marketing, space and aviation at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsemi Corp.\n\n\n , a company that makes radiation-hardened computing components for the aerospace industry. But that process is essential to creating reliable computers embedded in spacecraft, he said.\nResearchers at HPE want to see if commercially available hardware running specialized software can help prevent the ill effects of radiation. The idea is to use sensors and other means to detect the presence of high radiation and then lower the power consumption and the speed of the computer.\nLike a driver slowing down in a snowstorm, the reduced speeds help the computer deal with unfavorable conditions and recover from errors.\nThe Spaceborne Computer contains some of the same technology as NASA\u2019s Pleiades Supercomputer but is much smaller because it relies on the space station\u2019s solar cells for power.\nWrite to Rachael King at rachael.king@wsj.com Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is reaching for the stars, sending the first commercial supercomputer into space for a yearlong experiment that could help make possible an eventual mission to Mars. ",
        "author": "Rachael King"
    },
    {
        "title": "Orbital ATK Successfully Launches Antares Rocket (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6709",
        "date": "2017-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/orbital-atk-successfully-launches-antares-rocket-carrying-cargo-capsule-into-orbit-1510490474?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=22",
        "text": "Related NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns, Delays (May 15) NASA, Contractors Weigh Plans for Exploration Gateway (April 4) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) \n\n\nThe launch continued the company\u2019s rebound from a catastrophic 2014 rocket explosion at the start of a mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Investigators said the explosion\u2014which destroyed a cargo capsule it was carrying and all its contents\u2014was caused by a malfunctioning, 1970s-era Russian-built engine.\nAn Antares rocket with the same revamped propulsion system as Sunday\u2019s craft delivered an unmanned capsule to the orbiting international laboratory last year as part of a NASA contract.\n\n\nSunday morning\u2019s launch also is likely to increase momentum for Orbital ATK\u2019s efforts to eventually compete with a trio of other companies vying for Pentagon approval to transport future national-security satellites into high-altitude orbits. \nCommercial space-transportation companies Space Exploration Technologies Corp., led by billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n and Blue Origin LLC, founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n also are looking to snare such future Pentagon business. So is United Launch Alliance, a rocket-making joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , which currently is the primary heavy-lift launch provider for the U.S. military.\nNext year, Air Force procurement officials are expected to pick three contractor teams to provide prototype rockets intended to meet military needs through the next decades.\nA well-functioning Antares could help buttress Virginia-based Orbital ATK\u2019s argument for its next-generation launch system and potentially persuade Pentagon brass on the company\u2019s resilience and expertise. Just four days before the latest launch, the company announced it cleared an important milestone testing the structural strength of the composite case for future solid rocket motors. \nBuilding on the company\u2019s existing family of boosters, the follow-on rocket is being designed to transport up to 15,400 pounds into high-earth orbit. Depending on Air Force funding, technical progress and other factors, the new rocket is expected to have its first certification test flight in 2021.\nSunday\u2019s mission also comes as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n seeks to complete its proposed acquisition of Orbital ATK in a transaction valued at more than $9 billion. \nThe 133-foot Antares rocket blasted into clear skies above Wallops Island, with the first stage separating at an altitude of roughly 67 miles at a speed of more than 9,000 miles an hour. All engines cut off, as expected, about six minutes into the flight, and the capsule separated about nine minutes after liftoff.\nDuring the roughly three minutes of the Antares\u2019s main stage firing, both of the kerosene-fueled replacement RD-181 engines performed as anticipated by the company. The Cygnus spacecraft is slated to reach the space station Tuesday, and it will remain there until early December while astronauts unload it and then use it as a temporary space to conduct experiments.\nThe capsule will be loaded with refuse before leaving the station and is designed to burn up during descent toward Earth.\nThe launch was initially planned for Saturday but was aborted with only about one minute to liftoff as a precautionary measure when a small aircraft flew at an altitude of roughly 500 feet into the restricted area surrounding the launchpad. The Federal Aviation Administration, which had issued a routine notice restricting flights in the vicinity, said it was investigating.\nUnlike SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, which has slashed commercial launch costs, revolutionized the global aerospace industry and has been ramping up overall operations to try to launch as frequently as twice a month, Antares hasn\u2019t attracted any commercial contracts. With Sunday\u2019s launch, the Orbital ATK rocket has now carried out four successful cargo deliveries to the space station over four years, but company officials have stressed the next-generation version will be less expensive and more flexible.\nFor now, however, both the company and NASA are emphasizing that astronauts will be getting long-awaited treats such as pizza, ice cream and frozen fruit bars. More importantly, Orbital ATK said that temporarily re-configuring part of Cygnus as a work space, which hasn\u2019t been tried before, shows \u201cthe ability to expand the station\u2019s capabilities for hosting experiments.\u201d The agency and boosters of the space station are eager to demonstrate expanded scientific work on board to justify multibillion-dollar annual operating costs, and support arguments for possibly extending its stay in orbit past the middle of the next decade.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Orbital ATK launched a civilian cargo capsule into orbit Sunday, marking the second successful flight of the redesigned Antares rocket and raising the company\u2019s hopes of developing a more powerful booster for military missions in the next decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Orbital ATK Successfully Launches Antares Rocket (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6710",
        "date": "2017-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/orbital-atk-successfully-launches-antares-rocket-carrying-cargo-capsule-into-orbit-1510490474?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=74",
        "text": "Related NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns, Delays (May 15) NASA, Contractors Weigh Plans for Exploration Gateway (April 4) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) \n\n\nThe launch continued the company\u2019s rebound from a catastrophic 2014 rocket explosion at the start of a mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Investigators said the explosion\u2014which destroyed a cargo capsule it was carrying and all its contents\u2014was caused by a malfunctioning, 1970s-era Russian-built engine.\nAn Antares rocket with the same revamped propulsion system as Sunday\u2019s craft delivered an unmanned capsule to the orbiting international laboratory last year as part of a NASA contract.\n\n\nSunday morning\u2019s launch also is likely to increase momentum for Orbital ATK\u2019s efforts to eventually compete with a trio of other companies vying for Pentagon approval to transport future national-security satellites into high-altitude orbits. \nCommercial space-transportation companies Space Exploration Technologies Corp., led by billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n and Blue Origin LLC, founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n also are looking to snare such future Pentagon business. So is United Launch Alliance, a rocket-making joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , which currently is the primary heavy-lift launch provider for the U.S. military.\nNext year, Air Force procurement officials are expected to pick three contractor teams to provide prototype rockets intended to meet military needs through the next decades.\nA well-functioning Antares could help buttress Virginia-based Orbital ATK\u2019s argument for its next-generation launch system and potentially persuade Pentagon brass on the company\u2019s resilience and expertise. Just four days before the latest launch, the company announced it cleared an important milestone testing the structural strength of the composite case for future solid rocket motors. \nBuilding on the company\u2019s existing family of boosters, the follow-on rocket is being designed to transport up to 15,400 pounds into high-earth orbit. Depending on Air Force funding, technical progress and other factors, the new rocket is expected to have its first certification test flight in 2021.\nSunday\u2019s mission also comes as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n seeks to complete its proposed acquisition of Orbital ATK in a transaction valued at more than $9 billion. \nThe 133-foot Antares rocket blasted into clear skies above Wallops Island, with the first stage separating at an altitude of roughly 67 miles at a speed of more than 9,000 miles an hour. All engines cut off, as expected, about six minutes into the flight, and the capsule separated about nine minutes after liftoff.\nDuring the roughly three minutes of the Antares\u2019s main stage firing, both of the kerosene-fueled replacement RD-181 engines performed as anticipated by the company. The Cygnus spacecraft is slated to reach the space station Tuesday, and it will remain there until early December while astronauts unload it and then use it as a temporary space to conduct experiments.\nThe capsule will be loaded with refuse before leaving the station and is designed to burn up during descent toward Earth.\nThe launch was initially planned for Saturday but was aborted with only about one minute to liftoff as a precautionary measure when a small aircraft flew at an altitude of roughly 500 feet into the restricted area surrounding the launchpad. The Federal Aviation Administration, which had issued a routine notice restricting flights in the vicinity, said it was investigating.\nUnlike SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, which has slashed commercial launch costs, revolutionized the global aerospace industry and has been ramping up overall operations to try to launch as frequently as twice a month, Antares hasn\u2019t attracted any commercial contracts. With Sunday\u2019s launch, the Orbital ATK rocket has now carried out four successful cargo deliveries to the space station over four years, but company officials have stressed the next-generation version will be less expensive and more flexible.\nFor now, however, both the company and NASA are emphasizing that astronauts will be getting long-awaited treats such as pizza, ice cream and frozen fruit bars. More importantly, Orbital ATK said that temporarily re-configuring part of Cygnus as a work space, which hasn\u2019t been tried before, shows \u201cthe ability to expand the station\u2019s capabilities for hosting experiments.\u201d The agency and boosters of the space station are eager to demonstrate expanded scientific work on board to justify multibillion-dollar annual operating costs, and support arguments for possibly extending its stay in orbit past the middle of the next decade.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Orbital ATK launched a civilian cargo capsule into orbit Sunday, marking the second successful flight of the redesigned Antares rocket and raising the company\u2019s hopes of developing a more powerful booster for military missions in the next decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Orbital ATK Successfully Launches Antares Rocket (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6711",
        "date": "2017-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/orbital-atk-successfully-launches-antares-rocket-carrying-cargo-capsule-into-orbit-1510490474?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=109",
        "text": "Related NASA\u2019s Plans for Mega-Rocket and Deep-Space Capsule Face Concerns, Delays (May 15) NASA, Contractors Weigh Plans for Exploration Gateway (April 4) Leading Commercial Space Group Embraces NASA\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7) \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe launch continued the company\u2019s rebound from a catastrophic 2014 rocket explosion at the start of a mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Investigators said the explosion\u2014which destroyed a cargo capsule it was carrying and all its contents\u2014was caused by a malfunctioning, 1970s-era Russian-built engine.\nAn Antares rocket with the same revamped propulsion system as Sunday\u2019s craft delivered an unmanned capsule to the orbiting international laboratory last year as part of a NASA contract.\n\n\nSunday morning\u2019s launch also is likely to increase momentum for Orbital ATK\u2019s efforts to eventually compete with a trio of other companies vying for Pentagon approval to transport future national-security satellites into high-altitude orbits. \nCommercial space-transportation companies Space Exploration Technologies Corp., led by billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n and Blue Origin LLC, founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n also are looking to snare such future Pentagon business. So is United Launch Alliance, a rocket-making joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , which currently is the primary heavy-lift launch provider for the U.S. military.\nNext year, Air Force procurement officials are expected to pick three contractor teams to provide prototype rockets intended to meet military needs through the next decades.\nA well-functioning Antares could help buttress Virginia-based Orbital ATK\u2019s argument for its next-generation launch system and potentially persuade Pentagon brass on the company\u2019s resilience and expertise. Just four days before the latest launch, the company announced it cleared an important milestone testing the structural strength of the composite case for future solid rocket motors. \nBuilding on the company\u2019s existing family of boosters, the follow-on rocket is being designed to transport up to 15,400 pounds into high-earth orbit. Depending on Air Force funding, technical progress and other factors, the new rocket is expected to have its first certification test flight in 2021.\nSunday\u2019s mission also comes as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n seeks to complete its proposed acquisition of Orbital ATK in a transaction valued at more than $9 billion. \nThe 133-foot Antares rocket blasted into clear skies above Wallops Island, with the first stage separating at an altitude of roughly 67 miles at a speed of more than 9,000 miles an hour. All engines cut off, as expected, about six minutes into the flight, and the capsule separated about nine minutes after liftoff.\nDuring the roughly three minutes of the Antares\u2019s main stage firing, both of the kerosene-fueled replacement RD-181 engines performed as anticipated by the company. The Cygnus spacecraft is slated to reach the space station Tuesday, and it will remain there until early December while astronauts unload it and then use it as a temporary space to conduct experiments.\nThe capsule will be loaded with refuse before leaving the station and is designed to burn up during descent toward Earth.\nThe launch was initially planned for Saturday but was aborted with only about one minute to liftoff as a precautionary measure when a small aircraft flew at an altitude of roughly 500 feet into the restricted area surrounding the launchpad. The Federal Aviation Administration, which had issued a routine notice restricting flights in the vicinity, said it was investigating.\nUnlike SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket, which has slashed commercial launch costs, revolutionized the global aerospace industry and has been ramping up overall operations to try to launch as frequently as twice a month, Antares hasn\u2019t attracted any commercial contracts. With Sunday\u2019s launch, the Orbital ATK rocket has now carried out four successful cargo deliveries to the space station over four years, but company officials have stressed the next-generation version will be less expensive and more flexible.\nFor now, however, both the company and NASA are emphasizing that astronauts will be getting long-awaited treats such as pizza, ice cream and frozen fruit bars. More importantly, Orbital ATK said that temporarily re-configuring part of Cygnus as a work space, which hasn\u2019t been tried before, shows \u201cthe ability to expand the station\u2019s capabilities for hosting experiments.\u201d The agency and boosters of the space station are eager to demonstrate expanded scientific work on board to justify multibillion-dollar annual operating costs, and support arguments for possibly extending its stay in orbit past the middle of the next decade.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Orbital ATK launched a civilian cargo capsule into orbit Sunday, marking the second successful flight of the redesigned Antares rocket and raising the company\u2019s hopes of developing a more powerful booster for military missions in the next decade. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Ship Reaches Space Station Following Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6712",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-astronauts-to-international-space-station-11636597066?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=3",
        "text": "On Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped by the Crew Dragon capsule blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:03 p.m. ET and headed toward the research facility. The group that reached the station is scheduled to spend six months on board, conducting research into plant science, materials and other topics, NASA has said. \nNASA had planned the launch for late October but delayed the trip several times because of weather conditions and because of a medical issue, described as minor by the agency, that affected one crew member.\n\nThe quartet will succeed another group of astronauts who arrived on the space station back in April. That crew\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Kimbrough\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan McArthur\n\n\n\n from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Akihiko Hoshide\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet\n\n\n\n from the European Space Agency\u2014left the facility Monday on another SpaceX Crew Dragon. It flew around the space station so that crew members could photograph its exterior. Then the vehicle began its descent and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico under parachutes at 10:33 p.m. ET, returning the astronauts to Earth after 199 days in orbit. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA and SpaceX had planned to conduct the latest launch before bringing the other crew back to ground, allowing for a short overlap on the space station between the two groups of astronauts. But the delays and tricky weather prompted officials to shift the sequence of events.\n\u201cWe had some weather conditions that really set up to make us land instead of launch first,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a NASA program manager, said at a briefing Tuesday night.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s enterprise, has emerged as the leader in human spaceflight in the U.S., providing NASA an alternative to purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nLast year, SpaceX blasted astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since the agency ended the space shuttle program in 2011. It has since launched three other crews of astronauts to the space station, including Wednesday\u2019s flight.\n\u201cHuman spaceflight is core to SpaceX\u2019s ultimate mission,\u201d Sarah Walker, a director at the company, said during a recent briefing about Wednesday\u2019s launch.\n\n\nSpaceflight America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year \n\n\nSpaceX, which has developed reusable rockets and space capsules, has extended its technology developed for NASA to private missions, like the orbital trip in September that technology entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman\n\n\n\n purchased for himself and three others. Space company Axiom Space Inc. has acquired four flights from SpaceX to take commercial astronauts to the space station, with the first such mission scheduled for February.\nNASA picked SpaceX and Boeing Co. seven years ago to provide vehicles the agency could hire to take astronauts to the space station and bring them back to ground. While SpaceX has completed multiple flights under that contract, Boeing has struggled to complete testing for its ship, called the Starliner.\nThe aerospace company last month recorded a $185 million charge related to stuck valves on the Starliner that prompted the postponement of a demonstration launch of the vehicle last summer. During a previous test flight in 2019, the Starliner failed to reach the space station as planned. Executives at Boeing have said the company will fulfill commitments it has made to NASA to carry crew to and from the space station.\nSpaceX has made changes to and analyzed its space vehicles, in part based on their performance in flight. During Mr. Isaacman\u2019s trip, a tube became unglued on the Crew Dragon and urine wasn\u2019t deposited in a storage tank as designed, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president, during a recent briefing.\nThose on board that flight didn\u2019t notice the issue, but urine contaminated areas under the capsule\u2019s floor, raising concerns about corrosion and necessitating changes to the vehicle used for the latest launch, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier. Officials from NASA and SpaceX concluded that the vehicle that returned to Earth Monday night, meanwhile, could be operated in a safe manner in spite of that issue.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up In Today's Paper A complete list, with links, of every article from the day's Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSeparately, when the Crew Dragon was returning to Earth on Monday, one out of the vehicle\u2019s four parachutes was roughly 75 seconds late in deploying, Mr. Gerstenmaier said yesterday. That performance was within the design criteria established for the spacecraft but generated fresh analysis of the parachutes by SpaceX and NASA staff, he said.\n\u201cWe\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly The crew of four aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon docked with the orbiting international research facility Thursday evening. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Ship Reaches Space Station Following Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6713",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-astronauts-to-international-space-station-11636597066?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=8",
        "text": "On Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped by the Crew Dragon capsule blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:03 p.m. ET and headed toward the research facility. The group that reached the station is scheduled to spend six months on board, conducting research into plant science, materials and other topics, NASA has said. \nNASA had planned the launch for late October but delayed the trip several times because of weather conditions and because of a medical issue, described as minor by the agency, that affected one crew member.\n\nThe quartet will succeed another group of astronauts who arrived on the space station back in April. That crew\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Kimbrough\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan McArthur\n\n\n\n from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Akihiko Hoshide\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet\n\n\n\n from the European Space Agency\u2014left the facility Monday on another SpaceX Crew Dragon. It flew around the space station so that crew members could photograph its exterior. Then the vehicle began its descent and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico under parachutes at 10:33 p.m. ET, returning the astronauts to Earth after 199 days in orbit. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA and SpaceX had planned to conduct the latest launch before bringing the other crew back to ground, allowing for a short overlap on the space station between the two groups of astronauts. But the delays and tricky weather prompted officials to shift the sequence of events.\n\u201cWe had some weather conditions that really set up to make us land instead of launch first,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a NASA program manager, said at a briefing Tuesday night.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s enterprise, has emerged as the leader in human spaceflight in the U.S., providing NASA an alternative to purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nLast year, SpaceX blasted astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since the agency ended the space shuttle program in 2011. It has since launched three other crews of astronauts to the space station, including Wednesday\u2019s flight.\n\u201cHuman spaceflight is core to SpaceX\u2019s ultimate mission,\u201d Sarah Walker, a director at the company, said during a recent briefing about Wednesday\u2019s launch.\n\n\nSpaceflight America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year \n\n\nSpaceX, which has developed reusable rockets and space capsules, has extended its technology developed for NASA to private missions, like the orbital trip in September that technology entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman\n\n\n\n purchased for himself and three others. Space company Axiom Space Inc. has acquired four flights from SpaceX to take commercial astronauts to the space station, with the first such mission scheduled for February.\nNASA picked SpaceX and Boeing Co. seven years ago to provide vehicles the agency could hire to take astronauts to the space station and bring them back to ground. While SpaceX has completed multiple flights under that contract, Boeing has struggled to complete testing for its ship, called the Starliner.\nThe aerospace company last month recorded a $185 million charge related to stuck valves on the Starliner that prompted the postponement of a demonstration launch of the vehicle last summer. During a previous test flight in 2019, the Starliner failed to reach the space station as planned. Executives at Boeing have said the company will fulfill commitments it has made to NASA to carry crew to and from the space station.\nSpaceX has made changes to and analyzed its space vehicles, in part based on their performance in flight. During Mr. Isaacman\u2019s trip, a tube became unglued on the Crew Dragon and urine wasn\u2019t deposited in a storage tank as designed, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president, during a recent briefing.\nThose on board that flight didn\u2019t notice the issue, but urine contaminated areas under the capsule\u2019s floor, raising concerns about corrosion and necessitating changes to the vehicle used for the latest launch, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier. Officials from NASA and SpaceX concluded that the vehicle that returned to Earth Monday night, meanwhile, could be operated in a safe manner in spite of that issue.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up In Today's Paper A complete list, with links, of every article from the day's Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSeparately, when the Crew Dragon was returning to Earth on Monday, one out of the vehicle\u2019s four parachutes was roughly 75 seconds late in deploying, Mr. Gerstenmaier said yesterday. That performance was within the design criteria established for the spacecraft but generated fresh analysis of the parachutes by SpaceX and NASA staff, he said.\n\u201cWe\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly The crew of four aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon docked with the orbiting international research facility Thursday evening. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Ship Reaches Space Station Following Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6714",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-astronauts-to-international-space-station-11636597066?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=11",
        "text": "On Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped by the Crew Dragon capsule blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:03 p.m. ET and headed toward the research facility. The group that reached the station is scheduled to spend six months on board, conducting research into plant science, materials and other topics, NASA has said. \n\n\n\n\nNASA had planned the launch for late October but delayed the trip several times because of weather conditions and because of a medical issue, described as minor by the agency, that affected one crew member.\n\nThe quartet will succeed another group of astronauts who arrived on the space station back in April. That crew\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Kimbrough\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan McArthur\n\n\n\n from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Akihiko Hoshide\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet\n\n\n\n from the European Space Agency\u2014left the facility Monday on another SpaceX Crew Dragon. It flew around the space station so that crew members could photograph its exterior. Then the vehicle began its descent and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico under parachutes at 10:33 p.m. ET, returning the astronauts to Earth after 199 days in orbit. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA and SpaceX had planned to conduct the latest launch before bringing the other crew back to ground, allowing for a short overlap on the space station between the two groups of astronauts. But the delays and tricky weather prompted officials to shift the sequence of events.\n\u201cWe had some weather conditions that really set up to make us land instead of launch first,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a NASA program manager, said at a briefing Tuesday night.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s enterprise, has emerged as the leader in human spaceflight in the U.S., providing NASA an alternative to purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nLast year, SpaceX blasted astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since the agency ended the space shuttle program in 2011. It has since launched three other crews of astronauts to the space station, including Wednesday\u2019s flight.\n\u201cHuman spaceflight is core to SpaceX\u2019s ultimate mission,\u201d Sarah Walker, a director at the company, said during a recent briefing about Wednesday\u2019s launch.\n\n\nSpaceflight America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year \n\n\nSpaceX, which has developed reusable rockets and space capsules, has extended its technology developed for NASA to private missions, like the orbital trip in September that technology entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman\n\n\n\n purchased for himself and three others. Space company Axiom Space Inc. has acquired four flights from SpaceX to take commercial astronauts to the space station, with the first such mission scheduled for February.\nNASA picked SpaceX and Boeing Co. seven years ago to provide vehicles the agency could hire to take astronauts to the space station and bring them back to ground. While SpaceX has completed multiple flights under that contract, Boeing has struggled to complete testing for its ship, called the Starliner.\nThe aerospace company last month recorded a $185 million charge related to stuck valves on the Starliner that prompted the postponement of a demonstration launch of the vehicle last summer. During a previous test flight in 2019, the Starliner failed to reach the space station as planned. Executives at Boeing have said the company will fulfill commitments it has made to NASA to carry crew to and from the space station.\nSpaceX has made changes to and analyzed its space vehicles, in part based on their performance in flight. During Mr. Isaacman\u2019s trip, a tube became unglued on the Crew Dragon and urine wasn\u2019t deposited in a storage tank as designed, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president, during a recent briefing.\nThose on board that flight didn\u2019t notice the issue, but urine contaminated areas under the capsule\u2019s floor, raising concerns about corrosion and necessitating changes to the vehicle used for the latest launch, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier. Officials from NASA and SpaceX concluded that the vehicle that returned to Earth Monday night, meanwhile, could be operated in a safe manner in spite of that issue.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up In Today's Paper A complete list, with links, of every article from the day's Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSeparately, when the Crew Dragon was returning to Earth on Monday, one out of the vehicle\u2019s four parachutes was roughly 75 seconds late in deploying, Mr. Gerstenmaier said yesterday. That performance was within the design criteria established for the spacecraft but generated fresh analysis of the parachutes by SpaceX and NASA staff, he said.\n\u201cWe\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly in space, and the way you do that safely is you keep looking at the data, and you learn from each and every flight,\u201d Mr. Gerstenmaier said.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tNASA ended the space shuttle program in 2011. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it ended in 2009. (Corrected on Nov. 11)\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com The crew of four aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon docked with the orbiting international research facility Thursday evening. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Ship Reaches Space Station Following Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6715",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-astronauts-to-international-space-station-11636597066?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=18",
        "text": "On Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped by the Crew Dragon capsule blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:03 p.m. ET and headed toward the research facility. The group that reached the station is scheduled to spend six months on board, conducting research into plant science, materials and other topics, NASA has said. \nNASA had planned the launch for late October but delayed the trip several times because of weather conditions and because of a medical issue, described as minor by the agency, that affected one crew member.\n\nThe quartet will succeed another group of astronauts who arrived on the space station back in April. That crew\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Kimbrough\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan McArthur\n\n\n\n from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Akihiko Hoshide\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet\n\n\n\n from the European Space Agency\u2014left the facility Monday on another SpaceX Crew Dragon. It flew around the space station so that crew members could photograph its exterior. Then the vehicle began its descent and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico under parachutes at 10:33 p.m. ET, returning the astronauts to Earth after 199 days in orbit. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA and SpaceX had planned to conduct the latest launch before bringing the other crew back to ground, allowing for a short overlap on the space station between the two groups of astronauts. But the delays and tricky weather prompted officials to shift the sequence of events.\n\u201cWe had some weather conditions that really set up to make us land instead of launch first,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a NASA program manager, said at a briefing Tuesday night.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s enterprise, has emerged as the leader in human spaceflight in the U.S., providing NASA an alternative to purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nLast year, SpaceX blasted astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since the agency ended the space shuttle program in 2011. It has since launched three other crews of astronauts to the space station, including Wednesday\u2019s flight.\n\u201cHuman spaceflight is core to SpaceX\u2019s ultimate mission,\u201d Sarah Walker, a director at the company, said during a recent briefing about Wednesday\u2019s launch.\n\n\nSpaceflight America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year \n\n\nSpaceX, which has developed reusable rockets and space capsules, has extended its technology developed for NASA to private missions, like the orbital trip in September that technology entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman\n\n\n\n purchased for himself and three others. Space company Axiom Space Inc. has acquired four flights from SpaceX to take commercial astronauts to the space station, with the first such mission scheduled for February.\nNASA picked SpaceX and Boeing Co. seven years ago to provide vehicles the agency could hire to take astronauts to the space station and bring them back to ground. While SpaceX has completed multiple flights under that contract, Boeing has struggled to complete testing for its ship, called the Starliner.\nThe aerospace company last month recorded a $185 million charge related to stuck valves on the Starliner that prompted the postponement of a demonstration launch of the vehicle last summer. During a previous test flight in 2019, the Starliner failed to reach the space station as planned. Executives at Boeing have said the company will fulfill commitments it has made to NASA to carry crew to and from the space station.\nSpaceX has made changes to and analyzed its space vehicles, in part based on their performance in flight. During Mr. Isaacman\u2019s trip, a tube became unglued on the Crew Dragon and urine wasn\u2019t deposited in a storage tank as designed, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president, during a recent briefing.\nThose on board that flight didn\u2019t notice the issue, but urine contaminated areas under the capsule\u2019s floor, raising concerns about corrosion and necessitating changes to the vehicle used for the latest launch, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier. Officials from NASA and SpaceX concluded that the vehicle that returned to Earth Monday night, meanwhile, could be operated in a safe manner in spite of that issue.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up In Today's Paper A complete list, with links, of every article from the day's Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSeparately, when the Crew Dragon was returning to Earth on Monday, one out of the vehicle\u2019s four parachutes was roughly 75 seconds late in deploying, Mr. Gerstenmaier said yesterday. That performance was within the design criteria established for the spacecraft but generated fresh analysis of the parachutes by SpaceX and NASA staff, he said.\n\u201cWe\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly The crew of four aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon docked with the orbiting international research facility Thursday evening. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Ship Reaches Space Station Following Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6716",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-launches-astronauts-to-international-space-station-11636597066?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=17",
        "text": "On Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped by the Crew Dragon capsule blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:03 p.m. ET and headed toward the research facility. The group that reached the station is scheduled to spend six months on board, conducting research into plant science, materials and other topics, NASA has said. \nNASA had planned the launch for late October but delayed the trip several times because of weather conditions and because of a medical issue, described as minor by the agency, that affected one crew member.\n\nThe quartet will succeed another group of astronauts who arrived on the space station back in April. That crew\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Kimbrough\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan McArthur\n\n\n\n from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Akihiko Hoshide\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet\n\n\n\n from the European Space Agency\u2014left the facility Monday on another SpaceX Crew Dragon. It flew around the space station so that crew members could photograph its exterior. Then the vehicle began its descent and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico under parachutes at 10:33 p.m. ET, returning the astronauts to Earth after 199 days in orbit. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think Elon Musk\u2019s ventures mean for the future of space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA and SpaceX had planned to conduct the latest launch before bringing the other crew back to ground, allowing for a short overlap on the space station between the two groups of astronauts. But the delays and tricky weather prompted officials to shift the sequence of events.\n\u201cWe had some weather conditions that really set up to make us land instead of launch first,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Stich,\n\n\n\n a NASA program manager, said at a briefing Tuesday night.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Mr. Musk\u2019s enterprise, has emerged as the leader in human spaceflight in the U.S., providing NASA an alternative to purchasing seats on Russian government rockets.\nLast year, SpaceX blasted astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil for the first time since the agency ended the space shuttle program in 2011. It has since launched three other crews of astronauts to the space station, including Wednesday\u2019s flight.\n\u201cHuman spaceflight is core to SpaceX\u2019s ultimate mission,\u201d Sarah Walker, a director at the company, said during a recent briefing about Wednesday\u2019s launch.\n\n\nSpaceflight America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year \n\n\nSpaceX, which has developed reusable rockets and space capsules, has extended its technology developed for NASA to private missions, like the orbital trip in September that technology entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Isaacman\n\n\n\n purchased for himself and three others. Space company Axiom Space Inc. has acquired four flights from SpaceX to take commercial astronauts to the space station, with the first such mission scheduled for February.\nNASA picked SpaceX and Boeing Co. seven years ago to provide vehicles the agency could hire to take astronauts to the space station and bring them back to ground. While SpaceX has completed multiple flights under that contract, Boeing has struggled to complete testing for its ship, called the Starliner.\nThe aerospace company last month recorded a $185 million charge related to stuck valves on the Starliner that prompted the postponement of a demonstration launch of the vehicle last summer. During a previous test flight in 2019, the Starliner failed to reach the space station as planned. Executives at Boeing have said the company will fulfill commitments it has made to NASA to carry crew to and from the space station.\nSpaceX has made changes to and analyzed its space vehicles, in part based on their performance in flight. During Mr. Isaacman\u2019s trip, a tube became unglued on the Crew Dragon and urine wasn\u2019t deposited in a storage tank as designed, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president, during a recent briefing.\nThose on board that flight didn\u2019t notice the issue, but urine contaminated areas under the capsule\u2019s floor, raising concerns about corrosion and necessitating changes to the vehicle used for the latest launch, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier. Officials from NASA and SpaceX concluded that the vehicle that returned to Earth Monday night, meanwhile, could be operated in a safe manner in spite of that issue.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up In Today's Paper A complete list, with links, of every article from the day's Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSeparately, when the Crew Dragon was returning to Earth on Monday, one out of the vehicle\u2019s four parachutes was roughly 75 seconds late in deploying, Mr. Gerstenmaier said yesterday. That performance was within the design criteria established for the spacecraft but generated fresh analysis of the parachutes by SpaceX and NASA staff, he said.\n\u201cWe\u2019re still learning how to operate these vehicles. We\u2019re learning how to fly The crew of four aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon docked with the orbiting international research facility Thursday evening. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6717",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-rely-on-commercial-partners-for-deep-space-exploration-1492136240?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=25",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s statement is the most direct agency indication so far that projected U.S. government funding may need to leverage private-sector investments and commercial expertise in order for crews to fulfill the agency\u2019s target of reaching Mars by the late 2030s and establishing settlements there by the 2040s. NASA said it also expected to persuade some foreign governments to participate in crewed voyages to Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, showing the vehicle at a drilled sample site on Mars in May 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n the head of NASA\u2019s human-exploration office, wrote to the inspector general that efforts to use private cargo rockets as part of the overall drive to send crews to Mars \u201care continual and will also be reflected in the exploration road map\u201d slated for delivery to Congress at the end of 2017.\n\n\nMr. Gerstenmaier\u2019s comments, in an April 12 letter that responded to the inspector general\u2019s report before its public release, suggest discussions are under way to devise a possible system of private cargo transportation through the 2030s similar to the unmanned commercial space tugs the agency relies on today to resupply the international space station orbiting the earth. Final decisions are years away, and the agency didn\u2019t elaborate on how such a public-private partnership may be implemented or structured.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, which uses its own Falcon 9 rockets and uncrewed Dragon capsules to deliver supplies and experiments to the orbiting international laboratory, has unveiled vague plans to develop much more powerful rockets able to send spacecraft deeper into space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said Blue Origin, his expanding space startup, is working on heavy-lift rocket designs with the intention of establishing human colonies in space.\nWith both companies aggressively pursuing such deep-space goals, questions about possible ways to coordinate or join forces with NASA\u2019s manned exploration initiatives have been roiling the aerospace world.\u00a0Thursday\u2019s\u00a0report is bound to ratchet up that debate.\nAgainst this backdrop, the inspector general\u2019s document raises a host of warnings about what it contends are shortcomings in NASA\u2019s current funding plans and program designs for Mars missions.\nThe report, among other things, contends that the early launch timetable for new hardware is likely to slip for technical reasons, and the agency has failed to firm up essential budget and schedule details for later flights.\nOver the past few years, NASA has looked to the private sector for assistance to promote scientific and commercial activities in Earth orbit. Increasingly, NASA\u2019s \u201cgoal is to make space available to commercial entities,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Suffredini,\n\n\n\n a former NASA official who managed the space station and is now part of a private venture looking to operate a commercial alternative, adding the agency \u201chas become more oriented to helping them succeed.\u201d \nBut in rolling out its Mars strategy, NASA has been less transparent about prospects of commercial partnerships. Agency officials generally have refrained from detailing such cooperation, though from the beginning they have stressed NASA expects other countries would join forces with the U.S. to help explore Mars.\nMore immediately, the report said program managers have failed to maintain adequate funding reserves to cope with unexpected development problems, testing disappointments or other contingencies that may crop up through the 2020s. NASA has contracted with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n to develop the Orion capsule, and with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to develop a heavy-lift rocket called SLS.\nSince 2012, NASA has invested more than $15 billion in the two programs and associated ground facilities. The report indicates the final cost of exploring Mars with astronauts\u2014including a pair of proposed yearlong stays on the surface in the 2040s\u2014could top $400 billion.\nAccording to the inspector general\u2019s analysis of current spending patterns, however, both programs have inadequate contingency reserves, amounting to about 1% of their budgets instead of the 10% to 30% typically recommended to safeguard complex, big-ticket projects.\nThe report also found that software development and verification efforts are behind schedule, and detailed life-cycle cost estimates for impending missions are missing.\nTo help cope with some of these challenges, the inspector general concluded that commercial partnerships \u201cmay provide a cost-effective option to develop needed technology, including habitat and propulsion systems.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Responding to criticism over inadequate funding and technical planning for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA leaders say they are counting on commercial participation as one means toward a sustainable strategy to explore the solar system over the next two decades. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6718",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-rely-on-commercial-partners-for-deep-space-exploration-1492136240?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=98",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s statement is the most direct agency indication so far that projected U.S. government funding may need to leverage private-sector investments and commercial expertise in order for crews to fulfill the agency\u2019s target of reaching Mars by the late 2030s and establishing settlements there by the 2040s. NASA said it also expected to persuade some foreign governments to participate in crewed voyages to Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, showing the vehicle at a drilled sample site on Mars in May 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n the head of NASA\u2019s human-exploration office, wrote to the inspector general that efforts to use private cargo rockets as part of the overall drive to send crews to Mars \u201care continual and will also be reflected in the exploration road map\u201d slated for delivery to Congress at the end of 2017.\n\n\nMr. Gerstenmaier\u2019s comments, in an April 12 letter that responded to the inspector general\u2019s report before its public release, suggest discussions are under way to devise a possible system of private cargo transportation through the 2030s similar to the unmanned commercial space tugs the agency relies on today to resupply the international space station orbiting the earth. Final decisions are years away, and the agency didn\u2019t elaborate on how such a public-private partnership may be implemented or structured.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, which uses its own Falcon 9 rockets and uncrewed Dragon capsules to deliver supplies and experiments to the orbiting international laboratory, has unveiled vague plans to develop much more powerful rockets able to send spacecraft deeper into space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said Blue Origin, his expanding space startup, is working on heavy-lift rocket designs with the intention of establishing human colonies in space.\nWith both companies aggressively pursuing such deep-space goals, questions about possible ways to coordinate or join forces with NASA\u2019s manned exploration initiatives have been roiling the aerospace world.\u00a0Thursday\u2019s\u00a0report is bound to ratchet up that debate.\nAgainst this backdrop, the inspector general\u2019s document raises a host of warnings about what it contends are shortcomings in NASA\u2019s current funding plans and program designs for Mars missions.\nThe report, among other things, contends that the early launch timetable for new hardware is likely to slip for technical reasons, and the agency has failed to firm up essential budget and schedule details for later flights.\nOver the past few years, NASA has looked to the private sector for assistance to promote scientific and commercial activities in Earth orbit. Increasingly, NASA\u2019s \u201cgoal is to make space available to commercial entities,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Suffredini,\n\n\n\n a former NASA official who managed the space station and is now part of a private venture looking to operate a commercial alternative, adding the agency \u201chas become more oriented to helping them succeed.\u201d \nBut in rolling out its Mars strategy, NASA has been less transparent about prospects of commercial partnerships. Agency officials generally have refrained from detailing such cooperation, though from the beginning they have stressed NASA expects other countries would join forces with the U.S. to help explore Mars.\nMore immediately, the report said program managers have failed to maintain adequate funding reserves to cope with unexpected development problems, testing disappointments or other contingencies that may crop up through the 2020s. NASA has contracted with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n to develop the Orion capsule, and with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to develop a heavy-lift rocket called SLS.\nSince 2012, NASA has invested more than $15 billion in the two programs and associated ground facilities. The report indicates the final cost of exploring Mars with astronauts\u2014including a pair of proposed yearlong stays on the surface in the 2040s\u2014could top $400 billion.\nAccording to the inspector general\u2019s analysis of current spending patterns, however, both programs have inadequate contingency reserves, amounting to about 1% of their budgets instead of the 10% to 30% typically recommended to safeguard complex, big-ticket projects.\nThe report also found that software development and verification efforts are behind schedule, and detailed life-cycle cost estimates for impending missions are missing.\nTo help cope with some of these challenges, the inspector general concluded that commercial partnerships \u201cmay provide a cost-effective option to develop needed technology, including habitat and propulsion systems.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Responding to criticism over inadequate funding and technical planning for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA leaders say they are counting on commercial participation as one means toward a sustainable strategy to explore the solar system over the next two decades. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6719",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-rely-on-commercial-partners-for-deep-space-exploration-1492136240?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=84",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s statement is the most direct agency indication so far that projected U.S. government funding may need to leverage private-sector investments and commercial expertise in order for crews to fulfill the agency\u2019s target of reaching Mars by the late 2030s and establishing settlements there by the 2040s. NASA said it also expected to persuade some foreign governments to participate in crewed voyages to Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, showing the vehicle at a drilled sample site on Mars in May 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n the head of NASA\u2019s human-exploration office, wrote to the inspector general that efforts to use private cargo rockets as part of the overall drive to send crews to Mars \u201care continual and will also be reflected in the exploration road map\u201d slated for delivery to Congress at the end of 2017.\n\n\nMr. Gerstenmaier\u2019s comments, in an April 12 letter that responded to the inspector general\u2019s report before its public release, suggest discussions are under way to devise a possible system of private cargo transportation through the 2030s similar to the unmanned commercial space tugs the agency relies on today to resupply the international space station orbiting the earth. Final decisions are years away, and the agency didn\u2019t elaborate on how such a public-private partnership may be implemented or structured.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, which uses its own Falcon 9 rockets and uncrewed Dragon capsules to deliver supplies and experiments to the orbiting international laboratory, has unveiled vague plans to develop much more powerful rockets able to send spacecraft deeper into space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said Blue Origin, his expanding space startup, is working on heavy-lift rocket designs with the intention of establishing human colonies in space.\nWith both companies aggressively pursuing such deep-space goals, questions about possible ways to coordinate or join forces with NASA\u2019s manned exploration initiatives have been roiling the aerospace world.\u00a0Thursday\u2019s\u00a0report is bound to ratchet up that debate.\nAgainst this backdrop, the inspector general\u2019s document raises a host of warnings about what it contends are shortcomings in NASA\u2019s current funding plans and program designs for Mars missions.\nThe report, among other things, contends that the early launch timetable for new hardware is likely to slip for technical reasons, and the agency has failed to firm up essential budget and schedule details for later flights.\nOver the past few years, NASA has looked to the private sector for assistance to promote scientific and commercial activities in Earth orbit. Increasingly, NASA\u2019s \u201cgoal is to make space available to commercial entities,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Suffredini,\n\n\n\n a former NASA official who managed the space station and is now part of a private venture looking to operate a commercial alternative, adding the agency \u201chas become more oriented to helping them succeed.\u201d \nBut in rolling out its Mars strategy, NASA has been less transparent about prospects of commercial partnerships. Agency officials generally have refrained from detailing such cooperation, though from the beginning they have stressed NASA expects other countries would join forces with the U.S. to help explore Mars.\nMore immediately, the report said program managers have failed to maintain adequate funding reserves to cope with unexpected development problems, testing disappointments or other contingencies that may crop up through the 2020s. NASA has contracted with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n to develop the Orion capsule, and with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to develop a heavy-lift rocket called SLS.\nSince 2012, NASA has invested more than $15 billion in the two programs and associated ground facilities. The report indicates the final cost of exploring Mars with astronauts\u2014including a pair of proposed yearlong stays on the surface in the 2040s\u2014could top $400 billion.\nAccording to the inspector general\u2019s analysis of current spending patterns, however, both programs have inadequate contingency reserves, amounting to about 1% of their budgets instead of the 10% to 30% typically recommended to safeguard complex, big-ticket projects.\nThe report also found that software development and verification efforts are behind schedule, and detailed life-cycle cost estimates for impending missions are missing.\nTo help cope with some of these challenges, the inspector general concluded that commercial partnerships \u201cmay provide a cost-effective option to develop needed technology, including habitat and propulsion systems.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Responding to criticism over inadequate funding and technical planning for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA leaders say they are counting on commercial participation as one means toward a sustainable strategy to explore the solar system over the next two decades. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6720",
        "date": "2017-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-rely-on-commercial-partners-for-deep-space-exploration-1492136240?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=125",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s statement is the most direct agency indication so far that projected U.S. government funding may need to leverage private-sector investments and commercial expertise in order for crews to fulfill the agency\u2019s target of reaching Mars by the late 2030s and establishing settlements there by the 2040s. NASA said it also expected to persuade some foreign governments to participate in crewed voyages to Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, showing the vehicle at a drilled sample site on Mars in May 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n the head of NASA\u2019s human-exploration office, wrote to the inspector general that efforts to use private cargo rockets as part of the overall drive to send crews to Mars \u201care continual and will also be reflected in the exploration road map\u201d slated for delivery to Congress at the end of 2017.\n\n\nMr. Gerstenmaier\u2019s comments, in an April 12 letter that responded to the inspector general\u2019s report before its public release, suggest discussions are under way to devise a possible system of private cargo transportation through the 2030s similar to the unmanned commercial space tugs the agency relies on today to resupply the international space station orbiting the earth. Final decisions are years away, and the agency didn\u2019t elaborate on how such a public-private partnership may be implemented or structured.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, which uses its own Falcon 9 rockets and uncrewed Dragon capsules to deliver supplies and experiments to the orbiting international laboratory, has unveiled vague plans to develop much more powerful rockets able to send spacecraft deeper into space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n has said Blue Origin, his expanding space startup, is working on heavy-lift rocket designs with the intention of establishing human colonies in space.\nWith both companies aggressively pursuing such deep-space goals, questions about possible ways to coordinate or join forces with NASA\u2019s manned exploration initiatives have been roiling the aerospace world.\u00a0Thursday\u2019s\u00a0report is bound to ratchet up that debate.\nAgainst this backdrop, the inspector general\u2019s document raises a host of warnings about what it contends are shortcomings in NASA\u2019s current funding plans and program designs for Mars missions.\nThe report, among other things, contends that the early launch timetable for new hardware is likely to slip for technical reasons, and the agency has failed to firm up essential budget and schedule details for later flights.\nOver the past few years, NASA has looked to the private sector for assistance to promote scientific and commercial activities in Earth orbit. Increasingly, NASA\u2019s \u201cgoal is to make space available to commercial entities,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Suffredini,\n\n\n\n a former NASA official who managed the space station and is now part of a private venture looking to operate a commercial alternative, adding the agency \u201chas become more oriented to helping them succeed.\u201d \nBut in rolling out its Mars strategy, NASA has been less transparent about prospects of commercial partnerships. Agency officials generally have refrained from detailing such cooperation, though from the beginning they have stressed NASA expects other countries would join forces with the U.S. to help explore Mars.\nMore immediately, the report said program managers have failed to maintain adequate funding reserves to cope with unexpected development problems, testing disappointments or other contingencies that may crop up through the 2020s. NASA has contracted with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n to develop the Orion capsule, and with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n to develop a heavy-lift rocket called SLS.\nSince 2012, NASA has invested more than $15 billion in the two programs and associated ground facilities. The report indicates the final cost of exploring Mars with astronauts\u2014including a pair of proposed yearlong stays on the surface in the 2040s\u2014could top $400 billion.\nAccording to the inspector general\u2019s analysis of current spending patterns, however, both programs have inadequate contingency reserves, amounting to about 1% of their budgets instead of the 10% to 30% typically recommended to safeguard complex, big-ticket projects.\nThe report also found that software development and verification efforts are behind schedule, and detailed life-cycle cost estimates for impending missions are missing.\nTo help cope with some of these challenges, the inspector general concluded that commercial partnerships \u201cmay provide a cost-effective option to develop needed technology, including habitat and propulsion systems.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Responding to criticism over inadequate funding and technical planning for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA leaders say they are counting on commercial participation as one means toward a sustainable strategy to explore the solar system over the next two decades. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Musk Says Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6721",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-spacexs-new-falcon-heavy-rocket-unlikely-to-carry-astronauts-1517876582?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=20",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of eventually transporting humans throughout the solar system, told reporters the change in plans wasn\u2019t due to doubts about the Falcon Heavy\u2019s design or capabilities. He said he remained \u201creally hopeful for this flight going as planned,\u201d adding that \u201cI\u2019m sure we have done everything we could do to maximize the chance of success.\u201d\nStill, he said SpaceX has decided that even if the Falcon Heavy performs as expected, management will shift its attention to a larger space-transportation system called BFR, for Big Falcon Rocket, envisioned to ultimately take humans to Mars.\n\n\nThe spacecraft designed to fly on top of the BFR, according to Mr. Musk, could begin short test flights perhaps as soon as next year. With work on the follow-on system to the Falcon Heavy \u201cmoving quickly,\u201d Mr. Musk said, \u201cit will not be necessary to qualify Falcon Heavy for crewed space flights.\u201d\n\n\nRelated New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX (Feb. 4) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18) NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (Jan. 12) \n\n\nObtaining such federal approval is an arduous process requiring the company to demonstrate the safety and reliability of all major systems. SpaceX\u2019s current workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which completed 18 unmanned launches last year, isn\u2019t expected to win approval to fly astronauts until late this year at the earliest.\nIn one fell swoop, Monday\u2019s announcement appears to render moot discussions about Falcon Heavy\u2019s potential participation in anticipated future government-industry missions carrying astronauts to the Moon. Mr. Musk also indicated that SpaceX\u2019s earlier plans to use the combination of the Falcon Heavy and the company\u2019s Dragon capsule to orbit two private passengers around the moon have been dropped, in favor of future missions using the BFR booster and its expanded spacecraft.\nSpaceX\u2019s revised strategy sees an unmanned future for the Falcon Heavy boosting the largest commercial and U.S. spy satellites into orbit. On Monday, he called it an \u201cincredibly capable rocket.\u201d But the market for those types of missions has shrunk considerably since the rocket was conceived in 2011.\nMr. Musk said if the Falcon Heavy\u2019s promise for carrying out unmanned missions pans out, \u201cit is game over\u201d for the competition. At the same time, the company\u2019s chief executive emphasized that if progress on the BFR takes longer than expected, SpaceX has left the door open to returning human missions to the Falcon Heavy.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally Published February 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nGetting relegated to serving as a backup, however, amounts to a big demotion for the rocket that is slated to blast off from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday and, as a mock payload and publicity stunt, send a bright red Tesla roadster into orbit more than 250 million miles from Earth. \nWhen Mr. Musk initially rolled out his plans for Falcon Heavy\u2014a concept derided at that point by many veteran government and industry space experts\u2014he called it \u201cpretty epic.\u201d The billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n described it as a \u201crocket of truly huge scale\u201d that would dwarf anything else flying once it made it off the launch pad.\nThe goal was to carry both people and payloads for a much lower price tag than any rivals. But on Monday, reflecting the evolution of his thinking and the expansion of his ambitions, Mr. Musk half-jokingly called the Falcon Heavy \u201ca bit small.\u201d\nThe latest shift in technical goals and corporate strategy marks the third time in the last three years that Mr. Musk has surprised the space world with a fundamentally recast business plan. \nIn 2016, when Falcon Heavy was mired in development difficulties, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief designer unveiled plans for a fleet of giant carbon-fiber rockets, equipped with detachable fuel tanks, able to fuel boosters in orbit and capable of reuse up to 1,000 times.\nA year later, he rolled out a revised plan for exploring deep space that focused on a somewhat scaled-down new rocket, still dubbed BFR, and capsules intended to be larger than superjumbo airliners. The changes entailed creating a single fleet of rockets to serve commercial satellite operators and U.S. government customers and to fulfill Mr. Musk\u2019s dreams of ultimately colonizing Mars. But in that presentation, the Falcon Heavy remained an integral part of shorter-term projects.\nNow, SpaceX once again has shaken up its game plan by shunting Falcon Heavy to the side when it comes to Mr. Musk\u2019s aim of carrying astronauts or passengers outside the atmosphere.\nResponding to question SpaceX chief Elon Musk said his company has essentially shelved plans to use its Falcon Heavy rocket to transport humans around the Moon or deeper into space, opting instead to focus on developing an even larger booster announced just last year. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Musk Says Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6722",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-spacexs-new-falcon-heavy-rocket-unlikely-to-carry-astronauts-1517876582?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=79",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of eventually transporting humans throughout the solar system, told reporters the change in plans wasn\u2019t due to doubts about the Falcon Heavy\u2019s design or capabilities. He said he remained \u201creally hopeful for this flight going as planned,\u201d adding that \u201cI\u2019m sure we have done everything we could do to maximize the chance of success.\u201d\nStill, he said SpaceX has decided that even if the Falcon Heavy performs as expected, management will shift its attention to a larger space-transportation system called BFR, for Big Falcon Rocket, envisioned to ultimately take humans to Mars.\n\n\nThe spacecraft designed to fly on top of the BFR, according to Mr. Musk, could begin short test flights perhaps as soon as next year. With work on the follow-on system to the Falcon Heavy \u201cmoving quickly,\u201d Mr. Musk said, \u201cit will not be necessary to qualify Falcon Heavy for crewed space flights.\u201d\n\n\nRelated New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX (Feb. 4) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18) NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (Jan. 12) \n\n\nObtaining such federal approval is an arduous process requiring the company to demonstrate the safety and reliability of all major systems. SpaceX\u2019s current workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which completed 18 unmanned launches last year, isn\u2019t expected to win approval to fly astronauts until late this year at the earliest.\nIn one fell swoop, Monday\u2019s announcement appears to render moot discussions about Falcon Heavy\u2019s potential participation in anticipated future government-industry missions carrying astronauts to the Moon. Mr. Musk also indicated that SpaceX\u2019s earlier plans to use the combination of the Falcon Heavy and the company\u2019s Dragon capsule to orbit two private passengers around the moon have been dropped, in favor of future missions using the BFR booster and its expanded spacecraft.\nSpaceX\u2019s revised strategy sees an unmanned future for the Falcon Heavy boosting the largest commercial and U.S. spy satellites into orbit. On Monday, he called it an \u201cincredibly capable rocket.\u201d But the market for those types of missions has shrunk considerably since the rocket was conceived in 2011.\nMr. Musk said if the Falcon Heavy\u2019s promise for carrying out unmanned missions pans out, \u201cit is game over\u201d for the competition. At the same time, the company\u2019s chief executive emphasized that if progress on the BFR takes longer than expected, SpaceX has left the door open to returning human missions to the Falcon Heavy.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally Published February 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nGetting relegated to serving as a backup, however, amounts to a big demotion for the rocket that is slated to blast off from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday and, as a mock payload and publicity stunt, send a bright red Tesla roadster into orbit more than 250 million miles from Earth. \nWhen Mr. Musk initially rolled out his plans for Falcon Heavy\u2014a concept derided at that point by many veteran government and industry space experts\u2014he called it \u201cpretty epic.\u201d The billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n described it as a \u201crocket of truly huge scale\u201d that would dwarf anything else flying once it made it off the launch pad.\nThe goal was to carry both people and payloads for a much lower price tag than any rivals. But on Monday, reflecting the evolution of his thinking and the expansion of his ambitions, Mr. Musk half-jokingly called the Falcon Heavy \u201ca bit small.\u201d\nThe latest shift in technical goals and corporate strategy marks the third time in the last three years that Mr. Musk has surprised the space world with a fundamentally recast business plan. \nIn 2016, when Falcon Heavy was mired in development difficulties, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief designer unveiled plans for a fleet of giant carbon-fiber rockets, equipped with detachable fuel tanks, able to fuel boosters in orbit and capable of reuse up to 1,000 times.\nA year later, he rolled out a revised plan for exploring deep space that focused on a somewhat scaled-down new rocket, still dubbed BFR, and capsules intended to be larger than superjumbo airliners. The changes entailed creating a single fleet of rockets to serve commercial satellite operators and U.S. government customers and to fulfill Mr. Musk\u2019s dreams of ultimately colonizing Mars. But in that presentation, the Falcon Heavy remained an integral part of shorter-term projects.\nNow, SpaceX once again has shaken up its game plan by shunting Falcon Heavy to the side when it comes to Mr. Musk\u2019s aim of carrying astronauts or passengers outside the atmosphere.\nResponding to question SpaceX chief Elon Musk said his company has essentially shelved plans to use its Falcon Heavy rocket to transport humans around the Moon or deeper into space, opting instead to focus on developing an even larger booster announced just last year. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Musk Says Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6723",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-spacexs-new-falcon-heavy-rocket-unlikely-to-carry-astronauts-1517876582?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=71",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of eventually transporting humans throughout the solar system, told reporters the change in plans wasn\u2019t due to doubts about the Falcon Heavy\u2019s design or capabilities. He said he remained \u201creally hopeful for this flight going as planned,\u201d adding that \u201cI\u2019m sure we have done everything we could do to maximize the chance of success.\u201d\nStill, he said SpaceX has decided that even if the Falcon Heavy performs as expected, management will shift its attention to a larger space-transportation system called BFR, for Big Falcon Rocket, envisioned to ultimately take humans to Mars.\n\n\nThe spacecraft designed to fly on top of the BFR, according to Mr. Musk, could begin short test flights perhaps as soon as next year. With work on the follow-on system to the Falcon Heavy \u201cmoving quickly,\u201d Mr. Musk said, \u201cit will not be necessary to qualify Falcon Heavy for crewed space flights.\u201d\n\n\nRelated New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX (Feb. 4) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18) NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (Jan. 12) \n\n\nObtaining such federal approval is an arduous process requiring the company to demonstrate the safety and reliability of all major systems. SpaceX\u2019s current workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which completed 18 unmanned launches last year, isn\u2019t expected to win approval to fly astronauts until late this year at the earliest.\nIn one fell swoop, Monday\u2019s announcement appears to render moot discussions about Falcon Heavy\u2019s potential participation in anticipated future government-industry missions carrying astronauts to the Moon. Mr. Musk also indicated that SpaceX\u2019s earlier plans to use the combination of the Falcon Heavy and the company\u2019s Dragon capsule to orbit two private passengers around the moon have been dropped, in favor of future missions using the BFR booster and its expanded spacecraft.\nSpaceX\u2019s revised strategy sees an unmanned future for the Falcon Heavy boosting the largest commercial and U.S. spy satellites into orbit. On Monday, he called it an \u201cincredibly capable rocket.\u201d But the market for those types of missions has shrunk considerably since the rocket was conceived in 2011.\nMr. Musk said if the Falcon Heavy\u2019s promise for carrying out unmanned missions pans out, \u201cit is game over\u201d for the competition. At the same time, the company\u2019s chief executive emphasized that if progress on the BFR takes longer than expected, SpaceX has left the door open to returning human missions to the Falcon Heavy.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally Published February 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nGetting relegated to serving as a backup, however, amounts to a big demotion for the rocket that is slated to blast off from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday and, as a mock payload and publicity stunt, send a bright red Tesla roadster into orbit more than 250 million miles from Earth. \nWhen Mr. Musk initially rolled out his plans for Falcon Heavy\u2014a concept derided at that point by many veteran government and industry space experts\u2014he called it \u201cpretty epic.\u201d The billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n described it as a \u201crocket of truly huge scale\u201d that would dwarf anything else flying once it made it off the launch pad.\nThe goal was to carry both people and payloads for a much lower price tag than any rivals. But on Monday, reflecting the evolution of his thinking and the expansion of his ambitions, Mr. Musk half-jokingly called the Falcon Heavy \u201ca bit small.\u201d\nThe latest shift in technical goals and corporate strategy marks the third time in the last three years that Mr. Musk has surprised the space world with a fundamentally recast business plan. \nIn 2016, when Falcon Heavy was mired in development difficulties, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief designer unveiled plans for a fleet of giant carbon-fiber rockets, equipped with detachable fuel tanks, able to fuel boosters in orbit and capable of reuse up to 1,000 times.\nA year later, he rolled out a revised plan for exploring deep space that focused on a somewhat scaled-down new rocket, still dubbed BFR, and capsules intended to be larger than superjumbo airliners. The changes entailed creating a single fleet of rockets to serve commercial satellite operators and U.S. government customers and to fulfill Mr. Musk\u2019s dreams of ultimately colonizing Mars. But in that presentation, the Falcon Heavy remained an integral part of shorter-term projects.\nNow, SpaceX once again has shaken up its game plan by shunting Falcon Heavy to the side when it comes to Mr. Musk\u2019s aim of carrying astronauts or passengers outside the atmosphere.\nResponding to question SpaceX chief Elon Musk said his company has essentially shelved plans to use its Falcon Heavy rocket to transport humans around the Moon or deeper into space, opting instead to focus on developing an even larger booster announced just last year. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Musk Says Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6724",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-spacexs-new-falcon-heavy-rocket-unlikely-to-carry-astronauts-1517876582?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=103",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of eventually transporting humans throughout the solar system, told reporters the change in plans wasn\u2019t due to doubts about the Falcon Heavy\u2019s design or capabilities. He said he remained \u201creally hopeful for this flight going as planned,\u201d adding that \u201cI\u2019m sure we have done everything we could do to maximize the chance of success.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nStill, he said SpaceX has decided that even if the Falcon Heavy performs as expected, management will shift its attention to a larger space-transportation system called BFR, for Big Falcon Rocket, envisioned to ultimately take humans to Mars.\n\n\nThe spacecraft designed to fly on top of the BFR, according to Mr. Musk, could begin short test flights perhaps as soon as next year. With work on the follow-on system to the Falcon Heavy \u201cmoving quickly,\u201d Mr. Musk said, \u201cit will not be necessary to qualify Falcon Heavy for crewed space flights.\u201d\n\n\nRelated New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX (Feb. 4) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18) NASA Safety Watchdogs Raise Concerns About SpaceX, Boeing Spacecraft (Jan. 12) \n\n\nObtaining such federal approval is an arduous process requiring the company to demonstrate the safety and reliability of all major systems. SpaceX\u2019s current workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which completed 18 unmanned launches last year, isn\u2019t expected to win approval to fly astronauts until late this year at the earliest.\nIn one fell swoop, Monday\u2019s announcement appears to render moot discussions about Falcon Heavy\u2019s potential participation in anticipated future government-industry missions carrying astronauts to the Moon. Mr. Musk also indicated that SpaceX\u2019s earlier plans to use the combination of the Falcon Heavy and the company\u2019s Dragon capsule to orbit two private passengers around the moon have been dropped, in favor of future missions using the BFR booster and its expanded spacecraft.\nSpaceX\u2019s revised strategy sees an unmanned future for the Falcon Heavy boosting the largest commercial and U.S. spy satellites into orbit. On Monday, he called it an \u201cincredibly capable rocket.\u201d But the market for those types of missions has shrunk considerably since the rocket was conceived in 2011.\nMr. Musk said if the Falcon Heavy\u2019s promise for carrying out unmanned missions pans out, \u201cit is game over\u201d for the competition. At the same time, the company\u2019s chief executive emphasized that if progress on the BFR takes longer than expected, SpaceX has left the door open to returning human missions to the Falcon Heavy.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally Published February 28, 2017)\n \n\n\nGetting relegated to serving as a backup, however, amounts to a big demotion for the rocket that is slated to blast off from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday and, as a mock payload and publicity stunt, send a bright red Tesla roadster into orbit more than 250 million miles from Earth. \nWhen Mr. Musk initially rolled out his plans for Falcon Heavy\u2014a concept derided at that point by many veteran government and industry space experts\u2014he called it \u201cpretty epic.\u201d The billionaire entrepreneur, who also runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n described it as a \u201crocket of truly huge scale\u201d that would dwarf anything else flying once it made it off the launch pad.\nThe goal was to carry both people and payloads for a much lower price tag than any rivals. But on Monday, reflecting the evolution of his thinking and the expansion of his ambitions, Mr. Musk half-jokingly called the Falcon Heavy \u201ca bit small.\u201d\nThe latest shift in technical goals and corporate strategy marks the third time in the last three years that Mr. Musk has surprised the space world with a fundamentally recast business plan. \nIn 2016, when Falcon Heavy was mired in development difficulties, SpaceX\u2019s founder and chief designer unveiled plans for a fleet of giant carbon-fiber rockets, equipped with detachable fuel tanks, able to fuel boosters in orbit and capable of reuse up to 1,000 times.\nA year later, he rolled out a revised plan for exploring deep space that focused on a somewhat scaled-down new rocket, still dubbed BFR, and capsules intended to be larger than superjumbo airliners. The changes entailed creating a single fleet of rockets to serve commercial satellite operators and U.S. government customers and to fulfill Mr. Musk\u2019s dreams of ultimately colonizing Mars. But in that presentation, the Falcon Heavy remained an integral part of shorter-term projects.\nNow, SpaceX once again has shaken up its game plan by shunting Falcon Heavy to the side when it comes to Mr. Musk\u2019s aim of carrying astronauts or passengers outside the atmosphere.\nResponding to ques SpaceX chief Elon Musk said his company has essentially shelved plans to use its Falcon Heavy rocket to transport humans around the Moon or deeper into space, opting instead to focus on developing an even larger booster announced just last year. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6725",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-news-conference-musk-dissects-falcon-heavy-angst-and-sweet-success-1517977916?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=20",
        "text": "Mr. Musk said the choreographed landing of twin spent boosters back on earth played out \u201cjust like the simulation\u201d created by SpaceX. That particular success, he added, \u201cgives me a lot of faith\u201d in the company\u2019s goal of ultimately operating a bustling spaceport on earth similar to those depicted in some science-fiction books and movies.\nDescribing company plans to develop fleets of much larger boosters and mammoth spacecraft targeting voyages to Mars in decades to come, Mr. Musk said the Falcon Heavy\u2019s reusability convinced him the\u00a0once far-fetched\u00a0concept is \u201creally quite workable.\u201d For now, he added, the aim is to \u201ckeep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability.\u201d\n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy rocket faces uncertain commercial prospects and likely won\u2019t be used to ferry any astronauts or paying passengers into earth\u2019s orbit or beyond. Still, as its chief designer, Mr. Musk offered that the booster\u2019s 27 main engines and reliable upper stage offer huge advantages for robotic or scientific missions because the combination \u201ccan launch things direct to Pluto and beyond.\u201d\nIn a moment of introspection, Mr. Musk said that SpaceX management had \u201ctried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times\u201d over the years, after discovering it was \u201cway harder than we thought.\u201d The biggest challenge was redesigning the central section to withstand added stresses due to linking three Falcon 9 boosters together.\nIn the past, Mr. Musk has indicated SpaceX spent nearly $1 billion to develop the rocket.\u00a0On Tuesday, he said the cost ended up \u201ca lot more than I\u2019d like to admit.\u201c But in his latest estimate, he pegged it at \u201chalf a billion [dollars] or more.\u201d\nSpeaking more broadly about the state of commercial space ventures, SpaceX\u2019s chief didn\u2019t respond directly to a question about whether he felt he was competing against fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n , who also has set his sights on eventually transporting large numbers of people deep into space. But Mr. Musk said he hoped Falcon Heavy\u2019s initial success will \u201cencourage other countries and companies to raise their sights\u201d regarding space endeavors.\n\u201cWe want a new space race,\u201d he said with a chuckle. \u201cRaces are exciting.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk said\u00a0Tuesday\u2019s\u00a0successful test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket reaffirmed his confidence in SpaceX\u2019s long-range vision of flying much bigger rockets to and from deep space many times a day. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6726",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-news-conference-musk-dissects-falcon-heavy-angst-and-sweet-success-1517977916?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=79",
        "text": "Mr. Musk said the choreographed landing of twin spent boosters back on earth played out \u201cjust like the simulation\u201d created by SpaceX. That particular success, he added, \u201cgives me a lot of faith\u201d in the company\u2019s goal of ultimately operating a bustling spaceport on earth similar to those depicted in some science-fiction books and movies.\nDescribing company plans to develop fleets of much larger boosters and mammoth spacecraft targeting voyages to Mars in decades to come, Mr. Musk said the Falcon Heavy\u2019s reusability convinced him the\u00a0once far-fetched\u00a0concept is \u201creally quite workable.\u201d For now, he added, the aim is to \u201ckeep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability.\u201d\n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy rocket faces uncertain commercial prospects and likely won\u2019t be used to ferry any astronauts or paying passengers into earth\u2019s orbit or beyond. Still, as its chief designer, Mr. Musk offered that the booster\u2019s 27 main engines and reliable upper stage offer huge advantages for robotic or scientific missions because the combination \u201ccan launch things direct to Pluto and beyond.\u201d\nIn a moment of introspection, Mr. Musk said that SpaceX management had \u201ctried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times\u201d over the years, after discovering it was \u201cway harder than we thought.\u201d The biggest challenge was redesigning the central section to withstand added stresses due to linking three Falcon 9 boosters together.\nIn the past, Mr. Musk has indicated SpaceX spent nearly $1 billion to develop the rocket.\u00a0On Tuesday, he said the cost ended up \u201ca lot more than I\u2019d like to admit.\u201c But in his latest estimate, he pegged it at \u201chalf a billion [dollars] or more.\u201d\nSpeaking more broadly about the state of commercial space ventures, SpaceX\u2019s chief didn\u2019t respond directly to a question about whether he felt he was competing against fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n , who also has set his sights on eventually transporting large numbers of people deep into space. But Mr. Musk said he hoped Falcon Heavy\u2019s initial success will \u201cencourage other countries and companies to raise their sights\u201d regarding space endeavors.\n\u201cWe want a new space race,\u201d he said with a chuckle. \u201cRaces are exciting.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk said\u00a0Tuesday\u2019s\u00a0successful test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket reaffirmed his confidence in SpaceX\u2019s long-range vision of flying much bigger rockets to and from deep space many times a day. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6727",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-news-conference-musk-dissects-falcon-heavy-angst-and-sweet-success-1517977916?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=80",
        "text": "Mr. Musk said the choreographed landing of twin spent boosters back on earth played out \u201cjust like the simulation\u201d created by SpaceX. That particular success, he added, \u201cgives me a lot of faith\u201d in the company\u2019s goal of ultimately operating a bustling spaceport on earth similar to those depicted in some science-fiction books and movies.\n\n\n\n\nDescribing company plans to develop fleets of much larger boosters and mammoth spacecraft targeting voyages to Mars in decades to come, Mr. Musk said the Falcon Heavy\u2019s reusability convinced him the\u00a0once far-fetched\u00a0concept is \u201creally quite workable.\u201d For now, he added, the aim is to \u201ckeep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability.\u201d\n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy rocket faces uncertain commercial prospects and likely won\u2019t be used to ferry any astronauts or paying passengers into earth\u2019s orbit or beyond. Still, as its chief designer, Mr. Musk offered that the booster\u2019s 27 main engines and reliable upper stage offer huge advantages for robotic or scientific missions because the combination \u201ccan launch things direct to Pluto and beyond.\u201d\nIn a moment of introspection, Mr. Musk said that SpaceX management had \u201ctried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times\u201d over the years, after discovering it was \u201cway harder than we thought.\u201d The biggest challenge was redesigning the central section to withstand added stresses due to linking three Falcon 9 boosters together.\nIn the past, Mr. Musk has indicated SpaceX spent nearly $1 billion to develop the rocket.\u00a0On Tuesday, he said the cost ended up \u201ca lot more than I\u2019d like to admit.\u201c But in his latest estimate, he pegged it at \u201chalf a billion [dollars] or more.\u201d\nSpeaking more broadly about the state of commercial space ventures, SpaceX\u2019s chief didn\u2019t respond directly to a question about whether he felt he was competing against fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n , who also has set his sights on eventually transporting large numbers of people deep into space. But Mr. Musk said he hoped Falcon Heavy\u2019s initial success will \u201cencourage other countries and companies to raise their sights\u201d regarding space endeavors.\n\u201cWe want a new space race,\u201d he said with a chuckle. \u201cRaces are exciting.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk said\u00a0Tuesday\u2019s\u00a0successful test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket reaffirmed his confidence in SpaceX\u2019s long-range vision of flying much bigger rockets to and from deep space many times a day. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6728",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-news-conference-musk-dissects-falcon-heavy-angst-and-sweet-success-1517977916?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=71",
        "text": "Mr. Musk said the choreographed landing of twin spent boosters back on earth played out \u201cjust like the simulation\u201d created by SpaceX. That particular success, he added, \u201cgives me a lot of faith\u201d in the company\u2019s goal of ultimately operating a bustling spaceport on earth similar to those depicted in some science-fiction books and movies.\nDescribing company plans to develop fleets of much larger boosters and mammoth spacecraft targeting voyages to Mars in decades to come, Mr. Musk said the Falcon Heavy\u2019s reusability convinced him the\u00a0once far-fetched\u00a0concept is \u201creally quite workable.\u201d For now, he added, the aim is to \u201ckeep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability.\u201d\n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy rocket faces uncertain commercial prospects and likely won\u2019t be used to ferry any astronauts or paying passengers into earth\u2019s orbit or beyond. Still, as its chief designer, Mr. Musk offered that the booster\u2019s 27 main engines and reliable upper stage offer huge advantages for robotic or scientific missions because the combination \u201ccan launch things direct to Pluto and beyond.\u201d\nIn a moment of introspection, Mr. Musk said that SpaceX management had \u201ctried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times\u201d over the years, after discovering it was \u201cway harder than we thought.\u201d The biggest challenge was redesigning the central section to withstand added stresses due to linking three Falcon 9 boosters together.\nIn the past, Mr. Musk has indicated SpaceX spent nearly $1 billion to develop the rocket.\u00a0On Tuesday, he said the cost ended up \u201ca lot more than I\u2019d like to admit.\u201c But in his latest estimate, he pegged it at \u201chalf a billion [dollars] or more.\u201d\nSpeaking more broadly about the state of commercial space ventures, SpaceX\u2019s chief didn\u2019t respond directly to a question about whether he felt he was competing against fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n , who also has set his sights on eventually transporting large numbers of people deep into space. But Mr. Musk said he hoped Falcon Heavy\u2019s initial success will \u201cencourage other countries and companies to raise their sights\u201d regarding space endeavors.\n\u201cWe want a new space race,\u201d he said with a chuckle. \u201cRaces are exciting.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk said\u00a0Tuesday\u2019s\u00a0successful test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket reaffirmed his confidence in SpaceX\u2019s long-range vision of flying much bigger rockets to and from deep space many times a day. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Dissects Falcon Heavy Angst and Sweet Smell of Success (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6729",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-news-conference-musk-dissects-falcon-heavy-angst-and-sweet-success-1517977916?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=102",
        "text": "Mr. Musk said the choreographed landing of twin spent boosters back on earth played out \u201cjust like the simulation\u201d created by SpaceX. That particular success, he added, \u201cgives me a lot of faith\u201d in the company\u2019s goal of ultimately operating a bustling spaceport on earth similar to those depicted in some science-fiction books and movies.\n\n\n\n\nDescribing company plans to develop fleets of much larger boosters and mammoth spacecraft targeting voyages to Mars in decades to come, Mr. Musk said the Falcon Heavy\u2019s reusability convinced him the\u00a0once far-fetched\u00a0concept is \u201creally quite workable.\u201d For now, he added, the aim is to \u201ckeep advancing the technology to achieve full and rapid reusability.\u201d\n\n\nThe Falcon Heavy rocket faces uncertain commercial prospects and likely won\u2019t be used to ferry any astronauts or paying passengers into earth\u2019s orbit or beyond. Still, as its chief designer, Mr. Musk offered that the booster\u2019s 27 main engines and reliable upper stage offer huge advantages for robotic or scientific missions because the combination \u201ccan launch things direct to Pluto and beyond.\u201d\nIn a moment of introspection, Mr. Musk said that SpaceX management had \u201ctried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times\u201d over the years, after discovering it was \u201cway harder than we thought.\u201d The biggest challenge was redesigning the central section to withstand added stresses due to linking three Falcon 9 boosters together.\nIn the past, Mr. Musk has indicated SpaceX spent nearly $1 billion to develop the rocket.\u00a0On Tuesday, he said the cost ended up \u201ca lot more than I\u2019d like to admit.\u201c But in his latest estimate, he pegged it at \u201chalf a billion [dollars] or more.\u201d\nSpeaking more broadly about the state of commercial space ventures, SpaceX\u2019s chief didn\u2019t respond directly to a question about whether he felt he was competing against fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n , who also has set his sights on eventually transporting large numbers of people deep into space. But Mr. Musk said he hoped Falcon Heavy\u2019s initial success will \u201cencourage other countries and companies to raise their sights\u201d regarding space endeavors.\n\u201cWe want a new space race,\u201d he said with a chuckle. \u201cRaces are exciting.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk said\u00a0Tuesday\u2019s\u00a0successful test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket reaffirmed his confidence in SpaceX\u2019s long-range vision of flying much bigger rockets to and from deep space many times a day. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Aims for First Rocket Launch With Reused Booster (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6730",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-for-historic-rocket-launch-with-reused-booster-1490693401?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=25",
        "text": "Mr. Musk and his team at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. hope to demonstrate the viability of such \u201cflight-proven\u201d hardware, which they argue will help usher in an unprecedented era of frequent, inexpensive flights into orbit and beyond. They and other space entrepreneurs, including Amazon.com Inc. Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n see re-flying rockets as the Holy Grail for exploring the solar system.\n\u201cFull reusability is a game changer,\u201d said Mr. Bezos, whose Blue Origin LLC also has signed up commercial customers willing to put expensive satellites on top of reusable rockets.\n\n\nRegardless of the outcome of Thursday\u2019s long-awaited, first-of-its-kind mission, industry and government experts say ambitious projections of cost savings and other operational gains wouldn\u2019t pan out for at least several years, and likely much longer.\n\n\nRelated Payloads Come With \u2018Lessons\u2019 Elon Musk Launches Neuralink to Connect Brains With Computers SpaceX Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Returns to Earth (March 20) SpaceX Scores Another Win in Push for Military Satellite Launches (March 15) FAA Mandating Higher Insurance Coverage for SpaceX Rockets (March 14) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (Feb. 28) Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Role of Private Enterprise (Feb. 5) \n\n\nSpaceX, which has suggested its launch prices may drop about 10% early on, expects roughly 30% overall price cuts in later years. But the company\u2019s internal financial projections, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, anticipate reusing rockets having only a marginal positive impact on SpaceX\u2019s profitability through the end of the decade. \nWith the advantages of reduced operating costs partly offset by lower per-launch prices, the documents project a relatively modest $200 million boost to profit through 2020. Total launch revenue is anticipated to be around $3.2 billion by then.\nThe Pentagon has routinely paid $500 million or more to launch just one of its biggest, most-advanced spy satellites\u2014a mission the Falcon 9 can\u2019t perform\u2014on a conventional rocket flown by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nIn decades to come, however, SpaceX\u2019s goals are striking. \u201cWe want to be launching rockets just like airlines fly airplanes,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a space conference in 2015. \n\u201cIf you don\u2019t get reusability to work,\u201d she told a different audience in fall 2016, \u201cit\u2019s a one-way trip to Mars.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully landed a spent rocket booster on land July 18 after launching its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying supplies for the International Space Station. Photo: NASA (Originally published July 18, 2016)\n \n\n\nIn a presentation last year about long-term plans to operate a fleet of next-generation reusable rockets\u2014intended to be refueled in space and transport a steady stream of settlers to the red planet\u2014Mr. Musk said it is reasonable to contemplate launch costs falling to roughly $200,000 per person, or \u201cequivalent to a median price house in the U.S.\u201d Russia\u2014the only nation whose rockets and capsules can ferry astronauts to the international space station\u2014charges more than $80 million a seat.\nBefore anything close to that can become reality, however, technical advances must shorten today\u2019s four-month refurbishment timetable to several days, or even less. Satellite makers and insurance companies also need to become significantly more comfortable with reused space systems. And SpaceX, which is initially looking at reusing its boosters once, has to determine how many more times it will be able to safely fly the same engines.\nIn the interim, skepticism among Pentagon brass, NASA policy makers and the bulk of SpaceX\u2019s commercial customers seems bound to impede widespread adoption of reused boosters. For example, satellite-services provider Hughes Network Systems, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n EchoStar Corp.\n\n\n , supports the initiative but has doubts about near-term benefits.\n\u201cIt\u2019s going to help a little,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Gaske,\n\n\n\n general manager of the unit\u2019s North American business, said in a recent interview. But so far, he said, the concept \u201chas not been shaken out\u201d and its \u201cimpact isn\u2019t anywhere near\u201d as significant as proponents contend.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claire Leon,\n\n\n\n the Pentagon\u2019s top launch-acquisition official, told reporters in early March that existing military launch contracts specifically prohibit reusing flight hardware. \u201cIf it proves successful for commercial\u201d customers, she said, \u201cwe might consider it for the future.\u201d\nBefore U.S. space shuttles were retired, contractors for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration refurbished the fleet\u2019s solid-fueled boosters and replaced certain parts of the engines of the orbiters th Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX will strive to make history once again, highlighting benefits of reusable boosters with the launch of the first large, liquid-fueled rocket powered by engines previously fired in space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Aims for First Rocket Launch With Reused Booster (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6731",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-for-historic-rocket-launch-with-reused-booster-1490693401?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=99",
        "text": "Mr. Musk and his team at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. hope to demonstrate the viability of such \u201cflight-proven\u201d hardware, which they argue will help usher in an unprecedented era of frequent, inexpensive flights into orbit and beyond. They and other space entrepreneurs, including Amazon.com Inc. Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n see re-flying rockets as the Holy Grail for exploring the solar system.\n\u201cFull reusability is a game changer,\u201d said Mr. Bezos, whose Blue Origin LLC also has signed up commercial customers willing to put expensive satellites on top of reusable rockets.\n\n\nRegardless of the outcome of Thursday\u2019s long-awaited, first-of-its-kind mission, industry and government experts say ambitious projections of cost savings and other operational gains wouldn\u2019t pan out for at least several years, and likely much longer.\n\n\nRelated Payloads Come With \u2018Lessons\u2019 Elon Musk Launches Neuralink to Connect Brains With Computers SpaceX Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Returns to Earth (March 20) SpaceX Scores Another Win in Push for Military Satellite Launches (March 15) FAA Mandating Higher Insurance Coverage for SpaceX Rockets (March 14) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (Feb. 28) Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Role of Private Enterprise (Feb. 5) \n\n\nSpaceX, which has suggested its launch prices may drop about 10% early on, expects roughly 30% overall price cuts in later years. But the company\u2019s internal financial projections, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, anticipate reusing rockets having only a marginal positive impact on SpaceX\u2019s profitability through the end of the decade. \nWith the advantages of reduced operating costs partly offset by lower per-launch prices, the documents project a relatively modest $200 million boost to profit through 2020. Total launch revenue is anticipated to be around $3.2 billion by then.\nThe Pentagon has routinely paid $500 million or more to launch just one of its biggest, most-advanced spy satellites\u2014a mission the Falcon 9 can\u2019t perform\u2014on a conventional rocket flown by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nIn decades to come, however, SpaceX\u2019s goals are striking. \u201cWe want to be launching rockets just like airlines fly airplanes,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a space conference in 2015. \n\u201cIf you don\u2019t get reusability to work,\u201d she told a different audience in fall 2016, \u201cit\u2019s a one-way trip to Mars.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully landed a spent rocket booster on land July 18 after launching its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying supplies for the International Space Station. Photo: NASA (Originally published July 18, 2016)\n \n\n\nIn a presentation last year about long-term plans to operate a fleet of next-generation reusable rockets\u2014intended to be refueled in space and transport a steady stream of settlers to the red planet\u2014Mr. Musk said it is reasonable to contemplate launch costs falling to roughly $200,000 per person, or \u201cequivalent to a median price house in the U.S.\u201d Russia\u2014the only nation whose rockets and capsules can ferry astronauts to the international space station\u2014charges more than $80 million a seat.\nBefore anything close to that can become reality, however, technical advances must shorten today\u2019s four-month refurbishment timetable to several days, or even less. Satellite makers and insurance companies also need to become significantly more comfortable with reused space systems. And SpaceX, which is initially looking at reusing its boosters once, has to determine how many more times it will be able to safely fly the same engines.\nIn the interim, skepticism among Pentagon brass, NASA policy makers and the bulk of SpaceX\u2019s commercial customers seems bound to impede widespread adoption of reused boosters. For example, satellite-services provider Hughes Network Systems, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n EchoStar Corp.\n\n\n , supports the initiative but has doubts about near-term benefits.\n\u201cIt\u2019s going to help a little,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Gaske,\n\n\n\n general manager of the unit\u2019s North American business, said in a recent interview. But so far, he said, the concept \u201chas not been shaken out\u201d and its \u201cimpact isn\u2019t anywhere near\u201d as significant as proponents contend.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claire Leon,\n\n\n\n the Pentagon\u2019s top launch-acquisition official, told reporters in early March that existing military launch contracts specifically prohibit reusing flight hardware. \u201cIf it proves successful for commercial\u201d customers, she said, \u201cwe might consider it for the future.\u201d\nBefore U.S. space shuttles were retired, contractors for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration refurbished the fleet\u2019s solid-fueled boosters and replaced certain parts of the engines of the orbiters th Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX will strive to make history once again, highlighting benefits of reusable boosters with the launch of the first large, liquid-fueled rocket powered by engines previously fired in space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Aims for First Rocket Launch With Reused Booster (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6732",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aims-for-historic-rocket-launch-with-reused-booster-1490693401?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=127",
        "text": "Mr. Musk and his team at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. hope to demonstrate the viability of such \u201cflight-proven\u201d hardware, which they argue will help usher in an unprecedented era of frequent, inexpensive flights into orbit and beyond. They and other space entrepreneurs, including Amazon.com Inc. Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n see re-flying rockets as the Holy Grail for exploring the solar system.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cFull reusability is a game changer,\u201d said Mr. Bezos, whose Blue Origin LLC also has signed up commercial customers willing to put expensive satellites on top of reusable rockets.\n\n\nRegardless of the outcome of Thursday\u2019s long-awaited, first-of-its-kind mission, industry and government experts say ambitious projections of cost savings and other operational gains wouldn\u2019t pan out for at least several years, and likely much longer.\n\n\nRelated Payloads Come With \u2018Lessons\u2019 Elon Musk Launches Neuralink to Connect Brains With Computers SpaceX Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Returns to Earth (March 20) SpaceX Scores Another Win in Push for Military Satellite Launches (March 15) FAA Mandating Higher Insurance Coverage for SpaceX Rockets (March 14) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (Feb. 28) Trump Space Policy Options Emphasize Role of Private Enterprise (Feb. 5) \n\n\nSpaceX, which has suggested its launch prices may drop about 10% early on, expects roughly 30% overall price cuts in later years. But the company\u2019s internal financial projections, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, anticipate reusing rockets having only a marginal positive impact on SpaceX\u2019s profitability through the end of the decade. \nWith the advantages of reduced operating costs partly offset by lower per-launch prices, the documents project a relatively modest $200 million boost to profit through 2020. Total launch revenue is anticipated to be around $3.2 billion by then.\nThe Pentagon has routinely paid $500 million or more to launch just one of its biggest, most-advanced spy satellites\u2014a mission the Falcon 9 can\u2019t perform\u2014on a conventional rocket flown by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nIn decades to come, however, SpaceX\u2019s goals are striking. \u201cWe want to be launching rockets just like airlines fly airplanes,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, said at a space conference in 2015. \n\u201cIf you don\u2019t get reusability to work,\u201d she told a different audience in fall 2016, \u201cit\u2019s a one-way trip to Mars.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully landed a spent rocket booster on land July 18 after launching its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying supplies for the International Space Station. Photo: NASA (Originally published July 18, 2016)\n \n\n\nIn a presentation last year about long-term plans to operate a fleet of next-generation reusable rockets\u2014intended to be refueled in space and transport a steady stream of settlers to the red planet\u2014Mr. Musk said it is reasonable to contemplate launch costs falling to roughly $200,000 per person, or \u201cequivalent to a median price house in the U.S.\u201d Russia\u2014the only nation whose rockets and capsules can ferry astronauts to the international space station\u2014charges more than $80 million a seat.\nBefore anything close to that can become reality, however, technical advances must shorten today\u2019s four-month refurbishment timetable to several days, or even less. Satellite makers and insurance companies also need to become significantly more comfortable with reused space systems. And SpaceX, which is initially looking at reusing its boosters once, has to determine how many more times it will be able to safely fly the same engines.\nIn the interim, skepticism among Pentagon brass, NASA policy makers and the bulk of SpaceX\u2019s commercial customers seems bound to impede widespread adoption of reused boosters. For example, satellite-services provider Hughes Network Systems, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n EchoStar Corp.\n\n\n , supports the initiative but has doubts about near-term benefits.\n\u201cIt\u2019s going to help a little,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Gaske,\n\n\n\n general manager of the unit\u2019s North American business, said in a recent interview. But so far, he said, the concept \u201chas not been shaken out\u201d and its \u201cimpact isn\u2019t anywhere near\u201d as significant as proponents contend.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claire Leon,\n\n\n\n the Pentagon\u2019s top launch-acquisition official, told reporters in early March that existing military launch contracts specifically prohibit reusing flight hardware. \u201cIf it proves successful for commercial\u201d customers, she said, \u201cwe might consider it for the future.\u201d\nBefore U.S. space shuttles were retired, contractors for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration refurbished the fleet\u2019s solid-fueled boosters and replaced certain parts of the engines of the orbiter Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX will strive to make history once again, highlighting benefits of reusable boosters with the launch of the first large, liquid-fueled rocket powered by engines previously fired in space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Data Show Extent of Financial Hit From Explosions (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6733",
        "date": "2017-01-13",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/exclusive-peek-at-spacex-data-shows-loss-in-2015-heavy-expectations-for-nascent-internet-service-1484316455?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=27",
        "text": "Internal financial documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former SpaceX employees depict robust growth in new rocket-launch contracts and a thin bottom line that is vulnerable when things go awry. They also show the company putting steep revenue expectations on a nascent satellite-internet business it hopes will eventually dwarf the rocket division and help finance its goal of manned missions to Mars.\nA second explosion during testing on the launchpad in September grounded SpaceX again, adding to losses and causing a four-month delay. Its next launch is planned for Saturday, when it will seek to regain momentum in the face of depressed revenue, jittery customers and a rising backlog of missions.\n\n\nSpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., transformed the aerospace industry with innovative rocket features and Silicon Valley-style software design principles mandated by Mr. Musk, its billionaire founder and chief executive. The 15-year-old company became the first American firm in years to compete for commercial launch contracts, and the first company to launch and return a spacecraft from orbit.\nSpaceX declined to comment on details of its finances but said it has a solid record of success and strong customer relationships. \u201cWe have more than 70 future launches on our manifest representing over $10 billion in contracts,\u201d said SpaceX Chief Financial Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bret Johnson.\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company is in a financially strong position and is well positioned for future growth,\u201d adding it has over $1 billion of cash and no debt.\nThe Journal reviewed SpaceX\u2019s financial results from 2011 through the end of 2015 as well as forecasts through the next decade. As a private company, SpaceX isn\u2019t obligated to publicly disclose the figures, and the information has never been widely shared.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who owns 54% of SpaceX and holds 78% of company votes, has said he isn\u2019t interested in going public until the company is able to transport humans to Mars, which he has said he hopes will happen in 2024. To reach the red planet, SpaceX would need to develop a rocket many times more powerful than its fourth-generation model, which hasn\u2019t flown and is four years behind schedule.\nSpaceX projected the satellite-internet business would have over 40 million subscribers and bring in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025, according to the documents. The internet service is currently in planning stages without a factory or a full-fledged team of engineers, according to industry officials and earlier comments by company President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell.\n\n\n\n \nSpaceX\u2019s rocket business hasn\u2019t pulled off consistent launches. From 2010 to June 2015, it managed 18 successful launches in a row before its first accident, versus more than 100 straight so far by its main U.S. rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , and more than 75 successful consecutive liftoffs for Europe\u2019s Arianespace SA. \nSpaceX delivered small operating profits in 2013 and 2014, as revenue jumped to $1 billion from $680 million thanks to contracts from NASA and commercial satellite operators.\nThe company lost $260 million in 2015 when one of its Falcon 9 rockets, carrying two tons of cargo to the international space station, exploded shortly after liftoff in June of that year. The accident thwarted SpaceX\u2019s plans to launch more than a dozen rockets that year; instead it launched six.\nThe disruptions have led some customers to look for alternatives. Last year satellite operators\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.\n\n\n each shifted one SpaceX launch to Arianespace, citing the delays, although they both retain slots on later missions. \nNASA is conducting a safety review of plans to have SpaceX carry astronauts into orbit. SpaceX has said it was committed to working with NASA to resolve safety issues before starting manned launches.\nMr. Musk targeted 27 launches for this year; its high-water mark is eight. By 2019, he projected SpaceX will launch 52, or one a week, according to the documents. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFounder and CEO Elon Musk hopes to be able to transport humans to Mars in the next decade.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX is building a new spaceport near Brownsville, Texas, expected to host its first launch in 2018, to help address its backlog and get its planned internet business rolling.\nMr. Musk, who also runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Motors Inc.,\n\n\n created SpaceX in 2002 to reliably launch satellites and other spacecraft at a low cost, historically considered contradictory goals in the rocket industry. To do so, he developed a steady stream of booster upgrades that have pushed technology and reduced the price of putting cargo in orbit. \nSpaceX phases in significant changes as they become ready, rather th Internal documents show SpaceX\u2019s bottom line is vulnerable when things go awry and that the aerospace firm sees revenue from its planned satellite-internet business eventually helping finance Mars missions. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Data Show Extent of Financial Hit From Explosions (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6734",
        "date": "2017-01-13",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/exclusive-peek-at-spacex-data-shows-loss-in-2015-heavy-expectations-for-nascent-internet-service-1484316455?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=103",
        "text": "Internal financial documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former SpaceX employees depict robust growth in new rocket-launch contracts and a thin bottom line that is vulnerable when things go awry. They also show the company putting steep revenue expectations on a nascent satellite-internet business it hopes will eventually dwarf the rocket division and help finance its goal of manned missions to Mars.\nA second explosion during testing on the launchpad in September grounded SpaceX again, adding to losses and causing a four-month delay. Its next launch is planned for Saturday, when it will seek to regain momentum in the face of depressed revenue, jittery customers and a rising backlog of missions.\n\n\nSpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., transformed the aerospace industry with innovative rocket features and Silicon Valley-style software design principles mandated by Mr. Musk, its billionaire founder and chief executive. The 15-year-old company became the first American firm in years to compete for commercial launch contracts, and the first company to launch and return a spacecraft from orbit.\nSpaceX declined to comment on details of its finances but said it has a solid record of success and strong customer relationships. \u201cWe have more than 70 future launches on our manifest representing over $10 billion in contracts,\u201d said SpaceX Chief Financial Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bret Johnson.\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company is in a financially strong position and is well positioned for future growth,\u201d adding it has over $1 billion of cash and no debt.\nThe Journal reviewed SpaceX\u2019s financial results from 2011 through the end of 2015 as well as forecasts through the next decade. As a private company, SpaceX isn\u2019t obligated to publicly disclose the figures, and the information has never been widely shared.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who owns 54% of SpaceX and holds 78% of company votes, has said he isn\u2019t interested in going public until the company is able to transport humans to Mars, which he has said he hopes will happen in 2024. To reach the red planet, SpaceX would need to develop a rocket many times more powerful than its fourth-generation model, which hasn\u2019t flown and is four years behind schedule.\nSpaceX projected the satellite-internet business would have over 40 million subscribers and bring in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025, according to the documents. The internet service is currently in planning stages without a factory or a full-fledged team of engineers, according to industry officials and earlier comments by company President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell.\n\n\n\n \nSpaceX\u2019s rocket business hasn\u2019t pulled off consistent launches. From 2010 to June 2015, it managed 18 successful launches in a row before its first accident, versus more than 100 straight so far by its main U.S. rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , and more than 75 successful consecutive liftoffs for Europe\u2019s Arianespace SA. \nSpaceX delivered small operating profits in 2013 and 2014, as revenue jumped to $1 billion from $680 million thanks to contracts from NASA and commercial satellite operators.\nThe company lost $260 million in 2015 when one of its Falcon 9 rockets, carrying two tons of cargo to the international space station, exploded shortly after liftoff in June of that year. The accident thwarted SpaceX\u2019s plans to launch more than a dozen rockets that year; instead it launched six.\nThe disruptions have led some customers to look for alternatives. Last year satellite operators\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.\n\n\n each shifted one SpaceX launch to Arianespace, citing the delays, although they both retain slots on later missions. \nNASA is conducting a safety review of plans to have SpaceX carry astronauts into orbit. SpaceX has said it was committed to working with NASA to resolve safety issues before starting manned launches.\nMr. Musk targeted 27 launches for this year; its high-water mark is eight. By 2019, he projected SpaceX will launch 52, or one a week, according to the documents. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFounder and CEO Elon Musk hopes to be able to transport humans to Mars in the next decade.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX is building a new spaceport near Brownsville, Texas, expected to host its first launch in 2018, to help address its backlog and get its planned internet business rolling.\nMr. Musk, who also runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Motors Inc.,\n\n\n created SpaceX in 2002 to reliably launch satellites and other spacecraft at a low cost, historically considered contradictory goals in the rocket industry. To do so, he developed a steady stream of booster upgrades that have pushed technology and reduced the price of putting cargo in orbit. \nSpaceX phases in significant changes as they become ready, rather th Internal documents show SpaceX\u2019s bottom line is vulnerable when things go awry and that the aerospace firm sees revenue from its planned satellite-internet business eventually helping finance Mars missions. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Data Show Extent of Financial Hit From Explosions (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6735",
        "date": "2017-01-13",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/exclusive-peek-at-spacex-data-shows-loss-in-2015-heavy-expectations-for-nascent-internet-service-1484316455?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=133",
        "text": "Internal financial documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and interviews with former SpaceX employees depict robust growth in new rocket-launch contracts and a thin bottom line that is vulnerable when things go awry. They also show the company putting steep revenue expectations on a nascent satellite-internet business it hopes will eventually dwarf the rocket division and help finance its goal of manned missions to Mars.\n\n\n\n\nA second explosion during testing on the launchpad in September grounded SpaceX again, adding to losses and causing a four-month delay. Its next launch is planned for Saturday, when it will seek to regain momentum in the face of depressed revenue, jittery customers and a rising backlog of missions.\n\n\nSpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., transformed the aerospace industry with innovative rocket features and Silicon Valley-style software design principles mandated by Mr. Musk, its billionaire founder and chief executive. The 15-year-old company became the first American firm in years to compete for commercial launch contracts, and the first company to launch and return a spacecraft from orbit.\nSpaceX declined to comment on details of its finances but said it has a solid record of success and strong customer relationships. \u201cWe have more than 70 future launches on our manifest representing over $10 billion in contracts,\u201d said SpaceX Chief Financial Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bret Johnson.\n\n\n\n \u201cThe company is in a financially strong position and is well positioned for future growth,\u201d adding it has over $1 billion of cash and no debt.\nThe Journal reviewed SpaceX\u2019s financial results from 2011 through the end of 2015 as well as forecasts through the next decade. As a private company, SpaceX isn\u2019t obligated to publicly disclose the figures, and the information has never been widely shared.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who owns 54% of SpaceX and holds 78% of company votes, has said he isn\u2019t interested in going public until the company is able to transport humans to Mars, which he has said he hopes will happen in 2024. To reach the red planet, SpaceX would need to develop a rocket many times more powerful than its fourth-generation model, which hasn\u2019t flown and is four years behind schedule.\nSpaceX projected the satellite-internet business would have over 40 million subscribers and bring in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025, according to the documents. The internet service is currently in planning stages without a factory or a full-fledged team of engineers, according to industry officials and earlier comments by company President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell.\n\n\n\n \nSpaceX\u2019s rocket business hasn\u2019t pulled off consistent launches. From 2010 to June 2015, it managed 18 successful launches in a row before its first accident, versus more than 100 straight so far by its main U.S. rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , and more than 75 successful consecutive liftoffs for Europe\u2019s Arianespace SA. \nSpaceX delivered small operating profits in 2013 and 2014, as revenue jumped to $1 billion from $680 million thanks to contracts from NASA and commercial satellite operators.\nThe company lost $260 million in 2015 when one of its Falcon 9 rockets, carrying two tons of cargo to the international space station, exploded shortly after liftoff in June of that year. The accident thwarted SpaceX\u2019s plans to launch more than a dozen rockets that year; instead it launched six.\nThe disruptions have led some customers to look for alternatives. Last year satellite operators\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.\n\n\n each shifted one SpaceX launch to Arianespace, citing the delays, although they both retain slots on later missions. \nNASA is conducting a safety review of plans to have SpaceX carry astronauts into orbit. SpaceX has said it was committed to working with NASA to resolve safety issues before starting manned launches.\nMr. Musk targeted 27 launches for this year; its high-water mark is eight. By 2019, he projected SpaceX will launch 52, or one a week, according to the documents. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFounder and CEO Elon Musk hopes to be able to transport humans to Mars in the next decade.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX is building a new spaceport near Brownsville, Texas, expected to host its first launch in 2018, to help address its backlog and get its planned internet business rolling.\nMr. Musk, who also runs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Motors Inc.,\n\n\n created SpaceX in 2002 to reliably launch satellites and other spacecraft at a low cost, historically considered contradictory goals in the rocket industry. To do so, he developed a steady stream of booster upgrades that have pushed technology and reduced the price of putting cargo in orbit. \nSpaceX phases in significant changes as they become ready, rathe Internal documents show SpaceX\u2019s bottom line is vulnerable when things go awry and that the aerospace firm sees revenue from its planned satellite-internet business eventually helping finance Mars missions. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bondholders Scuttle Merger Plan for Satellite Firms OneWeb and Intelsat (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6736",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/onewebs-complex-plan-to-buy-intelsat-grounded-by-bondholders-1496316146?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=24",
        "text": "Intelsat on Thursday said it was terminating a debt exchange key to the merger because minimum conditions weren\u2019t satisfied by the May 31 deadline.\u00a0The deadline had been extended multiple times.\nOneWeb declined to comment on the development. \n\n\nIntelsat Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Spengler\n\n\n\n said the company was disappointed that bondholders didn\u2019t accept the terms of the \u201ccomplex transaction.\u201d\nStill, he said Intelsat would work with OneWeb and SoftBank in the future. \u201cWe plan to jointly develop integrated solutions using both of our fleets,\u201d he said, with Intelsat also acting as a distributor to SoftBank.\nThe proposed deal would have brought together Intelsat\u2019s fleet of large satellites operating from high altitudes with OneWeb\u2019s network of perhaps more than 2,500 smaller, lower-flying spacecraft to provide connectivity from space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alok Sama,\n\n\n\n president and chief financial officer of SoftBank Group International, said the company was \u201cdisappointed\u201d by the development and would continue to back OneWeb as a stand-alone venture. SoftBank will work with OneWeb \u201cto seek alternative paths to accelerate its strategy,\u201d he said.\nThe attempted tie-up between OneWeb and Intelsat came as established satellite-services companies embrace newcomers to find ways to beam the internet to even the most remote locations. Luxembourg\u2019s SES SA last year agreed to buy all of O3b Networks Ltd. OneWeb\u2019s founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Wyler,\n\n\n\n also founded and served on the board of O3b. \nIntelsat has weathered a string of acquisitions and leveraged buyouts stretching back more than a decade. Several private-equity firms acquired the company in 2004 for $3.1 billion. Four years later, a different set of private-equity partners closed a deal for the company, relying on only $5 billion of equity and the assumption of more than $11 billion of debt. Recently, Intelsat\u2019s management has been seeking strategies to manage its debt and boost sales.\nFor OneWeb, which remains on track to begin production this summer of its first batch of small and powerful custom-built satellites, the setback may have little impact on its aggressive growth plans, according to industry officials. \nBacked by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE\u2019s technical expertise and SoftBank\u2019s financial clout, the company run by Mr. Wyler is pushing ahead with rapid, assembly-line production of satellites projected to cost around $1 million apiece.\nThose plans will test whether such novel production strategies and launches of multiple satellites on a single rocket can deploy a reliable system of low-cost internet access around the globe. Other entrepreneurs\u2014including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n various Silicon Valley players and legacy aerospace companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n \u2014also are considering multibillion-dollar projects featuring huge fleets of small communication satellites intended to orbit relatively close to earth.\nAccording to industry officials familiar with SoftBank\u2019s strategy, chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Masayoshi Son\n\n\n\n and his team weeks ago recognized the likelihood of the proposed deal falling apart and began evaluating other potential acquisition targets among satellite operators. It isn\u2019t clear if that process will result in a specific offer in the near future.\nGrowth for most operators of large communications satellites, some costing $200 million or more apiece, has been sluggish. \nMany operators have paused ordering additional in-orbit capacity while they assess industry trends and the anticipated impact of lower-cost rivals seeking consumer and business customers. \nSmall satellite constellations also are being studied by the Pentagon as potential alternatives to current commercial and military systems built around larger spacecraft.\nOneWeb anticipates launching its initial batch of satellites next year and projects providing service to Alaska as soon as 2019, as part of its plan to connect rural areas in the U.S. and elsewhere to the internet.\nIndustry officials expect that in the future, operators of some constellations of large satellites will continue seeking ways to combine them with smaller satellites operating in low-earth orbit in order to provide seamless, more-flexible connectivity options. Traditional satellite makers also have endorsed that concept.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A complicated tie-up that SoftBank has been trying to orchestrate between U.S. satellite startup OneWeb and debt-laden satellite operator Intelsat has collapsed after Intelsat bondholders failed to back the deal. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall in London and Andy Pasztor in Los Angeles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Top Russian Space Official Praises Reusable Rocket Technology (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6737",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-russian-space-official-sings-praises-of-reusable-rocket-technology-1491358619?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=25",
        "text": "In a wide-ranging press conference during his first U.S. visit since assuming his post with marching orders to shake up the troubled, state-controlled entity, Mr. Komarov also said he was open to talking about extending the life of the international space station to 2028.\u00a0But he made no commitment, noting that such decisions are made at the highest government levels.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace X's Falcon 9 first stage arriving Tuesday in Port Canaveral, Florida, aboard its landing platform ship. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he wants to go further in reusing his rockets after successfully launching a stage used in a previous flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bruce Weaver/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nCurrent international agreements with Russia, the European Space Agency and other partners call for continuing operations of the orbiting scientific laboratory to 2024, even as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is pushing to stretch that out four more years. \n\n\nIn the past, Russian officials have sent conflicting messages about their intentions for the space station, and on Tuesday Mr. Komarov hedged in some of his responses about Kremlin proposals to set up a separate but smaller Russian-built platform.\nU.S.-Russian ties in space have survived roller-coaster shifts in diplomatic relations over the decades, and the partnership has been strong since the initial crew moved into the space station 17 years ago. Earlier this week, Tass quoted Russian space officials saying they were working on a new spacecraft and lunar lander.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn 10 or 15 years in the future, reusability is a must.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov \n\n\n\nMr. Komarov was unequivocal when he talked about the long-term need to fly rockets multiple times to compete with SpaceX and other champions of reusability. \n\u201cIn 10 or 15 years in the future, reusability is a must,\u201d he said. \u201cOur scientists and engineers have long discussions about which way to go\u201d\u2014whether to repurpose just the engines or also try to recover and refurbish the fuel tanks and other surrounding hardware. He suggested the effort would likely last well into the next decade, but declined to elaborate.\nSpaceX\u2019s reduced prices have shaken up the global launch market and particularly hurt the competitiveness of Russian rockets, which used to be marketed for their relatively low price tags. Roscosmos is also reeling from a long string of quality-control lapses and other manufacturing problems that have resulted in a series of catastrophic accidents or botched missions.\nWithout going into specifics, Mr. Komarov indicated his teams are leaning toward recovering only the engines, which are the most expensive elements of any big rocket. The Russian official said while many Russian rocket engines were designed initially with the goal of reusability\u2014and have been successfully tested on the ground\u2014further advances in materials are essential before Roscosmos can rely on reusing them.\nFor the next few years at least, he said Roscosmos, which oversees nearly 60 different state-owned companies and about 250,000 employees, would concentrate on becoming more efficient and realizing productions savings in more traditional ways.\n\u201cWe understand that at first, we should simply be more cost effective\u201d by implementing conventional personnel savings and production improvements, Mr. Komarov said during an hour-long media session. Some of the designs, factory layouts and manufacturing processes he inherited are decades old. \nChallenging refurbishment practices can make reusability surprisingly expensive and time consuming, and was considered a major factor in the decision to retire the U.S. space shuttle fleet. \nRoscosmos already has cut launch prices for its workhorse Proton rockets by approximately 20% in response to SpaceX, Mr. Komarov said. He also talked about developing a next-generation launcher using new propulsion technology.\nThe Roscosmos chief alluded twice during the press conference to continuing work developing some type of nuclear-powered rocket engine, but he declined to discuss the initiative.\nAs Roscosmos officials have done in the past, Mr. Komarov also implicitly criticized NASA\u2019s plans to move toward manned Mars missions without first expending much effort or resources trying to perfect new technology for such missions on the surface of the moon. This debate has been under way for years, with space-agency leaders from Russia, Europe and Japan unsuccessfully urging their U.S. counterparts to adjust their strategy by agreeing to plan for such lunar landings.\nMr. Komarov reiterated the argument for what he called \u201ca very logical\u201d approach based on a gradual, step-by-step exploration drive aiming to resolve difficult technical challenges closer to Earth, before launching humans deep into the solar system. \n\u201cBetter to solve all these problems on the moon,\u201d he said, referring to issues such as protecting astronauts from dangerous exposure to radiation, Igor Komarov, director general of Roscosmos, lauded Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0SpaceX for developing reusable rockets and said his country has been\u00a0working on a variant of that approach to remain\u00a0competitive. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Top Russian Space Official Praises Reusable Rocket Technology (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6738",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-russian-space-official-sings-praises-of-reusable-rocket-technology-1491358619?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=85",
        "text": "In a wide-ranging press conference during his first U.S. visit since assuming his post with marching orders to shake up the troubled, state-controlled entity, Mr. Komarov also said he was open to talking about extending the life of the international space station to 2028.\u00a0But he made no commitment, noting that such decisions are made at the highest government levels.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace X's Falcon 9 first stage arriving Tuesday in Port Canaveral, Florida, aboard its landing platform ship. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he wants to go further in reusing his rockets after successfully launching a stage used in a previous flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bruce Weaver/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nCurrent international agreements with Russia, the European Space Agency and other partners call for continuing operations of the orbiting scientific laboratory to 2024, even as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is pushing to stretch that out four more years. \n\n\nIn the past, Russian officials have sent conflicting messages about their intentions for the space station, and on Tuesday Mr. Komarov hedged in some of his responses about Kremlin proposals to set up a separate but smaller Russian-built platform.\nU.S.-Russian ties in space have survived roller-coaster shifts in diplomatic relations over the decades, and the partnership has been strong since the initial crew moved into the space station 17 years ago. Earlier this week, Tass quoted Russian space officials saying they were working on a new spacecraft and lunar lander.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn 10 or 15 years in the future, reusability is a must.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov \n\n\n\nMr. Komarov was unequivocal when he talked about the long-term need to fly rockets multiple times to compete with SpaceX and other champions of reusability. \n\u201cIn 10 or 15 years in the future, reusability is a must,\u201d he said. \u201cOur scientists and engineers have long discussions about which way to go\u201d\u2014whether to repurpose just the engines or also try to recover and refurbish the fuel tanks and other surrounding hardware. He suggested the effort would likely last well into the next decade, but declined to elaborate.\nSpaceX\u2019s reduced prices have shaken up the global launch market and particularly hurt the competitiveness of Russian rockets, which used to be marketed for their relatively low price tags. Roscosmos is also reeling from a long string of quality-control lapses and other manufacturing problems that have resulted in a series of catastrophic accidents or botched missions.\nWithout going into specifics, Mr. Komarov indicated his teams are leaning toward recovering only the engines, which are the most expensive elements of any big rocket. The Russian official said while many Russian rocket engines were designed initially with the goal of reusability\u2014and have been successfully tested on the ground\u2014further advances in materials are essential before Roscosmos can rely on reusing them.\nFor the next few years at least, he said Roscosmos, which oversees nearly 60 different state-owned companies and about 250,000 employees, would concentrate on becoming more efficient and realizing productions savings in more traditional ways.\n\u201cWe understand that at first, we should simply be more cost effective\u201d by implementing conventional personnel savings and production improvements, Mr. Komarov said during an hour-long media session. Some of the designs, factory layouts and manufacturing processes he inherited are decades old. \nChallenging refurbishment practices can make reusability surprisingly expensive and time consuming, and was considered a major factor in the decision to retire the U.S. space shuttle fleet. \nRoscosmos already has cut launch prices for its workhorse Proton rockets by approximately 20% in response to SpaceX, Mr. Komarov said. He also talked about developing a next-generation launcher using new propulsion technology.\nThe Roscosmos chief alluded twice during the press conference to continuing work developing some type of nuclear-powered rocket engine, but he declined to discuss the initiative.\nAs Roscosmos officials have done in the past, Mr. Komarov also implicitly criticized NASA\u2019s plans to move toward manned Mars missions without first expending much effort or resources trying to perfect new technology for such missions on the surface of the moon. This debate has been under way for years, with space-agency leaders from Russia, Europe and Japan unsuccessfully urging their U.S. counterparts to adjust their strategy by agreeing to plan for such lunar landings.\nMr. Komarov reiterated the argument for what he called \u201ca very logical\u201d approach based on a gradual, step-by-step exploration drive aiming to resolve difficult technical challenges closer to Earth, before launching humans deep into the solar system. \n\u201cBetter to solve all these problems on the moon,\u201d he said, referring to issues such as protecting astronauts from dangerous exposure to radiation, Igor Komarov, director general of Roscosmos, lauded Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0SpaceX for developing reusable rockets and said his country has been\u00a0working on a variant of that approach to remain\u00a0competitive. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Top Russian Space Official Praises Reusable Rocket Technology (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6739",
        "date": "2017-04-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/top-russian-space-official-sings-praises-of-reusable-rocket-technology-1491358619?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=126",
        "text": "In a wide-ranging press conference during his first U.S. visit since assuming his post with marching orders to shake up the troubled, state-controlled entity, Mr. Komarov also said he was open to talking about extending the life of the international space station to 2028.\u00a0But he made no commitment, noting that such decisions are made at the highest government levels.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpace X's Falcon 9 first stage arriving Tuesday in Port Canaveral, Florida, aboard its landing platform ship. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he wants to go further in reusing his rockets after successfully launching a stage used in a previous flight.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bruce Weaver/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCurrent international agreements with Russia, the European Space Agency and other partners call for continuing operations of the orbiting scientific laboratory to 2024, even as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is pushing to stretch that out four more years. \n\n\nIn the past, Russian officials have sent conflicting messages about their intentions for the space station, and on Tuesday Mr. Komarov hedged in some of his responses about Kremlin proposals to set up a separate but smaller Russian-built platform.\nU.S.-Russian ties in space have survived roller-coaster shifts in diplomatic relations over the decades, and the partnership has been strong since the initial crew moved into the space station 17 years ago. Earlier this week, Tass quoted Russian space officials saying they were working on a new spacecraft and lunar lander.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn 10 or 15 years in the future, reusability is a must.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov \n\n\n\nMr. Komarov was unequivocal when he talked about the long-term need to fly rockets multiple times to compete with SpaceX and other champions of reusability. \n\u201cIn 10 or 15 years in the future, reusability is a must,\u201d he said. \u201cOur scientists and engineers have long discussions about which way to go\u201d\u2014whether to repurpose just the engines or also try to recover and refurbish the fuel tanks and other surrounding hardware. He suggested the effort would likely last well into the next decade, but declined to elaborate.\nSpaceX\u2019s reduced prices have shaken up the global launch market and particularly hurt the competitiveness of Russian rockets, which used to be marketed for their relatively low price tags. Roscosmos is also reeling from a long string of quality-control lapses and other manufacturing problems that have resulted in a series of catastrophic accidents or botched missions.\nWithout going into specifics, Mr. Komarov indicated his teams are leaning toward recovering only the engines, which are the most expensive elements of any big rocket. The Russian official said while many Russian rocket engines were designed initially with the goal of reusability\u2014and have been successfully tested on the ground\u2014further advances in materials are essential before Roscosmos can rely on reusing them.\nFor the next few years at least, he said Roscosmos, which oversees nearly 60 different state-owned companies and about 250,000 employees, would concentrate on becoming more efficient and realizing productions savings in more traditional ways.\n\u201cWe understand that at first, we should simply be more cost effective\u201d by implementing conventional personnel savings and production improvements, Mr. Komarov said during an hour-long media session. Some of the designs, factory layouts and manufacturing processes he inherited are decades old. \nChallenging refurbishment practices can make reusability surprisingly expensive and time consuming, and was considered a major factor in the decision to retire the U.S. space shuttle fleet. \nRoscosmos already has cut launch prices for its workhorse Proton rockets by approximately 20% in response to SpaceX, Mr. Komarov said. He also talked about developing a next-generation launcher using new propulsion technology.\nThe Roscosmos chief alluded twice during the press conference to continuing work developing some type of nuclear-powered rocket engine, but he declined to discuss the initiative.\nAs Roscosmos officials have done in the past, Mr. Komarov also implicitly criticized NASA\u2019s plans to move toward manned Mars missions without first expending much effort or resources trying to perfect new technology for such missions on the surface of the moon. This debate has been under way for years, with space-agency leaders from Russia, Europe and Japan unsuccessfully urging their U.S. counterparts to adjust their strategy by agreeing to plan for such lunar landings.\nMr. Komarov reiterated the argument for what he called \u201ca very logical\u201d approach based on a gradual, step-by-step exploration drive aiming to resolve difficult technical challenges closer to Earth, before launching humans deep into the solar system. \n\u201cBetter to solve all these problems on the moon,\u201d he said, referring to issues such as protecting astronauts from dangerous exposure to radiati Igor Komarov, director general of Roscosmos, lauded Elon Musk\u2019s\u00a0SpaceX for developing reusable rockets and said his country has been\u00a0working on a variant of that approach to remain\u00a0competitive. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Boosts U.S. Spy Satellite Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6740",
        "date": "2017-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-boosts-classified-u-s-spy-satellite-into-orbit-1493639487?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=25",
        "text": "In a move that is common for classified launches, neither the company nor the agency, which operates the U.S.\u2019s premier spy satellites, identified the nature of the spacecraft, its specific purpose or designated orbit.\nMonday\u2019s launch was part of the closely held company\u2019s drive, following catastrophic accidents in 2015 and 2016, to shore up confidence of commercial and U.S. government customers in its low-cost approach to providing space transportation.\n\n\nThe 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s cluster of nine main engines burned for two minutes and 20 seconds as planned, the lower stage separated without any problem, and later the company confirmed the upper stage was sending the payload into its intended position.\nMonday\u2019s flight was the fourth successful launch since the Falcon 9 returned to service in January, following a four-month lapse prompted by an explosion on the launchpad last September during routine ground tests.\nMonday\u2019s mission was watched closely by government and industry officials for two primary reasons. SpaceX expects an average of nearly two launches a month for all of 2017, but over several years it has consistently failed to reach its projected launch tempo. According to internal projections prepared around the beginning of 2016, months before the launchpad accident, management at that point envisioned a rate climbing to an average of nearly three launches a month by 2020.\nCash flow, profit and further technology development all depend on ramping up the pace of launches. Commercial customers, many of whom have been affected by cascading launch delays, also are betting on a steady uptick in launch tempo.\nSpaceX has said it has roughly $10 billion of launches in its order book. U.S. government missions, including those for the Pentagon and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, account for the bulk of that backlog, with the company seeking more military launches.\nAs a result, Monday\u2019s launch also presented an opportunity for SpaceX to demonstrate to the NRO\u2014and by extension the broader U.S. intelligence community\u2014its ability to launch expensive classified satellites safely and on time.\nSome NRO officials continue to be privately skeptical of trusting multibillion-dollar satellites to the company, according to government and industry officials, though SpaceX is officially certified to boost payloads to most of the orbits the agency has traditionally used.\nUntil recently, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n enjoyed a monopoly on launches of large national-security satellites. But Monday\u2019s mission, combined with a pair of Global Positioning System launches SpaceX won in 2016 and earlier this year, ended that decadelong monopoly. \nThe joint venture, called United Launch Alliance, remains on top when it comes to lofting the largest, most expensive and highest-security spy satellites and other national-security payloads into orbit. It can cost more than $500 million to transport such satellites into space using the heavy-lift variant of the venture\u2019s Delta IV rocket.\nBut in March, the Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019.\nThe latest launch, which used more than a million pounds of propellant, followed SpaceX\u2019s historic feat in March of successfully launching and safely retrieving the main portion of a Falcon 9 that had traveled to space previously. Mr. Musk and his team consider such reusability as the centerpiece of providing lower-cost space transportation.\nAs planned, 10 minutes after liftoff, thrusters on the first stage guided that portion of the Falcon 9 rocket back to a vertical landing near the launchpad. It was the fourth time the company succeeded in getting the main portion of a Falcon 9 back to the landing zone near the pad. The company also has landed the lower stage on a floating platform several times.\nIllustrating the smooth, problem-free nature of the launch, Mr. Musk posted a message on his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account barely three minutes before liftoff discussing weather conditions. \u201cWinds aloft are unusually high,\u201d it said, noting that they were still \u201cwithin structural safety bounds.\u201d In the same message, Mr. Musk called the situation worrisome, but confidently added \u201cnot a showstopper.\u201d\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said in March it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was made eligible last month. (May 1, 2017)\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies added another successful launch to its record Monday morning, but this time it carried a classified payload for the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Boosts U.S. Spy Satellite Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6741",
        "date": "2017-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-boosts-classified-u-s-spy-satellite-into-orbit-1493639487?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=96",
        "text": "In a move that is common for classified launches, neither the company nor the agency, which operates the U.S.\u2019s premier spy satellites, identified the nature of the spacecraft, its specific purpose or designated orbit.\nMonday\u2019s launch was part of the closely held company\u2019s drive, following catastrophic accidents in 2015 and 2016, to shore up confidence of commercial and U.S. government customers in its low-cost approach to providing space transportation.\n\n\nThe 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s cluster of nine main engines burned for two minutes and 20 seconds as planned, the lower stage separated without any problem, and later the company confirmed the upper stage was sending the payload into its intended position.\nMonday\u2019s flight was the fourth successful launch since the Falcon 9 returned to service in January, following a four-month lapse prompted by an explosion on the launchpad last September during routine ground tests.\nMonday\u2019s mission was watched closely by government and industry officials for two primary reasons. SpaceX expects an average of nearly two launches a month for all of 2017, but over several years it has consistently failed to reach its projected launch tempo. According to internal projections prepared around the beginning of 2016, months before the launchpad accident, management at that point envisioned a rate climbing to an average of nearly three launches a month by 2020.\nCash flow, profit and further technology development all depend on ramping up the pace of launches. Commercial customers, many of whom have been affected by cascading launch delays, also are betting on a steady uptick in launch tempo.\nSpaceX has said it has roughly $10 billion of launches in its order book. U.S. government missions, including those for the Pentagon and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, account for the bulk of that backlog, with the company seeking more military launches.\nAs a result, Monday\u2019s launch also presented an opportunity for SpaceX to demonstrate to the NRO\u2014and by extension the broader U.S. intelligence community\u2014its ability to launch expensive classified satellites safely and on time.\nSome NRO officials continue to be privately skeptical of trusting multibillion-dollar satellites to the company, according to government and industry officials, though SpaceX is officially certified to boost payloads to most of the orbits the agency has traditionally used.\nUntil recently, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n enjoyed a monopoly on launches of large national-security satellites. But Monday\u2019s mission, combined with a pair of Global Positioning System launches SpaceX won in 2016 and earlier this year, ended that decadelong monopoly. \nThe joint venture, called United Launch Alliance, remains on top when it comes to lofting the largest, most expensive and highest-security spy satellites and other national-security payloads into orbit. It can cost more than $500 million to transport such satellites into space using the heavy-lift variant of the venture\u2019s Delta IV rocket.\nBut in March, the Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019.\nThe latest launch, which used more than a million pounds of propellant, followed SpaceX\u2019s historic feat in March of successfully launching and safely retrieving the main portion of a Falcon 9 that had traveled to space previously. Mr. Musk and his team consider such reusability as the centerpiece of providing lower-cost space transportation.\nAs planned, 10 minutes after liftoff, thrusters on the first stage guided that portion of the Falcon 9 rocket back to a vertical landing near the launchpad. It was the fourth time the company succeeded in getting the main portion of a Falcon 9 back to the landing zone near the pad. The company also has landed the lower stage on a floating platform several times.\nIllustrating the smooth, problem-free nature of the launch, Mr. Musk posted a message on his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account barely three minutes before liftoff discussing weather conditions. \u201cWinds aloft are unusually high,\u201d it said, noting that they were still \u201cwithin structural safety bounds.\u201d In the same message, Mr. Musk called the situation worrisome, but confidently added \u201cnot a showstopper.\u201d\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said in March it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was made eligible last month. (May 1, 2017)\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies added another successful launch to its record Monday morning, but this time it carried a classified payload for the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Boosts U.S. Spy Satellite Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6742",
        "date": "2017-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-boosts-classified-u-s-spy-satellite-into-orbit-1493639487?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=84",
        "text": "In a move that is common for classified launches, neither the company nor the agency, which operates the U.S.\u2019s premier spy satellites, identified the nature of the spacecraft, its specific purpose or designated orbit.\nMonday\u2019s launch was part of the closely held company\u2019s drive, following catastrophic accidents in 2015 and 2016, to shore up confidence of commercial and U.S. government customers in its low-cost approach to providing space transportation.\n\n\nThe 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s cluster of nine main engines burned for two minutes and 20 seconds as planned, the lower stage separated without any problem, and later the company confirmed the upper stage was sending the payload into its intended position.\nMonday\u2019s flight was the fourth successful launch since the Falcon 9 returned to service in January, following a four-month lapse prompted by an explosion on the launchpad last September during routine ground tests.\nMonday\u2019s mission was watched closely by government and industry officials for two primary reasons. SpaceX expects an average of nearly two launches a month for all of 2017, but over several years it has consistently failed to reach its projected launch tempo. According to internal projections prepared around the beginning of 2016, months before the launchpad accident, management at that point envisioned a rate climbing to an average of nearly three launches a month by 2020.\nCash flow, profit and further technology development all depend on ramping up the pace of launches. Commercial customers, many of whom have been affected by cascading launch delays, also are betting on a steady uptick in launch tempo.\nSpaceX has said it has roughly $10 billion of launches in its order book. U.S. government missions, including those for the Pentagon and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, account for the bulk of that backlog, with the company seeking more military launches.\nAs a result, Monday\u2019s launch also presented an opportunity for SpaceX to demonstrate to the NRO\u2014and by extension the broader U.S. intelligence community\u2014its ability to launch expensive classified satellites safely and on time.\nSome NRO officials continue to be privately skeptical of trusting multibillion-dollar satellites to the company, according to government and industry officials, though SpaceX is officially certified to boost payloads to most of the orbits the agency has traditionally used.\nUntil recently, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n enjoyed a monopoly on launches of large national-security satellites. But Monday\u2019s mission, combined with a pair of Global Positioning System launches SpaceX won in 2016 and earlier this year, ended that decadelong monopoly. \nThe joint venture, called United Launch Alliance, remains on top when it comes to lofting the largest, most expensive and highest-security spy satellites and other national-security payloads into orbit. It can cost more than $500 million to transport such satellites into space using the heavy-lift variant of the venture\u2019s Delta IV rocket.\nBut in March, the Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019.\nThe latest launch, which used more than a million pounds of propellant, followed SpaceX\u2019s historic feat in March of successfully launching and safely retrieving the main portion of a Falcon 9 that had traveled to space previously. Mr. Musk and his team consider such reusability as the centerpiece of providing lower-cost space transportation.\nAs planned, 10 minutes after liftoff, thrusters on the first stage guided that portion of the Falcon 9 rocket back to a vertical landing near the launchpad. It was the fourth time the company succeeded in getting the main portion of a Falcon 9 back to the landing zone near the pad. The company also has landed the lower stage on a floating platform several times.\nIllustrating the smooth, problem-free nature of the launch, Mr. Musk posted a message on his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account barely three minutes before liftoff discussing weather conditions. \u201cWinds aloft are unusually high,\u201d it said, noting that they were still \u201cwithin structural safety bounds.\u201d In the same message, Mr. Musk called the situation worrisome, but confidently added \u201cnot a showstopper.\u201d\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said in March it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was made eligible last month. (May 1, 2017)\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies added another successful launch to its record Monday morning, but this time it carried a classified payload for the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Boosts U.S. Spy Satellite Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6743",
        "date": "2017-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-boosts-classified-u-s-spy-satellite-into-orbit-1493639487?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=124",
        "text": "In a move that is common for classified launches, neither the company nor the agency, which operates the U.S.\u2019s premier spy satellites, identified the nature of the spacecraft, its specific purpose or designated orbit.\n\n\n\n\nMonday\u2019s launch was part of the closely held company\u2019s drive, following catastrophic accidents in 2015 and 2016, to shore up confidence of commercial and U.S. government customers in its low-cost approach to providing space transportation.\n\n\nThe 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s cluster of nine main engines burned for two minutes and 20 seconds as planned, the lower stage separated without any problem, and later the company confirmed the upper stage was sending the payload into its intended position.\nMonday\u2019s flight was the fourth successful launch since the Falcon 9 returned to service in January, following a four-month lapse prompted by an explosion on the launchpad last September during routine ground tests.\nMonday\u2019s mission was watched closely by government and industry officials for two primary reasons. SpaceX expects an average of nearly two launches a month for all of 2017, but over several years it has consistently failed to reach its projected launch tempo. According to internal projections prepared around the beginning of 2016, months before the launchpad accident, management at that point envisioned a rate climbing to an average of nearly three launches a month by 2020.\nCash flow, profit and further technology development all depend on ramping up the pace of launches. Commercial customers, many of whom have been affected by cascading launch delays, also are betting on a steady uptick in launch tempo.\nSpaceX has said it has roughly $10 billion of launches in its order book. U.S. government missions, including those for the Pentagon and National Aeronautics and Space Administration, account for the bulk of that backlog, with the company seeking more military launches.\nAs a result, Monday\u2019s launch also presented an opportunity for SpaceX to demonstrate to the NRO\u2014and by extension the broader U.S. intelligence community\u2014its ability to launch expensive classified satellites safely and on time.\nSome NRO officials continue to be privately skeptical of trusting multibillion-dollar satellites to the company, according to government and industry officials, though SpaceX is officially certified to boost payloads to most of the orbits the agency has traditionally used.\nUntil recently, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n enjoyed a monopoly on launches of large national-security satellites. But Monday\u2019s mission, combined with a pair of Global Positioning System launches SpaceX won in 2016 and earlier this year, ended that decadelong monopoly. \nThe joint venture, called United Launch Alliance, remains on top when it comes to lofting the largest, most expensive and highest-security spy satellites and other national-security payloads into orbit. It can cost more than $500 million to transport such satellites into space using the heavy-lift variant of the venture\u2019s Delta IV rocket.\nBut in March, the Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019.\nThe latest launch, which used more than a million pounds of propellant, followed SpaceX\u2019s historic feat in March of successfully launching and safely retrieving the main portion of a Falcon 9 that had traveled to space previously. Mr. Musk and his team consider such reusability as the centerpiece of providing lower-cost space transportation.\nAs planned, 10 minutes after liftoff, thrusters on the first stage guided that portion of the Falcon 9 rocket back to a vertical landing near the launchpad. It was the fourth time the company succeeded in getting the main portion of a Falcon 9 back to the landing zone near the pad. The company also has landed the lower stage on a floating platform several times.\nIllustrating the smooth, problem-free nature of the launch, Mr. Musk posted a message on his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account barely three minutes before liftoff discussing weather conditions. \u201cWinds aloft are unusually high,\u201d it said, noting that they were still \u201cwithin structural safety bounds.\u201d In the same message, Mr. Musk called the situation worrisome, but confidently added \u201cnot a showstopper.\u201d\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center said in March it was making SpaceX eligible to compete for more than a dozen Pentagon launch contracts through late 2019. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was made eligible last month. (May 1, 2017)\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies added another successful launch to its record Monday morning, but this time it carried a classified payload for the Pentagon\u2019s National Reconnaissance Office. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Latest Dream: Underground Roadways (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6744",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-latest-dream-underground-roadways-1493416625?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=25",
        "text": "He also reiterated Tesla\u2019s plan to announce \u201cprobably four\u201d more of its giant battery factories by the end of the year and showed a teaser photo of an electric semi truck, which the company has said it will reveal in more detail in September.\nThe talk also included previous animations Mr. Musk has shown of a rocket SpaceX proposes to build to send people to Mars. He didn\u2019t discuss his newest company, Neuralink, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last month.\n\n\n\n\n\nRelated Video\n\n\n\n\nA concept video showing Elon Musk\u2019s idea for a roadway system underneath cities that could be accessed by elevators to zip cars through tunnels, avoiding surface traffic.\n\n\n\nMr. Musk is a hero to technology types who believe he can usher in a science fiction-inspired future, and also often criticized by some Wall Street investors for making what they see as ridiculous promises. Against great odds he has delivered highly popular electric vehicles and built the first company to return a rocket booster from orbit and launch it again. On the other hand, he has burned through billions in capital and routinely misses aggressive product release schedules.\n\n\nHe said he is devoting just 2% to 3% of his time to the Boring Company, which he said is staffed today with interns and part-timers and works with second-hand machinery. But TED audience members seemed no less wowed by the company\u2019s first concept video.\u00a0\nThe animation showed elevators built into the street that would lower cars to a tunnel network running on many levels, where they would travel on high-speed \u201cskates\u201d along what appear to be magnetic rails. These skates, Mr. Musk said, would top out at about 130 miles per hour.\nTo lower the cost of current tunneling technology, and make his network possible, Mr. Musk said he would decrease tunnel diameter and develop boring machines that could reinforce tunnels as they go, speeding the digging process.\nDays after Uber Technologies Inc. revealed plans to test flying cars\u00a0in three years, Mr. Musk criticized the idea of taking to the skies to alleviate road traffic.\u00a0\u201cIf something is flying over your head...that is not an anxiety-reducing situation,\u201d he said. As a person walking down the street, \u201cyou\u2019re thinking, \u2018Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and\u00a0guillotine me?\u2019 \u201d\nMr. Musk would have to address much more than tunneling technology to make his network possible. New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says on its website that \u201ctunneling\u201d was only 9% of the $4.5 billion construction cost of its Second Avenue subway.\u00a0\nDiscussing Tesla, Mr. Musk said the company is on track to begin production in July for its Model 3 sedan, its long-awaited mass-market car on which the future of the company is staked. Appeasing investor concerns, he called the company\u2019s ability to meet July deadline \u201cquite good.\u201d\nHe also reiterated that Tesla would show off a new electric semi in the fall, sharing a concept photo that was only the silhouette of a truck with its headlights on. He said the heavy-duty, long-range truck\u00a0will be capable of pulling a diesel semi uphill but will be as \u201cspry\u201d as a sports car.\nDespite\u00a0Tesla\u2019s recent loss of valuable members of its Autopilot self-driving car team, Mr. Musk said the company is still planning to\u00a0have a car drive itself from Los Angeles to New York in November or December, without a human touching the controls during the journey.\nMr. Musk said what motivates him to be so ambitious is that technology advancement isn\u2019t always inevitable. The U.S. sent men\u00a0to the moon in the 1960s, he said, and years later it no longer has a spacecraft that can even send them to low-earth orbit. The Egyptians forgot how to build the pyramids and the Romans their aqueducts, he said.\n\u201cI\u2019m not trying to be anyone\u2019s savior,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.\u201d\n\u2014Eliot Brown contributed to this article. The chef executive of Tesla Inc. touted ambitious plans, including an underground roadway accessed by elevators, more giant battery factories and an electric semi truck. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Latest Dream: Underground Roadways (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6745",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-latest-dream-underground-roadways-1493416625?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=96",
        "text": "He also reiterated Tesla\u2019s plan to announce \u201cprobably four\u201d more of its giant battery factories by the end of the year and showed a teaser photo of an electric semi truck, which the company has said it will reveal in more detail in September.\nThe talk also included previous animations Mr. Musk has shown of a rocket SpaceX proposes to build to send people to Mars. He didn\u2019t discuss his newest company, Neuralink, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last month.\n\n\n\n\n\nRelated Video\n\n\n\n\nA concept video showing Elon Musk\u2019s idea for a roadway system underneath cities that could be accessed by elevators to zip cars through tunnels, avoiding surface traffic.\n\n\n\nMr. Musk is a hero to technology types who believe he can usher in a science fiction-inspired future, and also often criticized by some Wall Street investors for making what they see as ridiculous promises. Against great odds he has delivered highly popular electric vehicles and built the first company to return a rocket booster from orbit and launch it again. On the other hand, he has burned through billions in capital and routinely misses aggressive product release schedules.\n\n\nHe said he is devoting just 2% to 3% of his time to the Boring Company, which he said is staffed today with interns and part-timers and works with second-hand machinery. But TED audience members seemed no less wowed by the company\u2019s first concept video.\u00a0\nThe animation showed elevators built into the street that would lower cars to a tunnel network running on many levels, where they would travel on high-speed \u201cskates\u201d along what appear to be magnetic rails. These skates, Mr. Musk said, would top out at about 130 miles per hour.\nTo lower the cost of current tunneling technology, and make his network possible, Mr. Musk said he would decrease tunnel diameter and develop boring machines that could reinforce tunnels as they go, speeding the digging process.\nDays after Uber Technologies Inc. revealed plans to test flying cars\u00a0in three years, Mr. Musk criticized the idea of taking to the skies to alleviate road traffic.\u00a0\u201cIf something is flying over your head...that is not an anxiety-reducing situation,\u201d he said. As a person walking down the street, \u201cyou\u2019re thinking, \u2018Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and\u00a0guillotine me?\u2019 \u201d\nMr. Musk would have to address much more than tunneling technology to make his network possible. New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says on its website that \u201ctunneling\u201d was only 9% of the $4.5 billion construction cost of its Second Avenue subway.\u00a0\nDiscussing Tesla, Mr. Musk said the company is on track to begin production in July for its Model 3 sedan, its long-awaited mass-market car on which the future of the company is staked. Appeasing investor concerns, he called the company\u2019s ability to meet July deadline \u201cquite good.\u201d\nHe also reiterated that Tesla would show off a new electric semi in the fall, sharing a concept photo that was only the silhouette of a truck with its headlights on. He said the heavy-duty, long-range truck\u00a0will be capable of pulling a diesel semi uphill but will be as \u201cspry\u201d as a sports car.\nDespite\u00a0Tesla\u2019s recent loss of valuable members of its Autopilot self-driving car team, Mr. Musk said the company is still planning to\u00a0have a car drive itself from Los Angeles to New York in November or December, without a human touching the controls during the journey.\nMr. Musk said what motivates him to be so ambitious is that technology advancement isn\u2019t always inevitable. The U.S. sent men\u00a0to the moon in the 1960s, he said, and years later it no longer has a spacecraft that can even send them to low-earth orbit. The Egyptians forgot how to build the pyramids and the Romans their aqueducts, he said.\n\u201cI\u2019m not trying to be anyone\u2019s savior,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.\u201d\n\u2014Eliot Brown contributed to this article. The chef executive of Tesla Inc. touted ambitious plans, including an underground roadway accessed by elevators, more giant battery factories and an electric semi truck. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Latest Dream: Underground Roadways (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6746",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-latest-dream-underground-roadways-1493416625?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=96",
        "text": "He also reiterated Tesla\u2019s plan to announce \u201cprobably four\u201d more of its giant battery factories by the end of the year and showed a teaser photo of an electric semi truck, which the company has said it will reveal in more detail in September.\n\n\n\n\nThe talk also included previous animations Mr. Musk has shown of a rocket SpaceX proposes to build to send people to Mars. He didn\u2019t discuss his newest company, Neuralink, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last month.\n\n\n\n\n\nRelated Video\n\n\n\n\nA concept video showing Elon Musk\u2019s idea for a roadway system underneath cities that could be accessed by elevators to zip cars through tunnels, avoiding surface traffic.\n\n\n\nMr. Musk is a hero to technology types who believe he can usher in a science fiction-inspired future, and also often criticized by some Wall Street investors for making what they see as ridiculous promises. Against great odds he has delivered highly popular electric vehicles and built the first company to return a rocket booster from orbit and launch it again. On the other hand, he has burned through billions in capital and routinely misses aggressive product release schedules.\n\n\nHe said he is devoting just 2% to 3% of his time to the Boring Company, which he said is staffed today with interns and part-timers and works with second-hand machinery. But TED audience members seemed no less wowed by the company\u2019s first concept video.\u00a0\nThe animation showed elevators built into the street that would lower cars to a tunnel network running on many levels, where they would travel on high-speed \u201cskates\u201d along what appear to be magnetic rails. These skates, Mr. Musk said, would top out at about 130 miles per hour.\nTo lower the cost of current tunneling technology, and make his network possible, Mr. Musk said he would decrease tunnel diameter and develop boring machines that could reinforce tunnels as they go, speeding the digging process.\nDays after Uber Technologies Inc. revealed plans to test flying cars\u00a0in three years, Mr. Musk criticized the idea of taking to the skies to alleviate road traffic.\u00a0\u201cIf something is flying over your head...that is not an anxiety-reducing situation,\u201d he said. As a person walking down the street, \u201cyou\u2019re thinking, \u2018Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and\u00a0guillotine me?\u2019 \u201d\nMr. Musk would have to address much more than tunneling technology to make his network possible. New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says on its website that \u201ctunneling\u201d was only 9% of the $4.5 billion construction cost of its Second Avenue subway.\u00a0\nDiscussing Tesla, Mr. Musk said the company is on track to begin production in July for its Model 3 sedan, its long-awaited mass-market car on which the future of the company is staked. Appeasing investor concerns, he called the company\u2019s ability to meet July deadline \u201cquite good.\u201d\nHe also reiterated that Tesla would show off a new electric semi in the fall, sharing a concept photo that was only the silhouette of a truck with its headlights on. He said the heavy-duty, long-range truck\u00a0will be capable of pulling a diesel semi uphill but will be as \u201cspry\u201d as a sports car.\nDespite\u00a0Tesla\u2019s recent loss of valuable members of its Autopilot self-driving car team, Mr. Musk said the company is still planning to\u00a0have a car drive itself from Los Angeles to New York in November or December, without a human touching the controls during the journey.\nMr. Musk said what motivates him to be so ambitious is that technology advancement isn\u2019t always inevitable. The U.S. sent men\u00a0to the moon in the 1960s, he said, and years later it no longer has a spacecraft that can even send them to low-earth orbit. The Egyptians forgot how to build the pyramids and the Romans their aqueducts, he said.\n\u201cI\u2019m not trying to be anyone\u2019s savior,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.\u201d\n\u2014Eliot Brown contributed to this article. The chef executive of Tesla Inc. touted ambitious plans, including an underground roadway accessed by elevators, more giant battery factories and an electric semi truck. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Latest Dream: Underground Roadways (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6747",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-latest-dream-underground-roadways-1493416625?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=124",
        "text": "He also reiterated Tesla\u2019s plan to announce \u201cprobably four\u201d more of its giant battery factories by the end of the year and showed a teaser photo of an electric semi truck, which the company has said it will reveal in more detail in September.\n\n\n\n\nThe talk also included previous animations Mr. Musk has shown of a rocket SpaceX proposes to build to send people to Mars. He didn\u2019t discuss his newest company, Neuralink, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last month.\n\n\n\n\n\nRelated Video\n\n\n\n\nA concept video showing Elon Musk\u2019s idea for a roadway system underneath cities that could be accessed by elevators to zip cars through tunnels, avoiding surface traffic.\n\n\n\nMr. Musk is a hero to technology types who believe he can usher in a science fiction-inspired future, and also often criticized by some Wall Street investors for making what they see as ridiculous promises. Against great odds he has delivered highly popular electric vehicles and built the first company to return a rocket booster from orbit and launch it again. On the other hand, he has burned through billions in capital and routinely misses aggressive product release schedules.\n\n\nHe said he is devoting just 2% to 3% of his time to the Boring Company, which he said is staffed today with interns and part-timers and works with second-hand machinery. But TED audience members seemed no less wowed by the company\u2019s first concept video.\u00a0\nThe animation showed elevators built into the street that would lower cars to a tunnel network running on many levels, where they would travel on high-speed \u201cskates\u201d along what appear to be magnetic rails. These skates, Mr. Musk said, would top out at about 130 miles per hour.\nTo lower the cost of current tunneling technology, and make his network possible, Mr. Musk said he would decrease tunnel diameter and develop boring machines that could reinforce tunnels as they go, speeding the digging process.\nDays after Uber Technologies Inc. revealed plans to test flying cars\u00a0in three years, Mr. Musk criticized the idea of taking to the skies to alleviate road traffic.\u00a0\u201cIf something is flying over your head...that is not an anxiety-reducing situation,\u201d he said. As a person walking down the street, \u201cyou\u2019re thinking, \u2018Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and\u00a0guillotine me?\u2019 \u201d\nMr. Musk would have to address much more than tunneling technology to make his network possible. New York City\u2019s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says on its website that \u201ctunneling\u201d was only 9% of the $4.5 billion construction cost of its Second Avenue subway.\u00a0\nDiscussing Tesla, Mr. Musk said the company is on track to begin production in July for its Model 3 sedan, its long-awaited mass-market car on which the future of the company is staked. Appeasing investor concerns, he called the company\u2019s ability to meet July deadline \u201cquite good.\u201d\nHe also reiterated that Tesla would show off a new electric semi in the fall, sharing a concept photo that was only the silhouette of a truck with its headlights on. He said the heavy-duty, long-range truck\u00a0will be capable of pulling a diesel semi uphill but will be as \u201cspry\u201d as a sports car.\nDespite\u00a0Tesla\u2019s recent loss of valuable members of its Autopilot self-driving car team, Mr. Musk said the company is still planning to\u00a0have a car drive itself from Los Angeles to New York in November or December, without a human touching the controls during the journey.\nMr. Musk said what motivates him to be so ambitious is that technology advancement isn\u2019t always inevitable. The U.S. sent men\u00a0to the moon in the 1960s, he said, and years later it no longer has a spacecraft that can even send them to low-earth orbit. The Egyptians forgot how to build the pyramids and the Romans their aqueducts, he said.\n\u201cI\u2019m not trying to be anyone\u2019s savior,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.\u201d\n\u2014Eliot Brown contributed to this article. The chef executive of Tesla Inc. touted ambitious plans, including an underground roadway accessed by elevators, more giant battery factories and an electric semi truck. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6748",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-projects-first-private-trips-to-mars-by-middle-of-next-decade-1506675589?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=22",
        "text": "From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n On Tuesday, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nProjecting the first trips to Mars in 2022 or 2024\u2014more than a decade before the U.S. or any other governments anticipate coming close\u2014Mr. Musk\u2019s latest plans are built around a business model he hadn\u2019t publicly broached before.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as his company is formally called, seeks to create a single fleet of super-powerful rockets and spacecraft able to serve commercial satellite operators, U.S. government customers and Mr. Musk\u2019s own dreams of deep space exploration.\n\n\nBy applying technology from his current boosters and vehicles to build much larger, more-capable versions, Mr. Musk aims to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his Mars ambitions. The existing hardware would be phased out and replaced by the multipurpose systems.\n\u201cI think we have figured out how to pay for it,\u201d he told the crowd of scientists, industry officials and space aficionados gathered in Adelaide. \u201cWe think we have a way to do it.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who is also the co-founder of Tesla Inc., stayed away from cost estimates\u2014even though industry officials over the years have questioned some of SpaceX\u2019s internal revenue and profit projections. The company\u2019s Falcon Heavy is four years late and its manned Dragon capsule, intended to carry astronauts to the international space station, is even tardier and hasn\u2019t yet flown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOutside experts estimate the price tag to reach Mars at $10 billion, raising questions about the company\u2019s ability to generate that level of free cash flow over the next few years. SpaceX\u2019s primary business today is lofting satellites for commercial customers and the Pentagon. Yet internal company projections from early 2016 showed that at best total launch revenue would continue climbing and still remain below $3.3 billion by 2019. Mr. Musk\u2019s plans for a multibillion-dollar satellite operating company are at an early stage.\nMr. Musk didn\u2019t mention the price of a ticket to Mars, either. Last year, while discussing a different rocket-spacecraft combination, the SpaceX chief said initially a voyage to Mars could cost a person roughly $200,000.\nDuring his speech Friday, Mr. Musk said a one-way trip to Mars would take three to six months. Independent space scientists have estimated it would take at least twice that long with current rocket technology, depending on the position of the planets. \nThe potential 2022 Mars rendezvous and other dates cited Friday appear more ambitious than references he made in a similar speech a year ago.\nCritics have said Mr. Musk\u2019s goals are overly ambitious and have noted SpaceX\u2019s fewer-than-planned launches and revenue shortfalls partly due to a pair of accidents.\nOn Friday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the 2022 target was largely \u201caspirational,\u201d but said he was \u201cfairly confident\u201d that by 2024 SpaceX could fly as many as four spacecraft, including two with crews, to the Martian surface to start building a fuel depot. \nThe planet\u2019s position in those two years is suitable for an attempt.\nThe billionaire, who has shaken up the space business and notched several historic firsts with his reusable rockets, was poised to counter naysayers who have called his grand plan a sci-fi dream.\nHis updated vision of a public-private partnership relies less on major new federal programs supporting Mars exploration and more on repurposing SpaceX\u2019s own cash flow from commercial ventures.\nMr. Musk\u2019s comments are likely to fan a debate over the role of entrepreneurial initiatives in championing exploration deeper into the solar system.\nAs he has done before, Mr. Musk is signaling to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration that SpaceX thinks it can implement plans to reach Mars that will be faster, cheaper and better than those being developed by the agency or its international partners.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk depicts a potential human colony on Mars on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n stringer/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe engineering underpinnings of the latest plan differ from earlier incarnations, including a revised heavy-lift rocket more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted the first U.S. astronauts to the moon half a century ago. \nSpaceX\u2019s next-generation rocket is now expected to be somewhat smaller than originally conceived, featuring 31 methane-fueled engines rather than the 42 Mr. Musk announced roughly a year ago. It is still slated to carry up to 150 tons into low-earth orbit.\nIt would be roughly 10 times more powerful th Billionaire entrepreneur sees super-powerful rockets and giant capsules being used for commercial contracts and deep space missions\u2014and later, passengers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6749",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-projects-first-private-trips-to-mars-by-middle-of-next-decade-1506675589?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=25",
        "text": "From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n On Tuesday, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nProjecting the first trips to Mars in 2022 or 2024\u2014more than a decade before the U.S. or any other governments anticipate coming close\u2014Mr. Musk\u2019s latest plans are built around a business model he hadn\u2019t publicly broached before.\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as his company is formally called, seeks to create a single fleet of super-powerful rockets and spacecraft able to serve commercial satellite operators, U.S. government customers and Mr. Musk\u2019s own dreams of deep space exploration.\n\n\nBy applying technology from his current boosters and vehicles to build much larger, more-capable versions, Mr. Musk aims to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his Mars ambitions. The existing hardware would be phased out and replaced by the multipurpose systems.\n\u201cI think we have figured out how to pay for it,\u201d he told the crowd of scientists, industry officials and space aficionados gathered in Adelaide. \u201cWe think we have a way to do it.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who is also the co-founder of Tesla Inc., stayed away from cost estimates\u2014even though industry officials over the years have questioned some of SpaceX\u2019s internal revenue and profit projections. The company\u2019s Falcon Heavy is four years late and its manned Dragon capsule, intended to carry astronauts to the international space station, is even tardier and hasn\u2019t yet flown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOutside experts estimate the price tag to reach Mars at $10 billion, raising questions about the company\u2019s ability to generate that level of free cash flow over the next few years. SpaceX\u2019s primary business today is lofting satellites for commercial customers and the Pentagon. Yet internal company projections from early 2016 showed that at best total launch revenue would continue climbing and still remain below $3.3 billion by 2019. Mr. Musk\u2019s plans for a multibillion-dollar satellite operating company are at an early stage.\nMr. Musk didn\u2019t mention the price of a ticket to Mars, either. Last year, while discussing a different rocket-spacecraft combination, the SpaceX chief said initially a voyage to Mars could cost a person roughly $200,000.\nDuring his speech Friday, Mr. Musk said a one-way trip to Mars would take three to six months. Independent space scientists have estimated it would take at least twice that long with current rocket technology, depending on the position of the planets. \nThe potential 2022 Mars rendezvous and other dates cited Friday appear more ambitious than references he made in a similar speech a year ago.\nCritics have said Mr. Musk\u2019s goals are overly ambitious and have noted SpaceX\u2019s fewer-than-planned launches and revenue shortfalls partly due to a pair of accidents.\nOn Friday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the 2022 target was largely \u201caspirational,\u201d but said he was \u201cfairly confident\u201d that by 2024 SpaceX could fly as many as four spacecraft, including two with crews, to the Martian surface to start building a fuel depot. \nThe planet\u2019s position in those two years is suitable for an attempt.\nThe billionaire, who has shaken up the space business and notched several historic firsts with his reusable rockets, was poised to counter naysayers who have called his grand plan a sci-fi dream.\nHis updated vision of a public-private partnership relies less on major new federal programs supporting Mars exploration and more on repurposing SpaceX\u2019s own cash flow from commercial ventures.\nMr. Musk\u2019s comments are likely to fan a debate over the role of entrepreneurial initiatives in championing exploration deeper into the solar system.\nAs he has done before, Mr. Musk is signaling to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration that SpaceX thinks it can implement plans to reach Mars that will be faster, cheaper and better than those being developed by the agency or its international partners.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk depicts a potential human colony on Mars on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n stringer/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe engineering underpinnings of the latest plan differ from earlier incarnations, including a revised heavy-lift rocket more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted the first U.S. astronauts to the moon half a century ago. \nSpaceX\u2019s next-generation rocket is now expected to be somewhat smaller than originally conceived, featuring 31 methane-fueled engines rather than the 42 Mr. Musk announced roughly a year ago. It is still slated to carry up to 150 tons into low-earth orbit.\nIt would be roughly 10 times more powerfu Billionaire entrepreneur sees super-powerful rockets and giant capsules being used for commercial contracts and deep space missions\u2014and later, passengers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6750",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-projects-first-private-trips-to-mars-by-middle-of-next-decade-1506675589?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=79",
        "text": "From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n On Tuesday, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nProjecting the first trips to Mars in 2022 or 2024\u2014more than a decade before the U.S. or any other governments anticipate coming close\u2014Mr. Musk\u2019s latest plans are built around a business model he hadn\u2019t publicly broached before.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as his company is formally called, seeks to create a single fleet of super-powerful rockets and spacecraft able to serve commercial satellite operators, U.S. government customers and Mr. Musk\u2019s own dreams of deep space exploration.\n\n\nBy applying technology from his current boosters and vehicles to build much larger, more-capable versions, Mr. Musk aims to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his Mars ambitions. The existing hardware would be phased out and replaced by the multipurpose systems.\n\u201cI think we have figured out how to pay for it,\u201d he told the crowd of scientists, industry officials and space aficionados gathered in Adelaide. \u201cWe think we have a way to do it.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who is also the co-founder of Tesla Inc., stayed away from cost estimates\u2014even though industry officials over the years have questioned some of SpaceX\u2019s internal revenue and profit projections. The company\u2019s Falcon Heavy is four years late and its manned Dragon capsule, intended to carry astronauts to the international space station, is even tardier and hasn\u2019t yet flown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOutside experts estimate the price tag to reach Mars at $10 billion, raising questions about the company\u2019s ability to generate that level of free cash flow over the next few years. SpaceX\u2019s primary business today is lofting satellites for commercial customers and the Pentagon. Yet internal company projections from early 2016 showed that at best total launch revenue would continue climbing and still remain below $3.3 billion by 2019. Mr. Musk\u2019s plans for a multibillion-dollar satellite operating company are at an early stage.\nMr. Musk didn\u2019t mention the price of a ticket to Mars, either. Last year, while discussing a different rocket-spacecraft combination, the SpaceX chief said initially a voyage to Mars could cost a person roughly $200,000.\nDuring his speech Friday, Mr. Musk said a one-way trip to Mars would take three to six months. Independent space scientists have estimated it would take at least twice that long with current rocket technology, depending on the position of the planets. \nThe potential 2022 Mars rendezvous and other dates cited Friday appear more ambitious than references he made in a similar speech a year ago.\nCritics have said Mr. Musk\u2019s goals are overly ambitious and have noted SpaceX\u2019s fewer-than-planned launches and revenue shortfalls partly due to a pair of accidents.\nOn Friday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the 2022 target was largely \u201caspirational,\u201d but said he was \u201cfairly confident\u201d that by 2024 SpaceX could fly as many as four spacecraft, including two with crews, to the Martian surface to start building a fuel depot. \nThe planet\u2019s position in those two years is suitable for an attempt.\nThe billionaire, who has shaken up the space business and notched several historic firsts with his reusable rockets, was poised to counter naysayers who have called his grand plan a sci-fi dream.\nHis updated vision of a public-private partnership relies less on major new federal programs supporting Mars exploration and more on repurposing SpaceX\u2019s own cash flow from commercial ventures.\nMr. Musk\u2019s comments are likely to fan a debate over the role of entrepreneurial initiatives in championing exploration deeper into the solar system.\nAs he has done before, Mr. Musk is signaling to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration that SpaceX thinks it can implement plans to reach Mars that will be faster, cheaper and better than those being developed by the agency or its international partners.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk depicts a potential human colony on Mars on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n stringer/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe engineering underpinnings of the latest plan differ from earlier incarnations, including a revised heavy-lift rocket more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted the first U.S. astronauts to the moon half a century ago. \nSpaceX\u2019s next-generation rocket is now expected to be somewhat smaller than originally conceived, featuring 31 methane-fueled engines rather than the 42 Mr. Musk announced roughly a year ago. It is still slated to carry up to 150 tons into low-earth orbit.\nIt would be roughly 10 times more powerful th Billionaire entrepreneur sees super-powerful rockets and giant capsules being used for commercial contracts and deep space missions\u2014and later, passengers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6751",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-projects-first-private-trips-to-mars-by-middle-of-next-decade-1506675589?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=76",
        "text": "From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n On Tuesday, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nProjecting the first trips to Mars in 2022 or 2024\u2014more than a decade before the U.S. or any other governments anticipate coming close\u2014Mr. Musk\u2019s latest plans are built around a business model he hadn\u2019t publicly broached before.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as his company is formally called, seeks to create a single fleet of super-powerful rockets and spacecraft able to serve commercial satellite operators, U.S. government customers and Mr. Musk\u2019s own dreams of deep space exploration.\n\n\nBy applying technology from his current boosters and vehicles to build much larger, more-capable versions, Mr. Musk aims to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his Mars ambitions. The existing hardware would be phased out and replaced by the multipurpose systems.\n\u201cI think we have figured out how to pay for it,\u201d he told the crowd of scientists, industry officials and space aficionados gathered in Adelaide. \u201cWe think we have a way to do it.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who is also the co-founder of Tesla Inc., stayed away from cost estimates\u2014even though industry officials over the years have questioned some of SpaceX\u2019s internal revenue and profit projections. The company\u2019s Falcon Heavy is four years late and its manned Dragon capsule, intended to carry astronauts to the international space station, is even tardier and hasn\u2019t yet flown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOutside experts estimate the price tag to reach Mars at $10 billion, raising questions about the company\u2019s ability to generate that level of free cash flow over the next few years. SpaceX\u2019s primary business today is lofting satellites for commercial customers and the Pentagon. Yet internal company projections from early 2016 showed that at best total launch revenue would continue climbing and still remain below $3.3 billion by 2019. Mr. Musk\u2019s plans for a multibillion-dollar satellite operating company are at an early stage.\nMr. Musk didn\u2019t mention the price of a ticket to Mars, either. Last year, while discussing a different rocket-spacecraft combination, the SpaceX chief said initially a voyage to Mars could cost a person roughly $200,000.\nDuring his speech Friday, Mr. Musk said a one-way trip to Mars would take three to six months. Independent space scientists have estimated it would take at least twice that long with current rocket technology, depending on the position of the planets. \nThe potential 2022 Mars rendezvous and other dates cited Friday appear more ambitious than references he made in a similar speech a year ago.\nCritics have said Mr. Musk\u2019s goals are overly ambitious and have noted SpaceX\u2019s fewer-than-planned launches and revenue shortfalls partly due to a pair of accidents.\nOn Friday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the 2022 target was largely \u201caspirational,\u201d but said he was \u201cfairly confident\u201d that by 2024 SpaceX could fly as many as four spacecraft, including two with crews, to the Martian surface to start building a fuel depot. \nThe planet\u2019s position in those two years is suitable for an attempt.\nThe billionaire, who has shaken up the space business and notched several historic firsts with his reusable rockets, was poised to counter naysayers who have called his grand plan a sci-fi dream.\nHis updated vision of a public-private partnership relies less on major new federal programs supporting Mars exploration and more on repurposing SpaceX\u2019s own cash flow from commercial ventures.\nMr. Musk\u2019s comments are likely to fan a debate over the role of entrepreneurial initiatives in championing exploration deeper into the solar system.\nAs he has done before, Mr. Musk is signaling to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration that SpaceX thinks it can implement plans to reach Mars that will be faster, cheaper and better than those being developed by the agency or its international partners.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk depicts a potential human colony on Mars on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n stringer/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe engineering underpinnings of the latest plan differ from earlier incarnations, including a revised heavy-lift rocket more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted the first U.S. astronauts to the moon half a century ago. \nSpaceX\u2019s next-generation rocket is now expected to be somewhat smaller than originally conceived, featuring 31 methane-fueled engines rather than the 42 Mr. Musk announced roughly a year ago. It is still slated to carry up to 150 tons into low-earth orbit.\nIt would be roughly 10 times more powerful th Billionaire entrepreneur sees super-powerful rockets and giant capsules being used for commercial contracts and deep space missions\u2014and later, passengers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6752",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-projects-first-private-trips-to-mars-by-middle-of-next-decade-1506675589?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=112",
        "text": "From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX\u2014Space Exploration Technologies\u2014said it plans to take tourists on a trip around the moon in as little as two years, after it starts ferrying NASA astronauts to the international space station. Photo: SpaceX/EPA (Originally published Feb. 28, 2017)\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n On Tuesday, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nProjecting the first trips to Mars in 2022 or 2024\u2014more than a decade before the U.S. or any other governments anticipate coming close\u2014Mr. Musk\u2019s latest plans are built around a business model he hadn\u2019t publicly broached before.\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as his company is formally called, seeks to create a single fleet of super-powerful rockets and spacecraft able to serve commercial satellite operators, U.S. government customers and Mr. Musk\u2019s own dreams of deep space exploration.\n\n\nBy applying technology from his current boosters and vehicles to build much larger, more-capable versions, Mr. Musk aims to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his Mars ambitions. The existing hardware would be phased out and replaced by the multipurpose systems.\n\u201cI think we have figured out how to pay for it,\u201d he told the crowd of scientists, industry officials and space aficionados gathered in Adelaide. \u201cWe think we have a way to do it.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who is also the co-founder of Tesla Inc., stayed away from cost estimates\u2014even though industry officials over the years have questioned some of SpaceX\u2019s internal revenue and profit projections. The company\u2019s Falcon Heavy is four years late and its manned Dragon capsule, intended to carry astronauts to the international space station, is even tardier and hasn\u2019t yet flown.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOutside experts estimate the price tag to reach Mars at $10 billion, raising questions about the company\u2019s ability to generate that level of free cash flow over the next few years. SpaceX\u2019s primary business today is lofting satellites for commercial customers and the Pentagon. Yet internal company projections from early 2016 showed that at best total launch revenue would continue climbing and still remain below $3.3 billion by 2019. Mr. Musk\u2019s plans for a multibillion-dollar satellite operating company are at an early stage.\nMr. Musk didn\u2019t mention the price of a ticket to Mars, either. Last year, while discussing a different rocket-spacecraft combination, the SpaceX chief said initially a voyage to Mars could cost a person roughly $200,000.\nDuring his speech Friday, Mr. Musk said a one-way trip to Mars would take three to six months. Independent space scientists have estimated it would take at least twice that long with current rocket technology, depending on the position of the planets. \nThe potential 2022 Mars rendezvous and other dates cited Friday appear more ambitious than references he made in a similar speech a year ago.\nCritics have said Mr. Musk\u2019s goals are overly ambitious and have noted SpaceX\u2019s fewer-than-planned launches and revenue shortfalls partly due to a pair of accidents.\nOn Friday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the 2022 target was largely \u201caspirational,\u201d but said he was \u201cfairly confident\u201d that by 2024 SpaceX could fly as many as four spacecraft, including two with crews, to the Martian surface to start building a fuel depot. \nThe planet\u2019s position in those two years is suitable for an attempt.\nThe billionaire, who has shaken up the space business and notched several historic firsts with his reusable rockets, was poised to counter naysayers who have called his grand plan a sci-fi dream.\nHis updated vision of a public-private partnership relies less on major new federal programs supporting Mars exploration and more on repurposing SpaceX\u2019s own cash flow from commercial ventures.\nMr. Musk\u2019s comments are likely to fan a debate over the role of entrepreneurial initiatives in championing exploration deeper into the solar system.\nAs he has done before, Mr. Musk is signaling to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration that SpaceX thinks it can implement plans to reach Mars that will be faster, cheaper and better than those being developed by the agency or its international partners.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk depicts a potential human colony on Mars on Friday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n stringer/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe engineering underpinnings of the latest plan differ from earlier incarnations, including a revised heavy-lift rocket more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted the first U.S. astronauts to the moon half a century ago. \nSpaceX\u2019s next-generation rocket is now expected to be somewhat smaller than originally conceived, featuring 31 methane-fueled engines rather than the 42 Mr. Musk announced roughly a year ago. It is still slated to carry up to 150 tons into low-earth orbit.\nIt would be roughly 10 times more powerfu Billionaire entrepreneur sees super-powerful rockets and giant capsules being used for commercial contracts and deep space missions\u2014and later, passengers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Unveils High-Level Council for Coordinating Space Policy (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6753",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-set-to-unveil-high-level-council-for-coordinating-space-policy-1498848039?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=80",
        "text": "Friday\u2019s announcement, long anticipated by lawmakers and industry officials, was decided before the GOP president was sworn in, according to people familiar with the details. The goals include speeding up big-ticket government space programs, while leveraging commercial projects to streamline federal efforts and reduce taxpayer costs.\nThe administration has yet to pick nominees for other important positions involving space, including the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. \n\n\nThe priorities detailed in Mr. Trump\u2019s executive order include developing long-range goals and strategies for space and fostering \u201cclose coordination, cooperation and technology and information exchange\u201d between various space sectors. Under the order, federal departments and agencies must conform to policies established by the council.\nMark Albrecht, the council\u2019s last executive secretary before the panel effectively ceased operations in 1993, helped establish the framework for the new group.\nMr. Albrecht said Friday that the order \u201cprovides all the necessary authorities\u201d to address every component of space\u2014from civil to commercial to national security operations\u2014\u201cseparately and as an integrated whole.\u201d\nThe council\u2019s \u201cagenda will be substantial and urgent,\u201d ranging from rationalizing launch options \u201cto fully integrating new privatized and commercial space capabilities\u201d into an overarching national space policy, Mr. Albrecht said.\nThe council will be comprised of a handful of cabinet members, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence and other senior White House aides. \nInitially, the president\u2019s executive order was supposed to be accompanied by some personnel decisions. Still, the anticipated move will provide top-level oversight of government space initiatives\u2014spanning both manned and unmanned programs\u2014while providing a single coordination point for matching priorities between NASA\u2019s more than $19 billion annual budget and the Pentagon\u2019s larger overall spending blueprint.\n Many national-security spy satellites, experimental spacecraft and other space projects are highly classified and their budgets aren\u2019t public.\nEarlier incarnations of the council stretched back to the height of the U.S.-Russian space race of the 1960s, while the last version was in place more than two decades ago during former President George H.W. Bush\u2019s tenure in the White House.\nOne of the council\u2019s primary missions is expected to be dealing with the bureaucratic logjam that has resulted in what many lawmakers and even Pentagon brass acknowledge are overly expensive launches of national-security satellites. NASA and the Pentagon currently are following independent plans to build next-generation launchers, and critics contend there hasn\u2019t been enough effort to identify potential cost saving through closer cooperation.\nIn addition, the budding commercial space industry offers new opportunities for the government to reduce launch costs and eventually replace some existing spy satellites with smaller, much less expensive versions.\nFormation of the council as a formal focus for such deliberations also comes at a time that the White House and the Pentagon are formulating plans to step up protection of U.S. space assets. Officials are working to devise new hardware, warfighting doctrine and organizational structures in response to aggressive moves by Russia, China and other nations challenging American supremacy in orbit.\nMr., Albrecht said the council will consider ways to deploy \u201cnew and dominant space deterrence and warfighting capabilities\u201d in light of the increasingly contested environment of space. Pentagon officials recently have stressed the importance of stepping up U.S. offensive capabilities in space, and lawmakers already have committed to increase budgets for that.\nFor NASA, closer White House scrutiny could mean hard decisions to abandon some current programs to fit projected spending within likely flat budget ceilings in coming years.\nAbsence of a NASA chief has hobbled efforts to revise agency priorities, and the signing ceremony itself reflected White House efforts to demonstrate that the council intends to look more broadly than manned exploration. None of NASA\u2019s senior career officials attended the ceremony.\nDespite a flurry of early interest by senior White House aides in changing civilian space policy, so far the administration has avoided major new programs and generally has maintained a status quo budget for NASA.\nEarly on, White House aides expressed interest in melding commercial efforts with NASA\u2019s manned space exploration programs, but there has been scant movement in that direction.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The White House revived a governmentwide policy council for space, to be headed by Vice President Mike Pence, with the goal of establishing closer coordination between civilian, military and budding commercial activities beyond the atmosphere. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Unveils High-Level Council for Coordinating Space Policy (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6754",
        "date": "2017-06-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-set-to-unveil-high-level-council-for-coordinating-space-policy-1498848039?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=119",
        "text": "Friday\u2019s announcement, long anticipated by lawmakers and industry officials, was decided before the GOP president was sworn in, according to people familiar with the details. The goals include speeding up big-ticket government space programs, while leveraging commercial projects to streamline federal efforts and reduce taxpayer costs.\n\n\n\n\nThe administration has yet to pick nominees for other important positions involving space, including the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. \n\n\nThe priorities detailed in Mr. Trump\u2019s executive order include developing long-range goals and strategies for space and fostering \u201cclose coordination, cooperation and technology and information exchange\u201d between various space sectors. Under the order, federal departments and agencies must conform to policies established by the council.\nMark Albrecht, the council\u2019s last executive secretary before the panel effectively ceased operations in 1993, helped establish the framework for the new group.\nMr. Albrecht said Friday that the order \u201cprovides all the necessary authorities\u201d to address every component of space\u2014from civil to commercial to national security operations\u2014\u201cseparately and as an integrated whole.\u201d\nThe council\u2019s \u201cagenda will be substantial and urgent,\u201d ranging from rationalizing launch options \u201cto fully integrating new privatized and commercial space capabilities\u201d into an overarching national space policy, Mr. Albrecht said.\nThe council will be comprised of a handful of cabinet members, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence and other senior White House aides. \nInitially, the president\u2019s executive order was supposed to be accompanied by some personnel decisions. Still, the anticipated move will provide top-level oversight of government space initiatives\u2014spanning both manned and unmanned programs\u2014while providing a single coordination point for matching priorities between NASA\u2019s more than $19 billion annual budget and the Pentagon\u2019s larger overall spending blueprint.\n Many national-security spy satellites, experimental spacecraft and other space projects are highly classified and their budgets aren\u2019t public.\nEarlier incarnations of the council stretched back to the height of the U.S.-Russian space race of the 1960s, while the last version was in place more than two decades ago during former President George H.W. Bush\u2019s tenure in the White House.\nOne of the council\u2019s primary missions is expected to be dealing with the bureaucratic logjam that has resulted in what many lawmakers and even Pentagon brass acknowledge are overly expensive launches of national-security satellites. NASA and the Pentagon currently are following independent plans to build next-generation launchers, and critics contend there hasn\u2019t been enough effort to identify potential cost saving through closer cooperation.\nIn addition, the budding commercial space industry offers new opportunities for the government to reduce launch costs and eventually replace some existing spy satellites with smaller, much less expensive versions.\nFormation of the council as a formal focus for such deliberations also comes at a time that the White House and the Pentagon are formulating plans to step up protection of U.S. space assets. Officials are working to devise new hardware, warfighting doctrine and organizational structures in response to aggressive moves by Russia, China and other nations challenging American supremacy in orbit.\nMr., Albrecht said the council will consider ways to deploy \u201cnew and dominant space deterrence and warfighting capabilities\u201d in light of the increasingly contested environment of space. Pentagon officials recently have stressed the importance of stepping up U.S. offensive capabilities in space, and lawmakers already have committed to increase budgets for that.\nFor NASA, closer White House scrutiny could mean hard decisions to abandon some current programs to fit projected spending within likely flat budget ceilings in coming years.\nAbsence of a NASA chief has hobbled efforts to revise agency priorities, and the signing ceremony itself reflected White House efforts to demonstrate that the council intends to look more broadly than manned exploration. None of NASA\u2019s senior career officials attended the ceremony.\nDespite a flurry of early interest by senior White House aides in changing civilian space policy, so far the administration has avoided major new programs and generally has maintained a status quo budget for NASA.\nEarly on, White House aides expressed interest in melding commercial efforts with NASA\u2019s manned space exploration programs, but there has been scant movement in that direction.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The White House revived a governmentwide policy council for space, to be headed by Vice President Mike Pence, with the goal of establishing closer coordination between civilian, military and budding commercial activities beyond the atmosphere. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket With 10 Iridium Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6755",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-resumes-rocket-launches-by-lofting-cluster-of-iridium-satellites-1484417292?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=27",
        "text": "Following three postponements in recent weeks for technical or weather reasons, the 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket rose through clear skies carrying a cluster of next-generation spacecraft intended to start revitalizing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aging satellite constellation. \nTo top it off, SpaceX once again landed the lower part of the rocket back on a floating platform\u2014this time in the Pacific Ocean. That return landing is part of a goal to save money by reusing major components in multiple launches.\n\n\nThe flight was uneventful from start to finish, offering scant drama even when the time came to release the Iridium satellites, one by one, from a specially designed dispenser. Communication problems hampered initial verification of satellite deployment, but about an hour and 17 minutes after launch, SpaceX\u2019s webcast confirmed all 10 were safely in their proper position. \nIridium\u2019s spacecraft originally were slated to go up last summer, leaving company executives and customers fretting about delays and uncertainty. Last month, however, Iridium Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch\n\n\n\n said that the company never looked into alternatives because SpaceX\u2019s rivals were about twice as expensive.\nAmid celebratory whoops from SpaceX officials in mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket\u2019s main engine cut off and the second-stage engine took over as designed about two minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff was closely watched by many industry officials because it followed the September explosion of an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket during routine launchpad tests in Florida. About 14 months earlier, in June 2015, a cargo mission destined for the international space station ended in a fireball less than three minutes after blastoff. Both times, investigators determined the cause primarily stemmed from unintended consequences of the novel way SpaceX designs, builds and operates rockets.\nThose accidents sparked questions about continuing to develop and phase in new booster variants even as the company sought to ramp up launch tempo to reduce a bulging backlog of delayed missions. Company leaders now appear focused on protecting against the downside of such ambitious dual goals.\nIndustry officials and space experts contend introducing a steady stream of design changes can erode safety. Legacy rocket makers including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n historically have stuck with flight-proven technologies for many years or even decades, convinced that is the best strategy for avoiding accidents.\n\n\nRelated Space-Based Flight Tracking Comes Closer With Launch of Satellites Exclusive Look at SpaceX Data Shows Loss in 2015, Heavy Expectations for Nascent Internet Service NASA Advisory Panel Heightens Warnings About Manned Spacex Flights \n\n\nWith SpaceX making a lot of changes simultaneously, even the smallest changes can have profound consequences on rocket reliability, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n an American University professor and expert on space hardware.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s team of mostly young engineers counter that their more-flexible, contrarian practices promote efficiency, lower costs and in the end, enhance reliability. \u201cInnovation often leads you to be more safe,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Garrett Reisman,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut and senior SpaceX manager.\nDuring Saturday\u2019s countdown\u2014and launch at a precisely the designated instant\u2014fuel, oxidant and helium were loaded more slowly than in some previous launches, reflecting lessons learned from the 2016 launchpad accident.\nDespite its latest success, SpaceX is bound to stay embroiled in those conflicting arguments as it pushes ahead with plans to carry National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts into orbit before the end of the decade.\nSaturday\u2019s launch also represents another sharp turnaround for Mr. Musk and his company, which almost collapsed in its infancy because fledgling, smaller rockets suffered a number of failures. But since 2008, SpaceX has garnered billions of dollars in NASA contracts to become the federal government\u2019s most prominent champion of commercial space ventures.\nWith NASA\u2019s blessing, the company from the start reduced costs and\u00a0sped up production partly by cutting back traditional quality-control\u00a0checks and inspections of parts from subcontractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view Friday of the Falcon 9 rocket on the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX also devised a system to rely on supercooled fuel to assure longer\u00a0engine burns. The aim is to increase reserves of liquid oxidants needed\u00a0to execute maneuvers to return the main part of a booster back to Earth.\nIt took repeated attempts before SpaceX initially managed to land a spent lower stage on a floating platform. Despite the stumbles, industry o Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket, rebounding from a catastrophic accident in September. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket With 10 Iridium Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6756",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-resumes-rocket-launches-by-lofting-cluster-of-iridium-satellites-1484417292?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=103",
        "text": "Following three postponements in recent weeks for technical or weather reasons, the 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket rose through clear skies carrying a cluster of next-generation spacecraft intended to start revitalizing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aging satellite constellation. \nTo top it off, SpaceX once again landed the lower part of the rocket back on a floating platform\u2014this time in the Pacific Ocean. That return landing is part of a goal to save money by reusing major components in multiple launches.\n\n\nThe flight was uneventful from start to finish, offering scant drama even when the time came to release the Iridium satellites, one by one, from a specially designed dispenser. Communication problems hampered initial verification of satellite deployment, but about an hour and 17 minutes after launch, SpaceX\u2019s webcast confirmed all 10 were safely in their proper position. \nIridium\u2019s spacecraft originally were slated to go up last summer, leaving company executives and customers fretting about delays and uncertainty. Last month, however, Iridium Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch\n\n\n\n said that the company never looked into alternatives because SpaceX\u2019s rivals were about twice as expensive.\nAmid celebratory whoops from SpaceX officials in mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket\u2019s main engine cut off and the second-stage engine took over as designed about two minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff was closely watched by many industry officials because it followed the September explosion of an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket during routine launchpad tests in Florida. About 14 months earlier, in June 2015, a cargo mission destined for the international space station ended in a fireball less than three minutes after blastoff. Both times, investigators determined the cause primarily stemmed from unintended consequences of the novel way SpaceX designs, builds and operates rockets.\nThose accidents sparked questions about continuing to develop and phase in new booster variants even as the company sought to ramp up launch tempo to reduce a bulging backlog of delayed missions. Company leaders now appear focused on protecting against the downside of such ambitious dual goals.\nIndustry officials and space experts contend introducing a steady stream of design changes can erode safety. Legacy rocket makers including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n historically have stuck with flight-proven technologies for many years or even decades, convinced that is the best strategy for avoiding accidents.\n\n\nRelated Space-Based Flight Tracking Comes Closer With Launch of Satellites Exclusive Look at SpaceX Data Shows Loss in 2015, Heavy Expectations for Nascent Internet Service NASA Advisory Panel Heightens Warnings About Manned Spacex Flights \n\n\nWith SpaceX making a lot of changes simultaneously, even the smallest changes can have profound consequences on rocket reliability, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n an American University professor and expert on space hardware.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s team of mostly young engineers counter that their more-flexible, contrarian practices promote efficiency, lower costs and in the end, enhance reliability. \u201cInnovation often leads you to be more safe,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Garrett Reisman,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut and senior SpaceX manager.\nDuring Saturday\u2019s countdown\u2014and launch at a precisely the designated instant\u2014fuel, oxidant and helium were loaded more slowly than in some previous launches, reflecting lessons learned from the 2016 launchpad accident.\nDespite its latest success, SpaceX is bound to stay embroiled in those conflicting arguments as it pushes ahead with plans to carry National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts into orbit before the end of the decade.\nSaturday\u2019s launch also represents another sharp turnaround for Mr. Musk and his company, which almost collapsed in its infancy because fledgling, smaller rockets suffered a number of failures. But since 2008, SpaceX has garnered billions of dollars in NASA contracts to become the federal government\u2019s most prominent champion of commercial space ventures.\nWith NASA\u2019s blessing, the company from the start reduced costs and\u00a0sped up production partly by cutting back traditional quality-control\u00a0checks and inspections of parts from subcontractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view Friday of the Falcon 9 rocket on the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX also devised a system to rely on supercooled fuel to assure longer\u00a0engine burns. The aim is to increase reserves of liquid oxidants needed\u00a0to execute maneuvers to return the main part of a booster back to Earth.\nIt took repeated attempts before SpaceX initially managed to land a spent lower stage on a floating platform. Despite the stumbles, industry o Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket, rebounding from a catastrophic accident in September. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket With 10 Iridium Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6757",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-resumes-rocket-launches-by-lofting-cluster-of-iridium-satellites-1484417292?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=89",
        "text": "Following three postponements in recent weeks for technical or weather reasons, the 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket rose through clear skies carrying a cluster of next-generation spacecraft intended to start revitalizing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aging satellite constellation. \nTo top it off, SpaceX once again landed the lower part of the rocket back on a floating platform\u2014this time in the Pacific Ocean. That return landing is part of a goal to save money by reusing major components in multiple launches.\n\n\nThe flight was uneventful from start to finish, offering scant drama even when the time came to release the Iridium satellites, one by one, from a specially designed dispenser. Communication problems hampered initial verification of satellite deployment, but about an hour and 17 minutes after launch, SpaceX\u2019s webcast confirmed all 10 were safely in their proper position. \nIridium\u2019s spacecraft originally were slated to go up last summer, leaving company executives and customers fretting about delays and uncertainty. Last month, however, Iridium Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch\n\n\n\n said that the company never looked into alternatives because SpaceX\u2019s rivals were about twice as expensive.\nAmid celebratory whoops from SpaceX officials in mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket\u2019s main engine cut off and the second-stage engine took over as designed about two minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff was closely watched by many industry officials because it followed the September explosion of an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket during routine launchpad tests in Florida. About 14 months earlier, in June 2015, a cargo mission destined for the international space station ended in a fireball less than three minutes after blastoff. Both times, investigators determined the cause primarily stemmed from unintended consequences of the novel way SpaceX designs, builds and operates rockets.\nThose accidents sparked questions about continuing to develop and phase in new booster variants even as the company sought to ramp up launch tempo to reduce a bulging backlog of delayed missions. Company leaders now appear focused on protecting against the downside of such ambitious dual goals.\nIndustry officials and space experts contend introducing a steady stream of design changes can erode safety. Legacy rocket makers including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n historically have stuck with flight-proven technologies for many years or even decades, convinced that is the best strategy for avoiding accidents.\n\n\nRelated Space-Based Flight Tracking Comes Closer With Launch of Satellites Exclusive Look at SpaceX Data Shows Loss in 2015, Heavy Expectations for Nascent Internet Service NASA Advisory Panel Heightens Warnings About Manned Spacex Flights \n\n\nWith SpaceX making a lot of changes simultaneously, even the smallest changes can have profound consequences on rocket reliability, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n an American University professor and expert on space hardware.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s team of mostly young engineers counter that their more-flexible, contrarian practices promote efficiency, lower costs and in the end, enhance reliability. \u201cInnovation often leads you to be more safe,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Garrett Reisman,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut and senior SpaceX manager.\nDuring Saturday\u2019s countdown\u2014and launch at a precisely the designated instant\u2014fuel, oxidant and helium were loaded more slowly than in some previous launches, reflecting lessons learned from the 2016 launchpad accident.\nDespite its latest success, SpaceX is bound to stay embroiled in those conflicting arguments as it pushes ahead with plans to carry National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts into orbit before the end of the decade.\nSaturday\u2019s launch also represents another sharp turnaround for Mr. Musk and his company, which almost collapsed in its infancy because fledgling, smaller rockets suffered a number of failures. But since 2008, SpaceX has garnered billions of dollars in NASA contracts to become the federal government\u2019s most prominent champion of commercial space ventures.\nWith NASA\u2019s blessing, the company from the start reduced costs and\u00a0sped up production partly by cutting back traditional quality-control\u00a0checks and inspections of parts from subcontractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view Friday of the Falcon 9 rocket on the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX also devised a system to rely on supercooled fuel to assure longer\u00a0engine burns. The aim is to increase reserves of liquid oxidants needed\u00a0to execute maneuvers to return the main part of a booster back to Earth.\nIt took repeated attempts before SpaceX initially managed to land a spent lower stage on a floating platform. Despite the stumbles, industry o Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket, rebounding from a catastrophic accident in September. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket With 10 Iridium Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6758",
        "date": "2017-01-16",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-resumes-rocket-launches-by-lofting-cluster-of-iridium-satellites-1484417292?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=133",
        "text": "Following three postponements in recent weeks for technical or weather reasons, the 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket rose through clear skies carrying a cluster of next-generation spacecraft intended to start revitalizing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n aging satellite constellation. \n\n\n\n\nTo top it off, SpaceX once again landed the lower part of the rocket back on a floating platform\u2014this time in the Pacific Ocean. That return landing is part of a goal to save money by reusing major components in multiple launches.\n\n\nThe flight was uneventful from start to finish, offering scant drama even when the time came to release the Iridium satellites, one by one, from a specially designed dispenser. Communication problems hampered initial verification of satellite deployment, but about an hour and 17 minutes after launch, SpaceX\u2019s webcast confirmed all 10 were safely in their proper position. \nIridium\u2019s spacecraft originally were slated to go up last summer, leaving company executives and customers fretting about delays and uncertainty. Last month, however, Iridium Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Desch\n\n\n\n said that the company never looked into alternatives because SpaceX\u2019s rivals were about twice as expensive.\nAmid celebratory whoops from SpaceX officials in mission control in Hawthorne, Calif., the rocket\u2019s main engine cut off and the second-stage engine took over as designed about two minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.\nSaturday\u2019s blastoff was closely watched by many industry officials because it followed the September explosion of an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket during routine launchpad tests in Florida. About 14 months earlier, in June 2015, a cargo mission destined for the international space station ended in a fireball less than three minutes after blastoff. Both times, investigators determined the cause primarily stemmed from unintended consequences of the novel way SpaceX designs, builds and operates rockets.\nThose accidents sparked questions about continuing to develop and phase in new booster variants even as the company sought to ramp up launch tempo to reduce a bulging backlog of delayed missions. Company leaders now appear focused on protecting against the downside of such ambitious dual goals.\nIndustry officials and space experts contend introducing a steady stream of design changes can erode safety. Legacy rocket makers including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n historically have stuck with flight-proven technologies for many years or even decades, convinced that is the best strategy for avoiding accidents.\n\n\nRelated Space-Based Flight Tracking Comes Closer With Launch of Satellites Exclusive Look at SpaceX Data Shows Loss in 2015, Heavy Expectations for Nascent Internet Service NASA Advisory Panel Heightens Warnings About Manned Spacex Flights \n\n\nWith SpaceX making a lot of changes simultaneously, even the smallest changes can have profound consequences on rocket reliability, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard McCurdy,\n\n\n\n an American University professor and expert on space hardware.\nBut Mr. Musk\u2019s team of mostly young engineers counter that their more-flexible, contrarian practices promote efficiency, lower costs and in the end, enhance reliability. \u201cInnovation often leads you to be more safe,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Garrett Reisman,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut and senior SpaceX manager.\nDuring Saturday\u2019s countdown\u2014and launch at a precisely the designated instant\u2014fuel, oxidant and helium were loaded more slowly than in some previous launches, reflecting lessons learned from the 2016 launchpad accident.\nDespite its latest success, SpaceX is bound to stay embroiled in those conflicting arguments as it pushes ahead with plans to carry National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts into orbit before the end of the decade.\nSaturday\u2019s launch also represents another sharp turnaround for Mr. Musk and his company, which almost collapsed in its infancy because fledgling, smaller rockets suffered a number of failures. But since 2008, SpaceX has garnered billions of dollars in NASA contracts to become the federal government\u2019s most prominent champion of commercial space ventures.\nWith NASA\u2019s blessing, the company from the start reduced costs and\u00a0sped up production partly by cutting back traditional quality-control\u00a0checks and inspections of parts from subcontractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view Friday of the Falcon 9 rocket on the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nSpaceX also devised a system to rely on supercooled fuel to assure longer\u00a0engine burns. The aim is to increase reserves of liquid oxidants needed\u00a0to execute maneuvers to return the main part of a booster back to Earth.\nIt took repeated attempts before SpaceX initially managed to land a spent lower stage on a floating platform. Despite the stumbles, indust Space Exploration Technologies Corp. successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket, rebounding from a catastrophic accident in September. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon CEO\u2019s Rocket Firm Blue Origin Emerges as Force in Aerospace (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6759",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceos-rocket-company-to-compete-aggressively-for-commercial-launches-1488975249?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=25",
        "text": "Financial details weren\u2019t immediately available.\nMr. Bezos posted a message on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n confirming that the agreement is for \u201cfor five launches initially,\u201d and added a personal nod to the OneWeb\u2019s founder: \u201cHappy to work with you.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nOn his Twitter feed, Mr. Wyler said \u201cwe will be busy\u201d making satellites \u201cand creating jobs.\u201d\n\n\nFor Mr. Bezos and his closely held Blue Origin, which for years has been developing its family of reusable rockets and manned capsules without fanfare and almost entirely in secret, the contracts represent a financial and public relations coup.\nCombined with the company\u2019s separate launch contract for a much larger satellite announced Tuesday with Eutelsat SA, a legacy operator with a fleet of 39 satellites, the disclosures amount to a carefully choreographed, partial lifting of Blue Origin\u2019s corporate veil.\nCoinciding with a major satellite conference in Washington, the announcements signal that the company Mr. Bezos founded in 2000 in some ways is now moving into the mainstream of the global aerospace arena.\nBoth OneWeb and Eutelsat previously contracted with established launch providers, making their high-profile demonstrations of confidence in Blue Origin significant.\nThe massive rocket that is slated to launch the satellites probably won\u2019t fly until the end of the decade. Photographs of its first fully assembled primary engine weren\u2019t released until this week. And despite his persistence, deep pockets and passion for space, Mr. Bezos hasn\u2019t yet blasted any booster or spacecraft into orbit.\nStill, developments in the past two days underscore that Blue Origin\u2014now boasting some 1,000 employees and facilities from Florida to the Northwest\u2014intends to use its New Glenn rocket to compete aggressively for commercial launches. Mr. Bezos also has indicated his aim is to develop a bigger, more powerful booster eventually capable of transporting astronauts deep into the solar system.\nThe two-stage version of Blue Origin\u2019s workhorse New Glenn rocket, named after the late U.S. astronaut and senator John Glenn, has been described by the company as 270 feet tall, and able to generate nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust from seven main engines. A larger, three-stage version would be more than 310 feet tall.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin behind strict confidentiality restrictions\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding. But now, a new commercial sales push appears to be changing that corporate culture to some extent.\nIt was only last fall that Mr. Bezos rocked the global aerospace community by disclosing some particulars of the New Glenn rocket. If all goes well, by 2021 or 2022 the booster could become a full-fledged competitor for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded and run by fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n It also could vie for launch contracts against Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider, and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOneWeb, which is 20%-owned by Japanese telecom company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SoftBank Group Corp.\n\n\n and backed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus Group SE,\n\n\n has announced firm plans to launch some 600 satellites to provide faster and cheaper internet connections world-wide. OneWeb has suggested it ultimately may launch as many as 2,000 additional satellites, after initial commercial operations begin in 2019.\nOneWeb anticipates assembling satellites in Florida at a rate of one in less than 24 hours\u2014at a cost below $1 million apiece. With that kind of production profile, the company is looking for multiple launch providers for later phases of the venture.\nMr. Wyler stopped short of saying the company and its backers have committed to launching the estimated 2,000 satellites. But when it comes to those plans, he said \u201cmore than our toe is in the water.\u201d Suggesting that more launch contracts with other providers are in the offing, he said \u201cwe talk broadly across the launch industry\u201d regarding OneWeb\u2019s future requirements.\nMr. Wyler also said follow-on satellites may be more than twice as heavy as the roughly 300 pounds the initial versions are designed to weigh. He suggested that the existing manufacturing joint venture between OneWeb and Airbus, which still needs to build its planned factory, already is contemplating expanding production capacity.\nBlue Origin is building its own facility nearby, and plans to use an adjacent government pad to conduct launch operations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Expanding satellite-service provider OneWeb has signed multiple contracts for launches early in the next decade with Blue Origin, the high-profile space company run by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon CEO\u2019s Rocket Firm Blue Origin Emerges as Force in Aerospace (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6760",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceos-rocket-company-to-compete-aggressively-for-commercial-launches-1488975249?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=100",
        "text": "Financial details weren\u2019t immediately available.\nMr. Bezos posted a message on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n confirming that the agreement is for \u201cfor five launches initially,\u201d and added a personal nod to the OneWeb\u2019s founder: \u201cHappy to work with you.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nOn his Twitter feed, Mr. Wyler said \u201cwe will be busy\u201d making satellites \u201cand creating jobs.\u201d\n\n\nFor Mr. Bezos and his closely held Blue Origin, which for years has been developing its family of reusable rockets and manned capsules without fanfare and almost entirely in secret, the contracts represent a financial and public relations coup.\nCombined with the company\u2019s separate launch contract for a much larger satellite announced Tuesday with Eutelsat SA, a legacy operator with a fleet of 39 satellites, the disclosures amount to a carefully choreographed, partial lifting of Blue Origin\u2019s corporate veil.\nCoinciding with a major satellite conference in Washington, the announcements signal that the company Mr. Bezos founded in 2000 in some ways is now moving into the mainstream of the global aerospace arena.\nBoth OneWeb and Eutelsat previously contracted with established launch providers, making their high-profile demonstrations of confidence in Blue Origin significant.\nThe massive rocket that is slated to launch the satellites probably won\u2019t fly until the end of the decade. Photographs of its first fully assembled primary engine weren\u2019t released until this week. And despite his persistence, deep pockets and passion for space, Mr. Bezos hasn\u2019t yet blasted any booster or spacecraft into orbit.\nStill, developments in the past two days underscore that Blue Origin\u2014now boasting some 1,000 employees and facilities from Florida to the Northwest\u2014intends to use its New Glenn rocket to compete aggressively for commercial launches. Mr. Bezos also has indicated his aim is to develop a bigger, more powerful booster eventually capable of transporting astronauts deep into the solar system.\nThe two-stage version of Blue Origin\u2019s workhorse New Glenn rocket, named after the late U.S. astronaut and senator John Glenn, has been described by the company as 270 feet tall, and able to generate nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust from seven main engines. A larger, three-stage version would be more than 310 feet tall.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin behind strict confidentiality restrictions\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding. But now, a new commercial sales push appears to be changing that corporate culture to some extent.\nIt was only last fall that Mr. Bezos rocked the global aerospace community by disclosing some particulars of the New Glenn rocket. If all goes well, by 2021 or 2022 the booster could become a full-fledged competitor for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded and run by fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n It also could vie for launch contracts against Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider, and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOneWeb, which is 20%-owned by Japanese telecom company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SoftBank Group Corp.\n\n\n and backed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus Group SE,\n\n\n has announced firm plans to launch some 600 satellites to provide faster and cheaper internet connections world-wide. OneWeb has suggested it ultimately may launch as many as 2,000 additional satellites, after initial commercial operations begin in 2019.\nOneWeb anticipates assembling satellites in Florida at a rate of one in less than 24 hours\u2014at a cost below $1 million apiece. With that kind of production profile, the company is looking for multiple launch providers for later phases of the venture.\nMr. Wyler stopped short of saying the company and its backers have committed to launching the estimated 2,000 satellites. But when it comes to those plans, he said \u201cmore than our toe is in the water.\u201d Suggesting that more launch contracts with other providers are in the offing, he said \u201cwe talk broadly across the launch industry\u201d regarding OneWeb\u2019s future requirements.\nMr. Wyler also said follow-on satellites may be more than twice as heavy as the roughly 300 pounds the initial versions are designed to weigh. He suggested that the existing manufacturing joint venture between OneWeb and Airbus, which still needs to build its planned factory, already is contemplating expanding production capacity.\nBlue Origin is building its own facility nearby, and plans to use an adjacent government pad to conduct launch operations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Expanding satellite-service provider OneWeb has signed multiple contracts for launches early in the next decade with Blue Origin, the high-profile space company run by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon CEO\u2019s Rocket Firm Blue Origin Emerges as Force in Aerospace (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6761",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-ceos-rocket-company-to-compete-aggressively-for-commercial-launches-1488975249?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=128",
        "text": "Financial details weren\u2019t immediately available.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Bezos posted a message on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n confirming that the agreement is for \u201cfor five launches initially,\u201d and added a personal nod to the OneWeb\u2019s founder: \u201cHappy to work with you.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nOn his Twitter feed, Mr. Wyler said \u201cwe will be busy\u201d making satellites \u201cand creating jobs.\u201d\n\n\nFor Mr. Bezos and his closely held Blue Origin, which for years has been developing its family of reusable rockets and manned capsules without fanfare and almost entirely in secret, the contracts represent a financial and public relations coup.\nCombined with the company\u2019s separate launch contract for a much larger satellite announced Tuesday with Eutelsat SA, a legacy operator with a fleet of 39 satellites, the disclosures amount to a carefully choreographed, partial lifting of Blue Origin\u2019s corporate veil.\nCoinciding with a major satellite conference in Washington, the announcements signal that the company Mr. Bezos founded in 2000 in some ways is now moving into the mainstream of the global aerospace arena.\nBoth OneWeb and Eutelsat previously contracted with established launch providers, making their high-profile demonstrations of confidence in Blue Origin significant.\nThe massive rocket that is slated to launch the satellites probably won\u2019t fly until the end of the decade. Photographs of its first fully assembled primary engine weren\u2019t released until this week. And despite his persistence, deep pockets and passion for space, Mr. Bezos hasn\u2019t yet blasted any booster or spacecraft into orbit.\nStill, developments in the past two days underscore that Blue Origin\u2014now boasting some 1,000 employees and facilities from Florida to the Northwest\u2014intends to use its New Glenn rocket to compete aggressively for commercial launches. Mr. Bezos also has indicated his aim is to develop a bigger, more powerful booster eventually capable of transporting astronauts deep into the solar system.\nThe two-stage version of Blue Origin\u2019s workhorse New Glenn rocket, named after the late U.S. astronaut and senator John Glenn, has been described by the company as 270 feet tall, and able to generate nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust from seven main engines. A larger, three-stage version would be more than 310 feet tall.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin behind strict confidentiality restrictions\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding. But now, a new commercial sales push appears to be changing that corporate culture to some extent.\nIt was only last fall that Mr. Bezos rocked the global aerospace community by disclosing some particulars of the New Glenn rocket. If all goes well, by 2021 or 2022 the booster could become a full-fledged competitor for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded and run by fellow billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk.\n \n\n\n\n It also could vie for launch contracts against Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider, and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOneWeb, which is 20%-owned by Japanese telecom company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SoftBank Group Corp.\n\n\n and backed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus Group SE,\n\n\n has announced firm plans to launch some 600 satellites to provide faster and cheaper internet connections world-wide. OneWeb has suggested it ultimately may launch as many as 2,000 additional satellites, after initial commercial operations begin in 2019.\nOneWeb anticipates assembling satellites in Florida at a rate of one in less than 24 hours\u2014at a cost below $1 million apiece. With that kind of production profile, the company is looking for multiple launch providers for later phases of the venture.\nMr. Wyler stopped short of saying the company and its backers have committed to launching the estimated 2,000 satellites. But when it comes to those plans, he said \u201cmore than our toe is in the water.\u201d Suggesting that more launch contracts with other providers are in the offing, he said \u201cwe talk broadly across the launch industry\u201d regarding OneWeb\u2019s future requirements.\nMr. Wyler also said follow-on satellites may be more than twice as heavy as the roughly 300 pounds the initial versions are designed to weigh. He suggested that the existing manufacturing joint venture between OneWeb and Airbus, which still needs to build its planned factory, already is contemplating expanding production capacity.\nBlue Origin is building its own facility nearby, and plans to use an adjacent government pad to conduct launch operations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Expanding satellite-service provider OneWeb has signed multiple contracts for launches early in the next decade with Blue Origin, the high-profile space company run by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hughes Targets Suburban U.S. With Faster Satellite Internet Service (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6762",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hughes-targets-suburban-u-s-customers-with-faster-satellite-internet-service-1488903304?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=25",
        "text": "Customers will have download speeds of 25 megabits per second nationwide, which Hughes said currently isn\u2019t standard on any other satellite network serving the U.S. Pricing for the new service will start at $49.99 a month for residential customers and $69.99 for businesses. Current plans start at $39.99 a month for 15 megabits per second.\nBut the move comes as rivals are gearing up to market even faster speeds in coming years, with the anticipated launch of more-advanced and flexible satellite constellations aimed at the U.S. and international markets. \n\n\nHughes faces competition from two directions: proposed swarms of smaller satellites, as well as a few big spacecraft featuring greater power and faster transmission capabilities.\nBut for now, the company describes HughesNet Gen5 as the most capable satellite broadband offering across the U.S.\n\n\nRelated SoftBank Orchestrates Satellite Deal to Expand Internet Reach(March 3) Race Is On to Deliver Internet From Space(Feb. 16) Japan\u2019s SoftBank Invests $1 Billion in Satellite Startup OneWeb(Dec. 19) How to Build Satellites Much Faster\u2014and Cheaper(June 7) \n\n\n\u201cIt will offer more speed for everybody,\u201d according to Hughes Executive Vice President Mike Cook, who added that customers won\u2019t be constrained by any limits on data. High-volume users, though, will be subject to slower download speeds after a certain point.\nPartly targeting suburban areas across the country reliant on outmoded terrestrial connections, Mr. Cook said Hughes expects residential subscribers to double to roughly two million by the end of the decade. Hughes also anticipates subscriber growth in Mexico and Latin American markets, including Brazil, Panama and Chile.\nIn an interview before the announcement, Hughes officials said the new service, slated to kick off mid-March, will allow faster data speeds to aircraft as well.\nBut the outlook for satellite internet options is changing quickly, with rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.\n\n\n making a major play to offer less expensive plans to customers using next-generation satellites with greater capacity.\nViaSat\u2019s newest satellite, scheduled to go into orbit later this year, will cover nearly one-third of the Earth with broadband coverage and have double the capacity of the company\u2019s existing service.\nIn an interview last month, Mark Dankberg, ViaSat\u2019s chairman and chief executive, said the design focuses on \u201cmaking a single spacecraft able to do multiple different missions.\u201d From the outset, he said the satellite was intended to \u201chave a lot of flexibility in where the actual bandwidth is allocated.\u201d\nAccording to Mr. Dankberg, such a design is best suited to provide high-speed connections from space because \u201cretail demand is very highly concentrated\u201d in and around urban areas. As a result, he sees ViaSat\u2019s satellite able to steer capacity to metropolitan areas where capacity typically \u201csells out fast.\u201d\nAn even more powerful ViaSat spacecraft, designated ViaSat-3, will have added flexibility to adjust its coverage area based on shifting demand, according to Mr. Dankberg, while further reducing costs for residential, business and mobile users. ViaSat-3 is slated to go into orbit in mid-2019, with service commencing in early 2020.\nAnother potential rival on the horizon is OneWeb Ltd., a satellite startup backed by Japanese telecom giant\nSoftBank Group Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus Group SE\n\n\n and other investors, which plans to launch hundreds of small satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide fast internet connections. Initial service is targeted for 2019.\nHughes, which has invested roughly $50 million in OneWeb to gain access to some of that future capacity, sees promise from both the small and large ends of the satellite spectrum. \u201cWe believe in both technologies,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pradman Kaul,\n\n\n\n president of Hughes, and \u201cexpect to have both in our portfolio.\u201d\nAs part of its expansion of aeronautical links, which already cover some 750 aircraft, Hughes is introducing a new generation of airborne services. The company, based in Germantown, Md., is teaming up with Israel\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd.\n\n\n to roll out an advanced, high-performance aircraft antenna able to receive different types of satellite signals. According to the companies, advantages include relying on a single antenna on routes that require connecting to a combination of constellations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com EchoStar\u2019s Hughes Network Systems unveiled a new service aimed at delivering faster internet connections and boosting its number of residential and business subscribers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hughes Targets Suburban U.S. With Faster Satellite Internet Service (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6763",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hughes-targets-suburban-u-s-customers-with-faster-satellite-internet-service-1488903304?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=86",
        "text": "Customers will have download speeds of 25 megabits per second nationwide, which Hughes said currently isn\u2019t standard on any other satellite network serving the U.S. Pricing for the new service will start at $49.99 a month for residential customers and $69.99 for businesses. Current plans start at $39.99 a month for 15 megabits per second.\nBut the move comes as rivals are gearing up to market even faster speeds in coming years, with the anticipated launch of more-advanced and flexible satellite constellations aimed at the U.S. and international markets. \n\n\nHughes faces competition from two directions: proposed swarms of smaller satellites, as well as a few big spacecraft featuring greater power and faster transmission capabilities.\nBut for now, the company describes HughesNet Gen5 as the most capable satellite broadband offering across the U.S.\n\n\nRelated SoftBank Orchestrates Satellite Deal to Expand Internet Reach(March 3) Race Is On to Deliver Internet From Space(Feb. 16) Japan\u2019s SoftBank Invests $1 Billion in Satellite Startup OneWeb(Dec. 19) How to Build Satellites Much Faster\u2014and Cheaper(June 7) \n\n\n\u201cIt will offer more speed for everybody,\u201d according to Hughes Executive Vice President Mike Cook, who added that customers won\u2019t be constrained by any limits on data. High-volume users, though, will be subject to slower download speeds after a certain point.\nPartly targeting suburban areas across the country reliant on outmoded terrestrial connections, Mr. Cook said Hughes expects residential subscribers to double to roughly two million by the end of the decade. Hughes also anticipates subscriber growth in Mexico and Latin American markets, including Brazil, Panama and Chile.\nIn an interview before the announcement, Hughes officials said the new service, slated to kick off mid-March, will allow faster data speeds to aircraft as well.\nBut the outlook for satellite internet options is changing quickly, with rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViaSat Inc.\n\n\n making a major play to offer less expensive plans to customers using next-generation satellites with greater capacity.\nViaSat\u2019s newest satellite, scheduled to go into orbit later this year, will cover nearly one-third of the Earth with broadband coverage and have double the capacity of the company\u2019s existing service.\nIn an interview last month, Mark Dankberg, ViaSat\u2019s chairman and chief executive, said the design focuses on \u201cmaking a single spacecraft able to do multiple different missions.\u201d From the outset, he said the satellite was intended to \u201chave a lot of flexibility in where the actual bandwidth is allocated.\u201d\nAccording to Mr. Dankberg, such a design is best suited to provide high-speed connections from space because \u201cretail demand is very highly concentrated\u201d in and around urban areas. As a result, he sees ViaSat\u2019s satellite able to steer capacity to metropolitan areas where capacity typically \u201csells out fast.\u201d\nAn even more powerful ViaSat spacecraft, designated ViaSat-3, will have added flexibility to adjust its coverage area based on shifting demand, according to Mr. Dankberg, while further reducing costs for residential, business and mobile users. ViaSat-3 is slated to go into orbit in mid-2019, with service commencing in early 2020.\nAnother potential rival on the horizon is OneWeb Ltd., a satellite startup backed by Japanese telecom giant\nSoftBank Group Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus Group SE\n\n\n and other investors, which plans to launch hundreds of small satellites into low-Earth orbit to provide fast internet connections. Initial service is targeted for 2019.\nHughes, which has invested roughly $50 million in OneWeb to gain access to some of that future capacity, sees promise from both the small and large ends of the satellite spectrum. \u201cWe believe in both technologies,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pradman Kaul,\n\n\n\n president of Hughes, and \u201cexpect to have both in our portfolio.\u201d\nAs part of its expansion of aeronautical links, which already cover some 750 aircraft, Hughes is introducing a new generation of airborne services. The company, based in Germantown, Md., is teaming up with Israel\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd.\n\n\n to roll out an advanced, high-performance aircraft antenna able to receive different types of satellite signals. According to the companies, advantages include relying on a single antenna on routes that require connecting to a combination of constellations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com EchoStar\u2019s Hughes Network Systems unveiled a new service aimed at delivering faster internet connections and boosting its number of residential and business subscribers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6764",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-prepares-to-launch-plan-b-if-commercial-space-taxis-stall-1518172203?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=20",
        "text": "But with the operation of commercial space taxis already years behind schedule due primarily to technical hurdles, and the latest deadlines in danger of slipping further, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering Plan B: Turning scheduled test flights of new crew vehicles to the station into modified operational missions to ensure continuous U.S. presence onboard the orbiting laboratory.\nThe potential move was disclosed Thursday, as part of various contingency options, by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n head of the agency\u2019s human exploration programs.\n\n\nNASA currently has contracts to use Russian rockets and capsules to transport astronauts to and from the space station through late 2019. If Boeing and SpaceX aren\u2019t ready to take over the job at that time, the agency will need a contingency plan to get crews to the station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Published Feb. 8. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nWhile Mr. Gerstenmaier said Boeing and SpaceX have made good progress on their respective crew vehicles, the shift to using American hardware is expected to take time and include \u201cbumps in the road.\u201d By making each of the planned test flights \u201calmost an operational mission,\u201d the agency would be able to plug potential gaps in space station staffing, he told an industry-government conference in Washington.\nBoeing and SpaceX have previously said they are on track to complete one test flight with people on board by the end of this year, and Mr. Gerstenmaier said in an interview that the agency has \u201calmost six months of\u00a0margin on the schedules\u201d\u2014meaning they can be up to half a year behind deadline and still avoid a gap. Still, technical challenges and agency reviews could delay those plans. \nMr. Gerstenmaier said preliminary discussions have started inside NASA, as well as with industry officials, about pushing the test flights into 2019 or later, as \u201cpart of normal contingency planning.\u201d Regular missions are slated to commence after test flights are successfully finished.\nThe extent of potential test-flight slips will depend on \u201chow late things are and how much of a gap we need to fill,\u201d the veteran NASA official said in the interview. \nNASA has several months to weigh alternative strategies, and Mr. Gerstenmaier stressed that no final decision had been made.\n\u201cIn the worst case, we could potentially downsize\u201d the number of U.S. astronauts on board the space station as a temporary stopgap measure, Mr. Gerstenmaier told conference attendees. Such a move would reduce the amount of research conducted in orbit. \nThe latest comments underscore nagging questions inside and outside NASA about the likely schedule for shifting crew transportation to U.S. providers.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Launches World\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7, 2018) SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6, 2018) Elon Musk Says SpaceX\u2019s New Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (Feb. 5, 2018) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18, 2018) \n\n\nAfter fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer than the shuttle fleet it was then operating. Yet as NASA works to certify separate transport systems developed by contractors, agency experts are wrestling with challenging safety and schedule trade-offs. \nIn his speech, Mr. Gerstenmaier said his intention is to \u201copenly talk about the risks\u201d inherent in space travel and \u201cnot rush decisions\u201d to meet arbitrary deadlines. \u201cWe need to accept risk and move forward,\u201d he said. In the interview, he reiterated that risk assessments are imprecise and detailed statistical measures can vary significantly depending on assumptions.\nNASA has a longstanding requirement that commercial crew systems meet certain statistical safety benchmarks before ferrying astronauts. The agency has established that risk standard as no greater than one possible fatal accident in 270 flights. \nAlthough\u00a0that still seems perilous, the standard reflects the technical hurdles confronting contractors. It is more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns. \nNASA officials and the agency\u2019s top independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to precisely comply with the new standard, in part because companies are having trouble finding ways to reduce cumulative exposure to radiation during typical trips to the space station and six-month stints for astronauts in orbit.\nEven if the agency opts for some contingency plans, Mr. Gerstenmaier and his colleagues may have to issue certain safety waivers before commercial crew capsules can begin making regular trips.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency is working on a novel fallback plan in case new commercial vehicles hit further delays in their schedule to begin ferrying U.S. astronauts into orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6765",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-prepares-to-launch-plan-b-if-commercial-space-taxis-stall-1518172203?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=78",
        "text": "But with the operation of commercial space taxis already years behind schedule due primarily to technical hurdles, and the latest deadlines in danger of slipping further, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering Plan B: Turning scheduled test flights of new crew vehicles to the station into modified operational missions to ensure continuous U.S. presence onboard the orbiting laboratory.\nThe potential move was disclosed Thursday, as part of various contingency options, by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n head of the agency\u2019s human exploration programs.\n\n\nNASA currently has contracts to use Russian rockets and capsules to transport astronauts to and from the space station through late 2019. If Boeing and SpaceX aren\u2019t ready to take over the job at that time, the agency will need a contingency plan to get crews to the station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Published Feb. 8. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nWhile Mr. Gerstenmaier said Boeing and SpaceX have made good progress on their respective crew vehicles, the shift to using American hardware is expected to take time and include \u201cbumps in the road.\u201d By making each of the planned test flights \u201calmost an operational mission,\u201d the agency would be able to plug potential gaps in space station staffing, he told an industry-government conference in Washington.\nBoeing and SpaceX have previously said they are on track to complete one test flight with people on board by the end of this year, and Mr. Gerstenmaier said in an interview that the agency has \u201calmost six months of\u00a0margin on the schedules\u201d\u2014meaning they can be up to half a year behind deadline and still avoid a gap. Still, technical challenges and agency reviews could delay those plans. \nMr. Gerstenmaier said preliminary discussions have started inside NASA, as well as with industry officials, about pushing the test flights into 2019 or later, as \u201cpart of normal contingency planning.\u201d Regular missions are slated to commence after test flights are successfully finished.\nThe extent of potential test-flight slips will depend on \u201chow late things are and how much of a gap we need to fill,\u201d the veteran NASA official said in the interview. \nNASA has several months to weigh alternative strategies, and Mr. Gerstenmaier stressed that no final decision had been made.\n\u201cIn the worst case, we could potentially downsize\u201d the number of U.S. astronauts on board the space station as a temporary stopgap measure, Mr. Gerstenmaier told conference attendees. Such a move would reduce the amount of research conducted in orbit. \nThe latest comments underscore nagging questions inside and outside NASA about the likely schedule for shifting crew transportation to U.S. providers.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Launches World\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7, 2018) SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6, 2018) Elon Musk Says SpaceX\u2019s New Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (Feb. 5, 2018) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18, 2018) \n\n\nAfter fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer than the shuttle fleet it was then operating. Yet as NASA works to certify separate transport systems developed by contractors, agency experts are wrestling with challenging safety and schedule trade-offs. \nIn his speech, Mr. Gerstenmaier said his intention is to \u201copenly talk about the risks\u201d inherent in space travel and \u201cnot rush decisions\u201d to meet arbitrary deadlines. \u201cWe need to accept risk and move forward,\u201d he said. In the interview, he reiterated that risk assessments are imprecise and detailed statistical measures can vary significantly depending on assumptions.\nNASA has a longstanding requirement that commercial crew systems meet certain statistical safety benchmarks before ferrying astronauts. The agency has established that risk standard as no greater than one possible fatal accident in 270 flights. \nAlthough\u00a0that still seems perilous, the standard reflects the technical hurdles confronting contractors. It is more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns. \nNASA officials and the agency\u2019s top independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to precisely comply with the new standard, in part because companies are having trouble finding ways to reduce cumulative exposure to radiation during typical trips to the space station and six-month stints for astronauts in orbit.\nEven if the agency opts for some contingency plans, Mr. Gerstenmaier and his colleagues may have to issue certain safety waivers before commercial crew capsules can begin making regular trips.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency is working on a novel fallback plan in case new commercial vehicles hit further delays in their schedule to begin ferrying U.S. astronauts into orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6766",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-prepares-to-launch-plan-b-if-commercial-space-taxis-stall-1518172203?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=71",
        "text": "But with the operation of commercial space taxis already years behind schedule due primarily to technical hurdles, and the latest deadlines in danger of slipping further, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering Plan B: Turning scheduled test flights of new crew vehicles to the station into modified operational missions to ensure continuous U.S. presence onboard the orbiting laboratory.\nThe potential move was disclosed Thursday, as part of various contingency options, by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n head of the agency\u2019s human exploration programs.\n\n\nNASA currently has contracts to use Russian rockets and capsules to transport astronauts to and from the space station through late 2019. If Boeing and SpaceX aren\u2019t ready to take over the job at that time, the agency will need a contingency plan to get crews to the station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Published Feb. 8. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nWhile Mr. Gerstenmaier said Boeing and SpaceX have made good progress on their respective crew vehicles, the shift to using American hardware is expected to take time and include \u201cbumps in the road.\u201d By making each of the planned test flights \u201calmost an operational mission,\u201d the agency would be able to plug potential gaps in space station staffing, he told an industry-government conference in Washington.\nBoeing and SpaceX have previously said they are on track to complete one test flight with people on board by the end of this year, and Mr. Gerstenmaier said in an interview that the agency has \u201calmost six months of\u00a0margin on the schedules\u201d\u2014meaning they can be up to half a year behind deadline and still avoid a gap. Still, technical challenges and agency reviews could delay those plans. \nMr. Gerstenmaier said preliminary discussions have started inside NASA, as well as with industry officials, about pushing the test flights into 2019 or later, as \u201cpart of normal contingency planning.\u201d Regular missions are slated to commence after test flights are successfully finished.\nThe extent of potential test-flight slips will depend on \u201chow late things are and how much of a gap we need to fill,\u201d the veteran NASA official said in the interview. \nNASA has several months to weigh alternative strategies, and Mr. Gerstenmaier stressed that no final decision had been made.\n\u201cIn the worst case, we could potentially downsize\u201d the number of U.S. astronauts on board the space station as a temporary stopgap measure, Mr. Gerstenmaier told conference attendees. Such a move would reduce the amount of research conducted in orbit. \nThe latest comments underscore nagging questions inside and outside NASA about the likely schedule for shifting crew transportation to U.S. providers.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Launches World\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7, 2018) SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6, 2018) Elon Musk Says SpaceX\u2019s New Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (Feb. 5, 2018) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18, 2018) \n\n\nAfter fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer than the shuttle fleet it was then operating. Yet as NASA works to certify separate transport systems developed by contractors, agency experts are wrestling with challenging safety and schedule trade-offs. \nIn his speech, Mr. Gerstenmaier said his intention is to \u201copenly talk about the risks\u201d inherent in space travel and \u201cnot rush decisions\u201d to meet arbitrary deadlines. \u201cWe need to accept risk and move forward,\u201d he said. In the interview, he reiterated that risk assessments are imprecise and detailed statistical measures can vary significantly depending on assumptions.\nNASA has a longstanding requirement that commercial crew systems meet certain statistical safety benchmarks before ferrying astronauts. The agency has established that risk standard as no greater than one possible fatal accident in 270 flights. \nAlthough\u00a0that still seems perilous, the standard reflects the technical hurdles confronting contractors. It is more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns. \nNASA officials and the agency\u2019s top independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to precisely comply with the new standard, in part because companies are having trouble finding ways to reduce cumulative exposure to radiation during typical trips to the space station and six-month stints for astronauts in orbit.\nEven if the agency opts for some contingency plans, Mr. Gerstenmaier and his colleagues may have to issue certain safety waivers before commercial crew capsules can begin making regular trips.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency is working on a novel fallback plan in case new commercial vehicles hit further delays in their schedule to begin ferrying U.S. astronauts into orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Prepares to Launch Plan B if Commercial Space Taxis Stall (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6767",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-prepares-to-launch-plan-b-if-commercial-space-taxis-stall-1518172203?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=102",
        "text": "But with the operation of commercial space taxis already years behind schedule due primarily to technical hurdles, and the latest deadlines in danger of slipping further, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is considering Plan B: Turning scheduled test flights of new crew vehicles to the station into modified operational missions to ensure continuous U.S. presence onboard the orbiting laboratory.\n\n\n\n\nThe potential move was disclosed Thursday, as part of various contingency options, by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n head of the agency\u2019s human exploration programs.\n\n\nNASA currently has contracts to use Russian rockets and capsules to transport astronauts to and from the space station through late 2019. If Boeing and SpaceX aren\u2019t ready to take over the job at that time, the agency will need a contingency plan to get crews to the station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Published Feb. 8. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nWhile Mr. Gerstenmaier said Boeing and SpaceX have made good progress on their respective crew vehicles, the shift to using American hardware is expected to take time and include \u201cbumps in the road.\u201d By making each of the planned test flights \u201calmost an operational mission,\u201d the agency would be able to plug potential gaps in space station staffing, he told an industry-government conference in Washington.\nBoeing and SpaceX have previously said they are on track to complete one test flight with people on board by the end of this year, and Mr. Gerstenmaier said in an interview that the agency has \u201calmost six months of\u00a0margin on the schedules\u201d\u2014meaning they can be up to half a year behind deadline and still avoid a gap. Still, technical challenges and agency reviews could delay those plans. \nMr. Gerstenmaier said preliminary discussions have started inside NASA, as well as with industry officials, about pushing the test flights into 2019 or later, as \u201cpart of normal contingency planning.\u201d Regular missions are slated to commence after test flights are successfully finished.\nThe extent of potential test-flight slips will depend on \u201chow late things are and how much of a gap we need to fill,\u201d the veteran NASA official said in the interview. \nNASA has several months to weigh alternative strategies, and Mr. Gerstenmaier stressed that no final decision had been made.\n\u201cIn the worst case, we could potentially downsize\u201d the number of U.S. astronauts on board the space station as a temporary stopgap measure, Mr. Gerstenmaier told conference attendees. Such a move would reduce the amount of research conducted in orbit. \nThe latest comments underscore nagging questions inside and outside NASA about the likely schedule for shifting crew transportation to U.S. providers.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Launches World\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7, 2018) SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond (Feb. 6, 2018) Elon Musk Says SpaceX\u2019s New Falcon Heavy Rocket Unlikely to Carry Astronauts (Feb. 5, 2018) Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (Jan. 18, 2018) \n\n\nAfter fatal explosions of two space shuttles in 1986 and 2003, NASA committed to making future spacecraft substantially safer than the shuttle fleet it was then operating. Yet as NASA works to certify separate transport systems developed by contractors, agency experts are wrestling with challenging safety and schedule trade-offs. \nIn his speech, Mr. Gerstenmaier said his intention is to \u201copenly talk about the risks\u201d inherent in space travel and \u201cnot rush decisions\u201d to meet arbitrary deadlines. \u201cWe need to accept risk and move forward,\u201d he said. In the interview, he reiterated that risk assessments are imprecise and detailed statistical measures can vary significantly depending on assumptions.\nNASA has a longstanding requirement that commercial crew systems meet certain statistical safety benchmarks before ferrying astronauts. The agency has established that risk standard as no greater than one possible fatal accident in 270 flights. \nAlthough\u00a0that still seems perilous, the standard reflects the technical hurdles confronting contractors. It is more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011 under budgetary strains and safety concerns. \nNASA officials and the agency\u2019s top independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to precisely comply with the new standard, in part because companies are having trouble finding ways to reduce cumulative exposure to radiation during typical trips to the space station and six-month stints for astronauts in orbit.\nEven if the agency opts for some contingency plans, Mr. Gerstenmaier and his colleagues may have to issue certain safety waivers before commercial crew capsules can begin making regular trips.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency is working on a novel fallback plan in case new commercial vehicles hit further delays in their schedule to begin ferrying U.S. astronauts into orbit. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Seeks Ambitious Launch Tempo Surpassing Current Rivals (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6768",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-seeks-ambitious-launch-tempo-surpassing-current-rivals-1507209179?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=22",
        "text": "But the latest numbers, unveiled at a space symposium last week in Australia, suggest Mr. Musk has put aside for now more ambitious goals for launching swarms of SpaceX satellites and ramping up operation of a heavy-lift rocket that has encountered delays.\n\n\nRead More Blast from the Past: Watch a SpaceX Rocket Launch in Florida (Oct. 4) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (Sept. 29) SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket In Historic Flight (March 30) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late September 2016, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nAccording to Mr. Musk\u2019s latest projections, SpaceX by the end of December aims to blast off seven more rockets on top of the 13 already successfully launched this year, followed by 30 more next year. \u201cIf SpaceX does do something like\u201d that in 2018, Mr. Musk told the conference in Adelaide, it will account for \u201capproximately half of all orbital launches that occur on Earth.\u201d\n\n\nSpaceX began 15 years ago with a handful of employees located in a warehouse district near a Southern California strip mall. Now with roughly 5,000 employees, it is hailed as a space pioneer that has transformed the launch business and landed approximately $10 billion in contracts in the process.\nDespite SpaceX\u2019s accelerating launches, the latest projections fall short of targets appearing in internal documents prepared about two years ago. The documents, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, cited 27 launches for this year and 44 for 2018.\nThe documents projected that SpaceX would be launching once a week by 2019.\nMuch of the paring of launch goals appears to stem from significant delays getting SpaceX\u2019s planned internet-via-satellite business and Falcon Heavy booster off the ground.\nA SpaceX spokesman didn\u2019t have any comment. In the past, the company has stressed that internal documents provide a snapshot in time and that projections are routinely revised as business conditions change.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur employees to boost their performance.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n mike blake/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who founded the company and serves as chairman and chief designer, is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur on employees.\nThe internal documents projected four Falcon Heavy launches for this year, including a Pentagon mission, and five in 2018. The rocket, powered by 27 engines, is four years late and is now slated to have its maiden test flight in the next three months.\nThe documents also envisioned more than a dozen launches through the end of 2018 dedicated to the early phase of a SpaceX satellite fleet. So far, the company hasn\u2019t reported lofting a single prototype or demonstration payload, and it hasn\u2019t publicly laid out manufacturing or detailed operating plans.\nThe internal documents projected that revenue from the nascent satellite-internet business would dwarf the company\u2019s rocket segment in just a few years. At the time, SpaceX envisioned satellite operations garnering more than 40 million subscribers and bringing in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025.\nLast week, Mr. Musk outlined the 2017 and 2018 launch targets as part of a broader presentation of SpaceX\u2019s revised plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and use it to launch giant, reusable spacecraft to Mars within a decade. He didn\u2019t discuss the proposed satellite venture.\nMr. Musk said the Mars initiative is expected to draw much of its funding from SpaceX\u2019s projected boom in commercial, scientific and military launch contracts.\n\u201cI\u2019m very excited there is a business case\u201d supporting SpaceX\u2019s Mars ambitions, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor who was a senior member of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nIndustry officials and space experts have praised SpaceX\u2019s accomplishments so far, including bringing down global launch prices and ending the traditional monopoly on Pentagon launches held by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOverall, SpaceX sees frequent launches reusing boosters that already have flown in space as the key to markedly reducing its manufacturing costs, as well as evenutally saving money by relying on a much smaller contingent of ground-support personnel.\nIf SpaceX successfully completes the three launches scheduled over the next few weeks, its 2017 total will double its entire launch output for 2016.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX aims to have one of its rockets lift off roughly every two weeks on average through the end of 2018, exceeding any government or company launch schedule around the globe. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Seeks Ambitious Launch Tempo Surpassing Current Rivals (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6769",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-seeks-ambitious-launch-tempo-surpassing-current-rivals-1507209179?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=86",
        "text": "But the latest numbers, unveiled at a space symposium last week in Australia, suggest Mr. Musk has put aside for now more ambitious goals for launching swarms of SpaceX satellites and ramping up operation of a heavy-lift rocket that has encountered delays.\n\n\nRead More Blast from the Past: Watch a SpaceX Rocket Launch in Florida (Oct. 4) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (Sept. 29) SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket In Historic Flight (March 30) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late September 2016, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nAccording to Mr. Musk\u2019s latest projections, SpaceX by the end of December aims to blast off seven more rockets on top of the 13 already successfully launched this year, followed by 30 more next year. \u201cIf SpaceX does do something like\u201d that in 2018, Mr. Musk told the conference in Adelaide, it will account for \u201capproximately half of all orbital launches that occur on Earth.\u201d\n\n\nSpaceX began 15 years ago with a handful of employees located in a warehouse district near a Southern California strip mall. Now with roughly 5,000 employees, it is hailed as a space pioneer that has transformed the launch business and landed approximately $10 billion in contracts in the process.\nDespite SpaceX\u2019s accelerating launches, the latest projections fall short of targets appearing in internal documents prepared about two years ago. The documents, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, cited 27 launches for this year and 44 for 2018.\nThe documents projected that SpaceX would be launching once a week by 2019.\nMuch of the paring of launch goals appears to stem from significant delays getting SpaceX\u2019s planned internet-via-satellite business and Falcon Heavy booster off the ground.\nA SpaceX spokesman didn\u2019t have any comment. In the past, the company has stressed that internal documents provide a snapshot in time and that projections are routinely revised as business conditions change.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur employees to boost their performance.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n mike blake/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who founded the company and serves as chairman and chief designer, is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur on employees.\nThe internal documents projected four Falcon Heavy launches for this year, including a Pentagon mission, and five in 2018. The rocket, powered by 27 engines, is four years late and is now slated to have its maiden test flight in the next three months.\nThe documents also envisioned more than a dozen launches through the end of 2018 dedicated to the early phase of a SpaceX satellite fleet. So far, the company hasn\u2019t reported lofting a single prototype or demonstration payload, and it hasn\u2019t publicly laid out manufacturing or detailed operating plans.\nThe internal documents projected that revenue from the nascent satellite-internet business would dwarf the company\u2019s rocket segment in just a few years. At the time, SpaceX envisioned satellite operations garnering more than 40 million subscribers and bringing in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025.\nLast week, Mr. Musk outlined the 2017 and 2018 launch targets as part of a broader presentation of SpaceX\u2019s revised plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and use it to launch giant, reusable spacecraft to Mars within a decade. He didn\u2019t discuss the proposed satellite venture.\nMr. Musk said the Mars initiative is expected to draw much of its funding from SpaceX\u2019s projected boom in commercial, scientific and military launch contracts.\n\u201cI\u2019m very excited there is a business case\u201d supporting SpaceX\u2019s Mars ambitions, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor who was a senior member of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nIndustry officials and space experts have praised SpaceX\u2019s accomplishments so far, including bringing down global launch prices and ending the traditional monopoly on Pentagon launches held by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOverall, SpaceX sees frequent launches reusing boosters that already have flown in space as the key to markedly reducing its manufacturing costs, as well as evenutally saving money by relying on a much smaller contingent of ground-support personnel.\nIf SpaceX successfully completes the three launches scheduled over the next few weeks, its 2017 total will double its entire launch output for 2016.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX aims to have one of its rockets lift off roughly every two weeks on average through the end of 2018, exceeding any government or company launch schedule around the globe. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Seeks Ambitious Launch Tempo Surpassing Current Rivals (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6770",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-seeks-ambitious-launch-tempo-surpassing-current-rivals-1507209179?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=76",
        "text": "But the latest numbers, unveiled at a space symposium last week in Australia, suggest Mr. Musk has put aside for now more ambitious goals for launching swarms of SpaceX satellites and ramping up operation of a heavy-lift rocket that has encountered delays.\n\n\nRead More Blast from the Past: Watch a SpaceX Rocket Launch in Florida (Oct. 4) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (Sept. 29) SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket In Historic Flight (March 30) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late September 2016, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nAccording to Mr. Musk\u2019s latest projections, SpaceX by the end of December aims to blast off seven more rockets on top of the 13 already successfully launched this year, followed by 30 more next year. \u201cIf SpaceX does do something like\u201d that in 2018, Mr. Musk told the conference in Adelaide, it will account for \u201capproximately half of all orbital launches that occur on Earth.\u201d\n\n\nSpaceX began 15 years ago with a handful of employees located in a warehouse district near a Southern California strip mall. Now with roughly 5,000 employees, it is hailed as a space pioneer that has transformed the launch business and landed approximately $10 billion in contracts in the process.\nDespite SpaceX\u2019s accelerating launches, the latest projections fall short of targets appearing in internal documents prepared about two years ago. The documents, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, cited 27 launches for this year and 44 for 2018.\nThe documents projected that SpaceX would be launching once a week by 2019.\nMuch of the paring of launch goals appears to stem from significant delays getting SpaceX\u2019s planned internet-via-satellite business and Falcon Heavy booster off the ground.\nA SpaceX spokesman didn\u2019t have any comment. In the past, the company has stressed that internal documents provide a snapshot in time and that projections are routinely revised as business conditions change.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur employees to boost their performance.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n mike blake/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who founded the company and serves as chairman and chief designer, is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur on employees.\nThe internal documents projected four Falcon Heavy launches for this year, including a Pentagon mission, and five in 2018. The rocket, powered by 27 engines, is four years late and is now slated to have its maiden test flight in the next three months.\nThe documents also envisioned more than a dozen launches through the end of 2018 dedicated to the early phase of a SpaceX satellite fleet. So far, the company hasn\u2019t reported lofting a single prototype or demonstration payload, and it hasn\u2019t publicly laid out manufacturing or detailed operating plans.\nThe internal documents projected that revenue from the nascent satellite-internet business would dwarf the company\u2019s rocket segment in just a few years. At the time, SpaceX envisioned satellite operations garnering more than 40 million subscribers and bringing in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025.\nLast week, Mr. Musk outlined the 2017 and 2018 launch targets as part of a broader presentation of SpaceX\u2019s revised plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and use it to launch giant, reusable spacecraft to Mars within a decade. He didn\u2019t discuss the proposed satellite venture.\nMr. Musk said the Mars initiative is expected to draw much of its funding from SpaceX\u2019s projected boom in commercial, scientific and military launch contracts.\n\u201cI\u2019m very excited there is a business case\u201d supporting SpaceX\u2019s Mars ambitions, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor who was a senior member of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nIndustry officials and space experts have praised SpaceX\u2019s accomplishments so far, including bringing down global launch prices and ending the traditional monopoly on Pentagon launches held by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOverall, SpaceX sees frequent launches reusing boosters that already have flown in space as the key to markedly reducing its manufacturing costs, as well as evenutally saving money by relying on a much smaller contingent of ground-support personnel.\nIf SpaceX successfully completes the three launches scheduled over the next few weeks, its 2017 total will double its entire launch output for 2016.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX aims to have one of its rockets lift off roughly every two weeks on average through the end of 2018, exceeding any government or company launch schedule around the globe. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Seeks Ambitious Launch Tempo Surpassing Current Rivals (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6771",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-seeks-ambitious-launch-tempo-surpassing-current-rivals-1507209179?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=111",
        "text": "But the latest numbers, unveiled at a space symposium last week in Australia, suggest Mr. Musk has put aside for now more ambitious goals for launching swarms of SpaceX satellites and ramping up operation of a heavy-lift rocket that has encountered delays.\n\n\nRead More\n\n\n\n Blast from the Past: Watch a SpaceX Rocket Launch in Florida (Oct. 4) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) Elon Musk Aims to Land Humans on Mars by Middle of Next Decade (Sept. 29) SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket In Historic Flight (March 30) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late September 2016, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nAccording to Mr. Musk\u2019s latest projections, SpaceX by the end of December aims to blast off seven more rockets on top of the 13 already successfully launched this year, followed by 30 more next year. \u201cIf SpaceX does do something like\u201d that in 2018, Mr. Musk told the conference in Adelaide, it will account for \u201capproximately half of all orbital launches that occur on Earth.\u201d\n\n\nSpaceX began 15 years ago with a handful of employees located in a warehouse district near a Southern California strip mall. Now with roughly 5,000 employees, it is hailed as a space pioneer that has transformed the launch business and landed approximately $10 billion in contracts in the process.\nDespite SpaceX\u2019s accelerating launches, the latest projections fall short of targets appearing in internal documents prepared about two years ago. The documents, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, cited 27 launches for this year and 44 for 2018.\nThe documents projected that SpaceX would be launching once a week by 2019.\nMuch of the paring of launch goals appears to stem from significant delays getting SpaceX\u2019s planned internet-via-satellite business and Falcon Heavy booster off the ground.\nA SpaceX spokesman didn\u2019t have any comment. In the past, the company has stressed that internal documents provide a snapshot in time and that projections are routinely revised as business conditions change.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur employees to boost their performance.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n mike blake/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk, who founded the company and serves as chairman and chief designer, is renowned for setting highly ambitious goals as a way to spur on employees.\nThe internal documents projected four Falcon Heavy launches for this year, including a Pentagon mission, and five in 2018. The rocket, powered by 27 engines, is four years late and is now slated to have its maiden test flight in the next three months.\nThe documents also envisioned more than a dozen launches through the end of 2018 dedicated to the early phase of a SpaceX satellite fleet. So far, the company hasn\u2019t reported lofting a single prototype or demonstration payload, and it hasn\u2019t publicly laid out manufacturing or detailed operating plans.\nThe internal documents projected that revenue from the nascent satellite-internet business would dwarf the company\u2019s rocket segment in just a few years. At the time, SpaceX envisioned satellite operations garnering more than 40 million subscribers and bringing in more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025.\nLast week, Mr. Musk outlined the 2017 and 2018 launch targets as part of a broader presentation of SpaceX\u2019s revised plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and use it to launch giant, reusable spacecraft to Mars within a decade. He didn\u2019t discuss the proposed satellite venture.\nMr. Musk said the Mars initiative is expected to draw much of its funding from SpaceX\u2019s projected boom in commercial, scientific and military launch contracts.\n\u201cI\u2019m very excited there is a business case\u201d supporting SpaceX\u2019s Mars ambitions, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor who was a senior member of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nIndustry officials and space experts have praised SpaceX\u2019s accomplishments so far, including bringing down global launch prices and ending the traditional monopoly on Pentagon launches held by a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOverall, SpaceX sees frequent launches reusing boosters that already have flown in space as the key to markedly reducing its manufacturing costs, as well as evenutally saving money by relying on a much smaller contingent of ground-support personnel.\nIf SpaceX successfully completes the three launches scheduled over the next few weeks, its 2017 total will double its entire launch output for 2016.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX aims to have one of its rockets lift off roughly every two weeks on average through the end of 2018, exceeding any government or company launch schedule around the globe. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Capsules Unlikely to Launch With Astronauts Before 2020 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6772",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-capsules-unlikely-to-launch-with-astronauts-before-2020-11563322257?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=15",
        "text": "But technical challenges and pending federal safety certifications mean the initial flights of privately developed spacecraft\u2014intended to ferry crews to and from the international space station\u2014are likely to shift past December.\nSuch a delay to 2020 became more likely this week, with entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. disclosing how long the company expects it will take to bounce back from an April ground-test accident that destroyed one of its Dragon capsules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s head of flight reliability, told reporters on Monday that a flight carrying people still was possible in 2019, but added \u201cit\u2019s getting increasingly difficult\u201d to envision how that would occur.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s program director for so-called commercial crew taxis, had the same message at the media event, saying a flurry of impending tests \u201cmakes it very difficult to pinpoint exactly\u201d when the first crewed capsule will blast off.\n\n\nSenior managers at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n , which is developing a rival capsule also intended to ferry astronauts to the orbiting international laboratory, have talked about launching their own demonstration flight with humans on board in the last few weeks of the year. But increasingly, according to industry and government officials familiar with the deliberations, that mission also seems poised for a delay. \nAny blastoff with people on board could be delayed past the end of the year, these officials said, by several potential challenges: getting timely access to a busy launchpad; problems with an uncrewed mission into orbit currently slated for August; or even minor problems resulting from a later test designed to confirm astronauts could safely escape the Starliner capsule in the event of an emergency.\nSpaceX and Boeing, which together have NASA contracts valued at more than $6.8 billion for capsule development and early operational missions, are years behind executing the required demonstration flights with people. Since 2017, the companies each have asked NASA for nine separate delays in safety certification, a step that isn\u2019t mandatory for test flights but is required for them to begin routinely carrying astronauts.\nThe renewed focus on schedule comes days after NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n abruptly demoted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who had been in charge of the agency\u2019s human exploration efforts. In response to questions Tuesday, Mr. Bridenstine suggested the 2019 dates are under heightened internal scrutiny and are likely to be revised as part of the leadership changes.\nThrough a spokeswoman, the NASA chief said the personnel move was intended to help NASA \u201creturn to more realistic cost and schedule plans.\u201d Once new leadership is in place, Mr. Bridenstine added, the agency will re-evaluate its timeline, consult with the companies and then inform the public of the revisions.\nNASA and the contractors repeatedly have stressed the capsules won\u2019t fly until all safety questions are resolved.\nAs recently as last month, Mr. Bridenstine expressed seemingly full confidence in the 2019 goal. During remarks to reporters at the Paris International Air Show, he confidently predicted that \u201cthis year we\u2019re going to have commercial crew [vehicles] taking people to and from the international space station.\u201d Currently, NASA depends on buying seats on Russian-built systems to reach the orbiting facility.\nMeanwhile, SpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s closely held company is called, said it is making steady progress on its accident investigation. During the Monday media teleconference, Mr. Koenigsmann said engineers had concluded that a design problem and a suspect fuel valve in the emergency-escape system caused the Dragon capsule to explode. The company is moving to eliminate the hazard and reassess other hardware for potential safety problems. \u201cThis will help us fly safer,\u201d Ms. Lueders said.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Plans by the White House and NASA to start using new U.S. space capsules to blast humans into orbit before the end of this year appear to be slipping, according to government and aerospace-industry officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Capsules Unlikely to Launch With Astronauts Before 2020 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6773",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-capsules-unlikely-to-launch-with-astronauts-before-2020-11563322257?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=53",
        "text": "But technical challenges and pending federal safety certifications mean the initial flights of privately developed spacecraft\u2014intended to ferry crews to and from the international space station\u2014are likely to shift past December.\nSuch a delay to 2020 became more likely this week, with entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. disclosing how long the company expects it will take to bounce back from an April ground-test accident that destroyed one of its Dragon capsules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s head of flight reliability, told reporters on Monday that a flight carrying people still was possible in 2019, but added \u201cit\u2019s getting increasingly difficult\u201d to envision how that would occur.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s program director for so-called commercial crew taxis, had the same message at the media event, saying a flurry of impending tests \u201cmakes it very difficult to pinpoint exactly\u201d when the first crewed capsule will blast off.\n\n\nSenior managers at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n , which is developing a rival capsule also intended to ferry astronauts to the orbiting international laboratory, have talked about launching their own demonstration flight with humans on board in the last few weeks of the year. But increasingly, according to industry and government officials familiar with the deliberations, that mission also seems poised for a delay. \nAny blastoff with people on board could be delayed past the end of the year, these officials said, by several potential challenges: getting timely access to a busy launchpad; problems with an uncrewed mission into orbit currently slated for August; or even minor problems resulting from a later test designed to confirm astronauts could safely escape the Starliner capsule in the event of an emergency.\nSpaceX and Boeing, which together have NASA contracts valued at more than $6.8 billion for capsule development and early operational missions, are years behind executing the required demonstration flights with people. Since 2017, the companies each have asked NASA for nine separate delays in safety certification, a step that isn\u2019t mandatory for test flights but is required for them to begin routinely carrying astronauts.\nThe renewed focus on schedule comes days after NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n abruptly demoted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who had been in charge of the agency\u2019s human exploration efforts. In response to questions Tuesday, Mr. Bridenstine suggested the 2019 dates are under heightened internal scrutiny and are likely to be revised as part of the leadership changes.\nThrough a spokeswoman, the NASA chief said the personnel move was intended to help NASA \u201creturn to more realistic cost and schedule plans.\u201d Once new leadership is in place, Mr. Bridenstine added, the agency will re-evaluate its timeline, consult with the companies and then inform the public of the revisions.\nNASA and the contractors repeatedly have stressed the capsules won\u2019t fly until all safety questions are resolved.\nAs recently as last month, Mr. Bridenstine expressed seemingly full confidence in the 2019 goal. During remarks to reporters at the Paris International Air Show, he confidently predicted that \u201cthis year we\u2019re going to have commercial crew [vehicles] taking people to and from the international space station.\u201d Currently, NASA depends on buying seats on Russian-built systems to reach the orbiting facility.\nMeanwhile, SpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s closely held company is called, said it is making steady progress on its accident investigation. During the Monday media teleconference, Mr. Koenigsmann said engineers had concluded that a design problem and a suspect fuel valve in the emergency-escape system caused the Dragon capsule to explode. The company is moving to eliminate the hazard and reassess other hardware for potential safety problems. \u201cThis will help us fly safer,\u201d Ms. Lueders said.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Plans by the White House and NASA to start using new U.S. space capsules to blast humans into orbit before the end of this year appear to be slipping, according to government and aerospace-industry officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Capsules Unlikely to Launch With Astronauts Before 2020 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6774",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-capsules-unlikely-to-launch-with-astronauts-before-2020-11563322257?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=69",
        "text": "But technical challenges and pending federal safety certifications mean the initial flights of privately developed spacecraft\u2014intended to ferry crews to and from the international space station\u2014are likely to shift past December.\n\n\n\n\nSuch a delay to 2020 became more likely this week, with entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. disclosing how long the company expects it will take to bounce back from an April ground-test accident that destroyed one of its Dragon capsules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s head of flight reliability, told reporters on Monday that a flight carrying people still was possible in 2019, but added \u201cit\u2019s getting increasingly difficult\u201d to envision how that would occur.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again.\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathy Lueders,\n\n\n\n the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s program director for so-called commercial crew taxis, had the same message at the media event, saying a flurry of impending tests \u201cmakes it very difficult to pinpoint exactly\u201d when the first crewed capsule will blast off.\n\n\nSenior managers at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA 0.37%\n\n\n , which is developing a rival capsule also intended to ferry astronauts to the orbiting international laboratory, have talked about launching their own demonstration flight with humans on board in the last few weeks of the year. But increasingly, according to industry and government officials familiar with the deliberations, that mission also seems poised for a delay. \nAny blastoff with people on board could be delayed past the end of the year, these officials said, by several potential challenges: getting timely access to a busy launchpad; problems with an uncrewed mission into orbit currently slated for August; or even minor problems resulting from a later test designed to confirm astronauts could safely escape the Starliner capsule in the event of an emergency.\nSpaceX and Boeing, which together have NASA contracts valued at more than $6.8 billion for capsule development and early operational missions, are years behind executing the required demonstration flights with people. Since 2017, the companies each have asked NASA for nine separate delays in safety certification, a step that isn\u2019t mandatory for test flights but is required for them to begin routinely carrying astronauts.\nThe renewed focus on schedule comes days after NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n abruptly demoted\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who had been in charge of the agency\u2019s human exploration efforts. In response to questions Tuesday, Mr. Bridenstine suggested the 2019 dates are under heightened internal scrutiny and are likely to be revised as part of the leadership changes.\nThrough a spokeswoman, the NASA chief said the personnel move was intended to help NASA \u201creturn to more realistic cost and schedule plans.\u201d Once new leadership is in place, Mr. Bridenstine added, the agency will re-evaluate its timeline, consult with the companies and then inform the public of the revisions.\nNASA and the contractors repeatedly have stressed the capsules won\u2019t fly until all safety questions are resolved.\nAs recently as last month, Mr. Bridenstine expressed seemingly full confidence in the 2019 goal. During remarks to reporters at the Paris International Air Show, he confidently predicted that \u201cthis year we\u2019re going to have commercial crew [vehicles] taking people to and from the international space station.\u201d Currently, NASA depends on buying seats on Russian-built systems to reach the orbiting facility.\nMeanwhile, SpaceX, as Mr. Musk\u2019s closely held company is called, said it is making steady progress on its accident investigation. During the Monday media teleconference, Mr. Koenigsmann said engineers had concluded that a design problem and a suspect fuel valve in the emergency-escape system caused the Dragon capsule to explode. The company is moving to eliminate the hazard and reassess other hardware for potential safety problems. \u201cThis will help us fly safer,\u201d Ms. Lueders said.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Plans by the White House and NASA to start using new U.S. space capsules to blast humans into orbit before the end of this year appear to be slipping, according to government and aerospace-industry officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX to Cut 10% of Workforce (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6775",
        "date": "2019-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-to-cut-10-of-workforce-11547264846?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=17",
        "text": "Buoyed by a hefty backlog of commercial and government launches, the company in recent years racked up a string of historic space-transportation accomplishments even as Mr. Musk and his management team identified still-more-difficult and expensive goals: sending large spacecraft to Mars and launching more than 11,000 small satellites to provide global internet connections.\nEach of those efforts promise to dwarf SpaceX\u2019s current business, but Mr. Musk has never spelled out how he planned to pay for development, testing and manufacturing costs. His deep-space exploration endeavors currently don\u2019t have any obvious commercial market.\n\n\nIn a statement, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, indicated payroll savings are now part of its financial realignment.\n \u201cTo continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet,\u201d SpaceX said, it must become a leaner company. \u201cEither of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations.\u201d\nThe company also said action to reduce head count \u201cis taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.\u201d\nThe move, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, suggests at least a portion of the engineers and other employees who helped devise SpaceX\u2019s reusable Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules are now considered expendable. \u201cWe are grateful for everything they have accomplished and their commitment to SpaceX\u2019s mission,\u201d SpaceX said.\nIn the past, SpaceX officials have touted the company\u2019s rapid growth in both payroll and facilities spread across the country. Its main production and engineering site is located in Hawthorne, Calif.\nBut with the company\u2019s core satellite-launching business projected to decline this year and possibly in 2020\u2014and investment in new technology slated to increase\u2014SpaceX took the uncharacteristic step of acknowledging it confronts greater challenges than it previously indicated publicly.\nAnalysts have estimated it could take an investment of more than $50 billion to bring the Mars and broadband-via-satellite ventures to fruition.\nFor the shorter term, SpaceX has told analysts, investors and others that it expects cost savings from reusing boosters, noting that its launch business was profitable last year. The company plans to launch two of its Falcon Heavy rockets in 2019, currently the most powerful booster in the world. \nBut in recent months, Mr. Musk, who also is the chief designer and technical officer, has abruptly changed designs for a proposed deep-space exploration system. Mr. Musk previously played down expectations about how quickly his proposed satellite constellation would become operational.\nSpaceX is on track to launch fewer than two dozen satellites overall this year\u2014about half the total number internal company plans projected when they were drafted roughly three years ago. On Friday, a SpaceX spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the prepared statement.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX\u00a0plans to reduce its workforce by 10%, or roughly 600 employees, even as the company seeks to ramp up ambitious projects. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX to Cut 10% of Workforce (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6776",
        "date": "2019-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-to-cut-10-of-workforce-11547264846?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=63",
        "text": "Buoyed by a hefty backlog of commercial and government launches, the company in recent years racked up a string of historic space-transportation accomplishments even as Mr. Musk and his management team identified still-more-difficult and expensive goals: sending large spacecraft to Mars and launching more than 11,000 small satellites to provide global internet connections.\nEach of those efforts promise to dwarf SpaceX\u2019s current business, but Mr. Musk has never spelled out how he planned to pay for development, testing and manufacturing costs. His deep-space exploration endeavors currently don\u2019t have any obvious commercial market.\n\n\nIn a statement, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, indicated payroll savings are now part of its financial realignment.\n \u201cTo continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet,\u201d SpaceX said, it must become a leaner company. \u201cEither of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations.\u201d\nThe company also said action to reduce head count \u201cis taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.\u201d\nThe move, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, suggests at least a portion of the engineers and other employees who helped devise SpaceX\u2019s reusable Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules are now considered expendable. \u201cWe are grateful for everything they have accomplished and their commitment to SpaceX\u2019s mission,\u201d SpaceX said.\nIn the past, SpaceX officials have touted the company\u2019s rapid growth in both payroll and facilities spread across the country. Its main production and engineering site is located in Hawthorne, Calif.\nBut with the company\u2019s core satellite-launching business projected to decline this year and possibly in 2020\u2014and investment in new technology slated to increase\u2014SpaceX took the uncharacteristic step of acknowledging it confronts greater challenges than it previously indicated publicly.\nAnalysts have estimated it could take an investment of more than $50 billion to bring the Mars and broadband-via-satellite ventures to fruition.\nFor the shorter term, SpaceX has told analysts, investors and others that it expects cost savings from reusing boosters, noting that its launch business was profitable last year. The company plans to launch two of its Falcon Heavy rockets in 2019, currently the most powerful booster in the world. \nBut in recent months, Mr. Musk, who also is the chief designer and technical officer, has abruptly changed designs for a proposed deep-space exploration system. Mr. Musk previously played down expectations about how quickly his proposed satellite constellation would become operational.\nSpaceX is on track to launch fewer than two dozen satellites overall this year\u2014about half the total number internal company plans projected when they were drafted roughly three years ago. On Friday, a SpaceX spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the prepared statement.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX\u00a0plans to reduce its workforce by 10%, or roughly 600 employees, even as the company seeks to ramp up ambitious projects. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX to Cut 10% of Workforce (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6777",
        "date": "2019-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-to-cut-10-of-workforce-11547264846?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=60",
        "text": "Buoyed by a hefty backlog of commercial and government launches, the company in recent years racked up a string of historic space-transportation accomplishments even as Mr. Musk and his management team identified still-more-difficult and expensive goals: sending large spacecraft to Mars and launching more than 11,000 small satellites to provide global internet connections.\nEach of those efforts promise to dwarf SpaceX\u2019s current business, but Mr. Musk has never spelled out how he planned to pay for development, testing and manufacturing costs. His deep-space exploration endeavors currently don\u2019t have any obvious commercial market.\n\n\nIn a statement, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, indicated payroll savings are now part of its financial realignment.\n \u201cTo continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet,\u201d SpaceX said, it must become a leaner company. \u201cEither of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations.\u201d\nThe company also said action to reduce head count \u201cis taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.\u201d\nThe move, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, suggests at least a portion of the engineers and other employees who helped devise SpaceX\u2019s reusable Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules are now considered expendable. \u201cWe are grateful for everything they have accomplished and their commitment to SpaceX\u2019s mission,\u201d SpaceX said.\nIn the past, SpaceX officials have touted the company\u2019s rapid growth in both payroll and facilities spread across the country. Its main production and engineering site is located in Hawthorne, Calif.\nBut with the company\u2019s core satellite-launching business projected to decline this year and possibly in 2020\u2014and investment in new technology slated to increase\u2014SpaceX took the uncharacteristic step of acknowledging it confronts greater challenges than it previously indicated publicly.\nAnalysts have estimated it could take an investment of more than $50 billion to bring the Mars and broadband-via-satellite ventures to fruition.\nFor the shorter term, SpaceX has told analysts, investors and others that it expects cost savings from reusing boosters, noting that its launch business was profitable last year. The company plans to launch two of its Falcon Heavy rockets in 2019, currently the most powerful booster in the world. \nBut in recent months, Mr. Musk, who also is the chief designer and technical officer, has abruptly changed designs for a proposed deep-space exploration system. Mr. Musk previously played down expectations about how quickly his proposed satellite constellation would become operational.\nSpaceX is on track to launch fewer than two dozen satellites overall this year\u2014about half the total number internal company plans projected when they were drafted roughly three years ago. On Friday, a SpaceX spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the prepared statement.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX\u00a0plans to reduce its workforce by 10%, or roughly 600 employees, even as the company seeks to ramp up ambitious projects. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX to Cut 10% of Workforce (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6778",
        "date": "2019-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-to-cut-10-of-workforce-11547264846?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=80",
        "text": "Buoyed by a hefty backlog of commercial and government launches, the company in recent years racked up a string of historic space-transportation accomplishments even as Mr. Musk and his management team identified still-more-difficult and expensive goals: sending large spacecraft to Mars and launching more than 11,000 small satellites to provide global internet connections.\n\n\n\n\nEach of those efforts promise to dwarf SpaceX\u2019s current business, but Mr. Musk has never spelled out how he planned to pay for development, testing and manufacturing costs. His deep-space exploration endeavors currently don\u2019t have any obvious commercial market.\n\n\nIn a statement, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally called, indicated payroll savings are now part of its financial realignment.\n \u201cTo continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet,\u201d SpaceX said, it must become a leaner company. \u201cEither of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations.\u201d\nThe company also said action to reduce head count \u201cis taken only due to the extraordinarily difficult challenges ahead and would not otherwise be necessary.\u201d\nThe move, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, suggests at least a portion of the engineers and other employees who helped devise SpaceX\u2019s reusable Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon capsules are now considered expendable. \u201cWe are grateful for everything they have accomplished and their commitment to SpaceX\u2019s mission,\u201d SpaceX said.\nIn the past, SpaceX officials have touted the company\u2019s rapid growth in both payroll and facilities spread across the country. Its main production and engineering site is located in Hawthorne, Calif.\nBut with the company\u2019s core satellite-launching business projected to decline this year and possibly in 2020\u2014and investment in new technology slated to increase\u2014SpaceX took the uncharacteristic step of acknowledging it confronts greater challenges than it previously indicated publicly.\nAnalysts have estimated it could take an investment of more than $50 billion to bring the Mars and broadband-via-satellite ventures to fruition.\nFor the shorter term, SpaceX has told analysts, investors and others that it expects cost savings from reusing boosters, noting that its launch business was profitable last year. The company plans to launch two of its Falcon Heavy rockets in 2019, currently the most powerful booster in the world. \nBut in recent months, Mr. Musk, who also is the chief designer and technical officer, has abruptly changed designs for a proposed deep-space exploration system. Mr. Musk previously played down expectations about how quickly his proposed satellite constellation would become operational.\nSpaceX is on track to launch fewer than two dozen satellites overall this year\u2014about half the total number internal company plans projected when they were drafted roughly three years ago. On Friday, a SpaceX spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the prepared statement.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX\u00a0plans to reduce its workforce by 10%, or roughly 600 employees, even as the company seeks to ramp up ambitious projects. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Gets Set to Blast Into Space Next Month (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6779",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-to-be-on-blue-origins-first-human-space-flight-11623066174?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=7",
        "text": "Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n are competing in the emerging market for suborbital travel. After years of delays, the two companies are promising passengers a short joy ride for prices expected to be less than $500,000, based on prior comments from Virgin executives. Mr. Branson plans to join Virgin Galactic\u2019s third crewed test flight later this year. \nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard has made 15 uncrewed test flights, which the company said demonstrates the mission\u2019s safety. Most commercial aircraft don\u2019t carry passengers before undergoing an intensive series of hundreds of piloted flights.\n\n\n\u201cI want to go on this flight because it\u2019s a thing I\u2019ve wanted to do all my life,\u201d Mr. Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram. \u201cIt\u2019s an adventure. It\u2019s a big deal for me.\u201d \nMr. Bezos is stepping down as Amazon\u2019s chief executive July 5 after leading the company for more than two decades, and has invested heavily in Blue Origin, contributing as much as roughly $1 billion a year.\nThe passenger list for Blue Origin\u2019s July flight is set to include the winner of a charity auction that attracted nearly 6,000 participants. The highest bid on Monday climbed $400,000 to $3.2 million, Blue Origin said, with the winner decided in a live auction slated for June 12.\nMark Bezos is a co-founder of HighPost Capital LLC and is on the leadership council for Robin Hood, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that invests in antipoverty programs. He has also served as a volunteer firefighter. \nThe New Shepard capsule has room for six people and is fully autonomous. A rocket propels the craft briefly above the Karman Line\u2014an imaginary boundary about 62 miles above sea level that is considered the beginning of space\u2014before the capsule returns to the ground beneath a parachute around 10 minutes after launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule, shown here in an undated illustration, has room for six people and is fully autonomous.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos and his brother can expect to travel at three times the speed of sound and experience three times the force of gravity during their planned trip, less than on some large roller coasters. Prospective astronauts will have three days of training before flying,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ariane Cornell,\n\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s sales director, said last month.\nPassengers have to be able to dress in a one-piece flight suit, and must be able to climb the New Shepard\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven stories up\u2014in under 90 seconds, Blue Origin said. The winning bidder will have to waive his or her right to sue Blue Origin and must sign a consent form about the flight\u2019s risks that is required by the Federal Aviation Administration.\nThe FAA, which regulates space launches because they travel through public airspace, has seen traffic grow quickly as commercial spaceflight expands.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is working with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips less costly. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\n\u201cThis year, we\u2019re expecting a licensed launch or re-entry on average about once a week,\u201d FAA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Dickson\n\n\n\n said in March.\nFor their space-tourism efforts, Blue Origin and other companies including Virgin Galactic are targeting suborbital commercial space flight, where crew members are weightless for minutes and don\u2019t have to endure the rigors of specialized training for longer periods in space and re-entry. \nVirgin Galactic went public in a 2019 merger with a blank-check company. Its spacecraft, which shoots into the lower portions of space after being dropped by a highflying airplane, has carried professional pilots on test flights. Mr. Branson plans to be one of the first space tourists the company will carry, CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said last month, with commercial flights planned next year. Its shares gained 8% on Monday. \nSpaceX, the rocket company led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n has plans this year to carry paying passengers higher than Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic, taking them into orbit. Passengers with all three companies would join the fewer than 600 people who have ever traveled in space, according to Blue Origin\u2019s tally. \nAs suborbital spaceflight promises to ease passenger requirements, Mr. Bezos\u2019s trip would make him one of a small number of amateurs who have flown in space. As space-shuttle missions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became more routine in the 1980s, the agency added nonprofessionals to some crews. Congressmen Jake Garn and Bill Nelson were among the participants on shuttle missions. Mr The Amazon founder plans to travel to space as one of the first passengers carried by Blue Origin, his space company. The New Shepard spacecraft is scheduled for launch from West Texas on July 20. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Gets Set to Blast Into Space Next Month (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6780",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-to-be-on-blue-origins-first-human-space-flight-11623066174?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=8",
        "text": "Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n are competing in the emerging market for suborbital travel. After years of delays, the two companies are promising passengers a short joy ride for prices expected to be less than $500,000, based on prior comments from Virgin executives. Mr. Branson plans to join Virgin Galactic\u2019s third crewed test flight later this year. \n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard has made 15 uncrewed test flights, which the company said demonstrates the mission\u2019s safety. Most commercial aircraft don\u2019t carry passengers before undergoing an intensive series of hundreds of piloted flights.\n\n\n\u201cI want to go on this flight because it\u2019s a thing I\u2019ve wanted to do all my life,\u201d Mr. Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram. \u201cIt\u2019s an adventure. It\u2019s a big deal for me.\u201d \nMr. Bezos is stepping down as Amazon\u2019s chief executive July 5 after leading the company for more than two decades, and has invested heavily in Blue Origin, contributing as much as roughly $1 billion a year.\nThe passenger list for Blue Origin\u2019s July flight is set to include the winner of a charity auction that attracted nearly 6,000 participants. The highest bid on Monday climbed $400,000 to $3.2 million, Blue Origin said, with the winner decided in a live auction slated for June 12.\nMark Bezos is a co-founder of HighPost Capital LLC and is on the leadership council for Robin Hood, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that invests in antipoverty programs. He has also served as a volunteer firefighter. \nThe New Shepard capsule has room for six people and is fully autonomous. A rocket propels the craft briefly above the Karman Line\u2014an imaginary boundary about 62 miles above sea level that is considered the beginning of space\u2014before the capsule returns to the ground beneath a parachute around 10 minutes after launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule, shown here in an undated illustration, has room for six people and is fully autonomous.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos and his brother can expect to travel at three times the speed of sound and experience three times the force of gravity during their planned trip, less than on some large roller coasters. Prospective astronauts will have three days of training before flying,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ariane Cornell,\n\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s sales director, said last month.\nPassengers have to be able to dress in a one-piece flight suit, and must be able to climb the New Shepard\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven stories up\u2014in under 90 seconds, Blue Origin said. The winning bidder will have to waive his or her right to sue Blue Origin and must sign a consent form about the flight\u2019s risks that is required by the Federal Aviation Administration.\nThe FAA, which regulates space launches because they travel through public airspace, has seen traffic grow quickly as commercial spaceflight expands.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is working with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips less costly. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\n\u201cThis year, we\u2019re expecting a licensed launch or re-entry on average about once a week,\u201d FAA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Dickson\n\n\n\n said in March.\nFor their space-tourism efforts, Blue Origin and other companies including Virgin Galactic are targeting suborbital commercial space flight, where crew members are weightless for minutes and don\u2019t have to endure the rigors of specialized training for longer periods in space and re-entry. \nVirgin Galactic went public in a 2019 merger with a blank-check company. Its spacecraft, which shoots into the lower portions of space after being dropped by a highflying airplane, has carried professional pilots on test flights. Mr. Branson plans to be one of the first space tourists the company will carry, CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said last month, with commercial flights planned next year. Its shares gained 8% on Monday. \nSpaceX, the rocket company led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n has plans this year to carry paying passengers higher than Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic, taking them into orbit. Passengers with all three companies would join the fewer than 600 people who have ever traveled in space, according to Blue Origin\u2019s tally. \nAs suborbital spaceflight promises to ease passenger requirements, Mr. Bezos\u2019s trip would make him one of a small number of amateurs who have flown in space. As space-shuttle missions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became more routine in the 1980s, the agency added nonprofessionals to some crews. Congressmen Jake Garn and Bill Nelson were among the participants on shuttle missions The Amazon founder plans to travel to space as one of the first passengers carried by Blue Origin, his space company. The New Shepard spacecraft is scheduled for launch from West Texas on July 20. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Gets Set to Blast Into Space Next Month (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6781",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-to-be-on-blue-origins-first-human-space-flight-11623066174?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=29",
        "text": "Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n are competing in the emerging market for suborbital travel. After years of delays, the two companies are promising passengers a short joy ride for prices expected to be less than $500,000, based on prior comments from Virgin executives. Mr. Branson plans to join Virgin Galactic\u2019s third crewed test flight later this year. \nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard has made 15 uncrewed test flights, which the company said demonstrates the mission\u2019s safety. Most commercial aircraft don\u2019t carry passengers before undergoing an intensive series of hundreds of piloted flights.\n\n\n\u201cI want to go on this flight because it\u2019s a thing I\u2019ve wanted to do all my life,\u201d Mr. Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram. \u201cIt\u2019s an adventure. It\u2019s a big deal for me.\u201d \nMr. Bezos is stepping down as Amazon\u2019s chief executive July 5 after leading the company for more than two decades, and has invested heavily in Blue Origin, contributing as much as roughly $1 billion a year.\nThe passenger list for Blue Origin\u2019s July flight is set to include the winner of a charity auction that attracted nearly 6,000 participants. The highest bid on Monday climbed $400,000 to $3.2 million, Blue Origin said, with the winner decided in a live auction slated for June 12.\nMark Bezos is a co-founder of HighPost Capital LLC and is on the leadership council for Robin Hood, a New York City-based nonprofit organization that invests in antipoverty programs. He has also served as a volunteer firefighter. \nThe New Shepard capsule has room for six people and is fully autonomous. A rocket propels the craft briefly above the Karman Line\u2014an imaginary boundary about 62 miles above sea level that is considered the beginning of space\u2014before the capsule returns to the ground beneath a parachute around 10 minutes after launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s New Shepard capsule, shown here in an undated illustration, has room for six people and is fully autonomous.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nMr. Bezos and his brother can expect to travel at three times the speed of sound and experience three times the force of gravity during their planned trip, less than on some large roller coasters. Prospective astronauts will have three days of training before flying,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ariane Cornell,\n\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s sales director, said last month.\nPassengers have to be able to dress in a one-piece flight suit, and must be able to climb the New Shepard\u2019s launch tower\u2014about seven stories up\u2014in under 90 seconds, Blue Origin said. The winning bidder will have to waive his or her right to sue Blue Origin and must sign a consent form about the flight\u2019s risks that is required by the Federal Aviation Administration.\nThe FAA, which regulates space launches because they travel through public airspace, has seen traffic grow quickly as commercial spaceflight expands.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is working with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips less costly. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\n\u201cThis year, we\u2019re expecting a licensed launch or re-entry on average about once a week,\u201d FAA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Dickson\n\n\n\n said in March.\nFor their space-tourism efforts, Blue Origin and other companies including Virgin Galactic are targeting suborbital commercial space flight, where crew members are weightless for minutes and don\u2019t have to endure the rigors of specialized training for longer periods in space and re-entry. \nVirgin Galactic went public in a 2019 merger with a blank-check company. Its spacecraft, which shoots into the lower portions of space after being dropped by a highflying airplane, has carried professional pilots on test flights. Mr. Branson plans to be one of the first space tourists the company will carry, CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Colglazier\n\n\n\n said last month, with commercial flights planned next year. Its shares gained 8% on Monday. \nSpaceX, the rocket company led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n has plans this year to carry paying passengers higher than Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic, taking them into orbit. Passengers with all three companies would join the fewer than 600 people who have ever traveled in space, according to Blue Origin\u2019s tally. \nAs suborbital spaceflight promises to ease passenger requirements, Mr. Bezos\u2019s trip would make him one of a small number of amateurs who have flown in space. As space-shuttle missions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became more routine in the 1980s, the agency added nonprofessionals to some crews. Congressmen Jake Garn and Bill Nelson were among the participants on shuttle missions. Mr The Amazon founder plans to travel to space as one of the first passengers carried by Blue Origin, his space company. The New Shepard spacecraft is scheduled for launch from West Texas on July 20. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6782",
        "date": "2018-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/headed-to-mars-a-big-experiment-in-tiny-satellites-1542891601?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=17",
        "text": "An engineer uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the MarCO CubeSats spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in this undated photo provided by NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHundreds of such tiny bargain-basement spacecraft, called CubeSats after their student-inspired standardized form, are transforming the business of space operations in Earth orbit. They image crops, beam internet service, gather weather data, track aircraft, monitor factories, and count the cars in shopping malls to gauge retail sales. Aerospace companies have filed plans to orbit thousands of these diminutive satellites in the coming decade.\nBut until now, no one knew whether these miniature satellites could withstand the rigors of deep space.\n\n\nNASA\u2019s two MarCO CubeSats, as the pair nearing Mars are called, are the first CubeSats to attempt an interplanetary journey. Launched this past May, each one is no bigger than a briefcase, is built from off-the-shelf commercial parts, and cost $18.2 million\u2014a fraction of the price of the InSight craft they are escorting.\nAs an engineering experiment, their most important task has been simply to survive the 300-million mile voyage.\n\n\n Interplanetary CubeSats Two tiny MarCO CubeSats are cruising to Mars as part of NASA's Insight mission. This is the first time that a CubeSat travels to another planet. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Source: NASA \n\n\n\u201cWe have our fingers crossed,\u201d said systems engineer Roger Walker, who oversees CubeSats developments at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. \u201cMarCO is paving the way to explore space at a much reduced cost. For the same cost as a larger mission, we could launch 10 in one go.\u201d\nIf successful, it could become a turning point in deep space engineering, researchers said. Such tiny probes can be developed not only more cheaply\u2014a tenth of the cost of many traditional missions\u2014but much more quickly, NASA engineers said. The more conventional InSight lander took seven years to design, build and test. The two MarCO craft took just over a year.\n\u201cWe were given roughly 15 months to go from PowerPoint slides to the flight of two spacecraft,\u201d said MarCO chief engineer Andy Klesh at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. \u201cWe met the deadline.\u201d\nMoreover, spaceflight engineers can be freer to use experimental propulsion systems, electronics and artificial intelligence systems considered too risky for more expensive spacecraft. \u201cMarCO is carrying several systems that we have been waiting decades to put into space,\u201d said Anthony Freeman, director of JPL\u2019s Innovation Foundry, which develops advanced mission concepts.\nIn fact, the MarCo spacecraft packs a lot of advanced technology into a package about the size of an overnight mail carton. Each one contains a miniaturized guidance, control and navigation system, eight gas-powered thrusters to stay on course, a newly designed flat antenna, a color camera, and the smallest radio ever flown in deep space, JPL engineers said.\n\n\nRelated There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Two briefcase-sized spacecraft known as CubeSats are on an interplanetary journey to Mars, the vanguard of what satellite designers hope one day will be swarms of tiny probes prowling the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6783",
        "date": "2018-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/headed-to-mars-a-big-experiment-in-tiny-satellites-1542891601?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=68",
        "text": "An engineer uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the MarCO CubeSats spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in this undated photo provided by NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHundreds of such tiny bargain-basement spacecraft, called CubeSats after their student-inspired standardized form, are transforming the business of space operations in Earth orbit. They image crops, beam internet service, gather weather data, track aircraft, monitor factories, and count the cars in shopping malls to gauge retail sales. Aerospace companies have filed plans to orbit thousands of these diminutive satellites in the coming decade.\n\n\n\n\nBut until now, no one knew whether these miniature satellites could withstand the rigors of deep space.\n\n\nNASA\u2019s two MarCO CubeSats, as the pair nearing Mars are called, are the first CubeSats to attempt an interplanetary journey. Launched this past May, each one is no bigger than a briefcase, is built from off-the-shelf commercial parts, and cost $18.2 million\u2014a fraction of the price of the InSight craft they are escorting.\nAs an engineering experiment, their most important task has been simply to survive the 300-million mile voyage.\n\n\n Interplanetary CubeSats Two tiny MarCO CubeSats are cruising to Mars as part of NASA's Insight mission. This is the first time that a CubeSat travels to another planet. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Source: NASA \n\n\n\u201cWe have our fingers crossed,\u201d said systems engineer Roger Walker, who oversees CubeSats developments at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. \u201cMarCO is paving the way to explore space at a much reduced cost. For the same cost as a larger mission, we could launch 10 in one go.\u201d\nIf successful, it could become a turning point in deep space engineering, researchers said. Such tiny probes can be developed not only more cheaply\u2014a tenth of the cost of many traditional missions\u2014but much more quickly, NASA engineers said. The more conventional InSight lander took seven years to design, build and test. The two MarCO craft took just over a year.\n\u201cWe were given roughly 15 months to go from PowerPoint slides to the flight of two spacecraft,\u201d said MarCO chief engineer Andy Klesh at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. \u201cWe met the deadline.\u201d\nMoreover, spaceflight engineers can be freer to use experimental propulsion systems, electronics and artificial intelligence systems considered too risky for more expensive spacecraft. \u201cMarCO is carrying several systems that we have been waiting decades to put into space,\u201d said Anthony Freeman, director of JPL\u2019s Innovation Foundry, which develops advanced mission concepts.\nIn fact, the MarCo spacecraft packs a lot of advanced technology into a package about the size of an overnight mail carton. Each one contains a miniaturized guidance, control and navigation system, eight gas-powered thrusters to stay on course, a newly designed flat antenna, a color camera, and the smallest radio ever flown in deep space, JPL engineers said.\n\n\nRelated There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth, Smashing Into Things How to Make a Tiny Satellite Tiny Satellites: The Latest Innovation Hedge Funds Are Using to Get a Leg Up How to Build Satellites Much Faster\u2014and Cheaper \n\n\nInspired by the success of small satellites orbiting Earth, U.S. and European aerospace engineers are coming up with audacious ideas for inexpensive, high-risk deep space missions. In various scenarios, CubeSats could infiltrate the rings of Saturn, sample the atmosphere of Venus, skim the surface of Jupiter\u2019s moons, explore hundreds of near-Earth asteroids for mineral deposits, or even voyage to the stars.\nAs artificial intelligence systems become space worthy, NASA and European engineers believe that networks of CubeSats will require little supervision from Earth. One plan calls for a swarm of 50 small satellites to orbit together on the far side of the moon, shielded from Earth\u2019s electromagnetic interference, as a radio telescope mapping signals from the instant after the Big Bang.\nSome are already lined up for launch.\nNext year, NASA\u2019s new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, is scheduled to carry 13 CubeSats. One of them, called the Lunar Flashlight, aims to shine a laser light to map the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar South Pole. A second, called NEAScout, will ride on an experimental solar sail to a nearby asteroid.\nDr. Walker and his colleagues at the European Space Agency are developing deep space CubeSat missions for launch by 2023, including a mission to a nearby asteroid to help assess the risk of its collision with Earth.\nIndeed, there are more missions in the works than there are rockets to ferry them throughout the solar system. CubeSats typically ride as hitchhikers on other missions, but interplanetary flights are rare. \u201cAll these rockets launch with ballast of some kind,\u201d said Dr. Klesh. \u201cWe are advocating that this be smart ballast\u2014ballast with a mission.\u201d\nBy picking up the pace of satellite development, CubeSats are energizing a new generation of deep space explorers.\nJPL system engineer Anne Marinan will manage one of the MarCO CubeSats during the Mars landing later this month. She joined JPL in 2016 after finishing her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.\n\u201cI have been at JPL for two years and I already have two satellites on the way to Mars,\u201d she said. \u201cHow cool is that?\u201d\nShe has another one in the works.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Two briefcase-sized spacecraft known as CubeSats are on an interplanetary journey to Mars, the vanguard of what satellite designers hope one day will be swarms of tiny probes prowling the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6784",
        "date": "2018-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/headed-to-mars-a-big-experiment-in-tiny-satellites-1542891601?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=62",
        "text": "An engineer uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the MarCO CubeSats spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in this undated photo provided by NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHundreds of such tiny bargain-basement spacecraft, called CubeSats after their student-inspired standardized form, are transforming the business of space operations in Earth orbit. They image crops, beam internet service, gather weather data, track aircraft, monitor factories, and count the cars in shopping malls to gauge retail sales. Aerospace companies have filed plans to orbit thousands of these diminutive satellites in the coming decade.\nBut until now, no one knew whether these miniature satellites could withstand the rigors of deep space.\n\n\nNASA\u2019s two MarCO CubeSats, as the pair nearing Mars are called, are the first CubeSats to attempt an interplanetary journey. Launched this past May, each one is no bigger than a briefcase, is built from off-the-shelf commercial parts, and cost $18.2 million\u2014a fraction of the price of the InSight craft they are escorting.\nAs an engineering experiment, their most important task has been simply to survive the 300-million mile voyage.\n\n\n Interplanetary CubeSats Two tiny MarCO CubeSats are cruising to Mars as part of NASA's Insight mission. This is the first time that a CubeSat travels to another planet. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Source: NASA \n\n\n\u201cWe have our fingers crossed,\u201d said systems engineer Roger Walker, who oversees CubeSats developments at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. \u201cMarCO is paving the way to explore space at a much reduced cost. For the same cost as a larger mission, we could launch 10 in one go.\u201d\nIf successful, it could become a turning point in deep space engineering, researchers said. Such tiny probes can be developed not only more cheaply\u2014a tenth of the cost of many traditional missions\u2014but much more quickly, NASA engineers said. The more conventional InSight lander took seven years to design, build and test. The two MarCO craft took just over a year.\n\u201cWe were given roughly 15 months to go from PowerPoint slides to the flight of two spacecraft,\u201d said MarCO chief engineer Andy Klesh at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. \u201cWe met the deadline.\u201d\nMoreover, spaceflight engineers can be freer to use experimental propulsion systems, electronics and artificial intelligence systems considered too risky for more expensive spacecraft. \u201cMarCO is carrying several systems that we have been waiting decades to put into space,\u201d said Anthony Freeman, director of JPL\u2019s Innovation Foundry, which develops advanced mission concepts.\nIn fact, the MarCo spacecraft packs a lot of advanced technology into a package about the size of an overnight mail carton. Each one contains a miniaturized guidance, control and navigation system, eight gas-powered thrusters to stay on course, a newly designed flat antenna, a color camera, and the smallest radio ever flown in deep space, JPL engineers said.\n\n\nRelated There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Two briefcase-sized spacecraft known as CubeSats are on an interplanetary journey to Mars, the vanguard of what satellite designers hope one day will be swarms of tiny probes prowling the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6785",
        "date": "2018-11-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/headed-to-mars-a-big-experiment-in-tiny-satellites-1542891601?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=84",
        "text": "An engineer uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the MarCO CubeSats spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in this undated photo provided by NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHundreds of such tiny bargain-basement spacecraft, called CubeSats after their student-inspired standardized form, are transforming the business of space operations in Earth orbit. They image crops, beam internet service, gather weather data, track aircraft, monitor factories, and count the cars in shopping malls to gauge retail sales. Aerospace companies have filed plans to orbit thousands of these diminutive satellites in the coming decade.\n\n\n\n\nBut until now, no one knew whether these miniature satellites could withstand the rigors of deep space.\n\n\nNASA\u2019s two MarCO CubeSats, as the pair nearing Mars are called, are the first CubeSats to attempt an interplanetary journey. Launched this past May, each one is no bigger than a briefcase, is built from off-the-shelf commercial parts, and cost $18.2 million\u2014a fraction of the price of the InSight craft they are escorting.\nAs an engineering experiment, their most important task has been simply to survive the 300-million mile voyage.\n\n\n Interplanetary CubeSats Two tiny MarCO CubeSats are cruising to Mars as part of NASA's Insight mission. This is the first time that a CubeSat travels to another planet. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Stowed size of MarCO High gain reflectarray antenna Deploys to point back to Earth to transmit data received from InSight. 4.6in. 14.4in. 9.5in. Solar panel Cold gas thrusters Each satellite has eight thrusters which can fire in various directions to direct the path of travel. Ultra-high frequency antenna This will pick up transmissions from InSight when it lands on Mars. Data received from Insight is handled here before being transmitted to Earth. Source: NASA \n\n\n\u201cWe have our fingers crossed,\u201d said systems engineer Roger Walker, who oversees CubeSats developments at the European Space Agency in the Netherlands. \u201cMarCO is paving the way to explore space at a much reduced cost. For the same cost as a larger mission, we could launch 10 in one go.\u201d\nIf successful, it could become a turning point in deep space engineering, researchers said. Such tiny probes can be developed not only more cheaply\u2014a tenth of the cost of many traditional missions\u2014but much more quickly, NASA engineers said. The more conventional InSight lander took seven years to design, build and test. The two MarCO craft took just over a year.\n\u201cWe were given roughly 15 months to go from PowerPoint slides to the flight of two spacecraft,\u201d said MarCO chief engineer Andy Klesh at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. \u201cWe met the deadline.\u201d\nMoreover, spaceflight engineers can be freer to use experimental propulsion systems, electronics and artificial intelligence systems considered too risky for more expensive spacecraft. \u201cMarCO is carrying several systems that we have been waiting decades to put into space,\u201d said Anthony Freeman, director of JPL\u2019s Innovation Foundry, which develops advanced mission concepts.\nIn fact, the MarCo spacecraft packs a lot of advanced technology into a package about the size of an overnight mail carton. Each one contains a miniaturized guidance, control and navigation system, eight gas-powered thrusters to stay on course, a newly designed flat antenna, a color camera, and the smallest radio ever flown in deep space, JPL engineers said.\n\n\nRelated There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Sp Two briefcase-sized spacecraft known as CubeSats are on an interplanetary journey to Mars, the vanguard of what satellite designers hope one day will be swarms of tiny probes prowling the solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Launches Its First Commercial Payload Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6786",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-successfully-launches-its-first-commercial-payload-into-orbit-1541927391?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=17",
        "text": "After a successful test flight in January, a scrubbed launch in April and then a roughly seven-month delay to redesign a key engine component, the 56-foot tall booster carried with it the ambitions of a budding market segment that aims to drastically cut the cost of access to space.\nThe goal is to eventually reduce those costs to hundreds of thousands of dollars per customer for satellites weighing no more than hundreds of pounds. That compares with price tags of tens of millions of dollars\u2014or historically $150 million and higher\u2014for some satellites as large as a school bus and often weighing several tons each.\n\nRocket Lab operates from its private New Zealand site and a second launchpad off the Virginia coast that the company recently signed up with state officials to use.\nFounder and Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Beck\n\n\n\n has said the company envisions ramping up launch rates to roughly one every week by early 2020. Its current prices to launch small satellites into relatively low orbits around the Earth are about $5 million, but the Electron is intended to boost multiple satellites nestled on top.\nRocket Lab\u2019s new-found prominence comes during a period of exploding growth globally in the number of proposed small-rocket makers funded by entrepreneurs or fledgling commercial-space companies. Dozens of would-be launch providers are bound to fail financially or technically before their boosters ever reach space, according to experts, but rising demand for low-cost orbital rides also is likely to produce some winners.\nAt the same time, swarms of small-satellite companies based in countries other than the U.S.\u2014such as U.K., Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates\u2014are scrambling to parlay low-cost launchers into novel business plans. Many rely on miniaturized components, assembly-line production and automated quality-assurance practices to turn out inexpensive satellites similar in size to a modest microwave, or even smaller versions called nonosats or cubesats that are about the size of a shoe box. But if used as part of fleet of several dozen or more, such spacecraft can have extensive capabilities for communications, Earth-imaging or scientific applications.\nIn the first three quarters of 2018 alone, some industry estimates peg total venture-capital investment in all aspects of commercial space at more than $1.2 billon, though that includes a big chunk for established competitors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nBut according to Mr. Beck, Rocket Lab\u2019s founder, small-satellite customers are demanding launches just as reliable as much larger counterparts with substantially deeper pockets. Despite exponentially lower investments required by smaller satellites, Mr. Beck said weeks before Sunday\u2019s launch, \u201cwhen you actually talk to your customers, they want no risk.\u201d Often, early-stage companies simply can\u2019t afford any failures or delays in order to survive.\nUnlike dozens of other rocket startups spanning the globe that still must convince customers and investors about the soundness of their technology, Mr. Beck\u2019s team at Rocket Lab already is focused on how to accelerate production and launch tempo to deliver on earlier promises.\n\n\nRelated Across the U.S., the Spaceport Race Is On Startup Rocket Lab Puts Satellites in Orbit for First Time in Successful Test Flight (Jan. 21, 2018) The Best Place on Earth to Fire 3,000 Rockets Into Outer Space Is... (Jan. 9, 2017) \n\n\nAfter the satellites were safely released on Sunday, the company posted a message on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n proclaiming: \u201cThe world is waking up to a new normal. Rapid and reliable access to space is now a reality for small satellites.\u201d\nThe company, which counts aerospace giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\namong its early investors, has said it doesn\u2019t need additional funding to meet its operational goals over the next few years.\nRocket Lab dubbed the mission \u201cIt\u2019s Business Time.\u201d Underlying the tongue-in-cheek reference, however, Sunday\u2019s launch highlighted a renewed emphasis on predictable schedules and ambitious commercial goals. The company has said it has firm launch contracts spanning the next 18 months.\nCompared with rivals, \u201cwe are not living from financing round to financing round,\u201d Mr. Beck said. \u201cWe\u2019re focused on big growth, long term.\u201d\nIn addition to scientific missions and launch contracts covering a bevy of commercial communications and Earth-imaging satellites, Rocket Lab already has snared the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a customer.\nAt the same time, Mr. Beck and his lieutenants have publicly sketched out a longer-term strategy to attract U.S. military payloads and potentially even spy satellites.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe Virginia facility is likely to boost such plans, and the company expects to choose a third launch facility s Rocket Lab has successfully blasted its first commercial payload into space, carrying with it the ambitions of a budding industry that is aiming to drastically cut the cost of access to space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Launches Its First Commercial Payload Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6787",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-successfully-launches-its-first-commercial-payload-into-orbit-1541927391?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=62",
        "text": "After a successful test flight in January, a scrubbed launch in April and then a roughly seven-month delay to redesign a key engine component, the 56-foot tall booster carried with it the ambitions of a budding market segment that aims to drastically cut the cost of access to space.\nThe goal is to eventually reduce those costs to hundreds of thousands of dollars per customer for satellites weighing no more than hundreds of pounds. That compares with price tags of tens of millions of dollars\u2014or historically $150 million and higher\u2014for some satellites as large as a school bus and often weighing several tons each.\n\nRocket Lab operates from its private New Zealand site and a second launchpad off the Virginia coast that the company recently signed up with state officials to use.\nFounder and Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Beck\n\n\n\n has said the company envisions ramping up launch rates to roughly one every week by early 2020. Its current prices to launch small satellites into relatively low orbits around the Earth are about $5 million, but the Electron is intended to boost multiple satellites nestled on top.\nRocket Lab\u2019s new-found prominence comes during a period of exploding growth globally in the number of proposed small-rocket makers funded by entrepreneurs or fledgling commercial-space companies. Dozens of would-be launch providers are bound to fail financially or technically before their boosters ever reach space, according to experts, but rising demand for low-cost orbital rides also is likely to produce some winners.\nAt the same time, swarms of small-satellite companies based in countries other than the U.S.\u2014such as U.K., Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates\u2014are scrambling to parlay low-cost launchers into novel business plans. Many rely on miniaturized components, assembly-line production and automated quality-assurance practices to turn out inexpensive satellites similar in size to a modest microwave, or even smaller versions called nonosats or cubesats that are about the size of a shoe box. But if used as part of fleet of several dozen or more, such spacecraft can have extensive capabilities for communications, Earth-imaging or scientific applications.\nIn the first three quarters of 2018 alone, some industry estimates peg total venture-capital investment in all aspects of commercial space at more than $1.2 billon, though that includes a big chunk for established competitors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nBut according to Mr. Beck, Rocket Lab\u2019s founder, small-satellite customers are demanding launches just as reliable as much larger counterparts with substantially deeper pockets. Despite exponentially lower investments required by smaller satellites, Mr. Beck said weeks before Sunday\u2019s launch, \u201cwhen you actually talk to your customers, they want no risk.\u201d Often, early-stage companies simply can\u2019t afford any failures or delays in order to survive.\nUnlike dozens of other rocket startups spanning the globe that still must convince customers and investors about the soundness of their technology, Mr. Beck\u2019s team at Rocket Lab already is focused on how to accelerate production and launch tempo to deliver on earlier promises.\n\n\nRelated Across the U.S., the Spaceport Race Is On Startup Rocket Lab Puts Satellites in Orbit for First Time in Successful Test Flight (Jan. 21, 2018) The Best Place on Earth to Fire 3,000 Rockets Into Outer Space Is... (Jan. 9, 2017) \n\n\nAfter the satellites were safely released on Sunday, the company posted a message on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n proclaiming: \u201cThe world is waking up to a new normal. Rapid and reliable access to space is now a reality for small satellites.\u201d\nThe company, which counts aerospace giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\namong its early investors, has said it doesn\u2019t need additional funding to meet its operational goals over the next few years.\nRocket Lab dubbed the mission \u201cIt\u2019s Business Time.\u201d Underlying the tongue-in-cheek reference, however, Sunday\u2019s launch highlighted a renewed emphasis on predictable schedules and ambitious commercial goals. The company has said it has firm launch contracts spanning the next 18 months.\nCompared with rivals, \u201cwe are not living from financing round to financing round,\u201d Mr. Beck said. \u201cWe\u2019re focused on big growth, long term.\u201d\nIn addition to scientific missions and launch contracts covering a bevy of commercial communications and Earth-imaging satellites, Rocket Lab already has snared the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a customer.\nAt the same time, Mr. Beck and his lieutenants have publicly sketched out a longer-term strategy to attract U.S. military payloads and potentially even spy satellites.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe Virginia facility is likely to boost such plans, and the company expects to choose a third launch facility s Rocket Lab has successfully blasted its first commercial payload into space, carrying with it the ambitions of a budding industry that is aiming to drastically cut the cost of access to space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Launches Its First Commercial Payload Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6788",
        "date": "2018-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-lab-successfully-launches-its-first-commercial-payload-into-orbit-1541927391?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=84",
        "text": "After a successful test flight in January, a scrubbed launch in April and then a roughly seven-month delay to redesign a key engine component, the 56-foot tall booster carried with it the ambitions of a budding market segment that aims to drastically cut the cost of access to space.\n\n\n\n\nThe goal is to eventually reduce those costs to hundreds of thousands of dollars per customer for satellites weighing no more than hundreds of pounds. That compares with price tags of tens of millions of dollars\u2014or historically $150 million and higher\u2014for some satellites as large as a school bus and often weighing several tons each.\n\nRocket Lab operates from its private New Zealand site and a second launchpad off the Virginia coast that the company recently signed up with state officials to use.\nFounder and Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Beck\n\n\n\n has said the company envisions ramping up launch rates to roughly one every week by early 2020. Its current prices to launch small satellites into relatively low orbits around the Earth are about $5 million, but the Electron is intended to boost multiple satellites nestled on top.\nRocket Lab\u2019s new-found prominence comes during a period of exploding growth globally in the number of proposed small-rocket makers funded by entrepreneurs or fledgling commercial-space companies. Dozens of would-be launch providers are bound to fail financially or technically before their boosters ever reach space, according to experts, but rising demand for low-cost orbital rides also is likely to produce some winners.\nAt the same time, swarms of small-satellite companies based in countries other than the U.S.\u2014such as U.K., Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates\u2014are scrambling to parlay low-cost launchers into novel business plans. Many rely on miniaturized components, assembly-line production and automated quality-assurance practices to turn out inexpensive satellites similar in size to a modest microwave, or even smaller versions called nonosats or cubesats that are about the size of a shoe box. But if used as part of fleet of several dozen or more, such spacecraft can have extensive capabilities for communications, Earth-imaging or scientific applications.\nIn the first three quarters of 2018 alone, some industry estimates peg total venture-capital investment in all aspects of commercial space at more than $1.2 billon, though that includes a big chunk for established competitors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\nBut according to Mr. Beck, Rocket Lab\u2019s founder, small-satellite customers are demanding launches just as reliable as much larger counterparts with substantially deeper pockets. Despite exponentially lower investments required by smaller satellites, Mr. Beck said weeks before Sunday\u2019s launch, \u201cwhen you actually talk to your customers, they want no risk.\u201d Often, early-stage companies simply can\u2019t afford any failures or delays in order to survive.\nUnlike dozens of other rocket startups spanning the globe that still must convince customers and investors about the soundness of their technology, Mr. Beck\u2019s team at Rocket Lab already is focused on how to accelerate production and launch tempo to deliver on earlier promises.\n\n\nRelated Across the U.S., the Spaceport Race Is On Startup Rocket Lab Puts Satellites in Orbit for First Time in Successful Test Flight (Jan. 21, 2018) The Best Place on Earth to Fire 3,000 Rockets Into Outer Space Is... (Jan. 9, 2017) \n\n\nAfter the satellites were safely released on Sunday, the company posted a message on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n proclaiming: \u201cThe world is waking up to a new normal. Rapid and reliable access to space is now a reality for small satellites.\u201d\nThe company, which counts aerospace giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\namong its early investors, has said it doesn\u2019t need additional funding to meet its operational goals over the next few years.\nRocket Lab dubbed the mission \u201cIt\u2019s Business Time.\u201d Underlying the tongue-in-cheek reference, however, Sunday\u2019s launch highlighted a renewed emphasis on predictable schedules and ambitious commercial goals. The company has said it has firm launch contracts spanning the next 18 months.\nCompared with rivals, \u201cwe are not living from financing round to financing round,\u201d Mr. Beck said. \u201cWe\u2019re focused on big growth, long term.\u201d\nIn addition to scientific missions and launch contracts covering a bevy of commercial communications and Earth-imaging satellites, Rocket Lab already has snared the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a customer.\nAt the same time, Mr. Beck and his lieutenants have publicly sketched out a longer-term strategy to attract U.S. military payloads and potentially even spy satellites.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe Virginia facility is likely to boost such plans, and the company expects to choose a third launch facili Rocket Lab has successfully blasted its first commercial payload into space, carrying with it the ambitions of a budding industry that is aiming to drastically cut the cost of access to space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Is Buying Up a Texas Village. Homeowners Cry Foul. (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6789",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-boca-chica-texas-starbase-11620353687?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=8",
        "text": "\u201cSpaceX bullied us from the beginning,\u201d she said. \u201cSpaceX employees did what they wanted.\u201d SpaceX, the maker of rockets and spacecraft controlled by Mr. Musk, among the world\u2019s richest people, is facing off against a handful of households that have refused to sell their properties in this remote unincorporated village. Some 30 small ranch houses sit on a sandy spit of land near the Mexican border and Gulf of Mexico beaches, where SpaceX rockets roar into the sky and then return for a landing. Some come crashing back on land. Villagers said Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u00a0has tried multiple times to buy them out. Some took the money, and SpaceX used the homes for its workers.\u00a0Holdouts, at least seven of them, said they want more from a billionaire who\u2019s after their dream vacation homes. Mr. Musk and SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it\u2019s cool,\u201d Mr. Musk said of the South Texas location at a 2018 press conference, according to media reports. It\u2019s hard to know exactly why SpaceX wants residents\u2019 houses, but indications are that it would be less of a security and safety issue not to have to worry about people living so close to launches. SpaceX has also indicated, based on the company\u2019s job postings, that it would like to develop the area into a resort.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some in the small border town believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development, jobs and education. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nThe Texas property scuffle is beginning to echo Old West tales of outsiders who pressure residents to give up land for development\u2014including the classic threat of eminent domain. In March, Mr. Musk tweeted \u201cCreating the city of Starbase, Texas,\u201d adding that this would happen through incorporation of the town\u2014a tactic mining companies commonly used to create company towns. If incorporation were successful, Starbase officials would have the power of eminent domain. If incorporated, depending on what type of municipality it became, the village could have a city manager, city counselor or mayor. There are about 14 people not connected to SpaceX living in Boca Chica Village now and a few more in surrounding areas that might be included. To incorporate the village, SpaceX would need to show that more than 200 people lived in the area and to garner a majority of their votes. They could use that power to eject holdouts, said lawyers and law professors. They would also control the police, could issue tax-free municipal bonds and might attain statutory authority over the one road in and out of the village, opening and closing it at will, these legal experts said. Eddie Trevi\u00f1o, Cameron County Judge\u2014a position akin to the top county commissioner in most states\u2014said he discussed the possibility of incorporation with\u00a0SpaceX before Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet, but \u201cI didn\u2019t think much of it at the time.\u201d Boca Chica is in the county. Eminent domain is \u201can option we may need to consider,\u201d he said. The remaining Boca Chica Village residents might need to leave for their own safety, he said: \u201cYou don\u2019t want individuals near rocket ships being tested and landing. We don\u2019t want anyone to get hurt.\u201dBeach regulations Since Mr. Musk founded his space company in 2002 in a converted Southern California warehouse, SpaceX has expanded to roughly 8,000 employees and has facilities from Florida to Texas to Washington state. It has focused on launching satellites for commercial uses, national security and weather forecasting. At Boca Chica, SpaceX is developing a large new rocket, the Super Heavy, which aims to take people to the moon and Mars\u2014a goal fortified in April when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded SpaceX a contract to build a capsule to land astronauts on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the past few months, multiple SpaceX rockets have exploded; a SpaceX site in Boca Chica in November.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mauricio Atilano/RGV Aerial Photography\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk has had an assist from Texas. The state has allocated around $30 million in incentives for SpaceX\u2019s Boca Chica operations. In 2013, state lawmakers passed a bill allowing Cameron County to temporarily close beach and beach-access points for spaceflight activity, despite the Texas constitution\u2019s protection of the public\u2019s free and unrestricted access to beaches. The lawmakers behind the legislation didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Texas House Rep. Alex Dominguez said that he has filed a bill to limit beach and beach-access closures at Boca Chica in response to constituent complaints but that he is working with SpaceX officials to try to improve beach access without limiting the company\u2019s allowed closure hours, with measures like reducing the radius of the launch area and In echoes of the Old West, the Tesla CEO\u2019s rocket firm has been building a company town in seaside Boca Chica, pressuring locals to sell their properties and talking of incorporating the town\u2014a move that could give it eminent domain to seize houses; \u201cbullied us from the beginning.\u201d ",
        "author": "Nancy Keates and Mark Maremont | Photographs by Phil Kline for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Is Buying Up a Texas Village. Homeowners Cry Foul. (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6790",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-boca-chica-texas-starbase-11620353687?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=8",
        "text": "\u201cSpaceX bullied us from the beginning,\u201d she said. \u201cSpaceX employees did what they wanted.\u201d SpaceX, the maker of rockets and spacecraft controlled by Mr. Musk, among the world\u2019s richest people, is facing off against a handful of households that have refused to sell their properties in this remote unincorporated village. Some 30 small ranch houses sit on a sandy spit of land near the Mexican border and Gulf of Mexico beaches, where SpaceX rockets roar into the sky and then return for a landing. Some come crashing back on land. Villagers said Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u00a0has tried multiple times to buy them out. Some took the money, and SpaceX used the homes for its workers.\u00a0Holdouts, at least seven of them, said they want more from a billionaire who\u2019s after their dream vacation homes. Mr. Musk and SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it\u2019s cool,\u201d Mr. Musk said of the South Texas location at a 2018 press conference, according to media reports. It\u2019s hard to know exactly why SpaceX wants residents\u2019 houses, but indications are that it would be less of a security and safety issue not to have to worry about people living so close to launches. SpaceX has also indicated, based on the company\u2019s job postings, that it would like to develop the area into a resort.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some in the small border town believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development, jobs and education. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nThe Texas property scuffle is beginning to echo Old West tales of outsiders who pressure residents to give up land for development\u2014including the classic threat of eminent domain. In March, Mr. Musk tweeted \u201cCreating the city of Starbase, Texas,\u201d adding that this would happen through incorporation of the town\u2014a tactic mining companies commonly used to create company towns. If incorporation were successful, Starbase officials would have the power of eminent domain. If incorporated, depending on what type of municipality it became, the village could have a city manager, city counselor or mayor. There are about 14 people not connected to SpaceX living in Boca Chica Village now and a few more in surrounding areas that might be included. To incorporate the village, SpaceX would need to show that more than 200 people lived in the area and to garner a majority of their votes. They could use that power to eject holdouts, said lawyers and law professors. They would also control the police, could issue tax-free municipal bonds and might attain statutory authority over the one road in and out of the village, opening and closing it at will, these legal experts said. Eddie Trevi\u00f1o, Cameron County Judge\u2014a position akin to the top county commissioner in most states\u2014said he discussed the possibility of incorporation with\u00a0SpaceX before Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet, but \u201cI didn\u2019t think much of it at the time.\u201d Boca Chica is in the county. Eminent domain is \u201can option we may need to consider,\u201d he said. The remaining Boca Chica Village residents might need to leave for their own safety, he said: \u201cYou don\u2019t want individuals near rocket ships being tested and landing. We don\u2019t want anyone to get hurt.\u201dBeach regulations Since Mr. Musk founded his space company in 2002 in a converted Southern California warehouse, SpaceX has expanded to roughly 8,000 employees and has facilities from Florida to Texas to Washington state. It has focused on launching satellites for commercial uses, national security and weather forecasting. At Boca Chica, SpaceX is developing a large new rocket, the Super Heavy, which aims to take people to the moon and Mars\u2014a goal fortified in April when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded SpaceX a contract to build a capsule to land astronauts on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the past few months, multiple SpaceX rockets have exploded; a SpaceX site in Boca Chica in November.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mauricio Atilano/RGV Aerial Photography\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk has had an assist from Texas. The state has allocated around $30 million in incentives for SpaceX\u2019s Boca Chica operations. In 2013, state lawmakers passed a bill allowing Cameron County to temporarily close beach and beach-access points for spaceflight activity, despite the Texas constitution\u2019s protection of the public\u2019s free and unrestricted access to beaches. The lawmakers behind the legislation didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Texas House Rep. Alex Dominguez said that he has filed a bill to limit beach and beach-access closures at Boca Chica in response to constituent complaints but that he is working with SpaceX officials to try to improve beach access without limiting the company\u2019s allowed closure hours, with measures like reducing the radius of the launch area and In echoes of the Old West, the Tesla CEO\u2019s rocket firm has been building a company town in seaside Boca Chica, pressuring locals to sell their properties and talking of incorporating the town\u2014a move that could give it eminent domain to seize houses; \u201cbullied us from the beginning.\u201d ",
        "author": "Nancy Keates and Mark Maremont | Photographs by Phil Kline for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Is Buying Up a Texas Village. Homeowners Cry Foul. (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6791",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-boca-chica-texas-starbase-11620353687?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=20",
        "text": "\u201cSpaceX bullied us from the beginning,\u201d she said. \u201cSpaceX employees did what they wanted.\u201d SpaceX, the maker of rockets and spacecraft controlled by Mr. Musk, among the world\u2019s richest people, is facing off against a handful of households that have refused to sell their properties in this remote unincorporated village. Some 30 small ranch houses sit on a sandy spit of land near the Mexican border and Gulf of Mexico beaches, where SpaceX rockets roar into the sky and then return for a landing. Some come crashing back on land. Villagers said Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u00a0has tried multiple times to buy them out. Some took the money, and SpaceX used the homes for its workers.\u00a0Holdouts, at least seven of them, said they want more from a billionaire who\u2019s after their dream vacation homes. Mr. Musk and SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it\u2019s cool,\u201d Mr. Musk said of the South Texas location at a 2018 press conference, according to media reports. It\u2019s hard to know exactly why SpaceX wants residents\u2019 houses, but indications are that it would be less of a security and safety issue not to have to worry about people living so close to launches. SpaceX has also indicated, based on the company\u2019s job postings, that it would like to develop the area into a resort.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some in the small border town believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development, jobs and education. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nThe Texas property scuffle is beginning to echo Old West tales of outsiders who pressure residents to give up land for development\u2014including the classic threat of eminent domain. In March, Mr. Musk tweeted \u201cCreating the city of Starbase, Texas,\u201d adding that this would happen through incorporation of the town\u2014a tactic mining companies commonly used to create company towns. If incorporation were successful, Starbase officials would have the power of eminent domain. If incorporated, depending on what type of municipality it became, the village could have a city manager, city counselor or mayor. There are about 14 people not connected to SpaceX living in Boca Chica Village now and a few more in surrounding areas that might be included. To incorporate the village, SpaceX would need to show that more than 200 people lived in the area and to garner a majority of their votes. They could use that power to eject holdouts, said lawyers and law professors. They would also control the police, could issue tax-free municipal bonds and might attain statutory authority over the one road in and out of the village, opening and closing it at will, these legal experts said. Eddie Trevi\u00f1o, Cameron County Judge\u2014a position akin to the top county commissioner in most states\u2014said he discussed the possibility of incorporation with\u00a0SpaceX before Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet, but \u201cI didn\u2019t think much of it at the time.\u201d Boca Chica is in the county. Eminent domain is \u201can option we may need to consider,\u201d he said. The remaining Boca Chica Village residents might need to leave for their own safety, he said: \u201cYou don\u2019t want individuals near rocket ships being tested and landing. We don\u2019t want anyone to get hurt.\u201dBeach regulations Since Mr. Musk founded his space company in 2002 in a converted Southern California warehouse, SpaceX has expanded to roughly 8,000 employees and has facilities from Florida to Texas to Washington state. It has focused on launching satellites for commercial uses, national security and weather forecasting. At Boca Chica, SpaceX is developing a large new rocket, the Super Heavy, which aims to take people to the moon and Mars\u2014a goal fortified in April when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded SpaceX a contract to build a capsule to land astronauts on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the past few months, multiple SpaceX rockets have exploded; a SpaceX site in Boca Chica in November.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mauricio Atilano/RGV Aerial Photography\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk has had an assist from Texas. The state has allocated around $30 million in incentives for SpaceX\u2019s Boca Chica operations. In 2013, state lawmakers passed a bill allowing Cameron County to temporarily close beach and beach-access points for spaceflight activity, despite the Texas constitution\u2019s protection of the public\u2019s free and unrestricted access to beaches. The lawmakers behind the legislation didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Texas House Rep. Alex Dominguez said that he has filed a bill to limit beach and beach-access closures at Boca Chica in response to constituent complaints but that he is working with SpaceX officials to try to improve beach access without limiting the company\u2019s allowed closure hours, with measures like reducing the radius of the launch area and In echoes of the Old West, the Tesla CEO\u2019s rocket firm has been building a company town in seaside Boca Chica, pressuring locals to sell their properties and talking of incorporating the town\u2014a move that could give it eminent domain to seize houses; \u201cbullied us from the beginning.\u201d ",
        "author": "Nancy Keates and Mark Maremont | Photographs by Phil Kline for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Is Buying Up a Texas Village. Homeowners Cry Foul. (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6792",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-spacex-rocket-boca-chica-texas-starbase-11620353687?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=30",
        "text": "\u201cSpaceX bullied us from the beginning,\u201d she said. \u201cSpaceX employees did what they wanted.\u201d SpaceX, the maker of rockets and spacecraft controlled by Mr. Musk, among the world\u2019s richest people, is facing off against a handful of households that have refused to sell their properties in this remote unincorporated village. Some 30 small ranch houses sit on a sandy spit of land near the Mexican border and Gulf of Mexico beaches, where SpaceX rockets roar into the sky and then return for a landing. Some come crashing back on land. Villagers said Mr. Musk\u2019s company\u00a0has tried multiple times to buy them out. Some took the money, and SpaceX used the homes for its workers.\u00a0Holdouts, at least seven of them, said they want more from a billionaire who\u2019s after their dream vacation homes. Mr. Musk and SpaceX didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of land with nobody around, so if it blows up, it\u2019s cool,\u201d Mr. Musk said of the South Texas location at a 2018 press conference, according to media reports. It\u2019s hard to know exactly why SpaceX wants residents\u2019 houses, but indications are that it would be less of a security and safety issue not to have to worry about people living so close to launches. SpaceX has also indicated, based on the company\u2019s job postings, that it would like to develop the area into a resort.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some in the small border town believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development, jobs and education. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan\n \n\n\nThe Texas property scuffle is beginning to echo Old West tales of outsiders who pressure residents to give up land for development\u2014including the classic threat of eminent domain. In March, Mr. Musk tweeted \u201cCreating the city of Starbase, Texas,\u201d adding that this would happen through incorporation of the town\u2014a tactic mining companies commonly used to create company towns. If incorporation were successful, Starbase officials would have the power of eminent domain. If incorporated, depending on what type of municipality it became, the village could have a city manager, city counselor or mayor. There are about 14 people not connected to SpaceX living in Boca Chica Village now and a few more in surrounding areas that might be included. To incorporate the village, SpaceX would need to show that more than 200 people lived in the area and to garner a majority of their votes. They could use that power to eject holdouts, said lawyers and law professors. They would also control the police, could issue tax-free municipal bonds and might attain statutory authority over the one road in and out of the village, opening and closing it at will, these legal experts said. Eddie Trevi\u00f1o, Cameron County Judge\u2014a position akin to the top county commissioner in most states\u2014said he discussed the possibility of incorporation with\u00a0SpaceX before Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet, but \u201cI didn\u2019t think much of it at the time.\u201d Boca Chica is in the county. Eminent domain is \u201can option we may need to consider,\u201d he said. The remaining Boca Chica Village residents might need to leave for their own safety, he said: \u201cYou don\u2019t want individuals near rocket ships being tested and landing. We don\u2019t want anyone to get hurt.\u201dBeach regulations Since Mr. Musk founded his space company in 2002 in a converted Southern California warehouse, SpaceX has expanded to roughly 8,000 employees and has facilities from Florida to Texas to Washington state. It has focused on launching satellites for commercial uses, national security and weather forecasting. At Boca Chica, SpaceX is developing a large new rocket, the Super Heavy, which aims to take people to the moon and Mars\u2014a goal fortified in April when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded SpaceX a contract to build a capsule to land astronauts on the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the past few months, multiple SpaceX rockets have exploded; a SpaceX site in Boca Chica in November.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mauricio Atilano/RGV Aerial Photography\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk has had an assist from Texas. The state has allocated around $30 million in incentives for SpaceX\u2019s Boca Chica operations. In 2013, state lawmakers passed a bill allowing Cameron County to temporarily close beach and beach-access points for spaceflight activity, despite the Texas constitution\u2019s protection of the public\u2019s free and unrestricted access to beaches. The lawmakers behind the legislation didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Texas House Rep. Alex Dominguez said that he has filed a bill to limit beach and beach-access closures at Boca Chica in response to constituent complaints but that he is working with SpaceX officials to try to improve beach access without limiting the company\u2019s allowed closure hours, with measures like reducing the radius of the launch area and In echoes of the Old West, the Tesla CEO\u2019s rocket firm has been building a company town in seaside Boca Chica, pressuring locals to sell their properties and talking of incorporating the town\u2014a move that could give it eminent domain to seize houses; \u201cbullied us from the beginning.\u201d ",
        "author": "Nancy Keates and Mark Maremont | Photographs by Phil Kline for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yuri Milner: Online Spending Will Fuel World-Wide Growth (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6793",
        "date": "2017-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/yuri-milner-online-spending-will-fuel-world-wide-growth-1496974807?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=24",
        "text": "\u201cSo we only need to assume that the whole world will catch up with China to come up with the number $7 trillion dollars worth of market cap\u201d in the world\u2019s tech sector, up from about $3 trillion today, he told an audience in Hong Kong.\n\n\nMore From WSJ D.Live Asia 2017 Microsoft Seeks Closer Partnerships With Chinese Firms Baidu Pins Hopes on Self-Driving Technology Ctrip.com: We Can Grow at Home and Overseas China Supports Certain Tech Sectors, Top Venture Capitalist Says Founder of Indonesia\u2019s Go-Jek: We\u2019re Beating Uber, Grab New Ping An Insurance Fund Is Hunting for Fintech Investments GrabTaxi Co-Founder: Didi Isn\u2019t Interested in Buying Us\u2014For Now Kakao to Launch Voice-Activated AI Services in Third Quarter Full Coverage \n\n\nMr. Milner was an early investor in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n as well as a number of other now-dominant technology companies. He said the massive amount of spending on research and development is helping to fuel the fast growth in the tech sector and is funding disruptive new technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.\n\n\nMr. Milner is also an active investor in China\u2019s technology sector and he addressed his investment in Xiaomi Corp., the startup that led China in smartphones sold in 2015 but slipped to fifth place last year amid fierce competition from Chinese competitors such as Oppo, Vivo and Huawei Technologies Co. He said Xiaomi is \u201cturning the corner,\u201d adding that the company was \u201ca bit ahead of its time\u201d with its original focus on online distribution networks.\n\u201cAs it turns out, the way people buy phones is mostly offline,\u201d Mr. Milner said. \u201cEventually, the market will catch up with that specific online distribution model, but Xiaomi of course responded to this challenge by investing in its own branded stores and the stores seem to be doing pretty well.\u201d\nMr. Milner has also been an outspoken advocate and financial backer of the search for extraterrestrial life, including Breakthrough Initiatives, an effort aimed at funding projects like high-speed spacecrafts. He said that search is critical because \u201cthe stakes are high,\u201d regardless of the outcome.\n\u201cWe should collectively as a civilization allocate a small fraction of our resources to solving existential questions,\u201d he said. \u201cAre we alone in the universe is one of those existential questions.\u201d\nWrite to Dan Strumpf at daniel.strumpf@wsj.com Massive growth in online spending will help fuel world-wide growth in the technology sector in the next decade, Yuri Milner, founder of DST Global, said at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s D.Live Asia 2017 conference. ",
        "author": "Dan Strumpf"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Targets More Funds for Satellite-Launch Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6794",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-targets-more-funds-for-satellite-launch-venture-11603231801?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=11",
        "text": "Virgin Orbit hopes to use a jumbo jet as a platform to fire small satellites into orbit. The novel technology aims to meet surging demand for launches of commercial and national-security payloads, eventually perhaps from sites in Southern California, Guam, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.\nMr. Branson, also the founder of space-tourism business\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n said that company is expected to use a spaceplane to transport passengers to the edge of space\u2014starting with himself\u2014in the next few months. Reiterating his long-held desire to be among the first people not trained for months as astronauts to briefly experience weightlessness on such a thrill ride, he said, \u201cIn the earlyish part of next year, I hope to be an astronaut.\u201d\n\n\nThe upbeat comments, after years of delays and technical setbacks for his ambitious space dreams, come as the pandemic has shut down and endangered other parts of his Virgin Group empire, ranging from airlines to cruise ships. Without elaborating, Mr. Branson said he has been able to use cash in some space assets to help soften the blow to his other businesses and \u201cmake sure they stay afloat\u201d until the Covid-19 threat recedes. \u201cSpace has come to the rescue,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson speaking at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Tech Live conference Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic in August said the flight with Mr. Branson was likely to occur in the first quarter of next year. The mission would start from the company\u2019s New Mexico launch site Virgin Galactic calls Spaceport America.\nThe launch was originally planned much earlier but was delayed when Virgin Galactic suffered a setback in 2014 with the crash of a test vehicle killing one of the test pilots. Since then, the company has redesigned its vehicle, shaken up its production plans and revamped its overall approach to safety.\nOver the summer, Virgin Galactic showed its design for the passenger cabin of SpaceShipTwo, the suborbital rocket it is building to send tourists to the edge of space.\nMr. Branson said Tuesday he saw little competition in the space-tourism business in the near-term. The only immediate rival, he said, is Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMr. Branson, however, tempered his earlier exuberance about expanding Virgin Galactic\u2019s strategy to provide deep-space tourism or transport passengers and cargo around the globe in minutes. \u201cWe would love to do point-to-point travel,\u201d he said, but \u201cright now, everybody is just focused on\u201d the initial goal of \u201cbeing able to get people into space on a regular basis.\u201d\n\n\nWSJ\u2019s Tech Live Conference Snapchat Nears 250 Million Daily Users as Advertisers Lift Spending on Platform Oyo CEO Says Company\u2019s Business Has Rebounded From Spring Nadir Facial-Recognition Startup Clearview Moves to Limit Risk of Police Abuse Intel Sees Opportunity in U.S.-China Tensions\u2019 Impact on Supply Chains IBM Hopes to Double Sales at Red Hat in Next Three Years \n\n\nVirgin Orbit, the satellite-launch company, meanwhile hopes to carve out a niche based on its flexibility. With companies and governments planning massive constellations of low-flying satellites for everything from global broadband access to earth imaging to spy spacecraft, Virgin Orbit says it will be able to blast payloads into orbit from its reconfigured\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jet with a single day\u2019s notice. Traditional rocket launches to transport satellites take months or longer to schedule.\nMr. Branson said the company could envision having five or six of those planes stationed around the world, with rockets ready to rapidly launch satellites into precise orbits maximized for individual customers. For military customers, that could mean positioning replacement spacecraft within a day or two of potential hostile action by an adversary.\n\u201cWe\u2019re working on a completely different approach,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart,\n\n\n\n Virgin Orbit\u2019s chief executive, said. \u201cThere is a huge opportunity here\u201d current rivals can\u2019t tap, he told the virtual conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The space entrepreneur said Virgin Orbit, which is aiming for additional demonstration flights in the coming months after a setback earlier this year, will require roughly $200 million in additional cash infusion. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Targets More Funds for Satellite-Launch Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6795",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-targets-more-funds-for-satellite-launch-venture-11603231801?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=33",
        "text": "Virgin Orbit hopes to use a jumbo jet as a platform to fire small satellites into orbit. The novel technology aims to meet surging demand for launches of commercial and national-security payloads, eventually perhaps from sites in Southern California, Guam, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.\nMr. Branson, also the founder of space-tourism business\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n said that company is expected to use a spaceplane to transport passengers to the edge of space\u2014starting with himself\u2014in the next few months. Reiterating his long-held desire to be among the first people not trained for months as astronauts to briefly experience weightlessness on such a thrill ride, he said, \u201cIn the earlyish part of next year, I hope to be an astronaut.\u201d\n\n\nThe upbeat comments, after years of delays and technical setbacks for his ambitious space dreams, come as the pandemic has shut down and endangered other parts of his Virgin Group empire, ranging from airlines to cruise ships. Without elaborating, Mr. Branson said he has been able to use cash in some space assets to help soften the blow to his other businesses and \u201cmake sure they stay afloat\u201d until the Covid-19 threat recedes. \u201cSpace has come to the rescue,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson speaking at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Tech Live conference Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic in August said the flight with Mr. Branson was likely to occur in the first quarter of next year. The mission would start from the company\u2019s New Mexico launch site Virgin Galactic calls Spaceport America.\nThe launch was originally planned much earlier but was delayed when Virgin Galactic suffered a setback in 2014 with the crash of a test vehicle killing one of the test pilots. Since then, the company has redesigned its vehicle, shaken up its production plans and revamped its overall approach to safety.\nOver the summer, Virgin Galactic showed its design for the passenger cabin of SpaceShipTwo, the suborbital rocket it is building to send tourists to the edge of space.\nMr. Branson said Tuesday he saw little competition in the space-tourism business in the near-term. The only immediate rival, he said, is Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMr. Branson, however, tempered his earlier exuberance about expanding Virgin Galactic\u2019s strategy to provide deep-space tourism or transport passengers and cargo around the globe in minutes. \u201cWe would love to do point-to-point travel,\u201d he said, but \u201cright now, everybody is just focused on\u201d the initial goal of \u201cbeing able to get people into space on a regular basis.\u201d\n\n\nWSJ\u2019s Tech Live Conference Snapchat Nears 250 Million Daily Users as Advertisers Lift Spending on Platform Oyo CEO Says Company\u2019s Business Has Rebounded From Spring Nadir Facial-Recognition Startup Clearview Moves to Limit Risk of Police Abuse Intel Sees Opportunity in U.S.-China Tensions\u2019 Impact on Supply Chains IBM Hopes to Double Sales at Red Hat in Next Three Years \n\n\nVirgin Orbit, the satellite-launch company, meanwhile hopes to carve out a niche based on its flexibility. With companies and governments planning massive constellations of low-flying satellites for everything from global broadband access to earth imaging to spy spacecraft, Virgin Orbit says it will be able to blast payloads into orbit from its reconfigured\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jet with a single day\u2019s notice. Traditional rocket launches to transport satellites take months or longer to schedule.\nMr. Branson said the company could envision having five or six of those planes stationed around the world, with rockets ready to rapidly launch satellites into precise orbits maximized for individual customers. For military customers, that could mean positioning replacement spacecraft within a day or two of potential hostile action by an adversary.\n\u201cWe\u2019re working on a completely different approach,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart,\n\n\n\n Virgin Orbit\u2019s chief executive, said. \u201cThere is a huge opportunity here\u201d current rivals can\u2019t tap, he told the virtual conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The space entrepreneur said Virgin Orbit, which is aiming for additional demonstration flights in the coming months after a setback earlier this year, will require roughly $200 million in additional cash infusion. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Targets More Funds for Satellite-Launch Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6796",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-targets-more-funds-for-satellite-launch-venture-11603231801?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=11",
        "text": "Virgin Orbit hopes to use a jumbo jet as a platform to fire small satellites into orbit. The novel technology aims to meet surging demand for launches of commercial and national-security payloads, eventually perhaps from sites in Southern California, Guam, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson, also the founder of space-tourism business\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -1.72%\n\n\n said that company is expected to use a spaceplane to transport passengers to the edge of space\u2014starting with himself\u2014in the next few months. Reiterating his long-held desire to be among the first people not trained for months as astronauts to briefly experience weightlessness on such a thrill ride, he said, \u201cIn the earlyish part of next year, I hope to be an astronaut.\u201d\n\n\nThe upbeat comments, after years of delays and technical setbacks for his ambitious space dreams, come as the pandemic has shut down and endangered other parts of his Virgin Group empire, ranging from airlines to cruise ships. Without elaborating, Mr. Branson said he has been able to use cash in some space assets to help soften the blow to his other businesses and \u201cmake sure they stay afloat\u201d until the Covid-19 threat recedes. \u201cSpace has come to the rescue,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson speaking at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Tech Live conference Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic in August said the flight with Mr. Branson was likely to occur in the first quarter of next year. The mission would start from the company\u2019s New Mexico launch site Virgin Galactic calls Spaceport America.\nThe launch was originally planned much earlier but was delayed when Virgin Galactic suffered a setback in 2014 with the crash of a test vehicle killing one of the test pilots. Since then, the company has redesigned its vehicle, shaken up its production plans and revamped its overall approach to safety.\nOver the summer, Virgin Galactic showed its design for the passenger cabin of SpaceShipTwo, the suborbital rocket it is building to send tourists to the edge of space.\nMr. Branson said Tuesday he saw little competition in the space-tourism business in the near-term. The only immediate rival, he said, is Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMr. Branson, however, tempered his earlier exuberance about expanding Virgin Galactic\u2019s strategy to provide deep-space tourism or transport passengers and cargo around the globe in minutes. \u201cWe would love to do point-to-point travel,\u201d he said, but \u201cright now, everybody is just focused on\u201d the initial goal of \u201cbeing able to get people into space on a regular basis.\u201d\n\n\nWSJ\u2019s Tech Live Conference Snapchat Nears 250 Million Daily Users as Advertisers Lift Spending on Platform Oyo CEO Says Company\u2019s Business Has Rebounded From Spring Nadir Facial-Recognition Startup Clearview Moves to Limit Risk of Police Abuse Intel Sees Opportunity in U.S.-China Tensions\u2019 Impact on Supply Chains IBM Hopes to Double Sales at Red Hat in Next Three Years \n\n\nVirgin Orbit, the satellite-launch company, meanwhile hopes to carve out a niche based on its flexibility. With companies and governments planning massive constellations of low-flying satellites for everything from global broadband access to earth imaging to spy spacecraft, Virgin Orbit says it will be able to blast payloads into orbit from its reconfigured\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jet with a single day\u2019s notice. Traditional rocket launches to transport satellites take months or longer to schedule.\nMr. Branson said the company could envision having five or six of those planes stationed around the world, with rockets ready to rapidly launch satellites into precise orbits maximized for individual customers. For military customers, that could mean positioning replacement spacecraft within a day or two of potential hostile action by an adversary.\n\u201cWe\u2019re working on a completely different approach,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart,\n\n\n\n Virgin Orbit\u2019s chief executive, said. \u201cThere is a huge opportunity here\u201d current rivals can\u2019t tap, he told the virtual conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The space entrepreneur said Virgin Orbit, which is aiming for additional demonstration flights in the coming months after a setback earlier this year, will require roughly $200 million in additional cash infusion. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Targets More Funds for Satellite-Launch Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6797",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-targets-more-funds-for-satellite-launch-venture-11603231801?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=30",
        "text": "Virgin Orbit hopes to use a jumbo jet as a platform to fire small satellites into orbit. The novel technology aims to meet surging demand for launches of commercial and national-security payloads, eventually perhaps from sites in Southern California, Guam, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.\nMr. Branson, also the founder of space-tourism business\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n said that company is expected to use a spaceplane to transport passengers to the edge of space\u2014starting with himself\u2014in the next few months. Reiterating his long-held desire to be among the first people not trained for months as astronauts to briefly experience weightlessness on such a thrill ride, he said, \u201cIn the earlyish part of next year, I hope to be an astronaut.\u201d\n\n\nThe upbeat comments, after years of delays and technical setbacks for his ambitious space dreams, come as the pandemic has shut down and endangered other parts of his Virgin Group empire, ranging from airlines to cruise ships. Without elaborating, Mr. Branson said he has been able to use cash in some space assets to help soften the blow to his other businesses and \u201cmake sure they stay afloat\u201d until the Covid-19 threat recedes. \u201cSpace has come to the rescue,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson speaking at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Tech Live conference Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic in August said the flight with Mr. Branson was likely to occur in the first quarter of next year. The mission would start from the company\u2019s New Mexico launch site Virgin Galactic calls Spaceport America.\nThe launch was originally planned much earlier but was delayed when Virgin Galactic suffered a setback in 2014 with the crash of a test vehicle killing one of the test pilots. Since then, the company has redesigned its vehicle, shaken up its production plans and revamped its overall approach to safety.\nOver the summer, Virgin Galactic showed its design for the passenger cabin of SpaceShipTwo, the suborbital rocket it is building to send tourists to the edge of space.\nMr. Branson said Tuesday he saw little competition in the space-tourism business in the near-term. The only immediate rival, he said, is Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMr. Branson, however, tempered his earlier exuberance about expanding Virgin Galactic\u2019s strategy to provide deep-space tourism or transport passengers and cargo around the globe in minutes. \u201cWe would love to do point-to-point travel,\u201d he said, but \u201cright now, everybody is just focused on\u201d the initial goal of \u201cbeing able to get people into space on a regular basis.\u201d\n\n\nWSJ\u2019s Tech Live Conference Snapchat Nears 250 Million Daily Users as Advertisers Lift Spending on Platform Oyo CEO Says Company\u2019s Business Has Rebounded From Spring Nadir Facial-Recognition Startup Clearview Moves to Limit Risk of Police Abuse Intel Sees Opportunity in U.S.-China Tensions\u2019 Impact on Supply Chains IBM Hopes to Double Sales at Red Hat in Next Three Years \n\n\nVirgin Orbit, the satellite-launch company, meanwhile hopes to carve out a niche based on its flexibility. With companies and governments planning massive constellations of low-flying satellites for everything from global broadband access to earth imaging to spy spacecraft, Virgin Orbit says it will be able to blast payloads into orbit from its reconfigured\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jet with a single day\u2019s notice. Traditional rocket launches to transport satellites take months or longer to schedule.\nMr. Branson said the company could envision having five or six of those planes stationed around the world, with rockets ready to rapidly launch satellites into precise orbits maximized for individual customers. For military customers, that could mean positioning replacement spacecraft within a day or two of potential hostile action by an adversary.\n\u201cWe\u2019re working on a completely different approach,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart,\n\n\n\n Virgin Orbit\u2019s chief executive, said. \u201cThere is a huge opportunity here\u201d current rivals can\u2019t tap, he told the virtual conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The space entrepreneur said Virgin Orbit, which is aiming for additional demonstration flights in the coming months after a setback earlier this year, will require roughly $200 million in additional cash infusion. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Targets More Funds for Satellite-Launch Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6798",
        "date": "2020-10-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-targets-more-funds-for-satellite-launch-venture-11603231801?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=39",
        "text": "Virgin Orbit hopes to use a jumbo jet as a platform to fire small satellites into orbit. The novel technology aims to meet surging demand for launches of commercial and national-security payloads, eventually perhaps from sites in Southern California, Guam, the United Kingdom and elsewhere.\nMr. Branson, also the founder of space-tourism business\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.,\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n said that company is expected to use a spaceplane to transport passengers to the edge of space\u2014starting with himself\u2014in the next few months. Reiterating his long-held desire to be among the first people not trained for months as astronauts to briefly experience weightlessness on such a thrill ride, he said, \u201cIn the earlyish part of next year, I hope to be an astronaut.\u201d\n\n\nThe upbeat comments, after years of delays and technical setbacks for his ambitious space dreams, come as the pandemic has shut down and endangered other parts of his Virgin Group empire, ranging from airlines to cruise ships. Without elaborating, Mr. Branson said he has been able to use cash in some space assets to help soften the blow to his other businesses and \u201cmake sure they stay afloat\u201d until the Covid-19 threat recedes. \u201cSpace has come to the rescue,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRichard Branson speaking at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Tech Live conference Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic in August said the flight with Mr. Branson was likely to occur in the first quarter of next year. The mission would start from the company\u2019s New Mexico launch site Virgin Galactic calls Spaceport America.\nThe launch was originally planned much earlier but was delayed when Virgin Galactic suffered a setback in 2014 with the crash of a test vehicle killing one of the test pilots. Since then, the company has redesigned its vehicle, shaken up its production plans and revamped its overall approach to safety.\nOver the summer, Virgin Galactic showed its design for the passenger cabin of SpaceShipTwo, the suborbital rocket it is building to send tourists to the edge of space.\nMr. Branson said Tuesday he saw little competition in the space-tourism business in the near-term. The only immediate rival, he said, is Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nMr. Branson, however, tempered his earlier exuberance about expanding Virgin Galactic\u2019s strategy to provide deep-space tourism or transport passengers and cargo around the globe in minutes. \u201cWe would love to do point-to-point travel,\u201d he said, but \u201cright now, everybody is just focused on\u201d the initial goal of \u201cbeing able to get people into space on a regular basis.\u201d\n\n\nWSJ\u2019s Tech Live Conference Snapchat Nears 250 Million Daily Users as Advertisers Lift Spending on Platform Oyo CEO Says Company\u2019s Business Has Rebounded From Spring Nadir Facial-Recognition Startup Clearview Moves to Limit Risk of Police Abuse Intel Sees Opportunity in U.S.-China Tensions\u2019 Impact on Supply Chains IBM Hopes to Double Sales at Red Hat in Next Three Years \n\n\nVirgin Orbit, the satellite-launch company, meanwhile hopes to carve out a niche based on its flexibility. With companies and governments planning massive constellations of low-flying satellites for everything from global broadband access to earth imaging to spy spacecraft, Virgin Orbit says it will be able to blast payloads into orbit from its reconfigured\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 747 jumbo jet with a single day\u2019s notice. Traditional rocket launches to transport satellites take months or longer to schedule.\nMr. Branson said the company could envision having five or six of those planes stationed around the world, with rockets ready to rapidly launch satellites into precise orbits maximized for individual customers. For military customers, that could mean positioning replacement spacecraft within a day or two of potential hostile action by an adversary.\n\u201cWe\u2019re working on a completely different approach,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Hart,\n\n\n\n Virgin Orbit\u2019s chief executive, said. \u201cThere is a huge opportunity here\u201d current rivals can\u2019t tap, he told the virtual conference.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The space entrepreneur said Virgin Orbit, which is aiming for additional demonstration flights in the coming months after a setback earlier this year, will require roughly $200 million in additional cash infusion. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saudi Arabia to Inject $1 Billion Into Virgin Galactic Space Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6799",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-to-inject-1-billion-into-virgin-galactic-space-venture-1509060475?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=22",
        "text": "Specifics of the revised ownership structure weren\u2019t disclosed. The deal was announced at a three-day event, dubbed \u201cDavos in the Desert,\u201d organized by Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund to showcase\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Prince Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision for a tech-driven economy.\nFollowing an October 2014 test flight tragedy that killed one pilot and injured the other, Mr. Branson\u2019s management team was forced to suspend operations and reassess manufacturing, safety and test flight procedures. The company\u2019s rocket-propelled spacecraft, intended to briefly take tourists to the edge of space before landing like a conventional plane, hasn\u2019t conducted a powered flight since that crash. But limited-altitude test flights using rocket propulsion are expected to resume shortly.\n\n\nThe announcement also offered the most authoritative and detailed timetable yet for the anticipated resumption of more ambitious, suborbital test flights. \u201cWe are now just months away from going into space with people on board,\u201d Mr. Branson said in a statement. In various recent interviews, the colorful British billionaire previously suggested suborbital tests were slated to begin around the end of this year, with full-blown commercial operations likely to occur by the end of 2018.\n\n\nRelated Saudis Showcase Technology in Bid to Woo Business Leaders Chinese Tech Giant Baidu Steps Back From Middle East Saudi Prince Pushes Greater Tolerance, Unveils Development Project (Oct. 24) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic's VSS Unity, glides for the first time after being released over the Mojave Desert in California in this Dec. 3, 2016 photo. The spaceship was carried aloft by its mothership, Eve, then released before gliding for 10 minutes toward a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s founder has been working since 2004 to make good on promises to carry passengers into weightlessness for $250,000 each. Mr. Branson has said he and some family members intend to be on the first commercial suborbital journey. In addition to offering thrill rides for a new category of well-heeled space passengers, Mr. Branson envisions launching small satellites into orbit using rocket ships released in midair from specially outfitted Boeing 747 jumbo jets for a cut-rate price of approximately $20 million.\nReflecting industry comments that delays and unexpected extra development tasks have stretched Virgin Galactic\u2019s finances, the announcement said the Saudi investment will \u201cenable us to develop the next generation of satellite launchers and accelerate\u201d efforts to implement \u201cpoint-to-point supersonic space travel.\u201d \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s rivals include separate space transportation companies run by fellow billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX expects to start transporting astronauts to the international space station sometime next year. That is also roughly the timeline in which Blue Origin LLC, the company founded and funded by Mr. Bezos, expects to start commercial suborbital flights for tourists.\nAbu Dhabi\u2019s Aabar Investments group made an initial investment of $300 million in Virgin Galactic before the accident devastated the company\u2019s plans. And after the crash, according to industry officials, the same group offered to increase its financial exposure in exchange for an increased stake. But over the years, both sides declined to comment on the substance of those discussions.\nThe memorandum of understanding between Mr. Branson\u2019s companies and the Saudi investment fund also includes provisions for options totaling another $480 million in financing, including potential payments for transportation services.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Saudi Arabia is poised to invest $1 billion in entrepreneur Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism and satellite-launching venture, which is seeking to show it is back on track three years after a fatal accident. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saudi Arabia to Inject $1 Billion Into Virgin Galactic Space Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6800",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-to-inject-1-billion-into-virgin-galactic-space-venture-1509060475?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=84",
        "text": "Specifics of the revised ownership structure weren\u2019t disclosed. The deal was announced at a three-day event, dubbed \u201cDavos in the Desert,\u201d organized by Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund to showcase\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Prince Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision for a tech-driven economy.\nFollowing an October 2014 test flight tragedy that killed one pilot and injured the other, Mr. Branson\u2019s management team was forced to suspend operations and reassess manufacturing, safety and test flight procedures. The company\u2019s rocket-propelled spacecraft, intended to briefly take tourists to the edge of space before landing like a conventional plane, hasn\u2019t conducted a powered flight since that crash. But limited-altitude test flights using rocket propulsion are expected to resume shortly.\n\n\nThe announcement also offered the most authoritative and detailed timetable yet for the anticipated resumption of more ambitious, suborbital test flights. \u201cWe are now just months away from going into space with people on board,\u201d Mr. Branson said in a statement. In various recent interviews, the colorful British billionaire previously suggested suborbital tests were slated to begin around the end of this year, with full-blown commercial operations likely to occur by the end of 2018.\n\n\nRelated Saudis Showcase Technology in Bid to Woo Business Leaders Chinese Tech Giant Baidu Steps Back From Middle East Saudi Prince Pushes Greater Tolerance, Unveils Development Project (Oct. 24) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic's VSS Unity, glides for the first time after being released over the Mojave Desert in California in this Dec. 3, 2016 photo. The spaceship was carried aloft by its mothership, Eve, then released before gliding for 10 minutes toward a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s founder has been working since 2004 to make good on promises to carry passengers into weightlessness for $250,000 each. Mr. Branson has said he and some family members intend to be on the first commercial suborbital journey. In addition to offering thrill rides for a new category of well-heeled space passengers, Mr. Branson envisions launching small satellites into orbit using rocket ships released in midair from specially outfitted Boeing 747 jumbo jets for a cut-rate price of approximately $20 million.\nReflecting industry comments that delays and unexpected extra development tasks have stretched Virgin Galactic\u2019s finances, the announcement said the Saudi investment will \u201cenable us to develop the next generation of satellite launchers and accelerate\u201d efforts to implement \u201cpoint-to-point supersonic space travel.\u201d \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s rivals include separate space transportation companies run by fellow billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX expects to start transporting astronauts to the international space station sometime next year. That is also roughly the timeline in which Blue Origin LLC, the company founded and funded by Mr. Bezos, expects to start commercial suborbital flights for tourists.\nAbu Dhabi\u2019s Aabar Investments group made an initial investment of $300 million in Virgin Galactic before the accident devastated the company\u2019s plans. And after the crash, according to industry officials, the same group offered to increase its financial exposure in exchange for an increased stake. But over the years, both sides declined to comment on the substance of those discussions.\nThe memorandum of understanding between Mr. Branson\u2019s companies and the Saudi investment fund also includes provisions for options totaling another $480 million in financing, including potential payments for transportation services.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Saudi Arabia is poised to invest $1 billion in entrepreneur Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism and satellite-launching venture, which is seeking to show it is back on track three years after a fatal accident. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saudi Arabia to Inject $1 Billion Into Virgin Galactic Space Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6801",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-to-inject-1-billion-into-virgin-galactic-space-venture-1509060475?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=24",
        "text": "Specifics of the revised ownership structure weren\u2019t disclosed. The deal was announced at a three-day event, dubbed \u201cDavos in the Desert,\u201d organized by Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund to showcase\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Prince Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision for a tech-driven economy.\n\n\n\n\nFollowing an October 2014 test flight tragedy that killed one pilot and injured the other, Mr. Branson\u2019s management team was forced to suspend operations and reassess manufacturing, safety and test flight procedures. The company\u2019s rocket-propelled spacecraft, intended to briefly take tourists to the edge of space before landing like a conventional plane, hasn\u2019t conducted a powered flight since that crash. But limited-altitude test flights using rocket propulsion are expected to resume shortly.\n\n\nThe announcement also offered the most authoritative and detailed timetable yet for the anticipated resumption of more ambitious, suborbital test flights. \u201cWe are now just months away from going into space with people on board,\u201d Mr. Branson said in a statement. In various recent interviews, the colorful British billionaire previously suggested suborbital tests were slated to begin around the end of this year, with full-blown commercial operations likely to occur by the end of 2018.\n\n\nRelated Saudis Showcase Technology in Bid to Woo Business Leaders Chinese Tech Giant Baidu Steps Back From Middle East Saudi Prince Pushes Greater Tolerance, Unveils Development Project (Oct. 24) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic's VSS Unity, glides for the first time after being released over the Mojave Desert in California in this Dec. 3, 2016 photo. The spaceship was carried aloft by its mothership, Eve, then released before gliding for 10 minutes toward a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s founder has been working since 2004 to make good on promises to carry passengers into weightlessness for $250,000 each. Mr. Branson has said he and some family members intend to be on the first commercial suborbital journey. In addition to offering thrill rides for a new category of well-heeled space passengers, Mr. Branson envisions launching small satellites into orbit using rocket ships released in midair from specially outfitted Boeing 747 jumbo jets for a cut-rate price of approximately $20 million.\nReflecting industry comments that delays and unexpected extra development tasks have stretched Virgin Galactic\u2019s finances, the announcement said the Saudi investment will \u201cenable us to develop the next generation of satellite launchers and accelerate\u201d efforts to implement \u201cpoint-to-point supersonic space travel.\u201d \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s rivals include separate space transportation companies run by fellow billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX expects to start transporting astronauts to the international space station sometime next year. That is also roughly the timeline in which Blue Origin LLC, the company founded and funded by Mr. Bezos, expects to start commercial suborbital flights for tourists.\nAbu Dhabi\u2019s Aabar Investments group made an initial investment of $300 million in Virgin Galactic before the accident devastated the company\u2019s plans. And after the crash, according to industry officials, the same group offered to increase its financial exposure in exchange for an increased stake. But over the years, both sides declined to comment on the substance of those discussions.\nThe memorandum of understanding between Mr. Branson\u2019s companies and the Saudi investment fund also includes provisions for options totaling another $480 million in financing, including potential payments for transportation services.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Saudi Arabia is poised to invest $1 billion in entrepreneur Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism and satellite-launching venture, which is seeking to show it is back on track three years after a fatal accident. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saudi Arabia to Inject $1 Billion Into Virgin Galactic Space Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6802",
        "date": "2017-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-to-inject-1-billion-into-virgin-galactic-space-venture-1509060475?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=77",
        "text": "Specifics of the revised ownership structure weren\u2019t disclosed. The deal was announced at a three-day event, dubbed \u201cDavos in the Desert,\u201d organized by Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund to showcase\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Prince Mohammed bin Salman\u2019s\n\n\n\n vision for a tech-driven economy.\nFollowing an October 2014 test flight tragedy that killed one pilot and injured the other, Mr. Branson\u2019s management team was forced to suspend operations and reassess manufacturing, safety and test flight procedures. The company\u2019s rocket-propelled spacecraft, intended to briefly take tourists to the edge of space before landing like a conventional plane, hasn\u2019t conducted a powered flight since that crash. But limited-altitude test flights using rocket propulsion are expected to resume shortly.\n\n\nThe announcement also offered the most authoritative and detailed timetable yet for the anticipated resumption of more ambitious, suborbital test flights. \u201cWe are now just months away from going into space with people on board,\u201d Mr. Branson said in a statement. In various recent interviews, the colorful British billionaire previously suggested suborbital tests were slated to begin around the end of this year, with full-blown commercial operations likely to occur by the end of 2018.\n\n\nRelated Saudis Showcase Technology in Bid to Woo Business Leaders Chinese Tech Giant Baidu Steps Back From Middle East Saudi Prince Pushes Greater Tolerance, Unveils Development Project (Oct. 24) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic's VSS Unity, glides for the first time after being released over the Mojave Desert in California in this Dec. 3, 2016 photo. The spaceship was carried aloft by its mothership, Eve, then released before gliding for 10 minutes toward a landing at Mojave Air and Space Port.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nVirgin Galactic\u2019s founder has been working since 2004 to make good on promises to carry passengers into weightlessness for $250,000 each. Mr. Branson has said he and some family members intend to be on the first commercial suborbital journey. In addition to offering thrill rides for a new category of well-heeled space passengers, Mr. Branson envisions launching small satellites into orbit using rocket ships released in midair from specially outfitted Boeing 747 jumbo jets for a cut-rate price of approximately $20 million.\nReflecting industry comments that delays and unexpected extra development tasks have stretched Virgin Galactic\u2019s finances, the announcement said the Saudi investment will \u201cenable us to develop the next generation of satellite launchers and accelerate\u201d efforts to implement \u201cpoint-to-point supersonic space travel.\u201d \nVirgin Galactic\u2019s rivals include separate space transportation companies run by fellow billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Mr. Musk\u2019s SpaceX expects to start transporting astronauts to the international space station sometime next year. That is also roughly the timeline in which Blue Origin LLC, the company founded and funded by Mr. Bezos, expects to start commercial suborbital flights for tourists.\nAbu Dhabi\u2019s Aabar Investments group made an initial investment of $300 million in Virgin Galactic before the accident devastated the company\u2019s plans. And after the crash, according to industry officials, the same group offered to increase its financial exposure in exchange for an increased stake. But over the years, both sides declined to comment on the substance of those discussions.\nThe memorandum of understanding between Mr. Branson\u2019s companies and the Saudi investment fund also includes provisions for options totaling another $480 million in financing, including potential payments for transportation services.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Saudi Arabia is poised to invest $1 billion in entrepreneur Richard Branson\u2019s space-tourism and satellite-launching venture, which is seeking to show it is back on track three years after a fatal accident. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "WeWork: A $20 Billion Startup Fueled by Silicon Valley Pixie Dust (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6803",
        "date": "2017-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-a-20-billion-startup-fueled-by-silicon-valley-pixie-dust-1508424483?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=110",
        "text": "When Mr. Neumann and his guests walk in, he often remarks how the office always seems filled with life, according to several former employees.\n\n\n\n\nFueled by showmanship, an expansive vision and the occasional shot of tequila, Mr. Neumann has propelled the New York-based office-space provider into being one of the world\u2019s richest startups. With a valuation of more than $20 billion, or about 20 times annualized revenue, it is the fourth most valuable U.S. startup after Uber Technologies Inc., Airbnb Inc. and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX. WeWork\u2019s valuation has galloped higher in each of the past five years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Neumann has dazzled tech investors by portraying WeWork as a Silicon Valley-style company that provides a \u201cphysical social network\u201d for millennials. Top investors include SoftBank Group Corp. and its tech-focused Vision Fund, which added $4.4 billion in August.\n\n\nOthers in the real-estate industry and some Silicon Valley investors say the company\u2019s well-crafted image belies the mundane nature of its business. WeWork takes on long-term leases for raw office space and builds out the interior with flexible spaces and modern design that it then subleases for terms as short as a month. \n\nIWG\n\n\n PLC, an office-leasing company with a business model similar to WeWork\u2019s, manages five times the square footage and has about one-eighth the market value.\n\nBoston Properties Inc.,\n\n\n the country\u2019s largest publicly traded office landlord, owns five times the square footage that WeWork manages and has a market capitalization of $19 billion.\nWeWork\u2019s strategy carries the costs and risks associated with traditional real estate. Its client list is heavily weighted toward startups that may or may not be around for long. WeWork is on the hook for long-term leases, and it doesn\u2019t own its own buildings. Vacancy rates have risen recently, and the company is increasing incentives to draw tenants.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA team of workers in their WeWork space in Argentina this summer.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alfieri Mauro/La Nacion/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIf you had positioned this as a real-estate company, it wouldn\u2019t be worth this,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barry Sternlicht,\n\n\n\n who runs Starwood Capital Group LLC, with more than $50 billion of real-estate assets under management. Mr. Neumann \u201cdressed it up and made it into a community, and that turned it into a tech play.\u201d\nVenture capitalists and mutual funds have poured billions into companies claiming they can upend traditional industries whether through the use of technology or their unique appeal to millennials. Startups in the business of selling meal kits, mattresses and razors have received tech-like valuations based on the idea their rapid growth can continue for years.\nMr. Neumann in public remarks often compares WeWork to ride-hailing company Uber and home-rental service Airbnb, whose valuations soared on the premise they were technology platforms, not taxi or hotel companies.\n\n\n Office Space ",
        "author": "Eliot Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla Investors OK Plan That Could Pay Musk Billions (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6804",
        "date": "2018-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-shareholders-approve-elon-musks-new-pay-package-1521651639?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=99",
        "text": "Under the plan, Tesla\u2019s market value needs to skyrocket to $650 billion over 10 years for all the options to vest. The 46 year-old Mr. Musk also must stay at Tesla either as chief executive or executive chairman and chief product officer to receive the package, which was initially valued at about $2.6 billion but could yield him more than $50 billion.\n\n\n\n\nBased on Wednesday\u2019s closing, Tesla\u2019s market value stood at $53.62 billion. \n\n\nThe plan, modeled on a 2012 pay package, includes more than 20 million in stock options that would vest in 12 tranches, each with shares equal to 1% of the company\u2019s total shares outstanding as of Jan. 21. \nAt the time of the 2012 award, Tesla had a market value of about $3.2 billion and then targeted a market value of $43.2 billion, pointing to the then much larger market valuations of rivals\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n It has since surpassed both companies in market value.\nAs with the 2012 award, the latest pay package ties Mr. Musk\u2019s compensation to the company\u2019s value reaching certain levels and a series of operational milestones being met.\nFor example, for the first tranche of options to vest, Tesla\u2019s market valuation would have to reach $100 billion and achieve either $20 billion in revenue or $1.5 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, after adjusting for stock compensation.\nIn 2017, Tesla\u2019s Ebitda stood at $528.5 million and revenue at $11.76 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data.\nTesla has said the pay package would be key to achieve its road map, what it calls its \u201cMaster Plan, Part Deux.\u201d\n\u201cThe Board believes that the Award will continue to incentivize and motivate Elon to lead Tesla over the long-term, particularly in light of his other business interests,\u201d Tesla said in a securities filing this month.\nMr. Musk, Tesla\u2019s largest shareholder whose fortune Forbes estimates at some $20 billion, is also CEO and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX as the developer and manufacturer of space launch vehicles is known, and is involved in other ventures. \nProxy-advisory firms Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. and Glass Lewis & Co. had recommended Tesla shareholders vote against the package, calling it too costly.\n\u201cEven when annualized, Musk\u2019s pay opportunity would dwarf that of nearly every CEO at the largest and most profitable public companies. This raises even more questions given that Musk doesn\u2019t devote his full-time attention to Tesla, and serves as the CEO of multiple other high-profile companies,\u201d ISS had said.\nThe Silicon Valley company, which has yet to turn an annual profit, has a lot riding on its Model 3 car, a key part of Mr. Musk\u2019s strategy to remake Tesla from a niche luxury-car company into a mainstream player that sells electric vehicles, solar panels and storage batteries.\n\u2014Tim Higgins contributed to this article.\nWrite to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com Tesla\u2019s shareholders approved a hefty pay package for Chief Executive Elon Musk that seeks to keep the billionaire in the driver\u2019s seat while tying his pay to ambitious goals for the company\u2019s growth. ",
        "author": "Maria Armental"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon\u2019s Bezos Reveals Launch Deal With Eutelsat (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6805",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-chief-bezos-reveals-launch-deal-with-european-satellite-operator-eutelsat-1488897509?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=100",
        "text": "Tuesday\u2019s joint announcement, made at an international trade show in Washington, represents Blue Origin\u2019s emergence as a force in the commercial satellite world. From the outset, the rocket\u2014called New Glenn\u2014was intended to be reusable, and Mr. Bezos said during his presentation that it is being designed to fly as many as 100 times.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nUnderscoring Blue Origin\u2019s growth, Mr. Bezos said the company, based in a Seattle suburb, now has more than 1,000 employees. The company expects a two-stage version of the New Glenn rocket to blast a payload of up to 13 tons into low-Earth orbit.\n\n\nOnce a major satellite company develops enough trust in a newly designed rocket to commit to a maiden launch\u2014even if at a sharply reduced price\u2014launch contracts with other operators typically follow.\nNeither Mr. Bezos nor Eutelsat disclosed the price of the anticipated launch, but traditionally such introductory missions have involved as much as a 70% cut from the projected full price.\nFor Blue Origin, which hasn\u2019t yet conducted a full-fledged test flight of its big booster, the contract with Eutelsat adds to the credibility of the space company\u2019s team.\nPlans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals to powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.\nThe two-stage version of the New Glenn rocket, named after the late U.S. astronaut and senator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn,\n\n\n\n previously was described by Blue Origin as 270 feet tall, and able to generate nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust from seven main engines. A larger, three-stage version would be more than 310 feet tall.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding. As expected, however, Tuesday\u2019s announcement adds transparency.\nLast fall, Mr. Bezos rocked the international aerospace community by disclosing some particulars of the New Glenn rocket. If it begins commercial flights within four years as intended, the booster also would become a competitor for Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider, and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOver the years, Mr. Bezos has stressed the importance of creating reusable technology capable of slashing transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today\u2019s rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d\nThe Eutelsat announcement came a day after Mr. Bezos released the first photographs of a fully assembled BE-4 engine, which will power New Glenn into orbit.\nIn conjunction with his speech at the satellite conference, Mr. Bezos continued his pattern of focusing on long-term goals of space exploration and settlement. In a message posted on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter,\n\n\n the self-described \u201cspace geek\u201d pointedly said he and his company \u201ccan\u2019t wait to take you to space.\u201d\nMr. Bezos told conference attendees that to make space transportation less expensive, the eventual goal ought to be to make rocket launches comparable to commercial aircraft operations. SpaceX\u2019s Mr. Musk and other commercial-space champions have echoed the same sentiments over the years.\nNew Glenn piggybacks on development of Blue Origin\u2019s simpler, suborbital New Shepard launch system, a single-stage rocket and capsule designed to fly fare-paying tourists some 60 miles above the planet. Test flights with crew members aboard are expected to begin sometime this year, with commercial operations starting perhaps a year later.\nBasking in the glow of his new role as a satellite launch provider, Mr. Bezos told the audience, \u201cwe couldn\u2019t hope for a better first partner.\u201d\nBased in Paris, Eutelsat has more than three dozen satellites circling the Earth and provides services that include video broadcasting, news gathering and broadband connections. Started as an international satellite organization in the 1970s, it became a private company in 2001.\nPreviously, Mr., Bezos signaled his engineers and scientists also were actively working on a significantly larger rocket designed for interplanetary travel. He reiterated on Tuesday that he beca The space-transportation company run by Amazon chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos announced European satellite operator Eutelsat is its first commercial launch customer. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon\u2019s Bezos Reveals Launch Deal With Eutelsat (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6806",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-chief-bezos-reveals-launch-deal-with-european-satellite-operator-eutelsat-1488897509?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=128",
        "text": "Tuesday\u2019s joint announcement, made at an international trade show in Washington, represents Blue Origin\u2019s emergence as a force in the commercial satellite world. From the outset, the rocket\u2014called New Glenn\u2014was intended to be reusable, and Mr. Bezos said during his presentation that it is being designed to fly as many as 100 times.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnderscoring Blue Origin\u2019s growth, Mr. Bezos said the company, based in a Seattle suburb, now has more than 1,000 employees. The company expects a two-stage version of the New Glenn rocket to blast a payload of up to 13 tons into low-Earth orbit.\n\n\nOnce a major satellite company develops enough trust in a newly designed rocket to commit to a maiden launch\u2014even if at a sharply reduced price\u2014launch contracts with other operators typically follow.\nNeither Mr. Bezos nor Eutelsat disclosed the price of the anticipated launch, but traditionally such introductory missions have involved as much as a 70% cut from the projected full price.\nFor Blue Origin, which hasn\u2019t yet conducted a full-fledged test flight of its big booster, the contract with Eutelsat adds to the credibility of the space company\u2019s team.\nPlans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr. Bezos, including one roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals to powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.\nThe two-stage version of the New Glenn rocket, named after the late U.S. astronaut and senator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn,\n\n\n\n previously was described by Blue Origin as 270 feet tall, and able to generate nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust from seven main engines. A larger, three-stage version would be more than 310 feet tall.\nWith a few exceptions, Mr. Bezos has opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy\u2014and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding. As expected, however, Tuesday\u2019s announcement adds transparency.\nLast fall, Mr. Bezos rocked the international aerospace community by disclosing some particulars of the New Glenn rocket. If it begins commercial flights within four years as intended, the booster also would become a competitor for Arianespace, Europe\u2019s premier launch provider, and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOver the years, Mr. Bezos has stressed the importance of creating reusable technology capable of slashing transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today\u2019s rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of \u201cmillions of people living and working in space.\u201d\nThe Eutelsat announcement came a day after Mr. Bezos released the first photographs of a fully assembled BE-4 engine, which will power New Glenn into orbit.\nIn conjunction with his speech at the satellite conference, Mr. Bezos continued his pattern of focusing on long-term goals of space exploration and settlement. In a message posted on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter,\n\n\n the self-described \u201cspace geek\u201d pointedly said he and his company \u201ccan\u2019t wait to take you to space.\u201d\nMr. Bezos told conference attendees that to make space transportation less expensive, the eventual goal ought to be to make rocket launches comparable to commercial aircraft operations. SpaceX\u2019s Mr. Musk and other commercial-space champions have echoed the same sentiments over the years.\nNew Glenn piggybacks on development of Blue Origin\u2019s simpler, suborbital New Shepard launch system, a single-stage rocket and capsule designed to fly fare-paying tourists some 60 miles above the planet. Test flights with crew members aboard are expected to begin sometime this year, with commercial operations starting perhaps a year later.\nBasking in the glow of his new role as a satellite launch provider, Mr. Bezos told the audience, \u201cwe couldn\u2019t hope for a better first partner.\u201d\nBased in Paris, Eutelsat has more than three dozen satellites circling the Earth and provides services that include video broadcasting, news gathering and broadband connections. Started as an international satellite organization in the 1970s, it became a private company in 2001.\nPreviously, Mr., Bezos signaled his engineers and scientists also were actively working on a significantly larger rocket designed for interplanetary travel. He reiterated on Tuesday that he The space-transportation company run by Amazon chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos announced European satellite operator Eutelsat is its first commercial launch customer. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Got 4,000 SpaceX Workers to Join a Covid-19 Study (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6807",
        "date": "2021-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-got-4-000-spacex-workers-to-join-a-covid-19-study-heres-what-he-learned-11613826001?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=9",
        "text": "To monitor the prevalence of the virus among SpaceX workers nationwide, Mr. Musk and the rocket company\u2019s top medical executive worked with doctors and academic researchers to build an antibody-testing program. More than 4,000 SpaceX workers volunteered for monthly blood tests.\nThis week the group published its findings, which suggest that a certain threshold of antibodies might provide people lasting protection against the virus. Mr. Musk is listed as a co-author of the peer-reviewed study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDoes your employer offer Covid-19 antibody testing? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cPeople can have antibodies, but it doesn\u2019t mean they are going to be immune\u201d to Covid-19, said Galit Alter, a co-author of the study who is a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. Individuals who experienced fewer, milder Covid-19 symptoms generated fewer antibodies and were therefore less likely to meet the threshold for longer-term immunity, the study found.\n\n\nThe idea is one that other researchers are exploring as they and public-health officials try to understand Covid-19 immunity.\n\u201cTo really nail this down at a public-health level would require doing reinfection studies and following people for reinfection\u201d over time, said Joshua T. Schiffer, associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center\u2019s vaccine and infectious-disease division.\nAs vaccines roll out slowly across the globe, the scientists who studied SpaceX workers say their findings could be used to inform who is most vulnerable to the virus and should be vaccinated first. For example, those with no antibodies in areas with high case counts could get priority, Dr. Alter said.\nCompanies from\nAlphabet Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Google to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.,\nAmazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tyson Foods Inc.\n\n\n offer Covid-19 diagnostic tests to get a moment-in-time snapshot of who is infected. Few businesses have regularly tested worker blood samples for antibodies.\nRepresentatives for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, declined to comment on the testing.\nMr. Musk, who is chief executive officer of SpaceX and of Tesla Inc. and has decried shutdown orders, took a personal interest in the research and had the scientists brief him and top SpaceX executives during the pandemic on how antibodies and vaccines work, Dr. Alter said.\nMr. Musk in November said he tested positive for the virus. \u201cMild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days,\u201d he tweeted at the time. \nDr. Alter, who studies immunology and the molecular mechanisms of how antibodies fight diseases, created at the start of the year high-throughput Covid-19 antibody testing. Her work attracted investments from the hedge-fund manager Nancy Zimmerman, former Soros Fund Management CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Schwartz\n\n\n\n and his wife, Lisa Schwartz, as well as a host of philanthropies (among them the Musk Foundation) and government agencies.\nIn April 2020, when Covid tests were scarce, SpaceX contacted Eric Nilles, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard, and he enlisted Dr. Alter\u2019s help.\nTogether with SpaceX\u2019s medical director, Anil Menon, they built a testing program. SpaceX recruited workers from California to Florida who were willing to have their blood tested monthly starting in April.\nBefore the pandemic, Dr. Menon had set up medical facilities at SpaceX worksites across the country. SpaceX has sent astronauts and aims to eventually send civilians into orbit. He used some of those facilities to quickly scale up blood-drawing stations and recruited medical interns from local hospitals to collect samples.\nIn May, SpaceX launched a successful test flight of its Dragon capsule in Florida carrying two astronauts.\nIn June, samples Dr. Alter processed from local workers foretold worsening cases in Texas. Instead of a typical 3% positivity rate for the virus, 12% of the samples suggested infection. She reran them multiple times and confirmed that they were correct, which led the company to send infected workers home and advise them to isolate.\nOf the roughly 4,000 SpaceX workers tested multiple times, 300 became infected with Covid-19. Researchers had enough data on 120 people to dig deeper into their infections and subsequent levels of antibodies to draw conclusions in the study.\nThe median age of that small sample was 31, and 92% of them were male, which the authors acknowledge might skew their findings because people of different ages and backgrounds present different immune-system responses. The study included test results between April and June.\n\u201cThe good news is most of the vaccines induce [antibody] levels way higher than these levels\u201d for people who get both doses, Dr. Alter said. \u201cSo far it is pretty clear that we are hitting levels that are orders of magnitude higher with vaccination.\u201d\nThe Centers for To monitor the prevalence of the virus among employees nationwide, the tech billionaire worked with researchers to build an antibody-testing program. Here\u2019s what he learned. ",
        "author": "Sarah Krouse"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Got 4,000 SpaceX Workers to Join a Covid-19 Study (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6808",
        "date": "2021-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-got-4-000-spacex-workers-to-join-a-covid-19-study-heres-what-he-learned-11613826001?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=34",
        "text": "To monitor the prevalence of the virus among SpaceX workers nationwide, Mr. Musk and the rocket company\u2019s top medical executive worked with doctors and academic researchers to build an antibody-testing program. More than 4,000 SpaceX workers volunteered for monthly blood tests.\nThis week the group published its findings, which suggest that a certain threshold of antibodies might provide people lasting protection against the virus. Mr. Musk is listed as a co-author of the peer-reviewed study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDoes your employer offer Covid-19 antibody testing? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cPeople can have antibodies, but it doesn\u2019t mean they are going to be immune\u201d to Covid-19, said Galit Alter, a co-author of the study who is a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. Individuals who experienced fewer, milder Covid-19 symptoms generated fewer antibodies and were therefore less likely to meet the threshold for longer-term immunity, the study found.\n\n\nThe idea is one that other researchers are exploring as they and public-health officials try to understand Covid-19 immunity.\n\u201cTo really nail this down at a public-health level would require doing reinfection studies and following people for reinfection\u201d over time, said Joshua T. Schiffer, associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center\u2019s vaccine and infectious-disease division.\nAs vaccines roll out slowly across the globe, the scientists who studied SpaceX workers say their findings could be used to inform who is most vulnerable to the virus and should be vaccinated first. For example, those with no antibodies in areas with high case counts could get priority, Dr. Alter said.\nCompanies from\nAlphabet Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Google to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.,\nAmazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tyson Foods Inc.\n\n\n offer Covid-19 diagnostic tests to get a moment-in-time snapshot of who is infected. Few businesses have regularly tested worker blood samples for antibodies.\nRepresentatives for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, declined to comment on the testing.\nMr. Musk, who is chief executive officer of SpaceX and of Tesla Inc. and has decried shutdown orders, took a personal interest in the research and had the scientists brief him and top SpaceX executives during the pandemic on how antibodies and vaccines work, Dr. Alter said.\nMr. Musk in November said he tested positive for the virus. \u201cMild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days,\u201d he tweeted at the time. \nDr. Alter, who studies immunology and the molecular mechanisms of how antibodies fight diseases, created at the start of the year high-throughput Covid-19 antibody testing. Her work attracted investments from the hedge-fund manager Nancy Zimmerman, former Soros Fund Management CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Schwartz\n\n\n\n and his wife, Lisa Schwartz, as well as a host of philanthropies (among them the Musk Foundation) and government agencies.\nIn April 2020, when Covid tests were scarce, SpaceX contacted Eric Nilles, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard, and he enlisted Dr. Alter\u2019s help.\nTogether with SpaceX\u2019s medical director, Anil Menon, they built a testing program. SpaceX recruited workers from California to Florida who were willing to have their blood tested monthly starting in April.\nBefore the pandemic, Dr. Menon had set up medical facilities at SpaceX worksites across the country. SpaceX has sent astronauts and aims to eventually send civilians into orbit. He used some of those facilities to quickly scale up blood-drawing stations and recruited medical interns from local hospitals to collect samples.\nIn May, SpaceX launched a successful test flight of its Dragon capsule in Florida carrying two astronauts.\nIn June, samples Dr. Alter processed from local workers foretold worsening cases in Texas. Instead of a typical 3% positivity rate for the virus, 12% of the samples suggested infection. She reran them multiple times and confirmed that they were correct, which led the company to send infected workers home and advise them to isolate.\nOf the roughly 4,000 SpaceX workers tested multiple times, 300 became infected with Covid-19. Researchers had enough data on 120 people to dig deeper into their infections and subsequent levels of antibodies to draw conclusions in the study.\nThe median age of that small sample was 31, and 92% of them were male, which the authors acknowledge might skew their findings because people of different ages and backgrounds present different immune-system responses. The study included test results between April and June.\n\u201cThe good news is most of the vaccines induce [antibody] levels way higher than these levels\u201d for people who get both doses, Dr. Alter said. \u201cSo far it is pretty clear that we are hitting levels that are orders of magnitude higher with vaccination.\u201d\nThe Centers for To monitor the prevalence of the virus among employees nationwide, the tech billionaire worked with researchers to build an antibody-testing program. Here\u2019s what he learned. ",
        "author": "Sarah Krouse"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Got 4,000 SpaceX Workers to Join a Covid-19 Study (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6809",
        "date": "2021-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-got-4-000-spacex-workers-to-join-a-covid-19-study-heres-what-he-learned-11613826001?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=36",
        "text": "To monitor the prevalence of the virus among SpaceX workers nationwide, Mr. Musk and the rocket company\u2019s top medical executive worked with doctors and academic researchers to build an antibody-testing program. More than 4,000 SpaceX workers volunteered for monthly blood tests.\n\n\n\n\nThis week the group published its findings, which suggest that a certain threshold of antibodies might provide people lasting protection against the virus. Mr. Musk is listed as a co-author of the peer-reviewed study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDoes your employer offer Covid-19 antibody testing? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cPeople can have antibodies, but it doesn\u2019t mean they are going to be immune\u201d to Covid-19, said Galit Alter, a co-author of the study who is a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. Individuals who experienced fewer, milder Covid-19 symptoms generated fewer antibodies and were therefore less likely to meet the threshold for longer-term immunity, the study found.\n\n\nThe idea is one that other researchers are exploring as they and public-health officials try to understand Covid-19 immunity.\n\u201cTo really nail this down at a public-health level would require doing reinfection studies and following people for reinfection\u201d over time, said Joshua T. Schiffer, associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center\u2019s vaccine and infectious-disease division.\nAs vaccines roll out slowly across the globe, the scientists who studied SpaceX workers say their findings could be used to inform who is most vulnerable to the virus and should be vaccinated first. For example, those with no antibodies in areas with high case counts could get priority, Dr. Alter said.\nCompanies from\nAlphabet Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Google to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.,\nAmazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tyson Foods Inc.\n\n\n offer Covid-19 diagnostic tests to get a moment-in-time snapshot of who is infected. Few businesses have regularly tested worker blood samples for antibodies.\nRepresentatives for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the official name of the closely held Southern California company, declined to comment on the testing.\nMr. Musk, who is chief executive officer of SpaceX and of Tesla Inc. and has decried shutdown orders, took a personal interest in the research and had the scientists brief him and top SpaceX executives during the pandemic on how antibodies and vaccines work, Dr. Alter said.\nMr. Musk in November said he tested positive for the virus. \u201cMild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days,\u201d he tweeted at the time. \nDr. Alter, who studies immunology and the molecular mechanisms of how antibodies fight diseases, created at the start of the year high-throughput Covid-19 antibody testing. Her work attracted investments from the hedge-fund manager Nancy Zimmerman, former Soros Fund Management CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Schwartz\n\n\n\n and his wife, Lisa Schwartz, as well as a host of philanthropies (among them the Musk Foundation) and government agencies.\nIn April 2020, when Covid tests were scarce, SpaceX contacted Eric Nilles, an infectious-disease expert at Harvard, and he enlisted Dr. Alter\u2019s help.\nTogether with SpaceX\u2019s medical director, Anil Menon, they built a testing program. SpaceX recruited workers from California to Florida who were willing to have their blood tested monthly starting in April.\nBefore the pandemic, Dr. Menon had set up medical facilities at SpaceX worksites across the country. SpaceX has sent astronauts and aims to eventually send civilians into orbit. He used some of those facilities to quickly scale up blood-drawing stations and recruited medical interns from local hospitals to collect samples.\nIn May, SpaceX launched a successful test flight of its Dragon capsule in Florida carrying two astronauts.\nIn June, samples Dr. Alter processed from local workers foretold worsening cases in Texas. Instead of a typical 3% positivity rate for the virus, 12% of the samples suggested infection. She reran them multiple times and confirmed that they were correct, which led the company to send infected workers home and advise them to isolate.\nOf the roughly 4,000 SpaceX workers tested multiple times, 300 became infected with Covid-19. Researchers had enough data on 120 people to dig deeper into their infections and subsequent levels of antibodies to draw conclusions in the study.\nThe median age of that small sample was 31, and 92% of them were male, which the authors acknowledge might skew their findings because people of different ages and backgrounds present different immune-system responses. The study included test results between April and June.\n\u201cThe good news is most of the vaccines induce [antibody] levels way higher than these levels\u201d for people who get both doses, Dr. Alter said. \u201cSo far it is pretty clear that we are hitting levels that are orders of magnitude higher with vaccination.\u201d\nThe Centers To monitor the prevalence of the virus among employees nationwide, the tech billionaire worked with researchers to build an antibody-testing program. Here\u2019s what he learned. ",
        "author": "Sarah Krouse"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Defiance in the Time of Coronavirus (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6810",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-defiance-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-11584733458?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=46",
        "text": "Thursday, under pressure from local authorities and some in the public, he finally relented, agreeing to temporarily suspend production in Fremont. \nThe decision followed weeks\u2014and, arguably, a career\u2014of defiance.\n\n\nA malaria survivor who founded SpaceX, his rocket company, with the aim of colonizing Mars because he fears Earth could be doomed, Mr. Musk, 48, has consistently played down the reaction to the coronavirus outbreak as a panic. He has held forth on Twitter with his own sanguine takes on its epidemiology and likely impact.\n\u201cMy guess is that the panic will cause more harm than the virus, if that hasn\u2019t happened already,\u201d Mr. Musk said Wednesday evening on Twitter, doubling down on skepticism he expressed earlier. He didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment about his thinking; neither did Tesla.\nMr. Musk has for more than a decade cultivated a persona as a visionary truth-teller, constantly pushing back against doubters, critics, short-sighted nonbelievers and stodgy government agencies. His contrarian stance is core to his business model. His bravado and sense of certainty have created both ardent believers and plenty of skeptics on Wall Street and in the public eye. His legions of superfans are vocal on Twitter. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n On Dec. 1, 2019, a patient in Wuhan, China, started showing symptoms of what doctors determined was a new coronavirus. Since then, the virus has spread to infect more than 100,000 people. Here\u2019s how the virus grew to a global pandemic. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nThe billionaire has attributed his business success to the scientific approach called First Principles, which is rooted in Aristotle\u2019s writings and among other things rejects solving problems with copycat solutions and depends upon reducing problems to their essence even if the solutions might seem counterintuitive. \n\u201cWhen you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach,\u201d he said during a 2013 TED Talks appearance. \nThe decision to keep his factory open flows from such a mindset, according to Gene Munster, who follows Tesla closely as managing partner at investment and research firm Loup Ventures. \n\u201cIt\u2019s a first principle for him, do everything in his power to move forward even when people say it\u2019s not possible,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about producing cars to stay in business. Tesla has the money to weather this storm. Times like this that the first principles approach is tone deaf.\u201d \nIn 1995, when he was 24, Mr. Musk took on the phone book industry with his first startup Zip2. The sale of that startup helped fund his next venture, an online company to compete with the banking industry that would eventually become known as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal.\n\n\n That bet gained him the fortune he used to fund the early days of SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and Tesla\u2014passions he developed after nearly dying from malaria contracted in 2000. His family has said the prospect of dying led him to reconsider his life, concluding he should focus on ways to help humanity through colonizing Mars and creating sustainable transportation. \nMr. Musk isn\u2019t shy about airing his opinions, having developed a reputation for battling any threat to him or his companies\u2014in person, and usually on Twitter\u2014with a vigor most other CEOs would never consider. He attacks Tesla\u2019s shortsellers with a vengeance, calling them \u201cvalue destroyers\u201d and \u201cjerks who want us to die.\u201d He\u2019s tangled with safety regulators who he thought were stifling innovation and fought with the Securities and Exchange Commission over tweets he made in 2018 that said he had lined up funding to take Tesla private. (The SEC considered it misleading shareholders when it became clear a deal wasn\u2019t so certain; the two sides settled with a deal that\u2019s supposed to curtail some of Mr. Musk\u2019s Twitter use.)\nIn 2018, he gained attention on Twitter for trying to develop a mini-submarine to help rescue a boys soccer team stuck in flooded Thai caves\u2014leading to a war of words with one cave expert that ended up in court. \nOver the past month, as officials in the U.S. grew more concerned about the Covid-19 crisis, Mr. Musk sounded off. \u201cThe coronavirus panic is dumb,\u201d he tweeted on March 6. The same day,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.\n\n\n began encouraging its employees to work from home. Most Silicon Valley giants soon did the same. \nMr. Musk continued to take a lighthearted tone about the virus. \u201cCoachella should postpone itself until it stops sucking,\u201d he wrote on Twitter on March 10, as the popular music festival decided to move from April to October over coronavirus fears. \nSeveral times on Twitter, Mr. Musk has promoted the idea that chloroquine, which he took for malaria, might be a remedy. President Trump on Thursday said he has directed the Food and Drug Administration to look at the potential for such malaria-fighting drugs to be used for coronavirus, something some doctors around the wor The Tesla CEO held out for days on suspending U.S. car production; \u2018The coronavirus panic is dumb.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Defiance in the Time of Coronavirus (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6811",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-defiance-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-11584733458?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=58",
        "text": "Thursday, under pressure from local authorities and some in the public, he finally relented, agreeing to temporarily suspend production in Fremont. \n\n\n\n\nThe decision followed weeks\u2014and, arguably, a career\u2014of defiance.\n\n\nA malaria survivor who founded SpaceX, his rocket company, with the aim of colonizing Mars because he fears Earth could be doomed, Mr. Musk, 48, has consistently played down the reaction to the coronavirus outbreak as a panic. He has held forth on Twitter with his own sanguine takes on its epidemiology and likely impact.\n\u201cMy guess is that the panic will cause more harm than the virus, if that hasn\u2019t happened already,\u201d Mr. Musk said Wednesday evening on Twitter, doubling down on skepticism he expressed earlier. He didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment about his thinking; neither did Tesla.\nMr. Musk has for more than a decade cultivated a persona as a visionary truth-teller, constantly pushing back against doubters, critics, short-sighted nonbelievers and stodgy government agencies. His contrarian stance is core to his business model. His bravado and sense of certainty have created both ardent believers and plenty of skeptics on Wall Street and in the public eye. His legions of superfans are vocal on Twitter. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n On Dec. 1, 2019, a patient in Wuhan, China, started showing symptoms of what doctors determined was a new coronavirus. Since then, the virus has spread to infect more than 100,000 people. Here\u2019s how the virus grew to a global pandemic. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nThe billionaire has attributed his business success to the scientific approach called First Principles, which is rooted in Aristotle\u2019s writings and among other things rejects solving problems with copycat solutions and depends upon reducing problems to their essence even if the solutions might seem counterintuitive. \n\u201cWhen you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach,\u201d he said during a 2013 TED Talks appearance. \nThe decision to keep his factory open flows from such a mindset, according to Gene Munster, who follows Tesla closely as managing partner at investment and research firm Loup Ventures. \n\u201cIt\u2019s a first principle for him, do everything in his power to move forward even when people say it\u2019s not possible,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about producing cars to stay in business. Tesla has the money to weather this storm. Times like this that the first principles approach is tone deaf.\u201d \nIn 1995, when he was 24, Mr. Musk took on the phone book industry with his first startup Zip2. The sale of that startup helped fund his next venture, an online company to compete with the banking industry that would eventually become known as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal.\n\n\n That bet gained him the fortune he used to fund the early days of SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and Tesla\u2014passions he developed after nearly dying from malaria contracted in 2000. His family has said the prospect of dying led him to reconsider his life, concluding he should focus on ways to help humanity through colonizing Mars and creating sustainable transportation. \nMr. Musk isn\u2019t shy about airing his opinions, having developed a reputation for battling any threat to him or his companies\u2014in person, and usually on Twitter\u2014with a vigor most other CEOs would never consider. He attacks Tesla\u2019s shortsellers with a vengeance, calling them \u201cvalue destroyers\u201d and \u201cjerks who want us to die.\u201d He\u2019s tangled with safety regulators who he thought were stifling innovation and fought with the Securities and Exchange Commission over tweets he made in 2018 that said he had lined up funding to take Tesla private. (The SEC considered it misleading shareholders when it became clear a deal wasn\u2019t so certain; the two sides settled with a deal that\u2019s supposed to curtail some of Mr. Musk\u2019s Twitter use.)\nIn 2018, he gained attention on Twitter for trying to develop a mini-submarine to help rescue a boys soccer team stuck in flooded Thai caves\u2014leading to a war of words with one cave expert that ended up in court. \nOver the past month, as officials in the U.S. grew more concerned about the Covid-19 crisis, Mr. Musk sounded off. \u201cThe coronavirus panic is dumb,\u201d he tweeted on March 6. The same day,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.\n\n\n began encouraging its employees to work from home. Most Silicon Valley giants soon did the same. \nMr. Musk continued to take a lighthearted tone about the virus. \u201cCoachella should postpone itself until it stops sucking,\u201d he wrote on Twitter on March 10, as the popular music festival decided to move from April to October over coronavirus fears. \nSeveral times on Twitter, Mr. Musk has promoted the idea that chloroquine, which he took for malaria, might be a remedy. President Trump on Thursday said he has directed the Food and Drug Administration to look at the potential for such malaria-fighting drugs to be used for coronavirus, something some doctors around the The Tesla CEO held out for days on suspending U.S. car production; \u2018The coronavirus panic is dumb.\u2019 ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Peter Thiel\u2019s Founders Fund Builds New War Chest in Strategy Shift (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6812",
        "date": "2019-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiels-founders-fund-building-new-war-chest-in-strategy-shift-11571672563?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=65",
        "text": "The venture firm, co-founded by Mr. Thiel, typically backs early-stage companies. But with its biggest winners, like Airbnb Inc., staying private longer than startups of an earlier generation, Founders needs to be able to make larger investments at later stages of a company\u2019s lifetime to maintain comparable stakes and a say in company operations, some of the people said. \n\n\n\n\n\u201cWinning in venture means riding your winners all the way to the finish line,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeremy Liew,\n\n\n\n partner at venture-capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has sometimes invested alongside Founders but isn\u2019t involved in the current effort.\n\n\nMr. Liew, who has raised a fund to invest in growth-stage private companies, said he and his peers must ensure that they retain a high ownership percentage of companies heading public. \u201cIf you can\u2019t continue to be a major source of financing, you get diluted.\u201d\nMr. Thiel, 52, is known for both his investment prowess and outlier politics in liberal Silicon Valley. The billionaire is a vocal supporter of President Trump and spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Long before that, he co-founded\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal Holdings Inc.\n\n\n and wrote one of the first checks to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mark Zuckerberg\n \n\n\n\n to start\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n He remains on Facebook\u2019s board. \nOf $2.7 billion that Founders expects to raise by the first quarter of next year, some $1.5 billion will go to the growth strategy aimed at older, larger companies, people familiar with the matter said. The remainder will follow Founders\u2019 existing strategy, which includes some investment in startups when they are nascent business ideas. \nMr. Thiel\u2019s and Founders\u2019 move toward later-stage startups is indicative of a wider trend in technology toward so-called growth-stage financing, or investments in mature companies. The $100 billion gorilla in the space is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SoftBank Group Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Vision Fund, which launched two years ago.\nSoftBank\u2019s strategy remains unproven. One of its biggest investments, WeWork parent We Co., is in disarray, while shares of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Uber Technologies Inc.\n\n\n are trading well below their initial public offering price. It remains to be seen whether SoftBank will be able to raise a second fund. \nFounders Fund is undaunted. It has told potential investors that older companies that stay private longer can prove to be more stable, if less lucrative, investments than moonshot startup bets, according to the people familiar with the matter.\nThe firm continues to enjoy a maverick image; it is hosting Hereticon next year, a conference to foster what it calls \u201cheretical thinkers.\u201d\n\u201cTroublemakers are essential to mankind\u2019s progress, and so we must protect them,\u201d Founders Fund said in announcing the event. \nMr. Thiel and other Founders partners are expected to provide roughly 20% of the new funds\u2019 money. Recent investments include game-show app HQ Trivia and The Athletic, a sports news site.\nFounders has produced investment returns well-above the industry average, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year. Its earliest funds, from 2005 and 2007, grew sixfold and more than eightfold, respectively, by the third quarter of last year. Early investments in Facebook and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, fueled the returns.\nWrite to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com and Katie Roof at katie.roof@wsj.com raising nearly $3 billion\u2014and in a switch from the company\u2019s usual script, much of the war chest will be poured into the swelling ranks of technology startups that have stayed private for years. ",
        "author": "Rob Copeland and Katie Roof"
    },
    {
        "title": "Twitter Launches Cryptocurrency Team to Explore Bitcoin and Blockchain Uses (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6813",
        "date": "2021-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-adds-cryptocurrency-team-to-explore-bitcoin-and-blockchain-uses-11636581330?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=17",
        "text": "The team is being led by a new hire, software engineer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tess Rinearson,\n\n\n\n who will report to Twitter\u2019s chief technology officer. The team is looking to fill new roles, but didn\u2019t specify how many. Twitter said the new team will \u201cset the strategy for the future of crypto at (and on) Twitter.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nTwitter already lets people tip users with bitcoin, the world\u2019s largest cryptocurrency. And it recently announced a way for users to verify they own a nonfungible token, or NFT, that they post as a profile picture. But the company wants to explore decentralized apps, which run independently and not through a server owned by a company, giving users more control over privacy and over what they can post.\u00a0\n\n\nA Twitter spokeswoman declined to give specific examples of what the company might build, but added that it sees \u201can opportunity to help creators participate in the promise of an evolving, decentralized internet, directly on Twitter.\u201d\u00a0\nThe price of bitcoin recently traded at roughly $66,000, near its record high, according to CoinDesk.\u00a0\nTwitter Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack Dorsey,\n\n\n\n who has been a long-time fan of bitcoin, sold his first tweet as an NFT in March for about $2.9 million.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n A bitcoin mining facility in upstate New York is using electricity from a local hydroelectric plant powered by the Niagara River. The company is part of a group of miners attempting to make the industry more sustainable, both environmentally and financially. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe announcement comes after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.\n\n\n CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Cook\n\n\n\n said earlier this week that the company is looking into digital currencies. While the company has no immediate plans to accept cryptocurrency on Apple Pay or as a means of tender for its products, \u201cthere are other things that we are definitely looking at,\u201d Mr. Cook said at a conference on Tuesday, without offering further details.\nOther companies and executives have ventured into the cryptocurrency space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n disclosed a $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin in February and soon after began accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for its vehicles. The company suspended that initiative in May, however, as Tesla CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n expressed worry about the source of the electricity being used to power bitcoin mining.\u00a0\nMr. Musk said in July that he and his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, hold bitcoin.\n\nPayPal Holdings Inc.\n\n\n has said it is looking to expand its business of enabling customers to pay merchants with cryptocurrency assets. And payments company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Square Inc.,\n\n\n which like Twitter is also led by Mr. Dorsey, said last year that it acquired about $50 million worth of bitcoin for its corporate treasury.\nWrite to Joseph Pisani at joseph.pisani@wsj.com The Twitter Crypto group will set strategy to help the social-media app\u2019s creators. ",
        "author": "Joseph Pisani"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla Gives Musk New Long-Term Pay Deal (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6814",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-gives-musk-new-long-term-pay-deal-tied-to-big-targets-1516704840?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=79",
        "text": "The plan, which is modeled on an earlier program set for Mr. Musk in 2012, entails a 10-year grant of stock options that would vest in 12 tranches. Each would vest only if a set of two milestones are achieved, one based on market value, the other on a measure of revenue or profit. For each tranche achieved, Mr. Musk would receive shares equal to 1% of the company\u2019s total shares outstanding as of Jan. 21, 2018.\nFor example, the first tranche would vest if Tesla hits $100 billion in market value and $20 billion in revenue or $1.5 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, after adjusting for stock compensation. For all 12 tranches to vest, Tesla\u2019s market value would have to reach $650 billion.\n\n\nTesla, which reported revenue of $7 billion for 2016, had a market value of about $58.8 billion as of Monday\u2019s close. Mr. Musk owns about 20% of the company, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.\n\u201cThis ensures that Elon will continue to lead Tesla\u2019s management over the long-term while also providing the flexibility to bring in another CEO who would report to Elon at some point in the future,\u201d Tesla said in a statement about the plan released around 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday in California. \u201cAlthough there is no current intention for this to happen, it provides the flexibility as Tesla continues to grow to potentially allow Elon to focus more of his attention on the kinds of key product and strategic matters that most impact Tesla\u2019s long-term growth and profitability.\u201d\nTesla said that if none of the tranches are achieved, Mr. Musk wouldn\u2019t receive any compensation. That would put him in similar territory to some other prominent Silicon Valley leaders who own enormously valuable stakes in their companies but receive little or no salary.\nMr. Musk\u2019s previous compensation program, granted in 2012, targeted a market value of $43.2 billion along with meeting certain milestones by 2022. It required him to remain as CEO.\nSince Tesla overtook\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n \u2019s market value last year, and flirted with that of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , the Silicon Valley auto maker\u2019s valuation has been a continual point of conversation. Critics question why investors are betting so much on a company that has yet to turn an annual profit and that has delivered a fraction of the sales of much larger competitors.\nFans say they are betting on Mr. Musk\u2019s vision for personal transportation that includes electric cars that drive themselves and are powered off the company\u2019s solar panels and charged from its storage batteries.\nInvestor enthusiasm fueled Tesla\u2019s growth last year, even as Mr. Musk struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan, which is testing his ability to evolve the company into a more mainstream auto maker from one of a luxury niche player.\nMr. Musk has previously outlined a way for the company to reach a market cap of $700 billion, something he reiterated last year.\n\u201cI could be completely delusional but I think I see a clear path to that outcome,\u201d he told analysts in May.\nMr. Musk, who also heads other companies including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has hinted that he might want to change his role at Tesla.\nIn May, an analyst asked Mr. Musk if he still intended to step away from Tesla after bringing out the Model 3, as he had previously suggested.\n\u201cI intend to be actively involved with Tesla for the rest of my life,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cHopefully, stopping before I get too old\u2014or too crazy, I don\u2019t know. But that doesn\u2019t mean I should be CEO forever.\u201d He suggested a role contributing in \u201cproduct design and technology.\u201d\nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com Tesla said it updated the pay package for Elon Musk with a plan that again ties his compensation entirely to key performance benchmarks\u2014albeit this time much larger ones. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla Gives Musk New Long-Term Pay Deal (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6815",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-gives-musk-new-long-term-pay-deal-tied-to-big-targets-1516704840?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=104",
        "text": "The plan, which is modeled on an earlier program set for Mr. Musk in 2012, entails a 10-year grant of stock options that would vest in 12 tranches. Each would vest only if a set of two milestones are achieved, one based on market value, the other on a measure of revenue or profit. For each tranche achieved, Mr. Musk would receive shares equal to 1% of the company\u2019s total shares outstanding as of Jan. 21, 2018.\n\n\n\n\nFor example, the first tranche would vest if Tesla hits $100 billion in market value and $20 billion in revenue or $1.5 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, after adjusting for stock compensation. For all 12 tranches to vest, Tesla\u2019s market value would have to reach $650 billion.\n\n\nTesla, which reported revenue of $7 billion for 2016, had a market value of about $58.8 billion as of Monday\u2019s close. Mr. Musk owns about 20% of the company, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.\n\u201cThis ensures that Elon will continue to lead Tesla\u2019s management over the long-term while also providing the flexibility to bring in another CEO who would report to Elon at some point in the future,\u201d Tesla said in a statement about the plan released around 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday in California. \u201cAlthough there is no current intention for this to happen, it provides the flexibility as Tesla continues to grow to potentially allow Elon to focus more of his attention on the kinds of key product and strategic matters that most impact Tesla\u2019s long-term growth and profitability.\u201d\nTesla said that if none of the tranches are achieved, Mr. Musk wouldn\u2019t receive any compensation. That would put him in similar territory to some other prominent Silicon Valley leaders who own enormously valuable stakes in their companies but receive little or no salary.\nMr. Musk\u2019s previous compensation program, granted in 2012, targeted a market value of $43.2 billion along with meeting certain milestones by 2022. It required him to remain as CEO.\nSince Tesla overtook\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n \u2019s market value last year, and flirted with that of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , the Silicon Valley auto maker\u2019s valuation has been a continual point of conversation. Critics question why investors are betting so much on a company that has yet to turn an annual profit and that has delivered a fraction of the sales of much larger competitors.\nFans say they are betting on Mr. Musk\u2019s vision for personal transportation that includes electric cars that drive themselves and are powered off the company\u2019s solar panels and charged from its storage batteries.\nInvestor enthusiasm fueled Tesla\u2019s growth last year, even as Mr. Musk struggled to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan, which is testing his ability to evolve the company into a more mainstream auto maker from one of a luxury niche player.\nMr. Musk has previously outlined a way for the company to reach a market cap of $700 billion, something he reiterated last year.\n\u201cI could be completely delusional but I think I see a clear path to that outcome,\u201d he told analysts in May.\nMr. Musk, who also heads other companies including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has hinted that he might want to change his role at Tesla.\nIn May, an analyst asked Mr. Musk if he still intended to step away from Tesla after bringing out the Model 3, as he had previously suggested.\n\u201cI intend to be actively involved with Tesla for the rest of my life,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cHopefully, stopping before I get too old\u2014or too crazy, I don\u2019t know. But that doesn\u2019t mean I should be CEO forever.\u201d He suggested a role contributing in \u201cproduct design and technology.\u201d\nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com Tesla said it updated the pay package for Elon Musk with a plan that again ties his compensation entirely to key performance benchmarks\u2014albeit this time much larger ones. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla to Sell $1.5 Billion in Debt Amid Launch of Model 3 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6816",
        "date": "2017-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-to-sell-1-5-billion-in-debt-amid-launch-of-model-3-1502103232?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=116",
        "text": "The Palo Alto, Calif., company said on Monday that the funds would help push broader sales of its lower-price Model 3 sedan, which the company plans to use to steal a march on mass market rivals such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n F -0.52%\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTesla has been a big winner in the stock market\u2014up more than 1,000% in the past five years to a recent market value of $59 billion\u2014and investors said they expect the firm\u2019s efforts to sell junk bonds to succeed, given the market\u2019s thirst for high-yield debt.\n\n\nAt\u00a0the same time, the auto industry is among the most capital-intensive ventures in business. Tesla posted a loss of $336 million in its most recent quarter despite rising revenue, highlighting the firm\u2019s dependence on raising capital in the financial markets. Tesla is the most valuable U.S. auto maker, but it sells a fraction of the vehicles sold by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , Ford or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Fiat Chrysler Automobiles\n\n\n NV\u2014and has yet to report an annual profit after nearly 15 years in business.\n\n\nRelated Heard on the Street: A Missed Opportunity for Tesla Tesla\u2019s Cash Could Burn in Production \u2018Hell\u2019 Tesla Loss Widens But Beats Expectations Tesla Sets Aggressive Production Plan for Model 3 \n\n\nTesla \u201cburns a lot of cash and it\u2019s not clear they have a sustainable business,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Schwartz,\n\n\n\n a bond analyst for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AllianceBernstein\n\n\n LP who is debating whether to buy the new debt. The deal is likely to get strong support from investment firms that already own Tesla stock, but \u201cjust because it has a huge market cap doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a good credit,\u201d he said.\nTesla is rated B-minus by S&P Global, seven notches below the firm\u2019s rating of Ford.\nTurning to the bond market allows Tesla Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n to raise money without diluting his ownership or further encumbering corporate assets.\nTesla tapped Goldman to arrange the issue of an eight-year, $1.5 billion bond, and the investment bank is unofficially marketing it to yield 5.25%, a person familiar with the matter said. Goldman is offering prospective investors a tour of the company\u2019s factory on Wednesday to introduce them to the firm, according to an investor.\nThe sale comes after Tesla repeatedly sold stock and convertible bonds, which can be exchanged for equity later, raising almost $8.5 billion in such deals since 2010, according to Dealogic. The firm also started borrowing against its hard assets in the corporate-loan market in 2015 and has since issued $4.5 billion in loans.\nThe business case for electric cars remains murky. Gasoline is cheap, driving people to pickups and sport-utility vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, and battery-powered cars are seen as taking too long to charge, expensive and lacking range. Tesla\u2019s cars, to date, have qualified for a $7,500 federal tax credit and Tesla has spent heavily to place so-called fast chargers all over the world.\nRecently, Tesla\u2019s Mr. Musk promised to add electric pickup trucks, small SUVs, large trucks and bus-like vehicles. Analysts expect the future ambitions of Tesla, which is already committing a substantial chunk of the company\u2019s revenue to capital expenditures and R&D, to require additional capital increases.\nThe Model 3 is aimed at more mainstream buyers, with a base price of $35,000. Critics say that car can\u2019t be plagued with the same quality glitches that Model S or X buyers experienced, and that wait times for service or delivery need to be curtailed. Selling hundreds of thousands of Model 3s is seen as necessary because it could bring battery costs closer in line with conventional engines.\nAn electric car can cost upward of $10,000 more than its conventional counterpart, and analysts say it could take nearly a decade to close the gap. Tesla, building its own batteries, could have disproportionate influence in bringing those costs down due to its deep experience, access to technical experts and considerable scale.\nA year ago, Mr. Musk combined Tesla with SolarCity, a home-solar company that he served as chairman of at the time. Combining the two companies was designed to make Tesla a more diverse company focused on batteries, solar energy and automobiles. Other auto makers have scaled back on alternative business lines.\nMr. Musk runs several ventures outside of the car business, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp. He is a major backer of those companies, with shares in some being used as collateral for personal loans used to buy even more stock in the companies he runs.\nBond investors are eager for new deals because there has been little supply in recent months due to a slowdown in mergers and acquisitions, which are usually funded with junk bonds. High-yield companies issued $9 billion of new bonds in July, the lowest amount since January 2016, according to Dealogic, when collapsing oil prices caused junk-debt markets to Tesla took a step toward financing its transformation from a niche builder of pricey luxury cars to a mass-market rival of Fords and Chevrolets, setting plans to raise $1.5 billion in its first-ever sale of traditional bonds. ",
        "author": "Matt Wirz and John D. Stoll"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Tesla\u2019s Musk Makes a Strategy Out of Defiance (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6817",
        "date": "2018-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-teslas-musk-makes-a-strategy-out-of-defiance-1523793601?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=75",
        "text": "The from-the-hip approach has largely worked so far for Mr. Musk, who has built the scrappy upstart into a global luxury brand whose market value has at times exceeded that of General Motors Co. But some observers question the style\u2019s suitability to a company of Tesla\u2019s size and age, and some investors are growing impatient for Mr. Musk to deliver on his promises, including the protracted production ramp-up for the new Model 3 sedan. \n\u201dI love that Elon Musk isn\u2019t bound by tradition\u2014that\u2019s part of his brilliance,\u201d Rebecca Lindland, a longtime automotive-industry analysts at Kelley Blue Book, said. But \u201cthey need to get out of the startup realm and start behaving like a company that\u2019s worth more than GM.\u201d\n\n\nLittle about Mr. Musk follows normal business logic, starting with the fact that he also runs another major company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and has founded several smaller startups all while trying to disrupt the auto industry. \u201cIf one were to do a risk-adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put basically building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list,\u201d Mr. Musk said recently. \u201cThey would have to be the dumbest things to do.\u201d\nWhere management textbooks counsel delegation, Mr. Musk micromanages, boasting about sleeping at the factory so he can help fine-tune production. And while many CEOs are guarded in their public statements, Mr. Musk often fires off\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n posts rebutting critics or making sometimes enigmatic statements about his business plans.\nHis unorthodox\u00a0style was on display in tweets over the past couple of weeks, where Mr. Musk has joked about the company going bankrupt on April Fools\u2019 Day, criticized coverage of Tesla by publications including the Economist and The Wall Street Journal, and predicted\u00a0in a post after 1 a.m. one night that the company, which has never reported an annual profit, will be profitable in the third and fourth quarters this year.\nEven by his standards, the battle with the NTSB is risky. Mr. Musk\u2019s public sparring with NTSB, which he claimed is more concerned about headlines than safety, puts Tesla at odds with an influential agency whose report on Last month\u2019s fatal crash of a Model X sport-utility vehicle could influence public perception and policy. \nThat controversy comes as Tesla is struggling to prove that it can mass produce electric cars. In recent weeks, questions about Tesla\u2019s cash needs amid delays in ramping up production of the Model 3 have intensified, including Moody\u2019s Investors Service downgrading its credit rating.\nMr. Musk\u2019s early bet with Tesla was that a sexy sports car could excite buyers for an electric vehicle. His more recent Model 3 bucks tradition as well, with a minimalist design aesthetic in a cockpit dominated by a 15-inch touch screen that resembles an oversize iPad, displaying information such as speed and offering controls for temperature and other functions.\nMr. Musk has also eschewed franchised dealership, arguing that the direct relationship with the customer is important and plowing a new way of selling cars in company-owned stores and online as dealers have fought the approach across the country.\nSome industry traditionalists find Mr. Musk\u2019s approach vexing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Jackson,\n\n\n\n CEO of AutoNation Inc., the nation\u2019s largest dealership group, pointed to Tesla\u2019s marketing of the Model 3 on its website as starting at $35,000, even though the current version of the Model 3 starts in the U.S. at $49,000.\n\u201cYou can\u2019t advertise something at a price point and then not have it at that price point,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s like you have the normal world and then you have this Tesla bubble world where the rules don\u2019t apply.\u201d\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been very clear since we launched Model 3 last year about the price of current Model 3 configurations, which has been repeatedly mentioned in reviews of the car, and that the $35,000 base model would come as production ramps,\u201d a Tesla spokeswoman said. \u201cWe are working as quickly as we can to introduce less expensive Model 3 variants.\u201d\nLike Mr. Musk, his fans revel in dismissing skeptics. Trip Chowdhry, an analyst for Global Equities Research, often sends notes to investors with messages such as one on April 7: \u201cBetting against Elon Musk is not only insane but total stupidity\u2014equivalent to committing a `Career Suicide,\u2019\u2019\u2019 he wrote.\nAlong with being unpredictable, Mr. Musk is sometimes unrealistic. Tesla this month reported that during the first quarter it again missed its production target for the Model 3, which it has revised multiple times, though it said it is on track to reach about 5,000 a week around the end of the second quarter. \nIn an interview with CBS This Morning that aired on Friday, Mr. Musk blamed some of the troubles on too much automation at the factory\u2014something he has championed in the past\u2014and for putting too much new technology into the sedan.\n\u201cWe got complacent about som Tesla\u2019s public feud with a top safety investigator is highly unusual in business, but classic Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Tesla\u2019s Musk Makes a Strategy Out of Defiance (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6818",
        "date": "2018-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-teslas-musk-makes-a-strategy-out-of-defiance-1523793601?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=98",
        "text": "The from-the-hip approach has largely worked so far for Mr. Musk, who has built the scrappy upstart into a global luxury brand whose market value has at times exceeded that of General Motors Co. But some observers question the style\u2019s suitability to a company of Tesla\u2019s size and age, and some investors are growing impatient for Mr. Musk to deliver on his promises, including the protracted production ramp-up for the new Model 3 sedan. \n\n\n\n\n\u201dI love that Elon Musk isn\u2019t bound by tradition\u2014that\u2019s part of his brilliance,\u201d Rebecca Lindland, a longtime automotive-industry analysts at Kelley Blue Book, said. But \u201cthey need to get out of the startup realm and start behaving like a company that\u2019s worth more than GM.\u201d\n\n\nLittle about Mr. Musk follows normal business logic, starting with the fact that he also runs another major company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and has founded several smaller startups all while trying to disrupt the auto industry. \u201cIf one were to do a risk-adjusted rate of return estimate on various industry opportunities, I would put basically building rockets and cars pretty close to the bottom of the list,\u201d Mr. Musk said recently. \u201cThey would have to be the dumbest things to do.\u201d\nWhere management textbooks counsel delegation, Mr. Musk micromanages, boasting about sleeping at the factory so he can help fine-tune production. And while many CEOs are guarded in their public statements, Mr. Musk often fires off\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n posts rebutting critics or making sometimes enigmatic statements about his business plans.\nHis unorthodox\u00a0style was on display in tweets over the past couple of weeks, where Mr. Musk has joked about the company going bankrupt on April Fools\u2019 Day, criticized coverage of Tesla by publications including the Economist and The Wall Street Journal, and predicted\u00a0in a post after 1 a.m. one night that the company, which has never reported an annual profit, will be profitable in the third and fourth quarters this year.\nEven by his standards, the battle with the NTSB is risky. Mr. Musk\u2019s public sparring with NTSB, which he claimed is more concerned about headlines than safety, puts Tesla at odds with an influential agency whose report on Last month\u2019s fatal crash of a Model X sport-utility vehicle could influence public perception and policy. \nThat controversy comes as Tesla is struggling to prove that it can mass produce electric cars. In recent weeks, questions about Tesla\u2019s cash needs amid delays in ramping up production of the Model 3 have intensified, including Moody\u2019s Investors Service downgrading its credit rating.\nMr. Musk\u2019s early bet with Tesla was that a sexy sports car could excite buyers for an electric vehicle. His more recent Model 3 bucks tradition as well, with a minimalist design aesthetic in a cockpit dominated by a 15-inch touch screen that resembles an oversize iPad, displaying information such as speed and offering controls for temperature and other functions.\nMr. Musk has also eschewed franchised dealership, arguing that the direct relationship with the customer is important and plowing a new way of selling cars in company-owned stores and online as dealers have fought the approach across the country.\nSome industry traditionalists find Mr. Musk\u2019s approach vexing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Jackson,\n\n\n\n CEO of AutoNation Inc., the nation\u2019s largest dealership group, pointed to Tesla\u2019s marketing of the Model 3 on its website as starting at $35,000, even though the current version of the Model 3 starts in the U.S. at $49,000.\n\u201cYou can\u2019t advertise something at a price point and then not have it at that price point,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s like you have the normal world and then you have this Tesla bubble world where the rules don\u2019t apply.\u201d\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been very clear since we launched Model 3 last year about the price of current Model 3 configurations, which has been repeatedly mentioned in reviews of the car, and that the $35,000 base model would come as production ramps,\u201d a Tesla spokeswoman said. \u201cWe are working as quickly as we can to introduce less expensive Model 3 variants.\u201d\nLike Mr. Musk, his fans revel in dismissing skeptics. Trip Chowdhry, an analyst for Global Equities Research, often sends notes to investors with messages such as one on April 7: \u201cBetting against Elon Musk is not only insane but total stupidity\u2014equivalent to committing a `Career Suicide,\u2019\u2019\u2019 he wrote.\nAlong with being unpredictable, Mr. Musk is sometimes unrealistic. Tesla this month reported that during the first quarter it again missed its production target for the Model 3, which it has revised multiple times, though it said it is on track to reach about 5,000 a week around the end of the second quarter. \nIn an interview with CBS This Morning that aired on Friday, Mr. Musk blamed some of the troubles on too much automation at the factory\u2014something he has championed in the past\u2014and for putting too much new technology into the sedan.\n\u201cWe got complacent about Tesla\u2019s public feud with a top safety investigator is highly unusual in business, but classic Elon Musk. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket in Historic Flight (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6819",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-lofts-commercial-satellite-with-reused-rocket-in-historic-flight-1490914549?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=25",
        "text": "The Falcon 9\u2019s trouble-free blastoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center at 6:27 p.m. local time, followed by normal operation of its cluster of main engines previously used in space, marked a long-awaited accomplishment for the closely held space-transportation company. Mr. Musk and his technical team at Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. are counting on multiple flights of the same rockets to meet ambitious goals of taking humans around the Moon within a few years, and eventually landing settlers on Mars.\nThe first-of-its-kind feat also represents a major boost for the commercial-space industry, which is growing in size and influence as Mr. Musk,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and others strive to surpass legacy launch providers in terms of frequent flights, schedule flexibility and lower price. No other private or government-supported large, liquid-fueled rocket has managed to do what SpaceX pulled off Thursday.\n\n\nFollowing a smooth blastoff without any delays or technical glitches, the main engines cut off as expected about two minutes and 45 seconds into the flight, followed about a minute later by the satellite\u2019s protective covering separating from the rocket.\nOnce the satellite was safely headed toward its designated orbit, Mr. Musk appeared on camera to say his team \u201chad an incredible day,\u201d capping off 15 years of planning and \u201clots of difficult steps along the way\u201d to do something that was once considered impossible. He called it a \u201cgreat day not just for SpaceX, but for the space industry as a whole.\u201d \nAs celebrating SpaceX employees at the Hawthorne, Calif., mission control facility cheered, another camera in Florida broadcast images of an exultant but at one point tongue-tied Mr. Musk, the company\u2019s founder and chairman who prides himself on the additional title of chief rocket designer. He said the goal of reusing rockets the way airlines fly aircraft \u201cis going to be, ultimately, a huge revolution\u201d in the space business. Demonstrating the company\u2019s confidence, barely a few minutes prior to liftoff Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, predicted in a prerecorded video that \u201cthis will be written up as a historic event.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBefore the launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Halliwell,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer of SES SA, the Luxembourg-based operator of the satellite placed into Earth\u2019s orbit, called the mission a historic watershed for space transport and said company engineers were confident of the outcome. \u201cWe\u2019ve managed to build up our confidence that this is, in fact, an extremely good and extremely safe booster,\u201d he told reporters Tuesday, adding that the design is \u201cwell within its capabilities to fly multiple times.\u201d\nSpaceX has suggested it may launch a handful of what it calls \u201cflight-proven\u201d rockets this year. And in May, it is slated to conduct the first launch of a refurbished Dragon cargo capsule for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nFor now, the company is returning the Falcon 9\u2019s lower stage and its nine main engines for reuse. Thursday\u2019s success marks the ninth time SpaceX has recovered a spent booster. Later this year, it expects to fly the latest upgraded version of its Falcon 9, optimized for multiple flights.\nUltimately, when SpaceX anticipates operating much larger and more capable rockets with in-orbit refueling features, it hopes to recycle all of their parts and fuel-supply vehicles.\nThe concept of reusable rockets\u2014designed to land vertically near the launchpad or on specially outfitted barges\u2014has intrigued space aficionados and rocket scientists for decades. But for Mr. Musk and his team, rapid and inexpensive turnaround of rockets is central to their long-term vision of revolutionizing the space transportation business.\nJovial and talkative in the afterglow of success as reporters peppered him with questions for an hour, Mr. Musk disclosed that it cost SpaceX \u201cat least one billion dollars to develop\u201d what is currently a partly reusable rocket. He said customers will have to wait for dramatic cuts in launch prices until the company recoups that investment. \nBut with larger rockets and accelerated launch schedules on the horizon, the SpaceX chief said his long-range aim is to achieve \u201cover a hundredfold reduction in the cost of access to space.\u201d\nIn the near term, Mr. Musk said he anticipates flying reused boosters roughly ten times with almost no refurbishment. And in a surprising twist that SpaceX hadn\u2019t telegraphed previously, Mr. Musk forecast that by next year the company likely will have enough experience to inspect, refuel and get rockets back flying within a 24-hour period.\nSaying he was \u201creally quite speechless, after it all happened\u201d Thursday, Mr. Musk added: \u201cMy mind is blown, frankly.\u201d\nSpaceX\u2019s primary European rival, Arianespace, has dismissed the importance of reusable boosters, while its biggest domestic competitor, Entrepreneur Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a reused booster on a demanding commercial mission. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket in Historic Flight (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6820",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-lofts-commercial-satellite-with-reused-rocket-in-historic-flight-1490914549?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=99",
        "text": "The Falcon 9\u2019s trouble-free blastoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center at 6:27 p.m. local time, followed by normal operation of its cluster of main engines previously used in space, marked a long-awaited accomplishment for the closely held space-transportation company. Mr. Musk and his technical team at Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. are counting on multiple flights of the same rockets to meet ambitious goals of taking humans around the Moon within a few years, and eventually landing settlers on Mars.\nThe first-of-its-kind feat also represents a major boost for the commercial-space industry, which is growing in size and influence as Mr. Musk,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and others strive to surpass legacy launch providers in terms of frequent flights, schedule flexibility and lower price. No other private or government-supported large, liquid-fueled rocket has managed to do what SpaceX pulled off Thursday.\n\n\nFollowing a smooth blastoff without any delays or technical glitches, the main engines cut off as expected about two minutes and 45 seconds into the flight, followed about a minute later by the satellite\u2019s protective covering separating from the rocket.\nOnce the satellite was safely headed toward its designated orbit, Mr. Musk appeared on camera to say his team \u201chad an incredible day,\u201d capping off 15 years of planning and \u201clots of difficult steps along the way\u201d to do something that was once considered impossible. He called it a \u201cgreat day not just for SpaceX, but for the space industry as a whole.\u201d \nAs celebrating SpaceX employees at the Hawthorne, Calif., mission control facility cheered, another camera in Florida broadcast images of an exultant but at one point tongue-tied Mr. Musk, the company\u2019s founder and chairman who prides himself on the additional title of chief rocket designer. He said the goal of reusing rockets the way airlines fly aircraft \u201cis going to be, ultimately, a huge revolution\u201d in the space business. Demonstrating the company\u2019s confidence, barely a few minutes prior to liftoff Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, predicted in a prerecorded video that \u201cthis will be written up as a historic event.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBefore the launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Halliwell,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer of SES SA, the Luxembourg-based operator of the satellite placed into Earth\u2019s orbit, called the mission a historic watershed for space transport and said company engineers were confident of the outcome. \u201cWe\u2019ve managed to build up our confidence that this is, in fact, an extremely good and extremely safe booster,\u201d he told reporters Tuesday, adding that the design is \u201cwell within its capabilities to fly multiple times.\u201d\nSpaceX has suggested it may launch a handful of what it calls \u201cflight-proven\u201d rockets this year. And in May, it is slated to conduct the first launch of a refurbished Dragon cargo capsule for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nFor now, the company is returning the Falcon 9\u2019s lower stage and its nine main engines for reuse. Thursday\u2019s success marks the ninth time SpaceX has recovered a spent booster. Later this year, it expects to fly the latest upgraded version of its Falcon 9, optimized for multiple flights.\nUltimately, when SpaceX anticipates operating much larger and more capable rockets with in-orbit refueling features, it hopes to recycle all of their parts and fuel-supply vehicles.\nThe concept of reusable rockets\u2014designed to land vertically near the launchpad or on specially outfitted barges\u2014has intrigued space aficionados and rocket scientists for decades. But for Mr. Musk and his team, rapid and inexpensive turnaround of rockets is central to their long-term vision of revolutionizing the space transportation business.\nJovial and talkative in the afterglow of success as reporters peppered him with questions for an hour, Mr. Musk disclosed that it cost SpaceX \u201cat least one billion dollars to develop\u201d what is currently a partly reusable rocket. He said customers will have to wait for dramatic cuts in launch prices until the company recoups that investment. \nBut with larger rockets and accelerated launch schedules on the horizon, the SpaceX chief said his long-range aim is to achieve \u201cover a hundredfold reduction in the cost of access to space.\u201d\nIn the near term, Mr. Musk said he anticipates flying reused boosters roughly ten times with almost no refurbishment. And in a surprising twist that SpaceX hadn\u2019t telegraphed previously, Mr. Musk forecast that by next year the company likely will have enough experience to inspect, refuel and get rockets back flying within a 24-hour period.\nSaying he was \u201creally quite speechless, after it all happened\u201d Thursday, Mr. Musk added: \u201cMy mind is blown, frankly.\u201d\nSpaceX\u2019s primary European rival, Arianespace, has dismissed the importance of reusable boosters, while its biggest domestic competitor, Entrepreneur Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a reused booster on a demanding commercial mission. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket in Historic Flight (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6821",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-lofts-commercial-satellite-with-reused-rocket-in-historic-flight-1490914549?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=85",
        "text": "The Falcon 9\u2019s trouble-free blastoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center at 6:27 p.m. local time, followed by normal operation of its cluster of main engines previously used in space, marked a long-awaited accomplishment for the closely held space-transportation company. Mr. Musk and his technical team at Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. are counting on multiple flights of the same rockets to meet ambitious goals of taking humans around the Moon within a few years, and eventually landing settlers on Mars.\nThe first-of-its-kind feat also represents a major boost for the commercial-space industry, which is growing in size and influence as Mr. Musk,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and others strive to surpass legacy launch providers in terms of frequent flights, schedule flexibility and lower price. No other private or government-supported large, liquid-fueled rocket has managed to do what SpaceX pulled off Thursday.\n\n\nFollowing a smooth blastoff without any delays or technical glitches, the main engines cut off as expected about two minutes and 45 seconds into the flight, followed about a minute later by the satellite\u2019s protective covering separating from the rocket.\nOnce the satellite was safely headed toward its designated orbit, Mr. Musk appeared on camera to say his team \u201chad an incredible day,\u201d capping off 15 years of planning and \u201clots of difficult steps along the way\u201d to do something that was once considered impossible. He called it a \u201cgreat day not just for SpaceX, but for the space industry as a whole.\u201d \nAs celebrating SpaceX employees at the Hawthorne, Calif., mission control facility cheered, another camera in Florida broadcast images of an exultant but at one point tongue-tied Mr. Musk, the company\u2019s founder and chairman who prides himself on the additional title of chief rocket designer. He said the goal of reusing rockets the way airlines fly aircraft \u201cis going to be, ultimately, a huge revolution\u201d in the space business. Demonstrating the company\u2019s confidence, barely a few minutes prior to liftoff Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, predicted in a prerecorded video that \u201cthis will be written up as a historic event.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBefore the launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Halliwell,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer of SES SA, the Luxembourg-based operator of the satellite placed into Earth\u2019s orbit, called the mission a historic watershed for space transport and said company engineers were confident of the outcome. \u201cWe\u2019ve managed to build up our confidence that this is, in fact, an extremely good and extremely safe booster,\u201d he told reporters Tuesday, adding that the design is \u201cwell within its capabilities to fly multiple times.\u201d\nSpaceX has suggested it may launch a handful of what it calls \u201cflight-proven\u201d rockets this year. And in May, it is slated to conduct the first launch of a refurbished Dragon cargo capsule for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nFor now, the company is returning the Falcon 9\u2019s lower stage and its nine main engines for reuse. Thursday\u2019s success marks the ninth time SpaceX has recovered a spent booster. Later this year, it expects to fly the latest upgraded version of its Falcon 9, optimized for multiple flights.\nUltimately, when SpaceX anticipates operating much larger and more capable rockets with in-orbit refueling features, it hopes to recycle all of their parts and fuel-supply vehicles.\nThe concept of reusable rockets\u2014designed to land vertically near the launchpad or on specially outfitted barges\u2014has intrigued space aficionados and rocket scientists for decades. But for Mr. Musk and his team, rapid and inexpensive turnaround of rockets is central to their long-term vision of revolutionizing the space transportation business.\nJovial and talkative in the afterglow of success as reporters peppered him with questions for an hour, Mr. Musk disclosed that it cost SpaceX \u201cat least one billion dollars to develop\u201d what is currently a partly reusable rocket. He said customers will have to wait for dramatic cuts in launch prices until the company recoups that investment. \nBut with larger rockets and accelerated launch schedules on the horizon, the SpaceX chief said his long-range aim is to achieve \u201cover a hundredfold reduction in the cost of access to space.\u201d\nIn the near term, Mr. Musk said he anticipates flying reused boosters roughly ten times with almost no refurbishment. And in a surprising twist that SpaceX hadn\u2019t telegraphed previously, Mr. Musk forecast that by next year the company likely will have enough experience to inspect, refuel and get rockets back flying within a 24-hour period.\nSaying he was \u201creally quite speechless, after it all happened\u201d Thursday, Mr. Musk added: \u201cMy mind is blown, frankly.\u201d\nSpaceX\u2019s primary European rival, Arianespace, has dismissed the importance of reusable boosters, while its biggest domestic competitor, Entrepreneur Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a reused booster on a demanding commercial mission. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lofts Commercial Satellite With Reused Rocket in Historic Flight (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6822",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-lofts-commercial-satellite-with-reused-rocket-in-historic-flight-1490914549?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=126",
        "text": "The Falcon 9\u2019s trouble-free blastoff from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center at 6:27 p.m. local time, followed by normal operation of its cluster of main engines previously used in space, marked a long-awaited accomplishment for the closely held space-transportation company. Mr. Musk and his technical team at Southern California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. are counting on multiple flights of the same rockets to meet ambitious goals of taking humans around the Moon within a few years, and eventually landing settlers on Mars.\n\n\n\n\nThe first-of-its-kind feat also represents a major boost for the commercial-space industry, which is growing in size and influence as Mr. Musk,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and others strive to surpass legacy launch providers in terms of frequent flights, schedule flexibility and lower price. No other private or government-supported large, liquid-fueled rocket has managed to do what SpaceX pulled off Thursday.\n\n\nFollowing a smooth blastoff without any delays or technical glitches, the main engines cut off as expected about two minutes and 45 seconds into the flight, followed about a minute later by the satellite\u2019s protective covering separating from the rocket.\nOnce the satellite was safely headed toward its designated orbit, Mr. Musk appeared on camera to say his team \u201chad an incredible day,\u201d capping off 15 years of planning and \u201clots of difficult steps along the way\u201d to do something that was once considered impossible. He called it a \u201cgreat day not just for SpaceX, but for the space industry as a whole.\u201d \nAs celebrating SpaceX employees at the Hawthorne, Calif., mission control facility cheered, another camera in Florida broadcast images of an exultant but at one point tongue-tied Mr. Musk, the company\u2019s founder and chairman who prides himself on the additional title of chief rocket designer. He said the goal of reusing rockets the way airlines fly aircraft \u201cis going to be, ultimately, a huge revolution\u201d in the space business. Demonstrating the company\u2019s confidence, barely a few minutes prior to liftoff Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president and chief operating officer, predicted in a prerecorded video that \u201cthis will be written up as a historic event.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBefore the launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Halliwell,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer of SES SA, the Luxembourg-based operator of the satellite placed into Earth\u2019s orbit, called the mission a historic watershed for space transport and said company engineers were confident of the outcome. \u201cWe\u2019ve managed to build up our confidence that this is, in fact, an extremely good and extremely safe booster,\u201d he told reporters Tuesday, adding that the design is \u201cwell within its capabilities to fly multiple times.\u201d\nSpaceX has suggested it may launch a handful of what it calls \u201cflight-proven\u201d rockets this year. And in May, it is slated to conduct the first launch of a refurbished Dragon cargo capsule for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\nFor now, the company is returning the Falcon 9\u2019s lower stage and its nine main engines for reuse. Thursday\u2019s success marks the ninth time SpaceX has recovered a spent booster. Later this year, it expects to fly the latest upgraded version of its Falcon 9, optimized for multiple flights.\nUltimately, when SpaceX anticipates operating much larger and more capable rockets with in-orbit refueling features, it hopes to recycle all of their parts and fuel-supply vehicles.\nThe concept of reusable rockets\u2014designed to land vertically near the launchpad or on specially outfitted barges\u2014has intrigued space aficionados and rocket scientists for decades. But for Mr. Musk and his team, rapid and inexpensive turnaround of rockets is central to their long-term vision of revolutionizing the space transportation business.\nJovial and talkative in the afterglow of success as reporters peppered him with questions for an hour, Mr. Musk disclosed that it cost SpaceX \u201cat least one billion dollars to develop\u201d what is currently a partly reusable rocket. He said customers will have to wait for dramatic cuts in launch prices until the company recoups that investment. \nBut with larger rockets and accelerated launch schedules on the horizon, the SpaceX chief said his long-range aim is to achieve \u201cover a hundredfold reduction in the cost of access to space.\u201d\nIn the near term, Mr. Musk said he anticipates flying reused boosters roughly ten times with almost no refurbishment. And in a surprising twist that SpaceX hadn\u2019t telegraphed previously, Mr. Musk forecast that by next year the company likely will have enough experience to inspect, refuel and get rockets back flying within a 24-hour period.\nSaying he was \u201creally quite speechless, after it all happened\u201d Thursday, Mr. Musk added: \u201cMy mind is blown, frankly.\u201d\nSpaceX\u2019s primary European rival, Arianespace, has dismissed the importance of reusable boosters, while its biggest domestic competit Entrepreneur Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully launched a reused booster on a demanding commercial mission. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s New Boring Co. Faced Questions Over SpaceX Financial Ties (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6823",
        "date": "2018-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-new-boring-co-faced-questions-over-spacex-financial-ties-11545078371?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=82",
        "text": "The entrance of the two-mile-long Boring test tunnel is being constructed in Hawthorne, Calif., at the headquarters of another Musk-controlled company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., partly by SpaceX employees using equipment purchased with SpaceX funds, people familiar with the matter said.\n\n\n\n\nThe arrangement alarmed some longtime investors in SpaceX, including its largest outside backer,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\u2019s\n\n\n\n Founders Fund, some of the people said. The investors learned in recent months that despite the diversion of SpaceX resources and staffing to the fledgling Boring startup, it was Mr. Musk who was in line to receive almost all of any future profits, these people said.\n\n\nThe investors questioned SpaceX about why their investment dollars into a company ostensibly devoted to launching satellites and carrying humans to Mars were instead partly used to start a separate company that principally benefited Mr. Musk. When the Boring Co. was earlier this year spun into its own firm, more than 90% of the equity went to Mr. Musk and the rest to early employees, the company has said. \nIn internal meetings this year, Founders Fund partners debated what to do about the diversion of SpaceX resources. Their concerns reached a SpaceX board member and other company officials, the people familiar with the matter said.\nThe SpaceX board never voted on devoting resources to Mr. Musk\u2019s new venture.\n\n\n Growing Empire Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk oversees a collection of technology companies with overlapping ties.\n Largest shareholder at all four companies Elon Musk Musk holds nearly all equity in Boring The Boring Company SpaceX Loaned staff, property and funds for a 6% stake Neuralink Shares executives Tesla Sold $400,000 in parts Sources: company filings; photo: Kyle Grillot/Reuters \n\n\nThe Boring Co. has since given some equity to SpaceX as compensation for the help, a move that hasn\u2019t been previously reported or publicly disclosed. SpaceX hasn\u2019t formally notified its investors of the exchange. Some investors say they aren\u2019t aware of it. \nSpaceX received about 6% of Boring stock, \u201cbased on the value of land, time and other resources contributed since creation of the company,\u201d said a SpaceX spokesman. He declined to comment further on the circumstances surrounding the transaction.\nMr. Musk declined to comment through the SpaceX spokesman. \nFounders Fund in a statement said it has been briefed on the relationship between SpaceX and the Boring Co. \u201cand we have no concerns whatsoever.\u201d \nThe Boring Co.\u2019s unusual inception is illustrative of how Mr. Musk defies the conventions of traditional corporate chieftains and sometimes supports his business empire by shuffling finances between companies. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Hyperloop Explained\n\n\n\nEarly in Tesla\u2019s history, he personally borrowed $20 million from SpaceX to help fund the electric-car company. He is the chief executive and largest shareholder of both companies. In 2015 and 2016, according to regulatory filings, SpaceX purchased more than $250 million worth of bonds from SolarCity, the solar-panel installation firm where Mr. Musk was chairman and its largest shareholder. Later in 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity after other bidders passed. \n\u201cThere were a few cases where one company was doing considerably better than another, and I borrowed money,\u201d he said in a 2016 interview with The Wall Street Journal. \nIn April, a Boring Co. regulatory filing disclosed the company had raised $112.5 million in financing and lists as an executive and director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jared Birchall,\n\n\n\n who is also the president of another Mr. Musk-led company, Neuralink, which is developing brain computers. A Tesla proxy filing this year revealed it has sold about $400,000 in parts to the Boring Co. \nThe idea for the Boring Co. traces back to two years ago when Mr. Musk, in what he has since described as a joke, wrote in a series of tweets: \u201cTraffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging....\u201d \nHe last year revealed a Boring Co. concept video showing elevators built into a street that would lower cars into a tunnel, where they would travel on high-speed \u201cskates\u201d at up to 130 miles an hour. A subsequent video from May showed pedestrians walking onto a futuristic bus that is lowered underground to the tunnel network.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLoop Video\n\n\n\nSome SpaceX employees began working on the project and last year acquired a secondhand giant tunneling machine to help construct the first phase of what Mr. Musk predicted could be a series of underground tubes connecting cities like Washington, D.C., and New York.\nLocal regulators who visited the construction site had trouble determining who was leading the project. In an August 2017 visit, representatives of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health were told by the site safety manager\u2014himself a SpaceX employee\u2014he was \u201cunsure whether TBC is a s Elon Musk\u2019s tunnel-digging venture, the Boring Co., is the latest to be drawn into the billionaire entrepreneur\u2019s tradition of spreading overlapping resources across his growing technology empire. On Tuesday, the Tesla chief is set to unveil a test tunnel developed by the Boring Co., the first of what Mr. Musk imagines as a futuristic series of high-speed underground highways to alleviate traffic. ",
        "author": "Rob Copeland"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla Board\u2019s Independence Faces Tough Test (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6824",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-boards-independence-is-tested-by-musks-buyout-idea-1533893403?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=90",
        "text": "The board\u2019s role in the possible buyout was clouded by Mr. Musk\u2019s unusual way of announcing the idea\u2014in a sudden, very brief tweet on Tuesday. That tweet was followed more than 20 hours later by a short statement from six directors saying the board had met several times since Mr. Musk told it of his go-private idea last week, and that it was \u201ctaking the appropriate next steps to evaluate this.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nThe sequence of events suggests that \u201cthe board review has been very, very informal,\u201d said Adam Epstein, who heads corporate-governance consultant Third Creek Advisors.\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s announcement attracted scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has asked Tesla whether Mr. Musk was truthful when he said in his tweet that he had secured funding for the buyout. \nTesla didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment on the SEC queries.\nOn Thursday, Tesla shares fell for a second straight day to $352.45, leaving them below their level before Mr. Musk\u2019s announcement and about 16% under the $420 target price he set for a buyout of the electric-car maker.\n\n\nRelated Tesla Fans: Sign Us Up for Private Ride With Elon Musk Tesla\u2019s Board Has Met Several Times to Discuss Going-Private Proposal Heard on the Street: Tesla\u2019s Go-Private Dream Doesn\u2019t Add Up Tesla Asks Suppliers for Cash Back to Help Turn a Profit (July 22) \n\n\nTesla\u2019s board has nine members. Mr. Musk, who owns about a fifth of Tesla, is chairman as well as chief executive. He and his brother, Kimbal, are the only directors the board doesn\u2019t label as independent.\nTesla says that it evaluates numerous factors in determining directors\u2019 independence, including their commercial, accounting, legal, banking, consulting, charitable and familial relationships.\nSeveral other directors are close to Mr. Musk, including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brad Buss,\n\n\n\n who was previously chief financial officer at SolarCity, the renewable energy company Mr. Musk led and that Tesla acquired in 2016.\nLead independent director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Antonio Gracias,\n\n\n\n founder of Valor Equity Partners, has invested in several Musk ventures going back to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal,\n\n\n which Mr. Musk co-founded. He was a SolarCity director and is a director at Mr. Musk\u2019s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. The Musk brothers have invested with Valor, according to Tesla\u2019s proxy statement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ira Ehrenpreis,\n\n\n\n who heads Tesla\u2019s compensation committee and its nominating and governance committee, also is a SpaceX investor, as is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Jurvetson,\n\n\n\n a venture capitalist who is on leave from Tesla\u2019s board. Both have been associates of Mr. Musk for years.\nMessrs. Gracias, Buss and Ehrenpreis didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Jurvetson declined to comment about the proposed deal and didn\u2019t respond to questions about the board\u2019s independence.\nBoard independence has received more attention in recent years. Governance specialists point out that regulatory requirements for independence have limited scope.\nTodd Henderson, professor at the University of Chicago Law School, says the value of independence can be overstated. Still, he says following normal procedure for cases like Tesla\u2019s\u2014such as forming a special committee on the board to consider the buyout\u2014would improve the reception for any deal.\nBoards normally play active roles overseeing major transactions, and in management-backed buyouts their importance can be greater because directors must negotiate against CEOs on behalf of other shareholders.\nSix months before PC-maker Dell announced founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Dell\u2019s\n\n\n\n plan to take the company private in 2013, its board formed a special committee to negotiate terms with him, according to company filings. When the deal was announced it came with a detailed financing plan including backing from the equity sponsors and debt underwriting from Wall Street banks. Afterwards the board clashed with Mr. Dell and his partners as directors sought a higher price for shareholders. They won a slight increase.\nShareholder advocates have frequently challenged Tesla\u2019s board, with little success.\nGlass Lewis, one of two major shareholder advisory services, strongly opposed the proposal for Tesla to buy SolarCity, calling it a \u201cthinly veiled bail-out plan\u201d and saying the Tesla board was \u201crife with conflicts.\u201d Shareholders approved the deal.\nLast year, under pressure from shareholders including California State Teachers\u2019 Retirement System to add two independent directors, Tesla announced the addition of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Murdoch,\n\n\n\n CEO of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n 21st Century Fox,\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Linda Johnson Rice,\n\n\n\n CEO of Johnson Publishing Co. (21st Century Fox and News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal, share common ownership.) \nThis year, when Mr. Murdoch was up for re-election, Glass Lewis and rival adviser Institutio Elon Musk\u2019s surprising buyout idea for Tesla puts the spotlight on its board members, most of whom have close business or personal relationships with the electric-car company\u2019s leader. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside Musk\u2019s Tunnel to Fix \u2018Soul-Destroying\u2019 Traffic (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6825",
        "date": "2018-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-elon-musks-tunnel-to-alleviate-soul-destroying-traffic-11545229597?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=65",
        "text": "The billionaire entrepreneur held a glitzy event staged across the street from the headquarters of his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., in Southern California. Nearby was a giant boring machine that dug a 1.14-mile tunnel about 40-feet underground, starting at the site and curving around the north side of Hawthorne Municipal Airport to a former cabinet shop converted into a station for exiting and entering.\n\n\nThe event started with a video feed of a white Tesla Model X sport-utility vehicle speeding through the tunnel and then emerging in front of the crowd gathered around a large pit created to dig the passage. Ever the showman, Mr. Musk emerged from the SUV to cheers.\n\n\n\u201cTraffic is soul-destroying\u2014it\u2019s like acid on the soul,\u201d Mr. Musk told the crowd. \u201cFinally, finally, finally\u2014there\u2019s something that can solve the goddamn traffic problem.\u201d\nWhat began seemingly as a joke by Mr. Musk on Twitter two years ago is now a passion to create an alternative way for people to quickly get around town. Using SpaceX staff and resources, he spun the project this year into its own company, the Boring Co. \nA key part of his pitch is reducing the cost and increasing the speed of tunneling. He is projecting a 15-fold increase in speed over the industry\u2019s fastest boring operation by automating some of the work, improving the processes and making the drilling more powerful.\nHe imagines a network of tunnels beneath a city that allow for electric autonomous vehicles to travel at speeds greater than 150 miles an hour, saying he expects such a system to be in place in Los Angeles by 2028. He is working on tunnel projects in Chicago and between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and proposed a tunnel in Los Angeles to Dodger Stadium.\nThe test tunnel celebrated Tuesday cost about $10 million to complete, Mr. Musk told reporters beforehand.\nOne of the changes that emerged from his original plan is the elimination of a skateboard-like system that would have shuttled the cars. Instead, his engineers have designed deployable tracking wheels that would be attached to the front of a car. The wheels run along the curbs of the tunnels to keep the vehicle going straight.\u00a0The idea would require an electric vehicle, to avoid spewing toxic fumes, that is equipped with autonomous driving technology so it will stop properly, Mr. Musk said. The tunnel wouldn\u2019t be limited to Tesla vehicles.\nInside the worksite, ferns and space heaters were staged around drilling equipment as guests enjoyed cocktails and food. A 45-foot medieval-like guard tower was erected near the giant hole, built with bricks made from the dirt pulled from the tunnel. Mr. Musk plans to cut costs by recycling the dirt from the tunnel to make bricks that are then sold. Outside the tower, a man dressed in armor posed for pictures.\nAt a s\u2019more station, a young woman wearing a company jacket used a Boring Co.-branded flamethrower to warm a marshmallow held at the tip of a sword.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s previous tweets about the project were blown up on poster boards, including the original from 2016: \u201cTraffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging\u2026\u201d\nThe company offered guests a chance to travel through the tunnel. During a demonstration, a Model X pulled into an alley between houses and businesses until it reached a gate with a guard. It opened to reveal \u201cO\u2019Leary Station,\u201d where a giant circle on a metal surface marked the spot for the vehicle to park.\nAn elevator then slowly lowered the vehicle about 40 feet to the mouth of the tunnel. Neon red lights encircled the opening while another strand of lights led into the heart of the tunnel, which has white walls.\nThe driver edged into the tunnel where lateral wheels affixed to the SUV\u2019s front wheels bumped against the tunnel\u2019s walls. He then gunned the accelerator to quickly reach over 40 miles an hour. The SUV\u2019s lateral wheels seemed to jerk between the tunnel walls, creating a bumpy experience while the vehicle quietly whirred through the path. Dust that kicked up from a previous ride hung in the air.\nThe ride ended about three minutes later.\nOne of the many obstacles faced by the Boring Co: Tunneling is often a minority of the cost of underground transportation projects, so even with a substantial decrease in tunneling costs, subway projects would still be extremely expensive. This is largely due to costs related to the complex task of building underground stations\u2014which can\u2019t be hollowed out with a boring machine\u2014as well as land acquisition and design costs.\nIn Los Angeles, a 2.6-mile extension of the Purple Line subway is projected to cost $3.6 billion, but the tunneling contract is just $410 million. In New York, a 1.5-mile extension of the No. 7 subway cost $2.5 billion, of which the tunneling contract was $1.1 billion.\nMr. Musk\u2019s plan appears to side step large stations by accessing the network through elevators that can take up, according to him, the space of two parkin Elon Musk took a breather from his electric-car company and rocket maker to showcase his grand vision for a network of tunnels that can shuttle electric cars underground at high speeds. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inside Musk\u2019s Tunnel to Fix \u2018Soul-Destroying\u2019 Traffic (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6826",
        "date": "2018-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-elon-musks-tunnel-to-alleviate-soul-destroying-traffic-11545229597?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=82",
        "text": "The billionaire entrepreneur held a glitzy event staged across the street from the headquarters of his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., in Southern California. Nearby was a giant boring machine that dug a 1.14-mile tunnel about 40-feet underground, starting at the site and curving around the north side of Hawthorne Municipal Airport to a former cabinet shop converted into a station for exiting and entering.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe event started with a video feed of a white Tesla Model X sport-utility vehicle speeding through the tunnel and then emerging in front of the crowd gathered around a large pit created to dig the passage. Ever the showman, Mr. Musk emerged from the SUV to cheers.\n\n\n\u201cTraffic is soul-destroying\u2014it\u2019s like acid on the soul,\u201d Mr. Musk told the crowd. \u201cFinally, finally, finally\u2014there\u2019s something that can solve the goddamn traffic problem.\u201d\nWhat began seemingly as a joke by Mr. Musk on Twitter two years ago is now a passion to create an alternative way for people to quickly get around town. Using SpaceX staff and resources, he spun the project this year into its own company, the Boring Co. \nA key part of his pitch is reducing the cost and increasing the speed of tunneling. He is projecting a 15-fold increase in speed over the industry\u2019s fastest boring operation by automating some of the work, improving the processes and making the drilling more powerful.\nHe imagines a network of tunnels beneath a city that allow for electric autonomous vehicles to travel at speeds greater than 150 miles an hour, saying he expects such a system to be in place in Los Angeles by 2028. He is working on tunnel projects in Chicago and between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and proposed a tunnel in Los Angeles to Dodger Stadium.\nThe test tunnel celebrated Tuesday cost about $10 million to complete, Mr. Musk told reporters beforehand.\nOne of the changes that emerged from his original plan is the elimination of a skateboard-like system that would have shuttled the cars. Instead, his engineers have designed deployable tracking wheels that would be attached to the front of a car. The wheels run along the curbs of the tunnels to keep the vehicle going straight.\u00a0The idea would require an electric vehicle, to avoid spewing toxic fumes, that is equipped with autonomous driving technology so it will stop properly, Mr. Musk said. The tunnel wouldn\u2019t be limited to Tesla vehicles.\nInside the worksite, ferns and space heaters were staged around drilling equipment as guests enjoyed cocktails and food. A 45-foot medieval-like guard tower was erected near the giant hole, built with bricks made from the dirt pulled from the tunnel. Mr. Musk plans to cut costs by recycling the dirt from the tunnel to make bricks that are then sold. Outside the tower, a man dressed in armor posed for pictures.\nAt a s\u2019more station, a young woman wearing a company jacket used a Boring Co.-branded flamethrower to warm a marshmallow held at the tip of a sword.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s previous tweets about the project were blown up on poster boards, including the original from 2016: \u201cTraffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging\u2026\u201d\nThe company offered guests a chance to travel through the tunnel. During a demonstration, a Model X pulled into an alley between houses and businesses until it reached a gate with a guard. It opened to reveal \u201cO\u2019Leary Station,\u201d where a giant circle on a metal surface marked the spot for the vehicle to park.\nAn elevator then slowly lowered the vehicle about 40 feet to the mouth of the tunnel. Neon red lights encircled the opening while another strand of lights led into the heart of the tunnel, which has white walls.\nThe driver edged into the tunnel where lateral wheels affixed to the SUV\u2019s front wheels bumped against the tunnel\u2019s walls. He then gunned the accelerator to quickly reach over 40 miles an hour. The SUV\u2019s lateral wheels seemed to jerk between the tunnel walls, creating a bumpy experience while the vehicle quietly whirred through the path. Dust that kicked up from a previous ride hung in the air.\nThe ride ended about three minutes later.\nOne of the many obstacles faced by the Boring Co: Tunneling is often a minority of the cost of underground transportation projects, so even with a substantial decrease in tunneling costs, subway projects would still be extremely expensive. This is largely due to costs related to the complex task of building underground stations\u2014which can\u2019t be hollowed out with a boring machine\u2014as well as land acquisition and design costs.\nIn Los Angeles, a 2.6-mile extension of the Purple Line subway is projected to cost $3.6 billion, but the tunneling contract is just $410 million. In New York, a 1.5-mile extension of the No. 7 subway cost $2.5 billion, of which the tunneling contract was $1.1 billion.\nMr. Musk\u2019s plan appears to side step large stations by accessing the network through elevators that can take up, according to him, the space of two pa Elon Musk took a breather from his electric-car company and rocket maker to showcase his grand vision for a network of tunnels that can shuttle electric cars underground at high speeds. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Wins Air Force Contract for GPS Satellite Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6827",
        "date": "2017-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-scores-another-win-in-push-for-military-satellite-launches-1489549635?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=100",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has battled for years and even took the military to court to be allowed to bid on such contracts using its Falcon 9 booster. The latest developments mark another victory in the company\u2019s campaign to snare business away from its dominant rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin Corp.\nSpaceX became eligible to conduct military launches in May 2015 and won its first Pentagon contract, also for a GPS navigation satellite, in April 2016.\n\n\nRead More FAA Mandating Higher Insurance Coverage for SpaceX Rockets Bezos Reveals Launch Deal With European Satellite Operator Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon \n\n\nThe rival venture, called United Launch Alliance, for more than a decade had enjoyed a monopoly boosting large military satellites into orbit before SpaceX entered the fray. Until then, the venture\u2019s average launch costs hovered around $200 million per mission.\n\n\nUnited Launch still remains on top when it comes to lofting the largest, most expensive and highest-security spy satellites and other national-security payloads. It can cost more than $500 million to transport such satellites into space using the heavy-lift variant of the Delta IV rocket. Last month, two senior members of the House Armed Services Committee called on the Pentagon to ensure continued use of \u00a0the Delta IV.\nBut in announcing its award of the contract to SpaceX, the Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center also said it was making the company eligible to compete for five additional contracts through late 2019. That brings to 14 the total number of launch contracts the Air Force has committed to make competitive through that period, according to the release.\nLt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, commander of the space and missiles center and the Air Force\u2019s senior space acquisition official, said Tuesday\u2019s award supports the goal of \u201cdelivering resilient and affordable space capabilities.\u201d The launch is scheduled for early 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said \u201cwe appreciate the confidence that the Air Force has placed in our company.\u201d\nSpaceX also is developing a more powerful rocket designed to launch the biggest intelligence satellites, some the size of school buses. But that rocket, the Falcon Heavy, isn\u2019t slated to fly until later this year. It is expected to take at least several years for Pentagon officials and leaders of the intelligence community to become comfortable using the Falcon Heavy for cutting-edge spy satellites, according to government and industry experts.\nThe Air Force said the decision to expand competitive bidding also was intended \u201cto allow the development of new launch vehicles.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX CEO Elon Musk, shown in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nicholas kamm/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nUnited Launch, which has slashed employees and otherwise cut costs, also seeks to end its dependence on Russian engines for its workhorse Atlas V rockets. It previously announced it was working on a lower-cost replacement booster called Vulcan, featuring U.S.-built main engines. Blue Origin LLC, the growing space startup founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n chairman and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n , is the front-runner to provide those engines.\nPentagon officials have said the results of competitive bidding between SpaceX and United Launch will depend on more than simply price. Previously, Air Force officials provided industry with strategy documents indicating the military didn\u2019t anticipate \u201cfull and open competition\u201d between United Launch and SpaceX to begin until 2023.\nOver the years, the Air Force has said its launch-acquisition strategy takes into consideration factors such as booster reliability and the impact of specific awards on the health of the country\u2019s industrial base.\nLast year, Claire Leon, a top Air Force acquisition official, spelled out competing pressures to save money by choosing the lower-cost competitor while complying with high-level White House and Pentagon directives to maintain two separate launch providers. She told an industry conference in Pasadena, Calif., that until United Launch becomes a more agile competitor, the Air Force \u201cmay end up needing to compete a little differently,\u201d by unilaterally allocating certain launches.\n\u201cIt\u2019s likely to be a split buy in some fashion,\u201d she said. The U.S. Air Force picked Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to blast a second Global Positioning System satellite into orbit, part of a broader drive to open up various other launch contracts for competitive bidding through late 2019. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Wins Air Force Contract for GPS Satellite Launch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6828",
        "date": "2017-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-scores-another-win-in-push-for-military-satellite-launches-1489549635?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=86",
        "text": "Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has battled for years and even took the military to court to be allowed to bid on such contracts using its Falcon 9 booster. The latest developments mark another victory in the company\u2019s campaign to snare business away from its dominant rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n and Lockheed Martin Corp.\nSpaceX became eligible to conduct military launches in May 2015 and won its first Pentagon contract, also for a GPS navigation satellite, in April 2016.\n\n\nRead More FAA Mandating Higher Insurance Coverage for SpaceX Rockets Bezos Reveals Launch Deal With European Satellite Operator Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Plans for Private Space Exploration SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon \n\n\nThe rival venture, called United Launch Alliance, for more than a decade had enjoyed a monopoly boosting large military satellites into orbit before SpaceX entered the fray. Until then, the venture\u2019s average launch costs hovered around $200 million per mission.\n\n\nUnited Launch still remains on top when it comes to lofting the largest, most expensive and highest-security spy satellites and other national-security payloads. It can cost more than $500 million to transport such satellites into space using the heavy-lift variant of the Delta IV rocket. Last month, two senior members of the House Armed Services Committee called on the Pentagon to ensure continued use of \u00a0the Delta IV.\nBut in announcing its award of the contract to SpaceX, the Air Force\u2019s Space and Missile Systems Center also said it was making the company eligible to compete for five additional contracts through late 2019. That brings to 14 the total number of launch contracts the Air Force has committed to make competitive through that period, according to the release.\nLt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, commander of the space and missiles center and the Air Force\u2019s senior space acquisition official, said Tuesday\u2019s award supports the goal of \u201cdelivering resilient and affordable space capabilities.\u201d The launch is scheduled for early 2019.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said \u201cwe appreciate the confidence that the Air Force has placed in our company.\u201d\nSpaceX also is developing a more powerful rocket designed to launch the biggest intelligence satellites, some the size of school buses. But that rocket, the Falcon Heavy, isn\u2019t slated to fly until later this year. It is expected to take at least several years for Pentagon officials and leaders of the intelligence community to become comfortable using the Falcon Heavy for cutting-edge spy satellites, according to government and industry experts.\nThe Air Force said the decision to expand competitive bidding also was intended \u201cto allow the development of new launch vehicles.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX CEO Elon Musk, shown in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nicholas kamm/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nUnited Launch, which has slashed employees and otherwise cut costs, also seeks to end its dependence on Russian engines for its workhorse Atlas V rockets. It previously announced it was working on a lower-cost replacement booster called Vulcan, featuring U.S.-built main engines. Blue Origin LLC, the growing space startup founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n chairman and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n , is the front-runner to provide those engines.\nPentagon officials have said the results of competitive bidding between SpaceX and United Launch will depend on more than simply price. Previously, Air Force officials provided industry with strategy documents indicating the military didn\u2019t anticipate \u201cfull and open competition\u201d between United Launch and SpaceX to begin until 2023.\nOver the years, the Air Force has said its launch-acquisition strategy takes into consideration factors such as booster reliability and the impact of specific awards on the health of the country\u2019s industrial base.\nLast year, Claire Leon, a top Air Force acquisition official, spelled out competing pressures to save money by choosing the lower-cost competitor while complying with high-level White House and Pentagon directives to maintain two separate launch providers. She told an industry conference in Pasadena, Calif., that until United Launch becomes a more agile competitor, the Air Force \u201cmay end up needing to compete a little differently,\u201d by unilaterally allocating certain launches.\n\u201cIt\u2019s likely to be a split buy in some fashion,\u201d she said. The U.S. Air Force picked Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to blast a second Global Positioning System satellite into orbit, part of a broader drive to open up various other launch contracts for competitive bidding through late 2019. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Big Question: Better or Worse Off as Private Company (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6829",
        "date": "2018-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-big-question-better-or-worse-off-as-private-company-1533751228?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=65",
        "text": "Read More Tesla\u2019s Board Has Met Several Times to Discuss Going-Private Proposal (Aug. 8) Musk\u2019s Tesla Claim Could Land Him in Regulatory Trouble (Aug. 7) Heard on the Street: Tesla\u2019s Go-Private Dream Doesn\u2019t Add Up (Aug. 7) Elon Musk Tweets He Is Considering Taking Tesla Private (Aug. 7) \n\n\nTaking Tesla private would end one of the fiercest debates in recent years between bulls and bears, with Mr. Musk frequently sparring with detractors and short sellers. It would also shield Tesla\u2019s financial health and other competitive information from rivals racing to catch up with their own electric vehicles.\nIn a memo to employees and several\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n messages Tuesday, Mr. Musk said he believes a private capital structure will allow Tesla to tap its full potential. \u201cWe are at our best when everyone is focused on executing, when we can remain focused on our long-term mission,\u201d he wrote in the memo.\n\n\nStill, analysts say a key to Tesla\u2019s success has been its ability to use the high profile and promotional skills of its CEO and the loyal investor support it engenders to easily raise fresh equity. Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has raised nearly $4 billion from public stock offerings to help fund operating losses, in addition to more than $13 billion from the debt markets.\n\u201cTesla has hugely benefited from supportive public markets and from abnormally low cost of capital, which may not be sustained privately,\u201d Jefferies analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philippe Houchois\n\n\n\n wrote in a research note.\nThe billionaire CEO has never fit the mold of public-company CEO. He often has shrugged off badly missed financial forecasts or production targets and has jousted with analysts and short sellers. The pressure mounted in the past year as Mr. Musk twice missed self-imposed production deadlines, even as he sometimes slept on the factory floor to meet them.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLeading a private company could allow Mr. Musk greater latitude to run Tesla the way he wants, analysts say, pulling off his unorthodox moves without the penalty of an immediate stock hit. Tesla\u2019s shares tanked in 2016 when he merged Tesla with solar-panel company SolarCity Corp., of which Mr. Musk was the largest shareholder. Some investors viewed the deal as a bailout of a firm that had struggled to raise capital.\nMr. Musk said in Tuesday\u2019s memo that he has no plans to combine Tesla with his other company, rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\n\u201cHe seems to be most excited and operating at his best when he\u2019s afforded the opportunity to simply focus on the company,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jamie Albertine,\n\n\n\n an analyst with Consumer Edge Research, said.\nFor automotive competitors, the move would reduce visibility into a company that has captured the collective attention of a once-skeptical industry.\nTesla initially was dismissed by auto executives from Detroit to Germany as a dreamy upstart dabbling in an electric-car market in which consumers had little interest. But Tesla soon developed a fervent fan base and drew luxury-car buyers eager to pay $100,000 for Tesla\u2019s Model S sedan and later the Model X sport-utility vehicle.\nDespite persistent losses and production struggles, investors rewarded Tesla, which became a bellwether for where Wall Street was placing its automotive bets. Tesla\u2019s market value of about $64 billion is higher than that of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , and nearly equal to Ford and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Fiat Chrysler Automobiles\n\n\n NV combined.\nMr. Musk\u2019s go-private plan ultimately could again pressure traditional auto makers, says Evercore ISI analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Galliers.\n\n\n\n He sees a scenario whereby Tesla is successful lining up strategic investors to not only take the company private but commit ongoing capital for its international expansion.\n\u201cThis only increases the need for transition\u201d at traditional car companies, who must manage an overhaul of their product offerings to electric from gasoline-powered \u201cif they choose to compete with a potentially faster and more nimble Tesla,\u201d Mr. Galliers wrote in a note.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEven as a private company, pressure will remain on Tesla to lift production so it can boost free cash flow to pay down its roughly $10 billion in debt and fund planned expansions. Mr. Musk has repeatedly missed production milestones for the Model 3 sedan, the car introduced last year that is intended to transform Tesla into a profitable, self-sustaining company.\nTesla also needs to sell more cars to fund considerable capital expenditures. The company plans to build a factory in China in coming years and has also explored building one in Europe. It is also developing a small SUV, a booming category.\nAny traditionally-structured buyout deal for the car maker could leave it in a more precarious financial position than it already finds itself. Barclays analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Johnson\n\n\n\n estimates Tesla would need t Elon Musk is betting that taking Tesla private would free his company of scrutiny. But it could complicate efforts to build a mainstream electric car by removing the easy access to capital the Wall Street darling has enjoyed. ",
        "author": "Mike Colias and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Big Question: Better or Worse Off as Private Company (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6830",
        "date": "2018-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-big-question-better-or-worse-off-as-private-company-1533751228?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=90",
        "text": "Read More Tesla\u2019s Board Has Met Several Times to Discuss Going-Private Proposal (Aug. 8) Musk\u2019s Tesla Claim Could Land Him in Regulatory Trouble (Aug. 7) Heard on the Street: Tesla\u2019s Go-Private Dream Doesn\u2019t Add Up (Aug. 7) Elon Musk Tweets He Is Considering Taking Tesla Private (Aug. 7) \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTaking Tesla private would end one of the fiercest debates in recent years between bulls and bears, with Mr. Musk frequently sparring with detractors and short sellers. It would also shield Tesla\u2019s financial health and other competitive information from rivals racing to catch up with their own electric vehicles.\nIn a memo to employees and several\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n messages Tuesday, Mr. Musk said he believes a private capital structure will allow Tesla to tap its full potential. \u201cWe are at our best when everyone is focused on executing, when we can remain focused on our long-term mission,\u201d he wrote in the memo.\n\n\nStill, analysts say a key to Tesla\u2019s success has been its ability to use the high profile and promotional skills of its CEO and the loyal investor support it engenders to easily raise fresh equity. Since it went public in 2010, Tesla has raised nearly $4 billion from public stock offerings to help fund operating losses, in addition to more than $13 billion from the debt markets.\n\u201cTesla has hugely benefited from supportive public markets and from abnormally low cost of capital, which may not be sustained privately,\u201d Jefferies analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philippe Houchois\n\n\n\n wrote in a research note.\nThe billionaire CEO has never fit the mold of public-company CEO. He often has shrugged off badly missed financial forecasts or production targets and has jousted with analysts and short sellers. The pressure mounted in the past year as Mr. Musk twice missed self-imposed production deadlines, even as he sometimes slept on the factory floor to meet them.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLeading a private company could allow Mr. Musk greater latitude to run Tesla the way he wants, analysts say, pulling off his unorthodox moves without the penalty of an immediate stock hit. Tesla\u2019s shares tanked in 2016 when he merged Tesla with solar-panel company SolarCity Corp., of which Mr. Musk was the largest shareholder. Some investors viewed the deal as a bailout of a firm that had struggled to raise capital.\nMr. Musk said in Tuesday\u2019s memo that he has no plans to combine Tesla with his other company, rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\n\u201cHe seems to be most excited and operating at his best when he\u2019s afforded the opportunity to simply focus on the company,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jamie Albertine,\n\n\n\n an analyst with Consumer Edge Research, said.\nFor automotive competitors, the move would reduce visibility into a company that has captured the collective attention of a once-skeptical industry.\nTesla initially was dismissed by auto executives from Detroit to Germany as a dreamy upstart dabbling in an electric-car market in which consumers had little interest. But Tesla soon developed a fervent fan base and drew luxury-car buyers eager to pay $100,000 for Tesla\u2019s Model S sedan and later the Model X sport-utility vehicle.\nDespite persistent losses and production struggles, investors rewarded Tesla, which became a bellwether for where Wall Street was placing its automotive bets. Tesla\u2019s market value of about $64 billion is higher than that of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , and nearly equal to Ford and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Fiat Chrysler Automobiles\n\n\n NV combined.\nMr. Musk\u2019s go-private plan ultimately could again pressure traditional auto makers, says Evercore ISI analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Galliers.\n\n\n\n He sees a scenario whereby Tesla is successful lining up strategic investors to not only take the company private but commit ongoing capital for its international expansion.\n\u201cThis only increases the need for transition\u201d at traditional car companies, who must manage an overhaul of their product offerings to electric from gasoline-powered \u201cif they choose to compete with a potentially faster and more nimble Tesla,\u201d Mr. Galliers wrote in a note.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEven as a private company, pressure will remain on Tesla to lift production so it can boost free cash flow to pay down its roughly $10 billion in debt and fund planned expansions. Mr. Musk has repeatedly missed production milestones for the Model 3 sedan, the car introduced last year that is intended to transform Tesla into a profitable, self-sustaining company.\nTesla also needs to sell more cars to fund considerable capital expenditures. The company plans to build a factory in China in coming years and has also explored building one in Europe. It is also developing a small SUV, a booming category.\nAny traditionally-structured buyout deal for the car maker could leave it in a more precarious financial position than it already finds itself. Barclays analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Johnson\n\n\n\n estimates Tesla would ne Elon Musk is betting that taking Tesla private would free his company of scrutiny. But it could complicate efforts to build a mainstream electric car by removing the easy access to capital the Wall Street darling has enjoyed. ",
        "author": "Mike Colias and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Oracle Moves Headquarters to Texas (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6831",
        "date": "2020-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-moves-corporate-headquarters-to-austin-texas-11607724881?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=40",
        "text": "Oracle, which was founded in Santa Clara, Calif., in 1977, most recently had its headquarters up the road in Redwood City. The software giant and Silicon Valley stalwart said the relocation was part of an effort to have a more flexible approach to its workforce.\n\n\n\n\nIt wasn\u2019t immediately clear what Oracle\u2019s decision means beyond having a new address for its headquarters. The company said it had no plans to move staff from its existing headquarters to Austin, and Oracle\u2019s state tax bill makes up only a small portion of its overall expenses. \n\n\nOracle joins others in moving some operations away from the region that for decades has been synonymous with America\u2019s tech industry.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.\n\n HPE 1.50%\n\n\n earlier this month said it was moving its headquarters to the Houston area.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Palantir Technologies Inc.,\n\n PLTR -2.65%\n\n\n founded in the Bay Area in 2003, moved its headquarters to Denver this year, and company co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joe Lonsdale,\n\n\n\n a venture capitalist, moved to Austin.\nMany of the executives that are turning their back on Silicon Valley share conservative political views and, at times, have taken issue with what they regard as the region\u2019s liberal politics. Two prominent conservative venture capitalists,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Keith Rabois,\n\n\n\n have cited what they see as Silicon Valley\u2019s political leanings as reasons to relocate. \nMr. Ellison earlier this year threw a fundraiser at his house for President Trump, and Oracle Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Safra Catz\n\n\n\n worked on the executive committee for the Trump transition team in 2016.\nGreg Abbott, Texas\u2019 Republican governor, cheered the Oracle news, tweeting: \u201cTexas is truly the land of business, jobs, and opportunity.\u201d The state doesn\u2019t collect state income or capital-gains tax for individuals.\nCalifornia\u2019s tax regime has its share of critics. Its personal-income tax tops out at 13.3% for amounts over $1 million a year, the highest in the nation. Capital gains are taxed at a similar rate.\nOracle reported tax expenses of $1.9 billion in the fiscal year that ended on May 31, according to its securities filings. Of that, about $172 million were state tax expenses.\nThe mailing address of a company\u2019s headquarters doesn\u2019t determine where it pays the bulk of its taxes. Companies generally divide their U.S. earnings among the various states where they do business according to formulas that can reflect sales, employment, physical facilities or other factors. A company moving its headquarters to Texas from California wouldn\u2019t necessarily stop paying California\u2019s corporate income tax.\nCalifornia\u2019s newly appointed senior adviser to Gov.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gavin Newsom\n\n\n\n on economic development, Dee Dee Myers, said in a statement: \u201cCalifornia has a unique combination of assets, including our spirit of innovation, inclusive culture, unparalleled workforce, and access to new technology and capital that make this state a great place for businesses to start and grow.\u201d\nThis week\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n said he had moved himself from California to Texas. The electric-car maker is building a new plant in Austin and Mr. Musk\u2019s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has operations in South Texas. Mr. Ellison sits on Tesla\u2019s board. \nOracle already has a presence in Austin. In 2015, the company announced plans to build a new corporate campus in the city. That year it also bought Austin-based software company StackEngine Inc. The Austin campus opened in 2018 and features apartments and restaurants on site.\nThe decision by Oracle to facilitate greater flexibility for employees is another signal that the trend toward more remote working brought on by the pandemic could outlast the health crisis. \nThe push for flexibility has meant the addition of corporate jobs and remote workers in Texas, with its lure of lower costs. Its capital Austin, in particular, has been able to attract businesses because of the supply of skilled workers in a town that is home to the University of Texas. The area also has actively courted outside companies, offering local tax incentives to companies such as Tesla.\nSince its founding, Oracle grew into one of the biggest software providers. But the company was slow to adapt to the emerging field of cloud computing that has lifted the fortunes of rivals such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Oracle has now pivoted to pursue cloud growth, but without the kind of top-line gains some competitors have seen. Oracle on Thursday posted a 2% quarterly sales increase from a year earlier. On a call with analysts, Mr. Ellison blamed constrained capacity within its cloud infrastructure for not growing more quickly.\nTh The database company said it has changed its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas, the latest high-profile defection from Silicon Valley. ",
        "author": "Aaron Tilley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tech Luminary Peter Thiel Parts Ways With Silicon Valley (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6832",
        "date": "2018-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-luminary-peter-thiel-parts-ways-with-silicon-valley-1518696120?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=102",
        "text": "Mr. Thiel has also discussed with people close to him the possibility of resigning from the board of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.,\n\n FB -3.38%\n\n\n the people familiar with his thinking said. His relationship with the social-networking company\u2014where he has been a director since 2005, the year after its founding\u2014came under strain after a dispute with a fellow director over Mr. Thiel\u2019s support for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n presidential campaign and a related confrontation over boardroom leaks with Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mark Zuckerberg\n \n\n\n\n last summer, the people said.",
        "author": "Douglas MacMillan, Keach Hagey and Deepa Seetharaman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Elon Musk Regains Bravado (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6833",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-elon-musk-regains-bravado-with-better-outlook-for-model-3-1518089528?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=102",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, speaking on a call about Tesla\u2019s fourth-quarter results,\u00a0was upbeat one day after his other company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., sent the world\u2019s most powerful rocket in almost five decades into space with a Tesla Roadster on board. \n\n\n\n\nThe Tesla CEO again boldly predicted his company would make one million vehicles a year in 2020. He boasted Tesla would build a car manufacturing system that is superior to anything in the century-old automotive industry. And he claimed that in as soon as three months a self-driving Tesla car would cross the U.S.\u2014after missing a deadline last year. \n\n\nRead More Tesla Says It Is Making Progress on Model 3 Production Issues Falcon Heavy Angst and the Sweet Smell of Success New Falcon Heavy Rocket Represents a Major Bet for SpaceX \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\nMr. Musk also seemingly shrugged off Tesla\u2019s troubles producing the Model 3, saying the company was now on track to meet its oft-stated goal of making 5,000 cars a week. And once Tesla achieved that milestone by the end of June, he said, the company would then make a sustainable operating profit this year\u2014maybe even a net profit.\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m hopeful that people think that if we can send a Roadster to the asteroid belt, we can probably solve Model 3 production,\u201d he said.\nMr. Musk was talking shortly after Tesla announced a worst-ever quarterly loss of $675 million. His comments on Wednesday contrasted with his dour statements in November, when he surprised analysts by going so far as suggesting Tesla could put the brakes on growth.\nAs the CEO of two multibillion companies with a lot on the line\u2014not to mention the founder of a brain-computer startup and a tunnel-building venture\u2014Mr. Musk admits he is under a lot of pressure and prone to mood swings. In July, he said on Twitter that his life consists of \u201cgreat highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Tesla Roadster being prepped for its trip aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket. The car went up with the rocket on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Elon Musk/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn the past month, Mr. Musk launched the world\u2019s biggest rocket, raised millions of dollars for his tunneling startup by selling branded flamethrowers, and attracted tabloid attention for his on-again, off-again relationship with actress Amber Heard.\nMr. Musk did come back to earth at times on Wednesday. He acknowledged that rolling out the Model 3, which began production in July, was harder than expected. \u201cWe were in a deeper level of hell than expected,\u201d he said. \u201cStill a few levels deeper than we\u2019d like to be but swiftly exiting, I think.\u201d\nThen, he added, \u201cit was really on balance a phenomenal year.\u201d\nMr. Musk, of course, has made brazen predictions before, including in 2016 when he suggested that by the second half of 2017 Tesla would be making as many as 200,000 Model 3s, the compact car that is key to his plans to make the company a mainstream electric-vehicle maker. Tesla instead made about 2,700 in that period.\nIn 2016, Mr. Musk accelerated a plan to make a total of 500,000 vehicles a year in 2018, including the company\u2019s more expensive Model S sedans and Model X sport-utility vehicles. That would increase to a total of one million a year in 2020, helped by the arrival of a new compact SUV called the Model Y.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk speaking at a news conference after the Falcon 9 SpaceX heavy rocket launched successfully from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Tuesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nAsked on Wednesday if the one-million target was still in play, Mr. Musk said it was. And not only that, he said, the company might make one million Model Ys in a year\u2014though he didn\u2019t say in what year. A consensus of analysts surveyed by FactSet estimate Tesla will make 647,000 cars in 2020.\nHe also took a swipe at his automotive competitors, promising Tesla could leap over them with advances in manufacturing. While the automotive industry is \u201cquite good at manufacturing,\u201d he said it produces cars too slowly, churning out at best a vehicle every 25 seconds.\n\u201cGrandma with a walker can exceed the fastest production line on earth,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cSo really, not that fast.\u201d\nLongtime automotive industry analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Johnson,\n\n\n\n of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Barclays,\n\n\n tried to push for greater clarity on what Tesla was thinking of doing differently than competitors such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota Motor Corp.\n\n\n , which revolutionized car manufacturing more than a generation ago.\n\u201cThe most fundamental difference is thinking about the factory really as a product,\u201d Mr. Musk said.\nJ.B. Straubel, Tesla\u2019s chief technical officer, added that Tesla would be treating it more as an engineering and technical problem. Three months ago, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk warned of the company\u2019s production issues. On Wednesday, a day after his SpaceX rocket blasted into space, Mr. Musk\u00a0was upbeat, again boldly predicting his company would make one million vehicles a year in 2020. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Possible Tesla Share Sale Comes as Tax Bill Looms (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6834",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-possible-tesla-share-sale-comes-as-the-taxman-looms-11636482029?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=17",
        "text": "Mr. Musk is worth roughly $300 billion on paper, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with the majority of that wealth tied up in Tesla and his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. The Tesla chief executive, who is compensated in stock awards and doesn\u2019t accept a cash salary from the electric-vehicle maker, faces an August deadline to convert roughly 22.9 million vested stock options into shares or let them expire worthless, according to a regulatory filing.\n\n\n\n\nHe would need about $143 million to exercise those options, and could owe more than $9 billion in federal income and Medicare taxes upon exercising them. Under California law, Mr. Musk also likely would face a sizable state tax burden because exercised options are treated as compensation partly earned in the state while he lived there.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology Alert Major news in the technology sector. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThat California tax likely would be due even though Mr. Musk said in late 2020 that he had moved to Texas, which doesn\u2019t impose individual income or capital-gains taxes. He subsequently said Tesla was moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Silicon Valley.\n\nMr. Musk didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment about the details of his tax planning or when he plans to make good on his pledge to sell. Tesla didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nThe CEO, who travels frequently between California, Texas and elsewhere on a private jet, has at times made a show of some of his financial choices. Last year, he put several mansions he owned up for sale. \u201cI am selling almost all physical possessions,\u201d he tweeted at the time. \u201cWill own no house.\u201d\nHe has long borrowed to support his lifestyle, like many other wealthy individuals. More than half of Mr. Musk\u2019s Tesla stock\u2014or roughly 88 million shares, valued at more than $90 billion at recent prices\u2014is pledged as collateral to secure personal debt, an August regulatory filing shows.\nSeveral years ago, Mr. Musk\u2019s younger brother,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kimbal Musk,\n\n\n\n leaned on him for a loan.\n\u201cYou do know that I don\u2019t actually have cash, right?\u201d Mr. Musk told his brother, court records show. \u201cI have to borrow.\u201d\nOver the weekend, Mr. Musk took to Twitter to ask users there whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock. He framed the question in terms of a continuing debate about how some of America\u2019s wealthiest individuals should be taxed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla intends to move its headquarters to Austin, Texas, according to CEO Elon Musk, who compared the current crowded operations at the factory in Fremont, Calif., to \u2018Spam in a can.\u2019 He said the electric-vehicle maker would continue expanding in California. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\u201cMuch is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,\u201d he said as he launched the poll Saturday. Roughly 58% of respondents supported a sale, and Mr. Musk has said he would abide by the result.\nTesla shares are down roughly 16% this week after retreating 12% to $1,023.50 on Tuesday. Through Friday, the stock had risen more than 70% in 2021, thanks in large part to a sharp increase in recent weeks that has cemented Mr. Musk\u2019s place ahead of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n AMZN 5.41%\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n at the top of the wealth rankings.\nThe tax hit that Mr. Musk faces likely would have come regardless of the political debate unfolding in Washington. Mr. Musk himself signaled at a September conference that he expected to exercise options in the fourth quarter, triggering what he called a huge tax liability.\nHe could seek to satisfy at least part of his commitment to sell Tesla stock\u2014and pay any tax bills associated with exercising his options\u2014by selling some of the roughly 170 million shares he already owns, which are valued around $174 billion.\nBut selling those older shares could come with a second significant tax cost, because he would owe tax on the difference between his relatively low purchase price and the current value.\nHe could, instead, pay the taxes by selling some of the shares he would obtain by exercising already vested options. His cost would be the value when he obtains them. The potential capital gains are likely to be much smaller if he sells them quickly before the price changes much.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018There\u2019s certainly good reason\u2026to accelerate income. Someone of that wealth is going to face higher tax rates almost certainly next year.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Robert Willens, tax consultant \n\n\n\nNo matter which route he takes, he might want to move quickly. The current top tax rate on long-term capital gains is 23.8%, but Congress is poised to vote in the next few weeks on adding an 8% surtax on income above $25 million, starting in January. The potential for a surtax gives Mr. Musk and others who are considering whether to exercise options or sell appreciated assets an incentive to do so now. Expiring stock options mean the car maker\u2019s chief executive likely faces a large IRS bill regardless of a proposed billionaires tax. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott, Richard Rubin and Theo Francis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk, Tech\u2019s Cash-Poor Billionaire (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6835",
        "date": "2020-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-techs-cash-poor-billionaire-11588967043?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=55",
        "text": "Mr. Musk has since listed three of his California mansions for sale with asking prices totaling $75 million. In emails Thursday, he told The Wall Street Journal that he also plans to unload four other houses in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel-Air. Once they are sold, he said, he wasn\u2019t sure \u201cwhere I will stay yet, but will probably rent a small house somewhere.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA house near the city of Burlingame, Calif., that Elon Musk has for sale.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Pictometry\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe new burst of public intrigue follows a relative lull for the longtime\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n maverick. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he has blasted authorities over shelter-in-place rules, talked down Tesla\u2019s stock price and announced the birth of a son with experimental-pop star Claire Boucher, known as Grimes. They named their child X \u00c6 A-12 Musk, referencing both a favorite song and a military jet, among other eponyms. \n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s decision to liquidate renews attention on his perplexing personal finances\u2014a multibillionaire who in past years has claimed he was cash poor, according to court records. \nHis holdings in Tesla, his rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and other assets give the 48-year-old a net worth estimated by Forbes at $39 billion. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk at a ceremony in January for Tesla\u2019s new China factory in Shanghai.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n aly song/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nYet he has to borrow, sometimes a lot, to pay for his lifestyle and business investments without liquidating shares that help him maintain control of the companies he runs. About half his Tesla stock is pledged as collateral for personal loans, an April 28 financial filing shows. Maintaining his equity stake\u2014about 20%, or around $28 billion at Friday\u2019s valuation\u2014is important for him to keep control over the Silicon Valley auto maker.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk accepts no salary at Tesla. His compensation package entitles him to stock awards potentially worth more than $50 billion if the company passes certain milestones by 2028. This past week, he became eligible for the first of 12 tranches of the stock options because Tesla\u2019s market value had remained above $100 billion for a specified amount of time. To secure the payout of 1.69 million shares, worth more than $1 billion, Mr. Musk would need about $592 million to exercise the option without having to sell the stock.\nIn the email exchange with the Journal, Mr. Musk said he wasn\u2019t selling his possessions because he needs the money: \u201cI\u2019m trying to make my life as simple as possible right now, so will only keep things that have sentimental value.\u201d\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWould you bet on Elon Musk\u2019s long-term success or failure?Join the conversation below.\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s vision for Tesla and the future of electric and driverless cars has helped stoke investor enthusiasm, driving shares to record heights this year and making it the world\u2019s second-largest auto maker by market value behind\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota Motor Corp.\n\nHis personal finances nonetheless matter to Tesla investors because his borrowing against shares creates a risk that is hard to quantify. If Tesla stocks fall below a certain level, financial institutions can call in the loans unless Mr. Musk makes up the difference. The fear is if it leads him to unload a large number of Tesla shares.\n\u201cIf he is forced to liquidate it, the downward pressure on the stock would be tremendous,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Elson,\n\n\n\n a University of Delaware professor and a corporate governance expert.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFiguring out when Mr. Musk would have to sell has spurred intense speculation among Tesla short sellers\u2014investors who have bet heavily that the electric-car maker is overvalued and who would profit if shares drop. They anticipate that such a margin call could crush the company.\nTesla has warned investors in regulatory filings about the risk. \u201cIf the price of our common stock were to decline substantially and Mr. Musk were unable to avoid a sale of the pledged shares (for example, by contributing additional collateral or reducing his leverage), Mr. Musk may be forced by one or more of the banking institutions to sell shares of Tesla common stock under the terms of his loans. Any such sales could cause the price of our common stock to decline,\u201d the company said in a February filing.\nAt the moment, such concerns are hypothetical: Tesla\u2019s shares have surged. The stock is up 96% this year through Friday, even as the markets have been roiled by concerns about a global recession from the Covid-19 pandemic. Analysts still expect Tesla to mark its first annual profit in 2020, according to FactSet.\nOn stage Tesla investors are accustomed to turbulence from Mr. Musk, often coming from his Twitter account, including his disastrous 2018 tweet saying he had secured funding to take Tesla private.\nLast year, Mr. Musk seemed more focused on sending The Tesla CEO is worth $39 billion on paper, but the electric-car maker, who recently announced he\u2019s selling his houses and most of his worldly possessions, needs a wad of money to exercise his latest payout. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Pledges $2 Billion for Charity (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6836",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-to-create-2-billion-fund-for-homeless-preschools-1536856739?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=88",
        "text": "Mr. Bezos wrote in a tweet that it is human nature to continuously seek ways to improve things, something the previous generations succeeded to do. \u201cIf our own great grandchildren don\u2019t have lives better than ours, something has gone very wrong,\u201d he added.\n\n\n\n\nIn January, the Bezoses, who have four children, granted $33 million in college scholarships for undocumented immigrant high-school graduates in the U.S. Last week, they made their first major foray into politics, contributing $10 million to a super PAC that aims to elect military veterans to Congress. \n\n\nMr. Bezos\u2019 increase in charitable giving comes as Amazon has faced criticism over the wages it pays to warehouse workers and broader societal effects tied to the e-commerce giant, for example, driving up property prices in its hometown of Seattle.\nSeattle recently tried to enact a tax to force the company to help with the city\u2019s growing homeless problem, though the decision was later reversed. And Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill aimed at taxing big companies whose employees rely on federal benefits to make ends meet, specifically targeting Mr. Bezos by contrasting his vast personal wealth with the compensation of the companies\u2019 lowest-paid workers. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon wants to deliver everything you want to your doorstep, anywhere in the world. But the e-commerce giant faces several challenges in its pursuit of a global empire. WSJ's Karan Deep Singh breaks down the basics with the help of an Amazon delivery box.\n \n\n\nMr. Bezos, who founded Amazon in his garage in 1994, has seen his net worth skyrocket over the past few years as his company has grown. He became the world\u2019s wealthiest person last year, surpassing Microsoft Corp. co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Gates.\n\n\n\n The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his current net value at roughly $164 billion.\nMr. Bezos owns about 16% of Amazon, according to an August regulatory filing. The company last week became the second U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion in market value. \nMr. Bezos\u2019 initial Day One Fund commitment is small compared with the pledges of some other wealthy donors. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, established by Mr. Gates and his wife in part to fight diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS, received $35.8 billion from the couple between 1994 and 2017.\nBerkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Warren Buffett\n\n\n\n said in 2006 he planned to give away the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, a gift at the time valued at more than $30 billion. \nFacebook Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mark Zuckerberg\n \n\n\n\n and his wife,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Priscilla Chan,\n\n\n\n said in December 2015 that over the course of their lives they would give away 99% of their Facebook shares, at the time valued at $45 billion.\nThe initial $2 billion committed by the Bezoses is a starting point, according to a person familiar with the matter.\nMr. Bezos in June 2017 tweeted a request for ideas for charitable giving, saying he was drawn to \u201cthe right now,\u201d rather than the long-term focus of most his professional work.\n\u201cI like long-term\u2014it\u2019s a huge lever: Blue Origin, Amazon, Washington Post \u2014all of these are contributing to society and civilization in their own ways,\u201d Mr. Bezos wrote in the tweet. \u201cBut I\u2019m thinking I want much of my philanthropic activity to be helping people in the here and now\u2014short term\u2014at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact.\u201d\nThe Amazon CEO also owns the Washington Post\u2014an institution that bolsters democracy, Mr. Bezos said Thursday\u2014and Blue Origin LLC, a company he founded a decade ago to make reusable rockets a reality and to lower launch costs. Mr. Bezos has said he sells about a billion dollars of Amazon stock annually to invest in his rocket company.\nMr. Bezos has previously said he believes one of his major contributions to society will be from his backing of space exploration. That sentiment was echoed in his tweet Thursday, which highlighted his \u201cinvestment in the future of our planet and civilization through the development of foundational space infrastructure.\u201d\nWrite to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com Amazon.com\u2019s Jeff Bezos and his wife are committing $2 billion to fund a new charitable organization dedicated to helping the homeless and educating preschoolers. ",
        "author": "Laura Stevens"
    },
    {
        "title": "Investor Steve Jurvetson Works to Move On With New Fund (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6837",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/venture-capitalist-steve-jurvetson-is-back-with-a-new-200-million-fund-11550239323?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=62",
        "text": "Maryanna Saenko and Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures in San Francisco, Feb. 13.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe announcement comes 15 months after Mr. Jurvetson parted ways with the firm he co-founded, DFJ. At the venture-capital firm, formerly known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, he was known for leading lucrative early investments in two companies founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc. and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies. Mr. Jurvetson is a director for both companies, but has been on leave from the Tesla board since November 2017, when he also left DFJ.\nMr. Jurvetson spoke to The Wall Street Journal this week from his firm\u2019s San Francisco office, addressing in an interview for the first time the circumstances surrounding his departure from DFJ.\n\nIn 2017, with concerns heightening in Silicon Valley over sexual harassment in the male-dominated tech world, venture firms were on high alert for inappropriate behavior by their partners. Mr. Jurvetson said he had heard that a journalist was looking into rumors about his behavior toward women.\nThe issue spilled into public view in October 2017 when an ex-girlfriend of Mr. Jurvetson\u2019s, Keri Kukral, wrote on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n about what she called \u201cpredatory behavior\u201d at DFJ.\nThe next day, DFJ said publicly that it had been investigating Mr. Jurvetson since the summer and was aware of \u201cindirect and secondhand allegations\u201d against him. The firm didn\u2019t specify what those allegations were. Two weeks later, with the investigation ongoing, there was \u201ca mutual fracture of trust\u201d between himself and his DFJ partners, Mr. Jurvetson said this week in the interview. DFJ said at the time the departure was \u201cby mutual agreement.\u201d \nA person familiar with the matter said DFJ unanimously voted to sever ties with Mr. Jurvetson. It discovered that he had lied to the firm about some of the allegations being investigated, including dishonest behavior toward women, the person said. \nMr. Jurvetson said he wasn\u2019t told of any findings and didn\u2019t lie. Tech news site Recode first reported the firm\u2019s findings and the vote to push him out in late 2017. \nMr. Jurvetson said the allegations stemmed from the fact that he was bad at dating and mishandled some past relationships and breakups with women including Ms. Kukral.\n\u201cI think I was insecure,\u201d he said. \u201cMy first girlfriend was sophomore year in college. My second girlfriend in my life was senior year of college. And that\u2019s who I married.\u201d He said he was unhappy in the marriage and began dating during it, leading him to his second wife, whom he married last year. \nMr. Jurvetson said that in the process, he \u201cmanaged to really hurt myself and hurt others it appears, by not I guess, communicating clearly when I didn\u2019t love someone and was moving on. Like I just didn\u2019t draw a bow on that very well and bring it to closure.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMs. Kukral, who said she dated Mr. Jurvetson during his first marriage a few years ago, said in an interview she discovered he had carried on multiple extramarital affairs simultaneously. She said she wrote the Facebook post because Mr. Jurvetson suggested to her that he was using his firm\u2019s resources to track women, which she interpreted as threatening at the time. Mr. Jurvetson said this was a misunderstanding and that he wasn\u2019t tracking women.\nMs. Kukral said Mr. Jurvetson had apologized and that she has moved on. \u201cWhen people take responsibility and own up to it, and then truly apologize, with sincerity, and then show life changes\u2026then I\u2019m OK,\u201d she said.\nThe scrutiny of Mr. Jurvetson grew in tech circles in January the next year when a book called \u201cBrotopia\u201d described how Silicon Valley\u2019s male-dominated culture can marginalize women. In a chapter subtitled \u201cSex Parties of the Tech and Famous,\u201d the book described a party thrown at Mr. Jurvetson\u2019s house attended by techies that included drug use and a \u201ccuddle puddle\u201d area outfitted in \u201cwhite faux fur and pillows.\u201d An excerpt stirred headlines of a sex party hosted by Mr. Jurvetson. \nMr. Jurvetson denies he threw a sex party, and several people who attended the party, including Mr. Musk, publicly stated they hadn\u2019t witnessed any sex. He said he doesn\u2019t know if drug use happened. In correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, a lawyer for the book\u2019s publisher said the book didn\u2019t specifically refer to his party as a \u201csex party,\u201d pointing to a sentence that referred to \u201cpockets\u201d of drugs and sexual activity.\nMr. Jurvetson says in the future he won\u2019t throw work parties to avoid any uncomfortable situations. \u201cThe things you might do personally\u2013karaoke, a hot tub\u2013no, you don\u2019t do that at a work party,\u201d he says.\nFuture Ventures aims to invest early in startups in Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson is back on the investment scene with a new fund, more than a year after he was hit with allegations that he mistreated women and left the firm he co-founded. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Investor Steve Jurvetson Works to Move On With New Fund (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6838",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/venture-capitalist-steve-jurvetson-is-back-with-a-new-200-million-fund-11550239323?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=78",
        "text": "Maryanna Saenko and Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures in San Francisco, Feb. 13.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe announcement comes 15 months after Mr. Jurvetson parted ways with the firm he co-founded, DFJ. At the venture-capital firm, formerly known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, he was known for leading lucrative early investments in two companies founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc. and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies. Mr. Jurvetson is a director for both companies, but has been on leave from the Tesla board since November 2017, when he also left DFJ.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Jurvetson spoke to The Wall Street Journal this week from his firm\u2019s San Francisco office, addressing in an interview for the first time the circumstances surrounding his departure from DFJ.\n\nIn 2017, with concerns heightening in Silicon Valley over sexual harassment in the male-dominated tech world, venture firms were on high alert for inappropriate behavior by their partners. Mr. Jurvetson said he had heard that a journalist was looking into rumors about his behavior toward women.\nThe issue spilled into public view in October 2017 when an ex-girlfriend of Mr. Jurvetson\u2019s, Keri Kukral, wrote on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n about what she called \u201cpredatory behavior\u201d at DFJ.\nThe next day, DFJ said publicly that it had been investigating Mr. Jurvetson since the summer and was aware of \u201cindirect and secondhand allegations\u201d against him. The firm didn\u2019t specify what those allegations were. Two weeks later, with the investigation ongoing, there was \u201ca mutual fracture of trust\u201d between himself and his DFJ partners, Mr. Jurvetson said this week in the interview. DFJ said at the time the departure was \u201cby mutual agreement.\u201d \nA person familiar with the matter said DFJ unanimously voted to sever ties with Mr. Jurvetson. It discovered that he had lied to the firm about some of the allegations being investigated, including dishonest behavior toward women, the person said. \nMr. Jurvetson said he wasn\u2019t told of any findings and didn\u2019t lie. Tech news site Recode first reported the firm\u2019s findings and the vote to push him out in late 2017. \nMr. Jurvetson said the allegations stemmed from the fact that he was bad at dating and mishandled some past relationships and breakups with women including Ms. Kukral.\n\u201cI think I was insecure,\u201d he said. \u201cMy first girlfriend was sophomore year in college. My second girlfriend in my life was senior year of college. And that\u2019s who I married.\u201d He said he was unhappy in the marriage and began dating during it, leading him to his second wife, whom he married last year. \nMr. Jurvetson said that in the process, he \u201cmanaged to really hurt myself and hurt others it appears, by not I guess, communicating clearly when I didn\u2019t love someone and was moving on. Like I just didn\u2019t draw a bow on that very well and bring it to closure.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMs. Kukral, who said she dated Mr. Jurvetson during his first marriage a few years ago, said in an interview she discovered he had carried on multiple extramarital affairs simultaneously. She said she wrote the Facebook post because Mr. Jurvetson suggested to her that he was using his firm\u2019s resources to track women, which she interpreted as threatening at the time. Mr. Jurvetson said this was a misunderstanding and that he wasn\u2019t tracking women.\nMs. Kukral said Mr. Jurvetson had apologized and that she has moved on. \u201cWhen people take responsibility and own up to it, and then truly apologize, with sincerity, and then show life changes\u2026then I\u2019m OK,\u201d she said.\nThe scrutiny of Mr. Jurvetson grew in tech circles in January the next year when a book called \u201cBrotopia\u201d described how Silicon Valley\u2019s male-dominated culture can marginalize women. In a chapter subtitled \u201cSex Parties of the Tech and Famous,\u201d the book described a party thrown at Mr. Jurvetson\u2019s house attended by techies that included drug use and a \u201ccuddle puddle\u201d area outfitted in \u201cwhite faux fur and pillows.\u201d An excerpt stirred headlines of a sex party hosted by Mr. Jurvetson. \nMr. Jurvetson denies he threw a sex party, and several people who attended the party, including Mr. Musk, publicly stated they hadn\u2019t witnessed any sex. He said he doesn\u2019t know if drug use happened. In correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, a lawyer for the book\u2019s publisher said the book didn\u2019t specifically refer to his party as a \u201csex party,\u201d pointing to a sentence that referred to \u201cpockets\u201d of drugs and sexual activity.\nMr. Jurvetson says in the future he won\u2019t throw work parties to avoid any uncomfortable situations. \u201cThe things you might do personally\u2013karaoke, a hot tub\u2013no, you don\u2019t do that at a work party,\u201d he says.\nFuture Ventures aims to invest early in startup Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson is back on the investment scene with a new fund, more than a year after he was hit with allegations that he mistreated women and left the firm he co-founded. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says Its Rocket Didn\u2019t Cause Loss of Spy Satellite (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6839",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-indicates-its-rocket-didnt-cause-loss-of-spy-satellite-1515530259?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=72",
        "text": "Lawmakers and congressional staffers from the Senate and the House have been briefed about the satellite\u2014code-named Zuma and launched from Florida on board a Falcon 9 rocket\u2014which is believed to have plummeted back into the atmosphere, according to government and industry officials. Presumed to be a total loss, the satellite didn\u2019t separate as planned from the upper part of the rocket, these officials said.\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, in its latest statement appeared to pin the blame elsewhere by saying a data review indicated the rocket \u201cdid everything correctly\u201d and management has concluded \u201cno design, operational or other changes are needed.\u201d\n\n\nThe two-paragraph statement by company President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n who also said future launch schedules aren\u2019t expected to be affected, suggests that the culprit was a glitch with the adapter that attached the satellite to the rocket or some malfunction with the satellite itself. Industry officials tracking the investigation said the satellite\u2019s protective cover separated as planned.\nBut SpaceX declined to elaborate and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which built the satellite, said under its normal procedures it doesn\u2019t comment on classified projects.\nThe satellite\u2019s mission and fate, however, sparked intense interest in industry circles and on Capitol Hill, partly because of what is believed to be a multibillion-dollar price tag and the apparent rush to get it into orbit. It was placed on SpaceX\u2019s manifest with scant advance notice.\nOnce the engine powering a rocket\u2019s expendable second stage stops firing, whatever it is carrying is supposed to separate and proceed on its own trajectory. The separation procedure generally isn\u2019t considered as vital or complex as proper engine firing, but problems with it have been known to disable satellites carried by other rockets in the past.\nIf a satellite isn\u2019t set free at the right time or is damaged upon release, it can be dragged back toward earth.\nScheduled for mid-November, Zuma\u2019s launch was delayed when SpaceX announced engineers \u201cwanted to take a closer look at data from recent\u201d tests of a fairing, or protective covering for a satellite, used for another customer. At the time, the company didn\u2019t publicly outline what prompted the additional testing. Fairings are used to shield satellites that are carried near the nose of the rocket. They remain in place during the early phases of the ascent, but are jettisoned before final insertion into orbit.\nDuring the launch, SpaceX didn\u2019t signal any problems with the fairing or associated hardware. A real-time videotape broadcast of the flight on SpaceX\u2019s website was halted shortly after the covering separated from the rocket, a move intended to block public view of the highly classified satellite.\n\n\nREAD MORE SpaceX Raises $100 Million More SpaceX Has Successful Launch As It Ramps Up Operational Tempo U.S. Space Taxi Services Struggle to Meet NASA Safety Rules \n\n\nPrior to launch, some trade press reports indicated Northrop Grumman provided the adapter attaching the payload to the rocket. But the companies haven\u2019t confirmed that detail. Over the years, the Falcon 9 hasn\u2019t experienced difficulties with hardware designed to release satellites into space.\nSpaceX\u2019s usual protocols should provide engineers with a huge cache of video images and sensor data as they delve into what happened.\nThe lack of public details about what occurred means that some possible alternate sequence of events other than a failed separation still could turn out to be the culprit. But SpaceX\u2019s repeated assertions that the rocket performed exactly as expected\u2014from blastoff to final engine shutdown\u2014make that increasingly unlikely.\nFor rapidly growing SpaceX, which seeks to establish itself as a reliable, low-cost launch provider for the Pentagon, the failed mission came at an important juncture. The company is stepping up competition for more national-security launches against its primary rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it wasn\u2019t responsible for the loss of an expensive U.S. spy satellite it launched over the weekend, pointing instead to unspecified problems with the payload or mechanisms that attached it and eventually were supposed to release it from the rocket. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Says Its Rocket Didn\u2019t Cause Loss of Spy Satellite (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6840",
        "date": "2018-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-indicates-its-rocket-didnt-cause-loss-of-spy-satellite-1515530259?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=105",
        "text": "Lawmakers and congressional staffers from the Senate and the House have been briefed about the satellite\u2014code-named Zuma and launched from Florida on board a Falcon 9 rocket\u2014which is believed to have plummeted back into the atmosphere, according to government and industry officials. Presumed to be a total loss, the satellite didn\u2019t separate as planned from the upper part of the rocket, these officials said.\n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as the company is formally known, in its latest statement appeared to pin the blame elsewhere by saying a data review indicated the rocket \u201cdid everything correctly\u201d and management has concluded \u201cno design, operational or other changes are needed.\u201d\n\n\nThe two-paragraph statement by company President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n who also said future launch schedules aren\u2019t expected to be affected, suggests that the culprit was a glitch with the adapter that attached the satellite to the rocket or some malfunction with the satellite itself. Industry officials tracking the investigation said the satellite\u2019s protective cover separated as planned.\nBut SpaceX declined to elaborate and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which built the satellite, said under its normal procedures it doesn\u2019t comment on classified projects.\nThe satellite\u2019s mission and fate, however, sparked intense interest in industry circles and on Capitol Hill, partly because of what is believed to be a multibillion-dollar price tag and the apparent rush to get it into orbit. It was placed on SpaceX\u2019s manifest with scant advance notice.\nOnce the engine powering a rocket\u2019s expendable second stage stops firing, whatever it is carrying is supposed to separate and proceed on its own trajectory. The separation procedure generally isn\u2019t considered as vital or complex as proper engine firing, but problems with it have been known to disable satellites carried by other rockets in the past.\nIf a satellite isn\u2019t set free at the right time or is damaged upon release, it can be dragged back toward earth.\nScheduled for mid-November, Zuma\u2019s launch was delayed when SpaceX announced engineers \u201cwanted to take a closer look at data from recent\u201d tests of a fairing, or protective covering for a satellite, used for another customer. At the time, the company didn\u2019t publicly outline what prompted the additional testing. Fairings are used to shield satellites that are carried near the nose of the rocket. They remain in place during the early phases of the ascent, but are jettisoned before final insertion into orbit.\nDuring the launch, SpaceX didn\u2019t signal any problems with the fairing or associated hardware. A real-time videotape broadcast of the flight on SpaceX\u2019s website was halted shortly after the covering separated from the rocket, a move intended to block public view of the highly classified satellite.\n\n\nREAD MORE SpaceX Raises $100 Million More SpaceX Has Successful Launch As It Ramps Up Operational Tempo U.S. Space Taxi Services Struggle to Meet NASA Safety Rules \n\n\nPrior to launch, some trade press reports indicated Northrop Grumman provided the adapter attaching the payload to the rocket. But the companies haven\u2019t confirmed that detail. Over the years, the Falcon 9 hasn\u2019t experienced difficulties with hardware designed to release satellites into space.\nSpaceX\u2019s usual protocols should provide engineers with a huge cache of video images and sensor data as they delve into what happened.\nThe lack of public details about what occurred means that some possible alternate sequence of events other than a failed separation still could turn out to be the culprit. But SpaceX\u2019s repeated assertions that the rocket performed exactly as expected\u2014from blastoff to final engine shutdown\u2014make that increasingly unlikely.\nFor rapidly growing SpaceX, which seeks to establish itself as a reliable, low-cost launch provider for the Pentagon, the failed mission came at an important juncture. The company is stepping up competition for more national-security launches against its primary rival, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it wasn\u2019t responsible for the loss of an expensive U.S. spy satellite it launched over the weekend, pointing instead to unspecified problems with the payload or mechanisms that attached it and eventually were supposed to release it from the rocket. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hyperloop One Taps the Brakes on Testing (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6841",
        "date": "2017-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hyperloop-one-taps-the-brakes-on-testing-1492603205?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=97",
        "text": "Last year, Hyperloop One said it would perform the public test\u2014which it called its \u201cKitty Hawk moment,\u201d referring to the Wright brothers\u2019 aviation achievement\u2014before the end of 2016. It later put off the deadline to March 31, which it also missed. Last month, Hyperloop One\u2019s general counsel said at a public hearing the company plans to hold a public test of a prototype \u201cby May or June.\u201d\nMeanwhile, it has slashed the length of the test track for the prototype by more than 80%, meaning the technology won\u2019t be able to reach the planned top speed of about 750 miles an hour, previously a key feature of the planned public display.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re not building an app,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Josh Giegel,\n\n\n\n Hyperloop One\u2019s president of engineering, said in a recent interview. \u201cIt takes more money and time and physical space to build what it is we are building.\u201d\nMr. Giegel said the company is on track to extend the test track\u2019s size and speed in later stages. A date for the test hasn\u2019t yet been set, a spokeswoman said.\nThe delay and scale-back are a setback for a company that has been vocal about its aggressive timetable, a selling point in its quest to be the first to bring the high-speed transportation network to life.\nOne aim of these tests is to fuel interest in the technology among governments and potential developers. Hyperloop One is under pressure to win over these groups because ultimately it is counting on them to build the hyperloop tubes. The Los Angeles-based company would sell components such as the pods.\nHyperloop One is among a handful of startups aiming to commercialize the idea that billionaire inventor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n floated in 2013 in a paper about transporting people in low-pressure tubes at nearly the speed of sound. Hyperloop One has raised the most money, signed the most deals and performed the most testing. Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. recently built its own low-pressure tube, where other companies tested hyperloop pods.\nDespite predictions from transportation-industry professionals that its construction costs will prove wildly understated and the concept impractical, the technology has dazzled venture-capital investors, from whom Hyperloop One has collected about $160 million. Mr. Giegel, who is now responsible for the technology, rose to the top engineering position last July after the previous engineering head left the company and filed a lawsuit alleging mismanagement and mistreatment. The parties settled in November.\nLast May, Hyperloop One conducted a test of its propulsion system in a high-profile display of its technology. In front of bleachers filled with journalists, investors and employees\u2019 family members, a sled zipped down a track in the Nevada desert for about two seconds and crashed into a pile of sand, as intended.\nAs soon as the test concluded, Hyperloop One executives began touting the next step: Kitty Hawk. In January, Hyperloop One finance chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brent Callinicos\n\n\n\n predicted the Kitty Hawk test would \u201ccause a spike in demand\u201d from investors. At the time, he said the company expected to soon raise additional money from investors.\nMr. Giegel favors undertaking more frequent and smaller tests, moving away from Hyperloop One\u2019s previous public displays of prowess. \u201cThe quicker we get to testing, the quicker we get to data to influence our design,\u201d he said.\nHe affirmed that the company is still working toward its Kitty Hawk moment\u2014with a complete tube and pod, using levitation technology\u2014but on a shorter track that won\u2019t allow the pod to reach full speed.\nHyperloop One has built its track to 500 meters instead of the full 3,000 meters planned when the company struck an incentive deal with Nevada in March 2016. The demonstration doesn\u2019t need to test the technology at the full speed, Mr. Giegel said. He declined to say what speed he expects the pod to reach.\nWith the shorter test, Mr. Giegel hopes to learn, for example, how leaky the hyperloop\u2019s tube will be, something for which a longer tube wouldn\u2019t have provided much more information, he said.\nAt the end of March, Hyperloop One did its first test of the electrical system at its Las Vegas facility that takes power from the grid and distributes it throughout the tube, Mr. Giegel said.\nStill, Hyperloop One is moving more slowly than once promised. In multiple presentations to government officials last year, PowerPoint slides touted the two-mile test route as \u201cFull scale, Full Speed, Fully Operational in Q4 2016.\u201d\nWrite to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com Hyperloop One Inc. is delaying and scaling back the first full test of its prototype of trainlike pods that whisk through low-pressure tubes, an event the company has held up as a historic milestone that would showcase the technology and help attract crucial future investment. ",
        "author": "Georgia Wells and Eliot Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hyperloop One Taps the Brakes on Testing (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6842",
        "date": "2017-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hyperloop-one-taps-the-brakes-on-testing-1492603205?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=124",
        "text": "Last year, Hyperloop One said it would perform the public test\u2014which it called its \u201cKitty Hawk moment,\u201d referring to the Wright brothers\u2019 aviation achievement\u2014before the end of 2016. It later put off the deadline to March 31, which it also missed. Last month, Hyperloop One\u2019s general counsel said at a public hearing the company plans to hold a public test of a prototype \u201cby May or June.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, it has slashed the length of the test track for the prototype by more than 80%, meaning the technology won\u2019t be able to reach the planned top speed of about 750 miles an hour, previously a key feature of the planned public display.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re not building an app,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Josh Giegel,\n\n\n\n Hyperloop One\u2019s president of engineering, said in a recent interview. \u201cIt takes more money and time and physical space to build what it is we are building.\u201d\nMr. Giegel said the company is on track to extend the test track\u2019s size and speed in later stages. A date for the test hasn\u2019t yet been set, a spokeswoman said.\nThe delay and scale-back are a setback for a company that has been vocal about its aggressive timetable, a selling point in its quest to be the first to bring the high-speed transportation network to life.\nOne aim of these tests is to fuel interest in the technology among governments and potential developers. Hyperloop One is under pressure to win over these groups because ultimately it is counting on them to build the hyperloop tubes. The Los Angeles-based company would sell components such as the pods.\nHyperloop One is among a handful of startups aiming to commercialize the idea that billionaire inventor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n floated in 2013 in a paper about transporting people in low-pressure tubes at nearly the speed of sound. Hyperloop One has raised the most money, signed the most deals and performed the most testing. Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. recently built its own low-pressure tube, where other companies tested hyperloop pods.\nDespite predictions from transportation-industry professionals that its construction costs will prove wildly understated and the concept impractical, the technology has dazzled venture-capital investors, from whom Hyperloop One has collected about $160 million. Mr. Giegel, who is now responsible for the technology, rose to the top engineering position last July after the previous engineering head left the company and filed a lawsuit alleging mismanagement and mistreatment. The parties settled in November.\nLast May, Hyperloop One conducted a test of its propulsion system in a high-profile display of its technology. In front of bleachers filled with journalists, investors and employees\u2019 family members, a sled zipped down a track in the Nevada desert for about two seconds and crashed into a pile of sand, as intended.\nAs soon as the test concluded, Hyperloop One executives began touting the next step: Kitty Hawk. In January, Hyperloop One finance chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brent Callinicos\n\n\n\n predicted the Kitty Hawk test would \u201ccause a spike in demand\u201d from investors. At the time, he said the company expected to soon raise additional money from investors.\nMr. Giegel favors undertaking more frequent and smaller tests, moving away from Hyperloop One\u2019s previous public displays of prowess. \u201cThe quicker we get to testing, the quicker we get to data to influence our design,\u201d he said.\nHe affirmed that the company is still working toward its Kitty Hawk moment\u2014with a complete tube and pod, using levitation technology\u2014but on a shorter track that won\u2019t allow the pod to reach full speed.\nHyperloop One has built its track to 500 meters instead of the full 3,000 meters planned when the company struck an incentive deal with Nevada in March 2016. The demonstration doesn\u2019t need to test the technology at the full speed, Mr. Giegel said. He declined to say what speed he expects the pod to reach.\nWith the shorter test, Mr. Giegel hopes to learn, for example, how leaky the hyperloop\u2019s tube will be, something for which a longer tube wouldn\u2019t have provided much more information, he said.\nAt the end of March, Hyperloop One did its first test of the electrical system at its Las Vegas facility that takes power from the grid and distributes it throughout the tube, Mr. Giegel said.\nStill, Hyperloop One is moving more slowly than once promised. In multiple presentations to government officials last year, PowerPoint slides touted the two-mile test route as \u201cFull scale, Full Speed, Fully Operational in Q4 2016.\u201d\nWrite to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com and Eliot Brown at eliot.brown@wsj.com Hyperloop One Inc. is delaying and scaling back the first full test of its prototype of trainlike pods that whisk through low-pressure tubes, an event the company has held up as a historic milestone that would showcase the technology and help attract crucial future investment. ",
        "author": "Georgia Wells and Eliot Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "SoftBank Finalizes $4.4 Billion WeWork Investment (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6843",
        "date": "2017-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-invests-additional-3-billion-in-wework-1503597860?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=115",
        "text": "It is one of the largest single slugs of capital ever in a venture-backed startup, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, and brings WeWork\u2019s valuation to about $20 billion, making it the fourth-most-valuable startup in the U.S. behind ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc., home-rental site Airbnb Inc. and rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\n\n\n\n\nSoftBank also took two board seats at the seven-year-old company, suggesting an unusually high level of control for a late-stage investor.\n\n\n\u201cWe are thrilled to support WeWork as they expand across markets and geographies and unleash a new wave of productivity around the world,\u201d SoftBank Chairman and Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Masayoshi Son\n\n\n\n said in a news release.\nThe Vision Fund, backed by Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund and numerous other investors, has shaken Silicon Valley in recent months, as Mr. Son has rapidly directed giant volumes of cash across the startup sector on a scale never seen before by a single investor.\nAnd while Mr. Son initially billed the Vision Fund as a bet on the tech industry\u2014especially on emerging fields like artificial intelligence and deep learning\u2014it has strayed well outside traditional sectors like software and telecom to more far-flung categories. Beneficiaries of Vision Fund\u2019s capital include San Francisco-based Plenty United LLC, an indoor-farming startup that raised $200 million, and Jacksonville, Fla., online sports retail company Fanatics Inc., which this month raised $1 billion. Other investments include the acquisition of Google\u2019s robotics division Boston Dynamics and artificial intelligence company Brain Corp., in which the fund led a $114 million investment.\nSoftBank also recently proposed an investment of at least $1 billion in Uber that the ride-hailing company\u2019s board is weighing, people familiar with the matter have said.\n\u201cFrom our perspective, the world is changing,\u201d Mr. Son said earlier this month at a SoftBank investor event. \u201cWith the evolution of IT, the evolution of the internet and the evolution of the smartphone, people\u2019s lifestyles are changing.\u201d\nEven before the Vision Fund, Mr. Son had already turned SoftBank into one of Japan\u2019s biggest companies by making sizable investments in telecommunications, e-commerce and technology, including an early investment in Chinese internet company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.\n\n\n , a gamble on U.S. telecommunications company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sprint Corp.\n\n\n and a buyout of U.K. microchip designer ARM Holdings PLC.\nWeWork, which essentially operates in the staid office-leasing business, isn\u2019t an obvious fit for a tech fund. The company leases space from landlords, carves it up into small glassy offices and rents them out to larger companies for an average of around $650 a month. While it initially billed itself as largely for startups and small companies that could do deals and business with each other, it has been expanding its reach into larger companies\u2014including tech giants such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM Corp.\n\nStill, many executives and analysts within the real-estate industry, as well as the tech sector, have been perplexed by WeWork\u2019s valuation, which is extremely high by real estate standards.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IWG\n\n\n PLC, the parent of Regus, has a similar business model, although less cultural appeal and brand recognition with young workers. Its market capitalization equates to about $10,000 per desk. WeWork\u2019s valuation equals about $160,000 per desk.\nBut many of its investors view WeWork as a bet on the larger tech and startup economy: As it grows, so should WeWork.\n\n\nREAD MORE How SoftBank and Saudi Arabia Settled Their Differences to Birth the World\u2019s Biggest Tech Fund The Startup Stock Tracker WeWork and Other Firms Test Brooklyn\u2019s Office Market \n\n\nWeWork has grown rapidly in recent years. Led by a voluble, long-haired chief executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adam Neumann,\n\n\n\n WeWork has expanded from a single small building in Manhattan to more than 160 locations in 16 countries, with nearly $1 billion in annualized revenue and more than 125,000 desks. It has been doubling each year recently, and has no plans of slowing. Legions of architects and engineers on staff pump out designs for new locations.\nThe company gained the eye of Silicon Valley early on, winning backing in 2012 from the well-regarded venture capital investor Benchmark, which also made early bets on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Snap Inc.\n\n\n and Uber.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAdam Neumann is the chief executive of WeWork, which has more than 160 locations in 16 countries.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n eduardo munoz/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThrough late last year, the company had raised $1.7 billion and was viewed as a likely candidate for an initial public offering sometime in 2017.\nBut then it began talking with SoftBank, which had considered\u2014and passed on\u2014investing SSoftBank Group has finalized a deal to invest $4.4 billion in office-sharing company WeWork, a massive deal that demonstrates the outsize ambition of the Japanese conglomerate to wield influence in startups around the world. ",
        "author": "Eliot Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Silicon Valley\u2019s Unbridled Optimism Gets Fresh Reality Check (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6844",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valleys-optimism-turns-into-shame-of-being-suckered-11548153000?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=80",
        "text": "Hustle is hardly the first startup to spend lavishly in an era of technology riches. What is new these days: The bill is coming due.\n\n\n\n\nStartup investors and company founders warn that the unchecked growth of the past several years\u2014which by some metrics exceeded heights from the dot-com boom\u2014could be hitting a limit. A rout of publicly traded technology companies is fostering newfound restraint for investors in Silicon Valley, especially for younger, cash-strapped startups like Hustle.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe unbridled optimism that inhabits our world,\u201d said startup investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sunny Dhillon,\n\n\n\n \u201cis getting a shot of realism.\u201d\n\nOutright signs of distress remain speckled. And most startups fail, even in the best of times.\nYet a worrying sign is the shrinking of so-called seed deals, essentially the earliest investments in startups. The number of these deals has fallen steadily, dropping to 882 in the fourth quarter from more than 1,500 three years earlier, according to researcher PitchBook.\nVenture capitalists typically follow the trajectory of tech stocks, as they did in early 2016 when they abruptly pulled back investments\u2014only to return when the market roared back. The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nasdaq,\n\n\n a bellwether index of publicly traded technology giants such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.,\n\n\n is down 13% from its high set in August. That means even the best-funded startups are feeling some pressure.\nElectric-scooter startups Bird Rides Inc. and Lime\u2014each valued by investors above $1 billion\u2014both recently lowered their valuation goals in fundraising efforts, people familiar with the matter have said, an indication that backers are concerned about future growth. On Monday, meal-kit service Munchery shut after cycling through myriad business models and more than $100 million from brand-name venture capitalists. \n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., earlier this month said it is shedding roughly 600 jobs to \u201cbecome a leaner company\u201d with \u201cextraordinarily difficult challenges ahead.\u201d \nThe announcement came one day after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\nshut its shared-ride business Chariot, citing lower demand.\nEven free-spending\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SoftBank Group Corp.\n\n\n was forced this month to slash a planned $16 billion investment in co-working startup WeWork Cos. by 88% after SoftBank\u2019s backers objected and the Japanese company\u2019s stock had fallen. \nThe attitude among technology investors is shifting, said venture capitalist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Josh Wolfe\n\n\n\n of Lux Capital, \u201cswapping \u2019fear of missing out\u2019 for \u2019shame of being suckered.\u2019 \u201d\nInvestors caution that startup deals are typically negotiated over many weeks or months, meaning that reverberations might not be fully realized for a while.\nIndeed, U.S. venture-backed companies raised a record $131 billion last year, topping the previous high of $105 billion set in 2000, according to PitchBook. The influx of money from investors at home and abroad has cushioned startups with shaky business models. \n\n\n\n\u201cLast year, they were flying you in business class. This year, they can barely afford coach.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Christian Ferris, investor in venture-backed tech companies \n\n\n\nThat trend might press on. Several venture investors recently raised multibillion-dollar funds. Private technology giants such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc. are widely expected to go public, cashing out early investors with fresh money to plow into new bets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christian Ferris,\n\n\n\n an investor in venture-backed companies in the once-hot world of blockchain and cryptocurrency, said he served on the boards of three companies that shut down in the past three months. A frequent paid speaker, he said appearance offers this year were light.\n\u201cLast year, they were flying you in business class,\u201d he said. \u201cThis year, they can barely afford coach.\u201d\nHustle, which helps companies with marketing via text message, gained brief fame in 2016 for helping\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Bernie Sanders\u2019s\n\n\n\n presidential campaign ping volunteers. Mr. Lindsay, a Stanford University graduate and an early hire at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.,\n\n\n initially raised $8 million in 2017 and didn\u2019t appear shy about spending it.\nA year ago, Hustle flew staff cross-country for an all-expenses-paid retreat around Napa, Calif. Mr. Lindsay, 33 years old, brought disc-jockey equipment, and spun music for his employees, attendees recall.\nA Hustle spokeswoman said in an email that the Napa location was chosen in part to boost the local economy after deadly wildfires nearby. She said Mr. Lindsay\u2019s music meant the company didn\u2019t need to hire a professional DJ.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nHustle opened three offices and last April raised an additional $30 Startup investors and company founders warn that the unchecked growth of the past several years could be hitting a limit. A rout of publicly traded tech companies is fostering newfound restraint. ",
        "author": "Rob Copeland"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Tweet Teases a New York-to-D.C. Hyperloop (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6845",
        "date": "2017-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/musk-teases-a-new-york-to-d-c-hyperloop-in-a-tweet-1500571308?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=118",
        "text": "He didn\u2019t immediately say which government agency or official had given approval, or elaborate on issues such as timing or cost, but later added he aimed to build similar systems in suburban Los Angeles and Texas. Infrastructure projects of large sizes often take years\u2014if not decades\u2014to receive government approvals.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cStill a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly,\u201d Mr. Musk wrote.\n\n\nA spokesman for Mr. Musk\u2019s tunnel venture, the Boring Co., said in a written statement that the company has had \u201cpromising conversations\u201d with local, state and federal government officials, without disclosing names. He added that the company expects to receive formal government approvals to \u201cbreak ground\u201d later this year. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s announcement that he had received \u201cverbal\u201d government approval to build a Hyperloop\u2014the billionaire\u2019s idea for high-speed transportation in low-pressure tubes\u2014offers momentum to an idea that has been slow to progress. Photo: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies\n \n\n\nThe Transportation Department referred questions about the hyperloop to the White House, which confirmed conversations with Mr. Musk and other Boring Co. executives. But the White House didn\u2019t say whether it had provided any kind of approval for the hyperloop.\nA White House spokesman said in a written statement: \u201cWe have had promising conversations to date, are committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector.\u201d\nA spokesman for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that the announcement was \u201cnews to City Hall.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s tweets raised more questions than they answered.\nDepending on the route, such a project could require approvals from five or six state governments, said Lynne Kiesling, associate director of Purdue University\u2019s Research Center in Economics. Ms. Kiesling\u2019s research includes the effect of regulatory institutions on technological change.\n\u201cStringing together five or six such approvals would be a long, costly and fractious process,\u201d she said.\nMr. Musk has long talked about the creation of a so-called hyperloop, a system for high-speed transportation in a near-vacuum state that takes place in miles-long tubes. Since Mr. Musk floated the idea in 2013, others have tried to commercialize the concept. Hyperloop One has raised $180 million but has faced delays in rolling out a prototype.\nMr. Musk\u2019s tweets convey his wide-ranging interests. He is chief executive of electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n which last year merged with energy company SolarCity, another business he backed. Mr. Musk also leads the rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Hyperloop Technologies and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are locked in a high-stakes race to create the first hyperloop, a low-pressure tube in which levitating capsules carry passengers at nearly the speed of sound. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon for The Wall Street Journal (Originally published Jan. 21, 2016)\n \n\n\nIn April, Mr. Musk announced plans for a new company called Neuralink Corp., where he also is CEO, aiming to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in \u201cconsensual telepathy.\u201d\nIn his series of tweets Thursday, Mr. Musk said the hyperloop system, a network linking New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, would be accessible from city centers, with as many as a dozen access points in each city.\nMr. Musk responded to few of the questions posed to him on Twitter. \u201cSupport would be much appreciated!\u201d Mr. Musk said in one tweet.\nHe began teasing the idea of a tunnel project on Twitter in December, with a post saying, \u201cTraffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging...\u201d \nIt wasn\u2019t clear, however, if the musing was more than just a man bored with Los Angeles traffic.\nIn January he tweeted: \u201cExciting progress on the tunnel front.\u201d \u201cPlan to start digging in a month or so,\u201d he said.\nHe has been testing his tunneling techniques at SpaceX in Hawthorne, Calif. \nJust days ago, at a gathering of U.S. governors, Mr. Musk answered a question about whether he feels pressure from people\u2019s expectations about his projects, particularly in light of Tesla\u2019s stock price, which has soared more than 50% this year.\n\u201cI find it quite tough when there are very high expectations,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cI try to actually tamp down those expectations.\u201d\n\u2014Eliot Brown\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tcontributed to this article.\nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com Known for his teasing tweets and ever-expanding list of high-tech ambitions, Elon Musk set observers abuzz again with a vague claim he received \u201cverbal\u201d approval for a high-speed, tunnel-based travel system along one of the busiest corridors in the U.S. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Tweets (in Jest?) That He Might Quit His Jobs (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6846",
        "date": "2021-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweets-that-hes-considering-joining-the-great-resignation-maybe-11639154480?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=11",
        "text": "Earlier this year Mr. Musk told analysts he expected to be CEO of Tesla for several years.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk in an interview at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s CEO Council summit this week said \u201cI do crack a lot of jokes. They don\u2019t all land, but I am aspirationally funny.\u201d Mr. Musk didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment about whether he was serious about potentially giving up his positions running Tesla or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLater, Mr. Musk tweeted crying-with-laughter emojis in response to someone tweeting a story about his statement.\n\n\nTesla shares were down more than 1% in early Friday trading.\nAt the WSJ event, Mr. Musk made fun of the CEO title, saying it was made up. Mr. Musk has previously signaled that he doesn\u2019t view formal corporate titles as set in stone. Tesla said earlier this year that Mr. Musk was adding \u201cTechnoking of Tesla\u201d to his title.\nMr. Musk has a reputation for making eyebrow-raising statements on Twitter, where he has more than 65 million followers. Last month, he initiated a poll on the microblogging site, asking people whether he should sell 10% of his Tesla holdings, which voters backed. About two months earlier, Mr. Musk initiated a plan under which he has exercised some of his nearly 23 million vested stock options that are due to expire next year and sold some of his shares to cover tax withholding obligations. Mr. Musk on Thursday reported exercising more than 2.1 million stock options and selling around $963 million worth of stock to cover tax withholdings, according to regulatory filings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The Tesla chief executive tells WSJ's Joanna Stern that many corporate titles \"don't mean anything,\" at the WSJ CEO Council summit. Photo: Ralph Alswang for the Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nLast month, the Tesla boss raised doubt about a deal between the car maker and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Hertz Global Holdings Inc.\n\n\n when he tweeted that no contract had been signed in connection with the car-rental company\u2019s announcement of a 100,000-car order. Last year, he tweeted that he thought Tesla\u2019s stock was too high, sending shares lower.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Twitter pronouncements at times have been a source of controversy. In 2018, he tweeted he might take Tesla private and had \u201cfunding secured\u201d for the deal, spurring the Securities and Exchange Commission to sue him for fraud. Mr. Musk agreed to pay a $20 million fine\u2014Tesla also paid $20 million\u2014and relinquish his chairman title.\nWrite to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said he might quit his jobs, without providing details about which positions he might relinquish or how serious he was about changing roles. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Elliott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla to Cut Down on Board Members (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6847",
        "date": "2019-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-to-shrink-board-11555712007?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=74",
        "text": "Brad Buss,\n\n\n\n who has been a director since 2009, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Linda Johnson Rice,\n\n\n\n who joined in 2017 as an independent director, don\u2019t plan to seek re-election this year, and the board doesn\u2019t plan to fill their seats. \n\n\n\n\nSteve Jurvetson and Antonio Gracias, two early investors and close friends of Mr. Musk, plan to step down next year, and those seats also won\u2019t be filled.\n\n\nTesla said the planned moves aren\u2019t the result of any disagreements with the four directors.\nAlong with shrinking the size of the board, Tesla also laid out a series of shareholder proposals that it says are designed to improve its corporate governance and that take into account input from institutional investors. The proposals include removing a supermajority voting requirement and shortening director terms to two years from three. \nMr. Gracias\u2019s term is slated to end in 2021, but he would exit next year if the new term-length proposal is approved by shareholders at the annual meeting in June.\n\u201cIt is the appropriate time to give our stockholders a greater voice by facilitating their ability to effect changes to certain corporate and board matters,\u201d the company said in the filing, \u201cand allowing them to vote on the performance of our directors with greater frequency.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Sonnenfeld,\n\n\n\n a Yale University management professor who has criticized Tesla\u2019s board, called the directors\u2019 departures a modest step in the right direction. Another vocal critic, Dieter Waizenegger, executive director of CtW Investment Group, which represents union-sponsored pension funds that own Tesla shares, said he believes Tesla could have gone further in improving the board, for example, by adding directors with manufacturing expertise.\nTesla\u2019s board has received support from shareholders over the years as the stock surged and Mr. Musk succeeded in turning the company into a major brand of electric vehicles. But some investors and activist groups have complained that the directors weren\u2019t properly supervising Mr. Musk, who has sometimes stirred controversy with outlandish statements, wild financial projections and erratic management.\nScrutiny of the board intensified last August when Mr. Musk surprised investors with an announcement on Twitter that he was thinking about taking the auto maker private and had secured funding to do so. The directors\u2019 close ties to Mr. Musk and the board\u2019s role in serving shareholders were tested in the following days as the board weighed Mr. Musk\u2019s proposal. \nMr. Musk\u2019s audacious buyout plan was shakier than his tweets suggested, and he ultimately decided to abandon it. The SEC accused Mr. Musk of misleading investors, and the two sides later settled.\nAs part of that deal, Tesla in December added a pair of new independent directors, including Oracle Corp. Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Ellison\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kathleen Wilson-Thompson,\n\n\n\n the global head of human resources for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.\n\nTesla also replaced Mr. Musk as chairman with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robyn Denholm,\n\n\n\n chief financial officer of Australian telecommunications company Telstra Corp. She has served on Tesla\u2019s board since 2014.\nMr. Musk and his brother, Kimbal, are the only directors the board doesn\u2019t label as independent. But several other directors are close to Mr. Musk, including Ira Ehrenpreis, who heads Tesla\u2019s compensation committee and its nominating and governance committee and is an investor in Mr. Musk\u2019s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Inc.\nMr. Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners and a Tesla board member for more than a decade, has invested in several Musk ventures. He was a director at SolarCity\u2014the renewable-energy company Mr. Musk led and that Tesla acquired in 2016\u2014and has been a director at SpaceX. Mr. Buss is a former financial chief at SolarCity.\nMs. Johnson Rice was named to the board in July 2017 along with media executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Murdoch\n\n\n\n amid criticism about the board\u2019s lack of independence. Mr. Murdoch is on the board of News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.\nAn 11th director, Mr. Jurvetson, had been on leave from the Tesla board since November 2017 after he parted ways with the venture-capital firm he co-founded, DFJ, amid allegations of misconduct. Tesla said he returned to actively serving on the auto maker\u2019s board this month.\nThe question of Mr. Musk\u2019s oversight continues to come into play. Since the SEC settlement, he has sparred with the agency and during TV appearances has said he doesn\u2019t respect it. In February, the SEC asked a judge to hold him in contempt for allegedly not following the terms of the settlement that included an unusual requirement he seek preapproval of his tweets if the information might be material to the company\u2019s stock. \nA judge has instructed the two sides to try to work out the dispute, granting them on Thursda Tesla plans to shrink its board from 11 to seven directors over this year and next, with three longtime allies of CEO Elon Musk planning to step down along with one of the auto maker\u2019s newer independent members. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Tech CEOs, Not Attending White House Summit Is Greater Risk (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6848",
        "date": "2017-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-tech-ceos-not-attending-white-house-summit-is-greater-risk-1497783604?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=120",
        "text": "Also expected to attend are\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp.\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Krzanich,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Oracle Corp.\n\n\n co-CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Safra Katz,\n\n\n\n a member of Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Cisco Systems Corp.\n\n CSCO 1.07%\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Robbins.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\u201cIf you don\u2019t show up, I think that\u2019s the worst scenario,\u201d Apple Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Cook\n\n\n\n said in early May, when asked about the company\u2019s relationship to the White House during an interview with CNBC. \u201cBecause then you\u2019re quiet and this doesn\u2019t do your cause any good, or your point of view any good.\u201d\n\n\nCommunication between the White House and Silicon Valley, already strained by the president\u2019s proposed ban on travel to the U.S. by people from six Muslim-majority countries, was shaken after the White House pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord.\n\nElon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n CEO of both\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n TSLA -4.30%\n\n\n and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., announced after the move he was quitting his role on councils that advise the president. He had been among the most vocal and visible Silicon Valley contacts for the White House.\nA Tesla spokesman declined to comment.\n\n\nMore CEOs Have Access to Trump, But Do They Have Clout? \n\n\n\nSalesforce.com\n\n\n CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marc Benioff,\n\n\n\n who tweeted his disappointment after the Paris decision, isn\u2019t attending the Monday session because of a scheduling conflict that arose after the summit was rescheduled, a person familiar with the matter said.\nOthers plan to attend despite the tensions. \u201cYou have to take a look at the landscape and see where you can find some common ground,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Linda Moore,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Technet, a Washington-based lobbying group comprising U.S. technology companies and executives. Those areas include tax reform and workforce development, she said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aaron Levie,\n\n\n\n CEO of the digital-storage company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Box Inc.,\n\n\n said in an interview last month the risk of the administration making decisions without hearing directly from the tech industry is too great.\n\u201cIt\u2019s not a given that the policy decisions are going to be aligned with the long-term trends that I think at least the tech industry is witnessing on the front lines,\u201d he said.\nMr. Levie, along with Cisco chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Chambers\n\n\n\n and venture capitalist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Doerr,\n\n\n\n met in April with White House officials and members of Congress to discuss tech issues including education and privacy.\n\u201cEveryone\u2019s kind of got their own comfort level and their own desire of how much they want to engage,\u201d said Ms. Moore.\nMr. Cook, for example, spoke to the White House following both its immigration order and its exit from the Paris accord. Apple didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. \nIn March, Mr. Benioff attended a White House roundtable on workforce development with Mr. Trump, German Chancellor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Angela Merkel\n\n\n\n and other CEOs, during which he suggested the aspirational goal of creating five million apprenticeships by 2020. Earlier this week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to reduce barriers to apprenticeships.\nWrite to Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com Technology executives at odds with the Trump administration see a bigger problem than attending a White House brainstorming session Monday\u2014not attending. ",
        "author": "Yoree Koh"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Lays Out Plans to Meld Brains and Computers (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6849",
        "date": "2017-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-lays-out-plans-to-meld-brains-and-computers-1492738741?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=124",
        "text": "A Neuralink spokesman said Mr. Musk plans to serve as the chief executive, adding another CEO role to his already busy schedule running electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n TSLA -4.14%\n\n\n and rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Mr. Musk couldn\u2019t be reached for comment through the spokesman.\n\n\n\n\nNeuralink\u2019s goals are arguably bolder than Tesla\u2019s plans of mass-market electric vehicles or SpaceX\u2019s ambitions to send humans to Mars. As Mr. Musk describes it, Neuralink wants to develop brain interfaces that would effectively replace human language as we know it.\n\n\n\u201cThere are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing,\u201d Mr. Musk told Mr. Urban in his\u00a036,000-word blog post, which at times reads like a neuroscience textbook. \u201cThat\u2019s what language is, your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer.\u00a0\n\u201cIf you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person,\u201d Mr. Musk said. He explained how it would be easier if people could beam a picture into the heads of others instead of trying to describe it with words.\nBut first Mr. Musk is looking for more realistic applications of Neuralink\u2019s technology. He said that in about four years Neuralink hopes to market a device that would help treat severe brain injuries, including strokes, cancer lesions, paralysis and memory problems.\u00a0The strategy is similar to SpaceX and Tesla, where Mr. Musk developed new rocket and electric-car technologies, proved they work, and is now using them to pursue more ambitious projects.\n\u201cI think we are about eight to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability,\u201d Mr. Musk said in the post. \u201cIt is important to note that this depends heavily on regulatory approval timing and how well our devices work on people with disabilities.\u201d\nMr. Musk has spoken out about the dangers of being left behind by the advancements of artificial intelligence. \u201cThe pace of progress in this direction matters a lot,\u201d Mr. Musk said in Thursday\u2019s post. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to develop digital superintelligence too far before being able to do a merged brain-computer interface.\u201d\nThere are several challenges to developing the technology\u2014miniaturizing electrodes, making them much more technically sophisticated as well as compatible with and implantable in brain matter. Neuralink wants its interface to operate wirelessly of course, so it will have to find a way to convert brain signals to digital signals, and send huge amounts of data into and out of the brain.\nMr. Musk\u2019s comments come a day after Facebook Inc. announced similar ambitions. \u201cWhat if you could type directly from your brain?\u201d asked\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Regina Dugan,\n\n\n\n who runs Facebook\u2019s secretive hardware division Building 8, during a keynote address at the company\u2019s F8 developer conference Wednesday. Facebook job postings show the company is looking to hire engineers to work on \u201cbrain-computer interface\u201d technology.\nNeuralink is in hiring mode, too. Its new website is essentially a list of open positions in San Francisco, mostly for a range of engineers. First on the list is a \u201cmicrofabrication engineer\u201d to lead development of a new class of \u201cbiological probes.\u201d\u00a0\n\u2014Deepa Seetharaman contributed to this article.\nWrite to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com Elon Musk confirmed plans for his newest company, Neuralink, revealing he will be CEO of the startup that aims\u00a0to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in \u201cconsensual telepathy.\u201d ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Startups Chase Otherworldly Opportunities (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6850",
        "date": "2018-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/japanese-startups-chase-otherworldly-opportunities-1537957703?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=63",
        "text": "A handful of Japanese companies are jockeying for position in the global rush for business opportunities on the moon, fueled by falling launch costs and growing government spending. The U.S. is studying building a lunar station in the mid-2020s; China plans to send rovers to the far side of the moon this year.\nExtraterrestrial ambitions are also propelling outsize valuations for Japan\u2019s space-related startups. Last year, ispace\u2019s initial funding round raised more than $90 million\u2014a big sum in a country where venture-capital investments last business year came to just $1.3 billion, less than 2% of the U.S. total.\n\n\nJapan is second to the U.S. in the number of companies investing in startup space businesses, according to technology analytics firm Bryce Space and Technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nispace is funded by the government-backed Innovation Network Corp. of Japan and Development Bank of Japan, as well as car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Suzuki Motor Co.\n\n\n and precision-equipment makers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toppan Printing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Konica Minolta Inc.\n\nFor Japanese corporations, the investments are long-term bets on moon-related demand in areas including construction, manufacturing, energy and communications.\nThe private sector can lower costs by using existing hardware, reducing development needs. Japanese space ventures have access to a range of automotive and precision-equipment companies at home, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hidetaka Aoki,\n\n\n\n partner at Tokyo-based venture-capital firm Global Brain Corp.\nMr. Aoki co-founded S-Matching, which helps space ventures meet businesses sitting on large cash reserves, among them blue-chip companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Itochu Corp.\n\n\n \u2014an investor in satellite-data analytics company Orbital Insight Inc.\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Japan Airlines,\n\n\n construction company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shimizu Corp.\n\n\n and advertising company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dentsu Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nispace\u2019s lunar lander and rover as they might look on the moon, a vision the company aims to make real in mid-2021\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ispace\n \n\n\n\nispace\u2019s two missions will comprise a mid-2020 lunar-orbiter launch and a mid-2021 moon landing. On that second trip its robot lander will carry two rovers, 22-pound. robots on wheels. The company is now taking orders for other payloads\u2014the lander can haul 66 pounds\u2014and seeking sponsorships to help cover operational costs.\nAfter the second mission, the company plans to quickly start deploying robots every month, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Takeshi Hakamada,\n\n\n\n ispace founder and chief executive.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n December 2016: Japan is leaping into space resources, agreeing to work with a robotic-exploration company to create a blueprint for an industry to extract resources from the moon that would enable more extensive space exploration. Photo: EPA\n \n\n\nispace faces competition from Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology Inc., which plans its maiden launch in late 2020. Customers are already reserving space aboard Astrobotic\u2019s Peregrine lander, at $540,000 a pound. ispace said it is considering a slightly higher price.\nSupport from the Japanese government for ispace project reflects the possibility of finding rare earths or water\u2014for turning into fuel\u2014on the moon. Resource-poor Japan has earmarked \u00a5355 billion ($3.14 billion) for its space program in the year starting April 2019.\n\u201cWhen resources are found on the moon or on Mars, we want to have a seat at the table,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hiroshi Sasaki,\n\n\n\n director of the JAXA Space Exploration Center at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the country\u2019s space agency.\nWrite to Mayumi Negishi at mayumi.negishi@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tDentsu Inc. is an advertising company, and Hiroshi Sasaki is director of the JAXA Space Exploration Center. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Dentsu is an auto-parts maker and that Susumu Sasaki is director of the center. (Sept. 27) A handful of Japanese companies are jockeying for position in the global rush to do business on the moon, fueled by falling launch costs and growing government spending. ",
        "author": "Mayumi Negishi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Startups Chase Otherworldly Opportunities (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6851",
        "date": "2018-09-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/japanese-startups-chase-otherworldly-opportunities-1537957703?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=87",
        "text": "A handful of Japanese companies are jockeying for position in the global rush for business opportunities on the moon, fueled by falling launch costs and growing government spending. The U.S. is studying building a lunar station in the mid-2020s; China plans to send rovers to the far side of the moon this year.\n\n\n\n\nExtraterrestrial ambitions are also propelling outsize valuations for Japan\u2019s space-related startups. Last year, ispace\u2019s initial funding round raised more than $90 million\u2014a big sum in a country where venture-capital investments last business year came to just $1.3 billion, less than 2% of the U.S. total.\n\n\nJapan is second to the U.S. in the number of companies investing in startup space businesses, according to technology analytics firm Bryce Space and Technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nispace is funded by the government-backed Innovation Network Corp. of Japan and Development Bank of Japan, as well as car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Suzuki Motor Co.\n\n\n and precision-equipment makers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toppan Printing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Konica Minolta Inc.\n\nFor Japanese corporations, the investments are long-term bets on moon-related demand in areas including construction, manufacturing, energy and communications.\nThe private sector can lower costs by using existing hardware, reducing development needs. Japanese space ventures have access to a range of automotive and precision-equipment companies at home, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hidetaka Aoki,\n\n\n\n partner at Tokyo-based venture-capital firm Global Brain Corp.\nMr. Aoki co-founded S-Matching, which helps space ventures meet businesses sitting on large cash reserves, among them blue-chip companies such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Itochu Corp.\n\n\n \u2014an investor in satellite-data analytics company Orbital Insight Inc.\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Japan Airlines,\n\n\n construction company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Shimizu Corp.\n\n\n and advertising company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dentsu Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nispace\u2019s lunar lander and rover as they might look on the moon, a vision the company aims to make real in mid-2021\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ispace\n \n\n\n\nispace\u2019s two missions will comprise a mid-2020 lunar-orbiter launch and a mid-2021 moon landing. On that second trip its robot lander will carry two rovers, 22-pound. robots on wheels. The company is now taking orders for other payloads\u2014the lander can haul 66 pounds\u2014and seeking sponsorships to help cover operational costs.\nAfter the second mission, the company plans to quickly start deploying robots every month, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Takeshi Hakamada,\n\n\n\n ispace founder and chief executive.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n December 2016: Japan is leaping into space resources, agreeing to work with a robotic-exploration company to create a blueprint for an industry to extract resources from the moon that would enable more extensive space exploration. Photo: EPA\n \n\n\nispace faces competition from Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology Inc., which plans its maiden launch in late 2020. Customers are already reserving space aboard Astrobotic\u2019s Peregrine lander, at $540,000 a pound. ispace said it is considering a slightly higher price.\nSupport from the Japanese government for ispace project reflects the possibility of finding rare earths or water\u2014for turning into fuel\u2014on the moon. Resource-poor Japan has earmarked \u00a5355 billion ($3.14 billion) for its space program in the year starting April 2019.\n\u201cWhen resources are found on the moon or on Mars, we want to have a seat at the table,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hiroshi Sasaki,\n\n\n\n director of the JAXA Space Exploration Center at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the country\u2019s space agency.\nWrite to Mayumi Negishi at mayumi.negishi@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tDentsu Inc. is an advertising company, and Hiroshi Sasaki is director of the JAXA Space Exploration Center. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Dentsu is an auto-parts maker and that Susumu Sasaki is director of the center. (Sept. 27) A handful of Japanese companies are jockeying for position in the global rush to do business on the moon, fueled by falling launch costs and growing government spending. ",
        "author": "Mayumi Negishi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk to Add \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 Host to His R\u00e9sum\u00e9 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6852",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-to-add-saturday-night-live-host-to-his-resume-11619304255?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=31",
        "text": "A businessman is an atypical choice for \u201cSNL\u201d host, but Mr. Musk is an atypical businessman. Tesla recently notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that he was adding the formal title of \u201cTechnoking\u201d to his CEO role, and Mr. Musk is famous for his prolific tweets offering proclamations, jokes, and occasional attacks on regulators and short sellers of his stock. \nWhile hosting a comedy sketch show will be a departure for Mr. Musk, he has played the showman for years at his companies\u2019 product events, and has enjoyed the entertainment-industry spotlight before, with sometimes unpredictable results. He has appeared multiple times on the podcast of Joe Rogan\u2014the comedian, television host and mixed martial arts commentator\u2014 including a September 2018 episode in which a video recording appeared to show Mr. Musk smoking marijuana. Shares in Tesla fell after the event.\n\n\nThe Tesla chief also has made a number of film and TV cameos, including \u201cIron Man 2\u201d and episodes of \u201cThe Big Bang Theory,\u201d \u201cSouth Park\u201d and \u201cThe Simpsons.\u201d\nMr. Musk, one of the world\u2019s wealthiest people, has often drawn attention for pronouncements that veer from typical CEO language. In January, Mr. Musk joined a chat on the popular audio-discussion app Clubhouse, speaking with his CEO counterpart from Robinhood Markets Inc., as the stock-trading app and other brokers were grappling with the deluge in demand from retail investors for shares in some companies, including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop Corp.\n\n\n Mr. Musk had cheered some of the stock buying that, at the time, hurt some short sellers the Tesla CEO has sparred with.\nSome of his eccentric stunts have gotten him in trouble. The Securities and Exchange Commission took issue with tweets he made in 2018 saying that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. Mr. Musk and the SEC later settled with a deal intended to limit his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n use, though he has since used the platform to mock the regulator. \n\u201cSNL,\u201d which has been airing since 1975, generally taps the entertainment world for its hosts, but it has reached into other realms of celebrity before, including business and politics. Publishing magnate Steve Forbes did the honors in 1996, shortly after giving up his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination. The late George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, hosted in 1990, and Ralph Nader, the high-profile consumer crusader, hosted in 1977.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n hosted in 2004, when he was early in his tenure on the NBC reality series \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d and again 2015, when he was vying to be the Republican candidate for the White House.\nThe musical guest star for the episode to be hosted by Mr. Musk is scheduled to be Miley Cyrus, who would be making her sixth appearance on the show, NBC said.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe formal name of SpaceX is Space Exploration Technologies Corp. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Space Exploration Technology Corp. (Corrected on May 9.) The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is scheduled to headline the long-running NBC late-night comedy show on May 8. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk to Add \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 Host to His R\u00e9sum\u00e9 (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6853",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-to-add-saturday-night-live-host-to-his-resume-11619304255?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=32",
        "text": "A businessman is an atypical choice for \u201cSNL\u201d host, but Mr. Musk is an atypical businessman. Tesla recently notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that he was adding the formal title of \u201cTechnoking\u201d to his CEO role, and Mr. Musk is famous for his prolific tweets offering proclamations, jokes, and occasional attacks on regulators and short sellers of his stock. \n\n\n\n\nWhile hosting a comedy sketch show will be a departure for Mr. Musk, he has played the showman for years at his companies\u2019 product events, and has enjoyed the entertainment-industry spotlight before, with sometimes unpredictable results. He has appeared multiple times on the podcast of Joe Rogan\u2014the comedian, television host and mixed martial arts commentator\u2014 including a September 2018 episode in which a video recording appeared to show Mr. Musk smoking marijuana. Shares in Tesla fell after the event.\n\n\nThe Tesla chief also has made a number of film and TV cameos, including \u201cIron Man 2\u201d and episodes of \u201cThe Big Bang Theory,\u201d \u201cSouth Park\u201d and \u201cThe Simpsons.\u201d\nMr. Musk, one of the world\u2019s wealthiest people, has often drawn attention for pronouncements that veer from typical CEO language. In January, Mr. Musk joined a chat on the popular audio-discussion app Clubhouse, speaking with his CEO counterpart from Robinhood Markets Inc., as the stock-trading app and other brokers were grappling with the deluge in demand from retail investors for shares in some companies, including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop Corp.\n\n\n Mr. Musk had cheered some of the stock buying that, at the time, hurt some short sellers the Tesla CEO has sparred with.\nSome of his eccentric stunts have gotten him in trouble. The Securities and Exchange Commission took issue with tweets he made in 2018 saying that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. Mr. Musk and the SEC later settled with a deal intended to limit his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n use, though he has since used the platform to mock the regulator. \n\u201cSNL,\u201d which has been airing since 1975, generally taps the entertainment world for its hosts, but it has reached into other realms of celebrity before, including business and politics. Publishing magnate Steve Forbes did the honors in 1996, shortly after giving up his pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination. The late George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, hosted in 1990, and Ralph Nader, the high-profile consumer crusader, hosted in 1977.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n hosted in 2004, when he was early in his tenure on the NBC reality series \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d and again 2015, when he was vying to be the Republican candidate for the White House.\nThe musical guest star for the episode to be hosted by Mr. Musk is scheduled to be Miley Cyrus, who would be making her sixth appearance on the show, NBC said.\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe formal name of SpaceX is Space Exploration Technologies Corp. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Space Exploration Technology Corp. (Corrected on May 9.) The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is scheduled to headline the long-running NBC late-night comedy show on May 8. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Twitter Rant Against Cave Rescuer Extreme Even for Him (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6854",
        "date": "2018-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-lashes-out-at-critic-in-latest-twitter-outburst-1531752197?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=91",
        "text": "\u201cSorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it,\u201d read a post on Mr. Musk\u2019s official Twitter account early Sunday in response to the explorer\u2019s criticism. The post quickly prompted criticism, eliciting a follow-up from Mr. Musk to someone who challenged the statement, which read: \u201cBet ya a signed dollar it\u2019s true.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThose posts were deleted later Sunday. A spokesman for Tesla didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. Mr. Unsworth couldn\u2019t be reached for comment Monday in Thailand, but he told Australian television that the dispute wasn\u2019t finished yet.\n\n\nTesla shares slid 3.51% to $307.68 in morning trading in New York.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc. stocks and bonds fell after an unusual earnings call on May 2 threatened investors\u2019 faith at a pivotal time for the company. These are the highlights. Photo: Reuters/Joe Skipper\n \n\n\nIt was the latest example of Mr. Musk\u2019s aggressive and sometimes controversial use of Twitter. In recent months, he has used the platform to criticize regulators, taunt short-sellers and debate people who criticized his political donations.\nMr. Musk\u2019s seemingly unfiltered use of the platform is unusual among major CEOs, whose public remarks are generally carefully controlled. The messages are part of a pattern of defiance that has won Mr. Musk many fans and gained him more than 22 million followers on Twitter, to whom he often promotes new products and features or customer questions.\nThe interactions often become hostile. In one particularly testy exchange in May, Mr. Musk fired back at a profane comment directed his way by tweeting at its author: \u201cDoes the psych ward know you smuggled in a mobile phone?\u201d\nIn May, he waged a lengthy attack on the media following unflattering articles about Tesla, and announced plans to create a Yelp.com-like website where people can rate the credibility of journalists and news organizations. Mr. Musk said he would name it Pravda, after the former Soviet Union\u2019s main propaganda outlet, then changed it to Pravduh.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sheer volume of tweets from Mr. Musk is all the more remarkable given the enormous demands on his attention at Tesla, which has been struggling to sharply increase production of its new sedan, and at his other companies including rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX.\nMr. Musk has defended his use of Twitter, while also suggesting he would adjust. \u201cI have made the mistaken assumption\u2014and I will attempt to be better at this\u2014of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season,\u201d Mr. Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. \u201cAnd that is my mistake. I will correct it.\u201d\nMr. Musk\u2019s involvement with the Thai cave drama began on Twitter, when he responded on July 4 to a user asking him to assist in the rescue. He later posted videos of swimming-pool tests in California of a metal tube that his team fashioned to carry the Thai boys out of the flooded cave.\nMeanwhile, Thai authorities successfully rescued all 12 boys and their coach without Mr. Musk\u2019s device.\nMr. Musk, who praised the rescue effort, stopped off to visit the cave on a trip to China and said he was leaving the sub in case it could be useful in the future.\nMr. Musk chafed at criticism of his effort. \u201cThis reaction has shaken my opinion of many people,\u201d he tweeted on July 11. \u201cWe were asked to create a backup option & worked hard to do so.\u201d\nLate last week, a CNN posted a video in which Mr. Unsworth called Mr. Musk\u2019s mini-sub a \u201cPR stunt,\u201d saying it \u201chad absolutely no chance of working\u201d because it was too big for the cave. \u201cHe can stick his submarine where it hurts,\u201d Mr. Unsworth said.\nSunday morning, Mr. Musk replied to a tweet citing the comments, saying: \u201cNever saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus) at any point when we were in the caves,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOnly people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great.\u201d\nHe then challenged Mr. Unsworth to show a video of the rescue, before adding: \u201cYou know what, don\u2019t bother showing the video. We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.\u201d\nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@wsj.com Musk for years has used Twitter to combat critics in ways that few other business leaders would dare. His latest outburst on the platform\u2014in which he suggested a British cave rescuer is a pedophile\u2014was extreme even by his standards. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Steve Jurvetson Fires Back at DFJ After His Exit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6855",
        "date": "2017-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/steve-jurvetson-fires-back-at-dfj-after-his-exit-1510739231?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=108",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s incredibly sad to see how things broke down, and the acrimony that arose between us,\u201d he wrote.\n\n\n\n\nDFJ didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. \n\n\nIn October, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm said it had opened an investigation into Mr. Jurvetson over the summer after hearing indirect and secondhand allegations about his conduct. The firm didn\u2019t specify the nature of those allegations. The investigation is ongoing. \n\n\nRelated Jurvetson Exits Venture Firm, Steps Back From Tesla Board Amid Misconduct Probe \n\n\nDFJ has investments in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n -led companies\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as well as China\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Baidu Inc.\n\nIn addition to leaving DFJ, Mr. Jurvetson is also on leave from his board seats at Tesla and SpaceX pending resolution of the allegations, SpaceX and Tesla said Monday. \nMr. Jurvetson became one of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley in the dot-com era with an early investment in Hotmail. In recent years, he has focused on frontier technologies, betting on space technology, quantum computing and robotics.\nThe tech publication The Information in October reported the investigation of Mr. Jurvetson was opened after media entrepreneur Keri Kukral posted on Facebook, without citing any partner by name, that women should be wary of \u201cpredatory behavior\u201d at DFJ. Ms. Kukral declined to elaborate on her post or comment on Mr. Jurvetson\u2019s.\nDFJ Partner\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heidi Roizen\n\n\n\n subsequently asserted on her blog that any allegation of a predatory culture at the firm was \u201cpatently wrong.\u201d \nIn his post on Tuesday, Mr. Jurvetson wrote that people have concluded he left the firm over \u201cwholly false allegations about sexual predation and workplace harassment.\u201d He said \u201cno such allegations are true.\u201d\nHe said in the Facebook post he has \u201clearned that an ill-advised relationship, where the other person is left feeling hurt, angry or scorned, can have far reaching consequences in the digital age.\u201d But he added that it was \u201cinaccurate and unfair\u201d to characterize this as harassment or predation. \n\u201cI think my personal life, and other people\u2019s personal lives, should stay personal,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt should not be in the court of public opinion.\u201d\nWrite to Cat Zakrzewski at cat.zakrzewski@wsj.com Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson fired back at his former DFJ partners and denied any sexual harassment on his part, one day after the Silicon Valley firm he co-founded announced he would step down under a \u201cmutual agreement.\u201d ",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Roblox Looks to Bring Educational Videogames to Schools (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6856",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/roblox-looks-to-bring-educational-videogames-to-schools-11636988400?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=11",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s been a vision since we started the company over 16 years ago to have these types of experiences,\u201d Roblox Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Baszucki\n\n\n\n told The Wall Street Journal. \u201cWe\u2019ve always had that educational background in mind.\u201d\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingRoblox Sees Path to Metaverse Through ClassroomsVideogame platform Roblox is spending $10 million to help develop educational games. Reporter Sarah Needleman joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss why the company is looking to get into classrooms and what it could mean for the company's ambitions in the metaverse.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of the games the company is funding will teach robotics, another will focus on space exploration, and the third will help students explore careers and concepts in computer science, engineering and biomedical science. They were developed by nonprofits including Boston\u2019s Museum of Science, and one was made in partnership with a small educational game studio.\n\nRoblox\u2019s platform already features millions of games and other activities, all of which are made by its own users, though only a few were designed for classrooms. The three games it is funding, due out next year, won\u2019t offer any virtual goods for sale.\nWhile $10 million is a small amount for Roblox, the largest pure-play U.S. videogame company by market capitalization, it will be the first time the company has put money into the development of games for its platform. Its educational aspirations coincide with its plans to build a stake in the metaverse, a term loosely defined as an extensive future online world where people interact in shared virtual spaces through digital avatars. The company\u2019s platform is considered an early iteration of such a world, as its users already interact as avatars as they teleport from one game to another and participate in online events such as concerts and TV-show screenings.\nOther big tech companies are also working on metaverse products and services, including Microsoft.,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nvidia Corp.\n\n\n , Epic Games Inc. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Unity Software Inc.\nFacebook Inc.\n\n\n recently changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc. to reflect its increased focus on augmented reality and virtual reality, technologies that give the metaverse its immersive 3-D qualities.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoblox is funding the development of an educational robotics game for its platform created by a nonprofit and a developer studio.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology/Filament Games\n \n\n\n\nEducation will play a major role in the metaverse, tech visionaries say, enabling students, for instance, to explore together three-dimensional replicas of historic sites such as Rome\u2019s Colosseum just as it looked hundreds of years ago.\nVideogames have been in classrooms for decades. \u201cThe Oregon Trail,\u201d a 1971 computer game that challenged players to survive a wagon ride across 1800s America, came bundled with school computers. In 2016, Microsoft introduced an education edition for its popular Minecraft franchise, which includes special features for teachers such as the ability to create custom projects and track students\u2019 progress. Microsoft said that version of the block-building game is being used by more than 35 million students and teachers around the globe.\nEven so, videogames have long faced scrutiny from legislators, parents and advocacy groups over their impact on children. The World Health Organization added \u201cgaming disorder\u201d to an updated version of its International Classification of Diseases in 2018, warning about a condition in which people overly indulge in videogame play despite negative consequences. Earlier this year, China issued strict new measures aimed at curbing what authorities there describe as youth videogame addiction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Metaverse Prompts High-Stakes Race for Big TechSkip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 6:12ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.The Metaverse Prompts High-Stakes Race for Big TechPlay video: The Metaverse Prompts High-Stakes Race for Big Tech\n\n A tech industry battle is taking shape over the metaverse. WSJ tech reporter Meghan Bobrowsky explains the concept and why tech companies like Facebook, Roblox and Epic Games are investing billions to develop this digital space. Photo: Storyblocks\n \n\n\n\u201cVideogames are not inherently bad,\u201d as they can help students develop critical-thinking, collaboration and other skills, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Steyer,\n\n\n\n founder of Common Sense Media, a group that promotes safe technology and media for children. The nonprofit also rates games for their educational qualities or lack thereof.\nThe best kind of videogames for classrooms, Mr. Steyer said, are made by developers looking to encourage and engage learners. \u201cThey must be committed to rigorous educational content and rigorous privacy and safety practices,\u201d he said, adding that he thinks Roblox needs to do a better job of keeping troublemakers off its platform before it can become \u201ca trusted education tool.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Roblox said the company employs a team of more than 3,000 people to monitor games for safety, using a combination of artificial intelligence and human moderators. She also said teachers can create private groups known as servers for their students to play games only among themselves on Roblox.\nTo raise awareness of the new games Roblox is funding, the company said the education-focused nonprofits making them will tap their networks to help drive adoption in schools.\nMr. Baszucki said he envisions Roblox one day offering a wide range of virtual educational opportunities for students, from dissecting frogs to exploring volcanoes, regardless of their economic status or location.\n\u201cOur platform can help society directly in an area where we need help,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com Company is starting with a $10 million investment for nonprofits to develop games, its first such funding, amid a push to help build out the metaverse. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Roblox Looks to Bring Educational Videogames to Schools (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6857",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/roblox-looks-to-bring-educational-videogames-to-schools-11636988400?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=17",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s been a vision since we started the company over 16 years ago to have these types of experiences,\u201d Roblox Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Baszucki\n\n\n\n told The Wall Street Journal. \u201cWe\u2019ve always had that educational background in mind.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of the games the company is funding will teach robotics, another will focus on space exploration, and the third will help students explore careers and concepts in computer science, engineering and biomedical science. They were developed by nonprofits including Boston\u2019s Museum of Science, and one was made in partnership with a small educational game studio.\n\nRoblox\u2019s platform already features millions of games and other activities, all of which are made by its own users, though only a few were designed for classrooms. The three games it is funding, due out next year, won\u2019t offer any virtual goods for sale.\nWhile $10 million is a small amount for Roblox, the largest pure-play U.S. videogame company by market capitalization, it will be the first time the company has put money into the development of games for its platform. Its educational aspirations coincide with its plans to build a stake in the metaverse, a term loosely defined as an extensive future online world where people interact in shared virtual spaces through digital avatars. The company\u2019s platform is considered an early iteration of such a world, as its users already interact as avatars as they teleport from one game to another and participate in online events such as concerts and TV-show screenings.\nOther big tech companies are also working on metaverse products and services, including Microsoft.,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nvidia Corp.\n\n\n , Epic Games Inc. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Unity Software Inc.\nFacebook Inc.\n\n\n recently changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc. to reflect its increased focus on augmented reality and virtual reality, technologies that give the metaverse its immersive 3-D qualities.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoblox is funding the development of an educational robotics game for its platform created by a nonprofit and a developer studio.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology/Filament Games\n \n\n\n\nEducation will play a major role in the metaverse, tech visionaries say, enabling students, for instance, to explore together three-dimensional replicas of historic sites such as Rome\u2019s Colosseum just as it looked hundreds of years ago.\nVideogames have been in classrooms for decades. \u201cThe Oregon Trail,\u201d a 1971 computer game that challenged players to survive a wagon ride across 1800s America, came bundled with school computers. In 2016, Microsoft introduced an education edition for its popular Minecraft franchise, which includes special features for teachers such as the ability to create custom projects and track students\u2019 progress. Microsoft said that version of the block-building game is being used by more than 35 million students and teachers around the globe.\nEven so, videogames have long faced scrutiny from legislators, parents and advocacy groups over their impact on children. The World Health Organization added \u201cgaming disorder\u201d to an updated version of its International Classification of Diseases in 2018, warning about a condition in which people overly indulge in videogame play despite negative consequences. Earlier this year, China issued strict new measures aimed at curbing what authorities there describe as youth videogame addiction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n A tech industry battle is taking shape over the metaverse. WSJ tech reporter Meghan Bobrowsky explains the concept and why tech companies like Facebook, Roblox and Epic Games are investing billions to develop this digital space. Photo: Storyblocks\n \n\n\n\u201cVideogames are not inherently bad,\u201d as they can help students develop critical-thinking, collaboration and other skills, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Steyer,\n\n\n\n founder of Common Sense Media, a group that promotes safe technology and media for children. The nonprofit also rates games for their educational qualities or lack thereof.\nThe best kind of videogames for classrooms, Mr. Steyer said, are made by developers looking to encourage and engage learners. \u201cThey must be committed to rigorous educational content and rigorous privacy and safety practices,\u201d he said, adding that he thinks Roblox needs to do a better job of keeping troublemakers off its platform before it can become \u201ca trusted education tool.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nA spokeswoman for Roblox said the company employs a team of more than 3,000 people to monitor games for safety, using a combination of artificial intelligence and human moderators. She also said teachers can create private groups known as servers for their students to play games only among themselves on Roblox.\nTo raise awarene Company is starting with a $10 million investment for nonprofits to develop games, its first such funding, amid a push to help build out the metaverse. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Wants to Make Teslas in Russia (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6858",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-made-in-russia-elon-musk-says-its-possible-11621600327?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=22",
        "text": "\u201cI think we are close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia, that would be great,\u201d Mr. Musk said Friday, adding that he was also looking at expanding to\u00a0the former Soviet nation of\u00a0Kazakhstan,\u00a0and other neighboring states.\n\u201cOver time, we will look to have factories in other parts of the world,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThere were\u00a0around 11,000 electric passenger cars registered in Russia,\u00a0of which\u00a0only 700 were Teslas, at the start of 2021.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n evgenia novozhenina/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr.\u00a0Musk was speaking at a festival for students that attracts science and tech entrepreneurs,\u00a0and touched on everything from Mars exploration to religion and the future of humanity.\u00a0Apple Inc. co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Wozniak\n\n\n\n was\u00a0also scheduled to\u00a0speak at the forum.\n\nMr. Musk called for dialogue between the U.S. and Russia at a time when relations\u00a0between the two nations\u00a0have deteriorated to\u00a0Cold War-era\u00a0lows. Mr. Musk said Kremlin\u00a0spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Peskov\n\n\n\n invited him to\u00a0participate in the forum.\n\u201cThere is a lot of talent and energy in Russia,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cThere should be more dialogue and communication between Russia and the United States.\u201d\nEarlier in 2021,\u00a0the billionaire entrepreneur invited\u00a0Russian President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n to join him for a chat on\u00a0the\u00a0social-media app Clubhouse. Mr. Peskov said Friday that such a talk could happen in the future.\nThe Russian market for electric cars is small though it has grown fast in recent years.\u00a0At the start of 2021,\u00a0there were\u00a0around 11,000 electric passenger cars registered in Russia,\u00a0of which\u00a0only 700 were Tesla models, according to data provider Autostat. The most popular model in Russia is the Nissan Leaf, with around 9,000 vehicles,\u00a0Autostat data shows.\nThe lack of charging infrastructure is one of the main issues holding back electric cars in Russia,\u00a0analysts say, noting that there are only around 400 charging stations across the country, which is the world\u2019s largest by territory. Still, the number of electric cars registered in Russia has grown by 71% over the past year,\u00a0according to\u00a0Autostat, mainly due to an abolition of import duties on electric cars from nearby countries.\nRussia\u00a0has no major electric car projects. Minister of Industry and Trade\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Denis Manturov\n\n\n\n said in March that private car maker Zetta was designing an experimental model and planned to launch production in 2021.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAt the forum, Mr.\u00a0Musk\u00a0said that in the future, all transport, apart from rockets,\u00a0would\u00a0be electric.\n\u201cI think we\u2019ll look back at internal combustion engine cars in the same way we look back on steam engines,\u201d\u00a0he said.\u00a0\u201cIt is happening very fast.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who also heads SpaceX,\u00a0formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said that humanity needed to become a multi-planet civilization\u00a0with \u201ctravel beyond the Solar System.\u201d He joked that he was an alien. \u201cWhere do you think I got all this technology from?\u201d he asked.\nWrite to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com Elon Musk raised the prospect of Russian-made Tesla cars, saying the electric-vehicle maker was considering opening a factory there as it looks to expand its production facilities globally. ",
        "author": "Georgi Kantchev"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Wants to Make Teslas in Russia (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6859",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-made-in-russia-elon-musk-says-its-possible-11621600327?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=30",
        "text": "\u201cI think we are close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia, that would be great,\u201d Mr. Musk said Friday, adding that he was also looking at expanding to\u00a0the former Soviet nation of\u00a0Kazakhstan,\u00a0and other neighboring states.\n\u201cOver time, we will look to have factories in other parts of the world,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThere were\u00a0around 11,000 electric passenger cars registered in Russia,\u00a0of which\u00a0only 700 were Teslas, at the start of 2021.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n evgenia novozhenina/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr.\u00a0Musk was speaking at a festival for students that attracts science and tech entrepreneurs,\u00a0and touched on everything from Mars exploration to religion and the future of humanity.\u00a0Apple Inc. co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Wozniak\n\n\n\n was\u00a0also scheduled to\u00a0speak at the forum.\n\nMr. Musk called for dialogue between the U.S. and Russia at a time when relations\u00a0between the two nations\u00a0have deteriorated to\u00a0Cold War-era\u00a0lows. Mr. Musk said Kremlin\u00a0spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Peskov\n\n\n\n invited him to\u00a0participate in the forum.\n\u201cThere is a lot of talent and energy in Russia,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cThere should be more dialogue and communication between Russia and the United States.\u201d\nEarlier in 2021,\u00a0the billionaire entrepreneur invited\u00a0Russian President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n to join him for a chat on\u00a0the\u00a0social-media app Clubhouse. Mr. Peskov said Friday that such a talk could happen in the future.\nThe Russian market for electric cars is small though it has grown fast in recent years.\u00a0At the start of 2021,\u00a0there were\u00a0around 11,000 electric passenger cars registered in Russia,\u00a0of which\u00a0only 700 were Tesla models, according to data provider Autostat. The most popular model in Russia is the Nissan Leaf, with around 9,000 vehicles,\u00a0Autostat data shows.\nThe lack of charging infrastructure is one of the main issues holding back electric cars in Russia,\u00a0analysts say, noting that there are only around 400 charging stations across the country, which is the world\u2019s largest by territory. Still, the number of electric cars registered in Russia has grown by 71% over the past year,\u00a0according to\u00a0Autostat, mainly due to an abolition of import duties on electric cars from nearby countries.\nRussia\u00a0has no major electric car projects. Minister of Industry and Trade\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Denis Manturov\n\n\n\n said in March that private car maker Zetta was designing an experimental model and planned to launch production in 2021.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAt the forum, Mr.\u00a0Musk\u00a0said that in the future, all transport, apart from rockets,\u00a0would\u00a0be electric.\n\u201cI think we\u2019ll look back at internal combustion engine cars in the same way we look back on steam engines,\u201d\u00a0he said.\u00a0\u201cIt is happening very fast.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who also heads SpaceX,\u00a0formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said that humanity needed to become a multi-planet civilization\u00a0with \u201ctravel beyond the Solar System.\u201d He joked that he was an alien. \u201cWhere do you think I got all this technology from?\u201d he asked.\nWrite to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com Elon Musk raised the prospect of Russian-made Tesla cars, saying the electric-vehicle maker was considering opening a factory there as it looks to expand its production facilities globally. ",
        "author": "Georgi Kantchev"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Wants to Make Teslas in Russia (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6860",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-made-in-russia-elon-musk-says-its-possible-11621600327?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=22",
        "text": "\u201cI think we are close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia, that would be great,\u201d Mr. Musk said Friday, adding that he was also looking at expanding to\u00a0the former Soviet nation of\u00a0Kazakhstan,\u00a0and other neighboring states.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cOver time, we will look to have factories in other parts of the world,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThere were\u00a0around 11,000 electric passenger cars registered in Russia,\u00a0of which\u00a0only 700 were Teslas, at the start of 2021.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n evgenia novozhenina/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr.\u00a0Musk was speaking at a festival for students that attracts science and tech entrepreneurs,\u00a0and touched on everything from Mars exploration to religion and the future of humanity.\u00a0Apple Inc. co-founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Wozniak\n\n\n\n was\u00a0also scheduled to\u00a0speak at the forum.\n\nMr. Musk called for dialogue between the U.S. and Russia at a time when relations\u00a0between the two nations\u00a0have deteriorated to\u00a0Cold War-era\u00a0lows. Mr. Musk said Kremlin\u00a0spokesman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dmitry Peskov\n\n\n\n invited him to\u00a0participate in the forum.\n\u201cThere is a lot of talent and energy in Russia,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cThere should be more dialogue and communication between Russia and the United States.\u201d\nEarlier in 2021,\u00a0the billionaire entrepreneur invited\u00a0Russian President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n to join him for a chat on\u00a0the\u00a0social-media app Clubhouse. Mr. Peskov said Friday that such a talk could happen in the future.\nThe Russian market for electric cars is small though it has grown fast in recent years.\u00a0At the start of 2021,\u00a0there were\u00a0around 11,000 electric passenger cars registered in Russia,\u00a0of which\u00a0only 700 were Tesla models, according to data provider Autostat. The most popular model in Russia is the Nissan Leaf, with around 9,000 vehicles,\u00a0Autostat data shows.\nThe lack of charging infrastructure is one of the main issues holding back electric cars in Russia,\u00a0analysts say, noting that there are only around 400 charging stations across the country, which is the world\u2019s largest by territory. Still, the number of electric cars registered in Russia has grown by 71% over the past year,\u00a0according to\u00a0Autostat, mainly due to an abolition of import duties on electric cars from nearby countries.\nRussia\u00a0has no major electric car projects. Minister of Industry and Trade\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Denis Manturov\n\n\n\n said in March that private car maker Zetta was designing an experimental model and planned to launch production in 2021.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Technology A weekly digest of tech reviews, headlines, columns and your questions answered by WSJ's Personal Tech gurus. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAt the forum, Mr.\u00a0Musk\u00a0said that in the future, all transport, apart from rockets,\u00a0would\u00a0be electric.\n\u201cI think we\u2019ll look back at internal combustion engine cars in the same way we look back on steam engines,\u201d\u00a0he said.\u00a0\u201cIt is happening very fast.\u201d\nMr. Musk, who also heads SpaceX,\u00a0formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said that humanity needed to become a multi-planet civilization\u00a0with \u201ctravel beyond the Solar System.\u201d He joked that he was an alien. \u201cWhere do you think I got all this technology from?\u201d he asked.\nWrite to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com Elon Musk raised the prospect of Russian-made Tesla cars, saying the electric-vehicle maker was considering opening a factory there as it looks to expand its production facilities globally. ",
        "author": "Georgi Kantchev"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6861",
        "date": "2018-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=70",
        "text": "\u201cI don\u2019t see how this could hurt me,\u201d he said of vehicles on the slow-speed line. \u201cI want the cars to just keep moving.\u201d When a senior engineering manager involved with the system explained that it was a safety measure, Mr. Musk told him, \u201cGet out!\u201d Tesla said the manager was fired for other reasons. One of the world\u2019s most celebrated and controversial entrepreneurs, Mr. Musk operates as though he is the only one who can deliver on his boundless ambitions, in electric cars and solar power, as well as his grand missions to ferry people to Mars and fix Los Angeles traffic, said people who have worked for him. He craves perfection and can frustrate underlings by taking matters into his own hands, those people said. He asks a lot of questions but answers to no one, according to friends, associates and relatives. Dozens of senior executives have churned through Tesla, leaving him isolated. Judged even by the egomaniacal standards of Silicon Valley, this means that bets on Elon Musk\u2019s companies are, in fact, bets on Elon Musk. So far, they have paid off. Tesla\u2019s market value\u2014$50 billion-plus, even after a recent stock price drop\u2014rivals those of traditional U.S. car makers. His rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Inc., or SpaceX, is valued at more than $20 billion. To many investors and analysts, Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet on Aug. 7\u2014\u201cAm considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured\u201d\u2014and his decision 16 days later to scrap the plan, represent the other side of the coin: single-mindedness that can look like recklessness and even raise questions about Mr. Musk\u2019s fitness as chief executive. Federal securities regulators have started a formal investigation into whether Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet violated the law by misleading investors. Friends and family are concerned that Mr. Musk is fatigued and overworked. Mr. Musk said his actions and rapid decision-making can be misunderstood as erratic behavior. \u201cIt is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate,\u201d he said last weekend in a series of emails with The Wall Street Journal, \u201cbecause obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.\u201d Tesla said Mr. Musk, in a safety hat, had tapped, not headbutted, the car on the assembly line that day, and that the system was adjusted without jeopardizing safety.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAssembly robots on the Model 3 assembly line in June at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brian Molyneaux for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nShort sellers have amplified attacks against Tesla and Mr. Musk over the past months, especially as Tesla struggled to meet production goals for its Model 3, the vehicle intended to bring electric cars to the masses. The will-he, won\u2019t-he drama that made headlines in August broadened criticism of Mr. Musk. \u201cEveryone that believes in the company would prefer the controversy incited by Elon would be toned down, but you can\u2019t have Tesla without Elon Musk to drive it,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brett Winton,\n\n\n\n research director at ARK Invest, a New York-based investment firm that owns about $182 million worth of Tesla stock. Mr. Musk, supremely confident, invoked the language of Las Vegas gambling to explain his go-private tweet and subsequent about-face. \u201cIf the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,\u201d Mr. Musk said in emails to the Journal. \u201cThis is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.\u201d The question now is whether Mr. Musk\u2014however brilliant, charismatic and inspiring\u2014can continue to keep the odds in his favor. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk in 2011 holds a news conference about renovating the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California for use by SpaceX.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nHigh-speed success Mr. Musk, 47 years old, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at roughly $20 billion, and his allies warn about betting against him. \u201cHe sets goals beyond people\u2019s capacity because his capacity is so much greater than everyone else\u2019s,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Haldeman,\n\n\n\n a Southern California neurologist and Mr. Musk\u2019s uncle. Risk-taking runs in Mr. Musk\u2019s family. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Joshua Haldeman, left Canada for South Africa when his children were young. The grandfather later piloted one of the first flights from South Africa to Australia and searched for the Lost City of the Kalahari, a desert ruin. As a child growing up in South Africa, Mr. Musk had a voracious appetite for books and the capacity to devour information. \u201cThe curiosity he had was a driving force,\u201d his uncle, Dr. Haldeman, recalled\u2014whether about medicine, buildi The visionary entrepreneur seeks to ferry mankind to Mars and investors to prosperity. His ego may be all that stands in the way. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6862",
        "date": "2018-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=71",
        "text": "\u201cI don\u2019t see how this could hurt me,\u201d he said of vehicles on the slow-speed line. \u201cI want the cars to just keep moving.\u201d When a senior engineering manager involved with the system explained that it was a safety measure, Mr. Musk told him, \u201cGet out!\u201d Tesla said the manager was fired for other reasons. One of the world\u2019s most celebrated and controversial entrepreneurs, Mr. Musk operates as though he is the only one who can deliver on his boundless ambitions, in electric cars and solar power, as well as his grand missions to ferry people to Mars and fix Los Angeles traffic, said people who have worked for him. He craves perfection and can frustrate underlings by taking matters into his own hands, those people said. He asks a lot of questions but answers to no one, according to friends, associates and relatives. Dozens of senior executives have churned through Tesla, leaving him isolated. Judged even by the egomaniacal standards of Silicon Valley, this means that bets on Elon Musk\u2019s companies are, in fact, bets on Elon Musk. So far, they have paid off. Tesla\u2019s market value\u2014$50 billion-plus, even after a recent stock price drop\u2014rivals those of traditional U.S. car makers. His rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Inc., or SpaceX, is valued at more than $20 billion. To many investors and analysts, Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet on Aug. 7\u2014\u201cAm considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured\u201d\u2014and his decision 16 days later to scrap the plan, represent the other side of the coin: single-mindedness that can look like recklessness and even raise questions about Mr. Musk\u2019s fitness as chief executive. Federal securities regulators have started a formal investigation into whether Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet violated the law by misleading investors. Friends and family are concerned that Mr. Musk is fatigued and overworked. Mr. Musk said his actions and rapid decision-making can be misunderstood as erratic behavior. \u201cIt is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate,\u201d he said last weekend in a series of emails with The Wall Street Journal, \u201cbecause obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.\u201d Tesla said Mr. Musk, in a safety hat, had tapped, not headbutted, the car on the assembly line that day, and that the system was adjusted without jeopardizing safety.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAssembly robots on the Model 3 assembly line in June at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brian Molyneaux for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nShort sellers have amplified attacks against Tesla and Mr. Musk over the past months, especially as Tesla struggled to meet production goals for its Model 3, the vehicle intended to bring electric cars to the masses. The will-he, won\u2019t-he drama that made headlines in August broadened criticism of Mr. Musk. \u201cEveryone that believes in the company would prefer the controversy incited by Elon would be toned down, but you can\u2019t have Tesla without Elon Musk to drive it,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brett Winton,\n\n\n\n research director at ARK Invest, a New York-based investment firm that owns about $182 million worth of Tesla stock. Mr. Musk, supremely confident, invoked the language of Las Vegas gambling to explain his go-private tweet and subsequent about-face. \u201cIf the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,\u201d Mr. Musk said in emails to the Journal. \u201cThis is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.\u201d The question now is whether Mr. Musk\u2014however brilliant, charismatic and inspiring\u2014can continue to keep the odds in his favor. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk in 2011 holds a news conference about renovating the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California for use by SpaceX.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nHigh-speed success Mr. Musk, 47 years old, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at roughly $20 billion, and his allies warn about betting against him. \u201cHe sets goals beyond people\u2019s capacity because his capacity is so much greater than everyone else\u2019s,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Haldeman,\n\n\n\n a Southern California neurologist and Mr. Musk\u2019s uncle. Risk-taking runs in Mr. Musk\u2019s family. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Joshua Haldeman, left Canada for South Africa when his children were young. The grandfather later piloted one of the first flights from South Africa to Australia and searched for the Lost City of the Kalahari, a desert ruin. As a child growing up in South Africa, Mr. Musk had a voracious appetite for books and the capacity to devour information. \u201cThe curiosity he had was a driving force,\u201d his uncle, Dr. Haldeman, recalled\u2014whether about medicine, building a business or commercial farming.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s brother, Kimbal, during an appearance at the Milken Institute Global Conference in 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nHis childhood was also marked by difficulties. His father, an engineer with an interest in an African mining operation, and mother, a model with master\u2019s degrees in dietetics and nutritional science, divorced when he was 8.\n\n\n Elon\u2019s Orbit The entrepreneur's grand bets have reaped a fortune worth more than $20 billion Zip2 CO-founder, CTO Web publishing software company founded in 1995. Sold in 1999 to Compaq for about $300 million, netting Musk $22 million. X.com Co-founder, CEO Online payments company founded in 1999. Later became PayPal and sold to eBay for $1.4 billion, yielding Musk over $100 million. SpaceX CO-founder, CTO, CEO Started in 2002. Musk owned 54% of the $21 billion rocket company as of late 2016. Tesla CEO The electric car company started in 2003 and is valued at $53 billion. Musk owns about 20%. SolarCity Chairman The solar panel company was co-founded by Musk\u2019s cousins in 2006. He owned 22% in 2016 when it sold to Tesla for more than $2 billion. Neuralink and Boring Co. co-founder, CEO Musk started the brain computer company and announced the tunnel digging startup in 2016. Note: Tesla valuation as of Aug. 30. Sources: the companies; Forbes (net worth) \n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s bookishness seemed to make him a target at his all-boys school in Pretoria, Dr. Haldeman said, where classmates distinguished themselves in such sports as rugby and cricket. Mr. Musk\u2019s brother, Kimbal, about two years younger, became his best friend and confidant. At age 17, Mr. Musk moved to Canada and later enrolled at Queen\u2019s University. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and economics. He hosted house parties for as many as 500 people, charging $5 to $10 at the door, said Adeo Ressi, a former college roommate. During the 1990s dot-com boom, the Musk brothers started an internet business called Zip2, which helped newspapers go online. Four years later, in 1999, they sold it to Compaq Computer. At age 27, Mr. Musk walked away with $22 million. He spent $1 million on a McLaren F1 supercar and bet the rest on his next startup, X.com, which became \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal.\n While on vacation in Africa, Mr. Musk contracted a severe case of malaria. The prospect of dying prompted Mr. Musk to reconsider his life, family members said, and he concluded, with some grandiosity, that he could save humanity by colonizing Mars and creating sustainable transportation. \nEBay Inc.\n\n\n bought PayPal for $1.4 billion in 2002. As the largest shareholder, Mr. Musk collected more than $100 million. He was 31.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn October 2000, Peter Thiel, left, then the chairman of X.Com Corp., and Elon Musk, at the time the company\u2019s president and CEO.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Paul Sakuma/ASSOCIATED PRESS\n \n\n\n\nMr. Musk shoveled most of the money into SpaceX, the rocket company he hoped would help one day colonize Mars; Tesla, the auto maker that would make internal-combustion engines obsolete; and SolarCity, to reduce the world\u2019s reliance on grid electricity. Wealth didn\u2019t seem a singular goal. When Tesla veered near bankruptcy in 2008, Mr. Musk used his money to save the company. He still believes his work has no less a mission than saving humanity. Mr. Musk splits his time between Southern California, where SpaceX is located, and Tesla in Northern California, sometimes working as many as 100 to 120 hours a week, according to Mr. Musk and people close to him. He expects much the same of his employees and sets a high-profile example. At Tesla, Mr. Musk works long hours on the factory floor. People who have worked under Mr. Musk say he leads his companies toward the impossible. Mr. Musk surprised the auto industry with Tesla\u2019s Model S sedan, persuading consumers to buy electric cars because they were sexy. Mr. Musk attracted top engineers who adopted as religion his goal of replacing gas-powered cars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk discusses the features of Tesla\u2019s Roadster, the company\u2019s flagship electric sports car, during a talk in February 2008.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ryan Anson/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nHe also is described as an obsessive taskmaster. Former executives say they had to be prepared to know the smallest details. If there was a problem on the assembly line, they said, it was best to show it to him in person. When the Model X sport-utility vehicle was having problems with the back seats, Mr. Musk helped engineers design a new bracket, a person familiar with the matter said. He spent years on the door handles for the Model S sedan, another person said. For the Model 3, he became consumed with automation, which he later acknowledged contributed to months of delays. Some former employees said they preferred communicating with Mr. Musk by email. After pushing send, they said, they would wait nervously, hoping for a two-letter response that said: \u201cOK.\u201d A lengthy response from Mr. Musk was likely criticism or entirely new marching orders, one former employee said. He also could summon managers to the factory at all hours of the night, former workers recalled. Senior managers said they found Mr. Musk inspiring and sometimes funny. But when the boss was in a bad mood, they avoided proposing ideas or raising concerns. Some scheduled important meetings after a successful SpaceX rocket launch, when Mr. Musk was buoyant, one of these employees said. \u201cAs long as he kept nodding, I just needed to continue to speak,\u201d a former manager said. \u201cAnd as soon as he stopped nodding, that\u2019s when you needed to shut up.\u201d Others said they tried to anticipate his mood by following news of his personal life, even tracking the hair of actress \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Talulah Riley\n\n\n\n when she was his second wife, believing Mr. Musk was happiest when her hair color approached platinum.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk in June 2010 with then-fianc\u00e9e Talulah Riley in New York.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nGoing it alone At SpaceX, Mr. Musk has relied on \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n company president, to run day-to-day operations. The rocket business is more predictable than Tesla: It has far fewer customers, gets paid before a launch and is privately held, reducing investor pressures. The executive team at Tesla that Mr. Musk once relied upon for information is depleted. More than 50 vice presidents or higher have left the company in the past two years. Mr. Musk hasn\u2019t so far found a second-in-command with the expertise or vision that appeals to him, people familiar with his thinking said.\n\n\n Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, during an Aug. 13 appearance with NASA astronaut Bob Behnken at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. At right, Jon McNeill, Tesla Inc.'s president of global sales and service, speaking in Beijing last year.Photos: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News; Xinhua/ZUMA Press\n\n\nMr. Musk had long told his executives he didn\u2019t want to be CEO and planned to serve only as long as it took to bring Tesla up to speed, leaving him to focus on product development, people familiar with his comments said. Aides debated who would take his place: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Field,\n\n\n\n the engineering chief, or \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon McNeill,\n\n\n\n the sales chief. Both men left Tesla this year, and Mr. Musk assumed their roles instead of hiring replacements. Tesla said neither man was being groomed for CEO. Mr. Musk said he doesn\u2019t know of anyone better to replace him, in a recent interview with the Journal. \u201cThis is not me clinging to be CEO,\u201d he said. He has told aides he worried about the risks to Tesla if he stepped down. The job takes a toll. Mr. Musk struggles with sleep and has talked about his use of the sleeping drug Ambien. When the drug doesn\u2019t work, according to a person familiar with his usage, fatigue saps his productivity the next day. His five boys\u2014triplets and twins with his first wife, Justine Musk\u2014help relieve his stress when they are all at home in Bel-Air, Calif., this person said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk's market-moving tweet about possibly taking Tesla private is just the latest erratic move in a tumultuous year for the CEO. Photo illustration: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWhen Tesla struggled to ramp up production of the Model X a few years ago, one person recalled Mr. Musk calling an impromptu huddle with workers at the end of the assembly line. The boss gave his thanks, and he choked up when acknowledging the time they sacrificed from their families. \u201cI\u2019m missing the important days of my family as well,\u201d Mr. Musk said. Over the years, Mr. Musk\u2019s personal life has taken on a public dimension. In 2012, he indicated in a tweet that he was divorcing Ms. Riley. Tesla\u2019s stock dipped 2% that day, and the company\u2019s communications chief warned him about tweeting news of his personal life, according to former employees. In a 1999 CNN interview, after selling Zip2 and making his first fortune, Mr. Musk is shown taking delivery of his McLaren F1. \u201cI\u2019d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019d be cool.\u201d His wish came true in November 2017, and Mr. Musk seems to enjoy his celebrity. \u201cIron Man\u201d director \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Favreau\n\n\n\n and actor \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Downey Jr.\n\n\n\n spoke often with Mr. Musk as they developed the movie\u2019s \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tony Stark\n\n\n\n character.\n\n\n Director Jon Favreau, left, and Elon Musk at the 2012 Vanity Fair Oscar party in 2012. Right, a boring machine, part of Mr. Musk's plan to create an underground transportation system that will help solve Los Angeles-area traffic problems.Photos: Jeff Vespa/WireImage/Getty Images; Boring Company/ZUMA Press\n\n\nDirector \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.J. Abrams,\n\n\n\n whose movies include \u201cMission: Impossible III\u201d and \u201cStar Wars: The Force Awakens,\u201d said he and Mr. Musk often trade emails and socialize every few months. When Mr. Abrams read this year that Mr. Musk had dug a tunnel near Los Angeles to demonstrate a plan to reduce traffic, Mr. Abrams emailed and said, \u201cI know this sounds bad, but I want to come see your hole.\u201d The director visited SpaceX\u2019s property and toured a tunnel dug for Mr. Musk\u2019s Boring Co., which seeks to build high-speed, underground transportation. Mr. Abrams designed a logo and asked his production company to put it on a baseball cap. \u201cNext thing I knew, I saw a photograph of the Boring Company drill with the logo emblazoned on it.\u201d Mr. Abrams said. \u201cI was thrilled.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nClaire Elise Boucher, known as the pop musician Grimes, shared the spotlight with Elon Musk at the 2018 Costume Institute Benefit Gala in May.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Starmax/ZUMA PRESS.\n \n\n\n\nSince at least spring, Mr. Musk has dated \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Claire Elise Boucher,\n\n\n\n the pop musician known as Grimes. For her new album, she planned to collaborate with New York-based singer \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Azealia\n\n\n\n Banks, according to Ms. Banks\u2019s Instagram feed. Ms. Banks suggested on Instagram after the blockbuster Aug. 7 tweet that Mr. Musk used LSD while tweeting, a claim described by a spokesperson for Mr. Musk as \u201ccomplete nonsense.\u201d Ms. Banks later apologized on Instagram. Representatives of Ms. Banks and Ms. Boucher declined to comment. The Tesla board wasn\u2019t happy with Mr. Musk\u2019s use of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter,\n\n\n according to a person familiar with the matter, and told him to be more careful. Earlier this summer, he implied in a tweet that a British cave explorer who helped rescue a youth soccer team in a Thailand cave was a pedophile. He later apologized. Mr. Musk, while freely letting loose his own tweets, finds time to police critics. He looks for the Twitter hashtag $TSLA, populated by short sellers, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Musk believes short sellers and critics aren\u2019t just betting against Tesla, they are trying to undermine his \u201cgood intentions in the world,\u201d said Mr. Ressi, his college friend. Mr. Musk told the Journal that in July he emailed \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Herbert Diess,\n\n\n\n chief executive of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Volkswagen AG\n\n\n , to ask if a Volkswagen employee was criticizing Tesla on Twitter, using a fake name. The Twitter account ended up belonging to the brother of a Volkswagen worker. \u201cThey would definitely be playing with fire, given that they are still paying the fine from their last emissions cheating scandal,\u201d Mr. Musk said. \u201cDiess replied saying it was the guy\u2019s brother. That\u2019s pretty much it.\u201d Mr. Diess declined to comment. Volkswagen said, \u201cMr. Diess\u2019s aides handled the details.\u201d This summer, Mr. Musk also went after Lawrence Fossi, who used the online moniker \u201cMontana Skeptic\u201d to post criticism of Tesla both on Twitter and Seeking Alpha, a crowdsourced content service for financial markets.\u00a0 On July 23, Mr. Musk sent a text to the top executive at Mr. Fossi\u2019s company, asking the boss if he knew his employee \u201cwas obsessively trashing Tesla via a pseudonym.\u201c Mr. Fossi, who voluntarily deactivated his Twitter account soon after and stopped writing for Seeking Alpha, said he was surprised Mr. Musk would go to such lengths to squelch criticism: \u201cI\u2019m a nobody and he calls my employer?\u201d \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Liz Hoffman,\n\n\n\n Susan Pulliam and William Boston contributed to this article.\n\n\nRelated Elon Musk\u2019s Twitter Habit, Dissected Inside the Unraveling of Elon Musk\u2019s Tesla Buyout Tesla\u2019s Challenges Are Back in Spotlight \n\n\nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com, Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com and Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com The visionary entrepreneur seeks to ferry mankind to Mars and investors to prosperity. His ego may be all that stands in the way. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6863",
        "date": "2018-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=64",
        "text": "\u201cI don\u2019t see how this could hurt me,\u201d he said of vehicles on the slow-speed line. \u201cI want the cars to just keep moving.\u201d When a senior engineering manager involved with the system explained that it was a safety measure, Mr. Musk told him, \u201cGet out!\u201d Tesla said the manager was fired for other reasons. One of the world\u2019s most celebrated and controversial entrepreneurs, Mr. Musk operates as though he is the only one who can deliver on his boundless ambitions, in electric cars and solar power, as well as his grand missions to ferry people to Mars and fix Los Angeles traffic, said people who have worked for him. He craves perfection and can frustrate underlings by taking matters into his own hands, those people said. He asks a lot of questions but answers to no one, according to friends, associates and relatives. Dozens of senior executives have churned through Tesla, leaving him isolated. Judged even by the egomaniacal standards of Silicon Valley, this means that bets on Elon Musk\u2019s companies are, in fact, bets on Elon Musk. So far, they have paid off. Tesla\u2019s market value\u2014$50 billion-plus, even after a recent stock price drop\u2014rivals those of traditional U.S. car makers. His rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Inc., or SpaceX, is valued at more than $20 billion. To many investors and analysts, Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet on Aug. 7\u2014\u201cAm considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured\u201d\u2014and his decision 16 days later to scrap the plan, represent the other side of the coin: single-mindedness that can look like recklessness and even raise questions about Mr. Musk\u2019s fitness as chief executive. Federal securities regulators have started a formal investigation into whether Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet violated the law by misleading investors. Friends and family are concerned that Mr. Musk is fatigued and overworked. Mr. Musk said his actions and rapid decision-making can be misunderstood as erratic behavior. \u201cIt is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate,\u201d he said last weekend in a series of emails with The Wall Street Journal, \u201cbecause obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.\u201d Tesla said Mr. Musk, in a safety hat, had tapped, not headbutted, the car on the assembly line that day, and that the system was adjusted without jeopardizing safety.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAssembly robots on the Model 3 assembly line in June at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brian Molyneaux for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nShort sellers have amplified attacks against Tesla and Mr. Musk over the past months, especially as Tesla struggled to meet production goals for its Model 3, the vehicle intended to bring electric cars to the masses. The will-he, won\u2019t-he drama that made headlines in August broadened criticism of Mr. Musk. \u201cEveryone that believes in the company would prefer the controversy incited by Elon would be toned down, but you can\u2019t have Tesla without Elon Musk to drive it,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brett Winton,\n\n\n\n research director at ARK Invest, a New York-based investment firm that owns about $182 million worth of Tesla stock. Mr. Musk, supremely confident, invoked the language of Las Vegas gambling to explain his go-private tweet and subsequent about-face. \u201cIf the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,\u201d Mr. Musk said in emails to the Journal. \u201cThis is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.\u201d The question now is whether Mr. Musk\u2014however brilliant, charismatic and inspiring\u2014can continue to keep the odds in his favor. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk in 2011 holds a news conference about renovating the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California for use by SpaceX.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nHigh-speed success Mr. Musk, 47 years old, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at roughly $20 billion, and his allies warn about betting against him. \u201cHe sets goals beyond people\u2019s capacity because his capacity is so much greater than everyone else\u2019s,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Haldeman,\n\n\n\n a Southern California neurologist and Mr. Musk\u2019s uncle. Risk-taking runs in Mr. Musk\u2019s family. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Joshua Haldeman, left Canada for South Africa when his children were young. The grandfather later piloted one of the first flights from South Africa to Australia and searched for the Lost City of the Kalahari, a desert ruin. As a child growing up in South Africa, Mr. Musk had a voracious appetite for books and the capacity to devour information. \u201cThe curiosity he had was a driving force,\u201d his uncle, Dr. Haldeman, recalled\u2014whether about medicine, buildi The visionary entrepreneur seeks to ferry mankind to Mars and investors to prosperity. His ego may be all that stands in the way. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Faces His Own Worst Enemy (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6864",
        "date": "2018-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-faces-his-own-worst-enemy-1535727324?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=88",
        "text": "\u201cI don\u2019t see how this could hurt me,\u201d he said of vehicles on the slow-speed line. \u201cI want the cars to just keep moving.\u201d When a senior engineering manager involved with the system explained that it was a safety measure, Mr. Musk told him, \u201cGet out!\u201d Tesla said the manager was fired for other reasons. One of the world\u2019s most celebrated and controversial entrepreneurs, Mr. Musk operates as though he is the only one who can deliver on his boundless ambitions, in electric cars and solar power, as well as his grand missions to ferry people to Mars and fix Los Angeles traffic, said people who have worked for him. He craves perfection and can frustrate underlings by taking matters into his own hands, those people said. He asks a lot of questions but answers to no one, according to friends, associates and relatives. Dozens of senior executives have churned through Tesla, leaving him isolated. Judged even by the egomaniacal standards of Silicon Valley, this means that bets on Elon Musk\u2019s companies are, in fact, bets on Elon Musk. So far, they have paid off. Tesla\u2019s market value\u2014$50 billion-plus, even after a recent stock price drop\u2014rivals those of traditional U.S. car makers. His rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Inc., or SpaceX, is valued at more than $20 billion. To many investors and analysts, Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet on Aug. 7\u2014\u201cAm considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured\u201d\u2014and his decision 16 days later to scrap the plan, represent the other side of the coin: single-mindedness that can look like recklessness and even raise questions about Mr. Musk\u2019s fitness as chief executive. Federal securities regulators have started a formal investigation into whether Mr. Musk\u2019s tweet violated the law by misleading investors. Friends and family are concerned that Mr. Musk is fatigued and overworked. Mr. Musk said his actions and rapid decision-making can be misunderstood as erratic behavior. \u201cIt is better to make many decisions per unit time with a slightly higher error rate, than few with a slightly lower error rate,\u201d he said last weekend in a series of emails with The Wall Street Journal, \u201cbecause obviously one of your future right decisions can be to reverse an earlier wrong one, provided the earlier one was not catastrophic, which they rarely are.\u201d Tesla said Mr. Musk, in a safety hat, had tapped, not headbutted, the car on the assembly line that day, and that the system was adjusted without jeopardizing safety.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAssembly robots on the Model 3 assembly line in June at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Brian Molyneaux for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nShort sellers have amplified attacks against Tesla and Mr. Musk over the past months, especially as Tesla struggled to meet production goals for its Model 3, the vehicle intended to bring electric cars to the masses. The will-he, won\u2019t-he drama that made headlines in August broadened criticism of Mr. Musk. \u201cEveryone that believes in the company would prefer the controversy incited by Elon would be toned down, but you can\u2019t have Tesla without Elon Musk to drive it,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brett Winton,\n\n\n\n research director at ARK Invest, a New York-based investment firm that owns about $182 million worth of Tesla stock. Mr. Musk, supremely confident, invoked the language of Las Vegas gambling to explain his go-private tweet and subsequent about-face. \u201cIf the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,\u201d Mr. Musk said in emails to the Journal. \u201cThis is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.\u201d The question now is whether Mr. Musk\u2014however brilliant, charismatic and inspiring\u2014can continue to keep the odds in his favor. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk in 2011 holds a news conference about renovating the launchpad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California for use by SpaceX.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gene Blevins/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nHigh-speed success Mr. Musk, 47 years old, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at roughly $20 billion, and his allies warn about betting against him. \u201cHe sets goals beyond people\u2019s capacity because his capacity is so much greater than everyone else\u2019s,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Haldeman,\n\n\n\n a Southern California neurologist and Mr. Musk\u2019s uncle. Risk-taking runs in Mr. Musk\u2019s family. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Joshua Haldeman, left Canada for South Africa when his children were young. The grandfather later piloted one of the first flights from South Africa to Australia and searched for the Lost City of the Kalahari, a desert ruin. As a child growing up in South Africa, Mr. Musk had a voracious appetite for books and the capacity to devour information. \u201cThe curiosity he had was a driving force,\u201d his uncle, Dr. Haldeman, recalled\u2014whether about medicine, buildi The visionary entrepreneur seeks to ferry mankind to Mars and investors to prosperity. His ego may be all that stands in the way. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins, Tripp Mickle and Rolfe Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Tweets About Mysterious Tunnel Project (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6865",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweets-about-mysterious-tunnel-project-1485407280?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=102",
        "text": "\u201cExciting progress on the tunnel front,\u201d he said on Twitter on Wednesday. \u201cPlan to start digging in a month or so.\u201d\nThe cryptic statements have launched speculation about another fantastic transportation idea from Mr. Musk, who builds orbital rockets at his Space Exploration Technologies company, better known as SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles International Airport.\n\n\nBut the equivocal tweets leave his tunnel plan completely unclear.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s tweets didn\u2019t hint at the tunnel\u2019s dimensions, where it would go, whether it would it be for his electric Tesla automobiles, subway trains, his futuristic \u201chyperloop\u201d tube transportation gizmo, or something entirely different.\nIn the mid-December tweets that started the fuss, Mr. Musk named his tunneling enterprise\u2014\u201cIt shall be called \u2018The Boring Company\u2019\u201d\u2014and gave its mission statement: \u201cBoring, it\u2019s what we do.\u201d But he has been short on details.\nAnother tweet indicated the starting point would be \u201cacross from my desk at SpaceX. Crenshaw (Boulevard) and the 105 Freeway, which is 5 mins from LAX.\u201d\nThere was no immediate response to an email seeking comment from Hawthorne\u2019s interim city manager, who is also the public-works director and city engineer.\nThere has been no mention of any of the necessities of major transportation tunneling projects such as environmental impact reports, public hearings, geotechnical reports, surveys of existing underground infrastructure, noise and vibration studies.\nSuch projects require yearslong time horizons and boring machines that weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. A few years ago, when contractor Traylor Brothers Inc. went to work on a downtown regional connector for Los Angeles County transit lines, the company noted that just completing the tunnel-boring machine would take about eight months.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 the Associated Press Weeks after tweeting that traffic was driving him nuts, the SpaceX and Tesla founder says he plans to start digging a tunnel in a month or so. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Tweets About Mysterious Tunnel Project (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6866",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweets-about-mysterious-tunnel-project-1485407280?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=89",
        "text": "\u201cExciting progress on the tunnel front,\u201d he said on Twitter on Wednesday. \u201cPlan to start digging in a month or so.\u201d\nThe cryptic statements have launched speculation about another fantastic transportation idea from Mr. Musk, who builds orbital rockets at his Space Exploration Technologies company, better known as SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles International Airport.\n\n\nBut the equivocal tweets leave his tunnel plan completely unclear.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s tweets didn\u2019t hint at the tunnel\u2019s dimensions, where it would go, whether it would it be for his electric Tesla automobiles, subway trains, his futuristic \u201chyperloop\u201d tube transportation gizmo, or something entirely different.\nIn the mid-December tweets that started the fuss, Mr. Musk named his tunneling enterprise\u2014\u201cIt shall be called \u2018The Boring Company\u2019\u201d\u2014and gave its mission statement: \u201cBoring, it\u2019s what we do.\u201d But he has been short on details.\nAnother tweet indicated the starting point would be \u201cacross from my desk at SpaceX. Crenshaw (Boulevard) and the 105 Freeway, which is 5 mins from LAX.\u201d\nThere was no immediate response to an email seeking comment from Hawthorne\u2019s interim city manager, who is also the public-works director and city engineer.\nThere has been no mention of any of the necessities of major transportation tunneling projects such as environmental impact reports, public hearings, geotechnical reports, surveys of existing underground infrastructure, noise and vibration studies.\nSuch projects require yearslong time horizons and boring machines that weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. A few years ago, when contractor Traylor Brothers Inc. went to work on a downtown regional connector for Los Angeles County transit lines, the company noted that just completing the tunnel-boring machine would take about eight months.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 the Associated Press Weeks after tweeting that traffic was driving him nuts, the SpaceX and Tesla founder says he plans to start digging a tunnel in a month or so. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Tweets About Mysterious Tunnel Project (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6867",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-tweets-about-mysterious-tunnel-project-1485407280?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=132",
        "text": "\u201cExciting progress on the tunnel front,\u201d he said on Twitter on Wednesday. \u201cPlan to start digging in a month or so.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe cryptic statements have launched speculation about another fantastic transportation idea from Mr. Musk, who builds orbital rockets at his Space Exploration Technologies company, better known as SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles International Airport.\n\n\nBut the equivocal tweets leave his tunnel plan completely unclear.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s tweets didn\u2019t hint at the tunnel\u2019s dimensions, where it would go, whether it would it be for his electric Tesla automobiles, subway trains, his futuristic \u201chyperloop\u201d tube transportation gizmo, or something entirely different.\nIn the mid-December tweets that started the fuss, Mr. Musk named his tunneling enterprise\u2014\u201cIt shall be called \u2018The Boring Company\u2019\u201d\u2014and gave its mission statement: \u201cBoring, it\u2019s what we do.\u201d But he has been short on details.\nAnother tweet indicated the starting point would be \u201cacross from my desk at SpaceX. Crenshaw (Boulevard) and the 105 Freeway, which is 5 mins from LAX.\u201d\nThere was no immediate response to an email seeking comment from Hawthorne\u2019s interim city manager, who is also the public-works director and city engineer.\nThere has been no mention of any of the necessities of major transportation tunneling projects such as environmental impact reports, public hearings, geotechnical reports, surveys of existing underground infrastructure, noise and vibration studies.\nSuch projects require yearslong time horizons and boring machines that weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. A few years ago, when contractor Traylor Brothers Inc. went to work on a downtown regional connector for Los Angeles County transit lines, the company noted that just completing the tunnel-boring machine would take about eight months.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 the Associated Press Weeks after tweeting that traffic was driving him nuts, the SpaceX and Tesla founder says he plans to start digging a tunnel in a month or so. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rockets Were Imperiled by Contractor\u2019s Falsified Reports, Prosecutors Say (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6868",
        "date": "2019-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-rockets-were-imperiled-by-falsified-reports-prosecutors-say-11558576047?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=55",
        "text": "The alleged fraud, involving what authorities describe as flight-critical parts for the company\u2019s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, occurred over a roughly 10-month period through early 2018.\nNASA, the Air Force and other federal agencies have contracted to use SpaceX rockets for a range of missions. Mr. Smalley was accused of falsifying inspectors\u2019 signatures on at least 38 reports on parts for the Falcon rockets. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMr. Smalley, 41 years old, appeared before a federal judge Thursday afternoon in Rochester. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful, and his attorney didn\u2019t return a call. \n\nAccording to the government, Mr. Smalley acted alone to falsify the inspection reports. In an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Smalley estimated he forged signatures on reports about 15 to 30 times, and falsified perhaps one or two certifications, according to an affidavit from an agent with NASA\u2019s office of inspector general.\nAt least 76 parts that were either rejected or never inspected by SpaceX\u2019s quality assurance contractor were shipped to the company, according to the affidavit.\nIn January 2018, an audit by SpaceX\u2019s quality assurance contractor, SQA Services Inc., of inspection reports and certifications for parts from PMI showed multiple documents had been falsified, according to the affidavit.\nA spokeswoman for SpaceX declined to comment, and SQA didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nIn February 2018, a top attorney at the NASA unit focused on rocket launches grew concerned that the agency\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission was going to involve products with falsified inspections and certifications, according to the affidavit. The mission, using a Falcon 9 rocket, was launched in April 2018. \nNASA didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. A representative from the inspector general\u2019s office for the agency declined comment.\nSeven NASA space flights, two Air Force space missions and one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration space mission involved parts SpaceX purchased from PMI, according to the affidavit.\nMr. Smalley was able to circumvent a protocol that required SQA to inspect all parts from PMI before they were shipped, the affidavit said. \nWhen a PMI part failed SQA\u2019s inspection, SpaceX was supposed to be notified of the results and the manufacturer would have to rework the part. However, Mr. Smalley realized he could falsify inspection materials and ship the faulty parts to SpaceX, the affidavit said. \nMr. Smalley took the act of forgery to a \u201cpotentially catastrophic level with the potential to not only cost millions of dollars, but also jeopardize years of irreplicable work,\u201d FBI Buffalo Special Agent-in-Charge Gary Loeffert said in a statement.\nSpaceX terminated its contract with PMI, which subsequently closed down because it lost that business and laid off about 35 people, the affidavit said. Executives at PMI\u2019s parent company, BAM Enterprises Inc., couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk introduced e-commerce mogul Yusaku Maezawa at a news conference Monday in California. The Japanese billionaire, who will be the first paying passenger for SpaceX\u2019s planned 2023 trip around the moon, said up to eight artists will join him. Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters (Originally published Sept. 18, 2018)\n \n\n\nWrite to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com An engineer who was responsible for ensuring the quality of parts for Elon Musk\u2019s space venture has been charged with falsifying inspection reports. ",
        "author": "Maria Armental and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rockets Were Imperiled by Contractor\u2019s Falsified Reports, Prosecutors Say (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6869",
        "date": "2019-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-rockets-were-imperiled-by-falsified-reports-prosecutors-say-11558576047?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=55",
        "text": "The alleged fraud, involving what authorities describe as flight-critical parts for the company\u2019s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, occurred over a roughly 10-month period through early 2018.\nNASA, the Air Force and other federal agencies have contracted to use SpaceX rockets for a range of missions. Mr. Smalley was accused of falsifying inspectors\u2019 signatures on at least 38 reports on parts for the Falcon rockets. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMr. Smalley, 41 years old, appeared before a federal judge Thursday afternoon in Rochester. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful, and his attorney didn\u2019t return a call. \n\nAccording to the government, Mr. Smalley acted alone to falsify the inspection reports. In an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Smalley estimated he forged signatures on reports about 15 to 30 times, and falsified perhaps one or two certifications, according to an affidavit from an agent with NASA\u2019s office of inspector general.\nAt least 76 parts that were either rejected or never inspected by SpaceX\u2019s quality assurance contractor were shipped to the company, according to the affidavit.\nIn January 2018, an audit by SpaceX\u2019s quality assurance contractor, SQA Services Inc., of inspection reports and certifications for parts from PMI showed multiple documents had been falsified, according to the affidavit.\nA spokeswoman for SpaceX declined to comment, and SQA didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nIn February 2018, a top attorney at the NASA unit focused on rocket launches grew concerned that the agency\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission was going to involve products with falsified inspections and certifications, according to the affidavit. The mission, using a Falcon 9 rocket, was launched in April 2018. \nNASA didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. A representative from the inspector general\u2019s office for the agency declined comment.\nSeven NASA space flights, two Air Force space missions and one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration space mission involved parts SpaceX purchased from PMI, according to the affidavit.\nMr. Smalley was able to circumvent a protocol that required SQA to inspect all parts from PMI before they were shipped, the affidavit said. \nWhen a PMI part failed SQA\u2019s inspection, SpaceX was supposed to be notified of the results and the manufacturer would have to rework the part. However, Mr. Smalley realized he could falsify inspection materials and ship the faulty parts to SpaceX, the affidavit said. \nMr. Smalley took the act of forgery to a \u201cpotentially catastrophic level with the potential to not only cost millions of dollars, but also jeopardize years of irreplicable work,\u201d FBI Buffalo Special Agent-in-Charge Gary Loeffert said in a statement.\nSpaceX terminated its contract with PMI, which subsequently closed down because it lost that business and laid off about 35 people, the affidavit said. Executives at PMI\u2019s parent company, BAM Enterprises Inc., couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk introduced e-commerce mogul Yusaku Maezawa at a news conference Monday in California. The Japanese billionaire, who will be the first paying passenger for SpaceX\u2019s planned 2023 trip around the moon, said up to eight artists will join him. Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters (Originally published Sept. 18, 2018)\n \n\n\nWrite to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com An engineer who was responsible for ensuring the quality of parts for Elon Musk\u2019s space venture has been charged with falsifying inspection reports. ",
        "author": "Maria Armental and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Rockets Were Imperiled by Contractor\u2019s Falsified Reports, Prosecutors Say (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6870",
        "date": "2019-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-rockets-were-imperiled-by-falsified-reports-prosecutors-say-11558576047?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=72",
        "text": "The alleged fraud, involving what authorities describe as flight-critical parts for the company\u2019s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, occurred over a roughly 10-month period through early 2018.\n\n\n\n\nNASA, the Air Force and other federal agencies have contracted to use SpaceX rockets for a range of missions. Mr. Smalley was accused of falsifying inspectors\u2019 signatures on at least 38 reports on parts for the Falcon rockets. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Notes on the News Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today\u2019s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMr. Smalley, 41 years old, appeared before a federal judge Thursday afternoon in Rochester. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful, and his attorney didn\u2019t return a call. \n\nAccording to the government, Mr. Smalley acted alone to falsify the inspection reports. In an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Smalley estimated he forged signatures on reports about 15 to 30 times, and falsified perhaps one or two certifications, according to an affidavit from an agent with NASA\u2019s office of inspector general.\nAt least 76 parts that were either rejected or never inspected by SpaceX\u2019s quality assurance contractor were shipped to the company, according to the affidavit.\nIn January 2018, an audit by SpaceX\u2019s quality assurance contractor, SQA Services Inc., of inspection reports and certifications for parts from PMI showed multiple documents had been falsified, according to the affidavit.\nA spokeswoman for SpaceX declined to comment, and SQA didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nIn February 2018, a top attorney at the NASA unit focused on rocket launches grew concerned that the agency\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission was going to involve products with falsified inspections and certifications, according to the affidavit. The mission, using a Falcon 9 rocket, was launched in April 2018. \nNASA didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. A representative from the inspector general\u2019s office for the agency declined comment.\nSeven NASA space flights, two Air Force space missions and one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration space mission involved parts SpaceX purchased from PMI, according to the affidavit.\nMr. Smalley was able to circumvent a protocol that required SQA to inspect all parts from PMI before they were shipped, the affidavit said. \nWhen a PMI part failed SQA\u2019s inspection, SpaceX was supposed to be notified of the results and the manufacturer would have to rework the part. However, Mr. Smalley realized he could falsify inspection materials and ship the faulty parts to SpaceX, the affidavit said. \nMr. Smalley took the act of forgery to a \u201cpotentially catastrophic level with the potential to not only cost millions of dollars, but also jeopardize years of irreplicable work,\u201d FBI Buffalo Special Agent-in-Charge Gary Loeffert said in a statement.\nSpaceX terminated its contract with PMI, which subsequently closed down because it lost that business and laid off about 35 people, the affidavit said. Executives at PMI\u2019s parent company, BAM Enterprises Inc., couldn\u2019t be reached for comment. \n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk introduced e-commerce mogul Yusaku Maezawa at a news conference Monday in California. The Japanese billionaire, who will be the first paying passenger for SpaceX\u2019s planned 2023 trip around the moon, said up to eight artists will join him. Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters (Originally published Sept. 18, 2018)\n \n\n\nWrite to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com and Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com An engineer who was responsible for ensuring the quality of parts for Elon Musk\u2019s space venture has been charged with falsifying inspection reports. ",
        "author": "Maria Armental and Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Interviews With Alphabet, ViacomCBS, Reddit CEOs (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6871",
        "date": "2021-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/wsj-tech-live-conference-features-interviews-with-alphabet-ceo-sundar-pichai-ceos-of-viacomcbs-and-reddit-11634549401?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=3",
        "text": "Here is a rundown of interviews. Access to the conference is complimentary for Journal subscribers. You can see more details here.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingWSJ Tech Live: What to ExpectThe Wall Street Journal's Tech Live conference, featuring some of the biggest names and most influential people in the tech world, starts Monday. The WSJ's live journalism editor Kim Last joins host Zoe Thomas to preview the big themes that will come up at this year's event. Register and tune in at techlive.wsj.com/tlpodcast.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFirst, starting at 11:15 a.m. ET,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ViacomCBS Inc.\n\n\n Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Bakish\n\n\n\n discusses the company\u2019s investments in content and plans to increase global subscribers, following a recent leadership revamp at Paramount Pictures.\n\n\nThe conference then features conversations about the cutting edge of transportation. Grab Holdings Inc. co-founder Hooi Ling Tan will discuss plans to go public in a record-setting special-purpose acquisition and the company\u2019s future in last-mile deliveries and financial services at 11:40 a.m. ET. Two astronauts who traveled to the edge of space with actor William Shatner will talk about their space tourism experience at 12:05 p.m. ET. Later, one of the top researchers in artificial intelligence,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Raquel Urtasun,\n\n\n\n will speak about the future of autonomous trucking at 12:40 p.m. ET.\nInvestor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alexis Ohanian\n\n\n\n speaks at 12:15 p.m. ET on his latest venture capital endeavor, Seven Seven Six, which has focuses on founders\u2019 well-being at a time of increased burnout and always-on work culture.\nAlphabet CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sundar Pichai\n\n\n\n speaks at 2 p.m. ET on Google\u2019s evolving workplace culture, privacy concerns and regulatory challenges, as the company battles antitrust lawsuits domestically and a $5 billion antitrust fine in Europe. Then, Reddit CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Huffman\n\n\n\n will discuss the social media platform\u2019s global expansion, as the popularity of \u201cmeme stocks\u201d helped to catapult the platform to a $10 billion valuation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in Switzerland last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n fabrice coffrini/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOnline educator Sal Khan talks about the future of virtual learning at 3:15 p.m. ET, followed by Cameo CEO Steven Galanis, who will speak about the growing opportunities for content creators to monetize their fan bases.\nArm Holdings CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Simon Segars\n\n\n\n speaks at 4:35 p.m. ET about the continuing chip supply issues, in light of companies like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.\ndesigning their own microchips. Following that, Xbox head\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Spencer\n\n\n\n will speak about cloud gaming and the future of the console.\nAt 5:30 p.m. ET, the day concludes with basketball star and Los Angeles Lakers forward Carmelo Anthony who will speak about his tech investments, including his investment with Overtime Sports Inc. The Wall Street Journal is hosting its virtual Tech Live conference with top executives, technologists and policy makers to discuss a range of issues including the lasting impact of Covid-19 and other topics. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Aborts Approach to Space Station (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6872",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-aborts-approach-to-space-station-delivery-delayed-1487765142?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=92",
        "text": "\u201cAs a pilot it is sometimes better to accelerate and circle around than attempt a difficult landing,\u201d French astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Pesquet\n\n\n\n said in a tweet from the space station. \u201cSame in space\u2014we\u2019ll be ready tomorrow!\u201d\nJust a few hours earlier, Russia successfully launched a cargo ship from Kazakhstan, its first since a failed launch in December.\n\n\nSpaceX launched the Dragon capsule Sunday from Kennedy Space Center\u2019s Launch Complex 39A, out of action since NASA\u2019s space shuttle program ended in 2011. It is the same spot where astronauts flew to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. SpaceX has a 20-year lease with NASA for 39A; besides launching station cargo from there, the company hopes to send up astronauts as early as next year.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, carrying a load of supplies for the International Space Station. After liftoff, the booster rocket was brought back to Cape Canaveral where it successfully landed vertically. Photo: AP.\n \n\n\nEverything was going well with this latest SpaceX flight until the GPS issue. The Dragon\u2019s computers halted the rendezvous from just seven-tenths of a mile away. SpaceX said the problem is well understood and can be fixed before Thursday morning\u2019s delivery attempt. The Russian supplies should arrive Friday.\nThis was the first time that SpaceX had to abort a shipment at the last minute like this. The private company, led by tech billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n has been making station deliveries since 2012.\nIn December, Russia lost a load of station supplies shortly after liftoff. The upper stage of the Soyuz rocket and the cargo ship ended up in pieces over Siberia.\nIt is the same kind of rocket used for launching crews, and the accident ended up delaying the return of three space station astronauts and the launch of two others. Russian investigators concluded there was a manufacturing flaw in the third-stage engine.\nThe 250-mile-high station is home to two Americans, three Russians and Mr. Pesquet, from France.\n\u2014Copyright Associated Press 2017 A navigation error has forced SpaceX to delay its shipment to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Activision Blizzard Earnings: What to Watch (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6873",
        "date": "2017-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/activision-blizzard-earnings-what-to-watch-1493899201?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=95",
        "text": "REVENUE FORECAST: Adjusted revenue is expected climb 20% to $1.09 billion, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, from $908 million a year earlier. Under U.S. accounting rules, videogame companies defer some revenue from certain online-enabled games. Total revenue a year ago was $1.46 billion.\n\n\n\n\nWHAT TO WATCH:\n\n\n\u2014 EXTRA! EXTRA!: With no blockbuster releases in the quarter, as was the case a year ago, a key metric will be revenue from extra content delivered for older games. \u201cOverwatch,\u201d a team-based shooter for consoles and PCs, was likely the quarter\u2019s biggest contributor, analysts say. Activision said the game, which launched last May, saw its player base top 30 million. Analysts also peg \u201cHearthstone\u201d as a top driver of in-game spending. Activision on Monday said the three-year-old strategy game for PCs and mobile devices has more than 70 million players.\n\u2014 QUIETER \u2018CALL OF DUTY\u2019: Call of Duty is Activision\u2019s biggest franchise, yet one game not expected to show hefty post-launch sales is last year\u2019s \u201cInfinite Warfare.\u201d The shooter game wasn\u2019t as popular as previous installments, Activision has said, as some fans were turned off by its change of setting to outer space. Analysts are upbeat about the next chapter in the venerable series, which will take place during World War II, just like original game from 2003. A reveal trailer released last week got more than 14 millions views on YouTube, with about 900,000 thumbs-up ratings and 80,000 thumbs down -- a stark reversal from last year\u2019s reaction.\n\u2014 FULL KING QUARTER: Activision completed its $5.9 billion acquisition of King in late February 2016, so last year the \u201cCandy Crush Saga\u201d creator only contributed to five weeks of its new owner\u2019s first quarter. This year, King contributed to Activision\u2019s entire first quarter. The company was the No. 3 U.S. mobile-app publisher by revenue in the January-through-March period, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower Inc. (Supercell Oy, the company behind \u201cClash of Clans,\u201d was No. 2 and Machine Zone Inc., which makes \u201cGame of War: Fire Age,\u201d was No. 1.), Analysts will be listening on the earnings call for an update on King\u2019s new advertising strategy and more details about the new Call of Duty mobile game it is making.\n\u2014 PLANNING FOR FALL: No major releases are on deck for the current quarter, making it an eventual tough comparison to last year, when \u201cOverwatch\u201d launched. Activision\u2019s next big game is expected to be a sequel to the science-fiction shooter \u201cDestiny\u201d slated for release Sept. 8. Analysts will be listening for guidance on how results will stack up. Activision also this fall is expected to launch a league of professional \u201cOverwatch\u201d teams, which\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morgan Stanley\n\n\n estimates could yield $70 million in 2017 revenue. Analysts will be looking for insight into the initiative\u2019s progress, as the company hasn\u2019t yet reported the sale of any city-based teams. Activision Blizzard Inc. reports first-quarter results after the close of trading Thursday. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Calls for Amazon Breakup in Spat With Bezos (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6874",
        "date": "2020-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-calls-for-amazon-breakup-in-latest-spat-with-jeff-bezos-11591305297?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=12",
        "text": "\u201cThis is insane @JeffBezos,\u201d Mr. Musk initially tweeted, criticizing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s\n\n AMZN -0.88%\n\n\n decision. He has repeatedly questioned the severity of the pandemic and criticized parts of the government response as overzealous. \u201cTime to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!\u201d Mr. Musk added in an intensifying battle between two business titans who both seek to dominate key markets on Earth and in outer space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Two studies casting doubt on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine against Covid-19 were retracted; Elon Musk blasted Jeff Bazos and Amazon for rejecting a book; George Floyd\u2019s autopsy says he was positive for Covid-19. WSJ\u2019s Jason Bellini has the latest. Photo: George Frey/Reuters\n \n\n\nShortly after the exchange, an Amazon spokeswoman said the book had been removed in error and was being reinstated. The company earlier tied the decision to withhold the book to the retailer\u2019s policy on content around disease-related information, according to a portion of a note from the company to Mr. Berenson that he shared on Twitter. The Amazon spokeswoman didn\u2019t address Mr. Musk\u2019s claim that the company was a monopoly that should be broken up. \n\n\nSoon after Mr. Musk\u2019s message, Mr. Berenson tweeted that Amazon had \u201cbacked down\u201d and shared a screenshot of a message he had received from Kindle that the book had been published and would be available on the website \u201cin a few hours.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon dominates the U.S. book-retail market. Its online retail store commands about 50% of all new book sales in the U.S. and nearly three-quarters of e-book sales, according to research firm Codex Group. Amazon accounts for at least two-thirds of all U.S. self-published books.\n\u201cThey are by far the largest self-publishing platform in this country,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Hildick-Smith,\n\n\n\n president of Codex Group. \u201cWriters want to be there because they believe they\u2019ll have an inside track with the largest bookseller in the country.\u201d \nAmazon also has emerged as a major publisher of books, turning into a formidable threat for traditional publishing houses.\nMr. Berenson initially said Amazon was censoring the book, putting Amazon in the middle of a political firestorm swirling around social-media companies caught between efforts to stem misinformation and claims of stifling political voices, including President Trump. He is unhappy with Twitter\u2019s placement of warnings on tweets from him and the White House last week that the company said violated its rules about glorifying violence.\nMr. Musk\u2019s \u201cmonopoly\u201d jab comes as regulators and politicians in both parties press Amazon on its business practices. The Justice Department last year opened a broad antitrust review of large tech companies, including Amazon, geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and e-commerce, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The Federal Trade Commission also is looking into Amazon acquisitions as part of a broader probe of tech giants.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the announcement of Blue Moon in May 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nTensions between Amazon\u2019s role as a retail and as a producer of goods extend to other parts of its business, such as its private-label goods. One challenge in bringing an antitrust action against Amazon on traditional grounds is that it offers low prices, helping to protect the company against claims that its market power harms consumers.\nIn Congress, former Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Vermont\u2019s Sen. Bernie Sanders each called for Amazon to be broken up because of its size and dominance of e-commerce. Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in April urged the Justice Department to \u201copen a criminal antitrust investigation of Amazon\u201d after a Wall Street Journal report detailed the company\u2019s use of third-party seller data to develop its products. \nPresumptive Democratic presidential nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Joe Biden,\n \n\n\n\n the former vice president, was asked last week on CNBC whether Amazon should be broken up. \u201cI don\u2019t think any company, I don\u2019t give a damn how big they are, the Lord almighty, should absolutely be in a position where they pay no tax and make billions and billions and billions of dollars,\u201d Mr. Biden said.\nAmazon has paid income taxes somewhere, albeit at a low rate, likely helped by deductions and incentives related to investment, research and employee compensation. \nMr. Trump also has been a frequent critic of Amazon and Mr. Bezos, related, in part, to the CEO\u2019s ownership of the Washington Post. The president last year also questioned some of Amazon\u2019s actions in pursuit of a massive Pentagon cloud-computing contract, since awarded to Microsoft Corp. Amazon has challenged the award, in part claiming Mr. Trump had pressured the Defense Departmen Elon Musk blasted Amazon.com and its founder Jeff Bezos, after the online retail giant rejected a book about the coronavirus pandemic, a clash that highlights the power some big tech companies wield over speech. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Calls for Amazon Breakup in Spat With Bezos (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6875",
        "date": "2020-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-calls-for-amazon-breakup-in-latest-spat-with-jeff-bezos-11591305297?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=44",
        "text": "\u201cThis is insane @JeffBezos,\u201d Mr. Musk initially tweeted, criticizing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s\n\n AMZN -0.88%\n\n\n decision. He has repeatedly questioned the severity of the pandemic and criticized parts of the government response as overzealous. \u201cTime to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!\u201d Mr. Musk added in an intensifying battle between two business titans who both seek to dominate key markets on Earth and in outer space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Two studies casting doubt on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine against Covid-19 were retracted; Elon Musk blasted Jeff Bazos and Amazon for rejecting a book; George Floyd\u2019s autopsy says he was positive for Covid-19. WSJ\u2019s Jason Bellini has the latest. Photo: George Frey/Reuters\n \n\n\nShortly after the exchange, an Amazon spokeswoman said the book had been removed in error and was being reinstated. The company earlier tied the decision to withhold the book to the retailer\u2019s policy on content around disease-related information, according to a portion of a note from the company to Mr. Berenson that he shared on Twitter. The Amazon spokeswoman didn\u2019t address Mr. Musk\u2019s claim that the company was a monopoly that should be broken up. \n\n\nSoon after Mr. Musk\u2019s message, Mr. Berenson tweeted that Amazon had \u201cbacked down\u201d and shared a screenshot of a message he had received from Kindle that the book had been published and would be available on the website \u201cin a few hours.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon dominates the U.S. book-retail market. Its online retail store commands about 50% of all new book sales in the U.S. and nearly three-quarters of e-book sales, according to research firm Codex Group. Amazon accounts for at least two-thirds of all U.S. self-published books.\n\u201cThey are by far the largest self-publishing platform in this country,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Hildick-Smith,\n\n\n\n president of Codex Group. \u201cWriters want to be there because they believe they\u2019ll have an inside track with the largest bookseller in the country.\u201d \nAmazon also has emerged as a major publisher of books, turning into a formidable threat for traditional publishing houses.\nMr. Berenson initially said Amazon was censoring the book, putting Amazon in the middle of a political firestorm swirling around social-media companies caught between efforts to stem misinformation and claims of stifling political voices, including President Trump. He is unhappy with Twitter\u2019s placement of warnings on tweets from him and the White House last week that the company said violated its rules about glorifying violence.\nMr. Musk\u2019s \u201cmonopoly\u201d jab comes as regulators and politicians in both parties press Amazon on its business practices. The Justice Department last year opened a broad antitrust review of large tech companies, including Amazon, geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and e-commerce, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The Federal Trade Commission also is looking into Amazon acquisitions as part of a broader probe of tech giants.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the announcement of Blue Moon in May 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nTensions between Amazon\u2019s role as a retail and as a producer of goods extend to other parts of its business, such as its private-label goods. One challenge in bringing an antitrust action against Amazon on traditional grounds is that it offers low prices, helping to protect the company against claims that its market power harms consumers.\nIn Congress, former Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Vermont\u2019s Sen. Bernie Sanders each called for Amazon to be broken up because of its size and dominance of e-commerce. Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in April urged the Justice Department to \u201copen a criminal antitrust investigation of Amazon\u201d after a Wall Street Journal report detailed the company\u2019s use of third-party seller data to develop its products. \nPresumptive Democratic presidential nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Joe Biden,\n \n\n\n\n the former vice president, was asked last week on CNBC whether Amazon should be broken up. \u201cI don\u2019t think any company, I don\u2019t give a damn how big they are, the Lord almighty, should absolutely be in a position where they pay no tax and make billions and billions and billions of dollars,\u201d Mr. Biden said.\nAmazon has paid income taxes somewhere, albeit at a low rate, likely helped by deductions and incentives related to investment, research and employee compensation. \nMr. Trump also has been a frequent critic of Amazon and Mr. Bezos, related, in part, to the CEO\u2019s ownership of the Washington Post. The president last year also questioned some of Amazon\u2019s actions in pursuit of a massive Pentagon cloud-computing contract, since awarded to Microsoft Corp. Amazon has challenged the award, in part claiming Mr. Trump had pressured the Defense Departmen Elon Musk blasted Amazon.com and its founder Jeff Bezos, after the online retail giant rejected a book about the coronavirus pandemic, a clash that highlights the power some big tech companies wield over speech. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Calls for Amazon Breakup in Spat With Bezos (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6876",
        "date": "2020-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-calls-for-amazon-breakup-in-latest-spat-with-jeff-bezos-11591305297?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=53",
        "text": "\u201cThis is insane @JeffBezos,\u201d Mr. Musk initially tweeted, criticizing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\u2019s\n\n AMZN 0.77%\n\n\n decision. He has repeatedly questioned the severity of the pandemic and criticized parts of the government response as overzealous. \u201cTime to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!\u201d Mr. Musk added in an intensifying battle between two business titans who both seek to dominate key markets on Earth and in outer space. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Two studies casting doubt on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine against Covid-19 were retracted; Elon Musk blasted Jeff Bazos and Amazon for rejecting a book; George Floyd\u2019s autopsy says he was positive for Covid-19. WSJ\u2019s Jason Bellini has the latest. Photo: George Frey/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nShortly after the exchange, an Amazon spokeswoman said the book had been removed in error and was being reinstated. The company earlier tied the decision to withhold the book to the retailer\u2019s policy on content around disease-related information, according to a portion of a note from the company to Mr. Berenson that he shared on Twitter. The Amazon spokeswoman didn\u2019t address Mr. Musk\u2019s claim that the company was a monopoly that should be broken up. \n\n\nSoon after Mr. Musk\u2019s message, Mr. Berenson tweeted that Amazon had \u201cbacked down\u201d and shared a screenshot of a message he had received from Kindle that the book had been published and would be available on the website \u201cin a few hours.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon dominates the U.S. book-retail market. Its online retail store commands about 50% of all new book sales in the U.S. and nearly three-quarters of e-book sales, according to research firm Codex Group. Amazon accounts for at least two-thirds of all U.S. self-published books.\n\u201cThey are by far the largest self-publishing platform in this country,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Hildick-Smith,\n\n\n\n president of Codex Group. \u201cWriters want to be there because they believe they\u2019ll have an inside track with the largest bookseller in the country.\u201d \nAmazon also has emerged as a major publisher of books, turning into a formidable threat for traditional publishing houses.\nMr. Berenson initially said Amazon was censoring the book, putting Amazon in the middle of a political firestorm swirling around social-media companies caught between efforts to stem misinformation and claims of stifling political voices, including President Trump. He is unhappy with Twitter\u2019s placement of warnings on tweets from him and the White House last week that the company said violated its rules about glorifying violence.\nMr. Musk\u2019s \u201cmonopoly\u201d jab comes as regulators and politicians in both parties press Amazon on its business practices. The Justice Department last year opened a broad antitrust review of large tech companies, including Amazon, geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and e-commerce, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The Federal Trade Commission also is looking into Amazon acquisitions as part of a broader probe of tech giants.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon CEO Jeff Bezos at the announcement of Blue Moon in May 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nTensions between Amazon\u2019s role as a retail and as a producer of goods extend to other parts of its business, such as its private-label goods. One challenge in bringing an antitrust action against Amazon on traditional grounds is that it offers low prices, helping to protect the company against claims that its market power harms consumers.\nIn Congress, former Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Vermont\u2019s Sen. Bernie Sanders each called for Amazon to be broken up because of its size and dominance of e-commerce. Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in April urged the Justice Department to \u201copen a criminal antitrust investigation of Amazon\u201d after a Wall Street Journal report detailed the company\u2019s use of third-party seller data to develop its products. \nPresumptive Democratic presidential nominee\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Joe Biden,\n \n\n\n\n the former vice president, was asked last week on CNBC whether Amazon should be broken up. \u201cI don\u2019t think any company, I don\u2019t give a damn how big they are, the Lord almighty, should absolutely be in a position where they pay no tax and make billions and billions and billions of dollars,\u201d Mr. Biden said.\nAmazon has paid income taxes somewhere, albeit at a low rate, likely helped by deductions and incentives related to investment, research and employee compensation. \nMr. Trump also has been a frequent critic of Amazon and Mr. Bezos, related, in part, to the CEO\u2019s ownership of the Washington Post. The president last year also questioned some of Amazon\u2019s actions in pursuit of a massive Pentagon cloud-computing contract, since awarded to Microsoft Corp. Amazon has challenged the award, in part claiming Mr. Trump had pressured the Defense Depart Elon Musk blasted Amazon.com and its founder Jeff Bezos, after the online retail giant rejected a book about the coronavirus pandemic, a clash that highlights the power some big tech companies wield over speech. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Does China\u2019s Tencent Want With Silicon Valley? (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6877",
        "date": "2017-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-tencent-casts-wide-net-in-search-for-techs-next-big-thing-1496592020?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=27",
        "text": "People close to Tencent, China\u2019s most valuable listed company with a market capitalization of $328 billion, say the approach reflects the company\u2019s desire to remain abreast of even the most far-fetched ideas and products out of Silicon Valley\u2014and its fear of missing out on the next big thing.\n\n\n\n\nWhile several Chinese firms have jumped into hot areas such as artificial intelligence and driverless vehicles, Tencent hopes an active investment arm will offer a window into even more outside-the-box developments in Silicon Valley, people familiar with the company said.\n\n\nThe strategy underscores Tencent\u2019s broader ambitions after rising to dominance at home with its ubiquitous WeChat app\u2014which hasn\u2019t gained much traction overseas amid competition from the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n The WeChat social-media platform boasted 938 million monthly active users in the first quarter, 23% more than a year earlier.\n\u201cIf you want to be a top-10 corporation on a global scale\u2014and Tencent is already a top 10-type of corporation\u2014I don\u2019t think there is any aspect of technology that you should leave behind,\u201d said Sinovation Ventures\u2019s Chris Evdemon, of Tencent\u2019s U.S. approach. Mr. Evdemon is a partner at the venture-capital firm, which has made investments alongside Tencent.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTencent\u2019s top U.S. executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Wallerstein,\n\n\n\n said the active U.S. investing presence is aimed at finding companies tackling big-picture problems. \u201cI deliberately seek to push out on the frontier a little further than the other teams\u201d in Tencent, he said. \nBased in the southern Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen, Tencent competes on many fronts with China\u2019s two other tech giants,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Baidu Inc.\n\n\n Each has ventured overseas as part of their appetite for growth outside China, though none has invested as aggressively in the U.S. as Tencent.\nSince 2011, Tencent has invested in 41 tech startups in the U.S., joining fundraising rounds worth $3.5 billion. The figure excludes investments in public companies. \nThat makes it the second-biggest foreign investor in the sector\u2014behind only Korea\u2019s Samsung Group\u2014and tied for 11th biggest corporate investor overall, up from 18th four years ago, according to research firm CB Insights. Google parent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\n\n\n is at the top of the list.\nIn May Tencent reported a 58% rise in first-quarter profit and a cash pile of $4 billion.\nMr. Wallerstein, whose official title is \u201cchief exploration officer,\u201d is a key figure in the company\u2019s overseas push. The California native joined Tencent in 2001 and spent more than a decade shuttling between China and the U.S. before settling full time at the company\u2019s U.S. headquarters in a converted church in Palo Alto, Calif. \nPeople close to Tencent said Mr. Wallerstein and his team of roughly half a dozen executives take a hands-off approach after buying a stake, investing just a few million dollars at a time or less, typically alongside other big companies or well-known Silicon Valley investors.\n\u201cWe get behind the founder and the executive team and help the company become the best company they can become,\u201d Mr. Wallerstein said. \u201cWe will work with the company to bring their technology to China when they\u2019re ready, but we do not push the company.\u201d\nThese investments differ from the handful of big-ticket stakes that Tencent has taken in the U.S. Those deals have been led by the company\u2019s China-based deals team, people familiar with the company said, and include its acquisition of Los Angeles-based Riot Games as well as its $1.8 billion investment in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\u201cChinese companies are now wanting to go global more than ever before,\u201d said Connie Chan, partner at the Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.\nAmong recent investments, Tencent led a $10 million investment round in Academia.edu, a San Francisco-based company that operates a platform for scientists and academics to publish and review papers online. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTencent\u2019s best-known investments include \u2018League of Legends\u2019 maker Riot Games. Above, a \u2018League of Legends\u2019 competition in Santa Monica, Calif., last month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nRichard Price, the company\u2019s founder, said he hopes to give researchers an alternative to the longstanding model of publishing papers in physical journals. \u201cTencent itself as an organization has made its money through gaming,\u201d but it\u2019s venturing elsewhere, he said of the previously undisclosed investment.\nOther smaller stakes include: a $3 million investment disclosed earlier this year in Innovega Inc., a Bellevue, Wash.-based company building an \u201caugmented reality\u201d device into a contact lens. A former Tencent executive now sits on the company\u2019s board, and Chief Executive Steve Willey says he plans to first launch the final product in China with Tencen In its quest to expand its global reach, Tencent Holdings has quietly become China\u2019s top corporate investor in Silicon Valley, pouring money into everything from electric cars to moonshot ventures such as space tourism and asteroid mining. ",
        "author": "Dan Strumpf"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Does China\u2019s Tencent Want With Silicon Valley? (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6878",
        "date": "2017-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-tencent-casts-wide-net-in-search-for-techs-next-big-thing-1496592020?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=121",
        "text": "People close to Tencent, China\u2019s most valuable listed company with a market capitalization of $328 billion, say the approach reflects the company\u2019s desire to remain abreast of even the most far-fetched ideas and products out of Silicon Valley\u2014and its fear of missing out on the next big thing.\n\n\n\n\nWhile several Chinese firms have jumped into hot areas such as artificial intelligence and driverless vehicles, Tencent hopes an active investment arm will offer a window into even more outside-the-box developments in Silicon Valley, people familiar with the company said.\n\n\nThe strategy underscores Tencent\u2019s broader ambitions after rising to dominance at home with its ubiquitous WeChat app\u2014which hasn\u2019t gained much traction overseas amid competition from the likes of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n The WeChat social-media platform boasted 938 million monthly active users in the first quarter, 23% more than a year earlier.\n\u201cIf you want to be a top-10 corporation on a global scale\u2014and Tencent is already a top 10-type of corporation\u2014I don\u2019t think there is any aspect of technology that you should leave behind,\u201d said Sinovation Ventures\u2019s Chris Evdemon, of Tencent\u2019s U.S. approach. Mr. Evdemon is a partner at the venture-capital firm, which has made investments alongside Tencent.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTencent\u2019s top U.S. executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Wallerstein,\n\n\n\n said the active U.S. investing presence is aimed at finding companies tackling big-picture problems. \u201cI deliberately seek to push out on the frontier a little further than the other teams\u201d in Tencent, he said. \nBased in the southern Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen, Tencent competes on many fronts with China\u2019s two other tech giants,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Baidu Inc.\n\n\n Each has ventured overseas as part of their appetite for growth outside China, though none has invested as aggressively in the U.S. as Tencent.\nSince 2011, Tencent has invested in 41 tech startups in the U.S., joining fundraising rounds worth $3.5 billion. The figure excludes investments in public companies. \nThat makes it the second-biggest foreign investor in the sector\u2014behind only Korea\u2019s Samsung Group\u2014and tied for 11th biggest corporate investor overall, up from 18th four years ago, according to research firm CB Insights. Google parent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\n\n\n is at the top of the list.\nIn May Tencent reported a 58% rise in first-quarter profit and a cash pile of $4 billion.\nMr. Wallerstein, whose official title is \u201cchief exploration officer,\u201d is a key figure in the company\u2019s overseas push. The California native joined Tencent in 2001 and spent more than a decade shuttling between China and the U.S. before settling full time at the company\u2019s U.S. headquarters in a converted church in Palo Alto, Calif. \nPeople close to Tencent said Mr. Wallerstein and his team of roughly half a dozen executives take a hands-off approach after buying a stake, investing just a few million dollars at a time or less, typically alongside other big companies or well-known Silicon Valley investors.\n\u201cWe get behind the founder and the executive team and help the company become the best company they can become,\u201d Mr. Wallerstein said. \u201cWe will work with the company to bring their technology to China when they\u2019re ready, but we do not push the company.\u201d\nThese investments differ from the handful of big-ticket stakes that Tencent has taken in the U.S. Those deals have been led by the company\u2019s China-based deals team, people familiar with the company said, and include its acquisition of Los Angeles-based Riot Games as well as its $1.8 billion investment in\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\u201cChinese companies are now wanting to go global more than ever before,\u201d said Connie Chan, partner at the Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.\nAmong recent investments, Tencent led a $10 million investment round in Academia.edu, a San Francisco-based company that operates a platform for scientists and academics to publish and review papers online. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nTencent\u2019s best-known investments include \u2018League of Legends\u2019 maker Riot Games. Above, a \u2018League of Legends\u2019 competition in Santa Monica, Calif., last month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nRichard Price, the company\u2019s founder, said he hopes to give researchers an alternative to the longstanding model of publishing papers in physical journals. \u201cTencent itself as an organization has made its money through gaming,\u201d but it\u2019s venturing elsewhere, he said of the previously undisclosed investment.\nOther smaller stakes include: a $3 million investment disclosed earlier this year in Innovega Inc., a Bellevue, Wash.-based company building an \u201caugmented reality\u201d device into a contact lens. A former Tencent executive now sits on the company\u2019s board, and Chief Executive Steve Willey says he plans to first launch the final product in China with Tencen In its quest to expand its global reach, Tencent Holdings has quietly become China\u2019s top corporate investor in Silicon Valley, pouring money into everything from electric cars to moonshot ventures such as space tourism and asteroid mining. ",
        "author": "Dan Strumpf"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Has Successful Launch As It Ramps Up Operational Tempo (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6879",
        "date": "2017-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-has-successful-launch-as-it-ramps-up-operational-tempo-1507557834?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=85",
        "text": "The bright orange glow during ascent filled the night sky, and the clear weather meant the plumes of the returning first stage were clearly visible as it headed back for a pinpoint landing on a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean.\nMore than an hour after launch, SpaceX confirmed all the satellites had been deployed in their proper orbits.\n\n\nThe company previously launched 20 satellites for Iridium, its single largest commercial customer, and is contracted to carry out five additional unmanned launches for the company.\n\n\nRelated Coverage SpaceX Seeks Ambitious Launch Tempo Surpassing Current Rivals (Oct. 5) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) \n\n\nSpaceX plans to put up a commercial satellite for a different customer on another Falcon 9 rocket from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center as early as Wednesday afternoon, demonstrating its bicoastal prowess to dispatch and organize launch personnel on such a compressed timeline.\nThrough the end of 2018, Mr. Musk\u2019s management team is targeting one launch every two weeks on average, a pace exceeding any company or government schedule world-wide.\nThe company pulled off a similar double-header feat over two days during the summer, with the moves signaling increasing capabilities to conduct fast-paced operations. SpaceX officials have said their long-term goal is to launch several times a day and quickly turn around reused boosters more akin to commercial aircraft than traditional rocketry.\nThe Air Force recently suggested it is moving toward the ability to launch two rockets from various Florida pads on the same day. To boost its overall launch capability and avoid delays often associated with sharing Florida facilities with the Pentagon, SpaceX is building a separate pad near Brownsville, Texas. But that facility has been delayed by at least a couple of years and isn\u2019t likely to begin operations until the end of the decade.\nWednesday\u2019s launch in Florida is scheduled to precede the first launch of a larger, more-powerful derivative of the Falcon 9, called the Falcon Heavy, featuring three times as many engines and a substantially greater payload capacity. The beefed-up rocket is slated to blast off from the same Florida pad before the end of the year.\nBut emergence of the Falcon Heavy, roughly four years later than initially proposed, comes as the market generally is shrinking for such heavy-lift rockets tailored to handle the largest commercial payloads. Instead, commercial-fleet operators increasingly are looking to buy and launch midsize and smaller satellites designed to be more flexible and efficient, particularly serving mobile users.\nThe company hasn\u2019t indicated when the second Falcon Heavy is likely to go up.\u00a0Mr. Musk has said development, which cost roughly $1 billion, turned out to be more difficult than anticipated\u2014or \u201ccrazy hard\u201d as he described it during a March press conference.\nMeanwhile, SpaceX and other aerospace contractors are maneuvering to determine whether the National Aeronautics and Space Administration intends to pursue possible public-private partnerships to send astronauts back to the moon. Career NASA officials are devising new strategies to respond to initiatives by private companies to explore the solar system, though the White House hasn\u2019t proposed anything specific.\nMr. Musk\u2019s own plan to send humans to Mars envisions ultimately phasing out both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, replacing them with an even more powerful deep-space booster, called the BFR.\nSeparately from that proposal, Mr. Musk previously disclosed plans\u00a0to send an unmanned capsule to Mars, perhaps as soon as 2018, as part of his ultimate vision for a private enterprise to colonize the red planet.\nOver the years, Mr. Musk has repeatedly said his top-priority goal\u2014more important than the economic success of his separate space and electric-car companies\u2014is to build colonies on Mars, envisioning thousands of inhabitants served by airline-like flights to and from earth.\nSpaceX also is seeking to garner more Pentagon launches in the next few years. Last week, the Air Force released a request for industry proposals for prototypes of next-generation rockets. Planning to use some version of public-private partnerships, Pentagon brass are looking for all-domestic options able to transport military communications satellites as well as spy payloads in the next decade.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies blasted 10 commercial satellites into orbit, completing the first of a pair of consecutive launches slated from opposite coasts in roughly two days. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Has Successful Launch As It Ramps Up Operational Tempo (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6880",
        "date": "2017-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-has-successful-launch-as-it-ramps-up-operational-tempo-1507557834?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=111",
        "text": "The bright orange glow during ascent filled the night sky, and the clear weather meant the plumes of the returning first stage were clearly visible as it headed back for a pinpoint landing on a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean.\n\n\n\n\nMore than an hour after launch, SpaceX confirmed all the satellites had been deployed in their proper orbits.\n\n\nThe company previously launched 20 satellites for Iridium, its single largest commercial customer, and is contracted to carry out five additional unmanned launches for the company.\n\n\nRelated Coverage SpaceX Seeks Ambitious Launch Tempo Surpassing Current Rivals (Oct. 5) SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs (Oct. 4) \n\n\nSpaceX plans to put up a commercial satellite for a different customer on another Falcon 9 rocket from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center as early as Wednesday afternoon, demonstrating its bicoastal prowess to dispatch and organize launch personnel on such a compressed timeline.\nThrough the end of 2018, Mr. Musk\u2019s management team is targeting one launch every two weeks on average, a pace exceeding any company or government schedule world-wide.\nThe company pulled off a similar double-header feat over two days during the summer, with the moves signaling increasing capabilities to conduct fast-paced operations. SpaceX officials have said their long-term goal is to launch several times a day and quickly turn around reused boosters more akin to commercial aircraft than traditional rocketry.\nThe Air Force recently suggested it is moving toward the ability to launch two rockets from various Florida pads on the same day. To boost its overall launch capability and avoid delays often associated with sharing Florida facilities with the Pentagon, SpaceX is building a separate pad near Brownsville, Texas. But that facility has been delayed by at least a couple of years and isn\u2019t likely to begin operations until the end of the decade.\nWednesday\u2019s launch in Florida is scheduled to precede the first launch of a larger, more-powerful derivative of the Falcon 9, called the Falcon Heavy, featuring three times as many engines and a substantially greater payload capacity. The beefed-up rocket is slated to blast off from the same Florida pad before the end of the year.\nBut emergence of the Falcon Heavy, roughly four years later than initially proposed, comes as the market generally is shrinking for such heavy-lift rockets tailored to handle the largest commercial payloads. Instead, commercial-fleet operators increasingly are looking to buy and launch midsize and smaller satellites designed to be more flexible and efficient, particularly serving mobile users.\nThe company hasn\u2019t indicated when the second Falcon Heavy is likely to go up.\u00a0Mr. Musk has said development, which cost roughly $1 billion, turned out to be more difficult than anticipated\u2014or \u201ccrazy hard\u201d as he described it during a March press conference.\nMeanwhile, SpaceX and other aerospace contractors are maneuvering to determine whether the National Aeronautics and Space Administration intends to pursue possible public-private partnerships to send astronauts back to the moon. Career NASA officials are devising new strategies to respond to initiatives by private companies to explore the solar system, though the White House hasn\u2019t proposed anything specific.\nMr. Musk\u2019s own plan to send humans to Mars envisions ultimately phasing out both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, replacing them with an even more powerful deep-space booster, called the BFR.\nSeparately from that proposal, Mr. Musk previously disclosed plans\u00a0to send an unmanned capsule to Mars, perhaps as soon as 2018, as part of his ultimate vision for a private enterprise to colonize the red planet.\nOver the years, Mr. Musk has repeatedly said his top-priority goal\u2014more important than the economic success of his separate space and electric-car companies\u2014is to build colonies on Mars, envisioning thousands of inhabitants served by airline-like flights to and from earth.\nSpaceX also is seeking to garner more Pentagon launches in the next few years. Last week, the Air Force released a request for industry proposals for prototypes of next-generation rockets. Planning to use some version of public-private partnerships, Pentagon brass are looking for all-domestic options able to transport military communications satellites as well as spy payloads in the next decade.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies blasted 10 commercial satellites into orbit, completing the first of a pair of consecutive launches slated from opposite coasts in roughly two days. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house.  (WP: Tech in Your Life) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6881",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/09/space-activities-family/",
        "text": "On one hand, space is for everyone. On the other hand, no it isn\u2019t.We saw that starkly this year as we gazed up into the cosmos in humility and awe, wondering what it must be like to found a billion-dollar corporation and acquire Whole Foods.Help Desk: Technology coverage that makes tech work for youArrowRight2021 was declared the year of the space billionaires after Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched themselves into the great beyond on rockets owned by their space companies, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa \u2014 who rode a rocket into space this week \u2014 bought every seat on a SpaceX commercial flight to the moon slated for 2023. Some people hail the trips as one small step for billionaires, one giant leap for humankind as we weigh our chances as an interplanetary species. Others have called the rides tone-deaf when the rest of us are fretting about finances and struggling to find toilet paper. Founding an airline empire or an e-commerce behemoth aren\u2019t the only ways to get to space, though. You could dedicate your life to training as an astronaut, attend a boot camp for space tourists or join hundreds of thousands of others in a raffle, such as the one for a seat on one of Branson\u2019s forthcoming commercial flights to the edge of the thermosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGeoff Clayton, a professor and astronomer at Louisiana State University, took the third route when he entered a drawing for a spot on a space flight commanded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. Clayton didn\u2019t win the ticket.\u201cI decided when I was 8 years old that I wanted to be an astronomer,\u201d he said. \u201cI would love to be going up into space; I just don\u2019t have the money yet.\u201dIn his research, Clayton focuses on tiny, dispersed particles of space dust \u2014 or as he puts it, \u201calmost nothing.\u201d But the best way to describe his relationship to space would be \u201clove,\u201d he said. His favorite fact about space? Every atom inside of your body was, at one point, part of a distant star.Story continues below advertisementClayton and the rest of us may not have the stuff to become captains of industry. But, as he tells the 300 students in his introduction to astronomy class, there are plenty of ways to enjoy the cosmos from your own backyard. I asked him and a few other space experts for some tips to tide us over as we wait for our savings accounts to hit 10 digits.How you too can experience weightlessness without having to go to spaceBoost your vision with binocularsThere are plenty of affordable telescope options for space enthusiasts, says Diana Hannikainen, observing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. But most families don\u2019t need to spend anything at all to get a much better view of the night sky. Just dig out those binoculars from the junk drawer and step outside. You\u2019ll be surprised by the extra things you see, Hannikainen said.For instance: Most people can count about six or seven stars in the Pleiades cluster with the naked eye. Hold up your binoculars, and you\u2019ll be \u201cblown away\u201d by all the new detail, she said. Then check out the crags on our moon and even the moons of Jupiter on a clear night.Get your bearings with a stargazing appScientists estimate there are nearly 10,000 visible stars in the night sky \u2014 which, for the uninitiated, is way too many to navigate without some help.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStargazing apps point you toward constellations, planets and even faraway galaxies, and all you have to do is hold your phone up to the sky. Some, such as Star Walk, offer extra science-y information about whatever you\u2019re looking at. I learned why Neptune is blue (methane) and scrolled through a gallery of photos from large telescopes.Our experts also recommended SkySafari, SkyView and Stellarium as the best apps for stargazing.Become an astrophotographerAs an observatory manager at Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Wallace Astrophysical Observatory, Tim Brothers is an expert at working with the often tricky equipment required to take research-worthy photos of the cosmos. But some of the best shots he\u2019s ever gotten were taken with his cellphone, he said.Story continues below advertisementIf you use the latest iPhone 13 Pro Max or a Google Pixel 3 or later, your phone comes with an astrophotography mode for capturing the night sky. Here are guides to shooting astrophotography on a Pixel and using night mode on a Samsung Galaxy S21. (Most current Samsung phones support night mode.)Get inspired by downloading the official NASA app, selecting the Images tab and tapping on the three-line menu in the upper right corner. Then, choose \u201ctop rated overall.\u201d This shows you which space photos other people have ranked highest since the app\u2019s inception, according to the app\u2019s project manager at NASA, Jerry Colen. Most people gravitate toward photos of stars and other heavenly bodies, he said, while he prefers photos of astronauts and spacewalks.But then step away from the screenYour smartphone is a helpful stargazing tool. But the blue light from your screen can kill the vibe. Light on that end of the color spectrum tampers with our eyes and makes it harder to see the light coming from the sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt takes your eye about 30 or 40 minutes to get fully adjusted in the dark, so as soon as you look at the phone, it resets that clock again,\u201d Brothers said.He recommends using your stargazing app indoors to orient yourself, then going outside phone-free. If you must bring the phone along, switch it to night mode or red mode to avoid blue light\u2019s effects. (On an iPhone, go to Settings \u2192 Display & Brightness \u2192 Night Shift \u2192 Manually Enable Until Tomorrow.) Settle in with a blanket and a hot drink and enjoy some peace and stillness while the stars come into focus.The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.Mooch off the space nerdsDepending where you live, there\u2019s probably an amateur astronomy club nearby. If you\u2019re ready to dedicate some time and money to observing, get yourself an affordable telescope and join. But you can also soak up some space knowledge with no commitment at all.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrack down a local group\u2019s website and visit the \u201coutreach\u201d section, Sky & Telescope\u2019s Hannikainen suggested. Most clubs host amateur astronomy nights, where enthusiasts set up their rigs and point them toward different spots in the night sky. Visitors can walk among the telescopes taking in the views and learning from real people. This is a good activity for families, as well, she noted.\u201cAmateur astronomers love sharing their passion for the sky with people, so you shouldn't be shy if there's a public outreach event organized by amateurs,\u201d Hannikainen said. \u201cThey just can't wait to show you what they love so much about the sky.\u201dPlanetariums and science museums also organize space-themed events for communities. Check their calendars for viewing parties next time there\u2019s an upcoming eclipse or passing comet.Keep tabs on the cosmic calendarWant to witness a space event but not sure when they happen or where they\u2019re visible? Open the NASA app, tap on the three-line menu symbol in the top right and flip on the notifications. This will alert you when to catch a glimpse of the passing International Space Station \u2014 you can also sign up for simple text alerts here.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo see when to expect cool phenomena such as meteors, check out the calendars in stargazing apps including Stellarium and Star Walk. (There\u2019s a whole meteor shower coming on Dec. 13 and 14.)And while you\u2019re playing with apps, download Spacecraft AR from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. You can flip through augmented-reality models of spacecraft from different parts of the solar system and project them onto any flat surface. Pinch your fingers to move them around and zoom in and out, and tap the question mark to learn what purpose they serve.Check out the sky on the night you were bornThe night sky is always changing. Travel back in time with Stellarium\u2019s Web-based astronomy tool and see what the cosmos looked like from Earth on the night you were born, right before you met your partner or for your ancestors on a different continent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust open the online planetarium and click on the date and time in the bottom right corner. Then punch in which moment in history you\u2019d like to visit. Click the \u201cnear\u201d button in the bottom left corner to choose a spot on the globe.Before you leave, check out the \u201cPlanets Tonight\u201d tab in the left-hand menu. It\u2019ll prime your stargazing by telling you which celestial bodies are easiest to spot where you live.Ponder the mysteries of the universeApps and outings make it easier to appreciate the night sky we usually take for granted. But it\u2019s also okay to just step outside, look up at the stars and do some navel-gazing. Maybe your problems will feel smaller.\u201cOur world is this fragile little ecosystem zipping around this normal star in a normal galaxy that\u2019s one of millions and millions of other galaxies \u2014 maybe we should rethink our attitude toward our neighbor,\u201d Hannikainen said.Or, even better, maybe you\u2019ll be struck with a billion-dollar business idea.Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircut You don't have to be a billionaire to enjoy space. Here are ways to do so inexpensively. Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house. ",
        "author": "Tatum Hunter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house.  (WP: Tech in Your Life) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6882",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/09/space-activities-family/",
        "text": "On one hand, space is for everyone. On the other hand, no it isn\u2019t.We saw that starkly this year as we gazed up into the cosmos in humility and awe, wondering what it must be like to found a billion-dollar corporation and acquire Whole Foods.Help Desk: Technology coverage that makes tech work for youArrowRight2021 was declared the year of the space billionaires after Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched themselves into the great beyond on rockets owned by their space companies, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa \u2014 who rode a rocket into space this week \u2014 bought every seat on a SpaceX commercial flight to the moon slated for 2023. Some people hail the trips as one small step for billionaires, one giant leap for humankind as we weigh our chances as an interplanetary species. Others have called the rides tone-deaf when the rest of us are fretting about finances and struggling to find toilet paper. Founding an airline empire or an e-commerce behemoth aren\u2019t the only ways to get to space, though. You could dedicate your life to training as an astronaut, attend a boot camp for space tourists or join hundreds of thousands of others in a raffle, such as the one for a seat on one of Branson\u2019s forthcoming commercial flights to the edge of the thermosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGeoff Clayton, a professor and astronomer at Louisiana State University, took the third route when he entered a drawing for a spot on a space flight commanded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. Clayton didn\u2019t win the ticket.\u201cI decided when I was 8 years old that I wanted to be an astronomer,\u201d he said. \u201cI would love to be going up into space; I just don\u2019t have the money yet.\u201dIn his research, Clayton focuses on tiny, dispersed particles of space dust \u2014 or as he puts it, \u201calmost nothing.\u201d But the best way to describe his relationship to space would be \u201clove,\u201d he said. His favorite fact about space? Every atom inside of your body was, at one point, part of a distant star.Story continues below advertisementClayton and the rest of us may not have the stuff to become captains of industry. But, as he tells the 300 students in his introduction to astronomy class, there are plenty of ways to enjoy the cosmos from your own backyard. I asked him and a few other space experts for some tips to tide us over as we wait for our savings accounts to hit 10 digits.How you too can experience weightlessness without having to go to spaceBoost your vision with binocularsThere are plenty of affordable telescope options for space enthusiasts, says Diana Hannikainen, observing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. But most families don\u2019t need to spend anything at all to get a much better view of the night sky. Just dig out those binoculars from the junk drawer and step outside. You\u2019ll be surprised by the extra things you see, Hannikainen said.For instance: Most people can count about six or seven stars in the Pleiades cluster with the naked eye. Hold up your binoculars, and you\u2019ll be \u201cblown away\u201d by all the new detail, she said. Then check out the crags on our moon and even the moons of Jupiter on a clear night.Get your bearings with a stargazing appScientists estimate there are nearly 10,000 visible stars in the night sky \u2014 which, for the uninitiated, is way too many to navigate without some help.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStargazing apps point you toward constellations, planets and even faraway galaxies, and all you have to do is hold your phone up to the sky. Some, such as Star Walk, offer extra science-y information about whatever you\u2019re looking at. I learned why Neptune is blue (methane) and scrolled through a gallery of photos from large telescopes.Our experts also recommended SkySafari, SkyView and Stellarium as the best apps for stargazing.Become an astrophotographerAs an observatory manager at Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Wallace Astrophysical Observatory, Tim Brothers is an expert at working with the often tricky equipment required to take research-worthy photos of the cosmos. But some of the best shots he\u2019s ever gotten were taken with his cellphone, he said.Story continues below advertisementIf you use the latest iPhone 13 Pro Max or a Google Pixel 3 or later, your phone comes with an astrophotography mode for capturing the night sky. Here are guides to shooting astrophotography on a Pixel and using night mode on a Samsung Galaxy S21. (Most current Samsung phones support night mode.)Get inspired by downloading the official NASA app, selecting the Images tab and tapping on the three-line menu in the upper right corner. Then, choose \u201ctop rated overall.\u201d This shows you which space photos other people have ranked highest since the app\u2019s inception, according to the app\u2019s project manager at NASA, Jerry Colen. Most people gravitate toward photos of stars and other heavenly bodies, he said, while he prefers photos of astronauts and spacewalks.But then step away from the screenYour smartphone is a helpful stargazing tool. But the blue light from your screen can kill the vibe. Light on that end of the color spectrum tampers with our eyes and makes it harder to see the light coming from the sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt takes your eye about 30 or 40 minutes to get fully adjusted in the dark, so as soon as you look at the phone, it resets that clock again,\u201d Brothers said.He recommends using your stargazing app indoors to orient yourself, then going outside phone-free. If you must bring the phone along, switch it to night mode or red mode to avoid blue light\u2019s effects. (On an iPhone, go to Settings \u2192 Display & Brightness \u2192 Night Shift \u2192 Manually Enable Until Tomorrow.) Settle in with a blanket and a hot drink and enjoy some peace and stillness while the stars come into focus.The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.Mooch off the space nerdsDepending where you live, there\u2019s probably an amateur astronomy club nearby. If you\u2019re ready to dedicate some time and money to observing, get yourself an affordable telescope and join. But you can also soak up some space knowledge with no commitment at all.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrack down a local group\u2019s website and visit the \u201coutreach\u201d section, Sky & Telescope\u2019s Hannikainen suggested. Most clubs host amateur astronomy nights, where enthusiasts set up their rigs and point them toward different spots in the night sky. Visitors can walk among the telescopes taking in the views and learning from real people. This is a good activity for families, as well, she noted.\u201cAmateur astronomers love sharing their passion for the sky with people, so you shouldn't be shy if there's a public outreach event organized by amateurs,\u201d Hannikainen said. \u201cThey just can't wait to show you what they love so much about the sky.\u201dPlanetariums and science museums also organize space-themed events for communities. Check their calendars for viewing parties next time there\u2019s an upcoming eclipse or passing comet.Keep tabs on the cosmic calendarWant to witness a space event but not sure when they happen or where they\u2019re visible? Open the NASA app, tap on the three-line menu symbol in the top right and flip on the notifications. This will alert you when to catch a glimpse of the passing International Space Station \u2014 you can also sign up for simple text alerts here.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo see when to expect cool phenomena such as meteors, check out the calendars in stargazing apps including Stellarium and Star Walk. (There\u2019s a whole meteor shower coming on Dec. 13 and 14.)And while you\u2019re playing with apps, download Spacecraft AR from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. You can flip through augmented-reality models of spacecraft from different parts of the solar system and project them onto any flat surface. Pinch your fingers to move them around and zoom in and out, and tap the question mark to learn what purpose they serve.Check out the sky on the night you were bornThe night sky is always changing. Travel back in time with Stellarium\u2019s Web-based astronomy tool and see what the cosmos looked like from Earth on the night you were born, right before you met your partner or for your ancestors on a different continent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust open the online planetarium and click on the date and time in the bottom right corner. Then punch in which moment in history you\u2019d like to visit. Click the \u201cnear\u201d button in the bottom left corner to choose a spot on the globe.Before you leave, check out the \u201cPlanets Tonight\u201d tab in the left-hand menu. It\u2019ll prime your stargazing by telling you which celestial bodies are easiest to spot where you live.Ponder the mysteries of the universeApps and outings make it easier to appreciate the night sky we usually take for granted. But it\u2019s also okay to just step outside, look up at the stars and do some navel-gazing. Maybe your problems will feel smaller.\u201cOur world is this fragile little ecosystem zipping around this normal star in a normal galaxy that\u2019s one of millions and millions of other galaxies \u2014 maybe we should rethink our attitude toward our neighbor,\u201d Hannikainen said.Or, even better, maybe you\u2019ll be struck with a billion-dollar business idea.Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircut You don't have to be a billionaire to enjoy space. Here are ways to do so inexpensively. Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house. ",
        "author": "Tatum Hunter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house.  (WP: Tech in Your Life) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6883",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/09/space-activities-family/",
        "text": "On one hand, space is for everyone. On the other hand, no it isn\u2019t.We saw that starkly this year as we gazed up into the cosmos in humility and awe, wondering what it must be like to found a billion-dollar corporation and acquire Whole Foods.Help Desk: Technology coverage that makes tech work for youArrowRight2021 was declared the year of the space billionaires after Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched themselves into the great beyond on rockets owned by their space companies, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa \u2014 who rode a rocket into space this week \u2014 bought every seat on a SpaceX commercial flight to the moon slated for 2023. Some people hail the trips as one small step for billionaires, one giant leap for humankind as we weigh our chances as an interplanetary species. Others have called the rides tone-deaf when the rest of us are fretting about finances and struggling to find toilet paper. Founding an airline empire or an e-commerce behemoth aren\u2019t the only ways to get to space, though. You could dedicate your life to training as an astronaut, attend a boot camp for space tourists or join hundreds of thousands of others in a raffle, such as the one for a seat on one of Branson\u2019s forthcoming commercial flights to the edge of the thermosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGeoff Clayton, a professor and astronomer at Louisiana State University, took the third route when he entered a drawing for a spot on a space flight commanded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. Clayton didn\u2019t win the ticket.\u201cI decided when I was 8 years old that I wanted to be an astronomer,\u201d he said. \u201cI would love to be going up into space; I just don\u2019t have the money yet.\u201dIn his research, Clayton focuses on tiny, dispersed particles of space dust \u2014 or as he puts it, \u201calmost nothing.\u201d But the best way to describe his relationship to space would be \u201clove,\u201d he said. His favorite fact about space? Every atom inside of your body was, at one point, part of a distant star.Story continues below advertisementClayton and the rest of us may not have the stuff to become captains of industry. But, as he tells the 300 students in his introduction to astronomy class, there are plenty of ways to enjoy the cosmos from your own backyard. I asked him and a few other space experts for some tips to tide us over as we wait for our savings accounts to hit 10 digits.How you too can experience weightlessness without having to go to spaceBoost your vision with binocularsThere are plenty of affordable telescope options for space enthusiasts, says Diana Hannikainen, observing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. But most families don\u2019t need to spend anything at all to get a much better view of the night sky. Just dig out those binoculars from the junk drawer and step outside. You\u2019ll be surprised by the extra things you see, Hannikainen said.For instance: Most people can count about six or seven stars in the Pleiades cluster with the naked eye. Hold up your binoculars, and you\u2019ll be \u201cblown away\u201d by all the new detail, she said. Then check out the crags on our moon and even the moons of Jupiter on a clear night.Get your bearings with a stargazing appScientists estimate there are nearly 10,000 visible stars in the night sky \u2014 which, for the uninitiated, is way too many to navigate without some help.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStargazing apps point you toward constellations, planets and even faraway galaxies, and all you have to do is hold your phone up to the sky. Some, such as Star Walk, offer extra science-y information about whatever you\u2019re looking at. I learned why Neptune is blue (methane) and scrolled through a gallery of photos from large telescopes.Our experts also recommended SkySafari, SkyView and Stellarium as the best apps for stargazing.Become an astrophotographerAs an observatory manager at Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Wallace Astrophysical Observatory, Tim Brothers is an expert at working with the often tricky equipment required to take research-worthy photos of the cosmos. But some of the best shots he\u2019s ever gotten were taken with his cellphone, he said.Story continues below advertisementIf you use the latest iPhone 13 Pro Max or a Google Pixel 3 or later, your phone comes with an astrophotography mode for capturing the night sky. Here are guides to shooting astrophotography on a Pixel and using night mode on a Samsung Galaxy S21. (Most current Samsung phones support night mode.)Get inspired by downloading the official NASA app, selecting the Images tab and tapping on the three-line menu in the upper right corner. Then, choose \u201ctop rated overall.\u201d This shows you which space photos other people have ranked highest since the app\u2019s inception, according to the app\u2019s project manager at NASA, Jerry Colen. Most people gravitate toward photos of stars and other heavenly bodies, he said, while he prefers photos of astronauts and spacewalks.But then step away from the screenYour smartphone is a helpful stargazing tool. But the blue light from your screen can kill the vibe. Light on that end of the color spectrum tampers with our eyes and makes it harder to see the light coming from the sky.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt takes your eye about 30 or 40 minutes to get fully adjusted in the dark, so as soon as you look at the phone, it resets that clock again,\u201d Brothers said.He recommends using your stargazing app indoors to orient yourself, then going outside phone-free. If you must bring the phone along, switch it to night mode or red mode to avoid blue light\u2019s effects. (On an iPhone, go to Settings \u2192 Display & Brightness \u2192 Night Shift \u2192 Manually Enable Until Tomorrow.) Settle in with a blanket and a hot drink and enjoy some peace and stillness while the stars come into focus.The next step in space tourism? A luxury training center for civilians.Mooch off the space nerdsDepending where you live, there\u2019s probably an amateur astronomy club nearby. If you\u2019re ready to dedicate some time and money to observing, get yourself an affordable telescope and join. But you can also soak up some space knowledge with no commitment at all.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrack down a local group\u2019s website and visit the \u201coutreach\u201d section, Sky & Telescope\u2019s Hannikainen suggested. Most clubs host amateur astronomy nights, where enthusiasts set up their rigs and point them toward different spots in the night sky. Visitors can walk among the telescopes taking in the views and learning from real people. This is a good activity for families, as well, she noted.\u201cAmateur astronomers love sharing their passion for the sky with people, so you shouldn't be shy if there's a public outreach event organized by amateurs,\u201d Hannikainen said. \u201cThey just can't wait to show you what they love so much about the sky.\u201dPlanetariums and science museums also organize space-themed events for communities. Check their calendars for viewing parties next time there\u2019s an upcoming eclipse or passing comet.Keep tabs on the cosmic calendarWant to witness a space event but not sure when they happen or where they\u2019re visible? Open the NASA app, tap on the three-line menu symbol in the top right and flip on the notifications. This will alert you when to catch a glimpse of the passing International Space Station \u2014 you can also sign up for simple text alerts here.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo see when to expect cool phenomena such as meteors, check out the calendars in stargazing apps including Stellarium and Star Walk. (There\u2019s a whole meteor shower coming on Dec. 13 and 14.)And while you\u2019re playing with apps, download Spacecraft AR from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. You can flip through augmented-reality models of spacecraft from different parts of the solar system and project them onto any flat surface. Pinch your fingers to move them around and zoom in and out, and tap the question mark to learn what purpose they serve.Check out the sky on the night you were bornThe night sky is always changing. Travel back in time with Stellarium\u2019s Web-based astronomy tool and see what the cosmos looked like from Earth on the night you were born, right before you met your partner or for your ancestors on a different continent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust open the online planetarium and click on the date and time in the bottom right corner. Then punch in which moment in history you\u2019d like to visit. Click the \u201cnear\u201d button in the bottom left corner to choose a spot on the globe.Before you leave, check out the \u201cPlanets Tonight\u201d tab in the left-hand menu. It\u2019ll prime your stargazing by telling you which celestial bodies are easiest to spot where you live.Ponder the mysteries of the universeApps and outings make it easier to appreciate the night sky we usually take for granted. But it\u2019s also okay to just step outside, look up at the stars and do some navel-gazing. Maybe your problems will feel smaller.\u201cOur world is this fragile little ecosystem zipping around this normal star in a normal galaxy that\u2019s one of millions and millions of other galaxies \u2014 maybe we should rethink our attitude toward our neighbor,\u201d Hannikainen said.Or, even better, maybe you\u2019ll be struck with a billion-dollar business idea.Japanese billionaire launches into space, plans cash giveaways and a zero-gravity haircut You don't have to be a billionaire to enjoy space. Here are ways to do so inexpensively. Not all of us can be space billionaires. Here\u2019s how to enjoy the cosmos from your house. ",
        "author": "Tatum Hunter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to launch for first time from historic Apollo-era launch site (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6884",
        "date": "2017-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/17/elon-musks-spacex-to-launch-for-first-time-from-historic-apollo-era-launch-site/",
        "text": "UPDATE: SpaceX postponed the mission because of an issue with the positioning of a second stage engine nozzle. Next attempt is scheduled for Sunday at 9:38 a.m.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 For decades it has stood like a skyscraper on the Florida coast, its spire stretching more than 400 feet high. The kings and queens of the cosmos \u2014 astronauts from Apollo and the shuttle eras, including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 have zipped to the top of its tower in an elevator to get one last view of the waves lapping the Florida coast before launching violently into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut then in 2011, when the space shuttle was retired, and NASA could no longer fly humans into space, NASA\u2019s Launch Complex 39A went dormant, a symbol of a once great era rusting away in the salt air.Story continues below advertisementNow the venerable site is about to come back to life. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX, the commercial space venture founded by Elon Musk, plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from the pad on Saturday morning, the first since the shuttle era.AdvertisementWhile SpaceX has plans to eventually fly NASA astronauts from 39A, Saturday\u2019s launch will\u00a0have no passengers, and instead carry 5,500 pounds of cargo and experiments for the International Space Station.A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch to the International Space Station from NASA's Kennedy Space Station was put on hold during the countdown to lift off. (NASA TV)The pad hosted six of the Apollo lunar launches, including Apollo 11, the first mission to land humans on the moon. And it was also the stage for many shuttle missions, earning it a place on the National Register of Historic Places.Story continues below advertisementIn an interview last year, Musk said he was grateful to be able to lease the site from NASA.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d he said. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dThe resurrection of 39A, which SpaceX has spent years renovating, is yet another step in the transformation of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center into what officials here call a \u201cmulti-user space port.\u201d NASA and the Air Force, which operates the adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, have leased out large swaths of the area to commercial companies that are taking over roles that traditionally were the exclusive domain of the government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA, meanwhile, is focusing on deep space exploration. Its monster rocket, the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, which it plans to fly around the moon in 2018, would launch from Launch Complex 39B. (While that flight was initially supposed to be without passengers, NASA is now exploring the possibility of putting astronauts on board.)But signs of the private sector\u2019s emergence are all over this place, with corporate symbols rising alongside NASA\u2019s logo and the American flag. Boeing, which along with SpaceX is under contract by NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, has revamped Launch Complex 41, and has taken over a former shuttle processing facility. After competing unsuccessfully against SpaceX for pad 39A, Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is leasing another launch site here. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have four active human spaceflight programs here at Kennedy Space Center at this point in time: Orion, SpaceX, Boeing and now Blue Origin that are all going to be in the next few years taking humans to space,\u201d said Tom Engler, of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. \u201cIf you put that in context of the history of human spaceflight only three countries have ever flown humans into space: U.S., Russia and China.\u201dIn a statement, NASA said that SpaceX\u2019s launch from 39A will \u201cmark a turning point for Kennedy's transition to a multi-user spaceport geared to support public and private missions, as well as those conducted in partnership with NASA.\u201dAbout 10 minutes after the launch, scheduled for 10:01 a.m. Saturday, SpaceX will once again attempt to land its booster on a landing pad it had built here. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean. But SpaceX has been able to successfully recover several of its boosters. Later this year it plans to re-fly one of its used boosters, which it calls \u201cflight proven,\u201d for the first time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year, it also plans to launch the maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy, a much more powerful rocket that has been under development for years. SpaceX plans to use the Falcon Heavy to launch its Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars by as early as 2018 in an uncrewed mission.Launchpad 39A is also where the company plans to fly NASA astronauts to the station. While that was initially supposed to happen by 2017, both SpaceX and Boeing have faced delays that could push certification of their vehicles to 2019, the Government Accountability Office recently reported.SpaceX has another launch site here, pad 40. But it was damaged significantly when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded in September while being fueled ahead of an engine test. The launch of a Falcon 9 rocket would be the first time venerable launchpad 39A has been used since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to launch for first time from historic Apollo-era launch site",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to launch for first time from historic Apollo-era launch site (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6885",
        "date": "2017-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/17/elon-musks-spacex-to-launch-for-first-time-from-historic-apollo-era-launch-site/",
        "text": "UPDATE: SpaceX postponed the mission because of an issue with the positioning of a second stage engine nozzle. Next attempt is scheduled for Sunday at 9:38 a.m.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 For decades it has stood like a skyscraper on the Florida coast, its spire stretching more than 400 feet high. The kings and queens of the cosmos \u2014 astronauts from Apollo and the shuttle eras, including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 have zipped to the top of its tower in an elevator to get one last view of the waves lapping the Florida coast before launching violently into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut then in 2011, when the space shuttle was retired, and NASA could no longer fly humans into space, NASA\u2019s Launch Complex 39A went dormant, a symbol of a once great era rusting away in the salt air.Story continues below advertisementNow the venerable site is about to come back to life. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX, the commercial space venture founded by Elon Musk, plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from the pad on Saturday morning, the first since the shuttle era.AdvertisementWhile SpaceX has plans to eventually fly NASA astronauts from 39A, Saturday\u2019s launch will\u00a0have no passengers, and instead carry 5,500 pounds of cargo and experiments for the International Space Station.A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch to the International Space Station from NASA's Kennedy Space Station was put on hold during the countdown to lift off. (NASA TV)The pad hosted six of the Apollo lunar launches, including Apollo 11, the first mission to land humans on the moon. And it was also the stage for many shuttle missions, earning it a place on the National Register of Historic Places.Story continues below advertisementIn an interview last year, Musk said he was grateful to be able to lease the site from NASA.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d he said. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dThe resurrection of 39A, which SpaceX has spent years renovating, is yet another step in the transformation of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center into what officials here call a \u201cmulti-user space port.\u201d NASA and the Air Force, which operates the adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, have leased out large swaths of the area to commercial companies that are taking over roles that traditionally were the exclusive domain of the government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA, meanwhile, is focusing on deep space exploration. Its monster rocket, the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, which it plans to fly around the moon in 2018, would launch from Launch Complex 39B. (While that flight was initially supposed to be without passengers, NASA is now exploring the possibility of putting astronauts on board.)But signs of the private sector\u2019s emergence are all over this place, with corporate symbols rising alongside NASA\u2019s logo and the American flag. Boeing, which along with SpaceX is under contract by NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, has revamped Launch Complex 41, and has taken over a former shuttle processing facility. After competing unsuccessfully against SpaceX for pad 39A, Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is leasing another launch site here. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have four active human spaceflight programs here at Kennedy Space Center at this point in time: Orion, SpaceX, Boeing and now Blue Origin that are all going to be in the next few years taking humans to space,\u201d said Tom Engler, of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. \u201cIf you put that in context of the history of human spaceflight only three countries have ever flown humans into space: U.S., Russia and China.\u201dIn a statement, NASA said that SpaceX\u2019s launch from 39A will \u201cmark a turning point for Kennedy's transition to a multi-user spaceport geared to support public and private missions, as well as those conducted in partnership with NASA.\u201dAbout 10 minutes after the launch, scheduled for 10:01 a.m. Saturday, SpaceX will once again attempt to land its booster on a landing pad it had built here. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean. But SpaceX has been able to successfully recover several of its boosters. Later this year it plans to re-fly one of its used boosters, which it calls \u201cflight proven,\u201d for the first time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year, it also plans to launch the maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy, a much more powerful rocket that has been under development for years. SpaceX plans to use the Falcon Heavy to launch its Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars by as early as 2018 in an uncrewed mission.Launchpad 39A is also where the company plans to fly NASA astronauts to the station. While that was initially supposed to happen by 2017, both SpaceX and Boeing have faced delays that could push certification of their vehicles to 2019, the Government Accountability Office recently reported.SpaceX has another launch site here, pad 40. But it was damaged significantly when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded in September while being fueled ahead of an engine test. The launch of a Falcon 9 rocket would be the first time venerable launchpad 39A has been used since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to launch for first time from historic Apollo-era launch site",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to launch for first time from historic Apollo-era launch site (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6886",
        "date": "2017-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/17/elon-musks-spacex-to-launch-for-first-time-from-historic-apollo-era-launch-site/",
        "text": "UPDATE: SpaceX postponed the mission because of an issue with the positioning of a second stage engine nozzle. Next attempt is scheduled for Sunday at 9:38 a.m.CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 For decades it has stood like a skyscraper on the Florida coast, its spire stretching more than 400 feet high. The kings and queens of the cosmos \u2014 astronauts from Apollo and the shuttle eras, including Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 have zipped to the top of its tower in an elevator to get one last view of the waves lapping the Florida coast before launching violently into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut then in 2011, when the space shuttle was retired, and NASA could no longer fly humans into space, NASA\u2019s Launch Complex 39A went dormant, a symbol of a once great era rusting away in the salt air.Story continues below advertisementNow the venerable site is about to come back to life. If all goes according to plan, SpaceX, the commercial space venture founded by Elon Musk, plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from the pad on Saturday morning, the first since the shuttle era.AdvertisementWhile SpaceX has plans to eventually fly NASA astronauts from 39A, Saturday\u2019s launch will\u00a0have no passengers, and instead carry 5,500 pounds of cargo and experiments for the International Space Station.A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch to the International Space Station from NASA's Kennedy Space Station was put on hold during the countdown to lift off. (NASA TV)The pad hosted six of the Apollo lunar launches, including Apollo 11, the first mission to land humans on the moon. And it was also the stage for many shuttle missions, earning it a place on the National Register of Historic Places.Story continues below advertisementIn an interview last year, Musk said he was grateful to be able to lease the site from NASA.\u201cI think it\u2019s a great honor, and I have incredible respect for the hallowed ground that it is,\u201d he said. \u201cI would have never imagined that we would have the same opportunity to launch from the same launchpad as Apollo 11.\u201dThe resurrection of 39A, which SpaceX has spent years renovating, is yet another step in the transformation of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center into what officials here call a \u201cmulti-user space port.\u201d NASA and the Air Force, which operates the adjacent Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, have leased out large swaths of the area to commercial companies that are taking over roles that traditionally were the exclusive domain of the government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA, meanwhile, is focusing on deep space exploration. Its monster rocket, the Space Launch System and Orion capsule, which it plans to fly around the moon in 2018, would launch from Launch Complex 39B. (While that flight was initially supposed to be without passengers, NASA is now exploring the possibility of putting astronauts on board.)But signs of the private sector\u2019s emergence are all over this place, with corporate symbols rising alongside NASA\u2019s logo and the American flag. Boeing, which along with SpaceX is under contract by NASA to fly astronauts to the space station, has revamped Launch Complex 41, and has taken over a former shuttle processing facility. After competing unsuccessfully against SpaceX for pad 39A, Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is leasing another launch site here. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have four active human spaceflight programs here at Kennedy Space Center at this point in time: Orion, SpaceX, Boeing and now Blue Origin that are all going to be in the next few years taking humans to space,\u201d said Tom Engler, of NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. \u201cIf you put that in context of the history of human spaceflight only three countries have ever flown humans into space: U.S., Russia and China.\u201dIn a statement, NASA said that SpaceX\u2019s launch from 39A will \u201cmark a turning point for Kennedy's transition to a multi-user spaceport geared to support public and private missions, as well as those conducted in partnership with NASA.\u201dAbout 10 minutes after the launch, scheduled for 10:01 a.m. Saturday, SpaceX will once again attempt to land its booster on a landing pad it had built here. Traditionally, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean. But SpaceX has been able to successfully recover several of its boosters. Later this year it plans to re-fly one of its used boosters, which it calls \u201cflight proven,\u201d for the first time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year, it also plans to launch the maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy, a much more powerful rocket that has been under development for years. SpaceX plans to use the Falcon Heavy to launch its Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars by as early as 2018 in an uncrewed mission.Launchpad 39A is also where the company plans to fly NASA astronauts to the station. While that was initially supposed to happen by 2017, both SpaceX and Boeing have faced delays that could push certification of their vehicles to 2019, the Government Accountability Office recently reported.SpaceX has another launch site here, pad 40. But it was damaged significantly when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded in September while being fueled ahead of an engine test. The launch of a Falcon 9 rocket would be the first time venerable launchpad 39A has been used since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to launch for first time from historic Apollo-era launch site",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX successfully launches the X-37B, the Pentagon\u2019s secretive autonomous space drone (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6887",
        "date": "2017-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/07/spacex-set-to-launch-the-x-37b-the-pentagons-secretive-autonomous-space-drone/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.In the Pentagon's vast arsenal there is little\u00a0quite like it: a super-secret space drone that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle, but orbits the Earth for months, even years, at a time. Doing what? The Air Force won't say.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn the tarmac, the X-37B, as it is called, looks tiny, standing not much taller than a person. Its wingspan measures less than 15 feet, and it weighs in at just 11,000 pounds. But over the course of six flights, it has proved to be a rugged little robotic spacecraft, spending a total of nearly six years probing the hard environment of the high frontier. On Thursday, after a successful morning launch at\u00a0the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the X-37B headed\u00a0yet again to the vital real estate known as low Earth orbit, home to the International Space Station and all sorts of military and commercial satellites. The mission is slated to last 270 days, but the Air Force warned in a statement that \u201cthe actual duration depends on test objectives, on-orbit vehicle performance and conditions at the landing facility.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn other words, there\u2019s no telling how long the thing will be up there.[The inside story of how billionaires are racing to take you to outer space.]There\u2019s also no telling what the spaceplane will be doing.On a fact sheet, the Air Force says that, \u201cthe primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold: reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.\u201dOn this flight, the Air Force will say only that the mission is to carry small satellites, \u201cdemonstrate greater opportunities for rapid space access and on-orbit testing of emerging space technologies.\u201d The service also said it would test experimental electronics in a weightless environment.Story continues below advertisementBut at a time when space is becoming a contested environment, having an orbiting spaceplane with the potential to keep a lookout on weather or the enemy or satellites, all while testing new technologies, could be highly beneficial.AdvertisementThe mission is also significant because it marked the first time SpaceX has been chosen to launch for the Air Force \u2014 a coup for the California firm started in 2002 by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.The launch\u00a0took place as the Pentagon sounds the alarm about the importance of defending the ultimate high ground should war break out in space.\u00a0More recently,\u00a0the House has even pushed for the creation of a separate \"Space Corps\" within the Air Force designed to focus exclusively on the beyond.Story continues below advertisementThe provision, included in the House's version of the defense spending bill, comes amid concerns that Russia and China are quickly eroding\u00a0the advantage that the United States has held in orbit for years.\u201cSpace has become so critical to the way we fight and win wars, it can no longer be subordinate,\u201d Rep. Mike D. Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said at an event this week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Space Corps would focus on \u201cspace domination,\u201d he said, with a dedicated leadership and resources that would allow it to move more nimbly than the Pentagon bureaucracy.Advertisement\u201cThe Air Force is about as fast a herd of turtles as far as space is concerned,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat Russia and China are doing is startling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile most agree that space is an increasingly important military domain, support in the Senate for a new separate military branch is far from assured. And many in the upper reaches of the Pentagon also oppose it.The X-37B was\u00a0launched on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.\u00a0SpaceX also successfully landed the first stage on a landing pad on the Cape--a bit of rocket artistry that Musk and others have said could help dramatically lower the cost of space travel. By now the feat is becoming\u00a0routine for the company, which plans to reuse its boosters instead of throwing them away after each launch, as had been the traditional practice.Musk\u2019s space company had been fighting to enter the national security launch market for years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor nearly a decade, the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, had a monopoly on Pentagon launches. SpaceX filed suit against the Air Force for the right to compete. In 2015, the parties settled and SpaceX was ultimately allowed to compete against ULA, opening up a potentially lucrative source of revenue. Since then, SpaceX has won two of three contested launch contracts.[SpaceX set to win\u00a0Pentagon mission after United Launch Alliance pulls out of competition.]While the launch of the X-37B was not competed \u2014 ULA President Tory Bruno has said that his company was not given the option to bid \u2014 it marks SpaceX\u2019s first military mission after years of launching payloads for NASA and commercial satellites. All four of the X-37B's previous launches were aboard ULA's Atlas V rocket.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Pentagon said it was grateful to have two companies with the ability to launch, introducing competition, and lower prices.\u201cThe benefit we\u2019re seeing now is competition,\u201d Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said during a June Senate hearing. \u201cThere are some very exciting things happening in commercial space that bring the opportunity for assured access to space at a very competitive price.\u201dFurther reading:SpaceX wants to fly two private citizens around the moon by late 2018.SPAceX makes history by launching a 'flight proven' rocket.\u00a0 The launch, a coup for SpaceX, comes as the Pentagon increasingly sees space as a contested domain.  SpaceX successfully launches the X-37B, the Pentagon\u2019s secretive autonomous space drone",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX successfully launches the X-37B, the Pentagon\u2019s secretive autonomous space drone (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6888",
        "date": "2017-09-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/07/spacex-set-to-launch-the-x-37b-the-pentagons-secretive-autonomous-space-drone/",
        "text": "This post has been updated.In the Pentagon's vast arsenal there is little\u00a0quite like it: a super-secret space drone that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle, but orbits the Earth for months, even years, at a time. Doing what? The Air Force won't say.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn the tarmac, the X-37B, as it is called, looks tiny, standing not much taller than a person. Its wingspan measures less than 15 feet, and it weighs in at just 11,000 pounds. But over the course of six flights, it has proved to be a rugged little robotic spacecraft, spending a total of nearly six years probing the hard environment of the high frontier. On Thursday, after a successful morning launch at\u00a0the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the X-37B headed\u00a0yet again to the vital real estate known as low Earth orbit, home to the International Space Station and all sorts of military and commercial satellites. The mission is slated to last 270 days, but the Air Force warned in a statement that \u201cthe actual duration depends on test objectives, on-orbit vehicle performance and conditions at the landing facility.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn other words, there\u2019s no telling how long the thing will be up there.[The inside story of how billionaires are racing to take you to outer space.]There\u2019s also no telling what the spaceplane will be doing.On a fact sheet, the Air Force says that, \u201cthe primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold: reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.\u201dOn this flight, the Air Force will say only that the mission is to carry small satellites, \u201cdemonstrate greater opportunities for rapid space access and on-orbit testing of emerging space technologies.\u201d The service also said it would test experimental electronics in a weightless environment.Story continues below advertisementBut at a time when space is becoming a contested environment, having an orbiting spaceplane with the potential to keep a lookout on weather or the enemy or satellites, all while testing new technologies, could be highly beneficial.AdvertisementThe mission is also significant because it marked the first time SpaceX has been chosen to launch for the Air Force \u2014 a coup for the California firm started in 2002 by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.The launch\u00a0took place as the Pentagon sounds the alarm about the importance of defending the ultimate high ground should war break out in space.\u00a0More recently,\u00a0the House has even pushed for the creation of a separate \"Space Corps\" within the Air Force designed to focus exclusively on the beyond.Story continues below advertisementThe provision, included in the House's version of the defense spending bill, comes amid concerns that Russia and China are quickly eroding\u00a0the advantage that the United States has held in orbit for years.\u201cSpace has become so critical to the way we fight and win wars, it can no longer be subordinate,\u201d Rep. Mike D. Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said at an event this week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Space Corps would focus on \u201cspace domination,\u201d he said, with a dedicated leadership and resources that would allow it to move more nimbly than the Pentagon bureaucracy.Advertisement\u201cThe Air Force is about as fast a herd of turtles as far as space is concerned,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat Russia and China are doing is startling.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWhile most agree that space is an increasingly important military domain, support in the Senate for a new separate military branch is far from assured. And many in the upper reaches of the Pentagon also oppose it.The X-37B was\u00a0launched on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.\u00a0SpaceX also successfully landed the first stage on a landing pad on the Cape--a bit of rocket artistry that Musk and others have said could help dramatically lower the cost of space travel. By now the feat is becoming\u00a0routine for the company, which plans to reuse its boosters instead of throwing them away after each launch, as had been the traditional practice.Musk\u2019s space company had been fighting to enter the national security launch market for years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor nearly a decade, the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, had a monopoly on Pentagon launches. SpaceX filed suit against the Air Force for the right to compete. In 2015, the parties settled and SpaceX was ultimately allowed to compete against ULA, opening up a potentially lucrative source of revenue. Since then, SpaceX has won two of three contested launch contracts.[SpaceX set to win\u00a0Pentagon mission after United Launch Alliance pulls out of competition.]While the launch of the X-37B was not competed \u2014 ULA President Tory Bruno has said that his company was not given the option to bid \u2014 it marks SpaceX\u2019s first military mission after years of launching payloads for NASA and commercial satellites. All four of the X-37B's previous launches were aboard ULA's Atlas V rocket.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Pentagon said it was grateful to have two companies with the ability to launch, introducing competition, and lower prices.\u201cThe benefit we\u2019re seeing now is competition,\u201d Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said during a June Senate hearing. \u201cThere are some very exciting things happening in commercial space that bring the opportunity for assured access to space at a very competitive price.\u201dFurther reading:SpaceX wants to fly two private citizens around the moon by late 2018.SPAceX makes history by launching a 'flight proven' rocket.\u00a0 The launch, a coup for SpaceX, comes as the Pentagon increasingly sees space as a contested domain.  SpaceX successfully launches the X-37B, the Pentagon\u2019s secretive autonomous space drone",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why DARPA and NASA are building robot spacecraft designed to act like service stations on orbit (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6889",
        "date": "2017-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/22/why-darpa-and-nasa-are-building-robot-spacecraft-designed-to-act-like-service-stations-on-orbit/",
        "text": "There\u2019s a graveyard in space littered with the corpses of dozens of dead satellites, a remote spot in the cosmos reserved to entomb spacecraft at the end of their lives.Even the most robust and expensive satellites eventually break down or run out of fuel and must be retired to a remote parking orbit more than 22,000 miles away, safely out of the way of other satellites. There, the graveyard holds billions of dollars' worth of some of the most expensive hardware ever to leave Earth \u2014 not just commercial communications satellites but some of the Pentagon\u2019s most sensitive assets, used for spying, guiding bombs and warning against missile launches. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA and others, are developing technologies that would extend the life of the critical infrastructure in space, preventing satellites from being shipped to the graveyard for years. If successful, the agencies would have fleets of\u00a0robots with arms and cameras that could inspect, refuel and repair satellites, keeping them operational well beyond their expected lifetimes. The spacecraft might even\u00a0upgrade the satellites they service with the latest technology, like an iPhone update.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhere else do we build something that costs a billion dollars and then never inspect it, never maintain it and never repair it?\u201d said Gordon Roesler, the program manager at DARPA. \u201cBut that\u2019s what we do in space.\u201dThat may be changing as a wave of innovation takes root in the space industry, much of it driven by private billionaires and commercial enterprises. There are companies\u00a0building lunar landers and others developing probes that could lead to the mining of celestial bodies. Still others are working on 3-D printers designed to build things in space.\u201cEverything that we now do on Earth we will eventually do on-orbit,\u201d said Richard White, president of SSL Government Systems, which is working with DARPA on the program. \u201cThe satellite-manufacturing facility of the future could be located in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDARPA\u2019s program to service satellites comes at a time when the Pentagon is increasingly worried about, and planning for, war in space. Citing the advancements of Russia and China, the White House\u2019s recently released National Security Strategy cited space as one of the Pentagon\u2019s top priorities and issued this warning: \u201cAny harmful interference with or an attack upon critical components of our space architecture that directly affects this vital U.S. interest will be met with a deliberate response at a time, place, manner, and domain of our choosing.\u201dDARPA is focused on fixing satellites in what\u2019s known as geosynchronous equatorial orbit, or GEO, more than 22,000 miles away. At that altitude, the orbit of satellites matches the rotation of Earth. GEO is where the Pentagon keeps classified satellites used for tasks such as detecting nuclear missile launches, guiding precision weapons, conducting surveillance and managing communication.\u201cThe U.S. has some extremely important national security satellites in that region, and they are very concerned about those satellites breaking down, having problems or being attacked,\u201d said Brian Weeden, a director for the Secure World Foundation,\u00a0an advocacy organization focusing\u00a0on space security.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2007, China fired a missile that blew up a dead satellite in what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit. A few years later, it demonstrated that it could hit satellites in GEO by firing a rocket there.In response, the Pentagon is moving toward putting up constellations of much smaller satellites, so if one is damaged another can take its place. But it also wants the ability to be able to repair its large and most capable satellites and to check to see whether they\u2019ve been tampered with.Initially, the things DARPA is looking at \u201care very simple,\u201d Roesler said, such as fixing antennas that didn\u2019t deploy properly or solar arrays that didn\u2019t fully unfold.Story continues below advertisementOrbital ATK, based in Dulles, Va., is developing a \u201cmission extension vehicle\u201d that would be able to attach itself to a satellite and then take over propulsion, firing thrusters to keep the satellite in the correct orbit. The company already has a customer, Intelsat, and plans to demonstrate the technology by early 2019, said Tom Wilson, president of Orbital ATK Space Logistics.AdvertisementNASA\u2019s program is focused instead on low Earth orbit, where there are all sorts of communication, weather and remote-sensing satellites whizzing about at 17,500 mph. At the end of their lives, those satellites eventually de-orbit, falling to Earth and burning up in the atmosphere. NASA, through a program called Restore-L, is working with SSL, based in Palo Alto, Calif., to develop a spacecraft that could reach out with a robotic arm and refuel the satellites so they could continue to maintain their position.By 2021, NASA plans to attempt to refuel Landsat 7, an Earth observation satellite launched in 1999. Using its robotic arm, the spacecraft would reach out and refuel it.Story continues below advertisementEventually, the\u00a0agency would like the robots to even update the spacecraft\u2019s hardware. The idea is to \u201cswitch out the payload and update the communications technology,\u201d said Stephen Jurczyk, the associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Space Technology Mission Directorate. \u201cThat also could be a game-changer in that you could evolve the technology without having to develop and then launch a whole new program.\u201dEditors\u2019 note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the DARPA and NASA satellites in geosynchronous orbit stay over a fixed spot on the Earth, when in fact it is geostationary orbit, a special subset of geosynchronous orbit, that allows them to stay over a fixed spot relative to the Earth's surface. The story has been updated. The Pentagon and the space agency are looking for ways to extend the lives of crucial satellites by refueling or repairing them. Why DARPA and NASA are building robot spacecraft designed to act like service stations on orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why DARPA and NASA are building robot spacecraft designed to act like service stations on orbit (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6890",
        "date": "2017-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/22/why-darpa-and-nasa-are-building-robot-spacecraft-designed-to-act-like-service-stations-on-orbit/",
        "text": "There\u2019s a graveyard in space littered with the corpses of dozens of dead satellites, a remote spot in the cosmos reserved to entomb spacecraft at the end of their lives.Even the most robust and expensive satellites eventually break down or run out of fuel and must be retired to a remote parking orbit more than 22,000 miles away, safely out of the way of other satellites. There, the graveyard holds billions of dollars' worth of some of the most expensive hardware ever to leave Earth \u2014 not just commercial communications satellites but some of the Pentagon\u2019s most sensitive assets, used for spying, guiding bombs and warning against missile launches. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA and others, are developing technologies that would extend the life of the critical infrastructure in space, preventing satellites from being shipped to the graveyard for years. If successful, the agencies would have fleets of\u00a0robots with arms and cameras that could inspect, refuel and repair satellites, keeping them operational well beyond their expected lifetimes. The spacecraft might even\u00a0upgrade the satellites they service with the latest technology, like an iPhone update.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhere else do we build something that costs a billion dollars and then never inspect it, never maintain it and never repair it?\u201d said Gordon Roesler, the program manager at DARPA. \u201cBut that\u2019s what we do in space.\u201dThat may be changing as a wave of innovation takes root in the space industry, much of it driven by private billionaires and commercial enterprises. There are companies\u00a0building lunar landers and others developing probes that could lead to the mining of celestial bodies. Still others are working on 3-D printers designed to build things in space.\u201cEverything that we now do on Earth we will eventually do on-orbit,\u201d said Richard White, president of SSL Government Systems, which is working with DARPA on the program. \u201cThe satellite-manufacturing facility of the future could be located in space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDARPA\u2019s program to service satellites comes at a time when the Pentagon is increasingly worried about, and planning for, war in space. Citing the advancements of Russia and China, the White House\u2019s recently released National Security Strategy cited space as one of the Pentagon\u2019s top priorities and issued this warning: \u201cAny harmful interference with or an attack upon critical components of our space architecture that directly affects this vital U.S. interest will be met with a deliberate response at a time, place, manner, and domain of our choosing.\u201dDARPA is focused on fixing satellites in what\u2019s known as geosynchronous equatorial orbit, or GEO, more than 22,000 miles away. At that altitude, the orbit of satellites matches the rotation of Earth. GEO is where the Pentagon keeps classified satellites used for tasks such as detecting nuclear missile launches, guiding precision weapons, conducting surveillance and managing communication.\u201cThe U.S. has some extremely important national security satellites in that region, and they are very concerned about those satellites breaking down, having problems or being attacked,\u201d said Brian Weeden, a director for the Secure World Foundation,\u00a0an advocacy organization focusing\u00a0on space security.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2007, China fired a missile that blew up a dead satellite in what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit. A few years later, it demonstrated that it could hit satellites in GEO by firing a rocket there.In response, the Pentagon is moving toward putting up constellations of much smaller satellites, so if one is damaged another can take its place. But it also wants the ability to be able to repair its large and most capable satellites and to check to see whether they\u2019ve been tampered with.Initially, the things DARPA is looking at \u201care very simple,\u201d Roesler said, such as fixing antennas that didn\u2019t deploy properly or solar arrays that didn\u2019t fully unfold.Story continues below advertisementOrbital ATK, based in Dulles, Va., is developing a \u201cmission extension vehicle\u201d that would be able to attach itself to a satellite and then take over propulsion, firing thrusters to keep the satellite in the correct orbit. The company already has a customer, Intelsat, and plans to demonstrate the technology by early 2019, said Tom Wilson, president of Orbital ATK Space Logistics.AdvertisementNASA\u2019s program is focused instead on low Earth orbit, where there are all sorts of communication, weather and remote-sensing satellites whizzing about at 17,500 mph. At the end of their lives, those satellites eventually de-orbit, falling to Earth and burning up in the atmosphere. NASA, through a program called Restore-L, is working with SSL, based in Palo Alto, Calif., to develop a spacecraft that could reach out with a robotic arm and refuel the satellites so they could continue to maintain their position.By 2021, NASA plans to attempt to refuel Landsat 7, an Earth observation satellite launched in 1999. Using its robotic arm, the spacecraft would reach out and refuel it.Story continues below advertisementEventually, the\u00a0agency would like the robots to even update the spacecraft\u2019s hardware. The idea is to \u201cswitch out the payload and update the communications technology,\u201d said Stephen Jurczyk, the associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Space Technology Mission Directorate. \u201cThat also could be a game-changer in that you could evolve the technology without having to develop and then launch a whole new program.\u201dEditors\u2019 note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the DARPA and NASA satellites in geosynchronous orbit stay over a fixed spot on the Earth, when in fact it is geostationary orbit, a special subset of geosynchronous orbit, that allows them to stay over a fixed spot relative to the Earth's surface. The story has been updated. The Pentagon and the space agency are looking for ways to extend the lives of crucial satellites by refueling or repairing them. Why DARPA and NASA are building robot spacecraft designed to act like service stations on orbit",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6891",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/21/why-the-white-house-wants-to-create-a-commercial-space-czar-to-oversee-spacex-and-others/",
        "text": "The\u00a0National Space Council on Wednesday, headed by Vice President Pence, formally recommended that\u00a0space commerce responsibilities be consolidated under the Commerce Department, while creating a sort of space czar \u2014 an undersecretary of space commerce to oversee \u201call commercial space regulatory functions.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Pence also announced a plan to streamline\u00a0licensing requirements for rockets that launch and then return, which the industry has been pushing for. The Commerce Department would also work to\u00a0cut back on\u00a0regulations for remote sensing and the way spacecraft approach and interact with each other in space. The recommendations, which would need to be approved by the president, come as companies such as Planet are putting up constellations of satellites to beam back images of the Earth. And others, such as Space Systems Loral and Orbital ATK, are working to perform maintenance in space, which could extend the life of satellites on orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe moves are designed to\u00a0reduce regulations and help boost the commercial space industry as it begins to show momentum.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said during the meeting that American industry was competing \u201cagainst 70 foreign governments, so they need all the support we can give them.\u201d To do that, he said there would be a \u201cnew, one-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\u201cAsteroid mining, space tourism and space habitats are quickly becoming much more than science fiction,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we need a future-oriented space commerce agenda.\u201dIn a speech, Pence likened the emerging space industry to \u201cthe railroads that opened up the American West.\u201d And he said that as \u201ccaptains of industry turn their gaze to the\u00a0infinite frontier,\u201d they would \u201cusher in a new era of American space leadership.\u201d But he said companies are too often \u201cstifled\u201d by \u201coutdated regulatory processes.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the National Space Council in Florida Feb. 21, Vice President Pence said President Trump\u2019s 2018 budget prepares NASA to expand space exploration. (The Washington Post)Brian Weeden, a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, said it was a \u201cbig positive\u201d to find a way for \u201cthe government to say \u2018yes\u2019 to all the new and innovative commercial activities, such as satellite servicing and asteroid mining, which currently don\u2019t have a licensing process.\u201d But he said that not all space activity can be put under the umbrella of the Commerce Department since the Federal Aviation Administration is required by law to license rocket launches, and the Federal Communications Commission licenses radio frequency spectrum use.Moving much of the regulation from the Department of Transportation to Commerce reflects an ideological difference, he said.\u201cBoth commerce and transportation are tasked to promote and regulate industry, but Republicans perceive commerce as putting promotion ahead of regulation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhoever is in charge, the challenge will be whether the office has enough staff and resources to oversee the growing industry\u2014\u201cand they are already struggling to meet the workload of their existing responsibilities,\u201d Weeden said.The council's recommendations follow other wins for the industry, which for years has lobbied Congress to take the sort of hands-off approach that it said would allow it to flourish. More than a decade ago, it pushed for human space flights to be regulated by the same \u201cinformed consent\u201d standards that govern extreme sports such as skydiving.More recently, Congress pass legislation giving U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space \u2014 on asteroids or on the moon, for example.Story continues below advertisementThe space council's meeting came\u00a0a couple weeks after SpaceX launched its massive Falcon Heavy rocket and returned two of the boosters safely to a landing site on Cape Canaveral. Nick Ayers, Pence's chief of staff, tweeted before the launch that the rocket could have \u201cmajor (positive) ramifications for US space industry if this goes according to plan.\u201dAdvertisementIn his speech, Pence said the launch and landings were \u201cvery impressive indeed.\u201dToday I surveyed @blueorigin and @ulalaunch\u2019s manufacturing facilities. These companies are making huge advancements on the #NextFrontier. Looking forward to our second meeting of the #NationalSpaceCouncil tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/u1Hxq37GoM\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) February 21, 2018\n\nPence attended a reception where one of the boosters was on display Tuesday evening, ahead of the second meeting of the Space Council, which\u00a0includes the secretaries of state, commerce, defense and transportation, among others. He also toured the facilities of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIn an interview earlier this month while attending the Falcon Heavy launch, Ross, the commerce secretary, said he applauded the growing space industry's success in winning back a large portion of the world\u2019s market share for commercial launches. He said one of the council\u2019s top priorities is \u201cto accelerate the progress of the commercialization of space. We\u2019re moving quite aggressively to try to accomplish that.\u201d Vice President Pence to recommend streamlining efforts that would help the space industry continue to grow.  Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6892",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/21/why-the-white-house-wants-to-create-a-commercial-space-czar-to-oversee-spacex-and-others/",
        "text": "The\u00a0National Space Council on Wednesday, headed by Vice President Pence, formally recommended that\u00a0space commerce responsibilities be consolidated under the Commerce Department, while creating a sort of space czar \u2014 an undersecretary of space commerce to oversee \u201call commercial space regulatory functions.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Pence also announced a plan to streamline\u00a0licensing requirements for rockets that launch and then return, which the industry has been pushing for. The Commerce Department would also work to\u00a0cut back on\u00a0regulations for remote sensing and the way spacecraft approach and interact with each other in space. The recommendations, which would need to be approved by the president, come as companies such as Planet are putting up constellations of satellites to beam back images of the Earth. And others, such as Space Systems Loral and Orbital ATK, are working to perform maintenance in space, which could extend the life of satellites on orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe moves are designed to\u00a0reduce regulations and help boost the commercial space industry as it begins to show momentum.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said during the meeting that American industry was competing \u201cagainst 70 foreign governments, so they need all the support we can give them.\u201d To do that, he said there would be a \u201cnew, one-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\u201cAsteroid mining, space tourism and space habitats are quickly becoming much more than science fiction,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we need a future-oriented space commerce agenda.\u201dIn a speech, Pence likened the emerging space industry to \u201cthe railroads that opened up the American West.\u201d And he said that as \u201ccaptains of industry turn their gaze to the\u00a0infinite frontier,\u201d they would \u201cusher in a new era of American space leadership.\u201d But he said companies are too often \u201cstifled\u201d by \u201coutdated regulatory processes.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the National Space Council in Florida Feb. 21, Vice President Pence said President Trump\u2019s 2018 budget prepares NASA to expand space exploration. (The Washington Post)Brian Weeden, a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, said it was a \u201cbig positive\u201d to find a way for \u201cthe government to say \u2018yes\u2019 to all the new and innovative commercial activities, such as satellite servicing and asteroid mining, which currently don\u2019t have a licensing process.\u201d But he said that not all space activity can be put under the umbrella of the Commerce Department since the Federal Aviation Administration is required by law to license rocket launches, and the Federal Communications Commission licenses radio frequency spectrum use.Moving much of the regulation from the Department of Transportation to Commerce reflects an ideological difference, he said.\u201cBoth commerce and transportation are tasked to promote and regulate industry, but Republicans perceive commerce as putting promotion ahead of regulation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhoever is in charge, the challenge will be whether the office has enough staff and resources to oversee the growing industry\u2014\u201cand they are already struggling to meet the workload of their existing responsibilities,\u201d Weeden said.The council's recommendations follow other wins for the industry, which for years has lobbied Congress to take the sort of hands-off approach that it said would allow it to flourish. More than a decade ago, it pushed for human space flights to be regulated by the same \u201cinformed consent\u201d standards that govern extreme sports such as skydiving.More recently, Congress pass legislation giving U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space \u2014 on asteroids or on the moon, for example.Story continues below advertisementThe space council's meeting came\u00a0a couple weeks after SpaceX launched its massive Falcon Heavy rocket and returned two of the boosters safely to a landing site on Cape Canaveral. Nick Ayers, Pence's chief of staff, tweeted before the launch that the rocket could have \u201cmajor (positive) ramifications for US space industry if this goes according to plan.\u201dAdvertisementIn his speech, Pence said the launch and landings were \u201cvery impressive indeed.\u201dToday I surveyed @blueorigin and @ulalaunch\u2019s manufacturing facilities. These companies are making huge advancements on the #NextFrontier. Looking forward to our second meeting of the #NationalSpaceCouncil tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/u1Hxq37GoM\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) February 21, 2018\n\nPence attended a reception where one of the boosters was on display Tuesday evening, ahead of the second meeting of the Space Council, which\u00a0includes the secretaries of state, commerce, defense and transportation, among others. He also toured the facilities of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIn an interview earlier this month while attending the Falcon Heavy launch, Ross, the commerce secretary, said he applauded the growing space industry's success in winning back a large portion of the world\u2019s market share for commercial launches. He said one of the council\u2019s top priorities is \u201cto accelerate the progress of the commercialization of space. We\u2019re moving quite aggressively to try to accomplish that.\u201d Vice President Pence to recommend streamlining efforts that would help the space industry continue to grow.  Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6893",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/21/why-the-white-house-wants-to-create-a-commercial-space-czar-to-oversee-spacex-and-others/",
        "text": "The\u00a0National Space Council on Wednesday, headed by Vice President Pence, formally recommended that\u00a0space commerce responsibilities be consolidated under the Commerce Department, while creating a sort of space czar \u2014 an undersecretary of space commerce to oversee \u201call commercial space regulatory functions.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Pence also announced a plan to streamline\u00a0licensing requirements for rockets that launch and then return, which the industry has been pushing for. The Commerce Department would also work to\u00a0cut back on\u00a0regulations for remote sensing and the way spacecraft approach and interact with each other in space. The recommendations, which would need to be approved by the president, come as companies such as Planet are putting up constellations of satellites to beam back images of the Earth. And others, such as Space Systems Loral and Orbital ATK, are working to perform maintenance in space, which could extend the life of satellites on orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe moves are designed to\u00a0reduce regulations and help boost the commercial space industry as it begins to show momentum.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said during the meeting that American industry was competing \u201cagainst 70 foreign governments, so they need all the support we can give them.\u201d To do that, he said there would be a \u201cnew, one-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\u201cAsteroid mining, space tourism and space habitats are quickly becoming much more than science fiction,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we need a future-oriented space commerce agenda.\u201dIn a speech, Pence likened the emerging space industry to \u201cthe railroads that opened up the American West.\u201d And he said that as \u201ccaptains of industry turn their gaze to the\u00a0infinite frontier,\u201d they would \u201cusher in a new era of American space leadership.\u201d But he said companies are too often \u201cstifled\u201d by \u201coutdated regulatory processes.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the National Space Council in Florida Feb. 21, Vice President Pence said President Trump\u2019s 2018 budget prepares NASA to expand space exploration. (The Washington Post)Brian Weeden, a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, said it was a \u201cbig positive\u201d to find a way for \u201cthe government to say \u2018yes\u2019 to all the new and innovative commercial activities, such as satellite servicing and asteroid mining, which currently don\u2019t have a licensing process.\u201d But he said that not all space activity can be put under the umbrella of the Commerce Department since the Federal Aviation Administration is required by law to license rocket launches, and the Federal Communications Commission licenses radio frequency spectrum use.Moving much of the regulation from the Department of Transportation to Commerce reflects an ideological difference, he said.\u201cBoth commerce and transportation are tasked to promote and regulate industry, but Republicans perceive commerce as putting promotion ahead of regulation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhoever is in charge, the challenge will be whether the office has enough staff and resources to oversee the growing industry\u2014\u201cand they are already struggling to meet the workload of their existing responsibilities,\u201d Weeden said.The council's recommendations follow other wins for the industry, which for years has lobbied Congress to take the sort of hands-off approach that it said would allow it to flourish. More than a decade ago, it pushed for human space flights to be regulated by the same \u201cinformed consent\u201d standards that govern extreme sports such as skydiving.More recently, Congress pass legislation giving U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space \u2014 on asteroids or on the moon, for example.Story continues below advertisementThe space council's meeting came\u00a0a couple weeks after SpaceX launched its massive Falcon Heavy rocket and returned two of the boosters safely to a landing site on Cape Canaveral. Nick Ayers, Pence's chief of staff, tweeted before the launch that the rocket could have \u201cmajor (positive) ramifications for US space industry if this goes according to plan.\u201dAdvertisementIn his speech, Pence said the launch and landings were \u201cvery impressive indeed.\u201dToday I surveyed @blueorigin and @ulalaunch\u2019s manufacturing facilities. These companies are making huge advancements on the #NextFrontier. Looking forward to our second meeting of the #NationalSpaceCouncil tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/u1Hxq37GoM\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) February 21, 2018\n\nPence attended a reception where one of the boosters was on display Tuesday evening, ahead of the second meeting of the Space Council, which\u00a0includes the secretaries of state, commerce, defense and transportation, among others. He also toured the facilities of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIn an interview earlier this month while attending the Falcon Heavy launch, Ross, the commerce secretary, said he applauded the growing space industry's success in winning back a large portion of the world\u2019s market share for commercial launches. He said one of the council\u2019s top priorities is \u201cto accelerate the progress of the commercialization of space. We\u2019re moving quite aggressively to try to accomplish that.\u201d Vice President Pence to recommend streamlining efforts that would help the space industry continue to grow.  Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6894",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/21/why-the-white-house-wants-to-create-a-commercial-space-czar-to-oversee-spacex-and-others/",
        "text": "The\u00a0National Space Council on Wednesday, headed by Vice President Pence, formally recommended that\u00a0space commerce responsibilities be consolidated under the Commerce Department, while creating a sort of space czar \u2014 an undersecretary of space commerce to oversee \u201call commercial space regulatory functions.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Pence also announced a plan to streamline\u00a0licensing requirements for rockets that launch and then return, which the industry has been pushing for. The Commerce Department would also work to\u00a0cut back on\u00a0regulations for remote sensing and the way spacecraft approach and interact with each other in space. The recommendations, which would need to be approved by the president, come as companies such as Planet are putting up constellations of satellites to beam back images of the Earth. And others, such as Space Systems Loral and Orbital ATK, are working to perform maintenance in space, which could extend the life of satellites on orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe moves are designed to\u00a0reduce regulations and help boost the commercial space industry as it begins to show momentum.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said during the meeting that American industry was competing \u201cagainst 70 foreign governments, so they need all the support we can give them.\u201d To do that, he said there would be a \u201cnew, one-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\u201cAsteroid mining, space tourism and space habitats are quickly becoming much more than science fiction,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we need a future-oriented space commerce agenda.\u201dIn a speech, Pence likened the emerging space industry to \u201cthe railroads that opened up the American West.\u201d And he said that as \u201ccaptains of industry turn their gaze to the\u00a0infinite frontier,\u201d they would \u201cusher in a new era of American space leadership.\u201d But he said companies are too often \u201cstifled\u201d by \u201coutdated regulatory processes.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the National Space Council in Florida Feb. 21, Vice President Pence said President Trump\u2019s 2018 budget prepares NASA to expand space exploration. (The Washington Post)Brian Weeden, a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, said it was a \u201cbig positive\u201d to find a way for \u201cthe government to say \u2018yes\u2019 to all the new and innovative commercial activities, such as satellite servicing and asteroid mining, which currently don\u2019t have a licensing process.\u201d But he said that not all space activity can be put under the umbrella of the Commerce Department since the Federal Aviation Administration is required by law to license rocket launches, and the Federal Communications Commission licenses radio frequency spectrum use.Moving much of the regulation from the Department of Transportation to Commerce reflects an ideological difference, he said.\u201cBoth commerce and transportation are tasked to promote and regulate industry, but Republicans perceive commerce as putting promotion ahead of regulation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhoever is in charge, the challenge will be whether the office has enough staff and resources to oversee the growing industry\u2014\u201cand they are already struggling to meet the workload of their existing responsibilities,\u201d Weeden said.The council's recommendations follow other wins for the industry, which for years has lobbied Congress to take the sort of hands-off approach that it said would allow it to flourish. More than a decade ago, it pushed for human space flights to be regulated by the same \u201cinformed consent\u201d standards that govern extreme sports such as skydiving.More recently, Congress pass legislation giving U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space \u2014 on asteroids or on the moon, for example.Story continues below advertisementThe space council's meeting came\u00a0a couple weeks after SpaceX launched its massive Falcon Heavy rocket and returned two of the boosters safely to a landing site on Cape Canaveral. Nick Ayers, Pence's chief of staff, tweeted before the launch that the rocket could have \u201cmajor (positive) ramifications for US space industry if this goes according to plan.\u201dAdvertisementIn his speech, Pence said the launch and landings were \u201cvery impressive indeed.\u201dToday I surveyed @blueorigin and @ulalaunch\u2019s manufacturing facilities. These companies are making huge advancements on the #NextFrontier. Looking forward to our second meeting of the #NationalSpaceCouncil tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/u1Hxq37GoM\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) February 21, 2018\n\nPence attended a reception where one of the boosters was on display Tuesday evening, ahead of the second meeting of the Space Council, which\u00a0includes the secretaries of state, commerce, defense and transportation, among others. He also toured the facilities of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIn an interview earlier this month while attending the Falcon Heavy launch, Ross, the commerce secretary, said he applauded the growing space industry's success in winning back a large portion of the world\u2019s market share for commercial launches. He said one of the council\u2019s top priorities is \u201cto accelerate the progress of the commercialization of space. We\u2019re moving quite aggressively to try to accomplish that.\u201d Vice President Pence to recommend streamlining efforts that would help the space industry continue to grow.  Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6895",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/21/why-the-white-house-wants-to-create-a-commercial-space-czar-to-oversee-spacex-and-others/",
        "text": "The\u00a0National Space Council on Wednesday, headed by Vice President Pence, formally recommended that\u00a0space commerce responsibilities be consolidated under the Commerce Department, while creating a sort of space czar \u2014 an undersecretary of space commerce to oversee \u201call commercial space regulatory functions.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Pence also announced a plan to streamline\u00a0licensing requirements for rockets that launch and then return, which the industry has been pushing for. The Commerce Department would also work to\u00a0cut back on\u00a0regulations for remote sensing and the way spacecraft approach and interact with each other in space. The recommendations, which would need to be approved by the president, come as companies such as Planet are putting up constellations of satellites to beam back images of the Earth. And others, such as Space Systems Loral and Orbital ATK, are working to perform maintenance in space, which could extend the life of satellites on orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe moves are designed to\u00a0reduce regulations and help boost the commercial space industry as it begins to show momentum.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said during the meeting that American industry was competing \u201cagainst 70 foreign governments, so they need all the support we can give them.\u201d To do that, he said there would be a \u201cnew, one-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\u201cAsteroid mining, space tourism and space habitats are quickly becoming much more than science fiction,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we need a future-oriented space commerce agenda.\u201dIn a speech, Pence likened the emerging space industry to \u201cthe railroads that opened up the American West.\u201d And he said that as \u201ccaptains of industry turn their gaze to the\u00a0infinite frontier,\u201d they would \u201cusher in a new era of American space leadership.\u201d But he said companies are too often \u201cstifled\u201d by \u201coutdated regulatory processes.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the National Space Council in Florida Feb. 21, Vice President Pence said President Trump\u2019s 2018 budget prepares NASA to expand space exploration. (The Washington Post)Brian Weeden, a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, said it was a \u201cbig positive\u201d to find a way for \u201cthe government to say \u2018yes\u2019 to all the new and innovative commercial activities, such as satellite servicing and asteroid mining, which currently don\u2019t have a licensing process.\u201d But he said that not all space activity can be put under the umbrella of the Commerce Department since the Federal Aviation Administration is required by law to license rocket launches, and the Federal Communications Commission licenses radio frequency spectrum use.Moving much of the regulation from the Department of Transportation to Commerce reflects an ideological difference, he said.\u201cBoth commerce and transportation are tasked to promote and regulate industry, but Republicans perceive commerce as putting promotion ahead of regulation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhoever is in charge, the challenge will be whether the office has enough staff and resources to oversee the growing industry\u2014\u201cand they are already struggling to meet the workload of their existing responsibilities,\u201d Weeden said.The council's recommendations follow other wins for the industry, which for years has lobbied Congress to take the sort of hands-off approach that it said would allow it to flourish. More than a decade ago, it pushed for human space flights to be regulated by the same \u201cinformed consent\u201d standards that govern extreme sports such as skydiving.More recently, Congress pass legislation giving U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space \u2014 on asteroids or on the moon, for example.Story continues below advertisementThe space council's meeting came\u00a0a couple weeks after SpaceX launched its massive Falcon Heavy rocket and returned two of the boosters safely to a landing site on Cape Canaveral. Nick Ayers, Pence's chief of staff, tweeted before the launch that the rocket could have \u201cmajor (positive) ramifications for US space industry if this goes according to plan.\u201dAdvertisementIn his speech, Pence said the launch and landings were \u201cvery impressive indeed.\u201dToday I surveyed @blueorigin and @ulalaunch\u2019s manufacturing facilities. These companies are making huge advancements on the #NextFrontier. Looking forward to our second meeting of the #NationalSpaceCouncil tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/u1Hxq37GoM\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) February 21, 2018\n\nPence attended a reception where one of the boosters was on display Tuesday evening, ahead of the second meeting of the Space Council, which\u00a0includes the secretaries of state, commerce, defense and transportation, among others. He also toured the facilities of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIn an interview earlier this month while attending the Falcon Heavy launch, Ross, the commerce secretary, said he applauded the growing space industry's success in winning back a large portion of the world\u2019s market share for commercial launches. He said one of the council\u2019s top priorities is \u201cto accelerate the progress of the commercialization of space. We\u2019re moving quite aggressively to try to accomplish that.\u201d Vice President Pence to recommend streamlining efforts that would help the space industry continue to grow.  Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6896",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/21/why-the-white-house-wants-to-create-a-commercial-space-czar-to-oversee-spacex-and-others/",
        "text": "The\u00a0National Space Council on Wednesday, headed by Vice President Pence, formally recommended that\u00a0space commerce responsibilities be consolidated under the Commerce Department, while creating a sort of space czar \u2014 an undersecretary of space commerce to oversee \u201call commercial space regulatory functions.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, Pence also announced a plan to streamline\u00a0licensing requirements for rockets that launch and then return, which the industry has been pushing for. The Commerce Department would also work to\u00a0cut back on\u00a0regulations for remote sensing and the way spacecraft approach and interact with each other in space. The recommendations, which would need to be approved by the president, come as companies such as Planet are putting up constellations of satellites to beam back images of the Earth. And others, such as Space Systems Loral and Orbital ATK, are working to perform maintenance in space, which could extend the life of satellites on orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe moves are designed to\u00a0reduce regulations and help boost the commercial space industry as it begins to show momentum.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said during the meeting that American industry was competing \u201cagainst 70 foreign governments, so they need all the support we can give them.\u201d To do that, he said there would be a \u201cnew, one-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\u201cAsteroid mining, space tourism and space habitats are quickly becoming much more than science fiction,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we need a future-oriented space commerce agenda.\u201dIn a speech, Pence likened the emerging space industry to \u201cthe railroads that opened up the American West.\u201d And he said that as \u201ccaptains of industry turn their gaze to the\u00a0infinite frontier,\u201d they would \u201cusher in a new era of American space leadership.\u201d But he said companies are too often \u201cstifled\u201d by \u201coutdated regulatory processes.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the National Space Council in Florida Feb. 21, Vice President Pence said President Trump\u2019s 2018 budget prepares NASA to expand space exploration. (The Washington Post)Brian Weeden, a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, a space advocacy group, said it was a \u201cbig positive\u201d to find a way for \u201cthe government to say \u2018yes\u2019 to all the new and innovative commercial activities, such as satellite servicing and asteroid mining, which currently don\u2019t have a licensing process.\u201d But he said that not all space activity can be put under the umbrella of the Commerce Department since the Federal Aviation Administration is required by law to license rocket launches, and the Federal Communications Commission licenses radio frequency spectrum use.Moving much of the regulation from the Department of Transportation to Commerce reflects an ideological difference, he said.\u201cBoth commerce and transportation are tasked to promote and regulate industry, but Republicans perceive commerce as putting promotion ahead of regulation,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhoever is in charge, the challenge will be whether the office has enough staff and resources to oversee the growing industry\u2014\u201cand they are already struggling to meet the workload of their existing responsibilities,\u201d Weeden said.The council's recommendations follow other wins for the industry, which for years has lobbied Congress to take the sort of hands-off approach that it said would allow it to flourish. More than a decade ago, it pushed for human space flights to be regulated by the same \u201cinformed consent\u201d standards that govern extreme sports such as skydiving.More recently, Congress pass legislation giving U.S. companies the right to the resources they mine in space \u2014 on asteroids or on the moon, for example.Story continues below advertisementThe space council's meeting came\u00a0a couple weeks after SpaceX launched its massive Falcon Heavy rocket and returned two of the boosters safely to a landing site on Cape Canaveral. Nick Ayers, Pence's chief of staff, tweeted before the launch that the rocket could have \u201cmajor (positive) ramifications for US space industry if this goes according to plan.\u201dAdvertisementIn his speech, Pence said the launch and landings were \u201cvery impressive indeed.\u201dToday I surveyed @blueorigin and @ulalaunch\u2019s manufacturing facilities. These companies are making huge advancements on the #NextFrontier. Looking forward to our second meeting of the #NationalSpaceCouncil tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/u1Hxq37GoM\u2014 Vice President Mike Pence Archived (@VP45) February 21, 2018\n\nPence attended a reception where one of the boosters was on display Tuesday evening, ahead of the second meeting of the Space Council, which\u00a0includes the secretaries of state, commerce, defense and transportation, among others. He also toured the facilities of the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementIn an interview earlier this month while attending the Falcon Heavy launch, Ross, the commerce secretary, said he applauded the growing space industry's success in winning back a large portion of the world\u2019s market share for commercial launches. He said one of the council\u2019s top priorities is \u201cto accelerate the progress of the commercialization of space. We\u2019re moving quite aggressively to try to accomplish that.\u201d Vice President Pence to recommend streamlining efforts that would help the space industry continue to grow.  Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and others",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Government watchdog says SpaceX, Boeing delays could imperil NASA\u2019s presence on the space station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6897",
        "date": "2017-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/16/government-watchdog-says-spacex-boeing-delays-could-imperil-nasas-presence-on-the-space-station/",
        "text": "The two contractors that\u00a0NASA has hired to build new spacecrafts to fly astronauts to the International Space Station could face further delays that push certification of their vehicles to 2019, two years behind schedule, according to a report issued Thursday by government investigators.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that happens, NASA might be stranded, with no way to get its astronauts to the International Space Station, the Government Accountability Office said. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop vehicles that could restore the agency's\u00a0ability to put humans in space after\u00a0the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Under the Commercial Crew program, Boeing was awarded $4.2 billion; SpaceX $2.6 billion.Story continues below advertisementSince the shuttle was mothballed, NASA has had to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to the station, an orbiting laboratory some 240 miles above Earth.AdvertisementNASA has bought seats with Russia through 2018, the report said. But there could be a problem if Boeing and SpaceX face further delays, because it typically takes three years to procure seats from Russia, the report said.\u201cIn order to avoid a potential crew transportation gap in 2019, the contracting process would have needed to start in early 2016,\u201d the GAO said.It added that if \u201cNASA does not develop a viable contingency plan for ensuring access to the ISS in the event of further Commercial Crew delays, it risks not being able to maximize the return on its multibillion dollar investment in the space station.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRelying on Russia has come at considerable cost for NASA \u2014 and for a country that won the Apollo-era space race to the moon.Last year, a report issued by NASA\u2019s inspector general found the cost Russia charges jumped from $21.3 million in 2006 to $81.9 million in 2015.AdvertisementIn its report, the GAO said that in 2015, SpaceX identified \u201ccracks in the turbines of its engine.\u201d NASA informed SpaceX that the cracks amount to \u201can unacceptable risk for human spaceflight,\u201d the GAO said. \u201cSpaceX officials told us that they are working closely with NASA to eliminate these cracks in order to meet NASA\u2019s stringent targets for human rating.\u201dThe GAO said that SpaceX\u2019s biggest risks stem from it constantly upgrading its rocket to make it more efficient and robust. The GAO said there \u201cmay not be enough time for SpaceX to implement these changes and get them approved prior to the first uncrewed flight test in November 2017.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company has already had two catastrophic failures of its Falcon 9, the rocket that it would use to fly astronauts to the station. In 2015, a Falcon 9 exploded while it was carrying cargo \u2014 but no crew \u2014 to the station. Then last September, another one blew up while it was being fueled on a Cape Canaveral launchpad ahead of an engine test fire.AdvertisementThe company has since returned to flight and plans to launch another cargo mission to the station Saturday.Unlike other rockets, which are fueled before astronauts board, SpaceX plans to fuel the rocket while they are in the vehicle. And that, the GAO said, is another \u201cpotential safety risk.\u201dSpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisementThe risks with Boeing\u2019s offering \u2014 a Starliner capsule that would launch aboard an Atlas V rocket \u2014 are related to the rocket\u2019s Russian-made engine. While the rocket is viewed as highly reliable and has been certified by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites, it hasn\u2019t yet been certified by NASA to fly humans.But getting the data needed to make that certification has been difficult because it \u201cis highly restricted by agreements between the U.S. and Russian governments.\u201dAdvertisementBoeing said that the United Launch Alliance, which makes the Atlas V, \u201cwill provide NASA with complete insight into the RD-180 engines.\u201dIt also said that \u201cproviding astronauts with safe crew transportation to and from the International Space Station is our first and most important priority.\u201dBoth companies have made significant progress on their launch sites. Boeing recently showed off the Cape Canaveral launchpad it renovated for the program. And on Saturday, SpaceX plans to launch from pad 39A, the historic site that hosted many of the Apollo and shuttle launches. In a report, the GAO found the companies\u2019 spacecrafts may not be certified until 2019 \u2014 too late to reserve room on Russian spacecraft. Government watchdog says SpaceX, Boeing delays could imperil NASA\u2019s presence on the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Government watchdog says SpaceX, Boeing delays could imperil NASA\u2019s presence on the space station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6898",
        "date": "2017-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/16/government-watchdog-says-spacex-boeing-delays-could-imperil-nasas-presence-on-the-space-station/",
        "text": "The two contractors that\u00a0NASA has hired to build new spacecrafts to fly astronauts to the International Space Station could face further delays that push certification of their vehicles to 2019, two years behind schedule, according to a report issued Thursday by government investigators.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that happens, NASA might be stranded, with no way to get its astronauts to the International Space Station, the Government Accountability Office said. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop vehicles that could restore the agency's\u00a0ability to put humans in space after\u00a0the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Under the Commercial Crew program, Boeing was awarded $4.2 billion; SpaceX $2.6 billion.Story continues below advertisementSince the shuttle was mothballed, NASA has had to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to the station, an orbiting laboratory some 240 miles above Earth.AdvertisementNASA has bought seats with Russia through 2018, the report said. But there could be a problem if Boeing and SpaceX face further delays, because it typically takes three years to procure seats from Russia, the report said.\u201cIn order to avoid a potential crew transportation gap in 2019, the contracting process would have needed to start in early 2016,\u201d the GAO said.It added that if \u201cNASA does not develop a viable contingency plan for ensuring access to the ISS in the event of further Commercial Crew delays, it risks not being able to maximize the return on its multibillion dollar investment in the space station.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRelying on Russia has come at considerable cost for NASA \u2014 and for a country that won the Apollo-era space race to the moon.Last year, a report issued by NASA\u2019s inspector general found the cost Russia charges jumped from $21.3 million in 2006 to $81.9 million in 2015.AdvertisementIn its report, the GAO said that in 2015, SpaceX identified \u201ccracks in the turbines of its engine.\u201d NASA informed SpaceX that the cracks amount to \u201can unacceptable risk for human spaceflight,\u201d the GAO said. \u201cSpaceX officials told us that they are working closely with NASA to eliminate these cracks in order to meet NASA\u2019s stringent targets for human rating.\u201dThe GAO said that SpaceX\u2019s biggest risks stem from it constantly upgrading its rocket to make it more efficient and robust. The GAO said there \u201cmay not be enough time for SpaceX to implement these changes and get them approved prior to the first uncrewed flight test in November 2017.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company has already had two catastrophic failures of its Falcon 9, the rocket that it would use to fly astronauts to the station. In 2015, a Falcon 9 exploded while it was carrying cargo \u2014 but no crew \u2014 to the station. Then last September, another one blew up while it was being fueled on a Cape Canaveral launchpad ahead of an engine test fire.AdvertisementThe company has since returned to flight and plans to launch another cargo mission to the station Saturday.Unlike other rockets, which are fueled before astronauts board, SpaceX plans to fuel the rocket while they are in the vehicle. And that, the GAO said, is another \u201cpotential safety risk.\u201dSpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisementThe risks with Boeing\u2019s offering \u2014 a Starliner capsule that would launch aboard an Atlas V rocket \u2014 are related to the rocket\u2019s Russian-made engine. While the rocket is viewed as highly reliable and has been certified by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites, it hasn\u2019t yet been certified by NASA to fly humans.But getting the data needed to make that certification has been difficult because it \u201cis highly restricted by agreements between the U.S. and Russian governments.\u201dAdvertisementBoeing said that the United Launch Alliance, which makes the Atlas V, \u201cwill provide NASA with complete insight into the RD-180 engines.\u201dIt also said that \u201cproviding astronauts with safe crew transportation to and from the International Space Station is our first and most important priority.\u201dBoth companies have made significant progress on their launch sites. Boeing recently showed off the Cape Canaveral launchpad it renovated for the program. And on Saturday, SpaceX plans to launch from pad 39A, the historic site that hosted many of the Apollo and shuttle launches. In a report, the GAO found the companies\u2019 spacecrafts may not be certified until 2019 \u2014 too late to reserve room on Russian spacecraft. Government watchdog says SpaceX, Boeing delays could imperil NASA\u2019s presence on the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Government watchdog says SpaceX, Boeing delays could imperil NASA\u2019s presence on the space station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6899",
        "date": "2017-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/16/government-watchdog-says-spacex-boeing-delays-could-imperil-nasas-presence-on-the-space-station/",
        "text": "The two contractors that\u00a0NASA has hired to build new spacecrafts to fly astronauts to the International Space Station could face further delays that push certification of their vehicles to 2019, two years behind schedule, according to a report issued Thursday by government investigators.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf that happens, NASA might be stranded, with no way to get its astronauts to the International Space Station, the Government Accountability Office said. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to develop vehicles that could restore the agency's\u00a0ability to put humans in space after\u00a0the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Under the Commercial Crew program, Boeing was awarded $4.2 billion; SpaceX $2.6 billion.Story continues below advertisementSince the shuttle was mothballed, NASA has had to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to the station, an orbiting laboratory some 240 miles above Earth.AdvertisementNASA has bought seats with Russia through 2018, the report said. But there could be a problem if Boeing and SpaceX face further delays, because it typically takes three years to procure seats from Russia, the report said.\u201cIn order to avoid a potential crew transportation gap in 2019, the contracting process would have needed to start in early 2016,\u201d the GAO said.It added that if \u201cNASA does not develop a viable contingency plan for ensuring access to the ISS in the event of further Commercial Crew delays, it risks not being able to maximize the return on its multibillion dollar investment in the space station.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRelying on Russia has come at considerable cost for NASA \u2014 and for a country that won the Apollo-era space race to the moon.Last year, a report issued by NASA\u2019s inspector general found the cost Russia charges jumped from $21.3 million in 2006 to $81.9 million in 2015.AdvertisementIn its report, the GAO said that in 2015, SpaceX identified \u201ccracks in the turbines of its engine.\u201d NASA informed SpaceX that the cracks amount to \u201can unacceptable risk for human spaceflight,\u201d the GAO said. \u201cSpaceX officials told us that they are working closely with NASA to eliminate these cracks in order to meet NASA\u2019s stringent targets for human rating.\u201dThe GAO said that SpaceX\u2019s biggest risks stem from it constantly upgrading its rocket to make it more efficient and robust. The GAO said there \u201cmay not be enough time for SpaceX to implement these changes and get them approved prior to the first uncrewed flight test in November 2017.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company has already had two catastrophic failures of its Falcon 9, the rocket that it would use to fly astronauts to the station. In 2015, a Falcon 9 exploded while it was carrying cargo \u2014 but no crew \u2014 to the station. Then last September, another one blew up while it was being fueled on a Cape Canaveral launchpad ahead of an engine test fire.AdvertisementThe company has since returned to flight and plans to launch another cargo mission to the station Saturday.Unlike other rockets, which are fueled before astronauts board, SpaceX plans to fuel the rocket while they are in the vehicle. And that, the GAO said, is another \u201cpotential safety risk.\u201dSpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisementThe risks with Boeing\u2019s offering \u2014 a Starliner capsule that would launch aboard an Atlas V rocket \u2014 are related to the rocket\u2019s Russian-made engine. While the rocket is viewed as highly reliable and has been certified by the Pentagon to launch national security satellites, it hasn\u2019t yet been certified by NASA to fly humans.But getting the data needed to make that certification has been difficult because it \u201cis highly restricted by agreements between the U.S. and Russian governments.\u201dAdvertisementBoeing said that the United Launch Alliance, which makes the Atlas V, \u201cwill provide NASA with complete insight into the RD-180 engines.\u201dIt also said that \u201cproviding astronauts with safe crew transportation to and from the International Space Station is our first and most important priority.\u201dBoth companies have made significant progress on their launch sites. Boeing recently showed off the Cape Canaveral launchpad it renovated for the program. And on Saturday, SpaceX plans to launch from pad 39A, the historic site that hosted many of the Apollo and shuttle launches. In a report, the GAO found the companies\u2019 spacecrafts may not be certified until 2019 \u2014 too late to reserve room on Russian spacecraft. Government watchdog says SpaceX, Boeing delays could imperil NASA\u2019s presence on the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman to buy aerospace manufacturer Orbital ATK (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6900",
        "date": "2017-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/18/northrop-grumman-to-buy-rocket-maker-orbital-atk/",
        "text": "The Pentagon increasingly views space as the next great battle front. North Korea is flexing its muscle by firing test missiles and developing its nuclear arsenal. And NASA has seeded the private sector with billions of dollars in contracts, as the industry focuses more on small satellite technology.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAll which helps explain why Northrop Grumman, one of the nation's largest defense contractors, announced on Monday that it planned to acquire Dulles-based Orbital ATK, by paying $7.8 billion in cash while assuming $1.4 billion in debt. The surprise move gives Falls Church-based Northrop some sought-after capabilities \u2014 from missile defense, to small satellites and even a rocket \u2014 allowing it to enter new markets at a time of increased tension globally.Story continues below advertisementThere is \u201cvery little overlap\u201d between the two companies, Northrop chief executive Wes Bush said Monday during a conference call with analysts. \u201cThrough our combination, customers will benefit from expanded capabilities, accelerated innovation and greater competition in critical global security domains.\u201dAdvertisementNorthrop has long been a leader in the defense industry and is currently developing the B-21 Raider, the long-range stealth bomber, for the Air Force, after beating out a Boeing-Lockheed Martin team for the contract. It manages\u00a0a large cyber division and works to develop the technology behind autonomous systems and radars, while also building\u00a0large satellites.The acquisition, should it be approved by regulators and Orbital ATK\u2019s shareholders, would give Northrop access to Orbital ATK\u2019s small satellite division at a time when the Pentagon, and others, are seeking to put up constellations of small satellites that could beam Internet to remote areas and provide Earth observation capabilities. Orbital also has been developing the technology to service satellites in space, allowing them to operate much longer.Story continues below advertisement[Companies flood Earth\u2019s\u00a0orbit\u00a0with satellites, but no one\u2019s directing traffic.]AdvertisementOne of Orbital's\u00a0key areas of expertise is robust missile and missile defense division, an important asset at a time when North Korea recently fired a missile over Japan and is developing its nuclear arsenal.In the conference call with analysts Monday, Bush said that the acquisition would bolster Northrop Grumman's\u00a0ability to compete at a time when defense technologies are advancing rapidly, and other nations are catching up to the United States.\u201cOur nation and our allies are also having to address our missile and missile defense capabilities in news ways, as the technological capacity of our potential adversaries continue to advance,\u201d Bush said.Story continues below advertisementWhile North Korea has strengthened its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, national security experts are also increasingly worried over China and Russia's ability to challenge the United States' dominance in space.AdvertisementIn recent years, the Air Force has pledged to move more forcefully to defend its assets in space \u2014 the communication, GPS and spy satellites that act as its \u201ceyes and ears\u201d above ground. Some in Congress, however, feel that the Pentagon is not moving aggressively enough and has called for the creation of a dedicated Space Corps, a new military branch that would focus exclusively on space.[House approves measure to create a 'Space Corps' dedicated to fighting wars in the cosmos.]Story continues below advertisementWhatever happens, Orbital\u2019s expertise building small satellites would better position Northrop.\u201cWe can no longer treat space as a permissive environment,\u201d Bush said in the conference call.Bush balked at providing a definitive answer when asked what new opportunities the merger would position the company for. One analyst took that to mean the company is eyeing classified opportunities, possibly related to government intelligence satellites.Advertisement\u201cIt was pretty clear that was part of what motivated this deal because of the changes that are looming in military space architecture,\" said Byron Callan, director at Capital Alpha Partners investment bank. \"We\u2019re going from these big bus-sized satellites to smaller distributed systems, so that\u2019s what Orbital ATK is bringing to the party.\"Story continues below advertisementAlong with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, Orbital ATK also has a contract to supply the International Space Station with cargo. Its Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft launch from Wallops Island on Virginia\u2019s eastern shore.[Orbital\u00a0ATK resumes flight from Wallops Island, Va., in a stunning launch visible for miles.]For years, NASA flew its space shuttle to the orbiting station. But has more recently hired private sector companies to ferry cargo there in contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.AdvertisementOrbital ATK also developed the\u00a0Pegasus rocket, a\u00a0small rocket that is tethered to the belly of a jet, then \u201cair-launched\u201d to space. It is capable of deploying small satellites, weighing up to 1,000 pounds, to low Earth orbit.Story continues below advertisementThe deal comes on the heel of another major aerospace merger, between United Technologies Corp. and Rockwell Collins. While that was viewed as an effort to strengthen the firms\u2019 position in the commercial market, Monday\u2019s deal would better position Northrop to sell to the Pentagon, NASA and other government agencies.Still, both mergers suggest that corporations are comfortable making big, risky moves at a time when stock prices are soaring and a business-friendly administration is unlikely to block big mergers, said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with aerospace-defense consultancy Teal Group.Advertisement\u201cCorporations have a lot of cash right now, and we have an administration that is probably going to have a favorable attitude toward these types of deals,\u201d he said. \u201cThat's the common thread.\u201dOrbital ATK has 13,000 employees and a backlog of more than $15 billion in contracts. It was formed in 2015 after the merger of Orbital Sciences and ATK.Under the deal, Northrop would pay $134.50 a share, a significant premium. On Friday the stock closed at just over $110 a share.The deal is slated to close in the first half of 2018. The $7.8 billion deal is slated to close in the first half of 2018. Northrop Grumman to buy aerospace manufacturer Orbital ATK",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s how a Las Vegas millionaire plans to build an orbiting space station for the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6901",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/17/heres-how-a-las-vegas-millionaire-plans-to-build-an-orbiting-space-station-for-the-moon/",
        "text": "The moon \u2014 that cold, gray outpost that NASA last visited 45 years ago \u2014 is hot again.The vice president says so. So do Elon Musk and Jeffrey P. Bezos. And as the Trump administration sets its sights on the lunar surface, a growing number of companies\u00a0say they are ready for the challenge. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe latest is Bigelow Aerospace, the Las Vegas-based maker of inflatable space habitats. In an announcement Tuesday, the company that it is hoping to send one of its space stations to lunar orbit by 2022 in partnership with the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.Bigelow, run by multimillionaire Robert Bigelow, the founder of Budget Suites of America,\u00a0has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing\u00a0space habitats made from Kevlar-like material that are inflated once in space. One of its smaller habitats, known as the BEAM, is currently attached to the International Station, where it\u2019s been tested for months.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Bigelow Aerospace\u00a0proposes sending a much larger version, known as the B330, into orbit around the moon. If NASA goes for it, the $2.3 billion mission would go something like this:The habitat would launch on ULA\u2019s Vulcan rocket into low Earth orbit, where it would stay for a period of months, receiving supplies and cargo, while it underwent testing to make sure everything was working properly.Then a space tug would ferry it from Earth orbit to lunar orbit, where it\u00a0would essentially become a space station for the moon.In laying out his plan during an interview Tuesday, Bigelow said he was\u00a0well aware of the political and industry implications in such a mission. The Trump administration is looking for a first-term coup, and, he said, this \u201ccan actually be done within one administration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA also needs a destination for the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft it has been developing for years and at great expense, he said.Furthermore, his plan could involve different sectors of the growing space industry \u2014 which the Trump administration has said it wants to help foster. While the ULA would launch the B330, Musk\u2019s SpaceX could resupply it while in Earth orbit, Bigelow said.Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has said it is developing a lunar lander that could ferry supplies to the surface of the moon. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has said \u201cit\u2019s time to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay.\u201dAnd during a recent speech, Musk said \u201cit\u2019s 2017. We should have a lunar base by now. What the hell has been going on?\u201dStory continues below advertisementOther companies are interested as well. Moon Express says it plans on sending a lunar lander\u00a0to the moon by next year. Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems are also working with NASA to develop vehicles that could touch down on the surface of the moon.AdvertisementAnd during a recent speech, Vice President Pence vowed to \u201creturn American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dAll of which adds up to a growing momentum for a return to the moon since Gene Cernan became the last man to walk on the lunar surface in 1972.\u201cWe don\u2019t want to see another 45 years go by,\u201d Bigelow said. \u201cSomething needs to happen.\u201dThe question now is, will NASA go for it?It didn't say for sure, but offered this statement in response:\"NASA is excited to see continued global interest in moving human exploration farther into the solar system. A sustainable crew presence in deep space will require the best of NASA, our international partners and the private sector.\" As the Trump administration pivots to the moon, industry senses an opportunity. Here\u2019s how a Las Vegas millionaire plans to build an orbiting space station for the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s how a Las Vegas millionaire plans to build an orbiting space station for the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6902",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/17/heres-how-a-las-vegas-millionaire-plans-to-build-an-orbiting-space-station-for-the-moon/",
        "text": "The moon \u2014 that cold, gray outpost that NASA last visited 45 years ago \u2014 is hot again.The vice president says so. So do Elon Musk and Jeffrey P. Bezos. And as the Trump administration sets its sights on the lunar surface, a growing number of companies\u00a0say they are ready for the challenge. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe latest is Bigelow Aerospace, the Las Vegas-based maker of inflatable space habitats. In an announcement Tuesday, the company that it is hoping to send one of its space stations to lunar orbit by 2022 in partnership with the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.Bigelow, run by multimillionaire Robert Bigelow, the founder of Budget Suites of America,\u00a0has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing\u00a0space habitats made from Kevlar-like material that are inflated once in space. One of its smaller habitats, known as the BEAM, is currently attached to the International Station, where it\u2019s been tested for months.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Bigelow Aerospace\u00a0proposes sending a much larger version, known as the B330, into orbit around the moon. If NASA goes for it, the $2.3 billion mission would go something like this:The habitat would launch on ULA\u2019s Vulcan rocket into low Earth orbit, where it would stay for a period of months, receiving supplies and cargo, while it underwent testing to make sure everything was working properly.Then a space tug would ferry it from Earth orbit to lunar orbit, where it\u00a0would essentially become a space station for the moon.In laying out his plan during an interview Tuesday, Bigelow said he was\u00a0well aware of the political and industry implications in such a mission. The Trump administration is looking for a first-term coup, and, he said, this \u201ccan actually be done within one administration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA also needs a destination for the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft it has been developing for years and at great expense, he said.Furthermore, his plan could involve different sectors of the growing space industry \u2014 which the Trump administration has said it wants to help foster. While the ULA would launch the B330, Musk\u2019s SpaceX could resupply it while in Earth orbit, Bigelow said.Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has said it is developing a lunar lander that could ferry supplies to the surface of the moon. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has said \u201cit\u2019s time to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay.\u201dAnd during a recent speech, Musk said \u201cit\u2019s 2017. We should have a lunar base by now. What the hell has been going on?\u201dStory continues below advertisementOther companies are interested as well. Moon Express says it plans on sending a lunar lander\u00a0to the moon by next year. Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems are also working with NASA to develop vehicles that could touch down on the surface of the moon.AdvertisementAnd during a recent speech, Vice President Pence vowed to \u201creturn American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dAll of which adds up to a growing momentum for a return to the moon since Gene Cernan became the last man to walk on the lunar surface in 1972.\u201cWe don\u2019t want to see another 45 years go by,\u201d Bigelow said. \u201cSomething needs to happen.\u201dThe question now is, will NASA go for it?It didn't say for sure, but offered this statement in response:\"NASA is excited to see continued global interest in moving human exploration farther into the solar system. A sustainable crew presence in deep space will require the best of NASA, our international partners and the private sector.\" As the Trump administration pivots to the moon, industry senses an opportunity. Here\u2019s how a Las Vegas millionaire plans to build an orbiting space station for the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s how a Las Vegas millionaire plans to build an orbiting space station for the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6903",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/17/heres-how-a-las-vegas-millionaire-plans-to-build-an-orbiting-space-station-for-the-moon/",
        "text": "The moon \u2014 that cold, gray outpost that NASA last visited 45 years ago \u2014 is hot again.The vice president says so. So do Elon Musk and Jeffrey P. Bezos. And as the Trump administration sets its sights on the lunar surface, a growing number of companies\u00a0say they are ready for the challenge. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe latest is Bigelow Aerospace, the Las Vegas-based maker of inflatable space habitats. In an announcement Tuesday, the company that it is hoping to send one of its space stations to lunar orbit by 2022 in partnership with the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.Bigelow, run by multimillionaire Robert Bigelow, the founder of Budget Suites of America,\u00a0has spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing\u00a0space habitats made from Kevlar-like material that are inflated once in space. One of its smaller habitats, known as the BEAM, is currently attached to the International Station, where it\u2019s been tested for months.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow Bigelow Aerospace\u00a0proposes sending a much larger version, known as the B330, into orbit around the moon. If NASA goes for it, the $2.3 billion mission would go something like this:The habitat would launch on ULA\u2019s Vulcan rocket into low Earth orbit, where it would stay for a period of months, receiving supplies and cargo, while it underwent testing to make sure everything was working properly.Then a space tug would ferry it from Earth orbit to lunar orbit, where it\u00a0would essentially become a space station for the moon.In laying out his plan during an interview Tuesday, Bigelow said he was\u00a0well aware of the political and industry implications in such a mission. The Trump administration is looking for a first-term coup, and, he said, this \u201ccan actually be done within one administration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA also needs a destination for the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft it has been developing for years and at great expense, he said.Furthermore, his plan could involve different sectors of the growing space industry \u2014 which the Trump administration has said it wants to help foster. While the ULA would launch the B330, Musk\u2019s SpaceX could resupply it while in Earth orbit, Bigelow said.Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin has said it is developing a lunar lander that could ferry supplies to the surface of the moon. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, has said \u201cit\u2019s time to go back to the moon \u2014 this time to stay.\u201dAnd during a recent speech, Musk said \u201cit\u2019s 2017. We should have a lunar base by now. What the hell has been going on?\u201dStory continues below advertisementOther companies are interested as well. Moon Express says it plans on sending a lunar lander\u00a0to the moon by next year. Astrobotic and Masten Space Systems are also working with NASA to develop vehicles that could touch down on the surface of the moon.AdvertisementAnd during a recent speech, Vice President Pence vowed to \u201creturn American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dAll of which adds up to a growing momentum for a return to the moon since Gene Cernan became the last man to walk on the lunar surface in 1972.\u201cWe don\u2019t want to see another 45 years go by,\u201d Bigelow said. \u201cSomething needs to happen.\u201dThe question now is, will NASA go for it?It didn't say for sure, but offered this statement in response:\"NASA is excited to see continued global interest in moving human exploration farther into the solar system. A sustainable crew presence in deep space will require the best of NASA, our international partners and the private sector.\" As the Trump administration pivots to the moon, industry senses an opportunity. Here\u2019s how a Las Vegas millionaire plans to build an orbiting space station for the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6904",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/27/elon-musks-spacex-plans-to-fly-two-private-citizens-around-the-moon-by-late-next-year/",
        "text": "SpaceX said Monday it plans to fly two private citizens on a mission around the moon by late 2018 as part of a lunar journey that would last about a week and travel deeper into space than any human has ventured before.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX founder Elon Musk would not name the two individuals, who he said approached the company and would pay for the flight. The announcement is yet another bold declaration by SpaceX, the leader of a host of other entrepreneurial commercial space ventures that have ended governments\u2019 long-standing monopoly on space.Musk is famous for laying out ambitious timelines and goals\u2014he ultimately plans to colonize Mars, for example\u2014 that often get pushed back. SpaceX has never flown people before, and has had two of its rockets blow up in the last two years. Some think this mission, aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket, which has yet to fly, could be delayed as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Musk has also had a string of successes that have upended that traditional space industry. The company has had a long running partnership with NASA, which has pumped millions of dollars into SpaceX, hiring it to fly cargo and eventually crews to the International Space Station.While President Trump has yet to name a new NASA administrator, there are signs that his administration also wants to continue to work with the private sector, and companies are sensing a huge opportunity on a potential lunar mission.In a call with reporters, Musk said he is not in competition with the government space agency, and that if NASA wanted to partner on the lunar mission that would take priority over the two private individuals.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat matters is the advancement of space exploration and exceeding the high-water mark that was set in 1969 with the Apollo program,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd having a really exciting future in space that inspires the world.\u201dAdvertisementIn a blog post, he said the mission \u201cpresents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years, and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.\u201dMusk has met with Trump or his associates several times, first in New York and later in the White House. Trump has indicated interest in doing something bold in space; during the transition, he spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley about President Kennedy\u2019s vow to go to the moon.Story continues below advertisementJohn Logsdon, professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University, said of Musk, \u201cHe\u2019s in pretty close contact with the White House folks. Who\u2019s whispering in who\u2019s ear?\u201d[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Others in the industry also sense an opening.Advertisement\u201cWith the new administration, regardless of what you think politically, comes a new sense of commercial partnerships which is good for us in the space industry,\u201d said Bob Richards, the chief executive of Moon Express, a private company that plans to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon this year in a race to claim the Google Lunar X Prize.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI feel, as many do, a lunar tide rising. The political environment is catching up with logic\u201d with the moon as an important step for even deeper space exploration, he said.A SpaceX mission in 2018 would likely circle the moon before NASA gets another chance. NASA recently announced that it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crews to the mission, which would then occur by 2019, officials have said.Advertisement[NASA considers adding astronauts to a test flight\u00a0moon mission.]Story continues below advertisement\u201cNASA commends its industry partners for reaching higher,\" the agency said in a statement released by spokesman Bob Jacobs.Phil Larson, a former space policy adviser to President Obama who went to work for SpaceX and is now at the University of Colorado, said Musk\u2019s announcement was timely, given that the new administration has to decide what to do with NASA and its human spaceflight program.\u201cThis goes to show that America\u2019s commercial space industry is ready to go beyond Low Earth Orbit, not in 10 years but now,\u201d Larson said.James Muncy, an analyst at the consultancy PoliSpace who also is a lobbyist for SpaceX, said SpaceX\u2019s announcement could alter NASA\u2019s plans. A crewed flight by 2019 would be enormously expensive, he said. Now, NASA could remain on its original timetable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s lunar mission is yet another in a series of grand plans announced by SpaceX. Since Musk founded it in 2002, it has made one bold proclamation after another, often earning jeers from skeptics who say that he moves too fast in an industry that demands caution.While it has had two of its rockets blow up, Musk said Monday that the company\u2019s \u201csuccess rate is actually quite high.\u201dStill he acknowledged the dangers of the mission.The passengers \u201care entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here\u201d he said. \u201cThey are certainly not na\u00efve. We\u2019ll do everything we can to minimize that risk. But it\u2019s not zero.\u201dBut while many of his plans face delays, Musk has pulled off several noteworthy successes\u2014from becoming the first private company to fly to the International Space Station, and the first to ever to land the first stage of a rocket that had lifted a payload into orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlong with Boeing, SpaceX has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. While the Government Accountability Office recently reported that both companies could face delay, SpaceX has maintained that it is on track for the first crewed mission by the middle of next year, which would then come about six months before the private lunar flight.Musk has said the company would be able to fly humans to Mars by 2025.\u201cElon\u2019s at it again,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cIt is typical Musk bravado.\u201dBut Logsdon said a mission that would orbit the moon and return is not far-fetched, though the Dragon capsule would need to be modified.\u201cCircumlunar is not that hard, because if you get the trajectory right, it\u2019s free return,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like throwing a baseball up high with the right velocity and angle, it will come back to where it started. You don\u2019t have to do much navigation or have propulsion.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA under President Obama, expressed doubt that SpaceX could pull off a lunar mission in just the next couple of years, but said it could possibly be done by 2020, and that it would be \u201cfantastic.\u201d\u201cIt would show that we, in this country, are still in space, and innovating and exploring and capturing the excitement that we have. I think it would be very positive,\u201d Garver said.Further reading:\u00a0With Trump, Gingrich and GOP calling the shots, NASA may go back to the moon.Get the lowdown on commercial spaceflight from three of the world's top space barons. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post) Musk would not name the two potential space explorers, but he said they would pay the cost of the trip.  Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6905",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/27/elon-musks-spacex-plans-to-fly-two-private-citizens-around-the-moon-by-late-next-year/",
        "text": "SpaceX said Monday it plans to fly two private citizens on a mission around the moon by late 2018 as part of a lunar journey that would last about a week and travel deeper into space than any human has ventured before.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX founder Elon Musk would not name the two individuals, who he said approached the company and would pay for the flight. The announcement is yet another bold declaration by SpaceX, the leader of a host of other entrepreneurial commercial space ventures that have ended governments\u2019 long-standing monopoly on space.Musk is famous for laying out ambitious timelines and goals\u2014he ultimately plans to colonize Mars, for example\u2014 that often get pushed back. SpaceX has never flown people before, and has had two of its rockets blow up in the last two years. Some think this mission, aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket, which has yet to fly, could be delayed as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Musk has also had a string of successes that have upended that traditional space industry. The company has had a long running partnership with NASA, which has pumped millions of dollars into SpaceX, hiring it to fly cargo and eventually crews to the International Space Station.While President Trump has yet to name a new NASA administrator, there are signs that his administration also wants to continue to work with the private sector, and companies are sensing a huge opportunity on a potential lunar mission.In a call with reporters, Musk said he is not in competition with the government space agency, and that if NASA wanted to partner on the lunar mission that would take priority over the two private individuals.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat matters is the advancement of space exploration and exceeding the high-water mark that was set in 1969 with the Apollo program,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd having a really exciting future in space that inspires the world.\u201dAdvertisementIn a blog post, he said the mission \u201cpresents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years, and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.\u201dMusk has met with Trump or his associates several times, first in New York and later in the White House. Trump has indicated interest in doing something bold in space; during the transition, he spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley about President Kennedy\u2019s vow to go to the moon.Story continues below advertisementJohn Logsdon, professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University, said of Musk, \u201cHe\u2019s in pretty close contact with the White House folks. Who\u2019s whispering in who\u2019s ear?\u201d[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Others in the industry also sense an opening.Advertisement\u201cWith the new administration, regardless of what you think politically, comes a new sense of commercial partnerships which is good for us in the space industry,\u201d said Bob Richards, the chief executive of Moon Express, a private company that plans to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon this year in a race to claim the Google Lunar X Prize.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI feel, as many do, a lunar tide rising. The political environment is catching up with logic\u201d with the moon as an important step for even deeper space exploration, he said.A SpaceX mission in 2018 would likely circle the moon before NASA gets another chance. NASA recently announced that it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crews to the mission, which would then occur by 2019, officials have said.Advertisement[NASA considers adding astronauts to a test flight\u00a0moon mission.]Story continues below advertisement\u201cNASA commends its industry partners for reaching higher,\" the agency said in a statement released by spokesman Bob Jacobs.Phil Larson, a former space policy adviser to President Obama who went to work for SpaceX and is now at the University of Colorado, said Musk\u2019s announcement was timely, given that the new administration has to decide what to do with NASA and its human spaceflight program.\u201cThis goes to show that America\u2019s commercial space industry is ready to go beyond Low Earth Orbit, not in 10 years but now,\u201d Larson said.James Muncy, an analyst at the consultancy PoliSpace who also is a lobbyist for SpaceX, said SpaceX\u2019s announcement could alter NASA\u2019s plans. A crewed flight by 2019 would be enormously expensive, he said. Now, NASA could remain on its original timetable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s lunar mission is yet another in a series of grand plans announced by SpaceX. Since Musk founded it in 2002, it has made one bold proclamation after another, often earning jeers from skeptics who say that he moves too fast in an industry that demands caution.While it has had two of its rockets blow up, Musk said Monday that the company\u2019s \u201csuccess rate is actually quite high.\u201dStill he acknowledged the dangers of the mission.The passengers \u201care entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here\u201d he said. \u201cThey are certainly not na\u00efve. We\u2019ll do everything we can to minimize that risk. But it\u2019s not zero.\u201dBut while many of his plans face delays, Musk has pulled off several noteworthy successes\u2014from becoming the first private company to fly to the International Space Station, and the first to ever to land the first stage of a rocket that had lifted a payload into orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlong with Boeing, SpaceX has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. While the Government Accountability Office recently reported that both companies could face delay, SpaceX has maintained that it is on track for the first crewed mission by the middle of next year, which would then come about six months before the private lunar flight.Musk has said the company would be able to fly humans to Mars by 2025.\u201cElon\u2019s at it again,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cIt is typical Musk bravado.\u201dBut Logsdon said a mission that would orbit the moon and return is not far-fetched, though the Dragon capsule would need to be modified.\u201cCircumlunar is not that hard, because if you get the trajectory right, it\u2019s free return,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like throwing a baseball up high with the right velocity and angle, it will come back to where it started. You don\u2019t have to do much navigation or have propulsion.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA under President Obama, expressed doubt that SpaceX could pull off a lunar mission in just the next couple of years, but said it could possibly be done by 2020, and that it would be \u201cfantastic.\u201d\u201cIt would show that we, in this country, are still in space, and innovating and exploring and capturing the excitement that we have. I think it would be very positive,\u201d Garver said.Further reading:\u00a0With Trump, Gingrich and GOP calling the shots, NASA may go back to the moon.Get the lowdown on commercial spaceflight from three of the world's top space barons. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post) Musk would not name the two potential space explorers, but he said they would pay the cost of the trip.  Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6906",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/27/elon-musks-spacex-plans-to-fly-two-private-citizens-around-the-moon-by-late-next-year/",
        "text": "SpaceX said Monday it plans to fly two private citizens on a mission around the moon by late 2018 as part of a lunar journey that would last about a week and travel deeper into space than any human has ventured before.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceX founder Elon Musk would not name the two individuals, who he said approached the company and would pay for the flight. The announcement is yet another bold declaration by SpaceX, the leader of a host of other entrepreneurial commercial space ventures that have ended governments\u2019 long-standing monopoly on space.Musk is famous for laying out ambitious timelines and goals\u2014he ultimately plans to colonize Mars, for example\u2014 that often get pushed back. SpaceX has never flown people before, and has had two of its rockets blow up in the last two years. Some think this mission, aboard the Falcon Heavy rocket, which has yet to fly, could be delayed as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Musk has also had a string of successes that have upended that traditional space industry. The company has had a long running partnership with NASA, which has pumped millions of dollars into SpaceX, hiring it to fly cargo and eventually crews to the International Space Station.While President Trump has yet to name a new NASA administrator, there are signs that his administration also wants to continue to work with the private sector, and companies are sensing a huge opportunity on a potential lunar mission.In a call with reporters, Musk said he is not in competition with the government space agency, and that if NASA wanted to partner on the lunar mission that would take priority over the two private individuals.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhat matters is the advancement of space exploration and exceeding the high-water mark that was set in 1969 with the Apollo program,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd having a really exciting future in space that inspires the world.\u201dAdvertisementIn a blog post, he said the mission \u201cpresents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years, and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them.\u201dMusk has met with Trump or his associates several times, first in New York and later in the White House. Trump has indicated interest in doing something bold in space; during the transition, he spoke with historian Douglas Brinkley about President Kennedy\u2019s vow to go to the moon.Story continues below advertisementJohn Logsdon, professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University, said of Musk, \u201cHe\u2019s in pretty close contact with the White House folks. Who\u2019s whispering in who\u2019s ear?\u201d[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Others in the industry also sense an opening.Advertisement\u201cWith the new administration, regardless of what you think politically, comes a new sense of commercial partnerships which is good for us in the space industry,\u201d said Bob Richards, the chief executive of Moon Express, a private company that plans to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon this year in a race to claim the Google Lunar X Prize.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI feel, as many do, a lunar tide rising. The political environment is catching up with logic\u201d with the moon as an important step for even deeper space exploration, he said.A SpaceX mission in 2018 would likely circle the moon before NASA gets another chance. NASA recently announced that it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crews to the mission, which would then occur by 2019, officials have said.Advertisement[NASA considers adding astronauts to a test flight\u00a0moon mission.]Story continues below advertisement\u201cNASA commends its industry partners for reaching higher,\" the agency said in a statement released by spokesman Bob Jacobs.Phil Larson, a former space policy adviser to President Obama who went to work for SpaceX and is now at the University of Colorado, said Musk\u2019s announcement was timely, given that the new administration has to decide what to do with NASA and its human spaceflight program.\u201cThis goes to show that America\u2019s commercial space industry is ready to go beyond Low Earth Orbit, not in 10 years but now,\u201d Larson said.James Muncy, an analyst at the consultancy PoliSpace who also is a lobbyist for SpaceX, said SpaceX\u2019s announcement could alter NASA\u2019s plans. A crewed flight by 2019 would be enormously expensive, he said. Now, NASA could remain on its original timetable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s lunar mission is yet another in a series of grand plans announced by SpaceX. Since Musk founded it in 2002, it has made one bold proclamation after another, often earning jeers from skeptics who say that he moves too fast in an industry that demands caution.While it has had two of its rockets blow up, Musk said Monday that the company\u2019s \u201csuccess rate is actually quite high.\u201dStill he acknowledged the dangers of the mission.The passengers \u201care entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here\u201d he said. \u201cThey are certainly not na\u00efve. We\u2019ll do everything we can to minimize that risk. But it\u2019s not zero.\u201dBut while many of his plans face delays, Musk has pulled off several noteworthy successes\u2014from becoming the first private company to fly to the International Space Station, and the first to ever to land the first stage of a rocket that had lifted a payload into orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlong with Boeing, SpaceX has a contract to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. While the Government Accountability Office recently reported that both companies could face delay, SpaceX has maintained that it is on track for the first crewed mission by the middle of next year, which would then come about six months before the private lunar flight.Musk has said the company would be able to fly humans to Mars by 2025.\u201cElon\u2019s at it again,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cIt is typical Musk bravado.\u201dBut Logsdon said a mission that would orbit the moon and return is not far-fetched, though the Dragon capsule would need to be modified.\u201cCircumlunar is not that hard, because if you get the trajectory right, it\u2019s free return,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like throwing a baseball up high with the right velocity and angle, it will come back to where it started. You don\u2019t have to do much navigation or have propulsion.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA under President Obama, expressed doubt that SpaceX could pull off a lunar mission in just the next couple of years, but said it could possibly be done by 2020, and that it would be \u201cfantastic.\u201d\u201cIt would show that we, in this country, are still in space, and innovating and exploring and capturing the excitement that we have. I think it would be very positive,\u201d Garver said.Further reading:\u00a0With Trump, Gingrich and GOP calling the shots, NASA may go back to the moon.Get the lowdown on commercial spaceflight from three of the world's top space barons. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post) Musk would not name the two potential space explorers, but he said they would pay the cost of the trip.  Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Internet satellites are part of a wave of new tech that could give you more choice in broadband providers (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6907",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/22/spacexs-internet-satellites-are-part-of-a-wave-of-new-tech-that-could-give-you-more-choice-in-broadband-providers/",
        "text": "SpaceX hit another orbital milestone on Wednesday: It launched a pair of experimental broadband satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.The test satellites are another step forward for chief executive Elon Musk, who dreams of building a worldwide network of thousands of orbiting devices that can beam Internet signals down to Earth from low orbit. While much of the project is aimed at connecting developing countries to the Web, many people in wealthy nations are likely to benefit, too, experts say, thanks to the increased broadband competition it may prompt. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFirst two Starlink demo satellites, called Tintin A & B, deployed and communicating to Earth stations pic.twitter.com/TfI53wHEtz\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2018\n\nSpaceX's effort is just one of many new communications innovations, which include 5G data and more efficient use of our airwaves, that could boost competition in your local broadband market in the coming years. If it pays off, the result may be faster Internet speeds, better service and lower prices.Why the White House wants to create a commercial space czar to oversee SpaceX and othersAlong with SpaceX,\u00a0about a dozen such companies are exploring the idea. Although satellite Internet isn't new, the companies are promising a new generation of satellites that orbit much closer to Earth than traditional data satellites and can send and receive signals in a fraction of the time. The idea is to blanket the\u00a0world in wireless broadband, effectively adding a new Internet provider in areas with only one or two services.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe same\u00a0goal\u00a0is driving Microsoft's\u00a0initiative\u00a0to transmit Internet signals over unused TV airwaves. The company has said it hopes to bring 2 million rural Americans online by 2022. Since July, Microsoft has launched seven\u00a0pilot projects in areas such as Georgia, Kansas, Maine, Virginia and Washington state.Meanwhile, AT&T announced\u00a0this week that it would start rolling out 5G \u2014 a next-generation alternative to 4G mobile data \u2014 in three metropolitan areas: Dallas, Waco, Tex.; and Atlanta. Designed for cellular devices that haven't hit the market yet,\u00a0AT&T's 5G capability hints at a future of incredibly fast speeds and low lag for mobile service, an ideal\u00a0combination\u00a0that could support self-driving cars, smart appliances and other gadgets in the Internet of Things. Verizon\u00a0has plans\u00a0to make 5G a viable substitute for home broadband for as many as 30 million households, and smaller carriers have looked into the idea, as well.Why everyone is freaking out about a White House plan to nationalize the country\u2019s 5G data networksThis potpourri of new technologies could bolster competition in\u00a0various ways, according to Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Project at the New America Foundation. For example, imagine if your local telephone company could set up a wireless 5G hotspot in your neighborhood rather than digging into the ground to lay expensive Internet cables to each house.\u00a0As the 5G might be just as good (if not better) than what the cable company offers, customers might benefit from more providers fighting for their loyalty.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor competition, it\u2019s particularly good,\u201d said Calabrese, \u201cbecause it\u2019ll allow these guys to overbuild \u2014 in other words, to become a competitive provider at relatively low capital cost.\u201dCable companies have already begun to anticipate this possibility. That's why you're seeing companies such as Comcast launching their own cellphone services; they know that as Americans increasingly turn to mobile devices, the cable industry will be fighting with wireless carriers over broadband subscriptions.Satellite broadband aspires to compete against both cable and telecom companies by dropping in from space. If it works, consumers could see an entirely new sector spring up to challenge large incumbents like AT&T and Comcast \u2014 something we haven't seen since the emergence of cable itself.Story continues below advertisementStill, there's a lot that satellite broadband companies need to figure out. For example, while the technology makes sense for rural areas where customers have a clear view of the sky, customers in urban areas could be harder to serve because of all the buildings that tend to get in the way of the signal, said Roger Entner, an industry analyst at Recon Analytics.Then there's the question of\u00a0how many customers the satellite Internet can realistically support, experts say.\u00a0\u201cIf too many people sign up,\u201d Entner said, \u201cbecause it\u2019s a shared resource, it might run out of capacity.\u201dEntner said companies could solve this by putting more satellites in orbit. But then the skies could become cluttered with space junk, which may pose risks to other spacecraft. The result could be more competition in an industry that's starved for it. SpaceX\u2019s Internet satellites are part of a wave of new tech that could give you more choice in broadband providers",
        "author": "Brian Fung"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants to stand up a military \u2018Space Force.\u2019 Here\u2019s why. (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6908",
        "date": "2018-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/13/as-concerns-over-war-in-space-rise-a-pair-of-reports-highlight-the-mounting-threat-russia-and-china-pose/",
        "text": "Russia and China are engaged in robust efforts to fight wars in space, developing technology and weapons designed to take out U.S. satellites that provide missile defense\u00a0and enable soldiers to communicate and monitor adversaries, according to a pair of reports released this week.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe reports punctuate a growing concern by the Pentagon, which has been increasingly vocal about the vital role space plays in modern conflict. And they come as some members of Congress have pushed for a \u201cspace corps,\u201d a proposal that seemed to gain the backing of President Trump, who in a recent speech said that \u201cspace is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea. We may even have a space force. \u2026 We have the Air Force; we\u2019ll have the space force.\u201d The proposal by the House last year to create\u00a0the Space Corps, which would become the first new military service branch since the Air Force was created in 1947, was unsuccessful after top Pentagon leaders came out against the measure. But the Pentagon is increasingly concerned that its assets in space, which are vital for modern warfare, are vulnerable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have lost a dramatic lead in space that we should have never let get away from us,\u201d Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) said as he was pushing the space-corps concept last year. \u201cSo that\u2019s what gave us the sense of urgency to get after this.\u201dThat view is shared broadly. The White House\u2019s National Security Strategy, released late last year, cited space as one of the Pentagon\u2019s top priorities and warned: \u201cAny harmful interference with or an attack upon critical components of our space architecture that directly affects this vital U.S. interest will be met with a deliberate response at a time, place, manner and domain of our choosing.\u201dDuring a speech at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego on March 13, President Trump said the U.S. may develop a \u201cspace force.\u201d (The Washington Post)As reports released this week from the Secure World Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies show, the countries have been quite active in recent years, posing a significant threat to the United States. Though much of the foreign nations\u2019 activities in space are secret, the reports are an attempt to spotlight some of the publicly known activities to create a clearer picture of the threats the United States could face in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2007, China fired a missile that blew up a dead satellite, a worrisome demonstration of power that put the Pentagon on notice that its assets in low orbit could be vulnerable. Then, in 2013, China fired a rocket into a far more distant orbit, 22,000 miles away, where some of the nation\u2019s most sensitive satellites live.More recently, Russia sparked concern when one of its satellites flew between two commercial Intelsat communications satellites and then sidled up to a third.The threats range from missiles that could destroy satellites by physically taking them out, to cyberattacks and even lasers and jammers that could disrupt sensors and blind the eyes and ears the Pentagon relies on in orbit. While the worst-case scenario of blowing up satellites concerns military officials, the \"non-kinetic\" attacks can be just as effective, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, \"and are becoming a lot more prevalent.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe organization's report noted that \u201cChina has recently designated space as a military domain, and military writings state that the goal of space warfare and operations is to achieve space superiority using offensive and defensive means.\u201dIn 2014, China hacked U.S. weather and satellite systems operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Russia has also been active in space, heightening tensions between the former Cold War adversaries.\u201cThere is strong evidence that Russia has embarked on a set of programs over the last decade to regain some of its Cold War-era counterspace capability,\u201d according to the Secure World Foundation.Story continues below advertisementUnlike China, Russia \u201cis actively employing counterspace capabilities in current military conflicts,\u201d including with Ukraine, the report said.In recent years, Russia flew a spacecraft uncomfortably close to other satellites. While there was no evidence of foul play, the Secure World Foundation report concluded, \u201cIt is possible that the technologies they tested could be used offensively,\u201d including jamming the satellite\u2019s communications.AdvertisementWhile the United States \"pioneered many of the national security space applications that are in use today and remains the technology leader in nearly all categories,\" the advancements by Russia and China are forcing the Pentagon to augment its systems, the report said.Story continues below advertisement\"There is evidence to suggest a robust debate is underway, largely behind closed doors, on whether the United States should develop new counterspace capabilities, both to counter or deter an adversary from attacking U.S. assets in space and to deny an adversary their own space capabilities in the event of a future conflict.\"But the Pentagon is not sitting on its hands. In the fall, the Air Force launched its X-37B, a classified space plane built by Boeing that can stay aloft for months at a time. Though the Air Force would say only that\u00a0the mission is to carry small satellites and \u201cdemonstrate greater opportunities for rapid space access and on-orbit testing of emerging space technologies,\u201d many officials say it could also be used to gather intelligence.AdvertisementAt a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies event, Bill LaPlante, a senior vice president at the Mitre Corporation who served as the Air Force\u2019s top procurement official, compared the activity to Sputnik, the small, beeping satellite that served as a wake-up call for the United States and helped touch off the Cold War. Because so much of what is happening in space is classified, the American public doesn\u2019t have a good sense of how much of a focus it has become for the military \u2014 something he said needs to change.\u201cIf you actually saw what was going on every day in space today, you\u2019d be saying, 'What, we reacted like that to Sputnik, and you see what\u2019s going on today with space?' \u201d he said. \u201cSo there does need to be an education of the American public.\u201d New reports show lawmakers' and President Trump's recent embrace of space forces may be justified. Trump wants to stand up a military \u2018Space Force.\u2019 Here\u2019s why.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump wants to stand up a military \u2018Space Force.\u2019 Here\u2019s why. (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6909",
        "date": "2018-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/13/as-concerns-over-war-in-space-rise-a-pair-of-reports-highlight-the-mounting-threat-russia-and-china-pose/",
        "text": "Russia and China are engaged in robust efforts to fight wars in space, developing technology and weapons designed to take out U.S. satellites that provide missile defense\u00a0and enable soldiers to communicate and monitor adversaries, according to a pair of reports released this week.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe reports punctuate a growing concern by the Pentagon, which has been increasingly vocal about the vital role space plays in modern conflict. And they come as some members of Congress have pushed for a \u201cspace corps,\u201d a proposal that seemed to gain the backing of President Trump, who in a recent speech said that \u201cspace is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea. We may even have a space force. \u2026 We have the Air Force; we\u2019ll have the space force.\u201d The proposal by the House last year to create\u00a0the Space Corps, which would become the first new military service branch since the Air Force was created in 1947, was unsuccessful after top Pentagon leaders came out against the measure. But the Pentagon is increasingly concerned that its assets in space, which are vital for modern warfare, are vulnerable.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe have lost a dramatic lead in space that we should have never let get away from us,\u201d Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) said as he was pushing the space-corps concept last year. \u201cSo that\u2019s what gave us the sense of urgency to get after this.\u201dThat view is shared broadly. The White House\u2019s National Security Strategy, released late last year, cited space as one of the Pentagon\u2019s top priorities and warned: \u201cAny harmful interference with or an attack upon critical components of our space architecture that directly affects this vital U.S. interest will be met with a deliberate response at a time, place, manner and domain of our choosing.\u201dDuring a speech at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego on March 13, President Trump said the U.S. may develop a \u201cspace force.\u201d (The Washington Post)As reports released this week from the Secure World Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies show, the countries have been quite active in recent years, posing a significant threat to the United States. Though much of the foreign nations\u2019 activities in space are secret, the reports are an attempt to spotlight some of the publicly known activities to create a clearer picture of the threats the United States could face in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2007, China fired a missile that blew up a dead satellite, a worrisome demonstration of power that put the Pentagon on notice that its assets in low orbit could be vulnerable. Then, in 2013, China fired a rocket into a far more distant orbit, 22,000 miles away, where some of the nation\u2019s most sensitive satellites live.More recently, Russia sparked concern when one of its satellites flew between two commercial Intelsat communications satellites and then sidled up to a third.The threats range from missiles that could destroy satellites by physically taking them out, to cyberattacks and even lasers and jammers that could disrupt sensors and blind the eyes and ears the Pentagon relies on in orbit. While the worst-case scenario of blowing up satellites concerns military officials, the \"non-kinetic\" attacks can be just as effective, said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, \"and are becoming a lot more prevalent.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe organization's report noted that \u201cChina has recently designated space as a military domain, and military writings state that the goal of space warfare and operations is to achieve space superiority using offensive and defensive means.\u201dIn 2014, China hacked U.S. weather and satellite systems operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.Russia has also been active in space, heightening tensions between the former Cold War adversaries.\u201cThere is strong evidence that Russia has embarked on a set of programs over the last decade to regain some of its Cold War-era counterspace capability,\u201d according to the Secure World Foundation.Story continues below advertisementUnlike China, Russia \u201cis actively employing counterspace capabilities in current military conflicts,\u201d including with Ukraine, the report said.In recent years, Russia flew a spacecraft uncomfortably close to other satellites. While there was no evidence of foul play, the Secure World Foundation report concluded, \u201cIt is possible that the technologies they tested could be used offensively,\u201d including jamming the satellite\u2019s communications.AdvertisementWhile the United States \"pioneered many of the national security space applications that are in use today and remains the technology leader in nearly all categories,\" the advancements by Russia and China are forcing the Pentagon to augment its systems, the report said.Story continues below advertisement\"There is evidence to suggest a robust debate is underway, largely behind closed doors, on whether the United States should develop new counterspace capabilities, both to counter or deter an adversary from attacking U.S. assets in space and to deny an adversary their own space capabilities in the event of a future conflict.\"But the Pentagon is not sitting on its hands. In the fall, the Air Force launched its X-37B, a classified space plane built by Boeing that can stay aloft for months at a time. Though the Air Force would say only that\u00a0the mission is to carry small satellites and \u201cdemonstrate greater opportunities for rapid space access and on-orbit testing of emerging space technologies,\u201d many officials say it could also be used to gather intelligence.AdvertisementAt a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies event, Bill LaPlante, a senior vice president at the Mitre Corporation who served as the Air Force\u2019s top procurement official, compared the activity to Sputnik, the small, beeping satellite that served as a wake-up call for the United States and helped touch off the Cold War. Because so much of what is happening in space is classified, the American public doesn\u2019t have a good sense of how much of a focus it has become for the military \u2014 something he said needs to change.\u201cIf you actually saw what was going on every day in space today, you\u2019d be saying, 'What, we reacted like that to Sputnik, and you see what\u2019s going on today with space?' \u201d he said. \u201cSo there does need to be an education of the American public.\u201d New reports show lawmakers' and President Trump's recent embrace of space forces may be justified. Trump wants to stand up a military \u2018Space Force.\u2019 Here\u2019s why.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6910",
        "date": "2018-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/17/spacex-boeing-face-delays-and-techncial-challenges-as-they-work-to-restore-human-spaceflight-for-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s bold experiment to rely on contractors to provide a taxi service for its astronauts to the International Space Station is running into troubles that could delay the first flights and leave the space agency without a way to get its astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn prepared testimony submitted to a congressional hearing on the status of the program, the Government Accountability Office said ongoing \u201cdelays and uncertain final certification dates raise questions about whether the United States will have uninterrupted access to the [space station] after 2019.\u201d If SpaceX and Boeing, the companies NASA has hired to fly its astronauts to space, can\u2019t meet NASA\u2019s rigorous requirements for human spaceflight by late next year, the space agency would have to continue to rely on the Russians, who charge more than $80 million a seat to launch Americans to orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFailing that, NASA would face the ignominious prospect that the United States would not be able to access the space station, on which it has spent billions of dollars to build and maintain.\u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns,\u201d said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House\u00a0Science subcommittee on space.He added that the \u201csituation gets even worse when we look at safety and reliability concerns surrounding these two new systems.\u201d As a result, NASA may have to seek additional funding or accept greater risk. \u201cNeither of those options is viable,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementNASA has been unable to fly humans to the space station since the shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, the space agency has awarded contracts worth up to $6.8 billion in total to Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft capable of flying humans to and from the station, which orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 250 miles.AdvertisementThe reliance on private-sector companies to perform a function that had traditionally been purely the government\u2019s domain was seen as a bold bet, one that would free NASA up to pursue more ambitious deep space missions.While Boeing has a long heritage in space, dating to the early days of the Space Age, and SpaceX has been supplying the station with cargo and supplies for years, both companies are struggling with deadlines and safety issues in the \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBefore they fly humans, Boeing and SpaceX must overcome complex technical problems with their spacecraft, the GAO said. Boeing has an issue with its abort system that may cause the spacecraft to \u201ctumble,\u201d posing \u201ca threat to the crew\u2019s safety.\u201d Boeing is also addressing a concern that as the spacecraft reenters the Earth's atmosphere, the heat shield could disconnect \u201cand damage the parachute system,\u201d the GAO found.AdvertisementBefore it allows SpaceX to fly, NASA must first determine whether it can safely fuel its rocket while the astronauts are on board \u2014 an issue that the both the GAO and the agency\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said could be a safety risk. In 2016, SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket exploded into a massive fireball while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test.Heading into 2018, the program is at a critical juncture, as NASA will have to sign off on some key decisions about whether it thinks Boeing and SpaceX\u2019s spacecraft will be able to meet the agency\u2019s rigorous safety standards.Story continues below advertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s advisory panel recently wrote that \u201cwe expect to see several significant certification issues brought to culmination within the next year that will require NASA risk-acceptance decisions at a very high level within the agency.\u201dAdvertisementRep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) defended the companies, saying they had saved money and come up with innovative approaches even though initially the program had been starved of money, stunting development from the outset.\u201cIt looks like the program is going along as we thought it would, even though there have been glitches,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there are glitches in the development of any new technology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe hearing comes as NASA recently announced the schedule for SpaceX\u2019s test flights has slipped. Its flight without astronauts, which had been scheduled for March, is now slated for August. And its flight with crew pushed back four months to December. Boeing plans an uncrewed flight in August, and one with astronauts in November \u2014 a month before SpaceX.Boeing and SpaceX have been working for years to get their spacecraft ready so that they meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety standards.AdvertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recently wrote that NASA \u201cis addressing safety properly, but human space flight is inherently risky.\u201d It noted that in particular, orbital debris can pose a significant danger. In space, even a small piece of debris, something the size of a screw, can wreak havoc when orbiting at more than 17,000 mph.Story continues below advertisementEven though the program is behind its original schedule, the report warned against prioritizing schedule over safety.John Mulholland, Boeing program manager for commercial crew, said the company is \u201cmaking steady progress on achieving certification\u201d from NASA for its Starliner spacecraft. He added that the company exceeds \u201cour requirements for crew safety.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, said SpaceX has \u201ccompleted nearly all technical development,\u201d as it works toward flying its first mission with astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations said that both companies have made significant progress, and that their success will help lay \u201ca foundation for a more affordable and sustainable future for human spaceflight.\u201dBut he added that the \u201cschedule for this activity has taken longer than originally envisioned.\u201d And he said the coming year \u201cwill be particularly challenging for our team as some of the most difficult milestones are just ahead.\u201d Further delays could mean NASA has no way to get its astronauts to the International Space Station, watchdog agencies said during a congressional hearing. SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6911",
        "date": "2018-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/17/spacex-boeing-face-delays-and-techncial-challenges-as-they-work-to-restore-human-spaceflight-for-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s bold experiment to rely on contractors to provide a taxi service for its astronauts to the International Space Station is running into troubles that could delay the first flights and leave the space agency without a way to get its astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn prepared testimony submitted to a congressional hearing on the status of the program, the Government Accountability Office said ongoing \u201cdelays and uncertain final certification dates raise questions about whether the United States will have uninterrupted access to the [space station] after 2019.\u201d If SpaceX and Boeing, the companies NASA has hired to fly its astronauts to space, can\u2019t meet NASA\u2019s rigorous requirements for human spaceflight by late next year, the space agency would have to continue to rely on the Russians, who charge more than $80 million a seat to launch Americans to orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFailing that, NASA would face the ignominious prospect that the United States would not be able to access the space station, on which it has spent billions of dollars to build and maintain.\u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns,\u201d said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House\u00a0Science subcommittee on space.He added that the \u201csituation gets even worse when we look at safety and reliability concerns surrounding these two new systems.\u201d As a result, NASA may have to seek additional funding or accept greater risk. \u201cNeither of those options is viable,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementNASA has been unable to fly humans to the space station since the shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, the space agency has awarded contracts worth up to $6.8 billion in total to Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft capable of flying humans to and from the station, which orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 250 miles.AdvertisementThe reliance on private-sector companies to perform a function that had traditionally been purely the government\u2019s domain was seen as a bold bet, one that would free NASA up to pursue more ambitious deep space missions.While Boeing has a long heritage in space, dating to the early days of the Space Age, and SpaceX has been supplying the station with cargo and supplies for years, both companies are struggling with deadlines and safety issues in the \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBefore they fly humans, Boeing and SpaceX must overcome complex technical problems with their spacecraft, the GAO said. Boeing has an issue with its abort system that may cause the spacecraft to \u201ctumble,\u201d posing \u201ca threat to the crew\u2019s safety.\u201d Boeing is also addressing a concern that as the spacecraft reenters the Earth's atmosphere, the heat shield could disconnect \u201cand damage the parachute system,\u201d the GAO found.AdvertisementBefore it allows SpaceX to fly, NASA must first determine whether it can safely fuel its rocket while the astronauts are on board \u2014 an issue that the both the GAO and the agency\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said could be a safety risk. In 2016, SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket exploded into a massive fireball while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test.Heading into 2018, the program is at a critical juncture, as NASA will have to sign off on some key decisions about whether it thinks Boeing and SpaceX\u2019s spacecraft will be able to meet the agency\u2019s rigorous safety standards.Story continues below advertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s advisory panel recently wrote that \u201cwe expect to see several significant certification issues brought to culmination within the next year that will require NASA risk-acceptance decisions at a very high level within the agency.\u201dAdvertisementRep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) defended the companies, saying they had saved money and come up with innovative approaches even though initially the program had been starved of money, stunting development from the outset.\u201cIt looks like the program is going along as we thought it would, even though there have been glitches,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there are glitches in the development of any new technology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe hearing comes as NASA recently announced the schedule for SpaceX\u2019s test flights has slipped. Its flight without astronauts, which had been scheduled for March, is now slated for August. And its flight with crew pushed back four months to December. Boeing plans an uncrewed flight in August, and one with astronauts in November \u2014 a month before SpaceX.Boeing and SpaceX have been working for years to get their spacecraft ready so that they meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety standards.AdvertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recently wrote that NASA \u201cis addressing safety properly, but human space flight is inherently risky.\u201d It noted that in particular, orbital debris can pose a significant danger. In space, even a small piece of debris, something the size of a screw, can wreak havoc when orbiting at more than 17,000 mph.Story continues below advertisementEven though the program is behind its original schedule, the report warned against prioritizing schedule over safety.John Mulholland, Boeing program manager for commercial crew, said the company is \u201cmaking steady progress on achieving certification\u201d from NASA for its Starliner spacecraft. He added that the company exceeds \u201cour requirements for crew safety.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, said SpaceX has \u201ccompleted nearly all technical development,\u201d as it works toward flying its first mission with astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations said that both companies have made significant progress, and that their success will help lay \u201ca foundation for a more affordable and sustainable future for human spaceflight.\u201dBut he added that the \u201cschedule for this activity has taken longer than originally envisioned.\u201d And he said the coming year \u201cwill be particularly challenging for our team as some of the most difficult milestones are just ahead.\u201d Further delays could mean NASA has no way to get its astronauts to the International Space Station, watchdog agencies said during a congressional hearing. SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6912",
        "date": "2018-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/17/spacex-boeing-face-delays-and-techncial-challenges-as-they-work-to-restore-human-spaceflight-for-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s bold experiment to rely on contractors to provide a taxi service for its astronauts to the International Space Station is running into troubles that could delay the first flights and leave the space agency without a way to get its astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn prepared testimony submitted to a congressional hearing on the status of the program, the Government Accountability Office said ongoing \u201cdelays and uncertain final certification dates raise questions about whether the United States will have uninterrupted access to the [space station] after 2019.\u201d If SpaceX and Boeing, the companies NASA has hired to fly its astronauts to space, can\u2019t meet NASA\u2019s rigorous requirements for human spaceflight by late next year, the space agency would have to continue to rely on the Russians, who charge more than $80 million a seat to launch Americans to orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFailing that, NASA would face the ignominious prospect that the United States would not be able to access the space station, on which it has spent billions of dollars to build and maintain.\u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns,\u201d said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House\u00a0Science subcommittee on space.He added that the \u201csituation gets even worse when we look at safety and reliability concerns surrounding these two new systems.\u201d As a result, NASA may have to seek additional funding or accept greater risk. \u201cNeither of those options is viable,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementNASA has been unable to fly humans to the space station since the shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, the space agency has awarded contracts worth up to $6.8 billion in total to Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft capable of flying humans to and from the station, which orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 250 miles.AdvertisementThe reliance on private-sector companies to perform a function that had traditionally been purely the government\u2019s domain was seen as a bold bet, one that would free NASA up to pursue more ambitious deep space missions.While Boeing has a long heritage in space, dating to the early days of the Space Age, and SpaceX has been supplying the station with cargo and supplies for years, both companies are struggling with deadlines and safety issues in the \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBefore they fly humans, Boeing and SpaceX must overcome complex technical problems with their spacecraft, the GAO said. Boeing has an issue with its abort system that may cause the spacecraft to \u201ctumble,\u201d posing \u201ca threat to the crew\u2019s safety.\u201d Boeing is also addressing a concern that as the spacecraft reenters the Earth's atmosphere, the heat shield could disconnect \u201cand damage the parachute system,\u201d the GAO found.AdvertisementBefore it allows SpaceX to fly, NASA must first determine whether it can safely fuel its rocket while the astronauts are on board \u2014 an issue that the both the GAO and the agency\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said could be a safety risk. In 2016, SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket exploded into a massive fireball while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test.Heading into 2018, the program is at a critical juncture, as NASA will have to sign off on some key decisions about whether it thinks Boeing and SpaceX\u2019s spacecraft will be able to meet the agency\u2019s rigorous safety standards.Story continues below advertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s advisory panel recently wrote that \u201cwe expect to see several significant certification issues brought to culmination within the next year that will require NASA risk-acceptance decisions at a very high level within the agency.\u201dAdvertisementRep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) defended the companies, saying they had saved money and come up with innovative approaches even though initially the program had been starved of money, stunting development from the outset.\u201cIt looks like the program is going along as we thought it would, even though there have been glitches,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there are glitches in the development of any new technology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe hearing comes as NASA recently announced the schedule for SpaceX\u2019s test flights has slipped. Its flight without astronauts, which had been scheduled for March, is now slated for August. And its flight with crew pushed back four months to December. Boeing plans an uncrewed flight in August, and one with astronauts in November \u2014 a month before SpaceX.Boeing and SpaceX have been working for years to get their spacecraft ready so that they meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety standards.AdvertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recently wrote that NASA \u201cis addressing safety properly, but human space flight is inherently risky.\u201d It noted that in particular, orbital debris can pose a significant danger. In space, even a small piece of debris, something the size of a screw, can wreak havoc when orbiting at more than 17,000 mph.Story continues below advertisementEven though the program is behind its original schedule, the report warned against prioritizing schedule over safety.John Mulholland, Boeing program manager for commercial crew, said the company is \u201cmaking steady progress on achieving certification\u201d from NASA for its Starliner spacecraft. He added that the company exceeds \u201cour requirements for crew safety.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, said SpaceX has \u201ccompleted nearly all technical development,\u201d as it works toward flying its first mission with astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations said that both companies have made significant progress, and that their success will help lay \u201ca foundation for a more affordable and sustainable future for human spaceflight.\u201dBut he added that the \u201cschedule for this activity has taken longer than originally envisioned.\u201d And he said the coming year \u201cwill be particularly challenging for our team as some of the most difficult milestones are just ahead.\u201d Further delays could mean NASA has no way to get its astronauts to the International Space Station, watchdog agencies said during a congressional hearing. SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6913",
        "date": "2018-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/17/spacex-boeing-face-delays-and-techncial-challenges-as-they-work-to-restore-human-spaceflight-for-nasa/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s bold experiment to rely on contractors to provide a taxi service for its astronauts to the International Space Station is running into troubles that could delay the first flights and leave the space agency without a way to get its astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn prepared testimony submitted to a congressional hearing on the status of the program, the Government Accountability Office said ongoing \u201cdelays and uncertain final certification dates raise questions about whether the United States will have uninterrupted access to the [space station] after 2019.\u201d If SpaceX and Boeing, the companies NASA has hired to fly its astronauts to space, can\u2019t meet NASA\u2019s rigorous requirements for human spaceflight by late next year, the space agency would have to continue to rely on the Russians, who charge more than $80 million a seat to launch Americans to orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFailing that, NASA would face the ignominious prospect that the United States would not be able to access the space station, on which it has spent billions of dollars to build and maintain.\u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns,\u201d said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House\u00a0Science subcommittee on space.He added that the \u201csituation gets even worse when we look at safety and reliability concerns surrounding these two new systems.\u201d As a result, NASA may have to seek additional funding or accept greater risk. \u201cNeither of those options is viable,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementNASA has been unable to fly humans to the space station since the shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, the space agency has awarded contracts worth up to $6.8 billion in total to Boeing and SpaceX to develop spacecraft capable of flying humans to and from the station, which orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 250 miles.AdvertisementThe reliance on private-sector companies to perform a function that had traditionally been purely the government\u2019s domain was seen as a bold bet, one that would free NASA up to pursue more ambitious deep space missions.While Boeing has a long heritage in space, dating to the early days of the Space Age, and SpaceX has been supplying the station with cargo and supplies for years, both companies are struggling with deadlines and safety issues in the \u201ccommercial crew program.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBefore they fly humans, Boeing and SpaceX must overcome complex technical problems with their spacecraft, the GAO said. Boeing has an issue with its abort system that may cause the spacecraft to \u201ctumble,\u201d posing \u201ca threat to the crew\u2019s safety.\u201d Boeing is also addressing a concern that as the spacecraft reenters the Earth's atmosphere, the heat shield could disconnect \u201cand damage the parachute system,\u201d the GAO found.AdvertisementBefore it allows SpaceX to fly, NASA must first determine whether it can safely fuel its rocket while the astronauts are on board \u2014 an issue that the both the GAO and the agency\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said could be a safety risk. In 2016, SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket exploded into a massive fireball while it was being fueled ahead of an engine test.Heading into 2018, the program is at a critical juncture, as NASA will have to sign off on some key decisions about whether it thinks Boeing and SpaceX\u2019s spacecraft will be able to meet the agency\u2019s rigorous safety standards.Story continues below advertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s advisory panel recently wrote that \u201cwe expect to see several significant certification issues brought to culmination within the next year that will require NASA risk-acceptance decisions at a very high level within the agency.\u201dAdvertisementRep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) defended the companies, saying they had saved money and come up with innovative approaches even though initially the program had been starved of money, stunting development from the outset.\u201cIt looks like the program is going along as we thought it would, even though there have been glitches,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there are glitches in the development of any new technology.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe hearing comes as NASA recently announced the schedule for SpaceX\u2019s test flights has slipped. Its flight without astronauts, which had been scheduled for March, is now slated for August. And its flight with crew pushed back four months to December. Boeing plans an uncrewed flight in August, and one with astronauts in November \u2014 a month before SpaceX.Boeing and SpaceX have been working for years to get their spacecraft ready so that they meet NASA\u2019s rigorous safety standards.AdvertisementIn its annual report, NASA\u2019s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recently wrote that NASA \u201cis addressing safety properly, but human space flight is inherently risky.\u201d It noted that in particular, orbital debris can pose a significant danger. In space, even a small piece of debris, something the size of a screw, can wreak havoc when orbiting at more than 17,000 mph.Story continues below advertisementEven though the program is behind its original schedule, the report warned against prioritizing schedule over safety.John Mulholland, Boeing program manager for commercial crew, said the company is \u201cmaking steady progress on achieving certification\u201d from NASA for its Starliner spacecraft. He added that the company exceeds \u201cour requirements for crew safety.\u201dHans Koenigsmann, SpaceX\u2019s vice president for build and flight reliability, said SpaceX has \u201ccompleted nearly all technical development,\u201d as it works toward flying its first mission with astronauts by the end of the year.AdvertisementWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for human exploration and operations said that both companies have made significant progress, and that their success will help lay \u201ca foundation for a more affordable and sustainable future for human spaceflight.\u201dBut he added that the \u201cschedule for this activity has taken longer than originally envisioned.\u201d And he said the coming year \u201cwill be particularly challenging for our team as some of the most difficult milestones are just ahead.\u201d Further delays could mean NASA has no way to get its astronauts to the International Space Station, watchdog agencies said during a congressional hearing. SpaceX, Boeing face delays and technical challenges as they work to restore human spaceflight for NASA",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s new administrator says he\u2019s talking to companies about taking over operations of the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6914",
        "date": "2018-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/05/nasas-new-administrator-says-hes-talking-to-companies-to-take-over-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "NASA is talking to several international companies about forming a consortium that would take over operation of the International Space Station and run it as a commercial space lab, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019re in a position now where there are people out there that can do commercial management of the International Space Station,\u201d Bridenstine said in his first extensive interview since being sworn in as NASA administrator in April. \u201cI\u2019ve talked to many large corporations that are interested in getting involved in that through a consortium, if you will.\u201d The White House touched off a heated discussion about the future of the orbiting laboratory earlier this year when it said it planned to end direct government funding of the station by 2025, while working on a transition plan to turn the station over to the private sector.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members of Congress said they would vigorously oppose any plan that ends the station\u2019s life prematurely. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said the decision to end funding for it was the result of \u201cnumskulls\u201d at the Office of Management and Budget.And it was unclear, who, if anyone, would want to take over operations of the station, which costs NASA about $3 billion to $4 billion a year and is run by an international partnership that includes the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency. An orbiting laboratory that flies some 250 miles above the Earth's surface, it has been continuously inhabited by astronauts since 2000.The White House wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run venture after 2024, according to an internal NASA document. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)In unveiling its plan to commercialize the station earlier this year, the White House offered few details of how exactly it would work.\u00a0As it prepares a transition plan, the White House said it \u201cwill request market analysis and business plans from the commercial sector and solicit plans from commercial industry.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe international nature of the station could make it tricky, though perhaps there could be an international commercial partnership with some sort of a government role, said Frank Slazer, the vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association.\u201cIt will be very hard to turn ISS into a truly commercial outpost because of the international agreements that the United States is involved in,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s inherently always going to be an international construct that requires U.S. government involvement and multinational cooperation.\u201dBridenstine declined to name the companies that have expressed interest in managing the station, and said he\u00a0was aware that companies may find it \u201chard to close the business case.\u201d But he said there was still seven years to plan for the future of the station, and with the White House\u2019s budget request \u201cwe have forced the conversation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA former congressman from Oklahoma, Bridenstine, was confirmed by the Senate by a narrow 50-to-49 vote this spring, after the post had remained vacant for 15 months. Democrats had rallied against his nomination, saying he lacked the managerial and scientific background for the job.Many had labeled him a climate-change denier over controversial comments Bridenstine, a conservative Republican, had made in the past.But during a Senate hearing last month, he said his views had evolved, and that he believes human activity is the leading cause of climate change. That earned him plaudits from Democrats, such as Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) who had opposed his nomination.Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) questioned NASA Administrator James Bridenstine about climate change during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing May 23. (Sen. Brian Schatz)\u201cI have come to the conclusion that this is a true evolution,\u201d Schatz said. \u201cThat you respect people with whom you work, you respect the science, you want their respect.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the interview, Bridenstine said there was no single event that cause him to change his thinking. As chairman of the Environment subcommittee, he said he \u201clistened to a lot of testimony. I heard a lot of experts, and I read a lot. I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that we've put a lot of it into the atmosphere and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we've seen. And we've done it in really significant ways.\u201dIn the wide-ranging interview, Bridenstine also listed a return to the moon and the restoration of human spaceflight from United States soil as two of his top priorities. NASA has proposed building an outpost in the vicinity of the moon that could be inhabited by humans from time to time, with landers that could ferry supplies to the lunar surface.Known as the Lunar Orbiting Platform Gateway, the system would be built by NASA in partnership with industry and its international partners, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI've met with a lot of leaders of space agencies from around the world,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a lot of interest in the Gateway in the lunar outpost because a lot of countries want to have access to the surface of the moon. And this can help them as well and they can help us. It helps expand the partnership that we've seen in low Earth orbit with the International Space Station.\u201dBut the first element of the system wouldn\u2019t be launched until 2021 or 2022, he said.Perhaps as early as this year, Boeing and SpaceX, the companies hired by NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station, could see their first test flights with people on board, though it\u2019s possible they could be delayed to next year.Elon Musk's Space X is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at riskSince the space shuttle was retired in 2011, Russia has flown NASA\u2019s astronauts to the station, charging hundreds of millions of dollars over that time. Bridenstine said that it is \u201ca big objective is to once again launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth Boeing and SpaceX have had delays and setbacks in their programs. Government watchdogs have said they were concerned about an issue with Boeing's abort system that may cause its spacecraft to \u201ctumble,\u201d posing a threat to the crew\u2019s safety. Boeing has said it has fixed that problem, as well as a concern with the heat shield that the Government Accountability Office said last year could disconnect\u00a0\u201cand damage the parachute system.\u201dJohn Mulholland, Boeing's commercial crew program manager, told Congress earlier this year that the company's \"analyses show that we exceed our requirements for crew safety.\"As administrator, Bridenstine and his staff will also have to sign off on SpaceX\u2019s decision to fuel its Falcon 9 rocket after the crews are on board -- which some have said could put astronauts at risk. But during a recent NASA safety advisory panel, some members said they thought the procedure could be a \u201cviable option\u201d if adequate safety controls are in place.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told reporters last month that he did not think the fueling process \"presents a safety issue for astronauts. But we can adjust our operational procedures to load propellant before the astronauts board. But I really think this is an overblown issue.\u201dIn the interview, Bridenstine said no decision had been made yet about the fueling procedures. \u201cI haven\u2019t signed off on anything at this point,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure we test it every which way you can possibly imagine. And that\u2019s underway right now. We\u2019re not going to put anybody in any undue risk.\u201d The new NASA administrator said two of his top priorities are returning to the moon and restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil.  NASA\u2019s new administrator says he\u2019s talking to companies about taking over operations of the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s new administrator says he\u2019s talking to companies about taking over operations of the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6915",
        "date": "2018-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/05/nasas-new-administrator-says-hes-talking-to-companies-to-take-over-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "NASA is talking to several international companies about forming a consortium that would take over operation of the International Space Station and run it as a commercial space lab, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019re in a position now where there are people out there that can do commercial management of the International Space Station,\u201d Bridenstine said in his first extensive interview since being sworn in as NASA administrator in April. \u201cI\u2019ve talked to many large corporations that are interested in getting involved in that through a consortium, if you will.\u201d The White House touched off a heated discussion about the future of the orbiting laboratory earlier this year when it said it planned to end direct government funding of the station by 2025, while working on a transition plan to turn the station over to the private sector.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome members of Congress said they would vigorously oppose any plan that ends the station\u2019s life prematurely. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said the decision to end funding for it was the result of \u201cnumskulls\u201d at the Office of Management and Budget.And it was unclear, who, if anyone, would want to take over operations of the station, which costs NASA about $3 billion to $4 billion a year and is run by an international partnership that includes the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency. An orbiting laboratory that flies some 250 miles above the Earth's surface, it has been continuously inhabited by astronauts since 2000.The White House wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run venture after 2024, according to an internal NASA document. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)In unveiling its plan to commercialize the station earlier this year, the White House offered few details of how exactly it would work.\u00a0As it prepares a transition plan, the White House said it \u201cwill request market analysis and business plans from the commercial sector and solicit plans from commercial industry.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe international nature of the station could make it tricky, though perhaps there could be an international commercial partnership with some sort of a government role, said Frank Slazer, the vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association.\u201cIt will be very hard to turn ISS into a truly commercial outpost because of the international agreements that the United States is involved in,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s inherently always going to be an international construct that requires U.S. government involvement and multinational cooperation.\u201dBridenstine declined to name the companies that have expressed interest in managing the station, and said he\u00a0was aware that companies may find it \u201chard to close the business case.\u201d But he said there was still seven years to plan for the future of the station, and with the White House\u2019s budget request \u201cwe have forced the conversation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA former congressman from Oklahoma, Bridenstine, was confirmed by the Senate by a narrow 50-to-49 vote this spring, after the post had remained vacant for 15 months. Democrats had rallied against his nomination, saying he lacked the managerial and scientific background for the job.Many had labeled him a climate-change denier over controversial comments Bridenstine, a conservative Republican, had made in the past.But during a Senate hearing last month, he said his views had evolved, and that he believes human activity is the leading cause of climate change. That earned him plaudits from Democrats, such as Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) who had opposed his nomination.Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) questioned NASA Administrator James Bridenstine about climate change during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing May 23. (Sen. Brian Schatz)\u201cI have come to the conclusion that this is a true evolution,\u201d Schatz said. \u201cThat you respect people with whom you work, you respect the science, you want their respect.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the interview, Bridenstine said there was no single event that cause him to change his thinking. As chairman of the Environment subcommittee, he said he \u201clistened to a lot of testimony. I heard a lot of experts, and I read a lot. I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that we've put a lot of it into the atmosphere and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we've seen. And we've done it in really significant ways.\u201dIn the wide-ranging interview, Bridenstine also listed a return to the moon and the restoration of human spaceflight from United States soil as two of his top priorities. NASA has proposed building an outpost in the vicinity of the moon that could be inhabited by humans from time to time, with landers that could ferry supplies to the lunar surface.Known as the Lunar Orbiting Platform Gateway, the system would be built by NASA in partnership with industry and its international partners, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI've met with a lot of leaders of space agencies from around the world,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a lot of interest in the Gateway in the lunar outpost because a lot of countries want to have access to the surface of the moon. And this can help them as well and they can help us. It helps expand the partnership that we've seen in low Earth orbit with the International Space Station.\u201dBut the first element of the system wouldn\u2019t be launched until 2021 or 2022, he said.Perhaps as early as this year, Boeing and SpaceX, the companies hired by NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station, could see their first test flights with people on board, though it\u2019s possible they could be delayed to next year.Elon Musk's Space X is using a powerful rocket technology. NASA advisers say it could put lives at riskSince the space shuttle was retired in 2011, Russia has flown NASA\u2019s astronauts to the station, charging hundreds of millions of dollars over that time. Bridenstine said that it is \u201ca big objective is to once again launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth Boeing and SpaceX have had delays and setbacks in their programs. Government watchdogs have said they were concerned about an issue with Boeing's abort system that may cause its spacecraft to \u201ctumble,\u201d posing a threat to the crew\u2019s safety. Boeing has said it has fixed that problem, as well as a concern with the heat shield that the Government Accountability Office said last year could disconnect\u00a0\u201cand damage the parachute system.\u201dJohn Mulholland, Boeing's commercial crew program manager, told Congress earlier this year that the company's \"analyses show that we exceed our requirements for crew safety.\"As administrator, Bridenstine and his staff will also have to sign off on SpaceX\u2019s decision to fuel its Falcon 9 rocket after the crews are on board -- which some have said could put astronauts at risk. But during a recent NASA safety advisory panel, some members said they thought the procedure could be a \u201cviable option\u201d if adequate safety controls are in place.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told reporters last month that he did not think the fueling process \"presents a safety issue for astronauts. But we can adjust our operational procedures to load propellant before the astronauts board. But I really think this is an overblown issue.\u201dIn the interview, Bridenstine said no decision had been made yet about the fueling procedures. \u201cI haven\u2019t signed off on anything at this point,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to make sure we test it every which way you can possibly imagine. And that\u2019s underway right now. We\u2019re not going to put anybody in any undue risk.\u201d The new NASA administrator said two of his top priorities are returning to the moon and restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil.  NASA\u2019s new administrator says he\u2019s talking to companies about taking over operations of the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6916",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/an-exclusive-look-at-jeff-bezos-plan-to-set-up-amazon-like-delivery-for-future-human-settlement-of-the-moon/",
        "text": "More than four decades after the last man walked on the lunar surface, several upstart space entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on NASA's renewed interest in returning to the moon, offering a variety of proposals with the ultimate goal of establishing a lasting human presence there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe commercial sector's interest comes as many anticipate support from the Trump administration, which is eager for a first-term triumph to rally the nation\u00a0the way the Apollo flights did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition team about the company's\u00a0interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service\u00a0for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable \u201cfuture human settlement\u201d of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is time for America to return to the Moon \u2014 this time to stay,\u201d Bezos said in response to emailed questions from The Post. \u201cA permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.\u201dThe Post obtained a copy of the white paper, marked \u201cproprietary and confidential,\u201d and the company then confirmed its authenticity and agreed to answer questions about it.Bezos\u2019s proposal comes as SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a stunning announcement this week that his company planned\u00a0to fly two unnamed, private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year \u2014 an ambitious timeline that, if met, could beat a similar mission by NASA.Story continues below advertisement[SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year.]Anticipating that the Trump administration is focusing on the moon, the space agency recently announced it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crew for a mission that would then occur by 2019.Advertisement[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Obama killed plans for a lunar mission, saying in 2010 that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before.\u201d But the administration\u2019s Mars plan was still far from\u00a0actually delivering humans there, and critics grew frustrated that NASA has not been able to fly humans out of low Earth orbit since the 1970s. A shot around the moon, however, could be feasible, even within a few years.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn\u2019t involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the\u00a0equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon \u2014 unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left \u201cflags and footprints\u201d and then came home.NASA already has shown a willingness to work closely with the commercial sector, hiring companies to fly supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. It is providing technical expertise, but no funding, to SpaceX\u2019s plan to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars by 2020.AdvertisementThe prospect of a lunar mission has several companies lining up to provide not just transportation, but also habitats, science experiments and even the ability to mine the moon for resources.Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has also been working on plans to create a transportation network to the area around the moon, known as cislunar space.\u201cI\u2019m excited by the possibilities,\u201d said Tory Bruno, the alliance's chief executive. \u201cThis administration, near as we can tell, feels a sense of urgency to go out and make things happen, and to have high-profile demonstrations that are along the road map to accomplish these broad goals. \u2026 There is an opportunity to begin building that infrastructure right now \u2014 within the next four years.\u201dRobert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of inflatable space habitats, said his company could create a depot that could orbit the moon by 2020, housing\u00a0supplies and medial facilities, as well as humans. A smaller version of the possible habitats, known as the BEAM, is docked to the International Space Station, where astronauts have been testing it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Bigelow said he was glad the administration seems to be refocusing on the moon. \u201cMars is premature at this time. The moon is not,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the technology. We have the ability, and the potential for a terrific business case.\u201dAt an Aviation Week awards ceremony Thursday evening, Bezos added that the moon could help propel humans even further into space, to destinations such as Mars: \"I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily.\"After remaining quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to partner with NASA is a huge coming out of sorts for the company, which has been funded almost exclusively by Bezos. The paper urges NASA to develop a program that provides \u201cincentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that\u00a0it could \u201conly be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I\u2019m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.\u201dLast year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company\u2019s West Texas facility.That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin\u2019s feather symbol.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon\u2019s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft\u2019s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the \u201cwater ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater\u2019s deep crevices.\u201dWater is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.The Blue Moon spacecraft could carry as much as 10,000 pounds of material and fly atop several different rockets, including NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Atlas V or its own New Glenn rocket, which is under development and expected to fly by the end of the decade, the company said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOnce on the surface, the lander\u2019s useful payload can be used to conduct science or deploy rovers,\u201d the company said. \u201cA robotic arm attached to the lander will deploy to examine the lunar surface with an array of instruments.\u201dThe initial landing \u201cis envisioned as the first in a series of increasingly capable missions,\u201d including flying samples of lunar ice back to Earth for study.The company said it could also help deliver the cargo and supplies needed for human settlements.\u201cBlue Moon is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the Moon,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cAny credible first lunar settlement will require that capability.\u201d In a paper prepared for NASA, Bezos says his Blue Origin space company could land a delivery vehicle on the moon by 2020. An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6917",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/an-exclusive-look-at-jeff-bezos-plan-to-set-up-amazon-like-delivery-for-future-human-settlement-of-the-moon/",
        "text": "More than four decades after the last man walked on the lunar surface, several upstart space entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on NASA's renewed interest in returning to the moon, offering a variety of proposals with the ultimate goal of establishing a lasting human presence there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe commercial sector's interest comes as many anticipate support from the Trump administration, which is eager for a first-term triumph to rally the nation\u00a0the way the Apollo flights did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition team about the company's\u00a0interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service\u00a0for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable \u201cfuture human settlement\u201d of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is time for America to return to the Moon \u2014 this time to stay,\u201d Bezos said in response to emailed questions from The Post. \u201cA permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.\u201dThe Post obtained a copy of the white paper, marked \u201cproprietary and confidential,\u201d and the company then confirmed its authenticity and agreed to answer questions about it.Bezos\u2019s proposal comes as SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a stunning announcement this week that his company planned\u00a0to fly two unnamed, private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year \u2014 an ambitious timeline that, if met, could beat a similar mission by NASA.Story continues below advertisement[SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year.]Anticipating that the Trump administration is focusing on the moon, the space agency recently announced it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crew for a mission that would then occur by 2019.Advertisement[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Obama killed plans for a lunar mission, saying in 2010 that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before.\u201d But the administration\u2019s Mars plan was still far from\u00a0actually delivering humans there, and critics grew frustrated that NASA has not been able to fly humans out of low Earth orbit since the 1970s. A shot around the moon, however, could be feasible, even within a few years.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn\u2019t involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the\u00a0equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon \u2014 unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left \u201cflags and footprints\u201d and then came home.NASA already has shown a willingness to work closely with the commercial sector, hiring companies to fly supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. It is providing technical expertise, but no funding, to SpaceX\u2019s plan to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars by 2020.AdvertisementThe prospect of a lunar mission has several companies lining up to provide not just transportation, but also habitats, science experiments and even the ability to mine the moon for resources.Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has also been working on plans to create a transportation network to the area around the moon, known as cislunar space.\u201cI\u2019m excited by the possibilities,\u201d said Tory Bruno, the alliance's chief executive. \u201cThis administration, near as we can tell, feels a sense of urgency to go out and make things happen, and to have high-profile demonstrations that are along the road map to accomplish these broad goals. \u2026 There is an opportunity to begin building that infrastructure right now \u2014 within the next four years.\u201dRobert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of inflatable space habitats, said his company could create a depot that could orbit the moon by 2020, housing\u00a0supplies and medial facilities, as well as humans. A smaller version of the possible habitats, known as the BEAM, is docked to the International Space Station, where astronauts have been testing it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Bigelow said he was glad the administration seems to be refocusing on the moon. \u201cMars is premature at this time. The moon is not,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the technology. We have the ability, and the potential for a terrific business case.\u201dAt an Aviation Week awards ceremony Thursday evening, Bezos added that the moon could help propel humans even further into space, to destinations such as Mars: \"I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily.\"After remaining quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to partner with NASA is a huge coming out of sorts for the company, which has been funded almost exclusively by Bezos. The paper urges NASA to develop a program that provides \u201cincentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that\u00a0it could \u201conly be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I\u2019m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.\u201dLast year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company\u2019s West Texas facility.That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin\u2019s feather symbol.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon\u2019s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft\u2019s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the \u201cwater ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater\u2019s deep crevices.\u201dWater is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.The Blue Moon spacecraft could carry as much as 10,000 pounds of material and fly atop several different rockets, including NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Atlas V or its own New Glenn rocket, which is under development and expected to fly by the end of the decade, the company said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOnce on the surface, the lander\u2019s useful payload can be used to conduct science or deploy rovers,\u201d the company said. \u201cA robotic arm attached to the lander will deploy to examine the lunar surface with an array of instruments.\u201dThe initial landing \u201cis envisioned as the first in a series of increasingly capable missions,\u201d including flying samples of lunar ice back to Earth for study.The company said it could also help deliver the cargo and supplies needed for human settlements.\u201cBlue Moon is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the Moon,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cAny credible first lunar settlement will require that capability.\u201d In a paper prepared for NASA, Bezos says his Blue Origin space company could land a delivery vehicle on the moon by 2020. An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6918",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/an-exclusive-look-at-jeff-bezos-plan-to-set-up-amazon-like-delivery-for-future-human-settlement-of-the-moon/",
        "text": "More than four decades after the last man walked on the lunar surface, several upstart space entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on NASA's renewed interest in returning to the moon, offering a variety of proposals with the ultimate goal of establishing a lasting human presence there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe commercial sector's interest comes as many anticipate support from the Trump administration, which is eager for a first-term triumph to rally the nation\u00a0the way the Apollo flights did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition team about the company's\u00a0interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service\u00a0for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable \u201cfuture human settlement\u201d of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is time for America to return to the Moon \u2014 this time to stay,\u201d Bezos said in response to emailed questions from The Post. \u201cA permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.\u201dThe Post obtained a copy of the white paper, marked \u201cproprietary and confidential,\u201d and the company then confirmed its authenticity and agreed to answer questions about it.Bezos\u2019s proposal comes as SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a stunning announcement this week that his company planned\u00a0to fly two unnamed, private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year \u2014 an ambitious timeline that, if met, could beat a similar mission by NASA.Story continues below advertisement[SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year.]Anticipating that the Trump administration is focusing on the moon, the space agency recently announced it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crew for a mission that would then occur by 2019.Advertisement[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Obama killed plans for a lunar mission, saying in 2010 that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before.\u201d But the administration\u2019s Mars plan was still far from\u00a0actually delivering humans there, and critics grew frustrated that NASA has not been able to fly humans out of low Earth orbit since the 1970s. A shot around the moon, however, could be feasible, even within a few years.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn\u2019t involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the\u00a0equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon \u2014 unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left \u201cflags and footprints\u201d and then came home.NASA already has shown a willingness to work closely with the commercial sector, hiring companies to fly supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. It is providing technical expertise, but no funding, to SpaceX\u2019s plan to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars by 2020.AdvertisementThe prospect of a lunar mission has several companies lining up to provide not just transportation, but also habitats, science experiments and even the ability to mine the moon for resources.Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has also been working on plans to create a transportation network to the area around the moon, known as cislunar space.\u201cI\u2019m excited by the possibilities,\u201d said Tory Bruno, the alliance's chief executive. \u201cThis administration, near as we can tell, feels a sense of urgency to go out and make things happen, and to have high-profile demonstrations that are along the road map to accomplish these broad goals. \u2026 There is an opportunity to begin building that infrastructure right now \u2014 within the next four years.\u201dRobert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of inflatable space habitats, said his company could create a depot that could orbit the moon by 2020, housing\u00a0supplies and medial facilities, as well as humans. A smaller version of the possible habitats, known as the BEAM, is docked to the International Space Station, where astronauts have been testing it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Bigelow said he was glad the administration seems to be refocusing on the moon. \u201cMars is premature at this time. The moon is not,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the technology. We have the ability, and the potential for a terrific business case.\u201dAt an Aviation Week awards ceremony Thursday evening, Bezos added that the moon could help propel humans even further into space, to destinations such as Mars: \"I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily.\"After remaining quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to partner with NASA is a huge coming out of sorts for the company, which has been funded almost exclusively by Bezos. The paper urges NASA to develop a program that provides \u201cincentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that\u00a0it could \u201conly be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I\u2019m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.\u201dLast year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company\u2019s West Texas facility.That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin\u2019s feather symbol.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon\u2019s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft\u2019s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the \u201cwater ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater\u2019s deep crevices.\u201dWater is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.The Blue Moon spacecraft could carry as much as 10,000 pounds of material and fly atop several different rockets, including NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Atlas V or its own New Glenn rocket, which is under development and expected to fly by the end of the decade, the company said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOnce on the surface, the lander\u2019s useful payload can be used to conduct science or deploy rovers,\u201d the company said. \u201cA robotic arm attached to the lander will deploy to examine the lunar surface with an array of instruments.\u201dThe initial landing \u201cis envisioned as the first in a series of increasingly capable missions,\u201d including flying samples of lunar ice back to Earth for study.The company said it could also help deliver the cargo and supplies needed for human settlements.\u201cBlue Moon is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the Moon,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cAny credible first lunar settlement will require that capability.\u201d In a paper prepared for NASA, Bezos says his Blue Origin space company could land a delivery vehicle on the moon by 2020. An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6919",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/an-exclusive-look-at-jeff-bezos-plan-to-set-up-amazon-like-delivery-for-future-human-settlement-of-the-moon/",
        "text": "More than four decades after the last man walked on the lunar surface, several upstart space entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on NASA's renewed interest in returning to the moon, offering a variety of proposals with the ultimate goal of establishing a lasting human presence there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe commercial sector's interest comes as many anticipate support from the Trump administration, which is eager for a first-term triumph to rally the nation\u00a0the way the Apollo flights did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition team about the company's\u00a0interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service\u00a0for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable \u201cfuture human settlement\u201d of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is time for America to return to the Moon \u2014 this time to stay,\u201d Bezos said in response to emailed questions from The Post. \u201cA permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.\u201dThe Post obtained a copy of the white paper, marked \u201cproprietary and confidential,\u201d and the company then confirmed its authenticity and agreed to answer questions about it.Bezos\u2019s proposal comes as SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a stunning announcement this week that his company planned\u00a0to fly two unnamed, private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year \u2014 an ambitious timeline that, if met, could beat a similar mission by NASA.Story continues below advertisement[SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year.]Anticipating that the Trump administration is focusing on the moon, the space agency recently announced it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crew for a mission that would then occur by 2019.Advertisement[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Obama killed plans for a lunar mission, saying in 2010 that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before.\u201d But the administration\u2019s Mars plan was still far from\u00a0actually delivering humans there, and critics grew frustrated that NASA has not been able to fly humans out of low Earth orbit since the 1970s. A shot around the moon, however, could be feasible, even within a few years.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn\u2019t involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the\u00a0equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon \u2014 unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left \u201cflags and footprints\u201d and then came home.NASA already has shown a willingness to work closely with the commercial sector, hiring companies to fly supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. It is providing technical expertise, but no funding, to SpaceX\u2019s plan to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars by 2020.AdvertisementThe prospect of a lunar mission has several companies lining up to provide not just transportation, but also habitats, science experiments and even the ability to mine the moon for resources.Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has also been working on plans to create a transportation network to the area around the moon, known as cislunar space.\u201cI\u2019m excited by the possibilities,\u201d said Tory Bruno, the alliance's chief executive. \u201cThis administration, near as we can tell, feels a sense of urgency to go out and make things happen, and to have high-profile demonstrations that are along the road map to accomplish these broad goals. \u2026 There is an opportunity to begin building that infrastructure right now \u2014 within the next four years.\u201dRobert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of inflatable space habitats, said his company could create a depot that could orbit the moon by 2020, housing\u00a0supplies and medial facilities, as well as humans. A smaller version of the possible habitats, known as the BEAM, is docked to the International Space Station, where astronauts have been testing it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Bigelow said he was glad the administration seems to be refocusing on the moon. \u201cMars is premature at this time. The moon is not,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the technology. We have the ability, and the potential for a terrific business case.\u201dAt an Aviation Week awards ceremony Thursday evening, Bezos added that the moon could help propel humans even further into space, to destinations such as Mars: \"I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily.\"After remaining quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to partner with NASA is a huge coming out of sorts for the company, which has been funded almost exclusively by Bezos. The paper urges NASA to develop a program that provides \u201cincentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that\u00a0it could \u201conly be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I\u2019m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.\u201dLast year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company\u2019s West Texas facility.That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin\u2019s feather symbol.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon\u2019s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft\u2019s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the \u201cwater ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater\u2019s deep crevices.\u201dWater is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.The Blue Moon spacecraft could carry as much as 10,000 pounds of material and fly atop several different rockets, including NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Atlas V or its own New Glenn rocket, which is under development and expected to fly by the end of the decade, the company said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOnce on the surface, the lander\u2019s useful payload can be used to conduct science or deploy rovers,\u201d the company said. \u201cA robotic arm attached to the lander will deploy to examine the lunar surface with an array of instruments.\u201dThe initial landing \u201cis envisioned as the first in a series of increasingly capable missions,\u201d including flying samples of lunar ice back to Earth for study.The company said it could also help deliver the cargo and supplies needed for human settlements.\u201cBlue Moon is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the Moon,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cAny credible first lunar settlement will require that capability.\u201d In a paper prepared for NASA, Bezos says his Blue Origin space company could land a delivery vehicle on the moon by 2020. An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6920",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/an-exclusive-look-at-jeff-bezos-plan-to-set-up-amazon-like-delivery-for-future-human-settlement-of-the-moon/",
        "text": "More than four decades after the last man walked on the lunar surface, several upstart space entrepreneurs are looking to capitalize on NASA's renewed interest in returning to the moon, offering a variety of proposals with the ultimate goal of establishing a lasting human presence there.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe commercial sector's interest comes as many anticipate support from the Trump administration, which is eager for a first-term triumph to rally the nation\u00a0the way the Apollo flights did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latest to offer a proposal is Jeffrey P. Bezos, whose space company Blue Origin has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition team about the company's\u00a0interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service\u00a0for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable \u201cfuture human settlement\u201d of the moon. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt is time for America to return to the Moon \u2014 this time to stay,\u201d Bezos said in response to emailed questions from The Post. \u201cA permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this.\u201dThe Post obtained a copy of the white paper, marked \u201cproprietary and confidential,\u201d and the company then confirmed its authenticity and agreed to answer questions about it.Bezos\u2019s proposal comes as SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a stunning announcement this week that his company planned\u00a0to fly two unnamed, private citizens on a tourist trip around the moon by next year \u2014 an ambitious timeline that, if met, could beat a similar mission by NASA.Story continues below advertisement[SpaceX plans to fly two private citizens around the moon by late next year.]Anticipating that the Trump administration is focusing on the moon, the space agency recently announced it is considering adding astronauts to the first flight of its Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. That flight, originally scheduled to fly without humans in 2018, would also circle the moon. But as the space agency seeks to move faster under the Trump administration, it is now studying the feasibility of adding crew for a mission that would then occur by 2019.Advertisement[NASA officials discuss Trump's push for first-term moon mission.]Obama killed plans for a lunar mission, saying in 2010 that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before.\u201d But the administration\u2019s Mars plan was still far from\u00a0actually delivering humans there, and critics grew frustrated that NASA has not been able to fly humans out of low Earth orbit since the 1970s. A shot around the moon, however, could be feasible, even within a few years.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin\u2019s proposal, dated Jan. 4, doesn\u2019t involve flying humans, but rather is focused on a series of cargo missions. Those could deliver the\u00a0equipment necessary to help establish a human colony on the moon \u2014 unlike the Apollo missions, in which the astronauts left \u201cflags and footprints\u201d and then came home.NASA already has shown a willingness to work closely with the commercial sector, hiring companies to fly supplies and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. It is providing technical expertise, but no funding, to SpaceX\u2019s plan to fly an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars by 2020.AdvertisementThe prospect of a lunar mission has several companies lining up to provide not just transportation, but also habitats, science experiments and even the ability to mine the moon for resources.Story continues below advertisementThe United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has also been working on plans to create a transportation network to the area around the moon, known as cislunar space.\u201cI\u2019m excited by the possibilities,\u201d said Tory Bruno, the alliance's chief executive. \u201cThis administration, near as we can tell, feels a sense of urgency to go out and make things happen, and to have high-profile demonstrations that are along the road map to accomplish these broad goals. \u2026 There is an opportunity to begin building that infrastructure right now \u2014 within the next four years.\u201dRobert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a maker of inflatable space habitats, said his company could create a depot that could orbit the moon by 2020, housing\u00a0supplies and medial facilities, as well as humans. A smaller version of the possible habitats, known as the BEAM, is docked to the International Space Station, where astronauts have been testing it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Bigelow said he was glad the administration seems to be refocusing on the moon. \u201cMars is premature at this time. The moon is not,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have the technology. We have the ability, and the potential for a terrific business case.\u201dAt an Aviation Week awards ceremony Thursday evening, Bezos added that the moon could help propel humans even further into space, to destinations such as Mars: \"I think that if you go to the moon first, and make the moon your home, then you can get to Mars more easily.\"After remaining quiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin\u2019s attempt to partner with NASA is a huge coming out of sorts for the company, which has been funded almost exclusively by Bezos. The paper urges NASA to develop a program that provides \u201cincentives to the private sector to demonstrate a commercial lunar cargo delivery service.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin could perform the first lunar mission as early as July 2020, Bezos wrote, but stressed that\u00a0it could \u201conly be done in partnership with NASA. Our liquid hydrogen expertise and experience with precision vertical landing offer the fastest path to a lunar lander mission. I\u2019m excited about this and am ready to invest my own money alongside NASA to make it happen.\u201dLast year, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed its suborbital rocket, the New Shepard, five times within less than a year, flying just past the 62-mile edge of space and then landing vertically on a landing pad at the company\u2019s West Texas facility.That same technology could be used to land the Blue Moon vehicle on the lunar surface, the company said. Its white paper shows what looks like a modified New Shepard rocket, standing on the moon with an American flag, a NASA logo and Blue Origin\u2019s feather symbol.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company said it plans to land its Blue Moon lunar lander at Shackleton Crater on the moon\u2019s south pole. The site has nearly continuous sunlight to provide power through the spacecraft\u2019s solar arrays. The company also chose to land there because of the \u201cwater ice in the perpetual shadow of the crater\u2019s deep crevices.\u201dWater is vital not just for human survival, but also because hydrogen and oxygen in water could be transformed into rocket fuel. The moon, then, is seen as a massive gas station in space.The Blue Moon spacecraft could carry as much as 10,000 pounds of material and fly atop several different rockets, including NASA\u2019s Space Launch System, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Atlas V or its own New Glenn rocket, which is under development and expected to fly by the end of the decade, the company said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOnce on the surface, the lander\u2019s useful payload can be used to conduct science or deploy rovers,\u201d the company said. \u201cA robotic arm attached to the lander will deploy to examine the lunar surface with an array of instruments.\u201dThe initial landing \u201cis envisioned as the first in a series of increasingly capable missions,\u201d including flying samples of lunar ice back to Earth for study.The company said it could also help deliver the cargo and supplies needed for human settlements.\u201cBlue Moon is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the Moon,\u201d Bezos wrote. \u201cAny credible first lunar settlement will require that capability.\u201d In a paper prepared for NASA, Bezos says his Blue Origin space company could land a delivery vehicle on the moon by 2020. An exclusive look at Jeff Bezos\u2019s plan to set up Amazon-like delivery for \u2018future human settlement\u2019 of the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX is flying an artificially intelligent robot named CIMON to the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6921",
        "date": "2018-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/29/spacex-is-flying-an-artificially-intelligent-robot-named-cimon-to-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 Unlike HAL, it won\u2019t be able to open the pod bay doors.Its programming is limited, capable of conversation and technical support but not much else, at least for now. And instead of the searing red eye of the super computer gone rogue in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi film, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d the artificially intelligent robot launched into space Friday has a screen displaying a genial face prone to smiles. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCIMON, as it is known (an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), is designed to help astronauts on board the International Space Station perform their work \u2014 namely the science experiments they are sent aboard the orbiting laboratory.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, it became the first AI technology launched to the space station, officials said, an experiment that would be a sort of Alexa in space, able to help astronauts through the steps outlined in a manual, show pictures of certain parts of the experiment and answer questions about it.Tomorrow CIMON, the astronaut assistant \ud83d\udc68",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX is flying an artificially intelligent robot named CIMON to the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6922",
        "date": "2018-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/29/spacex-is-flying-an-artificially-intelligent-robot-named-cimon-to-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 Unlike HAL, it won\u2019t be able to open the pod bay doors.Its programming is limited, capable of conversation and technical support but not much else, at least for now. And instead of the searing red eye of the super computer gone rogue in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi film, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d the artificially intelligent robot launched into space Friday has a screen displaying a genial face prone to smiles. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCIMON, as it is known (an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), is designed to help astronauts on board the International Space Station perform their work \u2014 namely the science experiments they are sent aboard the orbiting laboratory.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, it became the first AI technology launched to the space station, officials said, an experiment that would be a sort of Alexa in space, able to help astronauts through the steps outlined in a manual, show pictures of certain parts of the experiment and answer questions about it.Tomorrow CIMON, the astronaut assistant \ud83d\udc68",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX is flying an artificially intelligent robot named CIMON to the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6923",
        "date": "2018-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/29/spacex-is-flying-an-artificially-intelligent-robot-named-cimon-to-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 Unlike HAL, it won\u2019t be able to open the pod bay doors.Its programming is limited, capable of conversation and technical support but not much else, at least for now. And instead of the searing red eye of the super computer gone rogue in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi film, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d the artificially intelligent robot launched into space Friday has a screen displaying a genial face prone to smiles. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCIMON, as it is known (an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), is designed to help astronauts on board the International Space Station perform their work \u2014 namely the science experiments they are sent aboard the orbiting laboratory.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, it became the first AI technology launched to the space station, officials said, an experiment that would be a sort of Alexa in space, able to help astronauts through the steps outlined in a manual, show pictures of certain parts of the experiment and answer questions about it.Tomorrow CIMON, the astronaut assistant \ud83d\udc68",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX is flying an artificially intelligent robot named CIMON to the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6924",
        "date": "2018-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/29/spacex-is-flying-an-artificially-intelligent-robot-named-cimon-to-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 Unlike HAL, it won\u2019t be able to open the pod bay doors.Its programming is limited, capable of conversation and technical support but not much else, at least for now. And instead of the searing red eye of the super computer gone rogue in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s sci-fi film, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d the artificially intelligent robot launched into space Friday has a screen displaying a genial face prone to smiles. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCIMON, as it is known (an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), is designed to help astronauts on board the International Space Station perform their work \u2014 namely the science experiments they are sent aboard the orbiting laboratory.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, it became the first AI technology launched to the space station, officials said, an experiment that would be a sort of Alexa in space, able to help astronauts through the steps outlined in a manual, show pictures of certain parts of the experiment and answer questions about it.Tomorrow CIMON, the astronaut assistant \ud83d\udc68",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX eyes another historic first, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin returns to flight (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6925",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12/as-elon-musks-spacex-eyes-another-historic-first-private-space-venture-gear-up-for-a-momentous-2018/",
        "text": "Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin got a step closer to flying tourists to space Tuesday when it launched a life-size dummy the company named \u201cMannequin Skywalker\u201d from its remote West Texas facility.The updated booster and crew capsule, which the company hopes to use to fly its first human tourists to space by as early as next year, hit a peak altitude of nearly 100 kilometers, or what's considered the threshold of space, the company said in a statement. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe New Shepard booster, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, then flew back to Earth, successfully touching down\u00a0on a landing pad so that it can be reused. The capsule, designed with what Blue Origin says are the largest windows ever to fly into space, floated back under parachutes for a landing in a flight that lasted 10 minutes and six seconds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"#NewShepard had a successful first flight of Crew Capsule 2.0 today,\u201d Bezos wrote on Twitter. \u201cComplete with windows and our instrumented test dummy. He had a great ride.\u201dEven though the rocket blasted off at about noon Eastern, the company didn't announce it until some 11 hours later. The Federal Aviation Administration, which licensed the launch,\u00a0declined to confirm that it had occurred for more than 24 hours after the rocket left Earth.The launch, Blue Origin's first in over a year, comes during a big week for the space industry, and it follows a White House ceremony this week in which President Trump officially put NASA on a track back to the moon.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, Elon Musk\u00a0hopes to pull off yet another improbable feat with the launch of a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station: Both the booster of the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft it will be lofting into orbit will have previously flown to space, proving that the era of\u00a0reusable rocketry has arrived in earnest.AdvertisementEarlier this year, SpaceX for the first time re-flew a booster. Then later it flew a Dragon spacecraft again. But Friday's launch, a mission to carry 4,800 pounds of cargo and supplies to the space station, would be the first time a used booster and a used spacecraft would fly together. It\u2019s also the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to use a previously flown rocket on one\u00a0of the agency's missions.Since SpaceX first landed a booster two years ago \u2014 typically they are ditched into the ocean, never to be used again \u2014 it has repeated the accomplishment numerous times in a quest to treat space travel more like commercial aviation. Airlines don\u2019t throw away their airplanes after each use, as Musk and others have noted. Instead of falling into the sea, SpaceX's rockets fly back to Earth, landing on a landing pad or on ships at sea.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the long run, reusability is going to significantly reduce the cost of access to space, and that\u2019s what\u2019s going to be required to send future generations to explore the universe,\u201d Jessica Jensen, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon mission manager, said during a news briefing Monday. \u201cWe want to be able to send thousands of people into space, not just tens.\u201dAdvertisementThe launch has been delayed a couple of times, first because the company wanted to do additional checks of its ground systems, then because it found particles in the second stage fuel system. The launch is also notable because it would be the first from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida since a rocket explosion there caused $50 million in damage. A Falcon 9 rocket blew up in September 2016 while fueling ahead of an engine test.Despite those setbacks, SpaceX has been on a roll this year. It has launched 16 times successfully, doubling the number of its launches in a single year and tying the\u00a0greatest\u00a0annual number by its chief rival, the United Launch Alliance.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to launching the used boosters and spacecraft, SpaceX also christened launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the historic site from which the Apollo astronauts took off for the moon.AdvertisementNow the company is looking ahead to 2018, a potentially momentous year \u2014 not just for SpaceX but for several companies and NASA.Under contract with NASA, Boeing and SpaceX are\u00a0preparing to fly astronauts from U.S. soil in 2018, marking the first government launches since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, NASA has had to send up its astronauts in Russian rockets, at a cost that stands at more than $80 million a seat.Also next year, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin could start flying paying tourists to the edge of space. And a company called Moon Express plans to fly a robotic lander to the lunar surface next year.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s launch would be one of a number of high-profile events this week, which began with President Trump signing a new space policy directive in a White House ceremony Monday. Although light on specifics, the president called for a return to the moon \u2014 in partnership with industry and international partners \u2014 not just to visit, but \u201cfor long-term exploration and use.\u201dAdvertisementAlso on Tuesday, Arianespace, the French space company, completed its 11th successful launch of the year. Rocket Lab, a private space venture based in California and New Zealand, was set to attempt a test flight of its Electron rocket this week as well.The rush of activity by the American space enterprise shows that the private sector increasingly threatens government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space, said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the government's National Space Council from 1989 to 1992.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe may have reached that tipping point, or are close to it, where the center of space activity is moving toward these new commercial enterprises,\u201d he said.SpaceX has also been working toward launching its Falcon Heavy rocket, essentially three Falcon 9s bound together, in what would become a massive vehicle capable of flying to the moon and\u00a0reaching Musk\u2019s ultimate goal, Mars. Earlier this year, Musk promised another milestone for 2018: that he would fly two paying passengers on a trip around the moon.But first, he\u2019s got to fly the Falcon Heavy rocket. Its maiden flight was scheduled for this year, but after repeated delays, Musk now says it is set for January. He\u2019s warned, though, that the chances of failure are high. Meaning 2018 could start off with a bang. As it prepares to fly tourists to space as soon as next year, Blue Origin closes out 2017 with a successful test flight. As Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX eyes another historic first, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin returns to flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX eyes another historic first, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin returns to flight (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6926",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12/as-elon-musks-spacex-eyes-another-historic-first-private-space-venture-gear-up-for-a-momentous-2018/",
        "text": "Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin got a step closer to flying tourists to space Tuesday when it launched a life-size dummy the company named \u201cMannequin Skywalker\u201d from its remote West Texas facility.The updated booster and crew capsule, which the company hopes to use to fly its first human tourists to space by as early as next year, hit a peak altitude of nearly 100 kilometers, or what's considered the threshold of space, the company said in a statement. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe New Shepard booster, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, then flew back to Earth, successfully touching down\u00a0on a landing pad so that it can be reused. The capsule, designed with what Blue Origin says are the largest windows ever to fly into space, floated back under parachutes for a landing in a flight that lasted 10 minutes and six seconds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"#NewShepard had a successful first flight of Crew Capsule 2.0 today,\u201d Bezos wrote on Twitter. \u201cComplete with windows and our instrumented test dummy. He had a great ride.\u201dEven though the rocket blasted off at about noon Eastern, the company didn't announce it until some 11 hours later. The Federal Aviation Administration, which licensed the launch,\u00a0declined to confirm that it had occurred for more than 24 hours after the rocket left Earth.The launch, Blue Origin's first in over a year, comes during a big week for the space industry, and it follows a White House ceremony this week in which President Trump officially put NASA on a track back to the moon.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, Elon Musk\u00a0hopes to pull off yet another improbable feat with the launch of a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station: Both the booster of the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft it will be lofting into orbit will have previously flown to space, proving that the era of\u00a0reusable rocketry has arrived in earnest.AdvertisementEarlier this year, SpaceX for the first time re-flew a booster. Then later it flew a Dragon spacecraft again. But Friday's launch, a mission to carry 4,800 pounds of cargo and supplies to the space station, would be the first time a used booster and a used spacecraft would fly together. It\u2019s also the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to use a previously flown rocket on one\u00a0of the agency's missions.Since SpaceX first landed a booster two years ago \u2014 typically they are ditched into the ocean, never to be used again \u2014 it has repeated the accomplishment numerous times in a quest to treat space travel more like commercial aviation. Airlines don\u2019t throw away their airplanes after each use, as Musk and others have noted. Instead of falling into the sea, SpaceX's rockets fly back to Earth, landing on a landing pad or on ships at sea.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the long run, reusability is going to significantly reduce the cost of access to space, and that\u2019s what\u2019s going to be required to send future generations to explore the universe,\u201d Jessica Jensen, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon mission manager, said during a news briefing Monday. \u201cWe want to be able to send thousands of people into space, not just tens.\u201dAdvertisementThe launch has been delayed a couple of times, first because the company wanted to do additional checks of its ground systems, then because it found particles in the second stage fuel system. The launch is also notable because it would be the first from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida since a rocket explosion there caused $50 million in damage. A Falcon 9 rocket blew up in September 2016 while fueling ahead of an engine test.Despite those setbacks, SpaceX has been on a roll this year. It has launched 16 times successfully, doubling the number of its launches in a single year and tying the\u00a0greatest\u00a0annual number by its chief rival, the United Launch Alliance.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to launching the used boosters and spacecraft, SpaceX also christened launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the historic site from which the Apollo astronauts took off for the moon.AdvertisementNow the company is looking ahead to 2018, a potentially momentous year \u2014 not just for SpaceX but for several companies and NASA.Under contract with NASA, Boeing and SpaceX are\u00a0preparing to fly astronauts from U.S. soil in 2018, marking the first government launches since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, NASA has had to send up its astronauts in Russian rockets, at a cost that stands at more than $80 million a seat.Also next year, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin could start flying paying tourists to the edge of space. And a company called Moon Express plans to fly a robotic lander to the lunar surface next year.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s launch would be one of a number of high-profile events this week, which began with President Trump signing a new space policy directive in a White House ceremony Monday. Although light on specifics, the president called for a return to the moon \u2014 in partnership with industry and international partners \u2014 not just to visit, but \u201cfor long-term exploration and use.\u201dAdvertisementAlso on Tuesday, Arianespace, the French space company, completed its 11th successful launch of the year. Rocket Lab, a private space venture based in California and New Zealand, was set to attempt a test flight of its Electron rocket this week as well.The rush of activity by the American space enterprise shows that the private sector increasingly threatens government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space, said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the government's National Space Council from 1989 to 1992.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe may have reached that tipping point, or are close to it, where the center of space activity is moving toward these new commercial enterprises,\u201d he said.SpaceX has also been working toward launching its Falcon Heavy rocket, essentially three Falcon 9s bound together, in what would become a massive vehicle capable of flying to the moon and\u00a0reaching Musk\u2019s ultimate goal, Mars. Earlier this year, Musk promised another milestone for 2018: that he would fly two paying passengers on a trip around the moon.But first, he\u2019s got to fly the Falcon Heavy rocket. Its maiden flight was scheduled for this year, but after repeated delays, Musk now says it is set for January. He\u2019s warned, though, that the chances of failure are high. Meaning 2018 could start off with a bang. As it prepares to fly tourists to space as soon as next year, Blue Origin closes out 2017 with a successful test flight. As Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX eyes another historic first, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin returns to flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX eyes another historic first, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin returns to flight (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6927",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12/as-elon-musks-spacex-eyes-another-historic-first-private-space-venture-gear-up-for-a-momentous-2018/",
        "text": "Jeffrey P. Bezos's Blue Origin got a step closer to flying tourists to space Tuesday when it launched a life-size dummy the company named \u201cMannequin Skywalker\u201d from its remote West Texas facility.The updated booster and crew capsule, which the company hopes to use to fly its first human tourists to space by as early as next year, hit a peak altitude of nearly 100 kilometers, or what's considered the threshold of space, the company said in a statement. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe New Shepard booster, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, then flew back to Earth, successfully touching down\u00a0on a landing pad so that it can be reused. The capsule, designed with what Blue Origin says are the largest windows ever to fly into space, floated back under parachutes for a landing in a flight that lasted 10 minutes and six seconds.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"#NewShepard had a successful first flight of Crew Capsule 2.0 today,\u201d Bezos wrote on Twitter. \u201cComplete with windows and our instrumented test dummy. He had a great ride.\u201dEven though the rocket blasted off at about noon Eastern, the company didn't announce it until some 11 hours later. The Federal Aviation Administration, which licensed the launch,\u00a0declined to confirm that it had occurred for more than 24 hours after the rocket left Earth.The launch, Blue Origin's first in over a year, comes during a big week for the space industry, and it follows a White House ceremony this week in which President Trump officially put NASA on a track back to the moon.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, Elon Musk\u00a0hopes to pull off yet another improbable feat with the launch of a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station: Both the booster of the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft it will be lofting into orbit will have previously flown to space, proving that the era of\u00a0reusable rocketry has arrived in earnest.AdvertisementEarlier this year, SpaceX for the first time re-flew a booster. Then later it flew a Dragon spacecraft again. But Friday's launch, a mission to carry 4,800 pounds of cargo and supplies to the space station, would be the first time a used booster and a used spacecraft would fly together. It\u2019s also the first time NASA has allowed SpaceX to use a previously flown rocket on one\u00a0of the agency's missions.Since SpaceX first landed a booster two years ago \u2014 typically they are ditched into the ocean, never to be used again \u2014 it has repeated the accomplishment numerous times in a quest to treat space travel more like commercial aviation. Airlines don\u2019t throw away their airplanes after each use, as Musk and others have noted. Instead of falling into the sea, SpaceX's rockets fly back to Earth, landing on a landing pad or on ships at sea.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the long run, reusability is going to significantly reduce the cost of access to space, and that\u2019s what\u2019s going to be required to send future generations to explore the universe,\u201d Jessica Jensen, SpaceX\u2019s Dragon mission manager, said during a news briefing Monday. \u201cWe want to be able to send thousands of people into space, not just tens.\u201dAdvertisementThe launch has been delayed a couple of times, first because the company wanted to do additional checks of its ground systems, then because it found particles in the second stage fuel system. The launch is also notable because it would be the first from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida since a rocket explosion there caused $50 million in damage. A Falcon 9 rocket blew up in September 2016 while fueling ahead of an engine test.Despite those setbacks, SpaceX has been on a roll this year. It has launched 16 times successfully, doubling the number of its launches in a single year and tying the\u00a0greatest\u00a0annual number by its chief rival, the United Launch Alliance.Story continues below advertisementIn addition to launching the used boosters and spacecraft, SpaceX also christened launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, the historic site from which the Apollo astronauts took off for the moon.AdvertisementNow the company is looking ahead to 2018, a potentially momentous year \u2014 not just for SpaceX but for several companies and NASA.Under contract with NASA, Boeing and SpaceX are\u00a0preparing to fly astronauts from U.S. soil in 2018, marking the first government launches since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, NASA has had to send up its astronauts in Russian rockets, at a cost that stands at more than $80 million a seat.Also next year, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin could start flying paying tourists to the edge of space. And a company called Moon Express plans to fly a robotic lander to the lunar surface next year.Story continues below advertisementSpaceX\u2019s launch would be one of a number of high-profile events this week, which began with President Trump signing a new space policy directive in a White House ceremony Monday. Although light on specifics, the president called for a return to the moon \u2014 in partnership with industry and international partners \u2014 not just to visit, but \u201cfor long-term exploration and use.\u201dAdvertisementAlso on Tuesday, Arianespace, the French space company, completed its 11th successful launch of the year. Rocket Lab, a private space venture based in California and New Zealand, was set to attempt a test flight of its Electron rocket this week as well.The rush of activity by the American space enterprise shows that the private sector increasingly threatens government\u2019s long-held monopoly on space, said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the government's National Space Council from 1989 to 1992.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe may have reached that tipping point, or are close to it, where the center of space activity is moving toward these new commercial enterprises,\u201d he said.SpaceX has also been working toward launching its Falcon Heavy rocket, essentially three Falcon 9s bound together, in what would become a massive vehicle capable of flying to the moon and\u00a0reaching Musk\u2019s ultimate goal, Mars. Earlier this year, Musk promised another milestone for 2018: that he would fly two paying passengers on a trip around the moon.But first, he\u2019s got to fly the Falcon Heavy rocket. Its maiden flight was scheduled for this year, but after repeated delays, Musk now says it is set for January. He\u2019s warned, though, that the chances of failure are high. Meaning 2018 could start off with a bang. As it prepares to fly tourists to space as soon as next year, Blue Origin closes out 2017 with a successful test flight. As Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX eyes another historic first, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin returns to flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6928",
        "date": "2017-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/10/nasas-cargo-and-space-trash-hauler-is-about-to-become-an-astronaut-workroom-on-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It\u2019s perhaps not the prettiest spacecraft, its barrel shape more function than form. Like a truck, it hauls cargo to the International Space Station that is unloaded by astronauts who then fill it with trash, turning it as a massive space garbage can. When full of refuse, it falls back to Earth and is ignominiously incinerated in the atmosphere. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Orbital ATK has big ambitions for its Cygnus spacecraft and will soon get to demonstrate what it can do.\u00a0On Saturday morning, the Dulles-based company is scheduled to launch Cygnus aboard its Antares rocket from the Eastern Shore of Virginia.\u00a0On the mission, Cygnus will be carrying 7,400 pounds of food, clothing and experiments to the orbiting station, some 240 miles above the Earth.But this time, the spacecraft will be more than a cargo and trash hauler; it would become a\u00a0temporary room on the space station, giving the astronauts an additional 27 cubic meters to do their work. On this flight, the Cygnus will be outfitted so that it would be able to support science experiments and other research on the orbiting laboratory.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve always considered to be part of the ISS, and that\u2019s certainly true physically, but now we\u2019ll be doing it functionally,\u201d said Frank DeMauro, the general manager and vice president of the company's Advanced Programs division.The step is part of an effort by Orbital ATK to eventually turn Cygnus into a habitat that could help NASA explore deep space, including the region around the moon known as cislunar space. The company has a contract from NASA to continue turning it into a habitat for astronauts that could connect with NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, giving astronauts more room.Cygnus won\u2019t be the only private sector module attached to the space station. For months, Bigelow Aerospace\u2019s BEAM, an inflatable habitat, has been affixed to the station as part of a test program to see how the technology works. Bigelow is also developing a habitat that would be much larger and could serve as a commercial outpost in space.In addition to carrying cargo to the station, Cyngus will have 14 small satellites on board. After it\u00a0serves as temporary space, the spacecraft will detach and fly about 50 km above the station to deploy the satellites. Then, full of trash, it will plunge back toward Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.The launch from NASA\u2019s Wallops Flight Facility is scheduled for Saturday at 7:37 a.m. Orbital ATK is preparing to launch its versatile Cyngus spacecraft from Wallops Flight Facility on Saturday. NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6929",
        "date": "2017-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/10/nasas-cargo-and-space-trash-hauler-is-about-to-become-an-astronaut-workroom-on-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It\u2019s perhaps not the prettiest spacecraft, its barrel shape more function than form. Like a truck, it hauls cargo to the International Space Station that is unloaded by astronauts who then fill it with trash, turning it as a massive space garbage can. When full of refuse, it falls back to Earth and is ignominiously incinerated in the atmosphere. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Orbital ATK has big ambitions for its Cygnus spacecraft and will soon get to demonstrate what it can do.\u00a0On Saturday morning, the Dulles-based company is scheduled to launch Cygnus aboard its Antares rocket from the Eastern Shore of Virginia.\u00a0On the mission, Cygnus will be carrying 7,400 pounds of food, clothing and experiments to the orbiting station, some 240 miles above the Earth.But this time, the spacecraft will be more than a cargo and trash hauler; it would become a\u00a0temporary room on the space station, giving the astronauts an additional 27 cubic meters to do their work. On this flight, the Cygnus will be outfitted so that it would be able to support science experiments and other research on the orbiting laboratory.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve always considered to be part of the ISS, and that\u2019s certainly true physically, but now we\u2019ll be doing it functionally,\u201d said Frank DeMauro, the general manager and vice president of the company's Advanced Programs division.The step is part of an effort by Orbital ATK to eventually turn Cygnus into a habitat that could help NASA explore deep space, including the region around the moon known as cislunar space. The company has a contract from NASA to continue turning it into a habitat for astronauts that could connect with NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, giving astronauts more room.Cygnus won\u2019t be the only private sector module attached to the space station. For months, Bigelow Aerospace\u2019s BEAM, an inflatable habitat, has been affixed to the station as part of a test program to see how the technology works. Bigelow is also developing a habitat that would be much larger and could serve as a commercial outpost in space.In addition to carrying cargo to the station, Cyngus will have 14 small satellites on board. After it\u00a0serves as temporary space, the spacecraft will detach and fly about 50 km above the station to deploy the satellites. Then, full of trash, it will plunge back toward Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.The launch from NASA\u2019s Wallops Flight Facility is scheduled for Saturday at 7:37 a.m. Orbital ATK is preparing to launch its versatile Cyngus spacecraft from Wallops Flight Facility on Saturday. NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6930",
        "date": "2017-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/10/nasas-cargo-and-space-trash-hauler-is-about-to-become-an-astronaut-workroom-on-the-international-space-station/",
        "text": "It\u2019s perhaps not the prettiest spacecraft, its barrel shape more function than form. Like a truck, it hauls cargo to the International Space Station that is unloaded by astronauts who then fill it with trash, turning it as a massive space garbage can. When full of refuse, it falls back to Earth and is ignominiously incinerated in the atmosphere. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Orbital ATK has big ambitions for its Cygnus spacecraft and will soon get to demonstrate what it can do.\u00a0On Saturday morning, the Dulles-based company is scheduled to launch Cygnus aboard its Antares rocket from the Eastern Shore of Virginia.\u00a0On the mission, Cygnus will be carrying 7,400 pounds of food, clothing and experiments to the orbiting station, some 240 miles above the Earth.But this time, the spacecraft will be more than a cargo and trash hauler; it would become a\u00a0temporary room on the space station, giving the astronauts an additional 27 cubic meters to do their work. On this flight, the Cygnus will be outfitted so that it would be able to support science experiments and other research on the orbiting laboratory.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve always considered to be part of the ISS, and that\u2019s certainly true physically, but now we\u2019ll be doing it functionally,\u201d said Frank DeMauro, the general manager and vice president of the company's Advanced Programs division.The step is part of an effort by Orbital ATK to eventually turn Cygnus into a habitat that could help NASA explore deep space, including the region around the moon known as cislunar space. The company has a contract from NASA to continue turning it into a habitat for astronauts that could connect with NASA\u2019s Orion spacecraft, giving astronauts more room.Cygnus won\u2019t be the only private sector module attached to the space station. For months, Bigelow Aerospace\u2019s BEAM, an inflatable habitat, has been affixed to the station as part of a test program to see how the technology works. Bigelow is also developing a habitat that would be much larger and could serve as a commercial outpost in space.In addition to carrying cargo to the station, Cyngus will have 14 small satellites on board. After it\u00a0serves as temporary space, the spacecraft will detach and fly about 50 km above the station to deploy the satellites. Then, full of trash, it will plunge back toward Earth, burning up in the atmosphere.The launch from NASA\u2019s Wallops Flight Facility is scheduled for Saturday at 7:37 a.m. Orbital ATK is preparing to launch its versatile Cyngus spacecraft from Wallops Flight Facility on Saturday. NASA\u2019s cargo and space trash hauler is about to become an astronaut workroom on the International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s new autonomous space shuttle just had a successful test flight (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6931",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/13/nasas-new-autonomous-space-shuttle-just-had-a-successful-test-flight/",
        "text": "It only lasted a minute. And it flew from just 12,500 feet. But Saturday\u2019s first-ever successful test flight of a miniature, new-generation space shuttle was something of a coup for\u00a0the Sierra Nevada Corp., which had been waiting years to fly.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe company is under contract from NASA to fly its Dream Chaser spaceplane to the International Space Station by 2020. Unlike other spacecraft \u2014 the capsules that look like the vehicles that flew in the Apollo-era \u2014 the Dream Chaser has wings and wheels that allow it to land on a runway. On Saturday, it was dropped from a helicopter over the Mojave Desert in California, and then glided to a runway at Edwards Air Force Base. The successful flight had no passengers on board, and the vehicle flew itself instead of being controlled remotely.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was a really good day. We had a full flight. We met all our goals. The vehicle landed safely, and there were absolutely no issues,\u201d Mark Sirangelo, the head of Sierra Nevada Corp\u2019s Space Systems Division, said in an interview.AdvertisementHe said the fully autonomous vehicle \u201cflew itself from the drop to the ground through the landing.\u201dAlong with SpaceX and Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada is under contract from NASA for as many as six cargo flights to the station. Dream Chaser, which looks like a smaller version of the Space Shuttle, would initially be launched on an Atlas V rocket. It\u00a0is being designed to land on runways and then allow crews to access the materials flown back to Earth soon after landing.The company is also developing a version of its shuttle that could carry as many as seven passengers to low Earth orbit. Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser hopes to fly cargo to the International Space Station by 2020. NASA\u2019s new autonomous space shuttle just had a successful test flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6932",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/05/pence-calls-for-a-return-to-the-moon-in-partnership-with-industry/",
        "text": "In opening the first meeting of the resurrected National Space Council, Vice President Pence said Thursday that the United States would regain a leadership role in human space flight by embarking on a return mission to the moon, building the foundation to go to Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPence offered no specific timeline. Speaking before a group of cabinet members and the chief executives of several top space companies, he said the moon would be a \u201csteppingstone, a training ground\u201d that would eventually propel humanity deeper into the cosmos in partnership with the growing commercial space industry. While he called for a renewed emphasis on exploration, he also said the council, designed to help guide U.S. policy in space, would need to create a more robust national security response to advances made by Russia and China in developing \u201cjamming and hacking\u201d capabilities that can \u201ccripple\u201d military and intelligence satellites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s call to return to the moon was the official declaration of a much-discussed goal of the Trump administration. Its nominee to take over NASA has advocated returning to the moon. And NASA has said it would solicit proposals from industry to develop landers that could take cargo and experiments to the lunar surface by as soon as next year.It also marked a reversal from plans\u00a0pushed by the Obama administration. In 2010, Obama famously said of the moon that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before\u201d and that NASA should instead focus on reaching an asteroid and Mars.In his opening remarks, made before the space shuttle Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center, Pence made it clear that the Trump administration would build on Obama\u2019s reliance on industry \u2014 both the large traditional contractors and the growing group of entrepreneurial companies \u2014 to get there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany top corporate leaders have decried the Trump administration over a number of issues, and two corporate advisory boards disbanded. But on Thursday, the heads of several top space and aerospace executives, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Orbital ATK, spoke before the council, saying they were ready and eager to work with the administration and fulfill its goals in space.(Blue Origin founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cNow is the time for swift and bold action,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, told the council. \u201cA permanent presence on the moon and American boots on the surface of Mars are not impossible and not long-term goals.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration didn\u2019t nominate a new NASA administrator, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), until August. And Bridenstine still hasn\u2019t been confirmed by the Senate. But Pence has shown a key interest in space, visiting both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Texas.He said the reconstituted council, dormant for some 25 years, would help the United States regain a leadership role in the cosmos. The council, initially created during the Eisenhower administration, includes the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security, in addition to other government officials, including the NASA administrator.Asked whether the Space Council would make a difference, John Logsdon, a space historian and the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said he was \u201coptimistic that they are going to try. It's not words. It's actions. It's the commitment of resources.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLogsdon noted that relying so heavily on the commercial sector could pose problems. \u201cI note the Falcon Heavy has yet to fly,\u201d he said, referring to SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket. \u201cSome aspirations are reasonable, and some aren't.\u201dIn an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Pence lamented what he called \u201cAmerica\u2019s abdication of leadership in space\u201d and called to \u201crefocus America\u2019s space program toward human exploration of discovery\u201d at a time when NASA has to rely on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.While it hasn\u2019t flown humans to space in six years, NASA has launched probes, such as New Horizons to Pluto and Cassini to Saturn. The agency put the Curiosity rover on Mars. And as Pence was speaking Thursday morning, American astronauts Randy Bresnik and Mark Vande Hei were performing a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring his speech, Pence cited the advancements made by adversaries that allow soldiers to communicate in war zones, that guide precision munitions and keep an eye on adversaries.Congress has also grown increasingly concerned about space as a key domain in war, and the House has proposed creating a Space Corps, which would become the first new military branch since the Air Force was created in 1947.The vice president also lamented the fact that the United States has not had the ability to fly American astronauts to space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Instead it has paid Russia hundreds of millions of dollars to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station.Story continues below advertisementBoeing and SpaceX are currently under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft that could fly astronauts to the station.Pence expressed a sense of urgency to get those programs moving.Advertisement\u201cWhen the space shuttle program ended in 2011, we had four years to find an assured way for our astronauts to get into space,\u201d he said. In the meantime, we agreed to pay Russia to hitch a ride on their rockets. ... Here we are, in 2017, still relying on the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201dHe noted that the United States \u201chas not sent an American astronaut beyond low-Earth orbit in 45 years.\u201d Pence made his remarks during the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council. Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6933",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/05/pence-calls-for-a-return-to-the-moon-in-partnership-with-industry/",
        "text": "In opening the first meeting of the resurrected National Space Council, Vice President Pence said Thursday that the United States would regain a leadership role in human space flight by embarking on a return mission to the moon, building the foundation to go to Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPence offered no specific timeline. Speaking before a group of cabinet members and the chief executives of several top space companies, he said the moon would be a \u201csteppingstone, a training ground\u201d that would eventually propel humanity deeper into the cosmos in partnership with the growing commercial space industry. While he called for a renewed emphasis on exploration, he also said the council, designed to help guide U.S. policy in space, would need to create a more robust national security response to advances made by Russia and China in developing \u201cjamming and hacking\u201d capabilities that can \u201ccripple\u201d military and intelligence satellites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s call to return to the moon was the official declaration of a much-discussed goal of the Trump administration. Its nominee to take over NASA has advocated returning to the moon. And NASA has said it would solicit proposals from industry to develop landers that could take cargo and experiments to the lunar surface by as soon as next year.It also marked a reversal from plans\u00a0pushed by the Obama administration. In 2010, Obama famously said of the moon that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before\u201d and that NASA should instead focus on reaching an asteroid and Mars.In his opening remarks, made before the space shuttle Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center, Pence made it clear that the Trump administration would build on Obama\u2019s reliance on industry \u2014 both the large traditional contractors and the growing group of entrepreneurial companies \u2014 to get there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany top corporate leaders have decried the Trump administration over a number of issues, and two corporate advisory boards disbanded. But on Thursday, the heads of several top space and aerospace executives, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Orbital ATK, spoke before the council, saying they were ready and eager to work with the administration and fulfill its goals in space.(Blue Origin founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cNow is the time for swift and bold action,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, told the council. \u201cA permanent presence on the moon and American boots on the surface of Mars are not impossible and not long-term goals.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration didn\u2019t nominate a new NASA administrator, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), until August. And Bridenstine still hasn\u2019t been confirmed by the Senate. But Pence has shown a key interest in space, visiting both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Texas.He said the reconstituted council, dormant for some 25 years, would help the United States regain a leadership role in the cosmos. The council, initially created during the Eisenhower administration, includes the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security, in addition to other government officials, including the NASA administrator.Asked whether the Space Council would make a difference, John Logsdon, a space historian and the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said he was \u201coptimistic that they are going to try. It's not words. It's actions. It's the commitment of resources.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLogsdon noted that relying so heavily on the commercial sector could pose problems. \u201cI note the Falcon Heavy has yet to fly,\u201d he said, referring to SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket. \u201cSome aspirations are reasonable, and some aren't.\u201dIn an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Pence lamented what he called \u201cAmerica\u2019s abdication of leadership in space\u201d and called to \u201crefocus America\u2019s space program toward human exploration of discovery\u201d at a time when NASA has to rely on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.While it hasn\u2019t flown humans to space in six years, NASA has launched probes, such as New Horizons to Pluto and Cassini to Saturn. The agency put the Curiosity rover on Mars. And as Pence was speaking Thursday morning, American astronauts Randy Bresnik and Mark Vande Hei were performing a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring his speech, Pence cited the advancements made by adversaries that allow soldiers to communicate in war zones, that guide precision munitions and keep an eye on adversaries.Congress has also grown increasingly concerned about space as a key domain in war, and the House has proposed creating a Space Corps, which would become the first new military branch since the Air Force was created in 1947.The vice president also lamented the fact that the United States has not had the ability to fly American astronauts to space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Instead it has paid Russia hundreds of millions of dollars to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station.Story continues below advertisementBoeing and SpaceX are currently under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft that could fly astronauts to the station.Pence expressed a sense of urgency to get those programs moving.Advertisement\u201cWhen the space shuttle program ended in 2011, we had four years to find an assured way for our astronauts to get into space,\u201d he said. In the meantime, we agreed to pay Russia to hitch a ride on their rockets. ... Here we are, in 2017, still relying on the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201dHe noted that the United States \u201chas not sent an American astronaut beyond low-Earth orbit in 45 years.\u201d Pence made his remarks during the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council. Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6934",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/05/pence-calls-for-a-return-to-the-moon-in-partnership-with-industry/",
        "text": "In opening the first meeting of the resurrected National Space Council, Vice President Pence said Thursday that the United States would regain a leadership role in human space flight by embarking on a return mission to the moon, building the foundation to go to Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPence offered no specific timeline. Speaking before a group of cabinet members and the chief executives of several top space companies, he said the moon would be a \u201csteppingstone, a training ground\u201d that would eventually propel humanity deeper into the cosmos in partnership with the growing commercial space industry. While he called for a renewed emphasis on exploration, he also said the council, designed to help guide U.S. policy in space, would need to create a more robust national security response to advances made by Russia and China in developing \u201cjamming and hacking\u201d capabilities that can \u201ccripple\u201d military and intelligence satellites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s call to return to the moon was the official declaration of a much-discussed goal of the Trump administration. Its nominee to take over NASA has advocated returning to the moon. And NASA has said it would solicit proposals from industry to develop landers that could take cargo and experiments to the lunar surface by as soon as next year.It also marked a reversal from plans\u00a0pushed by the Obama administration. In 2010, Obama famously said of the moon that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before\u201d and that NASA should instead focus on reaching an asteroid and Mars.In his opening remarks, made before the space shuttle Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center, Pence made it clear that the Trump administration would build on Obama\u2019s reliance on industry \u2014 both the large traditional contractors and the growing group of entrepreneurial companies \u2014 to get there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany top corporate leaders have decried the Trump administration over a number of issues, and two corporate advisory boards disbanded. But on Thursday, the heads of several top space and aerospace executives, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Orbital ATK, spoke before the council, saying they were ready and eager to work with the administration and fulfill its goals in space.(Blue Origin founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cNow is the time for swift and bold action,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, told the council. \u201cA permanent presence on the moon and American boots on the surface of Mars are not impossible and not long-term goals.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration didn\u2019t nominate a new NASA administrator, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), until August. And Bridenstine still hasn\u2019t been confirmed by the Senate. But Pence has shown a key interest in space, visiting both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Texas.He said the reconstituted council, dormant for some 25 years, would help the United States regain a leadership role in the cosmos. The council, initially created during the Eisenhower administration, includes the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security, in addition to other government officials, including the NASA administrator.Asked whether the Space Council would make a difference, John Logsdon, a space historian and the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said he was \u201coptimistic that they are going to try. It's not words. It's actions. It's the commitment of resources.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLogsdon noted that relying so heavily on the commercial sector could pose problems. \u201cI note the Falcon Heavy has yet to fly,\u201d he said, referring to SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket. \u201cSome aspirations are reasonable, and some aren't.\u201dIn an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Pence lamented what he called \u201cAmerica\u2019s abdication of leadership in space\u201d and called to \u201crefocus America\u2019s space program toward human exploration of discovery\u201d at a time when NASA has to rely on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.While it hasn\u2019t flown humans to space in six years, NASA has launched probes, such as New Horizons to Pluto and Cassini to Saturn. The agency put the Curiosity rover on Mars. And as Pence was speaking Thursday morning, American astronauts Randy Bresnik and Mark Vande Hei were performing a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring his speech, Pence cited the advancements made by adversaries that allow soldiers to communicate in war zones, that guide precision munitions and keep an eye on adversaries.Congress has also grown increasingly concerned about space as a key domain in war, and the House has proposed creating a Space Corps, which would become the first new military branch since the Air Force was created in 1947.The vice president also lamented the fact that the United States has not had the ability to fly American astronauts to space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Instead it has paid Russia hundreds of millions of dollars to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station.Story continues below advertisementBoeing and SpaceX are currently under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft that could fly astronauts to the station.Pence expressed a sense of urgency to get those programs moving.Advertisement\u201cWhen the space shuttle program ended in 2011, we had four years to find an assured way for our astronauts to get into space,\u201d he said. In the meantime, we agreed to pay Russia to hitch a ride on their rockets. ... Here we are, in 2017, still relying on the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201dHe noted that the United States \u201chas not sent an American astronaut beyond low-Earth orbit in 45 years.\u201d Pence made his remarks during the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council. Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6935",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/05/pence-calls-for-a-return-to-the-moon-in-partnership-with-industry/",
        "text": "In opening the first meeting of the resurrected National Space Council, Vice President Pence said Thursday that the United States would regain a leadership role in human space flight by embarking on a return mission to the moon, building the foundation to go to Mars.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPence offered no specific timeline. Speaking before a group of cabinet members and the chief executives of several top space companies, he said the moon would be a \u201csteppingstone, a training ground\u201d that would eventually propel humanity deeper into the cosmos in partnership with the growing commercial space industry. While he called for a renewed emphasis on exploration, he also said the council, designed to help guide U.S. policy in space, would need to create a more robust national security response to advances made by Russia and China in developing \u201cjamming and hacking\u201d capabilities that can \u201ccripple\u201d military and intelligence satellites.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPence\u2019s call to return to the moon was the official declaration of a much-discussed goal of the Trump administration. Its nominee to take over NASA has advocated returning to the moon. And NASA has said it would solicit proposals from industry to develop landers that could take cargo and experiments to the lunar surface by as soon as next year.It also marked a reversal from plans\u00a0pushed by the Obama administration. In 2010, Obama famously said of the moon that \u201cwe\u2019ve been there before\u201d and that NASA should instead focus on reaching an asteroid and Mars.In his opening remarks, made before the space shuttle Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum\u2019s Udvar-Hazy Center, Pence made it clear that the Trump administration would build on Obama\u2019s reliance on industry \u2014 both the large traditional contractors and the growing group of entrepreneurial companies \u2014 to get there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany top corporate leaders have decried the Trump administration over a number of issues, and two corporate advisory boards disbanded. But on Thursday, the heads of several top space and aerospace executives, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Orbital ATK, spoke before the council, saying they were ready and eager to work with the administration and fulfill its goals in space.(Blue Origin founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u201cNow is the time for swift and bold action,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, told the council. \u201cA permanent presence on the moon and American boots on the surface of Mars are not impossible and not long-term goals.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe Trump administration didn\u2019t nominate a new NASA administrator, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), until August. And Bridenstine still hasn\u2019t been confirmed by the Senate. But Pence has shown a key interest in space, visiting both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center in Texas.He said the reconstituted council, dormant for some 25 years, would help the United States regain a leadership role in the cosmos. The council, initially created during the Eisenhower administration, includes the secretaries of state, defense, commerce, transportation and homeland security, in addition to other government officials, including the NASA administrator.Asked whether the Space Council would make a difference, John Logsdon, a space historian and the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said he was \u201coptimistic that they are going to try. It's not words. It's actions. It's the commitment of resources.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLogsdon noted that relying so heavily on the commercial sector could pose problems. \u201cI note the Falcon Heavy has yet to fly,\u201d he said, referring to SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket. \u201cSome aspirations are reasonable, and some aren't.\u201dIn an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Pence lamented what he called \u201cAmerica\u2019s abdication of leadership in space\u201d and called to \u201crefocus America\u2019s space program toward human exploration of discovery\u201d at a time when NASA has to rely on Russia for rides to the International Space Station.While it hasn\u2019t flown humans to space in six years, NASA has launched probes, such as New Horizons to Pluto and Cassini to Saturn. The agency put the Curiosity rover on Mars. And as Pence was speaking Thursday morning, American astronauts Randy Bresnik and Mark Vande Hei were performing a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring his speech, Pence cited the advancements made by adversaries that allow soldiers to communicate in war zones, that guide precision munitions and keep an eye on adversaries.Congress has also grown increasingly concerned about space as a key domain in war, and the House has proposed creating a Space Corps, which would become the first new military branch since the Air Force was created in 1947.The vice president also lamented the fact that the United States has not had the ability to fly American astronauts to space since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. Instead it has paid Russia hundreds of millions of dollars to fly NASA\u2019s astronauts to the space station.Story continues below advertisementBoeing and SpaceX are currently under contract from NASA to develop spacecraft that could fly astronauts to the station.Pence expressed a sense of urgency to get those programs moving.Advertisement\u201cWhen the space shuttle program ended in 2011, we had four years to find an assured way for our astronauts to get into space,\u201d he said. In the meantime, we agreed to pay Russia to hitch a ride on their rockets. ... Here we are, in 2017, still relying on the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station.\u201dHe noted that the United States \u201chas not sent an American astronaut beyond low-Earth orbit in 45 years.\u201d Pence made his remarks during the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council. Why the Trump administration wants to return to the moon in partnership with industry",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saboteur or whistleblower? Battle between Elon Musk and former Tesla employee turns ugly, exposing internal rancor (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6936",
        "date": "2018-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/21/saboteur-or-whistleblower-battle-between-elon-musk-and-former-tesla-employee-turns-ugly-exposing-internal-rancor/",
        "text": "Hours after Tesla sued its former employee on charges he had stolen company secrets, and days after chief Elon Musk had called him a saboteur, the Silicon Valley automaker\u00a0made\u00a0a startling claim. The company had received a call from a friend of the employee, Martin Tripp, saying he would be coming to Tesla's Gigafactory battery plant in Nevada to \u201cshoot the place up,\u201d according to a Tesla spokesman. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut Tripp, who says he became a whistleblower after seeing what he called dangerous conditions in\u00a0the company's car batteries, told The Washington Post he had said no such thing. Emails exchanged that day between him and Musk, provided to The Post and confirmed by Tesla, show bitter words from both men but also Tripp saying he had \u201cnever made a threat.\u201d Tesla's claims, he said, are \u201cabsurd! Insane is a better word.\u201dThe sheriff's office in Storey County, where the Gigafactory is located, said Thursday that it had received information of a threat to security at the Gigafactory on Wednesday but determined \u201cafter several hours of investigation ... there was no credible threat.\u201d Sheriff Gerald Antinoro said that names of all involved parties will be withheld while the investigation is ongoing. Tesla said it is increasing security at the Gigafactory as a precaution.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe showdown has exposed deep rancor at a tech giant famous for its head-turning cars, high-pressure workloads \u2014 and Musk, its unyielding boss. It also marks a new depth of\u00a0suspicions from Musk, who recently sent\u00a0companywide emails\u00a0urging workers to stay vigilant against shadowy \u201coutside forces,\u201d saying, \u201cOnly the paranoid survive.\u201d[Former employee sued by Tesla says he was a whistleblower, alarmed by company practices and Elon Musk]It's rare for any major company, let alone one worth roughly $60 billion, to allow its\u00a0internal warfare to play out in such a public way. It's even rarer for a billionaire leader like Musk \u2014 currently leading efforts to build\u00a0self-driving cars, underground super-tunnels and advanced spacecraft \u2014 to\u00a0serve as a soldier in the charge.But the emails show Musk\u00a0duking it out with Tripp, calling him a \u201chorrible human being\u201d who should be \u201cashamed\u201d of himself and face \u201clegal penalties.\u201dTesla's lawsuit, filed\u00a0Wednesday in a Nevada federal court, accuses Tripp of hacking the company's computer systems in order to steal\u00a0confidential photos and video of Tesla's manufacturing systems and other trade secrets.\u00a0The suit also accuses him\u00a0of giving false information to journalists, being \u201cdisruptive and combative\u201d in the workplace and attempting to\u00a0rope other co-workers into his scheme.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTesla lawyers\u00a0said Tripp, who worked at the Gigafactory as a technician\u00a0from October to last week, was disgruntled over a lost promotion. But Tripp said he tampered with no systems and shared information with the media only after seeing things that alarmed him within the company, including what he says were dangerously punctured batteries used in Tesla's latest Model 3 sedans. Tripp said he has documents\u00a0to support his claims, some of which, he said, were cited in a Business Insider news report.Tesla rebutted Tripp's claims to being a whistleblower and said his claims are exaggerated or misconstrued. The company\u00a0said no punctured batteries were ever used in Model 3 vehicles and that Musk\u00a0accurately reported the\u00a0cars' production numbers.The Post could find no criminal charges against Tripp. In 2007, he was the victim in a domestic incident in Michigan.Tripp said he was visited by sheriff's deputies Wednesday night about the threat allegations. He is seeking an attorney and official whistleblower protections. He said he and his family have temporarily vacated their home after their address was posted online.Alice Crites contributed to this report. That showdown has exposed deep rancor at a tech giant that has become infamous for its head-turning cars, high-pressure workloads \u2014 and Musk, its unyielding boss. Saboteur or whistleblower? Battle between Elon Musk and former Tesla employee turns ugly, exposing internal rancor",
        "author": "Drew Harwell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Elon Musk has so much riding on SpaceX\u2019s upcoming rocket launch (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6937",
        "date": "2017-01-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/06/why-elon-musk-has-so-much-riding-on-spacexs-upcoming-rocket-launch/",
        "text": "Elon Musk has ambitious goals\u00a0for SpaceX in the next couple of years. The company plans to launch its new massive rocket, the Falcon Heavy, as it works toward flying an unmanned spacecraft to Mars next year. It also is planning to fly astronauts to the International Space Station by 2018, a feat that would return the United States to human spaceflight. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBefore it embarks on all of that, however, it first has to launch what would normally be a routine flight of commercial satellites to orbit. But that launch, scheduled for Monday, is now anything but routine \u2014 and is instead one of the most important in history of the company.The launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base is the first since SpaceX\u2019s rocket exploded on Sept. 1 while being fueled ahead of an engine test fire. That explosion was the company\u2019s second failure in less than two years \u2014 in 2015, it lost a rocket a couple minutes into flight \u2014 leading to questions about its ability to fly reliably.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to the goals of Mars and resuming the nation's manned spaceflight program, the company also has a massive backlog of launches that was delayed while the company was grounded during its four-month investigation.The stakes for this flight, then, are huge, said Todd Harrison, the director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.\u201cThey\u2019ve got to prove it\u00a0and restore confidence in their system on this flight,\u201d he said. \u201cIf they have another failure, it\u2019s going to stop them dead in their tracks.\u201dOn Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the way for SpaceX\u2019s launch. The agency accepted SpaceX\u2019s investigative report on its rocket explosion, closing the case, and issued it a launch license.Story continues below advertisementOn Thursday, Musk tweeted that SpaceX successfully performed an engine test firing and wrote that, \u201cAll systems are go for launch next week.\u201d Originally, the launch was scheduled for Sunday, and it was unclear why the schedule slipped a day to Monday.AdvertisementEarlier this week, the company said the cause of the September explosion was traced to a problem with a pressure vessel in the second-stage liquid oxygen tank. The tank buckled, the company said, and supercooled liquid oxygen pooled in the lining. The fuel was ignited by breaking fibers or friction.SpaceX said in the short term, it plans to change the way it loads fuel. Eventually, it plans to change the design of the pressure vessels to prevent buckling.Story continues below advertisementEvery launch carries the risk of failure, said Jim Muncy, the president of PoliSpace, a consulting firm. SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 is a \u201cproven vehicle,\u201d he said. SpaceX continually tries to innovate, and had been super cooling its fuel to make it more dense so that the rocket could carry more of it.The extra fuel was necessary as the company began flying its rocket boosters back to land \u2014 or to ships at sea \u2014 so that they could be reused. But taking such advanced steps \u2014 no one had ever successfully landed an orbital-class rocket before \u2014 can cause problems, Muncy said.\u201cAs you try to increase performance, you find out if you\u2019re pushing the envelope too far,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re clearly pulling back and not pushing the envelope as much with this launch.\u201dThe launch, which would carry 10 Iridium communications satellites to orbit, is scheduled for Monday at 1:22 p.m. Eastern time \u2014 weather permitting. The launch, now scheduled for Monday, would be the first since its rocket blew up in September. Why Elon Musk has so much riding on SpaceX\u2019s upcoming rocket launch",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "New spacesuit by Boeing: First look at the spacesuit that will take astronauts to International Space Station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6938",
        "date": "2017-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/25/a-new-spacesuit-for-a-new-spacecraft/",
        "text": "Do spacesuits always have to be so bulky? Do astronauts have to lumber around like the Michelin man? Or is there a way to design something a bit sleeker, more fashionable? Boeing is set to unveil its new spacesuit on Wednesday, giving a look at a suit designed not by NASA but a commercial company. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBoeing is under contract by the space agency to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station next year. The suit would be worn by passengers in the new spacecraft Boeing is designing, the Starliner. NASA has hired both Boeing and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX to fly crews to the space station. Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the United States has not had the ability to fly human passengers, relying instead on Russia. It\u2019s not yet clear whether SpaceX or Boeing would fly first, but whoever does would earn the honor of restoring the country\u2019s ability to fly humans from American soil. This week, Boeing teased out images of its new suit. And it plans to model it on Wednesday, when it also plans to show off a mockup of the Starliner and the launchpad it is renovating on Cape Canaveral.\u00a0 Boeing is set to unveil a new suit for people flying on the Starliner. New spacesuit by Boeing: First look at the spacesuit that will take astronauts to International Space Station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the White House wants to create a traffic cop for space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6939",
        "date": "2018-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/17/why-the-white-house-wants-to-create-a-traffic-cop-for-space/",
        "text": "COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 Space\u00a0may be vast, but it\u2019s getting pretty crowded up there. There are now nearly 1,500 satellites in orbit around Earth and lots of debris \u2014\u00a0an estimated\u00a020,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimeters\u00a0and hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd it\u2019s only going to get more congested going forward. Companies such as OneWeb, SpaceX and Boeing have plans to put thousands of small-satellite constellations\u00a0in orbit to beam the Internet down to remote areas and\u00a0 provide communications and Earth-observation services. With all of that stuff whizzing around at incredibly\u00a0high speeds, the United States is increasingly concerned about the prospect\u00a0of additional collisions in space that could make it even more difficult to navigate. With satellites and debris orbiting at thousands of miles per hour, even something the size of a peanut can become a fearsome projectile, capable of causing\u00a0a lot of\u00a0damage.Chinese space station plunges into the ocean. No one hurt, no one there.The Pentagon tracks objects in space and warns satellite operators and foreign governments when there might be a collision or close call. But it doesn\u2019t have the authority to order operators to move their satellites to avoid a crash.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a speech at\u00a0an\u00a0annual space symposium here this week, Vice President Pence said the federal government would start playing the role of space traffic cop, giving the responsibility to the Commerce Department, as it tries to promote the growth of the commercial space industry.He cited a collision in 2009 between a\u00a0U.S. satellite and an inactive Russian spacecraft that created thousands of pieces of debris.\u201cPresident Trump knows that a stable and orderly space environment is critical to the strength of our economy and the resilience of our national security systems,\u201d\u00a0Pence said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s why the National Space Council has developed the first comprehensive space-traffic-management policy, which we will soon be sending to the president\u2019s desk for his approval.\u201dTrump wants to a military \u2018Space Force.\u2019 Here\u2019s why.But\u00a0Pence offered scant details of what that policy would be\u00a0or how\u00a0and when it would be implemented. And there are no signs that the government intends to dedicate the funds\u00a0that many experts say are required to oversee the thousands of spacecraft speeding through the cosmos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the big questions is resources,\u201d said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, which advocates for space sustainability policies. He noted that the Commerce Department \u201chas only a handful of people working on space licensing and a very small budget.\u201dIn a speech here Tuesday morning, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross echoed Pence's comments, saying the department wants to establish \u201csome \u2018rules of the road\u2019 in space to protect U.S. business assets.\u201d\u00a0He said that \u201cthe prospect of additional devastating collisions is no longer becoming a question of if but of when.\u201dIn a meeting with reporters before the speech, Ross said the department would move slowly at first, working with industry and foreign governments.\u00a0\u201cWe want to do baby steps, and we want to be sure we get this first phase done right before we try to embroider on top of the additional steps,\u201d Ross said. \u201cBecause I think the only thing worse than too aggressive regulation is ill-prepared regulation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss said the department would start modestly. \u201cWe\u2019re talking small millions of dollars for a budget,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not something that is going to break the camel\u2019s back.\u201dBut he said the\u00a0United States\u00a0had to lead in setting the rules of the road.\u201cI think everybody recognizes there is a need for some sort of regulation, some sort of orderly practice, some sort of standards in space,\u201d\u00a0Ross said. \u201cAnd very often, he who gets there first with a halfway decent set of ideas becomes the standard.\u201d As companies plan to put up large constellations of satellites into orbit, there are concerns about the increasing possibility of collisions.  Why the White House wants to create a traffic cop for space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A first look at the path NASA astronauts will walk when the U.S. launches humans into space again (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6940",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/27/a-first-look-at-the-path-nasa-astronauts-will-walk-when-the-u-s-launches-humans-into-space-again/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 They\u2019ll take the elevator 175 feet above the shoreline, then march 15 steps across the platform and 13 down the grated gangplank to the double doors that open to a small white room. There the astronauts will make their final preparations, adjust their spacesuits, check their equipment, before stepping into the spacecraft. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the walk the astronauts will take as part of the NASA\u2019s effort to restore human spaceflights from U.S. soil by 2018, ending an ignominious hiatus that has endured since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Now, NASA is depending on two commercial companies \u2014 Boeing and SpaceX \u2014 to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station, under contracts worth billions of dollars.Story continues below advertisementBoth companies have faced technical and design challenges that have forced them to push back the dates of their initial flights \u2014 delays that could prove costly.But there are growing signs that the companies are making progress, and this week Boeing provided a glimpse of what\u2019s to come, opening up some of its new facilities here for the first time and unveiling its new spacesuit.A new crew tower at Launch Complex 41, the last place on Earth the astronauts will walk before stepping into the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, is one example of the company\u2019s progress. It\u2019s a massive structure, made of 1.4 million pounds of steel, that adds yet another point to the cape\u2019s skyline and offers a penthouse-like view of the shoreline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing has also built a new mission control room at the Kennedy Space Center, with rows of computer consoles that will one day monitor the rocket\u2019s health, its communications, fuel and navigation systems.Then there\u2019s the sleek new blue Boeing spacesuit that, at 20 pounds, weighs 10 pounds\u00a0less\u00a0than the one worn by shuttle astronauts. It comes with gloves that work on touch screens and lightweight boots designed by Reebok that feel like slippers. Instead of having a huge fishbowl bubble helmet, as the shuttle astronauts\u2019 suits did, the new suit\u2019s helmet slips over the head like a hood.\u201cWe like to think this represents the future of what protective space gear will be,\u201d said Chris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut and ex-Navy fighter pilot who is now Boeing\u2019s director of crew and mission systems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause it\u2019s so lightweight and flexible, Ferguson said, \u201cit feels a lot more like a flight suit than a spacesuit.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is designing its own suit\u00a0that it has not yet been unveiled. But just across the cape, SpaceX has made visible progress with its new launch site, the historic Pad 39A that was used during the Apollo and shuttle eras.That launch site, which years ago was rusting away in the salt air, has been completely renovated. Nearby, the company\u00a0has built a massive rocket hangar that has the SpaceX logo emblazoned across it \u2014 a potent symbol of the private sector putting its stamp on the venerable government facility.SpaceX plans to christen the pad within days, launching the first rocket from 39A since the last shuttle mission, some six years ago.Story continues below advertisementThe work by SpaceX and Boeing is\u00a0part of a broader effort to transform Cape Canaveral from an area once dominated by the government to what NASA calls a \u201cmulti-user spaceport,\u201d one that is home to several commercial companies.AdvertisementJeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is also leasing a launch site here. The company is building a massive 750,000-square-foot facility where it wants\u00a0to build its New Glenn rocket, which it plans to fly from here by the end of the decade. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.Story continues below advertisementBut nothing will represent the cape\u2019s renaissance more than the return of human spaceflight from its shores. Boeing and SpaceX are competing to see which company will fly first. SpaceX says its first test flight with passengers is scheduled for May 2018. Boeing plans to make its first uncrewed flight in June 2018, with a two-person test flight in August\u00a0of that year.AdvertisementBoth companies, however, have faced delays that the NASA inspector general\u2019s office last year warned could force NASA to buy more seats from the Russians, who currently take U.S. astronauts to the space station. The inspector general found that Russia\u2019s price for ferrying U.S. astronauts jumped 284 percent over the past decade, growing from $21.3 million in 2006 to $81.9 million last year.In its report, the watchdog said it believed that neither company would \u201cachieve certified, crewed flight to the ISS until late 2018.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the past, funding shortfalls led to the delays, the inspector general\u00a0said. But \u201ctechnical challenges with the contractors\u2019 spacecraft designs are now driving the schedule slippages,\u201d it said.Boeing\u2019s spacecraft, the Starliner, has had problems with its mass and the effects of vibrations during launch. SpaceX\u2019s delays came when it changed its capsule design to land in the water instead of on land, it said.AdvertisementBoeing\u2019s Ferguson said that \u201cturning from the design effort to the manufacturing effort became more of a challenge than we anticipated.\u201dThe company has \u201cslogged through some of the real engineering challenges, and now we are getting to the point where those challenges are largely behind us and it\u2019s time to get on to the rubber meeting the road,\u201d he said.Sunita Williams, one of four NASA astronauts chosen to fly on the first commercial flights, said she is \u201cpumped\u201d by the prospect of launching again from American soil. \u201cWe\u2019re getting closer and closer,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementBut she acknowledged that the companies still have \u201ca long road and they have a lot to do. But I am really encouraged and excited at the pace at which both companies are taking this challenge. \u2026 Things are ticking along. It\u2019s going to happen.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this post said the amount\u00a0Russia charges to ferry U.S. astronauts had jumped 384 percent. It is 284 percent. This version has been updated. Boeing, under contract from NASA to fly crews to the space station, reveals its new space suit and facilities. A first look at the path NASA astronauts will walk when the U.S. launches humans into space again",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "A first look at the path NASA astronauts will walk when the U.S. launches humans into space again (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6941",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/27/a-first-look-at-the-path-nasa-astronauts-will-walk-when-the-u-s-launches-humans-into-space-again/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 They\u2019ll take the elevator 175 feet above the shoreline, then march 15 steps across the platform and 13 down the grated gangplank to the double doors that open to a small white room. There the astronauts will make their final preparations, adjust their spacesuits, check their equipment, before stepping into the spacecraft. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the walk the astronauts will take as part of the NASA\u2019s effort to restore human spaceflights from U.S. soil by 2018, ending an ignominious hiatus that has endured since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.Now, NASA is depending on two commercial companies \u2014 Boeing and SpaceX \u2014 to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station, under contracts worth billions of dollars.Story continues below advertisementBoth companies have faced technical and design challenges that have forced them to push back the dates of their initial flights \u2014 delays that could prove costly.But there are growing signs that the companies are making progress, and this week Boeing provided a glimpse of what\u2019s to come, opening up some of its new facilities here for the first time and unveiling its new spacesuit.A new crew tower at Launch Complex 41, the last place on Earth the astronauts will walk before stepping into the company\u2019s Starliner spacecraft, is one example of the company\u2019s progress. It\u2019s a massive structure, made of 1.4 million pounds of steel, that adds yet another point to the cape\u2019s skyline and offers a penthouse-like view of the shoreline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing has also built a new mission control room at the Kennedy Space Center, with rows of computer consoles that will one day monitor the rocket\u2019s health, its communications, fuel and navigation systems.Then there\u2019s the sleek new blue Boeing spacesuit that, at 20 pounds, weighs 10 pounds\u00a0less\u00a0than the one worn by shuttle astronauts. It comes with gloves that work on touch screens and lightweight boots designed by Reebok that feel like slippers. Instead of having a huge fishbowl bubble helmet, as the shuttle astronauts\u2019 suits did, the new suit\u2019s helmet slips over the head like a hood.\u201cWe like to think this represents the future of what protective space gear will be,\u201d said Chris Ferguson, a former NASA astronaut and ex-Navy fighter pilot who is now Boeing\u2019s director of crew and mission systems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause it\u2019s so lightweight and flexible, Ferguson said, \u201cit feels a lot more like a flight suit than a spacesuit.\u201dElon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is designing its own suit\u00a0that it has not yet been unveiled. But just across the cape, SpaceX has made visible progress with its new launch site, the historic Pad 39A that was used during the Apollo and shuttle eras.That launch site, which years ago was rusting away in the salt air, has been completely renovated. Nearby, the company\u00a0has built a massive rocket hangar that has the SpaceX logo emblazoned across it \u2014 a potent symbol of the private sector putting its stamp on the venerable government facility.SpaceX plans to christen the pad within days, launching the first rocket from 39A since the last shuttle mission, some six years ago.Story continues below advertisementThe work by SpaceX and Boeing is\u00a0part of a broader effort to transform Cape Canaveral from an area once dominated by the government to what NASA calls a \u201cmulti-user spaceport,\u201d one that is home to several commercial companies.AdvertisementJeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is also leasing a launch site here. The company is building a massive 750,000-square-foot facility where it wants\u00a0to build its New Glenn rocket, which it plans to fly from here by the end of the decade. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.Story continues below advertisementBut nothing will represent the cape\u2019s renaissance more than the return of human spaceflight from its shores. Boeing and SpaceX are competing to see which company will fly first. SpaceX says its first test flight with passengers is scheduled for May 2018. Boeing plans to make its first uncrewed flight in June 2018, with a two-person test flight in August\u00a0of that year.AdvertisementBoth companies, however, have faced delays that the NASA inspector general\u2019s office last year warned could force NASA to buy more seats from the Russians, who currently take U.S. astronauts to the space station. The inspector general found that Russia\u2019s price for ferrying U.S. astronauts jumped 284 percent over the past decade, growing from $21.3 million in 2006 to $81.9 million last year.In its report, the watchdog said it believed that neither company would \u201cachieve certified, crewed flight to the ISS until late 2018.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn the past, funding shortfalls led to the delays, the inspector general\u00a0said. But \u201ctechnical challenges with the contractors\u2019 spacecraft designs are now driving the schedule slippages,\u201d it said.Boeing\u2019s spacecraft, the Starliner, has had problems with its mass and the effects of vibrations during launch. SpaceX\u2019s delays came when it changed its capsule design to land in the water instead of on land, it said.AdvertisementBoeing\u2019s Ferguson said that \u201cturning from the design effort to the manufacturing effort became more of a challenge than we anticipated.\u201dThe company has \u201cslogged through some of the real engineering challenges, and now we are getting to the point where those challenges are largely behind us and it\u2019s time to get on to the rubber meeting the road,\u201d he said.Sunita Williams, one of four NASA astronauts chosen to fly on the first commercial flights, said she is \u201cpumped\u201d by the prospect of launching again from American soil. \u201cWe\u2019re getting closer and closer,\u201d she said.Story continues below advertisementBut she acknowledged that the companies still have \u201ca long road and they have a lot to do. But I am really encouraged and excited at the pace at which both companies are taking this challenge. \u2026 Things are ticking along. It\u2019s going to happen.\u201dCorrection: An earlier version of this post said the amount\u00a0Russia charges to ferry U.S. astronauts had jumped 384 percent. It is 284 percent. This version has been updated. Boeing, under contract from NASA to fly crews to the space station, reveals its new space suit and facilities. A first look at the path NASA astronauts will walk when the U.S. launches humans into space again",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launches for first time from historic Kennedy Space Center pad (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6942",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/19/elon-musks-spacex-launches-for-first-time-from-historic-kennedy-space-center-pad/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX christened historic Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center here Sunday\u00a0morning with the first launch from the pad since the shuttle last flew more than five years ago.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAbout eight minutes after the 9:39 a.m. liftoff from what NASA calls the \u201cgreat American gateway to space,\u201d the rocket\u2019s first stage returned to Earth and touched down safely on a massive landing pad the company has constructed here at Cape Canaveral. The launch, which carried no passengers, was to deliver 5,500 pounds of cargo and supplies to the International Space Station aboard a Dragon spacecraft. But its significance was broader.Story continues below advertisementLaunch Complex 39A is the site from which many of the Apollo astronauts \u2014 including the Apollo 11 crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 took off on their trips to the moon. It also hosted many shuttle missions, serving as the stage for dozens of fiery blastoffs along the Florida coast.AdvertisementBut after the shuttle was retired in 2011 and interest in the United States' space program waned, 39A sat dormant as NASA contemplated an uncertain future.NASA officials decided to lease out the launch site and found a willing tenant in SpaceX, the hard-charging venture founded by Musk, whose goal is ultimately to put humans on Mars.If not for the arrangement, the towering pad of concrete and steel \u201cwould have wasted away in the salt air,\u201d said NASA\u2019s Robert Cabana, the director of the Kennedy Space Center.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s flight, then, was an important resurrection of the site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. For SpaceX, the use of 39A reinforces\u00a0its status as a leader among a group of commercial space ventures that are trying to lower the cost of space travel, and revolutionize an industry that has been stagnant for decades.AdvertisementAnd the mission\u00a0represented another successful launch \u2014 and landing \u2014 after suffering two explosions in the last two years.\u201cEvery launch for me is a significant emotional event. There\u2019s not one launch where I feel comfortable and calm,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX said at a prelaunch briefing Friday. \u201cThey are always, always nerve wracking. I can tell you it\u2019s an extra special launch tomorrow for sure, maybe extra nerve-racking.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor NASA, the flight signals an important transformation of the Kennedy Space Center, as it increasingly relies on the private sector for travel to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit. Several commercial companies now have contracts to fly cargo to the space station. SpaceX and Boeing also have been hired to fly astronauts there.Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is leasing another launch site here. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementA host of big, legacy contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed are also building NASA\u2019s new rocket, the Space Launch System, and the Orion crew capsule, which NASA hopes will fly astronauts to the moon or Mars from here.Story continues below advertisementAll of the activity on the Florida Space Coast stands in contrast to just a few years ago when the shuttle was being retired and the Obama administration killed the Constellation program \u2014 an over-budget and behind-schedule plan to build a big rocket and spacecraft designed to go to the moon.That \u201cwas a bleak time here at the center,\u201d said Tom Engler, director of the NASA\u2019s Center Planning and Development Directorate.But times have changed, he said.\u201cWe have four active human spaceflight programs here at Kennedy Space Center at this point in time: Orion, SpaceX, Boeing and now Blue Origin that are all going to be in the next few years taking humans to space,\u201d Engler said. \u201cIf you put that in context of the history of human spaceflight, only three countries have ever flown humans into space: U.S., Russia and China.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTraditionally, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean. But SpaceX has been able to successfully recover several of its boosters. Later this year it plans to re-fly one of its used boosters, which it calls \u201cflight proven,\u201d for the first time. SpaceX officials also said it plans to reuse a previously flown Dragon spacecraft on a future cargo mission.This year, it plans to launch of maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy, a much more powerful rocket that has been under development for years. SpaceX plans to use the Falcon Heavy to launch its Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2020 in an uncrewed mission.Launchpad 39A is where the company plans to fly NASA astronauts to the station. While that was initially supposed to happen by 2017, both SpaceX and Boeing have faced delays that could push certification of their vehicles to 2019, the Government Accountability Office recently reported. But Shotwell said the company is still on track for 2018.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX has another launch site here, pad 40. But it was damaged significantly when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded in September while being fueled ahead of an engine test.The launch was originally scheduled for Saturday, but Musk personally called off the flight at almost the last second because of concerns about a potential mechanical problem. The Dragon spacecraft is carrying several experiments, including an instrument that would monitor the health of the ozone layer, a sensor that would study lightning from space and a study of the growth of certain types of stem cells in microgravity.It is scheduled to meet up with the station in a couple of days. The launch of the Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A is another symbol of the rise of the commercial space industry. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launches for first time from historic Kennedy Space Center pad",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launches for first time from historic Kennedy Space Center pad (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6943",
        "date": "2017-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/19/elon-musks-spacex-launches-for-first-time-from-historic-kennedy-space-center-pad/",
        "text": "CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX christened historic Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center here Sunday\u00a0morning with the first launch from the pad since the shuttle last flew more than five years ago.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAbout eight minutes after the 9:39 a.m. liftoff from what NASA calls the \u201cgreat American gateway to space,\u201d the rocket\u2019s first stage returned to Earth and touched down safely on a massive landing pad the company has constructed here at Cape Canaveral. The launch, which carried no passengers, was to deliver 5,500 pounds of cargo and supplies to the International Space Station aboard a Dragon spacecraft. But its significance was broader.Story continues below advertisementLaunch Complex 39A is the site from which many of the Apollo astronauts \u2014 including the Apollo 11 crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins \u2014 took off on their trips to the moon. It also hosted many shuttle missions, serving as the stage for dozens of fiery blastoffs along the Florida coast.AdvertisementBut after the shuttle was retired in 2011 and interest in the United States' space program waned, 39A sat dormant as NASA contemplated an uncertain future.NASA officials decided to lease out the launch site and found a willing tenant in SpaceX, the hard-charging venture founded by Musk, whose goal is ultimately to put humans on Mars.If not for the arrangement, the towering pad of concrete and steel \u201cwould have wasted away in the salt air,\u201d said NASA\u2019s Robert Cabana, the director of the Kennedy Space Center.Story continues below advertisementSunday\u2019s flight, then, was an important resurrection of the site, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. For SpaceX, the use of 39A reinforces\u00a0its status as a leader among a group of commercial space ventures that are trying to lower the cost of space travel, and revolutionize an industry that has been stagnant for decades.AdvertisementAnd the mission\u00a0represented another successful launch \u2014 and landing \u2014 after suffering two explosions in the last two years.\u201cEvery launch for me is a significant emotional event. There\u2019s not one launch where I feel comfortable and calm,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX said at a prelaunch briefing Friday. \u201cThey are always, always nerve wracking. I can tell you it\u2019s an extra special launch tomorrow for sure, maybe extra nerve-racking.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFor NASA, the flight signals an important transformation of the Kennedy Space Center, as it increasingly relies on the private sector for travel to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit. Several commercial companies now have contracts to fly cargo to the space station. SpaceX and Boeing also have been hired to fly astronauts there.Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin is leasing another launch site here. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Moon Express, which is vying to land a spacecraft on the moon as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, has also had a partnership with NASA to test its lunar lander at the Kennedy Space Center.AdvertisementA host of big, legacy contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed are also building NASA\u2019s new rocket, the Space Launch System, and the Orion crew capsule, which NASA hopes will fly astronauts to the moon or Mars from here.Story continues below advertisementAll of the activity on the Florida Space Coast stands in contrast to just a few years ago when the shuttle was being retired and the Obama administration killed the Constellation program \u2014 an over-budget and behind-schedule plan to build a big rocket and spacecraft designed to go to the moon.That \u201cwas a bleak time here at the center,\u201d said Tom Engler, director of the NASA\u2019s Center Planning and Development Directorate.But times have changed, he said.\u201cWe have four active human spaceflight programs here at Kennedy Space Center at this point in time: Orion, SpaceX, Boeing and now Blue Origin that are all going to be in the next few years taking humans to space,\u201d Engler said. \u201cIf you put that in context of the history of human spaceflight, only three countries have ever flown humans into space: U.S., Russia and China.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTraditionally, the first stages of rockets were ditched into the ocean. But SpaceX has been able to successfully recover several of its boosters. Later this year it plans to re-fly one of its used boosters, which it calls \u201cflight proven,\u201d for the first time. SpaceX officials also said it plans to reuse a previously flown Dragon spacecraft on a future cargo mission.This year, it plans to launch of maiden flight of its Falcon Heavy, a much more powerful rocket that has been under development for years. SpaceX plans to use the Falcon Heavy to launch its Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2020 in an uncrewed mission.Launchpad 39A is where the company plans to fly NASA astronauts to the station. While that was initially supposed to happen by 2017, both SpaceX and Boeing have faced delays that could push certification of their vehicles to 2019, the Government Accountability Office recently reported. But Shotwell said the company is still on track for 2018.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX has another launch site here, pad 40. But it was damaged significantly when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded in September while being fueled ahead of an engine test.The launch was originally scheduled for Saturday, but Musk personally called off the flight at almost the last second because of concerns about a potential mechanical problem. The Dragon spacecraft is carrying several experiments, including an instrument that would monitor the health of the ozone layer, a sensor that would study lightning from space and a study of the growth of certain types of stem cells in microgravity.It is scheduled to meet up with the station in a couple of days. The launch of the Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A is another symbol of the rise of the commercial space industry. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launches for first time from historic Kennedy Space Center pad",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Elon Musk antagonized rival, the space industry battled over who will host a cocktail reception for the vice president (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6944",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/16/as-elon-musk-antagonizes-rival-the-space-industry-battled-over-who-will-host-a-cocktail-reception-for-the-vice-president/",
        "text": "After he launched his giant new rocket into space last week, Elon Musk said he was spoiling for a good race in space. This week, he learned his rivals were up\u00a0for the challenge, even when it involves such terrestrial trivialities as a cocktail party.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAhead of the second meeting of the White House\u2019s National Space Council in Florida next week, a consortium of upstart entrepreneurial companies known as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which includes SpaceX, decided to host a reception for members of the council, who just happen to be some of the most powerful players in Washington. Headed by Vice President Pence, the policymaking council is made up of the secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Transportation and Defense\u00a0and other top government officials. But when the groups representing some of the more traditional space contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, caught wind of the party, they complained to the White House, which agreed that they, too, should host the reception.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ultimate party crash?More like \u201cwe wanted to make sure the entirety of the industry was represented to the council and not just a subset,\u201d said one industry official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.As a result, what started as a simple soiree has ballooned into a full-on convocation, according to five industry and government officials who discussed the back and forth, agreeing to speak only on the condition of anonymity\u00a0for fear of retribution.Some history: Once derided as an \u201cankle-biter\u201d by its competitors, SpaceX, and the entrepreneurial industry it has helped spawn, has emerged as a disruptive force that has forced\u00a0the space industry establishment\u00a0to improvise and adapt. SpaceX currently has contracts worth several billion dollars to fly cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. And it is threatening the lock that the United Launch Alliance,\u00a0a joint venture of Lockheed and Boeing, has long had over the lucrative national security market.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch is the intensity of their rivalry that when industry veterans heard that SpaceX and its ilk in the Commercial Spaceflight Federation planned to host an\u00a0low-key gathering with the vice president and others ahead of the Space Council meeting, they launched an all-out lobbying blitz insisting they be included.\u201cIt charged up a lot of groups when it was a CSF-only thing,\u201d one official said.After taking their complaints were conveyed to the Space Council, the party, to be held Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, grew in size and is now being hosted by the Aerospace Industries Association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, as well as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, formally welcomed the new co-hosts, saying\u00a0the reception will\u00a0be an \u201cinclusive event\u00a0that celebrates the achievements and innovations of the American space industry.\u201d He said his group looks \u201cforward to the work the Vice President and the Council are doing to help move America forward on our shared goals and dreams that space offers. We are partnering on this event with our association colleagues to showcase the best and brightest aspects of American ingenuity.\u201dAdvertisementAs the groups were squabbling behind the scenes over who should host the reception, Musk was antagonizing Tory Bruno, chief executive of the rival United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.On Twitter, Musk went after the cost of his competitor\u2019s rocket, saying the price was more than $400 million for a launch of ULA\u2019s Delta IV Heavy rocket, far greater than his Falcon Heavy rocket.Story continues below advertisementBruno responded by saying that the cost was actually $350 million, and that his company was developing another rocket, known as Vulcan, which ULA has said will be even more competitive when it starts flying.But Musk said he didn\u2019t think the rocket would be certified by the Air Force to be able to launch Pentagon missions any time soon.\u201cI will seriously eat my hat with a side of mustard if that rocket flies a national security spacecraft before 2023,\u201d he wrote on Twitter.The next day, Bruno tweeted a picture of a ULA-logoed lunchbox and a baseball cap.Maybe that plan works out, but I will seriously eat my hat with a side of mustard if that rocket flies a national security spacecraft before 2023\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2018\n\n The tiff comes as the National Space Council, led by Vice President Pence, is set to meet again.  As Elon Musk antagonized rival, the space industry battled over who will host a cocktail reception for the vice president",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Elon Musk antagonized rival, the space industry battled over who will host a cocktail reception for the vice president (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6945",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/16/as-elon-musk-antagonizes-rival-the-space-industry-battled-over-who-will-host-a-cocktail-reception-for-the-vice-president/",
        "text": "After he launched his giant new rocket into space last week, Elon Musk said he was spoiling for a good race in space. This week, he learned his rivals were up\u00a0for the challenge, even when it involves such terrestrial trivialities as a cocktail party.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAhead of the second meeting of the White House\u2019s National Space Council in Florida next week, a consortium of upstart entrepreneurial companies known as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which includes SpaceX, decided to host a reception for members of the council, who just happen to be some of the most powerful players in Washington. Headed by Vice President Pence, the policymaking council is made up of the secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Transportation and Defense\u00a0and other top government officials. But when the groups representing some of the more traditional space contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, caught wind of the party, they complained to the White House, which agreed that they, too, should host the reception.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ultimate party crash?More like \u201cwe wanted to make sure the entirety of the industry was represented to the council and not just a subset,\u201d said one industry official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.As a result, what started as a simple soiree has ballooned into a full-on convocation, according to five industry and government officials who discussed the back and forth, agreeing to speak only on the condition of anonymity\u00a0for fear of retribution.Some history: Once derided as an \u201cankle-biter\u201d by its competitors, SpaceX, and the entrepreneurial industry it has helped spawn, has emerged as a disruptive force that has forced\u00a0the space industry establishment\u00a0to improvise and adapt. SpaceX currently has contracts worth several billion dollars to fly cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. And it is threatening the lock that the United Launch Alliance,\u00a0a joint venture of Lockheed and Boeing, has long had over the lucrative national security market.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch is the intensity of their rivalry that when industry veterans heard that SpaceX and its ilk in the Commercial Spaceflight Federation planned to host an\u00a0low-key gathering with the vice president and others ahead of the Space Council meeting, they launched an all-out lobbying blitz insisting they be included.\u201cIt charged up a lot of groups when it was a CSF-only thing,\u201d one official said.After taking their complaints were conveyed to the Space Council, the party, to be held Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, grew in size and is now being hosted by the Aerospace Industries Association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, as well as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, formally welcomed the new co-hosts, saying\u00a0the reception will\u00a0be an \u201cinclusive event\u00a0that celebrates the achievements and innovations of the American space industry.\u201d He said his group looks \u201cforward to the work the Vice President and the Council are doing to help move America forward on our shared goals and dreams that space offers. We are partnering on this event with our association colleagues to showcase the best and brightest aspects of American ingenuity.\u201dAdvertisementAs the groups were squabbling behind the scenes over who should host the reception, Musk was antagonizing Tory Bruno, chief executive of the rival United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.On Twitter, Musk went after the cost of his competitor\u2019s rocket, saying the price was more than $400 million for a launch of ULA\u2019s Delta IV Heavy rocket, far greater than his Falcon Heavy rocket.Story continues below advertisementBruno responded by saying that the cost was actually $350 million, and that his company was developing another rocket, known as Vulcan, which ULA has said will be even more competitive when it starts flying.But Musk said he didn\u2019t think the rocket would be certified by the Air Force to be able to launch Pentagon missions any time soon.\u201cI will seriously eat my hat with a side of mustard if that rocket flies a national security spacecraft before 2023,\u201d he wrote on Twitter.The next day, Bruno tweeted a picture of a ULA-logoed lunchbox and a baseball cap.Maybe that plan works out, but I will seriously eat my hat with a side of mustard if that rocket flies a national security spacecraft before 2023\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2018\n\n The tiff comes as the National Space Council, led by Vice President Pence, is set to meet again.  As Elon Musk antagonized rival, the space industry battled over who will host a cocktail reception for the vice president",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Elon Musk antagonized rival, the space industry battled over who will host a cocktail reception for the vice president (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6946",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/16/as-elon-musk-antagonizes-rival-the-space-industry-battled-over-who-will-host-a-cocktail-reception-for-the-vice-president/",
        "text": "After he launched his giant new rocket into space last week, Elon Musk said he was spoiling for a good race in space. This week, he learned his rivals were up\u00a0for the challenge, even when it involves such terrestrial trivialities as a cocktail party.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAhead of the second meeting of the White House\u2019s National Space Council in Florida next week, a consortium of upstart entrepreneurial companies known as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which includes SpaceX, decided to host a reception for members of the council, who just happen to be some of the most powerful players in Washington. Headed by Vice President Pence, the policymaking council is made up of the secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Transportation and Defense\u00a0and other top government officials. But when the groups representing some of the more traditional space contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, caught wind of the party, they complained to the White House, which agreed that they, too, should host the reception.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe ultimate party crash?More like \u201cwe wanted to make sure the entirety of the industry was represented to the council and not just a subset,\u201d said one industry official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.As a result, what started as a simple soiree has ballooned into a full-on convocation, according to five industry and government officials who discussed the back and forth, agreeing to speak only on the condition of anonymity\u00a0for fear of retribution.Some history: Once derided as an \u201cankle-biter\u201d by its competitors, SpaceX, and the entrepreneurial industry it has helped spawn, has emerged as a disruptive force that has forced\u00a0the space industry establishment\u00a0to improvise and adapt. SpaceX currently has contracts worth several billion dollars to fly cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station. And it is threatening the lock that the United Launch Alliance,\u00a0a joint venture of Lockheed and Boeing, has long had over the lucrative national security market.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch is the intensity of their rivalry that when industry veterans heard that SpaceX and its ilk in the Commercial Spaceflight Federation planned to host an\u00a0low-key gathering with the vice president and others ahead of the Space Council meeting, they launched an all-out lobbying blitz insisting they be included.\u201cIt charged up a lot of groups when it was a CSF-only thing,\u201d one official said.After taking their complaints were conveyed to the Space Council, the party, to be held Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, grew in size and is now being hosted by the Aerospace Industries Association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, as well as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, formally welcomed the new co-hosts, saying\u00a0the reception will\u00a0be an \u201cinclusive event\u00a0that celebrates the achievements and innovations of the American space industry.\u201d He said his group looks \u201cforward to the work the Vice President and the Council are doing to help move America forward on our shared goals and dreams that space offers. We are partnering on this event with our association colleagues to showcase the best and brightest aspects of American ingenuity.\u201dAdvertisementAs the groups were squabbling behind the scenes over who should host the reception, Musk was antagonizing Tory Bruno, chief executive of the rival United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.On Twitter, Musk went after the cost of his competitor\u2019s rocket, saying the price was more than $400 million for a launch of ULA\u2019s Delta IV Heavy rocket, far greater than his Falcon Heavy rocket.Story continues below advertisementBruno responded by saying that the cost was actually $350 million, and that his company was developing another rocket, known as Vulcan, which ULA has said will be even more competitive when it starts flying.But Musk said he didn\u2019t think the rocket would be certified by the Air Force to be able to launch Pentagon missions any time soon.\u201cI will seriously eat my hat with a side of mustard if that rocket flies a national security spacecraft before 2023,\u201d he wrote on Twitter.The next day, Bruno tweeted a picture of a ULA-logoed lunchbox and a baseball cap.Maybe that plan works out, but I will seriously eat my hat with a side of mustard if that rocket flies a national security spacecraft before 2023\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2018\n\n The tiff comes as the National Space Council, led by Vice President Pence, is set to meet again.  As Elon Musk antagonized rival, the space industry battled over who will host a cocktail reception for the vice president",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Dragon spacecraft postpones docking with space station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6947",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/22/spacex-dragon-spacecraft-postpones-docking-with-space-station/",
        "text": "A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that lifted off from historic launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday did not dock with the International Space Station as planned Wednesday morning after computers onboard recognized it had incorrect data about the location of the station.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe docking was postponed until Thursday.The unmanned spacecraft is carrying 5,500 pounds of supplies and experiments to the astronauts aboard the station. In a statement, NASA said that \u201conboard computers triggered the abort after recognizing an incorrect value in data about the location of the space station. Per the re-rendezvous plan built into every mission, the spacecraft automatically reset for another rendezvous and docking attempt in 24 hours.\u201dIt said that Dragon\u00a0\u201cis in excellent shape with no issues, and the crew aboard the space station is safe.\u201dThe space station, an orbiting laboratory, circles the globe at about 17,500 mph from an altitude of about 240 miles. NASA said the spacecraft will try again in 24 hours. SpaceX Dragon spacecraft postpones docking with space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Dragon spacecraft postpones docking with space station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6948",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/22/spacex-dragon-spacecraft-postpones-docking-with-space-station/",
        "text": "A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that lifted off from historic launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday did not dock with the International Space Station as planned Wednesday morning after computers onboard recognized it had incorrect data about the location of the station.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe docking was postponed until Thursday.The unmanned spacecraft is carrying 5,500 pounds of supplies and experiments to the astronauts aboard the station. In a statement, NASA said that \u201conboard computers triggered the abort after recognizing an incorrect value in data about the location of the space station. Per the re-rendezvous plan built into every mission, the spacecraft automatically reset for another rendezvous and docking attempt in 24 hours.\u201dIt said that Dragon\u00a0\u201cis in excellent shape with no issues, and the crew aboard the space station is safe.\u201dThe space station, an orbiting laboratory, circles the globe at about 17,500 mph from an altitude of about 240 miles. NASA said the spacecraft will try again in 24 hours. SpaceX Dragon spacecraft postpones docking with space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule arrives at the space station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6949",
        "date": "2017-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/23/spacexs-dragon-capsule-arrives-at-the-space-station/",
        "text": "A day after aborting an attempted docking, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday and was captured by the station's robotic arm while flying over Australia.The spacecraft is carrying 5,500 pounds of supplies and science experiments for the astronauts aboard the station. It launched Sunday from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Florida's Space Coast. It was the first time a rocket had flown from the historic pad, which hosted many of the Apollo moon missions, since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDragon was originally scheduled to arrive at the station Wednesday. But the docking was postponed after the spacecraft's computers recognized it had incorrect data about the location of the station. The docking was postponed from Wednesday after the spacecraft's computers noticed incorrect data about the location of the station. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule arrives at the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule arrives at the space station (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6950",
        "date": "2017-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/23/spacexs-dragon-capsule-arrives-at-the-space-station/",
        "text": "A day after aborting an attempted docking, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday and was captured by the station's robotic arm while flying over Australia.The spacecraft is carrying 5,500 pounds of supplies and science experiments for the astronauts aboard the station. It launched Sunday from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Florida's Space Coast. It was the first time a rocket had flown from the historic pad, which hosted many of the Apollo moon missions, since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDragon was originally scheduled to arrive at the station Wednesday. But the docking was postponed after the spacecraft's computers recognized it had incorrect data about the location of the station. The docking was postponed from Wednesday after the spacecraft's computers noticed incorrect data about the location of the station. SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule arrives at the space station",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Google Lunar XPrize competition to end without a winner (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6951",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23/google-lunar-xprize-competition-to-end-without-a-winner/",
        "text": "The Google Lunar XPrize, an ambitious $30 million competition to send a robot to the surface of the moon, will end without any of the teams able to meet the March 31 deadline, organizers said in a statement Tuesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter consulting with the five teams left in the competition, \u201cwe have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline,\u201d founder Peter Diamandis and chief executive Marcus Shingles wrote in the statement. \u201cThis literal \u2018moonshot\u2019 is hard, and while we did expect a winner by now, due to the difficulties of fundraising, technical and regulatory challenges, the grand prize of the $30 [million] Google Lunar XPrize will go unclaimed.\u201d To win, contestants would have been required to land a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s surface, travel at least 500 meters, and then transmit high-definition video and images back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe end of the competition is a letdown and a sign of the difficulties of commercial space travel, despite the advancements of companies such as SpaceX. The Lunar XPrize was a follow-on to the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million contest captured by Paul Allen\u2019s SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 became the first nongovernmental vehicle to make it past the edge of space.Officials in the space industry had similar high hopes for the moon competition, and there were a few prospects that appeared to have good chances \u2014 chief among them a company called Moon Express.In 2016, the Florida-based company became the first commercial entity granted permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to leave Earth\u2019s orbit for deep space.Story continues below advertisementThe company has said while it was competing in the XPrize, it would carry on with its plans to land on the moon.Advertisement\u201cThe competition was a sweetener in the landscape of our business case, but it\u2019s never been the business case itself,\u201d Bob Richards, the founder and chief executive of Moon Express said in a statement. \u201cWe continue to focus on our core business plans of collapsing the cost of access to the moon, our partnership with NASA and our long-term vision of unlocking lunar resources for the benefit of life on Earth and our future in space.\u201dDiamandis and Shingles\u00a0said in the statement that\u00a0XPrize is \u201cexploring a number of ways to proceed from here. This may include finding a new title sponsor to provide a prize purse following in the footsteps of Google\u2019s generosity, or continuing the Lunar XPrize as a non-cash competition.\u201d One of the main competitors, Moon Express, plans to press on with its lunar mission. Google Lunar XPrize competition to end without a winner",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Google Lunar XPrize competition to end without a winner (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6952",
        "date": "2018-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23/google-lunar-xprize-competition-to-end-without-a-winner/",
        "text": "The Google Lunar XPrize, an ambitious $30 million competition to send a robot to the surface of the moon, will end without any of the teams able to meet the March 31 deadline, organizers said in a statement Tuesday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter consulting with the five teams left in the competition, \u201cwe have concluded that no team will make a launch attempt to reach the moon by the March 31st, 2018 deadline,\u201d founder Peter Diamandis and chief executive Marcus Shingles wrote in the statement. \u201cThis literal \u2018moonshot\u2019 is hard, and while we did expect a winner by now, due to the difficulties of fundraising, technical and regulatory challenges, the grand prize of the $30 [million] Google Lunar XPrize will go unclaimed.\u201d To win, contestants would have been required to land a spacecraft on the moon\u2019s surface, travel at least 500 meters, and then transmit high-definition video and images back to Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe end of the competition is a letdown and a sign of the difficulties of commercial space travel, despite the advancements of companies such as SpaceX. The Lunar XPrize was a follow-on to the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million contest captured by Paul Allen\u2019s SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 became the first nongovernmental vehicle to make it past the edge of space.Officials in the space industry had similar high hopes for the moon competition, and there were a few prospects that appeared to have good chances \u2014 chief among them a company called Moon Express.In 2016, the Florida-based company became the first commercial entity granted permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to leave Earth\u2019s orbit for deep space.Story continues below advertisementThe company has said while it was competing in the XPrize, it would carry on with its plans to land on the moon.Advertisement\u201cThe competition was a sweetener in the landscape of our business case, but it\u2019s never been the business case itself,\u201d Bob Richards, the founder and chief executive of Moon Express said in a statement. \u201cWe continue to focus on our core business plans of collapsing the cost of access to the moon, our partnership with NASA and our long-term vision of unlocking lunar resources for the benefit of life on Earth and our future in space.\u201dDiamandis and Shingles\u00a0said in the statement that\u00a0XPrize is \u201cexploring a number of ways to proceed from here. This may include finding a new title sponsor to provide a prize purse following in the footsteps of Google\u2019s generosity, or continuing the Lunar XPrize as a non-cash competition.\u201d One of the main competitors, Moon Express, plans to press on with its lunar mission. Google Lunar XPrize competition to end without a winner",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson starting a new venture dedicated to launching small satellites into space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6953",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/richard-branson-starting-a-new-venture-dedicated-to-launching-small-satellites-into-space/",
        "text": "The celebrity space tourists that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic plans to shoot into space in the coming years may get most of the attention. But over the past couple of years he\u2019s been increasingly focused on another space venture \u2014 one that would launch small satellites into orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow Virgin Galactic officials have decided to break off the satellite launcher program and make it its own company. Called Virgin Orbit, the California-based firm is seeking to enter a market that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years as satellites, once huge and expensive, have shrunk in size and cost. The new company is to\u00a0be led by Dan Hart, who spent 34 years at Boeing, where he most recently ran its satellite programs.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, Branson said the new venture fits into his ethos of opening up the cosmos \u201cby manufacturing vehicles of the future, enabling the small satellite revolution, and preparing commercial space flight for many more humans to reach space and see our home planet.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview in 2015, he said he \u201cnever even thought of satellites when we thought of Virgin Galactic originally. I just thought of human space travel and a personal desire to go to space and trying to make dreams come true and so on. And then embarking on that, suddenly you realize there\u2019s another whole aspect to this. Which is equally as exciting, really.\u201dVirgin Orbit would join a growing number of companies developing rockets designed specifically for carrying smaller payloads into space.Story continues below advertisementAnd it comes as a number of companies have proposed putting up large constellations of small satellites \u2014 some the size of a shoe box \u2014 that could serve a wide array of purposes, including monitoring crop yields, taking images of Earth, and providing Internet and communications.Backed by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity, Elon Musk's SpaceX has announced plans to launch nearly 4,500 satellites that would beam Internet service to Earth. Boeing has a similar plan, as does a London-based company called OneWeb.AdvertisementSoftBank, the Tokyo-based telecommunications firm, recently announced that it is investing $1.7 billion to merge OneWeb with Intelsat.Story continues below advertisementAs interest grows in the new generation of satellites, many companies are sensing an opportunity. Vector, founded by a pair of entrepreneurs who were involved in the early days of SpaceX, is developing a new rocket designed for smaller payloads. As is Rocket Labs, which is based in New Zealand and California.Carissa Christensen, the chief executive of consultancy for Bryce Space and Technology (formerly known as Tauri Group Space and Technology), said there are about three dozen small satellite launch vehicles at various stages of development \u2014 likely resulting in winners and losers.\u201cThe market cannot support that many vehicles,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a shakeout.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFailed ventures, however, are not \u201cindicative of a broken system,\u201d she said. Much of the initial start-up money for these small satellite companies is coming from venture capital firms that \u201care generally risk tolerant. So you get starts and stops. You get companies that try and fail,\u201d she said.Virgin Orbit may begin with an advantage. It already has several commercial and government customers signed up, said George Whitesides, who oversees Virgin\u2019s commercial space portfolio. It operates in a 180,000-square-foot manufacturing site in Long Beach, Calif., with 200 employees.The company plans to \u201cair launch\u201d its two-stage rocket \u2014 meaning it would be tethered under the wing of a 747 airplane that Branson dubbed \u201cCosmic Girl\u201d and that would fly to an altitude of 35,000 feet or so. The rocket would be released and then shoot off to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhitesides said that the company would \u201claunch when we\u2019re ready\u201d but that it hopes to complete a test flight by the end of the year.Virgin Galactic also air launches its spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, which is designed to fly two pilots and six passengers into space. The latest version of the spacecraft had its third successful test flight when it was released from its mother ship last week. It then glided back down to Earth without firing its engines. Once focused primarily on flying tourists into space, Virgin senses an opportunity as the size and cost of satellites have been greatly reduced. Richard Branson starting a new venture dedicated to launching small satellites into space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson starting a new venture dedicated to launching small satellites into space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6954",
        "date": "2017-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02/richard-branson-starting-a-new-venture-dedicated-to-launching-small-satellites-into-space/",
        "text": "The celebrity space tourists that Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic plans to shoot into space in the coming years may get most of the attention. But over the past couple of years he\u2019s been increasingly focused on another space venture \u2014 one that would launch small satellites into orbit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow Virgin Galactic officials have decided to break off the satellite launcher program and make it its own company. Called Virgin Orbit, the California-based firm is seeking to enter a market that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years as satellites, once huge and expensive, have shrunk in size and cost. The new company is to\u00a0be led by Dan Hart, who spent 34 years at Boeing, where he most recently ran its satellite programs.Story continues below advertisementIn a statement, Branson said the new venture fits into his ethos of opening up the cosmos \u201cby manufacturing vehicles of the future, enabling the small satellite revolution, and preparing commercial space flight for many more humans to reach space and see our home planet.\u201dAdvertisementIn an interview in 2015, he said he \u201cnever even thought of satellites when we thought of Virgin Galactic originally. I just thought of human space travel and a personal desire to go to space and trying to make dreams come true and so on. And then embarking on that, suddenly you realize there\u2019s another whole aspect to this. Which is equally as exciting, really.\u201dVirgin Orbit would join a growing number of companies developing rockets designed specifically for carrying smaller payloads into space.Story continues below advertisementAnd it comes as a number of companies have proposed putting up large constellations of small satellites \u2014 some the size of a shoe box \u2014 that could serve a wide array of purposes, including monitoring crop yields, taking images of Earth, and providing Internet and communications.Backed by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity, Elon Musk's SpaceX has announced plans to launch nearly 4,500 satellites that would beam Internet service to Earth. Boeing has a similar plan, as does a London-based company called OneWeb.AdvertisementSoftBank, the Tokyo-based telecommunications firm, recently announced that it is investing $1.7 billion to merge OneWeb with Intelsat.Story continues below advertisementAs interest grows in the new generation of satellites, many companies are sensing an opportunity. Vector, founded by a pair of entrepreneurs who were involved in the early days of SpaceX, is developing a new rocket designed for smaller payloads. As is Rocket Labs, which is based in New Zealand and California.Carissa Christensen, the chief executive of consultancy for Bryce Space and Technology (formerly known as Tauri Group Space and Technology), said there are about three dozen small satellite launch vehicles at various stages of development \u2014 likely resulting in winners and losers.\u201cThe market cannot support that many vehicles,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a shakeout.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFailed ventures, however, are not \u201cindicative of a broken system,\u201d she said. Much of the initial start-up money for these small satellite companies is coming from venture capital firms that \u201care generally risk tolerant. So you get starts and stops. You get companies that try and fail,\u201d she said.Virgin Orbit may begin with an advantage. It already has several commercial and government customers signed up, said George Whitesides, who oversees Virgin\u2019s commercial space portfolio. It operates in a 180,000-square-foot manufacturing site in Long Beach, Calif., with 200 employees.The company plans to \u201cair launch\u201d its two-stage rocket \u2014 meaning it would be tethered under the wing of a 747 airplane that Branson dubbed \u201cCosmic Girl\u201d and that would fly to an altitude of 35,000 feet or so. The rocket would be released and then shoot off to space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhitesides said that the company would \u201claunch when we\u2019re ready\u201d but that it hopes to complete a test flight by the end of the year.Virgin Galactic also air launches its spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, which is designed to fly two pilots and six passengers into space. The latest version of the spacecraft had its third successful test flight when it was released from its mother ship last week. It then glided back down to Earth without firing its engines. Once focused primarily on flying tourists into space, Virgin senses an opportunity as the size and cost of satellites have been greatly reduced. Richard Branson starting a new venture dedicated to launching small satellites into space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic just got another step closer to flying tourists to space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6955",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/29/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-just-got-another-step-closer-to-flying-tourists-to-space/",
        "text": "Richard Branson is a step closer to getting to space. On Tuesday, Virgin Galactic, the company he founded more than a decade ago with the goal of flying tourists to the edge of space and back, performed another test flight over the Mojave Desert in California.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceShipTwo, Unity, a winged space plane, went supersonic for the second time, firing its engine for just 31 seconds. But that was enough to power the vehicle to an altitude of nearly 22 miles and a maximum speed of almost Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic conducted the second test flight of its commercial spaceship, VSS Unity. (Virgin Galactic)In an interview after the flight, Branson said, \u201cIt was as good as it gets today.\u201d The pilots, he said, \u201ccame back with massive beams on their faces. It\u2019s a big, big step today.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company plans to have another test flight in about six weeks or so, he said, and then it could attempt to reach the edge of space on the next flight \u2014 but that would depend on how the vehicle performs in the test flights.AdvertisementVirgin Galactic, which charges $250,000 a ticket, has some 700 people signed up to fly, and Branson has said he would be among the first to go. To prepare for his flight, which he has said could come this year, the 67-year-old said he\u2019s been cycling, playing tennis in the morning and evening, and spending time in a centrifuge to get his body used to the additional gravitational forces passengers would experience on SpaceShipTwo.Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, is also aiming to fly its first test flights with people by the end of this year. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementBranson said he expected that the companies would both \u201chave a person in space roundabout the same time.\u201d But he said they \u201care not in a race to get to space. \u2026 All that matters in the end is that everybody is safe and well.\u201dAdvertisementHe said that some of his customers have also expressed interest in flying with Blue Origin, which has not set a price. \u201cThe more spaceships that get built, the better the price will be, and the bigger the market, and the more resources that Jeff and ourselves will have to invest in exciting things going forward in space,\u201d he said.SpaceShipTwo is \u201cair launched,\u201d meaning it is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which flies to some 45,000 feet. Then the spacecraft is released; it fires its engine and powers off through the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementBranson has been attempting to get to space for years, ever since he acquired the rights to the technology of the spacecraft from Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft who in 2004 backed a venture that flew a vehicle past the 100-kilometer edge of space three times. Since then, Branson has been pursuing his own quest to build an even bigger vehicle that would be capable of carrying as many as six passengers and two pilots to the edge of space, where they would enjoy floating weightlessly around the cabin and views of the Earth from above.But the program has had multiple setbacks. The schedule has been delayed for years. And in 2014,\u00a0a previous version of SpaceShipTwo\u00a0came apart midflight, killing the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury. In a test flight that Branson said was \u201cas good as it gets,\" SpaceShipTwo, the company's winged space plane, flew more than 20 miles high. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic just got another step closer to flying tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic just got another step closer to flying tourists to space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6956",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/29/richard-bransons-virgin-galactic-just-got-another-step-closer-to-flying-tourists-to-space/",
        "text": "Richard Branson is a step closer to getting to space. On Tuesday, Virgin Galactic, the company he founded more than a decade ago with the goal of flying tourists to the edge of space and back, performed another test flight over the Mojave Desert in California.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSpaceShipTwo, Unity, a winged space plane, went supersonic for the second time, firing its engine for just 31 seconds. But that was enough to power the vehicle to an altitude of nearly 22 miles and a maximum speed of almost Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic conducted the second test flight of its commercial spaceship, VSS Unity. (Virgin Galactic)In an interview after the flight, Branson said, \u201cIt was as good as it gets today.\u201d The pilots, he said, \u201ccame back with massive beams on their faces. It\u2019s a big, big step today.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company plans to have another test flight in about six weeks or so, he said, and then it could attempt to reach the edge of space on the next flight \u2014 but that would depend on how the vehicle performs in the test flights.AdvertisementVirgin Galactic, which charges $250,000 a ticket, has some 700 people signed up to fly, and Branson has said he would be among the first to go. To prepare for his flight, which he has said could come this year, the 67-year-old said he\u2019s been cycling, playing tennis in the morning and evening, and spending time in a centrifuge to get his body used to the additional gravitational forces passengers would experience on SpaceShipTwo.Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, is also aiming to fly its first test flights with people by the end of this year. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementBranson said he expected that the companies would both \u201chave a person in space roundabout the same time.\u201d But he said they \u201care not in a race to get to space. \u2026 All that matters in the end is that everybody is safe and well.\u201dAdvertisementHe said that some of his customers have also expressed interest in flying with Blue Origin, which has not set a price. \u201cThe more spaceships that get built, the better the price will be, and the bigger the market, and the more resources that Jeff and ourselves will have to invest in exciting things going forward in space,\u201d he said.SpaceShipTwo is \u201cair launched,\u201d meaning it is tethered to the belly of a mother ship, which flies to some 45,000 feet. Then the spacecraft is released; it fires its engine and powers off through the atmosphere.Story continues below advertisementBranson has been attempting to get to space for years, ever since he acquired the rights to the technology of the spacecraft from Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft who in 2004 backed a venture that flew a vehicle past the 100-kilometer edge of space three times. Since then, Branson has been pursuing his own quest to build an even bigger vehicle that would be capable of carrying as many as six passengers and two pilots to the edge of space, where they would enjoy floating weightlessly around the cabin and views of the Earth from above.But the program has had multiple setbacks. The schedule has been delayed for years. And in 2014,\u00a0a previous version of SpaceShipTwo\u00a0came apart midflight, killing the co-pilot, Michael Alsbury. In a test flight that Branson said was \u201cas good as it gets,\" SpaceShipTwo, the company's winged space plane, flew more than 20 miles high. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic just got another step closer to flying tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk says his next spaceship will not only take you to the moon and Mars, but from NY to London in 29 minutes (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6957",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/29/elon-musk-says-his-next-spaceship-could-not-only-take-to-you-the-moon-and-mars-but-from-n-y-to-london-in-29-minutes/",
        "text": "For years, Elon Musk has been focused on building a colony on Mars.\u00a0That's why he founded SpaceX in 2002, and it\u2019s been the driving force behind the company ever since.But during a speech in Adelaide, Australia, on Friday morning, Musk said he has dramatically expanded his already-outsize ambitions. In addition to helping create a city on the Red Planet, he said the next rocket he intends to build\u00a0could be used to\u00a0establish a base camp on the moon \u2014 and fly people across the globe. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now,\u201d he said during a 40-minute speech at the International Astronautical Congress. \u201cWhat the hell has been going on?\u201dIn a surprise twist, he also said his planned massive rocket and spaceship, which would have more pressurized passenger space than an Airbus A380 airplane, could fly\u00a0passengers anywhere on Earth\u00a0in less than an hour. Traveling at a maximum speed of\u00a0nearly\u00a017,000 mph, a trip from New York to Shanghai, for example, would take 39 minutes, he said. New York to London could be done in 29 minutes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf we\u2019re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, why not go other places as well?\u201d he said.The speech was billed as an update to one he gave a year ago, in which he provided details for how SpaceX would\u00a0attempt to make humanity a \u201cmulti-planet species.\u201dAt the speech a year ago, Musk unveiled a behemoth of a rocket that was so ambitious and mind-bogglingly large that critics said it was detached from reality. Now, he and his team at SpaceX have done some editing, and Musk presented a revised plan early Friday to build a massive, but more reasonably sized, rocket that he calls the BFR, or Big [expletive] Rocket.\u201cI think we\u2019ve figured out how to pay for it, this is very important,\u201d he said.Elon Musk posted a video showcasing SpaceX rocket explosions, and the reason behind each explosion. (SpaceX)The new fully reusable system includes a booster stage and a spaceship capable of carrying 100 people or so. It would be capable of flying astronauts and cargo on an array of missions, from across the globe, to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit and to the moon and Mars in deep space. It would also be capable of launching satellites, he said, while effectively replacing all of the rockets and spacecraft SpaceX currently uses or is developing, making them redundant.That would allow the company to put all of its resources into development of the BFR, he said.Earlier this year, Musk announced that SpaceX would fly two private citizens in a trip around the moon by late next year. And he hinted at the moon base during a conference in July.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you want to get the public really fired up, I think we\u2019ve got to have a base on the moon. That\u2019d be pretty cool. And then going beyond there and getting people to Mars,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for.\u201dIt also could be a good business move. Jim Bridenstine, the Trump administration's nominee for NASA administrator, has advocated a return to the moon, writing in a blog post last year that \u201cfrom the discovery of water ice on the moon until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines, with occasional manned missions for science and maintenance.\u201dNASA is poised to ask the private sector for proposals to develop a lunar lander that could take\u00a0experiments and cargo to the moon's surface, with flights starting as early as 2018. And Jeffrey P. Bezos' Blue Origin has already pitched NASA on a plan to fly a lander\u00a0there by 2020. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think Elon was worried that he was leaving a huge market wide open for Jeff Bezos,\u201d said Charles Miller, the president of NextGen Space, a consulting company. \u201cCompetition is wonderful.\u201dBut Friday morning Musk made it clear that Mars is still the ultimate goal. During his talk, a chart showed that SpaceX planned to fly two cargo missions to Mars by 2022, a very ambitious timeline.\u201cThat\u2019s not a typo,\u201d he said, but allowed: \u201cIt is aspirational.\u201dBy 2024, he said, the company could fly four more ships to Mars, two with human passengers and two more cargo-only ships.SpaceX has upended the space industry, and Musk, with his celebrity, bravado and business acumen, has reignited interest in space. The company, which has won more than $4 billion in contracts from NASA, was the first commercial venture to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station; previously it had been done only by governments. It currently delivers cargo there, and is also under contract from NASA to\u00a0ferry astronauts, which could happen as early as next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite all its triumphs, the company still hasn\u2019t flown a single human to space, not even to low Earth orbit, let alone Mars, which on average is 140 million miles from Earth (though the planets come to within 35 million miles of each other every 26 months).The travel between cities on Earth would also face substantial hurdles. In\u00a0addition to the technological challenges, there would have to be regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.Musk\u2019s speech comes two days after NASA announced it had signed an agreement with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to study exploration in the vicinity of the moon under a plan called the \u201cDeep Space Gateway\u201d that could, eventually, lead to a habitat near the moon.Story continues below advertisementSeparately, Lockheed Martin unveiled a plan for deep space exploration Thursday, updating its \u201cMars Base Camp\u201d system, a massive orbiting laboratory. Now the company says it could also build a lander capable of touching down on Mars or the moon. The company said it could launch within a decade in conjunction with NASA.Advertisement\u201cThe big news in space this week were announcements by private sector companies,\u201d said Bobby Braun, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder. \u201cIt really goes to show how much the space sector has advanced in just the last few years. While the timeline and capabilities are certainly ambitious, I'm bullish on U.S. industry's ability to carry out challenging and far-reaching goals.\u201d In a speech, the SpaceX CEO unveiled even bigger plans than just colonizing Mars. Elon Musk says his next spaceship will not only take you to the moon and Mars, but from NY to London in 29 minutes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk says his next spaceship will not only take you to the moon and Mars, but from NY to London in 29 minutes (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6958",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/29/elon-musk-says-his-next-spaceship-could-not-only-take-to-you-the-moon-and-mars-but-from-n-y-to-london-in-29-minutes/",
        "text": "For years, Elon Musk has been focused on building a colony on Mars.\u00a0That's why he founded SpaceX in 2002, and it\u2019s been the driving force behind the company ever since.But during a speech in Adelaide, Australia, on Friday morning, Musk said he has dramatically expanded his already-outsize ambitions. In addition to helping create a city on the Red Planet, he said the next rocket he intends to build\u00a0could be used to\u00a0establish a base camp on the moon \u2014 and fly people across the globe. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now,\u201d he said during a 40-minute speech at the International Astronautical Congress. \u201cWhat the hell has been going on?\u201dIn a surprise twist, he also said his planned massive rocket and spaceship, which would have more pressurized passenger space than an Airbus A380 airplane, could fly\u00a0passengers anywhere on Earth\u00a0in less than an hour. Traveling at a maximum speed of\u00a0nearly\u00a017,000 mph, a trip from New York to Shanghai, for example, would take 39 minutes, he said. New York to London could be done in 29 minutes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf we\u2019re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, why not go other places as well?\u201d he said.The speech was billed as an update to one he gave a year ago, in which he provided details for how SpaceX would\u00a0attempt to make humanity a \u201cmulti-planet species.\u201dAt the speech a year ago, Musk unveiled a behemoth of a rocket that was so ambitious and mind-bogglingly large that critics said it was detached from reality. Now, he and his team at SpaceX have done some editing, and Musk presented a revised plan early Friday to build a massive, but more reasonably sized, rocket that he calls the BFR, or Big [expletive] Rocket.\u201cI think we\u2019ve figured out how to pay for it, this is very important,\u201d he said.Elon Musk posted a video showcasing SpaceX rocket explosions, and the reason behind each explosion. (SpaceX)The new fully reusable system includes a booster stage and a spaceship capable of carrying 100 people or so. It would be capable of flying astronauts and cargo on an array of missions, from across the globe, to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit and to the moon and Mars in deep space. It would also be capable of launching satellites, he said, while effectively replacing all of the rockets and spacecraft SpaceX currently uses or is developing, making them redundant.That would allow the company to put all of its resources into development of the BFR, he said.Earlier this year, Musk announced that SpaceX would fly two private citizens in a trip around the moon by late next year. And he hinted at the moon base during a conference in July.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you want to get the public really fired up, I think we\u2019ve got to have a base on the moon. That\u2019d be pretty cool. And then going beyond there and getting people to Mars,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for.\u201dIt also could be a good business move. Jim Bridenstine, the Trump administration's nominee for NASA administrator, has advocated a return to the moon, writing in a blog post last year that \u201cfrom the discovery of water ice on the moon until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines, with occasional manned missions for science and maintenance.\u201dNASA is poised to ask the private sector for proposals to develop a lunar lander that could take\u00a0experiments and cargo to the moon's surface, with flights starting as early as 2018. And Jeffrey P. Bezos' Blue Origin has already pitched NASA on a plan to fly a lander\u00a0there by 2020. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think Elon was worried that he was leaving a huge market wide open for Jeff Bezos,\u201d said Charles Miller, the president of NextGen Space, a consulting company. \u201cCompetition is wonderful.\u201dBut Friday morning Musk made it clear that Mars is still the ultimate goal. During his talk, a chart showed that SpaceX planned to fly two cargo missions to Mars by 2022, a very ambitious timeline.\u201cThat\u2019s not a typo,\u201d he said, but allowed: \u201cIt is aspirational.\u201dBy 2024, he said, the company could fly four more ships to Mars, two with human passengers and two more cargo-only ships.SpaceX has upended the space industry, and Musk, with his celebrity, bravado and business acumen, has reignited interest in space. The company, which has won more than $4 billion in contracts from NASA, was the first commercial venture to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station; previously it had been done only by governments. It currently delivers cargo there, and is also under contract from NASA to\u00a0ferry astronauts, which could happen as early as next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite all its triumphs, the company still hasn\u2019t flown a single human to space, not even to low Earth orbit, let alone Mars, which on average is 140 million miles from Earth (though the planets come to within 35 million miles of each other every 26 months).The travel between cities on Earth would also face substantial hurdles. In\u00a0addition to the technological challenges, there would have to be regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.Musk\u2019s speech comes two days after NASA announced it had signed an agreement with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to study exploration in the vicinity of the moon under a plan called the \u201cDeep Space Gateway\u201d that could, eventually, lead to a habitat near the moon.Story continues below advertisementSeparately, Lockheed Martin unveiled a plan for deep space exploration Thursday, updating its \u201cMars Base Camp\u201d system, a massive orbiting laboratory. Now the company says it could also build a lander capable of touching down on Mars or the moon. The company said it could launch within a decade in conjunction with NASA.Advertisement\u201cThe big news in space this week were announcements by private sector companies,\u201d said Bobby Braun, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder. \u201cIt really goes to show how much the space sector has advanced in just the last few years. While the timeline and capabilities are certainly ambitious, I'm bullish on U.S. industry's ability to carry out challenging and far-reaching goals.\u201d In a speech, the SpaceX CEO unveiled even bigger plans than just colonizing Mars. Elon Musk says his next spaceship will not only take you to the moon and Mars, but from NY to London in 29 minutes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk says his next spaceship will not only take you to the moon and Mars, but from NY to London in 29 minutes (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6959",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/29/elon-musk-says-his-next-spaceship-could-not-only-take-to-you-the-moon-and-mars-but-from-n-y-to-london-in-29-minutes/",
        "text": "For years, Elon Musk has been focused on building a colony on Mars.\u00a0That's why he founded SpaceX in 2002, and it\u2019s been the driving force behind the company ever since.But during a speech in Adelaide, Australia, on Friday morning, Musk said he has dramatically expanded his already-outsize ambitions. In addition to helping create a city on the Red Planet, he said the next rocket he intends to build\u00a0could be used to\u00a0establish a base camp on the moon \u2014 and fly people across the globe. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt\u2019s 2017, we should have a lunar base by now,\u201d he said during a 40-minute speech at the International Astronautical Congress. \u201cWhat the hell has been going on?\u201dIn a surprise twist, he also said his planned massive rocket and spaceship, which would have more pressurized passenger space than an Airbus A380 airplane, could fly\u00a0passengers anywhere on Earth\u00a0in less than an hour. Traveling at a maximum speed of\u00a0nearly\u00a017,000 mph, a trip from New York to Shanghai, for example, would take 39 minutes, he said. New York to London could be done in 29 minutes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf we\u2019re building this thing to go to the moon and Mars, why not go other places as well?\u201d he said.The speech was billed as an update to one he gave a year ago, in which he provided details for how SpaceX would\u00a0attempt to make humanity a \u201cmulti-planet species.\u201dAt the speech a year ago, Musk unveiled a behemoth of a rocket that was so ambitious and mind-bogglingly large that critics said it was detached from reality. Now, he and his team at SpaceX have done some editing, and Musk presented a revised plan early Friday to build a massive, but more reasonably sized, rocket that he calls the BFR, or Big [expletive] Rocket.\u201cI think we\u2019ve figured out how to pay for it, this is very important,\u201d he said.Elon Musk posted a video showcasing SpaceX rocket explosions, and the reason behind each explosion. (SpaceX)The new fully reusable system includes a booster stage and a spaceship capable of carrying 100 people or so. It would be capable of flying astronauts and cargo on an array of missions, from across the globe, to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit and to the moon and Mars in deep space. It would also be capable of launching satellites, he said, while effectively replacing all of the rockets and spacecraft SpaceX currently uses or is developing, making them redundant.That would allow the company to put all of its resources into development of the BFR, he said.Earlier this year, Musk announced that SpaceX would fly two private citizens in a trip around the moon by late next year. And he hinted at the moon base during a conference in July.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf you want to get the public really fired up, I think we\u2019ve got to have a base on the moon. That\u2019d be pretty cool. And then going beyond there and getting people to Mars,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the continuance of the dream of Apollo that I think people are really looking for.\u201dIt also could be a good business move. Jim Bridenstine, the Trump administration's nominee for NASA administrator, has advocated a return to the moon, writing in a blog post last year that \u201cfrom the discovery of water ice on the moon until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines, with occasional manned missions for science and maintenance.\u201dNASA is poised to ask the private sector for proposals to develop a lunar lander that could take\u00a0experiments and cargo to the moon's surface, with flights starting as early as 2018. And Jeffrey P. Bezos' Blue Origin has already pitched NASA on a plan to fly a lander\u00a0there by 2020. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think Elon was worried that he was leaving a huge market wide open for Jeff Bezos,\u201d said Charles Miller, the president of NextGen Space, a consulting company. \u201cCompetition is wonderful.\u201dBut Friday morning Musk made it clear that Mars is still the ultimate goal. During his talk, a chart showed that SpaceX planned to fly two cargo missions to Mars by 2022, a very ambitious timeline.\u201cThat\u2019s not a typo,\u201d he said, but allowed: \u201cIt is aspirational.\u201dBy 2024, he said, the company could fly four more ships to Mars, two with human passengers and two more cargo-only ships.SpaceX has upended the space industry, and Musk, with his celebrity, bravado and business acumen, has reignited interest in space. The company, which has won more than $4 billion in contracts from NASA, was the first commercial venture to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station; previously it had been done only by governments. It currently delivers cargo there, and is also under contract from NASA to\u00a0ferry astronauts, which could happen as early as next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut despite all its triumphs, the company still hasn\u2019t flown a single human to space, not even to low Earth orbit, let alone Mars, which on average is 140 million miles from Earth (though the planets come to within 35 million miles of each other every 26 months).The travel between cities on Earth would also face substantial hurdles. In\u00a0addition to the technological challenges, there would have to be regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.Musk\u2019s speech comes two days after NASA announced it had signed an agreement with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to study exploration in the vicinity of the moon under a plan called the \u201cDeep Space Gateway\u201d that could, eventually, lead to a habitat near the moon.Story continues below advertisementSeparately, Lockheed Martin unveiled a plan for deep space exploration Thursday, updating its \u201cMars Base Camp\u201d system, a massive orbiting laboratory. Now the company says it could also build a lander capable of touching down on Mars or the moon. The company said it could launch within a decade in conjunction with NASA.Advertisement\u201cThe big news in space this week were announcements by private sector companies,\u201d said Bobby Braun, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder. \u201cIt really goes to show how much the space sector has advanced in just the last few years. While the timeline and capabilities are certainly ambitious, I'm bullish on U.S. industry's ability to carry out challenging and far-reaching goals.\u201d In a speech, the SpaceX CEO unveiled even bigger plans than just colonizing Mars. Elon Musk says his next spaceship will not only take you to the moon and Mars, but from NY to London in 29 minutes",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As human space flights get closer, the competition for launch contracts heats up (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6960",
        "date": "2018-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/25/jeffrey-p-bezos-blue-origin-getting-closer-to-flying-tourists-to-space-as-it-begins-to-compete-on-several-fronts/",
        "text": "For a decade, there was only one company for the Pentagon to turn to\u00a0for launching its satellites into space: the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing known as the United Launch Alliance.A few years ago, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX ended the company\u2019s lucrative monopoly, after suing for the right to compete for the launches. Now, two more companies are building rockets that would be capable of vying for the launch contracts, which can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars each. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBlue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, and Orbital ATK, the Dulles-based outfit that already launches cargo to the International Space Station for NASA and does a lot of Pentagon business, are eyeing the contracts, company officials said. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementThe launch market has gone through a disruption period, led by SpaceX, in an effort to lower the cost of getting to space. With all that\u2019s changing, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said in a recent interview that, \u201cI don\u2019t think that the past is a good predictor of the future,\u201d which he said was true for the commercial satellite market as well.AdvertisementQuiet and obsessively secretive for years, Blue Origin has more recently started to emerge from the shadows. Last year, it announced its first customers for its New Glenn rocket, which is set to launch for the first time in 2020. Company officials met with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs last week. Last month, Bezos tweeted a picture of himself meeting with Betty Sapp, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office.\u201cWe cheer every new entrant who\u2019s brave enough to go into the space business,\u201d Sapp said in a tweet.Story continues below advertisementBut Blue Origin is not the only new entrant. Orbital ATK, which recently announced its OmegA rocket, plans to bid on national security launch contracts. While not as well known as some of its competitors, it has a long heritage and is set to be acquired later this year by Northrop Grumman, which could also give it a boost.Advertisement\u201cWe don\u2019t want to be the dark horse anymore,\u201d said Orbital ATK spokesman Barron Beneski. \u201cWe\u2019re in it to win it. \u2026 We are part of the fabric of national security. These are not new customers. It\u2019s a new product.\u201dIn addition to competing for national security launches, Blue Origin is also competing against Virgin Galactic to take paying tourists to the edge of space. For years, Virgin\u2019s owner, Richard Branson, has been salivating at the prospect of turning ordinary people into astronauts \u2014 for a cost, at least initially, of $250,000 a ticket.Story continues below advertisementEarlier this month, its spacecraft, a winged space plane known as SpaceShipTwo, passed a major milestone when it lighted its engines for the first time in flight, tearing through the skies at nearly Mach 2. And Branson has said he hopes to start flying customers as soon as this year.AdvertisementSmith said Blue Origin\u2019s first test flight, with people, could come by the end of this year from its site in West Texas. The company, which says its ultimate goal is \u201cmillions of people living and working in space,\u201d hasn\u2019t announced a price for tourists, or when commercial operations would begin. But he said that the company is also eager to get ordinary people into the vastness of space.\u201cI'm completely supportive of all kinds of people going into space. I mean that's the whole point of what we're trying to go do,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want poets, we want artists, we want journalists, we want all kinds of people to go out there because we believe strongly that there is this thing called the \u2018overview effect,\u2019 where people get a better perspective of where they live.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDown on Earth, Blue Origin is also in a heated race with Aerojet Rocketdyne to supply ULA with the engine for its new rocket, which is called Vulcan. Blue Origin brought one of its BE-4 engines to the symposium, and Smith said that the company is \u201cnearing a contractual agreement with ULA after having met the BE-4 engine performance milestones in the fall of last year and early spring of this year.\u201dBut Eileen Drake, Aerojet\u2019s chief executive, said it was making progress on its offering, \u201can engine like no other engine in the United States.\u201dAsked recently by a reporter when the company would make its decision, ULA CEO Tory Bruno only would say \u201csoon.\u201d Bezos's Blue Origin, Musk's Space X and Orbital ATK are racing to be the first to send people to space. As human space flights get closer, the competition for launch contracts heats up",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos shows off the crew capsule that could soon take tourists to space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6961",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/04/05/jeff-bezos-shows-off-the-crew-capsule-that-could-soon-take-tourists-to-space/",
        "text": "COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 The seats are comfortable, laid back with headrests like a La-Z-Boy. The walls are padded and white, and there are handles all over the place so that the floating astronauts can hang on like people riding the Metro.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut it\u2019s the windows that are the defining feature of the spacecraft that Jeffrey P. Bezos showed off Wednesday at the Space Symposium, a conference here. In a year or more \u2014 Bezos said the timing hasn\u2019t been decided \u2014 his space company Blue Origin plans to begin flying tourists past the edge of space, 62 miles high, where for about four minutes they\u2019ll experience the thrill of weightlessness and view the curvature of the Earth. \u201cEverybody says that when you go to space, it changes you,\u201d said Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the owner of The Washington Post. \u201cAll the astronauts come back with stories like that. It\u2019s very emotional to see this Earth, to see the thin layer of the atmosphere.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin is one of several entrepreneurial companies that are seeking to lower the cost of access to space, and touch off what Bezos said could become a \u201cgolden age of space.\u201d In addition to Blue Origin, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has accomplished several\u00a0feats, such as becoming the first commercial venture to fly a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Last week, SpaceX\u00a0became the first company to re-fly the first stage of a rocket that had delivered a payload to orbit.Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, also plans to fly tourists to space, and is in the middle of testing its new space plane, SpaceShipTwo, which would be tethered to the bellow of a mother ship and then launched in flight.\u00a0Virgin charges $250,000 a flight; Blue Origin hasn\u2019t decided what its tickets would cost.Flanked by the Blue Origin spacecraft\u00a0and the New Shepard booster, which has flown past the edge of space five times, Bezos said the company could begin flying paying customers as soon as 2018, but the schedule is fluid. Although\u00a0his \u201csingular focus is people in space,\u201d the flight-testing program will be deliberate and painstaking, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not racing,\u201d he said. \u201cThis vehicle is going to carry humans. We\u2019re going to make it as safe as we can make it \u2026 we\u2019re not going to take any shortcuts.\u201dThe goal of Blue Origin, the space company Bezos founded in 2000, is to one day help enable \u201cmillions of people living and working in space,\u201d as Bezos likes to say. Space tourism is a first step on that journey, Bezos said, a way for the company to practice launching on a frequent basis.The suborbital tourist flights would require minimal training, he said, and be quick, just 10 or 11 minutes. As many as six passengers would board the spacecraft about 30 minutes before liftoff. Near the flight\u2019s apogee, the capsule would separate from a\u00a0booster\u00a0that would fly back and land on a landing pad on the ground. The capsule would continue climbing, allowing the\u00a0passengers to\u00a0unbuckleand then float around the cabin for about four minutes before the return flight down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUpon reentry, the passengers would for a few moments experience 5 Gs, or five times the gravitational force. At touchdown, the capsule would be traveling at about 2 mph.And no, people throwing up isn\u2019t a serious concern, he said.\u201cIt takes about three hours before you start to throw up,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a delayed effect, and this journey takes 10 or 11 minutes, so you\u2019re going to be fine.\u201dBlue Origin's business model has been, \u201cI sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.\u201d But the company is also working on an orbital rocket, the New Glenn, which is expected to fly by 2020. The company has signed up customers for that rocket and is looking for more.\u201cI think it\u2019s very important the Blue Origin stand on its own feet,\u201d Bezos\u00a0said. Blue Origin, Bezos' space company, could start flying paying customers by 2018 after a rigorous test program. Jeff Bezos shows off the crew capsule that could soon take tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos shows off the crew capsule that could soon take tourists to space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "6962",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/04/05/jeff-bezos-shows-off-the-crew-capsule-that-could-soon-take-tourists-to-space/",
        "text": "COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 The seats are comfortable, laid back with headrests like a La-Z-Boy. The walls are padded and white, and there are handles all over the place so that the floating astronauts can hang on like people riding the Metro.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut it\u2019s the windows that are the defining feature of the spacecraft that Jeffrey P. Bezos showed off Wednesday at the Space Symposium, a conference here. In a year or more \u2014 Bezos said the timing hasn\u2019t been decided \u2014 his space company Blue Origin plans to begin flying tourists past the edge of space, 62 miles high, where for about four minutes they\u2019ll experience the thrill of weightlessness and view the curvature of the Earth. \u201cEverybody says that when you go to space, it changes you,\u201d said Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the owner of The Washington Post. \u201cAll the astronauts come back with stories like that. It\u2019s very emotional to see this Earth, to see the thin layer of the atmosphere.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin is one of several entrepreneurial companies that are seeking to lower the cost of access to space, and touch off what Bezos said could become a \u201cgolden age of space.\u201d In addition to Blue Origin, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has accomplished several\u00a0feats, such as becoming the first commercial venture to fly a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Last week, SpaceX\u00a0became the first company to re-fly the first stage of a rocket that had delivered a payload to orbit.Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, also plans to fly tourists to space, and is in the middle of testing its new space plane, SpaceShipTwo, which would be tethered to the bellow of a mother ship and then launched in flight.\u00a0Virgin charges $250,000 a flight; Blue Origin hasn\u2019t decided what its tickets would cost.Flanked by the Blue Origin spacecraft\u00a0and the New Shepard booster, which has flown past the edge of space five times, Bezos said the company could begin flying paying customers as soon as 2018, but the schedule is fluid. Although\u00a0his \u201csingular focus is people in space,\u201d the flight-testing program will be deliberate and painstaking, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not racing,\u201d he said. \u201cThis vehicle is going to carry humans. We\u2019re going to make it as safe as we can make it \u2026 we\u2019re not going to take any shortcuts.\u201dThe goal of Blue Origin, the space company Bezos founded in 2000, is to one day help enable \u201cmillions of people living and working in space,\u201d as Bezos likes to say. Space tourism is a first step on that journey, Bezos said, a way for the company to practice launching on a frequent basis.The suborbital tourist flights would require minimal training, he said, and be quick, just 10 or 11 minutes. As many as six passengers would board the spacecraft about 30 minutes before liftoff. Near the flight\u2019s apogee, the capsule would separate from a\u00a0booster\u00a0that would fly back and land on a landing pad on the ground. The capsule would continue climbing, allowing the\u00a0passengers to\u00a0unbuckleand then float around the cabin for about four minutes before the return flight down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUpon reentry, the passengers would for a few moments experience 5 Gs, or five times the gravitational force. At touchdown, the capsule would be traveling at about 2 mph.And no, people throwing up isn\u2019t a serious concern, he said.\u201cIt takes about three hours before you start to throw up,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a delayed effect, and this journey takes 10 or 11 minutes, so you\u2019re going to be fine.\u201dBlue Origin's business model has been, \u201cI sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.\u201d But the company is also working on an orbital rocket, the New Glenn, which is expected to fly by 2020. The company has signed up customers for that rocket and is looking for more.\u201cI think it\u2019s very important the Blue Origin stand on its own feet,\u201d Bezos\u00a0said. Blue Origin, Bezos' space company, could start flying paying customers by 2018 after a rigorous test program. Jeff Bezos shows off the crew capsule that could soon take tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos shows off the crew capsule that could soon take tourists to space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6963",
        "date": "2017-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/04/05/jeff-bezos-shows-off-the-crew-capsule-that-could-soon-take-tourists-to-space/",
        "text": "COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 The seats are comfortable, laid back with headrests like a La-Z-Boy. The walls are padded and white, and there are handles all over the place so that the floating astronauts can hang on like people riding the Metro.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut it\u2019s the windows that are the defining feature of the spacecraft that Jeffrey P. Bezos showed off Wednesday at the Space Symposium, a conference here. In a year or more \u2014 Bezos said the timing hasn\u2019t been decided \u2014 his space company Blue Origin plans to begin flying tourists past the edge of space, 62 miles high, where for about four minutes they\u2019ll experience the thrill of weightlessness and view the curvature of the Earth. \u201cEverybody says that when you go to space, it changes you,\u201d said Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the owner of The Washington Post. \u201cAll the astronauts come back with stories like that. It\u2019s very emotional to see this Earth, to see the thin layer of the atmosphere.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin is one of several entrepreneurial companies that are seeking to lower the cost of access to space, and touch off what Bezos said could become a \u201cgolden age of space.\u201d In addition to Blue Origin, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has accomplished several\u00a0feats, such as becoming the first commercial venture to fly a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Last week, SpaceX\u00a0became the first company to re-fly the first stage of a rocket that had delivered a payload to orbit.Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, also plans to fly tourists to space, and is in the middle of testing its new space plane, SpaceShipTwo, which would be tethered to the bellow of a mother ship and then launched in flight.\u00a0Virgin charges $250,000 a flight; Blue Origin hasn\u2019t decided what its tickets would cost.Flanked by the Blue Origin spacecraft\u00a0and the New Shepard booster, which has flown past the edge of space five times, Bezos said the company could begin flying paying customers as soon as 2018, but the schedule is fluid. Although\u00a0his \u201csingular focus is people in space,\u201d the flight-testing program will be deliberate and painstaking, he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are not racing,\u201d he said. \u201cThis vehicle is going to carry humans. We\u2019re going to make it as safe as we can make it \u2026 we\u2019re not going to take any shortcuts.\u201dThe goal of Blue Origin, the space company Bezos founded in 2000, is to one day help enable \u201cmillions of people living and working in space,\u201d as Bezos likes to say. Space tourism is a first step on that journey, Bezos said, a way for the company to practice launching on a frequent basis.The suborbital tourist flights would require minimal training, he said, and be quick, just 10 or 11 minutes. As many as six passengers would board the spacecraft about 30 minutes before liftoff. Near the flight\u2019s apogee, the capsule would separate from a\u00a0booster\u00a0that would fly back and land on a landing pad on the ground. The capsule would continue climbing, allowing the\u00a0passengers to\u00a0unbuckleand then float around the cabin for about four minutes before the return flight down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUpon reentry, the passengers would for a few moments experience 5 Gs, or five times the gravitational force. At touchdown, the capsule would be traveling at about 2 mph.And no, people throwing up isn\u2019t a serious concern, he said.\u201cIt takes about three hours before you start to throw up,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a delayed effect, and this journey takes 10 or 11 minutes, so you\u2019re going to be fine.\u201dBlue Origin's business model has been, \u201cI sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin.\u201d But the company is also working on an orbital rocket, the New Glenn, which is expected to fly by 2020. The company has signed up customers for that rocket and is looking for more.\u201cI think it\u2019s very important the Blue Origin stand on its own feet,\u201d Bezos\u00a0said. Blue Origin, Bezos' space company, could start flying paying customers by 2018 after a rigorous test program. Jeff Bezos shows off the crew capsule that could soon take tourists to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why is Paul Allen building the world\u2019s largest airplane? Perhaps to launch a space shuttle called Black Ice. (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6964",
        "date": "2018-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/06/why-is-paul-allen-building-the-worlds-largest-airplane-perhaps-to-launch-a-space-shuttle-called-black-ice/",
        "text": "A\u00a0massive airplane being built by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen\u00a0moved a step closer to flight last week, when it crept out of its hangar in Mojave, Calif., and practiced rolling\u00a0down the runway, hitting a top speed of 46 mph.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightKnown as Stratolaunch, the plane has a wingspan even greater than that of business mogul Howard Hughes\u2019s famed Spruce Goose and is designed to carry as many as three rockets, tethered to its belly, to about 35,000 feet. Once aloft, the rockets would drop, then fire their engines and\u00a0deliver satellites to orbit. But Allen has even bigger ambitions for Stratolaunch and is considering pairing it with a new\u00a0space shuttle that\u2019s known inside the company as Black Ice.Story continues below advertisementIn exclusive interviews last summer, Allen and Jean Floyd, Stratolaunch System's chief executive, laid out the company\u2019s plans for the giant plane, providing an answer\u00a0to why anyone would want to build an aircraft\u00a0that has\u00a028 wheels, six 747 jet engines and a wingspan longer than a football field.Advertisement\u201cI would love to see us have a full reusable system and have weekly, if not more often, airport-style, repeatable operations going,\u201d Allen said in an interview in his Seattle office.The Black Ice space plane \u2014 should it be built \u2014 would be about as big as the former space shuttle developed by NASA and capable of staying up for at least three days. It could be launched from virtually anywhere in the world, as long as the runway could accommodate Stratolaunch\u2019s size. And it would be capable of flying to the International Space Station, taking satellites and experiments to orbit, and maybe one day even people \u2014 though there are no plans for that in the near-term.Story continues below advertisementThen it would land back on the runway, ready to fly again.\u201cYou make your rocket a plane,\u201d Floyd said. \u201cSo, you have an airplane carrying a plane that\u2019s fully reusable. You don\u2019t throw anything away ever. Only fuel.\u201dAdvertisementFor now, the company is focused on the maiden flight of Stratolaunch, which could come later this year. Then it would decide whether to pursue Black Ice.Space launch company Stratolaunch Systems rolls its twin-fuselage plane out of its hangar for the first time to conduct fueling tests. Jane Ross reports. (Reuters)Returning to human spaceflight could be a possibility sometime in the future, said Allen, the billionaire entrepreneur, who founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and now owns the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks.\u201cIf you caught the bug back in the Mercury era, of course it\u2019s in the back of your mind,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think you\u2019re seeing right now, other than [space station] resupply missions, most spaceflights are about launching satellites. That\u2019s the reality. And they are extremely important for everything from television to data all over the world. You can get data in the Kalahari Desert because there\u2019s a satellite up there.\u201dStory continues below advertisementStratolaunch has generated all sorts of interest, a curiosity that for years was being built in secret inside a hangar so big that the contractor\u00a0fashioning it, Scaled Composites, needed special permits just for the construction scaffolding.AdvertisementVice President Pence has visited the plane in its hangar and walked across its wingspan. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson has dropped by to see it as well, writing on Twitter that she had \u201cthe chance to see firsthand how Stratolaunch is developing an air-launch platform to make space more accessible.\u201dAllen made history in 2004, when he hired Scaled Composites to build another spacecraft called SpaceShipOne\u00a0that won the Ansari X Prize when it became the first nongovernmental vehicle to reach the edge of space. Allen ultimately licensed the technology behind the spacecraft to Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic is now pursuing\u00a0its own plan to fly tourists to space aboard yet another new space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFlying test pilots, I understand,\u201d Allen said. \u201cBut paying-man-on-the-street-type passengers, I wanted to leave that to someone else.\u201dAdvertisementAfter bowing out of the space business, Allen eventually returned to pursue one of his greatest passions, and in 2011 announced that he was building Stratolaunch. \u201cYou have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cAnd this is a dream that I\u2019m very excited about.\u201dAllen, a connoisseur of antique planes, has amassed a collection of World War II relics that he had painstakingly refurbished. He recovered them from old battlefields \u2014 a Messerschmitt, a German fighter plane, was dug out of a sand dune on a French beach where it had been buried for decades; an Ilyushin IL-2M3 Shturmovik was pieced together from the wreckage of four planes recovered in northwest Russia.Story continues below advertisementTo showcase his collection, Allen created a museum, the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum in Everett, Wash., which features a Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat and a B-25 Bomber, among others.AdvertisementAs a child, Allen knew all the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts, as if they were the players of his favorite baseball team, and he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. But then in the sixth grade, he no longer could see the blackboard, even from his front-row seat. His nearsightedness meant \u201cmy dreams of being an astronaut were over,\u201d he said. \u201cSomehow I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.\u201dHe once tried to launch the arm of an aluminum chair by packing it with powdered zinc and sulfur and firing it from a coffeepot, he recalled in his memoir, \u201cIdea Man.\u201d It didn\u2019t work.Story continues below advertisement\u201cTurns out the melting point of aluminum was lower than I understood,\u201d he said.As an adult, his passion for space continued. In 1981, he went to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the first shuttle launch. \u201cThe sound was unbelievable,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThe air was vibrating, and you could feel compression waves going into your chest. \u2026 You could feel the heat from the engines on your face.\u201d Allen watched it alongside the thousands who had packed the Florida coastline, many yelling: \u201cGo! Go! Go!\u201d \u201cIt was so inspiring,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn a post on Stratolaunch\u2019s website,\u00a0Allen said he has long been \u201centhralled by the idea of space exploration. \u2026 But I would have never imagined that, more than 50 years later, access to low Earth orbit would still be costly, complex and difficult. I am determined to change this to help maximize the potential of space to improve life here on Earth.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA fully reusable shuttle would go a long way toward doing that, especially if it were capable of deploying constellations of small satellites. In the interview, Allen said he was keenly interested in that technology.\u201cThe capabilities of these small satellites is something that\u2019s really interesting and fascinating, both for communications, where a lot of people are putting up constellations of satellites\u00a0for monitoring the challenged health of our planet,\u201d he said. He\u2019d become particularly interested in how space could be used to keeping an eye on \u201cthings like illegal fishing in the ocean, which is an increasing problem.\u201d After winning the Ansari X Prize, the co-founder of Microsoft is coming back to the space game. Why is Paul Allen building the world\u2019s largest airplane? Perhaps to launch a space shuttle called Black Ice.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why is Paul Allen building the world\u2019s largest airplane? Perhaps to launch a space shuttle called Black Ice. (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6965",
        "date": "2018-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/06/why-is-paul-allen-building-the-worlds-largest-airplane-perhaps-to-launch-a-space-shuttle-called-black-ice/",
        "text": "A\u00a0massive airplane being built by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen\u00a0moved a step closer to flight last week, when it crept out of its hangar in Mojave, Calif., and practiced rolling\u00a0down the runway, hitting a top speed of 46 mph.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightKnown as Stratolaunch, the plane has a wingspan even greater than that of business mogul Howard Hughes\u2019s famed Spruce Goose and is designed to carry as many as three rockets, tethered to its belly, to about 35,000 feet. Once aloft, the rockets would drop, then fire their engines and\u00a0deliver satellites to orbit. But Allen has even bigger ambitions for Stratolaunch and is considering pairing it with a new\u00a0space shuttle that\u2019s known inside the company as Black Ice.Story continues below advertisementIn exclusive interviews last summer, Allen and Jean Floyd, Stratolaunch System's chief executive, laid out the company\u2019s plans for the giant plane, providing an answer\u00a0to why anyone would want to build an aircraft\u00a0that has\u00a028 wheels, six 747 jet engines and a wingspan longer than a football field.Advertisement\u201cI would love to see us have a full reusable system and have weekly, if not more often, airport-style, repeatable operations going,\u201d Allen said in an interview in his Seattle office.The Black Ice space plane \u2014 should it be built \u2014 would be about as big as the former space shuttle developed by NASA and capable of staying up for at least three days. It could be launched from virtually anywhere in the world, as long as the runway could accommodate Stratolaunch\u2019s size. And it would be capable of flying to the International Space Station, taking satellites and experiments to orbit, and maybe one day even people \u2014 though there are no plans for that in the near-term.Story continues below advertisementThen it would land back on the runway, ready to fly again.\u201cYou make your rocket a plane,\u201d Floyd said. \u201cSo, you have an airplane carrying a plane that\u2019s fully reusable. You don\u2019t throw anything away ever. Only fuel.\u201dAdvertisementFor now, the company is focused on the maiden flight of Stratolaunch, which could come later this year. Then it would decide whether to pursue Black Ice.Space launch company Stratolaunch Systems rolls its twin-fuselage plane out of its hangar for the first time to conduct fueling tests. Jane Ross reports. (Reuters)Returning to human spaceflight could be a possibility sometime in the future, said Allen, the billionaire entrepreneur, who founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and now owns the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks.\u201cIf you caught the bug back in the Mercury era, of course it\u2019s in the back of your mind,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I think you\u2019re seeing right now, other than [space station] resupply missions, most spaceflights are about launching satellites. That\u2019s the reality. And they are extremely important for everything from television to data all over the world. You can get data in the Kalahari Desert because there\u2019s a satellite up there.\u201dStory continues below advertisementStratolaunch has generated all sorts of interest, a curiosity that for years was being built in secret inside a hangar so big that the contractor\u00a0fashioning it, Scaled Composites, needed special permits just for the construction scaffolding.AdvertisementVice President Pence has visited the plane in its hangar and walked across its wingspan. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson has dropped by to see it as well, writing on Twitter that she had \u201cthe chance to see firsthand how Stratolaunch is developing an air-launch platform to make space more accessible.\u201dAllen made history in 2004, when he hired Scaled Composites to build another spacecraft called SpaceShipOne\u00a0that won the Ansari X Prize when it became the first nongovernmental vehicle to reach the edge of space. Allen ultimately licensed the technology behind the spacecraft to Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic is now pursuing\u00a0its own plan to fly tourists to space aboard yet another new space plane, known as SpaceShipTwo.Story continues below advertisement\u201cFlying test pilots, I understand,\u201d Allen said. \u201cBut paying-man-on-the-street-type passengers, I wanted to leave that to someone else.\u201dAdvertisementAfter bowing out of the space business, Allen eventually returned to pursue one of his greatest passions, and in 2011 announced that he was building Stratolaunch. \u201cYou have a certain number of dreams in your life you want to fulfill,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cAnd this is a dream that I\u2019m very excited about.\u201dAllen, a connoisseur of antique planes, has amassed a collection of World War II relics that he had painstakingly refurbished. He recovered them from old battlefields \u2014 a Messerschmitt, a German fighter plane, was dug out of a sand dune on a French beach where it had been buried for decades; an Ilyushin IL-2M3 Shturmovik was pieced together from the wreckage of four planes recovered in northwest Russia.Story continues below advertisementTo showcase his collection, Allen created a museum, the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum in Everett, Wash., which features a Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat and a B-25 Bomber, among others.AdvertisementAs a child, Allen knew all the names of the Mercury 7 astronauts, as if they were the players of his favorite baseball team, and he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. But then in the sixth grade, he no longer could see the blackboard, even from his front-row seat. His nearsightedness meant \u201cmy dreams of being an astronaut were over,\u201d he said. \u201cSomehow I knew you had to have perfect eyesight to be a test pilot, and so that was it for my astronaut career.\u201dHe once tried to launch the arm of an aluminum chair by packing it with powdered zinc and sulfur and firing it from a coffeepot, he recalled in his memoir, \u201cIdea Man.\u201d It didn\u2019t work.Story continues below advertisement\u201cTurns out the melting point of aluminum was lower than I understood,\u201d he said.As an adult, his passion for space continued. In 1981, he went to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the first shuttle launch. \u201cThe sound was unbelievable,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThe air was vibrating, and you could feel compression waves going into your chest. \u2026 You could feel the heat from the engines on your face.\u201d Allen watched it alongside the thousands who had packed the Florida coastline, many yelling: \u201cGo! Go! Go!\u201d \u201cIt was so inspiring,\u201d he said.AdvertisementIn a post on Stratolaunch\u2019s website,\u00a0Allen said he has long been \u201centhralled by the idea of space exploration. \u2026 But I would have never imagined that, more than 50 years later, access to low Earth orbit would still be costly, complex and difficult. I am determined to change this to help maximize the potential of space to improve life here on Earth.\u201dStory continues below advertisementA fully reusable shuttle would go a long way toward doing that, especially if it were capable of deploying constellations of small satellites. In the interview, Allen said he was keenly interested in that technology.\u201cThe capabilities of these small satellites is something that\u2019s really interesting and fascinating, both for communications, where a lot of people are putting up constellations of satellites\u00a0for monitoring the challenged health of our planet,\u201d he said. He\u2019d become particularly interested in how space could be used to keeping an eye on \u201cthings like illegal fishing in the ocean, which is an increasing problem.\u201d After winning the Ansari X Prize, the co-founder of Microsoft is coming back to the space game. Why is Paul Allen building the world\u2019s largest airplane? Perhaps to launch a space shuttle called Black Ice.",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The Galaxy Note 8 is huge, fast and very pricey \u2014 and has yet to explode on me (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6966",
        "date": "2017-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/05/the-galaxy-note-8-is-huge-fast-and-very-pricey-and-has-yet-to-explode-on-me/",
        "text": "Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 hits store shelves Sept. 15 \u2014 at a whopping starting price of $930, though carrier plans may soften the blow. The premium phone is Samsung's latest after its\u00a0predecessor, the Note 7, was pulled from shelves after a rash of battery fires. So the\u00a0Note 8 faces not only high expectations but also a lot of scrutiny.\u00a0Here's what I've learned from a little over a week with the\u00a0phone. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLet's get this out of the way first: There were no fires or explosions. In fact, I never even registered a moment when the Note 8 was running hot.What did register was the Note 8's size. It measures in at 6.3 inches to the iPhone 7 Plus\u2019s 5.7 inches, and is truly a phablet.That has its drawbacks: When making voice calls, the phone looks a little ridiculous held up to your face; I found myself\u00a0using headphones for comfort\u2019s sake. It\u2019s definitely a two-handed device; while Samsung does have a one-handed mode on offer, most of the time I was defaulting to using both hands.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet despite its\u00a0size, the Note 8 was surprisingly easy to hold, thanks to a taller, thinner design that felt solid in my hand\u00a0without making me worry\u00a0about dropping it \u2014 even without a case.In terms of overall performance, the Note 8 was noticeably zippy even when running multiple apps, including streaming video. Samsung has marketed and priced this as a top-of-the-line phone, and it fits that bill in every way.Battery, of course, is a major focus of the Note 8, given what came before. Samsung didn't pack the Note 8 with a larger-capacity battery. In fact, its battery holds less of a charge than the Galaxy S8 Plus. As a result, it has decent but\u00a0not groundbreaking battery life. If you\u2019re a light smartphone user, the charge could last you for more than a day. But chances are that if you\u2019re a light smartphone user you aren\u2019t looking at the Note 8.Why Samsung and Apple can get away with $1,000 smartphonesOn days of heavy use \u2014 with constant emailing, movie streaming, music streaming, social media check-ins, etc. \u2014 the Note 8 still got me through a day without prompting any panic about finding an outlet. Practically speaking, that experience was similar to the iPhone 7 Plus, though the Note 8 generally had more battery left over at the end of the day.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe screen was the most striking thing about the Note 8 right off the bat, and my impressions of it\u00a0have only improved on further acquaintance. The serious real estate makes multitasking on this phone a joy. Samsung has long had a split-screen option, but the Note 8\u2019s screen makes it easy to use two apps at once, and users can even bookmark app pairs so that you can have a shortcut to your favorite set.Samsung also made a big deal about its camera, particularly as compared with the iPhone 7 Plus. It does generally live up to its own hype in low light and in terms of stability. Other software features also let you cover a multitude of sins \u2014 for example, being able to\u00a0refocus\u00a0a picture to blur or sharpen the background.As for the rest of the phone, Samsung\u00a0often packs its devices\u00a0with features \u2014 some useful, some not. On the Note 8, the most useful additions I found all relate to the S Pen, which again nestles into the bottom of the phone. The screen-off memo, which lets you jot down notes without unlocking your screen, proved particularly useful for me, especially when I didn't have a pen on hand.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther\u00a0features make a reappearance: The Note 8 is still waterproof and (if you're worried) still has a headphone jack.Other features aren't quite so useful. The phone comes with Samsung\u2019s voice assistant, Bixby, which has more promise than practical application at the moment. Bixby is smart and, for example, can recognize images in a photo and put them in a particular folder if asked. But it doesn't work with enough apps outside of the Samsung universe to capitalize fully on those advanced features.All in all, the Galaxy Note 8 is a phone for a very particular type of person: one who\u2019s happy to spend to get the most out of their smartphone. The\u00a0phone's $930 price tag\u00a0is a big investment, even when\u00a0spread over a number of monthly payments.Story continues below advertisementFor those evaluating the Note 8 against its competitors, I'd say that I like it better than the iPhone 7 Plus in terms of design and usability. But the iPhone 7 Plus isn't going to be the Note 8's primary iPhone competition. That will fall to whatever Apple releases on Sept. 12.But until then, at least, the Note 8 can claim victory in the top tier of smartphones.Read more:\u00a0Apple will debut next iPhone at its new \u2018spaceship\u2019 campusGet ready for the next smartphone smackdown between Apple and SamsungSamsung has a more advanced digital assistant than Bixby. But where is it? Samsung has redeemed the Note line, but it carries a hefty price tag. The Galaxy Note 8 is huge, fast and very pricey \u2014 and has yet to explode on me",
        "author": "Hayley Tsukayama"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Oculus Go is the first VR gadget you might actually buy (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6967",
        "date": "2018-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/01/oculus-go-is-the-first-vr-gadget-you-might-actually-buy/",
        "text": "If all the hype about virtual reality were true, you\u2019d be reading this column through VR goggles.But in actual reality, tech\u2019s next big thing has been stuck as tech\u2019s niche market thing. When VR for homes arrived two years ago, it required strapping on a $600 face computer with a cable slithering down your back into another, even more expensive computer. Or you needed a special phone slipped inside funny headgear. The tech got in the way of non-gamers even trying VR. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow VR\u2019s getting another shot called the Oculus Go. This new headset, which goes on sale Tuesday, is the product Facebook\u2019s Oculus division should have sold the first time around. After testing one for a week, the Oculus Go is the first VR gadget I actually want to buy.Story continues below advertisementIt costs just $200. It has no cables. It\u2019s easy to use. It works for iPhone people and Android people, Mac people and PC people.AdvertisementAnd it\u2019s for more than just playing games. Call it Oculus and chill: The Go lets you curl up and watch TV virtually along with a faraway friend. Or on a long flight, you can use one as your private movie theater. Noise-cancelling headphones, meet the annoying-seatmate canceling headset.The Oculus Rift was the 2016 gadget you hoped your neighbor bought so you could try it out. The Oculus Go is the 2018 gadget you buy as a gift.Why is virtual reality taking so long to take off?The Oculus Go doesn\u2019t solve all the problems facing VR. You can teleport to new places, but you won\u2019t forget you\u2019re actually wearing goggles. And aficionados will be disappointed that the Oculus Go, in an effort to trim its price and bulk, offers less-sophisticated VR experiences than its predecessors.Yet the Oculus Go addresses what I think is a bigger issue: It\u2019s accessible to people who aren\u2019t super rich or super into video games and computers. And VR will become better when more than just geeks get involved.No strings attached \u2014 except the Facebook oneWhat makes the Oculus Go a breakthrough is that it\u2019s self-contained. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, which debuted in 2016, are tethered to high-end PCs. Sony\u2019s PlayStation VR plugs into a PlayStation. The less-expensive Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream View require specific-model Android phones. (That, in particular, had left iPhone people out of the fun.)Think of the Oculus Go as oversize ski goggles, blacked out with paint. Inside, LCD screens shine images onto lenses designed for close-up viewing. (You can still wear glasses inside, or even order prescription lenses to screw into the headset.) Setup takes 5 minutes via a smartphone. After that, the Oculus Go gets everything it needs directly over WiFi.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou operate the Oculus Go with a remote control that acts like a virtual laser pointer. You have to use it by touch alone but it\u2019s pretty intuitive. Most of my volunteer testers figured it out with minimal instruction. A pair of 7-year-olds I gave it to needed no help at all.If you\u2019ve tried another VR headset, the Oculus Go offers some subtle design improvements. You can remove its top strap if it\u2019s messing with your hair. It is lined with soft fabric in the places where it touches your face. I wouldn\u2019t call the 1-pound headset extremely comfortable, but it\u2019s better than others. One time I did inadvertently take a nap wearing it. (I woke to find goggle lines on my face.)The Oculus Go\u2019s speakers are built into a part of the strap that hovers near your ears, but doesn\u2019t cover them, creating a cool surround-sound effect. (Or you can plug in headphones.) The quality of what you see inside, too, is modestly better. New screen technology with physically larger pixels makes it feel less like you\u2019re looking at the world through a screen door. It\u2019s immersive, so intense apps that make you feel like you\u2019re moving might leave you reaching for the Dramamine.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat Oculus gave up to reach the Go\u2019s low price and portability is the whiz-bang tech that can make VR feel much more immersive. That means you have to use the Go in a swivel chair or by standing in one place \u2014 you can\u2019t walk around things to get a different view. It offers experiences very similar to the Samsung Gear VR, and many of the same apps run on both. (Oculus is working on a self-contained product you can move around in while wearing, but it\u2019s still in the lab.)There is room for improvement. You\u2019re effectively blindfolded once you put it on, which can be disorienting. A camera on the outside might help warn you if you\u2019re going to hit into a wall or, say, your brother is playing a prank on you. And using the Oculus Go would be a more social experience if the people around you could also experience some of what you\u2019re seeing. More expensive VR equipment can mirror what\u2019s happening inside to a nearby TV.Oculus Touch gaming: Welcome to the futureAnd then there\u2019s the Facebook problem. The parent company of Oculus doesn\u2019t have the most stellar reputation for protecting our privacy and data. It says Oculus does not share people\u2019s data with the social network for third-party advertising. But Facebook is letting apps track our movements, literally, in multiple new dimensions. And there will be temptations to use that info for advertising, surveillance \u2014 and ways we haven\u2019t even yet imagined.Here\u2019s what you do with itAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo now that VR costs less than an iPad, what\u2019s it good for? The Oculus Go has more answers to that question than when VR first arrived. What will stick \u2014 and with what sorts of people \u2014 are still open questions.You can, of course, use it for gaming. Even though the Oculus Go\u2019s technology is limited to mostly seated experiences, there\u2019s still a remarkable amount of physical fun. You tilt and rotate your head to pilot a spaceship around debris and shoot bad guys with a game called Anshar. My 7-year-old helpers particularly enjoyed a game called Coaster Combat, which simulates the rush of a roller coaster as you collect points by zapping targets with the remote. (Officially, the Oculus Go is for ages 13 and up, to protect children from potentially inappropriate online social activity, the company says.)It could be the biggest change to movies since sound. If anyone will pay for it.But I was most surprised by all the ways to use the Oculus Go just to chill out. Oculus execs say they heard from customers that sometimes they just wanted to escape from family, roommates or whatever. You can stream regular old Netflix, Hulu and YouTube. (In case you were wondering, Oculus doesn\u2019t sell pornography apps in its store.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen you play a movie, inside the Oculus Go it looks like you\u2019re in a theater or a groovy loft apartment. You can also buy Hollywood movies from Oculus or even download your own videos to watch on a flight \u2014 perhaps the most brilliant use for a VR headset I\u2019ve seen yet.The battery lasts for more than 2 hours of movie playing, and about an hour and a half of playing games. That\u2019s not long enough for a cross-country flight without a recharge, but you\u2019d probably want to give your eyes a break anyway.The most fun is watching what kinds of only-in-VR experiences people are dreaming up. There\u2019s a growing catalogue of video shot as look-around, 360-degree experiences. A new app designed for the Oculus Go called MelodyVR lets you hop around the stage during rock concerts. An app called NextVR puts you in the corner of the ring during WWE wrestling matches. Even the producers of Bravo\u2019s\u00a0\u201cVanderpump Rules\u201d announced they would begin filming with 360-degree cameras. (Warning: VR can induce nausea.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVR doesn\u2019t have to be an anti-social experience, either. An app called Oculus Rooms lets you and friends watch movies and TV shows and play simple games in a private \u201cparty\u201d mode that I couldn\u2019t resist calling \u201cOculus and chill.\u201dIn this virtual romper room,\u00a0you are\u00a0represented by a virtual avatar of\u00a0your own choosing, but you can chitchat in your own voice. You can also bring the party into third-party games and TV streaming apps, including Hulu. I caught up on my shows with a friend on a virtual couch.Who knows which of these ideas will stick, but with the Oculus Go, the tech is finally starting to get out of the way.Read more from Geoffrey A. Fowler:\u00a0The new Gmail sends self-destructing emails\u00a0\u2014 and nudges you to reply to momElectric scooters might revolutionize urban transport \u2014\u00a0if it wasn't for stupid humansNo, Mark Zuckerberg, we're not really in control of our data Virtual reality just became way more accessible with this new one-piece, $200 headset from Facebook's Oculus. What do you with it? Snuggle up to watch TV with a friend far away, for starters.\n Oculus Go is the first VR gadget you might actually buy",
        "author": "Geoffrey A. Fowler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apple will debut next iPhone at its new \u2018spaceship\u2019 campus (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6968",
        "date": "2017-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/08/31/apple-will-debut-new-iphone-at-its-new-spaceship-campus/",
        "text": "Get ready for liftoff, Apple fans.Apple on Thursday invited the media to the first-ever event at Apple Park, colloquially known as its \u201cspaceship\u201d headquarters: the giant, circular building in Cupertino, Calif., that the firm started building in 2013.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Sept. 12 event is widely expected to feature the release of the next iPhone, a decade after it was introduced by Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs. To have the 10th anniversary phone debut at an Apple theater named for Jobs brings the product full-circle \u2014 if you'll excuse the pun. At an event last year, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that he believed it would be the last time he introduced a product in the old Cupertino complex, with its very famous address of 1 Infinite Loop.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is probably the last product introduction in the town hall that you're sitting in today,\u201d\u00a0Cook said. \u201cWe've had a lot of important announcements here. It's a very special place with lots of memories. The iPod was announced in this room; so was the App Store. We have lots of great memories here.\u201dAdvertisementCook and the rest of Apple head into the event with big expectations. Having decided to give the latest iPhones \u2014 the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus \u2014 a smaller-than-expected makeover, the pressure is on to deliver something spectacular with the next models. Apple insiders expect the company to show off a 10th-anniversary model of the iPhone that is substantially redesigned, with an edge-to-edge screen and no home button.Apple is also expected to announce a refresh for the Apple TV set-top box, which may gain support for ultra-high-definition 4K video. The firm may also offer an update of its Apple Watch.Read more from Hayley Tsukayama:The rise of the $1,000 smartphoneSamsung has a more advanced digital assistant than Bixby. But where is it?Apple's iOS 11 is in public beta. Here's what to expect. Apple has invited the media to check out its next products at its brand-new headquarters. Apple will debut next iPhone at its new \u2018spaceship\u2019 campus",
        "author": "Hayley Tsukayama"
    },
    {
        "title": "First look at Apple\u2019s new \u2018spaceship\u2019 campus (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6969",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/12/first-look-at-apples-new-spaceship-campus/",
        "text": "CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Apple is set to unveil its 10th anniversary iPhone here at its new \"spaceship\" headquarters. Here's our first look at the $5 billion Apple Park, which the company started building in 2013.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightApple's new headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., looms ahead of the tech giant's iPhone launch Tuesday.Approaching the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park. If you look really closely, you can see Apple\u00a0co-founder Steve Wozniack, center left, near the Steve Jobs Theater.A view of Apple Park from the theater lobby.A view of the visitor center.Another view of the visitor centerApple Park, as seen from the Steve Jobs Theater.  First look at Apple\u2019s new \u2018spaceship\u2019 campus",
        "author": "Hayley Tsukayama"
    },
    {
        "title": "Employees kept crashing into the glass walls at Apple\u2019s new headquarters. Here\u2019s what they told 911. (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6970",
        "date": "2018-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/05/employees-kept-crashing-into-apples-new-headquarters-glass-walls-heres-what-they-told-911/",
        "text": "Apple's new state-of-the-art $5 billion \u201cspaceship\u201d campus boasts a huge glass-walled building with the latest in energy efficiencies, and a 100,000-square-foot fitness center, and it sits amid an orchard, meadows and a pond. But the serene office space appears to have\u00a0caused some trouble for\u00a0several employees.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAccording to transcripts obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, at least three 911 calls were made from Apple Park after\u00a0people walked into the building's signature glass walls. Two of the emergency calls happened on the same day in January and the third occurred just 48 hours later. In one incident, a man in his late 20s\u00a0ran into\u00a0a glass panel head first in the middle of the day, cutting open his brow. According to a second emergency call later that day, a middle-aged man slammed into a glass window hard enough\u00a0that Apple staff expected he would need stitches to close his wound, also on his eyebrow.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTwo days later, 1 Apple Park Way called in another emergency:Dispatcher: Tell me exactly what happened.\u00a0\u2026Caller: Um, I walked into a glass door on the first floor of Apple Park when I was trying to go outside, which was very silly.Dispatcher: You keep breaking up. You walked through a glass door?Caller: I didn\u2019t walk through a glass door. I walked into a glass door.Dispatcher: OK, one second. Did you injure your head?Caller: I hit my head.Foster and Partners, the architecture firm behind Apple's headquarters, did not respond to a request for comment. The building's curved glass design, backed by late\u00a0Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, was meant to inspire creativity and collaboration, with employees taking in the California landscape and bountiful green space.\u00a0According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Apple\u00a0has since placed additional rectangular stickers on the glass panes in the building to prevent people from walking into them. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At least three emergency calls were placed from Apple's new headquarters after employees walked into glass walls. Employees kept crashing into the glass walls at Apple\u2019s new headquarters. Here\u2019s what they told 911.",
        "author": "Hamza Shaban"
    },
    {
        "title": "Millions of people already have iPhones. Can Apple use that to get you to watch its shows? (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6971",
        "date": "2017-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/08/31/millions-of-people-already-have-iphones-can-apple-use-that-to-get-you-to-watch-its-shows/",
        "text": "",
        "author": "Hayley Tsukayama"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator comes under fire at Senate hearing (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6972",
        "date": "2017-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/01/trumps-nominee-for-nasa-administrator-comes-under-fire-at-senate-hearing/",
        "text": "Sen. Bill Nelson on Wednesday unleashed a blistering attack against Jim Bridenstine, the Trump administration\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, saying he not only lacks the technical and management experience but has been a partisan warrior whose behavior is an example of \u201cwhy Washington is broken.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDuring Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing Wednesday, Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, accused Bridenstine, a conservative Republican congressman from Oklahoma, of being a climate-change denier, backing legislation that discriminated against the LGBT community and acting as a divisive force in Washington. \u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent and a skilled executive,\u201d said Nelson, who wields great influence over the space agency, in his written opening statement. \u201cMore importantly, the administrator must be a leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added: \u201cFrankly, congressman Bridenstine, I cannot see how you meet these criteria.\u201dSupporters of Bridenstine, a naval aviator and the former head of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, have said that his views on climate change have evolved, and that he does not deny the effects of climate change. In his opening statement, Bridenstine said he would not only support NASA\u2019s mission to explore space, focusing on a return to human spaceflight from United States soil, but continue to study Earth\u2019s climate.If confirmed, he said he would \u201clook forward to promoting the scientific community\u2019s priorities,\u201d and support efforts \u201cthat increase our understanding of the Earth as a system and can enable solutions to the most pressing issues we face on our home planet.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDuring the hearing, Bridenstine said he \u201cabsolutely\u201d believes in climate change, that it is already having devastating effects and that humans contribute to it. But he demurred when asked whether human activity was the leading cause, saying more study was needed. In response to questions, he vowed to protect the integrity of NASA\u2019s research, and to keep it an \u201capolitical\u201d organization that should be driven by science, not politics.AdvertisementSince being nominated, Bridenstine has received some high-profile endorsements, including from Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), but also from Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, and some key industry groups, such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said the committee would seek to move his nomination to the full Senate by as early as next week.Even though Democrats \"were trying to rough up the nominee,\" he predicted that \"the votes will be there\" for Bridenstine's confirmation.Story continues below advertisementIn the House, where Bridenstine has served since 2013, he has been recognized as a leader on space issues and was the sponsor of a wide-ranging bill, known as the American Space Renaissance Act, which touched on national security and how to manage space debris and regulate the commercial space industry.AdvertisementBut a growing chorus of opponents have spoken out against him, including Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), saying his opposition to same-sex marriage and the Violence Against Women Act made him unfit. \u201cIt is clear Representative Bridenstine would move us backwards not forwards,\u201d she said in a statement, urging the committee to vote against his nomination.Nelson said he was \u201coffended\u201d by Bridenstine\u2019s comments criticizing Democrats and Republicans working across the aisle to pass legislation. He noted that Bridenstine had not only called former president Barack Obama \u201cdishonest, incompetent and vengeful,\u201d but that he has also supported the opponent of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the GOP primary and attacked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for working with Democrats on immigration.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine said that his activity as a congressman, representing the interests of his district, would be very different from the way he would act as NASA administrator. Politics, he said, has no part in the space agency. He also said that \u201cI\u00a0do believe, from my heart, that every human being has dignity and worth and each person should be treated as though they are a valued member of the team.\u201dBut Nelson, the committee's ranking member, wasn\u2019t convinced.\u201cNASA needs a leader who will unite us, not divide us,\u201d he said. \u201cRespectfully, congressman Bridenstine, I don\u2019t think you\u2019re that leader.\u201d Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida and other Democrats went after the Oklahoma conservative on climate change and leadership style. Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator comes under fire at Senate hearing",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator comes under fire at Senate hearing (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6973",
        "date": "2017-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/01/trumps-nominee-for-nasa-administrator-comes-under-fire-at-senate-hearing/",
        "text": "Sen. Bill Nelson on Wednesday unleashed a blistering attack against Jim Bridenstine, the Trump administration\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, saying he not only lacks the technical and management experience but has been a partisan warrior whose behavior is an example of \u201cwhy Washington is broken.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDuring Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing Wednesday, Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, accused Bridenstine, a conservative Republican congressman from Oklahoma, of being a climate-change denier, backing legislation that discriminated against the LGBT community and acting as a divisive force in Washington. \u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional who is technically and scientifically competent and a skilled executive,\u201d said Nelson, who wields great influence over the space agency, in his written opening statement. \u201cMore importantly, the administrator must be a leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added: \u201cFrankly, congressman Bridenstine, I cannot see how you meet these criteria.\u201dSupporters of Bridenstine, a naval aviator and the former head of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, have said that his views on climate change have evolved, and that he does not deny the effects of climate change. In his opening statement, Bridenstine said he would not only support NASA\u2019s mission to explore space, focusing on a return to human spaceflight from United States soil, but continue to study Earth\u2019s climate.If confirmed, he said he would \u201clook forward to promoting the scientific community\u2019s priorities,\u201d and support efforts \u201cthat increase our understanding of the Earth as a system and can enable solutions to the most pressing issues we face on our home planet.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDuring the hearing, Bridenstine said he \u201cabsolutely\u201d believes in climate change, that it is already having devastating effects and that humans contribute to it. But he demurred when asked whether human activity was the leading cause, saying more study was needed. In response to questions, he vowed to protect the integrity of NASA\u2019s research, and to keep it an \u201capolitical\u201d organization that should be driven by science, not politics.AdvertisementSince being nominated, Bridenstine has received some high-profile endorsements, including from Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), but also from Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, and some key industry groups, such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said the committee would seek to move his nomination to the full Senate by as early as next week.Even though Democrats \"were trying to rough up the nominee,\" he predicted that \"the votes will be there\" for Bridenstine's confirmation.Story continues below advertisementIn the House, where Bridenstine has served since 2013, he has been recognized as a leader on space issues and was the sponsor of a wide-ranging bill, known as the American Space Renaissance Act, which touched on national security and how to manage space debris and regulate the commercial space industry.AdvertisementBut a growing chorus of opponents have spoken out against him, including Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), saying his opposition to same-sex marriage and the Violence Against Women Act made him unfit. \u201cIt is clear Representative Bridenstine would move us backwards not forwards,\u201d she said in a statement, urging the committee to vote against his nomination.Nelson said he was \u201coffended\u201d by Bridenstine\u2019s comments criticizing Democrats and Republicans working across the aisle to pass legislation. He noted that Bridenstine had not only called former president Barack Obama \u201cdishonest, incompetent and vengeful,\u201d but that he has also supported the opponent of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the GOP primary and attacked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for working with Democrats on immigration.Story continues below advertisementBridenstine said that his activity as a congressman, representing the interests of his district, would be very different from the way he would act as NASA administrator. Politics, he said, has no part in the space agency. He also said that \u201cI\u00a0do believe, from my heart, that every human being has dignity and worth and each person should be treated as though they are a valued member of the team.\u201dBut Nelson, the committee's ranking member, wasn\u2019t convinced.\u201cNASA needs a leader who will unite us, not divide us,\u201d he said. \u201cRespectfully, congressman Bridenstine, I don\u2019t think you\u2019re that leader.\u201d Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida and other Democrats went after the Oklahoma conservative on climate change and leadership style. Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator comes under fire at Senate hearing",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why the Trump administration wants to make it easier for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and others to get to space (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6974",
        "date": "2018-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/24/why-the-trump-administration-wants-to-make-it-easier-for-elon-musks-spacex-and-others-to-get-to-space/",
        "text": "President Trump wants to go back to the moon. But the way to do that would be very different from the 1960s-era Apollo program.Instead of being driven by a Cold War space race against the Soviet Union, the United States instead is trying partner with a growing commercial space industry that has drawn the attention of the White House. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a new policy directive to be signed Thursday, the White House vowed to streamline old regulations that it said hampered space companies for years, allowing them to grow and prosper. That, in turn, would help the White House meet its goal of returning to the lunar surface.In a call with reporters, a senior White House official said: \u201cWe realized that budgets are limited, and this is not going to be a Cold War space race where we drop almost unlimited amounts of money on a problem. So, if we\u2019re really going to do our space exploration activities, we need to grow the economy. And one of the best ways we can think of to grow the economy, in fact, is to deregulate it, streamline it, provide new enabling regulations that provide a foundation for all of our space activities.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump recently lauded the triumphs of several space companies founded by billionaire entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, saying at a Cabinet meeting: \u201cRich guys, they love rocket ships. That\u2019s good. That\u2019s better than us paying for them.\u201dThe new policy would make it easier for companies to get licenses to launch their rockets and create what Scott Pace, executive secretary of the National Space Council, called a \u201cnew one-stop shop at the Department of Commerce for commercial space companies.\u201dIn a statement, Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said the industry has been hampered \u201cunder the burden of outdated regulations written decades ago.\u201dHe added that the United States \u201ccan\u2019t sustainably return to the moon and beyond without partnerships with the commercial space industry, and this directive helps set that course in a much more timely and effective manner.\u201d The White House is seeking to ease regulations on industry to help enable a return to the moon. Why the Trump administration wants to make it easier for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and others to get to space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump vows Americans will return to the moon. The question is how? (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6975",
        "date": "2017-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/11/trump-vows-americans-will-return-to-the-moon-the-question-is-how/",
        "text": "Once again, the Trump administration has pledged to restore America\u2019s leadership in space by teaming with the private sector and returning to the moon. Speaking at a White House ceremony Monday, President Trump offered high ambitions but few specifics in signing a new space policy directive that had no timeline\u00a0and promised no funding for future missions. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith\u00a0Apollo astronaut Harrison \"Jack\" Schmitt in attendance on the 45th\u00a0anniversary of Apollo 17\u2019s landing on\u00a0the moon, Trump said NASA would not only return to the lunar surface but use it as a stepping stone to explore even deeper into the cosmos.\u201cThe directive I\u2019m signing today will refocus America\u2019s space program on human exploration and discovery,\u201d he said. \u201cIt marks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps, someday, to many worlds beyond. This directive will ensure America\u2019s space program once again leads and inspires all of humanity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis remarks mimicked those by Vice President Pence in October when he said in reconstituting the National Space Council: \u201cWe will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dThe policy directive marks the official reversal of the Obama administration\u2019s plan to visit an asteroid and fly to Mars by the mid-2030s. It also makes it clear that the Trump administration wants to explore the moon in partnership with the private sector and other countries. The directive says that \u201cthe moon is of interest to international partners and is within reach of America\u2019s private space industry.\u201dMoon Express, which intends to launch a robotic lander to the moon\u2019s surface as early as next year, and Lockheed Martin, which is building the Orion crew capsule for NASA, praised the announcement. As did industry groups the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, whose president, Eric Stallmer, said that commercial companies have \u201cinvested hundreds of millions of dollars in private capital to develop innovative capabilities for lunar transport, operations and resource utilization.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut presidents have promised Apollo-like ambitions for generations, and Trump is now the third consecutive Republican president to vow a return to the moon. Both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush gave lofty speeches about space exploration, and President Barack Obama promised a \u201cjourney to Mars.\u201d But a lack of funding and a clear, sustained direction has hampered those efforts, for decades preventing any human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.While Trump offered scant specifics about how NASA would return to the moon, or how much such an endeavor would cost, the difference this time is that his administration would attempt to leverage the growing private sector for the mission. In addition to Moon Express, several commercial companies, including the United Launch Alliance, SpaceX and Blue Origin, have announced plans to return to the moon. (Blue Origin\u2019s founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\"This is very different than what happened in previous major space efforts where it was really just governments,\" said Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council. \"We want U.S. industry to be leading, and we want to do it with our international partners.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome think they will be the key that could give Trump a space triumph.\"For all of this goal-setting, the real test of Trump\u00a0administration\u2019s space plan is simple: is it a giveaway to special interests, or an actual space strategy that will push us ahead,\" said Phil Larson, an assistant dean\u00a0at the University of Colorado Boulder\u2019s college of engineering. \"We don\u2019t know the answer to that yet. But we do know a commercially led approach is the best deal for U.S. taxpayers. The moon is great, but the plans and partnerships matter more than dates and destinations.\" Trump's new space directive is high on ambition, but low on specifics Trump vows Americans will return to the moon. The question is how?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump vows Americans will return to the moon. The question is how? (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6976",
        "date": "2017-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/11/trump-vows-americans-will-return-to-the-moon-the-question-is-how/",
        "text": "Once again, the Trump administration has pledged to restore America\u2019s leadership in space by teaming with the private sector and returning to the moon. Speaking at a White House ceremony Monday, President Trump offered high ambitions but few specifics in signing a new space policy directive that had no timeline\u00a0and promised no funding for future missions. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith\u00a0Apollo astronaut Harrison \"Jack\" Schmitt in attendance on the 45th\u00a0anniversary of Apollo 17\u2019s landing on\u00a0the moon, Trump said NASA would not only return to the lunar surface but use it as a stepping stone to explore even deeper into the cosmos.\u201cThe directive I\u2019m signing today will refocus America\u2019s space program on human exploration and discovery,\u201d he said. \u201cIt marks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 for long-term exploration and use. This time, we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars and perhaps, someday, to many worlds beyond. This directive will ensure America\u2019s space program once again leads and inspires all of humanity.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis remarks mimicked those by Vice President Pence in October when he said in reconstituting the National Space Council: \u201cWe will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave behind footprints and flags, but to build the foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond.\u201dThe policy directive marks the official reversal of the Obama administration\u2019s plan to visit an asteroid and fly to Mars by the mid-2030s. It also makes it clear that the Trump administration wants to explore the moon in partnership with the private sector and other countries. The directive says that \u201cthe moon is of interest to international partners and is within reach of America\u2019s private space industry.\u201dMoon Express, which intends to launch a robotic lander to the moon\u2019s surface as early as next year, and Lockheed Martin, which is building the Orion crew capsule for NASA, praised the announcement. As did industry groups the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, whose president, Eric Stallmer, said that commercial companies have \u201cinvested hundreds of millions of dollars in private capital to develop innovative capabilities for lunar transport, operations and resource utilization.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut presidents have promised Apollo-like ambitions for generations, and Trump is now the third consecutive Republican president to vow a return to the moon. Both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush gave lofty speeches about space exploration, and President Barack Obama promised a \u201cjourney to Mars.\u201d But a lack of funding and a clear, sustained direction has hampered those efforts, for decades preventing any human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.While Trump offered scant specifics about how NASA would return to the moon, or how much such an endeavor would cost, the difference this time is that his administration would attempt to leverage the growing private sector for the mission. In addition to Moon Express, several commercial companies, including the United Launch Alliance, SpaceX and Blue Origin, have announced plans to return to the moon. (Blue Origin\u2019s founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\"This is very different than what happened in previous major space efforts where it was really just governments,\" said Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council. \"We want U.S. industry to be leading, and we want to do it with our international partners.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome think they will be the key that could give Trump a space triumph.\"For all of this goal-setting, the real test of Trump\u00a0administration\u2019s space plan is simple: is it a giveaway to special interests, or an actual space strategy that will push us ahead,\" said Phil Larson, an assistant dean\u00a0at the University of Colorado Boulder\u2019s college of engineering. \"We don\u2019t know the answer to that yet. But we do know a commercially led approach is the best deal for U.S. taxpayers. The moon is great, but the plans and partnerships matter more than dates and destinations.\" Trump's new space directive is high on ambition, but low on specifics Trump vows Americans will return to the moon. The question is how?",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX successfully launches the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, as it sends a Tesla on a path near Mars (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6977",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/06/one-big-boom-whether-spacexs-maiden-falcon-heavy-launch-is-a-success-or-failure-elon-musk-says-its-going-to-be-a-show/",
        "text": "KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 SpaceX successfully launched what is now the world\u2019s most powerful rocket\u00a0Tuesday, a towering behemoth known as the Falcon Heavy that tore through the sky with the thundering force of 18 Boeing 747 jetliners.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLifting off at 3:45 p.m. from the same launchpad that sent the crew of Apollo 11 to the moon, the rocket sent up a mountain-sized plume of smoke\u00a0and\u00a0a rattling\u00a0roar across Florida\u2019s Space Coast, where thousands gathered to watch. The mission represented the first test of the massive rocket, powered by 27 engines in three first-stage boosters that are essentially strapped together. The maiden flight also marked the first time a privately financed\u00a0venture ever attempted to\u00a0launch a rocket so powerful that it was capable of hoisting a payload out of Earth's orbit. As a promotional stunt, SpaceX founder Elon Musk\u00a0loaded the Falcon Heavy with his own cherry-red Tesla\u00a0Roadster carrying a spacesuit-clad mannequin named \"Starman\" in the driver's seat. Musk said he planned to send the convertible, built by another one of his companies, into an orbit around the sun that\u00a0would take it near\u00a0Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt was a beautiful day for a launch. Clear blue skies. A slight breeze. Warm weather that attracted space fans by the thousands who lined the beaches and causeways in anticipation. SpaceX topped off\u00a0the launch\u00a0by successfully landing two boosters on land, setting off twin sonic booms on their return. (A third first-stage, the so-called center core, crash landed at sea.) At SpaceX's headquarters, throngs of employees cheered wildly as the rocket soared out of the atmosphere.\"I\u2019m still trying to absorb everything that happened because it seemed surreal to me,\" Musk told reporters later. \"I had an image of a giant explosion on the pad with a wheel bouncing down the road and the Tesla logo landing somewhere. But fortunately that\u2019s not what happened. The mission seemed to have gone as well as possible.\"If SpaceX can fly the Falcon Heavy reliably, the rocket could prove useful to the Pentagon for lifting national security satellites and\u00a0to NASA\u00a0for helping its human exploration goals. SpaceX says\u00a0the rocket is capable of hauling more mass farther than any existing rocket \u2014 an estimated 140,000 pounds to low Earth orbit, and nearly 40,000 pounds to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut industry officials say there are some concerns about how big the market is for the Falcon Heavy. SpaceX had been planning to fly a pair of tourists around the moon as early as this year. But on Monday, Musk announced a reversal, saying the Falcon Heavy probably would never fly humans, as the company shifts its focus to its next-generation rocket, known as the \u201cBFR,\u201d or \u201cBig Falcon Rocket.\u201dStill, the Falcon Heavy\u2019s successful launch represents a \u201crevival of the exploring spirit,\u201d said John Logsdon, a space historian who is a professor emeritus at George Washington University.NASA's\u00a0space shuttle program, which ended in 2011, was limited to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit, where the International Space Station flies at about 250 miles above the surface of the earth.Story continues below advertisementBut the Falcon Heavy represents a chance to go beyond that, into deep space, to really \u201cpush the frontier,\u201d Logsdon said. \u201cThis really gives us a capability that this country has not had since the last Saturn V flight, which was in 1973.\u201dSpaceX founder Elon Musk launched a Tesla sports car into space on Feb. 6, along with a \"driver\u201d dubbed Starman. (SpaceX)SpaceX\u2019s launch comes as the Trump administration is focused on returning to the moon. While it has not released details of its plans or their cost, officials support having\u00a0NASA partner with commercial companies such as SpaceX, which are striving to make space travel far more affordable than it has been in the past.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to overstate the importance of the launch today,\u201d said Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator. \u201cI think this could end up being really the savior of NASA and deep space exploration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementCommerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a member of the reconstituted National Space Council, was\u00a0on hand Tuesday to view the launch. In an interview, he lauded SpaceX\u2019s efforts in bring back to the United States a large portion of the world market share for launches. And he said that one of the council\u2019s top priorities is \u201chow to accelerate the progress of the commercialization of space. We\u2019re moving quite aggressively to try to accomplish that.\u201dSpaceX\u2019s successful launch raises questions for NASA about how best to proceed. For years, the space agency has been working to develop the Space Launch System, an even more powerful rocket than the Falcon Heavy, but at about $1 billion per launch,\u00a0it\u00a0is many times more expensive. Ross said there is room for both systems.Advertisement\u201cSpace is a big, big thing,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementAfter the launch, SpaceX broadcast a live stream from the Roadster in space using the three cameras mounted to the vehicle. In addition to carrying a plaque with the names of 6,000 SpaceX employees, the car also transported a data storage device containing Isasac Asimov\u2019s classic Foundation science fiction trilogy.Aaron Gregg in Washington contributed to this report.An earlier headline suggested the Tesla would be going to Mars. The plan is to put the vehicle in an orbit that will take it near the planet. The post has been updated. The rocket took off from the same launchpad that first sent astronauts to the moon SpaceX successfully launches the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, as it sends a Tesla on a path near Mars",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pondering the future of the space station, as Trump reaches for the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6978",
        "date": "2018-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/26/pondering-the-future-of-the-space-station-as-trump-reaches-for-the-moon/",
        "text": "It can\u2019t stay up there forever. Space is harsh, the International Space Station is getting old and the astronauts on board are continually doing repairs. During his year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent a fair amount of time fixing the toilet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs big as a football field, the station is a marvel of engineering that\u2019s been continuously inhabited by an international cadre of astronauts since 2000 \u2014 allowing humanity to live in orbit, 250 miles up, for nearly two decades. The United States has spent nearly $100 billion on the orbiting laboratory, and has continually looked for ways to keep it flying. Under then-president Barack Obama, the life of the station was extended to 2024. And NASA has been studying whether it could continue as long as 2028. Since President Trump was elected, he has promised big plans for the United States in space. He resurrected the National Space Council, tapping Vice President Pence to lead it. The White House has talked about\u00a0returning to the moon, this time creating a permanent presence there. How and at what cost, it has not said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, there has been concerns that the administration plans to stick to Obama\u2019s timeline and stop funding for the station in 2024. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) decried the move, saying if the White House tried to do that \u201cthey\u2019re going to have a fight on their hands.\u201dBoeing, which operates the station for NASA, said that \u201cwalking away\u201d from the station \u201cwould be a mistake, threatening American leadership in space and hurting the commercial market as well as the scientific community.\u201dThe White House isn\u2019t planning to release its budget until Feb. 12, so exact details are sketchy, and the National Space Council declined to comment. But in a brief\u00a0and strongly worded statement, NASA said it is \u201ccommitted to full scientific and technical research on the orbiting laboratory, as it is the foundation on which we will extend human presence deeper into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson\u2019s concern, shared by many, is that the station\u00a0serves not just as a science lab, but as an economic engine. Companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Sierra Nevada Corp. are paid billions to fly cargo and supplies there.SpaceX and Boeing are under contracts to fly astronauts there, in test flights that could begin this year.But for all the talk about pulling support from the space station, the White House is on the record in favor of maintaining a human presence in low Earth orbit, the neighborhood that the station inhabits.In a speech in October, Pence said, \u201cThe president has charged us with laying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial, human presence in low Earth orbit.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe White House has said repeatedly that it intends to recommit the nation to space exploration, in partnership with the private sector and the international community. Some in industry have said they expect the administration to unveil a plan to involve commercial entities in a deep-space mission, aimed at the moon. And others have said there will be some sort of partnership, on the space station or not, to keep a presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementEric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said he looks \u201cforward to working with the administration on a transition plan for the station that includes the commercial sector playing a vital role.\u201dBigelow Aerospace, for example, is building expandable space habitats. One of them is even attached to the station now, as a test site. In an interview, Bob Bigelow, the company\u2019s chief executive, said he plans to launch two space habitats to low Earth orbit by 2021.Story continues below advertisementBut he\u2019s in no rush to see the space station go away anytime soon.\u201cThere\u2019s no question the ISS is a huge financial albatross around NASA\u2019s neck,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat also is a fact is, the ISS is still the only game in town that we have at the moment. So it needs to be a harmonious transition between that platform and using commercial platforms that could serve your needs better and at significantly less cost.\u201d The orbiting station serves as a laboratory in space where a rotating cast of international astronauts performs experiments. Pondering the future of the space station, as Trump reaches for the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pondering the future of the space station, as Trump reaches for the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6979",
        "date": "2018-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/26/pondering-the-future-of-the-space-station-as-trump-reaches-for-the-moon/",
        "text": "It can\u2019t stay up there forever. Space is harsh, the International Space Station is getting old and the astronauts on board are continually doing repairs. During his year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent a fair amount of time fixing the toilet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs big as a football field, the station is a marvel of engineering that\u2019s been continuously inhabited by an international cadre of astronauts since 2000 \u2014 allowing humanity to live in orbit, 250 miles up, for nearly two decades. The United States has spent nearly $100 billion on the orbiting laboratory, and has continually looked for ways to keep it flying. Under then-president Barack Obama, the life of the station was extended to 2024. And NASA has been studying whether it could continue as long as 2028. Since President Trump was elected, he has promised big plans for the United States in space. He resurrected the National Space Council, tapping Vice President Pence to lead it. The White House has talked about\u00a0returning to the moon, this time creating a permanent presence there. How and at what cost, it has not said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, there has been concerns that the administration plans to stick to Obama\u2019s timeline and stop funding for the station in 2024. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) decried the move, saying if the White House tried to do that \u201cthey\u2019re going to have a fight on their hands.\u201dBoeing, which operates the station for NASA, said that \u201cwalking away\u201d from the station \u201cwould be a mistake, threatening American leadership in space and hurting the commercial market as well as the scientific community.\u201dThe White House isn\u2019t planning to release its budget until Feb. 12, so exact details are sketchy, and the National Space Council declined to comment. But in a brief\u00a0and strongly worded statement, NASA said it is \u201ccommitted to full scientific and technical research on the orbiting laboratory, as it is the foundation on which we will extend human presence deeper into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson\u2019s concern, shared by many, is that the station\u00a0serves not just as a science lab, but as an economic engine. Companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Sierra Nevada Corp. are paid billions to fly cargo and supplies there.SpaceX and Boeing are under contracts to fly astronauts there, in test flights that could begin this year.But for all the talk about pulling support from the space station, the White House is on the record in favor of maintaining a human presence in low Earth orbit, the neighborhood that the station inhabits.In a speech in October, Pence said, \u201cThe president has charged us with laying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial, human presence in low Earth orbit.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe White House has said repeatedly that it intends to recommit the nation to space exploration, in partnership with the private sector and the international community. Some in industry have said they expect the administration to unveil a plan to involve commercial entities in a deep-space mission, aimed at the moon. And others have said there will be some sort of partnership, on the space station or not, to keep a presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementEric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said he looks \u201cforward to working with the administration on a transition plan for the station that includes the commercial sector playing a vital role.\u201dBigelow Aerospace, for example, is building expandable space habitats. One of them is even attached to the station now, as a test site. In an interview, Bob Bigelow, the company\u2019s chief executive, said he plans to launch two space habitats to low Earth orbit by 2021.Story continues below advertisementBut he\u2019s in no rush to see the space station go away anytime soon.\u201cThere\u2019s no question the ISS is a huge financial albatross around NASA\u2019s neck,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat also is a fact is, the ISS is still the only game in town that we have at the moment. So it needs to be a harmonious transition between that platform and using commercial platforms that could serve your needs better and at significantly less cost.\u201d The orbiting station serves as a laboratory in space where a rotating cast of international astronauts performs experiments. Pondering the future of the space station, as Trump reaches for the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pondering the future of the space station, as Trump reaches for the moon (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6980",
        "date": "2018-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/26/pondering-the-future-of-the-space-station-as-trump-reaches-for-the-moon/",
        "text": "It can\u2019t stay up there forever. Space is harsh, the International Space Station is getting old and the astronauts on board are continually doing repairs. During his year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly spent a fair amount of time fixing the toilet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAs big as a football field, the station is a marvel of engineering that\u2019s been continuously inhabited by an international cadre of astronauts since 2000 \u2014 allowing humanity to live in orbit, 250 miles up, for nearly two decades. The United States has spent nearly $100 billion on the orbiting laboratory, and has continually looked for ways to keep it flying. Under then-president Barack Obama, the life of the station was extended to 2024. And NASA has been studying whether it could continue as long as 2028. Since President Trump was elected, he has promised big plans for the United States in space. He resurrected the National Space Council, tapping Vice President Pence to lead it. The White House has talked about\u00a0returning to the moon, this time creating a permanent presence there. How and at what cost, it has not said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRecently, there has been concerns that the administration plans to stick to Obama\u2019s timeline and stop funding for the station in 2024. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) decried the move, saying if the White House tried to do that \u201cthey\u2019re going to have a fight on their hands.\u201dBoeing, which operates the station for NASA, said that \u201cwalking away\u201d from the station \u201cwould be a mistake, threatening American leadership in space and hurting the commercial market as well as the scientific community.\u201dThe White House isn\u2019t planning to release its budget until Feb. 12, so exact details are sketchy, and the National Space Council declined to comment. But in a brief\u00a0and strongly worded statement, NASA said it is \u201ccommitted to full scientific and technical research on the orbiting laboratory, as it is the foundation on which we will extend human presence deeper into space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNelson\u2019s concern, shared by many, is that the station\u00a0serves not just as a science lab, but as an economic engine. Companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Sierra Nevada Corp. are paid billions to fly cargo and supplies there.SpaceX and Boeing are under contracts to fly astronauts there, in test flights that could begin this year.But for all the talk about pulling support from the space station, the White House is on the record in favor of maintaining a human presence in low Earth orbit, the neighborhood that the station inhabits.In a speech in October, Pence said, \u201cThe president has charged us with laying the foundation for America to maintain a constant commercial, human presence in low Earth orbit.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe White House has said repeatedly that it intends to recommit the nation to space exploration, in partnership with the private sector and the international community. Some in industry have said they expect the administration to unveil a plan to involve commercial entities in a deep-space mission, aimed at the moon. And others have said there will be some sort of partnership, on the space station or not, to keep a presence in low Earth orbit.AdvertisementEric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said he looks \u201cforward to working with the administration on a transition plan for the station that includes the commercial sector playing a vital role.\u201dBigelow Aerospace, for example, is building expandable space habitats. One of them is even attached to the station now, as a test site. In an interview, Bob Bigelow, the company\u2019s chief executive, said he plans to launch two space habitats to low Earth orbit by 2021.Story continues below advertisementBut he\u2019s in no rush to see the space station go away anytime soon.\u201cThere\u2019s no question the ISS is a huge financial albatross around NASA\u2019s neck,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat also is a fact is, the ISS is still the only game in town that we have at the moment. So it needs to be a harmonious transition between that platform and using commercial platforms that could serve your needs better and at significantly less cost.\u201d The orbiting station serves as a laboratory in space where a rotating cast of international astronauts performs experiments. Pondering the future of the space station, as Trump reaches for the moon",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Support builds for Bridenstine to lead NASA despite past skepticism on climate change (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6981",
        "date": "2017-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/11/support-builds-for-bridenstine-to-lead-nasa-despite-past-skepticism-on-climate-change/",
        "text": "If confirmed, Jim Bridenstine would be the first NASA administrator in the post-Apollo era who wasn\u2019t yet born when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He\u2019s a politician and a Navy aviator, not a rocket scientist, whose credentials have already been criticized by Florida's two U.S. senators. And\u00a0the congressman's comments expressing skepticism about the role humans have played in climate change have sparked controversy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut in the days since President Trump announced that Bridenstine was his pick to lead the space agency, the 42-year-old conservative Republican House member\u00a0from Oklahoma has lined up some key support\u00a0from members of Congress and\u00a0industry groups.Bridenstine\u2019s nomination comes as NASA is increasingly relying on the private sector to perform tasks that were once the exclusive domain of the government. Under President George W. Bush, NASA decided to hire commercial ventures to fly cargo to the International Space Station. Under President Barack Obama, the private sector was tasked with flying astronauts there, with the first flights with human passengers coming in a year or so.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, under Trump, the growing private sector is looking to capitalize on its momentum and partner with NASA to go even farther \u2014 to the moon and deep space. And it regards Bridenstine as someone who would be good for business.\u201cNASA needs dedicated and inspired leadership, and Representative Bridenstine is an outstanding choice to provide precisely that,\u201d said S. Alan Stern, chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group representing many space companies and start-ups.The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, representing\u00a0many of the big legacy contractors, said it also welcomed the nomination, saying Bridenstine \u201chas been an active and vocal advocate for space on Capitol Hill.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut in a subsequent statement to The Washignton Post, the coalition's president, Mary Lynne Dittmar, backed away from a full endorsement, saying, \u201cWe look forward to learning more from Rep. Bridenstine during the Senate confirmation hearings.\u201dAdvertisementHis nomination is moving forward\u00a0at a pivotal time for NASA and the growing space industry. Under contracts with the agency, SpaceX and Boeing are set to fly astronauts to the space station, restoring human spaceflight from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. NASA also is preparing\u00a0to launch its massive Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule in the coming years.NASA is poised to ask the private sector for proposals to develop a lunar lander that could take\u00a0experiments and cargo to the surface of the moon, with flights starting as early as 2018. Bridenstine, who serves in the Navy Reserve, has advocated a return to the moon, writing in a blog post last year that \u201cfrom the discovery of water ice on the moon until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines, with occasional manned missions for science and maintenance.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt a recent congressional hearing, Jason Crusan, the director of NASA\u2019s division of advanced exploration systems, said the solicitation for lunar landers shows the agency\u2019s \u201cgrowing confidence in the commercial industry.\u201dAdvertisementMany in\u00a0Congress\u00a0agree.\u201cNot only can space involve the private sector, it must involve the private sector,\u201d said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House Science subcommittee on space.In addition to backing work with younger, entrepreneurial firms, Bridenstine has also voiced his support for the traditional industrial base, made up of behemoths such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. They want to ensure that programs such as the Space Launch System, the massive rocket being developed by NASA, and the Orion crew capsule continue, even though they\u2019ve been criticized\u00a0for being well over budget and behind schedule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not 'or.' It\u2019s 'and,' \u201d said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. \u201cIt\u2019s the notion that you can have the traditional approach and you can have this newer commercial approach, and both could yield great benefits to the agency. Bridenstine understands as well as anyone the capabilities that are offered by both of these sectors.\u201dAdvertisementMike Gold, the chairman of a commercial space advisory committee for the Federal Aviation Administration, said that Bridenstine would be able to unite\u00a0the industry with \u201chis support for a diverse array of activities such as deep-space exploration, private-sector partnerships, Earth science and technology development.\u201dBut Bridenstine sparked controversy when he demanded during a House floor speech that Obama apologize for spending more on climate-change research than weather forecasting. He also said that global temperatures \u201cstopped rising 10 years ago,\u201d which isn\u2019t true.Story continues below advertisementThose comments could haunt him in his Senate confirmation hearing and have already made him a target.\u201cClimate change due to global warming is one of the greatest threats facing us as a species,\u201d science blogger Phil Plait wrote recently.\u00a0\u201cThe leader of the world\u2019s premier space agency should at the very bare minimum be willing to admit it exists.\u201dAdvertisementSupporters say that his views have evolved and that he is not a climate-change denier. As a representative from a state that is often battered by tornadoes, he is passionate about ensuring that Earth-science efforts are robust and well funded, they say.He also has been criticized by Sens. Marco Rubio\u00a0(R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, who told Politico that NASA should not be run by a politician.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics, and it\u2019s at a critical juncture in its history,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cI would hate to see an administrator held up \u2014 on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes or statements made in the past \u2014 because the agency can\u2019t afford it and it can\u2019t afford the controversy.\u201dBut Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat who serves with Bridenstine on the House Science Committee, called him a \u201ca no-nonsense straight shooter when it comes to space exploration and weather issues.\u201dHe said he planned \u201cto speak up to my friends over in the Senate to let them know I think he\u2019d be a good administrator. He\u2019s someone who listens closely and has a strong mind, and I think will be good leader.\u201d Several space industry groups signal their support.   Support builds for Bridenstine to lead NASA despite past skepticism on climate change",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Support builds for Bridenstine to lead NASA despite past skepticism on climate change (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6982",
        "date": "2017-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/11/support-builds-for-bridenstine-to-lead-nasa-despite-past-skepticism-on-climate-change/",
        "text": "If confirmed, Jim Bridenstine would be the first NASA administrator in the post-Apollo era who wasn\u2019t yet born when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He\u2019s a politician and a Navy aviator, not a rocket scientist, whose credentials have already been criticized by Florida's two U.S. senators. And\u00a0the congressman's comments expressing skepticism about the role humans have played in climate change have sparked controversy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut in the days since President Trump announced that Bridenstine was his pick to lead the space agency, the 42-year-old conservative Republican House member\u00a0from Oklahoma has lined up some key support\u00a0from members of Congress and\u00a0industry groups.Bridenstine\u2019s nomination comes as NASA is increasingly relying on the private sector to perform tasks that were once the exclusive domain of the government. Under President George W. Bush, NASA decided to hire commercial ventures to fly cargo to the International Space Station. Under President Barack Obama, the private sector was tasked with flying astronauts there, with the first flights with human passengers coming in a year or so.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, under Trump, the growing private sector is looking to capitalize on its momentum and partner with NASA to go even farther \u2014 to the moon and deep space. And it regards Bridenstine as someone who would be good for business.\u201cNASA needs dedicated and inspired leadership, and Representative Bridenstine is an outstanding choice to provide precisely that,\u201d said S. Alan Stern, chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group representing many space companies and start-ups.The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, representing\u00a0many of the big legacy contractors, said it also welcomed the nomination, saying Bridenstine \u201chas been an active and vocal advocate for space on Capitol Hill.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut in a subsequent statement to The Washignton Post, the coalition's president, Mary Lynne Dittmar, backed away from a full endorsement, saying, \u201cWe look forward to learning more from Rep. Bridenstine during the Senate confirmation hearings.\u201dAdvertisementHis nomination is moving forward\u00a0at a pivotal time for NASA and the growing space industry. Under contracts with the agency, SpaceX and Boeing are set to fly astronauts to the space station, restoring human spaceflight from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. NASA also is preparing\u00a0to launch its massive Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule in the coming years.NASA is poised to ask the private sector for proposals to develop a lunar lander that could take\u00a0experiments and cargo to the surface of the moon, with flights starting as early as 2018. Bridenstine, who serves in the Navy Reserve, has advocated a return to the moon, writing in a blog post last year that \u201cfrom the discovery of water ice on the moon until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines, with occasional manned missions for science and maintenance.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt a recent congressional hearing, Jason Crusan, the director of NASA\u2019s division of advanced exploration systems, said the solicitation for lunar landers shows the agency\u2019s \u201cgrowing confidence in the commercial industry.\u201dAdvertisementMany in\u00a0Congress\u00a0agree.\u201cNot only can space involve the private sector, it must involve the private sector,\u201d said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House Science subcommittee on space.In addition to backing work with younger, entrepreneurial firms, Bridenstine has also voiced his support for the traditional industrial base, made up of behemoths such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. They want to ensure that programs such as the Space Launch System, the massive rocket being developed by NASA, and the Orion crew capsule continue, even though they\u2019ve been criticized\u00a0for being well over budget and behind schedule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not 'or.' It\u2019s 'and,' \u201d said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. \u201cIt\u2019s the notion that you can have the traditional approach and you can have this newer commercial approach, and both could yield great benefits to the agency. Bridenstine understands as well as anyone the capabilities that are offered by both of these sectors.\u201dAdvertisementMike Gold, the chairman of a commercial space advisory committee for the Federal Aviation Administration, said that Bridenstine would be able to unite\u00a0the industry with \u201chis support for a diverse array of activities such as deep-space exploration, private-sector partnerships, Earth science and technology development.\u201dBut Bridenstine sparked controversy when he demanded during a House floor speech that Obama apologize for spending more on climate-change research than weather forecasting. He also said that global temperatures \u201cstopped rising 10 years ago,\u201d which isn\u2019t true.Story continues below advertisementThose comments could haunt him in his Senate confirmation hearing and have already made him a target.\u201cClimate change due to global warming is one of the greatest threats facing us as a species,\u201d science blogger Phil Plait wrote recently.\u00a0\u201cThe leader of the world\u2019s premier space agency should at the very bare minimum be willing to admit it exists.\u201dAdvertisementSupporters say that his views have evolved and that he is not a climate-change denier. As a representative from a state that is often battered by tornadoes, he is passionate about ensuring that Earth-science efforts are robust and well funded, they say.He also has been criticized by Sens. Marco Rubio\u00a0(R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, who told Politico that NASA should not be run by a politician.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics, and it\u2019s at a critical juncture in its history,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cI would hate to see an administrator held up \u2014 on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes or statements made in the past \u2014 because the agency can\u2019t afford it and it can\u2019t afford the controversy.\u201dBut Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat who serves with Bridenstine on the House Science Committee, called him a \u201ca no-nonsense straight shooter when it comes to space exploration and weather issues.\u201dHe said he planned \u201cto speak up to my friends over in the Senate to let them know I think he\u2019d be a good administrator. He\u2019s someone who listens closely and has a strong mind, and I think will be good leader.\u201d Several space industry groups signal their support.   Support builds for Bridenstine to lead NASA despite past skepticism on climate change",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Support builds for Bridenstine to lead NASA despite past skepticism on climate change (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6983",
        "date": "2017-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/09/11/support-builds-for-bridenstine-to-lead-nasa-despite-past-skepticism-on-climate-change/",
        "text": "If confirmed, Jim Bridenstine would be the first NASA administrator in the post-Apollo era who wasn\u2019t yet born when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He\u2019s a politician and a Navy aviator, not a rocket scientist, whose credentials have already been criticized by Florida's two U.S. senators. And\u00a0the congressman's comments expressing skepticism about the role humans have played in climate change have sparked controversy. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut in the days since President Trump announced that Bridenstine was his pick to lead the space agency, the 42-year-old conservative Republican House member\u00a0from Oklahoma has lined up some key support\u00a0from members of Congress and\u00a0industry groups.Bridenstine\u2019s nomination comes as NASA is increasingly relying on the private sector to perform tasks that were once the exclusive domain of the government. Under President George W. Bush, NASA decided to hire commercial ventures to fly cargo to the International Space Station. Under President Barack Obama, the private sector was tasked with flying astronauts there, with the first flights with human passengers coming in a year or so.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, under Trump, the growing private sector is looking to capitalize on its momentum and partner with NASA to go even farther \u2014 to the moon and deep space. And it regards Bridenstine as someone who would be good for business.\u201cNASA needs dedicated and inspired leadership, and Representative Bridenstine is an outstanding choice to provide precisely that,\u201d said S. Alan Stern, chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group representing many space companies and start-ups.The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, representing\u00a0many of the big legacy contractors, said it also welcomed the nomination, saying Bridenstine \u201chas been an active and vocal advocate for space on Capitol Hill.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut in a subsequent statement to The Washignton Post, the coalition's president, Mary Lynne Dittmar, backed away from a full endorsement, saying, \u201cWe look forward to learning more from Rep. Bridenstine during the Senate confirmation hearings.\u201dAdvertisementHis nomination is moving forward\u00a0at a pivotal time for NASA and the growing space industry. Under contracts with the agency, SpaceX and Boeing are set to fly astronauts to the space station, restoring human spaceflight from United States soil for the first time since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. NASA also is preparing\u00a0to launch its massive Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule in the coming years.NASA is poised to ask the private sector for proposals to develop a lunar lander that could take\u00a0experiments and cargo to the surface of the moon, with flights starting as early as 2018. Bridenstine, who serves in the Navy Reserve, has advocated a return to the moon, writing in a blog post last year that \u201cfrom the discovery of water ice on the moon until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines, with occasional manned missions for science and maintenance.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt a recent congressional hearing, Jason Crusan, the director of NASA\u2019s division of advanced exploration systems, said the solicitation for lunar landers shows the agency\u2019s \u201cgrowing confidence in the commercial industry.\u201dAdvertisementMany in\u00a0Congress\u00a0agree.\u201cNot only can space involve the private sector, it must involve the private sector,\u201d said Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.), the chairman of the House Science subcommittee on space.In addition to backing work with younger, entrepreneurial firms, Bridenstine has also voiced his support for the traditional industrial base, made up of behemoths such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing. They want to ensure that programs such as the Space Launch System, the massive rocket being developed by NASA, and the Orion crew capsule continue, even though they\u2019ve been criticized\u00a0for being well over budget and behind schedule.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s not 'or.' It\u2019s 'and,' \u201d said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. \u201cIt\u2019s the notion that you can have the traditional approach and you can have this newer commercial approach, and both could yield great benefits to the agency. Bridenstine understands as well as anyone the capabilities that are offered by both of these sectors.\u201dAdvertisementMike Gold, the chairman of a commercial space advisory committee for the Federal Aviation Administration, said that Bridenstine would be able to unite\u00a0the industry with \u201chis support for a diverse array of activities such as deep-space exploration, private-sector partnerships, Earth science and technology development.\u201dBut Bridenstine sparked controversy when he demanded during a House floor speech that Obama apologize for spending more on climate-change research than weather forecasting. He also said that global temperatures \u201cstopped rising 10 years ago,\u201d which isn\u2019t true.Story continues below advertisementThose comments could haunt him in his Senate confirmation hearing and have already made him a target.\u201cClimate change due to global warming is one of the greatest threats facing us as a species,\u201d science blogger Phil Plait wrote recently.\u00a0\u201cThe leader of the world\u2019s premier space agency should at the very bare minimum be willing to admit it exists.\u201dAdvertisementSupporters say that his views have evolved and that he is not a climate-change denier. As a representative from a state that is often battered by tornadoes, he is passionate about ensuring that Earth-science efforts are robust and well funded, they say.He also has been criticized by Sens. Marco Rubio\u00a0(R) and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida, who told Politico that NASA should not be run by a politician.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the one federal mission which has largely been free of politics, and it\u2019s at a critical juncture in its history,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cI would hate to see an administrator held up \u2014 on [grounds of] partisanship, political arguments, past votes or statements made in the past \u2014 because the agency can\u2019t afford it and it can\u2019t afford the controversy.\u201dBut Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Colorado Democrat who serves with Bridenstine on the House Science Committee, called him a \u201ca no-nonsense straight shooter when it comes to space exploration and weather issues.\u201dHe said he planned \u201cto speak up to my friends over in the Senate to let them know I think he\u2019d be a good administrator. He\u2019s someone who listens closely and has a strong mind, and I think will be good leader.\u201d Several space industry groups signal their support.   Support builds for Bridenstine to lead NASA despite past skepticism on climate change",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX makes history by launching a \u2018flight-proven\u2019 rocket (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6984",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/30/elon-musks-spacex-makes-history-by-launching-a-flight-proven-rocket/",
        "text": "From a distance, it looked like any other rocket at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, a soaring tower of thrust and power, ready to blast off into orbit. Upon closer inspection, though, there were signs of\u00a0something different about this rocket.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Falcon 9\u2019s first-stage booster was not as clean and shiny as they usually are. It was just a touch dull, showing, ever so slightly, the scorched wear from its first launch, almost a year ago \u2014 a \u201cflight-proven\u201d rocket, as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX likes to call it. On Thursday evening, almost one year after it had previously flown the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX launched it again. The launch, at 6:27 p.m., marked the first time that a rocket had flown a payload to orbit, landed vertically and then been\u00a0reused. The flight\u00a0signaled an important landmark, capping years of work and some fiery theatrics of boosters screaming back from space only to explode in failed attempts to land on ships at sea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn December 2015, SpaceX was able to land its first rocket on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. A\u00a0few months later, the company did it again, this time at sea. Since then, it has made landing rockets as exciting \u2014 or more so \u2014 than the 3-2-1, bone-rattling liftoffs of fire and smoke that have reignited interest in space exploration.After the successful launch, an emotional Musk called it \u201can incredible milestone in the history of space.\u201dOnce aloft, the Falcon 9 boosters perform a bit of aerial acrobatics, turning around and then flying back to Earth. Guided by computer algorithms and GPS navigation, they make their way through the clouds to their target, slowing down by firing their engines again until they touch down softly, with remarkable, near bull\u2019s-eye precision.Story continues below advertisementThose feats are meant to serve a higher purpose than entertaining the company\u2019s growing and at times rabid fan base, which treats launches like groupies do rock concerts. The real goal is to dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight, making it accessible as the company pursues its ultimate goal of reaching Mars.AdvertisementThat has taken a lot of ingenuity \u2014 and computing power.Up until recently, the first stages of rockets were traditionally discarded, lost\u00a0in the ocean after providing the initial power to escape Earth\u2019s gravity.\u00a0But to entrepreneurs like Musk, that is an incredible waste \u2014 like throwing away an airplane after every use. The technology has also been pursued by Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company, which has flown the same New Shepard booster past the edge of space five times. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not one-way-trip-to-Mars people. We want to make sure that whoever we take can come back. And from that perspective, you have to have a reusable system,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president, said during the company\u2019s live broadcast before the launch. \u201cWe\u2019re really looking for true operational reusability, like an aircraft.\u201dAdvertisementThursday\u2019s flight was the first time a rocket designed to deliver a payload to orbit \u2014 a more difficult feat than Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital flights \u2014 had been launched anew. It came during a mission to deliver a commercial satellite for SES, a Luxembourg-based satellite operations company, to what\u2019s known as geostationary orbit, more than 22,000 miles high.\u201cWhat SpaceX did today is a historic accomplishment,\u201d said Alan Stern, a former NASA executive and chairman of the board of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. \u201cThey are transforming the future of space exploration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMartin Halliwell, SES\u2019s chief technology officer, said the company had no concerns about\u00a0putting its satellite, which would help beam high-definition television to parts of Mexico and South America, on a used rocket. The company thoroughly vetted the rocket along with SpaceX, which spent months examining and testing it ahead of the launch, he said.AdvertisementAnd it looked good for a rocket that\u2019s been flown before, Halliwell\u00a0said. Any wear and tear were signs of pride.\u201cIt hasn\u2019t been repainted,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe Elon specifically didn\u2019t want it repainted. . . . It doesn\u2019t look all scruffy and scorched and sooty. It looks pretty good.\u201dSeveral minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 flew back to Earth, touching down yet again. Halliwell said the company has contracted SpaceX for four more flights this year. He said the company is considering flying at least two of those on \u201cflight-proven\u201d rockets. The launch from Kennedy Space Center marks the first time a rocket delivered a payload to orbit, landed and then launched again Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX makes history by launching a \u2018flight-proven\u2019 rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX makes history by launching a \u2018flight-proven\u2019 rocket (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6985",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/30/elon-musks-spacex-makes-history-by-launching-a-flight-proven-rocket/",
        "text": "From a distance, it looked like any other rocket at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center, a soaring tower of thrust and power, ready to blast off into orbit. Upon closer inspection, though, there were signs of\u00a0something different about this rocket.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Falcon 9\u2019s first-stage booster was not as clean and shiny as they usually are. It was just a touch dull, showing, ever so slightly, the scorched wear from its first launch, almost a year ago \u2014 a \u201cflight-proven\u201d rocket, as Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX likes to call it. On Thursday evening, almost one year after it had previously flown the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX launched it again. The launch, at 6:27 p.m., marked the first time that a rocket had flown a payload to orbit, landed vertically and then been\u00a0reused. The flight\u00a0signaled an important landmark, capping years of work and some fiery theatrics of boosters screaming back from space only to explode in failed attempts to land on ships at sea.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn December 2015, SpaceX was able to land its first rocket on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. A\u00a0few months later, the company did it again, this time at sea. Since then, it has made landing rockets as exciting \u2014 or more so \u2014 than the 3-2-1, bone-rattling liftoffs of fire and smoke that have reignited interest in space exploration.After the successful launch, an emotional Musk called it \u201can incredible milestone in the history of space.\u201dOnce aloft, the Falcon 9 boosters perform a bit of aerial acrobatics, turning around and then flying back to Earth. Guided by computer algorithms and GPS navigation, they make their way through the clouds to their target, slowing down by firing their engines again until they touch down softly, with remarkable, near bull\u2019s-eye precision.Story continues below advertisementThose feats are meant to serve a higher purpose than entertaining the company\u2019s growing and at times rabid fan base, which treats launches like groupies do rock concerts. The real goal is to dramatically lower the cost of spaceflight, making it accessible as the company pursues its ultimate goal of reaching Mars.AdvertisementThat has taken a lot of ingenuity \u2014 and computing power.Up until recently, the first stages of rockets were traditionally discarded, lost\u00a0in the ocean after providing the initial power to escape Earth\u2019s gravity.\u00a0But to entrepreneurs like Musk, that is an incredible waste \u2014 like throwing away an airplane after every use. The technology has also been pursued by Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space company, which has flown the same New Shepard booster past the edge of space five times. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re not one-way-trip-to-Mars people. We want to make sure that whoever we take can come back. And from that perspective, you have to have a reusable system,\u201d Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX\u2019s president, said during the company\u2019s live broadcast before the launch. \u201cWe\u2019re really looking for true operational reusability, like an aircraft.\u201dAdvertisementThursday\u2019s flight was the first time a rocket designed to deliver a payload to orbit \u2014 a more difficult feat than Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital flights \u2014 had been launched anew. It came during a mission to deliver a commercial satellite for SES, a Luxembourg-based satellite operations company, to what\u2019s known as geostationary orbit, more than 22,000 miles high.\u201cWhat SpaceX did today is a historic accomplishment,\u201d said Alan Stern, a former NASA executive and chairman of the board of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. \u201cThey are transforming the future of space exploration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementMartin Halliwell, SES\u2019s chief technology officer, said the company had no concerns about\u00a0putting its satellite, which would help beam high-definition television to parts of Mexico and South America, on a used rocket. The company thoroughly vetted the rocket along with SpaceX, which spent months examining and testing it ahead of the launch, he said.AdvertisementAnd it looked good for a rocket that\u2019s been flown before, Halliwell\u00a0said. Any wear and tear were signs of pride.\u201cIt hasn\u2019t been repainted,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe Elon specifically didn\u2019t want it repainted. . . . It doesn\u2019t look all scruffy and scorched and sooty. It looks pretty good.\u201dSeveral minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9 flew back to Earth, touching down yet again. Halliwell said the company has contracted SpaceX for four more flights this year. He said the company is considering flying at least two of those on \u201cflight-proven\u201d rockets. The launch from Kennedy Space Center marks the first time a rocket delivered a payload to orbit, landed and then launched again Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX makes history by launching a \u2018flight-proven\u2019 rocket",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Democrats opposed, Trump\u2019s NASA pick gets political (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6986",
        "date": "2018-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/18/with-democrats-opposed-trumps-nasa-pick-gets-political/",
        "text": "Despite strong opposition from Democrats, the White House and congressional Republicans are\u00a0pushing\u00a0President Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, who on Thursday again was approved by a Senate committee by a narrow, party-line vote.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLast year, Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, squeaked through committee, but his nomination was never brought to\u00a0the\u00a0Senate floor for a vote. The White House recently renominated him,\u00a0forcing the second vote by\u00a0the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which approved his nomination, 14-13. Shortly before the vote, Bridenstine released a statement saying that he would host Bill Nye the chief executive office of the Planetary Society, to the State of the Union address later this month. In the statement, Nye, also known as \u201cthe Science Guy,\u201d stopped short of endorsing Bridenstine but said he was pleased to be his guest and that he hoped Trump would \u201cpresent plans for an ambitious, science-driven space exploration agenda.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe announcement appeared to be an attempt by Bridenstine to counter accusations by Democrats that he is a climate-change denier, and wouldn't value NASA's science mission \u2014 claims he has denied. Sen. Bill Nelson, the influential Democrat from Florida, led the charge against Bridenstine, saying he lacked the credentials to lead the space agency.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate professional who is technically and scientifically competent and a skilled executive,\u201d he said during the confirmation hearing last year. \u201cMore importantly, the administrator must be a leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration.\u201dHe added: \u201cFrankly, Congressman Bridenstine, I cannot see how you meet these criteria.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, said he thought there was a \u201cvery high\u201d chance that Bridenstine would soon be confirmed and that he thought Bridenstine would be \u201ca very good administrator.\u201dWith Vice President Pence leading a reconstituted National Space Council, he said that Bridenstine was the right guy to be able to help NASA on its mission to go back to the moon in partnership with the private sector.\u201cYou need to have someone who is going to be a pretty aggressive leader, someone who is going to insist on real changes,\u201d he said. He also said that Bridenstine would be an effective \u201ccheerleader, who can get the American people engaged. If they are excited, then Congress will be excited.\u201d Bill Nye \u201cthe Science Guy\u201d will accompany Bridenstine to Trump's State of the Union address. With Democrats opposed, Trump\u2019s NASA pick gets political",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "With Democrats opposed, Trump\u2019s NASA pick gets political (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6987",
        "date": "2018-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/18/with-democrats-opposed-trumps-nasa-pick-gets-political/",
        "text": "Despite strong opposition from Democrats, the White House and congressional Republicans are\u00a0pushing\u00a0President Trump\u2019s nominee for NASA administrator, who on Thursday again was approved by a Senate committee by a narrow, party-line vote.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLast year, Rep. Jim Bridenstine, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, squeaked through committee, but his nomination was never brought to\u00a0the\u00a0Senate floor for a vote. The White House recently renominated him,\u00a0forcing the second vote by\u00a0the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which approved his nomination, 14-13. Shortly before the vote, Bridenstine released a statement saying that he would host Bill Nye the chief executive office of the Planetary Society, to the State of the Union address later this month. In the statement, Nye, also known as \u201cthe Science Guy,\u201d stopped short of endorsing Bridenstine but said he was pleased to be his guest and that he hoped Trump would \u201cpresent plans for an ambitious, science-driven space exploration agenda.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe announcement appeared to be an attempt by Bridenstine to counter accusations by Democrats that he is a climate-change denier, and wouldn't value NASA's science mission \u2014 claims he has denied. Sen. Bill Nelson, the influential Democrat from Florida, led the charge against Bridenstine, saying he lacked the credentials to lead the space agency.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate professional who is technically and scientifically competent and a skilled executive,\u201d he said during the confirmation hearing last year. \u201cMore importantly, the administrator must be a leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration.\u201dHe added: \u201cFrankly, Congressman Bridenstine, I cannot see how you meet these criteria.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn an interview, Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, said he thought there was a \u201cvery high\u201d chance that Bridenstine would soon be confirmed and that he thought Bridenstine would be \u201ca very good administrator.\u201dWith Vice President Pence leading a reconstituted National Space Council, he said that Bridenstine was the right guy to be able to help NASA on its mission to go back to the moon in partnership with the private sector.\u201cYou need to have someone who is going to be a pretty aggressive leader, someone who is going to insist on real changes,\u201d he said. He also said that Bridenstine would be an effective \u201ccheerleader, who can get the American people engaged. If they are excited, then Congress will be excited.\u201d Bill Nye \u201cthe Science Guy\u201d will accompany Bridenstine to Trump's State of the Union address. With Democrats opposed, Trump\u2019s NASA pick gets political",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apple, Google take reputation ding among consumers for lackluster products in new poll (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6988",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/14/apple-google-take-reputation-ding-among-consumers-for-lackluster-products-in-new-poll/",
        "text": "Consumers have lost some faith in Apple and Google products, according to an annual survey that looks at how average Americans view the 100 most talked-about\u00a0brands.The reputations of the two tech giants both took a significant hit this year,\u00a0falling out of the top\u00a020 for the first time since 2009, according to the poll by market research company Harris Insights. Apple\u00a0dropped from second place to 29th place; Google moved from eighth place to 28th. Neither firm appeared on\u00a0the poll's list for best \u201cproducts and services\u201d either, though Amazon.com, LG Electronics and Microsoft did. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe poll\u00a0asked\u00a0survey participants\u00a0two open-ended questions: Which companies did they think had the best reputations last year? And which had the worst? The firm then took the 100 most-mentioned companies and asked more than 25,000 consumers\u00a0how they view each brand on a variety of criteria including social responsibility and financial performance.Apple\u2019s latest acquisition will let it distribute magazines like the Atlantic and Bon App\u00e9titOverall, Amazon took the top spot for the third year in a row (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post). The list covers a\u00a0variety of industries. This year, air bag manufacturer Takata rounded out the bottom, just below the Weinstein Company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA slip in reputation doesn't necessarily spell doom for a company said David Schweidel, a professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. (Apple, for example, recently hit a record high on the stock market in its pursuit of a trillion-dollar market cap.)\u00a0Still, he said, the poll gets a sample of consumer sentiment that can be otherwise hard to measure. Those views can be valuable when taken into account with other surveys and story lines about the companies, such as the perception that Apple is losing its innovative touch.New federal rules on Facebook and Google ads may not be in place for 2018 midtermsJohn Gerzema, chief executive\u00a0of Harris Insights,\u00a0attributed Apple's and Google's slide to a failure to\u00a0deliver big products that fit into people's everyday lives.\u00a0Consumer sentiment toward companies is often cyclical, he said, and\u00a0for tech it is closely tied to what products come out that year. While Apple and Google released many products, including Apple's iPhone X and Google's Home Mini and Home Max, the poll indicates those\u00a0gadgets didn't seem to resonate with\u00a0the average person.\u201cThe story for me this year is that tech has got to provide utility and be tangible,\u201d Gerzema said.\u00a0 \u201cApple had a down year on innovation \u2014 from the Apple Watch to\u00a0a really expensive X phone for $1,000.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApple and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the rankings.Why billionaires keep pouring money into the space industryOverall, the index showed that consumers\u00a0appeared to\u00a0favor\u00a0firms that are making bold statements about their values and engaging in public conversations. Two companies that have\u00a0been\u00a0public\u00a0about\u00a0their\u00a0policy views\u00a0made the top 10 this year: outerwear company Patagonia, which sued President Trump over his cuts to the Bears Ears National Park, and fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, which took a stand against gay marriage. Gerzema said that another brand on the upswing this year, Tesla,\u00a0was\u00a0probably bolstered by the innovative reputation of its outspoken\u00a0founder, Elon Musk, and its association with Musk's company SpaceX, which has worked with the government to jump-start space exploration.Consumers are increasingly drawn to companies that are \u201cstepping into this bit of dysfunction in government and paralysis,\u201d\u00a0Gerzema said. \u201cThat\u2019s a big opportunity for the tech companies to go to that place.\u201d LG, Microsoft and Amazon all made the list of companies that Americans think make the best products and services. Apple and Google did not.  Apple, Google take reputation ding among consumers for lackluster products in new poll",
        "author": "Hayley Tsukayama"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump administration pick to run NASA to finally get a vote (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6989",
        "date": "2018-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/17/trump-administration-pick-to-run-nasa-to-finally-get-a-vote/",
        "text": "COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 After languishing in the Senate for months, Trump\u2019s nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine to run NASA looks as though\u00a0it will finally get a vote as early as this week.The\u00a0signal by the Senate to move forward with the nomination of the conservative Republican from Oklahoma who had sparked controversy with comments about climate change, implies that the chamber\u2019s leadership believes it has enough votes to approve him. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space agency has gone without a permanent leader for 15 months, since Charles Bolden resigned as Trump took office. During that time, Robert Lightfoot, a NASA veteran, has been running the agency. But he recently announced that he was retiring from the agency at the end of this month.Story continues below advertisementIn an interview here, Lightfoot said that the \u201cperiod of uncertainty is hard\u201d and that \u201cit\u2019s always better when the president\u2019s appointees are running the agencies.\u201dAdvertisementBut he stressed that even though he was in the job on an acting basis, \u201cI have had zero problems with getting access to the White House.\u201d And he has been praised by members of the administration and the White House for leading the agency while Bridenstine\u2019s nomination was on hold.During a speech at the National Space Symposium here Monday, Vice President Pence thanked Lightfoot and said, \u201cWe\u2019re hopeful very soon that those big shoes will be filled.\u201d He praised Bridenstine as \u201ca great champion of the men and women at NASA and a great champion of the president\u2019s vision for NASA, and for American leadership in space.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBridenstine is a former naval aviator who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum before coming to Congress in 2013. An avid supporter of space exploration, he sponsored the American Space Renaissance Act, a wide-ranging bill that touched on national security, how best to deal with debris in space, and how to regulate the commercial space industry.AdvertisementBut his nomination ran immediately into resistance from Democrats, who said he was unfit for the post. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) led the effort, accusing him of being a climate change denier who lacked the necessary leadership experience.\u201cThe NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional, who is technically and scientifically competent and a skilled executive,\u201d\u00a0Nelson said during Bridenstine\u2019s confirmation hearing last year. \u201cMore importantly, the administrator must be a leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe added: \u201cFrankly, Congressman Bridenstine, I cannot see how you meet these criteria.\u201dBridenstine, who was endorsed by Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, had said that his views had evolved and that he \u201cabsolutely\u201d believed in climate change. If confirmed, Bridenstine said he would \u201clook forward to promoting the scientific community\u2019s priorities.\u201dHis nomination comes at a critical time for the agency, which is preparing to return to the moon, and to restore human spaceflight from United States soil, a capability that was lost when the space shuttle program was retired in 2011. Jim Bridenstine, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, could be confirmed as soon as this week. Trump administration pick to run NASA to finally get a vote",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Amazon might want a deal with Dish (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6990",
        "date": "2017-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/07/07/why-amazon-might-want-a-deal-with-dish/",
        "text": "Amazon is\u00a0exploring a partnership with Dish Network, the satellite TV company, in a bid to enter the wireless business together, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.The potential tie-up could give Amazon access to a whole new range of capabilities, according to the Journal, from selling cellphone service to Prime members to giving\u00a0Amazon's package delivery drones more connectivity in the air. For Dish, a partnership with one of the world's largest retailers could prove extremely lucrative and give chief executive Charlie Ergen something to do with the massive stockpile of airwaves he's sitting on. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDish declined to comment on the matter. Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.Story continues below advertisementSome analysts said a consumer cellphone service was less likely than a partnership to ferry information across networks of smart devices\u00a0or AI assistants like Amazon Alexa \u2014 part of a growing \"Internet of Things.\"Advertisement\"It\u2019s been clear for years now that building another consumer-grade wireless network is likely to be prohibitively expensive,\" said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research. \"But building a more specialized IoT network with much more limited bandwidth requirements is at least a little more feasible.\"Ergen and Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos (who also owns The Washington Post) have grown increasingly close over the past year as they've discussed common interests in space and robotics, the Journal said. Bezos manages a separate space exploration company, Blue Origin.Story continues below advertisementErgen, a billionaire media mogul, has been described as a potential kingmaker\u00a0in a flurry of deals that analysts say\u00a0could be announced in the coming months. With\u00a0tens of billions of dollars' worth of spectrum\u00a0under his company's control, Ergen has the potential to make or break the wireless aspirations of numerous companies. That includes those in the traditional telecom and cable industries, of course, but now, according to the Journal, also those in the Internet\u00a0market.AdvertisementAs more Americans shift to mobile Internet and to\u00a0smart, Web-connected appliances for everyday tasks, companies in Silicon Valley have begun casting their gaze toward wireless technology, as well.\u00a0Even Alphabet, whose Google Fiber unit seeks to provide\u00a0an alternative to\u00a0firms such as Comcast and Verizon, has shifted from laying physical broadband cables in favor of exploring a high-speed wireless Internet\u00a0service.So in the grand scheme of things,\u00a0it makes sense that Amazon \u2014 with its expansive mission to create an online marketplace for almost anything \u2014 may be thinking about wireless connectivity, too.\"Given its scale and ambitions, Amazon has the luxury of not needing a detailed blueprint for a Dish deal to make a lot of sense,\" said Paul Gallant, an analyst at Cowen & Co. It makes total sense that Amazon is thinking about wireless. Why Amazon might want a deal with Dish",
        "author": "Brian Fung"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is what Elon Musk\u2019s mysterious digging tweets are about (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6991",
        "date": "2017-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/28/this-is-what-elon-musks-mysterious-digging-tweets-are-about/",
        "text": "LOS ANGELES -- Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has broken ground on an\u00a0underground tunnel he plans to burrow beneath the city of Los Angeles to spare himself from having to sit in traffic.He's also about to purchase a large earth drilling machine to continue the tunnel, which was\u00a0started on his companies' properties in Hawthorne, CA, according to a person familiar with his thinking. Elon Musk is chief executive of the space transportation company SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla Motors, which are located on sprawling adjacent properties in Hawthorne. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe drilling is just a hobby; Musk is not planning to start a new tunneling company, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details\u00a0have not been made public. The person addedStory continues below advertisementThe idea was first hatched by Musk in December, who tweeted, \"Traffic is driving me nuts\" and \"am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.\" He said it would start beneath his desk at SpaceX.AdvertisementThe tweet gave rise to a flurry of speculation, which was further fueled on Wednesday, when Musk tweeted again that he had made \"exciting progress.\" Then, late Friday night, on the eve of a large student competition being held at SpaceX, Musk tweeted \"we start digging the tunnel tonight.\"It was unclear whether Musk had applied for legal permits to begin his digging. Apparently digging, even on one's own property, is not always allowed.Story continues below advertisementDrilling underneath public property requires a variety of permits, which are issued locally in California.The City of Hawthorne could not be reached for comment.The engineering competition was for the best design for a pod to go through a hyperloop, a vacuum tube that can propel vehicles at very high speeds. Musk proposed the idea of building a hyperloop two years ago, in a white paper that inspired entrepreneurs to build hyperloop companies and engineering students around the world to compete to build one. This man really hates traffic. This is what Elon Musk\u2019s mysterious digging tweets are about",
        "author": "Elizabeth Dwoskin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden can\u2019t fix the chip shortage anytime soon. Here\u2019s why. (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "6992",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/01/semiconductor-shortage-halts-auto-factories/",
        "text": "Semiconductor executive Tom Caulfield knew a crisis was brewing when he started getting frantic calls from big automakers just before Christmas.\u201cTom, you\u2019re killing me. You need to make more,\u201d Caulfield, the chief executive of chipmaker GlobalFoundries, recalls the auto executives saying. \u201cFord, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler-Benz, Fiat Chrysler, GM \u2014 every one of them became my new best friends.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Santa Clara, Calif.-headquartered company did its best to ramp up production for car manufacturers at its three big factories in the United States, Germany and Singapore, Caulfield said in an interview. But its efforts alone couldn\u2019t fix a supply problem that had been building for months as an unprecedented surge of demand far outstripped supplies across the globe, leaving manufacturers of all kinds in the lurch.What you need to know about the global chip shortageThe shortages have forced General Motors and Ford to slash production in three states as well as in Canada and Mexico, threatening jobs at the auto companies and their suppliers. The White House has already leaned on big chip producers and their host nations, including Taiwan, to increase output, but on Friday, governors from eight states urged President Biden to \u201credouble those efforts,\u201d warning of a \u201cgrowing list of automakers, suppliers, and dealers negatively affected by the shortage.\u201dGrowing computer-chip shortage alarms Biden and CongressSemiconductors are the brains behind an ever increasing range of products, from vacuum cleaners and refrigerators to computers and space shuttles. The average automobile contains dozens of the integrated circuits, controlling air bags, power windows, catalytic converters and dashboard displays.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of the factors contributing to the shortfall are tied to recent events like the pandemic and the cold snap that slapped Texas and sidelined two chip factories in Austin. But the growing presence of chips in devices large and small foreshadows a supply problem not easily resolved by warmer weather or presidential executive orders. New semiconductor factories are among the most complex manufacturing facilities to build, costing billions of dollars and taking years to construct.That means much of the world\u2019s electronics industry will continue to depend heavily on existing factories, many of them in Taiwan \u2014 a reliance that critics say looks increasingly risky as the island\u2019s tensions with China rise. One Taiwanese company, TSMC, produces 70 percent of the global auto industry\u2019s supply of a key type of chip called a microcontroller, according to research firm IHS Markit.\u201cYou have an entire global electronics supply chain that is dependent on Taiwan, and it\u2019s 100 miles offshore of China,\u201d said Stacy Rasgon, a semiconductor analyst at the financial services firm AllianceBernstein. \u201cGiven everything going on with geopolitical tensions, that\u2019s becoming a strategically untenable position.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat has helped spark bipartisan calls for government subsidies to encourage construction of more chip factories in the United States, which today hosts 12 percent of global semiconductor manufacturing.The supply pinch has hit auto manufacturers particularly hard because they use many chips designed years ago that are lower-priority items for semiconductor makers. Those chips yield lower profit margins than the newer, pricier semiconductors that power 5G smartphones and video games, which are also in high demand worldwide and dominate many manufacturing lines.The global auto industry will produce 1.5 million to 5 million fewer vehicles this year than originally planned because of the supply constraints, according to the consulting firm AlixPartners. Some analysts predict that could raise auto costs for consumers and threaten jobs in a sector that employs hundreds of thousands of Americans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe roots of the shortage lie in the early weeks of the pandemic, when auto plants worldwide abruptly shut down amid widespread stay-at-home orders. Auto sales fell by almost half between February and April. As a result, car companies and their parts suppliers drastically cut their semiconductor purchases.At the same time, demand for computers and other electronics soared as consumers tried to make their new work-from-home lifestyles palatable by bingeing on monitors, laptops and entertainment devices. So manufacturers of those items stepped up their chip purchases.\u201cIt comes down to capacity,\u201d said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of IPC, an electronics industry association. \u201cSemiconductor manufacturers weren\u2019t getting orders from auto manufacturers. They were getting orders from other industries, so they started to reallocate production.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAuto sales recovered faster than expected, as China\u2019s economy bounced back and as consumers everywhere sought to avoid public transportation. By September, annualized sales figures reached 97 percent of the pre-pandemic volume.As automakers tried to place chip orders again, however, they found their suppliers busy making components for electronics companies. Switching manufacturing lines from one type of chip to another is a lengthy process that companies don\u2019t undertake lightly.Biden orders sweeping review of U.S. supply chain weak spotsOther factors compounded the problem. An Oct. 21 blaze disrupted production at a Japanese chip factory, while the recent cold snap in Texas knocked two semiconductor plants in Austin offline.Story continues below advertisementThe owner of those factories, NXP Semiconductors, says it is working to restore production as soon as possible, but auto industry executives say that supply may not resume till late March. NXP declined to confirm that date.AdvertisementEven U.S. sanctions limiting chip sales to Chinese telecommunications giants Huawei and ZTE played a role, said Bindiya Vakil, chief executive of Resilinc, a maker of supply chain management software.The sanctions kicked off a domino effect as the Chinese giants stockpiled chips, prompting others to do the same.\u201cA lot of companies started to hoard,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen large players like this make large moves, they have a ripple effect on others.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTaiwan and its biggest chip maker, TSMC, are now under pressure from all sides to boost output. In a Feb. 17 letter, Biden\u2019s top economic adviser, Brian Deese, thanked Taiwan\u2019s economics minister, Wang Mei-Hua, for her efforts to resolve the chip shortage for automakers.\u201cWe see significant potential for broader engagement over the medium-to-longer term to enhance supply chain resilience,\u201d Deese wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by The Washington Post and reported earlier by Bloomberg News. \u201cWe also look forward to working closely with you on the broader U.S.-Taiwan economic relationship,\u201d Deese said.AdvertisementA TSMC spokeswoman pointed to the company\u2019s Jan. 28 statement that called addressing the auto chip shortage \u201cour top priority.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhile our capacity is fully utilized with demand from every sector, TSMC is reallocating our wafer capacity to support the worldwide automotive industry,\u201d the statement said.Car manufacturers began using electronics to control automobiles in the 1970s, replacing older mechanical controls. Gradually, the number of tiny chips known as microcontrollers increased inside cars, powering a wide array of functions, from lights to engine cooling systems.The 38 microcontrollers in an Audi Q7 come from eight companies, highlighting the complexity of auto supply chains, according to research firm IHS Markit.Yet because TSMC manufactures nearly three-quarters of all auto microcontrollers, any capacity crunch at the company has ripple effects through the entire auto industry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe most modern chips feature ever smaller transistors, measured by their width in nanometers, a unit that itself shows just how small these devices are. (It takes 25.4 million nanometers to equal an inch.) In general, the smaller the nanometer number, the smarter and faster the chip is, and the more expensive and difficult it is to make. Auto chips don\u2019t tend to contain the latest nanometer technology.Most semiconductor companies have focused their capital investments in recent years on the latest, high-tech chips, leaving insufficient investment in production capacity for more mature chips, Caulfield said.Car companies are often slow to update their components because they undergo lengthy internal checks to ensure safety and durability. Switching to more modern chips would improve their access to supply but would cost more money and require lengthy revalidation of parts, said Ambrose Conroy, founder of Seraph Consulting, which is advising two automakers on the chip shortage.Advertisement\u201cThey don\u2019t want to spend the money to revalidate chips and change things within the vehicle, but they know they have to,\u201d he said, adding that cars \u201care increasingly becoming computer electronics devices.\u201dU.S. restricts tech exports to China\u2019s biggest semiconductor manufacturer in escalation of trade tensionsIn the short term, companies like Ford and General Motors can try to outbid electronics makers for scarce chips, analysts said.\u201cMaybe you take a bigger wallet with you,\u201d said Koray Kose, a senior supply chain analyst for Gartner.Caulfield said some auto companies are also trying to establish closer relationships with semiconductor manufacturers to ensure steady supply. Traditionally, car companies haven\u2019t dealt directly with chip companies, leaving those relationships more to middleman suppliers.Jeff Fieldhack, an analyst with the market research firm Counterpoint, said the advent of 5G mobile connectivity has increased competition for chips.In addition to the sheer amount of demand for new phones, 5G handsets require two to four times more power management chips than 4G phones do because of the complexity of the wireless technology, he said. Those power management chips, which tell batteries when to send power and where, are also used in automobiles.The addition of more and more cameras to smartphones \u2014 the latest Samsung phone has five \u2014 also requires more display chips, which are also needed in automobiles for backup cameras, infotainment screens, driver assistance sensors and more.Some smartphone makers are already facing shortages, Fieldhack said. In parts of the country, prepaid phones and handsets from smaller companies like Alcatel, OnePlus and Motorola are in short supply, he said.It\u2019s unlikely, though, that Apple or Samsung would face similar problems, Fieldhack said.\u201cThe Apples and Samsungs of the world are so big and powerful,\u201d he said, that chip suppliers put them at the front of the list. \u201cThe weaker and smaller get pushed to the back of the line for sure.\u201d Chip shortages have forced General Motors and Ford to slash production in three states as well as in Canada and Mexico, threatening jobs at the auto companies and their suppliers. Biden can\u2019t fix the chip shortage anytime soon. Here\u2019s why.",
        "author": "Jeanne Whalen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apple wants to know your heart rate. For science. (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6993",
        "date": "2017-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/30/apple-wants-to-know-your-heart-rate-for-science/",
        "text": "Apple\u2019s trying out something entirely new starting Thursday: a medical study.The company has released a new app that will use the Apple Watch's heart-rate monitor to check for irregular heart rates as part of a study it's running with Stanford University. While others have used Apple's software and devices in\u00a0medical studies, this is the first time that it\u2019s actually sponsored one itself. The move is another sign that Apple is moving deeper into the health space.\u201cWorking alongside the medical community, not only can we inform people of certain health conditions, we also hope to advance discoveries in heart science,\u201d said Apple chief operating officer Jeff Williams, in a statement.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHealth and fitness have been a key focus for Apple, especially since launching the Apple Watch two years ago. That has allowed the company to tap the $3 billion health care market and, analysts say, find new audiences for its products and services. Apple already employs a small staff of medical professionals to develop its health products, and it is reportedly working on a diabetes glucose-monitoring device that won\u2019t pierce the skin. It's also worked with hospitals to include more of its tech in patients' rooms. The Switch: Apple wants to change the way doctors and patients talk to each other by giving everyone an iPadThe new study takes all of that a step further: Now Apple itself will be running a study and submitting data to the Food and Drug Administration. The heart-rate researcher will look specifically at atrial fibrillation \u2014 or afib \u2014 which refers to an irregular heart rate and is a leading cause of stroke and other heart conditions. The condition kills around 130,000 people per year, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUsers have to be over the age of 22 if they want to participate in the study. If the app detects an irregular heartbeat, it will notify that person on the Watch and iPhone. From there, he or she may opt to see a doctor online, for a free consult on their health. Apple and Stanford are partnering with Boston firm American Well to provide those consults.The study, while promising, is not perfect, experts said.For one, atrial fibrilation is generally more prevalent in older people and obese individuals, said Ron Blankstein, a cardiologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.\u00a0That may not be the biggest users of the Apple Watch yet. Then there's the fact that not all irregular heartbeats are a sign of a serious condition, he said. The Watch's heart monitors are not as precise as clinical diagnostic tools. This could lead to overtreatment, he said.Apple has previously noted how its products can make it easier for researchers to find study participants, thanks to their broad reach. Traditionally, researchers have had to seek out study participants directly \u2014 through medical facilities, by email or with fliers. Then, they often must visit them in person to collect data. By enrolling using devices, Apple has said, it makes it easier for scientists to both find and monitor study participants.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt least 33 million units of the Watch have been sold, according to Asymco analyst Horace Deidu\u00a0 \u2014 Apple itself does not officially release sales figures, nor information on\u00a0who is buying the Watch. But Apple researchers said they believe the Watch will provide a representative sample of the population for their study.Apple declined to say how long the study will run and whether it would take on further research in the future. Apple's launching its very own medical research study, in conjunction with Stanford Medicine, signaling an ever deeper push into the health-care world Apple wants to know your heart rate. For science.",
        "author": "Hayley Tsukayama"
    },
    {
        "title": "UAE\u2019s Amal spacecraft rockets toward Mars in Arab world 1st (WP: Technology) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6994",
        "date": "2020-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/united-arab-emirates-amal-functioning-after-launch-to-mars/2020/07/19/63a98752-ca1c-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html",
        "text": "TOKYO \u2014 A United Arab Emirates spacecraft rocketed into blue skies from a Japanese launch center Monday at the start of a seven-month journey to Mars on the Arab world\u2019s first interplanetary mission.The liftoff of the Mars orbiter named Amal, or Hope, starts a rush to fly to Earth\u2019s neighbor that is scheduled to be followed in the next few days by China and the United States. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt the space center in Dubai, people watching were transfixed by the liftoff, then cheered and clapped, with one woman with offering a celebratory cry common for weddings.Amal blasted off from the Tanegashima Space Center aboard a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries\u2019 H-IIA rocket on time at 6:58 a.m. (2158 GMT Sunday) after being delayed five days by bad weather.Story continues below advertisementMitsubishi later said the probe successfully separated from the rocket and was now on its solo journey to Mars.AdvertisementThe probe was sending signals that would be analyzed later but everything appeared good for now, Omran Sharaf, the UAE Mars mission director told journalists in Dubai about an hour and a half after liftoff.Amal is set to reach Mars in February 2021, the year the UAE celebrates 50 years since the country\u2019s formation. In September that year, Amal will start transmitting Martian atmospheric data, which will be made available to the international scientific community, Sharaf said.\u201cThe UAE is now a member of the club and we will learn more and we will engage more and we\u2019ll continue developing our space exploration program,\u201d UAE Space Agency chief Mohammed Al Ahbabi told a joint online news conference from Tanegashima.Story continues below advertisementAt Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai, Emirati men in their traditional white kandora robes and women in their black abayas watched the liftoff. As its stages separated, a cheer went out from men seated on the floor. They began clapping, one using his face mask, worn due to the coronavirus pandemic, to wipe away a tear.Advertisement\u201cIt was great to see everything going according to schedule today. It looks like things are all on track. It\u2019s a huge step in terms of space exploration to have a nation like the UAE taking that giant leap to send a spacecraft to Mars,\u201d said Fred Watson, Australia\u2019s astronomer-at-large. \u201cBeing on route to a planet like Mars is an exceptional achievement.\u201dA newcomer in space development, the UAE has successfully put three Earth observation satellites into orbit. Two were developed by South Korea and launched by Russia, and a third \u2014 its own \u2014 was launched by Japan.Story continues below advertisementA successful mission to Mars would be a major step for the oil-dependent economy seeking a future in space, coming less than a year after the launch of the first UAE astronaut, Hazzaa Ali Almansoori. He spent over a week at the International Space Station last fall.AdvertisementThe UAE has set a goal to build a human colony on Mars by 2117.\u201cIt sends a very strong message to the Arab youth that if the UAE is able to reach Mars in less than 50 years, they could do much more,\u201d Sharaf told The Associated Press on Sunday as his colleagues prepared for the launch.The Emiratis also acknowledged it represented a step forward for the Arab world, the home of mathematicians and scientists for centuries before the wars and chaos that have gripped wide swathes of it in recent times.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSo the region has been going through tough times in the past decades, if not centuries,\u201d Sharaf said. \u201cNow we have the case of the UAE, a country that\u2019s moving forward with its plans, looking at the future and the future of region also.\u201dFor its first Mars mission, the UAE chose partners instead of doing it all on its own.Advertisement\u201cDeveloping a spacecraft is not easy even if there is ample funding,\u201d said Junya Terazono, an astronomer at Aizu University.Emirati scientists worked with researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, University of California, Berkeley, and Arizona State University. The spacecraft was assembled at Boulder and transported to Japan as the two countries looked to expand their ties with the rich and politically stable Middle Eastern nation.Story continues below advertisementThe Amal spacecraft, along with its launch, cost $200 million, according to Sharaf. Operation costs at Mars have yet to be divulged.Amal, about the size of a small car, carries three instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change while circling the red planet for at least two years. It is set to follow up on NASA\u2019s Maven orbiter sent to Mars in 2014 to study how the planet went from a warm, wet world that may have harbored microbial life during its first billion years, to the cold, barren place of today. Hope also plans to send back images of weather changes.AdvertisementJapan has long collaborated with the U.S. and other partners in defense and space technology, and the resource-poor country has traditionally kept friendly ties with Middle Eastern countries. Japan\u2019s launch services are known for accuracy and an on-time record, but the providers are working to cut costs to be more internationally competitive.Story continues below advertisementTwo other Mars missions are planned in coming days. China aims to explore the Martian surface with an orbiter and rover and to search for water and ice with a launch expected around Thursday. The U.S. plans to send a rover named Perseverance to search for signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for return to Earth. Liftoff is targeted for July 30.Japan has its own Mars mission planned in 2024. It plans to send spacecraft to the Martian moon Phobos to collect samples to bring back to Earth in 2029.Advertisement___Milko reported from Jakarta, Indonesia. Associated Press writers Malak Harb and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. A United Arab Emirates spacecraft has rocketed away on a seven-month journey to Mars UAE\u2019s Amal spacecraft rockets toward Mars in Arab world 1st",
        "author": "Mari Yamaguchi and Victoria Milko\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "UAE\u2019s Amal spacecraft rockets toward Mars in Arab world 1st (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "6995",
        "date": "2020-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/united-arab-emirates-amal-functioning-after-launch-to-mars/2020/07/19/63a98752-ca1c-11ea-99b0-8426e26d203b_story.html",
        "text": "TOKYO \u2014 A United Arab Emirates spacecraft rocketed into blue skies from a Japanese launch center Monday at the start of a seven-month journey to Mars on the Arab world\u2019s first interplanetary mission.The liftoff of the Mars orbiter named Amal, or Hope, starts a rush to fly to Earth\u2019s neighbor that is scheduled to be followed in the next few days by China and the United States. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt the space center in Dubai, people watching were transfixed by the liftoff, then cheered and clapped, with one woman with offering a celebratory cry common for weddings.Amal blasted off from the Tanegashima Space Center aboard a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries\u2019 H-IIA rocket on time at 6:58 a.m. (2158 GMT Sunday) after being delayed five days by bad weather.Story continues below advertisementMitsubishi later said the probe successfully separated from the rocket and was now on its solo journey to Mars.AdvertisementThe probe was sending signals that would be analyzed later but everything appeared good for now, Omran Sharaf, the UAE Mars mission director told journalists in Dubai about an hour and a half after liftoff.Amal is set to reach Mars in February 2021, the year the UAE celebrates 50 years since the country\u2019s formation. In September that year, Amal will start transmitting Martian atmospheric data, which will be made available to the international scientific community, Sharaf said.\u201cThe UAE is now a member of the club and we will learn more and we will engage more and we\u2019ll continue developing our space exploration program,\u201d UAE Space Agency chief Mohammed Al Ahbabi told a joint online news conference from Tanegashima.Story continues below advertisementAt Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai, Emirati men in their traditional white kandora robes and women in their black abayas watched the liftoff. As its stages separated, a cheer went out from men seated on the floor. They began clapping, one using his face mask, worn due to the coronavirus pandemic, to wipe away a tear.Advertisement\u201cIt was great to see everything going according to schedule today. It looks like things are all on track. It\u2019s a huge step in terms of space exploration to have a nation like the UAE taking that giant leap to send a spacecraft to Mars,\u201d said Fred Watson, Australia\u2019s astronomer-at-large. \u201cBeing on route to a planet like Mars is an exceptional achievement.\u201dA newcomer in space development, the UAE has successfully put three Earth observation satellites into orbit. Two were developed by South Korea and launched by Russia, and a third \u2014 its own \u2014 was launched by Japan.Story continues below advertisementA successful mission to Mars would be a major step for the oil-dependent economy seeking a future in space, coming less than a year after the launch of the first UAE astronaut, Hazzaa Ali Almansoori. He spent over a week at the International Space Station last fall.AdvertisementThe UAE has set a goal to build a human colony on Mars by 2117.\u201cIt sends a very strong message to the Arab youth that if the UAE is able to reach Mars in less than 50 years, they could do much more,\u201d Sharaf told The Associated Press on Sunday as his colleagues prepared for the launch.The Emiratis also acknowledged it represented a step forward for the Arab world, the home of mathematicians and scientists for centuries before the wars and chaos that have gripped wide swathes of it in recent times.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSo the region has been going through tough times in the past decades, if not centuries,\u201d Sharaf said. \u201cNow we have the case of the UAE, a country that\u2019s moving forward with its plans, looking at the future and the future of region also.\u201dFor its first Mars mission, the UAE chose partners instead of doing it all on its own.Advertisement\u201cDeveloping a spacecraft is not easy even if there is ample funding,\u201d said Junya Terazono, an astronomer at Aizu University.Emirati scientists worked with researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, University of California, Berkeley, and Arizona State University. The spacecraft was assembled at Boulder and transported to Japan as the two countries looked to expand their ties with the rich and politically stable Middle Eastern nation.Story continues below advertisementThe Amal spacecraft, along with its launch, cost $200 million, according to Sharaf. Operation costs at Mars have yet to be divulged.Amal, about the size of a small car, carries three instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change while circling the red planet for at least two years. It is set to follow up on NASA\u2019s Maven orbiter sent to Mars in 2014 to study how the planet went from a warm, wet world that may have harbored microbial life during its first billion years, to the cold, barren place of today. Hope also plans to send back images of weather changes.AdvertisementJapan has long collaborated with the U.S. and other partners in defense and space technology, and the resource-poor country has traditionally kept friendly ties with Middle Eastern countries. Japan\u2019s launch services are known for accuracy and an on-time record, but the providers are working to cut costs to be more internationally competitive.Story continues below advertisementTwo other Mars missions are planned in coming days. China aims to explore the Martian surface with an orbiter and rover and to search for water and ice with a launch expected around Thursday. The U.S. plans to send a rover named Perseverance to search for signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for return to Earth. Liftoff is targeted for July 30.Japan has its own Mars mission planned in 2024. It plans to send spacecraft to the Martian moon Phobos to collect samples to bring back to Earth in 2029.Advertisement___Milko reported from Jakarta, Indonesia. Associated Press writers Malak Harb and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.___The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. A United Arab Emirates spacecraft has rocketed away on a seven-month journey to Mars UAE\u2019s Amal spacecraft rockets toward Mars in Arab world 1st",
        "author": "Mari Yamaguchi and Victoria Milko\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission (WP: Technology) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "6996",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/08/spacex-crew-2-splashdown/",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night, ending an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station, which was forced off its trajectory twice during the astronauts\u2019 expedition because of errant thruster firings.Under a quartet of parachutes, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down softly in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla., at 10:33 p.m. after undocking from the orbiting laboratory more than eight hours earlier. On board the autonomous spacecraft were two NASA astronauts, commander Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur. They were accompanied by astronauts Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The successful splashdown appeared to go flawlessly, except that one of the four main parachutes inflated slower than the others.Speaking after the splashdown, Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s Space Operations Mission Directorate, joked that \u201cI\u2019m always amazed that I can hold my breath for those last 10 minutes of re-entry. That is high drama right there and ... seeing those chutes come out, it\u2019s just an amazing thing.\u201dShe said that \u201cthe return looked spotless.\u201d But she conceded that, \u201cI know folks will be wondering about the that one lagging main parachute. And the team will be going off and looking at how the loading was on the chutes and understanding that behavior. It is behavior we\u2019ve seen multiple times on other tests, and usually happens when the lines kind of bunch up together until the aero forces kind of open up and spread the chutes.\u201dThe return comes at a busy time for human spaceflight. On Wednesday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch another quartet of astronauts to the space station \u2014 a mission that had been scheduled to lift off last week but was delayed because of weather and an astronaut\u2019s illness. NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not covid.The Crew-2 astronauts who returned Monday had two dramatic moments onboard the station when it was forced out of position because of errant thruster firings, prompting the NASA crew to evacuate the station at least once and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to come home.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough told reporters last week. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course, it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t say when they evacuated the station, and a NASA public affairs officer could not provide an answer or confirm that the astronauts boarded Dragon. In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, last month, the station was again forced out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews regained control of the station in less than an hour, NASA has said.The astronauts were on board for another dramatic event \u2014 the filming of a scene for a Russian movie. Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko visited to shoot a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Before heading home, the Dragon spacecraft, dubbed Endeavour, flew around the space station so that the astronauts could photograph the exterior. The fly-around was not done in response to the errant thruster firings, NASA said, but rather as a general inspection of the more-than-20-year-old station.During their time on the station, the astronauts performed more than 300 experiments and participated in four spacewalks. As Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dThe ride home was intense as well. Plunging through the atmosphere, the Dragon capsule endured temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, engulfing the spacecraft in flames. Astronauts aboard the capsule also were asked not to use the spacecraft\u2019s toilet during the eight-hour return because of a malfunction that SpaceX had discovered after another recent flight.Still, as it neared the Gulf of Mexico, the capsule successfully deployed its parachutes and touched down safely, completing another mission for SpaceX, landing precisely on time.SpaceX and NASA will now turn their attention to Wednesday\u2019s launch, scheduled for 9:03 p.m., from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That flight will carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany. They\u2019ll join NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and two Russian cosmonauts, bringing the space station\u2019s population back to seven.Here\u2019s what you need to knowThe returning astronauts spent 199 days in space.During their time aboard the space station, the Crew-2 astronauts performed more than 300 experiments.They also experienced two harrowing unplanned events when Russian rocket engines fired unexpectedly, sending the International Space Station off its trajectory. During one of those, the Crew-2 astronauts reentered the Dragon capsule in case they had to abandon the station, Kimbrough said last week.MORE TOP STORIESOmicron spreading rapidly in U.S. and could bring punishing wave as soon as January, CDC warnsNews\u2022December 14, 2021The striking race gap in corporate AmericaDecember 15, 2021An Arkansas waitress served a party that tipped $4,400. It led to her getting fired.News\u2022December 16, 2021Crew exits the spacecraftReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:34 p.m.Link copiedLinkCrews started exiting the spacecraft at about 11:25 p.m. or less than an hour after splashing down, ending a largely successful mission. As they exited Dragon they smiled and waved to the cameras, looking happy and healthy. All were out of the capsule within an hour of splashdown. The astronauts next were to be assessed by medical personnel on the recovery ship before being flown back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrews preparing to secure capsule and hoist it onto recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkFast boats have reached the spacecraft as it bobs in the Gulf of Mexico. Crews will secure the spacecraft, make sure it is safe and prepare it with rigging to be hoisted onto the deck of a recovery ship.The goal is to get the spacecraft on board the ship in less than an hour, so that the astronauts can exit and be seen by medical personnel before being flown back to the mainland.So far the mission appears to have gone flawlessly. The only issue seems to be that one of the four main parachutes inflated a bit more slowly than the others. But SpaceX mission controllers said it inflated at a normal rate.Speaking from the recovery ship, NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier said \u201cthings are moving really smoothly here.\u201d She said the crews could see the spacecraft hurtling through the atmosphere to Earth, saying it was like \u201ca meteorite in the sky.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:33 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member crew has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The astronauts, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of the United States, Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan, will exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:30 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestone before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft flies on its ownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe astronauts on board the Dragon spacecraft are highly trained, and among NASA\u2019s best. But when it comes to flying the capsule, they are, for the most part, mere passengers. That\u2019s because the capsule is fully autonomous. It flies itself, knowing where it is and what it needs to do at every point in the mission, from undocking from the space station to deploying its parachutes on the way down.In case anything goes wrong, the astronauts can take manual control, of course. But the spacecraft is designed so that virtually anyone can fly in it. In September, a crew of four private space travelers, all amateurs who had never been to space before, spent three days in orbit as part of what was called the Inspiration4 mission. And not once did they take control of the spacecraft.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft is plunging through the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begun its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft, causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last several minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk and SpaceX also looking to the moonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhile all eyes are currently focused on getting the Crew-2 astronauts home safely. SpaceX and NASA are also preparing to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.Earlier this year, SpaceX won a major NASA contract to develop the spacecraft that would fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, beating out Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion for the contract, or about double what SpaceX bid. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin twice contested the contract award, losing both times, and NASA has said it is ready and eager to get moving with SpaceX. The space agency has scheduled a briefing for Tuesday afternoon to discuss the future of its so-called Artemis program.While it had originally been aiming to get astronauts back to the moon by 2024, that is unlikely to happen. And NASA officials are expected to discuss a revised timeline and give an update of where the program stands.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule spent 90 minutes photographing the space station before heading homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 p.m.Link copiedLinkBefore heading home, the crew spent about an hour and a half flying around the space station to take photos of the exterior. The station is more than 20 years old and has shown signs of wear and tear, so NASA wanted to have the astronauts spend some time gathering images to see how it is holding up.The decision to do the fly around was made before errant thrusters on Russian spacecraft knocked it off its course, NASA officials said. In one of those cases, the space station careened so dramatically that one flight director said he was relieved that the solar arrays were still attached.As it flew around, the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s nose remained pointed at the station so the astronauts could take pictures through a window.Last week, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said that officials \u201cdon\u2019t have that many opportunities to see the station from outside.\u201d And that the photos would be to get \u201ca good view so that folks on the ground can put their eyes on the outside equipment. There is a lot of equipment outside the station to make it go.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:58 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has completed the last burn of its engines, and the capsule is now flying on a trajectory to its landing site in the Gulf of Mexico. Mission control in SpaceX headquarters said the 16-and-a-half minute \u201cdeorbit burn,\u201d which committed the capsule to landing, was \u201cnominal\", or successful.The spacecraft will soon plunge into the atmosphere, generating temperatures of about 3,500 degrees. Once through the atmosphere it would deploy its parachutes and splashdown in the water.Filming a movie in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is open to all kinds of visitors these days, or at least those who can afford the hefty price for a week on the station \u2014 estimated to cost about $55 million.During the Crew-2\u2019s time on the station they were visited by Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko, who were shooting a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Having a taste of Hollywood on board \u201cwas a little bit unusual,\u201d Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut, told reporters last week. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really know how to position ourselves initially. We got a really good briefing, we got to talk to them and then everything ended up working out really, really smoothly.\u201dAfter watching the filming, he said, \u201cwe can\u2019t wait to see the result.\u201dIt may not be the only time a film crew visits the station. Jim Bridenstine, the former NASA administrator, said last year that the agency was also working with Tom Cruise to shoot a movie on the station.Spacecraft trunk jettisoned and deorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon capsule has jettisoned its trunk, the unpressurized part of the capsule. That exposes the heat shield, which will bear the brunt of the heat as the spacecraft plunges through the atmosphere.The spacecraft has also begun its \u201cdeborbit burn,\u201d a more than 16-minute firing of the engines that will bring the Dragon into the atmosphere. Colliding with the air creates friction. As the heat builds around the capsule, plasma will form and cause a communications blackout that should last about seven minutes.No crew overlap this timeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkIdeally, one crew arrives at the International Space Station before the other departs. But because of delays, that won\u2019t happen for the Crew-2 and Crew-3 astronauts.The Crew-3 astronauts were initially supposed to launch to the station last week. But bad weather delayed the launch and then one of the astronauts got sick, delaying the launch. (NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not the coronavirus.)As a result, NASA decided that the Crew-2 astronauts should come home first, and then Crew-3 could launch afterward. Currently, that is scheduled for Wednesday at 9:03 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.That means the astronauts won\u2019t overlap on the station. Usually the outgoing crew likes to spend at least a couple of days bringing the new arrivals up to speed on what\u2019s going on at the station.In a tweet, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet lamented the fact that he won\u2019t see his comrades on orbit.\u201cIt seems we will not cross paths with our #Crew3 colleagues on the Space Station,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPity, it would have been a pleasure to explain the finer points of living up here.\u201dThe space station won\u2019t be abandoned in between the flights, however. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei remains on the station with a pair of Russian cosmonauts. Vande Hei is scheduled to remain on the station until March, and possibly break the longest stay for an American. That mark is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days in space. Vande Hei could stay aloft for as many as 353 days.During their tour on the station, the crew faced a couple of emergenciesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkTrips to the International Space Station are always eventful. But few expeditions have been quite like what the Crew-2 astronauts have experienced since they arrived at the station in April.During their time on board the orbiting laboratory, the crew has performed more than 300 science experiments, according to NASA officials. \u201cWe\u2019ve had seven visiting vehicles come and go to the International Space Station,\u201d said Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station manager. \u201cAnd this crew has participated in four spacewalks during the expedition.\u201dBut they\u2019ve also had the station be tilted perilously out of position twice because of errant thruster firings. That prompted the NASA crew to evacuate the station and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to abort and come home, NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough said during a briefing last week.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d Kimbrough said. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t specify when the astronauts left the station for the Dragon, and a NASA spokesperson said she did not know.In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football-field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, in October, the station was again tilted out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews were able to get control of the station within less than an hour, NASA has said.As French astronaut Thomas Pesquet put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dReturning astronauts are wearing diapers because the spacecraft\u2019s toilet is out of orderReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft that is flying the crew home is a marvel of engineering that\u2019s able to survive in the vacuum of space for months at a time, withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it reenters the atmosphere and then land softly in the water.But this particular ship has a bit of a flaw \u2014 the toilet doesn\u2019t work \u2014 and as a result the four astronauts on their way home are wearing diapers.SpaceX first discovered the problem after the Inspiration4 mission in September, which flew a crew of private space travelers in orbit for three days. After the spacecraft landed, engineers studied it and discovered that a tube that funnels urine into a storage tank had become unglued. SpaceX engineers fixed the problem for future missions by welding the tube in place.Astronauts on board the space station were not able to make that fix, however, and NASA and SpaceX decided it was best if they avoided using the facilities all together during the eight-hour flight home.Being able to use the bathroom is \u201csuboptimal,\u201d NASA astronaut Megan McArthur said during a news conference last week. \u201cBut we are prepared to manage that.\u201d She said, \u201cspaceflight is full of lots of little challenges. This is just one more that we\u2019ll encounter and take care of in our mission. So we\u2019re not too worried about it.\u201dBill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said recently there was a concern that a compound known as oxone, used to remove ammonia from urine, could cause corrosion in the vehicle. As a result, he said, crews on the ground \u201cdid extensive tests where we took aluminum samples, and we placed an oxone-urine mixture on them. And then we put them in a chamber that mimics the humidity and temperature conditions onboard [the] space station.\u201dThe corrosion, he said, was limited because of the low-humidity environment, and the aluminum alloy used in the spacecraft is resistant to corrosion. Still, he said, engineers \u201cwill double-check things, we\u2019ll triple-check some things \u2026 and we\u2019ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.\u201d SpaceX's Crew Dragon splashed down off the coast of Florida at 10:33 p.m., precisely on time. SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "6997",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/08/spacex-crew-2-splashdown/",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night, ending an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station, which was forced off its trajectory twice during the astronauts\u2019 expedition because of errant thruster firings.Under a quartet of parachutes, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down softly in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla., at 10:33 p.m. after undocking from the orbiting laboratory more than eight hours earlier. On board the autonomous spacecraft were two NASA astronauts, commander Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur. They were accompanied by astronauts Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The successful splashdown appeared to go flawlessly, except that one of the four main parachutes inflated slower than the others.Speaking after the splashdown, Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s Space Operations Mission Directorate, joked that \u201cI\u2019m always amazed that I can hold my breath for those last 10 minutes of re-entry. That is high drama right there and ... seeing those chutes come out, it\u2019s just an amazing thing.\u201dShe said that \u201cthe return looked spotless.\u201d But she conceded that, \u201cI know folks will be wondering about the that one lagging main parachute. And the team will be going off and looking at how the loading was on the chutes and understanding that behavior. It is behavior we\u2019ve seen multiple times on other tests, and usually happens when the lines kind of bunch up together until the aero forces kind of open up and spread the chutes.\u201dThe return comes at a busy time for human spaceflight. On Wednesday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch another quartet of astronauts to the space station \u2014 a mission that had been scheduled to lift off last week but was delayed because of weather and an astronaut\u2019s illness. NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not covid.The Crew-2 astronauts who returned Monday had two dramatic moments onboard the station when it was forced out of position because of errant thruster firings, prompting the NASA crew to evacuate the station at least once and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to come home.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough told reporters last week. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course, it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t say when they evacuated the station, and a NASA public affairs officer could not provide an answer or confirm that the astronauts boarded Dragon. In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, last month, the station was again forced out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews regained control of the station in less than an hour, NASA has said.The astronauts were on board for another dramatic event \u2014 the filming of a scene for a Russian movie. Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko visited to shoot a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Before heading home, the Dragon spacecraft, dubbed Endeavour, flew around the space station so that the astronauts could photograph the exterior. The fly-around was not done in response to the errant thruster firings, NASA said, but rather as a general inspection of the more-than-20-year-old station.During their time on the station, the astronauts performed more than 300 experiments and participated in four spacewalks. As Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dThe ride home was intense as well. Plunging through the atmosphere, the Dragon capsule endured temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, engulfing the spacecraft in flames. Astronauts aboard the capsule also were asked not to use the spacecraft\u2019s toilet during the eight-hour return because of a malfunction that SpaceX had discovered after another recent flight.Still, as it neared the Gulf of Mexico, the capsule successfully deployed its parachutes and touched down safely, completing another mission for SpaceX, landing precisely on time.SpaceX and NASA will now turn their attention to Wednesday\u2019s launch, scheduled for 9:03 p.m., from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That flight will carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany. They\u2019ll join NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and two Russian cosmonauts, bringing the space station\u2019s population back to seven.Here\u2019s what you need to knowThe returning astronauts spent 199 days in space.During their time aboard the space station, the Crew-2 astronauts performed more than 300 experiments.They also experienced two harrowing unplanned events when Russian rocket engines fired unexpectedly, sending the International Space Station off its trajectory. During one of those, the Crew-2 astronauts reentered the Dragon capsule in case they had to abandon the station, Kimbrough said last week.MORE TOP STORIESOmicron spreading rapidly in U.S. and could bring punishing wave as soon as January, CDC warnsNews\u2022December 14, 2021The striking race gap in corporate AmericaDecember 15, 2021An Arkansas waitress served a party that tipped $4,400. It led to her getting fired.News\u2022December 16, 2021Crew exits the spacecraftReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:34 p.m.Link copiedLinkCrews started exiting the spacecraft at about 11:25 p.m. or less than an hour after splashing down, ending a largely successful mission. As they exited Dragon they smiled and waved to the cameras, looking happy and healthy. All were out of the capsule within an hour of splashdown. The astronauts next were to be assessed by medical personnel on the recovery ship before being flown back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrews preparing to secure capsule and hoist it onto recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkFast boats have reached the spacecraft as it bobs in the Gulf of Mexico. Crews will secure the spacecraft, make sure it is safe and prepare it with rigging to be hoisted onto the deck of a recovery ship.The goal is to get the spacecraft on board the ship in less than an hour, so that the astronauts can exit and be seen by medical personnel before being flown back to the mainland.So far the mission appears to have gone flawlessly. The only issue seems to be that one of the four main parachutes inflated a bit more slowly than the others. But SpaceX mission controllers said it inflated at a normal rate.Speaking from the recovery ship, NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier said \u201cthings are moving really smoothly here.\u201d She said the crews could see the spacecraft hurtling through the atmosphere to Earth, saying it was like \u201ca meteorite in the sky.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:33 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member crew has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The astronauts, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of the United States, Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan, will exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:30 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestone before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft flies on its ownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe astronauts on board the Dragon spacecraft are highly trained, and among NASA\u2019s best. But when it comes to flying the capsule, they are, for the most part, mere passengers. That\u2019s because the capsule is fully autonomous. It flies itself, knowing where it is and what it needs to do at every point in the mission, from undocking from the space station to deploying its parachutes on the way down.In case anything goes wrong, the astronauts can take manual control, of course. But the spacecraft is designed so that virtually anyone can fly in it. In September, a crew of four private space travelers, all amateurs who had never been to space before, spent three days in orbit as part of what was called the Inspiration4 mission. And not once did they take control of the spacecraft.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft is plunging through the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begun its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft, causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last several minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk and SpaceX also looking to the moonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhile all eyes are currently focused on getting the Crew-2 astronauts home safely. SpaceX and NASA are also preparing to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.Earlier this year, SpaceX won a major NASA contract to develop the spacecraft that would fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, beating out Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion for the contract, or about double what SpaceX bid. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin twice contested the contract award, losing both times, and NASA has said it is ready and eager to get moving with SpaceX. The space agency has scheduled a briefing for Tuesday afternoon to discuss the future of its so-called Artemis program.While it had originally been aiming to get astronauts back to the moon by 2024, that is unlikely to happen. And NASA officials are expected to discuss a revised timeline and give an update of where the program stands.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule spent 90 minutes photographing the space station before heading homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 p.m.Link copiedLinkBefore heading home, the crew spent about an hour and a half flying around the space station to take photos of the exterior. The station is more than 20 years old and has shown signs of wear and tear, so NASA wanted to have the astronauts spend some time gathering images to see how it is holding up.The decision to do the fly around was made before errant thrusters on Russian spacecraft knocked it off its course, NASA officials said. In one of those cases, the space station careened so dramatically that one flight director said he was relieved that the solar arrays were still attached.As it flew around, the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s nose remained pointed at the station so the astronauts could take pictures through a window.Last week, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said that officials \u201cdon\u2019t have that many opportunities to see the station from outside.\u201d And that the photos would be to get \u201ca good view so that folks on the ground can put their eyes on the outside equipment. There is a lot of equipment outside the station to make it go.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:58 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has completed the last burn of its engines, and the capsule is now flying on a trajectory to its landing site in the Gulf of Mexico. Mission control in SpaceX headquarters said the 16-and-a-half minute \u201cdeorbit burn,\u201d which committed the capsule to landing, was \u201cnominal\", or successful.The spacecraft will soon plunge into the atmosphere, generating temperatures of about 3,500 degrees. Once through the atmosphere it would deploy its parachutes and splashdown in the water.Filming a movie in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is open to all kinds of visitors these days, or at least those who can afford the hefty price for a week on the station \u2014 estimated to cost about $55 million.During the Crew-2\u2019s time on the station they were visited by Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko, who were shooting a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Having a taste of Hollywood on board \u201cwas a little bit unusual,\u201d Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut, told reporters last week. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really know how to position ourselves initially. We got a really good briefing, we got to talk to them and then everything ended up working out really, really smoothly.\u201dAfter watching the filming, he said, \u201cwe can\u2019t wait to see the result.\u201dIt may not be the only time a film crew visits the station. Jim Bridenstine, the former NASA administrator, said last year that the agency was also working with Tom Cruise to shoot a movie on the station.Spacecraft trunk jettisoned and deorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon capsule has jettisoned its trunk, the unpressurized part of the capsule. That exposes the heat shield, which will bear the brunt of the heat as the spacecraft plunges through the atmosphere.The spacecraft has also begun its \u201cdeborbit burn,\u201d a more than 16-minute firing of the engines that will bring the Dragon into the atmosphere. Colliding with the air creates friction. As the heat builds around the capsule, plasma will form and cause a communications blackout that should last about seven minutes.No crew overlap this timeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkIdeally, one crew arrives at the International Space Station before the other departs. But because of delays, that won\u2019t happen for the Crew-2 and Crew-3 astronauts.The Crew-3 astronauts were initially supposed to launch to the station last week. But bad weather delayed the launch and then one of the astronauts got sick, delaying the launch. (NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not the coronavirus.)As a result, NASA decided that the Crew-2 astronauts should come home first, and then Crew-3 could launch afterward. Currently, that is scheduled for Wednesday at 9:03 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.That means the astronauts won\u2019t overlap on the station. Usually the outgoing crew likes to spend at least a couple of days bringing the new arrivals up to speed on what\u2019s going on at the station.In a tweet, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet lamented the fact that he won\u2019t see his comrades on orbit.\u201cIt seems we will not cross paths with our #Crew3 colleagues on the Space Station,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPity, it would have been a pleasure to explain the finer points of living up here.\u201dThe space station won\u2019t be abandoned in between the flights, however. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei remains on the station with a pair of Russian cosmonauts. Vande Hei is scheduled to remain on the station until March, and possibly break the longest stay for an American. That mark is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days in space. Vande Hei could stay aloft for as many as 353 days.During their tour on the station, the crew faced a couple of emergenciesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkTrips to the International Space Station are always eventful. But few expeditions have been quite like what the Crew-2 astronauts have experienced since they arrived at the station in April.During their time on board the orbiting laboratory, the crew has performed more than 300 science experiments, according to NASA officials. \u201cWe\u2019ve had seven visiting vehicles come and go to the International Space Station,\u201d said Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station manager. \u201cAnd this crew has participated in four spacewalks during the expedition.\u201dBut they\u2019ve also had the station be tilted perilously out of position twice because of errant thruster firings. That prompted the NASA crew to evacuate the station and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to abort and come home, NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough said during a briefing last week.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d Kimbrough said. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t specify when the astronauts left the station for the Dragon, and a NASA spokesperson said she did not know.In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football-field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, in October, the station was again tilted out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews were able to get control of the station within less than an hour, NASA has said.As French astronaut Thomas Pesquet put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dReturning astronauts are wearing diapers because the spacecraft\u2019s toilet is out of orderReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft that is flying the crew home is a marvel of engineering that\u2019s able to survive in the vacuum of space for months at a time, withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it reenters the atmosphere and then land softly in the water.But this particular ship has a bit of a flaw \u2014 the toilet doesn\u2019t work \u2014 and as a result the four astronauts on their way home are wearing diapers.SpaceX first discovered the problem after the Inspiration4 mission in September, which flew a crew of private space travelers in orbit for three days. After the spacecraft landed, engineers studied it and discovered that a tube that funnels urine into a storage tank had become unglued. SpaceX engineers fixed the problem for future missions by welding the tube in place.Astronauts on board the space station were not able to make that fix, however, and NASA and SpaceX decided it was best if they avoided using the facilities all together during the eight-hour flight home.Being able to use the bathroom is \u201csuboptimal,\u201d NASA astronaut Megan McArthur said during a news conference last week. \u201cBut we are prepared to manage that.\u201d She said, \u201cspaceflight is full of lots of little challenges. This is just one more that we\u2019ll encounter and take care of in our mission. So we\u2019re not too worried about it.\u201dBill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said recently there was a concern that a compound known as oxone, used to remove ammonia from urine, could cause corrosion in the vehicle. As a result, he said, crews on the ground \u201cdid extensive tests where we took aluminum samples, and we placed an oxone-urine mixture on them. And then we put them in a chamber that mimics the humidity and temperature conditions onboard [the] space station.\u201dThe corrosion, he said, was limited because of the low-humidity environment, and the aluminum alloy used in the spacecraft is resistant to corrosion. Still, he said, engineers \u201cwill double-check things, we\u2019ll triple-check some things \u2026 and we\u2019ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.\u201d SpaceX's Crew Dragon splashed down off the coast of Florida at 10:33 p.m., precisely on time. SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "6998",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/08/spacex-crew-2-splashdown/",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night, ending an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station, which was forced off its trajectory twice during the astronauts\u2019 expedition because of errant thruster firings.Under a quartet of parachutes, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down softly in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla., at 10:33 p.m. after undocking from the orbiting laboratory more than eight hours earlier. On board the autonomous spacecraft were two NASA astronauts, commander Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur. They were accompanied by astronauts Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The successful splashdown appeared to go flawlessly, except that one of the four main parachutes inflated slower than the others.Speaking after the splashdown, Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s Space Operations Mission Directorate, joked that \u201cI\u2019m always amazed that I can hold my breath for those last 10 minutes of re-entry. That is high drama right there and ... seeing those chutes come out, it\u2019s just an amazing thing.\u201dShe said that \u201cthe return looked spotless.\u201d But she conceded that, \u201cI know folks will be wondering about the that one lagging main parachute. And the team will be going off and looking at how the loading was on the chutes and understanding that behavior. It is behavior we\u2019ve seen multiple times on other tests, and usually happens when the lines kind of bunch up together until the aero forces kind of open up and spread the chutes.\u201dThe return comes at a busy time for human spaceflight. On Wednesday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch another quartet of astronauts to the space station \u2014 a mission that had been scheduled to lift off last week but was delayed because of weather and an astronaut\u2019s illness. NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not covid.The Crew-2 astronauts who returned Monday had two dramatic moments onboard the station when it was forced out of position because of errant thruster firings, prompting the NASA crew to evacuate the station at least once and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to come home.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough told reporters last week. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course, it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t say when they evacuated the station, and a NASA public affairs officer could not provide an answer or confirm that the astronauts boarded Dragon. In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, last month, the station was again forced out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews regained control of the station in less than an hour, NASA has said.The astronauts were on board for another dramatic event \u2014 the filming of a scene for a Russian movie. Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko visited to shoot a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Before heading home, the Dragon spacecraft, dubbed Endeavour, flew around the space station so that the astronauts could photograph the exterior. The fly-around was not done in response to the errant thruster firings, NASA said, but rather as a general inspection of the more-than-20-year-old station.During their time on the station, the astronauts performed more than 300 experiments and participated in four spacewalks. As Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dThe ride home was intense as well. Plunging through the atmosphere, the Dragon capsule endured temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, engulfing the spacecraft in flames. Astronauts aboard the capsule also were asked not to use the spacecraft\u2019s toilet during the eight-hour return because of a malfunction that SpaceX had discovered after another recent flight.Still, as it neared the Gulf of Mexico, the capsule successfully deployed its parachutes and touched down safely, completing another mission for SpaceX, landing precisely on time.SpaceX and NASA will now turn their attention to Wednesday\u2019s launch, scheduled for 9:03 p.m., from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That flight will carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany. They\u2019ll join NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and two Russian cosmonauts, bringing the space station\u2019s population back to seven.Here\u2019s what you need to knowThe returning astronauts spent 199 days in space.During their time aboard the space station, the Crew-2 astronauts performed more than 300 experiments.They also experienced two harrowing unplanned events when Russian rocket engines fired unexpectedly, sending the International Space Station off its trajectory. During one of those, the Crew-2 astronauts reentered the Dragon capsule in case they had to abandon the station, Kimbrough said last week.MORE TOP STORIESOmicron spreading rapidly in U.S. and could bring punishing wave as soon as January, CDC warnsNews\u2022December 14, 2021The striking race gap in corporate AmericaDecember 15, 2021An Arkansas waitress served a party that tipped $4,400. It led to her getting fired.News\u2022December 16, 2021Crew exits the spacecraftReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:34 p.m.Link copiedLinkCrews started exiting the spacecraft at about 11:25 p.m. or less than an hour after splashing down, ending a largely successful mission. As they exited Dragon they smiled and waved to the cameras, looking happy and healthy. All were out of the capsule within an hour of splashdown. The astronauts next were to be assessed by medical personnel on the recovery ship before being flown back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrews preparing to secure capsule and hoist it onto recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkFast boats have reached the spacecraft as it bobs in the Gulf of Mexico. Crews will secure the spacecraft, make sure it is safe and prepare it with rigging to be hoisted onto the deck of a recovery ship.The goal is to get the spacecraft on board the ship in less than an hour, so that the astronauts can exit and be seen by medical personnel before being flown back to the mainland.So far the mission appears to have gone flawlessly. The only issue seems to be that one of the four main parachutes inflated a bit more slowly than the others. But SpaceX mission controllers said it inflated at a normal rate.Speaking from the recovery ship, NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier said \u201cthings are moving really smoothly here.\u201d She said the crews could see the spacecraft hurtling through the atmosphere to Earth, saying it was like \u201ca meteorite in the sky.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:33 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member crew has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The astronauts, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of the United States, Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan, will exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:30 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestone before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft flies on its ownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe astronauts on board the Dragon spacecraft are highly trained, and among NASA\u2019s best. But when it comes to flying the capsule, they are, for the most part, mere passengers. That\u2019s because the capsule is fully autonomous. It flies itself, knowing where it is and what it needs to do at every point in the mission, from undocking from the space station to deploying its parachutes on the way down.In case anything goes wrong, the astronauts can take manual control, of course. But the spacecraft is designed so that virtually anyone can fly in it. In September, a crew of four private space travelers, all amateurs who had never been to space before, spent three days in orbit as part of what was called the Inspiration4 mission. And not once did they take control of the spacecraft.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft is plunging through the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begun its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft, causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last several minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk and SpaceX also looking to the moonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhile all eyes are currently focused on getting the Crew-2 astronauts home safely. SpaceX and NASA are also preparing to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.Earlier this year, SpaceX won a major NASA contract to develop the spacecraft that would fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, beating out Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion for the contract, or about double what SpaceX bid. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin twice contested the contract award, losing both times, and NASA has said it is ready and eager to get moving with SpaceX. The space agency has scheduled a briefing for Tuesday afternoon to discuss the future of its so-called Artemis program.While it had originally been aiming to get astronauts back to the moon by 2024, that is unlikely to happen. And NASA officials are expected to discuss a revised timeline and give an update of where the program stands.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule spent 90 minutes photographing the space station before heading homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 p.m.Link copiedLinkBefore heading home, the crew spent about an hour and a half flying around the space station to take photos of the exterior. The station is more than 20 years old and has shown signs of wear and tear, so NASA wanted to have the astronauts spend some time gathering images to see how it is holding up.The decision to do the fly around was made before errant thrusters on Russian spacecraft knocked it off its course, NASA officials said. In one of those cases, the space station careened so dramatically that one flight director said he was relieved that the solar arrays were still attached.As it flew around, the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s nose remained pointed at the station so the astronauts could take pictures through a window.Last week, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said that officials \u201cdon\u2019t have that many opportunities to see the station from outside.\u201d And that the photos would be to get \u201ca good view so that folks on the ground can put their eyes on the outside equipment. There is a lot of equipment outside the station to make it go.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:58 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has completed the last burn of its engines, and the capsule is now flying on a trajectory to its landing site in the Gulf of Mexico. Mission control in SpaceX headquarters said the 16-and-a-half minute \u201cdeorbit burn,\u201d which committed the capsule to landing, was \u201cnominal\", or successful.The spacecraft will soon plunge into the atmosphere, generating temperatures of about 3,500 degrees. Once through the atmosphere it would deploy its parachutes and splashdown in the water.Filming a movie in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is open to all kinds of visitors these days, or at least those who can afford the hefty price for a week on the station \u2014 estimated to cost about $55 million.During the Crew-2\u2019s time on the station they were visited by Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko, who were shooting a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Having a taste of Hollywood on board \u201cwas a little bit unusual,\u201d Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut, told reporters last week. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really know how to position ourselves initially. We got a really good briefing, we got to talk to them and then everything ended up working out really, really smoothly.\u201dAfter watching the filming, he said, \u201cwe can\u2019t wait to see the result.\u201dIt may not be the only time a film crew visits the station. Jim Bridenstine, the former NASA administrator, said last year that the agency was also working with Tom Cruise to shoot a movie on the station.Spacecraft trunk jettisoned and deorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon capsule has jettisoned its trunk, the unpressurized part of the capsule. That exposes the heat shield, which will bear the brunt of the heat as the spacecraft plunges through the atmosphere.The spacecraft has also begun its \u201cdeborbit burn,\u201d a more than 16-minute firing of the engines that will bring the Dragon into the atmosphere. Colliding with the air creates friction. As the heat builds around the capsule, plasma will form and cause a communications blackout that should last about seven minutes.No crew overlap this timeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkIdeally, one crew arrives at the International Space Station before the other departs. But because of delays, that won\u2019t happen for the Crew-2 and Crew-3 astronauts.The Crew-3 astronauts were initially supposed to launch to the station last week. But bad weather delayed the launch and then one of the astronauts got sick, delaying the launch. (NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not the coronavirus.)As a result, NASA decided that the Crew-2 astronauts should come home first, and then Crew-3 could launch afterward. Currently, that is scheduled for Wednesday at 9:03 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.That means the astronauts won\u2019t overlap on the station. Usually the outgoing crew likes to spend at least a couple of days bringing the new arrivals up to speed on what\u2019s going on at the station.In a tweet, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet lamented the fact that he won\u2019t see his comrades on orbit.\u201cIt seems we will not cross paths with our #Crew3 colleagues on the Space Station,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPity, it would have been a pleasure to explain the finer points of living up here.\u201dThe space station won\u2019t be abandoned in between the flights, however. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei remains on the station with a pair of Russian cosmonauts. Vande Hei is scheduled to remain on the station until March, and possibly break the longest stay for an American. That mark is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days in space. Vande Hei could stay aloft for as many as 353 days.During their tour on the station, the crew faced a couple of emergenciesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkTrips to the International Space Station are always eventful. But few expeditions have been quite like what the Crew-2 astronauts have experienced since they arrived at the station in April.During their time on board the orbiting laboratory, the crew has performed more than 300 science experiments, according to NASA officials. \u201cWe\u2019ve had seven visiting vehicles come and go to the International Space Station,\u201d said Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station manager. \u201cAnd this crew has participated in four spacewalks during the expedition.\u201dBut they\u2019ve also had the station be tilted perilously out of position twice because of errant thruster firings. That prompted the NASA crew to evacuate the station and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to abort and come home, NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough said during a briefing last week.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d Kimbrough said. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t specify when the astronauts left the station for the Dragon, and a NASA spokesperson said she did not know.In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football-field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, in October, the station was again tilted out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews were able to get control of the station within less than an hour, NASA has said.As French astronaut Thomas Pesquet put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dReturning astronauts are wearing diapers because the spacecraft\u2019s toilet is out of orderReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft that is flying the crew home is a marvel of engineering that\u2019s able to survive in the vacuum of space for months at a time, withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it reenters the atmosphere and then land softly in the water.But this particular ship has a bit of a flaw \u2014 the toilet doesn\u2019t work \u2014 and as a result the four astronauts on their way home are wearing diapers.SpaceX first discovered the problem after the Inspiration4 mission in September, which flew a crew of private space travelers in orbit for three days. After the spacecraft landed, engineers studied it and discovered that a tube that funnels urine into a storage tank had become unglued. SpaceX engineers fixed the problem for future missions by welding the tube in place.Astronauts on board the space station were not able to make that fix, however, and NASA and SpaceX decided it was best if they avoided using the facilities all together during the eight-hour flight home.Being able to use the bathroom is \u201csuboptimal,\u201d NASA astronaut Megan McArthur said during a news conference last week. \u201cBut we are prepared to manage that.\u201d She said, \u201cspaceflight is full of lots of little challenges. This is just one more that we\u2019ll encounter and take care of in our mission. So we\u2019re not too worried about it.\u201dBill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said recently there was a concern that a compound known as oxone, used to remove ammonia from urine, could cause corrosion in the vehicle. As a result, he said, crews on the ground \u201cdid extensive tests where we took aluminum samples, and we placed an oxone-urine mixture on them. And then we put them in a chamber that mimics the humidity and temperature conditions onboard [the] space station.\u201dThe corrosion, he said, was limited because of the low-humidity environment, and the aluminum alloy used in the spacecraft is resistant to corrosion. Still, he said, engineers \u201cwill double-check things, we\u2019ll triple-check some things \u2026 and we\u2019ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.\u201d SpaceX's Crew Dragon splashed down off the coast of Florida at 10:33 p.m., precisely on time. SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "6999",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/08/spacex-crew-2-splashdown/",
        "text": "Four astronauts splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico Monday night, ending an eventful six-month stay on the International Space Station, which was forced off its trajectory twice during the astronauts\u2019 expedition because of errant thruster firings.Under a quartet of parachutes, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down softly in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Fla., at 10:33 p.m. after undocking from the orbiting laboratory more than eight hours earlier. On board the autonomous spacecraft were two NASA astronauts, commander Shane Kimbrough and pilot Megan McArthur. They were accompanied by astronauts Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.The successful splashdown appeared to go flawlessly, except that one of the four main parachutes inflated slower than the others.Speaking after the splashdown, Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA\u2019s Space Operations Mission Directorate, joked that \u201cI\u2019m always amazed that I can hold my breath for those last 10 minutes of re-entry. That is high drama right there and ... seeing those chutes come out, it\u2019s just an amazing thing.\u201dShe said that \u201cthe return looked spotless.\u201d But she conceded that, \u201cI know folks will be wondering about the that one lagging main parachute. And the team will be going off and looking at how the loading was on the chutes and understanding that behavior. It is behavior we\u2019ve seen multiple times on other tests, and usually happens when the lines kind of bunch up together until the aero forces kind of open up and spread the chutes.\u201dThe return comes at a busy time for human spaceflight. On Wednesday, SpaceX is scheduled to launch another quartet of astronauts to the space station \u2014 a mission that had been scheduled to lift off last week but was delayed because of weather and an astronaut\u2019s illness. NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not covid.The Crew-2 astronauts who returned Monday had two dramatic moments onboard the station when it was forced out of position because of errant thruster firings, prompting the NASA crew to evacuate the station at least once and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to come home.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough told reporters last week. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course, it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t say when they evacuated the station, and a NASA public affairs officer could not provide an answer or confirm that the astronauts boarded Dragon. In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, last month, the station was again forced out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews regained control of the station in less than an hour, NASA has said.The astronauts were on board for another dramatic event \u2014 the filming of a scene for a Russian movie. Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko visited to shoot a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Before heading home, the Dragon spacecraft, dubbed Endeavour, flew around the space station so that the astronauts could photograph the exterior. The fly-around was not done in response to the errant thruster firings, NASA said, but rather as a general inspection of the more-than-20-year-old station.During their time on the station, the astronauts performed more than 300 experiments and participated in four spacewalks. As Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dThe ride home was intense as well. Plunging through the atmosphere, the Dragon capsule endured temperatures of more than 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, engulfing the spacecraft in flames. Astronauts aboard the capsule also were asked not to use the spacecraft\u2019s toilet during the eight-hour return because of a malfunction that SpaceX had discovered after another recent flight.Still, as it neared the Gulf of Mexico, the capsule successfully deployed its parachutes and touched down safely, completing another mission for SpaceX, landing precisely on time.SpaceX and NASA will now turn their attention to Wednesday\u2019s launch, scheduled for 9:03 p.m., from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That flight will carry NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshurn and Kayla Barron as well as Matthias Maurer of Germany. They\u2019ll join NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and two Russian cosmonauts, bringing the space station\u2019s population back to seven.Here\u2019s what you need to knowThe returning astronauts spent 199 days in space.During their time aboard the space station, the Crew-2 astronauts performed more than 300 experiments.They also experienced two harrowing unplanned events when Russian rocket engines fired unexpectedly, sending the International Space Station off its trajectory. During one of those, the Crew-2 astronauts reentered the Dragon capsule in case they had to abandon the station, Kimbrough said last week.MORE TOP STORIESOmicron spreading rapidly in U.S. and could bring punishing wave as soon as January, CDC warnsNews\u2022December 14, 2021The striking race gap in corporate AmericaDecember 15, 2021An Arkansas waitress served a party that tipped $4,400. It led to her getting fired.News\u2022December 16, 2021Crew exits the spacecraftReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport11:34 p.m.Link copiedLinkCrews started exiting the spacecraft at about 11:25 p.m. or less than an hour after splashing down, ending a largely successful mission. As they exited Dragon they smiled and waved to the cameras, looking happy and healthy. All were out of the capsule within an hour of splashdown. The astronauts next were to be assessed by medical personnel on the recovery ship before being flown back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCrews preparing to secure capsule and hoist it onto recovery shipReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:47 p.m.Link copiedLinkFast boats have reached the spacecraft as it bobs in the Gulf of Mexico. Crews will secure the spacecraft, make sure it is safe and prepare it with rigging to be hoisted onto the deck of a recovery ship.The goal is to get the spacecraft on board the ship in less than an hour, so that the astronauts can exit and be seen by medical personnel before being flown back to the mainland.So far the mission appears to have gone flawlessly. The only issue seems to be that one of the four main parachutes inflated a bit more slowly than the others. But SpaceX mission controllers said it inflated at a normal rate.Speaking from the recovery ship, NASA public affairs officer Leah Cheshier said \u201cthings are moving really smoothly here.\u201d She said the crews could see the spacecraft hurtling through the atmosphere to Earth, saying it was like \u201ca meteorite in the sky.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSplashdownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:33 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-member crew has splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast. Recovery ships are speeding toward the capsule, which will be hoisted onto the deck of a ship. The astronauts, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of the United States, Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan, will exit the capsule then and be assessed by medical personnel before coming back to land.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementParachutes deployedReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:30 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe capsule\u2019s four main parachutes have successfully deployed, the last major milestone before the spacecraft splashes down in the water.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft flies on its ownReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:25 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe astronauts on board the Dragon spacecraft are highly trained, and among NASA\u2019s best. But when it comes to flying the capsule, they are, for the most part, mere passengers. That\u2019s because the capsule is fully autonomous. It flies itself, knowing where it is and what it needs to do at every point in the mission, from undocking from the space station to deploying its parachutes on the way down.In case anything goes wrong, the astronauts can take manual control, of course. But the spacecraft is designed so that virtually anyone can fly in it. In September, a crew of four private space travelers, all amateurs who had never been to space before, spent three days in orbit as part of what was called the Inspiration4 mission. And not once did they take control of the spacecraft.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDragon spacecraft is plunging through the atmosphereReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:21 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft has begun its plunge through the thickening atmosphere, generating temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result of the extreme heat, a plasma layer builds up around the spacecraft, causing a communications blackout with the ground. The blackout should last several minutes.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementElon Musk and SpaceX also looking to the moonReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:09 p.m.Link copiedLinkWhile all eyes are currently focused on getting the Crew-2 astronauts home safely. SpaceX and NASA are also preparing to return astronauts to the surface of the moon.Earlier this year, SpaceX won a major NASA contract to develop the spacecraft that would fly astronauts to and from the lunar surface, beating out Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin, which had bid $6 billion for the contract, or about double what SpaceX bid. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Blue Origin twice contested the contract award, losing both times, and NASA has said it is ready and eager to get moving with SpaceX. The space agency has scheduled a briefing for Tuesday afternoon to discuss the future of its so-called Artemis program.While it had originally been aiming to get astronauts back to the moon by 2024, that is unlikely to happen. And NASA officials are expected to discuss a revised timeline and give an update of where the program stands.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementCapsule spent 90 minutes photographing the space station before heading homeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport10:01 p.m.Link copiedLinkBefore heading home, the crew spent about an hour and a half flying around the space station to take photos of the exterior. The station is more than 20 years old and has shown signs of wear and tear, so NASA wanted to have the astronauts spend some time gathering images to see how it is holding up.The decision to do the fly around was made before errant thrusters on Russian spacecraft knocked it off its course, NASA officials said. In one of those cases, the space station careened so dramatically that one flight director said he was relieved that the solar arrays were still attached.As it flew around, the Dragon spacecraft\u2019s nose remained pointed at the station so the astronauts could take pictures through a window.Last week, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said that officials \u201cdon\u2019t have that many opportunities to see the station from outside.\u201d And that the photos would be to get \u201ca good view so that folks on the ground can put their eyes on the outside equipment. There is a lot of equipment outside the station to make it go.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementDeorbit burn completeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:58 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has completed the last burn of its engines, and the capsule is now flying on a trajectory to its landing site in the Gulf of Mexico. Mission control in SpaceX headquarters said the 16-and-a-half minute \u201cdeorbit burn,\u201d which committed the capsule to landing, was \u201cnominal\", or successful.The spacecraft will soon plunge into the atmosphere, generating temperatures of about 3,500 degrees. Once through the atmosphere it would deploy its parachutes and splashdown in the water.Filming a movie in spaceReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:50 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe International Space Station is open to all kinds of visitors these days, or at least those who can afford the hefty price for a week on the station \u2014 estimated to cost about $55 million.During the Crew-2\u2019s time on the station they were visited by Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer-director Klim Shipenko, who were shooting a scene for a film called \u201cThe Challenge\u201d about a doctor sent to save an astronaut\u2019s life.Having a taste of Hollywood on board \u201cwas a little bit unusual,\u201d Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut, told reporters last week. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really know how to position ourselves initially. We got a really good briefing, we got to talk to them and then everything ended up working out really, really smoothly.\u201dAfter watching the filming, he said, \u201cwe can\u2019t wait to see the result.\u201dIt may not be the only time a film crew visits the station. Jim Bridenstine, the former NASA administrator, said last year that the agency was also working with Tom Cruise to shoot a movie on the station.Spacecraft trunk jettisoned and deorbit burn has begunReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:40 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe SpaceX Dragon capsule has jettisoned its trunk, the unpressurized part of the capsule. That exposes the heat shield, which will bear the brunt of the heat as the spacecraft plunges through the atmosphere.The spacecraft has also begun its \u201cdeborbit burn,\u201d a more than 16-minute firing of the engines that will bring the Dragon into the atmosphere. Colliding with the air creates friction. As the heat builds around the capsule, plasma will form and cause a communications blackout that should last about seven minutes.No crew overlap this timeReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkIdeally, one crew arrives at the International Space Station before the other departs. But because of delays, that won\u2019t happen for the Crew-2 and Crew-3 astronauts.The Crew-3 astronauts were initially supposed to launch to the station last week. But bad weather delayed the launch and then one of the astronauts got sick, delaying the launch. (NASA did not say which astronaut got sick or what the illness was, other than it was not the coronavirus.)As a result, NASA decided that the Crew-2 astronauts should come home first, and then Crew-3 could launch afterward. Currently, that is scheduled for Wednesday at 9:03 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.That means the astronauts won\u2019t overlap on the station. Usually the outgoing crew likes to spend at least a couple of days bringing the new arrivals up to speed on what\u2019s going on at the station.In a tweet, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet lamented the fact that he won\u2019t see his comrades on orbit.\u201cIt seems we will not cross paths with our #Crew3 colleagues on the Space Station,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPity, it would have been a pleasure to explain the finer points of living up here.\u201dThe space station won\u2019t be abandoned in between the flights, however. NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei remains on the station with a pair of Russian cosmonauts. Vande Hei is scheduled to remain on the station until March, and possibly break the longest stay for an American. That mark is currently held by Scott Kelly, who spent 340 days in space. Vande Hei could stay aloft for as many as 353 days.During their tour on the station, the crew faced a couple of emergenciesReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:16 p.m.Link copiedLinkTrips to the International Space Station are always eventful. But few expeditions have been quite like what the Crew-2 astronauts have experienced since they arrived at the station in April.During their time on board the orbiting laboratory, the crew has performed more than 300 science experiments, according to NASA officials. \u201cWe\u2019ve had seven visiting vehicles come and go to the International Space Station,\u201d said Joel Mantalbano, NASA\u2019s space station manager. \u201cAnd this crew has participated in four spacewalks during the expedition.\u201dBut they\u2019ve also had the station be tilted perilously out of position twice because of errant thruster firings. That prompted the NASA crew to evacuate the station and board their Dragon spacecraft in case they needed to abort and come home, NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough said during a briefing last week.\u201cThe ground teams really, really worked hard to make sure we were in the safest posture possible,\u201d Kimbrough said. \u201cWe were actually in the Dragon capsule in case something really bad did happen. We were ready to go and undock if that was necessary. Of course it wasn\u2019t, thankfully.\u201dHe didn\u2019t specify when the astronauts left the station for the Dragon, and a NASA spokesperson said she did not know.In July, the thrusters of a newly installed Russian module fired unexpectedly, sending the station on a wild ride. It spun one and a half times, and ended up upside down, before crews could right the football-field-sized ship.NASA said the crew was never in danger, but afterward Zebulon Scoville, a NASA flight director, wrote on Twitter he had never \u201chad to declare a space craft emergency until now\u201d and that he had never \u201cbeen so happy to see all solar arrays + radiators still attached.\u201dThen, in October, the station was again tilted out of position during the test firing of the thrusters of a Russia spacecraft that was attached to the station. The test was supposed to come to an end, but the thruster kept firing unexpectedly, NASA officials said.Ground crews were able to get control of the station within less than an hour, NASA has said.As French astronaut Thomas Pesquet put it: \u201cThe mission has certainly been very, very intense.\u201dReturning astronauts are wearing diapers because the spacecraft\u2019s toilet is out of orderReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport9:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Dragon spacecraft that is flying the crew home is a marvel of engineering that\u2019s able to survive in the vacuum of space for months at a time, withstand temperatures as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit as it reenters the atmosphere and then land softly in the water.But this particular ship has a bit of a flaw \u2014 the toilet doesn\u2019t work \u2014 and as a result the four astronauts on their way home are wearing diapers.SpaceX first discovered the problem after the Inspiration4 mission in September, which flew a crew of private space travelers in orbit for three days. After the spacecraft landed, engineers studied it and discovered that a tube that funnels urine into a storage tank had become unglued. SpaceX engineers fixed the problem for future missions by welding the tube in place.Astronauts on board the space station were not able to make that fix, however, and NASA and SpaceX decided it was best if they avoided using the facilities all together during the eight-hour flight home.Being able to use the bathroom is \u201csuboptimal,\u201d NASA astronaut Megan McArthur said during a news conference last week. \u201cBut we are prepared to manage that.\u201d She said, \u201cspaceflight is full of lots of little challenges. This is just one more that we\u2019ll encounter and take care of in our mission. So we\u2019re not too worried about it.\u201dBill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX\u2019s vice president of build and flight reliability, said recently there was a concern that a compound known as oxone, used to remove ammonia from urine, could cause corrosion in the vehicle. As a result, he said, crews on the ground \u201cdid extensive tests where we took aluminum samples, and we placed an oxone-urine mixture on them. And then we put them in a chamber that mimics the humidity and temperature conditions onboard [the] space station.\u201dThe corrosion, he said, was limited because of the low-humidity environment, and the aluminum alloy used in the spacecraft is resistant to corrosion. Still, he said, engineers \u201cwill double-check things, we\u2019ll triple-check some things \u2026 and we\u2019ll be ready to go and make sure the crew is safe to return.\u201d SpaceX's Crew Dragon splashed down off the coast of Florida at 10:33 p.m., precisely on time. SpaceX Crew-2 astronauts splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, completing their mission",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX lands Starship spacecraft in first full successful test flight (WP: Technology) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7000",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/elon-musks-spacex-lands-starship-spacecraft-first-time/",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX finally stuck the landing of one of its Starship spacecraft prototypes Wednesday, a key milestone in the test program and a dramatic statement coming just two weeks after NASA chose the vehicle to fly its astronauts to the surface of the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Starship spacecraft, known as Serial Number 15 (SN15), lifted off from SpaceX\u2019s launch site near the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas, firing its three Raptor engines to an altitude of about 6 miles. It then turned itself sideways in a \u201cbelly flop\u201d maneuver and headed back to Earth before righting itself, reigniting its engines and touching down softly. \u201cThe Starship has landed,\u201d John Insprucker, SpaceX principal integration engineer, said during the live broadcast.With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to spaceIt marked the second time SpaceX has landed Starship. A previous version exploded a few minutes after it landed harder than anticipated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther versions blew up during crash landings, and one exploded just before touching down \u2014 a series of Earth-shattering fireballs that turned the stainless-steel spacecraft into shrapnel.Despite those setbacks, Musk has said he was optimistic about the SN15 flight and the spacecraft\u2019s ability to make it to orbit by the end of this year and eventually transport people. But, he added, \u201cobviously we need to, like, not be making craters.\u201dThe lack of a crater this time was a triumph then \u2014 not only for SpaceX but for NASA, which is now heavily invested in Starship and will oversee its development after awarding SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface.Starship landing nominal!\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2021\n\nThe successful test also served notice, coming as SpaceX finds itself under attack by the two competitors it beat out for the NASA contract: a team led by Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, and Dynetics, a defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth companies have protested the award with the Government Accountability Office, saying the process was flawed and that the space agency should have two providers in case one stumbles. They also are lobbying members of Congress and the space agency\u2019s leadership to add funding for another spacecraft that could move astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceXWhile all that happens behind the scenes, SpaceX is pressing ahead with its Starship program at a blistering pace. On Tuesday, it launched its Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in a mission that hoisted 60 Starlink satellites to orbit. They are part of a constellation of more than 1,000 satellites that SpaceX has put into space to beam the Internet to remote areas.SpaceX also flew its third group of astronauts to the International Space Station late last month, and on Sunday it returned four astronauts from the orbiting laboratory in its Dragon spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk, who is set to host \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d this weekend, is focused on Starship, a fully reusable system that he is planning to use to take people to the moon and Mars. The Starship prototypes SpaceX has been testing at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas, would serve as the second stage of the rocket and be hoisted to orbit by what SpaceX calls the Super Heavy booster. Combined, the stainless steel booster and the spacecraft would be nearly 400 feet tall, larger than the Saturn V rocket that flew the Apollo astronauts to the moon.Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moonWhile Musk\u2019s ultimate goal is to use Starship to send people to Mars, he recently said that \u201cit\u2019s a great honor to be chosen by NASA to return people to the moon. It's been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. That's too long. We need to get back there and have \u2026 a permanently occupied based on the moon.\u201dSo far, SpaceX has been funding a lot of the development internally, he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s been pretty expensive. As you can tell if you\u2019ve been watching the videos, you know we\u2019ve blown up a few of them. So, excitement guaranteed.\u201dBut being able to fly the spacecraft and the booster back so they can be reused would \u201crevolutionize space,\u201d he said. It would cut the cost of access to orbit and beyond \u201cby potentially a factor of 100 or more.\u201d The flight comes after NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop Starship to land astronauts on the moon. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX lands Starship spacecraft in first full successful test flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX lands Starship spacecraft in first full successful test flight (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7001",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/elon-musks-spacex-lands-starship-spacecraft-first-time/",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX finally stuck the landing of one of its Starship spacecraft prototypes Wednesday, a key milestone in the test program and a dramatic statement coming just two weeks after NASA chose the vehicle to fly its astronauts to the surface of the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Starship spacecraft, known as Serial Number 15 (SN15), lifted off from SpaceX\u2019s launch site near the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas, firing its three Raptor engines to an altitude of about 6 miles. It then turned itself sideways in a \u201cbelly flop\u201d maneuver and headed back to Earth before righting itself, reigniting its engines and touching down softly. \u201cThe Starship has landed,\u201d John Insprucker, SpaceX principal integration engineer, said during the live broadcast.With another human spaceflight success, SpaceX turns toward flying private citizens to spaceIt marked the second time SpaceX has landed Starship. A previous version exploded a few minutes after it landed harder than anticipated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther versions blew up during crash landings, and one exploded just before touching down \u2014 a series of Earth-shattering fireballs that turned the stainless-steel spacecraft into shrapnel.Despite those setbacks, Musk has said he was optimistic about the SN15 flight and the spacecraft\u2019s ability to make it to orbit by the end of this year and eventually transport people. But, he added, \u201cobviously we need to, like, not be making craters.\u201dThe lack of a crater this time was a triumph then \u2014 not only for SpaceX but for NASA, which is now heavily invested in Starship and will oversee its development after awarding SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface.Starship landing nominal!\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 5, 2021\n\nThe successful test also served notice, coming as SpaceX finds itself under attack by the two competitors it beat out for the NASA contract: a team led by Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, and Dynetics, a defense contractor. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoth companies have protested the award with the Government Accountability Office, saying the process was flawed and that the space agency should have two providers in case one stumbles. They also are lobbying members of Congress and the space agency\u2019s leadership to add funding for another spacecraft that could move astronauts to and from the lunar surface.Jeff Bezos challenges NASA moon-contract award to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceXWhile all that happens behind the scenes, SpaceX is pressing ahead with its Starship program at a blistering pace. On Tuesday, it launched its Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in a mission that hoisted 60 Starlink satellites to orbit. They are part of a constellation of more than 1,000 satellites that SpaceX has put into space to beam the Internet to remote areas.SpaceX also flew its third group of astronauts to the International Space Station late last month, and on Sunday it returned four astronauts from the orbiting laboratory in its Dragon spacecraft.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk, who is set to host \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d this weekend, is focused on Starship, a fully reusable system that he is planning to use to take people to the moon and Mars. The Starship prototypes SpaceX has been testing at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas, would serve as the second stage of the rocket and be hoisted to orbit by what SpaceX calls the Super Heavy booster. Combined, the stainless steel booster and the spacecraft would be nearly 400 feet tall, larger than the Saturn V rocket that flew the Apollo astronauts to the moon.Biden\u2019s NASA nominee says he\u2019ll try to stick to Trump\u2019s schedule for return to the moonWhile Musk\u2019s ultimate goal is to use Starship to send people to Mars, he recently said that \u201cit\u2019s a great honor to be chosen by NASA to return people to the moon. It's been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. That's too long. We need to get back there and have \u2026 a permanently occupied based on the moon.\u201dSo far, SpaceX has been funding a lot of the development internally, he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s been pretty expensive. As you can tell if you\u2019ve been watching the videos, you know we\u2019ve blown up a few of them. So, excitement guaranteed.\u201dBut being able to fly the spacecraft and the booster back so they can be reused would \u201crevolutionize space,\u201d he said. It would cut the cost of access to orbit and beyond \u201cby potentially a factor of 100 or more.\u201d The flight comes after NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop Starship to land astronauts on the moon. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX lands Starship spacecraft in first full successful test flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "As offices open back up, not all tech companies are sold on a remote future (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7002",
        "date": "2021-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/04/big-tech-office-openings/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Twitter doesn\u2019t want its executives to come back to the office, at least not full time.Neither does Slack, which makes workplace-collaboration tools. Both companies are letting employees work partially or fully remotely after the pandemic and want to make sure everyone adheres to the new policies to create equality. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAmazon, on the other hand, believes the best way to keep its foothold as a leading tech giant is by bringing everyone back to an \u201coffice-centric culture,\u201d as soon as it\u2019s safely possible. In between are companies such as Google and Apple, which are allowing two work-from-home days every week.Big tech companies were some of the earliest to shut down and lead the way for remote work at the start of the pandemic. Now many are evaluating the future, some choosing at least limited returns to expensive tech campuses, in which the largest companies have invested billions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs they announce their plans, it\u2019s becoming clear: Many of the same companies behind the technology that has made remote work possible for the past 15 months are not willing to buy into a fully remote workplace for themselves.That has created tension among some white-collar tech workers, as the companies try to balance retaining control with the demands of employees who have grown used to managing their own locations and schedules. They\u2019ve commiserated on internal forums and pushed back on early offerings from employers.Now, many tech companies are inviting (or requiring) their employees to come back to the office a few days a week, most commonly three. Some including Google and Apple are adding on stretches of remote-work time, so people can take two or more weeks of working vacation from wherever they choose. A few like Facebook are letting some people apply to be fully remote, with plans of hiring more people to do so in the future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a whole, however, the companies\u2019 plans acknowledge that 2020 changed how people work, and there\u2019s no going back, at least not entirely.\u201cWhat bosses need to understand is that this experience we\u2019ve all lived through has had as big an impact on how we think about life as any other world event in history,\u201d said Jared Spataro, Microsoft\u2019s executive overseeing modern work technology. \u201cIf you then go try to run a company like it\u2019s 2019, workers might say, \u2018I\u2019ve changed, but you haven\u2019t? Then I think I have to go make a change.'\u201dMicrosoft announced most of its workers will be able to work remotely up to 50 percent of the time after offices are fully open, if their jobs allow and the workers choose to. The company, like many others including Slack and Twitter, conducted a survey of its employees to see what they wanted their work life to look like after the pandemic. Across the companies, many people want to come back to offices at least part time, and a smaller slice wants to go back full time.The battle for talentCompanies have slowly been releasing and adjusting their back-to-work plans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFacebook has not committed to any new work-from-home policies yet. After some offices start opening to a portion of workers July 2, people who are back will be able to work from home one day a week, which was Facebook\u2019s policy before the pandemic.\u201cAs we get closer to re-opening our offices at scale, we\u2019re considering our approach to in-office time, and expect this will likely evolve,\u201d said Facebook spokesperson Katelyn Brehony in a statement.Some employees at Facebook are unhappy with the system for choosing who can work fully remotely. The company is letting only workers at certain levels of seniority apply, though it varies between departments. According to Facebook, of the people who have applied to go fully remote so far, nearly 90 percent have been approved.Story continues below advertisementGoogle\u2019s plans include most workers showing up in the office three days a week, though 20 percent of staff may end up working from home permanently, and another 20 percent might switch offices. Inside the company, it\u2019s still unclear what exactly expectations will be and how they will differ between work locations and teams, one engineering employee said on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.Advertisement\u201cThe return-to-office plans announced so far for desk workers like me have so far been quite vague, so folks are generally waiting to see what we learn as more details are announced,\u201d said Andrew Gainer-Dewar, a software engineer in Google\u2019s Cambridge, Mass., office and member of the Alphabet Workers Union, in an email. \u201cHowever, workers in Google\u2019s child-care centers in the Bay Area have been called back to work without any provision for transportation, which was previously provided by Google\u2019s network of shuttles.\u201dGoogle is helping those affected workers find short-term transportation, including carpools, spokesperson Katie Hutchison said. In a May memo, Google said leaders would be sharing remote-work details with specific teams by mid-June.Story continues below advertisementThe exact terms of work could vary widely across the large companies, depending on specific teams and managers. While Amazon plans to return to \u201coffice-centric\u201d life, the e-commerce giant also noted that employees had some flexibility to manage their work life before the pandemic, and that will continue. The company says it isn\u2019t concerned about the potential impact on recruiting talent.Advertisement\u201cWe know people come, and stay, at Amazon because of the high levels of ownership they have over their work and the innovation happening around every corner,\u201d Amazon spokesperson Jose Negrete said in a statement.Apple announced its remote-work policy on Wednesday. In a memo sent out to employees, Apple said that workers would be back in the office in September and that they had to come to the office three days a week. Working from home will be available only Wednesdays and Fridays.Story continues below advertisementStill, companies may be forced to compete with one another to win the best talent and may offer more remote options as they recruit.\u201cThis is what is required in order to stay at the top of our game,\u201d said Slack chief people officer Nadia Rawlinson. She pointed out that tech recruiting has long been competitive and that flexibility in work life is now a must. Allowing remote work is especially important for companies hoping to have more racial diversity and inclusion on their teams, Rawlinson said.AdvertisementSlack will allow most of its employees to apply to stay remote, with adjusted salaries based on location. Even chief executive Stewart Butterfield has moved away from the San Francisco Bay area to Colorado and plans to work from there.Story continues below advertisementIn May 2020, at the height of San Francisco\u2019s coronavirus shutdown, Slack employee Kendall Fallon packed up and moved to Dallas. The analyst relations senior manager had already planned to relocate before the pandemic to be closer to family and to accommodate her husband\u2019s new job, and then the whole company went remote, too.Now her three-person team is spread across different time zones, staying in touch over phone calls and \u2014 of course \u2014 Slack, where Fallon mixes work conversations with photos of her new puppy, Frank. She was originally hesitant about being fully remote, but having everyone else at home has helped make it seem less isolating.Advertisement\u201cWhen we do shift to this flexible working environment, there\u2019s just going to be this empathy of knowing what it\u2019s like to work remote full time,\u201d she said.Filling seats at billion-dollar campusesOne major factor in the tech giants\u2019 decisions is the billions they have spent on their campuses.Story continues below advertisementBefore March 2020, many of the big technology companies in Silicon Valley were pouring money into elaborate new headquarters \u2014 from fancy downtown office towers to sprawling all-inclusive suburban campuses with parks and public spaces. The campuses are designed in part as a recruiting tool, with companies such as Google and Facebook offering perks such as free meals and napping pods.Apple spent $5 billion on its four-year-old spaceship campus in Cupertino, Calif. Google is working on a planned 595,000-square-foot building in Mountain View and an 80-acre campus in San Jose. Facebook expanded its campus recently with new Frank Gehry buildings in Menlo Park.Beautiful, perk-filled and mostly empty: What the future holds for tech\u2019s billion-dollar headquartersAmazon never fully closed its 11 million-square-foot urban Seattle campus dotted with office towers, where some workers have kept going in during the pandemic. The company is building a second headquarters in Northern Virginia, where it says it will invest $2.5 billion. It plans to bring back the rest of its office workers as early as this summer and into the fall.Advertisement\u201cOur plan is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline,\u201d Amazon said in a blog post in late March. \u201cWe believe it enables us to invent, collaborate, and learn together most effectively.\u201d(Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Uber\u2019s new campus in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco was completed during the pandemic. The office, which was built to hold 5,000 workers, sat empty for months but was one of the first to welcome back a small number of employees at the end of March, though employees can work remotely until Sept. 13. Uber said it was returning to its pre-pandemic remote-work policies: Any employees had to come into the office they were hired to work in at least three days a weekThe location of tech giants in hubs along the West Coast has been a big part of their success, experts said.\u201cThere\u2019s a reason all these companies are situated here, and the biggest reason of all is talent and knowledge-sharing,\u201d said Patrick Kallerman, vice president of research at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, a public-policy advocacy group. He predicts fully remote workforces will be the exception, not the rule.Office life has changed foreverAlready, some early volunteers who are going back are discovering a shortage of the usual perks and, in the case of Google\u2019s child-care workers, necessities.In Microsoft\u2019s Redmond, Wash., office, hot catering has been momentarily replaced by more sanitary boxed lunches. And regular shuttles between the dozens of buildings on its sprawling campus have been halted. Microsoft said the services will return as more employees come back to the office.For the companies launching a hybrid work model, there are likely to be growing pains. Work experts point to problems with potential inequality when some workers get face time and others are remote. Others might change their minds about going back when they see co-workers doing it.\u201cI wonder how much FOMO we will see as people watch some of their colleagues or competitors go back to the office,\u201d said Jed Kolko, chief economist at jobs listing site Indeed. \u201cThey might feel behind or left out if they work remotely.\u201dAt Slack, if one person has to dial in to a meeting, everyone else does, too \u2014 even if that means people in the office will take the call from their desks.Big Tech was first to send workers home. Now it\u2019s in no rush to bring them back.At Microsoft, in-office workers can still go into conference rooms but are asked to face their chairs toward huge screens and dial in on their own devices on mute. That way, remote workers can still see their colleagues\u2019 (virtual) faces up close and feel connected.Microsoft\u2019s Spataro said one thing the company\u2019s early return to headquarters has revealed is just how isolating it can be for the few remote people on a conference call, staring at a group sitting near one another in real life. It\u2019s a big shift from the past year, when nearly everyone was remote, to now have a split.\u201cWe totally underestimated how bad it would feel to be the one looking in,\u201d he said.Google, which defined the Silicon Valley office of the mid-2000s and 2010s with its colorful slides between floors, outdoor volleyball courts and round-the-clock free food, has had a team working on ways to redesign how its workspaces look throughout the pandemic, the company said. Ideas include \u201cballoon walls\u201d that can inflate to provide extra privacy and separation, or circular conference rooms with a camera in the middle and large TV screens around the sides so people calling in aren\u2019t limited by not being able to see their in-person colleagues, and vice versa.Twitter, which announced a permanent remote-work policy already underway during the pandemic, has transformed its San Francisco headquarters, chief human resources officer Jennifer Christie said in an interview. When it partially reopens July 12, there will be no more assigned desks and team locations. Instead, certain areas will be designated as \u201cquiet\u201d and others as \u201csocial.\u201dIt will continue to host its all-company meetings, which once were in the San Francisco headquarters\u2019 auditorium, via video conference, she said. And it\u2019s requiring employees who are a certain level, even executives, to work partially from home so employees who don\u2019t come into an office aren\u2019t left behind.\u201cWe\u2019re making sure there\u2019s no advantage for coming into the office, that it\u2019s not a center of gravity,\u201d Christie said.Still, people are excited for the office to reopen, she said. They miss their colleagues and they miss socializing, the company hears from regular employee surveys.\u201cWe think we\u2019re going to have a mad rush of people wanting to come in, and it\u2019s probably going to stay that way for a while,\u201d Christie said. But she expects it will quickly settle down as people figure out how often they want to work from home or be up close and personal with other people.Gerrit De Vynck and Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report. Tech companies were the first to send workers home. Now, they\u2019re figuring out how and whether to bring them back. As offices open back up, not all tech companies are sold on a remote future",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beautiful, perk-filled and mostly empty: What the future holds for tech\u2019s billion-dollar headquarters (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7003",
        "date": "2020-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/02/beautiful-perk-filled-mostly-empty-what-future-holds-techs-billion-dollar-headquarters/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 For years, they weren\u2019t much to look at. The Silicon Valley tech companies famously started in garages eventually upgraded to low, beige office parks that bloated outward as more employees were hired. Bland on the outside, lucrative and increasingly crammed with college-like perks on the inside, they were the standard tech headquarters for years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOver the past decade, however, tech giants have invested in real estate and proper headquarters. The kind of buildings and campuses that draw attention and lure thousands of employees to commute five days a week to work inside their open floor plans. Generous on-site benefits give those workers little reason to leave for a meal, a trip to the bank or even to get dry cleaning.Forty five miles south of San Francisco, Apple has its still-new $5 billion, 175-acre, circular \u201cspaceship\u201d campus in Cupertino. Amazon placed giant, glass-dome greenhouses at the base of its main tower in downtown Seattle, part of a $4 billion city campus. Enterprise software company Salesforce changed the San Francisco skyline with its massive billion-dollar skyscraper, topped with moving animations like dancing silhouettes and the Eye of Sauron. Also in Silicon Valley, the stretch of land between San Jose and San Francisco, Google is building the circus-tentlike 595,000-square-foot Charleston East building in Mountain View, which is expected to be completed next year. And by a marsh on the bay in Menlo Park, Facebook erected boxy Frank Gehry buildings topped with trees at around $300 million each, according to Build Zoom.In March, the commutes stopped. Many tech company offices in the United States have been fully or partially closed since the coronavirus pandemic took hold here, and some of the largest like Google and Facebook have told employees they can continue to work remotely until at least summer 2021. A handful, including Twitter and Slack, have gone so far as to say working from home, even in another part of the country, will be an option for some or all employees indefinitely.Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company was looking at more flexible hybrid models of in-person and remote work in a recent interview with Time magazine, after an internal survey found that 62 percent of employees wanted to come back to work in the office just \u201csome days.\u201d Even Apple seems to be embracing the shift, although still unofficially. CEO Tim Cook said that 10 to 15 percent of employees have come back to the office but that things won\u2019t entirely return to the way they were. A recent video presentation of its latest gadgets showed a largely empty campus.Americans might never come back to the office, and Twitter is leading the charge.When the pandemic winds down and offices are a safe option again, white-collar workplaces could be changed forever. The corporate headquarters that serve as both branding and workspace could change too, with ripple effects on their surrounding communities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is too early to know what trends will stick. It could all depend on what makes the next generation of employees happy.\u201cAmazon and other tech companies are competing for, not average talent, but the best of the best talent. The talent that is going to be producing patents or intellectual property that is going to be the next iPhone or next Alexa or next Netflix,\u201d said Mike Grella, founder of Grella Partnership Strategies and a former Amazon executive who works in economic development.While perks like YouTube\u2019s giant indoor slide, Google\u2019s college-like campus complete with bikes and Facebook\u2019s free food were appealing in the past, covid-19 has changed what may employees expect.Story continues below advertisementHousing costs in Silicon Valley and Seattle are still some of the highest in the country, and strict zoning laws \u2014 plus surrounding bodies of water \u2014 have made it nearly impossible to build enough new homes to keep up with the demand exhausted by tech companies. To compensate, tech employees receive high salaries on top of the generous perks, and sometimes even get help from the companies finding housing.AdvertisementDuring the pandemic, some tech workers found a way to pay less. They have moved from major cities to suburbs, or even away from the states where their companies are based. Their decisions are often driven by the desire for more space and a lower cost of living, but also wanting to be closer to family. Once people get used to having more flexibility with where they live, it could be hard for tech companies to enforce old norms like coming in and meeting in conference rooms or chatting over low cubicle walls.Hot new job title in a pandemic: \u2018Head of remote work\u2019Some tech companies have changed their real estate plans. Pinterest paid an $89.5 million termination fee for the 490,000-square-foot office space it was planning on moving into in San Francisco. The company, which is keeping its current offices in the city, said covid-19 was making it possible to have a more distributed workforce.Story continues below advertisementTwitter is subleasing 100,000 square feet of its downtown San Francisco office space after the company announced employees could choose to work from home permanently.Companies have long cycled in and out of the Bay Area, but it\u2019s too early to tell if their decisions are part of a larger shift or just a blip.\u201cAre we still going to see the Bay Area create new companies to take the place of the ones that have left?\u201d said Nick Josefowitz, chief of policy at SPUR, an urban-planning think tank in the Bay Area. \u201cWe\u2019ve taken that for granted for a while. We can\u2019t take for granted anymore that we\u2019re going to be the center of this tech ecosystem.\u201dAdvertisementMany of the tech giants are still pushing forward with existing real estate expansions, including a new generation of campuses that goes in the opposite direction. They\u2019re the modern version of company towns, mixing public spaces, stores and housing with traditional offices. If you live next door to the company where you work, the remote work decisions are suddenly less complicated.Story continues below advertisementWillow Village is the quaint-sounding name of Facebook\u2019s planned 59-acre campus in Menlo Park that has been at least three years in the making. What\u2019s notable about the plan, which is still in the review phase, isn\u2019t how much is dedicated office space \u2014 currently 1.25 million square feet \u2014 but how much is for other uses. There\u2019s a grocery store and pharmacy, a hotel, an elevated park, a \u201ctown square,\u201d bike paths, stores, a visitors center and a dog park. There are also plans for up to 1,735 units of housing, about 20 percent of which would be made available at \u201cbelow market rates.\u201d\u201cHalf our employees could be remote within the decade. We\u2019re also growing fast. We continue to invest in additional office space around the world and remain committed to our Bay Area offices,\u201d said Chloe Meyere, a Facebook company spokesperson.AdvertisementGoogle is attempting something similar in Mountain View, with a new proposal for a 40-acre \u201clive-work\u201d neighborhood called Middlefield Park. It envisions a mix of office space, stores and up to 1,850 units of housing with ample green areas where non-Googlers would be allowed, as well. Construction is expected to begin with the housing in 2022, and the first phase could be completed between 2025 and 2026.Big Tech was first to send workers home. Now it\u2019s in no rush to bring them back.Farther south in San Jose, the company is working on plans for its 80-acre Downtown West mega campus, which would include up to 7.3 million square feet of office space and around 4,000 housing units, along with the mix of public spaces and parks that go hand-in-hand with these proposals. Construction could start in the next few years, pending city approval.Story continues below advertisementThese kinds of campuses could help the companies get more control in their communities, while also offering benefits for non-employee residents. With claims of community connections and environmentally friendly design, they\u2019re also an attempt to appeal to the values of potential employees, Grella said.\u201cPart of it is that appeal to a millennial sense of wanting open space,\u201d Grella said. \u201cThere\u2019s a strong bend among millennials in caring about sustainable development and sustainable place-making and open spaces. I think that is a very intentional appeal to those employees.\u201dGiving employees a reason to stay local is one strategy for tech companies. Another is meeting potential talent where they want to live.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAmazon changed how people think about headquarters by forcing them to think about headquarters nonstop for much of 2018. The company launched a nationwide search to find a location for a second corporate base, which would cost $5 billion and employ up to 50,000 people. Dubbed HQ2, the search quickly became a media-ready contest among cities trying to woo the company and its promise of economic revitalization with tax breaks and other incentives.(The Washington Post is owned by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos.)The dramatic buildup ended with a fizzle after Amazon chose Long Island City for half of the promised campus, then pulled out after objections from community groups and lawmakers over nearly $3 billion in planned tax breaks for the company.Amazon says it will avoid a housing crunch with HQ2 by planning better than it did in SeattleThe idea of diversifying office locations stuck for the company, which has gone ahead with plans for a base in the Crystal City area of Virginia. And diversifying locations is becoming more appealing for other tech companies, as talent scatters during the pandemic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMany of the major tech players are investing in smaller \u201chubs,\u201d or big offices outside their base locations. Facebook just purchased outdoor company REI\u2019s 400,000-square-foot Bellevue, Wash., campus for $367.6 million. Amazon in August announced plans to hire more people at offices in Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix and San Diego. It is also expanding closer to home, with newly announced plans to add 25,000 employees in Bellevue, a Seattle suburb. Google is opening new offices in Houston and recently expanded in Atlanta, Chicago and Madison, Wis.Will Hunsinger, CEO of Silicon Valley executive-recruiting company Riviera Partners, says he has clients trying to recruit talent from the Bay Area by selling the benefits of their less-obvious locations, like Austin; Boulder, Colo.; and even Bozeman, Mont.In general, the tech companies he works with are on the fence about going all-in on remote work. It could be a tempting perk to lure talented employees, but most companies still prefer to have people in the offices, he said. Smaller organizations might try it first, because it could save them money on real estate while being perceived as a perk. Companies can also offer lower salaries to employees living outside of costly coastal cities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the senior executives, proximity is more important. For the individual or more junior folks, they\u2019re the ones who probably are going to gain ground at the end of the day,\u201d Hunsinger said.In the communities already forever altered by their presence, by soaring housing prices, gentrification and investments in infrastructure, the future of these headquarters is complicated. If they stay and grow, problems of inequality, housing shortages and gentrification could be exacerbated. If the companies pull out, they could take a piece of the local economy with them.\u201cWho\u2019s impacted the most, oddly it\u2019s not the high-skilled service worker, it\u2019s the property owners, the small business,\u201d said Adie Tomer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. \u201cThey can take a real hit, that can create a negative cycle.\u201dApple says it will spend $2.5 billion on housing crunchThe housing issues in these cities aren\u2019t going away anytime soon, even if local and state governments are able to loosen existing zoning laws. That creates an opportunity for other cities with more ample supplies of housing in dense neighborhoods, office space and access to nature. However, those same cities could end up in similar situations to Silicon Valley and Seattle if they don\u2019t plan for housing ahead of time.Advertisement\u201cThere becomes this symbiotic, parasitic relationship between the companies and the cities, they really do rely on them at that scale,\u201d Tomer said.The companies and their employees are an important tax base for the cities where they are located. While the cost of some housing would go down, the cost of delivering the social services the communities rely on would not, said SPUR\u2019s Josefowitz.\u201cWhat you\u2019re going to see is there\u2019s just generally less tax revenue to invest in essential social services that our communities rely on,\u201d Josefowitz said. Tech employees are working from home while company headquarters sit empty. What happens to tech's biggest real estate projects if remote work stretches on? Beautiful, perk-filled and mostly empty: What the future holds for tech\u2019s billion-dollar headquarters",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Man\u2019s Endless Hunt for a Dopamine Rush in Virtual Reality (NYT: Technology) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7004",
        "date": "2021-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/technology/virtual-reality-fascination.html",
        "text": "From Burning Man to spaceships, the technology has carried him through a 10-year fascination that delights, disappoints and continues to improve. From Burning Man to spaceships, the technology has carried him through a 10-year fascination that delights, disappoints and continues to improve. On a recent Thursday evening at the City Life Community Center in Missoula, Mont., Wolf Heffelfinger played laser tag.",
        "author": "By Cade Metz"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Man\u2019s Endless Hunt for a Dopamine Rush in Virtual Reality (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7005",
        "date": "2021-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/technology/virtual-reality-fascination.html",
        "text": "From Burning Man to spaceships, the technology has carried him through a 10-year fascination that delights, disappoints and continues to improve. From Burning Man to spaceships, the technology has carried him through a 10-year fascination that delights, disappoints and continues to improve. On a recent Thursday evening at the City Life Community Center in Missoula, Mont., Wolf Heffelfinger played laser tag.",
        "author": "By Cade Metz"
    },
    {
        "title": "One Man\u2019s Endless Hunt for a Dopamine Rush in Virtual Reality (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7006",
        "date": "2021-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/technology/virtual-reality-fascination.html",
        "text": "From Burning Man to spaceships, the technology has carried him through a 10-year fascination that delights, disappoints and continues to improve. From Burning Man to spaceships, the technology has carried him through a 10-year fascination that delights, disappoints and continues to improve. On a recent Thursday evening at the City Life Community Center in Missoula, Mont., Wolf Heffelfinger played laser tag.",
        "author": "By Cade Metz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Model Y is a car Elon Musk hopes will distract from everything else (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7007",
        "date": "2019-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/03/14/teslas-model-y-is-car-elon-musk-hopes-will-distract-everything-else/",
        "text": "Besieged on seemingly every front, Tesla is betting that the unveiling of a smaller battery-powered SUV, the Model Y, will reinvigorate the Silicon Valley upstart with the dazzle and fanfare that made it one of America\u2019s most valuable automakers.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut executives also hope it will distract from practically everything else the car company has faced recently, from financial land mines to courtroom brawls to doubts over the survivability of Elon Musk as Tesla\u2019s visionary marketer-in-chief. Musk revealed the Model Y in Los Angeles Thursday night in what has for him been the friendliest possible territory: before an audience of boosters, inside a Tesla design studio, on the stage that helped make him a star.Story continues below advertisementThe car is expected to launch next fall starting at $47,000, with a lower-ranged version selling for $39,000 debuting the following spring. It will also complete one of the nerdy billionaire\u2019s longest-running gags, in which the cars\u2019 names \u2014 S, 3, X and Y \u2014 appear to spell out the word \u201csexy.\u201d\u201cWe are bringing 'sexy\u2019 back quite literally,\u201d he told the cheering crowd.Tesla\u2019s fifth major auto debut in 15 years could prove to be its most important and profitable reveal. Roomier than its Model 3 sedan and more compact than the hulking Model X, it will mark Tesla\u2019s first swing at the \u201ccrossover\u201d that has become America\u2019s most popular type of car.AdvertisementNew Tesla unveilings have traditionally been some of the most energizing events in the company\u2019s history. When Musk revealed the Model 3 sedan in 2016, he positioned the electric car as a revolutionary act toward saving the world. An uproarious crowd showered him with praise and a landslide of reservations. \u201cYou did it!\u201d one onlooker screamed.Story continues below advertisementBut Tesla now endures a major news event nearly every day \u2014 and instead of celebrations, they\u2019re often centered on Musk\u2019s slap-fights with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tesla\u2019s mass layoffs and store closures, or the company\u2019s stuttering rollouts of hardware and technology, often marred by years of delays.For Musk, the unveiling is \u201ckind of like going back to your wubby. This is his comfortable place,\u201d said Mike Ramsey, the senior automotive research director for the advisory firm Gartner. But the Model Y is also, he said, \u201cthe product they can\u2019t screw up. \u2026 There\u2019s only so many times you can hit the adrenaline pump on Tesla and get a reaction.\u201dMusk asks judge to reject contempt order, accuses SEC of \u2018retaliation,\u2019 \u2018power grab\u2019The Model Y will cost about 10 percent more than Tesla\u2019s cheapest car, offers a shorter driving range and looks like a beefier Model 3, the sedan with which it will share about three-quarters of its parts. But the event did not go off without a hitch: Visitors redirected to a Tesla website for designing and buying the car said it appeared to be offline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe unveil followed a winding trip down Tesla\u2019s recent history, in which Musk, dressed in special Tesla-branded Nike sneakers, talked about early doubts about starting an electric-car company (\u201cstupidity squared\u201d), extolled other Tesla vehicles like the Model X (\u201ca Faberg\u00e9 egg meets a spaceship\u201d), and spoke candidly about his chaotic 2018 (\u201clike aging five years in one\u201d).The Model 3 sedan, while still a shrimp compared to its much larger gas-powered rivals, has become the best-selling electric car in the world. And some analysts expect the Model Y could be much bigger: Crossover SUVs like the Toyota RAV4 and Honda CR-V dominate the modern car dealership and are rapidly gaining in markets across China and Europe, where Tesla has placed its biggest hopes for long-term profit.Tesla is hopeful Thursday\u2019s unveiling will trigger a surge of deposits from would-be buyers, giving Tesla an instant bundle of interest-free money that will help it boost its cash supply. It will also signal to investors eyeing its stock price, which has slumped more than 10 percent this year, that the company can still gin up demand.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut that hype cycle could bring its own dangers. Shortly after the Model 3 reveal in 2016, more than 100,000 hopeful buyers plunked down a $1,000 deposit to preorder the $35,000 sedan. Many dropped their reservations or ended up shelling out more for a pricier car in the following years; the Model 3 only went up for sale at that price last month.The Model Y will be more affordable than Tesla\u2019s high-end Model X, but it will likely sail way over what the average American driver can afford. Years after Musk said his \u201cmaster plan\u201d was to sell cool electric cars for the middle class, Teslas are still mostly seen as status symbols for the rich and aspirational: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, for instance, announced he had one Thursday at a Ways and Means hearing.Some analysts question whether Tesla\u2019s reveal of another upscale car will really help. The company can no longer lure buyers in with a $7,500 tax incentive, which was chopped in half at the start of the year, and Musk himself has acknowledged that Teslas are \u201cstill too expensive for most people.\u201d Demand, he said in January, is \u201cinsanely high,\u201d but buyers \u201cjust don\u2019t have enough money in their bank account.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat price wall \u2014 coupled with America\u2019s shrugging disinterest in electric cars \u2014 has served to cage Tesla behind a seemingly shrinking niche. Teslas also remain largely a West Coast fling: More than 40 percent of the company\u2019s sales last year were in California.Most automakers reveal new cars alongside detailed launch plans, with the implicit guarantee that they\u2019re primed and ready to begin building and selling en masse. With Tesla, it\u2019s not only unclear when Model Ys will hit the road, but where even they\u2019ll get made: Musk has hinted that the car could be produced at its Gigafactory outside Reno, Nevada, though that plant makes batteries and would need an entirely separate assembly line for cars.Tesla says it wants to launch a factory in China, but nothing\u2019s been built, and making the car there would open the company to a raft of tariff and logistical nightmares. Analysts say the company\u2019s only current car-making factory, in Fremont, Calif., is so tapped out that changing its production lines could damage the company\u2019s bottom line.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company continues to blow past dire financial milestones, including two mass layoffs in the last year and growing uncertainty about its national footprint. Musk abruptly announced last month that the company would close most of its showrooms \u2014 a huge retreat for a company that was celebrating ribbon-cuttings a few months ago \u2014 then just as abruptly said it would be keeping many open, following a revolt from investors, landlords and fans. Evercore ISI analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said the double U-turn looked \u201clike amateur hour.\u201dTo save money, Musk also said Tesla will raise prices about 3 percent across the board and sell the cars only online \u2014 an unproven model that will force buyers to use a website when committing to one of the most expensive products they\u2019ll probably ever buy.What 150,000 miles in a private jet reveal about Elon Musk's \u2018excruciating\u2019 2018Tesla will be expected to build more cars even as it endures more public scrutiny than ever before, with regulators, lenders and whistleblowers all breathing down the company\u2019s neck.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA federal judge is currently weighing whether to hold Musk in contempt after the SEC said he violated a settlement deal reached near the end of last year. Musk\u2019s attorneys have argued that the settlement he agreed to \u2014 which required he get company preapproval for tweets that could surprise investors \u2014 was an \u201cunprecedented overreach\u201d that would trample on his First Amendment rights. The SEC, which Musk has said he does not \u201crespect,\u201d has until Tuesday to give the judge its reply.The Model Y also faces challenges in the market where it will have to compete with a growing lineup of sleek, electric crossovers from major brands, like Volvo\u2019s Polestar 2.Tesla boosters say the Model Y will be red meat for the company\u2019s often-rabidly enthusiastic fan base. And they expect, like the Model 3, that it could fuel a buyer-reservation binge that could help propel the company through financial doubts or missed deadlines.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut others aren\u2019t entirely convinced it will be enough \u2014 or that the adoration Musk is counting on will last.\u201cThanks to the quality issues and scandals over the last year, the brand\u2019s halo has started to dull,\u201d Jessica Caldwell, the executive director of industry analysis at Edmunds, wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. \u201cThe Model Y will debut with promises of grandeur, (but) if there are any chinks in Tesla\u2019s brand armor, this vehicle will expose them.\u201d Tesla\u2019s fifth major consumer-auto reveal in 15 years could prove to be its most important and profitable car. It's also \"the product they can\u2019t screw up.\" Tesla\u2019s Model Y is a car Elon Musk hopes will distract from everything else",
        "author": "Drew Harwell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Now all he needs is a throne: Elon Musk assumes title of Technoking of Tesla (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7008",
        "date": "2021-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/15/technoking-elon-musk-tesla/",
        "text": "SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Elon Musk has a new name at his electric car company. And that name is Technoking of Tesla.The car manufacturer ran by the outspoken billionaire filed an official notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday stating that henceforth, Musk\u2019s title will be Technoking of Tesla and chief financial officer Zach Kirkhorn\u2019s title will be Master of Coin. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe pair will still keep their positions of CEO and CFO.Elon Musk moved to Texas and embraced celebrity. Can Tesla run on Autopilot?Musk, who is sometimes the richest person in the world, is known for his showy antics and bold rebukes of authority. He named his son with singer Grimes X \u00c6 A-12 (later seemingly changed to X \u00c6 A-Xii), which may have run up against California state naming regulations.Story continues below advertisementHe settled with the SEC in 2018 to the tune of $20 million \u2014 and lost his chairman title \u2014 for tweeting that he had \u201cfunding secured\u201d to take Tesla private, something later disputed as accurate.AdvertisementHe defiantly reopened the company\u2019s Bay Area plant in May despite a countywide stay-at-home order, daring authorities to arrest him. The Washington Post reported last week that the plant recorded hundreds of covid-19 cases following the reopening.Hundreds of covid cases reported at Tesla plant following Musk\u2019s defiant reopening, county data showsMusk has somewhat of a cult following, especially online, where he controls his own Twitter account and often engages fans on bitcoin, updates from Tesla and his space exploration company SpaceX.Kirkhorn\u2019s new title could be a nod to Tesla\u2019s commitment to cryptocurrency bitcoin. The company invested $1.5 billion in bitcoin last month and said it plans to soon accept the cryptocurrency as payment.Musk has yet to tweet about his new title but on Saturday he seemed to profess his love for techno.\u201cHomo sapiens techno: Loves raves & technology,\u201d he wrote.A follower replied: \u201cTesla rave cave at Giga Berlin still planned?\u201d\u201cJa,\u201d Musk confirmed.Homo sapiens techno: Loves raves & technology\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 14, 2021\n\nTesla did not immediately respond to a request for further comment on the significance of the title changes. Elon Musk will now be Technoking of Tesla, and chief financial officer Zach Kirkhorn will be Master of Coin. Now all he needs is a throne: Elon Musk assumes title of Technoking of Tesla",
        "author": "Rachel Lerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos\u2019s likely Amazon successor is an executive made in Bezos\u2019s image (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7009",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/10/amazon-bezos-successor-jassy/",
        "text": "Now: Jeff Bezos announces AWS chief Andy Jassy as new Amazon CEOSEATTLE \u2014 There are few chief executives more identified with the companies they run than Jeff Bezos.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the 56-year-old Amazon founder, and the world\u2019s wealthiest person, will one day need to pass on the reins of the e-commerce giant. And an heir apparent has emerged in recent weeks: Andy Jassy, the 52-year-old head of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the company\u2019s cloud computing business, who was one of two No. 2s in Amazon\u2019s corner offices. The likelihood of Jassy\u2019s being Bezos\u2019s successor increased when the other deputy, Jeff Wilke, who ran Amazon\u2019s retail business, last month unexpectedly announced plans to retire early next year. Wilke, 53, and Jassy shared a spot in the corporate hierarchy and were both seen to be groomed for the top job, according to current and former executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo most, Amazon is known as a massive online marketplace where they can buy books, housewares, televisions and more. But Jassy\u2019s Amazon career is defined by his leading Amazon into a wholly new market, cloud computing, a business the company has come to dominate just as aggressively as it leads in the world of e-commerce. And the fact that Jassy is now most likely to succeed Bezos offers insight into Amazon: that the company still values high-risk, high-reward bets and is less defined by online shopping than some might think.\u201cAndy embodies the culture of Amazon,\u201d said Matt McIlwain, the managing director of Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle venture firm that invests in cloud start-ups. \u201cHe has consistently demonstrated the ability to be a builder.\"Amazon declined to make any executives available for this article.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBezos has given no indication that he plans to step away from the company he created 26 years ago. But he has gradually added extracurricular interests to his portfolio \u2014 including funding space exploration, beginning a life with his new girlfriend and owning The Washington Post.And the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the challenges that might make Bezos less likely to give up his leadership anytime soon. On the retail side, Amazon has wrestled with shipping delays and out-of-stock items, leaving some of its customers to shop at rivals with quicker service. It has struggled to keep warehouse workers safe. Some have raised concerns that the company hasn\u2019t done enough to protect them from contracting the virus. Even in the cloud business, Amazon has had to confront a newly vigorous rival, Microsoft, which has won contracts \u2014 including a massive one from the Defense Department \u2014 that Amazon might have handily taken just a few years ago.Amazon\u2019s retail chief, viewed as a possible CEO, will instead retire next yearFew company founders have turned their creations into global powers and remained at the helm for decades. That means there are few templates for how to make the transition, a challenge even in the most ordinary of circumstances, from an iconic founder to a new chief executive.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne example: Bezos\u2019s fellow Pacific Northwest billionaire Bill Gates. The Microsoft co-founder spread his separation from the company over two decades. In January 2000, Gates, then 44, turned the chief executive job over to Steve Ballmer. Gates gradually shed roles at the software giant until he gave up his last official Microsoft title as a board director in March.Moreover, moving away from a CEO whose persona is so deeply tied to the company as a founder is perilous. It took Microsoft more than a decade to reemerge as a tech leader as it forged a new path in cloud computing after long lording over the personal computing industry under Gates.\u201cPeople that are founders and this is their life, it\u2019s hard for them to move onto their next phase,\u201d said David Larcker, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business who specializes in corporate governance.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLarcker\u2019s survey of 113 directors and 18 executive recruiters and compensation experts three years ago found that Bezos would be the most difficult CEO to replace among those of several major U.S. corporations.Amazon\u2019s virus stumbles have been a boon for Walmart and TargetAmazon is going through its own transition. More than just an online marketplace, Amazon has rapidly grown its bricks-and-mortar business, opening physical bookstores and grab-and-go convenience shops and acquiring the natural and organic foods grocer Whole Foods Market. It has created a massive logistics machine that rivals those of UPS and FedEx. And it has pushed into a raft of new businesses, including movie and television production and online advertising. One of Amazon\u2019s leadership principles is to \u201cthink big,\u201d and whoever replaces Bezos will be tasked with finding the next multibillion-dollar-a-year business for the company to seize.Jassy, the executive who would be Bezos\u2019s successor, is an Amazon lifer, having joined the company in 1997 after graduating from Harvard Business School. Back then Amazon had only a few hundred employees \u2014 it now has 876,800 workers \u2014 and it had just turned public, compared with a current market valuation of $1.64 trillion. He led Amazon\u2019s first push outside of book sales, drawing up the plans to add music sales to the young online retailer\u2019s remit. In the early 2000s, Jassy shadowed Bezos as his technical assistant, something of a chief-of-staff role.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe has adopted a lot of Jeff\u2019s personality,\u201d said a former executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to converse candidly about previous colleagues. \u201cHe\u2019s more of a creative ideas person, rather than an operations person.\u201dRaised in Westchester County, just north of New York City, he\u2019s a rabid New York sports fan with an elaborate man cave for watching sports in his Seattle home. Jassy is a part-owner of the new Seattle National Hockey League franchise, the Kraken, which will join the league in the 2021-2022 season.Was tabloid expos\u00e9 of Bezos affair just juicy gossip or a political hit job?But Jassy isn\u2019t deeply steeped in Amazon\u2019s retail operations, which accounted for the lion\u2019s share of Amazon\u2019s $88.9 billion of sales last quarter. Wilke, as chief executive of Amazon\u2019s Worldwide Consumer business, also helped Amazon develop its warehouse operations, where packing goods into boxes resembles assembly-line operations that had been more commonly seen in manufacturing. The overwhelming majority of Amazon\u2019s employees work in those warehouses, or in the system that delivers items from them, that Wilke helped create.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe business with which Jassy is most identified is Amazon Web Services, the unit that pioneered cloud computing, the business of renting space and software programming for customers to run their technical operations on the company\u2019s vast array of servers. Amazon had already developed the technology to run its own business when a group of executives, including Jassy, met during a brainstorming session in the living room of Bezos\u2019s Seattle-area home in 2003 and proposed offering unused computing storage and service to other businesses.\u201cAndy pushed to get Amazon into a new business where it hadn\u2019t been,\u201d said a second former Amazon executive who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.The company launched AWS three years later, with Jassy at the helm. The unit upended the business software industry, putting giants such as IBM and Oracle, which were slower to pivot their offerings to cloud services, on their heels. Amazon has come to dominate the business of providing cloud infrastructure, holding 45 percent of the global market in 2019, according to the market research firm Gartner. Companies as diverse as Netflix, Kellogg\u2019s, Airbnb and BP run significant pieces of their computing operations on AWS.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJassy is not a technologist, but former executives say he often dives deep into the various pieces of AWS businesses, including its controversial facial-recognition technology and its fledgling videoconferencing Chime service and breaches such as last year\u2019s hack of Capital One\u2019s computing operations, allegedly carried out by a former AWS employee.Fierce backlash against Amazon paved the way for Microsoft\u2019s stunning Pentagon cloud winWhile retail drives Amazon\u2019s revenue, the cloud business fuels Amazon\u2019s bottom line. AWS generated $3.4 billion in net income in the most recent quarter, about 64 percent of Amazon\u2019s total profit, even though the business accounted for just 12 percent of Amazon\u2019s sales.Former executives say that while Bezos has been known to micromanage pieces of Amazon\u2019s operations, particularly its retail operations and its business-making devices, he has largely left Jassy to run AWS with little interference. That may be because the business doesn\u2019t capture Bezos\u2019s imagination as much as Amazon\u2019s other operations. But former executives also say it may be because Jassy has run AWS adeptly on his own.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe\u2019s not really that invested in AWS,\u201d the first former Amazon executive said of Bezos. \u201cIt\u2019s simply because he has so much trust and faith in Andy.\u201dIt may be that Jassy\u2019s vision for fledgling businesses is what sets him apart in Bezos\u2019s mind. Wilke, for instance, acknowledged that he initially opposed one of the moonshot products that Bezos loves, the Kindle e-reader. He worried about Amazon\u2019s lack of expertise building consumer electronic devices and feared that it might miss its launch date, he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal three years ago.\u201cMany of the things I predicted ultimately happened. But it didn\u2019t matter,\u201d Wilke said. \u201cJeff [Bezos] at the time said, \u2018It\u2019s the right thing to do for customers.\u2019 I disagreed and committed, and I\u2019m very glad I did.\u201dAmazon cloud boss chides Pentagon for awarding Microsoft lucrative contractThe criticism of AWS, much like the criticism of Amazon as a whole, is that the business has grown so dominant that it\u2019s sometimes accused of trampling the smaller companies that make their own niche cloud services that run on top of it. The technologies can be deeply geeky \u2014 such as data analytics or tools to automate tasks for software developers. Jassy has said the company expands into those markets because its customers have asked it to.For all Amazon\u2019s clout in cloud computing, Microsoft has emerged as a potent rival. The software giant has won over several retailers as customers, including Walmart, that have been reluctant to sign up for the cloud offerings of their biggest rival. And the Pentagon awarded its largest-ever cloud computing contract \u2014 a $10 billion, 10-year deal \u2014 to Microsoft last year, though Amazon challenged the decision, claiming President Trump\u2019s animosity toward Amazon improperly influenced the contract decision.In December, at the annual AWS conference in Las Vegas, Jassy ripped the decision as well as Trump\u2019s antipathy toward Bezos.\u201cWhen you have a sitting president who is willing to share openly his disdain for a company and the leader of that company, it makes it really difficult for government agencies, including the DOD, to make an objective decision without fear of reprisal,\u201d Jassy said at the time. With the pending retirement of Amazon's retail operations chief, the leader of its cloud-computing business, Andy Jassy, is now the clear heir apparent to Jeff Bezos. Bezos\u2019s likely Amazon successor is an executive made in Bezos\u2019s image",
        "author": "Jay Greene"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The two sides of Elon Musk (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7010",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/16/elon-musk-trial-analysis/",
        "text": "In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a brilliant inventor who fashioned wings for him and his son, Icarus, to escape imprisonment. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. But Icarus, heady with the power of flight, couldn\u2019t help himself. Daedalus survived; Icarus scorched his wings and died.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen Elon Musk laid out an ambitious plan to buy the struggling solar firm SolarCity in 2016, Tesla\u2019s then-CFO internally dubbed it \u201cProject Icarus\u201d \u2014 a detail that came out in a trial this week as Musk took the stand to defend the controversial $2.6 billion deal. \u201cDid it dawn on you that this is the flying too close to the sun?\u201d the plaintiffs\u2019 attorney, Randall Baron, asked the Tesla chief, referring to his SolarCity bid. \u201cThis is the crashing and burning that he meant?\u201d Musk said he caught the allusion but took it as simply a bit of humor, not a prophecy of doom. \u201cIt should have been called Project Daedalus,\u201d he added, smiling \u2014 perhaps implying that Musk, like Daedalus, would escape the ordeal unscathed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe trial is, on one level, a business dispute over the SolarCity deal, which some Tesla shareholders view as a boondoggle that Musk forced through for his own purposes. (SolarCity was run by his cousins, he was part owner, and it was in financial crisis when Tesla bought it.) But for Musk, the stakes are higher. It\u2019s a referendum on his own leadership, integrity and vision. Put another way: It\u2019s about whether he\u2019s Daedalus, the resourceful mastermind, or Icarus, flirting with disaster and bound for a tragic fall.Elon Musk defends Tesla solar deal in court, calls opposing lawyer \u2018a bad human being\u2019The answer matters to more than just Musk. He now leads two companies, Tesla and SpaceX, whose products people literally entrust with their lives. Both have pushed the boundaries of what\u2019s considered possible \u2014 and safe. Like Daedalus\u2019 wings, Tesla\u2019s \u201cautopilot\u201d technology and SpaceX\u2019s crewed space missions require enormous faith in technology and expose their users to novel risks. So the question of Musk\u2019s trustworthiness is, in a real sense, life-or-death.The trial\u2019s most illuminating moments were the ones in which the central questions that have long haunted Musk\u2019s career were made explicit. Is he a visionary or a huckster? A marketing genius or a narcissistic troll?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe world\u2019s second-richest person, by some counts, easily could have afforded to settle the SolarCity case out of court, as all of his fellow Tesla board members did last year. Instead, he chose to fight it. And so he spent Monday and Tuesday in a dreary Delaware courtroom, defending his reputation against a lawyer bent on exposing him as a self-dealing fraud, even as his fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos were in various stages of adventuring to space. (Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)The cost of that defense is fresh scrutiny of Musk\u2019s record, and by implication, his fitness to lead. On Monday, Musk did himself no favors by calling Baron \u201ca bad human being\u201d \u2014 or by insisting that \u201cI rather hate\u201d being CEO of Tesla. But his exchanges with Baron did on several occasions offer insight into how Musk views himself, and how he justifies actions that others find troubling or incomprehensible.For example: Why does Musk routinely make unrealistic promises? And does that make him dishonest, or is it crucial to his success?Elon Musk has been missing deadlines since he was a kidSpecifically, Baron pressed Musk on his grand plan for a \u201csolar roof\u201d: a house roof that\u2019s literally made out of solar panels. He unveiled the idea in 2016, partly to justify the SolarCity deal, and at one point claimed that it would be ready for widespread deployment by the following year \u2014 a bold claim for what was at the time a nonfunctional concept. Five years later, it still isn\u2019t in mass production, though Musk hasn\u2019t given up on it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI have a habit of being optimistic with schedules,\u201d Musk said. \u201cIf I wasn\u2019t optimistic, I don\u2019t think I would have started an electric-car company or a rocket company.\u201dBaron wasn\u2019t buying it. \u201cThis is more than optimistic,\u201d he said of the solar roof timeline. \u201cThis is just plain-out false.\u201dSo is Musk an optimist or a liar? The truth may be some of each: Whether it\u2019s his prediction of a solar roof by 2017, a fully self-driving Tesla by 2018, or one million robotaxis on the road by 2020, Musk often fails to deliver. And yet it\u2019s that same outrageous ambition that has driven his companies to achievements that few thought possible, from leading an electric revolution in the automotive industry to pioneering commercial space exploration.For the SpaceX founder, getting NASA astronauts to the International Space Station is just a first step. Elon Musk has the moon and Mars in his sights. (Lee Powell/The Washington Post)Similarly, Musk\u2019s bizarre tweets and antics \u2014 from crowning himself \u201cTechnoking\u201d of Tesla in a federal filing to selling flamethrowers to smoking weed on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast to naming his child X \u00c6 A-12 \u2014 can be viewed in two ways. One view is that he\u2019s an immature, entitled jerk with no self-control. The other, which Musk himself hinted at in court this week, is that he\u2019s an ingenious marketer and showman.Now all he needs is a throne: Elon Musk assumes title of Technoking of TeslaBaron held up the \u201cTechnoking\u201d maneuver as an example of Musk\u2019s willingness to put his own whims above the interests of his firm. Musk countered that his whimsy is actually strategic. \u201cIf we are entertaining, then people will write stories about us, and then we don\u2019t have to spend money on advertising that would increase the price of our products,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat might sound like a stretch, particularly when it comes to some of Musk\u2019s more ill-advised stunts, such as the \u201cfunding secured\u201d tweet that cost him his Tesla chairmanship, or his unhelpful meddling in a Thailand cave rescue effort. But there\u2019s no denying that he has succeeded in making Tesla a household name worldwide without commissioning a single car commercial. Again, both can be true: Musk is a reckless, self-aggrandizing loudmouth and a master of earned media.Of all the crises Musk has weathered so far, the shareholder lawsuit over his SolarCity acquisition seems unlikely to be the one that brings him down. Unseemly as the deal appears from many angles, it hasn\u2019t kept Tesla\u2019s stock from soaring, and Musk made a persuasive enough case that solar energy remains a plausible long-term bet for the company. Even losing the case wouldn\u2019t put much of a dent in his bank account.But to return to the metaphor of Daedalus and Icarus, there was one key point that Musk seemed to overlook. Daedalus may have survived the flight \u2014 escaping from a labyrinth of his own making, by the way. But Icarus\u2019s death was on his hands, and it haunted him. Elon Musk has made it this far, flying as close to the sun as any figure in the modern business world. Not every Tesla autopilot driver has been so lucky. And as more and more people rely on his companies\u2019 technology, his brash approach raises justifiable concerns about whether he gives safety its due priority.After all, it\u2019s not Musk\u2019s survival that the rest of us need to worry about most. It\u2019s the survival of the people who use his contraptions. Optimist or liar? Visionary or huckster? Marketing genius or troll? A trial in Delaware highlighted the contradictions at the Tesla chief\u2019s core. The two sides of Elon Musk",
        "author": "Will Oremus"
    },
    {
        "title": "CES shows us a future with flying cars \u2014 but can\u2019t avoid the reality of climate change, pollution and war   (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7011",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/09/ces-2020-future/",
        "text": "LAS VEGAS \u2014 Amid the flying taxis, cat exercise machines and companion robots on display this year at the world\u2019s largest consumer tech conference, a different kind of company was cropping up.Take AoAir\u2019s Atmos face mask, a clear plastic bubble that fits over your nose and mouth, framing them with multicolored lights like a dystopian fashion statement. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe battery-powered air filter isn\u2019t something for the future. It\u2019s made for the 95 percent of the world\u2019s population who live, commute and work in areas with polluted air. The two-phase air filtration system can clean smoke from wildfires, such as those ravaging Australia. It can also provide more information about air quality.CES 2020: Anxiety, cats and yet another streaming service, called Quibi\u201cWe\u2019re facing realities unlike before,\u201d said Mikal Peveto, U.S. head of AoAir. \u201cUnless people really know what air they\u2019re breathing in, they don\u2019t really act.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mask was on display at CES, a 53-year-old conference that more typically reflects the shiny utopian future of technology, with robots doing all the hard work while people kick back in their spotless Internet-connected smart homes, watching obscenely large 8K TVs.The Washington Post's Geoffrey Fowler and Heather Kelly are at CES 2020 to find the coolest and weirdest gadgets of the future. (The Washington Post)With each CES, more reality creeps in. For the second consecutive year, the event had a section focused on climate change-related technology with the optimistic name \u201cResilience.\u201d Other devices on display hinted at general heightened anxiety and helicopter parenting of the digital age, with tech to help you sleep, meditate and track every thing and person in your life to make sure they\u2019re okay.Ivanka Trump CES keynote address sparks backlashPrompting even more introspection, smartphones across the conference were lighting up with alerts on unrest in Iran as some muted TVs played the news. It was a serious and stressful interruption that brought a more somber tone to the somewhat silly parade of such gadgets as a robot that delivers a roll of toilet paper.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is not the event\u2019s first collision with reality. Last year, government officials including Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao had to cancel CES appearances because of the U.S. government shutdown. In 2018, security at the event was at an all-time high just months after the mass shooting a few miles away.In front of the convention center this year, Zero Mass Water set up its hydro-panels to collect moisture from the air and offer attendees samples of the water. Like many people this week, Zero Mass chief executive Cody Friesen was closely following news on the Middle East and Australia. He said he could see connections between what was in the news and the companies at CES.At CES, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are preaching privacy. Don\u2019t believe the hype.\u201cA huge percentage of the wars we fight now are around water stress, around resource stress. Things we could solve. We could hopefully de-escalate conflicts, not in a utopian way but in a realistic way,\u201d Friesen said.No single event encapsulated the contrast between the world CES imagines and the one we live in like the keynote talk from Ivanka Trump on Tuesday. During a session on the future of work, Trump talked with Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association, about job retraining and skipping college. She never addressed or acknowledged her father\u2019s pending impeachment trial, the tense military standoff with Iran or climate change.Overlaps between the unpleasantness of the real world and the optimism of the technology industry is nothing new. While tech giants like Facebook and Google once set out to make the world more connected and better informed, in recent years they\u2019ve struggled with the spread of disinformation and election interference. Companies including Microsoft, Amazon and Google have come under fire for working with law enforcement and pursuing Defense Department contracts. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)CES 2020 preview: Surveillance, sex toys and futuristic gadgetsOn the show floor, people crowded around self-driving delivery vans, flying taxis, companion robots for the elderly, laptops with foldable screens and computer-generated customer service representatives. They took rides on the next generation of transportation options, like self-balancing scooters and Segway\u2019s odd-looking S-Pod people-mover, which looked like something straight out of \u201cWALL-E\u201d \u2014 a cautionary movie about the environment and outsourcing everything to technology.Segway announced its new S-Pod at CES 2020, and it might soon carry you through an airport. (Heather Kelly/The Washington Post)Meanwhile, more of the exhibitors this year were prepping for a bleaker future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe resilience category, reserved for innovations to help with disasters or such issues as rising sea levels, pollution and water shortages, included almost 40 companies, some grouped together and others spread around the show. Their tech didn\u2019t draw as much attention as the flashy consumer hardware or innovations that reflected the future people want. But they were, perhaps, more realistic about the future to which we\u2019re headed.The most disappointing technologies of the decade: Face computers, space tourism and JuiceroThere was Senegalese company Dictaf, which says it uses artificial intelligence to help farmers improve their crops, and Corners, a South Korean company developing evacuation systems to better help people survive such disasters as gas leaks or, for U.S. customers, active-shooter events. Multiple companies, including John Deere and Odd.bot, are working on weeding technology to help farmers use fewer chemical herbicides.A handful of companies were focused on the environment and climate change. There was technology aimed at cities and towns facing pollution and climate issues. The BeachBot is a small, rugged autonomous vehicle from the Netherlands designed to clean up beaches using object detection. Its makers hope to start selling it to local governments next month. Korean company N.thing showed off its modular indoor farm systems in stackable shipping containers, which grow vegetables in locations where the climate has become too dry or hot for some outdoor farming.Some corners of the conference are a prepper\u2019s paradise, with solutions for anyone interested in living off the grid just in case existing infrastructure collapses. There are DIY greenhouses for growing your own food, solar panels for homes and batteries to store enough electricity to weather power outages. Air filtration systems promised to make air more breathable, inside homes and cars or during time outside.The Technology 202: Silicon Valley will face new challenges in 2020. Here's what we're watching.Another mask \u2014 AirBliss Plus\u2019s more traditional-looking smart air pollution mask \u2014 was designed to be comfortable for prolonged wear.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClimateSeed didn\u2019t have any technology or fun hardware prototypes at its simple booth in the crowded basement of the Sands, the location of the smaller start-ups\u2019 exhibits. The company takes money from businesses hoping to offset their carbon footprint, then invests it in projects, such as preventing deforestation in Brazil. The idea is to cancel out, on paper anyway, the damage businesses might do to the environment through such things as manufacturing.Edoardo Bertin, ClimateSeed\u2019s head of marketing and partnerships, said he hadn\u2019t seen much innovation around addressing climate change.Impossible Foods unveils its new 'pork' products at CES\u201cIt\u2019s strange to see the four thousand exhibitors and only a really small part focused on the environment,\u201d Bertin said.Zero Mass Water\u2019s Friesen thinks the intelligence on display at CES, and in the technology sector around the world, could be applied to bigger problems and help humans live better lives.\u201cThere\u2019s a huge opportunity to create solutions that both provide joy to people and make their lives better, as opposed to just simply another screen with higher resolution.\u201d CES shows us a happy, optimistic vision of our relaxing robot-filled future. But the stresses and concerns of the real world are increasingly finding their way in. CES shows us a future with flying cars \u2014 but can\u2019t avoid the reality of climate change, pollution and war  ",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "CES shows us a future with flying cars \u2014 but can\u2019t avoid the reality of climate change, pollution and war   (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7012",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/09/ces-2020-future/",
        "text": "LAS VEGAS \u2014 Amid the flying taxis, cat exercise machines and companion robots on display this year at the world\u2019s largest consumer tech conference, a different kind of company was cropping up.Take AoAir\u2019s Atmos face mask, a clear plastic bubble that fits over your nose and mouth, framing them with multicolored lights like a dystopian fashion statement. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe battery-powered air filter isn\u2019t something for the future. It\u2019s made for the 95 percent of the world\u2019s population who live, commute and work in areas with polluted air. The two-phase air filtration system can clean smoke from wildfires, such as those ravaging Australia. It can also provide more information about air quality.CES 2020: Anxiety, cats and yet another streaming service, called Quibi\u201cWe\u2019re facing realities unlike before,\u201d said Mikal Peveto, U.S. head of AoAir. \u201cUnless people really know what air they\u2019re breathing in, they don\u2019t really act.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe mask was on display at CES, a 53-year-old conference that more typically reflects the shiny utopian future of technology, with robots doing all the hard work while people kick back in their spotless Internet-connected smart homes, watching obscenely large 8K TVs.The Washington Post's Geoffrey Fowler and Heather Kelly are at CES 2020 to find the coolest and weirdest gadgets of the future. (The Washington Post)With each CES, more reality creeps in. For the second consecutive year, the event had a section focused on climate change-related technology with the optimistic name \u201cResilience.\u201d Other devices on display hinted at general heightened anxiety and helicopter parenting of the digital age, with tech to help you sleep, meditate and track every thing and person in your life to make sure they\u2019re okay.Ivanka Trump CES keynote address sparks backlashPrompting even more introspection, smartphones across the conference were lighting up with alerts on unrest in Iran as some muted TVs played the news. It was a serious and stressful interruption that brought a more somber tone to the somewhat silly parade of such gadgets as a robot that delivers a roll of toilet paper.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is not the event\u2019s first collision with reality. Last year, government officials including Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao had to cancel CES appearances because of the U.S. government shutdown. In 2018, security at the event was at an all-time high just months after the mass shooting a few miles away.In front of the convention center this year, Zero Mass Water set up its hydro-panels to collect moisture from the air and offer attendees samples of the water. Like many people this week, Zero Mass chief executive Cody Friesen was closely following news on the Middle East and Australia. He said he could see connections between what was in the news and the companies at CES.At CES, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are preaching privacy. Don\u2019t believe the hype.\u201cA huge percentage of the wars we fight now are around water stress, around resource stress. Things we could solve. We could hopefully de-escalate conflicts, not in a utopian way but in a realistic way,\u201d Friesen said.No single event encapsulated the contrast between the world CES imagines and the one we live in like the keynote talk from Ivanka Trump on Tuesday. During a session on the future of work, Trump talked with Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association, about job retraining and skipping college. She never addressed or acknowledged her father\u2019s pending impeachment trial, the tense military standoff with Iran or climate change.Overlaps between the unpleasantness of the real world and the optimism of the technology industry is nothing new. While tech giants like Facebook and Google once set out to make the world more connected and better informed, in recent years they\u2019ve struggled with the spread of disinformation and election interference. Companies including Microsoft, Amazon and Google have come under fire for working with law enforcement and pursuing Defense Department contracts. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)CES 2020 preview: Surveillance, sex toys and futuristic gadgetsOn the show floor, people crowded around self-driving delivery vans, flying taxis, companion robots for the elderly, laptops with foldable screens and computer-generated customer service representatives. They took rides on the next generation of transportation options, like self-balancing scooters and Segway\u2019s odd-looking S-Pod people-mover, which looked like something straight out of \u201cWALL-E\u201d \u2014 a cautionary movie about the environment and outsourcing everything to technology.Segway announced its new S-Pod at CES 2020, and it might soon carry you through an airport. (Heather Kelly/The Washington Post)Meanwhile, more of the exhibitors this year were prepping for a bleaker future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe resilience category, reserved for innovations to help with disasters or such issues as rising sea levels, pollution and water shortages, included almost 40 companies, some grouped together and others spread around the show. Their tech didn\u2019t draw as much attention as the flashy consumer hardware or innovations that reflected the future people want. But they were, perhaps, more realistic about the future to which we\u2019re headed.The most disappointing technologies of the decade: Face computers, space tourism and JuiceroThere was Senegalese company Dictaf, which says it uses artificial intelligence to help farmers improve their crops, and Corners, a South Korean company developing evacuation systems to better help people survive such disasters as gas leaks or, for U.S. customers, active-shooter events. Multiple companies, including John Deere and Odd.bot, are working on weeding technology to help farmers use fewer chemical herbicides.A handful of companies were focused on the environment and climate change. There was technology aimed at cities and towns facing pollution and climate issues. The BeachBot is a small, rugged autonomous vehicle from the Netherlands designed to clean up beaches using object detection. Its makers hope to start selling it to local governments next month. Korean company N.thing showed off its modular indoor farm systems in stackable shipping containers, which grow vegetables in locations where the climate has become too dry or hot for some outdoor farming.Some corners of the conference are a prepper\u2019s paradise, with solutions for anyone interested in living off the grid just in case existing infrastructure collapses. There are DIY greenhouses for growing your own food, solar panels for homes and batteries to store enough electricity to weather power outages. Air filtration systems promised to make air more breathable, inside homes and cars or during time outside.The Technology 202: Silicon Valley will face new challenges in 2020. Here's what we're watching.Another mask \u2014 AirBliss Plus\u2019s more traditional-looking smart air pollution mask \u2014 was designed to be comfortable for prolonged wear.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClimateSeed didn\u2019t have any technology or fun hardware prototypes at its simple booth in the crowded basement of the Sands, the location of the smaller start-ups\u2019 exhibits. The company takes money from businesses hoping to offset their carbon footprint, then invests it in projects, such as preventing deforestation in Brazil. The idea is to cancel out, on paper anyway, the damage businesses might do to the environment through such things as manufacturing.Edoardo Bertin, ClimateSeed\u2019s head of marketing and partnerships, said he hadn\u2019t seen much innovation around addressing climate change.Impossible Foods unveils its new 'pork' products at CES\u201cIt\u2019s strange to see the four thousand exhibitors and only a really small part focused on the environment,\u201d Bertin said.Zero Mass Water\u2019s Friesen thinks the intelligence on display at CES, and in the technology sector around the world, could be applied to bigger problems and help humans live better lives.\u201cThere\u2019s a huge opportunity to create solutions that both provide joy to people and make their lives better, as opposed to just simply another screen with higher resolution.\u201d CES shows us a happy, optimistic vision of our relaxing robot-filled future. But the stresses and concerns of the real world are increasingly finding their way in. CES shows us a future with flying cars \u2014 but can\u2019t avoid the reality of climate change, pollution and war  ",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "E-books at libraries are a huge hit, leading to long waits, reader hacks and worried publishers (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7013",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/26/e-books-libraries-are-huge-hit-leading-long-waits-reader-hacks-worried-publishers/",
        "text": "While some people are scrambling to collect log-ins for Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu and, now, Disney Plus, Sarah Jacobsson Purewal is working on a different kind of hustle. She signs up for any public library that will have her to find and reserve available e-books.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Los Angeles-based freelance writer used to borrow a friend\u2019s address to keep a New York Public Library account, and helped another out-of-state friend get a card for the Los Angeles Public Library. \u201cI\u2019m a member of every library in California that allows me to be a member as a resident of the state,\u201d said Jacobsson Purewal, before rattling off a list of cities: Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego.Story continues below advertisementOver the past two decades, electronic books have taken off as a way to read on smartphones and e-readers like the Kindle. Digital books are sold online, typically for less than their physical counterparts. They\u2019ve also found popularity in public library systems, where cardholders can download multiple e-books and audiobooks to their devices without leaving home. But, as with hardback library books, there can also be weeks-long waits and the inability to extend loan times for in-demand titles.You don\u2019t have to feel guilty about sharing your TV log-inAnd while there are technically an infinite number of copies of digital files, e-books also work differently. When a library wants to buy a physical book, it pays the list price of about $12 to $14, or less if buying in bulk, plus for services like maintenance. An e-book, however, tends to be far more expensive because it\u2019s licensed from a publisher instead of purchased outright, and the higher price typically only covers a set number of years or reads.AdvertisementThat means Prince\u2019s recently released memoir \u201cThe Beautiful Ones\u201d recently had a four-week wait for the e-book in San Francisco. Library-goers in Ohio\u2019s Cuyahoga County were waiting 13 weeks to download Jia Tolentino\u2019s book of essays, \u201cTrick Mirror.\u201dStory continues below advertisementLibrary e-book waits, now often longer than for hard copies, have prompted some to take their memberships to a new extreme, collecting library cards or card numbers to enable them to find the rarest or most popular books, with the shortest wait.Recently, Julian Hayashi-Marsano found \u201cBringing Columbia Home,\u201d a book about the multistate recovery effort to locate every piece of the space shuttle to return to Kennedy Space Center, with just a short wait before downloading it on his Kindle. The first-grade teacher is a card-holding member of the Queens, Brooklyn, and New York Public Library systems, the Cape Cod library sharing system (CLAMS), and another city\u2019s library where he borrowed a relative\u2019s address.Advertisement\u201cE-books have been mostly very good as an experience. The downside is that wait times for titles are often quite long, because people will troll the catalogues and put everything on hold,\u201d Hayashi-Marsano said. \u201cSo it\u2019s only certain boutique interests of mine that get indulged regularly.\u201d Those include accident reports, National Transportation Safety Board investigations, organizational psychology, gardening, water ponds, applied economics, and nontraditional building methods like cob housing, rammed-earth and adobe.Apps for reading could be your Netflix of booksA library typically pays between $40 and $60 to license a new e-book adult title, which it can then loan out to one patron at a time, mimicking how physical loans work. Each publisher offers different payment models. Under one, a library only has an e-book for two years or 52 checkouts, whichever comes first. Another agreement covers 26 checkouts per book.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have dozens of publishers who are vying to have their books made available, sometimes at no cost, because they absolutely see \u2026 when libraries promote an author, their print sales spike, their e-book sales grow, and their audiobooks as well,\u201d said Steve Potash, chief executive of OverDrive, which works with more than 43,000 libraries to negotiate prices with publishers and provides tools to manage digital collections, including the library app Libby. Unlike with physical books, one library system will have an OverDrive system for all its individual branches, creating a single collection of titles they share.The 10 Best Books of 2019Maintaining these collections is expensive. In 2017, libraries spent 27 percent of their collection budgets on electronic materials \u2014 which include e-books, databases and other digital content \u2014 versus 54.8 percent on print. That\u2019s up from 16.7 percent spent on electronic content five years before that, according to data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which handles federal funding for public libraries.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a tremendous amount of work for our collection librarians to manage the e-book collection, as titles are expiring every day and they have to decide to repurchase or to let it go,\u201d said Jennifer Tormey, who manages technical services at the Des Moines Public Library.Story continues below advertisementEven with the higher prices, some publishers are balking at the popularity of library e-books, saying they may be hurting business.Macmillan, one of the five-largest publishers in the United States, started enforcing a new embargo on e-book sales to public libraries this month. Libraries are only allowed to buy a single e-book version of its new titles until eight weeks after their release. Then they can buy more.In a letter announcing the change, Macmillan CEO John Sargent said library loans were \u201ccannibalizing sales.\u201d The company declined to comment further.AdvertisementE-book sales have dropped every year since 2014, according to the market research firm NPD Group, although there\u2019s no evidence it\u2019s tied to library loans. Print book sales have continued to rise.People are happier in states that spend more money on public places like parks and librariesIn response, some library systems are boycotting Macmillan e-books, and the American Library Association says it is considering legislative options.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhy should a publisher dictate how public libraries get run?\u201d said Lisa Rosenblum, the executive director of the King County library system in Washington state. \u201cYou can say, \u2018I\u2019m not making any money; I want to charge you more.\u2019 That\u2019s an argument I can understand, but to refuse to sell to us?\u201dThe embargo would create a massive backlog of holds for new titles and cost the library more, according to Rosenblum. Her library system, which is the largest digital lender in the country, already spent more than $2 million, or 16 percent of its collections budget, on e-books last year. It still invests far more in print, which made up 52 percent of its expenditures, or about $7 million.AdvertisementDespite Macmillan\u2019s concerns, multiple publishing executives told The Washington Post that libraries were key to promoting new authors and stimulating sales, and that internal research did not support the same conclusion.Story continues below advertisementMeanwhile, Amazon Publishing \u2014 the company\u2019s 10-year-old book publishing arm with 16 imprints and a growing roster of big-name authors \u2014 has a different approach. It refuses to sell any e-books of its titles to libraries. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Amazon declined to comment.At D.C. libraries, the formerly homeless help those currently strugglingSome readers are also moving to paid Netflix-like subscription services for e-books, such as Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, Bookmate and services tailored to specific genres, like Harlequin\u2019s romance e-book subscription service.Librarians say the patrons most likely to be hurt by Macmillan\u2019s rule are people like D.V. Thorn, a voracious reader who is unable to leave their house and is mostly bed-bound due to disabilities. Thorn has read and listened to around 800 books so far this year through e-lending apps, and uses multiple area library accounts for the shortest hold times.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNot only does it disproportionately target marginalized people, particularly multiply marginalized poor and disabled people, but it also shows they don\u2019t really understand libraries or their users,\u201d Thorn said. \u201cA lot of people use the library to check out a book initially, and then buy copies for themselves for the books they love. I have been that person!\u201dMeanwhile, e-book lovers are finding more creative ways to make the most of libraries. Take Scott McNulty, an author who has written books about the Kindle, who downloads library books and then puts his device into airplane mode. \u201cThat way you can read an e-book after its due date because the Kindle has to be connected to the network to remove the book,\" McNulty said.The book still appears as returned in the library system, so it doesn\u2019t hold up other readers. He sometimes even \u201creturns\u201d a book early to free it up.There\u2019s now an e-reader just for kids, and it misses what children love about booksSince auctioneer Stacie Hewitt always has her maximum five holds in the Libby app, and as multiple books can become available at once, she regularly uses the \u201csuspend hold\u201d option, which keeps her on the waitlist without going to the back of the line at her local Louisville library.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome people interviewed by The Post admitted they borrow a parent\u2019s library log-in or sign up under their own name using a friend\u2019s address, but none would use their names for fear of losing access to their secret supply of e-books.Cheating is not always necessary. A number of major library systems offer memberships to state residents, and even paid options for out-of-state readers. For example, anyone in New York can sign up for an \u201ceCard\u201d to access the Brooklyn Public Library. The Los Angeles Public Library charges $50 a year for a nonresident membership, though nonresidents must apply and renew in person.Meanwhile, a free browser plug-in called Library Extension shows library book availability while browsing titles on Amazon. Since Seattle-based software engineer Andrew Abrahamowicz built the tool eight years ago, it\u2019s grown to around 5,000 libraries and more than 100,000 users. Abrahamowicz, who used to work for Amazon, says he believes the extension helps readers decide what they want to purchase.Advertisement\u201cI don\u2019t think [publishers] would lose so much business in these cases,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people who are users of this extension are users of the library, and if they don\u2019t have it they\u2019ll buy it on Amazon.\u201dThe hacks themselves can be seen as evidence that publishers\u2019 e-book limits are working. That difficulty, dubbed \u201cfriction\" by the industry, is the magic ingredient keeping the peace.For her part, Jacobsson Purewal plans to keep adding to her collection of thousands of physical books. After using her library log-ins to track down \u201cBlackjack Shuffle Tracker\u2019s Cookbook,\u201d she bought it.If she\u2019s found out, \u201cI\u2019m a member of enough libraries, they can\u2019t all kick me out,\u201d she said.WpRequest for Reader SubmissionWhat are some of your favorite tech hacks?We want to hear about some of your best tips and tricks. A Washington Post reporter may contact you. We may use your submission in future Washington Post coverage online, in print or on social media. Full terms here.Tell the PostRead our full submission guidelines here Library e-book waits have prompted some to take their memberships to a new extreme, collecting library cards or card numbers to enable them to find the rarest or most popular books, with the shortest wait. E-books at libraries are a huge hit, leading to long waits, reader hacks and worried publishers",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The most disappointing technologies of the decade: Face computers, space tourism and Juicero (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7014",
        "date": "2019-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/26/most-disappointing-technologies-decade-face-computers-space-tourism-juicero/",
        "text": "Like most teen years, the past decade in technology started out someplace relatively innocent before growing moody, dark and disillusioned.In 2010, we were excited about new iPhones and finding old friends on Facebook, not fretting about our digital privacy or social media\u2019s threat to democracy. Now we are wondering how to rein in the largest companies in the world and reckoning with wanting innovation to be both fast and responsible. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOver the past 10 years, new technology has changed how we communicate, date, work, get around and pass time. But for every hit, there have been high-profile disappointments and delays. That includes overpriced gadgets for making juice, face computers, promises of taking a vacation in space and companies claiming to be saving the world.Story continues below advertisementThe failures served a purpose, acting as reality checks for the technology industry and the people who fund, regulate or consume its products. Tech companies spent the last decade first trying to grasp, then distance themselves from, their impact on society. Facebook\u2019s famously decommissioned \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d motto sounded plucky in 2010 and laughably misguided in 2019, when the company had, in fact, broken things.AdvertisementIt was a decade when billions of dollars were thrown at tech companies, and yet many of the promises those companies made never materialized, blew up in our faces or were indefinitely delayed. And while tech failures are nothing new, taken together they brought the innovation industrial complex closer to earth and made us all a bit more realistic \u2014 if less fun.Like proper adults.The benevolent, world-saving tech company\u201cDon\u2019t be evil\u201d read Google\u2019s famous motto, which sat atop its code of conduct until 2018, when it was quietly demoted to the last line.Story continues below advertisementAt the beginning of the decade, that is exactly how many of the largest tech companies and CEOs marketed themselves. Their products were not only going to make daily life easier or more enjoyable, but they also would make the entire world better \u2014 even if their business models depended on ads and your personal data.Advertisement\u201cFacebook was not originally founded to be a company. We\u2019ve always cared primarily about our social mission,\u201d chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2012 letter, just before the company\u2019s initial public offering. He outlined lofty visions going forward, including that Facebook would create a more \u201chonest and transparent dialog\u201d about government through accountability.Does \u2018don\u2019t be evil\u2019 still apply, Google?Russia used social media to try to influence the 2016 presidential election. Here\u2019s what you need to know about how it modernized its propaganda tactics. (The Washington Post)Instead, the decade turned toward disinformation, and hate speech spread on social media. Facebook, Twitter and Google\u2019s YouTube were used to spread disinformation ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, while Google briefly worked on a search engine for China that would censor content. Companies profited off mountains of user data they collected but failed to protect, as major data breaches hit Equifax, Yahoo and others.Story continues below advertisementIn response, workers are pushing back, growing into quiet armies attempting to redirect their companies toward social goals.Face computersGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin debuted Google Glass in 2012 by wearing a prototype of the smart glasses onstage. Its real PR outing came later that year when skydivers live-streamed their jump out of a blimp above San Francisco during a Google developer conference.AdvertisementBy showing information in front of the face instead of on a phone, Google said the $1,500 Glass would allow people to interact more with the world around them. Instead, its legacy has been questions about our right to privacy from recording devices, the word \u201cglasshole,\u201d and at least one bar fight. The company stopped selling Glass to consumers in 2015 and shifted it to a workplace product, targeting everyone from factory workers to doctors.Everything you need to know about Google GlassGoogle was not alone. Microsoft made HoloLens, a technically ambitious piece of eyewear that looked like round steampunk goggles and used augmented reality. Facebook bought virtual-reality goggle maker Oculus for $2 billion and heavily invested in and promoted it as a gaming and entertainment device (and the future of social media). Magic Leap, another augmented reality headset promising immersive and mind-blowing entertainment, managed to raise $2.6 billion and only release one $2,295 developer product.Story continues below advertisementEventually we may wear glasses that display useful information on top of the real world, outfitted with smart assistants that whisper in our ears. Google\u2019s early attempt at a consumer face-wearable was not destined to be that device.A more efficient way of eatingJuice. Colorful, thirst-quenching, vitamin-packed, on-demand juice. It seemed an unlikely thing for Silicon Valley to try to disrupt. But in the 2010s, entrepreneurs\u2019 impatience with preparing and even consuming the calories necessary to survive led to a number of eating innovations.AdvertisementOne of the decade\u2019s most memorable tech failures asked the question: What if you spent $699 for an elaborate machine that squeezed juice from proprietary bags of fruit and vegetable pulp for you? The answer, discovered by intrepid Bloomberg journalists in 2017, is that you could squeeze those packets with your hands instead of overpaying for a machine. That machine was Juicero, and it raised $120 million in funding before shutting down just five months later.Juicero shows what\u2019s wrong with Silicon Valley thinkingOther food innovations have fallen far short of their revolutionary promises. Smart ovens became fire hazards; meal-kit delivery start-ups went under; robots tossed salads, mixed drinks and flipped burgers; and pod-based devices for random foods (cocktails, tortillas, cookies, yogurt, jello shots) failed. And then there\u2019s Soylent \u2014 a meal in drink form, designed to save time by cutting out \u201ctasting good\u201d and \u201cchewing.\u201d Soylent has managed to find a small but enthusiastic fan base, and even got into solids recently with a line of meal-replacement bars called Squared.Story continues below advertisementThe decade\u2019s real food change came from delivery apps that pay on-demand workers to bring meals made in actual kitchens to your door. Those companies are dealing with employee protests over low and confusing pay while trying to become profitable.Non-Facebook social networks Remember Path? Color? Yik Yak, Meerkat and Google Buzz? And iTunes Ping, Apple\u2019s short-lived attempt at making its music hub social? Start-ups and the tech giants alike launched social products over the past decade, but few succeeded.AdvertisementIn 2010 there was Google Buzz, which was quickly replaced by Google+ in 2011. The service struggled to attract users and experienced privacy issues, such as a bug exposing more than 52 million people\u2019s data. It was finally declared dead this year, though some of its best features live on in Google Photos.Story continues below advertisementVine burned bright for too short a time before being closed in 2016 by Twitter, which had bought the company for a reported $30 million in 2012. (Speaking of Twitter, it hung on thanks in part to its popularity with politicians, celebrities and people who are mad online, though it is far smaller than Facebook. Snapchat and TikTok have also carved out niches.)What the Internet loses when Vine shuts downFacebook dominated at the start of the decade and continues to dominate at the end, in part by buying or blatantly copying any competitors along the way. It acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, integrating both more closely with the Facebook brand. Even with major scandals and fumbles, its global user base grew to more than 2 billion people.A crowdfunding, DIY revolution For a short time, it looked as though the next generation of gadgets would come from outside the usual Silicon Valley idea factories. They would be dreamed up by passionate hobbyists, prototyped on 3-D printers and funded by fans instead of venture capitalists (though still manufactured in Shenzhen, China). Despite some notable successes \u2014 Oculus, Peloton, Boosted Boards \u2014 it turns out getting an idea from your cocktail napkin to market is pretty tough.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNotable failures include the disappointing Coolest Cooler, which featured both Bluetooth and a blender and raised more than $13 million on Kickstarter in 2014. It failed to deliver products to a third of its backers; many that shipped didn\u2019t work. Others never materialized, such as iBackPack, which was supposed to produce a WiFi hotspot. The people behind it raised more than $800,000 and were accused by the Federal Trade Commission of using those funds to buy bitcoin and pay off credit cards. Skarp Laser Razor, a razor with dubious hair-removal technology, managed to get more than $4 million in pledges from interested customers before Kickstarter suspended its campaign for violating policies on working prototypes.Backer beware: What to know before you support a crowdfunding product(Kickstarter said the vast majority of its products make it to production and that it aims \u201cto be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly.\u201d)Consumer 3-D printers also failed to live up to the hype. We were supposed to have a printer in every home, spitting out replacement Legos and screws, art projects, and even food. The high cost of the devices and the skills needed to use them could not compete with overnight shipping.Drones dropping deliveries\u201cCould it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it\u2019s gonna be a lot of fun,\u201d Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe year was 2013, and Bezos was on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d to unveil the next big thing in package delivery: drones. He said that within that time frame, quadcopters would be able to drop packages from warehouses at customers\u2019 doors within 30 minutes. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)In 2016, Amazon showed off its first commercial drone delivery in a rural area of the United Kingdom, a 13-minute delivery of an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn. Its latest drone iteration was on display earlier this year at MARS, its weird tech conference, again promising that drone deliveries were coming soon.Amazon makes its first drone delivery to a real customerBut as of the end of the decade, Amazon packages are still being delivered by humans. In fact, Amazon announced in 2018 that it was adding 20,000 delivery vans via third-party delivery partners to its ground fleet. Other companies, including Uber, UPS and Alphabet\u2019s Wing, have also been testing drone deliveries, and it\u2019s possible that we will have boxes from the sky onto porches in the next decade.Vaping to fix smokingIt was supposed to be safer than smoking and a way to quit nicotine altogether. While vaping has indeed caught on, its biggest selling point has blown up in recent years. Eight deaths and more than 2,500 cases of lung-related illnesses have been linked to vaping in the United States.Evidence mounts that vitamin E acetate is to blame for vaping-related illnesses, deathsCritics say fun-sounding flavors and colorful devices, most notably from the company Juul, have made vaping wildly popular with teenagers \u2014 1 in 4 high schoolers vapes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now the Food and Drug Administration and lawmakers are investigating vaping companies. But if we draw on experience from the cigarette industry, vaping is not likely to disappear anytime soon.Amazon\u2019s big phone playApple and Google have direct access to billions of people with their smartphone operating systems and hardware \u2014 2.5 billion devices run Google\u2019s Android operating system, and 900 million iPhones are in use.AdvertisementOne company noticeably absent from our pockets is Amazon, but not for lack of trying. After several years of stealth development, Amazon announced its Fire Phone in 2014. The smartphone did not look like much, started at $199, ran on a customized version of Android and was only available on AT&T. Amazon reported $83 million of unused inventory in late 2014, and it discontinued the Fire Phone a year after its introduction.Amazon unveils the Fire PhoneNow that Amazon is competing against those two companies for voice-assistant dominance, its lack of a smartphone is even more glaring. It has put Alexa in anything with a microphone, from cameras to headphones and, soon, eyeglasses. (It is on smartphones, but you have to open the Alexa app first.) Meanwhile Apple\u2019s Siri and Google\u2019s Assistant are already in pockets, built into the core of the devices and listening for their next cue.Tourists in spaceIt is no secret that big-name billionaires love space. Despite their passion, the three boldest aspiring space barons have made and missed deadlines for sending people into space this decade.Richard Branson said Virgin Galactic would fly tourists into space by 2020, but its last test mission was two test pilots and a crew member at the start of last year. Bezos said at an Air Force Association conference in late 2018 that Blue Origin would send a test flight into the upper atmosphere with people on board this year, but the most recent test flight, on Dec. 11, contained no humans. In 2017, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX had taken deposits to fly two passengers around the moon in 2018. That flight did not take place. He has the whole next decade to hit a different goal, set in 2011: sending someone to Mars by 2031.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandateThere are plenty of interested customers. Virgin Galactic has sold tickets to more than 700 people wanting to take a trip to space at $250,000 a seat.If there is one thing on this list we would not want to rush just to meet a deadline, it is loading civilians into private rockets and hurling them into space. The decade was filled with successful new technology that changed the way we communicate, find love and get around. But it was also chock-full of failures, disappointments and delays. The most disappointing technologies of the decade: Face computers, space tourism and Juicero",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The most disappointing technologies of the decade: Face computers, space tourism and Juicero (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7015",
        "date": "2019-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/26/most-disappointing-technologies-decade-face-computers-space-tourism-juicero/",
        "text": "Like most teen years, the past decade in technology started out someplace relatively innocent before growing moody, dark and disillusioned.In 2010, we were excited about new iPhones and finding old friends on Facebook, not fretting about our digital privacy or social media\u2019s threat to democracy. Now we are wondering how to rein in the largest companies in the world and reckoning with wanting innovation to be both fast and responsible. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOver the past 10 years, new technology has changed how we communicate, date, work, get around and pass time. But for every hit, there have been high-profile disappointments and delays. That includes overpriced gadgets for making juice, face computers, promises of taking a vacation in space and companies claiming to be saving the world.Story continues below advertisementThe failures served a purpose, acting as reality checks for the technology industry and the people who fund, regulate or consume its products. Tech companies spent the last decade first trying to grasp, then distance themselves from, their impact on society. Facebook\u2019s famously decommissioned \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d motto sounded plucky in 2010 and laughably misguided in 2019, when the company had, in fact, broken things.AdvertisementIt was a decade when billions of dollars were thrown at tech companies, and yet many of the promises those companies made never materialized, blew up in our faces or were indefinitely delayed. And while tech failures are nothing new, taken together they brought the innovation industrial complex closer to earth and made us all a bit more realistic \u2014 if less fun.Like proper adults.The benevolent, world-saving tech company\u201cDon\u2019t be evil\u201d read Google\u2019s famous motto, which sat atop its code of conduct until 2018, when it was quietly demoted to the last line.Story continues below advertisementAt the beginning of the decade, that is exactly how many of the largest tech companies and CEOs marketed themselves. Their products were not only going to make daily life easier or more enjoyable, but they also would make the entire world better \u2014 even if their business models depended on ads and your personal data.Advertisement\u201cFacebook was not originally founded to be a company. We\u2019ve always cared primarily about our social mission,\u201d chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2012 letter, just before the company\u2019s initial public offering. He outlined lofty visions going forward, including that Facebook would create a more \u201chonest and transparent dialog\u201d about government through accountability.Does \u2018don\u2019t be evil\u2019 still apply, Google?Russia used social media to try to influence the 2016 presidential election. Here\u2019s what you need to know about how it modernized its propaganda tactics. (The Washington Post)Instead, the decade turned toward disinformation, and hate speech spread on social media. Facebook, Twitter and Google\u2019s YouTube were used to spread disinformation ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, while Google briefly worked on a search engine for China that would censor content. Companies profited off mountains of user data they collected but failed to protect, as major data breaches hit Equifax, Yahoo and others.Story continues below advertisementIn response, workers are pushing back, growing into quiet armies attempting to redirect their companies toward social goals.Face computersGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin debuted Google Glass in 2012 by wearing a prototype of the smart glasses onstage. Its real PR outing came later that year when skydivers live-streamed their jump out of a blimp above San Francisco during a Google developer conference.AdvertisementBy showing information in front of the face instead of on a phone, Google said the $1,500 Glass would allow people to interact more with the world around them. Instead, its legacy has been questions about our right to privacy from recording devices, the word \u201cglasshole,\u201d and at least one bar fight. The company stopped selling Glass to consumers in 2015 and shifted it to a workplace product, targeting everyone from factory workers to doctors.Everything you need to know about Google GlassGoogle was not alone. Microsoft made HoloLens, a technically ambitious piece of eyewear that looked like round steampunk goggles and used augmented reality. Facebook bought virtual-reality goggle maker Oculus for $2 billion and heavily invested in and promoted it as a gaming and entertainment device (and the future of social media). Magic Leap, another augmented reality headset promising immersive and mind-blowing entertainment, managed to raise $2.6 billion and only release one $2,295 developer product.Story continues below advertisementEventually we may wear glasses that display useful information on top of the real world, outfitted with smart assistants that whisper in our ears. Google\u2019s early attempt at a consumer face-wearable was not destined to be that device.A more efficient way of eatingJuice. Colorful, thirst-quenching, vitamin-packed, on-demand juice. It seemed an unlikely thing for Silicon Valley to try to disrupt. But in the 2010s, entrepreneurs\u2019 impatience with preparing and even consuming the calories necessary to survive led to a number of eating innovations.AdvertisementOne of the decade\u2019s most memorable tech failures asked the question: What if you spent $699 for an elaborate machine that squeezed juice from proprietary bags of fruit and vegetable pulp for you? The answer, discovered by intrepid Bloomberg journalists in 2017, is that you could squeeze those packets with your hands instead of overpaying for a machine. That machine was Juicero, and it raised $120 million in funding before shutting down just five months later.Juicero shows what\u2019s wrong with Silicon Valley thinkingOther food innovations have fallen far short of their revolutionary promises. Smart ovens became fire hazards; meal-kit delivery start-ups went under; robots tossed salads, mixed drinks and flipped burgers; and pod-based devices for random foods (cocktails, tortillas, cookies, yogurt, jello shots) failed. And then there\u2019s Soylent \u2014 a meal in drink form, designed to save time by cutting out \u201ctasting good\u201d and \u201cchewing.\u201d Soylent has managed to find a small but enthusiastic fan base, and even got into solids recently with a line of meal-replacement bars called Squared.Story continues below advertisementThe decade\u2019s real food change came from delivery apps that pay on-demand workers to bring meals made in actual kitchens to your door. Those companies are dealing with employee protests over low and confusing pay while trying to become profitable.Non-Facebook social networks Remember Path? Color? Yik Yak, Meerkat and Google Buzz? And iTunes Ping, Apple\u2019s short-lived attempt at making its music hub social? Start-ups and the tech giants alike launched social products over the past decade, but few succeeded.AdvertisementIn 2010 there was Google Buzz, which was quickly replaced by Google+ in 2011. The service struggled to attract users and experienced privacy issues, such as a bug exposing more than 52 million people\u2019s data. It was finally declared dead this year, though some of its best features live on in Google Photos.Story continues below advertisementVine burned bright for too short a time before being closed in 2016 by Twitter, which had bought the company for a reported $30 million in 2012. (Speaking of Twitter, it hung on thanks in part to its popularity with politicians, celebrities and people who are mad online, though it is far smaller than Facebook. Snapchat and TikTok have also carved out niches.)What the Internet loses when Vine shuts downFacebook dominated at the start of the decade and continues to dominate at the end, in part by buying or blatantly copying any competitors along the way. It acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, integrating both more closely with the Facebook brand. Even with major scandals and fumbles, its global user base grew to more than 2 billion people.A crowdfunding, DIY revolution For a short time, it looked as though the next generation of gadgets would come from outside the usual Silicon Valley idea factories. They would be dreamed up by passionate hobbyists, prototyped on 3-D printers and funded by fans instead of venture capitalists (though still manufactured in Shenzhen, China). Despite some notable successes \u2014 Oculus, Peloton, Boosted Boards \u2014 it turns out getting an idea from your cocktail napkin to market is pretty tough.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNotable failures include the disappointing Coolest Cooler, which featured both Bluetooth and a blender and raised more than $13 million on Kickstarter in 2014. It failed to deliver products to a third of its backers; many that shipped didn\u2019t work. Others never materialized, such as iBackPack, which was supposed to produce a WiFi hotspot. The people behind it raised more than $800,000 and were accused by the Federal Trade Commission of using those funds to buy bitcoin and pay off credit cards. Skarp Laser Razor, a razor with dubious hair-removal technology, managed to get more than $4 million in pledges from interested customers before Kickstarter suspended its campaign for violating policies on working prototypes.Backer beware: What to know before you support a crowdfunding product(Kickstarter said the vast majority of its products make it to production and that it aims \u201cto be quite clear about the fact that not all projects will go smoothly.\u201d)Consumer 3-D printers also failed to live up to the hype. We were supposed to have a printer in every home, spitting out replacement Legos and screws, art projects, and even food. The high cost of the devices and the skills needed to use them could not compete with overnight shipping.Drones dropping deliveries\u201cCould it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it\u2019s gonna be a lot of fun,\u201d Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe year was 2013, and Bezos was on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d to unveil the next big thing in package delivery: drones. He said that within that time frame, quadcopters would be able to drop packages from warehouses at customers\u2019 doors within 30 minutes. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)In 2016, Amazon showed off its first commercial drone delivery in a rural area of the United Kingdom, a 13-minute delivery of an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn. Its latest drone iteration was on display earlier this year at MARS, its weird tech conference, again promising that drone deliveries were coming soon.Amazon makes its first drone delivery to a real customerBut as of the end of the decade, Amazon packages are still being delivered by humans. In fact, Amazon announced in 2018 that it was adding 20,000 delivery vans via third-party delivery partners to its ground fleet. Other companies, including Uber, UPS and Alphabet\u2019s Wing, have also been testing drone deliveries, and it\u2019s possible that we will have boxes from the sky onto porches in the next decade.Vaping to fix smokingIt was supposed to be safer than smoking and a way to quit nicotine altogether. While vaping has indeed caught on, its biggest selling point has blown up in recent years. Eight deaths and more than 2,500 cases of lung-related illnesses have been linked to vaping in the United States.Evidence mounts that vitamin E acetate is to blame for vaping-related illnesses, deathsCritics say fun-sounding flavors and colorful devices, most notably from the company Juul, have made vaping wildly popular with teenagers \u2014 1 in 4 high schoolers vapes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now the Food and Drug Administration and lawmakers are investigating vaping companies. But if we draw on experience from the cigarette industry, vaping is not likely to disappear anytime soon.Amazon\u2019s big phone playApple and Google have direct access to billions of people with their smartphone operating systems and hardware \u2014 2.5 billion devices run Google\u2019s Android operating system, and 900 million iPhones are in use.AdvertisementOne company noticeably absent from our pockets is Amazon, but not for lack of trying. After several years of stealth development, Amazon announced its Fire Phone in 2014. The smartphone did not look like much, started at $199, ran on a customized version of Android and was only available on AT&T. Amazon reported $83 million of unused inventory in late 2014, and it discontinued the Fire Phone a year after its introduction.Amazon unveils the Fire PhoneNow that Amazon is competing against those two companies for voice-assistant dominance, its lack of a smartphone is even more glaring. It has put Alexa in anything with a microphone, from cameras to headphones and, soon, eyeglasses. (It is on smartphones, but you have to open the Alexa app first.) Meanwhile Apple\u2019s Siri and Google\u2019s Assistant are already in pockets, built into the core of the devices and listening for their next cue.Tourists in spaceIt is no secret that big-name billionaires love space. Despite their passion, the three boldest aspiring space barons have made and missed deadlines for sending people into space this decade.Richard Branson said Virgin Galactic would fly tourists into space by 2020, but its last test mission was two test pilots and a crew member at the start of last year. Bezos said at an Air Force Association conference in late 2018 that Blue Origin would send a test flight into the upper atmosphere with people on board this year, but the most recent test flight, on Dec. 11, contained no humans. In 2017, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX had taken deposits to fly two passengers around the moon in 2018. That flight did not take place. He has the whole next decade to hit a different goal, set in 2011: sending someone to Mars by 2031.Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin to team up with aerospace giants to help meet Trump\u2019s moon mandateThere are plenty of interested customers. Virgin Galactic has sold tickets to more than 700 people wanting to take a trip to space at $250,000 a seat.If there is one thing on this list we would not want to rush just to meet a deadline, it is loading civilians into private rockets and hurling them into space. The decade was filled with successful new technology that changed the way we communicate, find love and get around. But it was also chock-full of failures, disappointments and delays. The most disappointing technologies of the decade: Face computers, space tourism and Juicero",
        "author": "Heather Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Out and Explore the Universe Without Leaving Home (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7016",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/technology/personaltech/techtip-nasa-apps.html",
        "text": "If NASA\u2019s new 2020 missions have inspired an interest in science and celestial objects, these apps and sites can open a whole new batch of worlds. If NASA\u2019s new 2020 missions have inspired an interest in science and celestial objects, these apps and sites can open a whole new batch of worlds. After almost nine years of astronauts hitching rides off the planet, Americans are finally traveling on their own rockets again with this week\u2019s NASA-SpaceX launch of crew to the International Space Station. And with Perseverance, another NASA rover vehicle, headed to Mars this summer, 2020 is shaping up to be a busy year on the final frontier.",
        "author": "By J. D. Biersdorfer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Out and Explore the Universe Without Leaving Home (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7017",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/technology/personaltech/techtip-nasa-apps.html",
        "text": "If NASA\u2019s new 2020 missions have inspired an interest in science and celestial objects, these apps and sites can open a whole new batch of worlds. If NASA\u2019s new 2020 missions have inspired an interest in science and celestial objects, these apps and sites can open a whole new batch of worlds. After almost nine years of astronauts hitching rides off the planet, Americans are finally traveling on their own rockets again with this week\u2019s NASA-SpaceX launch of crew to the International Space Station. And with Perseverance, another NASA rover vehicle, headed to Mars this summer, 2020 is shaping up to be a busy year on the final frontier.",
        "author": "By J. D. Biersdorfer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Out and Explore the Universe Without Leaving Home (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7018",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/technology/personaltech/techtip-nasa-apps.html",
        "text": "If NASA\u2019s new 2020 missions have inspired an interest in science and celestial objects, these apps and sites can open a whole new batch of worlds. If NASA\u2019s new 2020 missions have inspired an interest in science and celestial objects, these apps and sites can open a whole new batch of worlds. After almost nine years of astronauts hitching rides off the planet, Americans are finally traveling on their own rockets again with this week\u2019s NASA-SpaceX launch of crew to the International Space Station. And with Perseverance, another NASA rover vehicle, headed to Mars this summer, 2020 is shaping up to be a busy year on the final frontier.",
        "author": "By J. D. Biersdorfer"
    },
    {
        "title": "2019 was a year of space exploration (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7019",
        "date": "2019-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/amp-stories/the-year-in-space/",
        "text": " The U.S. space program hit key milestones \u2014 but also experienced a series of delays and setbacks. The year in American spaceflight",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Orville\u2019 and Its Vintage Vibe Fill the Void for Some \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Fans (WSJ: Television) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7020",
        "date": "2018-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-orville-and-its-vintage-vibe-fill-the-void-for-some-star-trek-fans-11545834842?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=60",
        "text": "Jeff Lee, a \u201cStar Trek\u201d buff who lives in Chicago, wasn\u2019t fully on board with the 52-year-old franchise\u2019s shift toward a darker, action-heavy serial style in \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d which is produced for the subscription streaming site CBS All Access. \nBy contrast, \u201cThe Orville\u201d is a brightly lighted show that features bantering crew members and a new alien life-form or space-time anomaly each episode. It is heavily influenced by vintage \u201cStar Trek,\u201d especially the 1990s series \u201cThe Next Generation,\u201d filling a void for some sci-fi fans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Lee, a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fan in Chicago, wearing the U.S.S. Orville uniform that he designed.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Karen Kaiser Lee\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt feels like \u2018The Orville\u2019 is closer to the original spirit of \u2018Star Trek.\u2019 It has that positivity that\u2019s been lacking in science fiction,\u201d Mr. Lee says. The 52-year-old computer systems administrator designed and sewed a homemade version of the uniform worn by commanders of the U.S.S. Orville, complete with a pistol and other accessories from his 3-D printer, drawing compliments when he wore it to a local comic-book convention last spring.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s one of the things we were holding our breath for,\u201d says \u201cOrville\u201d creator and star\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seth MacFarlane.\n\n\n\n \u201cSeeing uniforms [at conventions] is a really good barometer.\u201d \n\u201cThe Orville\u201d returns for a second season on Sunday. It drew an average 10.7 million total viewers last season (including people who watched on DVR and on-demand platforms) and finished among TV\u2019s top 10 highest-rated dramas. Equally important to the show\u2019s future, especially as one of the few sci-fi series on the big four broadcast networks, is its ability to grow and sustain a hard-core following known in geek culture as a fandom. \nA fandom\u2019s clout is measured not just in the number of people who dress as its characters but in the volume and intensity of online discussions and demand for show-related merchandise. \u201cThe Orville\u201d accumulated 319,000 social-media followers by the end of its debut season, an online circle that grew about three times faster than the average broadcast drama during that period, according to ListenFirst Media data provided by Fox.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left, Jason Isaacs, Sonequa Martin-Green and Shazad Latif in \u2018Star Trek: Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CBS\n \n\n\n\nFox\u2019s licensing division is selling some 50 pieces of \u201cOrville\u201d merchandise, including metallic badges, trading cards and a hardcover behind-the-scenes book. Next month comes a soundtrack album available on limited-edition vinyl. Such a rollout is rare for such a young TV series. \nMr. MacFarlane owes the longevity of his career to the fervor of fans. His first TV show, the animated comedy \u201cFamily Guy,\u201d was canceled by Fox in 2002, then relaunched on the same network three years later after viewers flocked to its DVDs and reruns on cable. \u201cFamily Guy\u201d and another animated series of his, \u201cAmerican Dad,\u201d are two of the longest-running scripted shows on TV.\nCapt. Ed Mercer, the first live-action lead character Mr. MacFarlane has played on TV, helms the circular bridge of the Orville with a mix of human and alien officers, plus a blunt-talking robot. Their 25th-century technology includes holographic simulators, glowing hand-held scanners and laser pistols that they set to \u201cstun\u201d to fend off hostile life-forms. Each episodic adventure brings a new world (a planet where an Orville officer is worshiped as a god) or allegory (a society that metes out justice based on people\u2019s reputation online). \nIt all seems strangely familiar to anyone who has seen \u201cThe Next Generation.\u201d Where Mr. MacFarlane and his team charted territory of their own is with jokes and relationships that help humanize the Orville\u2019s crew\u2014or the equivalent for characters who don\u2019t hail from Earth, such as the gelatinous Lt. Yaphit (voiced by Norm Macdonald). Crew members get drunk after work, play pranks and nurse jealousies, crushes and beefs. \nThis interplay helped the show appeal to an audience beyond the sci-fi faithful, says 40-year-old Justin \u201cJ.P.\u201d Pool of Tulsa, Okla., who evangelizes about \u201cThe Orville\u201d on his YouTube channel, Egotastic FunTime. \u201cEverybody on the show acts like people you know. We\u2019re on board a spaceship on an adventure of discovery and hope, but at the same time we\u2019re doing it with our co-workers.\u201d \nIn his videos, Mr. Pool also pokes fun at \u201cStar Trek: Discovery.\u201d He edited one to make it seem like the Orville crew is cringing at an intense scene from \u201cDiscovery\u201d on their monitor.\nCBS declined to comment. One \u201cDiscovery\u201d fan, Bill Smith, a 49-year-old computer systems engineer and co-host of two \u201cStar Trek\u201d podcasts, says the show is unfolding like a novel, an evolution from the old \u201calien-of-the-week\u201d formula. \nHe gave up on \u201cThe Orville\u201d after a handful of episodes. \u201cMy \u2018Star Trek\u2019 typically doesn\u2019t have toilet humor,\u201d he says. \nMr. MacFarlane, who unsuccessfully pitch \u201cThe Orville\u201d has survived and thrived, thanks in part to \u201cStar Trek\u201d fans who rebelled against \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d a TV spinoff introduced around the same time. ",
        "author": "John Jurgensen"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Orville\u2019 and Its Vintage Vibe Fill the Void for Some \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Fans (WSJ: Television) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7021",
        "date": "2018-12-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-orville-and-its-vintage-vibe-fill-the-void-for-some-star-trek-fans-11545834842?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=81",
        "text": "Jeff Lee, a \u201cStar Trek\u201d buff who lives in Chicago, wasn\u2019t fully on board with the 52-year-old franchise\u2019s shift toward a darker, action-heavy serial style in \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d which is produced for the subscription streaming site CBS All Access. \n\n\n\n\nBy contrast, \u201cThe Orville\u201d is a brightly lighted show that features bantering crew members and a new alien life-form or space-time anomaly each episode. It is heavily influenced by vintage \u201cStar Trek,\u201d especially the 1990s series \u201cThe Next Generation,\u201d filling a void for some sci-fi fans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Lee, a \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fan in Chicago, wearing the U.S.S. Orville uniform that he designed.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Karen Kaiser Lee\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt feels like \u2018The Orville\u2019 is closer to the original spirit of \u2018Star Trek.\u2019 It has that positivity that\u2019s been lacking in science fiction,\u201d Mr. Lee says. The 52-year-old computer systems administrator designed and sewed a homemade version of the uniform worn by commanders of the U.S.S. Orville, complete with a pistol and other accessories from his 3-D printer, drawing compliments when he wore it to a local comic-book convention last spring.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s one of the things we were holding our breath for,\u201d says \u201cOrville\u201d creator and star\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seth MacFarlane.\n\n\n\n \u201cSeeing uniforms [at conventions] is a really good barometer.\u201d \n\u201cThe Orville\u201d returns for a second season on Sunday. It drew an average 10.7 million total viewers last season (including people who watched on DVR and on-demand platforms) and finished among TV\u2019s top 10 highest-rated dramas. Equally important to the show\u2019s future, especially as one of the few sci-fi series on the big four broadcast networks, is its ability to grow and sustain a hard-core following known in geek culture as a fandom. \nA fandom\u2019s clout is measured not just in the number of people who dress as its characters but in the volume and intensity of online discussions and demand for show-related merchandise. \u201cThe Orville\u201d accumulated 319,000 social-media followers by the end of its debut season, an online circle that grew about three times faster than the average broadcast drama during that period, according to ListenFirst Media data provided by Fox.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left, Jason Isaacs, Sonequa Martin-Green and Shazad Latif in \u2018Star Trek: Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CBS\n \n\n\n\nFox\u2019s licensing division is selling some 50 pieces of \u201cOrville\u201d merchandise, including metallic badges, trading cards and a hardcover behind-the-scenes book. Next month comes a soundtrack album available on limited-edition vinyl. Such a rollout is rare for such a young TV series. \nMr. MacFarlane owes the longevity of his career to the fervor of fans. His first TV show, the animated comedy \u201cFamily Guy,\u201d was canceled by Fox in 2002, then relaunched on the same network three years later after viewers flocked to its DVDs and reruns on cable. \u201cFamily Guy\u201d and another animated series of his, \u201cAmerican Dad,\u201d are two of the longest-running scripted shows on TV.\nCapt. Ed Mercer, the first live-action lead character Mr. MacFarlane has played on TV, helms the circular bridge of the Orville with a mix of human and alien officers, plus a blunt-talking robot. Their 25th-century technology includes holographic simulators, glowing hand-held scanners and laser pistols that they set to \u201cstun\u201d to fend off hostile life-forms. Each episodic adventure brings a new world (a planet where an Orville officer is worshiped as a god) or allegory (a society that metes out justice based on people\u2019s reputation online). \nIt all seems strangely familiar to anyone who has seen \u201cThe Next Generation.\u201d Where Mr. MacFarlane and his team charted territory of their own is with jokes and relationships that help humanize the Orville\u2019s crew\u2014or the equivalent for characters who don\u2019t hail from Earth, such as the gelatinous Lt. Yaphit (voiced by Norm Macdonald). Crew members get drunk after work, play pranks and nurse jealousies, crushes and beefs. \nThis interplay helped the show appeal to an audience beyond the sci-fi faithful, says 40-year-old Justin \u201cJ.P.\u201d Pool of Tulsa, Okla., who evangelizes about \u201cThe Orville\u201d on his YouTube channel, Egotastic FunTime. \u201cEverybody on the show acts like people you know. We\u2019re on board a spaceship on an adventure of discovery and hope, but at the same time we\u2019re doing it with our co-workers.\u201d \nIn his videos, Mr. Pool also pokes fun at \u201cStar Trek: Discovery.\u201d He edited one to make it seem like the Orville crew is cringing at an intense scene from \u201cDiscovery\u201d on their monitor.\nCBS declined to comment. One \u201cDiscovery\u201d fan, Bill Smith, a 49-year-old computer systems engineer and co-host of two \u201cStar Trek\u201d podcasts, says the show is unfolding like a novel, an evolution from the old \u201calien-of-the-week\u201d formula. \nHe gave up on \u201cThe Orville\u201d after a handful of episodes. \u201cMy \u2018Star Trek\u2019 typically doesn\u2019t have toilet humor,\u201d he says. \nMr. MacFarlane, who unsuccessfully p \u201cThe Orville\u201d has survived and thrived, thanks in part to \u201cStar Trek\u201d fans who rebelled against \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d a TV spinoff introduced around the same time. ",
        "author": "John Jurgensen"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Veep\u2019 Writer Launches Into an \u2018Absurd\u2019 Future and a Dickensian Past (WSJ: Television) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7022",
        "date": "2020-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/veep-veteran-launches-into-an-absurd-future-and-a-dickensian-past-11579020742?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=46",
        "text": "Armando Iannucci says in later episodes, the show \u2018Avenue 5\u2019 starts looking at things \u2018like what is true and what isn\u2019t true.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Buckner/Deadline/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nIn \u201cAvenue 5,\u201d (premiering on HBO Jan. 19), Hugh Laurie plays Ryan Clark, captain of a spaceship that is the futuristic version of a luxury cruise liner. When the ship is knocked off course in its trip around Saturn, he has to deal with dissatisfied passengers and dead bodies floating outside the window. Mr. Iannucci directed and co-wrote \u201cThe Personal History of David Copperfield,\u201d (opening on May 8), which includes a multicultural cast led by Dev Patel. Mr. Laurie plays the fantasizing Mr. Dick, haunted by thoughts of King Charles I. \nMr. Iannucci talked to The Wall Street Journal about setting his new works in the future and the past. Edited excerpts:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhy did you make a futuristic science-fiction comedy? \n\nI\u2019m a sci-fi fan, so when I\u2019m thinking of a theme, I will think of \u201cWhat\u2019s the sci-fi version of that?\u201d But also the spaceship is just a holding bay for the themes I want to look at\u2014leadership, power, wealth, how society works, what happens when it breaks down. The sci-fi element is minimal once we\u2019re up there. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9, but all sci-fi is really about today. \nIt\u2019s a common assumption that it\u2019s harder to satirize politics today because reality overtakes it. Have you deliberately turned away from politics as a subject?\nNo. My first instinct is not necessarily political. I think unintentionally I seem to be moving away from the present day, possibly because the present day is going to take a little bit of time to assess how to respond to it. \nThere is a lot of social satire embedded in \u201cAvenue 5.\u201d What targets did you have in mind? \nIn later episodes we start looking at things like what is true and what isn\u2019t true. If people believe something, is that just as valid as things that are factually true? The series starts to prod away at themes that are current, because things like social media and the fact we\u2019re all hooked on our devices is now having as big an impact on our lives as, say, the president is. I want to explore those elements of our everyday life, not just the things that make it into stories on our front pages.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHugh Laurie, center, Armando Iannucci, standing behind him, and Jessica St. Clair work on the set of \u2018Avenue 5\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n HBO\n \n\n\n\nDid the story take any surprising turns as you were writing it? \nIt was surprising how quickly we got it into a very absurd and dark place. There might be a baying mob outside as soon as you come out of your room. The bridge does look like a bridge of a spaceship and Ryan does look like a ship\u2019s captain. With each episode layers are peeled away and by the end actual reality is far different from what we assumed when we started. \nYou\u2019ve been a Dickens fan for a long time, and even made a documentary about him in 2012. How has he inspired your comedy writing?\nHe wants to make something entertaining that speaks to a wide audience. At the same time he\u2019s not nervous of dealing with difficult subjects, themes of loss and poverty, at all times making sure that we concentrate on the humanity at the center of it. \nIn \u201cDavid Copperfield,\u201d was your goal to take characters like Mr. Micawber, who are often seen as caricatures, and show that humanity? \nAbsolutely. We\u2019ve grown up on this idea of Micawber being a jolly, roly-poly figure, but in fact he\u2019s a man demonized by debt. I wanted Peter Capaldi to bring that out in his performance. Mr. Dick is the first genuine portrayal in English to show mental illness, described as mental illness. With Hugh Laurie, we discussed being quite true about that and not making Mr. Dick just a figure of fun for being eccentric. He\u2019s a fragile human being.\nHow is Dickens relevant today? \n\u201cDavid Copperfield\u201d is all about the perennial problem of status anxiety. Everyone goes through some point in their life where they think: Am I doing OK? Am I fitting in? David goes through that in massive swings. \nWhat does multicultural casting give you in the film?\nI wanted the film to feel fresh and vibrant, not like it was old-fashioned, dusty history. Therefore it\u2019s important that it reflects society today as well as society of 1840.\nBRIEF BIO\nNAME: Armando Iannucci \nWHAT HE DOES: Television and film writing and directing. \nHOW HE GOT THERE: \u201cI grew up passionately a fan of radio comedy shows,\u201d like \u201cHitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy,\u201d and began mimicking their writing as a boy in Glasgow. After performing and writing comedy sketches at Oxford, he got a job as a radio comedy producer, which led to television writing. \nHIS BIG BREAK: In 2005 he created the British satirical series \u201cThe Thick of It,\u201d set in a government office rife with spin and cynicism. Its success spurred his similarly themed film, \u201cIn the Loop,\u201d and the U.S. series \u201cVeep.\u201d \nHIS OBSESSION: \u201cMusic Writer Armando Iannucci\u2019s latest projects\u2014a comedy series set in space  and a movie of Charles Dickens\u2019 \u201cDavid Copperfield\u201d\u2014take him back to his roots in two fields unlikely to mix: sketch comedy and literary studies. ",
        "author": "Caryn James"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Veep\u2019 Writer Launches Into an \u2018Absurd\u2019 Future and a Dickensian Past (WSJ: Television) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7023",
        "date": "2020-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/veep-veteran-launches-into-an-absurd-future-and-a-dickensian-past-11579020742?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=50",
        "text": "Armando Iannucci says in later episodes, the show \u2018Avenue 5\u2019 starts looking at things \u2018like what is true and what isn\u2019t true.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Buckner/Deadline/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nIn \u201cAvenue 5,\u201d (premiering on HBO Jan. 19), Hugh Laurie plays Ryan Clark, captain of a spaceship that is the futuristic version of a luxury cruise liner. When the ship is knocked off course in its trip around Saturn, he has to deal with dissatisfied passengers and dead bodies floating outside the window. Mr. Iannucci directed and co-wrote \u201cThe Personal History of David Copperfield,\u201d (opening on May 8), which includes a multicultural cast led by Dev Patel. Mr. Laurie plays the fantasizing Mr. Dick, haunted by thoughts of King Charles I. \nMr. Iannucci talked to The Wall Street Journal about setting his new works in the future and the past. Edited excerpts:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhy did you make a futuristic science-fiction comedy? \n\nI\u2019m a sci-fi fan, so when I\u2019m thinking of a theme, I will think of \u201cWhat\u2019s the sci-fi version of that?\u201d But also the spaceship is just a holding bay for the themes I want to look at\u2014leadership, power, wealth, how society works, what happens when it breaks down. The sci-fi element is minimal once we\u2019re up there. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9, but all sci-fi is really about today. \nIt\u2019s a common assumption that it\u2019s harder to satirize politics today because reality overtakes it. Have you deliberately turned away from politics as a subject?\nNo. My first instinct is not necessarily political. I think unintentionally I seem to be moving away from the present day, possibly because the present day is going to take a little bit of time to assess how to respond to it. \nThere is a lot of social satire embedded in \u201cAvenue 5.\u201d What targets did you have in mind? \nIn later episodes we start looking at things like what is true and what isn\u2019t true. If people believe something, is that just as valid as things that are factually true? The series starts to prod away at themes that are current, because things like social media and the fact we\u2019re all hooked on our devices is now having as big an impact on our lives as, say, the president is. I want to explore those elements of our everyday life, not just the things that make it into stories on our front pages.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHugh Laurie, center, Armando Iannucci, standing behind him, and Jessica St. Clair work on the set of \u2018Avenue 5\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n HBO\n \n\n\n\nDid the story take any surprising turns as you were writing it? \nIt was surprising how quickly we got it into a very absurd and dark place. There might be a baying mob outside as soon as you come out of your room. The bridge does look like a bridge of a spaceship and Ryan does look like a ship\u2019s captain. With each episode layers are peeled away and by the end actual reality is far different from what we assumed when we started. \nYou\u2019ve been a Dickens fan for a long time, and even made a documentary about him in 2012. How has he inspired your comedy writing?\nHe wants to make something entertaining that speaks to a wide audience. At the same time he\u2019s not nervous of dealing with difficult subjects, themes of loss and poverty, at all times making sure that we concentrate on the humanity at the center of it. \nIn \u201cDavid Copperfield,\u201d was your goal to take characters like Mr. Micawber, who are often seen as caricatures, and show that humanity? \nAbsolutely. We\u2019ve grown up on this idea of Micawber being a jolly, roly-poly figure, but in fact he\u2019s a man demonized by debt. I wanted Peter Capaldi to bring that out in his performance. Mr. Dick is the first genuine portrayal in English to show mental illness, described as mental illness. With Hugh Laurie, we discussed being quite true about that and not making Mr. Dick just a figure of fun for being eccentric. He\u2019s a fragile human being.\nHow is Dickens relevant today? \n\u201cDavid Copperfield\u201d is all about the perennial problem of status anxiety. Everyone goes through some point in their life where they think: Am I doing OK? Am I fitting in? David goes through that in massive swings. \nWhat does multicultural casting give you in the film?\nI wanted the film to feel fresh and vibrant, not like it was old-fashioned, dusty history. Therefore it\u2019s important that it reflects society today as well as society of 1840.\nBRIEF BIO\nNAME: Armando Iannucci \nWHAT HE DOES: Television and film writing and directing. \nHOW HE GOT THERE: \u201cI grew up passionately a fan of radio comedy shows,\u201d like \u201cHitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy,\u201d and began mimicking their writing as a boy in Glasgow. After performing and writing comedy sketches at Oxford, he got a job as a radio comedy producer, which led to television writing. \nHIS BIG BREAK: In 2005 he created the British satirical series \u201cThe Thick of It,\u201d set in a government office rife with spin and cynicism. Its success spurred his similarly themed film, \u201cIn the Loop,\u201d and the U.S. series \u201cVeep.\u201d \nHIS OBSESSION: \u201cMusic is my great passion. I can\u2019t play an instrument. I have a lousy singing voice. But I love listening to music.\u201d When adding the score to \u201cDavid Copperfield,\u201d he says, \u201cIt\u2019s been great being able to sit there in the middle of a live orchestra, hearing them play to your film. It\u2019s the first time you get that sense that the film is complete.\u201d Writer Armando Iannucci\u2019s latest projects\u2014a comedy series set in space  and a movie of Charles Dickens\u2019 \u201cDavid Copperfield\u201d\u2014take him back to his roots in two fields unlikely to mix: sketch comedy and literary studies. ",
        "author": "Caryn James"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Veep\u2019 Writer Launches Into an \u2018Absurd\u2019 Future and a Dickensian Past (WSJ: Television) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7024",
        "date": "2020-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/veep-veteran-launches-into-an-absurd-future-and-a-dickensian-past-11579020742?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=60",
        "text": "Armando Iannucci says in later episodes, the show \u2018Avenue 5\u2019 starts looking at things \u2018like what is true and what isn\u2019t true.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Michael Buckner/Deadline/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nIn \u201cAvenue 5,\u201d (premiering on HBO Jan. 19), Hugh Laurie plays Ryan Clark, captain of a spaceship that is the futuristic version of a luxury cruise liner. When the ship is knocked off course in its trip around Saturn, he has to deal with dissatisfied passengers and dead bodies floating outside the window. Mr. Iannucci directed and co-wrote \u201cThe Personal History of David Copperfield,\u201d (opening on May 8), which includes a multicultural cast led by Dev Patel. Mr. Laurie plays the fantasizing Mr. Dick, haunted by thoughts of King Charles I. \nMr. Iannucci talked to The Wall Street Journal about setting his new works in the future and the past. Edited excerpts:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhy did you make a futuristic science-fiction comedy? \n\nI\u2019m a sci-fi fan, so when I\u2019m thinking of a theme, I will think of \u201cWhat\u2019s the sci-fi version of that?\u201d But also the spaceship is just a holding bay for the themes I want to look at\u2014leadership, power, wealth, how society works, what happens when it breaks down. The sci-fi element is minimal once we\u2019re up there. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9, but all sci-fi is really about today. \nIt\u2019s a common assumption that it\u2019s harder to satirize politics today because reality overtakes it. Have you deliberately turned away from politics as a subject?\nNo. My first instinct is not necessarily political. I think unintentionally I seem to be moving away from the present day, possibly because the present day is going to take a little bit of time to assess how to respond to it. \nThere is a lot of social satire embedded in \u201cAvenue 5.\u201d What targets did you have in mind? \nIn later episodes we start looking at things like what is true and what isn\u2019t true. If people believe something, is that just as valid as things that are factually true? The series starts to prod away at themes that are current, because things like social media and the fact we\u2019re all hooked on our devices is now having as big an impact on our lives as, say, the president is. I want to explore those elements of our everyday life, not just the things that make it into stories on our front pages.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHugh Laurie, center, Armando Iannucci, standing behind him, and Jessica St. Clair work on the set of \u2018Avenue 5\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n HBO\n \n\n\n\nDid the story take any surprising turns as you were writing it? \nIt was surprising how quickly we got it into a very absurd and dark place. There might be a baying mob outside as soon as you come out of your room. The bridge does look like a bridge of a spaceship and Ryan does look like a ship\u2019s captain. With each episode layers are peeled away and by the end actual reality is far different from what we assumed when we started. \nYou\u2019ve been a Dickens fan for a long time, and even made a documentary about him in 2012. How has he inspired your comedy writing?\nHe wants to make something entertaining that speaks to a wide audience. At the same time he\u2019s not nervous of dealing with difficult subjects, themes of loss and poverty, at all times making sure that we concentrate on the humanity at the center of it. \nIn \u201cDavid Copperfield,\u201d was your goal to take characters like Mr. Micawber, who are often seen as caricatures, and show that humanity? \nAbsolutely. We\u2019ve grown up on this idea of Micawber being a jolly, roly-poly figure, but in fact he\u2019s a man demonized by debt. I wanted Peter Capaldi to bring that out in his performance. Mr. Dick is the first genuine portrayal in English to show mental illness, described as mental illness. With Hugh Laurie, we discussed being quite true about that and not making Mr. Dick just a figure of fun for being eccentric. He\u2019s a fragile human being.\nHow is Dickens relevant today? \n\u201cDavid Copperfield\u201d is all about the perennial problem of status anxiety. Everyone goes through some point in their life where they think: Am I doing OK? Am I fitting in? David goes through that in massive swings. \nWhat does multicultural casting give you in the film?\nI wanted the film to feel fresh and vibrant, not like it was old-fashioned, dusty history. Therefore it\u2019s important that it reflects society today as well as society of 1840.\nBRIEF BIO\nNAME: Armando Iannucci \nWHAT HE DOES: Television and film writing and directing. \nHOW HE GOT THERE: \u201cI grew up passionately a fan of radio comedy shows,\u201d like \u201cHitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy,\u201d and began mimicking their writing as a boy in Glasgow. After performing and writing comedy sketches at Oxford, he got a job as a radio comedy producer, which led to television writing. \nHIS BIG BREAK: In 2005 he created the British satirical series \u201cThe Thick of It,\u201d set in a government office rife with spin and cynicism. Its success spurred his similarly themed film, \u201cIn the Loop,\u201d and the U.S. series \u201cVeep.\u201d \nHIS OBSESSION: \u201cMusic Writer Armando Iannucci\u2019s latest projects\u2014a comedy series set in space  and a movie of Charles Dickens\u2019 \u201cDavid Copperfield\u201d\u2014take him back to his roots in two fields unlikely to mix: sketch comedy and literary studies. ",
        "author": "Caryn James"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Debris\u2019 Review: Unidentified Flying Objects (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7025",
        "date": "2021-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/debris-review-unidentified-flying-objects-11614283676?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=9",
        "text": "Debris Begins Monday, 10 p.m., NBC\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThis will be especially true of sci-fi fans, who have seen it all, maybe even imagined it all and might still be taken aback, not just by the unfolding details of the storyline but the way it plays hard-to-get. It\u2019s in no rush to provide details, only mood. You don\u2019t quite know what\u2019s happening, so you lean in to learn more. It\u2019s a common enough technique, but one very seductively executed by the show\u2019s creator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J.H. Wyman\n\n\n\n (\u201cAlmost Human,\u201d \u201cFringe\u201d).\nIn it, \u201cDebris\u201d supposes that a spaceship of unknown origin has come apart, violently it seems, and the pieces are descending to Earth and causing mischief. And worse. Aggravating matters for U.S. intelligence agent Bryan Beneventi (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Tucker\n\n\n\n ) and his British colleague,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Finola Jones\n\n\n\n of MI6 (Riann Steele), is that the fragments of debris they\u2019re hunting down have hit the black market and are being bought up by such dubious characters as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anson Ash\n\n\n\n (Scroobius Pip).\nWhy? The power of the pieces isn\u2019t totally clear, of course. Future episodes will no doubt clarify. But the black, animated shards of spacecraft seem to tap into people\u2019s grief, resurrecting their loved ones\u2014in some ephemeral form, at least\u2014and after using up one human\u2019s emotions move on to another, as if changing batteries. The used-up human bodies are left levitating a foot in the air, seemingly alive and conscious but in suspended animation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRiann Steele and Jonathan Tucker\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sergei Bachlakov/NBC\n \n\n\n\nHow is this working out for everyone? Not well. Both Bryan and Finola are like first responders in a pandemic\u2014as susceptible to the influence of the debris as anyone else. They must avoid and resist. They also have specific motives for being where they are: Bryan, whom one assumes is CIA, has been in Afghanistan and is looking for something equally meaningful to do. Finola, whose late astrophysicist father had been \u201cthe first to be told the truth\u201d about the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope of the \u201cdebris cloud\u201d resulting from the mysterious cosmic event, has been born into the space-garbage game.\n\nShe is not necessarily Bryan\u2019s friend. And he is aware of this: Back at HQ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig Maddox\n\n\n\n keeps Bryan apprised of the chicanery afoot between the British and American interests in the field. There are tensions. There are opposing interests. One can only hope that Maddox\u2014played by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Norbert Leo Butz,\n\n\n\n darling of Broadway theatergoers\u2014has more to do in the coming chapters of the series, which, I must admit, had me at hello. Intelligence agents attempt to solve an extraterrestrial mystery in NBC\u2019s new sci-fi drama. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Away\u2019 Review: High Drama in Space (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7026",
        "date": "2020-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/away-review-high-drama-in-space-11599167330?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=33",
        "text": "Away Friday, Netflix\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nGood game, her tenderhearted father tells her. Her mother explains how important it is to take your shot when it presents itself. No one will miss the implication of this impassioned piece of parental instruction\u2014the words of a woman about to command an international team embarking on the first manned mission to Mars.\nBut the scene is, as well, an indicator of what\u2019s to come in this series whose spellbinding tensions derive mainly from the world of that spaceship. It\u2019s when the action there gives way to focus on the show\u2019s other vehicle\u2014the one thrashing its way through story lines about the team\u2019s loved ones down on Earth\u2014that the show\u2019s drama sputters to a near halt. Which is where it stays till the script returns to the ship. \nTrue, certain members of the crew sustain this domestic melodrama via messages\u2014particularly those of Emma and her daughter: a C in a science course (she usually got A\u2019s) is enough to provoke emotional disturbance in Alexis. Then there are the exchanges between the acerbic Russian cosmonaut Misha (a scene-stealing Mark Ivanir) and his adult daughter, who detests him\u2014as her contemptuous onscreen tirades tell. In one she shouts that he wanted her forgiveness only because he was just stupid enough to believe he would survive this flight if he had it. \n\nStill, in the spaceship, at least, there is always the chance that the family therapy sessions will be interrupted by some new and deadly glitch in the system that could blow up the ship and its crew. There are plenty of those interruptions in \u201cAway\u201d\u2014terrorizing emergencies beautifully rendered with special effects that are the distinguishing power of the series.\nThere are, of course, no special effects to offset the flood of relationship babble that washes over this tale in its family-story sections, which constitute a good half of this series.\nThat\u2019s not to say that the storytelling (creator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Hinderaker\n\n\n\n ) lacks seductiveness. The sagas of the families left behind\u2014largely, family life sociology with a touch of soap opera\u2014are, at least, watchable and sometimes better than that. They can\u2019t, however, compare with the irresistible drama of life on the spaceship\u2014its excitement, its science, its crisp technical argumentation, its sudden eruptions of hostility between members of the team, usually about matters like decision-making authority\u2014and not least the exhilarating prospect of the goal ahead. If they survive\u2014a landing on Mars. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRay Panthaki and Hilary Swank\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\nThe team members contemplating this future are, to put it mildly, sketchily drawn. There is in \u201cAway\u201d scant evidence of any effort to impart depth to these characters. One imagines the show\u2019s many writers deciding that this is, after all, an international team with members from Russia, China, Africa, India and America\u2014identities that could stand in for actual character detail. And, indeed, the role of Misha conforms exactly to the stereotype of the gloomy Russian\u2014chronically suspicious, grim, combative. But don\u2019t underestimate him. \nThe Chinese astronaut and chemist Lu Wang (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivian Wu\n\n\n\n ) in turn represents a familiar image of the Chinese professional woman\u2014uncommunicative, cold, brilliant perhaps, and completely mysterious. It\u2019s with some relief that we find along the way that one of the secrets Lu Wang kept to herself was her complicated personal life.\nPerhaps the most engaging of the team members is Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ato Essandoh\n\n\n\n ), who, as his name suggests, is a product of mixed cultures. This renowned young botanist, a British citizen born in Ghana, and an observant Jew, recites regularly from the Torah. Kwesi is highly regarded for his steadfast calm and humor and, increasingly, for his prayers on behalf of the group in times of mortal danger.\nOf Emma Green\u2014devoted wife and mother, and skilled astronaut, we know as much as necessary. Though there were moments, early in the series, that raised a question or two about who the writers imagine this character is, or ought to be. Emma addresses her adored husband as \u201cs\u2014head,\u201d which she does twice in the series. It\u2019s especially noteworthy when she does so after a bout of tender lovemaking, the night before she heads off on her three-year mission to Mars. \nWe will never know the answer to this mystery, which is doubtless for the best. \nWhat we do know, and it should be enough, is that these 10 hours spent hurtling toward Mars hold the promise of rich entertainment. Hilary Swank stars in a Netflix series about the first manned mission to Mars. ",
        "author": "Dorothy Rabinowitz"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Away\u2019 Review: High Drama in Space (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7027",
        "date": "2020-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/away-review-high-drama-in-space-11599167330?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=38",
        "text": "Away Friday, Netflix\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nGood game, her tenderhearted father tells her. Her mother explains how important it is to take your shot when it presents itself. No one will miss the implication of this impassioned piece of parental instruction\u2014the words of a woman about to command an international team embarking on the first manned mission to Mars.\nBut the scene is, as well, an indicator of what\u2019s to come in this series whose spellbinding tensions derive mainly from the world of that spaceship. It\u2019s when the action there gives way to focus on the show\u2019s other vehicle\u2014the one thrashing its way through story lines about the team\u2019s loved ones down on Earth\u2014that the show\u2019s drama sputters to a near halt. Which is where it stays till the script returns to the ship. \nTrue, certain members of the crew sustain this domestic melodrama via messages\u2014particularly those of Emma and her daughter: a C in a science course (she usually got A\u2019s) is enough to provoke emotional disturbance in Alexis. Then there are the exchanges between the acerbic Russian cosmonaut Misha (a scene-stealing Mark Ivanir) and his adult daughter, who detests him\u2014as her contemptuous onscreen tirades tell. In one she shouts that he wanted her forgiveness only because he was just stupid enough to believe he would survive this flight if he had it. \n\nStill, in the spaceship, at least, there is always the chance that the family therapy sessions will be interrupted by some new and deadly glitch in the system that could blow up the ship and its crew. There are plenty of those interruptions in \u201cAway\u201d\u2014terrorizing emergencies beautifully rendered with special effects that are the distinguishing power of the series.\nThere are, of course, no special effects to offset the flood of relationship babble that washes over this tale in its family-story sections, which constitute a good half of this series.\nThat\u2019s not to say that the storytelling (creator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Hinderaker\n\n\n\n ) lacks seductiveness. The sagas of the families left behind\u2014largely, family life sociology with a touch of soap opera\u2014are, at least, watchable and sometimes better than that. They can\u2019t, however, compare with the irresistible drama of life on the spaceship\u2014its excitement, its science, its crisp technical argumentation, its sudden eruptions of hostility between members of the team, usually about matters like decision-making authority\u2014and not least the exhilarating prospect of the goal ahead. If they survive\u2014a landing on Mars. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRay Panthaki and Hilary Swank\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\nThe team members contemplating this future are, to put it mildly, sketchily drawn. There is in \u201cAway\u201d scant evidence of any effort to impart depth to these characters. One imagines the show\u2019s many writers deciding that this is, after all, an international team with members from Russia, China, Africa, India and America\u2014identities that could stand in for actual character detail. And, indeed, the role of Misha conforms exactly to the stereotype of the gloomy Russian\u2014chronically suspicious, grim, combative. But don\u2019t underestimate him. \nThe Chinese astronaut and chemist Lu Wang (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivian Wu\n\n\n\n ) in turn represents a familiar image of the Chinese professional woman\u2014uncommunicative, cold, brilliant perhaps, and completely mysterious. It\u2019s with some relief that we find along the way that one of the secrets Lu Wang kept to herself was her complicated personal life.\nPerhaps the most engaging of the team members is Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ato Essandoh\n\n\n\n ), who, as his name suggests, is a product of mixed cultures. This renowned young botanist, a British citizen born in Ghana, and an observant Jew, recites regularly from the Torah. Kwesi is highly regarded for his steadfast calm and humor and, increasingly, for his prayers on behalf of the group in times of mortal danger.\nOf Emma Green\u2014devoted wife and mother, and skilled astronaut, we know as much as necessary. Though there were moments, early in the series, that raised a question or two about who the writers imagine this character is, or ought to be. Emma addresses her adored husband as \u201cs\u2014head,\u201d which she does twice in the series. It\u2019s especially noteworthy when she does so after a bout of tender lovemaking, the night before she heads off on her three-year mission to Mars. \nWe will never know the answer to this mystery, which is doubtless for the best. \nWhat we do know, and it should be enough, is that these 10 hours spent hurtling toward Mars hold the promise of rich entertainment. Hilary Swank stars in a Netflix series about the first manned mission to Mars. ",
        "author": "Dorothy Rabinowitz"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Away\u2019 Review: High Drama in Space (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7028",
        "date": "2020-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/away-review-high-drama-in-space-11599167330?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=41",
        "text": "Away Friday, Netflix\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nGood game, her tenderhearted father tells her. Her mother explains how important it is to take your shot when it presents itself. No one will miss the implication of this impassioned piece of parental instruction\u2014the words of a woman about to command an international team embarking on the first manned mission to Mars.\nBut the scene is, as well, an indicator of what\u2019s to come in this series whose spellbinding tensions derive mainly from the world of that spaceship. It\u2019s when the action there gives way to focus on the show\u2019s other vehicle\u2014the one thrashing its way through story lines about the team\u2019s loved ones down on Earth\u2014that the show\u2019s drama sputters to a near halt. Which is where it stays till the script returns to the ship. \nTrue, certain members of the crew sustain this domestic melodrama via messages\u2014particularly those of Emma and her daughter: a C in a science course (she usually got A\u2019s) is enough to provoke emotional disturbance in Alexis. Then there are the exchanges between the acerbic Russian cosmonaut Misha (a scene-stealing Mark Ivanir) and his adult daughter, who detests him\u2014as her contemptuous onscreen tirades tell. In one she shouts that he wanted her forgiveness only because he was just stupid enough to believe he would survive this flight if he had it. \n\nStill, in the spaceship, at least, there is always the chance that the family therapy sessions will be interrupted by some new and deadly glitch in the system that could blow up the ship and its crew. There are plenty of those interruptions in \u201cAway\u201d\u2014terrorizing emergencies beautifully rendered with special effects that are the distinguishing power of the series.\nThere are, of course, no special effects to offset the flood of relationship babble that washes over this tale in its family-story sections, which constitute a good half of this series.\nThat\u2019s not to say that the storytelling (creator,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Hinderaker\n\n\n\n ) lacks seductiveness. The sagas of the families left behind\u2014largely, family life sociology with a touch of soap opera\u2014are, at least, watchable and sometimes better than that. They can\u2019t, however, compare with the irresistible drama of life on the spaceship\u2014its excitement, its science, its crisp technical argumentation, its sudden eruptions of hostility between members of the team, usually about matters like decision-making authority\u2014and not least the exhilarating prospect of the goal ahead. If they survive\u2014a landing on Mars. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRay Panthaki and Hilary Swank\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\nThe team members contemplating this future are, to put it mildly, sketchily drawn. There is in \u201cAway\u201d scant evidence of any effort to impart depth to these characters. One imagines the show\u2019s many writers deciding that this is, after all, an international team with members from Russia, China, Africa, India and America\u2014identities that could stand in for actual character detail. And, indeed, the role of Misha conforms exactly to the stereotype of the gloomy Russian\u2014chronically suspicious, grim, combative. But don\u2019t underestimate him. \nThe Chinese astronaut and chemist Lu Wang (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivian Wu\n\n\n\n ) in turn represents a familiar image of the Chinese professional woman\u2014uncommunicative, cold, brilliant perhaps, and completely mysterious. It\u2019s with some relief that we find along the way that one of the secrets Lu Wang kept to herself was her complicated personal life.\nPerhaps the most engaging of the team members is Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ato Essandoh\n\n\n\n ), who, as his name suggests, is a product of mixed cultures. This renowned young botanist, a British citizen born in Ghana, and an observant Jew, recites regularly from the Torah. Kwesi is highly regarded for his steadfast calm and humor and, increasingly, for his prayers on behalf of the group in times of mortal danger.\nOf Emma Green\u2014devoted wife and mother, and skilled astronaut, we know as much as necessary. Though there were moments, early in the series, that raised a question or two about who the writers imagine this character is, or ought to be. Emma addresses her adored husband as \u201cs\u2014head,\u201d which she does twice in the series. It\u2019s especially noteworthy when she does so after a bout of tender lovemaking, the night before she heads off on her three-year mission to Mars. \nWe will never know the answer to this mystery, which is doubtless for the best. \nWhat we do know, and it should be enough, is that these 10 hours spent hurtling toward Mars hold the promise of rich entertainment. Hilary Swank stars in a Netflix series about the first manned mission to Mars. ",
        "author": "Dorothy Rabinowitz"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Right Stuff\u2019 Review: A Space Race Re-Entry (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7029",
        "date": "2020-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-right-stuff-review-a-space-race-re-entry-11602189591?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=40",
        "text": "The Right Stuff Begins Friday, Disney+\n\n\nBut what makes it noteworthy is where it diverges from its predecessor\u2014 in its sins of omission/commission. Solely on its own merits, the series, a presentation of National Geographic (airing on Disney+), is a perfectly serviceable drama about a rococo period of American history and the complicated, high-flying, surprisingly unlikable people who flew the Mercury space missions of the 1960s. Regarded as part of the Greater Right Stuff, however, it becomes more than just a character-centric soap about the \u201960s Race for Space.\nSome art lovers, after all, prefer cover versions to originals. The band Fountains of Wayne performing a Britney Spears song.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Ives\n\n\n\n vamping on \u201cDixie.\u201d Francis Bacon\u2019s screaming popes don\u2019t mean as much without the Velazquez original\u2014the value lies in the variations. So it is with the new \u201cRight Stuff.\u201d As a series (two episodes make their debut Friday) it can go deeper than a single movie into the stories of the men involved. And that\u2019s the approach the series seems destined to take, even while leaving out the story of test pilot\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chuck Yeager,\n\n\n\n who was arguably the heart of Mr. Kaufman\u2019s film and represented the space administration\u2019s willingness to sacrifice heroism and ability in favor of a shiny image. (He was not a college graduate, and thus deemed ineligible.) It\u2019s worth noting that famed screenwriter\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Goldman,\n\n\n\n who wrote an unproduced adaptation of \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d also left Yeager out, and that Kaufman put him back in.\nYeager\u2019s absence from the new series limits the scope of the drama to the astronauts themselves: The lead character now, the one through whom we watch America wage the Cold War from the launch pads of Cape Canaveral, is the good-looking, appropriately credentialed\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Shepard,\n\n\n\n America\u2019s first man in space\u2014and, per actor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jake McDorman\u2019s\n\n\n\n portrayal, a colossally arrogant finagler, philanderer and astronaut-to-be.\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nShepard, a Navy ace who would one day walk on the moon, isn\u2019t the only disagreeable character among the team of military fliers drafted by NASA in its effort to play catch-up with the Soviets. But he\u2019s the most regularly in our face, sauntering, fuming and grabbing every piece of astro-groupie he can lay his hands on. His antithesis\u2014no surprise to anyone familiar with the movie and/or book and/or history\u2014is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick J. Adams\n\n\n\n ), the sanctimonious, nearly 40-year-old Marine Corps pilot whose natural talent in front of the cameras, and for getting himself in front of them first, made antagonists of his Mercury colleagues. None are as antagonized as Shepard, who looks on Glenn\u2019s media skills with a mix of grudging admiration and outright loathing.\n\nThe one-man Mercury missions involved Air Force, Navy and Marine fliers, college graduates and men with stable families, although the stability could be staged:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Cooper\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin O\u2019Donoghue\n\n\n\n ), for instance, has to woo his estranged wife (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eloise Mumford\n\n\n\n ) into moving back in so he can present an image of domestic bliss to the movie-industry marketers to whom the White House has entrusted NASA\u2019s public image. Glenn, of course, is the kind of poster boy the space program wants, although the casting of the charisma-free Mr. Adams makes him more irritating than he might have been.\nThe casting in general is a problem in this \u201cRight Stuff,\u201d even if it reflects accurately the cookie-cutter notions NASA had about who should represent the U.S. and its space program. There\u2019s very little to distinguish one astronaut from the other, save for Shepard and Glenn. And Mr. Adams just seems wrong: When Mr. Harris played the astronaut (and future U.S. senator), there was something inside that was being suppressed, some animal energy straining against the choir-boy fa\u00e7ade. Here the animal is Shepard, a man torn between his sense of privacy and the perquisites of space-age celebrity. There are many, as these astronauts will learn. Inspired by the book and film of the same name, a series on Disney+ offers a middling retelling of the Mercury space missions of the 1960s. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Invasion\u2019 Review: It Came From Outer Space...Eventually (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7030",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/invasion-review-apple-tv-sam-neill-11634851241?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=19",
        "text": "Invasion Begins Friday, Apple TV+\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s a truism in science fiction that the human element provides the conflict and the drama. But after many episodes of calibrated anxiety and ping-ponging between locations, seeing something with three-heads would be refreshing. The show doesn\u2019t offer a good glimpse of any such thing\u2014or much idea of what\u2019s instigating the massive explosions occurring here and there\u2014until at least chapter 6, though you do get a hint early on: A Yemeni traveler, showing less sense than his camels (who flee), stares at whatever\u2019s hurtling toward him in a cloud of dust, like a misguided Roomba. It quivers. It explodes. So does he.\nSomething similar begins happening everywhere\u2014in the English countryside, for instance, where a bus hurtles into an alien-blasted gorge, trapping a bunch of school kids primed to re-enact \u201cLord of the Flies.\u201d In agricultural Oklahoma, a crop circle is enormous and quick to become the obsession of Sheriff\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Bell Tyson\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sam Neill\n\n\n\n ), who thought he was retiring. In Japan\u2014or some miles above it\u2014a \u201cJASA\u201d space mission explodes, presumably liquidating a crew that included the lover of ground-team specialist Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna), who is determined to cut through the bureaucracy and find the cause. Back in New York, the only house left relatively intact on one Long Island block belongs to Aneesha (the glorious Golshifteh Farahani), who has just discovered that her husband, Ahmed (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Firas Nassar\n\n\n\n ), has been having an affair with a woman who posts recipes on Instagram. When Aneesha serves Ahmed the same dishes, it is rather delicious.\nIt\u2019s also dramaturgical madness. Created by producers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Simon Kinberg\n\n\n\n (\u201cX-Men,\u201d \u201cDeadpool,\u201d \u201cThe Martian\u201d) and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Weil\n\n\n\n (\u201cHunters\u201d), the series takes the not-unreasonable tack of establishing its characters and their soapy backstories at length to encourage our emotional investment. But it becomes distractingly evident, right away, that the producers have the luxury of 10 episodes to do so. While it is true that many characters are not aware that space creatures are bombing the Earth\u2014that a particular cataclysm isn\u2019t an isolated incident\u2014they do seem relatively casual about it all. The bullied English boy (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Billy Barratt\n\n\n\n ) keeps being bullied; Aneesha can\u2019t get over the fact that her husband\u2019s paramour is white and blond, though racism in general seems undeterred by alien attacks. Mitsuki gets emotionally waylaid by her lesbian lover\u2019s relationship with her father (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Togo Igawa\n\n\n\n ).\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShioli Kutsuna\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Apple TV+\n \n\n\n\nIn Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers seem to think they\u2019ve been deployed to a frat party, Spc. Trevante Ward (Shamier Anderson) is the only American left after an attack by what can only be described as a three-legged crotch\u2014perhaps a first in intergalactic ghoulery\u2014which looms many stories above the men and then explodes. There\u2019s nothing Freudian about it, though when an alien finally does get a close-up, a viewer could be forgiven for thinking of Georgia O\u2019Keefe. But Trevante\u2019s behavior is typical of both the writing and direction here, as he fumes, spewing vulgarities no one can hear, abusing the goat herder who treats his wounds and speaking English louder and louder, as if that would help.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShamier Anderson\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Apple TV+\n \n\n\n\nThat people will act badly in times of an apocalyptic crisis is a convention of the genre, and in \u201cInvasion\u201d the behavior is very bad and the worst behaved are Americans. We can take it. What viewers might not be able to accept is a space-invasion series that takes so long to get to the point\u2014which is, we are led to believe, a space invasion. It\u2019s interesting, if not in an adrenaline-fueled kind of way, to have a thriller that\u2019s almost completely a response to the thrills, and in which the action is basically reaction. \u201cInvasion\u201d does give us some useful things to think about, though: If you plan to escape while extraterrestrials are shutting down the power grid, scrambling telecommunications and draining batteries, don\u2019t buy a Tesla. And if your camels grunt and run away, take the hint. Extraterrestrials wreak havoc on Earth in a new Apple TV+ show, but with many characters and a dragging storyline it creeps rather than thrills. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Invasion\u2019 Review: It Came From Outer Space...Eventually (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7031",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/invasion-review-apple-tv-sam-neill-11634851241?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=13",
        "text": "Invasion Begins Friday, Apple TV+\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s a truism in science fiction that the human element provides the conflict and the drama. But after many episodes of calibrated anxiety and ping-ponging between locations, seeing something with three-heads would be refreshing. The show doesn\u2019t offer a good glimpse of any such thing\u2014or much idea of what\u2019s instigating the massive explosions occurring here and there\u2014until at least chapter 6, though you do get a hint early on: A Yemeni traveler, showing less sense than his camels (who flee), stares at whatever\u2019s hurtling toward him in a cloud of dust, like a misguided Roomba. It quivers. It explodes. So does he.\nSomething similar begins happening everywhere\u2014in the English countryside, for instance, where a bus hurtles into an alien-blasted gorge, trapping a bunch of school kids primed to re-enact \u201cLord of the Flies.\u201d In agricultural Oklahoma, a crop circle is enormous and quick to become the obsession of Sheriff\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Bell Tyson\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sam Neill\n\n\n\n ), who thought he was retiring. In Japan\u2014or some miles above it\u2014a \u201cJASA\u201d space mission explodes, presumably liquidating a crew that included the lover of ground-team specialist Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna), who is determined to cut through the bureaucracy and find the cause. Back in New York, the only house left relatively intact on one Long Island block belongs to Aneesha (the glorious Golshifteh Farahani), who has just discovered that her husband, Ahmed (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Firas Nassar\n\n\n\n ), has been having an affair with a woman who posts recipes on Instagram. When Aneesha serves Ahmed the same dishes, it is rather delicious.\nIt\u2019s also dramaturgical madness. Created by producers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Simon Kinberg\n\n\n\n (\u201cX-Men,\u201d \u201cDeadpool,\u201d \u201cThe Martian\u201d) and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Weil\n\n\n\n (\u201cHunters\u201d), the series takes the not-unreasonable tack of establishing its characters and their soapy backstories at length to encourage our emotional investment. But it becomes distractingly evident, right away, that the producers have the luxury of 10 episodes to do so. While it is true that many characters are not aware that space creatures are bombing the Earth\u2014that a particular cataclysm isn\u2019t an isolated incident\u2014they do seem relatively casual about it all. The bullied English boy (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Billy Barratt\n\n\n\n ) keeps being bullied; Aneesha can\u2019t get over the fact that her husband\u2019s paramour is white and blond, though racism in general seems undeterred by alien attacks. Mitsuki gets emotionally waylaid by her lesbian lover\u2019s relationship with her father (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Togo Igawa\n\n\n\n ).\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShioli Kutsuna\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Apple TV+\n \n\n\n\nIn Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers seem to think they\u2019ve been deployed to a frat party, Spc. Trevante Ward (Shamier Anderson) is the only American left after an attack by what can only be described as a three-legged crotch\u2014perhaps a first in intergalactic ghoulery\u2014which looms many stories above the men and then explodes. There\u2019s nothing Freudian about it, though when an alien finally does get a close-up, a viewer could be forgiven for thinking of Georgia O\u2019Keefe. But Trevante\u2019s behavior is typical of both the writing and direction here, as he fumes, spewing vulgarities no one can hear, abusing the goat herder who treats his wounds and speaking English louder and louder, as if that would help.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShamier Anderson\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Apple TV+\n \n\n\n\nThat people will act badly in times of an apocalyptic crisis is a convention of the genre, and in \u201cInvasion\u201d the behavior is very bad and the worst behaved are Americans. We can take it. What viewers might not be able to accept is a space-invasion series that takes so long to get to the point\u2014which is, we are led to believe, a space invasion. It\u2019s interesting, if not in an adrenaline-fueled kind of way, to have a thriller that\u2019s almost completely a response to the thrills, and in which the action is basically reaction. \u201cInvasion\u201d does give us some useful things to think about, though: If you plan to escape while extraterrestrials are shutting down the power grid, scrambling telecommunications and draining batteries, don\u2019t buy a Tesla. And if your camels grunt and run away, take the hint. Extraterrestrials wreak havoc on Earth in a new Apple TV+ show, but with many characters and a dragging storyline it creeps rather than thrills. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Feed\u2019 Review: Minor Technical Difficulties (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7032",
        "date": "2019-11-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-feed-review-minor-technical-difficulties-11574374398?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=52",
        "text": "The Feed Friday, Amazon Prime\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n \u2018The Chaperone\u2019 \n\n\nIn a less-than-startling leap of imagination, the series posits a Western world in which almost everyone is wired, anatomically, into the streaming service of the title, a Twitter-Wikipedia-Google Glasses of the mind, with sound so good it might as well be in your head. Which is precisely the case. And something is scrambling the reception.\nOf course it is. In the world of sci-fi, technology is like outer space\u2014nothing benevolent has ever come out of it, except maybe \u201cE.T.\u201d The basic premise of \u201cThe Feed\u201d is easy enough to swallow, no pun intended: Would people really voluntarily have their bodies infiltrated by a corporate\u2014and corpuscular\u2014entity that easily takes up residence in their brains, but is close to impossible (and very painful) to remove? OK, that\u2019s not really a serious question. What\u2019s implausible about \u201cThe Feed,\u201d though, is twofold: That the system has taken less than a generation to saturate the developed world. And that it\u2019s taken so long to go utterly wrong.\nIt\u2019s a cautionary tale, naturally, as well as a kind of cybernetic \u201cSuccession,\u201d only with characters who are more likable while generating the same high degree of intramural intrigue. The paterfamilias is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lawrence Hatfield\n\n\n\n (a revelatory\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Thewlis\n\n\n\n ), the Bill Gates/\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Zuckerberg\n\n\n\n /Ming the Merciless of The Feed, which is big enough to operate as its own criminal justice system, especially when Feed-associated outrages\u2014such as the attempted assassination of Lawrence at the wedding of his son Ben (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeremy Neumark Jones\n\n\n\n )\u2014take place. Another attack occurs two years later, the commonality being that each assailant gouged out an eye (and, with it, the feed of The Feed). Both events, evidently, are sparked by something inside the system. Evidently to the viewer, at least. Considering that they run an enterprise so dependent on math, it takes an inordinate amount of time for the Feed folk to put two and two together.\n\nThe series is similarly slow to get started and doesn\u2019t pick up real momentum till episode 4. Based on the novel by Nick\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clark Windo,\n\n\n\n it features\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Guy Burnet\n\n\n\n as the \u201cgood son,\u201d Tom, a \u201cFeed psychologist\u201d who works outside the family firm, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nina Toussaint-White\n\n\n\n as Kate. They meet cute at that aforementioned wedding, get married, and have a child who will be imperiled by the very system that Tom\u2019s dad cooked up long ago. And for which his mother, Meredith (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle Fairley\n\n\n\n ), serves as corporate spokesmodel, appearing in people\u2019s heads and making emergency announcements like a demonic flight attendant. She\u2019s not exactly cuddly. But she\u2019s an interesting character, as is her husband.\nThe sadly predictable thing is that as the show picks up steam, the characters revert to type. To what will be no one\u2019s surprise, there\u2019s a radical anti-Feed movement afoot. The Hatfield family members are at odds with each other. One son is a hero, the other is a dork. Someone will suggest that Tom and Kate\u2019s baby be \u201cengaged\u201d in utero. It\u2019s crazy. Someday, it will seem like a documentary. In a not-too-distant sci-fi future, a streaming service beamed into people\u2019s brains starts experiencing problems. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Challenger: The Final Flight\u2019 Review: A Tragedy Foretold (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7033",
        "date": "2020-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/challenger-the-final-flight-review-a-tragedy-foretold-11600202289?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=40",
        "text": "Challenger: The Final Flight Wednesday, Netflix\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cChallenger: The Final Flight,\u201d a four-part documentary on Netflix, may not offer any earth-shattering revelations about NASA\u2019s most famous catastrophe, or its most famous fatality\u2014New Hampshire schoolteacher\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe,\n\n\n\n chosen to be the first private citizen in space. That it was a predictable tragedy is the thrust of the series, but certainly no surprise. \u201cThe shuttle is going to explode,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Ebeling,\n\n\n\n one of the solid-rocket booster engineers at NASA contractor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Morton Thiokol,\n\n\n\n well before the Jan. 28, 1986, launch. NASA knew the now-notorious O-rings\u2014the gasket-like devices that kept the fuel in the boosters\u2014were flawed, and increasingly subject to failure the lower the outside temperature. (It was cold that January morning in Florida.) Even the postmortem Rogers Commission, reportedly asked by President Reagan to go easy on NASA, delivered a damning assessment of the agency\u2019s haste and incompetence.\nBut the series does take a deep dive into the story, providing no small amount of drama and some eye-opening details. A few of them regard the fractious meeting between NASA and Morton Thiokol that preceded the flight. Others involve the inner workings of the Rogers Commission. (Serving almost as comic relief, there are delicious anecdotal details about Nobel laureate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Feynman\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. Donald Kutyna\n\n\n\n maneuvering the commission into an honest conclusion.) To absolutely appalling effect, however, the filmmakers bring before their camera the very people who gave the green light to a launch that evidently should not have taken place, men who take \u201cblame\u201d but \u201cfeel no guilt.\u201d Among them:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Lucas,\n\n\n\n the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, who resigned not long after the explosion; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lawrence Mulloy,\n\n\n\n the shuttle program manager who, as portrayed by those interviewed in the series, rode roughshod over engineers trying to stop the launch. (\u201cMy God, Thiokol,\u201d Mr. Mulloy reportedly asked, \u201cwhen do you want me to launch, next April?\u201d)\nJudging by the delays, mechanical snafus and unfavorable weather cataloged by \u201cChallenger,\u201d a superstitious person would have said that the omens were against the shuttle ever making it to space. Engineers would say\u2014and did\u2014that the design flaws should have grounded the flight.\n\nBut there was a lot riding on the shuttle, including McAuliffe, whose inclusion had generated wildly favorable publicity for the space agency, which was under enormous pressure to make more flights, lower their costs, prevent delays and cater to Congress. The American public, school kids in particular, were enthralled by the teacher who is recalled by those who knew her\u2014notably Lisa Bristol, her sister, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barbara Morgan,\n\n\n\n her understudy for the shuttle flight\u2014as being perhaps even more marvelous than NASA\u2019s publicity machine had made her seem. Among the haunting aspects of the Challenger explosion was that so many children were watching it.\nTo their credit, producer-directors\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steven Leckart\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Junge\n\n\n\n (J.J. Abrams is an executive producer) devote considerable time to all the lost astronauts, interview their survivors where possible, provide their personal stories and extol their virtues. One of these, of course, is courage, something \u201cChallenger\u201d concludes was in abundance aboard the mission and sorely lacking among the people behind it. Netflix\u2019s documentary series dives deep into NASA\u2019s infamous catastrophe. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The First\u2019 Review: Scintillating Space Race (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7034",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-review-scintillating-space-race-1536874510?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=64",
        "text": "The First Friday, Hulu\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe first two episodes, directed by the remarkable\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Agnieszka Holland\n\n\n\n (\u201cEuropa, Europa,\u201d \u201cIn Darkness\u201d), possess a grandeur that will make more than a few viewers think about \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d especially during the moments when the Mars astronauts are presented to the world and board their craft for the more than two-year mission to the red planet, escorted by the music of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Stetson,\n\n\n\n with its echoes of Aaron Copland. (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philip Kaufman\n\n\n\n had done similar things with Handel and Holst.) The resulting tragedy in the skies above Houston\u2014the Challenger disaster was the obvious model\u2014is handled so convincingly you realize only later that you were being set up by all the camaraderie and the hope. You also know that Mr. Penn\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Hagerty\n\n\n\n \u2014the 13th man to walk on the moon and the ex-astronaut who trained the Mars crew\u2014will be booked on the next flight skyward.\nThe calamitous end of one mission is really the beginning of the story, and provides all the character setup the series needs: We first met Tom on a morning run near his home in New Orleans (where the show was shot). Coming home to find his kitchen sink not working, he\u2019d set to work fixing it, because he\u2019s a man of decisive action. Also, because he needed to keep his mind off what was going on at the space center\u2014namely the flight wasn\u2019t on and wanted to be. The woman who cut him: Laz Ingram (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Natascha McElhone\n\n\n\n ), the head of the corporation that has partnered with NASA to push the space program forward, and a distinctly icy presence. Like Pluto.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNatascha McElhone, center\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Hulu\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThe First\u201d is the creation of Beau Willimon, who also fathered \u201cHouse of Cards\u201d and who has enlisted four directors to do two episodes each. I haven\u2019t seen all eight, but there\u2019s a marked shift in tone after the opening two chapters; the heightened sensibility of Ms. Holland evaporates as the new crew is assembled, trained and survives various personal crises as its members get ready to make another stab at Mars.\n\nThis is not a space show, or at least it won\u2019t be till the end of the season. But it does what it does with a high degree of intelligence: Set just a few years in the future (the 2030s), it incorporates new technology casually, and thus convincingly, making what\u2019s currently remarkable into what will, inevitably, be pedestrian. There\u2019s nothing pedestrian about \u201cThe First,\u201d though. It orbits high above the cable traffic. Sean Penn stars in Hulu\u2019s new show set in the near-future that follows astronauts trying to become the first team to reach Mars. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 10-Point: Gerard Baker on the London subway terrorist incident, GOP resistance to Trump\u2019s latest agreement, another North Korean missile launch and more (WSJ: The 10-Point) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7035",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-10-point-1505472655?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=22",
        "text": "The GOP Resistance Top congressional Republicans signaled Thursday they wouldn\u2019t be pressured into enacting an immigration framework reached between President Trump and top Democrats, as conservatives reacted with alarm to reports of a fledgling deal to protect young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The framework marked the second time in a week that Mr. Trump bypassed his party and dealt directly with Democrats. The president, who ran on a hard-line immigration platform, jolted many of his own supporters by agreeing to pair legal status for the group of young people\u2014often called \u201cDreamers\u201d\u2014with enhanced border-security measures. Mr. Trump also agreed that the package would omit funding for his promised wall on the border with Mexico. He said nothing about including other enforcement measures aimed at finding and deporting people living illegally in the U.S. After President Trump said House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were \u201con board\u201d with his approach, the GOP leaders said negotiations would take on a broad set of immigration issues, including enforcement measures beyond border security.\nSoft Money SoftBank is nearing an ambitious deal to take a substantial stake in Uber\u2014but only if the Japanese technology investor can persuade shareholders to sell enough stock at a steep discount. After weeks of deliberation, Uber\u2019s board in recent days has been hashing out its response to a potential investment led by SoftBank that could total as much as $10 billion. If successful, that would be among the largest single investments in a private venture-backed startup. It would also give SoftBank\u2014whose chief executive, Masayoshi Son, has predicted that companies such as Uber will transform the world\u2014major stakes in nearly all the world\u2019s top ride-hailing companies. Elsewhere, Google parent Alphabet has held talks to invest about $1 billion in Lyft, which would further an alliance against Uber.\n\n\nMissile Launch For the second time in a month, North Korea fired a missile over Japan, defying rising international efforts to force it to abandon course. In a rare move, South Korea responded by immediately conducting a simulated strike of the North Korean launch site, an air base near Pyongyang. In Japan, alerts were sent early Friday local time to smartphones of people living in areas where the missile was projected to pass over soon after the launch had been detected. No injuries or damage were reported. The launch was of a shorter-range projectile that wouldn\u2019t be able to reach the U.S. mainland. The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting Friday at the request of the U.S. and Japan. A new violation by Pyongyang had been anticipated in response to the Security Council\u2019s adoption of new sanctions Monday, some diplomats said, raising the stakes for finding a diplomatic solution.\nStyle Icons This weekend, Jared Leto stars on the cover of WSJ. Magazine\u2019s September Men\u2019s Style issue. From what is referred to as his base\u2014a 100,000-square-foot decommissioned Air Force station he converted into a private residence\u2014the actor, tech entrepreneur, stadium-filling rock star, fashion icon and successful Silicon Valley investor brings us inside his highflying life. Also in the issue, an exclusive tour of Palais de la Zahia, French iconoclast Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy\u2019s sprawling riad in the heart of the medina in Marrakesh, Morocco; the late Pierre Berg\u00e9 on partner Yves Saint Laurent\u2019s legacy; a look inside the world\u2019s first major museum devoted to contemporary African art; Nathalie Du Pasquier, a founder of the Memphis Group, finally gets her due; dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied takes us through his day; the resurgence of modernist pioneers Anni and Josef Albers; and a new film from artist Alex Israel. Plus, the future of Rag & Bone under co-founder Marcus Wainwright, a whimsical fashion portfolio inspired by decades past and the latest in streetwear.\n\n\nToday\u2019s VideoMission Accomplished\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will make its suicide plunge into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere Friday. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn\u2019s rings, moons and surface.\n\n\n\n\nTOP STORIESU.S.House, Senate Tax Proposals Likely to Diverge An Illinois City Aims to Move Better Policing Right Into the Neighborhood WORLDCentral Banks Edge Away From Easy Money as BOE Signals Rate Rise ISIS Convoy Reaches Militant-Held Syria After Coalition Stops Strikes, Activists Say BUSINESSThe Second-Class Office Workers Verizon Looks to Cut $10 Billion in Costs by 2021 MARKETSFlorida Is Short on Insurance Adjusters, and That Could Stall Recovery Efforts Some Equifax Customers Who Sought Safety Got Burned in the Data Breach\n\n\n\n\nNumber of the Day22The number of consecutive games the Cleveland Indians have won, after a thrilling 3-2 victory over the Kans A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal, from Editor in Chief Gerard Baker. ",
        "author": "Gerard Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 10-Point: Gerard Baker on the London subway terrorist incident, GOP resistance to Trump\u2019s latest agreement, another North Korean missile launch and more (WSJ: The 10-Point) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7036",
        "date": "2017-09-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-10-point-1505472655?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=77",
        "text": "The GOP Resistance Top congressional Republicans signaled Thursday they wouldn\u2019t be pressured into enacting an immigration framework reached between President Trump and top Democrats, as conservatives reacted with alarm to reports of a fledgling deal to protect young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The framework marked the second time in a week that Mr. Trump bypassed his party and dealt directly with Democrats. The president, who ran on a hard-line immigration platform, jolted many of his own supporters by agreeing to pair legal status for the group of young people\u2014often called \u201cDreamers\u201d\u2014with enhanced border-security measures. Mr. Trump also agreed that the package would omit funding for his promised wall on the border with Mexico. He said nothing about including other enforcement measures aimed at finding and deporting people living illegally in the U.S. After President Trump said House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were \u201con board\u201d with his approach, the GOP leaders said negotiations would take on a broad set of immigration issues, including enforcement measures beyond border security.\nSoft Money SoftBank is nearing an ambitious deal to take a substantial stake in Uber\u2014but only if the Japanese technology investor can persuade shareholders to sell enough stock at a steep discount. After weeks of deliberation, Uber\u2019s board in recent days has been hashing out its response to a potential investment led by SoftBank that could total as much as $10 billion. If successful, that would be among the largest single investments in a private venture-backed startup. It would also give SoftBank\u2014whose chief executive, Masayoshi Son, has predicted that companies such as Uber will transform the world\u2014major stakes in nearly all the world\u2019s top ride-hailing companies. Elsewhere, Google parent Alphabet has held talks to invest about $1 billion in Lyft, which would further an alliance against Uber.\n\n\nMissile Launch For the second time in a month, North Korea fired a missile over Japan, defying rising international efforts to force it to abandon course. In a rare move, South Korea responded by immediately conducting a simulated strike of the North Korean launch site, an air base near Pyongyang. In Japan, alerts were sent early Friday local time to smartphones of people living in areas where the missile was projected to pass over soon after the launch had been detected. No injuries or damage were reported. The launch was of a shorter-range projectile that wouldn\u2019t be able to reach the U.S. mainland. The U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting Friday at the request of the U.S. and Japan. A new violation by Pyongyang had been anticipated in response to the Security Council\u2019s adoption of new sanctions Monday, some diplomats said, raising the stakes for finding a diplomatic solution.\nStyle Icons This weekend, Jared Leto stars on the cover of WSJ. Magazine\u2019s September Men\u2019s Style issue. From what is referred to as his base\u2014a 100,000-square-foot decommissioned Air Force station he converted into a private residence\u2014the actor, tech entrepreneur, stadium-filling rock star, fashion icon and successful Silicon Valley investor brings us inside his highflying life. Also in the issue, an exclusive tour of Palais de la Zahia, French iconoclast Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy\u2019s sprawling riad in the heart of the medina in Marrakesh, Morocco; the late Pierre Berg\u00e9 on partner Yves Saint Laurent\u2019s legacy; a look inside the world\u2019s first major museum devoted to contemporary African art; Nathalie Du Pasquier, a founder of the Memphis Group, finally gets her due; dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied takes us through his day; the resurgence of modernist pioneers Anni and Josef Albers; and a new film from artist Alex Israel. Plus, the future of Rag & Bone under co-founder Marcus Wainwright, a whimsical fashion portfolio inspired by decades past and the latest in streetwear.\n\n\nToday\u2019s VideoMission Accomplished\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter 20 years in space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will make its suicide plunge into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere Friday. For the team of scientists who began working on the project in the 1980s, it means the end of decades of work that led to scientific progress and never-before-seen images of Saturn\u2019s rings, moons and surface.\n\n\n\n\nTOP STORIESU.S.House, Senate Tax Proposals Likely to Diverge An Illinois City Aims to Move Better Policing Right Into the Neighborhood WORLDCentral Banks Edge Away From Easy Money as BOE Signals Rate Rise ISIS Convoy Reaches Militant-Held Syria After Coalition Stops Strikes, Activists Say BUSINESSThe Second-Class Office Workers Verizon Looks to Cut $10 Billion in Costs by 2021 MARKETSFlorida Is Short on Insurance Adjusters, and That Could Stall Recovery Efforts Some Equifax Customers Who Sought Safety Got Burned in the Data Breach\n\n\n\n\nNumber of the Day22The number of consecutive games the Cleveland Indians have won, after a thrilling 3-2 victory over the Kans A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal, from Editor in Chief Gerard Baker. ",
        "author": "Gerard Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 10-Point: Gerard Baker on escalating trade tensions, the global growth slowdown and more (WSJ: The 10-Point) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7037",
        "date": "2018-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-10-point-1528108152?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=94",
        "text": "Trade Tension The Trump administration showed no sign of backing down from tariffs in the face of resistance from allies and China over the weekend, isolating the U.S. and complicating the president\u2019s meeting this week with leaders of Washington\u2019s staunchest partners. Top finance officials from the Group of Seven leading nations met in Canada, where the non-U.S. members\u2014the host country, along with France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.K.\u2014publicly rebuked Washington for its new steel and aluminum tariffs. Beijing said it won\u2019t abide by any agreement to buy more American products if the U.S. goes ahead with trade sanctions. President Trump now must face leaders of countries who have termed his policies extreme, unwise and in some cases illegal when he arrives in Quebec for a summit of G-7 leaders scheduled for Friday and Saturday. Barring another cancellation, that will be followed by a meeting with North Korea in Singapore on June 12.\nLosing Steam The global growth story is fading. Stock indexes that rode accelerating growth to fresh records in January are now hamstrung by a moderate but unmistakable slowdown in economic momentum in Europe and elsewhere. The Dow industrials have struggled to push past 25000 since March. Hardly anyone expects a recession soon. But with government-bond yields near record lows in many countries and the median S&P 500 stock trading at a price/earnings multiple seen only rarely in the past century, many investors are buying government bonds and other lower-risk assets in a bid to brace against what is expected to be a volatile market year. Still, the U.S. is once again looking like the star performer.\nLess Is More \n\n\n\nCancer researchers are exploring whether they can eliminate or scale back treatments to spare patients from tough side effects\u2014and costs\u2014without jeopardizing survival. The latest studies suggest this approach can work. One federally funded study, presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, showed that many women with early-stage breast cancer could safely skip commonly used chemotherapy after surgery. Doctors said the finding could spare tens of thousands of women a year from chemo side effects such as nausea and early menopause. The studies are part of a growing movement among cancer doctors and researchers to de-escalate treatments for certain tumor types, as drugs become more expensive.\n\n\nA Lifetime of Fun Forgotten how to have fun? You\u2019re not alone. Many adults lose the knack after spending years paying off mortgages, getting kids through school and taking care of aging parents. Experts abound in elderly grief, illness, finance and ethics\u2014but few focus on ways to enjoy plentiful leisure time. It\u2019s not that older adults are glum. They\u2019re happier than middle-aged and younger adults, according to researchers at the Stanford Center on Longevity. Stress, anger and worry decrease with age, according to Laura Carstensen, director of the center and co-author of the study. For those at a loss for how to have fun, start by watching less than 48 hours of TV a week, Journal columnist Clare Ansberry writes.\n\n\nToday\u2019s VideoHow to Work From Anywhere\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cAt work\u201d doesn\u2019t mean \u201cat the office\u201d anymore. Now you have the tools to get away from your crowded workspace and be more productive in a coffee shop or an airport. Our personal technology columnist David Pierce explains.\n\n\n\n\nTOP STORIESU.S.U.S. Weighs Expanding Military Role in Yemen War FDA Chief Expects to Play Role in Wake of \u2018Right to Try\u2019 Law WORLDVolcanic Eruption in Guatemala Kills Dozens Merkel Responds to Macron\u2019s Plan to Overhaul the EU BUSINESSGM\u2019s Rebuilt Finance Arm: Profits Minus the Mortgage Mess SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon MARKETSWall Street, Hedge Funds Add Social Media to Research Menu Winning Bid to Have Lunch With Warren Buffett: $3.3 Million\n\n\n\n\nNumber of the Day67The number of software flaws that Apple has fixed since September for its mobile operating system iOS. That\u2019s a 46% increase from the 46 bugs addressed in the same period a year earlier. At Apple\u2019s annual conference for developers Monday, executives face the task of shoring up confidence that the company can deliver quality software.\n\n\n\n\nQuote of the Day\n\n\u201cOrange County should be to the Republican Party what Hollywood is to the Democratic Party.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Scott Baugh, a former campaign aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.), who is one of 15 challengers to Mr. Rohrabacher. Orange County has unexpectedly emerged as a battleground as the GOP fights to hold its House majority. But a bounty of Democratic candidates could help vulnerable Republicans.\n\n\n\n\n\nToday\u2019s QuestionGoing back to our story above, what are your thoughts on doctors\u2019 suggesting a less-is-more approach to treating cancer? Send your comments, which we may edit before publication, to 10point@wsj.com. Please include your name and location.\n\n\n\u2014Compiled by Jessica Menton\n\n\nReader ResponseResponding t A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal, from Editor in Chief Gerard Baker. ",
        "author": "Gerard Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: SpaceX's historic launch could mark a new era in space exploration (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7038",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-technology-202/2020/05/26/the-technology-202-spacex-s-historic-launch-could-mark-a-new-era-in-space-exploration/5ecc0cac88e0fa6727004626/",
        "text": "with Tonya RileyThe space industry is preparing for a historic moment of liftoff tomorrow.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightElon Musk\u2019s firm SpaceX is set to become the first private company to launch humans into orbit, as long as the weather cooperates. The launch will be the most high-profile test to date for the company \u2014 which my colleague Christian Davenport reports was once criticized as a billionaire\u2019s long shot fantasy.\u00a0 \u201cOne industry veteran told me, \u2018You know their rockets are put together with rubber bands and sealing wax,\u2019\u201d Lori Garver, a former deputy National Aeronautics and Space Administration who pushed the agency to outsource human spaceflight to the private sector, told Christian. \u201c\u2018It\u2019s not real. It won\u2019t fly.\u2019\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut Wednesday's launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard underscores just how much Musk's company has shaken up the space business.pic.twitter.com/iSGrzHgENp\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2020\n\nThe company may earn a place in the history books for ushering in a new era of space travel.\u00a0AdvertisementThe mission marks a broader shift at the NASA away from the costly and time-consuming project of building government-owned spacecraft. If tomorrow\u2019s launch is a success, it could signal that more future space endeavors will be based on similar partnerships between corporations and governments.\u00a0The mission is also poised to end a drought of launches of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired almost a decade ago. The rise of greater collaboration between companies like SpaceX and the federal government could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign space programs such as Russia, which has ferried American astronauts to the space station in intervening years.\u00a0From diving to zip lining to flying, The Washington Post goes behind the scenes with American astronauts training for a new era in human space flight. (Eric Maierson/The Washington Post)The flight marks an apparent victory for SpaceX in its long-running rivalry with Boeing.\u00a0Countries used to vie against one another in space achievements, as the United States and Soviet Union famously did in the effort to land a man on the moon. But these days, companies are defining the space race.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo one thought that Musk's relative upstart would beat the legacy aerospace giant to space, Christian writes. The fact that SpaceX appears to have won the race underscores just how much space travel has changed as it becomes increasingly privatized.\u00a0SpaceX may have had an advantage in its contract with NASA because it's known for reusing materials, making it more cost efficient. The company has built a reputation for repurposing all sorts of things, even a 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank that an employee found scrapped at an old abandoned Cape Canaveral launch site.\u201cWe had to be super scrappy,\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post. \u201cIf we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years, we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: Those were our two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, make them work.\u201dBut SpaceX still has had high-profile problems along its path.\u00a0Several incidents have raised questions about whether there's enough government oversight of private space companies. The company has had two Falcon 9 rockets explode, and it struggled with a parachute system \u00a0needed to slow down the spacecraft on its return to Earth. The company said last year that its Dragon capsule was completely destroyed during a test.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince these incidents, SpaceX has uncovered what caused the problems and fixed them, NASA tells Christian.\u00a0The launch will also be a pivotal assessment of the Trump administration's space ambitions.\u00a0\u201cIf it goes well, it would be a moment of triumph for an administration that boasts it is \u2018renewing American leadership in space\u2019 and would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads,\u201d Christian writes. \u201cIf something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.\u201dPresident Trump and Vice President Pence are planning to attend the launch, which is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. Wednesday from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Story continues below advertisementTrump has previously shown an interest in having high-profile \u201cspace barons,\u201d such as Musk and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, and their companies play a role in rejuvenating space travel, Christian writes.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cRich guys, they love rocket ships,\u201d Trump said in 2018. \u201cThat\u2019s good. That\u2019s better than us paying for them.\u201d\u00a0The coronavirus will make this launch different from others.\u00a0Don't expect to see the usual crowds near the Kennedy Space Center, The Verge's Nicole Wetsman writes. NASA is taking some precautions to ensure the safety of the astronauts and ground crew by conducting temperature checks, and spreading people out at Mission Control. They\u2019ll disinfect rooms regularly and put up Plexiglass between different work stations.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re looking at all the things where we can practice the guidelines for social distancing, and at the same time, launch this very important mission to the International Space Station,\u201d said Steve Stich, deputy manager of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, during a press call this month.AdvertisementProgramming note: The Washington Post will \u00a0tomorrow broadcast the SpaceX launch on our homepage and on YouTube. The Post\u2019s Libby Casey will anchor the broadcast with space industry reporter Davenport, which will include exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the astronauts and launch.\u00a0Guests will include NASA astronaut Suni Williams, and former NASA astronauts Frank Culbertson Jr. and Pam Melory, as well as Ellen Stofan, the Director of the Smithsonian\u2019s Air & Space Museum. The program will feature an exclusive online interview with Elon Musk and reporting and analysis from the Post\u2019s Joel Achenbach, Whitney Leaming and Whitney Shefte.Story continues below advertisementTake some time to read this fun article from Christian before tomorrow's launch:Meet Bob and Doug, the NASA astronauts about to make history. They\u2019re hilarious (and kinda goofy). (Christian Davenport)AdvertisementNote to readers: The Technology 202 will only publish today, Wednesday and Thursday this week. We will return to our normal schedule next week.Our top tabsA new bill would prohibit tech giants from offering political advertising tools that target users based on demographics or behavioral data.The bill, introduced by Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.), would apply to all communications or advocacy for a federal candidate and would be enforced by the Federal Election Commission. Democrats have raised concerns since the 2016 election that \u201cmicrotargeting\u201d can\u00a0make it more challenging to police disinformation in political ads. \u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cMicrotargeting political ads fractures our open Democratic debate into millions of private, unchecked silos, allowing for the spread of false promises, polarizing lies, disinformation, fake news, and voter suppression,\u201d Eshoo said in a news release.\u00a0\u201cWith spending on digital ads in the 2020 election expected to exceed $1.3 billion, Congress must step in to protect our nation\u2019s Democratic process.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThe Banning Microtargeted Political Ads Act has the support of nearly a dozen privacy and campaign finance experts and advocacy groups. Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who has expressed support for regulating microtargeting, said she was glad to see the issue receiving attention.Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) is also expected to introduced legislation today that would limit use of the technology to targeting users only on the basis of age, gender and location. Eshoo's bill has greater restrictions on how location data can be used to microtarget.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementApproximately 72 percent of Americans also favor greater regulation of the practice, according to a Knight-Gallup poll earlier this year.Clarification: This item has been updated to clarify Weintraub\u2019s comments.Officials in the Chinese tech hub of Hangzhou may make its coronavirus health-tracking technology permanent.The proposed permanent version of the tool would assign individuals a color-coded health badge based on \u201ca collation of their medical records, physical examination results, and lifestyle habits, such as smoking and alcohol consumption,\u201d the Wall Street Journal's Liza Lin reports. Officials have used QR-code-based health-rating apps to control the movement of residents to limit the spread of the virus during the pandemic.AdvertisementThe announcement sparked a backlash on Chinese social media, where residents accused the city of using the pandemic as an excuse to expand government monitoring of citizens.\u00a0It also came days after Robin Li, chief executive of the Chinese tech giant Baidu and a member of a Chinese political advisory body, introduced a new nonbinding proposal urging legislators to wind down collection of personal information used in the coronavirus response. There has been a recent push in the nation for increased privacy protections against the government, Lin reports.Ireland\u2019s top privacy watchdog has yet to crack down on Big Tech in the two years since Europe\u2019s landmark data protection law took effect, critics say.Ireland\u2019s Data Protection Commission has yet to finalize investigations into any tech companies and has struggled to keep up with thousands of complaints introduced under the General Data Protection Regulation, Mark Scott of Politico reports.\u00a0\u201cNothing has really changed,\u201d said Fred Logue, a Dublin-based privacy lawyer. \u201cWhen you deal with them, you don\u2019t get the sense that they are there to vindicate data protection rights.\u201dOf the nearly 7,000 complaints the agency received last year, about 4,500 were completed without any specific enforcement action and about 1,000 are awaiting fines or enforcement actions.European Union officials in other countries have also complained about the agency\u2019s slow pace. Several told Politico that they waited months for little or no updates for cases referred to Ireland. France and Germany moved to take action against Google without waiting on Ireland.Helen Dixon, who heads the agency of more than 140 regulators, defended its actions. \u201cWe are now on a pathway where we are going to resolve, one by one, as fast as we can with as many resources as we can, these very entrenched issues,\u201d she told Scott.The agency expects to launch fines against Facebook and Twitter by early summer \u2014 \u00a0a year after the enforcement actions were expected.Rant and raveMore thoughts on GDPR\u2019s birthday yesterday from European Parliament member Sophie in \u2019t Veld:\ud83d\udeab stop abuse of GDPR. Courts/authorities in \ud83c\uddf7\ud83c\uddf4, \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf1, \ud83c\uddf8\ud83c\uddf0, & \ud83c\udded\ud83c\uddfa invoke GDPR to attack NGOs and investigative journalism\ud83c\udf0e safe international data transfers: EU citizens\u2019 data should not be intercepted for mass surveillance once transferred to other countries, particularly \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8&\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde7\u2014 Sophie in 't Veld (@SophieintVeld) May 25, 2020\n\nTrump trackerPresident Trump is considering creating a White House commission to review alleged online bias against conservatives.The administration may also encourage the Federal Communications Commission and the FEC to embark on similar reviews, John D. McKinnon and Alex Leary report in the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0President Trump has long railed against an alleged anti-conservative bias from online platforms, even hosting a summit on the subject last summer. Tech companies have consistently disputed his claims. An independent audit of Facebook last year found no evidence supporting his claims.More White House news:Tensions flare as U.S. signals broader crackdown on Chinese telecoms (Politico)Trump expected to broaden foreign worker bans (Politico)The digital race to 2020A key evangelical group supporting Trump is upping its data mining efforts to give the campaign a boost amid the pandemic.United In Purpose \u201cplans to use data mining to identify millions of new voters and target them with cheap ads on Facebook,\u201d Lee Fang of the Intercept reports.\u00a0The group, founded by a former technology entrepreneur, is powered by Pioneer Solutions, a data-mining operation used to find and activate religious voters. A leak of the group\u2019s database showed that it has demographics information on nearly 200 million Americans. It also shares connections with CatholicVote, a group that has used cellphone data to target Catholic voters in support of the Republican Party.Inside the industryAmazon, Microsoft and Google are providing web services to Chinese surveillance firms blacklisted by the United States for human rights abuses.The services include email, website hosting and log-in authentication, according researchers at privacy website Top10VPN, CNBC reports.The new report alleges that Amazon and Google are providing Web services for Dahua Technology and Hikvision, two video surveillance companies blacklisted for aiding in the abuses of Uighurs, China\u2019s Muslim minority population. Artificial intelligence start-ups SenseTime and Megvii were also blacklisted for human rights abuses but appear to still be using Microsoft technology.All four Chinese companies have disputed allegations of their involvement in human rights abuses. None of the U.S. companies mentioned in the report immediately responded to CNBC for comment.More industry news:Wikimedia is writing new policies to fight Wikipedia harassment (The Verge)Mental health apps draw wave of new users as experts call for more oversight (CNBC)TrendingOur Habits Have Changed. These Gadgets Are Proof. (Wall Street Journal)Gucci Says Fashion Shows Should Never Be the Same (New York Times)Bookmark thisHere\u2019s How Facebook And YouTube Allowed Conspiracy Theorists To Turn Bill Gates Into The Villain Of The Coronavirus Pandemic (BuzzFeed News)DaybookDominic LeBlanc, president of the Queen\u2019s Privy Council for Canada, will host a virtual event and make an announcement related to countering election interference, along with Microsoft and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, at 10 a.m. Register here.Ranking Digital Rights will host an event \u201cGetting to the Source of the 2020 Infodemic: It\u2019s the Business Model,\u201d on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m.Before you log offNose for news? We\u2019ve got you covered:Being informed is my favorite song pic.twitter.com/Cx8Lnf4jVq\u2014 Dave Jorgenson \ud83c\udf70 (@davejorgenson) May 23, 2020\n\n It underscores just how much Elon Musk's company has shaken up the business of space. The Technology 202: SpaceX's historic launch could mark a new era in space exploration",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: SpaceX's historic launch could mark a new era in space exploration (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7039",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-technology-202/2020/05/26/the-technology-202-spacex-s-historic-launch-could-mark-a-new-era-in-space-exploration/5ecc0cac88e0fa6727004626/",
        "text": "with Tonya RileyThe space industry is preparing for a historic moment of liftoff tomorrow.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightElon Musk\u2019s firm SpaceX is set to become the first private company to launch humans into orbit, as long as the weather cooperates. The launch will be the most high-profile test to date for the company \u2014 which my colleague Christian Davenport reports was once criticized as a billionaire\u2019s long shot fantasy.\u00a0 \u201cOne industry veteran told me, \u2018You know their rockets are put together with rubber bands and sealing wax,\u2019\u201d Lori Garver, a former deputy National Aeronautics and Space Administration who pushed the agency to outsource human spaceflight to the private sector, told Christian. \u201c\u2018It\u2019s not real. It won\u2019t fly.\u2019\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut Wednesday's launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard underscores just how much Musk's company has shaken up the space business.pic.twitter.com/iSGrzHgENp\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2020\n\nThe company may earn a place in the history books for ushering in a new era of space travel.\u00a0AdvertisementThe mission marks a broader shift at the NASA away from the costly and time-consuming project of building government-owned spacecraft. If tomorrow\u2019s launch is a success, it could signal that more future space endeavors will be based on similar partnerships between corporations and governments.\u00a0The mission is also poised to end a drought of launches of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired almost a decade ago. The rise of greater collaboration between companies like SpaceX and the federal government could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign space programs such as Russia, which has ferried American astronauts to the space station in intervening years.\u00a0From diving to zip lining to flying, The Washington Post goes behind the scenes with American astronauts training for a new era in human space flight. (Eric Maierson/The Washington Post)The flight marks an apparent victory for SpaceX in its long-running rivalry with Boeing.\u00a0Countries used to vie against one another in space achievements, as the United States and Soviet Union famously did in the effort to land a man on the moon. But these days, companies are defining the space race.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo one thought that Musk's relative upstart would beat the legacy aerospace giant to space, Christian writes. The fact that SpaceX appears to have won the race underscores just how much space travel has changed as it becomes increasingly privatized.\u00a0SpaceX may have had an advantage in its contract with NASA because it's known for reusing materials, making it more cost efficient. The company has built a reputation for repurposing all sorts of things, even a 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank that an employee found scrapped at an old abandoned Cape Canaveral launch site.\u201cWe had to be super scrappy,\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post. \u201cIf we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years, we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: Those were our two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, make them work.\u201dBut SpaceX still has had high-profile problems along its path.\u00a0Several incidents have raised questions about whether there's enough government oversight of private space companies. The company has had two Falcon 9 rockets explode, and it struggled with a parachute system \u00a0needed to slow down the spacecraft on its return to Earth. The company said last year that its Dragon capsule was completely destroyed during a test.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince these incidents, SpaceX has uncovered what caused the problems and fixed them, NASA tells Christian.\u00a0The launch will also be a pivotal assessment of the Trump administration's space ambitions.\u00a0\u201cIf it goes well, it would be a moment of triumph for an administration that boasts it is \u2018renewing American leadership in space\u2019 and would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads,\u201d Christian writes. \u201cIf something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.\u201dPresident Trump and Vice President Pence are planning to attend the launch, which is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. Wednesday from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Story continues below advertisementTrump has previously shown an interest in having high-profile \u201cspace barons,\u201d such as Musk and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, and their companies play a role in rejuvenating space travel, Christian writes.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cRich guys, they love rocket ships,\u201d Trump said in 2018. \u201cThat\u2019s good. That\u2019s better than us paying for them.\u201d\u00a0The coronavirus will make this launch different from others.\u00a0Don't expect to see the usual crowds near the Kennedy Space Center, The Verge's Nicole Wetsman writes. NASA is taking some precautions to ensure the safety of the astronauts and ground crew by conducting temperature checks, and spreading people out at Mission Control. They\u2019ll disinfect rooms regularly and put up Plexiglass between different work stations.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re looking at all the things where we can practice the guidelines for social distancing, and at the same time, launch this very important mission to the International Space Station,\u201d said Steve Stich, deputy manager of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, during a press call this month.AdvertisementProgramming note: The Washington Post will \u00a0tomorrow broadcast the SpaceX launch on our homepage and on YouTube. The Post\u2019s Libby Casey will anchor the broadcast with space industry reporter Davenport, which will include exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the astronauts and launch.\u00a0Guests will include NASA astronaut Suni Williams, and former NASA astronauts Frank Culbertson Jr. and Pam Melory, as well as Ellen Stofan, the Director of the Smithsonian\u2019s Air & Space Museum. The program will feature an exclusive online interview with Elon Musk and reporting and analysis from the Post\u2019s Joel Achenbach, Whitney Leaming and Whitney Shefte.Story continues below advertisementTake some time to read this fun article from Christian before tomorrow's launch:Meet Bob and Doug, the NASA astronauts about to make history. They\u2019re hilarious (and kinda goofy). (Christian Davenport)AdvertisementNote to readers: The Technology 202 will only publish today, Wednesday and Thursday this week. We will return to our normal schedule next week.Our top tabsA new bill would prohibit tech giants from offering political advertising tools that target users based on demographics or behavioral data.The bill, introduced by Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.), would apply to all communications or advocacy for a federal candidate and would be enforced by the Federal Election Commission. Democrats have raised concerns since the 2016 election that \u201cmicrotargeting\u201d can\u00a0make it more challenging to police disinformation in political ads. \u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cMicrotargeting political ads fractures our open Democratic debate into millions of private, unchecked silos, allowing for the spread of false promises, polarizing lies, disinformation, fake news, and voter suppression,\u201d Eshoo said in a news release.\u00a0\u201cWith spending on digital ads in the 2020 election expected to exceed $1.3 billion, Congress must step in to protect our nation\u2019s Democratic process.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThe Banning Microtargeted Political Ads Act has the support of nearly a dozen privacy and campaign finance experts and advocacy groups. Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who has expressed support for regulating microtargeting, said she was glad to see the issue receiving attention.Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) is also expected to introduced legislation today that would limit use of the technology to targeting users only on the basis of age, gender and location. Eshoo's bill has greater restrictions on how location data can be used to microtarget.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementApproximately 72 percent of Americans also favor greater regulation of the practice, according to a Knight-Gallup poll earlier this year.Clarification: This item has been updated to clarify Weintraub\u2019s comments.Officials in the Chinese tech hub of Hangzhou may make its coronavirus health-tracking technology permanent.The proposed permanent version of the tool would assign individuals a color-coded health badge based on \u201ca collation of their medical records, physical examination results, and lifestyle habits, such as smoking and alcohol consumption,\u201d the Wall Street Journal's Liza Lin reports. Officials have used QR-code-based health-rating apps to control the movement of residents to limit the spread of the virus during the pandemic.AdvertisementThe announcement sparked a backlash on Chinese social media, where residents accused the city of using the pandemic as an excuse to expand government monitoring of citizens.\u00a0It also came days after Robin Li, chief executive of the Chinese tech giant Baidu and a member of a Chinese political advisory body, introduced a new nonbinding proposal urging legislators to wind down collection of personal information used in the coronavirus response. There has been a recent push in the nation for increased privacy protections against the government, Lin reports.Ireland\u2019s top privacy watchdog has yet to crack down on Big Tech in the two years since Europe\u2019s landmark data protection law took effect, critics say.Ireland\u2019s Data Protection Commission has yet to finalize investigations into any tech companies and has struggled to keep up with thousands of complaints introduced under the General Data Protection Regulation, Mark Scott of Politico reports.\u00a0\u201cNothing has really changed,\u201d said Fred Logue, a Dublin-based privacy lawyer. \u201cWhen you deal with them, you don\u2019t get the sense that they are there to vindicate data protection rights.\u201dOf the nearly 7,000 complaints the agency received last year, about 4,500 were completed without any specific enforcement action and about 1,000 are awaiting fines or enforcement actions.European Union officials in other countries have also complained about the agency\u2019s slow pace. Several told Politico that they waited months for little or no updates for cases referred to Ireland. France and Germany moved to take action against Google without waiting on Ireland.Helen Dixon, who heads the agency of more than 140 regulators, defended its actions. \u201cWe are now on a pathway where we are going to resolve, one by one, as fast as we can with as many resources as we can, these very entrenched issues,\u201d she told Scott.The agency expects to launch fines against Facebook and Twitter by early summer \u2014 \u00a0a year after the enforcement actions were expected.Rant and raveMore thoughts on GDPR\u2019s birthday yesterday from European Parliament member Sophie in \u2019t Veld:\ud83d\udeab stop abuse of GDPR. Courts/authorities in \ud83c\uddf7\ud83c\uddf4, \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf1, \ud83c\uddf8\ud83c\uddf0, & \ud83c\udded\ud83c\uddfa invoke GDPR to attack NGOs and investigative journalism\ud83c\udf0e safe international data transfers: EU citizens\u2019 data should not be intercepted for mass surveillance once transferred to other countries, particularly \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8&\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde7\u2014 Sophie in 't Veld (@SophieintVeld) May 25, 2020\n\nTrump trackerPresident Trump is considering creating a White House commission to review alleged online bias against conservatives.The administration may also encourage the Federal Communications Commission and the FEC to embark on similar reviews, John D. McKinnon and Alex Leary report in the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0President Trump has long railed against an alleged anti-conservative bias from online platforms, even hosting a summit on the subject last summer. Tech companies have consistently disputed his claims. An independent audit of Facebook last year found no evidence supporting his claims.More White House news:Tensions flare as U.S. signals broader crackdown on Chinese telecoms (Politico)Trump expected to broaden foreign worker bans (Politico)The digital race to 2020A key evangelical group supporting Trump is upping its data mining efforts to give the campaign a boost amid the pandemic.United In Purpose \u201cplans to use data mining to identify millions of new voters and target them with cheap ads on Facebook,\u201d Lee Fang of the Intercept reports.\u00a0The group, founded by a former technology entrepreneur, is powered by Pioneer Solutions, a data-mining operation used to find and activate religious voters. A leak of the group\u2019s database showed that it has demographics information on nearly 200 million Americans. It also shares connections with CatholicVote, a group that has used cellphone data to target Catholic voters in support of the Republican Party.Inside the industryAmazon, Microsoft and Google are providing web services to Chinese surveillance firms blacklisted by the United States for human rights abuses.The services include email, website hosting and log-in authentication, according researchers at privacy website Top10VPN, CNBC reports.The new report alleges that Amazon and Google are providing Web services for Dahua Technology and Hikvision, two video surveillance companies blacklisted for aiding in the abuses of Uighurs, China\u2019s Muslim minority population. Artificial intelligence start-ups SenseTime and Megvii were also blacklisted for human rights abuses but appear to still be using Microsoft technology.All four Chinese companies have disputed allegations of their involvement in human rights abuses. None of the U.S. companies mentioned in the report immediately responded to CNBC for comment.More industry news:Wikimedia is writing new policies to fight Wikipedia harassment (The Verge)Mental health apps draw wave of new users as experts call for more oversight (CNBC)TrendingOur Habits Have Changed. These Gadgets Are Proof. (Wall Street Journal)Gucci Says Fashion Shows Should Never Be the Same (New York Times)Bookmark thisHere\u2019s How Facebook And YouTube Allowed Conspiracy Theorists To Turn Bill Gates Into The Villain Of The Coronavirus Pandemic (BuzzFeed News)DaybookDominic LeBlanc, president of the Queen\u2019s Privy Council for Canada, will host a virtual event and make an announcement related to countering election interference, along with Microsoft and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, at 10 a.m. Register here.Ranking Digital Rights will host an event \u201cGetting to the Source of the 2020 Infodemic: It\u2019s the Business Model,\u201d on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m.Before you log offNose for news? We\u2019ve got you covered:Being informed is my favorite song pic.twitter.com/Cx8Lnf4jVq\u2014 Dave Jorgenson \ud83c\udf70 (@davejorgenson) May 23, 2020\n\n It underscores just how much Elon Musk's company has shaken up the business of space. The Technology 202: SpaceX's historic launch could mark a new era in space exploration",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: SpaceX's historic launch could mark a new era in space exploration (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7040",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-technology-202/2020/05/26/the-technology-202-spacex-s-historic-launch-could-mark-a-new-era-in-space-exploration/5ecc0cac88e0fa6727004626/",
        "text": "with Tonya RileyThe space industry is preparing for a historic moment of liftoff tomorrow.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightElon Musk\u2019s firm SpaceX is set to become the first private company to launch humans into orbit, as long as the weather cooperates. The launch will be the most high-profile test to date for the company \u2014 which my colleague Christian Davenport reports was once criticized as a billionaire\u2019s long shot fantasy.\u00a0 \u201cOne industry veteran told me, \u2018You know their rockets are put together with rubber bands and sealing wax,\u2019\u201d Lori Garver, a former deputy National Aeronautics and Space Administration who pushed the agency to outsource human spaceflight to the private sector, told Christian. \u201c\u2018It\u2019s not real. It won\u2019t fly.\u2019\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut Wednesday's launch of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule with astronauts aboard underscores just how much Musk's company has shaken up the space business.pic.twitter.com/iSGrzHgENp\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2020\n\nThe company may earn a place in the history books for ushering in a new era of space travel.\u00a0AdvertisementThe mission marks a broader shift at the NASA away from the costly and time-consuming project of building government-owned spacecraft. If tomorrow\u2019s launch is a success, it could signal that more future space endeavors will be based on similar partnerships between corporations and governments.\u00a0The mission is also poised to end a drought of launches of humans to orbit from U.S. soil since the space shuttle retired almost a decade ago. The rise of greater collaboration between companies like SpaceX and the federal government could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign space programs such as Russia, which has ferried American astronauts to the space station in intervening years.\u00a0From diving to zip lining to flying, The Washington Post goes behind the scenes with American astronauts training for a new era in human space flight. (Eric Maierson/The Washington Post)The flight marks an apparent victory for SpaceX in its long-running rivalry with Boeing.\u00a0Countries used to vie against one another in space achievements, as the United States and Soviet Union famously did in the effort to land a man on the moon. But these days, companies are defining the space race.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo one thought that Musk's relative upstart would beat the legacy aerospace giant to space, Christian writes. The fact that SpaceX appears to have won the race underscores just how much space travel has changed as it becomes increasingly privatized.\u00a0SpaceX may have had an advantage in its contract with NASA because it's known for reusing materials, making it more cost efficient. The company has built a reputation for repurposing all sorts of things, even a 125,000-gallon liquid nitrogen tank that an employee found scrapped at an old abandoned Cape Canaveral launch site.\u201cWe had to be super scrappy,\u201d Musk once told The Washington Post. \u201cIf we did it the standard way, we would have run out of money. For many years, we were week to week on cash flow, within weeks of running out of money. It definitely creates a mind-set of smart spending. Be scrappy or die: Those were our two options. Buy scrap components, fix them up, make them work.\u201dBut SpaceX still has had high-profile problems along its path.\u00a0Several incidents have raised questions about whether there's enough government oversight of private space companies. The company has had two Falcon 9 rockets explode, and it struggled with a parachute system \u00a0needed to slow down the spacecraft on its return to Earth. The company said last year that its Dragon capsule was completely destroyed during a test.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince these incidents, SpaceX has uncovered what caused the problems and fixed them, NASA tells Christian.\u00a0The launch will also be a pivotal assessment of the Trump administration's space ambitions.\u00a0\u201cIf it goes well, it would be a moment of triumph for an administration that boasts it is \u2018renewing American leadership in space\u2019 and would no doubt end up in election-year campaign ads,\u201d Christian writes. \u201cIf something goes wrong, it would be a staggering blow that could send the space agency reeling and jeopardize the White House\u2019s signature mission to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.\u201dPresident Trump and Vice President Pence are planning to attend the launch, which is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. Wednesday from launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Story continues below advertisementTrump has previously shown an interest in having high-profile \u201cspace barons,\u201d such as Musk and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, and their companies play a role in rejuvenating space travel, Christian writes.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cRich guys, they love rocket ships,\u201d Trump said in 2018. \u201cThat\u2019s good. That\u2019s better than us paying for them.\u201d\u00a0The coronavirus will make this launch different from others.\u00a0Don't expect to see the usual crowds near the Kennedy Space Center, The Verge's Nicole Wetsman writes. NASA is taking some precautions to ensure the safety of the astronauts and ground crew by conducting temperature checks, and spreading people out at Mission Control. They\u2019ll disinfect rooms regularly and put up Plexiglass between different work stations.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re looking at all the things where we can practice the guidelines for social distancing, and at the same time, launch this very important mission to the International Space Station,\u201d said Steve Stich, deputy manager of NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, during a press call this month.AdvertisementProgramming note: The Washington Post will \u00a0tomorrow broadcast the SpaceX launch on our homepage and on YouTube. The Post\u2019s Libby Casey will anchor the broadcast with space industry reporter Davenport, which will include exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the astronauts and launch.\u00a0Guests will include NASA astronaut Suni Williams, and former NASA astronauts Frank Culbertson Jr. and Pam Melory, as well as Ellen Stofan, the Director of the Smithsonian\u2019s Air & Space Museum. The program will feature an exclusive online interview with Elon Musk and reporting and analysis from the Post\u2019s Joel Achenbach, Whitney Leaming and Whitney Shefte.Story continues below advertisementTake some time to read this fun article from Christian before tomorrow's launch:Meet Bob and Doug, the NASA astronauts about to make history. They\u2019re hilarious (and kinda goofy). (Christian Davenport)AdvertisementNote to readers: The Technology 202 will only publish today, Wednesday and Thursday this week. We will return to our normal schedule next week.Our top tabsA new bill would prohibit tech giants from offering political advertising tools that target users based on demographics or behavioral data.The bill, introduced by Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.), would apply to all communications or advocacy for a federal candidate and would be enforced by the Federal Election Commission. Democrats have raised concerns since the 2016 election that \u201cmicrotargeting\u201d can\u00a0make it more challenging to police disinformation in political ads. \u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cMicrotargeting political ads fractures our open Democratic debate into millions of private, unchecked silos, allowing for the spread of false promises, polarizing lies, disinformation, fake news, and voter suppression,\u201d Eshoo said in a news release.\u00a0\u201cWith spending on digital ads in the 2020 election expected to exceed $1.3 billion, Congress must step in to protect our nation\u2019s Democratic process.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThe Banning Microtargeted Political Ads Act has the support of nearly a dozen privacy and campaign finance experts and advocacy groups. Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who has expressed support for regulating microtargeting, said she was glad to see the issue receiving attention.Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) is also expected to introduced legislation today that would limit use of the technology to targeting users only on the basis of age, gender and location. Eshoo's bill has greater restrictions on how location data can be used to microtarget.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementApproximately 72 percent of Americans also favor greater regulation of the practice, according to a Knight-Gallup poll earlier this year.Clarification: This item has been updated to clarify Weintraub\u2019s comments.Officials in the Chinese tech hub of Hangzhou may make its coronavirus health-tracking technology permanent.The proposed permanent version of the tool would assign individuals a color-coded health badge based on \u201ca collation of their medical records, physical examination results, and lifestyle habits, such as smoking and alcohol consumption,\u201d the Wall Street Journal's Liza Lin reports. Officials have used QR-code-based health-rating apps to control the movement of residents to limit the spread of the virus during the pandemic.AdvertisementThe announcement sparked a backlash on Chinese social media, where residents accused the city of using the pandemic as an excuse to expand government monitoring of citizens.\u00a0It also came days after Robin Li, chief executive of the Chinese tech giant Baidu and a member of a Chinese political advisory body, introduced a new nonbinding proposal urging legislators to wind down collection of personal information used in the coronavirus response. There has been a recent push in the nation for increased privacy protections against the government, Lin reports.Ireland\u2019s top privacy watchdog has yet to crack down on Big Tech in the two years since Europe\u2019s landmark data protection law took effect, critics say.Ireland\u2019s Data Protection Commission has yet to finalize investigations into any tech companies and has struggled to keep up with thousands of complaints introduced under the General Data Protection Regulation, Mark Scott of Politico reports.\u00a0\u201cNothing has really changed,\u201d said Fred Logue, a Dublin-based privacy lawyer. \u201cWhen you deal with them, you don\u2019t get the sense that they are there to vindicate data protection rights.\u201dOf the nearly 7,000 complaints the agency received last year, about 4,500 were completed without any specific enforcement action and about 1,000 are awaiting fines or enforcement actions.European Union officials in other countries have also complained about the agency\u2019s slow pace. Several told Politico that they waited months for little or no updates for cases referred to Ireland. France and Germany moved to take action against Google without waiting on Ireland.Helen Dixon, who heads the agency of more than 140 regulators, defended its actions. \u201cWe are now on a pathway where we are going to resolve, one by one, as fast as we can with as many resources as we can, these very entrenched issues,\u201d she told Scott.The agency expects to launch fines against Facebook and Twitter by early summer \u2014 \u00a0a year after the enforcement actions were expected.Rant and raveMore thoughts on GDPR\u2019s birthday yesterday from European Parliament member Sophie in \u2019t Veld:\ud83d\udeab stop abuse of GDPR. Courts/authorities in \ud83c\uddf7\ud83c\uddf4, \ud83c\uddf5\ud83c\uddf1, \ud83c\uddf8\ud83c\uddf0, & \ud83c\udded\ud83c\uddfa invoke GDPR to attack NGOs and investigative journalism\ud83c\udf0e safe international data transfers: EU citizens\u2019 data should not be intercepted for mass surveillance once transferred to other countries, particularly \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8&\ud83c\uddec\ud83c\udde7\u2014 Sophie in 't Veld (@SophieintVeld) May 25, 2020\n\nTrump trackerPresident Trump is considering creating a White House commission to review alleged online bias against conservatives.The administration may also encourage the Federal Communications Commission and the FEC to embark on similar reviews, John D. McKinnon and Alex Leary report in the Wall Street Journal.\u00a0President Trump has long railed against an alleged anti-conservative bias from online platforms, even hosting a summit on the subject last summer. Tech companies have consistently disputed his claims. An independent audit of Facebook last year found no evidence supporting his claims.More White House news:Tensions flare as U.S. signals broader crackdown on Chinese telecoms (Politico)Trump expected to broaden foreign worker bans (Politico)The digital race to 2020A key evangelical group supporting Trump is upping its data mining efforts to give the campaign a boost amid the pandemic.United In Purpose \u201cplans to use data mining to identify millions of new voters and target them with cheap ads on Facebook,\u201d Lee Fang of the Intercept reports.\u00a0The group, founded by a former technology entrepreneur, is powered by Pioneer Solutions, a data-mining operation used to find and activate religious voters. A leak of the group\u2019s database showed that it has demographics information on nearly 200 million Americans. It also shares connections with CatholicVote, a group that has used cellphone data to target Catholic voters in support of the Republican Party.Inside the industryAmazon, Microsoft and Google are providing web services to Chinese surveillance firms blacklisted by the United States for human rights abuses.The services include email, website hosting and log-in authentication, according researchers at privacy website Top10VPN, CNBC reports.The new report alleges that Amazon and Google are providing Web services for Dahua Technology and Hikvision, two video surveillance companies blacklisted for aiding in the abuses of Uighurs, China\u2019s Muslim minority population. Artificial intelligence start-ups SenseTime and Megvii were also blacklisted for human rights abuses but appear to still be using Microsoft technology.All four Chinese companies have disputed allegations of their involvement in human rights abuses. None of the U.S. companies mentioned in the report immediately responded to CNBC for comment.More industry news:Wikimedia is writing new policies to fight Wikipedia harassment (The Verge)Mental health apps draw wave of new users as experts call for more oversight (CNBC)TrendingOur Habits Have Changed. These Gadgets Are Proof. (Wall Street Journal)Gucci Says Fashion Shows Should Never Be the Same (New York Times)Bookmark thisHere\u2019s How Facebook And YouTube Allowed Conspiracy Theorists To Turn Bill Gates Into The Villain Of The Coronavirus Pandemic (BuzzFeed News)DaybookDominic LeBlanc, president of the Queen\u2019s Privy Council for Canada, will host a virtual event and make an announcement related to countering election interference, along with Microsoft and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, at 10 a.m. Register here.Ranking Digital Rights will host an event \u201cGetting to the Source of the 2020 Infodemic: It\u2019s the Business Model,\u201d on Wednesday at 11:30 a.m.Before you log offNose for news? We\u2019ve got you covered:Being informed is my favorite song pic.twitter.com/Cx8Lnf4jVq\u2014 Dave Jorgenson \ud83c\udf70 (@davejorgenson) May 23, 2020\n\n It underscores just how much Elon Musk's company has shaken up the business of space. The Technology 202: SpaceX's historic launch could mark a new era in space exploration",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Cybersecurity 202: This Florida city just paid hackers a huge ransom. Is that better or worse for taxpayers? (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7041",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2019/06/21/the-cybersecurity-202-this-florida-city-just-paid-hackers-a-huge-ransom-is-that-better-or-worse-for-taxpayers/5d0bbc9f1ad2e552a21d5024/",
        "text": "with Tonya RileyTHE KEYWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA small Florida city paid an extraordinary $600,000 in ransom this week to hackers who had locked up the city\u2019s computer systems -- highlighting an increasingly common dilemma for city leaders across the country.\u00a0Cities have been hit with an\u00a0increase in ransomware attacks in recent years since tight budgets have left them with outdated and hackable computer systems. But paying the ransoms to reverse the attack means putting money -- taxpayer money -- into the\u00a0hands of nefarious hacking groups who probably will use it to target other victims. \u00a0 If they refuse to pay up, though, they could be saddled with an even bigger bill to get their cities back online.\u00a0And they may have to deal with lasting consequences -- like in Baltimore, where city leaders decided against paying the ransom and still hasn\u2019t restored all its city services six weeks after a devastating attack.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhen you pay the ransom, you\u2019re making the bad guys better,\u201d says\u00a0Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. \u201cBut, from a strictly business perspective, sometimes you have to pay the ransom because the cost of not paying it is going to be much, much more.\"But cities, of course, are not just businesses - they have citizens who don't want\u00a0their tax dollars\u00a0wasted and leaders who want to get re-elected.\u00a0Given there are taxpayer costs\u00a0to either choice, this is both a practical and moral question for city leaders.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s their constituents\u2019 money and it\u2019s taxpayer money, so that\u2019s very different,\u201d Liska tells me.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementNot to mention, there could also be career and electoral consequences for city officials who don't stand up to bad guys.\u00a0\u201cNo politician wants to go on record as having paid a ransom to a cybercriminal,\u201d Liska said.AdvertisementAlready on Thursday, the payout had registered in Washington, where Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said he\u2019s working on ways the federal government can help.Don\u2019t understand why these attacks aren\u2019t getting more attention & generating more concernTaxpayers of Riviera Beach, #Florida just paid $600k in ransom to cyber-criminalsI am working on ideas to help local govts protect against this https://t.co/aIfwT3xkwK #Sayfie\u2014 Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 20, 2019\n\nA study from\u00a0Recorded Future found that cities are actually slightly less likely to pay off ransomware hackers than other victims. Just 17 percent of the cities struck with ransomware in the study paid compared with about 45 percent of ransomware victims overall.That figure could change, though, as city officials\u00a0draw lessons from major ransomware attacks in cities that didn't pay. In\u00a0Baltimore,\u00a0officials\u00a0expect to pay about $18 million after refusing to pay a ransom demand of just about $70,000, and a 2018 attack in Atlanta\u00a0cost the city about $2.6 million to recover from.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIn the case of Riviera Beach, Fla., the city suffered through three weeks during which city workers couldn\u2019t access their email accounts and\u00a0emergency dispatchers couldn\u2019t log calls into computers, my colleague Rachel Siegel reported. Ultimately, the city council voted unanimously to pay the hackers 65 bitcoin, which amounts to about $592,000.AdvertisementPrice tags like that are bound to make city officials think twice about whether they can refuse a ransom\u00a0demand, Joe Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me.\u201cYou\u2019d think the incentive would be to pay as little as possible,\u201d he said.Ransom payments and ransomware recovery costs are sometimes covered by insurance, but insurance rarely covers all the costs and a big payout will raise cities' insurance\u00a0rates.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementAnother lesson cities are hopefully taking from the Baltimore, Atlanta and Riviera Beach examples, however, is that they should be better protecting their computer systems against hackers before the ransomware strikes, Tad McGalliard, director of research and policy at the International City/County Management Association, told me.That includes installing basic protections such as guarding against phishing emails and requiring extra verification before people can access computer systems, he said. It also includes making sure that all the city\u2019s vital records are backed up someplace offline where hackers can\u2019t seize them and lock them up.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re likely to see a continuing increase in ransomware attacks on local governments, but I hope we also see local governments taking note of this and doing everything in their power to bulk up their cyber defenses,\u201d McGalliard said.Story continues below advertisement \n \n \n You are reading The Cybersecurity 202, our must-read newsletter on cybersecurity policy news. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n PINGED, PATCHED, PWNED\nPINGED: Iranian hackers are scaling up attacks on U.S. government agencies while conflict mounts between the nations over Iran\u2019s nuclear program, Andy Greenberg at Wired reports. None of the attacks appear to have been successful yet, but the attackers\u2019 targets include the Energy Department and its federal research facilities, according to researchers at the cybersecurity firm Dragos.\u201cWe\u2019re probably headed for a place very, very soon, where the days of aggressive Iranian activity are likely to return. If we\u2019re trading blows with them in the Gulf, I don\u2019t see them holding back,\u201d John Hultquist, director of threat intelligence at FireEye, told Wired.Both FireEye and Dragos attributed the attack to APT33, a hacker group linked to the Iranian government. \u00a0PATCHED: A bipartisan pair of House lawmakers wants a government watchdog to measure how well the United States is working with other countries to combat cybercrime.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite a bevy of efforts to counter cybercrime across the State and Justice departments, the government has not \u201cclearly articulated an inter-agency strategy with firm objectives as to what these efforts are aiming to achieve,\u201d Reps. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) and Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the top Democrat and Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee,\u00a0wrote the Government Accountability Office.\u00a0The report should focus on the State Department's cyber office, which has gone through jarring reorganizations during the past two years, as well as the U.S. government\u2019s work with\u00a0international organizations including the United Nations and Interpol.\u00a0PWNED: NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was hacked in April of 2018, allowing attackers to access a communications network used by multiple NASA spacecrafts, according to a\u00a0government watchdog report out this week. The attack was serious enough to spook the Johnson Space Center into ceasing to share some data communications with the lab, fearing a breach could lead to more attacks on other technology infrastructure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJPL did not follow a number of NASA cybersecurity protocols,\u00a0according to the report\u00a0from NASA's inspector general.\u00a0Even after security vulnerabilities were identified they \u201cwere not resolved for extended periods of time \u2014 sometimes longer than 180 days,\" per the report.\u00a0In addition to fixing the security weaknesses, investigators are ordering the NASA lab to introduce a new threat identification process to prevent more attacks.If hackers got into JPL they could have a field day, information security analyst Mike Thompson tells Davey Winder at Forbes. \u201c[NASA's] depth of research and development includes patents covering cutting edge science that nation states would literally kill for,\u201d he said. The lab was also the target of a China-based attack in 2012.\n PUBLIC KEY\n\u2014 Cybersecurity news from the public sector:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNadler: Hope Hicks broke with Trump on accepting foreign dirt (Politico)The Drone Iran Shot Down Was a $220M Surveillance Monster (Wired)Prosecutors rebut Roger Stone: U.S. caught Russian election hackers on its own (Politico)Group sues for records on US election hacking vulnerability (Tom Davies\u2009|\u2009AP)Senate wants to boost oversight of Pentagon\u2019s cyber activities (Fifth Domain)\n PRIVATE KEY\n\u2014 Cybersecurity news from the private sector:Email scammers use corporate consultant sites to find victims (Axios)California experienced more data breaches than any other state in the past decade: report (The Hill)Meds prescriptions for 78,000 patients left in a database with no password | ZDNet (ZDNet)Dell quietly patched a SupportAssist vulnerability that affected millions of users - CyberScoop (CyberScoop)\n THE NEW WILD WEST\n\u2014 Cybersecurity news from abroad:Canadian lender Desjardins says personal data of 2.9 million... (Reuters)\n ZERO DAYBOOK\n\u2014 Coming Soon:The House Administration Committee\u00a0will mark up HR. 2722, the Securing America's Federal Elections Act, on Friday\u00a0at 9 a.m.\u00a0The House\u00a0Homeland Security Committee\u00a0will host a hearing on Artificial Intelligence and Counterterrorism on June 25 at 10 a.m.The House Homeland Security Committee\u00a0will bring in representatives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter to discuss their company's efforts to address terror content and misinformation on June 26 at 10 a.m.\u00a0 Taxpayers will pay to get city systems back online either way. But there's a moral question. The Cybersecurity 202: This Florida city just paid hackers a huge ransom. Is that better or worse for taxpayers?",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: Protests, coronavirus and election present disinformation challenge for social media companies (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7042",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-technology-202/2020/06/01/the-technology-202-protests-coronavirus-and-election-present-disinformation-challenge-for-social-media-companies/5ed3f3a9602ff12947e801f0/",
        "text": "with Tonya RileySilicon Valley giants are about to be tested in unprecedented ways.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWidespread racial unrest, a pandemic and a presidential election could bring a flood of disinformation on social media platforms in the coming months. It's a perfect storm: All this is happening as the companies struggle to develop and enforce content moderation policies \u2013 with more limited staff and operations due to the coronavirus pandemic.\u00a0 Policymakers and disinformation experts are already raising concerns that online activism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd could be hijacked by bad actors.\u00a0Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) who temporarily chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned on Saturday that foreign adversaries were already ramping up activity related to the protests.\u00a0Tonight seeing VERY heavy social media activity on #protests & counter reactions from social media accounts linked to at least 3 foreign adversaries.They didn\u2019t create these divisions. But they are actively stoking & promoting violence & confrontation from multiple angles.\u2014 Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 31, 2020\n\nHe did not point to specific activity or identify the actors, and his office didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementExperts are calling on social media users to exercise caution and check their sources before they hit retweet or share. From Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington:\u00a0Please vet your sources. Don\u2019t retweet someone you don\u2019t know without figuring out who they are why they\u2019re there. Don\u2019t add new follows without doing a deep dive of those accounts. We are really vulnerable to information operations during these tumultuous times.\u2014 Kate Starbird (@katestarbird) May 30, 2020\n\nBad actors, both foreign and domestic, have in recent years exploited major news events and polarizing situations to sow divisions.\u00a0Race has been a core component of this: A report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018 found that Russia engaged in sustained attempts to target black voters and stoke existing racial tensions ahead of the last presidential election. Domestic provocateurs have increasingly taken a page out of their playbook. President Trump's tweets blaming the far-left \u201cantifa\u201d movement for violent protests \u2013 and Minnesota officials' suggestions white supremacists were responsible for mayhem in their state \u2013 seem primed for disinformation as actors seek to exacerbate the divisions.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe companies insist they're prepared. Twitter said it would take action on any coordinated attempts to disrupt conversation around the protests, and that it is staffed appropriately for the work. YouTube said it has yet to see any foreign adversaries on its platform targeting the protests, but pledged to continue to be vigilant. Facebook said it is constantly monitoring for coordinated inauthentic behavior, and it reports when it takes action against accounts monthly.\u00a0But journalists and researchers are identifying falsehoods going viral on the platforms amid the mayhem and confusion of the protests. Jane Lytvynenko and Craig Silverman have been tracking hoaxes: They debunked a post that had more than 15,000 retweets claiming that a McDonald's restaurant was burning down in the Minnesota protests. The photo was actually in Pennsylvania in 2016. They also fact-checked a tweet claiming there was an explosion inside a police precinct in Minneapolis; the explosion depicted was actually from a Chinese city in 2015. \u00a0Companies are already dealing with major backlash over their content moderation practices.\u00a0Facebook's own employees are taking the extremely rare step of speaking out publicly against the company's decision not to take action against a post from Trump last week that said \u201cwhen the looting starts, the shooting starts.\" The post gained traction on both the Facebook and Instagram services, while Twitter shielded it from public view and prevented it from being liked, retweeted or replied to.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNotably, the employees are voicing their criticism of Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's decision on Twitter:I work at Facebook and I am not proud of how we\u2019re showing up. The majority of coworkers I\u2019ve spoken to feel the same way. We are making our voice heard.\u2014 Jason Toff (@jasontoff) June 1, 2020\n\nThe criticism is emerging after Axios reported that Facebook chief executive spoke on the phone with Trump about the controversial post.\u00a0Facebook is also facing backlash from the outside. Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor and the author of \u201cZucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,\u201d compared the company to an old chemical company spewing toxins into the environment during a CNN interview. \u00a0The companies are not presenting a united front as they spar over how to handle Trump's controversial posts.\u00a0Tech companies have at times worked with one another to address problematic content on their platforms -- such as in instances of terrorist content and the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections.\u00a0Not so in this case. Twitter has been cracking down on President Trump\u2019s posts in new ways as Facebook chooses not to moderate them.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementZuckerberg defended Facebook's decision not to label President Trump\u2019s comments about mail-in voting during an interview on Fox News. He said he didn\u2019t believe digital platforms should act as the \u201carbiter of truth of everything that people say online.\u201d But Twitter's chief Jack Dorsey clapped back at Zuckerberg in a series of tweets, saying his platform is not an arbiter of truth either but would continue would to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections.\u00a0Trump's efforts to seek political revenge from Silicon Valley just puts another plate in the air. Trump signed an executive order taking aim at a key legal shield that protects tech companies from lawsuits for the photos, videos and posts people share on their services. The president signed the order that would direct federal regulators to review the scope of the provision, known as Section 230, after Twitter's decision to label two of his tweets.\u00a0The challenge for the companies only gets tougher as coronavirus limits human content moderation teams.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFewer moderators are working due to the privacy and mental-health concerns about people doing this sensitive work from home. YouTube tells me that is continuing to operate with a reduced human content moderator force.\u00a0Facebook says its moderators are getting back to work, after it warned it would be making content moderation mistakes during the pandemic because of an increased reliance on artificial intelligence.\u00a0\u201cOver the last several months the majority of the reviewers employed by our partners have been successfully transitioned to work from home,\u201d Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said.\u00a0Twitter\u2019s content moderator staffing has returned to normal levels, according to the company.\u00a0Our top tabsSeveral major tech companies are making commitments to donate to racial justice organizations in the wake of Floyd's death.\u00a0Zuckerberg pledged to donate $10 million to groups working for racial justice. He also noted that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic effort he runs with wife Priscilla Chan, has been investing $40 million a year in such organizations.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApple chief executive Tim Cook wrote in a memo to employees the company would be donating to groups including the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative, Bloomberg News reported. The company would also offer two-for-one matching for employee donations in June.YouTube pledged $1 million on Friday:We stand in solidarity against racism and violence. When members of our community hurt, we all hurt. We\u2019re pledging $1M in support of efforts to address social injustice.\u2014 YouTube (@YouTube) May 30, 2020\n\nBox chief executive Aaron Levie committed to donating $500,000 more to organizations working on racial justice. Levie also donated $5,000 to the Minnesota Freedom Fund.We have profound racial injustice in our society. George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Enough is enough. @joelle_emerson and I are committing $500,000 to support organizations that are doing important work in this space. Let us know if you have any orgs to recommend.\u2014 Aaron Levie (@levie) May 29, 2020\n\nSnap chief executive Evan Spiegel went further than most executives and called for a reparations commission and radical tax changes to address social injustices in America against black people, The Information reports. He shared this call in a letter to employees, where he said he was \u201cheartbroken and enraged\u201d by racism in America.Story continues below advertisementMore than three dozen tech companies or tech chief executives have tweeted or shared a statement in support of black employees and communities, journalist Sherrell Dorsey found.\u00a0Amazon, which has reduced deliveries in some cities amid the protests, was one of the companies that released a statement in solidarity with the black community yesterday. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementBut civil liberties groups who have called out Amazon for its extensive work with the police and more recent mistreatment of black warehouse workers were quick to bring up the company's past behavior:The American Civil Liberties Union:Cool tweet. Will you commit to stop selling face recognition surveillance technology that supercharges police abuse? https://t.co/DfnAhyw2PW\u2014 ACLU (@ACLU) May 31, 2020\n\nFight for the Future:Amazon shows its solidarity by:-Firing Black employees who speak out about unsafe warehouse conditions-Forming more than 1,000 Ring doorbell surveillance partnerships with police departments -Selling racially biased facial recognition software to cops https://t.co/xaTIExSCXp\u2014 Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) May 31, 2020\n\nThe semiconductor industry is lobbying for billions in funding to bring manufacturing to the United States amid coronavirus-related tensions with China.\u00a0\u00a0A new crop of proposals from an industry trade group includes billions in subsidies for a new chip factory, aid for states looking to attract industry investment and increased research funding, the Wall Street Journal reports. \u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe push could find support from both the White House and bipartisan members of Congress who have seen strengthening the U.S. semiconductor industry at home as a key component to reducing reliance on Chinese hardware.\u00a0Advertisement\u00a0\"The Trump administration is committed to ensuring the United States has a secure, vibrant, and internationally competitive high-tech ecosystem, supported by domestic chip production,\u201d said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Last month the White House moved to make it harder for Chinese companies to use U.S. chip-making technology.But there's disagreement within the industry over how potential subsidies should work, the Journal reports. And some smaller players are worried that some of the proposals being discussed would cause U.S. states to compete with each other instead of China.SpaceX founder Elon Musk has his eyes on Mars after the company's first successful human launch mission.The company launched two NASA astronauts into space on Saturday and successfully docked them at the International Space Station yesterday, making it the first private company to do so in the history of space flight. It's a success that few thought would be possible, Christian Davenport reports.The mission is just one step toward Musk's ambitious goal of sending humans to Mars. First, the company will focus on flying another mission with astronauts to the International Space Station late this summer. The company also recently won a contract from NASA to build a spacecraft that could land humans on the moonOn May 30, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule separated from the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s second stage booster and entered a stable low-Earth orbit. (The Washington Post)\u201cI didn\u2019t feel nervous. I felt like it was going to work,\u201d Musk said on Saturday.\u00a0It's the kind of determination the company will need to actually make it to Mars, Christian notes. On Friday, a prototype test of the rocket SpaceX is building to send to Mars blew up in a test.Rant and raveBuzzFeed reporter Caroline Haskins breaks down the surveillance technology powering police in Minneapolis:There's a couple scoops here: The Minneapolis PD, the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office, and the Minnesota Fusion Center have all used Clearview AI's facial recognition toolhttps://t.co/fOrjOsTEaA\u2014 Caroline Haskins (@carolineha_) May 29, 2020\n\n\u201cThe idea that you have groups of people that are raising legitimate concerns and now that could be subject to face recognition or surveillance... amplifies the overall concerns with law enforcement having this technology to begin with.\u201d- @neemagulianihttps://t.co/fOrjOsTEaA\u2014 Caroline Haskins (@carolineha_) May 29, 2020\n\nWorkforce reportMicrosoft is laying off dozens of journalists employed by its news arm.\u00a0The layoffs come as part of a push to rely more on artificial intelligence to pick news content displayed on MSN.com and in Microsoft news apps, the Verge reports.Walmart Employees Are Out to Show Its Anti-Shoplifting AI Doesn't Work (Wired)TrendingYouTuber Jake Paul defends being among crowd of looters as critics call him \u2018epitome of white male privilege\u2019 (Travis Andrews)How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance (Wired)DaybookThe House Homeland Security Committee will host a panel \u201cElection Security and Integrity During a Pandemic\u201d at 3 p.m. today.George Washington University\u2019s Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics will host a virtual forum on covid-19 and social media disinformation on June 16 at 10 a.m.Before you log offMore views from SpaceX's historic mission:NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley floated from their SpaceX Dragon capsule into the International Space Station on May 31. (NASATV) It's a perfect storm.  The Technology 202: Protests, coronavirus and election present disinformation challenge for social media companies",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: YouTube alternative Rumble highlights conservatives' move to more hands-off social networks (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7043",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/16/technology-202-youtube-alternative-rumble-highlights-conservatives-move-more-hands-off-social-networks/",
        "text": "with Tonya RileyConservatives frustrated with large social media companies are urging their fans and supporters to follow them to Rumble, an alternative to YouTube.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and popular right-leaning conservative influencers want devotees to follow them on the video-streaming service, which takes a much more hands-off approach to content moderation than Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Charlie Kirk, the founder of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, said he would bring his podcast to the platform, as did Dan Bongino, a conservative commentator.\u00a0 Rumble chief executive Chris Pavlovski tells me in an interview the company has seen a surge in new users since Election Day. He anticipates the company will close out the month with about 80 million unique users, up from about 60 million in October and 40 million midsummer. The company's app has been installed about 375,000 times in the last seven days, according estimates from data firm Sensor Tower. That's a 12 percent increase over the number of installs the company was seeing in the seven days leading up to the 2020 election, the firm says.\u00a0Rumble has decided to take a far more hands-off approach to content moderation than others.\u00a0Pavlovski describes his approach to content moderation as similar to the larger tech companies \u201cten years ago.\u201d Rumble's terms of service prohibit certain forms of obscene content, such as pornography, nudity or child exploitation, as well as videos that show the assembly of weapons. But the company is taking a hands-off approach to falsehoods \u2014 even about sensitive issues such as the election or the novel coronavirus.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe don't get involved in political debates or opinions,\u201d Pavolvski said. \u201cWe're an open platform.\u201d\u00a0Other tech companies have significantly stepped up their efforts to limit the spread of misinformation, particularly about the coronavirus as health officials have warned of an \u201cinfodemic\u201d \u00a0where misinformation spreading on social media undermines attempts to contain the virus. But Rumble wouldn't take action against such false information. \u201cWe don't get involved in scientific opinions; we don't have the expertise to do that and we don't want to do that,\" Pavolvski said.\u00a0Rumble has existed since 2013 \u2013 long before the most recent controversies over Silicon Valley's handling of controversial or false content. Pavolvski emphasized that all political views are welcome on the platform.\u00a0Rumble's rise highlights a growing ecosystem of smaller social media services that are becoming a haven for Republicans fed up with Silicon Valley.Conservatives have long accused tech companies of being biased against them \u2014 often based on specious evidence. But the recent crackdown by companies on President Trump's false claims of election victory and suggestions without evidence of election fraud has exacerbated the issue.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMuch of Rumble's referral traffic is coming from Parler, a Twitter clone favored by conservatives that has seen a surge in usage since the election. Pavlovski said more traffic is coming from Parler than Facebook and Twitter. Parler has seen an even greater explosion in growth than Rumble since the election. It has been installed approximately 3.8 million times in the last seven days, according to Sensor Tower. That's about 53 times the amount it was being installed in the seven days prior to the general election.\u00a0Parler is financed in part by Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge-fund investor Robert Mercer, according to the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey. The Mercer family is known for financing conservative causes.\u00a0Researchers said the growth of these apps could contribute to a fractured ecosystem, where people see unfettered misinformation about the election process.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere are real dangers around a fractured misinformation system, especially as it relates to organizing against our electoral integrity,\u201d Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and senior researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, told the New York Times.\u00a0Yet it's unclear if many of these influencers are permanently or completely leaving major social media platforms, such as Twitter. Many calling for a shift to Parler are still posting on those services.\u00a0Researchers also have warned the alternative social media companies are rife with misinformation.\u00a0\"A lot of people are just discovering Parler for the first time, but it's been around for a while in terms of being an echo chamber for both right-wing news, but also for misinformation,\" Joan Donovan, an expert in online extremism and disinformation and research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, told CNN.\u00a0The backlash highlights the delicate position in which Big Tech finds itself.Conservatives flocking to these new services say the major companies have gone too far in labeling or otherwise limiting the spread of false election content on their services. But many liberals and misinformation experts believe they haven't gone far enough in stopping the spread of baseless election fraud claims.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYouTube, particularly, has faced backlash for not removing video pushing claims of election fraud without evidence. In some instances, they've blocked such videos from pulling in advertising money, and otherwise limited their distribution on the platform. But such videos remain viewable.\u00a0Twitter, meanwhile, has been notably aggressive recently in labeling false claims from Trump and his allies about election fraud. However some believe the company should go farther, and have called for Trump to be deactivated from the platform.\u00a0This debate is expected to be in the spotlight this week as Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg testify before Congress. The hearing was called in response to the steps the companies took to limit the spread of a New York Post article about alleged emails belonging to Hunter Biden. (The Washington Post has not substantiated the emails.) But it's likely lawmakers will delve into more recent events.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRepublicans said in a news release that the hearing would \u201cprovide a valuable opportunity to review the companies\u2019 handling of the 2020 election.\u201dOur top tabsSpaceX's most recent launch marks a huge win for private space companies.SpaceX successfully launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Nov. 15, the second time a private company has sent astronauts into space. (NASA via AP)SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday, Hamza Shaban and Christian Davenport report.SpaceX's Dragon capsule recently became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX and NASA \u00a0already have a second mission scheduled for March.\u00a0The launch marks the next step in private space companies' partnerships with NASA. It's less clear what that relationship will look like under a Biden administration. The agency probably will have a renewed focus on Earth science and combating climate change, Christian reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden congratulated SpaceX and NASA on the launch.Congratulations to NASA and SpaceX on today's launch. It\u2019s a testament to the power of science and what we can accomplish by harnessing our innovation, ingenuity, and determination. I join all Americans and the people of Japan in wishing the astronauts Godspeed on their journey.\u2014 Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 16, 2020\n\nSpaceX founder Elon Musk did not attend the event because of a recent coronavirus diagnosis.\u00a0\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re Elon Musk or Jim Bridenstine,\u201d Norm Knight, NASA\u2019s deputy manager for flight operations, told a news conference Friday evening. \u201cIf you have not met those protocols, or if any of those protocols have been compromised, then we\u2019re not going to let you near the crew.\"\u00a0Elon Musk sparked controversy for questioning the efficacy of coronavirus tests.\u00a0The Tesla founder confirmed in a tweet on Saturday he appears to have a \u201cmoderate\u201d case of the infection.Am getting wildly different results from different labs, but most likely I have a moderate case of covid. My symptoms are that of a minor cold, which is no surprise, since a coronavirus is a type of cold.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2020\n\nMusk expressed skepticism of his test results, alleging that \u201csomething extremely bogus is going on\u201d when a rapid-response test turned back positive and negative results.\u00a0Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2020\n\nBut experts warned that rapid response tests aren't the same as PCR exams, a more thorough kind of testing. Harvard immunologist Michael Mina:PCR CAN be used as comparator - but must be w extreme careRNA presence does not = live virus presenceIt\u2019s like faulting a newly installed security camera for not detecting a crime that was committed - even though some DNA is left on the floor at which it points.\u2014 Michael Mina (@michaelmina_lab) November 14, 2020\n\nGreat question! It\u2019s more complex question and depends on why the test is being used - ie: do you want to know if you are currently contagious/risky to others or if you have any remnants of RNA? The difference may sound trivial but it is massive1/\u2014 Michael Mina (@michaelmina_lab) November 15, 2020\n\nOther medical experts chided Musk as irresponsible for casting doubt on the recent rise of coronavirus cases across the country.Continuing to debunk the stereotype of rocket scientists being smart, Elon Musk now literally has symptomatic COVID (he got tested because he is sick) and had two tests detect SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA in him but he refuses to believe it.I wish I could just stop believing in COVID. https://t.co/4voroAYSwr\u2014 Ryan Marino (@RyanMarino) November 13, 2020\n\nHey @elonmusk. I have a challenge for you. If you agree to do an ICU or COVID-19 floor shift, I will find you a colleague in a Midwest hospital willing to let you shadow them. You can learn about how many covid-19 cases are \u201creal\u201d.\u2014 Dr. Nahid Bhadelia (@BhadeliaMD) November 14, 2020\n\nMusk was an ardent critic of efforts of government stay-at-home orders earlier this year, openly flouting local orders to shut down Tesla's Fremont, Calif., plant, as The Technology 202 previously reported.\u00a0The U.S. government has extended the deadline for a sale of TikTok.\u00a0ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the popular video app, now has until Nov. 27 to reach a deal that meets the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, Rachel Lerman reports. The interagency committee determined earlier this year that the company's Chinese ownership posed a national security risk, and ByteDance would have to divest if the app wanted to continue U.S. operations. Trump threatened to ban the app by executive order, but the effort has been tied up in the courts.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe U.S. government claims TikTok could be compelled to share U.S. user data with the Chinese government, a claim it denies. TikTok has been in talks to launch a new company with investments from American companies Oracle and Walmart. The deal appeared to have the president's blessing but negotiations stalled.\u00a0If ByteDance doesn't reach a new deal by the deadline, the Treasury Department could sue the company. However, it's unclear whether it would.TrendingThe forgotten tech company that tried to sway the election \u2014 in 1960 (Nitasha Tiku)Behind the Scenes of a TikTok Video: Weeks of Work for Seconds of Content (The Wall Street Journal)Rant and raveIt's a new world.I just want to remind you that not only does this exist, but that \u201cas seen on Twitter\u201d is actually a thing people say to promote a product. pic.twitter.com/iTz16aQ2oz\u2014 Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) November 15, 2020\n\nDaybookThe Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing with Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey about news and censorship at 10 a.m.The Aspen Institute's Tech Executive Leadership Initiative Launch Event will take place Wednesday 7 pm ET.Before you log offMore on TikTok from \u201c60 Minutes\u201d:TikTok\u2019s Vanessa Pappas says Pres Trump's August executive order \u2014 which called the app a \u201cthreat\u201d \u2014 \u201cwas done without due process and was not based on facts.\u201d Pappas says TikTok \u201cdisagree[s] with the characterization.\u201d https://t.co/lQsy8EWPOS pic.twitter.com/x3mVu8OzHk\u2014 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 16, 2020\n\nMore from the launch:Separation confirmed. Crew Dragon Resilience is flying free. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/0LEQlROSuY\u2014 NASA (@NASA) November 16, 2020\n\n Tech companies recent moves to limit misinformation are increasing tensions The Technology 202: YouTube alternative Rumble highlights conservatives' move to more hands-off social networks",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Two things you should know when Trump administration talks about Paris climate accord (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7044",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2017/09/18/the-energy-202-get-ready-for-more-false-alarms-on-the-paris-climate-accord/59bf131630fb045176650d01/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOver the weekend, there was big news in the world of energy and environmental policy.Until there wasn\u2019t.On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal published a story titled \u201cTrump Administration Won\u2019t Withdraw from Paris Climate Deal.\u201d Citing a European climate official speaking in Montreal, the newspaper reported that \u201cthe U.S. wouldn\u2019t pull out of the Paris Agreement, offering to re-engage in the international deal to fight climate change.\u201d \u201cThe U.S. has stated that they will not renegotiate the Paris accord,\u201d the newspaper quoted Miguel Arias Ca\u00f1ete, European commissioner for climate action and energy, as saying, \u201cbut they will try to review the terms on which they could be engaged under this agreement.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAt first glance, the implications of the statement\u00a0seemed huge. A move to reverse President Trump\u2019s decision to pull the United States out of the landmark climate accord would have been a step toward mending relations with allies abroad and toward further repudiating the Stephen K. Bannon wing of the White House after the president\u2019s apparent deal with Democrats to find some way of allowing undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.AdvertisementBut it was not to be. Shortly after the Journal published the article, the White House pushed back furiously against the story. Trump, administration officials said, stands firm in his commitment to end United States\u00a0involvement in the Paris accord as it exists today. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, quickly tweeted:Our position on the Paris agreement has not changed. @POTUS has been clear, US withdrawing unless we get pro-America terms.\u2014 Kayleigh McEnany (@PressSec) September 16, 2017\n\nAnd the following morning, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster used appearances on Sunday morning news programs to push back further.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThat's a false report,\u201d McMaster said. He added: \"The president\u00a0decided to pull out of the Paris accord because it's a bad deal for the American people and it's a bad deal for the environment.\"Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil chief executive who\u00a0advocated for staying in the agreement, criticized the Paris accord on CBS's \u201cFace the Nation \u00a0as being \u201cout of balance\u201d for the United States and China but said the administration is seeking \u201cother ways\u201d to work with other countries on tackling climate change \u201cunder the right conditions.\u201dNational security adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Trump is still withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord as of Sept. 17. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)Ca\u00f1ete, it seems, had overstated the content of his conversation with the White House. And the Wall Street Journal, it seems, had overplayed its headline.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere\u2019s the thing: It\u2019s only been three months since Trump announced in the Rose Garden that we won\u2019t always have Paris, and we\u2019ve already played this is-he-in-or-is-he-out? game at least once before.During a joint July news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump \u00a0said: \u201cSomething could happen with respect to the Paris accords. Let\u2019s see what happens.\u201dSpeaking separately later, Macron sounded optimistic. \u201cDonald Trump listened to me,\u201d he said. \u201cHe understood the reason for my position, notably the link between climate change and terrorism.\u201dThose comments set off another round of media coverage about Trump\u2019s apparent waffling on the climate agreement. But nothing, it seems, has happened yet.Story continues below advertisementTo figure out\u00a0why this is happening, you have to go back to June and understand two things about what Trump announced.AdvertisementFirst, what White House officials apparently expressed to both Ca\u00f1ete and Macron is not widely different from what Trump said when announcing the Paris withdrawal.In June, Trump told the nation\u00a0he was willing to \u201creenter either the Paris accord\u201d or an \u201centirely new transaction\u201d if changes are made to make it\u00a0\u201cfair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.Many Democrats and environmentalists doubted that Trump, who labeled climate change a \u201choax\u201d before running for office, was sincere in his desire to renegotiate. Trump officials did little to clarify what changes were necessary to make the Paris accord \"fair.\" Given Trump\u2019s lack of conviction about the scientific consensus behind climate change, that very well could be the case.Story continues below advertisementBut it\u2019s not a press-stopping news event when the Trump administration does what it says it was going to do, and talks with foreign counterparts about what it would need\u00a0to stay in the agreement.\u00a0Indeed, Trump's top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, is expected Monday to brief allies attending the United Nation General Assembly meeting on the administration's proposals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, The Journal also reports, even as the Environmental Protection Agency and others slash the previous administration's emissions-cutting measures.AdvertisementSecond, we must understand Trump\u2019s announcement in June for what it was: a piece of political theater that is legally unnecessary even if it is, as Trump seems to believe, essential for fulfilling a campaign promise to his base.\u00a0Or as Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, put it:Paris climate pact allows each country to set its own targets. No reason to leave except to score pol points w base https://t.co/v2MB1TXv71\u2014 Richard N. Haass (@RichardHaass) September 18, 2017\n\nNo party to the agreement, the United States included, can begin the process of withdrawing from the accord until three years after signing it. For the United States, that date is Nov. 5, 2019. And because the withdrawal takes one year to finalize, the earliest the United States can officially exit is Nov. 5, 2020 \u2014\u00a0two days after, perhaps not coincidentally, the presidential election.Story continues below advertisementSo that original Journal headline, \u201cTrump Administration Won\u2019t Withdraw from Paris Climate Deal,\u201d was correct in a strictly technical sense. Trump won\u2019t withdraw from the Paris climate deal. Not yet. Not until 2020.AdvertisementMeaning that for the next 38 months we\u2019ll probably be treated to false alarms like this. \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\n-- An Arctic fight is heating up: Over the weekend, The Post's Juliet Eilperin reported on a memo\u00a0indicating the Trump administration is quietly moving to allow energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)\u00a0for the first time in more than 30 years.\u00a0The proposal for seismic testing, in order to probe just how much oil exists under the refuge,\u00a0is a twist in a political fight that has raged for decades.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe politics of the move:\u00a0Congress has sole authority to determine whether oil and gas drilling can take place within the refuge\u2019s 19.6 million acres. Indeed, opening ANWR\u00a0to drilling has long been a political priority for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).\u00a0The fact that the\u00a0Interior Department is taking steps\u00a0toward allowing\u00a0drilling on ANWR\u00a0is an indication of warming relations between the Alaska senator and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke\u00a0after the former did not yield to pressure from Zinke and others in the Trump administration to vote to overhaul Obamacare.AdvertisementThe economics of it: Murkowski\u00a0and other Alaskan politicians want access to ANWR\u00a0in order to replenish\u00a0the state's oil reserves, which\u00a0funds the annual dividend\u00a0each Alaska resident receives. But with oil prices averaging around $50 per barrel, potentially too low to justify a significant investment in drilling in the refuge, it is unclear how much interest companies would actually have in exploiting the oil there \u2014 for now, at least.-- Like the president,\u00a0Eilperin\u00a0had a\u00a0second scoop over the weekend: Zinke\u00a0has recommended that President Trump modify 10 national monuments, including shrinking at least four western sites, Juliet\u00a0reported on Sunday evening:Story continues below advertisementThe memorandum, which the White House has refused to release since Zinke submitted it late last month, does not specify exact reductions for the four protected areas Zinke would have Trump narrow \u2014 Utah\u2019s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, Nevada\u2019s Gold Butte, and Oregon\u2019s Cascade-Siskiyou \u2014 or the two marine national monuments \u2014 the Pacific Remote Islands and Rose Atoll \u2014 for which he raised the same prospect. The two Utah sites encompass a total of more than 3.2\u2009million acres, part of the reason they have aroused such intense emotions since their designation.Nothing is set in stone yet. It's the White House, not the Interior Department,\u00a0that will make\u00a0final decisions\u00a0on the secretary\u2019s recommendations. White House spokesman Kelly Love told The Post\u00a0that the administration \u201cdoes not comment on leaked documents, especially internal drafts which are still under review by the President and relevant agencies.\u201d-- Junking so-called \"junk science\":\u00a0A new\u00a0list\u00a0of more than 100 potential candidates for the EPA\u2019s Science Advisory Board includes people who have openly questioned scientific consensus on climate change, The Post\u2019s Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis\u00a0report\u00a0following an earlier story from E&E News. There are 15 terms ending of the board\u2019s 47 current members, according to the report. Of those nominated for the spots, five have challenged the EPA on global warming in court, one believes carbon dioxide will \u201cconfer great benefits upon future inhabitants of the globe\u201d by driving plant growth and one boiled the climate change debate down to \u201cscare tactics and junk science\u2026 used to secure lucrative government contracts.\u201dAdvertisementThe caveats:\u00a0The\u00a0nomination process is open to anyone,\u00a0and an EPA official warned the list had not yet been pared down. The list will likely be cut at after the\u00a0public comment period wraps up later this month. But it's EPA chief\u00a0Scott Pruitt who\u00a0will make\u00a0the final decision of\u00a0who ends up on the advisory board. And the views of Pruitt, who once wrote that the \"prosecution of those who question man-made global warming\" was \"un-American,\"\u00a0are not widely out of line with some of the statements above.In Irma's wake, millions of gallons of sewage and wastewater are bubbling up across Florida (Steven Mufson and Brady Dennis)\n OIL CHECK\n--\u00a0Rising gasoline prices\u00a0lifts all boats: Fuel prices in the United States are poised to remain high\u00a0for the rest of the year following back-to-back major hurricanes hitting the country. So some\u00a0refiners with facilities in Texas\u00a0inundated by Hurricane Harvey may actually be flush with profit from the higher prices at the pump, The Wall Street Journal reports.\u00a0Valero, Phillips 66 and Marathon, which all have Gulf Coast refineries hit by Harvey, \"are expected to see sizable increases in their third-quarter earnings compared with the same period in 2016,\"\u00a0Lynn Cook and Bradley Olson report.Advertisement\n THERMOMETER\n-- Another hot Arctic debate: Harvey and Irma have prompted climate scientists to discuss\u00a0links\u00a0between climate change and extreme storms with renewed\u00a0vigor, with the\u00a0consensus being that climate change can make\u00a0hurricanes\u00a0wetter and push storm surges higher.But other theories\u00a0are far more controversial. \"And now,\" writes Chelsea Harvey in The Post, \"recent events have once again raised one of the biggest debates in climate science \u2014 that is, whether the rapidly warming Arctic may be influencing the tracks of hurricanes and other weather patterns around the world.\"The question is this: Can warming in the Arctic affect the\u00a0trajectory of hurricanes? Mainly, over the past several years scientists have\u00a0investigated\u00a0whether\u00a0a warmer Arctic affects the shape\u00a0of\u00a0the jet stream --\u00a0\u00a0a huge, wavy air current that flows from west to east around the world.\u00a0If Arctic warming is warping the jet stream \u2014 and that's still a big \"if\" among climate scientists\u00a0\u2014 then everything from the\u00a0intensity of winter cold snaps to the\u00a0path of hurricanes\u00a0could be affected further south.\u00a0Harvey writes:Some scientists have said this theory could help explain the remarkable trajectory of Hurricane Sandy, which crashed into the New Jersey coast in 2012. And now, they say that the unusual behavior of Hurricane Harvey \u2014 which stalled over Texas, dumping record amounts of rain \u2014 could be related to Arctic-driven changes in the jet stream, as well.Warm waters off West Coast has lingering effects for salmon (Associated Press)\n LOCAL ENVIRONS\n-- South Florida: The region\u00a0is no stranger to hurricanes, but scientists are worried how continued storms and the effects of climate change are impacting the prized Everglades. One of the main culprits of the degradation: salt water, which is being pushed into the Everglades by sea-level rise, writes Chelsea.\"This is bad news for the freshwater plants and animals that live there, but it\u2019s also a major threat to South Florida\u2019s drinking water supplies,\" Harvey writes. \"And some scientists believe that salt water intrusion may be contributing to the erosion and collapse of certain parts of the landscape.\"As researchers wait for it to be safe to start surveying the impact of Irma, Harvey reports\u00a0they will be looking to asses the extent of the salt water\u2019s reach, and the beginnings of a recovery that will also help understand how storms will continue to affect the wetlands region.\n DAYBOOK\nTodayThe National Rural Water Associations WaterPro Conference starts today and continues through Wednesday.Coming UpThe Southwestern Tribal Climate Change Summit begins Tuesday.The National Hydropower Association Alaska Regional Meeting is set for Tuesday.The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee holds a business meeting on various DOE, FERC and Interior nominees on Tuesday.The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee holds a hearing on land management requirements for electricity assets on Tuesday.The Senate Environment and Public Works committee holds a hearing on the nominations of Michael Dourson, Matthew Leopold, David Ross, and William Wehrum to be assistant administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Jeffery Baran to be a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Wednesday.The Institute of World Politics holds an event on energy security on Wednesday.\n EXTRA MILEAGE\nHugs and high-fives as Cassini spacecraft's mission comes to an end:NASA received the final signal from its Cassini spacecraft on Friday, ending a groundbreaking 13-year Saturn mission. (Reuters)Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Trump is 'willing to work with partners' on the Paris climate accord:Appearing on CBS's \"Face the Nation\" on Sunday, Sept. 17, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson criticized the Paris climate accord for being \"out of balance\" for America and China, but said the Trump administration would look for ways to work with other countries on tackling climate \u201cunder the right conditions.\u201d (Reuters)From luxury brand to political statement, Trump properties see shift in business:As President Trump's actions and rhetoric grow more polarizing, his business empire is losing lucrative event business. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)Trump can't stop talking about Hillary Clinton:\u00a0Donald Trump won the presidential election. Yet, since Nov. 8, Trump has tweeted about Democratic rival Hillary Clinton many times. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)At the Emmys, Stephen Colbert says to tune out of reality with TV:Stephen Colbert covered a lot of territory as host of the 2017 Emmys, from President Trump's TV viewing habits to a big swing at Bill Maher. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post) The United States isn't officially out until Nov. 5, 2019.  The Energy 202: Two things you should know when Trump administration talks about Paris climate accord",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Trump takes on wind energy, talks solar-powered border wall in Iowa speech (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7045",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2017/06/22/the-energy-202-trump-takes-on-wind-energy-talks-solar-powered-border-wall-in-iowa-speech/594aaf07e9b69b2fb981ddef/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Wednesday evening, an evidently gleeful President Trump gave a campaign-style speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in which he attacked some of his favorite objects of ire in front of diehard fans, including Democrats, the Russia investigation and the news media.\u00a0Feisty following a Republican winning the fifth special election for a House seat in a heavily contested Georgia seat, Trump reiterated promises to cut taxes, rebuild infrastructure and repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. (Read more from by colleagues John Wagner and Jenna Johnson here.) But in his meandering speech, Trump, perhaps tellingly, also focused ridicule at wind energy in Iowa, a state where the\u00a0renewable energy industry makes up a significant portion of the energy portfolio. Only days earlier, Trump\u2019s energy secretary, Rick Perry, delivered a strikingly different message to Congress, telling lawmakers the United States will pursue an \u201call-of-the-above\u201d approach to energy production.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn his Iowa speech, Trump also made unrealistic claims about putting solar panels on his long-promised border wall with Mexico and outright misleading claims about the recently exited Paris climate accord.It fits a pattern of misstatement about energy production that was also on display in Trump\u2019s Rose Garden speech announcing U.S. withdrawal from the Paris deal.\u00a0As The Energy 202 did then, let\u2019s break down the claims:CLAIM #1: \u201cI don\u2019t want to just hope the wind blows to light up your house and your factory as the birds fall to the ground,\u201d Trump said in Iowa in a remark in line with his past comments about wind energy. Before becoming president (or even running for office), Trump disparaged wind turbines as \u201cugly\u201d and claimed wind power \u201ckills all the birds.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTHE PROBLEM: There are at least two. As he did occasionally on the campaign trail, Trump is overstating the impact wind turbines have on bird populations. According to the National Audubon Society, wind turbines cause about 234,000 bird deaths a year, or less than 0.01 percent of all human-related bird deaths. Tall buildings and automobiles cause significantly more fatalities.#windpower causes <0.01% of human-related bird impacts, best for wildlife of all utility-scale energy sources https://t.co/6pEy0QTyDd. pic.twitter.com/w1Faq27qHe\u2014 Tom Kiernan (@TomCKiernan) June 22, 2017\n\nSecond, Iowa got more than a third of its net energy generation from wind production last year, a higher percentage than any other state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Only Texas produced more wind energy outright.AdvertisementWind turbines -- and the federal tax credits that support them -- are also politically popular in the state. \u201cIf he wants to do away with it,\u201d Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in August of then-GOP nominee Trump and federal wind-energy tax credits, which Grassley helped write, \u201che\u2019ll have to get a bill through Congress, and he\u2019ll do it over my dead body.\u201dStory continues below advertisementTrump may have been reminded of the many wind turbines dotting Iowa\u00a0prairies\u00a0with a stop at a community college with a\u00a0240-foot-tall wind turbine\u00a0on campus:Amazing. Trump visited Kirkwood Community College before this event. The school has a 240-foot-tall wind turbine. https://t.co/w0xE8Uk0S6 https://t.co/zPYCYU5L3I\u2014 Dan Merica (@merica) June 22, 2017\n\nLater in the speech, the president\u00a0dialed back his critique of wind energy and stayed on message with his administration\u2019s all-of-the-above energy strategy: \"We use electric. We use wind. We use solar. We use coal. We use natural gas. We will use nuclear if the right opportunity presents itself.\u201dAdvertisementCLAIM #2: \u201cThey all say it\u2019s non-binding,\u201d Trump claimed of the Paris climate accord, riling the crowd about his decision to withdraw the United States from the international agreement. \u201cLike hell it\u2019s non-binding.\"Story continues below advertisementTHE PROBLEM: The Paris accord is non-binding.Under the agreement, countries voluntarily set their own greenhouse-gas emissions targets. That\u2019s its key virtue, the reason Trump\u2019s predecessor, President Obama, was able to convince nearly every other nation on Earth to sign onto it. Previous international efforts to reduce climate-warming emissions, most notably the Kyoto Protocol, were not able to generate that level of consensus in the international community, and get 195 nations to sign on in 2015, precisely because those treaties were legally binding.CLAIM #3: \u201cWe\u2019re thinking about building the wall as a solar wall, so it creates energy, and pays for itself,\u201d Trump said in Iowa. \u201cAnd this way Mexico will have to pay much less money, and that\u2019s good.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president later asked: \u201cPretty good imagination, right? Good? My idea.\u201dTHE PROBLEM: It was not his idea.At the very least, Thomas Gleason had the idea before President Trump. Gleason, a business owner in North Las Vegas, Nev., submitted a bid back in April to the U.S.\u00a0Customs and Border Protection agency with designs for a border wall covered with solar panels, according to the Las-Vegas Journal Review.More significantly, experts who have taken the solar-paneled border wall proposal seriously say such a structure would have significant issues. Vertically fixed panels could lead to an efficiency loss of around 50 percent, according to an analysis by the Financial Times.Story continues below advertisementAnd that\u2019s just the beginning. As Sophie Yeo reported for The Post earlier this month:In addition, solar panels degrade over time. The requirements dictated by the security aspects of the border wall \u2014 bricks and spray paint, for example \u2014 could further reduce efficiency. \nThen there is the question of finding a market for any electricity that would be generated by a solar wall in a remote section of the country. \nWith less than 2 percent of the U.S. population living within 40 miles of the Mexico border, the electricity generated by the wall would mostly be useless \u2014 unless costly transmission lines were built to take the electricity to other areas of the country. \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\n-- Three heavyweight researchers who study various aspects of the science and politics of climate change -- Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;\u00a0Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT; and Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard -- wrote a searing critique of an idea espoused by New York University professor Steven Koonin and embraced by\u00a0EPA \u00a0Administrator Scott Pruitt\u00a0to conduct a\u00a0\u201cRed Team/Blue Team\u201d process for climate science.AdvertisementThey write in an op-ed in The Post:Story continues below advertisementThe basic premise of these \u201cRed Team/Blue Team\u201d requests is that climate science is broken and needs to be fixed. The implicit message in the requests is that scientists belong to tribes, and key findings of climate science \u2014 such as the existence of a large human-caused warming signal \u2014 have not undergone adequate review by all tribes. This tribalism could be addressed, Koonin believes, by emulating Red Team/Blue Team assessment strategies in \u201cintelligence assessments, spacecraft design, and major industrial operations.\u201d \nIn Koonin\u2019s view, \u201ctraditional\u201d peer-review processes are flawed and lack transparency, and international scientific assessments do not accurately represent \u201cthe vibrant and developing science.\u201d He implicitly accuses the climate science community of \u201cadvisory malpractice\u201d by ignoring major sources of uncertainty. To use present-day vernacular, both Koonin and Pruitt are essentially claiming that peer-review systems are rigged, and that climate scientists are not providing sound scientific information to policymakers. \nWe do not consider ourselves to be members of any team or tribe. Our goal is not to \u201cwin\u201d against \u201cthe other side.\u201d Our prime motivation is to understand the natural world, and to use that knowledge and understanding to inform sensible decisions on important public policy questions. Whether we succeed in doing so is what we are ultimately judged on. \nThe peer-review system criticized by Koonin and Pruitt is imperfect, but it is the best system we have, and has served science well for several centuries.\n OIL CHECK\n-- Oil will continue to flow through the Dakota Access pipeline pending a new review of its environmental impact. A federal judge said Wednesday that he will decide later this year whether to shut the pipeline down in the meantime. In court Wednesday, an attorney for the Army Corps of Engineers Matthew Marinelli said he \"cannot give you a time frame\" for how long the additional review would take. \"The corps is just starting to grapple with the issues the court identified,\" according to E&E News.\u00a0A federal judge ruled last week that the Army Corps of Engineers did not consider how oil spills may impact the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and ordered a redo of its\u00a0environmental review, the Associated Press reported.\u00a0--\u00a0With the strong rebound in the U.S. shale-il drilling and production, crude oil prices have tumbled more than 20 percent over the last 10 months, The Post's Steven Mufson reports. U.S. consumers benefit as a result: Gasoline prices are hitting lows at the start of the summer driving season, a time when increased demand typically bumps up the cost of gas. And the low oil prices will help keep a lid on inflation and, because the United States is a major oil importer, will reduce the trade deficit.This is happening despite\u00a0Saudi Arabian efforts to cut output by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and to coordinate with Moscow to trim Russian supplies. In May, OPEC and non-OPEC members led by Russia extended supply cuts through the first quarter of 2018 in a bid to drain plentiful global inventories.-- What states are releasing the most carbon into the air? Bloomberg took a look at a report from Ceres, Bank of America, Exelon Corp., and the Natural Resources Defense Council among others that analyzed power plant emissions by state.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTexas was found to have the highest level of emissions, more than twice any other state, followed by Florida.\u00a0Bloomberg's Mark Chediak reported\u00a0that \"despite a\u00a0surge in wind power\u00a0there, Texas still depends on fossil fuel-burning generators to serve a large and growing population.\"\u00a0When focused on emission rates, or carbon dioxide released per megawatt-hour of electricity, Texas drops to 20th\u00a0and Florida to 27th place. Instead, Wyoming, Kentucky and West Virginia take the top rankings for a high use of coal.\u00a0And California ranks near the bottom of the list for emission rates, using minimal amounts of coal-fired power generation, and accessing electricity from renewables, Bloomberg reported.\u00a0-- State regulators say that an ambitious\u00a0\"clean coal\"\u00a0power plant in Mississippi run by Southern Co. should switch to burning natural gas. The Wall Street Journal's Russell Gold reports: \"Mississippi regulators said they wanted the Kemper power plant, which has already taken $7.5 billion and seven years to finish, to run using natural gas henceforth, and don't want to pass on additional costs to electricity customers. The plant has primarily been running on natural gas, not coal, because the company has struggled to make the clean coal technology consistently work.\"AdvertisementLast July, that plant was subject to a thorough New York Times investigation that found the project \"has been plagued by problems that managers tried to conceal.\"\u00a0\n THERMOMETER\n-- Turning to the ocean, there's some good news and bad news from government scientists:Good news: An ongoing global coral bleaching event, one that\u2019s affected more than 70 percent of tropical reefs worldwide, may finally be coming to a close. A new forecast from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)\u00a0suggests that the high ocean temperatures that lead to bleaching are no longer widespread in the Indian Ocean, potentially signaling the end of what\u2019s been a worldwide event for the past three years,\u00a0Chelsea Harvey\u00a0reports for The Post.Bad news: An oxygen-poor \u201cdead zone\u201d in the Gulf of Mexico, which can prompt harmful algae blooms and threaten marine life, could approach the size of New Jersey this summer, federal scientists say,\u00a0making it the third-largest the Gulf has seen. A new forecast, again from NOAA, predicts that the annual dead zone will reach an area of nearly 8,200 square miles in July, more than 50 percent larger than its average size,\u00a0Chelsea Harvey\u00a0reports.Advertisement\n HURRICANE-FORCE SPIN\n-- A meteorological research group is firing off on Energy Secretary Perry for his claim\u00a0that carbon dioxide is not a main driver of climate change, suggesting he does not have a \"fundamental understanding\" of science.\u00a0In a Wednesday letter, the executive director of the American Meteorological Society wrote to Perry that \"it is critically important that that you understand that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the primary cause. This ia a conclusion based on the comprehensive assessment of scientific evidence.\"\u00a0The letter added that \"skepticism and debate are always welcome and are critically important to the advancement of science,\" but that \"skepticism that fails to account for evidence is no virtue.\"\u00a0And Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) seemed to share in AMS's message:\u00a0RT to join me in echoing the American Meteorological Society's (@ametsoc) message to @Energy's @SecretaryPerry: https://t.co/XGMkalV0CM\u2014 Mike Quigley (@RepMikeQuigley) June 21, 2017\n\nThe letter follows after the energy secretary's\u00a0remark\u00a0about\u00a0carbon dioxide on national television.When asked on CNBC if CO2 was \"primary control knob for the temperature of the Earth and for climate,\" Perry said: \"No, most likely the primary control knob is ocean waters and the environment that we live in.\"\u00a0\n LOCAL ENVIRONS\n-- Fake earthquake: A staff member at the California Institute of Technology erroneously sent out an alert for a large magnitude 6.8 earthquake\u00a0on Wednesday afternoon for a quake that happened off the Santa Barbara coast\u00a0in 1925. When the staffer tried to correct data on the location of the 92-year-old quake, a new report went out instead, the Los Angeles Times reported.There was not a 6.8 earthquake in Isla Vista. The USGS just alerted a quake that happened in 1925. Story to come.\u2014 Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 21, 2017\n\nThe alert went out at 4:51 p.m. PDT, the Los Angeles Times reported. And some on Twitter began to wonder why they hadn't felt such a large magnitude quake:\u00a0@DrLucyJones M6.8 90 miles away Im sure we'd feel it right? Is this real? pic.twitter.com/OX1MzcgFrC\u2014 Alexander Salazar (@alxxdes) June 22, 2017\n\nShortly after, U.S. Geological Survey tweeted about the mistake, saying that the notification was \"caused by a revision of the historic 1925 M6 Santa Barbara earthquake and was misinterpreted by software as a current event\":\u00a0Regarding: https://t.co/z8Ykmo6OXX pic.twitter.com/68Q0I2Ix2j\u2014 USGS (@USGS) June 22, 2017\n\n\n DAYBOOK\nTodayZinke\u00a0will also testify about the department\u2019s budget during a\u00a0hearing before\u00a0the House\u00a0Committee\u00a0on Natural Resources.Perry will testify before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the department\u2019s budget.The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard will hold a\u00a0hearing\u00a0on marine debris.The House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials will hold a\u00a0hearing\u00a0on rail infrastructure.\u00a0\n EXTRA MILEAGE\nPresident Trump talks about his proposed border wall at last night's rally in Iowa:\u00a0President Trump held a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on June 21, promising stricter immigration laws and a solar powered border wall. (The Washington Post)Watch how a bizarre experiment studies pumas reacting to political talk shows:Scientists from University of California at Santa Cruz researched mountain lions' fear of humans by exposing them to clips of political talk shows. Here's what happened. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)Stephen Colbert says Republicans want a vote, not a debate, on health care:\u00a0 There were several misleading claims at the president's rally. The Energy 202: Trump takes on wind energy, talks solar-powered border wall in Iowa speech",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Wilbur Ross declined to endorse his own department's climate science findings (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7046",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2018/05/16/the-energy-202-wilbur-ross-declined-to-endorse-his-own-department-s-climate-science-findings/5afb13a830fb04258879951b/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCommerce Secretary Wilbur Ross declined to defend the work of\u00a0climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), noting the agency's numerous reports on global warming have been reviewed less\u00a0favorably by some critics.During a talk at the National Press Club on Monday, Ross was asked by an audience member whether he accepts \u201cNOAA findings that humans are the\u00a0primary drivers of climate change.\u201d NOAA is a division of the Commerce Department.\u00a0 Ross started his response by saying,\u00a0\u201cI'm not going to get into the climate debate.\u201dThen he dove in: \u201cCommerce Department's NOAA has issued various reports that reflect the thinking of their scientists, and those reports in general have been reviewed, sometimes favorably, sometimes less so by other people in that field. So I think I'll just let that record speak for itself.\u201d A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment further.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss, before he took office, promised not to obstruct climate research under his purview. But by declining to endorse the research his department produced, Ross seemed to be pulling a page from the\u00a0playbook of other Trump officials at departments such as the Environment Protection Agency who are aggressively trying to dismantle the Obama administration's policies.\u00a0The comment swiftly\u00a0drew rebuke\u00a0from a science group\u00a0that accused the Commerce chief of being overly political.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe secretary of commerce should be unequivocally\u00a0supportive of the climate scientists, and the climate science happening under his watch,\u201d\u00a0said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy and chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe only people who are making unfavorable comments,\u201d he added, \u201care political leaders and their allies in the Republican Party.\"AdvertisementSen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, weighed in too:\u00a0\"The vast majority of science done at NOAA, NASA, and universities is crystal clear: if we want a prosperous future, we must address climate change and sea level rise now,\" he said in a statement. \"The only real debate left is how best to address it. \u00a0Are we going to rise to the challenge and protect our communities, spur the jobs of tomorrow and stop the damage? \u00a0Or will we continue to ignore the oncoming threat? \u00a0For Florida, there is too much at stake and the sooner we act, the better.\"Republicans on the House Science Committee are among the harsh critics of NOAA's climate science. That panel's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), has repeatedly accused NOAA climate scientists of falsifying data to generate \"politically correct results.\"\u00a0Smith even went so far as to subpoena\u00a0President Barack Obama's NOAA head,\u00a0Kathryn Sullivan.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementWhile Ross has not been unequivocally supportive of NOAA's climate science, he hasn't been really tried to obstruct it\u00a0either. During Donald Trump's presidency, climate scientists at NOAA and NASA, the other science agency primarily responsible for studying the warming of Earth's atmosphere,\u00a0have\u00a0carried\u00a0on\u00a0climate research with little apparent interference.AdvertisementIn December, for example, numerous NOAA scientists contributed to a\u00a0sprawling report on the links between climate change and extreme weather events, such as heat waves in Alaska and\u00a0droughts in Africa. That same month, NOAA's acting administrator,\u00a0Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, declared findings about unprecedented warming in the Arctic \u201cdirectly relate to the priorities of this administration\u201d when it comes to national and economic security.By contrast,\u00a0leaders at the EPA and the Interior Department have sought to interfere with the publication of\u00a0climate science by\u00a0forbidding\u00a0federal researchers\u00a0from presenting on climate change at a conference and directing\u00a0language\u00a0about climate change be removed from a news release on\u00a0a sea-level-rise study.Story continues below advertisementYet there have been times when the Commerce Department's\u00a0record at facilitating scientific discussion has\u00a0raised questions. Ross allowed the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, which works to translate\u00a0the findings of the National Climate Assessment to a broad audience, to expire in August. My colleague Juliet Eilperin\u00a0reported Tuesday\u00a0that\u00a0Trump officials\u00a0faulted climate panel for having only \"one member from industry,\" citing emails released under the\u00a0Freedom of Information Act to the\u00a0advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity.\u00a0AdvertisementStill, Ross has said he is unwilling to disrupt the dissemination of science.\u00a0\u201cIf confirmed, I intend to see that the Department provides the public with as much factual and accurate data as we have available,\u201d Ross wrote in response to\u00a0a letter\u00a0Nelson sent last year regarding climate science.\u00a0\u201cIt is public tax dollars that support the Department\u2019s scientific research, and barring some national security concern, I see no valid reason to keep peer reviewed research from the public.\u201dOne reason\u00a0for the more hands-off approach is that, unlike the EPA and the Interior Department, NOAA merely studies climate change \u2014 it does not set regulations trying to address its causes or effects.Story continues below advertisementAnother may just be\u00a0that NOAA still lacks a\u00a0permanent leader, even though Trump has been president for\u00a016 months.AdvertisementLast October, the president nominated Barry Myers, chief executive of the private forecasting firm AccuWeather, to head NOAA. But his nomination may be still gummed up after three former NOAA administrators\u00a0voiced\u00a0serious concerns about the businessman, who has tried to persuade Congress to curb free services\u00a0from\u00a0NOAA\u2019s National Weather Service that overlap with products sold by\u00a0AccuWeather. \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\n\u2014\u00a0A senior GOP senator may ask Scott Pruitt to quit, but\u00a0not for the reason you might think: Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley threatened to ask EPA chief Scott Pruitt to resign if he did not address the way large refineries acquire waivers exempting them\u00a0from the nation\u2019s biofuel regulations. On a call with reporters on Tuesday, Grassley said that if the EPA did not follow through on federal ethanol mandates that he would \u201cbe calling for Pruitt to resign because I\u2019m done playing around with this,\u201d per the Associated Press.Story continues below advertisementGrassley\u00a0expanded on his threats on Twitter:I\u2019ve supported Pruitt but if he pushes changes to RFS that permanently cut ethanol by billions of gallons he will have broken Trump promise & he should step down & let someone else do the job of implementing Trump agenda if he refuses 1/2\u2014 ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) May 15, 2018\n\n1/19/16 Trump at IA Renewable fuels summit: EPA shld make sure blend levels match statutory level set by Congress THAT\u2019S 15B GALLONS/Pruitt shld work hard to make sure he doesn\u2019t undercut the president\u2019s support of ethanol 2/2\u2014 ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) May 15, 2018\n\nMeanwhile, the EPA is planning to ask for input on whether to increase the overall transparency of the biofuel-credit market, Bloomberg News reports. The agency will seek public comment as part of a review of proposed biofuel quotes for 2018 being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget.Advertisement\u2014 The EPA\u00a0just became a little more like Toyota, as my colleague Juliet Eilperin\u00a0explains: On Monday the agency announced that it had created the \u201cOffice of Continuous Improvement,\u201d which will apply the Lean Management System to track EPA\u2019s performance in an effort to enhance efficiency. The method, pioneered at Toyota, scrutinizes each step of a manufacturing or decision-making process, in an effort to make it more efficient. \u00a0 At an event at EPA headquarters,\u00a0Pruitt lauded the change, saying that the agency is now tracking how long it takes to issue permits. It plans to cut the time to issue permits to six months, he said. \u201cWe are tracking those things now,\u201d said Pruitt, who did not take questions from supporters. \u201cThat is a dramatic improvement from where we\u2019ve been in recent years.\u201d\u00a0Serena Mcllwain, a 30-year veteran of the federal government who worked in EPA Region 9 before moving to headquarters, will head the new office. \u00a0 Henry Darwin, EPA\u2019s chief operating officer, told reporters that Pruitt\u2019s predecessor Gina McCarthy also embraced the idea of Lean Management, but applied it to a discrete number of projects in each office. Darwin said the idea is to deliver better performance for \u201ccustomers\u201d\u2014those regulated by the agency\u2014as well as \u201ctaxpayer-investors.\u201d Darwin said that it would strike \u201ca balance between our customers and our taxpayer-investors,\u201d adding that taxpayers expect \u201cclean air, clean water, clean land and safe chemicals.\u201d\u2014 Get your popcorn ready: Pruitt will testify Wednesday on the agency\u2019s budget before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. The office of the top Democrat\u00a0on that panel, Sen. Tom Udall (N.M.), made it clear in an email\u00a0this week he will question Pruitt on\u00a0\"his spending and ethics issues,\" along with the 2019 budget.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Democrats on\u00a0the main Senate oversight panel for the EPA \u2014 the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee \u2014 still have not had a crack at questioning the EPA administrator about his spending and personnel decisions. \u201cAdministrator Pruitt\u2019s testimony, viewed in the most charitable light, depicted a chief executive who has failed to exert any oversight over his staff as they have, as he testified, spent exorbitant funds and made impactful personnel decisions without his knowledge or approval,\u201d Democrats wrote in a letter\u00a0to committee chairman Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) when asking for a hearing.\u2014 Make it a dozen: The EPA\u2019s watchdog announced a new probe on Tuesday to review Pruitt\u2019s use of nonpublic email accounts, the now 12th federal investigation into the administrator. \u201cSpecifically, the inspector general said it would look into whether Pruitt is properly preserving email records as required under federal law and whether the agency is properly searching all of his accounts in response to public records requests,\u201d Politico reports. Democratic Sens. Tom Carper (Del.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.) confirmed the investigation in a letter.\u2014 Budget bullet dodged: The Interior Department and the EPA will\u00a0avoid the steep budget cuts initially proposed by\u00a0Trump based on the spending bill released by House appropriators this week. The spending bill proposes a $100 million cut for the EPA, bringing its 2018 budget of $8.05 billion to $7.95 billion for 2019, compared to Trump\u2019s proposed $6.15 billion, according to E&E News. For the Interior Department, the measure proposed a $13.1 billion budget for 2019, which is about the same as what lawmakers gave the department in 2018 \u2014 and up from the $11.7 billion recommended by Trump.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\n OIL CHECK\n\u2014 Pipeline halted: A federal appeals court ordered late Tuesday a halt of construction of Dominion Energy\u2019s Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and ruled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had inadequately set limits for the impact on threatened or endangered species, The Post\u2019s Gregory S. Schneider reports. \u201cIt\u2019s foolish and shortsighted to risk losing rare species for an unnecessary and costly pipeline boondoggle,\u201d attorney D.J. Gerken, who represents Southern Environmental Law Center who brought the case against the pipeline, said in an email. A Dominion spokeswoman said the ruling affects only parts of the route and that the pipeline \u201cwill continue to move forward with construction as scheduled.\u201d\u2014 One in four\u00a0nuclear plants at risk of early closure: More than a fourth of the nuclear power plants in the country don\u2019t make enough money to manage the cost of operations and may be at risk of early retirement, Bloomberg News reports: \u201cOf the 66 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S., 24 are either scheduled to close or probably won\u2019t make money through 2021, according Nicholas Steckler, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance.\u201d\u2014 And nearly a fourth of coal-fired plants in the country don\u2019t have control technology that helps\u00a0limit sulfur dioxide emissions, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity. That\u2019s because under a 1977 law, plants built before 1978 were able to avoid installing the necessary but costly technology. Environmental advocates argue\u00a0the 1977 loophole \"has been misused, letting dirtier plants operate longer at the expense of public health,\u201d per the report, which adds that last year 145 plants without the technology put out nearly 580,000 tons of sulfur dioxide. The report suggests\u00a0\u201cPruitt is making it easier for coal plants and other industrial facilities to avoid New Source Review altogether.\u201d\n THERMOMETER\n\u2014 Alaska\u2019s political climate change:\u00a0The deep-red state that is also a major oil and gas producer is discussing on its own plan to address the global warming, the New York Times reports, which will include potentially cutting state emissions by 2025 and taxing companies that emit carbon dioxide. \u201cWhile many conservative-leaning states have resisted aggressive climate policies, Alaska is already seeing the dramatic effects of global warming firsthand, making the issue difficult for local politicians to ignore,\u201d per the report.\u00a0\n DAYBOOK\nTodayEPA chief Scott Pruitt\u00a0testifies\u00a0before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies.The House Science, Space and Technology Committee holds a\u00a0hearing\u00a0on technology to address climate change.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources will hold a legislative\u00a0hearing.The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment holds a\u00a0hearing\u00a0on \u201cLegislation Addressing New Source Review Permitting Reform.\"The National Press Club holds an\u00a0event\u00a0with former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation holds an\u00a0event\u00a0on manufacturing at the Energy Department.Coming UpThe Senate Environment and Public Works Committee holds a legislative\u00a0hearing\u00a0on America\u2019s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 on\u00a0Thursday.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands holds a legislative\u00a0hearing\u00a0on\u00a0Thursday.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans holds an oversight\u00a0hearing\u00a0on\u00a0Thursday.The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission holds a\u00a0meetingon\u00a0Thursday.U.S. Energy Association holds an\u00a0event\u00a0on a carbon sequestration partnership on\u00a0Thursday.The Center for Strategic and International Studies holds a\u00a0conversation\u00a0with Total S.A. CEO Patrick Pouyann\u00e9 on\u00a0Thursday.\n EXTRA MILEAGE\n\u2014 NASA is sending a tiny robot helicopter to Mars: A robot spacecraft that has a meter-long rotor and a body the size of a chihuahua\u00a0will fly in the underbelly of the Mars 2020 rover when it launches in two years, The\u00a0Post's Sarah Kaplan reports.We\u2019re sending a helicopter to Mars, but it won\u2019t fly there on its own. Traveling onboard our #Mars2020 rover, this #Marscopter will test our capabilities for controlled flight in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet: https://t.co/sbrU9JtEmU. pic.twitter.com/kggE5eAlCg\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 14, 2018\n\n The Commerce Secretary did not defend the work of NOAA's climate scientists. The Energy 202: Wilbur Ross declined to endorse his own department's climate science findings",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Wilbur Ross declined to endorse his own department's climate science findings (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7047",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2018/05/16/the-energy-202-wilbur-ross-declined-to-endorse-his-own-department-s-climate-science-findings/5afb13a830fb04258879951b/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCommerce Secretary Wilbur Ross declined to defend the work of\u00a0climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), noting the agency's numerous reports on global warming have been reviewed less\u00a0favorably by some critics.During a talk at the National Press Club on Monday, Ross was asked by an audience member whether he accepts \u201cNOAA findings that humans are the\u00a0primary drivers of climate change.\u201d NOAA is a division of the Commerce Department.\u00a0 Ross started his response by saying,\u00a0\u201cI'm not going to get into the climate debate.\u201dThen he dove in: \u201cCommerce Department's NOAA has issued various reports that reflect the thinking of their scientists, and those reports in general have been reviewed, sometimes favorably, sometimes less so by other people in that field. So I think I'll just let that record speak for itself.\u201d A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment further.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss, before he took office, promised not to obstruct climate research under his purview. But by declining to endorse the research his department produced, Ross seemed to be pulling a page from the\u00a0playbook of other Trump officials at departments such as the Environment Protection Agency who are aggressively trying to dismantle the Obama administration's policies.\u00a0The comment swiftly\u00a0drew rebuke\u00a0from a science group\u00a0that accused the Commerce chief of being overly political.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe secretary of commerce should be unequivocally\u00a0supportive of the climate scientists, and the climate science happening under his watch,\u201d\u00a0said Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy and chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe only people who are making unfavorable comments,\u201d he added, \u201care political leaders and their allies in the Republican Party.\"AdvertisementSen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, weighed in too:\u00a0\"The vast majority of science done at NOAA, NASA, and universities is crystal clear: if we want a prosperous future, we must address climate change and sea level rise now,\" he said in a statement. \"The only real debate left is how best to address it. \u00a0Are we going to rise to the challenge and protect our communities, spur the jobs of tomorrow and stop the damage? \u00a0Or will we continue to ignore the oncoming threat? \u00a0For Florida, there is too much at stake and the sooner we act, the better.\"Republicans on the House Science Committee are among the harsh critics of NOAA's climate science. That panel's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), has repeatedly accused NOAA climate scientists of falsifying data to generate \"politically correct results.\"\u00a0Smith even went so far as to subpoena\u00a0President Barack Obama's NOAA head,\u00a0Kathryn Sullivan.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementWhile Ross has not been unequivocally supportive of NOAA's climate science, he hasn't been really tried to obstruct it\u00a0either. During Donald Trump's presidency, climate scientists at NOAA and NASA, the other science agency primarily responsible for studying the warming of Earth's atmosphere,\u00a0have\u00a0carried\u00a0on\u00a0climate research with little apparent interference.AdvertisementIn December, for example, numerous NOAA scientists contributed to a\u00a0sprawling report on the links between climate change and extreme weather events, such as heat waves in Alaska and\u00a0droughts in Africa. That same month, NOAA's acting administrator,\u00a0Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, declared findings about unprecedented warming in the Arctic \u201cdirectly relate to the priorities of this administration\u201d when it comes to national and economic security.By contrast,\u00a0leaders at the EPA and the Interior Department have sought to interfere with the publication of\u00a0climate science by\u00a0forbidding\u00a0federal researchers\u00a0from presenting on climate change at a conference and directing\u00a0language\u00a0about climate change be removed from a news release on\u00a0a sea-level-rise study.Story continues below advertisementYet there have been times when the Commerce Department's\u00a0record at facilitating scientific discussion has\u00a0raised questions. Ross allowed the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, which works to translate\u00a0the findings of the National Climate Assessment to a broad audience, to expire in August. My colleague Juliet Eilperin\u00a0reported Tuesday\u00a0that\u00a0Trump officials\u00a0faulted climate panel for having only \"one member from industry,\" citing emails released under the\u00a0Freedom of Information Act to the\u00a0advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity.\u00a0AdvertisementStill, Ross has said he is unwilling to disrupt the dissemination of science.\u00a0\u201cIf confirmed, I intend to see that the Department provides the public with as much factual and accurate data as we have available,\u201d Ross wrote in response to\u00a0a letter\u00a0Nelson sent last year regarding climate science.\u00a0\u201cIt is public tax dollars that support the Department\u2019s scientific research, and barring some national security concern, I see no valid reason to keep peer reviewed research from the public.\u201dOne reason\u00a0for the more hands-off approach is that, unlike the EPA and the Interior Department, NOAA merely studies climate change \u2014 it does not set regulations trying to address its causes or effects.Story continues below advertisementAnother may just be\u00a0that NOAA still lacks a\u00a0permanent leader, even though Trump has been president for\u00a016 months.AdvertisementLast October, the president nominated Barry Myers, chief executive of the private forecasting firm AccuWeather, to head NOAA. But his nomination may be still gummed up after three former NOAA administrators\u00a0voiced\u00a0serious concerns about the businessman, who has tried to persuade Congress to curb free services\u00a0from\u00a0NOAA\u2019s National Weather Service that overlap with products sold by\u00a0AccuWeather. \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\n\u2014\u00a0A senior GOP senator may ask Scott Pruitt to quit, but\u00a0not for the reason you might think: Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley threatened to ask EPA chief Scott Pruitt to resign if he did not address the way large refineries acquire waivers exempting them\u00a0from the nation\u2019s biofuel regulations. On a call with reporters on Tuesday, Grassley said that if the EPA did not follow through on federal ethanol mandates that he would \u201cbe calling for Pruitt to resign because I\u2019m done playing around with this,\u201d per the Associated Press.Story continues below advertisementGrassley\u00a0expanded on his threats on Twitter:I\u2019ve supported Pruitt but if he pushes changes to RFS that permanently cut ethanol by billions of gallons he will have broken Trump promise & he should step down & let someone else do the job of implementing Trump agenda if he refuses 1/2\u2014 ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) May 15, 2018\n\n1/19/16 Trump at IA Renewable fuels summit: EPA shld make sure blend levels match statutory level set by Congress THAT\u2019S 15B GALLONS/Pruitt shld work hard to make sure he doesn\u2019t undercut the president\u2019s support of ethanol 2/2\u2014 ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) May 15, 2018\n\nMeanwhile, the EPA is planning to ask for input on whether to increase the overall transparency of the biofuel-credit market, Bloomberg News reports. The agency will seek public comment as part of a review of proposed biofuel quotes for 2018 being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget.Advertisement\u2014 The EPA\u00a0just became a little more like Toyota, as my colleague Juliet Eilperin\u00a0explains: On Monday the agency announced that it had created the \u201cOffice of Continuous Improvement,\u201d which will apply the Lean Management System to track EPA\u2019s performance in an effort to enhance efficiency. The method, pioneered at Toyota, scrutinizes each step of a manufacturing or decision-making process, in an effort to make it more efficient. \u00a0 At an event at EPA headquarters,\u00a0Pruitt lauded the change, saying that the agency is now tracking how long it takes to issue permits. It plans to cut the time to issue permits to six months, he said. \u201cWe are tracking those things now,\u201d said Pruitt, who did not take questions from supporters. \u201cThat is a dramatic improvement from where we\u2019ve been in recent years.\u201d\u00a0Serena Mcllwain, a 30-year veteran of the federal government who worked in EPA Region 9 before moving to headquarters, will head the new office. \u00a0 Henry Darwin, EPA\u2019s chief operating officer, told reporters that Pruitt\u2019s predecessor Gina McCarthy also embraced the idea of Lean Management, but applied it to a discrete number of projects in each office. Darwin said the idea is to deliver better performance for \u201ccustomers\u201d\u2014those regulated by the agency\u2014as well as \u201ctaxpayer-investors.\u201d Darwin said that it would strike \u201ca balance between our customers and our taxpayer-investors,\u201d adding that taxpayers expect \u201cclean air, clean water, clean land and safe chemicals.\u201d\u2014 Get your popcorn ready: Pruitt will testify Wednesday on the agency\u2019s budget before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. The office of the top Democrat\u00a0on that panel, Sen. Tom Udall (N.M.), made it clear in an email\u00a0this week he will question Pruitt on\u00a0\"his spending and ethics issues,\" along with the 2019 budget.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Democrats on\u00a0the main Senate oversight panel for the EPA \u2014 the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee \u2014 still have not had a crack at questioning the EPA administrator about his spending and personnel decisions. \u201cAdministrator Pruitt\u2019s testimony, viewed in the most charitable light, depicted a chief executive who has failed to exert any oversight over his staff as they have, as he testified, spent exorbitant funds and made impactful personnel decisions without his knowledge or approval,\u201d Democrats wrote in a letter\u00a0to committee chairman Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) when asking for a hearing.\u2014 Make it a dozen: The EPA\u2019s watchdog announced a new probe on Tuesday to review Pruitt\u2019s use of nonpublic email accounts, the now 12th federal investigation into the administrator. \u201cSpecifically, the inspector general said it would look into whether Pruitt is properly preserving email records as required under federal law and whether the agency is properly searching all of his accounts in response to public records requests,\u201d Politico reports. Democratic Sens. Tom Carper (Del.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.) confirmed the investigation in a letter.\u2014 Budget bullet dodged: The Interior Department and the EPA will\u00a0avoid the steep budget cuts initially proposed by\u00a0Trump based on the spending bill released by House appropriators this week. The spending bill proposes a $100 million cut for the EPA, bringing its 2018 budget of $8.05 billion to $7.95 billion for 2019, compared to Trump\u2019s proposed $6.15 billion, according to E&E News. For the Interior Department, the measure proposed a $13.1 billion budget for 2019, which is about the same as what lawmakers gave the department in 2018 \u2014 and up from the $11.7 billion recommended by Trump.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\n OIL CHECK\n\u2014 Pipeline halted: A federal appeals court ordered late Tuesday a halt of construction of Dominion Energy\u2019s Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and ruled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had inadequately set limits for the impact on threatened or endangered species, The Post\u2019s Gregory S. Schneider reports. \u201cIt\u2019s foolish and shortsighted to risk losing rare species for an unnecessary and costly pipeline boondoggle,\u201d attorney D.J. Gerken, who represents Southern Environmental Law Center who brought the case against the pipeline, said in an email. A Dominion spokeswoman said the ruling affects only parts of the route and that the pipeline \u201cwill continue to move forward with construction as scheduled.\u201d\u2014 One in four\u00a0nuclear plants at risk of early closure: More than a fourth of the nuclear power plants in the country don\u2019t make enough money to manage the cost of operations and may be at risk of early retirement, Bloomberg News reports: \u201cOf the 66 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S., 24 are either scheduled to close or probably won\u2019t make money through 2021, according Nicholas Steckler, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance.\u201d\u2014 And nearly a fourth of coal-fired plants in the country don\u2019t have control technology that helps\u00a0limit sulfur dioxide emissions, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity. That\u2019s because under a 1977 law, plants built before 1978 were able to avoid installing the necessary but costly technology. Environmental advocates argue\u00a0the 1977 loophole \"has been misused, letting dirtier plants operate longer at the expense of public health,\u201d per the report, which adds that last year 145 plants without the technology put out nearly 580,000 tons of sulfur dioxide. The report suggests\u00a0\u201cPruitt is making it easier for coal plants and other industrial facilities to avoid New Source Review altogether.\u201d\n THERMOMETER\n\u2014 Alaska\u2019s political climate change:\u00a0The deep-red state that is also a major oil and gas producer is discussing on its own plan to address the global warming, the New York Times reports, which will include potentially cutting state emissions by 2025 and taxing companies that emit carbon dioxide. \u201cWhile many conservative-leaning states have resisted aggressive climate policies, Alaska is already seeing the dramatic effects of global warming firsthand, making the issue difficult for local politicians to ignore,\u201d per the report.\u00a0\n DAYBOOK\nTodayEPA chief Scott Pruitt\u00a0testifies\u00a0before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies.The House Science, Space and Technology Committee holds a\u00a0hearing\u00a0on technology to address climate change.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources will hold a legislative\u00a0hearing.The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment holds a\u00a0hearing\u00a0on \u201cLegislation Addressing New Source Review Permitting Reform.\"The National Press Club holds an\u00a0event\u00a0with former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation holds an\u00a0event\u00a0on manufacturing at the Energy Department.Coming UpThe Senate Environment and Public Works Committee holds a legislative\u00a0hearing\u00a0on America\u2019s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 on\u00a0Thursday.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands holds a legislative\u00a0hearing\u00a0on\u00a0Thursday.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans holds an oversight\u00a0hearing\u00a0on\u00a0Thursday.The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission holds a\u00a0meetingon\u00a0Thursday.U.S. Energy Association holds an\u00a0event\u00a0on a carbon sequestration partnership on\u00a0Thursday.The Center for Strategic and International Studies holds a\u00a0conversation\u00a0with Total S.A. CEO Patrick Pouyann\u00e9 on\u00a0Thursday.\n EXTRA MILEAGE\n\u2014 NASA is sending a tiny robot helicopter to Mars: A robot spacecraft that has a meter-long rotor and a body the size of a chihuahua\u00a0will fly in the underbelly of the Mars 2020 rover when it launches in two years, The\u00a0Post's Sarah Kaplan reports.We\u2019re sending a helicopter to Mars, but it won\u2019t fly there on its own. Traveling onboard our #Mars2020 rover, this #Marscopter will test our capabilities for controlled flight in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet: https://t.co/sbrU9JtEmU. pic.twitter.com/kggE5eAlCg\u2014 NASA (@NASA) May 14, 2018\n\n The Commerce Secretary did not defend the work of NOAA's climate scientists. The Energy 202: Wilbur Ross declined to endorse his own department's climate science findings",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Coronavirus pandemic could give Democrats easier way to repeal major Trump EPA rules (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7048",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2020/06/01/the-energy-202-coronavirus-pandemic-could-give-democrats-easier-way-to-repeal-major-trump-epa-rules/5ed3f48f602ff12947e80201/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziIf Democrats win big in the November election, they may have an unusual way of quickly repealing some important Trump administration environmental rollbacks. That's because the coronavirus pandemic has upended the schedule in Congress.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAn obscure tool may be available to Democrats who have pledged to bring back car and water pollution rules undone by Trump\u2019s Environmental Protection Agency, since the viral outbreak has drastically altered the planned congressional calendar.\u00a0 Restoring Obama-era pollution protections is one of former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden's biggest campaign promises when it comes to addressing climate change and cleaning up the environment.If Biden wins, he could avoid going through a long bureaucratic process of repealing Trump-era rules.\u00a0The Congressional Review Act gives Congress and the president the power to repeal any federal regulation within 60 legislative days of it being implemented. All it takes is a simple majority in both chambers to cancel a regulation using the act \u2014 no Senate filibuster allowed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the exact amount of days Congress is in session is critical to this timeline. At the start of the year, the House was planning to work for 25 weeks in 2020. But House leaders scrapped plans to meet through much of the spring as the virus spread. And an updated House legislative calendar released Friday includes only one voting day in June and none in August.\u00a0The initial schedule meant that only regulations finished after mid-May would be subject to being quickly canceled by a new Democratic Congress in early 2021. But the reduction in congressional work days mean that the Trump administration's deadline to finish regulations that could avoid the Congressional Review Act shifted back to about April 17, according to calculations done by Dan Goldbeck of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.Suddenly, several major EPA rules completed in late April are more vulnerable to being nixed.They include one rule weakening the government\u2019s mileage standards for cars and pickup trucks, completed on April 30, and another scaling back which waterways fall under federal protection, finalized on April 21.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd any additional rule completed between now and the end of Trump\u2019s term, such as a forthcoming plan for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, may also be revoked under the Congressional Review Act.Using the law negates the need for a president to go through the regular regulation-writing process, which take many months to complete and may be challenged in court.Of course, making use of the law depends on not only Biden beating Trump in November \u2013 but also on Democrats retaking the Senate and retaining the House. Or, at least, on Democrats getting enough votes for a simple majority in both chambers to reverse Trump's orders.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe exact date by which Trump rules need to be completed to avoid being revoked under the act can only be known once the full congressional calendar is set. \u201cYou can only really know when the window opens in retrospect,\u201d said Bridget C.E. Dooling, a research professor at the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University.AdvertisementHouse Majority Leader Steny Hoyer\u2019s office said it will release the House schedule for the fall at a later date.\u00a0Still, some left-leaning organizations say they will prepare which regulations they will push Democrats to use the Congressional Review Act to target.\u201cThose discussions will begin in earnest this summer,\u201d said Kate Kelly, a public lands expert at the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank.The Congressional Review Act played a prominent role in the first few months of the Trump administration.In 2017, the GOP-led Congress dusted off the tool to nullify an Interior Department regulation protecting streams from coal-industry pollution and a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rule limiting the shooting of wolves from planes and other hunting practices in Alaska.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn total, Republicans used the law to roll back more than a dozen Obama administration rules on a broad range of issues that year.Liberals usually haven\u2019t been the biggest fans of the 1996 law, a brainchild of former House speaker Newt Gingrich.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s not clear why there should be this shortcut,\u201d said Amit Narang, regulatory expert at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. \u201cIt\u2019s a badly drafted, poorly worded law.\u201dBut since Trump has taken office, Democrats in Congress have embraced it.\u00a0Last year, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) used the law to force a vote to repeal a Trump administration regulation on coal-fired power plants that environmentalists say is too weak. The measure was defeated in a 53-to-41 vote along party lines.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf everything fell into place,\u201d Goldbeck said, \u201cthere would be significant interest\u201d among Democrats in using it again in 2021.Trump\u2019s EPA spent the first few months of 2020 hurrying to put the final touches on its regulations.As my colleagues Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis reported, Trump appointees at the EPA ignored warnings from career employees that its new mileage standards for cars were seriously flawed as the agency rushed to get the rule out the door.AdvertisementEPA chief Andrew Wheeler made significant changes to the rule after he signed it on March 30, before it was officially published in the Federal Register nearly a month later.\u201cThe agency is focused on completing its work in a thorough and timely manner,\u201d agency spokeswoman Enesta Jones said in a statement.Power playsAn internal watchdog said a senior Interior Department official violated ethics rules, again.Douglas W. Domenech, an assistant interior secretary, violated federal ethics rules by using his role to try to get a member of his family a role at the Environmental Protection Agency, the New York Times reports, citing an internal watchdog report.\u00a0It\u2019s the second time in six months the Interior Department\u2019s inspector general found that Domenech violated ethics laws.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe latest watchdog report notes that \u201cat the time of these events Domenech was not new to Government service,\u201d having worked in the federal bureaucracy for more than a decade.The Environmental Protection Agency said it won\u2019t formally object to the proposed Pebble Mine.\u00a0It\u2019s the latest development in the years-long battle between a Canadian-owned mining firm against commercial fishing operators, native Alaskans and conservationists who warn the mining could damage the world\u2019s largest sockeye salmon fishery.\u201cChristopher Hladick, the EPA\u2019s regional administrator for Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, wrote to the Alaska district engineer, Col. David Hibner, that the agency still has serious concerns about the plan, including that dredging for the open-pit mine \u2018may well contribute to the permanent loss of 2,292 acres of wetlands and \u2026 105.4 miles of streams,\u2019 \u201d Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis report. \u201cBut Hladick said the EPA would not elevate the matter to the leadership of the two agencies, which could delay necessary approvals for the project to advance. The EPA \u2018appreciates the Corps\u2019 recent commitment to continue this coordination into the future,\u2019 he wrote.\u201dThe Treasury Department and IRS extended relief for those developing renewable energy projects.\u00a0The agencies announced late last week they would provide \u201csafe harbor\u201d for taxpayers who develop electricity projects from sources including wind, biomass and hydropower, and use technologies such as solar panels and fuel cells.\u00a0The Energy 202 reported last month that the Treasury Department told senators it was considering ways to allow solar, wind and other alternative energy developers to continue to qualify for tax incentives even if construction is paused amid the pandemic.\u00a0Coronavirus latestThe world's three biggest producers of greenhouse gases are reopening, and they have very different paths forward.\u00a0In Europe, a more than $800 billion recovery package includes a plan to move away from fossil fuels. China has allowed for the building of new coal plants but has \u201cdeclined to set specific economic growth targets for this year, a move that came as a relief to environmentalists because it reduces the pressure to turn up the country\u2019s industrial machine quickly,\u201d the New York Times reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the United Sates, meanwhile, the Trump administration has \u201cused the coronavirus pandemic to relax an array of environmental rules. Embattled Republicans and their allies have been testing the argument that climate friendly policies would kill jobs and crush an already ailing economy, though there is no evidence to support those claims. And, while the early United States aid packages have resisted calls to boost renewable energy, and fossil fuel companies have dipped into the relief money, the next rounds of government stimulus are still in play.\u201dA team of scientists is trying to develop a coronavirus test for marine mammals.\u00a0It\u2019s not yet known whether dolphins and whales get covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, but they do get coronaviruses, neuroimmunologist Tracy Romano told E&E News.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHer team at Mystic Aquarium in Stonington, Conn., wants to test the mammals to determine whether their immune systems can fight pathogens. It's research that could benefit humans, as well.\u00a0\u201cAllison Tuttle, a veterinary scientist at Mystic Aquarium, said there has been evidence in the past of coronaviruses affecting marine mammals, including instances of pneumonia in seals in California, bacterial infections in seals along the Atlantic Coast and hepatitis in beluga whales,\u201d E&E reports.\u00a0Oil checkShell evacuates workers from offshore platform.Six out of nine workers who were evacuated from a Shell-operated platform in the Gulf of Mexico tested positive for the coronavirus, the Times-Picayune reports.\u201cThere have been about 100 known cases of COVID-19 among offshore workers in the U.S. since the pandemic began, according to the National Ocean Industries Association. That's out of 25,000 workers who rotate offshore,\u201d per the report.\u00a0AdvertisementThe company implemented mandatory coronavirus testing for all personnel traveling to offshore platforms earlier this month.\u00a0\u201cPrior to the mandatory testing, Shell workers were required to fill out a screening questionnaire before they were flown to offshore platforms by helicopter,\u201d according to the newspaper. \u201cThe company also extended the length of stay on production platforms from 14 days to 21 days. Those who work on drilling rigs will now stay offshore for 28 days, instead of 21 days.\u201d\u00a0Russia has no objection to an early meeting date for OPEC and its allies.The meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners was planned for June 9-10 but is being moved forward to June 4, Reuters reports, \u201cto facilitate oil sales for countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait.\u201d\u201cThe lack of Russian opposition to an earlier date could indicate that it is moving closer to an agreement with OPEC\u2019s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, on how to extend oil production cuts for the rest of the year,\u201d Reuters adds.Climate solutionsThe Empire State Building\u2019s owners set out to cut carbon emissions and save money at the same time. The plan succeeded.\u00a0The building\u2019s major retrofit cut down on its carbon footprint by about 40 percent and dropped its annual electric bill by $4.4 million, Sarah Kaplan reports. The project is \u201cwell on its way to paying for itself more than twice over.\"How can you apply the same strategies to make your home as energy efficient? The key steps are to improve insulation; increase indoor efficiency including by unplugging outlets and devices when they\u2019re not in use; and downsizing water heaters or air-conditioning units.\u00a0Extra mileageAstronauts soared into space from U.S. soil again.\u00a0A SpaceX spacecraft carrying a pair of NASA astronauts successfully docked with the International Space Station on Sunday, Christian Davenport and Jacob Bogage report.On May 30, SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule separated from the Falcon 9 rocket\u2019s second stage booster and entered a stable low-Earth orbit. (The Washington Post) The reduced congressional schedule means Biden, if he wins, could avoid a lengthy bureaucratic process.  The Energy 202: Coronavirus pandemic could give Democrats easier way to repeal major Trump EPA rules",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Pressure is on Exxon and Chevron after BP makes major climate pledge (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7049",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2020/02/14/the-energy-202-pressure-is-on-exxon-and-chevron-after-bp-makes-major-climate-pledge/5e45831b88e0fa4a22a4bc96/",
        "text": "with Meryl KornfieldTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe biggest British petroleum producer just set one of the most ambitious climate goals of any major multinational oil-and-gas company.\u00a0Now the pressure is on its American counterparts to do the same.\u00a0On Wednesday, BP said\u00a0it will try to slash its own greenhouse gas emissions from the production and use of its gasoline, jet fuel and other products. Its goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century follows similar pledges from other European oil majors, including Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol. Though BP was short on details about how it will hit that ambitious mark, its announcement is a coup for investors and activists putting pressure on corporations to confront a dire and looming environmental crisis.Story continues below advertisementNow their attention is turning to ExxonMobil and Chevron, the two largest oil companies in the United States.Advertisement\u201cThey were laggards before and they're now further behind than they were a month or two ago,\u201d said Andrew Logan, a senior director at Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit organization pressing companies to address climate change.So far, the two big U.S. petroleum producers have only committed to trimming emissions from drilling, refining and transporting their products \u2014 not from their use in automobiles or at power plants.\u00a0But those operational emissions account for only a fraction of any oil companies' overall contribution to rising temperatures worldwide.Story continues below advertisementChevron spokesman Sean Comey said that cutting emissions from the burning of its products \"requires a combination of well-designed policies and carbon pricing mechanisms\" from governments around the world, as noted in a statement on carbon pricing that Chevron and other major oil companies signed at the request of Pope Francis. Exxon did not reply to a request for comment.AdvertisementThat's what makes BP's commitment noteworthy: It includes end-use emissions in its climate targets. The company plans to still produce oil and gas by 2050, but that would require major breakthroughs in technologies that capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere. Those carbon-capture technologies are still in development and are not yet financially feasible.\u00a0BP's pledge, Logan said, \u201cexpands the scope of what's seen as possible for what an oil company can do.\u201d\u00a0The announcement is one of the first moves made by Bernard Looney,\u00a0BP\u2019s new chief executive, who started the job earlier this month.Story continues below advertisementThe news comes as big Wall Street banks are under greater pressure than ever to withhold financing from fossil-fuel projects.\u00a0In a note to investors, one of those financial institutions, HSBC, called BP's pledge \u201cpotentially a game-changer for the company and the industry.\u201dAdvertisementExxonMobil and Chevron have made their fair share of pledges when it comes to climate change. In a break with President Trump, a staunch ally of the U.S. oil sector, both companies support placing a tax on carbon emissions and\u00a0agreed with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which seeks to\u00a0limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris accord.Exxon, too, says it supports having some sort of federal regulation on the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, from\u00a0oil and gas facilities. The Trump administration has rolled back methane rules put in place under President Barack Obama.Story continues below advertisementBut Exxon has otherwise resisted overtures from activist investors to tackle climate change more aggressively. Last year, Exxon persuaded the\u00a0Securities and Exchange Commission to block a proposal urging the company to\u00a0adopt and disclose greenhouse gas targets aligned with the Paris accord.AdvertisementSo why have European oil companies been more ambitious in their climate pledges than major U.S. firms?\u00a0Kathy Mulvey, an\u00a0accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, chalked up that transatlantic gap to oil companies facing greater pressure from European lawmakers to act on climate change.\u201cAt the national level in Europe,\u201d she said, \u201cthere's more happening.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisementPOWER PLAYS\u2014 EPA releases new environmental enforcement data: The agency yesterday revealed new numbers on how vigorously it enforced environmental law through the 12-month period ending September 2019.What went up: The agency opened more criminal cases and collected more fines in fiscal 2019 than in the previous year.What went down: The new data also showed the agency conducted fewer inspections and initiated fewer civil cases.An outsider's perspective: The Environmental Integrity Project gave the numbers a mixed review: \u201cWhile we see slight improvement, the numbers suggest a continuing downward trend in environmental enforcement,\u201d said Eric Schaeffer, the organization\u2019s executive director and former director of civil enforcement at the EPA. \u201cThis is especially troubling, because we don\u2019t think states are in a position to take up the slack, even if they wanted to, because they have reported declining environmental budgets and workforces.\u201dNOAA: In the 141 years of global climate records, January 2020 was the hottest on record. Additionally, #Earth's four hottest Januaries have all occurred since 2016. More: https://t.co/bO5Pi4T3qF pic.twitter.com/7NpdLKRWjo\u2014 NOAA Satellites - Public Affairs (@NOAASatellitePA) February 13, 2020\n\n\u2014 The hottest January on record: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced January was the hottest on record. The month clocked in at about two degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average of 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit.AdvertisementLast record: January 2016 previously held the record for the warmest January.Up next: The report warns that 2020 is very likely to rank among the five warmest years on record.\u2014 A fresh lobbying effort for a carbon tax: The Climate Leadership Council, a group of prominent politicians, economists and corporate executives, is renewing its push for Congress to implement a new tax on carbon emissions fees, and pay back to Americans the revenue raised to the tune of approximately $2,000 a year for a family of four, The Post's Steven Mufson reports.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementWho supports it: A number of prominent economists and former presidential officials, including former Federal Reserve chair Janet L. Yellen, former treasury secretary James A. Baker and former secretary of state George P. Shultz.But will it be a bill? The group began promoting the idea back in 2017, but has found little traction in Congress so far. The group briefed the Senate Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and other lawmakers Tuesday and Wednesday. Sens. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who head the caucus, have not endorsed any particular plan and said Wednesday, \u201cWe look forward to continuing these conversations with a wide range of stakeholders and perspectives from across the country.\u201d\u2014 Trump taps two new number twos: The president announced Thursday he will nominate two men for high-level environmental and energy positions in his administration. Both posts require confirmation by the Senate.The first is Mark Menezes, the under secretary of energy, who is being put up for the job of deputy secretary at the Energy Department. He would replace Dan Brouillette, who became secretary after the departure of Rick Perry.\u00a0The second is Douglas Benevento, who will be nominated as the EPA's deputy administrator. Benevento previously led the agency's Denver-based regional office.\u2014 A plan to make a mural of Greta Thunberg is sparking outrage in North Dakota: A photographer who planned to make a seven-foot mural outside a bakery in downtown Bismarck has been inundated with attacks and threats calling the teenage activist a \u201cpropaganda machine from the Left,\u201d The Post\u2019s Teo Armus reports.\u00a0AdvertisementTo quote: \u201cThis isn\u2019t a swastika that I\u2019m installing, or something with nudity. This is a young girl standing in a field,\u201d said photographer Shane Balkowitsch, who has decided to abandon his plans for the mural.\u00a0Why the strong reaction? \u201cIn a place like Bismarck, where much of the economy is tied to North Dakota\u2019s lucrative oil fields, it seems the mere sight of her face has taken on a divisive tenor too,\u201d Armus writes.Trump wants to slash Chesapeake Bay funding. Environmentalists hope Congress steps in again. (Marissa Lang)Tesla faces a new SEC investigation (The New York Times)Story continues below advertisementRajendra Pachauri, Indian climate change authority who led IPCC, dies at 79 (Harrison Smith)DAYBOOKComing up:The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs will hold a hearing entitled \u201cSurface Transportation Reauthorization: Public Transportation Stakeholders\u2019 Perspectives\" on Tuesday, Feb. 25.EXTRA MILEAGE\u2014 A cosmic capture: NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft snapped a picture of Arrokoth, a celestial fossil the size of a city, and what looked like two lumpy, reddish snowballs, last year. On Thursday, scientists said that the object provides compelling evidence for how planets, including Earth, formed, The Post\u2019s Joel Achenbach reports.\u00a0 No comment from the oil majors yet. The Energy 202: Pressure is on Exxon and Chevron after BP makes major climate pledge",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7050",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/17/daily-202-biden-is-not-confident-he-can-change-putin-thats-good/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty (some assembly required) arrived in New York Harbor.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden declared Wednesday he was \u201cnot confident\u201d of changing Vladimir Putin\u2019s ways and admitted his cautious remarks about pulling U.S.-Russia relations up from their lowest point in years amounted to putting on \u201can optimistic front.\u201d \u201cThis is not about trust. This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest,\u201d he told reporters.Biden\u2019s skeptical remarks, made in a solo news conference after their first summit and later on the tarmac near Air Force One, broke with decades of presidents predicting they would charm, cajole or cow their counterparts in Moscow.Those overly sunny diagnoses have blinded American leaders to just who they\u2019re dealing with in the Kremlin, with unhappy consequences for U.S. interests to say nothing of people in Moscow\u2019s \u201cnear abroad\u201d like Ukraine and Georgia.President Barack Obama had gushed to Putin in July 2009 about the \u201cextraordinary work\u201d he\u2019d done in office and their \u201cexcellent opportunity\u201d to reset relations, eight years after George W. Bush set the modern standard for regrettable Putin assessments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue,\" Bush said. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue. \u2026 And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship.\u201dWhile Obama (sanctions on Iran, help with troop withdrawals from Afghanistan) and Bush (post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism cooperation) each got some help from Putin, both came to regret their sunny early rhetoric.Biden may have had both in mind as he relayed what messages he had delivered to the Russian leader and sketched out his sense of the wily former KGB officer after their summit in Geneva delivered no breakthroughs in major disputes.Story continues below advertisementThe president described the behind-the-scenes dialogue as businesslike, nothing \u201cstrident,\u201d no \u201chyperbolic atmosphere.\u201d\u201cThis is about practical, straightforward, no-nonsense decisions that we have to make or not make.\u201dBiden said \u201cwe'll find out within the next six months to a year\u201d whether the summit paid dividends on new arms control efforts, the release of Americans held in Russian prisons, and getting Moscow to halt cyberattacks on U.S. targets.AdvertisementHe also said \u201cthere were no threats \u2026 just simple assertions,\u201d and denied he had raised the prospects of a military response to Russian hacks or ransomware operations, but also warned of retaliation for future digital intrusions.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability.\u00a0And he knows it,\u201d Biden told reporters. \u201cAnd if, in fact, they violate these basic norms, we will respond with cyber.\u00a0He knows.\u201dLater, he described himself conjuring up a hypothetical scenario for the Russian officials, who might justifiably have seen it as \u2026 let\u2019s call it \u201cthreat-adjacent.\u201d\u201cWhat happens if that ransomware outfit were sitting in Florida or Maine and took action, as I said, on their single lifeline to their economy \u2014 oil?\u201d he said he asked.\u00a0\u201cThat would be devastating.\u201dAsked in the news conference why he seemed confident of changing Russia\u2019s behavior, considering Putin had denied any involvement in cyberattacks, Biden snapped:\u00a0\u201cI'm not confident he'll change his behavior.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater, in more reflective remarks on the tarmac, Biden told reporters \u201cthere\u2019s a value to being realistic and put on an optimistic front, an optimistic face\u201d because with pessimism \u201cyou\u2019d guarantee nothing happens.\u201dThe president described Putin as leading a diminished power troubled by a rising China and fretting about losing even more influence, citing an old mocking description of the Soviet Union as \u201cUpper Volta with nuclear weapons.\u201d\u201cYou have to figure out what the other guy's self-interest is,\u201d he said, and the Russians \u201cwant desperately to remain a major power \u2026 desperately want to be relevant.\u201dAnd this is where Biden\u2019s assessment of Russia, and Putin, took a glossier hue.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI found it matters to almost every world leader \u2014 no matter where they're from \u2014 how they're perceived, their standing in the world.\u00a0It matters to them.\u00a0It matters to them in terms of their support at home as well,\u201d Biden said.AdvertisementOne consequence of Russia tolerating \u2014 or carrying out \u2014 cyberattacks is \u201chis credibility worldwide shrinks.\u201d\u201cHow would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?\u00a0What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in?\u00a0 It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power,\u201d Biden said.Story continues below advertisementLeaving aside that the United States during the Cold War interfered in elections all over the world and supported bloody coups around the globe, there\u2019s no evidence Putin puts much stock in that sort of reputational damage.He directed Russia\u2019s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and subsequent annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea. U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of meddling in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and of carrying out the massive SolarWinds hack \u2014 as well as tolerating a wave of recent criminal ransomware assaults from Russian soil.AdvertisementIt may be the sorts of things Biden says cost Russia prestige, Putin sees as making Moscow \u201crelevant\u201d and a power with which the West must reckon.What\u2019s happening nowThe Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to Obamacare, saying Republican-led states do not have the legal standing to try to upend the law.\u00a0\u201cJustice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the court\u2019s 7 to 2 decision that preserves the law that provides millions of Americans with health coverage. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M Gorsuch dissented,\u201d Robert Barnes reports. \u201cThe key issue this time was whether a 2017 decision by Congress to remove the penalty for not buying health insurance \u2014 the so-called individual mandate \u2014 meant that the law was unconstitutional and should be wiped from the books. That would end popular provisions such as keeping young adults on their parents\u2019 insurance policies, and ensuring coverage for those with preexisting medical conditions. But the court said the states did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe court also said Philadelphia was wrong to end a contract to provide foster care services to a religious organization that refuses to work with same-sex couples, Barnes reports. \u201cAll nine justices agreed with the outcome, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a majority of six in saying Philadelphia violated the Constitution\u2019s guarantee of free exercise of religion in ending a contract with Catholic Social Services to screen potential foster care parents.\u201dBiden will sign a bill today making Juneteenth a federal holiday, which means federal employees will get Friday off, John Wagner reports. Yesterday, the House approved legislation making the day that marks the end of slavery in Texas a federal holiday 415-to-14. The Senate passed the bill suddenly and unanimously on Tuesday.\u00a0Jobless claims surged back about 400,000, snapping six weeks of declines.\u00a0\u201cAmericans filed 412,000 initial unemployment claims, the Labor Department reported,\u201d Aaron Gregg reports. \u201cThe new numbers mark an increase of 37,000 from the 375,000 reported the week before, pushing the tally back above the 400,000 threshold amid labor shortages and a moderate slowdown in vaccination rates. The job market still has a long way to go before reaching its pre-pandemic vitality, when weekly jobless claims stood at 256,000.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA \u201cmega-heatwave\u201d is peaking in the West, breaking records and intensifying droughts and fires.\u00a0\u201cOne of the most extreme heat waves ever observed in the Western U.S. this early in the season is near its climax. The punishing blast of heat, which began Sunday, has set hundreds of records while simultaneously worsening a historically severe drought, intensifying fires and degrading air quality. About 40 million Americans have endured triple-digit heat and more than 50 million have been under excessive-heat warnings this week,\u201d Jason Samenow and Diana Leonard report. \u201cWhile it\u2019s just mid-June and the hottest time of the year is historically still weeks away, temperatures have matched their highest ever observed levels in parts of Utah, Wyoming and Montana. Salt Lake City, Casper, Wyo., and Billings, Mont., all made history Tuesday, soaring to 107, 101, and 108 degrees, respectively.\u201d\u00a0To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cRansomware claims are roiling an entire segment of the insurance industry,\u201d\u00a0by Rachel Lerman and Gerrit de Vynck: \u201cRansomware attacks ... have increased in frequency and severity over the past two years. According to blockchain research firm Chainalysis, ransom payments from companies increased 341 percent to a total of $412 million during 2020. ... That\u2019s pushing insurance carriers to reevaluate how much coverage they can afford to offer and how much they have to charge clients to do so. Underwriters are demanding to see detailed proof of clients\u2019 cybersecurity measures in ways they never have before. For example, not using multifactor authentication, which requires a user to verify themselves in multiple ways, might result in a rejection.\u201d\u201cHong Kong police raid newspaper offices, arrest editors, executives under security law,\u201d\u00a0by Shibani Mahtani: \u201cPolice on Thursday raided the Apple Daily newspaper, known for its support for Hong Kong's democracy movement, and arrested five executives, including three top editors, on suspicion of violating the city's national security law. Authorities also froze the tabloid's assets. The early-morning operation highlighted the authorities\u2019 resolve to shut down any residual space for dissent, including silencing media critical of the Chinese government. Press freedom is supposed to be guaranteed under the Basic Law, Hong Kong\u2019s mini-constitution.\u201d\u201cChina launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up,\u201d\u00a0by Michael Miller: \u201cThe morning rocket launch in northwest China sent a spacecraft carrying three astronauts into Earth\u2019s orbit, where it docked with the still-under-construction space station later in the day. The liftoff, which Chinese officials called a \u2018complete success,\u2019 marks the first time in five years that China has sent a crewed mission to space. It comes amid a flurry of Chinese achievements in space that have spurred the United States to speed up some of its own plans.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cWhen the Pentagon visits Silicon Valley,\u201d\u00a0by the American Prospect\u2019s Jonathan Guyer: \u201cFew people in the Biden administration have as much personal experience with the dangers of surveillance technology as Colin Kahl. ... Kahl is the number three official in the Pentagon and oversees big-picture planning. As tech companies strengthen their relationships with Washington, leaders like Kahl have the chance to prioritize civil liberties and put in place guardrails to ensure that the kind of spying that happened to him doesn\u2019t happen to others. But instead, Kahl appears to be brokering deals with the very tech companies that facilitate this activity.\u201d\u201cThe son of Rudy is working out his father issues on the road to Albany,\u201d\u00a0by New York Magazine\u2019s Olivia Nuzzi: \u201cAndrew Giuliani was holding a silver spoon. He just was. There\u2019s no getting around it. ... Giuliani, who is 35 years old, spent his early childhood on the Upper East Side, attended prep school in a tony Jersey suburb and college in North Carolina. ... He cites as qualifying work experience his stint as a professional golfer; the four years he spent in the Trump administration, where he served in the Office of Public Liaison and as a special assistant to the president; and the seven weeks he was professionally a pundit on Newsmax. ... But Trump is not happy with what Giuliani has been telling the press about their relationship.\u201dThe Biden agendaThe Biden administration will announce a $3.2 billion investment for a pill to fight viruses.\u00a0\u201cBorrowing from the model used to create drugs that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable disease, the Biden administration plans to announce Thursday a $3.2 billion plan to stock the medicine cabinet with drugs that would be ready to treat future viral threats \u2014 whether a hemorrhagic fever, influenza or another coronavirus,\u201d Carolyn Johnson reports.\u201cThe $3.2 billion represents a multiyear investment to jump-start basic science research to develop new drugs and test whether existing drugs show promise. The funding will support clinical research and manufacturing. The focus initially is on this coronavirus but will expand into collaborative drug discovery programs focused on viruses that have the potential to spark a pandemic. At the same time, the government has started placing preorders for antiviral drugs for this pandemic \u2014 before they have been shown to work. It\u2019s a strategy similar to the one used to encourage vaccine development.\u201dTreasury Secretary Janet Yellen is carefully navigating an inflation test.\u00a0\u201cThe stakes of Yellen\u2019s public economic posture only intensified Wednesday, when she testified to Congress that inflation is likely to remain transitory hours before the Federal Reserve dramatically increased its inflation projections for the year,\u201d Jeff Stein reports. \u201cBoth Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell made clear that the economic outlook remains fluid because of uncertainty caused by the pandemic and that they see inflation as likely to subside next year. But the next few months of the economic recovery will be crucial to the legacy of the treasury secretary, who is widely viewed by administration officials as Biden\u2019s leading macroeconomic voice.\u201d\u201cShe has proved to be a far more deft dealmaker than many critics expected, given her lack of experience in high-stakes corporate or congressional negotiations. Yellen and her international tax lead, Itai Grinberg, recently deployed a \u2018good cop, bad cop\u2019 strategy with the six other international finance ministers in the Group of Seven. ... In navigating heavily male congressional and business arenas, some observers say, she makes a point of praising men\u2019s observations where consistent with her positions \u2014 careful to avoid alienating allies, while simultaneously standing firmly behind her own carefully considered arguments.\u201dSen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va) outlined demands on voting legislation, creating an opening for a potential Democratic compromise.\u00a0\u201cA three-page memo circulated by Manchin\u2019s office this week indicates the West Virginia centrist\u2019s willingness to support key provisions of the For the People Act, the marquee Democratic bill that the House passed in March \u2014 including provisions mandating at least two weeks of early voting and measures meant to eliminate partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts,\u201d Mike DeBonis reports. \u201cBut Manchin\u2019s memo also sketches out several provisions that have historically been opposed by most Democrats, including backing an ID requirement for voters and the ability of local election officials to purge voter rolls using other government records.\u201d\u201cProminent voting rights activist Stacey Abrams said Thursday that she could \u2018absolutely\u2019 support compromises floated by [Manchin],\u201d Wagner and DeBonis report. \u201cAbrams said it is a common misperception, fueled by Republicans, that Democrats outright oppose voter ID. Rather, she said, she and others object to restrictive provisions that are \u2018designed to keep people out of the process.\u2019 \u2018No one has ever objected to having to prove who you are to vote,\u2019 she said. \u2018What [Manchin] is proposing makes sense.\u2019\u201dAn infrastructure update: The bipartisan pitch is gaining steam.\u00a0\u201cThe initial framework, written by the likes of Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and seven other senators, falls far short of the sweeping infrastructure proposal that Biden has pitched, yet aims to try to satisfy the president\u2019s hunger for bipartisanship,\u201d Seung Min Kim and Tony Romm report. \u201cBut their efforts received a big boost Wednesday, when 11 more senators joined the original 10 and said they supported the still-unreleased blueprint of a deal. The group now includes 11 Republicans, nine Democrats and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats. All told, they account for a fifth of the entire chamber.\u201d\u201cEven as they rallied support for their plan, however, Senate Democrats huddled privately Wednesday to devise a path forward for trillions of dollars in additional spending in infrastructure improvements and other economic initiatives that may not make it into a bipartisan deal.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cI'm not a no. I'm not a yes,\u201d Manchin told reporters.\u00a0Biden apologized for snapping at a CNN reporter over her questions on Putin.\u00a0\u201cAs Biden turned to walk off the stage following a news conference in Geneva after his summit with Putin, a reporter shouted out one final question. \u2018Why are you so confident [Putin] will change his behavior, Mr. President?\u2019 CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins asked,\u201d Katie Shepherd reports. \u201cThe president, who had already turned away from the clutch of journalists, threw up his hands and started back toward the reporters while wagging his finger. \u2018What the hell? \u2026 When did I say I was confident?\u2019 Biden said as he headed back toward Collins, before launching into a tense back-and-forth with the reporter while defending his approach with the Russian president.\u201d\u201cAs his exchange with Collins went viral, some critics jumped to defend the reporter, while others argued that her question unfairly reflected the president\u2019s earlier statements. Soon after the exchange, Biden issued a mea culpa for his tone. \u2018I owe my last questioner an apology,\u2019 the president told reporters on the tarmac as he readied to board Air Force One on Wednesday afternoon. \u2018I shouldn\u2019t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.\u2019\u201dThe Biden administration canceled Trump\u2019s limits on asylum eligibility.\u00a0\u201cAttorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday rolled back a pair of Trump administration legal decisions that had narrowed access to the U.S. asylum system, where caseloads have ballooned in recent years from soaring numbers of claims,\u201d Nick Miroff reports. \u201cGarland\u2019s decisions vacated Trump-era rulings that had limited asylum eligibility for immigrants fleeing gangs or gender-based attacks, which his administration characterized as \u2018private\u2019 forms of violence that did not constitute membership in a persecuted social group.\u201dHot on the left\u201cRep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), who voted against awarding police officers the Congressional Gold Medal for their bravery in protecting the U.S. Capitol against violent, pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6, refused to shake hands with D.C. police officer Michael Fanone on Wednesday,\u201d\u00a0Colby Itkowitz and Peter Hermann report. \u201cFanone, joined by Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, returned to the Capitol on Wednesday, the day after 21 House Republicans voted against the Gold Medal resolution, in an effort to meet them and tell his story. He said he recognized Clyde at an elevator and that he and Dunn hopped in with the congressman.\u201d Fanone said he extended his hand for a greeting after introducing himself. \u201cI\u2019m a D.C. police officer and I fought to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6,\u201d Fanone told him. \u201cHis response was nothing,\u201d Fanone said. \u201cHe turned away from me, pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementFanone told Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about the encounter:\u00a0#BREAKING Officer Fanone just ran into @Rep_Clyde at Capitol (he\u2019s the \u201cJan 6 was a typical tour\u201d guy). Fanone introduced himself as \u201csomeone who fought to defend the Capitol\u201d and put out his hand. Clyde refused to shake it. To honor Trump, @housegop will dishonor the police.\u2014 Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 16, 2021\n\nI just called Officer Fanone and confirmed this story. This is really incredible. Also relayed an interaction he had with another members Chief of Staff that was really incredibly bad and disrespectful. https://t.co/fERYjK6dWg\u2014 Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) June 16, 2021\n\nHot on the rightIn a secret recording, a little-known GOP congressional candidate in one of Florida\u2019s most competitive districts threatened to send a Russian and Ukrainian \"hit squad\u201d against a fellow Republican opponent to make her \u201cdisappear.\u201d\u00a0\u201cDuring a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor,\u201d Politico\u2019s Marc Caputo reports. \u201c \u2018I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America,\u2019 Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week. ... \u2018That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f---ing speed bump in the road. She's a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0Toxic cargo from container ship fire, visualizedMore than two weeks after a blazing 610-foot container ship lit up the coastline of Sri Lanka, most of the X-Press Pearl, a four-month-old Singapore-flagged container ship, has settled on the bottom of the sea. Close to 1,500 containers were aboard the ship. According to X-Press Feeders, 81 of them contained dangerous goods, including 25 metric tons of nitric acid. The Post obtained a copy of the manifest for the ship, which details all of the cargo on board.Today in WashingtonBiden\u00a0will sign a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday today at 3:30 p.m. He and Vice President Harris\u00a0will give remarks.\u00a0In closingSeth Meyers reviewed Biden's foreign trip: Lots of sizing up, copious disagreements, no breakthroughs at summit. The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good.",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7051",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/17/daily-202-biden-is-not-confident-he-can-change-putin-thats-good/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty (some assembly required) arrived in New York Harbor.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden declared Wednesday he was \u201cnot confident\u201d of changing Vladimir Putin\u2019s ways and admitted his cautious remarks about pulling U.S.-Russia relations up from their lowest point in years amounted to putting on \u201can optimistic front.\u201d \u201cThis is not about trust. This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest,\u201d he told reporters.Biden\u2019s skeptical remarks, made in a solo news conference after their first summit and later on the tarmac near Air Force One, broke with decades of presidents predicting they would charm, cajole or cow their counterparts in Moscow.Those overly sunny diagnoses have blinded American leaders to just who they\u2019re dealing with in the Kremlin, with unhappy consequences for U.S. interests to say nothing of people in Moscow\u2019s \u201cnear abroad\u201d like Ukraine and Georgia.President Barack Obama had gushed to Putin in July 2009 about the \u201cextraordinary work\u201d he\u2019d done in office and their \u201cexcellent opportunity\u201d to reset relations, eight years after George W. Bush set the modern standard for regrettable Putin assessments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue,\" Bush said. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue. \u2026 And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship.\u201dWhile Obama (sanctions on Iran, help with troop withdrawals from Afghanistan) and Bush (post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism cooperation) each got some help from Putin, both came to regret their sunny early rhetoric.Biden may have had both in mind as he relayed what messages he had delivered to the Russian leader and sketched out his sense of the wily former KGB officer after their summit in Geneva delivered no breakthroughs in major disputes.Story continues below advertisementThe president described the behind-the-scenes dialogue as businesslike, nothing \u201cstrident,\u201d no \u201chyperbolic atmosphere.\u201d\u201cThis is about practical, straightforward, no-nonsense decisions that we have to make or not make.\u201dBiden said \u201cwe'll find out within the next six months to a year\u201d whether the summit paid dividends on new arms control efforts, the release of Americans held in Russian prisons, and getting Moscow to halt cyberattacks on U.S. targets.AdvertisementHe also said \u201cthere were no threats \u2026 just simple assertions,\u201d and denied he had raised the prospects of a military response to Russian hacks or ransomware operations, but also warned of retaliation for future digital intrusions.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability.\u00a0And he knows it,\u201d Biden told reporters. \u201cAnd if, in fact, they violate these basic norms, we will respond with cyber.\u00a0He knows.\u201dLater, he described himself conjuring up a hypothetical scenario for the Russian officials, who might justifiably have seen it as \u2026 let\u2019s call it \u201cthreat-adjacent.\u201d\u201cWhat happens if that ransomware outfit were sitting in Florida or Maine and took action, as I said, on their single lifeline to their economy \u2014 oil?\u201d he said he asked.\u00a0\u201cThat would be devastating.\u201dAsked in the news conference why he seemed confident of changing Russia\u2019s behavior, considering Putin had denied any involvement in cyberattacks, Biden snapped:\u00a0\u201cI'm not confident he'll change his behavior.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater, in more reflective remarks on the tarmac, Biden told reporters \u201cthere\u2019s a value to being realistic and put on an optimistic front, an optimistic face\u201d because with pessimism \u201cyou\u2019d guarantee nothing happens.\u201dThe president described Putin as leading a diminished power troubled by a rising China and fretting about losing even more influence, citing an old mocking description of the Soviet Union as \u201cUpper Volta with nuclear weapons.\u201d\u201cYou have to figure out what the other guy's self-interest is,\u201d he said, and the Russians \u201cwant desperately to remain a major power \u2026 desperately want to be relevant.\u201dAnd this is where Biden\u2019s assessment of Russia, and Putin, took a glossier hue.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI found it matters to almost every world leader \u2014 no matter where they're from \u2014 how they're perceived, their standing in the world.\u00a0It matters to them.\u00a0It matters to them in terms of their support at home as well,\u201d Biden said.AdvertisementOne consequence of Russia tolerating \u2014 or carrying out \u2014 cyberattacks is \u201chis credibility worldwide shrinks.\u201d\u201cHow would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?\u00a0What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in?\u00a0 It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power,\u201d Biden said.Story continues below advertisementLeaving aside that the United States during the Cold War interfered in elections all over the world and supported bloody coups around the globe, there\u2019s no evidence Putin puts much stock in that sort of reputational damage.He directed Russia\u2019s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and subsequent annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea. U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of meddling in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and of carrying out the massive SolarWinds hack \u2014 as well as tolerating a wave of recent criminal ransomware assaults from Russian soil.AdvertisementIt may be the sorts of things Biden says cost Russia prestige, Putin sees as making Moscow \u201crelevant\u201d and a power with which the West must reckon.What\u2019s happening nowThe Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to Obamacare, saying Republican-led states do not have the legal standing to try to upend the law.\u00a0\u201cJustice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the court\u2019s 7 to 2 decision that preserves the law that provides millions of Americans with health coverage. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M Gorsuch dissented,\u201d Robert Barnes reports. \u201cThe key issue this time was whether a 2017 decision by Congress to remove the penalty for not buying health insurance \u2014 the so-called individual mandate \u2014 meant that the law was unconstitutional and should be wiped from the books. That would end popular provisions such as keeping young adults on their parents\u2019 insurance policies, and ensuring coverage for those with preexisting medical conditions. But the court said the states did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe court also said Philadelphia was wrong to end a contract to provide foster care services to a religious organization that refuses to work with same-sex couples, Barnes reports. \u201cAll nine justices agreed with the outcome, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a majority of six in saying Philadelphia violated the Constitution\u2019s guarantee of free exercise of religion in ending a contract with Catholic Social Services to screen potential foster care parents.\u201dBiden will sign a bill today making Juneteenth a federal holiday, which means federal employees will get Friday off, John Wagner reports. Yesterday, the House approved legislation making the day that marks the end of slavery in Texas a federal holiday 415-to-14. The Senate passed the bill suddenly and unanimously on Tuesday.\u00a0Jobless claims surged back about 400,000, snapping six weeks of declines.\u00a0\u201cAmericans filed 412,000 initial unemployment claims, the Labor Department reported,\u201d Aaron Gregg reports. \u201cThe new numbers mark an increase of 37,000 from the 375,000 reported the week before, pushing the tally back above the 400,000 threshold amid labor shortages and a moderate slowdown in vaccination rates. The job market still has a long way to go before reaching its pre-pandemic vitality, when weekly jobless claims stood at 256,000.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA \u201cmega-heatwave\u201d is peaking in the West, breaking records and intensifying droughts and fires.\u00a0\u201cOne of the most extreme heat waves ever observed in the Western U.S. this early in the season is near its climax. The punishing blast of heat, which began Sunday, has set hundreds of records while simultaneously worsening a historically severe drought, intensifying fires and degrading air quality. About 40 million Americans have endured triple-digit heat and more than 50 million have been under excessive-heat warnings this week,\u201d Jason Samenow and Diana Leonard report. \u201cWhile it\u2019s just mid-June and the hottest time of the year is historically still weeks away, temperatures have matched their highest ever observed levels in parts of Utah, Wyoming and Montana. Salt Lake City, Casper, Wyo., and Billings, Mont., all made history Tuesday, soaring to 107, 101, and 108 degrees, respectively.\u201d\u00a0To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cRansomware claims are roiling an entire segment of the insurance industry,\u201d\u00a0by Rachel Lerman and Gerrit de Vynck: \u201cRansomware attacks ... have increased in frequency and severity over the past two years. According to blockchain research firm Chainalysis, ransom payments from companies increased 341 percent to a total of $412 million during 2020. ... That\u2019s pushing insurance carriers to reevaluate how much coverage they can afford to offer and how much they have to charge clients to do so. Underwriters are demanding to see detailed proof of clients\u2019 cybersecurity measures in ways they never have before. For example, not using multifactor authentication, which requires a user to verify themselves in multiple ways, might result in a rejection.\u201d\u201cHong Kong police raid newspaper offices, arrest editors, executives under security law,\u201d\u00a0by Shibani Mahtani: \u201cPolice on Thursday raided the Apple Daily newspaper, known for its support for Hong Kong's democracy movement, and arrested five executives, including three top editors, on suspicion of violating the city's national security law. Authorities also froze the tabloid's assets. The early-morning operation highlighted the authorities\u2019 resolve to shut down any residual space for dissent, including silencing media critical of the Chinese government. Press freedom is supposed to be guaranteed under the Basic Law, Hong Kong\u2019s mini-constitution.\u201d\u201cChina launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up,\u201d\u00a0by Michael Miller: \u201cThe morning rocket launch in northwest China sent a spacecraft carrying three astronauts into Earth\u2019s orbit, where it docked with the still-under-construction space station later in the day. The liftoff, which Chinese officials called a \u2018complete success,\u2019 marks the first time in five years that China has sent a crewed mission to space. It comes amid a flurry of Chinese achievements in space that have spurred the United States to speed up some of its own plans.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cWhen the Pentagon visits Silicon Valley,\u201d\u00a0by the American Prospect\u2019s Jonathan Guyer: \u201cFew people in the Biden administration have as much personal experience with the dangers of surveillance technology as Colin Kahl. ... Kahl is the number three official in the Pentagon and oversees big-picture planning. As tech companies strengthen their relationships with Washington, leaders like Kahl have the chance to prioritize civil liberties and put in place guardrails to ensure that the kind of spying that happened to him doesn\u2019t happen to others. But instead, Kahl appears to be brokering deals with the very tech companies that facilitate this activity.\u201d\u201cThe son of Rudy is working out his father issues on the road to Albany,\u201d\u00a0by New York Magazine\u2019s Olivia Nuzzi: \u201cAndrew Giuliani was holding a silver spoon. He just was. There\u2019s no getting around it. ... Giuliani, who is 35 years old, spent his early childhood on the Upper East Side, attended prep school in a tony Jersey suburb and college in North Carolina. ... He cites as qualifying work experience his stint as a professional golfer; the four years he spent in the Trump administration, where he served in the Office of Public Liaison and as a special assistant to the president; and the seven weeks he was professionally a pundit on Newsmax. ... But Trump is not happy with what Giuliani has been telling the press about their relationship.\u201dThe Biden agendaThe Biden administration will announce a $3.2 billion investment for a pill to fight viruses.\u00a0\u201cBorrowing from the model used to create drugs that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable disease, the Biden administration plans to announce Thursday a $3.2 billion plan to stock the medicine cabinet with drugs that would be ready to treat future viral threats \u2014 whether a hemorrhagic fever, influenza or another coronavirus,\u201d Carolyn Johnson reports.\u201cThe $3.2 billion represents a multiyear investment to jump-start basic science research to develop new drugs and test whether existing drugs show promise. The funding will support clinical research and manufacturing. The focus initially is on this coronavirus but will expand into collaborative drug discovery programs focused on viruses that have the potential to spark a pandemic. At the same time, the government has started placing preorders for antiviral drugs for this pandemic \u2014 before they have been shown to work. It\u2019s a strategy similar to the one used to encourage vaccine development.\u201dTreasury Secretary Janet Yellen is carefully navigating an inflation test.\u00a0\u201cThe stakes of Yellen\u2019s public economic posture only intensified Wednesday, when she testified to Congress that inflation is likely to remain transitory hours before the Federal Reserve dramatically increased its inflation projections for the year,\u201d Jeff Stein reports. \u201cBoth Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell made clear that the economic outlook remains fluid because of uncertainty caused by the pandemic and that they see inflation as likely to subside next year. But the next few months of the economic recovery will be crucial to the legacy of the treasury secretary, who is widely viewed by administration officials as Biden\u2019s leading macroeconomic voice.\u201d\u201cShe has proved to be a far more deft dealmaker than many critics expected, given her lack of experience in high-stakes corporate or congressional negotiations. Yellen and her international tax lead, Itai Grinberg, recently deployed a \u2018good cop, bad cop\u2019 strategy with the six other international finance ministers in the Group of Seven. ... In navigating heavily male congressional and business arenas, some observers say, she makes a point of praising men\u2019s observations where consistent with her positions \u2014 careful to avoid alienating allies, while simultaneously standing firmly behind her own carefully considered arguments.\u201dSen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va) outlined demands on voting legislation, creating an opening for a potential Democratic compromise.\u00a0\u201cA three-page memo circulated by Manchin\u2019s office this week indicates the West Virginia centrist\u2019s willingness to support key provisions of the For the People Act, the marquee Democratic bill that the House passed in March \u2014 including provisions mandating at least two weeks of early voting and measures meant to eliminate partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts,\u201d Mike DeBonis reports. \u201cBut Manchin\u2019s memo also sketches out several provisions that have historically been opposed by most Democrats, including backing an ID requirement for voters and the ability of local election officials to purge voter rolls using other government records.\u201d\u201cProminent voting rights activist Stacey Abrams said Thursday that she could \u2018absolutely\u2019 support compromises floated by [Manchin],\u201d Wagner and DeBonis report. \u201cAbrams said it is a common misperception, fueled by Republicans, that Democrats outright oppose voter ID. Rather, she said, she and others object to restrictive provisions that are \u2018designed to keep people out of the process.\u2019 \u2018No one has ever objected to having to prove who you are to vote,\u2019 she said. \u2018What [Manchin] is proposing makes sense.\u2019\u201dAn infrastructure update: The bipartisan pitch is gaining steam.\u00a0\u201cThe initial framework, written by the likes of Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and seven other senators, falls far short of the sweeping infrastructure proposal that Biden has pitched, yet aims to try to satisfy the president\u2019s hunger for bipartisanship,\u201d Seung Min Kim and Tony Romm report. \u201cBut their efforts received a big boost Wednesday, when 11 more senators joined the original 10 and said they supported the still-unreleased blueprint of a deal. The group now includes 11 Republicans, nine Democrats and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats. All told, they account for a fifth of the entire chamber.\u201d\u201cEven as they rallied support for their plan, however, Senate Democrats huddled privately Wednesday to devise a path forward for trillions of dollars in additional spending in infrastructure improvements and other economic initiatives that may not make it into a bipartisan deal.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cI'm not a no. I'm not a yes,\u201d Manchin told reporters.\u00a0Biden apologized for snapping at a CNN reporter over her questions on Putin.\u00a0\u201cAs Biden turned to walk off the stage following a news conference in Geneva after his summit with Putin, a reporter shouted out one final question. \u2018Why are you so confident [Putin] will change his behavior, Mr. President?\u2019 CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins asked,\u201d Katie Shepherd reports. \u201cThe president, who had already turned away from the clutch of journalists, threw up his hands and started back toward the reporters while wagging his finger. \u2018What the hell? \u2026 When did I say I was confident?\u2019 Biden said as he headed back toward Collins, before launching into a tense back-and-forth with the reporter while defending his approach with the Russian president.\u201d\u201cAs his exchange with Collins went viral, some critics jumped to defend the reporter, while others argued that her question unfairly reflected the president\u2019s earlier statements. Soon after the exchange, Biden issued a mea culpa for his tone. \u2018I owe my last questioner an apology,\u2019 the president told reporters on the tarmac as he readied to board Air Force One on Wednesday afternoon. \u2018I shouldn\u2019t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.\u2019\u201dThe Biden administration canceled Trump\u2019s limits on asylum eligibility.\u00a0\u201cAttorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday rolled back a pair of Trump administration legal decisions that had narrowed access to the U.S. asylum system, where caseloads have ballooned in recent years from soaring numbers of claims,\u201d Nick Miroff reports. \u201cGarland\u2019s decisions vacated Trump-era rulings that had limited asylum eligibility for immigrants fleeing gangs or gender-based attacks, which his administration characterized as \u2018private\u2019 forms of violence that did not constitute membership in a persecuted social group.\u201dHot on the left\u201cRep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), who voted against awarding police officers the Congressional Gold Medal for their bravery in protecting the U.S. Capitol against violent, pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6, refused to shake hands with D.C. police officer Michael Fanone on Wednesday,\u201d\u00a0Colby Itkowitz and Peter Hermann report. \u201cFanone, joined by Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, returned to the Capitol on Wednesday, the day after 21 House Republicans voted against the Gold Medal resolution, in an effort to meet them and tell his story. He said he recognized Clyde at an elevator and that he and Dunn hopped in with the congressman.\u201d Fanone said he extended his hand for a greeting after introducing himself. \u201cI\u2019m a D.C. police officer and I fought to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6,\u201d Fanone told him. \u201cHis response was nothing,\u201d Fanone said. \u201cHe turned away from me, pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementFanone told Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about the encounter:\u00a0#BREAKING Officer Fanone just ran into @Rep_Clyde at Capitol (he\u2019s the \u201cJan 6 was a typical tour\u201d guy). Fanone introduced himself as \u201csomeone who fought to defend the Capitol\u201d and put out his hand. Clyde refused to shake it. To honor Trump, @housegop will dishonor the police.\u2014 Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 16, 2021\n\nI just called Officer Fanone and confirmed this story. This is really incredible. Also relayed an interaction he had with another members Chief of Staff that was really incredibly bad and disrespectful. https://t.co/fERYjK6dWg\u2014 Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) June 16, 2021\n\nHot on the rightIn a secret recording, a little-known GOP congressional candidate in one of Florida\u2019s most competitive districts threatened to send a Russian and Ukrainian \"hit squad\u201d against a fellow Republican opponent to make her \u201cdisappear.\u201d\u00a0\u201cDuring a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor,\u201d Politico\u2019s Marc Caputo reports. \u201c \u2018I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America,\u2019 Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week. ... \u2018That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f---ing speed bump in the road. She's a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0Toxic cargo from container ship fire, visualizedMore than two weeks after a blazing 610-foot container ship lit up the coastline of Sri Lanka, most of the X-Press Pearl, a four-month-old Singapore-flagged container ship, has settled on the bottom of the sea. Close to 1,500 containers were aboard the ship. According to X-Press Feeders, 81 of them contained dangerous goods, including 25 metric tons of nitric acid. The Post obtained a copy of the manifest for the ship, which details all of the cargo on board.Today in WashingtonBiden\u00a0will sign a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday today at 3:30 p.m. He and Vice President Harris\u00a0will give remarks.\u00a0In closingSeth Meyers reviewed Biden's foreign trip: Lots of sizing up, copious disagreements, no breakthroughs at summit. The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good.",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7052",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/17/daily-202-biden-is-not-confident-he-can-change-putin-thats-good/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty (some assembly required) arrived in New York Harbor.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden declared Wednesday he was \u201cnot confident\u201d of changing Vladimir Putin\u2019s ways and admitted his cautious remarks about pulling U.S.-Russia relations up from their lowest point in years amounted to putting on \u201can optimistic front.\u201d \u201cThis is not about trust. This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest,\u201d he told reporters.Biden\u2019s skeptical remarks, made in a solo news conference after their first summit and later on the tarmac near Air Force One, broke with decades of presidents predicting they would charm, cajole or cow their counterparts in Moscow.Those overly sunny diagnoses have blinded American leaders to just who they\u2019re dealing with in the Kremlin, with unhappy consequences for U.S. interests to say nothing of people in Moscow\u2019s \u201cnear abroad\u201d like Ukraine and Georgia.President Barack Obama had gushed to Putin in July 2009 about the \u201cextraordinary work\u201d he\u2019d done in office and their \u201cexcellent opportunity\u201d to reset relations, eight years after George W. Bush set the modern standard for regrettable Putin assessments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue,\" Bush said. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue. \u2026 And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship.\u201dWhile Obama (sanctions on Iran, help with troop withdrawals from Afghanistan) and Bush (post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism cooperation) each got some help from Putin, both came to regret their sunny early rhetoric.Biden may have had both in mind as he relayed what messages he had delivered to the Russian leader and sketched out his sense of the wily former KGB officer after their summit in Geneva delivered no breakthroughs in major disputes.Story continues below advertisementThe president described the behind-the-scenes dialogue as businesslike, nothing \u201cstrident,\u201d no \u201chyperbolic atmosphere.\u201d\u201cThis is about practical, straightforward, no-nonsense decisions that we have to make or not make.\u201dBiden said \u201cwe'll find out within the next six months to a year\u201d whether the summit paid dividends on new arms control efforts, the release of Americans held in Russian prisons, and getting Moscow to halt cyberattacks on U.S. targets.AdvertisementHe also said \u201cthere were no threats \u2026 just simple assertions,\u201d and denied he had raised the prospects of a military response to Russian hacks or ransomware operations, but also warned of retaliation for future digital intrusions.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability.\u00a0And he knows it,\u201d Biden told reporters. \u201cAnd if, in fact, they violate these basic norms, we will respond with cyber.\u00a0He knows.\u201dLater, he described himself conjuring up a hypothetical scenario for the Russian officials, who might justifiably have seen it as \u2026 let\u2019s call it \u201cthreat-adjacent.\u201d\u201cWhat happens if that ransomware outfit were sitting in Florida or Maine and took action, as I said, on their single lifeline to their economy \u2014 oil?\u201d he said he asked.\u00a0\u201cThat would be devastating.\u201dAsked in the news conference why he seemed confident of changing Russia\u2019s behavior, considering Putin had denied any involvement in cyberattacks, Biden snapped:\u00a0\u201cI'm not confident he'll change his behavior.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater, in more reflective remarks on the tarmac, Biden told reporters \u201cthere\u2019s a value to being realistic and put on an optimistic front, an optimistic face\u201d because with pessimism \u201cyou\u2019d guarantee nothing happens.\u201dThe president described Putin as leading a diminished power troubled by a rising China and fretting about losing even more influence, citing an old mocking description of the Soviet Union as \u201cUpper Volta with nuclear weapons.\u201d\u201cYou have to figure out what the other guy's self-interest is,\u201d he said, and the Russians \u201cwant desperately to remain a major power \u2026 desperately want to be relevant.\u201dAnd this is where Biden\u2019s assessment of Russia, and Putin, took a glossier hue.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI found it matters to almost every world leader \u2014 no matter where they're from \u2014 how they're perceived, their standing in the world.\u00a0It matters to them.\u00a0It matters to them in terms of their support at home as well,\u201d Biden said.AdvertisementOne consequence of Russia tolerating \u2014 or carrying out \u2014 cyberattacks is \u201chis credibility worldwide shrinks.\u201d\u201cHow would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?\u00a0What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in?\u00a0 It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power,\u201d Biden said.Story continues below advertisementLeaving aside that the United States during the Cold War interfered in elections all over the world and supported bloody coups around the globe, there\u2019s no evidence Putin puts much stock in that sort of reputational damage.He directed Russia\u2019s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and subsequent annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea. U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of meddling in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and of carrying out the massive SolarWinds hack \u2014 as well as tolerating a wave of recent criminal ransomware assaults from Russian soil.AdvertisementIt may be the sorts of things Biden says cost Russia prestige, Putin sees as making Moscow \u201crelevant\u201d and a power with which the West must reckon.What\u2019s happening nowThe Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to Obamacare, saying Republican-led states do not have the legal standing to try to upend the law.\u00a0\u201cJustice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the court\u2019s 7 to 2 decision that preserves the law that provides millions of Americans with health coverage. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M Gorsuch dissented,\u201d Robert Barnes reports. \u201cThe key issue this time was whether a 2017 decision by Congress to remove the penalty for not buying health insurance \u2014 the so-called individual mandate \u2014 meant that the law was unconstitutional and should be wiped from the books. That would end popular provisions such as keeping young adults on their parents\u2019 insurance policies, and ensuring coverage for those with preexisting medical conditions. But the court said the states did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe court also said Philadelphia was wrong to end a contract to provide foster care services to a religious organization that refuses to work with same-sex couples, Barnes reports. \u201cAll nine justices agreed with the outcome, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a majority of six in saying Philadelphia violated the Constitution\u2019s guarantee of free exercise of religion in ending a contract with Catholic Social Services to screen potential foster care parents.\u201dBiden will sign a bill today making Juneteenth a federal holiday, which means federal employees will get Friday off, John Wagner reports. Yesterday, the House approved legislation making the day that marks the end of slavery in Texas a federal holiday 415-to-14. The Senate passed the bill suddenly and unanimously on Tuesday.\u00a0Jobless claims surged back about 400,000, snapping six weeks of declines.\u00a0\u201cAmericans filed 412,000 initial unemployment claims, the Labor Department reported,\u201d Aaron Gregg reports. \u201cThe new numbers mark an increase of 37,000 from the 375,000 reported the week before, pushing the tally back above the 400,000 threshold amid labor shortages and a moderate slowdown in vaccination rates. The job market still has a long way to go before reaching its pre-pandemic vitality, when weekly jobless claims stood at 256,000.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA \u201cmega-heatwave\u201d is peaking in the West, breaking records and intensifying droughts and fires.\u00a0\u201cOne of the most extreme heat waves ever observed in the Western U.S. this early in the season is near its climax. The punishing blast of heat, which began Sunday, has set hundreds of records while simultaneously worsening a historically severe drought, intensifying fires and degrading air quality. About 40 million Americans have endured triple-digit heat and more than 50 million have been under excessive-heat warnings this week,\u201d Jason Samenow and Diana Leonard report. \u201cWhile it\u2019s just mid-June and the hottest time of the year is historically still weeks away, temperatures have matched their highest ever observed levels in parts of Utah, Wyoming and Montana. Salt Lake City, Casper, Wyo., and Billings, Mont., all made history Tuesday, soaring to 107, 101, and 108 degrees, respectively.\u201d\u00a0To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cRansomware claims are roiling an entire segment of the insurance industry,\u201d\u00a0by Rachel Lerman and Gerrit de Vynck: \u201cRansomware attacks ... have increased in frequency and severity over the past two years. According to blockchain research firm Chainalysis, ransom payments from companies increased 341 percent to a total of $412 million during 2020. ... That\u2019s pushing insurance carriers to reevaluate how much coverage they can afford to offer and how much they have to charge clients to do so. Underwriters are demanding to see detailed proof of clients\u2019 cybersecurity measures in ways they never have before. For example, not using multifactor authentication, which requires a user to verify themselves in multiple ways, might result in a rejection.\u201d\u201cHong Kong police raid newspaper offices, arrest editors, executives under security law,\u201d\u00a0by Shibani Mahtani: \u201cPolice on Thursday raided the Apple Daily newspaper, known for its support for Hong Kong's democracy movement, and arrested five executives, including three top editors, on suspicion of violating the city's national security law. Authorities also froze the tabloid's assets. The early-morning operation highlighted the authorities\u2019 resolve to shut down any residual space for dissent, including silencing media critical of the Chinese government. Press freedom is supposed to be guaranteed under the Basic Law, Hong Kong\u2019s mini-constitution.\u201d\u201cChina launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up,\u201d\u00a0by Michael Miller: \u201cThe morning rocket launch in northwest China sent a spacecraft carrying three astronauts into Earth\u2019s orbit, where it docked with the still-under-construction space station later in the day. The liftoff, which Chinese officials called a \u2018complete success,\u2019 marks the first time in five years that China has sent a crewed mission to space. It comes amid a flurry of Chinese achievements in space that have spurred the United States to speed up some of its own plans.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cWhen the Pentagon visits Silicon Valley,\u201d\u00a0by the American Prospect\u2019s Jonathan Guyer: \u201cFew people in the Biden administration have as much personal experience with the dangers of surveillance technology as Colin Kahl. ... Kahl is the number three official in the Pentagon and oversees big-picture planning. As tech companies strengthen their relationships with Washington, leaders like Kahl have the chance to prioritize civil liberties and put in place guardrails to ensure that the kind of spying that happened to him doesn\u2019t happen to others. But instead, Kahl appears to be brokering deals with the very tech companies that facilitate this activity.\u201d\u201cThe son of Rudy is working out his father issues on the road to Albany,\u201d\u00a0by New York Magazine\u2019s Olivia Nuzzi: \u201cAndrew Giuliani was holding a silver spoon. He just was. There\u2019s no getting around it. ... Giuliani, who is 35 years old, spent his early childhood on the Upper East Side, attended prep school in a tony Jersey suburb and college in North Carolina. ... He cites as qualifying work experience his stint as a professional golfer; the four years he spent in the Trump administration, where he served in the Office of Public Liaison and as a special assistant to the president; and the seven weeks he was professionally a pundit on Newsmax. ... But Trump is not happy with what Giuliani has been telling the press about their relationship.\u201dThe Biden agendaThe Biden administration will announce a $3.2 billion investment for a pill to fight viruses.\u00a0\u201cBorrowing from the model used to create drugs that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable disease, the Biden administration plans to announce Thursday a $3.2 billion plan to stock the medicine cabinet with drugs that would be ready to treat future viral threats \u2014 whether a hemorrhagic fever, influenza or another coronavirus,\u201d Carolyn Johnson reports.\u201cThe $3.2 billion represents a multiyear investment to jump-start basic science research to develop new drugs and test whether existing drugs show promise. The funding will support clinical research and manufacturing. The focus initially is on this coronavirus but will expand into collaborative drug discovery programs focused on viruses that have the potential to spark a pandemic. At the same time, the government has started placing preorders for antiviral drugs for this pandemic \u2014 before they have been shown to work. It\u2019s a strategy similar to the one used to encourage vaccine development.\u201dTreasury Secretary Janet Yellen is carefully navigating an inflation test.\u00a0\u201cThe stakes of Yellen\u2019s public economic posture only intensified Wednesday, when she testified to Congress that inflation is likely to remain transitory hours before the Federal Reserve dramatically increased its inflation projections for the year,\u201d Jeff Stein reports. \u201cBoth Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell made clear that the economic outlook remains fluid because of uncertainty caused by the pandemic and that they see inflation as likely to subside next year. But the next few months of the economic recovery will be crucial to the legacy of the treasury secretary, who is widely viewed by administration officials as Biden\u2019s leading macroeconomic voice.\u201d\u201cShe has proved to be a far more deft dealmaker than many critics expected, given her lack of experience in high-stakes corporate or congressional negotiations. Yellen and her international tax lead, Itai Grinberg, recently deployed a \u2018good cop, bad cop\u2019 strategy with the six other international finance ministers in the Group of Seven. ... In navigating heavily male congressional and business arenas, some observers say, she makes a point of praising men\u2019s observations where consistent with her positions \u2014 careful to avoid alienating allies, while simultaneously standing firmly behind her own carefully considered arguments.\u201dSen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va) outlined demands on voting legislation, creating an opening for a potential Democratic compromise.\u00a0\u201cA three-page memo circulated by Manchin\u2019s office this week indicates the West Virginia centrist\u2019s willingness to support key provisions of the For the People Act, the marquee Democratic bill that the House passed in March \u2014 including provisions mandating at least two weeks of early voting and measures meant to eliminate partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts,\u201d Mike DeBonis reports. \u201cBut Manchin\u2019s memo also sketches out several provisions that have historically been opposed by most Democrats, including backing an ID requirement for voters and the ability of local election officials to purge voter rolls using other government records.\u201d\u201cProminent voting rights activist Stacey Abrams said Thursday that she could \u2018absolutely\u2019 support compromises floated by [Manchin],\u201d Wagner and DeBonis report. \u201cAbrams said it is a common misperception, fueled by Republicans, that Democrats outright oppose voter ID. Rather, she said, she and others object to restrictive provisions that are \u2018designed to keep people out of the process.\u2019 \u2018No one has ever objected to having to prove who you are to vote,\u2019 she said. \u2018What [Manchin] is proposing makes sense.\u2019\u201dAn infrastructure update: The bipartisan pitch is gaining steam.\u00a0\u201cThe initial framework, written by the likes of Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and seven other senators, falls far short of the sweeping infrastructure proposal that Biden has pitched, yet aims to try to satisfy the president\u2019s hunger for bipartisanship,\u201d Seung Min Kim and Tony Romm report. \u201cBut their efforts received a big boost Wednesday, when 11 more senators joined the original 10 and said they supported the still-unreleased blueprint of a deal. The group now includes 11 Republicans, nine Democrats and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats. All told, they account for a fifth of the entire chamber.\u201d\u201cEven as they rallied support for their plan, however, Senate Democrats huddled privately Wednesday to devise a path forward for trillions of dollars in additional spending in infrastructure improvements and other economic initiatives that may not make it into a bipartisan deal.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cI'm not a no. I'm not a yes,\u201d Manchin told reporters.\u00a0Biden apologized for snapping at a CNN reporter over her questions on Putin.\u00a0\u201cAs Biden turned to walk off the stage following a news conference in Geneva after his summit with Putin, a reporter shouted out one final question. \u2018Why are you so confident [Putin] will change his behavior, Mr. President?\u2019 CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins asked,\u201d Katie Shepherd reports. \u201cThe president, who had already turned away from the clutch of journalists, threw up his hands and started back toward the reporters while wagging his finger. \u2018What the hell? \u2026 When did I say I was confident?\u2019 Biden said as he headed back toward Collins, before launching into a tense back-and-forth with the reporter while defending his approach with the Russian president.\u201d\u201cAs his exchange with Collins went viral, some critics jumped to defend the reporter, while others argued that her question unfairly reflected the president\u2019s earlier statements. Soon after the exchange, Biden issued a mea culpa for his tone. \u2018I owe my last questioner an apology,\u2019 the president told reporters on the tarmac as he readied to board Air Force One on Wednesday afternoon. \u2018I shouldn\u2019t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.\u2019\u201dThe Biden administration canceled Trump\u2019s limits on asylum eligibility.\u00a0\u201cAttorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday rolled back a pair of Trump administration legal decisions that had narrowed access to the U.S. asylum system, where caseloads have ballooned in recent years from soaring numbers of claims,\u201d Nick Miroff reports. \u201cGarland\u2019s decisions vacated Trump-era rulings that had limited asylum eligibility for immigrants fleeing gangs or gender-based attacks, which his administration characterized as \u2018private\u2019 forms of violence that did not constitute membership in a persecuted social group.\u201dHot on the left\u201cRep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), who voted against awarding police officers the Congressional Gold Medal for their bravery in protecting the U.S. Capitol against violent, pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6, refused to shake hands with D.C. police officer Michael Fanone on Wednesday,\u201d\u00a0Colby Itkowitz and Peter Hermann report. \u201cFanone, joined by Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, returned to the Capitol on Wednesday, the day after 21 House Republicans voted against the Gold Medal resolution, in an effort to meet them and tell his story. He said he recognized Clyde at an elevator and that he and Dunn hopped in with the congressman.\u201d Fanone said he extended his hand for a greeting after introducing himself. \u201cI\u2019m a D.C. police officer and I fought to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6,\u201d Fanone told him. \u201cHis response was nothing,\u201d Fanone said. \u201cHe turned away from me, pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementFanone told Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about the encounter:\u00a0#BREAKING Officer Fanone just ran into @Rep_Clyde at Capitol (he\u2019s the \u201cJan 6 was a typical tour\u201d guy). Fanone introduced himself as \u201csomeone who fought to defend the Capitol\u201d and put out his hand. Clyde refused to shake it. To honor Trump, @housegop will dishonor the police.\u2014 Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 16, 2021\n\nI just called Officer Fanone and confirmed this story. This is really incredible. Also relayed an interaction he had with another members Chief of Staff that was really incredibly bad and disrespectful. https://t.co/fERYjK6dWg\u2014 Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) June 16, 2021\n\nHot on the rightIn a secret recording, a little-known GOP congressional candidate in one of Florida\u2019s most competitive districts threatened to send a Russian and Ukrainian \"hit squad\u201d against a fellow Republican opponent to make her \u201cdisappear.\u201d\u00a0\u201cDuring a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor,\u201d Politico\u2019s Marc Caputo reports. \u201c \u2018I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America,\u2019 Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week. ... \u2018That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f---ing speed bump in the road. She's a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0Toxic cargo from container ship fire, visualizedMore than two weeks after a blazing 610-foot container ship lit up the coastline of Sri Lanka, most of the X-Press Pearl, a four-month-old Singapore-flagged container ship, has settled on the bottom of the sea. Close to 1,500 containers were aboard the ship. According to X-Press Feeders, 81 of them contained dangerous goods, including 25 metric tons of nitric acid. The Post obtained a copy of the manifest for the ship, which details all of the cargo on board.Today in WashingtonBiden\u00a0will sign a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday today at 3:30 p.m. He and Vice President Harris\u00a0will give remarks.\u00a0In closingSeth Meyers reviewed Biden's foreign trip: Lots of sizing up, copious disagreements, no breakthroughs at summit. The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good.",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7053",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/17/daily-202-biden-is-not-confident-he-can-change-putin-thats-good/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1885, the Statue of Liberty (some assembly required) arrived in New York Harbor.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden declared Wednesday he was \u201cnot confident\u201d of changing Vladimir Putin\u2019s ways and admitted his cautious remarks about pulling U.S.-Russia relations up from their lowest point in years amounted to putting on \u201can optimistic front.\u201d \u201cThis is not about trust. This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest,\u201d he told reporters.Biden\u2019s skeptical remarks, made in a solo news conference after their first summit and later on the tarmac near Air Force One, broke with decades of presidents predicting they would charm, cajole or cow their counterparts in Moscow.Those overly sunny diagnoses have blinded American leaders to just who they\u2019re dealing with in the Kremlin, with unhappy consequences for U.S. interests to say nothing of people in Moscow\u2019s \u201cnear abroad\u201d like Ukraine and Georgia.President Barack Obama had gushed to Putin in July 2009 about the \u201cextraordinary work\u201d he\u2019d done in office and their \u201cexcellent opportunity\u201d to reset relations, eight years after George W. Bush set the modern standard for regrettable Putin assessments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue,\" Bush said. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. And I appreciated so very much the frank dialogue. \u2026 And that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship.\u201dWhile Obama (sanctions on Iran, help with troop withdrawals from Afghanistan) and Bush (post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism cooperation) each got some help from Putin, both came to regret their sunny early rhetoric.Biden may have had both in mind as he relayed what messages he had delivered to the Russian leader and sketched out his sense of the wily former KGB officer after their summit in Geneva delivered no breakthroughs in major disputes.Story continues below advertisementThe president described the behind-the-scenes dialogue as businesslike, nothing \u201cstrident,\u201d no \u201chyperbolic atmosphere.\u201d\u201cThis is about practical, straightforward, no-nonsense decisions that we have to make or not make.\u201dBiden said \u201cwe'll find out within the next six months to a year\u201d whether the summit paid dividends on new arms control efforts, the release of Americans held in Russian prisons, and getting Moscow to halt cyberattacks on U.S. targets.AdvertisementHe also said \u201cthere were no threats \u2026 just simple assertions,\u201d and denied he had raised the prospects of a military response to Russian hacks or ransomware operations, but also warned of retaliation for future digital intrusions.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability.\u00a0And he knows it,\u201d Biden told reporters. \u201cAnd if, in fact, they violate these basic norms, we will respond with cyber.\u00a0He knows.\u201dLater, he described himself conjuring up a hypothetical scenario for the Russian officials, who might justifiably have seen it as \u2026 let\u2019s call it \u201cthreat-adjacent.\u201d\u201cWhat happens if that ransomware outfit were sitting in Florida or Maine and took action, as I said, on their single lifeline to their economy \u2014 oil?\u201d he said he asked.\u00a0\u201cThat would be devastating.\u201dAsked in the news conference why he seemed confident of changing Russia\u2019s behavior, considering Putin had denied any involvement in cyberattacks, Biden snapped:\u00a0\u201cI'm not confident he'll change his behavior.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater, in more reflective remarks on the tarmac, Biden told reporters \u201cthere\u2019s a value to being realistic and put on an optimistic front, an optimistic face\u201d because with pessimism \u201cyou\u2019d guarantee nothing happens.\u201dThe president described Putin as leading a diminished power troubled by a rising China and fretting about losing even more influence, citing an old mocking description of the Soviet Union as \u201cUpper Volta with nuclear weapons.\u201d\u201cYou have to figure out what the other guy's self-interest is,\u201d he said, and the Russians \u201cwant desperately to remain a major power \u2026 desperately want to be relevant.\u201dAnd this is where Biden\u2019s assessment of Russia, and Putin, took a glossier hue.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI found it matters to almost every world leader \u2014 no matter where they're from \u2014 how they're perceived, their standing in the world.\u00a0It matters to them.\u00a0It matters to them in terms of their support at home as well,\u201d Biden said.AdvertisementOne consequence of Russia tolerating \u2014 or carrying out \u2014 cyberattacks is \u201chis credibility worldwide shrinks.\u201d\u201cHow would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?\u00a0What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in?\u00a0 It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power,\u201d Biden said.Story continues below advertisementLeaving aside that the United States during the Cold War interfered in elections all over the world and supported bloody coups around the globe, there\u2019s no evidence Putin puts much stock in that sort of reputational damage.He directed Russia\u2019s invasion of Georgia in 2008, its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and subsequent annexation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea. U.S. intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of meddling in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and of carrying out the massive SolarWinds hack \u2014 as well as tolerating a wave of recent criminal ransomware assaults from Russian soil.AdvertisementIt may be the sorts of things Biden says cost Russia prestige, Putin sees as making Moscow \u201crelevant\u201d and a power with which the West must reckon.What\u2019s happening nowThe Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to Obamacare, saying Republican-led states do not have the legal standing to try to upend the law.\u00a0\u201cJustice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the court\u2019s 7 to 2 decision that preserves the law that provides millions of Americans with health coverage. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M Gorsuch dissented,\u201d Robert Barnes reports. \u201cThe key issue this time was whether a 2017 decision by Congress to remove the penalty for not buying health insurance \u2014 the so-called individual mandate \u2014 meant that the law was unconstitutional and should be wiped from the books. That would end popular provisions such as keeping young adults on their parents\u2019 insurance policies, and ensuring coverage for those with preexisting medical conditions. But the court said the states did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe court also said Philadelphia was wrong to end a contract to provide foster care services to a religious organization that refuses to work with same-sex couples, Barnes reports. \u201cAll nine justices agreed with the outcome, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a majority of six in saying Philadelphia violated the Constitution\u2019s guarantee of free exercise of religion in ending a contract with Catholic Social Services to screen potential foster care parents.\u201dBiden will sign a bill today making Juneteenth a federal holiday, which means federal employees will get Friday off, John Wagner reports. Yesterday, the House approved legislation making the day that marks the end of slavery in Texas a federal holiday 415-to-14. The Senate passed the bill suddenly and unanimously on Tuesday.\u00a0Jobless claims surged back about 400,000, snapping six weeks of declines.\u00a0\u201cAmericans filed 412,000 initial unemployment claims, the Labor Department reported,\u201d Aaron Gregg reports. \u201cThe new numbers mark an increase of 37,000 from the 375,000 reported the week before, pushing the tally back above the 400,000 threshold amid labor shortages and a moderate slowdown in vaccination rates. The job market still has a long way to go before reaching its pre-pandemic vitality, when weekly jobless claims stood at 256,000.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA \u201cmega-heatwave\u201d is peaking in the West, breaking records and intensifying droughts and fires.\u00a0\u201cOne of the most extreme heat waves ever observed in the Western U.S. this early in the season is near its climax. The punishing blast of heat, which began Sunday, has set hundreds of records while simultaneously worsening a historically severe drought, intensifying fires and degrading air quality. About 40 million Americans have endured triple-digit heat and more than 50 million have been under excessive-heat warnings this week,\u201d Jason Samenow and Diana Leonard report. \u201cWhile it\u2019s just mid-June and the hottest time of the year is historically still weeks away, temperatures have matched their highest ever observed levels in parts of Utah, Wyoming and Montana. Salt Lake City, Casper, Wyo., and Billings, Mont., all made history Tuesday, soaring to 107, 101, and 108 degrees, respectively.\u201d\u00a0To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cRansomware claims are roiling an entire segment of the insurance industry,\u201d\u00a0by Rachel Lerman and Gerrit de Vynck: \u201cRansomware attacks ... have increased in frequency and severity over the past two years. According to blockchain research firm Chainalysis, ransom payments from companies increased 341 percent to a total of $412 million during 2020. ... That\u2019s pushing insurance carriers to reevaluate how much coverage they can afford to offer and how much they have to charge clients to do so. Underwriters are demanding to see detailed proof of clients\u2019 cybersecurity measures in ways they never have before. For example, not using multifactor authentication, which requires a user to verify themselves in multiple ways, might result in a rejection.\u201d\u201cHong Kong police raid newspaper offices, arrest editors, executives under security law,\u201d\u00a0by Shibani Mahtani: \u201cPolice on Thursday raided the Apple Daily newspaper, known for its support for Hong Kong's democracy movement, and arrested five executives, including three top editors, on suspicion of violating the city's national security law. Authorities also froze the tabloid's assets. The early-morning operation highlighted the authorities\u2019 resolve to shut down any residual space for dissent, including silencing media critical of the Chinese government. Press freedom is supposed to be guaranteed under the Basic Law, Hong Kong\u2019s mini-constitution.\u201d\u201cChina launches first astronauts to its new space station, as race with U.S. heats up,\u201d\u00a0by Michael Miller: \u201cThe morning rocket launch in northwest China sent a spacecraft carrying three astronauts into Earth\u2019s orbit, where it docked with the still-under-construction space station later in the day. The liftoff, which Chinese officials called a \u2018complete success,\u2019 marks the first time in five years that China has sent a crewed mission to space. It comes amid a flurry of Chinese achievements in space that have spurred the United States to speed up some of its own plans.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cWhen the Pentagon visits Silicon Valley,\u201d\u00a0by the American Prospect\u2019s Jonathan Guyer: \u201cFew people in the Biden administration have as much personal experience with the dangers of surveillance technology as Colin Kahl. ... Kahl is the number three official in the Pentagon and oversees big-picture planning. As tech companies strengthen their relationships with Washington, leaders like Kahl have the chance to prioritize civil liberties and put in place guardrails to ensure that the kind of spying that happened to him doesn\u2019t happen to others. But instead, Kahl appears to be brokering deals with the very tech companies that facilitate this activity.\u201d\u201cThe son of Rudy is working out his father issues on the road to Albany,\u201d\u00a0by New York Magazine\u2019s Olivia Nuzzi: \u201cAndrew Giuliani was holding a silver spoon. He just was. There\u2019s no getting around it. ... Giuliani, who is 35 years old, spent his early childhood on the Upper East Side, attended prep school in a tony Jersey suburb and college in North Carolina. ... He cites as qualifying work experience his stint as a professional golfer; the four years he spent in the Trump administration, where he served in the Office of Public Liaison and as a special assistant to the president; and the seven weeks he was professionally a pundit on Newsmax. ... But Trump is not happy with what Giuliani has been telling the press about their relationship.\u201dThe Biden agendaThe Biden administration will announce a $3.2 billion investment for a pill to fight viruses.\u00a0\u201cBorrowing from the model used to create drugs that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable disease, the Biden administration plans to announce Thursday a $3.2 billion plan to stock the medicine cabinet with drugs that would be ready to treat future viral threats \u2014 whether a hemorrhagic fever, influenza or another coronavirus,\u201d Carolyn Johnson reports.\u201cThe $3.2 billion represents a multiyear investment to jump-start basic science research to develop new drugs and test whether existing drugs show promise. The funding will support clinical research and manufacturing. The focus initially is on this coronavirus but will expand into collaborative drug discovery programs focused on viruses that have the potential to spark a pandemic. At the same time, the government has started placing preorders for antiviral drugs for this pandemic \u2014 before they have been shown to work. It\u2019s a strategy similar to the one used to encourage vaccine development.\u201dTreasury Secretary Janet Yellen is carefully navigating an inflation test.\u00a0\u201cThe stakes of Yellen\u2019s public economic posture only intensified Wednesday, when she testified to Congress that inflation is likely to remain transitory hours before the Federal Reserve dramatically increased its inflation projections for the year,\u201d Jeff Stein reports. \u201cBoth Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell made clear that the economic outlook remains fluid because of uncertainty caused by the pandemic and that they see inflation as likely to subside next year. But the next few months of the economic recovery will be crucial to the legacy of the treasury secretary, who is widely viewed by administration officials as Biden\u2019s leading macroeconomic voice.\u201d\u201cShe has proved to be a far more deft dealmaker than many critics expected, given her lack of experience in high-stakes corporate or congressional negotiations. Yellen and her international tax lead, Itai Grinberg, recently deployed a \u2018good cop, bad cop\u2019 strategy with the six other international finance ministers in the Group of Seven. ... In navigating heavily male congressional and business arenas, some observers say, she makes a point of praising men\u2019s observations where consistent with her positions \u2014 careful to avoid alienating allies, while simultaneously standing firmly behind her own carefully considered arguments.\u201dSen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va) outlined demands on voting legislation, creating an opening for a potential Democratic compromise.\u00a0\u201cA three-page memo circulated by Manchin\u2019s office this week indicates the West Virginia centrist\u2019s willingness to support key provisions of the For the People Act, the marquee Democratic bill that the House passed in March \u2014 including provisions mandating at least two weeks of early voting and measures meant to eliminate partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts,\u201d Mike DeBonis reports. \u201cBut Manchin\u2019s memo also sketches out several provisions that have historically been opposed by most Democrats, including backing an ID requirement for voters and the ability of local election officials to purge voter rolls using other government records.\u201d\u201cProminent voting rights activist Stacey Abrams said Thursday that she could \u2018absolutely\u2019 support compromises floated by [Manchin],\u201d Wagner and DeBonis report. \u201cAbrams said it is a common misperception, fueled by Republicans, that Democrats outright oppose voter ID. Rather, she said, she and others object to restrictive provisions that are \u2018designed to keep people out of the process.\u2019 \u2018No one has ever objected to having to prove who you are to vote,\u2019 she said. \u2018What [Manchin] is proposing makes sense.\u2019\u201dAn infrastructure update: The bipartisan pitch is gaining steam.\u00a0\u201cThe initial framework, written by the likes of Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and seven other senators, falls far short of the sweeping infrastructure proposal that Biden has pitched, yet aims to try to satisfy the president\u2019s hunger for bipartisanship,\u201d Seung Min Kim and Tony Romm report. \u201cBut their efforts received a big boost Wednesday, when 11 more senators joined the original 10 and said they supported the still-unreleased blueprint of a deal. The group now includes 11 Republicans, nine Democrats and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats. All told, they account for a fifth of the entire chamber.\u201d\u201cEven as they rallied support for their plan, however, Senate Democrats huddled privately Wednesday to devise a path forward for trillions of dollars in additional spending in infrastructure improvements and other economic initiatives that may not make it into a bipartisan deal.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cI'm not a no. I'm not a yes,\u201d Manchin told reporters.\u00a0Biden apologized for snapping at a CNN reporter over her questions on Putin.\u00a0\u201cAs Biden turned to walk off the stage following a news conference in Geneva after his summit with Putin, a reporter shouted out one final question. \u2018Why are you so confident [Putin] will change his behavior, Mr. President?\u2019 CNN\u2019s Kaitlan Collins asked,\u201d Katie Shepherd reports. \u201cThe president, who had already turned away from the clutch of journalists, threw up his hands and started back toward the reporters while wagging his finger. \u2018What the hell? \u2026 When did I say I was confident?\u2019 Biden said as he headed back toward Collins, before launching into a tense back-and-forth with the reporter while defending his approach with the Russian president.\u201d\u201cAs his exchange with Collins went viral, some critics jumped to defend the reporter, while others argued that her question unfairly reflected the president\u2019s earlier statements. Soon after the exchange, Biden issued a mea culpa for his tone. \u2018I owe my last questioner an apology,\u2019 the president told reporters on the tarmac as he readied to board Air Force One on Wednesday afternoon. \u2018I shouldn\u2019t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.\u2019\u201dThe Biden administration canceled Trump\u2019s limits on asylum eligibility.\u00a0\u201cAttorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday rolled back a pair of Trump administration legal decisions that had narrowed access to the U.S. asylum system, where caseloads have ballooned in recent years from soaring numbers of claims,\u201d Nick Miroff reports. \u201cGarland\u2019s decisions vacated Trump-era rulings that had limited asylum eligibility for immigrants fleeing gangs or gender-based attacks, which his administration characterized as \u2018private\u2019 forms of violence that did not constitute membership in a persecuted social group.\u201dHot on the left\u201cRep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.), who voted against awarding police officers the Congressional Gold Medal for their bravery in protecting the U.S. Capitol against violent, pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6, refused to shake hands with D.C. police officer Michael Fanone on Wednesday,\u201d\u00a0Colby Itkowitz and Peter Hermann report. \u201cFanone, joined by Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, returned to the Capitol on Wednesday, the day after 21 House Republicans voted against the Gold Medal resolution, in an effort to meet them and tell his story. He said he recognized Clyde at an elevator and that he and Dunn hopped in with the congressman.\u201d Fanone said he extended his hand for a greeting after introducing himself. \u201cI\u2019m a D.C. police officer and I fought to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6,\u201d Fanone told him. \u201cHis response was nothing,\u201d Fanone said. \u201cHe turned away from me, pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementFanone told Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) about the encounter:\u00a0#BREAKING Officer Fanone just ran into @Rep_Clyde at Capitol (he\u2019s the \u201cJan 6 was a typical tour\u201d guy). Fanone introduced himself as \u201csomeone who fought to defend the Capitol\u201d and put out his hand. Clyde refused to shake it. To honor Trump, @housegop will dishonor the police.\u2014 Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 16, 2021\n\nI just called Officer Fanone and confirmed this story. This is really incredible. Also relayed an interaction he had with another members Chief of Staff that was really incredibly bad and disrespectful. https://t.co/fERYjK6dWg\u2014 Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) June 16, 2021\n\nHot on the rightIn a secret recording, a little-known GOP congressional candidate in one of Florida\u2019s most competitive districts threatened to send a Russian and Ukrainian \"hit squad\u201d against a fellow Republican opponent to make her \u201cdisappear.\u201d\u00a0\u201cDuring a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor,\u201d Politico\u2019s Marc Caputo reports. \u201c \u2018I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America,\u2019 Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week. ... \u2018That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f---ing speed bump in the road. She's a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0Toxic cargo from container ship fire, visualizedMore than two weeks after a blazing 610-foot container ship lit up the coastline of Sri Lanka, most of the X-Press Pearl, a four-month-old Singapore-flagged container ship, has settled on the bottom of the sea. Close to 1,500 containers were aboard the ship. According to X-Press Feeders, 81 of them contained dangerous goods, including 25 metric tons of nitric acid. The Post obtained a copy of the manifest for the ship, which details all of the cargo on board.Today in WashingtonBiden\u00a0will sign a bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday today at 3:30 p.m. He and Vice President Harris\u00a0will give remarks.\u00a0In closingSeth Meyers reviewed Biden's foreign trip: Lots of sizing up, copious disagreements, no breakthroughs at summit. The Daily 202: Biden is \u2018not confident\u2019 he can change Putin. That\u2019s good.",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden next week will go big to his biggest audience yet (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7054",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/23/daily-202-biden-next-week-will-go-big-his-biggest-audience-yet/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Happy birthday to William Shakespeare (we think) and to James Buchanan (we know)!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden\u2019s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday won\u2019t look or sound much like those his predecessors gave, and not just because pandemic precautions mean he\u2019ll speak to a much emptier House chamber. It\u2019ll look different not just because of the social distancing, which also means lawmakers can\u2019t bring the usual headline-stealing guests, but also because for the first time in U.S. history the two people seated directly behind him will be women \u2014 Vice President Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).It\u2019ll sound different not just because of thinner applause (and boos) from a depleted crowd, but because\u00a0giving it this late in his first year means Biden won\u2019t just lay out his agenda \u2014 he\u2019ll be able to brag about his accomplishments in a way his predecessors could not in February of their inaugural years in office.Biden pushed through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package with only Democratic votes and has introduced a more than $2 trillion infrastructure package, both of which stand to remake large swaths of the economy. He has pledged to slash U.S. carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 to fight the climate crisis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile some early proposals have surrendered to political reality \u2014 internal Democratic dissent led him to nix, or at least postpone, efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour \u2014 Biden has unquestionably been ambitious.\u201cI did not expect him to be as big and as bold as he\u2019s been,\u201d House Democratic Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose 2020 endorsement reinvigorated Biden\u2019s campaign,\u00a0told Bloomberg Businessweek.White House aides have said since late last year Biden will be judged \u2014 by history and, well before that, by midterm election voters \u2014 based on his handling of the pandemic and the limping U.S. economy he inherited.\u201cHe certainly recognizes this is an opportunity to speak directly with the American people \u2014 one of the highest-profile opportunities that any president has in their first year in office,\u201d Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden will be able to say he met the goal he set of\u00a0getting 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses into 200 million arms in his\u00a0first 100 days and point to\u00a0stronger-than-expected recent job growth \u2014 even if he and his advisers underline the need to get more aid to more Americans this year.Biden is likely to credit\u00a0his broadly popular $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and notably its direct payments of up to $1,400 to millions of Americans, while urging support for his roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and his emerging American Families Plan \u2014 a package of largely popular benefits.The new initiative comprises new child-care benefits, universal prekindergarten education, paid family and medical leave, free community college, and nutritional aid, all with a price tag expected to run about $1.5 trillion,\u00a0my colleagues Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager reported this week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration envisions it will be \u201clargely if not fully paid for with new tax increases centered on upper-income Americans and wealthy investors,\u201d Jeff and Tyler reported.Biden plans to announce what would amount to dramatic tax hikes on the richest Americans, steps that \u201ccould reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor,\u201d\u00a0according to Bloomberg News\u2019s Laura Davison and Allyson Versprille.Biden \u201cwill propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6%, which, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for investors could be as high as 43.4%, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d they reported.Story continues below advertisementBiden is likely to promote efforts to overhaul policing, his ambitious (though nonbinding)\u00a0new commitments to battle the climate crisis, his setting in motion a full U.S.\u00a0troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, and other initiatives.AdvertisementThe president is also likely to defend his handling of immigration and the crisis at the southern border, where record numbers of unaccompanied migrants are overwhelming federal facilities to house them. Polls show far lower approval for Biden\u2019s approach to the issue than for other matters, and Republicans have hammered him on it.He could also do what most of his modern predecessors have done: Plead for bipartisan cooperation, even if (as I have written before) a cynic might describe that as a call to set aside ideological differences and do what the president wants.\u201cThe people did not send us here to bicker,\u201d then-President George H.W. Bush\u00a0said in his first speech to Congress in February 1989. \u201cIt is time to govern.\u201dWhile the GOP will deliver the usual rebuttal speech \u2014 this year,\u00a0the job falls to Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only Black Republican in the Senate \u2014 there will also be a response from Rep.\u00a0Jamaal Bowman, (D-N.Y.) on behalf of progressives.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a balancing act. He's already done a lot that I love. And he's going to say a lot of things that I like, as well,\u201d\u00a0Bowman told NBC in an interview. \u201cBut if we relent, it doesn't mean that what's been going on so far is going to continue. It's important for us as progressives to continue to push and continue to organize.\u201dAs for Scott, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) described the South Carolinian as \u201cone of the most inspiring and unifying leaders in our nation\u201d and underlined \u201cnobody is better at communicating why far-left policies fail working Americans.\u201dIn recent decades, with expanded viewing options and diminished attention spans, the traditional speech \u2014 don\u2019t call it a State of the Union address until 2022, please \u2014 has\u00a0lost much of its ratings, and consequently some of its luster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven with incredibly high stakes, the rote format invites lampooning \u2014 \u201cmy fellow Americans, I come before you tonight to speak in ringing tones and stare into the middle distance\u201d is a favorite. And some past stunts could be grating, like bipartisan seating, which one wag described as the political equivalent of a comb-over in that\u00a0it looks weird and fools no one.But that recalls the definition of a cynic as a person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The speech gets the president the largest audience he \u2014 any American politician, really \u2014 is guaranteed to get this year.\u201cIt won't represent or touch on the totality of every issue that's a priority,\u201d Psaki said. \u201cUnless you want to sit through a seven-hour speech. Which I don\u2019t think you do.\u201dWhat\u2019s happening nowBiden will travel to the U.K. and Belgium this June in his first overseas trip as president, the White House said. Biden will attend the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall from June 11 to 13, and he will also meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. After that, the president will travel to Brussels, where he will participate in the NATO summit on June 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRussian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will end his prison hunger strike, following the advice of his doctors who warned he could soon die.\u00a0\u201cNavalny, who is serving a more-than two-year sentence, began his hunger strike [24 days ago] as a demand to see independent medical specialists of his choosing at his expense,\u201d Isabelle Khurshudyan reports.\u00a0Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) will campaign for Michael Wood, a GOP congressional candidate in Texas who\u2019s calling for the party to move past Donald Trump.\u00a0\u201cKinzinger\u2019s office confirmed the visit, which will take him into a special election for Texas\u2019s 6th Congressional District, a part of the greater Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex that supports Republicans but backed Trump last year by just three points. Wood, a veteran and first-time candidate, has also received financial support from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and announced Monday that he had raised nearly $100,000 for the short special election campaign,\u201d David Weigel reports.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year.\u00a0\u201cFlying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan,\u201d Christian Davenport reports. \u201cCurrently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status.\u201d\u00a0SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on April 23, carrying four international astronauts to the International Space Station. (NASA TV)To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cTed Cruz maintains ties to right-wing group despite its extremist messaging,\u201d by Beth Reinhard and Neena Satija: \u201cA Post review of True Texas Project\u2019s activities and social media shows that Cruz has continued to embrace the [right-wing] group, even as its nativist rhetoric and divisive tactics have alienated some other conservative elected officials. Cruz\u2019s father, a frequent campaign surrogate for his son, spoke at a meeting of the group shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, at a time when the group\u2019s leadership was defending the pro-Trump mob on social media... Cruz\u2019s ongoing ties to TTP contrast with the group\u2019s fraught relationship with much of the Republican establishment in Texas. The group has lashed out at Republicans it perceives as too moderate \u2014 including Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.) and Gov. Greg Abbott \u2014 and has backed candidates against officeholders it once helped elect... James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said Cruz appears to have \u2018turned a blind eye\u2019 to the group\u2019s most extreme rhetoric. Many Cruz supporters would not view the group\u2019s messaging as racist, he added.\u201d\u201cSenate committee to take up Biden judicial nominees in preview of potential Supreme Court fight,\u201d by Ann Marimow and Paul Kane: \u201cThe Senate Judiciary Committee will take its first look next week at Biden\u2019s initial batch of judicial nominees... Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to review Biden\u2019s nominees to take advantage of their slim majority in the Senate and begin to remake the courts with judges from diverse personal and professional backgrounds. All five nominees under consideration next Wednesday are people of color ... The hearing featuring Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is up for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, could be a preview of what she would face if she is eventually nominated for a potential vacancy on the Supreme Court.More: \u201cMany senators are keeping an eye across the street, awaiting word whether Justice Stephen G. Breyer, 82, will step down. Democrats have not overtly pressured the court\u2019s oldest justice to retire, but privately they are hopeful he will step aside for a younger liberal while the party retains a majority \u2014 one that could disappear in the 2022 midterms or through an untimely illness that relegates them to minority status.\"\u201cThe United Nations is turning to artificial intelligence in search for peace in war zones,\u201d by Dalvin Brown: \u201cOver the past year, the United Nations has worked with the AI start-up Remesh on an algorithm that helped negotiate peace agreements across Yemen and Libya as the two nations grappled with ongoing civil wars and the coronavirus pandemic. The tool was deployed as a website link to stakeholders in embattled regions. It was designed to assess open-ended responses on the Internet from up to 1,000 people at a time and derive a consensus in near real-time. The software has helped the U.N. understand what groups in conflict zones are most concerned about during live discussions with political leaders.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cKevin McCarthy\u2019s gamble on a \u201cBig Tent\u201d GOP,\u201d\u00a0by Time\u2019s Lissandra Villa: \u201cThough he\u2019s one of the most senior Republicans in the country, McCarthy has declined to articulate a clear vision for which direction the party should be headed. \u2018This Republican Party\u2019s a very big tent,\u2019 he said after a closed-door conference meeting in February. ... \u2018Everyone\u2019s invited in,\u2019 McCarthy said. The \u2018big tent\u2019 doctrine is quintessential McCarthy. ... But conversations with more than a dozen current and former House members, GOP strategists, Republican staffers and other party observers offer a portrait of a politician with a win-at-all-costs approach.\u201d\u201cDemocrat Joe Manchin says there\u2019s one GOP senator he\u2019d endorse \u2018in a heartbeat,\u2019\u201d by Politico\u2019s Burgess Everett: \u201cThe West Virginia senator is backing Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski\u2019s reelection bid in the face of a pointed challenge from Trump. ... \u2018People understand that they have a person that understands Alaska and has Alaska in her blood and in every part of her veins and every morsel of her body,\u2019\u201d he said.\u201cU.S. drop in vaccine demand has some places turning down doses,\u201d\u00a0the Associated Press\u2019s Leah Willingham, Heather Hollingsworth and Michelle R. Smith report: \u201cLouisiana has stopped asking the federal government for its full allotment of COVID-19 vaccine. About three-quarters of Kansas counties have turned down new shipments of the vaccine at least once over the past month. And in Mississippi, officials asked the federal government to ship vials in smaller packages so they don\u2019t go to waste.\u201dThe Biden climate summitBiden delivered another round of remarks at the climate summit, focusing on the \u201ceconomic opportunities\u201d presented by climate change.\u00a0The president touted the new jobs combating climate change could bring, including in \u201cfields we haven\u2019t even conceived of yet,\u201d John Wagner reports. Biden also stressed the importance of ensuring that workers who \u201cthrived in yesterday\u2019s and today\u2019s industries have as bright a tomorrow in the new industries.\u201dJohn F. Kerry, Biden\u2019s special envoy for climate, opened the second day of the summit by echoing the same themes.\u00a0Fighting climate change \"is going to create millions of high-quality, good-paying jobs around the world, especially in countries that seize this agenda,\u201d Kerry said. \u201cToday is going to be about that vision. We\u2019re going to hear from governments, entrepreneurs, community and labor leaders about how they see the future.\u201dTransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg cast the climate challenge as a shared endeavor. \u201cPursuing a net-zero goal is not a zero-sum game,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all benefit if we succeed at this. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it\u2019s how interconnected we are and how capable we are of change.\u201dRead continuing coverage of the climate summit on our liveblog.The Energy Department announced more than $109.5 million for projects supporting job creation.\u00a0\u201cThe coal and power plant workers who built our nation can play a huge role in making America\u2019s clean energy future a reality, and this report outlines just the first steps the Biden administration is taking to make sure they have those opportunities right in their communities,\u201d Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said before launching the summit.The money, Steven Mufson reports, includes: $75 million funding opportunity to engineer carbon capture projects; $19.5 million in funding awards for critical mineral extraction from coal and associated waste streams; $15 million for geothermal energy research projects at West Virginia and Sandia National Laboratories.Notable:\u00a0That money is likely to help bolster support from the Senate\u2019s swing vote, Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).The United States, Britain and the UAE endorsed a new organization that helps farmers suffering from climate change.\u00a0\u201cUAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum said the joint effort would go toward research and development over the next five years,\u201d Mufson reports. \u201cPrivate investor and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the mission would help vulnerable subsistence farmers suffering from the unpredictable nature of climate change. They are hoping that other countries will join the initiative.\u201dCountries continued making their climate pledges.\u00a0Israel pledged to no longer burn coal in 2025 \u201cbarring unforeseen circumstances.\u201d\u00a0Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also announced that, by the end of this decade, renewable energy will provide more than one-third of Israel\u2019s electricity, John Wagner reports.Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen detailed some of her country\u2019s big plans to achieve a 70 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.\u00a0\u201cImagine that you are flying across the North Sea. Hundreds of wind turbines appear on the horizon. As you get closer, you spot an island, an island creating clean electricity, clean fuels, green innovation for millions of European households,\u201d Frederiksen said. \u201cThat\u2019s our Danish vision of the world\u2019s first energy island. ... Denmark will soon make it a reality.\u201dBiden\u2019s climate plan faces global skepticism.\u00a0\u201cWashington's history of backing out or failing to ratify climate commitments now jeopardizes widespread support for Biden\u2019s just-announced plans,\u201d Politico reports. \u201cThe Chinese government ... has been particularly scathing. \u2018The U.S. chose to come and go as it likes with regard to the Paris Agreement,\u2019 Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, implying that America may be offered forgiveness for its Paris Agreement backflips, but it cannot also expect applause for setting a 2030 target.\u201dChina\u2019s rivalry with the United States complicates its green push.\u00a0\u201c\u2026 it\u2019s uncertain how much more ground Xi is willing to concede \u2014 and under what circumstances,\u201d Gerry Shih reports. \u201cAlthough the United States, Japan and Canada on Thursday unveiled tighter new greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2030, Xi \u2014 as well as another key figure, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi \u2014 refrained from new commitments.\u201d\u201cEnvironmental groups say they were disappointed because Xi has staked out significant long-term goals to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 \u2014 but has not yet presented clarity about how to get there. Xi\u2019s reticence at the summit could be driven by domestic considerations, said Li Shuo, senior adviser at Greenpeace East Asia.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s precisely because it\u2019s a U.S.-organized event that China might have been more hesitant to put more offers on the table,\u201d Li told Shih.\u201cLi said the next venue for a potential Chinese announcement could be the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26 \u2014 a multilateral, rather than Biden-led, forum to take place in Glasgow in November.\u201dMore on Biden's expected tax proposals.\u201cBiden will propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6% to help pay for a raft of social spending that addresses long-standing inequality, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d Bloomberg News reports. \u201cFor those earning $1 million or more, the new top rate, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for wealthy investors could be as high as 43.4%. The new marginal 39.6% rate would be an increase from the current base rate of 20%.\u201d\u201cA 3.8% tax on investment income that funds Obamacare would be kept in place, pushing the tax rate on returns on financial assets higher than rates on some wage and salary income, they said... The proposal could reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor.\u201dPolicing in AmericaSix in 10 Americans say the country should do more to hold police accountable for mistreatment of Black people.\u00a0That is according to a new Post-ABC News poll, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report, which also found \u201csome skepticism of how Biden has handled the issue, with 42 percent of Americans saying he is doing \u2018too little\u2019 to reform police practices in the country, while 32 percent say he has done the right amount and 15 percent say he has done \u2018too much.\u2019\u201d\u201cNearly half of Black Americans and Democrats say Biden has done too little on this issue, a significant break from their typical lopsided support of his actions on other fronts.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cShe didn\u2019t even have a chance to live her life or make decisions\u201d said the great-grandmother of Ma\u2019Khia Bryant, the teenager fatally shot by a Columbus police officer on Tuesday. \u201cJustice was not done.\u201d\u00a0Hot on the right\u201cThe border turned out to be a better attack on Biden than even Republicans thought,\u201d\u00a0Politico\u2019s Anita Kumar reports: \u201cAfter weeks of traveling to the border, writing letters, drafting memos and calling for investigations, Republicans are readying an even more aggressive plan to feature Biden\u2019s policies in campaign ads and mailers in states across the country. GOP officials say the border \u2014 alongside the resistance to reopening schools during the pandemic \u2014 offer[s] them the greatest political opportunities so far in Biden\u2019s young presidency. \u2018It\u2019s going to be a massive issue ... in the midterms,\u2019 said Republican strategist Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump. \u2018Biden clearly made a number of deals with progressives in his party but progressives in his party don\u2019t necessarily represent the swing voters and working class blue collar voters all around the country.\u2019\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCase in point, this tweet by Texas Republican Gov. Abbott:\u00a0\"The president doesn't feel that children coming to our border seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships & other dire circumstances is a crisis.\u201d - PsakiBiden\u2019s open border subjects children to the horrors of human trafficking. It\u2019s a crisis.https://t.co/GgLrqaXMCk\u2014 Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 22, 2021\n\nHot on the leftFormer president George W. Bush revealed to People magazine that he wrote in Condoleezza Rice\u2019s name in the 2020 presidential election. Folks on both sides of the aisle weren't impressed.He was proud to be the decider. But when it was all on the line, in 2020, he wouldn\u2019t decide. https://t.co/r3GE1OJ39G\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 23, 2021\n\nI worked for @JohnKerry in 2004 and have not regretted it for a single minute since. https://t.co/M6x6PHUz96\u2014 Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) April 23, 2021\n\nAnd a Cruz video went viral last night after he was stopped by a student near the Capitol, who asked him for a selfie \u2014 and then followed up with a question about his infamous trip to Canc\u00fan, Mexico.\u00a0Cruz, laughing awkwardly, rushes away from him.\u00a0Ted Cruz wouldn\u2019t tell me if he enjoyed Cancun \ud83c\udfd6 pic.twitter.com/7qRdWzuC7S\u2014 Noah \ud83d\uddf3 (@noahmitchell0) April 22, 2021\n\nBig Tech acquisitions, visualizedThe Washington Post reviewed multiple data sets and studies to show the scope of these purchases, which have drawn the attention of critics who worry the practice will dampen innovation and hurt consumers.Today in WashingtonHarris\u00a0will visit New Hampshire to resume the promotion of Biden\u2019s $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure package. She will hold a \u201clistening session\u201d in Plymouth on broadband access at 11:55 a.m. and will later visit a union hall in Concord at 2 p.m. before giving a speech on the plan at 2:40 p.m.\u00a0Biden\u00a0will receive the weekly economic briefing today at 1:45 and will participate in a virtual Department of Defense senior leaders conference at 2:45 p.m.\u00a0In closingDuring Biden\u2019s climate summit, British Prime Minister Johnson said his approach to combating climate change was not \u201cbunny hugging,\u201d and he insisted that green policies could be an economic opportunity. Activist Greta Thunberg, who loves to troll politicians on Twitter, changed her bio:Greta Thunberg trolling Boris Johnson has got to be the best thing I've seen since she trolled Trump pic.twitter.com/BJ6TizcHvj\u2014 alice \ud83d\udfe8\ud83d\udfe5\ud83c\udff3\ufe0f",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden next week will go big to his biggest audience yet (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7055",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/23/daily-202-biden-next-week-will-go-big-his-biggest-audience-yet/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Happy birthday to William Shakespeare (we think) and to James Buchanan (we know)!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden\u2019s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday won\u2019t look or sound much like those his predecessors gave, and not just because pandemic precautions mean he\u2019ll speak to a much emptier House chamber. It\u2019ll look different not just because of the social distancing, which also means lawmakers can\u2019t bring the usual headline-stealing guests, but also because for the first time in U.S. history the two people seated directly behind him will be women \u2014 Vice President Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).It\u2019ll sound different not just because of thinner applause (and boos) from a depleted crowd, but because\u00a0giving it this late in his first year means Biden won\u2019t just lay out his agenda \u2014 he\u2019ll be able to brag about his accomplishments in a way his predecessors could not in February of their inaugural years in office.Biden pushed through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package with only Democratic votes and has introduced a more than $2 trillion infrastructure package, both of which stand to remake large swaths of the economy. He has pledged to slash U.S. carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 to fight the climate crisis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile some early proposals have surrendered to political reality \u2014 internal Democratic dissent led him to nix, or at least postpone, efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour \u2014 Biden has unquestionably been ambitious.\u201cI did not expect him to be as big and as bold as he\u2019s been,\u201d House Democratic Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose 2020 endorsement reinvigorated Biden\u2019s campaign,\u00a0told Bloomberg Businessweek.White House aides have said since late last year Biden will be judged \u2014 by history and, well before that, by midterm election voters \u2014 based on his handling of the pandemic and the limping U.S. economy he inherited.\u201cHe certainly recognizes this is an opportunity to speak directly with the American people \u2014 one of the highest-profile opportunities that any president has in their first year in office,\u201d Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden will be able to say he met the goal he set of\u00a0getting 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses into 200 million arms in his\u00a0first 100 days and point to\u00a0stronger-than-expected recent job growth \u2014 even if he and his advisers underline the need to get more aid to more Americans this year.Biden is likely to credit\u00a0his broadly popular $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and notably its direct payments of up to $1,400 to millions of Americans, while urging support for his roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and his emerging American Families Plan \u2014 a package of largely popular benefits.The new initiative comprises new child-care benefits, universal prekindergarten education, paid family and medical leave, free community college, and nutritional aid, all with a price tag expected to run about $1.5 trillion,\u00a0my colleagues Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager reported this week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration envisions it will be \u201clargely if not fully paid for with new tax increases centered on upper-income Americans and wealthy investors,\u201d Jeff and Tyler reported.Biden plans to announce what would amount to dramatic tax hikes on the richest Americans, steps that \u201ccould reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor,\u201d\u00a0according to Bloomberg News\u2019s Laura Davison and Allyson Versprille.Biden \u201cwill propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6%, which, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for investors could be as high as 43.4%, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d they reported.Story continues below advertisementBiden is likely to promote efforts to overhaul policing, his ambitious (though nonbinding)\u00a0new commitments to battle the climate crisis, his setting in motion a full U.S.\u00a0troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, and other initiatives.AdvertisementThe president is also likely to defend his handling of immigration and the crisis at the southern border, where record numbers of unaccompanied migrants are overwhelming federal facilities to house them. Polls show far lower approval for Biden\u2019s approach to the issue than for other matters, and Republicans have hammered him on it.He could also do what most of his modern predecessors have done: Plead for bipartisan cooperation, even if (as I have written before) a cynic might describe that as a call to set aside ideological differences and do what the president wants.\u201cThe people did not send us here to bicker,\u201d then-President George H.W. Bush\u00a0said in his first speech to Congress in February 1989. \u201cIt is time to govern.\u201dWhile the GOP will deliver the usual rebuttal speech \u2014 this year,\u00a0the job falls to Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only Black Republican in the Senate \u2014 there will also be a response from Rep.\u00a0Jamaal Bowman, (D-N.Y.) on behalf of progressives.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a balancing act. He's already done a lot that I love. And he's going to say a lot of things that I like, as well,\u201d\u00a0Bowman told NBC in an interview. \u201cBut if we relent, it doesn't mean that what's been going on so far is going to continue. It's important for us as progressives to continue to push and continue to organize.\u201dAs for Scott, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) described the South Carolinian as \u201cone of the most inspiring and unifying leaders in our nation\u201d and underlined \u201cnobody is better at communicating why far-left policies fail working Americans.\u201dIn recent decades, with expanded viewing options and diminished attention spans, the traditional speech \u2014 don\u2019t call it a State of the Union address until 2022, please \u2014 has\u00a0lost much of its ratings, and consequently some of its luster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven with incredibly high stakes, the rote format invites lampooning \u2014 \u201cmy fellow Americans, I come before you tonight to speak in ringing tones and stare into the middle distance\u201d is a favorite. And some past stunts could be grating, like bipartisan seating, which one wag described as the political equivalent of a comb-over in that\u00a0it looks weird and fools no one.But that recalls the definition of a cynic as a person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The speech gets the president the largest audience he \u2014 any American politician, really \u2014 is guaranteed to get this year.\u201cIt won't represent or touch on the totality of every issue that's a priority,\u201d Psaki said. \u201cUnless you want to sit through a seven-hour speech. Which I don\u2019t think you do.\u201dWhat\u2019s happening nowBiden will travel to the U.K. and Belgium this June in his first overseas trip as president, the White House said. Biden will attend the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall from June 11 to 13, and he will also meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. After that, the president will travel to Brussels, where he will participate in the NATO summit on June 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRussian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will end his prison hunger strike, following the advice of his doctors who warned he could soon die.\u00a0\u201cNavalny, who is serving a more-than two-year sentence, began his hunger strike [24 days ago] as a demand to see independent medical specialists of his choosing at his expense,\u201d Isabelle Khurshudyan reports.\u00a0Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) will campaign for Michael Wood, a GOP congressional candidate in Texas who\u2019s calling for the party to move past Donald Trump.\u00a0\u201cKinzinger\u2019s office confirmed the visit, which will take him into a special election for Texas\u2019s 6th Congressional District, a part of the greater Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex that supports Republicans but backed Trump last year by just three points. Wood, a veteran and first-time candidate, has also received financial support from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and announced Monday that he had raised nearly $100,000 for the short special election campaign,\u201d David Weigel reports.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year.\u00a0\u201cFlying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan,\u201d Christian Davenport reports. \u201cCurrently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status.\u201d\u00a0SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on April 23, carrying four international astronauts to the International Space Station. (NASA TV)To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cTed Cruz maintains ties to right-wing group despite its extremist messaging,\u201d by Beth Reinhard and Neena Satija: \u201cA Post review of True Texas Project\u2019s activities and social media shows that Cruz has continued to embrace the [right-wing] group, even as its nativist rhetoric and divisive tactics have alienated some other conservative elected officials. Cruz\u2019s father, a frequent campaign surrogate for his son, spoke at a meeting of the group shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, at a time when the group\u2019s leadership was defending the pro-Trump mob on social media... Cruz\u2019s ongoing ties to TTP contrast with the group\u2019s fraught relationship with much of the Republican establishment in Texas. The group has lashed out at Republicans it perceives as too moderate \u2014 including Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.) and Gov. Greg Abbott \u2014 and has backed candidates against officeholders it once helped elect... James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said Cruz appears to have \u2018turned a blind eye\u2019 to the group\u2019s most extreme rhetoric. Many Cruz supporters would not view the group\u2019s messaging as racist, he added.\u201d\u201cSenate committee to take up Biden judicial nominees in preview of potential Supreme Court fight,\u201d by Ann Marimow and Paul Kane: \u201cThe Senate Judiciary Committee will take its first look next week at Biden\u2019s initial batch of judicial nominees... Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to review Biden\u2019s nominees to take advantage of their slim majority in the Senate and begin to remake the courts with judges from diverse personal and professional backgrounds. All five nominees under consideration next Wednesday are people of color ... The hearing featuring Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is up for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, could be a preview of what she would face if she is eventually nominated for a potential vacancy on the Supreme Court.More: \u201cMany senators are keeping an eye across the street, awaiting word whether Justice Stephen G. Breyer, 82, will step down. Democrats have not overtly pressured the court\u2019s oldest justice to retire, but privately they are hopeful he will step aside for a younger liberal while the party retains a majority \u2014 one that could disappear in the 2022 midterms or through an untimely illness that relegates them to minority status.\"\u201cThe United Nations is turning to artificial intelligence in search for peace in war zones,\u201d by Dalvin Brown: \u201cOver the past year, the United Nations has worked with the AI start-up Remesh on an algorithm that helped negotiate peace agreements across Yemen and Libya as the two nations grappled with ongoing civil wars and the coronavirus pandemic. The tool was deployed as a website link to stakeholders in embattled regions. It was designed to assess open-ended responses on the Internet from up to 1,000 people at a time and derive a consensus in near real-time. The software has helped the U.N. understand what groups in conflict zones are most concerned about during live discussions with political leaders.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cKevin McCarthy\u2019s gamble on a \u201cBig Tent\u201d GOP,\u201d\u00a0by Time\u2019s Lissandra Villa: \u201cThough he\u2019s one of the most senior Republicans in the country, McCarthy has declined to articulate a clear vision for which direction the party should be headed. \u2018This Republican Party\u2019s a very big tent,\u2019 he said after a closed-door conference meeting in February. ... \u2018Everyone\u2019s invited in,\u2019 McCarthy said. The \u2018big tent\u2019 doctrine is quintessential McCarthy. ... But conversations with more than a dozen current and former House members, GOP strategists, Republican staffers and other party observers offer a portrait of a politician with a win-at-all-costs approach.\u201d\u201cDemocrat Joe Manchin says there\u2019s one GOP senator he\u2019d endorse \u2018in a heartbeat,\u2019\u201d by Politico\u2019s Burgess Everett: \u201cThe West Virginia senator is backing Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski\u2019s reelection bid in the face of a pointed challenge from Trump. ... \u2018People understand that they have a person that understands Alaska and has Alaska in her blood and in every part of her veins and every morsel of her body,\u2019\u201d he said.\u201cU.S. drop in vaccine demand has some places turning down doses,\u201d\u00a0the Associated Press\u2019s Leah Willingham, Heather Hollingsworth and Michelle R. Smith report: \u201cLouisiana has stopped asking the federal government for its full allotment of COVID-19 vaccine. About three-quarters of Kansas counties have turned down new shipments of the vaccine at least once over the past month. And in Mississippi, officials asked the federal government to ship vials in smaller packages so they don\u2019t go to waste.\u201dThe Biden climate summitBiden delivered another round of remarks at the climate summit, focusing on the \u201ceconomic opportunities\u201d presented by climate change.\u00a0The president touted the new jobs combating climate change could bring, including in \u201cfields we haven\u2019t even conceived of yet,\u201d John Wagner reports. Biden also stressed the importance of ensuring that workers who \u201cthrived in yesterday\u2019s and today\u2019s industries have as bright a tomorrow in the new industries.\u201dJohn F. Kerry, Biden\u2019s special envoy for climate, opened the second day of the summit by echoing the same themes.\u00a0Fighting climate change \"is going to create millions of high-quality, good-paying jobs around the world, especially in countries that seize this agenda,\u201d Kerry said. \u201cToday is going to be about that vision. We\u2019re going to hear from governments, entrepreneurs, community and labor leaders about how they see the future.\u201dTransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg cast the climate challenge as a shared endeavor. \u201cPursuing a net-zero goal is not a zero-sum game,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all benefit if we succeed at this. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it\u2019s how interconnected we are and how capable we are of change.\u201dRead continuing coverage of the climate summit on our liveblog.The Energy Department announced more than $109.5 million for projects supporting job creation.\u00a0\u201cThe coal and power plant workers who built our nation can play a huge role in making America\u2019s clean energy future a reality, and this report outlines just the first steps the Biden administration is taking to make sure they have those opportunities right in their communities,\u201d Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said before launching the summit.The money, Steven Mufson reports, includes: $75 million funding opportunity to engineer carbon capture projects; $19.5 million in funding awards for critical mineral extraction from coal and associated waste streams; $15 million for geothermal energy research projects at West Virginia and Sandia National Laboratories.Notable:\u00a0That money is likely to help bolster support from the Senate\u2019s swing vote, Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).The United States, Britain and the UAE endorsed a new organization that helps farmers suffering from climate change.\u00a0\u201cUAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum said the joint effort would go toward research and development over the next five years,\u201d Mufson reports. \u201cPrivate investor and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the mission would help vulnerable subsistence farmers suffering from the unpredictable nature of climate change. They are hoping that other countries will join the initiative.\u201dCountries continued making their climate pledges.\u00a0Israel pledged to no longer burn coal in 2025 \u201cbarring unforeseen circumstances.\u201d\u00a0Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also announced that, by the end of this decade, renewable energy will provide more than one-third of Israel\u2019s electricity, John Wagner reports.Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen detailed some of her country\u2019s big plans to achieve a 70 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.\u00a0\u201cImagine that you are flying across the North Sea. Hundreds of wind turbines appear on the horizon. As you get closer, you spot an island, an island creating clean electricity, clean fuels, green innovation for millions of European households,\u201d Frederiksen said. \u201cThat\u2019s our Danish vision of the world\u2019s first energy island. ... Denmark will soon make it a reality.\u201dBiden\u2019s climate plan faces global skepticism.\u00a0\u201cWashington's history of backing out or failing to ratify climate commitments now jeopardizes widespread support for Biden\u2019s just-announced plans,\u201d Politico reports. \u201cThe Chinese government ... has been particularly scathing. \u2018The U.S. chose to come and go as it likes with regard to the Paris Agreement,\u2019 Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, implying that America may be offered forgiveness for its Paris Agreement backflips, but it cannot also expect applause for setting a 2030 target.\u201dChina\u2019s rivalry with the United States complicates its green push.\u00a0\u201c\u2026 it\u2019s uncertain how much more ground Xi is willing to concede \u2014 and under what circumstances,\u201d Gerry Shih reports. \u201cAlthough the United States, Japan and Canada on Thursday unveiled tighter new greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2030, Xi \u2014 as well as another key figure, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi \u2014 refrained from new commitments.\u201d\u201cEnvironmental groups say they were disappointed because Xi has staked out significant long-term goals to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 \u2014 but has not yet presented clarity about how to get there. Xi\u2019s reticence at the summit could be driven by domestic considerations, said Li Shuo, senior adviser at Greenpeace East Asia.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s precisely because it\u2019s a U.S.-organized event that China might have been more hesitant to put more offers on the table,\u201d Li told Shih.\u201cLi said the next venue for a potential Chinese announcement could be the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26 \u2014 a multilateral, rather than Biden-led, forum to take place in Glasgow in November.\u201dMore on Biden's expected tax proposals.\u201cBiden will propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6% to help pay for a raft of social spending that addresses long-standing inequality, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d Bloomberg News reports. \u201cFor those earning $1 million or more, the new top rate, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for wealthy investors could be as high as 43.4%. The new marginal 39.6% rate would be an increase from the current base rate of 20%.\u201d\u201cA 3.8% tax on investment income that funds Obamacare would be kept in place, pushing the tax rate on returns on financial assets higher than rates on some wage and salary income, they said... The proposal could reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor.\u201dPolicing in AmericaSix in 10 Americans say the country should do more to hold police accountable for mistreatment of Black people.\u00a0That is according to a new Post-ABC News poll, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report, which also found \u201csome skepticism of how Biden has handled the issue, with 42 percent of Americans saying he is doing \u2018too little\u2019 to reform police practices in the country, while 32 percent say he has done the right amount and 15 percent say he has done \u2018too much.\u2019\u201d\u201cNearly half of Black Americans and Democrats say Biden has done too little on this issue, a significant break from their typical lopsided support of his actions on other fronts.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cShe didn\u2019t even have a chance to live her life or make decisions\u201d said the great-grandmother of Ma\u2019Khia Bryant, the teenager fatally shot by a Columbus police officer on Tuesday. \u201cJustice was not done.\u201d\u00a0Hot on the right\u201cThe border turned out to be a better attack on Biden than even Republicans thought,\u201d\u00a0Politico\u2019s Anita Kumar reports: \u201cAfter weeks of traveling to the border, writing letters, drafting memos and calling for investigations, Republicans are readying an even more aggressive plan to feature Biden\u2019s policies in campaign ads and mailers in states across the country. GOP officials say the border \u2014 alongside the resistance to reopening schools during the pandemic \u2014 offer[s] them the greatest political opportunities so far in Biden\u2019s young presidency. \u2018It\u2019s going to be a massive issue ... in the midterms,\u2019 said Republican strategist Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump. \u2018Biden clearly made a number of deals with progressives in his party but progressives in his party don\u2019t necessarily represent the swing voters and working class blue collar voters all around the country.\u2019\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCase in point, this tweet by Texas Republican Gov. Abbott:\u00a0\"The president doesn't feel that children coming to our border seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships & other dire circumstances is a crisis.\u201d - PsakiBiden\u2019s open border subjects children to the horrors of human trafficking. It\u2019s a crisis.https://t.co/GgLrqaXMCk\u2014 Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 22, 2021\n\nHot on the leftFormer president George W. Bush revealed to People magazine that he wrote in Condoleezza Rice\u2019s name in the 2020 presidential election. Folks on both sides of the aisle weren't impressed.He was proud to be the decider. But when it was all on the line, in 2020, he wouldn\u2019t decide. https://t.co/r3GE1OJ39G\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 23, 2021\n\nI worked for @JohnKerry in 2004 and have not regretted it for a single minute since. https://t.co/M6x6PHUz96\u2014 Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) April 23, 2021\n\nAnd a Cruz video went viral last night after he was stopped by a student near the Capitol, who asked him for a selfie \u2014 and then followed up with a question about his infamous trip to Canc\u00fan, Mexico.\u00a0Cruz, laughing awkwardly, rushes away from him.\u00a0Ted Cruz wouldn\u2019t tell me if he enjoyed Cancun \ud83c\udfd6 pic.twitter.com/7qRdWzuC7S\u2014 Noah \ud83d\uddf3 (@noahmitchell0) April 22, 2021\n\nBig Tech acquisitions, visualizedThe Washington Post reviewed multiple data sets and studies to show the scope of these purchases, which have drawn the attention of critics who worry the practice will dampen innovation and hurt consumers.Today in WashingtonHarris\u00a0will visit New Hampshire to resume the promotion of Biden\u2019s $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure package. She will hold a \u201clistening session\u201d in Plymouth on broadband access at 11:55 a.m. and will later visit a union hall in Concord at 2 p.m. before giving a speech on the plan at 2:40 p.m.\u00a0Biden\u00a0will receive the weekly economic briefing today at 1:45 and will participate in a virtual Department of Defense senior leaders conference at 2:45 p.m.\u00a0In closingDuring Biden\u2019s climate summit, British Prime Minister Johnson said his approach to combating climate change was not \u201cbunny hugging,\u201d and he insisted that green policies could be an economic opportunity. Activist Greta Thunberg, who loves to troll politicians on Twitter, changed her bio:Greta Thunberg trolling Boris Johnson has got to be the best thing I've seen since she trolled Trump pic.twitter.com/BJ6TizcHvj\u2014 alice \ud83d\udfe8\ud83d\udfe5\ud83c\udff3\ufe0f",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden next week will go big to his biggest audience yet (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7056",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/23/daily-202-biden-next-week-will-go-big-his-biggest-audience-yet/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Happy birthday to William Shakespeare (we think) and to James Buchanan (we know)!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden\u2019s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday won\u2019t look or sound much like those his predecessors gave, and not just because pandemic precautions mean he\u2019ll speak to a much emptier House chamber. It\u2019ll look different not just because of the social distancing, which also means lawmakers can\u2019t bring the usual headline-stealing guests, but also because for the first time in U.S. history the two people seated directly behind him will be women \u2014 Vice President Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).It\u2019ll sound different not just because of thinner applause (and boos) from a depleted crowd, but because\u00a0giving it this late in his first year means Biden won\u2019t just lay out his agenda \u2014 he\u2019ll be able to brag about his accomplishments in a way his predecessors could not in February of their inaugural years in office.Biden pushed through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package with only Democratic votes and has introduced a more than $2 trillion infrastructure package, both of which stand to remake large swaths of the economy. He has pledged to slash U.S. carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 to fight the climate crisis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile some early proposals have surrendered to political reality \u2014 internal Democratic dissent led him to nix, or at least postpone, efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour \u2014 Biden has unquestionably been ambitious.\u201cI did not expect him to be as big and as bold as he\u2019s been,\u201d House Democratic Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose 2020 endorsement reinvigorated Biden\u2019s campaign,\u00a0told Bloomberg Businessweek.White House aides have said since late last year Biden will be judged \u2014 by history and, well before that, by midterm election voters \u2014 based on his handling of the pandemic and the limping U.S. economy he inherited.\u201cHe certainly recognizes this is an opportunity to speak directly with the American people \u2014 one of the highest-profile opportunities that any president has in their first year in office,\u201d Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden will be able to say he met the goal he set of\u00a0getting 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses into 200 million arms in his\u00a0first 100 days and point to\u00a0stronger-than-expected recent job growth \u2014 even if he and his advisers underline the need to get more aid to more Americans this year.Biden is likely to credit\u00a0his broadly popular $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and notably its direct payments of up to $1,400 to millions of Americans, while urging support for his roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and his emerging American Families Plan \u2014 a package of largely popular benefits.The new initiative comprises new child-care benefits, universal prekindergarten education, paid family and medical leave, free community college, and nutritional aid, all with a price tag expected to run about $1.5 trillion,\u00a0my colleagues Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager reported this week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration envisions it will be \u201clargely if not fully paid for with new tax increases centered on upper-income Americans and wealthy investors,\u201d Jeff and Tyler reported.Biden plans to announce what would amount to dramatic tax hikes on the richest Americans, steps that \u201ccould reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor,\u201d\u00a0according to Bloomberg News\u2019s Laura Davison and Allyson Versprille.Biden \u201cwill propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6%, which, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for investors could be as high as 43.4%, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d they reported.Story continues below advertisementBiden is likely to promote efforts to overhaul policing, his ambitious (though nonbinding)\u00a0new commitments to battle the climate crisis, his setting in motion a full U.S.\u00a0troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, and other initiatives.AdvertisementThe president is also likely to defend his handling of immigration and the crisis at the southern border, where record numbers of unaccompanied migrants are overwhelming federal facilities to house them. Polls show far lower approval for Biden\u2019s approach to the issue than for other matters, and Republicans have hammered him on it.He could also do what most of his modern predecessors have done: Plead for bipartisan cooperation, even if (as I have written before) a cynic might describe that as a call to set aside ideological differences and do what the president wants.\u201cThe people did not send us here to bicker,\u201d then-President George H.W. Bush\u00a0said in his first speech to Congress in February 1989. \u201cIt is time to govern.\u201dWhile the GOP will deliver the usual rebuttal speech \u2014 this year,\u00a0the job falls to Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only Black Republican in the Senate \u2014 there will also be a response from Rep.\u00a0Jamaal Bowman, (D-N.Y.) on behalf of progressives.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a balancing act. He's already done a lot that I love. And he's going to say a lot of things that I like, as well,\u201d\u00a0Bowman told NBC in an interview. \u201cBut if we relent, it doesn't mean that what's been going on so far is going to continue. It's important for us as progressives to continue to push and continue to organize.\u201dAs for Scott, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) described the South Carolinian as \u201cone of the most inspiring and unifying leaders in our nation\u201d and underlined \u201cnobody is better at communicating why far-left policies fail working Americans.\u201dIn recent decades, with expanded viewing options and diminished attention spans, the traditional speech \u2014 don\u2019t call it a State of the Union address until 2022, please \u2014 has\u00a0lost much of its ratings, and consequently some of its luster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven with incredibly high stakes, the rote format invites lampooning \u2014 \u201cmy fellow Americans, I come before you tonight to speak in ringing tones and stare into the middle distance\u201d is a favorite. And some past stunts could be grating, like bipartisan seating, which one wag described as the political equivalent of a comb-over in that\u00a0it looks weird and fools no one.But that recalls the definition of a cynic as a person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The speech gets the president the largest audience he \u2014 any American politician, really \u2014 is guaranteed to get this year.\u201cIt won't represent or touch on the totality of every issue that's a priority,\u201d Psaki said. \u201cUnless you want to sit through a seven-hour speech. Which I don\u2019t think you do.\u201dWhat\u2019s happening nowBiden will travel to the U.K. and Belgium this June in his first overseas trip as president, the White House said. Biden will attend the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall from June 11 to 13, and he will also meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. After that, the president will travel to Brussels, where he will participate in the NATO summit on June 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRussian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will end his prison hunger strike, following the advice of his doctors who warned he could soon die.\u00a0\u201cNavalny, who is serving a more-than two-year sentence, began his hunger strike [24 days ago] as a demand to see independent medical specialists of his choosing at his expense,\u201d Isabelle Khurshudyan reports.\u00a0Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) will campaign for Michael Wood, a GOP congressional candidate in Texas who\u2019s calling for the party to move past Donald Trump.\u00a0\u201cKinzinger\u2019s office confirmed the visit, which will take him into a special election for Texas\u2019s 6th Congressional District, a part of the greater Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex that supports Republicans but backed Trump last year by just three points. Wood, a veteran and first-time candidate, has also received financial support from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and announced Monday that he had raised nearly $100,000 for the short special election campaign,\u201d David Weigel reports.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year.\u00a0\u201cFlying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan,\u201d Christian Davenport reports. \u201cCurrently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status.\u201d\u00a0SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on April 23, carrying four international astronauts to the International Space Station. (NASA TV)To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cTed Cruz maintains ties to right-wing group despite its extremist messaging,\u201d by Beth Reinhard and Neena Satija: \u201cA Post review of True Texas Project\u2019s activities and social media shows that Cruz has continued to embrace the [right-wing] group, even as its nativist rhetoric and divisive tactics have alienated some other conservative elected officials. Cruz\u2019s father, a frequent campaign surrogate for his son, spoke at a meeting of the group shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, at a time when the group\u2019s leadership was defending the pro-Trump mob on social media... Cruz\u2019s ongoing ties to TTP contrast with the group\u2019s fraught relationship with much of the Republican establishment in Texas. The group has lashed out at Republicans it perceives as too moderate \u2014 including Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.) and Gov. Greg Abbott \u2014 and has backed candidates against officeholders it once helped elect... James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said Cruz appears to have \u2018turned a blind eye\u2019 to the group\u2019s most extreme rhetoric. Many Cruz supporters would not view the group\u2019s messaging as racist, he added.\u201d\u201cSenate committee to take up Biden judicial nominees in preview of potential Supreme Court fight,\u201d by Ann Marimow and Paul Kane: \u201cThe Senate Judiciary Committee will take its first look next week at Biden\u2019s initial batch of judicial nominees... Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to review Biden\u2019s nominees to take advantage of their slim majority in the Senate and begin to remake the courts with judges from diverse personal and professional backgrounds. All five nominees under consideration next Wednesday are people of color ... The hearing featuring Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is up for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, could be a preview of what she would face if she is eventually nominated for a potential vacancy on the Supreme Court.More: \u201cMany senators are keeping an eye across the street, awaiting word whether Justice Stephen G. Breyer, 82, will step down. Democrats have not overtly pressured the court\u2019s oldest justice to retire, but privately they are hopeful he will step aside for a younger liberal while the party retains a majority \u2014 one that could disappear in the 2022 midterms or through an untimely illness that relegates them to minority status.\"\u201cThe United Nations is turning to artificial intelligence in search for peace in war zones,\u201d by Dalvin Brown: \u201cOver the past year, the United Nations has worked with the AI start-up Remesh on an algorithm that helped negotiate peace agreements across Yemen and Libya as the two nations grappled with ongoing civil wars and the coronavirus pandemic. The tool was deployed as a website link to stakeholders in embattled regions. It was designed to assess open-ended responses on the Internet from up to 1,000 people at a time and derive a consensus in near real-time. The software has helped the U.N. understand what groups in conflict zones are most concerned about during live discussions with political leaders.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cKevin McCarthy\u2019s gamble on a \u201cBig Tent\u201d GOP,\u201d\u00a0by Time\u2019s Lissandra Villa: \u201cThough he\u2019s one of the most senior Republicans in the country, McCarthy has declined to articulate a clear vision for which direction the party should be headed. \u2018This Republican Party\u2019s a very big tent,\u2019 he said after a closed-door conference meeting in February. ... \u2018Everyone\u2019s invited in,\u2019 McCarthy said. The \u2018big tent\u2019 doctrine is quintessential McCarthy. ... But conversations with more than a dozen current and former House members, GOP strategists, Republican staffers and other party observers offer a portrait of a politician with a win-at-all-costs approach.\u201d\u201cDemocrat Joe Manchin says there\u2019s one GOP senator he\u2019d endorse \u2018in a heartbeat,\u2019\u201d by Politico\u2019s Burgess Everett: \u201cThe West Virginia senator is backing Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski\u2019s reelection bid in the face of a pointed challenge from Trump. ... \u2018People understand that they have a person that understands Alaska and has Alaska in her blood and in every part of her veins and every morsel of her body,\u2019\u201d he said.\u201cU.S. drop in vaccine demand has some places turning down doses,\u201d\u00a0the Associated Press\u2019s Leah Willingham, Heather Hollingsworth and Michelle R. Smith report: \u201cLouisiana has stopped asking the federal government for its full allotment of COVID-19 vaccine. About three-quarters of Kansas counties have turned down new shipments of the vaccine at least once over the past month. And in Mississippi, officials asked the federal government to ship vials in smaller packages so they don\u2019t go to waste.\u201dThe Biden climate summitBiden delivered another round of remarks at the climate summit, focusing on the \u201ceconomic opportunities\u201d presented by climate change.\u00a0The president touted the new jobs combating climate change could bring, including in \u201cfields we haven\u2019t even conceived of yet,\u201d John Wagner reports. Biden also stressed the importance of ensuring that workers who \u201cthrived in yesterday\u2019s and today\u2019s industries have as bright a tomorrow in the new industries.\u201dJohn F. Kerry, Biden\u2019s special envoy for climate, opened the second day of the summit by echoing the same themes.\u00a0Fighting climate change \"is going to create millions of high-quality, good-paying jobs around the world, especially in countries that seize this agenda,\u201d Kerry said. \u201cToday is going to be about that vision. We\u2019re going to hear from governments, entrepreneurs, community and labor leaders about how they see the future.\u201dTransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg cast the climate challenge as a shared endeavor. \u201cPursuing a net-zero goal is not a zero-sum game,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all benefit if we succeed at this. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it\u2019s how interconnected we are and how capable we are of change.\u201dRead continuing coverage of the climate summit on our liveblog.The Energy Department announced more than $109.5 million for projects supporting job creation.\u00a0\u201cThe coal and power plant workers who built our nation can play a huge role in making America\u2019s clean energy future a reality, and this report outlines just the first steps the Biden administration is taking to make sure they have those opportunities right in their communities,\u201d Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said before launching the summit.The money, Steven Mufson reports, includes: $75 million funding opportunity to engineer carbon capture projects; $19.5 million in funding awards for critical mineral extraction from coal and associated waste streams; $15 million for geothermal energy research projects at West Virginia and Sandia National Laboratories.Notable:\u00a0That money is likely to help bolster support from the Senate\u2019s swing vote, Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).The United States, Britain and the UAE endorsed a new organization that helps farmers suffering from climate change.\u00a0\u201cUAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum said the joint effort would go toward research and development over the next five years,\u201d Mufson reports. \u201cPrivate investor and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the mission would help vulnerable subsistence farmers suffering from the unpredictable nature of climate change. They are hoping that other countries will join the initiative.\u201dCountries continued making their climate pledges.\u00a0Israel pledged to no longer burn coal in 2025 \u201cbarring unforeseen circumstances.\u201d\u00a0Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also announced that, by the end of this decade, renewable energy will provide more than one-third of Israel\u2019s electricity, John Wagner reports.Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen detailed some of her country\u2019s big plans to achieve a 70 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.\u00a0\u201cImagine that you are flying across the North Sea. Hundreds of wind turbines appear on the horizon. As you get closer, you spot an island, an island creating clean electricity, clean fuels, green innovation for millions of European households,\u201d Frederiksen said. \u201cThat\u2019s our Danish vision of the world\u2019s first energy island. ... Denmark will soon make it a reality.\u201dBiden\u2019s climate plan faces global skepticism.\u00a0\u201cWashington's history of backing out or failing to ratify climate commitments now jeopardizes widespread support for Biden\u2019s just-announced plans,\u201d Politico reports. \u201cThe Chinese government ... has been particularly scathing. \u2018The U.S. chose to come and go as it likes with regard to the Paris Agreement,\u2019 Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, implying that America may be offered forgiveness for its Paris Agreement backflips, but it cannot also expect applause for setting a 2030 target.\u201dChina\u2019s rivalry with the United States complicates its green push.\u00a0\u201c\u2026 it\u2019s uncertain how much more ground Xi is willing to concede \u2014 and under what circumstances,\u201d Gerry Shih reports. \u201cAlthough the United States, Japan and Canada on Thursday unveiled tighter new greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2030, Xi \u2014 as well as another key figure, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi \u2014 refrained from new commitments.\u201d\u201cEnvironmental groups say they were disappointed because Xi has staked out significant long-term goals to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 \u2014 but has not yet presented clarity about how to get there. Xi\u2019s reticence at the summit could be driven by domestic considerations, said Li Shuo, senior adviser at Greenpeace East Asia.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s precisely because it\u2019s a U.S.-organized event that China might have been more hesitant to put more offers on the table,\u201d Li told Shih.\u201cLi said the next venue for a potential Chinese announcement could be the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26 \u2014 a multilateral, rather than Biden-led, forum to take place in Glasgow in November.\u201dMore on Biden's expected tax proposals.\u201cBiden will propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6% to help pay for a raft of social spending that addresses long-standing inequality, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d Bloomberg News reports. \u201cFor those earning $1 million or more, the new top rate, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for wealthy investors could be as high as 43.4%. The new marginal 39.6% rate would be an increase from the current base rate of 20%.\u201d\u201cA 3.8% tax on investment income that funds Obamacare would be kept in place, pushing the tax rate on returns on financial assets higher than rates on some wage and salary income, they said... The proposal could reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor.\u201dPolicing in AmericaSix in 10 Americans say the country should do more to hold police accountable for mistreatment of Black people.\u00a0That is according to a new Post-ABC News poll, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report, which also found \u201csome skepticism of how Biden has handled the issue, with 42 percent of Americans saying he is doing \u2018too little\u2019 to reform police practices in the country, while 32 percent say he has done the right amount and 15 percent say he has done \u2018too much.\u2019\u201d\u201cNearly half of Black Americans and Democrats say Biden has done too little on this issue, a significant break from their typical lopsided support of his actions on other fronts.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cShe didn\u2019t even have a chance to live her life or make decisions\u201d said the great-grandmother of Ma\u2019Khia Bryant, the teenager fatally shot by a Columbus police officer on Tuesday. \u201cJustice was not done.\u201d\u00a0Hot on the right\u201cThe border turned out to be a better attack on Biden than even Republicans thought,\u201d\u00a0Politico\u2019s Anita Kumar reports: \u201cAfter weeks of traveling to the border, writing letters, drafting memos and calling for investigations, Republicans are readying an even more aggressive plan to feature Biden\u2019s policies in campaign ads and mailers in states across the country. GOP officials say the border \u2014 alongside the resistance to reopening schools during the pandemic \u2014 offer[s] them the greatest political opportunities so far in Biden\u2019s young presidency. \u2018It\u2019s going to be a massive issue ... in the midterms,\u2019 said Republican strategist Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump. \u2018Biden clearly made a number of deals with progressives in his party but progressives in his party don\u2019t necessarily represent the swing voters and working class blue collar voters all around the country.\u2019\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCase in point, this tweet by Texas Republican Gov. Abbott:\u00a0\"The president doesn't feel that children coming to our border seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships & other dire circumstances is a crisis.\u201d - PsakiBiden\u2019s open border subjects children to the horrors of human trafficking. It\u2019s a crisis.https://t.co/GgLrqaXMCk\u2014 Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 22, 2021\n\nHot on the leftFormer president George W. Bush revealed to People magazine that he wrote in Condoleezza Rice\u2019s name in the 2020 presidential election. Folks on both sides of the aisle weren't impressed.He was proud to be the decider. But when it was all on the line, in 2020, he wouldn\u2019t decide. https://t.co/r3GE1OJ39G\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 23, 2021\n\nI worked for @JohnKerry in 2004 and have not regretted it for a single minute since. https://t.co/M6x6PHUz96\u2014 Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) April 23, 2021\n\nAnd a Cruz video went viral last night after he was stopped by a student near the Capitol, who asked him for a selfie \u2014 and then followed up with a question about his infamous trip to Canc\u00fan, Mexico.\u00a0Cruz, laughing awkwardly, rushes away from him.\u00a0Ted Cruz wouldn\u2019t tell me if he enjoyed Cancun \ud83c\udfd6 pic.twitter.com/7qRdWzuC7S\u2014 Noah \ud83d\uddf3 (@noahmitchell0) April 22, 2021\n\nBig Tech acquisitions, visualizedThe Washington Post reviewed multiple data sets and studies to show the scope of these purchases, which have drawn the attention of critics who worry the practice will dampen innovation and hurt consumers.Today in WashingtonHarris\u00a0will visit New Hampshire to resume the promotion of Biden\u2019s $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure package. She will hold a \u201clistening session\u201d in Plymouth on broadband access at 11:55 a.m. and will later visit a union hall in Concord at 2 p.m. before giving a speech on the plan at 2:40 p.m.\u00a0Biden\u00a0will receive the weekly economic briefing today at 1:45 and will participate in a virtual Department of Defense senior leaders conference at 2:45 p.m.\u00a0In closingDuring Biden\u2019s climate summit, British Prime Minister Johnson said his approach to combating climate change was not \u201cbunny hugging,\u201d and he insisted that green policies could be an economic opportunity. Activist Greta Thunberg, who loves to troll politicians on Twitter, changed her bio:Greta Thunberg trolling Boris Johnson has got to be the best thing I've seen since she trolled Trump pic.twitter.com/BJ6TizcHvj\u2014 alice \ud83d\udfe8\ud83d\udfe5\ud83c\udff3\ufe0f",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Biden next week will go big to his biggest audience yet (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7057",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/23/daily-202-biden-next-week-will-go-big-his-biggest-audience-yet/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Happy birthday to William Shakespeare (we think) and to James Buchanan (we know)!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden\u2019s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday won\u2019t look or sound much like those his predecessors gave, and not just because pandemic precautions mean he\u2019ll speak to a much emptier House chamber. It\u2019ll look different not just because of the social distancing, which also means lawmakers can\u2019t bring the usual headline-stealing guests, but also because for the first time in U.S. history the two people seated directly behind him will be women \u2014 Vice President Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).It\u2019ll sound different not just because of thinner applause (and boos) from a depleted crowd, but because\u00a0giving it this late in his first year means Biden won\u2019t just lay out his agenda \u2014 he\u2019ll be able to brag about his accomplishments in a way his predecessors could not in February of their inaugural years in office.Biden pushed through a $1.9 trillion stimulus package with only Democratic votes and has introduced a more than $2 trillion infrastructure package, both of which stand to remake large swaths of the economy. He has pledged to slash U.S. carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 to fight the climate crisis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile some early proposals have surrendered to political reality \u2014 internal Democratic dissent led him to nix, or at least postpone, efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour \u2014 Biden has unquestionably been ambitious.\u201cI did not expect him to be as big and as bold as he\u2019s been,\u201d House Democratic Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose 2020 endorsement reinvigorated Biden\u2019s campaign,\u00a0told Bloomberg Businessweek.White House aides have said since late last year Biden will be judged \u2014 by history and, well before that, by midterm election voters \u2014 based on his handling of the pandemic and the limping U.S. economy he inherited.\u201cHe certainly recognizes this is an opportunity to speak directly with the American people \u2014 one of the highest-profile opportunities that any president has in their first year in office,\u201d Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden will be able to say he met the goal he set of\u00a0getting 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses into 200 million arms in his\u00a0first 100 days and point to\u00a0stronger-than-expected recent job growth \u2014 even if he and his advisers underline the need to get more aid to more Americans this year.Biden is likely to credit\u00a0his broadly popular $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, and notably its direct payments of up to $1,400 to millions of Americans, while urging support for his roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and his emerging American Families Plan \u2014 a package of largely popular benefits.The new initiative comprises new child-care benefits, universal prekindergarten education, paid family and medical leave, free community college, and nutritional aid, all with a price tag expected to run about $1.5 trillion,\u00a0my colleagues Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager reported this week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe administration envisions it will be \u201clargely if not fully paid for with new tax increases centered on upper-income Americans and wealthy investors,\u201d Jeff and Tyler reported.Biden plans to announce what would amount to dramatic tax hikes on the richest Americans, steps that \u201ccould reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor,\u201d\u00a0according to Bloomberg News\u2019s Laura Davison and Allyson Versprille.Biden \u201cwill propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6%, which, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for investors could be as high as 43.4%, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d they reported.Story continues below advertisementBiden is likely to promote efforts to overhaul policing, his ambitious (though nonbinding)\u00a0new commitments to battle the climate crisis, his setting in motion a full U.S.\u00a0troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, and other initiatives.AdvertisementThe president is also likely to defend his handling of immigration and the crisis at the southern border, where record numbers of unaccompanied migrants are overwhelming federal facilities to house them. Polls show far lower approval for Biden\u2019s approach to the issue than for other matters, and Republicans have hammered him on it.He could also do what most of his modern predecessors have done: Plead for bipartisan cooperation, even if (as I have written before) a cynic might describe that as a call to set aside ideological differences and do what the president wants.\u201cThe people did not send us here to bicker,\u201d then-President George H.W. Bush\u00a0said in his first speech to Congress in February 1989. \u201cIt is time to govern.\u201dWhile the GOP will deliver the usual rebuttal speech \u2014 this year,\u00a0the job falls to Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), the only Black Republican in the Senate \u2014 there will also be a response from Rep.\u00a0Jamaal Bowman, (D-N.Y.) on behalf of progressives.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt's a balancing act. He's already done a lot that I love. And he's going to say a lot of things that I like, as well,\u201d\u00a0Bowman told NBC in an interview. \u201cBut if we relent, it doesn't mean that what's been going on so far is going to continue. It's important for us as progressives to continue to push and continue to organize.\u201dAs for Scott, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) described the South Carolinian as \u201cone of the most inspiring and unifying leaders in our nation\u201d and underlined \u201cnobody is better at communicating why far-left policies fail working Americans.\u201dIn recent decades, with expanded viewing options and diminished attention spans, the traditional speech \u2014 don\u2019t call it a State of the Union address until 2022, please \u2014 has\u00a0lost much of its ratings, and consequently some of its luster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven with incredibly high stakes, the rote format invites lampooning \u2014 \u201cmy fellow Americans, I come before you tonight to speak in ringing tones and stare into the middle distance\u201d is a favorite. And some past stunts could be grating, like bipartisan seating, which one wag described as the political equivalent of a comb-over in that\u00a0it looks weird and fools no one.But that recalls the definition of a cynic as a person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The speech gets the president the largest audience he \u2014 any American politician, really \u2014 is guaranteed to get this year.\u201cIt won't represent or touch on the totality of every issue that's a priority,\u201d Psaki said. \u201cUnless you want to sit through a seven-hour speech. Which I don\u2019t think you do.\u201dWhat\u2019s happening nowBiden will travel to the U.K. and Belgium this June in his first overseas trip as president, the White House said. Biden will attend the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall from June 11 to 13, and he will also meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. After that, the president will travel to Brussels, where he will participate in the NATO summit on June 14.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRussian opposition leader Alexei Navalny will end his prison hunger strike, following the advice of his doctors who warned he could soon die.\u00a0\u201cNavalny, who is serving a more-than two-year sentence, began his hunger strike [24 days ago] as a demand to see independent medical specialists of his choosing at his expense,\u201d Isabelle Khurshudyan reports.\u00a0Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) will campaign for Michael Wood, a GOP congressional candidate in Texas who\u2019s calling for the party to move past Donald Trump.\u00a0\u201cKinzinger\u2019s office confirmed the visit, which will take him into a special election for Texas\u2019s 6th Congressional District, a part of the greater Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex that supports Republicans but backed Trump last year by just three points. Wood, a veteran and first-time candidate, has also received financial support from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and announced Monday that he had raised nearly $100,000 for the short special election campaign,\u201d David Weigel reports.\u00a0Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX launched NASA\u2019s Crew-2 to orbit, its third human spaceflight in less than a year.\u00a0\u201cFlying inside SpaceX\u2019s autonomous Dragon spacecraft was an international quartet known as Crew-2: NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, as well as Thomas Pesquet of France and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan,\u201d Christian Davenport reports. \u201cCurrently, SpaceX is NASA\u2019s sole American human spaceflight provider. Boeing is months behind schedule in its efforts to win similar status.\u201d\u00a0SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on April 23, carrying four international astronauts to the International Space Station. (NASA TV)To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cTed Cruz maintains ties to right-wing group despite its extremist messaging,\u201d by Beth Reinhard and Neena Satija: \u201cA Post review of True Texas Project\u2019s activities and social media shows that Cruz has continued to embrace the [right-wing] group, even as its nativist rhetoric and divisive tactics have alienated some other conservative elected officials. Cruz\u2019s father, a frequent campaign surrogate for his son, spoke at a meeting of the group shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, at a time when the group\u2019s leadership was defending the pro-Trump mob on social media... Cruz\u2019s ongoing ties to TTP contrast with the group\u2019s fraught relationship with much of the Republican establishment in Texas. The group has lashed out at Republicans it perceives as too moderate \u2014 including Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.) and Gov. Greg Abbott \u2014 and has backed candidates against officeholders it once helped elect... James Riddlesperger, a political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said Cruz appears to have \u2018turned a blind eye\u2019 to the group\u2019s most extreme rhetoric. Many Cruz supporters would not view the group\u2019s messaging as racist, he added.\u201d\u201cSenate committee to take up Biden judicial nominees in preview of potential Supreme Court fight,\u201d by Ann Marimow and Paul Kane: \u201cThe Senate Judiciary Committee will take its first look next week at Biden\u2019s initial batch of judicial nominees... Democratic lawmakers are moving quickly to review Biden\u2019s nominees to take advantage of their slim majority in the Senate and begin to remake the courts with judges from diverse personal and professional backgrounds. All five nominees under consideration next Wednesday are people of color ... The hearing featuring Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is up for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, could be a preview of what she would face if she is eventually nominated for a potential vacancy on the Supreme Court.More: \u201cMany senators are keeping an eye across the street, awaiting word whether Justice Stephen G. Breyer, 82, will step down. Democrats have not overtly pressured the court\u2019s oldest justice to retire, but privately they are hopeful he will step aside for a younger liberal while the party retains a majority \u2014 one that could disappear in the 2022 midterms or through an untimely illness that relegates them to minority status.\"\u201cThe United Nations is turning to artificial intelligence in search for peace in war zones,\u201d by Dalvin Brown: \u201cOver the past year, the United Nations has worked with the AI start-up Remesh on an algorithm that helped negotiate peace agreements across Yemen and Libya as the two nations grappled with ongoing civil wars and the coronavirus pandemic. The tool was deployed as a website link to stakeholders in embattled regions. It was designed to assess open-ended responses on the Internet from up to 1,000 people at a time and derive a consensus in near real-time. The software has helped the U.N. understand what groups in conflict zones are most concerned about during live discussions with political leaders.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cKevin McCarthy\u2019s gamble on a \u201cBig Tent\u201d GOP,\u201d\u00a0by Time\u2019s Lissandra Villa: \u201cThough he\u2019s one of the most senior Republicans in the country, McCarthy has declined to articulate a clear vision for which direction the party should be headed. \u2018This Republican Party\u2019s a very big tent,\u2019 he said after a closed-door conference meeting in February. ... \u2018Everyone\u2019s invited in,\u2019 McCarthy said. The \u2018big tent\u2019 doctrine is quintessential McCarthy. ... But conversations with more than a dozen current and former House members, GOP strategists, Republican staffers and other party observers offer a portrait of a politician with a win-at-all-costs approach.\u201d\u201cDemocrat Joe Manchin says there\u2019s one GOP senator he\u2019d endorse \u2018in a heartbeat,\u2019\u201d by Politico\u2019s Burgess Everett: \u201cThe West Virginia senator is backing Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski\u2019s reelection bid in the face of a pointed challenge from Trump. ... \u2018People understand that they have a person that understands Alaska and has Alaska in her blood and in every part of her veins and every morsel of her body,\u2019\u201d he said.\u201cU.S. drop in vaccine demand has some places turning down doses,\u201d\u00a0the Associated Press\u2019s Leah Willingham, Heather Hollingsworth and Michelle R. Smith report: \u201cLouisiana has stopped asking the federal government for its full allotment of COVID-19 vaccine. About three-quarters of Kansas counties have turned down new shipments of the vaccine at least once over the past month. And in Mississippi, officials asked the federal government to ship vials in smaller packages so they don\u2019t go to waste.\u201dThe Biden climate summitBiden delivered another round of remarks at the climate summit, focusing on the \u201ceconomic opportunities\u201d presented by climate change.\u00a0The president touted the new jobs combating climate change could bring, including in \u201cfields we haven\u2019t even conceived of yet,\u201d John Wagner reports. Biden also stressed the importance of ensuring that workers who \u201cthrived in yesterday\u2019s and today\u2019s industries have as bright a tomorrow in the new industries.\u201dJohn F. Kerry, Biden\u2019s special envoy for climate, opened the second day of the summit by echoing the same themes.\u00a0Fighting climate change \"is going to create millions of high-quality, good-paying jobs around the world, especially in countries that seize this agenda,\u201d Kerry said. \u201cToday is going to be about that vision. We\u2019re going to hear from governments, entrepreneurs, community and labor leaders about how they see the future.\u201dTransportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg cast the climate challenge as a shared endeavor. \u201cPursuing a net-zero goal is not a zero-sum game,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all benefit if we succeed at this. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it\u2019s how interconnected we are and how capable we are of change.\u201dRead continuing coverage of the climate summit on our liveblog.The Energy Department announced more than $109.5 million for projects supporting job creation.\u00a0\u201cThe coal and power plant workers who built our nation can play a huge role in making America\u2019s clean energy future a reality, and this report outlines just the first steps the Biden administration is taking to make sure they have those opportunities right in their communities,\u201d Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said before launching the summit.The money, Steven Mufson reports, includes: $75 million funding opportunity to engineer carbon capture projects; $19.5 million in funding awards for critical mineral extraction from coal and associated waste streams; $15 million for geothermal energy research projects at West Virginia and Sandia National Laboratories.Notable:\u00a0That money is likely to help bolster support from the Senate\u2019s swing vote, Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).The United States, Britain and the UAE endorsed a new organization that helps farmers suffering from climate change.\u00a0\u201cUAE Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum said the joint effort would go toward research and development over the next five years,\u201d Mufson reports. \u201cPrivate investor and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said the mission would help vulnerable subsistence farmers suffering from the unpredictable nature of climate change. They are hoping that other countries will join the initiative.\u201dCountries continued making their climate pledges.\u00a0Israel pledged to no longer burn coal in 2025 \u201cbarring unforeseen circumstances.\u201d\u00a0Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also announced that, by the end of this decade, renewable energy will provide more than one-third of Israel\u2019s electricity, John Wagner reports.Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen detailed some of her country\u2019s big plans to achieve a 70 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.\u00a0\u201cImagine that you are flying across the North Sea. Hundreds of wind turbines appear on the horizon. As you get closer, you spot an island, an island creating clean electricity, clean fuels, green innovation for millions of European households,\u201d Frederiksen said. \u201cThat\u2019s our Danish vision of the world\u2019s first energy island. ... Denmark will soon make it a reality.\u201dBiden\u2019s climate plan faces global skepticism.\u00a0\u201cWashington's history of backing out or failing to ratify climate commitments now jeopardizes widespread support for Biden\u2019s just-announced plans,\u201d Politico reports. \u201cThe Chinese government ... has been particularly scathing. \u2018The U.S. chose to come and go as it likes with regard to the Paris Agreement,\u2019 Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, implying that America may be offered forgiveness for its Paris Agreement backflips, but it cannot also expect applause for setting a 2030 target.\u201dChina\u2019s rivalry with the United States complicates its green push.\u00a0\u201c\u2026 it\u2019s uncertain how much more ground Xi is willing to concede \u2014 and under what circumstances,\u201d Gerry Shih reports. \u201cAlthough the United States, Japan and Canada on Thursday unveiled tighter new greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2030, Xi \u2014 as well as another key figure, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi \u2014 refrained from new commitments.\u201d\u201cEnvironmental groups say they were disappointed because Xi has staked out significant long-term goals to reach carbon neutrality by 2060 \u2014 but has not yet presented clarity about how to get there. Xi\u2019s reticence at the summit could be driven by domestic considerations, said Li Shuo, senior adviser at Greenpeace East Asia.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s precisely because it\u2019s a U.S.-organized event that China might have been more hesitant to put more offers on the table,\u201d Li told Shih.\u201cLi said the next venue for a potential Chinese announcement could be the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP26 \u2014 a multilateral, rather than Biden-led, forum to take place in Glasgow in November.\u201dMore on Biden's expected tax proposals.\u201cBiden will propose almost doubling the capital gains tax rate for wealthy individuals to 39.6% to help pay for a raft of social spending that addresses long-standing inequality, according to people familiar with the proposal,\u201d Bloomberg News reports. \u201cFor those earning $1 million or more, the new top rate, coupled with an existing surtax on investment income, means that federal tax rates for wealthy investors could be as high as 43.4%. The new marginal 39.6% rate would be an increase from the current base rate of 20%.\u201d\u201cA 3.8% tax on investment income that funds Obamacare would be kept in place, pushing the tax rate on returns on financial assets higher than rates on some wage and salary income, they said... The proposal could reverse a long-standing provision of the tax code that taxes returns on investment lower than on labor.\u201dPolicing in AmericaSix in 10 Americans say the country should do more to hold police accountable for mistreatment of Black people.\u00a0That is according to a new Post-ABC News poll, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report, which also found \u201csome skepticism of how Biden has handled the issue, with 42 percent of Americans saying he is doing \u2018too little\u2019 to reform police practices in the country, while 32 percent say he has done the right amount and 15 percent say he has done \u2018too much.\u2019\u201d\u201cNearly half of Black Americans and Democrats say Biden has done too little on this issue, a significant break from their typical lopsided support of his actions on other fronts.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cShe didn\u2019t even have a chance to live her life or make decisions\u201d said the great-grandmother of Ma\u2019Khia Bryant, the teenager fatally shot by a Columbus police officer on Tuesday. \u201cJustice was not done.\u201d\u00a0Hot on the right\u201cThe border turned out to be a better attack on Biden than even Republicans thought,\u201d\u00a0Politico\u2019s Anita Kumar reports: \u201cAfter weeks of traveling to the border, writing letters, drafting memos and calling for investigations, Republicans are readying an even more aggressive plan to feature Biden\u2019s policies in campaign ads and mailers in states across the country. GOP officials say the border \u2014 alongside the resistance to reopening schools during the pandemic \u2014 offer[s] them the greatest political opportunities so far in Biden\u2019s young presidency. \u2018It\u2019s going to be a massive issue ... in the midterms,\u2019 said Republican strategist Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump. \u2018Biden clearly made a number of deals with progressives in his party but progressives in his party don\u2019t necessarily represent the swing voters and working class blue collar voters all around the country.\u2019\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCase in point, this tweet by Texas Republican Gov. Abbott:\u00a0\"The president doesn't feel that children coming to our border seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships & other dire circumstances is a crisis.\u201d - PsakiBiden\u2019s open border subjects children to the horrors of human trafficking. It\u2019s a crisis.https://t.co/GgLrqaXMCk\u2014 Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 22, 2021\n\nHot on the leftFormer president George W. Bush revealed to People magazine that he wrote in Condoleezza Rice\u2019s name in the 2020 presidential election. Folks on both sides of the aisle weren't impressed.He was proud to be the decider. But when it was all on the line, in 2020, he wouldn\u2019t decide. https://t.co/r3GE1OJ39G\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 23, 2021\n\nI worked for @JohnKerry in 2004 and have not regretted it for a single minute since. https://t.co/M6x6PHUz96\u2014 Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) April 23, 2021\n\nAnd a Cruz video went viral last night after he was stopped by a student near the Capitol, who asked him for a selfie \u2014 and then followed up with a question about his infamous trip to Canc\u00fan, Mexico.\u00a0Cruz, laughing awkwardly, rushes away from him.\u00a0Ted Cruz wouldn\u2019t tell me if he enjoyed Cancun \ud83c\udfd6 pic.twitter.com/7qRdWzuC7S\u2014 Noah \ud83d\uddf3 (@noahmitchell0) April 22, 2021\n\nBig Tech acquisitions, visualizedThe Washington Post reviewed multiple data sets and studies to show the scope of these purchases, which have drawn the attention of critics who worry the practice will dampen innovation and hurt consumers.Today in WashingtonHarris\u00a0will visit New Hampshire to resume the promotion of Biden\u2019s $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure package. She will hold a \u201clistening session\u201d in Plymouth on broadband access at 11:55 a.m. and will later visit a union hall in Concord at 2 p.m. before giving a speech on the plan at 2:40 p.m.\u00a0Biden\u00a0will receive the weekly economic briefing today at 1:45 and will participate in a virtual Department of Defense senior leaders conference at 2:45 p.m.\u00a0In closingDuring Biden\u2019s climate summit, British Prime Minister Johnson said his approach to combating climate change was not \u201cbunny hugging,\u201d and he insisted that green policies could be an economic opportunity. Activist Greta Thunberg, who loves to troll politicians on Twitter, changed her bio:Greta Thunberg trolling Boris Johnson has got to be the best thing I've seen since she trolled Trump pic.twitter.com/BJ6TizcHvj\u2014 alice \ud83d\udfe8\ud83d\udfe5\ud83c\udff3\ufe0f",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: The Ukraine transcript is full of fresh fodder for Democrats who want to impeach Trump (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7058",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/09/25/daily-202-the-ukraine-transcript-is-full-of-fresh-fodder-for-democrats-who-want-to-impeach-trump/5d8af523602ff14beb3da8cc/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0If President Trump thought releasing the transcript of his call with Ukraine\u2019s president would break impeachment fever on Capitol Hill, he miscalculated. The five-page summary released this morning will only intensify Democratic demands to see the entire whistleblower complaint.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), a member of Democratic leadership, said the president asking for Ukraine\u2019s help to undermine his 2020 challenger is \u201ca textbook abuse of power.\u201d At a news conference, he said \u201cthe transcripts become exhibit A.\u201d According to the transcript, Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Attorney General Bill Barr and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate the conduct of Joe Biden and offered to meet with the new president at the White House after he promised to conduct such an inquiry. \u201cI would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,\u201d Trump said, according to the transcript.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump seems to suggest that Hillary Clinton\u2019s private email server is in Ukraine at one point. He asserts at another that Bob Mueller\u2019s investigation started with that country.-- \u201cSenior Justice Department officials said the director of national intelligence referred the concerns about the call to the Justice Department, after the intelligence community inspector general found that it was a possible violation of campaign finance laws that ban people from soliciting contributions from foreign sources. The inspector general later also referred the matter to the FBI,\u201d Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig report. \u201cCareer prosecutors and officials in the Justice Department\u2019s criminal division then reviewed the transcript of the call, which they obtained voluntarily from the White House, and determined the facts \u2018could not make out and cannot make out\u2019 the appropriate basis for an investigation, a senior Justice Department official said. As part of their reasoning, Justice Department lawyers determined that help with a government investigation could not be considered \u2018a thing of value\u2019 under the law.\u201d-- What was released by the White House is a five-page summary of a 30-minute conversation. That means some of what was covered is likely not even in the memo. The document includes a disclaimer on the first page that it is \u201cnot a verbatim transcript of a discussion.\u201d\u201cThe text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty Officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place,\u201d it says. \u201cA number of factors can affect the accuracy of the record, including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation.\u201d-- Richard Nixon released a transcript, too. After the revelation that he recorded Oval Office meetings, the then-president refused to turn over the tapes, claiming executive privilege, and fought subpoenas in court. Eventually, trying to quell a political firestorm, he offered transcripts \u2013 which he personally edited \u2013 and insisted they exonerated him. \u201cI want there to be no question remaining about the fact that the president has nothing to hide in this matter,\u201d Nixon said in April 1974. Months later, when House investigators listened to some of the audio, it turned out there were significant discrepancies and key phrases missing. Ever since Nixon resigned, the White House has, perhaps understandably, generally avoided recording presidential phone calls. That tradition explains why there\u2019s apparently no recording on the American side of Trump\u2019s July conversation.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called for a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump on Sept. 24 after a history of quelling impeachment calls. (The Washington Post)-- Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill made clear even before the summary came out that the summary will not be enough to deter them from moving ahead with the impeachment inquiry. They argue that Trump does not need to have explicitly linked U.S. financial assistance to a Biden investigation for the call to represent a clear-cut abuse of power. \u201cThere is no requirement there be a quid pro quo in the conversation,\u201d Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during a live event for the Atlantic. \u201cYou don't ask foreign governments to help us in our election. \u2026 I don't think there's a grasp on the part of this administration that the quid pro quo is not essential to an impeachable offense.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) says the whistleblower, whose identity remains unknown and is entitled to legal protections, wants to speak to members of his committee and has formally sought guidance from acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire about how he could do so. \u201cWe\u2019re in touch with counsel and look forward to the whistleblower\u2019s testimony as soon as this week,\u201d Schiff tweeted. Lawyers for the whistleblower confirmed this.-- The Senate passed a resolution last night, by unanimous consent and with no Republican objections, calling for the Trump administration to turn over the whistleblower complaint to the intelligence committees, as is required by law. The House plans to vote later today on a resolution condemning the administration\u2019s refusal to provide the complaint. Meanwhile, Trump is scheduled to sit down with the Ukrainian president later today at the U.N. General Assembly. Maguire, the acting DNI, is scheduled to testify in open session tomorrow before the House Intelligence Committee and then in closed session before the Senate Intelligence Committee.-- Pelosi personally informed Trump of her decision to move forward with an impeachment inquiry in a Tuesday morning phone call. \u201cThe president, in New York for the U.N. meeting, telephoned the speaker to discuss gun legislation, Pelosi told lawmakers in private meetings,\u201d per Rachael Bade, Mike DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian. \u201cThe conversation, however, quickly turned to the president\u2019s conversations with the Ukrainian leader. Trump insisted he had nothing to do with his administration\u2019s refusal to share with Congress an intelligence community whistleblower complaint about his actions \u2026 Trump told Pelosi that he wasn\u2019t the one blocking the complaint. \u2026 She responded that he had the power to fix it and challenged him to turn over the complaint.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- The New York Times reports that White House and intelligence officials are trying to hash out a plan to release a redacted version of the whistleblower report in a bid to quell calls for impeachment and sow Democratic divisions on the best path forward: \u201cPeople familiar with the situation said the administration was putting the complaint through a declassification process and planned to release a redacted version within days,\u201d Michael Schmidt, Julian Barnes and Maggie Haberman report. \u201cThe appearance that they were stonewalling Congress, in their view, could prove more damaging than the whistle-blower\u2019s account. Mr. Trump also believes that the allegations about him are not nearly as damning as they have been portrayed and that disclosing them will undercut the impeachment drive, people close to the president said.\u201d -- A senior administration official told Politico that the White House is \u201cpreparing\u201d to give Congress both the whistleblower complaint and the inspector general\u2019s report by the end of this week. \u201cThe administration official stressed the decision and timing could change over the next few days,\u201d Nancy Cook reports. \u201cThe format of presentation, or process of viewing the documents, wasn't decided. The president has agreed to the move, the official added.\u201dThe Fact Checker unravels what happened when Trump tried to force an investigation into the false rumor about then-Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine. (The Washington Post)-- Even though the whistleblower complaint focused on the Trump call with Zelensky, officials familiar with its contents say that it includes references to other developments tied to the president, including efforts by Giuliani to insert himself into U.S.-Ukrainian relations. \u201cRudy \u2014 he did all of this,\u201d one U.S. official said. \u201cThis s---show that we\u2019re in \u2014 it\u2019s him injecting himself into the process.\u201d That anonymous quote comes from a story that posted last night by Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, Paul Sonne and Ellen Nakashima.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTrump\u2019s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists \u2026 to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev,\u201d they report. \u201cThe sequence, which began early this year, involved the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the circumvention of senior officials on the National Security Council, and the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid administered by the Defense and State departments \u2014 all as key officials from these agencies struggled to piece together Giuliani\u2019s activities from news reports.\u201cSeveral officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president\u2019s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump\u2019s political gain. As those worries intensified, some senior officials worked behind the scenes to hold off a Trump meeting or call with [Zelensky] out of concern that Trump would use the conversation to press Kiev for damaging information on Trump\u2019s potential rival in the 2020 race \u2026\u201cU.S. officials described an atmosphere of intense pressure inside the NSC and other departments since the existence of the whistleblower complaint became known, with some officials facing suspicion that they had a hand either in the complaint or in relaying damaging information to the whistleblower \u2026 One official \u2014 speaking, like others, on the condition of anonymity \u2014 described the climate as verging on \u2018bloodletting.\u2019 \u2026 Trump has fanned this dynamic with his own denunciations of the whistleblower and thinly veiled suggestions that the person should be outed. \u2026 Trump\u2019s closest advisers, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who was ordered by Trump to suspend the aid to Ukraine, are also increasingly targets of internal finger-pointing. Mulvaney has agitated for foreign aid to be cut universally but has also stayed away from meetings with Giuliani and Trump \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThen-national security adviser John Bolton was outraged by the outsourcing of a relationship with a country struggling to survive Russian aggression \u2026 But by then his standing with Trump was strained, and neither he nor his senior aides could get straight answers about Giuliani\u2019s agenda or authority \u2026 Giuliani told The Post that one of his calls with a top Ukrainian aide was partially arranged by Kurt Volker, a State Department official, and that he briefed the department afterward. \u2018We had the same visibility as anybody else \u2014 watching Giuliani on television,\u2019 a former senior official said. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev were similarly deprived of information, even as they faced questions from Ukrainians about whether Giuliani was a designated representative.\u201d-- Giuliani had an outburst on Fox News last night when a fellow panelist was talking over him. \u201cShut up, moron,\u201d Giuliani shouted on \u201cThe Ingraham Angle,\u201d yelling at liberal radio host Christopher Hahn. \u201cShut up. You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d (Allyson Chiu)Here's how house and senate democrats responded this week to the developments in the whistleblower case and the momentum toward impeachment. (The Washington Post)DEMOCRATIC DIVISIONS REMAIN OVER IMPEACHMENT:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Pelosi\u2019s declaration left unsettled key questions about how that investigation will unfold. Mike DeBonis and Rachael Bade explore some of them: \u201cHow sweeping will the probe be? How long will it last? Who will conduct it? And will Pelosi\u2019s unilateral pronouncement \u2014 which was delivered with no immediate plans to ratify it with a House vote \u2014 do anything to change the course of existing investigations that have hit a stone wall of White House resistance? \u2026 The lack of detail about the road ahead, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and aides, reflected both the speed with which once-wavering Democrats unified behind a formal impeachment probe \u2014 and the continuing divisions among them on how it should be conducted. \u2026\u201c[T]he House Judiciary Committee will continue playing the lead role in the proceedings, despite the desire of some Democrats to involve a broader swath of lawmakers and to at least partly sideline Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the panel\u2019s fervently pro-impeachment chairman. In the days leading up to Tuesday\u2019s announcement, Pelosi explored potentially establishing a special \u2018select\u2019 committee, with members handpicked by House leaders, but backed away from that idea after the dispute generated protests from liberals and threatened to divide the caucus along ideological lines. \u2026 The past two presidential impeachment processes, involving [Nixon] and Bill Clinton, included votes of the full House authorizing the Judiciary Committee to formally investigate. There are no plans for such a vote now \u2026\u00a0 That is a question likely to be litigated in the courts. \u2026\u201cMeanwhile, an even more fundamental dispute lingered \u2014 one that may not be resolved any time soon. Many Democrats are urging that the inquiry focus solely on the present outcry \u2026 and not on other alleged abuses, such as the potential obstruction of justice detailed by [Mueller], episodes of congressional stonewalling and instances of bigotry. More than 30 Democratic lawmakers announced support for impeachment just this week, many of them Democratic \u2018frontliners\u2019 in vulnerable districts who said that the Ukraine allegations prompted them to speak out. \u2026 \u2018This should be a very distinct procedure relative to this allegation, rather than the whole basket,\u2019 said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), a freshman who backed impeachment proceedings Monday after months of resisting pressure to take that step.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut Pelosi\u2019s involvement of other committees besides the Judiciary, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence panels with direct jurisdiction over the Ukraine matter suggest the impeachment brief could go much wider. The Financial Services Committee, for instance, is probing Trump\u2019s real estate dealings; the Ways and Means Committee is seeking Trump\u2019s tax returns; and the Oversight and Reform Committee is investigating whether Trump is using the presidency for self-enrichment. \u2018I see the most recent issue as one issue among many issues,\u2019 said Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), who has pushed for Trump\u2019s impeachment for two years, forcing multiple unsuccessful votes on removing Trump over alleged instances of bigotry.\u201d-- Our latest whip count: 198 House Democrats now publicly support opening an impeachment inquiry. That includes 22 of the 24 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Fifty-seven Democrats endorsed proceedings in a period of 24 hours:THE POLITICS OF IMPEACHMENT:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- House Democrats have crossed the Rubicon, and nobody really knows where it will lead.\u00a0\u201cI can\u2019t tell you what will come from this. I don\u2019t think anybody can,\u201d said Dan Sena, who was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018. \u201cBut it is definitely going to be an X-factor going into the 2020 election.\u201d\u00a0Michael Scherer talked to several other political professionals:Democratic strategists hope the fact pattern behind Trump\u2019s communications with Ukraine is far more direct and damning than the complex stories of potential obstruction contained in Bob Mueller's report: \u201cThis is a more supportable narrative about his conduct,\u201d said pollster Geoff Garin. \u201cTrump has already admitted to most of the egregious behavior. He is out of the business of claiming nothing happened.\"GOP strategists hope impeachment would gin up their voters in 2020: \u201cThere is nothing that will do more for Republican turnout than this. And the last couple of presidential elections have all been turnout elections,\u201d said Jim McLaughlin, a pollster working on the Trump reelection effort.-- A Quinnipiac poll that was in the field from this past Thursday through Monday found that 57 percent of voters believe Trump should not be impeached. John Wagner reports: \u201cAmong Democrats, 73 percent support impeachment, while 21 percent are opposed. Among Republicans, only 4 percent support impeachment, while 95 percent are opposed. Trump\u2019s overall job approval rating remains in the range it has for nearly his entire presidency, with 40 percent of voters approving of how he is handling his job, and 55 percent saying they disapprove.\u201d-- This explains why many moderate Democrats still remain cautious. For example, Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) \u2013 who picked up a Republican seat in the Kansas City suburbs last year \u2013 expressed support for Pelosi\u2019s pronouncement last night but carefully avoided using the word \u201cimpeachment\u201d in her statement. (K.C. Star)-- Biden is mostly alone in the Democratic presidential field in not calling for the House to begin an immediate impeachment inquiry. Speaking in Delaware, the former vice president called on Congress to begin proceedings if the White House continues stalling lawmakers' investigations. \"Biden, who spoke for several minutes and left without taking questions, said that if Trump doesn\u2019t comply with Congress, it will be forced to begin impeachment hearings,\"\u00a0Matt Viser, Colby Itkowitz and Cleve Wootson Jr. report:Bernie Sanders would not say whether he would vote to convict Trump if articles of impeachment come before the Senate, saying he wants\u00a0to review evidence before making a decision. He also reserved judgment about whether Hunter Biden\u2019s conduct is fair game. \"I don\u2019t know enough at this point to make any definitive statement,\"\u00a0he said in Iowa.Elizabeth Warren\u00a0said proceedings must begin now.Pete Buttigieg, who has been more cautious on the question, said Trump \u201chas made it clear he deserves to be impeached.\u201dBeto O\u2019Rourke called on his former House colleagues to \u201cfinish the job and impeach him.\u201dHillary Clinton also changed her mind, saying she\u2019s now in favor of moving toward impeachment of a president she described as a \u201ccorrupt human tornado.\u201d \u201cI did not come to that decision easily or quickly,\u201d she said, \u201cbut this is an emergency as I see it.\u201d-- The impeachment debate will effectively freeze\u00a0the 2020 campaign, predicts ABC News\u00a0political director Rick Klein: \u201cIt would all play out against an inconvenient political timeline, with hearings in the House and a potential trial in the Senate almost certainly extending well into the winter. That's the precise time that campaigning is most intense, with primary voting beginning in February. For the six senators and two sitting House members running for president, that could make for far more time spent at the day job in Washington than anticipated. Long-developed plans for policy rollouts and potential breakout moments could wind up subsumed by the news.\"-- The Trump reelection campaign immediately tried to turn the impeachment inquiry into a fundraising opportunity. Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports: \u201cEmails, texts, tweets and a video directed his supporters to a new Republican portal designed to capi",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: The Ukraine transcript is full of fresh fodder for Democrats who want to impeach Trump (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7059",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/09/25/daily-202-the-ukraine-transcript-is-full-of-fresh-fodder-for-democrats-who-want-to-impeach-trump/5d8af523602ff14beb3da8cc/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0If President Trump thought releasing the transcript of his call with Ukraine\u2019s president would break impeachment fever on Capitol Hill, he miscalculated. The five-page summary released this morning will only intensify Democratic demands to see the entire whistleblower complaint.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), a member of Democratic leadership, said the president asking for Ukraine\u2019s help to undermine his 2020 challenger is \u201ca textbook abuse of power.\u201d At a news conference, he said \u201cthe transcripts become exhibit A.\u201d According to the transcript, Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Attorney General Bill Barr and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate the conduct of Joe Biden and offered to meet with the new president at the White House after he promised to conduct such an inquiry. \u201cI would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,\u201d Trump said, according to the transcript.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump seems to suggest that Hillary Clinton\u2019s private email server is in Ukraine at one point. He asserts at another that Bob Mueller\u2019s investigation started with that country.-- \u201cSenior Justice Department officials said the director of national intelligence referred the concerns about the call to the Justice Department, after the intelligence community inspector general found that it was a possible violation of campaign finance laws that ban people from soliciting contributions from foreign sources. The inspector general later also referred the matter to the FBI,\u201d Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig report. \u201cCareer prosecutors and officials in the Justice Department\u2019s criminal division then reviewed the transcript of the call, which they obtained voluntarily from the White House, and determined the facts \u2018could not make out and cannot make out\u2019 the appropriate basis for an investigation, a senior Justice Department official said. As part of their reasoning, Justice Department lawyers determined that help with a government investigation could not be considered \u2018a thing of value\u2019 under the law.\u201d-- What was released by the White House is a five-page summary of a 30-minute conversation. That means some of what was covered is likely not even in the memo. The document includes a disclaimer on the first page that it is \u201cnot a verbatim transcript of a discussion.\u201d\u201cThe text in this document records the notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty Officers and NSC policy staff assigned to listen and memorialize the conversation in written form as the conversation takes place,\u201d it says. \u201cA number of factors can affect the accuracy of the record, including poor telecommunications connections and variations in accent and/or interpretation.\u201d-- Richard Nixon released a transcript, too. After the revelation that he recorded Oval Office meetings, the then-president refused to turn over the tapes, claiming executive privilege, and fought subpoenas in court. Eventually, trying to quell a political firestorm, he offered transcripts \u2013 which he personally edited \u2013 and insisted they exonerated him. \u201cI want there to be no question remaining about the fact that the president has nothing to hide in this matter,\u201d Nixon said in April 1974. Months later, when House investigators listened to some of the audio, it turned out there were significant discrepancies and key phrases missing. Ever since Nixon resigned, the White House has, perhaps understandably, generally avoided recording presidential phone calls. That tradition explains why there\u2019s apparently no recording on the American side of Trump\u2019s July conversation.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called for a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump on Sept. 24 after a history of quelling impeachment calls. (The Washington Post)-- Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill made clear even before the summary came out that the summary will not be enough to deter them from moving ahead with the impeachment inquiry. They argue that Trump does not need to have explicitly linked U.S. financial assistance to a Biden investigation for the call to represent a clear-cut abuse of power. \u201cThere is no requirement there be a quid pro quo in the conversation,\u201d Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during a live event for the Atlantic. \u201cYou don't ask foreign governments to help us in our election. \u2026 I don't think there's a grasp on the part of this administration that the quid pro quo is not essential to an impeachable offense.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) says the whistleblower, whose identity remains unknown and is entitled to legal protections, wants to speak to members of his committee and has formally sought guidance from acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire about how he could do so. \u201cWe\u2019re in touch with counsel and look forward to the whistleblower\u2019s testimony as soon as this week,\u201d Schiff tweeted. Lawyers for the whistleblower confirmed this.-- The Senate passed a resolution last night, by unanimous consent and with no Republican objections, calling for the Trump administration to turn over the whistleblower complaint to the intelligence committees, as is required by law. The House plans to vote later today on a resolution condemning the administration\u2019s refusal to provide the complaint. Meanwhile, Trump is scheduled to sit down with the Ukrainian president later today at the U.N. General Assembly. Maguire, the acting DNI, is scheduled to testify in open session tomorrow before the House Intelligence Committee and then in closed session before the Senate Intelligence Committee.-- Pelosi personally informed Trump of her decision to move forward with an impeachment inquiry in a Tuesday morning phone call. \u201cThe president, in New York for the U.N. meeting, telephoned the speaker to discuss gun legislation, Pelosi told lawmakers in private meetings,\u201d per Rachael Bade, Mike DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian. \u201cThe conversation, however, quickly turned to the president\u2019s conversations with the Ukrainian leader. Trump insisted he had nothing to do with his administration\u2019s refusal to share with Congress an intelligence community whistleblower complaint about his actions \u2026 Trump told Pelosi that he wasn\u2019t the one blocking the complaint. \u2026 She responded that he had the power to fix it and challenged him to turn over the complaint.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- The New York Times reports that White House and intelligence officials are trying to hash out a plan to release a redacted version of the whistleblower report in a bid to quell calls for impeachment and sow Democratic divisions on the best path forward: \u201cPeople familiar with the situation said the administration was putting the complaint through a declassification process and planned to release a redacted version within days,\u201d Michael Schmidt, Julian Barnes and Maggie Haberman report. \u201cThe appearance that they were stonewalling Congress, in their view, could prove more damaging than the whistle-blower\u2019s account. Mr. Trump also believes that the allegations about him are not nearly as damning as they have been portrayed and that disclosing them will undercut the impeachment drive, people close to the president said.\u201d -- A senior administration official told Politico that the White House is \u201cpreparing\u201d to give Congress both the whistleblower complaint and the inspector general\u2019s report by the end of this week. \u201cThe administration official stressed the decision and timing could change over the next few days,\u201d Nancy Cook reports. \u201cThe format of presentation, or process of viewing the documents, wasn't decided. The president has agreed to the move, the official added.\u201dThe Fact Checker unravels what happened when Trump tried to force an investigation into the false rumor about then-Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine. (The Washington Post)-- Even though the whistleblower complaint focused on the Trump call with Zelensky, officials familiar with its contents say that it includes references to other developments tied to the president, including efforts by Giuliani to insert himself into U.S.-Ukrainian relations. \u201cRudy \u2014 he did all of this,\u201d one U.S. official said. \u201cThis s---show that we\u2019re in \u2014 it\u2019s him injecting himself into the process.\u201d That anonymous quote comes from a story that posted last night by Greg Miller, Josh Dawsey, Paul Sonne and Ellen Nakashima.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cTrump\u2019s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists \u2026 to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev,\u201d they report. \u201cThe sequence, which began early this year, involved the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the circumvention of senior officials on the National Security Council, and the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid administered by the Defense and State departments \u2014 all as key officials from these agencies struggled to piece together Giuliani\u2019s activities from news reports.\u201cSeveral officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president\u2019s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump\u2019s political gain. As those worries intensified, some senior officials worked behind the scenes to hold off a Trump meeting or call with [Zelensky] out of concern that Trump would use the conversation to press Kiev for damaging information on Trump\u2019s potential rival in the 2020 race \u2026\u201cU.S. officials described an atmosphere of intense pressure inside the NSC and other departments since the existence of the whistleblower complaint became known, with some officials facing suspicion that they had a hand either in the complaint or in relaying damaging information to the whistleblower \u2026 One official \u2014 speaking, like others, on the condition of anonymity \u2014 described the climate as verging on \u2018bloodletting.\u2019 \u2026 Trump has fanned this dynamic with his own denunciations of the whistleblower and thinly veiled suggestions that the person should be outed. \u2026 Trump\u2019s closest advisers, including acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who was ordered by Trump to suspend the aid to Ukraine, are also increasingly targets of internal finger-pointing. Mulvaney has agitated for foreign aid to be cut universally but has also stayed away from meetings with Giuliani and Trump \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThen-national security adviser John Bolton was outraged by the outsourcing of a relationship with a country struggling to survive Russian aggression \u2026 But by then his standing with Trump was strained, and neither he nor his senior aides could get straight answers about Giuliani\u2019s agenda or authority \u2026 Giuliani told The Post that one of his calls with a top Ukrainian aide was partially arranged by Kurt Volker, a State Department official, and that he briefed the department afterward. \u2018We had the same visibility as anybody else \u2014 watching Giuliani on television,\u2019 a former senior official said. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev were similarly deprived of information, even as they faced questions from Ukrainians about whether Giuliani was a designated representative.\u201d-- Giuliani had an outburst on Fox News last night when a fellow panelist was talking over him. \u201cShut up, moron,\u201d Giuliani shouted on \u201cThe Ingraham Angle,\u201d yelling at liberal radio host Christopher Hahn. \u201cShut up. You don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d (Allyson Chiu)Here's how house and senate democrats responded this week to the developments in the whistleblower case and the momentum toward impeachment. (The Washington Post)DEMOCRATIC DIVISIONS REMAIN OVER IMPEACHMENT:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Pelosi\u2019s declaration left unsettled key questions about how that investigation will unfold. Mike DeBonis and Rachael Bade explore some of them: \u201cHow sweeping will the probe be? How long will it last? Who will conduct it? And will Pelosi\u2019s unilateral pronouncement \u2014 which was delivered with no immediate plans to ratify it with a House vote \u2014 do anything to change the course of existing investigations that have hit a stone wall of White House resistance? \u2026 The lack of detail about the road ahead, according to interviews with more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and aides, reflected both the speed with which once-wavering Democrats unified behind a formal impeachment probe \u2014 and the continuing divisions among them on how it should be conducted. \u2026\u201c[T]he House Judiciary Committee will continue playing the lead role in the proceedings, despite the desire of some Democrats to involve a broader swath of lawmakers and to at least partly sideline Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the panel\u2019s fervently pro-impeachment chairman. In the days leading up to Tuesday\u2019s announcement, Pelosi explored potentially establishing a special \u2018select\u2019 committee, with members handpicked by House leaders, but backed away from that idea after the dispute generated protests from liberals and threatened to divide the caucus along ideological lines. \u2026 The past two presidential impeachment processes, involving [Nixon] and Bill Clinton, included votes of the full House authorizing the Judiciary Committee to formally investigate. There are no plans for such a vote now \u2026\u00a0 That is a question likely to be litigated in the courts. \u2026\u201cMeanwhile, an even more fundamental dispute lingered \u2014 one that may not be resolved any time soon. Many Democrats are urging that the inquiry focus solely on the present outcry \u2026 and not on other alleged abuses, such as the potential obstruction of justice detailed by [Mueller], episodes of congressional stonewalling and instances of bigotry. More than 30 Democratic lawmakers announced support for impeachment just this week, many of them Democratic \u2018frontliners\u2019 in vulnerable districts who said that the Ukraine allegations prompted them to speak out. \u2026 \u2018This should be a very distinct procedure relative to this allegation, rather than the whole basket,\u2019 said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), a freshman who backed impeachment proceedings Monday after months of resisting pressure to take that step.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut Pelosi\u2019s involvement of other committees besides the Judiciary, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence panels with direct jurisdiction over the Ukraine matter suggest the impeachment brief could go much wider. The Financial Services Committee, for instance, is probing Trump\u2019s real estate dealings; the Ways and Means Committee is seeking Trump\u2019s tax returns; and the Oversight and Reform Committee is investigating whether Trump is using the presidency for self-enrichment. \u2018I see the most recent issue as one issue among many issues,\u2019 said Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.), who has pushed for Trump\u2019s impeachment for two years, forcing multiple unsuccessful votes on removing Trump over alleged instances of bigotry.\u201d-- Our latest whip count: 198 House Democrats now publicly support opening an impeachment inquiry. That includes 22 of the 24 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Fifty-seven Democrats endorsed proceedings in a period of 24 hours:THE POLITICS OF IMPEACHMENT:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- House Democrats have crossed the Rubicon, and nobody really knows where it will lead.\u00a0\u201cI can\u2019t tell you what will come from this. I don\u2019t think anybody can,\u201d said Dan Sena, who was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2018. \u201cBut it is definitely going to be an X-factor going into the 2020 election.\u201d\u00a0Michael Scherer talked to several other political professionals:Democratic strategists hope the fact pattern behind Trump\u2019s communications with Ukraine is far more direct and damning than the complex stories of potential obstruction contained in Bob Mueller's report: \u201cThis is a more supportable narrative about his conduct,\u201d said pollster Geoff Garin. \u201cTrump has already admitted to most of the egregious behavior. He is out of the business of claiming nothing happened.\"GOP strategists hope impeachment would gin up their voters in 2020: \u201cThere is nothing that will do more for Republican turnout than this. And the last couple of presidential elections have all been turnout elections,\u201d said Jim McLaughlin, a pollster working on the Trump reelection effort.-- A Quinnipiac poll that was in the field from this past Thursday through Monday found that 57 percent of voters believe Trump should not be impeached. John Wagner reports: \u201cAmong Democrats, 73 percent support impeachment, while 21 percent are opposed. Among Republicans, only 4 percent support impeachment, while 95 percent are opposed. Trump\u2019s overall job approval rating remains in the range it has for nearly his entire presidency, with 40 percent of voters approving of how he is handling his job, and 55 percent saying they disapprove.\u201d-- This explains why many moderate Democrats still remain cautious. For example, Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.) \u2013 who picked up a Republican seat in the Kansas City suburbs last year \u2013 expressed support for Pelosi\u2019s pronouncement last night but carefully avoided using the word \u201cimpeachment\u201d in her statement. (K.C. Star)-- Biden is mostly alone in the Democratic presidential field in not calling for the House to begin an immediate impeachment inquiry. Speaking in Delaware, the former vice president called on Congress to begin proceedings if the White House continues stalling lawmakers' investigations. \"Biden, who spoke for several minutes and left without taking questions, said that if Trump doesn\u2019t comply with Congress, it will be forced to begin impeachment hearings,\"\u00a0Matt Viser, Colby Itkowitz and Cleve Wootson Jr. report:Bernie Sanders would not say whether he would vote to convict Trump if articles of impeachment come before the Senate, saying he wants\u00a0to review evidence before making a decision. He also reserved judgment about whether Hunter Biden\u2019s conduct is fair game. \"I don\u2019t know enough at this point to make any definitive statement,\"\u00a0he said in Iowa.Elizabeth Warren\u00a0said proceedings must begin now.Pete Buttigieg, who has been more cautious on the question, said Trump \u201chas made it clear he deserves to be impeached.\u201dBeto O\u2019Rourke called on his former House colleagues to \u201cfinish the job and impeach him.\u201dHillary Clinton also changed her mind, saying she\u2019s now in favor of moving toward impeachment of a president she described as a \u201ccorrupt human tornado.\u201d \u201cI did not come to that decision easily or quickly,\u201d she said, \u201cbut this is an emergency as I see it.\u201d-- The impeachment debate will effectively freeze\u00a0the 2020 campaign, predicts ABC News\u00a0political director Rick Klein: \u201cIt would all play out against an inconvenient political timeline, with hearings in the House and a potential trial in the Senate almost certainly extending well into the winter. That's the precise time that campaigning is most intense, with primary voting beginning in February. For the six senators and two sitting House members running for president, that could make for far more time spent at the day job in Washington than anticipated. Long-developed plans for policy rollouts and potential breakout moments could wind up subsumed by the news.\"-- The Trump reelection campaign immediately tried to turn the impeachment inquiry into a fundraising opportunity. Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports: \u201cEmails, texts, tweets and a video directed his supporters to a new Republican portal designed to capi",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Trump\u2019s threat to veto NDAA follows pattern of tenuously invoking \u2018National Security\u2019 (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7060",
        "date": "2020-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/02/daily-202-trumps-threat-veto-ndaa-follows-pattern-tenuously-invoking-national-security/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroPresident Trump upended months of careful, bipartisan negotiations on Tuesday night by threatening to veto a $740 billion bill to fund the military unless Congress includes language to remove liability protections for Facebook, Twitter, Google and other technology companies that have drawn his ire.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a pair of tweets at 9:45 p.m., Trump demanded the repeal of a 24-year-old federal statute known as Section 230, which has been the legal foundation for free expression on the World Wide Web. .....Therefore, if the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk. Take back America NOW. Thank you!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020\n\nTrump\u2019s animus toward tech companies has intensified as search engines and social media giants have taken modest steps to limit the spread of dangerous election disinformation and otherwise challenge his false declarations of victory. On his way out the door, the lame-duck president is desperate to pull the levers of state power to squeeze private enterprises he views as inhospitable to his political interests. That is deeply at odds with the American tradition. It also would have been anathema to conservatives before Trump hijacked their movement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House did not respond to a request for an explanation of why a 1996 amendment to a 1934 communications law represents \u201ca serious threat to our National Security.\u201d There is no evidence that it does. Section 230 has no meaningful nexus with national security.President Trump said on Nov. 2, he would veto the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act unless Congress repeals Section 230. (Reuters)Over the past four years, Trump has repeatedly stretched the meaning of \u201cNational Security.\u201d He always treats it as a proper noun.\u00a0He has invoked the term to justify nativism on immigration, from imposing the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries to diverting money from the military budget for his border wall and excluding the state of New York from a trusted traveler program.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementHe has cited national security to defend rolling back environmental protections to allow more coal mining and to offer government support for oil companies.AdvertisementHe has trotted out the \u201cNational Security\u201d excuse to justify imposing tariffs on stalwart allies. Even Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called that rationale \u201cinsulting and unacceptable.\u201dWhen Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor anonymously wrote a critical op-ed for the New York Times in 2018, Trump suggested that their source was phony. \u201cIf the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist,\u201d he tweeted, \u201cthe Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe has claimed that former national security adviser John Bolton\u2019s book endangered \u201cNational Security.\u201d In October, the president tweeted that \u201cJoe Biden is a National Security threat!\u201d In 2017, Trump tweeted that his former opponent Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server \u201cendangered National Security.\u201d He did not feel the same way when his daughter was caught conducting government business on her own private email account.AdvertisementIronically, on Feb. 18, a few months before he tried to ban TikTok on national security grounds, Trump decried efforts on Capitol Hill to limit what products businesses can sell to China by complaining about the \u201calways used National Security excuse.\u201dTrump already threatened last month to veto the National Defense Authorization Act if it retains a provision requiring the Pentagon to change the names of 10 military installations that honor racist Confederate officers who took up arms against the United States to preserve the institution of slavery. Trump has massively resisted this change.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSome Republicans in recent days have suggested a trade: Reforming Section 230 in exchange for the base-name changes that Democrats seek. Democrats largely have balked at the idea,\u201d Tony Romm explains. \u201cMany lawmakers \u2014 Democrats and Republicans \u2014 increasingly have come to question whether the protections are outdated, conferring legal immunity on tech giants at a time when they have failed to crack down on hate speech, election disinformation and other harmful content online. But Trump and his Republican allies have seized on the debate to advance their arguments that Facebook, Google, Twitter and others should be penalized for exhibiting systemic political bias against conservatives \u2014 a charge for which they have provided scant evidence, and one that tech giants long have denied.\u201dAdvertisementA handful of Republicans are speaking out against Trump\u2019s threat to derail funding for the troops. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) tweeted this morning that \u201c230 should NOT be mixed with NDAA & used by @realDonaldTrump to veto.\u201dThis would be Trump\u2019s ninth veto as president. An NDAA has passed for 59 consecutive years. In October 2015, President Barack Obama initially vetoed the bill because of the way it would have sidestepped budget limitations for the military and because it would restrict the transfer of detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay. A few weeks later, after Congress passed an updated version that addressed some of his concerns, Obama signed the measure into law.Story continues below advertisementHere is what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had to say at the time:Blocking #NDAA funding is not in our national interest and it's profoundly unfair to our nation's brave troops.\u2014 Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) June 3, 2015\n\nThe voting warsGabriel Sterling, a Georgia state election official, on Dec. 1 slammed President Trump for not condemning threats of violence against election workers. (Reuters)A Republican election official in Georgia accuses Trump of fostering violent threats.\u00a0\u201cGabriel Sterling, a voting systems manager for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, was visibly angry and shaken as he approached a lectern in the Georgia Capitol,\u201d Amy Gardner and Keith Newell report. \u201c\u2018Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language,\u2019 he said. \u2018Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. \u2026 Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.\u2019 \u2026 Sterling\u2019s public chastisement represents one of the strongest rebukes yet of Trump\u2019s baseless attacks on the election\u2019s integrity by a member of his own party. \u2026 Sterling also demanded that the two senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, denounce the threats that flowed into his office after Trump began attacking Raffensperger for failing to repeat his false accusations of fraud.\u201d Trump responded to a video of Sterling's speech by reiterating the false conspiracy theories that have fueled the threats.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn related news: When five patients died of the coronavirus in a 32-hour span at a hospital in Reno, Nev., physician Jacob Keeperman turned to Twitter to thank colleagues for all their support, tweeting a selfie of him on the day the alternate care site opened. His message took on a different meaning Tuesday evening, though, when Trump retweeted a conservative lifestyle blog that falsely claimed the selfie in front of empty hospital beds proved that the pandemic was a hoax. Keeperman said he was saddened that the president shared the disinformation. \u201cIt was turned into something that it was never meant to be,\u201d he said. (Andrea Salcedo)Trump\u2019s allies will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on mail-in ballots. (Robert Barnes and Elise Viebeck)Trump\u2019s campaign asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn the president's loss in the state by throwing out hundreds of thousands of ballots in the two most Democratic-leaning counties. (Rosalind Helderman)Trump\u2019s recently disavowed attorney Sidney Powell has gained a strange new ally. She filed an affidavit from the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the QAnon conspiracy theory\u2019s Internet home. (Drew Harwell)\u201cTrump fired me for saying this, but I\u2019ll say it again: The election wasn\u2019t rigged,\u201d Chris Krebs wrote an op-ed for our newspaper.A group of 25 former presidents of the D.C. Bar said lawyers shouldn\u2019t be complicit in Trump\u2019s attacks on democracy.\u00a0In an op-ed, they write that \u201cno lawyer may seek, on behalf of any client, to subvert democratic institutions or burden the courts with claims that the lawyer knows are frivolous.\"Attorney General Bill Barr says he hasn\u2019t seen fraud that could affect the election\u2019s outcome.\u201cBarr said Tuesday that he has \u2018not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,\u2019 undercutting claims that President Trump and his allies have made \u2014 without evidence \u2014 of widespread and significant voting irregularities,\u201d Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey report. \u201cHis comments to the Associated Press, while caveated, make Barr the highest-ranking Trump administration official to break with the president on his allegation that the election was stolen. \u2026 Barr said the FBI and the Justice Department had looked into some fraud claims. \u2026 [Rudy Giuliani] and Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the campaign, said, \u2018With all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn\u2019t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation.\u2019 \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt the same time Barr's comments became public Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed that the attorney general had, in October, secretly appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut as special counsel examining how the FBI investigated the Trump campaign in 2016 and beyond \u2014 a move that might hearten Trump and his allies. \u2026 The order to install him as special counsel is likely to ensure that his work is not shut down by the incoming administration \u2026 Under Justice Department regulations, special counsels can be dismissed only for misconduct or some other good cause, making it more difficult for the next attorney general to end Durham\u2019s investigation. [This was cheered by Republicans and decried by Democrats.] \u2026\u201cA person who spoke with Trump on Monday said he was railing against governors in Republican states \u2014 particularly in Georgia and Arizona \u2014 who would not back up his claims of fraud and were proceeding to certify election results. \u2026 Trump nevertheless is unlikely to give it up until at least after the electoral college votes Dec. 14, this person said. An administration official \u2026 told The Post that in recent months, Barr and Trump have \u2018barely spoken,\u2019 though they did have a conversation the week before Thanksgiving. \u2026 Trump has complained to advisers about his attorney general, two officials said, and the frustration has filtered to Barr even as the men have talked less frequently. The president has also been annoyed that Barr has expressed support for FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, whose public statements contradicting Trump \u2014 about election security and domestic extremism \u2014 have made him a frequent target of the president\u2019s rage.\"Every losing candidate since 1896 has offered a concession. Trump could break that mold.\u00a0That's \u201cwhen defeated Nebraska lawyer William Jennings Bryan sent a conciliatory telegram to Ohio Gov. William McKinley, who won the election to succeed Grover Cleveland,\u201d Bonnie Berkowitz reports. Inauguration Day often begins with a pre-inauguration meal at the White House that is supposed to be cordial and noncontroversial. It isn\u2019t always. In 1953, following a spat over a missed meeting, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower didn\u2019t show up to the customary lunch that Bess Truman prepared. Inauguration Day also usually features a show of unity in a ride to the Capitol. The tradition began in 1837, when Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson shared a carriage. So far, only President-elect Ulysses Grant has refused to share a ride, prompting his predecessor, Andrew Johnson, to skip his inauguration, making Johnson the third and last president to date to refuse to see his successor sworn in. Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams left Washington early to avoid the celebrations. Inauguration day ends with the swearing-in. Each departing president since Ronald Reagan has left a handwritten note for his successor in the Oval Office. We\u2019ll see if Trump does the same for the man who made him a one-term president.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump is considering kicking off his 2024 campaign on Inauguration Day. \u201cThere is \u2018preliminary planning\u2019 underway for a Jan. 20 event to kick off a new Trump bid, the people familiar with the discussions said, though it\u2019s possible the president could make the announcement earlier as no final decisions have been made,\u201d NBC News reports. \u201cRegardless of the timing of a campaign announcement, Trump is not expected to attend the inauguration \u2026 He also does not plan to invite Biden to the White House or even call him.\u201dTrump considers granting pre-emptive pardons to his children and son-in-law.\u201cMr. Trump has told others that he is concerned that a Biden Justice Department might seek retribution against the president by targeting the oldest three of his five children \u2014 Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump \u2014 as well as Ms. Trump\u2019s husband, Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser,\u201d the New York Times reports. \u201cThe nature of Mr. Trump\u2019s concern about any potential criminal exposure of Eric Trump or Ivanka Trump is unclear, although an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the Trump Organization has expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees by the company, some of which appear to have gone to Ms. Trump. Presidential pardons, however, do not provide protection against state or local crimes.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThe Justice Department in August investigated a potential \u2018bribery-for-pardon\u2019 scheme in which a large political contribution would be offered in exchange for a presidential pardon by the White House, according to court records unsealed Tuesday,\u201d Spencer Hsu reports.A lawyer for Trump and three of his adult children argued before the 2nd Circuit that a fraud case brought against them for endorsing ACN \u2014 a marketing organization selling telecommunications products \u2014 should be sent to arbitration and not go forward in open court. Four plaintiffs say they were duped into paying to join ACN as independent sales representatives because the Trumps presented it as a promising business opportunity on \u201cThe Apprentice.\u201d A district court judge ruled against the Trumps. (Shayna Jacobs)The coronavirusAsked about a new bipartisan coronavirus relief proposal on Dec. 1, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said \u201cWe just don\u2019t have time to waste time.\" (The Washington Post)Several new coronavirus relief proposals emerge on Capitol Hill.In addition to a compromise proposal from several centrist senators, House Democrats and McConnell circulated new offers. \"The growing calls for action have not led to a unified approach,\u201d Seung Min Kim, Jeff Stein and Mike DeBonis report. \u201cStill, the new actions and statements Tuesday may reflect movement toward some level of pandemic relief \u2026 McConnell disclosed Tuesday that senior Republicans received a new coronavirus relief offer from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday night. Democratic aides declined to disclose details of their offer, and Schumer called it a \u2018private proposal to help us move the ball forward.\u2019\u00a0\"Senate Republican leaders circulated a slimmed-down plan Tuesday that would probably be fiercely opposed by Democrats. The measure includes a liability shield for businesses and more small-business assistance. It would provide short-term, limited jobless aid but no additional funding for state and local governments or help for cash-strapped transit agencies. \u2026 The McConnell bill also reintroduces a Republican plan to allow diners to claim a tax deduction on their meal expenditures, a provision pushed by the business lobby but viewed skeptically by economists and some Republicans. \u2026\u00a0\u201cSome lawmakers have hoped that elements of a bipartisan stimulus deal could be added to the spending bill required to avoid a Dec. 11 government shutdown, although that could complicate the must-pass legislation. Nonetheless, McConnell suggested Tuesday that the spending bill could be an avenue to pass targeted coronavirus relief. Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke Tuesday afternoon about the government funding bill. As for the bipartisan Senate framework, Mnuchin said he would review it, although the plan got a much icier reaction from the White House.\u201dAgainst the backdrop of federal inaction, states are racing to craft their own economic relief plans. \u201cMichigan, for example, has sought to extend another round of enhanced payments to its unemployed residents. Minnesota has eyed one-time stimulus checks to locals under financial duress. And Colorado has mounted a wide-ranging effort to help its cash-starved workers and businesses, working on legislative proposals that could help cover rent payments, utility bills and other critical costs,\u201d Romm reports.As President-elect Biden introduced his economic brain trust in Wilmington, Del., his pick for Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, urged a swift and ambitious response.\u00a0\u201cBiden\u2019s choice of economic advisers highlights a commitment to spend whatever is needed to restore a full-employment economy, setting up a clash with Senate Republicans who are sounding alarms over a national debt they helped Trump increase by nearly $7 trillion,\u201d David Lynch reports.\u00a0Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales disappointed, another sign that the recovery is stumbling. Fewer Americans shopped over the weekend, and those who did spent 14 percent less than last year. (Abha Bhattarai)\u00a0More than half of the emergency small-business funds under the Paycheck Protection Program went to larger businesses. About 600 mostly larger companies, including dozens of national chains, received the maximum amount allowed under the program. (Jonathan O\u2019Connell, Andrew Van Dam, Aaron Gregg and Alyssa Fowers)New York\u2019s MTA is preparing to cut subway service by 40 percent while it considers a $3 billion loan from the Federal Reserve. Boston is proposing to shorten hours of operation. The D.C. Metro announced plans to eliminate weekend rail service. The stark vision of the capital region operating without weekend transit service for the first time since launching 44 years ago jolted residents and lawmakers alike. (Justin George, Lori Aratani and Meagan Flynn)Schumer told major donors during a private call that Democrats failed to win Senate control because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and North Carolina Democratic candidate Cal Cunningham \u201ccouldn\u2019t keep his zipper up.\u201d The minority leader expressed regret for recruiting Cunningham and for failing to convince Stacey Abrams to run in Georgia. (Axios)Quote of the day\u201cThe risk of overdoing it is less than the risk of under doing it,\u201d Fed Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking Committee. (Bloomberg News)The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted on the recommendations for whom should be given the covid-19 vaccine first when it becomes available. (The Washington Post)Britain beats U.S. in granting the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine emergency authorization.\u201cBritain became the first country to grant emergency approval \u2026 to the coronavirus vaccine developed by the Pfizer and BioNTech, smashing all speed records to see a potentially lifesaving shot invented, tested and approved in less than a year.,\u201d William Booth and Karla Adam report. \u201cBritish officials said a mass immunization program would begin almost immediately, with distribution of the first 800,000 doses to begin next week. \u2026 Drug regulators in Britain have a global reputation for being tough but fast, and [the] decision is likely to intensify the focus on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has faced increasing pressure from the Trump administration to approve Pfizer\u2019s vaccine.\u201dWho will get the first doses on this side of the pond?A federal advisory panel recommended last night that the initial inoculations should be given to an estimated 21 million health-care workers and 3 million residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities. \"These groups were deemed the highest priority by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, because the vaccine will initially be in extremely short supply after it is cleared by federal regulators,\u201d Lena Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker report.\u00a0\"Residents and employees of long-term-care facilities were prioritized because they account for nearly 40 percent of deaths from covid-19 \u2026 The recommendations for the highest-priority groups, known as Phase 1a, will be sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield, who also informs Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. If the recommendations are approved, they will become official CDC recommendations on immunization in the United States and provide guidance to state officials, who are scrambling to meet a Friday deadline for vaccine distribution planning.\u00a0\u201cThe committee voted 13 to 1 to prioritize the two groups. Helen Keipp Talbot, an associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University, was the sole dissenting vote. Unease over the recommendations centered on the inclusion of long-term-care residents, with several panel members saying there was insufficient vaccine safety and efficacy data to support immunizing them right away. \u2026 What the committee will probably recommend may differ from what some Trump administration officials want, according to three federal health officials.\u201dThe Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine must be transported and stored at minus-94 degrees, jump-starting the race for special freezers. \u201cFord has announced it is acquiring its own ultracold freezers to supply employees with Pfizer\u2019s vaccine. Hospital systems, logistics and delivery companies are also gearing up,\u201d Stefano Pitrelli reports.\u201cInvestigators at the Department of Homeland Security are bracing for a new wave of fraud attempts by criminal groups that officials expect will try to take advantage of the extraordinary demand for doses,\u201d Nick Miroff reports.Japan\u2019s parliament passed a law that would make covid-19 vaccines free for everyone. (Simon Denyer and Akiko Kashiwagi)Experts fear children won\u2019t get the vaccine in time for next school year. (Meryl Kornfield)Nearly 100,000 covid patients are hospitalized in U.S., and 181,769 new cases were reported yesterday.\u201cAn influx of new covid-19 patients could lead to hard decisions in the worst-hit hospitals about how to allocate medical resources and care,\u201d Ariana Eunjung Cha, Lenny Bernstein, Sun and Jose Del Real report.\u00a0\u201cTom Moore, an infectious-disease doctor in Wichita, said cases had been rising steadily throughout the summer because of outbreaks at meatpacking plants. But over the past few days, the number of positive cases has reached shocking levels. \u2026 Moore described a nurse in the intensive care unit breaking down crying \u2026 Sixteen states and Puerto Rico reported record numbers of hospitalizations on Tuesday, and four states tied with their highest days. Arizona, California, Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each reported more than a 25 percent increase in the average number of hospitalizations compared with one week ago.\" Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) moved to increase hospital staff capacity. The state has 1,583 people in hospitals being treated for the virus, the most since early May.Revised CDC guidance says 2-week coronavirus quarantines can be cut to 10 or 7 days.\u201cThe move reflects the agency\u2019s recognition that the two-week quarantine rule is onerous for many people and that most of the public health benefit from quarantining people exposed to the virus can be gained with a more flexible approach,\u201d Joel Achenbach reports. \u201cThe CDC acknowledges that this new guidance involves a trade-off. The existing 14-day quarantine recommendation reflects the ability of the virus to incubate for a long period of time before symptoms appear. But lack of compliance \u2014 for example, among people who fear that they will lose a job, or two weeks of income, if they admit to being exposed \u2014 can undermine the public health benefit from that standard.\u201dHealth officials learned several lessons from last week.\u201cAmericans heard the pleas to stay home. They were told what would happen if they didn\u2019t. Still, millions traveled and gathered during last week\u2019s Thanksgiving holiday,\u201d William Wan and Brittany Shammas report. \u201cHealth experts point to several key takeaways: Many states were overwhelmed by unexpected surges in testing \u2014 with many families hoping a negative result might make their planned gatherings a little safer. Some airports were not prepared for the huge crowds that had not been seen since the beginning of the pandemic, making it difficult for travelers to maintain social distancing. But perhaps the most obvious lesson: Public health messaging needs to be retooled, as whole swaths of the country are simply tuning out the warnings from officials and experts.\u201dNew Hampshire\u2019s lawmakers will bundle up and hold their legislative session outdoors to allow for social distancing. (Antonia Farzan)",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Trump\u2019s threat to veto NDAA follows pattern of tenuously invoking \u2018National Security\u2019 (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7061",
        "date": "2020-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/02/daily-202-trumps-threat-veto-ndaa-follows-pattern-tenuously-invoking-national-security/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroPresident Trump upended months of careful, bipartisan negotiations on Tuesday night by threatening to veto a $740 billion bill to fund the military unless Congress includes language to remove liability protections for Facebook, Twitter, Google and other technology companies that have drawn his ire.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn a pair of tweets at 9:45 p.m., Trump demanded the repeal of a 24-year-old federal statute known as Section 230, which has been the legal foundation for free expression on the World Wide Web. .....Therefore, if the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk. Take back America NOW. Thank you!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2020\n\nTrump\u2019s animus toward tech companies has intensified as search engines and social media giants have taken modest steps to limit the spread of dangerous election disinformation and otherwise challenge his false declarations of victory. On his way out the door, the lame-duck president is desperate to pull the levers of state power to squeeze private enterprises he views as inhospitable to his political interests. That is deeply at odds with the American tradition. It also would have been anathema to conservatives before Trump hijacked their movement.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House did not respond to a request for an explanation of why a 1996 amendment to a 1934 communications law represents \u201ca serious threat to our National Security.\u201d There is no evidence that it does. Section 230 has no meaningful nexus with national security.President Trump said on Nov. 2, he would veto the $740 billion National Defense Authorization Act unless Congress repeals Section 230. (Reuters)Over the past four years, Trump has repeatedly stretched the meaning of \u201cNational Security.\u201d He always treats it as a proper noun.\u00a0He has invoked the term to justify nativism on immigration, from imposing the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries to diverting money from the military budget for his border wall and excluding the state of New York from a trusted traveler program.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementHe has cited national security to defend rolling back environmental protections to allow more coal mining and to offer government support for oil companies.AdvertisementHe has trotted out the \u201cNational Security\u201d excuse to justify imposing tariffs on stalwart allies. Even Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called that rationale \u201cinsulting and unacceptable.\u201dWhen Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor anonymously wrote a critical op-ed for the New York Times in 2018, Trump suggested that their source was phony. \u201cIf the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist,\u201d he tweeted, \u201cthe Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe has claimed that former national security adviser John Bolton\u2019s book endangered \u201cNational Security.\u201d In October, the president tweeted that \u201cJoe Biden is a National Security threat!\u201d In 2017, Trump tweeted that his former opponent Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server \u201cendangered National Security.\u201d He did not feel the same way when his daughter was caught conducting government business on her own private email account.AdvertisementIronically, on Feb. 18, a few months before he tried to ban TikTok on national security grounds, Trump decried efforts on Capitol Hill to limit what products businesses can sell to China by complaining about the \u201calways used National Security excuse.\u201dTrump already threatened last month to veto the National Defense Authorization Act if it retains a provision requiring the Pentagon to change the names of 10 military installations that honor racist Confederate officers who took up arms against the United States to preserve the institution of slavery. Trump has massively resisted this change.Story continues below advertisement\u201cSome Republicans in recent days have suggested a trade: Reforming Section 230 in exchange for the base-name changes that Democrats seek. Democrats largely have balked at the idea,\u201d Tony Romm explains. \u201cMany lawmakers \u2014 Democrats and Republicans \u2014 increasingly have come to question whether the protections are outdated, conferring legal immunity on tech giants at a time when they have failed to crack down on hate speech, election disinformation and other harmful content online. But Trump and his Republican allies have seized on the debate to advance their arguments that Facebook, Google, Twitter and others should be penalized for exhibiting systemic political bias against conservatives \u2014 a charge for which they have provided scant evidence, and one that tech giants long have denied.\u201dAdvertisementA handful of Republicans are speaking out against Trump\u2019s threat to derail funding for the troops. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) tweeted this morning that \u201c230 should NOT be mixed with NDAA & used by @realDonaldTrump to veto.\u201dThis would be Trump\u2019s ninth veto as president. An NDAA has passed for 59 consecutive years. In October 2015, President Barack Obama initially vetoed the bill because of the way it would have sidestepped budget limitations for the military and because it would restrict the transfer of detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay. A few weeks later, after Congress passed an updated version that addressed some of his concerns, Obama signed the measure into law.Story continues below advertisementHere is what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had to say at the time:Blocking #NDAA funding is not in our national interest and it's profoundly unfair to our nation's brave troops.\u2014 Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) June 3, 2015\n\nThe voting warsGabriel Sterling, a Georgia state election official, on Dec. 1 slammed President Trump for not condemning threats of violence against election workers. (Reuters)A Republican election official in Georgia accuses Trump of fostering violent threats.\u00a0\u201cGabriel Sterling, a voting systems manager for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, was visibly angry and shaken as he approached a lectern in the Georgia Capitol,\u201d Amy Gardner and Keith Newell report. \u201c\u2018Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language,\u2019 he said. \u2018Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. \u2026 Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.\u2019 \u2026 Sterling\u2019s public chastisement represents one of the strongest rebukes yet of Trump\u2019s baseless attacks on the election\u2019s integrity by a member of his own party. \u2026 Sterling also demanded that the two senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, denounce the threats that flowed into his office after Trump began attacking Raffensperger for failing to repeat his false accusations of fraud.\u201d Trump responded to a video of Sterling's speech by reiterating the false conspiracy theories that have fueled the threats.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn related news: When five patients died of the coronavirus in a 32-hour span at a hospital in Reno, Nev., physician Jacob Keeperman turned to Twitter to thank colleagues for all their support, tweeting a selfie of him on the day the alternate care site opened. His message took on a different meaning Tuesday evening, though, when Trump retweeted a conservative lifestyle blog that falsely claimed the selfie in front of empty hospital beds proved that the pandemic was a hoax. Keeperman said he was saddened that the president shared the disinformation. \u201cIt was turned into something that it was never meant to be,\u201d he said. (Andrea Salcedo)Trump\u2019s allies will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on mail-in ballots. (Robert Barnes and Elise Viebeck)Trump\u2019s campaign asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to overturn the president's loss in the state by throwing out hundreds of thousands of ballots in the two most Democratic-leaning counties. (Rosalind Helderman)Trump\u2019s recently disavowed attorney Sidney Powell has gained a strange new ally. She filed an affidavit from the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the QAnon conspiracy theory\u2019s Internet home. (Drew Harwell)\u201cTrump fired me for saying this, but I\u2019ll say it again: The election wasn\u2019t rigged,\u201d Chris Krebs wrote an op-ed for our newspaper.A group of 25 former presidents of the D.C. Bar said lawyers shouldn\u2019t be complicit in Trump\u2019s attacks on democracy.\u00a0In an op-ed, they write that \u201cno lawyer may seek, on behalf of any client, to subvert democratic institutions or burden the courts with claims that the lawyer knows are frivolous.\"Attorney General Bill Barr says he hasn\u2019t seen fraud that could affect the election\u2019s outcome.\u201cBarr said Tuesday that he has \u2018not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,\u2019 undercutting claims that President Trump and his allies have made \u2014 without evidence \u2014 of widespread and significant voting irregularities,\u201d Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey report. \u201cHis comments to the Associated Press, while caveated, make Barr the highest-ranking Trump administration official to break with the president on his allegation that the election was stolen. \u2026 Barr said the FBI and the Justice Department had looked into some fraud claims. \u2026 [Rudy Giuliani] and Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the campaign, said, \u2018With all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn\u2019t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation.\u2019 \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAt the same time Barr's comments became public Tuesday, the Justice Department revealed that the attorney general had, in October, secretly appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut as special counsel examining how the FBI investigated the Trump campaign in 2016 and beyond \u2014 a move that might hearten Trump and his allies. \u2026 The order to install him as special counsel is likely to ensure that his work is not shut down by the incoming administration \u2026 Under Justice Department regulations, special counsels can be dismissed only for misconduct or some other good cause, making it more difficult for the next attorney general to end Durham\u2019s investigation. [This was cheered by Republicans and decried by Democrats.] \u2026\u201cA person who spoke with Trump on Monday said he was railing against governors in Republican states \u2014 particularly in Georgia and Arizona \u2014 who would not back up his claims of fraud and were proceeding to certify election results. \u2026 Trump nevertheless is unlikely to give it up until at least after the electoral college votes Dec. 14, this person said. An administration official \u2026 told The Post that in recent months, Barr and Trump have \u2018barely spoken,\u2019 though they did have a conversation the week before Thanksgiving. \u2026 Trump has complained to advisers about his attorney general, two officials said, and the frustration has filtered to Barr even as the men have talked less frequently. The president has also been annoyed that Barr has expressed support for FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, whose public statements contradicting Trump \u2014 about election security and domestic extremism \u2014 have made him a frequent target of the president\u2019s rage.\"Every losing candidate since 1896 has offered a concession. Trump could break that mold.\u00a0That's \u201cwhen defeated Nebraska lawyer William Jennings Bryan sent a conciliatory telegram to Ohio Gov. William McKinley, who won the election to succeed Grover Cleveland,\u201d Bonnie Berkowitz reports. Inauguration Day often begins with a pre-inauguration meal at the White House that is supposed to be cordial and noncontroversial. It isn\u2019t always. In 1953, following a spat over a missed meeting, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower didn\u2019t show up to the customary lunch that Bess Truman prepared. Inauguration Day also usually features a show of unity in a ride to the Capitol. The tradition began in 1837, when Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson shared a carriage. So far, only President-elect Ulysses Grant has refused to share a ride, prompting his predecessor, Andrew Johnson, to skip his inauguration, making Johnson the third and last president to date to refuse to see his successor sworn in. Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams left Washington early to avoid the celebrations. Inauguration day ends with the swearing-in. Each departing president since Ronald Reagan has left a handwritten note for his successor in the Oval Office. We\u2019ll see if Trump does the same for the man who made him a one-term president.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump is considering kicking off his 2024 campaign on Inauguration Day. \u201cThere is \u2018preliminary planning\u2019 underway for a Jan. 20 event to kick off a new Trump bid, the people familiar with the discussions said, though it\u2019s possible the president could make the announcement earlier as no final decisions have been made,\u201d NBC News reports. \u201cRegardless of the timing of a campaign announcement, Trump is not expected to attend the inauguration \u2026 He also does not plan to invite Biden to the White House or even call him.\u201dTrump considers granting pre-emptive pardons to his children and son-in-law.\u201cMr. Trump has told others that he is concerned that a Biden Justice Department might seek retribution against the president by targeting the oldest three of his five children \u2014 Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump \u2014 as well as Ms. Trump\u2019s husband, Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser,\u201d the New York Times reports. \u201cThe nature of Mr. Trump\u2019s concern about any potential criminal exposure of Eric Trump or Ivanka Trump is unclear, although an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the Trump Organization has expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees by the company, some of which appear to have gone to Ms. Trump. Presidential pardons, however, do not provide protection against state or local crimes.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThe Justice Department in August investigated a potential \u2018bribery-for-pardon\u2019 scheme in which a large political contribution would be offered in exchange for a presidential pardon by the White House, according to court records unsealed Tuesday,\u201d Spencer Hsu reports.A lawyer for Trump and three of his adult children argued before the 2nd Circuit that a fraud case brought against them for endorsing ACN \u2014 a marketing organization selling telecommunications products \u2014 should be sent to arbitration and not go forward in open court. Four plaintiffs say they were duped into paying to join ACN as independent sales representatives because the Trumps presented it as a promising business opportunity on \u201cThe Apprentice.\u201d A district court judge ruled against the Trumps. (Shayna Jacobs)The coronavirusAsked about a new bipartisan coronavirus relief proposal on Dec. 1, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said \u201cWe just don\u2019t have time to waste time.\" (The Washington Post)Several new coronavirus relief proposals emerge on Capitol Hill.In addition to a compromise proposal from several centrist senators, House Democrats and McConnell circulated new offers. \"The growing calls for action have not led to a unified approach,\u201d Seung Min Kim, Jeff Stein and Mike DeBonis report. \u201cStill, the new actions and statements Tuesday may reflect movement toward some level of pandemic relief \u2026 McConnell disclosed Tuesday that senior Republicans received a new coronavirus relief offer from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday night. Democratic aides declined to disclose details of their offer, and Schumer called it a \u2018private proposal to help us move the ball forward.\u2019\u00a0\"Senate Republican leaders circulated a slimmed-down plan Tuesday that would probably be fiercely opposed by Democrats. The measure includes a liability shield for businesses and more small-business assistance. It would provide short-term, limited jobless aid but no additional funding for state and local governments or help for cash-strapped transit agencies. \u2026 The McConnell bill also reintroduces a Republican plan to allow diners to claim a tax deduction on their meal expenditures, a provision pushed by the business lobby but viewed skeptically by economists and some Republicans. \u2026\u00a0\u201cSome lawmakers have hoped that elements of a bipartisan stimulus deal could be added to the spending bill required to avoid a Dec. 11 government shutdown, although that could complicate the must-pass legislation. Nonetheless, McConnell suggested Tuesday that the spending bill could be an avenue to pass targeted coronavirus relief. Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke Tuesday afternoon about the government funding bill. As for the bipartisan Senate framework, Mnuchin said he would review it, although the plan got a much icier reaction from the White House.\u201dAgainst the backdrop of federal inaction, states are racing to craft their own economic relief plans. \u201cMichigan, for example, has sought to extend another round of enhanced payments to its unemployed residents. Minnesota has eyed one-time stimulus checks to locals under financial duress. And Colorado has mounted a wide-ranging effort to help its cash-starved workers and businesses, working on legislative proposals that could help cover rent payments, utility bills and other critical costs,\u201d Romm reports.As President-elect Biden introduced his economic brain trust in Wilmington, Del., his pick for Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, urged a swift and ambitious response.\u00a0\u201cBiden\u2019s choice of economic advisers highlights a commitment to spend whatever is needed to restore a full-employment economy, setting up a clash with Senate Republicans who are sounding alarms over a national debt they helped Trump increase by nearly $7 trillion,\u201d David Lynch reports.\u00a0Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales disappointed, another sign that the recovery is stumbling. Fewer Americans shopped over the weekend, and those who did spent 14 percent less than last year. (Abha Bhattarai)\u00a0More than half of the emergency small-business funds under the Paycheck Protection Program went to larger businesses. About 600 mostly larger companies, including dozens of national chains, received the maximum amount allowed under the program. (Jonathan O\u2019Connell, Andrew Van Dam, Aaron Gregg and Alyssa Fowers)New York\u2019s MTA is preparing to cut subway service by 40 percent while it considers a $3 billion loan from the Federal Reserve. Boston is proposing to shorten hours of operation. The D.C. Metro announced plans to eliminate weekend rail service. The stark vision of the capital region operating without weekend transit service for the first time since launching 44 years ago jolted residents and lawmakers alike. (Justin George, Lori Aratani and Meagan Flynn)Schumer told major donors during a private call that Democrats failed to win Senate control because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and North Carolina Democratic candidate Cal Cunningham \u201ccouldn\u2019t keep his zipper up.\u201d The minority leader expressed regret for recruiting Cunningham and for failing to convince Stacey Abrams to run in Georgia. (Axios)Quote of the day\u201cThe risk of overdoing it is less than the risk of under doing it,\u201d Fed Chair Jerome Powell told the Senate Banking Committee. (Bloomberg News)The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted on the recommendations for whom should be given the covid-19 vaccine first when it becomes available. (The Washington Post)Britain beats U.S. in granting the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine emergency authorization.\u201cBritain became the first country to grant emergency approval \u2026 to the coronavirus vaccine developed by the Pfizer and BioNTech, smashing all speed records to see a potentially lifesaving shot invented, tested and approved in less than a year.,\u201d William Booth and Karla Adam report. \u201cBritish officials said a mass immunization program would begin almost immediately, with distribution of the first 800,000 doses to begin next week. \u2026 Drug regulators in Britain have a global reputation for being tough but fast, and [the] decision is likely to intensify the focus on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has faced increasing pressure from the Trump administration to approve Pfizer\u2019s vaccine.\u201dWho will get the first doses on this side of the pond?A federal advisory panel recommended last night that the initial inoculations should be given to an estimated 21 million health-care workers and 3 million residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities. \"These groups were deemed the highest priority by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, because the vaccine will initially be in extremely short supply after it is cleared by federal regulators,\u201d Lena Sun and Isaac Stanley-Becker report.\u00a0\"Residents and employees of long-term-care facilities were prioritized because they account for nearly 40 percent of deaths from covid-19 \u2026 The recommendations for the highest-priority groups, known as Phase 1a, will be sent to CDC Director Robert Redfield, who also informs Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. If the recommendations are approved, they will become official CDC recommendations on immunization in the United States and provide guidance to state officials, who are scrambling to meet a Friday deadline for vaccine distribution planning.\u00a0\u201cThe committee voted 13 to 1 to prioritize the two groups. Helen Keipp Talbot, an associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University, was the sole dissenting vote. Unease over the recommendations centered on the inclusion of long-term-care residents, with several panel members saying there was insufficient vaccine safety and efficacy data to support immunizing them right away. \u2026 What the committee will probably recommend may differ from what some Trump administration officials want, according to three federal health officials.\u201dThe Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine must be transported and stored at minus-94 degrees, jump-starting the race for special freezers. \u201cFord has announced it is acquiring its own ultracold freezers to supply employees with Pfizer\u2019s vaccine. Hospital systems, logistics and delivery companies are also gearing up,\u201d Stefano Pitrelli reports.\u201cInvestigators at the Department of Homeland Security are bracing for a new wave of fraud attempts by criminal groups that officials expect will try to take advantage of the extraordinary demand for doses,\u201d Nick Miroff reports.Japan\u2019s parliament passed a law that would make covid-19 vaccines free for everyone. (Simon Denyer and Akiko Kashiwagi)Experts fear children won\u2019t get the vaccine in time for next school year. (Meryl Kornfield)Nearly 100,000 covid patients are hospitalized in U.S., and 181,769 new cases were reported yesterday.\u201cAn influx of new covid-19 patients could lead to hard decisions in the worst-hit hospitals about how to allocate medical resources and care,\u201d Ariana Eunjung Cha, Lenny Bernstein, Sun and Jose Del Real report.\u00a0\u201cTom Moore, an infectious-disease doctor in Wichita, said cases had been rising steadily throughout the summer because of outbreaks at meatpacking plants. But over the past few days, the number of positive cases has reached shocking levels. \u2026 Moore described a nurse in the intensive care unit breaking down crying \u2026 Sixteen states and Puerto Rico reported record numbers of hospitalizations on Tuesday, and four states tied with their highest days. Arizona, California, Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each reported more than a 25 percent increase in the average number of hospitalizations compared with one week ago.\" Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) moved to increase hospital staff capacity. The state has 1,583 people in hospitals being treated for the virus, the most since early May.Revised CDC guidance says 2-week coronavirus quarantines can be cut to 10 or 7 days.\u201cThe move reflects the agency\u2019s recognition that the two-week quarantine rule is onerous for many people and that most of the public health benefit from quarantining people exposed to the virus can be gained with a more flexible approach,\u201d Joel Achenbach reports. \u201cThe CDC acknowledges that this new guidance involves a trade-off. The existing 14-day quarantine recommendation reflects the ability of the virus to incubate for a long period of time before symptoms appear. But lack of compliance \u2014 for example, among people who fear that they will lose a job, or two weeks of income, if they admit to being exposed \u2014 can undermine the public health benefit from that standard.\u201dHealth officials learned several lessons from last week.\u201cAmericans heard the pleas to stay home. They were told what would happen if they didn\u2019t. Still, millions traveled and gathered during last week\u2019s Thanksgiving holiday,\u201d William Wan and Brittany Shammas report. \u201cHealth experts point to several key takeaways: Many states were overwhelmed by unexpected surges in testing \u2014 with many families hoping a negative result might make their planned gatherings a little safer. Some airports were not prepared for the huge crowds that had not been seen since the beginning of the pandemic, making it difficult for travelers to maintain social distancing. But perhaps the most obvious lesson: Public health messaging needs to be retooled, as whole swaths of the country are simply tuning out the warnings from officials and experts.\u201dNew Hampshire\u2019s lawmakers will bundle up and hold their legislative session outdoors to allow for social distancing. (Antonia Farzan)",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Daily 202: State of the Union guests invited by Democratic presidential candidates preview 2020 themes (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7062",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/02/05/daily-202-state-of-the-union-guests-invited-by-democratic-presidential-candidates-preview-2020-themes/5c590ec71b326b66eb09861a/",
        "text": "with Joanie GreveWith Joanie GreveWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Joshua Trump, a sixth-grader from Delaware, has been bullied because he shares a last name with the president. \u201cThey curse at him, they call him an idiot, they call him stupid,\u201d his mother, Megan Trump Berto, told a local TV station last year. Yakelin Garcia Contreras, from Guatemala, was the same age as Joshua, 11, when she was separated from her mother last year after they arrived at the southern border to seek asylum. \u201cWe fled our homes seeking protection from violence and a better life for my daughter,\u201d said Albertina Contreras Telator, her mother, who got her back after two months apart. \u201cThe treatment we were met with was horrifying.\u201dStory continues below advertisementJoshua will be President Trump\u2019s guest during tonight\u2019s State of the Union. He\u2019ll be seated in the first lady\u2019s box, the White House announced late Monday.AdvertisementYakelin will be the guest of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who helped draw public attention to the Trump administration\u2019s family separation policy last June at a time when the White House was denying the very existence of such a policy. Merkley is now seriously considering a run for president. \u201cWe need to bear witness to the suffering that this cruel policy inflicted and resolve to make sure that nothing like this ever happens in the United States of America again,\u201d the senator said, explaining why he\u2019s bringing a preteen to watch a man who doesn\u2019t want her in this country deliver a speech in her nonnative tongue. (Today also happens to be her 12th birthday.)Merkley is part of a bumper crop of Democratic lawmakers who have their eyes set on the White House this year. They may be in the minority, but they\u2019re using Trump\u2019s State of the Union to draw attention to causes close to their hearts and to appeal to constituencies important to their campaigns. Ambitious members now approach the big speech as if they\u2019re asking someone to prom or maybe, because of the growing ranks of women in the legislative branch, the Sadie Hawkins dance.In 1913, Woodrow Wilson started the tradition of presidents delivering the constitutionally required update on the state of the country in person, rather than via letter. Ronald Reagan humanized it in 1982, starting what\u2019s become a ritual of presidents giving shout-outs to their guests when he praised Congressional Budget Office staffer Lenny Skutnik for jumping into the Potomac to save a woman after a plane crash. In recent years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have become much more deliberate about whom they give their tickets to. These invites often get positive coverage from hometown outlets that don\u2019t cover politics as much as they used to. Like so much else, this trend has supercharged in the Trump era. The guests have become symbols. Some might use a less charitable term: props.-- Here\u2019s who other 2020 contenders invited \u2014 and what it says about their campaigns:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who has been making a play for the LGBT donor community and has carved out a niche on the Armed Services committee, is bringing a transgender Navy officer. Lt. Commander Blake Dremann, who has had 11 overseas deployments, is president of SPARTA, an organization that advocates for transgender troops. Gillibrand will introduce a bill this week to protect transgender members who are already in the armed forces. The Supreme Court agreed two weeks ago to let the Trump administration\u2019s broad restrictions on transgender troops go into effect while the legal battle plays out in lower courts. \u201cTransgender service members like Lt. Commander Dremann make extraordinary sacrifices every day to defend our freedom and our most sacred values, and President Trump\u2019s decision to ban them from military service is cruel and undermines our military readiness,\u201d Gillibrand said in a statement.-- Health care will be a top-tier issue once again in next year\u2019s election, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) has focused on lowering drug prices. She\u2019s bringing Nicole Smith-Holt, whose son Alec had Type 1 diabetes and died at age 26 after losing health insurance coverage through her plan. She believes he was rationing insulin because of its high cost. The Washington Post Magazine published a profile last month of the mom from Richfield, Minn. \u201cNicole\u2019s story is absolutely heartbreaking\u2014no mother should have to watch her son decide between food and medication,\u201d Klobuchar said.-- Most of the Democratic candidates are trying to woo organized labor with their invitations. Trump\u2019s third address from the House chamber, after all, was postponed because of the longest partial government shutdown in U.S. history, which affected 800,000 mostly unionized federal workers.Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is bringing Sajid Shahriar, a Boston-based employee of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who was furloughed during the shutdown. Shahriar is executive vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3258 and sits on the board of Massachusetts AFL-CIO. \u201cSajid has devoted his career to fighting for fair housing, equal pay, the dignity of all work, and strong collective bargaining rights for workers across this country,\u201d Warren\u2019s office said in a news release. \u201cIt's time to send a message to President Trump and Senate Republicans: federal and contract workers are the backbone of our economy and their livelihoods should never be used as pawns in Republican political games,\u201d Warren said in a statement.Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) found an air traffic controller who got furloughed during the shutdown after losing her home in a wildfire. Trisha Pesiri-Dybvik is also active in the AFL-CIO \u2014 one of the most sought-after endorsements in a Democratic primary \u2014 and has three young kids. Her husband, Jed, is a Navy veteran who was forced to work without pay throughout the 35-day shutdown because his job as a controller was deemed essential. (Her position was not.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHarris said she chose Pesiri-Dybvik because she\u2019s the living embodiment of \u201cstrength and resilience.\u201d Adding insult to injury, the threat of flooding and mudslides \u2014 which have gotten worse in California because of climate change \u2014\u00a0forced the family to flee the property they rented in Camarillo after their home in Ventura burned down. \u201cSince the tragic loss of their home, Trisha, Jed, and their three children have worked diligently to bounce back and reestablish a sense of normalcy in their lives, even amidst an unnecessary government shutdown that caused both of them to miss their paychecks for over a month,\u201d Harris said in a statement. \u201cWashington needs to hear her story.\u201dSen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is bringing Rita Lewis for the second year in a row. Rita\u2019s husband Butch, who passed away in 2015, was a Vietnam veteran, truck driver and a member of the Teamsters who became an activist to preserve underfunded pension plans. She\u2019s continued his work. \u201cBrown continues working to highlight the pension crisis that threatens more than 60,000 Ohioans and 1.3 million workers and retirees nationwide,\u201d his office said in a news release.-- Bernie Sanders will again deliver his own live-streamed response, in addition to the official Democratic speech by former Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams and the Spanish-language response from California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. The Vermont senator\u2019s spokesman didn\u2019t respond to an email asking who will get his tickets. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) will announce his guest later today, a spokeswoman said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who is not as serious about running for president as his colleagues but continues to keep the door open, is bringing his daughter with him, an aide emailed this morning.-- Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who has been traveling to the early states as he mulls a long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination, is highlighting his support for gun control by bringing a survivor of last February\u2019s shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. The student, Cameron Kasky, has advocated for tough new gun laws since the massacre that killed 17 people last Valentine\u2019s Day. The 18-year-old co-founded an advocacy group called Never Again MSD and helped organize the March for Our Lives protests. \u201cThe shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., happened while I was in congressional orientation in December 2012, and I figured Congress would have to act,\u201d Swalwell said in a statement. \u201cAs Republicans stymied all efforts since then, I started to grow frustrated but the \u2026 voices of the Parkland generation have inspired me to renew our efforts.\u201dTrade deals, immigration reform, and prescription drug legislation: Which of Trump's State of the Union proposals actually got done? (Joy Sharon Yi/The Washington Post)WHAT TO EXPECT TONIGHT:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- News: Trump is expected to announce a campaign to halt transmission of HIV in the United States by 2030, a goal some experts say is within reach. Lenny Bernstein, Lena Sun and Amy Goldstein report: \u201cThe U.S. Health and Human Services Department is expected to roll out the plan within days of Trump\u2019s address ... Greg Millett, director of public policy for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, said the initial plan may focus on wiping out HIV transmission in 46 U.S. counties responsible for about half of all new HIV cases in the United States, based on information he has seen.\u201d-- The president continues to threaten that he will declare a national emergency to redirect Pentagon funding for the project, although aides said he is not expected to formally make that declaration during his speech. David Nakamura reports: \u201cWhite House officials insisted that Trump will not use the speech as a cudgel to pummel Democrats over the wall and play solely to his conservative base. The president certainly intends to make a robust defense of his immigration agenda, they said, but also will spend time discussing areas where he hopes to forge consensus, including around infrastructure projects and cutting the cost of prescription drugs. Aides said the president will obliquely address the government shutdown \u2026 by charting a path forward on the budget fight and his demands for a border wall.\u201d\u201cThis president is going to call for an end to the politics of resistance, retribution and call for more comity,\u201d said White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway. \u201cHe\u2019s calling for cooperation \u2026 and also compromise. And he\u2019s going to point out a couple of examples in which this has happened on his watch.\u201d\u201cTogether we can break decades of political stalemate,\u201d Trump plans to say in the speech. \u201cWe can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions and unlock the extraordinary promise of America\u2019s future. The decision is ours to make.\u201d\u201cTrump, aides said, will discuss the administration\u2019s trade war with China, which Trump has suggested could be the focus of a potential summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month in Asia,\u201d per David. \u201cTrump also is tentatively scheduled to hold a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this month, possibly in Vietnam. During his national address last year, Trump highlighted the Kim regime\u2019s brutality to build public pressure on Pyongyang, but this year, he is expected to hail progress in their nuclear weapons negotiations, even though experts have said North Korea has taken few tangible steps toward disarmament.\u201d (David also wrote an excellent story for today\u2019s newspaper about the North Korean defector who was hailed by Trump during last year\u2019s speech but now worries that the president is ignoring Kim\u2019s human rights abuses.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Trump\u2019s other guests, via Eli Rosenberg: \u201cGrace Eline, a child who was diagnosed with a brain tumor when she was 9; Judah Samet, a survivor of the Holocaust who lived through the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; Ashley Evans, a recovering opioid addict; Elvin Hernandez, a special agent at the Department of Homeland Security who focuses on human trafficking; and Debra Bissell, Heather Armstrong and Madison Armstrong, family members of a Nevada couple who authorities say were killed by an undocumented immigrant.\u201d (Read the White House\u2019s news release with their bios.)-- Trump has been practicing the delivery of this speech more than usual because he wants to nail the dismount. \u201cAfter spending part of the weekend at Mar-a-Lago \u2026 working on the speech, Mr. Trump spent two hours going over it with Stephen Miller, his chief policy adviser, in the Oval Office,\u201d Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times. \u201cHe also spent time on Monday practicing in the Map Room with a handful of senior administration officials. He was expected to do another teleprompter-and-lectern practice session there on Tuesday, with his aides giving him notes. \u2026\u201cThis year, there has also been concern among the president\u2019s allies that Mr. Miller, who in previous years has bristled at losing control of the speech-writing process, has been trying to reassert himself as the final voice on a speech that will most likely lean heavily on immigration.\u201cFor all of the president\u2019s fabled norm-busting, there are aspects of the conventional presidency that appeal to him. \u2026 The cinematic aspect of the annual tradition is one piece of the presidency that Mr. Trump embraces rather than disrupts, according to more than a half-dozen current and former aides.\u201d-- More WaPo team coverage:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFact Checker Glenn Kessler revisits the proposals Trump outlined a year ago: \u201cWhat flopped and what succeeded.\u201dAdam Taylor: \u201cWhat Trump said about foreign policy \u2026 (and what actually happened).\u201dDan Balz and Griff Witte: \u201cEuropeans fear Trump may threaten not just the transatlantic bond, but the state of their union.\u201dPaul Kane: \u201cIf a Democrat is sitting next to a Republican on Tuesday, it\u2019s almost certainly because Democrats won so many seats in the 2018 midterms that they cannot all fit on their side of the aisle.\u201dElise Viebeck: An activist who confronted Jeff Flake in an elevator during the debate over Brett Kavanaugh will attend as the guest of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).For locals: Luz Lazo has a rundown of road closures around the Capitol.-- How it\u2019s playing elsewhere:Associated Press: \u201cPelosi over his shoulder: Trump faces empowered Dems at SOTU.\u201dABC News: \u201cTrump's promise to 'heal' sounds familiar, but unconvincing.\u201d\u00a0CNN: \u201cState of the Union promises epic political drama.\u201dWall Street Journal: \u201cTrump to Call for Bipartisanship as He Threatens to Declare Emergency.\u201dThe New Yorker: \u201cThe Shrunken State of Donald Trump\u2019s Presidency.\u201dHuffPost: Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) became the fourth Democratic member of Congress to announce he\u2019ll skip Trump\u2019s speech, joining Steve Cohen, John Lewis and Hank Johnson.-- Tune in: I\u2019ll be in the Capitol tonight for the speech and will offer pregame analysis from 8:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern as part of The Washington Post\u2019s live broadcast. Libby Casey will anchor, and Seung Min Kim and Rhonda Colvin will join us on set in Statuary Hall. We\u2019ll stream on The Post\u2019s home page, plus YouTube and Twitch. \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nGET SMART FAST:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Trump is teeing up stress tests for several institutions, from DHS to DOJ and the IRS (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7063",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/04/09/daily-202-trump-is-teeing-up-stress-tests-for-several-institutions-from-dhs-to-doj-and-the-irs/5cab9f2ca7a0a475985bd368/",
        "text": "with Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWith Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0To work, the American system of checks and balances requires that the executive branch respect the prerogatives of Congress, from appropriations to oversight, and the interpretations by judges of the law and the Constitution. That\u2019s what the rule of law requires. That\u2019s what President Trump swore an oath 27 months ago to preserve, protect and defend. All government employees, from civil servants to political appointees, take a similar oath. That\u2019s why it\u2019s such a big deal that any U.S. president would suggest to armed law enforcement officers that they should disregard court orders. During his visit Friday to Calexico, Calif., Trump told Border Patrol agents not to allow any migrants in, two sources who were present told CNN\u2019s Jake Tapper: \u201cTell them we don't have the capacity, he said. If judges give you trouble, say, \u2018Sorry, judge, I can't do it. We don't have the room.\u2019 After the president left the room, agents sought further advice from their leaders, who told them they were not giving them that direction and if they did what the president said they would take on personal liability. You have to follow the law, they were told.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is reminiscent of a likely apocryphal quote that\u2019s often attributed to Trump\u2019s favorite president. After the Supreme Court recognized tribal sovereignty in 1832 with Worcester v. Georgia, Andrew Jackson purportedly said this of the chief justice: \u201cJohn Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.\u201d Indeed, while Jackson forged ahead with his demonization of the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears, the state of Georgia complied with the court\u2019s order.-- Trump is systematically purging the upper echelons of the Department of Homeland Security, raising fears that he\u2019ll install loyalists who won\u2019t feel so constrained by legal strictures. The White House announced the removal of Secret Service Director Tex Alles. He dumped ICE chief Ron Vitiello on Friday and ousted DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Sunday. \u201cL. Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and DHS General Counsel John Mitnick could be the next to go,\u201d sources tell Nick Miroff, Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey and Carol Leonnig. \u201cNielsen has told confidants that she felt uncomfortable with some of the president\u2019s requests, particularly closing the border, and thought that the president did not understand many of the laws governing immigration. \u2026\u201cTrump has suggested to aides in recent weeks that the administration\u2019s previous policy of separating families at the border could be used to deter crossings and that a version of the policy could be reinstated \u2026 Some aides have resisted the idea of family separations \u2026 [Doing this] without lawmakers\u2019 approval risks another court injunction. \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNo president before Trump has pushed the country\u2019s security agencies into such a state of churning confusion, current and former DHS officials said. \u2026 \u2018The president doesn\u2019t like the news he\u2019s getting on immigration and has blamed leadership at DHS, but this is not something leadership at the department can fix,\u2019 said Stewart Baker, a top DHS adviser to President George W. Bush. \u2018This needs to be fixed in Congress, and there doesn\u2019t seem to be any appetite for that.\u2019\u201d-- The courts and Congress continue trying to check the zealousness of Trump\u2019s immigration agenda: A federal judge last night blocked the administration\u2019s experimental program to make asylum seekers at the southern border wait in Mexico as their cases are processed. U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco enjoined the policy, which began in January and was about to be expanded, with a preliminary injunction. In a 27-page ruling, Seeborg said the question before him was not whether it\u2019s a \u201cwise, intelligent, or humane policy.\u201d Rather, he said, Trump\u2019s move probably violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedure Act and other legal protections to ensure immigrants \u201care not returned to unduly dangerous circumstances.\u201dAfter 11 p.m., Trump retweeted Fox News host Laura Ingraham describing it as \u201ctyranny of [the] judiciary.\u201dA 9th Circuit Judge just ruled that Mexico is too dangerous for migrants. So unfair to the U.S. OUT OF CONTROL! https://t.co/XF8o3jMDle\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 9, 2019\n\n-- There\u2019s also a fresh push from leading Senate Republicans to protect certain conservatives from becoming victims of the Trump purge. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) warned Trump against dismissing Cissna in an interview with The Post last night. \u201cHe\u2019s pulling the rug out from the very people that are trying to help him accomplish his goal,\u201d Grassley complained. \u201cGrassley said he texted Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, to relay his concerns,\u201d Seung Min Kim reports. \u201cGrassley also said he was going on Fox News \u2014 Trump\u2019s favored cable news channel \u2014 to make his case publicly.\u201dKirstjen Nielsen, who resigned as secretary of homeland security on April 7, spoke to reporters outside of her Alexandria, Va., townhouse. (Reuters)THE PRICE OF LOYALTY:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- \u201cNobody debased herself quite as often as Nielsen did in her quest to keep the job,\u201d Dana Milbank writes, \u201cdefending Trump after the \u2018s---hole countries\u2019 and Charlottesville scandals, enduring frequent rebukes from Trump and leaks about her imminent firing, embracing his incendiary language and enduring his extralegal instincts, swallowing her moral misgivings to embrace the family-separation policy (while denying any such policy existed), and implausibly claiming that children weren\u2019t being put in cages.\u201d-- \u201cThe ouster of [Nielsen] \u2014 the implementer of some of the most unjust immigration policies since the internment of citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II \u2014 is further proof of President Trump\u2019s ratchet-wrench theory of loyalty. It goes only in his direction,\u201d writes Michael Gerson, a chief speechwriter in Bush 43\u2019s White House. \u201cBut the separation of crying migrant children from their parents as a deterrent, and the housing of children in prisonlike conditions, will be some of the most enduring political images of the Trump era. It says something about Nielsen that she took part in such practices. It says something about Trump that such actions were apparently too moderate and restrained for his taste.\u201dTHE OTHER STRESS TESTS:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- But it\u2019s not just DHS. Trump\u2019s desire to keep concealed from Congress both his personal tax returns and Bob Mueller\u2019s full report creates looming tests for other key institutions. The Justice and the Treasury departments are facing stress tests \u2014 akin to what the Federal Reserve does to make sure banks can stay solvent in a crisis \u2014 that may define the legacies of the political appointees who lead them.Trump quoted and retweeted several allies yesterday who criticized Democratic efforts to obtain the Mueller report and his tax filings. \u201cIn one tweet, Trump quoted Katie Pavlich, editor of Townhall.com, saying that Nadler was \u2018not entitled\u2019 to the full report and underlying documents produced by Mueller,\u201d John Wagner reports. \u201cIn another instance, Trump retweeted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a frequent ally and the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, saying that \u2018Dems want President\u2019s tax returns for purely political purposes!\u2019\u201dHarvard professor Larry Summers, who served as Bill Clinton\u2019s treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001, says that the IRS chief is legally obligated to release Trump\u2019s returns, whether he wants to or not, and that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has no business getting in the way. \u201cThe appropriate response of the treasury secretary is very clear: Under a long-standing delegation order, the secretary does not get involved in taxpayer-specific matters and has delegated to the IRS commissioner,\u201d Summers writes in an op-ed for today\u2019s Post. \u201cMoreover, this is not a delegation that is readily revocable. Federal law provides that if the secretary determines not to delegate a power, such determination may not take effect until 30 days after the secretary notifies the tax-writing (and other specified) committees. So for the secretary to seek to decide whether to pass on the president\u2019s tax return to Congress would surely be inappropriate and probably illegal. I would surely not have done it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPhilip Allen Lacovara, a counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor, and Larry Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, lay out one possible way that the House might be able to get the special counsel\u2019s report if Attorney General William Barr redacts too heavily: by opening a preliminary impeachment inquiry. \u201cOne of the exceptions to grand jury secrecy is disclosure \u2018preliminary to or in connection with a judicial proceeding,\u2019\u201d they write in an op-ed for today\u2019s paper. \u201cTo authorize disclosure of the Watergate grand jury information, the special prosecutor\u2019s office argued that the House had authorized its Judiciary Committee to conduct a formal impeachment inquiry and that such an inquiry could be fairly analogized to a \u2018grand jury\u2019 investigation and thus a judicial proceeding. Both the district court and the court of appeals agreed, and the Judiciary Committee obtained both the report and the underlying evidence.\u201d-- Speaking of the Mueller report, billionaire activist Tom Steyer is launching a $3 million ad buy today calling on Barr to put out the full Mueller report. \u201cIf you think we have a right to read the report for ourselves, you can call the attorney general at this number,\u201d Steyer says, speaking to the camera. \u201cOur tax dollars paid for the report. Don\u2019t let him cover up the truth.\u201d Earlier this year, Steyer committed an additional $40 million in 2019 toward impeaching Trump, though this commercial doesn\u2019t call for that.-- The top-ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee said yesterday that he supports Mueller coming to testify on the Hill. Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) said that he would like to see Mueller testify during the week of April 22. The Democratic chairman, Jerry Nadler, said that he agrees Mueller should appear but that his members need to read the full report and hear from Barr first so they can ask \u201cthe right questions.\u201dTHE NAME-CALLER IN CHIEF:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Speaking of Nadler, Trump went on a tirade against the congressman he calls \u201cFat Jerry\u201d during recent private remarks to GOP lawmakers. The feud between the two men dates to 1985, when Nadler, as a New York state assemblyman, proved to be a major obstacle for Trump\u2019s plans to build a vast development project on the west side of Manhattan, Rachael Bade and Josh Dawsey report: \u201c\u2018I\u2019ve been battling Nadler for years,\u2019 Trump told the GOP lawmakers, who were embarrassed by the outburst \u2026 Trump never forgave Nadler, and privately he has simmered about the chairman and his investigation, calling him an irritant who has long been out to get him and recounting their New York run-ins to aides.\u201d-- Separately, we learned yesterday that Trump has been referring to the now-ousted director of the Secret Service as \u201cDumbo\u201d because he has big ears. (That\u2019s according to the New York Times.)A TIMELY REMINDER OF THE STAKES: AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Here\u2019s the bottom line: Homeland security is no laughing matter, and our safety depends on law enforcement professionals doing their jobs effectively and legally. As the White House was consumed by drama and the president tried to fat-shame an opponent, prosecutors revealed in court filings that local police officers in Prince George\u2019s County, Md., thwarted what could have been a truly heinous terrorist attack on American soil.A Maryland man allegedly planned to run down crowds at National Harbor in an Islamic State-inspired attack. Lynh Bui reports: \u201cRondell Henry, 28, of Germantown was arrested March 28 at the waterfront complex in Prince George\u2019s County with a U-Haul he had stolen from a parking garage in Alexandria, Va., two days earlier, according to a newly unsealed charging document. Henry harbored 'hatred' for 'disbelievers' who didn\u2019t practice Islam and admitted to the plot in interviews with authorities, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court for Maryland asking that he be detained in jail until trial. \u2026\u201cBefore he arrived at the Maryland complex, he spent nearly two hours at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia on March 27 assessing crowds there but finding too few people for the scale of attack he envisioned, court documents contend. \u2018He had no escape plan, intending to die while killing others for his cause,\u2019 the government said in the detention memo. The government said that Henry sought out videos of terrorists beheading civilians and fighting overseas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe government asserts in its filings that because Henry, a computer engineer, had no weapons training, he planned an attack using a vehicle, inspired by the terrorist truck attack in Nice, France, that killed 84 people and left dozens more injured. Henry drove around the Washington area looking for a vehicle to steal, dumping his cellphone along an interstate highway to \u2018destroy evidence of the inspiration behind his attack,\u2019 court documents alleged. The phone was recovered by law enforcement agents and included images of armed ISIS fighters, the ISIS flag and the Pulse nightclub shooter, prosecutors said.\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- The University of Virginia won the March Madness tournament, defeating Texas Tech 85-77 in overtime.\u00a0Chuck Culpepper and Des Bieler report from Minneapolis: \u201cVirginia, a fine tortoise of a program with a warmish 114-year history, a knack for deliberative basketball and an unthinkable splat of 13 months ago, spent Monday night climbing the last jagged rungs to a pinnacle. When finally it made the last few agonizing steps ... it knew a feeling long associated only with others such as Duke or North Carolina, the neighboring hares that always left it among the overshadowed.\u201d-- Just when Virginia fans had grown used to seeing their team choking and turning their No. 1 seeds into comedy, they flipped the perception,\u00a0writes columnist Jerry Brewer:\u00a0\u201cThey turned their entire story into a redemption tale ... They tossed the monkey on their backs, their demons and their haters to the rafters of U.S. Bank Stadium. And then white, silver and gold confetti rained on the Cavaliers. If all those lost Marches over the past six years had soiled them, they now bathed in triumph. In the most incredible turnaround in tournament history, the Team That Lost To A No. 16 Seed last season returned the next year \u2014 not angry, not broken but transformed through humility and introspection \u2014 and won six straight games to claim the program\u2019s first national title.\u201d-- Charlottesville exploded in cheers and disbelief, giving the close-knit college town a chance to rewrite its story.\u00a0Moriah Balingit reports: \u201cFor a town beset by controversy and tragedy, it was about more than just the basketball team. Nearly 20 months ago, white supremacists descended on the town to protest the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee \u2026 Like so many other small communities that become settings for tragedies, the word Charlottesville became not just a place, but a single event. That event came to signify the terrifying rise of white supremacists. It came to signify many things that people who love the community say it is not. \u2018It\u2019s a lovely small town,\u2019 said Larry J. Sabato, director of U-Va.\u2019s Center for Politics. He has lived in Charlottesville since 1970. \u2018It\u2019s heaven to live in.\u2019 Sabato said the game signified a chance for the world to get to know Charlottesville beyond the headlines.\u201dAuthorities charged more than 50 people, like actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, March 12 with being part of a long-running college admittance scam. (Allie Caren, Justin Scuiletti/The Washington Post)GET SMART FAST:More than a dozen parents, including actress Felicity Huffman, agreed to plead\u00a0guilty to charges stemming from the college admissions scandal, as did a former University of Texas tennis coach.\u00a0Huffman expressed \u201cdeep regret and shame over what I have done\u201d and said her daughter did not know of her fraud. (Susan Svrluga)U.S. health officials found 78 new measles cases, bringing this year\u2019s total to 465, the highest number in the past five years.\u00a0Measles cases have now been reported in more than a third of U.S. states, with most of the illnesses occurring in children. There was a worrisome spike in the first week of April, and experts blame the anti-vaccination movement. (Reis Thebault)A huge spring storm is expected to unleash a blizzard and flooding in the Central U.S. this week.\u00a0Like its predecessor, the March \u201cbomb cyclone,\u201d this storm is expected to leave behind a heavy blanket of snow from South Dakota to southern Minnesota and Wisconsin while potentially whipping up fires in the Great Plains and thunderstorms in Kansas and Nebraska. (Ian Livingston)A Post analysis finds that communities affected by mass shootings have not changed their voting patterns much after the attacks.\u00a0Looking at seven such communities, we found that the majority of them showed a single-digit shift toward Democratic candidates in the wake of the tragedies. (Tim Craig and Scott Clement)The\u00a0number of children and teenagers going to the emergency room for suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts has doubled in the past decade.\u00a0According to new research, diagnoses of suicidal ideation or attempts increased from 580,000 in 2007 to 1.12 million in 2015. Nearly half of the visits came from children between ages\u00a05 and\u00a011. (CNN)The family of an American man who died in the Ethiopian Airplanes crash last month sued Boeing, accusing the company of\u00a0putting profits over people with its 737 Max plane.\u00a0The suit, filed in Chicago, is one of a growing list of claims against the company. (Lori Aratani)Students at George Mason University are protesting the school\u2019s decision to hire Brett Kavanaugh.\u00a0The Supreme Court\u00a0justice, who was confirmed despite allegations of sexual assault, plans to teach a summer course in England for students at the Antonin Scalia Law School, but many at the main campus want the university to rescind its offer.\u00a0(Isaac Stanley-Becker)Taylor Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, an LGBTQ advocacy group.\u00a0The pop star, who has been taking more political stands after being criticized for not doing so during the 2016 election, said the money will be used to fight anti-LGBTQ bills. (Billboard)Trump signed legislation giving Bob Dole a promotion in his military rank from captain to colonel.\u00a0The former Republican presidential nominee, who is\u00a095, served in the Army during World War II, earning two Purple Hearts and two awards of the Bronze Star Medal with Valor. (John Wagner)A West Virginia woman falsely accused an Egyptian man visiting the U.S. of attempting to abduct her child, calling the cops on him and posting a viral Facebook post about the experience.\u00a0Police later determined that the man had never even interacted with the woman or her children. She\u2019s been charged with falsely reporting an emergency. (Antonia Noori Farzan) \u00a0\u00a0The trial for the murder of Bonnie Haim, who disappeared in 1993 but whose remains were discovered in 2014, began in Florida.\u00a0Haim\u2019s husband, Michael, was arrested shortly after the pair\u2019s son excavated his mother\u2019s skull from the backyard of his old\u00a0home. (Kyle Swenson)Scientists believe a\u00a0Revolutionary War hero who served with George Washington may have been\u00a0intersex. The pelvic bone found with\u00a0the\u00a0remains of Gen. Casimir Pulaski, who is considered the \u201cfather of the American cavalry,\u201d appeared to be that\u00a0of a woman. (Kayla Epstein)THERE\u2019S A BEAR IN THE WOODS:-- The Chinese woman detained at Mar-a-Lago, Yujing Zhang, will remain\u00a0in jail at least one more week after prosecutors said she \u201clies to everyone\u201d and authorities found more suspicious electronics in her hotel room. Lori Rozsa and Devlin Barrett report: When the 32-year-old\u00a0was arrested, \u201cshe was carrying a thumb drive with malicious software on it, four phones, a laptop and a separate hard drive, authorities said. A subsequent search of her hotel room turned up more that alarmed investigators: nine thumb drives, five SIM cards for cellphones, about $8,000 in cash, several credit and debit cards, and a device used to detect hidden cameras \u2026 Prosecutors argued that Zhang was a flight risk and therefore should remain in custody. Her defense lawyer, Robert Adler, asked for more time to gather family and financial support for a release on bond. ...\u201cSecret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich testified about his questioning of Zhang and acknowledged a major misstep in the investigation\u2019s early hours. The agent said he documented about four hours of questioning on video, but when investigators played it back, they realized audio of the conversation had not recorded. Ivanovich also testified that when the thumb drive they recovered from Zhang at the club was inserted into another agent\u2019s computer, \u2018a file immediately began to install itself.\u2019 The agent, Ivanovich said, had never seen that happen before. \u2018He knew it was something out of the ordinary,\u2019 Ivanovich said. \u2018He had to immediately stop his analysis and shut down his computer in order to stop it.\u2019 A law enforcement official said the computer was not part of a government data network, and no sensitive information was put at risk.\u201d \n \n \n \n \n -- The Treasury Department allowed influential Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to satisfy the terms of his divorce by transferring millions of dollars in stock to his children as part of a deal to lift U.S. sanctions on his corporation. The New York Times\u2019s Kenneth P. Vogel and Andrew E. Kramer report: \u201cThe deal, announced by the Trump administration in December without publicly disclosing its details, included a clause providing for the completion of a transfer of 10.5 million shares of Mr. Deripaska\u2019s main holding company, EN+, to a trust fund for the two teenage children he had with his former wife, Polina Yumasheva. \u2026 When the Treasury Department announced the deal with Mr. Deripaska\u2019s companies to lift the sanctions, it cast the move as an effort to stabilize global aluminum markets roiled by the sanctions. \u2026 Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle blasted the deal as soft on Russia, and unsuccessfully tried to block it from going into effect.\u201d \n -- A federal investigative agency is probing how the Trump administration pursued a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. The Daily Beast\u2019s Erin Banco reports: The Office of the Special Counsel, which is separate from special counsel Bob Mueller\u2019s office, \u201cis looking at whether officials were retaliated against for raising concerns about the administration\u2019s work related to a Saudi nuclear deal. As part of that investigation, OSC has also reviewed allegations about potentially improper dealings by senior members of the Trump administration in their attempt to map out a nuclear deal with Riyadh, according to two sources with knowledge of OSC\u2019s work. The details of the OSC probe \u2026 are the first indication that a government body other than Congress is investigating matters related to a potential nuclear deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.\u201d \n -- House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) signaled that he has no intention of helping Michael Cohen delay the start of his three-year prison sentence, even after the president\u2019s former lawyer claimed he discovered troves of new records that could be useful to investigators. CNN\u2019s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb report: \u201c\u2019I don't get involved in sentencing matters as a practice. I never have in Congress and that's been my policy,\u2019 he said. \u2026 Schiff (added) that he was nevertheless interested in receiving any new information from Cohen, regardless of his prison sentence.\u201d \n -- Lawmakers in New York state, where Democrats control the legislature and the governor\u2019s mansion, are attempting to get Trump\u2019s state-level tax returns another way. \u201cUnder a bill that is scheduled to be introduced this week, the commissioner of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance would be permitted to release any state tax return requested by leaders of three congressional committees for any \u2018specific and legitimate legislative purpose,\u2019\u201d the New York Times\u2019s Jesse McKinley reports.\u00a0Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D)\u00a0threw his weight behind the measure last night. \n \n \n \n \nMORE FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE IMMIGRATION WARS: -- Sixteen Democratic senators sent a letter to ICE and CBP urging them to restore the policy of presumptive release \"for all pregnant women\" in immigrant detention. Trump reversed the Obama-era directive last year, but the lawmakers pointed to a recent stillbirth in government detention as evidence of the need to bring back the policy. (NBC News)-- Many of the employees at Trump\u2019s private clubs in Florida have foreign passports. Some are foreign guest workers, but others are undocumented staff members the president\u2019s private business continues to quietly remove.\u00a0The New York Times\u2019s Miriam Jordan, Annie Correal and Patricia Mazzei report: \u201cFacing growing questions about its employment of undocumented workers, the [Trump Organization] has quietly begun to take steps to eliminate any remaining undocumented workers from its labor pool in South Florida. In March, seven veteran maintenance workers at Trump National Jupiter \u2026 were informed that the work force was being reorganized. Workers had until March 22 to provide proof that they were legally eligible to work in the United States, they were told. One by one, the workers \u2014 from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico \u2014 began to depart. Only one of the seven was a legal resident.\u201d-- An undocumented couple working in Texas\u2019s booming construction industry was owed $11,000, but instead of paying them, the man who employed them called the authorities.\u00a0Claudia and Alex Golinelli\u2019s case highlights the exploitative nature of the construction industry in Texas, where the undocumented workforce remains largely unprotected from wage theft and unsafe working conditions.\u00a0Timothy Bella reports: \u201cThe employer finally said they would be paid on Feb. 28, 2014, if the Golinellis came to the job site to pick up the money. Yet when they pulled up to the supermarket in Roanoke, Tex., the couple saw the building\u2019s superintendent had called the police and accused the couple of stealing materials and tools. \u2026 The couple\u2019s story is highlighted in \u2018Building the American Dream,\u2019 a documentary [in which] undocumented workers in Texas talk about how their lives have been affected by an under-regulated industry, all while facing an uncertain future amid the Trump administration\u2019s ongoing immigration crackdown.\u201dThe U.S. declared Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization on April 8, 2019. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)THE NEW WORLD ORDER:-- Trump moved to designate the Iranian military group Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. Anne Gearan and Carol Morello report: \u201cThe designation marks the first time Washington has branded a foreign government entity a terrorist group and came despite warnings from U.S. military and intelligence officials that other nations could use the designation as a precedent against U.S. action abroad. The\u00a0announcement\u00a0also comes one day before Israeli elections in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking a fifth term by highlighting his close ties to the Trump administration and hawkish promises to battle threatening Iranian behavior across the ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Daily 202: Trump shows fresh disdain for the rule of law with national emergency declaration (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7064",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/02/15/daily-202-trump-shows-fresh-disdain-for-the-rule-of-law-with-national-emergency-declaration/5c65aa641b326b71858c6b8e/",
        "text": "with Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWith Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0The Justice Department warned the White House that the courts will probably block President Trump from declaring a national emergency to build a border wall that Congress will not fund. The White House Counsel\u2019s Office explained that disregarding the legislative branch\u2019s power of the purse creates \u201chigh litigation risk.\u201d Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) privately advised him two weeks ago that doing so would divide the GOP and could lead to a formal resolution of disapproval.Nevertheless, Trump persisted.\u201cWhite House lawyers have told Trump he could reprogram money without calling an emergency,\u201d Fred Barbash, Ellen Nakashima and Josh Dawsey report. \u201cBut Trump \u2026 has been determined to declare an emergency, partially for fear of looking weak.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is just the latest, and possibly starkest, illustration of Trump\u2019s disdain for the rule of law, as well as the premium he places on political expediency over constitutional norms and legal guardrails.That\u2019s why the president\u2019s looming announcement of an \u201cemergency\u201d in the Rose Garden this morning should be viewed in conjunction with Andy McCabe\u2019s new book about the events that transpired when Trump fired McCabe\u2019s boss, Jim Comey, as FBI director in 2017. McCabe says he opened a formal investigation into the president\u2019s ties to Russia because he was \u201cvery concerned\u201d that the probe would be shut down if he was quickly removed as acting director. Jeff Sessions later fired McCabe the day before he would have qualified for a full pension after Trump pilloried him on Twitter and attacked his wife over her unsuccessful Virginia state Senate campaign.\u201cBetween the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law. Yet now the rule of law is under attack, including from the president himself,\u201d McCabe writes in \u201cThe Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,\u201d which comes out Tuesday. \u201cPeople do not appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability. Today we have a president who is willing not only to comment prejudicially on criminal prosecutions but to comment on ones that potentially affect him. He does both of these things almost daily. He is not just sounding a dog whistle. He is lobbying for a result. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- It was overshadowed yesterday because Washington was so consumed with whether Trump would sign the bipartisan spending bill to avert another shutdown, but there was another story that also highlighted the Trump administration\u2019s willingness to flout the rules: A Trump appointee in the Department of Homeland Security has declined to cooperate with an inspector general's investigation into allegations that career government staffers faced political retaliation, yet she\u2019s faced no discipline for stonewalling.\u201cChristine Ciccone, a former senior official at the State Department and now an assistant secretary of legislative affairs at DHS, has failed to agree to an interview with investigators \u2018despite repeated requests made to both her and her attorney over many months,\u2019 DHS Acting Inspector General John Kelly wrote to Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen,\u201d per NBC\u2019s Dan de Luce. \u201cThat office is looking into allegations of retribution against career State Department employees, and has tried to speak with Ciccone as a \u2018key witness\u2019 in that inquiry since September, Kelly wrote in a memo released by three Democratic lawmakers. \u2026 The appointee\u2019s response \u2018sets a dangerous precedent contrary to the fundamental tenants\u2019 of the law establishing government inspector generals, and carries \u2018the potential to undermine our critical oversight function,\u2019 he wrote.Congressional Republicans are hopeful President Trump will sign the bipartisan immigration deal to keep the government open, as another shutdown looms. (Joyce Koh, Rhonda Colvin/The Washington Post)-- The biggest story of the day by far, however, is Trump\u2019s planned emergency declaration. House Democrats say they plan to move in the coming days or possibly weeks to pass a resolution formally disapproving of the president\u2019s gambit. They will do it in a way that forces McConnell to take up the measure, despite his resistance to doing so, within 18 days. Republicans have a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, but all the resolution needs to pass is a simple majority, and several GOP lawmakers have suggested that they\u2019d be amenable to voting for it. If that happened, Trump would then be forced to veto the resolution. It would be the first veto of his presidency. An override would be unlikely; it\u2019s hard to imagine 20 GOP senators crossing over to break with the president. But the debate over the resolution ensures several news cycles of high political drama.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf their resolution fails to pass the Senate or is vetoed by Trump, the House would probably sue,\u201d per Rachael Bade, Seung Min Kim, Mike DeBonis and Paul Kane. \u201cRep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a House Judiciary Committee member, said his discussions with House lawyers had centered around a 1952 Supreme Court ruling, Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer, in which the court rejected President Harry Truman\u2019s attempt to seize and operate the nation\u2019s steel mills to avert a strike. \u2018They\u2019re about to make the steel seizure decision the most famous Supreme Court case in Washington for the next couple months,\u2019 Raskin said about House lawyers. \u2018The Supreme Court said a red light from Congress is a red light from Congress, and you can\u2019t run a red.\u2019\u201d-- The spending deal almost fell apart, and McConnell had to talk with Trump by phone at least three times yesterday. To get his sign-off, the majority leader agreed to offer public support for the emergency declaration, despite his misgivings. \u201cWe thought he was good to go all morning, and then suddenly it\u2019s like everything is off the rails,\u201d said one senior Republican aide.That staffer was one of more than two dozen key players who were interviewed for a ticktock by Robert Costa, Bade, Dawsey and Kim on how the last few weeks went down: \u201cPrivately, Trump complained vociferously about the final deal and said he felt Republican negotiators had failed him \u2026 But Trump did not have the stomach for another shutdown and told aides it had generated nonstop negative coverage. \u2026 Still, Trump can be combustible and sometimes acts rashly when he feels cornered, so some Republican senators spent recent days on the phone, soothing him and trying to persuade him to hold his fire. \u2026 Democrats decided in the final days they needed to be careful with their language, worried they could provoke Trump into another shutdown. \u2026 One conferee summarized the instructions from Democratic leaders: \u2018Don\u2019t poke the bear.\u2019\u201dPresident Trump declared a national emergency to fund his border wall. Here are some of the challenges that could crop up to block his declaration. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)-- \u201cWhile the move means the country will avoid another protracted shutdown, legal specialists warned that the long-term costs to American democracy could be steep,\u201d Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt sets a precedent that a president can, without regard to an actual existence of an emergency, use this tool to evade the normal democratic process and fund projects on his own,\u201d said Syracuse University law professor William Banks, who co-authored the book \u201cNational Security Law and the Power of the Purse.\u201d \u201cThis is a real institutional threat to the separation of powers to use emergency powers to enable the president to bypass Congress to build a wall on his own initiative that our elected representatives have chosen not to fund.\u201d\u201cEvery time this president does something that would have been unthinkable under a previous administration, and every time he acts in a way we\u2019re used to seeing in an authoritarian regime, a little piece of our democracy dies, and this is a pretty big piece,\u201d said Elizabeth Goitein, who oversaw a study of presidential emergency powers for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. \u201cI know what the potential is for these laws to be abused once that seal is broken.\u201d-- \u201cThere will be lawsuits. Lots of them,\u201d Fred, Ellen and Josh report. \u201cFrom California to Congress, the litigants will multiply. They will file suit in numerous jurisdictions \u2014 certainly within the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on the West Coast, in U.S. District Court in Washington and maybe even in New York. That\u2019s been the pattern in the hundreds of lawsuits, many of them successful, brought against the Trump administration, the idea being that some judge somewhere will block the wall. \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnyone who claims certainty about the ultimate legal outcome, which will most likely come from the Supreme Court, is playing in their own field of dreams. \u2026 In 1976, thinking it was cracking down on presidentially declared states of emergency, Congress passed a law, the National Emergencies Act, that actually enabled them. \u2018When you and I think of an emergency, we think of the U.S. under attack.\u2019 said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. \u2018But the statute doesn\u2019t have that sort of definition.\u2019 Indeed, it has no definition.\u201d-- The Post\u2019s Editorial Board explains that the president\u2019s decision treats \u201cthe will of Congress, and the Constitution, with cavalier contempt\u201d: \u201cHis fulminations about a border wall having failed to convince the legislative branch, which forged a deal that yielded less than a quarter of the funds the president demanded, he has decided by his planned emergency declaration simply to render the legislative branch irrelevant. That\u2019s a tried-and-true technique for autocrats the world over; it\u2019s not what the framers had in mind when they granted Congress the power of the purse. By his declaration, Mr. Trump will inaugurate a new, imperial phase of his presidency.\u201d-- Hypocrisy watch: Trump said on \u201cFox & Friends\u201d in 2014 that Barack Obama could be impeached for taking executive action on immigration. Obama turned to what he liked to call his pen and his phone after House Republicans blocked an overhaul of the immigration system that had passed the Senate with bipartisan support. Months after expressing doubt about his legal authority to do so, Obama signed an executive order to protect the undocumented parents of children who were born in the United States, and thus American citizens, from being deported. \u201cThis is a very, very dangerous thing that should be overwritten easily by the Supreme Court,\u201d Trump said at the time. \u201cI think certainly he could be impeached ...\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAround that time, Trump also ripped Obama for using an executive order to shield \u201cdreamers\u201d from deportation. It\u2019s become a cliche, but there really is a tweet for everything:Repubs must not allow Pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit & because he is unable to negotiate w/ Congress.\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2014\n\n-- The last two years have offered a series of tests to reveal which Republican lawmakers were genuine when they criticized Obama for executive overreach. It has been especially fascinating to watch the divergent paths that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two of Trump\u2019s main rivals for the GOP nomination, have taken since 2016. Both are Cuban Americans whose world views were deeply shaped by their fathers\u2019 anti-communist opposition to Fidel Castro. Both are young and clearly hope to run for president again in 2024 or down the road.Cruz was maybe the most outspoken Republican in the Senate when it came to attacking Obama for using executive power during the second term. He routinely threw around words like \u201cking\u201d and \u201cemperor\u201d to describe Obama. Before Obama issued that order to protect the dreamers, Cruz took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to read from the speech that Cicero delivered on the floor of the Roman Senate in 63 B.C. warning that Catiline was out to violently destroy their republic. Cruz replaced all the references to \u201cCatiline\u201d with \u201cObama\u201d as he quoted Cicero: \u201cWhen, President Obama, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat year, Cruz said at the Conservative Political Action Conference: \u201cThis president of the United States is the first president we've ever had who thinks he can choose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore.\u201d (PolitiFact rated this claim as false.)In 2015, when Obama moved to rename Mount McKinley, Cruz called it \u201cthe latest manifestation of the megalomaniacal, imperial presidency that we have seen for six and a half years. This administration has been the most lawless administration we have ever seen. And this president routinely disregards the law, disregards the Constitution [and] disregards the Congress.\u201dLast night, though, Cruz defended Trump\u2019s move: \u201cDemocrats\u2019 intransigence has left the president with no other choice but to take executive action.\u201d He added that he\u2019ll wait to see where Trump takes the money from, giving him an opening to oppose the move if funds for Texas disaster relief are cannibalized.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn the other side, Rubio decried Trump\u2019s decision to go the emergency route. \u201cWe have a crisis at our southern border, but no crisis justifies violating the Constitution,\u201d the Florida Republican said in a statement. \u201cToday\u2019s national emergency is border security. But a future president may use this exact same tactic to impose the Green New Deal.\u201d-- A parade of conservative intellectuals also lamented Trump\u2019s move and warned the president\u2019s supporters on the right that Republicans will come to rue this day. Here are six takes in that vein:National Review\u2019s Jonah Goldberg: \u201cWe\u2019ll Regret This.\u201dThe Wall Street Journal\u2019s Editorial Board calls it a \u201cpolitical emergency\u201d that creates \u201can unfortunate precedent\u201d and will almost certainly be tied up \u201cfor years\u201d in the courts.The Bulwark\u2019s Tim Miller: \u201cThe President Is Hallucinating and I Think We Should Be Concerned. Trump is declaring a fictional emergency to complete a wall he hasn't started in response to an incursion that doesn't exist. It's Wayne Hays in the White House.\u201dThe Washington Examiner\u2019s Philip Klein: \u201cTrump declaring a national emergency to build border wall with McConnell's support will come back to haunt conservatives.\u201dThe Post\u2019s Henry Olsen, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center: \u201cIt will surely delight his base, but risks reinforcing negative views of him among the voters he needs to win reelection. \u2026 You can\u2019t claim to want bipartisan negotiation if you act alone \u2014 and on dubious legal authority \u2014 if you don\u2019t like the best deal you can get. You can\u2019t persuade people that you want to govern on behalf of all people if you contemptuously disregard the elected representatives that half the country put into office.\u201dMatt Latimer, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, writes for Politico Magazine: \u201cTrump\u2019s National Emergency Is Great News for Future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The president\u2019s latest decision will backfire on conservatives.\u201dWhat exactly is in the 1,159-page compromise legislation allocating $324 billion in government spending - and what's not? (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)MORE ON THE SPENDING DEAL:-- The $333 billion package, which keeps the government open through the end of September, passed 83 to 16 in the Senate and 300 to 128 in the House.\u00a0Mike DeBonis breaks down key items in the 1,169-page legislation:The administration will be able to hire as many as 1,200 new Border Patrol officers.The bill provides $100 million in technology funds for ports of entry and $112 million for aircraft and sensor systems.The administration secured $564 million to beef up scanning capability at these ports, where most drug smuggling and human trafficking happens.Democrats got a \u201csoft cap\u201d on the number of immigrants detained at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facilities. The bill lowers the detainee cap from 49,000 to 40,000. But Republicans believe ICE will have the flexibility it needs to do its job.The Census Bureau will receive a $1 billion increase in funding, which was a Democratic demand.-- The legislation does not\u00a0offer back pay to low-wage federal contractors who lost a month\u2019s worth of wages because of the last shutdown,\u00a0but it does provide\u00a0a 1.9 percent pay raise for federal employees,\u00a0applying retroactively to Jan. 6. Eric Yoder reports: \u201cUnder the bill, senior political appointees would see their first raise since 2010, although not the large jump they otherwise would have received under the complex federal pay law. \u2026 The raise is further to be divided: 1.4 percent across the board and the remainder paid in amounts varying by city area, based on pay comparisons reported last fall by an advisory council. The Washington-Baltimore metro zone is among the areas where federal pay is deemed to be the furthest behind, meaning it would receive one of the larger raises.\u201dFormer FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe told CBS's \"60 Minutes\" that he was concerned the Russia investigation would \"vanish in the night without a trace.\" (Reuters)MORE ON MCCABE\u2019S BOOK:\u00a0-- Andy McCabe portrays Jeff Sessions in an especially negative light in his memoir. Greg Miller reports: \u201cThe attorney general\u2019s views on race and religion are described as reprehensible. \u2026 The FBI was better off when \u2018you all only hired Irishmen,\u2019 Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau\u2019s workforce. \u2018They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos \u2014 who knows what they\u2019re doing?\u2019 \u2026 Sessions \u2018believed that Islam \u2014 inherently \u2014 advocated extremism\u2019 and ceaselessly sought to draw connections between crime and immigration. \u2018Where\u2019s he from?\u2019 was his first question about a suspect. The next: \u2018Where are his parents from?\u2019 \u2026\u201cInevitably, the book includes disturbing new detail about Trump\u2019s subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin. During an Oval Office briefing in July 2017, Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea had test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile \u2014 a test that Kim Jong Un had called a Fourth of July \u2018gift\u2019 to \u2018the arrogant Americans.\u2019 Trump dismissed the missile launch as a \u2018hoax,\u2019 McCabe writes. \u2018He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.\u2019\u201d-- CBS's Scott\u00a0Pelley, who interviewed McCabe for a \"60 Minutes\u201d segment to air Sunday, says he described conversations that officials had about using the 25th Amendment to oust the president. Matt Zapotosky and John Wagner report: Pelley \u201cdescribed the discussions of the 25th Amendment as \u2018counting noses\u2019 \u2014 or speculating on where various Cabinet members might stand on the question. Pelley said McCabe disputes the assertion, advanced by defenders of [Rod] Rosenstein, that the deputy attorney general was not serious about wearing a wire. Pelley said McCabe took the idea to FBI lawyers for a discussion afterward. ... About two hours after the clip aired, Trump blasted McCabe on Twitter, calling him \u2018a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country.\u2019 The Justice Department also disputed some of what McCabe contended.\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld told an audience in New Hampshire this morning that he will try to take on Trump in the 2020 Republican presidential primary. Annie Linskey and Dave Weigel report: \u201cWeld, 73, said he would seek to determine over the coming months if he can raise enough money to continue his challenge of the president. He said he would run on a traditional Republican agenda of fiscal responsibility and provide a stylistic contrast to Trump. \u2018It is time for all people of good will \u2014 and our country is filled with people of good will \u2014 to take a stand and plant a flag,\u2019 Weld said during a speech Friday at a Politics & Eggs breakfast in Bedford, N.H. \u2026 Weld opened his remarks in the first primary state with an unflinching denunciation of the president \u2014 \u2018he acts like a schoolyard bully\u2019 \u2014 and Republicans in Washington who \u2018exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome.\u2019\u201dGET SMART FAST:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Daily 202: Trump shows fresh disdain for the rule of law with national emergency declaration (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7065",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/02/15/daily-202-trump-shows-fresh-disdain-for-the-rule-of-law-with-national-emergency-declaration/5c65aa641b326b71858c6b8e/",
        "text": "with Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWith Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0The Justice Department warned the White House that the courts will probably block President Trump from declaring a national emergency to build a border wall that Congress will not fund. The White House Counsel\u2019s Office explained that disregarding the legislative branch\u2019s power of the purse creates \u201chigh litigation risk.\u201d Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) privately advised him two weeks ago that doing so would divide the GOP and could lead to a formal resolution of disapproval.Nevertheless, Trump persisted.\u201cWhite House lawyers have told Trump he could reprogram money without calling an emergency,\u201d Fred Barbash, Ellen Nakashima and Josh Dawsey report. \u201cBut Trump \u2026 has been determined to declare an emergency, partially for fear of looking weak.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is just the latest, and possibly starkest, illustration of Trump\u2019s disdain for the rule of law, as well as the premium he places on political expediency over constitutional norms and legal guardrails.That\u2019s why the president\u2019s looming announcement of an \u201cemergency\u201d in the Rose Garden this morning should be viewed in conjunction with Andy McCabe\u2019s new book about the events that transpired when Trump fired McCabe\u2019s boss, Jim Comey, as FBI director in 2017. McCabe says he opened a formal investigation into the president\u2019s ties to Russia because he was \u201cvery concerned\u201d that the probe would be shut down if he was quickly removed as acting director. Jeff Sessions later fired McCabe the day before he would have qualified for a full pension after Trump pilloried him on Twitter and attacked his wife over her unsuccessful Virginia state Senate campaign.\u201cBetween the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law. Yet now the rule of law is under attack, including from the president himself,\u201d McCabe writes in \u201cThe Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,\u201d which comes out Tuesday. \u201cPeople do not appreciate how far we have fallen from normal standards of presidential accountability. Today we have a president who is willing not only to comment prejudicially on criminal prosecutions but to comment on ones that potentially affect him. He does both of these things almost daily. He is not just sounding a dog whistle. He is lobbying for a result. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- It was overshadowed yesterday because Washington was so consumed with whether Trump would sign the bipartisan spending bill to avert another shutdown, but there was another story that also highlighted the Trump administration\u2019s willingness to flout the rules: A Trump appointee in the Department of Homeland Security has declined to cooperate with an inspector general's investigation into allegations that career government staffers faced political retaliation, yet she\u2019s faced no discipline for stonewalling.\u201cChristine Ciccone, a former senior official at the State Department and now an assistant secretary of legislative affairs at DHS, has failed to agree to an interview with investigators \u2018despite repeated requests made to both her and her attorney over many months,\u2019 DHS Acting Inspector General John Kelly wrote to Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen,\u201d per NBC\u2019s Dan de Luce. \u201cThat office is looking into allegations of retribution against career State Department employees, and has tried to speak with Ciccone as a \u2018key witness\u2019 in that inquiry since September, Kelly wrote in a memo released by three Democratic lawmakers. \u2026 The appointee\u2019s response \u2018sets a dangerous precedent contrary to the fundamental tenants\u2019 of the law establishing government inspector generals, and carries \u2018the potential to undermine our critical oversight function,\u2019 he wrote.Congressional Republicans are hopeful President Trump will sign the bipartisan immigration deal to keep the government open, as another shutdown looms. (Joyce Koh, Rhonda Colvin/The Washington Post)-- The biggest story of the day by far, however, is Trump\u2019s planned emergency declaration. House Democrats say they plan to move in the coming days or possibly weeks to pass a resolution formally disapproving of the president\u2019s gambit. They will do it in a way that forces McConnell to take up the measure, despite his resistance to doing so, within 18 days. Republicans have a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, but all the resolution needs to pass is a simple majority, and several GOP lawmakers have suggested that they\u2019d be amenable to voting for it. If that happened, Trump would then be forced to veto the resolution. It would be the first veto of his presidency. An override would be unlikely; it\u2019s hard to imagine 20 GOP senators crossing over to break with the president. But the debate over the resolution ensures several news cycles of high political drama.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf their resolution fails to pass the Senate or is vetoed by Trump, the House would probably sue,\u201d per Rachael Bade, Seung Min Kim, Mike DeBonis and Paul Kane. \u201cRep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a House Judiciary Committee member, said his discussions with House lawyers had centered around a 1952 Supreme Court ruling, Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer, in which the court rejected President Harry Truman\u2019s attempt to seize and operate the nation\u2019s steel mills to avert a strike. \u2018They\u2019re about to make the steel seizure decision the most famous Supreme Court case in Washington for the next couple months,\u2019 Raskin said about House lawyers. \u2018The Supreme Court said a red light from Congress is a red light from Congress, and you can\u2019t run a red.\u2019\u201d-- The spending deal almost fell apart, and McConnell had to talk with Trump by phone at least three times yesterday. To get his sign-off, the majority leader agreed to offer public support for the emergency declaration, despite his misgivings. \u201cWe thought he was good to go all morning, and then suddenly it\u2019s like everything is off the rails,\u201d said one senior Republican aide.That staffer was one of more than two dozen key players who were interviewed for a ticktock by Robert Costa, Bade, Dawsey and Kim on how the last few weeks went down: \u201cPrivately, Trump complained vociferously about the final deal and said he felt Republican negotiators had failed him \u2026 But Trump did not have the stomach for another shutdown and told aides it had generated nonstop negative coverage. \u2026 Still, Trump can be combustible and sometimes acts rashly when he feels cornered, so some Republican senators spent recent days on the phone, soothing him and trying to persuade him to hold his fire. \u2026 Democrats decided in the final days they needed to be careful with their language, worried they could provoke Trump into another shutdown. \u2026 One conferee summarized the instructions from Democratic leaders: \u2018Don\u2019t poke the bear.\u2019\u201dPresident Trump declared a national emergency to fund his border wall. Here are some of the challenges that could crop up to block his declaration. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)-- \u201cWhile the move means the country will avoid another protracted shutdown, legal specialists warned that the long-term costs to American democracy could be steep,\u201d Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt sets a precedent that a president can, without regard to an actual existence of an emergency, use this tool to evade the normal democratic process and fund projects on his own,\u201d said Syracuse University law professor William Banks, who co-authored the book \u201cNational Security Law and the Power of the Purse.\u201d \u201cThis is a real institutional threat to the separation of powers to use emergency powers to enable the president to bypass Congress to build a wall on his own initiative that our elected representatives have chosen not to fund.\u201d\u201cEvery time this president does something that would have been unthinkable under a previous administration, and every time he acts in a way we\u2019re used to seeing in an authoritarian regime, a little piece of our democracy dies, and this is a pretty big piece,\u201d said Elizabeth Goitein, who oversaw a study of presidential emergency powers for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. \u201cI know what the potential is for these laws to be abused once that seal is broken.\u201d-- \u201cThere will be lawsuits. Lots of them,\u201d Fred, Ellen and Josh report. \u201cFrom California to Congress, the litigants will multiply. They will file suit in numerous jurisdictions \u2014 certainly within the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on the West Coast, in U.S. District Court in Washington and maybe even in New York. That\u2019s been the pattern in the hundreds of lawsuits, many of them successful, brought against the Trump administration, the idea being that some judge somewhere will block the wall. \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAnyone who claims certainty about the ultimate legal outcome, which will most likely come from the Supreme Court, is playing in their own field of dreams. \u2026 In 1976, thinking it was cracking down on presidentially declared states of emergency, Congress passed a law, the National Emergencies Act, that actually enabled them. \u2018When you and I think of an emergency, we think of the U.S. under attack.\u2019 said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. \u2018But the statute doesn\u2019t have that sort of definition.\u2019 Indeed, it has no definition.\u201d-- The Post\u2019s Editorial Board explains that the president\u2019s decision treats \u201cthe will of Congress, and the Constitution, with cavalier contempt\u201d: \u201cHis fulminations about a border wall having failed to convince the legislative branch, which forged a deal that yielded less than a quarter of the funds the president demanded, he has decided by his planned emergency declaration simply to render the legislative branch irrelevant. That\u2019s a tried-and-true technique for autocrats the world over; it\u2019s not what the framers had in mind when they granted Congress the power of the purse. By his declaration, Mr. Trump will inaugurate a new, imperial phase of his presidency.\u201d-- Hypocrisy watch: Trump said on \u201cFox & Friends\u201d in 2014 that Barack Obama could be impeached for taking executive action on immigration. Obama turned to what he liked to call his pen and his phone after House Republicans blocked an overhaul of the immigration system that had passed the Senate with bipartisan support. Months after expressing doubt about his legal authority to do so, Obama signed an executive order to protect the undocumented parents of children who were born in the United States, and thus American citizens, from being deported. \u201cThis is a very, very dangerous thing that should be overwritten easily by the Supreme Court,\u201d Trump said at the time. \u201cI think certainly he could be impeached ...\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAround that time, Trump also ripped Obama for using an executive order to shield \u201cdreamers\u201d from deportation. It\u2019s become a cliche, but there really is a tweet for everything:Repubs must not allow Pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit & because he is unable to negotiate w/ Congress.\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2014\n\n-- The last two years have offered a series of tests to reveal which Republican lawmakers were genuine when they criticized Obama for executive overreach. It has been especially fascinating to watch the divergent paths that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two of Trump\u2019s main rivals for the GOP nomination, have taken since 2016. Both are Cuban Americans whose world views were deeply shaped by their fathers\u2019 anti-communist opposition to Fidel Castro. Both are young and clearly hope to run for president again in 2024 or down the road.Cruz was maybe the most outspoken Republican in the Senate when it came to attacking Obama for using executive power during the second term. He routinely threw around words like \u201cking\u201d and \u201cemperor\u201d to describe Obama. Before Obama issued that order to protect the dreamers, Cruz took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to read from the speech that Cicero delivered on the floor of the Roman Senate in 63 B.C. warning that Catiline was out to violently destroy their republic. Cruz replaced all the references to \u201cCatiline\u201d with \u201cObama\u201d as he quoted Cicero: \u201cWhen, President Obama, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat year, Cruz said at the Conservative Political Action Conference: \u201cThis president of the United States is the first president we've ever had who thinks he can choose which laws to enforce and which laws to ignore.\u201d (PolitiFact rated this claim as false.)In 2015, when Obama moved to rename Mount McKinley, Cruz called it \u201cthe latest manifestation of the megalomaniacal, imperial presidency that we have seen for six and a half years. This administration has been the most lawless administration we have ever seen. And this president routinely disregards the law, disregards the Constitution [and] disregards the Congress.\u201dLast night, though, Cruz defended Trump\u2019s move: \u201cDemocrats\u2019 intransigence has left the president with no other choice but to take executive action.\u201d He added that he\u2019ll wait to see where Trump takes the money from, giving him an opening to oppose the move if funds for Texas disaster relief are cannibalized.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn the other side, Rubio decried Trump\u2019s decision to go the emergency route. \u201cWe have a crisis at our southern border, but no crisis justifies violating the Constitution,\u201d the Florida Republican said in a statement. \u201cToday\u2019s national emergency is border security. But a future president may use this exact same tactic to impose the Green New Deal.\u201d-- A parade of conservative intellectuals also lamented Trump\u2019s move and warned the president\u2019s supporters on the right that Republicans will come to rue this day. Here are six takes in that vein:National Review\u2019s Jonah Goldberg: \u201cWe\u2019ll Regret This.\u201dThe Wall Street Journal\u2019s Editorial Board calls it a \u201cpolitical emergency\u201d that creates \u201can unfortunate precedent\u201d and will almost certainly be tied up \u201cfor years\u201d in the courts.The Bulwark\u2019s Tim Miller: \u201cThe President Is Hallucinating and I Think We Should Be Concerned. Trump is declaring a fictional emergency to complete a wall he hasn't started in response to an incursion that doesn't exist. It's Wayne Hays in the White House.\u201dThe Washington Examiner\u2019s Philip Klein: \u201cTrump declaring a national emergency to build border wall with McConnell's support will come back to haunt conservatives.\u201dThe Post\u2019s Henry Olsen, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center: \u201cIt will surely delight his base, but risks reinforcing negative views of him among the voters he needs to win reelection. \u2026 You can\u2019t claim to want bipartisan negotiation if you act alone \u2014 and on dubious legal authority \u2014 if you don\u2019t like the best deal you can get. You can\u2019t persuade people that you want to govern on behalf of all people if you contemptuously disregard the elected representatives that half the country put into office.\u201dMatt Latimer, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, writes for Politico Magazine: \u201cTrump\u2019s National Emergency Is Great News for Future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The president\u2019s latest decision will backfire on conservatives.\u201dWhat exactly is in the 1,159-page compromise legislation allocating $324 billion in government spending - and what's not? (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)MORE ON THE SPENDING DEAL:-- The $333 billion package, which keeps the government open through the end of September, passed 83 to 16 in the Senate and 300 to 128 in the House.\u00a0Mike DeBonis breaks down key items in the 1,169-page legislation:The administration will be able to hire as many as 1,200 new Border Patrol officers.The bill provides $100 million in technology funds for ports of entry and $112 million for aircraft and sensor systems.The administration secured $564 million to beef up scanning capability at these ports, where most drug smuggling and human trafficking happens.Democrats got a \u201csoft cap\u201d on the number of immigrants detained at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facilities. The bill lowers the detainee cap from 49,000 to 40,000. But Republicans believe ICE will have the flexibility it needs to do its job.The Census Bureau will receive a $1 billion increase in funding, which was a Democratic demand.-- The legislation does not\u00a0offer back pay to low-wage federal contractors who lost a month\u2019s worth of wages because of the last shutdown,\u00a0but it does provide\u00a0a 1.9 percent pay raise for federal employees,\u00a0applying retroactively to Jan. 6. Eric Yoder reports: \u201cUnder the bill, senior political appointees would see their first raise since 2010, although not the large jump they otherwise would have received under the complex federal pay law. \u2026 The raise is further to be divided: 1.4 percent across the board and the remainder paid in amounts varying by city area, based on pay comparisons reported last fall by an advisory council. The Washington-Baltimore metro zone is among the areas where federal pay is deemed to be the furthest behind, meaning it would receive one of the larger raises.\u201dFormer FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe told CBS's \"60 Minutes\" that he was concerned the Russia investigation would \"vanish in the night without a trace.\" (Reuters)MORE ON MCCABE\u2019S BOOK:\u00a0-- Andy McCabe portrays Jeff Sessions in an especially negative light in his memoir. Greg Miller reports: \u201cThe attorney general\u2019s views on race and religion are described as reprehensible. \u2026 The FBI was better off when \u2018you all only hired Irishmen,\u2019 Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau\u2019s workforce. \u2018They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos \u2014 who knows what they\u2019re doing?\u2019 \u2026 Sessions \u2018believed that Islam \u2014 inherently \u2014 advocated extremism\u2019 and ceaselessly sought to draw connections between crime and immigration. \u2018Where\u2019s he from?\u2019 was his first question about a suspect. The next: \u2018Where are his parents from?\u2019 \u2026\u201cInevitably, the book includes disturbing new detail about Trump\u2019s subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin. During an Oval Office briefing in July 2017, Trump refused to believe U.S. intelligence reports that North Korea had test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile \u2014 a test that Kim Jong Un had called a Fourth of July \u2018gift\u2019 to \u2018the arrogant Americans.\u2019 Trump dismissed the missile launch as a \u2018hoax,\u2019 McCabe writes. \u2018He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.\u2019\u201d-- CBS's Scott\u00a0Pelley, who interviewed McCabe for a \"60 Minutes\u201d segment to air Sunday, says he described conversations that officials had about using the 25th Amendment to oust the president. Matt Zapotosky and John Wagner report: Pelley \u201cdescribed the discussions of the 25th Amendment as \u2018counting noses\u2019 \u2014 or speculating on where various Cabinet members might stand on the question. Pelley said McCabe disputes the assertion, advanced by defenders of [Rod] Rosenstein, that the deputy attorney general was not serious about wearing a wire. Pelley said McCabe took the idea to FBI lawyers for a discussion afterward. ... About two hours after the clip aired, Trump blasted McCabe on Twitter, calling him \u2018a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country.\u2019 The Justice Department also disputed some of what McCabe contended.\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld told an audience in New Hampshire this morning that he will try to take on Trump in the 2020 Republican presidential primary. Annie Linskey and Dave Weigel report: \u201cWeld, 73, said he would seek to determine over the coming months if he can raise enough money to continue his challenge of the president. He said he would run on a traditional Republican agenda of fiscal responsibility and provide a stylistic contrast to Trump. \u2018It is time for all people of good will \u2014 and our country is filled with people of good will \u2014 to take a stand and plant a flag,\u2019 Weld said during a speech Friday at a Politics & Eggs breakfast in Bedford, N.H. \u2026 Weld opened his remarks in the first primary state with an unflinching denunciation of the president \u2014 \u2018he acts like a schoolyard bully\u2019 \u2014 and Republicans in Washington who \u2018exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome.\u2019\u201dGET SMART FAST:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Joe Biden is desperate to change the subject. The Iran imbroglio may let him pivot to foreign policy. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7066",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/06/21/daily-202-joe-biden-is-desperate-to-change-the-subject-the-iran-imbroglio-may-let-him-pivot-to-foreign-policy/5d0bb0051ad2e552a21d5020/",
        "text": "with Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWith Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Joe Biden met with senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus last night. He called Cory Booker to try smoothing things over after awkwardly demanding an apology from the African American senator. The Biden campaign distributed talking points touting the 76-year-old\u2019s record on civil rights. And the former vice president released a statement decrying President Trump\u2019s Iran strategy as \u201ca self-inflicted disaster.\u201d All these moves, including wading into the Iran debate, should be viewed as part of the broader damage control effort by the Biden campaign after his boast during a fundraiser on Tuesday night about working collegially to get things done with racist senators who championed segregation, specifically cotton plantation owner James Eastland. \u201cAt least there was some civility,\u201d Biden said of his fellow Democrats, who died a generation ago. \u201cHe never called me \u2018boy.\u2019 He always called me \u2018son.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden would much rather be trashing Trump on Iran than defending the leading role he played during the 1970s in partnering with segregationists to advance legislation that thwarted court-ordered busing of black children into majority-white schools as a means of integration. The barking dogs of war could thus represent a lucky break for Biden. For the first time since the start of the week, he won\u2019t be the biggest story in the news today.\u201cTwo of America's vital interests in the Middle East are preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and securing a stable energy supply through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is failing on both counts,\u201d Biden said in the statement. \u201cHe unilaterally withdrew from the hard-won nuclear agreement that the Obama-Biden Administration negotiated to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Trump promised that abandoning the deal and imposing sanctions would stop Iran\u2019s aggression in the region. But they\u2019ve only gotten more aggressive.\u201d-- News broke overnight that Trump ordered an attack on Iran yesterday in retaliation for the downing of a surveillance drone in the Strait of Hormuz, but he called the operation off just hours before it was due to occur.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president\u2019s top national security officials and congressional leaders,\u201d per the New York Times\u2019s Michael Shear, Eric Schmitt, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman. \u201cOfficials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries. The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down. The strike was set to take place just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and civilians. \u2026\u201cTrump\u2019s national security advisers split about whether to respond militarily,\u201d per the Times. \u201cSenior administration officials said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, had favored a military response. But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action could result in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.\u201d-- Trump confirmed in a tweet this morning that he called off the attack and took a shot at the Obama-Biden administration, as well as the nuclear agreement they signed:....Death to America. I terminated deal, which was not even ratified by Congress, and imposed strong sanctions. They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my Presidency, when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East. Now they are Bust!....\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019\n\n....proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019\n\n-- Biden clearly views his extensive diplomatic experience as a calling card, even a trump card, over a less experienced field. But it might not be the salve he hopes. The Trump campaign and Biden\u2019s rivals for the Democratic nomination seem perfectly happy to debate what critics on the right and the left consider a decidedly mixed 47-year foreign policy record.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Trump\u2019s reelection campaign quickly issued a response yesterday to Biden\u2019s statement: \u201cIran shoots down an American drone in international airspace, and Joe Biden\u2019s response is to attack President Trump? What is his solution? Send Iran more pallets of cash? Let Iran take more U.S. sailors hostage? More coddling?\u201d The Trump campaign\u2019s \u201cwar room\u201d pushed a quote from the memoir of Bob Gates, who served as secretary of defense under George W. Bush and stayed on under Obama: \u201cI think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.\u201d-- Biden critiqued Iran at the end of his statement, perhaps a preemptive rebuttal to the argument made by the Trump campaign: \u201cMake no mistake: Iran continues to be a bad actor that abuses human rights and supports terrorist activities throughout the region,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what we need is presidential leadership that will take strategic action to counter the Iranian threat, restore America's standing in the world, recognize the value of principled diplomacy, and strengthen our nation and our security by working strategically with our allies.\u201d-- One reason Biden wants to talk about Iran is because it allows him to talk about Barack Obama, who remains enormously popular among Democrats,\u00a0and to remind the base during a racially hued firestorm that the first black president, who is staying neutral in the primaries, picked him as a wingman.\u00a0Biden refers constantly to \u201cthe Obama-Biden administration,\u201d as he did in his latest statement. \u201cIt\u2019s sadly ironic that the State Department is now calling on Iran to abide by the very deal the Trump Administration abandoned,\u201d he said. \u201cBy walking away from diplomacy, Trump has made military conflict more likely. Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- On the other side, meanwhile, Biden\u2019s critics on the left have increasingly highlighted his vote for the Iraq War. Polls show it remains a political liability 17 years later. Bernie Sanders has emphasized his vote against the 2002 resolution that authorized the use of force and noted that Biden helped get it across the finish line. When Biden flip-flopped and endorsed taxpayer funding for abortion two weeks ago, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) called on the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to issue a similar mea culpa on Iraq. \u201cBravo to [Biden] for doing the right thing and reversing his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment,\u201d said Moulton, who served four tours of duty in Iraq. \u201cIt takes courage to admit when you're wrong, especially when those decisions affect millions of people. Now do the Iraq War.\u201dAt the Third Way conference in South Carolina I covered earlier this week, both Jim Messina and Jen Psaki emphasized that Obama could never have won the Democratic nomination in 2008 \u2014 over a field that included Biden and Hillary Clinton \u2014 if he had not been an early, consistent and outspoken critic of invading Iraq.Joe Biden hit back at criticism from Democratic presidential rival Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) over statements he made about working with segregationists. (Reuters)MORE BAD NEWS FOR BIDEN:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Correspondence provided to The Washington Post by the University of Mississippi, which houses Eastland\u2019s archived papers, appears to contradict Biden\u2019s characterization of his relationship with the late senator. \u201cBiden on Wednesday night described his relationship with Eastland as one he \u2018had to put up with,\u2019\u201d Matt Viser and Annie Linskey report. \u201cHe said of his relationships with Eastland and another staunch segregationist and southern Democrat, Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia, that \u2018the fact of the matter is that we were able to do it because we were able to win \u2014 we were able to beat them on everything they stood for.\u2019 \u2026 But the letters show a different type of relationship, one in which they were aligned on a legislative issue. Biden said at the time that he did not think that busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware and that systemic racism should be dealt with by investing in schools and improving housing policies.\u00a0...\u00a0\u2018I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week\u2019s [Judiciary] Committee meeting in attempting to bring my antibusing legislation to a vote,\u2019 Biden wrote on June 30, 1977.\u201cIn one letter, on March 2, 1977, Biden outlined legislation he was filing to restrict busing practices. \u2018My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court ordered busing,\u2019 he wrote to Eastland. \u2018It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the constitution where there is no evidence that the governmental officials intended to discriminate.\u2019 \u2026 The Senate two years earlier had passed a Biden amendment that prohibited the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing to achieve school integration. \u2018That was the first time the U.S. Senate took a firm stand in opposition to busing,\u2019 Biden wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe next year, he continued to push for antibusing legislation and again wrote to Eastland. \u2018Since your support was essential to having our bill reported out by the Judiciary Committee, I want to personally ask your continued support and alert you to our intentions,\u2019 Biden wrote on Aug 22, 1978. \u2018Your participation in floor debate would be welcomed.\u2019\u201cBiden\u2019s campaign late Thursday issued a statement saying that \u2018the insinuation that Joe Biden shared the same views as Eastland on segregation is a lie.\u2019 \u2026 \u2018Joe Biden has dedicated his career to fighting for civil rights,\u2019 the statement said. \u2026 Divisions also emerged in Biden\u2019s campaign over how he should handle such situations. Aides alternately argued that he simply misspoke in telling the anecdote, that he shouldn\u2019t be telling it at all \u2014 or that his remarks demonstrate his ability to work with those with whom he disagrees and the words were being purposefully twisted for political gain.\u201d-- Read the letters for yourself here.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- This one could leave a mark: Politico co-founder John F. Harris writes that Biden may hope that voters embrace him as a modern-day Winston Churchill. But the latest donnybrook raises the possibility that he is more like Grampa Simpson.THE LATEST ON IRAN:-- \u201cA spokesman for Iran\u2019s Supreme National Security Council said Iranian forces would respond to any retaliatory strike by the United States,\u201d Erin Cunningham, Missy Ryan and Dan Lamothe report. \u201cIran\u2019s state-controlled broadcaster Friday published images it said showed pieces of the drone recovered from the debris field. \u2026 Iranian officials told the Reuters news agency Friday that Tehran received a message from Trump through Oman overnight warning that a U.S. attack was imminent. \u2018Trump said he was against any war with Iran and wanted to talk to Tehran about various issues,\u2019 Reuters quoted one official as saying. \u2018He gave a short period of time to get our response.\u2019AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe Federal Aviation Administration late Thursday barred U.S.-registered aircraft from operating over the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, due to an increase in military activities and political tensions that it said might \u2018place commercial flights at risk.\u2019 Several U.S. and international carriers said that they had either canceled flights over Iranian airspace or were taking steps to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.\u201cOn Thursday, the European Union said officials from Germany, Britain, France, Russia, China and Iran would meet next week to discuss strategies to salvage the nuclear pact despite renewed U.S. sanctions and Tehran\u2019s threat to exceed limits on its uranium stockpiles. Saudi Arabia\u2019s deputy defense minister said Friday on Twitter that he met with Brian Hook, the State Department\u2019s special representative for Iran, in Riyadh \u2018to explore the latest efforts to counter hostile Iranian acts.\u2019\u201dHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said June 20 that the U.S. cannot be \"reckless\" amid rising tensions with Iran. (Reuters)-- Democratic lawmakers reiterated calls for restraint and demanded congressional oversight of military action:Donald Trump promised to bring our troops home. Instead he has pulled out of a deal that was working and instigated another unnecessary conflict. There is no justification for further escalating this crisis\u2014we need to step back from the brink of war. https://t.co/roUHtzRlE8\u2014 Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 21, 2019\n\nOnly Congress can authorize a war. We should vote next week.\u2014 Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) June 21, 2019\n\nThe place we have arrived at tonight on Iran is Donald Trump\u2019s choice. He chose escalation over diplomacy, without any idea how to get out of the downward spiral he set in motion.\u2014 Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 21, 2019\n\nIran's military released video on June 20 which claims to show a U.S. surveillance drone being shot down by Iranian forces over the country's airspace. (Iran Military Tube)FOUR SMART TAKES:\u00a0-- \u201cIran needs to play a short game to escape the U.S. chokehold before it becomes fatal,\u201d writes columnist David Ignatius: \u201cIran probably can\u2019t break out of this squeeze play without creating a larger crisis that forces international intervention \u2014 perhaps an Iranian attack that kills Americans and triggers a harsh U.S. retaliation. The Trump administration doesn\u2019t want such a war \u2014 at least, not yet \u2014 because officials know that with every day of sanctions, Iran becomes weaker. \u2026 When we examine the inner logic of the confrontation, the surrounding events become more comprehensible. Each side appears to be behaving rationally, hoping to obtain its goals without the broad military conflict that neither wants. That\u2019s mildly reassuring, but the danger of miscalculation remains huge.\u201d\u00a0-- In its latest game of rhetorical chicken, an outmatched Iran will likely lose, writes Jason Rezaian, our former Tehran bureau chief who was imprisoned by the regime: \u201cA key ingredient in the current volatility is the brazen language used by leaders on both sides. Iran has used this sort of rhetoric for decades, but rarely has a U.S. commander in chief been as prepared to engage on that level as our current president \u2014 and that should make everyone nervous. \u2026 The truth is the United States has an arsenal of weapons \u2014 military, economic, political and cultural \u2014 that Iran cannot and will never be able counter \u2026 But the promise of the regime lies in the false hope that, in the end, God will deliver the ultimate death blow to the country\u2019s enemies. And even if he doesn\u2019t, those who die in the process will be fast-tracked to heaven.\u201dSpeaking in the Oval Office with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Trump also said \"let\u2019s see what happens, it\u2019s all going to work out.\" (The Washington Post)-- Trump, who so far has played the role of belligerent isolationist, needs allies now that he\u2019s confronting Iran, writes Dennis Ross, a former special assistant to Obama: \u201cRegrettably, our traditional allies have been slow to accept the administration\u2019s charges that the Iranians carried out the recent attacks on two ships. While Pompeo is surely right that no one else, certainly not any proxy forces, had the means to place mines on the hulls of the ships, there is little trust in Washington. When you berate allies, they are not quick to respond when you need them \u2026 Our allies fear that supporting U.S. charges will lead the administration to escalate and make a war with Iran more likely. \u2026 But this could play to Trump\u2019s advantage. The administration could use the fear that it might provoke a war as leverage on the Europeans and others to internationalize the response to the Iranians.\u201d\u00a0-- Finally, while tensions with Iran escalate, the Pentagon not only lacks permanent leaders in the top two positions but remains mum to the media. Paul Farhi reports: \u201cOfficials at the Department of Defense summoned reporters to a hastily arranged briefing to discuss the tense situation unfolding in the Gulf of Oman after Iran\u2019s military shot down an American surveillance drone. The incident followed attacks on shipping vessels in the region last week. But when reporters assembled at the Pentagon\u2019s briefing room, a spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, quickly set the tone: \u2018At this time, we\u2019re not going to be taking questions,\u2019 he announced. What followed was less a briefing than an audio news release. \u2026 The all-too-brief briefing marked the first time in more than a year that a military officer or press secretary has addressed the press \u2014 and through it, the American public \u2014 with TV cameras rolling.\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- The Supreme Court overturned a Mississippi man\u2019s murder conviction in a case that raised questions of racial bias, ordering a new trial. Developing: \u201cCurtis Flowers, who is African American, was tried six times in the 1996 slaying of four people in a Winona, Miss., furniture store. His lawyers had argued that the local district attorney, Doug Evans, habitually blocked black potential jurors.\u201d-- The National Rifle Association has sidelined its top lobbyist, Chris Cox, after accusing him in court documents of participating in what it called a failed extortion scheme to rid the organization of its top executive. \u201cCox, the NRA\u2019s second-in-command and leader of its powerful political arm, was placed on administrative leave after the organization filed a lawsuit Wednesday in New York against former NRA president Oliver North, who resigned in April after accusing the NRA of exorbitant spending,\u201d Katie Zezima and Beth Reinhard report.\u201cChief executive Wayne LaPierre has accused North of attempting to extort the group. In its new suit, the NRA accused Cox of participating in a \u2018conspiracy\u2019 with North. LaPierre accused North of working in concert with the group\u2019s estranged public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen. In its lawsuit against North, the NRA claims that North said he could work with Ackerman\u2019s co-founder to negotiate an \u2018excellent retirement\u2019 for LaPierre if he cooperated. It also implicated another board member, former Oklahoma congressman Dan Boren (D), in the alleged scheme. Boren did not return a request for comment.\u201dCox called the allegations \u201coffensive and patently false.\u201d He\u2019s led the political and lobbying arm of the group since 2002, and tax records show he was paid $1.1 million in 2017. The NRA also placed one of Cox\u2019s top deputies, Scott Christman, on administrative leave.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Joe Biden is desperate to change the subject. The Iran imbroglio may let him pivot to foreign policy. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7067",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/06/21/daily-202-joe-biden-is-desperate-to-change-the-subject-the-iran-imbroglio-may-let-him-pivot-to-foreign-policy/5d0bb0051ad2e552a21d5020/",
        "text": "with Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWith Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Joe Biden met with senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus last night. He called Cory Booker to try smoothing things over after awkwardly demanding an apology from the African American senator. The Biden campaign distributed talking points touting the 76-year-old\u2019s record on civil rights. And the former vice president released a statement decrying President Trump\u2019s Iran strategy as \u201ca self-inflicted disaster.\u201d All these moves, including wading into the Iran debate, should be viewed as part of the broader damage control effort by the Biden campaign after his boast during a fundraiser on Tuesday night about working collegially to get things done with racist senators who championed segregation, specifically cotton plantation owner James Eastland. \u201cAt least there was some civility,\u201d Biden said of his fellow Democrats, who died a generation ago. \u201cHe never called me \u2018boy.\u2019 He always called me \u2018son.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden would much rather be trashing Trump on Iran than defending the leading role he played during the 1970s in partnering with segregationists to advance legislation that thwarted court-ordered busing of black children into majority-white schools as a means of integration. The barking dogs of war could thus represent a lucky break for Biden. For the first time since the start of the week, he won\u2019t be the biggest story in the news today.\u201cTwo of America's vital interests in the Middle East are preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and securing a stable energy supply through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is failing on both counts,\u201d Biden said in the statement. \u201cHe unilaterally withdrew from the hard-won nuclear agreement that the Obama-Biden Administration negotiated to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Trump promised that abandoning the deal and imposing sanctions would stop Iran\u2019s aggression in the region. But they\u2019ve only gotten more aggressive.\u201d-- News broke overnight that Trump ordered an attack on Iran yesterday in retaliation for the downing of a surveillance drone in the Strait of Hormuz, but he called the operation off just hours before it was due to occur.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president\u2019s top national security officials and congressional leaders,\u201d per the New York Times\u2019s Michael Shear, Eric Schmitt, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman. \u201cOfficials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries. The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down. The strike was set to take place just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and civilians. \u2026\u201cTrump\u2019s national security advisers split about whether to respond militarily,\u201d per the Times. \u201cSenior administration officials said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, had favored a military response. But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action could result in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.\u201d-- Trump confirmed in a tweet this morning that he called off the attack and took a shot at the Obama-Biden administration, as well as the nuclear agreement they signed:....Death to America. I terminated deal, which was not even ratified by Congress, and imposed strong sanctions. They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my Presidency, when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East. Now they are Bust!....\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019\n\n....proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019\n\n-- Biden clearly views his extensive diplomatic experience as a calling card, even a trump card, over a less experienced field. But it might not be the salve he hopes. The Trump campaign and Biden\u2019s rivals for the Democratic nomination seem perfectly happy to debate what critics on the right and the left consider a decidedly mixed 47-year foreign policy record.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Trump\u2019s reelection campaign quickly issued a response yesterday to Biden\u2019s statement: \u201cIran shoots down an American drone in international airspace, and Joe Biden\u2019s response is to attack President Trump? What is his solution? Send Iran more pallets of cash? Let Iran take more U.S. sailors hostage? More coddling?\u201d The Trump campaign\u2019s \u201cwar room\u201d pushed a quote from the memoir of Bob Gates, who served as secretary of defense under George W. Bush and stayed on under Obama: \u201cI think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.\u201d-- Biden critiqued Iran at the end of his statement, perhaps a preemptive rebuttal to the argument made by the Trump campaign: \u201cMake no mistake: Iran continues to be a bad actor that abuses human rights and supports terrorist activities throughout the region,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what we need is presidential leadership that will take strategic action to counter the Iranian threat, restore America's standing in the world, recognize the value of principled diplomacy, and strengthen our nation and our security by working strategically with our allies.\u201d-- One reason Biden wants to talk about Iran is because it allows him to talk about Barack Obama, who remains enormously popular among Democrats,\u00a0and to remind the base during a racially hued firestorm that the first black president, who is staying neutral in the primaries, picked him as a wingman.\u00a0Biden refers constantly to \u201cthe Obama-Biden administration,\u201d as he did in his latest statement. \u201cIt\u2019s sadly ironic that the State Department is now calling on Iran to abide by the very deal the Trump Administration abandoned,\u201d he said. \u201cBy walking away from diplomacy, Trump has made military conflict more likely. Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- On the other side, meanwhile, Biden\u2019s critics on the left have increasingly highlighted his vote for the Iraq War. Polls show it remains a political liability 17 years later. Bernie Sanders has emphasized his vote against the 2002 resolution that authorized the use of force and noted that Biden helped get it across the finish line. When Biden flip-flopped and endorsed taxpayer funding for abortion two weeks ago, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) called on the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to issue a similar mea culpa on Iraq. \u201cBravo to [Biden] for doing the right thing and reversing his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment,\u201d said Moulton, who served four tours of duty in Iraq. \u201cIt takes courage to admit when you're wrong, especially when those decisions affect millions of people. Now do the Iraq War.\u201dAt the Third Way conference in South Carolina I covered earlier this week, both Jim Messina and Jen Psaki emphasized that Obama could never have won the Democratic nomination in 2008 \u2014 over a field that included Biden and Hillary Clinton \u2014 if he had not been an early, consistent and outspoken critic of invading Iraq.Joe Biden hit back at criticism from Democratic presidential rival Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) over statements he made about working with segregationists. (Reuters)MORE BAD NEWS FOR BIDEN:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Correspondence provided to The Washington Post by the University of Mississippi, which houses Eastland\u2019s archived papers, appears to contradict Biden\u2019s characterization of his relationship with the late senator. \u201cBiden on Wednesday night described his relationship with Eastland as one he \u2018had to put up with,\u2019\u201d Matt Viser and Annie Linskey report. \u201cHe said of his relationships with Eastland and another staunch segregationist and southern Democrat, Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia, that \u2018the fact of the matter is that we were able to do it because we were able to win \u2014 we were able to beat them on everything they stood for.\u2019 \u2026 But the letters show a different type of relationship, one in which they were aligned on a legislative issue. Biden said at the time that he did not think that busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware and that systemic racism should be dealt with by investing in schools and improving housing policies.\u00a0...\u00a0\u2018I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week\u2019s [Judiciary] Committee meeting in attempting to bring my antibusing legislation to a vote,\u2019 Biden wrote on June 30, 1977.\u201cIn one letter, on March 2, 1977, Biden outlined legislation he was filing to restrict busing practices. \u2018My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court ordered busing,\u2019 he wrote to Eastland. \u2018It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the constitution where there is no evidence that the governmental officials intended to discriminate.\u2019 \u2026 The Senate two years earlier had passed a Biden amendment that prohibited the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing to achieve school integration. \u2018That was the first time the U.S. Senate took a firm stand in opposition to busing,\u2019 Biden wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe next year, he continued to push for antibusing legislation and again wrote to Eastland. \u2018Since your support was essential to having our bill reported out by the Judiciary Committee, I want to personally ask your continued support and alert you to our intentions,\u2019 Biden wrote on Aug 22, 1978. \u2018Your participation in floor debate would be welcomed.\u2019\u201cBiden\u2019s campaign late Thursday issued a statement saying that \u2018the insinuation that Joe Biden shared the same views as Eastland on segregation is a lie.\u2019 \u2026 \u2018Joe Biden has dedicated his career to fighting for civil rights,\u2019 the statement said. \u2026 Divisions also emerged in Biden\u2019s campaign over how he should handle such situations. Aides alternately argued that he simply misspoke in telling the anecdote, that he shouldn\u2019t be telling it at all \u2014 or that his remarks demonstrate his ability to work with those with whom he disagrees and the words were being purposefully twisted for political gain.\u201d-- Read the letters for yourself here.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- This one could leave a mark: Politico co-founder John F. Harris writes that Biden may hope that voters embrace him as a modern-day Winston Churchill. But the latest donnybrook raises the possibility that he is more like Grampa Simpson.THE LATEST ON IRAN:-- \u201cA spokesman for Iran\u2019s Supreme National Security Council said Iranian forces would respond to any retaliatory strike by the United States,\u201d Erin Cunningham, Missy Ryan and Dan Lamothe report. \u201cIran\u2019s state-controlled broadcaster Friday published images it said showed pieces of the drone recovered from the debris field. \u2026 Iranian officials told the Reuters news agency Friday that Tehran received a message from Trump through Oman overnight warning that a U.S. attack was imminent. \u2018Trump said he was against any war with Iran and wanted to talk to Tehran about various issues,\u2019 Reuters quoted one official as saying. \u2018He gave a short period of time to get our response.\u2019AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe Federal Aviation Administration late Thursday barred U.S.-registered aircraft from operating over the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, due to an increase in military activities and political tensions that it said might \u2018place commercial flights at risk.\u2019 Several U.S. and international carriers said that they had either canceled flights over Iranian airspace or were taking steps to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.\u201cOn Thursday, the European Union said officials from Germany, Britain, France, Russia, China and Iran would meet next week to discuss strategies to salvage the nuclear pact despite renewed U.S. sanctions and Tehran\u2019s threat to exceed limits on its uranium stockpiles. Saudi Arabia\u2019s deputy defense minister said Friday on Twitter that he met with Brian Hook, the State Department\u2019s special representative for Iran, in Riyadh \u2018to explore the latest efforts to counter hostile Iranian acts.\u2019\u201dHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said June 20 that the U.S. cannot be \"reckless\" amid rising tensions with Iran. (Reuters)-- Democratic lawmakers reiterated calls for restraint and demanded congressional oversight of military action:Donald Trump promised to bring our troops home. Instead he has pulled out of a deal that was working and instigated another unnecessary conflict. There is no justification for further escalating this crisis\u2014we need to step back from the brink of war. https://t.co/roUHtzRlE8\u2014 Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 21, 2019\n\nOnly Congress can authorize a war. We should vote next week.\u2014 Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) June 21, 2019\n\nThe place we have arrived at tonight on Iran is Donald Trump\u2019s choice. He chose escalation over diplomacy, without any idea how to get out of the downward spiral he set in motion.\u2014 Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 21, 2019\n\nIran's military released video on June 20 which claims to show a U.S. surveillance drone being shot down by Iranian forces over the country's airspace. (Iran Military Tube)FOUR SMART TAKES:\u00a0-- \u201cIran needs to play a short game to escape the U.S. chokehold before it becomes fatal,\u201d writes columnist David Ignatius: \u201cIran probably can\u2019t break out of this squeeze play without creating a larger crisis that forces international intervention \u2014 perhaps an Iranian attack that kills Americans and triggers a harsh U.S. retaliation. The Trump administration doesn\u2019t want such a war \u2014 at least, not yet \u2014 because officials know that with every day of sanctions, Iran becomes weaker. \u2026 When we examine the inner logic of the confrontation, the surrounding events become more comprehensible. Each side appears to be behaving rationally, hoping to obtain its goals without the broad military conflict that neither wants. That\u2019s mildly reassuring, but the danger of miscalculation remains huge.\u201d\u00a0-- In its latest game of rhetorical chicken, an outmatched Iran will likely lose, writes Jason Rezaian, our former Tehran bureau chief who was imprisoned by the regime: \u201cA key ingredient in the current volatility is the brazen language used by leaders on both sides. Iran has used this sort of rhetoric for decades, but rarely has a U.S. commander in chief been as prepared to engage on that level as our current president \u2014 and that should make everyone nervous. \u2026 The truth is the United States has an arsenal of weapons \u2014 military, economic, political and cultural \u2014 that Iran cannot and will never be able counter \u2026 But the promise of the regime lies in the false hope that, in the end, God will deliver the ultimate death blow to the country\u2019s enemies. And even if he doesn\u2019t, those who die in the process will be fast-tracked to heaven.\u201dSpeaking in the Oval Office with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Trump also said \"let\u2019s see what happens, it\u2019s all going to work out.\" (The Washington Post)-- Trump, who so far has played the role of belligerent isolationist, needs allies now that he\u2019s confronting Iran, writes Dennis Ross, a former special assistant to Obama: \u201cRegrettably, our traditional allies have been slow to accept the administration\u2019s charges that the Iranians carried out the recent attacks on two ships. While Pompeo is surely right that no one else, certainly not any proxy forces, had the means to place mines on the hulls of the ships, there is little trust in Washington. When you berate allies, they are not quick to respond when you need them \u2026 Our allies fear that supporting U.S. charges will lead the administration to escalate and make a war with Iran more likely. \u2026 But this could play to Trump\u2019s advantage. The administration could use the fear that it might provoke a war as leverage on the Europeans and others to internationalize the response to the Iranians.\u201d\u00a0-- Finally, while tensions with Iran escalate, the Pentagon not only lacks permanent leaders in the top two positions but remains mum to the media. Paul Farhi reports: \u201cOfficials at the Department of Defense summoned reporters to a hastily arranged briefing to discuss the tense situation unfolding in the Gulf of Oman after Iran\u2019s military shot down an American surveillance drone. The incident followed attacks on shipping vessels in the region last week. But when reporters assembled at the Pentagon\u2019s briefing room, a spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, quickly set the tone: \u2018At this time, we\u2019re not going to be taking questions,\u2019 he announced. What followed was less a briefing than an audio news release. \u2026 The all-too-brief briefing marked the first time in more than a year that a military officer or press secretary has addressed the press \u2014 and through it, the American public \u2014 with TV cameras rolling.\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- The Supreme Court overturned a Mississippi man\u2019s murder conviction in a case that raised questions of racial bias, ordering a new trial. Developing: \u201cCurtis Flowers, who is African American, was tried six times in the 1996 slaying of four people in a Winona, Miss., furniture store. His lawyers had argued that the local district attorney, Doug Evans, habitually blocked black potential jurors.\u201d-- The National Rifle Association has sidelined its top lobbyist, Chris Cox, after accusing him in court documents of participating in what it called a failed extortion scheme to rid the organization of its top executive. \u201cCox, the NRA\u2019s second-in-command and leader of its powerful political arm, was placed on administrative leave after the organization filed a lawsuit Wednesday in New York against former NRA president Oliver North, who resigned in April after accusing the NRA of exorbitant spending,\u201d Katie Zezima and Beth Reinhard report.\u201cChief executive Wayne LaPierre has accused North of attempting to extort the group. In its new suit, the NRA accused Cox of participating in a \u2018conspiracy\u2019 with North. LaPierre accused North of working in concert with the group\u2019s estranged public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen. In its lawsuit against North, the NRA claims that North said he could work with Ackerman\u2019s co-founder to negotiate an \u2018excellent retirement\u2019 for LaPierre if he cooperated. It also implicated another board member, former Oklahoma congressman Dan Boren (D), in the alleged scheme. Boren did not return a request for comment.\u201dCox called the allegations \u201coffensive and patently false.\u201d He\u2019s led the political and lobbying arm of the group since 2002, and tax records show he was paid $1.1 million in 2017. The NRA also placed one of Cox\u2019s top deputies, Scott Christman, on administrative leave.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Joe Biden is desperate to change the subject. The Iran imbroglio may let him pivot to foreign policy. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7068",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/06/21/daily-202-joe-biden-is-desperate-to-change-the-subject-the-iran-imbroglio-may-let-him-pivot-to-foreign-policy/5d0bb0051ad2e552a21d5020/",
        "text": "with Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWith Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Joe Biden met with senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus last night. He called Cory Booker to try smoothing things over after awkwardly demanding an apology from the African American senator. The Biden campaign distributed talking points touting the 76-year-old\u2019s record on civil rights. And the former vice president released a statement decrying President Trump\u2019s Iran strategy as \u201ca self-inflicted disaster.\u201d All these moves, including wading into the Iran debate, should be viewed as part of the broader damage control effort by the Biden campaign after his boast during a fundraiser on Tuesday night about working collegially to get things done with racist senators who championed segregation, specifically cotton plantation owner James Eastland. \u201cAt least there was some civility,\u201d Biden said of his fellow Democrats, who died a generation ago. \u201cHe never called me \u2018boy.\u2019 He always called me \u2018son.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden would much rather be trashing Trump on Iran than defending the leading role he played during the 1970s in partnering with segregationists to advance legislation that thwarted court-ordered busing of black children into majority-white schools as a means of integration. The barking dogs of war could thus represent a lucky break for Biden. For the first time since the start of the week, he won\u2019t be the biggest story in the news today.\u201cTwo of America's vital interests in the Middle East are preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and securing a stable energy supply through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is failing on both counts,\u201d Biden said in the statement. \u201cHe unilaterally withdrew from the hard-won nuclear agreement that the Obama-Biden Administration negotiated to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Trump promised that abandoning the deal and imposing sanctions would stop Iran\u2019s aggression in the region. But they\u2019ve only gotten more aggressive.\u201d-- News broke overnight that Trump ordered an attack on Iran yesterday in retaliation for the downing of a surveillance drone in the Strait of Hormuz, but he called the operation off just hours before it was due to occur.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAs late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president\u2019s top national security officials and congressional leaders,\u201d per the New York Times\u2019s Michael Shear, Eric Schmitt, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman. \u201cOfficials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries. The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down. The strike was set to take place just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and civilians. \u2026\u201cTrump\u2019s national security advisers split about whether to respond militarily,\u201d per the Times. \u201cSenior administration officials said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; John R. Bolton, the national security adviser; and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, had favored a military response. But top Pentagon officials cautioned that such an action could result in a spiraling escalation with risks for American forces in the region.\u201d-- Trump confirmed in a tweet this morning that he called off the attack and took a shot at the Obama-Biden administration, as well as the nuclear agreement they signed:....Death to America. I terminated deal, which was not even ratified by Congress, and imposed strong sanctions. They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my Presidency, when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East. Now they are Bust!....\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019\n\n....proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2019\n\n-- Biden clearly views his extensive diplomatic experience as a calling card, even a trump card, over a less experienced field. But it might not be the salve he hopes. The Trump campaign and Biden\u2019s rivals for the Democratic nomination seem perfectly happy to debate what critics on the right and the left consider a decidedly mixed 47-year foreign policy record.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Trump\u2019s reelection campaign quickly issued a response yesterday to Biden\u2019s statement: \u201cIran shoots down an American drone in international airspace, and Joe Biden\u2019s response is to attack President Trump? What is his solution? Send Iran more pallets of cash? Let Iran take more U.S. sailors hostage? More coddling?\u201d The Trump campaign\u2019s \u201cwar room\u201d pushed a quote from the memoir of Bob Gates, who served as secretary of defense under George W. Bush and stayed on under Obama: \u201cI think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.\u201d-- Biden critiqued Iran at the end of his statement, perhaps a preemptive rebuttal to the argument made by the Trump campaign: \u201cMake no mistake: Iran continues to be a bad actor that abuses human rights and supports terrorist activities throughout the region,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what we need is presidential leadership that will take strategic action to counter the Iranian threat, restore America's standing in the world, recognize the value of principled diplomacy, and strengthen our nation and our security by working strategically with our allies.\u201d-- One reason Biden wants to talk about Iran is because it allows him to talk about Barack Obama, who remains enormously popular among Democrats,\u00a0and to remind the base during a racially hued firestorm that the first black president, who is staying neutral in the primaries, picked him as a wingman.\u00a0Biden refers constantly to \u201cthe Obama-Biden administration,\u201d as he did in his latest statement. \u201cIt\u2019s sadly ironic that the State Department is now calling on Iran to abide by the very deal the Trump Administration abandoned,\u201d he said. \u201cBy walking away from diplomacy, Trump has made military conflict more likely. Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- On the other side, meanwhile, Biden\u2019s critics on the left have increasingly highlighted his vote for the Iraq War. Polls show it remains a political liability 17 years later. Bernie Sanders has emphasized his vote against the 2002 resolution that authorized the use of force and noted that Biden helped get it across the finish line. When Biden flip-flopped and endorsed taxpayer funding for abortion two weeks ago, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) called on the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to issue a similar mea culpa on Iraq. \u201cBravo to [Biden] for doing the right thing and reversing his long-standing support for the Hyde Amendment,\u201d said Moulton, who served four tours of duty in Iraq. \u201cIt takes courage to admit when you're wrong, especially when those decisions affect millions of people. Now do the Iraq War.\u201dAt the Third Way conference in South Carolina I covered earlier this week, both Jim Messina and Jen Psaki emphasized that Obama could never have won the Democratic nomination in 2008 \u2014 over a field that included Biden and Hillary Clinton \u2014 if he had not been an early, consistent and outspoken critic of invading Iraq.Joe Biden hit back at criticism from Democratic presidential rival Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) over statements he made about working with segregationists. (Reuters)MORE BAD NEWS FOR BIDEN:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Correspondence provided to The Washington Post by the University of Mississippi, which houses Eastland\u2019s archived papers, appears to contradict Biden\u2019s characterization of his relationship with the late senator. \u201cBiden on Wednesday night described his relationship with Eastland as one he \u2018had to put up with,\u2019\u201d Matt Viser and Annie Linskey report. \u201cHe said of his relationships with Eastland and another staunch segregationist and southern Democrat, Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia, that \u2018the fact of the matter is that we were able to do it because we were able to win \u2014 we were able to beat them on everything they stood for.\u2019 \u2026 But the letters show a different type of relationship, one in which they were aligned on a legislative issue. Biden said at the time that he did not think that busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware and that systemic racism should be dealt with by investing in schools and improving housing policies.\u00a0...\u00a0\u2018I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week\u2019s [Judiciary] Committee meeting in attempting to bring my antibusing legislation to a vote,\u2019 Biden wrote on June 30, 1977.\u201cIn one letter, on March 2, 1977, Biden outlined legislation he was filing to restrict busing practices. \u2018My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court ordered busing,\u2019 he wrote to Eastland. \u2018It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the constitution where there is no evidence that the governmental officials intended to discriminate.\u2019 \u2026 The Senate two years earlier had passed a Biden amendment that prohibited the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing to achieve school integration. \u2018That was the first time the U.S. Senate took a firm stand in opposition to busing,\u2019 Biden wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe next year, he continued to push for antibusing legislation and again wrote to Eastland. \u2018Since your support was essential to having our bill reported out by the Judiciary Committee, I want to personally ask your continued support and alert you to our intentions,\u2019 Biden wrote on Aug 22, 1978. \u2018Your participation in floor debate would be welcomed.\u2019\u201cBiden\u2019s campaign late Thursday issued a statement saying that \u2018the insinuation that Joe Biden shared the same views as Eastland on segregation is a lie.\u2019 \u2026 \u2018Joe Biden has dedicated his career to fighting for civil rights,\u2019 the statement said. \u2026 Divisions also emerged in Biden\u2019s campaign over how he should handle such situations. Aides alternately argued that he simply misspoke in telling the anecdote, that he shouldn\u2019t be telling it at all \u2014 or that his remarks demonstrate his ability to work with those with whom he disagrees and the words were being purposefully twisted for political gain.\u201d-- Read the letters for yourself here.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- This one could leave a mark: Politico co-founder John F. Harris writes that Biden may hope that voters embrace him as a modern-day Winston Churchill. But the latest donnybrook raises the possibility that he is more like Grampa Simpson.THE LATEST ON IRAN:-- \u201cA spokesman for Iran\u2019s Supreme National Security Council said Iranian forces would respond to any retaliatory strike by the United States,\u201d Erin Cunningham, Missy Ryan and Dan Lamothe report. \u201cIran\u2019s state-controlled broadcaster Friday published images it said showed pieces of the drone recovered from the debris field. \u2026 Iranian officials told the Reuters news agency Friday that Tehran received a message from Trump through Oman overnight warning that a U.S. attack was imminent. \u2018Trump said he was against any war with Iran and wanted to talk to Tehran about various issues,\u2019 Reuters quoted one official as saying. \u2018He gave a short period of time to get our response.\u2019AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe Federal Aviation Administration late Thursday barred U.S.-registered aircraft from operating over the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, due to an increase in military activities and political tensions that it said might \u2018place commercial flights at risk.\u2019 Several U.S. and international carriers said that they had either canceled flights over Iranian airspace or were taking steps to avoid the Strait of Hormuz.\u201cOn Thursday, the European Union said officials from Germany, Britain, France, Russia, China and Iran would meet next week to discuss strategies to salvage the nuclear pact despite renewed U.S. sanctions and Tehran\u2019s threat to exceed limits on its uranium stockpiles. Saudi Arabia\u2019s deputy defense minister said Friday on Twitter that he met with Brian Hook, the State Department\u2019s special representative for Iran, in Riyadh \u2018to explore the latest efforts to counter hostile Iranian acts.\u2019\u201dHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said June 20 that the U.S. cannot be \"reckless\" amid rising tensions with Iran. (Reuters)-- Democratic lawmakers reiterated calls for restraint and demanded congressional oversight of military action:Donald Trump promised to bring our troops home. Instead he has pulled out of a deal that was working and instigated another unnecessary conflict. There is no justification for further escalating this crisis\u2014we need to step back from the brink of war. https://t.co/roUHtzRlE8\u2014 Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 21, 2019\n\nOnly Congress can authorize a war. We should vote next week.\u2014 Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) June 21, 2019\n\nThe place we have arrived at tonight on Iran is Donald Trump\u2019s choice. He chose escalation over diplomacy, without any idea how to get out of the downward spiral he set in motion.\u2014 Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) June 21, 2019\n\nIran's military released video on June 20 which claims to show a U.S. surveillance drone being shot down by Iranian forces over the country's airspace. (Iran Military Tube)FOUR SMART TAKES:\u00a0-- \u201cIran needs to play a short game to escape the U.S. chokehold before it becomes fatal,\u201d writes columnist David Ignatius: \u201cIran probably can\u2019t break out of this squeeze play without creating a larger crisis that forces international intervention \u2014 perhaps an Iranian attack that kills Americans and triggers a harsh U.S. retaliation. The Trump administration doesn\u2019t want such a war \u2014 at least, not yet \u2014 because officials know that with every day of sanctions, Iran becomes weaker. \u2026 When we examine the inner logic of the confrontation, the surrounding events become more comprehensible. Each side appears to be behaving rationally, hoping to obtain its goals without the broad military conflict that neither wants. That\u2019s mildly reassuring, but the danger of miscalculation remains huge.\u201d\u00a0-- In its latest game of rhetorical chicken, an outmatched Iran will likely lose, writes Jason Rezaian, our former Tehran bureau chief who was imprisoned by the regime: \u201cA key ingredient in the current volatility is the brazen language used by leaders on both sides. Iran has used this sort of rhetoric for decades, but rarely has a U.S. commander in chief been as prepared to engage on that level as our current president \u2014 and that should make everyone nervous. \u2026 The truth is the United States has an arsenal of weapons \u2014 military, economic, political and cultural \u2014 that Iran cannot and will never be able counter \u2026 But the promise of the regime lies in the false hope that, in the end, God will deliver the ultimate death blow to the country\u2019s enemies. And even if he doesn\u2019t, those who die in the process will be fast-tracked to heaven.\u201dSpeaking in the Oval Office with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Trump also said \"let\u2019s see what happens, it\u2019s all going to work out.\" (The Washington Post)-- Trump, who so far has played the role of belligerent isolationist, needs allies now that he\u2019s confronting Iran, writes Dennis Ross, a former special assistant to Obama: \u201cRegrettably, our traditional allies have been slow to accept the administration\u2019s charges that the Iranians carried out the recent attacks on two ships. While Pompeo is surely right that no one else, certainly not any proxy forces, had the means to place mines on the hulls of the ships, there is little trust in Washington. When you berate allies, they are not quick to respond when you need them \u2026 Our allies fear that supporting U.S. charges will lead the administration to escalate and make a war with Iran more likely. \u2026 But this could play to Trump\u2019s advantage. The administration could use the fear that it might provoke a war as leverage on the Europeans and others to internationalize the response to the Iranians.\u201d\u00a0-- Finally, while tensions with Iran escalate, the Pentagon not only lacks permanent leaders in the top two positions but remains mum to the media. Paul Farhi reports: \u201cOfficials at the Department of Defense summoned reporters to a hastily arranged briefing to discuss the tense situation unfolding in the Gulf of Oman after Iran\u2019s military shot down an American surveillance drone. The incident followed attacks on shipping vessels in the region last week. But when reporters assembled at the Pentagon\u2019s briefing room, a spokesman, Jonathan Hoffman, quickly set the tone: \u2018At this time, we\u2019re not going to be taking questions,\u2019 he announced. What followed was less a briefing than an audio news release. \u2026 The all-too-brief briefing marked the first time in more than a year that a military officer or press secretary has addressed the press \u2014 and through it, the American public \u2014 with TV cameras rolling.\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- The Supreme Court overturned a Mississippi man\u2019s murder conviction in a case that raised questions of racial bias, ordering a new trial. Developing: \u201cCurtis Flowers, who is African American, was tried six times in the 1996 slaying of four people in a Winona, Miss., furniture store. His lawyers had argued that the local district attorney, Doug Evans, habitually blocked black potential jurors.\u201d-- The National Rifle Association has sidelined its top lobbyist, Chris Cox, after accusing him in court documents of participating in what it called a failed extortion scheme to rid the organization of its top executive. \u201cCox, the NRA\u2019s second-in-command and leader of its powerful political arm, was placed on administrative leave after the organization filed a lawsuit Wednesday in New York against former NRA president Oliver North, who resigned in April after accusing the NRA of exorbitant spending,\u201d Katie Zezima and Beth Reinhard report.\u201cChief executive Wayne LaPierre has accused North of attempting to extort the group. In its new suit, the NRA accused Cox of participating in a \u2018conspiracy\u2019 with North. LaPierre accused North of working in concert with the group\u2019s estranged public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen. In its lawsuit against North, the NRA claims that North said he could work with Ackerman\u2019s co-founder to negotiate an \u2018excellent retirement\u2019 for LaPierre if he cooperated. It also implicated another board member, former Oklahoma congressman Dan Boren (D), in the alleged scheme. Boren did not return a request for comment.\u201dCox called the allegations \u201coffensive and patently false.\u201d He\u2019s led the political and lobbying arm of the group since 2002, and tax records show he was paid $1.1 million in 2017. The NRA also placed one of Cox\u2019s top deputies, Scott Christman, on administrative leave.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: James Comey says he\u2019s more worried about Trump than Russian disinformation campaigns (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7069",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/04/12/daily-202-james-comey-says-he-s-more-worried-about-trump-than-russian-disinformation-campaigns/5caf6702a7a0a475985bd3f2/",
        "text": "with Joanie Greve and Mariana AlfaroTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWith Joanie Greve and Mariana Alfaro in WashingtonSAUSALITO, Calif. \u2014 Former FBI director Jim Comey pushed back on Bill Barr\u2019s claim that the U.S. government spied on President Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign as he pressed the attorney general to release special counsel Bob Mueller\u2019s report. \u201cI don\u2019t understand what the heck he\u2019s talking about,\u201d Comey said here on Thursday. \u201cBut when I hear that kind of language used, it\u2019s concerning because the FBI and the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance. I have never thought of that as \u2018spying.\u2019 The reason I\u2019m interested to know what he means by that is that, if the attorney general has come to the belief that that should be called \u2018spying,\u2019 then wow. That\u2019s going to require a whole lot of conversations inside the Department of Justice. I don\u2019t know of any court-ordered electronic surveillance aimed at the Trump campaign.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComey fielded questions for an hour-and-a-half during a cybersecurity conference sponsored by the nonpartisan Hewlett Foundation on Cavallo Point, a former U.S. Army post just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. A few dozen technology industry leaders from Silicon Valley and national security insiders from Washington, plus some academics and journalists, are grappling over four days with a thicket of thorny tissues, from when it\u2019s appropriate to conduct offensive cyber operations against American adversaries to how social media companies should balance consumer privacy with competing demands.Testifying before a Senate panel on Wednesday, Barr said the Justice Department is reviewing the decisions made during the 2016 campaign \u2014 something Trump has pushed for since taking office. \u201cI think spying did occur,\u201d the attorney general said. \u201cI\u2019m not suggesting it was not adequately predicated, but I need to explore that. \u2026 Frankly, to the extent that there were any issues at the FBI, I do not view it as a problem that\u2019s endemic to the FBI. I think there was probably a failure among a group of leaders there in the upper echelon.\u201dComey, of course, launched the FBI\u2019s investigation of Russian interference in 2016. He oversaw it until Trump fired him in May 2017. But\u00a0Comey emphasized that he\u2019s still trying to keep an open mind on Barr, who previously served as George H.W. Bush\u2019s attorney general. \u201cI think his career has earned him a presumption that he will be one of the rare Cabinet members who will stand up for things like truth and facts and institutional values,\u201d Comey said. \u201cLanguage like this makes it harder, but I still think he\u2019s entitled to that presumption.\u201dAttorney General William P. Barr on April 10 defended reviewing the start of the Trump campaign probe, saying, \"spying on a political campaign is a big deal.\" (Reuters)-- The 58-year-old Comey has also been in the news again this week because Trump has continued to attack him by name and refer to him as a \u201cdirty cop.\u201d \u201cIt was an illegal investigation. It was started illegally. Everything about it was crooked,\u201d the president told reporters on Wednesday. \u201cThis was an attempted coup. This was an attempted takedown of a president, and we beat them. We beat them!\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuzanne Spaulding, a former undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, asked Comey during Q&A with the audience about ongoing Russian efforts to manipulate American public opinion. \u201cI\u2019m worried that we may be missing the boat again around Russia\u2019s attacks against the justice system that are ongoing to this day and that you have been a victim of,\u201d she said. \u201cDisinformation campaigns have targeted you, Mueller, DOJ and FBI but also courts, judges and prosecutors across the country. \u2026 How dangerous is it that Russia may be trying to erode confidence in our courts and our justice system? How do we get ahead of this?\u201dComey said that he worries more about Trump in this regard than Russian President Vladimir Putin. \u201cMy mind actually doesn\u2019t go to Russia first when I worry about that threat,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m sure Russia is engaged in efforts to undermine all manner of American institutions, but the president of the United States tweets lies about those institutions nearly every day. He does it so often that we\u2019ve become numb to it. And there\u2019s danger in that numbness. I wake up some mornings and the president\u2019s tweeted I should be in jail. You know what I do? I laugh and I go, \u2018Oh, there he goes again.\u2019 I don\u2019t follow him on Twitter, so I only see it if one of you retweets it. But I laugh. And that laughing is dangerous.\u201dComey said there\u2019s \u201cno conceivable basis\u201d and there\u2019s nothing funny about Trump saying innocent Americans should be locked up. \u201cThere\u2019s not even an investigation of me,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the numbness is: Holy cow, the president of the United States is announcing that people should be in jail or that the FBI is corrupt! I haven\u2019t yet seen how he\u2019s going to navigate his belief that he was \u2018fully exonerated\u2019 by a \u2018corrupt\u2019 institution, but he\u2019ll navigate it somehow and he\u2019ll navigate it with lies. There\u2019s tremendous danger to us in our numbness. I\u2019m sure you all feel it.\u201dResponding to comments made by Attorney General Barr April 10, President Trump said there was \u201cillegal spying, unprecedented spying\u201d into his 2016 campaign. (The Washington Post)An erosion of democratic norms is the threat within that keeps Comey up at night. \u201cEvery president makes false statements,\u201d Comey said. \u201cBarack Obama did it when he said if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. George W. Bush when he said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. \u2026 We held them accountable because we measured their distance to the touchstone of the truth. And those two men spent the rest of their terms and probably the rest of their lives explaining to us \u2014 I know, I thought, I meant, I understood \u2014 to explain the tether. There are so many lies coming at us now that there\u2019s a danger that the touchstone will just wash away and that we will stop measuring our leaders against the truth. It should be plural because the Republican Party bears some responsibility here.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComey was a registered Republican for most of his adult life. He donated to the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain. Bush 43 appointed him as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and then deputy attorney general. Obama named him as FBI director.To be sure, Comey emphasized that the United States\u00a0is still not doing enough to counter the threat posed by the Kremlin. \u201cA response to an attack on the United States requires that the commander in chief recognize it and understand it,\u201d he said. \u201cOur fundamental problem is I don\u2019t see that our commander in chief acknowledges that it even happened. If you don\u2019t acknowledge that another nation attacked you, how can you possibly be doing enough to deal with it the next time? In fact, your silence is an invitation in many ways for them to do it again.\u201d-- Comey said he accepts Barr\u2019s summary at face value that Mueller\u2019s investigation \u201cdid not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.\u201d But he noted that Barr\u2019s four-page letter said Mueller did find evidence of Russian interference.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u00a0\u201cOne of the good things about Barr\u2019s letter is that it tells us \u2014 without even needing to read the Mueller report \u2014 that \u2018the Russia thing\u2019 was not a hoax, that it was real and that that assessment is backed by hard evidence,\u201d Comey said, alluding to Trump\u2019s acknowledgment in 2017 to NBC\u2019s Lester Holt that he had the \u201cRussia thing\u201d on his mind when he fired Comey.\u201cWe need to ask why our president won\u2019t acknowledge what his intelligence community has found overwhelmingly,\u201d he added. \u201cYou need to start there or else you have a situation where the great people who have sworn to protect the United States at lower levels in the government are having to act in the absence of presidential direction and in many ways in the face of presidential denial of a fundamental attack on the United States. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re adequately prepared and, in many ways, we\u2019re inviting it to happen again by virtue of our president\u2019s silence.\u201d-- Comey said the Russians will try to play aggressively again in the 2020 election. \u201cIt is true that the Russians came after us, and they are going to come again because they exceeded their wildest hopes,\u201d he said. \u201cThey dirtied up our election, they damaged Hillary Clinton and, I don\u2019t know what the causal relationship is, but Donald Trump was elected president.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Comey said he\u2019s especially concerned about what Moscow did to fan the flames of racial discord inside the United States, and he hopes that the Mueller report illuminates some of the 2016 misinformation efforts vis-a-vis African Americans. (I wrote a Big Idea about this in December.)Pointing to the charges that Mueller brought against the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, Comey said: \u201cYou see a lot in the indictment of the Russian actors that showed that their goal was to find our fault lines and to push on them to divide us. Obviously, things like guns are important fault lines, but I don\u2019t know of a more important, fundamental, fault line in the United States \u2014 since before we were the United States \u2014 than race. It appears from the indictment that there was a concerted effort to exploit that fault line to make us hate along lines where we sometimes hate quickly without being pushed. But they pushed.\u201d-- Barr said on Wednesday that he\u2019s still on track to release an abridged version of the 400-page Mueller report early next week. He warned Congress in a letter on March 29\u00a0that he will redact sensitive information related to sources and methods, grand jury material, ongoing criminal cases and \u2013 most significantly \u2014 information that \u201cunduly\u201d infringes upon the privacy and reputational interests of \u201cperipheral third parties.\u201d That fourth category gives Barr a lot of wiggle room to hold information back if he chooses to.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComey urged Barr to err on the side of putting out as much information as possible about \u201ckey players\u201d in the Russia probe and pointed to several precedents of the Justice Department weighing in publicly on people who weren\u2019t indicted. In doing so, he defended his July 2016 announcement that Hillary Clinton would not be charged with a crime but that her use of a private email server had been \u201cextremely careless.\u201d Comey announced shortly before the election that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton because of new information and then said a few days later that he was closing it again. Clinton has blamed Comey, and his letters, for her defeat.\u201cThe Department of Justice has long offered transparency about the conduct of uncharged individuals in cases of legitimate and extraordinary public interest,\u201d Comey said. \u201cThey did it after Ferguson, Missouri. \u2026 I did it after I thought the Hillary Clinton investigation was completed. \u2026 The Department of Justice after the so-called IRS targeting of the tea party criticized the conduct of Lois Lerner but didn\u2019t name and criticize the conduct of any lower-level people at the IRS. \u2026 She was a key player, and for the public to have confidence that the department wasn\u2019t pulling its punches they needed to know the department\u2019s assessment of this key player. So they said it was poor judgment and bad management, but it didn\u2019t rise to the level of criminal conduct.\u201cThat\u2019s very similar to what I said in the Hillary Clinton case,\u201d Comey continued. \u201cTo explain our judgment that this doesn\u2019t rise to the level of criminal conduct, we have to explain just what we think it is. Not to attack somebody or disparage them but to be transparent about the basis for this judgment. \u2026 You\u2019ll notice that I didn\u2019t talk about anybody else in that announcement in July 2016 except Secretary Clinton, and we tried not to name the people who set up the servers or the peripheral players. That\u2019s an important approach to these kinds of things that\u2019s consistent with the goal: The public needs to know enough to have confidence that this was done in the right way, and the public doesn\u2019t need to know about marginal players for that goal to be achieved.\u201d-- Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller as special counsel eight days after Comey\u2019s removal, also wrote the memo justifying Trump\u2019s decision to terminate the FBI director based on his handling of the Clinton case. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Rosenstein defended Barr\u2019s process. \u201cHe\u2019s being as forthcoming as he can, and so this notion that he\u2019s trying to mislead people, I think is just completely bizarre,\u201d Rosenstein said.-- Comey praised House Democrats for conducting rigorous oversight of the Trump administration. \u201cOversight by the third branch is essential,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the reasons I thought it was so important that at least one house of Congress be controlled by a different party [in the 2018 midterm elections] because we were seeing, as Americans, no meaningful oversight. And the founders designed our system to have interests crashing against themselves. So it is a great thing, whether you\u2019re a Republican or a Democrat or neither, for there to be some crashing. I know because I\u2019ve been subject to oversight when I\u2019ve been in government that it\u2019s a pain in the neck, but it\u2019s a great pain in the neck. I believed that even when I was the one being overseen. It\u2019s a healthy thing for democracy in general.\u201d-- Looking back, Comey said the U.S. government failed to appreciate how Russia intended to use the intelligence it was gathering in the run-up to the 2016 election. \u201cI think there was a fundamental miss there and an assumption that the extensive hacking activities that the U.S. and its allies saw \u2026 was traditional nation-state intelligence gathering,\u201d Comey explained. \u201cHad we known at that point that it was actually \u2026 something very different, which was an intention to weaponize or attack the democratic processes of the United States, the government might have done something different to get out in front of that. We looked at that conduct and tried where we could to warn organizations without blowing our sources and methods. If we\u2019d known they were stealing information in order to attack the American election in a year hence, I think we would have thought about and probably acted about it differently.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSusan Hennessey, a former lawyer for the National Security Agency who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and moderated the discussion, asked what else Comey would do differently if he could go back in time to when what was supposed to be a 10-year term started in 2013. \u201cCan I decline to accept the appointment as FBI director?\u201d Comey asked. \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- An American political consultant whose guilty plea marked the first confirmation that illegal foreign money was used to help fund Trump\u2019s inaugural committee was sentenced to probation Friday by a federal judge who cited his cooperation with prosecutors. Spencer Hsu reports: \u201cW. Samuel Patten, 47, in August admitted steering $50,000 from a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician to Trump\u2019s committee in an investigation spun off from [Mueller\u2019s] probe. \u2026 Patten acknowledged he was helped by a Russian national who is a longtime associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and the case was referred to prosecutors with the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Washington and the Justice Department\u2019s national security division. In sparing Patten from prison, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson accepted prosecutors\u2019 request for leniency and noted no federal sentencing guideline directly applies to his offense of failing to register as a foreign lobbyist, which is punishable by up to five years in prison. Patten\u2019s defense sought probation citing the substantial assistance he provided in several ongoing, undisclosed investigations.\u201d-- The Atlantic just posted a lengthy profile of Ivanka Trump and the rude awakening she faced in Washington\u00a0when she joined the White House as a senior adviser. Elaina Plott got impressive access, including to POTUS: \u201cIn our conversation, the president wanted to be clear: He was very proud of all his children. \u2026 But Ivanka, whom he sometimes calls \u2018Baby\u2019 in official meetings, is \u2018unique.\u2019 \u2026 No one understood what she had been brought on to do. Not even the president. During our interview, I asked Trump how he had envisioned Ivanka\u2019s role. \u2018So I didn\u2019t know,\u2019 he said without pause. \u2018I\u2019m not sure she knew.\u2019\u201d Other notable quotes from the piece:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDon Jr., her brother: \u201cShe was loved by all the people in the world she wanted to be loved by. \u2026 I can\u2019t say she\u2019s not disappointed by them turning on her. After the election, I found 10,000 emails saying, \u2018Hey buddy, we were with you all along,\u2019 and I\u2019m like, No you weren\u2019t. ...\u00a0I just think I figured it out a little bit earlier than she did that people were going to see us differently after my father won.\u201dJared Kushner, her husband: \u201cShe\u2019s like her dad in that she\u2019s very good at managing details. Her father is meticulous with details and has a great memory.\u201dIvana Trump, her mother, said Ivanka likes Melania Trump more than she did Marla Maples, her previous stepmother: \u201cShe likes her fine, because she didn\u2019t cause me to break up the marriage like the other one \u2014 I don\u2019t even want to pronounce her name.\u201dGET SMART FAST:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Finance 202: There's less to Trump's 'greatest and biggest deal' with China than meets the eye (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7070",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2019/10/14/the-finance-202-there-s-less-to-trump-s-greatest-and-biggest-deal-with-china-than-meets-the-eye/5da3ad2988e0fa3155a710c1/",
        "text": "with Brent D. GriffithsTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Trump hailed the preliminary trade agreement struck by American and Chinese negotiators as \u201cone of the biggest deals.\" It's \u201cby far, the greatest and biggest\u00a0deal\u00a0ever made for our Great Patriot Farmers in the history of our Country,\" he trumpeted.Closer inspection reveals there\u2019s less to it than the presidential hype suggests. And the news this morning that the Chinese want to hold more talks this month before President Xi Jinping signs an agreement is adding to investor skepticism. Here\u2019s what it\u00a0does:\u00a0Suspends a tariff increase, set to bite this week, that would have raised duties on $250 billion of Chinese imports from 25 percent to 30 percent.\u00a0Pencils in $40 to $50 billion in new Chinese purchases of U.S. farm products, though Beijing has yet to confirm this.\u00a0Gives American financial services firms expanded access to the Chinese market, according to Trump. This process was already underway.\u00a0Addresses U.S. concerns about Chinese currency manipulation, though U.S. officials offered no details.\u00a0Here\u2019s what it doesn\u2019t do:\u00a0Lay out its terms on paper. (\u201cI don\u2019t think it should be a problem getting it papered,\u201d\u00a0Trump said.)Address structural reforms that the United States has demanded of the Chinese, including an end to forced technology transfers and state subsidies for favored industries.\u00a0Specify steps the Chinese will take to enforce intellectual property protections for U.S. companies.Include enforcement mechanisms to ensure the Chinese abide by the terms of a final deal.Remove tariffs already in place on $360 billion of Chinese imports.\u00a0Suspend a major tariff escalation, of 15 percent on $156 billion of Chinese goods \u2014 many of them consumer products \u2014 set for Dec. 15.\u00a0In short, then, it appears the U.S. traded suspension of the next round of tariffs for stepped-up agricultural purchases \u2014\u00a0though the Chinese haven\u2019t confirmed their commitment and the timing of the purchases remains sketchy. Most everything else remains to be determined. Or as Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute who advises the White House, put it to The Post\u2019s David Lynch, \u201cIt\u2019s basically some purchases and a bunch of fluff because no one in the administration really wants to go through with the tariffs anyway.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScott Kennedy, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that the Chinese aren't touting the agreement, a potentially worrying sign of their commitment to it:\u00a0Xinhua report says the two sides made \u201csubstantial progress,\u201d but does not say a deal was reached. If both sides don\u2019t think there is a deal, there\u2019s no deal. https://t.co/UihEqcrMmU\u2014 Scott Kennedy (@KennedyCSIS) October 11, 2019\n\nChad Bown, trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, noted the agreement mostly preserves the status quo:\u00a0If the \"substantial phase one\" Trump-China deal does NOT ROLL BACK any tariffs imposed, then we are stuck at \u2022 US tariffs on China that average 21.0% (up from 3.0% pre-Trade War)\u2022 Chinese tariffs on US that average 21.8% (up from 8.0% pre-Trade War)https://t.co/6CPzc9K5dG\u2014 Chad P. Bown (@ChadBown) October 11, 2019\n\nGeorgetown Law professor Jennifer Hillman argued the deal will take weeks to wrtie up and could still fall apart:\u00a0US-China small maybe deal--a. will take 3-5 weeks to be written up (and could fall apart in process), b. includes unspecified transparency provision on currency, even tho China stopped manipulating its currency years ago, c. includes unspecified provisions related to IP but\u2014 Jennifer Hillman (@J_A_Hillman) October 12, 2019\n\nlost much. Bottom line: US-China trade war has inflicted tremendous pain on farmers, consumers, importers, supply chain managers without reaching agreement to address the real problems with China: SOEs and subsidies, Communist party control over economy, IP+tech transfer theft.\u2014 Jennifer Hillman (@J_A_Hillman) October 12, 2019\n\nAnd the American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Jim Pethokoukis criticized Trump's handling of the matter:Guys, Trump is not turning out to be a very good dealmaker. Maybe his dealmaking superpower is a very narrow one, like not paying creditors. Just not applicable to international trade deals.\u2014 James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) October 12, 2019\n\nThe market, which for months has reacted on a hair trigger to U.S.-China trade developments, processed news of the emerging agreement in real time on Friday. \u201cEven before the president spoke, the Dow Jones industrial average was up roughly 500 points, or close to 2 percent, amid hints that a partial accord was imminent,\u201d David writes. \u201cThe president celebrated the outcome \u2026 but the lack of specificity in his announcement, and his comment that the partial deal could take weeks to iron out, cooled traders\u2019 optimism. The Dow closed up almost 320 points, or 1.2 percent, to finish at 26,816.59.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShawn Donnan concludes in a Bloomberg analysis that \u201ceven if it gels in the way that Trump outlined Friday, the agreement is far smaller in scope than what the president himself once envisioned, or what was on the table when talks broke down in May.\u201d\u201cIt also leaves major questions hanging in the wind amid a broader relationship showing plenty of signs of souring,\u201d he writes, \u201cranging from the Chinese furor over an NBA executive\u2019s backing for the growing protests in Hong Kong to the administration\u2019s invocation for the first time this week of human rights to crack down on Chinese tech companies and visas for officials.\u201dMARKET MOVERS\u2014 Futures drop. Bloomberg's Todd White: \"Stocks in Europe dropped alongside U.S. equity futures after China appeared to pour cold water on a partial trade deal touted by Donald Trump, saying it wanted to\u00a0iron out details\u00a0before signing it. European bonds gained.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"The Stoxx Europe 600 index extended a decline, led by banks and miners, after Bloomberg reported China wants further talks before sealing the \u201cphase one\u201d agreement announced Friday by the U.S. president. S&P 500 futures turned lower, signaling U.S. equities may run out of steam after rising to within 1.8% of a record close Friday. Stocks had climbed earlier from Sydney to Hong Kong, helping sustain a rally in emerging-market assets after after the positive conclusion of the latest round of trade talk.\"\u2014 Bumpy earnings season begins. CNBC's Patti Domm: \"The third-quarter earnings season kicks off in the coming week, and it is likely to expose how much the trade war has cost companies\u2019 bottom lines.\"First out of the gate are major banks and financial companies, with\u00a0J.P. Morgan,\u00a0Citigroup,\u00a0Wells Fargo,\u00a0BlackRock\u00a0and\u00a0Goldman Sachs\u00a0reporting Tuesday. But by the end of the week, a smattering of industrial, tech, transportation and consumer names will have reported, including\u00a0Alcoa\u00a0and\u00a0Honeywell.\u00a0Netflix\u00a0and\u00a0IBM report Wednesday, and consumer giant\u00a0Coca-Cola\u00a0reports Friday.\u00a0United Airlines\u00a0reports Tuesday, and\u00a0CSX\u00a0reports Wednesday...AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"Earnings for the\u00a0S&P 500\u00a0are expected to decline by 3.1% for the third quarter, after growing by more than 3% in the second quarter, according to data from Refinitiv.\"\u2014 Brexit talks go down to the wire. Reuters's\u00a0Guy Faulconbridge and Gabriela Baczynska: \"A deal to smooth Britain\u2019s departure from the European Union hung in the balance on Monday after diplomats indicated the bloc wanted more concessions from Prime Minister Boris Johnson and said a full agreement was unlikely this week.\u00a0As the Brexit maelstrom spins ever faster, Johnson and EU leaders face a tumultuous week of reckoning that could decide whether the divorce is orderly, acrimonious or delayed yet again.\"Johnson says he wants to strike an exit deal at an EU summit on Thursday and Friday to allow an orderly departure on Oct. 31 but if an agreement is not possible he will lead the United Kingdom out of the club it joined in 1973 without a deal - even though parliament has passed a law saying he cannot do so.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMinneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari is sick of Wall Street's whining (Axios)TRUMP TRACKERTRADE FLY AROUND:\u2014 E.U. seeks to halt U.S. tariffs over Airbus fight: \u201cThe European Union made a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. to refrain from triggering retaliatory tariffs over illegal subsidies to Airbus SE, warning of economic harm to both sides and repeating a call for a negotiated solution,\u201d Bloomberg News\u2019s Jonathan Stearns reports.\u201cEuropean Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told her U.S. counterpart, Robert Lighthizer, that his plan to hit $7.5 billion of EU goods ranging from planes to whiskey with duties would compel the EU to apply countermeasures in a parallel lawsuit over market-distorting aid to Boeing Co. U.S. levies would make a negotiated settlement harder to reach, she said.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u2014 AMLO urges Pelosi to approve USMCA: Mexican President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador \u201csaid he wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) a letter asking her to push forward approval of the trade deal negotiated between the United States, Mexico and Canada, he told reporters at his daily news conference,\u201d the Hill\u2019s Rafael Bernal reports.Advertisement\u201cL\u00f3pez Obrador has made passage of the USMCA through the U.S. House of Representatives a top diplomatic priority, despite his historical opposition to similar free trade agreements. The Mexican Senate approved the agreement in June; the House of Representatives and Canadian Parliament have yet to ratify it.\u201dChina\u2019s U.S. Exports Tumble as Tariffs Bite (WSJ)Story continues below advertisementApple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China (BuzzFeed)TRUMP WATCH:\u2014 Trump says he would support sanctions on Turkey:\u00a0\"Trump\u2019s administration is set to impose economic sanctions on Ankara, potentially as early as this week, for its incursion into northern Syria, one of the few levers the United States still has over NATO-ally Turkey,\" Reuters's Idrees Ali and\u00a0Humeyra Pamuk report.\"After Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Friday that Trump had authorized 'very powerful'\u00a0new sanctions targeting Turkey, the administration appeared ready to start making good on Trump\u2019s threat to obliterate Turkey\u2019s economy.\u00a0On Sunday, Trump said he was listening to Congress, where Republicans and Democrats are pushing aggressively for sanctions action.\"POCKET CHANGE\u2014 Boeing CEO removed as chairman: \u201cThe clock is ticking ever more loudly for Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg as the grounding of the 737 Max hits the seven-month mark,\u201d Bloomberg News\u2019s Julie Johnsson reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe board removed him as chairman Oct. 11 after the close of the workweek, saying the change would enable Muilenburg to focus on returning Boeing Co.\u2019s best-selling jet to service \u2026 The Friday-evening shakeup weakens Muilenburg, 55, as he tries to get the Max back in the air this quarter and prepares for a crucial appearance before Congress on Oct. 30.\u201dMeanwhile, Boeing and SpaceX make progress on spacecraft: \u201cSpaceX and Boeing are each in the final stages of developing the spacecraft needed for the U.S. to once again fly astronauts, with NASA\u2019s leader estimating launches may happen as early as the first months of 2020,\u201d CNBC\u2019s Michael Sheetz reports. \u201cBut, while SpaceX and Boeing may be close to completing work on their respective Crew Dragon and Starliner capsules, [NASA Administrator Jim] Bridenstine emphasized that the current timeline is very fluid given the critical nature of the final tests.\u201d\u2014 SoftBank seeks to take control of WeWork: \u201cSoftBank Group Corp. has prepared a financing package that would give it control of WeWork and further sideline its founder Adam Neumann in exchange for relieving the shared-office startup\u2019s looming cash crunch, according to people familiar with the matter,\u201d the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Maureen Farrell, Liz Hoffman and Eliot Brown report.\u201cWeWork is racing to find a way to shore up its financing after its New York parent company We Co. pulled its plans for an initial public offering and Mr. Neumann resigned as chief executive under pressure \u2026 Another possibility: The board has tapped JPMorgan Chase & Co. to look at ways for the company to raise billions in debt, and the bank is in the middle of meetings with investors about participating in a multibillion-dollar debt deal, people familiar with the company\u2019s plans said.\u201d\u2014 Michigan pulls $600 million from Ken Fisher: \u201cThe State of Michigan Retirement Fund\u2019s pension account, worth more than $70 billion, ended its relationship with the investment firm of Ken Fisher in the latest backlash to offensive remarks the billionaire made this week at a conference,\u201d Bloomberg News\u2019s Janet Lorin reports.Advertisement\u201cFisher has apologized for sexist and off-color remarks he made at the Tiburon CEO summit in San Francisco, but it hasn\u2019t stopped the outrage \u2026 Fisher, 68, a longtime market commentator and conference speaker, has come under fire for comparing the process of gaining a client\u2019s trust to \u2018trying to get into a girl\u2019s pants\u2019 and talking about genitalia at the financial services conference.\u201d\u2014 Purdue Pharma gets pause on civil lawsuits: \u201cA U.S. bankruptcy judge on Friday temporarily halted scores of lawsuits against Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family,\u201d my colleague Renae Merle reports.\u201cExtending that relief to the Sacklers, who haven\u2019t filed for bankruptcy protection, is \u2018extraordinary\u2019 but appropriate in this case, Judge Robert Drain said from the bench. Drain\u2019s ruling stays action for three weeks in state and federal lawsuits against the Sackler family members, who own the company, as well as Purdue Pharma and related companies. During the three-week reprieve, Purdue Pharma agreed to address one of the key concerns \u2014 access to more information about the Sacklers\u2019 finances \u2014 raised by state attorneys general who objected to including the family in the temporary injunction.\u201d\u2014 UAW boosts strike pay: The United Auto Workers union said that\u00a0\u201cit will boost strike pay for 48,000 hourly workers at General Motors Co by $25 a week to $275 as a strike against the largest U.S. automaker nears the end of its fourth week,\u201d Reuters\u2019s David Shepardson reports.\u201cTalks were continuing [over the weekend] to try to resolve the longest nationwide strike at GM since 1970, both sides said. The UAW also said it would allow members striking to take on part-time jobs without reducing their strike pay \u2014 as long as they perform picket-line duties. The strike pay hike was previously set to increase on Jan. 1.\u201d\u2014 Work on global poverty nets a Nobel prize. Reuters: \"Economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize for creating an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday. 'This year\u2019s Laureates have introduced a new approach to obtaining reliable answers about the best ways to fight global poverty,'\u00a0the academy said in statement.\"MONEY ON THE HILL\u2014 Sanders unveils coporate profit-sharing plan:\u00a0\"The day before a debate where Sen. Bernie Sanders\u00a0will make his first formal appearance since his recent heart attack, he released a plan on 'corporate greed and corruption'\u00a0that would impose far-reaching rules on the country\u2019s largest corporations, forcing them to share profits and power with their workers,\" my colleagues\u00a0Chelsea Janes and Jeff Stein report.\"The plan, which would probably face substantial pushback from Republicans and corporations, is the latest flag planted by Sanders (I-Vt.) at the leftmost boundary of the Democratic field. It comes as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been siphoning support from Sanders among the party\u2019s most liberal voters, a group that belonged solely to Sanders in 2016.\"The details:Board seats: \"All publicly traded companies, as well as all private companies with more than $100\u00a0million in revenue, to give their workers at least 45\u00a0percent of the seats on their corporate boards \u2014 going further than a similar idea from Warren,\" who has called for giving workers input on 40\u00a0percent of those seats.Stock holdings:\u00a0\"Sanders takes a step beyond Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain\u2019s Labour Party, by calling for corporations to turn over at least 20\u00a0percent of their shares to these worker funds, compared to 10\u00a0percent for Corbyn.\"The staggering size: The plan would \"give an additional 56\u00a0million workers, in more than 22,000 companies, a share of their businesses. The campaign says workers at McDonald\u2019s, for example, would ultimately control 20\u00a0percent of its stock and 45\u00a0percent of the vote on its management decisions.\"\u2014 Hunter Biden resigns from Chinese company's board:\u00a0\"Hunter Biden, facing increasing questions about his work for a Chinese investment company, will step down from his position as a board director this month and promised not to do any work for foreign firms if his father, Joe Biden, is elected president, his lawyer said,\" my colleagues\u00a0Michael Kranish and\u00a0Anna Fifield\u00a0report.\"The lawyer\u2019s statement underscored how Hunter Biden\u2019s foreign work has become a major issue in the presidential campaign, raising questions about whether Joe Biden failed to understand the potential for a conflict of interest with his son\u2019s work and setting in motion a chain of events that have led to an impeachment inquiry about [Trump].\"\u2014 Warren pressed over Medicare-for-all pay-for: \"Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been dogged\u00a0from the debate stage\u00a0to town halls to late-night TV shows by questions about whether she plans to unveil a signature health-care proposal\u2014and how she would pay for expanding government-run insurance,\" WSJ's\u00a0\u00a0Joshua Jamerson and Tarini Parti\u00a0report.\"[Warren\u2019s] top aides have called at least one expert on single-payer health-care programs in recent weeks to discuss the costs involved. Her campaign declined to say whether it is crafting its own health-care proposal ... [South Bend Mayor Pete] Buttigieg, who has also called [Warren] 'extremely evasive,'\u00a0has aired an ad promoting his 'Medicare For All Who Want It'\u00a0health care plan and stressed in interviews that his plan wouldn\u2019t increase taxes for the middle class. [Sen. Bernie] Sanders has said his Medicare for All proposal would increase taxes but lower premiums. Ms. Warren hasn\u2019t been so specific about how she would pay for expanding government-run health insurance.\"DAYBOOKUpcoming:Citigroup, Wells Fargo, United Airlines, Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, BlackRock, Charles Schwab and United Health are among the notable companies to report their earnings on Tuesday, per Kiplinger.The House Financial Services Committee holds a hearing on the semi-annual review of the CFPB on Wednesday, director Kathy Kraninger will testify.IBM, Bank of America, PayPal, Netflix and Alcoa are among the notable companies to report their earnings on Wednesday, per Kiplinger.The House Budget Committee holds a hearing on improving economic resiliency on Wednesday.A Financial Services Subcommittee holds a hearing on reauthorizing the terrorism risk insurance program on Wednesday.The Joint Economic Committee holds a hearing on measuring income inequality on Wednesday.The Brookings Institution holds an event on what happens when a big domestic bank fails on Wednesday.Brookings also holds an event with European Central Bank economist Phillip Lane on Wednesday.E*Trade, Morgan Stanley, Phillip Morris, Union Pacific, Skechers USA and BB&T Corp. are among the notable companies to report their earnings on Thursday, per Kiplinger.The Senate Banking Committee holds its hearing on the CFPB\u2019s report on Thursday, Kraninger will testify.A Financial Services subcommittee holds a hearing on the impact of stock buybacks on Thursday.A House Small Business subcommittee holds a hearing on opportunity zones and small businesses on Thursday.The Tax Policy Center holds an event on cryptocurrency and tax administration on Thursday, featuring remarks by IRS chief counsel Michael Desmond.Coca-Cola and American Express the notable companies to report their earnings on Friday, per Kiplinger.THE FUNNIES View this post on Instagram A cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst. #TNYcartoons A post shared by The New Yorker Cartoons (@newyorkercartoons) on Oct 10, 2019 at 7:12am PDT\nBULL SESSIONICYMI: Here's what it does and doesn't do. The Finance 202: There's less to Trump's 'greatest and biggest deal' with China than meets the eye",
        "author": "Tory Newmyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Finance 202: Conservative economists say Trump\u2019s promises about his tax cuts did not come true (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7071",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2019/12/19/the-finance-202-conservative-economists-say-trump-s-promises-for-tax-cuts-did-not-come-true/5dfaa527602ff125ce5b6e26/",
        "text": "with Brent D. GriffithsTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Trump cites massive tax cuts, his signature legislative achievement, among wins that should dissuade lawmakers and voters from supporting his impeachment.\u00a0How do you get Impeached when you have done NOTHING wrong (a perfect call), have created the best economy in the history of our Country, rebuilt our Military, fixed the V.A. (Choice!), cut Taxes & Regs, protected your 2nd A, created Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, and soooo much more? Crazy!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2019\n\nCongressional Democrats reject out of hand that Trump\u2019s policy agenda has anything to do with the misconduct at the heart of their impeachment push. But more ominously for Trump\u2019s reelection prospects, several conservative economists now say the law, which turns two years old Sunday, so far has fallen short of its central promise to spread prosperity broadly. \u201cI was certainly expecting to see something different,\u201d Alan Viard, an economist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, says of a business investment boom that hasn't materialized. \u201cReally, you would have expected, if there\u2019s an effect taking place here, you would have seen it.\u201dBoosters of the package predicted it would set off a virtuous trickle-down effect. The cuts, they said, would compel businesses to invest in their own operations. In theory, that would boost their productivity, ultimately yielding higher wages for workers. Here\u2019s how the right-leaning Tax Foundation envisioned the process playing out in 2018:Instead, the first step in that daisy chain largely hasn\u2019t come to pass. Business investment\u00a0has contracted over the past two quarters, falling 3 percent over the three-month period that ended in September \u2014 the steepest such drop since 2015:Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal named the development as a top disappointment this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDefenders of the tax cut say Trump\u2019s trade war cast a pall of uncertainty over the economy, spooking business leaders into shelving any big spending plans they may have been contemplating. That, these economists say, makes it impossible to draw firm conclusions about how the tax cut would have performed without the fear unleashed by the trade war. Some argue the falloff in business investment would have been even worse \u2014\u00a0and that it could still recover if Trump winds down the trade hostilities next year, or that it needs more time to play out.At some point, however, the numbers speak for themselves. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen a huge investment boom. That was validating for a lot of folks on the center-left,\u201d says Garrett Watson of the Tax Foundation. \u201cThat\u2019s just an accurate description of where we are.\u201dSome conservatives say the partisan process that yielded the tax cuts, and their underperformance and poor public polling since have helped embolden aspiring Democratic leaders to propose dramatic tax hikes. Nicole Kaeding, vice president of policy promotion at right-leaning National Taxpayers Union Foundation, recently tweeted that when Trump signed the law two years ago, she \u201cdid not fully appreciate just how far left it would push the 2020 tax debate in the [Democratic] primaries.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWatson said Trump officials\u2019 hyperbolic claims about the boom times the tax cuts would unleash also hurt their own cause. The Tax Foundation for example projected the measure could juice economic growth to 2.7 percent \u2014 but White House officials publicly touted a pace nearly twice as brisk. \u201cWe\u2019ve been clear that should not have been expected, and it does not do proponents of tax reform any favors,\u201d he said.But economists critical of the law say the results make clear that theory behind the tax cuts was fundamentally broken from the start. \"There\u2019s just no shortage of business capital. You can see that by looking at interest rates,\u201d says Edward Kleinbard, a former chief of staff of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, now a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. \u201cIn a world where we are awash in capital, to say we now have a tax environment that\u2019s friendlier to business investment is no more convincing than pushing on a string.\u201dWhatever the combination of reasons, polls show the tax cuts have remained broadly unpopular with voters. And the package does not appear to be improving with age.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA new report by the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found 91 corporations in the Fortune 500 paid no federal taxes last year. And about 400 of the largest firms paid an average tax rate of 11 percent, half the burden prescribed by the tax law.\u00a0\u201cMany companies said a big drop in corporate tax rates would allow them to invest more in capital and equipment, but the uptick in new investment appears to have been short-lived,\u201d my colleagues Jeff Stein and Christopher Ingraham wrote recently. \u201cMuch of the extra capital went into record stock buybacks, which increase share prices without requiring new investment or hiring.\u201dPROGRAMMING NOTE: This will be our last newsletter of the year, and we'll be back in your inbox on Monday, Jan. 6. In the meantime, here's wishing you and yours a very happy holiday.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMARKET MOVERS\u2014 Wall Street still doesn't care about impeachment. MarketWatch's William Watts: \"Investors don\u2019t care about impeachment \u2014 and that is unlikely to change unless there is a shift in widely held expectations that [Trump] will remain in office...\u00a0\"Stock-market indexes aren\u2019t anticipated to produce much of a reaction on Thursday after finishing near all-time highs, with futures trading on Wednesday showing small gains for stocks. Equities weakened toward the end of Wednesday\u2019s regular session, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average ending slightly lower to break a five-day winning streak that had taken them to a series of records.Story continues below advertisementStocks have climbed since the process started: \"The impeachment battle has largely been ignored by investors. Indeed, the S&P 500 has added substantially to year-to-date gains, which now stand at more than 27%, even as the impeachment proceedings have taken shape.\"Advertisement\u2014 Economists predict the expansion will power through next year. WSJ's Harriet Torry: \"The U.S. expansion, now in its 11th year, will continue through the 2020 presidential election with a healthy labor market backing it up, economists say. The panel of 57 economists who participated in The Wall Street Journal\u2019s December economic survey offered a relatively optimistic outlook for 2020 growth, albeit at a slower pace than in 2019.\"On average, they expect U.S. economic growth to slow slightly in 2020, to a year-over-year rate of 1.8% in the fourth quarter from an estimated 2.2% in 2019. They also see lower odds of a recession over the next year than they did in the prior two months.\"Story continues below advertisement\u2014 A demographic time-bomb menaces the jobs boom. WSJ's Greg Ip: \"The U.S. job market continues to blow through expectations, generating 200,000 new jobs month after month and driving unemployment far below what economists thought a decade ago was the lowest possible level... Yet eventually it will hit a constraint: The U.S. will run out of people to join the workforce. Indeed, this bright cyclical picture for the labor market is on a collision course with a dimming demographic outlook. While jobs are growing faster than expected, population is growing more slowly.\"Advertisement\u2014\u00a0IPOs set record, despite big flame-outs: \u201cUnicorns like Uber, Lyft and Slack may have had disappointing IPOs, but U.S. venture capital firms gave birth to a record number of unicorns in 2019,\u201d Reuters\u2019s Jane Lanhee Lee\u00a0reports.\u201cSo far this year 66 venture capital-backed unicorns were minted in the United States versus 58 in 2018, according to market data firm CB Insights.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFed's Williams says repo operations working well and should stay in place 'just as long' as needed (CNBC)Trump Administration Weighs Plans to Reduce Student Debt (WSJ)TRUMP TRACKERTRADE FLY-AROUND:F202 exclusive: NAM survey finds optimism is stabilizing. Manufacturing optimism has stabilized, a National Association of Manufacturers' survey coming out this morning will reveal. Sixty-eight percent of manufacturers are reporting a positive outlook for their businesses for the fourth quarter of 2019, virtually the same as the previous quarter\u2019s numbers. In terms of concerns, the inability to attract and retain a talented workforce remains at the top of the list for the ninth straight quarter.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe survey went out before a round of even more positive news: House Democrats reached a deal on the USMCA, Trump announced a phase-one agreement with China and the year-end spending bill includes long-term reauthorization of the Export-Import bank --- all major priorities for the association.\u201cAll of these actions have the power to reduce the trade uncertainty we see in this survey,\u201d NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons said in a statement. Timmons also sent a letter to the Hill this morning strongly urging the USMCA\u2019s passage, which is expected to happen in the House later today. \u201cNAM believes strongly that passage of the USMCA is critical for restoring certainty and expanding growth for manufacturers across America,\u201d he writes.\u2014\u00a0House expected to vote on USMCA today:\u00a0\u201cThe House Ways and Means Committee favorably reported on the proposal, created as a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement, on Tuesday, clearing the way for the House vote,\u201d the UPI reports.\u201cThe bill received bipartisan support in the committee and is expected to receive similar backing when the full house votes on it.\u201dMeanwhile, moderate Democrats are mad at McConnell:\u00a0\u201cVulnerable House Democrats say they are frustrated that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pushed a Senate vote on the new North American trade pact to next year,\u201d Politico\u2019s Sabrina Rodr\u00edguez\u00a0reports.\u00a0\u2014 You have to marvel at this:\u00a0\u201cWakanda's free trade agreement with the United States wasn't forever,\u201d NBC News's Phil McCausland\u00a0reports.Advertisement\u201cUntil Wednesday afternoon, the fictional country from the popular 2018 Marvel superhero movie \u2018Black Panther\u2019 was listed as a free trade agreement partner of the United States on the Agricultural Tariff Tracker maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u2019s Foreign Agricultural Service \u2026 The USDA said they had used Wakanda when testing the system behind the tracker and had forgotten to remove Black Panther's home country.\u201dIMPEACHMENT MINUTE: A speed read on the latest from the congressional impeachment process.The House of Representatives voted on Dec. 18 to impeach President Trump on charges that he abused his office and obstructed Congress. (The Washington Post)\"Trump is impeached by the House, creating an indelible mark on his presidency.\" By The Post's Philip Rucker, Felicia Sonmez and Colby Itkowitz\u00a0\"Pelosi says House may withhold impeachment articles, delaying Senate trial.\" By The Post's Mike DeBonis\u00a0\"Impeachment split screen: As House votes in Washington, Trump rallies in Michigan.\" By The Post's Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker\u00a0\"However historic, impeachment is but a way station in the struggle over Trump\u2019s presidency.\" By The Post's Dan Balz\u00a0POCKET CHANGE\u2014\u00a0Americans' procrastination is big business: \u201cU.S. retailers are expected to ring up record sales on Super Saturday this year, as fewer days than usual between Thanksgiving and Christmas have squeezed shoppers to finish their purchases,\u201d Reuters\u2019s Nandita Bose\u00a0reports.\u201cIn recent years, the Saturday before Christmas has seen a late surge in shopper traffic. With retailers maintaining deep discounts late into the holiday season, total sales on Super Saturday have edged closer to Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving which traditionally kicks off the season in November.\u201d\u2014\u00a0Boeing faces key test: \u201c Boeing has been under siege for months after two of its 737 Max aircraft plummeted from the sky killing 346 people \u2026 Even Jim Chilton\u2019s part of the company \u2014 the space division \u2014 was the subject of a searing watchdog report last month that found it had received hundreds of millions of dollars in \u2018unnecessary\u2019 payments stemming from an unusually cozy relationship with NASA,\u201d my colleague Christian Davenport\u00a0reports.\u201cThat launch is now scheduled for 6:36 a.m. Friday from Cape Canaveral, and while no astronauts will be on board, the first launch of its new spacecraft has taken on a far greater importance for Boeing than just a test. It\u2019s a shot at a bit of redemption.\u201dSuppliers brace for fallout. The NYT's David Yaffe-Bellany writes the company's decision to halt production of the 737 Max \"is stretching far beyond Boeing\u2019s headquarters in Chicago and its giant production facility in Renton, Wash., rippling through the worldwide aerospace supply chain from California to Kansas, Britain to France. For Boeing\u2019s vast network of suppliers, the announcement made real what they had dreaded \u2014 a suspension of unknown length that could force some of them to scale back production and even lay off workers.\"\u2014\u00a0FedEx's feud with Amazon proves costly: \u201cFedEx\u2019s rocky relationship with Amazon may have contributed to its fiscal second-quarter earnings slump, but the shipping company says it could actually turn a corner and outpace its competitor in fiscal 2021,\u201d CNBC\u2019s Annie Palmer\u00a0reports.\u201cFedEx has spent heavily to expand its ground-delivery service to run seven days a week all year. Graf said those investments, along with \u2018operational synergies\u2019 in Europe, will start to pay off in the company\u2019s fiscal 2021. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u2014\u00a0Texas and Google battle over antitrust: \u201cTexas investigators are defending their decision to employ some of Google\u2019s longtime foes as part of an antitrust probe into the search giant, saying in a court filing that the recent legal objections raised by the company threaten to \u2018severely compromise\u2019 states\u2019 scrutiny,\u201d my colleague Tony Romm\u00a0reports.\u201cAt issue are a number of consultants retained by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading an inquiry into Google\u2019s ad business that\u2019s backed by 50 other attorneys general. The experts include people who previously have worked on behalf of Google\u2019s rivals, including News Corp., in antitrust battles around the world.\u201dRenaissance Employees Could Face Clawbacks Over Hedge Fund\u2019s Tax Maneuver (WSJ)MONEY ON THE HILL\u2014\u00a0Don\u2019t forget the debate is tonight: \u201cOne side of the Democratic Party wants the nation\u2019s billionaires to pay a slightly higher tax rate on their income. Through an unprecedented wealth tax, the other side would target the stock holdings, real estate and other property of the nation\u2019s billionaires to raise trillions of dollars of new revenue,\u201d my colleague Jeff Stein\u00a0reports.\u201cOne side has virtually no plans to have the government take over private industry. The other has an armada of proposals for federal interventions, spanning from government control of American health insurance to public production of prescription drugs to mandating worker control over their companies ...The eventual nominee will determine the party\u2019s position on the taxes paid by the richest Americans; the size of the federal welfare state; the makeup of the health-care industry; and the relationship between workers and corporations, among other vital economic questions.\u201d\u2014\u00a0More investors say Trump will win again: \u201cA growing majority of equity investors expect [Trump] will win re-election in 2020, according to an RBC survey,\u201d Bloomberg News\u2019s Felice Maranz\u00a0reports.\u201cIn the firm\u2019s December survey, 76 percent of 119 respondents said they thought Trump will win, a \u2018big jump\u2019 from September\u2019s 66 percent, Head of U.S. Equity Strategy Lori Calvasina wrote in a note. The figures reversed fading expectations regarding a Trump victory in June and September surveys. Those predicting a Democrat will win came in at 24 percent in December, down from 34 percent in September.\u201dTHE REGULATORS\u2014 A call for a financial fraud registry. The Post's Renae Merle: \"The federal government should establish a national financial fraud registry to make it easier for prosecutors and investors to identify repeat offenders, according to a top law enforcement official.\u201c'It is about public safety and deterrence. Financial institutions hold a place of trust, they are so interwoven in people\u2019s lives,' said Christy Goldsmith Romero, special inspector general with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which investigates crime at companies that received taxpayer bailouts during the global financial crisis. But 'there is no easy access to information when trying to determine where to investigate.'\"The Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), launched its own database for financial crimes on Wednesday. The searchable database includes details of nearly 400 criminal convictions, guilty pleas and fines secured by SIGTARP over the past decade.\"DAYBOOKToday:Rite Aid, Conagra Brands and Accenture PLC are among the notable companies reporting their earnings.The American Enterprise Institute holds an event about the USMCA with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.)Friday:Nike, Carnival Corp. and Carmax are among the notable companies reporting their earnings.THE FUNNIESBULL SESSION Two years later, there's no business investment boom. The Finance 202: Conservative economists say Trump\u2019s promises about his tax cuts did not come true",
        "author": "Tory Newmyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Did Obama squander an opportunity by nominating Merrick Garland? (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7072",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/09/09/daily-202-did-obama-squander-an-opportunity-by-nominating-merrick-garland/57d21088cd249a6fa9f8208b/",
        "text": "With Breanne DeppischTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0For six months, the Democratic push to move Merrick Garland has gone nowhere.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUsing the awesome power of the bully pulpit, the White House yesterday deployed Joe Biden to Capitol Hill. The vice president appeared at a press conference with 75 members of Congress, including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Garland himself met with Pat Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, for a photo opp and pep talk. It was his first visit to the Capitol since the spring. -- But the day-long push unintentionally underscored what relative non-issues the Supreme Court generally and Garland specifically have been in the 2016 campaign, despite Democrats talking a big game in the spring.Story continues below advertisementNo Democratic Senate candidates are talking about Garland in paid television ads.AdvertisementNo one mentioned Garland during the Democratic National Convention in July, including Barack Obama.Hillary Clinton has not committed to re-nominate Garland if she\u2019s elected. While she talks about the Supreme Court, she almost never talks about him.-- Some Democrats privately fear that Obama blew an opportunity to help re-activate the coalition that elected him twice by not picking a more progressive nominee \u2013 especially a minority candidate \u2013 to replace the late Antonin Scalia. Had Obama nominated someone who really ginned up the Democratic base, perhaps Clinton and the party would have more whole-heartedly embraced him or her.-- This counterfactual is worth considering.Story continues below advertisementThe National Organization for Women signed onto an open letter urging Obama to appoint an African American woman to the court after Scalia died. When Garland was announced, the group expressed concern that he is \u201cmore or less a blank slate\u201d on core women\u2019s issues like reproductive rights.AdvertisementNOW President Terry O'Neill wants the Senate to confirm Garland but she also thinks about how different the dynamic might be right now had the president gone with a more progressive black woman instead of a 63-year-old moderate white man.\u201cI\u2019m not going to say there wasn\u2019t some disappointment,\u201d she said in an interview last night. \u201cI am very positive that the progressive community would be extremely active in promoting a more left-leaning appointment.\u201dStory continues below advertisementO\u2019Neill posited that an African American woman might have provided a clearer contrast. \u201cSuppose he had nominated an African American woman,\u201d she said. \u201cNo matter how moderate she might be, Republicans would say she\u2019s way too out there and way too radical. The same way they talked about President Obama. \u2026 I don\u2019t think you can eliminate race from understanding what these senators are doing. There\u2019s no white president that\u2019s ever been treated so disrespectfully.\u201dAdvertisementShe lamented the paucity of media coverage about the vacancy.\u201cAny African American woman who might have been nominated would have been viciously attacked,\u201d O\u2019Neill added. \u201cIt\u2019s possible, if those vicious attacks would have happened, then the American public would have been much better informed of the outrageousness of what the Republicans are doing.\u201d-- Many of the same progressives who are not enthusiastic about Clinton are also not enthusiastic about Garland. Bernie Sanders said this spring as he campaigned for the Democratic nomination that he would\u00a0ask Obama to withdraw Garland if he got elected so he could pick someone more liberal.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe saw some of the highest grassroots energy in our eight year history in the run up to the president's Supreme Court nomination, and when the choice was Merrick Garland that energy completely plummeted,\u201d said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.AdvertisementLeaders in the African American community have called for a vote on Garland, but a lot of the key groups were also less than thrilled with his selection.Other liberal organizations like Democracy for America, which was founded by Howard Dean, said when Garland was nominated that it was \u201cdeeply disappointing that President Obama failed to use this opportunity to add the voice of another progressive woman of color to the Supreme Court.\u201d-- To be sure, Obama may still have the last laugh. People close to the White House say the president made the appointment with getting his pick through the Senate in mind, rather than helping out Clinton.Story continues below advertisementOnce Mitch McConnell staked out a firm position that the nominee would not get a hearing, Obama always felt that his best shot would come in the lame-duck session after the elections. The former law school professor loves the idea that one-third of the court could be there because of him. And he thought picking a centrist would be tantamount to making Republicans an offer they could not refuse, to borrow a line from one of Obama\u2019s favorite movies.Advertisement-- There is also a possibility that a more liberal nominee would have become a lightning rod, galvanizing the right more than the left and putting down-ballot Democrats in the uncomfortable position of having to answer for his or her most controversial opinions. Judge Garland has spent decades positioning himself for this dream job. In a town of cautious lawyers who avoid creating a paper trail, he might be the most cautious.\u201cGarland is the most qualified nominee to the Supreme Court in American history,\u201d said Emma Shapiro of the #WeNeedNine coalition, which has been organizing events this week to drum up public support for him. \u201cCompared to the histrionics of this election and Donald Trump, Merrick Garland is boring, which is the exact reason to confirm him.\"-- The GOP\u2019s base cares more about the Supreme Court this year than the Democratic base does. While liberal elites in D.C. are appropriately obsessed with the court, many rank-and-file Democrats see judicial selection as an esoteric issue and don\u2019t fully grasp how directly the court\u2019s decisions impact their lives. \u00a0Republicans, on the other hand, constantly tell me as I travel the country that they hate Trump but will vote for him anyway because of the Supreme Court. (See Monday\u2019s 202 for a few illustrations of that from Iowa. I also explored this dynamic on the ground in Wisconsin back in March.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe direction of the Supreme Court is a key motivator for Republicans voters,\u201d said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman Andrea Bozek. \u201cDemocrats have handled this Supreme Court fight so poorly they forgot to even mention Garland\u2019s name once during their entire convention. If it was such an effective message, why hasn\u2019t Chuck Schumer told the DSCC to mention it in their TV ads?\u201dAs another GOP operative, who is involved in the court fight, puts it: \u201cGarland did nothing to inspire the left wing of the Democratic Party, which was already vocal and restless, while McConnell picked a fight that united his base. It\u2019s increasingly rare in D.C. that the GOP grassroots is united with party leaders. This did it.\u201d-- Democrats involved in the races think Garland may help motivate center-left independents more than core base voters. In blue state Senate races, they say it will be a data point during the fall to show that Republicans are not as independent as they claim. \u201cThis obstructionism is yet another proof point our candidates have in making the case against their Republican opponents, who continue to walk lockstep with their party at the expense of the people they were elected to serve,\u201d said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokeswoman Lauren Passalacqua.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Polls show that the Supreme Court is not a top-tier issue. In a July AP-GfK poll, 55 percent said Supreme Court nominations are extremely or very important, meaningfully below the economy (85), health care (74) and the threat of ISIS (68). A Gallup poll last month found that only 2 percent named \"Judicial System/Courts/Laws\" as the most important issue facing the country.While majorities want Garland to get a hearing, it\u2019s not something most voters care much about. A CBS/New York Times poll in May showed the country divided along partisan lines: 48 percent said the Senate should vote on whether to confirm Garland, and 45 percent said the chamber should wait until next year for the new president to nominate somebody. The issue has moved so far to the back burner that a lot of pollsters have actually stopped asking about it.-- Latinos may not care about Garland specifically, but community leaders say they are nonetheless galvanized by the Supreme Court. The Spanish-language media, for instance, paid more attention to the vacancy after a deadlocked court in June failed to revive Obama\u2019s stalled plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give them the right to work legally in the United States.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf Garland had been confirmed \u2026 we probably would have won,\u201d said Marielena Hincapi\u00e9, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.Hincapi\u00e9 suggested that Garland was not her first choice, but that she would like to see him confirmed in the lame-duck. The group has petitioned for a rehearing of the immigration case. \u201cHaving a ninth justice sooner than later is important,\u201d she said.-- There could be tensions in the Democratic coalition after November on this point. Assuming Clinton wins, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee does not want Garland confirmed in the lame-duck. \"As Republican Sen. Jeff Flake said just recently, Garland was the most conservative possible Democratic nominee,\u201d Green, the group\u2019s co-founder, emailed. \u201cIt makes no sense for that to be who Democrats offer the nation after winning a fresh mandate -- and would symbolize a return to a Democratic Party intent on squandering leverage and blowing an opportunity to inspire the public.\u201d-- McConnell\u2019s spokesman reiterated yesterday that Republicans do not plan to allow a vote on the Garland in the lame duck, even if Clinton wins. \u201cThe majority leader has been clear: The next president will make the nomination for this vacancy,\u201d said Don Stewart. \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter. With contributions from Elise Viebeck (@eliseviebeck). Sign up to receive the newsletter. \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- North Korea conducted another nuclear\u00a0test this morning, its fifth since 2006 and potentially the\u00a0most powerful yet. The move \u201cunderscores North Korea\u2019s continued defiance,\u201d Anna Fifield reports from Tokyo,\u00a0\u201cbut also the ineffectiveness of even the most recent waves of tough sanctions imposed after the nuclear test in January.\"\u00a0South Korean and Japanese governments both convened emergency meetings to discuss the test, which was first mistakenly reported as a 5.3 magnitude earthquake. Scientists are now working to determine what kind of test it was, with Japan immediately sending two \u201csniffer\u201d planes into the air. \u201cThe US Air Force is expected to start flying the WC-135 Constant Phoenix Aircraft in the coming hours to take air samples,\u201d CNN reports.Bigger picture: The recent\u00a0missile launches are adding up to something very troubling.\u00a0\u201cIt seems like North Korea is trying to qualitatively improve its missiles and develop options to evade or fool U.S. missile defenses,\u201d said\u00a0Kelsey Davenport,\u00a0director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. \u201cIf this continues unchecked, they could develop an inter-continental ballistic missile that could pose a threat to the United States in the next decade.\u201d-- The test came just as\u00a0President Obama wrapped up his 10th \u2013 and final \u2013 trip to Asia.\u00a0(David Nakamura)-- In a new commercial going up today, Clinton criticizes Trump for saying: \u201cI, alone, can fix it\u201d at the RNC. She says she will work across party lines to get things done.-- The number of retired generals and admirals backing Clinton has grown to 110, with an additional 15 high-ranking officials endorsing her this morning. The Clinton campaign attributes\u00a0the fresh support to Trump\u2019s performance in Wednesday night\u2019s \u201cCommander-in-Chief\u201d forum.\u00a0Today the Democratic nominee is \u201cconvening experts on foreign policy and national security to discuss real solutions to the threat of terrorism,\u201d an advisory\u00a0says.\u00a0They\u2019ll meet at the New York Historical Society.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Trump\u2019s DACA \u2018deal\u2019 is another humiliation for Jeff Sessions (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7073",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/09/15/daily-202-trump-s-daca-deal-is-another-humiliation-for-jeff-sessions/59bb011f30fb045176650cd1/",
        "text": "with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie GreveWith Breanne\u00a0Deppisch and Joanie GreveWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Photographers caught a giddy Jeff Sessions cracking a satisfied smile last week as he prepared to announce that 690,000 undocumented immigrants who had been brought into the United States as minors would no longer be shielded from deportation. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program \u201cis being rescinded,\u201d the attorney general declared in the first line of his statement. \u201cThere is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration laws. \u2026 Failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism. \u2026 The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFact checkers called these and other claims Sessions made about the immigrants known as \u201cdreamers\u201d dubious or outright false. Perhaps that\u2019s why he didn\u2019t take questions afterward. Regardless, the speech was widely covered as a triumph for the nation\u2019s chief law enforcement officer and a sign that he was out of President Trump\u2019s doghouse. Not only did Sessions get the outcome he wanted; he also got to deliver the news from the Justice Department briefing room.Trump\u2019s DACA decision last week seemed to validate Sessions\u2019s decision to slog on through the summer even after being frozen out of the inner circle. From interviews to tweets, Trump repeatedly attacked his attorney general throughout July as \u201cweak\u201d and \u201cbeleaguered.\u201dThe main reason Sessions chose to put up with indignities that might cause most people to quit was because he believed he could make a difference on immigration policy. That has always been his signature issue and animated his two decades in the Senate.-- But it took less than 10 days for Trump to once again undercut Sessions. The president on Thursday signaled his embrace of granting permanent legal status to these \u201cdreamers\u201d as part of a deal with Democrats that he said is close to being finalized. He also acknowledged that he\u2019s not going to make a deal to save DACA contingent on getting funding for the wall he wants to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDiscussing the exact same group of people that Sessions painted with such a sinister brush one week earlier, Trump tweeted yesterday: \u201cDoes anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!\u201d Trump tweeted yesterday. \u201cThey have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own \u2014 brought in by parents at young age.\u201dPresident Trump's position on DACA has taken several twists and turns over the years. (Meg Kelly, Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)-- Adding insult to injury, the New York Times reported last night that Trump \u201cberated\u201d Sessions during an Oval Office meeting this spring. \u201cAccusing Mr. Sessions of \u2018disloyalty,\u2019 Mr. Trump unleashed a string of insults on his attorney general,\u201d Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report. \u201cMr. Trump told Mr. Sessions that choosing him to be attorney general was one of the worst decisions he had made, called him an \u2018idiot,\u2019 and said that he should resign. \u2026 Ashen and emotional, Mr. Sessions told the president he would quit and sent a resignation letter to the White House \u2026 Mr. Sessions would later tell associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.\u201dHere\u2019s how the May 17 meeting went down: The president blames Sessions\u2019s recusal from the Russia investigation for the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Sessions was in the Oval Office with Vice President Pence, White House Counsel Don McGahn and others to discuss who should be tapped to replace James Comey as FBI director. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called McGahn during the meeting to say that he was going to name Mueller that evening. Trump erupted when he learned the news.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAn emotional Mr. Sessions told the president he would resign and left the Oval Office,\u201d the Times reports. \u201cIn the hours after the Oval Office meeting, however, Mr. Trump\u2019s top advisers intervened to save Mr. Sessions\u2019s job. Mr. Pence; Stephen K. Bannon, the president\u2019s chief strategist at the time; and Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, all advised that accepting Mr. Sessions\u2019s resignation would only sow more chaos inside the administration and rally Republicans in Congress against the president. \u2026 The president relented, and eventually returned the resignation letter to Mr. Sessions.\u201d-- A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on both the president\u2019s DACA comments and the Times\u2019s story.-- Rachel Maddow asked Hillary Clinton on her show last night about Trump\u2019s eruption at Sessions. \u201cWell, look, this is a man who engages in humiliation and domination as a tactic of control,\u201d replied the 2016 Democratic nominee, who is giving a flurry of interviews to promote her new book. \u201cI think that's pretty deeply embedded in his character. \u2026 I think the goal might well have been, psychologically, to really make Jeff Sessions, who is a very proud man, \u2026 more dependent on pleasing the president. \u2026 It's all part of his manipulation.\u201dHere's a look at the \"dreamers\" whose DACA protections are set to expire. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)-- Sessions believed at the start of this year that he and the incoming president were genuinely friends. He was the first member of the Senate to endorse Trump\u2019s outsider campaign. It stung this summer when the president told reporters that he only backed him because of his popularity in Alabama. Sessions felt like he had really gone out on a limb and snubbed Ted Cruz, a friend and colleague, to do so.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- The thrice-married Trump has long struggled with staying loyal, even to people he once loved. As Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker wrote last weekend after the debt ceiling deal, Trump has a long history of broken alliances and agreements: \u201cIn business, his personal life, his campaign and now his presidency, Trump has sprung surprises on his allies with gusto. His dealings are frequently defined by freewheeling spontaneity, impulsive decisions and a desire to keep everyone guessing \u2014 especially those who assume they can control him. He also repeatedly demonstrates that, while he demands absolute loyalty from others, he is ultimately loyal to no one but himself. \u2026 Foreign diplomats euphemistically describe the president as \u2018unpredictable.\u2019\u201dPresident Trump's decision to work with Democratic lawmakers to move forward with border security and protections for dreamers inflamed his conservative base. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)WAPO TEAM COVERAGE:-- \u201cTrump and Democrats strike DACA deal. Yes? No? Sort of? Trump\u2019s world can be confusing,\u201d by Ashley Parker: \u201cOn Wednesday night, in a Blue Room dinner at the White House with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), the president reached a tentative agreement with the Democratic leaders \u2026 But even as Trump careens toward the sort of immigration deal that has eluded previous presidents \u2014 the latest capstone to a period of 10 days of sustained bipartisan overtures \u2014 the process exhibits certain Trumpian hallmarks: namely, a lack of clarity \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOften, Trump\u2019s underlings, friends, foes and allies never know quite where he stands \u2014 in part because of the president\u2019s penchant for telling his immediate audience exactly what they want to hear in any given moment. People who meet with the president frequently leave buoyed, an optimism punctured by a nagging question mere hours later: What just happened? \u2026 On Wednesday evening, as news of the agreement trickled out, Hill staffers sat glued to Twitter trying to discern that very query as aides to both sides scrambled to explain what, in the end, turned out to be disagreements that were largely semantics.\u201d (Read Ashley\u2019s full story for a blow-by-blow on the confusion that reigned in Washington yesterday.)House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) spoke on Sept. 14 about President Trump\u2019s discussion with Democrats on DACA and border security. (Reuters)-- \u201cHouse Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) dismissed the potential deal \u2026 as little more than a preliminary discussion \u2014 and insisted that any agreement must have buy-in from GOP leaders,\u201d per Elise Viebeck, Ed O'Keefe and Mike DeBonis. \u201cYet Ryan agreed in broad terms with the president\u2019s goal of protecting hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants while postponing talk of a border wall but toughening U.S. border security in other ways. \u2026 Ryan confirmed that he didn\u2019t learn of the potential deal with [\u201cChuck and Nancy\u201d] until Thursday morning, when Trump and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly confirmed it in phone conversations from Air Force One more than 12 hours after the dinner meeting. \u2026 (Mitch) McConnell remained noncommittal about a possible deal \u2014 and put the onus on the White House to come up with a proposal. \u2026\u201cSpecific talks on border security are expected to begin in the coming days, Schumer said. He and Pelosi said border security measures in the final agreement could include drones, sensor technology, road repairs and other strategies that were included in a bipartisan bill in 2013 that instructed federal officials to draft a plan ensuring apprehension of 90 percent of all illegal border-crossers within five years.\"Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) was unintentionally recorded on the Senate floor saying Trump \"likes us, he likes me anyway.\" (C-SPAN)-- \u201cHe likes us. He likes me, anyway,\u201d Schumer said on the Senate floor, in a comment picked up by a hot microphone. \u201cI said, 'Mr. President, you're much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes step left. If you have to step just to one direction, you're boxed.' He gets that. \u2026 It's going to work out, and it'll make us more productive, too.\u201dDemocrats decried the Trump administration's decision to wind down DACA, while many Republicans agreed that the program was an \"overreach.\" (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)-- \u201cTrump tests the faith of supporters with talk of immigration deal,\u201d by Robert Costa and Michael Scherer: \u201c\u2018Amnesty Don,\u2019 declared a bright-red headline on Breitbart News \u2026 Yet the lasting political cost of Trump\u2019s engagement with top Democrats on immigration remained ambiguous. While (Ann) Coulter and others vented, several conservative leaders Thursday remained hesitant about breaking with the president publicly given his continued grass-roots support. \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cPolling suggests that Trump has more room to maneuver with his base on the question of dreamers than on other planks of his immigration platform. An analysis of the 2016 presidential election by Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner found that among 2016 Trump voters, 67 percent supported building a southern border wall, 80 percent said speaking English was \u2018very important\u2019 to being American, and 80 percent were opposed to letting Syrian refugees into the United States. But among the same voters, 68 percent said child migrants brought illegally who have been here 10 years and have graduated high school should be allowed to stay in the country. \u2018That\u2019s what the White House is wrestling with right now,\u2019 says Jim McLaughlin, a campaign pollster for Trump who still consults with the White House.\u201dPresident Trump spoke to reporters on Sept. 14 about his deal with Democrats on DACA and immigration reform, saying \"we're moving very rapidly on the wall.\" (The Washington Post)-- \u201cIs Trump advocating \u2018amnesty?\u2019 Ask one conservative lawmaker, and watch him squirm,\u201d by Paul Kane: Dave Brat, the Virginia congressman who toppled Eric Cantor in 2014, \u201cpaused for four seconds, then started to talk, then stopped, then started again. \u2018There\u2019s no good answer I can give you to what they\u2019ve been talking about,\u2019 he said, requesting to know more details. \u2018You\u2019d have to give me \u2014 what is it? \u2014 before I elaborate.\u2019\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Listen to James's quick summary of today's Big Idea and the headlines you need to know to start your day: \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe to The Daily 202\u2019s Big Idea on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Podcasts and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:--A small explosion reported this morning on the London subway was declared a terrorist incident. Police and ambulances surrounded the Parsons Green station in west London as several morning commuters were treated for injuries, including facial burns, but the attack does not appear to have caused any fatalities. British Prime Minister Theresa May called a special afternoon meeting of the anti-terror Cobra committee to address the attack. (William Booth and Karla Adam have the latest on this developing story.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump reacted on Twitter this morning:Another attack in London by a loser terrorist.These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017\n\nLoser terrorists must be dealt with in a much tougher manner.The internet is their main recruitment tool which we must cut off & use better!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017\n\nAnd used the event to plug his travel ban:The travel ban into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more specific-but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017\n\nESCALATING THREAT:-- North Korea fired another missile from Pyongyang early Friday morning, which reportedly flew over Japan and triggered emergency alerts. Government officials said they are still assessing the launch, but if confirmed, it would mark the second time in less than three weeks that Pyongyang fired a missile over Japan,\u00a0Anna Fifield\u00a0reports. The launch comes just a day after\u00a0a North Korean state agency issued an alarming threat to Japan: \u201cThe four islands of the [Japanese] archipelago should be sunken into the sea by [our] nuclear bomb,\u201d the Korea Asia-Pacific peace committee said Thursday, adding: \u201cJapan is no longer needed to exist near us.\u201d\u00a0-- The chief of the U.S. Strategic Command said Thursday that the size of North Korea\u2019s most recent nuclear test \u201cequates\u201d to a hydrogen bomb, and that he must now \u201cassume Pyongyang can build one,\u201d\u00a0writes\u00a0Dan Lamothe: \u201cThe change from the original atomic bomb to the hydrogen changed our entire deterrent relationship with the Soviet Union,\u201d [said Air Force Gen. John Hyten, who oversees U.S. nuclear forces and monitors North Korea]. \u201cIt is significantly of concern not just to Strategic Command, but to everybody in the free world. It should be of concern to people in the neighborhood, which is Japan and Korea, as well as China and Russia.\u201d-- The Cleveland Indians set an MLB record with their 22nd consecutive victory. Dave Sheinin has the story: \u201cTrailing by a run and down to their last strike \u2026 the Indians watched Francisco Lindor launch a ball off the left field wall, an RBI double that tied the score at 2. An inning later, with nobody out, second baseman Jose Ramirez stretched a single to center field into a hustle double, narrowly avoiding the tag at second. Two batters later, right fielder Jay Bruce laced a double down the right field line to win it, sending the Indians streaming out of their dugout to celebrate the most improbable of these history-making 22 wins. As an October-tinged crowd of 30,874 stomped and hollered, Bruce was set upon by his Cleveland teammates somewhere near shortstop; they doused him with baby powder and bottled water, then started ripping the jersey clear off his back.\u201dSeen against the vastness of space, NASA's spacecraft Cassini might look small. Here's a look at its actual dimensions. You might be surprised at how massive it actually is. (William Neff, Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: DACA reaction shows how immigration has become a litmus test for Democrats (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7074",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/09/06/daily-202-daca-reaction-shows-how-immigration-has-become-a-litmus-test-for-democrats/59af142730fb04264c2a1ced/",
        "text": "with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie GreveTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0The House passed a Dream Act in 2010 that would have allowed illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship if they entered the United States as children, graduated from high school or got an equivalent degree, and had been in the United States for at least five years. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFive moderate Democrats in the Senate voted no. If each of them had supported it, the bill would have become law, DACA would have been unnecessary, and this manufactured political crisis now facing Congress would have been averted.Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) is the only one of those five Democrats still left in the upper chamber. Two lost reelection in 2014 (Kay Hagan in North Carolina and Mark Pryor in Arkansas), and two retired (Ben Nelson in Nebraska and Max Baucus in Montana). West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin said he would have opposed the bill, but he skipped the vote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite being up for reelection next year in a state that Donald Trump carried by 21 points, Tester spoke out yesterday against the president\u2019s decision to end the DACA program. Compare the news release he sent out after his \u201cno\u201d vote seven years ago to what he said last night:\u201cIllegal immigration is a critical problem facing our country, but amnesty is not the solution,\u201d he said in Dec. 2010. \u201cI do not support legislation that provides a path to citizenship for anyone in this country illegally.\u201dDiscussing the exact same group of people \u2014 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as minors \u2014 Tester said yesterday: \u201cAmerica\u2019s immigration system is badly broken and needs fixing, but breaking a promise to these children \u2014 who are here through no fault of their own \u2014 is not the solution. Congress must work together, Democrats and Republicans, to secure our borders, crack down on folks illegally entering our country, and provide a way forward for innocent kids.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYes, this is a cautious statement. But it\u2019s also a clear change in his position that reflects Tester\u2019s desire to avoid the backlash he faced from his left flank in 2010 after voting no on the Dream Act.-- Understandably, most of the media\u2019s coverage of the Trump administration\u2019s Tuesday announcement has focused on cleavages in the Republican ranks. The president has placed his adopted party in a bind by putting the onus on Congress to protect the 800,000 \u201cdreamers\u201d with a legislative fix in the next six months. Reflecting the fraught politics, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) \u2014 who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee \u2014 backed a bipartisan bill yesterday that would shield young immigrants from deportation and give them a pathway to citizenship.-- The untold story, though, is the degree to which Democrats are now in lockstep on what not long ago was an issue that divided them. Not a single Democrat in either chamber of Congress has expressed support for getting rid of DACA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- This is part of a larger lurch to the left in the Democratic Party on a host of hot-button issues. No matter where you\u2019re from, it is harder than ever to be a Democratic candidate who is against gun control, abortion rights or single-payer health insurance. That doesn\u2019t mean you cannot be, but one risks losing major donors and drawing the ire of the progressive grass roots \u2013 even if you represent a red state.-- Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), who voted against the Dream Act as a House member in 2010 and, like Tester, faces a tough race in a red state next year, also reversed course:Joe believes Congress should pass bipartisan legislation to protect #DACA youth. pic.twitter.com/jXc5W02Smg\u2014 Archive: Senator Joe Donnelly (@SenDonnelly) September 4, 2017\n\n-- Others \u201cevolved\u201d sooner. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) voted against a 2007 version of the Dream Act, but she decided to vote for the 2010 version. And thanks to Todd Akin\u2019s talk of \u201clegitimate rape,\u201d she got reelected in 2012. \u201cMy faith played a big role in my decision,\u201d she said in a statement explaining her flip. \u201cEzekiel 18:20 reads: \u2018The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.\u2019\u201dYesterday she unabashedly decried Trump\u2019s announcement. \u201cTaking young people who were brought here through no fault of their own, and have never known another country, and kicking them out of America is as dumb as it is counterproductive,\u201d McCaskill said. \u201cOver 90 percent of them are in school or working and many have proudly served our country in uniform.\u201d-- Fifteen Senate Democrats, plus a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders, voted against a carefully crafted immigration bill in 2007 that would have created a pathway to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants. Ted Kennedy negotiated with George W. Bush\u2019s White House, but the AFL-CIO mobilized against the hard-won compromise because union leaders believed that more competition in the labor force from guest workers would depress wages for the native-born.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSanders, who joined with Jeff Sessions to kill what turned out to be the last best hope in a generation for true reform, paid a political price in the 2016 Democratic primaries for siding with organized labor over the Latino community.\u201cSanctions against employers who employ illegal immigrants (are) virtually nonexistent,\u201d the Vermont senator complained at a news\u00a0conference 10 summers ago, as he stood alongside union leader Richard Trumka, now the AFL-CIO\u2019s president. \u201cOur border is very porous. \u2026 At a time when the middle class is shrinking, the last thing we need is to bring over, a period of years, millions of people into this country who are prepared to lower wages for American workers.\u201dFast forward to this Labor Day. Speaking Monday at a breakfast sponsored by the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, Sanders called Trump\u2019s decision to end DACA \u201cone of the most cruel and ugly decisions ever made in the modern history of this country by a president.\u201d The senator said Trump is \u201ctrying to divide our nation up based on the color of our skin (and) based on the country in which we were born.\u201d \u201cOur job as trade unionists, as our job as progressives, is to bring the American people together and to fight any and all attempts to divide us up,\u201d Sanders told the crowd of union members.-- That 2007 vote was only a decade ago, but it feels like an eternity. In the intervening years, there really has been a sea change in Democratic politics. Not a single Senate Democrat, or Sanders, opposed the bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013 but never got a vote in the GOP-controlled House.-- Don\u2019t forget the origins of the DACA order. Barack Obama signed it during the heat of the 2012 campaign in response to intense pressure from Latino leaders, who were angry that he had prioritized health care over immigration when he took office and that he was overseeing large-scale deportations. His strategists believed (correctly) that DACA would help galvanize Latino turnout in battlegrounds like Nevada, Colorado and Florida.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementObama was not always a leader on immigration. In fact, he was often a follower. He dragged his feet for years on taking executive action, concerned about its legality, until it was clear Congress wouldn\u2019t do anything on immigration during his presidency. In 2006, afraid of looking weak, the then-freshman senator voted for the Secure Fence Act, which authorized a barrier along the southern border. This is now the legal mechanism that Trump is using to push forward with his plans for a border wall.Frank Sharry, executive director of America\u2019s Voice, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrants, said the constellation of outside groups like his were not as organized or powerful 10 years ago. \u201cIt\u2019s an underreported story. There really has been a shift,\u201d he said in an interview last night. \u201cObama is a good example of how the electoral and movement politics underneath him shifted, and they finally adjusted to it. \u2026 Progressives generally have become much more supportive of immigration reform, and the public has become more supportive of immigrants.\u201d-- A big part of the story is the degree to which the complexion of the party has changed. Three in four Democrats were white 25 years ago. Now, it\u2019s just 57 percent. A breed of Blue Dogs has become endangered, if not extinct. Conservative Democrats a generation ago, especially whites in the South, are now Republicans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Jim Manley, who was a top aide to former Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said there might have been a time in the past when Democrats would look seriously at a proposal that tied protecting the \u201cdreamers\u201d to funding for a border wall. \u201cThose kinds of deals are DOA to Democrats in both the House and Senate,\u201d said Manley, now a Washington lobbyist.\u201cTwo things have changed,\u201d he emailed. \u201cPolitically, they watched the Hispanic community put Sen. Reid over the goal line in his close 2010 election. And since then, there have been others that have won because of their support. Now every smart Democrat is working hard to build alliances with Hispanic voters. But even more importantly, as they have gotten to know the community better they realize what is at stake and that something needs to be done to protect those that are here in this country.\u201d-- The big unions, which have also become markedly more diverse, have begun to show far more solidarity with Latinos than they once did. \u201cThis indefensible act will make our workplaces less fair and less safe and will undermine our freedom to join together and fight to raise wages and standards,\u201d Trumka said in a statement attacking Trump\u2019s decision yesterday. \u201cThis direct attack on union members and union values only strengthens our resolve to overcome racial divisions \u2026\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCalifornia Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a former member of House Democratic leadership, said the push for an immigration bill during Obama\u2019s second term may represent a breakthrough in hindsight, even though nothing became law, because organized labor was able to successfully negotiate with the business community, represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. \u201cRather than trying to fight the last century\u2019s wars, I think people have figured out that we should come together,\u201d Becerra said by phone from Sacramento last night. \u201cRather than fight, I think labor and the business community \u2014 which often times would use immigrants but not defend them \u2014 they see the potential. \u2026 That\u2019s the kind of compromise you want.\u201dBecerra, who said he is \u201cready to sue\u201d to defend DACA, said the program has allowed young immigrants to prove they can make valuable contributions to society if allowed to come out of the shadows. (One in four DACA recipients lives in California.) \u201cWhat\u2019s come to a head for folks on the Democratic side is that this is not working,\u201d he said. \u201cNow we\u2019re seeing the results of not getting immigration reform done.\u201d-- The Democratic Party platform on immigration has changed rapidly over the last decade. \u201cWe cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,\u201d it said in 2008. \u201cThose who enter our country\u2019s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.\u201d This was excised by 2016, as were three references to \u201cillegal\u201d immigration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2016, Trump successfully exploited xenophobia among working class whites who feel left behind. Hillary Clinton wrongly banked that the Hispanic share of the electorate was growing quickly enough, and that her opponent\u2019s comments regarding Mexicans were offensive enough, to offset the grievance Trump tapped into. Trying to gin up Latino turnout, she was far less nuanced when discussing immigration than she\u2019d been during her first campaign in 2008.-- A few prominent left-leaning pundits have been arguing this summer that Democrats are becoming too absolutist on immigration. \u201cLook at the Democracy Fund\u2019s voter study done in the wake of the 2016 election,\u201d Fareed Zakaria wrote in a column last month. \u201cIf you compare two groups of voters \u2014 those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and those who voted for Obama in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016 \u2014 the single biggest divergence on policy is immigration. In other words, there are many Americans who are otherwise sympathetic to Democratic ideas but on a few key issues \u2014 principally immigration \u2014 think the party is out of touch. And they are right. Consider the facts. Legal immigration in the United States has expanded dramatically over the last five decades. In 1970, 4.7 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born. Today, it\u2019s 13.4 percent. That\u2019s a large shift, and it\u2019s natural that it has caused some anxiety. The anxiety is about more than jobs. \u2026 Democrats should find a middle path on immigration. They can battle President Trump\u2019s drastic solutions but still speak in the language of national unity and identity.\u201dPeter Beinart wrote that \u201cDemocrats lost their way on immigration\u201d in a lengthy piece for last month\u2019s Atlantic magazine: \u201cThe myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that\u2019s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today. \u2026 Liberals must take seriously Americans\u2019 yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.\u201d Beinart faults Clinton for not talking at all about cutting down on people entering the U.S. illegally.\u201cNational polls show majorities in support of granting legal status or citizenship to undocumented immigrants,\u201d Thomas B. Edsall observed in the New York Times this February. \u201cThe problem for those calling for the enactment of liberal policies, however, is that immigration is a voting issue for a minority of the electorate. And among those who say immigration is their top issue, opponents outnumber supporters by nearly two to one. In this respect, immigration is similar to gun control \u2014 both mobilize opponents more than supporters.\u201d-- Democratic strategists are hopeful that Republican infighting over DACA will work to their advantage, as primary challengers try to outdo one another in expressing support for Trump\u2019s order. Kelli Ward, who is running against Sen. Jeff Flake in Arizona, endorsed the president\u2019s decision to end \u201cObama\u2019s unconstitutional amnesty program.\u201d Danny Tarkanian, who is running against Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada, called DACA \u201cunconstitutional\u201d and said it should \u201cnever have been implemented\u201d in a tweet yesterday. Rep. Lou Barletta, seeking the GOP nomination to run against Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey (D), commended Trump for \u201cputting America first\u201d and called the announcement \u201ca victory for the forgotten American worker.\u201d\u201cThe decision creates yet another riff for GOP candidates navigating crowded and contentious primaries while Democratic incumbents can do what they do best: work across the aisle to find commonsense solutions that grow our economy and reflect America\u2019s values,\u201d said Lauren Passalacqua, communications director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Listen to James's quick summary of today's Big Idea and the headlines you need to know to start your day: \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe to The Daily 202\u2019s Big Idea on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Podcasts and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n-- Happening Friday at 9 a.m. \u2014 The Daily 202 Live with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross: The start time of our on-stage interview at The Washington Post\u2019s headquarters has moved up to 9 a.m. ET. We\u2019ll discuss the Trump administration's efforts to reshape the playing field for international trade, including the future of NAFTA, the push to overhaul the tax code, and a host of other pressing issues. (More information here.)\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- Hurricane Irma continued to gather strength as it hurtled toward the U.S. coast Wednesday, intensifying into a Category 5 storm with winds exceeding 185 mph. It's the\u00a0strongest storm on Earth so far in 2017,\u00a0among the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic \u2014 and almost every model predicts the storm hitting Florida in one way or another. The National Hurricane Center has been blunt in its warnings\u00a0about the storm's power and said areas in its path could suffer \u201cpotentially catastrophic\u201d effects. (Brian McNoldy and Jason Samenow)-- Here\u2019s what you need to know:The eye of the storm made landfall on the Caribbean island of Barbuda this morning.\u00a0Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) asked Trump to declare a pre-landfall emergency in Florida, adding the storm could\u00a0require large-scale evacuations. Earlier Tuesday, he activated 100 members of the Florida National Guard and directed all 7,000 members to report for duty on Friday.Mandatory\u00a0evacuation orders have already been issued in certain parts of the state, including the Florida Keys.Miami-Dade \u2014 the state's most populous\u00a0county \u2014 is expected to order evacuations today.\u00a0Emergency officials estimate \u201chundreds of thousands\u201d of residents\u00a0will be asked to leave. (Miami Herald)\u201cThe uncertainty of Irma\u2019s track and the geography of the Florida peninsula have combined to create an unusually broad, essentially statewide sense of emergency,\u201d Francisco Alvarado, Mark Berman and Sandhya Somashekhar report. Irma\u2019s size alone could be cause for concern: Forecasters have warned that its effects could be felt as far as 200 miles out.The National Hurricane Center warned of \u201clarge and destructive waves\u201d along the coasts of Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, adding\u00a0that\u00a0parts of Puerto Rico\u00a0and the British and U.S. Virgin Islands could be \u201cdrenched\u201d by the storm.From a\u00a0National Hurricane Center scientist:\u00a0I am at a complete and utter loss for words looking at Irma's appearance on satellite imagery. pic.twitter.com/B0ewFyvcSv\u2014 Taylor Trogdon (@TTrogdon) September 5, 2017\n\n-- For those who could be affected, the Capital Weather Gang's\u00a0Angela Fritz compiled\u00a0a\u00a0handy guide on how to prepare for\u00a0Irma, while\u00a0Matthew Cappucci\u00a0tells us how to read the forecasts as we head into peak hurricane season.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Frozen wind turbines aren't why Texas can't keep the lights on (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7075",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/17/energy-202-frozen-wind-turbines-arent-why-texas-cant-keep-lights/",
        "text": "with Alexandra EllerbeckIt's not just wind turbines. The whole Texas power system wasn't ready for this.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe ongoing electricity crisis in the Lone Star State hasn't stopped a chorus of conservative pundits and even some Republican lawmakers from pointing fingers at the state's fleet of wind turbines as the reason for the rolling blackouts, as nearly 3 million remain without power throughout the state. Even the state's own governor, Greg Abbott (R), joined in. In reality, frozen wind turbines are just a small part of a much bigger problem. All types of energy systems in Texas are struggling with subfreezing temperatures. The rolling blackouts are the result of a systematic failure of Texas's power plant and grid operators to prepare for a record-shattering Arctic freeze.It is Texas's traditional thermal power plants, which rely mostly on natural gas, that were supposed to provide the bulk of power during the harshest winter months, but failed to do so, according to Texas grid officials and outside energy experts.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe entire system was overwhelmed,\u201d said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate on energy issues at the University of Texas at Austin.Yet as if an on cue, Republican lawmakers \u2014 even some from Texas \u2014 want to blame the power failures on renewable energy.The crisis in Texas shows the degree to which energy policy has been politicized along party lines in the United States.Abbott, Texas's governor, suggested on Fox News Tuesday that the crisis unfolding his state \u201cshows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal,\" referring to a sweeping manifesto from progressive Democrats to cut greenhouse-gas emissions that was never implemented in his state.Texas Gov. Abbott blames solar and wind for the blackouts in his state and says \"this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America\" pic.twitter.com/YfVwa3YRZQ\u2014 Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) February 17, 2021\n\nHe went on to single out renewables for Texas's power woes, saying \u201cour wind and our solar got shut down,\" without mentioning the steep decline in output from gas, coal and nuclear plants during the cold snap.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnchors elsewhere on the conservative news network spent much of Tuesday making dubious ties between the outages in Texas and proposals from Democrats for building out renewable energy resources in order to tackle climate change\u00a0Under the chyron \u201cTexas Power Issues Blamed on Frozen Wind Turbines,\u201d for example, host Pete Hegseth asked, \u201cIs this what America would look like under the Green New Deal?\u201d Another Fox News host, Dana Perino, similarly said the outages are \u201craising questions about the Lone Star State\u2019s increasing reliance on renewable energy.\u201d\u00a0Meanwhile on Twitter, GOP lawmakers such Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) linked the outages to the growth of Texas's renewable energy sector.It takes a special kind of stupidity to run out of energy in Texas. @TuckerCarlson does a great job here of exposing the green energy scam and how bad policy hurts people. pic.twitter.com/4AglREGJqH\u2014 Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) February 16, 2021\n\nThe truth: Traditional power plants, not wind turbines, are responsible for most of the energy shortfall.The loss of power from thermal plants \u2014 that is, gas, coal and nuclear \u2014 is more than five times greater than decline in output expected from the stalled wind turbines, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, with manages most of the state's grid. Texas only planned to get a tenth of its power anyways from wind energy during the peak winter season.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThere is significantly more megawatts in that thermal unit category than in the renewable category, as far as what's out during this particular event,\u201d Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told reporters Tuesday.Sky-high demand for gas for heating homes during the winter chill, along with power plant equipment designed for warmer weather being hobbled by frigid temperatures, is what is straining output from the state's gas, coal and nuclear generators during the cold snap.More fundamentally, well before the storm Texas declined to put in place financial incentives for power producers to prepare for winter and ensure they could meet energy needs during periods of extreme demand, as our colleague Will Englund explains.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe Lone Star State also runs an electric grid largely disconnected from the rest of the country, allowing it to operate with less federal scrutiny but making it difficult to draw power from neighboring regions during times of crisis.AdvertisementIced wind turbines, said Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, are \u201cso far down the list of what has gone wrong.\u201d\u201cOverall,\" he added, \"wind has come closer to expectations than many other sources.\u201dPower playsAt least 14 people are dead from winter storms and record-setting cold.\u00a0Some have died as they turn to unsafe methods to stay warm amid the widespread power outages. A woman and girl died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Houston after leaving a car running to stay warm, our colleagues report.Three people died in North Carolina after a tornado associated with the storm system, which has drawn Arctic air south, hit a seaside town. Others have died in car accidents or from exposure.IBM has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030.The technology company said that it would cut emissions 65 percent compared to 2010 levels within five years, the Verge reports. By the end of the decade, the company said 90 percent of its electricity would come from renewables, with any remaining carbon emissions offset through the use of carbon capture technology.But the company\u2019s commitment does not include indirect emissions from its supply chain or from the use of its products by consumers. Competitions Microsoft and Amazon, by contrast, have included these emission sources in their climate pledges. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and executive chair of its board owns The Washington Post).Toxic air pollution continues to decline.\u00a0The Environmental Protection Agency released annual data showing a significant decline in toxic power plant emissions, which are known to cause health problems.The 2020 data show that emissions of sulfur dioxide declined 19 percent compared to 2019; emissions of nitrogen oxides dropped 16 percent; and mercury emissions declined 17 percent.Last year\u2019s decline is part of a steady downward trend largely related to changes in the mix of fuels used to generate energy. That trend has seen annual emissions of sulfur dioxide decline by 95 percent from 1990 to 2020 and annual emissions of nitrogen oxides fall by 88 percent.Confirmation hearing for Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) is set for Feb. 23.The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold the hearing for President Biden\u2019s interior secretary nominee next week. If confirmed, Haaland would be the first Native American to run the Department of the Interior.Haaland has faced opposition from some Republicans, who have seized on her support for the New Green Deal and used her nomination as a venue to criticize the Biden administration\u2019s commitment to ending new oil and gas leases on federal lands. But Democrats likely have the votes to confirm her.A Wisconsin state biologist traded sturgeon eggs for $20,000 worth of caviar.State fisheries employees said that they needed sturgeon eggs for research. Instead, Ryan P. Koenigs, an official with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, traded the eggs \u2013 which are highly prized among chefs for their briny flavor \u2013 to a caviar processor in exchange for $20,000 in jars of caviar, the New York Times reports.\u201cThe arrest of Mr. Koenigs last week, along with three other people who were not state employees, followed a three-year investigation by the state and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A former supervisor of the fisheries unit told investigators that employees would accept caviar and eat some of it during team meetings, take some for personal use and give some to bars, according to prosecutors,\u201d the Times writes.Extra mileageSuccess in landing NASA\u2019s Mars rover depends on everything going exactly right.The spacecraft carrying NASA\u2019s Mars rover Perseverance is expected to arrive Thursday on Mars at a speed of 12,000 miles an hour. Its arrival in the atmosphere will trigger a harrowing seven minutes of entry, descent and landing, during which everything must operate perfectly, our colleagues Joel Achenbach, Ben Guarino and Christian Davenport report. The rover is aiming to land in Jezero Crater, a 30-mile-wide basin that contains the remnants of an ancient river delta. It\u2019s a much harder target than previous rover missions.\u201cHitting the 4.8-mile-wide landing site targeted by NASA after a journey of 300 million miles is akin to throwing a dart from the White House and scoring a bull\u2019s eye in Dallas,\u201d our colleagues write. That hasn't stopped it from becoming a right-wing talking point. The Energy 202: Frozen wind turbines aren't why Texas can't keep the lights on",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: Biden has stacked federal antitrust watchdogs with Big Tech critics (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7076",
        "date": "2021-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/21/technology-202-biden-has-stacked-federal-antitrust-watchdogs-with-big-tech-critics/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferThe tech industry\u2019s relationship with the Democratic Party has been deteriorating for years. President Biden's decisions to stack key regulatory agencies with tech foes signal the party is ready to back up its criticism of Silicon Valley with action.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPresident Biden plans to tap Jonathan Kanter, a lawyer who has long opposed the biggest tech companies, as assistant attorney general for antitrust, as my colleague Tyler Pager and I reported yesterday.\u00a0 The Biden administration for months has been building an increasingly aggressive posture toward Big Tech. First, it announced that Tim Wu, a major critic of the tech industry\u2019s power, would serve on the National Economic Council. Then, Lina Khan, one of the most prominent challengers of Amazon, was named to helm the Federal Trade Commission. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)Advocates for greater antitrust enforcement are celebrating the moves. Sarah Miller, the executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, said choosing Kanter is \u201cfurther evidence that President Biden is committed to addressing concentrated power to build an economy that is more just, equitable, and secure.\u201d\u00a0Yesterday\u2019s announcement squashed any lingering questions about the future of antitrust enforcement under Biden.\u00a0Until the White House nomination, speculation persisted over whether Biden would choose a more big-business-friendly official to fill the key vacancy at the helm of the antitrust division. But in picking Kanter, Biden is elevating yet another hero of the growing movement to expand antitrust enforcement in the United States. For months, trustbusters have been carrying mugs with the text \u201cWu& Khan& Kanter.\u201d around Capitol Hill, signifying their support for his nomination.\u00a0It's time to stop these corporations from hoarding wealth and power. Let's work together to make it happen, @POTUS & @WHCOS. https://t.co/BTxdELipI1 pic.twitter.com/ovbMjPLPLx\u2014 Congressman Jamaal Bowman (@RepBowman) May 10, 2021\n\nThe choice reflects a significant reversal in how Democrats approached tech regulation under former president Barack Obama. The administration did not pursue a major antitrust case against Google, and it was known for its cozy ties with top Silicon Valley companies.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThroughout the 2020 election, it was unclear if a Biden administration would mean a repeat of the same strategy. Though Biden was critical of Facebook's handling of misinformation and Amazon's tax payments, as a presidential candidate he rarely singled out individual companies on competition issues. As candidates, he and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) did not go as far as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in calling for a break up of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.\u00a0Industry-backed think tanks and trade groups also recognize a sea change is occurring. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank backed by Google and other tech giants, said Kanter's nomination signals federal agencies are about to \u201ctake a U-turn away from America\u2019s longstanding approach to regulating competition.\u201d\u00a0ITIF warns a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement would potentially leave U.S. companies more vulnerable to international competitors.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNow, if policymakers don\u2019t reconsider the decision to repeat old antitrust mistakes, the new winner will be China,\" Aurelien Portuese, director of ITIF\u2019s Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy for the Innovation Economy, said in a statement.\u00a0Kanter\u2019s business ties to Big Tech\u2019s rivals are also already drawing pushback from industry.Kanter is known as an adversary of giant tech corporations, including Google and Apple. He has represented large companies like Microsoft, as well as smaller tech companies such as the Google critic Yelp. He is a partner at the Kanter Law Group, which describes itself as \u201can antitrust advocacy boutique.\u201d\u201cThroughout his career, Kanter has also been a leading advocate and expert in the effort to promote strong and meaningful antitrust enforcement and competition policy,\u201d the White House said in a news release.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNetChoice, a tech trade group whose members include Google, Amazon and Facebook, raised concerns about Kanter\u2019s professional history.\u201cGiven that Kanter is famous for representing Microsoft and Yelp and attacking Google, Kanter will raise questions about his ability to impartially enforce the law against tech businesses, just like FTC Chair Khan,\u201d Carl Szabo, NetChoice vice president and general counsel, said in a statement.Khan has recently faced petitions from Facebook and Amazon calling on her to recuse herself from antitrust cases involving their companies, given her past criticism of them in her academic writing and work on the congressional probe into Silicon Valley\u2019s power. During her confirmation hearing, Khan said she had \u201cnone of the financial conflicts or personal ties that are the basis of recusal under federal ethics laws.\u201dYet it\u2019s possible Kanter could see support from both parties.\u00a0Khan\u2019s nomination drew bipartisan support, and she was confirmed to the FTC on a 69-to-28 vote. Twenty-one Republicans joined 46 Democrats and two independents in supporting Khan.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee antitrust panel, said he was \u201cencouraged\u201d by Kanter\u2019s track record on challenging tech giants.\u201cI look forward to learning more about his qualifications through the confirmation process,\u201d he said in a statement.Our top tabsGovernment pressure is building on NSO Group as revelations about its Pegasus spyware mount.The French government ordered investigations in the wake of reports by The Washington Post and 16 media partners that the phone numbers of President Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders were included on a list of 50,000 phone records that included targets of NSO Group\u2019s Pegasus spyware, Drew Harwell and Michael Birnbaum report.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf the facts are confirmed, they are clearly very serious,\u201d Macron\u2019s office said in a statement. \u201cAll light will be shed on these press revelations. Certain French victims have already announced that they would take legal action, and therefore judicial inquiries will be launched.\u201dAdvertisementIn all, the list included phone numbers of three presidents, 10 prime ministers and the king of Morocco, our colleagues report.None of the officials offered their phones for analysis, so it\u2019s impossible to tell if they were actually targeted or infected by Pegasus.\u00a0NSO disputed the report, saying that Macron, King Mohammed VI and some other French and Belgian officials on the list \u201care not and never have been Pegasus targets.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe company has denied that the list of phone numbers was a list of surveillance targets. \u201cThe data has many legitimate and entirely proper uses having nothing to do with surveillance or with NSO,\u201d NSO attorney Tom Clare said.Hong Kong\u2019s legislature is debating an anti-doxxing law that U.S. tech giants have criticized.The law could pass quickly because Hong Kong\u2019s legislature doesn\u2019t have an official opposition, Reuters reports. The Asia Internet Coalition, whose members include Google, Facebook and Twitter, warned that tech companies could stop offering services in Hong Kong if authorities went ahead with the proposal, which the group said was \u201cnot aligned with global norms and trends.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHong Kong authorities say the law is necessary to stop doxing \u2014 the publishing of people\u2019s personal information, which can lead to harassment. The practice was common during 2019 protests over Beijing\u2019s tightening grip on the city, where it implemented sweeping new powers last year. But critics warn that the measures could be used to protect the powerful and target civil society.\u00a0Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019s spaceflight portends a private space race.Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin company is nearing $100 million in sales of future seats on flights to space and plans two more human spaceflights this year, Christian Davenport reports. Blue Origin is also working on a larger rocket and a spacecraft that would bring astronauts to the moon, but it faces stiff competition in the private space race.Story continues below advertisement(Bezos owns The Washington Post.)AdvertisementThe company is battling with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon. The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on a Blue Origin protest in response to NASA\u2019s decision by Aug. 4. Billionaire Richard Branson beat Bezos to space this month, intensifying the rivalry between Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin.Rant and raveBezos\u2019s choice of hat was the source of jokes and memes on Twitter. Michael Pielocik, the head writer of \u201cDesus & Mero\u201d:you're telling me this guy is recently divorced? pic.twitter.com/4kFiJ8uxHf\u2014 Michael Pielocik (@michaelpielocik) July 20, 2021\n\nWashingtonian assistant editor Daniella Byck:Why do I feel like Jeff Bezos was wearing six tiny cowboy hats under his big cowboy hat.\u2014 Daniella Byck (@daniellabyck) July 20, 2021\n\nHill happeningsFive Democratic senators called on federal regulators to review Verizon\u2019s proposed $6.9 billion acquisition of TracFone.The lawmakers warned that the purchase \u201ccould result in increases in costs, reductions in competition, or diminished service offerings for consumers,\u201d and would endanger the Federal Communications Commission\u2019s Lifeline program, which provides discounted phone service to low-income consumers. They also encouraged the FCC to \u201cthoroughly review\u201d the proposal and its effects on consumers. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) signed the letter, which was addressed to acting FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cThe proposed TracFone acquisition will bring value and benefits to value-conscious consumers in a myriad of ways,\u201d Verizon spokesman Rich Young said. \u201cAs we continue to work through the regulatory review process, Verizon looks forward to providing current and potential TracFone customers with more choices, better plans at flexible prices, and access to our 5G network, all while we expand our offerings to value-conscious and low-income consumers. Lifeline is foundational to the acquisition, and in response to calls for time commitments, Verizon has committed to the Lifeline program for at least three years.\u201d TracFone did not respond to a request for comment.Inside the industryFacebook tightens up and clarifies policies on promotion of prescription drugs (Adweek)\u00a0Social media companies\u2019 political ad bans around the 2020 election had little impact on misinformation, a Duke University study found.Researchers concluded in a new study that bans around the 2020 election likely hurt poorer campaigns more than wealthier ones. They also said the bans likely hurt Democrats more than Republicans, because Democrats have tended to rely more heavily on Facebook ads than Republicans for small-dollar donations and other mobilization efforts.\u00a0The study\u2019s authors, J. Scott Babwah Brennen and Matt Perault, studied Facebook\u2019s decision to stop accepting new ads in the last week of the general election, as well as the political and social issue bans on Google and Facebook that began Nov. 4 and continued through mid-December.\u00a0They recommend that tech companies accept political ads for the 2022 midterms, and they called on the companies to provide campaigns and political advertisers with more time to navigate policy changes. They also said that political ads should be subject to \u201cat least\u201d the same content moderation standards as organic content. They called on Congress to criminalize the dissemination of information with the intent to suppress voters.\u00a0TrendingTeens around the world are lonelier than a decade ago. The reason may be smartphones. (Tara Bahrampour)DaybookThe Computer and Communications Industry Association hosts an event on the 10th anniversary of the America Invents Act on Thursday at 1 p.m.Twitter discusses its second-quarter earnings on a call on Thursday at 6 p.m.Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) speaks at a Brookings Institution event on cross-border data transfers on Friday at 12:30 p.m.Before you log offI, for one, appreciate all the tiktoks of the olympians showing us how sturdy the cardboard beds are pic.twitter.com/okViTKQW7t\u2014 Mariana Alfaro (@marianaa_alfaro) July 20, 2021\n\n The choices reflect a major shift in how the Democratic Party approaches tech regulation.  The Technology 202: Biden has stacked federal antitrust watchdogs with Big Tech critics",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube face high-stakes question of whether to recognize Taliban (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7077",
        "date": "2021-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/17/technology-202-facebook-twitter-youtube-face-high-stakes-question-whether-recognize-taliban/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferSocial media companies have had to make numerous critical calls over the years about contentious and even violent government transitions, including a military coup in Myanmar and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. They\u2019ve done so by leaning on decisions by global authorities, such as the United Nations. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the Taliban\u2019s swift push to wrest control of the Afghan government could soon force the platforms to make the same high-stakes decisions now confronting global leaders \u2014 determining whether to recognize a transfer of power and new regime, without the benefit of clear direction from their usual lodestars.\u201cIt feels unique,\u201d said Katie Harbath, a former public policy director at Facebook. \u201cIt feels like it is not a typical situation that there\u2019s like a written playbook for how to handle something like this.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSetting policies for Taliban rule would pose a major challenge for the companies, who will play a huge role in deciding how effectively the Afghan government and the Taliban can reach audiences online \u2014 and what they can do with that power.Companies will ultimately control who runs the government\u2019s official accounts, such as for the office of the Afghan president, which has nearly a million followers, and whether the Taliban\u2019s own pages will be granted an air of legitimacy by being verified or labeled by the platforms. They are also facing pressure to keep Taliban leaders off their services altogether because of the group\u2019s links to terrorism, particularly from conservatives still fuming over former president Donald Trump\u2019s suspensions.Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement that the Taliban is banned from the company\u2019s products under its policies against dangerous organizations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat means it will remove accounts maintained by the group or on its behalf, and prohibits \u201cpraise, support, and representation of them.\u201d (Despite the ban, the Taliban has already used Facebook\u2019s WhatsApp platform \u2014 where encryption shields users\u2019 private chats \u2014 to gain support in the country and spread its message, according to a Vice report.)But ultimately, Stone said, \u201cFacebook does not make decisions about the recognized government in any particular country but instead respects the authority of the international community in making these determinations.\u201dTwitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough noted in a statement that the \u201csituation in Afghanistan is rapidly evolving,\u201d and that \u201cTwitter\u2019s top priority is keeping people safe, and we remain vigilant.\u201d Spokespeople for Google-owned YouTube did not return a request for comment.\u00a0By relying on guidance from the U.N. and others, platforms escape making politically dicey and highly consequential decisions on which regimes to recognize. The picture may not be so clear this time, though.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEmerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council\u2019s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said social media companies are \u201cvery much in uncharted territory.\"\u201cWe\u2019ve seen attempted and successful coups in the Internet age, we\u2019ve seen revolutions, but we haven\u2019t seen a successful insurgency and invasion from within the state,\u201d he said.Some global leaders are already rejecting the prospect of Taliban rule. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called on other countries not to recognize the militant Islamist group as the government of Afghanistan. The United States is still \u201ctaking stock\u201d of the situation and whether to recognize Taliban rule, State Department spokesman Ned Price said Monday. China has welcomed \u201cfriendly\u201d relations with the Taliban but stopped short of recognizing its rule.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWithout clear cues from global leaders, tech companies are forced to make their own decisions about who gets to speak for the Afghan government on social media, and how seriously to take the Taliban\u2019s campaign to gain legitimacy. And to do that, they\u2019ll need to weigh other crucial factors, including the safety of users desperately seeking to flee Afghanistan.\u201cThis puts them in a surreal position where decisions they make about who to verify, who to give voice to, who to recognize as the president of Afghanistan could have extraordinary ramifications for how the next few weeks unfold,\u201d Brooking told The Technology 202.Twitter, Facebook and other platforms have long faced pressure to crack down more forcefully against countries linked to terrorism, such as Iran, and Afghanistan is now poised to become another battleground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementComplicating matters for platforms: while the Pakistani Taliban is designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the State Department, the Afghan Taliban is not. If a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is recognized internationally, it could create a tension with companies' policies against promoting terrorism.But Brooking said solving the issue isn\u2019t as simple as expelling the Taliban from the international community online, because having a presence could be important \u201cif for no other reason than they can be better compelled to abide by some basic norms and the treatment of their people.\u201dOur top tabsThe Facebook Oversight Board\u2019s nonbinding recommendations have become its most important work, members said.\u00a0Facebook Oversight Board members say their recommendations are having a bigger impact on Facebook than any of their other work.\u00a0That came as a surprise to Oversight Board Co-Chair Michael McConnell, who said he expected that the experimental board would wield the most influence in decisions about whether specific content should stay on or off Facebook. But instead he says he\u2019s optimistic that the company is taking the board\u2019s policy recommendations seriously, even though they\u2019re nonbinding.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe social media giant agreed to around half of the roughly 60 recommendations it has been given, McConnell told my colleague Cat Zakrzewski at an event hosted by the Technology Policy Institute. Another board member, Julie Owono, told Cat that she\u2019s \u201cextremely satisfied\u201d by Facebook\u2019s responses so far.\u00a0\u00a0However, the board is continuing to keep a watchful eye on whether the company is following through on implementing the recommendations it takes on. It recently started a working group to track the recommendations\u2019 rollout.\u00a0Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin sued to get a piece of NASA\u2019s moon contract.\u00a0The company is trying\u00a0to wrest control of the lucrative contract from Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX\u00a0and get NASA to fund a second lunar spacecraft,\u00a0Christian Davenport reports.\u00a0Blue Origin has asked for an injunction to block NASA from spending more money on the SpaceX\u00a0contract, a NASA spokesperson said.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement(Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u00a0Blue Origin has vigorously protested the\u00a0$2.9 billion contract. The company said the lawsuit is\u00a0\u201can attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA\u2019s Human Landing System. We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.\u201d\u00a0Beijing took an ownership stake in a Chinese arm of TikTok parent ByteDance.\u00a0The move does not appear to directly affect TikTok\u2019s ownership but suggests China\u2019s government is working to get more influence over ByteDance, Jeanne Whalen reports. It comes as China\u2019s government seeks more control over the country\u2019s technology sector, including by ordering the removal of popular apps\u00a0from domestic app stores.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementByteDance operates TikTok outside of China. The company also runs\u00a0a similar app, known as\u00a0Douyin, in the country.\u00a0\u00a0Rant and raveYik Yak, the anonymous and location-based app that was often used for bullying and harassment, is back\u00a0after a four-year break.\u00a0Writer and activist Imani Barbarin:\u00a0Ah, to be young and be racially abused through an app that uses your location to tell you the ugliest thoughts of people around you again. https://t.co/eClr7Clv6u\u2014 Imani Barbarin, MAGC | Crutches&Spice \u267f\ufe0f (@Imani_Barbarin) August 16, 2021\n\nVlogger Brooke Miccio:\u00a0Literally no one asked for this https://t.co/dUbM5vOFpw\u2014 bmic (@brookemiccio) August 16, 2021\n\nThe New York Times\u2019s Taylor Lorenz:\u00a02021 is trying hard to outdo 2020 https://t.co/MoEaVTitac\u2014 Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) August 16, 2021\n\nAgency scannerTesla Autopilot faces U.S. safety regulator\u2019s scrutiny after crashes with emergency vehicles (Aaron Gregg, Ian Duncan and Faiz Siddiqui)Inside the industryIndependent research firm sued by Apple now wants to help vet the phone maker\u2019s child sexual abuse scanning system (Reed Albergotti)Justice Thomas hired a Josh Hawley lawyer \u2014 then turned on Big Tech (Protocol)Workforce reportCulture change and conflict at Twitter (The New York Times)TrendingThousands of Wikipedia pages vandalized with giant swastikas (Gizmodo)Actually, many summer interns are happy working from home (Natachi Onwuamaegbu)MentionsMike Liptak is joining the Internet Association as director for federal government affairs. He previously worked as the Travel Technology Association\u2019s vice president of government relations.\u00a0Before you log offWhat should we name it?\ud83d\ude1f pic.twitter.com/MS2rSxxNeO\u2014 Maxwell Pearce (@maxwellpearce) February 11, 2020\n\n Setting policies for Taliban rule will pose a major challenge for the companies. The Technology 202: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube face high-stakes question of whether to recognize Taliban",
        "author": "Cristiano Lima"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Florida Republicans have added the words 'climate change' to their vocabularies \u2014 and to legislation (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7078",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2020/02/11/the-energy-202-florida-republicans-have-added-the-words-climate-change-to-their-vocabularies-and-to-legislation/5e417ef888e0fa0a47d9d875/",
        "text": "THE LIGHTBULBTALLAHASSEE \u2014 Florida Rep. Chris Sprowls, a Republican, declared it so in September 2019 at a\u00a0speech designating him the next speaker of the House: \u201cWe need to stop being afraid of words like \u2018climate change\u2019 and \u2018sea level rise.\u2019\u201d\u00a0And Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has used the term repeatedly since his campaign for the job in 2018, even saying it three times in a news release that announced a new statewide job, chief resilience officer, tasked with preparing Florida for sea level rise.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter years of the GOP dismissing scientists who say the planet is warming, Republicans in Florida, one of the states vulnerable to rising seas and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, are becoming increasingly comfortable with talking about the changing climate.Story continues below advertisementDeSantis\u2019s office said it does not see a downside to using \u201cthe term \u2018climate change\u2019 or any other term.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cAs it pertains to Florida\u2019s environment, the focus is and will remain solely on solutions,\u201d a spokesman for the governor told The Energy 202. He listed steps the governor has taken while in office to mitigate pollution, including funding $625 million toward water quality and restoration of the Everglades National Park, reaching an agreement to purchase 20,000 acres of wetlands intended for oil drilling.The governor has also created offices for environmental accountability and transparency as well as coastal protection.And in a departure from the past, more bills with the phrase \u201cclimate change\u201d have been filed this year in the Florida legislature than in the previous decade, according to an analysis by The Energy 202.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cI thought he showed real political courage in those remarks,\u201d Rep. Ben Diamond (D), the minority leader-in-waiting said of Sprowls\u2019s speech. \u201cWe're certainly in a far better place than we were under the [previous Gov. Rick] Scott administration because we're now having the discussions.\u201dAdvertisementThe rhetorical shift \u00a0by Florida Republicans on climate change\u00a0mirrors one happening in Washington, where top GOP officials are preparing their own climate legislation in response to concerns from young Republicans the party is ignoring the issue. But Republicans who want to tackle climate change are at odds with the Trump administration, which has backpedaled on the issue as the president has withdrawn the country from the Paris climate accords after calling climate change a \u201choax,\u201d and rolling back regulations to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to a warming planet.In Florida, the GOP\u2019s apparent new openness in acknowledging the Earth is getting hotter is a sea change from just a few years ago.Story continues below advertisementScott, now a U.S. senator, made\u00a0national headlines for allegedly banning the words climate change and sea level rise from use by the state\u2019s Department of Environmental Protection.\u00a0In 2015, scientists working for the department told reporters it was an unwritten policy under Scott not to use the term climate change.\u00a0AdvertisementAt the time, the policy became ammunition for the state\u2019s Democrats. Former senator Jeff Clemens mocked Bryan Koon, Scott\u2019s emergency management chief, when he testified in front of Clemens\u2019s committee and avoided the C-words. Clemens\u00a0jokingly suggested, \u201cmaybe as a state we use \u2018atmospheric re-employment,\u2019 That might be something the governor can get behind.\u201dScott denies ever banning the words, and his office defended his environmental record as governor.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAs we\u2019ve said many times, the claim that there was any policy banning the term climate change is laughably false and was never based on any actual evidence,\u201d Chris Hartline, Scott\u2019s spokesman, told The Energy 202.Hartline cited budget items Scott approved that put millions toward programs including flood mitigation, beach renourishment and coral reef protection.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cSenator Scott is glad the DeSantis administration is continuing his work to protect Florida\u2019s natural treasures for generations to come,\u201d Hartline added.When Hurricane Dorian was barreling toward his Florida last year, Scott was asked by\u00a0Fox News\u2019s Sunday host Chris Wallace whether he believed there was a connection between climate change and hurricane intensity. Scott answered that \u201cthe climate's changing\u201d and \u201cour storms seem to be getting bigger,\u201d but he said \u201cwe don't know what the cause is.\u201d\u00a0It hasn\u2019t just become a political priority to acknowledge climate change: In Florida, the consequences of sea level rise are significantly greater than in other states.Even at a committee meeting last week for a Florida House bill to require publicly funded construction projects along the coast evaluate sea level rise, Republicans doubled down on the significance of the state\u2019s geography.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFlorida is going to be seeing the effects of climate change long before a lot of other parts of this country,\u201d state Rep. Vance Aloupis, a Republican representing part of Miami and bill sponsor, told lawmakers. \u201cWhat we do will be an example for many other parts of this nation.\u201dPolitico\u2019s environment and energy reporter Bruce Ritchie, who reported on the exchange,\u00a0tweeted he hadn\u2019t \u201cheard any recognition of sea level rise like this in the Florida House in the 12+ years\u201d he has covered Tallahassee.Sprowls said conservatives need to stop confusing \u201cacknowledging a problem with acquiescing to a particular solution.\u201dWhile other Republican-controlled states, including Texas and South Carolina, have tiptoed around terms like climate change in their proposals for federal disaster dollars, Florida hasn\u2019t,\u00a0the New York Times found.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a draft proposal for $633 million from a federal program, Florida officials\u00a0wrote that \u201cclimate change is a key overarching challenge which threatens to compound the extent and effects of hazards.\u201dFormer Florida Republican congressman Carlos Curbelo\u00a0told my colleague Jackie Alemany the state \u201cis the avant-garde of the party\u201d because climate change is a local issue.\u201cFlorida is a state where the environment is top of mind for most voters,\u201d he said.Of 1,045 Floridians surveyed by\u00a0Florida Atlantic University in October, 56 percent agreed climate change is real and caused by people, including 44 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats.Both Diamond and Sprowls\u2019s districts are in one of the\u00a0most vulnerable metropolitan areas in the world to a major hurricane. Their constituents live near Tampa Bay, where waters could rise up to 8.5 feet above today\u2019s sea level in the next century, the Tampa Bay Times\u00a0reported.\u00a0Diamond, a top Democrat in the Florida House, is optimistic about passing his own climate bill because of the growing support from the other side of the aisle.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter no success last year, Diamond reintroduced the legislation with a Republican sponsor this year. The bill would create a program within the state\u2019s Department for Environmental Protection that produces a resiliency plan for sea level rise every four years.\u00a0After November, Sprowls will begin work as speaker, and one of his priorities is finding a way to acquire more data on sea level rise. With data, lawmakers can make informed decisions about where to focus funding and resources, he said.\u201cWe spend so much time on the hyper-politicization of climate change and these words like \u2018sea level rise\u2019 that we stopped looking for the common-sense things that we need to do to protect our community,\u201d he said. \u201cSay the word, don't say the word. Let's tackle the problem.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisementPOWER PLAYS\u2014 Budget cuts for the environment and science: Trump's $4.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2021 would curb funding for science research, The Post's Joel Achenbach, Laurie McGinley, Amy Goldstein and Ben Guarino report. Among the cuts is a 26 percent reduction to the Environmental Protection Agency, with 50 programs losing funds, and a 28.7 percent cut for the Energy Department, including more than one-seventh of its science program's budget. Remember: this budget is only a wish list and is unlikely to be passed by Congress.Advertisement'You're fired': Part of Trump's cuts to the EPA would mean eliminating 1,562 of the agency\u2019s 14,172 full-time staffers, the Associated Press reports.On the other hand: Not all science-specific federal programs would face the ax. NASA would receive a boost of $2.6 billion, and the Energy Department would get additional money for safeguarding the nuclear weapons stockpile.Moonshot: If passed, the NASA budget increase would be one of the largest in years, funding $3 billion to get astronauts to and from the moon as part of NASA\u2019s \u201cArtemis\u201d program, The Post's Christian Davenport reports.More cuts: Another item would eliminate the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program, which was created in 2007 to promote development of fuel-efficient vehicles, AP reports. This may impact Lordstown Motors Corp., which was considering asking for a loan from the program to reopen a former General Motors factory near Cleveland to build electric trucks.To quote: \u201cThe President\u2019s proposed budget is a severe disappointment for science and ignores the many ways in which science fuels our economy, safeguards our security, improves our health and well-being, and is critical for a thriving future,\u201d Chris McEntee, chief executive and executive director of the American Geophysical Union, told The Post.\u2014 A step closer to driverless cars: Nuro, a delivery robot company, will begin testing its autonomous\u00a0grocery car in Houston now that it has won the first federal safety approval of its kind, The Post's Ian Duncan reports. Transportation Department officials' approval indicates the federal government doesn't think robot cars must meet the design standards for regular vehicles to be approved. For instance, Nuro's vehicle won\u2019t need mirrors or a windshield.However: Even with the ruling, Nuro will still face limits. The approval is valid for only two years, the vehicle won\u2019t carry passengers or go more than 25\u00a0miles per hour, and production will be capped at 5,000 vehicles, Duncan\u00a0writes.\u2014\u00a0Butte has a waste problem: Butte, Mont. residents are waiting to see how the EPA will finish cleaning up what may constitute the nation\u2019s largest Superfund complex, Kathleen McLaughlin\u00a0reports for The Post. The once booming mining town wants toxic chemicals that threaten its drinking water cleared. State and federal officials who negotiated with the company on the hook for cleanup may announce what's next for Butte \"in weeks, if not days,\" McLaughlin\u00a0writes.History: \"The city\u2019s toxic sites, including the Berkeley Pit, were placed on the Superfund cleanup list in the 1980s, but the remediation plans and attempts that followed had no final deadlines,\" McLaughlin\u00a0writes. \"The complexity of what\u2019s required and the projected costs are part of the challenge.\"\u2014\u00a0Herbicide dicamba raises flags, sows divide among state and federal officials: Some state pesticide agencies are fielding complaints from farmers about dicamba, an herbicide produced by Monsanto, and have sought the EPA's advice, NPR reports. The EPA approved the chemical in 2016 to be sprayed directly on genetically engineered soybean plants, but farmers near sprayed fields have told state agencies their own crops are wilting. Despite previous issues, the EPA extended its approval just before the 2019 growing season, thinking new restrictions on how and where dicamba can be sprayed would help.Dialed in? \u201cLast November, state officials, including Leo Reed, of the Office of the Indiana State Chemist, pressed EPA officials in a conference call about dicamba. \u201cAre crinkled soybean leaves an 'unreasonable adverse effect?' \u201d someone asked. Reed told NPR that if it is an adverse effect, the herbicide is being misbranded.Up next: The EPA will decide whether it wants to reauthorize use of dicamba at the end of 2020.Your foam coffee cup is fighting for its life (The New York Times)High water wreaks havoc on Great Lakes, swamping communities (Associated Press)DAYBOOKComing up:The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change will hold a hearing entitled \"EPA\u2019s Lead and Copper Proposal: Failing to Protect Public Health\" on Tuesday.The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will markup Better Energy Storage Technology Act, Clean Industrial Technology Act of 2019 and more on Wednesday.The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs will hold a hearing entitled \u201cSurface Transportation Reauthorization: Public Transportation Stakeholders\u2019 Perspectives\" on Tuesday, Feb. 25.EXTRA MILEAGE\u2014 To the sun and back: NASA and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday. The probe's mission is to capture the first pictures of the sun\u2019s elusive poles, the Associated Press reports. Gov. DeSantis\u2019s office said there's no downside to using 'the term \u2018climate change\u2019 or any other term.' The Energy 202: Florida Republicans have added the words 'climate change' to their vocabularies \u2014 and to legislation",
        "author": "Meryl Kornfield"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Florida Republicans have added the words 'climate change' to their vocabularies \u2014 and to legislation (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7079",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2020/02/11/the-energy-202-florida-republicans-have-added-the-words-climate-change-to-their-vocabularies-and-to-legislation/5e417ef888e0fa0a47d9d875/",
        "text": "THE LIGHTBULBTALLAHASSEE \u2014 Florida Rep. Chris Sprowls, a Republican, declared it so in September 2019 at a\u00a0speech designating him the next speaker of the House: \u201cWe need to stop being afraid of words like \u2018climate change\u2019 and \u2018sea level rise.\u2019\u201d\u00a0And Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has used the term repeatedly since his campaign for the job in 2018, even saying it three times in a news release that announced a new statewide job, chief resilience officer, tasked with preparing Florida for sea level rise.\u00a0 WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter years of the GOP dismissing scientists who say the planet is warming, Republicans in Florida, one of the states vulnerable to rising seas and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, are becoming increasingly comfortable with talking about the changing climate.Story continues below advertisementDeSantis\u2019s office said it does not see a downside to using \u201cthe term \u2018climate change\u2019 or any other term.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cAs it pertains to Florida\u2019s environment, the focus is and will remain solely on solutions,\u201d a spokesman for the governor told The Energy 202. He listed steps the governor has taken while in office to mitigate pollution, including funding $625 million toward water quality and restoration of the Everglades National Park, reaching an agreement to purchase 20,000 acres of wetlands intended for oil drilling.The governor has also created offices for environmental accountability and transparency as well as coastal protection.And in a departure from the past, more bills with the phrase \u201cclimate change\u201d have been filed this year in the Florida legislature than in the previous decade, according to an analysis by The Energy 202.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cI thought he showed real political courage in those remarks,\u201d Rep. Ben Diamond (D), the minority leader-in-waiting said of Sprowls\u2019s speech. \u201cWe're certainly in a far better place than we were under the [previous Gov. Rick] Scott administration because we're now having the discussions.\u201dAdvertisementThe rhetorical shift \u00a0by Florida Republicans on climate change\u00a0mirrors one happening in Washington, where top GOP officials are preparing their own climate legislation in response to concerns from young Republicans the party is ignoring the issue. But Republicans who want to tackle climate change are at odds with the Trump administration, which has backpedaled on the issue as the president has withdrawn the country from the Paris climate accords after calling climate change a \u201choax,\u201d and rolling back regulations to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to a warming planet.In Florida, the GOP\u2019s apparent new openness in acknowledging the Earth is getting hotter is a sea change from just a few years ago.Story continues below advertisementScott, now a U.S. senator, made\u00a0national headlines for allegedly banning the words climate change and sea level rise from use by the state\u2019s Department of Environmental Protection.\u00a0In 2015, scientists working for the department told reporters it was an unwritten policy under Scott not to use the term climate change.\u00a0AdvertisementAt the time, the policy became ammunition for the state\u2019s Democrats. Former senator Jeff Clemens mocked Bryan Koon, Scott\u2019s emergency management chief, when he testified in front of Clemens\u2019s committee and avoided the C-words. Clemens\u00a0jokingly suggested, \u201cmaybe as a state we use \u2018atmospheric re-employment,\u2019 That might be something the governor can get behind.\u201dScott denies ever banning the words, and his office defended his environmental record as governor.Story continues below advertisement\u201cAs we\u2019ve said many times, the claim that there was any policy banning the term climate change is laughably false and was never based on any actual evidence,\u201d Chris Hartline, Scott\u2019s spokesman, told The Energy 202.Hartline cited budget items Scott approved that put millions toward programs including flood mitigation, beach renourishment and coral reef protection.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cSenator Scott is glad the DeSantis administration is continuing his work to protect Florida\u2019s natural treasures for generations to come,\u201d Hartline added.When Hurricane Dorian was barreling toward his Florida last year, Scott was asked by\u00a0Fox News\u2019s Sunday host Chris Wallace whether he believed there was a connection between climate change and hurricane intensity. Scott answered that \u201cthe climate's changing\u201d and \u201cour storms seem to be getting bigger,\u201d but he said \u201cwe don't know what the cause is.\u201d\u00a0It hasn\u2019t just become a political priority to acknowledge climate change: In Florida, the consequences of sea level rise are significantly greater than in other states.Even at a committee meeting last week for a Florida House bill to require publicly funded construction projects along the coast evaluate sea level rise, Republicans doubled down on the significance of the state\u2019s geography.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFlorida is going to be seeing the effects of climate change long before a lot of other parts of this country,\u201d state Rep. Vance Aloupis, a Republican representing part of Miami and bill sponsor, told lawmakers. \u201cWhat we do will be an example for many other parts of this nation.\u201dPolitico\u2019s environment and energy reporter Bruce Ritchie, who reported on the exchange,\u00a0tweeted he hadn\u2019t \u201cheard any recognition of sea level rise like this in the Florida House in the 12+ years\u201d he has covered Tallahassee.Sprowls said conservatives need to stop confusing \u201cacknowledging a problem with acquiescing to a particular solution.\u201dWhile other Republican-controlled states, including Texas and South Carolina, have tiptoed around terms like climate change in their proposals for federal disaster dollars, Florida hasn\u2019t,\u00a0the New York Times found.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a draft proposal for $633 million from a federal program, Florida officials\u00a0wrote that \u201cclimate change is a key overarching challenge which threatens to compound the extent and effects of hazards.\u201dFormer Florida Republican congressman Carlos Curbelo\u00a0told my colleague Jackie Alemany the state \u201cis the avant-garde of the party\u201d because climate change is a local issue.\u201cFlorida is a state where the environment is top of mind for most voters,\u201d he said.Of 1,045 Floridians surveyed by\u00a0Florida Atlantic University in October, 56 percent agreed climate change is real and caused by people, including 44 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats.Both Diamond and Sprowls\u2019s districts are in one of the\u00a0most vulnerable metropolitan areas in the world to a major hurricane. Their constituents live near Tampa Bay, where waters could rise up to 8.5 feet above today\u2019s sea level in the next century, the Tampa Bay Times\u00a0reported.\u00a0Diamond, a top Democrat in the Florida House, is optimistic about passing his own climate bill because of the growing support from the other side of the aisle.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter no success last year, Diamond reintroduced the legislation with a Republican sponsor this year. The bill would create a program within the state\u2019s Department for Environmental Protection that produces a resiliency plan for sea level rise every four years.\u00a0After November, Sprowls will begin work as speaker, and one of his priorities is finding a way to acquire more data on sea level rise. With data, lawmakers can make informed decisions about where to focus funding and resources, he said.\u201cWe spend so much time on the hyper-politicization of climate change and these words like \u2018sea level rise\u2019 that we stopped looking for the common-sense things that we need to do to protect our community,\u201d he said. \u201cSay the word, don't say the word. Let's tackle the problem.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisementPOWER PLAYS\u2014 Budget cuts for the environment and science: Trump's $4.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2021 would curb funding for science research, The Post's Joel Achenbach, Laurie McGinley, Amy Goldstein and Ben Guarino report. Among the cuts is a 26 percent reduction to the Environmental Protection Agency, with 50 programs losing funds, and a 28.7 percent cut for the Energy Department, including more than one-seventh of its science program's budget. Remember: this budget is only a wish list and is unlikely to be passed by Congress.Advertisement'You're fired': Part of Trump's cuts to the EPA would mean eliminating 1,562 of the agency\u2019s 14,172 full-time staffers, the Associated Press reports.On the other hand: Not all science-specific federal programs would face the ax. NASA would receive a boost of $2.6 billion, and the Energy Department would get additional money for safeguarding the nuclear weapons stockpile.Moonshot: If passed, the NASA budget increase would be one of the largest in years, funding $3 billion to get astronauts to and from the moon as part of NASA\u2019s \u201cArtemis\u201d program, The Post's Christian Davenport reports.More cuts: Another item would eliminate the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan Program, which was created in 2007 to promote development of fuel-efficient vehicles, AP reports. This may impact Lordstown Motors Corp., which was considering asking for a loan from the program to reopen a former General Motors factory near Cleveland to build electric trucks.To quote: \u201cThe President\u2019s proposed budget is a severe disappointment for science and ignores the many ways in which science fuels our economy, safeguards our security, improves our health and well-being, and is critical for a thriving future,\u201d Chris McEntee, chief executive and executive director of the American Geophysical Union, told The Post.\u2014 A step closer to driverless cars: Nuro, a delivery robot company, will begin testing its autonomous\u00a0grocery car in Houston now that it has won the first federal safety approval of its kind, The Post's Ian Duncan reports. Transportation Department officials' approval indicates the federal government doesn't think robot cars must meet the design standards for regular vehicles to be approved. For instance, Nuro's vehicle won\u2019t need mirrors or a windshield.However: Even with the ruling, Nuro will still face limits. The approval is valid for only two years, the vehicle won\u2019t carry passengers or go more than 25\u00a0miles per hour, and production will be capped at 5,000 vehicles, Duncan\u00a0writes.\u2014\u00a0Butte has a waste problem: Butte, Mont. residents are waiting to see how the EPA will finish cleaning up what may constitute the nation\u2019s largest Superfund complex, Kathleen McLaughlin\u00a0reports for The Post. The once booming mining town wants toxic chemicals that threaten its drinking water cleared. State and federal officials who negotiated with the company on the hook for cleanup may announce what's next for Butte \"in weeks, if not days,\" McLaughlin\u00a0writes.History: \"The city\u2019s toxic sites, including the Berkeley Pit, were placed on the Superfund cleanup list in the 1980s, but the remediation plans and attempts that followed had no final deadlines,\" McLaughlin\u00a0writes. \"The complexity of what\u2019s required and the projected costs are part of the challenge.\"\u2014\u00a0Herbicide dicamba raises flags, sows divide among state and federal officials: Some state pesticide agencies are fielding complaints from farmers about dicamba, an herbicide produced by Monsanto, and have sought the EPA's advice, NPR reports. The EPA approved the chemical in 2016 to be sprayed directly on genetically engineered soybean plants, but farmers near sprayed fields have told state agencies their own crops are wilting. Despite previous issues, the EPA extended its approval just before the 2019 growing season, thinking new restrictions on how and where dicamba can be sprayed would help.Dialed in? \u201cLast November, state officials, including Leo Reed, of the Office of the Indiana State Chemist, pressed EPA officials in a conference call about dicamba. \u201cAre crinkled soybean leaves an 'unreasonable adverse effect?' \u201d someone asked. Reed told NPR that if it is an adverse effect, the herbicide is being misbranded.Up next: The EPA will decide whether it wants to reauthorize use of dicamba at the end of 2020.Your foam coffee cup is fighting for its life (The New York Times)High water wreaks havoc on Great Lakes, swamping communities (Associated Press)DAYBOOKComing up:The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change will hold a hearing entitled \"EPA\u2019s Lead and Copper Proposal: Failing to Protect Public Health\" on Tuesday.The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will markup Better Energy Storage Technology Act, Clean Industrial Technology Act of 2019 and more on Wednesday.The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs will hold a hearing entitled \u201cSurface Transportation Reauthorization: Public Transportation Stakeholders\u2019 Perspectives\" on Tuesday, Feb. 25.EXTRA MILEAGE\u2014 To the sun and back: NASA and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday. The probe's mission is to capture the first pictures of the sun\u2019s elusive poles, the Associated Press reports. Gov. DeSantis\u2019s office said there's no downside to using 'the term \u2018climate change\u2019 or any other term.' The Energy 202: Florida Republicans have added the words 'climate change' to their vocabularies \u2014 and to legislation",
        "author": "Meryl Kornfield"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: 10 reasons Cruz\u2019s Fiorina gambit will likely flop (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7080",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/04/28/daily-202-10-reasons-cruz-s-fiorina-gambit-will-likely-flop/57211918981b92a22d32d85f/",
        "text": "THE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Desperate times call for desperate measures.If you had any doubt Ted Cruz was desperate, he proved it yesterday by announcing Carly Fiorina as his running mate three months before the Republican National Convention and six days before a win-or-die Indiana primary.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe gambit seems unlikely to change the trajectory of the race for 10 reasons: 1. It smacks of presumptuousness. It does not seem principled but political, which goes against the Texas senator\u2019s brand.2. It is hard to see the announcement dominating more than one news cycle. Cruz lost all five states that voted on Tuesday, finishing in third place behind Donald Trump and John Kasich in four of them. It was quite Trumpian of him to change the subject with a bold stunt. Remember when Trump rolled out the Chris Christie endorsement the morning after his terrible debate performance in Texas? But it feels inevitable that Trump will say or do something today to upstage Cruz\u2019s pick\u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement3. How many Indiana Republicans are going to decide to vote for Cruz because he tapped Fiorina? Not that many, we\u2019d guess. \u201cFiorina doesn\u2019t appeal to Kasich voters,\u201d the Manhattan Institute\u2019s Avik Roy argues in Forbes. \u201cFor better or worse, Kasich has become the vessel of moderate Republican voters: the suburban, upper-income folks who prefer pragmatism to bomb-throwing. And Fiorina is, at least rhetorically, a Cruz-style firebrand. There\u2019s also the fact that pragmatic conservatives tend to favor someone for veep who has deep experience in governing and legislating, something that Fiorina does not.\u201dTrump said on CNN last night\u00a0that he believes Indiana Gov. Mike Pence will either endorse him or no one. The Fiorina\u00a0rollout\u00a0telegraphs that Cruz does not think he will get the backing of either Pence or Mitch Daniels, the former governor, both of whom would help.4. This trick has failed every time it has been tried. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1976, on the verge of losing the nomination to incumbent President Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan announced Richard Schweiker as his running mate. It angered his core supporters, especially in the South, and did nothing to peel away any delegates from the Pennsylvania senator\u2019s delegation, which was the goal. Schweiker became such a liability that he offered to drop out. Reagan kept him.In 1952, Robert Taft told GOP insiders that he\u2019d pick Douglas MacArthur as his running mate if nominated over Dwight Eisenhower. Time Magazine recalls\u00a0that this led many to say MacArthur should be the nominee.In 1992, trying to woo African American voters, Jerry Brown said before the New York primary that he\u2019d pick Jesse Jackson as his vice president. But it hurt him badly with the state\u2019s huge Jewish population, the New York Times noted. Bill Clinton won the primary, and then the nomination. Brown wound up finishing third, behind Paul Tsongas, in the Empire State.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement5. Fiorina cannot deliver California. The only political contest Fiorina has ever actually won is a 2010 Republican primary in California. But after losing to Barbara Boxer, she actually moved away from the state. I was in New Hampshire last year when a voter told Fiorina how much she loves California. The then-candidate awkwardly responded that she now lives in Virginia and hinted pretty strongly that she doesn\u2019t like the state all that much.\u201cIn spite of her California ties, Fiorina does not bring deep connections to activists in that state or elsewhere, with her time in California politics mostly unmoored from the state\u2019s GOP establishment,\u201d Sean Sullivan writes. \u201cThat makes her useful in terms of understanding the contours of a statewide campaign and television markets but hardly a rainmaker in terms of delegate accumulation.\u201dAs Marty Wilson, who managed Fiorina\u2019s 2010 Senate campaign, told the Los Angeles Times: \u201cIs it a game changer? No, I don\u2019t see it that way.\u201d.@JasonMillerinDC debuts new logo pic.twitter.com/e9iY2YZphe\u2014 Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) April 27, 2016\n\n6. Fiorina is not actually that talented as a surrogate. \u201cIn 2008, she botched her role as a McCain surrogate when she first said his vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, was unqualified to be the CEO of HP, and then added that McCain was, too,\u201d notes\u00a0Newsweek\u2019s Matthew Cooper. \u201cHer somewhat contorted point\u2014nuanced would be kind\u2014that running a corporation is different from being president got lost in what seemed like a massive diss on the running mates.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement7. Her dismal tenure as CEO at Hewlett Packard, which included a scandal over spying on her board of directors, makes it harder for Cruz to attack Trump over his business record. \u201cIt doubles the size of the target. It basically opens the door for your opponents to attack your running mate,\u201d Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney told The Wrap.8. It deprives Cruz of the chance to name a stronger running mate down the road. Someone like Marco Rubio might have actually helped Cruz carry a state like Florida in November.9. Cruz has lost a valuable bargaining chip at a contested convention. He might have wanted to create some kind of unity ticket with Kasich, but that possibility is now foreclosed.Story continues below advertisement10. The mainstream media coverage this morning is pretty brutal and runs heavily negative. It is certainly not what the Cruz camp was hoping for. Reporters are grasping for various metaphors that make it seem like Cruz\u2019s campaign is on the verge of failure:Advertisement\u201cThis is a Hail Mary pass,\u201d writes The Fix\u2019s Chris Cillizza. \u201cIt, like the deal that Cruz and Kasich cut earlier this week, amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that if nothing changes in the race Trump is going to win. Could it work? Sure. Sometimes Hail Marys get caught. But usually they get knocked down and the other team starts celebrating.\u201d\u201cMr. Cruz\u2019s decision \u2026 was the political equivalent of a student pulling a fire alarm to avoid an exam: It was certain to draw attention and carried the possibility of meeting its immediate goal, but seemed unlikely to forestall the eventual reckoning,\u201d the New York Times\u2019 Jonathan Martin, Matt Flegenheimer and Alexander Burns write on the front page.Story continues below advertisement\u201cCruz\u2019s veep selection looks like a half-court shot at the buzzer. That almost never works,\u201d writes the Los Angeles Times\u2019 George Skelton. \u201cFiorina did perform well in the debates, but couldn\u2019t transform that into votes. And although Fiorina can be very pleasant in person, on the presidential trail she often came across as bitter and a bit mean \u2014 not exactly the counterweight Cruz should be looking for.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cA Fading Cruz Tosses a Hail Carly\u201d is the headline on Fortune.\"Fiorina is Cruz\u2019s latest desperate ploy\u201d is the headline of the New York Post\u2019s story.Republican strategist Alex Castellanos said the move makes no sense on Bloomberg TV.ABC News focuses on the unflattering comments Fiorina made about Cruz when she was a candidate.\u00a0In that vein, Trump highlighted an old clip of Fiorina on CNN, saying: \u201cTed Cruz is just like any other politician: he says whatever he needs to say to get elected.\u201dAgreed! pic.twitter.com/biyldP3CIw\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2016\n\nWhat other reporters across the mainstream media are saying:\u00a0Very smart for Cruz to select as a running mate a politician who voters in California and the rest of the country have said they don't like.\u2014 Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) April 27, 2016\n\nPolitico:Cruz-Fiorina 2016: Because the only thing better than one candidate who couldn't beat Trump, is two candidates who couldn't beat Trump.\u2014 Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) April 27, 2016\n\nThe NYT:Just two former vice chairs of the NRSC going after Washington insiders and \"the system\"\u2014 Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) April 27, 2016\n\n-- The Wall Street Journal appears to be the only major outlet playing the move as shrewd. \u201cPositioning himself as down-and-out isn\u2019t necessarily the worst move for Mr. Cruz in Indiana, where the state\u2019s tradition of revering underdogs is celebrated in the movie \u2018Hoosiers,\u2019\u201d writes Reid Epstein. \u201cJames Bopp Jr., a former member of the Republican National Committee from Terre Haute, Ind., said Mr. Cruz\u2019s naming of Mrs. Fiorina could help him win over business-minded Republicans in the Indianapolis suburbs who had been inclined to back Mr. Kasich before he abandoned the state on Sunday night. \u2018She\u2019s not a moderate, but she\u2019s obviously a culturally upscale, successful businesswoman extraordinaire,\u2019 Mr. Bopp said. \u2018That has some appeal in the doughnut counties around Indianapolis that are packed with Republicans and upscale Republican voters.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Flashback: Fiorina told Katie Couric she was being sexist last year when the anchor asked whether she was really campaigning to be vice president. \u201cOh, Katie, would you ask a male candidate that?\u201d Fiorina said. \u201cYes, I would,\u201d Couric replied. \u201cTo a male candidate that was polling at 1 percent, I would ask that question.\u201d (Watch the video here.)If you missed it, watch a 3-minute recap of last night's hour-long\u00a0Cruz-Fiorina rally:Ted Cruz announces he =former rival Carly Fiorina will be his running mate. Here are key moments from that event. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)Democrats had a field day:I predict that the latest @CarlyFiorina merger will be as successful as her last one.\u2014 Barbara Boxer (@BarbaraBoxer) April 27, 2016\n\nTed Cruz naming Carly Fiorina VP is like the #Browns putting playoff tickets on sale. #SteelersNation\u2014 Richard Trumka (@RichardTrumka) April 27, 2016\n\nCarly Fiorina just boarded her flight to the Ted Cruz press conference. pic.twitter.com/aS7deQuvm9\u2014 Chris Franjola (@ChrisFranjola) April 27, 2016\n\n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter. With contributions from Breanne Deppisch (@breanne_dep) and Elise Viebeck (@eliseviebeck) Sign up to receive the newsletter. \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- John Boehner absolutely unloaded on Cruz at Stanford last night. In an on-stage interview with Professor David M. Kennedy, the former Speaker said he would vote for Trump in November but not Cruz. \u201cLucifer in the flesh\u201d is how Boehner described the senator, according to The Stanford Daily. \u201cI have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.\u201d From The Stanford Daily\u2019s account:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoehner said he has played golf with Trump for years and that they are \u201ctexting buddies.\u201d\u201cEarly in the talk, the speaker impersonated Clinton, saying \u2018Oh I\u2019m a woman, vote for me,\u2019 to a negative crowd reaction.\u201d\u201cThroughout the talk, Boehner frequently referenced the Freedom Caucus as the \u2018knuckleheads\u2019 and \u2018goofballs\u2019 in Congress.\u201d-- The Commerce Department announced this morning that the U.S. economy slowed between the months of January and March, with the gross domestic product expanding at a paltry 0.5 percent pace.\u00a0\"That roughly matched the expectations of economists, who said the economy was hitting the brakes from the steady but unspectacular pace maintained over the last\u00a0nine months,\" Chico Harlan reports.\u00a0The GDP grew at a 1.4 percent pace in the last quarter of 2015.\"-- The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce will endorse John\u00a0Kasich and Hillary Clinton today, the first time the group has waded into a presidential primary. It is a notable snub of the only Hispanic in the race. Javier Palomarez, the chamber's president and CEO, tells Ed O\u2019Keefe in an interview that he knows Cruz from Texas. \"This is not about being Hispanic,\" he said. \"This is about selecting the best person for the job. \u2026 I\u2019m heartbroken, heartbroken that I can\u2019t endorse a Latino. \u2026 If you look at Ted\u2019s divisive rhetoric about immigrants, it disqualified him from consideration. His inability to work within his own caucus, let alone with Senate Democrats, made it hard for us to consider him. He also pushed for the deportation of up to 12 million people.\"--\u00a0John McCain has fired one of his fundraisers after a meth-lab was discovered in her home. The Maricopa Sheriff's Office identified one of two people arrested in a drug bust as 34-year-old Emily Pitha, a former member of the staff of retired Sen. Jon Kyl. She\u2019s listed as the RSVP contact on McCain\u2019s invites.\u201cA Maricopa County Sheriff's Office spokesman said authorities were first alerted to possible drug activity at Pitha's Phoenix home by a parcel in transit from the Netherlands containing over 250 grams of MDMA \u2013 raw ecstasy,\" the Arizona Republic reports. \"Detective Doug Matteson \u2026 said Pitha's boyfriend, 36-year-old Christopher Hustrulid, signed for the packaged when it arrived at their doorstep Tuesday afternoon. Detectives executing a search warrant at the home discovered an active meth lab, along with unspecified quantities of LSD, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, about $7,000 in loose currency, and counterfeit money.\"\u00a0A separate building on the property was found to have a hidden room that was to be used as a marijuana-grow facility...\"\u201cMatteson said two children living inside the home -- ages 5 and 10 \u2013 \u2018had easy access to all of (the) drugs and materials, even the bomb-making materials that were located in the back with the meth lab.\"Statement from McCain manager Ryan O'Daniel: \u201cThe campaign immediately terminated any relationship with Ms. Pitha upon learning of her alleged involvement in the operation.\u201d-- John Kerry choked up as he discussed Vietnam at the LBJ presidential library last night. From Carol Morello in Austin: The Secretary of State had to pause to regain control of his emotions while recalling his 1971 testimony before a Senate committee after returning from the war. \u201cI spoke of the determination of veterans to undertake one last mission,\u201d Kerry said, \u201cso that in 30 years, when our brothers went down the street without a leg or an arm and people asked why, we\u2019d be able to say \u2018Vietnam\u2019 and not mean a bitter memory\u2026\u2019\u201d He stopped, seeming to choke back tears before completing the thought.In an onstage talk with Ken Burns, Kerry said he thinks constantly about the lessons of Vietnam when he is involved in peace negotiations. \u201cI am now in a position of responsibility, to live my beliefs, to live my lessons,\u201d he said.Kerry rarely discusses his time as an anti-war protester. \u201cHis pointed remarks suggested that the poised, silver-haired diplomat who negotiates ceasefires and treaties, is just an evolution from the angry, shaggy-maned protester who posed the rhetorical question of how to ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake,\u201d Morello writes.\u201cI\u2019ll probably get in trouble for this,\u201d Kerry said at one point, before arguing that veterans should be able to go anywhere, not just to government hospitals, for health care. (Austin American Statesman)-- An airstrike in Aleppo destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital, killing at least 14\u00a0staff and patients\u00a0and threatening an already fragile cease-fire between rebels and government forces in the country.\u00a0(Erin Cunningham)-- Yale announced that it will NOT to change the name of Calhoun College, named for John C. Calhoun, who defended slavery as a \u201cpositive good.\u201d As part of a compromise, though, Yale will name a new residential college, opening in the fall of 2017, for Anna Pauline Murray, a lawyer and civil rights activist and the first black woman ordained as a priest in the Episcopalian church,\u00a0Isaac Stanley-Becker reports.\u00a0At Princeton, meanwhile,\u00a0administrators bowed to protestors\u00a0yesterday by saying they will remove a wall-sized photograph of Woodrow Wilson from a dining hall.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: As Alex Acosta resigns, the #MeToo reckoning continues (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7081",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/07/12/daily-202-as-alex-acosta-resigns-the-metoo-reckoning-continues/5d2833c41ad2e552a21d53a6/",
        "text": "THE BIG IDEA: More women are choosing to come forward with accounts of sexual assault, and many authorities appear to be taking such allegations more seriously than they once did. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta's resignation this morning is another data point of how far society has come since the #MeToo movement began. But several stories this week have also laid bare some of the persisting systemic challenges in combating what advocates call rape culture. There are daily reminders of how much still has not changed both at home and abroad. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight-- Acosta stepped down in the face of mounting scrutiny over his role in negotiating a 2008 deal with Jeffrey Epstein that allowed the financier to plead guilty to lesser offenses in a sex trafficking case. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s right or fair to have this administration\u2019s labor department have Epstein be the focus instead of the incredible economy we have today,\u201d Acosta said on the White House lawn. \u201cIt would be selfish for me to stay in the position and continue talking about a case that is 12 years old.\u201dStanding at his side, Trump emphasized that the decision to resign was made by Acosta and that he was not fired. \u201cThis was him, not me,\u201d the president said. \u201cI said to Alex, \u2018You don\u2019t have to do this.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Acosta tried to save his job with a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, but the reality turned out to be much more complicated than the version of events he outlined. Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett, Kimberly Kindy and Renae Merle reported last night: \u201cCurrent and former law enforcement officials expressed concerns about the number of unusual decisions made in Epstein\u2019s favor more than a decade ago. Court documents show that Acosta\u2019s office was amenable to the demands of Epstein\u2019s defense team even as it kept Epstein\u2019s alleged victims in the dark. And where Acosta would not bring a federal case, federal prosecutors in New York did \u2014 on the basis of at least some of the same allegations and evidence that Acosta was considering.\u201cAcosta said during his news conference that his office intervened in the early 2000s to make sure Epstein would be jailed after a grand jury convened by the Palm Beach County state attorney recommended a single charge that would have resulted in no jail time and no requirement that Epstein register as a sex offender. Former Palm Beach County state attorney Barry Krischer disputed that version of events, saying Acosta\u2019s \u2018recollection of this matter is completely wrong.\u2019 \u2026 And Acosta\u2019s characterization is somewhat undercut by internal Justice Department emails that became part of the public court record in subsequent lawsuits. Those messages show some coordination between federal prosecutors and the Palm Beach County state attorney. They also show a prosecutor in Acosta\u2019s office, A. Marie Villafana, acceding to demands from Epstein\u2019s attorneys not to inform alleged victims that the federal criminal investigation had been settled with a non-prosecution agreement.\u201d-- Meanwhile, at least a dozen new victims have come forward since the weekend to claim they were sexually abused by Epstein, according to the Miami Herald\u2019s Julie K. Brown and David Smiley, \u201ceven as the multimillionaire money manager tries to convince a federal judge to allow him to await a sex trafficking trial from the comfort of the same $77 million Manhattan mansion where he\u2019s accused of luring teenage girls into unwanted sex acts. Following Epstein\u2019s arrest Saturday in New Jersey, four women have reached out to New York lawyer David Boies, and at least 10 other women have approached other lawyers who have represented dozens of Epstein\u2019s alleged victims in the past. Jack Scarola, a Palm Beach attorney, said at least five women, all of whom were minors at the time of their alleged encounters with Epstein, have reached out to either him or Fort Lauderdale lawyer Brad Edwards.\u201d-- One of the new accusers, Jennifer Araoz, spoke with Savannah Guthrie this morning on NBC\u2019s \u201cToday\u201d show. She said she believes she was \u201cgroomed\u201d for Epstein. \u201cI was a pretty happy child, but I had some pains growing up because my father had passed when I was 12 years old, so that definitely took an effect on me as a kid,\u201d Araoz said. \u201cIt was [a process]. It wasn\u2019t an overnight thing and that\u2019s why I feel like it was really well thought out, well planned to really make me feel as comfortable as possible to almost keep me coming back. I didn\u2019t really think her and him would conspire to have me go there to do such weird things that ended up happening.\u201d-- Federal prosecutors are being more aggressive against others accused of sex crimes. For example, the R&B singer R. Kelly was arrested last night in Chicago after a federal grand jury indicted him on 13 new counts, including enticement of a minor and obstruction of justice. This is in addition to the charges he\u2019s already facing from local authorities in Illinois. \u201cThe 52-year-old Grammy winner, whose real name is Robert Kelly, was arrested in February on 10 counts in Illinois involving four women, three of whom were minors when the alleged abuse occurred. He pleaded not guilty to those charges and was released on bail,\u201d the AP notes. \u201cThen on May 30, Cook County prosecutors added 11 more sex-related counts involving one of the women who accused him of sexually abusing her when she was underage. \u2026\u201cKelly has faced mounting legal troubles this year after Lifetime aired a documentary \u2018Surviving R. Kelly,\u2019 which revisited allegations of sexual abuse of girls. The series followed the BBC\u2019s \u2018R Kelly: Sex, Girls & Videotapes,\u2019 released in 2018, that alleged the singer was holding women against their will and running a \u2018sex cult.\u2019 Soon after the release of the Lifetime documentary, Cook County State\u2019s Attorney Kim Foxx said her office had been inundated with calls about the allegations in the documentary. Her office\u2019s investigation led to the charges in February and additional counts added in May.\u201dTHE NEXT BIG #METOO FIGHT IN WASHINGTON: AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- \u201cDemocrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said Thursday that they want to hear from the Army colonel who has accused Trump\u2019s pick to become the military\u2019s No. 2 officer of sexual misconduct before they let his nomination proceed, putting them firmly at odds with the panel\u2019s Republican chairman,\u201d Karoun Demirjian and Paul Sonne report. \u201cThe allegations against Air Force Gen. John E. Hyten prompted a probe by the Air Force criminal investigative service. Based on the results, no disciplinary actions against him were taken. Air Force officials briefed senators on the findings Wednesday. Hyten, who was nominated in April to become the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has denied the allegations.\u201d\u201cI think she\u2019s very believable, and I think she deserves to be heard,\u201d said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.).\u201cNo, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s necessary,\u201d said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the committee chairman. When asked Thursday if he wanted to hear directly from the Army colonel, Inhofe said: \u201cI think the examination\u2019s been very thorough.\u201d\u201cSeveral members have publicly and privately raised questions about the way the investigation was conducted. In particular, they are concerned that Hyten may have received \u2018preferential treatment,\u2019 as Duckworth put it, while he was being investigated. Unlike others facing similar allegations, he wasn\u2019t removed from duty during the probe, several senators and aides said. \u2026 Members of both parties are acutely aware that if Hyten\u2019s nomination proceeds to a public confirmation hearing, it could be dominated by the sexual misconduct allegations regardless of whether the Army colonel receives an audience before the panel \u2014 and some Republicans would rather avoid that inevitability.\u201dPresident Trump's lawyers released this video they claim contradicts allegations made by former campaign staffer Alva Johnson that Trump forcibly kissed her. (Harder LLP via Storyful)-- \u201cAttorneys for Donald Trump say the video of the president embracing then-campaign staffer Alva Johnson in 2016 refutes her allegations that Trump forcibly kissed her without consent. Johnson\u2019s attorneys say that, if nothing else, the footage proves her claims were truthful,\u201d Michael Brice-Saddler reports. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFar from providing clarity, the 15-second video released Wednesday by Charles Harder, an attorney for Trump, only led to conflicting interpretations. In a February lawsuit and interview with The Washington Post, Johnson alleged the president grabbed her hand and leaned in for a kiss before a Florida rally on Aug. 24, 2016. She turned her head, which caused Trump to kiss the side of her mouth, she said, claiming she was humiliated. In a Wednesday court filing, Harder brushed off Johnson\u2019s battery claim as \u2018unmeritorious and frivolous.\u2019 The video, he argued, shows an \u2018innocent interaction that is mutual \u2014 and not forcible.\u2019 \u2026 Johnson is one of 16 women to accuse the president of sexual misconduct. Many of the accusations came following the release of the \u2018Access Hollywood\u2019 tape.\u201dA REMINDER OF THE HURDLES THAT FACE SURVIVORS: -- The New Jersey Supreme Court held a disciplinary hearing to mull how a superior court judge should be sanctioned for asking a rape victim if she \u201cknew how to stop somebody from having intercourse with\u201d her and if she could have just \u201cclosed her legs.\u201d The attorney for Judge John Russo Jr. said he is remorseful and ready to take whatever punishment the higher court sees fit, according to NJ.com\u2019s Amanda Hoover: \u201cRusso did not speak during the 20-minutes of oral arguments; he sat with his hands crossed, twiddling his thumbs. \u2026 An advisory panel for the court in April recommended the Ocean County family court judge receive three months suspension and wrote that his conduct demonstrated \u2018an emotional immaturity wholly unbefitting the judicial office and incompatible with the decorum expected of every jurist,\u2019 in its 45-page recommendation detailing four incidents of misconduct.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn off-the-record comments following the testimony, the nonchalant attitude toward sexual assault continued. \u2018As an exotic dancer, one would think you would know how to fend off unwanted sexual\u2026\u2019 was picked up on a recording. Laughter was heard in the conversation as well, which Russo maintained he was using as a teaching moment to educate a clerk when he said, \u2018it\u2019s not all fun and games out there.\u2019 \u2026 Separately, a former law clerk is also suing him for sexual harassment and discrimination.\u201d-- Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) vowed yesterday to end the nationwide rape kit backlog by the end of her first term as president by offering a total of $100 million in annual federal assistance to states that commit to improving their testing procedures. \u201cHer new federal plan, funding for which would have to be approved by Congress, would require states that opt into her proposal to count and report their untested rape kits each year, test their cases in a timely fashion, keep victims informed and increase access to rape kits in underserved areas,\u201d Chelsea Janes reports. \u201cHarris would also encourage states to require law enforcement agencies to keep rape kits in evidence files until the alleged crimes could no longer be prosecuted under statutes of limitations.\u201cAccording to End the Backlog, a project sponsored by the Joyful Heart Foundation, which seeks to assist crime victims, hundreds of thousands of rape kits collected from victims are sitting untested in evidence storage or crime labs nationwide. As advances in DNA testing placed strain on crime labs, there are no national standards for keeping and testing the evidence. Efforts by individual jurisdictions to eliminate the backlogs have shown benefits: When New York City committed to eliminating a backlog of 17,000 rape kits in 1999, the process yielded 200 arrests. As California attorney general, the job she held before being elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris sought to help local police agencies to clear backlogs by introducing new testing technology. Her office\u2019s Rapid DNA Service team said it cleared all 1,300 untested rape kits in the state\u2019s backlog in one year and earned national recognition and grants for its efforts.\u201dTHE CHALLENGES FOR WOMEN OVERSEAS:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- The BBC published a deeply unsettling story yesterday about endemic sexual harassment in the Afghanistan government, based on interviews with six women in Kabul. The whole thing is worth reading, but here\u2019s what two of the women had to say: \u201cIn a house near the foot of the dusty mountains that surround Kabul, I meet a former government employee. \u2026 She says her former boss, a senior minister in the government, repeatedly harassed her, and one day when she went to his office, tried to physically assault her. \u2018He directly asked me for a sexual favour. I told him I'm qualified and experienced. I never thought you would say such things to me. I stood up to leave. He grabbed my hand and took me to a room at the back of his office. He pushed me towards the room and told me, 'It'll take only a few minutes, don't worry, come with me.\u2019 I pushed him by his chest and said enough. Don't make me scream. That was the last time I saw him. I was so angry and upset.\u2019\u201cDid she file a complaint after the incident? \u2018No, I resigned from my job. I don't trust the government. If you go to the court or to the police, you will see how corrupt they are. You can't find a safe place to go and complain. If you speak out, everyone will blame the woman,\u2019 she tells me. \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn an office by a small park, I met another woman who was willing to share her story. She had applied for a job in government and had all but secured it when she was asked to meet a close aide of President Ashraf Ghani. \u2018This man appears in pictures with the president. He asked me to come to his private office. He said, come and sit, I'll approve your documents. He moved closer to me and then said let's drink and have sex,\u2019 she says. \u2018I had two options, to either accept the offer or leave. And if I had accepted, it wouldn't have stopped at him, but multiple men would have asked to have sex with me. It was really shocking. I got scared and left.\u2019 \u2026\u201cShe breaks down into tears during our conversation. \u2018If you go to complain to a judge, the police, a prosecutor, any of those, they will also ask you for sex. So if they're doing that, who can you go to? It's like it's become a part of the culture now, that every man around you wants to have sex with you,\u2019 she says. \u2026 The president's office declined a request for an interview, and didn't respond to emailed questions either.\u201d-- \u201cIgnored at Home, Battered Russian Women Take Cases to Europe,\u201d Andrew Higgins reports in today\u2019s New York Times: \u201cHe beat her. He kidnapped her. He threatened to kill her. But this was Russia, where domestic violence is both endemic and widely ignored. Every time Valeriya Volodina went to the police for protection from her ex-boyfriend, she got nowhere. \u2018Not once did they open a criminal case against him \u2014 they would not even acknowledge there was a case,\u2019 she says. So Ms. Volodina turned her sights out of the country, and this week, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled emphatically in her favor. Rejecting arguments from Russia that she had suffered no real harm, and that she had failed to file her complaints properly, the court awarded her 20,000 euros, about $22,500.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe ruling was the European court\u2019s first on a domestic violence case from Russia \u2014 but it may be far from its last. Ten more Russian women have similar cases pending before the court. \u2026 A report last year by Human Rights Watch described the problem as \u2018pervasive\u2019 in Russia but rarely addressed because of legal hurdles, social stigma and a general unwillingness by law enforcement officers to take it seriously. In Ms. Volodina\u2019s case, it was her boyfriend who finally shed light on why her complaints were being ignored by the police. \u2018With all the money I have spent on the cops, I could have bought a new car,\u2019 she remembers him complaining. \u2026 \u2018Justice has been achieved,\u2019 said Ms. Volodina, 34, \u2018but it is sad that this was done in a foreign country, not in Russia.\u2019\u201d \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- House Democrats and former special counsel Bob Mueller are in discussions about delaying his testimony for one week in exchange for more time for questioning. Mueller had been scheduled to testify Wednesday before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The panels planned back-to-back hearings of four hours of testimony. Multiple congressional officials said this morning that he has offered to delay his testimony to July 24 to spend more time answering lawmakers\u2019 questions. (Developing.)One day after floodwaters hit New Orleans, the city began preparing for another inundation. (The Washington Post)-- \u201cAs New Orleanians recover from floodwaters that inundated the city on Wednesday, residents are preparing for an unprecedented triple whammy this weekend: heavy rain, an already engorged Mississippi River and a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico that is expected to make landfall in Louisiana on Saturday, with a storm surge that could reach six feet,\u201d Tim Craig and Frances Stead Sellers report: \u201cFourteen years after Hurricane Katrina killed more than 1,800 people and swamped this city, the deluge will be a major test of the updated drains and pumps that remove water from the streets, the earthen levees that hold back the river, and the elaborate system of barriers that prevents tidal surges from sweeping in \u2014 all part of a $14 billion investment in the city\u2019s flood-fighting infrastructure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOn Thursday, the National Weather Service forecast that the river would crest at 19 feet, one foot lower than previously predicted, reducing concerns that river levees would be topped or breached. But residents, their memories of Katrina reawakened by Wednesday\u2019s downpour, are still worried about Tropical Storm Barry. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D), who declared a state of emergency Wednesday, said that expected rainfall \u2018is extremely serious\u2019 and the system will \u2018likely produce storm surge, hurricane-force winds and up to 15 inches of rain,\u2019 putting the entire state at risk.\u201dHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on July 11 said \u201cwe\u2019ll just see about the timing\u201d when asked about spending and debt ceiling negotiations. (Reuters)GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: GOP establishment working through the five stages of grief as Donald Trump trudges to Cleveland (WP: The 202s) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7082",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/03/03/daily-202-gop-establishment-working-through-the-five-stages-of-grief-as-donald-trump-trudges-to-cleveland/56d7baca981b92a22d64e56c/",
        "text": "Good morning from an Acela train bound for New Haven, Conn. Here\u2019s a preview of the message I\u2019ll deliver later to a seminar at Yale.THE BIG IDEA:WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Republican establishment is not monolithic. Thought leaders from the party\u2019s governing class \u2013 legislators, donors, operatives, think tankers, lobbyists \u2013 are coping in very different ways with Donald Trump\u2019s victories in 10 of the first 15 nominating contests. It is remarkable how much of the reaction to the Super Tuesday results fits neatly into Elisabeth Kubler-Ross\u2019s five stages of grief. It\u2019s like a psychiatry experiment playing out in real time, except without the approval of an Institutional Review Board.\u00a0It took nine months, but party elites are finally past the denial phase. No one thinks the first-time candidate can be ignored or that he\u2019s someone else\u2019s problem.\u00a0Other than that, they\u2019re all over the place!Step 2 (after denial) is\u00a0ANGER.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome key figures who basically stayed on the sidelines for the past year are now rushing to raise money and get ads up on the air that will drive up Trump\u2019s negatives before the winner-take-all primaries begin on March 15. -- Mitt Romney is not ready to endorse anyone yet, and associates say he\u2019s not going to jump into the race, but he\u2019ll deliver a high-profile speech at the University of Utah today decrying Trump and warning his 2012 supporters that it would be dangerous to nominate him.Trump attacked the \"failed\" candidate (and misspelled the president's name):Just another desperate move by the man who should have easily beaten Barrack Obama. (2/2)\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2016\n\nHe also released a video mocking Romney:Republican frontrunner Donald Trump released an ad attacking Mitt Romney after harsh criticism from the GOP establishment. (Facebook/Donald J. Trump)-- A group of more than 50 conservative foreign policy experts signed onto an open letter, saying Trump\u2019s rhetoric about national security has \u201ccrossed a line\u201d and rendered him unfit for office. \u201cAs Republicans, we are unable to support a party ticket with Trump at its head,\u201d says the letter, which hits Trump on everything from his nonchalance about torture to his anti-Muslim rhetoric. \u201cWe commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent [his] election.\u201d (Thomas Gibbons-Neff has a list of who signed the letter.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker became the latest prominent Republican to say he cannot vote for Trump in November. (Boston Globe)Step 3 is\u00a0BARGAINING.-- The establishment is also trying to make the case that they totally get the anger that\u2019s out there, and that they\u2019ll adjust to tap into what Trump represents. John Kasich had plane trouble, so he couldn\u2019t fly from New York to Michigan and he phoned into an event yesterday in Ann Arbor. His comments were emblematic: \u201cTo be honest with you, I do understand a lot of the appeal of Donald Trump because people are frustrated,\" he said, per the Ann Arbor News.\u00a0Kasich then reiterated his promise not to get out of the race until after Ohio, at the earliest, on Hugh Hewitt\u2019s radio show. Asked if he\u2019s a spoiler for Rubio, the governor replied: \u201cThey won some caucus somewhere. Where was it, Minnesota or something?\u201d The comments underscore the degree to which the field will stay splintered, despite abstract calls for unity.Step 4 is DEPRESSION.\u201cDespite some vague talk of rallying around a Trump alternative, Capitol Hill Republicans said Wednesday that no such effort is afoot and that anyone in Washington trying to execute such a plan was on a fool\u2019s errand,\u201d reports congressional correspondent Paul Kane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the reasons there\u2019s not a whole lot of pressure to do something here is there\u2019s a general sense that\u2019s there\u2019s probably not a whole lot you can do,\u201d said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of the leadership facing re-election in the fall. \u201cNobody thinks our involvement is particularly helpful, as it might\u2019ve once been.\u201d\u201cIf you don\u2019t see a donor rush, it\u2019s because people are seeing what I\u2019m seeing: Show me how Trump can be beaten,\u201d said Al Cardenas, a Miami-based lobbyist who backed Jeb Bush and is holding off on becoming a bundler for Rubio. For now, Cardenas told Ed O\u2019Keefe, \u201cI\u2019m off the grid. I put my heart and soul into helping Jeb and I\u2019m just not ready to get back into this thing anytime soon. I might. I\u2019m just not making that decision today.\u201dMike Murphy, who ran the pro-Bush super PAC, said the Trump \u201ctrain may have left the station.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t want to be a critic of what\u2019s being tried, but after millions of dollars in ads, it\u2019s more important to narrow the field than to air more ads against him,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEric Fehrnstrom, a former senior adviser to Romney, said it has become almost \u201cimpossible for (Trump\u2019s) opponents to catch up to him.\u201d (Both Mike and Eric are quoted in a meaty front-page story today on the GOP being in \u201ca state of pandemonium\u201d by my colleagues Matea Gold, Philip Rucker and Tom Hamburger.)Step 5 is ACCEPTANCE.Alex Castellanos, the legendary ad man, last year tried unsuccessfully to raise money for an anti-Trump advertising effort. Yesterday he called on the party to rally around Trump. \u201cA fantasy effort to stop Trump...exists only as the denial stage of grief,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cTrump has earned the nomination,\u201d Castellanos emailed The Post yesterday. \u201cTrump whipped the establishment and it is too late for the limp GOP establishment to ask their mommy to step in and rewrite the rules because they were humiliated for their impotence.\u201d (Read more choice quotes in a story by Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger here.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilliam J. Bennett, a former Reagan education secretary, similarly said he cannot support the anti-Trump movement. \u201cI\u2019m used to being the moral scold, but Trump is winning fair and square, so why should the nomination be grabbed from him?\u201d asked Bennett, now a conservative radio host, per Robert Costa. \u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to get white working-class people into the party for a long time. Now they\u2019re here in huge numbers because of Trump and we\u2019re going to alienate them? I don\u2019t get it. Too many people are on their high horse.\u201dEconomist Stephen Moore, a former member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, said he is considering an endorsement: \u201cFor me, Trump potentially represents a big expansion of the Republican Party, a way to bring in those blue-collar Reagan Democrats.\u201dAnd Ben Ginsberg, the veteran lawyer who knows the ins-and-outs of RNC rules as well as anyone, declared the chances are good that Trump will win the nomination outright. He told Greg Sargent that a contested convention wresting the nomination from Trump is unlikely. \u201cThe odds are still pretty long that we\u2019ll get to a contested convention,\u201d Ginsberg said. \u201cThe history of Republican primaries is that Trump as the front-runner with the delegates he\u2019s won is going to get a majority of the delegates.\u201d-- Against this backdrop: The Republicans debate for the 11th time tonight. The two-hour debate in Detroit airs on Fox News at 9 p.m. Eastern. Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace return as moderators.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- It seems almost certain that Trump will win Michigan next Tuesday. He leads by 10 points in a new poll from the Detroit Free Press, with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tied just under 20 percent. \u201cTrump\u2019s going to win Michigan,\u201d John Weaver, the chief strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, said as his candidate talked to 150 voters at a Ukrainian cultural center. \u201cHe\u2019s around 35 percent, and nobody\u2019s going to catch him. And you\u2019ve got some economic angst here, which he preys on.\u201d (David Weigel and Steve Friess report from the ground that Trump\u2019s message resonates in an industrial state with a large working class battered by economic stagnation. Their story is here.)\u00a0-- To be sure: Trump can still be stopped. Just like someone working through the stages of a grief after breaking up with a significant other sometimes gets back together with their ex. The Donald does NOT have a lock on the nomination, but he is the front-runner and still has momentum (despite the all-out assault). His adversaries in the establishment are now trying to block him from getting the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. That would push an ultimate decision to the Republican National Convention in July.If your plan to win the nomination is a brokered convention, you don't really have a plan\u2014 Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 2, 2016\n\n\n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter.With contributions from Breanne Deppisch (@b_deppy) and Elise Viebeck (@eliseviebeck)\n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- The Justice Department granted immunity to a former State Department staffer who previously worked on Clinton\u2019s private email server. Adam Goldman reports: \u201cThe FBI secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton\u2019s 2008 campaign and set up the server in her New York home in 2009, in exchange for not facing possible criminal charges. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the campaign is \u2018pleased\u2019 that Pagliano, who invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before a congressional panel in September, is cooperating with prosecutors.\u201d-- \u201cAs the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation, agents likely want to interview Clinton and aides about the private server: how it was set up, and whether participants knew [about it]. Clinton\u2019s team described the probe as a security review \u2026 But FBI and Justice Department officials said they\u2019re trying to determine whether a crime was committed. So far, there is no indication that prosecutors have convened a grand jury in the investigation to subpoena testimony or documents.\u201d-- North Korea fired six short-range projectiles into the sea off its east coast, just hours after the U.N. Security Council approved its toughest sanctions against Pyongyang in two decades. The projectiles reportedly flew 60 to 90 miles before landing in the sea, and were seen as a \u201clow level response\u201d to the heightened sanctions, the AP reports. The Security Council\u2019s vote yesterday was unanimous, which signals closer cooperation between the U.S. and China on containing the regime. (Carol Morello and Steven Mufson)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: GOP establishment working through the five stages of grief as Donald Trump trudges to Cleveland (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7083",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/03/03/daily-202-gop-establishment-working-through-the-five-stages-of-grief-as-donald-trump-trudges-to-cleveland/56d7baca981b92a22d64e56c/",
        "text": "Good morning from an Acela train bound for New Haven, Conn. Here\u2019s a preview of the message I\u2019ll deliver later to a seminar at Yale.THE BIG IDEA:WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Republican establishment is not monolithic. Thought leaders from the party\u2019s governing class \u2013 legislators, donors, operatives, think tankers, lobbyists \u2013 are coping in very different ways with Donald Trump\u2019s victories in 10 of the first 15 nominating contests. It is remarkable how much of the reaction to the Super Tuesday results fits neatly into Elisabeth Kubler-Ross\u2019s five stages of grief. It\u2019s like a psychiatry experiment playing out in real time, except without the approval of an Institutional Review Board.\u00a0It took nine months, but party elites are finally past the denial phase. No one thinks the first-time candidate can be ignored or that he\u2019s someone else\u2019s problem.\u00a0Other than that, they\u2019re all over the place!Step 2 (after denial) is\u00a0ANGER.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome key figures who basically stayed on the sidelines for the past year are now rushing to raise money and get ads up on the air that will drive up Trump\u2019s negatives before the winner-take-all primaries begin on March 15. -- Mitt Romney is not ready to endorse anyone yet, and associates say he\u2019s not going to jump into the race, but he\u2019ll deliver a high-profile speech at the University of Utah today decrying Trump and warning his 2012 supporters that it would be dangerous to nominate him.Trump attacked the \"failed\" candidate (and misspelled the president's name):Just another desperate move by the man who should have easily beaten Barrack Obama. (2/2)\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 2, 2016\n\nHe also released a video mocking Romney:Republican frontrunner Donald Trump released an ad attacking Mitt Romney after harsh criticism from the GOP establishment. (Facebook/Donald J. Trump)-- A group of more than 50 conservative foreign policy experts signed onto an open letter, saying Trump\u2019s rhetoric about national security has \u201ccrossed a line\u201d and rendered him unfit for office. \u201cAs Republicans, we are unable to support a party ticket with Trump at its head,\u201d says the letter, which hits Trump on everything from his nonchalance about torture to his anti-Muslim rhetoric. \u201cWe commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent [his] election.\u201d (Thomas Gibbons-Neff has a list of who signed the letter.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker became the latest prominent Republican to say he cannot vote for Trump in November. (Boston Globe)Step 3 is\u00a0BARGAINING.-- The establishment is also trying to make the case that they totally get the anger that\u2019s out there, and that they\u2019ll adjust to tap into what Trump represents. John Kasich had plane trouble, so he couldn\u2019t fly from New York to Michigan and he phoned into an event yesterday in Ann Arbor. His comments were emblematic: \u201cTo be honest with you, I do understand a lot of the appeal of Donald Trump because people are frustrated,\" he said, per the Ann Arbor News.\u00a0Kasich then reiterated his promise not to get out of the race until after Ohio, at the earliest, on Hugh Hewitt\u2019s radio show. Asked if he\u2019s a spoiler for Rubio, the governor replied: \u201cThey won some caucus somewhere. Where was it, Minnesota or something?\u201d The comments underscore the degree to which the field will stay splintered, despite abstract calls for unity.Step 4 is DEPRESSION.\u201cDespite some vague talk of rallying around a Trump alternative, Capitol Hill Republicans said Wednesday that no such effort is afoot and that anyone in Washington trying to execute such a plan was on a fool\u2019s errand,\u201d reports congressional correspondent Paul Kane.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the reasons there\u2019s not a whole lot of pressure to do something here is there\u2019s a general sense that\u2019s there\u2019s probably not a whole lot you can do,\u201d said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), a member of the leadership facing re-election in the fall. \u201cNobody thinks our involvement is particularly helpful, as it might\u2019ve once been.\u201d\u201cIf you don\u2019t see a donor rush, it\u2019s because people are seeing what I\u2019m seeing: Show me how Trump can be beaten,\u201d said Al Cardenas, a Miami-based lobbyist who backed Jeb Bush and is holding off on becoming a bundler for Rubio. For now, Cardenas told Ed O\u2019Keefe, \u201cI\u2019m off the grid. I put my heart and soul into helping Jeb and I\u2019m just not ready to get back into this thing anytime soon. I might. I\u2019m just not making that decision today.\u201dMike Murphy, who ran the pro-Bush super PAC, said the Trump \u201ctrain may have left the station.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t want to be a critic of what\u2019s being tried, but after millions of dollars in ads, it\u2019s more important to narrow the field than to air more ads against him,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEric Fehrnstrom, a former senior adviser to Romney, said it has become almost \u201cimpossible for (Trump\u2019s) opponents to catch up to him.\u201d (Both Mike and Eric are quoted in a meaty front-page story today on the GOP being in \u201ca state of pandemonium\u201d by my colleagues Matea Gold, Philip Rucker and Tom Hamburger.)Step 5 is ACCEPTANCE.Alex Castellanos, the legendary ad man, last year tried unsuccessfully to raise money for an anti-Trump advertising effort. Yesterday he called on the party to rally around Trump. \u201cA fantasy effort to stop Trump...exists only as the denial stage of grief,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cTrump has earned the nomination,\u201d Castellanos emailed The Post yesterday. \u201cTrump whipped the establishment and it is too late for the limp GOP establishment to ask their mommy to step in and rewrite the rules because they were humiliated for their impotence.\u201d (Read more choice quotes in a story by Matea Gold and Tom Hamburger here.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilliam J. Bennett, a former Reagan education secretary, similarly said he cannot support the anti-Trump movement. \u201cI\u2019m used to being the moral scold, but Trump is winning fair and square, so why should the nomination be grabbed from him?\u201d asked Bennett, now a conservative radio host, per Robert Costa. \u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to get white working-class people into the party for a long time. Now they\u2019re here in huge numbers because of Trump and we\u2019re going to alienate them? I don\u2019t get it. Too many people are on their high horse.\u201dEconomist Stephen Moore, a former member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, said he is considering an endorsement: \u201cFor me, Trump potentially represents a big expansion of the Republican Party, a way to bring in those blue-collar Reagan Democrats.\u201dAnd Ben Ginsberg, the veteran lawyer who knows the ins-and-outs of RNC rules as well as anyone, declared the chances are good that Trump will win the nomination outright. He told Greg Sargent that a contested convention wresting the nomination from Trump is unlikely. \u201cThe odds are still pretty long that we\u2019ll get to a contested convention,\u201d Ginsberg said. \u201cThe history of Republican primaries is that Trump as the front-runner with the delegates he\u2019s won is going to get a majority of the delegates.\u201d-- Against this backdrop: The Republicans debate for the 11th time tonight. The two-hour debate in Detroit airs on Fox News at 9 p.m. Eastern. Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace return as moderators.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- It seems almost certain that Trump will win Michigan next Tuesday. He leads by 10 points in a new poll from the Detroit Free Press, with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tied just under 20 percent. \u201cTrump\u2019s going to win Michigan,\u201d John Weaver, the chief strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, said as his candidate talked to 150 voters at a Ukrainian cultural center. \u201cHe\u2019s around 35 percent, and nobody\u2019s going to catch him. And you\u2019ve got some economic angst here, which he preys on.\u201d (David Weigel and Steve Friess report from the ground that Trump\u2019s message resonates in an industrial state with a large working class battered by economic stagnation. Their story is here.)\u00a0-- To be sure: Trump can still be stopped. Just like someone working through the stages of a grief after breaking up with a significant other sometimes gets back together with their ex. The Donald does NOT have a lock on the nomination, but he is the front-runner and still has momentum (despite the all-out assault). His adversaries in the establishment are now trying to block him from getting the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. That would push an ultimate decision to the Republican National Convention in July.If your plan to win the nomination is a brokered convention, you don't really have a plan\u2014 Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 2, 2016\n\n\n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter.With contributions from Breanne Deppisch (@b_deppy) and Elise Viebeck (@eliseviebeck)\n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- The Justice Department granted immunity to a former State Department staffer who previously worked on Clinton\u2019s private email server. Adam Goldman reports: \u201cThe FBI secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton\u2019s 2008 campaign and set up the server in her New York home in 2009, in exchange for not facing possible criminal charges. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the campaign is \u2018pleased\u2019 that Pagliano, who invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before a congressional panel in September, is cooperating with prosecutors.\u201d-- \u201cAs the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation, agents likely want to interview Clinton and aides about the private server: how it was set up, and whether participants knew [about it]. Clinton\u2019s team described the probe as a security review \u2026 But FBI and Justice Department officials said they\u2019re trying to determine whether a crime was committed. So far, there is no indication that prosecutors have convened a grand jury in the investigation to subpoena testimony or documents.\u201d-- North Korea fired six short-range projectiles into the sea off its east coast, just hours after the U.N. Security Council approved its toughest sanctions against Pyongyang in two decades. The projectiles reportedly flew 60 to 90 miles before landing in the sea, and were seen as a \u201clow level response\u201d to the heightened sanctions, the AP reports. The Security Council\u2019s vote yesterday was unanimous, which signals closer cooperation between the U.S. and China on containing the regime. (Carol Morello and Steven Mufson)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Finance 202: The lobbying war on tax overhaul has commenced (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7084",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2017/09/29/the-finance-202-the-lobbying-war-on-tax-overhaul-has-commenced/59cdb3e530fb0468cea81c98/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWant the inside story of how Trump and Republicans try to rewrite the tax code? Get it every day.Republicans have been riding high since the rollout of a tax framework was judged by themselves\u00a0as a success. But in reality it's all uphill from here: finding money to pay for the most sweeping rewrite of the tax code in a generation.\u00a0 And the GOP is already facing pressure from on and off Capitol Hill to back off the few deductions it has identified as likely funding sources.\u00a0The blueprint was light on details, particularly when it comes to how Republicans propose picking up the tab, which an early estimate says tips the scales at $5.8 trillion.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementOne potential gusher of new funding \u2014 scrapping the deduction for what businesses spend on interest \u2014\u00a0is generating the early makings of a lobbying war. The break is treasured by industries that rely on debt financing, a group that includes big banks and private equity firms, but also electric utilities, real estate developers, farms and small businesses.\u00a0AdvertisementRepealing it could yield as much as $1.5 trillion, so it also has become a juicy target for tax-writers. But with great money comes great political resistance. Armies of lobbyists from those that stand to get pinched are assembling, knives sharpened, to demand carve-outs. And there are some early signals that some Republican lawmakers\u00a0are willing to help.\u00a0Rep. Jim Renacci, a wealthy auto dealer and House Ways and Means Committee member, tells me the deduction on interest\u00a0for debt is a \u201cnormal and necessary operating expense\u201d that businesses need so they can continue to borrow at reasonable rates to invest and grow.The Ohio Republican says the final tax plan will carve out small businesses from a repeal of the interest deduction. The question is how small businesses are defined. \u201cI was just talking to some car dealers in there. They rely on interest to inventory their cars. I\u2019m sure if you\u2019re a dealer of farm equipment, you rely on interest to inventory your farm vehicle,\u201d he said Wednesday after stepping off the House floor. \u201cI\u2019m happy to see we\u2019re making an exception. Now I need to see whether the exception is something that works or not.\u201dHouse Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) has invoked the possibility of a carve-out for corporate debt, too. And one for farmers and ranchers. And land purchases.\u00a0And regulated utilities\u00a0(The Edison Electric Institute, representing electric companies, \"will continue to\u00a0educate policymakers on the unique nature of our industry as this process moves forward,\" spokesman Jeff Ostermayer says).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBanks of all sizes are still looking to limit any squeeze on the deduction, which effectively subsidizes their ability to provide capital to businesses. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to focus on it and make sure that we protect the interest deduction as much as we can, particularly for the small-business community,\u201d says John Hand, a top lobbyist for the Independent Community Bankers of America. In a statement of its tax principles, the American Bankers Association adds, \"Limiting the ability of borrowers to deduct their interest expense could adversely impact economic growth.\"It\u2019s not clear how much revenue the provision can yield once tax-writers are done carving it up.\u00a0Ditto for the other major pay-for that Republicans named in the blueprint: repealing the individual deduction for state and local taxes. As the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Richard Rubin and Siobhan Hughes report:\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFaced with the potential for defections by House Republicans from high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey, Republicans are exploring ways to satisfy those lawmakers without backing off the lower tax rates they promised. \n\u201cThe members with concerns from high-tax states have to be accommodated. This has to be dealt with,\u201d said Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.), a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee whose district outside Chicago ranks 37th out of 435 in use of the deduction. \u201cSo, you can imagine a soft landing on this that creative people are putting much time and energy into.\u201d \nThe fight over the state and local deduction, with more than $1 trillion at stake over a decade, is an early signal of the bruising battle ahead for Republicans trying to pass a tax bill that hasn\u2019t garnered Democratic support and that faces narrow GOP margins in the House and Senate. It is the most obvious case of a bloc of pivotal lawmakers holding a specific concern, but it won\u2019t be the only one.More, on the insta-opposition\u00a0arising from K Street, via The New York Times' Alan Rapaport and Thomas Kaplan:\u00a0Opposition from the real estate industry was swift and vocal, with trade groups strongly criticizing elements of the plan that they say will make home-buying less attractive and weaken the housing market. While the plan specifically calls for preserving the mortgage interest deduction, real estate agents are warning that a proposal to double the standard deduction will make taxpayers less likely to itemize their tax returns and claim the mortgage deduction.Republicans started with the dessert course by focusing their framework on the lowered rates they aim to achieve. They\u2019ll spend the rest of the year trying to choke down their vegetables.\u00a0 \n \n \n You are reading The Finance 202, our must-read tipsheet on where Wall Street meets Washington. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n MARKET MOVERS\nTAX FLY-AROUND:\u00a0\u2014 Oof. Gary Cohn can't guarantee taxes won't go up for some in the middle class. Via ABC News:\u00a0\"There's an exception to every rule,\" Cohn told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview on \"Good Morning America. \"I can't guarantee anything,\" said Cohn, the director of the White House Economic Council. \"You can always find a unique family somewhere.\" He said Trump's plan is \"purely aimed at middle-class families.\" But Cohn acknowledged that \"it depends which state you live in.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementExperts say it's tough to tell.\u00a0The Post's Carolyn Y. Johnson: \"Critics said that glaring omissions from the plan released Wednesday make it hard to tell whether middle-class families would fare better or worse, but they predicted that once the blanks were filled in, the effects were likely to be a modest cut with some winners and losers. People who itemize deductions on their tax returns and live in high-tax states, for example, may lose a valuable deduction in their state and local taxes.\"Trump, meanwhile, could save more than $1 billion, according to The New York Times' Jesse Drucker and Jadja Popovich.\u00a0\u2014 Cohn also said a tax cut will pay for itself. CNBC's Jeff Cox: \"Cohn said the cuts won't increase the budget deficit. 'We think we can drive a lot of business back to America, we can drive jobs back to America, we can make ourselves very competitive,' Cohn told CNBC in a live interview. 'We think we can pay for the entire tax cut through growth over the cycle.'\u00a0Cohn predicted that economic growth would be 'substantially over 3 percent'\u00a0due to tax reform and deregulation.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFormer Reagan adviser turned Never Trumper Bruce Bartlett disagrees: \"I helped create the GOP tax myth. Trump is wrong: Tax cuts don\u2019t equal growth,\" he writes for the hometown paper.\u00a0\u2014 Still more Cohn: \"No room to negotiate\" 20 percent corporate rate. He called it a \"bright-line test\" for the White House, via CNBC.\u00a0\u2014 Mnuchin calls Trump's prediction of 6 percent growth \"optimistic.\" That's one word for it. The Atlantic's Gillian B. White: \"Instead, he said he expected growth closer to the lower end of projections, at between 2.9 percent and 3.2 percent annually over 10 years, later emphasizing that he was \u201cvery comfortable that we can get to higher than 3 percent.\u201d Most economists think predictions that fall in the range Mnuchin originally cited are reasonable, but even 4 percent growth is considered quite high.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014 Treasury removes paper that disagreed with Mnuchin's tax analysis. Richard Rubin reports: \"The Treasury Department has taken down a 2012 economic analysis that contradicts Secretary Steven Mnuchin\u2019s argument that workers would benefit the most from a corporate income tax cut. The 2012 paper from the Office of Tax Analysis found that workers pay 18% of the corporate tax while owners of capital pay 82%. That is a breakdown in line with many economists\u2019 views and close to estimates from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office. The JCT, which will evaluate tax bills in Congress, estimates that capital bears 75% of the long-run corporate-tax burden, with labor paying the rest.But Mr. Mnuchin has been arguing the opposite, citing other papers that attribute more of the burden to labor. The point is central to Mr. Mnuchin\u2019s argument that workers would benefit from the corporate tax cut the administration is proposing, and switching that assumption would significantly alter the estimates of who would benefit from the Republican tax policy framework released on Wednesday.\"Dollar rally falters, global stocks rise with taxes in focus (Reuters)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementU.S. jobless claims increase more than expected (Reuters)\n POCKET CHANGE\n\u2014 Elon Musk's Mars vision:\u00a0A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One. The New York Times' Adam Baidawi and Kenneth Chang: \"Elon Musk is revising his ambitions for sending people to Mars, and he says he now has a clearer picture of how his company, SpaceX, can make money along the way. The key is a new rocket \u2014 smaller than the one he described at a conference in Mexico last year but still bigger than anything ever launched \u2014 and a new spaceship.\u2014 Kellogg CEO steps down. The Wall Street Journal's\u00a0Annie Gasparro and\u00a0Joann S. Lublin: \"Kellogg Co. chose an outsider as its new chief executive, becoming the fifth major food and beverage company to name a new leader in a tumultuous year for the industry. Steven Cahillane, the 52-year-old CEO of health-and-wellness company Nature\u2019s Bounty Co. and a former Coca-Cola Co. executive, will succeed Kellogg CEO John Bryant next week.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014 Because it's Friday: Read what a bunch of third graders have to say about the state of the world. Britt Peterson, for The Post: \"It can be tough to know exactly how the next generation is processing this difficult, tense era in our country\u2019s history. Toward the end of last school year, we decided to go directly to the source and have Washington third-graders narrate some of the biggest questions of this political moment in their own voices.\"\n TRUMP TRACKER\nRUSSIA WATCH:\u00a0\u2014 Kushner didn't disclose private email to Senate intel\u00a0panel. CNN's Jake Tapper: \"In his closed interview with the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner did not share the existence of his personal email account, which he has used for official business, CNN has learned.CNN has also learned that the chair and vice chair of the committee were so unhappy that they learned about the existence of his personal email account via news reports that they wrote him a letter via his attorney Thursday instructing him to double-check that he has turned over every relevant document to the committee including those from his 'personal email account' described to the news media, as well as all other email accounts, messaging apps, or similar communications channels you may have used, or that may contain information relevant to our inquiry.\"\u2014 The White House has launched an internal probe to look into the use of private email accounts, Politico reports.\u00a0\u2014 Senate intel invites tech chiefs for open hearing. The Post's Karoun Demirjian reports that the panel has asked\u00a0Facebook, Twitter and Google to testify \"as part of the panel\u2019s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to a senate aide. The hearing, which is set to take place on Nov. 1, is expected to be the second time the tech companies\u2019 executives will speak with the committee. Committee investigators have already conducted a closed-door interview with Facebook and are planning another with Twitter executives on Thursday; the committee is planning to speak with representatives of Google before the open hearing as well.\"One potential topic: \"Twitter said Thursday that it had shut down 201 accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads on Facebook, but the effort frustrated lawmakers who said the problem is far broader than the company appeared to know. The company said it also found three accounts from the news site RT \u2014 which Twitter linked to the Kremlin \u2014 that spent $274,100 in ads on its platform in 2016.\" Karoun,\u00a0Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Adam Entous report.\u00a0\u2014 Jon Huntsman confirmed as ambassador to Russia. Karoun reports that the former Utah governor will fill \"a critical diplomatic vacancy at a time of heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow.\"Tom Price apologizes for private-charter flights, pledges to repay taxpayers nearly $52,000 (Juliet Eilperin)How the Trump Administration Is Doing Renegotiating Nafta (New York Times)Trump Prepares to Pick His Own Auditor at the IRS (Bloomberg)\n MONEY ON THE HILL\n\u2014 Congress passes tax relief for hurricane relief, FAA extension. USA Today's Herb Jackson: \"The House and Senate approved reduced taxes for victims of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria on Thursday over the objections of some Democrats who said Superstorm Sandy victims did not get the same treatment. The tax provisions were combined with a bill both parties wanted to pass to extend through March the authorization for the Federal Aviation Administration, which is due to expire Saturday night.\"\u2014 Senate Dems push $500 billion in infrastructure. The Post's Ashley Halsey: \"Senate Democrats, emboldened by the GOP\u2019s failure to unilaterally pass a health-care bill, are launching an effort to win bipartisan support for the investment of $500 billion in taxpayer dollars in infrastructure improvements. With health-care changes at a standstill and tax reform \u2014 another objective on which Republicans campaigned last year \u2014 a complex project that is expected to take months, Democrats hope infrastructure spending will emerge as a desirable legislative win for Congress and the White House.The Democratic push came in a week when President Trump appeared to acknowledge that his campaign promise to raise $1 trillion for infrastructure largely through private-sector investment was not feasible.\"And Democrats want to spend $40 billion to bring high-speed Internet to rural America. The Post's Brian Fung: \"The proposal, unveiled Thursday, would have Internet providers compete for the right to build out the networks. Also local governments and cooperatives would be eligible for funding, according to a party white paper on the matter.\"A moderate GOP exodus? Possibly, but not yet. (Aaron Blake and Kevin Uhrmacher)\n THE REGULATORS\n\u2014 AIG getting sprung? Bloomberg's Jesse Hamilton: \"U.S. regulators are planning to release American International Group Inc. from the special government oversight ordered for the insurer after its central role in the 2008 financial crisis, according to people familiar with the discussions.The Financial Stability Oversight Council called an unusual last-minute meeting Friday to re-evaluate 'the designation of a nonbank financial company,'\u00a0it said late Thursday. While AIG isn\u2019t named in the statement, two people familiar with the discussions said the council has been working toward releasing AIG from its label as a systemically important financial institution. One of the people said Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is expected to tip the balance of votes to allow the company\u2019s exit.\"CapAlpha's Ian Katz weighs in on what's likely going on: \"FSOC Chairman [Mnuchin] needs at least one Obama-appointed regulator -- and possibly two -- to agree to rescind the AIG designation. We noted\u00a0last week that Fed Chair Janet Yellen, in her press conference, seemed to be open to the possibility. One question is whether that would be enough for the two-thirds needed to de-designate. And that question is a sub-part of another question: How is two-thirds counted if SEC Chair Jay Clayton recuses himself from the vote because of his former law firm\u2019s work with AIG?\"\u2014 Banks get extension on living wills. Reuters's Patrick Rucker: \"Eight of the largest U.S. banks and 82 foreign banks will have an extra year to submit their so-called living wills outlining how they would be unwound in the event of bankruptcy, the Federal Reserve said on Thursday. The extension granted by the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation\u00a0forms part of a broader effort by financial regulators to ease onerous post-crisis regulations under Republican President Donald Trump\u2019s pro-growth agenda.\"\n OPINIONS\nThe Myth of Mitch McConnell, Political Super-Genius (Adam Jentleson, via Politico Magazine)The Never-Trump Triumvirate (Kimberley A. Strassel, via The Wall Street Journal)\n DAYBOOK\nComing UpTreasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will appear on NBC's \"Meet the Press\" on Sunday.\u00a0The American Enterprise Institute holds an event on how \"decade of extreme monetary policy changed the banking system\" on Oct.\u2014 BULLETIN: Daily 202 author James Hohmann interviews OMB Director Mick Mulvaney on Wednesday, Oct. 4 from 10:30-11:30 a.m. at The Washington Post\u2019s headquarters. They\u2019ll talk tax reform, cutting federal regulations \u2013 and more. Click here to RSVP | Click here to watch the live stream\n BULL SESSION\nFact Check: Will the wealthy get a tax cut under President Trump's plan?:The wealthiest Americans pay the largest proportion of taxes. Consequently, any tax cut, unless very carefully tailored, will benefit them. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)Fact Check: President Trump's tax speech in Indianapolis:President Trump announced his tax plan on Sept. 27 in Indianapolis. We fact checked his address. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)Watch Rep. Steve Scalise\u2019s\u00a0 (R-La.) emotional return to the House floor:Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) returned to the House of Representatives on Sept. 28. (U.S. House of Representatives)Understudies, Ep. 1: Obama's other speechwriter:Episode one features David Litt. He is the author of the new memoir \u201cThanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years.\" (Lindsey Sitz/The Washington Post)Stephen Colbert says President Trump's tax plan sets us back $2 trillion:\u00a0 Bankers and some lawmakers want to save break for interest on debt. The Finance 202: The lobbying war on tax overhaul has commenced",
        "author": "Tory Newmyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Republican governors divided on Obamacare replacement (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7085",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/02/28/daily-202-republican-governors-divided-on-obamacare-replacement/58b4e423e9b69b1406c75cfb/",
        "text": "with Breanne DeppischWith Breanne DeppischWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Donald Trump has learned that repealing and replacing Obamacare is \u201can unbelievably complex subject\u201d since he became president. \u201cNobody knew health care could be so complicated,\u201d the president mused to a group of 46 governors at the White House yesterday.Except everyone in his audience has long known exactly how complicated this issue is. Health care eats up a huge chunk of their budgets. Republican chief executives struggled for years with the politically thorny question of whether to take federal money to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of which choice they made, and no matter how much they oppose the underlying law, every governor is now nervous about what exactly Congress might do. Those who didn\u2019t take the money are worried their states will now get short shrift in a replacement plan, and those who have expanded the rolls fear that the federal government is about to leave them in the\u00a0lurch by not providing enough money to pay for the entitlement they expanded. States that have expanded Medicaid are also concerned about per-capita caps and cutting eligibility levels, among other things.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe differing priorities of the expansion states and the non-expansion states make it very difficult for the GOP\u2019s gubernatorial wing to present a unified front. This divide carries over to Congress, as well: About half of the Republicans in the House hail from states that expanded Medicaid.As Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), a former hospital executive who didn\u2019t take the money, puts it: \u201cYou can\u2019t treat my state worse than an expansion state.\u201d States that\u00a0did not expand Medicaid, he told\u00a0the president during multiple meetings this weekend,\u00a0should receive financial compensation and additional flexibility. \n Gov. Rick Snyder, on the other side of the debate, carries around a stack of fact sheets that list how his decision to expand Medicaid has directly benefited Michiganders. \u201cLiterally we\u2019ve saved lives,\u201d he said. \n The Republican former head of Gateway Computers is an earnest technocrat who has often bristled at the ideologues in his party since he took office seven years ago. A certified public accountant by training, he remains more of a numbers guy than a politician. Since the inauguration last month, he has been in close touch with fellow expansion-state governors. \n \u201cI have no interest of being left with the bag on something that just isn\u2019t going to work,\u201d Snyder explained during an extended interview. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t give myself a block grant. We need to be held accountable. \u2026 Many are looking at this as a static question: How much money are we going to get? Is it a block grant or per capita? The real question is: What escalator would you use for future years to address the fact that you have this huge inflationary cost cycle? Fundamentally, a lot of people are skipping over that. I\u2019m worried to death about that. \u2026 You could reach collapse fairly quickly if you don\u2019t fundamentally move the [cost]\u00a0curve. We need to have a very thoughtful discussion about what that means. \u2026 I am willing to live with something less than medical inflation \u2026 but you\u2019ve got to give me some fair metrics and flexibility to do that.\u201d \n An independent analysis prepared for the nonpartisan National Governors Association has further elevated concerns among this crowd.\u00a0The 36-page document, a copy of which was obtained by Dan Balz, concluded that changes being floated by the House Republican leadership could significantly reduce the number of Americans with health insurance and potentially cost states billions of dollars over five years. The report from the consulting firm Avalere Health, presented during a closed-door meeting at the J.W. Marriott on Saturday, said that caps on Medicaid spending would probably result in state funding gaps and that future reductions in federal funding \u201cmay lead to cuts in eligibility, benefits or payment rates.\u201d The report\u2019s analysis of the individual marketplace examined the effect of shifting from the current system of income-based tax credits to age-based credits. \u201cA hypothetical expansion state with 300,000 people using the individual markets could see a 30-percent decline in the number of people insured and 90,000 more people without insurance,\u201d Balz explains. \u201cStates that did not expand Medicaid could see a 50 percent decline in coverage.\" \n \n Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R), meanwhile, says expanding Medicaid \u201chas been very beneficial to my state.\u201d He is apprehensive about per-capita caps being discussed by key Republicans in Congress, which have support from other governors. \u201cHow do you benchmark that? Nevada is one of the fastest-growing states in the country, so if you\u2019re going to benchmark me three years ago, that\u2019s going to punish Nevada,\u201d he explained. \n Without giving specifics, Sandoval said he received certain assurances from senior administration officials. But, he added, \u201cOf course I\u2019m concerned. \u2026 It works both ways. \u2026 Depending on the formula, you don\u2019t want to penalize those that chose not to expand, but at the same time you don\u2019t want to penalize states like mine.\u201d \n Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who did not expand Medicaid, is much more supportive of per-capita caps and block grants than someone like Sandoval. He notes that he has the youngest population on average of any state, so his health-care costs are much lower than next-door Arizona, which is home to many retirees. \u201cWe have a different need for health care than if you\u2019re in Arizona,\u201d said Herbert (R). \u201cMaybe that\u2019s going to be an impossibility, but at least let\u2019s get as close to fairness as we can.\u201d \nThe conversation among the governors comes as conservatives in both chambers of Congress rebel against a draft replacement plan being considered by House leaders that leaked out last week. Because Republicans have only 52 seats in the Senate, three defections can kill anything. So it was meaningful last night when GOP Sens. Rand Paul (ky.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) said they would not support the current House plan because it preserves too much of the Affordable Care Act.2 yrs ago, the GOP Congress voted to repeal Obamacare. That 2015 repeal language should be the floor, the bare minimum. #FullRepeal\u2014 Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) February 28, 2017\n\nThe leaders of the very conservative House Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), and the Republican Study Committee, Mark Walker (R-N.C.), also both came out against that plan yesterday. They don\u2019t like refundable tax credits included in the draft, which they see as a new entitlement program and Obamacare Lite.I support my friends @RandPaul, @SenMikeLee, and @tedcruz. Every tax, every mandate, every regulation of #Obamacare needs to go. https://t.co/zdlxLYRrqF\u2014 Mark Meadows (@MarkMeadows) February 28, 2017\n\nModerates, though, have made clear that they cannot get on board with only a straight repeal of Obamacare. A critical mass of lawmakers says a replacement needs to be in place first.\u00a0Trump included expanded savings accounts and the ability to purchase healthcare across state lines as parts of a new healthcare proposal to replace the ACA. (The Washington Post)Perhaps most significantly, top White House aides are increasingly divided over how much political capital to spend on health care. Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein have an inside look at the two camps:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSeveral people in Trump\u2019s orbit are eager to make bold changes to reduce the government\u2019s role in the health-care system. That camp includes Vice President Pence \u2026 as well as Domestic Policy Council aides Andrew Bremberg and Katy Talento and National Economic Council aide Brian ",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: With Obamacare repeal, Republicans are trying to accomplish something that\u2019s never been done (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7086",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/03/13/daily-202-with-obamacare-repeal-republicans-are-trying-to-accomplish-something-that-s-never-been-done/58c5e5fbe9b69b1406c75d60/",
        "text": "with Breanne DeppischWith Breanne DeppischWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Congress has never reversed a major program of social benefits once it has taken effect and reached millions of Americans. Many have tried, but no precedent or roadmap exists for Republicans as they press ahead with the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act, which passed with not a single Republican vote in either chamber, ushered in the most significant expansion of insurance coverage since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. Eleven million additional people joined the Medicaid rolls after the ACA allowed states to expand their programs to cover people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which means the system now covers 68 million people.Conservatives fought so hard to stop the ACA from getting through in the first place because they understood just how hard it would be to claw back, no matter how problematic or expensive the law turned out to be. Their fears are now coming to fruition, as the debate over Medicaid\u2019s future increasingly threatens to imperil the House GOP bill.-- Republicans have been in similar positions before. After Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security, leading Republicans ran on repealing the system, which they saw as an un-American redistribution of wealth. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower finally brought the GOP out of the wilderness after two decades by embracing the idea of Social Security and promising to keep other New Deal programs intact. Barry Goldwater famously attacked Eisenhower for offering \u201ca dime store New Deal\u201d when he proposed government medical care for the elderly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIke eventually wound up expanding Social Security eligibility. \u201cShould any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history,\u201d the president mused in a letter to his brother about the risks of taking away benefits that people have become accustomed to.Richard Nixon, a Big Government Republican who had been Eisenhower\u2019s vice president, never waged a frontal assault on Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Great Society programs, which included Medicare and Medicaid, because he had no stomach for the political risk. Neither did Gerald Ford.Ronald Reagan spoke out against Medicare in the 1960s but changed his tune by the 1980 campaign. The year he took office, he tried to reduce early retirement benefits for Social Security. But he backed off from that under public pressure.George W. Bush\u2019s inability to reform Social Security in 2005, fresh off a commanding reelection victory, is a more recent reminder of how hard it is to tinker with the safety net \u2014\u00a0even on the margins.-- Donald Trump recognized all of this intuitively as he ran for office. That\u2019s why he repeatedly promised during his campaign, including in his announcement speech, to never undercut Medicaid. \u201cI\u2019m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I\u2019m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,\u201d he said in 2015.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Columnist Charles Krauthammer is one of the conservative intellectuals who repeatedly made the point in 2010 that Obamacare could never be undone once it went into effect. \u201cYou cannot retract an entitlement once it's been granted,\u201d he explained last week, describing this as the \"genius\" of the left.Krauthammer now agrees with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that the House GOP plan is \u201cObamacare Lite,\u201d but he supports it anyway because he believes it is the best conservatives can hope for. \"I'm willing to admit it. Paul Ryan is not,\" Krauthammer told Bret Baier on Fox News last week. \"Get it while you can, and worry about the rest later.\u201d-- To be sure, just because something is hard and hasn\u2019t been done before doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not worth doing\u2026.Story continues below advertisement-- It also does not mean that Republican leaders will fail. Trump has political capital, and he\u2019s willing to spend it. Ryan (R-Wis.) believes that this fight will define his legacy as House speaker. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recognizes that a promise has been made to the conservative base over the past four election cycles, and he fears the fallout of breaking it. The Senate majority leader is up for reelection in 2020 and could face a primary challenge.-- But this weekend offered numerous illustrations, big and small, of the politically-perilous path ahead for the GOP:-- The number of Republican senators who said they won\u2019t vote for the House bill as presently constituted continues to rise.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDean Heller of Nevada, the only Republican senator who is up for reelection next year in a state Hillary Clinton won, said he worries that Ryan\u2019s bill will hurt seniors and the poor. More significantly, he declared that he sees health care as a fundamental right \u2014\u00a0a principle that conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus explicitly reject. \u201cDo I believe that all Americans should have access to health care? Absolutely, I do,\u201d he said in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. \u201cNot everything in the Affordable Care Act is bad. As we move forward and take a look at some of these changes and what\u2019s occurring, I think we ought to embrace what\u2019s good in the Affordable Care Act.\u201d (Politico\u2019s Burgess Everett obtained the audio of an event his staff closed to the press.)Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) warned House Republicans in dire terms not to risk their political careers on something that\u2019s bound to fail. \u201cDo not walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate and then have to face the consequences of that vote,\u201d he said on ABC\u2019s \u201cThis Week.\u201d \"I'm afraid that if they vote for this bill, they're going to put the House majority at risk next year.\"\u201cHe will not have the votes,\u201d Rand Paul added on CBS\u2019s \u201cFace the Nation.\u201d \u201cEverybody is being nice to everybody because they want us to vote for this, but we\u2019re not going to vote for it.\u201d-- John Kasich, one of more than a dozen Republican governors leading states that have accepted the Medicaid expansion, warned in ominous terms against the House bill. \"When you jam something through, just one party over another, it's not sustainable,\" the Ohioan said. \u201cWe're talking about lives. ... We better be careful we're not losing the soul of our country because we're playing politics.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d Chuck Todd played a clip from an interview Mike Pence gave to a local TV affiliate in Kasich\u2019s state. \u201cI'm very confident that this legislation will give Ohio both the resources and the flexibility that your governor, your legislature will need to be able to meet those needs going forward and literally offer our most vulnerable citizens even better coverage,\u201d the vice president said.\u201cIs he right?\u201d Chuck asked.\u201cNo, he's not right,\u201d Kasich replied. \u201cFirst of all, Medicaid expansion has covered 700,000 people in my state, a big chunk of whom are mentally ill and drug addicted and have chronic diseases. \u2026 If chronically ill, you\u2019re going to have to have consistent coverage. Under this bill you don\u2019t have it.\u201d-- Over three hours on Saturday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) continued to distance himself from Trump. After barely winning reelection in his suburban San Diego district because of backlash against Trump, he declared in his opening statement at a community meeting: \u201cI do not work for the executive branch. I investigated the Obama administration. I also investigated the Bush administration.\u201d Later, he said: \u201cI\u2019m going to be with Trump sometimes, against him sometimes.\u201d Tony Perry, who was in Oceanside for us, notes that no one asked Issa about local issues, not even about a recent deployment of Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton to Syria: \u201cThat suggests that the electorate is primed to turn the 2018 election into a referendum on Trump.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIssa\u2019s longtime former spokesman decried the Ryan plan last night:This isn't a #healthcare plan - it's a tax cut for the rich masquerading as an #obamacare repeal - all should oppose https://t.co/zTvcaoloOV\u2014 Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) March 13, 2017\n\nAnyone promoting the #GOP \"healthcare\" plan pic.twitter.com/Gba7vAlf4R\u2014 Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) March 13, 2017\n\n-- The press coverage continues to be overwhelmingly unfavorable to the House bill:The front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times is: \u201cTrump voters would be among the biggest losers in Republicans' Obamacare replacement plan.\u201d \u201cAmong those hit the hardest under the current House bill are 60-year-olds with annual incomes of $30,000, particularly in rural areas where healthcare costs are higher and Obamacare subsidies are greater,\u201d Noam Levey writes. \u201cIn nearly 1,500 counties nationwide, such a person stands to lose more than $6,000 a year in federal insurance subsidies. Ninety percent of those counties backed Trump. And 68 of the 70 counties where these consumers would suffer the largest losses supported Trump in November\u2026Story continues below advertisement\u201cMost affected by the Republican health plan would be parts of Alaska, Arizona, Nebraska, Tennessee and Oklahoma, where Obamacare insurance subsidies have been crucial in making high-priced insurance affordable. All five states went for Trump. Also hit hard would be parts of key swing states that backed Trump, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan\u2026\u201cMeanwhile, higher-income, younger Americans \u2014 many of whom live in urban areas won by Hillary Clinton \u2014 stand to get more assistance in the Republican legislation.\u201dHumanizing the consequences: The Post ran a lengthy feature on Sunday\u2019s front page from a health clinic in McDowell County, West Virginia, which Trump carried with 74 percent and which has the shortest life expectancy of any county in the nation. Many supporters of the president who are now able to see a doctor there because of the Medicaid expansion simply wouldn\u2019t be able to afford the care they now receive under the House plan. (Jessica Contrera has more.)Advertisement-- Unpopular elements of the Ryan plan are also getting additional scrutiny from health care reporters: \u201cEmployers could impose hefty penalties on employees who decline to participate in genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs,\u201d Lena Sun reports, to cite just one example. \u201cIn general, employers don't have that power under existing federal laws, which protect genetic privacy and nondiscrimination.\u201d-- There are hospitals in every congressional district, and they are mobilizing in a concerted way against Ryan\u2019s plan. \u201cAll of the major hospital groups, including the American Hospital Association and those representing children's hospitals and psychiatric hospitals, came out against the new legislation,\u201d USA Today notes this morning.-- Driving the week: The Congressional Budget Office\u2019s estimate of how much the bill will cost and how many will lose coverage is scheduled to land as early as today. Everyone knows that its\u00a0report will predict that millions of people would no longer have insurance. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRepublican leaders are trying to preempt that by diminishing the CBO\u2019s credibility, even though the office is led by an economist who was hand-picked by Republicans. \u201cI love the folks at the CBO,\u201d OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said Sunday on \u201cThis Week.\u201d \u201cBut sometimes we ask them to do things they\u2019re not capable of doing, and estimating the impact of a bill of this size probably isn\u2019t the best use of their time.\u201dIn fact, this is exactly what Congress created the CBO to do....The former OMB and CBO director in me is speechless. https://t.co/tPTmabqgna\u2014 Peter Orszag (@porszag) March 12, 2017\n\n-- Other administration officials, meanwhile, continue to make promises that experts agree they will not be able to keep:Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said yesterday that \u201cnobody will be worse off financially\u201d under the House bill. \"Success,\u201d he said, \u201cmeans more people covered than are covered right now, and at an average cost that is less.\u201dGary Cohn, chief economic adviser to President Trump, insisted on Fox News Sunday: \u201cIf you\u2019re on Medicaid, you\u2019re going to stay on Medicaid.\u201d-- To keep up the drumbeat for action, Trump will have a meeting \u201cwith victims of Obamacare\u201d in the White House Roosevelt Room later this morning \u201cto hear their stories.\u201d\u00a0-- Paul Ryan has tried to be more cautious than Trump and administration surrogates when it comes to making promises that could come back to haunt him down the road. Asked on \u201cFace the Nation\u201d yesterday how many will lose coverage under the House plan, the speaker said he cannot answer because it\u2019s up to people whether they pay for insurance or not. That prompted criticism.AdvertisementRyan made clear, though, that he gets the magnitude of the undertaking. Noting that the House bill caps Medicaid\u2019s growth, he boasted: \u201cThis is the most historic entitlement reform we have ever had!\u201d\n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:--\u00a0In D.C., much of Monday will be quiet and chilly before a siege of snow and wintry mix tonight. Here\u2019s the latest Capital Weather Gang forecast: \u201cToday we brace for a major late-winter storm set to begin this evening and continue into Tuesday. Depending on where you live, moderate to heavy amounts of snow could fall or a sloppy mix of snow, sleet and rain. The heaviest snowfall is expected to occur in our far western and northern areas, but the storm will likely will prove disruptive for much of the region through at least Tuesday morning. We want to stress that this forecast is extremely complex and we have lower confidence in predicted snow amounts than usual. This is especially true along and east of the Interstate 95 corridor where we have reduced our predicted snowfall amounts some. Starting Wednesday, in the wake of the storm, the region is locked into a winterlike regime with colder-than-normal temperatures through the weekend.\u201d-- March Madness begins. The NCAA tournament schedule has been revealed. If you\u2019re planning to fill out a bracket for an office pool and don\u2019t really follow college hoops, we aggregated a dozen stories from our sports reporters to create a cheat sheet.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: With Obamacare repeal, Republicans are trying to accomplish something that\u2019s never been done (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7087",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/03/13/daily-202-with-obamacare-repeal-republicans-are-trying-to-accomplish-something-that-s-never-been-done/58c5e5fbe9b69b1406c75d60/",
        "text": "with Breanne DeppischWith Breanne DeppischWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Congress has never reversed a major program of social benefits once it has taken effect and reached millions of Americans. Many have tried, but no precedent or roadmap exists for Republicans as they press ahead with the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare. The Affordable Care Act, which passed with not a single Republican vote in either chamber, ushered in the most significant expansion of insurance coverage since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. Eleven million additional people joined the Medicaid rolls after the ACA allowed states to expand their programs to cover people with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which means the system now covers 68 million people.Conservatives fought so hard to stop the ACA from getting through in the first place because they understood just how hard it would be to claw back, no matter how problematic or expensive the law turned out to be. Their fears are now coming to fruition, as the debate over Medicaid\u2019s future increasingly threatens to imperil the House GOP bill.-- Republicans have been in similar positions before. After Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security, leading Republicans ran on repealing the system, which they saw as an un-American redistribution of wealth. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower finally brought the GOP out of the wilderness after two decades by embracing the idea of Social Security and promising to keep other New Deal programs intact. Barry Goldwater famously attacked Eisenhower for offering \u201ca dime store New Deal\u201d when he proposed government medical care for the elderly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIke eventually wound up expanding Social Security eligibility. \u201cShould any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history,\u201d the president mused in a letter to his brother about the risks of taking away benefits that people have become accustomed to.Richard Nixon, a Big Government Republican who had been Eisenhower\u2019s vice president, never waged a frontal assault on Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Great Society programs, which included Medicare and Medicaid, because he had no stomach for the political risk. Neither did Gerald Ford.Ronald Reagan spoke out against Medicare in the 1960s but changed his tune by the 1980 campaign. The year he took office, he tried to reduce early retirement benefits for Social Security. But he backed off from that under public pressure.George W. Bush\u2019s inability to reform Social Security in 2005, fresh off a commanding reelection victory, is a more recent reminder of how hard it is to tinker with the safety net \u2014\u00a0even on the margins.-- Donald Trump recognized all of this intuitively as he ran for office. That\u2019s why he repeatedly promised during his campaign, including in his announcement speech, to never undercut Medicaid. \u201cI\u2019m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I\u2019m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,\u201d he said in 2015.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Columnist Charles Krauthammer is one of the conservative intellectuals who repeatedly made the point in 2010 that Obamacare could never be undone once it went into effect. \u201cYou cannot retract an entitlement once it's been granted,\u201d he explained last week, describing this as the \"genius\" of the left.Krauthammer now agrees with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that the House GOP plan is \u201cObamacare Lite,\u201d but he supports it anyway because he believes it is the best conservatives can hope for. \"I'm willing to admit it. Paul Ryan is not,\" Krauthammer told Bret Baier on Fox News last week. \"Get it while you can, and worry about the rest later.\u201d-- To be sure, just because something is hard and hasn\u2019t been done before doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s not worth doing\u2026.Story continues below advertisement-- It also does not mean that Republican leaders will fail. Trump has political capital, and he\u2019s willing to spend it. Ryan (R-Wis.) believes that this fight will define his legacy as House speaker. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recognizes that a promise has been made to the conservative base over the past four election cycles, and he fears the fallout of breaking it. The Senate majority leader is up for reelection in 2020 and could face a primary challenge.-- But this weekend offered numerous illustrations, big and small, of the politically-perilous path ahead for the GOP:-- The number of Republican senators who said they won\u2019t vote for the House bill as presently constituted continues to rise.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDean Heller of Nevada, the only Republican senator who is up for reelection next year in a state Hillary Clinton won, said he worries that Ryan\u2019s bill will hurt seniors and the poor. More significantly, he declared that he sees health care as a fundamental right \u2014\u00a0a principle that conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus explicitly reject. \u201cDo I believe that all Americans should have access to health care? Absolutely, I do,\u201d he said in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. \u201cNot everything in the Affordable Care Act is bad. As we move forward and take a look at some of these changes and what\u2019s occurring, I think we ought to embrace what\u2019s good in the Affordable Care Act.\u201d (Politico\u2019s Burgess Everett obtained the audio of an event his staff closed to the press.)Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) warned House Republicans in dire terms not to risk their political careers on something that\u2019s bound to fail. \u201cDo not walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate and then have to face the consequences of that vote,\u201d he said on ABC\u2019s \u201cThis Week.\u201d \"I'm afraid that if they vote for this bill, they're going to put the House majority at risk next year.\"\u201cHe will not have the votes,\u201d Rand Paul added on CBS\u2019s \u201cFace the Nation.\u201d \u201cEverybody is being nice to everybody because they want us to vote for this, but we\u2019re not going to vote for it.\u201d-- John Kasich, one of more than a dozen Republican governors leading states that have accepted the Medicaid expansion, warned in ominous terms against the House bill. \"When you jam something through, just one party over another, it's not sustainable,\" the Ohioan said. \u201cWe're talking about lives. ... We better be careful we're not losing the soul of our country because we're playing politics.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn \u201cMeet the Press,\u201d Chuck Todd played a clip from an interview Mike Pence gave to a local TV affiliate in Kasich\u2019s state. \u201cI'm very confident that this legislation will give Ohio both the resources and the flexibility that your governor, your legislature will need to be able to meet those needs going forward and literally offer our most vulnerable citizens even better coverage,\u201d the vice president said.\u201cIs he right?\u201d Chuck asked.\u201cNo, he's not right,\u201d Kasich replied. \u201cFirst of all, Medicaid expansion has covered 700,000 people in my state, a big chunk of whom are mentally ill and drug addicted and have chronic diseases. \u2026 If chronically ill, you\u2019re going to have to have consistent coverage. Under this bill you don\u2019t have it.\u201d-- Over three hours on Saturday, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) continued to distance himself from Trump. After barely winning reelection in his suburban San Diego district because of backlash against Trump, he declared in his opening statement at a community meeting: \u201cI do not work for the executive branch. I investigated the Obama administration. I also investigated the Bush administration.\u201d Later, he said: \u201cI\u2019m going to be with Trump sometimes, against him sometimes.\u201d Tony Perry, who was in Oceanside for us, notes that no one asked Issa about local issues, not even about a recent deployment of Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton to Syria: \u201cThat suggests that the electorate is primed to turn the 2018 election into a referendum on Trump.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIssa\u2019s longtime former spokesman decried the Ryan plan last night:This isn't a #healthcare plan - it's a tax cut for the rich masquerading as an #obamacare repeal - all should oppose https://t.co/zTvcaoloOV\u2014 Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) March 13, 2017\n\nAnyone promoting the #GOP \"healthcare\" plan pic.twitter.com/Gba7vAlf4R\u2014 Kurt Bardella (@kurtbardella) March 13, 2017\n\n-- The press coverage continues to be overwhelmingly unfavorable to the House bill:The front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times is: \u201cTrump voters would be among the biggest losers in Republicans' Obamacare replacement plan.\u201d \u201cAmong those hit the hardest under the current House bill are 60-year-olds with annual incomes of $30,000, particularly in rural areas where healthcare costs are higher and Obamacare subsidies are greater,\u201d Noam Levey writes. \u201cIn nearly 1,500 counties nationwide, such a person stands to lose more than $6,000 a year in federal insurance subsidies. Ninety percent of those counties backed Trump. And 68 of the 70 counties where these consumers would suffer the largest losses supported Trump in November\u2026Story continues below advertisement\u201cMost affected by the Republican health plan would be parts of Alaska, Arizona, Nebraska, Tennessee and Oklahoma, where Obamacare insurance subsidies have been crucial in making high-priced insurance affordable. All five states went for Trump. Also hit hard would be parts of key swing states that backed Trump, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan\u2026\u201cMeanwhile, higher-income, younger Americans \u2014 many of whom live in urban areas won by Hillary Clinton \u2014 stand to get more assistance in the Republican legislation.\u201dHumanizing the consequences: The Post ran a lengthy feature on Sunday\u2019s front page from a health clinic in McDowell County, West Virginia, which Trump carried with 74 percent and which has the shortest life expectancy of any county in the nation. Many supporters of the president who are now able to see a doctor there because of the Medicaid expansion simply wouldn\u2019t be able to afford the care they now receive under the House plan. (Jessica Contrera has more.)Advertisement-- Unpopular elements of the Ryan plan are also getting additional scrutiny from health care reporters: \u201cEmployers could impose hefty penalties on employees who decline to participate in genetic testing as part of workplace wellness programs,\u201d Lena Sun reports, to cite just one example. \u201cIn general, employers don't have that power under existing federal laws, which protect genetic privacy and nondiscrimination.\u201d-- There are hospitals in every congressional district, and they are mobilizing in a concerted way against Ryan\u2019s plan. \u201cAll of the major hospital groups, including the American Hospital Association and those representing children's hospitals and psychiatric hospitals, came out against the new legislation,\u201d USA Today notes this morning.-- Driving the week: The Congressional Budget Office\u2019s estimate of how much the bill will cost and how many will lose coverage is scheduled to land as early as today. Everyone knows that its\u00a0report will predict that millions of people would no longer have insurance. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRepublican leaders are trying to preempt that by diminishing the CBO\u2019s credibility, even though the office is led by an economist who was hand-picked by Republicans. \u201cI love the folks at the CBO,\u201d OMB Director Mick Mulvaney said Sunday on \u201cThis Week.\u201d \u201cBut sometimes we ask them to do things they\u2019re not capable of doing, and estimating the impact of a bill of this size probably isn\u2019t the best use of their time.\u201dIn fact, this is exactly what Congress created the CBO to do....The former OMB and CBO director in me is speechless. https://t.co/tPTmabqgna\u2014 Peter Orszag (@porszag) March 12, 2017\n\n-- Other administration officials, meanwhile, continue to make promises that experts agree they will not be able to keep:Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said yesterday that \u201cnobody will be worse off financially\u201d under the House bill. \"Success,\u201d he said, \u201cmeans more people covered than are covered right now, and at an average cost that is less.\u201dGary Cohn, chief economic adviser to President Trump, insisted on Fox News Sunday: \u201cIf you\u2019re on Medicaid, you\u2019re going to stay on Medicaid.\u201d-- To keep up the drumbeat for action, Trump will have a meeting \u201cwith victims of Obamacare\u201d in the White House Roosevelt Room later this morning \u201cto hear their stories.\u201d\u00a0-- Paul Ryan has tried to be more cautious than Trump and administration surrogates when it comes to making promises that could come back to haunt him down the road. Asked on \u201cFace the Nation\u201d yesterday how many will lose coverage under the House plan, the speaker said he cannot answer because it\u2019s up to people whether they pay for insurance or not. That prompted criticism.AdvertisementRyan made clear, though, that he gets the magnitude of the undertaking. Noting that the House bill caps Medicaid\u2019s growth, he boasted: \u201cThis is the most historic entitlement reform we have ever had!\u201d\n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:--\u00a0In D.C., much of Monday will be quiet and chilly before a siege of snow and wintry mix tonight. Here\u2019s the latest Capital Weather Gang forecast: \u201cToday we brace for a major late-winter storm set to begin this evening and continue into Tuesday. Depending on where you live, moderate to heavy amounts of snow could fall or a sloppy mix of snow, sleet and rain. The heaviest snowfall is expected to occur in our far western and northern areas, but the storm will likely will prove disruptive for much of the region through at least Tuesday morning. We want to stress that this forecast is extremely complex and we have lower confidence in predicted snow amounts than usual. This is especially true along and east of the Interstate 95 corridor where we have reduced our predicted snowfall amounts some. Starting Wednesday, in the wake of the storm, the region is locked into a winterlike regime with colder-than-normal temperatures through the weekend.\u201d-- March Madness begins. The NCAA tournament schedule has been revealed. If you\u2019re planning to fill out a bracket for an office pool and don\u2019t really follow college hoops, we aggregated a dozen stories from our sports reporters to create a cheat sheet.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Peter Navarro gets his 15 minutes of fame as the salesman for the Trump tariffs (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7088",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/03/06/daily-202-peter-navarro-gets-his-15-minutes-of-fame-as-the-salesman-for-the-trump-tariffs/5a9e186530fb047655a06b0b/",
        "text": "with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie GreveWith Breanne\u00a0Deppisch and Joanie Greve.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0After being marginalized inside the White House over the past year, Peter K. Navarro has been taking a public victory lap to celebrate his success at persuading President Trump to announce tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.As rivals in the West Wing maneuver to defuse a looming trade war, thus far to no avail, Trump\u2019s most protectionist adviser is celebrating what he sees as his greatest achievement. Navarro, the director of the White House\u2019s Trade and Manufacturing Policy office, has become ubiquitous on television since last Thursday, in appearances that have been at turns triumphal and testy. His outspoken bluntness has quickly turned him into one of the biggest lightning rods in Washington.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNavarro, 68, is a professor emeritus at the University of California at Irvine business school. After getting sidelined and effectively demoted by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly last fall, many advisers might have looked for other jobs. But Navarro had nowhere else he wanted to go. So he stuck it out. Now he\u2019s back in the room where it happens.Conservative economists, business executives and Republican elites who support free trade hate him for that, and they now speak of Navarro like he is a boogeyman.In a signal of just how much juice Navarro now has, several GOP leaders on Capitol Hill attacked him by name yesterday. \u201c[Trump] has got a few days to think this through. And I think he will. But I totally disagreed with that one staffer down there who is, in my opinion, misleading the president,\u201d Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the chairman of the Finance Committee, told reporters. \u201cNavarro should know better.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor conservatives who have embraced Trump, it\u2019s politically safer to blame Navarro than Trump for the tariffs they hate. They risk less backlash from the president that way. These tariffs are\u00a0completely consistent with everything Trump said on the campaign trail, but many Republicans who know better have been pretending the past few days as if this is something the president just dreamed up after talking to Navarro.In that way, Navarro is now playing the role on trade that Stephen Miller did on immigration: the hard-liner who is seen by outsiders as enabling and egging on Trump\u2019s most nativist and nationalistic instincts. Miller took much of the blame last month when Trump decided to torpedo a bipartisan compromise that could have saved the \u201cdreamers\u201d and secured funding for a border wall because it didn\u2019t reduce the levels of legal immigration.Guests on CNBC speculate in alarmed tones about Navarro\u2019s influence over Trump and what it might mean for the stock market.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCanada\u2019s most widely-read newspaper, the Globe and Mail, called Navarro \u201cOttawa\u2019s worst nightmare\u201d: \u201cIn the stiff-headed Navarro world view, free-trade talk is globaloney. Canadian officials have long shuddered at the nativist creed of the wiry and abrasive 68-year-old. And with good reason.\u201d",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "She claimed tall, blond aliens kidnapped her as a child. Now she\u2019s running for Congress. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7089",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/10/16/she-claimed-tall-blond-aliens-kidnapped-her-as-a-child-now-shes-running-for-congress/",
        "text": "Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera said the encounters began when she was\u00a0young and happened several times throughout her life.She saw three beings \u2014 two women and a man, she said.2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysisArrowRightThey were tall, full-figured and blond.They wore robes, spoke telepathically and were in a round spaceship.Rodriguez Aguilera described her experiences with extraterrestrials in old interviews unearthed by the Miami Herald\u00a0as the onetime council member from Doral, Fla., vies\u00a0for a seat in Congress. Several years before the 59-year-old announced her candidacy to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R), she\u00a0appeared on Spanish-language television programs and talked in great detail about her experiences with aliens.Story continues below advertisementIn\u00a0one video\u00a0that was uploaded to YouTube long before it was highlighted by the Herald, Rodriguez Aguilera, a Republican, said she saw the round spaceship for the first time when she was 7, after her parents asked her to go outside their home.AdvertisementShe boarded the spaceship, she said, and saw round seats.After the vessel took off, she said, aliens explained to her what they planned to do.\u201cGod is a universal energy, not a person,\u201d the aliens told her, according to Rodriguez Aguilera. \u201cIt\u2019s in everything. God talks to people and they understand it in different ways, but there\u2019s only one religion.\u201dIn another interview, she said the beings, with their arms wide open, reminded her of Jesus Christ, and that she saw them again during her teenage years.Story continues below advertisementShe also claimed that the center of energy is in Africa; that 30,000 skulls\u00a0different from human skulls are in a subterranean cave on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean; and that Coral Castle, a limestone structure in South Florida,\u00a0is an ancient pyramid.The aliens talked about Isis, Rodriguez Aguilera said, though she did not elaborate.\u00a0Isis is the name of an Egyptian goddess. (It\u2019s also an acronym for the Islamic State, which did not exist at the time of Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s interviews.)AdvertisementRodriguez Aguilera said the interviews happened eight years ago and were negatively portrayed by the Miami Herald.\u201cThe Miami Herald article is clearly an attack piece,\u201d she told The Washington Post, adding later:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m a person who owns up to who I am. And this is just an experience that I had. It has nothing to do with who I am and what I have shown in the past 40 years and what a positive role model I\u2019ve been to the community.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAsked why she decided to talk about her experiences publicly, she said, \u201cThe conditions were there and I just did it .\u2009.\u2009. They were going to do the interview, and I did the interview.\u201dIn a statement to the Herald, she said:For years people, including Presidents like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and astronauts have publicly claimed to have seen unidentified flying objects and scientists like Stephen Hawking and institutions like the Vatican have stated that there are billions of galaxies in the universe and we are probably not alone. I personally am a Christian and have a strong belief in God, I join the majority of Americans who believe that there must be intelligent life in the billions of planets and galaxies in the universe.A ridiculous YouTube video claiming we found aliens kept making the news, so NASA debunked itRos-Lehtinen, whom\u00a0Rodriguez Aguilera\u00a0hopes to replace, represents much of Miami and Miami Beach. The\u00a0moderate Republican and the first Hispanic woman and Cuban American elected to Congress,\u00a0announced in April that she is retiring, giving Democrats a chance to flip a seat in a\u00a0district Hillary Clinton carried in November.AdvertisementThe former Doral City Council\u00a0member announced\u00a0her intention to run in August.\u201cI have lived in the district most of my life. I believe I can give back. I\u2019ve proven that I can create jobs, which is, I think, the most important thing the district needs,\u201d Rodriguez Aguilera said. \u201cI am a person that has spent all my life fighting for human rights.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn 2014, she sponsored a human-trafficking ordinance after two massage parlors were shut down for prostitution.Rick Yabor, a Miami\u00a0lawyer\u00a0and political commentator, told The Post that Rodriguez Aguilera isn\u2019t likely to win \u2014 especially in light of revelations about her previous claims.\u201cWhy Bettina jumped in that race, I don\u2019t know. \u2026\u00a0Her views are not very mainstream,\u201d Yabor said, referring to Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s stories about aliens. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be people that believe her, and there\u2019s going to be people that think she\u2019s wacky.\u201dAdvertisementAnd anyway, Yabor said, the district leaned Democratic in last year\u2019s election.There are at least a dozen candidates vying to replace\u00a0Ros-Lehtinen, the majority of them Democrats.This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.Two of Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s\u00a0Republican primary opponents, Bruno Barreiro and Raquel Regalado, are better known in Miami-Dade County than she is,\u00a0Yabor said.Story continues below advertisementBarreiro has been a county commissioner for nearly 20 years. Regalado\u00a0is the daughter of Miami Mayor Tom\u00e1s Pedro Regalado and is a former school board member in the county.And they have\u00a0raised significantly more money than Rodriguez Aguilera.Barreiro has raised about $218,100, according to federal campaign records. Regalado is a distant second, with $15,050. Rodriguez Aguilera has raised less than $5,000.Rodriguez Aguilera said she has not raised much because she postponed her fundraising after Hurricane Irma hit to help Florida residents. She said she\u2019s raised a total of $10,000,\u00a0including \u201cin-kind services\u201d from the community.AdvertisementRodriguez Aguilera was a member of the Doral City Council from 2012 to 2014. The city\u2019s mayor nominated her to replace the vice mayor in 2013. She also said she helped boost Doral\u2019s economic and population growth during her time as the city\u2019s\u00a0economic development coordinator, a position she held for four years.Story continues below advertisementHer\u00a0campaign website\u00a0describes her as an \u201centrepreneur, educator and community leader\u201d with \u201cover 30 years of experience in the private and public sectors.\u201dIn 2015, Miami Dade College launched its Women\u2019s Institute, which offered a women\u2019s studies program developed in partnership with Rodriguez Aguilera, the South Florida Times reported.Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s daughter, Bettina Incl\u00e1n Agen, is a\u00a0former director of Hispanic outreach\u00a0for the Republican National Committee. Agen is married to Jarrod Agen, Vice President Pence\u2019s deputy chief of staff and communications director.Nick Miroff contributed to this report.READ MORE:NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versaUpdate: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliensThe man whose biblical doomsday claim has some nervously eyeing Sept. 23 Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who is retiring from Congress. She claimed tall, blond aliens kidnapped her as a child. Now she\u2019s running for Congress.",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "She claimed tall, blond aliens kidnapped her as a child. Now she\u2019s running for Congress. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7090",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/10/16/she-claimed-tall-blond-aliens-kidnapped-her-as-a-child-now-shes-running-for-congress/",
        "text": "Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera said the encounters began when she was\u00a0young and happened several times throughout her life.She saw three beings \u2014 two women and a man, she said.2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysisArrowRightThey were tall, full-figured and blond.They wore robes, spoke telepathically and were in a round spaceship.Rodriguez Aguilera described her experiences with extraterrestrials in old interviews unearthed by the Miami Herald\u00a0as the onetime council member from Doral, Fla., vies\u00a0for a seat in Congress. Several years before the 59-year-old announced her candidacy to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R), she\u00a0appeared on Spanish-language television programs and talked in great detail about her experiences with aliens.Story continues below advertisementIn\u00a0one video\u00a0that was uploaded to YouTube long before it was highlighted by the Herald, Rodriguez Aguilera, a Republican, said she saw the round spaceship for the first time when she was 7, after her parents asked her to go outside their home.AdvertisementShe boarded the spaceship, she said, and saw round seats.After the vessel took off, she said, aliens explained to her what they planned to do.\u201cGod is a universal energy, not a person,\u201d the aliens told her, according to Rodriguez Aguilera. \u201cIt\u2019s in everything. God talks to people and they understand it in different ways, but there\u2019s only one religion.\u201dIn another interview, she said the beings, with their arms wide open, reminded her of Jesus Christ, and that she saw them again during her teenage years.Story continues below advertisementShe also claimed that the center of energy is in Africa; that 30,000 skulls\u00a0different from human skulls are in a subterranean cave on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean; and that Coral Castle, a limestone structure in South Florida,\u00a0is an ancient pyramid.The aliens talked about Isis, Rodriguez Aguilera said, though she did not elaborate.\u00a0Isis is the name of an Egyptian goddess. (It\u2019s also an acronym for the Islamic State, which did not exist at the time of Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s interviews.)AdvertisementRodriguez Aguilera said the interviews happened eight years ago and were negatively portrayed by the Miami Herald.\u201cThe Miami Herald article is clearly an attack piece,\u201d she told The Washington Post, adding later:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m a person who owns up to who I am. And this is just an experience that I had. It has nothing to do with who I am and what I have shown in the past 40 years and what a positive role model I\u2019ve been to the community.\u201dStory continues below advertisementAsked why she decided to talk about her experiences publicly, she said, \u201cThe conditions were there and I just did it .\u2009.\u2009. They were going to do the interview, and I did the interview.\u201dIn a statement to the Herald, she said:For years people, including Presidents like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and astronauts have publicly claimed to have seen unidentified flying objects and scientists like Stephen Hawking and institutions like the Vatican have stated that there are billions of galaxies in the universe and we are probably not alone. I personally am a Christian and have a strong belief in God, I join the majority of Americans who believe that there must be intelligent life in the billions of planets and galaxies in the universe.A ridiculous YouTube video claiming we found aliens kept making the news, so NASA debunked itRos-Lehtinen, whom\u00a0Rodriguez Aguilera\u00a0hopes to replace, represents much of Miami and Miami Beach. The\u00a0moderate Republican and the first Hispanic woman and Cuban American elected to Congress,\u00a0announced in April that she is retiring, giving Democrats a chance to flip a seat in a\u00a0district Hillary Clinton carried in November.AdvertisementThe former Doral City Council\u00a0member announced\u00a0her intention to run in August.\u201cI have lived in the district most of my life. I believe I can give back. I\u2019ve proven that I can create jobs, which is, I think, the most important thing the district needs,\u201d Rodriguez Aguilera said. \u201cI am a person that has spent all my life fighting for human rights.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn 2014, she sponsored a human-trafficking ordinance after two massage parlors were shut down for prostitution.Rick Yabor, a Miami\u00a0lawyer\u00a0and political commentator, told The Post that Rodriguez Aguilera isn\u2019t likely to win \u2014 especially in light of revelations about her previous claims.\u201cWhy Bettina jumped in that race, I don\u2019t know. \u2026\u00a0Her views are not very mainstream,\u201d Yabor said, referring to Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s stories about aliens. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be people that believe her, and there\u2019s going to be people that think she\u2019s wacky.\u201dAdvertisementAnd anyway, Yabor said, the district leaned Democratic in last year\u2019s election.There are at least a dozen candidates vying to replace\u00a0Ros-Lehtinen, the majority of them Democrats.This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here.Two of Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s\u00a0Republican primary opponents, Bruno Barreiro and Raquel Regalado, are better known in Miami-Dade County than she is,\u00a0Yabor said.Story continues below advertisementBarreiro has been a county commissioner for nearly 20 years. Regalado\u00a0is the daughter of Miami Mayor Tom\u00e1s Pedro Regalado and is a former school board member in the county.And they have\u00a0raised significantly more money than Rodriguez Aguilera.Barreiro has raised about $218,100, according to federal campaign records. Regalado is a distant second, with $15,050. Rodriguez Aguilera has raised less than $5,000.Rodriguez Aguilera said she has not raised much because she postponed her fundraising after Hurricane Irma hit to help Florida residents. She said she\u2019s raised a total of $10,000,\u00a0including \u201cin-kind services\u201d from the community.AdvertisementRodriguez Aguilera was a member of the Doral City Council from 2012 to 2014. The city\u2019s mayor nominated her to replace the vice mayor in 2013. She also said she helped boost Doral\u2019s economic and population growth during her time as the city\u2019s\u00a0economic development coordinator, a position she held for four years.Story continues below advertisementHer\u00a0campaign website\u00a0describes her as an \u201centrepreneur, educator and community leader\u201d with \u201cover 30 years of experience in the private and public sectors.\u201dIn 2015, Miami Dade College launched its Women\u2019s Institute, which offered a women\u2019s studies program developed in partnership with Rodriguez Aguilera, the South Florida Times reported.Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s daughter, Bettina Incl\u00e1n Agen, is a\u00a0former director of Hispanic outreach\u00a0for the Republican National Committee. Agen is married to Jarrod Agen, Vice President Pence\u2019s deputy chief of staff and communications director.Nick Miroff contributed to this report.READ MORE:NASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versaUpdate: This mysterious space signal is definitely not from aliensThe man whose biblical doomsday claim has some nervously eyeing Sept. 23 Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is running to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who is retiring from Congress. She claimed tall, blond aliens kidnapped her as a child. Now she\u2019s running for Congress.",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "She claimed aliens kidnapped her as a child. A major newspaper endorsed her bid for Congress. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7091",
        "date": "2018-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/08/20/she-claimed-aliens-kidnapped-her-child-major-newspaper-endorsed-her-bid-congress/",
        "text": "\u201cWe realize that Rodriguez Aguilera is an unusual candidate.\u201d So conceded a Miami Herald editorial endorsing a candidate who once claimed that majestic, blond extraterrestrial beings kidnapped her when she was 7.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightYears before Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera announced her bid to replace one of the most influential Cuban Americans in Congress, she appeared on Spanish-language television programs and talked about her alien experience. She saw three beings \u2014 two women and a man \u2014 she said. They were tall and full-figured. They spoke to her telepathically. They took her on board the spaceship, and inside, she saw round seats. But editorial page editor Nancy Ancrum said she does not believe that Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s beliefs or past experiences have influenced her ability to become an effective public servant. Rodriguez Aguilera, who is running in the Republican primary for a South Florida congressional district, has the heftiest r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of all the candidates in that race the editorial board interviewed, Ancrum said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHere\u2019s why we chose her: She\u2019s not crazy,\u201d Ancrum told The Washington Post, adding later: \u201cWe chose not to see her as a two-dimensional figure. And we chose not to make that an overriding concern. We\u2019re more thoughtful than that.\u201d The endorsement does add another layer of weirdness to a state already known for its penchant for oddballs. Take, for example, Melissa Howard, a state House hopeful who is now infamous for touting a fake college diploma and has since dropped out of the race.In its editorial published Sunday, nine days before the primary election, the board said it agreed with Rodriguez Aguilera that her past comments about extraterrestrial beings are a \u201cnon-issue.\u201d She is a \u201cstrong candidate\u201d with \u201cplausible conservative ideas\u201d who has a solid background as a former city official and a business executive, the board wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe daughter of a Cuban political prisoner, Rodriguez Aguilera became an activist, volunteering with the Cuban American National Foundation,\u201d the board wrote.She claimed tall, blond aliens kidnapped her as a child. Now she's running for Congress.Rodriguez Aguilera said she\u2019s happy with the Herald\u2019s endorsement. She said the board asked her about her previous comments about extraterrestrial beings. Her response was that they are not important, and the board agreed, she said.\u201cWhat people care about is a candidate that can bring jobs \u2026 and that\u2019s what I have proven that I have been able to do for the past 40 years, and that will continue throughout my life,\u201d Rodriguez Aguilera, who\u2019s running on a promise to help South Florida\u2019s working class, told The Post.Story continues below advertisementRodriguez Aguilera is running to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R), the first Hispanic woman and Cuban American elected to Congress. Ros-Lehtinen, who represents much of Miami and Miami Beach, announced in April 2017 that she will retire, giving Democrats a chance to flip a South Florida congressional district that Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 presidential election.AdvertisementAccording to the Herald, Rodriguez Aguilera is one of three best-known candidates in the crowded Republican primary, though she\u2019s not viewed as the front-runner. The other two, Spanish-language television star Maria Elvira Salazar and former Miami-Dade Commissioner Bruno Barreiro, declined to participate in the Herald\u2019s interview processAncrum said Barreiro\u2019s campaign told the board that he is not seeking an endorsement, and Salazar\u2019s schedule is booked until Aug. 28, which is Election Day. That left the board with a choice between Rodriguez Aguilera and four other lesser-known candidates.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe have to look at each candidate in the context of who else is running in the race,\u201d Ancrum said, adding that the board did not believe the other four candidates were quite ready for a seat in Congress.AdvertisementRodriguez Aguilera, however, has raised only about $80,000, compared with Salazar\u2019s $682,000 and Barreiro\u2019s $576,000, according to federal campaign reports.She first entered politics as a council member from Doral, Fla., from 2012 to 2014. The city\u2019s mayor nominated her to replace the vice mayor in 2013. She sponsored a human-trafficking ordinance in 2014 after two massage parlors were shut down for prostitution. She said she helped boost Doral\u2019s economic and population growth during her time as the city\u2019s economic development coordinator, a position she held for four years. She also previously worked as a social worker for Miami-Dade County and later as an ombudsman at the county manager\u2019s office, according to her campaign website.Florida candidate tried to prove she\u2019s a college graduate. The school says her diploma is fake.Rodriguez Aguilera announced her candidacy for Florida\u2019s 27th Congressional District in August 2017. A few months later, the Miami Herald unearthed old television interviews in which she talked about extraterrestrials.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn one video that was uploaded to YouTube long before the Herald highlighted it, Rodriguez Aguilera talked about boarding the aliens' spaceship.\u201cGod is a universal energy, not a person,\u201d the aliens told her, according to Rodriguez Aguilera. \u201cIt\u2019s in everything. God talks to people, and they understand it in different ways, but there\u2019s only one religion.\u201d In another interview, she said that the beings, with their arms wide open, reminded her of Jesus Christ, and that she saw them again during her teenage years. She said the aliens also talked about Isis, an Egyptian goddess. (It\u2019s also an acronym for the Islamic State militant group, which did not exist at the time of Rodriguez Aguilera\u2019s interviews).Story continues below advertisementShe made several other claims: Africa is the center of energy. There are 30,000 nonhuman skulls in a subterranean cave on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. Coral Castle, a limestone structure in South Florida, is an ancient pyramid.AdvertisementRodriguez Aguilera told The Post earlier that she merely described experiences she had and that they have \u201cnothing to do\u201d with who she is and with her work in public service. She also accused the Herald of negatively portraying her interviews, calling an article published in October an \u201cattack piece.\u201d Now, the Herald\u2019s editorial board, which is separate from the paper\u2019s news section, is placing its support behind Rodriguez Aguilera, whose \u201cboots-on-the-ground ideas and experience\u201d set her apart from the two front-runners, the board said.Story continues below advertisementRodriguez Aguilera has outlined what she calls a \u201cworking-class agenda,\u201d and has proposed reforming the Fair Credit Act to change the credit score system, making student loan payments more affordable, and creating hardship rental insurance to reduce homelessness.Advertisement\u201cI think she would serve this district well . . . I don\u2019t think we went off the rails here,\u201d Ancrum said. \u201cPeople just have to look at it in context.\u201d Read more:Florida candidate who was caught touting a fake college diploma drops out of raceFormer state GOP leader kills mother\u2019s dog, claims he\u2019s \u2018the second coming of Christ,\u2019 police sayA black lawmaker was canvassing door to door in her district. A constituent called 911. \u201cHere\u2019s why we chose her: She\u2019s not crazy,\u201d Miami Herald editorial page editor Nancy Ancrum said. She claimed aliens kidnapped her as a child. A major newspaper endorsed her bid for Congress.",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: EPA finds no problems with Pruitt's climate change views (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7092",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2017/08/03/the-energy-202-epa-finds-no-problems-with-pruitt-s-climate-change-views/59820e6330fb045fdaef10b9/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhen Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt went on CNBC last March and said that he did not believe carbon dioxide was the \"primary\u00a0contributor\" to global warming, he put himself at odds with the scientific stances of many institutions \u2014 including, officially, the EPA itself. But an internal EPA review has found that the agency can tolerate such a disagreement.A panel of EPA scientists convened to investigate Pruitt's commentary found that the administrator was not in violation of the agency's scientific integrity policy because that policy \"explicitly protects differing opinion.\"\"This expression of opinion, which was not made in a decisional context, is fully within the protections of EPA's Scientific Integrity Policy and does not violate that Policy,\" the panel found, according to a letter sent to the Sierra Club and\u00a0obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and other outlets. The environmental group filed a complaint in March that prompted the internal review.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat month, Pruitt said on\u00a0CNBC: \"I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.\"EPA chief Scott Pruitt says carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to global warming https://t.co/pYlXvtrIII pic.twitter.com/caTvHc1aVo\u2014 CNBC (@CNBC) March 9, 2017\n\nAt the time, EPA's website stated the opposite. \"Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change,\" the website\u00a0read. That and other climate-related EPA webpages have since been archived, with links now leading to a\u00a0landing page that reads that the EPA is \"updating\u00a0our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.\"After the panel's letter leaked, the EPA sent the Free Beacon article out to reporters in an email blast.Story continues below advertisement\"Unfortunately, this letter effectively lets Pruitt off the hook for deceiving the American public regularly in high profile contexts,\" the Sierra Club said in response\u00a0to the decision.AdvertisementWhy Pruitt's comments matter:\u00a0The controversy over the role carbon dioxide plays in global warming\u00a0is at the heart of a key\u00a0determination made by the EPA under President Trump's predecessor. In\u00a02007, the Supreme\u00a0Court ruled that carbon dioxide\u00a0should be considered an \"air pollutant\" under\u00a0the main federal air pollution law, the Clean Air Act. Two years later, with President Obama in office, the EPA officially determined that carbon dioxide is a pollutant harmful enough to human health that it warranted\u00a0regulation.\u00a0Pruitt's comment does not undo that determination, but it does suggest he may be less willing\u00a0to enforce it.It's an often cited statistic, but: According to at least one\u00a0review of the scientific literature, 97 percent of climate scientists\u00a0endorse\u00a0the idea that humans are driving global warming.Story continues below advertisementOne of those scientists says: \"It\u2019s clear to me that Pruitt is in violation of basic standards of ethical conduct,\" Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, wrote by email.Advertisement \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\n-- Secretary swap?\u00a0Rick Perry may get roped into the game of musical chairs now being played in Trump's Cabinet. Bloomberg News is reporting that Perry is among the top candidates for the job of secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. That position is open now that former DHS head John Kelly replaced Reince\u00a0Priebus as\u00a0White House chief of staff.\u00a0There is always a Trump tweet: Here's what Trump thought of Perry's border security credentials two years ago when both men were seeking the Republican presidential nomination:Rick Perry did an absolutely horrible job of securing the border. He should be ashamed of himself. Gov. Abbott has since been terrific.\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 21, 2015\n\nAnother flashback: After Trump wrapped up the GOP nomination, Perry\u00a0suggested in a 2016 interview that Trump's proposed border wall would never happen \u2014 at least not literally.Story continues below advertisement\"It's a wall, but it's a technological wall; it's a digital wall,\" said Perry, who as governor of Texas oversaw\u00a0the state with the longest border with Mexico.AdvertisementLiz Mair, a GOP strategist and 2012 Perry adviser, thinks those at DHS would not be happy with the decision:If this happens, Trump may be getting a lot of lip from DHS re: his preferences re: border. https://t.co/yLHNVLxZiF\u2014 Liz Mair (@LizMair) August 2, 2017\n\nPerry is all too familiar with eminent domain issues that Texas landowners have with border wall project. https://t.co/yLHNVLxZiF\u2014 Liz Mair (@LizMair) August 2, 2017\n\nPerry also very aware that a lot of people have to be able to cross border every day for Texas economy to work.https://t.co/yLHNVLxZiF\u2014 Liz Mair (@LizMair) August 2, 2017\n\nAs such, I'm all for this appointment. Tho I think Perry would miss fun he's having at Energy. Little fun at DHS. https://t.co/yLHNVLxZiF\u2014 Liz Mair (@LizMair) August 2, 2017\n\nHere's what others are saying:Center for Public Integrity\u2019s Christina Wilkie:\u00a0This could be a good move. Perry understand the complexity of border issues, and Trump would be free to appoint a nukes expert to run DOE. https://t.co/htywYNmxpb\u2014 Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) August 2, 2017\n\nHouston Chronicle\u2019s Lydia DePillis:Perry was a border security hawk, but opposed a wall, and was much more humane towards undocumented population. https://t.co/uIyjWqYoYu https://t.co/sOrx7n0wky\u2014 Lydia DePillis (@lydiadepillis) August 2, 2017\n\nNational Review contributor Dan McLaughlin:This would be hilarious full-circle from Perry in August 2015 challenging Trump on border security. https://t.co/TnwhixHCk8\u2014 Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) August 2, 2017\n\nBut for now, Perry is doing his duties as energy secretary. On Wednesday, he hosted his predecessor, Ernest Moniz, at the department:Today, we honored former @Energy Secretary @ErnestMoniz for his service not only to this amazing department, but also our Nation. pic.twitter.com/SITjv3gzrd\u2014 Rick Perry (@SecretaryPerry) August 2, 2017\n\nWhat does Moniz\u00a0think of Perry? In an interview in June with The Post, Moniz\u00a0credited Perry for \"actively\u00a0working with the lab directors\" throughout\u00a0the Energy Department's national laboratory system. He praised some of Perry's rhetoric on research and development, even if it is not always backed up by the White House.Story continues below advertisement\"I think he's made some very, very strong statements in supporting the innovation agenda,\" Moniz\u00a0said.\u00a0\"However, there is also this disconnect that\u00a0the administration's budget does not seem to support the enthusiasm we are seeing for the R&D and the innovation agenda.\"Advertisement-- Few are better than CNN's\u00a0Andrew Kaczynski at digging up old documents, and his dossier on Sam Clovis \u2014 Trump's pick to lead the Agriculture Department's\u00a0Research, Education and Economics division \u2014 is a doozy.Drudging up old blog posts from Clovis's days as a radio talk show host, CNN found that:\u00a0He\u00a0wrote that\u00a0progressives are\u00a0\"liars, race traders, and race 'traitors.'\"He wrote that Iowa responded better to floods in 2008 than Louisiana did to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita because of Iowa's focus \"on family, community and the primacy of faith in life.\"He wrote that then-President Obama was a \"Maoist, anti-colonialist who is also a pathological narcissist.\"What is his background? The Post's\u00a0Juliet Eilperin and Chelsea Harvey have noted that Clovis, a former\u00a0economics\u00a0professor and talk radio host, lacks a hard-science background.\u00a0\u201cA\u00a0lot of the science is junk science,\" Clovis said of climate change in a 2014 radio interview.\u00a0\"It\u2019s not proven; I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any substantive information available to me that doesn\u2019t raise as many questions as it does answers. So I\u2019m a skeptic.\u201d-- Monument count: On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke\u00a0announced that he will recommend no changes to the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument\u00a0in Montana. The Interior secretary is currently reviewing the status of 27 national monuments designated under the last three presidents before Trump.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere's the tally so far. Zinke\u00a0has recommended:shrinking one monument (Bears Ears National Monument)and keeping four\u00a0other monuments the same size.The other 22 are still under review.-- Inside\u00a0Interior:\u00a0A new website published by the Western Values Project demonstrates that\u00a0Zinke continues to fill the department with pro-industry officials. The High County News writes that \u201cof the known political hires to the Interior thus far, 21 come from resource extraction industries.\" Only three come from \"conservation, outdoor recreation, or hunting and fishing backgrounds,\"\u00a0Chris Saeger, executive director of Western Values Project,\u00a0told the news organization.With President Trump doubling down on his anti-climate views, California\u2019s governor, Jerry Brown, vows to aggressively battle climate change. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)-- Governor Moonbeam vs. Trump: The president\u2019s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord has turned California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) into the anti-Trump on climate change, writes The Post\u2019s Chris Mooney.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIf anything, the Trump imperative going in the opposite direction is a stimulus,\u201d Brown said in a recent interview with The Post. \u201cIt\u2019s a goad, it\u2019s a pressure\u2026 In a way,\u00a0it\u2019s a rising of or raising of awareness that\u2019s actually making my agenda stronger and more resonant with the people of California.\u201dAdvertisementBrown, known as \"Governor Moonbeam\", Mooney writes, \"in part because of his passion for space exploration during his first two terms as governor in the 1970s,\" has launched the U.S. Climate Alliance since Trump's decision to leave the Paris deal\u00a0to continue\u00a0a more local-based commitment to the international accord. Brown says Trump\u2019s actions have encouraged conversations on climate.He finally did it... (Abby Phillip)Story continues below advertisementCourt lets blue states defend Obama ozone pollution rule (The Hill)\n ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE\nBP in talks with electric carmakers on adding recharging docks to gas stations (Reuters)\n THERMOMETER\n-- The mayor of Virginia\u2019s Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay\u2014 remember him?\u00a0\u2014 showed up at a CNN-hosted town hall with former vice president Al Gore to ask: \"If sea-level rise is occurring, why am I not seeing signs of it?\u201d James \u201cOoker\u201d Eskridge, the mayor, noted that, \u201cI\u2019m not a scientist, but I\u2019m a keen observer.\"AdvertisementHe instead blamed the water creeping up on\u00a0Tangier Island\u00a0homes on erosion, not sea-level rise:Pro-Trump mayor of disappearing island to Al Gore: \"Why am I not seeing signs of sea level rise?\" #algoretownhall https://t.co/4XfHoC9I4B\u2014 CNN (@CNN) August 2, 2017\n\nGore responded: \"It won't necessarily\u00a0do you any good for me to tell you that the scientists do say that the sea level is rising in the\u00a0Chesapeake Bay, and that you've lost about two-thirds of your island already.\"-- After two years of talks, United Nations diplomats recommended beginning treaty negotiations to determine how to protect waters that extend beyond national jurisdiction, the New York Times reported. Negotiations could begin as soon as 2018.Plans to protect the high seas that have until now gone ungoverned are sure to spark\u00a0pusback from\u00a0commercial interests and in countries who go to the open ocean for fishing or to gather valuable minerals.How do you govern areas outside anyone\u2019s jurisdiction? That, and many key questions are left to be answered in negotiations. The Times\u2019s Somini Sengupta writes: \u201cHow will marine protected areas be chosen? How much of the ocean will be set aside as sanctuaries? Will extraction of all marine resources be prohibited from those reserves \u2014 as so-called no-take areas \u2014 or will some human activity be allowed? Not least, how will the new reserve protections be enforced?\u201dThe changes could have a broader impact on the climate, as well. The report notes there is \u201cgrowing scientific evidence that creating large, undisturbed sanctuaries can help marine ecosystems and coastal populations cope with climate change effects, like sea-level rise, more intense storms, shifts in the distribution of species and ocean acidification.\u201d\u00a0-- Some good news abuzz:\u00a0The USDA said this week that the number of honeybees in the United States has increased \u2014 yes, increased \u2014 in 2017. Commercial U.S. honeybee colonies went up three\u00a0percent in the last year\u00a0as of April 1, Bloomberg reported. Environmentalist groups have been concerned (and still are) about the bee decline, and that the use of pesticides \u2014 in particular, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids\u00a0\u2014 may be partially to blame.-- And now for some more bad news: Scientists\u00a0warn that unchecked climate change could bring extremely dangerous heat to South Asia, reports Chelsea Harvey for The Post.--A cold patch, explained: A new study may bring scientists closer to understanding a cool-temperature zone in the North Atlantic Ocean just south of Greenland, writes Chelsea Harvey.The study published in Nature Climate Change describes that the \u201ccold patch is evidence that a major ocean current system \u2014 which transports heat and influences climate and weather patterns around the world \u2014 may be slowing down. What\u2019s more, the melting of Arctic sea ice could be to blame,\u201d Harvey writes.She adds:The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is a powerful conveyor-like current system that carries warm water north from the equator and sends cool water back down from the Arctic. It\u2019s responsible for transporting heat all over the ocean and regulating weather patterns in places like Europe and eastern North America. But some recent studies have suggested that the AMOC may be slowing down, which could explain why less heat is reaching the North Atlantic. \nWhether the AMOC has actually been weakening in recent decades, and to what extent, is still an open question among oceanographers. But many scientists worry that the future effects of global warming, including large influxes of fresh water from melting sea ice and retreating Greenland glaciers, could further disrupt the AMOC\u2019s flow.\n DAYBOOK\nThe Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a\u00a0hearing\u00a0to \u201cexamine federal and nonfederal collaboration, including through the use of technology, to reduce wildland fire risk to communities and enhance firefighting safety and effectiveness.\u201dThe UPROSE holds its 6th Climate Justice Youth\u00a0Summit\n EXTRA MILEAGE\nNew York City turns organic waste into green energy:A pilot project in New York City turns organic waste into methane that in the future will go back to residents to heat their stoves and homes. (Reuters)1600 Pennsylvania Ave.: The 'President's Palace' or Trump's 'dump'?:\u00a0President Trump doesn\u2019t seem to like life in the White House, reportedly calling it a \"real dump.\" Here's a look at the mansion's flaws and selling points. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)President Trump signs Russia sanctions bill, but calls it 'seriously flawed':\u00a0\u00a0President Trump signed a bill imposing new sanctions on Russia on Aug. 2. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)Watch Stephen Miller\u2019s heated exchange with CNN\u2019s Jim Acosta:Stephen Miller, President Trump\u2019s senior policy adviser, got into a tense exchange on Aug. 2 with CNN reporter Jim Acosta about immigration. (Reuters)On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle\u00a0reflects on comments he made about then President-elect Trump in November:\u00a0 Differing opinions are okay. The Energy 202: EPA finds no problems with Pruitt's climate change views",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Hurricanes Irma and Harvey renew calls to ax obscure shipping law (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7093",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2017/09/12/the-energy-202-hurricanes-harvey-and-irma-renew-calls-to-ax-obscure-shipping-law/59b6d37930fb045176650c04/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston, the shutdown of Gulf Coast refineries strained fuel supplies in much of the United States, including Florida, which gets almost all of its oil by boat.As Hurricane Irma menaced the Caribbean, increased demand within Florida drove up gas prices even further. There and in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, emergency responders also needed fuel for rescue and recovery efforts. So to more quickly get fuel to hurricane-hit regions, the Department of Homeland Security on Friday \u00a0temporarily suspended an obscure, nearly century-old law called the Merchant Marine Act, better known as the Jones Act.Story continues below advertisement\"We are worried about the fuel shortages,\" White House Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert said at the White House on Friday.\u00a0\"We are bringing in as much supply of refined fuel as possible, and we've waived a particular statute that allows for foreign-flagged vessels to help in that effort.\"AdvertisementBy issuing a temporary stay of the Jones Act,\u00a0long a bugaboo of proponents of free trade, President Trump has set off a new round of calls for reforming the law \u2014 or outright repealing it.\u201cEvery time we have a disaster that affects U.S. maritime shipping,\u201d said Scott Lincicome, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, \u201cthe harms of the Jones Act come into focus.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPassed in 1920, the Jones Act requires that all ships transporting goods between U.S. ports be owned and manned by U.S. citizens, and\u00a0be built within\u00a0U.S. shores.Sponsored by then-Sen. Wesley Jones (R-Wash.) as a boon to shipbuilders and longshoremen in the port of Seattle, the law is lambasted today by free-trade proponents who regard it as a relic of the country's protectionist past. Defenders of the law --\u00a0which include unions and some national-security experts --\u00a0\u00a0say the Jones Act protects U.S. jobs and ensures the nation has the shipyards to build naval fleets if necessary.AdvertisementThe debate over the arcane law\u00a0also stresses the tendons holding together the two halves of Trump's political thinking. With his \u201cenergy dominance\u201d agenda of encouraging more fossil-fuel extraction in the United States, Trump has identified himself as an ally of the oil and gas industry, which wants to rein in the shipping law that it argues\u00a0raises domestic fuel prices. But Trump also regards himself as a proponent of blue-collar workers, such as those working in shipyards, who helped vote him into power.Story continues below advertisementMost presidential candidates take a position on the Jones Act while running, according to James Coleman, an energy law professor at Southern Methodist University. But Trump's position on the little-known statute was never clear.\u201cSo no one really knows what the Trump administration thinks,\u201d Coleman said.Tension has flared before\u00a0surrounding the\u00a0Jones Act during times of crisis. President George W. Bush temporarily waived it following Hurricane Katrina, which also shut down Gulf Coast refineries. But Obama declined to do so during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the consternation at the time of the Heritage Foundation.AdvertisementShortly before Trump issued the waiver prior to Irma's Florida landfall, the Heritage Foundation's Salim Furth used the need for disaster relief to again critique the law: \"For Trump, this is an opportunity to drain a corner of the swamp that profits from the misfortunes of Americans.\"Story continues below advertisementThe Trump administration faced an early test when it had to consider whether to continue a review of the Jones Act's exact scope, which was\u00a0initiated during the last days of President Obama\u2019s tenure.The review aimed to close loopholes formed during the almost-100-year-old history of the law. Starting in 1976, rulings began allowing foreign-flagged ships to deliver energy-industry equipment to offshore oil platforms.The American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas lobbying group in the country, opposed undoing those rulings, arguing that by making it harder to get equipment to offshore drilling operations, the changes \u201cwould have widespread negative impacts on American jobs and the national economy,\u201d API\u2019s Erik Milito said in April.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, workers\u2019 groups, such the Seafarers International Union, argued that the revisions would bring shipping jobs back to U.S. shores. As it is, SIU spokesman Jordan P. Biscardo\u00a0said, the Jones Act \u201chelps maintain around 500,000 American jobs.\u201dTrump\u2019s decision in that instance: Side\u00a0with the oil and gas industry, and scuttle the Obama-initiated review.But even Jones Act opponents think it will be harder to get much further than that. In 2015, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced an amendment repealing the Jones Act.\"From time to time in Congress we find that legislation still remains on the books many decades after it has served its original stated purpose,\" McCain said in 2015.Story continues below advertisementBut McCain's effort\u00a0gained little traction. And two years later, some\u00a0Republicans and Democrats have a different view on what it means to be a free-trade proponent with Trump in office.Advertisement\u201cThe chances of repeal are lower,\u201d the Cato Institute\u2019s Lincicome said. \u201cA Jones Act repeal bill will be political kryptonite, regardless of the merits.\u201d \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\nWhite House national security adviser Tom Bossert responded to a question about climate change's impact on the devastating hurricanes this year on Sept. 11. (Reuters)-- Say that again? After not being asked a question about climate change during a White House news conference\u00a0since at least Aug. 23, a Trump administration representative finally address the issue on Monday amid the busy hurricane season.At first glance,\u00a0the answer,\u00a0from President Trump\u2019s homeland security adviser Tom Bossert, is less than clarifying. But in fact, it actually is.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI think what\u2019s prudent for us right now is making sure the response capabilities are there. Causality is something outside of my ability to analyze right now,\u201d Bossert said. (He also the official that called the Pentagon response to Irma was \"the largest-ever mobilization of our military in a naval and Marine operation.\" But The Post's Dan Lamothe points to others.)Advertisement\"I will tell you that we continue to take seriously\u00a0the climate change, not the cause of it, but the things that we observe,\" he then said.\"Gaffe\" is an overused word in U.S. politics, thrown around anytime a political figure blunders.\u00a0But according to journalist Michael Kinsley, founding editor of Slate, gaffe has a specific meaning.\u00a0\"A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth,\" Kinsley\u00a0once said,\u00a0\"some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.\"\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThat seems to be what Bossert\u00a0did here: Acknowledge that the administration is ignoring the underlying causes of climate change while also\u00a0trying to address, in the aftermath of two intense hurricanes, its potential causes.Bossert continued: \u201cSo there\u2019s rising floodwaters, I think one inch every 10 years in Tampa, things that would require prudent mitigation measures. And what I said from the podium the other day and what President Trump remains committed to is making sure federal dollars aren\u2019t used to rebuild things that will be in harms way later or that won't\u00a0be hardened against the future predictable floods that we see.\u201d-- All that said, there was some substance to come from\u00a0Bossert's news conference. Namely, that the administration is preparing to ask for even more hurricane relief funding from Congress \u2014 a \"third, perhaps fourth supplemental for the purpose of rebuilding,\" Bossert said. \"We will do it smartly.\"-- Head in the clouds: President Trump\u2019s nomination for NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, has gained some support in Congress, reports The Post\u2019s Christian Davenport, despite some of the controversy surrounding his credentials and his position on climate change.AdvertisementBridenstine, a 42-year-old conservative would be the first politician to run NASA, a point of criticism from Florida Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D).In 2013, the Oklahoman demanded that President Obama \u201capologize for spending more on climate change research than weather forecasting,\u201d Davenport writes. Bridenstine\u00a0also falsely stated that global temperatures \u201cstopped rising 10 years ago.\u201dBut Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), a colleague of Bridenstine\u2019s on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, called him a \"a no-nonsense, straight shooter when it comes to space exploration and weather issues.\" Perlmutter added he would defend Bridenstine in front of senators.\u00a0Meanwhile, more scrutiny is being given to\u00a0Bridenstine's effort\u00a0to rewrite the underlying missions of NASA itself. While in Congress, Bridenstine\u00a0has introduced a bill suggesting that NASA lacks\u00a0a \u201cclear purpose or mission\" and that it \"should undergo reorganization, altering its mission with a clearer focus.\"\u00a0Bridenstine\u00a0wants to\u00a0de-prioritize\u00a0science at NASA and instead focus the agency on\u00a0space travel.But as Will Thomas,\u00a0science policy analyst at the American Institute of Physics, pointed out, science has been part of NASA's mission since Day One. In fact, \"expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space\u201d is the very\u00a0first objective of NASA listed in the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, the legislation that created the space agency.\u00a0As\u00a0Joe Hanson, biologist and host of the PBS show \"It's Okay To Be Smart,\" pointed \u00a0out on Twitter:The nominee to lead @NASA wants to eliminate science from their mission\u2026 but still wants to go to planets n stuff? https://t.co/ueK3Sxd7NS pic.twitter.com/Ouie4jjvdI\u2014 Joe \ud83d\ude37 Hanson (@DrJoeHanson) September 8, 2017\n\n-- \"When you don't want to see, you don't see\":\u00a0Pope Francis condemned climate change deniers on Monday, charging that, in the wake of two back-to-back massive hurricanes in the United States, \u201chistory will judge the decisions\u201d of those who deny scientific consensus on the issue.AdvertisementFrancis warned: \"If we don't go back we will go down\u2026 You can see the effects of climate change with your own eyes and scientists tell us clearly the way forward. All of us have a responsibility. All of us. Some small, some big. A moral responsibility, to accept opinions, or make decisions. I think it is not something to joke about.\"He cited a passage from\u00a0Psalms about the stubbornness of man, the New York Times reported, in response to political leaders' skepticism of climate change.\u201cMan is stupid, the Bible said,\u201d Francis said. \u201cIt\u2019s like that, when you don\u2019t want to see, you don\u2019t see.\u201d-- \"If this isn\u2019t climate change, I don\u2019t know what is\": \u00a0Miami\u2019s Republican mayor even more directly challenged the administration on climate change \u2014 in particular, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt.\u201cThis is the time to talk about climate change. This is the time that the president and the EPA and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change,\u201d said Mayor Tom\u00e1s Regalado, speaking last week before Irma impact his city, the Miami Herald reported. \u201dIf this isn\u2019t climate change, I don\u2019t know what is. This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.\u201dLast week, Pruitt said \u201cto use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to this people in Florida.\"To help hurricane victims, Congress may make it easier to tap 401(k) accounts (Thomas Heath)States sue Trump administration over delayed fuel-economy fines (Reuters)\n THERMOMETER\nThe last throes of\u00a0Irma: The massive storm was finally downgraded to a tropical depression from a tropical storm on Monday night, and the National Hurricane Center\u2019s latest overnight advisory had the system 65 miles southwest of Atlanta and bringing \u201cmoderate rain to parts of the southeastern U.S. and Tennessee and Ohio Valleys.\u201dBut the cleanup continues: As of last night, 12 million Floridians were without power, and The Post\u2019s Joel Achenbach, Katie Zezima, Mark Berman and William Wan report that as the system trailed off, \u201cIrma\u2019s rains caused floodwaters to rise from Jacksonville, Fla., to Charleston, S.C., continuing to impact a massive area of the American southeast.\u201dMillions could remain in the dark for days and weeks. Yet they add: \"in the face of cataclysmic warnings and worries \u2014 including a mass exodus from Florida\u2019s most-populous area \u2014 Irma largely spared many of the major cities predicted to be in its path. Some, including Tampa and Orlando, escaped relatively unscathed. Others, such as Jacksonville, experienced unlikely \u2014 and record-breaking \u2014 effects.\"Flooding in Jacksonville\u00a0set a record Monday morning as Irma moved west toward Georgia.\u00a0Florida Times-Union reporter Christopher Hong tweeted a photo from the downtown area on Monday morning:#hurricanelrma in downtown Jacksonville pic.twitter.com/CNWxKGjAiH\u2014 Christopher Hong (@ChrisHongTU) September 11, 2017\n\nWhy wasn't Irma's impact\u00a0as bad as predicted?\u00a0The Post's\u00a0Jason\u00a0Samenow\u00a0writes that \"several twists of fortune eased the pain the storm inflicted on the state. And only slight deviations would have made the storm\u2019s outcome much more severe.\"A\u00a0few factors, according to\u00a0Samenow:The\u00a0center of Irma\u00a0scraped along Cuba\u2019s north coast, which was bad for Cuba but good for Florida because the hurricane dropped from Category 5 to Category 3 once it began to interact with a land mass.The most intense right-front quadrant of Irma's eyewall\u00a0passed to the east of populated Key West, instead blasting the\u00a0Florida Keys\u2019 far less developed zone from Sugarloaf Key to Marathon.Later, that\u00a0dangerous right-front quadrant with the worst winds and biggest surge targeted the stretch from Everglades City to Marco Island, instead of the heavy population center of Miami.Finally, that landfall made Irma weak\u00a0enough to spare\u00a0the very vulnerable Tampa Bay area\u00a0and other populous sections of the state\u00a0from the worst damage.\u00a0A few other\u00a0Harvey and Irma updates:White House homeland security adviser Bossert said it would likely be weeks before residents will be able to return to the Florida Keys.Tens of thousands of children returned to school on Monday in the Houston area after one of the nation\u2019s largest school districts was shutdown during Harvey.The EPA\u00a0said it will allow Florida\u2019s power plants to operate without being required to meet pollution control regulations in order to continue delivering power across the state in the aftermath of Irma, Reuters reported.\u00a0Some of the remaining floodwater in Houston is contaminated with dangerous levels of\u00a0bacteria and toxins in the aftermath of Harvey, the New York Times reported, based on testing organized by the newspaper.-- Photo finish: NASA images of the U.S. Virgin Islands\u00a0in the aftermath of Irma\u2019s destructive path shows the islands going from a verdant green to brown.What happened? \u201cThe most obvious change is the widespread browning of the landscape,\u201d NASA's Earth Observatory explains. \u201cThere are a number of possible reasons for this. Lush green tropical vegetation can be ripped away by a storm\u2019s strong winds, leaving the satellite with a view of more bare ground. Also, salt spray whipped up by the hurricane can coat and desiccate leaves while they are still on the trees.\u201dFour underappreciated ways that climate change could make hurricanes even worse (Chris Mooney)Irma's track forecast was adequate, but there's significant room for improvement (Ian Livingston)\n DAYBOOK\nTodayThe Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy will hold a hearing on\u00a0\u201cContributions of the Department of Energy's National Laboratories.\u201dThe House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands holds a legislative hearing on the SHARE Act.The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy holds a hearing on \u201cDefining Reliability in a Transforming Electricity Industry.\u201dThe Atlantic Council holds a hearing on the geopolitics of natural gas.The House Natural Resources Committee holds a markup on various legislation.\n EXTRA MILEAGE\nWhite House tells Floridians 'not to rush reentry':White House national security adviser Tom Bossert told those who evacuated from Florida to listen to officials \"about when and how to stagger your reentry.\" (Reuters)White House calls Harvey response 'the best integrated' effort in U.S. history:Tom Bossert called the Harvey response \"the best integrated, unified, joint federal, local, state response effort that our country has seen,\" on Sept. 11. (Reuters)A look at Key West after Hurricane Irma:An aerial and on-the-ground look at the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Downtown Jacksonville faces severe flooding:Downtown Jacksonville, Fla., was flooded on Sept. 11, as Tropical Storm Irma moved north towards Georgia. (Jacksonville Transportation Authority)How animals stayed safe during\u00a0Irma:Animals evacuated to creative shelters in the anticipation of Hurricane Irma, which made landfall in Florida on Sept 10. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)Washington Post video reporters fan out across Florida in the wake of Irma, assessing the storm's damage:\u00a0Washington Post reporters are on the ground in the wake of Hurricane Irma in Florida. See what they found. (The Washington Post) The Jones Act has been temporarily suspended. The Energy 202: Hurricanes Irma and Harvey renew calls to ax obscure shipping law",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Hurricanes Irma and Harvey renew calls to ax obscure shipping law (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7094",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2017/09/12/the-energy-202-hurricanes-harvey-and-irma-renew-calls-to-ax-obscure-shipping-law/59b6d37930fb045176650c04/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter Hurricane Harvey ravaged Houston, the shutdown of Gulf Coast refineries strained fuel supplies in much of the United States, including Florida, which gets almost all of its oil by boat.As Hurricane Irma menaced the Caribbean, increased demand within Florida drove up gas prices even further. There and in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, emergency responders also needed fuel for rescue and recovery efforts. So to more quickly get fuel to hurricane-hit regions, the Department of Homeland Security on Friday \u00a0temporarily suspended an obscure, nearly century-old law called the Merchant Marine Act, better known as the Jones Act.Story continues below advertisement\"We are worried about the fuel shortages,\" White House Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert said at the White House on Friday.\u00a0\"We are bringing in as much supply of refined fuel as possible, and we've waived a particular statute that allows for foreign-flagged vessels to help in that effort.\"AdvertisementBy issuing a temporary stay of the Jones Act,\u00a0long a bugaboo of proponents of free trade, President Trump has set off a new round of calls for reforming the law \u2014 or outright repealing it.\u201cEvery time we have a disaster that affects U.S. maritime shipping,\u201d said Scott Lincicome, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, \u201cthe harms of the Jones Act come into focus.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPassed in 1920, the Jones Act requires that all ships transporting goods between U.S. ports be owned and manned by U.S. citizens, and\u00a0be built within\u00a0U.S. shores.Sponsored by then-Sen. Wesley Jones (R-Wash.) as a boon to shipbuilders and longshoremen in the port of Seattle, the law is lambasted today by free-trade proponents who regard it as a relic of the country's protectionist past. Defenders of the law --\u00a0which include unions and some national-security experts --\u00a0\u00a0say the Jones Act protects U.S. jobs and ensures the nation has the shipyards to build naval fleets if necessary.AdvertisementThe debate over the arcane law\u00a0also stresses the tendons holding together the two halves of Trump's political thinking. With his \u201cenergy dominance\u201d agenda of encouraging more fossil-fuel extraction in the United States, Trump has identified himself as an ally of the oil and gas industry, which wants to rein in the shipping law that it argues\u00a0raises domestic fuel prices. But Trump also regards himself as a proponent of blue-collar workers, such as those working in shipyards, who helped vote him into power.Story continues below advertisementMost presidential candidates take a position on the Jones Act while running, according to James Coleman, an energy law professor at Southern Methodist University. But Trump's position on the little-known statute was never clear.\u201cSo no one really knows what the Trump administration thinks,\u201d Coleman said.Tension has flared before\u00a0surrounding the\u00a0Jones Act during times of crisis. President George W. Bush temporarily waived it following Hurricane Katrina, which also shut down Gulf Coast refineries. But Obama declined to do so during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the consternation at the time of the Heritage Foundation.AdvertisementShortly before Trump issued the waiver prior to Irma's Florida landfall, the Heritage Foundation's Salim Furth used the need for disaster relief to again critique the law: \"For Trump, this is an opportunity to drain a corner of the swamp that profits from the misfortunes of Americans.\"Story continues below advertisementThe Trump administration faced an early test when it had to consider whether to continue a review of the Jones Act's exact scope, which was\u00a0initiated during the last days of President Obama\u2019s tenure.The review aimed to close loopholes formed during the almost-100-year-old history of the law. Starting in 1976, rulings began allowing foreign-flagged ships to deliver energy-industry equipment to offshore oil platforms.The American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil and gas lobbying group in the country, opposed undoing those rulings, arguing that by making it harder to get equipment to offshore drilling operations, the changes \u201cwould have widespread negative impacts on American jobs and the national economy,\u201d API\u2019s Erik Milito said in April.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, workers\u2019 groups, such the Seafarers International Union, argued that the revisions would bring shipping jobs back to U.S. shores. As it is, SIU spokesman Jordan P. Biscardo\u00a0said, the Jones Act \u201chelps maintain around 500,000 American jobs.\u201dTrump\u2019s decision in that instance: Side\u00a0with the oil and gas industry, and scuttle the Obama-initiated review.But even Jones Act opponents think it will be harder to get much further than that. In 2015, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced an amendment repealing the Jones Act.\"From time to time in Congress we find that legislation still remains on the books many decades after it has served its original stated purpose,\" McCain said in 2015.Story continues below advertisementBut McCain's effort\u00a0gained little traction. And two years later, some\u00a0Republicans and Democrats have a different view on what it means to be a free-trade proponent with Trump in office.Advertisement\u201cThe chances of repeal are lower,\u201d the Cato Institute\u2019s Lincicome said. \u201cA Jones Act repeal bill will be political kryptonite, regardless of the merits.\u201d \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\nWhite House national security adviser Tom Bossert responded to a question about climate change's impact on the devastating hurricanes this year on Sept. 11. (Reuters)-- Say that again? After not being asked a question about climate change during a White House news conference\u00a0since at least Aug. 23, a Trump administration representative finally address the issue on Monday amid the busy hurricane season.At first glance,\u00a0the answer,\u00a0from President Trump\u2019s homeland security adviser Tom Bossert, is less than clarifying. But in fact, it actually is.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI think what\u2019s prudent for us right now is making sure the response capabilities are there. Causality is something outside of my ability to analyze right now,\u201d Bossert said. (He also the official that called the Pentagon response to Irma was \"the largest-ever mobilization of our military in a naval and Marine operation.\" But The Post's Dan Lamothe points to others.)Advertisement\"I will tell you that we continue to take seriously\u00a0the climate change, not the cause of it, but the things that we observe,\" he then said.\"Gaffe\" is an overused word in U.S. politics, thrown around anytime a political figure blunders.\u00a0But according to journalist Michael Kinsley, founding editor of Slate, gaffe has a specific meaning.\u00a0\"A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth,\" Kinsley\u00a0once said,\u00a0\"some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say.\"\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThat seems to be what Bossert\u00a0did here: Acknowledge that the administration is ignoring the underlying causes of climate change while also\u00a0trying to address, in the aftermath of two intense hurricanes, its potential causes.Bossert continued: \u201cSo there\u2019s rising floodwaters, I think one inch every 10 years in Tampa, things that would require prudent mitigation measures. And what I said from the podium the other day and what President Trump remains committed to is making sure federal dollars aren\u2019t used to rebuild things that will be in harms way later or that won't\u00a0be hardened against the future predictable floods that we see.\u201d-- All that said, there was some substance to come from\u00a0Bossert's news conference. Namely, that the administration is preparing to ask for even more hurricane relief funding from Congress \u2014 a \"third, perhaps fourth supplemental for the purpose of rebuilding,\" Bossert said. \"We will do it smartly.\"-- Head in the clouds: President Trump\u2019s nomination for NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, has gained some support in Congress, reports The Post\u2019s Christian Davenport, despite some of the controversy surrounding his credentials and his position on climate change.AdvertisementBridenstine, a 42-year-old conservative would be the first politician to run NASA, a point of criticism from Florida Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D).In 2013, the Oklahoman demanded that President Obama \u201capologize for spending more on climate change research than weather forecasting,\u201d Davenport writes. Bridenstine\u00a0also falsely stated that global temperatures \u201cstopped rising 10 years ago.\u201dBut Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), a colleague of Bridenstine\u2019s on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, called him a \"a no-nonsense, straight shooter when it comes to space exploration and weather issues.\" Perlmutter added he would defend Bridenstine in front of senators.\u00a0Meanwhile, more scrutiny is being given to\u00a0Bridenstine's effort\u00a0to rewrite the underlying missions of NASA itself. While in Congress, Bridenstine\u00a0has introduced a bill suggesting that NASA lacks\u00a0a \u201cclear purpose or mission\" and that it \"should undergo reorganization, altering its mission with a clearer focus.\"\u00a0Bridenstine\u00a0wants to\u00a0de-prioritize\u00a0science at NASA and instead focus the agency on\u00a0space travel.But as Will Thomas,\u00a0science policy analyst at the American Institute of Physics, pointed out, science has been part of NASA's mission since Day One. In fact, \"expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space\u201d is the very\u00a0first objective of NASA listed in the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, the legislation that created the space agency.\u00a0As\u00a0Joe Hanson, biologist and host of the PBS show \"It's Okay To Be Smart,\" pointed \u00a0out on Twitter:The nominee to lead @NASA wants to eliminate science from their mission\u2026 but still wants to go to planets n stuff? https://t.co/ueK3Sxd7NS pic.twitter.com/Ouie4jjvdI\u2014 Joe \ud83d\ude37 Hanson (@DrJoeHanson) September 8, 2017\n\n-- \"When you don't want to see, you don't see\":\u00a0Pope Francis condemned climate change deniers on Monday, charging that, in the wake of two back-to-back massive hurricanes in the United States, \u201chistory will judge the decisions\u201d of those who deny scientific consensus on the issue.AdvertisementFrancis warned: \"If we don't go back we will go down\u2026 You can see the effects of climate change with your own eyes and scientists tell us clearly the way forward. All of us have a responsibility. All of us. Some small, some big. A moral responsibility, to accept opinions, or make decisions. I think it is not something to joke about.\"He cited a passage from\u00a0Psalms about the stubbornness of man, the New York Times reported, in response to political leaders' skepticism of climate change.\u201cMan is stupid, the Bible said,\u201d Francis said. \u201cIt\u2019s like that, when you don\u2019t want to see, you don\u2019t see.\u201d-- \"If this isn\u2019t climate change, I don\u2019t know what is\": \u00a0Miami\u2019s Republican mayor even more directly challenged the administration on climate change \u2014 in particular, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt.\u201cThis is the time to talk about climate change. This is the time that the president and the EPA and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change,\u201d said Mayor Tom\u00e1s Regalado, speaking last week before Irma impact his city, the Miami Herald reported. \u201dIf this isn\u2019t climate change, I don\u2019t know what is. This is a truly, truly poster child for what is to come.\u201dLast week, Pruitt said \u201cto use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to this people in Florida.\"To help hurricane victims, Congress may make it easier to tap 401(k) accounts (Thomas Heath)States sue Trump administration over delayed fuel-economy fines (Reuters)\n THERMOMETER\nThe last throes of\u00a0Irma: The massive storm was finally downgraded to a tropical depression from a tropical storm on Monday night, and the National Hurricane Center\u2019s latest overnight advisory had the system 65 miles southwest of Atlanta and bringing \u201cmoderate rain to parts of the southeastern U.S. and Tennessee and Ohio Valleys.\u201dBut the cleanup continues: As of last night, 12 million Floridians were without power, and The Post\u2019s Joel Achenbach, Katie Zezima, Mark Berman and William Wan report that as the system trailed off, \u201cIrma\u2019s rains caused floodwaters to rise from Jacksonville, Fla., to Charleston, S.C., continuing to impact a massive area of the American southeast.\u201dMillions could remain in the dark for days and weeks. Yet they add: \"in the face of cataclysmic warnings and worries \u2014 including a mass exodus from Florida\u2019s most-populous area \u2014 Irma largely spared many of the major cities predicted to be in its path. Some, including Tampa and Orlando, escaped relatively unscathed. Others, such as Jacksonville, experienced unlikely \u2014 and record-breaking \u2014 effects.\"Flooding in Jacksonville\u00a0set a record Monday morning as Irma moved west toward Georgia.\u00a0Florida Times-Union reporter Christopher Hong tweeted a photo from the downtown area on Monday morning:#hurricanelrma in downtown Jacksonville pic.twitter.com/CNWxKGjAiH\u2014 Christopher Hong (@ChrisHongTU) September 11, 2017\n\nWhy wasn't Irma's impact\u00a0as bad as predicted?\u00a0The Post's\u00a0Jason\u00a0Samenow\u00a0writes that \"several twists of fortune eased the pain the storm inflicted on the state. And only slight deviations would have made the storm\u2019s outcome much more severe.\"A\u00a0few factors, according to\u00a0Samenow:The\u00a0center of Irma\u00a0scraped along Cuba\u2019s north coast, which was bad for Cuba but good for Florida because the hurricane dropped from Category 5 to Category 3 once it began to interact with a land mass.The most intense right-front quadrant of Irma's eyewall\u00a0passed to the east of populated Key West, instead blasting the\u00a0Florida Keys\u2019 far less developed zone from Sugarloaf Key to Marathon.Later, that\u00a0dangerous right-front quadrant with the worst winds and biggest surge targeted the stretch from Everglades City to Marco Island, instead of the heavy population center of Miami.Finally, that landfall made Irma weak\u00a0enough to spare\u00a0the very vulnerable Tampa Bay area\u00a0and other populous sections of the state\u00a0from the worst damage.\u00a0A few other\u00a0Harvey and Irma updates:White House homeland security adviser Bossert said it would likely be weeks before residents will be able to return to the Florida Keys.Tens of thousands of children returned to school on Monday in the Houston area after one of the nation\u2019s largest school districts was shutdown during Harvey.The EPA\u00a0said it will allow Florida\u2019s power plants to operate without being required to meet pollution control regulations in order to continue delivering power across the state in the aftermath of Irma, Reuters reported.\u00a0Some of the remaining floodwater in Houston is contaminated with dangerous levels of\u00a0bacteria and toxins in the aftermath of Harvey, the New York Times reported, based on testing organized by the newspaper.-- Photo finish: NASA images of the U.S. Virgin Islands\u00a0in the aftermath of Irma\u2019s destructive path shows the islands going from a verdant green to brown.What happened? \u201cThe most obvious change is the widespread browning of the landscape,\u201d NASA's Earth Observatory explains. \u201cThere are a number of possible reasons for this. Lush green tropical vegetation can be ripped away by a storm\u2019s strong winds, leaving the satellite with a view of more bare ground. Also, salt spray whipped up by the hurricane can coat and desiccate leaves while they are still on the trees.\u201dFour underappreciated ways that climate change could make hurricanes even worse (Chris Mooney)Irma's track forecast was adequate, but there's significant room for improvement (Ian Livingston)\n DAYBOOK\nTodayThe Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy will hold a hearing on\u00a0\u201cContributions of the Department of Energy's National Laboratories.\u201dThe House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands holds a legislative hearing on the SHARE Act.The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy holds a hearing on \u201cDefining Reliability in a Transforming Electricity Industry.\u201dThe Atlantic Council holds a hearing on the geopolitics of natural gas.The House Natural Resources Committee holds a markup on various legislation.\n EXTRA MILEAGE\nWhite House tells Floridians 'not to rush reentry':White House national security adviser Tom Bossert told those who evacuated from Florida to listen to officials \"about when and how to stagger your reentry.\" (Reuters)White House calls Harvey response 'the best integrated' effort in U.S. history:Tom Bossert called the Harvey response \"the best integrated, unified, joint federal, local, state response effort that our country has seen,\" on Sept. 11. (Reuters)A look at Key West after Hurricane Irma:An aerial and on-the-ground look at the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Downtown Jacksonville faces severe flooding:Downtown Jacksonville, Fla., was flooded on Sept. 11, as Tropical Storm Irma moved north towards Georgia. (Jacksonville Transportation Authority)How animals stayed safe during\u00a0Irma:Animals evacuated to creative shelters in the anticipation of Hurricane Irma, which made landfall in Florida on Sept 10. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)Washington Post video reporters fan out across Florida in the wake of Irma, assessing the storm's damage:\u00a0Washington Post reporters are on the ground in the wake of Hurricane Irma in Florida. See what they found. (The Washington Post) The Jones Act has been temporarily suspended. The Energy 202: Hurricanes Irma and Harvey renew calls to ax obscure shipping law",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: At least one GOP lawmaker on Jan. 6 committee called the riot \u2018criminal\u2019 (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7095",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/20/daily-202-least-one-gop-lawmaker-jan-6-committee-called-riot-criminal/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here.\u00a0On this day in 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHouse Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy\u2019s most interesting pick to serve on the special committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot\u00a0may be\u00a0a GOP lawmaker who\u00a0denounced that violent attack on Congress as \u201cun-American.\u201d\u00a0 In harrowing photos taken the day of the insurrection, Rep. Troy\u00a0Nehls\u00a0of Texas can be seen helping Capitol Police barricade House chamber doors against supporters of President Donald Trump who violently interrupted certification of President Biden\u2019s victory.\u201cWhat\u2019s taking place here right now is un-American,\u201d\u00a0the former sheriff\u00a0said\u00a0in a video message\u00a0even as\u00a0protesters rampaged through the\u00a0Capitol\u00a0in the worst assault on the legislature in centuries. \u201cThis is a sacred house.\u201dI was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with Capitol police barricading entrance to our sacred House chamber, while trying to calm the situation talking to protestors.What I\u2019m witnessing is a disgrace. We\u2019re better than this. Violence is NEVER the answer.Law and order! pic.twitter.com/SgN2F8YGIS\u2014 Troy Nehls (@SheriffTNehls) January 6, 2021\n\nLast night,\u00a0my colleagues Marianna Sotomayor, Felicia Sonmez, and Karoun Demirjian reported\u00a0Nehls\u00a0will join Republican Reps.\u00a0Jim Jordan (Ohio), Jim Banks (Ind.), Rodney Davis (Ill.), Kelly Armstrong (N.D.)\u00a0as members of the bipartisan House Select Committee looking into the riot.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMcCarthy, who opposed the creation of\u00a0a\u00a0bipartisan independent commission to\u00a0look into\u00a0the riot and fought the establishment of the committee, had for weeks kept secret whether he would name members. He revealed his choices\u00a0days after meeting with Trump\u00a0at the latter\u2019s Bedminster, N.J. resort.\u00a0Some Republicans fret that the high-profile investigation will keep the violence \u2014 and Trump\u2019s role in encouraging the demonstration \u2014 on voters\u2019 minds as the 2022 midterms creep ever closer.\u00a0\u00a0The panel will hold its first hearing next Tuesday, featuring testimony from\u00a0two Capitol Police officers, and two officers from the Metropolitan Police Department, including Michael\u00a0Fanone, who\u00a0has given graphic first-hand accounts\u00a0of the violence he suffered.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)\u00a0announced her picks for the committee\u00a0early this month, including\u00a0Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.)\u00a0as its chair and\u00a0Rep. Liz Cheney\u00a0(R-Wyo.), a fierce Trump critic, as a member.\u00a0Pelosi\u2019s\u00a0six other appointees\u00a0are\u00a0Democratic Reps. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.), Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), Pete Aguilar (Calif.), Stephanie Murphy (Fla.), Jamie B.\u00a0Raskin\u00a0(Md.) and Elaine Luria (Va.).\u00a0Lofgren, who was one of the Democratic prosecutors in Trump\u2019s first and second impeachment trials, chairs the House Administration Committee, which has already held several hearings\u00a0looking into the riot and the police and emergency response. Davis is the panel\u2019s top Republican.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementSchiff and\u00a0Raskin\u00a0were the lead impeachment managers during Trump\u2019s first and second impeachment trials, respectively. Jordan was one of Trump's loudest defenders.AdvertisementIn the weeks and months since the riot, the former president has urged Republicans to reimagine the violent demonstrators as \u201cmartyrs and warlike heroes,\u201d\u00a0the Associated Press\u2019s Calvin Woodward, Colleen Long, and David\u00a0Klepper\u00a0reported.\u00a0As I wrote in May,\u00a0Republicans have been playing down\u00a0Jan. 6, which sent Vice President Mike Pence scurrying for his life, left 140 Capitol Police injured, offices ransacked, doors and windows broken, and interrupted the peaceful certification of Biden\u2019s victory.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementTrump\u00a0has repeated, sometimes several times a day, the falsehood that he was cheated out of a second term in an election marred by systemic fraud \u2014 a claim for which there is no evidence. Republican state election officials, Trump\u2019s Justice Department, countless judges including many named by the former president, have rejected those claims as meritless.\u00a0AdvertisementBut the Republican\u00a0Party has embraced\u00a0this \u201cBig Lie\u201d and\u00a0enlisted candidates who espouse it, as GOP officials pursue a state-by-state campaign to rein in electoral practices they blame for Trump\u2019s loss and give partisan politicians more power over election outcomes.\u00a0Anger at the riot may not mean much:\u00a0McCarthy\u2019s own initial outrage\u00a0has melted away.\u00a0And\u00a0Nehls\u00a0joined him, Jordan and Banks in the riot\u2019s immediate aftermath in\u00a0voting to overturn the results of the election. (Davis and Armstrong did not.)It\u2019s not clear what the GOP division of labor will look like.\u00a0Banks issued a statement\u00a0saying he would get the answer to questions like \u201cwhy was the Capitol unprepared and vulnerable to attack on January 6?\u201d while insisting the committee only exists \u201cto malign conservatives and to justify the Left\u2019s authoritarian agenda.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI will do everything possible to give the American people the facts about the lead up to January 6, the riot that day, and the responses from Capitol leadership and the Biden administration,\u201d Banks said. (Biden took office Jan. 20, so it seems likely the congressman means to scrutinize the president\u2019s anti-extremism strategy.)\u00a0In that context, it\u2019s worth revisiting an exchange\u00a0Nehls,\u00a0who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Army Reserve,\u00a0said he had\u00a0with some of the demonstrators\u00a0through the broken glass of one of the doors.\u00a0\u201cI had my Texas mask on,\u201d\u00a0Nehls\u00a0said. \u201cThey said, \u2018You\u2019re from Texas and you should be with us on this.\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m all OK, and I\u2019m all Texan, and I\u2019m all about the Constitution and individual and personal freedom, but, to me, this is criminal what you are doing here today.\u2019\u201dWhat\u2019s happening nowAmazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space this morning.\u00a0Bezos, along with his brother Mark, Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands, flew in the improbable spaceport his Blue Origin space venture built, Christian Davenport and Dalvin Brown report. The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not just by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires,\u201d our colleagues write.\u00a0Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cU.S. and E.U. security officials wary of NSO links to Israeli intelligence,\u201d\u00a0by Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet: \u201cThe Israeli company NSO Group has earned a reputation among national security experts around the world as a best-in-class manufacturer of surveillance technology capable of secretly gathering information from a target\u2019s phone. But U.S. and European security officials regard the company with a degree of suspicion despite the ability of its technology to help combat terrorists and violent criminals. In interviews, several current and former officials said they presumed that the company, which was founded by former Israeli intelligence officers, provides at least some information to the government in Jerusalem about who is using its spying products and what information they\u2019re collecting.\u201d\u201cWhat were the Capitol rioters thinking on Jan. 6?\u201d\u00a0by Dan Zak and Karen Heller: \u201cRobert Gieswein is a good man, according to family and friends, who describe him as gentle and compassionate. His mother says he has \u2018an amazing work ethic.\u2019 His younger sister calls him \u2018the most inspiring person in my life.\u2019 He bought clothes and shoes for the residents of a nursing home where he worked as a nurse\u2019s aide. The 24-year-old had no criminal history when he traveled to Washington, D.C., in January and, according to the U.S. government, joined a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol. Gieswein appears to be affiliated with the radical militia group the Three Percenters, the FBI says, and the leader of a \u2018private paramilitary training group\u2019 called the Woodland Wild Dogs. On Jan. 6 he donned goggles, a camouflage shirt, an army-style helmet and a military-style vest reinforced with an armored plate and a black pouch emblazoned with \u2018MY MOM THINKS I\u2019M SPECIAL.\u2019 Then, wielding a baseball bat and a noxious spray, he stormed the U.S. Capitol, attacked a federal officer and helped halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election, the government claims...\u201c\u2018If what the government says is true, then Mr. Gieswein committed assault on January 6,\u2019 federal public defender Ann Mason Rigby said July 1 during a hearing on his detention. \u2018The question before the court is: Is he incorrigibly violent? Is that a characteristic that cannot be controlled? And that\u2019s why you have to look at his history.\u2019 That\u2019s what the U.S. District Court in D.C. is doing with at least 535 people who were somehow involved in the breach of the Capitol; there are hundreds of ongoing investigations beyond that... Were these people acting on their most deeply held convictions, or were they somehow not themselves on Jan. 6? ... The insurrection itself, in other words, has been deployed as a defense. The mob mentality made them do it.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cA House race in Cleveland captures the Democrats\u2019 generational divide,\u201d\u00a0by the New York Times\u2019s Jonathan Weisman: \u201cNina Turner had just belted out a short address to God\u2019s Tabernacle of Faith Church in the cadences and tremulous volumes of a preacher when the Rev. Timothy Eppinger called on the whole congregation to lay hands on the woman seeking the House seat of greater Cleveland. ... In the final weeks of the campaign, the party establishment is throwing copious amounts of time and money into an effort to stop Ms. Turner, a fiery former Cleveland councilwoman and Ohio state senator known beyond this district as the face and spirit of Bernie Sanders\u2019s presidential campaigns ... That suggests leaders understand that the outcome of the race will be read as a signal about the party\u2019s future.\u201d\u201cAs many as 200 Americans have now reported possible symptoms of 'Havana Syndrome,' officials say,\u201d\u00a0by NBC News\u2019s Ken Dilanian, Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube: \u201cA U.S. official with knowledge of new potential cases of so-called Havana Syndrome said a steady drumbeat of cables has been coming in from overseas posts reporting new incidents \u2014 often multiple times each week. ... Officials with direct knowledge said there are now possible cases on every continent except Antarctica. ... Almost half of the possible cases involve CIA officers or their relatives, two officials said.\u201d\u201cBen & Jerry\u2019s says it will stop ice cream sales in occupied territories,\u201d\u00a0by NPR\u2019s Daniel Estrin: \u201cBen & Jerry's said it will stop selling its ice cream in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, calling it \u2018inconsistent with our values.\u2019 The company did not say when it would halt sales, but its sole local Israeli manufacturer vowed to continue selling as usual until its license expires at the end of 2022. ... Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called the decision \"antisemitic,\" and called on U.S. states with laws against Israel boycotts to sanction Ben & Jerry's. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the move \u2018morally wrong\u2019 and vowed to fight it.\u201dOn the HillA bipartisan bill aims to assert Congress\u2019s power over arms sales, emergencies and military operations.\u201cA bipartisan group of senators is unveiling legislation Tuesday to give Congress a more active role in approving arms sales, authorizing the use of military force and declaring national emergencies, in an across-the-board effort to claw back national security power from the executive branch,\u201d Karoun Demirjian reports.\u00a0\u201cThe bill aims, for the first time, to define what type of \u2018hostilities\u2019 require a president to seek congressional approval before committing military resources; establish expiration dates for national emergencies and military authorizations; and automatically curtail funding for any operation a president continues without explicit congressional support.\u201d\u201cThe comprehensive measure comes as Washington is grappling with whether and how to repeal long-running authorizations for use of military force, or AUMFs, including those passed nearly two decades ago to greenlight U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u201dThe infrastructure deal is in a precarious state as the endgame nears.\u00a0\u201cBiden on Monday took a subtle yet unmistakable dig at Republicans who have backed away from a major funding component in a bipartisan infrastructure package that is now starting to fray, saying pointedly that \u2018we shook hands on it\u2019 even as he continued to promote the agreement,\u201d Seung Min Kim reports. \u201cBiden\u2019s comment, with its accusatory undertones, reflected the agreement\u2019s precarious state at the outset of what could be a pivotal week. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to force a vote within days to advance the roughly $1 trillion plan despite the Republican hesitations\u201d\u201cBiden also will seek to turn up the pressure by traveling to Ohio on Wednesday to pitch the plan and hold a town hall session with voters.\u201d\u201cRepublicans were annoyed by Schumer\u2019s insistence on holding preliminary Senate votes Wednesday to proceed to a debate on the agreement, which has not been finalized. The majority leader finalized his floor strategy on Monday night, teeing up a Wednesday vote that would allow the Senate to proceed to the bipartisan package.\u201d\u201cBut since Schumer disclosed his strategy, Republicans have indicated that a critical mass of their members would effectively block the infrastructure package if a deal had not been finalized. \u2018It\u2019s not going to get 60, let\u2019s put it that way,\u2019 said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.).\u201d\u201cIssues large and small were still unresolved Monday, aides said. While the challenge of funding the package remained the biggest hurdle, there were also issues on the spending side of the deal, including transit, broadband and a proposed infrastructure bank, aides said.\u201dThe pandemicThe delta variant is posing a major risk to Biden\u2019s promises of a swift economic comeback.\u00a0\u201cA resurgence in coronavirus cases is threatening the Biden administration\u2019s promises of a swift economic recovery, with Wall Street getting battered on Monday and some leading forecasters beginning to rethink their extremely rosy projections,\u201d Jeff Stein and Heather Long report. \u201cThe administration is closely monitoring the economic risks associated with the delta variant, and senior U.S. officials have in recent days suggested local restrictions may have to be reimposed in response to the pandemic.\u201d\u201c \u2018This virus doesn\u2019t have to hold you back any longer. It doesn\u2019t have to hold our economy back any longer. But the only way we put it behind us is if more Americans get vaccinated,\u2019 President Biden said Monday.\u201d\u201cThe variant\u2019s proliferation abroad has already hurt U.S. supply chains, and shortages could exacerbate inflation by increasing the price of production. And a jump in hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated poses a particular challenge for the Biden administration in more conservative parts of the country ... These tensions played out in public on Monday, with Biden emphasizing his infrastructure package \u2014 the White House\u2019s first big non-covid legislative priority \u2014 amid headlines showing financial markets getting clobbered by renewed fears about the coronavirus. \u2018Our economy has come a long way over the past six months. We can\u2019t slow down now,\u2019 Biden said.\u201dA federal judge upheld a coronavirus vaccine mandate for Indiana University students\u201cThe ruling could be influential as colleges and universities across the country are preparing to reopen in the fall and deciding how to protect campuses from the ongoing public health threat of the lethal virus. Hundreds of schools have adopted vaccine requirements. Many others are only encouraging students to get vaccinated,\u201d Nick Anderson reports. \u201cThe split on mandates often follows a red-blue political divide. Colleges that require vaccination are more likely to be located in states that President Biden carried in last year\u2019s election.\u201dMask mandates are making a return \u2014 along with controversy.\u00a0\u201cTwo months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said vaccinated individuals didn\u2019t need to wear masks in most settings, a growing number of experts are warning it\u2019s time to put them back on,\u201d Dan Diamond reports.\u201cFirst, there was Los Angeles County, where the rising menace posed by the delta variant of the coronavirus prompted health officials to reimpose a mask mandate. Then, Bay Area health officers on Friday recommended that residents of seven counties and the city of Berkeley, Calif., resume wearing masks indoors. Mask mandates are being discussed, too, in coronavirus hot spots such as Arkansas and Missouri, where cases have sharply increased in recent weeks and many residents remain unvaccinated.\u201d\u201cBut the growing calls to reinstate mask mandates ... renewed a cultural and health flash point a year and a half after the virus landed in the United States. ... \u2018In a free [country] people will evaluate their personal risk factors and are smart enough to ultimately make medical decisions like wearing a mask themselves,\u2019 Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in a statement last week, introducing legislation that would ban mask mandates on planes and public transportation.\u201dThe U.S. warned against travel to Britain as coronavirus cases surge and restrictions lift.\u00a0\u201cThe State Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday urged all Americans to avoid visiting the country. \u2018Even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants,\u2019 the CDC said in an updated travel notice,\u201d Erin Cunningham reports. \u201cIn its highest-level advisory Monday, the State Department delivered an even sterner warning. \u2018Do not travel to the United Kingdom due to COVID-19,\u2019 the advisory said.\u201d\u201cThe new U.S. travel warnings are not binding, but they were issued as Britain struggles to contain the fallout from a surge in new infections caused by the delta variant first identified in India.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cThe rise of delta is potentially a human tragedy; I don\u2019t expect it to be hugely consequential macroeconomically,\u201d said Jason Furman, a former Obama administration economist, who noted the delta variant\u2019s spread across Europe did not appear to lead to major declines in mobility trends, a gauge of consumer patterns. \u201cThe U.S. economy is going to grow strongly every quarter this year. Will it be a little less strong because of this? Maybe. But I still expect economic growth to be above its pre-pandemic the rest of this year, and I don\u2019t think that changes that fundamental fact.\u201dUnvaccinated cases soaring again, visualizedCoronavirus cases are increasing almost exclusively in the unprotected population. So The Washington Post adjusted its case, death and hospitalization rates to account for that \u2014 and found that in many places, the virus continues to rage among those who have not received a shot.Hot on the leftTwitter temporarily suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for violating its coronavirus misinformation policy.\u00a0The suspension came after Greene falsely claimed that the coronavirus was \u201cnot dangerous\u201d for some, Bryan Pietsch reports. \u201cThe 12-hour suspension is the shortest of Twitter\u2019s read-only penalties, which its website says can range from 12 hours to seven days, \u2018depending on the nature of the violation.\u2019 Greene\u2019s account had violated the misinformation policy multiple times, according to Twitter. ... Greene said in a statement that the suspension was \u2018a Communist-style attack on free speech.\u2019 \u201dHot on the rightSteve Doocy is the rare Fox News host who is actually promoting vaccines.\u00a0\u201cDuring the past few months, as some of his Fox colleagues have cast doubt and uncertainty about the safety of the coronavirus vaccines, most notably prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Doocy has emerged as one of the network\u2019s biggest advocates for vaccines,\u201d Jeremy Barr reports. \u201cEchoing comments made by Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Doocy told viewers on Monday that \u201899 percent of the people who have died have not been vaccinated. And so, what they\u2019re trying to do is \u2026 make sure that all the people who have not been vaccinated get vaccinated.\u2019 The host then went on to list some popular conspiracy theories about the vaccines \u2014 adding that \u2018none of that is true.\u2019 ... Fox News prime-time host Sean Hannity drew some praise Monday night when he implored viewers to \u2018please take covid seriously.\u2019 But he stopped short of directly encouraging vaccination, as Doocy had done.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFox Corporation, meanwhile, has quietly implemented its own version of a vaccine passport while its personalities attack them.\u00a0\u201cFox employees, including those who work at Fox News, received an email, obtained by CNN Business, from the company's Human Resources department in early June that said Fox had \u2018developed a secure, voluntary way for employees to self-attest their vaccination status.\u2019 The system allows for employees to self-report to Fox the dates their shots were administered and which vaccines were used. The company has encouraged employees to report their status.\u201dToday in WashingtonBiden\u00a0is welcoming the Tampa Bay Buccaneers today to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl win. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff will also be there. At 3:15 p.m., Biden will hold a Cabinet meeting to mark six months in office along with Vice President Harris.\u00a0In closingLeyna Bloom, a 27-year-old model, became the first transgender woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated\u2019s swimsuit issue. Bloom \u201cis one of three women to appear on the 2021 edition\u2019s cover when it hits stands later this week, the magazine announced on Monday. The others are tennis star Naomi Osaka, 23, and rapper Megan Thee Stallion, 26,\u201d Jonathan Edwards reports. \u201cMany girls like us don\u2019t have the chance to live our dreams, or to live long at all. I hope my cover empowers those, who are struggling to be seen, feel valued,\u201d Bloom wrote on Instagram.\u00a0This moment heals a lot of pain in the world. We deserve this moment; we have waited millions of years to show up as survivors and be seen as full humans filled with wonder. @SI_Swimsuit #SI2021 pic.twitter.com/ArvYsG1IS2\u2014 Leyna Bloom (@leynabloom) July 19, 2021\n\nSeth Meyers examined why Trump and former Fox News host Bill O\u2019Reilly are having a hard time selling tickets for their arena tour:\u00a0And the secretary of transportation had to deal with some bridges this morning:\u00a0Seems a bit on the nose, but whatever it takes to sign in and get my news clips\u2026. pic.twitter.com/2A82tZXlJh\u2014 Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 20, 2021\n\n But like other Republicans, he may be moving to redefine the Capitol attack. The Daily 202: At least one GOP lawmaker on Jan. 6 committee called the riot \u2018criminal\u2019",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: At least one GOP lawmaker on Jan. 6 committee called the riot \u2018criminal\u2019 (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7096",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/20/daily-202-least-one-gop-lawmaker-jan-6-committee-called-riot-criminal/",
        "text": "with Mariana AlfaroWelcome to\u00a0The Daily 202 newsletter!\u00a0Tell your friends to sign up here.\u00a0On this day in 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHouse Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy\u2019s most interesting pick to serve on the special committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot\u00a0may be\u00a0a GOP lawmaker who\u00a0denounced that violent attack on Congress as \u201cun-American.\u201d\u00a0 In harrowing photos taken the day of the insurrection, Rep. Troy\u00a0Nehls\u00a0of Texas can be seen helping Capitol Police barricade House chamber doors against supporters of President Donald Trump who violently interrupted certification of President Biden\u2019s victory.\u201cWhat\u2019s taking place here right now is un-American,\u201d\u00a0the former sheriff\u00a0said\u00a0in a video message\u00a0even as\u00a0protesters rampaged through the\u00a0Capitol\u00a0in the worst assault on the legislature in centuries. \u201cThis is a sacred house.\u201dI was proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with Capitol police barricading entrance to our sacred House chamber, while trying to calm the situation talking to protestors.What I\u2019m witnessing is a disgrace. We\u2019re better than this. Violence is NEVER the answer.Law and order! pic.twitter.com/SgN2F8YGIS\u2014 Troy Nehls (@SheriffTNehls) January 6, 2021\n\nLast night,\u00a0my colleagues Marianna Sotomayor, Felicia Sonmez, and Karoun Demirjian reported\u00a0Nehls\u00a0will join Republican Reps.\u00a0Jim Jordan (Ohio), Jim Banks (Ind.), Rodney Davis (Ill.), Kelly Armstrong (N.D.)\u00a0as members of the bipartisan House Select Committee looking into the riot.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMcCarthy, who opposed the creation of\u00a0a\u00a0bipartisan independent commission to\u00a0look into\u00a0the riot and fought the establishment of the committee, had for weeks kept secret whether he would name members. He revealed his choices\u00a0days after meeting with Trump\u00a0at the latter\u2019s Bedminster, N.J. resort.\u00a0Some Republicans fret that the high-profile investigation will keep the violence \u2014 and Trump\u2019s role in encouraging the demonstration \u2014 on voters\u2019 minds as the 2022 midterms creep ever closer.\u00a0\u00a0The panel will hold its first hearing next Tuesday, featuring testimony from\u00a0two Capitol Police officers, and two officers from the Metropolitan Police Department, including Michael\u00a0Fanone, who\u00a0has given graphic first-hand accounts\u00a0of the violence he suffered.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)\u00a0announced her picks for the committee\u00a0early this month, including\u00a0Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.)\u00a0as its chair and\u00a0Rep. Liz Cheney\u00a0(R-Wyo.), a fierce Trump critic, as a member.\u00a0Pelosi\u2019s\u00a0six other appointees\u00a0are\u00a0Democratic Reps. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.), Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), Pete Aguilar (Calif.), Stephanie Murphy (Fla.), Jamie B.\u00a0Raskin\u00a0(Md.) and Elaine Luria (Va.).\u00a0Lofgren, who was one of the Democratic prosecutors in Trump\u2019s first and second impeachment trials, chairs the House Administration Committee, which has already held several hearings\u00a0looking into the riot and the police and emergency response. Davis is the panel\u2019s top Republican.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementSchiff and\u00a0Raskin\u00a0were the lead impeachment managers during Trump\u2019s first and second impeachment trials, respectively. Jordan was one of Trump's loudest defenders.AdvertisementIn the weeks and months since the riot, the former president has urged Republicans to reimagine the violent demonstrators as \u201cmartyrs and warlike heroes,\u201d\u00a0the Associated Press\u2019s Calvin Woodward, Colleen Long, and David\u00a0Klepper\u00a0reported.\u00a0As I wrote in May,\u00a0Republicans have been playing down\u00a0Jan. 6, which sent Vice President Mike Pence scurrying for his life, left 140 Capitol Police injured, offices ransacked, doors and windows broken, and interrupted the peaceful certification of Biden\u2019s victory.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementTrump\u00a0has repeated, sometimes several times a day, the falsehood that he was cheated out of a second term in an election marred by systemic fraud \u2014 a claim for which there is no evidence. Republican state election officials, Trump\u2019s Justice Department, countless judges including many named by the former president, have rejected those claims as meritless.\u00a0AdvertisementBut the Republican\u00a0Party has embraced\u00a0this \u201cBig Lie\u201d and\u00a0enlisted candidates who espouse it, as GOP officials pursue a state-by-state campaign to rein in electoral practices they blame for Trump\u2019s loss and give partisan politicians more power over election outcomes.\u00a0Anger at the riot may not mean much:\u00a0McCarthy\u2019s own initial outrage\u00a0has melted away.\u00a0And\u00a0Nehls\u00a0joined him, Jordan and Banks in the riot\u2019s immediate aftermath in\u00a0voting to overturn the results of the election. (Davis and Armstrong did not.)It\u2019s not clear what the GOP division of labor will look like.\u00a0Banks issued a statement\u00a0saying he would get the answer to questions like \u201cwhy was the Capitol unprepared and vulnerable to attack on January 6?\u201d while insisting the committee only exists \u201cto malign conservatives and to justify the Left\u2019s authoritarian agenda.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI will do everything possible to give the American people the facts about the lead up to January 6, the riot that day, and the responses from Capitol leadership and the Biden administration,\u201d Banks said. (Biden took office Jan. 20, so it seems likely the congressman means to scrutinize the president\u2019s anti-extremism strategy.)\u00a0In that context, it\u2019s worth revisiting an exchange\u00a0Nehls,\u00a0who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Army Reserve,\u00a0said he had\u00a0with some of the demonstrators\u00a0through the broken glass of one of the doors.\u00a0\u201cI had my Texas mask on,\u201d\u00a0Nehls\u00a0said. \u201cThey said, \u2018You\u2019re from Texas and you should be with us on this.\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m all OK, and I\u2019m all Texan, and I\u2019m all about the Constitution and individual and personal freedom, but, to me, this is criminal what you are doing here today.\u2019\u201dWhat\u2019s happening nowAmazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space this morning.\u00a0Bezos, along with his brother Mark, Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands, flew in the improbable spaceport his Blue Origin space venture built, Christian Davenport and Dalvin Brown report. The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration\u2019s modern renaissance, a movement that is being fueled not just by nations but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires,\u201d our colleagues write.\u00a0Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos, along with his younger brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen were passengers on the July 20 launch. (Blue Origin)To start your day with a full political briefing, sign up for our Power Up newsletter.Lunchtime reads from The Post\u201cU.S. and E.U. security officials wary of NSO links to Israeli intelligence,\u201d\u00a0by Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet: \u201cThe Israeli company NSO Group has earned a reputation among national security experts around the world as a best-in-class manufacturer of surveillance technology capable of secretly gathering information from a target\u2019s phone. But U.S. and European security officials regard the company with a degree of suspicion despite the ability of its technology to help combat terrorists and violent criminals. In interviews, several current and former officials said they presumed that the company, which was founded by former Israeli intelligence officers, provides at least some information to the government in Jerusalem about who is using its spying products and what information they\u2019re collecting.\u201d\u201cWhat were the Capitol rioters thinking on Jan. 6?\u201d\u00a0by Dan Zak and Karen Heller: \u201cRobert Gieswein is a good man, according to family and friends, who describe him as gentle and compassionate. His mother says he has \u2018an amazing work ethic.\u2019 His younger sister calls him \u2018the most inspiring person in my life.\u2019 He bought clothes and shoes for the residents of a nursing home where he worked as a nurse\u2019s aide. The 24-year-old had no criminal history when he traveled to Washington, D.C., in January and, according to the U.S. government, joined a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol. Gieswein appears to be affiliated with the radical militia group the Three Percenters, the FBI says, and the leader of a \u2018private paramilitary training group\u2019 called the Woodland Wild Dogs. On Jan. 6 he donned goggles, a camouflage shirt, an army-style helmet and a military-style vest reinforced with an armored plate and a black pouch emblazoned with \u2018MY MOM THINKS I\u2019M SPECIAL.\u2019 Then, wielding a baseball bat and a noxious spray, he stormed the U.S. Capitol, attacked a federal officer and helped halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election, the government claims...\u201c\u2018If what the government says is true, then Mr. Gieswein committed assault on January 6,\u2019 federal public defender Ann Mason Rigby said July 1 during a hearing on his detention. \u2018The question before the court is: Is he incorrigibly violent? Is that a characteristic that cannot be controlled? And that\u2019s why you have to look at his history.\u2019 That\u2019s what the U.S. District Court in D.C. is doing with at least 535 people who were somehow involved in the breach of the Capitol; there are hundreds of ongoing investigations beyond that... Were these people acting on their most deeply held convictions, or were they somehow not themselves on Jan. 6? ... The insurrection itself, in other words, has been deployed as a defense. The mob mentality made them do it.\u201d\u2026 and beyond\u201cA House race in Cleveland captures the Democrats\u2019 generational divide,\u201d\u00a0by the New York Times\u2019s Jonathan Weisman: \u201cNina Turner had just belted out a short address to God\u2019s Tabernacle of Faith Church in the cadences and tremulous volumes of a preacher when the Rev. Timothy Eppinger called on the whole congregation to lay hands on the woman seeking the House seat of greater Cleveland. ... In the final weeks of the campaign, the party establishment is throwing copious amounts of time and money into an effort to stop Ms. Turner, a fiery former Cleveland councilwoman and Ohio state senator known beyond this district as the face and spirit of Bernie Sanders\u2019s presidential campaigns ... That suggests leaders understand that the outcome of the race will be read as a signal about the party\u2019s future.\u201d\u201cAs many as 200 Americans have now reported possible symptoms of 'Havana Syndrome,' officials say,\u201d\u00a0by NBC News\u2019s Ken Dilanian, Josh Lederman and Courtney Kube: \u201cA U.S. official with knowledge of new potential cases of so-called Havana Syndrome said a steady drumbeat of cables has been coming in from overseas posts reporting new incidents \u2014 often multiple times each week. ... Officials with direct knowledge said there are now possible cases on every continent except Antarctica. ... Almost half of the possible cases involve CIA officers or their relatives, two officials said.\u201d\u201cBen & Jerry\u2019s says it will stop ice cream sales in occupied territories,\u201d\u00a0by NPR\u2019s Daniel Estrin: \u201cBen & Jerry's said it will stop selling its ice cream in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, calling it \u2018inconsistent with our values.\u2019 The company did not say when it would halt sales, but its sole local Israeli manufacturer vowed to continue selling as usual until its license expires at the end of 2022. ... Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called the decision \"antisemitic,\" and called on U.S. states with laws against Israel boycotts to sanction Ben & Jerry's. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the move \u2018morally wrong\u2019 and vowed to fight it.\u201dOn the HillA bipartisan bill aims to assert Congress\u2019s power over arms sales, emergencies and military operations.\u201cA bipartisan group of senators is unveiling legislation Tuesday to give Congress a more active role in approving arms sales, authorizing the use of military force and declaring national emergencies, in an across-the-board effort to claw back national security power from the executive branch,\u201d Karoun Demirjian reports.\u00a0\u201cThe bill aims, for the first time, to define what type of \u2018hostilities\u2019 require a president to seek congressional approval before committing military resources; establish expiration dates for national emergencies and military authorizations; and automatically curtail funding for any operation a president continues without explicit congressional support.\u201d\u201cThe comprehensive measure comes as Washington is grappling with whether and how to repeal long-running authorizations for use of military force, or AUMFs, including those passed nearly two decades ago to greenlight U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u201dThe infrastructure deal is in a precarious state as the endgame nears.\u00a0\u201cBiden on Monday took a subtle yet unmistakable dig at Republicans who have backed away from a major funding component in a bipartisan infrastructure package that is now starting to fray, saying pointedly that \u2018we shook hands on it\u2019 even as he continued to promote the agreement,\u201d Seung Min Kim reports. \u201cBiden\u2019s comment, with its accusatory undertones, reflected the agreement\u2019s precarious state at the outset of what could be a pivotal week. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to force a vote within days to advance the roughly $1 trillion plan despite the Republican hesitations\u201d\u201cBiden also will seek to turn up the pressure by traveling to Ohio on Wednesday to pitch the plan and hold a town hall session with voters.\u201d\u201cRepublicans were annoyed by Schumer\u2019s insistence on holding preliminary Senate votes Wednesday to proceed to a debate on the agreement, which has not been finalized. The majority leader finalized his floor strategy on Monday night, teeing up a Wednesday vote that would allow the Senate to proceed to the bipartisan package.\u201d\u201cBut since Schumer disclosed his strategy, Republicans have indicated that a critical mass of their members would effectively block the infrastructure package if a deal had not been finalized. \u2018It\u2019s not going to get 60, let\u2019s put it that way,\u2019 said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.).\u201d\u201cIssues large and small were still unresolved Monday, aides said. While the challenge of funding the package remained the biggest hurdle, there were also issues on the spending side of the deal, including transit, broadband and a proposed infrastructure bank, aides said.\u201dThe pandemicThe delta variant is posing a major risk to Biden\u2019s promises of a swift economic comeback.\u00a0\u201cA resurgence in coronavirus cases is threatening the Biden administration\u2019s promises of a swift economic recovery, with Wall Street getting battered on Monday and some leading forecasters beginning to rethink their extremely rosy projections,\u201d Jeff Stein and Heather Long report. \u201cThe administration is closely monitoring the economic risks associated with the delta variant, and senior U.S. officials have in recent days suggested local restrictions may have to be reimposed in response to the pandemic.\u201d\u201c \u2018This virus doesn\u2019t have to hold you back any longer. It doesn\u2019t have to hold our economy back any longer. But the only way we put it behind us is if more Americans get vaccinated,\u2019 President Biden said Monday.\u201d\u201cThe variant\u2019s proliferation abroad has already hurt U.S. supply chains, and shortages could exacerbate inflation by increasing the price of production. And a jump in hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated poses a particular challenge for the Biden administration in more conservative parts of the country ... These tensions played out in public on Monday, with Biden emphasizing his infrastructure package \u2014 the White House\u2019s first big non-covid legislative priority \u2014 amid headlines showing financial markets getting clobbered by renewed fears about the coronavirus. \u2018Our economy has come a long way over the past six months. We can\u2019t slow down now,\u2019 Biden said.\u201dA federal judge upheld a coronavirus vaccine mandate for Indiana University students\u201cThe ruling could be influential as colleges and universities across the country are preparing to reopen in the fall and deciding how to protect campuses from the ongoing public health threat of the lethal virus. Hundreds of schools have adopted vaccine requirements. Many others are only encouraging students to get vaccinated,\u201d Nick Anderson reports. \u201cThe split on mandates often follows a red-blue political divide. Colleges that require vaccination are more likely to be located in states that President Biden carried in last year\u2019s election.\u201dMask mandates are making a return \u2014 along with controversy.\u00a0\u201cTwo months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said vaccinated individuals didn\u2019t need to wear masks in most settings, a growing number of experts are warning it\u2019s time to put them back on,\u201d Dan Diamond reports.\u201cFirst, there was Los Angeles County, where the rising menace posed by the delta variant of the coronavirus prompted health officials to reimpose a mask mandate. Then, Bay Area health officers on Friday recommended that residents of seven counties and the city of Berkeley, Calif., resume wearing masks indoors. Mask mandates are being discussed, too, in coronavirus hot spots such as Arkansas and Missouri, where cases have sharply increased in recent weeks and many residents remain unvaccinated.\u201d\u201cBut the growing calls to reinstate mask mandates ... renewed a cultural and health flash point a year and a half after the virus landed in the United States. ... \u2018In a free [country] people will evaluate their personal risk factors and are smart enough to ultimately make medical decisions like wearing a mask themselves,\u2019 Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in a statement last week, introducing legislation that would ban mask mandates on planes and public transportation.\u201dThe U.S. warned against travel to Britain as coronavirus cases surge and restrictions lift.\u00a0\u201cThe State Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday urged all Americans to avoid visiting the country. \u2018Even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants,\u2019 the CDC said in an updated travel notice,\u201d Erin Cunningham reports. \u201cIn its highest-level advisory Monday, the State Department delivered an even sterner warning. \u2018Do not travel to the United Kingdom due to COVID-19,\u2019 the advisory said.\u201d\u201cThe new U.S. travel warnings are not binding, but they were issued as Britain struggles to contain the fallout from a surge in new infections caused by the delta variant first identified in India.\u201dQuote of the day\u201cThe rise of delta is potentially a human tragedy; I don\u2019t expect it to be hugely consequential macroeconomically,\u201d said Jason Furman, a former Obama administration economist, who noted the delta variant\u2019s spread across Europe did not appear to lead to major declines in mobility trends, a gauge of consumer patterns. \u201cThe U.S. economy is going to grow strongly every quarter this year. Will it be a little less strong because of this? Maybe. But I still expect economic growth to be above its pre-pandemic the rest of this year, and I don\u2019t think that changes that fundamental fact.\u201dUnvaccinated cases soaring again, visualizedCoronavirus cases are increasing almost exclusively in the unprotected population. So The Washington Post adjusted its case, death and hospitalization rates to account for that \u2014 and found that in many places, the virus continues to rage among those who have not received a shot.Hot on the leftTwitter temporarily suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for violating its coronavirus misinformation policy.\u00a0The suspension came after Greene falsely claimed that the coronavirus was \u201cnot dangerous\u201d for some, Bryan Pietsch reports. \u201cThe 12-hour suspension is the shortest of Twitter\u2019s read-only penalties, which its website says can range from 12 hours to seven days, \u2018depending on the nature of the violation.\u2019 Greene\u2019s account had violated the misinformation policy multiple times, according to Twitter. ... Greene said in a statement that the suspension was \u2018a Communist-style attack on free speech.\u2019 \u201dHot on the rightSteve Doocy is the rare Fox News host who is actually promoting vaccines.\u00a0\u201cDuring the past few months, as some of his Fox colleagues have cast doubt and uncertainty about the safety of the coronavirus vaccines, most notably prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Doocy has emerged as one of the network\u2019s biggest advocates for vaccines,\u201d Jeremy Barr reports. \u201cEchoing comments made by Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Doocy told viewers on Monday that \u201899 percent of the people who have died have not been vaccinated. And so, what they\u2019re trying to do is \u2026 make sure that all the people who have not been vaccinated get vaccinated.\u2019 The host then went on to list some popular conspiracy theories about the vaccines \u2014 adding that \u2018none of that is true.\u2019 ... Fox News prime-time host Sean Hannity drew some praise Monday night when he implored viewers to \u2018please take covid seriously.\u2019 But he stopped short of directly encouraging vaccination, as Doocy had done.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFox Corporation, meanwhile, has quietly implemented its own version of a vaccine passport while its personalities attack them.\u00a0\u201cFox employees, including those who work at Fox News, received an email, obtained by CNN Business, from the company's Human Resources department in early June that said Fox had \u2018developed a secure, voluntary way for employees to self-attest their vaccination status.\u2019 The system allows for employees to self-report to Fox the dates their shots were administered and which vaccines were used. The company has encouraged employees to report their status.\u201dToday in WashingtonBiden\u00a0is welcoming the Tampa Bay Buccaneers today to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl win. Second gentleman Doug Emhoff will also be there. At 3:15 p.m., Biden will hold a Cabinet meeting to mark six months in office along with Vice President Harris.\u00a0In closingLeyna Bloom, a 27-year-old model, became the first transgender woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated\u2019s swimsuit issue. Bloom \u201cis one of three women to appear on the 2021 edition\u2019s cover when it hits stands later this week, the magazine announced on Monday. The others are tennis star Naomi Osaka, 23, and rapper Megan Thee Stallion, 26,\u201d Jonathan Edwards reports. \u201cMany girls like us don\u2019t have the chance to live our dreams, or to live long at all. I hope my cover empowers those, who are struggling to be seen, feel valued,\u201d Bloom wrote on Instagram.\u00a0This moment heals a lot of pain in the world. We deserve this moment; we have waited millions of years to show up as survivors and be seen as full humans filled with wonder. @SI_Swimsuit #SI2021 pic.twitter.com/ArvYsG1IS2\u2014 Leyna Bloom (@leynabloom) July 19, 2021\n\nSeth Meyers examined why Trump and former Fox News host Bill O\u2019Reilly are having a hard time selling tickets for their arena tour:\u00a0And the secretary of transportation had to deal with some bridges this morning:\u00a0Seems a bit on the nose, but whatever it takes to sign in and get my news clips\u2026. pic.twitter.com/2A82tZXlJh\u2014 Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 20, 2021\n\n But like other Republicans, he may be moving to redefine the Capitol attack. The Daily 202: At least one GOP lawmaker on Jan. 6 committee called the riot \u2018criminal\u2019",
        "author": "Olivier Knox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Finance 202: Biden fills out economic team as Trump's coalition continues to implode (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7097",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/08/finance-202-biden-fills-out-economic-team-trump-coalition-continues-implode/",
        "text": "with Brent D. GriffithsPresident-elect Joe Biden\u2019s government is coming together as President Trump\u2019s falls apart.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe incoming president will nominate Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo for commerce secretary and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) for labor secretary. He is also set to tap Isabel Guzman, director of California\u2019s Office of the Small Business Advocate, to lead the Small Business Administration; and Don Graves, a former economic advisor who went on to work at KeyBank, to serve as deputy commerce secretary, my colleagues report.\u00a0 The Cabinet picks balance Raimondo, a former venture capitalist who has clashed with organized labor, against Walsh, who has championed the needs of workers. And they amplify a signal Biden has been sending with other personnel decisions \u2014 that his administration will thread the moderate and liberal wings of his party as he seeks to restore stability to government.The chaos consuming the final days of Trump\u2019s presidency highlight the urgency of that challenge.\u00a0Just Thursday, Trump\u2019s White House suffered a raft of resignations following his role stirring the violent mob that attacked the Capitol the day before. Among those quitting: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Tyler Goodspeed, the acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDitto Mick Mulvaney, who has served Trump as acting chief of staff, budget director, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and, most recently, special envoy to Northern Ireland.\u00a0The former tea party congressman from South Carolina, who is seeking investments for a hedge fund he aims to launch, announced his decision on CNBC\u2019s \u201cSquawk Box,\u201d explaining, \u201cI can\u2019t do it. I can\u2019t stay.\u201d (There are now 12 days until Biden\u2019s inauguration.)It fell to lower-level White House staffers, speaking anonymously to Politico, to spell out the other major consideration for those eyeing the exits. As one put it, \u201dThis will hurt us in trying to get jobs.\u201dThe defections aren\u2019t just coming from within the administration.\u00a0The president faces growing calls for his removal from office \u2014 either through impeachment, which Democratic leaders say they are prepared to pursue, or through the 25th Amendment, an option former chief of staff John Kelly said he would have supported if he was still in the Cabinet. The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal called for him to resign.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd a number of Trump\u2019s staunchest supporters from Wall Street and beyond are cutting ties, in what appears to be a mix of last-minute reputation-rinsing and earnest revulsion at the president\u2019s role stoking violent resistance to the transfer of power.\u00a0Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, also appearing Thursday on CNBC, said he regrets voting for the Trump in November. He called the assault on the Capitol a \u201cdisgrace. As an American, I\u2019m embarrassed\u2026 All the good was gone, was thrown out, over the course of the last month and finished yesterday.\u201d Peltz, who said he is a registered independent, has contributed $464,000 to the Republican National Committee since 2016, per figures from the Center for Responsive Politics.\u00a0Leading lobbyists in Washington continued to speak out.\u00a0Jay Timmons, a former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee who now heads the National Association of Manufacturers, called Wednesday for Vice President Pence to consider invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementExpanding on that in a Washington Post op-ed, Timmons writes, \u201cThe only way to prevent further violence in these critical days is to address the root cause: the person inciting the violence. Trump should be held accountable. There are options besides the 25th Amendment, including resignation and impeachment\u2026 It also needs to be clear that any elected leader defending the president\u2019s actions is violating his or her oath to the Constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy.\u201dThe Business Roundtable, which released a statement Wednesday decrying the deadly attempted insurrection, put a sharper point on the condemnation in a follow-up statement on Thursday. \u201cYesterday\u2019s inexcusable violence and chaos at the Capitol makes clear that elected officials\u2019 perpetuation of the fiction of a fraudulent 2020 presidential election is not only reprehensible, but also a danger to our democracy, our society and our economy,\u201d the CEO lobbying group said.What, if anything, will follow those statements remains less clear.\u00a0We\u2019ve written here about roughly three dozen CEOs agreeing on a Tuesday conference call they would no longer direct campaign contributions to Republicans who objected to the certification of Biden\u2019s electoral college win. One of the organizers of that effort, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), is already seeing blowback, as publisher Simon & Shuster canceled a book contract with him and a home-state donor, Tamko Building Products CEO David Humphreys, called for his censure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the end, 139 House members and seven senators joined Hawley in voting to overturn the election results. Now, those lawmakers\u2019 corporate backers could face pressure from two directions. Judd Legum, a newsletter author with a big following, is seeking to put major corporations on the spot over whether they will continue supporting those lawmakers:\u00a0.@ATT donated over $2 million to 130 Republican members of Congress who participated in this effort to subvert democracy. When I asked if ATT would support these Republicans in the future, the company did not provide an answer.https://t.co/JhGHL1jEen https://t.co/p3GLcWHMkp\u2014 Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) January 8, 2021\n\nAnd Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist now with The Lincoln Project, said the Never Trump group will seek to expose corporations that contribute to the president\u2019s top allies in Congress:\u00a0We will foment it. @ProjectLincoln . Corporate America will have to make some decisions. Any funding to a political committees controlled by the seditious Kevin McCarthy @GOPLeader or any committee that has funded @tedcruz or @HawleyMO will trigger a public campaign. https://t.co/hCHz8kNlJ2\u2014 Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) January 7, 2021\n\nFallout from mayhem at the CapitolA Capitol Police officer has died.Five people have now died in connection to the riot: \u201cOfficer Brian D. Sicknick died at about 9:30 p.m. last night, the Capitol Police said in a statement. He had been with the agency since 2008,\" the New York Times's Mike Baker reports.Silicon Valley is bracing for a reckoning.The brief insurrection adds further fuel to the bipartisan loathing of big tech: \u201cFacebook, Google and Twitter are staring down the prospect of harsh new regulations in Washington, as politically ascendant Democrats in Congress pledge to take fresh aim,\u201d Tony Romm reports this morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the months to come, some Democrats now are promising to use their powerful new perches \u2014 and their control of the White House and Congress starting in a matter of days \u2014 to proffer the sort of tough new laws and other punishments that tech giants have successfully fended off for years. Their seething anger could result in major repercussions for the industry, opening the door for a wide array of policy changes that could hold Facebook, Google and Twitter newly liable for their missteps.\u201dThe companies responded with swift action after the riot: \u201cFacebook has since suspended Trump\u2018s account indefinitely, and Twitter blocked him from posting for 12 hours, a suspension now lifted. Google, which owns YouTube, joined the other tech giants in announcing policies that resulted in the removal of one of Trump\u2019s earlier videos that repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election even as the president urged rioters at the time to remain calm.\u201dShopify takes Trump Organization and campaign stores offline. \u201cA Shopify spokeswoman said [Trump] violated the company\u2019s policy, which prohibits retailers on the platform from promoting or supporting organizations or people that promote violence,\u201d WSJ's Vipal Monga reports.\u00a0Other news:Trump's remarks before the riot may be investigated: \u201cThe top federal prosecutor in D.C. said that Trump was not off-limits in his investigation of the events surrounding the riot, saying \u2018all actors' would be examined to determine if they broke the law,\u201d Devlin Barrett reports.Airlines and flight attendants are concerned about when rioters leave D.C.: \u201cAmerican Airlines and United Airlines have both increased staffing at the DC-area airports where they operate. American is also suspending alcohol service on its flights to and from the region. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International, which represents nearly 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines, said the rioters should not be allowed on flights home,\u201d CNN's Pete Muntean, Gregory Wallace, Eric Levenson and Francesca Street report.Beijing is trolling us: \u201cMuch of the media coverage focused on connecting the reaction to the mob with the US\u2019s support of the Hong Kong protests, and the apparent hypocrisy of the US political establishment and media in supporting protests in another country but not their own (that comparison is disingenuous given Hong Kong\u2019s protests were a fight for free and fair democratic procedures, while the Trump protests were a denial of them.),\" Quartz's Jane Li & Mary Hui report.Coronavirus falloutDecember jobs report could be weaker.The year-end covid surge could loom large: \u201cEconomists expect 50,000 jobs were added in December, slightly more than a fifth of the 245,000 in November, according to Dow Jones. The unemployment rate is expected to rise slightly to 6.8 percent from 6.7 percent. The report is out at 8:30 a.m.,\u201d CNBC's Patti Domm reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201c'I think it\u2019s 50/50 whether it\u2019s going to be up 50,000 or down 50,000. We\u2019re kind of on the knife\u2019s edge between creating additional jobs and the recovery falling back a step,' said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank.\u201dWeekly unemployment claims remain elevated: \u201cWorkers continued to apply for unemployment aid at an elevated level at the end of 2020 and holiday-season demand for imported consumer products pushed the November trade deficit in goods to a record, signs of the uneven economic recovery,\u201d the WSJ's Eric Morath and Harriet Torry report. \u201cWeekly initial claims for jobless benefits from regular state programs, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 787,000 in the week ended Jan. 2, the Labor Department said Thursday. The prior week\u2019s figure was revised up by 3,000.\u201dMore from the U.S.:Another grim day: \u201cOn Thursday, more than 4,000 people died of covid-19 in the United States, the first time the toll has exceeded that milestone, following a record day Wednesday of 3,915 deaths. The pandemic has now claimed more than 363,000 lives in the United States. More than 265,000 new coronavirus cases were reported, the second-highest count in a day according to a Washington Post analysis,\u201d Paulina Firozi,\u00a0Jacqueline Dupree and Meryl Kornfield report.People without symptoms spread covid in more than half of cases: \u201cFifty-nine percent of all transmission came from people without symptoms, under the Center for Disease Control and Prevention model\u2019s baseline scenario. That includes 35 percent of new cases from people who infect others before they show symptoms and 24 percent that come from people who never develop symptoms at all,\" Ben Guarino reports.Some Americans won't get a stimulus payment until they file their taxes: \u201cThe Treasury has paid out about 68 percent of the payments so far, with millions of Americans receiving their $600 via direct deposit or a check in the mail. Yet, some Americans are still waiting to receive their money, and others will not receive any money until they file their 2020 tax return,\u201d Heather Long reports.From the corporate front:Walgreens maintains full-year profit growth forecast: \u201cThe company expects benefits from vaccinations to cushion the impact of pandemic-induced restrictions, and stuck to its full-year earnings growth forecast, sending its shares up 7 percent,\u201d Reuters's Mrinalika Roy and Dania Nadeem reports.Pandemic may change gyms forever: \u201cAmericans spent heavily across all price points, from $3,000 cardio machines to $20 yoga mats \u2026 Health and fitness equipment revenue more than doubled, to $2.3 billion, from March to October, according to NPD retail data. Sales of treadmills soared 135 percent while those of stationary bikes nearly tripled, depleting inventories,\u201d Hamza Shaban reports.Market moversStocks soar to record highs.The Nasdaq cleared the 13,000 mark: \u201cShares of Microsoft and Alphabet both gained more than 2 percent and Apple rose 3.4 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 211.73 points, or 0.7 percent, to 31,041.13. At one point, the Dow was up more than 300 points. The S&P 500 climbed 1.5 percent to 3,803.79,\u201d CNBC's Fred Imbert and Maggie Fitzgerald reports.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was also the first time the Dow and S&P 500 ended a session above 31,000 and 3,800, respectively.\u201dAdvertisementGoldman Sachs predicts faster recovery with Democratic trifecta: \u201cThe bank upgraded its 2021 GDP and unemployment forecasts after CNN and other media outlets projected Democrats will take control of the US Senate, saying it means they will have enough votes to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of additional relief to an economy being hurt by the worsening pandemic,\u201d CNN Business Matt Egan reports.\u201cGoldman Sachs is now projecting GDP growth of 6.4 percent in 2021, up from 5.9 percent previously. That's well above consensus estimates of about 3.9 percent.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBitcoin hits $40,000 for the first time: \u201cThe world\u2019s most popular cryptocurrency climbed as high as $40,402.46 and was last up 6.1 percent at $39,100. It crossed $30,000 for the first time on Jan. 2 and $20,000 on Dec. 16,\u201d Reuters's Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss and Chuck Mikolajczak report.Advertisement\u201cSmaller coins ethereum, the second largest in terms of market capitalization, and XRP, the fourth biggest, gained 1.8 percent at $1,231 and 31 percent at 32 U.S. cents, respectively. Both currencies often move in tandem with bitcoin.\u201dTrade fly-aroundTrade policies have disproportionately harmed Black and Latino workers.A new study goes beyond the usual focus on the White working class: \u201cBlack and Latino workers suffered disproportionate economic harm by corporate offshoring following the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization agreement during the Clinton administration \u2014 trends that continued during Trump\u2019s presidency as more manufacturing jobs disappeared, researchers found,\u201d Tracy Jan reports this morning.\u201cNot only were Black and Latino factory workers more likely to lose their jobs, they were also less likely to find new employment, said the report by Public Citizen, a nonprofit corporate and government watchdog. When they did manage to secure work, they faced larger pay cuts than White workers with similar educational backgrounds.\u201dWhat might be behind some of this: \u201cBlack and Latino workers are overrepresented in the manufacturing sectors hit hardest by trade, including offshoring and imports, such as auto and steel, furniture, textiles and garments, and electrical appliances as well as customer service call centers, the report found. Wages in the manufacturing sectors have also stagnated in the past 25 years.\u201dRetaliatory tariffs on French goods are suspended for now: \u201cThe United States said it would hold off slapping tariffs on French cosmetics, handbags and other imports in retaliation for a digital services tax Washington says will harm U.S. tech firms, while it investigates similar taxes elsewhere,\u201d Reuters's Andrea Shalal reports.\u201cThe U.S. Trade Representative\u2019s office (USTR) said the 25 percent tariffs on imports of the French goods, which are valued at around $1.3 billion annually and were due to go into effect on Wednesday, would be suspended indefinitely \u2026 USTR said suspending the action against France would allow Washington to pursue a coordinated response in 10 investigations into similar taxes in India, Italy, Britain and other countries. It gave no timeframe for further action.\u201dPocket changeElon Musk is now the world's richest person.The Tesla CEO has seen his wealth skyrocket: \u201cA statement that seemed outlandish one year ago became plausible, then almost inevitable as Tesla Inc.\u2019s share price climbed higher and higher in 2020,\u201d Bloomberg News's Devon Pendleton reports.\u201cOn Thursday it finally happened. The electric-automaker\u2019s shares surged 7.9 percent, boosting Musk past Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world\u2019s 500 wealthiest people. Musk is worth $194.8 billion, or $9.5 billion more than Bezos, whose Blue Origin is a rival to Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Ltd., or SpaceX, in the private space race.\u201d (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Boeing agrees to pay $2.5 billion over 737 Max conspiracy: \u201cDavid P. Burns, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department\u2019s Criminal Division, said the crashes \u2018exposed fraudulent and deceptive conduct by employees of one of the world\u2019s leading commercial airplane manufacturers,\u2019\u201d Ian Duncan, Lori Aratani and Michael Laris report.\u201cThe penalty is a combination of a $244 million fine, $1.77 billion in compensation to Boeing\u2019s customers and a $500 million fund for the families of the crash victims. Boeing admitted that two of its technical pilots deceived federal safety regulators about a software system that was implicated in both crashes.\"Feds are probing AmEx card sales: \u201cThe inspectors general offices of the Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve are investigating whether AmEx used aggressive and misleading sales tactics to sell cards to business owners and whether customers were harmed \u2026 They are also examining whether specific employees contributed to the alleged behavior and if higher-level employees supported it \u2026,\u201d the WSJ's AnnaMaria Andriotis report.\u201cThe Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is also investigating business-card sales practices at AmEx \u2026 More than a dozen current and former AmEx employees previously told The Wall Street Journal that some salespeople strong-armed or misled small-business owners into signing up for cards to boost sales numbers.\u201dSheldon Adelson takes medical leave: \u201cThe casino magnate and Republican Party megadonor is stepping away from his Las Vegas Sands Corp. for cancer treatment, leaving his company amid economic uncertainty in the global gambling industry due to the pandemic,\u201d the WSJ's Katherine Sayre reports.\u201cAdelson, whose family is majority owner of the company, has said his succession plan is for the current executive team, including 25-year Sands veteran Robert Goldstein and Adelson\u2019s son-in-law Patrick Dumont, to lead the company \u2026\"DaybookToday:The Labor Department releases the December jobs reportThe funniespic.twitter.com/tuq6g3SQ4H\u2014 Matt Wuerker (@wuerker) January 6, 2021\n\nBull session White House officials are streaming for the exits while business leaders cut ties. The Finance 202: Biden fills out economic team as Trump's coalition continues to implode",
        "author": "Tory Newmyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Finance 202: Biden fills out economic team as Trump's coalition continues to implode (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7098",
        "date": "2021-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/08/finance-202-biden-fills-out-economic-team-trump-coalition-continues-implode/",
        "text": "with Brent D. GriffithsPresident-elect Joe Biden\u2019s government is coming together as President Trump\u2019s falls apart.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe incoming president will nominate Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo for commerce secretary and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) for labor secretary. He is also set to tap Isabel Guzman, director of California\u2019s Office of the Small Business Advocate, to lead the Small Business Administration; and Don Graves, a former economic advisor who went on to work at KeyBank, to serve as deputy commerce secretary, my colleagues report.\u00a0 The Cabinet picks balance Raimondo, a former venture capitalist who has clashed with organized labor, against Walsh, who has championed the needs of workers. And they amplify a signal Biden has been sending with other personnel decisions \u2014 that his administration will thread the moderate and liberal wings of his party as he seeks to restore stability to government.The chaos consuming the final days of Trump\u2019s presidency highlight the urgency of that challenge.\u00a0Just Thursday, Trump\u2019s White House suffered a raft of resignations following his role stirring the violent mob that attacked the Capitol the day before. Among those quitting: Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Tyler Goodspeed, the acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDitto Mick Mulvaney, who has served Trump as acting chief of staff, budget director, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and, most recently, special envoy to Northern Ireland.\u00a0The former tea party congressman from South Carolina, who is seeking investments for a hedge fund he aims to launch, announced his decision on CNBC\u2019s \u201cSquawk Box,\u201d explaining, \u201cI can\u2019t do it. I can\u2019t stay.\u201d (There are now 12 days until Biden\u2019s inauguration.)It fell to lower-level White House staffers, speaking anonymously to Politico, to spell out the other major consideration for those eyeing the exits. As one put it, \u201dThis will hurt us in trying to get jobs.\u201dThe defections aren\u2019t just coming from within the administration.\u00a0The president faces growing calls for his removal from office \u2014 either through impeachment, which Democratic leaders say they are prepared to pursue, or through the 25th Amendment, an option former chief of staff John Kelly said he would have supported if he was still in the Cabinet. The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal called for him to resign.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd a number of Trump\u2019s staunchest supporters from Wall Street and beyond are cutting ties, in what appears to be a mix of last-minute reputation-rinsing and earnest revulsion at the president\u2019s role stoking violent resistance to the transfer of power.\u00a0Billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, also appearing Thursday on CNBC, said he regrets voting for the Trump in November. He called the assault on the Capitol a \u201cdisgrace. As an American, I\u2019m embarrassed\u2026 All the good was gone, was thrown out, over the course of the last month and finished yesterday.\u201d Peltz, who said he is a registered independent, has contributed $464,000 to the Republican National Committee since 2016, per figures from the Center for Responsive Politics.\u00a0Leading lobbyists in Washington continued to speak out.\u00a0Jay Timmons, a former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee who now heads the National Association of Manufacturers, called Wednesday for Vice President Pence to consider invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementExpanding on that in a Washington Post op-ed, Timmons writes, \u201cThe only way to prevent further violence in these critical days is to address the root cause: the person inciting the violence. Trump should be held accountable. There are options besides the 25th Amendment, including resignation and impeachment\u2026 It also needs to be clear that any elected leader defending the president\u2019s actions is violating his or her oath to the Constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy.\u201dThe Business Roundtable, which released a statement Wednesday decrying the deadly attempted insurrection, put a sharper point on the condemnation in a follow-up statement on Thursday. \u201cYesterday\u2019s inexcusable violence and chaos at the Capitol makes clear that elected officials\u2019 perpetuation of the fiction of a fraudulent 2020 presidential election is not only reprehensible, but also a danger to our democracy, our society and our economy,\u201d the CEO lobbying group said.What, if anything, will follow those statements remains less clear.\u00a0We\u2019ve written here about roughly three dozen CEOs agreeing on a Tuesday conference call they would no longer direct campaign contributions to Republicans who objected to the certification of Biden\u2019s electoral college win. One of the organizers of that effort, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), is already seeing blowback, as publisher Simon & Shuster canceled a book contract with him and a home-state donor, Tamko Building Products CEO David Humphreys, called for his censure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the end, 139 House members and seven senators joined Hawley in voting to overturn the election results. Now, those lawmakers\u2019 corporate backers could face pressure from two directions. Judd Legum, a newsletter author with a big following, is seeking to put major corporations on the spot over whether they will continue supporting those lawmakers:\u00a0.@ATT donated over $2 million to 130 Republican members of Congress who participated in this effort to subvert democracy. When I asked if ATT would support these Republicans in the future, the company did not provide an answer.https://t.co/JhGHL1jEen https://t.co/p3GLcWHMkp\u2014 Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) January 8, 2021\n\nAnd Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist now with The Lincoln Project, said the Never Trump group will seek to expose corporations that contribute to the president\u2019s top allies in Congress:\u00a0We will foment it. @ProjectLincoln . Corporate America will have to make some decisions. Any funding to a political committees controlled by the seditious Kevin McCarthy @GOPLeader or any committee that has funded @tedcruz or @HawleyMO will trigger a public campaign. https://t.co/hCHz8kNlJ2\u2014 Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) January 7, 2021\n\nFallout from mayhem at the CapitolA Capitol Police officer has died.Five people have now died in connection to the riot: \u201cOfficer Brian D. Sicknick died at about 9:30 p.m. last night, the Capitol Police said in a statement. He had been with the agency since 2008,\" the New York Times's Mike Baker reports.Silicon Valley is bracing for a reckoning.The brief insurrection adds further fuel to the bipartisan loathing of big tech: \u201cFacebook, Google and Twitter are staring down the prospect of harsh new regulations in Washington, as politically ascendant Democrats in Congress pledge to take fresh aim,\u201d Tony Romm reports this morning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn the months to come, some Democrats now are promising to use their powerful new perches \u2014 and their control of the White House and Congress starting in a matter of days \u2014 to proffer the sort of tough new laws and other punishments that tech giants have successfully fended off for years. Their seething anger could result in major repercussions for the industry, opening the door for a wide array of policy changes that could hold Facebook, Google and Twitter newly liable for their missteps.\u201dThe companies responded with swift action after the riot: \u201cFacebook has since suspended Trump\u2018s account indefinitely, and Twitter blocked him from posting for 12 hours, a suspension now lifted. Google, which owns YouTube, joined the other tech giants in announcing policies that resulted in the removal of one of Trump\u2019s earlier videos that repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election even as the president urged rioters at the time to remain calm.\u201dShopify takes Trump Organization and campaign stores offline. \u201cA Shopify spokeswoman said [Trump] violated the company\u2019s policy, which prohibits retailers on the platform from promoting or supporting organizations or people that promote violence,\u201d WSJ's Vipal Monga reports.\u00a0Other news:Trump's remarks before the riot may be investigated: \u201cThe top federal prosecutor in D.C. said that Trump was not off-limits in his investigation of the events surrounding the riot, saying \u2018all actors' would be examined to determine if they broke the law,\u201d Devlin Barrett reports.Airlines and flight attendants are concerned about when rioters leave D.C.: \u201cAmerican Airlines and United Airlines have both increased staffing at the DC-area airports where they operate. American is also suspending alcohol service on its flights to and from the region. The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International, which represents nearly 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines, said the rioters should not be allowed on flights home,\u201d CNN's Pete Muntean, Gregory Wallace, Eric Levenson and Francesca Street report.Beijing is trolling us: \u201cMuch of the media coverage focused on connecting the reaction to the mob with the US\u2019s support of the Hong Kong protests, and the apparent hypocrisy of the US political establishment and media in supporting protests in another country but not their own (that comparison is disingenuous given Hong Kong\u2019s protests were a fight for free and fair democratic procedures, while the Trump protests were a denial of them.),\" Quartz's Jane Li & Mary Hui report.Coronavirus falloutDecember jobs report could be weaker.The year-end covid surge could loom large: \u201cEconomists expect 50,000 jobs were added in December, slightly more than a fifth of the 245,000 in November, according to Dow Jones. The unemployment rate is expected to rise slightly to 6.8 percent from 6.7 percent. The report is out at 8:30 a.m.,\u201d CNBC's Patti Domm reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201c'I think it\u2019s 50/50 whether it\u2019s going to be up 50,000 or down 50,000. We\u2019re kind of on the knife\u2019s edge between creating additional jobs and the recovery falling back a step,' said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank.\u201dWeekly unemployment claims remain elevated: \u201cWorkers continued to apply for unemployment aid at an elevated level at the end of 2020 and holiday-season demand for imported consumer products pushed the November trade deficit in goods to a record, signs of the uneven economic recovery,\u201d the WSJ's Eric Morath and Harriet Torry report. \u201cWeekly initial claims for jobless benefits from regular state programs, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 787,000 in the week ended Jan. 2, the Labor Department said Thursday. The prior week\u2019s figure was revised up by 3,000.\u201dMore from the U.S.:Another grim day: \u201cOn Thursday, more than 4,000 people died of covid-19 in the United States, the first time the toll has exceeded that milestone, following a record day Wednesday of 3,915 deaths. The pandemic has now claimed more than 363,000 lives in the United States. More than 265,000 new coronavirus cases were reported, the second-highest count in a day according to a Washington Post analysis,\u201d Paulina Firozi,\u00a0Jacqueline Dupree and Meryl Kornfield report.People without symptoms spread covid in more than half of cases: \u201cFifty-nine percent of all transmission came from people without symptoms, under the Center for Disease Control and Prevention model\u2019s baseline scenario. That includes 35 percent of new cases from people who infect others before they show symptoms and 24 percent that come from people who never develop symptoms at all,\" Ben Guarino reports.Some Americans won't get a stimulus payment until they file their taxes: \u201cThe Treasury has paid out about 68 percent of the payments so far, with millions of Americans receiving their $600 via direct deposit or a check in the mail. Yet, some Americans are still waiting to receive their money, and others will not receive any money until they file their 2020 tax return,\u201d Heather Long reports.From the corporate front:Walgreens maintains full-year profit growth forecast: \u201cThe company expects benefits from vaccinations to cushion the impact of pandemic-induced restrictions, and stuck to its full-year earnings growth forecast, sending its shares up 7 percent,\u201d Reuters's Mrinalika Roy and Dania Nadeem reports.Pandemic may change gyms forever: \u201cAmericans spent heavily across all price points, from $3,000 cardio machines to $20 yoga mats \u2026 Health and fitness equipment revenue more than doubled, to $2.3 billion, from March to October, according to NPD retail data. Sales of treadmills soared 135 percent while those of stationary bikes nearly tripled, depleting inventories,\u201d Hamza Shaban reports.Market moversStocks soar to record highs.The Nasdaq cleared the 13,000 mark: \u201cShares of Microsoft and Alphabet both gained more than 2 percent and Apple rose 3.4 percent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 211.73 points, or 0.7 percent, to 31,041.13. At one point, the Dow was up more than 300 points. The S&P 500 climbed 1.5 percent to 3,803.79,\u201d CNBC's Fred Imbert and Maggie Fitzgerald reports.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was also the first time the Dow and S&P 500 ended a session above 31,000 and 3,800, respectively.\u201dAdvertisementGoldman Sachs predicts faster recovery with Democratic trifecta: \u201cThe bank upgraded its 2021 GDP and unemployment forecasts after CNN and other media outlets projected Democrats will take control of the US Senate, saying it means they will have enough votes to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of additional relief to an economy being hurt by the worsening pandemic,\u201d CNN Business Matt Egan reports.\u201cGoldman Sachs is now projecting GDP growth of 6.4 percent in 2021, up from 5.9 percent previously. That's well above consensus estimates of about 3.9 percent.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBitcoin hits $40,000 for the first time: \u201cThe world\u2019s most popular cryptocurrency climbed as high as $40,402.46 and was last up 6.1 percent at $39,100. It crossed $30,000 for the first time on Jan. 2 and $20,000 on Dec. 16,\u201d Reuters's Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss and Chuck Mikolajczak report.Advertisement\u201cSmaller coins ethereum, the second largest in terms of market capitalization, and XRP, the fourth biggest, gained 1.8 percent at $1,231 and 31 percent at 32 U.S. cents, respectively. Both currencies often move in tandem with bitcoin.\u201dTrade fly-aroundTrade policies have disproportionately harmed Black and Latino workers.A new study goes beyond the usual focus on the White working class: \u201cBlack and Latino workers suffered disproportionate economic harm by corporate offshoring following the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization agreement during the Clinton administration \u2014 trends that continued during Trump\u2019s presidency as more manufacturing jobs disappeared, researchers found,\u201d Tracy Jan reports this morning.\u201cNot only were Black and Latino factory workers more likely to lose their jobs, they were also less likely to find new employment, said the report by Public Citizen, a nonprofit corporate and government watchdog. When they did manage to secure work, they faced larger pay cuts than White workers with similar educational backgrounds.\u201dWhat might be behind some of this: \u201cBlack and Latino workers are overrepresented in the manufacturing sectors hit hardest by trade, including offshoring and imports, such as auto and steel, furniture, textiles and garments, and electrical appliances as well as customer service call centers, the report found. Wages in the manufacturing sectors have also stagnated in the past 25 years.\u201dRetaliatory tariffs on French goods are suspended for now: \u201cThe United States said it would hold off slapping tariffs on French cosmetics, handbags and other imports in retaliation for a digital services tax Washington says will harm U.S. tech firms, while it investigates similar taxes elsewhere,\u201d Reuters's Andrea Shalal reports.\u201cThe U.S. Trade Representative\u2019s office (USTR) said the 25 percent tariffs on imports of the French goods, which are valued at around $1.3 billion annually and were due to go into effect on Wednesday, would be suspended indefinitely \u2026 USTR said suspending the action against France would allow Washington to pursue a coordinated response in 10 investigations into similar taxes in India, Italy, Britain and other countries. It gave no timeframe for further action.\u201dPocket changeElon Musk is now the world's richest person.The Tesla CEO has seen his wealth skyrocket: \u201cA statement that seemed outlandish one year ago became plausible, then almost inevitable as Tesla Inc.\u2019s share price climbed higher and higher in 2020,\u201d Bloomberg News's Devon Pendleton reports.\u201cOn Thursday it finally happened. The electric-automaker\u2019s shares surged 7.9 percent, boosting Musk past Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world\u2019s 500 wealthiest people. Musk is worth $194.8 billion, or $9.5 billion more than Bezos, whose Blue Origin is a rival to Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Ltd., or SpaceX, in the private space race.\u201d (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Boeing agrees to pay $2.5 billion over 737 Max conspiracy: \u201cDavid P. Burns, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department\u2019s Criminal Division, said the crashes \u2018exposed fraudulent and deceptive conduct by employees of one of the world\u2019s leading commercial airplane manufacturers,\u2019\u201d Ian Duncan, Lori Aratani and Michael Laris report.\u201cThe penalty is a combination of a $244 million fine, $1.77 billion in compensation to Boeing\u2019s customers and a $500 million fund for the families of the crash victims. Boeing admitted that two of its technical pilots deceived federal safety regulators about a software system that was implicated in both crashes.\"Feds are probing AmEx card sales: \u201cThe inspectors general offices of the Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve are investigating whether AmEx used aggressive and misleading sales tactics to sell cards to business owners and whether customers were harmed \u2026 They are also examining whether specific employees contributed to the alleged behavior and if higher-level employees supported it \u2026,\u201d the WSJ's AnnaMaria Andriotis report.\u201cThe Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is also investigating business-card sales practices at AmEx \u2026 More than a dozen current and former AmEx employees previously told The Wall Street Journal that some salespeople strong-armed or misled small-business owners into signing up for cards to boost sales numbers.\u201dSheldon Adelson takes medical leave: \u201cThe casino magnate and Republican Party megadonor is stepping away from his Las Vegas Sands Corp. for cancer treatment, leaving his company amid economic uncertainty in the global gambling industry due to the pandemic,\u201d the WSJ's Katherine Sayre reports.\u201cAdelson, whose family is majority owner of the company, has said his succession plan is for the current executive team, including 25-year Sands veteran Robert Goldstein and Adelson\u2019s son-in-law Patrick Dumont, to lead the company \u2026\"DaybookToday:The Labor Department releases the December jobs reportThe funniespic.twitter.com/tuq6g3SQ4H\u2014 Matt Wuerker (@wuerker) January 6, 2021\n\nBull session White House officials are streaming for the exits while business leaders cut ties. The Finance 202: Biden fills out economic team as Trump's coalition continues to implode",
        "author": "Tory Newmyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Power Up: Racism and police violence in spotlight at crucial time in 2020 race (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7099",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/powerup/2020/05/28/powerup-racism-and-police-violence-in-spotlight-at-crucial-time-in-2020-race/5eced36688e0fa32f822be79/",
        "text": "with Brent D. GriffithsIt's Thursday, Power People. Tips, comments, recipes? Reach out and sign up. Thanks for waking up with us.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThousands of people gathered on May 27 for a second night of protests in Minneapolis over the death of George Floyd, who died in police custody. (Nick Clausen/The Washington Post)The CampaignNOT JUST CORONAVIRUS: The recent spate of killings of African Americans has put racism and police violence in the spotlight at a crucial point in the 2020 race.\u00a0 A viral video capturing a white Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed father of two, George Floyd \u2014 who cried out that he could not breathe and later died \u2014 sparked public outrage and major protests even as a pandemic dominates the national discourse. The incident \u2014 which the FBI and Minnesota law enforcement are investigating \u2014 comes amid widespread outrage over the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a young black jogger in Georgia who was shot by white men who followed him with guns and Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT killed in her own apartment as Louisville officers were executing a drug warrant for a man who did not live there.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe racial pain also comes as President Trump is trying to make inroads with black voters, and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is counting on their support to put him in the White House. And Democratic voters who had a diverse primary field from which to choose may turn up pressure on Biden to pick a person of color as his number two to ensure their concerns get heard.\u00a0Trump called Floyd's death a \u201cvery, very sad event\u201d and tweeted last night that he asked \u201cfor this investigation to be expedited.\u201d \u00a0....I have asked for this investigation to be expedited and greatly appreciate all of the work done by local law enforcement. My heart goes out to George\u2019s family and friends. Justice will be served!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2020\n\nBiden condemned the \u201chorrific killing\u201d of Floyd and called for \u201can independent Department of Justice civil rights investigation,\u201d our colleague Sean Sullivan reports.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cWatching his life be taken in the same manner, echoing nearly the same words of Eric Garner more than five years ago \u2014 \u2018I can\u2019t breathe\u2019 \u2014 is a tragic reminder that this was not an isolated incident but a part of an ingrained systemic cycle of injustice that still exists in this country,\u201d Biden said during a virtual campaign event on Thursday with Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D).\u00a0Biden commended Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and the police department for acting swiftly to fire the four officers involved in Floyd's death but said that \u201cthey have to be more fully accountable.\u201d\u201cWe have to get to the root of all this. You know, we have to ensure that the Floyd family receive the justice they\u2019re entitled to,\u201d Biden added. \u201cAnd as a nation \u2026 we have to work relentlessly to eradicate these systemic failures that inflict so much damage on not just one family, one community, but on the people of color all across this nation.\u201dSome Trump allies are encouraging the president to do more in the wake of the killings. Darrell Scott, a pastor and the head of the Trump campaign's National Diversity Coalition, told Power Up he's calling for \u201csome type of federally mandated police reform\u201d program. He wants Trump to consider new ways to prevent and curtail the use of \u201cexcessive force\u201d by officers.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cI'm pro law and order and the president is pro-police,\u201d Scott added. \u201cWe have to be sympathetic to all parties involved in beginning to have this dialogue.\u201d (The White House and Trump campaign declined to comment on Scott's suggestion.)Biden's posture on police reform as a key part of his criminal justice reform proposal received praise from advocates who stress the need for federally-mandated standards and data collection on policing throughout America. The former vice president has proposed a $300 million Community Oriented Policing Services program to reform police departments around the country, in tandem with empowering the DOJ to \u201cto root out unconstitutional or unlawful policing.\u201d\u00a0\u201cThere is a very important role of federal government to play in creating national standards on best practices on public safety,\u201d Monique Dixon, the deputy policy director at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Power Up. \u201cEspecially when you look at training as it relates to the use of force and the importance of de-escalation. So the federal government can set standards and guidance that state and local law enforcement agencies should adopt. And we\u2019ve worked really hard to encourage the previous administration and this administration to create a national standard and incentives for state and local governments to follow these standards.\u201dVeep watch: Biden, who recently apologized for his comments that African Americans considering voting for Trump \u201cain't black,\u201d said last night that he hopes to name his running mate around August 1. Voters may see this as another chance for Biden to prove, as he said last week, that he would never \u201ctake the African American community for granted.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cThere are women of color under consideration, and they're women from every part of the country \u2014 so a lot of really qualified women that are ready to be president,\u201d Biden told CNN's Dana Bash earlier this week.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s really important that people who may be a part of this administration are bringing a lot of personal and professional experience to these topics,\u201d Vanita Gupta, the former head of the Justice Department's civil rights division under President Obama, told Power Up. \u201cIt matters to have and be able to bring that breadth of experience to inform this crucial work and to inform how the DOJ and the White House will engage on these issues,\u201d said Gupta, and \u00a0now runs the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cElective representation in America should represent the people of America and right now it does not,\u201d Senator Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) responded during a town hall when asked if there should be a woman of color on the ticket with Biden.The protests may also disqualify other contenders currently being vetted for the Veep-stakes: \u201cWe are now a nation reeling from a global pandemic that is disproportionately affecting African Americans. We are also a nation where videos from Brunswick, Ga., New York City and Minneapolis show in vivid and horrifying color the racism and brutality that blacks have faced since, well, 1619. And the situation in Minneapolis only serves to highlight why [Minnesota Sen. Amy] Klobuchar as Biden\u2019s running mate would be a bitter pill for black voters to swallow,\u201d The Post's opinion writer Jonathan Capehart argues.\u00a0Radio host Charlamagne Tha God went even further after his headline-making interview with Biden: \u201cI think that would be suicide for Joe Biden\u2019s campaign,\u201d he said of Klobuchar as a potential pick.\u201cIf he did that, especially at this moment, after the comments that he made \u2026 He would be a fool not to put a black woman as his running mate,\u201d he told our colleagues Annie Linskey and Sean Sullivan.The attacks may raise the stakes for the president, too, whose efforts to court black voters this cycle have largely fallen flat: \u201cNearly every week this spring, President Trump\u2019s reelection team has held one of the most peculiar events of the 2020 online campaign: \u2018Black Voices for Trump Real Talk.\u2019 It\u2019s a dizzying effort by Mr. Trump\u2019s black advisers to put their spin on his record,\u201d the New York Times's Annie Karni reported this week.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cFor an hour on a live stream, three black Republicans tried to portray [Biden] as a racist, while ignoring decades of racially divisive behavior by Mr. Trump, from his remarks on the Central Park Five to birtherism to Charlottesville \u2026 [Trump's] advisers often highlight the administration\u2019s work on\u00a0criminal justice reform\u00a0and financial support for\u00a0historically black colleges and universities\u00a0as twin planks of their appeal.\"AdvertisementBut: \u201c \u2026 The campaign\u2019s chief pitch to black voters going into the 2020 presidential election \u2014 a lower unemployment rate among African Americans \u2014 has eroded in the past few months. And the Trump campaign has a lot to ignore in terms of comments from its own candidate, and\u00a0 has, in the past, made remarks widely seen as racist; over the Memorial Day weekend, the president promoted posts from a racist and sexist Twitter feed.\u201d\u00a0The People100,000 DEAD:\u00a0\u201cOne hundred thousand Americans dead in less than four months,\u201d Marc Fisher reports. \u201cThe death toll from the coronavirus passed that hard-to-fathom marker on Wednesday, which slipped by like so many other days in this dark spring, one more spin of the Earth, one more headline in a numbing cascade of grim news.\u201dStory continues below advertisementChilling stat:\u00a0\u201cNearly three months into the brunt of the epidemic, 14 percent of Americans say they know someone who has succumbed to the virus.\u201dThe people we've lost: \u201cSome were well-known, and many were unsung. All added their stories, from all walks of life, to the diversity of the American experience,\u201d our colleagues write in their running collection of obituaries.\u00a0TRUMP DID NOT MARK THE GRIM MILESTONE:\u00a0\u201cTrump has spent his life in thrall to numbers \u2014 his wealth, his ratings, his polls. Even during the deadly pandemic, he has remained fixated on certain metrics \u2014 peppering aides about infection statistics, favoring rosy projections and obsessing over the gyrating stock market,\u201d Ashley Parker reports of the normally numerate president.AdvertisementHis most direct comments were in a pair of tweets:\u00a0\u201cFor all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn\u2019t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThat\u2019s 15 to 20 times more than we will lose.\u201dBiden struck a far different tone:\u00a0The former vice president released a solemn video message shortly after the news broke. He said, \u201cThere are moments in our history so grim, so heart-rending, that they're forever fixed in each of our hearts as shared grief. Today is one of those moments.\u201d\u00a0At The White HouseTRUMP TO SIGN ORDER THAT COULD PUNISH TECH COMPANIES: \u201cTrump is preparing to sign an executive order [today] that could open the door for federal officials to try to penalize Facebook, Google and Twitter for the way they moderate content on their sites \u2026,\u201d Tony Romm and Josh Dawsey report.Story continues below advertisementThe president and his allies are fuming over Twitter's fact-check of his tweets: The social media giant added a label to Trump's tweets for the first time on Tuesday after he continued to spread inaccurate information about mail-in voting. He later tweeted that the decision was tantamount to election interference.What may come today: \u201cTrump\u2019s directive chiefly seeks to embolden federal regulators to rethink a portion of law known as Section 230, which spares tech companies from being held liable for the comments, videos and other content posted by their users.\u201dAdvertisementEven an order will not be the final step: \u201cThe executive order has gone through multiple iterations in recent years, and it may still change \u2026 Even so, it would be up to the FCC and the FTC, two independent agencies operating outside the president\u2019s Cabinet, to determine exact courses of action once Trump signs it.\u201dOn The HillTHE FRACAS OVER FISA: \u201cAn effort to pass a significant surveillance overhaul package collapsed, falling victim to presidential tweets, opposition from the Justice Department and the fracturing of a fragile coalition among liberals, moderates and conservatives,\u201d Ellen Nakashima and Mike DeBonis report.House Democratic leaders had to pull the bill at the last minute: \u201cThey have not determined when \u2014 or whether \u2014 the legislation might be revived,\u201d our colleagues write.Story continues below advertisementHouse Republicans quickly reversed their support: GOP leadership instructed their members to vote no. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), who previously supported the bill, was among those who backtracked on their support amid Trump's promise to veto it.The breakdown: \"The pulling of the bill to reauthorize a number of national security powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act came a day after the president tweeted his disfavor, ostensibly on grounds that it fails to address what he calls \u201cthe greatest political, criminal, and subversive scandal in USA history,\u201d our colleagues write.\u00a0But the president doesn't appear to have his facts straight: \u201cWhile he has never explicitly spelled out what he means, Trump has blasted the FBI for its flawed surveillance of a former campaign aide, Carter Page, and accused the government without evidence of spying on Trump Tower during the campaign,\u201d our colleagues write. \u201cNone of the now-expired authorities the bill sought to revive were at issue in Page\u2019s surveillance, which the Justice Department inspector general roundly criticized in a December report as having been conducted on the basis of applications riddled with errors and omissions.\u201dOutside the BeltwayTHE UNLUCKIEST GENERATION:\u00a0\u201cAfter accounting for the present crisis, the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history,\" Andrew Van Dam reports.AdvertisementThe pain is only just beginning: \u201cMillennials will bear these economic scars the rest of their lives, in the form of lower earnings, lower wealth and delayed milestones, such as homeownership.\"\u00a0Millennials never recovered from the Great Recession: \u201cThanks to the Great Recession, the average millennial lost about 13 percent of their earnings between 2005 and 2017,\u201d our colleague writes of study conducted by Census Bureau economist Kevin Rinz.Story continues below advertisementNo generation took a similar hit: \u201cThat\u2019s worse than Gen X\u2019s 9 percent setback and almost double the 7 percent loss faced by baby boomers. By the end of the period, baby boomer earnings had recovered, even as millennials remained well below where they should have been.\u201dAnd they certainly weren't ready for another crisis: \u201cThis recession steamrolled younger workers just as millennials were entering their prime working years \u2014 the oldest millennials are nearing 40 while the youngest are in their mid-20s,\u201d our colleague writes. \u201cMillennial employment plunged by 16 percent in March and April this year, our calculations show. That\u2019s faster than either Gen X (12 percent) or the baby boomers (13 percent).\u201dBeing the most diverse generation also means millennials\u00a0are more vulnerable: \u201cMillennials are the most educated, most diverse generation in history \u2014 at least until zoomers pass them. Those distinctions come with burdens,\u201d our colleague writes.AdvertisementEducation status is a big divider: \u201cIt\u2019s part of trend of more marginalized groups falling behind. Millennials with a college degree aren\u2019t far behind previous generations in terms of wealth, [Ana Kent, a policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis] found, but their less-educated peers have a bit more than half of the wealth they\u2019d expect at this stage, based on previous generations.\u201dIn the MediaWHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:Pompeo says U.S. should end special treatment of Hong Kong amid Beijing's clampdown: \u201cSecretary of State Mike Pompeo's declaration could pave the way for [Trump] to impose on Hong Kong some of the same economic penalties that he wielded against China over the past two years,\u201d David J. Lynch reports. The secretary said \u201che had notified Congress on Wednesday that Hong Kong no longer enjoyed the full range of political freedoms that China had promised residents when it regained control of the trading center from Great Britain in 1997.\u201dUnrelated sanctions for China are headed to Trump's desk: The House of Representatives \u201cpassed legislation calling for sanctions against Chinese officials for the detention and torture of\u00a0Uighur Muslims in the country\u2019s western region of\u00a0Xinjiang \u2026,\" CNBC's Tucker Higgins reports. \u201cThe legislation was approved by a vote of 413-1 after passing overwhelmingly in the Senate earlier this month.\u201dSome Republicans tell Trump to cease with his debunked Scarborough conspiracy theory: McCarthy, the top House Republican, sidestepped questions about whether the president was \u201cdebasing his office\u201d by continuing to spread a baseless conspiracy about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former former Republican congressman from Florida who retired from politics in 2001, John Wagner and Paul Kane report.But other lawmakers have had enough: \u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of a pandemic. He\u2019s the commander in chief of this nation. And it\u2019s causing great pain to the family of the young woman who died,\u201d Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the No. 3 House Republican, told reporters.Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) expressed concern for Timothy J. Klausutis, the widow of Lori Klausutis, who worked in Scarborough\u2019s Florida office and died in 2001. Klausutis himself has implored Trump to stop pushing to reopen the \u201ccold case.\u201dI know Joe Scarborough. Joe is a friend of mine. I don't know T.J. Klausutis. Joe can weather vile, baseless accusations but T.J.? His heart is breaking. Enough already.\u2014 Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 27, 2020\n\nFailure to launch \u2026 for now: \u201cThe beginning of NASA\u2019s next chapter of space exploration will have to wait until the weekend. Space officials postponed the launch of a crewed SpaceX rocket en route to the International Space Station because of problematic weather around Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla., and a tropical storm brewing off the coast of the Carolinas,\u201d Jacob Bogage and Christian Davenport report. It may turn up the pressure on Biden to pick a woman of color as his potential veep. Power Up: Racism and police violence in spotlight at crucial time in 2020 race",
        "author": "Jacqueline Alemany"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Trump systematically alienates the Latino diaspora \u2014 from El Salvador to Puerto Rico and Mexico (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7100",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/01/09/daily-202-trump-systematically-alienates-the-latino-diaspora-from-el-salvador-to-puerto-rico-and-mexico/5a53c50830fb0469e883ffb1/",
        "text": "with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie GreveWith Breanne\u00a0Deppisch and Joanie Greve.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0A Manchurian Candidate who was secretly trying to alienate Hispanics would be hard pressed to do as much damage to the Republican brand as President Trump.The administration announced Monday that it will terminate the provisional residency permits of about 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the United States since at least 2001, leaving them to face deportation. Trump previously ended what is known as Temporary Protected Status for Nicaraguans and Haitians, and he\u2019s expected to cut off Hondurans later this year. This is part of a strategic, full-court press to make America less hospitable to immigrants, both legal and illegal. Immigration enforcement arrests are up 40 percent, Trump has slashed the number of refugees allowed into the United States to the lowest level since 1980 and the Justice Department has tried to crack down on \u201csanctuary cities\u201d during his first year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMost consequentially, Trump created an artificial political crisis by announcing the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows about 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children to avoid deportation and obtain work permits.The president is now trying to use the \u201cdreamers\u201d as bargaining chips to force Congress to pony up $18 billion for his border wall, breaking a campaign promise that Mexico would pay. Congressional Republicans are also offering to negotiate an extension of TPS protections in exchange for scaling back the diversity visa lottery program.There is a chance of a government shutdown in the next several weeks over the wall and/or DACA.Story continues below advertisementImmigration is the biggest stumbling block in negotiations about keeping the lights on past Jan. 19, which is next Friday. Republicans say Democrats are holding spending talks hostage to secure a DACA fix, which they\u2019d prefer to consider separately. As he meets with a bipartisan group of lawmakers at the White House later today, both Trump and Democratic leaders think they have the better hand \u2014 a recipe for trouble. The likeliest outcome is another short-term agreement.\u00a0These former congressional interns share why the battle in Congress over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is so personal. (Melissa Macaya, Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)Outside Washington, Trump\u2019s pardon of Joe Arpaio after he was convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge's order to stop racially profiling spoke volumes to Hispanics who see the former Arizona sheriff as a boogeyman. The president is also expected to travel later this month to look at prototypes of possible border walls, creating a visual that his base will love but will further galvanize Latinos.AdvertisementMore consequentially, Trump threatened to abandon Puerto Rico\u2019s recovery in October if people on the island didn\u2019t express more gratitude for his efforts in the wake of Hurricane Maria.\u00a0He has downplayed the death toll, thrown rolls of paper towels at people who lost everything and personally attacked the mayor of San Juan. Meanwhile, many still don\u2019t have power \u2014 and electricity might not be fully restored until May. Adding insult to injury, Puerto Rico is one of the biggest losers in the GOP tax bill.Story continues below advertisementThe continuing humanitarian crisis has triggered a massive influx of Puerto Ricans to the mainland, specifically the perennial political battleground of Florida. Unlike those who benefit from TPS, the Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. So they can easily register to vote. Their collective anger at Trump makes that likely.President Trump gave a speech at the American Farm Bureau Federation\u2019s Annual Convention in Nashville on Jan. 8. (The Washington Post)-- Trump\u2019s nativism may cost Republicans Senate seats this year in Arizona and Nevada, as well as several House seats across the Sun Belt. The party\u2019s top recruit for the Florida Senate race, outgoing Gov. Rick Scott, could opt not to run if the political atmospherics continue to be this bad.AdvertisementBut the much bigger issue is\u00a0the long-term damage that Trump is inflicting on his adopted party. When they look back a century from now, historians will likely write that immigration and health care were the defining issues of our time. Five years after the Republican National Committee\u2019s \u201cautopsy\u201d of the 2012 election highlighted the urgency of appealing to Latinos, Trump is driving his party down the same path that Pete Wilson followed in California when he embraced Proposition 187 to get reelected in 1994. He won a Pyrrhic victory. The Golden State GOP can\u2019t even field a credible candidate for governor or Senate in California this year.Story continues below advertisement-- None of this is surprising. Trump literally kicked off his campaign in June 2015 with an attack on Mexican immigrants. \u201cThey\u2019re bringing drugs. They\u2019re bringing crime. They\u2019re rapists,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd some, I assume, are good people.\u201d Trump made dozens of similarly ugly comments before the election, from calling for a \u201cdeportation force\u201d to saying that a federal judge who was born in Indiana couldn\u2019t fairly adjudicate a fraud case against Trump University because his parents immigrated from Mexico.Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://t.co/ufoTeQd8yA pic.twitter.com/k01Mc6CuDI\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016\n\n-- The latest moves underscore how much juice the hard-liners still have in the White House, specifically policy adviser Stephen Miller and Chief of Staff John Kelly. But the ultimate decider is Trump himself.\u00a0DHS announced May 4 that it will end protected immigration status for 50,000 Hondurans living in the U.S. since 1999. This is what you need to know about TPS. (Melissa Macaya, Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)-- Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Kelly\u2019s protege, said Monday that she determined conditions in El Salvador have improved significantly since earthquakes ravaged the country in 2001, which was the justification for the original program. She is giving an 18-month grace period for people to either leave or get legal residency \u2014 and to give Congress a window to change the law.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cImmigrant advocates, Salvadoran government officials and others had implored Nielsen to extend the TPS designation, citing the country\u2019s gang violence and the potentially destabilizing effect of so many people being sent home,\u201d Nick Miroff and David Nakamura report. \u201cEl Salvador\u2019s homicide rate \u2014 108 per 100,000 people in 2015 \u2014 was the world\u2019s highest for a country not at war, the most recent U.N. data shows \u2026 The mayors of Houston, Los Angeles and other cities with large numbers of Salvadorans had urged Nielsen to take into account the wider contributions of TPS recipients, a third of whom are U.S. homeowners .\u2009.\u2009.\u201cOthers urged Nielsen to consider the approximately 190,000 U.S.-born children of Salvadoran TPS recipients. Their parents must now decide whether to break up their families, take their children back to El Salvador or stay in the United States and risk deportation. Senior DHS officials told reporters Monday that Salvadoran parents would have to make that choice.\u201d-- Meet one of the people hurt by the announcement. From a story by Maria Sacchetti: \u201cOscar Cortez feels like he has an ordinary American life. He carries a Costco card. He roots for the Boston Red Sox. And five days a week, he rises before dawn, pulls on four shirts and two pairs of pants, and ventures into the frigid air to work as a plumber, a good job that pays for his Maryland townhouse and his daughters\u2019 college fund. At 15th and L streets NW in Washington, Cortez saw the news on his mobile phone while taking a break from laying copper pipe at the construction site of the new Fannie Mae headquarters. \u2018You feel like you\u2019re up in the air,\u2019 the silver-haired 46-year-old said. \u2018I feel bad and offended. They\u2019re playing with our stability. \u2026 I consider this my country.\u2019AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cCortez said he visited his parents in 2016 for the first time since he left and was shocked to see that the house had six locks on every door to ward off burglars. People he knew had left or died. Strangers stared at him on the street. \u2018I felt like a foreigner in my own land,\u2019 he said. \u2018Everyone is looking at you like you\u2019re from outer space.\u2019\u201d-- Columnist Petula Dvorak argues that Trump is taking away the American Dream from hundreds of thousands of hard-working people: \u201cBecause she didn\u2019t know how else to calm her nerves on Monday, Carmen Paz Villas did what she does best. She went to work, cleaning rooms at the hotel. On her day off. \u2018And now, I cry and cry,\u2019 Paz Villas said, in between rooms, when she learned that, no matter how hard she works, the country she\u2019s called home for 18 years doesn\u2019t want her family anymore. \u2018Everybody with TPS, all we can do is cry now.\u2019 Because, according to our government today, it\u2019s not enough to work hard, open a 401(k), buy a home, obey the law, start a business, get a Costco card, become a sports fan, win Employee of the Month and have a family to become an American.\u201dTrump\u2019s announcement means Paz Villas\u2019s husband can\u2019t stay: \u201cHe\u2019s from El Salvador. She\u2019s from Honduras, and the administration announced two months ago that roughly 57,000 Hondurans in the United States with protected status like her may also have to leave soon. So much for their home, their kids, their neighbors and their friends in Gaithersburg.\u201d\u00a0-- Ishaan Tharoor contrasts the DHS announcement with a speech that Pope Francis delivered yesterday at the Vatican: \u201cHe bemoaned the hostile climate in the West toward refugees and migrants. He decried politicians who demonize foreigners \u2018for the sake of stirring up primal fears\u2019 and urged greater global action to help asylum seekers. \u2018In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the history of salvation is essentially a history of migration,\u2019 said the pontiff. That's a message that clearly doesn't register with President Trump.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Listen to James's quick summary of today's Big Idea and the headlines you need to know to start your day: \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe to The Daily 202\u2019s Big Idea on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Podcasts and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- John Dickerson is expected to replace Charlie Rose on \u201cCBS This Morning.\u201d It\u2019s not clear if he will continue to anchor \u201cFace the Nation,\u201d which he took over from Bob Schieffer in 2015. (HuffPost)North Korea agreed to send a delegation to the 2018 Winter Olympic Games taking place in South Korea next month. (Reuters)-- North Korea has agreed to send athletes to next month\u2019s Winter Olympics in South Korea. Yoonjung Seo and Anna Fifield report: \u201cThere was no immediate confirmation from the northern side, but the South\u2019s announcement was in line with recent North Korean signals that it was willing to send competitors to the games, which will open in PyeongChang on Feb. 9. The talks are ongoing but the tentative agreement constitutes a rare moment of consensus between Kim Jong Un\u2019s regime, its estranged southern neighbor and the outside world. \u2026 The advent of the talks has kindled hopes in the South Korean government that an agreement on sports can be a gateway into broader discussions about thorny issues such as the North\u2019s nuclear program.\u201d-- Meanwhile, U.S. officials are\u00a0weighing a possible limited strike against North Korea, according to one report. The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Gerald F. Seib reports: \u201cThe idea is known as the \u2018bloody nose\u2019 strategy: React to some nuclear or missile test with a targeted strike against a North Korean facility to bloody Pyongyang\u2019s nose and illustrate the high price the regime could pay for its behavior. The hope would be to make that point without inciting a full-bore reprisal by North Korea. It\u2019s an enormously risky idea, and there is a debate among Trump administration officials about whether it is feasible. \u2026 Such a debate reflects how tense the situation remains, even though North Korea has scaled back the pace of its provocative actions in recent weeks and opened the door to diplomacy.\u201d-- Alabama defeated Georgia in overtime at the college football national championship game.\u00a0Chuck Culpepper reports: \u201c[The last shock of the game] came from the hand of a freshman from Hawaii, Tua Tagovailoa, and as it went up the left sideline, many of the 77,430 lucky to occupy Mercedes-Benz Stadium probably gasped. For there, after all the plays, ran an Alabama receiver, DeVonta Smith, with space behind the defense. Smith reached ahead and grabbed it in the end zone. \u2026 Somehow, after a 13-0 deficit at halftime, a 20-7 deficit in the third quarter and a quarterback who arrived at school only last January, Alabama had snared a 26-23 overtime win .\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0It had a fifth national title in the last nine seasons. It had [head coach Nick] Saban\u2019s sixth title all told, which pulled him alongside Bear Bryant.\u201dPresident Trump attended a college football national championship game between the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama in Atlanta on Jan. 8. (The Washington Post)-- Trump attended the game and was greeted by protesters, while the president made a point to stand during the national anthem. Sonam Vashi and Marwa Eltagouri report: \u201cHours before, Trump, speaking to a group of farmers and ranchers in Nashville, again criticized athletes who do not stand for the national anthem.\u00a0\u2026 The Atlanta branch of the NAACP on Monday afternoon had encouraged those going to the game to wear white and wave white towels if they disagreed with Trump\u2019s policies and statements, a move meant to mock conservatives who sometimes call liberals \u2018snowflakes.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president left the epic matchup early to fly back to Washington. Air Force One landed just as Alabama missed a field goal at the end of regulation that would have won the game. But Trump didn't stay on the plane to watch overtime.-- Related: The University of Wisconsin football team\u2019s stay at a Trump resort during the Orange Bowl may provide new ammunition to an emoluments lawsuit against the president.\u00a0Maryland\u2019s attorney general argued the public university\u2019s business with Trump National Doral golf resort represented a gift from a state government. But the Orange Bowl Committee, not the university, chose the resort back in 2014. (Jonathan O'Connell)-- Delays again today at some D.C. schools because of the winter weather.\u00a0The full list can be found here.-- But Washingtonians\u00a0will start to see warmer temperatures today\u00a0lasting for the rest of the workweek. The Capital Weather Gang forecasts: \u201cMorning clouds and areas of dense fog burn off after rush hour to make way for a mostly sunny situation and these near normal temperatures (mid-upper 40s) will feel like a big change compared to the past week of frigidity.\u201dFirefighters responded to a fire on the roof of Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 8. Officials said three people were injured. (The Washington Post)GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Finance 202: Mnuchin won't comment on whether Trump's middle-class tax cut is real or imaginary (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7101",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2018/12/19/the-finance-202-mnuchin-won-t-comment-on-whether-trump-s-middle-tax-cut-is-real-or-imaginary/5c1943b81b326b2d6629d4e6/",
        "text": "with Bastien InzaurraldeTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat happens to a dream of a middle-class tax cut deferred? For the Trump administration, evidently, it dries up like a raisin in the sun after the midterms.\u00a0President Trump\u2019s late-October promise to push a 10 percent cut for middle-income earners gave up the ghost on Tuesday when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin acknowledged the administration has no plan to pursue it.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m not going to comment on whether it is a real thing or not a real thing,\u201d Mnuchin told Bloomberg News\u00a0in a roundtable interview. \u201cI\u2019m saying for the moment we have other things we\u2019re focused on.\u201dTrump appeared to catch his own party off guard on Oct. 20 when he announced during a Nevada campaign swing that the GOP was planning to implement a \u201cvery major tax cut\u201d for the middle class before the election. A few days later, he said that Republicans would unveil a nonbinding resolution pledging action on the matter sometime after the midterms. And Mnuchin at the time indicated details would be forthcoming imminently.\u00a0They weren\u2019t. Republicans never specified who would benefit, how they would cover its likely multitrillion-dollar price tag, if at all, or how tax writers would block businesses filing on the individual side of the code from taking advantage.\u00a0Indeed, the gambit was a transparently political ploy aimed at resuscitating the GOP\u2019s moribund plan to run on the benefits of last year\u2019s tax cut. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat measure, which concentrated its benefits among the richest taxpayers, proved broadly unpopular with voters, and Republican candidates mostly shunned it in their campaigns. Trump floated the middle-class cut proposal amid a pre-midterm torrent of misleading and false claims \u2014 including that immigrant riots were breaking out across California, that Democrats wanted to give cars to undocumented immigrants\u00a0and that Middle Easterners had joined a caravan of Central Americans seeking asylum in Mexico and the United States.Mnuchin, in the Bloomberg interview, said he wants to focus on working with Congress on some \u201csome minor technical corrections\u201d to the 2017 law. But empowered House Democrats are more interested in using their new authority to attack the measure. CNBC\u2019s Ylan Mui reports the incoming majority is zeroing in on key aspects of the law\u00a0and probably will\u00a0direct attention to public companies such as AT&T and General Motors that laid off workers even as they reaped a windfall. Democrats are also considering rolling back changes to the individual side of the code, such as its cap\u00a0on state and local tax deductions.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who will chair the House Ways and Means Committee next year, is planning hearings on the law. And Mui reports conservative groups that backed it are gearing up to play defense, with Americans for Tax Reform preparing a campaign for early next year called \"Defend 21,\" referring to the lowest rate in the overhaul for corporations.\u00a0House Democrats also plan to shine a light on one decidedly non-middle-class taxpayer, namely Trump himself. Neal is laying the groundwork to obtain the president\u2019s tax returns, a bid Trump is expected to fight, suggesting it could land in the courts.\u00a0 \n \n \n You are reading The Finance 202, our must-read tipsheet on where Wall Street meets Washington. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n MARKET MOVERS\n\u2014 Fed set for a \"dovish hike.\" WSJ's Nick Timiraos: \"The Federal Reserve is preparing to raise short-term interest rates by a quarter percentage point after its two-day\u00a0policy meeting\u00a0concludes Wednesday, which would be the ninth such move since late 2015. Recent market turmoil has raised some doubts about whether the Fed would follow through on a rate increase, but economic data has been solid enough to justify a move that officials have hinted at for weeks. Rather, the turbulence raises the prospect that revised projections of future rate moves and the outlook for inflation and growth suggest a slower pace of rate increases in 2019...\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"Look for Mr. Powell to address worries about a turbulent stock market by pointing to relatively solid economic statistics, few of which are flashing yellow lights...\u00a0The big question for markets and the Fed right now is how much the recent selloff is due to economic reasons. If the current market scare is overdone, Fed officials don\u2019t want to overreact.\"\u2014 Stocks steady ahead of Fed decision. Bloomberg's\u00a0Vildana Hajric\u00a0and Sarah Ponczek: \u201cU.S. stocks held near a 14-month low on a volatile day that saw the benchmark gauge swing almost 2 percent from trough to peak. Oil tumbled. The S&P 500 Index ended virtually unchanged as investors braced for Wednesday\u2019s Federal Reserve policy decision. FedEx slumped almost 5 percent as of 4:30 p.m. in New York, after a lower profit forecast stoked doubts about the strength of global trade.\"Greenspan has another warning for investors. Liz Moyer at CNBC: \u201cAlan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chief who called out the tech-fueled rally of the mid-1990s as 'irrational exuberance,'\u00a0is now giving investors a new warning .\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0Greenspan said it was unlikely that the current market would stabilize and then take another big leg higher. 'It would be very surprising to see it sort of stabilize here, and then take off again,'\u00a0Greenspan said. Markets could still go up, but 'at the end of that run, run for cover.'\u00a0Greenspan told CNN the bull market is over, pointing to how stocks have fumbled in recent days.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMnuchin blames the Volcker Rule and high-speed trading. Bloomberg: \"Mnuchin blamed volatility in equity markets partly on high-speed trading and the effect of the Volcker Rule, adding that he planned to conduct an inter-agency review of market structure. \u201cOver a longer period of time the market reflects various different economic components but a normal trading day now is a 500-point range. A lot of that has to do with market structure, and that\u2019s something we\u2019re going to take a look at,\u201d Mnuchin said in a roundtable interview Tuesday...\u00a0Mnuchin declined to comment on other possible reasons for stock turmoil, saying that he didn\u2019t want to make remarks on the economy or broader markets during the Federal Reserve\u2019s policy meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington.\"\u2014 Oil crashes. NYT's Clifford Krauss: \"Oil prices tumbled more than 7 percent on Tuesday, falling to their lowest levels in more than a year, after investors learned that Russia and the United States were pumping a lot more oil than had been expected. The American benchmark fell below $47 a barrel for the first time in 15 months, capping a slide that has brought prices down by more than a third since early October. Bountiful, cheap oil supplies are an unanticipated holiday bonus for American consumers. The average price of regular gasoline has fallen to $2.37 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club, 26 cents lower than a month ago. For most of the year gasoline prices were rising, but the recent decline in oil prices has driven gasoline down by about a nickel a gallon compared with a year ago.\"\u2014 Both sides gird for a 'hard Brexit.' AP's Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka: \u201cBritain\u2019s government ramped up preparations Tuesday for the possibility that the country could leave the European Union in 101 days without a divorce deal \u2014 putting soldiers on standby and warning thousands of businesses and millions of households to get ready for the worst. With the country\u2019s departure set for March 29, it remains unclear whether British lawmakers will approve the divorce agreement that Prime Minister Theresa May\u2019s Conservative government has negotiated with the EU.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe alternative, a 'no-deal'\u00a0Brexit, risks plunging the British economy into recession and touching off chaos at the borders. .\u2009.\u2009. Members of May\u2019s Cabinet agreed to activate all the government\u2019s no-deal plans and advised the public to prepare for disruptions. Ministers insisted the steps were sensible.\u201dJay Clayton seeks assurances.\u00a0FT's Kadhim Shubber: \"Jay Clayton, the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, has called on the UK and EU to take action to ensure a no-deal Brexit would not cause havoc to global markets. The SEC chair told the Financial Times he would like to see firm commitments to ensure that key market functions can continue without disruption even if the UK crashed out of the EU without securing a withdrawal agreement...\u00a0\u2018Some period of adjustment would be good,\u2019 he said in a phone interview\u2026The comments by Mr Clayton are the latest in a series of warnings issued by US regulators.\"\n TRUMP TRACKER\nTRADE FLY-AROUND:\u2014 China scrambles to salvage trade truce. The Economist: \"China is determined to bring the trade war to an end. The view, once commonly heard in Beijing, that it could outlast America in a grinding tariff battle has given way to the realisation that, as the country with the huge trade surplus, China has more to lose upfront. Optimism that the government could fight on two fronts\u2014taming its heavy debt burden at the same time as taking on America\u2014has also cracked. The economic outlook has darkened. Analysts are debating whether the government will, once again, deploy a big fiscal stimulus to prop up growth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"So the swagger from a year ago is being replaced by more conciliatory messages. At a recent forum Ma Jiantang, vice-president of a think-tank under the cabinet, emphasised the deep ties between China\u2019s and America\u2019s economies. 'We are inseparable,' he said...\u00a0China\u2019s peace offering is starting to come together. The government has made or hinted at a series of concessions over the past two weeks.U.S., China talk ahead of January negotiations.\u00a0Bloomberg: \"China and the U.S. held vice-ministerial level talks on Wednesday to discuss the ongoing trade dispute as they move closer to meeting in January. The two sides spoke by phone\u00a0according\u00a0to China\u2019s Ministry of Commerce, and have held several rounds of talks in recent weeks, [Mnuchin] told Bloomberg on Tuesday in Washington. They plan to hold a formal, face-to-face meeting in January to negotiate a broader truce in their trade wars but are unlikely to meet in person before then, Mnuchin said.\"Inside Huawei's\u00a0company culture. Raymond Zhong at the New York Times: \u201cEarthquakes, terrorist attacks and low oxygen levels on Mount Everest could not hold them back. As the Chinese tech giant Huawei expanded around the globe, supplying equipment to bring mobile phone and data service to the planet\u2019s farthest reaches, its employees were urged on by a culture that celebrated daring feats in pursuit of new business. They worked grueling hours. They were encouraged to bend certain company rules, so long as doing so enriched the company and not employees personally .\u2009.\u2009. Employees at the company and people who have studied it have a name for its hard-charging corporate spirit: 'wolf culture.'AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNow, the company\u2019s aggressive ways have been cast in a new light. The United States has accused Meng Wanzhou, a top Huawei executive and daughter of its founder, of committing bank fraud to help the company\u2019s business in Iran. It is not clear precisely how Huawei\u2019s culture shaped its dealings in Iran. But an intense will to get ahead, which helped propel it to the head of the global market for telecom network equipment, seems to have informed employees\u2019 actions in previous cases that put the company under scrutiny.\u201dMELTDOWN WATCH:Democrats tried 17 different times to obtain President Trump\u2019s tax returns over the past two years. Now they may finally get them. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)\"Michael Flynn\u2019s sentencing delayed after judge tells the ex-Trump adviser he might not avoid prison time.\" The Post's\u00a0\u00a0Spencer S. Hsu, Matt Zapotosky and Carol D. Leonnig.\u201cTrump signed letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow project despite Giuliani insisting he didn\u2019t.\u201d CNN\u2019s Kate Sullivan.\u00a0\u201cMueller appears victorious in mystery subpoena dispute.\u201d Politico\u2019s Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Gerstein.\u00a0\"Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit.\" The Post's\u00a0David A. Fahrenthold.\n POCKET CHANGE\n\u2014 Under pressure, Facebook vows improvements. The Post's Hamza Shaban and Taylor Telford: \u201cFacebook and Twitter on Tuesday were under attack from an array of critics, including the president and civil rights leaders, triggered by revelations from two reports on the long Russian social media campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The Russians\u2019 segmented messaging and disinformation targeted African Americans in particular, according to the reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee released Monday, prompting the NAACP to urge Americans to abandon the social network. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company needs to do more to advance civil rights .\u2009.\u2009.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe reports for the Senate dovetailed with other strains of criticism \u2014 including privacy breaches, human rights abuses and a deflection of corporate responsibility \u2014 in what experts said marks a critical point in the public backlash against the global social networks.\"And it's got a massive new headache. The company gave\u00a0other tech firms much more access to users' personal data than it has acknowledged, according to a blockbuster NYT report: \"The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users \u2014 control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.\"Facebook allowed Microsoft\u2019s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users\u2019 friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users\u2019 private messages.\u00a0The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users\u2019 names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends\u2019 posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.\"From Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii):\u00a0The silence from Facebook is deafening. The New York Times has a story that says that PRIVATE MESSAGES were accessible to a bank in Canada and Netflix? I\u2019m trying to be measured and precise with my words here. But I\u2019m a customer as well as a Senator and I\u2019m angry in both roles.\u2014 Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) December 19, 2018\n\n\u2014 Space X valued at $30 billion. WSJ's\u00a0Rolfe Winkler, Andy Pasztor and Rob Copeland: \u201cElon Musk\u2019s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, in a bid to help get its internet-service business off the ground, according to people familiar with the fundraising. The Hawthorne, Calif., company, known as SpaceX, is raising the capital from existing shareholders and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co., one of the people said. The Scottish money-management firm is one of the largest investors in another Musk-led company, Tesla Inc., with about a 7.6% stake in the electric-car maker, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. SpaceX and the investors have agreed on the financing terms, but the money hasn\u2019t been sent to the company yet, this person said. SpaceX could announce the deal by year-end.\u201dMusk digging for an antidote\u00a0to traffic. AP's Amanda Lee Myers: \u201cMusk unveiled his underground transportation tunnel on Tuesday, allowing reporters and invited guests to take some of the first rides in the revolutionary albeit bumpy subterranean tube \u2014 the tech entrepreneur\u2019s answer to what he calls 'soul-destroying traffic.' Guests boarded Musk\u2019s Tesla Model S and rode along Los Angeles-area surface streets about a mile away to what\u2019s known as O\u2019Leary Station. The station, smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood \u2014 'basically in someone\u2019s backyard,'\u00a0Musk says \u2014 consists of a wall-less elevator that slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly 30 feet below the surface...\u00a0Musk described his first ride as 'epic.'\"\u2014 Pfizer, Glaxo Smith Kline to merge healthcare divisions. AP: \"Drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer are merging their healthcare divisions, creating a business with combined sales of $12.7 billion. British-based Glaxo will own 68 percent of the joint venture, while U.S.-based Pfizer will own the remaining 32 percent stake. The joint venture will bring together Glaxo\u2019s brands such as Sensodyne, Voltaren and Panadol with Pfizer\u2019s Advil and Centrum. Shareholders have long pressured Glaxo to break itself in two companies \u2014 with one focused on pharmaceuticals and vaccines, and the other on consumer healthcare. Glaxo aims to do this within three years.\"\n MONEY ON THE HILL\nWithout providing specifics, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Dec. 18 said a new trade agreement with Mexico would help pay for a wall. (Reuters)\u2014 Trump folds on border wall, but budget impasse persists. The Post's Erica Werner, Damian Paletta and Seung Min Kim: \"Trump on Tuesday abandoned months of strident demands for Congress to give him $5 billion for his border wall, bowing to political reality as Republicans scrambled to avoid shutting down large portions of the government this weekend.\"It was a stunning turnaround from one week ago, when Trump told Democratic congressional leaders during a bizarre on-camera sparring match that he\u2019d be 'proud'\u00a0to shut down the government to get his wall money. Instead, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday, Trump does not want a shutdown and will identify 'other ways'\u00a0to fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.\"But the concession by the president, which came after lawmakers from both parties argued that his $5 billion wall plan wouldn\u2019t get through Congress, did not break the impasse that\u2019s overtaken Capitol Hill in the final days of unified GOP control of Washington.\u00a0 Democrats rejected a Republican spending offer made shortly after Trump\u2019s retreat on the wall, and Congress appeared headed toward the lowest-common-denominator solution: a short-term funding extension that would keep the government open for a period of weeks and then hand Democrats the responsibility of passing a more lasting fix once they retake the House majority in January.\"Senate overwhelmingly backs overhaul of criminal justice system (John Wagner and Karoun Demirjian)\n DAYBOOK\nComing soon:\u00a0The Center for Strategic and International Studies\u00a0hosts \"Innovation, Partnership, and Self-Reliance: Health Policy Lessons from India\u2019s Bihar State\" in Washington on Wednesday.Brookings\u00a0hosts \"From Korea to the Congo: Nehru\u2019s India and UN Peacekeeping (1945-1965)\" in New Delhi on Wednesday.The Senate Committee on the Judiciary\u00a0holds \"hearings to examine a comparative look at competition law approaches to monopoly and abuse of dominance in the United States and European Union\" in Washington\u00a0 on Wednesday.\n THE FUNNIES\n\u2014 The New Yorker's Will McPhail:\u00a0 View this post on Instagram This week\u2019s @newyorkermag cartoon. A post shared by Will McPhail (@willmcphail4) on Dec 17, 2018 at 8:06am PST\n\n BULL SESSION\nOpinion | 'A bittersweet experience': What it was like to be in the Watergate prosecutor's officePhilip Allen Lacovara's job as counsel to the special prosecutor seeped into his family life. One worry? Whether Nixon's team was tapping his phones. (Kate Woodsome, Joy Yi, Breanna Muir/The Washington Post)How Martha McSally got a Senate seat despite losing the election:\u00a0Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) lost her Senate race in November, but Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announced on Dec. 18 that he appointed her to the Senate. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)Remembering sitcom star and director Penny Marshall:Actress and director Penny Marshall died Dec. 17 at age 75. Here is a look back at her iconic performances and films. (Melissa Macaya, Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post) The goal is now 'minor technical corrections' to 2017 tax law. The Finance 202: Mnuchin won't comment on whether Trump's middle-class tax cut is real or imaginary",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Finance 202: Mnuchin won't comment on whether Trump's middle-class tax cut is real or imaginary (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7102",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2018/12/19/the-finance-202-mnuchin-won-t-comment-on-whether-trump-s-middle-tax-cut-is-real-or-imaginary/5c1943b81b326b2d6629d4e6/",
        "text": "with Bastien InzaurraldeTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat happens to a dream of a middle-class tax cut deferred? For the Trump administration, evidently, it dries up like a raisin in the sun after the midterms.\u00a0President Trump\u2019s late-October promise to push a 10 percent cut for middle-income earners gave up the ghost on Tuesday when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin acknowledged the administration has no plan to pursue it.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m not going to comment on whether it is a real thing or not a real thing,\u201d Mnuchin told Bloomberg News\u00a0in a roundtable interview. \u201cI\u2019m saying for the moment we have other things we\u2019re focused on.\u201dTrump appeared to catch his own party off guard on Oct. 20 when he announced during a Nevada campaign swing that the GOP was planning to implement a \u201cvery major tax cut\u201d for the middle class before the election. A few days later, he said that Republicans would unveil a nonbinding resolution pledging action on the matter sometime after the midterms. And Mnuchin at the time indicated details would be forthcoming imminently.\u00a0They weren\u2019t. Republicans never specified who would benefit, how they would cover its likely multitrillion-dollar price tag, if at all, or how tax writers would block businesses filing on the individual side of the code from taking advantage.\u00a0Indeed, the gambit was a transparently political ploy aimed at resuscitating the GOP\u2019s moribund plan to run on the benefits of last year\u2019s tax cut. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat measure, which concentrated its benefits among the richest taxpayers, proved broadly unpopular with voters, and Republican candidates mostly shunned it in their campaigns. Trump floated the middle-class cut proposal amid a pre-midterm torrent of misleading and false claims \u2014 including that immigrant riots were breaking out across California, that Democrats wanted to give cars to undocumented immigrants\u00a0and that Middle Easterners had joined a caravan of Central Americans seeking asylum in Mexico and the United States.Mnuchin, in the Bloomberg interview, said he wants to focus on working with Congress on some \u201csome minor technical corrections\u201d to the 2017 law. But empowered House Democrats are more interested in using their new authority to attack the measure. CNBC\u2019s Ylan Mui reports the incoming majority is zeroing in on key aspects of the law\u00a0and probably will\u00a0direct attention to public companies such as AT&T and General Motors that laid off workers even as they reaped a windfall. Democrats are also considering rolling back changes to the individual side of the code, such as its cap\u00a0on state and local tax deductions.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who will chair the House Ways and Means Committee next year, is planning hearings on the law. And Mui reports conservative groups that backed it are gearing up to play defense, with Americans for Tax Reform preparing a campaign for early next year called \"Defend 21,\" referring to the lowest rate in the overhaul for corporations.\u00a0House Democrats also plan to shine a light on one decidedly non-middle-class taxpayer, namely Trump himself. Neal is laying the groundwork to obtain the president\u2019s tax returns, a bid Trump is expected to fight, suggesting it could land in the courts.\u00a0 \n \n \n You are reading The Finance 202, our must-read tipsheet on where Wall Street meets Washington. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n MARKET MOVERS\n\u2014 Fed set for a \"dovish hike.\" WSJ's Nick Timiraos: \"The Federal Reserve is preparing to raise short-term interest rates by a quarter percentage point after its two-day\u00a0policy meeting\u00a0concludes Wednesday, which would be the ninth such move since late 2015. Recent market turmoil has raised some doubts about whether the Fed would follow through on a rate increase, but economic data has been solid enough to justify a move that officials have hinted at for weeks. Rather, the turbulence raises the prospect that revised projections of future rate moves and the outlook for inflation and growth suggest a slower pace of rate increases in 2019...\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"Look for Mr. Powell to address worries about a turbulent stock market by pointing to relatively solid economic statistics, few of which are flashing yellow lights...\u00a0The big question for markets and the Fed right now is how much the recent selloff is due to economic reasons. If the current market scare is overdone, Fed officials don\u2019t want to overreact.\"\u2014 Stocks steady ahead of Fed decision. Bloomberg's\u00a0Vildana Hajric\u00a0and Sarah Ponczek: \u201cU.S. stocks held near a 14-month low on a volatile day that saw the benchmark gauge swing almost 2 percent from trough to peak. Oil tumbled. The S&P 500 Index ended virtually unchanged as investors braced for Wednesday\u2019s Federal Reserve policy decision. FedEx slumped almost 5 percent as of 4:30 p.m. in New York, after a lower profit forecast stoked doubts about the strength of global trade.\"Greenspan has another warning for investors. Liz Moyer at CNBC: \u201cAlan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chief who called out the tech-fueled rally of the mid-1990s as 'irrational exuberance,'\u00a0is now giving investors a new warning .\u2009.\u2009.\u00a0Greenspan said it was unlikely that the current market would stabilize and then take another big leg higher. 'It would be very surprising to see it sort of stabilize here, and then take off again,'\u00a0Greenspan said. Markets could still go up, but 'at the end of that run, run for cover.'\u00a0Greenspan told CNN the bull market is over, pointing to how stocks have fumbled in recent days.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMnuchin blames the Volcker Rule and high-speed trading. Bloomberg: \"Mnuchin blamed volatility in equity markets partly on high-speed trading and the effect of the Volcker Rule, adding that he planned to conduct an inter-agency review of market structure. \u201cOver a longer period of time the market reflects various different economic components but a normal trading day now is a 500-point range. A lot of that has to do with market structure, and that\u2019s something we\u2019re going to take a look at,\u201d Mnuchin said in a roundtable interview Tuesday...\u00a0Mnuchin declined to comment on other possible reasons for stock turmoil, saying that he didn\u2019t want to make remarks on the economy or broader markets during the Federal Reserve\u2019s policy meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington.\"\u2014 Oil crashes. NYT's Clifford Krauss: \"Oil prices tumbled more than 7 percent on Tuesday, falling to their lowest levels in more than a year, after investors learned that Russia and the United States were pumping a lot more oil than had been expected. The American benchmark fell below $47 a barrel for the first time in 15 months, capping a slide that has brought prices down by more than a third since early October. Bountiful, cheap oil supplies are an unanticipated holiday bonus for American consumers. The average price of regular gasoline has fallen to $2.37 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club, 26 cents lower than a month ago. For most of the year gasoline prices were rising, but the recent decline in oil prices has driven gasoline down by about a nickel a gallon compared with a year ago.\"\u2014 Both sides gird for a 'hard Brexit.' AP's Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka: \u201cBritain\u2019s government ramped up preparations Tuesday for the possibility that the country could leave the European Union in 101 days without a divorce deal \u2014 putting soldiers on standby and warning thousands of businesses and millions of households to get ready for the worst. With the country\u2019s departure set for March 29, it remains unclear whether British lawmakers will approve the divorce agreement that Prime Minister Theresa May\u2019s Conservative government has negotiated with the EU.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe alternative, a 'no-deal'\u00a0Brexit, risks plunging the British economy into recession and touching off chaos at the borders. .\u2009.\u2009. Members of May\u2019s Cabinet agreed to activate all the government\u2019s no-deal plans and advised the public to prepare for disruptions. Ministers insisted the steps were sensible.\u201dJay Clayton seeks assurances.\u00a0FT's Kadhim Shubber: \"Jay Clayton, the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, has called on the UK and EU to take action to ensure a no-deal Brexit would not cause havoc to global markets. The SEC chair told the Financial Times he would like to see firm commitments to ensure that key market functions can continue without disruption even if the UK crashed out of the EU without securing a withdrawal agreement...\u00a0\u2018Some period of adjustment would be good,\u2019 he said in a phone interview\u2026The comments by Mr Clayton are the latest in a series of warnings issued by US regulators.\"\n TRUMP TRACKER\nTRADE FLY-AROUND:\u2014 China scrambles to salvage trade truce. The Economist: \"China is determined to bring the trade war to an end. The view, once commonly heard in Beijing, that it could outlast America in a grinding tariff battle has given way to the realisation that, as the country with the huge trade surplus, China has more to lose upfront. Optimism that the government could fight on two fronts\u2014taming its heavy debt burden at the same time as taking on America\u2014has also cracked. The economic outlook has darkened. Analysts are debating whether the government will, once again, deploy a big fiscal stimulus to prop up growth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"So the swagger from a year ago is being replaced by more conciliatory messages. At a recent forum Ma Jiantang, vice-president of a think-tank under the cabinet, emphasised the deep ties between China\u2019s and America\u2019s economies. 'We are inseparable,' he said...\u00a0China\u2019s peace offering is starting to come together. The government has made or hinted at a series of concessions over the past two weeks.U.S., China talk ahead of January negotiations.\u00a0Bloomberg: \"China and the U.S. held vice-ministerial level talks on Wednesday to discuss the ongoing trade dispute as they move closer to meeting in January. The two sides spoke by phone\u00a0according\u00a0to China\u2019s Ministry of Commerce, and have held several rounds of talks in recent weeks, [Mnuchin] told Bloomberg on Tuesday in Washington. They plan to hold a formal, face-to-face meeting in January to negotiate a broader truce in their trade wars but are unlikely to meet in person before then, Mnuchin said.\"Inside Huawei's\u00a0company culture. Raymond Zhong at the New York Times: \u201cEarthquakes, terrorist attacks and low oxygen levels on Mount Everest could not hold them back. As the Chinese tech giant Huawei expanded around the globe, supplying equipment to bring mobile phone and data service to the planet\u2019s farthest reaches, its employees were urged on by a culture that celebrated daring feats in pursuit of new business. They worked grueling hours. They were encouraged to bend certain company rules, so long as doing so enriched the company and not employees personally .\u2009.\u2009. Employees at the company and people who have studied it have a name for its hard-charging corporate spirit: 'wolf culture.'AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cNow, the company\u2019s aggressive ways have been cast in a new light. The United States has accused Meng Wanzhou, a top Huawei executive and daughter of its founder, of committing bank fraud to help the company\u2019s business in Iran. It is not clear precisely how Huawei\u2019s culture shaped its dealings in Iran. But an intense will to get ahead, which helped propel it to the head of the global market for telecom network equipment, seems to have informed employees\u2019 actions in previous cases that put the company under scrutiny.\u201dMELTDOWN WATCH:Democrats tried 17 different times to obtain President Trump\u2019s tax returns over the past two years. Now they may finally get them. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)\"Michael Flynn\u2019s sentencing delayed after judge tells the ex-Trump adviser he might not avoid prison time.\" The Post's\u00a0\u00a0Spencer S. Hsu, Matt Zapotosky and Carol D. Leonnig.\u201cTrump signed letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow project despite Giuliani insisting he didn\u2019t.\u201d CNN\u2019s Kate Sullivan.\u00a0\u201cMueller appears victorious in mystery subpoena dispute.\u201d Politico\u2019s Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Gerstein.\u00a0\"Trump agrees to shut down his charity amid allegations that he used it for personal and political benefit.\" The Post's\u00a0David A. Fahrenthold.\n POCKET CHANGE\n\u2014 Under pressure, Facebook vows improvements. The Post's Hamza Shaban and Taylor Telford: \u201cFacebook and Twitter on Tuesday were under attack from an array of critics, including the president and civil rights leaders, triggered by revelations from two reports on the long Russian social media campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The Russians\u2019 segmented messaging and disinformation targeted African Americans in particular, according to the reports for the Senate Intelligence Committee released Monday, prompting the NAACP to urge Americans to abandon the social network. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company needs to do more to advance civil rights .\u2009.\u2009.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe reports for the Senate dovetailed with other strains of criticism \u2014 including privacy breaches, human rights abuses and a deflection of corporate responsibility \u2014 in what experts said marks a critical point in the public backlash against the global social networks.\"And it's got a massive new headache. The company gave\u00a0other tech firms much more access to users' personal data than it has acknowledged, according to a blockbuster NYT report: \"The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users \u2014 control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.\"Facebook allowed Microsoft\u2019s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users\u2019 friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users\u2019 private messages.\u00a0The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users\u2019 names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends\u2019 posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.\"From Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii):\u00a0The silence from Facebook is deafening. The New York Times has a story that says that PRIVATE MESSAGES were accessible to a bank in Canada and Netflix? I\u2019m trying to be measured and precise with my words here. But I\u2019m a customer as well as a Senator and I\u2019m angry in both roles.\u2014 Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) December 19, 2018\n\n\u2014 Space X valued at $30 billion. WSJ's\u00a0Rolfe Winkler, Andy Pasztor and Rob Copeland: \u201cElon Musk\u2019s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, in a bid to help get its internet-service business off the ground, according to people familiar with the fundraising. The Hawthorne, Calif., company, known as SpaceX, is raising the capital from existing shareholders and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co., one of the people said. The Scottish money-management firm is one of the largest investors in another Musk-led company, Tesla Inc., with about a 7.6% stake in the electric-car maker, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. SpaceX and the investors have agreed on the financing terms, but the money hasn\u2019t been sent to the company yet, this person said. SpaceX could announce the deal by year-end.\u201dMusk digging for an antidote\u00a0to traffic. AP's Amanda Lee Myers: \u201cMusk unveiled his underground transportation tunnel on Tuesday, allowing reporters and invited guests to take some of the first rides in the revolutionary albeit bumpy subterranean tube \u2014 the tech entrepreneur\u2019s answer to what he calls 'soul-destroying traffic.' Guests boarded Musk\u2019s Tesla Model S and rode along Los Angeles-area surface streets about a mile away to what\u2019s known as O\u2019Leary Station. The station, smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood \u2014 'basically in someone\u2019s backyard,'\u00a0Musk says \u2014 consists of a wall-less elevator that slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly 30 feet below the surface...\u00a0Musk described his first ride as 'epic.'\"\u2014 Pfizer, Glaxo Smith Kline to merge healthcare divisions. AP: \"Drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer are merging their healthcare divisions, creating a business with combined sales of $12.7 billion. British-based Glaxo will own 68 percent of the joint venture, while U.S.-based Pfizer will own the remaining 32 percent stake. The joint venture will bring together Glaxo\u2019s brands such as Sensodyne, Voltaren and Panadol with Pfizer\u2019s Advil and Centrum. Shareholders have long pressured Glaxo to break itself in two companies \u2014 with one focused on pharmaceuticals and vaccines, and the other on consumer healthcare. Glaxo aims to do this within three years.\"\n MONEY ON THE HILL\nWithout providing specifics, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Dec. 18 said a new trade agreement with Mexico would help pay for a wall. (Reuters)\u2014 Trump folds on border wall, but budget impasse persists. The Post's Erica Werner, Damian Paletta and Seung Min Kim: \"Trump on Tuesday abandoned months of strident demands for Congress to give him $5 billion for his border wall, bowing to political reality as Republicans scrambled to avoid shutting down large portions of the government this weekend.\"It was a stunning turnaround from one week ago, when Trump told Democratic congressional leaders during a bizarre on-camera sparring match that he\u2019d be 'proud'\u00a0to shut down the government to get his wall money. Instead, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday, Trump does not want a shutdown and will identify 'other ways'\u00a0to fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.\"But the concession by the president, which came after lawmakers from both parties argued that his $5 billion wall plan wouldn\u2019t get through Congress, did not break the impasse that\u2019s overtaken Capitol Hill in the final days of unified GOP control of Washington.\u00a0 Democrats rejected a Republican spending offer made shortly after Trump\u2019s retreat on the wall, and Congress appeared headed toward the lowest-common-denominator solution: a short-term funding extension that would keep the government open for a period of weeks and then hand Democrats the responsibility of passing a more lasting fix once they retake the House majority in January.\"Senate overwhelmingly backs overhaul of criminal justice system (John Wagner and Karoun Demirjian)\n DAYBOOK\nComing soon:\u00a0The Center for Strategic and International Studies\u00a0hosts \"Innovation, Partnership, and Self-Reliance: Health Policy Lessons from India\u2019s Bihar State\" in Washington on Wednesday.Brookings\u00a0hosts \"From Korea to the Congo: Nehru\u2019s India and UN Peacekeeping (1945-1965)\" in New Delhi on Wednesday.The Senate Committee on the Judiciary\u00a0holds \"hearings to examine a comparative look at competition law approaches to monopoly and abuse of dominance in the United States and European Union\" in Washington\u00a0 on Wednesday.\n THE FUNNIES\n\u2014 The New Yorker's Will McPhail:\u00a0 View this post on Instagram This week\u2019s @newyorkermag cartoon. A post shared by Will McPhail (@willmcphail4) on Dec 17, 2018 at 8:06am PST\n\n BULL SESSION\nOpinion | 'A bittersweet experience': What it was like to be in the Watergate prosecutor's officePhilip Allen Lacovara's job as counsel to the special prosecutor seeped into his family life. One worry? Whether Nixon's team was tapping his phones. (Kate Woodsome, Joy Yi, Breanna Muir/The Washington Post)How Martha McSally got a Senate seat despite losing the election:\u00a0Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) lost her Senate race in November, but Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announced on Dec. 18 that he appointed her to the Senate. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)Remembering sitcom star and director Penny Marshall:Actress and director Penny Marshall died Dec. 17 at age 75. Here is a look back at her iconic performances and films. (Melissa Macaya, Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post) The goal is now 'minor technical corrections' to 2017 tax law. The Finance 202: Mnuchin won't comment on whether Trump's middle-class tax cut is real or imaginary",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: The Senate approved a massive investment in U.S. tech competitiveness (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7103",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/09/technology-202-senate-approved-massive-investment-us-tech-competitiveness/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferThe Senate yesterday passed a major bill to address U.S. competitiveness with China, which would allocate billions to technology research and the semiconductor industry.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLawmakers adopted the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act on a rare bipartisan, 68-to-32 vote that signaled lawmakers from both parties are willing to work together to address China's rising technological prowess, even in a bitterly divided Capitol. The action comes after U.S. tech executives have repeatedly warned lawmakers of the rising competitive threat from China and called for greater federal investment in researching artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.\u00a0 \u201cI have watched China take advantage of us in ways legal and illegal over the years,\u201d Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the lead author of the bill, told my colleague Tony Romm in an interview before its passage. \u201cThe number one thing China was doing to take advantage of us \u2026 was investing heavily in research and science. And if we didn\u2019t do something about it, they would become the number one economy in the world.\u201dThe wide-ranging $250 billion package could have significant implications for tech companies.\u00a0Silicon Valley is rapidly transforming amid the pandemic. The proposed funding could help address some of the challenges the industry has faced, and accelerate the spread of tech investment beyond the Bay Area. The legislation would:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInvest more than $50 billion in chip manufacturing. Many companies currently source semiconductors from China, and this bill could be a boon to U.S. semiconductor companies. The funding comes as a global chip shortage is vexing U.S. businesses, from automakers to dog washers. The shortage was caused by soaring demand, coupled with disruptions in the supply chain related to the pandemic.Create a new Directorate of Technology and Innovation at the National Science Foundation. The directorate will focus on funding research in artificial intelligence and quantum science. The funding could address long-running concerns in the tech industry about the lack of U.S. government investment in emerging technologies.\u00a0Create a regional tech hub program. The legislation authorizes $10 billion in funding to ensure that U.S. tech development and research is disbursed throughout the country, and not just concentrated in a handful of coastal cities. The funding comes as tech companies and workers are grappling with the future of work, and in some instances, considering moving to smaller cities outside major tech hubs like San Francisco and Seattle.\u00a0Add $10 billion for a lunar landing program. The bill seeks to boost funding for space exploration, increasingly a focus of China. But some lawmakers raised concerns about the potential for the bill to benefit Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sought to remove the funding, calling it a \u201cBezos bailout.\u201d But the funding was included in the final version of the bill.Update merger filing fees to increase funding for antitrust regulators. In the scramble to pass the massive package, many provisions were added. Among them was Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley's (R-Iowa) bill to ensure larger companies are paying more in filing fees amid concerns that federal antitrust enforcers don't have the resources they need to take on large tech companies. Klobuchar praised the Senate vote in a statement, saying \u201cthe Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice\u2019s Antitrust Division are one step closer to having additional resources to conduct rigorous reviews of large mergers.\u201dSemiconductor companies widely praised the bill's passage.\u00a0Yet some tech groups raised concerns about late amendments to the bill.\u00a0\u201cWe are encouraged that the Senate has made U.S. competitiveness and technological innovation a priority with an emphasis on AI and other emerging and critical technologies,\u201d Computer & Communications Industry Association vice president of public policy Arthur D. Sidney said in a statement. \u201cHowever, late amendments to this critical bill may prove unworkable or counterproductive for U.S. industry.\u201d\u00a0The bill will now move to the House.\u00a0Its future there is uncertain as some Democrats have raised early concerns. President Biden praised the Senate's passage of the bill in a statement, and he said his administration would work with House lawmakers to ensure the legislation quickly comes to his desk.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off,\u201d Biden said in a statement. \u201cAs other countries continue to invest in their own research and development, we cannot risk falling behind. \u00a0America must maintain its position as the most innovative and productive nation on Earth.\u201dOur top tabsSome tech CEOs have paid relatively little in U.S. income taxes.Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other extremely wealthy Americans have paid little in income taxes to the U.S. government in recent years despite soaring incomes, according to confidential Internal Revenue Service data obtained by ProPublica. The data reveals how the wealthiest Americans have been able to legally reduce their tax burdens, Todd C. Frankel and Douglas MacMillan write.Story continues below advertisementIn 2011, Bezos reported losing money because of bad investments in a tax filing, allowing him to get a $4,000 tax credit for his children, according to ProPublica. Spokespeople for Musk and Bezos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Ohio\u2019s attorney general asked a judge to call Google a common carrier and public utility.The lawsuit from Ohio Republican Attorney General Dave Yost (R) aims to prevent the tech giant from giving its own products and services priority over competing services. It adds to the company's legal troubles, as it's already a target of multiple federal and state antitrust lawsuits.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cGoogle uses its dominance of Internet search to steer Ohioans to Google\u2019s own products \u2014 that's discriminatory and anti-competitive,\u201d Yost said. \u201cWhen you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe suit cites Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who earlier this year called for lawmakers to regulate major technology companies like utilities in a dissenting opinion.\u00a0\u201cYost's lawsuit would make Google Search results worse and make it harder for small businesses to connect directly with customers,\u201d Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said. \u201cOhioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company. This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we'll defend ourselves against it in court.\u201dCriminals worldwide used special smartphones to communicate. The FBI was listening.U.S. and Australian police created an app used by criminals to read millions of encrypted messages leading to hundreds of arrests, officials said on June 8. (Reuters)The FBI secretly loaded the phones with software called Anom, which allowed them to see the criminals\u2019 conversations for years, Rachel Pannett and Michael Birnbaum write. Law enforcement officials, some of whom could barely contain their excitement, said more than 800 people were arrested as a result, giving law enforcement agencies an unprecedented look into how criminal networks operate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe effort was \u201cone of the largest and most sophisticated law enforcement operations to date in the fight against encrypted criminal activities,\u201d Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, the deputy executive director for operations of Europol, said. Despite the messages\u2019 encryption, they were also sent directly to law enforcement agents.Rant and raveA massive Internet outage left people to vent on Twitter. Corellium chief operating officer Matt Tait:We did it everyone, we finally ran out of internet\u2014 Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) June 8, 2021\n\nFactal editorial development manager David Wyllie:excited to start my job as chief marketing officer of Fastly, with my pitched campaign of 'everyone should know who we are and what we do' time to sit down and take a big sip of cof\u2014 David Wyllie (@journodave) June 8, 2021\n\nWriter Shauna Wright:live shot from Fastly headquarters pic.twitter.com/OBVPnWcTRC\u2014 shauna (@goldengateblond) June 8, 2021\n\nInside the industryMoviePass deceived users so they\u2019d use it less, FTC says (The New York Times)Facebook offers 'extra cash' for creators who stream more (Engadget)Privacy monitorColorado closer to becoming third state to strengthen data privacy and transparency laws (Denver Post)Workforce reportN.Y. lawmaker drops bid for Uber driver union deal this year (Bloomberg)TrendingThe Verge reports on internet outage on Google Doc but forgot to make it private (Metro)New York Times publishes, then deletes, article claiming watermelons were found on Mars (Futurism)Young creators are burning out and breaking down (The New York Times)DaybookMakan Delrahim and Douglas Melamad, who served as Assistant Attorneys General of the Justice Department\u2019s Antitrust Division, speak at a leadershIP event with former acting FTC chair Maureen Ohlhausen today at noon.Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee\u2019s antitrust subcommittee, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) speak at an FCBA event today at 4 p.m.Google data governance director Kate Charlet and others debate federal privacy legislation at an R Street Institute event on Thursday at 2 p.m.Before you log offNigeria\u2019s president just banned Twitter in his country. Trump must be jealous as hell. pic.twitter.com/AmRIISZ9G7\u2014 The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 8, 2021\n\n The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act passed on a bipartisan vote. But its future is uncertain in the House.  The Technology 202: The Senate approved a massive investment in U.S. tech competitiveness",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: The Senate approved a massive investment in U.S. tech competitiveness (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7104",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/09/technology-202-senate-approved-massive-investment-us-tech-competitiveness/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferThe Senate yesterday passed a major bill to address U.S. competitiveness with China, which would allocate billions to technology research and the semiconductor industry.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLawmakers adopted the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act on a rare bipartisan, 68-to-32 vote that signaled lawmakers from both parties are willing to work together to address China's rising technological prowess, even in a bitterly divided Capitol. The action comes after U.S. tech executives have repeatedly warned lawmakers of the rising competitive threat from China and called for greater federal investment in researching artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.\u00a0 \u201cI have watched China take advantage of us in ways legal and illegal over the years,\u201d Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the lead author of the bill, told my colleague Tony Romm in an interview before its passage. \u201cThe number one thing China was doing to take advantage of us \u2026 was investing heavily in research and science. And if we didn\u2019t do something about it, they would become the number one economy in the world.\u201dThe wide-ranging $250 billion package could have significant implications for tech companies.\u00a0Silicon Valley is rapidly transforming amid the pandemic. The proposed funding could help address some of the challenges the industry has faced, and accelerate the spread of tech investment beyond the Bay Area. The legislation would:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInvest more than $50 billion in chip manufacturing. Many companies currently source semiconductors from China, and this bill could be a boon to U.S. semiconductor companies. The funding comes as a global chip shortage is vexing U.S. businesses, from automakers to dog washers. The shortage was caused by soaring demand, coupled with disruptions in the supply chain related to the pandemic.Create a new Directorate of Technology and Innovation at the National Science Foundation. The directorate will focus on funding research in artificial intelligence and quantum science. The funding could address long-running concerns in the tech industry about the lack of U.S. government investment in emerging technologies.\u00a0Create a regional tech hub program. The legislation authorizes $10 billion in funding to ensure that U.S. tech development and research is disbursed throughout the country, and not just concentrated in a handful of coastal cities. The funding comes as tech companies and workers are grappling with the future of work, and in some instances, considering moving to smaller cities outside major tech hubs like San Francisco and Seattle.\u00a0Add $10 billion for a lunar landing program. The bill seeks to boost funding for space exploration, increasingly a focus of China. But some lawmakers raised concerns about the potential for the bill to benefit Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sought to remove the funding, calling it a \u201cBezos bailout.\u201d But the funding was included in the final version of the bill.Update merger filing fees to increase funding for antitrust regulators. In the scramble to pass the massive package, many provisions were added. Among them was Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley's (R-Iowa) bill to ensure larger companies are paying more in filing fees amid concerns that federal antitrust enforcers don't have the resources they need to take on large tech companies. Klobuchar praised the Senate vote in a statement, saying \u201cthe Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice\u2019s Antitrust Division are one step closer to having additional resources to conduct rigorous reviews of large mergers.\u201dSemiconductor companies widely praised the bill's passage.\u00a0Yet some tech groups raised concerns about late amendments to the bill.\u00a0\u201cWe are encouraged that the Senate has made U.S. competitiveness and technological innovation a priority with an emphasis on AI and other emerging and critical technologies,\u201d Computer & Communications Industry Association vice president of public policy Arthur D. Sidney said in a statement. \u201cHowever, late amendments to this critical bill may prove unworkable or counterproductive for U.S. industry.\u201d\u00a0The bill will now move to the House.\u00a0Its future there is uncertain as some Democrats have raised early concerns. President Biden praised the Senate's passage of the bill in a statement, and he said his administration would work with House lawmakers to ensure the legislation quickly comes to his desk.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off,\u201d Biden said in a statement. \u201cAs other countries continue to invest in their own research and development, we cannot risk falling behind. \u00a0America must maintain its position as the most innovative and productive nation on Earth.\u201dOur top tabsSome tech CEOs have paid relatively little in U.S. income taxes.Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other extremely wealthy Americans have paid little in income taxes to the U.S. government in recent years despite soaring incomes, according to confidential Internal Revenue Service data obtained by ProPublica. The data reveals how the wealthiest Americans have been able to legally reduce their tax burdens, Todd C. Frankel and Douglas MacMillan write.Story continues below advertisementIn 2011, Bezos reported losing money because of bad investments in a tax filing, allowing him to get a $4,000 tax credit for his children, according to ProPublica. Spokespeople for Musk and Bezos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Ohio\u2019s attorney general asked a judge to call Google a common carrier and public utility.The lawsuit from Ohio Republican Attorney General Dave Yost (R) aims to prevent the tech giant from giving its own products and services priority over competing services. It adds to the company's legal troubles, as it's already a target of multiple federal and state antitrust lawsuits.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cGoogle uses its dominance of Internet search to steer Ohioans to Google\u2019s own products \u2014 that's discriminatory and anti-competitive,\u201d Yost said. \u201cWhen you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe suit cites Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who earlier this year called for lawmakers to regulate major technology companies like utilities in a dissenting opinion.\u00a0\u201cYost's lawsuit would make Google Search results worse and make it harder for small businesses to connect directly with customers,\u201d Google spokesman Peter Schottenfels said. \u201cOhioans simply don't want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company. This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we'll defend ourselves against it in court.\u201dCriminals worldwide used special smartphones to communicate. The FBI was listening.U.S. and Australian police created an app used by criminals to read millions of encrypted messages leading to hundreds of arrests, officials said on June 8. (Reuters)The FBI secretly loaded the phones with software called Anom, which allowed them to see the criminals\u2019 conversations for years, Rachel Pannett and Michael Birnbaum write. Law enforcement officials, some of whom could barely contain their excitement, said more than 800 people were arrested as a result, giving law enforcement agencies an unprecedented look into how criminal networks operate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe effort was \u201cone of the largest and most sophisticated law enforcement operations to date in the fight against encrypted criminal activities,\u201d Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, the deputy executive director for operations of Europol, said. Despite the messages\u2019 encryption, they were also sent directly to law enforcement agents.Rant and raveA massive Internet outage left people to vent on Twitter. Corellium chief operating officer Matt Tait:We did it everyone, we finally ran out of internet\u2014 Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) June 8, 2021\n\nFactal editorial development manager David Wyllie:excited to start my job as chief marketing officer of Fastly, with my pitched campaign of 'everyone should know who we are and what we do' time to sit down and take a big sip of cof\u2014 David Wyllie (@journodave) June 8, 2021\n\nWriter Shauna Wright:live shot from Fastly headquarters pic.twitter.com/OBVPnWcTRC\u2014 shauna (@goldengateblond) June 8, 2021\n\nInside the industryMoviePass deceived users so they\u2019d use it less, FTC says (The New York Times)Facebook offers 'extra cash' for creators who stream more (Engadget)Privacy monitorColorado closer to becoming third state to strengthen data privacy and transparency laws (Denver Post)Workforce reportN.Y. lawmaker drops bid for Uber driver union deal this year (Bloomberg)TrendingThe Verge reports on internet outage on Google Doc but forgot to make it private (Metro)New York Times publishes, then deletes, article claiming watermelons were found on Mars (Futurism)Young creators are burning out and breaking down (The New York Times)DaybookMakan Delrahim and Douglas Melamad, who served as Assistant Attorneys General of the Justice Department\u2019s Antitrust Division, speak at a leadershIP event with former acting FTC chair Maureen Ohlhausen today at noon.Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee\u2019s antitrust subcommittee, and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) speak at an FCBA event today at 4 p.m.Google data governance director Kate Charlet and others debate federal privacy legislation at an R Street Institute event on Thursday at 2 p.m.Before you log offNigeria\u2019s president just banned Twitter in his country. Trump must be jealous as hell. pic.twitter.com/AmRIISZ9G7\u2014 The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 8, 2021\n\n The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act passed on a bipartisan vote. But its future is uncertain in the House.  The Technology 202: The Senate approved a massive investment in U.S. tech competitiveness",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: Billionaires can now escape earth\u2019s gravity, but not its regulators (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7105",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/29/technology-202-billionaires-can-now-escape-earths-gravity-not-its-regulators/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferCommercial aerospace firm Boeing reported its first quarterly profit in two years on Wednesday. The firm\u2019s revenue\u00a0rose 44 percent to $16.9 billion, surprise numbers\u00a0partly driven by higher sales across its defense,\u00a0space\u00a0and security business.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the conglomerate\u00a0is turning its attention toward its next\u00a0big moment.\u00a0On Friday, Boeing is poised to make a second attempt at launching an uncrewed \u201cspace taxi\u201d to the International Space Station, one of several recent events marking a new chapter in space travel. Boosted largely by scrappy start-ups funded by billionaires, today\u2019s commercial space race\u00a0sets\u00a0the stage for everyday people to one day access cosmic territories entered only\u00a0by an elite few, with established companies like Boeing trying to gain a foothold.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis increased participation has also\u00a0ignited policy discussions, as regulators seek to develop new language to work within an increasingly diverse space.\u00a0\u00a0Over the past few weeks, as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin rocketed to the edge of space and back, stakeholders have attempted to reevaluate what\u2019s allowed to happen in microgravity.\u00a0For instance, the day Blue Origin blasted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos 351,000 feet in the air, the Federal Aviation Administration, which primarily sets air safety standards in the United States, reclassified who gets astronaut wings, limiting the title to\u00a0people with mission-critical roles\u00a0such as those acting as pilots or safety personnel and not passengers.\u00a0(Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe point is to highlight the people who have a major role, to reward that safety culture. Not to reward all future customers who fly to space,\u201d\u00a0Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical, told The Technology 202.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementAfter NASA rejected Blue Origin\u2019s bid to build a moon lander, Bezos called on the organization to reconsider. On Tuesday, the Amazon CEO offered to waive $2 billion in fees if NASA accepts the bid,\u00a0a move widely viewed as a public appeal to Congress\u00a0to appropriate more funding\u00a0to the project.\u00a0\u00a0These may seem like siloed events on the surface, but space analysts say the moves are\u00a0interconnected.\u00a0\u00a0Fewer than 600 people have ever reached Earth\u2019s orbit. But space firms\u00a0are attempting to\u00a0make the experience mainstream. As access to space becomes more democratized, new language will have to be adopted to describe roles and processes that previously didn\u2019t exist \u2014 and to identify whom to hold responsible if something goes wrong.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is no more just a domain for carrying out science experiments. It\u2019s being opened up for exploration and utilization,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an independent space policy analyst and co-author of the space exploration book \u201cScramble for the Skies.\u201d \u00a0\u201cOnce you have that shift, priorities change.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementAs\u00a0Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX\u00a0attempt to drive down costs,\u00a0after completing multimillion-dollar crewed flights to the edge of space and back, it\u2019s now prime time for policymakers to nail down a universal set of rules,\u00a0Goswami said. Though increased human activity can create a debris problem,\u00a0she added, it\u2019s\u00a0not about limiting the number of companies allowed to operate in space,\u00a0it\u2019s about requiring they\u00a0take responsible action.\u00a0While falling short of\u00a0actionable\u00a0policy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin\u00a0released a memo earlier this month outlining five tenets for \u201cresponsible behavior\u201d in space, including trajectory separation\u00a0and\u00a0planned flight notifications, among other tasks. Austin\u2019s report called for further action beyond these\u00a0minor classification and changes \u201cwithin the U.S. Government and in international relations.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisementInvestment in space has already led to faster digital communication and more precise weather monitoring.\u00a0Space innovations have trickled down to Earth in the form of smartphone cameras, air purifiers and jet engine turbines.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cWe don\u2019t know where the next century will take us. Maybe our grandchildren will be taking a trip to the moon,\u201d\u00a0Forczyk\u00a0said. \u201cThese mini suborbital stops along the way will help us build that bridge.\u201d\u00a0Our top tabsTechnology industry groups praised a $1 trillion infrastructure deal.The groups said they\u2019re encouraged by the agreement, which includes $65 billion for broadband infrastructure. Lawmakers still have to draft the legislation, which passed a significant hurdle Wednesday but will have to be carefully worded to pass the Senate, my colleague Tony Romm reports.Story continues below advertisementNCTA, the Internet & Television Association, said that while it still needs to see details of the plan, it is \u201cencouraged that the bipartisan infrastructure deal directly addresses two critical elements of reaching universal connectivity \u2014 dedicating funding first and foremost to those regions without any broadband service, and providing financial assistance to help low-income Americans subscribe to this critical service.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThe Information Technology Industry Council is \u201cencouraged by this bipartisan progress and look forward to learning more about the details of the plan, specifically efforts to close the digital divide and expand Internet access,\u201d according to Andy Halataei, its executive vice president of government affairs.And TechNet President and CEO Linda Moore applauded lawmakers and President Biden for coming together on the \u201chistoric\u201d package, which she said would \u201ccreate new opportunities for millions of Americans, spur economic growth, and strengthen American competitiveness.\u201d She also urged Congress to continue working on the bill to send it to Biden \u201cas soon as possible.\u201d The Computer and Communications Industry Association, and BSA, the Software Alliance, also applauded the legislation\u2019s broadband component.Lina Khan took aim at major tech platforms in her first testimony before Congress as FTC chair.Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan blamed major tech platforms for enabling rampant online fraud, the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Ryan Tracy and John D. McKinnon report. But Republicans on the FTC and in Congress expressed opposition to some of Khan\u2019s changes in the FTC. They say the changes bolster the power of Khan, a Big Tech skeptic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201c",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: Billionaires can now escape earth\u2019s gravity, but not its regulators (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7106",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/29/technology-202-billionaires-can-now-escape-earths-gravity-not-its-regulators/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferCommercial aerospace firm Boeing reported its first quarterly profit in two years on Wednesday. The firm\u2019s revenue\u00a0rose 44 percent to $16.9 billion, surprise numbers\u00a0partly driven by higher sales across its defense,\u00a0space\u00a0and security business.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the conglomerate\u00a0is turning its attention toward its next\u00a0big moment.\u00a0On Friday, Boeing is poised to make a second attempt at launching an uncrewed \u201cspace taxi\u201d to the International Space Station, one of several recent events marking a new chapter in space travel. Boosted largely by scrappy start-ups funded by billionaires, today\u2019s commercial space race\u00a0sets\u00a0the stage for everyday people to one day access cosmic territories entered only\u00a0by an elite few, with established companies like Boeing trying to gain a foothold.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis increased participation has also\u00a0ignited policy discussions, as regulators seek to develop new language to work within an increasingly diverse space.\u00a0\u00a0Over the past few weeks, as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin rocketed to the edge of space and back, stakeholders have attempted to reevaluate what\u2019s allowed to happen in microgravity.\u00a0For instance, the day Blue Origin blasted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos 351,000 feet in the air, the Federal Aviation Administration, which primarily sets air safety standards in the United States, reclassified who gets astronaut wings, limiting the title to\u00a0people with mission-critical roles\u00a0such as those acting as pilots or safety personnel and not passengers.\u00a0(Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe point is to highlight the people who have a major role, to reward that safety culture. Not to reward all future customers who fly to space,\u201d\u00a0Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical, told The Technology 202.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementAfter NASA rejected Blue Origin\u2019s bid to build a moon lander, Bezos called on the organization to reconsider. On Tuesday, the Amazon CEO offered to waive $2 billion in fees if NASA accepts the bid,\u00a0a move widely viewed as a public appeal to Congress\u00a0to appropriate more funding\u00a0to the project.\u00a0\u00a0These may seem like siloed events on the surface, but space analysts say the moves are\u00a0interconnected.\u00a0\u00a0Fewer than 600 people have ever reached Earth\u2019s orbit. But space firms\u00a0are attempting to\u00a0make the experience mainstream. As access to space becomes more democratized, new language will have to be adopted to describe roles and processes that previously didn\u2019t exist \u2014 and to identify whom to hold responsible if something goes wrong.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is no more just a domain for carrying out science experiments. It\u2019s being opened up for exploration and utilization,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an independent space policy analyst and co-author of the space exploration book \u201cScramble for the Skies.\u201d \u00a0\u201cOnce you have that shift, priorities change.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementAs\u00a0Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX\u00a0attempt to drive down costs,\u00a0after completing multimillion-dollar crewed flights to the edge of space and back, it\u2019s now prime time for policymakers to nail down a universal set of rules,\u00a0Goswami said. Though increased human activity can create a debris problem,\u00a0she added, it\u2019s\u00a0not about limiting the number of companies allowed to operate in space,\u00a0it\u2019s about requiring they\u00a0take responsible action.\u00a0While falling short of\u00a0actionable\u00a0policy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin\u00a0released a memo earlier this month outlining five tenets for \u201cresponsible behavior\u201d in space, including trajectory separation\u00a0and\u00a0planned flight notifications, among other tasks. Austin\u2019s report called for further action beyond these\u00a0minor classification and changes \u201cwithin the U.S. Government and in international relations.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisementInvestment in space has already led to faster digital communication and more precise weather monitoring.\u00a0Space innovations have trickled down to Earth in the form of smartphone cameras, air purifiers and jet engine turbines.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cWe don\u2019t know where the next century will take us. Maybe our grandchildren will be taking a trip to the moon,\u201d\u00a0Forczyk\u00a0said. \u201cThese mini suborbital stops along the way will help us build that bridge.\u201d\u00a0Our top tabsTechnology industry groups praised a $1 trillion infrastructure deal.The groups said they\u2019re encouraged by the agreement, which includes $65 billion for broadband infrastructure. Lawmakers still have to draft the legislation, which passed a significant hurdle Wednesday but will have to be carefully worded to pass the Senate, my colleague Tony Romm reports.Story continues below advertisementNCTA, the Internet & Television Association, said that while it still needs to see details of the plan, it is \u201cencouraged that the bipartisan infrastructure deal directly addresses two critical elements of reaching universal connectivity \u2014 dedicating funding first and foremost to those regions without any broadband service, and providing financial assistance to help low-income Americans subscribe to this critical service.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThe Information Technology Industry Council is \u201cencouraged by this bipartisan progress and look forward to learning more about the details of the plan, specifically efforts to close the digital divide and expand Internet access,\u201d according to Andy Halataei, its executive vice president of government affairs.And TechNet President and CEO Linda Moore applauded lawmakers and President Biden for coming together on the \u201chistoric\u201d package, which she said would \u201ccreate new opportunities for millions of Americans, spur economic growth, and strengthen American competitiveness.\u201d She also urged Congress to continue working on the bill to send it to Biden \u201cas soon as possible.\u201d The Computer and Communications Industry Association, and BSA, the Software Alliance, also applauded the legislation\u2019s broadband component.Lina Khan took aim at major tech platforms in her first testimony before Congress as FTC chair.Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan blamed major tech platforms for enabling rampant online fraud, the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Ryan Tracy and John D. McKinnon report. But Republicans on the FTC and in Congress expressed opposition to some of Khan\u2019s changes in the FTC. They say the changes bolster the power of Khan, a Big Tech skeptic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201c",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: Billionaires can now escape earth\u2019s gravity, but not its regulators (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7107",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/29/technology-202-billionaires-can-now-escape-earths-gravity-not-its-regulators/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferCommercial aerospace firm Boeing reported its first quarterly profit in two years on Wednesday. The firm\u2019s revenue\u00a0rose 44 percent to $16.9 billion, surprise numbers\u00a0partly driven by higher sales across its defense,\u00a0space\u00a0and security business.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow the conglomerate\u00a0is turning its attention toward its next\u00a0big moment.\u00a0On Friday, Boeing is poised to make a second attempt at launching an uncrewed \u201cspace taxi\u201d to the International Space Station, one of several recent events marking a new chapter in space travel. Boosted largely by scrappy start-ups funded by billionaires, today\u2019s commercial space race\u00a0sets\u00a0the stage for everyday people to one day access cosmic territories entered only\u00a0by an elite few, with established companies like Boeing trying to gain a foothold.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis increased participation has also\u00a0ignited policy discussions, as regulators seek to develop new language to work within an increasingly diverse space.\u00a0\u00a0Over the past few weeks, as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin rocketed to the edge of space and back, stakeholders have attempted to reevaluate what\u2019s allowed to happen in microgravity.\u00a0For instance, the day Blue Origin blasted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos 351,000 feet in the air, the Federal Aviation Administration, which primarily sets air safety standards in the United States, reclassified who gets astronaut wings, limiting the title to\u00a0people with mission-critical roles\u00a0such as those acting as pilots or safety personnel and not passengers.\u00a0(Bezos owns The Washington Post.)\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe point is to highlight the people who have a major role, to reward that safety culture. Not to reward all future customers who fly to space,\u201d\u00a0Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical, told The Technology 202.\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementAfter NASA rejected Blue Origin\u2019s bid to build a moon lander, Bezos called on the organization to reconsider. On Tuesday, the Amazon CEO offered to waive $2 billion in fees if NASA accepts the bid,\u00a0a move widely viewed as a public appeal to Congress\u00a0to appropriate more funding\u00a0to the project.\u00a0\u00a0These may seem like siloed events on the surface, but space analysts say the moves are\u00a0interconnected.\u00a0\u00a0Fewer than 600 people have ever reached Earth\u2019s orbit. But space firms\u00a0are attempting to\u00a0make the experience mainstream. As access to space becomes more democratized, new language will have to be adopted to describe roles and processes that previously didn\u2019t exist \u2014 and to identify whom to hold responsible if something goes wrong.\u00a0\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cSpace is no more just a domain for carrying out science experiments. It\u2019s being opened up for exploration and utilization,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an independent space policy analyst and co-author of the space exploration book \u201cScramble for the Skies.\u201d \u00a0\u201cOnce you have that shift, priorities change.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0AdvertisementAs\u00a0Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX\u00a0attempt to drive down costs,\u00a0after completing multimillion-dollar crewed flights to the edge of space and back, it\u2019s now prime time for policymakers to nail down a universal set of rules,\u00a0Goswami said. Though increased human activity can create a debris problem,\u00a0she added, it\u2019s\u00a0not about limiting the number of companies allowed to operate in space,\u00a0it\u2019s about requiring they\u00a0take responsible action.\u00a0While falling short of\u00a0actionable\u00a0policy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin\u00a0released a memo earlier this month outlining five tenets for \u201cresponsible behavior\u201d in space, including trajectory separation\u00a0and\u00a0planned flight notifications, among other tasks. Austin\u2019s report called for further action beyond these\u00a0minor classification and changes \u201cwithin the U.S. Government and in international relations.\u201d\u00a0Story continues below advertisementInvestment in space has already led to faster digital communication and more precise weather monitoring.\u00a0Space innovations have trickled down to Earth in the form of smartphone cameras, air purifiers and jet engine turbines.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cWe don\u2019t know where the next century will take us. Maybe our grandchildren will be taking a trip to the moon,\u201d\u00a0Forczyk\u00a0said. \u201cThese mini suborbital stops along the way will help us build that bridge.\u201d\u00a0Our top tabsTechnology industry groups praised a $1 trillion infrastructure deal.The groups said they\u2019re encouraged by the agreement, which includes $65 billion for broadband infrastructure. Lawmakers still have to draft the legislation, which passed a significant hurdle Wednesday but will have to be carefully worded to pass the Senate, my colleague Tony Romm reports.Story continues below advertisementNCTA, the Internet & Television Association, said that while it still needs to see details of the plan, it is \u201cencouraged that the bipartisan infrastructure deal directly addresses two critical elements of reaching universal connectivity \u2014 dedicating funding first and foremost to those regions without any broadband service, and providing financial assistance to help low-income Americans subscribe to this critical service.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementThe Information Technology Industry Council is \u201cencouraged by this bipartisan progress and look forward to learning more about the details of the plan, specifically efforts to close the digital divide and expand Internet access,\u201d according to Andy Halataei, its executive vice president of government affairs.And TechNet President and CEO Linda Moore applauded lawmakers and President Biden for coming together on the \u201chistoric\u201d package, which she said would \u201ccreate new opportunities for millions of Americans, spur economic growth, and strengthen American competitiveness.\u201d She also urged Congress to continue working on the bill to send it to Biden \u201cas soon as possible.\u201d The Computer and Communications Industry Association, and BSA, the Software Alliance, also applauded the legislation\u2019s broadband component.Lina Khan took aim at major tech platforms in her first testimony before Congress as FTC chair.Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan blamed major tech platforms for enabling rampant online fraud, the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Ryan Tracy and John D. McKinnon report. But Republicans on the FTC and in Congress expressed opposition to some of Khan\u2019s changes in the FTC. They say the changes bolster the power of Khan, a Big Tech skeptic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201c",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Biden creates new climate adviser role at NASA (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7108",
        "date": "2021-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/03/energy-202-biden-creates-new-climate-adviser-role-nasa/",
        "text": "By Dino Grandoni and Andrew Freedmanwith Alexandra EllerbeckWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA is elevating one of its top climate scientists to a new role, a move meant to put greater focus at the space agency on studying the causes and consequences of global warming under President Biden.Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, will serve in the newly created position of senior climate adviser. He is being brought on in an acting capacity until NASA\u2019s incoming administrator, who has yet to be named, makes a permanent appointment. In an interview Tuesday, Schmidt said his vision for the position is to have \u201cjust one person that\u2019s kind of really focused on the climate issues\u201d at the agency. Right now, the agency has high-ranking officials who oversee Earth science research, but their purview encompasses more than just climate change.The creation of the new high-level climate position is in line with the Biden administration\u2019s plan to marshal all federal agencies into action on climate change.\u00a0And the choice of Schmidt, one of the nation\u2019s most well-respected and outspoken modelers of how Earth\u2019s atmosphere traps heat, is another sign the Biden administration will argue for aggressive cuts in emissions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSteve Jurczyk, \u00a0NASA's acting chief, said in a statement the move \u201cwill enable the agency to more effectively align our efforts to help meet the administration\u2019s goals for addressing climate change.\u201dThough more famous for space exploration, NASA has a dual mission that includes studying our home planet.\u00a0The new adviser will guide NASA's administrator and other top leaders, as well as serve as a resource to other federal officials, according to senior administration officials.Central to the agency's climate work is its fleet of satellites that enables policymakers and activists to monitor carbon emissions, deforestation, land use change, snow cover, ice sheets and other shifts in the landscape, with many data sets offered freely to the public and dating back to the 1970s. NASA has a slew of climate-focused space missions coming up in the next few years.The agency, however, has not had a single point person on climate change issues, despite the role it plays in gathering critical data on the Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s climate adviser role is among a number of new positions focused on climate change under Biden. The two most prominent appointees are former secretary of state John F. Kerry, now serving as the president\u2019s special envoy on climate, and former Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy, now Biden\u2019s domestic climate czar.The move at NASA represents a sharp shift from the Trump administration\u2019s management of the agency.\u00a0Trump's White House sought to shift NASA\u2019s focus away from studying Earth and toward exploring space with its funding requests.Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator under Barack Obama, said the role is \u201ca fantastic and timely addition to NASA and Gavin is the right person to take on the task.\"Story continues below advertisement\u201cMost of what we know about earth systems science comes from satellites and the agency has a major role to play in driving solutions and assisting society with adaptation measures that can lessen human suffering,\u201d she added.AdvertisementBidisha Bhattacharyya, deputy director for climate and energy policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, agrees the new position is \u201can encouraging sign\u201d but would like to see the Biden administration should double the amount spent on NASA's Earth science program.\u201cNASA has been grossly underappreciated as a climate agency,\u201d she said.NASA's Earth science portfolio is funded at a level of $2 billion for the current fiscal year and includes money for satellites, supercomputers and more beyond just climate change. This compares to a human space exploration budget of $6.6 billion out of a total agency budget of $23.3 billion.\u00a0Schmidt is outspoken about the need to cut emissions and has not shied away from policy discussions.But he sees his role as distinct from any policy opinions. \u201cI\u2019m not being tapped for this role because they particularly want my views on policy,\u201d he said, adding NASA is a policy-neutral organization. \u201cI\u2019m looking forward to seeing where science falls on the table but I\u2019m not going to suddenly start designing cap-and-trade systems based on NASA science.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Oxford-trained climatologist has appeared as a guest on \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d and co-founded one of the first climate science blogs. In 2011, he received an award from the American Geophysical Union, the largest society of Earth scientists, for his work informing the public about rising temperatures.Schmidt has published numerous scientific papers and oversees NASA\u2019s surface temperature data set. His research areas include improving the accuracy of climate models and understanding climate variability, both from natural fluctuations and human-driven changes. He worked under renowned climate scientist James Hansen, who stepped down from running the institute in 2013.Schmidt will remain in New York for the next few months as he figures out how he can best serve the new administration, he said. His lab, situated in Manhattan above the restaurant used as the exterior of the diner on \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d is largely disconnected from the political scene in Washington.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added the position does not upend the organizational chart or make him the gatekeeper of NASA climate science, but rather is intended to help add more specific expertise for decision-making and intergovernmental efforts, including bringing climate science considerations into decisions on NASA\u2019s operations.For example, the agency\u2019s launchpads and other facilities in Cape Canaveral, Fla., are vulnerable to damage from hurricanes as well as long-term sea level rise, as are installations in Virginia and other parts of the country.\u00a0\u201cRight now there is not going to be a formal change to who I work for and what I do. In a couple of months it will be clearer what role this really is, whether I am the right person to do that, and whether we want to make things more permanent.\u201dPower playsThe Senate will hold two environmental hearings today.The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hear from Michael S. Regan, Biden\u2019s pick for head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Regan has served as North Carolina\u2019s top environmental regulator since 2017. If confirmed, he will make history as the first Black man to lead the agency at a time when Biden has promised to make environmental justice issues center to his administration\u2019s agenda.And the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on climate change \u2014 the first under Sen. Joe Manchin III's (D-W.Va.) leadership. Manchin is a coal country native who often has taken a conservative tack on environmental issues.Everyone take their seats: Senate Majority Leader Charles E/. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced new Democratic committee assignments.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSens. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.) and Alex Padilla (Calif.) will join the Environmental and Public Works Committee, replacing Cory Booker (N.J.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.)Kelly and Sen. John Hickenlooper (Colo.) will join the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Stabenow will leave the committee.And Booker, Sens. Ben Ray Luj\u00e1n (N.M.) and Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) will join the Agriculture Committee. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (Pa.) will leave the committee.Agriculture secretary nominee Tom Vilsack said the USDA will address inequities in the department's programs at his confirmation hearing on Feb. 2. (The Washington Post)Finally, the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee voted unanimously to advance Tom Vilsack\u2019s nomination as agriculture secretary, setting him up for a quick confirmation in by the full Senate, our colleague Laura Reiley reports.\u00a0Vilsack told lawmakers farmers would be crucial in combating climate change and said that he will focus on incentivizing farmers to adopt agricultural practices that reduce emissions or increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil.Automakers drop out of the legal battle against California\u2019s emission standards.Toyota, Hyundai, Kia and Stellantis, the company formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot S.A., are no longer trying to stop California from setting its own greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars. The group of automakers said they made the decision as \u201ca gesture of good faith and to find a constructive path forward.\"\u00a0Under Trump, the federal government had sought to strip the nation's most populous state of its ability to set its own tailpipe rules. The Biden's team is now expected to tighten those fuel-efficiency standards as part of its agenda fighting climate change.U.S. cities are underestimating their carbon emissions, researchers say.A study published in the journal Nature Communications found that cities underreport their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 18 percent, Reuters reports. The report comes as cities pledge huge cuts to their carbon emissions in an effort to combat climate change.The study compared self-reported emissions from 48 U.S. cities with estimates from an emissions data tool developed by study lead Kevin Gurney of Northern Arizona University. The data tool tracks emissions using an array of national public data sets and produces estimates consistent with atmospheric measurements, according to the paper.Extra mileageTest your knowledge of climate change.\u201cTime to see if you\u2019ve been paying attention to Washington Post coverage of the people, organizations and governments trying to mitigate climate change,\u201d our colleague Lyndsey Layton writes.You can take The Post\u2019s climate quiz to test your climate literacy.Climate-friendly farming and Science Moms (Lyndsey Layton) Gavin Schmidt will serve in the newly created position of senior climate adviser.  The Energy 202: Biden creates new climate adviser role at NASA",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Biden creates new climate adviser role at NASA (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7109",
        "date": "2021-02-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/03/energy-202-biden-creates-new-climate-adviser-role-nasa/",
        "text": "By Dino Grandoni and Andrew Freedmanwith Alexandra EllerbeckWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNASA is elevating one of its top climate scientists to a new role, a move meant to put greater focus at the space agency on studying the causes and consequences of global warming under President Biden.Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, will serve in the newly created position of senior climate adviser. He is being brought on in an acting capacity until NASA\u2019s incoming administrator, who has yet to be named, makes a permanent appointment. In an interview Tuesday, Schmidt said his vision for the position is to have \u201cjust one person that\u2019s kind of really focused on the climate issues\u201d at the agency. Right now, the agency has high-ranking officials who oversee Earth science research, but their purview encompasses more than just climate change.The creation of the new high-level climate position is in line with the Biden administration\u2019s plan to marshal all federal agencies into action on climate change.\u00a0And the choice of Schmidt, one of the nation\u2019s most well-respected and outspoken modelers of how Earth\u2019s atmosphere traps heat, is another sign the Biden administration will argue for aggressive cuts in emissions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSteve Jurczyk, \u00a0NASA's acting chief, said in a statement the move \u201cwill enable the agency to more effectively align our efforts to help meet the administration\u2019s goals for addressing climate change.\u201dThough more famous for space exploration, NASA has a dual mission that includes studying our home planet.\u00a0The new adviser will guide NASA's administrator and other top leaders, as well as serve as a resource to other federal officials, according to senior administration officials.Central to the agency's climate work is its fleet of satellites that enables policymakers and activists to monitor carbon emissions, deforestation, land use change, snow cover, ice sheets and other shifts in the landscape, with many data sets offered freely to the public and dating back to the 1970s. NASA has a slew of climate-focused space missions coming up in the next few years.The agency, however, has not had a single point person on climate change issues, despite the role it plays in gathering critical data on the Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s climate adviser role is among a number of new positions focused on climate change under Biden. The two most prominent appointees are former secretary of state John F. Kerry, now serving as the president\u2019s special envoy on climate, and former Environmental Protection Agency chief Gina McCarthy, now Biden\u2019s domestic climate czar.The move at NASA represents a sharp shift from the Trump administration\u2019s management of the agency.\u00a0Trump's White House sought to shift NASA\u2019s focus away from studying Earth and toward exploring space with its funding requests.Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator under Barack Obama, said the role is \u201ca fantastic and timely addition to NASA and Gavin is the right person to take on the task.\"Story continues below advertisement\u201cMost of what we know about earth systems science comes from satellites and the agency has a major role to play in driving solutions and assisting society with adaptation measures that can lessen human suffering,\u201d she added.AdvertisementBidisha Bhattacharyya, deputy director for climate and energy policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, agrees the new position is \u201can encouraging sign\u201d but would like to see the Biden administration should double the amount spent on NASA's Earth science program.\u201cNASA has been grossly underappreciated as a climate agency,\u201d she said.NASA's Earth science portfolio is funded at a level of $2 billion for the current fiscal year and includes money for satellites, supercomputers and more beyond just climate change. This compares to a human space exploration budget of $6.6 billion out of a total agency budget of $23.3 billion.\u00a0Schmidt is outspoken about the need to cut emissions and has not shied away from policy discussions.But he sees his role as distinct from any policy opinions. \u201cI\u2019m not being tapped for this role because they particularly want my views on policy,\u201d he said, adding NASA is a policy-neutral organization. \u201cI\u2019m looking forward to seeing where science falls on the table but I\u2019m not going to suddenly start designing cap-and-trade systems based on NASA science.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Oxford-trained climatologist has appeared as a guest on \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d and co-founded one of the first climate science blogs. In 2011, he received an award from the American Geophysical Union, the largest society of Earth scientists, for his work informing the public about rising temperatures.Schmidt has published numerous scientific papers and oversees NASA\u2019s surface temperature data set. His research areas include improving the accuracy of climate models and understanding climate variability, both from natural fluctuations and human-driven changes. He worked under renowned climate scientist James Hansen, who stepped down from running the institute in 2013.Schmidt will remain in New York for the next few months as he figures out how he can best serve the new administration, he said. His lab, situated in Manhattan above the restaurant used as the exterior of the diner on \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d is largely disconnected from the political scene in Washington.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added the position does not upend the organizational chart or make him the gatekeeper of NASA climate science, but rather is intended to help add more specific expertise for decision-making and intergovernmental efforts, including bringing climate science considerations into decisions on NASA\u2019s operations.For example, the agency\u2019s launchpads and other facilities in Cape Canaveral, Fla., are vulnerable to damage from hurricanes as well as long-term sea level rise, as are installations in Virginia and other parts of the country.\u00a0\u201cRight now there is not going to be a formal change to who I work for and what I do. In a couple of months it will be clearer what role this really is, whether I am the right person to do that, and whether we want to make things more permanent.\u201dPower playsThe Senate will hold two environmental hearings today.The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hear from Michael S. Regan, Biden\u2019s pick for head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Regan has served as North Carolina\u2019s top environmental regulator since 2017. If confirmed, he will make history as the first Black man to lead the agency at a time when Biden has promised to make environmental justice issues center to his administration\u2019s agenda.And the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on climate change \u2014 the first under Sen. Joe Manchin III's (D-W.Va.) leadership. Manchin is a coal country native who often has taken a conservative tack on environmental issues.Everyone take their seats: Senate Majority Leader Charles E/. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced new Democratic committee assignments.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSens. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Mark Kelly (Ariz.) and Alex Padilla (Calif.) will join the Environmental and Public Works Committee, replacing Cory Booker (N.J.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.)Kelly and Sen. John Hickenlooper (Colo.) will join the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Stabenow will leave the committee.And Booker, Sens. Ben Ray Luj\u00e1n (N.M.) and Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) will join the Agriculture Committee. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (Pa.) will leave the committee.Agriculture secretary nominee Tom Vilsack said the USDA will address inequities in the department's programs at his confirmation hearing on Feb. 2. (The Washington Post)Finally, the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee voted unanimously to advance Tom Vilsack\u2019s nomination as agriculture secretary, setting him up for a quick confirmation in by the full Senate, our colleague Laura Reiley reports.\u00a0Vilsack told lawmakers farmers would be crucial in combating climate change and said that he will focus on incentivizing farmers to adopt agricultural practices that reduce emissions or increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil.Automakers drop out of the legal battle against California\u2019s emission standards.Toyota, Hyundai, Kia and Stellantis, the company formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot S.A., are no longer trying to stop California from setting its own greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars. The group of automakers said they made the decision as \u201ca gesture of good faith and to find a constructive path forward.\"\u00a0Under Trump, the federal government had sought to strip the nation's most populous state of its ability to set its own tailpipe rules. The Biden's team is now expected to tighten those fuel-efficiency standards as part of its agenda fighting climate change.U.S. cities are underestimating their carbon emissions, researchers say.A study published in the journal Nature Communications found that cities underreport their greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 18 percent, Reuters reports. The report comes as cities pledge huge cuts to their carbon emissions in an effort to combat climate change.The study compared self-reported emissions from 48 U.S. cities with estimates from an emissions data tool developed by study lead Kevin Gurney of Northern Arizona University. The data tool tracks emissions using an array of national public data sets and produces estimates consistent with atmospheric measurements, according to the paper.Extra mileageTest your knowledge of climate change.\u201cTime to see if you\u2019ve been paying attention to Washington Post coverage of the people, organizations and governments trying to mitigate climate change,\u201d our colleague Lyndsey Layton writes.You can take The Post\u2019s climate quiz to test your climate literacy.Climate-friendly farming and Science Moms (Lyndsey Layton) Gavin Schmidt will serve in the newly created position of senior climate adviser.  The Energy 202: Biden creates new climate adviser role at NASA",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Trump has reached his ceiling, with little or no room to grow (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7110",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/10/17/daily-202-trump-has-reached-his-ceiling-with-little-or-no-room-to-grow/5804200be9b69b640f54c6a6/",
        "text": "With Breanne DeppischTHE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump is stuck. The deeper you drill into the crosstabs of our new poll, the clearer it becomes that he will have a very hard time getting more than 46 percent of the popular vote. That would translate into a landslide loss in the electoral college. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight-- On the surface, the Republican nominee is surprisingly close to Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post-ABC News survey. He trails by just four\u00a0points, 50 percent to 46 percent, among likely voters nationwide. That happens to be the same size as the margin of error. It is also only a two-point shift in Clinton\u2019s direction since our poll on the eve of the first debate, before his attacks on a former Miss Universe, the release of the 2005 video and the emergence of more than a dozen women who have accused him of unwanted sexual advances.-- These numbers would seem to bolster the notion that Trump is Teflon. But in fact he is in a particularly poor position to expand his support because the voters who currently back a third-party candidate or have not decided whom to support are far more critical of him than of Clinton. And they\u2019ve only become more so in recent weeks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the help of our in-house pollster Scott Clement, I studied the 14 percent of registered voters who support neither Clinton nor Trump in the four-way poll test. This includes the 6 percent for Gary Johnson and the 3 percent for Jill Stein but also the 3 percent who volunteered to our callers that they are supporting none of the four and the 2 percent who said they have not decided yet.Among this sub-group, 71 percent are \u201cstrongly unfavorable\u201d to Trump versus 46 percent who say the same of Clinton. He comes fairly close to her on honesty (83 percent say Trump is not honest and trustworthy, compared to 78 percent who say the same for Clinton) and on who is best for the economy (35 percent say Trump and 32 percent say Clinton). But there is a big chasm on two questions that tend to be better predictors of vote choice: 77 percent say Trump is not qualified to be president, compared to 44 percent who say Clinton is not. And 86 percent say Trump lacks the temperament to be president, compared to 42 percent who say the same of Clinton.This 14 percent is crucial because nearly everyone else can no longer be persuaded: 88 percent of Trump supporters and 89 percent of Clinton backers said they will \u201cdefinitely\u201d support their current preference. More than 1.4 million ballots have already been cast, and a superior Democratic ground game is locking in her advantage.-- Bigger picture: With the exception of an outlier or two, no poll worth the paper it is printed on has ever had Trump garnering more than 47 percent against Clinton in a head-to-head matchup.\u00a0A George Washington University poll being released later this morning has Clinton up eight\u00a0points among likely voters (47-39). Yesterday\u2019s NBC-Wall Street Journal poll had Clinton ahead 10 points in a head-to-head matchup, with Trump at 40 percent.\u00a0Last week\u00a0Fox News put Trump down seven\u00a0points, with 41 percent. For context, Mitt Romney got 47.2 percent of the popular vote \u2014\u00a0and 206 electoral votes. John McCain pulled 45.7 percent in 2008\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and 173 electoral votes.-- A generic Republican might be handily defeating Clinton, but Trump is not a generic Republican. Clinton\u2019s net negative is 14 points (42 percent of likely voters view her favorably and 56 percent see her in an unfavorable light), but Trump\u2019s is 25 points (37 percent favorable vs. 62 percent unfavorable). It is truly remarkable that Trump is down only four\u00a0points among likely voters when you consider that the same poll also finds:AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement68 percent believe Trump has made unwanted sexual advances toward women. Just 14 percent say he has not.57 percent said Trump\u2019s response to the 2005 \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d video was insincere.Only 40 percent agree with Trump that the comments are \u201clocker room talk.\u201d57 percent say it's inappropriate for Trump to say that Clinton would be in jail if he were president for her use of a private email server as secretary of state.While 55 percent say Trump\u2019s treatment of women is a legitimate issue in the campaign, 67 percent say Bill Clinton\u2019s treatment of women is not a legitimate issue.52 percent say Clinton does not have strong moral character, but 66 percent say Trump does not.-- Trump\u2019s lack of growth potential helps explain why he\u2019s decided to go all-in on mobilizing his own base while trying to suppress, intimidate and otherwise deter Democratic voters from participating in the election. His path to victory at this point depends on large swaths of the Obama coalition choosing to stay home.-- The numbers also demonstrate why Clinton continues to be so cautious. Like a quarterback who is ahead by a few touchdowns at the start of the fourth quarter, she has been running down the clock with a cautious, front-porch-style campaign that leaves little room for unforced errors. The Boston Globe tabulated both candidates\u2019 travels over past two-and-a-half months, and the numbers are stark: Clinton held 52 events compared with Trump\u2019s 88 between Aug. 1 and Oct. 10. President Obama held 74 events and Mitt Romney 76 during the same period in 2012. And over the same period in 2008, Obama held 108 events and John McCain 100. \u201cClinton, who, like Trump, is deeply unpopular with voters, also risks energizing her opponent\u2019s supporters every time she lands in a battleground state for a rally,\u201d Michael Levenson notes on today\u2019s front page.-- Our electoral college forecast looks even rosier for Clinton than the national popular vote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- The high command in Brooklyn is divided about how much Clinton should invest in the non-core battleground states during the final three weeks. From John Wagner, Abby Phillip and Jose A. DelReal: \u201cClinton and the Democratic Party entered October with twice as much money in the bank as Trump and the Republicans, but some in Clinton\u2019s camp have cautioned against any late moves that could jeopardize a victory in states she appears to have nailed down. The campaign is expected to decide in coming days whether to make a more aggressive play for states such as Georgia, which is being eyed as one of the more promising opportunities for Clinton, and Arizona, where a couple of high-profile surrogates are being deployed this week: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Tuesday and Chelsea Clinton on Wednesday.\u201d\u201cSeveral states that Trump initially sought to contest, including Colorado and Virginia, have now seemingly slipped out of reach. Clinton was up by 15 points in Virginia, according to a poll released Sunday by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. And Trump has pulled resources from Virginia. Trump\u2019s failure to perform in such states, Clinton aides said, will allow the campaign to shift attention even more to North Carolina and Florida \u2014 two must-win states for him \u2014 to choke his path to 270\u2026\u201d-- Follow the money. You can judge whether a campaign is serious about winning a state if it invests in TV commercials\u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClinton is currently on the air in seven states: Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio and Iowa.Trump\u2019s campaign now appears intent on remaining competitive in just four states: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.-- Republican operatives on the ground in Ohio tell me that the state, which had been leaning toward Trump, is back to being a true toss-up and may be leaning toward Clinton. Donald\u2019s campaign, making matters worse, publicly attacked the state GOP Chairman Matt Borges over the weekend. Borges is a loyalist to John Kasich, but he has nonetheless done a great deal to help the nominee. Trump \u201cis very disappointed in Matt\u2019s duplicity,\u201d Trump\u2019s Ohio campaign director Robert Paduchik said in an email, accusing Borges of embarking on a \u201cself-promotional media tour with state and national outlets to criticize our party\u2019s nominee.\u201d Borges\u2019s offense? He did not defend Trump\u2019s behavior toward women when reporters called about it.-- Another data point that Ohio has tightened:\u00a0Rob Portman's newest\u00a0mailer\u00a0tries to co-opt the Clinton campaign slogan \"stronger together.\"\u00a0The\u00a0Republican senator officially broke with Trump the Friday before last.-- On the early vote, Democrats are outpacing their 2012 early vote performance in Florida and North Carolina BUT are still trailing in Iowa and Ohio.\u00a0From Politico\u2019s Kyle Cheney: Republicans are clinging to narrow leads in the total number of mail-in ballots requested in the Sunshine State and the Tar Heel State. Yet in both states, Clinton is ahead of Obama\u2019s pace four years earlier \u2014 and the GOP trails Romney\u2019s clip. But political scientist\u00a0Michael McDonald said there are undercurrents that should cause concern for Clinton. Democratic early-vote performance in Midwestern states like Iowa and Ohio appears to be well behind its 2012 pace.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Top GOP officials in Arizona are sounding the alarm and telling reporters that\u00a0Trump is taking the Grand Canyon State for granted.\u00a0From NBC\u2019s Vaughn Hillyard: \u201cThe campaign has placed few resources in the state. There are five staffers aiding Trump's bid, paid for by a combination of the campaign, the RNC and the Arizona Republican Party. The campaign has not put up any broadcast TV or radio spots in Arizona, and it has committed just $15,000 for mailers for the remainder of this month and $7,000 for the final week of the campaign. Asked if more funds directly from the campaign and the RNC are wanted and if they have been requested, a state GOP party official (said): \u2018Of course. We'll take anything.\u2019\u201d \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter. With contributions from Elise Viebeck (@eliseviebeck). Sign up to receive the newsletter. \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- Iraqi forces have launched\u00a0the long-awaited\u00a0offensive to retake Mosul from ISIS,\u00a0which has\u00a0occupied the largest city in northern Iraq\u00a0as a de facto capital. Our\u00a0Loveday Morris and Mustafa Salim are on the ground: \u201cThe Mosul offensive marks a showdown in the Islamic State\u2019s last major stronghold in Iraq and the city that has come to symbolize the group\u2019s rise here. The battle for Mosul draws together tens of thousands of Iraqi troops from an array of the country\u2019s forces: Kurdish peshmerga soldiers, Sunni tribal fighters, army, police, Shiite militias and elite counterterrorism units. From the sky and on the ground comes close support from the U.S.-led coalition. More than 80,000 troops are involved, including engineers and logistical support. \u2026 [And] despite sometimes competing agendas, the various armed forces have united, at least for now, to take back the Islamic State\u2019s most prized remaining territory in the country.\u201d Opinions are split on just how long and grinding the battle ahead will be, though Iraqi leaders have pledged\u00a0to have the city back under government control by the end of the year.-- Sneak peek \u2014\u00a0Joe Biden\u2019s final \u201ccancer moonshot\u201d report will outline the hurdles that hinder progress: The vice president will meet privately with President Obama today and then give a speech to cancer researchers. He\u2019ll unveil a report that says formidable challenges remain, including a lack of coordination among researchers, an \u201cantiquated\u201d funding culture and unacceptably slow dissemination of important information about new treatments. Laurie McGinley got an advance copy: Biden says incentives that reward scientists for individual successes rather than team efforts that \u201ccan lead to new answers and new solutions.\u201d He complains that problems recruiting and retaining patients for clinical trials can cause costly delays. And he says it takes too long for cutting-edge treatments developed at the nation\u2019s premier cancer centers to reach the community oncologists who treat most patients. Initiatives to address some of the issues are underway, the VP\u00a0writes, but more needs to be done.GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: Leading moderate announces retirement from House with parting shot at direction of GOP (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7111",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/09/08/daily-202-leading-moderate-announces-retirement-from-house-with-parting-shot-at-direction-of-gop/59b1bf4e30fb045176650bc5/",
        "text": "with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie GreveTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0Exhausted from his ideological battles with the House Freedom Caucus and clashes with Donald Trump\u2019s White House, Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) has decided to retire.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAs a member of the governing wing of the Republican Party, I've worked to instill stability, certainty and predictability in Washington,\u201d Dent said in a statement last night announcing that he will not seek an eighth term. \u201cI've fought to fulfill the basic functions of government, like keeping the lights on and preventing default. Regrettably, that has not been easy given the disruptive outside influences that profit from increased polarization and ideological rigidity that leads to dysfunction, disorder and chaos.\u201d Story continues below advertisementDent is the co-chairman of the moderate Tuesday Group, which has about 50 center-right members. That\u2019s more than the three dozen or so guys in the Freedom Caucus, but the tea partyers punch above their weight because they mostly vote as a bloc.Advertisement-- The retirement gives Democrats a prime pickup opportunity, and some veteran GOP strategists are increasingly nervous that a stream of others will follow \u2013 especially if the House fails to put more legislative points on the board (e.g. overhauling the tax code) and the political winds continue to suggest major Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms.-- Dent has increasingly drawn the wrath of the Trumpist movement for his willingness to publicly express concerns about Trump that many of his House GOP colleagues are still only willing to say on background. The congressman called for Trump to drop out when the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d tape emerged last October and then voted for independent Evan McMullin. Since January, he\u2019s spoken out against the president\u2019s travel ban, his firing of James Comey as FBI director and his false moral equivalency after Charlottesville.Story continues below advertisementBreitbart, again under Steve Bannon\u2019s leadership, played up a story last Friday about an anti-Dent rally in Allentown that drew more than 100 conservative activists. AdvertisementPennsylvania state Rep. Justin Simmons announced on Wednesday that he would challenge Dent in a primary next year, emphasizing the incumbent\u2019s lack of support for Trump. \u201cLike many Republicans, I used to support Charlie Dent,\u201d Simmons said in the news release kicking off his campaign. \u201cBut in the past year, Charlie Dent has completely gone off the rails.\u201dDismissing the challenger as an opportunistic \u201cphony,\u201d Dent released embarrassing text messages that he received from him last year. One asked him to host a fundraiser to help in a contested primary. Another asked, \u201cDo you think there\u2019s any chance the party can replace Trump on the top of the ticket?\u201dInstead of facing off with Simmons, though, Dent is now stepping aside.-- That surprise news came just one day after another seven-term moderate announced he will retire. Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), who represents a suburban Seattle district that Hillary Clinton carried, is chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on trade. Breaking with the protectionist president, Reichert\u00a0wrote a\u00a0goodbye statement emphasizing\u00a0the importance of free trade to the Pacific Northwest. \u201cFrom serving on President Obama\u2019s Export Council to battling to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank to leading the fight to pass the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement, I have always fought to give our exporters the chance to sell their goods and services around the world,\u201d he wrote.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- A third moderate, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), also expressed concern about the direction of the party when she revealed her plan to step down this spring. The first Cuban American elected to Congress expressed confidence she\u2019d get reelected, even though Clinton won her Miami district by 20 points, but she said the prospect of two more years in the current environment just didn\u2019t appeal to her. \u201cIt was just a realization that I could keep getting elected \u2014 but it's not about getting elected,\u201d she told the Miami Herald in April.Ros-Lehtinen, the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has spoken out loudly against Trump since then, on issues like deportations (including DACA this week), transgender rights (her son is transgender) and budget cuts. \u201cI'm not one of those name-callers that think the Democrats don\u2019t have a single good idea,\u201d she said. \u201cToo many people think that way, and I think that's to the detriment to civility and of good government.\u201d-- Even as relations continue to fray between Republican congressional leaders and Trump, Democrats say these retirements are just the latest proof points that the Trumpists have completed their hostile takeover of the GOP. \u201cWith Trump in charge of the GOP, they might as well have a sign on the door that says \u2018Moderates need not apply,\u2019 \u201d said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson, who previously ran the independent expenditure arm of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. \u201cThe last cellblock has fallen and now Trump's rabble of inmates are running the asylum. Dare to stand up to Trumpism by thinking people should be able to keep their health care or by opposing white supremacists, and you'll find there is no home for you in the Republican party anymore. That's dangerous for the next two years and for the next 20. Whether it's in Seattle, Miami\u00a0or now Allentown, the GOP is pushing out the only leaders who could convince suburban voters there was a way to get a home in the Republican Party that wasn't Trump-owned.\u201d-- A close ally of GOP leadership, Dent also serves as chairman of the House Ethics Committee and is a powerful \u201ccardinal,\u201d which in congressional parlance means that he chairs an Appropriations subcommittee. (He controls tens of billions in annual spending related to veterans\u2019 affairs and military construction.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- While acknowledging that Trump is a factor, Dent says that the trends driving him to give up this immense power predate the current president.The ideological makeup of the House Republican conference has changed markedly since Newt Gingrich seized the majority in 1994. When the party won back the lower chamber in the 2010 midterms, after four years in the wilderness, the success of the tea party movement meant that there were relatively fewer moderates than before.Republicans dominated the decennial redistricting process and drew lots of safely red districts. This meant that many House members became more vulnerable to a primary challenge from their right than a general election challenge from a Democrat. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor went down in a 2014 primary, and the Freedom Caucus formed the next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis created additional incentives for members to become part of the unofficial \u201cvote no, hope yes\u201d caucus. This is a group of Republicans who want spending bills and debt-ceiling increases to pass but won\u2019t support them because they fear retaliation from outside conservative groups. The departure of Barack Obama from the Oval Office has lessened some of the reflexive, knee-jerk partisanship (it\u2019s harder to tell Trump no), but \u201cvote no, hope yes\u201d remains a powerful force that House Speaker Paul Ryan must contend with every day.Perversely, these \u201cno\u201d votes force Republican leaders to turn to Democrats for the necessary votes to pass key bills. That has given House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) more leverage than she would have otherwise had. The result is that final deals are often less conservative than they might be otherwise.People like Dent, who considers himself a conservative, constantly bang their heads against the wall because of this dynamic. He explained last night that solving problems requires \u201cnegotiation, cooperation and, inevitably, compromise.\u201dThe 57-year-old said he has been having \u201cperiodic discussions\u201d with his wife and three kids about whether to stay in Congress ever \u201csince the government shutdown in 2013.\u201d He said discussions about retiring \u201cincreased in frequency\u201d earlier this year, and that he made the decision to step down \u201cin midsummer\u201d \u2014 before he drew the primary challenger. \u201cAccomplishing the most basic fundamental tasks of governance is becoming far too difficult,\u201d Dent explained to The Washington Post's Mike DeBonis in an interview last night. \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t be, but that\u2019s reality.\u201d-- The nonpartisan Cook Political Report plans to move Pennsylvania\u2019s 15th District \u2013 which covers Allentown, Bethlehem and much of the Lehigh Valley \u2013 from \u201cSolid Republican\u201d to \u201cLean Republican\u201d in ratings that will publish later Friday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump carried the district by eight points last November, while Dent won reelection by 20 points. Obama won the 15th in 2008 and narrowly lost it in 2012.Democrats see a great pickup opportunity. \u201cAfter nine months of utter failure to get even the most basic things done for hardworking families, it\u2019s no surprise that Dent is as sick and tired of the Republican party as the American people,\u201d said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee\u00a0spokesman Evan Lukaske.The National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, Rep. Steve Stivers, expressed confidence Republicans will hold the seat. \u201cFrom reforming the broken VA to ensuring every child has access to a high-quality education, Congressman Dent has championed conservative values since taking office in 2005,\" said Stivers (R-Ohio). \u201cWhile his leadership in Congress will be sorely missed, I wish him the very best in the next chapter of his life.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Dent is the 13th Republican to leave the House since the start of 2017. Four accepted jobs in the Trump administration, and three more are running for governor. Dent is the sixth to retire without another position in mind.As a point of comparison, seven Democrats have announced plans to leave the House. All but one (Rep. Niki Tsongas\u00a0of\u00a0Massachusetts) did so to run for higher office. Only one represents a district Trump won: Rep. Tim Walz, who is now a front-runner to become the next governor of Minnesota.-- To be fair, though, the current number of House members who are retiring remains far below the historical norm. Going back to 1976, an average of 22 House members have retired in each cycle without seeking a higher office. With Dent, we\u2019re at just seven for this term. Contrary to some of the liberal commentary on places like Twitter and cable news, Trump has not opened the floodgates. At least not yet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Happening at 9 a.m. ET this morning: The Daily 202 Live with Wilbur Ross. Watch the live stream of my interview with the Commerce secretary here. \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Listen to James's quick summary of today's Big Idea and the headlines you need to know to start your day: \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Subscribe to The Daily 202\u2019s Big Idea on Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Podcasts and other podcast players. \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \u00a0\n \n \n \n \n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning briefing for decision-makers.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \n \n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:An 8.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the southern coast of Mexico on Sept. 7. (eduardo_amaro_flores/Instagram)-- A massive 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck off Mexico\u2019s southern coast, shaking Mexico City and killing at least five people. Joshua Partlow reports: \u201cThe epicenter of the quake was off the coast of Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico, but the rumblings rocked the Mexican capital more than 600 miles away, causing electricity failures, and reports of sporadic damage. \u2026 Photos showed collapsed ceilings, flattened concrete buildings, and rubble from damage in southern cities such as Tuxtla Guti\u00e9rrez and Tonala. \u2026 The U.S. Tsunami Warning System said hazardous tsunami waves were possible on the Pacific coasts of Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama and Honduras within three hours. There was no tsunami threat for the West Coast of the United States, but the warning system said waves could reach Mexico and as far as Ecuador.\u201d-- Defeat for President Trump and Jeff Sessions: A federal appeals court panel ruled Thursday that grandparents and extended relatives of people in the United States\u00a0are exempt from the travel ban, as well as refugees with formal assurances from a government agency. Matt Zapotosky reports: \u201cThe [ruling] is a blow to the government, which after the most recent Supreme Court compromise had been allowed to block refugees with assurances, though not grandparents and other extended relatives. ...\u00a0The judges also said their ruling would take effect in just five days \u2014 on Tuesday \u2014 a significant decrease from the normal 52 days, saying that refugees\u2019 lives \u2018remain in vulnerable limbo\u2019 in their current uncertain state. The government has estimated there are about 24,000 refugees with formal assurances.\u201d-- The Department of Homeland Security \u201cis planning nationwide raids to target 8,400 undocumented immigrants later this month, according to three law enforcement officials and an internal document that described the plan as \u2018the largest operation of its kind in the history of ICE,\u2019\u201d NBC News\u2019s Julia Ainsley and Andrew Blankstein report: \u201cThe raids, scheduled over five days beginning Sept. 17, are being called \u2018Operation Mega.\u2019 \u2026 The higher-than-usual target number may be partially driven by an effort to reach a deportation goal at the end of the [fiscal year]. \u00a0\u2026 \u00a0Other undocumented immigrants not suspected of crimes may be swept up in the raids as \u2018collateral,\u2019 the official said. Operation Mega would not target juveniles, one of the officials said.\u201d\u00a0Immigration and Customs Enforcement\u00a0issued a statement denying the plan for widespread raids: \u201cThere is currently no coordinated nationwide operation planned at this time.\u201dMiami Beach residents brace for Hurricane Irma as the deadly storm barrels toward southern Florida. (Zoeann Murphy, Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post)FLORIDA BRACES FOR IRMA'S WRATH:-- Hurricane Irma\u00a0continued its perilous path toward\u00a0Florida on Thursday, tearing through the Atlantic\u00a0and\u00a0leaving a trail of possibly catastrophic damage in its wake.\u00a0\u201cBased on what we know now,\" Gov. Rick Scott (R) said in a midday update, \u201cFlorida will have major hurricane impacts with deadly storm surge and life-threatening winds, and we can expect this all along the eastern coast of Florida.\u201dSignificant weakening of the storm\u00a0is unlikely at this point, and the National Hurricane Center labeled Irma a powerful Category 4\u00a0hurricane as it approached\u00a0Florida on Friday.\u00a0Because the storm could change its course, Scott added, \u201cevery Florida family must prepare to evacuate, regardless of the coast you live on.\" (Capital Weather Gang)\u00a0\u00a0-- \u201cIn Miami and all across the state, people are trying not to panic but anxiety is building as they contemplate danger, damage and devastation,\"\u00a0the Miami Herald reports.\u00a0\u201cOnce again, we are paying the price for living in paradise, and it is tremendous stress,\u201d said local resident Richard Crisler, who recounted his terrifying memories of Hurricane Andrew more than two decades ago. \u201cI\u2019m feeling an oppressive sense of dread.\u201dScott ordered the closure of every public school, college\u00a0and university in the state from Friday to Monday. Schools in non-affected areas will ensure extra space for shelters and emergency response shelters, he said.In the Florida Keys, residents were told that as of Friday morning, hospitals will be closed, ambulances will not be running, and all Coast Guard search-and-rescue vessels will have left the area. \u201cYou might as well leave now while you have a chance, because when you dial 911 you will not get an answer,\u201d said Monroe County administrator Ramon Gastesi. (CNN)Gas\u00a0remained impossibly scarce, with more than 35 percent of gas stations in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale region without fuel. Scott directed state police to escort fuel delivery trucks.Other essentials were also in short supply: One Best Buy store in Naples, for example, sold out of backup batteries and phone chargers in less than a minute, with dozens lining up in front of the store before it opened.\u00a0-- But some of the most vulnerable residents in\u00a0South Florida \u2014 those living in the region's 54,000 mobile homes \u2014 will not be evacuating ahead of the catastrophic storm. \u201cIn a high-rent, low-wage community like South Florida, trailer parks expose the economic disparities that can hinder evacuation efforts,\u201d the Herald writes. \u201cDuring Hurricane Andrew, trailer parks in South Dade were wiped off the face of the earth. \u2026 [But] with so much news coming over smartphones, those without internet access are a step behind.\u201d Some said they didn\u2019t know where the city\u2019s storm shelters are \u2014 or how to get there \u2014 while others were unaware that the mandatory evacuation orders had even taken effect.One trailer park owner said she estimates about half of the park\u2019s 230 residents plan to stay. \u201cI\u2019m going to talk to the police,\u201d she said. \u201cI want to light a fire under [the residents] \u2026 There will be casualties.\u201dPuerto Rico avoided a direct hit from Hurricane Irma, but more than a million people are without power. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)-- States of emergency were also declared\u00a0in Georgia, North Carolina\u00a0and South Carolina, where Irma could make landfall as a Category 2 or 3 hurricane.\u00a0Georgia ordered coastal evacuations beginning Saturday.\u00a0-- U.S. warships began\u00a0Irma relief operations Thursday, conducting damage assessments and medical evacuations for areas already hit by the monster storm. Four additional amphibious warships are either en route to the region or in standby position off Florida, making it one of the largest potential amphibious relief operations ever. (CNN)-- Meanwhile, two other hurricanes, Jose and Katia, continued to swirl in the Atlantic Ocean basin. The Capital Weather Gang reports they are both predicted to strengthen and impact land areas by Friday and into the weekend. \u201cLate afternoon Thursday, Jose had maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour, making it a Category 3 hurricane. \u2026 The storm is forecast to strengthen further by Friday, potentially reaching Category 4.\u201d Current models predict Jose could hit some of the same small islands devastated by Irma earlier this week.\u00a0GET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: More than 2 million downloaded Robinhood's app during GameStop frenzy (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7112",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/02/technology-202-more-than-2-million-downloaded-robinhood-app-during-gamestop-frenzy/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferDownloads of Robinhood and other brokerage apps spiked last week amid the GameStop stock craze.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRobinhood, a Silicon Valley start-up promising to democratize investing, is at the center of the frenzy \u2014 and struggling to keep up with a viral surge in demand. New data from SensorTower shows 2.1 million people downloaded the app during the week of Jan. 25. That\u2019s a nearly 400 percent increase in downloads from just a week earlier.\u00a0 Robinhoodi is in crisis mode as it scrambles to address a rise in collateral requirements related to the trading boom. The company has raised $3.4 billion just since Thursday \u2014 and the latest infusion of funding is expected to allow the brokerage to lift some of the restrictions it placed on investors that angered the public and sparked a frenzy, as the Wall Street Journal reported. The clearinghouse that processes and settles Robinhood\u2019s trades had asked the company for more cash to cover potential losses on the transactions due to the wild seesawing of stocks such as GameStop.Robinhood wasn\u2019t the only trading app that saw a big increase in demand, per SensorTower\u2019s data:\u2014Webull was downloaded 1.2 million times last week, a 751 percent increase week over week.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014Fidelity\u2019s app was downloaded 668,000 times, a 887 percent week-over-week gain.\u00a0\u2014TD Ameritrade was downloaded 507,000 times, a 576 percent increase.\u00a0Congress is set to more closely scrutinize fintech\u2019s apps role in the stock market chaos.\u00a0The download boom comes as Washington lawmakers and regulators are preparing to examine the role technology has played in democratizing finance \u2014 and how it can negatively affect and expose more people to risky financial moves. The scrutiny could have major implications for the future of trading apps in Silicon Valley.\u00a0The recent frenzy around GameStop and stocks of other struggling companies has raised questions about whether Washington has paid enough attention to how the Internet is transforming U.S. investing. And as the controversy drives more retail investors to trading apps, the stakes are only growing.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe House Financial Services Committee announced that it will host a Feb. 18 hearing called \u201cGame Stopped? Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide.\u201d The committee has not publicly announced the list of witnesses yet, but Politico reports that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is set to testify.\u00a0Lawmakers from both parties are raising concerns about the restrictions that Robinhood placed on trading last week, as The Technology 202 previously reported.Tenev is on the defensive about the company's moves \u2013 from business networks to chats with Elon Musk.\u00a0His recent interviews could preview the public grilling. Tenev expressed regret for how the company handled the abrupt halt in trading of stocks such as Gamestop, AMC and others in an impromptu interview with Musk on the new social app Clubhouse, my colleagues reported. \u201cWe knew this was a bad outcome for customers,\u201d Tenev said. \u201cPeople get really pissed off if they\u2019re holding stock and they want to sell it and can\u2019t.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTenev explained Robinhood had received a rare request early Thursday for a $3 billion deposit from the company\u2019s clearing agency, which works to fulfill transactions. That was a major problem for the company, which had only raised about $2 billion in funding at the time. Tenev said it was \u201can order of magnitude over\u201d the typical request amount and he later called for more transparency over the formulas used by financial institutions to calculate these requirements.Our top tabsAmazon is fighting the biggest labor battle in its history in the United States \u2013 and the stakes couldn't be higher.\u00a0The National Labor Relations Board will soon mail ballots to 5,805 Alabama warehouse workers, who will then have seven weeks to decide whether they want the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union to represent them, my colleague Jay Greene reports. If they vote yes, they'll be the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to organize and could potentially inspire a wave of other facilities across the country to follow suit.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAmazon workers all over the country will see there is a path to have a voice on the job,\u201d said Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University. \u201cCollective action is contagious.\u201dAmazon has been aggressively campaigning against the efforts to unionize, even posting fliers on bathroom stall doors and sending text messages discouraging employees from voting in favor of the efforts. Unionization could escalate battles for higher wages and improved working conditions, and it would force the company to negotiate expansion plans \u2013 potentially slowing the company's rapid growth. It would likely increase the company's costs and even hurt efficiency.\u00a0(Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post).\u00a0Facebook and Apple are preparing for a battle of push notifications.\u00a0The two companies are bringing their messages about privacy and security to consumers, Reed Albergotti reports. It\u2019s the latest salvo in a brewing battle between the two companies.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn recent weeks, the two tech giants have stepped up their war of words, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook exchanging barbs as Facebook plans to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. At the center of the dispute is Apple\u2019s move to ask consumers whether they\u2019d like to be tracked on the Web. Facebook has said that the move will harm small businesses \u2014 and its own bottom line.\u00a0Now, the social network is testing notifications that minimize the ad targeting\u2019s effects. The notifications say that the targeting can help consumers \u201cget ads that are more personalized\u201d and \u201csupport businesses that rely on ads to reach customers.\u201dTwitter blocks Indian farmers, then reverses course.The suspensions came after the farmers criticized the country\u2019s ruling party amid widespread protests in the country, Time\u2019s Billy Perrigo reports. The suspensions are raising concerns of censorship in the country, where farmers have protested new agricultural laws for months. One prominent account that was banned, @Tractor2twitr, weighed in:Press note from Tractor2TwitterAll the official press notes will be either sent from our Twitter Handles, or email & phone listed below:WhatsApp: +91 98727 10384tractor2twitter@gmail.com pic.twitter.com/gmi03HudbQ\u2014 Tractor2\u0a1f\u0a35\u0a3f\u0a71\u0a1f\u0a30 (@Tractor2twitr) February 1, 2021\n\nIndia\u2019s government sent Twitter a list of 250 accounts and tweets that used the hashtag \u201cModiPlanningFarmerGenocide,\u201d accusing them of \u201cmaking fake, intimidatory and provocative tweets\u201d while noting that \u201cincitement to genocide is a grave threat to public order.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bans were lifted 12 hours later, TechCrunch\u2019s Manish Singh reports. In a statement, the company reiterated its obligations to comply with local requests to \u201cwithhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time,\u201d BuzzFeed News reporter Pranav Dixit says:This is Twitter's statement on the incident. A Twitter spokesperson declined to speak to me on record despite multiple requests for more transparency. pic.twitter.com/MRlOPMvmsq\u2014 \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af (@PranavDixit) February 1, 2021\n\nInside the industryFacebook banned a Myanmar military television network page after Monday\u2019s coup.The page for the television network has since at least early 2020 shared posts that publicize efforts of the nation\u2019s military, gaining likes from more than 33,000 people, the Wall Street Journal's Newly Purnell reports. It's Facebook's latest move latest move in a country where its platform has been connected for years to physical violence.Story continues below advertisementFacebook removed the page after the Journal inquired about it. The company had previously pulled it down in 2018 as part of a crackdown on accounts that broke its rules, but it later reappeared.\u00a0Google and Ford announce partnership.The two companies are entering a six-year agreement that will position Google as the transportation company\u2019s cloud vendor of choice and put Google apps and services on Ford vehicles, Protocol\u2019s Mike Murphy reports. The move highlights tech giants' broader efforts to court a transportation industry transitioning quickly to autonomous and electric vehicles.AdvertisementGoogle Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Bloomberg News\u2019s Nico Grant that the Ford partnership is the \u201cfirst-of-a-kind in terms of an across-Alphabet partnership,\u201d referring to Google\u2019s parent company. \u201cIt\u2019s a really strategic one because it links all the elements: The experience people have in the cars while they\u2019re driving, the experience they have in the front office, the transformation of manufacturing and supply chain, and the modernization of the IT system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt comes just weeks after Google competitor Microsoft announced a similar agreement with General Motors, which has committed to selling only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.Risk of all-civilian space mission \u201cnot zero,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s Musk says.The comments to NBC News came as the company announced the first all-civilian mission to space, which is expected to take place by the end of the year. The private space race heated up in recent years, with a cast of companies competing to solidify their dominance in the space. But Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, said that \u201cany mission where there\u2019s a crew onboard makes me nervous.\u201dTesla Recalls Roughly 135,000 Vehicles Over Touch-Screen FailuresCoronavirus falloutAnti-vaccine protest at Dodger Stadium was organized on Facebook, including promotion of banned \u2018Plandemic\u2019 video (Isaac Stanley-Becker)MentionsJim Kolb, a voting member of the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, has registered to lobby for Uber via Summit Strategies Government Affairs. He is expected to monitor issues including infrastructure legislation.DaybookGoogle parent Alphabet and Amazon hold investor calls on their earnings today at 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., respectively.The two-day virtual Masters of Digital conference begins on Wednesday, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set to speak on Thursday at 11 a.m.The Electronic Frontier Foundation holds an event on online free speech issues on Wednesday at 11 a.m. The discussion will focus on conservative social media company Parler and social media platforms\u2019 removals of former president Donald Trump.The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee considers the nomination of Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo, President Biden\u2019s pick for commerce secretary, on Wednesday at 10 a.m.John Samples, a member of Facebook\u2019s oversight board, speaks at a virtual R Street Institute event on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. The discussion will center on the board\u2019s upcoming decision on Donald Trump\u2019s fate on the social media network.Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) delivers a keynote address on the first day of the three-day virtual INCOMPAS communications and technology policy summit.Before you log offStay safe this Super Bowl: New app download data shows the growing popularity of Robinhood and other apps facing fresh Washington scrutiny. The Technology 202: More than 2 million downloaded Robinhood's app during GameStop frenzy",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Technology 202: More than 2 million downloaded Robinhood's app during GameStop frenzy (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7113",
        "date": "2021-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/02/technology-202-more-than-2-million-downloaded-robinhood-app-during-gamestop-frenzy/",
        "text": "with Aaron SchafferDownloads of Robinhood and other brokerage apps spiked last week amid the GameStop stock craze.\u00a0WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRobinhood, a Silicon Valley start-up promising to democratize investing, is at the center of the frenzy \u2014 and struggling to keep up with a viral surge in demand. New data from SensorTower shows 2.1 million people downloaded the app during the week of Jan. 25. That\u2019s a nearly 400 percent increase in downloads from just a week earlier.\u00a0 Robinhoodi is in crisis mode as it scrambles to address a rise in collateral requirements related to the trading boom. The company has raised $3.4 billion just since Thursday \u2014 and the latest infusion of funding is expected to allow the brokerage to lift some of the restrictions it placed on investors that angered the public and sparked a frenzy, as the Wall Street Journal reported. The clearinghouse that processes and settles Robinhood\u2019s trades had asked the company for more cash to cover potential losses on the transactions due to the wild seesawing of stocks such as GameStop.Robinhood wasn\u2019t the only trading app that saw a big increase in demand, per SensorTower\u2019s data:\u2014Webull was downloaded 1.2 million times last week, a 751 percent increase week over week.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014Fidelity\u2019s app was downloaded 668,000 times, a 887 percent week-over-week gain.\u00a0\u2014TD Ameritrade was downloaded 507,000 times, a 576 percent increase.\u00a0Congress is set to more closely scrutinize fintech\u2019s apps role in the stock market chaos.\u00a0The download boom comes as Washington lawmakers and regulators are preparing to examine the role technology has played in democratizing finance \u2014 and how it can negatively affect and expose more people to risky financial moves. The scrutiny could have major implications for the future of trading apps in Silicon Valley.\u00a0The recent frenzy around GameStop and stocks of other struggling companies has raised questions about whether Washington has paid enough attention to how the Internet is transforming U.S. investing. And as the controversy drives more retail investors to trading apps, the stakes are only growing.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe House Financial Services Committee announced that it will host a Feb. 18 hearing called \u201cGame Stopped? Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide.\u201d The committee has not publicly announced the list of witnesses yet, but Politico reports that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is set to testify.\u00a0Lawmakers from both parties are raising concerns about the restrictions that Robinhood placed on trading last week, as The Technology 202 previously reported.Tenev is on the defensive about the company's moves \u2013 from business networks to chats with Elon Musk.\u00a0His recent interviews could preview the public grilling. Tenev expressed regret for how the company handled the abrupt halt in trading of stocks such as Gamestop, AMC and others in an impromptu interview with Musk on the new social app Clubhouse, my colleagues reported. \u201cWe knew this was a bad outcome for customers,\u201d Tenev said. \u201cPeople get really pissed off if they\u2019re holding stock and they want to sell it and can\u2019t.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTenev explained Robinhood had received a rare request early Thursday for a $3 billion deposit from the company\u2019s clearing agency, which works to fulfill transactions. That was a major problem for the company, which had only raised about $2 billion in funding at the time. Tenev said it was \u201can order of magnitude over\u201d the typical request amount and he later called for more transparency over the formulas used by financial institutions to calculate these requirements.Our top tabsAmazon is fighting the biggest labor battle in its history in the United States \u2013 and the stakes couldn't be higher.\u00a0The National Labor Relations Board will soon mail ballots to 5,805 Alabama warehouse workers, who will then have seven weeks to decide whether they want the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union to represent them, my colleague Jay Greene reports. If they vote yes, they'll be the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to organize and could potentially inspire a wave of other facilities across the country to follow suit.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAmazon workers all over the country will see there is a path to have a voice on the job,\u201d said Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University. \u201cCollective action is contagious.\u201dAmazon has been aggressively campaigning against the efforts to unionize, even posting fliers on bathroom stall doors and sending text messages discouraging employees from voting in favor of the efforts. Unionization could escalate battles for higher wages and improved working conditions, and it would force the company to negotiate expansion plans \u2013 potentially slowing the company's rapid growth. It would likely increase the company's costs and even hurt efficiency.\u00a0(Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post).\u00a0Facebook and Apple are preparing for a battle of push notifications.\u00a0The two companies are bringing their messages about privacy and security to consumers, Reed Albergotti reports. It\u2019s the latest salvo in a brewing battle between the two companies.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn recent weeks, the two tech giants have stepped up their war of words, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook exchanging barbs as Facebook plans to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. At the center of the dispute is Apple\u2019s move to ask consumers whether they\u2019d like to be tracked on the Web. Facebook has said that the move will harm small businesses \u2014 and its own bottom line.\u00a0Now, the social network is testing notifications that minimize the ad targeting\u2019s effects. The notifications say that the targeting can help consumers \u201cget ads that are more personalized\u201d and \u201csupport businesses that rely on ads to reach customers.\u201dTwitter blocks Indian farmers, then reverses course.The suspensions came after the farmers criticized the country\u2019s ruling party amid widespread protests in the country, Time\u2019s Billy Perrigo reports. The suspensions are raising concerns of censorship in the country, where farmers have protested new agricultural laws for months. One prominent account that was banned, @Tractor2twitr, weighed in:Press note from Tractor2TwitterAll the official press notes will be either sent from our Twitter Handles, or email & phone listed below:WhatsApp: +91 98727 10384tractor2twitter@gmail.com pic.twitter.com/gmi03HudbQ\u2014 Tractor2\u0a1f\u0a35\u0a3f\u0a71\u0a1f\u0a30 (@Tractor2twitr) February 1, 2021\n\nIndia\u2019s government sent Twitter a list of 250 accounts and tweets that used the hashtag \u201cModiPlanningFarmerGenocide,\u201d accusing them of \u201cmaking fake, intimidatory and provocative tweets\u201d while noting that \u201cincitement to genocide is a grave threat to public order.\u201d\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bans were lifted 12 hours later, TechCrunch\u2019s Manish Singh reports. In a statement, the company reiterated its obligations to comply with local requests to \u201cwithhold access to certain content in a particular country from time to time,\u201d BuzzFeed News reporter Pranav Dixit says:This is Twitter's statement on the incident. A Twitter spokesperson declined to speak to me on record despite multiple requests for more transparency. pic.twitter.com/MRlOPMvmsq\u2014 \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af (@PranavDixit) February 1, 2021\n\nInside the industryFacebook banned a Myanmar military television network page after Monday\u2019s coup.The page for the television network has since at least early 2020 shared posts that publicize efforts of the nation\u2019s military, gaining likes from more than 33,000 people, the Wall Street Journal's Newly Purnell reports. It's Facebook's latest move latest move in a country where its platform has been connected for years to physical violence.Story continues below advertisementFacebook removed the page after the Journal inquired about it. The company had previously pulled it down in 2018 as part of a crackdown on accounts that broke its rules, but it later reappeared.\u00a0Google and Ford announce partnership.The two companies are entering a six-year agreement that will position Google as the transportation company\u2019s cloud vendor of choice and put Google apps and services on Ford vehicles, Protocol\u2019s Mike Murphy reports. The move highlights tech giants' broader efforts to court a transportation industry transitioning quickly to autonomous and electric vehicles.AdvertisementGoogle Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Bloomberg News\u2019s Nico Grant that the Ford partnership is the \u201cfirst-of-a-kind in terms of an across-Alphabet partnership,\u201d referring to Google\u2019s parent company. \u201cIt\u2019s a really strategic one because it links all the elements: The experience people have in the cars while they\u2019re driving, the experience they have in the front office, the transformation of manufacturing and supply chain, and the modernization of the IT system.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIt comes just weeks after Google competitor Microsoft announced a similar agreement with General Motors, which has committed to selling only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.Risk of all-civilian space mission \u201cnot zero,\u201d SpaceX\u2019s Musk says.The comments to NBC News came as the company announced the first all-civilian mission to space, which is expected to take place by the end of the year. The private space race heated up in recent years, with a cast of companies competing to solidify their dominance in the space. But Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, said that \u201cany mission where there\u2019s a crew onboard makes me nervous.\u201dTesla Recalls Roughly 135,000 Vehicles Over Touch-Screen FailuresCoronavirus falloutAnti-vaccine protest at Dodger Stadium was organized on Facebook, including promotion of banned \u2018Plandemic\u2019 video (Isaac Stanley-Becker)MentionsJim Kolb, a voting member of the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, has registered to lobby for Uber via Summit Strategies Government Affairs. He is expected to monitor issues including infrastructure legislation.DaybookGoogle parent Alphabet and Amazon hold investor calls on their earnings today at 5 p.m. and 5:30 p.m., respectively.The two-day virtual Masters of Digital conference begins on Wednesday, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set to speak on Thursday at 11 a.m.The Electronic Frontier Foundation holds an event on online free speech issues on Wednesday at 11 a.m. The discussion will focus on conservative social media company Parler and social media platforms\u2019 removals of former president Donald Trump.The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee considers the nomination of Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo, President Biden\u2019s pick for commerce secretary, on Wednesday at 10 a.m.John Samples, a member of Facebook\u2019s oversight board, speaks at a virtual R Street Institute event on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. The discussion will center on the board\u2019s upcoming decision on Donald Trump\u2019s fate on the social media network.Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) delivers a keynote address on the first day of the three-day virtual INCOMPAS communications and technology policy summit.Before you log offStay safe this Super Bowl: New app download data shows the growing popularity of Robinhood and other apps facing fresh Washington scrutiny. The Technology 202: More than 2 million downloaded Robinhood's app during GameStop frenzy",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Finance 202: Steyer's wealth may put him at odds with direction of Democratic Party (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7114",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2019/07/10/the-finance-202-steyer-s-wealth-may-put-him-at-odds-with-direction-of-democratic-party/5d24f496a7a0a47d87c5709c/",
        "text": "with Brent D. GriffithsTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDemocrats running for president in 2020 are agitating against the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and decrying their influence on the political process. Now, they need to make room for one of those hyper-rich people in their own ranks. Tom Steyer, the hedge fund billionaire and second-most prolific political donor of all time, made it official Tuesday: He is jumping into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.\u00a0Steyer will have to overcome more than a late start. In his four-minute announcement video, he decried a broken government that represents corporate interests and those of the hyper-wealthy rather than everyday Americans. Watch it here:\u00a0But to push his message that he is the right leader to get big money out of politics, Steyer will be leaning on more of his own big money. He has pledged to spend up to $100 million of his personal fortune on the race.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA couple of his rivals for the nod seized on that fact Tuesday. In an appearance on MSNBC, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he likes Steyer personally but added he\u2019s getting \u201ca bit tired of billionaires trying to buy political power.\u201d Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) drew a contrast between Steyer\u2019s plan to self-fund and her own $19 million second-quarter fundraising haul drawn from a grass-roots network:\u00a0The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they\u2019re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that\u2019s powered by a grassroots movement.\u2014 Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 9, 2019\n\nSteyer, 62, cut his teeth on Wall Street, working under future Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin on Goldman Sachs's risk arbitrage desk. But he amassed his estimated $1.6 billion fortune at the helm of a hedge fund called Farallon Capital Management, which he founded in 1986. By the time Steyer gave up his ownership in late 2012, it had grown to one of the largest in the world, with about\u00a0$20 billion under management. The firm profited from investments in every sector of the economy, including fossil fuels, maintaining stakes in BP, oil-and-gas giant Nexen, and mining companies, among others.\u00a0By Steyer\u2019s account, a percolating crisis of conscience over those holdings reached full boil during a mountain hike in the summer of 2012 with environmentalist Bill McKibben. Afterward, he decided to personally divest from \u201cecologically unsound\u201d investments. That translated into dumping stakes in tar sands and coal, two of the dirtiest energy sources.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut he drew criticism for moving more slowly to divest from all fossil fuel interests. And the New York Times in 2014 found\u00a0that \u201cdespite his highly public declaration, Mr.\u00a0Steyer\u2019s divestment will do little to impede the coal-related projects his firm bankrolled, which will generate tens of millions of tons of carbon pollution for years, if not decades, to come. Over the past 15 years, Mr.\u00a0Steyer\u2019s fund,\u00a0Farallon Capital\u00a0Management, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that operate coal mines and coal-fired power plants from Indonesia to China.\u201dSteyer\u2019s record since of putting his money where his mouth is may blunt charges of hypocrisy as he becomes an official candidate. His organization NextGen Climate Action has plowed about $234 million into boosting Democratic candidates over the past three election cycles \u2014 with about $209 million of that sum coming from Steyer\u2019s own pocket, according to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics.\u00a0The bigger problem he faces is whether Democratic voters will embrace a billionaire at a time when populist animus is energizing the party\u2019s base.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMichael Bloomberg \u2014 a fellow billionaire who has funded climate change activism and other progressive causes while spending big to elect Democrats \u2014 surveyed the same landscape earlier this year and decided it would be hostile to his own presidential bid. In a Bloomberg News editorial announcing his decision, Bloomberg said he concluded he could never win the Democratic primary \u2014 beacuse though he worries the primary will \u201cdrag the party to an extreme,\u201d he would refuse to \u201cchange my views to match the polls.\u201d\u00a0That may distinguish Steyer from Bloomberg \u2014 and, to a lesser extent, Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO who looks to have given up on a potential independent bid that was based on the idea both parties had abandoned the center. Bloomberg has been an outspoken critic of some Democratic candidates\u2019 proposals to hike taxes on the rich, comparing Warren\u2019s plan for a wealth tax to socialism, for example. Steyer has called for raising taxes on upper-income earners, though he hasn\u2019t gotten specific yet.\u00a0But the issue points to a box Steyer could soon find himself in: Promote a more moderate economic program, and his rivals on the left will have an easy time lambasting him for seeking to protect his self-interest and that of his class; adopt the stridently liberal line, and the question arises why Steyer is better suited to carry that banner than candidates like Warren or Sanders who have already detailed their plans and developed major grassroots followings.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs The Post's Dave Weigel noted Wednesday, last month's\u00a0AP-NORC poll found just 26 percent of Democrats said they favored a candidate with experience running a business, while 73 percent said they preferred one with experience in public office. Yet Steyer\u00a0is emphasizing his lack of experience in office. \"I am an outsider from outside the system, and\u00a0I\u2019ve been doing this for 10 years,\u201d he told Weigel, referring to his activism. \"I think the question here for every single person who\u2019s running is: Who can connect with Americans? Who can rewrite the electorate and get us organized?\u00a0That is the question. You can\u2019t buy that.\"Steyer\u00a0is right that he can't buy voter support. But he's launching his bid by trying, spending nearly $1 million on a\u00a0TV ad campaign in states with early primary contests.\u00a0 \n \n \n You are reading The Finance 202, our must-read tipsheet on where Wall Street meets Washington. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n MARKET MOVERS\n\u2014\u00a0Powell faces tough task in Hill testimony: \u201cWhen Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell testifies before Congress on Wednesday and Thursday, he is expected to talk about slowing economic activity and increased risks, showing that the Fed is ready to cut interest rates as needed,\u201d CNBC\u2019s Patti Domm reports. \u201cBut Powell is also likely to keep the markets \u2014 and the White House \u2014 guessing about how soon and how deep the Fed intends to trim rates, when it meets at the end of July. The prevailing view, priced into the futures market, is for a 100% chance of a quarter-point rate cut July 31.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201c\u2018There is no part of what he has to do over the next two days that does not resemble walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls,\u2019 said Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivatives strategist at BTIG.\u201dBespoke Investment Group notes expectations for a rate cut this month have collapsed.\u00a0The bubble in expectations for a July 50 bps cut is bursting faster than the dot-com stocks. pic.twitter.com/eGM6dzcvYU\u2014 Bespoke (@bespokeinvest) July 9, 2019\n\nMeanwhile, via CNBC's Carl Quintanilla,\u00a0top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow suggested yesterday that the Fed should heed advice from\u00a0the White House:\u00a0Kudlow: the Fed is independent, but that \u201cdoesn\u2019t mean they shouldn\u2019t listen to advice from their elders.\u201d(via @cnbcevents) pic.twitter.com/rr71lmTG1M\u2014 Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) July 9, 2019\n\n\u2014 Job openings outnumber workers by 1.4 million. WSJ's Eric Morath: \"The number of unfilled jobs in the U.S. fell slightly in May, but remained near record levels, suggesting demand for workers was strong even during a month when hiring slowed sharply. There were a seasonally adjusted 7.323 million unfilled jobs at the end of May, down 49,000 from the prior month\u2019s revised figure, the Labor Department said Tuesday...\u00a0Openings have exceeded the number of unemployed for 15 straight months. Before last year, that had never occurred in nearly two decades of monthly records.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014\u00a0The housing market is about to turn against buyers again: \u201cCompetition in the housing market finally began to cool this year, as listings multiplied and price gains moderated. Bidding wars became less frequent and spring sales perked up a bit. Well, forget that. The heat is on yet again,\u201d CNBC\u2019s Diana Olick reports.\u201cThe housing shortage that fueled competition and resulted in sky-high price gains throughout 2017 and the first half of 2018 is on the horizon yet again. Supply is soon expected to drop and potentially hit a new low, according to realtor.com, after increasing in the second half of last year.\u201d\n TRUMP TRACKER\nTRADE FLY-AROUND:\u2014\u00a0Kudlow says U.S. and China may never reach a deal: \u201cThe United States and China may never be able to reach a trade deal because of the difficulty in resolving the relatively few remaining issues on the table, a top U.S. official said Tuesday,\u201d Politico\u2019s Doug Palmer reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDuring an interview at CNBC's Capital Exchange event in Washington, [Kudlow] said he was an optimist by nature and still believed a deal was possible. But he used a football analogy involving his favorite team to illustrate the potential for the Trump administration to fall short. 'It's like being on the seven-yard line at a football game,\u2019 Kudlow said. \u2018And as a long-suffering New York Giants fan, they could be on the seven and they never get the ball to the end zone.\u2019\u201dMeanwhile, talks have resumed: \u201cU.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He and Minister Zhong Shan on Tuesday to continue negotiations to resolve outstanding trade issues, a U.S. official said,\u201d Reuters\u2019s Chris Prentice reports.Trump administration allows sales to Huawei to resume.\u00a0NYT's Jim Tankersley and Ana Swanson: \"The Trump administration is following through with plans to allow American companies to continue doing business with Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment giant, just weeks after placing the company on a Commerce Department blacklist.\"On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the administration will issue licenses for American companies that want to do business with Huawei 'where there is no threat to national security.' And another top official suggested the move would allow chip makers to continue selling certain technology to Huawei.\"\u2014\u00a0Trump praises Acosta as he faces growing calls to resign: \u201c[Trump] praised Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta on Tuesday and said he felt 'very badly'\u00a0for him, as calls mounted for his Cabinet member to resign over his handling, as a U.S. attorney, of an earlier sex crimes case involving financier Jeffrey Epstein,\u201d my colleague John Wagner reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpeaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump also said the White House would look closely at the circumstances surrounding a 2007 plea deal overseen by Acosta that a growing number of Democrats argued Tuesday was far too lenient on Epstein \u2026 Shortly before, Acosta said in a tweet that he was pleased that federal prosecutors in New York are pursing a new sex trafficking case against Epstein involving minors.\"The crimes committed by Epstein are horrific, and I am pleased that NY prosecutors are moving forward with a case based on new evidence.\u2014 Secretary Acosta (@SecretaryAcosta) July 9, 2019\n\nEpstein recently tried to discuss damage control with a PR professional: \u201cPrivate as he was, he was apparently concerned about what the public thought of him. A mutual friend arranged for him to meet R. Couri Hay, a public relations consultant. Mr. Hay said on Monday that their first meeting, at Mr. Epstein\u2019s townhouse, took place three years ago,\u201d the New York Times\u2019s James Barron reports.\u00a0\u201cMr. Epstein was not ready to re-emerge in the public eye \u2014 not then, anyway. Three months ago, Mr. Epstein called and invited him over to discuss damage control, Mr. Hay said. \u2018He hates every story starting with \u2018billionaire pervert,\u2019\u201d Mr. Hay said. \u2018Jeffrey had long stories about the difference between pedophilia with very young children and tweens and teens a little older.\u2019 He added, \u2018It was his way of trying to talk his way around it.\u2019 \u201d\n POCKET CHANGE\n\u2014\u00a0Boeing set to lose biggest plane-maker title: \"Boeing Co is set to lose the title of being the world\u2019s biggest plane maker after reporting a 37% drop in deliveries for the first half of the year due to the prolonged grounding of its best-selling MAX jets,\" Reuters\u2019s\u00a0Ankit Ajmera reports.\u201cBoeing deliveries lagged those of Airbus SE, which on Tuesday said it handed over 389 planes in the same period, up 28% from a year earlier. Reuters had reported Airbus delivery numbers on Friday, citing sources. The numbers indicate that Boeing\u2019s full-year deliveries are likely to fall behind its European rival for the first time in eight years.\u201d\u2014\u00a0PepsiCo\u2019s earnings are on the rise: \u201cPepsiCo Inc. posted higher quarterly profit and sales as the food-and-beverage giant rolled out new products such as Pepsi Mango and ramped up marketing for some of its more established brands,\u201d the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Jennifer Maloney and Kimberly Chin report.\u201cUnder Chief Executive Ramon Laguarta, who took over from longtime chief Indra Nooyi in October, the company has been increasing spending on advertising and distribution networks, broadening its product lines and changing its packaging. Revenue in the company\u2019s North America beverages division increased 2.5% in the second quarter, as volume rose in ready-to-drink coffee and water brands such as Lifewtr and Bubly. The Pepsi and Mountain Dew brands, which slumped last year, continued to turn around, executives said.\u201d\u2014\u00a0Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public: \u201cBefore Virgin Galactic starts bringing human beings closer to the cosmos, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company has set its sights on another new frontier: the New York Stock Exchange,\u201d my colleagues Taylor Telford and Christian Davenport report.\u201cThe British billionaire announced Tuesday that Virgin Galactic planned to become the first human spaceflight company to go public via a merger with a New York investment firm. Social Capital Hedosophia will take a 49 percent stake in the company, which will be valued at roughly $1.5 billion. The firm\u2019s chief executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, will invest an additional $100 million in the combined enterprise at $10 per share and become its chairman. The listing is expected before the end of the year.\u201dU.S. Seizes MSC Container Ship After Record Drug Bust (WSJ)\n MONEY ON THE HILL\n\u2014 Saudi lobbying whirs on. The Post's Beth Reinhard, Jonathan O'Connell and Tom Hamburger: \"After the killing in October of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, a handful of lobbying firms and think tanks made a move rare in Washington: They publicly severed ties with Saudi Arabia, swearing off the kingdom\u2019s money. But nine months later, Saudi Arabia\u2019s efforts to influence U.S. policy continue unabated \u2014 bolstered by President Trump\u2019s embrace of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite\u00a0a recent United Nations report that the prince was complicit in the grisly killing and dismemberment of the Washington Post contributing columnist and political dissident.\u00a0\"Since fall 2018,\u00a0high-powered lobbyists and lawyers have reaped\u00a0millions of dollars for assisting the kingdom as it works to\u00a0develop nuclear power, buy American-made weapons and prolong U.S. assistance to the Saudi-led coalition waging war in Yemen,\u00a0foreign lobbying records show.\"\u2014\u00a0Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google to testify to Congress on antitrust: \u201cApple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have been summoned to Capitol Hill to testify next week as part of House lawmakers\u2019 wide-ranging investigation into big tech companies and the threats they may pose to competition,\u201d my colleague Tony Romm reports.\u201cThe hearing, scheduled for July 16 in front of the House Judiciary Committee\u2019s subcommittee that deals with antitrust, will bring simmering Democratic and Republican frustrations with Silicon Valley into public view, potentially setting the stage for further scrutiny \u2014 or regulation \u2014 of an industry that has long insisted that its size doesn\u2019t harm rivals or consumers.\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Joe Biden raked it in after leaving office: \u201cJoe Biden on Tuesday afternoon reported earning $15.6 million in income over the past two years, making him the wealthiest among his chief competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination,\u201d my colleagues Matt Viser and Anu Narayanswamy report.\u201cThe vast majority of the former vice president\u2019s income \u2014 which totaled $11 million in 2017 and $4.6 million in 2018 \u2014 came from book payments and speaking fees. Biden was also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was paid $371,159 in 2017 and $405,368 in 2018. The tax returns and financial disclosure statements Biden released Tuesday provided the first picture of the wealth he has accumulated since leaving a 44-year career in government.\u201d\n THE REGULATORS\n\u2014 Powell: Stress tests must evolve. WSJ's Lalita Clozel: \"\u00a0Powell said stress tests of the nation\u2019s largest banks must adapt and keep firms on their toes, or the annual exam could fail to prepare the financial system for the next downturn. 'If the stress tests do not evolve, they risk becoming a compliance exercise, breeding complacency from both supervisors and banks,'\u00a0Mr. Powell said Tuesday in prepared remarks for a stress-testing conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.\"\n DAYBOOK\nToday:Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testifies in front of the House Financial Services Committee.The Peterson Institute for International Economics holds an event on China and world.The House Committee on Small Businesses holds a hearing on the role military veteran entrepreneurs serve in the economy.Upcoming:Powell testifies in front of the Senate Banking Committee\u00a0on Thursday.Fed Vice Chair Randal Quarles speaks at the Bipartisan Policy Center\u00a0on Thursday.\n THE FUNNIES\n\n BULL SESSION\nHalle Bailey, a black actress and singer, has officially nabbed the starring role in the upcoming live-action remake of \u201cThe Little Mermaid.\u201d (The Washington Post) It's unclear where he stands on proposals like a wealth tax. The Finance 202: Steyer's wealth may put him at odds with direction of Democratic Party",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Finance 202: Steyer's wealth may put him at odds with direction of Democratic Party (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7115",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2019/07/10/the-finance-202-steyer-s-wealth-may-put-him-at-odds-with-direction-of-democratic-party/5d24f496a7a0a47d87c5709c/",
        "text": "with Brent D. GriffithsTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDemocrats running for president in 2020 are agitating against the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and decrying their influence on the political process. Now, they need to make room for one of those hyper-rich people in their own ranks. Tom Steyer, the hedge fund billionaire and second-most prolific political donor of all time, made it official Tuesday: He is jumping into the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.\u00a0Steyer will have to overcome more than a late start. In his four-minute announcement video, he decried a broken government that represents corporate interests and those of the hyper-wealthy rather than everyday Americans. Watch it here:\u00a0But to push his message that he is the right leader to get big money out of politics, Steyer will be leaning on more of his own big money. He has pledged to spend up to $100 million of his personal fortune on the race.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA couple of his rivals for the nod seized on that fact Tuesday. In an appearance on MSNBC, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he likes Steyer personally but added he\u2019s getting \u201ca bit tired of billionaires trying to buy political power.\u201d Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) drew a contrast between Steyer\u2019s plan to self-fund and her own $19 million second-quarter fundraising haul drawn from a grass-roots network:\u00a0The Democratic primary should not be decided by billionaires, whether they\u2019re funding Super PACs or funding themselves. The strongest Democratic nominee in the general will have a coalition that\u2019s powered by a grassroots movement.\u2014 Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 9, 2019\n\nSteyer, 62, cut his teeth on Wall Street, working under future Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin on Goldman Sachs's risk arbitrage desk. But he amassed his estimated $1.6 billion fortune at the helm of a hedge fund called Farallon Capital Management, which he founded in 1986. By the time Steyer gave up his ownership in late 2012, it had grown to one of the largest in the world, with about\u00a0$20 billion under management. The firm profited from investments in every sector of the economy, including fossil fuels, maintaining stakes in BP, oil-and-gas giant Nexen, and mining companies, among others.\u00a0By Steyer\u2019s account, a percolating crisis of conscience over those holdings reached full boil during a mountain hike in the summer of 2012 with environmentalist Bill McKibben. Afterward, he decided to personally divest from \u201cecologically unsound\u201d investments. That translated into dumping stakes in tar sands and coal, two of the dirtiest energy sources.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut he drew criticism for moving more slowly to divest from all fossil fuel interests. And the New York Times in 2014 found\u00a0that \u201cdespite his highly public declaration, Mr.\u00a0Steyer\u2019s divestment will do little to impede the coal-related projects his firm bankrolled, which will generate tens of millions of tons of carbon pollution for years, if not decades, to come. Over the past 15 years, Mr.\u00a0Steyer\u2019s fund,\u00a0Farallon Capital\u00a0Management, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that operate coal mines and coal-fired power plants from Indonesia to China.\u201dSteyer\u2019s record since of putting his money where his mouth is may blunt charges of hypocrisy as he becomes an official candidate. His organization NextGen Climate Action has plowed about $234 million into boosting Democratic candidates over the past three election cycles \u2014 with about $209 million of that sum coming from Steyer\u2019s own pocket, according to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics.\u00a0The bigger problem he faces is whether Democratic voters will embrace a billionaire at a time when populist animus is energizing the party\u2019s base.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMichael Bloomberg \u2014 a fellow billionaire who has funded climate change activism and other progressive causes while spending big to elect Democrats \u2014 surveyed the same landscape earlier this year and decided it would be hostile to his own presidential bid. In a Bloomberg News editorial announcing his decision, Bloomberg said he concluded he could never win the Democratic primary \u2014 beacuse though he worries the primary will \u201cdrag the party to an extreme,\u201d he would refuse to \u201cchange my views to match the polls.\u201d\u00a0That may distinguish Steyer from Bloomberg \u2014 and, to a lesser extent, Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO who looks to have given up on a potential independent bid that was based on the idea both parties had abandoned the center. Bloomberg has been an outspoken critic of some Democratic candidates\u2019 proposals to hike taxes on the rich, comparing Warren\u2019s plan for a wealth tax to socialism, for example. Steyer has called for raising taxes on upper-income earners, though he hasn\u2019t gotten specific yet.\u00a0But the issue points to a box Steyer could soon find himself in: Promote a more moderate economic program, and his rivals on the left will have an easy time lambasting him for seeking to protect his self-interest and that of his class; adopt the stridently liberal line, and the question arises why Steyer is better suited to carry that banner than candidates like Warren or Sanders who have already detailed their plans and developed major grassroots followings.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs The Post's Dave Weigel noted Wednesday, last month's\u00a0AP-NORC poll found just 26 percent of Democrats said they favored a candidate with experience running a business, while 73 percent said they preferred one with experience in public office. Yet Steyer\u00a0is emphasizing his lack of experience in office. \"I am an outsider from outside the system, and\u00a0I\u2019ve been doing this for 10 years,\u201d he told Weigel, referring to his activism. \"I think the question here for every single person who\u2019s running is: Who can connect with Americans? Who can rewrite the electorate and get us organized?\u00a0That is the question. You can\u2019t buy that.\"Steyer\u00a0is right that he can't buy voter support. But he's launching his bid by trying, spending nearly $1 million on a\u00a0TV ad campaign in states with early primary contests.\u00a0 \n \n \n You are reading The Finance 202, our must-read tipsheet on where Wall Street meets Washington. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n MARKET MOVERS\n\u2014\u00a0Powell faces tough task in Hill testimony: \u201cWhen Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell testifies before Congress on Wednesday and Thursday, he is expected to talk about slowing economic activity and increased risks, showing that the Fed is ready to cut interest rates as needed,\u201d CNBC\u2019s Patti Domm reports. \u201cBut Powell is also likely to keep the markets \u2014 and the White House \u2014 guessing about how soon and how deep the Fed intends to trim rates, when it meets at the end of July. The prevailing view, priced into the futures market, is for a 100% chance of a quarter-point rate cut July 31.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201c\u2018There is no part of what he has to do over the next two days that does not resemble walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls,\u2019 said Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivatives strategist at BTIG.\u201dBespoke Investment Group notes expectations for a rate cut this month have collapsed.\u00a0The bubble in expectations for a July 50 bps cut is bursting faster than the dot-com stocks. pic.twitter.com/eGM6dzcvYU\u2014 Bespoke (@bespokeinvest) July 9, 2019\n\nMeanwhile, via CNBC's Carl Quintanilla,\u00a0top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow suggested yesterday that the Fed should heed advice from\u00a0the White House:\u00a0Kudlow: the Fed is independent, but that \u201cdoesn\u2019t mean they shouldn\u2019t listen to advice from their elders.\u201d(via @cnbcevents) pic.twitter.com/rr71lmTG1M\u2014 Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) July 9, 2019\n\n\u2014 Job openings outnumber workers by 1.4 million. WSJ's Eric Morath: \"The number of unfilled jobs in the U.S. fell slightly in May, but remained near record levels, suggesting demand for workers was strong even during a month when hiring slowed sharply. There were a seasonally adjusted 7.323 million unfilled jobs at the end of May, down 49,000 from the prior month\u2019s revised figure, the Labor Department said Tuesday...\u00a0Openings have exceeded the number of unemployed for 15 straight months. Before last year, that had never occurred in nearly two decades of monthly records.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014\u00a0The housing market is about to turn against buyers again: \u201cCompetition in the housing market finally began to cool this year, as listings multiplied and price gains moderated. Bidding wars became less frequent and spring sales perked up a bit. Well, forget that. The heat is on yet again,\u201d CNBC\u2019s Diana Olick reports.\u201cThe housing shortage that fueled competition and resulted in sky-high price gains throughout 2017 and the first half of 2018 is on the horizon yet again. Supply is soon expected to drop and potentially hit a new low, according to realtor.com, after increasing in the second half of last year.\u201d\n TRUMP TRACKER\nTRADE FLY-AROUND:\u2014\u00a0Kudlow says U.S. and China may never reach a deal: \u201cThe United States and China may never be able to reach a trade deal because of the difficulty in resolving the relatively few remaining issues on the table, a top U.S. official said Tuesday,\u201d Politico\u2019s Doug Palmer reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDuring an interview at CNBC's Capital Exchange event in Washington, [Kudlow] said he was an optimist by nature and still believed a deal was possible. But he used a football analogy involving his favorite team to illustrate the potential for the Trump administration to fall short. 'It's like being on the seven-yard line at a football game,\u2019 Kudlow said. \u2018And as a long-suffering New York Giants fan, they could be on the seven and they never get the ball to the end zone.\u2019\u201dMeanwhile, talks have resumed: \u201cU.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He and Minister Zhong Shan on Tuesday to continue negotiations to resolve outstanding trade issues, a U.S. official said,\u201d Reuters\u2019s Chris Prentice reports.Trump administration allows sales to Huawei to resume.\u00a0NYT's Jim Tankersley and Ana Swanson: \"The Trump administration is following through with plans to allow American companies to continue doing business with Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment giant, just weeks after placing the company on a Commerce Department blacklist.\"On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the administration will issue licenses for American companies that want to do business with Huawei 'where there is no threat to national security.' And another top official suggested the move would allow chip makers to continue selling certain technology to Huawei.\"\u2014\u00a0Trump praises Acosta as he faces growing calls to resign: \u201c[Trump] praised Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta on Tuesday and said he felt 'very badly'\u00a0for him, as calls mounted for his Cabinet member to resign over his handling, as a U.S. attorney, of an earlier sex crimes case involving financier Jeffrey Epstein,\u201d my colleague John Wagner reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpeaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump also said the White House would look closely at the circumstances surrounding a 2007 plea deal overseen by Acosta that a growing number of Democrats argued Tuesday was far too lenient on Epstein \u2026 Shortly before, Acosta said in a tweet that he was pleased that federal prosecutors in New York are pursing a new sex trafficking case against Epstein involving minors.\"The crimes committed by Epstein are horrific, and I am pleased that NY prosecutors are moving forward with a case based on new evidence.\u2014 Secretary Acosta (@SecretaryAcosta) July 9, 2019\n\nEpstein recently tried to discuss damage control with a PR professional: \u201cPrivate as he was, he was apparently concerned about what the public thought of him. A mutual friend arranged for him to meet R. Couri Hay, a public relations consultant. Mr. Hay said on Monday that their first meeting, at Mr. Epstein\u2019s townhouse, took place three years ago,\u201d the New York Times\u2019s James Barron reports.\u00a0\u201cMr. Epstein was not ready to re-emerge in the public eye \u2014 not then, anyway. Three months ago, Mr. Epstein called and invited him over to discuss damage control, Mr. Hay said. \u2018He hates every story starting with \u2018billionaire pervert,\u2019\u201d Mr. Hay said. \u2018Jeffrey had long stories about the difference between pedophilia with very young children and tweens and teens a little older.\u2019 He added, \u2018It was his way of trying to talk his way around it.\u2019 \u201d\n POCKET CHANGE\n\u2014\u00a0Boeing set to lose biggest plane-maker title: \"Boeing Co is set to lose the title of being the world\u2019s biggest plane maker after reporting a 37% drop in deliveries for the first half of the year due to the prolonged grounding of its best-selling MAX jets,\" Reuters\u2019s\u00a0Ankit Ajmera reports.\u201cBoeing deliveries lagged those of Airbus SE, which on Tuesday said it handed over 389 planes in the same period, up 28% from a year earlier. Reuters had reported Airbus delivery numbers on Friday, citing sources. The numbers indicate that Boeing\u2019s full-year deliveries are likely to fall behind its European rival for the first time in eight years.\u201d\u2014\u00a0PepsiCo\u2019s earnings are on the rise: \u201cPepsiCo Inc. posted higher quarterly profit and sales as the food-and-beverage giant rolled out new products such as Pepsi Mango and ramped up marketing for some of its more established brands,\u201d the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Jennifer Maloney and Kimberly Chin report.\u201cUnder Chief Executive Ramon Laguarta, who took over from longtime chief Indra Nooyi in October, the company has been increasing spending on advertising and distribution networks, broadening its product lines and changing its packaging. Revenue in the company\u2019s North America beverages division increased 2.5% in the second quarter, as volume rose in ready-to-drink coffee and water brands such as Lifewtr and Bubly. The Pepsi and Mountain Dew brands, which slumped last year, continued to turn around, executives said.\u201d\u2014\u00a0Virgin Galactic announces it will take its space tourism venture public: \u201cBefore Virgin Galactic starts bringing human beings closer to the cosmos, Richard Branson\u2019s space tourism company has set its sights on another new frontier: the New York Stock Exchange,\u201d my colleagues Taylor Telford and Christian Davenport report.\u201cThe British billionaire announced Tuesday that Virgin Galactic planned to become the first human spaceflight company to go public via a merger with a New York investment firm. Social Capital Hedosophia will take a 49 percent stake in the company, which will be valued at roughly $1.5 billion. The firm\u2019s chief executive, Chamath Palihapitiya, will invest an additional $100 million in the combined enterprise at $10 per share and become its chairman. The listing is expected before the end of the year.\u201dU.S. Seizes MSC Container Ship After Record Drug Bust (WSJ)\n MONEY ON THE HILL\n\u2014 Saudi lobbying whirs on. The Post's Beth Reinhard, Jonathan O'Connell and Tom Hamburger: \"After the killing in October of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, a handful of lobbying firms and think tanks made a move rare in Washington: They publicly severed ties with Saudi Arabia, swearing off the kingdom\u2019s money. But nine months later, Saudi Arabia\u2019s efforts to influence U.S. policy continue unabated \u2014 bolstered by President Trump\u2019s embrace of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite\u00a0a recent United Nations report that the prince was complicit in the grisly killing and dismemberment of the Washington Post contributing columnist and political dissident.\u00a0\"Since fall 2018,\u00a0high-powered lobbyists and lawyers have reaped\u00a0millions of dollars for assisting the kingdom as it works to\u00a0develop nuclear power, buy American-made weapons and prolong U.S. assistance to the Saudi-led coalition waging war in Yemen,\u00a0foreign lobbying records show.\"\u2014\u00a0Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google to testify to Congress on antitrust: \u201cApple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have been summoned to Capitol Hill to testify next week as part of House lawmakers\u2019 wide-ranging investigation into big tech companies and the threats they may pose to competition,\u201d my colleague Tony Romm reports.\u201cThe hearing, scheduled for July 16 in front of the House Judiciary Committee\u2019s subcommittee that deals with antitrust, will bring simmering Democratic and Republican frustrations with Silicon Valley into public view, potentially setting the stage for further scrutiny \u2014 or regulation \u2014 of an industry that has long insisted that its size doesn\u2019t harm rivals or consumers.\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Joe Biden raked it in after leaving office: \u201cJoe Biden on Tuesday afternoon reported earning $15.6 million in income over the past two years, making him the wealthiest among his chief competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination,\u201d my colleagues Matt Viser and Anu Narayanswamy report.\u201cThe vast majority of the former vice president\u2019s income \u2014 which totaled $11 million in 2017 and $4.6 million in 2018 \u2014 came from book payments and speaking fees. Biden was also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was paid $371,159 in 2017 and $405,368 in 2018. The tax returns and financial disclosure statements Biden released Tuesday provided the first picture of the wealth he has accumulated since leaving a 44-year career in government.\u201d\n THE REGULATORS\n\u2014 Powell: Stress tests must evolve. WSJ's Lalita Clozel: \"\u00a0Powell said stress tests of the nation\u2019s largest banks must adapt and keep firms on their toes, or the annual exam could fail to prepare the financial system for the next downturn. 'If the stress tests do not evolve, they risk becoming a compliance exercise, breeding complacency from both supervisors and banks,'\u00a0Mr. Powell said Tuesday in prepared remarks for a stress-testing conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.\"\n DAYBOOK\nToday:Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testifies in front of the House Financial Services Committee.The Peterson Institute for International Economics holds an event on China and world.The House Committee on Small Businesses holds a hearing on the role military veteran entrepreneurs serve in the economy.Upcoming:Powell testifies in front of the Senate Banking Committee\u00a0on Thursday.Fed Vice Chair Randal Quarles speaks at the Bipartisan Policy Center\u00a0on Thursday.\n THE FUNNIES\n\n BULL SESSION\nHalle Bailey, a black actress and singer, has officially nabbed the starring role in the upcoming live-action remake of \u201cThe Little Mermaid.\u201d (The Washington Post) It's unclear where he stands on proposals like a wealth tax. The Finance 202: Steyer's wealth may put him at odds with direction of Democratic Party",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Finance 202: Wall Street predicts economy slowing dramatically as 2020 nears (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7116",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-finance-202/2018/11/20/the-finance-202-wall-street-predicts-economy-slowing-dramatically-as-2020-nears/5bf346a11b326b392905493e/",
        "text": "with Bastien InzaurraldeTHE TICKERWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFederal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell recently suggested\u00a0that economic conditions may be \u201ctoo good to be true.\u201d A new report from Goldman Sachs suggests he was on to something.\u00a0The bank is projecting economic growth will slow \u201csignificantly\u201d in the second half of 2019\u00a0as the twin jolts from tax cuts and a bump in federal spending fade while the Fed continues raising interest rates. More precisely, it expects this year\u2019s heady pace of 3 percent-plus growth will sink to 1.75 percent by the end of next year.\u00a0 The picture Goldman paints isn\u2019t entirely gloomy. Indeed, the bank expects the Fed will keep hiking interest rates in part to keep a humming expansion from overheating.. The report, which Goldman sent to clients on Sunday but isn't publicly available, predicts the unemployment rate will continue to drop, falling to 3 percent by 2020, while wage growth edges up as high as 3.5 percent. And it sees no disaster lurking: \u201cThe expansion is on course to become the longest in US history next year, and even in subsequent years recession is not our base case.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat places Goldman on the sunnier side of the Wall Street consensus: More than a third of top forecasters believe the U.S. economy will enter a recession in 2020; and a new Reuters poll of economists found they think the probability of a recession in the next two years is rising, to a median 35 percent. (The Fed projects GDP will slow to 2.5 percent next year, a 2 percent in 2020, before slipping to 1.8 percent in the longer run.)Such a slowdown could have dramatic political repercussions for the Trump administration and the broader Republican Party, which remain\u00a0invested in a roaring economy offering an effective argument heading into the 2020 election. That proved a losing bet in the midterms, in which House Democrats scored their biggest midterm pickups since the post-Watergate election of 1974. More troubling for the GOP, the Democrats\u2019 performance was arguably the best in history for an out-of-power party amid such strong economic conditions. If the economy hits a skid, Republican losses in the next election could get even worse.Despite the projections, top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow says business investment unleashed by the tax cuts will sustain the pace of growth. \u201cThis economic boom is great. I personally believe it\u2019s going to continue for quite some time,\u201d he recently told Politico. \u201cIf we don\u2019t get the capital expenditures, I\u2019ll be wrong. But I think we will.\u201d Business investment underwhelmed in the third quarter; Goldman says it will be solid if unremarkable for the next few years.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd there are plenty of other risks that could menace the expansion \u2014\u00a0including a misstep by monetary policymakers, as Scott Minerd of Guggenheim Partners argues:\u00a0Every #recession since 1970 was caused by the #Fed tightening monetary policy too far in response to a decline in the unemployment rate to a level below full employment. I doubt the Fed will negotiate a soft landing this time either. https://t.co/z2ZolVgiDR pic.twitter.com/dROuLvJ7iq\u2014 Scott Minerd (@ScottMinerd) November 19, 2018\n\nOr, as former Fed chair Janet Yellen, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and others are warning, a meltdown from the pileup of\u00a0risky corporate debt could knock things sideways. Or the trade war could spin out of control. Or some array of threats could add up to one nasty drag:I think Krugman gets this right (and like the term). If there were to be a recession in the next couple of years, it would probably be a smorgasbord recession. https://t.co/0kgnAhzlVb pic.twitter.com/wXjrZLWpdB\u2014 Neil Irwin (@Neil_Irwin) November 19, 2018\n\nSome investors think the stock market is indicating the slowdown is already knocking. Morgan Stanley equity strategist Michael Wilson, in a Monday note, declared an end to the bull market. \u201cWhile 2018 is clearly not a year of recession, the market is speaking loudly that bad news is coming,\u201d he wrote, per CNN\u2019s Matt Egan. That call came as a selloff among tech stocks dragged the market lower, deepening its weeks-long slump.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProgramming note: We\u2019re publishing an abbreviated version of the newsletter through Wednesday this week and then will be dark on Thursday and Friday in observance of Thanksgiving. We\u2019ll be back to our normal offering and frequency starting Monday. \n \n \n You are reading The Finance 202, our must-read tipsheet on where Wall Street meets Washington. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n MARKET MOVERS\n\u2014 Tech wreck continues, spreads stock market pain. WSJ's Riva Gold and Akane\u00a0Otani: \"The day\u2019s declines were accompanied by a broad retreat from risk across financial markets. Bitcoin prices crashed below $5,000 for the first time this year, and Google parent Alphabet Inc. closed in bear market territory: a drop of at least 20% from a recent high. Stocks have suffered a series of pullbacks this fall that have chipped away at much of their 2018 gains.\"Downbeat forecasts from former market leaders such as Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. have raised questions over whether the past year\u2019s gains can be justified. Adding to those worries, investors are already expecting a broader slowdown in corporate earnings growth as rising rates and a stronger dollar take a greater toll on profits...\u00a0The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the day down 395.78 points, or 1.6%, to 25017.44 after tumbling more than 500 points earlier. The S&P 500 fell 45.54 points, or 1.7%, to 2690.73 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite lost 219.40 points, or 3%, to 7028.48.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement$1 trillion gone.\u00a0The FAANG stocks \u2014 Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google-parent Alphabet \u2014 have collectively seen nearly $1 trillion erased from their market cap since hitting their highs, CNBC notes. Futures are pointing to more turbulence today.\u00a0Theresa May, Onetime Business Foe, Finds Corporate Embrace Amid Brexit Debate (NYT)Ray Dalio Sees Parallels to 1930s in Today\u2019s Markets (Bloomberg)\n TRUMP TRACKER\nTRADE FLY-AROUND:\u00a0\u2014 Trump administration eyes tech exports limits. The Post's Tony Romm: \"\u00a0Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and their peers could be subject to new restrictions on how they export the technology behind voice-activated smartphones, self-driving cars and speedy supercomputers to China under a proposal floated Monday by the Trump administration. For the U.S. government, its pursuit of new regulations marks a heightened effort to ensure that emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, don\u2019t fall into the hands of countries or actors that might pose a national security threat.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"The official request for public comment,\u00a0published in the Federal Register, asks whether a long list of AI tools should be subject to stricter export-control rules. The Trump administration\u2019s potential targets include image-recognition software, ultrafast quantum computers, advanced computer chips, self-driving cars and robots. Companies that make those products and services, for instance, might have to obtain licenses before selling them to foreign governments or partnering with some researchers in certain countries.\"\u2014 U.S. companies in no hurry to leave China. CNBC's Evelyn Chang: \"U.S. companies aren't leaving China\u00a0in a big way yet, despite escalating trade tensions between the two economic powerhouses, analysts said. 'A lot of companies are talking about making changes, but (are) not actively making changes,' said Chris Rogers, research analyst at Panjiva, a supply chain data company that's part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. 'Nobody's going to make any changes until they see how this summit goes between President\u00a0Trump\u00a0and President\u00a0Xi,\" he said referring to their upcoming meeting at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1.\"China approves Disney purchase of Fox.\u00a0NYT's Brooks Barnes: \"Disney is still awaiting regulatory approval from a handful of countries, which a spokeswoman declined to identify. But none are as important as China \u2014 a crucial growth market for Disney, given its swelling middle class. Furthermore, analysts had worried that the Disney deal could become collateral damage in the trade war, as China was looking for ways to retaliate against the United States.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe incredible U.S.-to-China soybean nosedive, in one chart (Yahoo Finance )He\u2019s an architect in Manhattan. He got $3,300 from Trump\u2019s farm bailout. (Jeff Stein)MELTDOWN WATCH:\u00a0Here's why the use of private email accounts and private email servers can be problematic for a president's administration. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)\u201cIvanka Trump used a personal email account to send hundreds of emails about government business last year.\u201d The Washington Post\u2019s Carol Leonnig and Josh Dawsey.\u00a0\u201cTrump to give Mueller written answers by Thanksgiving.\u201d Politico\u2019s Eliana Johnson and Darren Samuelsohn.\u00a0\u201cWhite House discusses possible Trump visit to troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.\u201d Josh Dawsey and Paul Sonne.\u201cFor Trump, the relationship with Saudi Arabia is all about money.\u201d The Post\u2019s Karen DeYoung.\u00a0\n POCKET CHANGE\n\u2014 Ghosn ouster could threaten\u00a0Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. WSJ's Stephen Wilmot: \"The arrest of Carlos Ghosn does more than bring down one of the titans of the auto industry. It effectively dashes hopes that the Renault -Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance that he created could be merged into a conventional car company. Investors who have been waiting for the deal suffered big losses Monday, while those who have opposed it\u2014largely on political grounds\u2014likely rejoiced that the three companies\u2019 independence looks to be secure for now. The outstanding question is whether the status quo can be maintained without the alliance\u2019s chief architect.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA nail in globalization. Fortune president Alan Murray, in his morning note, calls Ghosn's demise another knock on the post-World War II order: \"He in some ways represented its pinnacle\u2014a Lebanese-born Brazilian who came to run three different global companies all at once: Renault in France, Nissan and Mitsubishi in Japan. When he first assumed the joint-CEO position, many thought he was a harbinger of a new, cross-cultural business future. But now he marks that future\u2019s demise. With Ghosn gone, Japanese business has returned once again to its insular ways. And much of the world is heading in a similar direction.\"\u2014 Cramer: Facebook stock would rise if it dumped Sandberg. CNBC: \"Cramer was discussing a new report in The Wall Street Journal, which described Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as causing 'unprecedented turmoil'\u00a0at the social network amid scrutiny over its Cambridge Analytica scandal and subsequent public disclosures... On CNBC Monday, Cramer said Facebook \u2018is obviously\u2019 in disarray. \u2018Does anyone say it's humming?\u2019 the \u2018Mad Money\u2019 host asked. \u2018They can't get a hold of the narrative. It's bad.\u2019\u201d\u2014 D.C. offered up to $1 billion for HQ2. The Post's Jonathan O'Connell: \"The District offered Amazon.com up to $1\u00a0billion in tax incentives to open a second headquarters with 50,000 jobs in D.C., probably the largest subsidy ever offered by the city to a single employer but also far less than other jurisdictions agreed to provide to the tech giant. The package, released Monday by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), offered a combination of discounts on property, sales and corporate franchise taxes over a 15-year period as outlined in a\u00a0law\u00a0aimed at luring tech jobs to the city. Bowser\u2019s office estimated the package\u2019s value at between $488\u00a0million and $1.053\u00a0billion, depending on the number of jobs Amazon would have created, how many were filled by District residents, how much office space the company occupied and other factors. (Amazon\u2019s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Galactic Space Tourism (Christian Davenport, Whitney Shefte, Courtney Kan and Thomas Simonetti)Apple CEO Tim Cook: \u2018We have to admit when the free market is not working\u2019 (Brian Fung)\n MONEY ON THE HILL\n\u2014 16 Dems say they'll oppose Pelosi. The Post's Mike DeBonis and Bob Costa: \"Sixteen Democrats said Monday that they will oppose Rep. Nancy Pelosi\u2019s bid for House speaker, an act of defiance that puts the dissidents on the cusp of forcing a seismic leadership shake-up as the party prepares to take the majority.\"Their pledge to oppose Pelosi, delivered in a letter to Democratic colleagues, comes as the\u00a0California\u00a0congresswoman has marshaled a legion of supporters to make her case. She is courting members in one-on-one conversations while securing the backing of allies on and off Capitol Hill...\u00a0The insurrection against Pelosi stands as the only official obstacle to unity in the top leadership ranks, after Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) on Monday withdrew her challenge for the No. 3 job held by Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), and Pelosi endorsed her leadership team. But the renegades\u2019 threat is considerable.\"\u2014 SALT increase hurt Republicans. NYT's Ben Casselman: \"Trump\u2019s $1.5 trillion tax cut was supposed to be a big selling point for congressional Republicans in the midterm elections. Instead, it appears to have done more to hurt than help Republicans in high-tax districts across California, New Jersey, Virginia and other states.\"House Republicans suffered heavy Election Day losses in districts where large concentrations of taxpayers claim a popular tax break \u2014 the state and local tax deduction \u2014 which the law capped at $10,000 per household. The new limit resulted in an effective tax increase for\u00a0high-earning residents of high-tax states\u00a0who claim more than $10,000 per year in SALT.\"Democrats swept\u00a0four Republican-held districts in Orange County, Calif., where at least 40 percent of taxpayers claim the SALT tax break, defeating a pair of Republican incumbents and winning seats vacated by Representatives Ed Royce and Darrell Issa. Those districts include longtime Republican strongholds, like Newport Beach, and rank among the country\u2019s largest users of the state and local tax break.\"\n THE REGULATORS\n\u2014 Quarles to lead Financial Stability Board. WSJ's Ryan Tracy: \"A top Federal Reserve official is poised to lead a global body overseeing financial regulations, according to people familiar with the matter, overcoming\u00a0questions abroad about President Trump\u2019s posture toward international institutions. Randal Quarles, the Fed\u2019s vice chairman for bank supervision, is expected to be named to chair the Financial Stability Board, these people said. The decision won\u2019t be final until it is announced. An FSB spokesman declined to comment but said an announcement would be made before Dec. 1, when Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney\u2019s term as FSB chair expires. The decision would be a win for the Trump administration, which had backed Mr. Quarles and viewed his candidacy as a chance to influence the direction of global financial regulatory policy.\"\n BULL SESSION\nFeces comes in all shapes and sizes, and now, thanks to researchers at Georgia Tech, we know what makes wombat poop so distinct. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)Samuel Little, who was convicted of three California murders in 2014, now claims he was involved in 90 killings across the country between 1970 and 2013. (Drea Cornejo/The Washington Post) Goldman's report is latest to see slowdown. The Finance 202: Wall Street predicts economy slowing dramatically as 2020 nears",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Trump wants to create a Space Force. But he should perhaps be thinking harder about space weather. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7117",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/07/08/the-energy-202-trump-wants-to-create-a-space-force-but-he-should-perhaps-be-thinking-harder-about-space-weather/5d224431a7a0a47d87c5703c/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA rare \u201ctotal solar eclipse\u201d\u00a0was visible in Vicu\u00f1a, Chile on July 2. (The Washington Post)On Tuesday, a pinkish, spirally wisp dangled outward from the sun. Those watching this summer's\u00a0rare total solar eclipse would not have missed it. A live-feed of the celestial event passing over Chile and Argentina provided a close-up of the fetal fiery ejection as telescopes zoomed in on the dark disk closing over the sun\u2019s edge. This was a solar flare in the making. Most such phenomena are\u00a0not noteworthy.\u00a0But, in recorded history, many have careened directly toward\u00a0earth, carrying the power of up to 10 billion atomic bombs. \u201cSolar eclipses are a public reminder that space weather is all around us,\u201d said David DeVorkin a historian at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM). Story continues below advertisementLast week, millions looked up to awe at the heavens as a small slice of Chile and Argentina witnessed the full eclipse.\u00a0Meanwhile, many eclipse-chasing scientists worked to better predict these solar flares, and the fire balls they expel known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), so that they don\u2019t catch us on our heels and cause mass disruptions of earth's\u00a0electric grid.Advertisement\u201cThey literally fry transformers,\u201d said Robert Leamon, a NASA-affiliated research scientist.This is exactly what happened in March 1989 when the entire province of Quebec in Canada\u00a0went dark. Three days prior, scientists observed a powerful explosion from the sun. When the CME \u2014 carrying\u00a0its own ball of magnetism \u2014\u00a0struck earth\u2019s magnetic field,\u00a0it created a violent electrical change in the ground. That charge, according to NASA, found a weakness in Canada\u2019s electrical grid. A NASA rendering demonstrated\u00a0how this massive blackout was visible from space. The \u201cnorthern lights\u201d extended down from the poles and was visible in Cuba. \u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe Canadian event and last week's developing solar flare\u00a0proves the earth\u00a0is at the mercy of space weather, including\u00a0the sun\u2019s burps and power-charged belches. According to scientists, future events like this can be mitigated in two major ways. And policy plays a big role in making that happen. Advertisement\u201cSure, that\u2019s a concern at this point in our Space Age,\u201d says DeVorkin of NASM.But that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. The Trump administration's focus on creating a Space Force largely excludes this type of solar research. Most space-related investment under Trump would be heavily channeled\u00a0to activities giving\u00a0the U.S. a military advantage in outer space. Understanding the mysteries of the sun \u2014 and how it interferes with infrastructure and daily life on planet earth\u00a0\u2014\u00a0doesn't appear to be on\u00a0this administration\u2019s space menu. Story continues below advertisementAnd scientists believe the\u00a0next presidential term starting in 2021\u00a0will be one where the nation is particularly vulnerable to solar flares. Many 2020 candidates have proposed\u00a0infrastructure plans\u00a0that could mitigate the effects of solar weather, but those have not fully reached the media spotlight. Tuesday\u2019s eclipse was a visible reminder that we are it the sun\u2019s mercy, though not entirely helpless if better policy choices are made.AdvertisementExperts say the\u00a0first way to stop solar weather from becoming an earthly problem is to fund better forecasting. According to Leamon, Hydro Quebec, one of Canada's public electric utilities,\u00a0did not have a comprehensive heads-up before the 1989 event. In theory, a power company could have avoided tripped up circuit breakers by rerouting energy production and transfer to lesser affected area of the grid if it had known ahead of time of the possibility of disruptions.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re very good at now-casting,\u201d said Leamon, which he explained as the ability to see, with massive telescopes, a CME lift off the sun and then tell an affected region during the 24 to 36 hours it takes for the fireball to reach earth. \u201cBut we\u2019re not very good at forecasting.\u201dPaul Bryans was on top of a windy peak in the Atacama desert on Tuesday trying to make these \u201cnow-casts\u201d better and cheaper. He was testing compact instruments during the eclipse\u2019s fleeting masking\u00a0of the sun. As a project scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Bryans is interested in attaching his small, low-cost sensor to miniature satellites, which are growing in popularity. AdvertisementThe second thing policymakers could do to prevent problems is upgrade the nation\u2019s power grid. Story continues below advertisementToday, the Lower 48 states operate a patchwork of regional grids that don\u2019t necessarily communicate well with each other. Texas practically has its own grid. If the nation\u2019s grid was more connected across the expanse of the Lower 48 states, it might\u00a0better absorb the magnetic shock of a CME directly hitting earth.\u201cA bulletproof vest works by displacing the direct impact of a bullet across a larger area. A connected power grid would work in the same way,\u201d explains Leamon. In short, experts said we wouldn't be able to stop the sun\u2019s fiery \u201cbullets.\u201d But policymakers could use\u00a0infrastructure improvements to prevent a fatal hit. The 2003 Halloween storms served up a visual motivation for lawmakers. The CME-related storms resulted in an apocalyptic orange sky over Houston and created the \u201cscariest\u201d public show of magnetic space effects on earth. An online image search of the storms turns up scenes straight out of the TV show\u00a0Stranger Things.\u00a0 AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace weather\u2019s intrusion on daily life is not new. In 1859, the most powerful solar superstorm ever recorded completely fried the nation\u2019s telegraph system. When shocks flew\u00a0across the Victorian Internet, the system failed, telegraph papers caught fire, and a\u00a0Washington, D.C.-based operator almost died from electrocution. What is making news, at least in space science circles, are scientists\u2019 prediction that the next five\u00a0years may produce the most solar flares in decades. Leamon puts 2021 as the earliest possible peak in the sun\u2019s cycle. A more conservative consensus reached at a NASA-convened meeting last year places that peak between 2023 and 2025. Story continues below advertisementBetter put on those eclipse-watching glasses.Note to readers: Dino Grandoni is on vacation and will be back at the helm of this newsletter on Monday, July 15. Meanwhile, we have an all-star lineup of Post writers to keep you up-to-date on all your energy and environmental needs. Thanks for reading.AdvertisementPOWER PLAYS\u2014 Trump to deliver speech on environmental record: President Trump is planning a speech Monday to tout the administration's \u201cenvironmental leadership,\" despite its efforts to roll back many of\u00a0President Obama's environmental regulations. At an afternoon event titled \u201cPresidential Remarks on America\u2019s Environmental Leadership,\u201d Trump plans to \u201cgo on the offensive against criticism of his industry-friendly rollbacks of environment protections,\u201d The Guardian reports. \u201cTrump will tout America\u2019s clean air and water, although his administration has advanced many efforts that experts say have undercut the country\u2019s environmental record.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHere's what the White House says: \u201cThe media has largely ignored the fact that the United States under President Trump\u2019s leadership and policies has made the air, water, and environment cleaner and he\u2019s going to share that with the American people,\u201d deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere told our\u00a0colleague Jacqueline Alemany\u00a0in a statement. \u201cWe are the party of conservation, environmental protection, and expanding responsible clean energy technologies while the Democrats\u2019 radical Green New Deal would outlaw cows, cars, and planes, crippling America\u2019s economy and crushing the poorest communities across the globe that rely solely on fossil fuels to survive.\u201dAdvertisementFact check: The Energy 202 wrote\u00a0last week about the president's history of\u00a0conflating climate change and clean air and in March, Energy 202 author Dino Grandoni explained how cows and hamburgers became the rallying cry from Republicans against the Green New Deal resolution, though the \"resolution itself does not mention beef, burgers or anything similar.\"\u00a0\u00a0\u2014 Meanwhile: Climate change is one of many issues where the president\u2019s approval rating registers with voters as a\u00a0net negative, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released over the weekend, which showed\u00a0Trump with a\u00a0net negative of 33 points on climate change. Climate change trails other issues like the economy, health care and immigration as top issues for Americans ahead of the 2020 election.\u00a0But The Post\u2019s Dan Balz and Emily Guskin report \u00a0that \u201cstill over half say it\u2019s at least \u2018very important.\u2019\u201dAmidst high tensions with the U.S., Iran said July 8 it had surpassed the limits on its enriched uranium stockpile. What does that mean for the nuclear deal? (The Washington Post)\u2014 Iran breaches uranium limit: A spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organized said Iran has passed the uranium enrichment limit set by the nuclear deal in 2015, adding that \"there were no obstacles to Tehran enriching at even higher levels.\" \"Speaking to local news agencies, Behrouz Kamalvandi said Iran has exceeded the 3.67 percent limit and was now enriching uranium at 4.5 percent, a rate far below the 90 percent needed to produce a nuclear weapon,\" The Post's Erin Cunningham reports. \"...Iran had said Sunday it would shortly boost uranium enrichment above the cap, prompting a warning from President Trump, who has pressured Tehran to renegotiate the pact.\"\u00a0\u2014 Corn wars: The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed increasing the mandated amount of biofuel\u00a0blended into the nation\u2019s gasoline and diesel supply. The proposal would up the mandate to 20.04 billion gallons of required renewable fuel in 2020, up from 19.92 billion gallons in 2019. \u201cThe initiative aims to balance two competing interests -- oil and agriculture -- but left both sides unsatisfied Friday,\u201d Bloomberg reports. \u201cOil industry representatives say the Trump administration is bypassing opportunities to ratchet down requirements that displace petroleum-based gasoline. And renewable fuel advocates say the EPA is failing to account for agency decisions to waive refineries from billions of gallons worth of biofuel quotas.\u201d\u2014 He\u2019s running?: Months after announcing in Iowa his decision not to run for president in 2020, billionaire investor and environmental activist Tom Steyer is now reportedly ready to join the crowded Democratic field. He has \"privately told friends and associates in recent days that he plans to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to two Democrats familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly,\" The Post's Robert Costa reports. \"...A Steyer campaign would likely focus on impeaching and defeating President Trump and climate change \u2014 two causes that have animated Steyer\u2019s advocacy and where he has become a prominent national voice.\" No firm plans have been made for an announcement, but Steyer could enter the race on Tuesday, Costa adds.\u00a0OIL CHECK\u2014 Harvard\u2019s climate dilemma: More than 300 Harvard facility have signed a petition calling on the university to divest from its fossil fuel stocks. Leading alumni are pushing the institution to\u00a0divest its $39 billion endowment from fossil fuel investments, a group that includes former U.S. senator Timothy Wirth of Colorado, former vice president Al Gore and Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Post\u2019s Steven Mufson reports. \u00a0\u201cWith climate change policy lagging in the United States, many are hoping that a push by the nation\u2019s academic elites will provide impetus for wider action,\u201d he writes. \u201cSo far, however, only 47 U.S. colleges and universities have chosen to divest and only 10 have taken that step since 2017, according to the environmental activist group 350.org. And the Harvard faculty members who have signed the divestment petition represent less than 14 percent of the faculty.\u201d\u2014 The Sunshine State trails on solar: Solar advocates are pointing fingers at the state\u2019s utilities as the main reason that solar power has not taken off in Florida. \u201cThey have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, ad campaigns and political contributions. And when homeowners purchase solar equipment, the utilities have delayed connecting the systems for months,\u201d the New York Times reports. It\u2019s also one of eight states in the country that blocks the sale of solar electricity to consumers unless the power is provided by a utility. \u201cI\u2019ve had electric utility executives say with a straight face that we can\u2019t have solar power in Florida because we have so many cloudy days,\u201d Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) told the Times. \u201cI have watched as other states have surpassed us. I think that is largely because of the political influence of the investor-owned utilities.\u201dAdvertisement\u2014 The fate of two nuclear plants: Even after missing a June 30 deadline, Ohio lawmaker\u00a0said they would continue crafting legislation to keep the state\u2019s two nuclear plants operating. \u201cThe oil-and-gas industry, environmental groups and renewable energy companies have lined up to oppose the legislation, as Ohio becomes the latest state to wrestle with balancing a diverse energy portfolio with clean-energy goals and local economic interests,\u201d the Wall Street Journal reports. \u201c\u2026The company said this past Monday that it remains optimistic that lawmakers will pass a bill by July 17, indicating it would wait a little longer. But it cautioned that without legislation it would \u2018remain on path for safe deactivation and decommissioning.\u2019\u201dTHERMOMETER\u2014 Climate costs: By the year 2100, the consulting firm Moody\u2019s Analytics estimates climate change could lead to $69 trillion in costs for the global economy. \u201cThe new report predicts that rising temperatures will \u2018universally hurt worker health and productivity\u2019 and that more frequent extreme weather events \u2018will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property,\u2019\u201d Mufson reports. \u2014One way cities are dealing with relentless floods: As climate change spurs extreme weather, rising sea-levels and increased flooding,\u00a0a program in Nashville is trying to help people move out of flood-prone areas by making an offer to buy their homes. \u201cIf the owners accept the offer, they move out, the city razes the house and prohibits future development. The acquired land becomes an absorbent creekside buffer, much of it serving as parks with playgrounds and walking paths,\u201d the New York Times reports. Although other cities have similar relocation programs, the Times adds \u201cdisaster mitigation experts consider Nashville\u2019s a model that other communities would be wise to learn from: The United States spends far more on helping people rebuild after disasters than preventing problems.\u201d\u2014 Man it\u2019s a hot one: Facing a record high 90-degree day, the city of Anchorage issued a burn ban and had to cancel its Independence Day fireworks show last week. The Fourth of July temperature broke its previous all-time high record of 85 degrees from June 1969, The Post\u2019s Ian Livingston reports.\"With the combined forces of climate change that has disrupted temperature trends around the state, a remarkable dearth of ice in the Bering Sea and weather patterns generating a general heat wave, Alaska is facing a Fourth of July unlike any before,\" the New York Times wrote last week.\u00a0\u201cThis is unprecedented,\u201d said\u00a0Anchorage\u00a0Mayor Ethan Berkowitz. \u201cI tease people that Anchorage is the coolest city in the country \u2014 and climatically that is true \u2014 but right now we are seeing record heat.\u201dDAYBOOKComing UpThe Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy holds a legislative hearing on Tuesday.The House Transportation Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment holds a hearing on Water Resources Development Acts on Wednesday.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands holds a legislative hearing on Wednesday.The House Science, Space and Technology Committee holds a hearing on glacial and ice sheet melt and climate change on Thursday.EXTRA MILEAGE\u2014 Here's a\u00a0look at the president's extravagant Fourth of July celebration:\u00a0Thousands traveled to the Mall on July 4 for Independence Day and President Trump\u2019s \u201cSalute to America\u201d event. (The Washington Post) Solar flares could damage the electric grid. The Energy 202: Trump wants to create a Space Force. But he should perhaps be thinking harder about space weather.",
        "author": "Clare Fieseler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Trump wants to create a Space Force. But he should perhaps be thinking harder about space weather. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7118",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/07/08/the-energy-202-trump-wants-to-create-a-space-force-but-he-should-perhaps-be-thinking-harder-about-space-weather/5d224431a7a0a47d87c5703c/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA rare \u201ctotal solar eclipse\u201d\u00a0was visible in Vicu\u00f1a, Chile on July 2. (The Washington Post)On Tuesday, a pinkish, spirally wisp dangled outward from the sun. Those watching this summer's\u00a0rare total solar eclipse would not have missed it. A live-feed of the celestial event passing over Chile and Argentina provided a close-up of the fetal fiery ejection as telescopes zoomed in on the dark disk closing over the sun\u2019s edge. This was a solar flare in the making. Most such phenomena are\u00a0not noteworthy.\u00a0But, in recorded history, many have careened directly toward\u00a0earth, carrying the power of up to 10 billion atomic bombs. \u201cSolar eclipses are a public reminder that space weather is all around us,\u201d said David DeVorkin a historian at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM). Story continues below advertisementLast week, millions looked up to awe at the heavens as a small slice of Chile and Argentina witnessed the full eclipse.\u00a0Meanwhile, many eclipse-chasing scientists worked to better predict these solar flares, and the fire balls they expel known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), so that they don\u2019t catch us on our heels and cause mass disruptions of earth's\u00a0electric grid.Advertisement\u201cThey literally fry transformers,\u201d said Robert Leamon, a NASA-affiliated research scientist.This is exactly what happened in March 1989 when the entire province of Quebec in Canada\u00a0went dark. Three days prior, scientists observed a powerful explosion from the sun. When the CME \u2014 carrying\u00a0its own ball of magnetism \u2014\u00a0struck earth\u2019s magnetic field,\u00a0it created a violent electrical change in the ground. That charge, according to NASA, found a weakness in Canada\u2019s electrical grid. A NASA rendering demonstrated\u00a0how this massive blackout was visible from space. The \u201cnorthern lights\u201d extended down from the poles and was visible in Cuba. \u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe Canadian event and last week's developing solar flare\u00a0proves the earth\u00a0is at the mercy of space weather, including\u00a0the sun\u2019s burps and power-charged belches. According to scientists, future events like this can be mitigated in two major ways. And policy plays a big role in making that happen. Advertisement\u201cSure, that\u2019s a concern at this point in our Space Age,\u201d says DeVorkin of NASM.But that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon. The Trump administration's focus on creating a Space Force largely excludes this type of solar research. Most space-related investment under Trump would be heavily channeled\u00a0to activities giving\u00a0the U.S. a military advantage in outer space. Understanding the mysteries of the sun \u2014 and how it interferes with infrastructure and daily life on planet earth\u00a0\u2014\u00a0doesn't appear to be on\u00a0this administration\u2019s space menu. Story continues below advertisementAnd scientists believe the\u00a0next presidential term starting in 2021\u00a0will be one where the nation is particularly vulnerable to solar flares. Many 2020 candidates have proposed\u00a0infrastructure plans\u00a0that could mitigate the effects of solar weather, but those have not fully reached the media spotlight. Tuesday\u2019s eclipse was a visible reminder that we are it the sun\u2019s mercy, though not entirely helpless if better policy choices are made.AdvertisementExperts say the\u00a0first way to stop solar weather from becoming an earthly problem is to fund better forecasting. According to Leamon, Hydro Quebec, one of Canada's public electric utilities,\u00a0did not have a comprehensive heads-up before the 1989 event. In theory, a power company could have avoided tripped up circuit breakers by rerouting energy production and transfer to lesser affected area of the grid if it had known ahead of time of the possibility of disruptions.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re very good at now-casting,\u201d said Leamon, which he explained as the ability to see, with massive telescopes, a CME lift off the sun and then tell an affected region during the 24 to 36 hours it takes for the fireball to reach earth. \u201cBut we\u2019re not very good at forecasting.\u201dPaul Bryans was on top of a windy peak in the Atacama desert on Tuesday trying to make these \u201cnow-casts\u201d better and cheaper. He was testing compact instruments during the eclipse\u2019s fleeting masking\u00a0of the sun. As a project scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Bryans is interested in attaching his small, low-cost sensor to miniature satellites, which are growing in popularity. AdvertisementThe second thing policymakers could do to prevent problems is upgrade the nation\u2019s power grid. Story continues below advertisementToday, the Lower 48 states operate a patchwork of regional grids that don\u2019t necessarily communicate well with each other. Texas practically has its own grid. If the nation\u2019s grid was more connected across the expanse of the Lower 48 states, it might\u00a0better absorb the magnetic shock of a CME directly hitting earth.\u201cA bulletproof vest works by displacing the direct impact of a bullet across a larger area. A connected power grid would work in the same way,\u201d explains Leamon. In short, experts said we wouldn't be able to stop the sun\u2019s fiery \u201cbullets.\u201d But policymakers could use\u00a0infrastructure improvements to prevent a fatal hit. The 2003 Halloween storms served up a visual motivation for lawmakers. The CME-related storms resulted in an apocalyptic orange sky over Houston and created the \u201cscariest\u201d public show of magnetic space effects on earth. An online image search of the storms turns up scenes straight out of the TV show\u00a0Stranger Things.\u00a0 AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace weather\u2019s intrusion on daily life is not new. In 1859, the most powerful solar superstorm ever recorded completely fried the nation\u2019s telegraph system. When shocks flew\u00a0across the Victorian Internet, the system failed, telegraph papers caught fire, and a\u00a0Washington, D.C.-based operator almost died from electrocution. What is making news, at least in space science circles, are scientists\u2019 prediction that the next five\u00a0years may produce the most solar flares in decades. Leamon puts 2021 as the earliest possible peak in the sun\u2019s cycle. A more conservative consensus reached at a NASA-convened meeting last year places that peak between 2023 and 2025. Story continues below advertisementBetter put on those eclipse-watching glasses.Note to readers: Dino Grandoni is on vacation and will be back at the helm of this newsletter on Monday, July 15. Meanwhile, we have an all-star lineup of Post writers to keep you up-to-date on all your energy and environmental needs. Thanks for reading.AdvertisementPOWER PLAYS\u2014 Trump to deliver speech on environmental record: President Trump is planning a speech Monday to tout the administration's \u201cenvironmental leadership,\" despite its efforts to roll back many of\u00a0President Obama's environmental regulations. At an afternoon event titled \u201cPresidential Remarks on America\u2019s Environmental Leadership,\u201d Trump plans to \u201cgo on the offensive against criticism of his industry-friendly rollbacks of environment protections,\u201d The Guardian reports. \u201cTrump will tout America\u2019s clean air and water, although his administration has advanced many efforts that experts say have undercut the country\u2019s environmental record.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHere's what the White House says: \u201cThe media has largely ignored the fact that the United States under President Trump\u2019s leadership and policies has made the air, water, and environment cleaner and he\u2019s going to share that with the American people,\u201d deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere told our\u00a0colleague Jacqueline Alemany\u00a0in a statement. \u201cWe are the party of conservation, environmental protection, and expanding responsible clean energy technologies while the Democrats\u2019 radical Green New Deal would outlaw cows, cars, and planes, crippling America\u2019s economy and crushing the poorest communities across the globe that rely solely on fossil fuels to survive.\u201dAdvertisementFact check: The Energy 202 wrote\u00a0last week about the president's history of\u00a0conflating climate change and clean air and in March, Energy 202 author Dino Grandoni explained how cows and hamburgers became the rallying cry from Republicans against the Green New Deal resolution, though the \"resolution itself does not mention beef, burgers or anything similar.\"\u00a0\u00a0\u2014 Meanwhile: Climate change is one of many issues where the president\u2019s approval rating registers with voters as a\u00a0net negative, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released over the weekend, which showed\u00a0Trump with a\u00a0net negative of 33 points on climate change. Climate change trails other issues like the economy, health care and immigration as top issues for Americans ahead of the 2020 election.\u00a0But The Post\u2019s Dan Balz and Emily Guskin report \u00a0that \u201cstill over half say it\u2019s at least \u2018very important.\u2019\u201dAmidst high tensions with the U.S., Iran said July 8 it had surpassed the limits on its enriched uranium stockpile. What does that mean for the nuclear deal? (The Washington Post)\u2014 Iran breaches uranium limit: A spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organized said Iran has passed the uranium enrichment limit set by the nuclear deal in 2015, adding that \"there were no obstacles to Tehran enriching at even higher levels.\" \"Speaking to local news agencies, Behrouz Kamalvandi said Iran has exceeded the 3.67 percent limit and was now enriching uranium at 4.5 percent, a rate far below the 90 percent needed to produce a nuclear weapon,\" The Post's Erin Cunningham reports. \"...Iran had said Sunday it would shortly boost uranium enrichment above the cap, prompting a warning from President Trump, who has pressured Tehran to renegotiate the pact.\"\u00a0\u2014 Corn wars: The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed increasing the mandated amount of biofuel\u00a0blended into the nation\u2019s gasoline and diesel supply. The proposal would up the mandate to 20.04 billion gallons of required renewable fuel in 2020, up from 19.92 billion gallons in 2019. \u201cThe initiative aims to balance two competing interests -- oil and agriculture -- but left both sides unsatisfied Friday,\u201d Bloomberg reports. \u201cOil industry representatives say the Trump administration is bypassing opportunities to ratchet down requirements that displace petroleum-based gasoline. And renewable fuel advocates say the EPA is failing to account for agency decisions to waive refineries from billions of gallons worth of biofuel quotas.\u201d\u2014 He\u2019s running?: Months after announcing in Iowa his decision not to run for president in 2020, billionaire investor and environmental activist Tom Steyer is now reportedly ready to join the crowded Democratic field. He has \"privately told friends and associates in recent days that he plans to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, according to two Democrats familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly,\" The Post's Robert Costa reports. \"...A Steyer campaign would likely focus on impeaching and defeating President Trump and climate change \u2014 two causes that have animated Steyer\u2019s advocacy and where he has become a prominent national voice.\" No firm plans have been made for an announcement, but Steyer could enter the race on Tuesday, Costa adds.\u00a0OIL CHECK\u2014 Harvard\u2019s climate dilemma: More than 300 Harvard facility have signed a petition calling on the university to divest from its fossil fuel stocks. Leading alumni are pushing the institution to\u00a0divest its $39 billion endowment from fossil fuel investments, a group that includes former U.S. senator Timothy Wirth of Colorado, former vice president Al Gore and Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Post\u2019s Steven Mufson reports. \u00a0\u201cWith climate change policy lagging in the United States, many are hoping that a push by the nation\u2019s academic elites will provide impetus for wider action,\u201d he writes. \u201cSo far, however, only 47 U.S. colleges and universities have chosen to divest and only 10 have taken that step since 2017, according to the environmental activist group 350.org. And the Harvard faculty members who have signed the divestment petition represent less than 14 percent of the faculty.\u201d\u2014 The Sunshine State trails on solar: Solar advocates are pointing fingers at the state\u2019s utilities as the main reason that solar power has not taken off in Florida. \u201cThey have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, ad campaigns and political contributions. And when homeowners purchase solar equipment, the utilities have delayed connecting the systems for months,\u201d the New York Times reports. It\u2019s also one of eight states in the country that blocks the sale of solar electricity to consumers unless the power is provided by a utility. \u201cI\u2019ve had electric utility executives say with a straight face that we can\u2019t have solar power in Florida because we have so many cloudy days,\u201d Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) told the Times. \u201cI have watched as other states have surpassed us. I think that is largely because of the political influence of the investor-owned utilities.\u201dAdvertisement\u2014 The fate of two nuclear plants: Even after missing a June 30 deadline, Ohio lawmaker\u00a0said they would continue crafting legislation to keep the state\u2019s two nuclear plants operating. \u201cThe oil-and-gas industry, environmental groups and renewable energy companies have lined up to oppose the legislation, as Ohio becomes the latest state to wrestle with balancing a diverse energy portfolio with clean-energy goals and local economic interests,\u201d the Wall Street Journal reports. \u201c\u2026The company said this past Monday that it remains optimistic that lawmakers will pass a bill by July 17, indicating it would wait a little longer. But it cautioned that without legislation it would \u2018remain on path for safe deactivation and decommissioning.\u2019\u201dTHERMOMETER\u2014 Climate costs: By the year 2100, the consulting firm Moody\u2019s Analytics estimates climate change could lead to $69 trillion in costs for the global economy. \u201cThe new report predicts that rising temperatures will \u2018universally hurt worker health and productivity\u2019 and that more frequent extreme weather events \u2018will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property,\u2019\u201d Mufson reports. \u2014One way cities are dealing with relentless floods: As climate change spurs extreme weather, rising sea-levels and increased flooding,\u00a0a program in Nashville is trying to help people move out of flood-prone areas by making an offer to buy their homes. \u201cIf the owners accept the offer, they move out, the city razes the house and prohibits future development. The acquired land becomes an absorbent creekside buffer, much of it serving as parks with playgrounds and walking paths,\u201d the New York Times reports. Although other cities have similar relocation programs, the Times adds \u201cdisaster mitigation experts consider Nashville\u2019s a model that other communities would be wise to learn from: The United States spends far more on helping people rebuild after disasters than preventing problems.\u201d\u2014 Man it\u2019s a hot one: Facing a record high 90-degree day, the city of Anchorage issued a burn ban and had to cancel its Independence Day fireworks show last week. The Fourth of July temperature broke its previous all-time high record of 85 degrees from June 1969, The Post\u2019s Ian Livingston reports.\"With the combined forces of climate change that has disrupted temperature trends around the state, a remarkable dearth of ice in the Bering Sea and weather patterns generating a general heat wave, Alaska is facing a Fourth of July unlike any before,\" the New York Times wrote last week.\u00a0\u201cThis is unprecedented,\u201d said\u00a0Anchorage\u00a0Mayor Ethan Berkowitz. \u201cI tease people that Anchorage is the coolest city in the country \u2014 and climatically that is true \u2014 but right now we are seeing record heat.\u201dDAYBOOKComing UpThe Senate Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy holds a legislative hearing on Tuesday.The House Transportation Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment holds a hearing on Water Resources Development Acts on Wednesday.The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands holds a legislative hearing on Wednesday.The House Science, Space and Technology Committee holds a hearing on glacial and ice sheet melt and climate change on Thursday.EXTRA MILEAGE\u2014 Here's a\u00a0look at the president's extravagant Fourth of July celebration:\u00a0Thousands traveled to the Mall on July 4 for Independence Day and President Trump\u2019s \u201cSalute to America\u201d event. (The Washington Post) Solar flares could damage the electric grid. The Energy 202: Trump wants to create a Space Force. But he should perhaps be thinking harder about space weather.",
        "author": "Clare Fieseler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: As 2,798 Americans die, Trump\u2019s \u2018most important speech\u2019 makes only passing reference to pandemic (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7119",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/03/daily-202-2798-americans-die-trumps-most-important-speech-makes-only-passing-reference-pandemic/",
        "text": "with Mariana Alfaro\u201cThis may be the most important speech I\u2019ve ever made,\u201d President Trump said on Wednesday, as he began a rambling 46-minute monologue for his Facebook page that claimed, with no basis in reality, that it is \u201cstatistically impossible\u201d he actually lost the election.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside his White House cocoon, the United States surpassed 200,000 new coronavirus infections and topped 100,000 hospitalized covid-19 patients for the first time. Another 2,798 deaths from the coronavirus were reported on Wednesday, according to The Washington Post\u2019s tracker. For context, about 2,750 people were killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, including the passengers and crew of the two hijacked airliners that crashed into the towers.Since Nov. 4, President Trump has repeatedly claimed his election loss as a result of massive fraud. The following is a roundup of his claims. (The Washington Post)Trump made only a passing reference to the contagion in his rant, which he delivered straight to camera and without an audience.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cUsing the pandemic as a pretext, Democrat politicians and judges drastically changed election procedures just months, and in some cases, weeks before the election,\u201d Trump grumbled. \u201cThey used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China virus, where it originated, as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud, a fraud that the whole world is watching, and there is no one happier right now than China. \u2026 It is important for Americans to understand that these destructive changes to our election laws were not a necessary response to the pandemic. The pandemic simply gave the Democrats an excuse to do what they have been trying to do for many, many years.\u201dHe provided no evidence to support this provocative claim before moving on to proffer even more bizarre conspiracy theories and call on the Supreme Court to intervene and declare him the winner.Meanwhile, CDC Director Bob Redfield told reporters that this winter could be \u201cthe most difficult time in the public health history of this nation\u201d and warned that the covid death toll in the U.S. could reach 450,000 by February.\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs of this morning, at least 273,000 people have died of covid in the United States since February. The CDC\u2019s National Ensemble Forecast, which aggregates models from 37 groups, projects that by the end of December, the overall U.S. death toll from covid could reach 303,000 on the low end and 329,000 on the high end.In secret reports, the White House coronavirus task force warned governors this week that \u201cthe COVID risk to all Americans is at a historic high\u201d and said virus-mitigation efforts in many states are still not strong enough, according to the Center for Public Integrity. \u201cForty-seven states and the District of Columbia were in the red zone for new cases in this week\u2019s report.\u201dTrump no longer attends task force meetings. He did, though, tweet 23 times on Wednesday. But not one of his posts was about the coronavirus.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFormer Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who was demoted in July, said the president could have won if he had expressed more empathy about the pandemic. \u201cWe lost suburban families,\u201d Parscale said Tuesday on Fox News. \u201cI think that goes to one thing: the decision on covid to go for opening the economy versus public empathy. \u2026 I think if he had been publicly empathetic, he would have won.\u201dIt was Parscale\u2019s first interview since his wife called police in September to say he was armed and threatening to hurt himself. He said Trump has not spoken to him recently and described their falling out as \u201cpretty hurtful.\u201dWhite House press secretary on Dec. 2 took credit for the rapid development of the coronavirus vaccine, calling it the \u201cTrump vaccine.\u201d (The Washington Post)Trump accepts none of the blame for the botched pandemic, but he is eager to claim all the credit he can. A reporter asked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Wednesday about the United Kingdom approving the vaccine developed by Pfizer. \u201cIt\u2019s the Trump vaccine,\u201d she responded.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs Philip Bump notes, \u201cThe idea that the vaccine\u2019s development and deployment was solely a function of Trump is ridiculous. Pfizer, for example, declined a federal investment in the development of its vaccine, its CEO said in September, to avoid being mired in political disputes.\u201dMcEnany\u2019s husband, baseball pitcher Sean Gilmartin, watched Wednesday\u2019s briefing from the back of the press room as his wife also insisted that the White House has always followed the science. Yet illustrating how the White House has not been enforcing CDC guidelines, Gilmartin generated headlines by declining to wear a mask during the briefing. He even refused after being politely asked to do so by a photographer for the New York Times.Privately, Trump expressed anger that Britain approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine first, according to two White House officials, even though an FDA advisory committee is expected to meet on Dec. 10 and a final decision by the agency to authorize its use on this side of the pond could come soon after that. \u201cHis chief of staff, Mark Meadows, met twice this week with FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn to discuss how the vaccine process could be sped up in the United States. Hahn\u2019s job is said to be in jeopardy over his failure to further accelerate approval of the vaccine,\u201d\u00a0William Booth, Karla Adam, Laurie McGinley and Jose Del Real report.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Trump expounded on his meritless claims about fraud, which have been rejected by several of his own judicial nominees, former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton each volunteered to get the new vaccine publicly to reassure Americans that it is safe. Obama, in an interview that aired today with SiriusXM host Joe Madison, said that if Tony Fauci says a vaccine is safe, he will believe him. \u201cI promise you that when it's been made [available] for people who are less at risk, I will be taking it,\u201d Obama said. \u201cI may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people know that I trust this science.\u201dOn Dec. 2, President-elect Joe Biden met virtually with workers and small-business owners to discuss the economic impacts of coronavirus. (The Washington Post)\u201cAs President-elect Joe Biden makes fighting the raging coronavirus his most-urgent mission when he takes office next month, two figures already playing central roles in his transition are emerging as the most likely officials to preside over the new White House\u2019s pandemic response,\u201d Amy Goldstein and Toluse Olorunnipa report. \u201cOne contender for Biden\u2019s coronavirus coordinator, envisioned as a powerful role in setting the agenda and orchestrating the work of federal agencies, is Jeff Zients, a co-chairman of the Biden transition team who led the Obama administration\u2019s National Economic Council. Another is Vivek H. Murthy, a co-chair of the transition\u2019s covid-19 advisory board and a former U.S. surgeon general.\u201cWithin Biden\u2019s camp, the thinking appears to be evolving as to who should lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a sprawling department with moving parts crucial to bringing the pandemic under control. Murthy has been considered for that role, while New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D), had been considered a leading candidate although she is said to be out of the running. \u2026 The Biden team offered her the role of interior department secretary, but she declined.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring a virtual roundtable in Wilmington, Del., on Wednesday with a group of Americans who have experienced economic hardships because of the pandemic, Biden encouraged vigilance and offered reassurance. \u201cHelp is on the way,\u201d he said.More on the contagionHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lit the 2020 U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree during a ceremony on Dec. 2. (The Washington Post)Democratic congressional leaders embrace a $908 billion coronavirus relief framework.This massive concession is meant to prod Trump and Senate Republicans into accepting a compromise. \u201cWednesday\u2019s announcement by [Nancy] Pelosi and [Chuck] Schumer appeared to be the first time that leaders from one party agreed to back a proposal that had substantial support of members of the other party. And the willingness to accept a potential bill totaling less than $1 trillion represents a significant step-down for the top Democrats, who had pushed for more than $3 trillion in new aid,\" Mike DeBonis, Jeff Stein and Seung Min Kim report.\u00a0\u201cAides to senators hammering out the bipartisan, $908 billion framework have been in contact with Biden\u2019s staff \u2026 although the president-elect has been careful not to weigh in too heavily publicly, considering Trump is ultimately the one who will sign any relief package this year. \u2026 Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), one of [Mitch] McConnell\u2019s top deputies, suggested that the Republican-only plan \u2014 which administration officials say Trump will sign \u2014 could be merged with the bipartisan framework. \u2018They\u2019ve gotten reasonable,\u2019 Thune said of Democratic leaders.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHiring slowed in November as cases surged. ADP Research Institute said only 307,000 workers were added to private payrolls, missing the benchmark that analysts had expected. The Labor Department will release its monthly unemployment report on Friday. (Hamza Shaban)Insurance companies have started wrestling with whether to sell new policies to people who have recovered from covid-19. Application forms now specifically ask people trying to get coverage if they have had the virus. Millions of survivors are expected to be dealing with medical issues, including heart, kidney and lung damage, long after the pandemic subsides, and the long-term effects on mortality are unknown, even for those who had mild or asymptomatic cases. (Bloomberg)Mike Pompeo invites 900 people to indoor holiday parties.\u00a0\u201cState Department leadership sent out a notice to employees one week ago recommending that \u2018any non-mission critical events' be changed to \u2018virtual events as opposed to in-person gatherings.\u2019 That same week, U.S. event planners were told that the guidance did not apply to the upcoming functions they were working on: large indoor holiday parties hosted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his wife, Susan, on the eighth floor of the State Department involving hundreds of guests, food and drinks,\u201d John Hudson reports.Austin Mayor Steve Adler (D) warned residents that they needed to \u201cstay home.\u201d He did so while vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He also did so a day after he hosted an outdoor wedding and reception with 20 guests for his daughter at a hotel in downtown Austin. (Austin American Statesman)Police broke up a 400-person party at a Long Island mansion. The event was being held at a rented Airbnb, and the home\u2019s owner called police after discovering the gathering while watching his security cameras from afar. (NYT)About 400 mostly maskless protesters stood shoulder to shoulder outside a Staten Island bar to demonstrate against New York\u2019s restrictions and support a tavern that was forced to shut down for flouting those guidelines. (Timothy Bella)D.C. region officials outline plans for vaccine distribution.\u00a0D.C. Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt said the city will receive an estimated 6,800 doses of the vaccine in its first shipment \u2014 less than one-tenth of what is needed to vaccinate 85,000 health-care workers here. Maryland's first shipment will contain 150,000 doses, which will cover about half the state\u2019s health-care workers. Virginia expects to get 70,000 doses by the end of this month, which Gov. Ralph Northam (D) said will fall short of what is needed for the highest-priority recipients. (Rebecca Tan, Erin Cox, Laura Vozzella and Michael Brice-Saddler)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEmployers are starting to prepare for the vaccine with two questions: Can we require it? And what should we do if employees resist? They are waiting for specific guidance from federal agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and CDC, before setting corporate policies, employment lawyers say. (Jena McGregor)Tens of thousands of volunteers got placebo vaccines. Do they now deserve the real one? Some worry that \u201cunblinding\u201d the trials and giving vaccines to all of the volunteers would tarnish the long-term results. If all the volunteers who received placebo shots were to suddenly get vaccinated, scientists would no longer be able to compare the health of those who were vaccinated with those who were not. (NYT)As hospitals are overwhelmed, beds and space are less of a concern than workforce shortages. Executives worry that staffing levels won\u2019t be able to keep pace with demand as front-line workers become exhausted or, worse, infected. (Kaiser Health News)Contradicting Gov. Larry Hogan (R), Maryland\u2019s acting health secretary said that none of the 500,000 covid tests the state purchased from South Korea in April were used to diagnose whether people had the virus. Last month, Hogan insisted the tests had been used and \u201cworked great.\u201d But interviews and documents obtained by The Post have established that the governor was not telling the truth. (Steve Thompson)The Board of Supervisors in the rural Virginia county of Campbell passed a resolution rejecting the \u201ctyranny\u201d of Northam\u2019s mask mandate and his order that restaurants stop serving alcohol after 10 p.m. About 100 people gathered to celebrate. (Greg Schneider)When California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced a statewide mask mandate in June, Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones (R) said he would not enforce the order. Now he has tested positive. (Jaclyn Peiser)The Trump agendaAttorney General William P. Barr said Dec. 1 the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in presidential election. (Reuters)Trump is said to be livid at Bill Barr.A senior administration official indicated that there is a chance the attorney general could be fired \u2014 not just for his public comments undercutting Trump\u2019s unfounded fraud claims, but also for steps he did not take on a probe of the FBI\u2019s 2016 investigation into Trump\u2019s campaign. \u201cThe person said that several people are trying to persuade Trump not to do so,\" Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett report.\u00a0\u201cTrump, the official said, was perhaps even angrier that Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham did not issue a public report of his findings before last month\u2019s election, and that Barr had secretly appointed Durham as special counsel in October.\u201d\u00a0\u201cTrump\u2019s planned trip to Georgia on Saturday to campaign for two Senate candidates embroiled in tight runoff races has put some Republicans on edge that he could do more harm than good by repeating false claims about the voting system, attacking GOP officials and further inflaming a simmering civil war within the state party,\u201d Dawsey, Amy Gardner and Cleve Wootson report. \u201cThe president, Republican advisers say, is key to convincing his die-hard supporters to vote for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in a lower-turnout special election that will determine which party controls the Senate for the next two years.\"Perdue\u2019s stock trades have far outpaced those of his Senate colleagues and have included a range of companies involved with industries overseen by committees he sits on. (NYT)Fox News will present a town hall tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern with Perdue and Gov. Brian Kemp (R). Moderated by anchor Laura Ingraham, the socially distanced event will take place live from Hill Aircraft in Atlanta.A Florida attorney is under investigation for registering to vote in Georgia for the Senate runoffs and encouraging other Republicans to do the same. (WSB-TV)Trump campaign lawyer Joseph DiGenova resigned from the elite Gridiron Club following an uproar over his comments suggesting that ousted cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be shot. (Elahe Izadi)Former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell led a rally in a northern Atlanta suburb Wednesday in which she exhorted hundreds of the president\u2019s supporters not to participate in the Senate runoffs. (Phil Rucker)Quote of the day\u201cWe\u2019re not going to vote on your damn machines made in China,\u201d Trump ally Lin Wood said\u00a0at the rally, encouraging Republicans not to vote in the runoffs. \u201cWe\u2019re going to vote on machines made in the USA!\u201dElection officials across the United States warn that Trump is inciting violence.\u201cThey echoed calls by Gabriel Sterling, a top Republican election official in Georgia who on Tuesday urged Trump and other GOP politicians to tamp down their baseless claims of widespread fraud. In an impassioned statement, Sterling blamed the president for \u2018inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence,\u2019\u201d Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Emma Brown report. \u201cIn Arizona, authorities are investigating calls for violence against the family and staff of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D). In Vermont, state election officials received multiple voice mails Tuesday from an individual who urged violence against the staff \u2014 including execution by firing squad, according to the secretary of state\u2019s office. \u2026\u00a0\u201cConservatives have also been targeted with threats. In Michigan, attorney Ian Northon, who represents the Thomas More Society, a conservative nonprofit that has filed lawsuits challenging the election results, said he had received threats and hateful emails. And Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) is investigating threats against members of the Wayne County canvassing board. \u2026 Amber McReynolds, chief executive of the National Vote at Home Institute, which works to expand vote-by-mail options, called Trump\u2019s video address Wednesday \u2018dangerous, destructive, and damaging to our democracy and our trust in elections.\u2019 McReynolds, a former director of elections in Denver, was sent an image of a noose and a message calling her \u2018a traitor\u2019 via Twitter last week.\u201dThe Trump administration schedules a wave of executions for its final days.\u201cThe Justice Department\u2019s push to carry out executions during the run-up to Biden\u2019s inauguration \u2014 including scheduling three during the week before he takes office \u2014 has drawn sharp condemnation from critics who denounced these actions during the lame-duck window,\u201d Mark Berman and Zapotosky report. \u201c\u2018It\u2019s just unconscionable to move forward with executions at this point, in this situation,\u2019 said Shawn Nolan, a lawyer for two of the federal death-row inmates facing execution. \u2018Joe Biden ran on a platform of not moving forward with executions.'\"Barr's team published a rule last Friday, in a post-Thanksgiving news dump, that will allow federal inmates to be executed by electrocution, gas or firing squads in certain circumstances. The rule is set to take effect on Christmas Eve. (Zapotosky and Berman)Supreme Court justices spent 90 minutes in a teleconference hearing trying to hash out whether its ruling requiring unanimous juries in convictions for serious crimes should be applied retroactively. (Robert Barnes)Congressional Republicans pledge support for Trump in 2024.\"In a series of interviews Wednesday, House and Senate Republicans made clear that the GOP has no intention of turning its back on Trumpism \u2014 or Trump himself. That\u2019s in part because Trump remains an exceedingly popular figure in his party, far more than most congressional Republicans,\u201d Politico reports.\u201cIf he were to run in 2024, I think he would be the nominee. And I would support him doing that,\u201d said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).\u201cIt\u2019d be great if he ran. He\u2019s done a good job. I think he ought to run if he wants to run,\u201d said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.).\u201cI would encourage him to keep that option open. I would personally support him if he did,\u201d said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).Notably, two Republicans who have been laying the groundwork to run for president in 2024 pointedly declined to offer support for Trump: Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.).Vice President Pence starts to back away from Trump.\u00a0\"Since Nov. 25, not a single fundraising email from the Trump campaign or its Republican National Committee fundraising account has featured Pence\u2019s name in the \u2018from\u2019 field,\u201d the Daily Beast notes. \u201cAnd this week, that RNC joint fundraising committee \u2026 made another subtle change: a handful of its emails swapped out the official Trump-Pence campaign logo for one featuring just the president\u2019s name. \u2026 According to four people with knowledge of the matter, [both changes] reflect an effort by the vice president and his team to distance Pence from some of the president\u2019s more outlandish claims \u2026 \u2018It is an open secret [in Trumpworld] that [Pence] absolutely does not feel the same way about the legal effort as President Trump does,\u2019 said a senior administration official. \u2018The vice president doesn\u2019t want to go down with this ship.\u2019\u201dThe Republican National Committee invited 2024 hopefuls to a January meeting in a show of neutrality toward Trump. The list of would-be candidates invited to speak at a Florida meeting include South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley. Pence also plans to attend. (Politico)Key Republicans speak out against Trump's threat to veto funding for the troops.\u201cTrump is headed toward a veto showdown with Congress, as the White House doubles down on Trump\u2019s promise to scuttle a $740 billion defense bill unless it opens the door for new, unrelated sanctions against Silicon Valley,\u201d Karoun Demirjian and Tony Romm report. \u201cWith most leading Republicans and Democrats firmly united in their opposition to Trump\u2019s demands, the president is waging an uphill battle that, if nobody blinks, could result in the first veto override of his presidency. \u2026 \u2018[Section] 230 has nothing to do with the military,\u2019 said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), a Trump ally.\"\u00a0The Taliban and Afghan government teams negotiating peace reached an agreement on a set of rules and procedures, a small but important step that will allow the two sides to move forward after months of inaction in their pursuit of a political settlement. (Susannah George)The U.S. will withdraw some staff from its Baghdad embassy as tensions with Iran spike. A person familiar with the withdrawal described it as a temporary \u201cde-risking\u201d that will continue after the Jan.\u2009 3 anniversary of the slaying of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. (Louisa Loveluck, Hudson and Carol Morello)The U.N. made an 11th-hour appeal to the Trump administration about the potential for humanitarian disaster in Yemen ahead of an expected decision by the president to name the Houthi rebels there as a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are preparing to potentially halt a $700 million aid program for Yemen. (Missy Ryan and Hudson)Saudi Arabia and Qatar are close to a preliminary deal to end a lengthy rift, prodded by a Trump administration looking for some final \u201cwins.\u201d The tentative agreement doesn\u2019t involve the three other countries that also severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar three years ago \u2013 the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt \u2013 but it would open air and land borders between the two regional rivals. (Bloomberg)Trump dropped his call for a 1 percent federal employee pay raise in January, advocating instead for a freeze on pay rates for all 2.1 million executive branch workers. (Eric Yoder)\u00a0The Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog, found a \u201csubstantial likelihood of wrongdoing\u201d at the parent agency of the Voice of America under the leadership of Trump appointee Michael Pack. Since taking over the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Pack has turned it upside down, firing top leaders and directing investigations into journalists for perceived anti-Trump bias. (NPR)Ivanka Trump sits for a deposition as part of an inauguration fund lawsuit.A new court filing reveals that the president's daughter was deposed on Tuesday by lawyers from the D.C. attorney general's office, which has accused Trump\u2019s 2017 inauguration committee of misusing donor funds, the AP reports: \u201cAs part of the suit, they have subpoenaed records from Ivanka Trump, first lady Melania Trump, Thomas Barrack Jr., a close friend of the president who chaired the inaugural committee, and others. Barrack was also deposed last month. Trump\u2019s inaugural committee spent more than $1 million to book a ballroom at the Trump International Hotel in the nation\u2019s capital as part of a scheme to \u2018grossly overpay\u2019 for party space and enrich the president\u2019s own family in the process, the District of Columbia\u2019s attorney general, Karl Racine, alleges.\u201dThe Senate is expected to confirm Chris Waller to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, in what could be Trump\u2019s last addition to the central bank, as the more controversial nomination of Judy Shelton hangs in limbo. (Rachel Siegel)Biden has no plans to remove Chris Wray as FBI director if Trump does not fire him. The president-elect is expected to name his pick for CIA director soon. Former deputy director David Cohen is the leading choice. (NYT)Mark Kelly's swearing-in means Arizona has two Democratic senators for the first time since 1953. (Felicia Sonmez)The immigration warsBiden\u2019s immigration policies could leave him in a quandary, as a new migration surge looms.\u201cWhen Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20, he is likely to take on the nation\u2019s immigration policies almost immediately. It could be a difficult task: The new president will have to navigate between the expectations of supporters who demand a total repudiation of Trump\u2019s restrictive policies and the complex realities of a dysfunctional immigration system,\u201d Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti, Abigail Hauslohner and Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez report. \u201cBiden has pledged to stop work on Trump\u2019s border wall, to change the nation\u2019s approach to immigration enforcement and to again welcome refugees seeking protection from oppression. But experts warn that some shifts could take time amid bureaucratic overhauls and staffing concerns, and it is likely that any new wave of immigration to the U.S. southern border would provide an early test of the Biden administration\u2019s approach to an issue that has been central to Trump\u2019s presidency.\u201d\u00a0Biden will be able to eliminate some of Trump\u2019s hardline policies with the stroke of a pen. Others are regulations that would likely take months to change. A more lasting solution \u2014 immigration legislation passed by Congress \u2014 will almost certainly not materialize if Democrats are unable to win the Senate seats in Georgia. The incoming president is expected to rely heavily on executive authority. (Miroff and Sacchetti)Unraveling the programs, regulations and rules designed to shut out asylum seekers will be a major policy challenge for Biden. It probably will require recalibrating a federal apparatus that has been used during the past four years to try to stop the majority of immigrants from entering the country. Trump\u2019s asylum policies, including the Migrant Protection Protocols program, have left roughly 25,000 people marooned across Mexico. Rescinding it would probably mean allowing them into the United States for their hearings. (Hern\u00e1ndez and Kevin Sieff)The economies of Central American nations have been hammered by the pandemic and several powerful hurricanes, and experts expect more migrant caravans to arrive at the border. \u201cBiden will not have an easy set of choices, but I think he will try to thread the needle between a more humanitarian approach and a need to avoid getting overwhelmed,\u201d said Earl Anthony Wayne, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico under Obama. (Sieff and Miroff)Trump\u2019s border wall, meanwhile, faces an uncertain future. The structure will remain unfinished when he leaves office, and Biden has promised to stop construction after he\u2019s inaugurated. (Miroff)Undoing the results of Trump\u2019s \u201cMuslim ban\u201d could take years. Biden has promised he will do away with the ban within his first 100 days in office, but immigration lawyers and advocates estimate that tens of thousands of people have had their visa applications denied outright or sit idle for months or years in a bureaucratic purgatory known as \u201cadministrative processing,\u201d meaning it will take more than a stroke of the pen for the policy shift to yield actual travel visas for people hoping to come to America. (Hauslohner)The Obama administration deported about 3 million people, prosecuted thousands who came into the nation illegally and expanded family detention after a major influx of Central Americans at the border. Biden has said he would govern differently from Obama, and he has acknowledged that deporting people who committed no crimes other than crossing the border was a \u201cbig mistake.\u201d (Sacchetti)Biden has also vowed to immediately reinstate DACA \u2013 but he\u2019s already facing opposition. Pushing a citizenship bill that would give permanent legal status to \u201cDreamers\u201d \u2013 most of whom are now in their 20s \u2013 through a Republican-held Senate would be challenging. Biden\u2019s opponents are using the federal courts to try to stop him from restoring the program. Attorneys general in Texas and several other states are urging a federal judge in the border city of Brownsville to declare DACA unlawful and clear the way for an \u201corderly wind down\u201d during the next two years. (Sacchetti)Thousands of foreign doctors and nurses could surge into overwhelmed areas if Biden reverses Trump\u2019s crackdown on certain visas \u2013 including 10,000 physicians who are living in the U.S. on H-1B visas that currently restrict where they can work \u2013 and who could lose their legal status if they fall ill. (Politico)Social media speed readSen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) had this suggestion for a Biden administration:\u00a0I realize this might hurt their chances but if Biden becomes pres he should select an Iowan or Heidi Heitkamp or Collin Peterson to be Ag Secretary. They\u2019d be able to get things done for IA/Midwest farmers even w Democratic House & Republican Senate\u2014 ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) December 2, 2020\n\nFour senators have also been astronauts:\u00a0Mark Kelly today becomes the fourth U.S. Senator who has flown on the Space Shuttle ...-- @SenMarkKelly-- John Glenn-- Jake Garn-- @SenBillNelson pic.twitter.com/nYTPQINaPt\u2014 Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) December 2, 2020\n\nThe White House press secretary lied about something that was easily fact-checked:\u00a0Kayleigh McEnany: \"The president honored World AIDS Day yesterday in a way that no president has before, with the red ribbon\" hung at the White House.False. Here's the ribbon Obama hung in 2012. pic.twitter.com/z9KoDAHD9a\u2014 Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) December 2, 2020\n\nVideos of the dayStephen Colbert said it looked like Trump barely understood what he was talking about during his rambling Facebook speech:\u00a0Jimmy Kimmel has an idea to help keep the vaccine cold enough for distribution:\u00a0 President fixates on baseless fraud allegations as CDC director warns U.S. death toll could reach 450,000 by February. The Daily 202: As 2,798 Americans die, Trump\u2019s \u2018most important speech\u2019 makes only passing reference to pandemic",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | NASA searches the stars but can\u2019t keep track of all its earthly goods (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7120",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/30/nasa-searches-stars-cant-keep-track-all-its-earthly-goods/",
        "text": "NASA is a special place.It sends astronauts into space with remarkable precision.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt boosts our knowledge of the universe with amazing pictures and scientific exploration.It regularly ranks at the top of surveys tracking federal employee engagement and morale.So, why can\u2019t the agency that documents the stars and the planets keep better track of its earthly goods? A new report from the agency\u2019s Office of Inspector General says despite decades of improvements \u201ca significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the Agency\u2019s lack of adequate procedures.\"Consider the report\u2019s account of these items that floated away:Story continues below advertisement\u2014 In 2014, a lunar rover vehicle prototype was found in a Blountsville, Ala., residential neighborhood. The owner was willing to return it to NASA, but \u201cafter waiting more than 4 months for a decision from NASA, the individual sold the rover to a scrap yard. NASA officials subsequently offered to buy the rover, but the scrap-yard owner refused and, realizing the historical value of the rover, sold the vehicle at auction for an undisclosed sum.\u201d NASA and the inspector general had no information on how the rover got away to being with.Advertisement\u2014 \u201cPoor record keeping contributed to NASA losing possession of an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles.\u201d Authorities retrieved the bag in 2013, and the U.S. Marshals Service sold it to a private citizen in 2015 for $995. After one arm of the government sold the moon bag, another arm, NASA, sued to get the bag back but lost. In July 2017, the bag was auctioned for $1.8 million.\u2014 The inspector general\u2019s office learned an \u201cOmega Speedmaster Professional watch \u2014 a model NASA selected to use in space during space shuttle missions \u2014 was being auctioned in London, in December 2014. Because of NASA\u2019s poor record keeping, it was not clear if this watch was actually flown during a space shuttle mission; however, the watch was in the possession of German astronaut Reinhard Furrer at the time of his death.\u201d The government paid $2,300 for the watch and sent it to the Smithsonian for exhibition.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 A NASA supervisor told an employee to throw away three Apollo 11 hand controllers, like video game joysticks, in 1985. Instead, the employee took the controllers home, and years later, sold them to a space memorabilia collector. NASA tried to get the controllers back so they could be displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. \u201cAfter 3 years, NASA discontinued its pursuit of the items.\u201dAdvertisementSeparately, you can be the first in your crowd to own a piece of space memorabilia. Heritage Auctions is selling what it describes as \u201cNeil Armstrong\u2019s Owned and Worn Early Flight Suit Directly From The Armstrong Family Collection.\u201d As of Tuesday afternoon, the bid for the one-piece, light blue cotton jumpsuit with an \u201cembroidered NASA \u2018meatball\u2019 vector patch at the left breast\u201d was $11,000.NASA\u2019s \u201cfailure to appropriately preserve or account\u201d for its stuff, the report said, could lead to the loss of objects \u201cwith great historical value to NASA and the country.\u201d NASA, however, has shown \u201creluctance at times to assert an ownership claim over the items.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe reluctance is exacerbated by an \u201cit\u2019s not my job\u201d attitude.When inspector general investigators questioned employees in two NASA offices that deal with historic items, \u201cnone of the employees from these and other offices we met with during the course of this audit said it was their responsibility to identify or manage NASA\u2019s heritage assets.\u201dAdvertisementIn another case, Kennedy Space Center staffers said they rely on the contractor who runs a concession at the visitors\u2019 facility to decide which items are heritage assets. The inspector general\u2019s report politely suggested that having a contractor do that is not a good idea.Sometimes, NASA loans items to other organizations, but without a signed agreement or security plan. A NASA form outlines terms of loans, but borrowers do not have to sign the form, indicating agreement with the terms. That can lead to confusion.Story continues below advertisementIn 2013, Kennedy loaned the University of Texas at El Paso items from the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion that killed seven astronauts. A form indicated the loan was to end in 2015, but university personnel told inspectors it was for an indefinite period. NASA \u201cextended the duration of the loan based on verbal conversations with University personnel,\u201d the report said. NASA also hasn\u2019t required the university to annually inventory the artifacts.AdvertisementNASA agreed with most of the inspector general\u2019s recommendations, including development of a more effective process to identify and manage historic property. NASA would not comment further on the substance of the report to the Federal Insider, ignoring a question on why procedures were so lax to begin with.If NASA\u2019s sloppiness continues, the inspector general had a warning:\u201cUntil NASA improves its processes, the Agency\u2019s approach to recovering significant items from its past will continue in a haphazard, inefficient, and ultimately unsuccessful manner.\u201dRead more:Personnel chief wants a yes with unions, but Trump administration actions say noPainting in VA office, names of Army bases honor traitorsUnion complains of \u2018robust\u2019 bias at NASA \u201cUntil NASA improves its processes, the Agency\u2019s approach to recovering significant items from its past will continue in a haphazard, inefficient, and ultimately unsuccessful manner,\" a new report says. NASA searches the stars but can\u2019t keep track of all its earthly goods",
        "author": "Joe Davidson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | NASA searches the stars but can\u2019t keep track of all its earthly goods (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7121",
        "date": "2018-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/30/nasa-searches-stars-cant-keep-track-all-its-earthly-goods/",
        "text": "NASA is a special place.It sends astronauts into space with remarkable precision.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt boosts our knowledge of the universe with amazing pictures and scientific exploration.It regularly ranks at the top of surveys tracking federal employee engagement and morale.So, why can\u2019t the agency that documents the stars and the planets keep better track of its earthly goods? A new report from the agency\u2019s Office of Inspector General says despite decades of improvements \u201ca significant amount of historic personal property has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the Agency\u2019s lack of adequate procedures.\"Consider the report\u2019s account of these items that floated away:Story continues below advertisement\u2014 In 2014, a lunar rover vehicle prototype was found in a Blountsville, Ala., residential neighborhood. The owner was willing to return it to NASA, but \u201cafter waiting more than 4 months for a decision from NASA, the individual sold the rover to a scrap yard. NASA officials subsequently offered to buy the rover, but the scrap-yard owner refused and, realizing the historical value of the rover, sold the vehicle at auction for an undisclosed sum.\u201d NASA and the inspector general had no information on how the rover got away to being with.Advertisement\u2014 \u201cPoor record keeping contributed to NASA losing possession of an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles.\u201d Authorities retrieved the bag in 2013, and the U.S. Marshals Service sold it to a private citizen in 2015 for $995. After one arm of the government sold the moon bag, another arm, NASA, sued to get the bag back but lost. In July 2017, the bag was auctioned for $1.8 million.\u2014 The inspector general\u2019s office learned an \u201cOmega Speedmaster Professional watch \u2014 a model NASA selected to use in space during space shuttle missions \u2014 was being auctioned in London, in December 2014. Because of NASA\u2019s poor record keeping, it was not clear if this watch was actually flown during a space shuttle mission; however, the watch was in the possession of German astronaut Reinhard Furrer at the time of his death.\u201d The government paid $2,300 for the watch and sent it to the Smithsonian for exhibition.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 A NASA supervisor told an employee to throw away three Apollo 11 hand controllers, like video game joysticks, in 1985. Instead, the employee took the controllers home, and years later, sold them to a space memorabilia collector. NASA tried to get the controllers back so they could be displayed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. \u201cAfter 3 years, NASA discontinued its pursuit of the items.\u201dAdvertisementSeparately, you can be the first in your crowd to own a piece of space memorabilia. Heritage Auctions is selling what it describes as \u201cNeil Armstrong\u2019s Owned and Worn Early Flight Suit Directly From The Armstrong Family Collection.\u201d As of Tuesday afternoon, the bid for the one-piece, light blue cotton jumpsuit with an \u201cembroidered NASA \u2018meatball\u2019 vector patch at the left breast\u201d was $11,000.NASA\u2019s \u201cfailure to appropriately preserve or account\u201d for its stuff, the report said, could lead to the loss of objects \u201cwith great historical value to NASA and the country.\u201d NASA, however, has shown \u201creluctance at times to assert an ownership claim over the items.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe reluctance is exacerbated by an \u201cit\u2019s not my job\u201d attitude.When inspector general investigators questioned employees in two NASA offices that deal with historic items, \u201cnone of the employees from these and other offices we met with during the course of this audit said it was their responsibility to identify or manage NASA\u2019s heritage assets.\u201dAdvertisementIn another case, Kennedy Space Center staffers said they rely on the contractor who runs a concession at the visitors\u2019 facility to decide which items are heritage assets. The inspector general\u2019s report politely suggested that having a contractor do that is not a good idea.Sometimes, NASA loans items to other organizations, but without a signed agreement or security plan. A NASA form outlines terms of loans, but borrowers do not have to sign the form, indicating agreement with the terms. That can lead to confusion.Story continues below advertisementIn 2013, Kennedy loaned the University of Texas at El Paso items from the 2003 Columbia space shuttle explosion that killed seven astronauts. A form indicated the loan was to end in 2015, but university personnel told inspectors it was for an indefinite period. NASA \u201cextended the duration of the loan based on verbal conversations with University personnel,\u201d the report said. NASA also hasn\u2019t required the university to annually inventory the artifacts.AdvertisementNASA agreed with most of the inspector general\u2019s recommendations, including development of a more effective process to identify and manage historic property. NASA would not comment further on the substance of the report to the Federal Insider, ignoring a question on why procedures were so lax to begin with.If NASA\u2019s sloppiness continues, the inspector general had a warning:\u201cUntil NASA improves its processes, the Agency\u2019s approach to recovering significant items from its past will continue in a haphazard, inefficient, and ultimately unsuccessful manner.\u201dRead more:Personnel chief wants a yes with unions, but Trump administration actions say noPainting in VA office, names of Army bases honor traitorsUnion complains of \u2018robust\u2019 bias at NASA \u201cUntil NASA improves its processes, the Agency\u2019s approach to recovering significant items from its past will continue in a haphazard, inefficient, and ultimately unsuccessful manner,\" a new report says. NASA searches the stars but can\u2019t keep track of all its earthly goods",
        "author": "Joe Davidson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Daily 202: How Trump\u2019s threats against the Freedom Caucus may backfire (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7122",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/03/31/daily-202-how-trump-s-threats-against-the-freedom-caucus-may-backfire/58de0ed5e9b69b72b2551089/",
        "text": "with Breanne DeppischWith Breanne DeppischWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTHE BIG IDEA:\u00a0If Mark Sanford\u2019s \u201chiking trip\u201d on the Appalachian Trail with his Argentine\u00a0mistress couldn\u2019t stop him from getting elected to Congress, it is hard to imagine how mean tweets from Donald Trump will.Trump dispatched Mick Mulvaney to threaten the South Carolina congressman last week. \u201cThe president asked me to look you square in the eyes and to say that he hoped that you voted \u2018no\u2019 on this [health-care]\u00a0bill so he could run [a primary challenger]\u00a0against you in 2018,\u201d Sanford said the OMB director told him, according to the Charleston Post and Courier. \u201cI\u2019ve never had anyone, over my time in politics, put it to me as directly as that,\u201d the former two-term governor told his local paper. \"To state the obvious, I\u2019m not a guy who responds to threats well.... It\u2019s contrary to all that I believe in in politics.\" He said it also contradicts the South Carolina Republican Creed, which reads: \u201cI will never cower before any master, save my God.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSanford won reelection with 59 percent in his coastal district last year. Trump got 53 percent. \u201cI mentioned this to a couple of colleagues, and they said it sounds very Godfather-ish,\u201d Sanford added. \u201cTheir point was that this approach might work in New Jersey, but it probably doesn\u2019t work so well in South Carolina.\u201d-- Trump tried carrots, offering pizza parties and invitations to the White House bowling alley. Since that hasn\u2019t worked, he\u2019s using the stick. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that one should try to be loved and feared. \u201cBut, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved,\u201d the Italian diplomat explained in \u201cThe Prince.\u201dThis approach makes much less sense in America circa 2017 than it did in the Italy of 1532. Story continues below advertisementIn practice, throughout the history of our republic, this has almost never been an effective way to govern. Franklin Roosevelt, vastly more popular than the current occupant of the Oval Office, went all-in during the 1938 midterms against Southern Democrats who weren\u2019t consistently voting for New Deal programs. The ensuing debacle, in which all but one primary challenger FDR supported lost, is a cautionary tale that Trump may want to consider before he follows through on his threats to knock off members of the House Freedom Caucus if they don\u2019t quickly fall in line.AdvertisementThe defiance we saw from several members of the Freedom Caucus yesterday, including Sanford, strongly suggests that Trump\u2019s gambit will fail. Rather than cower, principled movement conservatives wore the attacks as badges of honor. They saw the threats as testaments to their courage. And they pledged to never back down. The fact that Sanford went to the Charleston paper to say Trump had threatened him reflects the degree to which these guys are not scared.\u201cI have zero worries about it,\u201d Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) told the Heritage Foundation-backed Daily Signal. \u201cTrump\u2019s tweets reaffirm that the Freedom Caucus is having a major impact on public policy in Congress \u2014 that the Freedom Caucus is not a force to be ignored. \u2026 If you want me to vote for a piece of legislation, either persuade me it is good for America or change it so that it is good for America.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), one of Trump\u2019s earliest endorsers, said the Freedom Caucus won\u2019t change no matter what the president does. \u201cWe\u2019re elected as Republicans to put forth good conservative policy, and I\u2019m on board as soon as we start doing that,\u201d he told Roll Call. \u201cIn my district, we\u2019re very conservative, so if he gets me out office, he\u2019s going to get someone more conservative than me.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cIf somebody can get to the right of me in the primary, God bless him,\u201d added Freedom Caucus member Trent Franks (R-Ariz.).President Trump on March 30 tweeted that he would \u201cfight\u201d the House Freedom Caucus in the 2018 midterm elections after the group blocked the health-care bill. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)-- A host of other dynamics, from redistricting to Citizens United, also make what Trump is doing much riskier than it might have been in the past.Story continues below advertisementThe president cannot cut off funding to intransigents. The Koch political network has pledged to give air cover to people whom Trump attacks because they opposed last week\u2019s bill. Groups like the Club for Growth also promise to mobilize for conservatives facing primary challenges. In the past, major donors might be afraid to cut checks to someone targeted by the president. Now, some will give because of it. The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP\u2019s campaign arm, also has a long-standing policy of supporting incumbents and could not back a primary challenger. \u201cAs long as they pay their dues, we\u2019re gonna be there for them,\u201d said NRCC chairman Steve Stivers.Advertisement\u201cTrump\u2019s own romp through the Republican primaries last year \u2014 vanquishing a raft of contenders more favored by the GOP establishment \u2014 was testament to how little control party leaders now have in channeling the passions and enthusiasm of the rank and file,\u201d Karen Tumulty notes. \u201cNow at the head of the party himself, and struggling to rack up some legislative achievements, Trump is fighting against some of the same forces that helped get him elected.\"The president is also not coming into this from a position of strength. His approval rating is in the mid-30s, and he is belatedly going to the mat for a bill that fewer than one in five Americans support. Meanwhile, the cloud of scandal continues to hang over the White House, and continuing revelations related to Russia threaten to imperil his very hold on power. The botched attempt at damage control, spearheaded so ham-handedly by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), has only made Trump\u2019s life worse. Now his former national security adviser is seeking immunity to testify. All of this makes the bully pulpit less impressive.Story continues below advertisementThe bottom line is that Trump needs the members of the Freedom Caucus more than they need him. Democrats are not going to work with the president. He has poisoned the well too much. Nancy Pelosi is an effective leader who will hold her caucus together to extract maximum concessions. If we wind up at a point when impeachment is seriously on the table, especially after expected Democratic gains in the midterms, how hard do you think the Freedom Caucus members will fight to protect a guy who went to war against them? Especially when an authentic movement conservative, Mike Pence, could replace Trump.Advertisement-- After attacking the Freedom Caucus generally yesterday morning, Trump singled out three leaders of the group last night: Reps. Mark Meadows (N.C.), Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Ra\u00fal R. Labrador (Idaho).The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017\n\nIf @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan and @Raul_Labrador would get on board we would have both great healthcare and massive tax cuts & reform.\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017\n\nWhere are @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan and @Raul_Labrador?#RepealANDReplace #Obamacare\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017\n\nEach of these guys won reelection with a higher percentage of the vote than Trump received in his district. Jordan won with 68 percent in his northwestern Ohio district. Trump got 64 percent. Trump pulled 63 percent in both Labrador\u2019s and Meadows\u2019s districts. The Idaho congressman got 68.2 percent, and the North Carolinian got 64.1 percent.Story continues below advertisementIronically, the roughly three dozen members in the Freedom Caucus were, overall, much more loyal to Trump during the general election than the squishy moderates he\u2019s now trying to make his bed with. Meadows stumped with him. Labrador interviewed to be interior secretary. When the \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d video came out last October, in which Trump boasted about being able to get away with groping women because he\u2019s a celebrity, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman withdrew his endorsement. But Jordan went to a Toledo-area tea party meeting to explain why conservatives should stand by the GOP nominee.AdvertisementMeadows said last night that the president is \u201cnot being well served\u201d by his advisers. \u201cThe narrative is not surprising in the White House because I think some of his advisers are suggesting that it was consensus that we pulled the rug out from underneath the president's agenda and nothing could be further from the truth,\" he told the Washington Examiner.\u201cI don't accept the premise. My guess is the American people won't accept it either,\u201d Jordan said during the same interview. \u201cI don't know how keeping your promise to the American people, doing what you told them you're going to do, doing what they sent you to do \u2014 how is that overplaying your hand?\"Story continues below advertisementLabrador replied to POTUS on Twitter:Freedom Caucus stood with u when others ran. Remember who your real friends are. We're trying to help u succeed.\u2014 Ra\u00fal R. Labrador (@Raul_Labrador) March 30, 2017\n\nRep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who represents Grand Rapids and has already beaten back primary challenges funded by the establishment, said Trump\u2019s approach would be \u201cconstructive in fifth grade.\u201d \u201cIt may allow a child to get his way, but that\u2019s not how our government works,\u201d he said.It didn't take long for the swamp to drain @realDonaldTrump. No shame, Mr. President. Almost everyone succumbs to the D.C. Establishment. https://t.co/9bDo8yzH7I\u2014 Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 30, 2017\n\nAnother libertarian-leaning Republican, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, piled on: .@realDonaldTrump it's a swamp not a hot tub. We both came here to drain it. #SwampCare polls 17%. Sad! https://t.co/4kjygV2tdS\u2014 Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 30, 2017\n\nThe official Freedom Caucus account later pushed back in a stream of tweets:.@RealDonaldTrump We are where we've always been: committed to keeping our promise. https://t.co/VVzqUKYoeX\u2014 House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) March 31, 2017\n\n.@RealDonaldTrump We can do better than a plan that only 17% of Americans support. #KeepOurPromise\u2014 House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) March 31, 2017\n\n-- A new report suggests that the base stands with the Freedom Caucus, not Trump. The fact that the president thinks otherwise merely reflects his hubris. The Associated Press deployed five reporters to interview voters in House districts represented by members who opposed the bill, and they found that conservatives are proud of their representatives for holding firm. Take Mary Broecker, president of the Oldham County Republican Women\u2019s Club and a strong proponent of fully repealing Obamacare. She\u2019s a constituent of Massie\u2019s in Kentucky. \u201cWhen he came out against this bill, I thought, \u2018I trust him so this must be the right way,\u2019\u201d the 76-year-old retired teacher said at a coffee shop in Buckner, Ky.The AP says this kind of praise was a common refrain during interviews from Iowa to Tennessee. \u201cIn Meadows\u2019 North Carolina district, 77-year-old Hendersonville retiree Don Lee said he voted for Trump to \u2018bring Republicans together,\u2019 but added that the president \u2018needed to take some more time with this bill and try to find some unity,\u2019\u201d the story notes.-- Once you use the stick, it is hard to start handing out carrots again. If the Freedom Caucus caves at this point, it\u00a0will look weak.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement-- Trump has become the boy who cries wolf. If he doesn\u2019t follow through after drawing this red line, his words will seem hollow. Bluster works better in business than politics.\u201cBy targeting individual congressmen, as Trump has now done, he runs the risk of looking pathetic if they remain unintimidated,\u201d former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson explains in his column today. \u201cAnd will he really carry this campaign beyond his Twitter feed? Have rallies in their districts? Criticize them on conservative talk radio? Raise money for their more moderate opponents? If he takes this route, then the GOP civil war will reach a new stage of bitterness, with legislative progress postponed until a core faction of the party is tweeted into submission or defeated\u2026.\u00a0And all this has come in the course of the president\u2019s political honeymoon. What, for goodness\u2019 sake, will the marriage be like?\"-- Notably, the president is still not trying to sell health or tax reform on its merits. He\u2019s framing this entirely as a test of personal loyalty. You\u2019re either with him or you\u2019re against him. There is no gray in his worldview. Only black and white.AdvertisementPeggy Noonan argues artfully in her column for Saturday\u2019s Wall Street Journal that Trump\u2019s mishandling of this Obamacare fight, including the latest attacks on the Freedom Caucus, shows that he really doesn\u2019t understand who makes up his base or how to pass legislation: \u201cA president dealing with a national issue that arouses anxieties has to take time and speak repeatedly on the plan and the goal, with the kind of specificity that encourages confidence. \u2018You win the argument, then you win legislatively,\u2019 Newt Gingrich said in an interview this week, paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher. And a president must always appear to be leading, not meekly tagging leaders within the Congress.\u201dThe former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan relays that her friends who backed Trump last year are standing by him, and she thinks this is because they do not fully understand what being president entails. \u201cWhenever I used to have disagreements with passionate pro-Trump people, I\u2019d hear their arguments, weigh their logic and grievances. I realized after a while that in every conversation we always brought different experiences to the table,\u201d Noonan writes. \u201cI had worked in a White House. I had personally observed its deeper realities and requirements. Their sense of how a White House works came from \u2026 TV shows such as \u2018House of Cards\u2019 and \u2018Scandal.\u2019 Those are dark, cynical shows that more or less suggest anyone can be president. I don\u2019t mean that in the nice way. Those programs don\u2019t convey how a White House is an organism demanding of true depth, of serious people, real professionals. A president has to be a serious person too, and not only an amusing or stimulating talker, or the object of a dream.\u201d-- Speaking of TV distorting reality: A White House official says that the president\u2019s threats to back challengers followed days of frustration with the amount of media attention that members of the Freedom Caucus were getting. \u201cWe are sick and tired of seeing them on TV,\u201d the Trump person told Bob Costa. \u201cJim Jordan has been on every five seconds, almost as much as Adam Schiff,\u201d a reference to the ranking Democrat of the House Intelligence Committee. \u201cIt\u2019s unhelpful and counterproductive. \u2026 Our view is: there\u2019s nothing as clarifying as the smell of Air Force One jet fuel. So if he needs to bring in the plane and do a rally, he\u2019s going to think about doing that.\u201d-- To be sure, many House Republicans share Trump\u2019s hostility toward the Freedom Caucus. Paul Ryan said yesterday that he sympathizes with where Trump is coming from. \u201cI understand the president\u2019s frustration. I share his frustration,\u201d the Speaker Said, saying that 10 percent of the conference killed the bill.Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) complains that the ideological purists in the Freedom Caucus won\u2019t take any deal, even when they get what they ask for. \u201cThey move the goal posts, and once that happens, they still refuse to play,\u201d Kinzinger writes in an op-ed for today\u2019s New York Times. \u201cWe are the Charlie Brown party, hoping that this time, things will be different. But time and again, the Freedom Caucus is Lucy \u2014 pulling the ball out from under us, letting us take the fall and smiling to themselves for making a splash. It's a cheap tactic, not a way to govern, and enough is enough.\u201dBut Republican leaders have taken aim at Freedom Caucus members before. \u201cA spate of 2015 ads purchased by the American Action Network, a nonprofit issue advocacy group with ties to House GOP leaders, targeted Jordan and two other hard-liners for opposing a Department of Homeland Security funding bill,\u201d Mike DeBonis notes. \u201cThose ads infuriated members of the caucus, then only months old, and spawned a confrontational relationship that culminated in John Boehner\u2019s resignation six months later.\u201d On the other hand, last year, an establishment-backed candidate unseated Rep. Tim Huelskamp in Kansas because he voted against the farm bill.-- Finally, few mainstream conservative thought leaders are coming to Trump\u2019s defense in his newest feud. Charles Krauthammer \u00a0frets in his column today that Trump will embrace Medicare-for-all to get Democrats on board. \u201cObamacare may turn out to be unworkable, indeed doomed, but it is having a profound effect on the zeitgeist: It is universalizing the idea of universal coverage,\u201d Charles writes, defending the House Freedom Caucus. \u201cLook at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any Obamacare repeal. A broad national consensus is developing that health care is indeed a right. This is historically new. And it carries immense implications for the future. It suggests that we may be heading inexorably to a government-run, single-payer system. It\u2019s what Barack Obama once admitted he would have preferred but didn\u2019t think the country was ready for. \u2026 I wouldn\u2019t be terribly surprised if Donald Trump, reading the zeitgeist, pulls the greatest 180 since Disraeli \u2018dished the Whigs\u2019 in 1867 (by radically expanding the franchise) and joins the single-payer side. Talk about disruption? About kicking over the furniture? That would be an American Krakatoa.\u201d\n \n \n Welcome to the Daily 202, PowerPost's morning newsletter.Sign up to receive the newsletter.\n \n \nWHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:-- Former national security adviser Michael Flynn told the FBI and congressional officials he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The Wall Street Journal reports: \u201cAs an adviser to Mr. Trump\u2019s presidential campaign, and later one of Mr. Trump\u2019s top aides in the White House, Mr. Flynn was privy to some of the most sensitive foreign-policy deliberations of the new administration and was directly involved in discussions about the possible lifting of sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama administration. It wasn\u2019t clear if Mr. Flynn had offered to talk about specific aspects of his time working for Mr. Trump, but the fact that he was seeking immunity suggested Mr. Flynn feels he may be in legal jeopardy following his brief stint as the national security adviser, one official said. He has made the offer to the FBI and the House and Senate intelligence committees through his lawyer but has so far found no takers \u2026\u201d\u201cOfficials said the idea of immunity for Flynn \u2014 who is considered a central figure in the probes because of his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States \u2014 was a \u2018non-starter,\u2019 particularly at such an early stage of the investigations,\u201d Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima report. \u201cA wide-ranging grant of immunity could protect Flynn from potential future charges from the Justice Department, but Congress has the power to grant only limited \u2018testimonial\u2019 immunity, which means prosecutors cannot use witnesses\u2019 testimony against them in any prosecution. Ultimately, it is Justice\u2019s decision whether to grant immunity from prosecution for any underlying conduct that is discussed, or other matters that don\u2019t come up in testimony. [Former U.S. prosecutor] Peter Zeidenberg said the Senate committee apparently did not \u201cwant to screw up a possible prosecution.\u201d \u201cBut, he added, \u2018there may be things more important than getting a prosecution of Flynn.\u2019 Such as learning the extent of contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials. \u2018That is a compelling and urgent need. A prosecution of Flynn could take several years. I wouldn\u2019t want them to wait that long to find out what Flynn knows.\u2019\u201d-- Trump this morning offered support for Flynn seeking immunity, even though in theory it could mean that his former national security adviser testifies against him down the road:Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2017\n\nCompare that to what he tweeted last October:ATTN: @HillaryClinton - Why did five of your staffers need FBI IMMUNITY?! #BigLeagueTruth #Debates\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2016\n\nRep. Devin Nunes's credibility questioned as Russia investigation goes on (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)WHERE THERE'S SMOKE...-- At least three senior White House officials, including the top lawyer for the National Security Council, helped provide Devin Nunes with intelligence files that show Trump and his officials were \u201cincidentally swept up\u201d in foreign surveillance by U.S. agencies. The revelation directly contradicts assertions made by Nunes, and adds to growing concerns that the Trump administration is collaborating with the leader of the House Russian investigation. Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung report: \u201cThe materials unearthed by Nunes have been used to defend [Trump\u2019s] baseless claims on Twitter that he had been wiretapped at Trump Tower under a surveillance operation ordered by [Barack Obama]. Nunes and [Sean Spicer] have repeatedly refused to answer questions about the identities of those involved in unearthing the intelligence reports \u2026 although Nunes at one point said his source was not a member of the White House staff.\u201dOne of those involved in procuring the documents, Ezra Cohen, has close ties with Flynn and survived a recent attempt to oust him from his job at the National Security Council by appealing to Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon. After assembling reports that showed that Trump officials were mentioned or inadvertently monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies targeting foreign individuals, Cohen took the matter to the top lawyer for the National Security Council, John Eisenberg. The third White House official involved was identified as Michael Ellis, a lawyer who previously worked with Nunes on the Intelligence Committee but joined the Trump administration and reports to Eisenberg.-- \u201cThis is a body blow for Nunes, who presented his findings last week as if they were surprising to the White House,\u201d writes\u00a0Bloomberg\u2019s Eli Lake. \"This week, he told me that his source for that information was an intelligence official, not a White House staffer. It turns out, he misled me. The New York Times reported Thursday that Nunes had two sources, and both worked for the White House. This distinction is important because it raises questions about the independence of the congressional investigation Nunes is leading, which may lead to officials at the White House. ... He briefed Trump, after holding a press conference on Capitol Hill. And as he was leaving the White House, he made sure to address the press again. But this was a show. The sources ... work for the president. They are political appointees. It strains credulity to think that Trump would need Nunes to tell him about intelligence reports discovered by people who work in the White House. \u2026 The fact that a serious investigation is being undermined by Nunes's ever-changing story is a tragedy.\u201d-- The White House has\u00a0now invited top party leaders from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees to review classified materials that it said relate to the surveillance. Abby Phillip and Jenna Johnson report: \u201cThere\u2019s a desire to make sure that both sides of the aisle as well as both chambers have that information,\u201d Sean Spicer told reporters.-- Sean Spicer argued Thursday that Nunes is entitled to keep his sources anonymous \u201cbecause journalists do\u201d \u2013 drawing a highly-flawed comparison between government officials and the news media. On \u201cReliable Sources,\u201d CNN\u2019s Dylan Byers explains why this is wrong:\u00a0\u201cThe difference between reporters and government officials is that government officials are public servants. They work for us. We, the public, seek information from them. Not the other way around\u2026\u201cSpicer has a habit of defending the administration by complaining about double standards between the White House and the media. It's a poor defense. The \u2018you did it too!\u2019 argument doesn't work when you lead the free world.\u201cSpicer acts like the media wants details about Nunes' sources because it cares about process more than substance. But in this case, the process is the substance. If White House officials sought to influence the Intelligence Committee, that's material.\u201d--\u00a0Bill Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, worked in the Reagan Administration during Iran-Contra and was Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff:This is like Iran-contra happening at warp speed in the first months of an administration --plus the national security adviser has flipped.\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 30, 2017\n\nOf course, Flynn's not seeking immunity from witch hunt by media & Dems. He's seeking immunity from criminal prosecution. By the government. https://t.co/9GB44xDwLW\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 31, 2017\n\nTo cut to the chase: What did Bannon know, and how and when did he know it? And what did Trump know, and how and when did he know it?\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 30, 2017\n\nFor what it's worth, I find it almost inconceivable that young Mr. Cohen-Watnick and Mr. Ellis were acting on their own at the White House.\u2014 Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 30, 2017\n\nStanford professor Mike McFaul worked as a senior official on Obama's National Security Council before he became U.S. ambassador to Russia. And he agreed with Kristol:Agreed. That would be very strange. https://t.co/VdAg3bFCn6\u2014 Michael McFaul (@McFaul) March 30, 2017\n\n-- Journalists react:Did the WH really think they could keep Nunes' sources secret? They could have gotten this info out days ago, w/o being accused of cover-up\u2014 Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) March 30, 2017\n\nNunes wasted more than a week of his investigation on a charade orchestrated by the White House to give Trump figleaf on wiretapping tweet.\u2014 Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) March 30, 2017\n\nAbsolutely remarkable efforts at the highest levels of government to defend a false tweet by the president. https://t.co/LfWjeAbXFe\u2014 Steven Ginsberg (@stevenjay) March 31, 2017\n\nCNN\u2019s Toobin: Is Devin Nunes \u2018Clueless or Corrupt or Both\u2019? https://t.co/5NgCvbnnkI (VIDEO) pic.twitter.com/W7UP7T8APR\u2014 Mediaite (@Mediaite) March 31, 2017\n\n-- Democrats are piling on:We need to hope that there is an adult someplace in the Trump Administration who will stand up for Americans. #FollowTheFacts\u2014 Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) March 31, 2017\n\nGET SMART FAST:",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: Agriculture Department pushes back against reports it\u2019s trying to curb climate-related science (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7123",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2019/07/11/the-energy-202-agriculture-department-pushes-back-against-reports-it-s-trying-to-curb-climate-related-science/5d266522a7a0a47d87c570c1/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Agriculture Department\u2019s research leaders appear to be doing damage control after reports that the agency suppressed climate science research and potentially violated its own scientific integrity policies.\u00a0The pushback comes after a Politico investigation\u00a0found the USDA attempted to keep innovative government-funded climate change research from the public eye. And The Washington Post revealed earlier this year the agency required its in-house scientists to label their peer-reviewed studies as \u201cpreliminary\u201d \u2014 a policy it reversed in May after criticism that such a disclaimer would diminish the impact of the work or prevent its publication. Story continues below advertisementIn an internal letter sent to all research employees on Friday, USDA scientific directors and administrators argued that the department did not undermine climate research \u2014 and had not violated its scientific integrity policy.Advertisement\u201cUSDA has no policy, practice, nor intent to minimize, discredit, de-emphasize or otherwise influence the climate-related science carried out by USDA scientists and agencies,\u201d read the letter signed by deputy undersecretary Scott Hutchins and several top research officials, including acting chief scientist Chavonda Jacobs-Young. Three USDA employees separately confirmed the letter\u2019s authenticity to The Post.USDA research contributed to more than 500 articles \u201crelated to climate science projects\u201d published in scientific journals in 2018, the letter continued.Story continues below advertisement\u201cScientific integrity is of paramount importance in USDA, and the USDA scientific integrity policy specifically states that \u2018scientific findings and products must not be suppressed or altered for political purposes and must not be subjected to inappropriate influence.\u2019 \u201dAdvertisementThe USDA did not offer further comment on the letter. \u201cThe email sent to REE employees last week is self-explanatory,\u201d USDA spokesman Damon Thompson said in an email to The Post, referring to the agency\u2019s research, education and economics division.But Politico uncovered that the USDA withheld a news release about a study that found rice loses nutrients when environmental carbon increases.Story continues below advertisementThe communications office also pressured the University of Washington, whose scientists were co-authors of the report, not to publicize the report. \u201cThe intent is to try to suppress a message \u2014 in this case, the increasing danger of human-caused climate change,\u201d Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann told Politico.\u201cWhen this has to be said, it confirms what we all know,\u201d said a senior employee at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional retaliation, of the letter. \u201cIf this were true, scientists wouldn\u2019t have had to publish their papers as \u2018preliminary data.\u2019 Instead, two USDA science agencies are being exiled to Kansas City.\u201dAdvertisementThe employee was referring to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue\u2019s announcement in June that the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which funds more than a billion dollars each year in agriculture research, and the Economic Research Service, an influential statistical agency, would move out of their Washington offices to Kansas City by the end of September. The decision prompted concerns among current and former USDA employees that the Trump administration was seeking to suppress research through employee attrition and physically moving them far from collaborators.Story continues below advertisementAn analysis by the firm Ernst & Young suggests the move will save $300 million over 15 years. But the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, a professional association for economists, has disputed those savings, arguing the move may cost taxpayers up to $128 million because the initial analysis does not account for the value of lost research data and overstates the cost of keeping the agencies in the capital.Employees, worried about uprooted families and hampered careers \u2014 the agencies frequently collaborate with other Washington-based employees \u2014 have quit in unusually large numbers. A recent survey conducted by the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents the two agencies, suggests about seven in 10 employees do not plan to relocate to Kansas City. \u00a0Advertisement\u201cOur staff, with all their years of experience, are leaving for other agencies. We should be focused on this, rather than hastily moving the agency,\u201d Wesley Dean, a NIFA employee and vice president of the local bargaining unit, said in a statement on Wednesday.Story continues below advertisementNote to readers: Dino Grandoni is on vacation and will be back at the helm of this newsletter on Monday, July 15. Meanwhile, we have an all-star lineup of Post writers to keep you up to date on all your energy and environmental needs. Thanks for reading.POWER PLAYS\u2014 State Dept. official who was barred from submitting climate testimony steps down: Rod Schoonover, the State Department intelligence aide who the White House blocked from submitting written testimony on climate change, is resigning from the agency. Schoonover is leaving voluntarily, The Post\u2019s Juliet Eilperin reports, adding that still, \u201cthe incident that led to his departure underscores the extent to which climate science has become contested terrain under the current administration.\u201d The State Department confirmed he will leave his post Friday. The outgoing aide \u201cspoke before the House Intelligence Committee on June 5 about the security risks the United States faces because of climate change. But White House officials would not let him submit the bureau\u2019s written statement that climate impacts could be \u2018possibly catastrophic,\u2019 after the State Department refused to cut references to federal scientific findings on climate change.\u201dCHair @RepRaulGrijalva is calling for Gov. Rossello of Puerto Rico to step down given multiple arrests in a corruption probe. The @washingtonpost story is accurate, despite some confusion. https://t.co/sVAwGRGlvs\u2014 Natural Resources Committee (@NRDems) July 10, 2019\n\n\u2014 Arrests in Puerto Rico scandal spur concerns about storm aid: The FBI arrested two former top officials who served in the administration of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossell\u00f3, an incident that pushed Rep. Ra\u00fal M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who leads the House panel that oversees the U.S. territory, to call for Rossell\u00f3 to resign. \u201cThe federal indictment says the former officials illegally directed federal funding to politically connected contractors. The arrests come about a month after Congress approved a controversial disaster aid bill that earmarked additional funding for Puerto Rico\u2019s recovery from Hurricane Maria in 2017, which was tied up in part because President Trump called Puerto Rico\u2019s officials 'incompetent or corrupt,'\" The Post\u2019s Jeff Stein\u00a0reports. He adds \"island\u2019s allies fear the arrests will give Trump greater justification for curtailing badly needed aid to the island.\"\u00a0AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014 The latest in tensions between Iran and Western powers: Britain says it stopped three Iranian vessels from interfering with one of its tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. In a statement the British government said it was \u201cconcerned by this action and continue to urge the Iranian authorities to de-escalate the situation in the region.\u201d \u201cIran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps denied Thursday that it was involved in challenging the British tanker, which is operated by the London-based oil and gas company BP, saying in a statement carried by Iranian news outlets that there had been no confrontations with foreign vessels in the past 24 hours,\u201d The Post\u2019s Erin Cunningham reports.\u2014 U.S. accuses Iran of \u2018nuclear extortion\u2019: In a statement made during an emergency meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the United States accused Iran of \u201cnuclear extortion\u201d and said its latest efforts to increase atomic energy activities would \u201cexacerbate\u201d tensions between the United States and Tehran, Cunningham reports. \u201cThere is no credible reason for Iran to expand its nuclear program, and there is no way to read this as anything other than a crude and transparent attempt to extort payments from the international community,\u201d the United States said at the meeting. President Trump also threatened Iran with more sanctions in a Wednesday tweet and without evidence charged that Iran has \u201clong been secretly \u2018enriching\u2019\u201d uranium in violation of the 2015 nuclear deal.THERMOMETERThe flooding may be a preview of what\u2019s to come when Tropical Storm or Hurricane Barry reaches the Gulf states this weekend. (The Washington Post)\u2014 New Orleans is preparing for a deluge: The city saw a flash flood emergency on Wednesday in what may have just been a preview of a\u00a0potential Hurricane Barry that could affect the region this weekend, The Post\u2019s Ian Livingston reports. \u201cDue to the effects of Barry, the Mississippi River is projected to see one of its highest crests on record in New Orleans Saturday, or the highest since the 1920s. The National Weather Service projects the river to crest at 20 feet, which is at the same height levees protect the city.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"No one should take this storm lightly\":\u00a0The National Hurricane Center is predicting that the season's first hurricane, Barry, will hit the coast of Louisiana on Saturday. \u201cThe storm is predicted to be a massive rainmaker, unloading double-digit rainfall totals that will probably trigger serious inland flooding. Assuming it attains hurricane strength, damaging wind gusts are likely near where it comes ashore as well as a dangerous storm surge, which is a rise in water above normally dry land that can inundate homes, roads and businesses,\" The Post's Brian McNoldy and Jason Samenow report. \"Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency on Wednesday,\u00a0warning residents\u00a0that '[t]his is going to be a Louisiana event with coastal flooding and heavy rainfall potentially impacting every part of the state. No one should take this storm lightly.'\"OIL CHECK\u2014 PG&E\u2019s wildfire woes:\u00a0California\u2019s largest utility was aware for years that hundreds of miles of its power lines could spark wildfires, but according to documents\u00a0obtained\u00a0by the Wall Street Journal, PG&E did not act to solve the problem. \u201cThe failure last year of a century-old transmission line that sparked a wildfire, killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise wasn\u2019t an aberration, the documents show,\u201d the Wall Street Journal reports. \u201cA year earlier, PG&E executives conceded to a state lawyer that the company needed to process many projects, all at once, to prevent system failures \u2014 a problem they said could be likened to a \u2018pig in the python.\u2019\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA judge responds: The federal judge overseeing PG&E\u2019s probation related to its safety-related violations is ordering PG&E to response to the Wall Street Journal\u2019s report \u201con a paragraph-by-paragraph basis.\u201d William Alsup, a U.S. district court judge in Northern California gave the company until the end of the month to submit a \u201cfresh, forthright statement owning up to the true extent of the\u201d report, according to the Journal. The filing cannot exceed 40 double-spaced pages.DAYBOOKTodayThe House Science, Space and Technology Committee holds a\u00a0hearing\u00a0on glacial and ice sheet melt and climate change. USDA leaders penned a letter to the agency\u2019s science branch.   The Energy 202: Agriculture Department pushes back against reports it\u2019s trying to curb climate-related science",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Twisting LeBron James\u2019s words, a fake Saturn photo and other news literacy lessons (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7124",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/14/twisting-lebrons-words-and-other-newsliteracy-lessons/",
        "text": "This is the latest installment of a weekly feature on this blog \u2014 lessons from the nonprofit News Literacy Project, which aims to teach students how to distinguish between what is real and what is not in this age of digital communication.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe material comes from the project\u2019s newsletter, the Sift, which takes the most recent viral rumors, conspiracy theories, hoaxes and journalistic ethics issues and turns them into timely lessons with discussion prompts and links. The Sift, which is published weekly during the school year, has more than 10,000 subscribers, most of them educators. The News Literacy Project also offers a program called Checkology, a browser-based platform designed for students in Grades 6 through 12 that helps prepare the next generation to easily identify misinformation. Checkology is free for educators, students, school districts and parents. Since 2016, more than 29,000 educators and parents in all 50 states and the District of Columbia have registered to use the platform. Since August, more than 1,000 educators and parents and more than 34,000 students have actively used Checkology.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can learn more about the News Literacy Project and all of the educational resources it provides in this piece, but here is a rundown:Founded more than a decade ago by Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the News Literacy Project is the leading provider of news literacy education.It creates digital curriculums and other resources, and it works with educators and journalists to teach middle school and high school students how to recognize news and information to trust \u2014 and it provides them with the tools they need to be informed and engaged participants in a democracy. It uses the standards of high-quality journalism as an aspirational yardstick against which to measure all news and information. Just as important, it provides the next generation with an appreciation of the First Amendment and the role of a free press.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere\u2019s material from this week\u2019s Sift:Viral rumor rundownNO: LeBron James did not say he didn\u2019t want anything to do with White people.YES: In the first episode of the HBO show \u201cThe Shop\u201d in 2018, James shared that he was initially wary of White people at his predominantly White Catholic high school in Akron, Ohio. YES: In telling this story on \u201cThe Shop,\u201d James said [link warning: profanity], \u201cWhen I first went to the ninth grade \u2026 I was so institutionalized, growing up in the hood, it\u2019s like \u2026 they don\u2019t want us to succeed \u2026 so I\u2019m like, I\u2019m going to this school to play ball, and that\u2019s it. I don\u2019t want nothing to do with White people. I don\u2019t believe that they want anything to do with me.\u201dStory continues below advertisementYES: The conversation went on to clarify that these initial feelings soon changed as sports and basketball created friendships.AdvertisementNote: This misleading quote has gone viral several times before. It recently recirculated after James tweeted a photo of a police officer who was identified as firing the shots that killed Ma\u2019Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio, on April 20, along with the message \u201cYOU\u2019RE NEXT #ACCOUNTABILITY.\u201d James later deleted the tweet.Also note: This \u201cEntertainment Tonight\u201d clip includes footage of this quote in context that is more appropriate for classroom use.Related:\u201cDid LeBron James Say He Wants Nothing To Do With White People?\u201d (Dan Evon, Snopes).\u201cViral image uses doctored photo to paint LeBron James as pro-China\u201d (Andy Nguyen, PolitiFact).NO: This is not a photo of Saturn.YES: It\u2019s an artistic rendering of the imagined view from the Cassini spacecraft during one of its final, close passes over Saturn in 2017.Story continues below advertisementTip: Fake or doctored photos supposedly from space are a common type of \u201cengagement bait\u201d online.Idea: Use a copy of this image (see the viral rumor example slides linked below) to teach students how to use a reverse image search to determine the original source for this image.AdvertisementResource: Reverse image search tutorial (NLP\u2019s Checkology\u00ae virtual classroom).News GogglesJournalists sometimes speak their own language. From \u201clede\u201d to \u201cnut graf\u201d and \u201cdateline\u201d to \u201cbyline\u201d \u2014 it can be hard to keep track! We\u2019ve introduced a lot of newsroom lingo in News Goggles this year.This week, let\u2019s take a look back and review some of these common key terms. See if you can spot them in news coverage.\u2605 Featured News Goggles resource: These classroom-ready slides offer a vocabulary review, discussion questions and a teaching idea.Discuss: Were any of these terms completely new to you? Were any surprising? Do you think any of them are confusing? Will you start using any of the terms, such as \u201cgraf\u201d?Idea: Challenge students in groups to find examples of each term in news reports and share their findings with classmates.Sift Pick\u201cStudy: Conservative media drove belief of covid-19 conspiracies\u201d (Brianna Keilar, CNN\u2019s \u201cNew Day\u201d).Note: This CNN report is based on a new study that examined whether a reliance on certain news sources and social media in the United States impacted people\u2019s belief in covid-19 falsehoods.Discuss: Why do you think \u201cfamiliarity with information increases the likelihood that you think it\u2019s accurate\u201d? What kinds of false information have you encountered about the pandemic? What are some possible real-world consequences of believing covid-19 falsehoods? Can likes and shares of misinformation on social media cause harm?Resource: \u201cConspiratorial Thinking\u201d (NLP\u2019s Checkology virtual classroom). From the News Literacy Project. Twisting LeBron James\u2019s words, a fake Saturn photo and other news literacy lessons",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The irony in Ivanka Trump\u2019s and Betsy DeVos\u2019s push for STEM education (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7125",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/28/the-irony-in-ivanka-trumps-and-betsy-devoss-push-for-stem-education/",
        "text": "This belongs in the you-can\u2019t-make-up-this-stuff category.On Tuesday, presidential daughter Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. According to the Education Department, they were there to \u201chighlight the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education\u201d and to discuss \u201cempowering young women to pursue STEM-related careers.\u201d They also introduced a viewing of \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d a film about a team of African American women who had a vital, unseen role at NASA when it was first launching men into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe event came just a short time after President Trump, Ivanka\u2019s father, advanced his first federal budget, which included some revealing proposals for NASA, the country\u2019s space agency. The Trump budget seeks to wipe out NASA\u2019s education office, which oversees efforts to support women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, operates camps and enrichment programs, and provides internships and scholarships for young scientists.NASA budget would cut Earth science and educationJoining Ivanka Trump and DeVos at the museum were NASA astronaut Kay Hire; J.R. \u201cJack\u201d Dailey, the John and Adrienne Mars director at Air and Space; Barbara Gruber, an aerospace educator at the museum; and Rae Stewart, a student educator at the museum.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn her introduction to the film, Ivanka Trump said that her father\u2019s administration \u201chas expanded NASA\u2019s space exploration mission\u201d though did not, unsurprisingly, mention that he actually proposed decreasing\u00a0NASA funding and eliminating the education office.The Trump-DeVos event drew some sharp criticism from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who said in a statement:\u00a0 \u201cEducation Secretary Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump are feigning an interest in STEM careers with a photo op at the National Air and Space Museum while eliminating all funding for NASA\u2019s education programs. This takes chutzpah to a new level. If this administration was genuinely interested in promoting STEM programs, it would walk the walk, not just talk the talk. The next generation of astronauts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians need support, not budget cuts eliminating the very programs being promoted.\u201dThere was also no mention of the 13.5 percent in cuts Trump has proposed to the Education Department, which include the reduction or elimination of grants for teacher training, after-school programs and aid to ",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The irony in Ivanka Trump\u2019s and Betsy DeVos\u2019s push for STEM education (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7126",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/28/the-irony-in-ivanka-trumps-and-betsy-devoss-push-for-stem-education/",
        "text": "This belongs in the you-can\u2019t-make-up-this-stuff category.On Tuesday, presidential daughter Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. According to the Education Department, they were there to \u201chighlight the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education\u201d and to discuss \u201cempowering young women to pursue STEM-related careers.\u201d They also introduced a viewing of \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d a film about a team of African American women who had a vital, unseen role at NASA when it was first launching men into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe event came just a short time after President Trump, Ivanka\u2019s father, advanced his first federal budget, which included some revealing proposals for NASA, the country\u2019s space agency. The Trump budget seeks to wipe out NASA\u2019s education office, which oversees efforts to support women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, operates camps and enrichment programs, and provides internships and scholarships for young scientists.NASA budget would cut Earth science and educationJoining Ivanka Trump and DeVos at the museum were NASA astronaut Kay Hire; J.R. \u201cJack\u201d Dailey, the John and Adrienne Mars director at Air and Space; Barbara Gruber, an aerospace educator at the museum; and Rae Stewart, a student educator at the museum.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn her introduction to the film, Ivanka Trump said that her father\u2019s administration \u201chas expanded NASA\u2019s space exploration mission\u201d though did not, unsurprisingly, mention that he actually proposed decreasing\u00a0NASA funding and eliminating the education office.The Trump-DeVos event drew some sharp criticism from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who said in a statement:\u00a0 \u201cEducation Secretary Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump are feigning an interest in STEM careers with a photo op at the National Air and Space Museum while eliminating all funding for NASA\u2019s education programs. This takes chutzpah to a new level. If this administration was genuinely interested in promoting STEM programs, it would walk the walk, not just talk the talk. The next generation of astronauts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians need support, not budget cuts eliminating the very programs being promoted.\u201dThere was also no mention of the 13.5 percent in cuts Trump has proposed to the Education Department, which include the reduction or elimination of grants for teacher training, after-school programs and aid to ",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The irony in Ivanka Trump\u2019s and Betsy DeVos\u2019s push for STEM education (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7127",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/28/the-irony-in-ivanka-trumps-and-betsy-devoss-push-for-stem-education/",
        "text": "This belongs in the you-can\u2019t-make-up-this-stuff category.On Tuesday, presidential daughter Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. According to the Education Department, they were there to \u201chighlight the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education\u201d and to discuss \u201cempowering young women to pursue STEM-related careers.\u201d They also introduced a viewing of \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d a film about a team of African American women who had a vital, unseen role at NASA when it was first launching men into space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe event came just a short time after President Trump, Ivanka\u2019s father, advanced his first federal budget, which included some revealing proposals for NASA, the country\u2019s space agency. The Trump budget seeks to wipe out NASA\u2019s education office, which oversees efforts to support women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, operates camps and enrichment programs, and provides internships and scholarships for young scientists.NASA budget would cut Earth science and educationJoining Ivanka Trump and DeVos at the museum were NASA astronaut Kay Hire; J.R. \u201cJack\u201d Dailey, the John and Adrienne Mars director at Air and Space; Barbara Gruber, an aerospace educator at the museum; and Rae Stewart, a student educator at the museum.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn her introduction to the film, Ivanka Trump said that her father\u2019s administration \u201chas expanded NASA\u2019s space exploration mission\u201d though did not, unsurprisingly, mention that he actually proposed decreasing\u00a0NASA funding and eliminating the education office.The Trump-DeVos event drew some sharp criticism from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who said in a statement:\u00a0 \u201cEducation Secretary Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump are feigning an interest in STEM careers with a photo op at the National Air and Space Museum while eliminating all funding for NASA\u2019s education programs. This takes chutzpah to a new level. If this administration was genuinely interested in promoting STEM programs, it would walk the walk, not just talk the talk. The next generation of astronauts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians need support, not budget cuts eliminating the very programs being promoted.\u201dThere was also no mention of the 13.5 percent in cuts Trump has proposed to the Education Department, which include the reduction or elimination of grants for teacher training, after-school programs and aid to ",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | How to get kids to love to write (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7128",
        "date": "2020-01-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/01/07/how-get-kids-love-write/",
        "text": "In 2002, the nationally renowned author Dave Eggers (\u201cA Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,\u201d \u201cThe Circle,\u201d \u201cWhat Can a Citizen Do?\u201d) started a nonprofit organization with educator N\u00ednive Calegari dedicated to helping kids learn how to write well. The San Francisco organization, 826 Valencia, is still in operation, and it spawned 826 National to take similar writing and tutoring programs to other cities. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat is 826 Valencia? How \u2014 and how well \u2014 does it work? This post explains all of that. It was written by David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, whose newest book is \u201cThe College Dropout Scandal.\u201dTo be sure, there is nothing new about the lament that too many Americans are poor writers, yet the problem remains, even though one approach after another is tried. The Common Core State Standards, which most states adopted early in the 2010s, were supposed to fix this problem, but there is no real indication that their implementation has broadly improved the situation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementKirp, it turns out, is a volunteer at 826 Valencia and describes his experiences with the program, offering one approach that he believes works well.By David KirpEarly on a muggy summer evening, in the backroom of a pirate store in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District, 20 middle and high school students are deep into a discussion about the contents of a magazine they plan to publish. A handful of adults \u2014 writers, teachers, techies, retirees and undergraduates \u2014 will mentor these youngsters. I\u2019m one of the mentors.Kids\u2019 hands shoot up, ideas get batted around and decisions made. Space exploration, women in politics and the San Francisco Giants (how they can become contenders again) are among the topics the youngsters choose. The eighth grader I will spend time with wants to learn about successful entrepreneurs \u2014 \u201clike my dad,\u201d he tells me.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the weeks go by, the magazine takes shape. The students conduct interviews or comb the Internet. They write drafts, share them with their mentor and the other kids. They rewrite them, sometimes twice over. The magazine they produce will be distributed in local schools.The organization that has been nurturing such creative activity for the past 18 years is called 826 Valencia, the address of the storefront where this venture had its start.Considerable teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing and finger-pointing has accompanied the news of U.S. students\u2019 mediocre performance on the PISA science, math and reading exams. But not enough attention gets paid to another weakness \u2014 most students cannot write well.Story continues below advertisementThere are a number of reasons for this sad state of affairs. The use in recent years on standardized test scores as a key metric of accountability in schools put a prime value on writing short exam essays, and that helped lead to a reduction in longer writing assignments. Some schools of education do a poor job of teaching students how to teach the subject, and some school districts do not provide teachers with a valid curriculum. There are, too, teachers saddled with as many as 200 students \u2014 \u201cwe feel like we\u2019re drowning,\u201d one teacher said \u2014 who can\u2019t assign many writing assignments because they don\u2019t have the time to grade them. And when assignments are made, many are less than enticing to young people.Advertisement826 Valencia looks nothing like this. The tutors are volunteers, who sign up because they love writing. There is no set-piece curriculum \u2014 the aim is to get kids, many of them minority youngsters from poor families, writing about whatever they care about most. Over the years, these youth have authored nearly a thousand books, such as \u201cTalking Back,\u201d students proffering advice to their teachers, and \u201cLike the Sun in Dark Spaces: Narratives across Generations and Continents,\u201d stories by immigrant kids about what it means to learn America.\u201cKids\u2019 brains change when they go into a place like a pirate store,\u201d co-founder Dave Eggers told me. (Eggers is, among many things, the author of \u201cA Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,\u201d a memoir so moving that it almost lives up to its title). \u201cThey feel at home because it\u2019s strange and funny, not intimidating.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe kids want to write about their own lives,\u201d Eggers said., recalling a moment when hordes of baton-wielding police stormed an inner-city high school to break up a garden-variety schoolyard fight. That episode traumatized many of the students, and it became the jumping-off point for a book about why youth of color are perceived so differently from youth in the suburbs.Advertisement\u201cThe essays helped them on their way to healing,\" he said. \u201cThe written word on a published page has that effect.\u201dThere is solid evidence that this approach is working. The 826 Valencia participants\u2019 writing improved 19 percent during the course of a school year, as measured by a National Writing Project rubric \u2014 that is well above the norm \u2014 and those whose writing was weakest at the outset showed a 30 percent gain.Story continues below advertisementWhen surveyed, almost all the students reported that they had become more confident about their writing. \u201cWhen I\u2019m published I feel like I\u2019m a movie star or a millionaire,\u201d one student explained. \u201cWhen I write about my life or funny stories or serious and sad stories, other people can laugh, cry or be sad \u2026 and when I\u2019m an adult I will be a famous writer in the city of San Francisco.\u201dAdvertisementThe idea behind 826 Valencia has spread far beyond San Francisco. Eggers proselytizes when he is on a book tour \u2014 \u201cmy Johnny Appleseed thing.\u201d Listeners who are intrigued venture to the pirate store, and some are so inspired that they start their own 826. Similar ventures have sprouted in nine U.S. cities \u2014 826 DC is housed in Tivoli\u2019s Astounding Magic Supply Company \u2014 as well as more than sixty countries, from Sweden to Chile.\u201cThe tendrils keep sprouting,\u201d says Eggers. Although the particulars differ, the motivation is the same \u2014 the belief that children deserve a chance to find their own voice. For novelist Roddy Doyle, who started an 826-inspired center called Fighting Words in Dublin, \u201caccess to writing is a modern human right.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThere is seemingly no end to the imaginative ways to hook children on getting their ideas down on paper. Children\u2019s poetry has appeared on pizza boxes in Detroit and on a postal stamp in Ireland. Two years ago, Thomas Pesquet, the first French astronaut, announced a writing competition from the International Space Station, inviting kids and young adults to write a short story inspired by \u201cLe Petit Prince.\u201d Four months later, he read the two best stories, selected from more than 8,500 submissions.AdvertisementCharles Autheman, the director of the Lab of Stories, dreamed up that contest. He is also the moving force behind a competition that will add art and poetry to mundane French manhole covers. Dave Eggers calls him \u201cthe most inspired leader in the global network,\u201d and with good reason. Starting eight years ago, with a single center in Paris, he has built a network that covers much of France and extends to enclaves in the Caribbean.\u201cFor young people, writing is often the first experience of freedom,\u201d Autheman told me. \u201cAs long as kids need a safe place to be heard, we have an obligation to grow.\u201d Here's one program, co-founded by author Dave Eggers, that gets the job done, according to a Berkeley professor. How to get kids to love to write",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yes, Bill Gates really compared Donald Trump to JFK \u2014 and said Trump could help education (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7129",
        "date": "2017-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/11/yes-bill-gates-really-compared-donald-trump-to-jfk-and-said-trump-could-help-education/",
        "text": "Bill Gates, the world\u2019s biggest-spending philanthropist, poured so much private money into pet education reform projects that he helped drive the public education policy agenda. His foundation funded the development, implementation and promotion of the Common Core State Standards, for one thing, and spent millions on other controversial school reforms that were supported by President Obama\u2019s Education Department. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhat are Bill and Melinda Gates talking about?Now, it seems, Gates is looking ahead. On Dec. 13, 2016, he met with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan\u00a0and had some kind words about him afterward. Really kind words, such as comparing him to John F. Kennedy.Here\u2019s what Gates told CNBC during an interview on \u201cSquawk Box\u201d broadcast the same day as the meeting with Trump:Story continues below advertisement\u201cI had an opportunity to talk to him about innovation. A lot of his message has been about things where he sees things not as good as he\u2019d like. But in the same way that President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that, I think that whether it\u2019s education or stopping epidemics, other health breakthroughs, finishing polio, and in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that his administration is going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation be one of the things that he gets behind. Of course, my whole career has been along those lines. And he was interested in listening to that. And I\u2019m sure there will be further conversation.\u201dTransforming education through \u201cinnovation\u201d is a Gates mantra, as expressed on the education homepage of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which lists it as one of three focuses, along with teaching and learning:Gates foundation chief admits Common Core mistakesOur goal: to support innovation that can improve U.S. K-12 public schools and ensure that students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college.And there\u2019s this:AdvertisementThe OpportunityBy focusing on the common goal of improving education through innovation \u2014 and by building on and sharing effective tools, strategies, and standards \u2014 educators, school leaders, and nonprofit partners across the country can transform U.S. public education.As it turns out, the school reforms that Gates bankrolled over the past 15 or so years have never turned out quite as he had imagined. After spending at least $2 billion on various reforms \u2014 a small-schools initiative in New York, the creation of teacher evaluation systems based on standardized test scores, the Core, etc. \u2014 the foundation\u2019s chief executive officer, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, wrote this in the 2016 annual letter:We are firm believers that education is a bridge to opportunity in America. My colleague, Allan Golston, spoke passionately about this at a gathering of education experts last year. However, we\u2019re facing the fact that it is a real struggle to make system-wide change.As for the Common Core, she said:Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators \u2014 particularly teachers \u2014 but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.A new administration, a new chance for Gates to try to work with a new Education Department, one that is likely to be led by Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire nominated by Trump. DeVos is a leader in the movement to privatize public education. How cozy will Gates get with the Trump administration? Stay tuned. \"I had an opportunity to talk to him about innovation.\" Yes, Bill Gates really compared Donald Trump to JFK \u2014 and said Trump could help education",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Teacher shortages affecting every state as 2017-18 school year begins (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7130",
        "date": "2017-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/08/28/teacher-shortages-affecting-every-state-as-2017-18-school-year-begins/",
        "text": "The 2017-18 school year has started in many places across the country, and federal data shows that every state is dealing with shortages of teachers in key subject areas. Some are having trouble finding substitute teachers, too.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe annual nationwide listing of areas with teacher shortages, compiled by the U.S. Education Department, shows many districts struggling to fill positions in subjects such as\u00a0math, the traditional sciences, foreign language and special education, but also in reading and English language arts, history, art, music, elementary education, middle school education, career and technical education, health, and computer science. That is not an exhaustive list. Teacher shortages are nothing new \u2014 most states have reported some since data started being kept more than 25 years ago \u2014 but the problem has grown more acute in recent years as the profession has been hit with low morale over low pay, unfair evaluation methods, assaults on due-process rights, high-stakes testing requirements, insufficient resources and other issues.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAccording\u00a0to a 2016 report by the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute, teacher education enrollment dropped from 691,000 to 451,000, a 35 percent reduction, between 2009 and 2014, the latest year for which there is data. And there are high levels of attrition, with nearly 8 percent of the teaching workforce leaving every year, the majority before retirement age.In California, for example, only three subjects had teaching shortages in the 1990-91 and 1991-92 school years: bilingual education (K-12), life science (grades 7-12) and physical science (grades 7-12). For 2016-17 and the new school year, statewide shortages were reported in English, drama, humanities, history, social science, math, computer education, physical education, health, dance, science, special education and self-contained class.In Virginia, these subjects had teaching shortages in 1990-91 and 1991-92: early childhood education, earth and space science (grades 9-12), high school foreign languages, and special education. For 2015-16 and the new school year, these subjects have reported shortages: career and technical education, elementary education, secondary English, foreign languages in all grades, health and physical education in all grades, high school, math (grades 6-12, including Algebra 1), middle school education, and special education.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can see the full listings of each state, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories below or here.States have employed different strategies to try to fill the gaps, some more drastic than others. In Oklahoma, Utah and Arizona, teachers can be hired without formal training. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed a new law a few months ago allowing people who have never been trained as teachers to go into schools and teach, as long as they have a bachelor\u2019s degree or five years of experience in fields \u201crelevant\u201d to the subject.In Arizona, teachers can now be hired with absolutely no training in how to teachIn Arizona\u2019s Vail Unified School District near Tucson, Education Week reported,\u00a0parents are being hired as teachers to help stem a years-long shortage. It said 17 of 24 noncertified new teachers in grades K-8 are parents, and more than a dozen parents teach in high schools, too. It quoted Superintendent Calvin Baker as saying, \u201cI think that a number of them were motivated by the need to stand in the gap, so to speak.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinding substitutes is taxing some districts, too. For example, NBC4 in Washington found that schools in the region are suffering an \u201cacute shortage of substitute teachers,\u201d with full-time teachers \u201csacrificing planning periods, grading sessions and staff meetings to cover vacant classes of colleagues.\u201d Administrators are pitching in, too, the report said.Freddie Cross, senior statistician at the Education Department, said in an email that teacher shortage data has been collected since 1990-91 \u2014 but it is still collected by paper and pencil and sent through the mail, making comparisons difficult. Cross said he is having all of the information compiled into a database so states can enter it electronically, analyses can be conducted, trends can be spotted, and terminology can be standardized. The work on this should be completed this fall.The Learning Policy Institute report found five key factors that influence whether a teacher decides to enter, remain in or leave the profession: salaries and other compensation; preparation and costs to entry; hiring and personnel management; induction and support for new teachers; and working conditions, including school leadership, professional collaboration and shared decision-making, accountability systems, and resources for teaching and learning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere you can look at a map and see how these play out in every state:And here is the Education Department\u2019s teacher shortage list for 2017-18: Why these shortages persist and sometimes deepen. Teacher shortages affecting every state as 2017-18 school year begins",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | So the eclipse is coming and you suddenly want to be an astronomer. Here\u2019s what they actually do. (WP: The Answer Sheet) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7131",
        "date": "2017-07-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/07/31/so-the-eclipse-is-coming-and-you-suddenly-want-to-be-an-astronomer-heres-what-they-actually-do/",
        "text": "It\u2019s being called the Great American Eclipse, because on Aug. 21, for the first time in U.S. history, a total solar eclipse will be seen only in this country \u2014 and it\u2019s the first total solar eclipse since 1918 to move from coast to coast. You can learn everything you need to know about the eclipse here, and in this post you can learn about the people who are most eager to study the phenomenon \u2014 astronomers. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAstronomy is one of those subjects many people find interesting but don\u2019t really understand. What do astronomers actually do? And how do they do it? How did they even become astronomers? This is Q&A that explores those and related issues with Amber Porter, a lecturer in astronomy and space science at Clemson University, where the 2017 eclipse will be seen in totality for 2 minutes and 37 seconds on Aug. 21.Everything you need to know about the solar eclipseQ: Let\u2019s start with your story: When did you decide you wanted to be an astronomer and why? And what was your educational route to becoming one?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA:\u00a0I have been interested in astronomy for a long time, but I don\u2019t think I knew that I wanted to be an astronomer until I decided to apply to graduate school. My love of science first became apparent in middle school and blossomed throughout high school. Learning facts in my science classes was never enough and I always wanted to know \u201cwhy\u201d nature acted the way it does. I enjoyed my chemistry and math classes in high school, but nothing compared to my earth space science class, so that is what really sent me down the path of pursuing physics and astronomy. After graduating from high school, I received a bachelor of science in physics at Lycoming College in 2009. I wasn\u2019t sure what to do next and the decline of the economy meant that there were very few jobs for college graduates at that time in their fields of study. When I received a job offer to work with some of the smallest aspects of nature by colliding subatomic particles together, I realized that I was much more interested in studying the biggest objects nature can offer\u00a0\u2014 stars and galaxies. So the next step was receiving a PhD in physics from Clemson University in 2016, where I studied the three-dimensional shape of exploding stars in distant galaxies.Capital Weather Gang's Angela Fritz breaks down what will happen when a total solar eclipse crosses the U.S. on Aug. 21. (Claritza Jimenez, Daron Taylor, Angela Fritz/The Washington Post)\nQ: The three-dimensional shape of exploding stars in distant galaxies? Sounds fascinating. Before I ask you why that is important to know, let\u2019s talk broadly about astronomy. How many different kinds of astronomers are there, and what do they do? A: This is an interesting question because scientists love to place objects into groups as a classification method and there are numerous ways that we can subdivide astronomers. An astronomer may identify themselves based on the part of the universe that they study. For example, there are planetary astronomers who want to determine what planets and their atmospheres in our solar system are made of and how they have changed over time. There are also astronomers who prefer to study what stars are made of and the life stages of these giant balls of gas. People who study cosmic rays, supernova explosions or black holes may call themselves galactic or extragalactic astronomers. Astronomers also describe themselves according to what part of the electromagnetic spectrum they tend to use to study an object such as radio astronomer or gamma-ray astronomer. These are people who collect the longest and shortest wavelengths of light, respectively, that are emitted by their object.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe last classification I\u2019ll offer is this: You often hear astronomers divide themselves into observational, computational, and theoretical regimes. Observational astronomers are those that use telescopes to collect the light of celestial objects for further analysis. Astronomers often require complex computer codes to build models of the universe in our computers. We can then tweak the parameters of the model like turning a knob to try to fine-tune our models to match the reality of the information we collected from space.Travel the path of the solar eclipseQ: So in what subjects do all astronomers have to excel? Math? At what level? Which sciences? What other subjects should wannabe astronomers study in school?A: In high school, wannabe astronomers should study as much math as possible up through calculus. Once in college, a physics or astronomy major will also take a variety of other higher level mathematics courses such as statistics, differential equations or linear algebra.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTaking a breadth of science courses as well is very helpful for astronomers. All of science is connected. We use the laws of gravity from physics to understand planetary orbits, we study how fusing nuclei in the bellies of stars produces a variety of elements on the periodic table, and we try to decipher what planets and their atmospheres are made of to see if they contain the building blocks for life that we study in biology classes.Gathering data from telescopes is a small piece of being an astronomer. Much of our time is spent on computers analyzing data and writing papers so computer programming and English classes are essential as well. As you can see, astronomers excel at nearly all subjects taught in schools. I think it is important to note that I myself never felt particularly gifted at math so if you are currently struggling in any one subject, don\u2019t feel as though you can never become a scientist or astronomer. I think it is much more important that you have the tenacity to work on hard problems and the desire to ask \u201cwhy.\u201dQ: What exactly do astronomers see when they look through telescopes?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: Contrary to popular belief, astronomers often do not look directly through telescopes anymore. If you are stargazing for pleasure on a clear night, you will still look through the eyepiece of a telescope. However, the large telescopes that professional astronomers use typically have primary mirrors with diameters between 1-10 meters (or approximately 3-33 feet in diameter) and are operated through computers in a control room. Some telescopes are even set up so that they can be controlled remotely over the Internet by observers sitting hundreds of miles away.When astronomers point a telescope toward a particular celestial object of their interest, they capture its image by exposing a charged-coupled device, or CCD, attached to the telescope. When light strikes the CCD, it dislodges electrons in the CCD\u2019s material. At the end of the exposure, the number of dislodged electrons in each pixel is read out to tell us how much light hit each particular pixel of the CCD. This digital signal is then turned into a black and white picture of the object the telescope is pointed toward. In order to get the really beautiful pictures we share with the public of celestial objects, astronomers must take pictures of the same object in a variety of wavelengths or bands that correspond to the colors seen by human eyes. We then carefully combine each of the photographs to produce the high quality images everyone loves to see.Q: How big of a deal is this upcoming eclipse to astronomers? What do they hope to learn from it?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: Many astronomers have never seen a total solar eclipse so seeing the corona of the sun during totality will be just as majestic for those who study space for a living as everyone else who stands in the shadow of the moon on Aug. 21.One question that astronomers will try to answer by studying the solar eclipse is what heats the outer layers of our star. Heat naturally flows from warmer to cooler places. The temperature of our sun decreases from tens of millions of degrees in the interior to about 10,000 degrees on its surface. By the laws of nature, we then expect the temperature to decrease as we move into the sun\u2019s atmosphere. However, the temperature rises to over 2 million degrees in the corona so there must be some additional heating process within the solar atmosphere that we do not completely understand yet. Astronomers can only see how the behavior of the atmosphere where it meets the surface of the sun during total solar eclipses so there are not many opportunities to do this type of science.There are a number of amazing citizen science projects that involve atmospheric physics and biological sciences that everyone can participate in on Aug. 21. A rundown of these projects is featured here.Think you love solar eclipses? Think again. This man has seen 20. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)\nQ: How is the astronomer pipeline? Are there as many students today as interested in entering the field as earlier during the space race and shuttle era?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: There are slightly more physics degrees conferred today as compared to the space race era and the number is on the rise. Watching men walk on the moon inspired an entire generation of people and I hope that witnessing something as awe-inspiring as a solar eclipse in your own backyard will enlighten the next generation to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) careers.As our global need for technology grows every day, we need Americans who are well prepared to lead us into the future. Majoring in science fields like astronomy and physics can lead you down many career paths. Astronomers are taught how think outside of the box, to have healthy levels of skepticism because they become great critical thinkers, and to break big problems into solvable pieces. So not everyone who majors in astronomy may continue to answer questions about space, but they may also crunch numbers as data scientists, write code as computer programmers, or be innovative at tech companies. The small skills learned along the way to understanding our big universe can add up to success in a variety of careers.Q: And, finally, early in the interview you mentioned the three-dimensional shape of exploding stars in distant galaxies. Why is it important to study that?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA: When supernovae are detected in distant galaxies, the explosions look like bright points of light, like brand new stars, that appeared in the galaxy seemingly overnight. These explosions are so bright that they can sometimes outshine the light of the entire galaxy where the star lived for billions of years. I study explosions that originate within burned out cores of stars called white dwarfs. These white dwarfs all explode at nearly the same mass and therefore are all equally bright explosions. However, by comparing how much a white dwarf\u2019s brightness dims to how bright we know it should be, we can determine the distance to that supernova and therefore to its host galaxy. Astronomers have used these white dwarf explosions, called Type Ia supernovae, to measure the distances to galaxies billions of light-years away. The results have shown us that our universe is expanding and the expansion is accelerating with time.In order to determine the accelerated rate more precisely, we must carefully study the intrinsic brightness of the Type Ia supernovae. That\u2019s where my work on measuring the three-dimensional shape of these explosion comes in. Our precise measurements of these explosions show that they are not perfectly round, and therefore the angle at which you view the explosion can change how bright you measure it to be. As an exaggerated example, imagine the ejecta of an exploded star takes on the shape of an egg rather than a baseball. The explosion will not appear as bright if you view the egg\u2019s top as compared to the egg\u2019s side. My quest is to measure the three-dimensional shape of Type Ia supernovae so that we can measure the distances to their galaxies more precisely.How to get kids ready for, and excited about, the Great American EclipseIf the moon rises in the east and sets in the west, why does the eclipse shadow travel from west to east? Dear Science is on the case. (Daron Taylor, Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post) Q & A with an astronomer about what she does and why next month's solar eclipse is such a big deal to her field. So the eclipse is coming and you suddenly want to be an astronomer. Here\u2019s what they actually do.",
        "author": "Valerie Strauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Black Hole Image Is a Bias-Testing Masterpiece (WSJ: The Captain Class) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7132",
        "date": "2019-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-black-hole-image-one-giant-leap-for-teamwork-11555732805?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=56",
        "text": "The budding astronomer obviously knew this, but as a student of something called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, he suspected there might be a hack. It wouldn\u2019t be easy. The plan might take decades and cost millions of dollars. It would also require an unprecedented collaboration by scientists all over the world. \nFor years, Dr. Doeleman struggled to raise funds for his long-shot project. In 2008, a small technical breakthrough tipped the scales. The idea, he told me, \u201cwent from being impossible to improbable to having real potential.\u201d \n\nThe project, which calls itself Event Horizon Telescope, would ultimately raise more than $40 million and convince 60 institutes in 20 nations to offer resources, including eight of the world\u2019s most expensive telescopes. Before all of that, however, Dr. Doeleman needed a team. \nPersuading scientists to join him was a tall order. \u201cPeople have careers to think about,\u201d he says. His comrades had to be both obsessive and unfazed by the prospect of failure; self-starters who could operate independently in a startup environment with no assumptions or precedents. Above all, he says, they had to embrace a culture of trust, \u201cone in which we can disagree but remain open to being convinced.\u201d \nAs determined as he was, Dr. Doeleman knew he was wading into the deep end. In business, any leader who bets audaciously on a new product or market position knows their work will be judged by the money it makes. In research, where the only currency is knowledge, experiments only succeed if the scientific community accepts the findings.\nAstronomers didn\u2019t really know how black holes worked and had only indirect evidence they exist. In theory, they should look like dark rings. But whether Dr. Doeleman\u2019s team produced a picture of a ring, an elephant or just an indeterminate blob, it was likely to be picked apart mercilessly.\nPut simply, Dr. Doleman, now an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was about to gamble his career on a plan he was not certain he could execute and whose findings could be discarded over a single misstep. \u201cIt was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down,\u201d he says. \nThe only way to \u201csee\u201d a black hole is to capture an image of its shadow. Rather than building one massive telescope, the EHT team wanted to combine the perspectives of many existing ones. Instead of taking pictures, they would capture signals from electromagnetic waves tumbling around the black hole\u2019s invisible contours. By feeding that data through an imaging algorithm, they hoped to construct a virtual rendering.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe project, which calls itself Event Horizon Telescope, raises more than $40 million and convinces 60 institutes in 20 nations to offer resources to produce the first image of a black hole.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n National Science Foundation/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDr. Doeleman\u2019s small team slowly grew to an army of 200 ranging from veterans like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sera Markoff,\n\n\n\n a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, to postdoctoral fellows like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kazunori Akiyama,\n\n\n\n who co-led the imaging group. As they puzzled over how to retrofit telescopes with atomic clocks or ship frozen hard drives from the South Pole, Dr. Doeleman gave them wide latitude to improvise. \nIn April 2017, eight telescopes from Chile to Hawaii simultaneously focused on the same supermassive black hole, collecting five petabytes of wave-signal data. Once the data had been processed, the team held four exhaustive all-hands meetings to review it. The next step\u2014reducing it all down to a single image\u2014was the trickiest. This was where human bias might creep in. \nAnalysts working in fields like intelligence or meteorology often make predictions that impact millions of lives. The persistent danger is that whatever they want to believe, or assume to be true, will override their objectivity. In his 2011 book \u201cReducing Uncertainty,\u201d former intelligence analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Fingar\n\n\n\n wrote: \u201cThe line between analysis produced to inform and analysis produced to influence can be very vague.\u201d\nOn business teams, the central enemy is groupthink, which occurs when a group\u2019s natural urge to seek agreement leads to catastrophically ill-adviseddecisions.\nThe chief threat to the EHT imaging team was the consensus that black holes look like rings. To build an algorithm that predicts what data might \u201clook\u201d like, they would have to make hundreds of assumptions. If they harbored any prejudice, even subconsciously, they might corrupt the formulas to produce nothing but rings. \nTo test their algorithms for bias, the imaging team generated \u201cfake\u201d data designed to evoke other shapes; a shadow, a crescent, even a snowman. If the algorithms still spit out rings, they were clearly biased.\nAfter clearing that bar, the team split into four groups. They were given separate algorithms and sent to four disti In pursuit of an astronomical breakthrough, a global team of scientists used conflict, dissent and relentless bias-testing to produce the first-ever image of a black hole. ",
        "author": "Sam Walker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Supreme Court agreed to hear the census citizenship case. Here\u2019s why that matters. (WP: The Fix) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7133",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/20/supreme-court-agreed-hear-census-citizenship-case-heres-why-that-matters/",
        "text": "Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced in March that a question about citizenship would be added to the 2020 Census. Wide-ranging opposition followed \u2014 from local and state government officials, members of Congress and former Census Bureau directors, all citing consequences for decades to come.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHistorically, the Census Bureau has worked to guarantee the most accurate count of the entire United States population, notwithstanding citizenship. Census-recorded data has been used to determine how to draw congressional districts, allocate federal funds, and for national disaster and epidemic preparedness. Supporters of the question say its inclusion is logical and necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The current administration\u2019s unabashed hostility toward immigrants has led others to believe that undocumented individuals will hesitate to participate in a survey that asks about citizenship, resulting in a significant undercount of immigrant and minority communities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss, embroiled in a multistate lawsuit to block the question, has been accused of adding it for partisan purposes. Key issues in the case have made their way to the Supreme Court.The census, which is mandated by the Constitution, may be necessary to a well-functioning democracy, but can this last-minute addition to the survey truly have such dramatic costs?Is an undercount that big of a deal? Yes, and one that affects all U.S. residents, including legally documented populations.The most commonly discussed consequences of an undercount are its effect on congressional districts and federal funding. Robert Shapiro, senior policy fellow at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, estimates that more than 24 million people could avoid the 2020 Census to keep their information from being shared with law enforcement. This would affect federal programs, such as Medicaid, Section 8 Housing and school lunch programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom an emergency management perspective, although there is an important need for accurate counting, particularly when discussing electoral representation, any discrepancy between the census-reported \u201cofficial\u201d population and the actual population is problematic, Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, deputy director for the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told The Washington Post.Strategic planning begins with survey data, he said, yet public health responders are responsible for entire communities, notwithstanding the census count. Depressed census numbers threaten to undercut funding and create preparation blind spots.\u201cYou only know what you know,\u201d Schlegelmilch noted. \u201cUpstream funding becomes important. If you\u2019re responsible for caring for a whole community of 25,000, and the official number is far less, you\u2019re getting less number per capita to care for them.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe also explained that public health responders\u2019 ability to interact with all members of a community is necessary to protect it.\u201cDisasters don\u2019t respect politics. They\u2019re going to affect everyone in the community and not just those enumerated under the census. We need to make sure we have the most accurate counts possible, especially with those that are determining policy and funding to respond to a disaster,\u201d Schlegelmilch said.Supreme Court will hear arguments concerning Census citizenship questionWere the consequences of the citizenship question considered?Between 1820 and 1950, a different version of a citizenship question was included on decennial censuses. Since then, it has only appeared as part of the American Community Survey, also administered by the Census Bureau, but annually and to a smaller number of participants.Story continues below advertisementTypically, new survey questions must go through a lengthy approval process, with the Census Bureau running tests in the years leading up to the count. Accuracy of the count is of utmost importance, according to Juan Pablo Hourcade, a member of the Census Bureau\u2019s Scientific Advisory Committee and associate director for informatics education at the University of Iowa.Advertisement\u201cI think of [running and organizing the decennial census] almost as a space mission to Mars. It costs billions of dollars and takes years of planning and testing things to make sure you get everything right,\u201d he said, adding that he was not speaking on behalf of the Committee.Contrary to the census tradition of testing a question\u2019s impact before adding it, the citizenship inquiry was introduced late, preventing the bureau from fully \u2014 or even passably \u2014 piloting it, according to the committee\u2019s spring 2018 report.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019ve been planning a space mission for 10 years, and right before the mission you make a significant change to the spacecraft without testing it,\u201d Hourcade said. \u201cMaybe it won\u2019t crash, but you don\u2019t know. It\u2019s a big risk.\u201dIn a Jan. 8, email, Stephen L. Buckner, assistant director for communications at the Census Bureau, wrote to set up a meeting with Ross and Undersecretary Karen Dunn Kelley. Buckner said that he wanted to discuss the \u201ccrisis\u201d \u2014 defined as \u201cthe unprecedented level of public distrust and fear of providing information to the Census Bureau that Census Bureau field representatives are experiencing\u201d \u2014 and the bureau\u2019s plans to address it.AdvertisementUsing language from the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations\u2019 2017 recommendations to the Bureau, he wrote,* \u201cHistorically, one of the Census Bureau\u2019s biggest challenges in promoting public participation in the decennial Census (and other surveys) is to overcome the fear that segments of the public have that the information they provide will not be used to harm them in some way and will not be safe and confidential. \u2026 The Bureau staff are experiencing such fear and distrust at levels they have not previously seen.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDespite this, Ross considered only data through 2016 in opting to include the question of citizenship. Hence, the committee\u2019s official position that its \u201clast-minute inclusion\u201d was ill-advised.The committee chairman wrote: \u201cMoreover, the empirical evidence that was discussed by Sec. Ross came from data collected in a different data collection context, in a different political climate, before anti-immigrant attitudes were as salient and consequential.\u201dAmericans say they are less likely to fill out census than they were 10 years agoWhere are we now? Attorneys and politicians across the country are wondering the same.AdvertisementRoss, originally claiming that the citizenship question was added in response to a Justice Department request and was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, is caught up in pending litigation. Emails subsequently emerged that contradicted his initial explanation, but the Supreme Court intervened to temporarily block his deposition last month. The court did allow other depositions and a New York federal trial to proceed.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over whether Ross and others can be compelled to explain their actions.The court\u2019s timing is curious, because the New York trial is underway, with closing arguments scheduled next week. The Trump administration followed up Friday\u2019s ruling with a letter to the trial judge and an application to an appellate court, asking all final judgments be withheld until the Supreme Court issues its decision next spring.AdvertisementFor now, the outcome remains to be seen. Whatever the ruling, though, timing is of the essence: Census forms must be sent to the printer by June 2019, with or without the added question.Tara Bahrampour contributed to this report.Story continues below advertisement* Clarification: A previous version of this story referenced an email that Stephen L. Buckner wrote. Buckner\u2019s email included language that was copied and pasted from the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations\u2019 2017 recommendations to the U.S. Census Bureau. This story has been updated.Read more:Supreme Court allows trial on census citizenship question to go forwardStatistics expert testifies census citizenship question would harm countWilbur Ross, stop rigging the Census Why the census citizenship question lawsuit matters, as Trump tries to halt it and the Supreme Court agrees to hear it. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the census citizenship case. Here\u2019s why that matters.",
        "author": "Deanna Paul"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Supreme Court agreed to hear the census citizenship case. Here\u2019s why that matters. (WP: The Fix) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7134",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/20/supreme-court-agreed-hear-census-citizenship-case-heres-why-that-matters/",
        "text": "Department of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced in March that a question about citizenship would be added to the 2020 Census. Wide-ranging opposition followed \u2014 from local and state government officials, members of Congress and former Census Bureau directors, all citing consequences for decades to come.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHistorically, the Census Bureau has worked to guarantee the most accurate count of the entire United States population, notwithstanding citizenship. Census-recorded data has been used to determine how to draw congressional districts, allocate federal funds, and for national disaster and epidemic preparedness. Supporters of the question say its inclusion is logical and necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The current administration\u2019s unabashed hostility toward immigrants has led others to believe that undocumented individuals will hesitate to participate in a survey that asks about citizenship, resulting in a significant undercount of immigrant and minority communities.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss, embroiled in a multistate lawsuit to block the question, has been accused of adding it for partisan purposes. Key issues in the case have made their way to the Supreme Court.The census, which is mandated by the Constitution, may be necessary to a well-functioning democracy, but can this last-minute addition to the survey truly have such dramatic costs?Is an undercount that big of a deal? Yes, and one that affects all U.S. residents, including legally documented populations.The most commonly discussed consequences of an undercount are its effect on congressional districts and federal funding. Robert Shapiro, senior policy fellow at the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, estimates that more than 24 million people could avoid the 2020 Census to keep their information from being shared with law enforcement. This would affect federal programs, such as Medicaid, Section 8 Housing and school lunch programs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom an emergency management perspective, although there is an important need for accurate counting, particularly when discussing electoral representation, any discrepancy between the census-reported \u201cofficial\u201d population and the actual population is problematic, Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, deputy director for the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told The Washington Post.Strategic planning begins with survey data, he said, yet public health responders are responsible for entire communities, notwithstanding the census count. Depressed census numbers threaten to undercut funding and create preparation blind spots.\u201cYou only know what you know,\u201d Schlegelmilch noted. \u201cUpstream funding becomes important. If you\u2019re responsible for caring for a whole community of 25,000, and the official number is far less, you\u2019re getting less number per capita to care for them.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe also explained that public health responders\u2019 ability to interact with all members of a community is necessary to protect it.\u201cDisasters don\u2019t respect politics. They\u2019re going to affect everyone in the community and not just those enumerated under the census. We need to make sure we have the most accurate counts possible, especially with those that are determining policy and funding to respond to a disaster,\u201d Schlegelmilch said.Supreme Court will hear arguments concerning Census citizenship questionWere the consequences of the citizenship question considered?Between 1820 and 1950, a different version of a citizenship question was included on decennial censuses. Since then, it has only appeared as part of the American Community Survey, also administered by the Census Bureau, but annually and to a smaller number of participants.Story continues below advertisementTypically, new survey questions must go through a lengthy approval process, with the Census Bureau running tests in the years leading up to the count. Accuracy of the count is of utmost importance, according to Juan Pablo Hourcade, a member of the Census Bureau\u2019s Scientific Advisory Committee and associate director for informatics education at the University of Iowa.Advertisement\u201cI think of [running and organizing the decennial census] almost as a space mission to Mars. It costs billions of dollars and takes years of planning and testing things to make sure you get everything right,\u201d he said, adding that he was not speaking on behalf of the Committee.Contrary to the census tradition of testing a question\u2019s impact before adding it, the citizenship inquiry was introduced late, preventing the bureau from fully \u2014 or even passably \u2014 piloting it, according to the committee\u2019s spring 2018 report.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019ve been planning a space mission for 10 years, and right before the mission you make a significant change to the spacecraft without testing it,\u201d Hourcade said. \u201cMaybe it won\u2019t crash, but you don\u2019t know. It\u2019s a big risk.\u201dIn a Jan. 8, email, Stephen L. Buckner, assistant director for communications at the Census Bureau, wrote to set up a meeting with Ross and Undersecretary Karen Dunn Kelley. Buckner said that he wanted to discuss the \u201ccrisis\u201d \u2014 defined as \u201cthe unprecedented level of public distrust and fear of providing information to the Census Bureau that Census Bureau field representatives are experiencing\u201d \u2014 and the bureau\u2019s plans to address it.AdvertisementUsing language from the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations\u2019 2017 recommendations to the Bureau, he wrote,* \u201cHistorically, one of the Census Bureau\u2019s biggest challenges in promoting public participation in the decennial Census (and other surveys) is to overcome the fear that segments of the public have that the information they provide will not be used to harm them in some way and will not be safe and confidential. \u2026 The Bureau staff are experiencing such fear and distrust at levels they have not previously seen.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDespite this, Ross considered only data through 2016 in opting to include the question of citizenship. Hence, the committee\u2019s official position that its \u201clast-minute inclusion\u201d was ill-advised.The committee chairman wrote: \u201cMoreover, the empirical evidence that was discussed by Sec. Ross came from data collected in a different data collection context, in a different political climate, before anti-immigrant attitudes were as salient and consequential.\u201dAmericans say they are less likely to fill out census than they were 10 years agoWhere are we now? Attorneys and politicians across the country are wondering the same.AdvertisementRoss, originally claiming that the citizenship question was added in response to a Justice Department request and was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, is caught up in pending litigation. Emails subsequently emerged that contradicted his initial explanation, but the Supreme Court intervened to temporarily block his deposition last month. The court did allow other depositions and a New York federal trial to proceed.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over whether Ross and others can be compelled to explain their actions.The court\u2019s timing is curious, because the New York trial is underway, with closing arguments scheduled next week. The Trump administration followed up Friday\u2019s ruling with a letter to the trial judge and an application to an appellate court, asking all final judgments be withheld until the Supreme Court issues its decision next spring.AdvertisementFor now, the outcome remains to be seen. Whatever the ruling, though, timing is of the essence: Census forms must be sent to the printer by June 2019, with or without the added question.Tara Bahrampour contributed to this report.Story continues below advertisement* Clarification: A previous version of this story referenced an email that Stephen L. Buckner wrote. Buckner\u2019s email included language that was copied and pasted from the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations\u2019 2017 recommendations to the U.S. Census Bureau. This story has been updated.Read more:Supreme Court allows trial on census citizenship question to go forwardStatistics expert testifies census citizenship question would harm countWilbur Ross, stop rigging the Census Why the census citizenship question lawsuit matters, as Trump tries to halt it and the Supreme Court agrees to hear it. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the census citizenship case. Here\u2019s why that matters.",
        "author": "Deanna Paul"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Wonder Hanger Max and Sea-Bond are on Bill O\u2019Reilly\u2019s shrinking list of advertisers (WP: The Fix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7135",
        "date": "2017-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/04/06/wonder-hanger-max-and-sea-bond-are-on-bill-oreillys-shrinking-list-of-advertisers/",
        "text": "Writing about Glenn Beck's demise at Fox News, in 2011, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank observed\u00a0that the conservative provocateur had \"pushed further into dark conspiracies, urging his viewers to hoard food in their homes and to buy freeze-dried meals for sustenance when civilization breaks down.\"WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Wednesday night, during the first commercial break on \"The O'Reilly Factor,\" I watched a family gather for a turkey dinner that had been freeze-dried 25 years earlier. An alien spaceship hovered outside the window. Because you \"never know what could happen,\" I was told, I should buy a Harvest Right freeze dryer. Now that dozens of major advertisers have abandoned him, after\u00a0\u00a0a New York Times report on sexual harassment settlements, Bill O'Reilly is in freeze-dryer territory. That's not a great place to be.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWho is still buying airtime on his show? Well, there's the Wonder Hanger Max, \"guaranteed to triple your closet space\"; Sea-Bond, which is sticking to O'Reilly like dentures to your gums; and something called the Scottevest, which features 26 \u2014\u00a0that's right, 26! \u2014\u00a0pockets, thus enabling you to carry everything you own on your body at all times.O'Reilly's remaining sponsors do include such big-name brands as Crowne Plaza hotels and Verizon Fios, but many others seem to have been called up from the advertising minor leagues. Here is a list of the ads that aired on Wednesday's episode of \"The Factor\" in the D.C. market:First commercial breakLife Credit Co. (offering loans for cancer patients)Wonder Hanger MaxHarvest RightSecond commercial break\"The Son\" on AMC (a new show starring Pierce Brosnan)Crowne PlazaMyPillow\u00a0(inventor Mike Lindell personally guarantees it will be the most comfortable pillow you'll ever own!)\"The First 100 Days\" on Fox NewsWatchable (it's an app)Verizon FiosThird commercial breakRosland Capital (retirement accounts backed by gold and silver)ClearChoice (dental implants)ScottevestFox News (just in case you forgot which channel you're watching)Fourth commercial breakStein MartMattress FirmAngie's ListSimpliSafe (home security)Fox News\u00a0RadioFifth commercial breakVisiting Angels (home care for the elderly)\"The First 100 Days\" (yes, another house ad)Nationwide Infiniti\u00a0(Maryland car dealership)Next Day BlindsM&T BankSea-BondInvisalignSixth commercial break\"Forge of Empires\" (video game)Smart Mouth\u00a0(for dry mouth and bad breath)Entyvio\u00a0(for ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease)Lumber Liquidators Many seem to have been called up from the advertising minor leagues. Wonder Hanger Max and Sea-Bond are on Bill O\u2019Reilly\u2019s shrinking list of advertisers",
        "author": "Callum Borchers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Trump promised his supporters \u2018everything.\u2019 He didn\u2019t deliver on much of it. (WP: The Fix) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7136",
        "date": "2021-01-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/20/trump-promised-his-supporters-everything-he-didnt-deliver-most-it/",
        "text": "President Trump\u2019s term in office expired at noon Wednesday. And although he was never a broadly popular president, those who stuck by him have almost always cited a few things. Among them: that, whatever warts exist, he tells it like it is, and that he delivered on what he promised. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe former is undermined by his well more than 30,000 falsehoods as president. The latter is undermined by his record.Back when Trump won the presidency, The Washington Post\u2019s Jenna Johnson offered an indispensable look at just how much he had promised he would do as president \u2014 282 items, to be exact. It was, to put it lightly, a lot. Perhaps in large part because of his lack of political expertise, and perhaps in larger part because of his showman persona and his willingness to just say, well, anything, his mouth wrote a lot of checks that his actions couldn\u2019t cash (so to speak).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow that Trump\u2019s presidency has come to an end, I decided to look back at Johnson\u2019s list to see where Trump\u2019s promises landed. Many of them are tough to pin down because of a lack of specificity, but most are easier to evaluate. And the number of broken promises far outnumbers the 31 by our count that he kept.Below, a review, with the promises from Johnson\u2019s original list in bold.Promises keptCall the executives at the parent company of Carrier, an air-conditioning manufacturer that is closing a plant in Indiana and moving to Mexico, and threaten to impose a 35 percent tariff on air conditioners imported into the United States. Trump predicts the company will say: \u201cSir, we\u2019ve decided to stay in the United States.\u201d (A deal was struck before Trump took office, preserving 800 jobs in Indiana and leading Trump to hail the announcement as a sign of things to come, although since then, many businesses have moved production out of Indiana and overseas.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLeave the federal minimum wage at $7.25 per hour, which is already too high. (Trump also promised to raise the minimum wage at another point, which is contained below.)Renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205. (The deal was renegotiated as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.)On the first day in office, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Obama\u2019s signature trade deal linking countries around the Pacific Rim. (Trump did this in his first week, but not on the first day \u2014 probably close enough.)Immediately institute a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the workforce through attrition. There would be exceptions for those in the military, public safety and public health. (Trump did so, but it was rescinded April 2017.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOrder agency and department heads to identify all \u201cneedless job-killing regulations\u201d and then remove them. (Trump ordered such a review in 2017.)Eliminate [the Affordable Care Act\u2019s] individual mandate, as \u201cno person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to.\u201d (The individual mandate in the legislation was repealed, although the broader law was not.)Preserve Medicare and Medicaid but encourage states to root out fraud, waste and abuse. Provide states with block grants of Medicaid funds to provide more freedom in designing programs to assist low-income citizens. (Trump sought to allow states to receive Medicaid block grants via executive action. Tennessee recently became the first state to take advantage of that.)Story continues below advertisementPush the Food and Drug Administration to more quickly approve the thousands of drugs it is reviewing. Trump also wants to \u201cadvance research and development in health care.\u201d (For better or worse, he applied pressure on the FDA on coronavirus treatments and vaccines.)AdvertisementEnd \u201ccatch-and-release.\u201d Anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed from the country. (This was still happening as of 2018, although the administration announced its official end in 2019, including implementing policies that led among other things to separating families.)Reduce the number of legal immigrants because it is \u201csimply too large to perform adequate screening,\u201d and these immigrants could be taking jobs away from American workers. (The number was sharply reduced, although Trump also promised to increase them at other points \u2014 as detailed below.)Story continues below advertisementAs soon as he takes office, ask Congress to repeal the defense sequester that limited the military\u2019s budget. (The process Trump was targeting \u2014 known as sequestration \u2014 remains on the books, but since 2018, it has essentially been displaced by new spending bills, and the limitations are due to end after 2021.)AdvertisementStrengthen the military so that it\u2019s \u201cso big and so strong and so great\u201d that \u201cnobody\u2019s going to mess with us.\u201d (Trump has expanded military funding, and nobody has messed with us during his four years \u2014 although that was also the case in previous presidencies.)Keep the military prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay open. (It\u2019s still open.)Get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin. \u201cI hope that we get along great with Putin because it would be great to have Russia with a good relationship.\u201d Trump would also look into lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea. (Trump got along great with Putin \u2014 often to the consternation of U.S. officials. But he did not lift Crimea-related sanctions.)Story continues below advertisementCommunicate with North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un about his nuclear program, which would mark a major shift in U.S. policy toward the isolated nation. \u201cI would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him.\u201d (Trump also did this, to the occasional consternation of said officials.)Advertisement\u201cStand with the oppressed people of Venezuela yearning to be free.\u201d (This was a priority for Trump\u2019s administration, including recognizing interim president Juan Guaid\u00f3.)Be a \u201ctrue friend to Israel.\u201d Trump says the United States will \u201cbe working with Israel very closely, very, very closely.\u201d (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Trump was the greatest friend Israel had.)Story continues below advertisementImmediately ask the generals to present a plan within 30 days to defeat and destroy the Islamic State. (Trump did this upon assuming the presidency. The caliphate has been essentially eliminated, although that builds upon progress from the prior administration.)Frequently use the term \u201cradical Islamic terrorism.\u201d (This was a mainstay of Trump\u2019s public comments, although others in his administration eschewed it.)Temporarily suspend \u201cimmigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism.\u201d Order the Department of State, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to develop a list of regions and countries to include. The list will likely include Syria and Libya. (Trump effectively did this with his travel ban from several countries, including Syria and Libya. He also at times proposed a Muslim ban \u2014 which will be cited later.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRescind all environmental executive actions signed by President Barack Obama. (Trump rescinded dozens of them.)Oppose a carbon tax on fossil fuels use that could be used to reverse damage to the environment caused by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (No carbon tax passed under Trump. One also failed under Obama.)Revoke restrictions on new drilling technologies and support \u201csafe hydraulic fracturing\u201d to create \u201cmillions of jobs.\u201d Lease more federal land for drilling, including \u201cvast areas of our offshore energy resources.\u201d (Trump routinely expanded drilling and fracking.)Pull out of the Paris agreement, which was signed by 196 countries pledging to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.Restore and protect the Florida Everglades, even though it\u2019s a \u201crough-looking sight down there.\u201d (The most recent budget signed by Trump last month included a record amount for the Everglades.)AdvertisementCreate \u201cjobs and opportunities for African Americans and Hispanic Americans.\u201d (Both unemployment rates hit record lows under Trump, as the overall unemployment rate also sank to a historic lows, although all have risen amid the coronavirus pandemic. What\u2019s more, the trends for each largely continued their trajectory from before the pandemic.)Rescind Obama\u2019s executive actions related to gun control. (Trump did so.)\u201cI refuse to be politically correct.\u201dPass on the president\u2019s annual salary of $400,000.\u201cI promise I will never be in a bicycle race. That I can tell you.\u201d (Trump criticized then-Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who was injured while riding a bicycle amid the Iran negotiations.) (Trump lived up to this, by all accounts.)Promises brokenCreate at least 25 million jobs and \u201cbe the greatest jobs president that God ever created.\u201d (About 6.5 million jobs were created in Trump\u2019s first three years, before the coronavirus pandemic set in. Even ignoring the losses since then, that wouldn\u2019t have been on pace for 25 million jobs even if Trump had served eight years.)\u201cWe will double our growth and have the strongest economy anywhere in the world.\u201d Grow the nation\u2019s economy by at least 4 percent per year, although Trump has also suggested he will boost growth to at least 6 percent per year \u2014 if not much higher. (Excluding 2020, growth in Trump\u2019s initial three years in office was 2.5 percent. That was narrowly above that of Obama.)Eliminate the $19 trillion national debt within eight years by \u201cvigorously eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, ending redundant government programs and growing the economy to increase tax revenues.\u201d (The debt grew to more than $26 trillion and was growing even before the pandemic.)Cut the budget by 20 percent by simply negotiating better prices or renegotiating existing deals. (See above.)Implement the \u201cPenny Plan,\u201d which each year would reduce net spending by 1 percent of the previous year\u2019s total. Over 10 years, Trump says, this would reduce spending by almost $1 trillion. Defense and public safety spending would be exempt. (See above.)\u201cCompletely repeal\u201d the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something \u201cterrific\u201d that is \u201cso much better, so much better, so much better.\u201d Americans will have \u201cgreat health care at a fraction of the cost.\u201d (The ACA, also known as Obamacare, wasn\u2019t repealed.)Accomplish more immigration reforms in a few months than politicians have accomplished in the past 50 years. With these reforms, Trump promised: \u201cCrime will go down, border crossings will plummet, gangs will disappear and welfare use will decrease.\u201d (Trump accomplished no significant immigration reform, beyond executive orders. Gangs still exist, and violent crime is about the same level as when Trump took over.)Make illegal immigration a \u201cmemory of the past.\u201d (It hasn\u2019t been eliminated as Trump suggested. There was also a huge surge on his watch.)\u201cGet Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries.\u201d (Apple in 2019 moved Mac Pro production out of the United States to China.)Raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour, as $7.25 is too low and \u201cthe minimum wage has to go up.\u201dInstitute a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. (Trump signed an executive order to this effect in 2017 but revoked it overnight.)\u201cI\u2019m going to be so presidential, you\u2019re going to be so bored.\u201d He might also quit tweeting. (He did not make anyone bored, and he stopped tweeting only this month, because he was banned from the platform.)Twitter on Jan. 8 banned President Trump from its site, a punishment for his role in inciting violence at the U.S. Capitol. (The Washington Post)\u201cI would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.\u201d Trump said he will make time for golf but promised to \u201calways play with leaders of countries and people that can help us.\u201d (Trump played golf more often than Obama, whom he often regularly criticized for playing too much, and he rarely did so with people of such stature. He also spent lots of time at his properties away from the White House.)\u201cIf I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce it.\u201d (He threatened North Korea with \u201cfire and fury\u201d if it continued to threaten the United States, but despite cordial relations with Kim, the threats remained.)Fully focus on the presidency and put his three oldest children \u2014 Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump \u2014 in charge of running his company. (Ivanka Trump joined the White House, and there were signs that Trump hadn\u2019t completely distanced himself from his businesses.)Lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent and get rid of most corporate tax loopholes or incentives. Allow corporations a one-time window to transfer money being held overseas, charging a much-reduced 10 percent tax. (The corporate tax rate remains at 21 percent \u2014 although that\u2019s down from 35 percent.)\u201cWe are going to have the biggest tax cuts since Ronald Reagan.\u201d (The Trump tax cut was nearly 0.9 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 2.89 percent of GDP for President Ronald Reagan\u2019s 1981 tax cut. Data show it\u2019s only the eighth-largest on record.)Negotiate trade deals with individual countries instead of regions. Trump would gather together the \u201csmartest negotiators in the world\u201d and assign them each a country. Billionaire hedge fund manager Carl Icahn would be in charge of trade negotiations with China and Japan. (Icahn advised on regulatory reform but quit without holding a formal position. There is no evidence that individuals such as him were hired to handle trade deals with specific countries.)Impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese products imported into the United States. (Trump\u2019s trade war did not go that far.)Stop spending money on space exploration until the United States can fix its potholes. Encourage private space-exploration companies to expand. (Trump proposed increased spending for NASA and launched Space Force.)Stop so-called zombie spending, in which the government funds programs that have had their congressional authorization lapse. By cutting 5 percent of this spending, Trump estimates he could save almost $200 billion over 10 years. (Such spending included funding \u201cveterans\u2019 medical care, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI, the Federal Election Commission and U.S. embassies and consulates abroad,\u201d none of which have ceased).Knock down the regulatory walls between states for health insurance, making plans available nationally instead of regionally. \u201cInsurance costs will go down and consumer satisfaction will go up.\u201d (Fact check)Expand use of Health Savings Accounts, which allow workers to save money for medical expenses without having to pay federal income tax on those funds. These payments will be allowed to accumulate and can be passed on to heirs. These funds can be used by any member of a family. (HSAs are very similar to when Trump took office.)Bring down drug prices by importing cheaper medications from overseas and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. (By and large, drug prices haven\u2019t decreased.)Fully fund the construction of an \u201cimpenetrable physical wall\u201d along the southern border with Mexico. The wall will be one foot taller than the Great Wall of China and \u201cartistically beautiful,\u201d constructed of hardened concrete, rebar and steel. The wall might cover only about 1,000 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile border because of natural barriers, and Trump is open to using fencing in some places. (The portion of wall that has been built is not impenetrable, and it\u2019s not nearly as expansive as Trump pledged.)Make Mexico pay for the wall, \u201c100 percent.\u201d If Mexico refuses, then the United States will impound remittance payments taken from the wages of undocumented immigrants, cut foreign aid, institute tariffs, cancel visas for Mexican business leaders and diplomats, and increase fees for visas, border-crossing cards and port use. (None of this has happened.)Each time President Trump turned down money for his wall, he ended up with less money than he started with. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)\u201cCharge Mexico $100,000 for every illegal that crosses that border because it\u2019s trouble.\u201d (See above.)Triple the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. (The size of ICE has not increased substantially during Trump\u2019s presidency.)Cancel federal funding to \u201csanctuary cities\u201d that choose to not prosecute undocumented immigrants for being in the country illegally. (According to PolitiFact, \u201cOverall, the Justice Department has not been successful in withholding federal funds for so-called sanctuary cities.\u201d)Immediately deport undocumented immigrants who have committed a crime, are a member of a gang or pose a security threat. Trump estimates this is 2 million to 3 million people, although experts say the number is much lower. Deport the millions of undocumented immigrants who are in the United States on an expired visa. (Trump removed about 935,000 people during his four years \u2014 far short of the millions promised and less than Obama\u2019s first term, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute.Restore the Secure Communities deportation program, which was ended by the Obama administration in 2014. The program was a partnership among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that worked together to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. (Trump\u2019s attempt was blocked by a judge.)Allow \u201ctremendous numbers\u201d of legal immigrants based on a \u201cmerit system,\u201d selecting immigrants who will help grow the country\u2019s economy. (The number of legal immigrants has been sharply reduced, although Trump at other points promised to decrease them.)Expand the number of H-1B visas for highly skilled workers so that more of the \u201ctalented people\u201d who graduate from Ivy League institutions can stay in the United States and work in Silicon Valley. (Trump tightened rules for these, although he at other points said he would restrict them.)Get rid of the H-1B visa program because it\u2019s \u201cvery, very bad\u201d for American workers. (He did not get rid of the program, although he tightened the rules.)End birthright citizenship, granting citizenship only to babies whose parents are legally in the country. (This would have required a constitutional amendment, but it was never pushed.)Strengthen and expand the use of E-Verify, which allows employers to check an employee\u2019s eligibility to work. (Trump retreated on this.)Urge assimilation because \u201cour system of government, and our American culture, is the best in the world and will produce the best outcomes for all who adopt it.\u201d (Trump didn\u2019t mention \u201cassimilation\u201d or \u201cassimilate\u201d once after he became president, per Factbase.)Grow the Army from its current size of 470,000 active-duty soldiers to 540,000. (As of September, it stood at about 481,000.)Drop that \u201cdirty, rotten traitor\u201d Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl out of an airplane into desolate Afghanistan without a parachute. Trump has also suggested that Bergdahl be shot. (Neither has occurred.)Appoint a Department of Veterans Affairs secretary whose \u201csole purpose will be to serve veterans.\u201d (Trump\u2019s first VA secretary, David Shulkin, was forced out over alleged misuse of taxpayer money.)Dramatically reform the agency. Fire \u201cthe corrupt and incompetent\u201d leaders and make it easier for the secretary to fire people. Trump promises to protect and promote \u201chonest employees\u201d who highlight wrongdoing. These employees will also receive bonuses. (Trump has claimed credit for the VA Choice Act, but it was passed under Obama.)President Trump has repeatedly tried to erase former president Barack Obama and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) from the history of the Veterans Choice Act. (The Washington Post)Stay out of the Syrian civil war. Although Trump considers Syrian President Bashar al-Assad \u201cbad,\u201d he has said the United States has higher priorities. Around the world, Trump said, he prefers stability over regime changes. (Trump struck Syria after a chemical weapons attack and hailed the U.S. role in the decline of the Islamic State in the region.)Negotiate the release of all U.S. prisoners held in Iran before taking office. (Five Americans were released during the campaign, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian; Trump claimed some credit for this.) (Other U.S. prisoners remain in Iran.)Refuse to call Iran\u2019s leader by his preferred title. \u201cI\u2019ll say, \u2018Hey, baby, how ya doing?\u2019 I will never call him the supreme leader.\u201d (Trump occasionally cast doubt on that title, but has also used it without that caveat.)Call an international conference focused on how to halt the spread of the \u201chateful ideology of Radical Islam.\u201dAllow Russia to deal with the Islamic State in Syria and/or work with Putin to wipe out shared enemies. (Trump routinely claimed credit for knocking out the Islamic State caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Although the United States became involved, there was no explicit partnership with Russia.)Shut down parts of the Internet so that Islamic State terrorists cannot use it to recruit American children. (Fact check)Bring back waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, and use interrogation techniques that are \u201ca hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.\u201d Even if such tactics don\u2019t work, Trump says, suspected terrorists \u201cdeserve it anyway, for what they\u2019re doing.\u201d (Trump suggested after the election, however, that he was reconsidering his position because of a conversation with a general who opposed the tactic.)Establish a Commission on Radical Islam that will include \u201creformist voices in the Muslim community\u201d and will identify the warning signs of radicalization, educate the American public, and develop protocol for police officers, federal investigators and immigration screeners. (Fact check)Heavily surveil mosques in the United States. Trump has said he would \u201cstrongly consider\u201d closing some mosques.Encourage Muslim communities to \u201ccooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad \u2014 and they do know where they are.\u201dBar Syrian refugees from entering the country and kick out any who are already living here, as they might be \u201cthe ultimate Trojan horse.\u201d (Trump pulled back on kicking out Syrian refugees.)Create a database of Syrian refugees. Trump has also seemed open to the idea of creating a database of Muslims in the country, although his aides say that is not true.Set up safe zones in Syria and then force wealthy Persian Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia to pick up the bill. \u201cThey\u2019re going to put up all the money. We\u2019re not going to put up money. We\u2019re going to lead it, and we\u2019ll do a great a job. But we\u2019re going to get the Gulf states to put up the money.\u201d (Trump continued talking about the idea, but there is no indication they\u2019ve been set up or funded as he suggested.)Scrap the Clean Power Plan, which reduces the amount of carbon pollution from power plants. Trump says this could save the country $7.2 billion per year. (Just this week, a federal appeals court struck down the Trump administration\u2019s Clean Power Plan replacement.)Treat climate change such as the \u201choax\u201d that Trump has said it is. (In a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump seemed to soften that position.) (Trump had not called climate change a \u201choax\u201d since assuming the presidency, although he cast doubt on its severity.)Become the world\u2019s dominant leader in energy production. Attain \u201ccomplete American energy independence\u201d so that the United States is no longer dependent on foreign oil. (The United States is not the world\u2019s dominant leader in energy, although it has increased energy production across sectors. The nation also still imports foreign oil.)Ensure the country has \u201cabsolutely crystal clear and clean water\u201d and \u201cbeautiful, immaculate air.\u201d (Air pollution has increased in recent years.)Spur the spending of $1 trillion in public and private funds on infrastructure projects over 10 years. Invest in \u201ctransportation, clean water, a modern and reliable electricity grid, telecommunications, security infrastructure and other pressing domestic infrastructure needs\u201d without adding to the national debt. (Despite repeated \u201cinfrastructure weeks,\u201d no significant infrastructure legislation was passed on Trump\u2019s watch.)President Trump has derailed White House \"infrastructure week,\" meant to promote his infrastructure agenda, at least half a dozen times over the past two years. (The Washington Post)\u201cDrain the swamp\u201d in Washington and \u201ccut our ties with the failed politicians of the past.\u201d (Trump pardoned several politicians found guilty of wrongdoing. He has also recently acknowledged, even after the 2020 campaign, that the \u201cswamp\u201d is not yet drained, suggesting that much of the work still lay ahead. \u201cOur fight to drain the Washington swamp and reclaim America\u2019s destiny and dignity has only just begun,\u201d he said earlier this month.)Trump said he would drain the swamp, even as his personal lawyer sold access to the president for hundreds of thousands of dollars. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)Propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress, limiting House members to three terms, or six years, and senators to two terms, or 12 years. (Trump never did so.)Ban foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections. (This was never passed. Trump also at times welcomed foreign help in his reelection campaign, including from Ukraine and China.)\u201cLock her up.\u201d Instruct the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u201csituation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.\u201d Trump had said the investigation would include Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and the ways in which the Clinton Foundation raised money. (Trump never got this done, although at times he reportedly pushed for such a step.)Get rid of Common Core because it\u2019s \u201ca disaster\u201d and a \u201cvery bad thing.\u201d (Many states still use Common Core.)Reduce or end the government\u2019s role in student loans. (The federal government remains very much involved in student loans, which Trump used to delay loan payments during the coronavirus pandemic.)Rewrite the tax code to allow parents to fully deduct child-care expenses for up to four children and older dependents. (Some of these expenses are already deductible under the law.)Guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave by amending the conditions of unemployment insurance employers are required to carry. (The vast majority of workers still don\u2019t have such paid leave.)Get rid of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations such as churches from formally endorsing or opposing political candidates. (Despite Trump\u2019s claims to he contrary, the Johnson Amendment is still on the books.)Quickly end inner-city violence, which Trump has repeatedly compared to war zones. \u201cI\u2019ll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in your inner city, or wherever you are, you\u2019re not going to be shot. Your child isn\u2019t going to be shot.\u201d (Trump said recently that urban areas remain dangerous places and used that as a centerpiece of his campaign.)Stop the surge of violent crime and homicides in Chicago within \u201cone week.\u201d (Chicago has recently experienced its highest crime and homicide rate in decades. Regardless of the cause, Trump didn\u2019t stop the surge \u2014 much less in one week.)\u201cThe crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.\u201d On that day, Trump says, \u201cAmericans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.\u201d (See above.)Immediately stop the killing of police officers. \u201cIt\u2019s going to stop, okay? It\u2019s going to stop. We\u2019re going to be law and order. It\u2019s going to stop.\u201d (Police officer deaths didn\u2019t stop, and they actually were on the high end during much of Trump\u2019s presidency.)Sign an executive order calling for the death penalty for anyone found guilty of killing a police officer. (This in all likelihood couldn\u2019t be done via executive order, and Trump never attempted it.)Expand the use of \u201cstop and frisk,\u201d which Trump says worked \u201cincredibly well\u201d in New York. (Trump talked about stop and frisk occasionally, but never took steps to expand its use.)Encourage profiling and targeting \u201cpeople that maybe look suspicious.\u201d (Trump didn\u2019t talk about profiling \u2014 racial or otherwise \u2014 as president, although some opponents of his immigration policies warned that such things could result from them.)\u201cIf I become president, we\u2019re all going to be saying \u2018Merry Christmas\u2019 again.\u201d (A December 2018 poll showed that, since Trump was elected in 2016, those preferring \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d over \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d actually dipped below 60 percent each year \u2014 lower than in previous surveys.)\u201cAnd at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African American vote. I promise you. Because I will produce.\u201d (Not even close. Trump got 12 percent, according to exit polls \u2014 although that was an improvement on recent Republican candidates.)Sign into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks, the point at which antiabortion activists say a fetus can feel pain. (The Senate did not pass the law, so Trump never signed it.)Make the Hyde Amendment permanent. Since 1976, Congress has annually passed the Hyde Amendment, banning the use of federal dollars \u2014 in particular, Medicaid funds \u2014 for abortion, except in the case of rape, incest or a threat to the mother\u2019s life. (The Senate also voted against making the Hyde Amendment permanent.)On the first day in office, get rid of gun-free zones at military bases, recruiting centers and, in some cases, schools. These zones are like \u201ctarget practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill.\u201d (Fact check)Fix the background check system used when purchasing guns to ensure states are properly uploading criminal and health records. (There have been no significant fixes to the background check system, even as Trump flirted with such ideas after mass shootings.)Allow concealed-carry permits to be recognized in all 50 states. (See above.)Impose a minimum sentence of five years in federal prison for any violent felon who commits a crime using a gun, with no chance for parole or early release. (See above.)Expand programs such as Project Exile, a federal program started in Virginia in 1997 that locked up criminals possessing illegal guns for years in federal prisons far from their homes. (See above.)\u201cOpen up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.\u201d (Libel laws remain unchanged, despite Trump\u2019s frequent threats on this front.)Stop AT&T from buying Time Warner, the parent company of CNN. Federal antitrust regulators would have to review and approve that type of merger. (Trump\u2019s Justice Department attempted to block the merger, but failed.)Fix the rigged system. (Trump claimed many things are \u201crigged,\u201d but foremost among them was our electoral system. Yet he failed to fix it, by his own admission. Trump spent two months after the 2020 election baselessly alleging that it had been stolen from him.)Institute a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave office. (Trump signed an executive order, but it included significant caveats, including restricting officials from lobbying their former agency and leaving a relatively narrow definition of \u201clobbying.\u201d He then rescinded that order, doing so overnight in the final hours of his presidency.)Sue the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or assault. \u201cAll of these liars will be sued after the election is over.\u201d (He never did so.)Sue the New York Times for publishing accusations from women who say Trump groped them. (Trump didn\u2019t sue the newspaper, although he later attempted to do so for its Russia investigation coverage.)Reopen Trump University.\u201cI don\u2019t settle cases. I don\u2019t do it.\u201d (Even after this comment but before he became president, Trump University settled. And since then, his organizations have settled some more.)Change the new name of North America\u2019s tallest mountain back to Mount McKinley. (It\u2019s still called Denali.)\u201cBe the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.\u201d (Even Trump\u2019s suspiciously rosy doctor\u2019s reports have put him on the borderline of obesity, and he made a still-unexplaine Th",
        "author": "Aaron Blake"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Trump promised his supporters \u2018everything.\u2019 He didn\u2019t deliver on much of it. (WP: The Fix) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7137",
        "date": "2021-01-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/20/trump-promised-his-supporters-everything-he-didnt-deliver-most-it/",
        "text": "President Trump\u2019s term in office expired at noon Wednesday. And although he was never a broadly popular president, those who stuck by him have almost always cited a few things. Among them: that, whatever warts exist, he tells it like it is, and that he delivered on what he promised. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe former is undermined by his well more than 30,000 falsehoods as president. The latter is undermined by his record.Back when Trump won the presidency, The Washington Post\u2019s Jenna Johnson offered an indispensable look at just how much he had promised he would do as president \u2014 282 items, to be exact. It was, to put it lightly, a lot. Perhaps in large part because of his lack of political expertise, and perhaps in larger part because of his showman persona and his willingness to just say, well, anything, his mouth wrote a lot of checks that his actions couldn\u2019t cash (so to speak).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow that Trump\u2019s presidency has come to an end, I decided to look back at Johnson\u2019s list to see where Trump\u2019s promises landed. Many of them are tough to pin down because of a lack of specificity, but most are easier to evaluate. And the number of broken promises far outnumbers the 31 by our count that he kept.Below, a review, with the promises from Johnson\u2019s original list in bold.Promises keptCall the executives at the parent company of Carrier, an air-conditioning manufacturer that is closing a plant in Indiana and moving to Mexico, and threaten to impose a 35 percent tariff on air conditioners imported into the United States. Trump predicts the company will say: \u201cSir, we\u2019ve decided to stay in the United States.\u201d (A deal was struck before Trump took office, preserving 800 jobs in Indiana and leading Trump to hail the announcement as a sign of things to come, although since then, many businesses have moved production out of Indiana and overseas.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLeave the federal minimum wage at $7.25 per hour, which is already too high. (Trump also promised to raise the minimum wage at another point, which is contained below.)Renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205. (The deal was renegotiated as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.)On the first day in office, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Obama\u2019s signature trade deal linking countries around the Pacific Rim. (Trump did this in his first week, but not on the first day \u2014 probably close enough.)Immediately institute a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the workforce through attrition. There would be exceptions for those in the military, public safety and public health. (Trump did so, but it was rescinded April 2017.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOrder agency and department heads to identify all \u201cneedless job-killing regulations\u201d and then remove them. (Trump ordered such a review in 2017.)Eliminate [the Affordable Care Act\u2019s] individual mandate, as \u201cno person should be required to buy insurance unless he or she wants to.\u201d (The individual mandate in the legislation was repealed, although the broader law was not.)Preserve Medicare and Medicaid but encourage states to root out fraud, waste and abuse. Provide states with block grants of Medicaid funds to provide more freedom in designing programs to assist low-income citizens. (Trump sought to allow states to receive Medicaid block grants via executive action. Tennessee recently became the first state to take advantage of that.)Story continues below advertisementPush the Food and Drug Administration to more quickly approve the thousands of drugs it is reviewing. Trump also wants to \u201cadvance research and development in health care.\u201d (For better or worse, he applied pressure on the FDA on coronavirus treatments and vaccines.)AdvertisementEnd \u201ccatch-and-release.\u201d Anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed from the country. (This was still happening as of 2018, although the administration announced its official end in 2019, including implementing policies that led among other things to separating families.)Reduce the number of legal immigrants because it is \u201csimply too large to perform adequate screening,\u201d and these immigrants could be taking jobs away from American workers. (The number was sharply reduced, although Trump also promised to increase them at other points \u2014 as detailed below.)Story continues below advertisementAs soon as he takes office, ask Congress to repeal the defense sequester that limited the military\u2019s budget. (The process Trump was targeting \u2014 known as sequestration \u2014 remains on the books, but since 2018, it has essentially been displaced by new spending bills, and the limitations are due to end after 2021.)AdvertisementStrengthen the military so that it\u2019s \u201cso big and so strong and so great\u201d that \u201cnobody\u2019s going to mess with us.\u201d (Trump has expanded military funding, and nobody has messed with us during his four years \u2014 although that was also the case in previous presidencies.)Keep the military prison at Guant\u00e1namo Bay open. (It\u2019s still open.)Get along with Russian President Vladimir Putin. \u201cI hope that we get along great with Putin because it would be great to have Russia with a good relationship.\u201d Trump would also look into lifting the sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea. (Trump got along great with Putin \u2014 often to the consternation of U.S. officials. But he did not lift Crimea-related sanctions.)Story continues below advertisementCommunicate with North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong Un about his nuclear program, which would mark a major shift in U.S. policy toward the isolated nation. \u201cI would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him.\u201d (Trump also did this, to the occasional consternation of said officials.)Advertisement\u201cStand with the oppressed people of Venezuela yearning to be free.\u201d (This was a priority for Trump\u2019s administration, including recognizing interim president Juan Guaid\u00f3.)Be a \u201ctrue friend to Israel.\u201d Trump says the United States will \u201cbe working with Israel very closely, very, very closely.\u201d (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Trump was the greatest friend Israel had.)Story continues below advertisementImmediately ask the generals to present a plan within 30 days to defeat and destroy the Islamic State. (Trump did this upon assuming the presidency. The caliphate has been essentially eliminated, although that builds upon progress from the prior administration.)Frequently use the term \u201cradical Islamic terrorism.\u201d (This was a mainstay of Trump\u2019s public comments, although others in his administration eschewed it.)Temporarily suspend \u201cimmigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism.\u201d Order the Department of State, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice to develop a list of regions and countries to include. The list will likely include Syria and Libya. (Trump effectively did this with his travel ban from several countries, including Syria and Libya. He also at times proposed a Muslim ban \u2014 which will be cited later.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRescind all environmental executive actions signed by President Barack Obama. (Trump rescinded dozens of them.)Oppose a carbon tax on fossil fuels use that could be used to reverse damage to the environment caused by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (No carbon tax passed under Trump. One also failed under Obama.)Revoke restrictions on new drilling technologies and support \u201csafe hydraulic fracturing\u201d to create \u201cmillions of jobs.\u201d Lease more federal land for drilling, including \u201cvast areas of our offshore energy resources.\u201d (Trump routinely expanded drilling and fracking.)Pull out of the Paris agreement, which was signed by 196 countries pledging to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.Restore and protect the Florida Everglades, even though it\u2019s a \u201crough-looking sight down there.\u201d (The most recent budget signed by Trump last month included a record amount for the Everglades.)AdvertisementCreate \u201cjobs and opportunities for African Americans and Hispanic Americans.\u201d (Both unemployment rates hit record lows under Trump, as the overall unemployment rate also sank to a historic lows, although all have risen amid the coronavirus pandemic. What\u2019s more, the trends for each largely continued their trajectory from before the pandemic.)Rescind Obama\u2019s executive actions related to gun control. (Trump did so.)\u201cI refuse to be politically correct.\u201dPass on the president\u2019s annual salary of $400,000.\u201cI promise I will never be in a bicycle race. That I can tell you.\u201d (Trump criticized then-Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who was injured while riding a bicycle amid the Iran negotiations.) (Trump lived up to this, by all accounts.)Promises brokenCreate at least 25 million jobs and \u201cbe the greatest jobs president that God ever created.\u201d (About 6.5 million jobs were created in Trump\u2019s first three years, before the coronavirus pandemic set in. Even ignoring the losses since then, that wouldn\u2019t have been on pace for 25 million jobs even if Trump had served eight years.)\u201cWe will double our growth and have the strongest economy anywhere in the world.\u201d Grow the nation\u2019s economy by at least 4 percent per year, although Trump has also suggested he will boost growth to at least 6 percent per year \u2014 if not much higher. (Excluding 2020, growth in Trump\u2019s initial three years in office was 2.5 percent. That was narrowly above that of Obama.)Eliminate the $19 trillion national debt within eight years by \u201cvigorously eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, ending redundant government programs and growing the economy to increase tax revenues.\u201d (The debt grew to more than $26 trillion and was growing even before the pandemic.)Cut the budget by 20 percent by simply negotiating better prices or renegotiating existing deals. (See above.)Implement the \u201cPenny Plan,\u201d which each year would reduce net spending by 1 percent of the previous year\u2019s total. Over 10 years, Trump says, this would reduce spending by almost $1 trillion. Defense and public safety spending would be exempt. (See above.)\u201cCompletely repeal\u201d the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something \u201cterrific\u201d that is \u201cso much better, so much better, so much better.\u201d Americans will have \u201cgreat health care at a fraction of the cost.\u201d (The ACA, also known as Obamacare, wasn\u2019t repealed.)Accomplish more immigration reforms in a few months than politicians have accomplished in the past 50 years. With these reforms, Trump promised: \u201cCrime will go down, border crossings will plummet, gangs will disappear and welfare use will decrease.\u201d (Trump accomplished no significant immigration reform, beyond executive orders. Gangs still exist, and violent crime is about the same level as when Trump took over.)Make illegal immigration a \u201cmemory of the past.\u201d (It hasn\u2019t been eliminated as Trump suggested. There was also a huge surge on his watch.)\u201cGet Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries.\u201d (Apple in 2019 moved Mac Pro production out of the United States to China.)Raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour, as $7.25 is too low and \u201cthe minimum wage has to go up.\u201dInstitute a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. (Trump signed an executive order to this effect in 2017 but revoked it overnight.)\u201cI\u2019m going to be so presidential, you\u2019re going to be so bored.\u201d He might also quit tweeting. (He did not make anyone bored, and he stopped tweeting only this month, because he was banned from the platform.)Twitter on Jan. 8 banned President Trump from its site, a punishment for his role in inciting violence at the U.S. Capitol. (The Washington Post)\u201cI would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.\u201d Trump said he will make time for golf but promised to \u201calways play with leaders of countries and people that can help us.\u201d (Trump played golf more often than Obama, whom he often regularly criticized for playing too much, and he rarely did so with people of such stature. He also spent lots of time at his properties away from the White House.)\u201cIf I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce it.\u201d (He threatened North Korea with \u201cfire and fury\u201d if it continued to threaten the United States, but despite cordial relations with Kim, the threats remained.)Fully focus on the presidency and put his three oldest children \u2014 Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump \u2014 in charge of running his company. (Ivanka Trump joined the White House, and there were signs that Trump hadn\u2019t completely distanced himself from his businesses.)Lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent and get rid of most corporate tax loopholes or incentives. Allow corporations a one-time window to transfer money being held overseas, charging a much-reduced 10 percent tax. (The corporate tax rate remains at 21 percent \u2014 although that\u2019s down from 35 percent.)\u201cWe are going to have the biggest tax cuts since Ronald Reagan.\u201d (The Trump tax cut was nearly 0.9 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 2.89 percent of GDP for President Ronald Reagan\u2019s 1981 tax cut. Data show it\u2019s only the eighth-largest on record.)Negotiate trade deals with individual countries instead of regions. Trump would gather together the \u201csmartest negotiators in the world\u201d and assign them each a country. Billionaire hedge fund manager Carl Icahn would be in charge of trade negotiations with China and Japan. (Icahn advised on regulatory reform but quit without holding a formal position. There is no evidence that individuals such as him were hired to handle trade deals with specific countries.)Impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese products imported into the United States. (Trump\u2019s trade war did not go that far.)Stop spending money on space exploration until the United States can fix its potholes. Encourage private space-exploration companies to expand. (Trump proposed increased spending for NASA and launched Space Force.)Stop so-called zombie spending, in which the government funds programs that have had their congressional authorization lapse. By cutting 5 percent of this spending, Trump estimates he could save almost $200 billion over 10 years. (Such spending included funding \u201cveterans\u2019 medical care, the National Institutes of Health, the FBI, the Federal Election Commission and U.S. embassies and consulates abroad,\u201d none of which have ceased).Knock down the regulatory walls between states for health insurance, making plans available nationally instead of regionally. \u201cInsurance costs will go down and consumer satisfaction will go up.\u201d (Fact check)Expand use of Health Savings Accounts, which allow workers to save money for medical expenses without having to pay federal income tax on those funds. These payments will be allowed to accumulate and can be passed on to heirs. These funds can be used by any member of a family. (HSAs are very similar to when Trump took office.)Bring down drug prices by importing cheaper medications from overseas and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. (By and large, drug prices haven\u2019t decreased.)Fully fund the construction of an \u201cimpenetrable physical wall\u201d along the southern border with Mexico. The wall will be one foot taller than the Great Wall of China and \u201cartistically beautiful,\u201d constructed of hardened concrete, rebar and steel. The wall might cover only about 1,000 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile border because of natural barriers, and Trump is open to using fencing in some places. (The portion of wall that has been built is not impenetrable, and it\u2019s not nearly as expansive as Trump pledged.)Make Mexico pay for the wall, \u201c100 percent.\u201d If Mexico refuses, then the United States will impound remittance payments taken from the wages of undocumented immigrants, cut foreign aid, institute tariffs, cancel visas for Mexican business leaders and diplomats, and increase fees for visas, border-crossing cards and port use. (None of this has happened.)Each time President Trump turned down money for his wall, he ended up with less money than he started with. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)\u201cCharge Mexico $100,000 for every illegal that crosses that border because it\u2019s trouble.\u201d (See above.)Triple the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. (The size of ICE has not increased substantially during Trump\u2019s presidency.)Cancel federal funding to \u201csanctuary cities\u201d that choose to not prosecute undocumented immigrants for being in the country illegally. (According to PolitiFact, \u201cOverall, the Justice Department has not been successful in withholding federal funds for so-called sanctuary cities.\u201d)Immediately deport undocumented immigrants who have committed a crime, are a member of a gang or pose a security threat. Trump estimates this is 2 million to 3 million people, although experts say the number is much lower. Deport the millions of undocumented immigrants who are in the United States on an expired visa. (Trump removed about 935,000 people during his four years \u2014 far short of the millions promised and less than Obama\u2019s first term, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute.Restore the Secure Communities deportation program, which was ended by the Obama administration in 2014. The program was a partnership among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that worked together to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. (Trump\u2019s attempt was blocked by a judge.)Allow \u201ctremendous numbers\u201d of legal immigrants based on a \u201cmerit system,\u201d selecting immigrants who will help grow the country\u2019s economy. (The number of legal immigrants has been sharply reduced, although Trump at other points promised to decrease them.)Expand the number of H-1B visas for highly skilled workers so that more of the \u201ctalented people\u201d who graduate from Ivy League institutions can stay in the United States and work in Silicon Valley. (Trump tightened rules for these, although he at other points said he would restrict them.)Get rid of the H-1B visa program because it\u2019s \u201cvery, very bad\u201d for American workers. (He did not get rid of the program, although he tightened the rules.)End birthright citizenship, granting citizenship only to babies whose parents are legally in the country. (This would have required a constitutional amendment, but it was never pushed.)Strengthen and expand the use of E-Verify, which allows employers to check an employee\u2019s eligibility to work. (Trump retreated on this.)Urge assimilation because \u201cour system of government, and our American culture, is the best in the world and will produce the best outcomes for all who adopt it.\u201d (Trump didn\u2019t mention \u201cassimilation\u201d or \u201cassimilate\u201d once after he became president, per Factbase.)Grow the Army from its current size of 470,000 active-duty soldiers to 540,000. (As of September, it stood at about 481,000.)Drop that \u201cdirty, rotten traitor\u201d Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl out of an airplane into desolate Afghanistan without a parachute. Trump has also suggested that Bergdahl be shot. (Neither has occurred.)Appoint a Department of Veterans Affairs secretary whose \u201csole purpose will be to serve veterans.\u201d (Trump\u2019s first VA secretary, David Shulkin, was forced out over alleged misuse of taxpayer money.)Dramatically reform the agency. Fire \u201cthe corrupt and incompetent\u201d leaders and make it easier for the secretary to fire people. Trump promises to protect and promote \u201chonest employees\u201d who highlight wrongdoing. These employees will also receive bonuses. (Trump has claimed credit for the VA Choice Act, but it was passed under Obama.)President Trump has repeatedly tried to erase former president Barack Obama and the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) from the history of the Veterans Choice Act. (The Washington Post)Stay out of the Syrian civil war. Although Trump considers Syrian President Bashar al-Assad \u201cbad,\u201d he has said the United States has higher priorities. Around the world, Trump said, he prefers stability over regime changes. (Trump struck Syria after a chemical weapons attack and hailed the U.S. role in the decline of the Islamic State in the region.)Negotiate the release of all U.S. prisoners held in Iran before taking office. (Five Americans were released during the campaign, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian; Trump claimed some credit for this.) (Other U.S. prisoners remain in Iran.)Refuse to call Iran\u2019s leader by his preferred title. \u201cI\u2019ll say, \u2018Hey, baby, how ya doing?\u2019 I will never call him the supreme leader.\u201d (Trump occasionally cast doubt on that title, but has also used it without that caveat.)Call an international conference focused on how to halt the spread of the \u201chateful ideology of Radical Islam.\u201dAllow Russia to deal with the Islamic State in Syria and/or work with Putin to wipe out shared enemies. (Trump routinely claimed credit for knocking out the Islamic State caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Although the United States became involved, there was no explicit partnership with Russia.)Shut down parts of the Internet so that Islamic State terrorists cannot use it to recruit American children. (Fact check)Bring back waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, and use interrogation techniques that are \u201ca hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.\u201d Even if such tactics don\u2019t work, Trump says, suspected terrorists \u201cdeserve it anyway, for what they\u2019re doing.\u201d (Trump suggested after the election, however, that he was reconsidering his position because of a conversation with a general who opposed the tactic.)Establish a Commission on Radical Islam that will include \u201creformist voices in the Muslim community\u201d and will identify the warning signs of radicalization, educate the American public, and develop protocol for police officers, federal investigators and immigration screeners. (Fact check)Heavily surveil mosques in the United States. Trump has said he would \u201cstrongly consider\u201d closing some mosques.Encourage Muslim communities to \u201ccooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad \u2014 and they do know where they are.\u201dBar Syrian refugees from entering the country and kick out any who are already living here, as they might be \u201cthe ultimate Trojan horse.\u201d (Trump pulled back on kicking out Syrian refugees.)Create a database of Syrian refugees. Trump has also seemed open to the idea of creating a database of Muslims in the country, although his aides say that is not true.Set up safe zones in Syria and then force wealthy Persian Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia to pick up the bill. \u201cThey\u2019re going to put up all the money. We\u2019re not going to put up money. We\u2019re going to lead it, and we\u2019ll do a great a job. But we\u2019re going to get the Gulf states to put up the money.\u201d (Trump continued talking about the idea, but there is no indication they\u2019ve been set up or funded as he suggested.)Scrap the Clean Power Plan, which reduces the amount of carbon pollution from power plants. Trump says this could save the country $7.2 billion per year. (Just this week, a federal appeals court struck down the Trump administration\u2019s Clean Power Plan replacement.)Treat climate change such as the \u201choax\u201d that Trump has said it is. (In a recent interview with the New York Times, Trump seemed to soften that position.) (Trump had not called climate change a \u201choax\u201d since assuming the presidency, although he cast doubt on its severity.)Become the world\u2019s dominant leader in energy production. Attain \u201ccomplete American energy independence\u201d so that the United States is no longer dependent on foreign oil. (The United States is not the world\u2019s dominant leader in energy, although it has increased energy production across sectors. The nation also still imports foreign oil.)Ensure the country has \u201cabsolutely crystal clear and clean water\u201d and \u201cbeautiful, immaculate air.\u201d (Air pollution has increased in recent years.)Spur the spending of $1 trillion in public and private funds on infrastructure projects over 10 years. Invest in \u201ctransportation, clean water, a modern and reliable electricity grid, telecommunications, security infrastructure and other pressing domestic infrastructure needs\u201d without adding to the national debt. (Despite repeated \u201cinfrastructure weeks,\u201d no significant infrastructure legislation was passed on Trump\u2019s watch.)President Trump has derailed White House \"infrastructure week,\" meant to promote his infrastructure agenda, at least half a dozen times over the past two years. (The Washington Post)\u201cDrain the swamp\u201d in Washington and \u201ccut our ties with the failed politicians of the past.\u201d (Trump pardoned several politicians found guilty of wrongdoing. He has also recently acknowledged, even after the 2020 campaign, that the \u201cswamp\u201d is not yet drained, suggesting that much of the work still lay ahead. \u201cOur fight to drain the Washington swamp and reclaim America\u2019s destiny and dignity has only just begun,\u201d he said earlier this month.)Trump said he would drain the swamp, even as his personal lawyer sold access to the president for hundreds of thousands of dollars. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)Propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress, limiting House members to three terms, or six years, and senators to two terms, or 12 years. (Trump never did so.)Ban foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections. (This was never passed. Trump also at times welcomed foreign help in his reelection campaign, including from Ukraine and China.)\u201cLock her up.\u201d Instruct the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u201csituation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.\u201d Trump had said the investigation would include Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and the ways in which the Clinton Foundation raised money. (Trump never got this done, although at times he reportedly pushed for such a step.)Get rid of Common Core because it\u2019s \u201ca disaster\u201d and a \u201cvery bad thing.\u201d (Many states still use Common Core.)Reduce or end the government\u2019s role in student loans. (The federal government remains very much involved in student loans, which Trump used to delay loan payments during the coronavirus pandemic.)Rewrite the tax code to allow parents to fully deduct child-care expenses for up to four children and older dependents. (Some of these expenses are already deductible under the law.)Guarantee six weeks of paid maternity leave by amending the conditions of unemployment insurance employers are required to carry. (The vast majority of workers still don\u2019t have such paid leave.)Get rid of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations such as churches from formally endorsing or opposing political candidates. (Despite Trump\u2019s claims to he contrary, the Johnson Amendment is still on the books.)Quickly end inner-city violence, which Trump has repeatedly compared to war zones. \u201cI\u2019ll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in your inner city, or wherever you are, you\u2019re not going to be shot. Your child isn\u2019t going to be shot.\u201d (Trump said recently that urban areas remain dangerous places and used that as a centerpiece of his campaign.)Stop the surge of violent crime and homicides in Chicago within \u201cone week.\u201d (Chicago has recently experienced its highest crime and homicide rate in decades. Regardless of the cause, Trump didn\u2019t stop the surge \u2014 much less in one week.)\u201cThe crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.\u201d On that day, Trump says, \u201cAmericans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.\u201d (See above.)Immediately stop the killing of police officers. \u201cIt\u2019s going to stop, okay? It\u2019s going to stop. We\u2019re going to be law and order. It\u2019s going to stop.\u201d (Police officer deaths didn\u2019t stop, and they actually were on the high end during much of Trump\u2019s presidency.)Sign an executive order calling for the death penalty for anyone found guilty of killing a police officer. (This in all likelihood couldn\u2019t be done via executive order, and Trump never attempted it.)Expand the use of \u201cstop and frisk,\u201d which Trump says worked \u201cincredibly well\u201d in New York. (Trump talked about stop and frisk occasionally, but never took steps to expand its use.)Encourage profiling and targeting \u201cpeople that maybe look suspicious.\u201d (Trump didn\u2019t talk about profiling \u2014 racial or otherwise \u2014 as president, although some opponents of his immigration policies warned that such things could result from them.)\u201cIf I become president, we\u2019re all going to be saying \u2018Merry Christmas\u2019 again.\u201d (A December 2018 poll showed that, since Trump was elected in 2016, those preferring \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d over \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d actually dipped below 60 percent each year \u2014 lower than in previous surveys.)\u201cAnd at the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over 95 percent of the African American vote. I promise you. Because I will produce.\u201d (Not even close. Trump got 12 percent, according to exit polls \u2014 although that was an improvement on recent Republican candidates.)Sign into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks, the point at which antiabortion activists say a fetus can feel pain. (The Senate did not pass the law, so Trump never signed it.)Make the Hyde Amendment permanent. Since 1976, Congress has annually passed the Hyde Amendment, banning the use of federal dollars \u2014 in particular, Medicaid funds \u2014 for abortion, except in the case of rape, incest or a threat to the mother\u2019s life. (The Senate also voted against making the Hyde Amendment permanent.)On the first day in office, get rid of gun-free zones at military bases, recruiting centers and, in some cases, schools. These zones are like \u201ctarget practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill.\u201d (Fact check)Fix the background check system used when purchasing guns to ensure states are properly uploading criminal and health records. (There have been no significant fixes to the background check system, even as Trump flirted with such ideas after mass shootings.)Allow concealed-carry permits to be recognized in all 50 states. (See above.)Impose a minimum sentence of five years in federal prison for any violent felon who commits a crime using a gun, with no chance for parole or early release. (See above.)Expand programs such as Project Exile, a federal program started in Virginia in 1997 that locked up criminals possessing illegal guns for years in federal prisons far from their homes. (See above.)\u201cOpen up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.\u201d (Libel laws remain unchanged, despite Trump\u2019s frequent threats on this front.)Stop AT&T from buying Time Warner, the parent company of CNN. Federal antitrust regulators would have to review and approve that type of merger. (Trump\u2019s Justice Department attempted to block the merger, but failed.)Fix the rigged system. (Trump claimed many things are \u201crigged,\u201d but foremost among them was our electoral system. Yet he failed to fix it, by his own admission. Trump spent two months after the 2020 election baselessly alleging that it had been stolen from him.)Institute a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave office. (Trump signed an executive order, but it included significant caveats, including restricting officials from lobbying their former agency and leaving a relatively narrow definition of \u201clobbying.\u201d He then rescinded that order, doing so overnight in the final hours of his presidency.)Sue the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct or assault. \u201cAll of these liars will be sued after the election is over.\u201d (He never did so.)Sue the New York Times for publishing accusations from women who say Trump groped them. (Trump didn\u2019t sue the newspaper, although he later attempted to do so for its Russia investigation coverage.)Reopen Trump University.\u201cI don\u2019t settle cases. I don\u2019t do it.\u201d (Even after this comment but before he became president, Trump University settled. And since then, his organizations have settled some more.)Change the new name of North America\u2019s tallest mountain back to Mount McKinley. (It\u2019s still called Denali.)\u201cBe the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.\u201d (Even Trump\u2019s suspiciously rosy doctor\u2019s reports have put him on the borderline of obesity, and he made a still-unexplaine Th",
        "author": "Aaron Blake"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s Next for the Energy Grid (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7138",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-next-for-the-energy-grid-11581645094?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=13",
        "text": "To meet the surge in demand projected by 2050, innovative engineers, utility operators and grid architects are planning for a future that blurs the distinctions between energy consumers and producers. Homeowners, businesses and other traditional utility customers are beginning to take on a new role as energy producers, through small-scale solar arrays, wind turbines and other new affordable technologies. To coordinate so many different power sources and demands, the future power grid will depend on artificial intelligence, automated two-way communications and computer control systems to continuously collect and synthesize data from millions of smart sensors.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat are the most important parts to get right as the power grid evolves? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nCities have signed increasingly large power purchase agreements to buy electricity from renewable energy developers. Over the next 15 years, energy is expected to account for nearly $25 trillion in infrastructure investment, according to the World Resources Institute. New demands, such as the growing popularity of electric cars, are already altering the national appetite for power. Moreover, sensors linked through the Internet of Things are offering unprecedented amounts of data documenting the moment-to-moment fluctuations in supply and demand. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBut that\u2019s just the beginning. Here, The Wall Street Journal looks at the elements that will go into the energy grid of the future, based on research by scientists at federal and university laboratories, utility planners and energy analysts. Some technologies, such as wind and solar power, are already on the market but are set to expand vastly in scale in the decades ahead. Others, such as generating power from the movement of ocean tides, are pilot projects. A few possibilities, such as microbe-powered energy cells and orbital solar power, are still experimental. As electricity needs fluctuate across the globe, utility engineers will have to make the grid smarter, more interactive, resilient and resistant to the threat of cyberattacks.Beaming Solar Power\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn a solar satellite, mirrors reflect light onto a central reflector. The light is turned into power with solar cells.\n\n\n\nScientists and engineers are working on spacecraft to capture sunlight and transform it into electricity that is wirelessly beamed to Earth. A prototype from the California Institute of Technology transmits power in a steerable beam. Japan\u2019s space agency JAXA demonstrated a unit that converted 1.8 kilowatts of electricity into microwaves and then beamed it about 100 yards. China is planning an orbital solar power station. \n\n\n\n\nLiving Solar Cells\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen sunlight hits bacteria, photosynthesis takes place. Water molecules split and release an electron. Hydrogen protons (H+) are able to pass through a membrane, while electrons (e-) are not. Electrons follow an electrode around in order to recombine with the hydrogen and oxygen to form a new water molecule.\n\n\n\nResearchers are exploring how to exploit the ability of many microorganisms to generate electric current through photosynthesis. Solar cells using microbes would be cleaner and cheaper than those based on conventional semiconductors. So far, the current is only about enough to drive a small fan. By using two kinds of microbes instead of one, scientists in China recently found a way to boost the electrical energy.\n\n\n\n\nThe Power of Brine\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n4.\n\n\nPower is sent to electrical grid.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator producing electricity.\n\n\nSalt water \n\n\n2.\n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh water\n\n\n\n\n\nPower is sent \nto electrical grid.\n\n\n4.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator producing electricity.\n\n\nSalt water \n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n2.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh water\n\n\n\n\n\n4.\n\n\nPower is sent \nto electrical grid.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator producing electricity.\n\n\nSalt water \n\n\n2.\n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh water\n\n\n\n\n\n4.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nSalt\nwater \n\n\n2.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh\nwater\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\n2.\n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator produ Living solar power cells, household microgrids and more projects in the works for the decentralized grid of the future. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Kevin Hand"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s Next for the Energy Grid (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7139",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-next-for-the-energy-grid-11581645094?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=59",
        "text": "To meet the surge in demand projected by 2050, innovative engineers, utility operators and grid architects are planning for a future that blurs the distinctions between energy consumers and producers. Homeowners, businesses and other traditional utility customers are beginning to take on a new role as energy producers, through small-scale solar arrays, wind turbines and other new affordable technologies. To coordinate so many different power sources and demands, the future power grid will depend on artificial intelligence, automated two-way communications and computer control systems to continuously collect and synthesize data from millions of smart sensors.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat are the most important parts to get right as the power grid evolves? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nCities have signed increasingly large power purchase agreements to buy electricity from renewable energy developers. Over the next 15 years, energy is expected to account for nearly $25 trillion in infrastructure investment, according to the World Resources Institute. New demands, such as the growing popularity of electric cars, are already altering the national appetite for power. Moreover, sensors linked through the Internet of Things are offering unprecedented amounts of data documenting the moment-to-moment fluctuations in supply and demand. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBut that\u2019s just the beginning. Here, The Wall Street Journal looks at the elements that will go into the energy grid of the future, based on research by scientists at federal and university laboratories, utility planners and energy analysts. Some technologies, such as wind and solar power, are already on the market but are set to expand vastly in scale in the decades ahead. Others, such as generating power from the movement of ocean tides, are pilot projects. A few possibilities, such as microbe-powered energy cells and orbital solar power, are still experimental. As electricity needs fluctuate across the globe, utility engineers will have to make the grid smarter, more interactive, resilient and resistant to the threat of cyberattacks.Beaming Solar Power\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn a solar satellite, mirrors reflect light onto a central reflector. The light is turned into power with solar cells.\n\n\n\nScientists and engineers are working on spacecraft to capture sunlight and transform it into electricity that is wirelessly beamed to Earth. A prototype from the California Institute of Technology transmits power in a steerable beam. Japan\u2019s space agency JAXA demonstrated a unit that converted 1.8 kilowatts of electricity into microwaves and then beamed it about 100 yards. China is planning an orbital solar power station. \n\n\n\n\nLiving Solar Cells\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhen sunlight hits bacteria, photosynthesis takes place. Water molecules split and release an electron. Hydrogen protons (H+) are able to pass through a membrane, while electrons (e-) are not. Electrons follow an electrode around in order to recombine with the hydrogen and oxygen to form a new water molecule.\n\n\n\nResearchers are exploring how to exploit the ability of many microorganisms to generate electric current through photosynthesis. Solar cells using microbes would be cleaner and cheaper than those based on conventional semiconductors. So far, the current is only about enough to drive a small fan. By using two kinds of microbes instead of one, scientists in China recently found a way to boost the electrical energy.\n\n\n\n\nThe Power of Brine\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n4.\n\n\nPower is sent to electrical grid.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator producing electricity.\n\n\nSalt water \n\n\n2.\n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh water\n\n\n\n\n\nPower is sent \nto electrical grid.\n\n\n4.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator producing electricity.\n\n\nSalt water \n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n2.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh water\n\n\n\n\n\n4.\n\n\nPower is sent \nto electrical grid.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator producing electricity.\n\n\nSalt water \n\n\n2.\n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh water\n\n\n\n\n\n4.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nSalt\nwater \n\n\n2.\n\n\n1.\n\n\nFilter\n\n\nFresh\nwater\n\n\n1.\n\n\nSalt water from the ocean and fresh water from a nearby source feed into the system.\n\n\n2.\n\n\nOsmosis, the process of salt attracting fresh water through a membrane, increases the salt water pressure.\n\n\n3.\n\n\nWater pressure turns turbine generator produ Living solar power cells, household microgrids and more projects in the works for the decentralized grid of the future. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Kevin Hand"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the Robots Helping in the Quest to Find Extraterrestrial Life (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7140",
        "date": "2017-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-robots-helping-in-the-quest-to-find-extraterrestrial-life-1508936403?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=22",
        "text": "The Polarstem research vessel had onboard a fleet of robots scientists and engineers hoped to use to study extreme environments, like the deep sea. Research teams also tested Arctic ice and deployed landers with suites of sensors. \n\n\nThe polar mission was the capstone of a five-year collaboration between 16 German organizations. Dubbed the Robex Alliance (short for Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments), the project is one of several world-wide academic and commercial initiatives with the same end: to develop technologies\u2014sensors, batteries, chips, robot bodies, software\u2014that could fast-track exploration of places that are too dangerous or hostile for humans to explore on their own. The advances have applications in search-and-rescue, the oil and gas industries, law enforcement, and others. They could also usher in a golden era for deep exploration of Earth\u2019s oceans, only 5% of which have been surveyed by humans.\n\n\n CAN. RUS. Area of exploration ASIA U.S. nor. EUROPE AFRICA \n\n\nIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets. A large part of August\u2019s polar mission was locating and retrieving Tramper, a 1,400-pound tank-like rover that had spent more than a year autonomously inching along the frozen terrain about a mile and a half below the surface. While ice made the water impassable for ships, Tramper roamed the sea floor, measuring oxygen content and collecting data. According to Frank Wenzh\u00f6fer, a microbiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research and the vessel\u2019s crew leader, the year Tramper spent underwater is the longest time a robot had been left to its own devices in the Arctic with no human contact.\n\n\n\n\n An artist\u2019s rendering of TRAMPER, an underwater autonomous rover, being deposited on the ocean floor to measure oxygen concentration. CREDIT: GEOMAR, MARUM, AWI AND AIRBUS\n \n\n\nEngineers also tested a prototype of a yellow space shuttle-looking glider designed to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration closer to the surface to complement TRAMPER\u2019s data. A torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle studied the biology at the interface between water and free-floating ice sheets called floes, an area researchers think is sensitive to changing conditions. To avoid collisions with fast-moving ice when the robot surfaced, a drone atop a floe beamed the engineers on the boat GPS coordinates they could use to change where the machine emerged from the water.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEngineers tested a prototype of a yellow glider, which they hope to use to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration of water closer to the surface.\n\n\n\nPlanetary scientists and astrobiologists once believed life could exist only in the so-called Goldilocks zone, defined by the distance that separates the sun from Earth\u2019s orbit, where the temperature allows for liquid water and a breathable atmosphere. But over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that some of the solar system\u2019s far-flung planets, including Jupiter and Saturn, have moons with liquid oceans. NASA posits that these moons are our best shots at finding extraterrestrial life.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets.\u201d\n\n\n\nData from Galileo, a spacecraft that flew by Jupiter\u2019s Europa in the late 1990s, suggested that the moon might have a subsurface ocean with plumes of gases bursting through fissures in its icy crust. In 2005, the Cassini-Huygens probe took images of similar structures on Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn. Sensors suggest that Enceladus has an active ocean sandwiched between a layer of ice dozens of miles thick and a rocky bottom. Earth ocean\u2019\u2019s own rocky bottom, scientists believe, could have provided the essential building blocks of life\u2014some of which, including hydrogen, nitrogen and salt, were detected by Cassini\u2019s instruments in the plumes of Enceladus.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nOn Sept. 15 of this year, Cassini\u2014low on fuel after 20 years of exploring\u2014intentionally flew into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere and burned up to avoid crashing into Enceladus and possibly contaminating environments that could already harbor or one day bear life. A flyby mission to Europa is scheduled to launch in the 2020s, and scientists are awaiting funding decisions for proposed missions to Enceladus. But before space programs can embark on multimillion-dollar expeditions to the outer solar system, scientists need robots that can handle on-the-ground exploration of extremely hostile environments where surface temperatures can plummet to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This is where Earth\u2019s most remote and inhospitable regions come in handy. The ice-covered oceans of the Arctic a Today, robots roam the deep seas and the slopes of volcanoes. Their next mission: the search for life beyond earth. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez Photographs by Esther Horvath for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the Robots Helping in the Quest to Find Extraterrestrial Life (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7141",
        "date": "2017-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-robots-helping-in-the-quest-to-find-extraterrestrial-life-1508936403?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=78",
        "text": "The Polarstem research vessel had onboard a fleet of robots scientists and engineers hoped to use to study extreme environments, like the deep sea. Research teams also tested Arctic ice and deployed landers with suites of sensors. \n\n\nThe polar mission was the capstone of a five-year collaboration between 16 German organizations. Dubbed the Robex Alliance (short for Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments), the project is one of several world-wide academic and commercial initiatives with the same end: to develop technologies\u2014sensors, batteries, chips, robot bodies, software\u2014that could fast-track exploration of places that are too dangerous or hostile for humans to explore on their own. The advances have applications in search-and-rescue, the oil and gas industries, law enforcement, and others. They could also usher in a golden era for deep exploration of Earth\u2019s oceans, only 5% of which have been surveyed by humans.\n\n\n CAN. RUS. Area of exploration ASIA U.S. nor. EUROPE AFRICA \n\n\nIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets. A large part of August\u2019s polar mission was locating and retrieving Tramper, a 1,400-pound tank-like rover that had spent more than a year autonomously inching along the frozen terrain about a mile and a half below the surface. While ice made the water impassable for ships, Tramper roamed the sea floor, measuring oxygen content and collecting data. According to Frank Wenzh\u00f6fer, a microbiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research and the vessel\u2019s crew leader, the year Tramper spent underwater is the longest time a robot had been left to its own devices in the Arctic with no human contact.\n\n\n\n\n An artist\u2019s rendering of TRAMPER, an underwater autonomous rover, being deposited on the ocean floor to measure oxygen concentration. CREDIT: GEOMAR, MARUM, AWI AND AIRBUS\n \n\n\nEngineers also tested a prototype of a yellow space shuttle-looking glider designed to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration closer to the surface to complement TRAMPER\u2019s data. A torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle studied the biology at the interface between water and free-floating ice sheets called floes, an area researchers think is sensitive to changing conditions. To avoid collisions with fast-moving ice when the robot surfaced, a drone atop a floe beamed the engineers on the boat GPS coordinates they could use to change where the machine emerged from the water.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEngineers tested a prototype of a yellow glider, which they hope to use to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration of water closer to the surface.\n\n\n\nPlanetary scientists and astrobiologists once believed life could exist only in the so-called Goldilocks zone, defined by the distance that separates the sun from Earth\u2019s orbit, where the temperature allows for liquid water and a breathable atmosphere. But over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that some of the solar system\u2019s far-flung planets, including Jupiter and Saturn, have moons with liquid oceans. NASA posits that these moons are our best shots at finding extraterrestrial life.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets.\u201d\n\n\n\nData from Galileo, a spacecraft that flew by Jupiter\u2019s Europa in the late 1990s, suggested that the moon might have a subsurface ocean with plumes of gases bursting through fissures in its icy crust. In 2005, the Cassini-Huygens probe took images of similar structures on Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn. Sensors suggest that Enceladus has an active ocean sandwiched between a layer of ice dozens of miles thick and a rocky bottom. Earth ocean\u2019\u2019s own rocky bottom, scientists believe, could have provided the essential building blocks of life\u2014some of which, including hydrogen, nitrogen and salt, were detected by Cassini\u2019s instruments in the plumes of Enceladus.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nOn Sept. 15 of this year, Cassini\u2014low on fuel after 20 years of exploring\u2014intentionally flew into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere and burned up to avoid crashing into Enceladus and possibly contaminating environments that could already harbor or one day bear life. A flyby mission to Europa is scheduled to launch in the 2020s, and scientists are awaiting funding decisions for proposed missions to Enceladus. But before space programs can embark on multimillion-dollar expeditions to the outer solar system, scientists need robots that can handle on-the-ground exploration of extremely hostile environments where surface temperatures can plummet to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This is where Earth\u2019s most remote and inhospitable regions come in handy. The ice-covered oceans of the Arctic a Today, robots roam the deep seas and the slopes of volcanoes. Their next mission: the search for life beyond earth. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez Photographs by Esther Horvath for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the Robots Helping in the Quest to Find Extraterrestrial Life (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7142",
        "date": "2017-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-robots-helping-in-the-quest-to-find-extraterrestrial-life-1508936403?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=85",
        "text": "The Polarstem research vessel had onboard a fleet of robots scientists and engineers hoped to use to study extreme environments, like the deep sea. Research teams also tested Arctic ice and deployed landers with suites of sensors. \n\n\nThe polar mission was the capstone of a five-year collaboration between 16 German organizations. Dubbed the Robex Alliance (short for Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments), the project is one of several world-wide academic and commercial initiatives with the same end: to develop technologies\u2014sensors, batteries, chips, robot bodies, software\u2014that could fast-track exploration of places that are too dangerous or hostile for humans to explore on their own. The advances have applications in search-and-rescue, the oil and gas industries, law enforcement, and others. They could also usher in a golden era for deep exploration of Earth\u2019s oceans, only 5% of which have been surveyed by humans.\n\n\n CAN. RUS. Area of exploration ASIA U.S. nor. EUROPE AFRICA \n\n\nIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets. A large part of August\u2019s polar mission was locating and retrieving Tramper, a 1,400-pound tank-like rover that had spent more than a year autonomously inching along the frozen terrain about a mile and a half below the surface. While ice made the water impassable for ships, Tramper roamed the sea floor, measuring oxygen content and collecting data. According to Frank Wenzh\u00f6fer, a microbiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research and the vessel\u2019s crew leader, the year Tramper spent underwater is the longest time a robot had been left to its own devices in the Arctic with no human contact.\n\n\n\n\n An artist\u2019s rendering of TRAMPER, an underwater autonomous rover, being deposited on the ocean floor to measure oxygen concentration. CREDIT: GEOMAR, MARUM, AWI AND AIRBUS\n \n\n\nEngineers also tested a prototype of a yellow space shuttle-looking glider designed to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration closer to the surface to complement TRAMPER\u2019s data. A torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle studied the biology at the interface between water and free-floating ice sheets called floes, an area researchers think is sensitive to changing conditions. To avoid collisions with fast-moving ice when the robot surfaced, a drone atop a floe beamed the engineers on the boat GPS coordinates they could use to change where the machine emerged from the water.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEngineers tested a prototype of a yellow glider, which they hope to use to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration of water closer to the surface.\n\n\n\nPlanetary scientists and astrobiologists once believed life could exist only in the so-called Goldilocks zone, defined by the distance that separates the sun from Earth\u2019s orbit, where the temperature allows for liquid water and a breathable atmosphere. But over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that some of the solar system\u2019s far-flung planets, including Jupiter and Saturn, have moons with liquid oceans. NASA posits that these moons are our best shots at finding extraterrestrial life.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets.\u201d\n\n\n\nData from Galileo, a spacecraft that flew by Jupiter\u2019s Europa in the late 1990s, suggested that the moon might have a subsurface ocean with plumes of gases bursting through fissures in its icy crust. In 2005, the Cassini-Huygens probe took images of similar structures on Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn. Sensors suggest that Enceladus has an active ocean sandwiched between a layer of ice dozens of miles thick and a rocky bottom. Earth ocean\u2019\u2019s own rocky bottom, scientists believe, could have provided the essential building blocks of life\u2014some of which, including hydrogen, nitrogen and salt, were detected by Cassini\u2019s instruments in the plumes of Enceladus.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nOn Sept. 15 of this year, Cassini\u2014low on fuel after 20 years of exploring\u2014intentionally flew into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere and burned up to avoid crashing into Enceladus and possibly contaminating environments that could already harbor or one day bear life. A flyby mission to Europa is scheduled to launch in the 2020s, and scientists are awaiting funding decisions for proposed missions to Enceladus. But before space programs can embark on multimillion-dollar expeditions to the outer solar system, scientists need robots that can handle on-the-ground exploration of extremely hostile environments where surface temperatures can plummet to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This is where Earth\u2019s most remote and inhospitable regions come in handy. The ice-covered oceans of the Arctic and the Antarctic resemble those discovered on Enceladus and Europa, and Mount Etna in Sicily has a craggy terrain and hazy atmosphere similar to that of Titan, Saturn\u2019s largest moon. Collaborations like the Robex Alliance, which includes space engineers, enable planetary scientists to test-drive robot prototypes in places similar to the extraterrestrial terrains they hope to explore. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nResearchers used Mount Etna in Italy as a stand-in for the moon so they could test technologies that could one day be used in space.\n\n\n\nIn July, a Robex team tested a Mars rover-like machine that positioned seismic sensors on the surface of Mount Etna to study its quakes. Using cameras and planning software, it surveyed its surroundings and then figured out where to place the sensors by itself. Similar software and versions of the hardware reinforced for space travel could one day be used in future missions to the moon or other celestial bodies. \n\n\n\n\n An autonomous rover traverses Mount Etna\u2019s moon-like terrain.\n \n\n\n\n\n A researcher tries to set up communications links on Mt. Etna during a robotic mock mission to the moon in 2016. The following year members of the team work with a Mars Rover like machine. \n\n\n\u201cThere are these areas on Earth that are as difficult to reach as foreign planets,\u201d says Antje Boetius, a deep-sea and polar researcher at Germany\u2019s Alfred Wegener Institute, which is part of Robex. \u201cIf we use Earth as the next best analog to a planet with a deep ocean and thick ice cover, how would we go about using a robot to explore?\u201d It starts with better hardware. When Robex located Tramper, it had been going around and around in circles in the same spot for 35 weeks, due to a broken gear. On Earth, where scientists can eventually retrieve and fix a stuck robot, their malfunctions are merely disappointing. In space, a mechanical failure could spell the end of the mission. (Some scientists are also working on robots that can heal themselves, although that ability is years if not decades away.)\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJohannes Lemburg from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research washes Tramper, an autonomous crawler, following its one-year deployment in the Arctic Ocean.\n\n\n\nROBEX researchers got a whiff of that doomsday scenario this summer when they deployed another crawler dubbed VIATOR and its landing station to the seafloor. Two previous attempts had failed. They only had two days left in the mission\u2014and five years of work behind them. When VIATOR finally made it to the bottom and attempted to leave its lander, one tread started rotating at half the speed as the other. It veered off course and crashed. On board, scientists and engineers watched through a camera feed from a remotely operated vehicle. \u201cThat was a real disaster,\u201d said Sascha Fl\u00f6gel, a marine geologist and lead for VIATOR. The seven-person team coded and beamed the machine a new program that instructed the faulty tread to move at approximately twice the normal speed to compensate. It wasn\u2019t perfect, but the rover\u2019s navigation program was able to self-correct as it made its way back to the station using light markers on the lander as guideposts. \u201cThe future is more autonomy,\u201d said Dr. Fl\u00f6gel. \n\n\n Robex researchers struggled to lower an autonomous crawler into the ocean. Once the rover reached the bottom, it malfunctioned and coders had to devise a quick fix. The team kept track of what their rover was doing deep in the ocean through a separate underwater vehicle with a camera. The video feed was displayed on monitors on the boat.\n\n\nToday\u2019s autonomous robots, such as Tramper, execute a set of predetermined commands without human intervention. If conditions change drastically, a robot can stall. Ideally, it would be able to adapt on the fly, but that requires learning. For instance, the robot would have to know from experience that a spike in oxygen is worth further exploration or that a change in the stability of the soil could put it in danger of getting stuck. This is impossible for most robots to do fully autonomously, in part, because the sensors that allow them to explore their environment don\u2019t directly feed back into the software that controls them. They lack a basic understanding of what they\u2019re seeing and touching.\n\n\n\n\u201cWe can only make progress if we enable robots to do things by themselves.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Antje Boetius\n\n\n\nAt NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Steve Chien is helping to build better brains for the robots of tomorrow. He\u2019s part of a team designing software for robotic explorers to Europa. \u201cThe places we really want to go the most [are] the places we know the least about,\u201d which makes his team\u2019s job especially challenging because their machines have to be ready to work in an enormous range of situations, he says. Dr. Chien is preparing for life-hunting missions to outer space by tapping the expertise of Chris German, an experienced hydrothermal-vent hunter. Hydrothermal vents are underwater fountains that spew hot water and chemicals from within the Earth\u2019s crust through ruptures on the ocean floor. Oceanographers posit that life on Earth may have evolved in these active zones, but only a fraction of these structures have been explored. Finding structures similar to Earth\u2019s hydrothermal vents on Enceladus sparked hope of finding life there. Dr. Chien\u2019s team monitored Dr. German to learn how he looks for vents. The goal: to turn his expertise into code for underwater autonomous vehicles. They wanted software \u201cthat could think the way I did,\u201d says Dr. German, who is based at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., and has collaborated with the Robex Alliance. After observing Dr. German for several weeks during a cruise through the Arctic last fall, Dr. Chien\u2019s team came up with an experimental algorithm to help robots search for vents. Changes in temperature or the chemistry of water, for instance, might signal plumes associated with hydrothermal vents. If a robot running Dr. Chien\u2019s algorithm detects these changes, it will try to localize the origin of those anomalies and search that area for a stronger signal. They\u2019re still fine-tuning the software with computer simulations\u2014a standard tool in software development for robotics\u2014and Dr. Chien hopes to test it in a robot in the field as early as 2018. By necessity, space robots have long had autonomous features. The Mars rover, for instance, was able to check its own batteries, shut down malfunctioning instruments that suck up power, and plan routes. But Dr. Chien\u2019s team is working on adaptive software for a new Mars rover that will be able to adjust its schedule of experiments based on power consumption or if some activities finish early. \u201cThat is something that the current [Mars] rover can\u2019t do,\u201d he says. A future iteration of that program would interconnect several rovers, drones, underwater robots and landers. These robots would be able to communicate with one another and adjust their tasks if one fails or detects some preliminary evidence of life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA researcher checks on one of the rovers during the 2016 tests on Mt. Etna.\n\n\n\nWrite to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com Today, robots roam the deep seas and the slopes of volcanoes. Their next mission: the search for life beyond earth. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez Photographs by Esther Horvath for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the Robots Helping in the Quest to Find Extraterrestrial Life (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7143",
        "date": "2017-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-robots-helping-in-the-quest-to-find-extraterrestrial-life-1508936403?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=75",
        "text": "The Polarstem research vessel had onboard a fleet of robots scientists and engineers hoped to use to study extreme environments, like the deep sea. Research teams also tested Arctic ice and deployed landers with suites of sensors. \n\n\nThe polar mission was the capstone of a five-year collaboration between 16 German organizations. Dubbed the Robex Alliance (short for Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments), the project is one of several world-wide academic and commercial initiatives with the same end: to develop technologies\u2014sensors, batteries, chips, robot bodies, software\u2014that could fast-track exploration of places that are too dangerous or hostile for humans to explore on their own. The advances have applications in search-and-rescue, the oil and gas industries, law enforcement, and others. They could also usher in a golden era for deep exploration of Earth\u2019s oceans, only 5% of which have been surveyed by humans.\n\n\n CAN. RUS. Area of exploration ASIA U.S. nor. EUROPE AFRICA \n\n\nIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets. A large part of August\u2019s polar mission was locating and retrieving Tramper, a 1,400-pound tank-like rover that had spent more than a year autonomously inching along the frozen terrain about a mile and a half below the surface. While ice made the water impassable for ships, Tramper roamed the sea floor, measuring oxygen content and collecting data. According to Frank Wenzh\u00f6fer, a microbiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research and the vessel\u2019s crew leader, the year Tramper spent underwater is the longest time a robot had been left to its own devices in the Arctic with no human contact.\n\n\n\n\n\n An artist\u2019s rendering of TRAMPER, an underwater autonomous rover, being deposited on the ocean floor to measure oxygen concentration. CREDIT: GEOMAR, MARUM, AWI AND AIRBUS\n \n\n\nEngineers also tested a prototype of a yellow space shuttle-looking glider designed to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration closer to the surface to complement TRAMPER\u2019s data. A torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle studied the biology at the interface between water and free-floating ice sheets called floes, an area researchers think is sensitive to changing conditions. To avoid collisions with fast-moving ice when the robot surfaced, a drone atop a floe beamed the engineers on the boat GPS coordinates they could use to change where the machine emerged from the water.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEngineers tested a prototype of a yellow glider, which they hope to use to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration of water closer to the surface.\n\n\n\nPlanetary scientists and astrobiologists once believed life could exist only in the so-called Goldilocks zone, defined by the distance that separates the sun from Earth\u2019s orbit, where the temperature allows for liquid water and a breathable atmosphere. But over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that some of the solar system\u2019s far-flung planets, including Jupiter and Saturn, have moons with liquid oceans. NASA posits that these moons are our best shots at finding extraterrestrial life.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets.\u201d\n\n\n\nData from Galileo, a spacecraft that flew by Jupiter\u2019s Europa in the late 1990s, suggested that the moon might have a subsurface ocean with plumes of gases bursting through fissures in its icy crust. In 2005, the Cassini-Huygens probe took images of similar structures on Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn. Sensors suggest that Enceladus has an active ocean sandwiched between a layer of ice dozens of miles thick and a rocky bottom. Earth ocean\u2019\u2019s own rocky bottom, scientists believe, could have provided the essential building blocks of life\u2014some of which, including hydrogen, nitrogen and salt, were detected by Cassini\u2019s instruments in the plumes of Enceladus.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nOn Sept. 15 of this year, Cassini\u2014low on fuel after 20 years of exploring\u2014intentionally flew into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere and burned up to avoid crashing into Enceladus and possibly contaminating environments that could already harbor or one day bear life. A flyby mission to Europa is scheduled to launch in the 2020s, and scientists are awaiting funding decisions for proposed missions to Enceladus. But before space programs can embark on multimillion-dollar expeditions to the outer solar system, scientists need robots that can handle on-the-ground exploration of extremely hostile environments where surface temperatures can plummet to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This is where Earth\u2019s most remote and inhospitable regions come in handy. The ice-covered oceans of the Arctic Today, robots roam the deep seas and the slopes of volcanoes. Their next mission: the search for life beyond earth. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez Photographs by Esther Horvath for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meet the Robots Helping in the Quest to Find Extraterrestrial Life (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7144",
        "date": "2017-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-robots-helping-in-the-quest-to-find-extraterrestrial-life-1508936403?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=109",
        "text": "The polar mission was the capstone of a five-year collaboration between 16 German organizations. Dubbed the Robex Alliance (short for Robotic Exploration of Extreme Environments), the project is one of several world-wide academic and commercial initiatives with the same end: to develop technologies\u2014sensors, batteries, chips, robot bodies, software\u2014that could fast-track exploration of places that are too dangerous or hostile for humans to explore on their own. The advances have applications in search-and-rescue, the oil and gas industries, law enforcement, and others. They could also usher in a golden era for deep exploration of Earth\u2019s oceans, only 5% of which have been surveyed by humans.\n\n\n CAN. RUS. Area of exploration ASIA U.S. nor. EUROPE AFRICA \n\n\nIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets. A large part of August\u2019s polar mission was locating and retrieving Tramper, a 1,400-pound tank-like rover that had spent more than a year autonomously inching along the frozen terrain about a mile and a half below the surface. While ice made the water impassable for ships, Tramper roamed the sea floor, measuring oxygen content and collecting data. According to Frank Wenzh\u00f6fer, a microbiologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research and the vessel\u2019s crew leader, the year Tramper spent underwater is the longest time a robot had been left to its own devices in the Arctic with no human contact.\n\n\n\n\n\n An artist\u2019s rendering of TRAMPER, an underwater autonomous rover, being deposited on the ocean floor to measure oxygen concentration. CREDIT: GEOMAR, MARUM, AWI AND AIRBUS\n \n\n\nEngineers also tested a prototype of a yellow space shuttle-looking glider designed to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration closer to the surface to complement TRAMPER\u2019s data. A torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle studied the biology at the interface between water and free-floating ice sheets called floes, an area researchers think is sensitive to changing conditions. To avoid collisions with fast-moving ice when the robot surfaced, a drone atop a floe beamed the engineers on the boat GPS coordinates they could use to change where the machine emerged from the water.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEngineers tested a prototype of a yellow glider, which they hope to use to measure temperature, salt content and oxygen concentration of water closer to the surface.\n\n\n\nPlanetary scientists and astrobiologists once believed life could exist only in the so-called Goldilocks zone, defined by the distance that separates the sun from Earth\u2019s orbit, where the temperature allows for liquid water and a breathable atmosphere. But over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that some of the solar system\u2019s far-flung planets, including Jupiter and Saturn, have moons with liquid oceans. NASA posits that these moons are our best shots at finding extraterrestrial life.\n\n\n\n\u201cIn the long term, this testing, prototyping and exploration will serve a second purpose: to create the robots that will search for life on the moons of other planets.\u201d\n\n\n\nData from Galileo, a spacecraft that flew by Jupiter\u2019s Europa in the late 1990s, suggested that the moon might have a subsurface ocean with plumes of gases bursting through fissures in its icy crust. In 2005, the Cassini-Huygens probe took images of similar structures on Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn. Sensors suggest that Enceladus has an active ocean sandwiched between a layer of ice dozens of miles thick and a rocky bottom. Earth ocean\u2019\u2019s own rocky bottom, scientists believe, could have provided the essential building blocks of life\u2014some of which, including hydrogen, nitrogen and salt, were detected by Cassini\u2019s instruments in the plumes of Enceladus.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\nOn Sept. 15 of this year, Cassini\u2014low on fuel after 20 years of exploring\u2014intentionally flew into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere and burned up to avoid crashing into Enceladus and possibly contaminating environments that could already harbor or one day bear life. A flyby mission to Europa is scheduled to launch in the 2020s, and scientists are awaiting funding decisions for proposed missions to Enceladus. But before space programs can embark on multimillion-dollar expeditions to the outer solar system, scientists need robots that can handle on-the-ground exploration of extremely hostile environments where surface temperatures can plummet to nearly minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This is where Earth\u2019s most remote and inhospitable regions come in handy. The ice-covered oceans of the Arctic and the Antarctic resemble those discovered on Enceladus and Europa, and Mount Etna in Sicily has a craggy terrain and hazy atmosphere similar to that of Titan, Saturn\u2019s largest moon. Collaborations like the Robex Alliance, which inclu Today, robots roam the deep seas and the slopes of volcanoes. Their next mission: the search for life beyond earth. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez Photographs by Esther Horvath for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7145",
        "date": "2019-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-is-poised-for-explosive-growth-lets-get-it-right-11554731633?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=16",
        "text": "The next decade is set to bring explosive commercial growth and more private industry players to low-earth orbit, the area spanning 100 to 1,240 miles above the planet\u2019s surface. SpaceX has proposed a satellite-based internet, and Planet is growing its fleet of Earth-imaging satellites. NASA plans a transition towards commercial management of the international space station. Several startups are developing low-earth orbit advertisements\u2014logos or other designs, visible in the night sky, made from tiny, reflective satellites. Entrepreneurs are making plans for space hotels.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBefore we let rampant development go unchecked, we should consider how these efforts might conflict with or complement each other. We still have the chance to intentionally design humanity\u2019s first \u201cplanned orbit.\u201d\nIn some ways, the challenges in space mimic those facing city planners on Earth. In the 19th-century, urban planners built systems for waste management and sanitation in industrializing cities. Today, we need to mitigate the risk of \u201cspace debris\u201d\u2014spent rocket stages, fuel tanks and decommissioned satellites that could damage other satellites, spacecraft and future human habitats. Several startups are developing solutions, including capture nets, \u201cchaser and target\u201d propulsion units that would force debris back to earth, and the repurposing of empty rocket stages into habitats. In November, the Federal Communications Commission voted to review and revise their satellite deorbiting rules, first adopted in 2004, to make them more stringent. To limit the creation of new debris, regulators around the world are addressing \u201cdeorbit plans\u201d that require certain classes of launched objects to prove they can successfully burn up on reentry. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nLow-earth orbit also raises questions of \u201cland use,\u201d zoning and shared utilities. One day, off-world manufacturing centers might take advantage of microgravity to make things like improved silicon wafers. Just as on earth, there are potential risks\u2014like explosions and pollution\u2014if facilities are built too close to habitats. Should we preserve swaths of orbit for scientific use in the same way we allocate land to national parks? Distances in space are vast, but we still need to manage shared-orbit traffic and satellite congestion. This is being addressed in part by bodies like U.S. Strategic Command, which tracks space objects for satellite operators, and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs\u2019 register of objects launched into outer space. \n\nJust as regulators oversee common utilities like water and electricity, in space we are allocating shared resources like electromagnetic spectrum, which impacts the availability of radio frequency bands for space-based communication. The FCC and the International Telecommunication Union currently regulate this in the U.S. and globally, respectively. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is developing a system of self-assembling modular tiles called Tesserae, which lock together using magnets to form a geodesic dome.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n TU Dortmund Fraunhofer Institute\n \n\n\n\nFuture low-earth orbit cities will also need reconfigurable architecture that can assemble autonomously\u2014to avoid dangerous and costly construction by humans\u2014and adapt to the needs of changing missions and the desires of inhabitants. At MIT, we\u2019re developing a system of self-assembling modular tiles, called Tesserae, that lock together using magnets to form a geodesic dome. The idea is to create low-cost, reusable modules that can be used as orbiting bases, small-scale habitats, space getaways or other infrastructure for life in space. Freed from the constraints of Earth\u2019s gravity, we can redefine how we design and build architecture.\nAs low-earth orbit\u2019s population grows from three crew members aboard the international space station to potentially millions of people living and working in space, the economic, architectural and socio-political decisions we make about what happens in near-space will directly impact life on the earth\u2019s surface. Will we allow floating advertisements to crowd the beauty of the cosmos, and possibly prevent astronomers from studying stars and galaxies? Will we make it easy for \u201ccitizen scientists\u201d to access and use satellite tec Before low-earth orbit is clogged with hotels, satellite traffic and debris, we should plan for the extra-planetary community we want, writes Ariel Ekblaw, founder of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative. ",
        "author": "Ariel Ekblaw"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7146",
        "date": "2019-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-is-poised-for-explosive-growth-lets-get-it-right-11554731633?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=57",
        "text": "The next decade is set to bring explosive commercial growth and more private industry players to low-earth orbit, the area spanning 100 to 1,240 miles above the planet\u2019s surface. SpaceX has proposed a satellite-based internet, and Planet is growing its fleet of Earth-imaging satellites. NASA plans a transition towards commercial management of the international space station. Several startups are developing low-earth orbit advertisements\u2014logos or other designs, visible in the night sky, made from tiny, reflective satellites. Entrepreneurs are making plans for space hotels.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nBefore we let rampant development go unchecked, we should consider how these efforts might conflict with or complement each other. We still have the chance to intentionally design humanity\u2019s first \u201cplanned orbit.\u201d\nIn some ways, the challenges in space mimic those facing city planners on Earth. In the 19th-century, urban planners built systems for waste management and sanitation in industrializing cities. Today, we need to mitigate the risk of \u201cspace debris\u201d\u2014spent rocket stages, fuel tanks and decommissioned satellites that could damage other satellites, spacecraft and future human habitats. Several startups are developing solutions, including capture nets, \u201cchaser and target\u201d propulsion units that would force debris back to earth, and the repurposing of empty rocket stages into habitats. In November, the Federal Communications Commission voted to review and revise their satellite deorbiting rules, first adopted in 2004, to make them more stringent. To limit the creation of new debris, regulators around the world are addressing \u201cdeorbit plans\u201d that require certain classes of launched objects to prove they can successfully burn up on reentry. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nLow-earth orbit also raises questions of \u201cland use,\u201d zoning and shared utilities. One day, off-world manufacturing centers might take advantage of microgravity to make things like improved silicon wafers. Just as on earth, there are potential risks\u2014like explosions and pollution\u2014if facilities are built too close to habitats. Should we preserve swaths of orbit for scientific use in the same way we allocate land to national parks? Distances in space are vast, but we still need to manage shared-orbit traffic and satellite congestion. This is being addressed in part by bodies like U.S. Strategic Command, which tracks space objects for satellite operators, and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs\u2019 register of objects launched into outer space. \n\nJust as regulators oversee common utilities like water and electricity, in space we are allocating shared resources like electromagnetic spectrum, which impacts the availability of radio frequency bands for space-based communication. The FCC and the International Telecommunication Union currently regulate this in the U.S. and globally, respectively. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is developing a system of self-assembling modular tiles called Tesserae, which lock together using magnets to form a geodesic dome.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n TU Dortmund Fraunhofer Institute\n \n\n\n\nFuture low-earth orbit cities will also need reconfigurable architecture that can assemble autonomously\u2014to avoid dangerous and costly construction by humans\u2014and adapt to the needs of changing missions and the desires of inhabitants. At MIT, we\u2019re developing a system of self-assembling modular tiles, called Tesserae, that lock together using magnets to form a geodesic dome. The idea is to create low-cost, reusable modules that can be used as orbiting bases, small-scale habitats, space getaways or other infrastructure for life in space. Freed from the constraints of Earth\u2019s gravity, we can redefine how we design and build architecture.\nAs low-earth orbit\u2019s population grows from three crew members aboard the international space station to potentially millions of people living and working in space, the economic, architectural and socio-political decisions we make about what happens in near-space will directly impact life on the earth\u2019s surface. Will we allow floating advertisements to crowd the beauty of the cosmos, and possibly prevent astronomers from studying stars and galaxies? Will we make it easy for \u201ccitizen scientists\u201d to access and use satellite tec Before low-earth orbit is clogged with hotels, satellite traffic and debris, we should plan for the extra-planetary community we want, writes Ariel Ekblaw, founder of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative. ",
        "author": "Ariel Ekblaw"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7147",
        "date": "2019-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-is-poised-for-explosive-growth-lets-get-it-right-11554731633?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=75",
        "text": "The next decade is set to bring explosive commercial growth and more private industry players to low-earth orbit, the area spanning 100 to 1,240 miles above the planet\u2019s surface. SpaceX has proposed a satellite-based internet, and Planet is growing its fleet of Earth-imaging satellites. NASA plans a transition towards commercial management of the international space station. Several startups are developing low-earth orbit advertisements\u2014logos or other designs, visible in the night sky, made from tiny, reflective satellites. Entrepreneurs are making plans for space hotels.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBefore we let rampant development go unchecked, we should consider how these efforts might conflict with or complement each other. We still have the chance to intentionally design humanity\u2019s first \u201cplanned orbit.\u201d\nIn some ways, the challenges in space mimic those facing city planners on Earth. In the 19th-century, urban planners built systems for waste management and sanitation in industrializing cities. Today, we need to mitigate the risk of \u201cspace debris\u201d\u2014spent rocket stages, fuel tanks and decommissioned satellites that could damage other satellites, spacecraft and future human habitats. Several startups are developing solutions, including capture nets, \u201cchaser and target\u201d propulsion units that would force debris back to earth, and the repurposing of empty rocket stages into habitats. In November, the Federal Communications Commission voted to review and revise their satellite deorbiting rules, first adopted in 2004, to make them more stringent. To limit the creation of new debris, regulators around the world are addressing \u201cdeorbit plans\u201d that require certain classes of launched objects to prove they can successfully burn up on reentry. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nLow-earth orbit also raises questions of \u201cland use,\u201d zoning and shared utilities. One day, off-world manufacturing centers might take advantage of microgravity to make things like improved silicon wafers. Just as on earth, there are potential risks\u2014like explosions and pollution\u2014if facilities are built too close to habitats. Should we preserve swaths of orbit for scientific use in the same way we allocate land to national parks? Distances in space are vast, but we still need to manage shared-orbit traffic and satellite congestion. This is being addressed in part by bodies like U.S. Strategic Command, which tracks space objects for satellite operators, and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs\u2019 register of objects launched into outer space. \n\nJust as regulators oversee common utilities like water and electricity, in space we are allocating shared resources like electromagnetic spectrum, which impacts the availability of radio frequency bands for space-based communication. The FCC and the International Telecommunication Union currently regulate this in the U.S. and globally, respectively. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is developing a system of self-assembling modular tiles called Tesserae, which lock together using magnets to form a geodesic dome.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n TU Dortmund Fraunhofer Institute\n \n\n\n\nFuture low-earth orbit cities will also need reconfigurable architecture that can assemble autonomously\u2014to avoid dangerous and costly construction by humans\u2014and adapt to the needs of changing missions and the desires of inhabitants. At MIT, we\u2019re developing a system of self-assembling modular tiles, called Tesserae, that lock together using magnets to form a geodesic dome. The idea is to create low-cost, reusable modules that can be used as orbiting bases, small-scale habitats, space getaways or other infrastructure for life in space. Freed from the constraints of Earth\u2019s gravity, we can redefine how we design and build architecture.\nAs low-earth orbit\u2019s population grows from three crew members aboard the international space station to potentially millions of people living and working in space, the economic, architectural and socio-political decisions we make about what happens in near-space will directly impact life on the earth\u2019s surface. Will we allow floating advertisements to crowd the beauty of the cosmos, and possibly prevent astronomers from studying stars and galaxies? Will we make it easy for \u201ccitizen scientists\u201d to access and use satellite Before low-earth orbit is clogged with hotels, satellite traffic and debris, we should plan for the extra-planetary community we want, writes Ariel Ekblaw, founder of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative. ",
        "author": "Ariel Ekblaw"
    },
    {
        "title": "Price, the Final Frontier: Blue Origin\u2019s Tourist Rocket (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7148",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/price-the-final-frontier-blue-origins-tourist-rocket-11555083002?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=16",
        "text": "Sure, I would do it, if I could afford it. Having had a tour of the assembly hall and a walkaround of the single-stage booster and six-person autonomous capsule, I\u2019m completely at ease with all the equipment but my own. I\u2019m what\u2019s known in the Air Force as a three-bagger. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, assured me the ride would be \u201cvery gentle,\u201d no more physically demanding than a roller coaster. I wondered if he had checked with the janitorial staff at Magic Mountain.\nBlue Origin will start flying humans this year but it hasn\u2019t announced the maiden voyage for retail customers. \u201cWe won\u2019t talk prices until we need to, and we don\u2019t need to until we actually have an operational vehicle,\u201d said Mr. Smith.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe New Shepard crew capsule holds six passengers\u2014Dan Neil included, if the price is right.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spencer Lowell for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nT-minus a pregnant pause: New Shepard\u2019s price point will resonate because cost is inversely proportional to access, and access\u2014the democratization of space\u2014is the notion that Blue Origin founder and world\u2019s-wealthiest-man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n has taken as the company\u2019s mandate. In a period of historic concentrations of global wealth, New Shepard risks looking like just another skyrocketing inequality, an experience underscoring the oneness of humanity, brought to you by the forces that keep us apart. Like tickets to \u201cHamilton.\u201d\n\nThe price \u201cis certainly a big debate\u201d in the space-watching community, said Tim Dodd, whose \u201cEveryday Astronaut\u201d YouTube channel has more than 280,000 subscribers. Mr. Dodd noted that Blue Origin\u2019s competitor, the Richard Branson-funded Virgin Galactic, has announced tickets on its space plane will cost $250,000, with passenger service beginning in 2019. \u201cI would guess [Blue Origin will] likely charge around $150,000 per seat so as to undercut Virgin Galactic,\u201d Mr. Dodd wrote in an email.\nBut in Kent, I found reasons to hope the ticket might not be so dear as that. In person, New Shepard presents as a surprisingly trim and hardy little machine\u2014only 60 feet tall when assembled on the pad, about 20 feet shorter than the in-sky Mercury-Redstone rocket of its namesake, astronaut Alan Shepard. There has never been a manned launch system so approachable, so human-scaled, so ineffably rideable.\nNew Shepard\u2019s construction is science but not science fiction. The fuselage/fuel tank, covered in thermal protection, is fabricated from 2000-series aluminum alloy typical of aerospace, rolled up and welded on special jigs in a high-tech but unexceptional way. Why not build structures with weight-saving carbon-fiber composites? First, I was told, because composites don\u2019t play well with cryogenic fuels. Also, composites\u2019 durability for long-term repeated use was unproven.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nNew Shepard is effectively designed around keeping paying astronauts in those six seats, with maximum reusability and minimum between-flight maintenance, very much like airlines turn around aircraft.\nFor example: Because the booster separates and falls away below the Karman Line, it isn\u2019t exposed to the extreme temps of orbital re-entry. It does get a bit blackened, however, from the uplicking flames during the propulsive landing. In most cases the ground crew will simply recover the booster, carry it back to the launching pad, check it, paint it, fuel it, and fly it. The landing team tries to avoid landing dead-center on the pad. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to repaint the logo,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice-president of sales, marketing and customer experience.\nNew Shepard\u2019s operating costs, flight to flight, should ideally reduce to the hand work required to recover and prepare the spacecraft, and the cost to tank it up with liquid oxygen and hydrogen (about $250,000). \u201cIf you get costs down and still get profitability on every flight, you can have larger addressable market,\u201d Mr. Smith said.\nAlso, the price to fly can be expected to fall as the inventory of seats goes up. The company currently has two boosters in Texas and two capsules, one for people and one for payloads, and is set up for serial production of both. The operational tempo of boosters is expected to be a launch a week. And since the New Shepard system is relatively small and transportable, it could be set up in any geographically appropriate place, although there are no plans to do so.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of E Jeff Bezos\u2019 space vessel is a marvel to behold, Dan Neil says, but the per-trip fare will be key to democratizing space travel. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Price, the Final Frontier: Blue Origin\u2019s Tourist Rocket (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7149",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/price-the-final-frontier-blue-origins-tourist-rocket-11555083002?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=60",
        "text": "Sure, I would do it, if I could afford it. Having had a tour of the assembly hall and a walkaround of the single-stage booster and six-person autonomous capsule, I\u2019m completely at ease with all the equipment but my own. I\u2019m what\u2019s known in the Air Force as a three-bagger. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, assured me the ride would be \u201cvery gentle,\u201d no more physically demanding than a roller coaster. I wondered if he had checked with the janitorial staff at Magic Mountain.\nBlue Origin will start flying humans this year but it hasn\u2019t announced the maiden voyage for retail customers. \u201cWe won\u2019t talk prices until we need to, and we don\u2019t need to until we actually have an operational vehicle,\u201d said Mr. Smith.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe New Shepard crew capsule holds six passengers\u2014Dan Neil included, if the price is right.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spencer Lowell for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nT-minus a pregnant pause: New Shepard\u2019s price point will resonate because cost is inversely proportional to access, and access\u2014the democratization of space\u2014is the notion that Blue Origin founder and world\u2019s-wealthiest-man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n has taken as the company\u2019s mandate. In a period of historic concentrations of global wealth, New Shepard risks looking like just another skyrocketing inequality, an experience underscoring the oneness of humanity, brought to you by the forces that keep us apart. Like tickets to \u201cHamilton.\u201d\n\nThe price \u201cis certainly a big debate\u201d in the space-watching community, said Tim Dodd, whose \u201cEveryday Astronaut\u201d YouTube channel has more than 280,000 subscribers. Mr. Dodd noted that Blue Origin\u2019s competitor, the Richard Branson-funded Virgin Galactic, has announced tickets on its space plane will cost $250,000, with passenger service beginning in 2019. \u201cI would guess [Blue Origin will] likely charge around $150,000 per seat so as to undercut Virgin Galactic,\u201d Mr. Dodd wrote in an email.\nBut in Kent, I found reasons to hope the ticket might not be so dear as that. In person, New Shepard presents as a surprisingly trim and hardy little machine\u2014only 60 feet tall when assembled on the pad, about 20 feet shorter than the in-sky Mercury-Redstone rocket of its namesake, astronaut Alan Shepard. There has never been a manned launch system so approachable, so human-scaled, so ineffably rideable.\nNew Shepard\u2019s construction is science but not science fiction. The fuselage/fuel tank, covered in thermal protection, is fabricated from 2000-series aluminum alloy typical of aerospace, rolled up and welded on special jigs in a high-tech but unexceptional way. Why not build structures with weight-saving carbon-fiber composites? First, I was told, because composites don\u2019t play well with cryogenic fuels. Also, composites\u2019 durability for long-term repeated use was unproven.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nNew Shepard is effectively designed around keeping paying astronauts in those six seats, with maximum reusability and minimum between-flight maintenance, very much like airlines turn around aircraft.\nFor example: Because the booster separates and falls away below the Karman Line, it isn\u2019t exposed to the extreme temps of orbital re-entry. It does get a bit blackened, however, from the uplicking flames during the propulsive landing. In most cases the ground crew will simply recover the booster, carry it back to the launching pad, check it, paint it, fuel it, and fly it. The landing team tries to avoid landing dead-center on the pad. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to repaint the logo,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice-president of sales, marketing and customer experience.\nNew Shepard\u2019s operating costs, flight to flight, should ideally reduce to the hand work required to recover and prepare the spacecraft, and the cost to tank it up with liquid oxygen and hydrogen (about $250,000). \u201cIf you get costs down and still get profitability on every flight, you can have larger addressable market,\u201d Mr. Smith said.\nAlso, the price to fly can be expected to fall as the inventory of seats goes up. The company currently has two boosters in Texas and two capsules, one for people and one for payloads, and is set up for serial production of both. The operational tempo of boosters is expected to be a launch a week. And since the New Shepard system is relatively small and transportable, it could be set up in any geographically appropriate place, although there are no plans to do so.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of E Jeff Bezos\u2019 space vessel is a marvel to behold, Dan Neil says, but the per-trip fare will be key to democratizing space travel. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Price, the Final Frontier: Blue Origin\u2019s Tourist Rocket (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7150",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/price-the-final-frontier-blue-origins-tourist-rocket-11555083002?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=62",
        "text": "Sure, I would do it, if I could afford it. Having had a tour of the assembly hall and a walkaround of the single-stage booster and six-person autonomous capsule, I\u2019m completely at ease with all the equipment but my own. I\u2019m what\u2019s known in the Air Force as a three-bagger. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, assured me the ride would be \u201cvery gentle,\u201d no more physically demanding than a roller coaster. I wondered if he had checked with the janitorial staff at Magic Mountain.\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin will start flying humans this year but it hasn\u2019t announced the maiden voyage for retail customers. \u201cWe won\u2019t talk prices until we need to, and we don\u2019t need to until we actually have an operational vehicle,\u201d said Mr. Smith.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe New Shepard crew capsule holds six passengers\u2014Dan Neil included, if the price is right.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spencer Lowell for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nT-minus a pregnant pause: New Shepard\u2019s price point will resonate because cost is inversely proportional to access, and access\u2014the democratization of space\u2014is the notion that Blue Origin founder and world\u2019s-wealthiest-man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n has taken as the company\u2019s mandate. In a period of historic concentrations of global wealth, New Shepard risks looking like just another skyrocketing inequality, an experience underscoring the oneness of humanity, brought to you by the forces that keep us apart. Like tickets to \u201cHamilton.\u201d\n\nThe price \u201cis certainly a big debate\u201d in the space-watching community, said Tim Dodd, whose \u201cEveryday Astronaut\u201d YouTube channel has more than 280,000 subscribers. Mr. Dodd noted that Blue Origin\u2019s competitor, the Richard Branson-funded Virgin Galactic, has announced tickets on its space plane will cost $250,000, with passenger service beginning in 2019. \u201cI would guess [Blue Origin will] likely charge around $150,000 per seat so as to undercut Virgin Galactic,\u201d Mr. Dodd wrote in an email.\nBut in Kent, I found reasons to hope the ticket might not be so dear as that. In person, New Shepard presents as a surprisingly trim and hardy little machine\u2014only 60 feet tall when assembled on the pad, about 20 feet shorter than the in-sky Mercury-Redstone rocket of its namesake, astronaut Alan Shepard. There has never been a manned launch system so approachable, so human-scaled, so ineffably rideable.\nNew Shepard\u2019s construction is science but not science fiction. The fuselage/fuel tank, covered in thermal protection, is fabricated from 2000-series aluminum alloy typical of aerospace, rolled up and welded on special jigs in a high-tech but unexceptional way. Why not build structures with weight-saving carbon-fiber composites? First, I was told, because composites don\u2019t play well with cryogenic fuels. Also, composites\u2019 durability for long-term repeated use was unproven.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nNew Shepard is effectively designed around keeping paying astronauts in those six seats, with maximum reusability and minimum between-flight maintenance, very much like airlines turn around aircraft.\nFor example: Because the booster separates and falls away below the Karman Line, it isn\u2019t exposed to the extreme temps of orbital re-entry. It does get a bit blackened, however, from the uplicking flames during the propulsive landing. In most cases the ground crew will simply recover the booster, carry it back to the launching pad, check it, paint it, fuel it, and fly it. The landing team tries to avoid landing dead-center on the pad. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to repaint the logo,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice-president of sales, marketing and customer experience.\nNew Shepard\u2019s operating costs, flight to flight, should ideally reduce to the hand work required to recover and prepare the spacecraft, and the cost to tank it up with liquid oxygen and hydrogen (about $250,000). \u201cIf you get costs down and still get profitability on every flight, you can have larger addressable market,\u201d Mr. Smith said.\nAlso, the price to fly can be expected to fall as the inventory of seats goes up. The company currently has two boosters in Texas and two capsules, one for people and one for payloads, and is set up for serial production of both. The operational tempo of boosters is expected to be a launch a week. And since the New Shepard system is relatively small and transportable, it could be set up in any geographically appropriate place, although there are no plans to do so.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSo how much\u2026about? Mr. Smith declined to ballpark. \u201cIn the early phases of our development there will be a different cost curve and therefore different pricing than it would be later at sustained operations,\u201d he said.\nAwww, man! Is it $150,000? Because if it\u2019s six figures, I\u2019m out. But if it\u2019s five figures\u2014and it sounds like it could be, maybe, one day\u2014I might be in.\nMr. Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, agreed that \u201cthat the cost to operate a flight might be under a half-million [dollars].\u201d Split six ways, that\u2019s only $83,333.33 per astronaut.\nI\u2019m sure they will let me keep the jumpsuit.\n\u2014Dan Neil writes the \u201cRumble Seat\u201d column for\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tThe Wall Street Journal. Jeff Bezos\u2019 space vessel is a marvel to behold, Dan Neil says, but the per-trip fare will be key to democratizing space travel. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Could AI Keep People \u2018Alive\u2019 After Death? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7151",
        "date": "2021-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/could-ai-keep-people-alive-after-death-11625317200?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=7",
        "text": "Numerous startups are already anticipating growing demand for digital personas, including Replika, an app that learns to replicate a person in the form of a chatbot, and HereAfter AI, which records people\u2019s life stories and uses them to create a replica embedded in a smart speaker.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nEven Big Tech seems to acknowledge the potential: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft Corp.\n\n\n recently patented a method of using chatbots to preserve historical figures and living people. A Microsoft spokeswoman says there is no plan to use it. Digital personas take many forms, from chatbots to animatronic robots to moving projections that gesture and speak like the real thing. AI is usually central to building and training them to interact with people. Already, hologram-like projections of dead musical artists, including Roy Orbison and Tupac Shakur, have performed on stage. In the Microsoft patent, two of the company\u2019s inventors, Dustin Abramson and Joseph Johnson, describe a conversational chatbot that uses data from social media, voice recordings and writings \u201cto train a chat bot to converse and interact in the personality of the specific person.\u201d That person, the patent says, \u201cmay correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure.\u201d The patent goes on to describe how the chatbot could mimic a person\u2019s voice and interact using two- or three-dimensional images \u201cto create a more realistic, human-like chat experience.\u201d As digital personas get closer to the real thing, they may become able to learn and evolve beyond the originator\u2019s death, adapting to new events as they happen. That would confer a kind of digital immortality\u2014not only preserving a personality but allowing it to live on in virtual form.\n\n\n\n\n\n Old photos, letters and tapes. Tech has long allowed us to preserve memories of people long after they have died. But with new tools there are now interactive solutions, including memorialized online accounts, voice bots and even humanoid robots. WSJ\u2019s Joanna Stern journeys across the world to test some of those for a young woman who is living on borrowed time. Photo illustration: Adele Morgan/The Wall Street Journal \n \n\n\nSuch \u201cimmortal\u201d personas could continue to interact with their families, friends and descendants long after their deaths, and inform historical and genealogical research. They could also be put to use aboard spacecraft exploring the universe, venturing further than any ordinary human could in a lifetime, says David Burden, an author and the chief executive of Daden Ltd., a U.K.-based company that builds chatbots. Living people might use digital replicas of themselves that email and chat with colleagues to get more work done, or to take over while they are on vacation, Mr. Burden says. It is easy to foresee that advancing further. An \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n -like executive might want to use a digital persona to manage a business after his death, he says.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think about using AI to raise the dead, so to speak? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cPeople who have created organizations and businesses don\u2019t really want to let go of the reins,\u201d he says. \u201cWhy not just hand it over to some sort of construct that will continue to grow the business in line with their particular thought?\u201d As with many sci-fi visions of the future, there are downsides. Virtual personas, for one, are inherently imperfect because they are typically based on speech, writings, social media posts and other output that doesn\u2019t necessarily capture the essence of a person. A digital persona constructed via AI has no consciousness. Society may have to wrestle with questions about who owns a dead person\u2019s avatar and any income it produces. Should virtual personas have rights? And will their existence mean people can\u2019t fully grieve the loss of friends and relatives who are preserved?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Chase Voorhees for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n Personas could also be created without the originator\u2019s knowledge or permission, provided enough data exists in the public realm to train an AI model to mimic him or her. Historical figures could be resurrected, whether or not they would have liked to be. Good replicas of famous people or politicians could also allow them to exert influence over future events, shaping the world from beyond the grave. Davide Sisto, a philosopher at the University of Turin in Italy and an author who focuses on mortality in digital culture, says he hoped it wouldn\u2019t be possible for a politician such as former Italian Prime Minister \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Silvio Berlusconi\n\n\n\n to have a virtual counterpart that continued to operate indefin Experts are exploring ways artificial intelligence might confer a kind of digital immortality, preserving the personalities of the departed in virtual form and then allowing them to evolve. ",
        "author": "Asa Fitch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Could AI Keep People \u2018Alive\u2019 After Death? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7152",
        "date": "2021-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/could-ai-keep-people-alive-after-death-11625317200?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=27",
        "text": "Numerous startups are already anticipating growing demand for digital personas, including Replika, an app that learns to replicate a person in the form of a chatbot, and HereAfter AI, which records people\u2019s life stories and uses them to create a replica embedded in a smart speaker.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nEven Big Tech seems to acknowledge the potential: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft Corp.\n\n\n recently patented a method of using chatbots to preserve historical figures and living people. A Microsoft spokeswoman says there is no plan to use it. Digital personas take many forms, from chatbots to animatronic robots to moving projections that gesture and speak like the real thing. AI is usually central to building and training them to interact with people. Already, hologram-like projections of dead musical artists, including Roy Orbison and Tupac Shakur, have performed on stage. In the Microsoft patent, two of the company\u2019s inventors, Dustin Abramson and Joseph Johnson, describe a conversational chatbot that uses data from social media, voice recordings and writings \u201cto train a chat bot to converse and interact in the personality of the specific person.\u201d That person, the patent says, \u201cmay correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure.\u201d The patent goes on to describe how the chatbot could mimic a person\u2019s voice and interact using two- or three-dimensional images \u201cto create a more realistic, human-like chat experience.\u201d As digital personas get closer to the real thing, they may become able to learn and evolve beyond the originator\u2019s death, adapting to new events as they happen. That would confer a kind of digital immortality\u2014not only preserving a personality but allowing it to live on in virtual form.\n\n\n\n\n\n Old photos, letters and tapes. Tech has long allowed us to preserve memories of people long after they have died. But with new tools there are now interactive solutions, including memorialized online accounts, voice bots and even humanoid robots. WSJ\u2019s Joanna Stern journeys across the world to test some of those for a young woman who is living on borrowed time. Photo illustration: Adele Morgan/The Wall Street Journal \n \n\n\nSuch \u201cimmortal\u201d personas could continue to interact with their families, friends and descendants long after their deaths, and inform historical and genealogical research. They could also be put to use aboard spacecraft exploring the universe, venturing further than any ordinary human could in a lifetime, says David Burden, an author and the chief executive of Daden Ltd., a U.K.-based company that builds chatbots. Living people might use digital replicas of themselves that email and chat with colleagues to get more work done, or to take over while they are on vacation, Mr. Burden says. It is easy to foresee that advancing further. An \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n -like executive might want to use a digital persona to manage a business after his death, he says.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think about using AI to raise the dead, so to speak? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cPeople who have created organizations and businesses don\u2019t really want to let go of the reins,\u201d he says. \u201cWhy not just hand it over to some sort of construct that will continue to grow the business in line with their particular thought?\u201d As with many sci-fi visions of the future, there are downsides. Virtual personas, for one, are inherently imperfect because they are typically based on speech, writings, social media posts and other output that doesn\u2019t necessarily capture the essence of a person. A digital persona constructed via AI has no consciousness. Society may have to wrestle with questions about who owns a dead person\u2019s avatar and any income it produces. Should virtual personas have rights? And will their existence mean people can\u2019t fully grieve the loss of friends and relatives who are preserved?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Chase Voorhees for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n Personas could also be created without the originator\u2019s knowledge or permission, provided enough data exists in the public realm to train an AI model to mimic him or her. Historical figures could be resurrected, whether or not they would have liked to be. Good replicas of famous people or politicians could also allow them to exert influence over future events, shaping the world from beyond the grave. Davide Sisto, a philosopher at the University of Turin in Italy and an author who focuses on mortality in digital culture, says he hoped it wouldn\u2019t be possible for a politician such as former Italian Prime Minister \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Silvio Berlusconi\n\n\n\n to have a virtual counterpart that continued to operate indefin Experts are exploring ways artificial intelligence might confer a kind of digital immortality, preserving the personalities of the departed in virtual form and then allowing them to evolve. ",
        "author": "Asa Fitch"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7153",
        "date": "2019-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/robotic-tails-and-zero-gravity-orchestras-lifestyle-upgrades-for-space-11554472496?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=16",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nValentina Sumini, a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab, and Manuel Muccillo, a product designer, are building a robotic tail called SpaceHuman. The idea is to help the casual space traveler grab objects, anchor to surfaces and balance while floating in environments with reduced gravity, like in a spacecraft or on the surface of Mars.\nDr. Sumini is a member of the Media Lab\u2019s Space Exploration Initiative, a group of 50 graduate students, faculty and staff developing technologies, tools and experiences for a new space age. In May, the group plans to test the tail and other projects on a microgravity flight. An airplane will take them up, then fly sharply down, allowing for 20 to 30 seconds of weightlessness at a time\u2014a follow-up to a similar test in November 2017.\nInspired by seahorses, Dr. Sumini and Mr. Muccillo began designing the tail this past summer. The prototype consists of a trio of ribbed tubes made of translucent, flexible silicone. The ribs are actually 36 air chambers that can be inflated in different configurations by 12 battery-operated air pumps attached to a belt, causing the tail to curve or lengthen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInspired by seahorses, Valentina Sumini and Mr. Muccillo began designing the SpaceHuman robotic tail this past summer. Dr. Sumini plans to test it on a microgravity flight in May.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe tail responds to the wearer\u2019s environment and movements, grabbing onto surfaces, acting like a rudder during jumps or picking up objects as needed, thanks to an array of sensors on the tail and body and an object-tracking camera on the back. The camera uses an algorithm to identify colors and materials that have been uploaded to the system\u2014brightly colored fabric for the microgravity test flight, but eventually handles and other items\u2014and to respond accordingly, based on the object, distance and body position. \u201cOur body is the main control tool,\u201d Dr. Sumini says. \n\nIn the meantime, Dr. Sumini is testing the prototype underwater. It\u2019s currently attached to a wet suit; eventually, the tail could be stuck to any piece of clothing with Velcro, she said. And it could have earthbound applications as a balancing device for first responders in disaster zones or an exoskeleton for construction or auto factory workers\u2014anywhere people need an extra hand.\n\n\n\n\nThe Zero-Gravity Orchestra Pianos don\u2019t work in zero gravity. But if we ever plan to spend extended periods in space, whether as orbital tourists, in lunar colonies or on missions to Mars, we may want to make a little music. Nicole L\u2019Huillier, a MIT Media Lab research assistant, and Sands Fish, a designer and computer scientist, are building a zero-gravity orchestra\u2014a series of instruments that rely on the suspension of gravity to play. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Telemetron.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ally Schmaling\n \n\n\n\nTheir first attempt was the Telemetron, a clear, 12-sided polycarbonate chamber about the size of a soccer ball, which they tested on a microgravity flight with the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative in November 2017. Inside, there were three cylindrical chimes outfitted with gyroscopes and sensors that tracked their spins, collisions and drifts. That data was beamed to a computer, which translated each action into a musical note and played the resulting composition, at once dreamy and robotic. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nNow, they\u2019re designing three more instruments: the N\u00facleo, a sphere with eight smaller spheres attached by springs; the Monolito, a 2-foot-long trapezoid; and the Sat\u00e9lite, made of five rotating bars that resemble the solar panels on a satellite.\nEach instrument will be equipped with an inertial measurement unit\u2014like a more sophisticated gyroscope\u2014that will record speed, rotation and movement. Mr. Fish and Ms. L\u2019Huillier have yet to finalize the sounds the instruments will make, but one might have a percussive effect, while another might sound more like a synthesizer. With their first instrument, slower motion produced quiet, low notes, while fast spins created a crescendo of loud, high notes. The next three will likely work the same way.\nFloating through space, the instruments can perform by themselves, or an astronaut could move them\u2014a musical per Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are developing technology for a day when amateur astronauts travel into orbit. ",
        "author": "Leigh Kamping-Carder"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7154",
        "date": "2019-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/robotic-tails-and-zero-gravity-orchestras-lifestyle-upgrades-for-space-11554472496?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=57",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nValentina Sumini, a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab, and Manuel Muccillo, a product designer, are building a robotic tail called SpaceHuman. The idea is to help the casual space traveler grab objects, anchor to surfaces and balance while floating in environments with reduced gravity, like in a spacecraft or on the surface of Mars.\nDr. Sumini is a member of the Media Lab\u2019s Space Exploration Initiative, a group of 50 graduate students, faculty and staff developing technologies, tools and experiences for a new space age. In May, the group plans to test the tail and other projects on a microgravity flight. An airplane will take them up, then fly sharply down, allowing for 20 to 30 seconds of weightlessness at a time\u2014a follow-up to a similar test in November 2017.\nInspired by seahorses, Dr. Sumini and Mr. Muccillo began designing the tail this past summer. The prototype consists of a trio of ribbed tubes made of translucent, flexible silicone. The ribs are actually 36 air chambers that can be inflated in different configurations by 12 battery-operated air pumps attached to a belt, causing the tail to curve or lengthen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInspired by seahorses, Valentina Sumini and Mr. Muccillo began designing the SpaceHuman robotic tail this past summer. Dr. Sumini plans to test it on a microgravity flight in May.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe tail responds to the wearer\u2019s environment and movements, grabbing onto surfaces, acting like a rudder during jumps or picking up objects as needed, thanks to an array of sensors on the tail and body and an object-tracking camera on the back. The camera uses an algorithm to identify colors and materials that have been uploaded to the system\u2014brightly colored fabric for the microgravity test flight, but eventually handles and other items\u2014and to respond accordingly, based on the object, distance and body position. \u201cOur body is the main control tool,\u201d Dr. Sumini says. \n\nIn the meantime, Dr. Sumini is testing the prototype underwater. It\u2019s currently attached to a wet suit; eventually, the tail could be stuck to any piece of clothing with Velcro, she said. And it could have earthbound applications as a balancing device for first responders in disaster zones or an exoskeleton for construction or auto factory workers\u2014anywhere people need an extra hand.\n\n\n\n\nThe Zero-Gravity Orchestra Pianos don\u2019t work in zero gravity. But if we ever plan to spend extended periods in space, whether as orbital tourists, in lunar colonies or on missions to Mars, we may want to make a little music. Nicole L\u2019Huillier, a MIT Media Lab research assistant, and Sands Fish, a designer and computer scientist, are building a zero-gravity orchestra\u2014a series of instruments that rely on the suspension of gravity to play. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Telemetron.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ally Schmaling\n \n\n\n\nTheir first attempt was the Telemetron, a clear, 12-sided polycarbonate chamber about the size of a soccer ball, which they tested on a microgravity flight with the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative in November 2017. Inside, there were three cylindrical chimes outfitted with gyroscopes and sensors that tracked their spins, collisions and drifts. That data was beamed to a computer, which translated each action into a musical note and played the resulting composition, at once dreamy and robotic. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nNow, they\u2019re designing three more instruments: the N\u00facleo, a sphere with eight smaller spheres attached by springs; the Monolito, a 2-foot-long trapezoid; and the Sat\u00e9lite, made of five rotating bars that resemble the solar panels on a satellite.\nEach instrument will be equipped with an inertial measurement unit\u2014like a more sophisticated gyroscope\u2014that will record speed, rotation and movement. Mr. Fish and Ms. L\u2019Huillier have yet to finalize the sounds the instruments will make, but one might have a percussive effect, while another might sound more like a synthesizer. With their first instrument, slower motion produced quiet, low notes, while fast spins created a crescendo of loud, high notes. The next three will likely work the same way.\nFloating through space, the instruments can perform by themselves, or an astronaut could move them\u2014a musical per Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are developing technology for a day when amateur astronauts travel into orbit. ",
        "author": "Leigh Kamping-Carder"
    },
    {
        "title": "How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7155",
        "date": "2019-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/robotic-tails-and-zero-gravity-orchestras-lifestyle-upgrades-for-space-11554472496?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=75",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nValentina Sumini, a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Media Lab, and Manuel Muccillo, a product designer, are building a robotic tail called SpaceHuman. The idea is to help the casual space traveler grab objects, anchor to surfaces and balance while floating in environments with reduced gravity, like in a spacecraft or on the surface of Mars.\n\n\n\n\nDr. Sumini is a member of the Media Lab\u2019s Space Exploration Initiative, a group of 50 graduate students, faculty and staff developing technologies, tools and experiences for a new space age. In May, the group plans to test the tail and other projects on a microgravity flight. An airplane will take them up, then fly sharply down, allowing for 20 to 30 seconds of weightlessness at a time\u2014a follow-up to a similar test in November 2017.\nInspired by seahorses, Dr. Sumini and Mr. Muccillo began designing the tail this past summer. The prototype consists of a trio of ribbed tubes made of translucent, flexible silicone. The ribs are actually 36 air chambers that can be inflated in different configurations by 12 battery-operated air pumps attached to a belt, causing the tail to curve or lengthen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInspired by seahorses, Valentina Sumini and Mr. Muccillo began designing the SpaceHuman robotic tail this past summer. Dr. Sumini plans to test it on a microgravity flight in May.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe tail responds to the wearer\u2019s environment and movements, grabbing onto surfaces, acting like a rudder during jumps or picking up objects as needed, thanks to an array of sensors on the tail and body and an object-tracking camera on the back. The camera uses an algorithm to identify colors and materials that have been uploaded to the system\u2014brightly colored fabric for the microgravity test flight, but eventually handles and other items\u2014and to respond accordingly, based on the object, distance and body position. \u201cOur body is the main control tool,\u201d Dr. Sumini says. \n\nIn the meantime, Dr. Sumini is testing the prototype underwater. It\u2019s currently attached to a wet suit; eventually, the tail could be stuck to any piece of clothing with Velcro, she said. And it could have earthbound applications as a balancing device for first responders in disaster zones or an exoskeleton for construction or auto factory workers\u2014anywhere people need an extra hand.\n\n\n\n\nThe Zero-Gravity Orchestra Pianos don\u2019t work in zero gravity. But if we ever plan to spend extended periods in space, whether as orbital tourists, in lunar colonies or on missions to Mars, we may want to make a little music. Nicole L\u2019Huillier, a MIT Media Lab research assistant, and Sands Fish, a designer and computer scientist, are building a zero-gravity orchestra\u2014a series of instruments that rely on the suspension of gravity to play. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Telemetron.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ally Schmaling\n \n\n\n\nTheir first attempt was the Telemetron, a clear, 12-sided polycarbonate chamber about the size of a soccer ball, which they tested on a microgravity flight with the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative in November 2017. Inside, there were three cylindrical chimes outfitted with gyroscopes and sensors that tracked their spins, collisions and drifts. That data was beamed to a computer, which translated each action into a musical note and played the resulting composition, at once dreamy and robotic. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nNow, they\u2019re designing three more instruments: the N\u00facleo, a sphere with eight smaller spheres attached by springs; the Monolito, a 2-foot-long trapezoid; and the Sat\u00e9lite, made of five rotating bars that resemble the solar panels on a satellite.\nEach instrument will be equipped with an inertial measurement unit\u2014like a more sophisticated gyroscope\u2014that will record speed, rotation and movement. Mr. Fish and Ms. L\u2019Huillier have yet to finalize the sounds the instruments will make, but one might have a percussive effect, while another might sound more like a synthesizer. With their first instrument, slower motion produced quiet, low notes, while fast spins created a crescendo of loud, high notes. The next three will likely work the same way.\nFloating through space, the instruments can perform by themselves, or an astronaut could move them\u2014a musical Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are developing technology for a day when amateur astronauts travel into orbit. ",
        "author": "Leigh Kamping-Carder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7156",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-jeff-bezos-make-money-in-space-11554975000?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=62",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nToday the company\u2014funded by Mr. Bezos to the tune of $1 billion a year\u2014employs more than 2,000 people at five sites, including a launch facility in West Texas where later this year it will begin manned tests of its suborbital space tourism rocket, named New Shepard, in honor of American space pioneer Alan Shepard. Blue Origin\u2019s next project literally dwarfs New Shepard: the mighty New Glenn, a 300-plus-foot orbital, reusable rocket, due to fly first in 2021. The company has constructed a sprawling new assembly facility next to Pad LC-36 at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of these reusable mega-rockets. Representing a reported $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn will offer customers up to 45 tons a lift into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has boosted production of its BE-3 and BE-4 rocket motors for its use as well as for commercial sale. Here, from left, the BE-4 engine and an engineering mockup of the aft portion of Blue Origin\u2019s orbital launch vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nTo get some idea of the step-up in size, \u201cNew Shepard will fit in the hold of New Glenn,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience. At this rate, the company might need to retire its motto Gradatim Ferociter\u2014\u201dstep by step, ferociously.\u201d It was always a little hard to picture, anyway. In its owner\u2019s quest to commercialize space, Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years, Chief Executive Bob Smith said in an interview at the company\u2019s headquarters in Kent, Wash. He adds that the company will continue to add capital investment and new customers. One example: The company has tooled up to serially produce its signature BE-4 and BE-3 rocket motors, for itself and client/competitors such as United Launch Alliance.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, shown in 2015, spends $1 billion a year on funding his Blue Origin space firm.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAs Blue Origin scales up, it finds itself courting the same vast bureaucracies Mr. Bezos once held at arm\u2019s length, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pentagon and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation\u2019s spy satellites. Until a few years ago, Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t publicly entertain the idea of competing for federal business. Now, the company is openly campaigning for lucrative, risk-intolerant government and national security payloads. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d Mr. Smith says. \u201cCustomers make you better.\u201d Howard McCurdy, an American University professor and space historian, said as entrepreneurial companies mature, it\u2019s hard for them to resist the lure of federal funding. \u201cThe natural tendency is to go the government route,\u201d he adds, even if such a reset entails more red tape and demands greater transparency. Mr. Bezos declined to comment for this article. There are potentially billions in new public money on the table. In June 2018, the Trump administration proposed the creation of a U.S. Space Force, an independent branch of the armed services, due to be activated in 2020. In March, Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n doubling down on pledges to return American astronauts to the moon by the middle of the next decade, for the first time suggested they could travel on privately built rockets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has been pursuing government and commercial business as it looks to catch up with rivals like SpaceX. Here, from left, a Blue Origin factory in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and the New Shepard rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nSuch trends \u201cgive us confidence that when we actually come into the market, there will be sufficient launch volume to get a good amount of return,\u201d says Mr. Smith. With New Glenn, the company is racing against its former, more deliberate ways. In October the company was one of three launch providers who received Air Force funds, intended to help potential launch partners defray costs incurred in preparing to fly national-security payloads. But in March, when a draft of the Air Force\u2019s bake-off rules became public, they stipulated there would be only two winners, not three, as Blue Origin had hoped. More damaging to Blue Origin\u2019s cause, the rules required both systems to be selected by 2020, in order to meet Congress\u2019s deadline to stop using Russian-made engines.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nThe rules would appear to leave New Glenn out of the running and also eliminate United Launch Alliance, which buys BE-4 engines for its Vulcan Centaur rocket. The winners: SpaceX and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman.\n Blue Origin fired up the lobbying afterburners in response to the apparent snub, taking its case to the public and Congress. In a letter to Air Force Secretary \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Heather Wilson\n\n\n\n dated March 28, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D., Wash.) pushed for a delay and reassessment, arguing a hasty decision \u201crisks undermining the Air Force\u2019s goal of maximizing and sustaining fair and open competition, and without sufficient information to properly evaluate next-generation launch systems.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin\u2019s reusable New Shepard rocket, whose aft portion is shown here, was named in honor of American space pioneer Alan Shepard.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spencer Lowell for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe release of the Launch Service Provider agreement was put on hold. In March, the commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, Lt. Gen. John F. Thompson, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Air Force opposed delay or modifications to the selection criteria. The trouble for Blue Origin is that, when it comes to payloads of national interest, nothing sells like success. SpaceX continues to fly complex, confidence-inspiring missions\u2014including the first unmanned test of the Dragon Crew capsule docking with the International Space Station\u2014while New Glenn will remain in spacedock for two more years, at least. The clock is running on other civil projects that BO would like a piece of. At a NASA employee meeting April 1, administrator Jim Bridenstine suggested for the first time that SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy may be an option for getting U.S. boots on the moon by 2024. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say [Blue Origin has] a toehold yet in government contracting,\u201d says veteran satellite-industry consultant Roger Rusch. \u201cThey haven\u2019t made a breakthrough.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor its next act, Blue Origin is working toward a mammoth rocket called New Glenn that is set to launch in 2021. Here, a specially built assembly facility for the New Glenn in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spencer Lowell for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nOn the commercial side, while the demand for heavy-lift launches remains soft, Mr. Smith noted a number of potential growth markets for New Glenn, including deployment of so-called satellite internet constellations comprising thousands of wireless routers, essentially, in low-earth orbit. A cloud above the clouds. \u201cThe demand for data is growing and insatiable,\u201d Mr. Smith says, \u201cand the physics don\u2019t change. If you want to move data around the world, you need lots of satellites.\u201d One such system was revealed in March when Mr. Bezos\u2019 online shopping empire Amazon confirmed Project Kuiper, an initiative to launch a constellation of 3,236 tiny satellites arrayed at three orbital altitudes, like concentric shells. Speaking of smaller: Blue Origin also faces competition from a number of lean-running rocket shops that are leveraging the shrinking costs of processes like 3D printing and carbon-composite manufacturing. One such startup is the New Zealand-based Rocket Lab, which has launched 25 satellites into low-earth orbit. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe New Shepard booster returns to a landing pad in West Texas after a successful mission in 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue origin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nNew Glenn\u2019s exceptional size will make it cheaper for constellation-satellite customers, said Blue Origin\u2019s Mr. Mowry, because it will require fewer missions. \u201cWe are bringing a huge vehicle with a lot of capability\u201d and a 22.9-foot in diameter payload bay, Mr. Mowry says. \u201cThis is really interesting if you\u2019re scientific and you want to build an interplanetary probe; if you are the [National Reconnaissance Office] and you have got something with a big mirror or antenna.\u201d Now that Blue Origin is ramping up its commercial efforts in the very expensive business of space, its rockets aren\u2019t the only thing that fill people with awe. \u201cThe fact that Jeff is putting in a billion dollars a year into this?\u201d Mr. Mowry says. \u201cThat\u2019s impressive, on any level, on any metric you want to apply to that. That level of commitment is unmatched, unprecedented, unheard-of, any un word you want to use. It is incredible.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBig TicketThe New Shepard\u2019s crew capsule is slated to bring its first passengers to the edge of space later this year. WSJ columnist Dan Neil says he\u2019s in\u2014if the price is right. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spencer Lowell for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nWhat moved me most about Blue Origin\u2019s factory in Kent, Wash., where the New Shepard tourist rocket is built, was the nearness of it all\u2014the realization that, if I don\u2019t fall off a ladder in the next year or so, I will have a chance to soar to the edge of space, 62 miles in altitude, the so-called Karman Line. Plenty of chances, actually. As Blue Origin execs describe it, New Shepard\u2019s West Texas launch site will operate rather like a skydiving outfit: Clients will show up, suit up, receive some brief training, and blast off; an hour later they will be on the ground again, getting their astronaut certificates and eating lunch. Sure, I would do it, if I could afford it. Having had a tour of the assembly hall and a walkaround of the single-stage booster and six-person autonomous capsule, I\u2019m completely at ease with all the equipment but my own. I\u2019m what\u2019s known in the Air Force as a three-bagger. Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, assured me the ride would be \u201cvery gentle,\u201d no more physically demanding than a roller coaster. I wondered if he had checked with the janitorial staff at Magic Mountain.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nBlue Origin will start flying humans this year but it hasn\u2019t announced the maiden voyage for retail customers. \u201cWe won\u2019t talk prices until we need to, and we don\u2019t need to until we actually have an operational vehicle,\u201d said Mr. Smith. T-minus a pregnant pause: New Shepard\u2019s price point will resonate because cost is inversely proportional to access, and access\u2014the democratization of space\u2014is the notion that Blue Origin founder and world\u2019s-wealthiest-man Jeff Bezos has taken as the company\u2019s mandate. In a period of historic concentrations of global wealth, New Shepard risks looking like just another skyrocketing inequality, an experience underscoring the oneness of humanity, brought to you by the forces that keep us apart. Like tickets to \u201cHamilton.\u201d The price \u201cis certainly a big debate\u201d in the space-watching community, said Tim Dodd, whose \u201cEveryday Astronaut\u201d YouTube channel has more than 280,000 subscribers. Mr. Dodd noted that Blue Origin\u2019s competitor, the Richard Branson-funded Virgin Galactic, has announced tickets on its space plane will cost $250,000, with passenger service beginning in 2019. \u201cI would guess [Blue Origin will] likely charge around $150,000 per seat so as to undercut Virgin Galactic,\u201d Mr. Dodd wrote in an email. But in Kent, I found reasons to hope the ticket might not be so dear as that. In person, New Shepard presents as a surprisingly trim and hardy little machine\u2014only 60 feet tall when assembled on the pad, about 20 feet shorter than the in-sky Mercury-Redstone rocket of its namesake, astronaut Alan Shepard. There has never been a manned launch system so approachable, so human-scaled, so ineffably rideable. New Shepard\u2019s construction is science but not science fiction. The fuselage/fuel tank, covered in thermal protection, is fabricated from 2000-series aluminum alloy typical of aerospace, rolled up and welded on special jigs in a high-tech but unexceptional way. Why not build structures with weight-saving carbon-fiber composites? First, I was told, because composites don\u2019t play well with cryogenic fuels. Also, I was told, composites\u2019 durability for long-term repeated use was unproven. New Shepard is effectively designed around keeping paying astronauts in those six seats, with maximum reusability and minimum between-flight maintenance, very much like airlines turn around aircraft. For example: Because the booster separates and falls away below the Karman Line, it isn\u2019t exposed to the extreme temps of orbital re-entry. It does get a bit blackened, however, from the uplicking flames during the propulsive landing. In most cases the ground crew will simply recover the booster, carry it back to the launching pad, check it, paint it, fuel it, and fly it. The landing team tries to avoid landing dead-center on the pad. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to repaint the logo,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice-president of sales, marketing and customer experience. New Shepard\u2019s operating costs, flight to flight, should ideally reduce to the hand work required to recover and prepare the spacecraft, and the cost to tank it up with liquid oxygen and hydrogen (about $250,000). \u201cIf you get costs down and still get profitability on every flight, you can have larger addressable market,\u201d Mr. Smith said. Also, the price to fly can be expected to fall as the inventory of seats goes up. The company currently has two boosters in Texas and two capsules, one for people and one for payloads, and is set up for serial production of both. The operational tempo of boosters is expected to be a launch a week. And since the New Shepard system is relatively small and transportable, it could be set up in any geographically appropriate place, although there are no plans to do so. So how much\u2026about? Mr. Smith declined to ballpark. \u201cIn the early phases of our development there will be a different cost curve and therefore different pricing than it would be later at sustained operations,\u201d he said. Awww, man! Is it $150,000? Because if it\u2019s six figures, I\u2019m out. But if it\u2019s five figures\u2014and it sounds like it could be, maybe, one day\u2014I might be in. Mr. Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, agreed that \u201cthat the cost to operate a flight might be under a half-million [dollars].\u201d Split six ways, that\u2019s only $83,333.33 per astronaut. I\u2019m sure they will let me keep the jumpsuit. \u2014Dan Neil Write to Dan Neil at Dan.Neil@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Corrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tBlue Origin is producing its signature BE-3 rocket motors for client/competitors such as United Launch Alliance. An earlier version of this article incorrectly cited Northrop Grumman. Separately, an Air Force launch contract that Blue Origin was competing for requires the winners to be selected by 2020; an earlier version incorrectly said the winners had to be flying by 2020. Winners of that Air Force contract were SpaceX and Northrop Grumman; an earlier version incorrectly said the winners were SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard rocket doesn\u2019t use power-braked descent and lands on a different pad after launch; an earlier version incorrectly said it did use power-braked descent and that it landed on the same pad. (April 11, 2019) The Amazon founder\u2019s Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years as it looks to be a player in the lucrative market for government and commercial business. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate-Proofing Homes for Extreme Weather Ahead (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7157",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-proofing-homes-for-extreme-weather-ahead-11607612462?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=10",
        "text": "Homeowners, real-estate developers and local governments will need to get more creative to better withstand climate-fueled events. Here, six experts offer their ideas.\n\n\n\n\nSet Homes Afloat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nWhen floods are not there, an \u201camphibious\u201d house lives on the land like an ordinary house, but it\u2019s capable, when the flood comes, of staying above the flood by having some source of buoyancy that lifts the occupied parts of the house so that there\u2019s no damage. We could most inexpensively apply this retrofit system to simple wooden houses with a crawl space where we can place the buoyancy elements [like dock floats or foam blocks] that lift the house, such are as common across the Gulf Coast. When you\u2019re doing retrofit, you\u2019re not promoting development. You\u2019re just fixing houses that are vulnerable now and making it possible for communities to continue to live in the places that they\u2019ve always lived and in the ways that they\u2019ve always lived. In the future, people might be able to perform these retrofits for $25,000 or less. There\u2019s currently nothing in the building codes that addresses amphibious construction, and that is a major hurdle in the U.S.\u2014Dr. Elizabeth English, professor of architecture at Canada\u2019s University of Waterloo, and founder and director of the Buoyant Foundation Project, a nonprofit that develops amphibious technologies\n\n\n\n\nGive Homeowners Detailed Data\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThere are different levels of risk inside of each city or inside of a region, but not many communities have access to that [granular level of] data. It needs to be democratized for better decision-making both in local and metropolitan government and at the scale of the property. Climate-risk data needs to be at your fingertips. As a homeowner who is looking to buy a home, you should be able to have access to the data that matches the profile of your community: flood risk data, extreme heat data, fire hazard, mudslides. If we look into the future, particularly with the advancement in AI, what would be wonderful is if we were in a place where we had rapidly updated data\u2014on a year-to-year basis would be amazing. Looking at the modeling of impacts moving forward, you may be moving from area to area inside a city. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Hebert\n\n\n\n , former chief resilience officer for the city of New Orleans, president of HR&A, an economic development and real estate consulting firm\n\n\n\n\nSeal Up the Cracks\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nOver 80% of our buildings we have today will remain. A salient question is how we retrofit those. The envelope of the house needs to be much more tied together to act as one system against wind-borne debris, water and things like that\u2014at critical junctures of the roof to other elements of the roof, and the roof to the walls, and the walls to the foundations. Another minimum standard is going to be high insulation rates which reduce your energy usage and protect you from extreme heat. New materials like aerogel [a fire-retardant material used to insulate spacecraft] give promise to fire suppression. One challenge is that some materials we currently use, like reinforced concrete, are carbon-intensive. How can we use carbon-intensive materials and aim for a sustainable future? That is a challenge, but we\u2019re working towards a solution. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Illya Azaroff,\n\n\n\n founding architect of +LAB Architect, associate professor of architectural technology at New York City College of Technology.\n\n\n\n\nFireproof Houses\u2014and Communities\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re living in a forested area, it\u2019s not if, but when fire will come. When a fire comes, embers are raining down. You would then want to have a roof that is noncombustible, a metal roof or an asphalt shingle roof. You have materials that are fire-resistant that you can side your home with [like cement board, stucco and masonry]. There are some homeowners associations that mandate that you will construct your home with these materials and that you will do cleaning around your homes, and that is becoming more and more accepted. If you\u2019re able to create open areas, widened roads and water resources, like a pond or buried water tanks, for firefighting, and people are taking ownership and protecting their homes, then you won\u2019t see those entire subdivisions leveled, like we saw with the Paradise fire in California. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Trapp,\n\n\n\n assistant chief at Red Lodge Fire Rescue, Montana \n\n\n\n\nPlan Better for Blackouts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nBeing a Floods, fires and storms are projected to get worse. Six experts get creative about how to protect the places we call home. ",
        "author": "Benoit Morenne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate-Proofing Homes for Extreme Weather Ahead (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7158",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-proofing-homes-for-extreme-weather-ahead-11607612462?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=32",
        "text": "Homeowners, real-estate developers and local governments will need to get more creative to better withstand climate-fueled events. Here, six experts offer their ideas.\n\n\n\n\nSet Homes Afloat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nWhen floods are not there, an \u201camphibious\u201d house lives on the land like an ordinary house, but it\u2019s capable, when the flood comes, of staying above the flood by having some source of buoyancy that lifts the occupied parts of the house so that there\u2019s no damage. We could most inexpensively apply this retrofit system to simple wooden houses with a crawl space where we can place the buoyancy elements [like dock floats or foam blocks] that lift the house, such are as common across the Gulf Coast. When you\u2019re doing retrofit, you\u2019re not promoting development. You\u2019re just fixing houses that are vulnerable now and making it possible for communities to continue to live in the places that they\u2019ve always lived and in the ways that they\u2019ve always lived. In the future, people might be able to perform these retrofits for $25,000 or less. There\u2019s currently nothing in the building codes that addresses amphibious construction, and that is a major hurdle in the U.S.\u2014Dr. Elizabeth English, professor of architecture at Canada\u2019s University of Waterloo, and founder and director of the Buoyant Foundation Project, a nonprofit that develops amphibious technologies\n\n\n\n\nGive Homeowners Detailed Data\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThere are different levels of risk inside of each city or inside of a region, but not many communities have access to that [granular level of] data. It needs to be democratized for better decision-making both in local and metropolitan government and at the scale of the property. Climate-risk data needs to be at your fingertips. As a homeowner who is looking to buy a home, you should be able to have access to the data that matches the profile of your community: flood risk data, extreme heat data, fire hazard, mudslides. If we look into the future, particularly with the advancement in AI, what would be wonderful is if we were in a place where we had rapidly updated data\u2014on a year-to-year basis would be amazing. Looking at the modeling of impacts moving forward, you may be moving from area to area inside a city. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Hebert\n\n\n\n , former chief resilience officer for the city of New Orleans, president of HR&A, an economic development and real estate consulting firm\n\n\n\n\nSeal Up the Cracks\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nOver 80% of our buildings we have today will remain. A salient question is how we retrofit those. The envelope of the house needs to be much more tied together to act as one system against wind-borne debris, water and things like that\u2014at critical junctures of the roof to other elements of the roof, and the roof to the walls, and the walls to the foundations. Another minimum standard is going to be high insulation rates which reduce your energy usage and protect you from extreme heat. New materials like aerogel [a fire-retardant material used to insulate spacecraft] give promise to fire suppression. One challenge is that some materials we currently use, like reinforced concrete, are carbon-intensive. How can we use carbon-intensive materials and aim for a sustainable future? That is a challenge, but we\u2019re working towards a solution. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Illya Azaroff,\n\n\n\n founding architect of +LAB Architect, associate professor of architectural technology at New York City College of Technology.\n\n\n\n\nFireproof Houses\u2014and Communities\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re living in a forested area, it\u2019s not if, but when fire will come. When a fire comes, embers are raining down. You would then want to have a roof that is noncombustible, a metal roof or an asphalt shingle roof. You have materials that are fire-resistant that you can side your home with [like cement board, stucco and masonry]. There are some homeowners associations that mandate that you will construct your home with these materials and that you will do cleaning around your homes, and that is becoming more and more accepted. If you\u2019re able to create open areas, widened roads and water resources, like a pond or buried water tanks, for firefighting, and people are taking ownership and protecting their homes, then you won\u2019t see those entire subdivisions leveled, like we saw with the Paradise fire in California. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Trapp,\n\n\n\n assistant chief at Red Lodge Fire Rescue, Montana \n\n\n\n\nPlan Better for Blackouts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nBeing able to more selectively do public safety power shut-offs or prevent an entire grid from going down in the event of downed power lines would be helpful, for instance by allowing different power generators to operate independently. A lot of critical systems already have multiple sources of electricity or multiple water pipelines. If you expect there to be problems more often, you probably need more of those. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Emily Grubert,\n\n\n\n assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology\u2019s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering\n\n\n\n\nGet Paid When Disaster Strikes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nWe need more variations in the types of insurance policies that are offered, like parametric insurance, which offers fast and flexible dollars based on the event. For instance, when there\u2019s a Category 3 storm within 5 miles of my house, I get $10,000 regardless of what happened. Maybe my house is fine, but I had to evacuate and I had to pay for a hotel and food. I could use it for that. Microinsurance could also help lower-income households recover. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Carolyn Kousky,\n\n\n\n executive director at the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania Interviews have been condensed and edited. \n\n\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything | Home Explore what\u2019s next for where we live.The House of Tomorrow Tour what\u2019s next for home design, from a fridge that knows what groceries to order to a storage unit that descends from the ceiling.How to Build a Home on the Moon A small-scale replica of a lunar habitat is taking shape at Purdue University. The goal is to prepare for life in a hostile environment\u2014including our own.How to Make the Housing Market More Equitable Homes in Black neighborhoods are underpriced by about $156 billion, according to Andre M. Perry of the Brookings Institution. He has ideas on how to change that number.Covid-19 Ushers in a New Era of Full-Time Travel Widespread remote work is poised to remake the \u2018digital nomad\u2019\u2014less backpacker in hostels, more middle-aged worker with a global hotel subscription.Read the full report. Floods, fires and storms are projected to get worse. Six experts get creative about how to protect the places we call home. ",
        "author": "Benoit Morenne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate-Proofing Homes for Extreme Weather Ahead (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7159",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-proofing-homes-for-extreme-weather-ahead-11607612462?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=41",
        "text": "Homeowners, real-estate developers and local governments will need to get more creative to better withstand climate-fueled events. Here, six experts offer their ideas.\n\n\n\n\nSet Homes Afloat\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nWhen floods are not there, an \u201camphibious\u201d house lives on the land like an ordinary house, but it\u2019s capable, when the flood comes, of staying above the flood by having some source of buoyancy that lifts the occupied parts of the house so that there\u2019s no damage. We could most inexpensively apply this retrofit system to simple wooden houses with a crawl space where we can place the buoyancy elements [like dock floats or foam blocks] that lift the house, such are as common across the Gulf Coast. When you\u2019re doing retrofit, you\u2019re not promoting development. You\u2019re just fixing houses that are vulnerable now and making it possible for communities to continue to live in the places that they\u2019ve always lived and in the ways that they\u2019ve always lived. In the future, people might be able to perform these retrofits for $25,000 or less. There\u2019s currently nothing in the building codes that addresses amphibious construction, and that is a major hurdle in the U.S.\u2014Dr. Elizabeth English, professor of architecture at Canada\u2019s University of Waterloo, and founder and director of the Buoyant Foundation Project, a nonprofit that develops amphibious technologies\n\n\n\n\nGive Homeowners Detailed Data\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThere are different levels of risk inside of each city or inside of a region, but not many communities have access to that [granular level of] data. It needs to be democratized for better decision-making both in local and metropolitan government and at the scale of the property. Climate-risk data needs to be at your fingertips. As a homeowner who is looking to buy a home, you should be able to have access to the data that matches the profile of your community: flood risk data, extreme heat data, fire hazard, mudslides. If we look into the future, particularly with the advancement in AI, what would be wonderful is if we were in a place where we had rapidly updated data\u2014on a year-to-year basis would be amazing. Looking at the modeling of impacts moving forward, you may be moving from area to area inside a city. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Hebert\n\n\n\n , former chief resilience officer for the city of New Orleans, president of HR&A, an economic development and real estate consulting firm\n\n\n\n\nSeal Up the Cracks\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nOver 80% of our buildings we have today will remain. A salient question is how we retrofit those. The envelope of the house needs to be much more tied together to act as one system against wind-borne debris, water and things like that\u2014at critical junctures of the roof to other elements of the roof, and the roof to the walls, and the walls to the foundations. Another minimum standard is going to be high insulation rates which reduce your energy usage and protect you from extreme heat. New materials like aerogel [a fire-retardant material used to insulate spacecraft] give promise to fire suppression. One challenge is that some materials we currently use, like reinforced concrete, are carbon-intensive. How can we use carbon-intensive materials and aim for a sustainable future? That is a challenge, but we\u2019re working towards a solution. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Illya Azaroff,\n\n\n\n founding architect of +LAB Architect, associate professor of architectural technology at New York City College of Technology.\n\n\n\n\nFireproof Houses\u2014and Communities\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re living in a forested area, it\u2019s not if, but when fire will come. When a fire comes, embers are raining down. You would then want to have a roof that is noncombustible, a metal roof or an asphalt shingle roof. You have materials that are fire-resistant that you can side your home with [like cement board, stucco and masonry]. There are some homeowners associations that mandate that you will construct your home with these materials and that you will do cleaning around your homes, and that is becoming more and more accepted. If you\u2019re able to create open areas, widened roads and water resources, like a pond or buried water tanks, for firefighting, and people are taking ownership and protecting their homes, then you won\u2019t see those entire subdivisions leveled, like we saw with the Paradise fire in California. \u2013\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jon Trapp,\n\n\n\n assistant chief at Red Lodge Fire Rescue, Montana \n\n\n\n\nPlan Better for Blackouts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n KYLE HILTON\n \n\n\n\nBeing a Floods, fires and storms are projected to get worse. Six experts get creative about how to protect the places we call home. ",
        "author": "Benoit Morenne"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Lab to Olympics: Scientists Work to Improve Athletic Gear (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7160",
        "date": "2020-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-lab-to-olympics-scientists-work-to-improve-athletic-gear-11583786874?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=13",
        "text": "Here, a look at the technology that may one day show up at a track, field or pool near you.\u00a0\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAdding Innovation to Injury Injuries can curtail athletes\u2019 careers, so researchers are developing new materials to make gear like helmets and shoes better at preventing them. After several University of California, Berkeley, students received head injuries from bicycle accidents, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Knight\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ram Gurumoorthy,\n\n\n\n the founders of the startup BrainGuard designed a helmet for cyclists and football players that they say offers extra protection against rotational forces, or impacts that quickly twist the head.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStartup BrainGuard\u2019s two-layered helmet design has an outer shell that wobbles when hit, like a bobblehead. The aim is to better protect cyclists and football players against impacts that quickly twist the head.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n UC Berkeley\n \n\n\n\nThe two-layered design has an outer shell that wobbles when hit, like a bobblehead. It is connected to an interior shell with rubber-band-like materials that absorb and diminish force before it reaches the brain. The helmet reduced impact force by 25% to 45% when compared with the top four current National Football League helmets, according to their impact tests. BrainGuard is waiting to receive a certification that would allow high-school and college teams to use the helmet, says Mr. Knight, also a neuroscience and psychology professor at UC Berkeley. Redwood City, Calif.-based Carbon Inc. and Riddell, a football equipment manufacturer based in Elyria, Ohio, are 3D-printing inner paddings for helmets that are customized to individual athletes. Others are experimenting with different kinds of plastic shells. Out-of-this-world innovations are also coming to shoes\u2014literally. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julian Rimoli,\n\n\n\n an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed a three-dimensional lattice material that could replace traditional, heavier foams in the soles of shoes, based on his studies of spacecraft\u2014specifically planetary landers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJulian Rimoli of the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a three-dimensional lattice material that could replace traditional, heavier foams in the soles of shoes.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Computational Solid Mechanics Lab/Georgia Tech\n \n\n\n\nDr. Rimoli found that the structure of a lander\u2014made of connecting bars and cables that interact with each other to maintain extreme stability\u2014recovered its form after impact without getting damaged. His research showed that a lattice material with the same structure is 10 times more efficient at absorbing energy compared with today\u2019s soles, potentially helping athletes run more efficiently while lessening their risks of knee and ankle injuries. The material could also provide impact protection for helmets and car bumpers.Performance Enhancing Duds The personalization of clothing and technology, down to their atomic structure, is helping companies and trainers enhance athletes\u2019 performance. Swimmers need tight clothing to reduce friction in the water, but too much compression over time can cause a buildup of lactic acid that makes muscles burn with fatigue. Olympic champion \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Phelps\n\n\n\n and his coach \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Bowman\n\n\n\n teamed up with Aqua Lung, a California-based aquatic-sports equipment company, to design highly customized swimsuits that aim to do a better job than current compression wear to preserve muscle energy and reduce weight and drag in the water for faster swims. The suits will be used by about a dozen athletes at the Tokyo Olympics in July.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe swimsuit designed by Mr. Phelps, Mr. Bowman and Aqua Lung will be used by about a dozen athletes at the Tokyo Olympics in July.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Aqua Lung\n \n\n\n\nThe designers developed an adaptive compression fabric technology for the suit with several panels that stretch in three dimensions, depending on the athlete and the body part. Hip, glute and stomach areas get tighter compression to keep the body as parallel to the water\u2019s surface as possible. The fabric, held together with specially placed, rigid seams, has textured panels that break water tension, similar to the effect of dimples on a golf ball. The new suit saw a 1% glide improvement compared with fabrics in current suits, which matters in a sport that measures time differences in hundredths of a second, the designers say. Customized fabrics can also protect athletes from overheating. MIT\u2019s \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Grossman,\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zhengmao Lu\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicola Ferralis\n\n\n\n Researchers are developing sports apparel and equipment that aims to boost performance and prevent injuries. Here\u2019s a look at what\u2019s in the works. ",
        "author": "Katie Camero"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Lab to Olympics: Scientists Work to Improve Athletic Gear (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7161",
        "date": "2020-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-lab-to-olympics-scientists-work-to-improve-athletic-gear-11583786874?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=47",
        "text": "Here, a look at the technology that may one day show up at a track, field or pool near you.\u00a0\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAdding Innovation to Injury Injuries can curtail athletes\u2019 careers, so researchers are developing new materials to make gear like helmets and shoes better at preventing them. After several University of California, Berkeley, students received head injuries from bicycle accidents, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Knight\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ram Gurumoorthy,\n\n\n\n the founders of the startup BrainGuard designed a helmet for cyclists and football players that they say offers extra protection against rotational forces, or impacts that quickly twist the head.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStartup BrainGuard\u2019s two-layered helmet design has an outer shell that wobbles when hit, like a bobblehead. The aim is to better protect cyclists and football players against impacts that quickly twist the head.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n UC Berkeley\n \n\n\n\nThe two-layered design has an outer shell that wobbles when hit, like a bobblehead. It is connected to an interior shell with rubber-band-like materials that absorb and diminish force before it reaches the brain. The helmet reduced impact force by 25% to 45% when compared with the top four current National Football League helmets, according to their impact tests. BrainGuard is waiting to receive a certification that would allow high-school and college teams to use the helmet, says Mr. Knight, also a neuroscience and psychology professor at UC Berkeley. Redwood City, Calif.-based Carbon Inc. and Riddell, a football equipment manufacturer based in Elyria, Ohio, are 3D-printing inner paddings for helmets that are customized to individual athletes. Others are experimenting with different kinds of plastic shells. Out-of-this-world innovations are also coming to shoes\u2014literally. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julian Rimoli,\n\n\n\n an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed a three-dimensional lattice material that could replace traditional, heavier foams in the soles of shoes, based on his studies of spacecraft\u2014specifically planetary landers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJulian Rimoli of the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a three-dimensional lattice material that could replace traditional, heavier foams in the soles of shoes.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Computational Solid Mechanics Lab/Georgia Tech\n \n\n\n\nDr. Rimoli found that the structure of a lander\u2014made of connecting bars and cables that interact with each other to maintain extreme stability\u2014recovered its form after impact without getting damaged. His research showed that a lattice material with the same structure is 10 times more efficient at absorbing energy compared with today\u2019s soles, potentially helping athletes run more efficiently while lessening their risks of knee and ankle injuries. The material could also provide impact protection for helmets and car bumpers.Performance Enhancing Duds The personalization of clothing and technology, down to their atomic structure, is helping companies and trainers enhance athletes\u2019 performance. Swimmers need tight clothing to reduce friction in the water, but too much compression over time can cause a buildup of lactic acid that makes muscles burn with fatigue. Olympic champion \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Phelps\n\n\n\n and his coach \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Bowman\n\n\n\n teamed up with Aqua Lung, a California-based aquatic-sports equipment company, to design highly customized swimsuits that aim to do a better job than current compression wear to preserve muscle energy and reduce weight and drag in the water for faster swims. The suits will be used by about a dozen athletes at the Tokyo Olympics in July.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe swimsuit designed by Mr. Phelps, Mr. Bowman and Aqua Lung will be used by about a dozen athletes at the Tokyo Olympics in July.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Aqua Lung\n \n\n\n\nThe designers developed an adaptive compression fabric technology for the suit with several panels that stretch in three dimensions, depending on the athlete and the body part. Hip, glute and stomach areas get tighter compression to keep the body as parallel to the water\u2019s surface as possible. The fabric, held together with specially placed, rigid seams, has textured panels that break water tension, similar to the effect of dimples on a golf ball. The new suit saw a 1% glide improvement compared with fabrics in current suits, which matters in a sport that measures time differences in hundredths of a second, the designers say. Customized fabrics can also protect athletes from overheating. MIT\u2019s \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Grossman,\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zhengmao Lu\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicola Ferralis\n\n\n\n developed a material\u2014originally designed for chocolate packaging\u2014that is capable of cooling contents up to 5 degrees Celsius for weeks at a time. So far, they have studied its application only for packaging, but they believe that one day it could be embedded in clothing fibers to regulate the body temperatures of athletes, firefighters and soldiers, especially when outdoors.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat future technology will have the largest impact on its respective sport? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe secret is in the atomic structure and layering of three types of materials that can collect water from the air, store it and then use controlled evaporation to release heat when the fabric detects excess warmth from the body. The passive cooling technology \u201cmakes the material itself intelligent,\u201d says Dr. Grossman, a materials scientist.The New Track Suit Less intrusive, AI-enabled sensors could soon collect even more sports and health-related data from the human body than current wearables. A Boston-based company called Figur8 has developed single-use sensors that stick to an athlete\u2019s skin or clothing. They can quantify the angles of joints and the timing and intensity of muscle activation in response to movements, and then translate that data to an app for analysis. The aim is to help athletes move more efficiently, recover faster and train smarter. The sensors are currently available for use by trainers and therapists. Eventually, the technology could help predict injuries and early signs of potential diseases. Other sensors, like those made by Nix, measure hydration levels during training. The stickers have a digital interface that, with the help of an algorithm, informs athletes when, what and how much to drink for optimal performance based on biomarkers in sweat. Instead of guessing their hydration needs, athletes would be told when to drink water, a sports drink or nothing at all to reduce risks of overhydration. Athletes have been slow to adopt sensors en masse because of their bulkiness, so some researchers are working to shrink and embed them in fabric. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nYoel Fink\u2019s \u2018fabric computer\u2019 starts as a 10-inch rod made of glass or plastic, filled with microscopic computer chips, microphones and batteries. The rod is then heated in a specialized furnace and stretched to make a fiber slightly thicker than a strand of hair.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Research Lab of Electronics/MIT\n \n\n\n\n\u201cFabrics are the new AI frontier,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yoel Fink,\n\n\n\n former director of MIT\u2019s Research Lab of Electronics and founder of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, who has designed a \u201cfabric computer.\u201d It starts as a 10-inch rod made of glass or plastic, filled with microscopic computer chips, microphones and batteries. The rod is then heated in a specialized furnace and stretched to make a fiber slightly thicker than a strand of hair. Today, the technology is confined to the lab, but eventually Dr. Fink hopes to make the fibers even smaller and to produce them in mass quantities. Woven together, the fibers would create clothing capable of storing energy, sensing temperature and measuring sweat salinity and heart rate. AI would then assess this data, giving athletes detailed information about how their activity affects their bodies.More in The Future of Everything | Sports Explore what\u2019s next for sports.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo Illustration by Steve Boyle for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\nThe Brave New World of Betting on Athletes\u2019 Data Sports gambling is colliding with technology that enables real-time tracking of biometric data, raising thorny legal questions. Can the law keep up?The Next Big Thing in Sports? These five forms of athletic competition are relatively niche, but their profiles are growingThe Race to Replace the Gender Binary of Men\u2019s and Women\u2019s Sports Are two athletic categories inadequate? Some researchers think the future lies in creating more, while others propose changing competition rules so that everyone can play against each otherWomen in Sports Are on a High. What\u2019s Next? Gymnastics champion Katelyn Ohashi, Notre Dame basketball coach Muffet McGraw and other experts discuss the changes coming to women\u2019s sportsTraditional Sports Look to Gamers to Reshape Viewers\u2019 Experience Broadcasters and tech companies are testing live-chatting, VR stadium access and other fan features inspired by esportsRead the full report. Researchers are developing sports apparel and equipment that aims to boost performance and prevent injuries. Here\u2019s a look at what\u2019s in the works. ",
        "author": "Katie Camero"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Lab to Olympics: Scientists Work to Improve Athletic Gear (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7162",
        "date": "2020-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-lab-to-olympics-scientists-work-to-improve-athletic-gear-11583786874?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=58",
        "text": "Here, a look at the technology that may one day show up at a track, field or pool near you.\u00a0\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAdding Innovation to Injury Injuries can curtail athletes\u2019 careers, so researchers are developing new materials to make gear like helmets and shoes better at preventing them. After several University of California, Berkeley, students received head injuries from bicycle accidents, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Knight\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ram Gurumoorthy,\n\n\n\n the founders of the startup BrainGuard designed a helmet for cyclists and football players that they say offers extra protection against rotational forces, or impacts that quickly twist the head.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStartup BrainGuard\u2019s two-layered helmet design has an outer shell that wobbles when hit, like a bobblehead. The aim is to better protect cyclists and football players against impacts that quickly twist the head.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n UC Berkeley\n \n\n\n\nThe two-layered design has an outer shell that wobbles when hit, like a bobblehead. It is connected to an interior shell with rubber-band-like materials that absorb and diminish force before it reaches the brain. The helmet reduced impact force by 25% to 45% when compared with the top four current National Football League helmets, according to their impact tests. BrainGuard is waiting to receive a certification that would allow high-school and college teams to use the helmet, says Mr. Knight, also a neuroscience and psychology professor at UC Berkeley. Redwood City, Calif.-based Carbon Inc. and Riddell, a football equipment manufacturer based in Elyria, Ohio, are 3D-printing inner paddings for helmets that are customized to individual athletes. Others are experimenting with different kinds of plastic shells. Out-of-this-world innovations are also coming to shoes\u2014literally. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julian Rimoli,\n\n\n\n an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed a three-dimensional lattice material that could replace traditional, heavier foams in the soles of shoes, based on his studies of spacecraft\u2014specifically planetary landers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJulian Rimoli of the Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a three-dimensional lattice material that could replace traditional, heavier foams in the soles of shoes.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Computational Solid Mechanics Lab/Georgia Tech\n \n\n\n\nDr. Rimoli found that the structure of a lander\u2014made of connecting bars and cables that interact with each other to maintain extreme stability\u2014recovered its form after impact without getting damaged. His research showed that a lattice material with the same structure is 10 times more efficient at absorbing energy compared with today\u2019s soles, potentially helping athletes run more efficiently while lessening their risks of knee and ankle injuries. The material could also provide impact protection for helmets and car bumpers.Performance Enhancing Duds The personalization of clothing and technology, down to their atomic structure, is helping companies and trainers enhance athletes\u2019 performance. Swimmers need tight clothing to reduce friction in the water, but too much compression over time can cause a buildup of lactic acid that makes muscles burn with fatigue. Olympic champion \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Phelps\n\n\n\n and his coach \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Bowman\n\n\n\n teamed up with Aqua Lung, a California-based aquatic-sports equipment company, to design highly customized swimsuits that aim to do a better job than current compression wear to preserve muscle energy and reduce weight and drag in the water for faster swims. The suits will be used by about a dozen athletes at the Tokyo Olympics in July.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe swimsuit designed by Mr. Phelps, Mr. Bowman and Aqua Lung will be used by about a dozen athletes at the Tokyo Olympics in July.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Aqua Lung\n \n\n\n\nThe designers developed an adaptive compression fabric technology for the suit with several panels that stretch in three dimensions, depending on the athlete and the body part. Hip, glute and stomach areas get tighter compression to keep the body as parallel to the water\u2019s surface as possible. The fabric, held together with specially placed, rigid seams, has textured panels that break water tension, similar to the effect of dimples on a golf ball. The new suit saw a 1% glide improvement compared with fabrics in current suits, which matters in a sport that measures time differences in hundredths of a second, the designers say. Customized fabrics can also protect athletes from overheating. MIT\u2019s \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeffrey Grossman,\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zhengmao Lu\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicola Ferralis\n\n\n\n Researchers are developing sports apparel and equipment that aims to boost performance and prevent injuries. Here\u2019s a look at what\u2019s in the works. ",
        "author": "Katie Camero"
    },
    {
        "title": "Autonomous Robots Are Coming to the Operating Room (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7163",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/autonomous-robots-are-coming-to-the-operating-room-11599786000?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=11",
        "text": "Dr. Tee\u2019s latest project is an \u201cartificial skin\u201d that would give robots a sense of touch, allowing them to do things like differentiate between healthy tissue and tumors and make surgical incisions. Other researchers are working on robots that stitch up incisions and navigate to repair organs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Benjamin Tee of the National University of Singapore\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ore Huiying for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dr. Tee and his team are developing \u2018artificial skin\u2019 designed to mimic the sense of touch, seen here on the finger of a robotic hand.\n \n\n\nToday, surgeons use million-dollar robotic devices such as \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intuitive Surgical Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n da Vinci robot in operations that require more precision, range of motion and control than they might get by using their own hands. The robot assists them with suturing, dissecting and retracting tissue, but the surgeons are always in control. Each movement of the surgeon\u2019s hands directs the robot\u2019s arms, which hold the surgical instruments. The next frontier is to build devices that function autonomously\u2014a critical feature for operations performed outside in Antarctica, in rural areas without access to surgeons or, one day, on a spacecraft. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAutomating mundane and repetitive tasks, such as suturing, could allow surgeons to focus on more critical and complex parts of operations and minimize the mental and physical fatigue associated with hourslong procedures. The U.S. has a worsening shortage of surgeons, with an expected shortfall of as many as 28,700 by 2033, up from a projected shortage of up to 5,600 this year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The coronavirus pandemic also highlighted the need for robot help in operating rooms to minimize the risk of exposure to the virus for staff and patients.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.The Blood of the Future Could be Made in a LabThe coronavirus pandemic led to blood-donation shortages across the world, outlining the fragility of the pipeline. That has brought fresh urgency to research that has been decades in the making but is only now starting to become a reality: The production of artificial blood. Last year, researchers began a pioneering clinical trial, and more are on the way, bringing us closer to a world where blood factories augment supplies. ADLoading advertisement...00:00 / 25:221xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nThere are technical, regulatory and safety hurdles. The algorithms underlying the robots need to be tested for accuracy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which clears most medical devices, hasn\u2019t yet approved an autonomous surgical robot. The machines would need to account for differences in anatomy or react appropriately to complications that come up during surgery, which can be unpredictable. Intuitive Surgical says it has no plans to develop robots that perform surgical tasks autonomously, in part because of a lack of demand. Still, early signs show that robots could eventually perform certain surgical procedures quickly and more consistently than humans, which could minimize complications. \u201cThat\u2019s something where the robot really shines\u2014precision, repeatability,\u201d says Axel Krieger, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, who is researching autonomous surgery. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t get tired.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Axel Krieger of Johns Hopkins examines STAR\u2019s autonomous suturing capabilities on a pig intestine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Max Aguilera-Hellweg for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nHere are three examples of current research projects in robotic surgery. Artificial skin Surgeons depend on their sense of touch to identify organs, cut tissue and tumors, and apply the right amount of force, says Khek-Yu Ho, a doctor and director of the Centre for Innovation in Healthcare at the National University Health System in Singapore. Researchers from the National University of Singapore and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp.\n\n\n are attempting to mimic that sense of touch with a robotic silicon finger. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA researcher at the National University of Singapore holds a piece of silicone sheet embedded with electronic conductors for tactile sensors.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ore Huiying for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe device has about 100 sensors per square centimeter, with data running through a single wire connected to a neuromorphic chip, a type of computer chip that allows AI models to be trained using a fraction of the data of traditional computer chips. In early tests this year, the finger was able to tell which of two similarly shaped objects was softer, about 10 times faster Scalpel-wielding droids are a long way off, but scientists are at work on devices that perform surgical tasks with minimal human oversight. ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Autonomous Robots Are Coming to the Operating Room (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7164",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/autonomous-robots-are-coming-to-the-operating-room-11599786000?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=37",
        "text": "Dr. Tee\u2019s latest project is an \u201cartificial skin\u201d that would give robots a sense of touch, allowing them to do things like differentiate between healthy tissue and tumors and make surgical incisions. Other researchers are working on robots that stitch up incisions and navigate to repair organs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Benjamin Tee of the National University of Singapore\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ore Huiying for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dr. Tee and his team are developing \u2018artificial skin\u2019 designed to mimic the sense of touch, seen here on the finger of a robotic hand.\n \n\n\nToday, surgeons use million-dollar robotic devices such as \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intuitive Surgical Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n da Vinci robot in operations that require more precision, range of motion and control than they might get by using their own hands. The robot assists them with suturing, dissecting and retracting tissue, but the surgeons are always in control. Each movement of the surgeon\u2019s hands directs the robot\u2019s arms, which hold the surgical instruments. The next frontier is to build devices that function autonomously\u2014a critical feature for operations performed outside in Antarctica, in rural areas without access to surgeons or, one day, on a spacecraft. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAutomating mundane and repetitive tasks, such as suturing, could allow surgeons to focus on more critical and complex parts of operations and minimize the mental and physical fatigue associated with hourslong procedures. The U.S. has a worsening shortage of surgeons, with an expected shortfall of as many as 28,700 by 2033, up from a projected shortage of up to 5,600 this year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The coronavirus pandemic also highlighted the need for robot help in operating rooms to minimize the risk of exposure to the virus for staff and patients.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThere are technical, regulatory and safety hurdles. The algorithms underlying the robots need to be tested for accuracy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which clears most medical devices, hasn\u2019t yet approved an autonomous surgical robot. The machines would need to account for differences in anatomy or react appropriately to complications that come up during surgery, which can be unpredictable. Intuitive Surgical says it has no plans to develop robots that perform surgical tasks autonomously, in part because of a lack of demand. Still, early signs show that robots could eventually perform certain surgical procedures quickly and more consistently than humans, which could minimize complications. \u201cThat\u2019s something where the robot really shines\u2014precision, repeatability,\u201d says Axel Krieger, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, who is researching autonomous surgery. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t get tired.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Axel Krieger of Johns Hopkins examines STAR\u2019s autonomous suturing capabilities on a pig intestine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Max Aguilera-Hellweg for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nHere are three examples of current research projects in robotic surgery. Artificial skin Surgeons depend on their sense of touch to identify organs, cut tissue and tumors, and apply the right amount of force, says Khek-Yu Ho, a doctor and director of the Centre for Innovation in Healthcare at the National University Health System in Singapore. Researchers from the National University of Singapore and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp.\n\n\n are attempting to mimic that sense of touch with a robotic silicon finger. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA researcher at the National University of Singapore holds a piece of silicone sheet embedded with electronic conductors for tactile sensors.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ore Huiying for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe device has about 100 sensors per square centimeter, with data running through a single wire connected to a neuromorphic chip, a type of computer chip that allows AI models to be trained using a fraction of the data of traditional computer chips. In early tests this year, the finger was able to tell which of two similarly shaped objects was softer, about 10 times faster than the blink of an eye, says Dr. Tee. In the next decade, the technology could be incorporated into a haptic glove\u2014which uses force, vibration and motion to simulate the feeling of a virtual object\u2014so that surgeons could perform operations remotely and feel what the robot feels. Surgical sutures Researchers from Children\u2019s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., and Johns Hopkins, including Dr. Krieger, are developing a robot capable of conducting a colon anastomosis on its own. An anastomosis refers to the closing up of a tubular structure, and is normally done by suturing, or stitching, the tissue back together. Reattaching a healthy colon requires about 15 to 20 stitches. If even one stitch is too loose, the patient risks an anastomosis leak, which can cause a deadly infection; consistent, high-quality sutures could reduce such complications. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSTAR uses a motorized robotic suturing tool that automatically positions and rotates the needle through, in this demonstration, a pig\u2019s intestine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Max Aguilera-Hellweg for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, uses a motorized robotic suturing tool that rotates the needle through the colon tissue automatically. STAR is powered in part by machine learning, which is used in detecting tissue motion. This way, the robot can recognize the patient\u2019s breathing and apply the suture at the correct point. In theory, the robot could achieve a level of consistency in the spacing and tension of the sutures beyond what humans can accomplish. Robotic catheters To minimize risks and recovery time for patients, cardiologists typically prefer to use a catheter\u2014a thin, flexible tube that is inserted through an arm, groin, thigh or neck\u2014to get access to the heart, rather than cutting open a person\u2019s chest. But navigating with a catheter to the right part of the heart is tricky work. A team led by Pierre Dupont, chief of pediatric cardiac bioengineering at Boston Children\u2019s Hospital and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, has developed a robotic catheter that would navigate on its own. In an experiment that concluded in 2019, the robotic catheter was able to help with leaks that sometimes happen after valve replacements. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you see as the benefits and drawbacks of advanced robotic surgery? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe catheter navigates using a haptic vision sensor, in which images from a tiny camera are combined with machine-learning algorithms that can tell whether the catheter tip is touching blood, tissue or valve. After the catheter arrives at the repair site, the surgeon takes over and patches up the leak with an occluder, which resembles a small metal plug. Automating the navigation would free up the surgeon to focus on deploying the occluder and optimizing the valve repair, much like a fighter pilot on a mission, Dr. Dupont says. The pilot \u201cis doing all of the higher-level mission planning work,\u201d he says. \u201cThe plane is in autopilot.\u201d Dr. Dupont and his team are currently researching ways for robotic catheters to help with more complex valve repairs. Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything | HealthA look at what\u2019s next for health The Doctor Won\u2019t See You Now As Covid-19 Depletes Blood Supplies, Scientists Test an Alternative Why We Need More Black Doctors\u2014and How to Get There Health Data After Covid-19: More Laws, Less Privacy Covid-19\u2019s Lasting Effects on Health Care See the full report. Scalpel-wielding droids are a long way off, but scientists are at work on devices that perform surgical tasks with minimal human oversight. ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "Autonomous Robots Are Coming to the Operating Room (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7165",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/autonomous-robots-are-coming-to-the-operating-room-11599786000?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=40",
        "text": "Dr. Tee\u2019s latest project is an \u201cartificial skin\u201d that would give robots a sense of touch, allowing them to do things like differentiate between healthy tissue and tumors and make surgical incisions. Other researchers are working on robots that stitch up incisions and navigate to repair organs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Benjamin Tee of the National University of Singapore\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ore Huiying for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dr. Tee and his team are developing \u2018artificial skin\u2019 designed to mimic the sense of touch, seen here on the finger of a robotic hand.\n \n\n\nToday, surgeons use million-dollar robotic devices such as \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intuitive Surgical Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n da Vinci robot in operations that require more precision, range of motion and control than they might get by using their own hands. The robot assists them with suturing, dissecting and retracting tissue, but the surgeons are always in control. Each movement of the surgeon\u2019s hands directs the robot\u2019s arms, which hold the surgical instruments. The next frontier is to build devices that function autonomously\u2014a critical feature for operations performed outside in Antarctica, in rural areas without access to surgeons or, one day, on a spacecraft. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAutomating mundane and repetitive tasks, such as suturing, could allow surgeons to focus on more critical and complex parts of operations and minimize the mental and physical fatigue associated with hourslong procedures. The U.S. has a worsening shortage of surgeons, with an expected shortfall of as many as 28,700 by 2033, up from a projected shortage of up to 5,600 this year, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The coronavirus pandemic also highlighted the need for robot help in operating rooms to minimize the risk of exposure to the virus for staff and patients.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.The Blood of the Future Could be Made in a LabThe coronavirus pandemic led to blood-donation shortages across the world, outlining the fragility of the pipeline. That has brought fresh urgency to research that has been decades in the making but is only now starting to become a reality: The production of artificial blood. Last year, researchers began a pioneering clinical trial, and more are on the way, bringing us closer to a world where blood factories augment supplies. ADLoading advertisement...00:00 / 25:221xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nThere are technical, regulatory and safety hurdles. The algorithms underlying the robots need to be tested for accuracy. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which clears most medical devices, hasn\u2019t yet approved an autonomous surgical robot. The machines would need to account for differences in anatomy or react appropriately to complications that come up during surgery, which can be unpredictable. Intuitive Surgical says it has no plans to develop robots that perform surgical tasks autonomously, in part because of a lack of demand. Still, early signs show that robots could eventually perform certain surgical procedures quickly and more consistently than humans, which could minimize complications. \u201cThat\u2019s something where the robot really shines\u2014precision, repeatability,\u201d says Axel Krieger, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, who is researching autonomous surgery. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t get tired.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Axel Krieger of Johns Hopkins examines STAR\u2019s autonomous suturing capabilities on a pig intestine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Max Aguilera-Hellweg for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nHere are three examples of current research projects in robotic surgery. Artificial skin Surgeons depend on their sense of touch to identify organs, cut tissue and tumors, and apply the right amount of force, says Khek-Yu Ho, a doctor and director of the Centre for Innovation in Healthcare at the National University Health System in Singapore. Researchers from the National University of Singapore and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp.\n\n\n are attempting to mimic that sense of touch with a robotic silicon finger. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA researcher at the National University of Singapore holds a piece of silicone sheet embedded with electronic conductors for tactile sensors.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ore Huiying for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThe device has about 100 sensors per square centimeter, with data running through a single wire connected to a neuromorphic chip, a type of computer chip that allows AI models to be trained using a fraction of the data of traditional computer chips. In early tests this year, the finger was able to tell which of two similarly shaped objects was softer, about 10 times faster Scalpel-wielding droids are a long way off, but scientists are at work on devices that perform surgical tasks with minimal human oversight. ",
        "author": "Sara Castellanos"
    },
    {
        "title": "3-D-Printed Bridges Promise Smarter, Greener Transit Links (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7166",
        "date": "2021-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/3-d-printed-bridges-promise-smarter-greener-transit-links-11635947943?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=3",
        "text": "Additive manufacturing, better known as 3-D printing, has found eager adopters in transportation thanks to the technology\u2019s ability to produce strong, lightweight parts in almost any shape. Spacecraft, airplanes and racing cars today routinely include components dreamed up digitally and then generated using exotic alloys or advanced plastics. The technology is also showing up in construction projects: Experimenters have printed structures including rough barracks and suburban homes. Printing can\u2019t yet rival factory mass production or routine fabrication in construction. Where 3-D-printed construction can prove its value, however, is with structures customized from the outset for a location. And few big structures need more site-specific engineering than bridges, those vital links without which most transportation would be impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nQueen M\u00e1xima of the Netherlands, in orange, opens MX3D\u2019s 3-D-printed bridge.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Adriaan de Groot/MX3D\n \n\n\n\n \u201cEvery bridge is different,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gijs van der Velden,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Dutch tech startup MX3D, which this summer installed a fancifully artistic bridge, 3-D printed from stainless steel, across a canal in Amsterdam\u2019s red-light district. Other 3-D printed bridges span a handful of bodies of water elsewhere in the Netherlands, China and Spain. Proponents believe the technology will eventually allow for longer bridges that are easier to maintain and manufactured with a smaller environmental footprint\u2014if the process can scale up. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nPretty much any bridge more ambitious than a felled tree must be crafted to carry a specified load, and maybe also to withstand crosswinds, pounding waters or shifting ground beneath. No two locations are identical. Bridges can be so sensitive to vibrations that marching soldiers are often ordered to break step while crossing. To 3-D print a bridge\u2014or any structure\u2014designers generally begin by entering into sophisticated computer models their basic parameters, such as size, stresses and materials, and letting the software generate optimal forms. The resulting structural elements often resemble vines more than girders, but biomorphic structures are no problem to 3-D print. Printing methods vary and are likely to evolve. MX3D\u2019s system uses an industrial robotic arm that continuously welds the tip of an unspooling metal wire on a constantly changing path. The Marines\u2019s more rudimentary printer\u2014an assemblage of construction equipment and custom-designed machinery that fits disassembled inside a 20-foot container\u2014pumped concrete fed from a nearby mixer through a hose.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMX3D\u2019s system uses an industrial robotic arm that continuously welds the tip of an unspooling metal wire on a constantly changing path.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Olivier de Gruijter/MX3D\n \n\n\n\nThe project, an experiment conducted during a military exercise in California, tested another promise of 3-D printing: the ability to whip up objects on demand. Additive manufacturing has already been used in deserts, on aircraft carriers and aboard the International Space Station to make items ranging from tools to shelters. The Marines wanted to know if in the future they could build a simple bridge where one is urgently needed. Militaries often transport prefabricated bridges into war zones and disaster areas, and even have vehicles that carry and deploy them. But the number of such bridges and vehicles is limited. Portable 3-D printers would let troops build a bridge from scratch\u2014ideally relying heavily on local materials\u2014to cross a span, and then go build another one. \u201cBeing able to do things quick and dirty is very relevant,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan Kreiger,\n\n\n\n program manager in additive construction at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Champaign, Ill., who led design and engineering of the bridge and development of the printer. Her team in late 2018 assembled a plan, equipment and materials, then shipped them to Camp Pendleton in California and worked with the Marines to print and assemble the foot bridge in six days\u2014three of them unexpectedly rainy. Later this year she plans to print a prototype vehicle bridge, which may be the first one ever.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn six days, U.S. Marines 3-D printed and assembled a foot bridge at Camp Pendleton in California as part of an exercise.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ensign Elizabeth Flanary/U.S. Navy\n \n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve only gotten a taste of what\u2019s to come\u201d in printed bridges, she says. Bridges historically have been monuments to cutting-edge technology\u2014from arched Roman aqueducts that have stood for two millennia to the 100-foot-long Iron Bridge over a gorge in the English Midlands, which helped launch the Industrial Building bridges is a good use for 3-D printing, proponents say, but the technology needs to scale. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels"
    },
    {
        "title": "3-D-Printed Bridges Promise Smarter, Greener Transit Links (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7167",
        "date": "2021-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/3-d-printed-bridges-promise-smarter-greener-transit-links-11635947943?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=11",
        "text": "Additive manufacturing, better known as 3-D printing, has found eager adopters in transportation thanks to the technology\u2019s ability to produce strong, lightweight parts in almost any shape. Spacecraft, airplanes and racing cars today routinely include components dreamed up digitally and then generated using exotic alloys or advanced plastics. The technology is also showing up in construction projects: Experimenters have printed structures including rough barracks and suburban homes. Printing can\u2019t yet rival factory mass production or routine fabrication in construction. Where 3-D-printed construction can prove its value, however, is with structures customized from the outset for a location. And few big structures need more site-specific engineering than bridges, those vital links without which most transportation would be impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nQueen M\u00e1xima of the Netherlands, in orange, opens MX3D\u2019s 3-D-printed bridge.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Adriaan de Groot/MX3D\n \n\n\n\n \u201cEvery bridge is different,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gijs van der Velden,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Dutch tech startup MX3D, which this summer installed a fancifully artistic bridge, 3-D printed from stainless steel, across a canal in Amsterdam\u2019s red-light district. Other 3-D printed bridges span a handful of bodies of water elsewhere in the Netherlands, China and Spain. Proponents believe the technology will eventually allow for longer bridges that are easier to maintain and manufactured with a smaller environmental footprint\u2014if the process can scale up. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nPretty much any bridge more ambitious than a felled tree must be crafted to carry a specified load, and maybe also to withstand crosswinds, pounding waters or shifting ground beneath. No two locations are identical. Bridges can be so sensitive to vibrations that marching soldiers are often ordered to break step while crossing. To 3-D print a bridge\u2014or any structure\u2014designers generally begin by entering into sophisticated computer models their basic parameters, such as size, stresses and materials, and letting the software generate optimal forms. The resulting structural elements often resemble vines more than girders, but biomorphic structures are no problem to 3-D print. Printing methods vary and are likely to evolve. MX3D\u2019s system uses an industrial robotic arm that continuously welds the tip of an unspooling metal wire on a constantly changing path. The Marines\u2019s more rudimentary printer\u2014an assemblage of construction equipment and custom-designed machinery that fits disassembled inside a 20-foot container\u2014pumped concrete fed from a nearby mixer through a hose.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMX3D\u2019s system uses an industrial robotic arm that continuously welds the tip of an unspooling metal wire on a constantly changing path.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Olivier de Gruijter/MX3D\n \n\n\n\nThe project, an experiment conducted during a military exercise in California, tested another promise of 3-D printing: the ability to whip up objects on demand. Additive manufacturing has already been used in deserts, on aircraft carriers and aboard the International Space Station to make items ranging from tools to shelters. The Marines wanted to know if in the future they could build a simple bridge where one is urgently needed. Militaries often transport prefabricated bridges into war zones and disaster areas, and even have vehicles that carry and deploy them. But the number of such bridges and vehicles is limited. Portable 3-D printers would let troops build a bridge from scratch\u2014ideally relying heavily on local materials\u2014to cross a span, and then go build another one. \u201cBeing able to do things quick and dirty is very relevant,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan Kreiger,\n\n\n\n program manager in additive construction at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Champaign, Ill., who led design and engineering of the bridge and development of the printer. Her team in late 2018 assembled a plan, equipment and materials, then shipped them to Camp Pendleton in California and worked with the Marines to print and assemble the foot bridge in six days\u2014three of them unexpectedly rainy. Later this year she plans to print a prototype vehicle bridge, which may be the first one ever.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn six days, U.S. Marines 3-D printed and assembled a foot bridge at Camp Pendleton in California as part of an exercise.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ensign Elizabeth Flanary/U.S. Navy\n \n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve only gotten a taste of what\u2019s to come\u201d in printed bridges, she says. Bridges historically have been monuments to cutting-edge technology\u2014from arched Roman aqueducts that have stood for two millennia to the 100-foot-long Iron Bridge over a gorge in the English Midlands, which helped launch the Industrial Building bridges is a good use for 3-D printing, proponents say, but the technology needs to scale. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels"
    },
    {
        "title": "3-D-Printed Bridges Promise Smarter, Greener Transit Links (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7168",
        "date": "2021-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/3-d-printed-bridges-promise-smarter-greener-transit-links-11635947943?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=9",
        "text": "Additive manufacturing, better known as 3-D printing, has found eager adopters in transportation thanks to the technology\u2019s ability to produce strong, lightweight parts in almost any shape. Spacecraft, airplanes and racing cars today routinely include components dreamed up digitally and then generated using exotic alloys or advanced plastics. The technology is also showing up in construction projects: Experimenters have printed structures including rough barracks and suburban homes. Printing can\u2019t yet rival factory mass production or routine fabrication in construction. Where 3-D-printed construction can prove its value, however, is with structures customized from the outset for a location. And few big structures need more site-specific engineering than bridges, those vital links without which most transportation would be impossible.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nQueen M\u00e1xima of the Netherlands, in orange, opens MX3D\u2019s 3-D-printed bridge.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Adriaan de Groot/MX3D\n \n\n\n\n \u201cEvery bridge is different,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gijs van der Velden,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Dutch tech startup MX3D, which this summer installed a fancifully artistic bridge, 3-D printed from stainless steel, across a canal in Amsterdam\u2019s red-light district. Other 3-D printed bridges span a handful of bodies of water elsewhere in the Netherlands, China and Spain. Proponents believe the technology will eventually allow for longer bridges that are easier to maintain and manufactured with a smaller environmental footprint\u2014if the process can scale up. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nPretty much any bridge more ambitious than a felled tree must be crafted to carry a specified load, and maybe also to withstand crosswinds, pounding waters or shifting ground beneath. No two locations are identical. Bridges can be so sensitive to vibrations that marching soldiers are often ordered to break step while crossing. To 3-D print a bridge\u2014or any structure\u2014designers generally begin by entering into sophisticated computer models their basic parameters, such as size, stresses and materials, and letting the software generate optimal forms. The resulting structural elements often resemble vines more than girders, but biomorphic structures are no problem to 3-D print. Printing methods vary and are likely to evolve. MX3D\u2019s system uses an industrial robotic arm that continuously welds the tip of an unspooling metal wire on a constantly changing path. The Marines\u2019s more rudimentary printer\u2014an assemblage of construction equipment and custom-designed machinery that fits disassembled inside a 20-foot container\u2014pumped concrete fed from a nearby mixer through a hose.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMX3D\u2019s system uses an industrial robotic arm that continuously welds the tip of an unspooling metal wire on a constantly changing path.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Olivier de Gruijter/MX3D\n \n\n\n\nThe project, an experiment conducted during a military exercise in California, tested another promise of 3-D printing: the ability to whip up objects on demand. Additive manufacturing has already been used in deserts, on aircraft carriers and aboard the International Space Station to make items ranging from tools to shelters. The Marines wanted to know if in the future they could build a simple bridge where one is urgently needed. Militaries often transport prefabricated bridges into war zones and disaster areas, and even have vehicles that carry and deploy them. But the number of such bridges and vehicles is limited. Portable 3-D printers would let troops build a bridge from scratch\u2014ideally relying heavily on local materials\u2014to cross a span, and then go build another one. \u201cBeing able to do things quick and dirty is very relevant,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan Kreiger,\n\n\n\n program manager in additive construction at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Champaign, Ill., who led design and engineering of the bridge and development of the printer. Her team in late 2018 assembled a plan, equipment and materials, then shipped them to Camp Pendleton in California and worked with the Marines to print and assemble the foot bridge in six days\u2014three of them unexpectedly rainy. Later this year she plans to print a prototype vehicle bridge, which may be the first one ever.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn six days, U.S. Marines 3-D printed and assembled a foot bridge at Camp Pendleton in California as part of an exercise.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ensign Elizabeth Flanary/U.S. Navy\n \n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019ve only gotten a taste of what\u2019s to come\u201d in printed bridges, she says. Bridges historically have been monuments to cutting-edge technology\u2014from arched Roman aqueducts that have stood for two millennia to the 100-foot-long Iron Bridge over a gorge in the English Midlands, which helped launch the Industrial Building bridges is a good use for 3-D printing, proponents say, but the technology needs to scale. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels"
    },
    {
        "title": "The First Female Space Tourist on What We Can Do in Orbit (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7169",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-female-space-tourist-on-what-we-can-do-in-orbit-11567087200?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=14",
        "text": "In October, she became chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, which runs incentive competitions to solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. To jumpstart innovations in commercial rocketry, her family funded the $10 million Ansari XPrize for the first private company to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks, a prize awarded in 2004 to the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. To tackle climate change, the foundation is offering a $20 million prize for inventors who find ways to convert carbon dioxide emissions from industrial facilities into building materials or alternative fuels. It\u2019s also offering a $10 million prize to create an \u201cAvatar\u201d system to allow someone to sense, feel and control things at a distance, whether at a far-flung factory or on another planet. In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems, a digital technology company developing health and elder-care applications for the Internet of Things, a catchall term for internet-connected objects. Last year, she co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMs. Ansari spoke with The Future of Everything about the long road ahead for space tourism, the prospect of growing organs in orbit and the need to regulate smart devices.Data Storage Will Go Into Orbit As our need for storing data and use of data with cloud computing increases, just having cloud computer systems here on Earth doesn\u2019t make sense except for very time-sensitive, real-time applications. But there\u2019s plenty of energy from the sun in space. So there is no need for us to pollute our own environment. Creating massive data centers and putting them in orbit would make a lot more sense. Then imagine, you don\u2019t have the cost of cooling and energy, so the cost probably will be lower for companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon. \n\n\nRelated For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\nHuman Organs Will Be Grown in Space Certain things will be better manufactured in space, especially, for example, growing organs. It\u2019s hard to grow large organs here on Earth. [Biomedical engineers are experimenting with 3D-printing technology to print living human tissue for grafts and organ transplants, but gravity hampers efforts to create the tiny blood vessels that nurture living tissue.] As we master the art of printing organs, it would make sense to do them in space. And everything that I talked about in orbit can also be implemented perhaps even cheaper or easier on the moon. More importantly, I think for us to go anywhere in our solar system, we need to build a colony on the moon and operate it for a long time because we just need to learn how to live in space and do things in space. Even for [future settlements on] Mars, I believe that starting it out on the moon makes sense. And the first colony, I don\u2019t think will be commercial. It could be a public-private partnership type of a project. I see, again, early signs of that, where NASA and perhaps even the European Space Agency would collaborate with some large private entity that\u2019s funded through private investment to create a base.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat kinds of extra-planetary projects should private space companies and government agencies prioritize, if any? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nDon\u2019t Book Your Moon Vacation Just Yet There will be people like me always that would do anything to go to space. In order for it to really be an industry, you have to have some volume of people doing this. And right now, it\u2019s difficult. The training required for [going into space] is very long. The cost is tremendously high. We will see space tourism flourishing in suborbital flight [about 62 miles above sea level]. It will give you that glimpse of space and that experience of space with a lot less danger. We won\u2019t see a lot of things happening, as far as tourism goes, in orbit and beyond.Without Regulations, Smart Devices Will Be Vulnerable The Internet of Things will be part of our homes, our cities, our work environment, everywhere. The part that concerns me is the data privacy side of it. We\u2019re sort of like children with a shiny toy in front of us who are so mesmerized with the shine that we\u2019re not asking the right questions. Who is using it? How is our data collected? How much do we know? The vulnerabilities that come with a smart device are not known to people. There will be hacks. We will have disasters and then we will hopefully course-correct properly so we don\u2019t repeat the mistakes. Frankly, I\u2019m not big on government involvement, but I think there are some areas we need regulation because businesses won\u2019t take the responsibility on their own. We need some regulation that would be enforceable and require a certain level of pr Anousheh Ansari, the chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, says that storing data and growing human organs would be easier off Earth\u2014but moon vacations are a ways off ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The First Female Space Tourist on What We Can Do in Orbit (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7170",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-female-space-tourist-on-what-we-can-do-in-orbit-11567087200?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=19",
        "text": "In October, she became chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, which runs incentive competitions to solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. To jumpstart innovations in commercial rocketry, her family funded the $10 million Ansari XPrize for the first private company to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks, a prize awarded in 2004 to the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. To tackle climate change, the foundation is offering a $20 million prize for inventors who find ways to convert carbon dioxide emissions from industrial facilities into building materials or alternative fuels. It\u2019s also offering a $10 million prize to create an \u201cAvatar\u201d system to allow someone to sense, feel and control things at a distance, whether at a far-flung factory or on another planet. In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems, a digital technology company developing health and elder-care applications for the Internet of Things, a catchall term for internet-connected objects. Last year, she co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMs. Ansari spoke with The Future of Everything about the long road ahead for space tourism, the prospect of growing organs in orbit and the need to regulate smart devices.Data Storage Will Go Into Orbit As our need for storing data and use of data with cloud computing increases, just having cloud computer systems here on Earth doesn\u2019t make sense except for very time-sensitive, real-time applications. But there\u2019s plenty of energy from the sun in space. So there is no need for us to pollute our own environment. Creating massive data centers and putting them in orbit would make a lot more sense. Then imagine, you don\u2019t have the cost of cooling and energy, so the cost probably will be lower for companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon. \n\n\nRelated For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\nHuman Organs Will Be Grown in Space Certain things will be better manufactured in space, especially, for example, growing organs. It\u2019s hard to grow large organs here on Earth. [Biomedical engineers are experimenting with 3D-printing technology to print living human tissue for grafts and organ transplants, but gravity hampers efforts to create the tiny blood vessels that nurture living tissue.] As we master the art of printing organs, it would make sense to do them in space. And everything that I talked about in orbit can also be implemented perhaps even cheaper or easier on the moon. More importantly, I think for us to go anywhere in our solar system, we need to build a colony on the moon and operate it for a long time because we just need to learn how to live in space and do things in space. Even for [future settlements on] Mars, I believe that starting it out on the moon makes sense. And the first colony, I don\u2019t think will be commercial. It could be a public-private partnership type of a project. I see, again, early signs of that, where NASA and perhaps even the European Space Agency would collaborate with some large private entity that\u2019s funded through private investment to create a base.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat kinds of extra-planetary projects should private space companies and government agencies prioritize, if any? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nDon\u2019t Book Your Moon Vacation Just Yet There will be people like me always that would do anything to go to space. In order for it to really be an industry, you have to have some volume of people doing this. And right now, it\u2019s difficult. The training required for [going into space] is very long. The cost is tremendously high. We will see space tourism flourishing in suborbital flight [about 62 miles above sea level]. It will give you that glimpse of space and that experience of space with a lot less danger. We won\u2019t see a lot of things happening, as far as tourism goes, in orbit and beyond.Without Regulations, Smart Devices Will Be Vulnerable The Internet of Things will be part of our homes, our cities, our work environment, everywhere. The part that concerns me is the data privacy side of it. We\u2019re sort of like children with a shiny toy in front of us who are so mesmerized with the shine that we\u2019re not asking the right questions. Who is using it? How is our data collected? How much do we know? The vulnerabilities that come with a smart device are not known to people. There will be hacks. We will have disasters and then we will hopefully course-correct properly so we don\u2019t repeat the mistakes. Frankly, I\u2019m not big on government involvement, but I think there are some areas we need regulation because businesses won\u2019t take the responsibility on their own. We need some regulation that would be enforceable and require a certain level of pr Anousheh Ansari, the chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, says that storing data and growing human organs would be easier off Earth\u2014but moon vacations are a ways off ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The First Female Space Tourist on What We Can Do in Orbit (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7171",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-female-space-tourist-on-what-we-can-do-in-orbit-11567087200?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=51",
        "text": "In October, she became chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, which runs incentive competitions to solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. To jumpstart innovations in commercial rocketry, her family funded the $10 million Ansari XPrize for the first private company to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks, a prize awarded in 2004 to the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. To tackle climate change, the foundation is offering a $20 million prize for inventors who find ways to convert carbon dioxide emissions from industrial facilities into building materials or alternative fuels. It\u2019s also offering a $10 million prize to create an \u201cAvatar\u201d system to allow someone to sense, feel and control things at a distance, whether at a far-flung factory or on another planet. In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems, a digital technology company developing health and elder-care applications for the Internet of Things, a catchall term for internet-connected objects. Last year, she co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMs. Ansari spoke with The Future of Everything about the long road ahead for space tourism, the prospect of growing organs in orbit and the need to regulate smart devices.Data Storage Will Go Into Orbit As our need for storing data and use of data with cloud computing increases, just having cloud computer systems here on Earth doesn\u2019t make sense except for very time-sensitive, real-time applications. But there\u2019s plenty of energy from the sun in space. So there is no need for us to pollute our own environment. Creating massive data centers and putting them in orbit would make a lot more sense. Then imagine, you don\u2019t have the cost of cooling and energy, so the cost probably will be lower for companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon. \n\n\nRelated For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\nHuman Organs Will Be Grown in Space Certain things will be better manufactured in space, especially, for example, growing organs. It\u2019s hard to grow large organs here on Earth. [Biomedical engineers are experimenting with 3D-printing technology to print living human tissue for grafts and organ transplants, but gravity hampers efforts to create the tiny blood vessels that nurture living tissue.] As we master the art of printing organs, it would make sense to do them in space. And everything that I talked about in orbit can also be implemented perhaps even cheaper or easier on the moon. More importantly, I think for us to go anywhere in our solar system, we need to build a colony on the moon and operate it for a long time because we just need to learn how to live in space and do things in space. Even for [future settlements on] Mars, I believe that starting it out on the moon makes sense. And the first colony, I don\u2019t think will be commercial. It could be a public-private partnership type of a project. I see, again, early signs of that, where NASA and perhaps even the European Space Agency would collaborate with some large private entity that\u2019s funded through private investment to create a base.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat kinds of extra-planetary projects should private space companies and government agencies prioritize, if any? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nDon\u2019t Book Your Moon Vacation Just Yet There will be people like me always that would do anything to go to space. In order for it to really be an industry, you have to have some volume of people doing this. And right now, it\u2019s difficult. The training required for [going into space] is very long. The cost is tremendously high. We will see space tourism flourishing in suborbital flight [about 62 miles above sea level]. It will give you that glimpse of space and that experience of space with a lot less danger. We won\u2019t see a lot of things happening, as far as tourism goes, in orbit and beyond.Without Regulations, Smart Devices Will Be Vulnerable The Internet of Things will be part of our homes, our cities, our work environment, everywhere. The part that concerns me is the data privacy side of it. We\u2019re sort of like children with a shiny toy in front of us who are so mesmerized with the shine that we\u2019re not asking the right questions. Who is using it? How is our data collected? How much do we know? The vulnerabilities that come with a smart device are not known to people. There will be hacks. We will have disasters and then we will hopefully course-correct properly so we don\u2019t repeat the mistakes. Frankly, I\u2019m not big on government involvement, but I think there are some areas we need regulation because businesses won\u2019t take the responsibility on their own. We need some regulation that would be enforceable and require a certain level of pr Anousheh Ansari, the chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, says that storing data and growing human organs would be easier off Earth\u2014but moon vacations are a ways off ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The First Female Space Tourist on What We Can Do in Orbit (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7172",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-female-space-tourist-on-what-we-can-do-in-orbit-11567087200?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=51",
        "text": "In October, she became chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, which runs incentive competitions to solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. To jumpstart innovations in commercial rocketry, her family funded the $10 million Ansari XPrize for the first private company to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks, a prize awarded in 2004 to the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. To tackle climate change, the foundation is offering a $20 million prize for inventors who find ways to convert carbon dioxide emissions from industrial facilities into building materials or alternative fuels. It\u2019s also offering a $10 million prize to create an \u201cAvatar\u201d system to allow someone to sense, feel and control things at a distance, whether at a far-flung factory or on another planet. In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems, a digital technology company developing health and elder-care applications for the Internet of Things, a catchall term for internet-connected objects. Last year, she co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMs. Ansari spoke with The Future of Everything about the long road ahead for space tourism, the prospect of growing organs in orbit and the need to regulate smart devices.Data Storage Will Go Into Orbit As our need for storing data and use of data with cloud computing increases, just having cloud computer systems here on Earth doesn\u2019t make sense except for very time-sensitive, real-time applications. But there\u2019s plenty of energy from the sun in space. So there is no need for us to pollute our own environment. Creating massive data centers and putting them in orbit would make a lot more sense. Then imagine, you don\u2019t have the cost of cooling and energy, so the cost probably will be lower for companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon. \n\n\nRelated For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\nHuman Organs Will Be Grown in Space Certain things will be better manufactured in space, especially, for example, growing organs. It\u2019s hard to grow large organs here on Earth. [Biomedical engineers are experimenting with 3D-printing technology to print living human tissue for grafts and organ transplants, but gravity hampers efforts to create the tiny blood vessels that nurture living tissue.] As we master the art of printing organs, it would make sense to do them in space. And everything that I talked about in orbit can also be implemented perhaps even cheaper or easier on the moon. More importantly, I think for us to go anywhere in our solar system, we need to build a colony on the moon and operate it for a long time because we just need to learn how to live in space and do things in space. Even for [future settlements on] Mars, I believe that starting it out on the moon makes sense. And the first colony, I don\u2019t think will be commercial. It could be a public-private partnership type of a project. I see, again, early signs of that, where NASA and perhaps even the European Space Agency would collaborate with some large private entity that\u2019s funded through private investment to create a base.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat kinds of extra-planetary projects should private space companies and government agencies prioritize, if any? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nDon\u2019t Book Your Moon Vacation Just Yet There will be people like me always that would do anything to go to space. In order for it to really be an industry, you have to have some volume of people doing this. And right now, it\u2019s difficult. The training required for [going into space] is very long. The cost is tremendously high. We will see space tourism flourishing in suborbital flight [about 62 miles above sea level]. It will give you that glimpse of space and that experience of space with a lot less danger. We won\u2019t see a lot of things happening, as far as tourism goes, in orbit and beyond.Without Regulations, Smart Devices Will Be Vulnerable The Internet of Things will be part of our homes, our cities, our work environment, everywhere. The part that concerns me is the data privacy side of it. We\u2019re sort of like children with a shiny toy in front of us who are so mesmerized with the shine that we\u2019re not asking the right questions. Who is using it? How is our data collected? How much do we know? The vulnerabilities that come with a smart device are not known to people. There will be hacks. We will have disasters and then we will hopefully course-correct properly so we don\u2019t repeat the mistakes. Frankly, I\u2019m not big on government involvement, but I think there are some areas we need regulation because businesses won\u2019t take the responsibility on their own. We need some regulation that would be enforceable and require a certain level of pr Anousheh Ansari, the chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, says that storing data and growing human organs would be easier off Earth\u2014but moon vacations are a ways off ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The First Female Space Tourist on What We Can Do in Orbit (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7173",
        "date": "2019-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-first-female-space-tourist-on-what-we-can-do-in-orbit-11567087200?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=67",
        "text": "In October, she became chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, which runs incentive competitions to solve humanity\u2019s biggest problems. To jumpstart innovations in commercial rocketry, her family funded the $10 million Ansari XPrize for the first private company to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks, a prize awarded in 2004 to the experimental spaceplane SpaceShipOne. To tackle climate change, the foundation is offering a $20 million prize for inventors who find ways to convert carbon dioxide emissions from industrial facilities into building materials or alternative fuels. It\u2019s also offering a $10 million prize to create an \u201cAvatar\u201d system to allow someone to sense, feel and control things at a distance, whether at a far-flung factory or on another planet. In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems, a digital technology company developing health and elder-care applications for the Internet of Things, a catchall term for internet-connected objects. Last year, she co-founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women with a goal of investing $1 billion in women-founded companies.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMs. Ansari spoke with The Future of Everything about the long road ahead for space tourism, the prospect of growing organs in orbit and the need to regulate smart devices.Data Storage Will Go Into Orbit As our need for storing data and use of data with cloud computing increases, just having cloud computer systems here on Earth doesn\u2019t make sense except for very time-sensitive, real-time applications. But there\u2019s plenty of energy from the sun in space. So there is no need for us to pollute our own environment. Creating massive data centers and putting them in orbit would make a lot more sense. Then imagine, you don\u2019t have the cost of cooling and energy, so the cost probably will be lower for companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon. \n\n\nRelated For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space How to Profit in Space: A Visual Guide What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race \n\n\nHuman Organs Will Be Grown in Space Certain things will be better manufactured in space, especially, for example, growing organs. It\u2019s hard to grow large organs here on Earth. [Biomedical engineers are experimenting with 3D-printing technology to print living human tissue for grafts and organ transplants, but gravity hampers efforts to create the tiny blood vessels that nurture living tissue.] As we master the art of printing organs, it would make sense to do them in space. And everything that I talked about in orbit can also be implemented perhaps even cheaper or easier on the moon. More importantly, I think for us to go anywhere in our solar system, we need to build a colony on the moon and operate it for a long time because we just need to learn how to live in space and do things in space. Even for [future settlements on] Mars, I believe that starting it out on the moon makes sense. And the first colony, I don\u2019t think will be commercial. It could be a public-private partnership type of a project. I see, again, early signs of that, where NASA and perhaps even the European Space Agency would collaborate with some large private entity that\u2019s funded through private investment to create a base.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat kinds of extra-planetary projects should private space companies and government agencies prioritize, if any? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nDon\u2019t Book Your Moon Vacation Just Yet There will be people like me always that would do anything to go to space. In order for it to really be an industry, you have to have some volume of people doing this. And right now, it\u2019s difficult. The training required for [going into space] is very long. The cost is tremendously high. We will see space tourism flourishing in suborbital flight [about 62 miles above sea level]. It will give you that glimpse of space and that experience of space with a lot less danger. We won\u2019t see a lot of things happening, as far as tourism goes, in orbit and beyond.Without Regulations, Smart Devices Will Be Vulnerable The Internet of Things will be part of our homes, our cities, our work environment, everywhere. The part that concerns me is the data privacy side of it. We\u2019re sort of like children with a shiny toy in front of us who are so mesmerized with the shine that we\u2019re not asking the right questions. Who is using it? How is our data collected? How much do we know? The vulnerabilities that come with a smart device are not known to people. There will be hacks. We will have disasters and then we will hopefully course-correct properly so we don\u2019t repeat the mistakes. Frankly, I\u2019m not big on government involvement, but I think there are some areas we need regulation because businesses won\u2019t take the responsibility on their own. We need some regulation that would be enforceable and require a certain level of pr Anousheh Ansari, the chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, says that storing data and growing human organs would be easier off Earth\u2014but moon vacations are a ways off ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7174",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-50-million-book-your-vacation-in-space-11554994767?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=20",
        "text": "Blue Origin is planning to offer 11-minute flights on its New Shepard capsule that can accommodate six people. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known, last year said it had signed up a tourist, a Japanese retail tycoon, for a trip around the moon, slated for around 2023.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAspiring astronauts be forewarned: It\u2019s mostly the super wealthy who\u2019d be able to afford a trip into space, at least at first. For a stay of several weeks or even months, prospective tourists should expect to spend $50 million or more. A shorter experience\u2014a few minutes of weightlessness\u2014might set you back less than $1 million. One approach to space tourism comes from hotel tycoon \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Bigelow,\n\n\n\n who has spent years working on the idea of hosting people in space. A firm he founded, Bigelow Aerospace, makes inflatable orbital habitats that could attach either to the international space station or float independently. The 330-cubic-meter space stations could accommodate six passengers. One smaller unit is already attached to the international space station. Mr. Bigelow, who aims to start sending up tourists around 2021, says he\u2019d like to bring some hospitality pizazz into space: think virtual reality experiences and other excitement he\u2019s still keeping secret. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nHe wants to make space travel accessible to nonbillionaires by creating ways for tourists to generate revenue on their trips, possibly via sponsorships or live TV feeds. \u201cIt is important that we can assist the tourist to generate income so it doesn\u2019t always have to be a billionaire tourist,\u201d he says. \u201cIt would be nice if you could cover half your cost in some kind of innovative effort that puts money in your pocket.\u201d Analysts at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n estimate that around 2030 space tourism could be a $3 billion or more business a year, with double-digit growth prospects. \u201cWhile space tourism is still nascent, we think it will become mainstream as the technology becomes proven and cost falls,\u201d UBS said in a report. The industry has had false dawns before. The first space tourist took to orbit in 2001, when investment-management mogul Dennis Tito spent a week as a paying passenger on the international space station. A few more have followed, but the business hasn\u2019t caught on widely. Twelve years later, Mr. Tito backed a project that set its sights on taking tourists around Mars. The goal was to reach the red planet in 2018. It hasn\u2019t happened. In 2004, a vehicle designed by Scaled Composites, now part of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , snagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize to become the first reusable, commercial spaceship to fly into orbit. It was supposed to spark a boom in space travel. An offshoot has become the vehicle Virgin Galactic is using. It first flew in 2010, suffered a fatal crash four years later, and only resumed flight trials in 2018. Industry officials are optimistic this time is different. New rockets are being developed to take passengers into space. Both \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and SpaceX this year are due to fly astronauts into space on new rockets. Other designs are on the drawing board promising to lower launch costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nDuring a test flight in February, Virgin Galactic carried a third crew member as a stepping stone to flying passengers. For space tourism, \u201cthe market has been there for a long time. It is now the technology that is catching up,\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive. He is coy about when customer flights would start. \u201cWe are getting close,\u201d he said, though a few more test flights are planned. Axiom Space Inc., run by former NASA ISS program manager Mike Suffredini, is hoping to take its first private astronauts to the station late next year. Axiom is also working on its own space station that could go aloft around 2023 or 2024. Tourists could provide the principal revenue in the early days, Mr. Suffredini says, though the business could shift to g A host of companies plan to offer trips that range from a quick, weightless jaunt to a months-long journey. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7175",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-50-million-book-your-vacation-in-space-11554994767?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=75",
        "text": "Blue Origin is planning to offer 11-minute flights on its New Shepard capsule that can accommodate six people. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as SpaceX is formally known, last year said it had signed up a tourist, a Japanese retail tycoon, for a trip around the moon, slated for around 2023.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAspiring astronauts be forewarned: It\u2019s mostly the super wealthy who\u2019d be able to afford a trip into space, at least at first. For a stay of several weeks or even months, prospective tourists should expect to spend $50 million or more. A shorter experience\u2014a few minutes of weightlessness\u2014might set you back less than $1 million. One approach to space tourism comes from hotel tycoon \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Bigelow,\n\n\n\n who has spent years working on the idea of hosting people in space. A firm he founded, Bigelow Aerospace, makes inflatable orbital habitats that could attach either to the international space station or float independently. The 330-cubic-meter space stations could accommodate six passengers. One smaller unit is already attached to the international space station. Mr. Bigelow, who aims to start sending up tourists around 2021, says he\u2019d like to bring some hospitality pizazz into space: think virtual reality experiences and other excitement he\u2019s still keeping secret. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nHe wants to make space travel accessible to nonbillionaires by creating ways for tourists to generate revenue on their trips, possibly via sponsorships or live TV feeds. \u201cIt is important that we can assist the tourist to generate income so it doesn\u2019t always have to be a billionaire tourist,\u201d he says. \u201cIt would be nice if you could cover half your cost in some kind of innovative effort that puts money in your pocket.\u201d Analysts at \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n UBS\n\n\n estimate that around 2030 space tourism could be a $3 billion or more business a year, with double-digit growth prospects. \u201cWhile space tourism is still nascent, we think it will become mainstream as the technology becomes proven and cost falls,\u201d UBS said in a report. The industry has had false dawns before. The first space tourist took to orbit in 2001, when investment-management mogul Dennis Tito spent a week as a paying passenger on the international space station. A few more have followed, but the business hasn\u2019t caught on widely. Twelve years later, Mr. Tito backed a project that set its sights on taking tourists around Mars. The goal was to reach the red planet in 2018. It hasn\u2019t happened. In 2004, a vehicle designed by Scaled Composites, now part of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , snagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize to become the first reusable, commercial spaceship to fly into orbit. It was supposed to spark a boom in space travel. An offshoot has become the vehicle Virgin Galactic is using. It first flew in 2010, suffered a fatal crash four years later, and only resumed flight trials in 2018. Industry officials are optimistic this time is different. New rockets are being developed to take passengers into space. Both \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and SpaceX this year are due to fly astronauts into space on new rockets. Other designs are on the drawing board promising to lower launch costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nDuring a test flight in February, Virgin Galactic carried a third crew member as a stepping stone to flying passengers. For space tourism, \u201cthe market has been there for a long time. It is now the technology that is catching up,\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Whitesides,\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic\u2019s chief executive. He is coy about when customer flights would start. \u201cWe are getting close,\u201d he said, though a few more test flights are planned. Axiom Space Inc., run by former NASA ISS program manager Mike Suffredini, is hoping to take its first private astronauts to the station late next year. Axiom is also working on its own space station that could go aloft around 2023 or 2024. Tourists could provide the principal revenue in the early days, Mr. Suffredini says, though the business could shift to g A host of companies plan to offer trips that range from a quick, weightless jaunt to a months-long journey. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7176",
        "date": "2019-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-were-promised-space-colonies-what-went-wrong-11552577256?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=57",
        "text": "The shuttle program began again in 1988, eventually launching the Hubble telescope and many pieces of the international space station. But it suffered another fatal crash in 2003 and ceased operation in 2011. \u201cThe shuttle was a remarkable achievement in what it could do but it was supposed to be routine and affordable and it ended up being neither of those,\u201d says John Logsdon, professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. \u201cIt was too risky and too expensive.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThere was a time when our move into space seemed inevitable. According to Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist from Nazi Germany who became a leader of the U.S. space program, humankind was due to take up residence beyond Earth five decades ago. \u201cWithin the next 10 or 15 years, the Earth can have a new companion in the skies, a manmade satellite which will be man\u2019s first foothold in space,\u201d von Braun wrote in \u201cCrossing the Last Frontier,\u201d part of a celebrated Collier\u2019s magazine series on space travel that began in 1952. \u201cMan Will Conquer Space Soon,\u201d the cover proclaimed. In von Braun\u2019s vision, shiny, reusable space shuttles would shoot into orbit almost daily. The first wave of brave souls would piece together a huge wheel-shaped space station. The 80 men\u2014and only men\u2014on board would subsist on frozen vegetables and T-bone steaks (deboned to save rocket fuel). The gentle spinning of the station would provide artificial gravity; the helium-oxygen atmosphere would make everyone inside talk like Mickey Mouse. The station would serve as a hub for manned missions to the moon and, eventually, Mars. None of this was technologically farfetched. But none of it has so far come to pass as von Braun predicted.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the early 1950s, space program pioneer Wernher von Braun released his plan for an 80-man space station, supported by reusable space shuttles. He believed it could be operational in orbit by the mid-1960s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Collier\u2019s Magazine/JTE Multimedia\n \n\n\n\nScientists drew up plans for space exploration, but politicians had to fund them. After the Soviet Union put the first human in space, President Kennedy was determined to plant the first flag in lunar soil. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon,\u201d he told the world in 1962. \u201cSome might suggest that the Kennedy decision was the worst decision ever,\u201d said Roger Launius, author of the forthcoming \u201cApollo\u2019s Legacy: Perspectives on the Moon Landings\u201d and NASA\u2019s chief historian from 1990 to 2002. We made it to the moon a decade sooner than von Braun expected, but at a cost that essentially bankrupted the space program. At roughly $150 billion in today\u2019s dollars, the Apollo moonshot remains the most expensive single peacetime project of the U.S. government, according to Prof. Logsdon.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nRichard Nixon was president when Neil Armstrong took his one small step. Less than a year later, Nixon cut NASA\u2019s budget dramatically. \u201cSpace expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities,\u201d the president said in a statement. The rocket that took humans to the moon was scrapped. The U.S. space program trudged forward. Construction on the ISS began in 1998. With a price tag of more than $100 billion, the station was supposed to become a cash-generating low-gravity manufacturing lab for new pharmaceuticals and materials. \u201cIt is a remarkable technical achievement to have a facility of this size and complexity operating,\u201d Prof. Logsdon said. \u201cBut it was supposed to be a research facility with all kinds of valuable payoffs. I think even its advocates would be hard-pressed to say the achievements to date justify its cost.\u201d That\u2019s the tricky part: justification. We\u2019re still looking for a reason to go beyond Earth in a lasting and meaningful way. \nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX is developing a heavy rocket and a capsule to carry humans to the ISS and\u2014potentially\u2014beyond. The company also provides launch services for government and commercial satellites. It\u2019s a business that could thrive, assuming new commercial endeavors increase demand. While the possibilities are broad\u2014microgravity manufacturing? orbital data centers? SpaceX\u2019s own satellite internet service?\u2014they\u2019re still unproven. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Life will be cramped and complica Rocket scientists of the 1950s had a vision of humanity\u2019s imminent first chapter in space. After more than half a century of ups and downs, we might finally be on course. ",
        "author": "Wilson Rothman"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7177",
        "date": "2019-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-were-promised-space-colonies-what-went-wrong-11552577256?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=58",
        "text": "The shuttle program began again in 1988, eventually launching the Hubble telescope and many pieces of the international space station. But it suffered another fatal crash in 2003 and ceased operation in 2011. \u201cThe shuttle was a remarkable achievement in what it could do but it was supposed to be routine and affordable and it ended up being neither of those,\u201d says John Logsdon, professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. \u201cIt was too risky and too expensive.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThere was a time when our move into space seemed inevitable. According to Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist from Nazi Germany who became a leader of the U.S. space program, humankind was due to take up residence beyond Earth five decades ago. \u201cWithin the next 10 or 15 years, the Earth can have a new companion in the skies, a manmade satellite which will be man\u2019s first foothold in space,\u201d von Braun wrote in \u201cCrossing the Last Frontier,\u201d part of a celebrated Collier\u2019s magazine series on space travel that began in 1952. \u201cMan Will Conquer Space Soon,\u201d the cover proclaimed. In von Braun\u2019s vision, shiny, reusable space shuttles would shoot into orbit almost daily. The first wave of brave souls would piece together a huge wheel-shaped space station. The 80 men\u2014and only men\u2014on board would subsist on frozen vegetables and T-bone steaks (deboned to save rocket fuel). The gentle spinning of the station would provide artificial gravity; the helium-oxygen atmosphere would make everyone inside talk like Mickey Mouse. The station would serve as a hub for manned missions to the moon and, eventually, Mars. None of this was technologically farfetched. But none of it has so far come to pass as von Braun predicted.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the early 1950s, space program pioneer Wernher von Braun released his plan for an 80-man space station, supported by reusable space shuttles. He believed it could be operational in orbit by the mid-1960s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Collier\u2019s Magazine/JTE Multimedia\n \n\n\n\nScientists drew up plans for space exploration, but politicians had to fund them. After the Soviet Union put the first human in space, President Kennedy was determined to plant the first flag in lunar soil. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon,\u201d he told the world in 1962. \u201cSome might suggest that the Kennedy decision was the worst decision ever,\u201d said Roger Launius, author of the forthcoming \u201cApollo\u2019s Legacy: Perspectives on the Moon Landings\u201d and NASA\u2019s chief historian from 1990 to 2002. We made it to the moon a decade sooner than von Braun expected, but at a cost that essentially bankrupted the space program. At roughly $150 billion in today\u2019s dollars, the Apollo moonshot remains the most expensive single peacetime project of the U.S. government, according to Prof. Logsdon.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nRichard Nixon was president when Neil Armstrong took his one small step. Less than a year later, Nixon cut NASA\u2019s budget dramatically. \u201cSpace expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities,\u201d the president said in a statement. The rocket that took humans to the moon was scrapped. The U.S. space program trudged forward. Construction on the ISS began in 1998. With a price tag of more than $100 billion, the station was supposed to become a cash-generating low-gravity manufacturing lab for new pharmaceuticals and materials. \u201cIt is a remarkable technical achievement to have a facility of this size and complexity operating,\u201d Prof. Logsdon said. \u201cBut it was supposed to be a research facility with all kinds of valuable payoffs. I think even its advocates would be hard-pressed to say the achievements to date justify its cost.\u201d That\u2019s the tricky part: justification. We\u2019re still looking for a reason to go beyond Earth in a lasting and meaningful way. \nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX is developing a heavy rocket and a capsule to carry humans to the ISS and\u2014potentially\u2014beyond. The company also provides launch services for government and commercial satellites. It\u2019s a business that could thrive, assuming new commercial endeavors increase demand. While the possibilities are broad\u2014microgravity manufacturing? orbital data centers? SpaceX\u2019s own satellite internet service?\u2014they\u2019re still unproven. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Life will be cramped and complica Rocket scientists of the 1950s had a vision of humanity\u2019s imminent first chapter in space. After more than half a century of ups and downs, we might finally be on course. ",
        "author": "Wilson Rothman"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7178",
        "date": "2019-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-were-promised-space-colonies-what-went-wrong-11552577256?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=76",
        "text": "The shuttle program began again in 1988, eventually launching the Hubble telescope and many pieces of the international space station. But it suffered another fatal crash in 2003 and ceased operation in 2011. \u201cThe shuttle was a remarkable achievement in what it could do but it was supposed to be routine and affordable and it ended up being neither of those,\u201d says John Logsdon, professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. \u201cIt was too risky and too expensive.\u201d\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThere was a time when our move into space seemed inevitable. According to Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist from Nazi Germany who became a leader of the U.S. space program, humankind was due to take up residence beyond Earth five decades ago. \u201cWithin the next 10 or 15 years, the Earth can have a new companion in the skies, a manmade satellite which will be man\u2019s first foothold in space,\u201d von Braun wrote in \u201cCrossing the Last Frontier,\u201d part of a celebrated Collier\u2019s magazine series on space travel that began in 1952. \u201cMan Will Conquer Space Soon,\u201d the cover proclaimed. In von Braun\u2019s vision, shiny, reusable space shuttles would shoot into orbit almost daily. The first wave of brave souls would piece together a huge wheel-shaped space station. The 80 men\u2014and only men\u2014on board would subsist on frozen vegetables and T-bone steaks (deboned to save rocket fuel). The gentle spinning of the station would provide artificial gravity; the helium-oxygen atmosphere would make everyone inside talk like Mickey Mouse. The station would serve as a hub for manned missions to the moon and, eventually, Mars. None of this was technologically farfetched. But none of it has so far come to pass as von Braun predicted.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the early 1950s, space program pioneer Wernher von Braun released his plan for an 80-man space station, supported by reusable space shuttles. He believed it could be operational in orbit by the mid-1960s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Collier\u2019s Magazine/JTE Multimedia\n \n\n\n\nScientists drew up plans for space exploration, but politicians had to fund them. After the Soviet Union put the first human in space, President Kennedy was determined to plant the first flag in lunar soil. \u201cWe choose to go to the moon,\u201d he told the world in 1962. \u201cSome might suggest that the Kennedy decision was the worst decision ever,\u201d said Roger Launius, author of the forthcoming \u201cApollo\u2019s Legacy: Perspectives on the Moon Landings\u201d and NASA\u2019s chief historian from 1990 to 2002. We made it to the moon a decade sooner than von Braun expected, but at a cost that essentially bankrupted the space program. At roughly $150 billion in today\u2019s dollars, the Apollo moonshot remains the most expensive single peacetime project of the U.S. government, according to Prof. Logsdon.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nRichard Nixon was president when Neil Armstrong took his one small step. Less than a year later, Nixon cut NASA\u2019s budget dramatically. \u201cSpace expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities,\u201d the president said in a statement. The rocket that took humans to the moon was scrapped. The U.S. space program trudged forward. Construction on the ISS began in 1998. With a price tag of more than $100 billion, the station was supposed to become a cash-generating low-gravity manufacturing lab for new pharmaceuticals and materials. \u201cIt is a remarkable technical achievement to have a facility of this size and complexity operating,\u201d Prof. Logsdon said. \u201cBut it was supposed to be a research facility with all kinds of valuable payoffs. I think even its advocates would be hard-pressed to say the achievements to date justify its cost.\u201d That\u2019s the tricky part: justification. We\u2019re still looking for a reason to go beyond Earth in a lasting and meaningful way. \nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX is developing a heavy rocket and a capsule to carry humans to the ISS and\u2014potentially\u2014beyond. The company also provides launch services for government and commercial satellites. It\u2019s a business that could thrive, assuming new commercial endeavors increase demand. While the possibilities are broad\u2014microgravity manufacturing? orbital data centers? SpaceX\u2019s own satellite internet service?\u2014they\u2019re still unproven. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Life will be cramped and complica Rocket scientists of the 1950s had a vision of humanity\u2019s imminent first chapter in space. After more than half a century of ups and downs, we might finally be on course. ",
        "author": "Wilson Rothman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Writer Neal Stephenson Thinks We\u2019ve Gotten Dystopia All Wrong (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7179",
        "date": "2020-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/writer-neal-stephenson-thinks-weve-gotten-dystopia-all-wrong-11594389600?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=41",
        "text": "Speculative-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has been musing on these themes for a long time. Nearly three decades ago, Mr. Stephenson wrote the acclaimed cyberpunk novel \u201cSnow Crash,\u201d which centers on a shared digital \u201cmetaverse\u201d that humans log into and experience through customized \u201cavatars,\u201d until a virus transmitted through the virtual world begins striking down the blood-and-flesh beings. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe book, which HBO Max is developing into a script for a pilot or series, anticipated how the internet would become a dominant medium for personal expression and a font of ever-evolving culture. Mr. Stephenson, a history buff who largely eschews social media, wrote subsequent novels foreshadowing the proliferation of e-books and digital currencies. For two decades, he has also advised some of the world\u2019s most ambitious technology companies, including Blue Origin, the space-exploration company founded by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n and Intellectual Ventures Labs, a prototyping and research company. Since 2014, he was the \u201cchief futurist\u201d at the augmented-reality company Magic Leap but was laid off in April along with a number of the company\u2019s staff. Magic Leap didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Mr. Stephenson about the consequences of social media, the privatization of space exploration and his work building virtual baby goats. You\u2019ve written about the dissolution of political institutions, gross inequality, plagues. How does 2020 compare to your novels? Our mass culture is driven by screened entertainment\u2014movies, TV, videogames\u2014so there\u2019s a tendency to tell stories in a way that looks good on screens. I think there is an overreliance on dystopia that is fundamentally driven by art direction and production design: if you\u2019re trying to create something on a screen that looks awesome, it\u2019s easier to start with the built environment that we live in and alter or degrade it than it is to invent a new vision of the world. We\u2019ve all gotten used to a particular way of thinking about dystopia\u2014and that\u2019s not what we\u2019ve got, right? We\u2019ve ended up with something that is very non-cinematic. With few exceptions, anywhere in the world affected by Covid-19, you can go out and walk down the street, drive around, look at stuff. And aside from the fact that there aren\u2019t as many people out and a lot of people are wearing masks, nothing looks different. There are no collapsed buildings or crashed trains or any of the other visual markers that you would see in a movie to tell you that a disaster has happened here. \n\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re living in grim times, there\u2019s no getting around it.\u201d\n\n\n\nYour latest novel, 2019\u2019s \u201cFall; or, Dodge in Hell,\u201d concerns the erosion of shared facts, and how technology has created circumstances inhospitable for them. What do you think can be done to address some of these problems? This environment in which there is no agreement as to fact is desirable for a lot of people. I feel that we\u2019re not going to return to a state of affairs in which people agree on facts until there\u2019s an incentive for them to do so. Covid-19 is an example of a situation where people are getting sick and dying, and it\u2019s happening all over the place, and they really are sick and some of them really are dead, and there\u2019s no getting around that fact. It\u2019s a case where we as a civic society do have the strongest possible incentive to want to know what\u2019s really going on, because if we fail to do so, there are huge and terrible consequences. But even that can be fudged by people who don\u2019t want the truth to be known. You make very limited use of Facebook and Twitter and haven\u2019t joined newer social media platforms such as Instagram. What do you think of the proliferation of technologies for sharing experiences digitally? I see people make blunders that I wish people had stopped making 10 years ago: that tendency to see something that strikes an emotional chord and immediately share it, like it, pass it on without thinking about it, without considering whether it came from a human being, or a bot, or a troll, or a political actor. It\u2019s been observed that when new forms of media become available, there tends to be a period when society doesn\u2019t know how to absorb the impact of those technologies, and negative side effects proliferate. Sooner or later, society adjusts and returns to a more stable, hopefully less easily manipulated form. The problem is that the manipulation is structurally built into these new media, and it\u2019s part of their business model. It\u2019s part of why they\u2019re able to raise a lot of money and extend their dominance over the market. So even if the people running those companies were entirely well-intentioned, which I don\u2019t think they are, it would be very difficult for them to fix a lot of the basic structural problems without shutting down their business.That\u2019s pretty grim. It\u2019s totally grim. We\u2019re living in grim times, there\u2019s no getting around it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018If you make a lot of predictions, some of them might vaguely come true,\u2019 Mr. Stephenson says.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jovelle Tamayo for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nHave current events changed the role of a writer of speculative fiction? The job has gotten a lot trickier in the last few years. Most of us didn\u2019t see a lot of important things coming, and then things have continued to happen thick and fast since. When you\u2019re scrambling around trying to adjust to a new event and incorporate that into a written work, more stuff happens that kind of pushes that out of your attention span. What do you make of the recurring tendency to view science fiction authors as prophets? I try to let it roll off my back as much as possible. It\u2019s just a statistical thing: If you make a lot of predictions, some of them might vaguely come true. And people are very generous in awarding credit for the ones that came through while turning a blind eye to all the ones that didn\u2019t.HBO Max recently announced it is developing your 1992 novel, \u201cSnow Crash,\u201d for a potential pilot or series. What makes that book resonant today? I think you can draw a direct connection between the mass phenomenon of the virus in the story and today\u2019s popular culture and social media. And then there\u2019s the distinction made in the book between virtual reality and augmented reality, although I don\u2019t think those terms are used [in the book]. But you\u2019ve got some characters who are fully immersed in a VR universe and other characters called \u201cgargoyles\u201d who are out in the real physical world, but they\u2019re working and using AR-type technology. So, that also lines up pretty well with current events.What kind of work did you do for Magic Leap? As I explained to everyone who would listen, I didn\u2019t see myself as a navel-gazing guru. I just wanted to identify something interesting that could be done in that space and to try to pursue it. It was a mix of technical engineering type work with creative content-making. We were working on a project called Baby Goats, which was meant to inhabit your space with virtual animals that knew the geometry of the room and would jump around and exhibit behaviors like real animals. But to even get started on that, we had to build tools. So we released a suite of tools called the Goat Labs Developer Samples in October of 2018. The other, larger project we were working on was basically creating a new universe\u2014in the sense of the Marvel Universe or what have you, a coherent fictional world for telling stories. The universe we were building was optimized to work with augmented-reality applications. I hope it sees the light of day eventually, and I\u2019m looking for ways to make that happen.Some people were surprised by the recent financial troubles at Magic Leap. Any insight on what went awry? I would refrain from trying to draw too many conclusions because it was such an exceptional circumstance. I think the real story there is Covid-19 and the resultant market crash more than anything about that particular company.What have those work experiences added to your understanding of the process of innovation? For example, in light of the recent launch of astronauts into space by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, what do you think of the shift in space exploration from the federal government to private industry? The government got some things done in that area that we still can\u2019t duplicate today. They built a rocket that\u2019s bigger than any rocket we\u2019ve got now. And they landed people on the moon and brought them back, and we\u2019re years away from being able to duplicate that feat. And they did it all with technology from the 1960s. As long as the space program was being driven forward by political competition with the Soviet Union and the vision of John F. Kennedy, it got a lot done really fast. When it then tried to justify itself by a \u201cWe\u2019re going to make ball bearings in space\u201d-kind of logic, it ran into a long dry spell. A lot happened, but the space shuttle never captured the imagination of people in the way that putting someone on the moon did. What\u2019s happening now is a return to where we were in the 1960s: The people who are driving it forward are doing it because Elon wants to go to Mars. But there\u2019s no real attempt to try to supply some cockamamie justification for it.Is that a good thing? I\u2019m not here to make judgements; it\u2019s just an observation about how things work. Personally, I\u2019m a space fan. I enjoy seeing this stuff happen, but I feel that way for basically personal reasons, and I don\u2019t attempt to tie it to any bigger agenda.How do you see our attitudes towards technology evolving? It\u2019s a pretty ingrained habit now to look at every technology and say, \u201cWhat are the unintended consequences that might result?\u201d And it\u2019s obvious why: There were all kinds of misapplications of hastily introduced tech\u2014DDT, thalidomide, nuclear reactors that were put into operation before we knew the full downside. It\u2019s understandable why people have developed that immediate skepticism. I do think that it can actually be counterproductive. In the field of nuclear energy, we\u2019re stuck with Fukushima-style, 1970s-era technology because the early versions were so faulty that people quite rightly became aware they were dangerous, so that industry went into eclipse for decades and didn\u2019t draw the investment and the technical talent that it might have. If we were going to do nukes or practically any other technology from scratch now, we would take a completely different approach and probably come up with something that was a lot better. We\u2019re a little bit stuck right now in a mindset that is suspicious of tech in a way that may not be as good for us as people imagine it to be. This interview has been condensed and edited. The \u201cSnow Crash\u201d author discusses the breakdown of facts on social media, his work with the augmented-reality startup Magic Leap and the way his novels compare to this unbelievable year. ",
        "author": "Ted Alcorn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Writer Neal Stephenson Thinks We\u2019ve Gotten Dystopia All Wrong (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7180",
        "date": "2020-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/writer-neal-stephenson-thinks-weve-gotten-dystopia-all-wrong-11594389600?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=51",
        "text": "Speculative-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has been musing on these themes for a long time. Nearly three decades ago, Mr. Stephenson wrote the acclaimed cyberpunk novel \u201cSnow Crash,\u201d which centers on a shared digital \u201cmetaverse\u201d that humans log into and experience through customized \u201cavatars,\u201d until a virus transmitted through the virtual world begins striking down the blood-and-flesh beings. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe book, which HBO Max is developing into a script for a pilot or series, anticipated how the internet would become a dominant medium for personal expression and a font of ever-evolving culture. Mr. Stephenson, a history buff who largely eschews social media, wrote subsequent novels foreshadowing the proliferation of e-books and digital currencies. For two decades, he has also advised some of the world\u2019s most ambitious technology companies, including Blue Origin, the space-exploration company founded by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n and Intellectual Ventures Labs, a prototyping and research company. Since 2014, he was the \u201cchief futurist\u201d at the augmented-reality company Magic Leap but was laid off in April along with a number of the company\u2019s staff. Magic Leap didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Mr. Stephenson about the consequences of social media, the privatization of space exploration and his work building virtual baby goats. You\u2019ve written about the dissolution of political institutions, gross inequality, plagues. How does 2020 compare to your novels? Our mass culture is driven by screened entertainment\u2014movies, TV, videogames\u2014so there\u2019s a tendency to tell stories in a way that looks good on screens. I think there is an overreliance on dystopia that is fundamentally driven by art direction and production design: if you\u2019re trying to create something on a screen that looks awesome, it\u2019s easier to start with the built environment that we live in and alter or degrade it than it is to invent a new vision of the world. We\u2019ve all gotten used to a particular way of thinking about dystopia\u2014and that\u2019s not what we\u2019ve got, right? We\u2019ve ended up with something that is very non-cinematic. With few exceptions, anywhere in the world affected by Covid-19, you can go out and walk down the street, drive around, look at stuff. And aside from the fact that there aren\u2019t as many people out and a lot of people are wearing masks, nothing looks different. There are no collapsed buildings or crashed trains or any of the other visual markers that you would see in a movie to tell you that a disaster has happened here. \n\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re living in grim times, there\u2019s no getting around it.\u201d\n\n\n\nYour latest novel, 2019\u2019s \u201cFall; or, Dodge in Hell,\u201d concerns the erosion of shared facts, and how technology has created circumstances inhospitable for them. What do you think can be done to address some of these problems? This environment in which there is no agreement as to fact is desirable for a lot of people. I feel that we\u2019re not going to return to a state of affairs in which people agree on facts until there\u2019s an incentive for them to do so. Covid-19 is an example of a situation where people are getting sick and dying, and it\u2019s happening all over the place, and they really are sick and some of them really are dead, and there\u2019s no getting around that fact. It\u2019s a case where we as a civic society do have the strongest possible incentive to want to know what\u2019s really going on, because if we fail to do so, there are huge and terrible consequences. But even that can be fudged by people who don\u2019t want the truth to be known. You make very limited use of Facebook and Twitter and haven\u2019t joined newer social media platforms such as Instagram. What do you think of the proliferation of technologies for sharing experiences digitally? I see people make blunders that I wish people had stopped making 10 years ago: that tendency to see something that strikes an emotional chord and immediately share it, like it, pass it on without thinking about it, without considering whether it came from a human being, or a bot, or a troll, or a political actor. It\u2019s been observed that when new forms of media become available, there tends to be a period when society doesn\u2019t know how to absorb the impact of those technologies, and negative side effects proliferate. Sooner or later, society adjusts and returns to a more stable, hopefully less easily manipulated form. The problem is that the manipulation is structurally built into these new media, and it\u2019s part of their business model. It\u2019s part of why they\u2019re able to raise a lot of money and extend their dominance over the market. So even if the people running those companies were entirely well-intentioned, which I don\u2019t think they are, it would be very difficult for them to fix a lot of the basic structural problems without s The \u201cSnow Crash\u201d author discusses the breakdown of facts on social media, his work with the augmented-reality startup Magic Leap and the way his novels compare to this unbelievable year. ",
        "author": "Ted Alcorn"
    },
    {
        "title": "High-Frequency Traders Eye Satellites for Speed Boost (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7181",
        "date": "2021-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-eye-satellites-for-ultimate-speed-boost-11617289217?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=32",
        "text": "Satellite networks orbiting a few hundred miles above the Earth\u2019s surface could represent the next technological leap forward. Starlink, deployed by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has already launched more than 1,000 satellites. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n OneWeb Global Ltd. and Telesat Canada are building rival networks set to go live in the coming years. And a U.K. space entrepreneur is planning a network that would cater to the high-frequency trading crowd. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe satellites in such constellations would orbit the Earth far closer than older generations of telecommunications satellites. They are also smaller and cheaper to launch. This makes it possible to deploy networks of hundreds or thousands of satellites, in which at least one satellite is always nearby, no matter where on the planet you are, even as the satellites whiz by at thousands of miles an hour. The more advanced projects plan to use laser links between satellites to create speedy data networks covering the globe. With such a network, a Chicago trader could beam U.S. futures prices to a satellite overhead, which would relay them over a chain of several satellites, then down to London. Such space-based connections could be faster than existing networks on Earth. That has the potential to change the way that high-frequency traders send data between exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMasters of the Universe\nSatellite networks could speed up data transmission for high-frequency trading firms.\n\n\n\nPotential technology\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\n2\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. A radio antenna in Chicago sends data up to a satellite.\n\n\n3. The data arrives in London. It is not yet known how long this will take, but one satellite operator has touted speeds of less than 29 milliseconds.\n\n\n2. The satellite receives the data and relays it via laser to another satellite, which then transmits it towards London.\n\n\nCurrent technology\n\n\nShortwave\n\n\nSubsea\nfiber\n\n\nIonosphere\n\n\n2\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n3\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. Microwave antennas send data from Chicago to New York.\n\n\n1. Data is encoded, which can take\nseveral milliseconds, and transmitted\nby shortwave radio from Chicago.\n\n\n2. The data travels under the Atlantic by fiber-optic cable. Fiber transmits data at about two-thirds the speed of light, slower than lasers or radio waves moving through air or space.\n\n\n2. The data signal bounces off the ionosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere.\n\n\n3. The signal is received in London. The speed of the process varies depending on the setup, but one provider says it delivers the data in 29.6 milliseconds.\n\n\n3. The data is received in London after 33.5 milliseconds.\n\n\n\n\n\nPotential technology\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\n2\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. A radio antenna in Chicago sends data up to a satellite.\n\n\n3. The data arrives in London. It is not yet known how long this will take, but one satellite operator has touted speeds of less than 29 milliseconds.\n\n\n2. The satellite receives the data and relays it via laser to another satellite, which then transmits it towards London.\n\n\nCurrent technology\n\n\nShortwave\n\n\nSubsea\nfiber\n\n\nIonosphere\n\n\n2\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n3\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n1. Data is encoded, which can take\nseveral milliseconds, and transmitted\nby shortwave radio from Chicago.\n\n\n1. Microwave antennas send data from Chicago to New York.\n\n\n2. The data travels under the Atlantic by fiber-optic cable. Fiber transmits data at about two-thirds the speed of light, slower than lasers or radio waves moving through air or space.\n\n\n2. The data signal bounces off the ionosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere.\n\n\n3. The signal is received in London. The speed of the process varies depending on the setup, but one provider says it delivers the data in 29.6 milliseconds.\n\n\n3. The data is received in London after 33.5 milliseconds.\n\n\n\n\n\nPotential technology\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\n2\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. A radio antenna in Chicago sends data up to a satellite.\n\n\n3. The data arrives in London. It is not yet known how long this will take, but one satellite operator has touted speeds of less than 29 milliseconds.\n\n\n2. The satellite receives the data and relays it via laser to another satellite, which then transmits it towards London.\n\n\nCurrent technology\n\n\nShortwave\n\n\nSubsea\nfiber\n\n\nIonosphere\n\n\n2\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n3\n\n\n2\n\n\n1. Data is encoded, which can take\nseveral milliseconds, and transmitted\nby shortwave radio from Chicago.\n\n\n1. Microwave antennas send data from Chicago to New York.\n\n\n2. The data travels under the Atlantic by fiber-optic cable. Fiber transmits data at about two-thirds the speed of light, slower than lasers or radio waves moving Satellite networks could represent the next technological leap forward for a business where every millisecond counts. ",
        "author": "Alexander Osipovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "High-Frequency Traders Eye Satellites for Speed Boost (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7182",
        "date": "2021-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-eye-satellites-for-ultimate-speed-boost-11617289217?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=33",
        "text": "Satellite networks orbiting a few hundred miles above the Earth\u2019s surface could represent the next technological leap forward. Starlink, deployed by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has already launched more than 1,000 satellites. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n OneWeb Global Ltd. and Telesat Canada are building rival networks set to go live in the coming years. And a U.K. space entrepreneur is planning a network that would cater to the high-frequency trading crowd. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe satellites in such constellations would orbit the Earth far closer than older generations of telecommunications satellites. They are also smaller and cheaper to launch. This makes it possible to deploy networks of hundreds or thousands of satellites, in which at least one satellite is always nearby, no matter where on the planet you are, even as the satellites whiz by at thousands of miles an hour. The more advanced projects plan to use laser links between satellites to create speedy data networks covering the globe. With such a network, a Chicago trader could beam U.S. futures prices to a satellite overhead, which would relay them over a chain of several satellites, then down to London. Such space-based connections could be faster than existing networks on Earth. That has the potential to change the way that high-frequency traders send data between exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMasters of the Universe\nSatellite networks could speed up data transmission for high-frequency trading firms.\n\n\n\nPotential technology\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\n2\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. A radio antenna in Chicago sends data up to a satellite.\n\n\n3. The data arrives in London. It is not yet known how long this will take, but one satellite operator has touted speeds of less than 29 milliseconds.\n\n\n2. The satellite receives the data and relays it via laser to another satellite, which then transmits it towards London.\n\n\nCurrent technology\n\n\nShortwave\n\n\nSubsea\nfiber\n\n\nIonosphere\n\n\n2\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n3\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. Microwave antennas send data from Chicago to New York.\n\n\n1. Data is encoded, which can take\nseveral milliseconds, and transmitted\nby shortwave radio from Chicago.\n\n\n2. The data travels under the Atlantic by fiber-optic cable. Fiber transmits data at about two-thirds the speed of light, slower than lasers or radio waves moving through air or space.\n\n\n2. The data signal bounces off the ionosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere.\n\n\n3. The signal is received in London. The speed of the process varies depending on the setup, but one provider says it delivers the data in 29.6 milliseconds.\n\n\n3. The data is received in London after 33.5 milliseconds.\n\n\n\n\n\nPotential technology\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\n2\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. A radio antenna in Chicago sends data up to a satellite.\n\n\n3. The data arrives in London. It is not yet known how long this will take, but one satellite operator has touted speeds of less than 29 milliseconds.\n\n\n2. The satellite receives the data and relays it via laser to another satellite, which then transmits it towards London.\n\n\nCurrent technology\n\n\nShortwave\n\n\nSubsea\nfiber\n\n\nIonosphere\n\n\n2\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n3\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n1. Data is encoded, which can take\nseveral milliseconds, and transmitted\nby shortwave radio from Chicago.\n\n\n1. Microwave antennas send data from Chicago to New York.\n\n\n2. The data travels under the Atlantic by fiber-optic cable. Fiber transmits data at about two-thirds the speed of light, slower than lasers or radio waves moving through air or space.\n\n\n2. The data signal bounces off the ionosphere, an upper layer of the atmosphere.\n\n\n3. The signal is received in London. The speed of the process varies depending on the setup, but one provider says it delivers the data in 29.6 milliseconds.\n\n\n3. The data is received in London after 33.5 milliseconds.\n\n\n\n\n\nPotential technology\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\nSatellite\n\n\n2\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1. A radio antenna in Chicago sends data up to a satellite.\n\n\n3. The data arrives in London. It is not yet known how long this will take, but one satellite operator has touted speeds of less than 29 milliseconds.\n\n\n2. The satellite receives the data and relays it via laser to another satellite, which then transmits it towards London.\n\n\nCurrent technology\n\n\nShortwave\n\n\nSubsea\nfiber\n\n\nIonosphere\n\n\n2\n\n\nChicago\n\n\n1\n\n\n3\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n1\n\n\nChicago\n\n\nLondon\n\n\n3\n\n\n2\n\n\n1. Data is encoded, which can take\nseveral milliseconds, and transmitted\nby shortwave radio from Chicago.\n\n\n1. Microwave antennas send data from Chicago to New York.\n\n\n2. The data travels under the Atlantic by fiber-optic cable. Fiber transmits data at about two-thirds the speed of light, slower than lasers or radio waves moving Satellite networks could represent the next technological leap forward for a business where every millisecond counts. ",
        "author": "Alexander Osipovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Build a Home on the Moon (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7183",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-build-a-home-on-the-moon-11607106600?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=31",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThis is no longer an academic question. NASA, with the help of international and commercial partners, plans to return people to the moon in 2024. In the following decade, the agency wants to establish \u201ca sustained long-term presence on the lunar surface,\u201d and build up infrastructure such as communications, power generation and waste disposal. Eventually, the so-called Artemis Base Camp could accommodate a crew of four astronauts with the goal of spending a month or two at a time on the surface. It\u2019s a lot closer than many people realize, says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ariel Ekblaw,\n\n\n\n founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Space Exploration Initiative. She expects a structure to be built on the moon late this decade or in the early 2030s. China has plans to start establishing an inhabited lunar station this decade. Jan Woerner, the European Space Agency\u2019s director general, in 2016 kicked off Moon Village, an international, collaborative initiative for moon exploration. Roughly a dozen private lunar-transportation companies are readying robotic missions to the surface, according to \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jessy Kate Schingler,\n\n\n\n co-founder and director of policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit advocating for peaceful and cooperative approaches to lunar settlement. There could be up to 1 billion metric tons of water in the form of ice on the moon, which could support hundreds of thousands of people working there, she says.\n\n\n To simulate damage, Zixin Wang, a graduate research assistant at Purdue, uses a specialized hammer to hit different parts of the dome.The data will be used to determine the types of impacts a lunar structure might face.Photos: Evan Jenkins for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\n\nStill, a lunar habitat will need to withstand failures and repair itself when there are no humans on board. \u201cIt will have smarts,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julia Badger,\n\n\n\n autonomous systems technology discipline lead at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center. \u201cIt will be able to handle a lot of the things it needs to do on its own.\u201d That\u2019s where RETHi comes in. Dr. Badger, a research collaborator on the project, expects it to inform NASA\u2019s moon missions and beyond. It could also help teach earthbound architects and engineers how to better build for a future of increasingly dense cities, limited resources and worsening climate change. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think you could call the moon \u201chome\u201d? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe project is led by Purdue University, in collaboration with Harvard University, the University of Connecticut and the University of Texas at San Antonio, with corporate partners Collins Aerospace and ILC Dover, a maker of engineered films and fabrics, including inflatable space habitats. RETHi\u2019s tests will examine what could happen under a range of disaster scenarios, from a micrometeorite punching a hole through a habitat to an hourslong moonquake jiggling the pipes of the environmental control and life support system. \u201cYou\u2019re looking into the future to see what could happen, what\u2019s most likely to happen, and then you\u2019re trying to determine what\u2019s the best way to deal with those likely scenarios,\u201d says Shirley Dyke, a professor of mechanical and civil engineering at Purdue and RETHi\u2019s executive director. \n\n\n Yuguang Fu, a post-doctoral research associate at Purdue, analyzes data collected from tests performed in the lab. Shirley Dyke, a professor of mechanical and civil engineering at Purdue, leads the RETHi project.Photos: Evan Jenkins for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\n\nThe moon offers no shortage of hardships. Lunar soil, known as regolith, is both sharp and fluffy, says Dr. Ekblaw. \u201cIt\u2019s confectioners\u2019 sugar that\u2019s like glass,\u201d says Dr. Dyke. It works its way into machinery, wears down equipment and accumulates on solar panels. There is no breathable air and only a sixth of Earth\u2019s gravity. Extended stays pose a radiation risk. Nighttime lasts for roughly 14 days, interrupting solar-power generation. For this reason, many plans for lunar habitats focus on the \u201cpeaks of eternal light,\u201d a fanciful term for areas that receive near constant sunlight, on the Shackleton crater at the moon\u2019s south pole. Scientists have also found water in the form of ice in the poles, suggesting it could be mined and turned into oxygen and hydrogen for breathable air and rocket fuel. The RETHi project focuses on three areas: resilience, or building a habitat that can stand up to the hostilities of the surface; awareness, or being able to detect and diagnose problems through an array of sensors; and robotics, or developing machines that can autonomously fix problems. For Dr. Dyke, emergencies are inevitable. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis \u2018tabletop earthquake system\u2019 shakes test mater A small-scale replica of a lunar habitat is taking shape at Purdue University. The goal is to prepare for life in a hostile environment\u2014including our own. ",
        "author": "Leigh Kamping-Carder"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Build a Home on the Moon (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7184",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-build-a-home-on-the-moon-11607106600?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=37",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThis is no longer an academic question. NASA, with the help of international and commercial partners, plans to return people to the moon in 2024. In the following decade, the agency wants to establish \u201ca sustained long-term presence on the lunar surface,\u201d and build up infrastructure such as communications, power generation and waste disposal. Eventually, the so-called Artemis Base Camp could accommodate a crew of four astronauts with the goal of spending a month or two at a time on the surface. It\u2019s a lot closer than many people realize, says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ariel Ekblaw,\n\n\n\n founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Space Exploration Initiative. She expects a structure to be built on the moon late this decade or in the early 2030s. China has plans to start establishing an inhabited lunar station this decade. Jan Woerner, the European Space Agency\u2019s director general, in 2016 kicked off Moon Village, an international, collaborative initiative for moon exploration. Roughly a dozen private lunar-transportation companies are readying robotic missions to the surface, according to \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jessy Kate Schingler,\n\n\n\n co-founder and director of policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit advocating for peaceful and cooperative approaches to lunar settlement. There could be up to 1 billion metric tons of water in the form of ice on the moon, which could support hundreds of thousands of people working there, she says.\n\n\n To simulate damage, Zixin Wang, a graduate research assistant at Purdue, uses a specialized hammer to hit different parts of the dome.The data will be used to determine the types of impacts a lunar structure might face.Photos: Evan Jenkins for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\n\nStill, a lunar habitat will need to withstand failures and repair itself when there are no humans on board. \u201cIt will have smarts,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julia Badger,\n\n\n\n autonomous systems technology discipline lead at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center. \u201cIt will be able to handle a lot of the things it needs to do on its own.\u201d That\u2019s where RETHi comes in. Dr. Badger, a research collaborator on the project, expects it to inform NASA\u2019s moon missions and beyond. It could also help teach earthbound architects and engineers how to better build for a future of increasingly dense cities, limited resources and worsening climate change. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think you could call the moon \u201chome\u201d? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe project is led by Purdue University, in collaboration with Harvard University, the University of Connecticut and the University of Texas at San Antonio, with corporate partners Collins Aerospace and ILC Dover, a maker of engineered films and fabrics, including inflatable space habitats. RETHi\u2019s tests will examine what could happen under a range of disaster scenarios, from a micrometeorite punching a hole through a habitat to an hourslong moonquake jiggling the pipes of the environmental control and life support system. \u201cYou\u2019re looking into the future to see what could happen, what\u2019s most likely to happen, and then you\u2019re trying to determine what\u2019s the best way to deal with those likely scenarios,\u201d says Shirley Dyke, a professor of mechanical and civil engineering at Purdue and RETHi\u2019s executive director. \n\n\n \n\n\n\nThe moon offers no shortage of hardships. Lunar soil, known as regolith, is both sharp and fluffy, says Dr. Ekblaw. \u201cIt\u2019s confectioners\u2019 sugar that\u2019s like glass,\u201d says Dr. Dyke. It works its way into machinery, wears down equipment and accumulates on solar panels. There is no breathable air and only a sixth of Earth\u2019s gravity. Extended stays pose a radiation risk. Nighttime lasts for roughly 14 days, interrupting solar-power generation. For this reason, many plans for lunar habitats focus on the \u201cpeaks of eternal light,\u201d a fanciful term for areas that receive near constant sunlight, on the Shackleton crater at the moon\u2019s south pole. Scientists have also found water in the form of ice in the poles, suggesting it could be mined and turned into oxygen and hydrogen for breathable air and rocket fuel. The RETHi project focuses on three areas: resilience, or building a habitat that can stand up to the hostilities of the surface; awareness, or being able to detect and diagnose problems through an array of sensors; and robotics, or developing machines that can autonomously fix problems. For Dr. Dyke, emergencies are inevitable. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis \u2018tabletop earthquake system\u2019 shakes test materials to show how they might behave under lunar conditions.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Evan Jenkins for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nDozens of faculty members and students at the four universities have spent the past year designing co A small-scale replica of a lunar habitat is taking shape at Purdue University. The goal is to prepare for life in a hostile environment\u2014including our own. ",
        "author": "Leigh Kamping-Carder"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Build a Home on the Moon (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7185",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-build-a-home-on-the-moon-11607106600?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=42",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThis is no longer an academic question. NASA, with the help of international and commercial partners, plans to return people to the moon in 2024. In the following decade, the agency wants to establish \u201ca sustained long-term presence on the lunar surface,\u201d and build up infrastructure such as communications, power generation and waste disposal. Eventually, the so-called Artemis Base Camp could accommodate a crew of four astronauts with the goal of spending a month or two at a time on the surface. It\u2019s a lot closer than many people realize, says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ariel Ekblaw,\n\n\n\n founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Space Exploration Initiative. She expects a structure to be built on the moon late this decade or in the early 2030s. China has plans to start establishing an inhabited lunar station this decade. Jan Woerner, the European Space Agency\u2019s director general, in 2016 kicked off Moon Village, an international, collaborative initiative for moon exploration. Roughly a dozen private lunar-transportation companies are readying robotic missions to the surface, according to \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jessy Kate Schingler,\n\n\n\n co-founder and director of policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit advocating for peaceful and cooperative approaches to lunar settlement. There could be up to 1 billion metric tons of water in the form of ice on the moon, which could support hundreds of thousands of people working there, she says.\n\n\n To simulate damage, Zixin Wang, a graduate research assistant at Purdue, uses a specialized hammer to hit different parts of the dome.The data will be used to determine the types of impacts a lunar structure might face.Photos: Evan Jenkins for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\n\nStill, a lunar habitat will need to withstand failures and repair itself when there are no humans on board. \u201cIt will have smarts,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Julia Badger,\n\n\n\n autonomous systems technology discipline lead at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center. \u201cIt will be able to handle a lot of the things it needs to do on its own.\u201d That\u2019s where RETHi comes in. Dr. Badger, a research collaborator on the project, expects it to inform NASA\u2019s moon missions and beyond. It could also help teach earthbound architects and engineers how to better build for a future of increasingly dense cities, limited resources and worsening climate change. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think you could call the moon \u201chome\u201d? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe project is led by Purdue University, in collaboration with Harvard University, the University of Connecticut and the University of Texas at San Antonio, with corporate partners Collins Aerospace and ILC Dover, a maker of engineered films and fabrics, including inflatable space habitats. RETHi\u2019s tests will examine what could happen under a range of disaster scenarios, from a micrometeorite punching a hole through a habitat to an hourslong moonquake jiggling the pipes of the environmental control and life support system. \u201cYou\u2019re looking into the future to see what could happen, what\u2019s most likely to happen, and then you\u2019re trying to determine what\u2019s the best way to deal with those likely scenarios,\u201d says Shirley Dyke, a professor of mechanical and civil engineering at Purdue and RETHi\u2019s executive director. \n\n\n \n\n\n\nThe moon offers no shortage of hardships. Lunar soil, known as regolith, is both sharp and fluffy, says Dr. Ekblaw. \u201cIt\u2019s confectioners\u2019 sugar that\u2019s like glass,\u201d says Dr. Dyke. It works its way into machinery, wears down equipment and accumulates on solar panels. There is no breathable air and only a sixth of Earth\u2019s gravity. Extended stays pose a radiation risk. Nighttime lasts for roughly 14 days, interrupting solar-power generation. For this reason, many plans for lunar habitats focus on the \u201cpeaks of eternal light,\u201d a fanciful term for areas that receive near constant sunlight, on the Shackleton crater at the moon\u2019s south pole. Scientists have also found water in the form of ice in the poles, suggesting it could be mined and turned into oxygen and hydrogen for breathable air and rocket fuel. The RETHi project focuses on three areas: resilience, or building a habitat that can stand up to the hostilities of the surface; awareness, or being able to detect and diagnose problems through an array of sensors; and robotics, or developing machines that can autonomously fix problems. For Dr. Dyke, emergencies are inevitable. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis \u2018tabletop earthquake system\u2019 shakes test materials to show how they might behave under lunar conditions.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Evan Jenkins for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nDozens of faculty members and students at the four universities have spent the past year designing co A small-scale replica of a lunar habitat is taking shape at Purdue University. The goal is to prepare for life in a hostile environment\u2014including our own. ",
        "author": "Leigh Kamping-Carder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fusion Startups Step In to Realize Clean Power Dream (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7186",
        "date": "2020-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fusion-startups-step-in-to-realize-decades-old-clean-power-dream-11581001383?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=49",
        "text": "Fusion, first theorized a century ago and shown to be possible decades later, is the same power that lights the sun and every other star, as well as hydrogen bombs. All it requires is the force to press small atoms together to build bigger ones\u2014a process that releases huge amounts of energy, no greenhouse emissions and limited radioactivity. The hitch is that these atoms repel each other, and overcoming that resistance requires enormous strength. In stars, gravity does the job, but on Earth we must find other methods. Scientists now are building systems that squeeze, pummel and bombard atoms into submission. Their challenge is to get far more energy out of a reaction than they put in, a feat nobody has yet accomplished.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOxford, England-based First Light Fusion co-founders Yiannis Ventikos, left, and Nick Hawker stand atop a machine they\u2019ve developed that can discharge up to 200,000 volts and more than 14 million amperes of power within two microseconds.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeremie Souteyrat for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nConcerns about global warming have brought fresh intensity to a field that languished for years. In December, Congress boosted research spending on fusion, recognizing it as a promising clean energy source to reliably power big economies. \u201cIf we can make fusion work, it really would be the perfect way to generate energy,\u201d says Steven Cowley, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a pioneer in the field run by Princeton University for the Energy Department.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nPrinceton and many other advanced labs are trying to fuse hydrogen isotopes by enveloping them in an intense magnetic field that traps and squeezes the atoms, heating them to temperatures 10 times the sun\u2019s core. Physicists generate the field with electromagnets demanding so much current that they must be superconductive, which has required cooling to near absolute zero\u2014the point where all motion stops. For years, scientists believed that this required reactors big enough to walk through, powered by electromagnets heavier than a blue whale and house-sized freezers. Budgets ran in billions of dollars, meaning only governments could underwrite fusion experiments. Technological breakthroughs have upended those assumptions. Advances in computing, precision machinery and synthetic materials have allowed scientists to design reactors a fraction of the size and cost of those just a few years ago. Lower price tags have put fusion within reach of private investors, allowing ventures to sprout.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything One Architect\u2019s Radical Vision to Replace the Open Office Virtual Travel Could Change the World\u2014if it Gets Off the Ground The Future of Everything\u2019s 10 Best Stories of 2019 \n\n\nAdvances in computer modeling brought First Light\u2019s Mr. Hawker to fusion over a decade ago, when he was getting a Ph.D. on simulating fluid dynamics at the University of Oxford. Mr. Hawker\u2019s adviser, Yiannis Ventikos, was intrigued by bubbles collapsing under intense force, like those produced by the tiny pistol shrimp\u2019s claw, which it snaps to generate a \u201cbubble bullet\u201d that stuns its prey. Scientists in 2001 had shown that the implosions produced not just noise but also extreme pressure, a flash of light\u2014dubbed shrimpoluminescense\u2014and temperatures exceeding 5,000 degrees Kelvin. Physicists decades earlier had considered bubble collapse to trigger fusion but lacked the computing power or math to model it, so looked elsewhere. Revisiting the question with advanced algorithms and powerful processors, Mr. Hawker and Mr. Ventikos showed the potential to generate million-degree conditions needed for fusion. Today, First Light has raised \u00a325 million (US$32.8 million) to build machines for testing its computer models. If the shock waves deliver, the next step is to build a prototype generator, potentially as soon as 2025. \u201cThings that were unthinkable 10 or 20 years ago are now fairly straightforward,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Carling,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Tokamak Energy, another startup based near Oxford, England, a fusion hub.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWould you trust fusion energy to power your town? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nTokamak Energy, which recently raised \u00a367 million (US$ 87.3 million), and at least two North American startups also aim around 2025 to fire up prototype fusion reactors, each roughly the size of turbines inside traditional power plants. If any of the upstarts succeed, it will mark a scientific leapfrog for the record books. Until recently, the unquestioned leader on the path to achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction\u2014a crucial hurdle before developing power plants\u2014was a 35-country consortium based in southern France called ITER. First proposed at a summit in 1985 between then-President Reagan and Soviet leader \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mikhail Gorbachev,\n\n\n\n the project today is a sprawling construction site of more than a dozen buildings. Coming together at its core is the world\u2019s biggest fusion system, a 98-foot-tall drum housing a 37-foot-high doughnut-shaped reactor core.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 35-country consortium known as ITER is building the world\u2019s biggest fusion system, with a 98-foot-tall drum and 37-foot-high donut-shaped reactor core, in southern France.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n jean-paul pelissier/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of ITER\u2019s \u2018poloidal field coils,\u2019 a component critical to establishing the reactor\u2019s magnetic field.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ITER\n \n\n\n\nThe project, costing more than $20 billion, was designed to show fusion\u2019s viability and develop needed technologies\u2014not put power on the grid. \u201cITER is really the final step in fusion research to enable the design and production of commercial machines,\u201d says Director-General \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bernard Bigot\n\n\n\n in his office overlooking armies of hard-hatted workers. Slated to begin testing in 2025 and achieve fusion around 2035, ITER targets a 10-fold increase in power between what goes in and what comes out. If all goes well, Mr. Bigot foresees others leveraging ITER\u2019s research to build commercial fusion plants in the 2050s. Private ventures aren\u2019t alone in trying to move faster. A new Chinese government project aims for fusion power before 2050, according to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Success for a newcomer wouldn\u2019t mean ITER is for naught. Officials across the growing industry say recent advances would have been impossible without work being done by government projects like ITER and Princeton\u2019s lab. \u201cWe\u2019re going to learn a lot from ITER,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Mumgaard,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Boston-based startup spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, another fusion hub. Mr. Mumgaard, who previously worked at MIT on early ITER research, exemplifies the crossover between labs and startups. As with the commercialization of space, fusion entrepreneurs have leveraged government research and hired government experts.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA 70% scale model of General Fusion\u2019s plasma injector, a prototype of the component that will be assembled into the demonstration version of the company\u2019s fusion system.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kristopher Grunert for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThis is kind of the SpaceX moment for fusion,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christofer Mowry,\n\n\n\n chief executive of General Fusion, a venture based in Vancouver, Canada, referring to how \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n started Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, by commercializing work of the U.S. space program. \u201cOur starting point is on the basis of mature science.\u201d General Fusion\u2019s approach\u2014mechanical compression inside a spherical reactor using synchronized pistons\u2014was enabled in part by 3-D printing and digital industrial controls, Mr. Mowry says. Both Commonwealth Fusion in Boston and Tokamak Energy in Oxford aim to shrink ITER\u2019s doughnut-shaped reactor to a scale that could fit inside a gymnasium by using new electromagnets roughly 2% the size of ITER\u2019s. The magnets use novel alloys that become superconductive at temperatures achievable with commercially available helium, so are much less expensive and energy-intensive to operate. First Light avoids magnets and relies more on physical compression in a collapsing bubble, painstakingly planned on computers. Leaps in processing power have helped simulate blindingly fast shock waves, as have advances in the science of modeling and machine learning. \u201cJust a bigger computer isn\u2019t enough,\u201d says Mr. Hawker. The prospect of compact, affordable fusion reactors producing bountiful energy but no greenhouse gasses that researchers say contribute to climate change has sparked investor interest. The 21 startups in the Fusion Industry Association, a trade group to lobby for government support and legislation necessary for fusion power, together have raised as much as $1.5 billion\u2014most of it in the past five years, says Executive Director Andrew Holland. At the association\u2019s inception in 2017, only 14 companies were involved, he says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA General Fusion scientist monitors a small-scale plasma injector.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kristopher Grunert for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nGeneral Fusion in December raised $65 million, its fifth funding round, from investors including Singapore\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund, Temasek. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Gates\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n have bankrolled fusion startups through funds aimed at transforming energy. Few investors are traditional venture capitalists. Since payback could take more than a decade, investments today are \u201calmost philanthropy,\u201d says Mr. Cowley at Princeton. \u201cInvestors want to be part of something that will change the world.\u201d ITER\u2019s Mr. Bigot fears some may be overly optimistic. \u201cI don\u2019t see any option being explored now able to deliver continuous power to the grid by 2030,\u201d he says. He questions whether materials exist to protect the insides of compact fusion reactors, which could get even hotter than his giant machine. \u201cIf they succeed, we applaud them,\u201d says Tim Luce, head of science and operations at ITER. One issue not sparking deep concern is radioactivity. Fusion reactions can\u2019t snowball out of control if a reactor breaks, as existing fission nuclear reactors can; without the required heat and pressure to sustain it, fusion would just stop. Reactor components used in fusion would pose little danger before long, because only a small amount of mildly radioactive fuel is required and the residue has a relatively short half-life. Fission waste, which is far more radioactive, lasts for eons. Another consensus across the fusion world is it\u2019s no longer a scientific riddle. Today it presents engineering challenges of equipment, materials and designs that can be tackled with time, testing and money, say proponents. \u201cIt\u2019s not an issue of if but when,\u201d says ITER\u2019s Mr. Luce. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeneral Fusion built its compression system testbed in 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Kristopher Grunert for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMore in The Future of Everything | Energy Explore what\u2019s next for energy and climate.To Store Wind and Sun, Energy Startups Look to Gravity From giant earth towers to compressed-air plants, entrepreneurs are piloting systems to make renewable energy more reliableWhat\u2019s Next for the Energy Grid Living solar power cells, household microgrids and more projects in the works for the decentralized grid of the future.How a Utility\u2019s Counterintuitive Strategy Might Fuel a Greener Future Consumers Energy aims to slash carbon emissions and replace traditional coal-fired plants with solar farms by betting on smarter energy consumption.The Key to Keeping the Lights On: Artificial Intelligence Power companies are turning to AI, drones and sensors to curtail outages, save money and help operate an increasingly complex electricity grid.A Sci-fi Author\u2019s Boldest Vision of Climate Change: Surviving It Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s novels imagine environmental collapse in arresting precision\u2014and humanity finding a way forwardRead the full report. Write to Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com Governments have spent billions of dollars studying fusion, an emissions-free energy source. Now, private ventures are building smaller, faster, cheaper reactors. ",
        "author": "Daniel Michaels"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Returning to the Moon, How Will Astronauts Get Around? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7187",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-returning-to-the-moon-how-will-astronauts-get-around-11636387210?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=11",
        "text": "Even if traffic jams are unlikely, the lunar surface is poised to become busier in the coming decades. The first inklings of what transportation networks and infrastructure might look like there are starting to emerge. Spacefaring nations are making fresh plans to explore the moon. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a base camp, part of a set of lunar missions under the Artemis banner. The agency hasn\u2019t specified when it would develop the camp, but it would be after it lands people back on the moon.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSpace agencies for China and Russia have said they expect to work together to develop a base of operations on the moon later this decade and into the 2030s. Europe\u2019s space agency last year released designs for a lunar village. Meanwhile, private companies developing lunar landers, rovers and other vehicles are assessing opportunities on a surface that last saw a human almost five decades ago. Simply returning people and rovers to the satellite\u2014an average of 239,000 miles from Earth and with temperatures that drop to -400 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014is an enormous challenge. Though it\u2019s too early for detailed plans, if humans establish settlements on the moon, amid its craters and highlands, roadways and traffic policies may be needed. Breaking new paths Infrastructure is coming to the lunar surface relatively soon\u2014though roads may be years away. More immediately, landers slated to return to the moon will serve as hubs for activity, providing power and communications for rovers, or vehicles designed to move around the lunar surface, according to Jessy Schingler, who studies policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for cooperative approaches for settlement on the moon. But roads, over time, may appear too. They are a basic technology of human societies, so it is natural to think that roads will have a place on the moon, she says. \n\n\n\n\u201cIf you occupy a piece of land on the moon, you don\u2019t own it. So that creates a lot of risk.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Douglas Ligor, Rand social scientist \n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s planned base camp will need some areas to be clean and dust-free, such as a landing pad and a path from that area to habitats, says the agency\u2019s Patrick Troutman, who has studied lunar architecture. Such paths could be hardened, he adds. That work could set the stage for roadways outside of camp as astronauts discover points of interest and the value of charting out a lane becomes clear. Spurs could \u201cgo out to either resources or areas of scientific value, and those would be more like your Oregon Trail with buoys and navigation beacons and charging stations here and there,\u201d Mr. Troutman says. One reason to build infrastructure like landing pads or roads would be to help tamp down regolith. \u201cKicking up this regolith all over the place is a problem,\u201d says Haym Benaroya, an engineering professor at Rutgers University who has studied lunar bases. Floating dust can interfere with machinery and has been linked to cancer. \u201cSintering,\u201d or melting the surface to harden it, could help, he says.Lunar vehicles Not every lunar sojourn would need to touch the surface. George Pollock, director of the astrodynamics department at Aerospace Corp., a federally funded research center, says that aerial vehicles may be more efficient for some trips, similar to how helicopters are better suited for some trips on Earth. Still, companies are working on vehicle options that mimic driving on our home planet. \nLockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n said earlier this year they would team up to create a lunar vehicle that could transport astronauts across the moon. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota Motor Corp.\n\n\n and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have researched creating a pressurized vehicle for the moon. NASA anticipates gradually expanding its transportation modes over time, says Mr. Troutman. The first, he says, would be crew members walking around in spacesuits. Then, a lunar terrain vehicle on the ground would extend the range for prospecting on the moon. When that vehicle has humans on board, it would stay closer to the agency\u2019s base camp; it could travel farther when operating autonomously. Later, NASA wants to have a pressurized rover akin to a camper that would allow astronauts to exit and enter relatively quickly to conduct scientific missions, he says.Rules of the roads Today, there is no way to claim property rights on the lunar surface, raising questions about how transportation projects will operate, says Douglas Ligor, a Rand Corp. social scientist who has studied space governance. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and other agreements outline how nations can use space but don\u2019t say how economic activity can be conducted, he says. \u201cIf you occupy a piece of land on the moon, you don\u2019t own it. S The lunar surface is slated to get more crowded in the coming years. What might transportation networks there look like? ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Returning to the Moon, How Will Astronauts Get Around? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7188",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/after-returning-to-the-moon-how-will-astronauts-get-around-11636387210?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=19",
        "text": "Even if traffic jams are unlikely, the lunar surface is poised to become busier in the coming decades. The first inklings of what transportation networks and infrastructure might look like there are starting to emerge. Spacefaring nations are making fresh plans to explore the moon. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans a base camp, part of a set of lunar missions under the Artemis banner. The agency hasn\u2019t specified when it would develop the camp, but it would be after it lands people back on the moon.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nSpace agencies for China and Russia have said they expect to work together to develop a base of operations on the moon later this decade and into the 2030s. Europe\u2019s space agency last year released designs for a lunar village. Meanwhile, private companies developing lunar landers, rovers and other vehicles are assessing opportunities on a surface that last saw a human almost five decades ago. Simply returning people and rovers to the satellite\u2014an average of 239,000 miles from Earth and with temperatures that drop to -400 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014is an enormous challenge. Though it\u2019s too early for detailed plans, if humans establish settlements on the moon, amid its craters and highlands, roadways and traffic policies may be needed. Breaking new paths Infrastructure is coming to the lunar surface relatively soon\u2014though roads may be years away. More immediately, landers slated to return to the moon will serve as hubs for activity, providing power and communications for rovers, or vehicles designed to move around the lunar surface, according to Jessy Schingler, who studies policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for cooperative approaches for settlement on the moon. But roads, over time, may appear too. They are a basic technology of human societies, so it is natural to think that roads will have a place on the moon, she says. \n\n\n\n\u201cIf you occupy a piece of land on the moon, you don\u2019t own it. So that creates a lot of risk.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Douglas Ligor, Rand social scientist \n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s planned base camp will need some areas to be clean and dust-free, such as a landing pad and a path from that area to habitats, says the agency\u2019s Patrick Troutman, who has studied lunar architecture. Such paths could be hardened, he adds. That work could set the stage for roadways outside of camp as astronauts discover points of interest and the value of charting out a lane becomes clear. Spurs could \u201cgo out to either resources or areas of scientific value, and those would be more like your Oregon Trail with buoys and navigation beacons and charging stations here and there,\u201d Mr. Troutman says. One reason to build infrastructure like landing pads or roads would be to help tamp down regolith. \u201cKicking up this regolith all over the place is a problem,\u201d says Haym Benaroya, an engineering professor at Rutgers University who has studied lunar bases. Floating dust can interfere with machinery and has been linked to cancer. \u201cSintering,\u201d or melting the surface to harden it, could help, he says.Lunar vehicles Not every lunar sojourn would need to touch the surface. George Pollock, director of the astrodynamics department at Aerospace Corp., a federally funded research center, says that aerial vehicles may be more efficient for some trips, similar to how helicopters are better suited for some trips on Earth. Still, companies are working on vehicle options that mimic driving on our home planet. \nLockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n said earlier this year they would team up to create a lunar vehicle that could transport astronauts across the moon. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota Motor Corp.\n\n\n and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have researched creating a pressurized vehicle for the moon. NASA anticipates gradually expanding its transportation modes over time, says Mr. Troutman. The first, he says, would be crew members walking around in spacesuits. Then, a lunar terrain vehicle on the ground would extend the range for prospecting on the moon. When that vehicle has humans on board, it would stay closer to the agency\u2019s base camp; it could travel farther when operating autonomously. Later, NASA wants to have a pressurized rover akin to a camper that would allow astronauts to exit and enter relatively quickly to conduct scientific missions, he says.Rules of the roads Today, there is no way to claim property rights on the lunar surface, raising questions about how transportation projects will operate, says Douglas Ligor, a Rand Corp. social scientist who has studied space governance. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and other agreements outline how nations can use space but don\u2019t say how economic activity can be conducted, he says. \u201cIf you occupy a piece of land on the moon, you don\u2019t own it. S The lunar surface is slated to get more crowded in the coming years. What might transportation networks there look like? ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7189",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-next-for-the-global-space-race-11554994844?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=57",
        "text": "But China isn\u2019t the only challenger. Japan and Russia both intend to land people on the moon by around 2030, while India is likely weeks away from deploying its first lunar lander. \nDeep-space exploration, too, is poised to enter a new phase, as China, Europe and the U.S. make preparations to probe uncharted regions of the solar system by harnessing the latest technology. For a U.S. that\u2019s rediscovering its fascination with space, this could all culminate in a first manned Martian landing around 2033.\n\n\nHere\u2019s an overview of the missions planned by each major government player: \n\n\n\n\nCHINA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2020: Mars rover and lander \n2022: Space station to be built by joining three modules in orbit \n2025: Construction to start on a lunar base, with a manned facility planned for 2030\n2028: Mars probe; the first to return Martian samples to Earth \n2029: Jupiter probe; China\u2019s first to outer reaches of the solar system \n\n\n\n\nEUROPE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2020: Europe\u2019s first Martian rover, known as the Rosalind Franklin rover \n2022: Mission to study three of Jupiter\u2019s moons with the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer\n\n\n\n\nINDIA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2019: India\u2019s first lunar lander/rover, the Chandrayaan-2, to launch\n2021: India\u2019s second Mars probe, the Mangalayaan-2, to launch \n\n\n\n\nJAPAN\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2021: Japan\u2019s first unmanned lunar probe to launch\n2030: Manned lunar landing \n\n\n\n\nRUSSIA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2031: First of a series of moon landings by Russian cosmonauts \n2034: Construction of Russian lunar base to begin \n\n\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2021: James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, begins 10-year mission \n2023: Space station orbiting the moon, known as Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, starts operations \n2023: Manned moon landing, NASA\u2019s first in over half a century \n2026: Probe known as the Europa Clipper to reach Jupiter\u2019s moon, Europa \n2033: First manned mission to Mars \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence The U.S. is vying to preserve its long-held dominance of space, as China, Russia and others make ambitious plans to explore the solar system. Here\u2019s a look at the missions in the works. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss and Tonia Cowan"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7190",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-next-for-the-global-space-race-11554994844?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=75",
        "text": "But China isn\u2019t the only challenger. Japan and Russia both intend to land people on the moon by around 2030, while India is likely weeks away from deploying its first lunar lander. \n\n\n\n\nDeep-space exploration, too, is poised to enter a new phase, as China, Europe and the U.S. make preparations to probe uncharted regions of the solar system by harnessing the latest technology. For a U.S. that\u2019s rediscovering its fascination with space, this could all culminate in a first manned Martian landing around 2033.\n\n\nHere\u2019s an overview of the missions planned by each major government player: \n\n\n\n\nCHINA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2020: Mars rover and lander \n2022: Space station to be built by joining three modules in orbit \n2025: Construction to start on a lunar base, with a manned facility planned for 2030\n2028: Mars probe; the first to return Martian samples to Earth \n2029: Jupiter probe; China\u2019s first to outer reaches of the solar system \n\n\n\n\nEUROPE\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2020: Europe\u2019s first Martian rover, known as the Rosalind Franklin rover \n2022: Mission to study three of Jupiter\u2019s moons with the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer\n\n\n\n\nINDIA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2019: India\u2019s first lunar lander/rover, the Chandrayaan-2, to launch\n2021: India\u2019s second Mars probe, the Mangalayaan-2, to launch \n\n\n\n\nJAPAN\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2021: Japan\u2019s first unmanned lunar probe to launch\n2030: Manned lunar landing \n\n\n\n\nRUSSIA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2031: First of a series of moon landings by Russian cosmonauts \n2034: Construction of Russian lunar base to begin \n\n\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n2021: James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, begins 10-year mission \n2023: Space station orbiting the moon, known as Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, starts operations \n2023: Manned moon landing, NASA\u2019s first in over half a century \n2026: Probe known as the Europa Clipper to reach Jupiter\u2019s moon, Europa \n2033: First manned mission to Mars \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence The U.S. is vying to preserve its long-held dominance of space, as China, Russia and others make ambitious plans to explore the solar system. Here\u2019s a look at the missions in the works. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss and Tonia Cowan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7191",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-in-charge-of-outer-space-1495195097?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=24",
        "text": "\u201cWhile the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high,\u201d the Goldman report concludes, \u201cthe actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.\u201d In April, NASA selected Trans Astronautica Corp., an aerospace company based in Lake View Terrace, Calif., for $3.25 million in technology study grants. Among TransAstra\u2019s NASA-approved projects: an asteroid-hunting telescope whose stated mission is \u201cto start a gold rush in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: A NEW WSJ PODCAST SERIES\n \n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingLaw and Order in the Final FrontierOuter space is starting to look like the Wild West. As more and more private businesses seek profits in the final frontier, serious questions are emerging about the legality of their plans. Who will write the rules beyond Earth?ADLoading advertisement...00:00 / 18:551xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play Music\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe final frontier is starting to look a lot like the Wild West. As more companies announce ambitious plans to do business beyond Earth, serious questions are emerging about the legality of off-planet activity. Everything that happens in space falls under the purview of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. This international agreement, also known as the Outer Space Treaty, turned 50 years old in January. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., Russia and China, are parties to the treaty. \u201cIt\u2019s the Constitution and the Magna Carta of space law,\u201d says Sagi Kfir, general counsel for Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company based in Mountain View, Calif. \u201cIt\u2019s so fundamental that its principles have become customary international law even for those countries that aren\u2019t signatories.\u201d The treaty\u2019s principal drafters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., were primarily concerned with nuclear weapons when they met in 1967 at the United Nations; Article IV of the treaty prohibits military installations and weapons of mass destruction from being placed in orbit or on other worlds. Further stipulations guarantee freedom of access to all nations, ban territorial claims and promote scientific cooperation. Above all, the treaty was designed to ensure that space exploration occur peacefully and for the benefit of all mankind. \u201cI think you can compress the main principles down to two,\u201d says Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. \u201cOne is the Golden Rule, and the other is don\u2019t do anything stupid; more specifically, don\u2019t do anything that will cause harm or get in the way of others in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMining the UniverseThe technology behind the coming outer space gold rush\u00a0\u00a0The Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra1 of 4\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 4Hide CaptionThe Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra\n\n\nBut the Golden Rule isn\u2019t a governing principle for competitive companies, who are certain to get in each other\u2019s way if space exploration proves as profitable as Goldman Sachs suggests. Drafted at a time when only governments had the resources to mount space missions, the Outer Space Treaty mentions \u201cnongovernmental entities\u201d in only one of its 17 articles. It makes no provisions for asteroid mining or suborbital tourism or the colonization of Mars, which leaves many of today\u2019s space-faring companies in something of a legal gray area. One of the biggest modern-day sticking points stems from Article VI, which states that nongovernmental entities\u2014i.e. private businesses\u2014must receive \u201cauthorization and continuing supervision\u201d from their country of origin. Article VI was originally a compromise between the communist Soviets, who wanted to ban off-planet commercial activity, and the Americans, who insisted that space be open for business. \u201cThe Soviets said, \u2018If you Americans are so crazy that you want those private-sector activities to be permitted, go ahead,\u2019 \u201d says Frans von der Dunk, a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. \u201c \u2018But you\u2019re responsible for their doings, and if they cause damage, you have to pay as a government.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nMore fr All extraterrestrial activity today is governed by a 50-year-old treaty drafted at the height of the Cold War. Will governments around the world agree on an update before the final frontier becomes the Wild West? ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7192",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-in-charge-of-outer-space-1495195097?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=95",
        "text": "\u201cWhile the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high,\u201d the Goldman report concludes, \u201cthe actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.\u201d In April, NASA selected Trans Astronautica Corp., an aerospace company based in Lake View Terrace, Calif., for $3.25 million in technology study grants. Among TransAstra\u2019s NASA-approved projects: an asteroid-hunting telescope whose stated mission is \u201cto start a gold rush in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: A NEW WSJ PODCAST SERIES\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play Music\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe final frontier is starting to look a lot like the Wild West. As more companies announce ambitious plans to do business beyond Earth, serious questions are emerging about the legality of off-planet activity. Everything that happens in space falls under the purview of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. This international agreement, also known as the Outer Space Treaty, turned 50 years old in January. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., Russia and China, are parties to the treaty. \u201cIt\u2019s the Constitution and the Magna Carta of space law,\u201d says Sagi Kfir, general counsel for Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company based in Mountain View, Calif. \u201cIt\u2019s so fundamental that its principles have become customary international law even for those countries that aren\u2019t signatories.\u201d The treaty\u2019s principal drafters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., were primarily concerned with nuclear weapons when they met in 1967 at the United Nations; Article IV of the treaty prohibits military installations and weapons of mass destruction from being placed in orbit or on other worlds. Further stipulations guarantee freedom of access to all nations, ban territorial claims and promote scientific cooperation. Above all, the treaty was designed to ensure that space exploration occur peacefully and for the benefit of all mankind. \u201cI think you can compress the main principles down to two,\u201d says Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. \u201cOne is the Golden Rule, and the other is don\u2019t do anything stupid; more specifically, don\u2019t do anything that will cause harm or get in the way of others in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMining the UniverseThe technology behind the coming outer space gold rush\u00a0\u00a0The Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra1 of 4\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 4Hide CaptionThe Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra\n\n\nBut the Golden Rule isn\u2019t a governing principle for competitive companies, who are certain to get in each other\u2019s way if space exploration proves as profitable as Goldman Sachs suggests. Drafted at a time when only governments had the resources to mount space missions, the Outer Space Treaty mentions \u201cnongovernmental entities\u201d in only one of its 17 articles. It makes no provisions for asteroid mining or suborbital tourism or the colonization of Mars, which leaves many of today\u2019s space-faring companies in something of a legal gray area. One of the biggest modern-day sticking points stems from Article VI, which states that nongovernmental entities\u2014i.e. private businesses\u2014must receive \u201cauthorization and continuing supervision\u201d from their country of origin. Article VI was originally a compromise between the communist Soviets, who wanted to ban off-planet commercial activity, and the Americans, who insisted that space be open for business. \u201cThe Soviets said, \u2018If you Americans are so crazy that you want those private-sector activities to be permitted, go ahead,\u2019 \u201d says Frans von der Dunk, a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. \u201c \u2018But you\u2019re responsible for their doings, and if they cause damage, you have to pay as a government.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nMore from The Future of Everything Is the Jetpack Movement Finally Taking Off? How New Technology is Illuminating a Classic Ethical Dilemma What\u2019s Next for Artificial Intelligence \n\n\nAll space-faring nations have set up their own administrative regimes to manage commercial players, but their jurisdictions are hazy. In the U.S., no company can launch a rocket into orbit without express permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, whose regula All extraterrestrial activity today is governed by a 50-year-old treaty drafted at the height of the Cold War. Will governments around the world agree on an update before the final frontier becomes the Wild West? ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7193",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-in-charge-of-outer-space-1495195097?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=27",
        "text": "\u201cWhile the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high,\u201d the Goldman report concludes, \u201cthe actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.\u201d In April, NASA selected Trans Astronautica Corp., an aerospace company based in Lake View Terrace, Calif., for $3.25 million in technology study grants. Among TransAstra\u2019s NASA-approved projects: an asteroid-hunting telescope whose stated mission is \u201cto start a gold rush in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: A NEW WSJ PODCAST SERIES\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play Music\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe final frontier is starting to look a lot like the Wild West. As more companies announce ambitious plans to do business beyond Earth, serious questions are emerging about the legality of off-planet activity. Everything that happens in space falls under the purview of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. This international agreement, also known as the Outer Space Treaty, turned 50 years old in January. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., Russia and China, are parties to the treaty. \u201cIt\u2019s the Constitution and the Magna Carta of space law,\u201d says Sagi Kfir, general counsel for Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company based in Mountain View, Calif. \u201cIt\u2019s so fundamental that its principles have become customary international law even for those countries that aren\u2019t signatories.\u201d The treaty\u2019s principal drafters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., were primarily concerned with nuclear weapons when they met in 1967 at the United Nations; Article IV of the treaty prohibits military installations and weapons of mass destruction from being placed in orbit or on other worlds. Further stipulations guarantee freedom of access to all nations, ban territorial claims and promote scientific cooperation. Above all, the treaty was designed to ensure that space exploration occur peacefully and for the benefit of all mankind. \u201cI think you can compress the main principles down to two,\u201d says Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. \u201cOne is the Golden Rule, and the other is don\u2019t do anything stupid; more specifically, don\u2019t do anything that will cause harm or get in the way of others in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMining the UniverseThe technology behind the coming outer space gold rush\u00a0\u00a0The Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra1 of 4\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 4Hide CaptionThe Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra\n\n\nBut the Golden Rule isn\u2019t a governing principle for competitive companies, who are certain to get in each other\u2019s way if space exploration proves as profitable as Goldman Sachs suggests. Drafted at a time when only governments had the resources to mount space missions, the Outer Space Treaty mentions \u201cnongovernmental entities\u201d in only one of its 17 articles. It makes no provisions for asteroid mining or suborbital tourism or the colonization of Mars, which leaves many of today\u2019s space-faring companies in something of a legal gray area. One of the biggest modern-day sticking points stems from Article VI, which states that nongovernmental entities\u2014i.e. private businesses\u2014must receive \u201cauthorization and continuing supervision\u201d from their country of origin. Article VI was originally a compromise between the communist Soviets, who wanted to ban off-planet commercial activity, and the Americans, who insisted that space be open for business. \u201cThe Soviets said, \u2018If you Americans are so crazy that you want those private-sector activities to be permitted, go ahead,\u2019 \u201d says Frans von der Dunk, a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. \u201c \u2018But you\u2019re responsible for their doings, and if they cause damage, you have to pay as a government.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nMore from The Future of Everything Is the Jetpack Movement Finally Taking Off? How New Technology is Illuminating a Classic Ethical Dilemma What\u2019s Next for Artificial Intelligence \n\n\nAll space-faring nations have set up their own administrative regimes to manage commercial players, but their jurisdictions are hazy. In the U.S., no company can launch a rocket into orbit without express permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, whose regula All extraterrestrial activity today is governed by a 50-year-old treaty drafted at the height of the Cold War. Will governments around the world agree on an update before the final frontier becomes the Wild West? ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7194",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-in-charge-of-outer-space-1495195097?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=87",
        "text": "\u201cWhile the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high,\u201d the Goldman report concludes, \u201cthe actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.\u201d In April, NASA selected Trans Astronautica Corp., an aerospace company based in Lake View Terrace, Calif., for $3.25 million in technology study grants. Among TransAstra\u2019s NASA-approved projects: an asteroid-hunting telescope whose stated mission is \u201cto start a gold rush in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: A NEW WSJ PODCAST SERIES\n \n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingLaw and Order in the Final FrontierOuter space is starting to look like the Wild West. As more and more private businesses seek profits in the final frontier, serious questions are emerging about the legality of their plans. Who will write the rules beyond Earth?ADLoading advertisement...00:00 / 18:551xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play Music\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe final frontier is starting to look a lot like the Wild West. As more companies announce ambitious plans to do business beyond Earth, serious questions are emerging about the legality of off-planet activity. Everything that happens in space falls under the purview of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. This international agreement, also known as the Outer Space Treaty, turned 50 years old in January. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., Russia and China, are parties to the treaty. \u201cIt\u2019s the Constitution and the Magna Carta of space law,\u201d says Sagi Kfir, general counsel for Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company based in Mountain View, Calif. \u201cIt\u2019s so fundamental that its principles have become customary international law even for those countries that aren\u2019t signatories.\u201d The treaty\u2019s principal drafters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., were primarily concerned with nuclear weapons when they met in 1967 at the United Nations; Article IV of the treaty prohibits military installations and weapons of mass destruction from being placed in orbit or on other worlds. Further stipulations guarantee freedom of access to all nations, ban territorial claims and promote scientific cooperation. Above all, the treaty was designed to ensure that space exploration occur peacefully and for the benefit of all mankind. \u201cI think you can compress the main principles down to two,\u201d says Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. \u201cOne is the Golden Rule, and the other is don\u2019t do anything stupid; more specifically, don\u2019t do anything that will cause harm or get in the way of others in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMining the UniverseThe technology behind the coming outer space gold rush\u00a0\u00a0The Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra1 of 4\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 4Hide CaptionThe Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra\n\n\nBut the Golden Rule isn\u2019t a governing principle for competitive companies, who are certain to get in each other\u2019s way if space exploration proves as profitable as Goldman Sachs suggests. Drafted at a time when only governments had the resources to mount space missions, the Outer Space Treaty mentions \u201cnongovernmental entities\u201d in only one of its 17 articles. It makes no provisions for asteroid mining or suborbital tourism or the colonization of Mars, which leaves many of today\u2019s space-faring companies in something of a legal gray area. One of the biggest modern-day sticking points stems from Article VI, which states that nongovernmental entities\u2014i.e. private businesses\u2014must receive \u201cauthorization and continuing supervision\u201d from their country of origin. Article VI was originally a compromise between the communist Soviets, who wanted to ban off-planet commercial activity, and the Americans, who insisted that space be open for business. \u201cThe Soviets said, \u2018If you Americans are so crazy that you want those private-sector activities to be permitted, go ahead,\u2019 \u201d says Frans von der Dunk, a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. \u201c \u2018But you\u2019re responsible for their doings, and if they cause damage, you have to pay as a government.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nMore fr All extraterrestrial activity today is governed by a 50-year-old treaty drafted at the height of the Cold War. Will governments around the world agree on an update before the final frontier becomes the Wild West? ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7195",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-in-charge-of-outer-space-1495195097?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=82",
        "text": "\u201cWhile the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high,\u201d the Goldman report concludes, \u201cthe actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.\u201d In April, NASA selected Trans Astronautica Corp., an aerospace company based in Lake View Terrace, Calif., for $3.25 million in technology study grants. Among TransAstra\u2019s NASA-approved projects: an asteroid-hunting telescope whose stated mission is \u201cto start a gold rush in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: A NEW WSJ PODCAST SERIES\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play Music\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe final frontier is starting to look a lot like the Wild West. As more companies announce ambitious plans to do business beyond Earth, serious questions are emerging about the legality of off-planet activity. Everything that happens in space falls under the purview of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. This international agreement, also known as the Outer Space Treaty, turned 50 years old in January. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., Russia and China, are parties to the treaty. \u201cIt\u2019s the Constitution and the Magna Carta of space law,\u201d says Sagi Kfir, general counsel for Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company based in Mountain View, Calif. \u201cIt\u2019s so fundamental that its principles have become customary international law even for those countries that aren\u2019t signatories.\u201d The treaty\u2019s principal drafters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., were primarily concerned with nuclear weapons when they met in 1967 at the United Nations; Article IV of the treaty prohibits military installations and weapons of mass destruction from being placed in orbit or on other worlds. Further stipulations guarantee freedom of access to all nations, ban territorial claims and promote scientific cooperation. Above all, the treaty was designed to ensure that space exploration occur peacefully and for the benefit of all mankind. \u201cI think you can compress the main principles down to two,\u201d says Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. \u201cOne is the Golden Rule, and the other is don\u2019t do anything stupid; more specifically, don\u2019t do anything that will cause harm or get in the way of others in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMining the UniverseThe technology behind the coming outer space gold rush\u00a0\u00a0The Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra1 of 4\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 4Hide CaptionThe Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra\n\n\nBut the Golden Rule isn\u2019t a governing principle for competitive companies, who are certain to get in each other\u2019s way if space exploration proves as profitable as Goldman Sachs suggests. Drafted at a time when only governments had the resources to mount space missions, the Outer Space Treaty mentions \u201cnongovernmental entities\u201d in only one of its 17 articles. It makes no provisions for asteroid mining or suborbital tourism or the colonization of Mars, which leaves many of today\u2019s space-faring companies in something of a legal gray area. One of the biggest modern-day sticking points stems from Article VI, which states that nongovernmental entities\u2014i.e. private businesses\u2014must receive \u201cauthorization and continuing supervision\u201d from their country of origin. Article VI was originally a compromise between the communist Soviets, who wanted to ban off-planet commercial activity, and the Americans, who insisted that space be open for business. \u201cThe Soviets said, \u2018If you Americans are so crazy that you want those private-sector activities to be permitted, go ahead,\u2019 \u201d says Frans von der Dunk, a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. \u201c \u2018But you\u2019re responsible for their doings, and if they cause damage, you have to pay as a government.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nMore from The Future of Everything Is the Jetpack Movement Finally Taking Off? How New Technology is Illuminating a Classic Ethical Dilemma What\u2019s Next for Artificial Intelligence \n\n\nAll space-faring nations have set up their own administrative regimes to manage commercial players, but their jurisdictions are hazy. In the U.S., no company can launch a rocket into orbit without express permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, whose regula All extraterrestrial activity today is governed by a 50-year-old treaty drafted at the height of the Cold War. Will governments around the world agree on an update before the final frontier becomes the Wild West? ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Who\u2019s in Charge of Outer Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7196",
        "date": "2017-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-in-charge-of-outer-space-1495195097?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=122",
        "text": "\u201cWhile the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high,\u201d the Goldman report concludes, \u201cthe actual financial and technological barriers are far lower.\u201d In April, NASA selected Trans Astronautica Corp., an aerospace company based in Lake View Terrace, Calif., for $3.25 million in technology study grants. Among TransAstra\u2019s NASA-approved projects: an asteroid-hunting telescope whose stated mission is \u201cto start a gold rush in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING: A NEW WSJ PODCAST SERIES\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play Music\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe final frontier is starting to look a lot like the Wild West. As more companies announce ambitious plans to do business beyond Earth, serious questions are emerging about the legality of off-planet activity. Everything that happens in space falls under the purview of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. This international agreement, also known as the Outer Space Treaty, turned 50 years old in January. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., Russia and China, are parties to the treaty. \u201cIt\u2019s the Constitution and the Magna Carta of space law,\u201d says Sagi Kfir, general counsel for Deep Space Industries, an asteroid-mining company based in Mountain View, Calif. \u201cIt\u2019s so fundamental that its principles have become customary international law even for those countries that aren\u2019t signatories.\u201d The treaty\u2019s principal drafters, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., were primarily concerned with nuclear weapons when they met in 1967 at the United Nations; Article IV of the treaty prohibits military installations and weapons of mass destruction from being placed in orbit or on other worlds. Further stipulations guarantee freedom of access to all nations, ban territorial claims and promote scientific cooperation. Above all, the treaty was designed to ensure that space exploration occur peacefully and for the benefit of all mankind. \u201cI think you can compress the main principles down to two,\u201d says Henry Hertzfeld, a professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. \u201cOne is the Golden Rule, and the other is don\u2019t do anything stupid; more specifically, don\u2019t do anything that will cause harm or get in the way of others in space.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMining the UniverseThe technology behind the coming outer space gold rush\u00a0\u00a0The Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra1 of 4\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 4Hide CaptionThe Theia telescope (bottom left), conceived by Trans Astronautica Corp., was recently selected by NASA for a $2.5 million contract under the Tipping Points program, which fosters new commercial capabilities that can benefit future NASA missions. The telescope will fly in low Earth orbit to locate space debris and potentially valuable\u2014or dangerous\u2014asteroids. TransAstra\n\n\nBut the Golden Rule isn\u2019t a governing principle for competitive companies, who are certain to get in each other\u2019s way if space exploration proves as profitable as Goldman Sachs suggests. Drafted at a time when only governments had the resources to mount space missions, the Outer Space Treaty mentions \u201cnongovernmental entities\u201d in only one of its 17 articles. It makes no provisions for asteroid mining or suborbital tourism or the colonization of Mars, which leaves many of today\u2019s space-faring companies in something of a legal gray area. One of the biggest modern-day sticking points stems from Article VI, which states that nongovernmental entities\u2014i.e. private businesses\u2014must receive \u201cauthorization and continuing supervision\u201d from their country of origin. Article VI was originally a compromise between the communist Soviets, who wanted to ban off-planet commercial activity, and the Americans, who insisted that space be open for business. \u201cThe Soviets said, \u2018If you Americans are so crazy that you want those private-sector activities to be permitted, go ahead,\u2019 \u201d says Frans von der Dunk, a professor of space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. \u201c \u2018But you\u2019re responsible for their doings, and if they cause damage, you have to pay as a government.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\nMore from The Future of Everything Is the Jetpack Movement Finally Taking Off? How New Technology is Illuminating a Classic Ethical Dilemma What\u2019s Next for Artificial Intelligence \n\n\nAll space-faring nations have set up their own administrative regimes to manage commercial players, but their jurisdictions are hazy. In the U.S., no company can launch a rocket into orbit without express permission from the Federal Aviation Administration, whose regula All extraterrestrial activity today is governed by a 50-year-old treaty drafted at the height of the Cold War. Will governments around the world agree on an update before the final frontier becomes the Wild West? ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7197",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-jeff-bezos-make-money-in-space-11554975000?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=16",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nToday the company\u2014funded by Mr. Bezos to the tune of $1 billion a year\u2014employs more than 2,000 people at five sites, including a launch facility in West Texas where later this year it will begin manned tests of its suborbital space tourism rocket, named New Shepard, in honor of American space pioneer Alan Shepard. Blue Origin\u2019s next project literally dwarfs New Shepard: the mighty New Glenn, a 300-plus-foot orbital, reusable rocket, due to fly first in 2021. The company has constructed a sprawling new assembly facility next to Pad LC-36 at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of these reusable mega-rockets. Representing a reported $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn will offer customers up to 45 tons a lift into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has boosted production of its BE-3 and BE-4 rocket motors for its use as well as for commercial sale. Here, from left, the BE-4 engine and an engineering mockup of the aft portion of Blue Origin\u2019s orbital launch vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nTo get some idea of the step-up in size, \u201cNew Shepard will fit in the hold of New Glenn,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience. At this rate, the company might need to retire its motto Gradatim Ferociter\u2014\u201dstep by step, ferociously.\u201d It was always a little hard to picture, anyway. In its owner\u2019s quest to commercialize space, Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years, Chief Executive Bob Smith said in an interview at the company\u2019s headquarters in Kent, Wash. He adds that the company will continue to add capital investment and new customers. One example: The company has tooled up to serially produce its signature BE-4 and BE-3 rocket motors, for itself and client/competitors such as United Launch Alliance.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, shown in 2015, spends $1 billion a year on funding his Blue Origin space firm.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAs Blue Origin scales up, it finds itself courting the same vast bureaucracies Mr. Bezos once held at arm\u2019s length, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pentagon and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation\u2019s spy satellites. Until a few years ago, Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t publicly entertain the idea of competing for federal business. Now, the company is openly campaigning for lucrative, risk-intolerant government and national security payloads. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d Mr. Smith says. \u201cCustomers make you better.\u201d Howard McCurdy, an American University professor and space historian, said as entrepreneurial companies mature, it\u2019s hard for them to resist the lure of federal funding. \u201cThe natural tendency is to go the government route,\u201d he adds, even if such a reset entails more red tape and demands greater transparency. Mr. Bezos declined to comment for this article. There are potentially billions in new public money on the table. In June 2018, the Trump administration proposed the creation of a U.S. Space Force, an independent branch of the armed services, due to be activated in 2020. In March, Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n doubling down on pledges to return American astronauts to the moon by the middle of the next decade, for the first time suggested they could travel on privately built rockets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has been pursuing government and commercial business as it looks to catch up with rivals like SpaceX. Here, from left, a Blue Origin factory in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and the New Shepard rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nSuch trends \u201cgive us confidence that when we actually come into the market, there will be sufficient launch volume to get a good amount of return,\u201d says Mr. Smith. With New Glenn, the company is racing against its former, more deliberate ways. In October the company was one of three launch providers who received Air Force funds, intended to help potential launch partners defray costs incurred in preparing to fly national-security payloads. But in March, when a draft of the Air Force\u2019s bake-off rules became public, they stipulated there would be only two winners, not three, as Blue Origin had hoped. More damaging to Blue Origin\u2019s cause, the rules required both systems to be selected by 2020, in order to meet Congress\u2019s deadline to stop using Russian-made engines.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the n The Amazon founder\u2019s Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years as it looks to be a player in the lucrative market for government and commercial business. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7198",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-jeff-bezos-make-money-in-space-11554975000?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=60",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nToday the company\u2014funded by Mr. Bezos to the tune of $1 billion a year\u2014employs more than 2,000 people at five sites, including a launch facility in West Texas where later this year it will begin manned tests of its suborbital space tourism rocket, named New Shepard, in honor of American space pioneer Alan Shepard. Blue Origin\u2019s next project literally dwarfs New Shepard: the mighty New Glenn, a 300-plus-foot orbital, reusable rocket, due to fly first in 2021. The company has constructed a sprawling new assembly facility next to Pad LC-36 at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of these reusable mega-rockets. Representing a reported $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn will offer customers up to 45 tons a lift into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has boosted production of its BE-3 and BE-4 rocket motors for its use as well as for commercial sale. Here, from left, the BE-4 engine and an engineering mockup of the aft portion of Blue Origin\u2019s orbital launch vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nTo get some idea of the step-up in size, \u201cNew Shepard will fit in the hold of New Glenn,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience. At this rate, the company might need to retire its motto Gradatim Ferociter\u2014\u201dstep by step, ferociously.\u201d It was always a little hard to picture, anyway. In its owner\u2019s quest to commercialize space, Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years, Chief Executive Bob Smith said in an interview at the company\u2019s headquarters in Kent, Wash. He adds that the company will continue to add capital investment and new customers. One example: The company has tooled up to serially produce its signature BE-4 and BE-3 rocket motors, for itself and client/competitors such as United Launch Alliance.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, shown in 2015, spends $1 billion a year on funding his Blue Origin space firm.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAs Blue Origin scales up, it finds itself courting the same vast bureaucracies Mr. Bezos once held at arm\u2019s length, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pentagon and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation\u2019s spy satellites. Until a few years ago, Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t publicly entertain the idea of competing for federal business. Now, the company is openly campaigning for lucrative, risk-intolerant government and national security payloads. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d Mr. Smith says. \u201cCustomers make you better.\u201d Howard McCurdy, an American University professor and space historian, said as entrepreneurial companies mature, it\u2019s hard for them to resist the lure of federal funding. \u201cThe natural tendency is to go the government route,\u201d he adds, even if such a reset entails more red tape and demands greater transparency. Mr. Bezos declined to comment for this article. There are potentially billions in new public money on the table. In June 2018, the Trump administration proposed the creation of a U.S. Space Force, an independent branch of the armed services, due to be activated in 2020. In March, Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n doubling down on pledges to return American astronauts to the moon by the middle of the next decade, for the first time suggested they could travel on privately built rockets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has been pursuing government and commercial business as it looks to catch up with rivals like SpaceX. Here, from left, a Blue Origin factory in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and the New Shepard rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nSuch trends \u201cgive us confidence that when we actually come into the market, there will be sufficient launch volume to get a good amount of return,\u201d says Mr. Smith. With New Glenn, the company is racing against its former, more deliberate ways. In October the company was one of three launch providers who received Air Force funds, intended to help potential launch partners defray costs incurred in preparing to fly national-security payloads. But in March, when a draft of the Air Force\u2019s bake-off rules became public, they stipulated there would be only two winners, not three, as Blue Origin had hoped. More damaging to Blue Origin\u2019s cause, the rules required both systems to be selected by 2020, in order to meet Congress\u2019s deadline to stop using Russian-made engines.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the n The Amazon founder\u2019s Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years as it looks to be a player in the lucrative market for government and commercial business. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7199",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-jeff-bezos-make-money-in-space-11554975000?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=20",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nToday the company\u2014funded by Mr. Bezos to the tune of $1 billion a year\u2014employs more than 2,000 people at five sites, including a launch facility in West Texas where later this year it will begin manned tests of its suborbital space tourism rocket, named New Shepard, in honor of American space pioneer Alan Shepard. Blue Origin\u2019s next project literally dwarfs New Shepard: the mighty New Glenn, a 300-plus-foot orbital, reusable rocket, due to fly first in 2021. The company has constructed a sprawling new assembly facility next to Pad LC-36 at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of these reusable mega-rockets. Representing a reported $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn will offer customers up to 45 tons a lift into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has boosted production of its BE-3 and BE-4 rocket motors for its use as well as for commercial sale. Here, from left, the BE-4 engine and an engineering mockup of the aft portion of Blue Origin\u2019s orbital launch vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nTo get some idea of the step-up in size, \u201cNew Shepard will fit in the hold of New Glenn,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience. At this rate, the company might need to retire its motto Gradatim Ferociter\u2014\u201dstep by step, ferociously.\u201d It was always a little hard to picture, anyway. In its owner\u2019s quest to commercialize space, Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years, Chief Executive Bob Smith said in an interview at the company\u2019s headquarters in Kent, Wash. He adds that the company will continue to add capital investment and new customers. One example: The company has tooled up to serially produce its signature BE-4 and BE-3 rocket motors, for itself and client/competitors such as United Launch Alliance.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, shown in 2015, spends $1 billion a year on funding his Blue Origin space firm.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAs Blue Origin scales up, it finds itself courting the same vast bureaucracies Mr. Bezos once held at arm\u2019s length, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pentagon and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation\u2019s spy satellites. Until a few years ago, Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t publicly entertain the idea of competing for federal business. Now, the company is openly campaigning for lucrative, risk-intolerant government and national security payloads. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d Mr. Smith says. \u201cCustomers make you better.\u201d Howard McCurdy, an American University professor and space historian, said as entrepreneurial companies mature, it\u2019s hard for them to resist the lure of federal funding. \u201cThe natural tendency is to go the government route,\u201d he adds, even if such a reset entails more red tape and demands greater transparency. Mr. Bezos declined to comment for this article. There are potentially billions in new public money on the table. In June 2018, the Trump administration proposed the creation of a U.S. Space Force, an independent branch of the armed services, due to be activated in 2020. In March, Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n doubling down on pledges to return American astronauts to the moon by the middle of the next decade, for the first time suggested they could travel on privately built rockets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has been pursuing government and commercial business as it looks to catch up with rivals like SpaceX. Here, from left, a Blue Origin factory in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and the New Shepard rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nSuch trends \u201cgive us confidence that when we actually come into the market, there will be sufficient launch volume to get a good amount of return,\u201d says Mr. Smith. With New Glenn, the company is racing against its former, more deliberate ways. In October the company was one of three launch providers who received Air Force funds, intended to help potential launch partners defray costs incurred in preparing to fly national-security payloads. But in March, when a draft of the Air Force\u2019s bake-off rules became public, they stipulated there would be only two winners, not three, as Blue Origin had hoped. More damaging to Blue Origin\u2019s cause, the rules required both systems to be selected by 2020, in order to meet Congress\u2019s deadline to stop using Russian-made engines.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the n The Amazon founder\u2019s Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years as it looks to be a player in the lucrative market for government and commercial business. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7200",
        "date": "2019-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-jeff-bezos-make-money-in-space-11554975000?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=57",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nToday the company\u2014funded by Mr. Bezos to the tune of $1 billion a year\u2014employs more than 2,000 people at five sites, including a launch facility in West Texas where later this year it will begin manned tests of its suborbital space tourism rocket, named New Shepard, in honor of American space pioneer Alan Shepard. Blue Origin\u2019s next project literally dwarfs New Shepard: the mighty New Glenn, a 300-plus-foot orbital, reusable rocket, due to fly first in 2021. The company has constructed a sprawling new assembly facility next to Pad LC-36 at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where it plans to build, service and launch a fleet of these reusable mega-rockets. Representing a reported $2.5 billion investment, New Glenn will offer customers up to 45 tons a lift into low-earth orbit\u2014a third more tonnage than SpaceX\u2019s largest rocket currently, the Falcon Heavy. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has boosted production of its BE-3 and BE-4 rocket motors for its use as well as for commercial sale. Here, from left, the BE-4 engine and an engineering mockup of the aft portion of Blue Origin\u2019s orbital launch vehicle.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nTo get some idea of the step-up in size, \u201cNew Shepard will fit in the hold of New Glenn,\u201d said Clay Mowry, vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience. At this rate, the company might need to retire its motto Gradatim Ferociter\u2014\u201dstep by step, ferociously.\u201d It was always a little hard to picture, anyway. In its owner\u2019s quest to commercialize space, Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years, Chief Executive Bob Smith said in an interview at the company\u2019s headquarters in Kent, Wash. He adds that the company will continue to add capital investment and new customers. One example: The company has tooled up to serially produce its signature BE-4 and BE-3 rocket motors, for itself and client/competitors such as United Launch Alliance.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, shown in 2015, spends $1 billion a year on funding his Blue Origin space firm.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Blue Origin/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAs Blue Origin scales up, it finds itself courting the same vast bureaucracies Mr. Bezos once held at arm\u2019s length, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pentagon and the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation\u2019s spy satellites. Until a few years ago, Mr. Bezos didn\u2019t publicly entertain the idea of competing for federal business. Now, the company is openly campaigning for lucrative, risk-intolerant government and national security payloads. \u201cWe need those customers,\u201d Mr. Smith says. \u201cCustomers make you better.\u201d Howard McCurdy, an American University professor and space historian, said as entrepreneurial companies mature, it\u2019s hard for them to resist the lure of federal funding. \u201cThe natural tendency is to go the government route,\u201d he adds, even if such a reset entails more red tape and demands greater transparency. Mr. Bezos declined to comment for this article. There are potentially billions in new public money on the table. In June 2018, the Trump administration proposed the creation of a U.S. Space Force, an independent branch of the armed services, due to be activated in 2020. In March, Vice President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n doubling down on pledges to return American astronauts to the moon by the middle of the next decade, for the first time suggested they could travel on privately built rockets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Origin has been pursuing government and commercial business as it looks to catch up with rivals like SpaceX. Here, from left, a Blue Origin factory in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and the New Shepard rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n SPENCER LOWELL FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (2)\n \n\n\n\nSuch trends \u201cgive us confidence that when we actually come into the market, there will be sufficient launch volume to get a good amount of return,\u201d says Mr. Smith. With New Glenn, the company is racing against its former, more deliberate ways. In October the company was one of three launch providers who received Air Force funds, intended to help potential launch partners defray costs incurred in preparing to fly national-security payloads. But in March, when a draft of the Air Force\u2019s bake-off rules became public, they stipulated there would be only two winners, not three, as Blue Origin had hoped. More damaging to Blue Origin\u2019s cause, the rules required both systems to be selected by 2020, in order to meet Congress\u2019s deadline to stop using Russian-made engines.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the n The Amazon founder\u2019s Blue Origin has expanded dramatically in the past three years as it looks to be a player in the lucrative market for government and commercial business. ",
        "author": "Dan Neil and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Precious Commodity of the Next Space Age (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7201",
        "date": "2019-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-precious-commodity-of-the-next-space-age-11571324201?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=19",
        "text": "Companies, nonprofits and space agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, are planning lunar and orbital habitats. Startups are developing vehicles for space tourism, and financing research and technology to mine the moon and asteroids for rare earth elements and precious metals. Small, cheap satellites are making space accessible for a new generation of extra-planetary entrepreneurs. But what happens after that? I propose that the next phase of a space-based economy will revolve around gravity. Humans evolved in the gravity environment of Earth\u2019s surface. The proper functioning of our bones and blood rely on it. Out in space, however, we meet with different gravity levels. The moon has one-sixth of Earth\u2019s gravity, and Mars is a bit over a third. Crew on the International Space Station live in microgravity: They are effectively weightless. To maintain their bone density and muscle mass, crew members must exercise for over two hours each day. Without this discipline, the astronauts could end up with osteoporosis. Living in gravity so different from Earth\u2019s has consequences, including vision impairment and diminished organ function.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIt will be many years before technology exists to sustain human colonies in space. But if people want future settlements to succeed, there must be long-term solutions to living in these environments. This may involve reconceptualizing our relationship to gravity. A few years ago, I tried a wordplay exercise with my students at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where I taught a course on space archaeology, or the study of the artifacts of human encounters with space. You take an existing word and add prefixes or suffixes, change letters, chop it up, make it into a verb or whatever you please. Then you think about what the new word means and what kind of society needs this word to describe its values or practices. I was curious to see what happened when the class took \u201cgravity\u201d as the base word. These are a few of the ideas we came up with. A \u201cmonograv\u201d is a person who has only ever lived in one type of gravity, considered inferior to those who are adapted to multiple gravity regimes. \u201cAntineogravitationists\u201d are people who oppose living in artificial gravity, believing that the body should adapt to whatever gravity it finds itself in. One student proposed a \u201cgroovity club,\u201d where dancers go to bust their moves to the DJ playing gravity levels along with the beats. Gravity might become as contested as diet is now\u2014perhaps there are groups who believe in \u201cpalaeogravity,\u201d replicating the gravity conditions of the pre-spacefaring age. A \u201cgravault\u201d is a prison where people adapted to low or microgravity are incarcerated in higher gravity, their ability to move freely taken away. Perhaps this is punishment for the future crime of \u201ckleptogravity,\u201d where a person steals another\u2019s gravity ration.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Custom Parts: The Future of Transplanted OrgansDemand for donated organs far outstrips supply. But researchers are working to remedy the crisis using everything from gene-edited pigs to 3D-printed tissue.ADLoading advertisement...00:00 / 17:151xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nThe earliest space stations, such as the rotating wheel conceived by the Viennese engineer Hermann Noordung in 1929, were designed to produce \u201cartificial\u201d gravity by spinning, like the centrifuge astronauts train in. Mr. Noordung thought that humans might be uncomfortable with the constant sensation of falling in Earth orbit, but he reasoned that pilots acclimate to a variety of such experiences, so it wasn\u2019t impossible to adapt. In the 1960s, NASA considered spinning space stations, but decided that astronauts might not enjoy being spun like a sock in a washing machine. Having been in a gravity rotor in an amusement park, I can categorically say that I did not enjoy it. None of the habitable space stations launched so far\u2014the Salyut series, Skylab, Mir, Tiangong 1 and 2 and the International Space Station\u2014has tried to create gravity by spinning. Part of their purpose is to conduct science in microgravity, after all. Higher gravity is just a luxury for the comfort of the crew.\n\n\nRelated Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? \n\n\nThe ISS crew\u2019s exercise regime is critical to ensuring that their bodies can adapt when they return home. The treadmills, cycles and weights are a form of gravity surrogate, substituting for the work done by bodies going about their daily tasks on Earth. Everyone gets equal access to the exercise equipment. It doesn\u2019t If extra-planetary travel ever becomes routine, power may revolve around who controls access to gravity, argues space archeologist Alice Gorman. ",
        "author": "Alice Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Precious Commodity of the Next Space Age (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7202",
        "date": "2019-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-precious-commodity-of-the-next-space-age-11571324201?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=54",
        "text": "Companies, nonprofits and space agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, are planning lunar and orbital habitats. Startups are developing vehicles for space tourism, and financing research and technology to mine the moon and asteroids for rare earth elements and precious metals. Small, cheap satellites are making space accessible for a new generation of extra-planetary entrepreneurs. But what happens after that? I propose that the next phase of a space-based economy will revolve around gravity. Humans evolved in the gravity environment of Earth\u2019s surface. The proper functioning of our bones and blood rely on it. Out in space, however, we meet with different gravity levels. The moon has one-sixth of Earth\u2019s gravity, and Mars is a bit over a third. Crew on the International Space Station live in microgravity: They are effectively weightless. To maintain their bone density and muscle mass, crew members must exercise for over two hours each day. Without this discipline, the astronauts could end up with osteoporosis. Living in gravity so different from Earth\u2019s has consequences, including vision impairment and diminished organ function.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIt will be many years before technology exists to sustain human colonies in space. But if people want future settlements to succeed, there must be long-term solutions to living in these environments. This may involve reconceptualizing our relationship to gravity. A few years ago, I tried a wordplay exercise with my students at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where I taught a course on space archaeology, or the study of the artifacts of human encounters with space. You take an existing word and add prefixes or suffixes, change letters, chop it up, make it into a verb or whatever you please. Then you think about what the new word means and what kind of society needs this word to describe its values or practices. I was curious to see what happened when the class took \u201cgravity\u201d as the base word. These are a few of the ideas we came up with. A \u201cmonograv\u201d is a person who has only ever lived in one type of gravity, considered inferior to those who are adapted to multiple gravity regimes. \u201cAntineogravitationists\u201d are people who oppose living in artificial gravity, believing that the body should adapt to whatever gravity it finds itself in. One student proposed a \u201cgroovity club,\u201d where dancers go to bust their moves to the DJ playing gravity levels along with the beats. Gravity might become as contested as diet is now\u2014perhaps there are groups who believe in \u201cpalaeogravity,\u201d replicating the gravity conditions of the pre-spacefaring age. A \u201cgravault\u201d is a prison where people adapted to low or microgravity are incarcerated in higher gravity, their ability to move freely taken away. Perhaps this is punishment for the future crime of \u201ckleptogravity,\u201d where a person steals another\u2019s gravity ration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe earliest space stations, such as the rotating wheel conceived by the Viennese engineer Hermann Noordung in 1929, were designed to produce \u201cartificial\u201d gravity by spinning, like the centrifuge astronauts train in. Mr. Noordung thought that humans might be uncomfortable with the constant sensation of falling in Earth orbit, but he reasoned that pilots acclimate to a variety of such experiences, so it wasn\u2019t impossible to adapt. In the 1960s, NASA considered spinning space stations, but decided that astronauts might not enjoy being spun like a sock in a washing machine. Having been in a gravity rotor in an amusement park, I can categorically say that I did not enjoy it. None of the habitable space stations launched so far\u2014the Salyut series, Skylab, Mir, Tiangong 1 and 2 and the International Space Station\u2014has tried to create gravity by spinning. Part of their purpose is to conduct science in microgravity, after all. Higher gravity is just a luxury for the comfort of the crew.\n\n\nRelated Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? \n\n\nThe ISS crew\u2019s exercise regime is critical to ensuring that their bodies can adapt when they return home. The treadmills, cycles and weights are a form of gravity surrogate, substituting for the work done by bodies going about their daily tasks on Earth. Everyone gets equal access to the exercise equipment. It doesn\u2019t take much to imagine, though, that situations might change and one group might assert dominance by controlling access to exercise, knowing the consequences for those excluded. What if there is no return to Earth, whether that is for cultural, political or economic reasons? Research using rats on Space Shuttle flights indicates that a lack of gravity can cause abnormalities in embryo development. This is just one of the serious challenges in sustaining a human population in space. On the upside, one study by Italian sports medicine researchers measured heart rates of pregnant women immersed in water. Their results suggested that microgravity might relieve some of the burden on muscles and bones experienced in late pregnancy. Living in variable gravity environments makes gravity a commodity that it simply isn\u2019t on Earth; it becomes foreground rather than background. Power may be determined by whomever controls access to specially designed, high-gravity environments where people can maintain their strength. Gravity may indeed be rationed, and depriving people of access could have serious health (and even legal) consequences. If humans are to have any hope of maintaining permanent settlements off Earth, we\u2019ll have to consider not only the physiological effects of low gravity but the social adaptations as well. Alice Gorman is a senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and senior lecturer at Flinders University, Adelaide. This article is adapted from her book, \u201cDr Space Junk vs The Universe: Archaeology and the Future,\u201d to be published Oct. 22 by the MIT Press. \n\n\nShare Your StoryFrom chatbots that help answer a bank\u2019s customer-service calls to robotic arms that flip burgers at fast-food restaurants, automation has moved off the assembly line, and more and more people are working in tandem with robots. Are you one of them? We want to hear from you.\n\n\n\n\n NameEmail AddressStateSelect one...AlabamaAlaskaAmerican SamoaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict Of ColumbiaFederated States Of MicronesiaFloridaGeorgiaGuamHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarshall IslandsMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaNorthern Mariana IslandsOhioOklahomaOregonPalauPennsylvaniaPuerto RicoRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirgin IslandsVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyomingWhat's good, bad or surprising about your experience working with robots and other forms of automation?By submitting your response to this questionnaire, you are indicating you are willing to be contacted by a reporter for The Wall Street Journal to discuss your answers further. Your identity, including your name, will be kept confidential unless a reporter contacts you and you allow your name to be used. Your answers (not including name and email) have the potential to be used in future news stories in combination with other participants even if a WSJ reporter has not contacted you. If extra-planetary travel ever becomes routine, power may revolve around who controls access to gravity, argues space archeologist Alice Gorman. ",
        "author": "Alice Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Most Precious Commodity of the Next Space Age (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7203",
        "date": "2019-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-precious-commodity-of-the-next-space-age-11571324201?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=65",
        "text": "Companies, nonprofits and space agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, are planning lunar and orbital habitats. Startups are developing vehicles for space tourism, and financing research and technology to mine the moon and asteroids for rare earth elements and precious metals. Small, cheap satellites are making space accessible for a new generation of extra-planetary entrepreneurs. But what happens after that? I propose that the next phase of a space-based economy will revolve around gravity. Humans evolved in the gravity environment of Earth\u2019s surface. The proper functioning of our bones and blood rely on it. Out in space, however, we meet with different gravity levels. The moon has one-sixth of Earth\u2019s gravity, and Mars is a bit over a third. Crew on the International Space Station live in microgravity: They are effectively weightless. To maintain their bone density and muscle mass, crew members must exercise for over two hours each day. Without this discipline, the astronauts could end up with osteoporosis. Living in gravity so different from Earth\u2019s has consequences, including vision impairment and diminished organ function.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIt will be many years before technology exists to sustain human colonies in space. But if people want future settlements to succeed, there must be long-term solutions to living in these environments. This may involve reconceptualizing our relationship to gravity. A few years ago, I tried a wordplay exercise with my students at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where I taught a course on space archaeology, or the study of the artifacts of human encounters with space. You take an existing word and add prefixes or suffixes, change letters, chop it up, make it into a verb or whatever you please. Then you think about what the new word means and what kind of society needs this word to describe its values or practices. I was curious to see what happened when the class took \u201cgravity\u201d as the base word. These are a few of the ideas we came up with. A \u201cmonograv\u201d is a person who has only ever lived in one type of gravity, considered inferior to those who are adapted to multiple gravity regimes. \u201cAntineogravitationists\u201d are people who oppose living in artificial gravity, believing that the body should adapt to whatever gravity it finds itself in. One student proposed a \u201cgroovity club,\u201d where dancers go to bust their moves to the DJ playing gravity levels along with the beats. Gravity might become as contested as diet is now\u2014perhaps there are groups who believe in \u201cpalaeogravity,\u201d replicating the gravity conditions of the pre-spacefaring age. A \u201cgravault\u201d is a prison where people adapted to low or microgravity are incarcerated in higher gravity, their ability to move freely taken away. Perhaps this is punishment for the future crime of \u201ckleptogravity,\u201d where a person steals another\u2019s gravity ration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe earliest space stations, such as the rotating wheel conceived by the Viennese engineer Hermann Noordung in 1929, were designed to produce \u201cartificial\u201d gravity by spinning, like the centrifuge astronauts train in. Mr. Noordung thought that humans might be uncomfortable with the constant sensation of falling in Earth orbit, but he reasoned that pilots acclimate to a variety of such experiences, so it wasn\u2019t impossible to adapt. In the 1960s, NASA considered spinning space stations, but decided that astronauts might not enjoy being spun like a sock in a washing machine. Having been in a gravity rotor in an amusement park, I can categorically say that I did not enjoy it. None of the habitable space stations launched so far\u2014the Salyut series, Skylab, Mir, Tiangong 1 and 2 and the International Space Station\u2014has tried to create gravity by spinning. Part of their purpose is to conduct science in microgravity, after all. Higher gravity is just a luxury for the comfort of the crew.\n\n\nRelated Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? \n\n\nThe ISS crew\u2019s exercise regime is critical to ensuring that their bodies can adapt when they return home. The treadmills, cycles and weights are a form of gravity surrogate, substituting for the work done by bodies going about their daily tasks on Earth. Everyone gets equal access to the exercise equipment. It doesn\u2019t take much to imagine, though, that situations might change and one group might assert dominance by controlling access to exercise, knowing the consequences for those excluded. What if there is no return to Earth, whether that is for cultural, political or economic reasons? Research using rats on Space Shuttle flights indicates that a lack of gravity can cause If extra-planetary travel ever becomes routine, power may revolve around who controls access to gravity, argues space archeologist Alice Gorman. ",
        "author": "Alice Gorman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Introducing The Future of Everything (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7204",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/introducing-the-future-of-everything-podcast-1495201874?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=122",
        "text": "We start by exploring the legal gray area of outer space and digging into the urban, indoor future of farming. We\u2019ll introduce you to the college freshman who\u2019s built the first fingerprint-reading smart gun and the doctors who are using brain implants to build the world\u2019s first true cyborgs. There\u2019s even high-tech vegetables that bleed like a burger.\n\n\n\n\nThe first five episodes are available now, and we\u2019ll be publishing a new episode each Friday in June. Subscribe to the Future of Everything on the following podcast apps to stay on top of the latest episodes.\n\n\n Episode 1: Law and Order in the Final Frontier\n Episode 2: Has the Smart Gun Revolution Begun?\n Episode 3: Are We Ready for Manufactured Meat?\n Episode 4: The Urban, Indoor Future of Farming\n Episode 5: Meet One of the First Human Cyborgs\n \n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play Music\n\n\n\n\nAs we get off the ground, we\u2019re eager to hear what you think. Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast network. We also welcome feedback in the comments section below.\n\n\n\n\nHow to Listen and Get New Episodes The Future of Everything is available on a number of popular audio apps.\nIf you\u2019re using an iPhone or iPad, tap here to open the series in the pre-loaded Podcasts app. From that page, select \u201csubscribe\u201d to get the latest episodes on your device automatically.\nIf you\u2019re using an Android device, tap here to open the series in the pre-loaded Google Play Music app. From that page, select \u201csubscribe\u201d to get the latest episodes on your device automatically.\nYou can listen to the Future of Everything on iHeartRadio, Spotify and Stitcher. We also have an RSS feed.\nIf you prefer to listen directly from WSJ.com, visit the Future of Everything podcast page to play from your web browser. If you\u2019re multitasking, you\u2019ll need to keep the browser window or tab open.\nThe Future of Everything will be coming soon to the Journal\u2019s presence on Amazon Echo and Google Home. We\u2019ll update this space with the details.\nSee the Journal\u2019s full lineup of podcasts, including the WSJ Minute Briefing, and subscribe wherever you like to listen. In our new audio series, Jennifer Strong goes behind the scenes with the scientists, coders, engineers and entrepreneurs who are designing the way our world will work in the future. Five episodes are available today. Subscribe wherever you like to listen. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "If You Hate Your Internet Provider, Look to Space (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7205",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hate-your-internet-provider-look-to-space-11554897532?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=57",
        "text": "The reasons this is happening now are myriad, but it wouldn\u2019t be happening as quickly if not for the whims of eccentric billionaires\u2014notably \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n through Amazon\u2019s just-revealed subsidiary Project Kuiper, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n of SpaceX, and Richard Branson of Virgin Orbit\u2014all of whom have plans to launch satellites to provide internet. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nMany of the plans for these networks describe what eventually could be thousands of satellites, communicating both with one another through still-exotic technologies like laser interconnects and with the ground through novel sorts of electronically steered antennas. These are not the ambitions of companies that want to bring internet access to remote villages\u2014they\u2019re the world-spanning, empire-building designs of companies that want to compete with Comcast, Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T and other giants as they race to bring ultrafast internet to our homes and businesses via fixed lines, wireless 5G and, eventually, satellite internet. Wireless communications from outer space are as old as the space race itself. It was radio transmissions from the \u201cnew moon\u201d of Sputnik that helped fuel America\u2019s ambitions for outer space, after all. But a number of factors have converged to make it so internet from space could become just one more marvel we can all take for granted. Driving things on the demand side is our insatiable need for more and faster and always-on connections to the internet, plus a growing digital divide between those close enough to terrestrial networks to get high-speed connections and those who go without. Enabling technologies include advances in the microelectronics that steer radio beams, as well as big drops in both the cost of things to be flung into space and the cost of doing so. To understand how all of this will work, it is helpful to visualize the scale of Earth and where satellites orbit in outer space. Picture a large navel orange. If this citrusy orb were our planet, then up to the height of a grape away from its surface would be what\u2019s called low-earth orbit. In this orbit, which runs up to 1,200 miles high, companies like OneWeb are aiming to put a network of satellites that will give the world an internet service that\u2019s different and better than the expensive and slow kind people in remote areas are currently saddled with. \n\n\n\nOrbits Explained\nA race is under way to build out a satellite network that can deliver high-speed internet anywhere in the world. The orbit used is key to delivering on the vision.\n\n\n\n\nGeosynchronous orbit\nTelecommunications networks in these orbits are about 23,000 miles above the earth. They call for fewer, larger, more expensive satellites, while low-earth orbits (up to 1,200 miles above the earth) allow for cheaper, but more numerous, satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeosynchronous orbit\nLow earth orbit\n\n\n\n\nPolar orbit\nIridium currently operates a network of 66 satellites in low-earth orbit, traveling in polar orbits in line with the north-south longitude of the planet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCrisscrossing orbit\nNetworks of thousands of satellites have been proposed or are already in the earliest stages of deployment. Crisscrossing orbits are already in use by global positioning system satellites.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSources: NASA, FCC, Combined Space Operations Center\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople in far-flung parts of Alaska, for example, are currently paying up to $300 a month for just a couple of megabits per second of internet access from a satellite. (The U.S. average broadband download speed is more than 90 megabits per second.) OneWeb, which already has launched its first six satellites out of a planned minimum of 650, wants to change the lives of such remote internet users by connecting to the ground from satellites that pass in and out of view of an antenna on Earth\u2019s surface every three minutes. Orbiting at 16,200 miles per hour, these satellites will have 16 independent radio beams, each with the ability to send and receive 400 megabits per second of data. It\u2019s hard to know exactly what that will mean for speeds for end users because everything depends on how popular the service is. Space internet, it turns out, means more bandwidth but not an end to wireless bandwidth issues.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nOne Facebook, Amazon and others are aiming to blanket low-earth orbit with satellites to deliver fast online access anywhere, at anytime, for anyone. It\u2019s the commoditization of space, Christopher Mims writes. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7206",
        "date": "2019-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fifty-years-after-apollo-11-the-moon-is-more-important-than-ever-11553697009?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=57",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe moon has all the resources (water, oxygen, silicon, titanium, iron) to create a base that can be resupplied from Earth, only a three-day journey away. NASA plans to establish a \u201cgateway\u201d orbiting the moon in the coming years, enabling regular missions to the lunar surface. The aim for any entity seeking to build a permanent lunar base, says Charlie Duke, the 10th person to walk on the moon, would be \u201cto learn how to extract minerals from the moon and to set up moon-based telescopes and other kinds of instruments, and then develop the systems where we cycle crews back and forth like we do on the [international] space station, every three months to six months,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Eagle, the lunar module of Apollo 11, prepares to dock with the command module after ascending from the moon's surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nHow will nations behave on the moon when precious minerals and gases like helium-3, or He-3, are at stake? Might a new destructive gold rush be unleashed by He-3, which is rare on Earth but abundant on the moon? He-3 is used in fusion power, a more efficient alternative to nuclear fission reactors. It\u2019s valued at roughly $5 billion per metric ton or more, according to Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council. (Gold\u2019s value is roughly $42 million per metric ton.) China, which landed a probe on the far side of the moon in January, has long-term plans to build a permanent lunar base to mine for He-3. Mr. Kulcinski and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harrison Schmitt,\n\n\n\n who walked on the moon in NASA\u2019s last lunar mission in 1972, have called on the U.S. to do the same.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina landed its Chang'e-4 lunar probe on the far side of the moon in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CNSA/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn 1967, the U.S. joined more than 100 other countries to sign what\u2019s known as the Outer Space Treaty, which prevented anyone from laying claim to any part of outer space, including the moon. But in 2015, Congress passed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, or the Space Act, giving U.S. citizens the right to extract resources from outer space for personal gain. What this means is that the moon is open for business. Whether nations will treat it as a common ground for cooperation and scientific advancement remains to be seen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Lyndon B. Johnson, right, watches the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBasil Hero is a former investigative reporter with NBC. This article is adapted from his book, \u201cThe Mission of a Lifetime: Lessons from the Men Who Went to the Moon,\u201d to be published April 2 by Grand Central Publishing. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence The moon offers a source of valuable precious metals and a launching pad for future space exploration, writes former investigative reporter Basil Hero ",
        "author": "Basil Hero"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7207",
        "date": "2019-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fifty-years-after-apollo-11-the-moon-is-more-important-than-ever-11553697009?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=76",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe moon has all the resources (water, oxygen, silicon, titanium, iron) to create a base that can be resupplied from Earth, only a three-day journey away. NASA plans to establish a \u201cgateway\u201d orbiting the moon in the coming years, enabling regular missions to the lunar surface. The aim for any entity seeking to build a permanent lunar base, says Charlie Duke, the 10th person to walk on the moon, would be \u201cto learn how to extract minerals from the moon and to set up moon-based telescopes and other kinds of instruments, and then develop the systems where we cycle crews back and forth like we do on the [international] space station, every three months to six months,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Eagle, the lunar module of Apollo 11, prepares to dock with the command module after ascending from the moon's surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nHow will nations behave on the moon when precious minerals and gases like helium-3, or He-3, are at stake? Might a new destructive gold rush be unleashed by He-3, which is rare on Earth but abundant on the moon? He-3 is used in fusion power, a more efficient alternative to nuclear fission reactors. It\u2019s valued at roughly $5 billion per metric ton or more, according to Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council. (Gold\u2019s value is roughly $42 million per metric ton.) China, which landed a probe on the far side of the moon in January, has long-term plans to build a permanent lunar base to mine for He-3. Mr. Kulcinski and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harrison Schmitt,\n\n\n\n who walked on the moon in NASA\u2019s last lunar mission in 1972, have called on the U.S. to do the same.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina landed its Chang'e-4 lunar probe on the far side of the moon in January.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CNSA/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn 1967, the U.S. joined more than 100 other countries to sign what\u2019s known as the Outer Space Treaty, which prevented anyone from laying claim to any part of outer space, including the moon. But in 2015, Congress passed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, or the Space Act, giving U.S. citizens the right to extract resources from outer space for personal gain. What this means is that the moon is open for business. Whether nations will treat it as a common ground for cooperation and scientific advancement remains to be seen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Lyndon B. Johnson, right, watches the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBasil Hero is a former investigative reporter with NBC. This article is adapted from his book, \u201cThe Mission of a Lifetime: Lessons from the Men Who Went to the Moon,\u201d to be published April 2 by Grand Central Publishing. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence The moon offers a source of valuable precious metals and a launching pad for future space exploration, writes former investigative reporter Basil Hero ",
        "author": "Basil Hero"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7208",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-researchers-hunt-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence-11554907706?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=62",
        "text": "Dr. Cabrol is at the forefront of the hunt for life off Earth. She works at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, Institute, a nonprofit based in Mountain View, Calif., where scientists study the origins of life, where it might exist in the universe and how to find it. Recent advances\u2014including the Kepler telescope\u2019s discovery of thousands of far-flung exoplanets\u2014have increased the chances of locating extraterrestrial life, if it exists. SETI scientists have worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and universities to develop instruments for probes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Cabrol has studied the universe for more than 25 years. In 1994, she presented a map of Mars\u2019 Gusev crater to NASA, with data indicating it might have been a lake billions of years ago. Based on her findings, NASA chose the crater as the landing site for its rover, Spirit, which touched down in 2004 and found evidence of past water. She has continued her research into Martian lakes, and has visited volcanoes in the Andes and Chile\u2019s Atacama desert to learn more about hunting for living organisms in extreme environments. Dr. Cabrol has been the director of the SETI Institute\u2019s Carl Sagan Center for Research, a division focused on astronomy, planetary and climate science, astrobiology and exploration, since 2015.\nDr. Cabrol spoke with The Future of Everything about the new technologies, from artificial intelligence to lasers, that will assist in the search for life in the universe.\n\nWe\u2019ll Need a More Bespoke Approach to Exploration We have to change the way we approach exploration. Right now we\u2019re doing general medicine. But every single planet and moon we\u2019re going to explore is its own planetary experiment. Of course you have the tools of general medicine that are going to always work\u2014the stethoscope, something to look in your ear, a camera. But as you go and explore each of these worlds you have to apply specialty medicine. Right now we have environmental stations on board these rovers [such as NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover on Mars], and this is great because this is finally giving us the high-resolution [temperature and atmospheric data] we need to understand the local conditions. But microbial organisms in those environments are going to be there because of micro- to nano-climates. We need to know the climate at the level of a rock, a slope. You have to sit still and you have to do a lot of work in a small area. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever \n\n\nAI Will Help Us Interpret Alien Signals We are looking for signals coming from outer space, but nothing tells us that a human being would be able to recognize patterns [created by alien technology]. This is where AI comes in. It can see the patterns that we might not necessarily recognize, and a lot faster. This has been a great tool to go back to [the SETI Institute\u2019s] archive of data and see if we don\u2019t already have something that has been acquired in the past that we didn\u2019t understand at the time and that might be a sign that there is somebody somewhere that can send messages into space. We can [use] exoplanet research, we can lean on co-evolutionary biology that tells us how biology evolved in extreme environments. Now you can take all of this data and start modeling what is going to happen on those planets, what type of life could evolve. This is very important because it leads to the question of how intelligent life communicates.\nNew Tools in the Hunt for Life: Lasers\u2026 What I\u2019m hoping is that we will develop new perspectives and new tools that we can search with. There is now laser SETI, which is a project to place specialized cameras around the globe to look for laser flashes from deep space. Laser SETI will observe all of the sky, all of the time, so even relatively rare events can be found. It can discover pulses over a wide range of pulse durations, which may have been overlooked in previous astronomical surveys. But equally exciting is the fact that by exploring new territory, the chances of finding something completely unexpected are not zero.\n\u2026and the Study of Light We\u2019re going to start being able to [analyze gases and minerals in the light coming from distant planets] with the next telescopes. Spectroscopy of the atmospheres of distant planets will tell us whether they contain things like water and methane. Once we start to see that some planet has an ocean and the mixture of gases in its atmosphere seems to be in disequilibrium, that\u2019s important. Life creates disequilibria. This is what we are looking for.\nWe\u2019ll Have to Change Our Definition of \u201cLife\u201d Say we find life on Mars tomorrow. That tells us that out of eight planets in the solar system, 25% of them support life. That\u2019s a staggering number. That changes our perspective on how inhabited the universe is. The issue is that it\u2019s difficult to search for something we don\u2019t know. So we start with something we know and have a base of something to search for. \nThis interview has been condensed and edited.\nForward Thinking is an interview series from The Future of Everything where noteworthy figures from business, culture and technology reveal what lies ahead. Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute, a nonprofit working with NASA and others, on the new tools helping us discover life in the universe ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7209",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-researchers-hunt-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence-11554907706?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=75",
        "text": "Dr. Cabrol is at the forefront of the hunt for life off Earth. She works at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, Institute, a nonprofit based in Mountain View, Calif., where scientists study the origins of life, where it might exist in the universe and how to find it. Recent advances\u2014including the Kepler telescope\u2019s discovery of thousands of far-flung exoplanets\u2014have increased the chances of locating extraterrestrial life, if it exists. SETI scientists have worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation and universities to develop instruments for probes to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Cabrol has studied the universe for more than 25 years. In 1994, she presented a map of Mars\u2019 Gusev crater to NASA, with data indicating it might have been a lake billions of years ago. Based on her findings, NASA chose the crater as the landing site for its rover, Spirit, which touched down in 2004 and found evidence of past water. She has continued her research into Martian lakes, and has visited volcanoes in the Andes and Chile\u2019s Atacama desert to learn more about hunting for living organisms in extreme environments. Dr. Cabrol has been the director of the SETI Institute\u2019s Carl Sagan Center for Research, a division focused on astronomy, planetary and climate science, astrobiology and exploration, since 2015.\nDr. Cabrol spoke with The Future of Everything about the new technologies, from artificial intelligence to lasers, that will assist in the search for life in the universe.\n\nWe\u2019ll Need a More Bespoke Approach to Exploration We have to change the way we approach exploration. Right now we\u2019re doing general medicine. But every single planet and moon we\u2019re going to explore is its own planetary experiment. Of course you have the tools of general medicine that are going to always work\u2014the stethoscope, something to look in your ear, a camera. But as you go and explore each of these worlds you have to apply specialty medicine. Right now we have environmental stations on board these rovers [such as NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover on Mars], and this is great because this is finally giving us the high-resolution [temperature and atmospheric data] we need to understand the local conditions. But microbial organisms in those environments are going to be there because of micro- to nano-climates. We need to know the climate at the level of a rock, a slope. You have to sit still and you have to do a lot of work in a small area. \n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever \n\n\nAI Will Help Us Interpret Alien Signals We are looking for signals coming from outer space, but nothing tells us that a human being would be able to recognize patterns [created by alien technology]. This is where AI comes in. It can see the patterns that we might not necessarily recognize, and a lot faster. This has been a great tool to go back to [the SETI Institute\u2019s] archive of data and see if we don\u2019t already have something that has been acquired in the past that we didn\u2019t understand at the time and that might be a sign that there is somebody somewhere that can send messages into space. We can [use] exoplanet research, we can lean on co-evolutionary biology that tells us how biology evolved in extreme environments. Now you can take all of this data and start modeling what is going to happen on those planets, what type of life could evolve. This is very important because it leads to the question of how intelligent life communicates.\nNew Tools in the Hunt for Life: Lasers\u2026 What I\u2019m hoping is that we will develop new perspectives and new tools that we can search with. There is now laser SETI, which is a project to place specialized cameras around the globe to look for laser flashes from deep space. Laser SETI will observe all of the sky, all of the time, so even relatively rare events can be found. It can discover pulses over a wide range of pulse durations, which may have been overlooked in previous astronomical surveys. But equally exciting is the fact that by exploring new territory, the chances of finding something completely unexpected are not zero.\n\u2026and the Study of Light We\u2019re going to start being able to [analyze gases and minerals in the light coming from distant planets] with the next telescopes. Spectroscopy of the atmospheres of distant planets wi Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute, a nonprofit working with NASA and others, on the new tools helping us discover life in the universe ",
        "author": "Adam Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7210",
        "date": "2019-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hunt-for-alien-life-starts-in-earths-most-extreme-places-11554810637?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=62",
        "text": "By studying the chemistry, physical properties and biology of Antarctica\u2019s icy ecosystems, scientists are hoping they\u2019ll not only discover what makes life at extremes tick, but also determine where to look\u2014and what to look for\u2014when they send satellites and robots to explore other potentially habitable planets and moons. Antarctica\u2019s ice-covered coastal regions and frozen lakes, for instance, mimic the geology that planetary scientists expect to encounter in the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which have ice-shelled salty oceans. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nJill Mikucki and T.J. Rogers collect samples at Blood Falls in Antarctica.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ricardo Garza-Giron\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThe universe is very cold,\u201d says Dr. Mikucki of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Until relatively recently, the idea that earthly life could thrive in extremely cold ecosystems, like deep within glaciers or in subglacial lakes, was controversial. When Dr. Mikucki first learned about Blood Falls as a graduate student in the early 2000s, she asked her professor what organisms lived there. Her question was met with skepticism and some laughter, she recalls. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nScientists now know that so-called extremophiles\u2014microorganisms that live in acidic or hot environments\u2014are common, and that they also thrive in ultra-frigid places. They can survive high radiation too and feed off or breathe metals, like uranium or iron, which are present at Blood Falls. A deeper understanding of these creatures\u2019 metabolism could help guide scientists searching for alien life, researchers say. On Earth, the work could also help bioengineers develop new antibiotics or crops better suited for extreme climates. That now-booming field, known as bioprospecting, is also interested in cold-loving microbes, and research in this area has accelerated with recent advances in molecular biology and genetic sequencing, she said. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA member of Britney Schmidt's team near Barne Glacier. Dr. Schmidt, a roboticist and planetary scientist, is using a robotic vehicle called Icefin to gather data that shed light on the underwater ecosystem, as well as the interactions between Antarctica\u2019s ice and ocean.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ALEXANDER HOTZ/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nWhen she began her doctoral work, she joined the lab of Montana State University\u2019s John Priscu, a firm believer that life could exist even in seemingly uninhabitable places like deep within Antarctica\u2019s ice sheets. \u201cIt never settled well with me that that much real estate\u2014the fifth-largest continent\u2014was dead,\u201d he said. Except for the \u201cDry Valleys,\u201d home to Blood Falls, most of Antarctica is covered in ice that can be miles thick. Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, once wrote that life grew out of a warm pond. Dr. Priscu didn\u2019t fully agree. Hot temperatures can degrade amino acids and DNA, the building blocks of life, while the cold is a natural preservative that gives life time to evolve, he says.\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space Welcome to Your Home on Mars Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nDr. Priscu said he spent years trying to get funding for projects to look for microbial life in Antarctica\u2019s ice. In 2009, he finally got money from the U.S. National Science Foundation to drill through the ice sheet. The technologies his team has used\u2014including a remotely operated vehicle and an ice drill that can bust through nearly 1,100-meter-thick ice using high-pressure, ultraclean hot water\u2014are helping scientists prototype the tools that could be useful for exploring Europa, one of Jupiter\u2019s icy moons, he says. The drill, he said, was designed, in part, with extraterrestrial exploration in mind. When robots finally make it to the Jovian satellite, they\u2019ll need to drill through more than 10 miles of ice, while ensuring they don\u2019t contaminate the environment. But they\u2019ll also have to be much, much lighter, Dr. Priscu said. The drill, for instance, weighed 500,000 pounds, \u201ca mass that would never make it to space,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Schmidt lowers the Icefin robot under sea ice.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ALEXANDER HOTZ/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nIn 2013, Dr. Priscu\u2019s team, which included Dr. Mikucki, found a high density of cells in samples they collected from a subglacial lake. This year, his team found preliminary evidence of microbes underneath another lake under the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, further suggesting the continent is teeming with hidden life-forms, he said. The origin of these microbes is unclear. But now that some of the new samples arrived in the U.S. earlier this month, his group will spend months sequencing and analyzing their genomes, he said. Still, one thing is certain: The lakes\u2019 organisms haven\u2019t \u201cseen the sun in hundreds of thousands of years,\u201d which means, to live, they must \u201cget their energy from the earth,\u201d Dr. Priscu said. It also means they thrive in extreme cold. All this makes him think Europa, like Antarctica, hosts life. \u201cIt\u2019s not \u2018if we have life there,\u2019 it\u2019s when we go and find it,\u201d he said. \u201cThe microbial world has no limits.\u201d To know where to drill and how to navigate once under the ice cover, scientists need practice. On November 30, a few days after Dr. Mikucki flew to Blood Falls, Britney Schmidt, a roboticist and planetary scientist from the Georgia Institute of Technology, led a team of scientists and engineers to Barne Glacier, near McMurdo Station, the largest U.S. base on the continent. They had with them a generator, tents, computers and a yellow torpedo-shaped robot called Icefin. Atop the sea ice, they set up a temporary camp and control room from which they monitored Icefin as it coursed underneath the ice. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Icefin robot has cameras and sensors that measure salt content, pressure, oxygen levels and temperature, among other factors.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ALEXANDER HOTZ/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nThe 12-foot machine, which Dr. Schmidt describes as a robotic oceanographer, resembles vehicles scientists might one day send into space, she said. It has cameras and sensors that measure salt content, pressure, oxygen levels and temperature, among other factors. That data, which the team is still analyzing, will help them understand the underwater ecosystem, as well as the dynamic interactions between Antarctica\u2019s ice and ocean, which affect the kind of life that can thrive there, she said. Such Antarctic expeditions give researchers a chance to figure out what types of measurements they might need to sleuth out signs of life in previously uncharted terrain. During such missions, there is very little room for error because any miscalculation could damage the machines tasked with exploring places humans can\u2019t go, Dr. Schmidt says. In outer space, the stakes are even higher because any misstep could be fatal for a robot. \u201cIf you haven\u2019t been to a place, it\u2019s hard to imagine how you explore it,\u201d she said. \u201cThe only hope for doing it there is to do it well here.\u201d \u2014Alexander Hotz contributed to this article. Write to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com By studying Antarctica\u2019s icy ecosystems, scientists hope they\u2019ll discover what makes life tick in hostile environments\u2014and how to find it in the solar system. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Understand the Data Explosion (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7211",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-understand-the-data-explosion-11638979214?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=8",
        "text": "The files on your phone are only a microcosm of the global increase in data creation and storage. Individuals, businesses and governments are generating an almost astronomical amount of data that require strings of zeros and arcane terms just to describe the sheer volume. About 64 zettabytes was created or copied last year, according to IDC, a technology market research firm. That\u2019s 64 followed by 21 zeros. A zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes or 1 trillion gigabytes.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIt isn\u2019t only hard to wrap your head around. All that data is a challenge to store, process and retrieve, and it will become more difficult as the volume surges and data stewards confront the sustainability of using immense amounts of electricity and water to power and cool data centers. Data-center construction will grow at compound annual rates of 5% to 10%, market researchers estimate. The prospect has researchers seeking radical alternatives, including synthetic DNA. Its information density far exceeds what\u2019s possible with storage media like magnetic tape or optical discs. One project, sponsored by the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is funding several teams with the short-term goal of producing DNA technology that can encode and retrieve up to 10 terabytes of information a day. The goal is to lay groundwork to shrink what now takes a full-size data center into a machine that sits on a desk. To be sure, consumers and businesses throw away most of the data they create every year. \n\n\nByte Guide 1 megabyte (MB) = 1,000 kilobytes 1 gigabyte (GB) = 1,000 megabytes 1 terabyte (TB) = 1,000 gigabytes 1 petabyte (PB) = 1,000 terabytes 1 exabyte (EB) = 1,000 petabytes 1 zettabyte (ZB) = 1,000 exabytes \n\n\n The digital master of a movie might be just a few gigabytes, and relatively little storage is needed to place copies on servers scattered around the world. But millions of viewers means making millions of copies. Even if that data isn\u2019t stored, industries have grown up around the infrastructure to distribute all that data smoothly. Or think of deleting six episodes of \u201cThe Voice\u201d from the family video recorder just before the Super Bowl. Likewise, millions of cameras monitor assembly lines, stores, front porches and what the dog\u2019s doing when no one is home. Much of it isn\u2019t needed and is soon overwritten. Almost two-thirds of last year\u2019s data existed only briefly, according to John Rydning, IDC\u2019s research vice president. The other third was stored but overwritten or deleted within the year. Only a tiny fraction\u2014less than 2%, IDC estimates\u2014survived into this year. But even 2% of 64 zettabytes is a huge amount. To understand the data explosion, it may be easier to look at it in reduced form\u2014as the amount of data that piles up daily as the result of activities that involve individuals, directly or indirectly. To help visualize amounts, we\u2019ve translated digital storage to rice. A grain of rice represents 1 megabyte, about the size of a low-resolution digital photo. A quarter-cup of rice\u2014a typical serving\u2014is about 2,000 grains or 2 gigabytes, about the amount that would fit on a small thumb drive. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nDriver Dollars In 2019, EZ Pass Group transponders handled 3.8 billion toll transactions on highways, bridges and tunnels\u2014more than 10 million a day. The consortium includes agencies in 19 Eastern U.S. states. Each acts as a clearinghouse so that a driver with a single account can use the pass anywhere. Each transaction includes details about time, location, vehicle and account. Many states also capture a photo of the license plate so that vehicles without a transponder can be billed, a practice called video tolling. As one example, drivers on Virginia\u2019s toll roads, bridges and tunnels logged more than half a million transactions a day in 2019, piling up 400 megabytes of data daily. The state keeps a year\u2019s worth of those details, or 144 gigabytes. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nInventions and Innovations The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approves more than 350,000 utility patents a year, which are stored in a well-indexed database that can be searched in many ways. The text and images of those approvals amounted to about 800 megabytes each workday in 2019, or almost 200 gigabytes for the year. In May, patent No. 11,000,000 was issued. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nQuakes and Shakes The U.S. Geological Survey collects and archives 53 gigabytes of data daily from a global network of seismometers, which measure earthquakes. This includes 42 gigabytes at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., and 11 gigabytes at the Earthquake Science Center The world is set to generate an astronomical amount of digital information. To get a handle on it, start with a grain of rice. ",
        "author": "Paul Overberg and Kevin Hand"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Understand the Data Explosion (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7212",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-understand-the-data-explosion-11638979214?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=9",
        "text": "The files on your phone are only a microcosm of the global increase in data creation and storage. Individuals, businesses and governments are generating an almost astronomical amount of data that require strings of zeros and arcane terms just to describe the sheer volume. About 64 zettabytes was created or copied last year, according to IDC, a technology market research firm. That\u2019s 64 followed by 21 zeros. A zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes or 1 trillion gigabytes.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIt isn\u2019t only hard to wrap your head around. All that data is a challenge to store, process and retrieve, and it will become more difficult as the volume surges and data stewards confront the sustainability of using immense amounts of electricity and water to power and cool data centers. Data-center construction will grow at compound annual rates of 5% to 10%, market researchers estimate. The prospect has researchers seeking radical alternatives, including synthetic DNA. Its information density far exceeds what\u2019s possible with storage media like magnetic tape or optical discs. One project, sponsored by the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is funding several teams with the short-term goal of producing DNA technology that can encode and retrieve up to 10 terabytes of information a day. The goal is to lay groundwork to shrink what now takes a full-size data center into a machine that sits on a desk. To be sure, consumers and businesses throw away most of the data they create every year. \n\n\nByte Guide 1 megabyte (MB) = 1,000 kilobytes 1 gigabyte (GB) = 1,000 megabytes 1 terabyte (TB) = 1,000 gigabytes 1 petabyte (PB) = 1,000 terabytes 1 exabyte (EB) = 1,000 petabytes 1 zettabyte (ZB) = 1,000 exabytes \n\n\n The digital master of a movie might be just a few gigabytes, and relatively little storage is needed to place copies on servers scattered around the world. But millions of viewers means making millions of copies. Even if that data isn\u2019t stored, industries have grown up around the infrastructure to distribute all that data smoothly. Or think of deleting six episodes of \u201cThe Voice\u201d from the family video recorder just before the Super Bowl. Likewise, millions of cameras monitor assembly lines, stores, front porches and what the dog\u2019s doing when no one is home. Much of it isn\u2019t needed and is soon overwritten. Almost two-thirds of last year\u2019s data existed only briefly, according to John Rydning, IDC\u2019s research vice president. The other third was stored but overwritten or deleted within the year. Only a tiny fraction\u2014less than 2%, IDC estimates\u2014survived into this year. But even 2% of 64 zettabytes is a huge amount. To understand the data explosion, it may be easier to look at it in reduced form\u2014as the amount of data that piles up daily as the result of activities that involve individuals, directly or indirectly. To help visualize amounts, we\u2019ve translated digital storage to rice. A grain of rice represents 1 megabyte, about the size of a low-resolution digital photo. A quarter-cup of rice\u2014a typical serving\u2014is about 2,000 grains or 2 gigabytes, about the amount that would fit on a small thumb drive. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nDriver Dollars In 2019, EZ Pass Group transponders handled 3.8 billion toll transactions on highways, bridges and tunnels\u2014more than 10 million a day. The consortium includes agencies in 19 Eastern U.S. states. Each acts as a clearinghouse so that a driver with a single account can use the pass anywhere. Each transaction includes details about time, location, vehicle and account. Many states also capture a photo of the license plate so that vehicles without a transponder can be billed, a practice called video tolling. As one example, drivers on Virginia\u2019s toll roads, bridges and tunnels logged more than half a million transactions a day in 2019, piling up 400 megabytes of data daily. The state keeps a year\u2019s worth of those details, or 144 gigabytes. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nInventions and Innovations The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approves more than 350,000 utility patents a year, which are stored in a well-indexed database that can be searched in many ways. The text and images of those approvals amounted to about 800 megabytes each workday in 2019, or almost 200 gigabytes for the year. In May, patent No. 11,000,000 was issued. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nQuakes and Shakes The U.S. Geological Survey collects and archives 53 gigabytes of data daily from a global network of seismometers, which measure earthquakes. This includes 42 gigabytes at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., and 11 gigabytes at the Earthquake Science Center in Menlo Park, Calif., which focuses on California. The center processes the data and publishes alerts within minutes for U.S. quakes that top magnitude 2 and quakes elsewhere that exceed magnitude 4. The data is just a portion of what\u2019s collected by IRIS, a consortium of U.S. universities that do seismological research. Its archive topped 825 terabytes in October. This year it expects to fulfill researchers\u2019 requests for 1,100 terabytes. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nThe Surface of the Earth For 50 years, U.S. satellites in the Landsat series, launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and run by the Geological Survey, have been circling the Earth, capturing images of its surface at visible and infrared wavelengths. Landsat 7 and Landsat 8, which entered service in 1999 and 2013, respectively, produce 700 gigabytes of imagery a day. Landsat 9, launched in September, is due to replace Landsat 7 this winter after its instruments are calibrated. When that happens, comparable output would more than double to 1.5 terabytes a day. Together, Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 would be able to photograph most places every eight days. Landsat imagery is searchable online and free. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\nInside Baseball Major League Baseball\u2019s Statcast system uses 12 special cameras in each stadium to track the ball and players during the 2,430 games in a regular season. Each game produces 24 terabytes of video, which is processed into hundreds of measures on every play: the spin rate of the pitch, the base runner\u2019s speed, the speed and angle of the ball as it leaves the bat and many more. Most of the video is discarded, but on a typical day the system creates about 4.7 terabytes of data for its archive. Each team\u2019s analytics department uses the data for tactical and strategic analyses. Fans get access, too. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\n Money\u2019s Worth The Social Security Administration keeps a detailed earnings history on most American workers. In 2019, it logged $9.2 trillion in earnings by 178 million workers. The agency keeps petabytes of this data so that it can track how much benefits to issue once a worker becomes disabled, retires or dies. The agency also keeps massive files documenting claims for disability payments, including medical records and recordings of hearings. And it processes applications for new Social Security numbers\u2014more than 5 million a year. In all, the agency says its data storage grows by 25 terabytes a day. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Kevin Hand\n \n\n\n\n Watching Ourselves YouTube reports that its users upload 500 hours of video each minute world-wide. At common rates of video file size, that translates to 4,860 terabytes a day. In 2007, when the company first quoted a figure, it received six hours of video a minute. By 2010, it had reached 35 hours a minute and by 2012, 60 hours a minute\u2014an hour every second. \n\n\n\n\n \n\n\nThe Future of Everything | DataExplore what's next for data.Read the December issueDecember 2021How to Understand the Data ExplosionDecember 2021Armed With Data, Musicians Have Big Plans to Court Their SuperfansDecember 2021Why the World\u2019s Biggest Traders Are Betting on Blockchain DataDecember 2021Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for SolutionsDecember 2021Personal Data Is Worth Billions. These Startups Want You to Get a Cut.December 2021Medical Records Data Offers Doctors Hope of Better Patient CareDecember 2021Smart Bandages and Other Data-Collecting Devices of the Future The world is set to generate an astronomical amount of digital information. To get a handle on it, start with a grain of rice. ",
        "author": "Paul Overberg and Kevin Hand"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cathie Wood Has Wall Street\u2019s Hottest Hand. Maybe Too Hot. (WSJ: The Intelligent Investor) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7213",
        "date": "2021-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cathie-wood-is-wall-streets-hottest-hand-maybe-too-hot-11612544044?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=37",
        "text": "Such success for other managers, however, has often carried the seeds of its own undoing. It\u2019s almost inevitable that when funds get too big, too fast, they can\u2019t sustain their performance.\n\n\n\n\nThat\u2019s partly because all that money makes it hard for fund managers to maneuver as nimbly as they did when they were small. Copycats mimic their every move, and it\u2019s a lot easier to sell a few shares of a stock on the way up than it is to sell oodles of them on the way down.\n\n\nARK runs five exchange-traded funds for which Ms. Wood and her team of 11 analysts and portfolio managers actively invest in companies they believe will change the world through what they call \u201cdisruptive innovation.\u201d\nSince its launch in October 2014, ARK Innovation, the firm\u2019s largest fund, has delivered an average return of 39% annually. Had you invested $10,000 at the fund\u2019s inception, it would have been worth more than $78,000 this week; the same stake in the S&P 500 would have amounted to less than $22,000.\nMoney chases performance. ARK managed a total of $11.4 billion at the end of March 2020. By year end, that had swollen to $58.2 billion.\nAmong the earliest institutional investors to buy both\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n stock and bitcoin, Ms. Wood is an eloquent evangelist for assets she believes are on \u201cexponential growth trajectories.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlready, Ark has to contend with mimicry. So far, a smartphone app and at least three websites have sprung up that purport to track Ark\u2019s daily trades. In reddit\u2019s sometimes raunchy online WallStreetBets forum, members call Ms. Wood Cathie Bae (short for \u201cbabe\u201d or \u201cbefore anyone else\u201d), and traders talk about buying ARK\u2019s favorite stocks and what the firm might invest in next. \nThis year, stocks are lifting off even before ARK buys them. On Jan. 13, the firm filed a prospectus to launch a new fund, ARK Space Exploration ETF. Although the fund hasn\u2019t yet received regulatory clearance, satellite and other space-related stocks shot up 8% to 10% the next day.\nSize also can become an impediment. When you have millions of dollars, you can easily invest in a few small companies. Once you have billions, you may have to spread investments across more and bigger companies; otherwise, your trades could wreak havoc on your holdings. Many fast-growing asset managers have changed their investing style, incurred much higher trading costs or simply suffered a severe decline in performance.\nARK is already a big owner of some small stocks. At Israeli biotech company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Pluristem Therapeutics Inc.,\n\n\n with a total stock-market value of $219 million, ARK holds 15.5% of the shares outstanding. That\u2019s three times as much as all other institutional owners combined. At a French biotech,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Cellectis S.A.\n\n\n , with a $900 million market value, ARK owns 11.5%\u2014more than the next 11 largest holders combined.\nAlthough those two positions make up barely 0.5% of ARK\u2019s total assets, they reflect the firm\u2019s style.\nAccording to FactSet, 43.5% of ARK\u2019s total equity holdings are in stocks of which the firm owns at least a tenth of all shares outstanding. At Vanguard Group, by contrast, only 9.7% of total equity positions are in such concentrated holdings.\nIf ARK ever needs to sell any of those holdings, who will buy in enough bulk to keep prices from collapsing? \nIn an interview, Ms. Wood says that as markets rise, ARK diversifies into larger companies. They form a kind of war chest that ARK can tap into \u201cduring downturns, when our less-liquid stocks will be hit disproportionately, giving us better bargains,\u201d she says. In other words, ARK counts on being able to sell some big stocks to buy smaller ones when those become even cheaper\u2014as it did successfully during last year\u2019s severe bear market.\nAlso, many of ARK\u2019s smaller companies are issuing additional shares, \u201cand it is with our encouragement sometimes,\u201d says Ms. Wood. \u201cWe want our companies to invest aggressively today,\u201d because ARK believes these businesses should be financing their unparalleled opportunities for future growth.\n\n\nMore From the Intelligent Investor\n\n\n\n\nStock Markets Usually Go Up. Sometimes, They Go Away.\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nHow to Invest Calmly in a Chaotic World\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nStock Market Got You Worried? Write a D-Day Note\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Trouble With a Stock-Market Bubble\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs a result of new stock offerings, those companies\u2019 shares are becoming more liquid over time, she says.\nWhat might happen if the same investors who flung billions of dollars into ARK\u2019s funds over the past year yank the money back out?\n\u201cNot concerned about it,\u201d says Ms. Wood. \u201cI mean, Tesla a year ago was 10 times smaller than it is today.\u201d (Tesla Inc.\u2019s total market value was $77 billion at year-end 2019; this week, it exceeded $810 billion.) \u201cThat\u2019s telling us, reinforcing our sense, that the market is beginning to understand the exponential growth opportunities out there,\u201d which will create ARK Investment\u2019s money under management grew more than fivefold from March to the end of last year. But when funds get too big, too fast, they often can\u2019t sustain their performance. ",
        "author": "Jason Zweig"
    },
    {
        "title": "Teaching Activities for: \u2018If No One Owns the Moon, Can Anyone Make Money Up There?\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7214",
        "date": "2017-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/learning/teaching-activities-for-if-no-one-owns-the-moon-can-anyone-make-money-up-there.html",
        "text": "Why and for what purposes are private companies trying to launch businesses in outer space? Why and for what purposes are private companies trying to launch businesses in outer space? Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Shannon Doyne"
    },
    {
        "title": "18 Warm-Up Activities to Engage Students Before They Read Nonfiction Texts (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7215",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/learning/lesson-plans/18-warm-up-activities-to-engage-students-before-they-read-nonfiction-text.html",
        "text": "Here is a collection of our favorite \u201cbell ringers,\u201d \u201cdo nows\u201d and \u201chooks\u201d to grab students\u2019 attention, along with examples from dozens of our daily lessons. Here is a collection of our favorite \u201cbell ringers,\u201d \u201cdo nows\u201d and \u201chooks\u201d to grab students\u2019 attention, along with examples from dozens of our daily lessons. How can you get your students interested in reading informational texts, whether the topic is Syria or sneakers, space exploration or statistics, surfing, superheroes or \u201cthe souls of Black girls\u201d? How can you help them make connections between unfamiliar topics and their own lives? How can you scaffold complex ideas to make them accessible for a wide variety of learners?",
        "author": "By The Learning Network"
    },
    {
        "title": "18 Warm-Up Activities to Engage Students Before They Read Nonfiction Texts (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7216",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/learning/lesson-plans/18-warm-up-activities-to-engage-students-before-they-read-nonfiction-text.html",
        "text": "Here is a collection of our favorite \u201cbell ringers,\u201d \u201cdo nows\u201d and \u201chooks\u201d to grab students\u2019 attention, along with examples from dozens of our daily lessons. Here is a collection of our favorite \u201cbell ringers,\u201d \u201cdo nows\u201d and \u201chooks\u201d to grab students\u2019 attention, along with examples from dozens of our daily lessons. How can you get your students interested in reading informational texts, whether the topic is Syria or sneakers, space exploration or statistics, surfing, superheroes or \u201cthe souls of Black girls\u201d? How can you help them make connections between unfamiliar topics and their own lives? How can you scaffold complex ideas to make them accessible for a wide variety of learners?",
        "author": "By The Learning Network"
    },
    {
        "title": "18 Warm-Up Activities to Engage Students Before They Read Nonfiction Texts (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7217",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/learning/lesson-plans/18-warm-up-activities-to-engage-students-before-they-read-nonfiction-text.html",
        "text": "Here is a collection of our favorite \u201cbell ringers,\u201d \u201cdo nows\u201d and \u201chooks\u201d to grab students\u2019 attention, along with examples from dozens of our daily lessons. Here is a collection of our favorite \u201cbell ringers,\u201d \u201cdo nows\u201d and \u201chooks\u201d to grab students\u2019 attention, along with examples from dozens of our daily lessons. How can you get your students interested in reading informational texts, whether the topic is Syria or sneakers, space exploration or statistics, surfing, superheroes or \u201cthe souls of Black girls\u201d? How can you help them make connections between unfamiliar topics and their own lives? How can you scaffold complex ideas to make them accessible for a wide variety of learners?",
        "author": "By The Learning Network"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Teach Science or Math Using The New York Times? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7218",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/learning/do-you-teach-science-or-math-using-the-new-york-times.html",
        "text": "Educators: We want to hear how you incorporate Science Times and other STEM coverage into your curriculum. Educators: We want to hear how you incorporate Science Times and other STEM coverage into your curriculum. The Science, Health and Technology sections of The New York Times are full of articles, graphs and multimedia stories that can help students connect the concepts they\u2019re learning in school to current events. Teachers can incorporate Times articles into lessons on a variety of subjects, including climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, space exploration and genetic research.",
        "author": "By The Learning Network"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Teach Science or Math Using The New York Times? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7219",
        "date": "2021-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/learning/do-you-teach-science-or-math-using-the-new-york-times.html",
        "text": "Educators: We want to hear how you incorporate Science Times and other STEM coverage into your curriculum. Educators: We want to hear how you incorporate Science Times and other STEM coverage into your curriculum. The Science, Health and Technology sections of The New York Times are full of articles, graphs and multimedia stories that can help students connect the concepts they\u2019re learning in school to current events. Teachers can incorporate Times articles into lessons on a variety of subjects, including climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, space exploration and genetic research.",
        "author": "By The Learning Network"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos From Space (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7220",
        "date": "2019-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/learning/photos-from-space.html",
        "text": "Would you ever want to travel to space? Would you ever want to travel to space? If it were possible, would you ever want to travel to space? Would you like to go as a space tourist or as an astronaut with a mission?",
        "author": "By Natalie Proulx"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lesson of the Day: \u2018A Future for People With Disabilities in Outer Space Takes Flight\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7221",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/learning/lesson-plans/lesson-of-the-day-a-future-for-people-with-disabilities-in-outer-space-takes-flight.html",
        "text": "In this lesson, students will learn about efforts being made to make spaceflight more accessible. Then, they will consider accessibility in their community. In this lesson, students will learn about efforts being made to make spaceflight more accessible. Then, they will consider accessibility in their community. Featured Article: \u201cA Future for People With Disabilities in Outer Space Takes Flight\u201d by Amanda Morris",
        "author": "By Nicole Daniels"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Want to Travel in Space? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7222",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/learning/do-you-want-to-travel-in-space.html",
        "text": "A 29-year-old cancer survivor is set to become the youngest American to travel to orbit. Have you ever dreamed of taking such a journey? A 29-year-old cancer survivor is set to become the youngest American to travel to orbit. Have you ever dreamed of taking such a journey? Have you ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut \u2014 or traveling to outer space? What\u2019s so appealing about leaving Earth?",
        "author": "By John Otis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lesson of the Day: \u2018Christina Koch Lands on Earth, and Crosses a Threshold for Women in Space\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7223",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/learning/lesson-of-the-day-christina-koch-lands-on-earth-and-crosses-a-threshold-for-women-in-space.html",
        "text": "A record-setting female astronaut has returned from space: What can we learn from her achievements and story? A record-setting female astronaut has returned from space: What can we learn from her achievements and story? Featured Article: \u201cChristina Koch Lands on Earth, and Crosses a Threshold for Women in Space\u201d",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will the U.S. Ever Go Metric? It Already Has, Sort Of (WSJ: The Numbers) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7224",
        "date": "2021-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-u-s-ever-go-metric-it-already-has-sort-of-11628242201?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=5",
        "text": "These changes have augmented the U.S. customary system of measurements, but they haven\u2019t replaced it. Weight is still measured in pounds, height in feet, distance in miles, property in acres and recipe ingredients in spoons and cups.\n\u201cWe\u2019re much more bilingual than we want to admit,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Mihm,\n\n\n\n a history professor at the University of Georgia who has researched U.S. weights and measures. \u201cWe don\u2019t think anything of going into a grocery store and buying half a pound of turkey and two liters of soda and putting them in the same grocery cart and walking out. That\u2019s just what we do.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould the U.S. adopt the metric system? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBecause the metric system is based on units of 10, a measurement given in one unit can be converted to another by simply moving the decimal place to the left or right: 1,000 grams equals 1 kilogram; 1,000 milliliters equals 1 liter; and 1,000 meters equals 1 kilometer.\n\n\nIn comparison, U.S. customary units are unrelated\u2014a pound has 16 ounces, a quart has 4 cups, a mile has 1,760 yards\u2014and similar names sometimes represent dissimilar values.\nDry cups, pints and quarts are not the same as liquid cups, pints and quarts. (Their volumes differ.) A survey foot is not equal to a regular foot. (Their lengths are not the same.) Bushels and pecks were once so familiar they were featured in a Broadway show tune, but who can accurately describe those measures today? (A bushel is 9.3 liquid gallons; a peck is 2.3.)\n\u201cI\u2019ve had consumers say that if I get a quart of mayonnaise it\u2019s the same as a quart of strawberries,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kenneth S. Butcher,\n\n\n\n a researcher in the Office of Weights and Measures at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. \u201cIt\u2019s not. I\u2019ve had fly-by-night gold and silver buyers use regular ounce scales as if an ounce of gold is the same as an ounce of bologna. It\u2019s not.\u201d\nAn avoirdupois ounce, the unit used to measure food, is approximately 28.4 grams, he said. A troy ounce, the unit used to weigh gold and other precious metals, is about 31.1 grams.\n\n\n\n\nStraddling the metric-imperial fence has had consequences.\nInfamously, NASA lost a $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 because engineers plotting its course failed to translate English measurements to metric units, causing the spacecraft to miss its intended orbit and fall into the Martian atmosphere, where it disintegrated.\nAccording to NIST, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that does not use the metric system as its predominant method of measurement, despite flirting with the idea on a regular basis.\nIn 1866, the Metric Act legalized the use of the metric system in the U.S. In 1975, the Metric Conversion Act designated the metric system as the country\u2019s preferred choice for trade and commerce. And in 1994, the Fair Packaging and Label Act was amended to require both metric and customary units on most packaged goods.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019ve had consumers say that if I get a quart of mayonnaise it\u2019s the same as a quart of strawberries. It\u2019s not.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Kenneth S. Butcher, National Institute of Standards and Technology \n\n\n\nU.S. manufacturers objected to converting because they traditionally worked with inches, but the resistance to change wasn\u2019t uniquely American.\nThe U.K. began to make the official switch in the 1960s and 1970s, but its movement petered out in the 1980s.\n\u201cThe upshot was a hybrid system as well, but one where metric predominates in official business of government and industry,\u201d Dr. Mihm said, adding that imperial units are still used to measure speed, distance and liquids\u2014including pints of beer.\nNow, technology has made conversion easier\u2014or, depending on your point of view, unnecessary. But Mr. Butcher sees signs that the metric migration will continue.\n\u201cThere are three areas where it will come up over next decade,\u201d he said, listing electric cars, which consume energy measured in watts; hydrogen vehicles that use fuel measured in kilograms; and cannabis, which is often sold in grams\u2014all metric units.\n\u201cIt\u2019s the method of sales that state and federal governments adopt that control which units can be used for what,\u201d Mr. Butcher said. \u201cThat\u2019s how you control the commercial marketplace.\u201d\nStill, he doesn\u2019t think the U.S. will give up its traditional units overnight.\n\u201cWhen will the U.S. be entirely converted?\u201d he said. \u201cNot for seven or more generations, if ever.\u201d\nThe U.S. customary system might have one foot in the grave. But the other is alive and kicking.\nWrite to Jo Craven McGinty at Jo.McGinty@wsj.com The country has been creeping toward the metric system for decades, and is fully bilingual when it comes to weights and measures. ",
        "author": "Jo Craven McGinty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Believe it or not, the Senate actually passed a very ambitious bill (WP: The Plum Line) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7225",
        "date": "2021-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/09/believe-it-or-not-senate-actually-passed-very-ambitious-bill/",
        "text": "Democrats sometimes lament that Republicans in Congress won\u2019t let any real legislation pass as long as there\u2019s a Democratic president. The Senate in particular, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell holds his caucus in an iron grip, is where President Biden\u2019s agenda will go to die.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut that isn\u2019t completely true \u2014 every once in a while a bill can pass there, even one of substantial size. But what kind of bill? That\u2019s the rub. We saw an outbreak of bipartisanship on Tuesday around the idea that China is very bad and steps must be taken against it:The proposal commits billions of dollars in federal funds across a wide array of research areas. It pours more than $50 billion in immediate funding into U.S. businesses that manufacture the sort of ultrasmall, in-demand computer chips that power consumer and military devices, which many companies source from China. And it paves the way for the next generation of space exploration at a time when Washington and Beijing are increasingly setting their eyes on the stars.With it, lawmakers also approved a host of proposals that seek to limit China\u2019s economic aspirations and curb its political influence. The bill opens the door for new sanctions targeting Beijing over its human rights practices, commissions a new study about the origin of the coronavirus and calls for a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics. It even authorizes $300 million specifically to counter the political influence of the Chinese Communist Party.The bill passed with the votes of every Democrat with the exception of Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is technically an independent, and 19 Republicans. Why would so many of them have voted for it?Story continues below advertisementThe simple answer is that it offered them plenty that they like with not much they don\u2019t like. It goes after China in ways both practical and symbolic, and many Republicans like the idea of a new Cold War to give U.S. foreign policy the brio it\u2019s been lacking of late (though many of the GOP\u2019s most enthusiastically hawkish fist-shakers, like Ted Cruz of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, voted against the bill).AdvertisementPerhaps more importantly, while it spends lots of money \u2014 on the order of $250 billion \u2014 that money is directed largely to corporations, not people. Despite their oft-stated belief in the majesty of perfectly free markets, most Republicans are quite happy with government economic intervention, as long as it\u2019s used for purposes they think are worthwhile.So $50 billion thrown at corporations that make computer chips seems like a good idea to them amid a global chip shortage, even though a doctrinaire free marketeer would argue that the shortage will work itself out as laws of supply and demand perform their magic.Story continues below advertisementAnd in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, precisely because this bill never broke down across bitter partisan lines, its passage won\u2019t get much attention. It won\u2019t be characterized as a victory for President Biden, which mitigates an important incentive for Republicans to kill it. There might be other bills they could live with on substantive terms but will filibuster just to deny Biden credit. But this one is low-profile enough to not impose a cost on their own political future.AdvertisementAnd again, they like the substance because its benefits flow to corporations. What Republicans are much less comfortable with is market interventions meant to help people, especially people seeking to equalize relationships of power in the workplace.That came through in the fate of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which Republicans successfully filibustered on the same day.Story continues below advertisementThat bill takes numerous steps to redress the fact that women are still paid less than men for doing the same jobs. These include making it illegal to forbid employees from discussing pay with one another (if you don\u2019t know what your co-workers are being paid, you won\u2019t know if you\u2019re being underpaid) and allowing women who are discriminated against to join in class action suits against employers.In other words, the bill tries to empower workers by allowing them to have more information and gain more leverage to fight discrimination. This violates a fundamental precept of contemporary conservative thinking on the workplace, which is that as much power as possible should reside with employers and employees should remain disempowered and isolated from one another. If you let them file class action suits for discrimination, the next thing you know they\u2019ll be forming unions and bargaining collectively.AdvertisementSo Republicans have substantive reasons to oppose the Paycheck Fairness Act, and political reasons as well. If it passed, Biden would be able to say he\u2019s making the workplace more fair (one of his priorities), and you, good voter, might see the benefits. It\u2019s far more concrete than a bill giving subsidies to a chip maker, which might benefit the economy as a whole but seems rather distant from most people\u2019s daily lives.Story continues below advertisementThe lesson here is that over the next year and a half, from time to time a bill, even a significant one, will gain enough Republican support in the Senate to overcome a Republican filibuster. It will have to meet a pretty unusual set of conditions, helping those whom Republicans like without helping those whom Democrats like, and not allowing Biden to take too much credit for it.But we should never forget that almost every bill is still being filibustered by Republicans. That\u2019s how we should understand and talk about it. Even if that filibuster may on a few occasions be defeated, the GOP is still trying to obstruct everything Biden and Democrats want to do.Read more: Kathleen Parker: Russell Moore delivers an unflinching indictment of the Southern Baptist ConventionDana Milbank: Mo Brooks is happy to incite Capitol rioters. But stay out of his garage!Ruth Marcus: Attorney General Garland, please stop diggingGeorge F. Will: The Reaganite optimist Paul Ryan on the future of the Republican Party As long as it helps corporations and Biden won't be able to take too much credit, Republicans can live with it. Opinion: Believe it or not, the Senate actually passed a very ambitious bill",
        "author": "Paul Waldman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will Your Uploaded Mind Still Be You? (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7226",
        "date": "2019-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-your-uploaded-mind-still-be-you-11568386410?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=55",
        "text": "The brain relies on an elegant, underlying principle: A simple working part, the neuron, is repeated over and over to create complexity. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons interconnected by about 100 trillion synapses. Information flows and transforms through those vast connected networks in complex and unpredictable patterns, creating the mind. \nTo upload a person\u2019s mind, at least two technical challenges would need to be solved. First, we would need to build an artificial brain made of simulated neurons. Second, we would need to scan a person\u2019s actual, biological brain and measure exactly how its neurons are connected to each other, to be able to copy that pattern in the artificial brain. Nobody knows if those two steps would really re-create a person\u2019s mind or if other, subtler aspects of the biology of the brain must be copied as well, but it is a good starting place.\n\n\n\n\nThe first technical challenge is all but solved. Engineers already know how to create artificial, simulated neurons and connect them together through synapses. We can simulate networks of thousands or even millions of neurons. The modern wonders of artificial intelligence, like Siri or self-driving cars, depend on large artificial neural networks. Simulating a brain with 86 billion neurons is a little beyond current technology, but probably not for long. Computer technology is always improving.\n\n\nThe second challenge is much harder. A team of scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine recently used an electron microscope to map the complete \u201cconnectome\u201d\u2014the pattern of connectivity among all neurons\u2014in a roundworm, a tiny creature that has about 300 neurons. The task required almost 10 years. It\u2019s a milestone. But to upload a human brain, we probably want a scanner that doesn\u2019t kill the subject, and we would need it to scan about a hundred million times as many details. That technology doesn\u2019t yet exist. The most wildly optimistic predictions place mind uploading within a few decades, but I would not be surprised if it took centuries.\nHowever long the technology takes, it seems likely to be a part of our future, so it\u2019s worth taking a moment now to think about the implications. What will mind-uploading mean for us philosophically and morally?\nSuppose I decide to have my brain scanned and my mind uploaded. Obviously, nobody knows what the process will really entail, but here\u2019s one scenario: A conscious mind wakes up. It has my personality, memories, wisdom and emotions. It thinks it\u2019s me. It can continue to learn and remember, because adaptability is the essence of an artificial neural network. Its synaptic connections continue to change with experience. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nCarrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves in \u2018The Matrix\u2019 (1999).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Warner Bros/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nSim-me (that is, simulated me) looks around and finds himself in a simulated, videogame environment. If that world is rendered well, it will look pretty much like the real world, and his virtual body will look like a real body. Maybe sim-me is assigned an apartment in a simulated version of Manhattan, where he lives with a whole population of other uploaded people in digital bodies. Sim-me can enjoy a stroll through the digitally rendered city on a beautiful day with always perfect weather. Smell, taste and touch might be muted because of the overwhelming bandwidth required to handle that type of information. By and large, however, sim-me can think to himself, \u201cAh, that upload was worth the money. I\u2019ve reached the digital afterlife, and it\u2019s a safe and pleasant place to live. May the computing cloud last indefinitely!\u201d\nBut what does biological me think? I leave the scanning facility feeling like I\u2019ve wasted my money. I\u2019m just as mortal as I was when I walked in. Sure, somewhere in the cloud a copy of me exists. I could even have a phone conversation with that copy and argue over who is the real me. But in the end, bio-me feels cheated.\n\n\nPhilosophically, what is the relationship between sim-me and bio-me? One way to understand it is through geometry. Imagine that my life is like the rising stalk of the letter Y. I was born at the base, and as I grew up, my mind was shaped and changed along a trajectory. One day, I have my mind uploaded. At that moment, the Y branches. There are now two trajectories, each one convinced that it\u2019s the real me. Let\u2019s say the left branch is the sim-me and the right branch is the bio-me. The two branches proceed along different life paths, with different accumulating experiences. The right-hand branch will inevitably die. The left-hand branch can live indefinitely, and in it, the stalk of the Y will also live on as memories and experiences.\nHave I really achieved digital immortality? The heart of the problem lies in that word, \u201creally.\u201d Neither one of us is the \u201creal\u201d me. We form an extended, branching geometry. That geometry might not stop at two branches, either. One could imagine a much more twiggy tree that is still, collectively, \u201cme.\u201d The idea of the individual would need to be revised or thrown out entirely. \nIt\u2019s a hard world to think about with any intuitive comfort because, of course, nobody has had any experience with it yet. We\u2019re all used to going to sleep at night, experiencing a form of little death and then waking up as someone who is 99.9%, but not exactly, the same. We don\u2019t obsess over whether yesterday\u2019s me died and a new person has been foisted on us in its place. We\u2019re all so used to the process that we don\u2019t think about it much. With mind uploading, we\u2019d have to get used to a different concept of the continuity of life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBruce Boxleitner in \u2018Tron\u2019 (1982).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Buena Vista/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nIn science fiction, the philosophical conundrum of a branching geometry is usually conveniently avoided. For example, in the movie \u201cTron\u201d (1982), arguably the first really popular mind-uploading fantasy, when a person enters the digital world, his physical self magically disappears, and when he leaves the digital world, his physical self reappears. That way, you never have to think about two of him at the same time. In \u201cThe Matrix\u201d (1999), each person has only one mind that can experience the physical world or be plugged into the simulated world of the matrix. \nThis kind of gimmick is a clever storytelling device that makes the fantasy digestible to the modern mind. But when mind uploading arrives for real, we will have to adjust to personhood as something more like a data file that can be duplicated and morphed into multiple versions.\nLet\u2019s think through the implications even further. Technologically, there is nothing to stop sim-me from connecting to the real world, calling or Skyping, keeping up to date on the latest news, day-trading or remote-conferencing. Sim-me may live in sim-Manhattan with other uploaded minds, but with my personality and memories, he will love my family just as I do and will want to interact with them. Sim-me will have the same political views and want to vote; he will have the same intellectual interests and want to return to the job he remembers and still loves. He\u2019ll want to be part of the world. \n\n\n\n\u201cBiological people would become a larval stage of human.\u201d\n\n\n\nAnd what would stop him? He may live in the cloud, with a simulated instead of a physical body, but his leverage on the real world would be as good as anyone else\u2019s. We already live in a world where almost everything we do flows through cyberspace. We keep up with friends and family through text and Twitter, Facebook and Skype. We keep informed about the world through social media and internet news. Even our jobs, some of them at least, increasingly exist in an electronic space. As a university professor, for example, everything I do, including teaching lecture courses, writing articles and mentoring young scientists, could be done remotely, without my physical presence in a room. \nThe same could be said of many other jobs\u2014librarian, CEO, novelist, artist, architect, member of Congress, President. So a digital afterlife, it seems to me, wouldn\u2019t become a separate place, utopian or otherwise. Instead, it would become merely another sector of the world, inhabited by an ever-growing population of citizens just as professionally, socially and economically connected to social media as anyone else.\nIn that imagined future, who would accumulate the most power? One possible answer is the people who live in the simulated world. They\u2019ve already built a lifetime of political and economic connections. Once uploaded, they\u2019ll have centuries to accumulate more resources and to expand their empires of influence. People who live in the physical world would be mere neophytes in comparison. Biological people would become a larval stage of human, each of them aspiring to be among the lucky few who are allowed to metamorphose into the immortal elites who own the world.\nA second possible answer is that the most powerful people would be those who control access to the simulated world. Think about how religions work. People at the top tell you that if you behave well, you\u2019ll enter heaven, and if you behave badly, you may end up in eternal punishment. A lot of wars have been fought based on that kind of motivation. We\u2019re told that suicide bombers are promised rewards in the afterlife. And yet, religious demagogues offer an afterlife that can\u2019t be objectively confirmed. It\u2019s an insubstantial carrot and stick. \nImagine the coercive power of an afterlife that is directly confirmable. The public could Skype with people who are in a digital heaven and (if the technology turns very dark) in a digital hell. Advertisers have known for a long time that nothing convinces people as powerfully as personal testimonial. Imagine if we all had access to the testimonials of people actually in the afterlife. Now imagine a political leader who offers that objectively confirmable heaven in return for loyalty and hell in return for betrayal. At that point, the gatekeepers of the digital afterlife gain a level of power that is impossible for anyone today to really understand.\n\n\nMore Saturday Essays\n\n\n\n\nWilliam Barr: When I Confronted Trump About Election Fraud\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nThe Lonely Odyssey of Chronic Illness\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nMarch 2020: How The Fed Averted Economic Disaster\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nWhat\u2019s Really at Stake in America\u2019s History Wars?\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAnd yet, a future with mind-uploading may not be entirely dark. It would allow for the accumulation of wisdom. Currently, we can accumulate knowledge. The invention of writing, five thousand years ago, gave us our primary tool for trans-generational accumulation of knowledge, and it also gave us the modern world. \nBut a wise, thoughtful mind has never been able to live across generations. Mind uploading would give us a powerful new way to accumulate skill and wisdom. It could cause as much of a change in human civilization as writing did.\nAnd mind uploading may give us one more remarkable benefit. Currently, we are not a space-faring species, and it\u2019s hard to imagine how we ever can be. Our bodies are fragile, the cosmic rays that permeate space are toxic to us, and we don\u2019t live long enough to go anywhere interesting. The fastest rockets today would take about 50,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star. \nYet all of these obstacles could be overcome by mind uploading. We could have whole colonies of minds, keeping each other company in a virtual environment, sent off to explore the galaxy without any intrinsic limit of time or space. The only way for us to become a truly space-faring civilization might be not by building a spaceship environment to house the human body but by building a platform to carry the human mind. Arguably, mind uploading is humanity\u2019s most obvious path into a deep future unburdened by our mortality or the fate of our terrestrial home.\nDr. Graziano is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from his new book \u201cRethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience,\u201d which will be published by W.W. Norton on Sept. 17. The day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer. How will we coexist with our digital replicas? ",
        "author": "Michael S.A. Graziano"
    },
    {
        "title": "Our Quest for Meaning in the Heavens (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7227",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-quest-for-meaning-in-the-heavens-11561733749?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=59",
        "text": "Rather, they were more like humanity dipping a toe in the cosmic ocean, finding it too cold and lifeless to enter, and deciding to stay at home. No human being has traveled beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo missions. And no astronauts have gone to space in an American craft since 2011, when the space shuttle program came to an end.\nIn recent years, both government agencies and private companies, like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, have announced plans to go back to the moon, and beyond. In May, Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n said that Americans will land on the moon by 2024, and NASA hopes to send astronauts to Mars by 2033. But even if those ambitious goals are met, the fundamental challenges of space travel have not changed since the days of Apollo: Space is simply too big and too harsh for human beings to get very far from Earth. No planet or moon in our solar system seems to be capable of sustaining life, and the nearest star to our sun would take some 19,000 years to reach with the fastest currently available engines.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe classical celestial spheres, depicted in a 17th century engraving.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat the Space Age has changed, then, is not mainly our ability to venture into outer space, which remains strictly limited. Rather, its most important effect has been to transform the way we think about the universe and our place in it. Ever since the earliest recorded speculation about the heavens, in the Bible and ancient Greek philosophy, human beings have always looked to the stars to understand our place in Creation. What is new about the Space Age is that it brings home to us, in concrete ways, a possibility that would have shocked and dismayed our ancestors: that the heavens might be empty.\n\n\nOne sign of this change is the way we use the word \u201cspace\u201d itself. For most of history, when human beings looked up to the sky, they called what they saw some version of \u201cthe heavens,\u201d a realm different from and superior to the Earth. In the Bible, the heavens are a sign of God\u2019s power and presence: \u201cThe heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork,\u201d says Psalm 19. For Plato, the sight of the heavens is responsible for the birth of science: \u201cNone of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens,\u201d he writes in the Timaeus. This is perhaps a secular way of saying the same thing as Genesis\u2019 account of the fourth day of Creation, when God declares, \u201cLet there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.\u201d\nIt was thanks to the heavens\u2014the spectacle of sun, moon and stars in the sky\u2014that the Abrahamic faiths, under the influence of Greek philosophy, developed the concept of heaven, a supernatural realm where souls go after death to dwell in the presence of God. Today, however, the term \u201cthe heavens\u201d has an antiquated sound, and we speak of the realm outside the Earth simply as \u201couter space.\u201d This is as neutral a term as possible. It refers not to what is in space\u2014the planets and moons and stars\u2014but simply to the space itself, as if it were a container. \n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat do you hope humanity will one day find in outer space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThis reflects two key facts about the modern way of thinking about the cosmos. First, space is mostly empty: To express the percentage of the universe that consists of matter requires a decimal followed by 20 zeros. Second, the space beyond Earth is continuous with the space in which we ourselves move on Earth: There is no difference in kind between the Earth and the heavens. Both can be mapped on the same grid.\nThis way of thinking about the universe is recent in human history. Until the Renaissance, most people in the West lived in a cosmos that combined scriptural and Greek philosophical ideas into a harmonious whole. In this world picture\u2014which C.S. Lewis deftly evoked in his 1964 book \u201cThe Discarded Image\u201d\u2014Earth sat at the center of a series of concentric spheres, each defined by the orbit of a planet, with the outermost sphere carrying the \u201cfixed stars.\u201d God set these spheres in motion to rotate at various speeds, which accounts for the movement of the stars across the sky at night and the movement of the planets against the field of stars. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSandra Bullock in the 2013 film \u2018Gravity.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Warner Bros/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThings on Earth were composed of mixtures of the four elements\u2014earth, fire, air and water\u2014but the spheres were made of a fifth element, or quintessence, that was entirely different and unchanging. In short, an ancient or medieval person who looked up at the night sky would have beheld an orderly and logical universe that bore the signature of an intelligent creator.\nIt is hard, in the Space Age, to imagine what that might have felt like. For space flight is the culmination of a centuries-long revolution in the way we think about the cosmos, one that began in the 16th and 17th centuries with the scientific work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. By the time that revolution was complete, humanity had learned that Earth is not the center of the universe but simply a planet circling an ordinary star, one of countless stars in a galaxy that is one of countless galaxies. There is no essential difference between what happens \u201cdown here\u201d on Earth and \u201cup there\u201d in the sky. Newton\u2019s theory of gravity showed that the force that causes an apple to fall to the ground is identical to the force that causes Jupiter to circle the sun.\nAlmost as soon as these ideas became current, thinkers recognized that they posed a serious metaphysical challenge. Astronomy doesn\u2019t disprove religion, of course, but it does present problems for those who want to see an intelligible message in the cosmos. In the early 17th century, the English poet\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Donne\n\n\n\n observed that humanity had lost its bearings in the universe: \u201cThe sun is lost, and the earth, and no man\u2019s wit/Can well direct him where to look for it.\u201d The heavens, once the setting for the Earth and human beings, had become space, a void in which we wander.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blaise Pascal,\n\n\n\n one of the greatest mathematicians and theologians of that era, famously wrote that \u201cthe eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cThe coldness of empty space is intolerable to human beings, and not just physically. \u201d\n\n\n\nThe coldness of empty space is intolerable to human beings, and not just physically. One of the key achievements of the Space Age was to build minute environments\u2014an Apollo capsule, a space shuttle, a space station\u2014that can preserve life in the middle of space. But these remain incredibly precarious bubbles in the void. The power of the 2013 movie \u201cGravity\u201d came from the vulnerability of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sandra Bullock\u2019s\n\n\n\n astronaut as she leapfrogged from spaceship to space station, like a rock climber looking for handholds on a sheer surface.\nIn turn, these tiny steps into outer space have transformed the way we think about the Earth itself. For us, Earth is another kind of bubble in space\u2014the \u201cblue marble\u201d of the famous photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 17, the last moon mission, in 1972. We know that only a thin layer of atmosphere protects the Earth from the unbreathable void. It is no coincidence that the Space Age is also the age of ecological awareness and climate fears: Our explorations of space have brought home to us in a new way the understanding that human beings are passengers on a planet-sized spaceship, which we will never be able to replace if it is broken. As\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan\n\n\n\n wrote, \u201cLike it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe \u2018Blue Marble\u2019 photograph of the Earth, taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in December 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nEven if we maintain our planet in good condition, the Space Age has made our cosmic loneliness more acute. That is why, today, the most urgent and exciting cosmic endeavors have to do not with carrying humans into space but bringing space closer to Earth, by finding proof that the universe contains Earthlike environments that may be hospitable to life. \nIn 2009, NASA\u2019s Kepler Space Telescope began searching the skies for exoplanets, which it detects by observing the distortion in the light from distant stars when planets pass in front of them. Kepler, which ceased operation in 2018, and other telescopes have discovered thousands of planets in other solar systems, some of which lie in the so-called \u201cGoldilocks zone\u201d\u2014neither too hot nor too cold for water, and therefore life, to exist. \nThere is also hope of finding organic matter closer to home. Just last week, NASA\u2019s Mars Curiosity Rover detected a plume of methane gas that excited astrobiologists, since on Earth methane is often produced by microbes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA visualization of the nebula Gum 29, made for the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015.\n\n\n\nBut the Holy Grail of the Space Age, the dream that has fueled countless dreams and fictions, is the discovery of intelligent life\u2014not just carbon-based molecules or liquid water but beings with whom we can communicate. Such a discovery would end the centuries of cosmic isolation that modern human beings have experienced when they look up at the night sky. \nOf course, dreams of alien contact often take the form of nightmares: The first alien-contact novel,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.G. Wells\u2019s\n\n\n\n 1897 \u201cThe War of the Worlds,\u201d imagined the aliens as ruthless invaders, on the model of Europeans conquering the Americas.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Hawking\n\n\n\n used the same analogy in 2010: \u201cIf aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Columbus\n\n\n\n first landed in America, which didn\u2019t turn out very well for the Native Americans.\u201d\nSuch fears haven\u2019t stopped us from searching the skies for signals of intelligent life. This year marks the 20th anniversary of SETI@home, based at the University of California at Berkeley, a project that enlists the computers of volunteers to analyze data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This month, Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million effort launched by Russian-born entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Milner,\n\n\n\n released a huge trove of astronomical data that it compiled in its own search for signals. Even UFOs, once the province of credulous conspiracy theorists, have recently become almost respectable: This month Congress was briefed on reports that U.S. Navy pilots have encountered flying objects that are different from any known type of aircraft.\nNone of these efforts, however, has come up with proof of alien intelligences. We are still asking the question that the physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Enrico Fermi\n\n\n\n posed in 1950, which has become known as Fermi\u2019s Paradox: \u201cWhere is everybody?\u201d The universe contains billions of galaxies, each of which contains billions of stars that have existed for billions of years. It defies logic to say that life would have evolved only once, on our planet, and nowhere else. So why isn\u2019t there any sign of life elsewhere?\nOne possible answer, a frightening one, is the economist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robin Hanson\u2019s\n\n\n\n notion of a \u201cGreat Filter\u201d\u2014the idea that anywhere life evolves, it will eventually face a hurdle that is almost impossible to overcome. The big question for the future of humanity is whether that filter lies behind us\u2014in the evolution of intelligence, for instance\u2014or ahead of us: Perhaps any sufficiently technologically advanced species will eventually destroy itself through war or pollution. Alternatively, it might be that space and time are simply too big. Maybe the universe is full of voices that we will never hear because they are too far away or too long ago.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe \u2018Wow! signal,\u2019 recorded by astronomer Jerry Ehman in 1977.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n\nStill, our desire to humanize the cosmos, to find meaning in the chaos of the stars, seems to be permanent. One of the most thrilling artifacts of the Space Age\u2014more important, potentially, even than the moon landing\u2014is a piece of paper that was generated at Ohio State University\u2019s Big Ear observatory on August 15, 1977. It is nothing more than a column of numbers and letters, but it records the discovery of a radio signal that behaves just the way we would expect an extraterrestrial transmission to behave. \nThe astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jerry Ehman,\n\n\n\n surprised at what he saw, wrote the word \u201cWow!\u201d in the margin, and ever since it has been known as \u201cthe Wow! signal.\u201d More conventional explanations of the signal have been offered, and no one has ever been able to find it again, but it endures as a hint, a possibility, of what the Space Age might still deliver: proof that the infinite spaces aren\u2019t silent after all.\n\n\nMore Saturday Essays\n\n\n\n\nWilliam Barr: When I Confronted Trump About Election Fraud\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nThe Lonely Odyssey of Chronic Illness\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nMarch 2020: How The Fed Averted Economic Disaster\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nWhat\u2019s Really at Stake in America\u2019s History Wars?\nFebruary 11, 2022 Fifty years after the first moon landing, outer space remains a mirror of humanity\u2019s hopes and fears ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "For NASA, It Should Be Mars or Bust (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7228",
        "date": "2020-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-nasa-it-should-be-mars-or-bust-11608306732?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=9",
        "text": "The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Artemis\n\n\n\n program is NASA\u2019s centerpiece today for human spaceflight. Its aim is to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024, but the prospects for that date are dim. There is still no well-defined mission plan, and work on the Artemis rocket and capsule are behind schedule and over budget. \nAs for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA has somehow always been a couple of tantalizing decades away, thanks to the shifting priorities of successive presidents. Consider the switch-ups just since 1988, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George H.W. Bush\n\n\n\n pushed for a return to the moon, to be followed by a mission to Mars. Bill Clinton canceled the lunar plan (to say nothing of Mars) and embraced the International Space Station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\n\n\n\n revived the moon-Mars sequence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n nixed the moon part of the program, saying that NASA had \u201cbeen there, done that,\u201d and opted instead for an asteroid mission and then Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\n\n\n\n rejected the Mars plan, choosing instead to reach the moon with Artemis, but NASA still says that Mars is on its agenda.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Andrew Morgan conducts a space walk in Earth orbit in 2019 to upgrade power systems on the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe idea of yoking the two destinations together may be politically appealing, but fiscal reality suggests that it will be one or the other, the moon or Mars. Congresses and presidents have often rewarded NASA\u2019s astounding achievements with punishing budget cuts. The Apollo program was arguably the greatest engineering and exploration feat in human history, but the U.S. government treated its final missions as the end of a public works project; little was done to build on its success and hard-won institutional knowledge. At the height of Apollo\u2019s development in 1966, NASA accounted for 6.6% of federal discretionary spending. Today, that figure is about 1.6%, a figure that has barely risen to accommodate the current lunar aspirations, let alone the exploration of another planetary system in our lifetimes.\n\n\nWhy shift gears and make Mars the priority? NASA estimates that just landing on the moon again\u2014not building a base there\u2014will cost $30 billion and says that lessons learned on the moon can be applied to future Mars plans. Broadly speaking, this is true, in the way that Antarctica and the Mojave are both deserts, and survival skills cultivated in one might help in the other. But the tools necessary to do anything useful in the two environments are very different and require, for the most part, very different technologies\u2014including, crucially, an entirely different landing vehicle to navigate the Martian atmosphere. \nThe moon\u2019s great advantage, of course, is that it\u2019s easier to reach and we\u2019ve done it before. But for all the difficulties of landing on Mars and establishing a human presence there, it is clearly the superior prospect for sustainable exploration. Mars is a bona fide planet with air, ice, wind, weather and usable resources. It also has real similarities to Earth. A Mars day is just over 24 hours long. The planet, on average, is just 30 degrees colder than Antarctica. Its gravity is one-third that of Earth (versus the moon, which is about one-sixth). It has moons and its own complex geology, from the highest mountain in the solar system to a canyon network that makes the Grand Canyon seem a mere local attraction by comparison. It could be a home for people in a way that the moon never will.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut John Glenn , left, listens to aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, Ala., in November 1962.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Interim Archives/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe American space program has always aimed at putting people on Mars. Before the word astronaut had been coined or an agency named NASA existed, there was \u201cDas Marsprojekt,\u201d a work of speculative fiction written in 1948 by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun,\n\n\n\n who developed rocket technology for Nazi Germany before escaping to the arms of the American military. He built the rocket that would put Explorer 1, the first American satellite, in space and became the leading engineer and best-known promoter of the early U.S. space program.\nThe plot of \u201cDas Marsprojekt\u201d was no mere thought experiment or flight of fancy\u2014no ray guns, no aliens in flying saucers. It amounted to the first serious study of how to get to Mars, and it would later be stripped of its fictional elements and published in the U.S. in 1952. Von Braun\u2019s plan involved a tentative moon program, space shuttles, a space station and a flotilla of reusable rockets. Once those were developed, it would be time to send astronauts to the Red Planet.\n\n\n\n\u201cWater is abundant on Mars in the form of ice. Melted down, it would flood the p After decades of nostalgia for the Apollo program, it\u2019s time for NASA to send astronauts on a radical new adventure, worthy of America\u2019s pioneering spirit ",
        "author": "David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "For NASA, It Should Be Mars or Bust (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7229",
        "date": "2020-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-nasa-it-should-be-mars-or-bust-11608306732?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=36",
        "text": "The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Artemis\n\n\n\n program is NASA\u2019s centerpiece today for human spaceflight. Its aim is to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024, but the prospects for that date are dim. There is still no well-defined mission plan, and work on the Artemis rocket and capsule are behind schedule and over budget. \nAs for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA has somehow always been a couple of tantalizing decades away, thanks to the shifting priorities of successive presidents. Consider the switch-ups just since 1988, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George H.W. Bush\n\n\n\n pushed for a return to the moon, to be followed by a mission to Mars. Bill Clinton canceled the lunar plan (to say nothing of Mars) and embraced the International Space Station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\n\n\n\n revived the moon-Mars sequence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n nixed the moon part of the program, saying that NASA had \u201cbeen there, done that,\u201d and opted instead for an asteroid mission and then Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\n\n\n\n rejected the Mars plan, choosing instead to reach the moon with Artemis, but NASA still says that Mars is on its agenda.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Andrew Morgan conducts a space walk in Earth orbit in 2019 to upgrade power systems on the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe idea of yoking the two destinations together may be politically appealing, but fiscal reality suggests that it will be one or the other, the moon or Mars. Congresses and presidents have often rewarded NASA\u2019s astounding achievements with punishing budget cuts. The Apollo program was arguably the greatest engineering and exploration feat in human history, but the U.S. government treated its final missions as the end of a public works project; little was done to build on its success and hard-won institutional knowledge. At the height of Apollo\u2019s development in 1966, NASA accounted for 6.6% of federal discretionary spending. Today, that figure is about 1.6%, a figure that has barely risen to accommodate the current lunar aspirations, let alone the exploration of another planetary system in our lifetimes.\n\n\nWhy shift gears and make Mars the priority? NASA estimates that just landing on the moon again\u2014not building a base there\u2014will cost $30 billion and says that lessons learned on the moon can be applied to future Mars plans. Broadly speaking, this is true, in the way that Antarctica and the Mojave are both deserts, and survival skills cultivated in one might help in the other. But the tools necessary to do anything useful in the two environments are very different and require, for the most part, very different technologies\u2014including, crucially, an entirely different landing vehicle to navigate the Martian atmosphere. \nThe moon\u2019s great advantage, of course, is that it\u2019s easier to reach and we\u2019ve done it before. But for all the difficulties of landing on Mars and establishing a human presence there, it is clearly the superior prospect for sustainable exploration. Mars is a bona fide planet with air, ice, wind, weather and usable resources. It also has real similarities to Earth. A Mars day is just over 24 hours long. The planet, on average, is just 30 degrees colder than Antarctica. Its gravity is one-third that of Earth (versus the moon, which is about one-sixth). It has moons and its own complex geology, from the highest mountain in the solar system to a canyon network that makes the Grand Canyon seem a mere local attraction by comparison. It could be a home for people in a way that the moon never will.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut John Glenn , left, listens to aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, Ala., in November 1962.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Interim Archives/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe American space program has always aimed at putting people on Mars. Before the word astronaut had been coined or an agency named NASA existed, there was \u201cDas Marsprojekt,\u201d a work of speculative fiction written in 1948 by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun,\n\n\n\n who developed rocket technology for Nazi Germany before escaping to the arms of the American military. He built the rocket that would put Explorer 1, the first American satellite, in space and became the leading engineer and best-known promoter of the early U.S. space program.\nThe plot of \u201cDas Marsprojekt\u201d was no mere thought experiment or flight of fancy\u2014no ray guns, no aliens in flying saucers. It amounted to the first serious study of how to get to Mars, and it would later be stripped of its fictional elements and published in the U.S. in 1952. Von Braun\u2019s plan involved a tentative moon program, space shuttles, a space station and a flotilla of reusable rockets. Once those were developed, it would be time to send astronauts to the Red Planet.\n\n\n\n\u201cWater is abundant on Mars in the form of ice. Melted down, it would flood the p After decades of nostalgia for the Apollo program, it\u2019s time for NASA to send astronauts on a radical new adventure, worthy of America\u2019s pioneering spirit ",
        "author": "David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "For NASA, It Should Be Mars or Bust (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7230",
        "date": "2020-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-nasa-it-should-be-mars-or-bust-11608306732?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=40",
        "text": "The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Artemis\n\n\n\n program is NASA\u2019s centerpiece today for human spaceflight. Its aim is to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2024, but the prospects for that date are dim. There is still no well-defined mission plan, and work on the Artemis rocket and capsule are behind schedule and over budget. \n\n\n\n\nAs for sending astronauts to Mars, NASA has somehow always been a couple of tantalizing decades away, thanks to the shifting priorities of successive presidents. Consider the switch-ups just since 1988, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George H.W. Bush\n\n\n\n pushed for a return to the moon, to be followed by a mission to Mars. Bill Clinton canceled the lunar plan (to say nothing of Mars) and embraced the International Space Station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George W. Bush\n\n\n\n revived the moon-Mars sequence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n nixed the moon part of the program, saying that NASA had \u201cbeen there, done that,\u201d and opted instead for an asteroid mission and then Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\n\n\n\n rejected the Mars plan, choosing instead to reach the moon with Artemis, but NASA still says that Mars is on its agenda.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Andrew Morgan conducts a space walk in Earth orbit in 2019 to upgrade power systems on the International Space Station.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe idea of yoking the two destinations together may be politically appealing, but fiscal reality suggests that it will be one or the other, the moon or Mars. Congresses and presidents have often rewarded NASA\u2019s astounding achievements with punishing budget cuts. The Apollo program was arguably the greatest engineering and exploration feat in human history, but the U.S. government treated its final missions as the end of a public works project; little was done to build on its success and hard-won institutional knowledge. At the height of Apollo\u2019s development in 1966, NASA accounted for 6.6% of federal discretionary spending. Today, that figure is about 1.6%, a figure that has barely risen to accommodate the current lunar aspirations, let alone the exploration of another planetary system in our lifetimes.\n\n\nWhy shift gears and make Mars the priority? NASA estimates that just landing on the moon again\u2014not building a base there\u2014will cost $30 billion and says that lessons learned on the moon can be applied to future Mars plans. Broadly speaking, this is true, in the way that Antarctica and the Mojave are both deserts, and survival skills cultivated in one might help in the other. But the tools necessary to do anything useful in the two environments are very different and require, for the most part, very different technologies\u2014including, crucially, an entirely different landing vehicle to navigate the Martian atmosphere. \nThe moon\u2019s great advantage, of course, is that it\u2019s easier to reach and we\u2019ve done it before. But for all the difficulties of landing on Mars and establishing a human presence there, it is clearly the superior prospect for sustainable exploration. Mars is a bona fide planet with air, ice, wind, weather and usable resources. It also has real similarities to Earth. A Mars day is just over 24 hours long. The planet, on average, is just 30 degrees colder than Antarctica. Its gravity is one-third that of Earth (versus the moon, which is about one-sixth). It has moons and its own complex geology, from the highest mountain in the solar system to a canyon network that makes the Grand Canyon seem a mere local attraction by comparison. It could be a home for people in a way that the moon never will.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut John Glenn , left, listens to aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville, Ala., in November 1962.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Interim Archives/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe American space program has always aimed at putting people on Mars. Before the word astronaut had been coined or an agency named NASA existed, there was \u201cDas Marsprojekt,\u201d a work of speculative fiction written in 1948 by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wernher von Braun,\n\n\n\n who developed rocket technology for Nazi Germany before escaping to the arms of the American military. He built the rocket that would put Explorer 1, the first American satellite, in space and became the leading engineer and best-known promoter of the early U.S. space program.\nThe plot of \u201cDas Marsprojekt\u201d was no mere thought experiment or flight of fancy\u2014no ray guns, no aliens in flying saucers. It amounted to the first serious study of how to get to Mars, and it would later be stripped of its fictional elements and published in the U.S. in 1952. Von Braun\u2019s plan involved a tentative moon program, space shuttles, a space station and a flotilla of reusable rockets. Once those were developed, it would be time to send astronauts to the Red Planet.\n\n\n\n\u201cWater is abundant on Mars in the form of ice. Melted down, it would flood t After decades of nostalgia for the Apollo program, it\u2019s time for NASA to send astronauts on a radical new adventure, worthy of America\u2019s pioneering spirit ",
        "author": "David W. Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7231",
        "date": "2017-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-smartphones-hijack-our-minds-1507307811?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=86",
        "text": "The smartphone is unique in the annals of personal technology. We keep the gadget within reach more or less around the clock, and we use it in countless ways, consulting its apps and checking its messages and heeding its alerts scores of times a day. The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn\u2019t imagine life without the device.\nWe love our phones for good reasons. It\u2019s hard to imagine another product that has provided so many useful functions in such a handy form. But while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition? \n\n\n\n\nScientists have begun exploring that question\u2014and what they\u2019re discovering is both fascinating and troubling. Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren\u2019t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adrian Ward,\n\n\n\n a cognitive psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been studying the way smartphones and the internet affect our thoughts and judgments for a decade. In his own work, as well as that of others, he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance. \n\n\nA 2015 Journal of Experimental Psychology study, involving 166 subjects, found that when people\u2019s phones beep or buzz while they\u2019re in the middle of a challenging task, their focus wavers, and their work gets sloppier\u2014whether they check the phone or not. Another 2015 study, which involved 41 iPhone users and appeared in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Serge Bloch\n \n\n\n\nThe earlier research didn\u2019t explain whether and how smartphones differ from the many other sources of distraction that crowd our lives. Dr. Ward suspected that our attachment to our phones has grown so intense that their mere presence might diminish our intelligence. Two years ago, he and three colleagues\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kristen Duke\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ayelet Gneezy\n\n\n\n from the University of California, San Diego, and Disney Research behavioral scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maarten Bos\n\n\n\n \u2014began an ingenious experiment to test his hunch.\nThe researchers recruited 520 undergraduate students at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged \u201cavailable cognitive capacity,\u201d a measure of how fully a person\u2019s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed \u201cfluid intelligence,\u201d a person\u2019s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects\u2019 smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.\n\n\n\n\u201cAs the phone\u2019s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe results were striking. In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone\u2019s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. \nIn subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn\u2019t been a distraction\u2014that they hadn\u2019t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking. \nA second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.\n\n\nRelated Reading Why You Might Spend $1,000 on a Smartphone How Apple\u2019s Pricey New iPhone X Tests Economic Theory The Smartphone Generation vs. Free Speech \n\n\nIn an April article in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Dr. Ward and his colleagues wrote that the \u201cintegration of smartphones into daily life\u201d appears to cause a \u201cbrain drain\u201d that can diminish such vital mental skills as \u201clearning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.\u201d Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we\u2019re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking. The fact that most of us now habitually keep our phones \u201cnearby and in sight,\u201d the researchers noted, only magnifies the mental toll.\nDr. Ward\u2019s findings are consistent with other recently published research. In a similar but smaller 2014 study (involving 47 subjects) in the journal Social Psychology, psychologists at the University of Southern Maine found that people who had their phones in view, albeit turned off, during two demanding tests of attention and cognition made significantly more errors than did a control group whose phones remained out of sight. (The two groups performed about the same on a set of easier tests.) \nIn another study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in April, researchers examined how smartphones affected learning in a lecture class with 160 students at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. They found that students who didn\u2019t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn\u2019t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly. A study of 91 secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students\u2019 examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.\nIt isn\u2019t just our reasoning that takes a hit when phones are around. Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well. Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we\u2019re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Serge Bloch\n \n\n\n\nIn a study conducted at the University of Essex in the U.K., 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for 10 minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, while half had no phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. \u201cThe mere presence of mobile phones,\u201d the researchers reported in 2013 in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, \u201cinhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust\u201d and diminished \u201cthe extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.\u201d The downsides were strongest when \u201ca personally meaningful topic\u201d was being discussed. The experiment\u2019s results were validated in a subsequent study by Virginia Tech researchers, published in 2016 in the journal Environment and Behavior.\nThe evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we\u2019re not even aware of. \nScientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking\u2014that has, in the psychological jargon, \u201csalience.\u201d Media and communications devices, from telephones to TV sets, have always tapped into this instinct. Whether turned on or switched off, they promise an unending supply of information and experiences. By design, they grab and hold our attention in ways natural objects never could. \n\n\nMore Saturday Essays\n\n\n\n\nWilliam Barr: When I Confronted Trump About Election Fraud\nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nThe Lonely Odyssey of Chronic Illness\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nMarch 2020: How The Fed Averted Economic Disaster\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nWhat\u2019s Really at Stake in America\u2019s History Wars?\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\nCan the Technology Behind Covid Vaccines Cure Other Diseases? \nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nBut even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a \u201csupernormal stimulus,\u201d one that can \u201chijack\u201d attention whenever it is part of our surroundings\u2014which it always is. Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can\u2019t take our minds off it. \nThe irony of the smartphone is that the qualities we find most appealing\u2014its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability\u2014are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds. Phone makers like Apple and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Samsung\n\n\n and app writers like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n and Google design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours, and we thank them by buying millions of the gadgets and downloading billions of the apps every year. \nA quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it isn\u2019t that simple. The way a media device is designed and used exerts at least as much influence over our minds as does the information that the device unlocks. \n\n\n\n\u201cPeople\u2019s knowledge may dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data.\u201d\n\n\n\nAs strange as it might seem, people\u2019s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores. In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers\u2014led by the Columbia University psychologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Betsy Sparrow\n\n\n\n and including the late Harvard memory expert\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Wegner\n\n\n\n \u2014had a group of volunteers read 40 brief, factual statements (such as \u201cThe space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003\u201d) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be immediately erased. \nAfterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn\u2019t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the \u201cGoogle effect\u201d and noted its broad implications: \u201cBecause search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.\u201d \nNow that our phones have made it so easy to gather information online, our brains are likely offloading even more of the work of remembering to technology. If the only thing at stake were memories of trivial facts, that might not matter. But, as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, \u201cthe art of remembering is the art of thinking.\u201d Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.\n\n\n\n\u201cWe aren\u2019t very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones.\u201d\n\n\n\nThis story has a twist. It turns out that we aren\u2019t very good at distinguishing the knowledge we keep in our heads from the information we find on our phones or computers. As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though \u201ctheir own mental capacities\u201d had generated the information, not their devices. \u201cThe advent of the \u2018information age\u2019 seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,\u201d the scholars concluded, even though \u201cthey may know ever less about the world around them.\u201d \nThat insight sheds light on our society\u2019s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you\u2019ll believe anything it tells you.\nData, the novelist and critic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cynthia Ozick\n\n\n\n once wrote, is \u201cmemory without history.\u201d Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains. When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning. Upgrading our gadgets won\u2019t solve the problem. We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.\nMr. Carr is the author of \u201cThe Shallows\u201d and \u201cUtopia Is Creepy,\u201d among other books. Research suggests that as the brain grows dependent on phone technology, the intellect weakens. ",
        "author": "Nicholas Carr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Our Quest for Meaning in the Heavens (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7232",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-quest-for-meaning-in-the-heavens-11561733749?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=54",
        "text": "Rather, they were more like humanity dipping a toe in the cosmic ocean, finding it too cold and lifeless to enter, and deciding to stay at home. No human being has traveled beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo missions. And no astronauts have gone to space in an American craft since 2011, when the space shuttle program came to an end.\nIn recent years, both government agencies and private companies, like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, have announced plans to go back to the moon, and beyond. In May, Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n said that Americans will land on the moon by 2024, and NASA hopes to send astronauts to Mars by 2033. But even if those ambitious goals are met, the fundamental challenges of space travel have not changed since the days of Apollo: Space is simply too big and too harsh for human beings to get very far from Earth. No planet or moon in our solar system seems to be capable of sustaining life, and the nearest star to our sun would take some 19,000 years to reach with the fastest currently available engines.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe classical celestial spheres, depicted in a 17th century engraving.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n\nWhat the Space Age has changed, then, is not mainly our ability to venture into outer space, which remains strictly limited. Rather, its most important effect has been to transform the way we think about the universe and our place in it. Ever since the earliest recorded speculation about the heavens, in the Bible and ancient Greek philosophy, human beings have always looked to the stars to understand our place in Creation. What is new about the Space Age is that it brings home to us, in concrete ways, a possibility that would have shocked and dismayed our ancestors: that the heavens might be empty.\n\n\nOne sign of this change is the way we use the word \u201cspace\u201d itself. For most of history, when human beings looked up to the sky, they called what they saw some version of \u201cthe heavens,\u201d a realm different from and superior to the Earth. In the Bible, the heavens are a sign of God\u2019s power and presence: \u201cThe heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork,\u201d says Psalm 19. For Plato, the sight of the heavens is responsible for the birth of science: \u201cNone of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens,\u201d he writes in the Timaeus. This is perhaps a secular way of saying the same thing as Genesis\u2019 account of the fourth day of Creation, when God declares, \u201cLet there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.\u201d\nIt was thanks to the heavens\u2014the spectacle of sun, moon and stars in the sky\u2014that the Abrahamic faiths, under the influence of Greek philosophy, developed the concept of heaven, a supernatural realm where souls go after death to dwell in the presence of God. Today, however, the term \u201cthe heavens\u201d has an antiquated sound, and we speak of the realm outside the Earth simply as \u201couter space.\u201d This is as neutral a term as possible. It refers not to what is in space\u2014the planets and moons and stars\u2014but simply to the space itself, as if it were a container. \n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat do you hope humanity will one day find in outer space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThis reflects two key facts about the modern way of thinking about the cosmos. First, space is mostly empty: To express the percentage of the universe that consists of matter requires a decimal followed by 20 zeros. Second, the space beyond Earth is continuous with the space in which we ourselves move on Earth: There is no difference in kind between the Earth and the heavens. Both can be mapped on the same grid.\nThis way of thinking about the universe is recent in human history. Until the Renaissance, most people in the West lived in a cosmos that combined scriptural and Greek philosophical ideas into a harmonious whole. In this world picture\u2014which C.S. Lewis deftly evoked in his 1964 book \u201cThe Discarded Image\u201d\u2014Earth sat at the center of a series of concentric spheres, each defined by the orbit of a planet, with the outermost sphere carrying the \u201cfixed stars.\u201d God set these spheres in motion to rotate at various speeds, which accounts for the movement of the stars across the sky at night and the movement of the planets against the field of stars. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSandra Bullock in the 2013 film \u2018Gravity.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Warner Bros/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThings on Earth were composed of mixtures of the four elements\u2014earth, fire, air and water\u2014but the spheres were made of a fifth element, or quintessence, that was entirely different and unchanging. In short, an ancient or medieval person who looked up at the night sky would have beh Fifty years after the first moon landing, outer space remains a mirror of humanity\u2019s hopes and fears ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Our Quest for Meaning in the Heavens (WSJ: The Saturday Essay) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7233",
        "date": "2019-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-quest-for-meaning-in-the-heavens-11561733749?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=71",
        "text": "Rather, they were more like humanity dipping a toe in the cosmic ocean, finding it too cold and lifeless to enter, and deciding to stay at home. No human being has traveled beyond low Earth orbit since the end of the Apollo missions. And no astronauts have gone to space in an American craft since 2011, when the space shuttle program came to an end.\nIn recent years, both government agencies and private companies, like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 Blue Origin and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX, have announced plans to go back to the moon, and beyond. In May, Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n said that Americans will land on the moon by 2024, and NASA hopes to send astronauts to Mars by 2033. But even if those ambitious goals are met, the fundamental challenges of space travel have not changed since the days of Apollo: Space is simply too big and too harsh for human beings to get very far from Earth. No planet or moon in our solar system seems to be capable of sustaining life, and the nearest star to our sun would take some 19,000 years to reach with the fastest currently available engines.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe classical celestial spheres, depicted in a 17th century engraving.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy Stock Photo\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWhat the Space Age has changed, then, is not mainly our ability to venture into outer space, which remains strictly limited. Rather, its most important effect has been to transform the way we think about the universe and our place in it. Ever since the earliest recorded speculation about the heavens, in the Bible and ancient Greek philosophy, human beings have always looked to the stars to understand our place in Creation. What is new about the Space Age is that it brings home to us, in concrete ways, a possibility that would have shocked and dismayed our ancestors: that the heavens might be empty.\n\n\nOne sign of this change is the way we use the word \u201cspace\u201d itself. For most of history, when human beings looked up to the sky, they called what they saw some version of \u201cthe heavens,\u201d a realm different from and superior to the Earth. In the Bible, the heavens are a sign of God\u2019s power and presence: \u201cThe heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork,\u201d says Psalm 19. For Plato, the sight of the heavens is responsible for the birth of science: \u201cNone of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens,\u201d he writes in the Timaeus. This is perhaps a secular way of saying the same thing as Genesis\u2019 account of the fourth day of Creation, when God declares, \u201cLet there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.\u201d\nIt was thanks to the heavens\u2014the spectacle of sun, moon and stars in the sky\u2014that the Abrahamic faiths, under the influence of Greek philosophy, developed the concept of heaven, a supernatural realm where souls go after death to dwell in the presence of God. Today, however, the term \u201cthe heavens\u201d has an antiquated sound, and we speak of the realm outside the Earth simply as \u201couter space.\u201d This is as neutral a term as possible. It refers not to what is in space\u2014the planets and moons and stars\u2014but simply to the space itself, as if it were a container. \n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat do you hope humanity will one day find in outer space? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThis reflects two key facts about the modern way of thinking about the cosmos. First, space is mostly empty: To express the percentage of the universe that consists of matter requires a decimal followed by 20 zeros. Second, the space beyond Earth is continuous with the space in which we ourselves move on Earth: There is no difference in kind between the Earth and the heavens. Both can be mapped on the same grid.\nThis way of thinking about the universe is recent in human history. Until the Renaissance, most people in the West lived in a cosmos that combined scriptural and Greek philosophical ideas into a harmonious whole. In this world picture\u2014which C.S. Lewis deftly evoked in his 1964 book \u201cThe Discarded Image\u201d\u2014Earth sat at the center of a series of concentric spheres, each defined by the orbit of a planet, with the outermost sphere carrying the \u201cfixed stars.\u201d God set these spheres in motion to rotate at various speeds, which accounts for the movement of the stars across the sky at night and the movement of the planets against the field of stars. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSandra Bullock in the 2013 film \u2018Gravity.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Warner Bros/Everett Collection\n \n\n\n\nThings on Earth were composed of mixtures of the four elements\u2014earth, fire, air and water\u2014but the spheres were made of a fifth element, or quintessence, that was entirely different and unchanging. In short, an ancient or medieval person who looked up at the night sky would have Fifty years after the first moon landing, outer space remains a mirror of humanity\u2019s hopes and fears ",
        "author": "Adam Kirsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tuesday briefing: What we know about the Wis. parade suspect; rising covid-19 cases; Black Friday shopping; and more (WP: The Seven) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7234",
        "date": "2021-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2021/11/23/what-to-know-for-november-23/",
        "text": "1The Wis. parade suspect had been fleeing a fight, officials said.Darrell E. Brooks Jr. will be charged with homicide after driving through a Christmas parade Sunday in Waukesha, leaving five people dead and 48 injured, according to police.What do we know about him? Brooks has a long criminal history and had been released from jail on bail just five days before the parade.Who are the victims? Tamara Durand, 52; Jane Kulich, 52; LeAnna Owen, 71; Virginia Sorenson, 79; and Wilhelm Hospel, 81. Some were part of a beloved \u201cDancing Grannies\u201d group in the parade.2The U.S. agreed to pay millions to families of Parkland shooting victims.Final details are still being worked out, but the tentative deal would divide about $130 million among the families.Why? They sued because the FBI didn\u2019t follow its own rules and didn\u2019t act on warnings that the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, was planning an attack.He killed 17 people in 2018 at the Florida high school.\n \n3Coronavirus cases are still rising in the U.S.New daily infections are up 10% over the past week, just as people head home for the holidays.What can be done? The White House said lockdowns aren\u2019t part of the plan. Instead, people should get vaccinated or get a booster shot. All adults are eligible for boosters now.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement4The U.S. will try to lower gas prices using oil reserves.50 million barrels will be released, though energy experts are skeptical about whether it will actually help.The average cost of gas is $3.41 per gallon as Americans prepare to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday.5You should start your Black Friday shopping now. Most places kicked off the holiday season early, so that, plus (you guessed it) supply chain issues, means shortages are likely.What else to know: Shop around to make sure you\u2019re getting the best deal (stores are increasingly willing to price match). However, don\u2019t expect typical deep Black Friday and Cyber Monday discounts. Check here for more tips.6NASA will try to hit an asteroid with a spacecraft.The goal: To knock it into a slightly different orbit, which would be the first time humans will have changed the trajectory of a celestial object.Why is it doing this? Scientists want to be prepared in case an asteroid is ever heading toward Earth that we need to bump away.The timeline: Launch could happen tonight, weather permitting, but the spacecraft won\u2019t get to the asteroid until next fall.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement7An NBA player won \u201cDancing With the Stars\u201d for the first time.Iman Shumpert, the season\u2019s underdog, triumphed over teen pop star JoJo Siwa, Peloton instructor Cody Rigsby and \u201cThe Talk\u201d co-host Amanda Kloots.It was a bit of an upset: Siwa, who made history as part of the first same-sex couple on the U.S. show, was the reliable front-runner.And now \u2026 today is supposed to be one of the busiest holiday travel days: Here are some tips on how to deal with it.Want to catch up quickly with \u201cThe 7\u201d every morning? Download The Post\u2019s app and turn on alert notifications for The 7 or sign up for the newsletter. Catch up in minutes with these 7 stories. Tuesday briefing: What we know about the Wis. parade suspect; rising covid-19 cases; Black Friday shopping; and more",
        "author": "Tess Homan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wednesday briefing: States expand booster eligibility; space station evacuation; Thanksgiving weather; Harry Potter reunion; and more (WP: The Seven) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7235",
        "date": "2021-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2021/11/17/what-to-know-for-november-17/",
        "text": "1States are making their own booster shot rules.At least five \u2014 California, Colorado, New Mexico, Arkansas and West Virginia \u2014 will let any adult get a coronavirus vaccine booster, with more expected to follow.Leaders hope that expanding access will keep case numbers down during the holidays.Official guidance could change soon, too: The FDA is expected to say all adults can get Pfizer\u2019s shot this week, and CDC will meet on the issue Friday.2The U.S. plans to buy a huge order of Pfizer\u2019s covid-19 pill.Why? Officials think it, as well as a similar treatment by Merck, will be a pandemic game-changer. They\u2019re ordering enough for 10 million people.What does it do? The company said the pill reduced risk of hospitalization or death by 89% when given within three days of symptoms appearing.The 5-day treatment is being reviewed by the FDA.\n \n3Astronauts had to evacuate the space station.What happened? Russia blew up a satellite during a missile test, which sent thousands of pieces of debris hurtling close to the station.The two crews sheltered in their spacecrafts, prepared to return to Earth, but the debris missed.This could become more common: A debris field has been forming around the planet that the International Space Station will have to deal with regularly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement4It\u2019s the defense\u2019s turn in the trial over Ahmaud Arbery\u2019s killing.The prosecution wrapped up after almost two weeks with testimony that could end up helping the shooter\u2019s self-defense claim.What\u2019s the trial about? Three White men are accused of racially profiling, chasing and fatally shooting Arbery, a Black man, as he was jogging in Georgia last year.Over in Wisconsin: Jurors in the Kyle Rittenhouse homicide trial will continue deliberating today.5Thanksgiving travel could be stormy in the eastern U.S.A blast of cold air (the chilliest of the season so far) is forecast to sweep across the region early next week.It could bring a big storm with it, too, and the stakes are high: More than 53 million Americans are expected to be traveling.6Heating your home will cost more this winter.Why? Higher energy prices, more demand than supply and what\u2019s supposed to be a slightly colder winter could increase bills by 30%.What can you do? Small changes add up. You can 1) save about 1-3% for each degree you lower your thermostat, 2) get a furnace tuneup to make sure it\u2019s operating efficiently and 3) program your thermostat to go down when you\u2019re away. (More tips here.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement7Harry Potter stars are reuniting for its 20th anniversary.When and where? In a TV special that will be available on HBO Max on New Year\u2019s Day.Who will be there? The series\u2019 three main stars \u2014 Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint \u2014 plus other cast members.Notably absent is J.K. Rowling, the author of the book series, whose comments on transgender people have received criticism in recent years.And now \u2026 want in on the great retirement boom? Here are the five things you should know.Want to catch up quickly with \u201cThe 7\u201d every morning? Download The Post\u2019s app and turn on alert notifications for The 7 or sign up for the newsletter. Catch up in minutes with these 7 stories. Wednesday briefing: States expand booster eligibility; space station evacuation; Thanksgiving weather; Harry Potter reunion; and more",
        "author": "Tess Homan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Monday briefing: Grim omicron outlook; NFL disruptions; looser alcohol rules; sounds from a Jupiter moon; and more (WP: The Seven) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7236",
        "date": "2021-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2021/12/20/what-to-know-for-december-20/",
        "text": "1Omicron will likely cause record U.S. coronavirus cases.New York had its highest number of daily infections yesterday, a sign of trouble for the rest of the country, health officials said.What can you do? Get a vaccine booster shot, experts said. Moderna said data showed its booster works well against the omicron variant.What about the holidays? Mask up while traveling, test beforehand and know the vaccination status of everyone at indoor celebrations, experts recommend.2Congress went home for the year stuck on President Biden\u2019s agenda.The latest: After months of negotiations, Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate West Virginia Democrat, said he won\u2019t vote for the president\u2019s $2 trillion Build Back Better plan.What that means: The proposal, in its current form, is basically dead. Democrats can\u2019t do much without Manchin because the Senate is split 50-50.Key pieces now on hold: A child tax credit extension, universal pre-K, funds to fight climate change and more.\n \n3Social Security closures have hurt vulnerable Americans.Most of its offices remain shut, while other parts of government, like courthouses and DMVs, have reopened.Who that affects: People who don\u2019t have or can\u2019t work computers or who need specialized help.What that means: The number of people applying for benefits for disabled children, disabled adults and the elderly has plummeted since the pandemic started.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement4Rising coronavirus cases are disrupting the NFL season.Three of this weekend\u2019s games were postponed after more than 150 players tested positive.New rules: The league will start testing vaccinated players and staffers only when they have symptoms, instead of once a week.The adjusted schedule: The Las Vegas Raiders play the Cleveland Browns this afternoon. Tomorrow night: Washington Football Team vs. Philadelphia Eagles and Seattle Seahawks vs. Los Angeles Rams.5Many states loosened alcohol laws during the pandemic.Key changes: Thirty-one allowed people to order takeout cocktails and at least nine made it easier for people to have alcohol delivered, changes so vast they\u2019re being compared to the end of Prohibition.At the same time: Alcohol sales have soared, and heavy drinking has gone up, studies say.6A floating-home movement is popping up in the Netherlands. Why? The country, a third of which is below sea level, has always had to fight back water, a problem that will only get worse with rising sea levels.These floating communities could end up being a solution for people there \u2014 and for millions around the world.How do they work? In Amsterdam, houses are moored to a lake bed, can be moved by a tugboat and are powered by green energy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement7NASA released a recording of one of Jupiter\u2019s moons.The background: A spacecraft orbiting the solar system\u2019s biggest planet is making flybys of its moons.It captured electric and magnetic emissions from Ganymede, which scientists converted into audio that kind of sounds like R2-D2 from Star Wars. You can listen here.And now \u2026 some delicious suggestions for your holiday menu: Ideas for drinks on Christmas Eve (triple hot chocolate, anyone?) and breakfast on Christmas.Want to catch up quickly with \u201cThe 7\u201d every morning? Download The Post\u2019s app and turn on alert notifications for The 7 or sign up for the newsletter. Catch up in minutes with these 7 stories. Monday briefing: Grim omicron outlook; NFL disruptions; looser alcohol rules; sounds from a Jupiter moon; and more",
        "author": "Tess Homan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thursday briefing: More extreme weather; Medals of Honor; Derek Chauvin; interest rates; corporate race gap; and more (WP: The Seven) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7237",
        "date": "2021-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/the-seven/2021/12/16/what-to-know-for-december-16/",
        "text": "1Major storms leave more than half a million without power.Extreme winds swept through the Central U.S. last night, kicking up dust storms, fueling wildfires, canceling flights and knocking out power from Colorado to Michigan.More tornadoes: Just days after the devastating weekend storms, the first December tornadoes in Minnesota and parts of Iowa were reported.As of early Thursday, one death has been reported. And unseasonably high temperatures mean most people won\u2019t go cold without heat.2Colleges are moving exams online as coronavirus cases rise.One example: More than 1,100 students at Cornell University tested positive for the virus this week, leading to canceled graduation ceremonies, closed libraries and more.What about the spring semester? So far, colleges aren\u2019t making changes.In vaccine news: CDC advisers meet today to consider how to use the Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine because of continued, but rare, blood clot issues.\n \n3Alwyn Cashe and two others will get Medals of Honor today.The Army platoon sergeant will be the first Black service member to get the military\u2019s top combat award for actions since 9/11.What happened: Cashe rescued fellow soldiers from a burning vehicle in Iraq in 2005 and died three weeks later.This is a long time coming: People have been advocating for Cashe to receive this honor for years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement4Derek Chauvin pleaded guilty to violating George Floyd\u2019s rights.Who is Chauvin? The former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering Floyd when he knelt on his neck during an arrest in 2020.Why was he back in court? These were federal civil rights charges. Chauvin is still appealing his murder conviction.5There could be as many as three interest rate hikes next year. Why? The Federal Reserve, the nation\u2019s central bank, is trying to fight inflation.What raising rates does: It increases the cost of loans and business investments, slowing growth and bringing down prices.How high is inflation? Prices rose at the fastest pace in nearly 40 years last month, and pretty much everything is more expensive.6There\u2019s still a striking race gap in corporate America.The numbers: Only 8% of top executives at the country\u2019s 50 biggest public companies are Black, a Post analysis found. At least eight list no Black executives.These companies pledged to address racial inequality the summer after Floyd\u2019s murder. But those tasked with expanding opportunities often lack the authority to do so.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement7A NASA spacecraft \u201ctouched the sun\u201d for the first time.What that means: The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, flew through the sun\u2019s upper atmosphere to sample particles and its magnetic fields. (The sun doesn\u2019t have a solid surface.)Why scientists are so excited: They hope to learn more about Earth\u2019s closest star, such as how solar wind can influence our planet.And now \u2026 a new Apple privacy feature was released this week. Here\u2019s how to make the most of it.Want to catch up quickly with \u201cThe 7\u201d every morning? Download The Post\u2019s app and turn on alert notifications for The 7 or sign up for the newsletter. Catch up in minutes with these 7 stories. Thursday briefing: More extreme weather; Medals of Honor; Derek Chauvin; interest rates; corporate race gap; and more",
        "author": "John Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Facebook whistleblower\u2019s revelations are rocking the U.K., too (WP: The Technology 202) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7238",
        "date": "2021-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/15/facebook-whistleblowers-revelations-are-rocking-uk-too/",
        "text": "Happy Friday! We hope you find time this weekend to take a break from Section 230 Twitter and tech antitrust Twitter, as we are.Below: All the backlash from Section 230 Twitter and tech antitrust Twitter to recent legislative proposals, and more on LinkedIn's China conundrum. First up:WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Facebook whistleblower\u2019s revelations are rocking the U.K., tooWhistleblower Frances Haugen\u2019s proposal to create a new digital regulator to police tech giants like Facebook may not be going anywhere in the United States anytime soon.\u00a0 But a top lawmaker in the United Kingdom said Haugen\u2019s remarks have bolstered the case to supercharge their own regulator and give it greater powers to rein in Silicon Valley behemoths.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementDamian Collins, former chair of Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said the troves of Facebook\u2019s internal research that Haugen made public, along with her recommendations, will inform legislation they are considering targeting online harms.Advertisement\u201cWe're looking forward to not only hearing about her experience, but her recommendations for how we create the kind of regulatory regime we're looking at,\u201d Collins, whose committee will hear testimony from Haugen on Oct. 25, told The Technology 202 on Thursday.Collins, an outspoken critic of industry giants like Facebook, said Haugen\u2019s input could shape what tools they give regulators to obtain internal research from companies, like what she disclosed. The U.K. proposal, known as the Online Safety Bill, would give the country\u2019s communications regulator new powers to punish companies that don\u2019t do enough to mitigate harmful and illegal content and protect users.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThat may include giving the regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), the ability to compel companies to share internal research and documents about how its products may be causing harm to users. \u201cFor this to be effective, that has to be a part of what the Online Safety Bill delivers,\u201d Collins said.AdvertisementLawmakers in the U.S. have called Haugen\u2019s leaks and recent testimony to the Senate a turning point in efforts to crack down on giants like Facebook. Collins said the revelations are a pivotal moment for global efforts to rein in Big Tech as well.\u00a0\u201cI think this really drives home the case for external regulation because what Frances Haugen is demonstrating is that the companies are well aware of the problems that have been caused, they\u2019re well aware of the harms that have been caused, and who has been harmed,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementHer disclosures about how Instagram may worsen body image issues for teens have been particularly \u201cdamaging\u201d and resonant for the millions of social media users who have children of their own, Collins said. \u201cThis comes from specific insights within the company,\u201d he added. (Facebook has sharply pushed back on Haugen\u2019s assertions and characterizations in the media of the research.)AdvertisementDuring her recent Senate testimony on kids\u2019 safety, Haugen made the role algorithms play in sometimes amplifying harmful content a focus of her critiques. Collins said he sees the issue as a key component of the legislation they are trying to advance in the U.K.\u00a0\u201cAs far as we're concerned, amplification is absolutely within the scope of the bill, and is one of the areas where the companies will be held to account,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementHaugen isn\u2019t the only whistleblower lawmakers in the U.K. are eager to hear from. Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang is set to appear before Collins\u2019s panel Monday.\u00a0Collins said Zhang\u2019s perspective will be crucial to understanding to what extent Facebook is successfully cracking down on networks of fake accounts that are seeking to spread disinformation, particularly in areas outside Western Europe and the United States.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cIt also gets into the kind of resources that companies like Facebook put behind moderating this sort of activity and the harm that it can cause and whether they invest enough certainly in those markets that are less probably commercially important to Facebook,\u201d he said.Story continues below advertisementCollins\u2019s panel on Thursday heard testimony from three other social media experts: New York University researcher Laura Edelson, Stanford Internet Observatory technical research manager Ren\u00e9e DiResta and former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot.\u00a0Collins said the session raised questions about whether the scope of the U.K.\u2019s Online Safety Bill should target online ads as well as organic user content.\u00a0\u201cI think that was an important point for us,\u201d he said.\u00a0Our top tabsState attorneys general are looking into the subjects of documents leaked by HaugenJohn Tye, a lawyer for Haugen, said his team has shared some of the documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission with state attorneys generals in California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Nebraska and Tennessee, Cat Zakrzewski reports.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMore than a dozen Democratic state attorneys general are demanding information from Facebook about how it handles vaccine misinformation in response to revelations from documents Haugen leaked to the Wall Street Journal. The regulators want to know if high-profile users known for spreading anti-vaccine content were protected by a Facebook system that shields VIP users from normal enforcement procedures.Facebook spokesman Andy Stone referred The Washington Post to previous statements noting that the company has removed more than three-dozen pages, groups and accounts linked to the users, who are known as the \u201cdisinformation dozen.\u201d The company has also imposed penalties so fewer people can see their posts, Stone said.Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D), who led the letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, signaled that he is looking at a broad array of possible harms in the way Facebook operates. \u201cWe\u2019re looking at all manners which they push information out through their platform and how that information puts people at risk,\u201d Tong said.Microsoft\u2019s LinkedIn is leaving ChinaLinkedIn said it made the decision after \u201cfacing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China,\u201d the Wall Street Journal\u2019s Liza Lin and Stu Woo report. It was the last major American social media network openly operating in the country.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn March, China\u2019s government forced the social media network to suspend new user sign-ups in the country for 30 days after it found politically objectionable content on the site, three people briefed on the matter told the New York Times. In recent weeks, LinkedIn has come under pressure by U.S. lawmakers for its censorship of journalists who reported on Chinese human rights issues.LinkedIn will replace its China website with a job board that doesn\u2019t have social media features, the company said. The Biden administration welcomed LinkedIn\u2019s move, an administration official told the Journal. China\u2019s Washington embassy did not respond to a request for comment from the outlet.Lawmakers and industry groups criticized major technology legislationMajor technology industry groups quickly blasted a new bill by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) that would make it illegal for major tech companies to give their products and services an edge over rivals\u2019.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNetChoice, whose members include Amazon, Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter, argued that the bill \u201cputs the interests of corporations ahead of consumers by banning useful services that Americans value because competitors say those services are difficult to compete against.\u201dIndustry groups also criticized a bill led by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) that seeks to hold platforms responsible for the personalized recommendations they make to users that lead to harm.\u00a0The Internet Association, whose members include Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, argued that the legislation could have unintended consequences and \u201cunintentionally disrupt the many systems in place that protect consumers from potentially harmful content.\u201dLawmakers also responded to the bill.Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who co-wrote Section 230, said he worries about \"approaches that use Section 230 as a bank-shot attempt to regulate lawful speech. These approaches are unlikely to solve the problems with harmful content, will silence marginalized groups and raise real First Amendment concerns as well.\u201dRant and raveWaymo's cars were confused by something rather low-tech: a quiet street in San Francisco. The New York Times's Farhad Manjoo:the other day there was a story about drones falling out of the sky in China. now pic.twitter.com/gFpEp6O22J\u2014 farhad manjoo (@fmanjoo) October 14, 2021\n\nThe MIT Technology Review's Eileen Guo:\"I woke to a strange hum and thought there was a spacecraft outside my window.\" The aliens were with us all along. They were just turned-around (or unable to turn around) self-driving cars. :Phttps://t.co/mxGntB1r0u\u2014 Eileen Guo (@eileenguo) October 14, 2021\n\nTwitter personality \u201cdarth\u201d:imagine all the ring doorbell cameras reporting all the robot cars driving by every day\u2014 darth\u2122 (@darth) October 14, 2021\n\nInside the industryChinese Telecom Giant ZTE in Dispute With U.S. Court-Appointed Monitor (Wall Street Journal)S.Korea targets Apple over new app store regulation (Reuters)Facebook Should Clarify Terms of Service, Irish Privacy Regulator Says (Wall Street Journal)YouTube\u2019s stronger election misinformation policies had a spillover effect on Twitter and Facebook, researchers say. (New York Times)MentionsDavid Bain is joining the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards, a division of the Information Technology Industry Council, as executive vice president. He previously worked as executive director of the Tech Integrity Council.TrendingDubbing movies and TV is the next frontier for machine learning and AI (Steven Zeitchik)DaybookNew York City\u2019s chief technology officer, John Paul Farmer, speaks at an Aspen Institute event about broadband inclusion on Oct. 20 at 7 p.m.Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, participates in a Brookings Institution event on technology equity on Oct. 21 at 2 p.m.Before you log offWait for it.. \ud83d\ude05 pic.twitter.com/UDkssIBlI2\u2014 Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) October 14, 2021\n\nThat\u2019s all for today \u2014 thank you so much for joining us! Make sure to tell others to subscribe to\u00a0The Technology 202 here. Get in touch with tips, feedback or greetings on Twitter or email.\u00a0 A top U.K. official says the discoveries bolster calls for regulation.  The Facebook whistleblower\u2019s revelations are rocking the U.K., too",
        "author": "Cristiano Lima"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Raise a Feminist Son (NYT: The Upshot) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7239",
        "date": "2017-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/upshot/how-to-raise-a-feminist-son.html",
        "text": "We raise our girls to fight stereotypes and pursue their dreams, but we don\u2019t do the same for our boys. We raise our girls to fight stereotypes and pursue their dreams, but we don\u2019t do the same for our boys. We\u2019re now more likely to tell our daughters they can be anything they want to be \u2014 an astronaut and a mother, a tomboy and a girlie girl. But we don\u2019t do the same for our sons. ",
        "author": "By Claire Cain Miller and Illustrations By Agnes Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Branson, Bezos Prepare to Lift Off, What's Next for Space Tourism? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7240",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/as-branson-bezos-prepare-to-lift-off-what-next-for-space-tourism/909BFC13-BF8F-45DB-96A6-4CFC55F6F214?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=7",
        "text": " This weekend, Richard Branson hopes to head to space on a flight with his company Virgin Galactic. Just over a week later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to board one of his Blue Origin spacecraft. So what do the billionaires' trips mean for the burgeoning space-tourism sector, and when will the rest of us get a chance? Reporter Micah Maidenburg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. Christopher Zinsli is our supervising producer. Kateri Jochum is the executive producer of WSJ Podcasts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "As Branson, Bezos Prepare to Lift Off, What's Next for Space Tourism? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7241",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/as-branson-bezos-prepare-to-lift-off-what-next-for-space-tourism/909BFC13-BF8F-45DB-96A6-4CFC55F6F214?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=7",
        "text": " This weekend, Richard Branson hopes to head to space on a flight with his company Virgin Galactic. Just over a week later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to board one of his Blue Origin spacecraft. So what do the billionaires' trips mean for the burgeoning space-tourism sector, and when will the rest of us get a chance? Reporter Micah Maidenburg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. Christopher Zinsli is our supervising producer. Kateri Jochum is the executive producer of WSJ Podcasts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "As Branson, Bezos Prepare to Lift Off, What's Next for Space Tourism? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7242",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/as-branson-bezos-prepare-to-lift-off-what-next-for-space-tourism/909BFC13-BF8F-45DB-96A6-4CFC55F6F214?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=18",
        "text": " This weekend, Richard Branson hopes to head to space on a flight with his company Virgin Galactic. Just over a week later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to board one of his Blue Origin spacecraft. So what do the billionaires' trips mean for the burgeoning space-tourism sector, and when will the rest of us get a chance? Reporter Micah Maidenburg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. Christopher Zinsli is our supervising producer. Kateri Jochum is the executive producer of WSJ Podcasts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "As Branson, Bezos Prepare to Lift Off, What's Next for Space Tourism? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7243",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/as-branson-bezos-prepare-to-lift-off-what-next-for-space-tourism/909BFC13-BF8F-45DB-96A6-4CFC55F6F214?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=27",
        "text": " This weekend, Richard Branson hopes to head to space on a flight with his company Virgin Galactic. Just over a week later, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to board one of his Blue Origin spacecraft. So what do the billionaires' trips mean for the burgeoning space-tourism sector, and when will the rest of us get a chance? Reporter Micah Maidenburg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. Christopher Zinsli is our supervising producer. Kateri Jochum is the executive producer of WSJ Podcasts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans on Mars by 2024? Elon Musk Says Yes (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7244",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/humans-on-mars-by-2024-elon-musk-says-yes/02B12F61-220F-4DA3-82E8-0A8A699C0432?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=22",
        "text": " Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and use it to launch a giant spacecraft to Mars -- potentially in less than a decade. The Wall Street Journal's Andy Pasztor talks his most aggressive expression yet for space exploration. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Humans on Mars by 2024? Elon Musk Says Yes (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7245",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/humans-on-mars-by-2024-elon-musk-says-yes/02B12F61-220F-4DA3-82E8-0A8A699C0432?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=112",
        "text": " Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled plans to build the most powerful rocket ever and use it to launch a giant spacecraft to Mars -- potentially in less than a decade. The Wall Street Journal's Andy Pasztor talks his most aggressive expression yet for space exploration. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Goes to Space With Blue Origin (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7246",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/william-shatner-goes-to-space-with-blue-origin/E5C262B9-3428-40F6-976B-D0689434E044?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=3",
        "text": " The actor who played Captain Kirk on 'Star Trek' has gone to space in real life. William Shatner joined three other passengers on Blue Origin's second crewed space flight on Wednesday. Reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss what this could signal about the future of space tourism, and whether high-profile passengers could move the industry forward. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Goes to Space With Blue Origin (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7247",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/william-shatner-goes-to-space-with-blue-origin/E5C262B9-3428-40F6-976B-D0689434E044?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=20",
        "text": " The actor who played Captain Kirk on 'Star Trek' has gone to space in real life. William Shatner joined three other passengers on Blue Origin's second crewed space flight on Wednesday. Reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss what this could signal about the future of space tourism, and whether high-profile passengers could move the industry forward. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Signs Up First Moon Tourist (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7248",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/elon-musk-spacex-signs-up-first-moon-tourist/A96FB0DD-6599-4A6D-859B-F4FBC86991D9?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=22",
        "text": " Elon Musk's SpaceX announced that it had signed up the first private passenger to fly around the moon. The Wall Street Journal's Andy Pasztor has more on the future of space tourism. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Delays First Space Tourists (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7249",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/elon-musk-spacex-delays-first-space-tourists/45EE46EE-0AFE-470C-A1AB-3595E27D8E7F?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=94",
        "text": " With news that SpaceX likely won't launch a pair of tourists to loop around the moon this year, the Wall Street Journal's Andy Pasztor talks the latest challenges disrupting Elon Musk's plans for human space exploration. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA's Ingenuity Set to Begin Test Flights on Mars (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7250",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/nasa-ingenuity-set-to-begin-test-flights-on-mars/4AB36824-4B70-48DE-8736-84E57E036D61?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=24",
        "text": " When NASA's Perseverance rover landed on the red planet in late February, it was carrying a stowaway: a small helicopter called Ingenuity. In the coming days, Ingenuity is set to begin a series of test flights that scientists are hoping could lead to breakthroughs in space exploration. Science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Amanda Lewellyn with the details. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA's Ingenuity Set to Begin Test Flights on Mars (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7251",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/nasa-ingenuity-set-to-begin-test-flights-on-mars/4AB36824-4B70-48DE-8736-84E57E036D61?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=33",
        "text": " When NASA's Perseverance rover landed on the red planet in late February, it was carrying a stowaway: a small helicopter called Ingenuity. In the coming days, Ingenuity is set to begin a series of test flights that scientists are hoping could lead to breakthroughs in space exploration. Science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Amanda Lewellyn with the details. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Webb Space Telescope Will See Into Deep Space (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7252",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/how-nasas-webb-space-telescope-will-see-into-deep-space/723647BD-74C3-46F3-B697-90C0975EDB90?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=3",
        "text": " After more than a decade of delays, the most powerful space telescope ever built is set to be launched this weekend. Once in action, the James Webb Space Telescope will replace the Hubble, which has been orbiting Earth for 30 years. WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the new telescope works and why astronomers say it will be worth the wait. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA\u2019s Webb Space Telescope Will See Into Deep Space (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7253",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/how-nasas-webb-space-telescope-will-see-into-deep-space/723647BD-74C3-46F3-B697-90C0975EDB90?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=3",
        "text": " After more than a decade of delays, the most powerful space telescope ever built is set to be launched this weekend. Once in action, the James Webb Space Telescope will replace the Hubble, which has been orbiting Earth for 30 years. WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the new telescope works and why astronomers say it will be worth the wait. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Historic SpaceX Mission: Crew Capsule Docks With Space Station (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7254",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/historic-spacex-mission-crew-capsule-docks-with-space-station/E78FD32D-6A48-43C2-A5F8-2AB100E4B2A5?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=58",
        "text": " A new-generation SpaceX capsule autonomously docked with the international space station, in a successful test of computers and maneuvering systems deemed essential to carry U.S. astronauts on future missions. The Wall Street Journal's Andy Pasztor has more. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What Virgin Galactic's Flight Could Mean for the Aerospace Industry (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7255",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/what-virgin-galactic-flight-could-mean-for-the-aerospace-industry/6CF712B5-6AD4-4AC2-9E35-ACF3BB86164F?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=6",
        "text": " P.M. Edition for July 12. British billionaire Richard Branson and five other crew members successfully flew to the edge of space on Sunday. But what's the practical impact of the trip for aerospace and the nascent space tourism sector? Aerospace reporter Doug Cameron joins host Annmarie Fertoli to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What Virgin Galactic's Flight Could Mean for the Aerospace Industry (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7256",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/what-virgin-galactic-flight-could-mean-for-the-aerospace-industry/6CF712B5-6AD4-4AC2-9E35-ACF3BB86164F?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=6",
        "text": " P.M. Edition for July 12. British billionaire Richard Branson and five other crew members successfully flew to the edge of space on Sunday. But what's the practical impact of the trip for aerospace and the nascent space tourism sector? Aerospace reporter Doug Cameron joins host Annmarie Fertoli to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What Virgin Galactic's Flight Could Mean for the Aerospace Industry (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7257",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/what-virgin-galactic-flight-could-mean-for-the-aerospace-industry/6CF712B5-6AD4-4AC2-9E35-ACF3BB86164F?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=27",
        "text": " P.M. Edition for July 12. British billionaire Richard Branson and five other crew members successfully flew to the edge of space on Sunday. But what's the practical impact of the trip for aerospace and the nascent space tourism sector? Aerospace reporter Doug Cameron joins host Annmarie Fertoli to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What Virgin Galactic's Flight Could Mean for the Aerospace Industry (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7258",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/what-virgin-galactic-flight-could-mean-for-the-aerospace-industry/6CF712B5-6AD4-4AC2-9E35-ACF3BB86164F?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=27",
        "text": " P.M. Edition for July 12. British billionaire Richard Branson and five other crew members successfully flew to the edge of space on Sunday. But what's the practical impact of the trip for aerospace and the nascent space tourism sector? Aerospace reporter Doug Cameron joins host Annmarie Fertoli to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Sian Proctor, the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft: \u2018The reality is that solving for space solves for Earth\u2019 (WP: The Washington Post Magazine) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7259",
        "date": "2021-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/space-spacex-nasa-sian-proctor/2021/11/01/52075a50-305b-11ec-a1e5-07223c50280a_story.html",
        "text": "Geoscientist and artist Sian Proctor, 51, made history in September as a member of the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight, SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission, and as the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft. She lives in Tempe, Ariz.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHow did your interest in space begin? I was born in Guam, because my dad was working at the NASA tracking station. And I was born 8 1/2 months after Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, so I consider myself to be a moon celebration baby, and space has always been in me, to some extent. As a kid I just wanted to fly. I made lots of model airplanes \u2014 World War II airplanes and military jet fighters. I always saw that as the path to space: You became a fighter pilot, and then went on and became the shuttle commander. Story continues below advertisementWomen couldn\u2019t be fighter pilots until the mid-\u201990s. But nobody ever told me that I couldn\u2019t. In fact, my dad encouraged me. He took me to the model shop to pick out the planes that I wanted to build. And he\u2019s the one who found the Civil Air Patrol for me to become a member when I was a kid. So he was very supportive of me following this dream and this passion and never was like, You know, this might be a hard thing to achieve. It was the complete opposite. But I got glasses when I was a teenager. And you weren\u2019t going to be able to be a military aviator if you wore glasses. So that kind of ended that whole career path for me. And that\u2019s when I really focused on becoming a scientist.AdvertisementSo you probably didn\u2019t think you would end up going to space at 51. No. It\u2019s been kind of like a roller-coaster ride. You know, a lot of times, in your 40s, 50s and 60s, you think the best part of your life has already passed you by. But that\u2019s not the case. You know: Fabulous 50s. Amazing 60s. I mean, there are things that are achievable and real, if you engage in lifelong learning and make opportunities for yourself and set fun goals.Story continues below advertisementAfter I got my PhD, I really wanted to gift myself something special, so I said: I\u2019m going to go get my pilot\u2019s license. Then, at 38, somebody sent me an email saying, NASA\u2019s looking for astronauts, you should apply. I had no idea how they even selected astronauts. And when I looked at the qualifications and was, like, Wow, I actually meet most of these qualifications. I had to kind of mentally talk myself into applying \u2014 I struggle with impostor syndrome. But I did. And I got down to being a finalist. It was literally a year-long process to get to that yes/no phone call. And that no was kind of crushing. Because, like, uh, I got so close to my childhood dream.AdvertisementSo I kind of got really sad. But I thought: Okay, I\u2019ll make myself better for the next round. I enrolled into a space studies program. I told myself I was going to get my instrument rating. I was going to get my advanced scuba and all of these things. But I was driving myself crazy. So I just had to stop and say: Whoa, just go back to living my life. And that\u2019s when I learned about becoming an analog astronaut living in moon and Mars simulations. A friend of mine said, \u201cHey, NASA\u2019s looking for people to go live in this new Mars simulation in Hawaii to investigate food\u201d \u2014 and I\u2019m a foodie! So I applied and ended up living in the HI-SEAS habitat for four months and becoming an analog astronaut. It was really fulfilling because I was, like, okay, if I\u2019m not going to go to space, then I\u2019m going to advance human spaceflight here on Earth in my own little way.Then the last astronaut selection announcement that came out two years ago, just before covid \u2014 I was 49, I think, when that came out. A lot of people asked me, \u201cAre you going to apply?\u201d And I was, like, \u201cNo, my time has passed for NASA. I\u2019m just too old.\u201d I said, \u201cMaybe one day I\u2019ll be able to go up on commercial space.\u201d But in my mind, that was a decade off. Not realizing it was right around the corner.Story continues below advertisementYou knew a lot about NASA and its training, infrastructure, but going up on the first fully civilian astronaut mission, did you have misgivings? AdvertisementNo. I think I\u2019ve always kind of been \u201cJump in head first and let\u2019s figure it out along the way.\u201d So for me, it was pure joy, excitement and gratitude from the beginning. Because here I was about to turn 51 and just like, Okay, let\u2019s do this. Because an opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime. And the fact that it happened, that this dream came true \u2014 I had been chasing it my entire life. So I was all-in.Commercial space flight is a completely different model. What do you see as some of the benefits and the drawbacks?Story continues below advertisementWell, the biggest drawback is cost. And so, just access. When you think about how do we have as many people experience this as possible because it opens up opportunity, it\u2019s like traveling on a plane, right? You\u2019re going somewhere. There\u2019s some destination. There\u2019s some experience. And that helps to broaden your understanding of our planet and our world and our culture and all of those things. And when I think about access to space and opening it up to more people, I think how all of that knowledge spurs the imagination. And with commercial space, because we\u2019re writing the narrative of human spaceflight now, we have to strive for that JEDI space: just, equitable, diverse and inclusive space. And how do we do that when the cost is so high?AdvertisementThere\u2019s criticism of the billionaire space race when there are so many problems here on Earth that those resources could be put toward. The reality is that solving for space solves for Earth. That\u2019s the message I don\u2019t think gets portrayed enough. Because everything that we do are real dollars spent here on Earth to advance human spaceflight. There are jobs. And not only that, but the technology and the spinoffs. They all come back here to help us. NASA\u2019s had basically 50 years of spinoff technology.Story continues below advertisementAnd as we push for the moon and Mars, it\u2019s all about efficiency and energy, water, food, structures. All of that we have to figure out in order for humans to be able to survive. Well, those are the things that we need to not just survive, but to thrive. To become more energy-efficient. To become more water-efficient. To become more food-efficient. Those are the big problems people are talking about solving. And we can solve them by solving for space.AdvertisementYou\u2019ve spoken about your father as a sort of hidden figure, and here you are now, a public pioneer. What do you think that would mean to him?Oh my goodness. Oh, he would be so proud and just overjoyed. And I think he would say, \u201cSee? I told you you could do anything.\u201d [Laughs.] Because he really instilled that message in me from the beginning \u2014 me and my siblings. We\u2019re so lucky to have had amazing parents who just \u2014 you know, they grew up half of their lives in segregation. And so they had every reason to be bitter, to some extent, and jaded. But they weren\u2019t. Both my parents believed that the key to advancement and success is education, even though neither of them ever went on to get their college degrees.Story continues below advertisementYou said that the highlight of the mission for you was opening the cupola. Can you describe what that is like for those of us who might not get that opportunity?AdvertisementIt was amazing. When you look up through the cupola at first, when you slide up into it for the first time, you literally openly gasp. Because you can see the entire sphere of the Earth. There\u2019s no way to describe how epic that moment is. You\u2019re just, like: \u201cWait, wait, ah, ah, oh, okay, ah, wow!\u201d [Laughs.] And then you see the star field down below and the moon peeking out right around the corner, suspended there. It\u2019s magical.Does seeing the Earth from up there change how you think about the planet and our lives here?Story continues below advertisementI\u2019ve been a geoscientist my entire career. So climate change, all of that stuff, I already had that in me. But as an artist and a poet, all I kept thinking when I looked at our planet swirling and moving below us was that it was a portrait in motion. It was this amazing portrait that we get to paint. And influence. And how delicate, fragile, and beautiful it is.AdvertisementI don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve ever seen the movie \u201cWhat Dreams May Come\u201d with Robin Williams. Great movie, and the scene where he\u2019s in a portrait, and he\u2019s just making the portrait swirl. And I just kept thinking, Wow, I feel like I could just reach my hand out from the cupola and just go like this and make it swirl. And, to some extent, when I think about human influence on our planet, that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing, right? But we\u2019re doing it from the Earth up. And here I am watching the impact of that from space. Because we could see the fires burning. So thinking how we can\u2019t mess this up. It\u2019s too beautiful to mess up.When you see the Earth from that perspective, it does change you. For some, it gives an appreciation for all that we have down there and this sense of stewardship. For others, it gives that urgency to keep going, to keep advancing human spaceflight out among the stars. But the reality is, it fundamentally changes you in some way. And that\u2019s a good thing.KK Ottesen is a regular contributor to the magazine. Follow her on Twitter: @kkOttesen. This interview has been edited and condensed. The geoscientist and crew member of the first fully civilian orbital spaceflight talks about the future of space travel. Sian Proctor, the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft: \u2018The reality is that solving for space solves for Earth\u2019",
        "author": "KK Ottesen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Sian Proctor, the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft: \u2018The reality is that solving for space solves for Earth\u2019 (WP: The Washington Post Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7260",
        "date": "2021-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/space-spacex-nasa-sian-proctor/2021/11/01/52075a50-305b-11ec-a1e5-07223c50280a_story.html",
        "text": "Geoscientist and artist Sian Proctor, 51, made history in September as a member of the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight, SpaceX\u2019s Inspiration4 mission, and as the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft. She lives in Tempe, Ariz.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHow did your interest in space begin? I was born in Guam, because my dad was working at the NASA tracking station. And I was born 8 1/2 months after Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon, so I consider myself to be a moon celebration baby, and space has always been in me, to some extent. As a kid I just wanted to fly. I made lots of model airplanes \u2014 World War II airplanes and military jet fighters. I always saw that as the path to space: You became a fighter pilot, and then went on and became the shuttle commander. Story continues below advertisementWomen couldn\u2019t be fighter pilots until the mid-\u201990s. But nobody ever told me that I couldn\u2019t. In fact, my dad encouraged me. He took me to the model shop to pick out the planes that I wanted to build. And he\u2019s the one who found the Civil Air Patrol for me to become a member when I was a kid. So he was very supportive of me following this dream and this passion and never was like, You know, this might be a hard thing to achieve. It was the complete opposite. But I got glasses when I was a teenager. And you weren\u2019t going to be able to be a military aviator if you wore glasses. So that kind of ended that whole career path for me. And that\u2019s when I really focused on becoming a scientist.AdvertisementSo you probably didn\u2019t think you would end up going to space at 51. No. It\u2019s been kind of like a roller-coaster ride. You know, a lot of times, in your 40s, 50s and 60s, you think the best part of your life has already passed you by. But that\u2019s not the case. You know: Fabulous 50s. Amazing 60s. I mean, there are things that are achievable and real, if you engage in lifelong learning and make opportunities for yourself and set fun goals.Story continues below advertisementAfter I got my PhD, I really wanted to gift myself something special, so I said: I\u2019m going to go get my pilot\u2019s license. Then, at 38, somebody sent me an email saying, NASA\u2019s looking for astronauts, you should apply. I had no idea how they even selected astronauts. And when I looked at the qualifications and was, like, Wow, I actually meet most of these qualifications. I had to kind of mentally talk myself into applying \u2014 I struggle with impostor syndrome. But I did. And I got down to being a finalist. It was literally a year-long process to get to that yes/no phone call. And that no was kind of crushing. Because, like, uh, I got so close to my childhood dream.AdvertisementSo I kind of got really sad. But I thought: Okay, I\u2019ll make myself better for the next round. I enrolled into a space studies program. I told myself I was going to get my instrument rating. I was going to get my advanced scuba and all of these things. But I was driving myself crazy. So I just had to stop and say: Whoa, just go back to living my life. And that\u2019s when I learned about becoming an analog astronaut living in moon and Mars simulations. A friend of mine said, \u201cHey, NASA\u2019s looking for people to go live in this new Mars simulation in Hawaii to investigate food\u201d \u2014 and I\u2019m a foodie! So I applied and ended up living in the HI-SEAS habitat for four months and becoming an analog astronaut. It was really fulfilling because I was, like, okay, if I\u2019m not going to go to space, then I\u2019m going to advance human spaceflight here on Earth in my own little way.Then the last astronaut selection announcement that came out two years ago, just before covid \u2014 I was 49, I think, when that came out. A lot of people asked me, \u201cAre you going to apply?\u201d And I was, like, \u201cNo, my time has passed for NASA. I\u2019m just too old.\u201d I said, \u201cMaybe one day I\u2019ll be able to go up on commercial space.\u201d But in my mind, that was a decade off. Not realizing it was right around the corner.Story continues below advertisementYou knew a lot about NASA and its training, infrastructure, but going up on the first fully civilian astronaut mission, did you have misgivings? AdvertisementNo. I think I\u2019ve always kind of been \u201cJump in head first and let\u2019s figure it out along the way.\u201d So for me, it was pure joy, excitement and gratitude from the beginning. Because here I was about to turn 51 and just like, Okay, let\u2019s do this. Because an opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime. And the fact that it happened, that this dream came true \u2014 I had been chasing it my entire life. So I was all-in.Commercial space flight is a completely different model. What do you see as some of the benefits and the drawbacks?Story continues below advertisementWell, the biggest drawback is cost. And so, just access. When you think about how do we have as many people experience this as possible because it opens up opportunity, it\u2019s like traveling on a plane, right? You\u2019re going somewhere. There\u2019s some destination. There\u2019s some experience. And that helps to broaden your understanding of our planet and our world and our culture and all of those things. And when I think about access to space and opening it up to more people, I think how all of that knowledge spurs the imagination. And with commercial space, because we\u2019re writing the narrative of human spaceflight now, we have to strive for that JEDI space: just, equitable, diverse and inclusive space. And how do we do that when the cost is so high?AdvertisementThere\u2019s criticism of the billionaire space race when there are so many problems here on Earth that those resources could be put toward. The reality is that solving for space solves for Earth. That\u2019s the message I don\u2019t think gets portrayed enough. Because everything that we do are real dollars spent here on Earth to advance human spaceflight. There are jobs. And not only that, but the technology and the spinoffs. They all come back here to help us. NASA\u2019s had basically 50 years of spinoff technology.Story continues below advertisementAnd as we push for the moon and Mars, it\u2019s all about efficiency and energy, water, food, structures. All of that we have to figure out in order for humans to be able to survive. Well, those are the things that we need to not just survive, but to thrive. To become more energy-efficient. To become more water-efficient. To become more food-efficient. Those are the big problems people are talking about solving. And we can solve them by solving for space.AdvertisementYou\u2019ve spoken about your father as a sort of hidden figure, and here you are now, a public pioneer. What do you think that would mean to him?Oh my goodness. Oh, he would be so proud and just overjoyed. And I think he would say, \u201cSee? I told you you could do anything.\u201d [Laughs.] Because he really instilled that message in me from the beginning \u2014 me and my siblings. We\u2019re so lucky to have had amazing parents who just \u2014 you know, they grew up half of their lives in segregation. And so they had every reason to be bitter, to some extent, and jaded. But they weren\u2019t. Both my parents believed that the key to advancement and success is education, even though neither of them ever went on to get their college degrees.Story continues below advertisementYou said that the highlight of the mission for you was opening the cupola. Can you describe what that is like for those of us who might not get that opportunity?AdvertisementIt was amazing. When you look up through the cupola at first, when you slide up into it for the first time, you literally openly gasp. Because you can see the entire sphere of the Earth. There\u2019s no way to describe how epic that moment is. You\u2019re just, like: \u201cWait, wait, ah, ah, oh, okay, ah, wow!\u201d [Laughs.] And then you see the star field down below and the moon peeking out right around the corner, suspended there. It\u2019s magical.Does seeing the Earth from up there change how you think about the planet and our lives here?Story continues below advertisementI\u2019ve been a geoscientist my entire career. So climate change, all of that stuff, I already had that in me. But as an artist and a poet, all I kept thinking when I looked at our planet swirling and moving below us was that it was a portrait in motion. It was this amazing portrait that we get to paint. And influence. And how delicate, fragile, and beautiful it is.AdvertisementI don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve ever seen the movie \u201cWhat Dreams May Come\u201d with Robin Williams. Great movie, and the scene where he\u2019s in a portrait, and he\u2019s just making the portrait swirl. And I just kept thinking, Wow, I feel like I could just reach my hand out from the cupola and just go like this and make it swirl. And, to some extent, when I think about human influence on our planet, that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing, right? But we\u2019re doing it from the Earth up. And here I am watching the impact of that from space. Because we could see the fires burning. So thinking how we can\u2019t mess this up. It\u2019s too beautiful to mess up.When you see the Earth from that perspective, it does change you. For some, it gives an appreciation for all that we have down there and this sense of stewardship. For others, it gives that urgency to keep going, to keep advancing human spaceflight out among the stars. But the reality is, it fundamentally changes you in some way. And that\u2019s a good thing.KK Ottesen is a regular contributor to the magazine. Follow her on Twitter: @kkOttesen. This interview has been edited and condensed. The geoscientist and crew member of the first fully civilian orbital spaceflight talks about the future of space travel. Sian Proctor, the first African American woman to pilot a spacecraft: \u2018The reality is that solving for space solves for Earth\u2019",
        "author": "KK Ottesen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Gene Weingarten: Oh, is it your birthday? I don\u2019t care. (WP: The Washington Post Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7261",
        "date": "2021-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/gene-weingarten-oh-is-it-your-birthday-i-dont-care/2021/04/01/9795774a-867a-11eb-8a8b-5cf82c3dffe4_story.html",
        "text": "I have a friend named Cecilia. She is a professional puppeteer, but that is not the most interesting fact about her. The most interesting fact about Cecilia is that, every single year, on June 10, she celebrates the day she was born, which was precisely on June 10. It is \u2014 get ready for this \u2014 her birthday. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNow, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: How can I get one of those? And the astonishing answer is that you can! You merely have to know the day you were born, and that is the day that is, and will always be, your birthday!Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: Wait a minute! Doesn\u2019t that make a birthday a moronic thing to celebrate, since every living human being has one, regardless of their goodness, or their accomplishments? For example, Adolf Hitler had a birthday. It was April 20.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo, that is what you are thinking. But you are wrong, since, by my calculation, confirmed by sources as august as Facebook, birthdays are a huge deal. When it is your birthday, all 7,500 of your closest friends get reminded digitally that it is your birthday, and, in a gigantic and generous and coordinated expenditure of four seconds of their time, they wish you a happy birthday. You feel validated.I hereby apologize to Cecilia, who is a real person, and an actual puppeteer, and who does not obnoxiously observe her birthday in an ostentatious display of self-celebration the way most of the rest of you do. For the purposes of this column, she is simply a tool, an innocent vessel through whom I am expressing utter disdain for people who consider their birthdays sacrosanct, worthy of applause, simply (rhyme alert) ... because. I recently had occasion to confront these people. It was on Twitter. I explained that I felt celebrating birthdays was a ridiculous thing to do, and that I had heard of friendships destroyed by people not remembering other people\u2019s birthdays, and \u2014 I am saying this again, for emphasis \u2014 that everyone has a birthday. Yours, for example, is Oct. 2. I have at least a one in 365 chance of getting it right, and you will be so happy.The results of the Twitter escapade sort of astounded me. People were outraged. One guy accused me of being un-American and evil, denying people the God-given right of feeling proud on the day they have officially lived another year. This man was not alone. There were dozens more. One informed me that I am the Grinch, only worse; that I seek to sap joy from all humans and bring disrepute on everyone\u2019s ancestors. I was flattered. I am second to none in my admiration for the Grinch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause you are a smart person, you are likely wondering what I think of childhood birthday parties. I am fine with them. Children are wonderful innocent creatures who have little reason, in their lives, to celebrate their accomplishments, except for such things as successfully pooping in a toilet. I do not begrudge them the birthday conceit, except that they have to understand it has to end. I propose the age of 9. I think every child\u2019s ninth birthday should be declared the Birthday Repudiation Day. The kid gets a lot of presents, and they will be big, like a piano or an actual spaceship, but that will be it for the remainder of his or her life. It\u2019s the day you understand your birthday means squat. If you are Jewish, this will be a more important day than your bar or bat mitzvah.My birthday, by the way, happens to be Oct. 2, like yours. It is one of the most common birthdays, because \u2014 this is true \u2014 it biologically coincides with people having sex on New Year\u2019s Eve. So, to me, it is a celebration of my parents that I refuse to think about and DEFINITELY don\u2019t celebrate.\n\nEmail Gene Weingarten at gene.weingarten@washpost.com. Find chats and updates at wapo.st/magazine.For stories, features such as Date Lab, @Work Advice and more, visit WP Magazine.Follow the Magazine on Twitter.Like us on Facebook.Email us at wpmagazine@washpost.com. I feel utter disdain for people who consider their birthdays sacrosanct, worthy of applause. Gene Weingarten: Oh, is it your birthday? I don\u2019t care.",
        "author": "Gene Weingarten"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Gene Weingarten: Behold, the worst diet of all time (WP: The Washington Post Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7262",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/gene-weingarten-behold-the-worst-diet-of-all-time/2021/04/08/07e00cdc-88be-11eb-bfdf-4d36dab83a6d_story.html",
        "text": "A few weeks ago, I clicked on a news story and my jaw dropped. It dropped because I was trying to insert into my mouth a big fat bratwurst smothered in butter-sauteed onions.Then I read the news story. It said that millennials are reporting an average weight gain of 41 pounds since the start of the pandemic. Wow, I thought. Those poor young men and women are stress-eating themselves to an early death. Alas, they lack the self-control and resilience of us older people. Then I decided, just for reassurance, to visit my bathroom scale. It had been a while. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMy scale is one of those electronic ones, where you don\u2019t see your weight right away. First, a display flashes and rolls, like on a slot machine, and then it settles on your weight. In my case, it didn\u2019t settle gently like a leaf, it thudded down like a gunnysack of organ meat.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA few days later, in a panic, I started the worst diet of all time, one largely of my own invention. It\u2019s quite easy to summarize, and even easier to name: You only eat foods that repulse you. I call it the Eat [Feces] Diet.Laugh if you want, but after 12 days I lost nine pounds. I do not feel sick. I feel terribly, terribly, horribly sorry for myself, but, hey, that\u2019s pretty much the state we\u2019re all in.I should note that in the past I have launched other lunatic diets \u2014 anything that could cause the loss of a pound or two and result in a column. Once I ate only dog food for a week. Another time I devised a diet where you could eat anything you want, and as much as you want, but you had to shovel the day\u2019s worth down in one five-minute sitting.Story continues below advertisementThe E.S. Diet is worse than either. No fat or sugar or starch. No butter. If you use oil, it can only be a single spray-dot less than the diameter of a quarter, the sole purpose of which is to avoid pan-bottom charring, because char tastes kinda good. You can\u2019t eat fruits and veggies you like, such as tomatoes or beets or bok choy, but raw kale is fine because it tastes like crepe paper. If there are low-fat things you kind of like, you have to ruin them before you can eat them. I like chicken, but not the wan and fatless white meat, unless it is slathered with gravy. This diet requires you to eat only the wan and fatless white meat, but you have to first boil it to culinary death. Hot sauce is legal, but you have to use too much of it. You may also use salt, but only if you over-salt and over-pepper, and add three other emphatically flavored spices that notoriously quarrel: Mix and match among garlic, fennel, basil, cloves and cinnamon.AdvertisementOn the E.S. Diet you simply lose all desire for food. You\u2019d be better off consuming protein pills on a spaceship. There is no limit to the serving size because there is no need for a limit. It is most effectively self-limiting.Oh, and beer is okay in moderation. One does not last weeks on this monstrous regimen without spiritual help.Story continues below advertisementAfter the diet was done, I was so resentful, and so desperate for the sheer taste of taste, that I put myself on a second diet. This one was the photo negative of the E.S. Diet. It was confined only to my favorite food in the world. For the next three days, I had only raw oysters and clams. Lost another two pounds.Then it was over. My first meal back was my favorite childhood comfort food, a peasant Russian dish called matzoh brei, a name my young kids had manhandled to \u201cmonster pie.\u201d It is ostentatiously opulent, involving matzoh, butter, cottage cheese, eggs and dollops of strawberry jam, all previously verboten. It was heaven. I had seconds.By Day 2, post-diets, I had regained three pounds. Thirty-eight pounds to go, I guess.\n\nEmail Gene Weingarten at gene.weingarten@washpost.com.Twitter: @geneweingarten. For previous columns, visit wapo.st/weingarten.For stories, features such as Date Lab, @Work Advice and more, visit WP Magazine.Follow the Magazine on Twitter.Like us on Facebook.Email us at wpmagazine@washpost.com. You only eat foods that repulse you. Gene Weingarten: Behold, the worst diet of all time",
        "author": "Gene Weingarten"
    },
    {
        "title": "When SpaceX\u2019s made its first successful test launch of a payload into Earth\u2019s orbit (WP: The Washington Post Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7263",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/when-spacexs-made-its-first-successful-test-launch-of-a-payload-into-earths-orbit/2018/09/14/cafbf776-9f46-11e8-93e3-24d1703d2a7a_story.html",
        "text": "SEPT. 28, 2008\u2009\u201cFourth time\u2019s a charm.\u201d That is what Elon Musk said on this day 10 years ago when his company Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, launched a dummy payload into Earth\u2019s orbit after three previous failed attempts. The successful launch of the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket was another milestone for the private spaceflight industry, which has been sending rockets into space since the 1980s. In the past two decades, the industry has attracted tech moguls such as Musk, who made his fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and later helped start the electric-car maker Tesla. \u201cThis really means a lot,\u201d Musk said on the day of the Falcon 1 launch, according to an Associated Press account. \u201cThere\u2019s only a handful of countries on Earth that have done this. It\u2019s usually a country thing, not a company thing. We did it.\u201d In February of this year, SpaceX sent a Tesla Roadster belonging to Musk hurtling toward Mars as part of a test of its Falcon Heavy, billed as the world\u2019s most powerful operational rocket. As of early September, according to whereisroadster.com, the car had traveled far enough to have surpassed its 36,000-mile warranty more than 8,400 times. Eventually, SpaceX wants to ferry humans into space. When SpaceX\u2019s made its first successful test launch of a payload into Earth\u2019s orbit",
        "author": "Annys Shin"
    },
    {
        "title": "At the Explorers Club\u2019s annual gala, guests share a love of adventure \u2014 and eating tarantulas (WP: The Washington Post Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7264",
        "date": "2019-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/at-the-explorers-clubs-annual-gala-guests-share-a-love-of-exploration--and-eating-tarantulas/2019/05/03/ecb58310-624f-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html",
        "text": "On a Saturday evening in March, while herds of St. Patrick's Day revelers clad in green pushed through Times Square past tourists gawking at a guy dressed as a giant Transformer, a wholly different spectacle was unfolding inside the Marriott Marquis. There, the Explorers Club, founded in 1904 in New York by academics and journalists, was in the midst of a weekend of meetings and receptions focused broadly on the confluence of science and exploration. The highlight was that evening's cocktail reception and silent auction, followed by a gala dinner with speeches, videos, awards and a live auction, where you could bid on things like a trip titled, \"Decoding the Pillars of Happiness: A Bespoke Invitation to the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan.\" (Suggested retail value: $20,000.) The club\u2019s gala is an enthusiastic celebration of science at a time when science is distrusted by no less than the current occupant of the White House. It\u2019s also an event built around a sometimes anachronistic elitism. And yet, this esoteric vibe only seems to enhance its allure.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis year, 1,700 people attended the dinner. Many arrived clad in tuxedos and formal dresses. Some men wore gloves and top hats or sported medals around their necks. Others looked as if they\u2019d come for some League of Extraordinary Gentlemen cosplay. One guy was wearing what I\u2019m pretty sure was a Canadian Mountie uniform. I spotted at least one kilt, an Austrian dirndl-style dress, and a crown of boar tusks.The Explorers Club is not for poseurs, though. According to the group\u2019s website, \u201cMembers are those individuals who have contributed in broad terms to the cause of exploration and who evidence a sustained interest in some field of scientific exploration\u201d; the site also notes that activities such as traveling for fun and big-game hunting do not count. Members don\u2019t necessarily have to go to far-flung locales: Curt Westergard, who belongs to the club\u2019s Washington-area chapter, builds tethered surveillance balloon systems to capture large aerial images, mostly of cities. \u201cI explore and document the space above buildings, but below where airplanes fly,\u201d he explained.Joining the club is not cheap: For most types of membership, there\u2019s an initiation fee that ranges from $340 to $765, and annual dues that range from $65 (for students) to $1,365. The club provides members with a community of like-minded individuals, while also supporting education and research. Notable past members include Roy Chapman Andrews, thought to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones, and Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who crossed the Pacific Ocean on a balsa wood raft. (Women weren\u2019t allowed as members until 1981.) The Apollo astronauts were given awards at this year\u2019s dinner. Buzz Aldrin was in attendance; Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin (and, full disclosure, The Washington Post), and Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, were invited but didn\u2019t make it, according to Lisa Kovitz, a publicist for the event.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI pushed through the crowd in search of what is arguably the dinner\u2019s most famous appetizer: tarantula tempura on a stick. I happened upon a large centerpiece made up of small, palm-like plants on top of a grassy surface, ringed with what appeared to be recently dead reptiles. There were no tarantulas, though. \u201cThey\u2019re the first to go,\u201d said a young man, as he took a selfie with a meal worm cake pop. He went on to explain that the reception was first open to VIPs, and the tarantulas were really Instagrammable. Later, Tariq Malik, managing editor of Space.com, told me he tried one, and it was \u201clike shoving an entire bloomin\u2019 onion in my mouth, except this had eyes that could see into my soul.\u201dAs the dinner chimes sounded, I picked up a bug on a skewer from amongst some dirty glasses and used napkins. I brandished it like a sword, and as I walked through the crowd, some folks pointed, while others shouted, \u201cEat it!\u201d One of the chefs in a long white hat who was leaning against a nearby counter informed me it was a cockroach. He said that it would taste crunchy on the outside and mealy on the inside; he also recommended procuring \u201ca shot or two of vodka\u201d prior to consumption. I took the skewer with me into the ballroom, where I abandoned it without taking a bite.On stage, the club\u2019s president, Richard Wiese, commented on the size of the turnout, declaring that it might be \u201cthe largest gathering of world-class explorers ever,\u201d as the crowd cheered. He continued, \u201cThis is the greatest club in the world!\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt is certainly a club that appreciates superlatives. Even the non-famous members were impressive. Besides the special awards bestowed upon the Apollo astronauts, one award went to anesthesiologist and diver Richard Harris for his role in rescuing the boys\u2019 soccer team from a cave in Thailand. Another went to biology professor James McClintock for his ongoing work in Antarctica, where he is researching the impacts of ocean acidification and climate change.The guy wearing the crown of boar tusks, which turned out to be a traditional Ethiopian tribal headdress, was video game entrepreneur Richard Garriott de Cayeux, a son of Owen Garriott, an astronaut who flew on space shuttle Columbia and Skylab, the first American space station. Richard and his wife, Laetitia, who is also a member, brought their two children, ages 6 and 4, to the gala. Richard and Laetitia are both space aficionados. The couple invests in SpaceX, as well as other space companies; in 2008, Richard spent $30\u00a0million to live in space for 12 days. Their latest expedition was closer to home, in Ethiopia, where they met members of a few Omo Valley tribes.Honorary President Bertrand Piccard reminded the crowd that it was their job to address the serious issues facing the planet, including poverty and the environment. Award-winner Kenneth Lacovara \u2014 who is dean of the School of Earth & Environment at Rowan University in New Jersey and renowned for his dinosaur discoveries, including one of the heaviest land animals known ever to have lived, the Dreadnoughtus \u2014 spoke about humanity owing its existence to the asteroid that brought on the demise of the dinosaurs. He urged the people in the room to work to solve the problems facing the planet, warning that, now, \u201cwe\u2019re the asteroid.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn a lighter note, each of the Apollo astronauts was asked to share a memory from their Apollo days. One astronaut discussed the rather delicate matter of using the bathroom, explaining that urine vented into space turned into something that looked like a kind of snow. The audience roared with laughter.Around 11 p.m., the crowd had thinned. Some attendees were already thinking about next year. Several people I spoke to talked about feeling that other members of the club really \u201cgot\u201d them. Indeed, as with all subcultures, the appeal of the Explorers Club may ultimately lie in the sense of belonging it promotes. Earlier in the evening, Gaelin Rosenwaks \u2014 a marine scientist, photographer and self-described \u201cocean storyteller\u201d who has done research around the world \u2014 told me how much she relishes the chance to connect with friends who are \u201camazing, like-minded people.\u201d \u201cWhen you tell people here what you\u2019re doing,\u201d she said, \u201cthey don\u2019t think you\u2019re crazy. Instead, they want to hear more.\u201dLia Kvatum is a writer and producer in Maryland. The evening celebrated Apollo astronauts, but Teddy Roosevelt still would\u2019ve felt at home. At the Explorers Club\u2019s annual gala, guests share a love of adventure \u2014 and eating tarantulas",
        "author": "Lia Kvatum"
    },
    {
        "title": "The American Dream Is Alive on Mars (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7265",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-dream-is-alive-on-mars-11614370446?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=8",
        "text": "Ms. Verma has good reason to pay heed to the time on Mars, currently 134 million miles away. She\u2019s the chief engineer of robotic operations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars on Feb. 18. The sight of NASA scientists cheering the successful descent from their control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lifted American hearts. But there were \u201cmany fewer people in the room,\u201d she tells me, than when the last rover, Curiosity, reached the red planet in 2012: \u201cThere had to be distancing this time because of the pandemic. So there were people in other rooms, and others observing remotely.\u201d\nMs. Verma and her team are responsible for \u201ceverything to do with the mobility of the rover,\u201d which includes driving and navigation as well as operating the robotic arm that gathers rock and core samples on Mars. They also oversee the Ingenuity helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft that weighs 4 pounds and spans 4 feet. \u201cThis will,\u201d she tells me, \u201cbe the first aircraft to attempt powered, controlled flight on another planet.\u201d \nMs. Verma does some of the driving of Perseverance herself, often remotely from home thanks to Covid. Her 18-month-old twins, Arjun and Anya, are usually home, so they\u2019re often on Mars time, too, \u201calthough it\u2019s sometimes hard to manage them.\u201d Fortunately, her husband, a systems engineer at JPL, is on hand to help. Ms. Verma thinks she has it easy. Some colleagues have more-taxing \u201cEarth-time counterparts in their life\u201d\u2014significant others and older children who have a hard time coexisting on cross-planetary clocks. \n\n\nRead More Weekend Interviews\n\n\n\n\nThe West\u2019s Economic War Plan Against Russia\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nThe Two Blunders That Caused the Ukraine War\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nHow Government Spending Fuels Inflation\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nGod and Man at Yale Law \nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\nThe Underside of the \u2018Great Resignation\u2019\nJanuary 21, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nA Mars day, called a sol, is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, so the time difference changes every day. \u201cYou try to get synchronized with Mars, instead of Earth,\u201d Ms. Verma says. \u201cSo we\u2019ll eat breakfast at 10 p.m. if that\u2019s when it\u2019s breakfast time on Mars, and dinner at 5 a.m. if it\u2019s night there.\u201d She tries to avoid \u201cEarth light when it isn\u2019t daytime on Mars, because it helps a lot with your circadian rhythm.\u201d Ms. Verma has been driving Mars rovers since 2008, so she has some advice for rookies: \u201cNo matter how dark your curtains are, they aren\u2019t ever dark enough to keep the light out. So it helps to put tinfoil on the windows, to completely block the light.\u201d \n\n\nAlthough she\u2019s too humble to say so outright, Ms. Verma\u2014who is in her 40s but declines to state her precise age\u2014is arguably the world\u2019s most experienced Martian robot operator. She joined JPL in 2007, shortly after completing her doctorate in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and by 2008 was driving Spirit and Opportunity, solar-powered rovers that landed in 2004. \u201cI was still an Indian citizen then,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I became an American citizen shortly after.\u201d\nMs. Verma was born near an Indian air force base in Halwara, in the state of Punjab, where her father was a pilot who flew Russian-made MiG jet fighters. Her mother, a \u201ctraditional housewife who can\u2019t drive a car,\u201d envisioned nothing more outlandish for young Vandi than a college education and an arranged marriage. (She got the former, but met her American husband at work.) But Ms. Verma says she was lost to tradition at age 7, when a family friend gave her a set of books about space for her birthday. \u201cI devoured those books, and I watched Dr. Spock on TV\u201d\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leonard Nimoy\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cStar Trek\u201d character. \u201cI knew what I wanted in life\u2014to be a space scientist.\u201d \nAfter a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering in India, she came to Carnegie Mellon, and she interned at NASA while earning her doctorate. Once it became clear that she would specialize in robotics, \u201cthere really was no other place to go\u201d than JPL, which describes itself on its website as \u201chumanity\u2019s leading center for exploring where humans cannot yet reach.\u201d \nMs. Verma worked on the Curiosity rover before it landed on Mars, and she drove it for five years, in the last of which she also worked on Perseverance, which left Earth on July 30, 2020. \u201cThe pandemic started well before we launched,\u201d she says, \u201cand we still had hardware to put together. We still had to take our rover to Cape Canaveral, because we launched from there.\u201d \nNASA couldn\u2019t afford to miss the launch window, because the next one wouldn\u2019t come until 2022. \u201cWe try to fly at a time when the path that the spacecraft will take from Earth to Mars is the shortest,\u201d she says. \u201cThat occurs every two years, because of the orbital mechanics.\u201d The whole team needed to be at the cape, so \u201cour entire operations facility was redone so that we could have the distancing we needed, and the air filtration\u201d to safeguard against the virus. \u201cWe just treated it as Growing up in India, Vandi Verma admired Spock on \u2018Star Trek\u2019 and wanted to be an engineer. Now she drives the NASA rover exploring the red planet. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The American Dream Is Alive on Mars (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7266",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-dream-is-alive-on-mars-11614370446?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=33",
        "text": "Ms. Verma has good reason to pay heed to the time on Mars, currently 134 million miles away. She\u2019s the chief engineer of robotic operations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars on Feb. 18. The sight of NASA scientists cheering the successful descent from their control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lifted American hearts. But there were \u201cmany fewer people in the room,\u201d she tells me, than when the last rover, Curiosity, reached the red planet in 2012: \u201cThere had to be distancing this time because of the pandemic. So there were people in other rooms, and others observing remotely.\u201d\nMs. Verma and her team are responsible for \u201ceverything to do with the mobility of the rover,\u201d which includes driving and navigation as well as operating the robotic arm that gathers rock and core samples on Mars. They also oversee the Ingenuity helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft that weighs 4 pounds and spans 4 feet. \u201cThis will,\u201d she tells me, \u201cbe the first aircraft to attempt powered, controlled flight on another planet.\u201d \nMs. Verma does some of the driving of Perseverance herself, often remotely from home thanks to Covid. Her 18-month-old twins, Arjun and Anya, are usually home, so they\u2019re often on Mars time, too, \u201calthough it\u2019s sometimes hard to manage them.\u201d Fortunately, her husband, a systems engineer at JPL, is on hand to help. Ms. Verma thinks she has it easy. Some colleagues have more-taxing \u201cEarth-time counterparts in their life\u201d\u2014significant others and older children who have a hard time coexisting on cross-planetary clocks. \n\n\nRead More Weekend Interviews\n\n\n\n\nThe West\u2019s Economic War Plan Against Russia\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nThe Two Blunders That Caused the Ukraine War\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nHow Government Spending Fuels Inflation\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nGod and Man at Yale Law \nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\nThe Underside of the \u2018Great Resignation\u2019\nJanuary 21, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nA Mars day, called a sol, is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, so the time difference changes every day. \u201cYou try to get synchronized with Mars, instead of Earth,\u201d Ms. Verma says. \u201cSo we\u2019ll eat breakfast at 10 p.m. if that\u2019s when it\u2019s breakfast time on Mars, and dinner at 5 a.m. if it\u2019s night there.\u201d She tries to avoid \u201cEarth light when it isn\u2019t daytime on Mars, because it helps a lot with your circadian rhythm.\u201d Ms. Verma has been driving Mars rovers since 2008, so she has some advice for rookies: \u201cNo matter how dark your curtains are, they aren\u2019t ever dark enough to keep the light out. So it helps to put tinfoil on the windows, to completely block the light.\u201d \n\n\nAlthough she\u2019s too humble to say so outright, Ms. Verma\u2014who is in her 40s but declines to state her precise age\u2014is arguably the world\u2019s most experienced Martian robot operator. She joined JPL in 2007, shortly after completing her doctorate in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and by 2008 was driving Spirit and Opportunity, solar-powered rovers that landed in 2004. \u201cI was still an Indian citizen then,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I became an American citizen shortly after.\u201d\nMs. Verma was born near an Indian air force base in Halwara, in the state of Punjab, where her father was a pilot who flew Russian-made MiG jet fighters. Her mother, a \u201ctraditional housewife who can\u2019t drive a car,\u201d envisioned nothing more outlandish for young Vandi than a college education and an arranged marriage. (She got the former, but met her American husband at work.) But Ms. Verma says she was lost to tradition at age 7, when a family friend gave her a set of books about space for her birthday. \u201cI devoured those books, and I watched Dr. Spock on TV\u201d\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leonard Nimoy\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cStar Trek\u201d character. \u201cI knew what I wanted in life\u2014to be a space scientist.\u201d \nAfter a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering in India, she came to Carnegie Mellon, and she interned at NASA while earning her doctorate. Once it became clear that she would specialize in robotics, \u201cthere really was no other place to go\u201d than JPL, which describes itself on its website as \u201chumanity\u2019s leading center for exploring where humans cannot yet reach.\u201d \nMs. Verma worked on the Curiosity rover before it landed on Mars, and she drove it for five years, in the last of which she also worked on Perseverance, which left Earth on July 30, 2020. \u201cThe pandemic started well before we launched,\u201d she says, \u201cand we still had hardware to put together. We still had to take our rover to Cape Canaveral, because we launched from there.\u201d \nNASA couldn\u2019t afford to miss the launch window, because the next one wouldn\u2019t come until 2022. \u201cWe try to fly at a time when the path that the spacecraft will take from Earth to Mars is the shortest,\u201d she says. \u201cThat occurs every two years, because of the orbital mechanics.\u201d The whole team needed to be at the cape, so \u201cour entire operations facility was redone so that we could have the distancing we needed, and the air filtration\u201d to safeguard against the virus. \u201cWe just treated it as Growing up in India, Vandi Verma admired Spock on \u2018Star Trek\u2019 and wanted to be an engineer. Now she drives the NASA rover exploring the red planet. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The American Dream Is Alive on Mars (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7267",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-american-dream-is-alive-on-mars-11614370446?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=36",
        "text": "Ms. Verma has good reason to pay heed to the time on Mars, currently 134 million miles away. She\u2019s the chief engineer of robotic operations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars on Feb. 18. The sight of NASA scientists cheering the successful descent from their control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lifted American hearts. But there were \u201cmany fewer people in the room,\u201d she tells me, than when the last rover, Curiosity, reached the red planet in 2012: \u201cThere had to be distancing this time because of the pandemic. So there were people in other rooms, and others observing remotely.\u201d\nMs. Verma and her team are responsible for \u201ceverything to do with the mobility of the rover,\u201d which includes driving and navigation as well as operating the robotic arm that gathers rock and core samples on Mars. They also oversee the Ingenuity helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft that weighs 4 pounds and spans 4 feet. \u201cThis will,\u201d she tells me, \u201cbe the first aircraft to attempt powered, controlled flight on another planet.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nMs. Verma does some of the driving of Perseverance herself, often remotely from home thanks to Covid. Her 18-month-old twins, Arjun and Anya, are usually home, so they\u2019re often on Mars time, too, \u201calthough it\u2019s sometimes hard to manage them.\u201d Fortunately, her husband, a systems engineer at JPL, is on hand to help. Ms. Verma thinks she has it easy. Some colleagues have more-taxing \u201cEarth-time counterparts in their life\u201d\u2014significant others and older children who have a hard time coexisting on cross-planetary clocks. \n\n\nRead More Weekend Interviews\n\n\n\n\nThe Two Blunders That Caused the Ukraine War\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nHow Government Spending Fuels Inflation\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nGod and Man at Yale Law \nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\nThe Underside of the \u2018Great Resignation\u2019\nJanuary 21, 2022 \n\n\nFlorida Is Living With Covid\u2014and Freedom\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nA Mars day, called a sol, is 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, so the time difference changes every day. \u201cYou try to get synchronized with Mars, instead of Earth,\u201d Ms. Verma says. \u201cSo we\u2019ll eat breakfast at 10 p.m. if that\u2019s when it\u2019s breakfast time on Mars, and dinner at 5 a.m. if it\u2019s night there.\u201d She tries to avoid \u201cEarth light when it isn\u2019t daytime on Mars, because it helps a lot with your circadian rhythm.\u201d Ms. Verma has been driving Mars rovers since 2008, so she has some advice for rookies: \u201cNo matter how dark your curtains are, they aren\u2019t ever dark enough to keep the light out. So it helps to put tinfoil on the windows, to completely block the light.\u201d \n\n\nAlthough she\u2019s too humble to say so outright, Ms. Verma\u2014who is in her 40s but declines to state her precise age\u2014is arguably the world\u2019s most experienced Martian robot operator. She joined JPL in 2007, shortly after completing her doctorate in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and by 2008 was driving Spirit and Opportunity, solar-powered rovers that landed in 2004. \u201cI was still an Indian citizen then,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I became an American citizen shortly after.\u201d\nMs. Verma was born near an Indian air force base in Halwara, in the state of Punjab, where her father was a pilot who flew Russian-made MiG jet fighters. Her mother, a \u201ctraditional housewife who can\u2019t drive a car,\u201d envisioned nothing more outlandish for young Vandi than a college education and an arranged marriage. (She got the former, but met her American husband at work.) But Ms. Verma says she was lost to tradition at age 7, when a family friend gave her a set of books about space for her birthday. \u201cI devoured those books, and I watched Dr. Spock on TV\u201d\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leonard Nimoy\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cStar Trek\u201d character. \u201cI knew what I wanted in life\u2014to be a space scientist.\u201d \nAfter a bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering in India, she came to Carnegie Mellon, and she interned at NASA while earning her doctorate. Once it became clear that she would specialize in robotics, \u201cthere really was no other place to go\u201d than JPL, which describes itself on its website as \u201chumanity\u2019s leading center for exploring where humans cannot yet reach.\u201d \nMs. Verma worked on the Curiosity rover before it landed on Mars, and she drove it for five years, in the last of which she also worked on Perseverance, which left Earth on July 30, 2020. \u201cThe pandemic started well before we launched,\u201d she says, \u201cand we still had hardware to put together. We still had to take our rover to Cape Canaveral, because we launched from there.\u201d \nNASA couldn\u2019t afford to miss the launch window, because the next one wouldn\u2019t come until 2022. \u201cWe try to fly at a time when the path that the spacecraft will take from Earth to Mars is the shortest,\u201d she says. \u201cThat occurs every two years, because of the orbital mechanics.\u201d The whole team needed to be at the cape, so \u201cour entire operations facility was redone so that we could have the distancing we needed, and the air filtration\u201d to safeguard against the virus. \u201cWe just treated it Growing up in India, Vandi Verma admired Spock on \u2018Star Trek\u2019 and wanted to be an engineer. Now she drives the NASA rover exploring the red planet. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New \u2018Gold Rush in Space\u2019 (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7268",
        "date": "2020-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-gold-rush-in-space-11596826062?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=37",
        "text": "Mr. Kokorich, 44, is one such entrepreneur. In 2017 he founded Momentus, a California-based company that seeks to revolutionize transport in space by developing in-space transfer vehicles that use water as a propellant. These would \u201ccomplement low-cost gigantic rockets, like Starship from SpaceX and New Glenn from Blue Origin,\u201d he says. Craft built by Momentus would enable the outer-space equivalent of the connecting flight. A satellite would reach orbit by \u201cride-sharing on a big rocket,\u201d then transfer to a Momentus vehicle for the next leg farther out. \nThe choice of water as a propellant, Mr. Kokorich says, would \u201cnot only enable extremely low-cost in-space vehicles\u2014built in a \u2018Mad Max\u2019 steampunk style\u2014but eventually allow the use of water mined from the moon and from asteroids.\u201d Far-fetched? He points to \u201cbinding contracts already with NASA,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin,\n\n\n and the U.S. Air Force,\u201d not to mention dozens of satellite operators and manufacturers. \u201cHell, Momentus even has a ride-share partnership agreement with SpaceX.\u201d\n\n\nNow a CEO in the vanguard of rocket science, Mr. Kokorich was born in a house with no indoor toilets and sporadic electricity in Aginskoye, Siberia, population around 10,000. His mother was 19 when she bore him, and he was raised by her parents, both schoolteachers with more education than almost anyone else in town. \u201cI often studied by the light of a kerosene lamp when I was young,\u201d he tells me by Zoom from his house in Los Altos Hills, Calif., where he\u2019s lived since he left Russia in 2014 as part of what he calls \u201cthe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Putin\n\n\n\n exodus.\u201d \nHe pored over more than science textbooks. \u201cI read many American writers,\u201d he says. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack London,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Twain,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Fenimore Cooper,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Dreiser,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ernest Hemingway.\n\n\n\n These books helped me understand the importance of human freedoms and the spirit of pioneers.\u201d \nThus he speaks of the Crew Dragon splashdown with a historical sweep. \u201cIn terms of managerial effectiveness,\u201d he says, \u201cusing private business for space is like Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s hiring of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Drake\n\n\n\n in the 16th century. These are buccaneers in space.\u201d Drake created a multigun ship, \u201cwhich was the greatest achievement of science and technology of that time.\u201d He leaps ahead to the 17th century: \u201cWith the help of the East India Co., the British Empire was built in the East. This laid the economic foundation for victory over Napoleonic France and the Pax Britannica in the 19th century.\u201d Mr. Kokorich says private companies like SpaceX\u2014and, yes, his own\u2014\u201cwill be the main driver of centuries of Pax Americana in space.\u201d\nAmerica is regenerating its space ambitions as Russia falls ever lower in the space-tech pecking order. \u201cThe U.S. is definitely No. 1, then the European Union, then China,\u201d Mr. Kokorich says. \u201cNext, I think India is now comparable with Russia, and maybe even more advanced than Russia in a wider sense.\u201d He attributes \u201cthe withering of Russia\u2019s historic might in space\u201d to its being strapped for cash, saddled with a Soviet-era approach that leans too heavily on the state, hampered by international sanctions and export restrictions, and debilitated by a brain drain\u2014of which he is an example: \u201cI am,\u201d he says, \u201cthe typical representative of the Putin exodus.\u201d\nHe says there\u2019s been a tectonic shift in space exploration, from the Cold War superpower rivalry to a \u201cgold rush in space,\u201d driven by private enterprise. Entry barriers are lower because satellites are connected to rockets in an increasingly standardized way, and the cost of hardware has dropped like a meteor. \u201cTen years ago,\u201d he says, \u201cit cost $100,000 to launch one kilo into space. Five years ago, with cheap post-Soviet Russian rockets, the price fell to $20,000 to $30,000. Today, it\u2019s $5,000.\u201d He says it will drop another order of magnitude, to $500, once Starship\u2014SpaceX\u2019s super heavy, fully reusable rocket\u2014is operational.\nMr. Kokorich believes the extraterrestrial gold rush favors the U.S. \u201cThe development of a new generation of reusable methane-fueled rocket engines,\u201d he says, \u201cdefinitively ended the U.S. dependence on Russian rockets that began when the Soviet Union collapsed.\u201d The choice of the Lunar Gateway as \u201cthe next human-habitation platform in space, instead of a space station in Earth\u2019s low orbit, carries with it financial and technical requirements that will effectively make the U.S. the controlling, if not the sole, platform operator.\u201d \nHe also cites President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n executive order of April 6 on the recovery and use of space resources, which he calls a \u201cgreat clarifier, reinforcing the view that Americans should have the right to engage in the commercial exploration and recovery of resources in outer space, rather than treating space as some sort of global commons.\u201d In short, Mr. Kokorich s Russian immigrant Mikhail Kokorich talks about America\u2019s edge in the new era of private exploration, and his own plans for a water-fueled space transport. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New \u2018Gold Rush in Space\u2019 (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7269",
        "date": "2020-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-gold-rush-in-space-11596826062?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=35",
        "text": "Mr. Kokorich, 44, is one such entrepreneur. In 2017 he founded Momentus, a California-based company that seeks to revolutionize transport in space by developing in-space transfer vehicles that use water as a propellant. These would \u201ccomplement low-cost gigantic rockets, like Starship from SpaceX and New Glenn from Blue Origin,\u201d he says. Craft built by Momentus would enable the outer-space equivalent of the connecting flight. A satellite would reach orbit by \u201cride-sharing on a big rocket,\u201d then transfer to a Momentus vehicle for the next leg farther out. \nThe choice of water as a propellant, Mr. Kokorich says, would \u201cnot only enable extremely low-cost in-space vehicles\u2014built in a \u2018Mad Max\u2019 steampunk style\u2014but eventually allow the use of water mined from the moon and from asteroids.\u201d Far-fetched? He points to \u201cbinding contracts already with NASA,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin,\n\n\n and the U.S. Air Force,\u201d not to mention dozens of satellite operators and manufacturers. \u201cHell, Momentus even has a ride-share partnership agreement with SpaceX.\u201d\n\n\nNow a CEO in the vanguard of rocket science, Mr. Kokorich was born in a house with no indoor toilets and sporadic electricity in Aginskoye, Siberia, population around 10,000. His mother was 19 when she bore him, and he was raised by her parents, both schoolteachers with more education than almost anyone else in town. \u201cI often studied by the light of a kerosene lamp when I was young,\u201d he tells me by Zoom from his house in Los Altos Hills, Calif., where he\u2019s lived since he left Russia in 2014 as part of what he calls \u201cthe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Putin\n\n\n\n exodus.\u201d \nHe pored over more than science textbooks. \u201cI read many American writers,\u201d he says. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack London,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Twain,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Fenimore Cooper,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Dreiser,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ernest Hemingway.\n\n\n\n These books helped me understand the importance of human freedoms and the spirit of pioneers.\u201d \nThus he speaks of the Crew Dragon splashdown with a historical sweep. \u201cIn terms of managerial effectiveness,\u201d he says, \u201cusing private business for space is like Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s hiring of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Drake\n\n\n\n in the 16th century. These are buccaneers in space.\u201d Drake created a multigun ship, \u201cwhich was the greatest achievement of science and technology of that time.\u201d He leaps ahead to the 17th century: \u201cWith the help of the East India Co., the British Empire was built in the East. This laid the economic foundation for victory over Napoleonic France and the Pax Britannica in the 19th century.\u201d Mr. Kokorich says private companies like SpaceX\u2014and, yes, his own\u2014\u201cwill be the main driver of centuries of Pax Americana in space.\u201d\nAmerica is regenerating its space ambitions as Russia falls ever lower in the space-tech pecking order. \u201cThe U.S. is definitely No. 1, then the European Union, then China,\u201d Mr. Kokorich says. \u201cNext, I think India is now comparable with Russia, and maybe even more advanced than Russia in a wider sense.\u201d He attributes \u201cthe withering of Russia\u2019s historic might in space\u201d to its being strapped for cash, saddled with a Soviet-era approach that leans too heavily on the state, hampered by international sanctions and export restrictions, and debilitated by a brain drain\u2014of which he is an example: \u201cI am,\u201d he says, \u201cthe typical representative of the Putin exodus.\u201d\nHe says there\u2019s been a tectonic shift in space exploration, from the Cold War superpower rivalry to a \u201cgold rush in space,\u201d driven by private enterprise. Entry barriers are lower because satellites are connected to rockets in an increasingly standardized way, and the cost of hardware has dropped like a meteor. \u201cTen years ago,\u201d he says, \u201cit cost $100,000 to launch one kilo into space. Five years ago, with cheap post-Soviet Russian rockets, the price fell to $20,000 to $30,000. Today, it\u2019s $5,000.\u201d He says it will drop another order of magnitude, to $500, once Starship\u2014SpaceX\u2019s super heavy, fully reusable rocket\u2014is operational.\nMr. Kokorich believes the extraterrestrial gold rush favors the U.S. \u201cThe development of a new generation of reusable methane-fueled rocket engines,\u201d he says, \u201cdefinitively ended the U.S. dependence on Russian rockets that began when the Soviet Union collapsed.\u201d The choice of the Lunar Gateway as \u201cthe next human-habitation platform in space, instead of a space station in Earth\u2019s low orbit, carries with it financial and technical requirements that will effectively make the U.S. the controlling, if not the sole, platform operator.\u201d \nHe also cites President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n executive order of April 6 on the recovery and use of space resources, which he calls a \u201cgreat clarifier, reinforcing the view that Americans should have the right to engage in the commercial exploration and recovery of resources in outer space, rather than treating space as some sort of global commons.\u201d In short, Mr. Kokorich s Russian immigrant Mikhail Kokorich talks about America\u2019s edge in the new era of private exploration, and his own plans for a water-fueled space transport. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New \u2018Gold Rush in Space\u2019 (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7270",
        "date": "2020-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-gold-rush-in-space-11596826062?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=39",
        "text": "Mr. Kokorich, 44, is one such entrepreneur. In 2017 he founded Momentus, a California-based company that seeks to revolutionize transport in space by developing in-space transfer vehicles that use water as a propellant. These would \u201ccomplement low-cost gigantic rockets, like Starship from SpaceX and New Glenn from Blue Origin,\u201d he says. Craft built by Momentus would enable the outer-space equivalent of the connecting flight. A satellite would reach orbit by \u201cride-sharing on a big rocket,\u201d then transfer to a Momentus vehicle for the next leg farther out. \n\n\n\n\nThe choice of water as a propellant, Mr. Kokorich says, would \u201cnot only enable extremely low-cost in-space vehicles\u2014built in a \u2018Mad Max\u2019 steampunk style\u2014but eventually allow the use of water mined from the moon and from asteroids.\u201d Far-fetched? He points to \u201cbinding contracts already with NASA,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin,\n\n\n and the U.S. Air Force,\u201d not to mention dozens of satellite operators and manufacturers. \u201cHell, Momentus even has a ride-share partnership agreement with SpaceX.\u201d\n\n\nNow a CEO in the vanguard of rocket science, Mr. Kokorich was born in a house with no indoor toilets and sporadic electricity in Aginskoye, Siberia, population around 10,000. His mother was 19 when she bore him, and he was raised by her parents, both schoolteachers with more education than almost anyone else in town. \u201cI often studied by the light of a kerosene lamp when I was young,\u201d he tells me by Zoom from his house in Los Altos Hills, Calif., where he\u2019s lived since he left Russia in 2014 as part of what he calls \u201cthe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Putin\n\n\n\n exodus.\u201d \nHe pored over more than science textbooks. \u201cI read many American writers,\u201d he says. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack London,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Twain,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Fenimore Cooper,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Dreiser,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ernest Hemingway.\n\n\n\n These books helped me understand the importance of human freedoms and the spirit of pioneers.\u201d \nThus he speaks of the Crew Dragon splashdown with a historical sweep. \u201cIn terms of managerial effectiveness,\u201d he says, \u201cusing private business for space is like Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s hiring of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Drake\n\n\n\n in the 16th century. These are buccaneers in space.\u201d Drake created a multigun ship, \u201cwhich was the greatest achievement of science and technology of that time.\u201d He leaps ahead to the 17th century: \u201cWith the help of the East India Co., the British Empire was built in the East. This laid the economic foundation for victory over Napoleonic France and the Pax Britannica in the 19th century.\u201d Mr. Kokorich says private companies like SpaceX\u2014and, yes, his own\u2014\u201cwill be the main driver of centuries of Pax Americana in space.\u201d\nAmerica is regenerating its space ambitions as Russia falls ever lower in the space-tech pecking order. \u201cThe U.S. is definitely No. 1, then the European Union, then China,\u201d Mr. Kokorich says. \u201cNext, I think India is now comparable with Russia, and maybe even more advanced than Russia in a wider sense.\u201d He attributes \u201cthe withering of Russia\u2019s historic might in space\u201d to its being strapped for cash, saddled with a Soviet-era approach that leans too heavily on the state, hampered by international sanctions and export restrictions, and debilitated by a brain drain\u2014of which he is an example: \u201cI am,\u201d he says, \u201cthe typical representative of the Putin exodus.\u201d\nHe says there\u2019s been a tectonic shift in space exploration, from the Cold War superpower rivalry to a \u201cgold rush in space,\u201d driven by private enterprise. Entry barriers are lower because satellites are connected to rockets in an increasingly standardized way, and the cost of hardware has dropped like a meteor. \u201cTen years ago,\u201d he says, \u201cit cost $100,000 to launch one kilo into space. Five years ago, with cheap post-Soviet Russian rockets, the price fell to $20,000 to $30,000. Today, it\u2019s $5,000.\u201d He says it will drop another order of magnitude, to $500, once Starship\u2014SpaceX\u2019s super heavy, fully reusable rocket\u2014is operational.\nMr. Kokorich believes the extraterrestrial gold rush favors the U.S. \u201cThe development of a new generation of reusable methane-fueled rocket engines,\u201d he says, \u201cdefinitively ended the U.S. dependence on Russian rockets that began when the Soviet Union collapsed.\u201d The choice of the Lunar Gateway as \u201cthe next human-habitation platform in space, instead of a space station in Earth\u2019s low orbit, carries with it financial and technical requirements that will effectively make the U.S. the controlling, if not the sole, platform operator.\u201d \nHe also cites President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n executive order of April 6 on the recovery and use of space resources, which he calls a \u201cgreat clarifier, reinforcing the view that Americans should have the right to engage in the commercial exploration and recovery of resources in outer space, rather than treating space as some sort of global commons.\u201d In short, Mr. Kokorich says, the U.S. will, \u201cfor the foreseeable future, use its market power to set the agenda of international cooperation.\u201d \nNumerous major U.S. corporations are already leading players in space. The big tech companies are developing satellite constellations to connect the estimated half of the global population that\u2019s not yet online. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n\n and the aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin,\u201d he says, \u201care working on Project Kuiper to enhance global broadband connectivity. With Google\u2019s backing, SpaceX is constructing a satellite constellation of its own. And true to form,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple\n\n\n is pursuing a space project in secret.\u201d Even\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n has confirmed a satellite program in the works. All this, he says, is proof of \u201ctransnational cooperation driven by an entrepreneurial initiative that serves all mankind,\u201d and of the benefits \u201cafforded by American oversight.\u201d \nMr. Kokorich is happy to see the U.S. leave his native land behind in the 21st century\u2019s space race. In 2014 he moved to the U.S. under an O-1 visa, granted to aliens \u201cwith extraordinary ability or achievement.\u201d In 2018, after he and his companies endured years of threats from Moscow, he applied for political asylum in the U.S. The last straw was his detention and four-hour interrogation that year at Moscow\u2019s international airport. He hasn\u2019t returned to Russia since, fearing imprisonment. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dimitry Rogozin,\n\n\n\n head of Russia\u2019s state-run space corporation, Roscosmos, suggested recently on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n that Mr. Kokorich\u2019s work in the U.S. space industry was akin to that of a Nazi collaborator. The tweet was later deleted. It said that Mr. Kokorich \u201cquickly changed his views after moving to the United States. As they say, nothing personal, only business. The \u2018Free World,\u2019 apparently, opened his eyes to many things. #Vlasovites.\u201d The hashtag refers to a Soviet general who defected to Germany, commanded a pro-Nazi force that styled itself the Russian Liberation Army, and was hanged for treason after the war.\nMr. Kokorich says he\u2019s had a political conscience for almost as long as he\u2019s been an entrepreneur. He started his first company in 1995, at 19, \u201cproviding explosives and chemical services to Siberian mining companies.\u201d In four years, \u201cwe became the largest supplier of explosives in Siberia.\u201d He then returned to finish his studies at Novosibirsk State University, \u201cthe best foundry for physicists in Russia.\u201d Mr. Kokorich, not always self-effacing, says he \u201cquickly became one of the most prominent students.\u201d\nHe came of age in the 1990s, a member of \u201cprobably the only generation in the history of Russia that had the opportunity to grow up exposed to political freedom, democracy, a free press, and respect for human rights.\u201d After\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n came to power in 2000, Mr. Kokorich grew alarmed by the curtailments of freedoms. He threw in his lot with Open Russia,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mikhail Khodorkovsky\u2019s\n\n\n\n opposition group, \u201crunning several programs for it in Siberia.\u201d\nIn 2005, Mr. Kokorich started a new company, ChudoDom (or Wonder House), which he describes as \u201ca kind of Russian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Bed, Bath & Beyond.\n\n\n \u201d It was the largest home-merchandise retail chain in Eastern Russia and, after 2009, in the whole country.\nIn 2011, at 35, Mr. Kokorich had what he calls his \u201cmidlife crisis\u201d and resolved to \u201cdo what I truly love\u2014physics and engineering.\u201d He co-founded Dauria Aerospace, Russia\u2019s first private aerospace company. Flush with cash from selling the retail chain, he gave generously to RPR-Parnas, a liberal opposition party. He also contributed \u201ca substantial amount of money to the organizing committee\u201d for rallies and protests against Mr. Putin in Bolotnaya Square, in central Moscow. These protests, which took place in 2011-12, were \u201cthe last time when there was real hope about any kind of democracy, or at least a glimmer of it,\u201d Mr. Kokorich says.\nIn 2014, an aerospace competitor informed the authorities that Mr. Kokorich had bankrolled the Bolotnaya protesters. That\u2019s when he decided to move to California with his wife and children. This move had consequences that were typical of Putin\u2019s Russia: His company was charged with various allegations of financial impropriety, and eventually shut down. \nYet Mr. Kokorich hasn\u2019t withdrawn from the Russian political fray. Angered that \u201cPutin appropriated the right to govern Russia as a czar,\u201d Mr. Kokorich serves as California coordinator for the Free Russia Foundation, a \u201cnonpartisan NGO that seeks to tell American lawmakers the truth about Russia, and help support an American \u2018Russia policy\u2019 that promotes freedom and democracy.\u201d \nIt surely didn\u2019t help Mr. Kokorich\u2019s standing with the Putin regime that he also favors secession for his home region. He is part Buryat, the northernmost of the Mongol peoples, whose land China ceded to Russia in the late 17th century.\n\u201cAn independent Siberia,\u201d he says, \u201chas a greater chance of becoming a democratic and liberal state than Russia.\u201d Perhaps, but the odds for extracting water from asteroids seem better than either.\nMr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Allysia Finley, Jillian Melchior and Dan Henninger. Image: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer Russian immigrant Mikhail Kokorich talks about America\u2019s edge in the new era of private exploration, and his own plans for a water-fueled space transport. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New \u2018Gold Rush in Space\u2019 (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7271",
        "date": "2020-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-gold-rush-in-space-11596826062?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=41",
        "text": "Mr. Kokorich, 44, is one such entrepreneur. In 2017 he founded Momentus, a California-based company that seeks to revolutionize transport in space by developing in-space transfer vehicles that use water as a propellant. These would \u201ccomplement low-cost gigantic rockets, like Starship from SpaceX and New Glenn from Blue Origin,\u201d he says. Craft built by Momentus would enable the outer-space equivalent of the connecting flight. A satellite would reach orbit by \u201cride-sharing on a big rocket,\u201d then transfer to a Momentus vehicle for the next leg farther out. \nThe choice of water as a propellant, Mr. Kokorich says, would \u201cnot only enable extremely low-cost in-space vehicles\u2014built in a \u2018Mad Max\u2019 steampunk style\u2014but eventually allow the use of water mined from the moon and from asteroids.\u201d Far-fetched? He points to \u201cbinding contracts already with NASA,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin,\n\n\n and the U.S. Air Force,\u201d not to mention dozens of satellite operators and manufacturers. \u201cHell, Momentus even has a ride-share partnership agreement with SpaceX.\u201d\n\n\nNow a CEO in the vanguard of rocket science, Mr. Kokorich was born in a house with no indoor toilets and sporadic electricity in Aginskoye, Siberia, population around 10,000. His mother was 19 when she bore him, and he was raised by her parents, both schoolteachers with more education than almost anyone else in town. \u201cI often studied by the light of a kerosene lamp when I was young,\u201d he tells me by Zoom from his house in Los Altos Hills, Calif., where he\u2019s lived since he left Russia in 2014 as part of what he calls \u201cthe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Putin\n\n\n\n exodus.\u201d \nHe pored over more than science textbooks. \u201cI read many American writers,\u201d he says. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack London,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Twain,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Fenimore Cooper,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Dreiser,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ernest Hemingway.\n\n\n\n These books helped me understand the importance of human freedoms and the spirit of pioneers.\u201d \nThus he speaks of the Crew Dragon splashdown with a historical sweep. \u201cIn terms of managerial effectiveness,\u201d he says, \u201cusing private business for space is like Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s hiring of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Drake\n\n\n\n in the 16th century. These are buccaneers in space.\u201d Drake created a multigun ship, \u201cwhich was the greatest achievement of science and technology of that time.\u201d He leaps ahead to the 17th century: \u201cWith the help of the East India Co., the British Empire was built in the East. This laid the economic foundation for victory over Napoleonic France and the Pax Britannica in the 19th century.\u201d Mr. Kokorich says private companies like SpaceX\u2014and, yes, his own\u2014\u201cwill be the main driver of centuries of Pax Americana in space.\u201d\nAmerica is regenerating its space ambitions as Russia falls ever lower in the space-tech pecking order. \u201cThe U.S. is definitely No. 1, then the European Union, then China,\u201d Mr. Kokorich says. \u201cNext, I think India is now comparable with Russia, and maybe even more advanced than Russia in a wider sense.\u201d He attributes \u201cthe withering of Russia\u2019s historic might in space\u201d to its being strapped for cash, saddled with a Soviet-era approach that leans too heavily on the state, hampered by international sanctions and export restrictions, and debilitated by a brain drain\u2014of which he is an example: \u201cI am,\u201d he says, \u201cthe typical representative of the Putin exodus.\u201d\nHe says there\u2019s been a tectonic shift in space exploration, from the Cold War superpower rivalry to a \u201cgold rush in space,\u201d driven by private enterprise. Entry barriers are lower because satellites are connected to rockets in an increasingly standardized way, and the cost of hardware has dropped like a meteor. \u201cTen years ago,\u201d he says, \u201cit cost $100,000 to launch one kilo into space. Five years ago, with cheap post-Soviet Russian rockets, the price fell to $20,000 to $30,000. Today, it\u2019s $5,000.\u201d He says it will drop another order of magnitude, to $500, once Starship\u2014SpaceX\u2019s super heavy, fully reusable rocket\u2014is operational.\nMr. Kokorich believes the extraterrestrial gold rush favors the U.S. \u201cThe development of a new generation of reusable methane-fueled rocket engines,\u201d he says, \u201cdefinitively ended the U.S. dependence on Russian rockets that began when the Soviet Union collapsed.\u201d The choice of the Lunar Gateway as \u201cthe next human-habitation platform in space, instead of a space station in Earth\u2019s low orbit, carries with it financial and technical requirements that will effectively make the U.S. the controlling, if not the sole, platform operator.\u201d \nHe also cites President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n executive order of April 6 on the recovery and use of space resources, which he calls a \u201cgreat clarifier, reinforcing the view that Americans should have the right to engage in the commercial exploration and recovery of resources in outer space, rather than treating space as some sort of global commons.\u201d In short, Mr. Kokorich s Russian immigrant Mikhail Kokorich talks about America\u2019s edge in the new era of private exploration, and his own plans for a water-fueled space transport. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "The New \u2018Gold Rush in Space\u2019 (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7272",
        "date": "2020-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-gold-rush-in-space-11596826062?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=49",
        "text": "Mr. Kokorich, 44, is one such entrepreneur. In 2017 he founded Momentus, a California-based company that seeks to revolutionize transport in space by developing in-space transfer vehicles that use water as a propellant. These would \u201ccomplement low-cost gigantic rockets, like Starship from SpaceX and New Glenn from Blue Origin,\u201d he says. Craft built by Momentus would enable the outer-space equivalent of the connecting flight. A satellite would reach orbit by \u201cride-sharing on a big rocket,\u201d then transfer to a Momentus vehicle for the next leg farther out. \n\n\n\n\nThe choice of water as a propellant, Mr. Kokorich says, would \u201cnot only enable extremely low-cost in-space vehicles\u2014built in a \u2018Mad Max\u2019 steampunk style\u2014but eventually allow the use of water mined from the moon and from asteroids.\u201d Far-fetched? He points to \u201cbinding contracts already with NASA,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin,\n\n\n and the U.S. Air Force,\u201d not to mention dozens of satellite operators and manufacturers. \u201cHell, Momentus even has a ride-share partnership agreement with SpaceX.\u201d\n\n\nNow a CEO in the vanguard of rocket science, Mr. Kokorich was born in a house with no indoor toilets and sporadic electricity in Aginskoye, Siberia, population around 10,000. His mother was 19 when she bore him, and he was raised by her parents, both schoolteachers with more education than almost anyone else in town. \u201cI often studied by the light of a kerosene lamp when I was young,\u201d he tells me by Zoom from his house in Los Altos Hills, Calif., where he\u2019s lived since he left Russia in 2014 as part of what he calls \u201cthe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Putin\n\n\n\n exodus.\u201d \nHe pored over more than science textbooks. \u201cI read many American writers,\u201d he says. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jack London,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Twain,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Fenimore Cooper,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Dreiser,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ernest Hemingway.\n\n\n\n These books helped me understand the importance of human freedoms and the spirit of pioneers.\u201d \nThus he speaks of the Crew Dragon splashdown with a historical sweep. \u201cIn terms of managerial effectiveness,\u201d he says, \u201cusing private business for space is like Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s hiring of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Drake\n\n\n\n in the 16th century. These are buccaneers in space.\u201d Drake created a multigun ship, \u201cwhich was the greatest achievement of science and technology of that time.\u201d He leaps ahead to the 17th century: \u201cWith the help of the East India Co., the British Empire was built in the East. This laid the economic foundation for victory over Napoleonic France and the Pax Britannica in the 19th century.\u201d Mr. Kokorich says private companies like SpaceX\u2014and, yes, his own\u2014\u201cwill be the main driver of centuries of Pax Americana in space.\u201d\nAmerica is regenerating its space ambitions as Russia falls ever lower in the space-tech pecking order. \u201cThe U.S. is definitely No. 1, then the European Union, then China,\u201d Mr. Kokorich says. \u201cNext, I think India is now comparable with Russia, and maybe even more advanced than Russia in a wider sense.\u201d He attributes \u201cthe withering of Russia\u2019s historic might in space\u201d to its being strapped for cash, saddled with a Soviet-era approach that leans too heavily on the state, hampered by international sanctions and export restrictions, and debilitated by a brain drain\u2014of which he is an example: \u201cI am,\u201d he says, \u201cthe typical representative of the Putin exodus.\u201d\nHe says there\u2019s been a tectonic shift in space exploration, from the Cold War superpower rivalry to a \u201cgold rush in space,\u201d driven by private enterprise. Entry barriers are lower because satellites are connected to rockets in an increasingly standardized way, and the cost of hardware has dropped like a meteor. \u201cTen years ago,\u201d he says, \u201cit cost $100,000 to launch one kilo into space. Five years ago, with cheap post-Soviet Russian rockets, the price fell to $20,000 to $30,000. Today, it\u2019s $5,000.\u201d He says it will drop another order of magnitude, to $500, once Starship\u2014SpaceX\u2019s super heavy, fully reusable rocket\u2014is operational.\nMr. Kokorich believes the extraterrestrial gold rush favors the U.S. \u201cThe development of a new generation of reusable methane-fueled rocket engines,\u201d he says, \u201cdefinitively ended the U.S. dependence on Russian rockets that began when the Soviet Union collapsed.\u201d The choice of the Lunar Gateway as \u201cthe next human-habitation platform in space, instead of a space station in Earth\u2019s low orbit, carries with it financial and technical requirements that will effectively make the U.S. the controlling, if not the sole, platform operator.\u201d \nHe also cites President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n executive order of April 6 on the recovery and use of space resources, which he calls a \u201cgreat clarifier, reinforcing the view that Americans should have the right to engage in the commercial exploration and recovery of resources in outer space, rather than treating space as some sort of global commons.\u201d In short, Mr. Kokori Russian immigrant Mikhail Kokorich talks about America\u2019s edge in the new era of private exploration, and his own plans for a water-fueled space transport. ",
        "author": "Tunku Varadarajan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The global space race, 2.0 (WP: The WorldPost) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7273",
        "date": "2018-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/13/space-race/",
        "text": "Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan is a senior fellow and the head of the nuclear and space policy initiative at the Observer Research Foundation.NEW DELHI \u2014 The recent launch of the SpaceX rocket Falcon Heavy is a good illustration of the entry of efficient and innovative private players into an arena long considered the preserve of national governments. But this does not mean that national competition in outer space is disappearing. If anything, it is actually accelerating in Asia. China\u2019s growing space prowess is leading to a space race with India and Japan, which are beginning to pool their resources to better match Beijing. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe India-Japan strategic partnership has grown enormously in the last decade. Last September, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recognized the salience of outer space in their bilateral relations and \u201cwelcomed the deepening of cooperation between the space agencies of the two countries in the field of Earth observation, satellite-based navigation, space sciences and lunar exploration.\u201d And as the president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) proclaimed two months later: \u201cIndia and Japan will lead the space sector in the Asia-Pacific region.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen in December, JAXA and the Indian Space Research Organization agreed to study a joint \u201clunar polar exploration\u201d mission, to be completed this March. This will lead to a joint expedition that is expected to land a remotely piloted vehicle on the surface of the moon to collect samples and bring them back to Earth.Both India and Japan have undertaken successful lunar missions before, but only to study the moon via satellites that orbited above; neither has sent a craft to land on the moon\u2019s surface. And neither country has carried out a lunar mission in almost a decade. Both are acutely aware of what China has accomplished, with four moon missions between 2007 and 2014 alone. China\u2019s technological dominance weighs on the Asian strategic balance, and both India and Japan are clearly feeling the pressure.One attempt to catch up was a joint India-Japan moon mission that was a finalist for the Google Lunar XPrize competition. TeamIndus, an Indian private aerospace firm, planned to carry a Japanese rover developed by Japan\u2019s Team Hakuto on its spacecraft. But the Google Lunar XPrize competition itself came to an end \u2014 none of the teams could meet the launch deadline of March 31, 2018.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe emergence of private space research entities in India represents an exciting development. Though the TeamIndus lunar mission was canceled, the team is working on a couple of different projects, including a satellite bus and a solar-powered drone, both of which it seeks to commercialize in the near future. As Rahul Narayan, the founder of TeamIndus, said: \u201cFrom an investment standpoint, this will be a three-to-five-year journey until we can stabilize as a standalone company. We are looking at equity investors to come in and take the risk of helping us build the product. By year end, we can start to generate revenues from what we do.\u201dAsia\u2019s growing space race is indicative of the larger geopolitical competition in the region. China\u2019s rise and the strategic uncertainties it has created are particularly worrying to India and Japan, leading to surprisingly fast-growing India-Japan strategic cooperation.Though India and Japan have had no history of direct conflict, the two were on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, with Japan formally allied with the United States and India tilting heavily to the Soviet side, leading to cordial but cool ties for decades. But China\u2019s rise has affected both countries and led to an emerging India-Japan consensus on a whole host of global commons issues, such as maritime security and protection of the sea lanes of communication.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe growing intensity of competition in outer space is partially due to the growing number of commercial players and partially due to underlying geopolitical tensions. As during the Cold War, outer space has become one more area of the strategic competition on Earth. This means that the race to return to the moon, as well as to explore the moon and asteroids for mining and resource extraction, are likely to intensify in the coming years.Even as the U.S. maintains a technological edge in this domain, China is fast catching up. The energized strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing \u2014 another new strategic entente \u2014 will only accelerate it. Private players are adding a new dimension to this space race, but national programs\u00a0are\u00a0driven by much older\u00a0and more\u00a0potent imperatives. As geopolitical competitions sharpen around the globe, those government-led efforts could turn out to be more important than private expeditions.This was produced by\u00a0The WorldPost, a partnership of the\u00a0Berggruen Institute\u00a0and The Washington Post. Outer space once again becomes a geopolitical arena. Opinion: The global space race, 2.0",
        "author": "Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The global space race, 2.0 (WP: The WorldPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7274",
        "date": "2018-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/13/space-race/",
        "text": "Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan is a senior fellow and the head of the nuclear and space policy initiative at the Observer Research Foundation.NEW DELHI \u2014 The recent launch of the SpaceX rocket Falcon Heavy is a good illustration of the entry of efficient and innovative private players into an arena long considered the preserve of national governments. But this does not mean that national competition in outer space is disappearing. If anything, it is actually accelerating in Asia. China\u2019s growing space prowess is leading to a space race with India and Japan, which are beginning to pool their resources to better match Beijing. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe India-Japan strategic partnership has grown enormously in the last decade. Last September, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recognized the salience of outer space in their bilateral relations and \u201cwelcomed the deepening of cooperation between the space agencies of the two countries in the field of Earth observation, satellite-based navigation, space sciences and lunar exploration.\u201d And as the president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) proclaimed two months later: \u201cIndia and Japan will lead the space sector in the Asia-Pacific region.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen in December, JAXA and the Indian Space Research Organization agreed to study a joint \u201clunar polar exploration\u201d mission, to be completed this March. This will lead to a joint expedition that is expected to land a remotely piloted vehicle on the surface of the moon to collect samples and bring them back to Earth.Both India and Japan have undertaken successful lunar missions before, but only to study the moon via satellites that orbited above; neither has sent a craft to land on the moon\u2019s surface. And neither country has carried out a lunar mission in almost a decade. Both are acutely aware of what China has accomplished, with four moon missions between 2007 and 2014 alone. China\u2019s technological dominance weighs on the Asian strategic balance, and both India and Japan are clearly feeling the pressure.One attempt to catch up was a joint India-Japan moon mission that was a finalist for the Google Lunar XPrize competition. TeamIndus, an Indian private aerospace firm, planned to carry a Japanese rover developed by Japan\u2019s Team Hakuto on its spacecraft. But the Google Lunar XPrize competition itself came to an end \u2014 none of the teams could meet the launch deadline of March 31, 2018.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe emergence of private space research entities in India represents an exciting development. Though the TeamIndus lunar mission was canceled, the team is working on a couple of different projects, including a satellite bus and a solar-powered drone, both of which it seeks to commercialize in the near future. As Rahul Narayan, the founder of TeamIndus, said: \u201cFrom an investment standpoint, this will be a three-to-five-year journey until we can stabilize as a standalone company. We are looking at equity investors to come in and take the risk of helping us build the product. By year end, we can start to generate revenues from what we do.\u201dAsia\u2019s growing space race is indicative of the larger geopolitical competition in the region. China\u2019s rise and the strategic uncertainties it has created are particularly worrying to India and Japan, leading to surprisingly fast-growing India-Japan strategic cooperation.Though India and Japan have had no history of direct conflict, the two were on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, with Japan formally allied with the United States and India tilting heavily to the Soviet side, leading to cordial but cool ties for decades. But China\u2019s rise has affected both countries and led to an emerging India-Japan consensus on a whole host of global commons issues, such as maritime security and protection of the sea lanes of communication.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe growing intensity of competition in outer space is partially due to the growing number of commercial players and partially due to underlying geopolitical tensions. As during the Cold War, outer space has become one more area of the strategic competition on Earth. This means that the race to return to the moon, as well as to explore the moon and asteroids for mining and resource extraction, are likely to intensify in the coming years.Even as the U.S. maintains a technological edge in this domain, China is fast catching up. The energized strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing \u2014 another new strategic entente \u2014 will only accelerate it. Private players are adding a new dimension to this space race, but national programs\u00a0are\u00a0driven by much older\u00a0and more\u00a0potent imperatives. As geopolitical competitions sharpen around the globe, those government-led efforts could turn out to be more important than private expeditions.This was produced by\u00a0The WorldPost, a partnership of the\u00a0Berggruen Institute\u00a0and The Washington Post. Outer space once again becomes a geopolitical arena. Opinion: The global space race, 2.0",
        "author": "Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The global space race, 2.0 (WP: The WorldPost) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7275",
        "date": "2018-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/13/space-race/",
        "text": "Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan is a senior fellow and the head of the nuclear and space policy initiative at the Observer Research Foundation.NEW DELHI \u2014 The recent launch of the SpaceX rocket Falcon Heavy is a good illustration of the entry of efficient and innovative private players into an arena long considered the preserve of national governments. But this does not mean that national competition in outer space is disappearing. If anything, it is actually accelerating in Asia. China\u2019s growing space prowess is leading to a space race with India and Japan, which are beginning to pool their resources to better match Beijing. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe India-Japan strategic partnership has grown enormously in the last decade. Last September, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recognized the salience of outer space in their bilateral relations and \u201cwelcomed the deepening of cooperation between the space agencies of the two countries in the field of Earth observation, satellite-based navigation, space sciences and lunar exploration.\u201d And as the president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) proclaimed two months later: \u201cIndia and Japan will lead the space sector in the Asia-Pacific region.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen in December, JAXA and the Indian Space Research Organization agreed to study a joint \u201clunar polar exploration\u201d mission, to be completed this March. This will lead to a joint expedition that is expected to land a remotely piloted vehicle on the surface of the moon to collect samples and bring them back to Earth.Both India and Japan have undertaken successful lunar missions before, but only to study the moon via satellites that orbited above; neither has sent a craft to land on the moon\u2019s surface. And neither country has carried out a lunar mission in almost a decade. Both are acutely aware of what China has accomplished, with four moon missions between 2007 and 2014 alone. China\u2019s technological dominance weighs on the Asian strategic balance, and both India and Japan are clearly feeling the pressure.One attempt to catch up was a joint India-Japan moon mission that was a finalist for the Google Lunar XPrize competition. TeamIndus, an Indian private aerospace firm, planned to carry a Japanese rover developed by Japan\u2019s Team Hakuto on its spacecraft. But the Google Lunar XPrize competition itself came to an end \u2014 none of the teams could meet the launch deadline of March 31, 2018.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe emergence of private space research entities in India represents an exciting development. Though the TeamIndus lunar mission was canceled, the team is working on a couple of different projects, including a satellite bus and a solar-powered drone, both of which it seeks to commercialize in the near future. As Rahul Narayan, the founder of TeamIndus, said: \u201cFrom an investment standpoint, this will be a three-to-five-year journey until we can stabilize as a standalone company. We are looking at equity investors to come in and take the risk of helping us build the product. By year end, we can start to generate revenues from what we do.\u201dAsia\u2019s growing space race is indicative of the larger geopolitical competition in the region. China\u2019s rise and the strategic uncertainties it has created are particularly worrying to India and Japan, leading to surprisingly fast-growing India-Japan strategic cooperation.Though India and Japan have had no history of direct conflict, the two were on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, with Japan formally allied with the United States and India tilting heavily to the Soviet side, leading to cordial but cool ties for decades. But China\u2019s rise has affected both countries and led to an emerging India-Japan consensus on a whole host of global commons issues, such as maritime security and protection of the sea lanes of communication.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe growing intensity of competition in outer space is partially due to the growing number of commercial players and partially due to underlying geopolitical tensions. As during the Cold War, outer space has become one more area of the strategic competition on Earth. This means that the race to return to the moon, as well as to explore the moon and asteroids for mining and resource extraction, are likely to intensify in the coming years.Even as the U.S. maintains a technological edge in this domain, China is fast catching up. The energized strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing \u2014 another new strategic entente \u2014 will only accelerate it. Private players are adding a new dimension to this space race, but national programs\u00a0are\u00a0driven by much older\u00a0and more\u00a0potent imperatives. As geopolitical competitions sharpen around the globe, those government-led efforts could turn out to be more important than private expeditions.This was produced by\u00a0The WorldPost, a partnership of the\u00a0Berggruen Institute\u00a0and The Washington Post. Outer space once again becomes a geopolitical arena. Opinion: The global space race, 2.0",
        "author": "Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Trump is robbing America of what makes it great (WP: The WorldPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7276",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/07/25/us-china-2/",
        "text": "Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. His forthcoming book, \u201cA New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism,\u201d will be published in October.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAmerican prosperity since World War II has been built upon science and technology breakthroughs spurred by a powerful innovation system linking the federal government, business, academia and venture capital. U.S. innovation policy has been successfully emulated in Europe and Asia, most recently by China. President Trump\u2019s trade war against China aims to slow China\u2019s technology ascent but is misguided and doomed to fail; instead, American prosperity should be assured by doing what America does best: innovating at home and trading with the rest of the world. The founding text of U.S. postwar prosperity was Vannevar Bush\u2019s report \u201cScience: The Endless Frontier.\u201d In an act of brilliance, America\u2019s greatest president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked his science advisor how the great scientific advances spurred by the military during World War II (semiconductors, radar, servomechanisms, computers, cryptography, aeronautics, nuclear science, new medicines and more) should be made public for postwar civilian use. A lesser president would have asked the opposite: how to keep military advances secret after the war.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBush\u2019s answer was inspired. Out of his thinking, directly and indirectly, emerged the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and federal aid to education. A new science-based industrial policy was born, one that also benefited dramatically from the arrival of Europe\u2019s greatest scientific minds, chased to America by Hitler and the war.The U.S. government, wrote Bush, should now take this further and launch a coordinated, large-scale program of scientific education, support for university research, public laboratories and funding for basic science and government-academia-business partnerships for technological advancement.Postwar military and civilian research and development were intertwined. Great universities such as MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and others engaged in federally funded research, and innovations first pioneered with defense spending were encouraged to find civilian outlets. The achievements were perhaps most remarkable in the emerging digital sciences and information and communications technologies, including computer science, transistors and integrated circuits, microprocessors, the Internet, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Cold War spurred the innovation machine in ways best exemplified by the \u201cSputnik moment\u201d that followed the Soviet launch of Sputnik and then former President John F. Kennedy\u2019s 1961 call for a moonshot. American math and science education was greatly boosted. (I myself was a lucky beneficiary of the \u201cnew math\u201d of primary and secondary education in the 1960s.) The moonshot, successfully achieved within JFK\u2019s timeline (\u201cbefore this decade is out\u201d), yielded massive and lasting benefits in countless technologies including computation, telecommunications, space sciences, materials science, energy systems, medical sciences and more.Few argued during World War II, the moonshot or the advent of the Internet that the federal government was incompetent and a drag on technology. That great lie emerged first with the demonization of government by the Ronald Reagan administration and enabled the private sector to harvest the profits from government-led innovation. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for example, carried out their pathbreaking work on National Science Foundation funding and then became mega-billionaires as they privatized the results. In an earlier era, polio-vaccine developer Jonas Salk and others thought it natural to turn their inventions over to the public without private patents attached.The anti-government rants have now gotten dangerously out-of-hand, causing Trump and know-nothings in the Republican Party to denounce science itself. They attack government scientists who present findings that deviate from Republican lobbies (such as the coal, oil and gas industry). They undermine public support for government investments in research and development. All of this now gravely threatens the U.S. innovation system itself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the meantime, American technology successes have been noted by other governments. Silicon Valley became the place to emulate, and there are now many science-and-technology zones in university towns across Europe and Asia churning out breakthroughs. The U.S. no longer stands head-and-shoulders above the rest.Global growth is now spurred by three major poles of \u201cendogenous\u201d (tech-led) growth: the United States, the European Union and Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea), plus various smaller dynamic locations including Singapore, Israel and others. We should expect still others to join in global innovation. There is no American monopoly on brainpower, excellent training and cutting-edge scientific know-how.China\u2019s rapid technological advance has stunned U.S. policymakers, especially in the national security apparatus. The \u201cMade in China 2025\u201d program is a brash, confident and yet utterly realistic statement of China\u2019s intention to develop the key technologies of the 21st century in advanced computation, robotics, renewable energy, precision medicine, agriculture and low-carbon transport. One of the most significant is China\u2019s ambitious plan to pioneer a\u00a0worldwide renewable electricity grid\u00a0\u2014 the first of its kind and scale. Trump\u2019s trade war aims to scuttle China\u2019s impertinence.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYet Trump\u2019s approach is profoundly misguided. There are three truths about China\u2019s technological vision. First, China is filled with brilliant young people who are equipped with excellent universities, ample government funding and private-market outlets for their energies. China\u2019s technological verve will not be stopped by Trump. Second, China\u2019s advances will benefit, not harm, the world, including the United States, by bringing forward new and highly beneficial technologies like zero-carbon energy, smart vehicles and more powerful computers.Third, and most importantly, China\u2019s inevitable advances will in no way prevent the United States from making similar progress, but only if Trump and the Republicans drop their anti-science stance, support the American system of government-business-academic innovation and direct efforts toward the true needs of the 21st century, notably zero-carbon energy and non-polluting industries. There is no future in trade wars, hot war or the polluting industries of the past.This was produced by The WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post. The anti-government rants have gotten dangerously out of hand. Opinion: Trump is robbing America of what makes it great",
        "author": "Jeffrey Sachs"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Asia\u2019s rocketing ambition (WP: The WorldPost) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7277",
        "date": "2018-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/16/china-asia/",
        "text": "This is the weekend roundup of\u00a0The WorldPost, of which Nathan Gardels is the editor in chief.\u00a0Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightIn his 2011 book, \u201cCivilization: The West and the Rest,\u201d historian Niall Ferguson credits a series of \u201ckiller apps\u201d for enabling the West to take off in the 15th century and remain dominant for the next 500 years while the rest of the world stalled. The two leading \u201capps\u201d in his scheme were competition and science. In that book, Ferguson recounts how competition among the nations and city-states of Europe over exploring trade routes to the New World and later, over exploiting the cutting-edge discoveries of the Newtonian scientific revolution, propelled them all forward. Each drove the others to greater heights of development.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA similar dynamic is taking place in Asia today. The fear of being left behind under the shadow of China\u2019s ascent is stoking competitive ambitions across the region. The Middle Kingdom\u2019s efforts to make its mark in every realm \u2014 from outer space to artificial intelligence and sustainable environmental practices\u00a0\u2014 incites others in its neighborhood, and indeed in America and Europe as well, to do likewise.Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan describes how geopolitical anxieties in Asia have prompted the governments of India and Japan to join together in a new project to land on the moon.\u201cThe recent launch of the SpaceX rocket Falcon Heavy is a good illustration of the entry of efficient and innovative private players into an arena long considered the preserve of national governments,\u201d she writes from New Delhi. \u201cBut this does not mean that national competition in outer space is disappearing. If anything, it is actually accelerating in Asia. China\u2019s growing space prowess is leading to a space race with India and Japan, which are beginning to pool their resources to better match Beijing.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe goes on to say: \u201cBoth are acutely aware of what China has accomplished, with four moon missions between 2007 and 2014 alone. China\u2019s technological dominance weighs on the Asian strategic balance, and both India and Japan are clearly feeling the pressure.\u201dChandran Nair notes how a new sustainable practice implemented by China is setting off a global competition in waste recycling. \u201cBeijing\u00a0decided\u00a0to halt imports of plastic waste in January, which had a knock-on effect on the rest of the world, since China has been a major outlet for recycling trash. Since then, both the\u00a0European Union\u00a0and the\u00a0U.K.\u00a0have announced their own controls on plastics and plastic waste,\u201d\u00a0he writes from Hong Kong.These government decisions, in turn, prompted several major multinational companies from Coca-Cola to Walmart to pledge in Davos last month to reduce their use of plastics. Drawing on the compelling card of global competition, Nair proposes that the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba lead the way in regulating the use of plastics in packaged deliveries, thus pressuring the other global giant, Amazon, to follow suit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven as China\u2019s juggernaut spurs competitors, the contradictions within its future vision could well cause its own ambitions to stumble. In domestic policy, China\u2019s \u201cInternet plus\u201d policy \u2014 a long-range plan to link cyber and physical infrastructure through high-tech innovation and the \u201cInternet of things\u201d \u2014 runs up against what might be called the \u201cInternet minus\u201d policy of censorship, which impedes a pragmatic approach to addressing its challenges through seeking truth from fact. Innovation entails steady disruption while the Communist Party, above all, seeks stability and control.To the extent China tries to extend control over inflows of information \u2014 including by seeking to curtail critical content in scholarly journals from the West that circulate in Chinese academia \u2014 or tries ham-handedly to promote its own narrative in the Western media, it is hurting its own cause.\u00a0 As Thomas Kellogg writes, such an effort has already been saddled with a pejorative moniker \u2014 \u201csharp power.\u201d Yet, there is an important distinction between China and Russia\u2019s efforts to manipulate public opinion. Russia is trying to sow division and discord in the Western body politic to undermine the democratic discourse; China is clumsily trying to control its own image in the West.Jonathan Hillman notes a related conundrum in China\u2019s main foreign policy initiative. \u201cAn idea as big as China\u2019s \u2018Belt and Road\u2019 is bound to have contradictions. As Chinese President Xi Jinping\u2019s signature foreign policy vision, it is massive in all dimensions, aiming to bind Beijing with the rest of the world through more than\u00a0$1 trillion\u00a0of new infrastructure, scores of trade agreements and countless other connections,\u201d he writes from Tashkurgan, a Chinese town on the Pakistan border.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cBut there is a fundamental tension between the connectivity China says it seeks and the control it is unwilling to give up,\u201d says Hillman, referring to the massive presence of anti-terror security forces and imposing police outposts across Xinjiang\u2019s predominantly Muslim Uyghur towns and cities. \u201cEven as China claims to be championing globalization and broadening ties, it is clamping down in critical borderlands that Belt and Road routes would pass through, potentially crippling its own projects,\u201d concludes Hillman.One clear lesson of history is that the growing dominance of a major power like China will generate challengers in kind, both those driven to compete as well as those determined to resist.This was produced by\u00a0The WorldPost, a partnership of the\u00a0Berggruen Institute\u00a0and The Washington Post.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementABOUT US:\u00a0The WorldPost\u00a0is an award-winning global media platform that aims to be a place where the world meets. We seek to make sense of an interdependent yet fragmenting world by commissioning voices that cross cultural and political boundaries. Publishing op-eds and features from around the globe, we work from a worldwide perspective looking around rather than a national perspective looking out.STAFF:\u00a0Nathan Gardels, Editor in Chief;\u00a0Kathleen Miles, Executive Editor;\u00a0Dawn Nakagawa, Vice President of Operations;\u00a0Farah Mohamed, Managing Editor;\u00a0Peter Mellgard, Features Editor;\u00a0Alex Gardels, Video Editor;\u00a0Clarissa Pharr, Associate Editor;\u00a0Rosa O\u2019Hara, Social Editor;\u00a0Suzanne Gaber, Editorial AssistantEDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Kathleen Miles, Jackson Diehl, Juan Luis Cebrian, Walter Isaacson, Yoichi Funabashi, Arianna Huffington, John Elkann, Pierre Omidyar, Eric Schmidt, Wadah KhanfarCONTRIBUTING EDITORS:\u00a0Moises Naim, Nayan Chanda, Katherine Keating, Sergio Munoz Bata, Parag Khanna, Seung-yoon Lee, Jared Cohen, Bruce Mau, Patrick Soon-Shiong From the space race to recycling plastic waste, China\u2019s prowess is stoking competition across Asia and the world. Opinion: Asia\u2019s rocketing ambition",
        "author": "Nathan Gardels"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Four Intimate Screen Encounters (One From Far Away) (NYT: Theater) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7278",
        "date": "2020-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/theater/here-we-are-lynn-nottage-nikkole-salter.html",
        "text": "The second grouping of these excellent \u201cHere We Are\u201d monologues includes a raucous report from outer space and a small gem from Lynn Nottage. The second grouping of these excellent \u201cHere We Are\u201d monologues includes a raucous report from outer space and a small gem from Lynn Nottage. On the night I watched several of the short plays that make up \u201cHere We Are,\u201d I was at my laptop in the living room while one roommate cooked dinner in the kitchen, just a few feet away, and my other roommate shuffled in and out, doing laundry. Behind me, on the other side of our bay windows, the sounds of Brooklyn wafted in from the street: people chatting, cars going by, dogs barking.",
        "author": "By Maya Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Four Intimate Screen Encounters (One From Far Away) (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7279",
        "date": "2020-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/theater/here-we-are-lynn-nottage-nikkole-salter.html",
        "text": "The second grouping of these excellent \u201cHere We Are\u201d monologues includes a raucous report from outer space and a small gem from Lynn Nottage. The second grouping of these excellent \u201cHere We Are\u201d monologues includes a raucous report from outer space and a small gem from Lynn Nottage. On the night I watched several of the short plays that make up \u201cHere We Are,\u201d I was at my laptop in the living room while one roommate cooked dinner in the kitchen, just a few feet away, and my other roommate shuffled in and out, doing laundry. Behind me, on the other side of our bay windows, the sounds of Brooklyn wafted in from the street: people chatting, cars going by, dogs barking.",
        "author": "By Maya Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ethan Lipton: Have Rocket, Will Travel (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7280",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/theater/ethan-lipton-have-rocket-will-travel.html",
        "text": "Mr. Lipton teams up with Leigh Silverman to bring \u201cThe Outer Space\u201d to Joe\u2019s Pub at the Public Theater. Mr. Lipton teams up with Leigh Silverman to bring \u201cThe Outer Space\u201d to Joe\u2019s Pub at the Public Theater. A man of many talents, Ethan Lipton \u2014 a performer, playwright, composer and musician \u2014 has been equally multifarious in his choice of subject matter: For his charming cabaret piece \u201cNo Place to Go,\u201d he faced the problems of relocating to Mars for work; he spent time with zombies and outlaws in the Old West for the sublimely silly horse opera \u201cTumacho;\u201d and he hunkered down empathetically amid the monotony of the everyday office in shows like \u201cRed-Handed Otter.\u201d",
        "author": "By Ben Brantley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: In \u2018Spaceman,\u2019 Floating in a Most Peculiar Way (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7281",
        "date": "2019-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/theater/review-spaceman-wild-project.html",
        "text": "Leegrid Stevens\u2019s play follows an astronaut on her journey to Mars, as she checks her air pressure, fuel levels and mental health. Leegrid Stevens\u2019s play follows an astronaut on her journey to Mars, as she checks her air pressure, fuel levels and mental health. A few years ago, the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield made a music video. Click over to YouTube and you can see him, singing David Bowie\u2019s \u201cSpace Oddity\u201d as he drifts in zero gravity. The guitar has Velcro patches \u2014 adorable. If an extended space mission involves enough downtime for classic rock covers, how bad can it be?",
        "author": "By Alexis Soloski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018The Outer Space\u2019 Is the Place, for an Unsettled Couple (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7282",
        "date": "2017-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/theater/the-outer-space-review.html",
        "text": "This new song cycle by Ethan Lipton (\u201cNo Place to Go\u201d) imagines a relocation to a spot across the solar system. This new song cycle by Ethan Lipton (\u201cNo Place to Go\u201d) imagines a relocation to a spot across the solar system. A show for anyone who has ever spent a sleepless night scouring real estate listings in search of simple human dignity or maybe a second bathroom, Ethan Lipton\u2019s \u201cThe Outer Space\u201d imagines escaping the ignominy of gentrification for a cozy spaceship orbiting Mercury. Sly, grumpy and just delightful, this sci-fi song cycle at Joe\u2019s Pub chronicles life millions of miles from the nearest bodega.",
        "author": "By Alexis Soloski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can a Play About Vaccines Be a Laughing Matter? (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7283",
        "date": "2019-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/25/theater/eureka-day-play-vaccinations.html",
        "text": "At the privileged private school in \u201cEureka Day,\u201d some parents refuse to give shots to their children. Then the mumps hits. At the privileged private school in \u201cEureka Day,\u201d some parents refuse to give shots to their children. Then the mumps hits. \u201cEureka Day\u201d is a play about a school in Berkeley, Calif., where the soccer team cheers when the other side scores a goal, and where parents were so concerned that an 8th grade production of \u201cPeter Pan\u201d would have \u201ccolonialist issues\u201d that it was set in outer space. It is also a school where many \u2014 many \u2014 families refuse to vaccinate their children. ",
        "author": "By Elizabeth A. Harris"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Playwright\u2019s New Subject: Her Husband, the Pandemic Expert (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7284",
        "date": "2021-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/theater/lauren-gunderson-the-catastrophist-nathan-wolfe.html",
        "text": "Prolific and widely-produced, Lauren Gunderson didn\u2019t have to look far to create \u201cThe Catastrophist,\u201d a play about risk that\u2019s both timely and personal. Prolific and widely-produced, Lauren Gunderson didn\u2019t have to look far to create \u201cThe Catastrophist,\u201d a play about risk that\u2019s both timely and personal. SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Confined by the pandemic to her three-story Victorian home, Lauren Gunderson did not have to go far to find inspiration for her latest play. He was one room away, in the home office next to hers on the top floor.",
        "author": "By Thomas Fuller"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Playwright\u2019s New Subject: Her Husband, the Pandemic Expert (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7285",
        "date": "2021-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/theater/lauren-gunderson-the-catastrophist-nathan-wolfe.html",
        "text": "Prolific and widely-produced, Lauren Gunderson didn\u2019t have to look far to create \u201cThe Catastrophist,\u201d a play about risk that\u2019s both timely and personal. Prolific and widely-produced, Lauren Gunderson didn\u2019t have to look far to create \u201cThe Catastrophist,\u201d a play about risk that\u2019s both timely and personal. SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 Confined by the pandemic to her three-story Victorian home, Lauren Gunderson did not have to go far to find inspiration for her latest play. He was one room away, in the home office next to hers on the top floor.",
        "author": "By Thomas Fuller"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Great Filter\u2019 Review: Earth Men, Home Alone (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7286",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/theater/the-great-filter-review.html",
        "text": "Frank Winters\u2019s play, about two astronauts in lockdown after a mission, uneasily grafts tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy. Frank Winters\u2019s play, about two astronauts in lockdown after a mission, uneasily grafts tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy. An \u201cexperiment that could forever revolutionize the way that humanity interacts with the cosmos.\u201d",
        "author": "By Elisabeth Vincentelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Great Filter\u2019 Review: Earth Men, Home Alone (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7287",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/theater/the-great-filter-review.html",
        "text": "Frank Winters\u2019s play, about two astronauts in lockdown after a mission, uneasily grafts tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy. Frank Winters\u2019s play, about two astronauts in lockdown after a mission, uneasily grafts tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy. An \u201cexperiment that could forever revolutionize the way that humanity interacts with the cosmos.\u201d",
        "author": "By Elisabeth Vincentelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forget Fan Fiction. In Nerdlesque, the Garters Come Off. (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7288",
        "date": "2017-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/theater/nerdlesque-burlesque-nyc.html",
        "text": "In this pop-culture twist on burlesque, performers put on tributes to movies and shows like \u201cDoctor Who.\u201d Not a fan? You can still admire the dancing. In this pop-culture twist on burlesque, performers put on tributes to movies and shows like \u201cDoctor Who.\u201d Not a fan? You can still admire the dancing. On stage at the Slipper Room this month, Lilly Hayes, the performer known as Miranda Raven, kicked off her black moon boots before zipping out of her astronaut costume to reveal a pair of jeans, white button-down shirt and denim jacket \u2014 the signature look of River Song, a character from \u201cDoctor Who.\u201d",
        "author": "By Sonia Weiser"
    },
    {
        "title": "High Above the Newsroom, a History of The Times (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7289",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/insider/high-above-the-newsroom-a-history-of-the-times.html",
        "text": "The newly opened Museum at The Times, on the 15th floor of the Times Building in New York, is filled with curios and artifacts that date back 170 years. The newly opened Museum at The Times, on the 15th floor of the Times Building in New York, is filled with curios and artifacts that date back 170 years. On the 15th floor of The New York Times Building, near a newspaper that traveled close to 1.8 million miles aboard the space shuttle Columbia, is a slab of metal shaped as the letter \u201cS.\u201d It is a piece from the \u201czipper,\u201d a belt of 14,800 bulbs that The New York Times operated to send news bulletins around Times Square, beginning in 1928.",
        "author": "By Emmett Lindner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Live Event: A Supermoon Viewing Party (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7290",
        "date": "2017-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/insider/events/supermoon-viewing-party.html",
        "text": "On Dec. 3, join two New York Times journalists, Columbia University\u2019s leading astronomers and a former astronaut for a multisensory celebration of space. On Dec. 3, join two New York Times journalists, Columbia University\u2019s leading astronomers and a former astronaut for a multisensory celebration of space. Welcome to Times Insider Events \u2014 live programming for Times Insiders and their guests. Times Insider offers behind-the-scenes insights into news, features and opinion at The New York Times.",
        "author": "By Insider Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Deadline Call on Posthumous Privacy (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7291",
        "date": "2017-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/insider/sally-ride-obituary-posthumous-privacy.html",
        "text": "The obituary for the astronaut Sally Ride set off a debate over how to report on her previously undisclosed sexuality. The obituary for the astronaut Sally Ride set off a debate over how to report on her previously undisclosed sexuality. Five years have passed since the death of Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space. Her New York Times obituary \u2014 specifically, the way we addressed her sexuality \u2014 provoked an intense debate that still echoes from time to time.",
        "author": "By Denise Grady"
    },
    {
        "title": "Arecibo Has Fallen Down. A Writer Looks Back. (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7292",
        "date": "2020-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/insider/arecibo-telescope-astronomy.html",
        "text": "Dennis Overbye has covered science since 1975. Here, he reflects on a great telescope\u2019s undignified end. Dennis Overbye has covered science since 1975. Here, he reflects on a great telescope\u2019s undignified end. Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Bob Marley to Falco: Twelve ambassadors choose the songs that best represent their countries (WP: Travel) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7293",
        "date": "2019-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/from-bob-marley-to-falco-twelve-ambassadors-choose-the-songs-that-best-represent-their-countries/2019/09/04/0f17a622-c2cc-11e9-9986-1fb3e4397be4_story.html",
        "text": "To get in the mood for an upcoming trip abroad, all you need to do is cue up a destination-themed soundtrack. If you\u2019re headed to England, maybe spin some Beatles, Bowie or \u201cGod Save the Queen\u201d \u2014 the Sex Pistols version. For Germany, you could crank up Beethoven, Kraftwerk or Nena, but not David Hasselhoff. For better or worse, he\u2019s ours, not theirs. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTo help create an international playlist, Babbel, the online foreign language-learning company, reached out to a dozen ambassadors posted in the United States. The staff asked the diplomats to suggest the music that best represents their country\u2019s culture and musical heritage. Several respondents also explained the reason for their selections \u2014 an A-ha moment for at least one dignitary. Here are their picks, which cross multiple genres, eras and levels of hummability.\u2022 Wolfgang Waldner, Austria\nAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cRock Me Amadeus\u201d by Falco\u201cFalco is an Austrian icon whose music has influenced our nation\u2019s pop culture since the 1980s. \u2018Rock Me Amadeus\u2019 was a number one hit on both sides of the Atlantic and blends virtuoso Viennese rap with international pop. Despite his untimely, James Dean-like death, Falco\u2019s bigger-than-life persona is still celebrated all across Austria.\u201d\u2022 Dirk Wouters, \nBelgium\u201cAlors On Danse\u201d by Stromae\u201cPaul Van Haver, better known as Stromae, is one of Belgium\u2019s best-selling artists, born in Brussels and representing some of the best that Belgium has to offer. His music is influenced by Belgian New Beat music as well as the timeless music of Jacques Brel, that other great Belgian musician.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBelgian jazz and \u201cBluesette\u201d by Toots Thielemans\u201cAlso, Belgian jazz, including two of Belgium\u2019s most celebrated musicians: Adolphe Sax, who was Belgian and invented the saxophone in the 1840s, and Toots Thielemans, the Belgian jazz musician famous for playing his harmonica and appearing with musicians such as Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Kenny Werner, Pat Metheny and many others.\u201dKeepsakes worth keeping\u2022 Tihomir Stoytchev, \nBulgaria Advertisement\u201cIzlel e Delyo Haydutin\u201d by Valya Balkanska\u201cBulgarian folk music is by far the most extensive traditional art. The music has a distinctive sound and uses a wide range of traditional instruments. One of those instruments is the bagpipe. One of the most famous Bulgarian folk music singers is Valya Balkanska. She is from the Rhodope Mountains and known locally for her wide repertoire of Balkan folk song, but in the world, mainly for singing the song \u201cIzlel ye Delyo Haydutin.\u201d The song is part of the Voyager Golden Record selection of music included in the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 as a musical message to the other unknown life-forms in the universe.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u2022 Fernando Llorca Castro, \nCosta Rica \u201cPatri\u00f3tica Costarricense\u201d by Manuel Mar\u00eda Guti\u00e9rrez Flores\u201cThe music is from Costa Rican composer Manuel Mar\u00eda Guti\u00e9rrez Flores. For many years, the lyrics were considered anonymous, but a recent investigation showed that they are an adaptation of a poem by Cuban writer Pedro Santacilia. It was performed for the first time in 1862 and since then has become the most cherished song for Costa Ricans. This song represents the best of Costa Rica and its people because it is a song about liberty, joy, sacrifice and humility but mainly about love for our homeland. Every child in Costa Rica grows up listening to it and learning to love our country through the images that its music and lyrics create.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2022 Jonatan Vseviov, \nEstonia \u201cEesti muld ja Eesti suda\u201d (\u201cEstonian Soil and Estonian Heart\u201d) by Lydia Koidula (lyrics) and Rein Rannap (music)\u201cThis is a 19th-century poem made into a song by a 20th-century composer. Immortalized by the band Ruja, it is an Estonian pop classic that has made its way to people\u2019s hearts and has become a part of Estonia\u2019s biggest music event: the traditional Song Festival, which is included in the UNESCO list of cultural treasures. Listen to the original or its modern remakes to understand why, for the Estonians, the soil and heart are inseparable.\u201d\u2022 Geir Haarde, \nIceland\u201cIsland er land pitt\u201d (\u201cIceland is your country\u201d) by Magnus Thor Sigmundsson (composer) and Margr\u00e9t J\u00f3nsd\u00f3ttir (lyrics).Story continues below advertisement\u2022 Audrey Marks, \nJamaica \u201cOne Love\u201d by Bob Marley and \u201cWonderful World, Beautiful People\u201d by Jimmy CliffAdvertisement\u201cBob Marley\u2019s iconic message in songs such as \u2018One Love\u2019, which was designated \u2018Song of the Millennium\u2019 by BBC in 1999, and \u2018Redemption Song\u2019 are widely known and acknowledged as global anthems of peace and love. \u2018Wonderful World, Beautiful People\u2019 by one of Jamaica\u2019s musical treasures, Jimmy Cliff, reflects a similar ethos to \u2018One Love\u2019 with its appeal for people across the world to live together in love and harmony. These songs are poignant demonstrations of Jamaica\u2019s global impact that belies our small size.\u201d\u2022 Francisco Obadiah Campbell Hooker, \nNicaragua Story continues below advertisement\u201cNicaragua Nicaraguita\u201d by Carlos Mej\u00eda Godoy\u2022Kare R. Aas, \nNorway \u201cIn the Hall of the Mountain King\u201d by Edvard Grieg\u201cEdvard Grieg\u2019s \u2018I Dovregubbens Hall\u2019 (\u2018In the Hall of the Mountain King\u2019), with its connection to Henrik Ibsen\u2019s play \u2018Peer Gynt\u2019 and the Norwegian trolls that according to lore live in the mountains.\u201dAdvertisementKygo\u201cAll the music of the performer Kygo \u2014 it\u2019s modern, has reached a large international audience and made a star out of a young man from Bergen: Kyrre Gorvell-Dahll.\u201d\u201cTake On Me\u201d by A-ha\u201c\u2018Take on Me,\u2019 a classic from the 1980s by the band A-ha \u2014 probably the first time a Norwegian band achieved this level of international attention. People are still humming it.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u2022 Domingos Fezas Vital, \nPortugal\u201cCan\u00e7\u00e3o do Mar\u201d by Am\u00e1lia Rodrigues\u2022 Stanislav Vidovic, \nSlovenia \u201cNa Golici\u201d by Slavko Avsenik\u201cThis song is a Slovenian polka composed by Slavko Avsenik in 1954. It takes its name from a beautiful Slovenian mountain in the Western Karawanks, on the border with Austria. It is known mainly for its fields of wild white narcissi (daffodils), swaths of which cover Golica and surrounding pastures in late April and early May. It is considered one of the most played instrumental tunes in the world and has to date over 600 different cover recordings, including with (ironically, as the song is instrumental) a cappella choir, Perpetuum Jazzille.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2022 Karin Olofsdotter, \nSweden \u201cSommartider\u201d by Gyllene Tider\u201cBefore forming Roxette with Marie Fredriksson, Per Gessle was very successful with his band Gyllene Tider (Golden Times). \u2018Sommartider\u2019 (Summer Time) is one of the group\u2019s most famous songs and an anthem of summer for a large number of Swedes. I also have a very personal reason for liking the song. Of course, it reminds me of summer but also the area where I grew up \u2014 it reminds me of home. Like Per Gessle, I am from the city Halmstad in southern Sweden.\u201dMore from Travel:Forget Coachella, there\u2019s a vibrant, more affordable music scene around Joshua Tree.In Sweden, a DIY dining adventureHave followers, will travel Language app Babbel asked a dozen diplomats for homeland playlists. Their answers might surprise you. From Bob Marley to Falco: Twelve ambassadors choose the songs that best represent their countries",
        "author": "Andrea Sachs"
    },
    {
        "title": "In the Central Oregon desert, an observatory with out-of-this-world views (WP: Travel) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7294",
        "date": "2019-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/in-the-central-oregon-desert-an-observatory-with-out-of-this-world-views/2019/09/12/2b8472e0-cff1-11e9-b29b-a528dc82154a_story.html",
        "text": "Our gazes first met at a party, from across a crowded galaxy. I gaped at an object of impossible beauty seemingly bedecked in diamonds. It stared back at me, and the 34,000-light-year distance between us disappeared. Star-struck, I couldn\u2019t tear my eyes away.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe object of my attraction was Messier 3, one of the night sky\u2019s biggest and brightest globular star clusters. And the party was Astronomy Day, held on May 11 and Oct. 5 this year. I was celebrating at the Oregon Observatory at Sunriver, which houses about 30 telescopes in the country\u2019s largest facility for public viewing. The nonprofit Oregon Observatory is dedicated to providing public access to the heavens. Unlike most research observatories where visitors admire telescopes from afar, it encourages aspiring astronomers to get an eyeful through its scopes, typically 12 to 15 on a given night. Celestial bodies are the stars of the show. And they\u2019re easy to spot, thanks to clear air and the darkness; Sunriver, the surrounding resort town, has a stringent lighting ordinance that protects the night sky from light pollution.Why women-only adventure travel is surging\u201cWe want people to look though the eyepieces,\u201d said observatory manager Robert Grossfeld, who has worked at the site since it opened in 1990. \u201cPublic access to such an array of telescopes is unusual. We have a diverse collection, and because different telescopes do different things well, people can view a wide range of objects in the sky.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlanetary viewing is often a highlight, since visitors can recognize details such as Jupiter\u2019s moons and Saturn\u2019s rings. But spring and fall are prime times for globular clusters (dense collections of ancient stars), especially on nights when bright moonlight might drown out the planets.The observatory also offers daily solar viewing through two special telescopes that allow visitors to safely watch hydrogen storms and sun spots.\u201cLooking directly at the sun is a unique experience,\u201d Grossfeld said. \u201cThe sun changes every day and every hour. Telescopes give us the opportunity to show people what a star truly looks like, since our sun is the only star where you can see detail.\u201dFor the biannual star party, I had driven a half-hour from downtown Bend, arriving for my springtime visit at 9 p.m. Frogs croaked in the fading twilight, which painted the surrounding Central Oregon high desert pastel. I followed a trail of red lights (the color helped our eyes remain adjusted to the darkness) to the two-story observatory dome, through a starport with a roll-off roof and finally to a star deck outside; in these areas, 14 telescopes pointed at different astronomical marvels.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA couple dozen adults and children were already waiting for their chance to peek into the cosmos. A few fervent amateur astronomers had set up their own telescopes, and newbies shared their galaxy-sized enthusiasm.\u201cThis is awesome!\u201d a man said as he gestured at the scattered scopes. \u201cLook at that, there are even more telescopes over there! This is going to be awesome!\u201dI stepped onto a ladder and squinted into the first eyepiece. A silver smudge hovered in the darkness.I was looking at the Great Cluster in Hercules, a globular star cluster with about 300,000 stars. As my sight adjusted, shapes emerged: subtle whorls that resembled a pinwheel twirling through countless pinpricks of light. Paul Poncy, the observatory\u2019s program facility lead, oriented a 12.5-inch telescope toward the waxing crescent moon. Its craters were so textured, their nubby indentations appeared within arm\u2019s reach.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile we waited for the sky to darken, Poncy gave a talk on Mars in an outdoor amphitheater. In the summer, the observatory rotates several presentations that focus on planets, the solar system and constellations. The projection screen lacked the telescopes\u2019 first-person flair, but Poncy still impressed the audience with descriptions of Olympus Mons, the solar system\u2019s largest-known volcano (it\u2019s two-and-a-half times the height of Mount Everest) and Valles Marineris, a canyon that covers the distance from Oregon to New York.When I returned to the star deck, the temperature had dipped into the 40s. I was grateful for my cold weather gear, and for the offseason. Up to 300 people might visit on a July or August night, but on this May evening, only 100 visitors craned their necks to the sky and tilted their ears to a dozen staffers and volunteers who were describing the sights. Fall and winter nights are similarly uncrowded.\u201cWe call the dim stuff \u2018faint fuzzies,\u2019\u2009\u201d said a volunteer as he took a break from answering a little girl\u2019s astute questions about triple star systems. \u201cThe longer you look, the more you see depth, patterns, colors and shape.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe was right. Examining the planetary Cat\u2019s Eye Nebula nestled in the Draco constellation, I waited for its details to emerge. The complex dust-and-gas cloud rewarded my patience with a subtle green and blue glimmer. After a few moments I discerned the fuzzy white dwarf, a dying star, in its center.I rubbernecked through telescope after telescope. In one, I peeked at Arcturus, a red giant star. In another, the Sombrero Galaxy, whose center probably contains a gigantic black hole. In a third, a flash of silver streaked across my field of vision: a shooting star.Finally, I blinked into an eyepiece at glittering Messier 3.\u201cIts nearly half a million stars are among the oldest in the universe, about 8 to 11 billion years old,\u201d explained a volunteer. \u201cGiven that the universe is about 14 billion years old, they\u2019re some pretty old stars.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI blinked again, trying to absorb quantities that stretched into endless space and shifted my perspective outward from our little planet.Don Barnes, a volunteer since the observatory\u2019s beginning, led visitors on a constellation tour without leaving the ground. He pointed a red laser into the heavens, where familiar figures cavorted: Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and Polaris. But with his guidance, new forms came alive. Draco the dragon blazed near Cygnus the swan in the north. Gemini, Leo, Corvus, Virgo and Lyra winked hello.Grossfeld told me that these tours are an important part of the program, since they allow visitors to appreciate the night sky with their naked eyes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe number one thing that we try to give people is a sense of wonder and awe,\u201d he added. \u201cYou don\u2019t even need a telescope for that.\u201dAdvertisementI was one of the last to leave at 11, lingering at a 20-inch research-grade telescope for one final look at Messier 3.\u201cIt would take the fastest spacecraft we\u2019ve ever built half a billion years to get there,\u201d Poncy said.Over two hours, I had journeyed across the universe, but the observatory was closing and I needed to return to Earth.Williams is a writer based in Nevada. Her website is erinewilliams.com.More from Travel:Where to stayMcMenamins Old St. Francis School700 NW Bond St., Bend541-382-5174mcmenamins.com/old-st-francis-schoolStory continues below advertisementOnce a 1936 Catholic schoolhouse, this beautifully converted hotel provides pet-friendly accommodations in former classrooms, as well as a tiled soaking pool and movie theater. Enjoy an apr\u00e8s-stargazing drink in one of its bars. Rooms from $135.Where to eatA Broken AngelAdvertisement643 NW Colorado Ave., Bend458-202-9334abrokenangel.comFood cart with local, organic plant-based menu with South American and French influences. Open 10\u2009a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday; check website for schedule updates. Located behind Palate a Coffee Bar. Also offers cooking classes. Entrees from $8.What to doOregon Observatory at Sunriver57245 River Rd., Sunriver541-593-4394Story continues below advertisementsnco.orgSolar viewing time is daily from 11\u2009a.m. to 2 p.m. Summer night sky viewing time is Tuesday through Sunday from 9 to 11 p.m. Beginning Oct. 27, fall and winter nighttime viewing is two nights per week \u2014 see website for dates and times. Admission $7 for adults, $5 for children for solar viewing and $10 for adults, $8 for children for nighttime viewing. No reservations accepted.Informationnasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/index.htmlE.W. Astronomy Day unveils the wonders of the universe to the public. In the Central Oregon desert, an observatory with out-of-this-world views",
        "author": "Erin E. Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "Camping with the Bedouins in southern Jordan (WP: Travel) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7295",
        "date": "2019-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/camping-with-the-bedouins-in-southern-jordan/2019/12/05/f3f83202-0fc5-11ea-9cd7-a1becbc82f5e_story.html",
        "text": "In a trailer for \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker,\u201d the Star Wars movie that opens later this month, we see Rey racing across a desert landscape, light saber in hand, trying to outrun a spacecraft. The landscape looked familiar to me, and for good reason: I had visited this dramatic desert on vacation in Jordan. Wadi Rum is just four hours south of Amman. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter a long, flat and mostly unremarkable drive on the Desert Highway, you arrive at the crest of a hill to behold this remarkable site, also called the Valley of the Moon. It feels like you\u2019ve landed on another planet.Petra is widely known as the crown jewel of Jordan, but for adventure seekers, Wadi Rum is the star. From the enormous red, pink and brown sandstone cliffs rising up out of the sandy desert floor, it\u2019s readily apparent why this place has earned starring roles as Mars in 2015\u2019s \u201cThe Martian\u201d; as the fictional city of Agrabah in 2019\u2019s \u201cAladdin\u201d; and, of course, as the fictional planet Pasaana for the final Skywalker installment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs far back as \u201cLawrence of Arabia\u201d in 1962, filmmakers have flocked to this site for its magnificent scenery. For tourists, Wadi Rum also offers a chance to experience the traditional Bedouin culture of southern Jordan.In Jordan, a wine industry takes rootI had never heard the term \u201cwadi\u201d before arriving in Jordan: It refers simply to a valley carved by water. But Jordan is famous for its wadis, most of which are narrow canyons that provide great hiking and an escape from the sun. Wadi Rum is vast, the largest in Jordan, taking up 280 square miles, nearly the area of New York City, and extending south to Jordan\u2019s border with Saudi Arabia.Day trippers can spend a few hours taking a jeep ride through Wadi Rum with stops to hike and scramble over rocks along the way. But it is the experience of staying in one of the many Bedouin",
        "author": "Amanda Orr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7296",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/space-hotel-tourism-voyager-station/2021/04/08/e1ce070e-9625-11eb-a6d0-13d207aadb78_story.html",
        "text": "When I read about the Orbital Assembly Corp.\u2019s plans to begin construction on a space hotel in 2026, it didn\u2019t occur to me to doubt that it would happen. I just imagined my first step, Neil Armstrong style, onto the jet bridge and felt my heart, legs and stomach all judder in real life. I wondered if I would be brave enough, given the chance, to take that second step. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the perfect cultural moment to dangle the Kennedy-era optimism of a space hotel before a country full of jumpy shut-ins. We\u2019re as ready to flee as Andy Dufresne tunneling out of Shawshank State Prison and, man, do we need an escape.Since a 3 1/2 day stay on the Voyager Station comes with a $5 million price tag, thinking about it is all many of us will ever do, but it\u2019s still fun. It\u2019s like when you put 67 things in your Etsy cart, and then just log off. As Debbie Harry sang, dreaming is free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s inspirational,\u201d says hotel industry expert Anthony Melchiorri, co-host of the podcast \u201cChecking in With Anthony and Glenn\u201d and host of the Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cHotel Impossible.\u201d \u201cAnd it\u2019s aspirational. You want to go there, you want to do that. And whether it happens or not in a couple of years, it just tells you how important travel is and how important hotels are, especially now.\u201dSpace hotels, Melchiorri notes, are an idea that has been orbiting the industry for decades. Hilton \u201cwanted to put a hotel on the moon back in the 1960s, so it\u2019s something people have been thinking about and dreaming about for a long time,\u201d he says. The idea was even promoted with mock-up keys and promotional reservation forms for the \u201cLunar Hilton.\u201dA guide to urban stargazing: What you need to start exploring the skies close to homeThere are other space tourism projects in the works, including Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceship III that is as retro-future glam as \u201cBarbarella,\u201d and SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, with a 360-degree glass viewing dome that looks like the Pop-O-Matic from the board game Trouble. (Orbital Assembly will likely be working with SpaceX to get the hotel done.) Both are slated to carry civilians into the cosmos this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpaceship\u201d and \u201ccapsule,\u201d though, don\u2019t have the comfortable familiarity of \u201chotel.\u201d That word makes it more desirable for those of us who are less space-savvy. It may look like a giant bike tire, but it will also have elements that we recognize, like maybe a gift shop stocked with special edition Mars and Milky Way bars or shirts that say, \u201cMy friend paid $5 million to go to space and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.\u201dWith that in mind, I asked experts on travel, hotels and real and imagined space what they would look for in a space hotel. Thankfully, none of them said \u201catmosphere.\u201dA nice view is always a plus in a hotel, and in a space hotel your view would be ever-changing. \u201cEvery 90 minutes or so you\u2019re going to go around the Earth one whole time, but half an orbit of the hotel later, you\u2019d be looking out at the sky,\u201d says Richard Jerousek, planetary scientist and lecturer at the University of Central Florida. \u201cA telescope that counter-rotates to account for the hotel\u2019s spin wouldn\u2019t be a bad idea for close-up views of the planets and the moon,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou could also snap some amazing pictures of nebulae and galaxies.\u201dOne thing I have not seen listed in the Voyager Station\u2019s promo materials is a pool, which is a pretty standard hotel feature. Jerousek cautions that the artificial lunar gravity would affect the water: Any waves would be bigger, but their speed would be slower, and our intuition about how they move would be off. Jerousek would spend an extra few days onboard to get used this kind of effect, he said, to better enjoy everything a space hotel has to offer.There are obvious draws to a hotel in space, such as staring out the window for hours or even days and trying to grasp the fact that you have actually left the planet. You can\u2019t get more \u201caway from it all\u201d than that. A leisurely spacewalk followed by a workout in an antigravity gym sounds ideal. In terms of amenities, experiencing lunar gravity, which is lighter than Earth\u2019s, for the duration of your space hotel stay beats a complimentary robe. (The hotel\u2019s website shows guests on a basketball court jumping so high they\u2019re level with the backboard.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Susan Moynihan, a travel adviser with the Honeymoonist and Largay Travel, wonders about the letdown. \u201cWhen I get back to Earth I\u2019d probably feel even heavier in comparison, like some existential space-age jet lag,\u201d she said.While we\u2019re on the subject of looking good, all first-wave space hotels should look like something straight out of \u201cThe Jetsons,\u201d the animated TV series from the early 1960s that made us expect a future of flying cars and jet packs, or \u201cLogan\u2019s Run,\u201d the 1976 sci-fi classic that was one glitzy dystopia. It should be as light, sleek and shiny as we thought the future was going to be back in the Acrylic Age.It should mimic the \u201cJFK, Pan Am building and \u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 aesthetic to a T, gleaming white everything and red shag carpeting, baby,\u201d says Charles Martin, a frequent panelist at science fiction conventions in the United States and abroad, and co-host of the tech news podcast Space Javelin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs you might expect, Tristan Ishtar, a former executive for Marriott and Hilton, has more practical concerns. Staffing, for starters. \u201cWhere are you going to find PhDs in astro-engineering who will work for minimum wage in the maintenance department?\u201d he asks. \u201cThough I suspect the entire hotel staff would be NASA-type trained astronauts.\u201dScience fiction writer Andy Weir, author of \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d is dubious about the scale of the undertaking. Weir\u2019s novel \u201cArtemis\u201d takes place in a human-built city on the moon, so he knows the territory, as it were.\u201cIt would be considerably easier to build the city [on the moon] than to build this space hotel, I think,\u201d he says.Story continues below advertisementThat does not mean he doesn\u2019t see any potential in the idea. I asked him what he thought the hotel\u2019s signature drink should be, and he suggested a \u201cTequila Sunrise Challenge \u2014 drink a tequila sunrise every sunrise. On a space station there\u2019ll be one every 90 minutes. How long can you keep it up?\u201dAdvertisementChecking in, though, is another story. \u201cI would not go at all ever,\u201d he says. \u201cI would not want to go to space on a NASA mission, either. I do not want to go to space. I\u2019m Earthbound.\u201d At first I\u2019m shocked. Then I remember his best-known work is about someone getting stuck out there.\u201cI write about brave people. I\u2019m not one of them. I like to use my imagination. I like pizza. I like knowing that the atmosphere is staying here and so is gravity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPeople often ask him, he says, what he would do if he were given a free trip to space.\u201cI\u2019d sell it,\u201d he says.Melchiorri is wary as well.\u201cA hotel isn\u2019t a hotel, it\u2019s a home,\u201d he says. \u201cSo if you go to space, you\u2019re trusting this hotel to keep you alive, literally.\u201d While the same would be true of an Earth hotel, \u201cit\u2019s a different level of security and a different level of commitment from the hotel.\u201dAdvertisementFor that reason, whether space hotels open in five years or 15 years, Melchoirri says, he will not be the first person to check in.\u201cAs the project is being built by veterans of NASA, I have great confidence that once completed it will be at least as safe as your standard hotel,\u201d Martin says. \u201cBut if I get there and the computer system is called HAL, I\u2019m turning around and going home.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFair enough. Since I get jittery just looking at roller coasters, I don\u2019t know why my mind went to space so quickly. I can get a tangtini, an actual cocktail that contains vodka, orange juice and Tang drink mix, right here.Still, I can\u2019t help but imagine looking at Earth from my hotel window \u2014 seeing all the places on it I\u2019ve never been, and thinking about how close we all are to getting to explore home again.\n\nLangley is a writer based in Orlando. Find her on Twitter: @LizLangley.More from Travel:At the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, socially distanced stargazingIn the Central Oregon desert, an observatory with out-of-this-world viewsFor the best stargazing, head to a patch of dark sky Tequila sunrise, anyone? As space tourism blasts off, experts contemplate the possibilities of an outer space check-in. Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars",
        "author": "Liz Langley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7297",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/space-hotel-tourism-voyager-station/2021/04/08/e1ce070e-9625-11eb-a6d0-13d207aadb78_story.html",
        "text": "When I read about the Orbital Assembly Corp.\u2019s plans to begin construction on a space hotel in 2026, it didn\u2019t occur to me to doubt that it would happen. I just imagined my first step, Neil Armstrong style, onto the jet bridge and felt my heart, legs and stomach all judder in real life. I wondered if I would be brave enough, given the chance, to take that second step. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the perfect cultural moment to dangle the Kennedy-era optimism of a space hotel before a country full of jumpy shut-ins. We\u2019re as ready to flee as Andy Dufresne tunneling out of Shawshank State Prison and, man, do we need an escape.Since a 3 1/2 day stay on the Voyager Station comes with a $5 million price tag, thinking about it is all many of us will ever do, but it\u2019s still fun. It\u2019s like when you put 67 things in your Etsy cart, and then just log off. As Debbie Harry sang, dreaming is free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s inspirational,\u201d says hotel industry expert Anthony Melchiorri, co-host of the podcast \u201cChecking in With Anthony and Glenn\u201d and host of the Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cHotel Impossible.\u201d \u201cAnd it\u2019s aspirational. You want to go there, you want to do that. And whether it happens or not in a couple of years, it just tells you how important travel is and how important hotels are, especially now.\u201dSpace hotels, Melchiorri notes, are an idea that has been orbiting the industry for decades. Hilton \u201cwanted to put a hotel on the moon back in the 1960s, so it\u2019s something people have been thinking about and dreaming about for a long time,\u201d he says. The idea was even promoted with mock-up keys and promotional reservation forms for the \u201cLunar Hilton.\u201dA guide to urban stargazing: What you need to start exploring the skies close to homeThere are other space tourism projects in the works, including Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceship III that is as retro-future glam as \u201cBarbarella,\u201d and SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, with a 360-degree glass viewing dome that looks like the Pop-O-Matic from the board game Trouble. (Orbital Assembly will likely be working with SpaceX to get the hotel done.) Both are slated to carry civilians into the cosmos this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpaceship\u201d and \u201ccapsule,\u201d though, don\u2019t have the comfortable familiarity of \u201chotel.\u201d That word makes it more desirable for those of us who are less space-savvy. It may look like a giant bike tire, but it will also have elements that we recognize, like maybe a gift shop stocked with special edition Mars and Milky Way bars or shirts that say, \u201cMy friend paid $5 million to go to space and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.\u201dWith that in mind, I asked experts on travel, hotels and real and imagined space what they would look for in a space hotel. Thankfully, none of them said \u201catmosphere.\u201dA nice view is always a plus in a hotel, and in a space hotel your view would be ever-changing. \u201cEvery 90 minutes or so you\u2019re going to go around the Earth one whole time, but half an orbit of the hotel later, you\u2019d be looking out at the sky,\u201d says Richard Jerousek, planetary scientist and lecturer at the University of Central Florida. \u201cA telescope that counter-rotates to account for the hotel\u2019s spin wouldn\u2019t be a bad idea for close-up views of the planets and the moon,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou could also snap some amazing pictures of nebulae and galaxies.\u201dOne thing I have not seen listed in the Voyager Station\u2019s promo materials is a pool, which is a pretty standard hotel feature. Jerousek cautions that the artificial lunar gravity would affect the water: Any waves would be bigger, but their speed would be slower, and our intuition about how they move would be off. Jerousek would spend an extra few days onboard to get used this kind of effect, he said, to better enjoy everything a space hotel has to offer.There are obvious draws to a hotel in space, such as staring out the window for hours or even days and trying to grasp the fact that you have actually left the planet. You can\u2019t get more \u201caway from it all\u201d than that. A leisurely spacewalk followed by a workout in an antigravity gym sounds ideal. In terms of amenities, experiencing lunar gravity, which is lighter than Earth\u2019s, for the duration of your space hotel stay beats a complimentary robe. (The hotel\u2019s website shows guests on a basketball court jumping so high they\u2019re level with the backboard.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Susan Moynihan, a travel adviser with the Honeymoonist and Largay Travel, wonders about the letdown. \u201cWhen I get back to Earth I\u2019d probably feel even heavier in comparison, like some existential space-age jet lag,\u201d she said.While we\u2019re on the subject of looking good, all first-wave space hotels should look like something straight out of \u201cThe Jetsons,\u201d the animated TV series from the early 1960s that made us expect a future of flying cars and jet packs, or \u201cLogan\u2019s Run,\u201d the 1976 sci-fi classic that was one glitzy dystopia. It should be as light, sleek and shiny as we thought the future was going to be back in the Acrylic Age.It should mimic the \u201cJFK, Pan Am building and \u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 aesthetic to a T, gleaming white everything and red shag carpeting, baby,\u201d says Charles Martin, a frequent panelist at science fiction conventions in the United States and abroad, and co-host of the tech news podcast Space Javelin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs you might expect, Tristan Ishtar, a former executive for Marriott and Hilton, has more practical concerns. Staffing, for starters. \u201cWhere are you going to find PhDs in astro-engineering who will work for minimum wage in the maintenance department?\u201d he asks. \u201cThough I suspect the entire hotel staff would be NASA-type trained astronauts.\u201dScience fiction writer Andy Weir, author of \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d is dubious about the scale of the undertaking. Weir\u2019s novel \u201cArtemis\u201d takes place in a human-built city on the moon, so he knows the territory, as it were.\u201cIt would be considerably easier to build the city [on the moon] than to build this space hotel, I think,\u201d he says.Story continues below advertisementThat does not mean he doesn\u2019t see any potential in the idea. I asked him what he thought the hotel\u2019s signature drink should be, and he suggested a \u201cTequila Sunrise Challenge \u2014 drink a tequila sunrise every sunrise. On a space station there\u2019ll be one every 90 minutes. How long can you keep it up?\u201dAdvertisementChecking in, though, is another story. \u201cI would not go at all ever,\u201d he says. \u201cI would not want to go to space on a NASA mission, either. I do not want to go to space. I\u2019m Earthbound.\u201d At first I\u2019m shocked. Then I remember his best-known work is about someone getting stuck out there.\u201cI write about brave people. I\u2019m not one of them. I like to use my imagination. I like pizza. I like knowing that the atmosphere is staying here and so is gravity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPeople often ask him, he says, what he would do if he were given a free trip to space.\u201cI\u2019d sell it,\u201d he says.Melchiorri is wary as well.\u201cA hotel isn\u2019t a hotel, it\u2019s a home,\u201d he says. \u201cSo if you go to space, you\u2019re trusting this hotel to keep you alive, literally.\u201d While the same would be true of an Earth hotel, \u201cit\u2019s a different level of security and a different level of commitment from the hotel.\u201dAdvertisementFor that reason, whether space hotels open in five years or 15 years, Melchoirri says, he will not be the first person to check in.\u201cAs the project is being built by veterans of NASA, I have great confidence that once completed it will be at least as safe as your standard hotel,\u201d Martin says. \u201cBut if I get there and the computer system is called HAL, I\u2019m turning around and going home.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFair enough. Since I get jittery just looking at roller coasters, I don\u2019t know why my mind went to space so quickly. I can get a tangtini, an actual cocktail that contains vodka, orange juice and Tang drink mix, right here.Still, I can\u2019t help but imagine looking at Earth from my hotel window \u2014 seeing all the places on it I\u2019ve never been, and thinking about how close we all are to getting to explore home again.\n\nLangley is a writer based in Orlando. Find her on Twitter: @LizLangley.More from Travel:At the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, socially distanced stargazingIn the Central Oregon desert, an observatory with out-of-this-world viewsFor the best stargazing, head to a patch of dark sky Tequila sunrise, anyone? As space tourism blasts off, experts contemplate the possibilities of an outer space check-in. Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars",
        "author": "Liz Langley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7298",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/space-hotel-tourism-voyager-station/2021/04/08/e1ce070e-9625-11eb-a6d0-13d207aadb78_story.html",
        "text": "When I read about the Orbital Assembly Corp.\u2019s plans to begin construction on a space hotel in 2026, it didn\u2019t occur to me to doubt that it would happen. I just imagined my first step, Neil Armstrong style, onto the jet bridge and felt my heart, legs and stomach all judder in real life. I wondered if I would be brave enough, given the chance, to take that second step. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the perfect cultural moment to dangle the Kennedy-era optimism of a space hotel before a country full of jumpy shut-ins. We\u2019re as ready to flee as Andy Dufresne tunneling out of Shawshank State Prison and, man, do we need an escape.Since a 3 1/2 day stay on the Voyager Station comes with a $5 million price tag, thinking about it is all many of us will ever do, but it\u2019s still fun. It\u2019s like when you put 67 things in your Etsy cart, and then just log off. As Debbie Harry sang, dreaming is free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s inspirational,\u201d says hotel industry expert Anthony Melchiorri, co-host of the podcast \u201cChecking in With Anthony and Glenn\u201d and host of the Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cHotel Impossible.\u201d \u201cAnd it\u2019s aspirational. You want to go there, you want to do that. And whether it happens or not in a couple of years, it just tells you how important travel is and how important hotels are, especially now.\u201dSpace hotels, Melchiorri notes, are an idea that has been orbiting the industry for decades. Hilton \u201cwanted to put a hotel on the moon back in the 1960s, so it\u2019s something people have been thinking about and dreaming about for a long time,\u201d he says. The idea was even promoted with mock-up keys and promotional reservation forms for the \u201cLunar Hilton.\u201dA guide to urban stargazing: What you need to start exploring the skies close to homeThere are other space tourism projects in the works, including Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceship III that is as retro-future glam as \u201cBarbarella,\u201d and SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, with a 360-degree glass viewing dome that looks like the Pop-O-Matic from the board game Trouble. (Orbital Assembly will likely be working with SpaceX to get the hotel done.) Both are slated to carry civilians into the cosmos this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpaceship\u201d and \u201ccapsule,\u201d though, don\u2019t have the comfortable familiarity of \u201chotel.\u201d That word makes it more desirable for those of us who are less space-savvy. It may look like a giant bike tire, but it will also have elements that we recognize, like maybe a gift shop stocked with special edition Mars and Milky Way bars or shirts that say, \u201cMy friend paid $5 million to go to space and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.\u201dWith that in mind, I asked experts on travel, hotels and real and imagined space what they would look for in a space hotel. Thankfully, none of them said \u201catmosphere.\u201dA nice view is always a plus in a hotel, and in a space hotel your view would be ever-changing. \u201cEvery 90 minutes or so you\u2019re going to go around the Earth one whole time, but half an orbit of the hotel later, you\u2019d be looking out at the sky,\u201d says Richard Jerousek, planetary scientist and lecturer at the University of Central Florida. \u201cA telescope that counter-rotates to account for the hotel\u2019s spin wouldn\u2019t be a bad idea for close-up views of the planets and the moon,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou could also snap some amazing pictures of nebulae and galaxies.\u201dOne thing I have not seen listed in the Voyager Station\u2019s promo materials is a pool, which is a pretty standard hotel feature. Jerousek cautions that the artificial lunar gravity would affect the water: Any waves would be bigger, but their speed would be slower, and our intuition about how they move would be off. Jerousek would spend an extra few days onboard to get used this kind of effect, he said, to better enjoy everything a space hotel has to offer.There are obvious draws to a hotel in space, such as staring out the window for hours or even days and trying to grasp the fact that you have actually left the planet. You can\u2019t get more \u201caway from it all\u201d than that. A leisurely spacewalk followed by a workout in an antigravity gym sounds ideal. In terms of amenities, experiencing lunar gravity, which is lighter than Earth\u2019s, for the duration of your space hotel stay beats a complimentary robe. (The hotel\u2019s website shows guests on a basketball court jumping so high they\u2019re level with the backboard.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Susan Moynihan, a travel adviser with the Honeymoonist and Largay Travel, wonders about the letdown. \u201cWhen I get back to Earth I\u2019d probably feel even heavier in comparison, like some existential space-age jet lag,\u201d she said.While we\u2019re on the subject of looking good, all first-wave space hotels should look like something straight out of \u201cThe Jetsons,\u201d the animated TV series from the early 1960s that made us expect a future of flying cars and jet packs, or \u201cLogan\u2019s Run,\u201d the 1976 sci-fi classic that was one glitzy dystopia. It should be as light, sleek and shiny as we thought the future was going to be back in the Acrylic Age.It should mimic the \u201cJFK, Pan Am building and \u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 aesthetic to a T, gleaming white everything and red shag carpeting, baby,\u201d says Charles Martin, a frequent panelist at science fiction conventions in the United States and abroad, and co-host of the tech news podcast Space Javelin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs you might expect, Tristan Ishtar, a former executive for Marriott and Hilton, has more practical concerns. Staffing, for starters. \u201cWhere are you going to find PhDs in astro-engineering who will work for minimum wage in the maintenance department?\u201d he asks. \u201cThough I suspect the entire hotel staff would be NASA-type trained astronauts.\u201dScience fiction writer Andy Weir, author of \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d is dubious about the scale of the undertaking. Weir\u2019s novel \u201cArtemis\u201d takes place in a human-built city on the moon, so he knows the territory, as it were.\u201cIt would be considerably easier to build the city [on the moon] than to build this space hotel, I think,\u201d he says.Story continues below advertisementThat does not mean he doesn\u2019t see any potential in the idea. I asked him what he thought the hotel\u2019s signature drink should be, and he suggested a \u201cTequila Sunrise Challenge \u2014 drink a tequila sunrise every sunrise. On a space station there\u2019ll be one every 90 minutes. How long can you keep it up?\u201dAdvertisementChecking in, though, is another story. \u201cI would not go at all ever,\u201d he says. \u201cI would not want to go to space on a NASA mission, either. I do not want to go to space. I\u2019m Earthbound.\u201d At first I\u2019m shocked. Then I remember his best-known work is about someone getting stuck out there.\u201cI write about brave people. I\u2019m not one of them. I like to use my imagination. I like pizza. I like knowing that the atmosphere is staying here and so is gravity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPeople often ask him, he says, what he would do if he were given a free trip to space.\u201cI\u2019d sell it,\u201d he says.Melchiorri is wary as well.\u201cA hotel isn\u2019t a hotel, it\u2019s a home,\u201d he says. \u201cSo if you go to space, you\u2019re trusting this hotel to keep you alive, literally.\u201d While the same would be true of an Earth hotel, \u201cit\u2019s a different level of security and a different level of commitment from the hotel.\u201dAdvertisementFor that reason, whether space hotels open in five years or 15 years, Melchoirri says, he will not be the first person to check in.\u201cAs the project is being built by veterans of NASA, I have great confidence that once completed it will be at least as safe as your standard hotel,\u201d Martin says. \u201cBut if I get there and the computer system is called HAL, I\u2019m turning around and going home.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFair enough. Since I get jittery just looking at roller coasters, I don\u2019t know why my mind went to space so quickly. I can get a tangtini, an actual cocktail that contains vodka, orange juice and Tang drink mix, right here.Still, I can\u2019t help but imagine looking at Earth from my hotel window \u2014 seeing all the places on it I\u2019ve never been, and thinking about how close we all are to getting to explore home again.\n\nLangley is a writer based in Orlando. Find her on Twitter: @LizLangley.More from Travel:At the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, socially distanced stargazingIn the Central Oregon desert, an observatory with out-of-this-world viewsFor the best stargazing, head to a patch of dark sky Tequila sunrise, anyone? As space tourism blasts off, experts contemplate the possibilities of an outer space check-in. Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars",
        "author": "Liz Langley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7299",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/space-hotel-tourism-voyager-station/2021/04/08/e1ce070e-9625-11eb-a6d0-13d207aadb78_story.html",
        "text": "When I read about the Orbital Assembly Corp.\u2019s plans to begin construction on a space hotel in 2026, it didn\u2019t occur to me to doubt that it would happen. I just imagined my first step, Neil Armstrong style, onto the jet bridge and felt my heart, legs and stomach all judder in real life. I wondered if I would be brave enough, given the chance, to take that second step. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is the perfect cultural moment to dangle the Kennedy-era optimism of a space hotel before a country full of jumpy shut-ins. We\u2019re as ready to flee as Andy Dufresne tunneling out of Shawshank State Prison and, man, do we need an escape.Since a 3 1/2 day stay on the Voyager Station comes with a $5 million price tag, thinking about it is all many of us will ever do, but it\u2019s still fun. It\u2019s like when you put 67 things in your Etsy cart, and then just log off. As Debbie Harry sang, dreaming is free.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s inspirational,\u201d says hotel industry expert Anthony Melchiorri, co-host of the podcast \u201cChecking in With Anthony and Glenn\u201d and host of the Travel Channel\u2019s \u201cHotel Impossible.\u201d \u201cAnd it\u2019s aspirational. You want to go there, you want to do that. And whether it happens or not in a couple of years, it just tells you how important travel is and how important hotels are, especially now.\u201dSpace hotels, Melchiorri notes, are an idea that has been orbiting the industry for decades. Hilton \u201cwanted to put a hotel on the moon back in the 1960s, so it\u2019s something people have been thinking about and dreaming about for a long time,\u201d he says. The idea was even promoted with mock-up keys and promotional reservation forms for the \u201cLunar Hilton.\u201dA guide to urban stargazing: What you need to start exploring the skies close to homeThere are other space tourism projects in the works, including Virgin Galactic\u2019s Spaceship III that is as retro-future glam as \u201cBarbarella,\u201d and SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon capsule, with a 360-degree glass viewing dome that looks like the Pop-O-Matic from the board game Trouble. (Orbital Assembly will likely be working with SpaceX to get the hotel done.) Both are slated to carry civilians into the cosmos this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cSpaceship\u201d and \u201ccapsule,\u201d though, don\u2019t have the comfortable familiarity of \u201chotel.\u201d That word makes it more desirable for those of us who are less space-savvy. It may look like a giant bike tire, but it will also have elements that we recognize, like maybe a gift shop stocked with special edition Mars and Milky Way bars or shirts that say, \u201cMy friend paid $5 million to go to space and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.\u201dWith that in mind, I asked experts on travel, hotels and real and imagined space what they would look for in a space hotel. Thankfully, none of them said \u201catmosphere.\u201dA nice view is always a plus in a hotel, and in a space hotel your view would be ever-changing. \u201cEvery 90 minutes or so you\u2019re going to go around the Earth one whole time, but half an orbit of the hotel later, you\u2019d be looking out at the sky,\u201d says Richard Jerousek, planetary scientist and lecturer at the University of Central Florida. \u201cA telescope that counter-rotates to account for the hotel\u2019s spin wouldn\u2019t be a bad idea for close-up views of the planets and the moon,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cYou could also snap some amazing pictures of nebulae and galaxies.\u201dOne thing I have not seen listed in the Voyager Station\u2019s promo materials is a pool, which is a pretty standard hotel feature. Jerousek cautions that the artificial lunar gravity would affect the water: Any waves would be bigger, but their speed would be slower, and our intuition about how they move would be off. Jerousek would spend an extra few days onboard to get used this kind of effect, he said, to better enjoy everything a space hotel has to offer.There are obvious draws to a hotel in space, such as staring out the window for hours or even days and trying to grasp the fact that you have actually left the planet. You can\u2019t get more \u201caway from it all\u201d than that. A leisurely spacewalk followed by a workout in an antigravity gym sounds ideal. In terms of amenities, experiencing lunar gravity, which is lighter than Earth\u2019s, for the duration of your space hotel stay beats a complimentary robe. (The hotel\u2019s website shows guests on a basketball court jumping so high they\u2019re level with the backboard.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Susan Moynihan, a travel adviser with the Honeymoonist and Largay Travel, wonders about the letdown. \u201cWhen I get back to Earth I\u2019d probably feel even heavier in comparison, like some existential space-age jet lag,\u201d she said.While we\u2019re on the subject of looking good, all first-wave space hotels should look like something straight out of \u201cThe Jetsons,\u201d the animated TV series from the early 1960s that made us expect a future of flying cars and jet packs, or \u201cLogan\u2019s Run,\u201d the 1976 sci-fi classic that was one glitzy dystopia. It should be as light, sleek and shiny as we thought the future was going to be back in the Acrylic Age.It should mimic the \u201cJFK, Pan Am building and \u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 aesthetic to a T, gleaming white everything and red shag carpeting, baby,\u201d says Charles Martin, a frequent panelist at science fiction conventions in the United States and abroad, and co-host of the tech news podcast Space Javelin.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs you might expect, Tristan Ishtar, a former executive for Marriott and Hilton, has more practical concerns. Staffing, for starters. \u201cWhere are you going to find PhDs in astro-engineering who will work for minimum wage in the maintenance department?\u201d he asks. \u201cThough I suspect the entire hotel staff would be NASA-type trained astronauts.\u201dScience fiction writer Andy Weir, author of \u201cThe Martian\u201d and \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d is dubious about the scale of the undertaking. Weir\u2019s novel \u201cArtemis\u201d takes place in a human-built city on the moon, so he knows the territory, as it were.\u201cIt would be considerably easier to build the city [on the moon] than to build this space hotel, I think,\u201d he says.Story continues below advertisementThat does not mean he doesn\u2019t see any potential in the idea. I asked him what he thought the hotel\u2019s signature drink should be, and he suggested a \u201cTequila Sunrise Challenge \u2014 drink a tequila sunrise every sunrise. On a space station there\u2019ll be one every 90 minutes. How long can you keep it up?\u201dAdvertisementChecking in, though, is another story. \u201cI would not go at all ever,\u201d he says. \u201cI would not want to go to space on a NASA mission, either. I do not want to go to space. I\u2019m Earthbound.\u201d At first I\u2019m shocked. Then I remember his best-known work is about someone getting stuck out there.\u201cI write about brave people. I\u2019m not one of them. I like to use my imagination. I like pizza. I like knowing that the atmosphere is staying here and so is gravity.\u201dStory continues below advertisementPeople often ask him, he says, what he would do if he were given a free trip to space.\u201cI\u2019d sell it,\u201d he says.Melchiorri is wary as well.\u201cA hotel isn\u2019t a hotel, it\u2019s a home,\u201d he says. \u201cSo if you go to space, you\u2019re trusting this hotel to keep you alive, literally.\u201d While the same would be true of an Earth hotel, \u201cit\u2019s a different level of security and a different level of commitment from the hotel.\u201dAdvertisementFor that reason, whether space hotels open in five years or 15 years, Melchoirri says, he will not be the first person to check in.\u201cAs the project is being built by veterans of NASA, I have great confidence that once completed it will be at least as safe as your standard hotel,\u201d Martin says. \u201cBut if I get there and the computer system is called HAL, I\u2019m turning around and going home.\u201dStory continues below advertisementFair enough. Since I get jittery just looking at roller coasters, I don\u2019t know why my mind went to space so quickly. I can get a tangtini, an actual cocktail that contains vodka, orange juice and Tang drink mix, right here.Still, I can\u2019t help but imagine looking at Earth from my hotel window \u2014 seeing all the places on it I\u2019ve never been, and thinking about how close we all are to getting to explore home again.\n\nLangley is a writer based in Orlando. Find her on Twitter: @LizLangley.More from Travel:At the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve, socially distanced stargazingIn the Central Oregon desert, an observatory with out-of-this-world viewsFor the best stargazing, head to a patch of dark sky Tequila sunrise, anyone? As space tourism blasts off, experts contemplate the possibilities of an outer space check-in. Imagining a five-star hotel among the stars",
        "author": "Liz Langley"
    },
    {
        "title": "A latecomer to the #vanlife party takes a 4,000-mile road trip in a pop-up camper (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7300",
        "date": "2021-09-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/road-trip-kids-camper-colorado-vermont/2021/09/23/571bc0c0-1248-11ec-9cb6-bf9351a25799_story.html",
        "text": "The hardest part was always going to be backing up. I knew this as soon as I picked up my Taxa Mantis Overland, a rugged 19-foot hard-shell travel trailer, from Great Outdoors RV in Greeley, Colo., about an hour northeast of my home in Boulder. Despite navigating rush-hour traffic, road construction and aggressive 18-wheelers, it was backing the Mantis into my driveway that almost undid me. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor those not acquainted with backing up a trailer that\u2019s hitched to their vehicle (in my case, a 2006 Toyota 4Runner), here\u2019s what it feels like: No matter which way you turn the steering wheel, it\u2019s wrong. Of course, this isn\u2019t literally true. But somehow, it\u2019s entirely too easy to oversteer and jackknife, or to understeer and do an embarrassingly crooked parking job.In the subsequent days, I packed the Mantis with food and equipment for a 4,000-mile road trip, trying not to fret about the backing up that awaited me. My family of four \u2014 and our dog \u2014 were driving from Boulder to Vermont\u2019s Isle La Motte for a family reunion with my in-laws, whom we hadn\u2019t seen since long before the pandemic began. Before picking up the Mantis, I convinced myself that driving would be a breeze. Long ago, I had a horse and a horse trailer that I backed up all the time. Surely a 19-foot travel trailer wouldn\u2019t be much different.For a newbie driver, the RV was her classroom and her subject matterSome background on how I came into possession of the Mantis Overland: For years, I\u2019ve looked askance at #vanlifers and friends who have forwent traditional camping for tow-along trailers or RVs. I\u2019m a longtime minimalist who wouldn\u2019t even bring a pillow on a car-camping trip (camping is for roughing it!), but the pandemic forced me to rethink my asceticism. My sons are too young to be vaccinated, and we wanted to avoid any unnecessary exposure to strangers. With the Mantis, we could cook all our own meals, set up camp quickly and easily, and have a home base once we got to Vermont. We\u2019d camp at the lake property my mother-in-law, Cassandra, owns, a small orchard with an outdoor kitchen and dilapidated barn but, currently, no house. If we wanted to make the approximately 2,000-mile trip from Colorado to Vermont \u2014 and we did \u2014 camping was no longer an end in itself, but the only feasible way for us to travel this summer.I did my best to quell my anxiety, and on an early Saturday morning in late July, I was at the wheel as we drove out of Boulder and headed east. The trailer weighed around 4,000 pounds, and the initial driving was relatively smooth once I remembered to give myself plenty of time for braking and to give any kind of turn \u2014 into a gas station, say \u2014 a wide berth. The kids practically vibrated with excitement in the back seat. Silas, my youngest, had made double the recipe of his favorite snack mix, and Henry had a nonfiction children\u2019s book on roadkill that he assured us was riveting. He planned to read it aloud on our way through Nebraska.We cut across a very flat northeastern Colorado and merged onto Interstate 80 in Nebraska. The boys cheered the cornfields while I experienced the Doppler effect of being passed by a massive long-haul truck going roughly 80 mph. I felt like a flimsy sailboat in a sea of yachts, but I took a deep breath and gave myself a pep talk. The Taxa was securely hitched onto my 4Runner \u2014 I had double- and triple-checked before our departure \u2014 and I simply needed to relax and pay attention. Soon enough, I had adapted and even ventured into the passing lane, where I accelerated without fear, then merged back into the right lane without any incidents. Trust me when I say this felt like a major accomplishment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMy husband, Jeff, and I alternated driving, with pit stops at interstate rest areas and gas stations. We\u2019d pop into the Mantis to grab snacks or cold drinks from the electric Dometic-brand refrigerator. This was probably the beginning of my love affair with the trailer. Taxa was founded by a former senior architect for NASA\u2019s Habitability Design Center, which means the interior of the Mantis Overland was as dialed in as a spaceship, if more spacious. With a slick milk crate shelving system (it\u2019s more impressive than it sounds) and a place for everything, grabbing snacks or lunch and plates, cups and bowls took less time than answering the question, \u201cHow much longer?\u201d The dog even had her own shelf, so each pit stop meant she got treats or a rawhide and, if it was her mealtime, kibble.At the end of our first day on the road, I was again driving when we reached our first Kampgrounds of America campground, where we\u2019d reserved a back-in site. I was nervous. Jeff offered to park, but I turned him down. I was absolutely determined not to be the kind of woman who let her husband park the trailer when the going got tough. But that didn\u2019t mean I was the kind of woman who could deftly back into the campsite. I braced for humiliation, but Steve, a campground host with an easy smile and a silver goatee, asked whether I would like assistance parking.Yes, please.How I learned to love RV travel in my 90sI followed him to our site, rolled down my window and followed his every instruction. Reader: I parked perfectly on the first try. Fifteen minutes later, we had attached the hose to the water pump, plugged into \u201cshore power,\u201d also known as the campground\u2019s electricity, deployed the Taxa\u2019s stabilizers, walked the dog and changed into our swimsuits. I admit that the campground pool gave me pause, but the boys loved it and did as many cannonballs into the deep end as they could before it was closed for the day. Cooking dinner was a breeze on the two-burner propane stove, and cleaning up was even easier, thanks to the separate sink and the Mantis\u2019s hot water heater.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBy the time we turned off the (many) electric lights that night, I realized how relatively effortless this version of \u201ccamping\u201d truly was. In fact, it could be summed up with three words: Why rough it? (I heard this rhetorical question from one of our fellow campers in Nebraska, who asked it as Steve admired his enormous rig.) Why, indeed?Tent camping \u2014 even car camping \u2014 can be tough. Gear gets jumbled, weight and space limit what you can bring. Pre-pandemic, I tended to think of that as an invigorating challenge. But after 18 months of pandemic restrictions and all the associated difficulties, I wanted this trip to be easy. And, as a particularly fastidious Virgo, I wanted to live with my family in a 19-foot trailer for almost three weeks without it getting cluttered or messy.As it happened, this is where the Mantis Overland really shone. The spacious interior was more like a boat than a traveling house. Everything belonged somewhere, whether in one of the milk crates or hanging from a carabiner clipped to one of the myriad holes in the steel frame or stored in a cubby underneath the eating/queen-size bed area where Jeff and I slept. There were nets everywhere to stash sundries such as books and water bottles. We even had room for a paddleboard and a Hobie pedalboard (a kind of aquatic StairMaster-meets-paddleboard contraption).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took four days to arrive at Isle La Motte, a picturesque island several miles south of the Canadian border on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain. After the buzz of the interstate and three nights in different KOA campgrounds, we were grateful for the solitude and serenity of the sleepy island. Many of its summer residents are Canadian, but the closed U.S.-Canada border prevented them from traveling south. But we weren\u2019t entirely alone. Isle La Motte has a community of full-time residents along with a handful of hotels and vacation rentals. Cyclists frequently sped past, and from Cassandra\u2019s rocky beach, we watched speedboats, sailing crafts, paddleboarders and kayakers.I backed up the Taxa next to her electrical outlets (without Steve, this effort admittedly took more than one attempt), and we plugged in, attached a hose to one of her water pumps, dropped the trailer stabilizers and set up the awning outside the front door.Thus settled, we relaxed into a lake vacation unlike any I\u2019ve experienced before. Lake Champlain is beautiful. Long and skinny, it stretches from Canada south for nearly 125 miles. At its widest, it is only about 12 miles across. From our beach, the water was shallow and warm.We swam every day. Some days, wind whipped the water into whitecaps and forced our pedaling, paddling or kayaking closer to shore. Other days, the water was remarkably still, like glass, and we set out in various watercraft for longer adventures. My nieces taught the boys how to dive from the swim dock. We skipped rocks for days. Each evening, we built a fire, an impossibility this summer in Colorado because of wildfire danger, and we watched sublime sunsets. We ate apples and plums fresh from trees on the property, and when we needed additional provisions, we bought organic, homegrown vegetables from the honor system farm stand at nearby Sandy Bottom Farm or free-range chicken and fresh eggs from the Happy Bird Poultry Farm.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe visited the Goodsell Ridge Fossil Preserve and the Fisk Quarry Preserve, both sites of the Chazy Fossil Reef, the oldest known biologically diverse fossil reef in the world, according to the Isle La Motte Preservation Trust. Several times we drove about 15\u00a0minutes for creemees (that\u2019s soft-serve ice cream for non-Vermonters) in nearby North Hero. We bought tart apples and Vermont maple syrup from Hall\u2019s Orchard.But mostly, we relaxed and had a newfound appreciation for in-person visits with loved ones. I lost track of the days. That\u2019s easy to do when life is reduced to morning coffee, breakfast, swimming, conversation, card games, lunch, reading and dinner. Maybe this is lake life everywhere. I wouldn\u2019t know: In landlocked Colorado, the lakes accessible to me are either snowmelt-fed and freezing or crowded, artificial reservoirs.And then, suddenly, sadly, it was time to return home. Jeff and I had to get back to work, and the boys had only a week until school started. And so we retraced our steps. The drive home was easier, perhaps because we were experienced at driving with the Taxa. We stayed at the same campgrounds and felt like old hats each time we checked in. I wouldn\u2019t say we were on par with the true RVers we met, a cohort of die-hards who drive to places such as Alaska and Florida and \u201ccamp\u201d in RVs that have \u201cwolf\u201d or \u201ccougar\u201d or \u201cthunder\u201d in their model names. But neither were we totally green.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFinally, 2,000 miles and four days after leaving Vermont, we arrived home to Boulder. This time, I didn\u2019t fret about what I needed to do. I drove slightly past our house, positioned the trailer and put the 4Runner in reverse.Turns out that backing up wasn\u2019t the hardest part. Without a doubt, the most difficult aspect of this particular trip was also the most inevitable: its end.\n\nWalker is a writer based in Boulder, Colo. Find her on Twitter: @racheljowalker.More from Travel:Planning an RV trip? Here\u2019s what you need to know before you go.A newbie RV renter learns from her mistakes \u2014 and so can youHow to book a campsite for every style \u2014 from parks to RVs to people\u2019s backyardsWhere to stayKampgrounds of America (KOA)888-562-0000koa.comWith more than 500 pet-friendly campgrounds across North America, KOA offers a soft landing for RV and trailer-camping newbies. Common features across campgrounds include play areas for children, pools, hot showers and flush toilets, as well as campground hosts ready to deliver ice and firewood via golf carts (and who also haul away trash). KOA campgrounds offer a variety of trailer sites with electric and water hookups, tent-camping sites and cabins. Rates range depending on location and site type; a 19-foot trailer site for four people and a dog in Omaha from $57 per night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSunset Rock RV Park & Lake Shore915 Quarry Rd.802-928-3522sunsetrockrvpark.comLocated on the southern tip of Isle La Motte, Sunset Rock RV Park has 150 sites for tents and campers. Offers easy access to Lake Champlain, with a fishing pier and public boat launch. Tent sites from $30 per night; cabin and RV sites from $55 per night.Ruthcliffe Lodge & Restaurant1002 Quarry Rd.800-769-8162ruthcliffe.comA rustic, family-owned lodge with six furnished guest rooms located on Lake Champlain. The restaurant, open during the summer, specializes in Italian American dishes, homemade soups and breads, and farm-fresh salads, along with an impressive wine selection. Rooms from $152.50 per night.Where to eatSandy Bottom FarmStory continues below advertisement2468 Main St.sandybottomfarmvt.comThis small certified-organic fruit, vegetable, herb and flower farm sells fresh produce at a self-serve farm stand and at local farmers markets. The stand is open daily from dusk to dawn, spring through fall.AdvertisementHappy Bird Poultry Farm568 Main St.802-343-4182happybirdpoultryfarm.comThis quaint farm store sells chicken in myriad forms \u2014 smoked, as sausage, in pot pies \u2014 plus pork, beef and a range of dairy products, including Vermont sharp cheddar and homemade fruit pies.What to doGoodsell Ridge Fossil Preserve69 Pine St.802-238-7040lclt.org/goodsell-and-fisk-quarry-preservesThe Lake Champlain Land Trust manages this 85-acre preserve where visitors can take self-guided tours of 480-million-year-old fossils. A volunteer-run visitor center occupies a beautiful restored barn. Free.Saint Anne\u2019s Shrine92 St. Anne\u2019s Rd.802-928-3362saintannesshrine.orgA waterfront shrine situated on 32 acres, Saint Anne\u2019s is a popular destination for religious pilgrims and tourists alike. The grounds feature rustic grottoes dedicated to the saints, lush lawns and forest. The sandy public beach is one of the more popular lake access points on the island. Free.Informationislelamotte.us\u2014 R.W. For this family of four \u2014 and their dog \u2014 hitting the road with a camper was the perfect pandemic-era travel solution. A latecomer to the #vanlife party takes a 4,000-mile road trip in a pop-up camper",
        "author": "Rachel Walker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Forget Silicon Valley, The Future of Tech Is in These Three Cities (WSJ: Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7301",
        "date": "2018-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-silicon-valley-the-future-of-tech-is-in-these-three-cities-1529426153?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=66",
        "text": "\u201cYou\u2019re getting this relatively sophisticated workforce that\u2019s being encouraged to move,\u201d says Sean Worker, CEO of BridgeStreet Global Hospitality, a company that assists with business travel. \u201cIn turn, the towns start to get the financing and infrastructure.\u201d With more than 160,000 accommodations in 81 countries, BridgeStreet studies where development dollars are headed, including these surprising boom towns.\nSPARKS, NEVADA The once-quiet 98,000-person neighbor of Reno (10 minutes away by car) is humming because of Tesla Motors and Panasonic\u2019s joint construction project: a large-scale battery manufacturing plant for the carmaker\u2019s electric vehicles and stationary storage products (above). The so-called Gigafactory, which broke ground in 2014, will be 5.5 million square feet (\u201clarge enough for a hundred 747 airplanes,\u201d Worker says) and aims to employ about 6,500 people by 2020. Worker notes that the town is known for its authentic diners and bars, like Squeeze In\u2014\u201cnot the fancy stuff!\u201d\n\n\nCLARKSVILLE, TENNESSEE Worker believes the skillset of the people, access to clean energy and strong partnership opportunities are what led to a major investment in the city of 150,000 people on the Kentucky border. \u201cGoogle broke ground in February on a $600 million data center on 1,300 acres,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd LG is spending $250 million to build an 829,000-square-foot home appliance factory slated to employ 600 workers.\u201d There\u2019s plenty to do, from strolling the riverfront and hiking the Clarksville Greenway to wandering the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center (above)\u2014but Worker\u2019s pick is D&D Black Light Mini Golf for a round of golf.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCustoms House Museum & Cultural Center, Clarksville, Tennessee.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JENNIFER WRIGHT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO\n \n\n\n\nHUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA Alabama\u2019s third- largest city, 75 miles north of Birmingham, has long been known for its engineering prowess. The city is nicknamed the Rocket City for its role in U.S. space missions associated with the area\u2019s U.S. Space & Rocket Center. In January, Toyota and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mazda\n\n\n announced plans to build together a $1.6 billion auto plant in the city of 193,000; it will eventually employ 4,000 people and assemble 300,000 vehicles a year. Huntsville is tracking to overtake Montomgery and Birmingham to become the state\u2019s biggest city within the decade. \u201cIt\u2019s a place with lots of Southern charm,\u201d says Worker, who mentions that Twickenham, the city\u2019s historic district, is a big draw.\nMissed the inaugural Far & Away magazine? Buy original print copies at WSJ Shop.\n\n\nMore in Travel\n\n\n\n\nHow Travel Rules Are Easing Around the World\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\nCarnival and Norwegian Cruises Go Masks-Optional for Most\nMarch 1, 2022 \n\n\nThe Wedding Boom of 2022 Won\u2019t Come Cheap for Traveling Guests\nFebruary 16, 2022 \n\n\nShould You Book Travel With a Buy-Now, Pay-Later Plan?\nFebruary 8, 2022 \n\n\nDo You Need a Covid-19 Vaccine Booster to Travel?\nFebruary 1, 2022 These under-the-radar towns are jockeying to be the next tech hotspots. ",
        "author": "Patrick Thomas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Worried about visiting the Middle East? These travel and safety experts have tips. (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7302",
        "date": "2020-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/worried-about-visiting-the-middle-east-these-travel-and-safety-experts-have-tips/2020/01/14/62732078-3705-11ea-bf30-ad313e4ec754_story.html",
        "text": "The recent escalation in tensions between the United States and Iran has people questioning the wisdom of traveling not only to Iran and Iraq, but also to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa that could potentially be caught up in the unrest. If you\u2019re a traveler wondering whether to cancel or carry on, here is some expert advice from security professionals, tour operators and frequent travelers about how to decide \u2014 and to prepare. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMaking the decision It\u2019s important to understand that the Middle East is not a monolith, says C.K. Redlinger, a former U.S. government security contractor who lived in the region for 12 years. While there may be some cultural similarities among certain countries, each has its own government, beliefs and customs. The same is true when it comes to levels of safety and security, says Redlinger, now president of MissionX, a team of Special Operations veterans who advise TV and film productions on military portrayals and organize extreme adventure vacations, including some in the region. So to make an informed decision about moving forward with travel plans, you must research the specific destination.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementK. Campbell, a military intelligence veteran and senior consultant at Blue Glacier Security & Intelligence, believes too many people focus their trip planning on airfare, hotel reservations and activities, while neglecting to research safety. He suggests travelers visit the U.S. State Department Travel Advisories website and also \u201cspend a few minutes doing your own general Internet search on safety and security in that country.\u201dA State Department spokesperson confirmed that \u201ca number of our embassies have issued recent alerts as a result of heightened tensions in the Middle East. We encourage U.S. citizens to check travel.state.gov for travel advisories and alerts in countries they plan to visit or where they reside overseas.\u201dThe State Department Travel Advisories website is a free resource that assigns levels 1-4 to every country in the world (with level 4 being \u201cdo not travel\u201d) and updates them as situations change. While it\u2019s run by the U.S. government and is geared toward American travelers, Redlinger says the site can also be a resource for non-American travelers because it identifies reasons for each advisory and highlights crime trends, conflicts or unsafe areas. Travelers can then decide whether the risks listed are of concern for them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s a great starting point,\u201d Redlinger says. \u201cFrom there I would broaden my research and see what else the current news is saying about that location.\u201d He also suggests consulting family and friends who have visited or lived in the location because the \u201creality on the ground is often different from what you see on TV.\u201d7 questions about traveling to Australia during catastrophic fires, answeredShivya Nath, global traveler and author of \u201cThe Shooting Star,\u201d has safely traveled to countries tagged with advisories over the years \u2014 including Myanmar, Turkey and Iran \u2014 and knows firsthand that media reports are only part of the story. Political agendas can skew the information you find; to get a more complete picture, cross-check your research using a variety of international and local sources. In addition to reading news from outlets around the world and comparing travel advisories posted by other countries (such as New Zealand\u2019s SafeTravel website and the Government of Canada\u2019s Travel Advice and Advisories), Nath urges travelers to \u201cfind local perspectives.\u201dLike Redlinger, she recommends tapping your own network to find friends who live there or have visited. If that\u2019s not an option, Nath suggests contacting an in-country travel agency and connecting with locals through social media to find out what things are like on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI look for people who are based there and maybe share my interests,\u201d she says. \u201cI reach out and try to have a conversation about whether it\u2019s a good idea to travel there, what regions they would recommend, and so forth.\u201dIf, after you\u2019ve done this research, you believe it\u2019s best to cancel an already booked trip but don\u2019t have travel insurance that covers cancellation, contact your travel agent or operator to discuss. If you booked the trip on your own, reach out to each property and service provider to evaluate your options. Some credit cards also offer trip cancellation coverage, so if you paid with your card, call the card company to inquire.Preparing for the tripIf you\u2019re moving forward with your plans, here are some key safety-related steps to take before you pack your bags.Story continues below advertisementObtain travel insurance, if you haven\u2019t already. Cory Sobczyk, vice president of business development at travel insurance provider Arch RoamRight, says there are three types of coverage travelers should look for: medical, including evacuation; cancellation (the \u201ccancel for any reason\u201d protection is recommended); and security/political evacuation. Many travel insurance policies don\u2019t automatically include security/political evacuation \u2014 in fact, unrest and acts of war are often listed as exclusions \u2014 so you\u2019ll need to inquire specifically about this coverage when searching for an insurance provider. Policies vary; read thoroughly before purchasing and, if in doubt, speak to an adviser who can help you choose. And don\u2019t wait until the last minute to purchase coverage. Although it may still be available at that point, some benefits \u2014 such as \u201ccancel for any reason\u201d \u2014 are offered only within a limited window of time from your trip deposit date.AdvertisementIf you\u2019re American, register with the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) any time you travel outside the United States. You\u2019ll receive alerts for your destination as they\u2019re updated. This program is also used in the event of emergencies as a way for the U.S. government to assess how many Americans are traveling in a particular country, locate and evacuate them if needed, and inform families.Make a note of whether embassy or consular services are available in the country you\u2019re visiting and how to contact them in an emergency. The State Department website has suggestions for what U.S. citizens should do if they find themselves in a crisis event. Print this out to refer to if needed.Story continues below advertisementBe sure your passport is up to date; having six more months of validity is a good standard for international travel. Prepare copies of it and other travel documents, such as your itinerary and in-country phone number. Take a set of copies with you and leave another with family or friends at home so they know your intended route and how to reach you.Warning! Travel insurance doesn\u2019t cover this.If you booked through a travel agency or operator, check with them to see if the trip is a go, what measures they\u2019re taking to ensure safety and whether they have pre-departure tips. Ask if they have eyes and ears on the ground and emergency plans in place.AdvertisementA trustworthy operator will be happy to \u2014 as the founder of Space Tourism Guide, Valerie Stimac, says \u2014 \u201copen up a channel of communication,\u201d answer questions and keep you informed. Stimac hasn\u2019t made any changes to her upcoming Jordan \u201cStars to Mars\u201d tour, but she\u2019ll continue to keep a close eye on the situation and advise her guests with the help of the Jordan-based operator she\u2019s working with.Story continues below advertisementAnother tour operator, experiential travel company Pelorus, monitors governmental risk reports, enlists the expertise of private consultancies that provide risk assessments, and conducts reconnaissance trips to the destination. According to Pelorus founder Geordie Mackay-Lewis, a former British army reconnaissance regiment captain, Pelorus also adjusts its offerings and sometimes forgoes destinations for a period of time if the team has determined safety is a concern. While the company continues to operate in the Middle East and North Africa, it is advising clients against travel to Yemen (mainland), Iran, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria. Mackay-Lewis recommends that anyone considering travel to the region \u201cconduct their own due diligence and talk to their embassies before planning any travel.\u201d\u00a0Traveling safely During your trip, there are several things you can do to protect yourself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDon\u2019t advertise that you\u2019re American,\u201d Campbell says. This means not carrying or wearing American flags and other overtly American-identifying apparel and paraphernalia.Adam Gonzales, a security specialist with experience in the Middle East and CEO of Silent Professionals, a company that helps veterans find employment in global private security, suggests that Americans invest in a passport cover that does not have an American emblem on the outside. Study up on customs, laws and clothing for your destination before you depart so you can keep a low profile on the ground. This isn\u2019t simply about style; it\u2019s about respect and safety. Disregarding cultural norms and laws might do more than offend locals \u2014 it could land you in jail or put a target on your back. Even when traveling to countries that aren\u2019t in conflict and may be \u201cWestern-friendly,\u201d you should know the culture and laws and try to \u201cblend in as much as possible to keep yourself from being a target,\u201d Gonzales says.Stay plugged in to local and global news. Avoid demonstrations, large gatherings and heated debates. Choose hotels that have a security presence and tour operators with a solid safety record. Vary your routine. Leave the flashy jewelry at home. And, Redlinger says, stop staring at your phone.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWalking around with your head down, looking at your phone, is giving an invitation to opportunists,\u201d he says. \u201cPractice \u2018situational awareness.\u2019 Walking with your shoulders back and your head up, paying attention to what\u2019s going on around you, keeps you from being a target.\u201dPutting your phone away and engaging your senses has the added benefit of keeping you in the present moment so you can connect with the place and people in front of you \u2014 and remind yourself why we travel to begin with: to experience and understand life beyond the familiar.\u201cAs travelers, we need to remember that people are not their government or their politics,\u201d Nath says. \u201cTraveling opens your mind to the world beyond what we see in the media.\u201dFitzgerald is a writer and responsible travel specialist based in Amman, Jordan. Her website is\u00a0thisissunny.com.More from Travel:Hotels make room for honeybee colonies to create buzz about at-risk pollinatorsThe world needs trees more than ever. Here\u2019s how to plant some on your travels.Is it safe to travel to Hong Kong? I went to find out. Research your destination, and if you decide to proceed, prepare well. Worried about visiting the Middle East? These travel and safety experts have tips.",
        "author": "Sunny Fitzgerald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Great reads for the armchair traveler (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7303",
        "date": "2020-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/great-reads-for-the-armchair-traveler/2020/03/26/725816aa-6de3-11ea-aa80-c2470c6b2034_story.html",
        "text": "The open road calls, and I reply with silence.After all, what\u2019s a road trip without ordering the local favorite at a restaurant, breaking bread with faraway friends, flirting with strangers in a saloon? Alas, in the time of corona, even touching a gas nozzle seems fraught.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAntsy for adventure, I consider other ways to transport myself. I settle on a tried-and-true escape hatch, accessible to anyone with an armchair: reading. Last week, I spoke with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. \u201cTry to catch up on the books you\u2019ve been meaning to read,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can take a spring break, travel overseas, have empathy for people in other places, travel through time. Good writers can place you right there.\u201dStory continues below advertisementReading about history, she said, can provide context and perspective during this time of uncertainty and fear: \u201cWhen this nation started, they didn\u2019t know if it was going to work or not,\u201d she said. And mysteries are fun, she noted, because they take us to a world in which problems are always solved.Rick Steves, Samantha Brown, Phil Keoghan and other travel pros reflect on being groundedIt\u2019s also a good time for reading aloud or recording oral histories, said Hayden, who fondly remembers her grandmother reading her Hans Christian Andersen stories. \u201cYou may not be able to see your grandparents in person, but you can share stories virtually.\u201dAdvertisementWe all need a little \u201ccandy for the brain\u201d during this stressful period, she added, and we mustn\u2019t feel obligated to finish any particular book. \u201cNo book shaming, no guilt,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is not the time to feel like you need to eat your broccoli. That\u2019s the beauty of having so many books around.\u201d\u201cThank you for that,\u201d I said, laughing.I decided to set aside two books that weren\u2019t grabbing me and \u2014 eager to embark on a journey \u2014 asked some notable readers for recommendations.Story continues below advertisementDana Canedy, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said we all need positive ways to relax, de-stress and distract ourselves. Among her suggestions was \u201cThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay\u201d by Michael Chabon, an epic novel about comic books, escapism and love that I devoured earlier this month.Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle, who recently tweeted that reading has always been his preferred method of social distancing, sent me a list of titles, including one of my favorites, \u201cA Gentleman in Moscow\u201d by Amor Towles.Advertisement\u201cIt feels like an appropriate book to read during a self-quarantine,\u201d Doolittle said. Count Rostov is sentenced to house arrest after the Russian Revolution and is forced to live out the rest of his life in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, where he develops relationships with the hotel staff and other guests; high jinks and heartbreak ensue. \u201cIt\u2019s beautifully written, equal parts historical fiction and fairy tale,\u201d Doolittle said, \u201cand I can\u2019t recommend it highly enough.\u201dStory continues below advertisementI look at the recommendations below and find serenity, for these books promise a world of places to explore, senses to enliven, and humans to understand and love.From my own bookshelf, I pick up \u201cDakota: A Spiritual Geography\u201d by Kathleen Norris and find myself in a place where the wind howls and the vast sky opens to long stretches of desolate highway. \u201cReading is a solitary act, one in keeping with the silence of the Plains,\u201d Norris writes, \u201cbut it\u2019s also paradoxically public, as it deepens my connections with the larger world.\u201d I reread that sentence perhaps a dozen times, understanding that today, when we long to connect in ways we cannot, reading feels like a calling.AdvertisementWith that, I bid thee farewell, dear readers, and bon voyage.Anthony Doerr, author of the beautiful Pulitzer Prize-winning World War II novel \u201cAll the Light We Cannot See\u201d (which is being adapted as a limited series by Netflix), is halfway through \u201cFlights\u201d by Nobel Prize-winning writer Olga Tokarczuk, which he said is the perfect book to pick up and read, a few pages at a time, when you realize you just spent an hour reading news on your phone. He describes the book as \u201cgorgeous, restless and totally original\u201d and said he\u2019s doling it out to himself in small doses like a precious antiviral medicine. \u201cIf you love W.G. Sebald\u2019s work, you\u2019ll love this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has that same nonlinear, accretive power.\u201dSeeking a gentle and heartening destination? Doerr said his blood pressure drops every time he picks up Nobel Prize-winner Juan Ram\u00f3n Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s \u201cPlatero and I,\u201d which he calls \u201ca glittering ticket to a glittering, redolent Andalusia of the past, full of church bells and pine nuts and wine harvests.\u201d In the century-old book about an adventure with a remarkable silver donkey named Platero, Jim\u00e9nez\u2019s prose carries you back to a slower time, Doerr said, \u201cwhen humans were more connected to the animals they lived beside, and the natural world pulsed with meaning.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso on Doerr\u2019s proverbial nightstand is Hilary Mantel\u2019s Wolf Hall trilogy. Before he allows himself the pleasure of reading Mantel\u2019s new \u201cThe Mirror & the Light,\u201d her final installment of the trilogy about Henry VIII\u2019s fixer, Thomas Cromwell, he\u2019s rereading the second of the series, \u201cBring Up the Bodies.\u201d \u201cTo me, Mantel is a world treasure,\u201d he said. \u201cThese are long, impeccably made historical novels that can lift you up out of whatever confinement you\u2019re feeling and airdrop you into the mud and smoke and slush of 16th-century England.\u201dFinally, Doerr is reading physicist and mathematician Brian Greene\u2019s \u201cUntil the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe\u201d \u2014 another book best taken in small doses. \u201cSentence by sentence, Greene is such a wonderful teacher,\u201d Doerr said. \u201cWhen the current hour gets overwhelming, and you feel like lowering yourself into a bath of hand sanitizer, it\u2019s a joy to sweep back and forth through the eons: You remember how infinitesimal this moment actually is, and that every second we get to be alive on this planet is an utter gift.\u201dDana Canedy, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said she can\u2019t think of a more appropriate book for this time than \u201cPersonal History\u201d by Katharine Graham. The book, winner of the 1998 Pulitzer for biography, \u201cspeaks to themes currently replaying in the country \u2014 the importance of American journalism, a defining moment in history and the evolution of women leaders,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCanedy also recommended four Pulitzer fiction winners, including \u201cKavalier and Clay\u201d: \u201cThe Grapes of Wrath\u201d by John Steinbeck, \u201ca masterpiece that, given our nation\u2019s current economic uncertainty, is likely to stir in readers an empathy for the Joad family and its struggles during the Great Depression\u201d; \u201cBeloved\u201d by Toni Morrison, \u201ca stunning and important work of literature that examines the barbaric legacy of slavery through the life of a former slave named Sethe\u201d; and \u201cLess\u201d by Andrew Sean Greer, \u201ca generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.\u201dNationals pitcher Sean Doolittle said \u201cThe Overstory\u201d by Richard Powers, which won a Pulitzer for fiction last year, is one of his favorite books of all time. He also recommended \u201cThe Other Americans\u201d by Laila Lalami, which he called an important book that examines our shared humanity as the characters come to grips with a suspicious crime committed in their California town.If you\u2019re itching to travel across the pond to London (actually, four parallel Londons), Doolittle said, consider V.E. Schwab\u2019s Shades of Magic trilogy, which opened up the genre of fantasy fiction to him and remains a favorite. If you don\u2019t want to commit to a trilogy, he recommended \u201cMagic for Liars\u201d by Sarah Gailey. And if you prefer a murder-mystery thriller without the magic, he suggested \u201cThe Silent Patient\u201d by Alex Michaelides, also set in London.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDoolittle said \u201cReincarnation Blues\u201d by Michael Poore was one of the most fun books he\u2019s read in a while: Milo has lived 9,995 lives and has yet to achieve \u201cPerfection\u201d; he keeps being reincarnated in different worlds as different people or other living things. \u201cFor all the talk about death in the book,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s darkly funny as it explores the meaning of the human experience.\u201dArena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, an Alaska Native who founded and ran Juneau\u2019s Perseverance Theatre for nearly two decades, said Chabon upended her ideas of what \u201cmight have been\u201d in his novel \u201cThe Yiddish Policemen\u2019s Union,\u201d a detective story based on the fictional idea that thousands of Jewish people settled in tiny Sitka, Alaska, after World War II. \u201cIt\u2019s sci fi and contains some of the most unusual language I\u2019ve ever read,\u201d Smith said. \u201cRiveting stuff.\u201dFor a total escape that Smith said she ate up \u201clike a box of candy,\u201d she suggested \u201cThe Lost Girls of Paris\u201d by Pam Jenoff, a mystery and spy novel about the women who helped win World War II. Smith has also recently read and loved the Pulitzer-winning \u201cFrederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom\u201d by David W. Blight; and \u201cCatch and Kill,\u201d Ronan Farrow\u2019s chilling read about the uncovering of powerful men in the entertainment industry who preyed on women, and the people who helped them cover it up.Samuel Freedman, a professor at Columbia Journalism School who teaches a nonfiction book writing seminar and has written eight books, said he appreciates travel narratives that not only take him to a foreign or different place, but that also use the journey as part of a larger story. \u201cMy all-time favorite in this genre is \u2018Destinations\u2019 by Jan Morris,\u201d Freedman said. \u201cIt\u2019s a collection of elegantly written and politically alert essays that Morris wrote primarily for Rolling Stone in the \u201970s.\u201dHe also recommended \u201cSearching for Zion\u201d by Emily Raboteau, the African American author\u2019s saga of trying to find her own promised land, a search that takes her to Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana and ultimately the American South; \u201cBad Land: An American Romance\u201d by Jonathan Raban, about the Anglo settlement of the Great Plains a century ago, specifically a remote part of eastern Montana; and \u201cThe Last Fine Time\u201d by Verlyn Klinkenborg, which Freedman described as \u201ca gorgeous ode to a grueling place \u2014 the portion of blue-collar Buffalo centered on a particular bar.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough his work and above recommendations are nonfiction, Freedman said his pleasure reading is 90 percent fiction. At the top of that list: \u201cHiroshima Joe\u201d by Martin Booth. \u201cIt\u2019s a war novel, a novel of illicit gay love, a novel of addiction,\u201d he said, \u201cand a stirring portrait of Hong Kong a year before and a decade after Japanese conquest and occupation.\u201dRichard Garriott de Cayeux, a video-game developer and entrepreneur who traveled to the International Space Station in 2008 as a space tourist, said he is inspired by literature that explores the past, present and future of humanity\u2019s great adventure beyond Earth. He recommended \u201cApollo 13\u201d by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger (previously published as \u201cLost Moon\u201d), which tells the story of the mission that showcased the best of what NASA was and aspired to be. \u201cAmerica was daring great adventures at great expense and great risk, backed up by tens of thousands of people back on Earth who all worked with skill and dedication in ways that show what a unified people can do.\u201dGarriott de Cayeux, the son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, also suggested \u201cMy Dream of Stars\u201d by Anousheh Ansari, with Homer Hickam, which tells the story of Ansari\u2019s family\u2019s unlikely escape from Iran, her funding of the Ansari X Prize and her own flight to the International Space Station; and \u201cThe Case for Space\u201d by Robert Zubrin, which shows how access to space is radically changing. \u201cNew commercial launch vehicles are already 10 times cheaper than just a decade ago and likely will become 10 times cheaper again in the next decade,\u201d Garriott de Cayeux said. \u201cWhen access to space is 100 time cheaper, it\u2019s a lot easier to think of good reasons to go explore and exploit the vast universe beyond our atmosphere.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt Capitol Hill Books in Washington, co-owner Kyle Burk selected The Bayou trilogy by Daniel Woodrell, composed of three crime novels set in the fictional town of St. Bruno, La., and featuring an ex-boxer who works for the St. Bruno police department. \u201cMost readers know Woodrell for \u2018Winter\u2019s Bone,\u2019 but these early works of his are especially literary hard-boiled detective fiction set in the heat and humidity of the Bayou,\u201d Burk said. \u201cWe get to experience the world of St. Bruno while enjoying Woodrell\u2019s innovative and imaginative use of the language, which has won him wide acclaim.\u201dCo-owner Aaron Beckwith picked \u201cGarlic, Mint, & Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, Mediterranean Cuisine, and Noir Fiction\u201d by Jean-Claude Izzo. \u201cSeems like as good a time as any,\u201d he said, \u201cto be transported to Marseilles and get enveloped by the fine wine, food and corruption of the Mediterranean.\u201dKaplan is a freelance writer in the District. Her website is melaniedgkaplan.com. Find her on Twitter: @melaniedgkaplanMore from Travel:Take a walk in D.C. and find these 8 murals off the beaten path\u2018We\u2019re closed for your hiking business.\u2019 Communities near national parks urge non-locals to stay away.\u2018The Princess Bride\u2019 and other fantastical novels to help you escape reality Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anthony Doerr, Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle and others share their cooped-up favorites. Great reads for the armchair traveler",
        "author": "Melanie D.G. Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "L.A. bounces back with breezy new stays, superheroes and movie magic (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7304",
        "date": "2021-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/new-attractions-los-angeles-hotels-shopping/2021/07/28/5cc2809a-ebec-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html",
        "text": "Los Angeles contains multitudes: Some first-time visitors are startled to learn the city has lion-prowled mountains, meditation gardens, heavyweight museums and even prehistoric tar pits within easy reach. But as travelers return this summer and fall, they\u2019ll find fresh attractions steeped in old-school Hollywood magic. Welcome back to the land of superheroes and silver-screen glamour. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAfter long anticipation, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will open Sept.\u00a030 with screenings of \u201cThe Wizard of Oz\u201d accompanied by live symphony music. The museum exhibits, on a Renzo Piano-designed Wilshire Boulevard campus, will display Hollywood totems including Dorothy\u2019s famous red slippers, the sole remaining shark from \u201cJaws\u201d and the space shuttle from Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey.\u201d (A concrete and glass sphere that houses the museum\u2019s screening theaters, meanwhile, reminds some Angelenos of George Lucas\u2019s Death Star.) Timed admission tickets go on sale Aug.\u00a05.Swelling the offerings at Anaheim\u2019s Disney California Adventure Park, the new superhero-themed Avengers Campus opened June 4 with a cast of characters sprung from the pages of comic books. Entering the Avengers Headquarters, visitors meet \u201ccast members\u201d channeling Black Panther, Loki or Captain Marvel, while Doctor Strange haunts the atmospheric ruins of his Ancient Sanctum.In Orlando or Anaheim for a Disney vacation? Explore the cities beyond the gates, too.\u201cThere is some incredibly cool stuff happening,\u201d said Adam Burke, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board. \u201cIt\u2019s been a really tough year and a half, but there\u2019s so much to make us excited that the L.A. experience will be stronger than it\u2019s ever been.\u201dBurke pointed to a $14.3\u00a0billion capital improvement project at LAX to ease the hassle of getting there, with the eventual inclusion of a metro line to downtown Los Angeles. That project won\u2019t be completed for years, but travelers aren\u2019t waiting to return. At the beginning of 2021, hotel occupancy was below 50\u00a0percent, Burke said, but that number has reached 70\u00a0percent for 17\u00a0consecutive weekends, with some properties at 90\u00a0percent on the busiest nights.Los Angeles\u2019 wealth of outdoor activities has been key to that recovery, Burke said. As in other cities, the pandemic brought fresh air to the fore. It\u2019s a trend that will probably continue: In July, Los Angeles County announced an indoor mask mandate in response to rising coronavirus cases fueled by the delta variant. Visitors seeking outdoor experiences have a lot to choose from, including the recently completed 13-mile Park to Playa Trail, which links parks and cycling paths from Crenshaw to the beach. Forest bathing has taken off at the 127-acre Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, and in November, the arboretum will unveil Lightscape, a mile-long installation with fountains and thousands of twinkling lights.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll salty tans and boardwalk chic, the 34-room Venice V Hotel opened in June steps from the famed waves at Venice Beach. Stars including Charlie Chaplin and Clara Bow once lived in the historic beachfront property, now renovated with a rooftop deck, exposed brick and ocean views from every room. Guests can book surf or skate lessons, or just rent a skateboard and head to the nearby Venice Beach Skate Park for a sunset session.Freshwater fans may prefer the 250-room Hotel June, which opened last June near the airport and Playa del Rey. Shady loungers and nighttime fire pits line the hotel\u2019s turquoise pool, and the two-story outdoor restaurant Caravan Swim Club serves a Baja-inspired menu, including dozens of hard-to-find brands of tequila and mezcal. Like Venice V Hotel, it\u2019s owned by hotel group Proper Hospitality, whose design-focused 148-room hotel Downtown L.A. Proper opens Aug. 26.From neon to knickknacks, \u2018the Smithsonian of the Valley\u2019 puts San Fernando Valley history on displayAnd a stroll away from downtown\u2019s Grand Central Market \u2014 a trove of food vendors more than a century old \u2014 will be a 315-room L.A. outpost of Netherlands-based hotel chain CitizenM. Minimalist rooms are teeny but smart, featuring king-size beds wedged between bright white walls. Downstairs, art-filled common spaces are made for mingling, with reservations available from Sept. 1.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGrand Central Market is always a good idea, but travelers will find some of the city\u2019s most interesting new meals a few miles away in the artsy Silver Lake neighborhood. That\u2019s where James Beard Award-nominated chef Mei Lin opened her Szechuan hot-chicken joint Daybird in March. Beloved vegan soul-food pop-up VTree found a bricks-and-mortar home there the same month. Though it turns two this fall, Silver Lake\u2019s diner-inspired All Day Baby still feels fresh, with hot crab sandwiches and airy biscuits.And then there are tacos. (In L.A., blessedly, there are nearly always tacos.) The city added one more option when the owners of Guisados, a celebrated Los Angeles mini-chain of Mexican restaurants, opened window-service Playita Mariscos in Silver Lake in March.A succinct menu of ceviche, tostadas and other sunny fare is inspired by the proprietors\u2019 family trips to Mexico; served in plastic cups topped with lime wedges, their Campechana seafood cocktails channel breezy afternoons at the beach. But ordering a plate of beer-battered fish tacos to carry down Sunset Boulevard? That\u2019s unmistakably L.A.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\n\nSmith is a writer based in Vermont. Her website is jenrosesmith.com. Find her on Twitter and Instagram: @jenrosesmithvt.More from Travel:A local\u2019s guide to Los AngelesInstead of a high-priced, high-end L.A. spa, take the waters at low-key Glen IvyStation to station: What to do and see along L.A.\u2019s Expo LineThe coronavirus pandemic has disrupted travel domestically and around the world. You will find the latest developments on The Post\u2019s live blog at www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus New things to do in Los Angeles include a motion-picture museum on the Miracle Mile and window-service tacos in Silver Lake. L.A. bounces back with breezy new stays, superheroes and movie magic",
        "author": "Jen Rose Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Wine to Sweets, Greek Goodies at a New Athens Market (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7305",
        "date": "2018-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/travel/yolenis-athens-market-review.html",
        "text": "Yoleni\u2019s, a food emporium in the upscale Kolonaki neighborhood, is all about showcasing the gems of Greek gastronomy. Yoleni\u2019s, a food emporium in the upscale Kolonaki neighborhood, is all about showcasing the gems of Greek gastronomy. At first glance, Yoleni\u2019s looks like an Athenian grocery store of a bygone era. You can taste cold cuts, cheeses and halvah before you buy; the feta is sold by the slice from a large slab preserved in salty brine; and there is a bakery and a fruit and vegetable section. But walk a few steps farther in, and you\u2019ll realize this multi-floor food emporium in Kolonaki, an upscale neighborhood of Athens, is all about showcasing the gems of Greek gastronomy.",
        "author": "By Margarita Gokun Silver"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Museums Around the World, a Focus on Food (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7306",
        "date": "2019-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/travel/food-museums.html",
        "text": "The new Cit\u00e9 Internationale de la Gastronomie de Lyon in southeastern France is one of a growing number of museums and centers devoted to food. The new Cit\u00e9 Internationale de la Gastronomie de Lyon in southeastern France is one of a growing number of museums and centers devoted to food. The city of Lyon, France, is hoping to cement its reputation as the cradle of French gastronomy with the opening of a new cultural gastronomy center that is being described as the first of its kind in France, and the largest of its kind in the world.",
        "author": "By Vivian Song"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Places to Go in Montmartre (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7307",
        "date": "2018-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/travel/five-places-to-go-in-montmartre.html",
        "text": "Gastronomic Montmartre is on the rise. Arty younger Parisians are flocking to this atmospheric old working-class quarter, which has seen a wave of new and reasonably priced restaurants. One was just awarded a Michelin star. Gastronomic Montmartre is on the rise. Arty younger Parisians are flocking to this atmospheric old working-class quarter, which has seen a wave of new and reasonably priced restaurants. One was just awarded a Michelin star. ",
        "author": "By Alexander Lobrano"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Lyon, a new museum celebrates a longstanding culinary tradition (WP: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7308",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/getting-a-taste-of-lyon-a-world-capital-of-gastronomy/2020/01/09/6f0f71f2-2039-11ea-bed5-880264cc91a9_story.html",
        "text": "Mention Lyon, France\u2019s third-largest city, and Francophile food fans perk up. Thanks in part to its location at the heart of France\u2019s agricultural larder, Lyon has always enjoyed a glowing reputation as a gastronomic hub. But things heated up in 1935 with the release of a guidebook titled \u201cLyon, Capitale Mondiale de la Gastronomie,\u201d penned by esteemed food critic Curnonsky with writer Marcel-Etienne Grancher. As famous for his poetic culinary musings as for his colossal appetite, Curnonsky (alias the Prince of Gastronomes) was one of the first writers to espouse the concept of culinary tourism. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo when I heard last year that Lyon was opening a so-called Cit\u00e9 Internationale de la Gastronomie, I climbed the ladder of my home library to seek the old guidebook. Six restaurants remained; a visit felt timely. I would hit each spot, discover the new Cit\u00e9 and consult a food historian: Could Lyon circa 2019 still claim the title of World Capital of Gastronomy?Brasserie Georges\u201cCurnonsky?\u201d asked the maitre d\u2019. \u201cTable six!\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNo Muzak here, only the happy chimes of silverware as I cruised along the immense art deco dining room, zigzagging between red moleskin banquettes and long tables covered with starched white tablecloths. Above my head, steel-and-glass chandeliers heralded the stylized ceiling fresco. And there it was \u2014 his name engraved on a copper plaque at table six.Taking my cues from Curnonsky\u2019s guidebook, I ordered the Incomparable gratin\u00e9e and a brown, fatty choucroute escorted by ham, sausages and boiled potatoes. The gratin\u00e9e, an exquisite onion soup, was thickened at the table with an egg yolk stirred in Madeira wine. Lightly acidic, the sauerkraut balanced the sweetness of the soup, while the plump meats yielded salty deliciousness.Brussels emerges as Europe\u2019s epicenter of contemporary artLa M\u00e8re BrazierAs Lyon\u2019s silk industry collapsed in the 1900s, bourgeois laid off their cooks. Finding themselves jobless, several women founded their own eateries and became known as Les M\u00e8res (the Mothers). In 1933, La M\u00e8re Brazier was the first woman to be anointed by the Michelin guide: three Michelin stars for each of her two restaurants!Since 2008, Chef Mathieu Viannay has led her downtown historical restaurant, and while she remains his inspiration, the authentic but modernized interior, as well as his inventive variations on her recipes \u2014 and his two stars \u2014 are clearly his own. Describing her cuisine, Curnonsky mentioned simple perfection. Dare I say that Viannay\u2019s 12th version of her foie gras terrine and artichoke heart came close? How long until his third star?Bouchon-Comptoir BrunetThe Brunet family is long gone, but current owners Xavier Beyrieux and Benjamin Baldassini are passionate about Lyon\u2019s culinary legacy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor us,\u201d said Beyrieux, \u201cacquiring a 1934 bistro only makes sense if we keep everything as close to the original as possible.\u201dThey kept the name, the original checkered floor tiles, similar marble tables and wooden chairs. The old bar collapsed, but the new one is its honorable heir. The menu still features tripe, sauce gribiche and cow\u2019s udder with garlic, but Curnonsky called the escargots \u201ca splendor.\u201d Indeed, snails bathed in bubbly caramelized parsley butter tasted splendid.L\u00e9on de LyonStanding proud since 1904 on a downtown street corner and named for its founder, L\u00e9on D\u00e9an \u2014 a king of cooks, wrote Curnonsky \u2014 this elegant wood-paneled space was recently revamped and now features a casual bistro, a gastronomic restaurant and a cozy contemporary bar. A collection of classic paintings depict kitchen scenes and set the stage for chef Olivier Bourrat\u2019s Lyonnais cuisine.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI was dying to experience the sum of gastronomical pleasures described by Curnonsky, but it was too early for liquor souffle. Instead, I savored another local favorite, the earthy p\u00e2t\u00e9 en cro\u00fbte, a mosaic of chicken, veal, sweetbreads, pork and foie gras encased in a savory crust as crumbly and buttery as a shortbread.Brasserie Le NordA model of good taste and practical sense, said my guidebook about the decor (red painted walls, stone arches and mosaic tiles still hold). This bustling brasserie, part of the late Paul Bocuse\u2019s empire, still churns out famous Lyonnais specialties among a pell-mell menu featuring linguine with mussels and Serrano ham.Story continues below advertisementCurnonsky mentioned the famous choucroute du Nord, but I opted for the massive saucisson pistach\u00e9, two hefty slices of pinkish saucisson studded with pistachios and stuffed into a delicious brioche.Le Passage\u201cCurnonsky who?\u201d asked the young chef of Le Passage, a gorgeous bistro hidden within a traboule, the typical Lyonnais covered passageway between two streets. My guidebook referred only to a smart wine list, but the young owners were thrilled to see their locale mentioned in a 1935 book. No history\u00a0buff here, but a solid contemporary menu and a modern cocktail selection at the theatrical bar.Cit\u00e9 Internationale de la GastronomieOnce UNESCO inscribed the French gastronomic meal on its intangible cultural heritage list in 2010, France was required to create ways to safeguard that concept. Several cities broached the idea of institutions dedicated to gastronomy. Four won the golden ticket, each with a specific theme, and Lyon is the first to open. Dijon, Tours and Paris-Rungis will follow.\u201cIt\u2019s not a museum nor a restaurant,\u201d said director Florent Bonnetain. \u201cIt\u2019s an interactive cultural space focused on food and health, for gourmands of all ages.\u201dThe Cit\u00e9, 43,000 square feet of exhibit space over four stories, is housed within the renovated 12th-century Hotel-Dieu \u2014 once a monumental hospital, today a stunning complex \u2014 comprising a five-star hotel, restaurants, offices and shops. Whether a visitor follows their nose directly to the working kitchen or digs into the culinary personalities who marked the city \u2014 Bocuse\u2019s old stove-top is there, M\u00e8re Brazier\u2019s towering pots and even a cardboard Curnonsky \u2014 the center celebrates culinary culture.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEverywhere I went in Lyon, people were eating. Besides the historical joints, the city brimmed with new eateries, sumptuous pastry shops and busy wine bars. Finally, I asked Bonnetain if Lyon could claim the world title.\u201cThere are many gastronomies today,\u201d he said. \u201cLyon may not be the world capital, but it remains a capital, a center of French, Lyonnais cuisine.\u201d\u201cDoes Curnonsky still matter?\u201d I asked culinary historian Yves Rou\u00e8che.\u201cHe put Lyon on the map in 1935,\u201d he answered, \u201cbut it was Paul Bocuse who promoted Lyon internationally. Now that he\u2019s gone, the question is: Who will pick up the baton?\u201dBigar is a writer based in New York City. Her website is sbigar.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @sylviebigar.More from Travel:Don\u2019t let the cost of your trip take you by surpriseWhy Montreal wants you to visit in the winterPlay where you stay: Great hotels for active vacationsWhere to stayLe Royal Lyon HotelStory continues below advertisement20 Place Bellecour011-33-4-78-37-57-31Advertisementlyonhotel-leroyal.com/en/home.htmlFacing Bellecour Square, one of the largest pedestrian squares in Europe, the Royal features regal luxury in the very center of town. Students from the Paul Bocuse Institute, a top hospitality school, spend time in each department as part of their internship and bring candid, friendly service. Rooms from about $200 per night.Coll\u00e8ge Hotel5 Place Saint-Paul011-33-4-72-10-05-05college-hotel.comIn the heart of old town, this fun property revisits with humor the theme of an old-fashioned French school. Comfortable and design-centric, the rooms are on the small side, though some feature balconies, and the library serves as a wonderful hangout. Rooms from about $133 per night.Where to eatBrasserie GeorgesStory continues below advertisement30 Cours de Verdun011-33-4-72-56-54-54brasseriegeorges.com/enAdvertisementNear the Perrache train station stands this epitome of a French brasserie, founded in 1899. Lyon has changed and grown around it, but the beer is still homemade and satisfying, the choucroute is still the best in town, and the room still packs celebrities, locals and travelers. Open weekdays 11:30\u00a0a.m. to 11 p.m. and weekends until 12:15 a.m. Entrees from about $21.La M\u00e8re Brazier12 Rue Royale011-33-4-78-23-17-20lamerebrazier.frChef Mathieu Viannay has revived the old haunt of La M\u00e8re Brazier, the first woman to receive three Michelin stars for each of her restaurants. Classics such as the artichoke and foie gras terrine or roasted venison are revisited and enhanced. This historical institution, a worthwhile splurge, has become my favorite table in Lyon. Open Monday to Friday noon to 1:15 p.m. for lunch, 7:45 to 9\u00a0p.m. for dinner. Entrees from about $62.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBouchon-Comptoir Brunet23 Rue Claudia011-33-4-78-37-44-31bouchonlyonnaisbrunet.fr/enThe small, bustling bistro in downtown Lyon specializes in simple Lyonnais dishes including offal, stews and goat cheese beignet. The wine list features numerous options by the glass and offers great value for local crus. Open weekdays except Tuesday noon to 2 p.m. and 7 to 9:30 p.m.; weekends noon to 2:30 p.m. and 6:30 to 10 p.m. Entrees from about $17.L\u00e9on de Lyon\n1 Rue Pleney011-33-4-72-10-11-12leondelyon.com/fr\nA historical restaurant revisited by a young team, L\u00e9on now features a gastronomic dining room and a casual cafe and bar within the old space. From bubbling marrow bones to delicate roasted pollock served with cockles, traditional French specialties are the focus here. Open daily noon to 2:30 p.m. and 7 to 11 p.m. Entrees from about $18.AdvertisementBrasserie Le Nord18 Rue Neuve011-33-4-72-10-69-69brasseries-bocuse.com/enOne of Paul Bocuse\u2019s brasseries, this busy spot caters mostly to a business crowd in search of a solid, no-fuss menu. Traditional local dishes share the spotlight with fusion-style specialties including sashimi, jamon Iberico and classic pasta. Open daily noon to 2 p.m. and 7 to 10:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays until 11 p.m. Entrees from about $18.Le Passage8 Rue du Platre011-33-4-78-28-11-16le-passage.comHidden in a traboule, a typical Lyonnais passageway between two buildings, this hip establishment is divided into a fine-dining room, a bar and two private salons including a cigar lounge. On the menu: steak tartare, veal sweetbreads, fillets of bass and a lively cocktail list. Open Tuesday to Saturday noon to 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. Entrees from about $21.What to doCit\u00e9 Internationale de la Gastronomie4 Grand Cloitre du Grand Hotel-Dieucitegastronomielyon.fr/enNestled within the monumental renovation of the 12th-century Hotel-Dieu, a former hospital, this interactive museum dedicated to food, gastronomy and health occupies four floors. Cooks and chefs work all day in the demo kitchen and produce interesting bites for tastings. The exhibits are open daily 10 a.m.-7\u00a0p.m. and until 10\u00a0p.m. on Saturday. Tickets and tasting about $27, adult tickets about $13, ages 5 to 15 about $9, children under 5 free.Informationen.lyon-france.comS.B.\u2009For the author\u2019s full list of Lyon recommendations, visit wapo.st/travel The French city famously dubbed a \u2018World Capital of Gastronomy\u2019 in 1935 still delivers. In Lyon, a new museum celebrates a longstanding culinary tradition",
        "author": "Sylvie Bigar"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Astronaut Tim Peake Can\u2019t Travel (to Space) Without (NYT: Travel) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7309",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/travel/what-astronaut-tim-peake-cant-travel-without.html",
        "text": "Mr. Peake, who spent six months on the International Space Station, talks about the importance of compression garments, T-shirts and an iPad Nano. Mr. Peake, who spent six months on the International Space Station, talks about the importance of compression garments, T-shirts and an iPad Nano. On June 18, 2016, Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, came back to Earth after six months on the International Space Station. His book of photographs taken in space, \u201cHello, Is This Planet Earth? My View From the International Space Station,\u201d will be published on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Nell McShane Wulfhart"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Astronaut Tim Peake Can\u2019t Travel (to Space) Without (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7310",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/travel/what-astronaut-tim-peake-cant-travel-without.html",
        "text": "Mr. Peake, who spent six months on the International Space Station, talks about the importance of compression garments, T-shirts and an iPad Nano. Mr. Peake, who spent six months on the International Space Station, talks about the importance of compression garments, T-shirts and an iPad Nano. On June 18, 2016, Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, came back to Earth after six months on the International Space Station. His book of photographs taken in space, \u201cHello, Is This Planet Earth? My View From the International Space Station,\u201d will be published on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Nell McShane Wulfhart"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Astronaut Tim Peake Can\u2019t Travel (to Space) Without (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7311",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/travel/what-astronaut-tim-peake-cant-travel-without.html",
        "text": "Mr. Peake, who spent six months on the International Space Station, talks about the importance of compression garments, T-shirts and an iPad Nano. Mr. Peake, who spent six months on the International Space Station, talks about the importance of compression garments, T-shirts and an iPad Nano. On June 18, 2016, Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European Space Agency, came back to Earth after six months on the International Space Station. His book of photographs taken in space, \u201cHello, Is This Planet Earth? My View From the International Space Station,\u201d will be published on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Nell McShane Wulfhart"
    },
    {
        "title": "Peer Inside Tashkent\u2019s Art-Filled (and Long-Shrouded) Subway (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7312",
        "date": "2019-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/travel/tashkent-uzbekistan-subway.html",
        "text": "For decades, the city\u2019s elaborately decorated metro stations were largely hidden from the outside world. For decades, the city\u2019s elaborately decorated metro stations were largely hidden from the outside world. Tashkent, Uzbekistan\u2019s capital, is home to one of the world\u2019s most ornate subway systems. Many of its 29 stations are elaborately decorated with mosaics and chandeliers, the artwork reflecting a range of themes \u2014 from the Soviet space program to elements of local history, industry and agriculture.",
        "author": "By Danielle Villasana and Stephen Hiltner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Peer Inside Tashkent\u2019s Art-Filled (and Long-Shrouded) Subway (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7313",
        "date": "2019-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/travel/tashkent-uzbekistan-subway.html",
        "text": "For decades, the city\u2019s elaborately decorated metro stations were largely hidden from the outside world. For decades, the city\u2019s elaborately decorated metro stations were largely hidden from the outside world. Tashkent, Uzbekistan\u2019s capital, is home to one of the world\u2019s most ornate subway systems. Many of its 29 stations are elaborately decorated with mosaics and chandeliers, the artwork reflecting a range of themes \u2014 from the Soviet space program to elements of local history, industry and agriculture.",
        "author": "By Danielle Villasana and Stephen Hiltner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Human trafficking victim, forced to work 10 years for no pay, awarded $8 million by federal judge (WP: True Crime) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7314",
        "date": "2018-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/05/30/human-trafficking-victim-forced-to-work-10-years-for-no-pay-awarded-8-million-by-federal-judge/",
        "text": "A woman who was trafficked for 10 years as an unpaid laborer in various cities across the United States has been awarded nearly $8 million in damages by a federal judge in Kansas, believed to be the largest trafficking-related verdict in\u00a0U.S. history.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightKendra Ross, now 27, said she was victimized by a group originally called the United Nation of Islam, which in 1978 split from the Nation of Islam headed by Louis Farrakhan. The group later changed its name to The Value Creators, with headquarters in Kansas City, Kan., and business and residential properties in\u00a0seven other cities around the country. For ten years, Ross was forced to work in the group\u2019s bakeries or restaurants and live in its homes, was separated from her mother at age 12 and ordered to marry another group member at 20, a judge in Kansas City, Kan., found. She was also shipped against her will from Kansas City to Atlanta, then to Newark, Harlem, Tennessee and\u00a0Ohio before escaping from the group at age 21, her lawsuit stated.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Value Creators is headed by Royall Jenkins, who did not return messages seeking comment. Jenkins allegedly issued strict orders governing every aspect of his group members\u2019 lives, from where they lived and worked to how they spoke, what they ate and whom they married. The members were denied proper health care and children were educated in the group\u2019s uncertified schools, Ross alleged. Jenkins filed one jumbled document in the case but otherwise did not respond to the suit, and a default judgment was entered against him.\u201cThis organization just took away her childhood,\u201d said her lawyer, Betsy Hutson of the law firm McGuireWoods, which in 2015 began representing a shelter for trafficking victims where Ross stayed. \u201cThey stripped her of 19 years of her life, forced her to work for no pay, and subjected her to just inhumane conditions.\u201d Ross testified in February that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, regular nightmares and anxiety.After she testified, U.S. District Judge Daniel D. Crabtree told her, \u201cThe way you were treated was despicable,\u201d according to a transcript of the hearing. \u201cIt\u2019s not the way we treat each other in America. It\u2019s not the way we treat each other here in Kansas.\u201d\u00a0Then Crabtree\u00a0stepped down from the bench, walked over to Ross and shook her hand. \u201cHe said, \u2018It\u2019s an honor and a privilege to meet you,'\u201d Hutson said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt wasn\u2019t until 2003 that federal laws permitted victims of trafficking to file civil suits against their captors. Martina Vandenberg, founder of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, said her group has tracked nearly 280 suits involving human trafficking, and Ross\u2019s case was \u201cthe highest single-victim verdict that we\u2019ve heard of.\u201d In the center\u2019s database of suits, Vandenberg said 93 percent were related to claims of forced labor.Jenkins, the leader of both the United Nation of Islam and The Value Creators, has said that around 1978, he was abducted by angels or scientists, escorted through the galaxy in a spaceship, informed that he was \u201cThe Supreme Being\u201d and instructed on how to govern Earth, according to Ross\u2019s lawsuit. One of his first acts upon returning to Earth was to separate from the Nation of Islam, and he reportedly instructed his followers to refer to him as \u201cAllah on Earth,\u201d \u201cAllah in Person\u201d or \u201cThe Supreme Being,\u201d Ross said.Jenkins had at least 13 wives and 20 children around the country, Ross\u2019s suit alleged, and formed communities of full-time followers in Kansas City, Kan., and elsewhere. \u201cUNOI doctrine focused primarily on the supremacy of Jenkins as God on Earth,\u201d the lawsuit states. \u201cAs such, disciples of UNOI \u2014 and now The Value Creators\u2013consider Jenkins\u2019 teaching as prophetical.\u201d The teachings emphasize the superiority of black people to white people and that \u201cwomen are inferior to men, and that women should completely submit to men to escape eternal damnation,\u201d the lawsuit states.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRoss said in her lawsuit filed last September that beginning at age 11 she was forced to work in a United Nation of Islam-run bakery for a few hours before school, and a full eight-hour shift after school, for which she was never paid. At 12 she was removed from her mother\u2019s home and sent to a women\u2019s house run by the group, while continuing to work either in the group\u2019s businesses, providing childcare or cleaning homes seven days a week. She testified that her irregular schooling, which often consisted of watching horror movies, was stopped when she was 15.At 16, Ross was relocated to Atlanta without her consent, and made to work full-time in a group-owned restaurant, then, once she returned home, cook and clean for a household of about 15 people, her suit said. Later that year, she was moved back to Kansas City where she said she was subjected to physical and emotional abuse by her home\u2019s caretaker.At 17, Ross said she was moved to New Jersey, where she worked as a cook and waitress in restaurants in Newark and Harlem, N.Y. She said she was told to avoid any child labor investigators and if any appeared, she should \u201ctake a walk.\u201d Two years later, she was moved to Dayton, Ohio, where she worked six days a week from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. in another UNOI restaurant without pay.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn her court testimony, Ross was asked if she were ever granted days off or holidays. \u201cNo,\u201d she said, \u201cI mean, Royall\u2019s birthday was, like, Christmas basically, so everyone \u2014 all of the members everywhere kind of took a break and came to Kansas to celebrate this birthday of his and that was, like, a few days and then I was back to work.\u201d She estimated there were about 600 members of the United Nation of Islam, and did not know how many members the Value Creators have. The group changed its name in 2015.No lawyers appeared for Jenkins or the Value Creators at the hearing.In 2011, at age 20, the group \u201cfacilitated a marriage between Ms. Ross and another UNOI member through a psychic doctor who claimed to have unique knowledge of compatibility among UNOI members,\u201d the lawsuit stated. She said UNOI husbands \u201cregularly practiced polygamy,\u201d and that her marriage was not legal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2012, Ross fled from the group and eventually entered a shelter for trafficking victims.Ross\u2019s lawyers sought back pay for the thousands of hours of unpaid labor she had performed over the years. Crabtree granted her $453,517 for restitution. He also awarded her $2.92 million for emotional distress, $3.37 million for punitive damages, and nearly $1.2 million for racketeering damages and unpaid overtime.Collecting the judgment may prove challenging, since Jenkins was difficult to locate and is believed to now live in Arizona, Hutson said. The Value Creators may own a number of commercial and residential properties in the cities where Ross lived.Story continues below advertisementRoss was unavailable for an interview but issued a statement thanking her lawyers, who were awarded $117,000 in fees and costs.\u00a0\u201cMostly, I\u2019m very happy that justice has been served and that Royall, UNOI, and The Value Creators are exposed,\u201d Ross said. \u00a0\u201cAlthough this legal win doesn\u2019t change anything that has happened in the past, it makes me feel like some justice has been served.\u00a0 I\u2019ll always live with the memories of what\u2019s been done to me. \u00a0To all of the members who are still a part of The Value Creators, and those who have left, it is not too late to get out, to be free and get help, justice and closure.\u201d She joined the United Nation of Islam with her mother, was forced to work in different cities starting at 11, and escaped at 21. Human trafficking victim, forced to work 10 years for no pay, awarded $8 million by federal judge",
        "author": "Tom Jackman"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Solos\u2019 is a veritable who\u2019s who of actors. Here\u2019s why it needed \u2018true masters of the craft.\u2019 (WP: TV) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7315",
        "date": "2021-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/solos-series-actors/2021/05/19/138aa980-b36a-11eb-9059-d8176b9e3798_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cMy dad always used to say, \u2018If you talk to yourself, that\u2019s fine, but if you answer yourself, it\u2019s a problem,\u2019\u2009\u201d recalls actor Anthony Mackie. In Amazon Prime\u2019s \u201cSolos,\u201d however, he kind of does just that.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn fact, most of his esteemed colleagues \u2014 including Oscar winners Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and Anne Hathaway, along with Constance Wu, Dan Stevens, Nicole Beharie and Uzo Aduba \u2014 do as well. Each of the show\u2019s seven episodes features, with slight exception, a single actor. Going it alone. Series creator David Weil, who also wrote and directed several episodes, spent much of his childhood hiking with his brothers in the Berkshire Mountains as they told scary stories, or at his grandmother\u2019s table with a bowl of chicken soup, listening to her experiences during World War II. \u201cThere was just one narrator in one environment,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s the way I fell in love with storytelling. And it\u2019s something I wanted to re-create \u2014 as if you are the only person at the end of the screen.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the pandemic, Weil found himself, like many of us, separated by a continent from his parents and family. \u201cThose feelings of loneliness and solitude, of yearning for family and connection, was something we all felt. And the first episodes I wrote were born from that.\u201dAs a sci-fi fan, Weil gave each \u201cSolos\u201d tale a futuristic bent. \u201cJust a few minutes in the future, though. Sometimes we need a little bit of distance to appreciate the experiences and emotions we\u2019re feeling today,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat if there was an A.I. that could replace your loved one who passes away? What if, in the future, there was a fertility drug that could ensure 100 percent success? What if, in the future, we had smart homes that were a participant in our own lives?\u201dThe concept gave him and his co-writers a chance to take some of those occasional character ideas that don\u2019t always have a place and give them their day. \u201cAll writers have ideas we scribble on the back of a bar napkin, or that we log in on our computer at 2 a.m. and don\u2019t know how they\u2019re going to fit in something we\u2019re working on,\u201d he says. \u201cThis was a moment to pluck those characters from obscurity and give them life, a moment onstage.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo how do you keep an audience interested in one person for a half-hour? In \u201cSolos,\u201d which premieres May 21, a large component is making viewers think the story will be about one thing, but often ending up somewhere else. \u201cI always like to start late,\u201d Weil says.In Mackie\u2019s episode, \u201cTom,\u201d his character has 15 minutes to teach an A.I. clone of himself \u2014 also played by Mackie \u2014 who he is. But we don\u2019t know that when Tom starts, or what he\u2019s really after. \u201cI always like to start with the audience being a little bit disoriented so that they become an active participant in the journey,\u201d Weil says.But what will likely keep viewers glued to \u201cSolos,\u201d along with the writing, is the veritable master class of acting from its impressive cast.In Mirren\u2019s episode, \u201cPeg,\u201d \u201cyou have no idea of the journey that she\u2019s about to take you on,\u201d says director Sam Taylor-Johnson. The plot finds a 72-year-old woman aboard a spacecraft headed on a trip of no return, answering questions and telling her story to a HAL-like computer. \u201cShe just starts to talk about her life, in reflection, and you\u2019re just captured by this performance of hers and what she\u2019s saying. Then you start to understand how pertinent her thoughts and reflections are to your own life.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGetting actors at Mirren\u2019s level was key, Weil says. \u201cI needed true masters of the craft who can communicate and express stories \u2014 not only with the written word but with the bat of an eyelash or the slight turn of the head. Because in this show, there is nowhere for the actor to hide. It is them. To really move an audience and have them reflect on their own lives, what we see on-screen has to feel real. You have to forget you\u2019re watching television.\u201dThe idea of doing a 25-minute monologue didn\u2019t have immediate appeal to the veteran actress \u2014 until she read Weil\u2019s script. \u201cI found myself reading through it and speaking out loud, which is always a sign I want to jump in,\u201d Mirren says. \u201cAnd I thought, \u2018What a lovely writer this woman is. What\u2019s her name?\u2019 and saw \u2018David!\u2019 I thought, \u2018That\u2019s impossible. Only a woman would understand a woman\u2019s point of view in this way.\u2019 But it\u2019s just beautiful, beautiful writing.\u201dWhat is uncanny about Mirren\u2019s performance is indeed its naturalism \u2014 the pauses as she stops to think to herself, as any of us would do in conversation \u2014 that make watching her Peg so engaging.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMirren did barely any prep for the part; she and Taylor-Johnson marched through the entire episode in single takes, making slight adjustments on each pass that allowed the actress to discover new bits of reality each time. \u201cMy instinct told me, because this was one long piece, with no interaction with anyone, to just live this in the moment,\u201d Mirren explains.And it was in those moments that she would find a real woman\u2019s experience, Taylor-Johnson says. \u201cShe understands, if I twitch my eye to the left, that might show that I\u2019m uncomfortable about talking about something. It\u2019s this minutiae of detail within her face that tells the story. And that really comes from experience and brilliance.\u201dMirren did, however, have the benefit of responding in real time to Stevens, who voiced the benevolent A.I., Tym, from a voice-over booth elsewhere on the stage. \u201cBecause he\u2019s performing live, he can interact with her and respond to things she says,\u201d says Taylor-Johnson.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe director and Stevens also worked together in the Freeman-centered episode, \u201cStuart,\u201d in which Stevens plays a young man looking for Freeman\u2019s character. Taylor-Johnson said that Freeman, whose voice also begins each episode, would introduce slight, subtle moves that place his performance into believable reality \u2014 such as a backward tilt of the head as he ponders a response to his scene partner.\u201cThe tilt of a head may be lost in a big scene, with cars and people,\u201d the director explains. \u201cBut when you\u2019re just looking at this actor, and listening intently to what\u2019s happening, that tilt of the head can have powerful meaning \u2014 a slight action that imbues a powerful reflection or thought.\u201dMackie also had an episode partner despite starring as both roles: a double portraying \u201cEdward,\u201d the A.I. clone whom he must teach about himself. At first, the double, always seen with his back to the camera, would simply mime Mackie\u2019s readings. But the \u201cFalcon and the Winter Soldier\u201d star eventually got him to say the lines out loud. \u201cHe was really acting with me, and he did it in a way that was subtle enough that all of my reactions made sense,\u201d Mackie says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLike Tym for Peg, Edward almost functions as Tom\u2019s therapist, prompting Tom to shift from his somewhat egotistical explanation of himself to a very real one. He is, in effect \u2014 as is the case in all of the episodes \u2014 getting to know himself at the same time we are. \u201cAnd that\u2019s something the actor builds,\u201d says Weil. \u201cThe writing can only offer breadcrumbs along the way. But if it sounds like exposition, when you can feel the writer\u2019s hand, it feels false. And only these artists know how to deliver that\u201d despite differences in their approach, whether through Mirren\u2019s more off-the-cuff take or Mackie\u2019s decision to spend a week writing notes and crafting delivery so every moment felt different.Wu (\u201cCrazy Rich Asians\u201d) didn\u2019t have the benefit of a scene partner, on- or off-screen. Hers is the sole episode featuring a character speaking directly into the camera \u2014 and the only episode rooted in comedy, though the story progresses to a revealed tragedy.Wu\u2019s Jenny is seen waiting interminably in an unusual waiting room, in an apparent costume featuring wings. After delivering a funny, outlandish opening line that sets the comic tone for the episode, we discover Jenny doesn\u2019t know where she is. But she eventually finds her answer in a swell of emotion delivered movingly by the actress. \u201cWe begin with a character who is a bit absurd, and then, slowly, we begin to peel these layers back from her,\u201d Weil says. \u201cThat\u2019s the mystery of the piece. The comedy begins to become much more serious and sour.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWu, who loved \u201cbeing able to play a spectrum of emotions,\u201d said she enjoys \u201cwhen dark things have a bit of levity and when comedic things have some depth to them. It makes them much more palatable.\u201dTaking advantage of her own depth and skill as an actor, Wu carefully studied and planned her delivery. While it might be intimidating to speak directly into the camera for 30 minutes, she was able to keep it interesting by changing who her audience was for each bit. \u201cI knew for each chunk that I needed to be specific with the person she\u2019s talking to \u2014 one, perhaps, she might see as a mentor, one as a child,\u201d Wu says. \u201cIt\u2019s just like a person in a dream \u2014 they morph, seamlessly, into different people, in different parts of the speech.\u201dHer character\u2019s understanding of herself evolves, just as it does for all those featured in \u201cSolos.\u201d \u201cPutting these people in these constrained situations is such an opportunity to understand yourself in a way that you don\u2019t normally get to do,\u201d Wu says.\u201cThis show is a piece of the times,\u201d Weil says. \u201cThey play with many of the feelings and emotions that we\u2019re all experiencing in this moment.\u201d\n\n Helen Mirren, Anthony Mackie and Constance Wu are among the stars of Amazon\u2019s \u201cSolos\u201d that make you forget you\u2019re watching TV. \u2018Solos\u2019 is a veritable who\u2019s who of actors. Here\u2019s why it needed \u2018true masters of the craft.\u2019",
        "author": "Matt Hurwitz"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to watch this weekend: \u2018The Reagans\u2019 on Showtime (WP: TV) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7316",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-to-watch-this-weekend-the-reagans-on-showtime/2020/11/13/4c4d2260-2536-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHistory\u2019s Greatest Mysteries (History\u2009at\u20099) Discover the true nature of some of history\u2019s most popular myths.Fox News Sunday (Fox\u2009at\u20099 a.m.) Ken Starr, former independent counsel, Laurence Tribe, Harvard University professor.White House Chronicle (WETA\u2009at\u20099 a.m.) The promise of low-level radiation as a treatment for covid-19, arthritis and Alzheimer\u2019s. Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo (Fox\u2009News at\u200910 a.m.) Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sen. David Purdue (R-Ga.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Sidney Powell, attorney to Gen. Michael Flynn.This Is America & the World (WETA\u2009at\u200910 a.m.) Vivian B. Pender, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.Story continues below advertisementMeet the Press (NBC\u2009at\u200910:30 a.m.) GOP strategist Al Cardenas, the Atlantic\u2019s Jeffrey Goldberg, Voto Latino\u2019s Mar\u00eda Teresa Kumar, NBC News\u2019s Carol Lee.AdvertisementThe Spanish Princess (Starz\u2009at\u20098) A grand meeting in France forms the backdrop for a political clash of wits between Catherine and Wolsey.The Simpsons (Fox\u2009at\u20098) Kent Brockman questions his career.Holiday Wars (Food\u2009at\u20098) Five teams of master cake and sugar artists create what happens when all those Thanksgiving turkeys decide to make a break for it.The Real Housewives of Potomac (Bravo\u2009at\u20098) Karen surprises the group with details about her marriage.90 Day Fiance: The Other Way (TLC\u2009at\u20098) Kenny and Armando fight for their right to marry.Story continues below advertisementAlaska: The Last Frontier (Discovery\u2009at\u20098) The Kilcher road is threatened by a dangerous flood, and Otto must repair the vital road before it\u2019s washed away.Bless the Harts (Fox\u2009at\u20098:30) When Marjune receives all the attention at a funeral by passing off a famous tale as her own, Betty and Crystalynn join forces to take her down.AdvertisementSnapped (Oxygen\u2009at\u20096) Former police officer Laurie Bembenek is found guilty of murdering her new husband\u2019s ex-wife.Bob\u2019s Burgers (Fox\u2009at\u20099) The family must figure out how to keep the restaurant open after Bob\u2019s flattop breaks.The Undoing (HBO\u2009at\u20099) As Haley begins to shape the case\u2019s narrative, Franklin uses his resources to help his family.Story continues below advertisementThe Good Lord Bird (Showtime\u2009at\u20099) John Brown and his remaining army take a last stand at Harper\u2019s Ferry.NCIS: New Orleans (CBS\u2009at\u20099) Tammy and Carter continue to investigate a suspicious death aboard a covid-infected humanitarian ship.Fear the Walking Dead (AMC\u2009at\u20099) A deadly explosion in the oil fields sends June on a mission to save as many lives as possible.Family Guy (Fox\u2009at\u20099:30) Meg plans her wedding to an unexpected Quahog resident.I Love a Mama\u2019s Boy (TLC\u2009at\u200910) Kelly interrupts a romantic dinner between Matt and Kim.AdvertisementFargo (FX\u2009at\u200910) Rabbi and Satchel hit the road.Moonbase 8 (Showtime\u2009at\u200911) Skip comes up with solutions to help the team suit up more efficiently.Story continues below advertisementCandy Land (Food\u2009at\u20099) Kristin Chenoweth guides teams through the edible regions of Candy Land, challenging them to create eye-popping desserts for a $25,000 grand prize.The Reagans (Showtime\u2009at\u20098) This four-part series contextualizes the legacy of Ronald and Nancy Reagan while exploring the palace intrigue of the Reagan White House years.Murder on Middle Beach (HBO\u2009at\u200910) This documentary series directed by first-time filmmaker Madison Hamburg presents his complicated journey to solve his mother\u2019s murder and absolve the people he loves.Space Launch Live: Crew-1 Lift Off (Discovery/Science\u2009at\u20095) Live broadcast of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, which will carry Crew-1 astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). This will be the first official mission launching astronauts to the ISS on board SpaceX\u2019s reusable spacecraft and rocket.2020 People\u2019s Choice Awards (E!\u2009at\u20099) The 46th ceremony of the awards honors the best in popular culture for 2020.Desus & Mero: DMFM: The Home of Boom Bap (Showtime\u2009at\u200910) Desus and Mero transform their studio into an old-school radio station to pay homage to the history of hip-hop.The Crown (Netflix) Season 4.\u2014 Nina Zafar Saturday November 14 and Sunday November 15, 2020 | \u201cThe Crown\u201d returns on Netflix. What to watch this weekend: \u2018The Reagans\u2019 on Showtime",
        "author": "Nina Zafar"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to watch this weekend: \u2018The Reagans\u2019 on Showtime (WP: TV) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7317",
        "date": "2020-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-to-watch-this-weekend-the-reagans-on-showtime/2020/11/13/4c4d2260-2536-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHistory\u2019s Greatest Mysteries (History\u2009at\u20099) Discover the true nature of some of history\u2019s most popular myths.Fox News Sunday (Fox\u2009at\u20099 a.m.) Ken Starr, former independent counsel, Laurence Tribe, Harvard University professor.White House Chronicle (WETA\u2009at\u20099 a.m.) The promise of low-level radiation as a treatment for covid-19, arthritis and Alzheimer\u2019s. Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo (Fox\u2009News at\u200910 a.m.) Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sen. David Purdue (R-Ga.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Sidney Powell, attorney to Gen. Michael Flynn.This Is America & the World (WETA\u2009at\u200910 a.m.) Vivian B. Pender, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.Story continues below advertisementMeet the Press (NBC\u2009at\u200910:30 a.m.) GOP strategist Al Cardenas, the Atlantic\u2019s Jeffrey Goldberg, Voto Latino\u2019s Mar\u00eda Teresa Kumar, NBC News\u2019s Carol Lee.AdvertisementThe Spanish Princess (Starz\u2009at\u20098) A grand meeting in France forms the backdrop for a political clash of wits between Catherine and Wolsey.The Simpsons (Fox\u2009at\u20098) Kent Brockman questions his career.Holiday Wars (Food\u2009at\u20098) Five teams of master cake and sugar artists create what happens when all those Thanksgiving turkeys decide to make a break for it.The Real Housewives of Potomac (Bravo\u2009at\u20098) Karen surprises the group with details about her marriage.90 Day Fiance: The Other Way (TLC\u2009at\u20098) Kenny and Armando fight for their right to marry.Story continues below advertisementAlaska: The Last Frontier (Discovery\u2009at\u20098) The Kilcher road is threatened by a dangerous flood, and Otto must repair the vital road before it\u2019s washed away.Bless the Harts (Fox\u2009at\u20098:30) When Marjune receives all the attention at a funeral by passing off a famous tale as her own, Betty and Crystalynn join forces to take her down.AdvertisementSnapped (Oxygen\u2009at\u20096) Former police officer Laurie Bembenek is found guilty of murdering her new husband\u2019s ex-wife.Bob\u2019s Burgers (Fox\u2009at\u20099) The family must figure out how to keep the restaurant open after Bob\u2019s flattop breaks.The Undoing (HBO\u2009at\u20099) As Haley begins to shape the case\u2019s narrative, Franklin uses his resources to help his family.Story continues below advertisementThe Good Lord Bird (Showtime\u2009at\u20099) John Brown and his remaining army take a last stand at Harper\u2019s Ferry.NCIS: New Orleans (CBS\u2009at\u20099) Tammy and Carter continue to investigate a suspicious death aboard a covid-infected humanitarian ship.Fear the Walking Dead (AMC\u2009at\u20099) A deadly explosion in the oil fields sends June on a mission to save as many lives as possible.Family Guy (Fox\u2009at\u20099:30) Meg plans her wedding to an unexpected Quahog resident.I Love a Mama\u2019s Boy (TLC\u2009at\u200910) Kelly interrupts a romantic dinner between Matt and Kim.AdvertisementFargo (FX\u2009at\u200910) Rabbi and Satchel hit the road.Moonbase 8 (Showtime\u2009at\u200911) Skip comes up with solutions to help the team suit up more efficiently.Story continues below advertisementCandy Land (Food\u2009at\u20099) Kristin Chenoweth guides teams through the edible regions of Candy Land, challenging them to create eye-popping desserts for a $25,000 grand prize.The Reagans (Showtime\u2009at\u20098) This four-part series contextualizes the legacy of Ronald and Nancy Reagan while exploring the palace intrigue of the Reagan White House years.Murder on Middle Beach (HBO\u2009at\u200910) This documentary series directed by first-time filmmaker Madison Hamburg presents his complicated journey to solve his mother\u2019s murder and absolve the people he loves.Space Launch Live: Crew-1 Lift Off (Discovery/Science\u2009at\u20095) Live broadcast of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, which will carry Crew-1 astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). This will be the first official mission launching astronauts to the ISS on board SpaceX\u2019s reusable spacecraft and rocket.2020 People\u2019s Choice Awards (E!\u2009at\u20099) The 46th ceremony of the awards honors the best in popular culture for 2020.Desus & Mero: DMFM: The Home of Boom Bap (Showtime\u2009at\u200910) Desus and Mero transform their studio into an old-school radio station to pay homage to the history of hip-hop.The Crown (Netflix) Season 4.\u2014 Nina Zafar Saturday November 14 and Sunday November 15, 2020 | \u201cThe Crown\u201d returns on Netflix. What to watch this weekend: \u2018The Reagans\u2019 on Showtime",
        "author": "Nina Zafar"
    },
    {
        "title": "The best of tonight\u2019s TV: The 2019 ESPYs, \u2018Snowfall\u2019 and more (WP: TV) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7318",
        "date": "2019-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/the-best-of-tonights-tv-the-2019-espys-etc/2019/07/09/27f822e8-982e-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)The Handmaid\u2019s Tale (Hulu streaming) Aunt Lydia\u2019s life before Gilead is explored.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMasterChef (FOX\u2009at\u20098) An immunity challenge pits the final 16 contestants against one another with an Italian-inspired team challenge.Married at First Sight (Lifetime\u2009at\u20098:30) The honeymoon phase isn\u2019t picture-perfect for the newlyweds, but before they leave Antigua, they get to know their new spouses. Younger (TV Land\u2009at\u200910) Kelsey and Liza have to win over a new author who doesn\u2019t have a high opinion of millennials, while Maggie seeks alternative healing measures for her problems.Harlots (Hulu streaming) Season 3.Snowfall (FX\u2009at\u200910) Season 3.Story continues below advertisementHere\u2019s what athletes and celebrities wore at the 2019 ESPY AwardsShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageGymnast Katelyn Ohashi arrives at the ESPY Awards on Wednesday, July 10, 2019, at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)Battle of the 80s Supercars With David Hasselhoff (History\u2009at\u20098) The \u201cKnight Rider\u201d alum chronicles how the 1980s changed cars and popular culture forever.AdvertisementHubble\u2019s Amazing Journey (NatGeo\u2009at\u20098) An updated look at what the imaging spacecraft was able to teach us about the universe.Family Reunion (Netflix streaming) A family moves from the Pacific Northwest to the South.Florida Girls (Pop\u2009at\u200910) Four friends try to get their lives together.Parchis: The Documentary (Netflix streaming) A look at the Spanish record company and how it was able to dominate the charts in the 1980s. English subtitles.Scream (VH1 at 10) The slasher reboot comes to a close.Conan (TBS at 11) Adam ScottDaily Show/Noah (Comedy Central at 11) Your Moment of Them: The Best of Michael Kosta Vol. 2Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC at 11:35) Seth Rogen, Dave Bautista, Jaden Smith.\u2014 Savannah Stephens\n Wednesday July 9, 2019 | \u201cHarlots\u201d returns for its third season. The best of tonight\u2019s TV: The 2019 ESPYs, \u2018Snowfall\u2019 and more",
        "author": "Savannah Stephens"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to watch on Monday: \u2018Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell\u2019 on Netflix (WP: TV) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7319",
        "date": "2021-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-to-watch-on-monday-biggie-i-got-a-story-to-tell-on-netflix/2021/02/28/f3dfaa1c-78b9-11eb-8115-9ad5e9c02117_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)The Bachelor (ABC\u2009at\u20098) Serena P. and Matt face each other for the first time since her emotional hometown date exit.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAll American (CW\u2009at\u20098) Olivia notices that Jordan and Simone are acting suspicious.9-1-1 (Fox\u2009at\u20098) Hen\u2019s mother unexpectedly arrives and announces she is moving to Los Angeles.9-1-1: Lone Star (Fox\u2009at\u20099) Owen and Tommy each feel displaced in their homes. Snowpiercer (TNT\u2009at\u20099) Mel arrives at the research station, making some startling discoveries while struggling to survive and thinking back to the days before the Freeze.Black Lightning (CW\u2009at\u20099) Jefferson pays Tobias a visit and warns him to stay away from his family.PremieresDebris (NBC\u2009at\u200910) An \u201cX-Files\u201d-style sci-fi thriller that follows a pair of agents who investigate the wreckage of a destroyed alien spacecraft \u2014 debris that appears to be changing the laws of physics on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEaster Basket Challenge (Food\u2009at\u200910) Host Sunny Anderson challenges seven bakers to make tasty and imaginative holiday masterpieces inspired by nostalgic candy and outrageous themes.MoviesBiggie: I Got a Story to Tell (Netflix) Made in collaboration with Biggie\u2019s estate, this is an intimate rendering of a man whose rapid ascent and tragic end have been at the center of rap lore for more than 20 years.Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words (Starz\u2009at\u20099) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg discusses the challenges she faced to make it to the Supreme Court.MiniseriesPrime Suspect: The Madeleine McCann Case (Discovery Plus) An examination of the new German suspect Christian B. and his link to one of the world\u2019s most well-known unsolved cases.Story continues below advertisementPlaying With Power: The Nintendo Story (Crackle) Sean Astin narrates a five-part look at the history of the Japanese gaming giant.SpecialPop My Pet (Discovery Plus) Skilled veterinarians race against the clock to save their animal patients from setbacks like lumps and masses.ReturningThe Voice (NBC\u2009at\u20098) Season 20.AdvertisementBelow Deck Sailing Yacht (Bravo\u2009at\u20099) Season 2.Late NightConan (TBS at 11) Chris Gethard.Tonight Show/Fallon (NBC at 11:34) John Legend, Jermaine Fowler, Arlo Parks.Late Show/Colbert (CBS at 11:35) Andy Samberg, Clarissa Ward.Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC at 11:35) Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Alan S. Kim, Madison Beer.Late Late Show/Corden (CBS at 12:37) Jamie Dornan, Kelly Marie Tran.Late Night/Meyers (NBC at 12:37) Kenan Thompson, Steven Yeun, Julien Baker.\u2014 Nina Zafar Monday, March 1, 2021 | \u201cThe Voice\u201d returns on NBC. What to watch on Monday: \u2018Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell\u2019 on Netflix",
        "author": "Nina Zafar"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s happening on TV tonight: The 52nd Annual CMA Awards, and more (WP: TV) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7320",
        "date": "2018-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/whats-happening-on-tv-tonight-the-52nd-annual-cma-awards-and-more/2018/11/13/f8d3fde0-e782-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern).Chicago Med (NBC\u2009at\u20098) Dr. Rhodes faces Goodwin\u2019s wrath after disregarding her instructions.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEmpire (Fox\u2009at\u20098) Jamal gets frustrated with Cookie when she tries to steal an artist from him.Riverdale (CW\u2009at\u20098) Veronica comes up with a plan to break Archie out of juvie.Chicago Fire (NBC\u2009at\u20099) Firehouse 51 battles a structure fire. Criminal Minds (CBS\u2009at\u200910) The BAU tries to stop a string of attacks in Washington.Origin (YouTube streaming) A 10-episode series staring Tom Felton about a group on a spacecraft headed for a distant land.Thai Cave Rescue (WETA\u2009at\u20099) A look back at the rescue of 12 boys and a soccer coach trapped in a cave system in Thailand.Story continues below advertisementAre You the One? (MTV\u2009at\u200910) Reunion. Season finale.Daily Show/Noah (Comedy Central at 11) Maurice Ashley.AdvertisementLate Show/Fallon (NBC at 11:34) Michael Shannon, Tig Notaro, the Struts, Kesha.Late Show/Colbert (CBS at 11:35) Ricky Gervais, Bianna Golodryga, Flynn McGarry.Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC at 11:35) Emily Blunt, Taron Egerton, Kane Brown.Late Late Show/Corden (CBS at 12:37) Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Mark Wahlberg, Ian Karmel.Tonight Show/Meyers (NBC at 12:37) Stanley Tucci, Pale Waves, Caitlin Kalafus.\u2014 Sarah Polus\n Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2018 | \u201cOrigin\u201d premieres on YouTube Premium. What\u2019s happening on TV tonight: The 52nd Annual CMA Awards, and more",
        "author": "Sarah Polus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | TV needs a really great space saga. \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 comes close, but the longing remains. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7321",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/tv-needs-a-really-great-space-saga-star-trek-discovery-comes-close-but-the-longing-remains/2018/02/07/f0d45604-0aa0-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html",
        "text": "While gazillionaires compete to launch the best private rockets, a space ad",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | TV needs a really great space saga. \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 comes close, but the longing remains. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7322",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/tv-needs-a-really-great-space-saga-star-trek-discovery-comes-close-but-the-longing-remains/2018/02/07/f0d45604-0aa0-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html",
        "text": "While gazillionaires compete to launch the best private rockets, a space ad",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | TV needs a really great space saga. \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 comes close, but the longing remains. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7323",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/tv-needs-a-really-great-space-saga-star-trek-discovery-comes-close-but-the-longing-remains/2018/02/07/f0d45604-0aa0-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html",
        "text": "While gazillionaires compete to launch the best private rockets, a space ad",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | TV needs a really great space saga. \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 comes close, but the longing remains. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7324",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/tv-needs-a-really-great-space-saga-star-trek-discovery-comes-close-but-the-longing-remains/2018/02/07/f0d45604-0aa0-11e8-8890-372e2047c935_story.html",
        "text": "While gazillionaires compete to launch the best private rockets, a space ad",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Netflix\u2019s \u2018Cowboy Bebop\u2019 reignites a debate: Is Jet Black a Black anime character? (WP: TV) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7325",
        "date": "2021-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/cowboy-bebop-mustafa-shakir-jet-black/2021/11/18/60d38452-462a-11ec-b8d9-232f4afe4d9b_story.html",
        "text": "Actor Mustafa Shakir sounds starry-eyed when he explains why he said yes to playing Jet Black, one of the central characters of Netflix\u2019s new \u201cCowboy Bebop.\u201d Shakir had become a devotee of the anime show, which originally aired in Japan in the late \u201990s and then helped launch Cartoon Network\u2019s Adult Swim programming block in the fall of 2001. \u201cMy thought was, this is like a gateway drug into anime,\u201d he says, which was the case for many U.S. viewers who had yet to understand that not all anime is kiddie fare. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightShakir, best known for playing Bushmaster on \u201cLuke Cage,\u201d was particularly intrigued by the way this anime paid loving tribute to American jazz, most explicitly through the character of Jet, an ex-cop and the paternal leader of an interstellar bounty-hunting crew, who named his spaceship \u2014 what else? \u2014 the Bebop.But translating \u201cCowboy Bebop\u201d to live action and satisfying the sky-high fan expectations around this beloved space-western was an imposing endeavor. The most persistent question on set was, \u201cIs this Bebop-y enough?\u201d (\u201cThat\u2019s a real term, you know?\u201d Shakir deadpans.) At the same time, Shakir \u2014 conscious of the stylistic differences between the fantasy realms of anime and Hollywood \u2014 had to balance capturing the spirit of the original while making sure that his performance still made sense in live action.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat makes an anime character, well, animated, can read as a caricature on screen. \u201cThere\u2019s obviously moments of heightened expressions,\u201d he says, \u201cbut in anime it\u2019s obviously a bit more punched out. To make that transition [on-screen], it\u2019s not easy.\u201d\u201cCowboy Bebop\u201d adds yet another layer to that debate: What happens when a production studio tries to assign race to a pop culture artifact where race is hinted at but not always made explicit? The race and appearance of all the main characters have been debated on Twitter, Reddit and TikTok, but incensed online commentators went as far as smearing Shakir\u2019s casting as \u201cblackwashing\u201d \u2014 a play on \u201cwhitewashing\u201d and an accusation often lobbed at Black anime fandom in cosplay and fan art.The original \u201cCowboy Bebop\u201d does feature explicitly dark-skinned characters the Netflix version made sure to include. And in the accompanying art book, \u201cThe Jazz Messengers,\u201d series creator Shinichiro Watanabe said that when developing the anime, he \u201cpaid a lot of attention to skin color.\u201d But the original anime never mentions or discusses race; it stands to reason that in a near future where Earth was all but obliterated, its ideas about race would have vanished along with it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat makes \u201cCowboy Bebop\u201d part of a larger phenomenon observed by scholars like Amy Lu, associate professor at Northeastern University. In a 2009 study, Lu asked more than 1,000 people to identify the race of nearly 350 anime protagonists, based solely on images of their faces. \u201cCowboy Bebop\u2019s\u201d Spike Spiegel was one of them. In the original anime, Spike \u201cdid mention that he was born on Mars, but he never talks about where his parents came from or his cultural heritage,\u201d Lu says. (Similarly, all the show specifies about Jet is that he\u2019s from a Jupiter satellite, Ganymede.)So Lu classified Spike as \u201cother.\u201d But Asian survey respondents were more likely to say that Spike was Asian, based on his skin color. And White participants tended to guess that Spike was White, based on his eye shape. (John Cho plays Spike in the new Netflix show.)Moreover, if an anime character was drawn as racially ambiguous, \u201cpeople rely on the most immediate sort of self-construct, which is their own face,\u201d Lu says. She coined a term for this phenomenon: \u201cown race projection,\u201d or \u201cthe perception that [racially] ambiguous characters are from the perceiver\u2019s own racial and ethnic group.\u201d Such behavior could help explain why, for 75 percent of the characters featured in Lu\u2019s survey, \u201cpeople just don\u2019t have a consensus on where they come from.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBeau Billingslea, a Black voice actor who provided the original English-language voice of Jet, would rather have this character be seen as \u201ccolor-neutral.\u201d\u201cWhen I first started in anime, there were hardly any anime characters that were persons of color,\u201d Billingslea says. \u201cIf [producers] stuck to a rule that only persons of color would voice characters of color, I never would have worked.\u201dWhen he began picking up voice acting work halfway through his nearly 40-year acting career, Billingslea regarded it as a side gig. Some of his earliest work was credited to John Billingslea, as if to keep it separate from his on-screen brand.Billingslea grew to appreciate how anime spared him from being typecast \u2014 or even having to be conscious of that possibility \u2014 as a Black actor. He and \u201cCowboy Bebop\u2019s\u201d producers agreed that Jet\u2019s voice would simply be \u201cmy voice, and I tweak it a little bit.\u201d (Indeed, while Billingslea was already in his 50s when he voiced Jet, Jet\u2019s voice is weathered more from bad luck and chain smoking than from age.)Shakir respects his elder\u2019s outlook. \u201cOther than his love for jazz and his name, Jet could be anybody,\u201d he begins. But mid-sentence, he second-guesses his train of thought. \u201cI know some Japanese jazz aficionados whose knowledge would rival most Black people,\u201d he says with a laugh.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGoing into his audition, and then during filming aboard a life-size recreation of Jet\u2019s beaten-down spaceship, Shakir was most concerned with matching \u201ca certain tone and timbre\u201d that he came to associate with his character.\u201cI was totally informed by [Billingslea\u2019s] voice acting, which matches the image,\u201d he says. \u201cJet, and the way he comes across in the voice acting, gave me something to play with.\u201d\u201cIt\u2019s still color-neutral,\u201d he adds. \u201cI even feel that about the tone in his voice. He borderlines Mr. Incredible [of \u201cThe Incredibles\u201d]; it\u2019s in that range. So it could be anybody. It\u2019s more authoritative than it is Black or White.\u201dViewers often call for more diversity on TV because they want to see themselves reflected in pop culture. Shakir understands that desire.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI love characters who are intelligent, and especially people of color who can talk that talk. It\u2019s just fun,\u201d Shakir says. \u201cThat was cool, because Jet gets real nerdy and I\u2019m like, yes, I totally dig the nerd, because I am one.\u201dAdvertisementBut he makes sure not to call Jet a Black anime character outright, as if to be respectful of Billingslea\u2019s characterization. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of blerds, or people of color who are not stereotypically what it means to be Black. So to have that representation is cool, and Jet \u2014 well, the character that I\u2019m playing \u2014 is that.\u201d\u201cNo matter who has been chosen for the live action, especially for those kinds of ambiguous characters, there will be some anime fans, guaranteed, who will not be happy with that choice,\u201d Lu, the researcher, says of a group that\u2019s already conditioned to be skeptical of live-action adaptations.Story continues below advertisementBearing that in mind, Lu \u2014 who ranks \u201cCowboy Bebop\u201d as her favorite anime of all time \u2014 has her own criteria for adaptations going forward. \u201cI would like to go beyond this visual resemblance, or similarities, to a character, to the actor\u2019s performance,\u201d she says. \u201cUltimately, it is the arc, emotions and performance that actually make a character three-dimensional, rather than just the look.\u201dAdvertisementShakir\u2019s portrayal of Jet may not be what some fans imagined, but if there is anything that playing the role has taught him, it is that appearances can be deceiving.Fans of the \u201990s series will have plenty to discuss and debate, with what was kept and changed from the original. Yet for all the creative liberties that this adaptation takes, Shakir\u2019s performance as Jet should feel instantly familiar.\u201cPlaying on Jet\u2019s emotional response, because he has so much to respond to emotionally, helped to just humanize him,\u201d Shakir says. \u201cLook at this guy. He\u2019s got a plate on his face, a scar and a metal arm. It\u2019d be real easy to go into that realm where you don\u2019t see his human heart. Grounding him, I think, helped. And that was my goal.\u201d\n\n The live-action adaptation makes racial identity an issue that\u2019s harder to avoid. Netflix\u2019s \u2018Cowboy Bebop\u2019 reignites a debate: Is Jet Black a Black anime character?",
        "author": "Christina Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to watch on TV this weekend: \u20182018 National Christmas Tree Lighting\u2019, etc. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7326",
        "date": "2018-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-to-watch-on-tv-this-weekend-2018-national-christmas-tree-lighting-etc/2018/11/30/310b13d4-f4cf-11e8-aeea-b85fd44449f5_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMemories of the Alhambra (Netflix streaming) An investment-firm executive tries to find the creator of an augmented-reality game. English subtitles.Christmas Wonderland (HMC\u2009at\u20099) Heidi returns home to babysit her niece and nephew and encounters an old flame.White House Chronicle\n (WETA\u2009at\u20099) Host Llewellyn King discusses the threat to the Navy from rising seas with a U.S. Naval War College faculty panel. Fox News Sunday (Fox\u2009at\u20099) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), retired Gen. Jack Keane, former undersecretary of defense Michele Flournoy.Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo (Fox\u2009at\u200910) Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), former U.S. circuit judge Ken Starr.Story continues below advertisementThis Is America & the World (WETA\u2009at\u200910) Former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.AdvertisementFace the Nations (CBS at 10:30) Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.).Discovery Live: Into the Blue Hole (Discovery\u2009at\u20094) Discovery takes a submarine into the Blue Hole, a remote spot explored in 1971 only by Jacques Cousteau.Garth: Live at Notre Dame! (CBS\u2009at\u20098) Country legend Garth Brooks performs.The Real Housewives of Orange County (Bravo\u2009at\u20099) Reunion Part 2.The Victoria\u2019s Secret Fashion Show Holiday Special (ABC\u2009at\u200910) Musical guests such as Bebe Rexha, the Chainsmokers, Halsey, Kelsea Ballerini, Leela James, Rita Ora, Shawn Mendes and the Struts perform as the supermodels hit the runway.Story continues below advertisementLife-Size 2 (Freeform\u2009at\u20099) Tyra Banks executive-produces this sequel to the 2000 TV movie.Nightflyers (Syfy\u2009at\u200910) A series set on a spaceship in 2093, based on George R. R. Martin\u2019s 1980 sci-fi/horror book and the following 1987 feature-film adaptation.Berlin Station (Epix\u2009at\u20099) Season 3.Charmed (CW\u2009at\u20099) Mel, Harry and Charity search for Jada. Season finale.\u2014 Sarah Polus\n Saturday, Dec. 1 and Sunday, Dec. 2, 2018 | \u201cLife Size 2\u201d premieres on Freeform. What to watch on TV this weekend: \u20182018 National Christmas Tree Lighting\u2019, etc.",
        "author": "Sarah Polus"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to watch on Monday: \u2018Homefest: James Corden\u2019s Late Late Show Special\u2019 (WP: TV) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7327",
        "date": "2020-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-to-watch-on-monday-homefest-james-cordens-late-late-show-special/2020/03/27/73a1c5d2-6fce-11ea-a3ec-70d7479d83f0_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)9-1-1 (Fox\u2009at\u20098) Bobby and Michael take Harry camping.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLove & Hip Hop: Atlanta (VH1\u2009at\u20098) Sierra continues to deal with her trust issues.The Voice (NBC\u2009at\u20098) The Jonas Brothers, Dua Lipa, Ella Mai and Bebe Rexha prepare the artists to go head-to-head.American Pickers (History\u2009at\u20099) Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz travel across America in search of rare artifacts. Better Call Saul (AMC\u2009at\u20099) Huell helps Jimmy and Kim build a legal firewall.Roswell, New Mexico (CW\u2009at\u20099) Alex and Michael work together to solve the mystery surrounding the night Nora\u2019s spaceship crashed in 1947.The Good Doctor (ABC\u2009at\u200910) An earthquake rocks the city of San Jose.Story continues below advertisementManifest (NBC\u2009at\u200910) Saanvi enlists help to protect herself from the Major.20/20: America Rising: Fighting the Pandemic (ABC\u2009at\u20099) Anchor David Muir highlights the work of health-care workers and communities, volunteers and celebrities who are stepping up to help fight covid-19.AdvertisementDriven (Discovery\u2009at\u20099) Following the work of Galpin Auto Sports, which designs, builds and sells custom cars.Almost Paradise (WGN\u2009at\u200910) A former Drug Enforcement Administration undercover agent thinks he\u2019s retired to a calmer life on a tropical Philippine island, but finds himself pulled back into the life of fighting crime when he comes into contact with shady characters at the luxury resort where he works.The Schouwendam 12 (Acorn TV) Dutch drama series focuses on an investigation into the mysterious disappearances of two teens in a village 25 years ago.Tonight Show/Fallon (NBC at 11:34) Ryan Tedder, Best of Fallon.\u2014 Nina Zafar Monday, March 30, 2020 | \u201cDriven\u201d premieres on Discovery Channel at 9. What to watch on Monday: \u2018Homefest: James Corden\u2019s Late Late Show Special\u2019",
        "author": "Nina Zafar"
    },
    {
        "title": "TV highlights: \u2018Chef\u2019s Table\u2019 returns to Netflix (WP: TV) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7328",
        "date": "2018-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/tv-highlights-chefs-table-returns-to-netflix/2018/04/12/0082ba14-3e68-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)\nVice (HBO\u2009at\u20097:30) Leaders on both sides of the conflict discuss America\u2019s plan to move its embassy to Jerusalem.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMasterChef Junior (Fox\u2009at\u20098) The contestants take over the kitchen at an upscale hotel.Once Upon a Time (ABC\u2009at\u20098) Zelena\u2019s encounter with Hansel and Gretel goes wrong.Jane the Virgin (CW\u2009at\u20099) Jane and Rafael find themselves in less than ideal living conditions when trying to save money. Blue Bloods (CBS\u2009at\u200910) Danny and Baez search for a missing girl who relies on heart medication to survive.In Principle (PBS\u2009at\u20098:30) A conservative talk show hosted by Michael Gerson, a Washington Post columnist, and Amy M. Holmes, formerly of Glenn Beck\u2019s TheBlaze TV.Story continues below advertisementRellik (Cinemax\u2009at\u200910) A British series about a serial killer, with the story told in reverse.Wyatt Cenac\u2019s Problem Areas (HBO\u2009at\u200911:30) With a comedic twist, the \u201cDaily Show\u201d veteran looks at cultural and social issues affecting the United States.Lost in Space (Netflix streaming) A\u00a0remake of the 1960s sci-fi series about a family whose spaceship veers off course.The Graham Norton Show (BBC America at 10) Season 22.Bosch (Amazon streaming) Season 4.Fallon (NBC at 11:34)\u2009Jeff Daniels, Joe Manganiello, Brian Regan.Colbert (CBS at 11:35)\u2009Aubrey Plaza, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Cookie Monster.\u2014 Sarah Polus\n Friday, April 13, 2018 | \u201cLost in Space\u201d premieres on Netflix. TV highlights: \u2018Chef\u2019s Table\u2019 returns to Netflix",
        "author": "Sarah Polus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | What\u2019s better than a TV shot of Apollo 11? The looks on the faces back home. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7329",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/whats-better-than-a-tv-shot-of-apollo-11-the-looks-on-the-faces-back-home/2019/07/18/80058902-a8a6-11e9-9214-246e594de5d5_story.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s a feat that grows more stunning in recollection (and imagination), given that America nowadays could not successfully collaborate on a pizza order, much less launch a trip to the moon and back. We argue too much. The glory of space exploration is thus ceded to billionaires and 1-percenter space tourists, while the rest of us retreat to caves to belligerently demean science. The moon gets an inch or so farther away from us each year; in a psychic sense, it drifts away even faster, along with our dreams. Neil Armstrong is dead. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTV\u2019s 50th-anniversary documentaries and retrospective specials about the 1969 lunar landing have been relentless, comprehensive and, to say the least, timelessly fascinating. Up and down the cable grid (Nat Geo, Smithsonian Channel, Discovery, Science Channel), along with PBS and the broadcast networks, these specials keep airing, with varying success at conveying the courage and awe, the tension and the relief.It would take x number of trips to the moon and back to add up to the y number of hours required to watch them all. Many are rote, perfunctory \u2014 making use of much of the same NASA and archival news footage we\u2019ve seen all our lives, conveying the same message of hope and wonderment: Once upon a time, against all odds, we sent astronauts to the moon, and, for the briefest moment, the world felt as one. (In the next moment, it was back to business: war, culture clash, suffering.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDon\u2019t ask me what it truly felt like; I was in diapers. I am, however, old enough to recognize that the challenge in 2019 is to tell an old story in a new way. Two standouts have already aired but are still readily available in repeats and on demand: Director Todd Douglas Miller\u2019s mesmerizing \u201cApollo 11,\u201d which played earlier this year in movie theaters and premiered last month on CNN (and will air again on the network Saturday night), is an artfully assembled account that draws only on footage \u2014 no talking heads, no omniscient narrator. The effect is spare and transcendent.\u201cChasing the Moon,\u201d Robert Stone\u2019s three-part documentary for PBS\u2019s \u201cAmerican Experience\u201d that premiered July 8, similarly achieves a Tom Wolfe-style sweeping epic of the nascent Space Age in the 1960s, all of it leading to the one giant leap for mankind.It, too, allows the momentum of archival footage to replace heavy narration. Voice-over interviews drift seamlessly between past and present. In both projects, a viewer can float free of the old format that required a voice of authority (usually male). It\u2019s as if history has a way of finally reaching its own orbit. We\u2019re no longer being informed so much as we are being invited to imagine the magnitude of it all, as it happened.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNext to NASA itself, television has every claim to the event \u2014 as well as its subsequent anniversaries. The TV is what everyone on Earth who was alive at the time remembers about that night. They remember it (or think they remember it) right down to the kind and size of the TV set and the late hour on a summer Sunday evening (in U.S. time zones) when Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent a couple of hours walking around the Eagle landing module at Tranquility Base, gathering samples, planting the flag and taking photographs, while a live black-and-white camera on the module beamed their shadowy movements to viewers back home.For some reason, in this slew of retrospectives, I am most drawn to the images and footage of ordinary people watching TV in that moment \u2014 gathered around store windows, sitting in living rooms. There is more than enough footage of all those engineers at Mission Control watching the astronauts\u2019 moonwalk (and I do admire them so, in their nerdy manliness; the Don Draper haircuts, short-sleeved dress shirts and horn-rimmed intensity). There\u2019s also plenty of wide shots of crowds in Florida watching Apollo 11\u2019s liftoff. But there is seemingly less interest in documenting the faces and reactions of Earthlings watching the big reveal.BBC America\u2019s \u201cMoon Landing Live,\u201d which premieres Saturday night, is an attempt, somewhat, to rectify that. In addition to replaying live news coverage, as Walter Cronkite and other anchormen collectively hold their breath during tense periods of radio silence between the astronauts and Mission Control, the documentary compiles footage from around the world as people fretted, prayed, marveled and just watched.People attending a soul music festival in Harlem are asked what they think of the Apollo mission. One man praises it but admits, \u201cI don\u2019t identify to it \u2014 as far as science goes and everyone involved in it.\u201d A German news crew asks passing women which of the three Apollo astronauts they\u2019d most like to go dancing with. (\u201cMit Armstrong, danke,\u201d one lady giggles.) \u201cI\u2019ve not got appropriate words,\u201d a Tokyo businessman tells an interviewer on the street. \u201cThe only thing I can say is, \u2018Banzai!\u2019 for Apollo 11.\u201d In another clip, a reporter asks an American soldier in Vietnam whether the lunar landing will really change the world, and the soldier concedes: Probably not.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMore like this, please. Everyone knows what the NASA footage looks like. Everyone knows what it means when Cronkite removes his glasses. Everyone has heard President Richard Nixon (who was probably more giddy about Ted Kennedy\u2019s car wreck at Chappaquiddick that same weekend) place his momentous phone call to Armstrong and Aldrin and assure them of their place in history: \u201cFor every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives.\u201dTime goes on, and fewer of us really know what that meant. I would watch an entire documentary made from footage of just the faces of people across the country and around the world struck dumb, seeking words to match their feelings, welling up with tears as it happened. But that one has so far eluded the schedule.Moon Landing Live\u2009(two hours) premieres Saturday at 9 p.m. on BBC America.Apollo 11\u2009(two hours), encore presentations Saturday at 9 and 11 p.m. on CNN.American Experience: Chasing the Moon\u2009(six hours, three parts) check your local PBS listings or visit pbs.org for viewing info. We\u2019re deliriously surrounded by moon-landing documentaries. But few of them feature ordinary Earthlings. What\u2019s better than a TV shot of Apollo 11? The looks on the faces back home.",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Let\u2019s go to Mars! Sure, right after Hulu\u2019s \u2018The First\u2019 jettisons its heavy payload. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7330",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/lets-go-to-mars-sure-right-after-hulus-the-first-jettisons-its-heavy-payload/2018/09/13/5682e562-b6a2-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe First,\u201d Hulu\u2019s slow-going and disappointingly dreary astronaut drama (premiering Friday), stars Sean Penn as Tom Hagerty, the troubled but determined commander of the first manned mission to Mars. We\u2019re in the early 2030s, and the trip is a public/private collaboration between NASA and a particularly driven yet personally frosty tech titan named Laz Ingram (Natascha McElhone). WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe First\u201d opens with the worst, as a happy crew of astronauts boards the Providence at a Louisiana launchpad and blasts off for their historic voyage, intending to rendezvous with an orbiter that will take them on a seven-month trip to Mars. A minute after takeoff, the Providence explodes \u2014 reminiscent in every way of the 1986 Challenger disaster, down to the plumes of smoke from wayward boosters and the horrified family members watching from the bleacher stands below.Back to the drawing board. While a budget-conscious congresswoman uses the disaster as an opportunity to propose scrubbing the costly Mars program, Ingram has just under two years to prepare her backup crew for the next mathematically available launch window.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShe turns to Hagerty to helm the next trip. He was supposed to be on the doomed mission, but had to bow out after his wife (Melissa George) committed suicide and his college-age daughter, Denise (Anna Jacoby-Heron), went into rehab with a serious drug addiction \u2014 the miseries of which we see in redundant flashback loops over several episodes. Hagerty\u2019s Earthbound problems were just too much to ignore, but now he has a second chance.His appointment means that the backup crew\u2019s other commander, Kayla Price (LisaGay Hamilton), is demoted to second-in-command. After a life committing herself to following military orders, she stoically accepts the fact that the Mars mission will no longer be commanded by a black, gay woman. Hamilton gives an especially good performance in this regard, summoning the sense of duty and wounded pride that accompanies this significant slight.Penn\u2019s performance, on the other hand, is an understated mush of grief and remorse, heavy as a brick and about as entertaining. Neither the actor nor the character suggest the kind of personality type one might associate with space-going pioneers. He doesn\u2019t seem ready to pilot a small Cessna, much less a rocket to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpeaking of which, a viewer will soon get the idea that this is a show about going to Mars with little to no Mars actually in it. Created by Beau Willimon (\u201cHouse of Cards\u201d), with initial episodes gorgeously and forlornly directed by Agnieszka Holland (\u201cIn Darkness\u201d), \u201cThe First\u201d is very much an interior drama about people problems and flawed relationships, with a few engineering issues thrown in to remind us of the ultimate prize.So, what you\u2019re saying is, the rocket takes off in the third episode, right?No.Okay, but surely by the fourth or fifth episode we\u2019re totally on our way to Mars, right? Already landed, perhaps? There are only eight episodes, after all.Story continues below advertisementYeah .\u2009.\u2009. about that.If your response to \u201cThe First\u201d is to keep shouting \u201cGet on with it, already!,\u201d then this may not be the mission-to-Mars story for you. The series is low on excitement, because it is obsessed with the feelings of leaving home and loved ones behind in such a profound way. Everything gets an layer or two of added pain, including the engineering problems, the funding issues and Ingram\u2019s inability to reconcile her goal with the human cost. The quest to depict a space mission from an emotional perspective is at times as impressive as all those movies and TV shows that relied purely on scientific innovations and nerd heroics.AdvertisementOnly near the very end does \u201cThe First\u201d strap in for another go, after viewers have endured far too much narrative flourish. It\u2019s easy to see what Willimon is going for \u2014 to give shape and heart to what is essentially a story of science and bureaucracy. It\u2019s also easy to see the mistake in the formula: Empathy does not equal velocity.The First\u2009(eight episodes) available for streaming Friday on Hulu. Sean Penn stars as a grief-stricken commander of a manned mission to the Red Planet in the 2030s. Let\u2019s go to Mars! Sure, right after Hulu\u2019s \u2018The First\u2019 jettisons its heavy payload.",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to watch on Monday: \u2018Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem\u2019 on Peacock (WP: TV) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7331",
        "date": "2021-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/what-to-watch-on-monday-days-of-our-lives-beyond-salem-on-peacock/2021/09/05/6daa8326-0cee-11ec-a6dd-296ba7fb2dce_story.html",
        "text": "(All times Eastern.)Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta (VH1\u2009at\u20098) Judy tries to get back into the good graces of Yandy and Mendeecees; Karlie and Jasmine are still at odds; Eric asks Sierra an important question at her birthday; back in Atlanta, Erica Mena suffers a pregnancy complication and files for divorce. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDarcey & Stacey (TLC\u2009at\u20098) Darcey and Stacey arrive in Turkey to begin their dramatic transformation; Stacey finds it difficult to keep a secret from Darcey.Hell\u2019s Kitchen (Fox\u2009at\u20098) The chefs must create visually stunning dishes to impress Chef Ramsay\u2019s Instagram followers.American Ninja Warrior (NBC\u2009at\u20098) The finals are in Las Vegas and the ninjas face up to eight obstacles, and for the first time in finals history, competitors have to decide between an upper-body obstacle or a balance one.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBachelor in Paradise (ABC\u2009at\u20098) Joe faces the woman who broke his heart; Natasha and Brendan heat up, but a familiar face makes an appearance.Roswell, New Mexico (CW\u2009at\u20098) Liz\u2019s plan does not go as expected and she puts herself, Isobel and Michael in danger; Eduardo confides in Alex.Ben & Jerry\u2019s: Clash of the Cones (Food\u2009at\u20099) The final three ice cream masters meet the ultimate flavor gurus as the last challenge is revealed.Love & Hip Hop: Miami (VH1\u2009at\u20099) Amara makes a choice about her future; Florence is betrayed by the people closest to her; Shelah deals with trauma and anxiety.Below Deck Mediterranean (Bravo\u2009at\u20099) Bad weather forces the crew of Lady Michelle to seek creative ways to keep the guests entertained.Story continues below advertisementThe Republic of Sarah (CW\u2009at\u20099) Sarah is offered the chance for Greylock to get international recognition but with great personal cost; Danny offers help to Corinne for her legal problems, but Corinne asks for something unexpected.AdvertisementThe Wall (NBC\u2009at\u200910) Teams of two battle trivia questions and a 40-foot wall to potentially win a million dollars.American Dad (TBS\u2009at\u200910) Stan tries to impress Toshi\u2019s dad; Klaus and Jeff go to the country for a weekend getaway.PremieresStreet Outlaws: Gone Girl (Discovery Plus) Featuring the fastest female drivers from around the country.MiniseriesCountdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space (Netflix) Following the Inspiration4 crew on the first all-civilian orbital space mission.Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem (Peacock) The daytime soap opera gets a limited spinoff so expect to see some familiar faces. From left: Thaao Penghlis as Tony DiMera and Leann Hunley as Anna DiMera.MoviesHarry & Meghan: Escaping the Palace (Lifetime\u2009at\u20098) A look at when Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, decided to move to the United States. See story, C1.ReturningHelp! I Wrecked My House (HGTV\u2009at\u20099) Season 2.Robot Chicken (Adult Swim\u2009at\u2009midnight) Season 11.\u2014 Anying Guo Monday, Sept. 6, 2021 | \u201cStreet Outlaws: Gone Girl\u201d on Discovery Plus. What to watch on Monday: \u2018Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem\u2019 on Peacock",
        "author": "Anying Guo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kenneth C. Kelly, Champion of Desegregation in California, Dies at 94 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7332",
        "date": "2021-04-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/kenneth-c-kelly-dead.html",
        "text": "When Mr. Kelly, an engineer, wasn\u2019t designing ways to communicate with spacecraft, he was opening doors for Black families to move into the San Fernando Valley. When Mr. Kelly, an engineer, wasn\u2019t designing ways to communicate with spacecraft, he was opening doors for Black families to move into the San Fernando Valley. Kenneth C. Kelly just wanted to buy a house near his office. An electrical engineer, he had moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1953; four years later, with a growing family, he dreamed of having a home in one of the city\u2019s fast-growing suburbs.",
        "author": "By Clay Risen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Intelligence officials are set to release a declassified U.F.O. report. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7333",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/intelligence-officials-are-set-to-release-a-declassified-ufo-report.html",
        "text": "Top intelligence officials are expected to release a much-anticipated report Friday on aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years \u2014 a document that is likely to do little to settle a growing debate over whether it is possible that alien spacecraft have visited earth.  Top intelligence officials are expected to release a much-anticipated report Friday on aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years \u2014 a document that is likely to do little to settle a growing debate over whether it is possible that alien spacecraft have visited earth.",
        "author": "By Julian E. Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Intelligence officials are set to release a declassified U.F.O. report. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7334",
        "date": "2021-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/politics/intelligence-officials-are-set-to-release-a-declassified-ufo-report.html",
        "text": "Top intelligence officials are expected to release a much-anticipated report Friday on aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years \u2014 a document that is likely to do little to settle a growing debate over whether it is possible that alien spacecraft have visited earth.  Top intelligence officials are expected to release a much-anticipated report Friday on aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years \u2014 a document that is likely to do little to settle a growing debate over whether it is possible that alien spacecraft have visited earth.",
        "author": "By Julian E. Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Glynn S. Lunney Dies at 84; Oversaw NASA Flights From Mission Control (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7335",
        "date": "2021-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/us/glynn-s-lunney-dead.html",
        "text": "He was hailed for leading the rescue of Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon, and for helping guide them home. He was hailed for leading the rescue of Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon, and for helping guide them home. Glynn S. Lunney, the NASA flight director who played a major role in America\u2019s space program and was hailed for his leadership in the rescue of three Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon in 1970, died on March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Texas. He was 84.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Glynn S. Lunney Dies at 84; Oversaw NASA Flights From Mission Control (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7336",
        "date": "2021-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/us/glynn-s-lunney-dead.html",
        "text": "He was hailed for leading the rescue of Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon, and for helping guide them home. He was hailed for leading the rescue of Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon, and for helping guide them home. Glynn S. Lunney, the NASA flight director who played a major role in America\u2019s space program and was hailed for his leadership in the rescue of three Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon in 1970, died on March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Texas. He was 84.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Glynn S. Lunney Dies at 84; Oversaw NASA Flights From Mission Control (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7337",
        "date": "2021-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/us/glynn-s-lunney-dead.html",
        "text": "He was hailed for leading the rescue of Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon, and for helping guide them home. He was hailed for leading the rescue of Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon, and for helping guide them home. Glynn S. Lunney, the NASA flight director who played a major role in America\u2019s space program and was hailed for his leadership in the rescue of three Apollo 13 astronauts when their spacecraft was rocked by an explosion en route to the moon in 1970, died on March 19 at his home in Clear Lake, Texas. He was 84.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Several Private Boats Encroach on SpaceX Landing Zone (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7338",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007269193/boats-circle-spacex-capsule.html",
        "text": "Onlookers circled the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as it bobbed in the water after its return to Earth, raising concerns about their possible exposure to toxic propellant fumes from the spacecraft. Onlookers circled the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as it bobbed in the water after its return to Earth, raising concerns about their possible exposure to toxic propellant fumes from the spacecraft. Onlookers circled the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as it bobbed in the water after its return to Earth, raising concerns about their possible exposure to toxic propellant fumes from the spacecraft.",
        "author": "By NASA"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7339",
        "date": "2018-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-grill-spacex-boeing-on-safety-of-commercial-crew-capsules-1516232668?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=21",
        "text": "With routine flights ferrying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station slated to begin in fall of 2019, the agency\u2019s top outside safety watchdog has raised new questions about potential hazards in testimony to the House panel. The safety of internal helium tanks, needed to keep fuel flowing properly during ascent, has been identified as one of the most prominent unresolved risks for SpaceX. \nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which is separately developing what are intended to be privately operated spacecraft, both face the \u201cvery real possibility of future schedule slips,\u201d said Patricia Sanders, who heads NASA\u2019s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.\n\n\nCommenting on the likelihood that neither company will be able to fully comply with all of NASA\u2019s longstanding safety standards, Ms. Sanders said ending current U.S. reliance on Russian capsules for crew transportation may \u201crequire decisions to accept a higher risk\u201d on next-generation U.S. systems than anticipated.\nThe hearing also disclosed that the statistical limit for a \u201cfailed mission\u201d remains approximately one in 55 launches, despite several years of intense development, NASA expenditures of about $5 billion and significant additional investment by the two companies. That limit applies to mission failures in which the vehicle doesn\u2019t reach the space station but the crew uses emergency procedures to survive.\nNASA\u2019s statistical standard for crew fatalities is no greater than one in 270 flights, though Ms. Sanders and NASA officials have signaled neither Boeing nor SpaceX is on track to meet that precise mandatory benchmark. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA woman in Apple Valley, Calif., photographed the Dec. 22 launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base some 200 miles away.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Quigg/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn the end, on-orbit inspection safeguards combined with certain NASA waivers are expected to provide the green light for initial crewed flights.\nBy contrast, the global airline industry has achieved fatal accident rates for jetliners of one crash for several million flights.\nDuring her testimony, Ms. Sanders also said that given the agency\u2019s expertise and history of close collaboration with the two companies, \u201cNASA will be able to make a reasonable decision\u201d to balance mitigating hazards while avoiding extensive delays.\nThe hearing was marked by repeated lawmaker comments expressing concern about the fall 2019 deadline to start ferrying astronauts to the space station. \nIn his prepared opening statement, Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin, the subcommittee chairman, said, \u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns.\u201d\nMr. Babin added that the challenges heighten the \u201crisk that the [space station] cannot be successfully or gracefully transitioned\u201d out of service in the middle of next decade.\nThe Government Accountability Office told the subcommittee that NASA\u2019s own program managers anticipate final certification of rockets and capsules \u201cis likely to slip into December 2019 for SpaceX and February 2020 for Boeing.\u201d Routine crew flights can\u2019t proceed before such approvals.\nSpaceX\u2019s top flight-reliability official told the panel the company is working in tandem with NASA to fully understand and alleviate risks associated with the helium tanks, which have been identified as the cause of two previous accidents.\nWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, testified that a redesign of the tanks is under way. \u201cWe will identify the most likely contributors\u201d that led to the previous catastrophic accidents, he said.\nHe also said NASA is methodically assessing, but hasn\u2019t signed off on, controversial SpaceX plans to load fuel into its rockets on the launchpad, while astronauts are strapped into the capsule on top.\nJohn Mulholland, who oversees Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program, testified that Boeing considered but rejected a similar fueling procedure years ago. \u201cWe never could get comfortable with the safety risks,\u201d he said. The Boeing official said his experts continue to have \u201csignificant concerns\u201d about the procedure.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n the SpaceX reliability official, countered that his company\u2019s unorthodox fueling procedures provide additional safety partly because ground personnel leave the pad during the process. \nThe pending decision means NASA managers \u201care about to learn a bunch of new lessons\u201d about managing risk while giving industry the lead in designing and operating crew vehicles, NASA\u2019s Mr. Gerstenmaier told the panel. House subcommittee explores challenges posed by NASA\u2019s decision to use privately operated space vehicles to ferry U.S. astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7340",
        "date": "2018-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-grill-spacex-boeing-on-safety-of-commercial-crew-capsules-1516232668?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=80",
        "text": "With routine flights ferrying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station slated to begin in fall of 2019, the agency\u2019s top outside safety watchdog has raised new questions about potential hazards in testimony to the House panel. The safety of internal helium tanks, needed to keep fuel flowing properly during ascent, has been identified as one of the most prominent unresolved risks for SpaceX. \nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which is separately developing what are intended to be privately operated spacecraft, both face the \u201cvery real possibility of future schedule slips,\u201d said Patricia Sanders, who heads NASA\u2019s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.\n\n\nCommenting on the likelihood that neither company will be able to fully comply with all of NASA\u2019s longstanding safety standards, Ms. Sanders said ending current U.S. reliance on Russian capsules for crew transportation may \u201crequire decisions to accept a higher risk\u201d on next-generation U.S. systems than anticipated.\nThe hearing also disclosed that the statistical limit for a \u201cfailed mission\u201d remains approximately one in 55 launches, despite several years of intense development, NASA expenditures of about $5 billion and significant additional investment by the two companies. That limit applies to mission failures in which the vehicle doesn\u2019t reach the space station but the crew uses emergency procedures to survive.\nNASA\u2019s statistical standard for crew fatalities is no greater than one in 270 flights, though Ms. Sanders and NASA officials have signaled neither Boeing nor SpaceX is on track to meet that precise mandatory benchmark. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA woman in Apple Valley, Calif., photographed the Dec. 22 launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base some 200 miles away.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Quigg/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn the end, on-orbit inspection safeguards combined with certain NASA waivers are expected to provide the green light for initial crewed flights.\nBy contrast, the global airline industry has achieved fatal accident rates for jetliners of one crash for several million flights.\nDuring her testimony, Ms. Sanders also said that given the agency\u2019s expertise and history of close collaboration with the two companies, \u201cNASA will be able to make a reasonable decision\u201d to balance mitigating hazards while avoiding extensive delays.\nThe hearing was marked by repeated lawmaker comments expressing concern about the fall 2019 deadline to start ferrying astronauts to the space station. \nIn his prepared opening statement, Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin, the subcommittee chairman, said, \u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns.\u201d\nMr. Babin added that the challenges heighten the \u201crisk that the [space station] cannot be successfully or gracefully transitioned\u201d out of service in the middle of next decade.\nThe Government Accountability Office told the subcommittee that NASA\u2019s own program managers anticipate final certification of rockets and capsules \u201cis likely to slip into December 2019 for SpaceX and February 2020 for Boeing.\u201d Routine crew flights can\u2019t proceed before such approvals.\nSpaceX\u2019s top flight-reliability official told the panel the company is working in tandem with NASA to fully understand and alleviate risks associated with the helium tanks, which have been identified as the cause of two previous accidents.\nWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, testified that a redesign of the tanks is under way. \u201cWe will identify the most likely contributors\u201d that led to the previous catastrophic accidents, he said.\nHe also said NASA is methodically assessing, but hasn\u2019t signed off on, controversial SpaceX plans to load fuel into its rockets on the launchpad, while astronauts are strapped into the capsule on top.\nJohn Mulholland, who oversees Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program, testified that Boeing considered but rejected a similar fueling procedure years ago. \u201cWe never could get comfortable with the safety risks,\u201d he said. The Boeing official said his experts continue to have \u201csignificant concerns\u201d about the procedure.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n the SpaceX reliability official, countered that his company\u2019s unorthodox fueling procedures provide additional safety partly because ground personnel leave the pad during the process. \nThe pending decision means NASA managers \u201care about to learn a bunch of new lessons\u201d about managing risk while giving industry the lead in designing and operating crew vehicles, NASA\u2019s Mr. Gerstenmaier told the panel. House subcommittee explores challenges posed by NASA\u2019s decision to use privately operated space vehicles to ferry U.S. astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7341",
        "date": "2018-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-grill-spacex-boeing-on-safety-of-commercial-crew-capsules-1516232668?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=72",
        "text": "With routine flights ferrying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station slated to begin in fall of 2019, the agency\u2019s top outside safety watchdog has raised new questions about potential hazards in testimony to the House panel. The safety of internal helium tanks, needed to keep fuel flowing properly during ascent, has been identified as one of the most prominent unresolved risks for SpaceX. \nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which is separately developing what are intended to be privately operated spacecraft, both face the \u201cvery real possibility of future schedule slips,\u201d said Patricia Sanders, who heads NASA\u2019s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.\n\n\nCommenting on the likelihood that neither company will be able to fully comply with all of NASA\u2019s longstanding safety standards, Ms. Sanders said ending current U.S. reliance on Russian capsules for crew transportation may \u201crequire decisions to accept a higher risk\u201d on next-generation U.S. systems than anticipated.\nThe hearing also disclosed that the statistical limit for a \u201cfailed mission\u201d remains approximately one in 55 launches, despite several years of intense development, NASA expenditures of about $5 billion and significant additional investment by the two companies. That limit applies to mission failures in which the vehicle doesn\u2019t reach the space station but the crew uses emergency procedures to survive.\nNASA\u2019s statistical standard for crew fatalities is no greater than one in 270 flights, though Ms. Sanders and NASA officials have signaled neither Boeing nor SpaceX is on track to meet that precise mandatory benchmark. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA woman in Apple Valley, Calif., photographed the Dec. 22 launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base some 200 miles away.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Quigg/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn the end, on-orbit inspection safeguards combined with certain NASA waivers are expected to provide the green light for initial crewed flights.\nBy contrast, the global airline industry has achieved fatal accident rates for jetliners of one crash for several million flights.\nDuring her testimony, Ms. Sanders also said that given the agency\u2019s expertise and history of close collaboration with the two companies, \u201cNASA will be able to make a reasonable decision\u201d to balance mitigating hazards while avoiding extensive delays.\nThe hearing was marked by repeated lawmaker comments expressing concern about the fall 2019 deadline to start ferrying astronauts to the space station. \nIn his prepared opening statement, Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin, the subcommittee chairman, said, \u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns.\u201d\nMr. Babin added that the challenges heighten the \u201crisk that the [space station] cannot be successfully or gracefully transitioned\u201d out of service in the middle of next decade.\nThe Government Accountability Office told the subcommittee that NASA\u2019s own program managers anticipate final certification of rockets and capsules \u201cis likely to slip into December 2019 for SpaceX and February 2020 for Boeing.\u201d Routine crew flights can\u2019t proceed before such approvals.\nSpaceX\u2019s top flight-reliability official told the panel the company is working in tandem with NASA to fully understand and alleviate risks associated with the helium tanks, which have been identified as the cause of two previous accidents.\nWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, testified that a redesign of the tanks is under way. \u201cWe will identify the most likely contributors\u201d that led to the previous catastrophic accidents, he said.\nHe also said NASA is methodically assessing, but hasn\u2019t signed off on, controversial SpaceX plans to load fuel into its rockets on the launchpad, while astronauts are strapped into the capsule on top.\nJohn Mulholland, who oversees Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program, testified that Boeing considered but rejected a similar fueling procedure years ago. \u201cWe never could get comfortable with the safety risks,\u201d he said. The Boeing official said his experts continue to have \u201csignificant concerns\u201d about the procedure.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n the SpaceX reliability official, countered that his company\u2019s unorthodox fueling procedures provide additional safety partly because ground personnel leave the pad during the process. \nThe pending decision means NASA managers \u201care about to learn a bunch of new lessons\u201d about managing risk while giving industry the lead in designing and operating crew vehicles, NASA\u2019s Mr. Gerstenmaier told the panel. House subcommittee explores challenges posed by NASA\u2019s decision to use privately operated space vehicles to ferry U.S. astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lawmakers Grill SpaceX, Boeing on Safety of Commercial Crew Capsules (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7342",
        "date": "2018-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-grill-spacex-boeing-on-safety-of-commercial-crew-capsules-1516232668?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=104",
        "text": "With routine flights ferrying U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station slated to begin in fall of 2019, the agency\u2019s top outside safety watchdog has raised new questions about potential hazards in testimony to the House panel. The safety of internal helium tanks, needed to keep fuel flowing properly during ascent, has been identified as one of the most prominent unresolved risks for SpaceX. \n\n\n\n\nSpace Exploration Technologies Corp., as Mr. Musk\u2019s company is called, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , which is separately developing what are intended to be privately operated spacecraft, both face the \u201cvery real possibility of future schedule slips,\u201d said Patricia Sanders, who heads NASA\u2019s independent Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel.\n\n\nCommenting on the likelihood that neither company will be able to fully comply with all of NASA\u2019s longstanding safety standards, Ms. Sanders said ending current U.S. reliance on Russian capsules for crew transportation may \u201crequire decisions to accept a higher risk\u201d on next-generation U.S. systems than anticipated.\nThe hearing also disclosed that the statistical limit for a \u201cfailed mission\u201d remains approximately one in 55 launches, despite several years of intense development, NASA expenditures of about $5 billion and significant additional investment by the two companies. That limit applies to mission failures in which the vehicle doesn\u2019t reach the space station but the crew uses emergency procedures to survive.\nNASA\u2019s statistical standard for crew fatalities is no greater than one in 270 flights, though Ms. Sanders and NASA officials have signaled neither Boeing nor SpaceX is on track to meet that precise mandatory benchmark. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA woman in Apple Valley, Calif., photographed the Dec. 22 launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base some 200 miles away.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Quigg/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn the end, on-orbit inspection safeguards combined with certain NASA waivers are expected to provide the green light for initial crewed flights.\nBy contrast, the global airline industry has achieved fatal accident rates for jetliners of one crash for several million flights.\nDuring her testimony, Ms. Sanders also said that given the agency\u2019s expertise and history of close collaboration with the two companies, \u201cNASA will be able to make a reasonable decision\u201d to balance mitigating hazards while avoiding extensive delays.\nThe hearing was marked by repeated lawmaker comments expressing concern about the fall 2019 deadline to start ferrying astronauts to the space station. \nIn his prepared opening statement, Texas Republican Rep. Brian Babin, the subcommittee chairman, said, \u201cWe are here today looking at not one, but two companies that are behind schedule, may not meet safety and reliability requirements and could even slip into cost overruns.\u201d\nMr. Babin added that the challenges heighten the \u201crisk that the [space station] cannot be successfully or gracefully transitioned\u201d out of service in the middle of next decade.\nThe Government Accountability Office told the subcommittee that NASA\u2019s own program managers anticipate final certification of rockets and capsules \u201cis likely to slip into December 2019 for SpaceX and February 2020 for Boeing.\u201d Routine crew flights can\u2019t proceed before such approvals.\nSpaceX\u2019s top flight-reliability official told the panel the company is working in tandem with NASA to fully understand and alleviate risks associated with the helium tanks, which have been identified as the cause of two previous accidents.\nWilliam Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, testified that a redesign of the tanks is under way. \u201cWe will identify the most likely contributors\u201d that led to the previous catastrophic accidents, he said.\nHe also said NASA is methodically assessing, but hasn\u2019t signed off on, controversial SpaceX plans to load fuel into its rockets on the launchpad, while astronauts are strapped into the capsule on top.\nJohn Mulholland, who oversees Boeing\u2019s commercial crew program, testified that Boeing considered but rejected a similar fueling procedure years ago. \u201cWe never could get comfortable with the safety risks,\u201d he said. The Boeing official said his experts continue to have \u201csignificant concerns\u201d about the procedure.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hans Koenigsmann,\n\n\n\n the SpaceX reliability official, countered that his company\u2019s unorthodox fueling procedures provide additional safety partly because ground personnel leave the pad during the process. \nThe pending decision means NASA managers \u201care about to learn a bunch of new lessons\u201d about managing risk while giving industry the lead in designing and operating crew vehicles, NASA\u2019s Mr. Gerstenmaier told the panel. House subcommittee explores challenges posed by NASA\u2019s decision to use privately operated space vehicles to ferry U.S. astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Charts Return to Venus Amid Fresh Interest in Space Exploration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7343",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-charts-return-to-venus-amid-fresh-interest-in-space-exploration-11622669206?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=29",
        "text": "With other countries including Japan and India and even private entrepreneurs weighing missions to the planet, NASA is opting to launch two missions later this decade to study the planet\u2019s geology and whether it could harbor life in its thick clouds.\nLockheed Martin plans to launch the spacecraft toward the end of this decade and operate both under NASA\u2019s evolving public-private partnership model, similar to its plans to return astronauts to the moon later this decade. A predecessor to the company built the spacecraft used on the Magellan mission to map Venus in 1989.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the Venus missions on Wednesday in Washington.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n alexander drago/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nPlans for the two programs come as NASA builds on the political and public capital from a renaissance in space exploration. It has celebrated the successful launch of U.S. astronauts on domestic rockets for the first time in more than a decade and the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an Earthlike planet can become a hothouse,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science.\nVenus had been on the backburner for space exploration for years before a resurgence in interest capped last fall by the discovery of a molecule of phosphine gas in the atmosphere that some scientists said could be produced by microbes.\nNASA has continued to fund some Venus-related research, including experiments to develop instruments that could work on the planet\u2019s scorching surface. It also supported a public contest to design a Venus rover for some future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Volcanic eruptions are often hard to predict and can cause widespread social and economic damage. Scientists are now turning to NASA satellites to help them forecast eruptions months or even years in advance, and minimize the impact on human activities. Photo Composite: Michelle Inez Simon\n \n\n\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The agency chose Lockheed Martin to build two spacecraft that would study why the planet\u2019s Earthlike climate became a hothouse. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Charts Return to Venus Amid Fresh Interest in Space Exploration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7344",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-charts-return-to-venus-amid-fresh-interest-in-space-exploration-11622669206?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=21",
        "text": "With other countries including Japan and India and even private entrepreneurs weighing missions to the planet, NASA is opting to launch two missions later this decade to study the planet\u2019s geology and whether it could harbor life in its thick clouds.\n\n\n\n\nLockheed Martin plans to launch the spacecraft toward the end of this decade and operate both under NASA\u2019s evolving public-private partnership model, similar to its plans to return astronauts to the moon later this decade. A predecessor to the company built the spacecraft used on the Magellan mission to map Venus in 1989.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the Venus missions on Wednesday in Washington.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n alexander drago/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nPlans for the two programs come as NASA builds on the political and public capital from a renaissance in space exploration. It has celebrated the successful launch of U.S. astronauts on domestic rockets for the first time in more than a decade and the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an Earthlike planet can become a hothouse,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science.\nVenus had been on the backburner for space exploration for years before a resurgence in interest capped last fall by the discovery of a molecule of phosphine gas in the atmosphere that some scientists said could be produced by microbes.\nNASA has continued to fund some Venus-related research, including experiments to develop instruments that could work on the planet\u2019s scorching surface. It also supported a public contest to design a Venus rover for some future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Volcanic eruptions are often hard to predict and can cause widespread social and economic damage. Scientists are now turning to NASA satellites to help them forecast eruptions months or even years in advance, and minimize the impact on human activities. Photo Composite: Michelle Inez Simon\n \n\n\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The agency chose Lockheed Martin to build two spacecraft that would study why the planet\u2019s Earthlike climate became a hothouse. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Charts Return to Venus Amid Fresh Interest in Space Exploration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7345",
        "date": "2021-06-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-charts-return-to-venus-amid-fresh-interest-in-space-exploration-11622669206?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=29",
        "text": "With other countries including Japan and India and even private entrepreneurs weighing missions to the planet, NASA is opting to launch two missions later this decade to study the planet\u2019s geology and whether it could harbor life in its thick clouds.\n\n\n\n\nLockheed Martin plans to launch the spacecraft toward the end of this decade and operate both under NASA\u2019s evolving public-private partnership model, similar to its plans to return astronauts to the moon later this decade. A predecessor to the company built the spacecraft used on the Magellan mission to map Venus in 1989.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the Venus missions on Wednesday in Washington.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n alexander drago/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nPlans for the two programs come as NASA builds on the political and public capital from a renaissance in space exploration. It has celebrated the successful launch of U.S. astronauts on domestic rockets for the first time in more than a decade and the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars.\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re ushering in a new decade of Venus to understand how an Earthlike planet can become a hothouse,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science.\nVenus had been on the backburner for space exploration for years before a resurgence in interest capped last fall by the discovery of a molecule of phosphine gas in the atmosphere that some scientists said could be produced by microbes.\nNASA has continued to fund some Venus-related research, including experiments to develop instruments that could work on the planet\u2019s scorching surface. It also supported a public contest to design a Venus rover for some future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Volcanic eruptions are often hard to predict and can cause widespread social and economic damage. Scientists are now turning to NASA satellites to help them forecast eruptions months or even years in advance, and minimize the impact on human activities. Photo Composite: Michelle Inez Simon\n \n\n\nWrite to Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com The agency chose Lockheed Martin to build two spacecraft that would study why the planet\u2019s Earthlike climate became a hothouse. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Seeks Funds to Return to Moon (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7346",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-seeks-funds-for-return-to-moon-11557802954?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=15",
        "text": "While Mr. Bridenstine highlighted the \u201cneed to inspire a new generation\u201d 50 years after the first Apollo moon landing, the spending projections reflected a stark political reality. Besides the initial down-payment request, he said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration isn\u2019t ready to present Congress with a detailed, multibillion-dollar package spelling out the initiative\u2019s anticipated full price tag.\nWhite House advisers, meanwhile, ended up directing some $650 million of the revised budget request to assist a pair of delayed, over-budget projects championed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n That move came despite a desire to jump-start commercial space endeavors. \n\n\n\u201cEverybody is a winner here,\u201d Mr. Bridenstine said, describing beefed-up funding for Boeing\u2019s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket program, promising streamlined NASA contracting procedures for new space companies and indicating that the agency will embrace commercial solutions because \u201cwe\u2019re not going to come up with a predefined way to get there.\u201d The NASA chief, among other things, disclosed that a female astronaut will be part of the first two-person crew destined to land on the moon.\n\n\nMore on NASA NASA\u2019s 2020 Budget Request Aims to Speed Lunar Exploration NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars \n\n\nAlluding to realities that previously projected overall NASA budgets to stay essentially flat at around $21 billion annually, Mr. Bridenstine said over \u201cfive years we are going to need more money; we all understand that.\u201d \nWhere those extra funds are\u00a0slated to come from will be spelled out in a\u00a0comprehensive package including proposed spending changes for other agencies. It is expected to be unveiled officially by the White House on Tuesday.\nMonday\u2019s announcement highlights a recurring policy and financial tug of war inside NASA, according to industry and government officials. The struggle pits political appointees pushing commercial options against career managers who generally favor traditional contracts with longstanding suppliers. \nBy seeking to grab extra dollars from outside NASA\u2019s existing budget, Mr. Bridenstine said the goal was to avoid the type of partisan and geographic battles on Capitol Hill that scuttled numerous NASA program shifts over the years. \nSome of the additional funding is earmarked for landers and vehicles able to transfer crews and cargo between a planned orbiting platform, smaller than the current international space station, and various moon destinations. Under the revised plan, however, that platform, or space gateway, would be simplified and lose about a third of its funding \nFunding boosts are envisioned for projects intended to demonstrate extraction of water and oxygen from lunar sources, test advanced electric-propulsion systems and find ways to produce fuel for spacecraft and boosters on the moon.\nCiting NASA\u2019s history of shifting goals as elections bring new administrations into power, the NASA chief portrayed the beefed-up lunar effort\u2014named Artemis after the goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology\u2014as transcending party divides. But Mr. Bridenstine was vague about how he and White House aides hope to rev up congressional support. At one point, he appeared to veer from his bipartisan approach by saying that if the plan succeeds, President Trump stands to be the first modern occupant of the White House to see such an ambitious project come to fruition during two terms in office.\nThe maneuvers are playing out as billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, are stepping up efforts to garner federal funds for human-exploration initiatives\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA unveiled plans to accelerate human exploration of the moon, including a requested $1.6 billion budget increase\u00a0for 2020 and enhanced commercial opportunities for rocket and spacecraft suppliers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Seeks Funds to Return to Moon (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7347",
        "date": "2019-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-seeks-funds-for-return-to-moon-11557802954?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=73",
        "text": "While Mr. Bridenstine highlighted the \u201cneed to inspire a new generation\u201d 50 years after the first Apollo moon landing, the spending projections reflected a stark political reality. Besides the initial down-payment request, he said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration isn\u2019t ready to present Congress with a detailed, multibillion-dollar package spelling out the initiative\u2019s anticipated full price tag.\n\n\n\n\nWhite House advisers, meanwhile, ended up directing some $650 million of the revised budget request to assist a pair of delayed, over-budget projects championed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n That move came despite a desire to jump-start commercial space endeavors. \n\n\n\u201cEverybody is a winner here,\u201d Mr. Bridenstine said, describing beefed-up funding for Boeing\u2019s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket program, promising streamlined NASA contracting procedures for new space companies and indicating that the agency will embrace commercial solutions because \u201cwe\u2019re not going to come up with a predefined way to get there.\u201d The NASA chief, among other things, disclosed that a female astronaut will be part of the first two-person crew destined to land on the moon.\n\n\nMore on NASA NASA\u2019s 2020 Budget Request Aims to Speed Lunar Exploration NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars \n\n\nAlluding to realities that previously projected overall NASA budgets to stay essentially flat at around $21 billion annually, Mr. Bridenstine said over \u201cfive years we are going to need more money; we all understand that.\u201d \nWhere those extra funds are\u00a0slated to come from will be spelled out in a\u00a0comprehensive package including proposed spending changes for other agencies. It is expected to be unveiled officially by the White House on Tuesday.\nMonday\u2019s announcement highlights a recurring policy and financial tug of war inside NASA, according to industry and government officials. The struggle pits political appointees pushing commercial options against career managers who generally favor traditional contracts with longstanding suppliers. \nBy seeking to grab extra dollars from outside NASA\u2019s existing budget, Mr. Bridenstine said the goal was to avoid the type of partisan and geographic battles on Capitol Hill that scuttled numerous NASA program shifts over the years. \nSome of the additional funding is earmarked for landers and vehicles able to transfer crews and cargo between a planned orbiting platform, smaller than the current international space station, and various moon destinations. Under the revised plan, however, that platform, or space gateway, would be simplified and lose about a third of its funding \nFunding boosts are envisioned for projects intended to demonstrate extraction of water and oxygen from lunar sources, test advanced electric-propulsion systems and find ways to produce fuel for spacecraft and boosters on the moon.\nCiting NASA\u2019s history of shifting goals as elections bring new administrations into power, the NASA chief portrayed the beefed-up lunar effort\u2014named Artemis after the goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology\u2014as transcending party divides. But Mr. Bridenstine was vague about how he and White House aides hope to rev up congressional support. At one point, he appeared to veer from his bipartisan approach by saying that if the plan succeeds, President Trump stands to be the first modern occupant of the White House to see such an ambitious project come to fruition during two terms in office.\nThe maneuvers are playing out as billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com\u00a0Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, are stepping up efforts to garner federal funds for human-exploration initiatives\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA unveiled plans to accelerate human exploration of the moon, including a requested $1.6 billion budget increase\u00a0for 2020 and enhanced commercial opportunities for rocket and spacecraft suppliers. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Voyager 2 Sends First Data From Interstellar Space (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7348",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-probes-journey-out-of-suns-warmth-yields-new-learnings-11572883200?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=14",
        "text": "When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched the spindly spacecraft in 1977\u2014one in a pair of star-bound Voyager probes\u2014Jimmy Carter was president, Apple Computer had just been incorporated, and snow fell in Miami for the first time in memory.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Titan Centaur rocket rises in the sky Aug. 20, 1977, at Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying the Voyager 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jim Bourdier/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nOriginally designed to visit Jupiter and Saturn, the probe was never meant to go so far, the scientists said. By doing so, researchers were able to get rare firsthand reports about the limits of the sun\u2019s protective shield, the heliosphere, which blocks most damaging cosmic rays from interstellar space, gaining knowledge that overturns some long-held assumptions.\n\n\nIn five technical papers about the milestone published in the journal Nature Astronomy, mission scientists and engineers detailed the exotic collision of superheated solar winds and frigid currents of interstellar space in a zone where the sun\u2019s protective bubble of influence fades away.\nThat solar boundary, called the heliopause, is created by intersecting magnetic fields, streams of cosmic rays from deep space and bursts of charged atomic particles from the sun.\nWhen the hotter but more tenuous material of solar particles plows into the cooler, denser substance of the space between the stars, it creates a bow wave like the prow of a speeding sailboat approximately 11 billion miles from the sun, the scientists said.\n\u201cThere was a time 50 years or so ago when people thought that the solar wind would get gradually whittled away or dissipated as it propagated into interstellar space,\u201d said physicist Edward Stone, Voyager\u2019s project scientist at the California Institute of Technology. \u201cIn fact, there is a very, very sharp boundary there.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018There was a time 50 years or so ago when people thought that the solar wind would get gradually whittled away or dissipated as it propagated into interstellar space. In fact, there is a very, very sharp boundary there.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist \n\n\n\nVoyager 2 officially crossed the boundary of the solar bubble on Nov. 5, 2018, recording its passage with all five of its sensors in working order, the scientists said. NASA is confirming the border crossing only now because it took almost a year to receive all\u00a0the probe\u2019s data. The information was coming from a distance where signals traveling at the speed of light take 16.5 hours to reach researchers on Earth, who then processed it, analyzed it and double-checked their conclusions.\nNo obvious visual indicators, such as an orbiting planet or an asteroid belt, mark the border. So the scientists decided the probe had broken through into interstellar space because data from the craft\u2019s sensors showed a sharp decrease in the intensity of low-energy solar ions and a simultaneous increase in the intensity of cosmic rays.\n\u201cWe saw the plasma density jump by a very large amount, by a factor of 20, in this very short boundary out there,\u201d said Voyager plasma wave physicist Donald Gurnett at the University of Iowa.\nVoyager 2 was the second spacecraft to go the distance. After several premature reports, NASA scientists in 2013 announced that the Voyager 1 probe had officially crossed into interstellar space on Aug. 25, 2012, becoming the first human artifact to leave the sphere of solar influence. It is the most distant object made by human hands.\nTechnically, neither craft has left the solar system yet, just the neighborhood encompassed by the sun\u2019s influence.\nThe farthest known region of the solar system is vast collection of comets and other space debris called the Oort cloud. At its current speed of about a million miles a day, NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 spacecraft won\u2019t enter the Oort cloud for about 300 years and won\u2019t exit the outer edge for 30,000 years or so, space agency scientists said.\nBoth Voyager probes are powered by plutonium-fueled nuclear generators and are expected to keep their sensors operating for another five years or so, the scientists said.\nEven after they lose power, they will continue outward as ambassadors from the life forms of Earth. Each carries a gold-plated disc containing images of humankind and multicultural greetings in 55 languages. Sounds include laughter and a human heartbeat.\nBarring any mishap, the Voyager 1 probe is expected to pass within 1.6 light years of a star called Gilese 445 in about 40,000 years, the scientists calculated. In about 296,000 years, Voyager 2, should its journey continue to be uneventful, will pass within 4.3 light years of Sirius\u2014the brightest star in the night sky.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this Aug. 4, 1977, photo provided by NASA, the \u2018Sounds of Earth\u2019 record is mounted on the Voyager 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Voyager 2\u2019s passage into interstellar space has yielded rare firsthand reports about the limits of the sun\u2019s protective shield. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Voyager 2 Sends First Data From Interstellar Space (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7349",
        "date": "2019-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-probes-journey-out-of-suns-warmth-yields-new-learnings-11572883200?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=50",
        "text": "When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched the spindly spacecraft in 1977\u2014one in a pair of star-bound Voyager probes\u2014Jimmy Carter was president, Apple Computer had just been incorporated, and snow fell in Miami for the first time in memory.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Titan Centaur rocket rises in the sky Aug. 20, 1977, at Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying the Voyager 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jim Bourdier/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nOriginally designed to visit Jupiter and Saturn, the probe was never meant to go so far, the scientists said. By doing so, researchers were able to get rare firsthand reports about the limits of the sun\u2019s protective shield, the heliosphere, which blocks most damaging cosmic rays from interstellar space, gaining knowledge that overturns some long-held assumptions.\n\n\nIn five technical papers about the milestone published in the journal Nature Astronomy, mission scientists and engineers detailed the exotic collision of superheated solar winds and frigid currents of interstellar space in a zone where the sun\u2019s protective bubble of influence fades away.\nThat solar boundary, called the heliopause, is created by intersecting magnetic fields, streams of cosmic rays from deep space and bursts of charged atomic particles from the sun.\nWhen the hotter but more tenuous material of solar particles plows into the cooler, denser substance of the space between the stars, it creates a bow wave like the prow of a speeding sailboat approximately 11 billion miles from the sun, the scientists said.\n\u201cThere was a time 50 years or so ago when people thought that the solar wind would get gradually whittled away or dissipated as it propagated into interstellar space,\u201d said physicist Edward Stone, Voyager\u2019s project scientist at the California Institute of Technology. \u201cIn fact, there is a very, very sharp boundary there.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018There was a time 50 years or so ago when people thought that the solar wind would get gradually whittled away or dissipated as it propagated into interstellar space. In fact, there is a very, very sharp boundary there.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist \n\n\n\nVoyager 2 officially crossed the boundary of the solar bubble on Nov. 5, 2018, recording its passage with all five of its sensors in working order, the scientists said. NASA is confirming the border crossing only now because it took almost a year to receive all\u00a0the probe\u2019s data. The information was coming from a distance where signals traveling at the speed of light take 16.5 hours to reach researchers on Earth, who then processed it, analyzed it and double-checked their conclusions.\nNo obvious visual indicators, such as an orbiting planet or an asteroid belt, mark the border. So the scientists decided the probe had broken through into interstellar space because data from the craft\u2019s sensors showed a sharp decrease in the intensity of low-energy solar ions and a simultaneous increase in the intensity of cosmic rays.\n\u201cWe saw the plasma density jump by a very large amount, by a factor of 20, in this very short boundary out there,\u201d said Voyager plasma wave physicist Donald Gurnett at the University of Iowa.\nVoyager 2 was the second spacecraft to go the distance. After several premature reports, NASA scientists in 2013 announced that the Voyager 1 probe had officially crossed into interstellar space on Aug. 25, 2012, becoming the first human artifact to leave the sphere of solar influence. It is the most distant object made by human hands.\nTechnically, neither craft has left the solar system yet, just the neighborhood encompassed by the sun\u2019s influence.\nThe farthest known region of the solar system is vast collection of comets and other space debris called the Oort cloud. At its current speed of about a million miles a day, NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 spacecraft won\u2019t enter the Oort cloud for about 300 years and won\u2019t exit the outer edge for 30,000 years or so, space agency scientists said.\nBoth Voyager probes are powered by plutonium-fueled nuclear generators and are expected to keep their sensors operating for another five years or so, the scientists said.\nEven after they lose power, they will continue outward as ambassadors from the life forms of Earth. Each carries a gold-plated disc containing images of humankind and multicultural greetings in 55 languages. Sounds include laughter and a human heartbeat.\nBarring any mishap, the Voyager 1 probe is expected to pass within 1.6 light years of a star called Gilese 445 in about 40,000 years, the scientists calculated. In about 296,000 years, Voyager 2, should its journey continue to be uneventful, will pass within 4.3 light years of Sirius\u2014the brightest star in the night sky.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this Aug. 4, 1977, photo provided by NASA, the \u2018Sounds of Earth\u2019 record is mounted on the Voyager 2.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Voyager 2\u2019s passage into interstellar space has yielded rare firsthand reports about the limits of the sun\u2019s protective shield. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Lays Out Policy Priorities, Commits to Climate-Change Research (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7350",
        "date": "2018-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-lays-out-lunar-exploration-plans-commits-to-climate-change-research-1527121030?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=19",
        "text": "Under his direction, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seeks to pursue various private-public partnerships to develop a family of spacecraft intended to return astronauts to the Moon by the early 2020s.\nTo maximize such partnerships for initial unmanned lunar missions, contractors will \u201cprovide all activities necessary to safely integrate, accommodate, transport and operate\u201d rockets, landers and re-entry systems, according to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s prepared testimony ahead of his appearance before the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA. Such principles, according to the statement, demonstrate NASA\u2019s \u201congoing confidence in the ability of U.S. industry\u201d to help meet the nation\u2019s exploration objectives.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine also reiterated that by 2023, the U.S. will launch the first proposed building blocks of a government-funded \u201cgateway\u201d for exploring deeper into the solar system.\nMore than previous NASA spending blueprints, the current plan aims to better coordinate human and robotic missions to develop technologies needed to eventually reach Mars. And the agency foresees extended stays by astronauts on the lunar surface as vital steps toward that ultimate goal.\nIn his initial weeks on the job, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma has moved quickly to shake up personnel and commit to continue scientific missions expanding Earth imaging and delving into climate change. Mr. Bridenstine told the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA that he agreed with the scientific community\u2019s consensus describing human activity as \u201cthe dominant cause\u201d of greenhouse gases leading to global warming.\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s views have evolved markedly since his nomination last year, when he indicated the extent of human contribution to climate change wasn\u2019t clear. In a televised town hall meeting last week with NASA staff, he said human beings were contributing to greenhouse gases \u201cin a major way.\u201d\nFollowing Wednesday\u2019s hearing, Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, who sparred with Mr. Bridenstine during the confirmation hearing, posted a message on twitter praising the NASA chief\u2019s latest statement as \u201can act of common sense and courage.\u201d The lawmaker said in a separate tweet: \u201cI don\u2019t want to overstate it, but it also shows that people of good faith, when exposed to the facts, can in fact acknowledge the reality of what we are doing to our planet.\u201d\nBut looming over the NASA chief\u2019s current honeymoon phase is a major dispute: The White House aims to cut off all federal funding for the international space station by 2025, arguing that will free up more than $3 billion annually for expanded exploration efforts. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, however, have vowed to continue funding the orbiting laboratory that is backed by more than a dozen countries\u2014and cost about $100 billion to assemble\u2014for at least several more years.\nIn his prepared testimony, Mr. Bridenstine said NASA has earmarked limited seed money to encourage private ventures to take over and use part of the orbiting facility past the 2025 deadline.\nBut last week, a House science committee heard Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Pentagon-backed think tank, testify about the challenges of building a smaller station or reusing part of the existing one. \u201cIt is unlikely that a commercial space station would be economically viable by 2025,\u201d Ms. Lal said. She noted that operating even a slimmed-down station likely would cost about $2 billion a year.\nExperts from the Government Accountability Office have reached basically the same conclusion.\nSen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA authorization bills, has characterized as \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d proposals for retiring the space station before the end of the next decade and called them a potential waste of billions of dollars.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA chief James Bridenstine unequivocally told a Senate panel that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, reversing his earlier skepticism, and sketched out a five-year, $52-billion lunar-exploration program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Lays Out Policy Priorities, Commits to Climate-Change Research (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7351",
        "date": "2018-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-lays-out-lunar-exploration-plans-commits-to-climate-change-research-1527121030?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=73",
        "text": "Under his direction, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seeks to pursue various private-public partnerships to develop a family of spacecraft intended to return astronauts to the Moon by the early 2020s.\nTo maximize such partnerships for initial unmanned lunar missions, contractors will \u201cprovide all activities necessary to safely integrate, accommodate, transport and operate\u201d rockets, landers and re-entry systems, according to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s prepared testimony ahead of his appearance before the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA. Such principles, according to the statement, demonstrate NASA\u2019s \u201congoing confidence in the ability of U.S. industry\u201d to help meet the nation\u2019s exploration objectives.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine also reiterated that by 2023, the U.S. will launch the first proposed building blocks of a government-funded \u201cgateway\u201d for exploring deeper into the solar system.\nMore than previous NASA spending blueprints, the current plan aims to better coordinate human and robotic missions to develop technologies needed to eventually reach Mars. And the agency foresees extended stays by astronauts on the lunar surface as vital steps toward that ultimate goal.\nIn his initial weeks on the job, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma has moved quickly to shake up personnel and commit to continue scientific missions expanding Earth imaging and delving into climate change. Mr. Bridenstine told the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA that he agreed with the scientific community\u2019s consensus describing human activity as \u201cthe dominant cause\u201d of greenhouse gases leading to global warming.\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s views have evolved markedly since his nomination last year, when he indicated the extent of human contribution to climate change wasn\u2019t clear. In a televised town hall meeting last week with NASA staff, he said human beings were contributing to greenhouse gases \u201cin a major way.\u201d\nFollowing Wednesday\u2019s hearing, Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, who sparred with Mr. Bridenstine during the confirmation hearing, posted a message on twitter praising the NASA chief\u2019s latest statement as \u201can act of common sense and courage.\u201d The lawmaker said in a separate tweet: \u201cI don\u2019t want to overstate it, but it also shows that people of good faith, when exposed to the facts, can in fact acknowledge the reality of what we are doing to our planet.\u201d\nBut looming over the NASA chief\u2019s current honeymoon phase is a major dispute: The White House aims to cut off all federal funding for the international space station by 2025, arguing that will free up more than $3 billion annually for expanded exploration efforts. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, however, have vowed to continue funding the orbiting laboratory that is backed by more than a dozen countries\u2014and cost about $100 billion to assemble\u2014for at least several more years.\nIn his prepared testimony, Mr. Bridenstine said NASA has earmarked limited seed money to encourage private ventures to take over and use part of the orbiting facility past the 2025 deadline.\nBut last week, a House science committee heard Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Pentagon-backed think tank, testify about the challenges of building a smaller station or reusing part of the existing one. \u201cIt is unlikely that a commercial space station would be economically viable by 2025,\u201d Ms. Lal said. She noted that operating even a slimmed-down station likely would cost about $2 billion a year.\nExperts from the Government Accountability Office have reached basically the same conclusion.\nSen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA authorization bills, has characterized as \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d proposals for retiring the space station before the end of the next decade and called them a potential waste of billions of dollars.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA chief James Bridenstine unequivocally told a Senate panel that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, reversing his earlier skepticism, and sketched out a five-year, $52-billion lunar-exploration program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Lays Out Policy Priorities, Commits to Climate-Change Research (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7352",
        "date": "2018-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-lays-out-lunar-exploration-plans-commits-to-climate-change-research-1527121030?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=67",
        "text": "Under his direction, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seeks to pursue various private-public partnerships to develop a family of spacecraft intended to return astronauts to the Moon by the early 2020s.\nTo maximize such partnerships for initial unmanned lunar missions, contractors will \u201cprovide all activities necessary to safely integrate, accommodate, transport and operate\u201d rockets, landers and re-entry systems, according to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s prepared testimony ahead of his appearance before the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA. Such principles, according to the statement, demonstrate NASA\u2019s \u201congoing confidence in the ability of U.S. industry\u201d to help meet the nation\u2019s exploration objectives.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine also reiterated that by 2023, the U.S. will launch the first proposed building blocks of a government-funded \u201cgateway\u201d for exploring deeper into the solar system.\nMore than previous NASA spending blueprints, the current plan aims to better coordinate human and robotic missions to develop technologies needed to eventually reach Mars. And the agency foresees extended stays by astronauts on the lunar surface as vital steps toward that ultimate goal.\nIn his initial weeks on the job, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma has moved quickly to shake up personnel and commit to continue scientific missions expanding Earth imaging and delving into climate change. Mr. Bridenstine told the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA that he agreed with the scientific community\u2019s consensus describing human activity as \u201cthe dominant cause\u201d of greenhouse gases leading to global warming.\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s views have evolved markedly since his nomination last year, when he indicated the extent of human contribution to climate change wasn\u2019t clear. In a televised town hall meeting last week with NASA staff, he said human beings were contributing to greenhouse gases \u201cin a major way.\u201d\nFollowing Wednesday\u2019s hearing, Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, who sparred with Mr. Bridenstine during the confirmation hearing, posted a message on twitter praising the NASA chief\u2019s latest statement as \u201can act of common sense and courage.\u201d The lawmaker said in a separate tweet: \u201cI don\u2019t want to overstate it, but it also shows that people of good faith, when exposed to the facts, can in fact acknowledge the reality of what we are doing to our planet.\u201d\nBut looming over the NASA chief\u2019s current honeymoon phase is a major dispute: The White House aims to cut off all federal funding for the international space station by 2025, arguing that will free up more than $3 billion annually for expanded exploration efforts. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, however, have vowed to continue funding the orbiting laboratory that is backed by more than a dozen countries\u2014and cost about $100 billion to assemble\u2014for at least several more years.\nIn his prepared testimony, Mr. Bridenstine said NASA has earmarked limited seed money to encourage private ventures to take over and use part of the orbiting facility past the 2025 deadline.\nBut last week, a House science committee heard Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Pentagon-backed think tank, testify about the challenges of building a smaller station or reusing part of the existing one. \u201cIt is unlikely that a commercial space station would be economically viable by 2025,\u201d Ms. Lal said. She noted that operating even a slimmed-down station likely would cost about $2 billion a year.\nExperts from the Government Accountability Office have reached basically the same conclusion.\nSen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA authorization bills, has characterized as \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d proposals for retiring the space station before the end of the next decade and called them a potential waste of billions of dollars.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA chief James Bridenstine unequivocally told a Senate panel that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, reversing his earlier skepticism, and sketched out a five-year, $52-billion lunar-exploration program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Lays Out Policy Priorities, Commits to Climate-Change Research (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7353",
        "date": "2018-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-lays-out-lunar-exploration-plans-commits-to-climate-change-research-1527121030?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=75",
        "text": "Under his direction, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seeks to pursue various private-public partnerships to develop a family of spacecraft intended to return astronauts to the Moon by the early 2020s.\n\n\n\n\nTo maximize such partnerships for initial unmanned lunar missions, contractors will \u201cprovide all activities necessary to safely integrate, accommodate, transport and operate\u201d rockets, landers and re-entry systems, according to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s prepared testimony ahead of his appearance before the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA. Such principles, according to the statement, demonstrate NASA\u2019s \u201congoing confidence in the ability of U.S. industry\u201d to help meet the nation\u2019s exploration objectives.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine also reiterated that by 2023, the U.S. will launch the first proposed building blocks of a government-funded \u201cgateway\u201d for exploring deeper into the solar system.\nMore than previous NASA spending blueprints, the current plan aims to better coordinate human and robotic missions to develop technologies needed to eventually reach Mars. And the agency foresees extended stays by astronauts on the lunar surface as vital steps toward that ultimate goal.\nIn his initial weeks on the job, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma has moved quickly to shake up personnel and commit to continue scientific missions expanding Earth imaging and delving into climate change. Mr. Bridenstine told the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA that he agreed with the scientific community\u2019s consensus describing human activity as \u201cthe dominant cause\u201d of greenhouse gases leading to global warming.\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s views have evolved markedly since his nomination last year, when he indicated the extent of human contribution to climate change wasn\u2019t clear. In a televised town hall meeting last week with NASA staff, he said human beings were contributing to greenhouse gases \u201cin a major way.\u201d\nFollowing Wednesday\u2019s hearing, Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, who sparred with Mr. Bridenstine during the confirmation hearing, posted a message on twitter praising the NASA chief\u2019s latest statement as \u201can act of common sense and courage.\u201d The lawmaker said in a separate tweet: \u201cI don\u2019t want to overstate it, but it also shows that people of good faith, when exposed to the facts, can in fact acknowledge the reality of what we are doing to our planet.\u201d\nBut looming over the NASA chief\u2019s current honeymoon phase is a major dispute: The White House aims to cut off all federal funding for the international space station by 2025, arguing that will free up more than $3 billion annually for expanded exploration efforts. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, however, have vowed to continue funding the orbiting laboratory that is backed by more than a dozen countries\u2014and cost about $100 billion to assemble\u2014for at least several more years.\nIn his prepared testimony, Mr. Bridenstine said NASA has earmarked limited seed money to encourage private ventures to take over and use part of the orbiting facility past the 2025 deadline.\nBut last week, a House science committee heard Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Pentagon-backed think tank, testify about the challenges of building a smaller station or reusing part of the existing one. \u201cIt is unlikely that a commercial space station would be economically viable by 2025,\u201d Ms. Lal said. She noted that operating even a slimmed-down station likely would cost about $2 billion a year.\nExperts from the Government Accountability Office have reached basically the same conclusion.\nSen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA authorization bills, has characterized as \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d proposals for retiring the space station before the end of the next decade and called them a potential waste of billions of dollars.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA chief James Bridenstine unequivocally told a Senate panel that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, reversing his earlier skepticism, and sketched out a five-year, $52-billion lunar-exploration program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Chief Lays Out Policy Priorities, Commits to Climate-Change Research (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7354",
        "date": "2018-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-chief-lays-out-lunar-exploration-plans-commits-to-climate-change-research-1527121030?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=95",
        "text": "Under his direction, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seeks to pursue various private-public partnerships to develop a family of spacecraft intended to return astronauts to the Moon by the early 2020s.\n\n\n\n\nTo maximize such partnerships for initial unmanned lunar missions, contractors will \u201cprovide all activities necessary to safely integrate, accommodate, transport and operate\u201d rockets, landers and re-entry systems, according to Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s prepared testimony ahead of his appearance before the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA. Such principles, according to the statement, demonstrate NASA\u2019s \u201congoing confidence in the ability of U.S. industry\u201d to help meet the nation\u2019s exploration objectives.\n\n\nMr. Bridenstine also reiterated that by 2023, the U.S. will launch the first proposed building blocks of a government-funded \u201cgateway\u201d for exploring deeper into the solar system.\nMore than previous NASA spending blueprints, the current plan aims to better coordinate human and robotic missions to develop technologies needed to eventually reach Mars. And the agency foresees extended stays by astronauts on the lunar surface as vital steps toward that ultimate goal.\nIn his initial weeks on the job, the former Republican congressman from Oklahoma has moved quickly to shake up personnel and commit to continue scientific missions expanding Earth imaging and delving into climate change. Mr. Bridenstine told the Senate appropriations subcommittee overseeing NASA that he agreed with the scientific community\u2019s consensus describing human activity as \u201cthe dominant cause\u201d of greenhouse gases leading to global warming.\nMr. Bridenstine\u2019s views have evolved markedly since his nomination last year, when he indicated the extent of human contribution to climate change wasn\u2019t clear. In a televised town hall meeting last week with NASA staff, he said human beings were contributing to greenhouse gases \u201cin a major way.\u201d\nFollowing Wednesday\u2019s hearing, Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Brian Schatz\n\n\n\n of Hawaii, who sparred with Mr. Bridenstine during the confirmation hearing, posted a message on twitter praising the NASA chief\u2019s latest statement as \u201can act of common sense and courage.\u201d The lawmaker said in a separate tweet: \u201cI don\u2019t want to overstate it, but it also shows that people of good faith, when exposed to the facts, can in fact acknowledge the reality of what we are doing to our planet.\u201d\nBut looming over the NASA chief\u2019s current honeymoon phase is a major dispute: The White House aims to cut off all federal funding for the international space station by 2025, arguing that will free up more than $3 billion annually for expanded exploration efforts. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, however, have vowed to continue funding the orbiting laboratory that is backed by more than a dozen countries\u2014and cost about $100 billion to assemble\u2014for at least several more years.\nIn his prepared testimony, Mr. Bridenstine said NASA has earmarked limited seed money to encourage private ventures to take over and use part of the orbiting facility past the 2025 deadline.\nBut last week, a House science committee heard Bhavya Lal, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a Pentagon-backed think tank, testify about the challenges of building a smaller station or reusing part of the existing one. \u201cIt is unlikely that a commercial space station would be economically viable by 2025,\u201d Ms. Lal said. She noted that operating even a slimmed-down station likely would cost about $2 billion a year.\nExperts from the Government Accountability Office have reached basically the same conclusion.\nSen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA authorization bills, has characterized as \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d proposals for retiring the space station before the end of the next decade and called them a potential waste of billions of dollars.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA chief James Bridenstine unequivocally told a Senate panel that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, reversing his earlier skepticism, and sketched out a five-year, $52-billion lunar-exploration program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Further Delays Its James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7355",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-expected-to-further-delay-its-james-webb-space-telescope-1522155840?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=20",
        "text": "To prevent further delays, senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials on Tuesday laid out an unusually stringent oversight plan\u2014including personnel changes and mandated twice monthly updates by senior Northrop Grumman management to agency headquarters. The goal is to gain more insight and assert greater control regarding the company\u2019s work. \n\u201cWe\u2019re reviewing technical processes and procedures at Northrop Grumman to assure mission success,\u201d Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator in NASA\u2019s science-mission division, told reporters.\n\n\nHis boss, Thomas Zurbuchen, who runs that part of the agency, said, \u201cWe have only one shot to get this right\u201d before launch, because \u201cwe want this to work well in orbit.\u201d \nThe move also likely sets up a congressional debate over reauthorizing the trouble-plagued program, and ripples could impact the timing of an array of other astrophysics projects being planned in the U.S. and overseas. Many of those projects partly depend on data anticipated from the James Webb platform.\nBefore the briefing, a Northrop Grumman spokesman released a terse statement indicating the company \u201cremains steadfast in its commitment to NASA and ensuring successful integration, launch and deployment.\u201d Afterward, the company declined to elaborate, and the spokesman didn\u2019t provide any additional response.\nEven with a program in crisis, it is uncharacteristic for NASA to take such a public stance attributing some problems to design issues that initially weren\u2019t recognized by agency managers but also pinpointing elementary factory-floor errors.\nNASA officials, for instance, said they grossly underestimated the time needed to test some critical components. But Mr. Zurbuchen also told reporters the agency intends to learn lessons from the James Webb program to \u201cactually develop the technologies before we start a mission.\u201d \nOutgoing NASA chief Robert Lightfoot said the agency has spent some $7.3 billion so far, and all the hardware has been manufactured, but integration of the spacecraft\u2019s parts and essential checks need to be completed. \u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of putting the two halves together and getting the testing done,\u201d he said. \nThe moves are expected to boost the program\u2019s cost above the combined $8.8 billion limit for development and operations previously established by lawmakers, but NASA officials declined to elaborate. They said details will be provided to lawmakers this summer, after additional internal and outside reviews.\nThe high-profile program is the largest international scientific effort in U.S. history that doesn\u2019t involve astronauts, and it is the most advanced space telescope ever developed. Northrop Grumman is responsible for building the portion that powers and protects the complex systems able to capture infrared signals.\nTuesday\u2019s developments follow a U.S. Government Accountability Office report last month projecting likely schedule and cost slippage. That study concluded, among other things, that NASA had a history of overstating workforce reductions;\u00a0that management decisions had eroded much of the program\u2019s funding cushions; and that the agency still confronted stiff technical challenges. At the time, the GAO also said certain \u201cwork continues to take longer than planned.\u201d\nGAO auditors found that project managers had \u201cused all remaining schedule reserve\u2014or extra time set aside in the schedule in the event of delays or unforeseen risks\u2014to address technical issues,\u201d including problems detected during vibration testing.\nInitially, the project carried a price tag of around $1.6 billion and was supposed to begin operation in 2011\nLast year, NASA pushed scheduled blastoff of the massive telescope from October 2018 to a launch window between March and June 2019, primarily as a result of delays integrating components.\nMonths before, NASA administrator Charles Bolden told reporters the space telescope was \u201can incredibly difficult program to manage.\u201d He said \u201cit almost didn\u2019t happen\u201d due to a cascade of previous problems.\nJust two weeks ago, NASA issued an upbeat statement indicating work was progressing well and that the agency had experienced \u201cgreat success\u201d in demonstrating readiness for launch.\nBut during a NASA advisory committee meeting last week, the agency telegraphed further delays were anticipated in the wake of an independent schedule review.\nOn Tuesday, NASA disclosed its revised schedule incorporates a three-month cushion to deal with more unexpected technical glitches or potentially new testing challenges. Looking ahead, Mr. Lightfoot said agency leaders \u201cwant to make sure what\u2019s going on pretty much on a daily basis\u201d considering the project\u2019s complexity and importance.\nAs part of the fiscal 2018 omnibus spending bill that lawmakers passed last week, the program received the full $533.7 million requested by the White House. But as in past spending packages, Congress directed NASA to notify it of any cost increase.\nSlated for launch by a European Ariane roc NASA announced a roughly one-year launch delay for the James Webb Space Telescope, blaming some of the setbacks plaguing its premier space-science program on \u201cavoidable errors\u201d by prime contractor Northrop Grumman. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Further Delays Its James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7356",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-expected-to-further-delay-its-james-webb-space-telescope-1522155840?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=78",
        "text": "To prevent further delays, senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials on Tuesday laid out an unusually stringent oversight plan\u2014including personnel changes and mandated twice monthly updates by senior Northrop Grumman management to agency headquarters. The goal is to gain more insight and assert greater control regarding the company\u2019s work. \n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re reviewing technical processes and procedures at Northrop Grumman to assure mission success,\u201d Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator in NASA\u2019s science-mission division, told reporters.\n\n\nHis boss, Thomas Zurbuchen, who runs that part of the agency, said, \u201cWe have only one shot to get this right\u201d before launch, because \u201cwe want this to work well in orbit.\u201d \nThe move also likely sets up a congressional debate over reauthorizing the trouble-plagued program, and ripples could impact the timing of an array of other astrophysics projects being planned in the U.S. and overseas. Many of those projects partly depend on data anticipated from the James Webb platform.\nBefore the briefing, a Northrop Grumman spokesman released a terse statement indicating the company \u201cremains steadfast in its commitment to NASA and ensuring successful integration, launch and deployment.\u201d Afterward, the company declined to elaborate, and the spokesman didn\u2019t provide any additional response.\nEven with a program in crisis, it is uncharacteristic for NASA to take such a public stance attributing some problems to design issues that initially weren\u2019t recognized by agency managers but also pinpointing elementary factory-floor errors.\nNASA officials, for instance, said they grossly underestimated the time needed to test some critical components. But Mr. Zurbuchen also told reporters the agency intends to learn lessons from the James Webb program to \u201cactually develop the technologies before we start a mission.\u201d \nOutgoing NASA chief Robert Lightfoot said the agency has spent some $7.3 billion so far, and all the hardware has been manufactured, but integration of the spacecraft\u2019s parts and essential checks need to be completed. \u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of putting the two halves together and getting the testing done,\u201d he said. \nThe moves are expected to boost the program\u2019s cost above the combined $8.8 billion limit for development and operations previously established by lawmakers, but NASA officials declined to elaborate. They said details will be provided to lawmakers this summer, after additional internal and outside reviews.\nThe high-profile program is the largest international scientific effort in U.S. history that doesn\u2019t involve astronauts, and it is the most advanced space telescope ever developed. Northrop Grumman is responsible for building the portion that powers and protects the complex systems able to capture infrared signals.\nTuesday\u2019s developments follow a U.S. Government Accountability Office report last month projecting likely schedule and cost slippage. That study concluded, among other things, that NASA had a history of overstating workforce reductions;\u00a0that management decisions had eroded much of the program\u2019s funding cushions; and that the agency still confronted stiff technical challenges. At the time, the GAO also said certain \u201cwork continues to take longer than planned.\u201d\nGAO auditors found that project managers had \u201cused all remaining schedule reserve\u2014or extra time set aside in the schedule in the event of delays or unforeseen risks\u2014to address technical issues,\u201d including problems detected during vibration testing.\nInitially, the project carried a price tag of around $1.6 billion and was supposed to begin operation in 2011\nLast year, NASA pushed scheduled blastoff of the massive telescope from October 2018 to a launch window between March and June 2019, primarily as a result of delays integrating components.\nMonths before, NASA administrator Charles Bolden told reporters the space telescope was \u201can incredibly difficult program to manage.\u201d He said \u201cit almost didn\u2019t happen\u201d due to a cascade of previous problems.\nJust two weeks ago, NASA issued an upbeat statement indicating work was progressing well and that the agency had experienced \u201cgreat success\u201d in demonstrating readiness for launch.\nBut during a NASA advisory committee meeting last week, the agency telegraphed further delays were anticipated in the wake of an independent schedule review.\nOn Tuesday, NASA disclosed its revised schedule incorporates a three-month cushion to deal with more unexpected technical glitches or potentially new testing challenges. Looking ahead, Mr. Lightfoot said agency leaders \u201cwant to make sure what\u2019s going on pretty much on a daily basis\u201d considering the project\u2019s complexity and importance.\nAs part of the fiscal 2018 omnibus spending bill that lawmakers passed last week, the program received the full $533.7 million requested by the White House. But as in past spending packages, Congress directed NASA to notify it of any cost increase.\nSlated for launch by a European Ariane rocket, the telescope is the most sophisticated\u2014and expensive\u2014space observatory ever conceived, featuring a 21.3-foot-wide primary mirror made up of 18 adjustable gold-coated segments. The design, much larger than its predecessor Hubble Space Telescope, is intended to capture infrared light behind a complex sunshade that unfurls to the size of a tennis court. NASA aims to use the next-generation platform to find new planets and cosmic structures and to better understand formation of distant stars, galaxies and the universe itself.\nUnlike Hubble, which operated in orbit relatively close to the earth and was able to be repeatedly repaired and serviced by astronauts, the James Webb telescope is bound for a location some one million miles away. It won\u2019t be accessible to any astronauts, which accounts for the extensive testing regime. Its mirrors have to be precisely polished and formed so they will achieve and maintain the correct shape in the frigid space environment.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA announced a roughly one-year launch delay for the James Webb Space Telescope, blaming some of the setbacks plaguing its premier space-science program on \u201cavoidable errors\u201d by prime contractor Northrop Grumman. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Further Delays Its James Webb Space Telescope (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7357",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-expected-to-further-delay-its-james-webb-space-telescope-1522155840?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=69",
        "text": "To prevent further delays, senior National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials on Tuesday laid out an unusually stringent oversight plan\u2014including personnel changes and mandated twice monthly updates by senior Northrop Grumman management to agency headquarters. The goal is to gain more insight and assert greater control regarding the company\u2019s work. \n\u201cWe\u2019re reviewing technical processes and procedures at Northrop Grumman to assure mission success,\u201d Dennis Andrucyk, deputy associate administrator in NASA\u2019s science-mission division, told reporters.\n\n\nHis boss, Thomas Zurbuchen, who runs that part of the agency, said, \u201cWe have only one shot to get this right\u201d before launch, because \u201cwe want this to work well in orbit.\u201d \nThe move also likely sets up a congressional debate over reauthorizing the trouble-plagued program, and ripples could impact the timing of an array of other astrophysics projects being planned in the U.S. and overseas. Many of those projects partly depend on data anticipated from the James Webb platform.\nBefore the briefing, a Northrop Grumman spokesman released a terse statement indicating the company \u201cremains steadfast in its commitment to NASA and ensuring successful integration, launch and deployment.\u201d Afterward, the company declined to elaborate, and the spokesman didn\u2019t provide any additional response.\nEven with a program in crisis, it is uncharacteristic for NASA to take such a public stance attributing some problems to design issues that initially weren\u2019t recognized by agency managers but also pinpointing elementary factory-floor errors.\nNASA officials, for instance, said they grossly underestimated the time needed to test some critical components. But Mr. Zurbuchen also told reporters the agency intends to learn lessons from the James Webb program to \u201cactually develop the technologies before we start a mission.\u201d \nOutgoing NASA chief Robert Lightfoot said the agency has spent some $7.3 billion so far, and all the hardware has been manufactured, but integration of the spacecraft\u2019s parts and essential checks need to be completed. \u201cIt\u2019s just a matter of putting the two halves together and getting the testing done,\u201d he said. \nThe moves are expected to boost the program\u2019s cost above the combined $8.8 billion limit for development and operations previously established by lawmakers, but NASA officials declined to elaborate. They said details will be provided to lawmakers this summer, after additional internal and outside reviews.\nThe high-profile program is the largest international scientific effort in U.S. history that doesn\u2019t involve astronauts, and it is the most advanced space telescope ever developed. Northrop Grumman is responsible for building the portion that powers and protects the complex systems able to capture infrared signals.\nTuesday\u2019s developments follow a U.S. Government Accountability Office report last month projecting likely schedule and cost slippage. That study concluded, among other things, that NASA had a history of overstating workforce reductions;\u00a0that management decisions had eroded much of the program\u2019s funding cushions; and that the agency still confronted stiff technical challenges. At the time, the GAO also said certain \u201cwork continues to take longer than planned.\u201d\nGAO auditors found that project managers had \u201cused all remaining schedule reserve\u2014or extra time set aside in the schedule in the event of delays or unforeseen risks\u2014to address technical issues,\u201d including problems detected during vibration testing.\nInitially, the project carried a price tag of around $1.6 billion and was supposed to begin operation in 2011\nLast year, NASA pushed scheduled blastoff of the massive telescope from October 2018 to a launch window between March and June 2019, primarily as a result of delays integrating components.\nMonths before, NASA administrator Charles Bolden told reporters the space telescope was \u201can incredibly difficult program to manage.\u201d He said \u201cit almost didn\u2019t happen\u201d due to a cascade of previous problems.\nJust two weeks ago, NASA issued an upbeat statement indicating work was progressing well and that the agency had experienced \u201cgreat success\u201d in demonstrating readiness for launch.\nBut during a NASA advisory committee meeting last week, the agency telegraphed further delays were anticipated in the wake of an independent schedule review.\nOn Tuesday, NASA disclosed its revised schedule incorporates a three-month cushion to deal with more unexpected technical glitches or potentially new testing challenges. Looking ahead, Mr. Lightfoot said agency leaders \u201cwant to make sure what\u2019s going on pretty much on a daily basis\u201d considering the project\u2019s complexity and importance.\nAs part of the fiscal 2018 omnibus spending bill that lawmakers passed last week, the program received the full $533.7 million requested by the White House. But as in past spending packages, Congress directed NASA to notify it of any cost increase.\nSlated for launch by a European Ariane roc NASA announced a roughly one-year launch delay for the James Webb Space Telescope, blaming some of the setbacks plaguing its premier space-science program on \u201cavoidable errors\u201d by prime contractor Northrop Grumman. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Probe to Explore Sun\u2019s Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7358",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-probe-to-explore-the-suns-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-1496256584?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=24",
        "text": "This is the first time a satellite will fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, hoping to answer questions including why the atmosphere, known as the corona, is hotter than the surface of the sun itself and other questions about space weather. The spacecraft and instruments will be protected by a 4.5-inch thick carbon-composite shield, NASA said.\n\u201cWe have not been able to answer these questions without being able to take a probe at the sun,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicola Fox,\n\n\n\n the mission project scientist for the solar probe. Answers to these questions are \u201ckey to us being able to put the last pieces together\u201d about the sun\u2019s atmosphere, she added.\n\n\nRead More House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration \n\n\nThe mission will also produce the first-ever close-up view of a star, providing a deeper understanding of the physics of stars across our universe.\n\n\nThe mission, which will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is fully funded, costing about $1.5 billion from development to launch.\nAbout eight weeks after the launch, the satellite will encounter Venus and do a flyby of the planet, and eight weeks after that, it will encounter the sun\u2019s atmosphere for the first time. Traveling at 430,000 miles an hour, the satellite will continue making orbits around the sun, using instruments to measure the atmosphere.\nThe whole mission will take about seven years, Dr. Fox said.\nNASA says the mission was 60 years in the making, bolstered by Dr. Parker\u2019s transformational research, in which he predicted the existence of solar winds. His research changed the way scientists perceive space and formed the basis for the solar probe.\nThe mission is a culmination of research in the field of solar and heliophysics since then, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n association administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA\u2019s Washington headquarters. \u201cWe want to go down there\u2026we built the machines robust enough to do that.\u201d\nUnderstanding weather patterns in space, scientists say, will have real-life applications, since plasma and radiation from the sun could affect our planet. Space weather can influence everything including electrical grids and GPS systems, and further understanding of the atmospheric changes will help scientists find ways to minimize disruptions to these systems on earth.\nThe mission can also help support space travel overall by providing a deeper understanding of the risk to astronauts posed by storms in space, scientists said.\nThe Parker Solar Probe is the first time that a NASA mission has been named after a living scientist. When Dr. Parker\u2019s research was first published in the 1960s, many initially dismissed his research as wrong until his theoretical models were confirmed by spacecraft.\n\u201cOne would like to have some more detailed measurements of what\u2019s going on in the solar wind,\u201d Dr. Parker said. \u201cI\u2019m sure that there will be some surprises. There always are.\u201d\nWrite to Shibani Mahtani at shibani.mahtani@wsj.com NASA said it will launch an unprecedented mission to fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, zooming within 4 million miles of the surface and withstanding temperatures of up to 2,500 Fahrenheit. ",
        "author": "Shibani Mahtani"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Probe to Explore Sun\u2019s Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7359",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-probe-to-explore-the-suns-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-1496256584?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=94",
        "text": "This is the first time a satellite will fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, hoping to answer questions including why the atmosphere, known as the corona, is hotter than the surface of the sun itself and other questions about space weather. The spacecraft and instruments will be protected by a 4.5-inch thick carbon-composite shield, NASA said.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe have not been able to answer these questions without being able to take a probe at the sun,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicola Fox,\n\n\n\n the mission project scientist for the solar probe. Answers to these questions are \u201ckey to us being able to put the last pieces together\u201d about the sun\u2019s atmosphere, she added.\n\n\nRead More House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration \n\n\nThe mission will also produce the first-ever close-up view of a star, providing a deeper understanding of the physics of stars across our universe.\n\n\nThe mission, which will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is fully funded, costing about $1.5 billion from development to launch.\nAbout eight weeks after the launch, the satellite will encounter Venus and do a flyby of the planet, and eight weeks after that, it will encounter the sun\u2019s atmosphere for the first time. Traveling at 430,000 miles an hour, the satellite will continue making orbits around the sun, using instruments to measure the atmosphere.\nThe whole mission will take about seven years, Dr. Fox said.\nNASA says the mission was 60 years in the making, bolstered by Dr. Parker\u2019s transformational research, in which he predicted the existence of solar winds. His research changed the way scientists perceive space and formed the basis for the solar probe.\nThe mission is a culmination of research in the field of solar and heliophysics since then, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n association administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA\u2019s Washington headquarters. \u201cWe want to go down there\u2026we built the machines robust enough to do that.\u201d\nUnderstanding weather patterns in space, scientists say, will have real-life applications, since plasma and radiation from the sun could affect our planet. Space weather can influence everything including electrical grids and GPS systems, and further understanding of the atmospheric changes will help scientists find ways to minimize disruptions to these systems on earth.\nThe mission can also help support space travel overall by providing a deeper understanding of the risk to astronauts posed by storms in space, scientists said.\nThe Parker Solar Probe is the first time that a NASA mission has been named after a living scientist. When Dr. Parker\u2019s research was first published in the 1960s, many initially dismissed his research as wrong until his theoretical models were confirmed by spacecraft.\n\u201cOne would like to have some more detailed measurements of what\u2019s going on in the solar wind,\u201d Dr. Parker said. \u201cI\u2019m sure that there will be some surprises. There always are.\u201d\nWrite to Shibani Mahtani at shibani.mahtani@wsj.com NASA said it will launch an unprecedented mission to fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, zooming within 4 million miles of the surface and withstanding temperatures of up to 2,500 Fahrenheit. ",
        "author": "Shibani Mahtani"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Probe to Explore Sun\u2019s Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7360",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-probe-to-explore-the-suns-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-1496256584?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=82",
        "text": "This is the first time a satellite will fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, hoping to answer questions including why the atmosphere, known as the corona, is hotter than the surface of the sun itself and other questions about space weather. The spacecraft and instruments will be protected by a 4.5-inch thick carbon-composite shield, NASA said.\n\u201cWe have not been able to answer these questions without being able to take a probe at the sun,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicola Fox,\n\n\n\n the mission project scientist for the solar probe. Answers to these questions are \u201ckey to us being able to put the last pieces together\u201d about the sun\u2019s atmosphere, she added.\n\n\nRead More House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration \n\n\nThe mission will also produce the first-ever close-up view of a star, providing a deeper understanding of the physics of stars across our universe.\n\n\nThe mission, which will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is fully funded, costing about $1.5 billion from development to launch.\nAbout eight weeks after the launch, the satellite will encounter Venus and do a flyby of the planet, and eight weeks after that, it will encounter the sun\u2019s atmosphere for the first time. Traveling at 430,000 miles an hour, the satellite will continue making orbits around the sun, using instruments to measure the atmosphere.\nThe whole mission will take about seven years, Dr. Fox said.\nNASA says the mission was 60 years in the making, bolstered by Dr. Parker\u2019s transformational research, in which he predicted the existence of solar winds. His research changed the way scientists perceive space and formed the basis for the solar probe.\nThe mission is a culmination of research in the field of solar and heliophysics since then, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n association administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA\u2019s Washington headquarters. \u201cWe want to go down there\u2026we built the machines robust enough to do that.\u201d\nUnderstanding weather patterns in space, scientists say, will have real-life applications, since plasma and radiation from the sun could affect our planet. Space weather can influence everything including electrical grids and GPS systems, and further understanding of the atmospheric changes will help scientists find ways to minimize disruptions to these systems on earth.\nThe mission can also help support space travel overall by providing a deeper understanding of the risk to astronauts posed by storms in space, scientists said.\nThe Parker Solar Probe is the first time that a NASA mission has been named after a living scientist. When Dr. Parker\u2019s research was first published in the 1960s, many initially dismissed his research as wrong until his theoretical models were confirmed by spacecraft.\n\u201cOne would like to have some more detailed measurements of what\u2019s going on in the solar wind,\u201d Dr. Parker said. \u201cI\u2019m sure that there will be some surprises. There always are.\u201d\nWrite to Shibani Mahtani at shibani.mahtani@wsj.com NASA said it will launch an unprecedented mission to fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, zooming within 4 million miles of the surface and withstanding temperatures of up to 2,500 Fahrenheit. ",
        "author": "Shibani Mahtani"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Probe to Explore Sun\u2019s Atmosphere for First Time (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7361",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-probe-to-explore-the-suns-atmosphere-for-the-first-time-1496256584?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=121",
        "text": "This is the first time a satellite will fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, hoping to answer questions including why the atmosphere, known as the corona, is hotter than the surface of the sun itself and other questions about space weather. The spacecraft and instruments will be protected by a 4.5-inch thick carbon-composite shield, NASA said.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe have not been able to answer these questions without being able to take a probe at the sun,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nicola Fox,\n\n\n\n the mission project scientist for the solar probe. Answers to these questions are \u201ckey to us being able to put the last pieces together\u201d about the sun\u2019s atmosphere, she added.\n\n\nRead More House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts NASA to Rely on Commercial Partners for Deep-Space Exploration \n\n\nThe mission will also produce the first-ever close-up view of a star, providing a deeper understanding of the physics of stars across our universe.\n\n\nThe mission, which will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is fully funded, costing about $1.5 billion from development to launch.\nAbout eight weeks after the launch, the satellite will encounter Venus and do a flyby of the planet, and eight weeks after that, it will encounter the sun\u2019s atmosphere for the first time. Traveling at 430,000 miles an hour, the satellite will continue making orbits around the sun, using instruments to measure the atmosphere.\nThe whole mission will take about seven years, Dr. Fox said.\nNASA says the mission was 60 years in the making, bolstered by Dr. Parker\u2019s transformational research, in which he predicted the existence of solar winds. His research changed the way scientists perceive space and formed the basis for the solar probe.\nThe mission is a culmination of research in the field of solar and heliophysics since then, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n association administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA\u2019s Washington headquarters. \u201cWe want to go down there\u2026we built the machines robust enough to do that.\u201d\nUnderstanding weather patterns in space, scientists say, will have real-life applications, since plasma and radiation from the sun could affect our planet. Space weather can influence everything including electrical grids and GPS systems, and further understanding of the atmospheric changes will help scientists find ways to minimize disruptions to these systems on earth.\nThe mission can also help support space travel overall by providing a deeper understanding of the risk to astronauts posed by storms in space, scientists said.\nThe Parker Solar Probe is the first time that a NASA mission has been named after a living scientist. When Dr. Parker\u2019s research was first published in the 1960s, many initially dismissed his research as wrong until his theoretical models were confirmed by spacecraft.\n\u201cOne would like to have some more detailed measurements of what\u2019s going on in the solar wind,\u201d Dr. Parker said. \u201cI\u2019m sure that there will be some surprises. There always are.\u201d\nWrite to Shibani Mahtani at shibani.mahtani@wsj.com NASA said it will launch an unprecedented mission to fly directly into the sun\u2019s atmosphere, zooming within 4 million miles of the surface and withstanding temperatures of up to 2,500 Fahrenheit. ",
        "author": "Shibani Mahtani"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Lands Perseverance Rover Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7362",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-perseverance-rover-lands-on-mars-after-seven-minutes-of-terror-11613682303?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=9",
        "text": "The two-year Perseverance mission is the latest and most ambitious effort by NASA to find evidence of past life on Mars. The 1-ton, SUV-size rover will spend the next two years prospecting for evidence of ancient microbes. It will pack up any promising soil or rock samples into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis.\n\u201cPerseverance is safely on the surface of Mars,\u201d Swati Mohan, guidance, navigation and controls operations engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said as the mission control room around her erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.\n\n\nBristling with 23 cameras, sensors, a laser and a drill-equipped robotic arm, Perseverance will spend the next two years prospecting for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life. \n\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission. \nNASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return the samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\nThough it is now a barren place of icy dunes, dust devils, dead volcanoes and subzero winds, scientists believe Mars in its remote past may have been a comparatively lush, warm world\u2014one suitable for the chemistry of life. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe surface of Mars is seen in a photo transmitted back after the successful landing of the NASA Perseverance rover Thursday afternoon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAble to cover ground three times faster than any previous Mars rover, Perseverance will look for traces of organic matter, which could be evidence of primordial microbes or other simple life-forms. Other places in the solar system\u2014from the searing clouds of Venus to the frozen oceans of moons around Jupiter and Saturn\u2014might also have the potential for life. But those places are considered even less accessible than Mars. \n\n\n\nThe Challenges of Landing on Mars\nNASA mission engineers call landing on Mars \u201cseven minutes of terror.\u201d Hundreds of things have to go perfectly. The landing zone is the smallest NASA has ever targeted. The spacecraft, though, is on its own all the way down, guided solely by pre-programmed commands in its onboard computer. That\u2019s because it takes about 11 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars, far too long for direct hands-on control. Here is how landing on Mars worked:\nAbout 10 minutes from landingThe spacecraft sheds solar panels, radios, and fuel tanks used during its flight to Mars. Only its protective aeroshell\u2014with rover and descent stage inside\u2014makes the trip to the surface. About 80 seconds after entering the atmosphere, the heat shield reaches about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Safe in the aeroshell, however, the rover gets up to only about room temperature.Six minutes, 50 seconds from landingTurbulence rocks the spacecraft as it descends, potentially nudging it off course. To compensate, it fires small thrusters on its backshell that adjust its angle and direction of lift. This \u201cguided entry\u201d technique helps the spacecraft stay on the path to its downrange target.Three minutes from landingTo balance its center of gravity, the spacecraft automatically ejects a half dozen small weights used to tilt the craft at the right angle for initial re-entry, preparing it for the parachute deployment.Two minutes, 45 seconds from landingParachute deploys, slowing the spacecraft from around 940 mph to around 200 mph. The spacecraft uses a new technology\u2014Range Trigger\u2014to calculate its distance to the landing target and open the parachute at the ideal time to hit its mark. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Two minutes, 25 seconds from landingThe spacecraft jettisons its heat shield, exposing the Perseverance rover to the onrush of air. Immediately, the rover starts photographing the approaching ground and using radar to figure out its altitude. The onboard computer compares the position data to an onboard map.One minute from landingTo slow down even more to its safe touchdown speed, the craft releases its back shield and cuts free of the parachute. It fires its eight descent stage engines. It maneuvers side-to-side to avoid the ejected parachute and shell.12 seconds from landingHovering about 66 feet above the surface, the descent stage lowers the rover on a set of cables about 21 feet long. Meanwhile, the rover unstows its mobility system, locking its legs and wheels into landing position.TouchdownThe rover lands safely in a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater. It cuts the tethers keeping it tied to the descent stage. This frees the descent stage to fly off and land at a safe distance from Perseverance.\nSource: NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryBrian McGill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\nThis is the first After a seven-month, 292-million-mile journey, NASA\u2019s fastest and best-equipped rover ever touched down safely on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Lands Perseverance Rover Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7363",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-perseverance-rover-lands-on-mars-after-seven-minutes-of-terror-11613682303?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=27",
        "text": "The two-year Perseverance mission is the latest and most ambitious effort by NASA to find evidence of past life on Mars. The 1-ton, SUV-size rover will spend the next two years prospecting for evidence of ancient microbes. It will pack up any promising soil or rock samples into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis.\n\u201cPerseverance is safely on the surface of Mars,\u201d Swati Mohan, guidance, navigation and controls operations engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said as the mission control room around her erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.\n\n\nBristling with 23 cameras, sensors, a laser and a drill-equipped robotic arm, Perseverance will spend the next two years prospecting for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life. \n\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission. \nNASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return the samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\nThough it is now a barren place of icy dunes, dust devils, dead volcanoes and subzero winds, scientists believe Mars in its remote past may have been a comparatively lush, warm world\u2014one suitable for the chemistry of life. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe surface of Mars is seen in a photo transmitted back after the successful landing of the NASA Perseverance rover Thursday afternoon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAble to cover ground three times faster than any previous Mars rover, Perseverance will look for traces of organic matter, which could be evidence of primordial microbes or other simple life-forms. Other places in the solar system\u2014from the searing clouds of Venus to the frozen oceans of moons around Jupiter and Saturn\u2014might also have the potential for life. But those places are considered even less accessible than Mars. \n\n\n\nThe Challenges of Landing on Mars\nNASA mission engineers call landing on Mars \u201cseven minutes of terror.\u201d Hundreds of things have to go perfectly. The landing zone is the smallest NASA has ever targeted. The spacecraft, though, is on its own all the way down, guided solely by pre-programmed commands in its onboard computer. That\u2019s because it takes about 11 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars, far too long for direct hands-on control. Here is how landing on Mars worked:\nAbout 10 minutes from landingThe spacecraft sheds solar panels, radios, and fuel tanks used during its flight to Mars. Only its protective aeroshell\u2014with rover and descent stage inside\u2014makes the trip to the surface. About 80 seconds after entering the atmosphere, the heat shield reaches about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Safe in the aeroshell, however, the rover gets up to only about room temperature.Six minutes, 50 seconds from landingTurbulence rocks the spacecraft as it descends, potentially nudging it off course. To compensate, it fires small thrusters on its backshell that adjust its angle and direction of lift. This \u201cguided entry\u201d technique helps the spacecraft stay on the path to its downrange target.Three minutes from landingTo balance its center of gravity, the spacecraft automatically ejects a half dozen small weights used to tilt the craft at the right angle for initial re-entry, preparing it for the parachute deployment.Two minutes, 45 seconds from landingParachute deploys, slowing the spacecraft from around 940 mph to around 200 mph. The spacecraft uses a new technology\u2014Range Trigger\u2014to calculate its distance to the landing target and open the parachute at the ideal time to hit its mark. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Two minutes, 25 seconds from landingThe spacecraft jettisons its heat shield, exposing the Perseverance rover to the onrush of air. Immediately, the rover starts photographing the approaching ground and using radar to figure out its altitude. The onboard computer compares the position data to an onboard map.One minute from landingTo slow down even more to its safe touchdown speed, the craft releases its back shield and cuts free of the parachute. It fires its eight descent stage engines. It maneuvers side-to-side to avoid the ejected parachute and shell.12 seconds from landingHovering about 66 feet above the surface, the descent stage lowers the rover on a set of cables about 21 feet long. Meanwhile, the rover unstows its mobility system, locking its legs and wheels into landing position.TouchdownThe rover lands safely in a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater. It cuts the tethers keeping it tied to the descent stage. This frees the descent stage to fly off and land at a safe distance from Perseverance.\nSource: NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryBrian McGill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\nThis is the first After a seven-month, 292-million-mile journey, NASA\u2019s fastest and best-equipped rover ever touched down safely on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Lands Perseverance Rover Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7364",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-perseverance-rover-lands-on-mars-after-seven-minutes-of-terror-11613682303?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=28",
        "text": "The two-year Perseverance mission is the latest and most ambitious effort by NASA to find evidence of past life on Mars. The 1-ton, SUV-size rover will spend the next two years prospecting for evidence of ancient microbes. It will pack up any promising soil or rock samples into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cPerseverance is safely on the surface of Mars,\u201d Swati Mohan, guidance, navigation and controls operations engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said as the mission control room around her erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.\n\n\nBristling with 23 cameras, sensors, a laser and a drill-equipped robotic arm, Perseverance will spend the next two years prospecting for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life. \n\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission. \nNASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return the samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\nThough it is now a barren place of icy dunes, dust devils, dead volcanoes and subzero winds, scientists believe Mars in its remote past may have been a comparatively lush, warm world\u2014one suitable for the chemistry of life. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe surface of Mars is seen in a photo transmitted back after the successful landing of the NASA Perseverance rover Thursday afternoon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAble to cover ground three times faster than any previous Mars rover, Perseverance will look for traces of organic matter, which could be evidence of primordial microbes or other simple life-forms. Other places in the solar system\u2014from the searing clouds of Venus to the frozen oceans of moons around Jupiter and Saturn\u2014might also have the potential for life. But those places are considered even less accessible than Mars. \n\n\n\nThe Challenges of Landing on Mars\nNASA mission engineers call landing on Mars \u201cseven minutes of terror.\u201d Hundreds of things have to go perfectly. The landing zone is the smallest NASA has ever targeted. The spacecraft, though, is on its own all the way down, guided solely by pre-programmed commands in its onboard computer. That\u2019s because it takes about 11 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars, far too long for direct hands-on control. Here is how landing on Mars worked:\nAbout 10 minutes from landingThe spacecraft sheds solar panels, radios, and fuel tanks used during its flight to Mars. Only its protective aeroshell\u2014with rover and descent stage inside\u2014makes the trip to the surface. About 80 seconds after entering the atmosphere, the heat shield reaches about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Safe in the aeroshell, however, the rover gets up to only about room temperature.Six minutes, 50 seconds from landingTurbulence rocks the spacecraft as it descends, potentially nudging it off course. To compensate, it fires small thrusters on its backshell that adjust its angle and direction of lift. This \u201cguided entry\u201d technique helps the spacecraft stay on the path to its downrange target.Three minutes from landingTo balance its center of gravity, the spacecraft automatically ejects a half dozen small weights used to tilt the craft at the right angle for initial re-entry, preparing it for the parachute deployment.Two minutes, 45 seconds from landingParachute deploys, slowing the spacecraft from around 940 mph to around 200 mph. The spacecraft uses a new technology\u2014Range Trigger\u2014to calculate its distance to the landing target and open the parachute at the ideal time to hit its mark. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Two minutes, 25 seconds from landingThe spacecraft jettisons its heat shield, exposing the Perseverance rover to the onrush of air. Immediately, the rover starts photographing the approaching ground and using radar to figure out its altitude. The onboard computer compares the position data to an onboard map.One minute from landingTo slow down even more to its safe touchdown speed, the craft releases its back shield and cuts free of the parachute. It fires its eight descent stage engines. It maneuvers side-to-side to avoid the ejected parachute and shell.12 seconds from landingHovering about 66 feet above the surface, the descent stage lowers the rover on a set of cables about 21 feet long. Meanwhile, the rover unstows its mobility system, locking its legs and wheels into landing position.TouchdownThe rover lands safely in a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater. It cuts the tethers keeping it tied to the descent stage. This frees the descent stage to fly off and land at a safe distance from Perseverance.\nSource: NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryBrian McGill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\nThis is the first time since the Viking missions of the 1970s that NASA has sent a spacecraft to Mars specifically designed to search for life, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA\u2019s planetary science division. Those early missions failed to detect any conclusive life signs. \u201cWe know now the experiments we designed back then weren\u2019t quite the right way to go about detecting the presence of life,\u201d she said.\nPerseverance is accompanied by the first helicopter to be transported to another world. NASA engineers expect to conduct several test flights of the four-pound drone, called Ingenuity. These would be the first powered controlled flights on another planet.\n\u201cIt will truly be a Wright brothers moment, but on another planet,\u201d said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity\u2019s project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.\nGetting Perseverance and Ingenuity on the ground wasn\u2019t easy. To land safely, more than two million lines of computer software code, thousands of electronic parts and 70 pyrotechnic devices all had to perform flawlessly.\n\u201cThe landing is the spectacular crux move of this mission,\u201d said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTouch Down\nOn Feb. 18th, Perseverance became the eighth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars since NASA's Viking 1 landed there in 1976.\n\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nUpcoming missions\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nFailed landing or swift malfunction\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nHuoxing-I\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nUpcoming over missions\n\n\nFailed landing or swift malfunction\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nTianwen-1\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nUpcoming mission\n\n\nFailed landing or swift malfunction\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nTianwen-1\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nType of mission\n\n\nLander\n\n\nRover\n\n\nUpcoming mission\n\n\nFailed landing or quick malfunction\n\n\nCountry of Origin\n\n\nSoviet Union\nor Russia\n\n\nU.S.\n\n\nEuropean\nUnion\n\n\nChina\n\n\nRosalind Franklin*\n\n\nViking 1\n\n\nPerseverance\n\n\nPathfinder & Sojourner\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nSchiaparelli EDM\n\n\nMars 6\n\n\nMars 2\n\n\nPhoenix\n\n\nViking 2\n\n\nTianwen-1\n\n\nBeagle 2\n\n\nInsight\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nMars 3\n\n\nMars Polar Lander\n\n\nRosalind Franklin, expected to land on Mars in 2023, is a joint effort between Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities and the European Space Agency.\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFollowing a harrowing plunge through the salmon pink skies and blue clouds of Mars\u2014what NASA engineers call \u201cseven minutes of terror\u201d\u2014the lander carrying Perseverance and Ingenuity settled safely onto the smallest, most rugged landing zone upon which the space agency has ever attempted a landing.\nOnce the lander began its automated descent, mission controllers on Earth had no contact with it\u2014and no way to control it\u2014until after it landed. Radio transmissions take 11 minutes, 22 seconds to travel from one planet to the other\u2014far too long to allow for controllers here on Earth to guide the craft.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0\n\n\n250,000\n\n\n500,000\n\n\n750,000\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328.1 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSpirit\n(2004)\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nCuriosity\n(2012)\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nPlanned mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n2\n\n\n4\n\n\n6\n\n\n8\n\n\n10\n\n\n12\n\n\n14\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nPlanned mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n2\n\n\n4\n\n\n6\n\n\n8\n\n\n10\n\n\n12\n\n\n14\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe lander, which carries Perseverance and Ingenuity inside a protective shell, was traveling at about 12,100 miles an hour\u2014about 3 miles a second\u2014when it entered the Martian atmosphere. Friction from the thin air slowed the craft and heated it to a temperature of about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hot enough to melt cast iron.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think Mars holds any prospects for human habitation? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWhile still traveling at twice the speed of sound, the lander next deployed a 70-foot-wide parachute, the largest high-speed chute ever constructed. Seconds later, the craft jettisoned its protective heat shield and fired its retro rockets. Once the lander neared the surface, it lowered Perseverance on cables, like a crane lowering a heavy package, onto a safe spot amid the boulders, trenches, dunes and steep cliffs of Jezero Crater.\nChina\u2019s Tiawen-1 probe, which entered orbit around Mars last week, is expected to make the country\u2019s first landing on the planet in May.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China, the UAE and the U.S. all have spacecraft visiting Mars in February to study the Red Planet. WSJ explains how out-of-this-world technology is being used by NASA\u2019s Perseverance and China\u2019s Tianwen-1 in the search for evidence of life beyond our planet. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com After a seven-month, 292-million-mile journey, NASA\u2019s fastest and best-equipped rover ever touched down safely on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Lands Perseverance Rover Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7365",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-perseverance-rover-lands-on-mars-after-seven-minutes-of-terror-11613682303?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=34",
        "text": "The two-year Perseverance mission is the latest and most ambitious effort by NASA to find evidence of past life on Mars. The 1-ton, SUV-size rover will spend the next two years prospecting for evidence of ancient microbes. It will pack up any promising soil or rock samples into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis.\n\u201cPerseverance is safely on the surface of Mars,\u201d Swati Mohan, guidance, navigation and controls operations engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said as the mission control room around her erupted in cheers, whistles and applause.\n\n\nBristling with 23 cameras, sensors, a laser and a drill-equipped robotic arm, Perseverance will spend the next two years prospecting for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life. \n\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission. \nNASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return the samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\nThough it is now a barren place of icy dunes, dust devils, dead volcanoes and subzero winds, scientists believe Mars in its remote past may have been a comparatively lush, warm world\u2014one suitable for the chemistry of life. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe surface of Mars is seen in a photo transmitted back after the successful landing of the NASA Perseverance rover Thursday afternoon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nAble to cover ground three times faster than any previous Mars rover, Perseverance will look for traces of organic matter, which could be evidence of primordial microbes or other simple life-forms. Other places in the solar system\u2014from the searing clouds of Venus to the frozen oceans of moons around Jupiter and Saturn\u2014might also have the potential for life. But those places are considered even less accessible than Mars. \n\n\n\nThe Challenges of Landing on Mars\nNASA mission engineers call landing on Mars \u201cseven minutes of terror.\u201d Hundreds of things have to go perfectly. The landing zone is the smallest NASA has ever targeted. The spacecraft, though, is on its own all the way down, guided solely by pre-programmed commands in its onboard computer. That\u2019s because it takes about 11 minutes for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars, far too long for direct hands-on control. Here is how landing on Mars worked:\nAbout 10 minutes from landingThe spacecraft sheds solar panels, radios, and fuel tanks used during its flight to Mars. Only its protective aeroshell\u2014with rover and descent stage inside\u2014makes the trip to the surface. About 80 seconds after entering the atmosphere, the heat shield reaches about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Safe in the aeroshell, however, the rover gets up to only about room temperature.Six minutes, 50 seconds from landingTurbulence rocks the spacecraft as it descends, potentially nudging it off course. To compensate, it fires small thrusters on its backshell that adjust its angle and direction of lift. This \u201cguided entry\u201d technique helps the spacecraft stay on the path to its downrange target.Three minutes from landingTo balance its center of gravity, the spacecraft automatically ejects a half dozen small weights used to tilt the craft at the right angle for initial re-entry, preparing it for the parachute deployment.Two minutes, 45 seconds from landingParachute deploys, slowing the spacecraft from around 940 mph to around 200 mph. The spacecraft uses a new technology\u2014Range Trigger\u2014to calculate its distance to the landing target and open the parachute at the ideal time to hit its mark. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Two minutes, 25 seconds from landingThe spacecraft jettisons its heat shield, exposing the Perseverance rover to the onrush of air. Immediately, the rover starts photographing the approaching ground and using radar to figure out its altitude. The onboard computer compares the position data to an onboard map.One minute from landingTo slow down even more to its safe touchdown speed, the craft releases its back shield and cuts free of the parachute. It fires its eight descent stage engines. It maneuvers side-to-side to avoid the ejected parachute and shell.12 seconds from landingHovering about 66 feet above the surface, the descent stage lowers the rover on a set of cables about 21 feet long. Meanwhile, the rover unstows its mobility system, locking its legs and wheels into landing position.TouchdownThe rover lands safely in a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater. It cuts the tethers keeping it tied to the descent stage. This frees the descent stage to fly off and land at a safe distance from Perseverance.\nSource: NASA's Jet Propulsion LaboratoryBrian McGill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\nThis is the first After a seven-month, 292-million-mile journey, NASA\u2019s fastest and best-equipped rover ever touched down safely on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "Independent Review Urges Continuation of James Webb Telescope for \u2018Compelling Science\u2019 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7366",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/independent-review-urges-continuation-of-james-webb-telescope-for-compelling-science-1530127006?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=19",
        "text": "The review reiterated that a series of design, production and quality-control lapses caused the latest difficulties, many of which could have been avoided or solved by \u201csimple fixes that were not implemented,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Young,\n\n\n\n a retired NASA and industry official who headed the outside panel. But despite nagging problems that reappeared years after lawmakers added funding for the high-profile project and NASA managers significantly pushed back the anticipated launch date at least twice before, Mr. Young told reporters his group unanimously agreed the ambitious space telescope should be completed in light of \u201cthe compelling science\u201d it promised.\nIn his remarks\u00a0Wednesday, Mr. Young said that as recently as March, when NASA delayed the projected launch date to May 2020 from June 2019, \u201ctoo much optimism had been built into the schedule.\u201d He also told reporters \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody can tell us today\u201d whether further problems will crop up to prompt additional delays.\n\n\nOriginally slated to be launched in 2007, the space telescope is intended to travel farther into space that any previous observatory to try to study origins of stars and potentially identify other planets capable of supporting life.\nMr. Young said he had 80% confidence that the latest schedule and cost estimates will be met. For James Webb to continue, lawmakers will have to approve the new cost ceiling, which exceeds a firm congressionally imposed cap of $8 billion in place since 2011.\nThe project\u2019s initial price tag was pegged at less than $3.5 billion. Now, NASA\u2019s overall budget is expected to remain flat, but the updated cost estimate for development and the first five years of operation of James Webb is projected to balloon to some $9.6 billion. As a result, the agency faces the tough task of finding extra funds for the space telescope in coming years, partly by potentially shifting dollars from other NASA programs.\nBefore the press conference, a NASA public affairs official said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n the agency\u2019s chief, had sent a message to employees expressing his \u201cunwavering support\u201d for the space telescope.\nNorthrop Grumman, which previously revamped its production procedures and agreed to strict new government oversight requirements, has been criticized because workers\u00a0installed 16 valves on the\u00a0satellite\u2019s thrusters without relying on detailed instructions and in the process used the wrong cleaning compound.\nResulting leaks required a subcontractor to refurbish the valves, followed by another time-consuming process to replace and retest them. It took about three months to complete the process, one person familiar with the details said. \nWhen workers deployed a sun shield designed to protect the spacecraft\u2019s intricate gold, hexagonal-shaped mirrors in space, the operation took twice as long as expected and revealed shortcomings despite earlier successful tests with a one-third-scale replica.\nCables that pull the shield into shape\u00a0\u201cdevelop too much slack during the deployment, creating a snagging hazard,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s associate administrator for unmanned missions, said earlier this year.\nSeveral tears also appeared in the shield, because of unexpected stresses stemming from workers\u2019 incorrectly attaching hooks and cables to the wrong holes. Several of those fasteners still haven\u2019t been retrieved, NASA officials said\u00a0Wednesday.\nIn a release, Mr. Bridenstine said the telescope is vital to future astrophysics research\u2014beyond the current Hubble Space Telescope\u2014to enable scientists to do amazing things \u201cwe\u2019ve never been able to do before,\u201d such as \u201cpeer into other galaxies and see light from the very dawn of time.\u201d The review board\u2019s 30 recommendations already have been implemented or NASA is in the process of devising plans to implement them, agency officials said.\nMajor company and agency missteps identified in the 60-page report were disclosed previously, but the document provides an unvarnished glimpse of morale problems among production workers, \u201clapses in individual accountability\u201d affecting the larger workforce and test failures after which mitigation efforts \u201cwere not successfully completed.\u201d The review board, among other things, faulted \u201cthe current management concept and reporting structure\u201d as \u201ccomplex, confusing and inefficient.\u201d Calling the space telescope \u201cthe most complex system\u201d NASA\u2019s science mission division \u201chas ever built,\u201d reviewers said \u201cmission risk inherent in the complexity...cannot be underestimated and should be communicated clearly\u201d inside and outside NASA.\nMr. Young\u2019s team of experts also recommended enhancing testing, improving the fidelity of simulators and ensuring continuity of oversight by the same engineers throughout design, fabrication and testing of parts.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Launch of NASA\u2019s troubled James Webb space telescope will be delayed another year to 2021 and development costs will climb 10% above revised targets announced just three months ago, creating further congressional turmoil for the agency\u2019s top astronomy project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Independent Review Urges Continuation of James Webb Telescope for \u2018Compelling Science\u2019 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7367",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/independent-review-urges-continuation-of-james-webb-telescope-for-compelling-science-1530127006?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=73",
        "text": "The review reiterated that a series of design, production and quality-control lapses caused the latest difficulties, many of which could have been avoided or solved by \u201csimple fixes that were not implemented,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Young,\n\n\n\n a retired NASA and industry official who headed the outside panel. But despite nagging problems that reappeared years after lawmakers added funding for the high-profile project and NASA managers significantly pushed back the anticipated launch date at least twice before, Mr. Young told reporters his group unanimously agreed the ambitious space telescope should be completed in light of \u201cthe compelling science\u201d it promised.\n\n\n\n\nIn his remarks\u00a0Wednesday, Mr. Young said that as recently as March, when NASA delayed the projected launch date to May 2020 from June 2019, \u201ctoo much optimism had been built into the schedule.\u201d He also told reporters \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody can tell us today\u201d whether further problems will crop up to prompt additional delays.\n\n\nOriginally slated to be launched in 2007, the space telescope is intended to travel farther into space that any previous observatory to try to study origins of stars and potentially identify other planets capable of supporting life.\nMr. Young said he had 80% confidence that the latest schedule and cost estimates will be met. For James Webb to continue, lawmakers will have to approve the new cost ceiling, which exceeds a firm congressionally imposed cap of $8 billion in place since 2011.\nThe project\u2019s initial price tag was pegged at less than $3.5 billion. Now, NASA\u2019s overall budget is expected to remain flat, but the updated cost estimate for development and the first five years of operation of James Webb is projected to balloon to some $9.6 billion. As a result, the agency faces the tough task of finding extra funds for the space telescope in coming years, partly by potentially shifting dollars from other NASA programs.\nBefore the press conference, a NASA public affairs official said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n the agency\u2019s chief, had sent a message to employees expressing his \u201cunwavering support\u201d for the space telescope.\nNorthrop Grumman, which previously revamped its production procedures and agreed to strict new government oversight requirements, has been criticized because workers\u00a0installed 16 valves on the\u00a0satellite\u2019s thrusters without relying on detailed instructions and in the process used the wrong cleaning compound.\nResulting leaks required a subcontractor to refurbish the valves, followed by another time-consuming process to replace and retest them. It took about three months to complete the process, one person familiar with the details said. \nWhen workers deployed a sun shield designed to protect the spacecraft\u2019s intricate gold, hexagonal-shaped mirrors in space, the operation took twice as long as expected and revealed shortcomings despite earlier successful tests with a one-third-scale replica.\nCables that pull the shield into shape\u00a0\u201cdevelop too much slack during the deployment, creating a snagging hazard,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s associate administrator for unmanned missions, said earlier this year.\nSeveral tears also appeared in the shield, because of unexpected stresses stemming from workers\u2019 incorrectly attaching hooks and cables to the wrong holes. Several of those fasteners still haven\u2019t been retrieved, NASA officials said\u00a0Wednesday.\nIn a release, Mr. Bridenstine said the telescope is vital to future astrophysics research\u2014beyond the current Hubble Space Telescope\u2014to enable scientists to do amazing things \u201cwe\u2019ve never been able to do before,\u201d such as \u201cpeer into other galaxies and see light from the very dawn of time.\u201d The review board\u2019s 30 recommendations already have been implemented or NASA is in the process of devising plans to implement them, agency officials said.\nMajor company and agency missteps identified in the 60-page report were disclosed previously, but the document provides an unvarnished glimpse of morale problems among production workers, \u201clapses in individual accountability\u201d affecting the larger workforce and test failures after which mitigation efforts \u201cwere not successfully completed.\u201d The review board, among other things, faulted \u201cthe current management concept and reporting structure\u201d as \u201ccomplex, confusing and inefficient.\u201d Calling the space telescope \u201cthe most complex system\u201d NASA\u2019s science mission division \u201chas ever built,\u201d reviewers said \u201cmission risk inherent in the complexity...cannot be underestimated and should be communicated clearly\u201d inside and outside NASA.\nMr. Young\u2019s team of experts also recommended enhancing testing, improving the fidelity of simulators and ensuring continuity of oversight by the same engineers throughout design, fabrication and testing of parts.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Launch of NASA\u2019s troubled James Webb space telescope will be delayed another year to 2021 and development costs will climb 10% above revised targets announced just three months ago, creating further congressional turmoil for the agency\u2019s top astronomy project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Independent Review Urges Continuation of James Webb Telescope for \u2018Compelling Science\u2019 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7368",
        "date": "2018-06-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/independent-review-urges-continuation-of-james-webb-telescope-for-compelling-science-1530127006?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=66",
        "text": "The review reiterated that a series of design, production and quality-control lapses caused the latest difficulties, many of which could have been avoided or solved by \u201csimple fixes that were not implemented,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Young,\n\n\n\n a retired NASA and industry official who headed the outside panel. But despite nagging problems that reappeared years after lawmakers added funding for the high-profile project and NASA managers significantly pushed back the anticipated launch date at least twice before, Mr. Young told reporters his group unanimously agreed the ambitious space telescope should be completed in light of \u201cthe compelling science\u201d it promised.\nIn his remarks\u00a0Wednesday, Mr. Young said that as recently as March, when NASA delayed the projected launch date to May 2020 from June 2019, \u201ctoo much optimism had been built into the schedule.\u201d He also told reporters \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody can tell us today\u201d whether further problems will crop up to prompt additional delays.\n\n\nOriginally slated to be launched in 2007, the space telescope is intended to travel farther into space that any previous observatory to try to study origins of stars and potentially identify other planets capable of supporting life.\nMr. Young said he had 80% confidence that the latest schedule and cost estimates will be met. For James Webb to continue, lawmakers will have to approve the new cost ceiling, which exceeds a firm congressionally imposed cap of $8 billion in place since 2011.\nThe project\u2019s initial price tag was pegged at less than $3.5 billion. Now, NASA\u2019s overall budget is expected to remain flat, but the updated cost estimate for development and the first five years of operation of James Webb is projected to balloon to some $9.6 billion. As a result, the agency faces the tough task of finding extra funds for the space telescope in coming years, partly by potentially shifting dollars from other NASA programs.\nBefore the press conference, a NASA public affairs official said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n the agency\u2019s chief, had sent a message to employees expressing his \u201cunwavering support\u201d for the space telescope.\nNorthrop Grumman, which previously revamped its production procedures and agreed to strict new government oversight requirements, has been criticized because workers\u00a0installed 16 valves on the\u00a0satellite\u2019s thrusters without relying on detailed instructions and in the process used the wrong cleaning compound.\nResulting leaks required a subcontractor to refurbish the valves, followed by another time-consuming process to replace and retest them. It took about three months to complete the process, one person familiar with the details said. \nWhen workers deployed a sun shield designed to protect the spacecraft\u2019s intricate gold, hexagonal-shaped mirrors in space, the operation took twice as long as expected and revealed shortcomings despite earlier successful tests with a one-third-scale replica.\nCables that pull the shield into shape\u00a0\u201cdevelop too much slack during the deployment, creating a snagging hazard,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s associate administrator for unmanned missions, said earlier this year.\nSeveral tears also appeared in the shield, because of unexpected stresses stemming from workers\u2019 incorrectly attaching hooks and cables to the wrong holes. Several of those fasteners still haven\u2019t been retrieved, NASA officials said\u00a0Wednesday.\nIn a release, Mr. Bridenstine said the telescope is vital to future astrophysics research\u2014beyond the current Hubble Space Telescope\u2014to enable scientists to do amazing things \u201cwe\u2019ve never been able to do before,\u201d such as \u201cpeer into other galaxies and see light from the very dawn of time.\u201d The review board\u2019s 30 recommendations already have been implemented or NASA is in the process of devising plans to implement them, agency officials said.\nMajor company and agency missteps identified in the 60-page report were disclosed previously, but the document provides an unvarnished glimpse of morale problems among production workers, \u201clapses in individual accountability\u201d affecting the larger workforce and test failures after which mitigation efforts \u201cwere not successfully completed.\u201d The review board, among other things, faulted \u201cthe current management concept and reporting structure\u201d as \u201ccomplex, confusing and inefficient.\u201d Calling the space telescope \u201cthe most complex system\u201d NASA\u2019s science mission division \u201chas ever built,\u201d reviewers said \u201cmission risk inherent in the complexity...cannot be underestimated and should be communicated clearly\u201d inside and outside NASA.\nMr. Young\u2019s team of experts also recommended enhancing testing, improving the fidelity of simulators and ensuring continuity of oversight by the same engineers throughout design, fabrication and testing of parts.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Launch of NASA\u2019s troubled James Webb space telescope will be delayed another year to 2021 and development costs will climb 10% above revised targets announced just three months ago, creating further congressional turmoil for the agency\u2019s top astronomy project. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7369",
        "date": "2017-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/floridas-space-coast-is-filling-the-crater-left-by-nasa-1487327408?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=26",
        "text": "The pad\u2019s rebirth illustrates the economic rebound of Florida\u2019s Space Coast as it transitions to a more-diverse aerospace economy, with a significant commercial sector, from one powered by government investment dating back to the administration of John F. Kennedy.\nIn the past six years, the area\u2019s economic development agency has announced projects bringing in $1.4 billion in capital investment and generating an estimated 7,900 jobs. That includes 1,800 new jobs announced by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which landed a Pentagon contract in 2015 to build long-range bombers.\n\n\n\u201cThe Space Coast is kind of on fire right now,\u201d said Greg Wyler, founder of OneWeb Ltd., which aims to use hundreds of satellites to provide internet access in rural and emerging markets.\nIn a joint venture with a division of Airbus SE, OneWeb plans to break ground soon on a high-tech manufacturing facility at Exploration Park, which borders the Kennedy Space Center and is managed by Space Florida, the state\u2019s aerospace development authority. The facility, expected to employ 250 people, is designed to crank out three satellites a day when it opens next year.\n\n\n Re-launching the Space Coast After years of economic downturn following the end of the NASA shuttle program, Florida\u2019s Space Coast is being rejuvenated by new space ventures. A look at some of the recent activity by space companies: 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. DETAIL 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. 1 OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 3 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. Cape Canaveral AFS 4 5 6. 6 Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 7 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar surface. Cocoa 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. DETAIL 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. 1 Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. 3 Cape Canaveral AFS 4 6. Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 5 6 7 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar surface. Cocoa 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. DETAIL 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. 1 OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 3 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. Cape Canaveral AFS 4 5 6. 6 Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 7 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar surface. Cocoa DETAIL FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 1 Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 3 Cape Canaveral AFS 4 5 6 7 8 Cocoa 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. 6. Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar surface The planned launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to the international space station illustrates the region\u2019s rebirth as a more-diverse aerospace economy. ",
        "author": "Arian Campo-Flores"
    },
    {
        "title": "Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7370",
        "date": "2017-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/floridas-space-coast-is-filling-the-crater-left-by-nasa-1487327408?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=130",
        "text": "The pad\u2019s rebirth illustrates the economic rebound of Florida\u2019s Space Coast as it transitions to a more-diverse aerospace economy, with a significant commercial sector, from one powered by government investment dating back to the administration of John F. Kennedy.\n\n\n\n\nIn the past six years, the area\u2019s economic development agency has announced projects bringing in $1.4 billion in capital investment and generating an estimated 7,900 jobs. That includes 1,800 new jobs announced by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which landed a Pentagon contract in 2015 to build long-range bombers.\n\n\n\u201cThe Space Coast is kind of on fire right now,\u201d said Greg Wyler, founder of OneWeb Ltd., which aims to use hundreds of satellites to provide internet access in rural and emerging markets.\nIn a joint venture with a division of Airbus SE, OneWeb plans to break ground soon on a high-tech manufacturing facility at Exploration Park, which borders the Kennedy Space Center and is managed by Space Florida, the state\u2019s aerospace development authority. The facility, expected to employ 250 people, is designed to crank out three satellites a day when it opens next year.\n\n\n Re-launching the Space Coast After years of economic downturn following the end of the NASA shuttle program, Florida\u2019s Space Coast is being rejuvenated by new space ventures. A look at some of the recent activity by space companies: 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. DETAIL 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. 1 OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 3 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. Cape Canaveral AFS 4 5 6. 6 Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 7 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar surface. Cocoa 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. DETAIL 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. 1 Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. 3 Cape Canaveral AFS 4 6. Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 5 6 7 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar surface. Cocoa 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. DETAIL 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. 1 OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 3 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. Cape Canaveral AFS 4 5 6. 6 Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 7 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar surface. Cocoa DETAIL FLORIDA NASA shuttle landing facility 1 Titusville 2 Kennedy Space Center 3 Cape Canaveral AFS 4 5 6 7 8 Cocoa 1. SpaceX: Launch Pad 39A, from which a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch as early as Saturday. 2. Boeing: NASA Starliner project, aimed at transporting crew to the international space station. 3. SpaceX: Launch Complex 40, site of a Falcon 9 explosion last year. 4. OneWeb: The company plans to break ground soon on a high-tech facility to assemble compact satellites. 5. Lockheed Martin: NASA Orion project, aimed at sending crew into deep space. 6. Blue Origin: Facility under construction to build New Glenn rocket. 7. Blue Origin: Launch Complex 36, from where the New Glenn will launch. 8. Moon Express: An old Delta launch pad where the company plans to build tiny spacecraft to travel to the lunar sur The planned launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to the international space station illustrates the region\u2019s rebirth as a more-diverse aerospace economy. ",
        "author": "Arian Campo-Flores"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. to Rely on Russia for Astronaut Transportation Into 2019 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7371",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-rely-on-russia-for-astronaut-transportation-into-2019-1513282340?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=21",
        "text": "The move indicates that senior NASA officials increasingly are concerned the current 2018 timetable for switching to U.S. vehicles may prove too ambitious. The extra Russian seats amount to an insurance policy that NASA will be able to continue ferrying its crews to the orbiting laboratory, even if U.S. firms developing two commercial alternatives take longer than expected to achieve final certification.\nEarlier this year, NASA disclosed that it had an option to lock in those seats, but it wasn\u2019t until this week that a high-ranking agency official publicly indicated the U.S. had taken formal steps to acquire them. Since retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet six years ago, U.S. astronauts have relied entirely on Russian rockets and capsules to reach and return from the space station.\n\n\nThe spokeswoman said the option was exercised in October to ensure \u201crequired flexibility to establish a reliable launch schedule\u201d to the space station. She also said the decision, along with a pair of seats purchased earlier, will \u201cmaximize time dedicated to research\u201d by maintaining a crew size of four on the U.S. segment of the $100-billion station.\nBoeing Co. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have separate contracts to develop space taxis to take crews to the station. SpaceX\u2019s latest projections call for the first crewed test flight in August 2018, and Boeing is targeting its first crewed test flight for November. The plan is to quickly start ferry flights afterward\nBut in light of technical challenges, those deadlines have been questioned by many industry officials, independent experts sitting on NASA advisory panels and even some agency managers. NASA officials and both contractors have stressed crews won\u2019t fly on the new capsules until all safety questions are resolved.\nSignificant issues include the reliability of crew abort systems during ascent, radiation hazards to crews inside the capsules and performance of parachutes and heat shields during descents.\nBoth SpaceX and Boeing have said they are on track to meet all agency standards and requirements. NASA\u2019s independent safety watchdogs, however, have said agency leaders may end up issuing waivers from some long-established safety requirements before initial crewed flights commence.\nUsing the three additional seats also is likely to prompt scrutiny on Capitol Hill, particularly among House Republicans who recently stepped up criticism of NASA managers for delays in several major programs. Lawmakers also are eager to end the Russian transportation.\nLast month, NASA\u2019s inspector general said technical challenges \u201care now driving schedule slippages,\u201d and the agency \u201cmay need to buy additional seats from Russia to ensure a continued U.S. presence\u201d on the space station. Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot responded to the report by saying that his team was working with Russia and domestic partners to guarantee \u201cthat the U.S. has uninterrupted access.\u201d\nIn the spring, NASA announced an unusual arrangement to buy two Soyuz seats\u2014intended to be used in 2017 and 2018\u2014from Boeing, which acquired them under a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\nAs part of the overall package, NASA also acquired the option for the three additional seats on Russian spacecraft in 2019. Now, those seats have been definitively reserved for U.S. astronauts, and the NASA spokeswoman said agency officials intend to use them regardless of progress on the domestic commercial crew programs.\nThe five seats cost NASA a total of $373.5 million, or about $75 million per astronaut. \nAt the start of the year, Government Accountability Office investigators predicted that both contractors likely would miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA started its effort more than a decade ago to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015 for crewed missions. Commercial cargo deliveries have been underway since 2012.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA will continue using Russian spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit for two more years, despite projections that domestic vehicles will be ready in 2018. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. to Rely on Russia for Astronaut Transportation Into 2019 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7372",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-rely-on-russia-for-astronaut-transportation-into-2019-1513282340?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=82",
        "text": "The move indicates that senior NASA officials increasingly are concerned the current 2018 timetable for switching to U.S. vehicles may prove too ambitious. The extra Russian seats amount to an insurance policy that NASA will be able to continue ferrying its crews to the orbiting laboratory, even if U.S. firms developing two commercial alternatives take longer than expected to achieve final certification.\nEarlier this year, NASA disclosed that it had an option to lock in those seats, but it wasn\u2019t until this week that a high-ranking agency official publicly indicated the U.S. had taken formal steps to acquire them. Since retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet six years ago, U.S. astronauts have relied entirely on Russian rockets and capsules to reach and return from the space station.\n\n\nThe spokeswoman said the option was exercised in October to ensure \u201crequired flexibility to establish a reliable launch schedule\u201d to the space station. She also said the decision, along with a pair of seats purchased earlier, will \u201cmaximize time dedicated to research\u201d by maintaining a crew size of four on the U.S. segment of the $100-billion station.\nBoeing Co. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have separate contracts to develop space taxis to take crews to the station. SpaceX\u2019s latest projections call for the first crewed test flight in August 2018, and Boeing is targeting its first crewed test flight for November. The plan is to quickly start ferry flights afterward\nBut in light of technical challenges, those deadlines have been questioned by many industry officials, independent experts sitting on NASA advisory panels and even some agency managers. NASA officials and both contractors have stressed crews won\u2019t fly on the new capsules until all safety questions are resolved.\nSignificant issues include the reliability of crew abort systems during ascent, radiation hazards to crews inside the capsules and performance of parachutes and heat shields during descents.\nBoth SpaceX and Boeing have said they are on track to meet all agency standards and requirements. NASA\u2019s independent safety watchdogs, however, have said agency leaders may end up issuing waivers from some long-established safety requirements before initial crewed flights commence.\nUsing the three additional seats also is likely to prompt scrutiny on Capitol Hill, particularly among House Republicans who recently stepped up criticism of NASA managers for delays in several major programs. Lawmakers also are eager to end the Russian transportation.\nLast month, NASA\u2019s inspector general said technical challenges \u201care now driving schedule slippages,\u201d and the agency \u201cmay need to buy additional seats from Russia to ensure a continued U.S. presence\u201d on the space station. Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot responded to the report by saying that his team was working with Russia and domestic partners to guarantee \u201cthat the U.S. has uninterrupted access.\u201d\nIn the spring, NASA announced an unusual arrangement to buy two Soyuz seats\u2014intended to be used in 2017 and 2018\u2014from Boeing, which acquired them under a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\nAs part of the overall package, NASA also acquired the option for the three additional seats on Russian spacecraft in 2019. Now, those seats have been definitively reserved for U.S. astronauts, and the NASA spokeswoman said agency officials intend to use them regardless of progress on the domestic commercial crew programs.\nThe five seats cost NASA a total of $373.5 million, or about $75 million per astronaut. \nAt the start of the year, Government Accountability Office investigators predicted that both contractors likely would miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA started its effort more than a decade ago to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015 for crewed missions. Commercial cargo deliveries have been underway since 2012.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA will continue using Russian spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit for two more years, despite projections that domestic vehicles will be ready in 2018. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. to Rely on Russia for Astronaut Transportation Into 2019 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7373",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-rely-on-russia-for-astronaut-transportation-into-2019-1513282340?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=73",
        "text": "The move indicates that senior NASA officials increasingly are concerned the current 2018 timetable for switching to U.S. vehicles may prove too ambitious. The extra Russian seats amount to an insurance policy that NASA will be able to continue ferrying its crews to the orbiting laboratory, even if U.S. firms developing two commercial alternatives take longer than expected to achieve final certification.\nEarlier this year, NASA disclosed that it had an option to lock in those seats, but it wasn\u2019t until this week that a high-ranking agency official publicly indicated the U.S. had taken formal steps to acquire them. Since retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet six years ago, U.S. astronauts have relied entirely on Russian rockets and capsules to reach and return from the space station.\n\n\nThe spokeswoman said the option was exercised in October to ensure \u201crequired flexibility to establish a reliable launch schedule\u201d to the space station. She also said the decision, along with a pair of seats purchased earlier, will \u201cmaximize time dedicated to research\u201d by maintaining a crew size of four on the U.S. segment of the $100-billion station.\nBoeing Co. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have separate contracts to develop space taxis to take crews to the station. SpaceX\u2019s latest projections call for the first crewed test flight in August 2018, and Boeing is targeting its first crewed test flight for November. The plan is to quickly start ferry flights afterward\nBut in light of technical challenges, those deadlines have been questioned by many industry officials, independent experts sitting on NASA advisory panels and even some agency managers. NASA officials and both contractors have stressed crews won\u2019t fly on the new capsules until all safety questions are resolved.\nSignificant issues include the reliability of crew abort systems during ascent, radiation hazards to crews inside the capsules and performance of parachutes and heat shields during descents.\nBoth SpaceX and Boeing have said they are on track to meet all agency standards and requirements. NASA\u2019s independent safety watchdogs, however, have said agency leaders may end up issuing waivers from some long-established safety requirements before initial crewed flights commence.\nUsing the three additional seats also is likely to prompt scrutiny on Capitol Hill, particularly among House Republicans who recently stepped up criticism of NASA managers for delays in several major programs. Lawmakers also are eager to end the Russian transportation.\nLast month, NASA\u2019s inspector general said technical challenges \u201care now driving schedule slippages,\u201d and the agency \u201cmay need to buy additional seats from Russia to ensure a continued U.S. presence\u201d on the space station. Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot responded to the report by saying that his team was working with Russia and domestic partners to guarantee \u201cthat the U.S. has uninterrupted access.\u201d\nIn the spring, NASA announced an unusual arrangement to buy two Soyuz seats\u2014intended to be used in 2017 and 2018\u2014from Boeing, which acquired them under a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\nAs part of the overall package, NASA also acquired the option for the three additional seats on Russian spacecraft in 2019. Now, those seats have been definitively reserved for U.S. astronauts, and the NASA spokeswoman said agency officials intend to use them regardless of progress on the domestic commercial crew programs.\nThe five seats cost NASA a total of $373.5 million, or about $75 million per astronaut. \nAt the start of the year, Government Accountability Office investigators predicted that both contractors likely would miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA started its effort more than a decade ago to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015 for crewed missions. Commercial cargo deliveries have been underway since 2012.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA will continue using Russian spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit for two more years, despite projections that domestic vehicles will be ready in 2018. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. to Rely on Russia for Astronaut Transportation Into 2019 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7374",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-rely-on-russia-for-astronaut-transportation-into-2019-1513282340?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=106",
        "text": "The move indicates that senior NASA officials increasingly are concerned the current 2018 timetable for switching to U.S. vehicles may prove too ambitious. The extra Russian seats amount to an insurance policy that NASA will be able to continue ferrying its crews to the orbiting laboratory, even if U.S. firms developing two commercial alternatives take longer than expected to achieve final certification.\n\n\n\n\nEarlier this year, NASA disclosed that it had an option to lock in those seats, but it wasn\u2019t until this week that a high-ranking agency official publicly indicated the U.S. had taken formal steps to acquire them. Since retirement of NASA\u2019s space shuttle fleet six years ago, U.S. astronauts have relied entirely on Russian rockets and capsules to reach and return from the space station.\n\n\nThe spokeswoman said the option was exercised in October to ensure \u201crequired flexibility to establish a reliable launch schedule\u201d to the space station. She also said the decision, along with a pair of seats purchased earlier, will \u201cmaximize time dedicated to research\u201d by maintaining a crew size of four on the U.S. segment of the $100-billion station.\nBoeing Co. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have separate contracts to develop space taxis to take crews to the station. SpaceX\u2019s latest projections call for the first crewed test flight in August 2018, and Boeing is targeting its first crewed test flight for November. The plan is to quickly start ferry flights afterward\nBut in light of technical challenges, those deadlines have been questioned by many industry officials, independent experts sitting on NASA advisory panels and even some agency managers. NASA officials and both contractors have stressed crews won\u2019t fly on the new capsules until all safety questions are resolved.\nSignificant issues include the reliability of crew abort systems during ascent, radiation hazards to crews inside the capsules and performance of parachutes and heat shields during descents.\nBoth SpaceX and Boeing have said they are on track to meet all agency standards and requirements. NASA\u2019s independent safety watchdogs, however, have said agency leaders may end up issuing waivers from some long-established safety requirements before initial crewed flights commence.\nUsing the three additional seats also is likely to prompt scrutiny on Capitol Hill, particularly among House Republicans who recently stepped up criticism of NASA managers for delays in several major programs. Lawmakers also are eager to end the Russian transportation.\nLast month, NASA\u2019s inspector general said technical challenges \u201care now driving schedule slippages,\u201d and the agency \u201cmay need to buy additional seats from Russia to ensure a continued U.S. presence\u201d on the space station. Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot responded to the report by saying that his team was working with Russia and domestic partners to guarantee \u201cthat the U.S. has uninterrupted access.\u201d\nIn the spring, NASA announced an unusual arrangement to buy two Soyuz seats\u2014intended to be used in 2017 and 2018\u2014from Boeing, which acquired them under a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\nAs part of the overall package, NASA also acquired the option for the three additional seats on Russian spacecraft in 2019. Now, those seats have been definitively reserved for U.S. astronauts, and the NASA spokeswoman said agency officials intend to use them regardless of progress on the domestic commercial crew programs.\nThe five seats cost NASA a total of $373.5 million, or about $75 million per astronaut. \nAt the start of the year, Government Accountability Office investigators predicted that both contractors likely would miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA started its effort more than a decade ago to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015 for crewed missions. Commercial cargo deliveries have been underway since 2012.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA will continue using Russian spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit for two more years, despite projections that domestic vehicles will be ready in 2018. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7375",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-passes-bipartisan-19-5-billion-nasa-reauthorization-bill-1488946651?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=25",
        "text": "The intent of the legislation, initially drafted before the November elections, was to try to block the incoming administration from making potentially wholesale changes to existing exploration projects, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s general goal to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the mid 2030s.\nBut in the process, House and Senate leaders agreed with various interest groups to safeguard their most important programs, meaning that the measure essentially punts on most of the tough spending trade-offs confronting NASA. Passed by the full House on a voice vote and virtually without public controversy, the bill also doesn\u2019t specifically deal with the concept of enhanced public-private partnerships President Donald Trump and his top aides favor as a way to accelerate manned exploration of the Moon or the solar system.\n\n\nReflecting the status quo nature of the package, lawmakers continued to support a hotly debated mission for an unmanned spacecraft to grab a sample of an asteroid. The program is strongly opposed by many House members.\nIn the same fashion, the final bill\u2014which was cleared beforehand with the White House\u2014doesn\u2019t cut back significantly on various earth-sensing and remote-observation programs intended to study climate change.\nSuch initiatives have been attacked as wasteful and misguided by various Republican leaders in the Senate. At the same time, White House budget officials are demanding deep cuts in related weather and environmental programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.\nFor NASA, however, the language of key provisions, combined with robust spending levels, provide \u201cmuch needed continuity and stability,\u201d while paving the way for potentially \u201ceven more significant investment in space exploration,\u201d according to Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the subcommittee that hammered out compromises with the House.\nRep. Brian Babin, another Texas Republican and head of the relevant House subcommittee, recently told an industry gathering in Washington that the legislation \u201cdirects the [Trump] administration to stay the course\u201d on all major programs.\nIt is imperative to \u201cmaintain commitment of purpose across the board,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, because the U.S. \u201ccannot afford to throw NASA\u2019s exploration programs into disarray the way they were derailed\u201d at the start of President Barack Obama\u2019s tenure in office. Mr. Obama canceled NASA-run programs to send astronauts to the Moon, and instead sought to promote commercial alternatives to ferry crews and cargo into orbit.\nThe companion bills that have now cleared both the House and the Senate call for NASA to formally study the option of continuing to keep the international space station in orbit through 2028, or four years beyond the current deadline.\nThe biggest changes in the bills relate to Mars. Lawmakers voted to require NASA to provide a more-detailed plan for deep-space exploration by astronauts. In addition, as expected, they identify getting crews to Mars as NASA\u2019s paramount mission over the next two decades. Such strong language isn\u2019t binding on future lawmakers, and progress will depend on funding variables and technological advances.\nBut in the end, the bill\u2019s proponents aim to make it politically harder for President Trump or his successors to scale back the effort\u2014or perhaps change the goal altogether.\nAfter passage, Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, put out a release noting that the legislation \u201cdirects NASA to create a road map for human exploration and guides the future path of exploration for decades to come.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The House on Tuesday followed the Senate\u2019s lead by adopting bipartisan legislation supporting all of NASA\u2019s major manned exploration programs but for the first time designated human settlement of Mars as one of the agency\u2019s explicit long-term goals. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7376",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-passes-bipartisan-19-5-billion-nasa-reauthorization-bill-1488946651?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=98",
        "text": "The intent of the legislation, initially drafted before the November elections, was to try to block the incoming administration from making potentially wholesale changes to existing exploration projects, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s general goal to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the mid 2030s.\n\n\n\n\nBut in the process, House and Senate leaders agreed with various interest groups to safeguard their most important programs, meaning that the measure essentially punts on most of the tough spending trade-offs confronting NASA. Passed by the full House on a voice vote and virtually without public controversy, the bill also doesn\u2019t specifically deal with the concept of enhanced public-private partnerships President Donald Trump and his top aides favor as a way to accelerate manned exploration of the Moon or the solar system.\n\n\nReflecting the status quo nature of the package, lawmakers continued to support a hotly debated mission for an unmanned spacecraft to grab a sample of an asteroid. The program is strongly opposed by many House members.\nIn the same fashion, the final bill\u2014which was cleared beforehand with the White House\u2014doesn\u2019t cut back significantly on various earth-sensing and remote-observation programs intended to study climate change.\nSuch initiatives have been attacked as wasteful and misguided by various Republican leaders in the Senate. At the same time, White House budget officials are demanding deep cuts in related weather and environmental programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.\nFor NASA, however, the language of key provisions, combined with robust spending levels, provide \u201cmuch needed continuity and stability,\u201d while paving the way for potentially \u201ceven more significant investment in space exploration,\u201d according to Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the subcommittee that hammered out compromises with the House.\nRep. Brian Babin, another Texas Republican and head of the relevant House subcommittee, recently told an industry gathering in Washington that the legislation \u201cdirects the [Trump] administration to stay the course\u201d on all major programs.\nIt is imperative to \u201cmaintain commitment of purpose across the board,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, because the U.S. \u201ccannot afford to throw NASA\u2019s exploration programs into disarray the way they were derailed\u201d at the start of President Barack Obama\u2019s tenure in office. Mr. Obama canceled NASA-run programs to send astronauts to the Moon, and instead sought to promote commercial alternatives to ferry crews and cargo into orbit.\nThe companion bills that have now cleared both the House and the Senate call for NASA to formally study the option of continuing to keep the international space station in orbit through 2028, or four years beyond the current deadline.\nThe biggest changes in the bills relate to Mars. Lawmakers voted to require NASA to provide a more-detailed plan for deep-space exploration by astronauts. In addition, as expected, they identify getting crews to Mars as NASA\u2019s paramount mission over the next two decades. Such strong language isn\u2019t binding on future lawmakers, and progress will depend on funding variables and technological advances.\nBut in the end, the bill\u2019s proponents aim to make it politically harder for President Trump or his successors to scale back the effort\u2014or perhaps change the goal altogether.\nAfter passage, Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, put out a release noting that the legislation \u201cdirects NASA to create a road map for human exploration and guides the future path of exploration for decades to come.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The House on Tuesday followed the Senate\u2019s lead by adopting bipartisan legislation supporting all of NASA\u2019s major manned exploration programs but for the first time designated human settlement of Mars as one of the agency\u2019s explicit long-term goals. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7377",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-passes-bipartisan-19-5-billion-nasa-reauthorization-bill-1488946651?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=86",
        "text": "The intent of the legislation, initially drafted before the November elections, was to try to block the incoming administration from making potentially wholesale changes to existing exploration projects, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s general goal to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the mid 2030s.\nBut in the process, House and Senate leaders agreed with various interest groups to safeguard their most important programs, meaning that the measure essentially punts on most of the tough spending trade-offs confronting NASA. Passed by the full House on a voice vote and virtually without public controversy, the bill also doesn\u2019t specifically deal with the concept of enhanced public-private partnerships President Donald Trump and his top aides favor as a way to accelerate manned exploration of the Moon or the solar system.\n\n\nReflecting the status quo nature of the package, lawmakers continued to support a hotly debated mission for an unmanned spacecraft to grab a sample of an asteroid. The program is strongly opposed by many House members.\nIn the same fashion, the final bill\u2014which was cleared beforehand with the White House\u2014doesn\u2019t cut back significantly on various earth-sensing and remote-observation programs intended to study climate change.\nSuch initiatives have been attacked as wasteful and misguided by various Republican leaders in the Senate. At the same time, White House budget officials are demanding deep cuts in related weather and environmental programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.\nFor NASA, however, the language of key provisions, combined with robust spending levels, provide \u201cmuch needed continuity and stability,\u201d while paving the way for potentially \u201ceven more significant investment in space exploration,\u201d according to Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the subcommittee that hammered out compromises with the House.\nRep. Brian Babin, another Texas Republican and head of the relevant House subcommittee, recently told an industry gathering in Washington that the legislation \u201cdirects the [Trump] administration to stay the course\u201d on all major programs.\nIt is imperative to \u201cmaintain commitment of purpose across the board,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, because the U.S. \u201ccannot afford to throw NASA\u2019s exploration programs into disarray the way they were derailed\u201d at the start of President Barack Obama\u2019s tenure in office. Mr. Obama canceled NASA-run programs to send astronauts to the Moon, and instead sought to promote commercial alternatives to ferry crews and cargo into orbit.\nThe companion bills that have now cleared both the House and the Senate call for NASA to formally study the option of continuing to keep the international space station in orbit through 2028, or four years beyond the current deadline.\nThe biggest changes in the bills relate to Mars. Lawmakers voted to require NASA to provide a more-detailed plan for deep-space exploration by astronauts. In addition, as expected, they identify getting crews to Mars as NASA\u2019s paramount mission over the next two decades. Such strong language isn\u2019t binding on future lawmakers, and progress will depend on funding variables and technological advances.\nBut in the end, the bill\u2019s proponents aim to make it politically harder for President Trump or his successors to scale back the effort\u2014or perhaps change the goal altogether.\nAfter passage, Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, put out a release noting that the legislation \u201cdirects NASA to create a road map for human exploration and guides the future path of exploration for decades to come.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The House on Tuesday followed the Senate\u2019s lead by adopting bipartisan legislation supporting all of NASA\u2019s major manned exploration programs but for the first time designated human settlement of Mars as one of the agency\u2019s explicit long-term goals. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "House Passes Bipartisan $19.5 Billion NASA Reauthorization Bill (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7378",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-passes-bipartisan-19-5-billion-nasa-reauthorization-bill-1488946651?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=128",
        "text": "The intent of the legislation, initially drafted before the November elections, was to try to block the incoming administration from making potentially wholesale changes to existing exploration projects, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s general goal to send astronauts to the Red Planet by the mid 2030s.\n\n\n\n\nBut in the process, House and Senate leaders agreed with various interest groups to safeguard their most important programs, meaning that the measure essentially punts on most of the tough spending trade-offs confronting NASA. Passed by the full House on a voice vote and virtually without public controversy, the bill also doesn\u2019t specifically deal with the concept of enhanced public-private partnerships President Donald Trump and his top aides favor as a way to accelerate manned exploration of the Moon or the solar system.\n\n\nReflecting the status quo nature of the package, lawmakers continued to support a hotly debated mission for an unmanned spacecraft to grab a sample of an asteroid. The program is strongly opposed by many House members.\nIn the same fashion, the final bill\u2014which was cleared beforehand with the White House\u2014doesn\u2019t cut back significantly on various earth-sensing and remote-observation programs intended to study climate change.\nSuch initiatives have been attacked as wasteful and misguided by various Republican leaders in the Senate. At the same time, White House budget officials are demanding deep cuts in related weather and environmental programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.\nFor NASA, however, the language of key provisions, combined with robust spending levels, provide \u201cmuch needed continuity and stability,\u201d while paving the way for potentially \u201ceven more significant investment in space exploration,\u201d according to Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the subcommittee that hammered out compromises with the House.\nRep. Brian Babin, another Texas Republican and head of the relevant House subcommittee, recently told an industry gathering in Washington that the legislation \u201cdirects the [Trump] administration to stay the course\u201d on all major programs.\nIt is imperative to \u201cmaintain commitment of purpose across the board,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, because the U.S. \u201ccannot afford to throw NASA\u2019s exploration programs into disarray the way they were derailed\u201d at the start of President Barack Obama\u2019s tenure in office. Mr. Obama canceled NASA-run programs to send astronauts to the Moon, and instead sought to promote commercial alternatives to ferry crews and cargo into orbit.\nThe companion bills that have now cleared both the House and the Senate call for NASA to formally study the option of continuing to keep the international space station in orbit through 2028, or four years beyond the current deadline.\nThe biggest changes in the bills relate to Mars. Lawmakers voted to require NASA to provide a more-detailed plan for deep-space exploration by astronauts. In addition, as expected, they identify getting crews to Mars as NASA\u2019s paramount mission over the next two decades. Such strong language isn\u2019t binding on future lawmakers, and progress will depend on funding variables and technological advances.\nBut in the end, the bill\u2019s proponents aim to make it politically harder for President Trump or his successors to scale back the effort\u2014or perhaps change the goal altogether.\nAfter passage, Rep. Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, put out a release noting that the legislation \u201cdirects NASA to create a road map for human exploration and guides the future path of exploration for decades to come.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The House on Tuesday followed the Senate\u2019s lead by adopting bipartisan legislation supporting all of NASA\u2019s major manned exploration programs but for the first time designated human settlement of Mars as one of the agency\u2019s explicit long-term goals. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7379",
        "date": "2017-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-manned-exploration-chief-highlights-risks-of-new-rockets-and-capsules-1486558730?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=26",
        "text": "The fundamental issue is \u201chow we should have this discussion with the public in general, and among ourselves\u201d to accept and try realistically to quantify the dangers, Mr. Gerstenmaier said. \u201cNo amount of hype can reduce the risk or make the risk less real.\u201d\nThe remarks come at a politically sensitive juncture for NASA, which is waiting for a new administrator and likely revised marching orders from President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n White House team. At the same time, the agency faces escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to complete a new generation of manned systems and lock in an exploration road map to Mars through the 2030s.\n\n\nUntil some of the new systems are operational, NASA has no choice but to continue relying on Russian rockets and spacecraft to blast U.S. astronauts into orbit.\nHistorically, newly-designed rockets have a failure rate of roughly one out of the first three missions. The record has been much better for the latest generation of boosters now flying, but industry and independent safety experts fret the trend could reverse itself.\nNASA is spending more than $2 billion annually on a heavy-lift booster, called the Space Launch System, headed by a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n .-led industry team.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n is working on a multibillion-dollar manned capsule, dubbed Orion, designed to sit atop that booster. The combination is slated to fly for the first time next year without a crew, followed by a manned test flight targeted for 2021.\nSeparately, Boeing is building what has been called a commercial space taxi to ferry U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station before the end of the decade.\nEntrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is scheduled to start regular astronaut trips to the station around 2019, using an upgraded variant of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket carrying a manned version of its Dragon cargo capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWilliam Gerstenmaier of NASA\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nTaken together, Mr. Gerstenmaier and other veteran NASA managers say, the level of activity\u2014including building and testing flight hardware\u2014is practically unmatched since the heyday of the manned Moon missions during the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s acting administrator, has described the heightened activity around the agency as a welcome sign of progress. He sees technical problems related to normal production and testing challenges.\nStill, Mr. Gerstenmaier, who is widely respected among industry and congressional leaders for his technical and management pedigree, urged everyone to be more forthright about the prospects that something catastrophic could occur as an array of new technologies is introduced and tested amid the rigors of space.\nJust before the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was deemed to be one in nine, according to the NASA official. Yet when the system was initially designed and fielded, he said, engineers and managers calculated the chances of such an event to be less than one in 500.\nNow, NASA\u2019s minimum safety target is to certify commercial spacecraft that statistically, have no more than one chance in 275 of suffering a catastrophic accident. But \u201cit is not a panacea to address the risk, and it is by no means absolute,\u201d according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, who managed integration of the space shuttle in the late 1980s and in 2002 became manager of the space shuttle program.\n\u201cWe should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d he told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d Above all, he said, introduction of new manned systems entails \u201ca substantial element of risk, which must be acknowledged.\u201d There will be close calls, and NASA and industry have to learn from them, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier.\nAfter his presentation, he told reporters \u201cwe have to accept that the benefits that we gain from this will be worth the risk\u201d of flight accidents. \u201cIt\u2019s disingenuous to either hide or bury those risks in rhetoric.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human exploration official issued a somber warning Tuesday about potentially fatal risks associated with new rockets and spacecraft intended to carry astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7380",
        "date": "2017-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-manned-exploration-chief-highlights-risks-of-new-rockets-and-capsules-1486558730?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=101",
        "text": "The fundamental issue is \u201chow we should have this discussion with the public in general, and among ourselves\u201d to accept and try realistically to quantify the dangers, Mr. Gerstenmaier said. \u201cNo amount of hype can reduce the risk or make the risk less real.\u201d\nThe remarks come at a politically sensitive juncture for NASA, which is waiting for a new administrator and likely revised marching orders from President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n White House team. At the same time, the agency faces escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to complete a new generation of manned systems and lock in an exploration road map to Mars through the 2030s.\n\n\nUntil some of the new systems are operational, NASA has no choice but to continue relying on Russian rockets and spacecraft to blast U.S. astronauts into orbit.\nHistorically, newly-designed rockets have a failure rate of roughly one out of the first three missions. The record has been much better for the latest generation of boosters now flying, but industry and independent safety experts fret the trend could reverse itself.\nNASA is spending more than $2 billion annually on a heavy-lift booster, called the Space Launch System, headed by a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n .-led industry team.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n is working on a multibillion-dollar manned capsule, dubbed Orion, designed to sit atop that booster. The combination is slated to fly for the first time next year without a crew, followed by a manned test flight targeted for 2021.\nSeparately, Boeing is building what has been called a commercial space taxi to ferry U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station before the end of the decade.\nEntrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is scheduled to start regular astronaut trips to the station around 2019, using an upgraded variant of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket carrying a manned version of its Dragon cargo capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWilliam Gerstenmaier of NASA\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nTaken together, Mr. Gerstenmaier and other veteran NASA managers say, the level of activity\u2014including building and testing flight hardware\u2014is practically unmatched since the heyday of the manned Moon missions during the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s acting administrator, has described the heightened activity around the agency as a welcome sign of progress. He sees technical problems related to normal production and testing challenges.\nStill, Mr. Gerstenmaier, who is widely respected among industry and congressional leaders for his technical and management pedigree, urged everyone to be more forthright about the prospects that something catastrophic could occur as an array of new technologies is introduced and tested amid the rigors of space.\nJust before the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was deemed to be one in nine, according to the NASA official. Yet when the system was initially designed and fielded, he said, engineers and managers calculated the chances of such an event to be less than one in 500.\nNow, NASA\u2019s minimum safety target is to certify commercial spacecraft that statistically, have no more than one chance in 275 of suffering a catastrophic accident. But \u201cit is not a panacea to address the risk, and it is by no means absolute,\u201d according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, who managed integration of the space shuttle in the late 1980s and in 2002 became manager of the space shuttle program.\n\u201cWe should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d he told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d Above all, he said, introduction of new manned systems entails \u201ca substantial element of risk, which must be acknowledged.\u201d There will be close calls, and NASA and industry have to learn from them, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier.\nAfter his presentation, he told reporters \u201cwe have to accept that the benefits that we gain from this will be worth the risk\u201d of flight accidents. \u201cIt\u2019s disingenuous to either hide or bury those risks in rhetoric.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human exploration official issued a somber warning Tuesday about potentially fatal risks associated with new rockets and spacecraft intended to carry astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7381",
        "date": "2017-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-manned-exploration-chief-highlights-risks-of-new-rockets-and-capsules-1486558730?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=88",
        "text": "The fundamental issue is \u201chow we should have this discussion with the public in general, and among ourselves\u201d to accept and try realistically to quantify the dangers, Mr. Gerstenmaier said. \u201cNo amount of hype can reduce the risk or make the risk less real.\u201d\nThe remarks come at a politically sensitive juncture for NASA, which is waiting for a new administrator and likely revised marching orders from President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n White House team. At the same time, the agency faces escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to complete a new generation of manned systems and lock in an exploration road map to Mars through the 2030s.\n\n\nUntil some of the new systems are operational, NASA has no choice but to continue relying on Russian rockets and spacecraft to blast U.S. astronauts into orbit.\nHistorically, newly-designed rockets have a failure rate of roughly one out of the first three missions. The record has been much better for the latest generation of boosters now flying, but industry and independent safety experts fret the trend could reverse itself.\nNASA is spending more than $2 billion annually on a heavy-lift booster, called the Space Launch System, headed by a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n .-led industry team.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n is working on a multibillion-dollar manned capsule, dubbed Orion, designed to sit atop that booster. The combination is slated to fly for the first time next year without a crew, followed by a manned test flight targeted for 2021.\nSeparately, Boeing is building what has been called a commercial space taxi to ferry U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station before the end of the decade.\nEntrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is scheduled to start regular astronaut trips to the station around 2019, using an upgraded variant of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket carrying a manned version of its Dragon cargo capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWilliam Gerstenmaier of NASA\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nTaken together, Mr. Gerstenmaier and other veteran NASA managers say, the level of activity\u2014including building and testing flight hardware\u2014is practically unmatched since the heyday of the manned Moon missions during the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s acting administrator, has described the heightened activity around the agency as a welcome sign of progress. He sees technical problems related to normal production and testing challenges.\nStill, Mr. Gerstenmaier, who is widely respected among industry and congressional leaders for his technical and management pedigree, urged everyone to be more forthright about the prospects that something catastrophic could occur as an array of new technologies is introduced and tested amid the rigors of space.\nJust before the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was deemed to be one in nine, according to the NASA official. Yet when the system was initially designed and fielded, he said, engineers and managers calculated the chances of such an event to be less than one in 500.\nNow, NASA\u2019s minimum safety target is to certify commercial spacecraft that statistically, have no more than one chance in 275 of suffering a catastrophic accident. But \u201cit is not a panacea to address the risk, and it is by no means absolute,\u201d according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, who managed integration of the space shuttle in the late 1980s and in 2002 became manager of the space shuttle program.\n\u201cWe should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d he told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d Above all, he said, introduction of new manned systems entails \u201ca substantial element of risk, which must be acknowledged.\u201d There will be close calls, and NASA and industry have to learn from them, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier.\nAfter his presentation, he told reporters \u201cwe have to accept that the benefits that we gain from this will be worth the risk\u201d of flight accidents. \u201cIt\u2019s disingenuous to either hide or bury those risks in rhetoric.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human exploration official issued a somber warning Tuesday about potentially fatal risks associated with new rockets and spacecraft intended to carry astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7382",
        "date": "2017-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-manned-exploration-chief-highlights-risks-of-new-rockets-and-capsules-1486558730?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=131",
        "text": "The fundamental issue is \u201chow we should have this discussion with the public in general, and among ourselves\u201d to accept and try realistically to quantify the dangers, Mr. Gerstenmaier said. \u201cNo amount of hype can reduce the risk or make the risk less real.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe remarks come at a politically sensitive juncture for NASA, which is waiting for a new administrator and likely revised marching orders from President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n White House team. At the same time, the agency faces escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to complete a new generation of manned systems and lock in an exploration road map to Mars through the 2030s.\n\n\nUntil some of the new systems are operational, NASA has no choice but to continue relying on Russian rockets and spacecraft to blast U.S. astronauts into orbit.\nHistorically, newly-designed rockets have a failure rate of roughly one out of the first three missions. The record has been much better for the latest generation of boosters now flying, but industry and independent safety experts fret the trend could reverse itself.\nNASA is spending more than $2 billion annually on a heavy-lift booster, called the Space Launch System, headed by a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n .-led industry team.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n is working on a multibillion-dollar manned capsule, dubbed Orion, designed to sit atop that booster. The combination is slated to fly for the first time next year without a crew, followed by a manned test flight targeted for 2021.\nSeparately, Boeing is building what has been called a commercial space taxi to ferry U.S. astronauts to the orbiting international space station before the end of the decade.\nEntrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is scheduled to start regular astronaut trips to the station around 2019, using an upgraded variant of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket carrying a manned version of its Dragon cargo capsule.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWilliam Gerstenmaier of NASA\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nTaken together, Mr. Gerstenmaier and other veteran NASA managers say, the level of activity\u2014including building and testing flight hardware\u2014is practically unmatched since the heyday of the manned Moon missions during the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s acting administrator, has described the heightened activity around the agency as a welcome sign of progress. He sees technical problems related to normal production and testing challenges.\nStill, Mr. Gerstenmaier, who is widely respected among industry and congressional leaders for his technical and management pedigree, urged everyone to be more forthright about the prospects that something catastrophic could occur as an array of new technologies is introduced and tested amid the rigors of space.\nJust before the space shuttle was retired in 2011, the statistical chance of having a catastrophic failure fatal to the crew was deemed to be one in nine, according to the NASA official. Yet when the system was initially designed and fielded, he said, engineers and managers calculated the chances of such an event to be less than one in 500.\nNow, NASA\u2019s minimum safety target is to certify commercial spacecraft that statistically, have no more than one chance in 275 of suffering a catastrophic accident. But \u201cit is not a panacea to address the risk, and it is by no means absolute,\u201d according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, who managed integration of the space shuttle in the late 1980s and in 2002 became manager of the space shuttle program.\n\u201cWe should figure out a better way to talk about these risks,\u201d he told the conference, \u201cnot to scare people\u201d but \u201cjust to recognize what they are.\u201d Above all, he said, introduction of new manned systems entails \u201ca substantial element of risk, which must be acknowledged.\u201d There will be close calls, and NASA and industry have to learn from them, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier.\nAfter his presentation, he told reporters \u201cwe have to accept that the benefits that we gain from this will be worth the risk\u201d of flight accidents. \u201cIt\u2019s disingenuous to either hide or bury those risks in rhetoric.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human exploration official issued a somber warning Tuesday about potentially fatal risks associated with new rockets and spacecraft intended to carry astronauts into space. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Spy Satellite Launched Amid Concerns Over Shutdown\u2019s Impact (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7383",
        "date": "2019-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-launches-spy-satellite-as-concerns-mount-over-shutdowns-impact-11547936852?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=59",
        "text": "The Delta IV rocket carrying a classified National Reconnaissance Office satellite blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 11:10 a.m. local time, with the 1.6-million-pound rocket\u2019s main engines performing as expected and the upper stage igniting about six minutes into the flight. The rocket was supplied to the Air Force by\u00a0United\u00a0Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOriginally scheduled for early December, the mission was the 11th launch of the most powerful and expensive variant of the Delta IV rocket, a version many lawmakers and Pentagon planners are eager to replace with less-expensive options. But Air Force and ULA officials have said they plan to rely on the heavy-lift model possibly late into the next decade, or until alternative boosters are developed, flight tested and proven to be equally reliable.\nIn the days leading up to the\u00a0launch, satellite and rocket industry officials raised concerns that the prolonged furlough of federal\u00a0employee could negatively affect missions slated to depart from launchpads run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other spaceports.\n\n\nThe Air Force and the rest of the armed forces aren\u2019t affected by the current budget dispute, but military launches require civilian licenses and other government approvals that could be caught up in the current partial shutdown.\nLockheed Martin has warned in a regulatory filing that the budget standoff threatens the launch of a commercial satellite for a Saudi Arabian client. Lockheed Martin needs government approval for a Russian-owned cargo jet to fly satellites from California to Florida for launch. The company also indicated the timetable for some planned military launches later this year could slip.\nThe partial shutdown already has affected at least one rocket startup, Exos Aerospace Systems & Technologies Inc., which earlier this month was forced to postpone a scheduled launch of its Sarge rocket from a New Mexico site. Federal Aviation Administration officials weren\u2019t available to handle changes to the Texas-based company\u2019s launch license.\nSome industry officials also pointed to potential hurdles for other projects stemming from delays obtaining certain U.S. government export licenses.\nOther experts said the long-awaited initial launch of a commercial crew capsule by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. could slip from mid-February partly due to government staffing issues. The demonstration mission, without any astronauts on board, would mark a milestone for NASA\u2019s efforts to resume launching American crews on U.S.-built rockets and spacecraft for the first time since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle fleet.\nThe SpaceX rocket is slated to take off from a NASA pad at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. NASA\u2019s furlough plans include keeping employees on the job, without pay, to support \u201cspace launch processing,\u201d protect human life and property and, among other things, continue progress on SpaceX\u2019s demonstration mission.\nNASA has indicated its current plans entail proceeding with the SpaceX mission without changes.\nBut industry officials said it is too early to tell whether NASA can adequately support the February mission, including conducting final technical reviews. Local news reports have indicated that only a small portion of Kennedy Space Center employees are exempt from the shutdown and remain on the job.\nSpaceX has said it is monitoring the impact of the furloughs on its manifest of other commercial launches. NASA has said it is working with SpaceX to complete \u201chardware testing and joint reviews\u201d to prepare for a launch of the unmanned crew capsule \u201cno earlier than February.\u201d\n\u2014Doug Cameron contributed to this article.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A large U.S. spy satellite was successfully launched into orbit as concerns mounted that the continued government shutdown threatens to disrupt launch plans for future commercial, civilian and potentially even military payloads. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Spy Satellite Launched Amid Concerns Over Shutdown\u2019s Impact (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7384",
        "date": "2019-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-launches-spy-satellite-as-concerns-mount-over-shutdowns-impact-11547936852?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=80",
        "text": "The Delta IV rocket carrying a classified National Reconnaissance Office satellite blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 11:10 a.m. local time, with the 1.6-million-pound rocket\u2019s main engines performing as expected and the upper stage igniting about six minutes into the flight. The rocket was supplied to the Air Force by\u00a0United\u00a0Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\nOriginally scheduled for early December, the mission was the 11th launch of the most powerful and expensive variant of the Delta IV rocket, a version many lawmakers and Pentagon planners are eager to replace with less-expensive options. But Air Force and ULA officials have said they plan to rely on the heavy-lift model possibly late into the next decade, or until alternative boosters are developed, flight tested and proven to be equally reliable.\n\n\n\n\nIn the days leading up to the\u00a0launch, satellite and rocket industry officials raised concerns that the prolonged furlough of federal\u00a0employee could negatively affect missions slated to depart from launchpads run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other spaceports.\n\n\nThe Air Force and the rest of the armed forces aren\u2019t affected by the current budget dispute, but military launches require civilian licenses and other government approvals that could be caught up in the current partial shutdown.\nLockheed Martin has warned in a regulatory filing that the budget standoff threatens the launch of a commercial satellite for a Saudi Arabian client. Lockheed Martin needs government approval for a Russian-owned cargo jet to fly satellites from California to Florida for launch. The company also indicated the timetable for some planned military launches later this year could slip.\nThe partial shutdown already has affected at least one rocket startup, Exos Aerospace Systems & Technologies Inc., which earlier this month was forced to postpone a scheduled launch of its Sarge rocket from a New Mexico site. Federal Aviation Administration officials weren\u2019t available to handle changes to the Texas-based company\u2019s launch license.\nSome industry officials also pointed to potential hurdles for other projects stemming from delays obtaining certain U.S. government export licenses.\nOther experts said the long-awaited initial launch of a commercial crew capsule by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. could slip from mid-February partly due to government staffing issues. The demonstration mission, without any astronauts on board, would mark a milestone for NASA\u2019s efforts to resume launching American crews on U.S.-built rockets and spacecraft for the first time since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle fleet.\nThe SpaceX rocket is slated to take off from a NASA pad at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. NASA\u2019s furlough plans include keeping employees on the job, without pay, to support \u201cspace launch processing,\u201d protect human life and property and, among other things, continue progress on SpaceX\u2019s demonstration mission.\nNASA has indicated its current plans entail proceeding with the SpaceX mission without changes.\nBut industry officials said it is too early to tell whether NASA can adequately support the February mission, including conducting final technical reviews. Local news reports have indicated that only a small portion of Kennedy Space Center employees are exempt from the shutdown and remain on the job.\nSpaceX has said it is monitoring the impact of the furloughs on its manifest of other commercial launches. NASA has said it is working with SpaceX to complete \u201chardware testing and joint reviews\u201d to prepare for a launch of the unmanned crew capsule \u201cno earlier than February.\u201d\n\u2014Doug Cameron contributed to this article.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A large U.S. spy satellite was successfully launched into orbit as concerns mounted that the continued government shutdown threatens to disrupt launch plans for future commercial, civilian and potentially even military payloads. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senior NASA Official Resigns Amid Probe Into Suspect Contracting Actions (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7385",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/senior-nasa-official-resigns-amid-probe-into-suspect-contracting-actions-11590012946?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=13",
        "text": "The decision, according to the person familiar with the details, was prompted by an internal agency inquiry into Mr. Loverro\u2019s alleged involvement in sharing data among certain companies vying for lunar-lander contracts as part of the moon program, known as Artemis.\nMr. Loverro circulated an email to colleagues announcing his immediate departure, including vague comments about taking responsibility for an unspecified risk he took and a mistake he had made. Without elaborating or mentioning any investigation of his actions, Mr. Loverro wrote: \u201cI judged [the actions] necessary to fulfill our mission\u201d and \u201cI alone must bear the consequences.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Loverro couldn\u2019t be reached for comment.\nAfter his resignation became public, he told the Washington Post that his departure \u201chad to do with moving fast on Artemis.\u201d He added: \u201cI don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for NASA confirmed the resignation but declined to elaborate, saying, \u201cit would be inappropriate to discuss personnel matters.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for the NASA inspector general declined to comment. That office earlier launched an inquiry into the suspected contracting issues, according to the person familiar with the details.\nThe personnel shift isn\u2019t expected to affect next Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch of the first NASA crew to head for orbit on board a U.S.-built rocket and spacecraft for the first time in nearly a decade.\nThe move blindsided many agency officials and roiled NASA\u2019s ranks at a time when the agency\u2019s leadership had hoped to focus public attention on accomplishing the historic milestone of transporting a crew to orbit from American soil on domestic hardware.\nMore broadly, Mr. Loverro\u2019s exit could become a distraction from President Trump\u2019s drive to accelerate human-exploration efforts. A longtime manager of military and intelligence space programs, Mr. Loverro was brought in to shake up the civilian agency\u2019s initiatives to quickly return U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface\u2014and ultimately transport them deeper into the\u00a0solar system\u2014by increasingly relying on commercial ventures to lead the way.\nHis aim was to craft more realistic budgets and timelines, particularly for some established programs targeting lunar exploration that have been plagued by delays and cost overruns.\nMr. Loverro, who will be replaced by his deputy and former astronaut, Kenneth Bowersox, was scheduled to conduct the final flight-readiness review Thursday for next week\u2019s astronaut mission to the international space station. He participated as usual in various agency meetings last week, which added to the surprise among NASA employees when word of his resignation began circulating.\nSome of Mr. Loverro\u2019s policy and budget decisions\u2014intended to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious timeline of a lunar landing before the end of 2024\u2014already had generated criticism in some corners of NASA and on Capitol Hill.\nThree weeks ago, NASA awarded lunar-lander contracts totaling nearly $1 billion to three separate teams led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the Dynetics unit of longtime agency contractor Leidos Holdings Inc. and Blue Origin LLC, founded and run by Amazon.com Inc. chairman,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nA Dynetics spokeswoman declined to comment. Press representatives of the two other companies couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment.\nMr. Loverro didn\u2019t make the final decision on those awards or sign the official memo granting the contracts and assessing the relative strengths of the winners. But in his role overseeing all of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs, Mr. Loverro was active in the discussions leading up to those contracts, according to agency and industry officials.\nMr. Loverro, according to the person familiar with the details of his departure, was under scrutiny for allegedly sharing certain company data with one or more of the bidding teams, which initially included\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , one of NASA\u2019s most prominent contractors since the dawn of the Space Age. Boeing was eliminated from the competition before specifics of the three awards were decided. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official resigned abruptly, about a week before the agency\u2019s most important astronaut launch in a decade, over what a person familiar with the details described as alleged contracting improprieties on a separate program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senior NASA Official Resigns Amid Probe Into Suspect Contracting Actions (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7386",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/senior-nasa-official-resigns-amid-probe-into-suspect-contracting-actions-11590012946?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=41",
        "text": "The decision, according to the person familiar with the details, was prompted by an internal agency inquiry into Mr. Loverro\u2019s alleged involvement in sharing data among certain companies vying for lunar-lander contracts as part of the moon program, known as Artemis.\nMr. Loverro circulated an email to colleagues announcing his immediate departure, including vague comments about taking responsibility for an unspecified risk he took and a mistake he had made. Without elaborating or mentioning any investigation of his actions, Mr. Loverro wrote: \u201cI judged [the actions] necessary to fulfill our mission\u201d and \u201cI alone must bear the consequences.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Loverro couldn\u2019t be reached for comment.\nAfter his resignation became public, he told the Washington Post that his departure \u201chad to do with moving fast on Artemis.\u201d He added: \u201cI don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for NASA confirmed the resignation but declined to elaborate, saying, \u201cit would be inappropriate to discuss personnel matters.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for the NASA inspector general declined to comment. That office earlier launched an inquiry into the suspected contracting issues, according to the person familiar with the details.\nThe personnel shift isn\u2019t expected to affect next Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch of the first NASA crew to head for orbit on board a U.S.-built rocket and spacecraft for the first time in nearly a decade.\nThe move blindsided many agency officials and roiled NASA\u2019s ranks at a time when the agency\u2019s leadership had hoped to focus public attention on accomplishing the historic milestone of transporting a crew to orbit from American soil on domestic hardware.\nMore broadly, Mr. Loverro\u2019s exit could become a distraction from President Trump\u2019s drive to accelerate human-exploration efforts. A longtime manager of military and intelligence space programs, Mr. Loverro was brought in to shake up the civilian agency\u2019s initiatives to quickly return U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface\u2014and ultimately transport them deeper into the\u00a0solar system\u2014by increasingly relying on commercial ventures to lead the way.\nHis aim was to craft more realistic budgets and timelines, particularly for some established programs targeting lunar exploration that have been plagued by delays and cost overruns.\nMr. Loverro, who will be replaced by his deputy and former astronaut, Kenneth Bowersox, was scheduled to conduct the final flight-readiness review Thursday for next week\u2019s astronaut mission to the international space station. He participated as usual in various agency meetings last week, which added to the surprise among NASA employees when word of his resignation began circulating.\nSome of Mr. Loverro\u2019s policy and budget decisions\u2014intended to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious timeline of a lunar landing before the end of 2024\u2014already had generated criticism in some corners of NASA and on Capitol Hill.\nThree weeks ago, NASA awarded lunar-lander contracts totaling nearly $1 billion to three separate teams led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the Dynetics unit of longtime agency contractor Leidos Holdings Inc. and Blue Origin LLC, founded and run by Amazon.com Inc. chairman,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nA Dynetics spokeswoman declined to comment. Press representatives of the two other companies couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment.\nMr. Loverro didn\u2019t make the final decision on those awards or sign the official memo granting the contracts and assessing the relative strengths of the winners. But in his role overseeing all of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs, Mr. Loverro was active in the discussions leading up to those contracts, according to agency and industry officials.\nMr. Loverro, according to the person familiar with the details of his departure, was under scrutiny for allegedly sharing certain company data with one or more of the bidding teams, which initially included\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , one of NASA\u2019s most prominent contractors since the dawn of the Space Age. Boeing was eliminated from the competition before specifics of the three awards were decided. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official resigned abruptly, about a week before the agency\u2019s most important astronaut launch in a decade, over what a person familiar with the details described as alleged contracting improprieties on a separate program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senior NASA Official Resigns Amid Probe Into Suspect Contracting Actions (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7387",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/senior-nasa-official-resigns-amid-probe-into-suspect-contracting-actions-11590012946?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=45",
        "text": "The decision, according to the person familiar with the details, was prompted by an internal agency inquiry into Mr. Loverro\u2019s alleged involvement in sharing data among certain companies vying for lunar-lander contracts as part of the moon program, known as Artemis.\nMr. Loverro circulated an email to colleagues announcing his immediate departure, including vague comments about taking responsibility for an unspecified risk he took and a mistake he had made. Without elaborating or mentioning any investigation of his actions, Mr. Loverro wrote: \u201cI judged [the actions] necessary to fulfill our mission\u201d and \u201cI alone must bear the consequences.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Loverro couldn\u2019t be reached for comment.\nAfter his resignation became public, he told the Washington Post that his departure \u201chad to do with moving fast on Artemis.\u201d He added: \u201cI don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for NASA confirmed the resignation but declined to elaborate, saying, \u201cit would be inappropriate to discuss personnel matters.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for the NASA inspector general declined to comment. That office earlier launched an inquiry into the suspected contracting issues, according to the person familiar with the details.\nThe personnel shift isn\u2019t expected to affect next Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch of the first NASA crew to head for orbit on board a U.S.-built rocket and spacecraft for the first time in nearly a decade.\nThe move blindsided many agency officials and roiled NASA\u2019s ranks at a time when the agency\u2019s leadership had hoped to focus public attention on accomplishing the historic milestone of transporting a crew to orbit from American soil on domestic hardware.\nMore broadly, Mr. Loverro\u2019s exit could become a distraction from President Trump\u2019s drive to accelerate human-exploration efforts. A longtime manager of military and intelligence space programs, Mr. Loverro was brought in to shake up the civilian agency\u2019s initiatives to quickly return U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface\u2014and ultimately transport them deeper into the\u00a0solar system\u2014by increasingly relying on commercial ventures to lead the way.\nHis aim was to craft more realistic budgets and timelines, particularly for some established programs targeting lunar exploration that have been plagued by delays and cost overruns.\nMr. Loverro, who will be replaced by his deputy and former astronaut, Kenneth Bowersox, was scheduled to conduct the final flight-readiness review Thursday for next week\u2019s astronaut mission to the international space station. He participated as usual in various agency meetings last week, which added to the surprise among NASA employees when word of his resignation began circulating.\nSome of Mr. Loverro\u2019s policy and budget decisions\u2014intended to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious timeline of a lunar landing before the end of 2024\u2014already had generated criticism in some corners of NASA and on Capitol Hill.\nThree weeks ago, NASA awarded lunar-lander contracts totaling nearly $1 billion to three separate teams led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the Dynetics unit of longtime agency contractor Leidos Holdings Inc. and Blue Origin LLC, founded and run by Amazon.com Inc. chairman,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nA Dynetics spokeswoman declined to comment. Press representatives of the two other companies couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment.\nMr. Loverro didn\u2019t make the final decision on those awards or sign the official memo granting the contracts and assessing the relative strengths of the winners. But in his role overseeing all of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs, Mr. Loverro was active in the discussions leading up to those contracts, according to agency and industry officials.\nMr. Loverro, according to the person familiar with the details of his departure, was under scrutiny for allegedly sharing certain company data with one or more of the bidding teams, which initially included\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , one of NASA\u2019s most prominent contractors since the dawn of the Space Age. Boeing was eliminated from the competition before specifics of the three awards were decided. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official resigned abruptly, about a week before the agency\u2019s most important astronaut launch in a decade, over what a person familiar with the details described as alleged contracting improprieties on a separate program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Senior NASA Official Resigns Amid Probe Into Suspect Contracting Actions (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7388",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/senior-nasa-official-resigns-amid-probe-into-suspect-contracting-actions-11590012946?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=54",
        "text": "The decision, according to the person familiar with the details, was prompted by an internal agency inquiry into Mr. Loverro\u2019s alleged involvement in sharing data among certain companies vying for lunar-lander contracts as part of the moon program, known as Artemis.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Loverro circulated an email to colleagues announcing his immediate departure, including vague comments about taking responsibility for an unspecified risk he took and a mistake he had made. Without elaborating or mentioning any investigation of his actions, Mr. Loverro wrote: \u201cI judged [the actions] necessary to fulfill our mission\u201d and \u201cI alone must bear the consequences.\u201d\n\n\nMr. Loverro couldn\u2019t be reached for comment.\nAfter his resignation became public, he told the Washington Post that his departure \u201chad to do with moving fast on Artemis.\u201d He added: \u201cI don\u2019t want to characterize it in any more detail than that.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for NASA confirmed the resignation but declined to elaborate, saying, \u201cit would be inappropriate to discuss personnel matters.\u201d\nA spokeswoman for the NASA inspector general declined to comment. That office earlier launched an inquiry into the suspected contracting issues, according to the person familiar with the details.\nThe personnel shift isn\u2019t expected to affect next Wednesday\u2019s scheduled launch of the first NASA crew to head for orbit on board a U.S.-built rocket and spacecraft for the first time in nearly a decade.\nThe move blindsided many agency officials and roiled NASA\u2019s ranks at a time when the agency\u2019s leadership had hoped to focus public attention on accomplishing the historic milestone of transporting a crew to orbit from American soil on domestic hardware.\nMore broadly, Mr. Loverro\u2019s exit could become a distraction from President Trump\u2019s drive to accelerate human-exploration efforts. A longtime manager of military and intelligence space programs, Mr. Loverro was brought in to shake up the civilian agency\u2019s initiatives to quickly return U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface\u2014and ultimately transport them deeper into the\u00a0solar system\u2014by increasingly relying on commercial ventures to lead the way.\nHis aim was to craft more realistic budgets and timelines, particularly for some established programs targeting lunar exploration that have been plagued by delays and cost overruns.\nMr. Loverro, who will be replaced by his deputy and former astronaut, Kenneth Bowersox, was scheduled to conduct the final flight-readiness review Thursday for next week\u2019s astronaut mission to the international space station. He participated as usual in various agency meetings last week, which added to the surprise among NASA employees when word of his resignation began circulating.\nSome of Mr. Loverro\u2019s policy and budget decisions\u2014intended to meet the White House\u2019s ambitious timeline of a lunar landing before the end of 2024\u2014already had generated criticism in some corners of NASA and on Capitol Hill.\nThree weeks ago, NASA awarded lunar-lander contracts totaling nearly $1 billion to three separate teams led by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the Dynetics unit of longtime agency contractor Leidos Holdings Inc. and Blue Origin LLC, founded and run by Amazon.com Inc. chairman,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \nA Dynetics spokeswoman declined to comment. Press representatives of the two other companies couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment.\nMr. Loverro didn\u2019t make the final decision on those awards or sign the official memo granting the contracts and assessing the relative strengths of the winners. But in his role overseeing all of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs, Mr. Loverro was active in the discussions leading up to those contracts, according to agency and industry officials.\nMr. Loverro, according to the person familiar with the details of his departure, was under scrutiny for allegedly sharing certain company data with one or more of the bidding teams, which initially included\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , one of NASA\u2019s most prominent contractors since the dawn of the Space Age. Boeing was eliminated from the competition before specifics of the three awards were decided. A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official resigned abruptly, about a week before the agency\u2019s most important astronaut launch in a decade, over what a person familiar with the details described as alleged contracting improprieties on a separate program. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, Boeing Signal Missions to Space Station to Be Delayed (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7389",
        "date": "2018-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-boeing-signal-regular-missions-to-space-station-to-be-delayed-1522984513?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=20",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s agreement to use Russian rockets and capsules to carry astronauts to and from the international laboratory ends in late 2019. \nThat is prompting NASA leaders to seek contingency plans to carry American astronauts into orbit\u2014and keep them there for extended periods\u2014in the event U.S. providers aren\u2019t ready to assume routine transportation responsibilities by the deadline.\u00a0Maintaining a\u00a0continuous U.S. presence on the international space station is important to NASA.\n\n\nEven after a successful crewed test flight, it could take NASA several months or longer to authorize routine missions, according to outside experts, agency advisory committees and senior NASA officials.\u00a0The process could leave the U.S. scrambling for stopgap measures unless alternate options are put in place relatively soon.\nOn its website, NASA\u00a0said\u00a0it is updating its existing contract with the company and \u201cmay evolve flight test strategy\u201d for Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule, in anticipation of validating the spacecraft\u2019s safety and authorizing \u201cregular post-certification crew rotation missions.\u201d\nBoeing was more direct. A spokeswoman said \u201cwe\u2019re moving forward\u201d to provide the enhanced capability. In a statement, the company said \u201cit was clear\u201d that \u201cwe needed to provide NASA with additional flexibility to ensure the station remains fully staffed and fully operational\u201d until U.S. capsules achieve a regular cadence of missions.\nIn February, NASA\u2019s top official in charge of the crewed exploration programs, William Gerstenmaier, telegraphed such moves were under active consideration but stopped short of announcing a decision.\nOn the web posting, Mr. Gerstenmaier said the contract modification \u201cprovides NASA with additional schedule margin if needed,\u201d but further technical reviews are anticipated. He also said NASA is \u201cpreparing for potential schedule adjustments normally experienced during\u00a0\u00a0spacecraft development.\u201d\nNASA stopped flying the space shuttle fleet in 2011 and has relied on Moscow for crew access to orbit since then. A major challenge for shuttle replacements is that the agency must comply with longstanding requirements that all commercial crew systems meet strict statistical safety benchmarks.\nBoeing already has six post-certification Starliner flights under contract, but dates and payments for those missions haven\u2019t been set. In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing a contract valued at as much as $4.2 billion, including an unmanned test flight followed by the first test flight with people on board.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is developing its own commercial space taxi and plans at least one crewed test flight before seeking approval to begin routine trips. After NASA gives the green light, both providers envision flying a pair of missions to the space station annually.\nBoeing and SpaceX will have to demonstrate their capsules are more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet when it was retired. But senior NASA officials and independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to comply with the new standards, and the agency may have to issue certain waivers before regular flights commence. Those deliberations could lead to delays.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency and Boeing have agreed to turn the initial test flight of the company\u2019s commercial crewed capsule into an operational mission, the latest sign that officials are hedging their bets on when American spacecraft will start regularly ferrying astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, Boeing Signal Missions to Space Station to Be Delayed (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7390",
        "date": "2018-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-boeing-signal-regular-missions-to-space-station-to-be-delayed-1522984513?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=76",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s agreement to use Russian rockets and capsules to carry astronauts to and from the international laboratory ends in late 2019. \nThat is prompting NASA leaders to seek contingency plans to carry American astronauts into orbit\u2014and keep them there for extended periods\u2014in the event U.S. providers aren\u2019t ready to assume routine transportation responsibilities by the deadline.\u00a0Maintaining a\u00a0continuous U.S. presence on the international space station is important to NASA.\n\n\nEven after a successful crewed test flight, it could take NASA several months or longer to authorize routine missions, according to outside experts, agency advisory committees and senior NASA officials.\u00a0The process could leave the U.S. scrambling for stopgap measures unless alternate options are put in place relatively soon.\nOn its website, NASA\u00a0said\u00a0it is updating its existing contract with the company and \u201cmay evolve flight test strategy\u201d for Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule, in anticipation of validating the spacecraft\u2019s safety and authorizing \u201cregular post-certification crew rotation missions.\u201d\nBoeing was more direct. A spokeswoman said \u201cwe\u2019re moving forward\u201d to provide the enhanced capability. In a statement, the company said \u201cit was clear\u201d that \u201cwe needed to provide NASA with additional flexibility to ensure the station remains fully staffed and fully operational\u201d until U.S. capsules achieve a regular cadence of missions.\nIn February, NASA\u2019s top official in charge of the crewed exploration programs, William Gerstenmaier, telegraphed such moves were under active consideration but stopped short of announcing a decision.\nOn the web posting, Mr. Gerstenmaier said the contract modification \u201cprovides NASA with additional schedule margin if needed,\u201d but further technical reviews are anticipated. He also said NASA is \u201cpreparing for potential schedule adjustments normally experienced during\u00a0\u00a0spacecraft development.\u201d\nNASA stopped flying the space shuttle fleet in 2011 and has relied on Moscow for crew access to orbit since then. A major challenge for shuttle replacements is that the agency must comply with longstanding requirements that all commercial crew systems meet strict statistical safety benchmarks.\nBoeing already has six post-certification Starliner flights under contract, but dates and payments for those missions haven\u2019t been set. In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing a contract valued at as much as $4.2 billion, including an unmanned test flight followed by the first test flight with people on board.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is developing its own commercial space taxi and plans at least one crewed test flight before seeking approval to begin routine trips. After NASA gives the green light, both providers envision flying a pair of missions to the space station annually.\nBoeing and SpaceX will have to demonstrate their capsules are more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet when it was retired. But senior NASA officials and independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to comply with the new standards, and the agency may have to issue certain waivers before regular flights commence. Those deliberations could lead to delays.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency and Boeing have agreed to turn the initial test flight of the company\u2019s commercial crewed capsule into an operational mission, the latest sign that officials are hedging their bets on when American spacecraft will start regularly ferrying astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, Boeing Signal Missions to Space Station to Be Delayed (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7391",
        "date": "2018-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-boeing-signal-regular-missions-to-space-station-to-be-delayed-1522984513?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=69",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s agreement to use Russian rockets and capsules to carry astronauts to and from the international laboratory ends in late 2019. \nThat is prompting NASA leaders to seek contingency plans to carry American astronauts into orbit\u2014and keep them there for extended periods\u2014in the event U.S. providers aren\u2019t ready to assume routine transportation responsibilities by the deadline.\u00a0Maintaining a\u00a0continuous U.S. presence on the international space station is important to NASA.\n\n\nEven after a successful crewed test flight, it could take NASA several months or longer to authorize routine missions, according to outside experts, agency advisory committees and senior NASA officials.\u00a0The process could leave the U.S. scrambling for stopgap measures unless alternate options are put in place relatively soon.\nOn its website, NASA\u00a0said\u00a0it is updating its existing contract with the company and \u201cmay evolve flight test strategy\u201d for Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule, in anticipation of validating the spacecraft\u2019s safety and authorizing \u201cregular post-certification crew rotation missions.\u201d\nBoeing was more direct. A spokeswoman said \u201cwe\u2019re moving forward\u201d to provide the enhanced capability. In a statement, the company said \u201cit was clear\u201d that \u201cwe needed to provide NASA with additional flexibility to ensure the station remains fully staffed and fully operational\u201d until U.S. capsules achieve a regular cadence of missions.\nIn February, NASA\u2019s top official in charge of the crewed exploration programs, William Gerstenmaier, telegraphed such moves were under active consideration but stopped short of announcing a decision.\nOn the web posting, Mr. Gerstenmaier said the contract modification \u201cprovides NASA with additional schedule margin if needed,\u201d but further technical reviews are anticipated. He also said NASA is \u201cpreparing for potential schedule adjustments normally experienced during\u00a0\u00a0spacecraft development.\u201d\nNASA stopped flying the space shuttle fleet in 2011 and has relied on Moscow for crew access to orbit since then. A major challenge for shuttle replacements is that the agency must comply with longstanding requirements that all commercial crew systems meet strict statistical safety benchmarks.\nBoeing already has six post-certification Starliner flights under contract, but dates and payments for those missions haven\u2019t been set. In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing a contract valued at as much as $4.2 billion, including an unmanned test flight followed by the first test flight with people on board.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is developing its own commercial space taxi and plans at least one crewed test flight before seeking approval to begin routine trips. After NASA gives the green light, both providers envision flying a pair of missions to the space station annually.\nBoeing and SpaceX will have to demonstrate their capsules are more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet when it was retired. But senior NASA officials and independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to comply with the new standards, and the agency may have to issue certain waivers before regular flights commence. Those deliberations could lead to delays.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency and Boeing have agreed to turn the initial test flight of the company\u2019s commercial crewed capsule into an operational mission, the latest sign that officials are hedging their bets on when American spacecraft will start regularly ferrying astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA, Boeing Signal Missions to Space Station to Be Delayed (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7392",
        "date": "2018-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-boeing-signal-regular-missions-to-space-station-to-be-delayed-1522984513?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=98",
        "text": "The agency\u2019s agreement to use Russian rockets and capsules to carry astronauts to and from the international laboratory ends in late 2019. \n\n\n\n\nThat is prompting NASA leaders to seek contingency plans to carry American astronauts into orbit\u2014and keep them there for extended periods\u2014in the event U.S. providers aren\u2019t ready to assume routine transportation responsibilities by the deadline.\u00a0Maintaining a\u00a0continuous U.S. presence on the international space station is important to NASA.\n\n\nEven after a successful crewed test flight, it could take NASA several months or longer to authorize routine missions, according to outside experts, agency advisory committees and senior NASA officials.\u00a0The process could leave the U.S. scrambling for stopgap measures unless alternate options are put in place relatively soon.\nOn its website, NASA\u00a0said\u00a0it is updating its existing contract with the company and \u201cmay evolve flight test strategy\u201d for Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule, in anticipation of validating the spacecraft\u2019s safety and authorizing \u201cregular post-certification crew rotation missions.\u201d\nBoeing was more direct. A spokeswoman said \u201cwe\u2019re moving forward\u201d to provide the enhanced capability. In a statement, the company said \u201cit was clear\u201d that \u201cwe needed to provide NASA with additional flexibility to ensure the station remains fully staffed and fully operational\u201d until U.S. capsules achieve a regular cadence of missions.\nIn February, NASA\u2019s top official in charge of the crewed exploration programs, William Gerstenmaier, telegraphed such moves were under active consideration but stopped short of announcing a decision.\nOn the web posting, Mr. Gerstenmaier said the contract modification \u201cprovides NASA with additional schedule margin if needed,\u201d but further technical reviews are anticipated. He also said NASA is \u201cpreparing for potential schedule adjustments normally experienced during\u00a0\u00a0spacecraft development.\u201d\nNASA stopped flying the space shuttle fleet in 2011 and has relied on Moscow for crew access to orbit since then. A major challenge for shuttle replacements is that the agency must comply with longstanding requirements that all commercial crew systems meet strict statistical safety benchmarks.\nBoeing already has six post-certification Starliner flights under contract, but dates and payments for those missions haven\u2019t been set. In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing a contract valued at as much as $4.2 billion, including an unmanned test flight followed by the first test flight with people on board.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n closely held Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is developing its own commercial space taxi and plans at least one crewed test flight before seeking approval to begin routine trips. After NASA gives the green light, both providers envision flying a pair of missions to the space station annually.\nBoeing and SpaceX will have to demonstrate their capsules are more than four times safer than the space shuttle fleet when it was retired. But senior NASA officials and independent safety watchdogs have repeatedly said it may be difficult to comply with the new standards, and the agency may have to issue certain waivers before regular flights commence. Those deliberations could lead to delays.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The U.S. space agency and Boeing have agreed to turn the initial test flight of the company\u2019s commercial crewed capsule into an operational mission, the latest sign that officials are hedging their bets on when American spacecraft will start regularly ferrying astronauts to the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7393",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-space-policy-group-poised-to-back-lunar-landings-1507211474?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=22",
        "text": "Reflecting heightened military and security concerns about the country\u2019s space posture, the extent of the National Security Council\u2019s involvement in the issues became evident. Unlike previous White House preferences to sometimes treat military and civilian space issues separately, National Security Adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n made it clear he and his staff retain sweeping authority over both areas.\nHe said the proper response requires \u201can integrated strategy to assure\u201d the nation\u2019s \u201cvital interests are advanced\u201d in the space domain. Gen. McMaster called for safeguarding U.S. \u201cleadership, preeminence and freedom to act in space,\u201d noting that the safety and stability of all space assets including commercial satellites must be protected. \n\n\nBut the high-level policy session didn\u2019t produce any technical or funding details about steps to reach that goal. And the most pressing questions remained unresolved about protecting space assets from adversaries intent on hacking, jamming or launching direct attacks.\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n signed an executive order in June re-establishing the space council, a high-level policy group intended to oversee both civilian and military space initiatives.\nThe wide-ranging discussion featured recommendations from a handful of industry leaders about enhancing private-public partnerships to promote civilian exploration programs. There also were stark warnings from experts about the hazards of countries, or potentially even terrorists, targeting U.S. space networks, including Global Positioning System satellites.\nMr. Pence set the tone by opening the meeting saying \u201cAmerica seems to have lost our edge in space\u201d and that without a coherent policy, manned exploration particularly has \u201csuffered from apathy and neglect.\u201d But, he added, \u201cthose days are over.\u201d\nNoting that the initial U.S. landing on the moon too often has been treated as \u201ca triumph to be remembered but not repeated,\u201d Mr. Pence said the administration is committed to returning crews to the lunar surface \u201cto build the foundation we need\u201d for pushing toward Mars and deeper into the solar system. Robert Lightfoot, acting head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who sits on the council, didn\u2019t elaborate.\nThe Democratic admnistration of former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n shied away from such clear-cut commitments, despite strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for returning to the moon. But Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is the council\u2019s top staff member, has long been viewed as a proponent of sending astronauts back there.\nRep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n an Oklahoma Republican nominated to head NASA, over the years also has been a staunch proponent of lunar exploration and settlement.\nThe direction sketched out by Mr. Pence and others on the council offers potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling moon initiative.\nFor example, Bob Smith, the newly appointed chief executive of Blue Origin LLC, the space startup founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n said his company is willing to share the cost with NASA to develop a possible lunar cargo delivery service.\nMr. Smith also disclosed that Blue Origin\u2019s planned space-tourism business now plans to start launching people on suborbital flight around the end of the first quarter of 2019. Mr. Bezos previously said he hoped initial flights would start sometime around the end of 2018, barring unexpected hurdles.\nMr. Pence ordered a comprehensive review of decades-old U.S. launch regulations after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said streamlining would make it easier to carry out a \u201cmore rapid cadence of launches.\u201d\nPart of the focus was on exploring strategies to protect spacecraft from attack, regardless of whether they are classified satellites or commercial telecommunications constellations. The best way to deter potential adversaries from hostile acts is \u201cto make it clear that we will protect our space assets,\u201d said former NASA chief Michael Griffin.\nThe national security discussion mirrored escalating concerns expressed by Pentagon brass over the past year or two regarding vulnerability of space assets. With China, Russia and other countries developing antisatellite weapons, Pentagon brass are scrambling to devise countermeasures and new tactics.\nRetired Admiral James Ellis told the council that allies and adversaries alike must see definitive U.S. policies \u201cabout what we stand for in space and what we will not stand for\u201d in terms of hostile acts.\nAlthough much of the public attention about potential space warfare has revolved around countries, there also was some discussion about dangers posed by \u201cnonstate actors.\u201d\nDirector of National Laying out the most specific plans yet to promote commercial and military space projects, Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday vowed to return U.S. astronauts to the moon while studying ways to streamline federal rules controlling rocket launches. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7394",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-space-policy-group-poised-to-back-lunar-landings-1507211474?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=25",
        "text": "Reflecting heightened military and security concerns about the country\u2019s space posture, the extent of the National Security Council\u2019s involvement in the issues became evident. Unlike previous White House preferences to sometimes treat military and civilian space issues separately, National Security Adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n made it clear he and his staff retain sweeping authority over both areas.\n\n\n\n\nHe said the proper response requires \u201can integrated strategy to assure\u201d the nation\u2019s \u201cvital interests are advanced\u201d in the space domain. Gen. McMaster called for safeguarding U.S. \u201cleadership, preeminence and freedom to act in space,\u201d noting that the safety and stability of all space assets including commercial satellites must be protected. \n\n\nBut the high-level policy session didn\u2019t produce any technical or funding details about steps to reach that goal. And the most pressing questions remained unresolved about protecting space assets from adversaries intent on hacking, jamming or launching direct attacks.\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n signed an executive order in June re-establishing the space council, a high-level policy group intended to oversee both civilian and military space initiatives.\nThe wide-ranging discussion featured recommendations from a handful of industry leaders about enhancing private-public partnerships to promote civilian exploration programs. There also were stark warnings from experts about the hazards of countries, or potentially even terrorists, targeting U.S. space networks, including Global Positioning System satellites.\nMr. Pence set the tone by opening the meeting saying \u201cAmerica seems to have lost our edge in space\u201d and that without a coherent policy, manned exploration particularly has \u201csuffered from apathy and neglect.\u201d But, he added, \u201cthose days are over.\u201d\nNoting that the initial U.S. landing on the moon too often has been treated as \u201ca triumph to be remembered but not repeated,\u201d Mr. Pence said the administration is committed to returning crews to the lunar surface \u201cto build the foundation we need\u201d for pushing toward Mars and deeper into the solar system. Robert Lightfoot, acting head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who sits on the council, didn\u2019t elaborate.\nThe Democratic admnistration of former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n shied away from such clear-cut commitments, despite strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for returning to the moon. But Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is the council\u2019s top staff member, has long been viewed as a proponent of sending astronauts back there.\nRep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n an Oklahoma Republican nominated to head NASA, over the years also has been a staunch proponent of lunar exploration and settlement.\nThe direction sketched out by Mr. Pence and others on the council offers potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling moon initiative.\nFor example, Bob Smith, the newly appointed chief executive of Blue Origin LLC, the space startup founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n said his company is willing to share the cost with NASA to develop a possible lunar cargo delivery service.\nMr. Smith also disclosed that Blue Origin\u2019s planned space-tourism business now plans to start launching people on suborbital flight around the end of the first quarter of 2019. Mr. Bezos previously said he hoped initial flights would start sometime around the end of 2018, barring unexpected hurdles.\nMr. Pence ordered a comprehensive review of decades-old U.S. launch regulations after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said streamlining would make it easier to carry out a \u201cmore rapid cadence of launches.\u201d\nPart of the focus was on exploring strategies to protect spacecraft from attack, regardless of whether they are classified satellites or commercial telecommunications constellations. The best way to deter potential adversaries from hostile acts is \u201cto make it clear that we will protect our space assets,\u201d said former NASA chief Michael Griffin.\nThe national security discussion mirrored escalating concerns expressed by Pentagon brass over the past year or two regarding vulnerability of space assets. With China, Russia and other countries developing antisatellite weapons, Pentagon brass are scrambling to devise countermeasures and new tactics.\nRetired Admiral James Ellis told the council that allies and adversaries alike must see definitive U.S. policies \u201cabout what we stand for in space and what we will not stand for\u201d in terms of hostile acts.\nAlthough much of the public attention about potential space warfare has revolved around countries, there also was some discussion about dangers posed by \u201cnonstate actors.\u201d\nDirector of Natio Laying out the most specific plans yet to promote commercial and military space projects, Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday vowed to return U.S. astronauts to the moon while studying ways to streamline federal rules controlling rocket launches. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7395",
        "date": "2017-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-space-policy-group-poised-to-back-lunar-landings-1507211474?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=111",
        "text": "Reflecting heightened military and security concerns about the country\u2019s space posture, the extent of the National Security Council\u2019s involvement in the issues became evident. Unlike previous White House preferences to sometimes treat military and civilian space issues separately, National Security Adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n made it clear he and his staff retain sweeping authority over both areas.\n\n\n\n\nHe said the proper response requires \u201can integrated strategy to assure\u201d the nation\u2019s \u201cvital interests are advanced\u201d in the space domain. Gen. McMaster called for safeguarding U.S. \u201cleadership, preeminence and freedom to act in space,\u201d noting that the safety and stability of all space assets including commercial satellites must be protected. \n\n\nBut the high-level policy session didn\u2019t produce any technical or funding details about steps to reach that goal. And the most pressing questions remained unresolved about protecting space assets from adversaries intent on hacking, jamming or launching direct attacks.\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n signed an executive order in June re-establishing the space council, a high-level policy group intended to oversee both civilian and military space initiatives.\nThe wide-ranging discussion featured recommendations from a handful of industry leaders about enhancing private-public partnerships to promote civilian exploration programs. There also were stark warnings from experts about the hazards of countries, or potentially even terrorists, targeting U.S. space networks, including Global Positioning System satellites.\nMr. Pence set the tone by opening the meeting saying \u201cAmerica seems to have lost our edge in space\u201d and that without a coherent policy, manned exploration particularly has \u201csuffered from apathy and neglect.\u201d But, he added, \u201cthose days are over.\u201d\nNoting that the initial U.S. landing on the moon too often has been treated as \u201ca triumph to be remembered but not repeated,\u201d Mr. Pence said the administration is committed to returning crews to the lunar surface \u201cto build the foundation we need\u201d for pushing toward Mars and deeper into the solar system. Robert Lightfoot, acting head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who sits on the council, didn\u2019t elaborate.\nThe Democratic admnistration of former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n shied away from such clear-cut commitments, despite strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for returning to the moon. But Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is the council\u2019s top staff member, has long been viewed as a proponent of sending astronauts back there.\nRep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n an Oklahoma Republican nominated to head NASA, over the years also has been a staunch proponent of lunar exploration and settlement.\nThe direction sketched out by Mr. Pence and others on the council offers potential moneymaking opportunities for companies eager to provide in-orbit services or assist the government\u2019s fledgling moon initiative.\nFor example, Bob Smith, the newly appointed chief executive of Blue Origin LLC, the space startup founded and run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n said his company is willing to share the cost with NASA to develop a possible lunar cargo delivery service.\nMr. Smith also disclosed that Blue Origin\u2019s planned space-tourism business now plans to start launching people on suborbital flight around the end of the first quarter of 2019. Mr. Bezos previously said he hoped initial flights would start sometime around the end of 2018, barring unexpected hurdles.\nMr. Pence ordered a comprehensive review of decades-old U.S. launch regulations after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n president of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said streamlining would make it easier to carry out a \u201cmore rapid cadence of launches.\u201d\nPart of the focus was on exploring strategies to protect spacecraft from attack, regardless of whether they are classified satellites or commercial telecommunications constellations. The best way to deter potential adversaries from hostile acts is \u201cto make it clear that we will protect our space assets,\u201d said former NASA chief Michael Griffin.\nThe national security discussion mirrored escalating concerns expressed by Pentagon brass over the past year or two regarding vulnerability of space assets. With China, Russia and other countries developing antisatellite weapons, Pentagon brass are scrambling to devise countermeasures and new tactics.\nRetired Admiral James Ellis told the council that allies and adversaries alike must see definitive U.S. policies \u201cabout what we stand for in space and what we will not stand for\u201d in terms of hostile acts.\nAlthough much of the public attention about potential space warfare has revolved around countries, there also was some discussion about dangers posed by \u201cnonstate actors.\u201d\nDirector of Natio Laying out the most specific plans yet to promote commercial and military space projects, Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday vowed to return U.S. astronauts to the moon while studying ways to streamline federal rules controlling rocket launches. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Commerce Secretary Becomes Point Man For Commercial Space Projects (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7396",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commerce-secretary-becomes-point-man-for-promoting-commercial-space-projects-1519257529?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=20",
        "text": "Pressure for such action has been building for some time, particularly in light of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n emphasis on promoting private space projects. Commerce\u2019s newfound prominence in the space arena isn\u2019t a surprise because Mr. Ross, a former private-equity investor who is personally close to Mr. Trump, for months has maneuvered to become the architect of rolling back regulations that apply to rockets and satellites. Many in the industry consider the current regulatory regime, overseen by several agencies including Commerce and the Federal Aviation Administration, outdated and overly stringent.\nAerospace trade associations welcomed the move, which envisions Mr. Ross personally coordinating with the Transportation Department and other agencies to create a \u201cone-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\n\n\nDuring Wednesday\u2019s meeting of the White House Space Council, a cabinet-level group seeking to coordinate U.S. military, civilian and commercial space priorities, members also heard presentations highlighting persistent Russian and Chinese efforts to develop antisatellite weapons.\nSusan Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, said both countries \u201cwill probably reach initial operational capability in the next few years\u201d with such technology. She said China and Russia also have laser weapons designed to \u201cdazzle or damage sensitive space-based optical sensors\u201d used on some of the most advanced American spy satellites.\nBut starting with the opening speech of Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads the council, much of the focus was on short- and long-term fixes to the industry\u2019s regulatory headaches. The nation\u2019s \u201cprosperity, security and even our national character depend on American leadership in space,\u201d Mr. Pence said.\nReferring to current requirements to obtain discrete launch licenses for every facility, even if the same type of rocket repeatedly is involved, Mr. Pence said, \u201cthe government has figured out how to honor drivers\u2019 licenses across state lines; there\u2019s no reason we can\u2019t do the same for rockets.\u201d\nDeputy Transportation Secretary Jeffrey Rosen told the group his goal was creating a more responsive, \u201ctwenty first-century \u2018file and fly\u2019 kind of licensing framework.\u201d\nThose standing to lose the most clout under the new oversight structure, which is expected to get the final signoff from Mr. Trump, are the FAA and its parent, the Transportation Department.\nActing FAA chief Dan Elwell has disputed arguments that current launch licensing is fundamentally flawed. The agency needs to move faster, he told a government-industry conference earlier this month, but he also said \u201cindustry must improve its safety performance.\u201d Before too many changes are made, he added, \u201cI think more talk about safety is time well spent.\u201d\nMr. Ross and a new space-policy lieutenant also will have jurisdiction to establish governmentwide deregulatory goals affecting export licenses, radio spectrum used by satellites and in-orbit servicing of spacecraft. Mr. Ross said the shifts were decided after consultations with an ambitious but frustrated industry.\n\u201cIf the United States is to continue to lead in space, we have got to create the right conditions,\u201d according to the commerce chief.\nThe Trump administration\u2019s more-lenient approach has plenty of adherents on Capitol Hill, where there is bipartisan support for generally reducing the industry\u2019s compliance times and costs.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Responding to industry complaints that federal rules increasingly hamper private ventures in space, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has emerged as the deregulation czar of the heavens. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Commerce Secretary Becomes Point Man For Commercial Space Projects (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7397",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commerce-secretary-becomes-point-man-for-promoting-commercial-space-projects-1519257529?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=77",
        "text": "Pressure for such action has been building for some time, particularly in light of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n emphasis on promoting private space projects. Commerce\u2019s newfound prominence in the space arena isn\u2019t a surprise because Mr. Ross, a former private-equity investor who is personally close to Mr. Trump, for months has maneuvered to become the architect of rolling back regulations that apply to rockets and satellites. Many in the industry consider the current regulatory regime, overseen by several agencies including Commerce and the Federal Aviation Administration, outdated and overly stringent.\nAerospace trade associations welcomed the move, which envisions Mr. Ross personally coordinating with the Transportation Department and other agencies to create a \u201cone-stop shop for space commerce.\u201d\n\n\nDuring Wednesday\u2019s meeting of the White House Space Council, a cabinet-level group seeking to coordinate U.S. military, civilian and commercial space priorities, members also heard presentations highlighting persistent Russian and Chinese efforts to develop antisatellite weapons.\nSusan Gordon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, said both countries \u201cwill probably reach initial operational capability in the next few years\u201d with such technology. She said China and Russia also have laser weapons designed to \u201cdazzle or damage sensitive space-based optical sensors\u201d used on some of the most advanced American spy satellites.\nBut starting with the opening speech of Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads the council, much of the focus was on short- and long-term fixes to the industry\u2019s regulatory headaches. The nation\u2019s \u201cprosperity, security and even our national character depend on American leadership in space,\u201d Mr. Pence said.\nReferring to current requirements to obtain discrete launch licenses for every facility, even if the same type of rocket repeatedly is involved, Mr. Pence said, \u201cthe government has figured out how to honor drivers\u2019 licenses across state lines; there\u2019s no reason we can\u2019t do the same for rockets.\u201d\nDeputy Transportation Secretary Jeffrey Rosen told the group his goal was creating a more responsive, \u201ctwenty first-century \u2018file and fly\u2019 kind of licensing framework.\u201d\nThose standing to lose the most clout under the new oversight structure, which is expected to get the final signoff from Mr. Trump, are the FAA and its parent, the Transportation Department.\nActing FAA chief Dan Elwell has disputed arguments that current launch licensing is fundamentally flawed. The agency needs to move faster, he told a government-industry conference earlier this month, but he also said \u201cindustry must improve its safety performance.\u201d Before too many changes are made, he added, \u201cI think more talk about safety is time well spent.\u201d\nMr. Ross and a new space-policy lieutenant also will have jurisdiction to establish governmentwide deregulatory goals affecting export licenses, radio spectrum used by satellites and in-orbit servicing of spacecraft. Mr. Ross said the shifts were decided after consultations with an ambitious but frustrated industry.\n\u201cIf the United States is to continue to lead in space, we have got to create the right conditions,\u201d according to the commerce chief.\nThe Trump administration\u2019s more-lenient approach has plenty of adherents on Capitol Hill, where there is bipartisan support for generally reducing the industry\u2019s compliance times and costs.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Responding to industry complaints that federal rules increasingly hamper private ventures in space, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has emerged as the deregulation czar of the heavens. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Commercial-Space Advocates Urge Looser Regulations (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7398",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commercial-space-advocates-urge-looser-regulations-1487154604?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=26",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration maintained that international space treaties required the U.S. to vet and monitor any mission by companies or entrepreneurs headed for the moon, asteroids or deeper into the solar system.\nMr. Obama\u2019s team set up a multiagency process including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to authorize such flights. The procedures are intended to verify that the proposed ventures would avoid contaminating the moon, asteroids and other extraterrestrial bodies with man-made materials, as mandated by treaty obligations. \n\n\nRep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n (R., Okla.), described by industry officials as the leading candidate to become NASA administrator under President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump,\n \n\n\n\n has supported similar enhanced rules and expanded authority for government agencies.\nBut now, with a more laissez-faire attitude in the White House and commercial space proponents pushing for changes, other lawmakers want to scale back, or practically eliminate, federal oversight of commercial missions.\nIn many cases, free-market champions argue formal regulations aren\u2019t appropriate. Their goal appears to be assuring nongovernmental entities swift and essentially unfettered access to every corner of space.\nThose principles were spelled out during a conference in Washington last week by Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin\n\n\n\n (R., Texas), who heads the House Science Committee\u2019s space panel.\nHis presentation argued that expansive regulations and a \u201ccheck the box\u201d mentality won\u2019t promote U.S. commercial interests. Instead, Mr. Babin advocated using oversight techniques such as private-public partnerships and standards-setting organizations.\nUsing some of his strongest language yet about the topic, Mr. Babin suggested that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote the budding space economy while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \nThe treaty prohibits governments from deploying nuclear weapons in space or claiming celestial resources such as the moon for themselves, among other restrictions, but it leaves oversight of commercial ventures up to individual countries without any specifics. Russia, which ratified the treaty in 1967, has historically been among the regimes prone to object to the assertion of private-property rights in space. \nAccording to Mr. Babin\u2019s vision, government regulations wouldn\u2019t specify safeguards against contamination of space or heavenly bodies by rocket segments, fuel and commercial operations such as mining.\n\u201cThe regulatory path is fraught with uncertainty\u201d because it can be \u201cheld hostage to the whims of unelected bureaucracies,\u201d he said.\nAs part of the 50-year-old space treaty, \u201cthere\u2019s flexibility afforded to the states\u201d to carry out their duties \u201cwithout stifling innovation or smothering the embers of creativity,\u201d Mr. Babin said.\n\u201cThe government\u2019s role isn\u2019t to give you permission to do these things; the government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Nield,\n\n\n\n head of the Federal Aviation Administration office that licenses space missions, told the same conference that launch applications are climbing dramatically partly as a result of the burgeoning commercial space sector.\u00a0\nBy 2018, the overall number of launches\u2014including rockets, balloons and other types of vehicles\u2014is projected to quadruple to more than 70, versus 17 in 2016.\n\u201cWe will be very interested to see what this new White House has to say about commercial space,\u201d Mr. Nield said. He also urged Congress to enact extensions of current policy and regulatory specifics designed to help the industry move forward.\nThe first commercial project authorized under the Obama team\u2019s regulatory procedures was a Northern California-based startup called Moon Express, which proposes to send a tiny, unmanned scientific spacecraft to the moon over the next year. Moon Express said on its website that it submitted its application to the FAA on April 8, 2016, and received approval in August.\nAn interagency group coordinated by Mr. Nield\u2019s office concluded that the launch of the proposed 20-pound rover complied with treaty obligations. The mission \u201cdoes not jeopardize public health and safety, safety of property [or] U.S. national security of foreign-policy interests,\u201d officials said.\nSince then, members of Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team have backed concepts calling for companies mining minerals on the moon or operating private space stations.\nAdministration officials, however, have stressed that such internal memos are merely preliminary ideas, with final decisions on government support for commercial ventures on hold until a new NASA chief is in place.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com With a more laissez-faire attitude in the White House and commercial-space proponents pushing for change, some lawmakers want to scale back, or practically eliminate, federal oversight of commercial missions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Commercial-Space Advocates Urge Looser Regulations (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7399",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commercial-space-advocates-urge-looser-regulations-1487154604?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=88",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration maintained that international space treaties required the U.S. to vet and monitor any mission by companies or entrepreneurs headed for the moon, asteroids or deeper into the solar system.\nMr. Obama\u2019s team set up a multiagency process including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to authorize such flights. The procedures are intended to verify that the proposed ventures would avoid contaminating the moon, asteroids and other extraterrestrial bodies with man-made materials, as mandated by treaty obligations. \n\n\nRep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n (R., Okla.), described by industry officials as the leading candidate to become NASA administrator under President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump,\n \n\n\n\n has supported similar enhanced rules and expanded authority for government agencies.\nBut now, with a more laissez-faire attitude in the White House and commercial space proponents pushing for changes, other lawmakers want to scale back, or practically eliminate, federal oversight of commercial missions.\nIn many cases, free-market champions argue formal regulations aren\u2019t appropriate. Their goal appears to be assuring nongovernmental entities swift and essentially unfettered access to every corner of space.\nThose principles were spelled out during a conference in Washington last week by Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin\n\n\n\n (R., Texas), who heads the House Science Committee\u2019s space panel.\nHis presentation argued that expansive regulations and a \u201ccheck the box\u201d mentality won\u2019t promote U.S. commercial interests. Instead, Mr. Babin advocated using oversight techniques such as private-public partnerships and standards-setting organizations.\nUsing some of his strongest language yet about the topic, Mr. Babin suggested that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote the budding space economy while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \nThe treaty prohibits governments from deploying nuclear weapons in space or claiming celestial resources such as the moon for themselves, among other restrictions, but it leaves oversight of commercial ventures up to individual countries without any specifics. Russia, which ratified the treaty in 1967, has historically been among the regimes prone to object to the assertion of private-property rights in space. \nAccording to Mr. Babin\u2019s vision, government regulations wouldn\u2019t specify safeguards against contamination of space or heavenly bodies by rocket segments, fuel and commercial operations such as mining.\n\u201cThe regulatory path is fraught with uncertainty\u201d because it can be \u201cheld hostage to the whims of unelected bureaucracies,\u201d he said.\nAs part of the 50-year-old space treaty, \u201cthere\u2019s flexibility afforded to the states\u201d to carry out their duties \u201cwithout stifling innovation or smothering the embers of creativity,\u201d Mr. Babin said.\n\u201cThe government\u2019s role isn\u2019t to give you permission to do these things; the government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Nield,\n\n\n\n head of the Federal Aviation Administration office that licenses space missions, told the same conference that launch applications are climbing dramatically partly as a result of the burgeoning commercial space sector.\u00a0\nBy 2018, the overall number of launches\u2014including rockets, balloons and other types of vehicles\u2014is projected to quadruple to more than 70, versus 17 in 2016.\n\u201cWe will be very interested to see what this new White House has to say about commercial space,\u201d Mr. Nield said. He also urged Congress to enact extensions of current policy and regulatory specifics designed to help the industry move forward.\nThe first commercial project authorized under the Obama team\u2019s regulatory procedures was a Northern California-based startup called Moon Express, which proposes to send a tiny, unmanned scientific spacecraft to the moon over the next year. Moon Express said on its website that it submitted its application to the FAA on April 8, 2016, and received approval in August.\nAn interagency group coordinated by Mr. Nield\u2019s office concluded that the launch of the proposed 20-pound rover complied with treaty obligations. The mission \u201cdoes not jeopardize public health and safety, safety of property [or] U.S. national security of foreign-policy interests,\u201d officials said.\nSince then, members of Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team have backed concepts calling for companies mining minerals on the moon or operating private space stations.\nAdministration officials, however, have stressed that such internal memos are merely preliminary ideas, with final decisions on government support for commercial ventures on hold until a new NASA chief is in place.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com With a more laissez-faire attitude in the White House and commercial-space proponents pushing for change, some lawmakers want to scale back, or practically eliminate, federal oversight of commercial missions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Commercial-Space Advocates Urge Looser Regulations (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7400",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/commercial-space-advocates-urge-looser-regulations-1487154604?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=130",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration maintained that international space treaties required the U.S. to vet and monitor any mission by companies or entrepreneurs headed for the moon, asteroids or deeper into the solar system.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Obama\u2019s team set up a multiagency process including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to authorize such flights. The procedures are intended to verify that the proposed ventures would avoid contaminating the moon, asteroids and other extraterrestrial bodies with man-made materials, as mandated by treaty obligations. \n\n\nRep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n (R., Okla.), described by industry officials as the leading candidate to become NASA administrator under President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump,\n \n\n\n\n has supported similar enhanced rules and expanded authority for government agencies.\nBut now, with a more laissez-faire attitude in the White House and commercial space proponents pushing for changes, other lawmakers want to scale back, or practically eliminate, federal oversight of commercial missions.\nIn many cases, free-market champions argue formal regulations aren\u2019t appropriate. Their goal appears to be assuring nongovernmental entities swift and essentially unfettered access to every corner of space.\nThose principles were spelled out during a conference in Washington last week by Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin\n\n\n\n (R., Texas), who heads the House Science Committee\u2019s space panel.\nHis presentation argued that expansive regulations and a \u201ccheck the box\u201d mentality won\u2019t promote U.S. commercial interests. Instead, Mr. Babin advocated using oversight techniques such as private-public partnerships and standards-setting organizations.\nUsing some of his strongest language yet about the topic, Mr. Babin suggested that largely voluntary industry initiatives\u2014rather than a rigid, government-imposed regulatory structure\u2014are best suited to promote the budding space economy while complying with provisions of the Cold War-era Outer Space Treaty. \nThe treaty prohibits governments from deploying nuclear weapons in space or claiming celestial resources such as the moon for themselves, among other restrictions, but it leaves oversight of commercial ventures up to individual countries without any specifics. Russia, which ratified the treaty in 1967, has historically been among the regimes prone to object to the assertion of private-property rights in space. \nAccording to Mr. Babin\u2019s vision, government regulations wouldn\u2019t specify safeguards against contamination of space or heavenly bodies by rocket segments, fuel and commercial operations such as mining.\n\u201cThe regulatory path is fraught with uncertainty\u201d because it can be \u201cheld hostage to the whims of unelected bureaucracies,\u201d he said.\nAs part of the 50-year-old space treaty, \u201cthere\u2019s flexibility afforded to the states\u201d to carry out their duties \u201cwithout stifling innovation or smothering the embers of creativity,\u201d Mr. Babin said.\n\u201cThe government\u2019s role isn\u2019t to give you permission to do these things; the government\u2019s role should be limited to only those areas that require its intrusion,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Nield,\n\n\n\n head of the Federal Aviation Administration office that licenses space missions, told the same conference that launch applications are climbing dramatically partly as a result of the burgeoning commercial space sector.\u00a0\nBy 2018, the overall number of launches\u2014including rockets, balloons and other types of vehicles\u2014is projected to quadruple to more than 70, versus 17 in 2016.\n\u201cWe will be very interested to see what this new White House has to say about commercial space,\u201d Mr. Nield said. He also urged Congress to enact extensions of current policy and regulatory specifics designed to help the industry move forward.\nThe first commercial project authorized under the Obama team\u2019s regulatory procedures was a Northern California-based startup called Moon Express, which proposes to send a tiny, unmanned scientific spacecraft to the moon over the next year. Moon Express said on its website that it submitted its application to the FAA on April 8, 2016, and received approval in August.\nAn interagency group coordinated by Mr. Nield\u2019s office concluded that the launch of the proposed 20-pound rover complied with treaty obligations. The mission \u201cdoes not jeopardize public health and safety, safety of property [or] U.S. national security of foreign-policy interests,\u201d officials said.\nSince then, members of Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team have backed concepts calling for companies mining minerals on the moon or operating private space stations.\nAdministration officials, however, have stressed that such internal memos are merely preliminary ideas, with final decisions on government support for commercial ventures on hold until a new NASA chief is in place.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com With a more laissez-faire attitude in the White House and commercial-space proponents pushing for change, some lawmakers want to scale back, or practically eliminate, federal oversight of commercial missions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Chief Mulls Public-Private Moon Exploration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7401",
        "date": "2018-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-nasa-chief-mulls-public-private-moon-exploration-1525033940?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=19",
        "text": "One letter from disgruntled researchers on a NASA-sponsored panel said the action was \u201cviewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community.\u201d Scientists working on the project, which has experienced repeated cost estimate increases, nevertheless argue that replacing it with an industry-NASA partnership would disrupt research and delay mission schedules.\nCiting budget constraints for the decision, NASA simultaneously is stepping up efforts to solicit proposals from private enterprise to build and operate alternate spacecraft for similar missions\u00a0during roughly the next decade. The follow-on projects are designed to build on progress by NASA so far.\n\n\nSuch tensions between traditional big-ticket NASA programs and a surge in government-industry partnerships, projected to be less expensive and more nimble, likely will be hallmarks of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s tenure, according to federal and industry experts. \nLong before the former Republican Congressman from Oklahoma narrowly won confirmation, the Trump administration staked out its commitment to rely on entrepreneurs and commercial-space companies to spearhead U.S. efforts to return to the moon.\nNow, the new team at the helm of NASA is searching for effective ways to meet that goal. Last week, the agency issued a draft request for proposals covering \u201cend-to-end commercial payload services between\u201d earth and the moon, utilizing private launch vehicles, landers and re-entry vehicles. The document, among other things, described the move as \u201cthe latest step in a long-running effort by NASA to support the development of commercial lunar capabilities.\u201d\nTo underscore that point, Mr. Bridenstine\u00a0on Friday\u00a0sent a message on twitter emphasizing NASA\u2019s renewed focus on lunar exploration. Some technology originally slated for Resource Prospector \u201cwill go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMore landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners.\u201d\nIn a statement, a NASA spokeswoman\u00a0said plans are under way for \u201ca series of progressive robotic missions to the lunar surface,\u201d envisioning increasingly\u00a0larger spacecraft \u201cleading to an eventual human lander capability.\u201d\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, the space-transportation startup founded and run by\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc. CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n are among the companies maneuvering to benefit from that trend. But scores of smaller, less well-known firms also hope to participate, especially after NASA eventually redirects billions of tax dollars currently appropriated each year to support operations of the international space station. \nThe White House carved out only $150 million for the next fiscal year to foster what it calls a \u201clong-term, sustained commercial presence\u201d in orbits between the earth and the moon. But that wedge of money\u2014along with funding for more advanced lunar landers\u2014is anticipated to grow dramatically after the space station is retired, possibly within the next six years, according to industry officials and experts advising NASA and the Trump administration. \n\u201cLeveraging commercial investment is more cost-effective\u201d than NASA\u2019s historic approach to exploration, and is essential to bring about private-public partnership models demanded by the White House, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a commercial-space advocate who runs a startup that works with NASA.\nInternal talking points distributed by NASA last month highlighted that agency officials will ask industry players \u201cwhat support they desire from NASA\u201d to promote commercial activities in the wake of the space station\u2019s anticipated retirement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who heads up NASA\u2019s human-exploration projects, sketched out the planned evolution of lander technology at an industry conference in Colorado earlier this month. \nInitially, commercially-built robotic landers will be able to carry about 200 pounds of scientific instruments to the lunar surface once a year. \u201cWe can take very high risks with these\u201d early versions, he said. \nThe next steps, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, would be to move toward \u201chuman-size\u201d derivatives carrying up to 1,000 pounds each, and sometime in the 2030s, to deploy fully-reusable landers for crews and cargo. Jim Bridenstine is facing tough choices about government-private partnerships to explore the moon. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Chief Mulls Public-Private Moon Exploration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7402",
        "date": "2018-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-nasa-chief-mulls-public-private-moon-exploration-1525033940?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=76",
        "text": "One letter from disgruntled researchers on a NASA-sponsored panel said the action was \u201cviewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community.\u201d Scientists working on the project, which has experienced repeated cost estimate increases, nevertheless argue that replacing it with an industry-NASA partnership would disrupt research and delay mission schedules.\n\n\n\n\nCiting budget constraints for the decision, NASA simultaneously is stepping up efforts to solicit proposals from private enterprise to build and operate alternate spacecraft for similar missions\u00a0during roughly the next decade. The follow-on projects are designed to build on progress by NASA so far.\n\n\nSuch tensions between traditional big-ticket NASA programs and a surge in government-industry partnerships, projected to be less expensive and more nimble, likely will be hallmarks of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s tenure, according to federal and industry experts. \nLong before the former Republican Congressman from Oklahoma narrowly won confirmation, the Trump administration staked out its commitment to rely on entrepreneurs and commercial-space companies to spearhead U.S. efforts to return to the moon.\nNow, the new team at the helm of NASA is searching for effective ways to meet that goal. Last week, the agency issued a draft request for proposals covering \u201cend-to-end commercial payload services between\u201d earth and the moon, utilizing private launch vehicles, landers and re-entry vehicles. The document, among other things, described the move as \u201cthe latest step in a long-running effort by NASA to support the development of commercial lunar capabilities.\u201d\nTo underscore that point, Mr. Bridenstine\u00a0on Friday\u00a0sent a message on twitter emphasizing NASA\u2019s renewed focus on lunar exploration. Some technology originally slated for Resource Prospector \u201cwill go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMore landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners.\u201d\nIn a statement, a NASA spokeswoman\u00a0said plans are under way for \u201ca series of progressive robotic missions to the lunar surface,\u201d envisioning increasingly\u00a0larger spacecraft \u201cleading to an eventual human lander capability.\u201d\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, the space-transportation startup founded and run by\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc. CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n are among the companies maneuvering to benefit from that trend. But scores of smaller, less well-known firms also hope to participate, especially after NASA eventually redirects billions of tax dollars currently appropriated each year to support operations of the international space station. \nThe White House carved out only $150 million for the next fiscal year to foster what it calls a \u201clong-term, sustained commercial presence\u201d in orbits between the earth and the moon. But that wedge of money\u2014along with funding for more advanced lunar landers\u2014is anticipated to grow dramatically after the space station is retired, possibly within the next six years, according to industry officials and experts advising NASA and the Trump administration. \n\u201cLeveraging commercial investment is more cost-effective\u201d than NASA\u2019s historic approach to exploration, and is essential to bring about private-public partnership models demanded by the White House, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a commercial-space advocate who runs a startup that works with NASA.\nInternal talking points distributed by NASA last month highlighted that agency officials will ask industry players \u201cwhat support they desire from NASA\u201d to promote commercial activities in the wake of the space station\u2019s anticipated retirement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who heads up NASA\u2019s human-exploration projects, sketched out the planned evolution of lander technology at an industry conference in Colorado earlier this month. \nInitially, commercially-built robotic landers will be able to carry about 200 pounds of scientific instruments to the lunar surface once a year. \u201cWe can take very high risks with these\u201d early versions, he said. \nThe next steps, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, would be to move toward \u201chuman-size\u201d derivatives carrying up to 1,000 pounds each, and sometime in the 2030s, to deploy fully-reusable landers for crews and cargo. Jim Bridenstine is facing tough choices about government-private partnerships to explore the moon. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Chief Mulls Public-Private Moon Exploration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7403",
        "date": "2018-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-nasa-chief-mulls-public-private-moon-exploration-1525033940?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=68",
        "text": "One letter from disgruntled researchers on a NASA-sponsored panel said the action was \u201cviewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community.\u201d Scientists working on the project, which has experienced repeated cost estimate increases, nevertheless argue that replacing it with an industry-NASA partnership would disrupt research and delay mission schedules.\nCiting budget constraints for the decision, NASA simultaneously is stepping up efforts to solicit proposals from private enterprise to build and operate alternate spacecraft for similar missions\u00a0during roughly the next decade. The follow-on projects are designed to build on progress by NASA so far.\n\n\nSuch tensions between traditional big-ticket NASA programs and a surge in government-industry partnerships, projected to be less expensive and more nimble, likely will be hallmarks of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s tenure, according to federal and industry experts. \nLong before the former Republican Congressman from Oklahoma narrowly won confirmation, the Trump administration staked out its commitment to rely on entrepreneurs and commercial-space companies to spearhead U.S. efforts to return to the moon.\nNow, the new team at the helm of NASA is searching for effective ways to meet that goal. Last week, the agency issued a draft request for proposals covering \u201cend-to-end commercial payload services between\u201d earth and the moon, utilizing private launch vehicles, landers and re-entry vehicles. The document, among other things, described the move as \u201cthe latest step in a long-running effort by NASA to support the development of commercial lunar capabilities.\u201d\nTo underscore that point, Mr. Bridenstine\u00a0on Friday\u00a0sent a message on twitter emphasizing NASA\u2019s renewed focus on lunar exploration. Some technology originally slated for Resource Prospector \u201cwill go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMore landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners.\u201d\nIn a statement, a NASA spokeswoman\u00a0said plans are under way for \u201ca series of progressive robotic missions to the lunar surface,\u201d envisioning increasingly\u00a0larger spacecraft \u201cleading to an eventual human lander capability.\u201d\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, the space-transportation startup founded and run by\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc. CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n are among the companies maneuvering to benefit from that trend. But scores of smaller, less well-known firms also hope to participate, especially after NASA eventually redirects billions of tax dollars currently appropriated each year to support operations of the international space station. \nThe White House carved out only $150 million for the next fiscal year to foster what it calls a \u201clong-term, sustained commercial presence\u201d in orbits between the earth and the moon. But that wedge of money\u2014along with funding for more advanced lunar landers\u2014is anticipated to grow dramatically after the space station is retired, possibly within the next six years, according to industry officials and experts advising NASA and the Trump administration. \n\u201cLeveraging commercial investment is more cost-effective\u201d than NASA\u2019s historic approach to exploration, and is essential to bring about private-public partnership models demanded by the White House, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a commercial-space advocate who runs a startup that works with NASA.\nInternal talking points distributed by NASA last month highlighted that agency officials will ask industry players \u201cwhat support they desire from NASA\u201d to promote commercial activities in the wake of the space station\u2019s anticipated retirement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who heads up NASA\u2019s human-exploration projects, sketched out the planned evolution of lander technology at an industry conference in Colorado earlier this month. \nInitially, commercially-built robotic landers will be able to carry about 200 pounds of scientific instruments to the lunar surface once a year. \u201cWe can take very high risks with these\u201d early versions, he said. \nThe next steps, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, would be to move toward \u201chuman-size\u201d derivatives carrying up to 1,000 pounds each, and sometime in the 2030s, to deploy fully-reusable landers for crews and cargo. Jim Bridenstine is facing tough choices about government-private partnerships to explore the moon. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "New NASA Chief Mulls Public-Private Moon Exploration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7404",
        "date": "2018-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-nasa-chief-mulls-public-private-moon-exploration-1525033940?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=96",
        "text": "One letter from disgruntled researchers on a NASA-sponsored panel said the action was \u201cviewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community.\u201d Scientists working on the project, which has experienced repeated cost estimate increases, nevertheless argue that replacing it with an industry-NASA partnership would disrupt research and delay mission schedules.\n\n\n\n\nCiting budget constraints for the decision, NASA simultaneously is stepping up efforts to solicit proposals from private enterprise to build and operate alternate spacecraft for similar missions\u00a0during roughly the next decade. The follow-on projects are designed to build on progress by NASA so far.\n\n\nSuch tensions between traditional big-ticket NASA programs and a surge in government-industry partnerships, projected to be less expensive and more nimble, likely will be hallmarks of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s tenure, according to federal and industry experts. \nLong before the former Republican Congressman from Oklahoma narrowly won confirmation, the Trump administration staked out its commitment to rely on entrepreneurs and commercial-space companies to spearhead U.S. efforts to return to the moon.\nNow, the new team at the helm of NASA is searching for effective ways to meet that goal. Last week, the agency issued a draft request for proposals covering \u201cend-to-end commercial payload services between\u201d earth and the moon, utilizing private launch vehicles, landers and re-entry vehicles. The document, among other things, described the move as \u201cthe latest step in a long-running effort by NASA to support the development of commercial lunar capabilities.\u201d\nTo underscore that point, Mr. Bridenstine\u00a0on Friday\u00a0sent a message on twitter emphasizing NASA\u2019s renewed focus on lunar exploration. Some technology originally slated for Resource Prospector \u201cwill go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign,\u201d he wrote. \u201cMore landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners.\u201d\nIn a statement, a NASA spokeswoman\u00a0said plans are under way for \u201ca series of progressive robotic missions to the lunar surface,\u201d envisioning increasingly\u00a0larger spacecraft \u201cleading to an eventual human lander capability.\u201d\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Blue Origin LLC, the space-transportation startup founded and run by\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc. CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n are among the companies maneuvering to benefit from that trend. But scores of smaller, less well-known firms also hope to participate, especially after NASA eventually redirects billions of tax dollars currently appropriated each year to support operations of the international space station. \nThe White House carved out only $150 million for the next fiscal year to foster what it calls a \u201clong-term, sustained commercial presence\u201d in orbits between the earth and the moon. But that wedge of money\u2014along with funding for more advanced lunar landers\u2014is anticipated to grow dramatically after the space station is retired, possibly within the next six years, according to industry officials and experts advising NASA and the Trump administration. \n\u201cLeveraging commercial investment is more cost-effective\u201d than NASA\u2019s historic approach to exploration, and is essential to bring about private-public partnership models demanded by the White House, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joel Sercel,\n\n\n\n a commercial-space advocate who runs a startup that works with NASA.\nInternal talking points distributed by NASA last month highlighted that agency officials will ask industry players \u201cwhat support they desire from NASA\u201d to promote commercial activities in the wake of the space station\u2019s anticipated retirement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Gerstenmaier,\n\n\n\n who heads up NASA\u2019s human-exploration projects, sketched out the planned evolution of lander technology at an industry conference in Colorado earlier this month. \nInitially, commercially-built robotic landers will be able to carry about 200 pounds of scientific instruments to the lunar surface once a year. \u201cWe can take very high risks with these\u201d early versions, he said. \nThe next steps, according to Mr. Gerstenmaier, would be to move toward \u201chuman-size\u201d derivatives carrying up to 1,000 pounds each, and sometime in the 2030s, to deploy fully-reusable landers for crews and cargo. Jim Bridenstine is facing tough choices about government-private partnerships to explore the moon. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Loses Suit Over NASA Moon Lander (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7405",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-loses-suit-over-nasa-moon-lander-11636050834?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=3",
        "text": "On Thursday, Federal Claims Judge Richard A. Hertling dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit. The court didn\u2019t make Judge Hertling\u2019s ruling public yet, to give the parties the chance to propose redactions.\nA spokesman for Blue Origin said the lawsuit highlighted safety issues with NASA\u2019s procurement process that have yet to be addressed. He said the company is working with NASA on other aspects of the mission to bring astronauts back to the moon.\n\n\n\u201cNot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract,\u201d Mr. Bezos said on Twitter. \nRepresentatives for SpaceX, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. On Twitter, Mr. Musk posted a meme reading \u201cYou have been judged!\u201d in apparent reference to the court\u2019s decision.\nNASA said it would resume work with SpaceX on the vehicle \u201cas soon as possible\u201d now that the suit has been dismissed. It had paused its work related to the vehicle after Blue Origin filed suit.\nSpaceX and Blue Origin have been competing to win high-profile contracts from NASA and cultivate a broader presence for private companies in space by taking commercial astronauts to space on their rockets.\nIn July, Mr. Bezos was among Blue Origin\u2019s first passengers on a mission that shot him and other guests to the edge of space. The company reprised the effort last month with a launch that counted actor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Shatner \n\n\n\n as a passenger.\nSpaceX has sent professional and amateur astronauts deeper into space. Last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft launched two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. That spaceflight was the first from the U.S. in nearly a decade and gave NASA a transportation option besides purchasing seats on Russian government rockets. In September the company sent four private astronauts to orbit on a three-day trip.\nNASA picked SpaceX for the lunar-lander project in April, choosing Mr. Musk\u2019s company over proposals from Blue Origin and from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which bid for the job through its Dynetics unit.\nThe space agency awarded the work as part of its efforts to send people back to the moon. NASA has said returning astronauts to the lunar surface could occur as soon as 2024.\nAfter NASA awarded the lander contract to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Leidos protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, an agency that oversees federal contracts. In July, the GAO upheld NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency was within its rights to award the contract to a single bidder.\nIn addition to the space-tourism market\u2014where Blue Origin is also competing with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has broad ambitions for its space business, which the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder has funded in part by selling large sums of his stock in the e-commerce giant.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nIt is developing its New Glenn rocket designed to use seven engines to lift huge payloads into orbit. Blue Origin is also building rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, and working on designs for nuclear-propulsion systems that could propel vehicles even farther into space.\nA more earthly competition has also played out between Messrs. Musk and Bezos this year for the title of the world\u2019s richest person. Mr. Musk, the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\nwon that title from Mr. Bezos for the first time in January as shares of the electric-vehicle maker soared.\nThe gap between their wealth has grown recently, with Mr. Musk\u2019s net worth exceeding $300 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. For now, Mr. Bezos is relegated to second place with a net worth of about $196 billion.\nWrite to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com Blue Origin sued the federal government after NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract for the lunar lander to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, claiming NASA had overlooked safety issues when assessing SpaceX\u2019s proposal. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Loses Suit Over NASA Moon Lander (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7406",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-loses-suit-over-nasa-moon-lander-11636050834?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=11",
        "text": "On Thursday, Federal Claims Judge Richard A. Hertling dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit. The court didn\u2019t make Judge Hertling\u2019s ruling public yet, to give the parties the chance to propose redactions.\nA spokesman for Blue Origin said the lawsuit highlighted safety issues with NASA\u2019s procurement process that have yet to be addressed. He said the company is working with NASA on other aspects of the mission to bring astronauts back to the moon.\n\n\n\u201cNot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract,\u201d Mr. Bezos said on Twitter. \nRepresentatives for SpaceX, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. On Twitter, Mr. Musk posted a meme reading \u201cYou have been judged!\u201d in apparent reference to the court\u2019s decision.\nNASA said it would resume work with SpaceX on the vehicle \u201cas soon as possible\u201d now that the suit has been dismissed. It had paused its work related to the vehicle after Blue Origin filed suit.\nSpaceX and Blue Origin have been competing to win high-profile contracts from NASA and cultivate a broader presence for private companies in space by taking commercial astronauts to space on their rockets.\nIn July, Mr. Bezos was among Blue Origin\u2019s first passengers on a mission that shot him and other guests to the edge of space. The company reprised the effort last month with a launch that counted actor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Shatner \n\n\n\n as a passenger.\nSpaceX has sent professional and amateur astronauts deeper into space. Last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft launched two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. That spaceflight was the first from the U.S. in nearly a decade and gave NASA a transportation option besides purchasing seats on Russian government rockets. In September the company sent four private astronauts to orbit on a three-day trip.\nNASA picked SpaceX for the lunar-lander project in April, choosing Mr. Musk\u2019s company over proposals from Blue Origin and from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which bid for the job through its Dynetics unit.\nThe space agency awarded the work as part of its efforts to send people back to the moon. NASA has said returning astronauts to the lunar surface could occur as soon as 2024.\nAfter NASA awarded the lander contract to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Leidos protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, an agency that oversees federal contracts. In July, the GAO upheld NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency was within its rights to award the contract to a single bidder.\nIn addition to the space-tourism market\u2014where Blue Origin is also competing with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has broad ambitions for its space business, which the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder has funded in part by selling large sums of his stock in the e-commerce giant.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nIt is developing its New Glenn rocket designed to use seven engines to lift huge payloads into orbit. Blue Origin is also building rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, and working on designs for nuclear-propulsion systems that could propel vehicles even farther into space.\nA more earthly competition has also played out between Messrs. Musk and Bezos this year for the title of the world\u2019s richest person. Mr. Musk, the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\nwon that title from Mr. Bezos for the first time in January as shares of the electric-vehicle maker soared.\nThe gap between their wealth has grown recently, with Mr. Musk\u2019s net worth exceeding $300 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. For now, Mr. Bezos is relegated to second place with a net worth of about $196 billion.\nWrite to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com Blue Origin sued the federal government after NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract for the lunar lander to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, claiming NASA had overlooked safety issues when assessing SpaceX\u2019s proposal. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Loses Suit Over NASA Moon Lander (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7407",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-loses-suit-over-nasa-moon-lander-11636050834?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=19",
        "text": "On Thursday, Federal Claims Judge Richard A. Hertling dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit. The court didn\u2019t make Judge Hertling\u2019s ruling public yet, to give the parties the chance to propose redactions.\nA spokesman for Blue Origin said the lawsuit highlighted safety issues with NASA\u2019s procurement process that have yet to be addressed. He said the company is working with NASA on other aspects of the mission to bring astronauts back to the moon.\n\n\n\u201cNot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract,\u201d Mr. Bezos said on Twitter. \nRepresentatives for SpaceX, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. On Twitter, Mr. Musk posted a meme reading \u201cYou have been judged!\u201d in apparent reference to the court\u2019s decision.\nNASA said it would resume work with SpaceX on the vehicle \u201cas soon as possible\u201d now that the suit has been dismissed. It had paused its work related to the vehicle after Blue Origin filed suit.\nSpaceX and Blue Origin have been competing to win high-profile contracts from NASA and cultivate a broader presence for private companies in space by taking commercial astronauts to space on their rockets.\nIn July, Mr. Bezos was among Blue Origin\u2019s first passengers on a mission that shot him and other guests to the edge of space. The company reprised the effort last month with a launch that counted actor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Shatner \n\n\n\n as a passenger.\nSpaceX has sent professional and amateur astronauts deeper into space. Last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft launched two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. That spaceflight was the first from the U.S. in nearly a decade and gave NASA a transportation option besides purchasing seats on Russian government rockets. In September the company sent four private astronauts to orbit on a three-day trip.\nNASA picked SpaceX for the lunar-lander project in April, choosing Mr. Musk\u2019s company over proposals from Blue Origin and from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which bid for the job through its Dynetics unit.\nThe space agency awarded the work as part of its efforts to send people back to the moon. NASA has said returning astronauts to the lunar surface could occur as soon as 2024.\nAfter NASA awarded the lander contract to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Leidos protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, an agency that oversees federal contracts. In July, the GAO upheld NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency was within its rights to award the contract to a single bidder.\nIn addition to the space-tourism market\u2014where Blue Origin is also competing with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has broad ambitions for its space business, which the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder has funded in part by selling large sums of his stock in the e-commerce giant.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nIt is developing its New Glenn rocket designed to use seven engines to lift huge payloads into orbit. Blue Origin is also building rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, and working on designs for nuclear-propulsion systems that could propel vehicles even farther into space.\nA more earthly competition has also played out between Messrs. Musk and Bezos this year for the title of the world\u2019s richest person. Mr. Musk, the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\nwon that title from Mr. Bezos for the first time in January as shares of the electric-vehicle maker soared.\nThe gap between their wealth has grown recently, with Mr. Musk\u2019s net worth exceeding $300 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. For now, Mr. Bezos is relegated to second place with a net worth of about $196 billion.\nWrite to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com Blue Origin sued the federal government after NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract for the lunar lander to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, claiming NASA had overlooked safety issues when assessing SpaceX\u2019s proposal. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Loses Suit Over NASA Moon Lander (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7408",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-loses-suit-over-nasa-moon-lander-11636050834?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=2",
        "text": "On Thursday, Federal Claims Judge Richard A. Hertling dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit. The court didn\u2019t make Judge Hertling\u2019s ruling public yet, to give the parties the chance to propose redactions.\n\n\n\n\nA spokesman for Blue Origin said the lawsuit highlighted safety issues with NASA\u2019s procurement process that have yet to be addressed. He said the company is working with NASA on other aspects of the mission to bring astronauts back to the moon.\n\n\n\u201cNot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract,\u201d Mr. Bezos said on Twitter. \nRepresentatives for SpaceX, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. On Twitter, Mr. Musk posted a meme reading \u201cYou have been judged!\u201d in apparent reference to the court\u2019s decision.\nNASA said it would resume work with SpaceX on the vehicle \u201cas soon as possible\u201d now that the suit has been dismissed. It had paused its work related to the vehicle after Blue Origin filed suit.\nSpaceX and Blue Origin have been competing to win high-profile contracts from NASA and cultivate a broader presence for private companies in space by taking commercial astronauts to space on their rockets.\nIn July, Mr. Bezos was among Blue Origin\u2019s first passengers on a mission that shot him and other guests to the edge of space. The company reprised the effort last month with a launch that counted actor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Shatner \n\n\n\n as a passenger.\nSpaceX has sent professional and amateur astronauts deeper into space. Last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft launched two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. That spaceflight was the first from the U.S. in nearly a decade and gave NASA a transportation option besides purchasing seats on Russian government rockets. In September the company sent four private astronauts to orbit on a three-day trip.\nNASA picked SpaceX for the lunar-lander project in April, choosing Mr. Musk\u2019s company over proposals from Blue Origin and from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which bid for the job through its Dynetics unit.\nThe space agency awarded the work as part of its efforts to send people back to the moon. NASA has said returning astronauts to the lunar surface could occur as soon as 2024.\nAfter NASA awarded the lander contract to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Leidos protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, an agency that oversees federal contracts. In July, the GAO upheld NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency was within its rights to award the contract to a single bidder.\nIn addition to the space-tourism market\u2014where Blue Origin is also competing with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has broad ambitions for its space business, which the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder has funded in part by selling large sums of his stock in the e-commerce giant.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nIt is developing its New Glenn rocket designed to use seven engines to lift huge payloads into orbit. Blue Origin is also building rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, and working on designs for nuclear-propulsion systems that could propel vehicles even farther into space.\nA more earthly competition has also played out between Messrs. Musk and Bezos this year for the title of the world\u2019s richest person. Mr. Musk, the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\nwon that title from Mr. Bezos for the first time in January as shares of the electric-vehicle maker soared.\nThe gap between their wealth has grown recently, with Mr. Musk\u2019s net worth exceeding $300 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. For now, Mr. Bezos is relegated to second place with a net worth of about $196 billion.\nWrite to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com Blue Origin sued the federal government after NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract for the lunar lander to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, claiming NASA had overlooked safety issues when assessing SpaceX\u2019s proposal. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Loses Suit Over NASA Moon Lander (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7409",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-loses-suit-over-nasa-moon-lander-11636050834?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=18",
        "text": "On Thursday, Federal Claims Judge Richard A. Hertling dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit. The court didn\u2019t make Judge Hertling\u2019s ruling public yet, to give the parties the chance to propose redactions.\n\n\n\n\nA spokesman for Blue Origin said the lawsuit highlighted safety issues with NASA\u2019s procurement process that have yet to be addressed. He said the company is working with NASA on other aspects of the mission to bring astronauts back to the moon.\n\n\n\u201cNot the decision we wanted, but we respect the court\u2019s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract,\u201d Mr. Bezos said on Twitter. \nRepresentatives for SpaceX, officially called Space Exploration Technologies Corp., didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment. On Twitter, Mr. Musk posted a meme reading \u201cYou have been judged!\u201d in apparent reference to the court\u2019s decision.\nNASA said it would resume work with SpaceX on the vehicle \u201cas soon as possible\u201d now that the suit has been dismissed. It had paused its work related to the vehicle after Blue Origin filed suit.\nSpaceX and Blue Origin have been competing to win high-profile contracts from NASA and cultivate a broader presence for private companies in space by taking commercial astronauts to space on their rockets.\nIn July, Mr. Bezos was among Blue Origin\u2019s first passengers on a mission that shot him and other guests to the edge of space. The company reprised the effort last month with a launch that counted actor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Shatner \n\n\n\n as a passenger.\nSpaceX has sent professional and amateur astronauts deeper into space. Last year, its Crew Dragon spacecraft launched two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. That spaceflight was the first from the U.S. in nearly a decade and gave NASA a transportation option besides purchasing seats on Russian government rockets. In September the company sent four private astronauts to orbit on a three-day trip.\nNASA picked SpaceX for the lunar-lander project in April, choosing Mr. Musk\u2019s company over proposals from Blue Origin and from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n which bid for the job through its Dynetics unit.\nThe space agency awarded the work as part of its efforts to send people back to the moon. NASA has said returning astronauts to the lunar surface could occur as soon as 2024.\nAfter NASA awarded the lander contract to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Leidos protested the decision to the Government Accountability Office, an agency that oversees federal contracts. In July, the GAO upheld NASA\u2019s decision, saying the space agency was within its rights to award the contract to a single bidder.\nIn addition to the space-tourism market\u2014where Blue Origin is also competing with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n \u2014Mr. Bezos\u2019 company has broad ambitions for its space business, which the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder has funded in part by selling large sums of his stock in the e-commerce giant.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nIt is developing its New Glenn rocket designed to use seven engines to lift huge payloads into orbit. Blue Origin is also building rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, which launches satellites for the Pentagon and U.S. spy agencies, and working on designs for nuclear-propulsion systems that could propel vehicles even farther into space.\nA more earthly competition has also played out between Messrs. Musk and Bezos this year for the title of the world\u2019s richest person. Mr. Musk, the founder of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\nwon that title from Mr. Bezos for the first time in January as shares of the electric-vehicle maker soared.\nThe gap between their wealth has grown recently, with Mr. Musk\u2019s net worth exceeding $300 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. For now, Mr. Bezos is relegated to second place with a net worth of about $196 billion.\nWrite to Matt Grossman at matt.grossman@wsj.com Blue Origin sued the federal government after NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract for the lunar lander to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, claiming NASA had overlooked safety issues when assessing SpaceX\u2019s proposal. ",
        "author": "Matt Grossman"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Spacecraft Rockets Toward Sun for Closer Look (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7410",
        "date": "2018-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-rockets-toward-sun-for-closest-look-yet-1534078762?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=18",
        "text": "No wonder scientists consider it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun, and what better day to launch to the sun than Sunday as NASA noted.\n\u201cAll I can say is, \u2018Wow, here we go.\u2019 We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Parker,\n\n\n\n the 91-year-old astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named.\n\n\nProtected by a revolutionary new carbon heat shield and other high-tech wonders, the spacecraft will zip past Venus in October. That will set up the first solar encounter in November.\nAltogether, the Parker probe will make 24 close approaches to the sun on the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking.\nFor the second straight day, thousands of spectators jammed the launch site in the middle of the night as well as surrounding towns, including Mr. Parker and his family. He proposed the existence of solar wind\u2014a steady, supersonic stream of particles blasting off the sun\u201460 years ago.\nIt was the first time NASA named a spacecraft after someone still alive, and Mr. Parker wasn\u2019t about to let it take off without him. Saturday morning\u2019s launch attempt was foiled by last-minute technical trouble. But Sunday gave way to complete success.\nThe Delta IV Heavy rocket thundered into the predawn darkness, thrilling onlookers for miles around as it climbed through a clear, star-studded sky. NASA needed the mighty 23-story rocket, plus a third stage, to get the diminutive Parker probe\u2014the size of a small car and well under a ton\u2014racing toward the sun.\nFrom Earth, it is 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) to the sun, and the Parker probe will be within 4% of that distance at its closest. That will be seven times closer than previous spacecraft.\n\u201cGo, baby, go!\u201d project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University shouted at liftoff.\nIt was the first rocket launch ever witnessed by Mr. Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He came away impressed, saying it was like looking at the Taj Mahal for years in photos and then beholding \u201cthe real thing\u201d in India.\n\u201cI really have to turn from biting my nails in getting it launched, to thinking about all the interesting things which I don\u2019t know yet and which will be made clear, I assume, over the next five or six or seven years,\u201d Parker said on NASA TV.\nNASA\u2019s science mission chief,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n was thrilled not only with the launch, but Mr. Parker\u2019s presence.\n\u201cI\u2019m in awe,\u201d Mr. Zurbuchen said. \u201cWhat a milestone. Also what\u2019s so cool is hanging out with Parker during all this and seeing his emotion, too.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis long exposure photograph provided by NASA, shows the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket as it launches NASA's Parker Solar Probe on Sunday in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nParker, the probe, will start shattering records this fall. On its very first brush with the sun, it will come within 15.5 million miles (25 million kilometers), easily beating the current record of 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) set by NASA\u2019s Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976. Mr. Zurbuchen expects the data from even this early stage to yield top science papers.\nBy the time Parker gets to its 22nd, 23rd and 24th orbits of the sun in 2024 and 2025, it will be even deeper into the corona and traveling at a record-breaking 430,000 mph (690,000 kilometers per hour).\nNothing from Planet Earth has ever hit that kind of speed.\nEven Ms. Fox has difficulty comprehending the mission\u2019s derring-do.\n\u201cTo me, it\u2019s still mind-blowing,\u201d she said. \u201cEven I still go, really? We\u2019re doing that?\u201d\nZurbuchen considers the sun the most important star in our universe\u2014it\u2019s ours, after all\u2014and so this is one of NASA\u2019s big-time strategic missions. By better understanding the sun\u2019s life-giving and sometimes violent nature, Earthlings can better protect satellites and astronauts in orbit, and power grids on the ground, he noted. In today\u2019s tech-dependent society, everyone stands to benefit.\nWith this first-of-its-kind stellar mission, scientists hope to unlock the many mysteries of the sun, a commonplace yellow dwarf star around 4.5 billion years old. Among the puzzlers: Why is the corona hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the sun and why is the sun\u2019s atmosphere continually expanding and accelerating, as Mr. Parker accurately predicted in 1958?\n\u201cThe only way we can do that is to finally go up and touch the sun,\u201d Ms. Fox said. \u201cWe\u2019ve looked at it. We\u2019ve studied it from missions that are close in, even as close as the planet Mercury. But we have to go there.\u201d\nThe spacecraft\u2019s heat shield will serve as an umbrella, shading the science instruments during the close, critical solar junctures. Sensors on the spacecraft will make certain the heat shield faces the sun at the right times. If there\u2019s any tilting, the spacecraft will correct itself so nothing gets fried. With a communication lag time of 16 minutes, As soon as this fall, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the edges of the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere and make 24 close approaches to the sun over the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Spacecraft Rockets Toward Sun for Closer Look (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7411",
        "date": "2018-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-rockets-toward-sun-for-closest-look-yet-1534078762?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=65",
        "text": "No wonder scientists consider it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun, and what better day to launch to the sun than Sunday as NASA noted.\n\u201cAll I can say is, \u2018Wow, here we go.\u2019 We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Parker,\n\n\n\n the 91-year-old astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named.\n\n\nProtected by a revolutionary new carbon heat shield and other high-tech wonders, the spacecraft will zip past Venus in October. That will set up the first solar encounter in November.\nAltogether, the Parker probe will make 24 close approaches to the sun on the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking.\nFor the second straight day, thousands of spectators jammed the launch site in the middle of the night as well as surrounding towns, including Mr. Parker and his family. He proposed the existence of solar wind\u2014a steady, supersonic stream of particles blasting off the sun\u201460 years ago.\nIt was the first time NASA named a spacecraft after someone still alive, and Mr. Parker wasn\u2019t about to let it take off without him. Saturday morning\u2019s launch attempt was foiled by last-minute technical trouble. But Sunday gave way to complete success.\nThe Delta IV Heavy rocket thundered into the predawn darkness, thrilling onlookers for miles around as it climbed through a clear, star-studded sky. NASA needed the mighty 23-story rocket, plus a third stage, to get the diminutive Parker probe\u2014the size of a small car and well under a ton\u2014racing toward the sun.\nFrom Earth, it is 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) to the sun, and the Parker probe will be within 4% of that distance at its closest. That will be seven times closer than previous spacecraft.\n\u201cGo, baby, go!\u201d project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University shouted at liftoff.\nIt was the first rocket launch ever witnessed by Mr. Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He came away impressed, saying it was like looking at the Taj Mahal for years in photos and then beholding \u201cthe real thing\u201d in India.\n\u201cI really have to turn from biting my nails in getting it launched, to thinking about all the interesting things which I don\u2019t know yet and which will be made clear, I assume, over the next five or six or seven years,\u201d Parker said on NASA TV.\nNASA\u2019s science mission chief,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n was thrilled not only with the launch, but Mr. Parker\u2019s presence.\n\u201cI\u2019m in awe,\u201d Mr. Zurbuchen said. \u201cWhat a milestone. Also what\u2019s so cool is hanging out with Parker during all this and seeing his emotion, too.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis long exposure photograph provided by NASA, shows the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket as it launches NASA's Parker Solar Probe on Sunday in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nParker, the probe, will start shattering records this fall. On its very first brush with the sun, it will come within 15.5 million miles (25 million kilometers), easily beating the current record of 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) set by NASA\u2019s Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976. Mr. Zurbuchen expects the data from even this early stage to yield top science papers.\nBy the time Parker gets to its 22nd, 23rd and 24th orbits of the sun in 2024 and 2025, it will be even deeper into the corona and traveling at a record-breaking 430,000 mph (690,000 kilometers per hour).\nNothing from Planet Earth has ever hit that kind of speed.\nEven Ms. Fox has difficulty comprehending the mission\u2019s derring-do.\n\u201cTo me, it\u2019s still mind-blowing,\u201d she said. \u201cEven I still go, really? We\u2019re doing that?\u201d\nZurbuchen considers the sun the most important star in our universe\u2014it\u2019s ours, after all\u2014and so this is one of NASA\u2019s big-time strategic missions. By better understanding the sun\u2019s life-giving and sometimes violent nature, Earthlings can better protect satellites and astronauts in orbit, and power grids on the ground, he noted. In today\u2019s tech-dependent society, everyone stands to benefit.\nWith this first-of-its-kind stellar mission, scientists hope to unlock the many mysteries of the sun, a commonplace yellow dwarf star around 4.5 billion years old. Among the puzzlers: Why is the corona hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the sun and why is the sun\u2019s atmosphere continually expanding and accelerating, as Mr. Parker accurately predicted in 1958?\n\u201cThe only way we can do that is to finally go up and touch the sun,\u201d Ms. Fox said. \u201cWe\u2019ve looked at it. We\u2019ve studied it from missions that are close in, even as close as the planet Mercury. But we have to go there.\u201d\nThe spacecraft\u2019s heat shield will serve as an umbrella, shading the science instruments during the close, critical solar junctures. Sensors on the spacecraft will make certain the heat shield faces the sun at the right times. If there\u2019s any tilting, the spacecraft will correct itself so nothing gets fried. With a communication lag time of 16 minutes, As soon as this fall, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the edges of the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere and make 24 close approaches to the sun over the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Spacecraft Rockets Toward Sun for Closer Look (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7412",
        "date": "2018-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-rockets-toward-sun-for-closest-look-yet-1534078762?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=72",
        "text": "No wonder scientists consider it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun, and what better day to launch to the sun than Sunday as NASA noted.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cAll I can say is, \u2018Wow, here we go.\u2019 We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Parker,\n\n\n\n the 91-year-old astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named.\n\n\nProtected by a revolutionary new carbon heat shield and other high-tech wonders, the spacecraft will zip past Venus in October. That will set up the first solar encounter in November.\nAltogether, the Parker probe will make 24 close approaches to the sun on the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking.\nFor the second straight day, thousands of spectators jammed the launch site in the middle of the night as well as surrounding towns, including Mr. Parker and his family. He proposed the existence of solar wind\u2014a steady, supersonic stream of particles blasting off the sun\u201460 years ago.\nIt was the first time NASA named a spacecraft after someone still alive, and Mr. Parker wasn\u2019t about to let it take off without him. Saturday morning\u2019s launch attempt was foiled by last-minute technical trouble. But Sunday gave way to complete success.\nThe Delta IV Heavy rocket thundered into the predawn darkness, thrilling onlookers for miles around as it climbed through a clear, star-studded sky. NASA needed the mighty 23-story rocket, plus a third stage, to get the diminutive Parker probe\u2014the size of a small car and well under a ton\u2014racing toward the sun.\nFrom Earth, it is 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) to the sun, and the Parker probe will be within 4% of that distance at its closest. That will be seven times closer than previous spacecraft.\n\u201cGo, baby, go!\u201d project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University shouted at liftoff.\nIt was the first rocket launch ever witnessed by Mr. Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He came away impressed, saying it was like looking at the Taj Mahal for years in photos and then beholding \u201cthe real thing\u201d in India.\n\u201cI really have to turn from biting my nails in getting it launched, to thinking about all the interesting things which I don\u2019t know yet and which will be made clear, I assume, over the next five or six or seven years,\u201d Parker said on NASA TV.\nNASA\u2019s science mission chief,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n was thrilled not only with the launch, but Mr. Parker\u2019s presence.\n\u201cI\u2019m in awe,\u201d Mr. Zurbuchen said. \u201cWhat a milestone. Also what\u2019s so cool is hanging out with Parker during all this and seeing his emotion, too.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis long exposure photograph provided by NASA, shows the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket as it launches NASA's Parker Solar Probe on Sunday in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nParker, the probe, will start shattering records this fall. On its very first brush with the sun, it will come within 15.5 million miles (25 million kilometers), easily beating the current record of 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) set by NASA\u2019s Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976. Mr. Zurbuchen expects the data from even this early stage to yield top science papers.\nBy the time Parker gets to its 22nd, 23rd and 24th orbits of the sun in 2024 and 2025, it will be even deeper into the corona and traveling at a record-breaking 430,000 mph (690,000 kilometers per hour).\nNothing from Planet Earth has ever hit that kind of speed.\nEven Ms. Fox has difficulty comprehending the mission\u2019s derring-do.\n\u201cTo me, it\u2019s still mind-blowing,\u201d she said. \u201cEven I still go, really? We\u2019re doing that?\u201d\nZurbuchen considers the sun the most important star in our universe\u2014it\u2019s ours, after all\u2014and so this is one of NASA\u2019s big-time strategic missions. By better understanding the sun\u2019s life-giving and sometimes violent nature, Earthlings can better protect satellites and astronauts in orbit, and power grids on the ground, he noted. In today\u2019s tech-dependent society, everyone stands to benefit.\nWith this first-of-its-kind stellar mission, scientists hope to unlock the many mysteries of the sun, a commonplace yellow dwarf star around 4.5 billion years old. Among the puzzlers: Why is the corona hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the sun and why is the sun\u2019s atmosphere continually expanding and accelerating, as Mr. Parker accurately predicted in 1958?\n\u201cThe only way we can do that is to finally go up and touch the sun,\u201d Ms. Fox said. \u201cWe\u2019ve looked at it. We\u2019ve studied it from missions that are close in, even as close as the planet Mercury. But we have to go there.\u201d\nThe spacecraft\u2019s heat shield will serve as an umbrella, shading the science instruments during the close, critical solar junctures. Sensors on the spacecraft will make certain the heat shield faces the sun at the right times. If there\u2019s any tilting, the spacecraft will correct itself so nothing gets fried. With a communication lag time of 16 minutes, the spacecraft must fend for itself at the sun. The Johns Hopkins flight controllers in Laurel, Maryland, will be too far away to help.\nA mission to get close up and personal with our star has been on NASA\u2019s books since 1958. The trick was making the spacecraft small, compact and light enough to travel at incredible speeds, while surviving the sun\u2019s punishing environment and the extreme change in temperature when the spacecraft is out near Venus.\n\u201cWe\u2019ve had to wait so long for our technology to catch up with our dreams,\u201d Ms. Fox said. \u201cIt\u2019s incredible to be standing here today.\u201d\nMore than 1 million names are aboard the spacecraft, submitted last spring by space enthusiasts, as well as photos of Parker, the man, and a copy of his 1958 landmark paper on solar wind.\n\u201cI\u2019ll bet you 10 bucks it works,\u201d Mr. Parker said.\n\u2014Copyright 2018 The Associated Press As soon as this fall, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the edges of the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere and make 24 close approaches to the sun over the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Spacecraft Rockets Toward Sun for Closer Look (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7413",
        "date": "2018-08-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-rockets-toward-sun-for-closest-look-yet-1534078762?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=90",
        "text": "No wonder scientists consider it the coolest, hottest mission under the sun, and what better day to launch to the sun than Sunday as NASA noted.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cAll I can say is, \u2018Wow, here we go.\u2019 We\u2019re in for some learning over the next several years,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eugene Parker,\n\n\n\n the 91-year-old astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named.\n\n\nProtected by a revolutionary new carbon heat shield and other high-tech wonders, the spacecraft will zip past Venus in October. That will set up the first solar encounter in November.\nAltogether, the Parker probe will make 24 close approaches to the sun on the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking.\nFor the second straight day, thousands of spectators jammed the launch site in the middle of the night as well as surrounding towns, including Mr. Parker and his family. He proposed the existence of solar wind\u2014a steady, supersonic stream of particles blasting off the sun\u201460 years ago.\nIt was the first time NASA named a spacecraft after someone still alive, and Mr. Parker wasn\u2019t about to let it take off without him. Saturday morning\u2019s launch attempt was foiled by last-minute technical trouble. But Sunday gave way to complete success.\nThe Delta IV Heavy rocket thundered into the predawn darkness, thrilling onlookers for miles around as it climbed through a clear, star-studded sky. NASA needed the mighty 23-story rocket, plus a third stage, to get the diminutive Parker probe\u2014the size of a small car and well under a ton\u2014racing toward the sun.\nFrom Earth, it is 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) to the sun, and the Parker probe will be within 4% of that distance at its closest. That will be seven times closer than previous spacecraft.\n\u201cGo, baby, go!\u201d project scientist Nicola Fox of Johns Hopkins University shouted at liftoff.\nIt was the first rocket launch ever witnessed by Mr. Parker, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He came away impressed, saying it was like looking at the Taj Mahal for years in photos and then beholding \u201cthe real thing\u201d in India.\n\u201cI really have to turn from biting my nails in getting it launched, to thinking about all the interesting things which I don\u2019t know yet and which will be made clear, I assume, over the next five or six or seven years,\u201d Parker said on NASA TV.\nNASA\u2019s science mission chief,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n was thrilled not only with the launch, but Mr. Parker\u2019s presence.\n\u201cI\u2019m in awe,\u201d Mr. Zurbuchen said. \u201cWhat a milestone. Also what\u2019s so cool is hanging out with Parker during all this and seeing his emotion, too.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis long exposure photograph provided by NASA, shows the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket as it launches NASA's Parker Solar Probe on Sunday in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nParker, the probe, will start shattering records this fall. On its very first brush with the sun, it will come within 15.5 million miles (25 million kilometers), easily beating the current record of 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) set by NASA\u2019s Helios 2 spacecraft in 1976. Mr. Zurbuchen expects the data from even this early stage to yield top science papers.\nBy the time Parker gets to its 22nd, 23rd and 24th orbits of the sun in 2024 and 2025, it will be even deeper into the corona and traveling at a record-breaking 430,000 mph (690,000 kilometers per hour).\nNothing from Planet Earth has ever hit that kind of speed.\nEven Ms. Fox has difficulty comprehending the mission\u2019s derring-do.\n\u201cTo me, it\u2019s still mind-blowing,\u201d she said. \u201cEven I still go, really? We\u2019re doing that?\u201d\nZurbuchen considers the sun the most important star in our universe\u2014it\u2019s ours, after all\u2014and so this is one of NASA\u2019s big-time strategic missions. By better understanding the sun\u2019s life-giving and sometimes violent nature, Earthlings can better protect satellites and astronauts in orbit, and power grids on the ground, he noted. In today\u2019s tech-dependent society, everyone stands to benefit.\nWith this first-of-its-kind stellar mission, scientists hope to unlock the many mysteries of the sun, a commonplace yellow dwarf star around 4.5 billion years old. Among the puzzlers: Why is the corona hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the sun and why is the sun\u2019s atmosphere continually expanding and accelerating, as Mr. Parker accurately predicted in 1958?\n\u201cThe only way we can do that is to finally go up and touch the sun,\u201d Ms. Fox said. \u201cWe\u2019ve looked at it. We\u2019ve studied it from missions that are close in, even as close as the planet Mercury. But we have to go there.\u201d\nThe spacecraft\u2019s heat shield will serve as an umbrella, shading the science instruments during the close, critical solar junctures. Sensors on the spacecraft will make certain the heat shield faces the sun at the right times. If there\u2019s any tilting, the spacecraft will correct itself so nothing gets fried. With a communication lag time of 16 minu As soon as this fall, the Parker Solar Probe will fly straight through the edges of the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere and make 24 close approaches to the sun over the seven-year, $1.5 billion undertaking. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plans for Lunar Bases in Limbo as NASA Mulls Schedule Slip and Program Changes (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7414",
        "date": "2020-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/plans-for-lunar-bases-in-limbo-as-nasa-mulls-schedule-slip-and-program-changes-11584228317?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=13",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration budgets and policies were built around the concept of using an orbital staging platform, called a lunar gateway, to assemble crews, vehicles and materials for missions to begin construction of bases on the moon. Such missions, possibly shipping stockpiles of water, food and building materials, were supposed to start no later than 2025.\nBut on Saturday Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, signaled that schedule could slip at least a year as NASA reconfigures the design and use of that gateway. \u201cWe are looking at alternatives,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cto make sure we can achieve sustainability as soon as possible.\u201d \n\n\nMr. Loverro also said significant changes to the gateway are intended to reduce overall cost and risk.\nIn public remarks last week, Mr. Lovero told an agency advisory committee that major spending and technical hurdles require revamping and, at least for now, simplifying NASA\u2019s moon priorities.\nIn his comments Friday, Mr. Loverro indicated that shorter-term efforts will focus NASA spending and expertise\u2014along with core industry initiatives\u2014primarily on using existing rockets to launch spacecraft capable of going to and returning from the moon by 2024. The shift means a slimmed-down lunar gateway still is slated to be in position by then, according to NASA, but the agency doesn\u2019t anticipate using it for some time after the initial astronauts land on the moon.\nOn Saturday, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said the gateway remains a critical part of the agency\u2019s sustainable lunar exploration effort. He added that NASA is refining plans to \u201cfirmly establish a sustainable presence around the moon by 2028, which will lead to NASA sending astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.\u201d\nIn addition to setting the stage for lunar settlements, the gateway concept has been part of NASA\u2019s drive to attract foreign government support for deep-space endeavors targeting Mars.\nIn February, NASA unveiled a beefed-up $25.2 billion budget request for next year, which emphasized the importance of setting up a lunar gateway. But in his comments on Friday, Mr. Loverro suggested he was poised to cancel that part of the Artemis project because NASA doesn\u2019t have enough money to aggressively invest in both the proposed gateway and lunar landers.\nUnder the new approach, details of which NASA is still developing, Mr.Loverro on Friday said the agency isn\u2019t abandoning the gateway or its ultimate benefits. Rather, he indicated a slower spending ramp-up\u2014supporting what is envisioned as the second phase of Artemis\u2014will allow the agency to more effectively recruit international partners.\nThe 2024 date for the first crewed landing was devised by the White House to coincide with the end of a possible second term for Mr. Trump, according to government and industry officials. NASA initially set 2028 as the deadline, but that was accelerated at the insistence of White House officials.\nMany space experts and former NASA officials, though, have been outspoken in criticizing the shorter deadline as arbitrary and unrealistic. House Democrats are championing legislation to push out the timetable for lunar landings close to the end of the decade.\nThe latest strategy doesn\u2019t resolve the role billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, will play in shipping astronauts and cargo to the moon.\nCurrently, Mr. Loverro and Mr. Bridenstine are betting heavily that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , prime contractor for a powerful new family or rockets under development for NASA, will be able to overcome a series of delays and cost overruns. Dubbed the Space Launch System, the boosters are intended to serve as the backbone for the 2024 lunar landing at a cost of roughly $2 billion per launch.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tNASA plans to have a slimmed-down version of its \u201corbital gateway\u201d in position by 2024, without using for some time after that. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said work on the gateway had been pushed back through 2028. (March 15) NASA is considering extending the timeline to start establishing a base for humans on the moon, potentially disrupting a central element of President Trump\u2019s space ambitions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plans for Lunar Bases in Limbo as NASA Mulls Schedule Slip and Program Changes (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7415",
        "date": "2020-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/plans-for-lunar-bases-in-limbo-as-nasa-mulls-schedule-slip-and-program-changes-11584228317?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=43",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration budgets and policies were built around the concept of using an orbital staging platform, called a lunar gateway, to assemble crews, vehicles and materials for missions to begin construction of bases on the moon. Such missions, possibly shipping stockpiles of water, food and building materials, were supposed to start no later than 2025.\nBut on Saturday Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, signaled that schedule could slip at least a year as NASA reconfigures the design and use of that gateway. \u201cWe are looking at alternatives,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cto make sure we can achieve sustainability as soon as possible.\u201d \n\n\nMr. Loverro also said significant changes to the gateway are intended to reduce overall cost and risk.\nIn public remarks last week, Mr. Lovero told an agency advisory committee that major spending and technical hurdles require revamping and, at least for now, simplifying NASA\u2019s moon priorities.\nIn his comments Friday, Mr. Loverro indicated that shorter-term efforts will focus NASA spending and expertise\u2014along with core industry initiatives\u2014primarily on using existing rockets to launch spacecraft capable of going to and returning from the moon by 2024. The shift means a slimmed-down lunar gateway still is slated to be in position by then, according to NASA, but the agency doesn\u2019t anticipate using it for some time after the initial astronauts land on the moon.\nOn Saturday, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said the gateway remains a critical part of the agency\u2019s sustainable lunar exploration effort. He added that NASA is refining plans to \u201cfirmly establish a sustainable presence around the moon by 2028, which will lead to NASA sending astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.\u201d\nIn addition to setting the stage for lunar settlements, the gateway concept has been part of NASA\u2019s drive to attract foreign government support for deep-space endeavors targeting Mars.\nIn February, NASA unveiled a beefed-up $25.2 billion budget request for next year, which emphasized the importance of setting up a lunar gateway. But in his comments on Friday, Mr. Loverro suggested he was poised to cancel that part of the Artemis project because NASA doesn\u2019t have enough money to aggressively invest in both the proposed gateway and lunar landers.\nUnder the new approach, details of which NASA is still developing, Mr.Loverro on Friday said the agency isn\u2019t abandoning the gateway or its ultimate benefits. Rather, he indicated a slower spending ramp-up\u2014supporting what is envisioned as the second phase of Artemis\u2014will allow the agency to more effectively recruit international partners.\nThe 2024 date for the first crewed landing was devised by the White House to coincide with the end of a possible second term for Mr. Trump, according to government and industry officials. NASA initially set 2028 as the deadline, but that was accelerated at the insistence of White House officials.\nMany space experts and former NASA officials, though, have been outspoken in criticizing the shorter deadline as arbitrary and unrealistic. House Democrats are championing legislation to push out the timetable for lunar landings close to the end of the decade.\nThe latest strategy doesn\u2019t resolve the role billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, will play in shipping astronauts and cargo to the moon.\nCurrently, Mr. Loverro and Mr. Bridenstine are betting heavily that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , prime contractor for a powerful new family or rockets under development for NASA, will be able to overcome a series of delays and cost overruns. Dubbed the Space Launch System, the boosters are intended to serve as the backbone for the 2024 lunar landing at a cost of roughly $2 billion per launch.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tNASA plans to have a slimmed-down version of its \u201corbital gateway\u201d in position by 2024, without using for some time after that. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said work on the gateway had been pushed back through 2028. (March 15) NASA is considering extending the timeline to start establishing a base for humans on the moon, potentially disrupting a central element of President Trump\u2019s space ambitions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plans for Lunar Bases in Limbo as NASA Mulls Schedule Slip and Program Changes (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7416",
        "date": "2020-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/plans-for-lunar-bases-in-limbo-as-nasa-mulls-schedule-slip-and-program-changes-11584228317?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=46",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration budgets and policies were built around the concept of using an orbital staging platform, called a lunar gateway, to assemble crews, vehicles and materials for missions to begin construction of bases on the moon. Such missions, possibly shipping stockpiles of water, food and building materials, were supposed to start no later than 2025.\nBut on Saturday Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, signaled that schedule could slip at least a year as NASA reconfigures the design and use of that gateway. \u201cWe are looking at alternatives,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cto make sure we can achieve sustainability as soon as possible.\u201d \n\n\nMr. Loverro also said significant changes to the gateway are intended to reduce overall cost and risk.\nIn public remarks last week, Mr. Lovero told an agency advisory committee that major spending and technical hurdles require revamping and, at least for now, simplifying NASA\u2019s moon priorities.\nIn his comments Friday, Mr. Loverro indicated that shorter-term efforts will focus NASA spending and expertise\u2014along with core industry initiatives\u2014primarily on using existing rockets to launch spacecraft capable of going to and returning from the moon by 2024. The shift means a slimmed-down lunar gateway still is slated to be in position by then, according to NASA, but the agency doesn\u2019t anticipate using it for some time after the initial astronauts land on the moon.\nOn Saturday, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said the gateway remains a critical part of the agency\u2019s sustainable lunar exploration effort. He added that NASA is refining plans to \u201cfirmly establish a sustainable presence around the moon by 2028, which will lead to NASA sending astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.\u201d\nIn addition to setting the stage for lunar settlements, the gateway concept has been part of NASA\u2019s drive to attract foreign government support for deep-space endeavors targeting Mars.\nIn February, NASA unveiled a beefed-up $25.2 billion budget request for next year, which emphasized the importance of setting up a lunar gateway. But in his comments on Friday, Mr. Loverro suggested he was poised to cancel that part of the Artemis project because NASA doesn\u2019t have enough money to aggressively invest in both the proposed gateway and lunar landers.\nUnder the new approach, details of which NASA is still developing, Mr.Loverro on Friday said the agency isn\u2019t abandoning the gateway or its ultimate benefits. Rather, he indicated a slower spending ramp-up\u2014supporting what is envisioned as the second phase of Artemis\u2014will allow the agency to more effectively recruit international partners.\nThe 2024 date for the first crewed landing was devised by the White House to coincide with the end of a possible second term for Mr. Trump, according to government and industry officials. NASA initially set 2028 as the deadline, but that was accelerated at the insistence of White House officials.\nMany space experts and former NASA officials, though, have been outspoken in criticizing the shorter deadline as arbitrary and unrealistic. House Democrats are championing legislation to push out the timetable for lunar landings close to the end of the decade.\nThe latest strategy doesn\u2019t resolve the role billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, will play in shipping astronauts and cargo to the moon.\nCurrently, Mr. Loverro and Mr. Bridenstine are betting heavily that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , prime contractor for a powerful new family or rockets under development for NASA, will be able to overcome a series of delays and cost overruns. Dubbed the Space Launch System, the boosters are intended to serve as the backbone for the 2024 lunar landing at a cost of roughly $2 billion per launch.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tNASA plans to have a slimmed-down version of its \u201corbital gateway\u201d in position by 2024, without using for some time after that. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said work on the gateway had been pushed back through 2028. (March 15) NASA is considering extending the timeline to start establishing a base for humans on the moon, potentially disrupting a central element of President Trump\u2019s space ambitions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plans for Lunar Bases in Limbo as NASA Mulls Schedule Slip and Program Changes (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7417",
        "date": "2020-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/plans-for-lunar-bases-in-limbo-as-nasa-mulls-schedule-slip-and-program-changes-11584228317?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=58",
        "text": "National Aeronautics and Space Administration budgets and policies were built around the concept of using an orbital staging platform, called a lunar gateway, to assemble crews, vehicles and materials for missions to begin construction of bases on the moon. Such missions, possibly shipping stockpiles of water, food and building materials, were supposed to start no later than 2025.\n\n\n\n\nBut on Saturday Doug Loverro, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, signaled that schedule could slip at least a year as NASA reconfigures the design and use of that gateway. \u201cWe are looking at alternatives,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cto make sure we can achieve sustainability as soon as possible.\u201d \n\n\nMr. Loverro also said significant changes to the gateway are intended to reduce overall cost and risk.\nIn public remarks last week, Mr. Lovero told an agency advisory committee that major spending and technical hurdles require revamping and, at least for now, simplifying NASA\u2019s moon priorities.\nIn his comments Friday, Mr. Loverro indicated that shorter-term efforts will focus NASA spending and expertise\u2014along with core industry initiatives\u2014primarily on using existing rockets to launch spacecraft capable of going to and returning from the moon by 2024. The shift means a slimmed-down lunar gateway still is slated to be in position by then, according to NASA, but the agency doesn\u2019t anticipate using it for some time after the initial astronauts land on the moon.\nOn Saturday, NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine\n\n\n\n said the gateway remains a critical part of the agency\u2019s sustainable lunar exploration effort. He added that NASA is refining plans to \u201cfirmly establish a sustainable presence around the moon by 2028, which will lead to NASA sending astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.\u201d\nIn addition to setting the stage for lunar settlements, the gateway concept has been part of NASA\u2019s drive to attract foreign government support for deep-space endeavors targeting Mars.\nIn February, NASA unveiled a beefed-up $25.2 billion budget request for next year, which emphasized the importance of setting up a lunar gateway. But in his comments on Friday, Mr. Loverro suggested he was poised to cancel that part of the Artemis project because NASA doesn\u2019t have enough money to aggressively invest in both the proposed gateway and lunar landers.\nUnder the new approach, details of which NASA is still developing, Mr.Loverro on Friday said the agency isn\u2019t abandoning the gateway or its ultimate benefits. Rather, he indicated a slower spending ramp-up\u2014supporting what is envisioned as the second phase of Artemis\u2014will allow the agency to more effectively recruit international partners.\nThe 2024 date for the first crewed landing was devised by the White House to coincide with the end of a possible second term for Mr. Trump, according to government and industry officials. NASA initially set 2028 as the deadline, but that was accelerated at the insistence of White House officials.\nMany space experts and former NASA officials, though, have been outspoken in criticizing the shorter deadline as arbitrary and unrealistic. House Democrats are championing legislation to push out the timetable for lunar landings close to the end of the decade.\nThe latest strategy doesn\u2019t resolve the role billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, will play in shipping astronauts and cargo to the moon.\nCurrently, Mr. Loverro and Mr. Bridenstine are betting heavily that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , prime contractor for a powerful new family or rockets under development for NASA, will be able to overcome a series of delays and cost overruns. Dubbed the Space Launch System, the boosters are intended to serve as the backbone for the 2024 lunar landing at a cost of roughly $2 billion per launch.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tNASA plans to have a slimmed-down version of its \u201corbital gateway\u201d in position by 2024, without using for some time after that. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said work on the gateway had been pushed back through 2028. (March 15) NASA is considering extending the timeline to start establishing a base for humans on the moon, potentially disrupting a central element of President Trump\u2019s space ambitions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Issues Strategies to Combat Growing Orbital Debris Risks (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7418",
        "date": "2018-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-issues-new-strategies-to-combat-growing-orbital-debris-risks-1529332532?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=19",
        "text": "Mr. Trump said the changes, among others he is championing, aim to ensure that \u201cAmerica will always be first in space\u201d in both military and commercial arenas.\nThe Pentagon will continue to maintain the central catalog of orbiting spacecraft and debris posing potential hazards to U.S. government and private satellites. But commerce department officials will have the authority to pass on that information to the industry, combined with data gathered from private or foreign government sources.\n\n\nDescribing plans for mega-constellations of small commercial satellites as a \u201cgreat motivator\u201d for the changes, Scott Pace, the top White House space adviser, told reporters Monday the Trump administration is \u201cexplicitly trying to avoid\u201d the time-consuming process of negotiating treaties concerning traffic management in space.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rep. Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma Tapped to Head NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7419",
        "date": "2017-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rep-jim-bridenstine-of-oklahoma-tapped-to-head-nasa-1504361235?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=23",
        "text": "Mr. Bridenstine, a strong supporter of private space endeavors such as minerals mining on the moon, has encouraged use of the council to better coordinate military and civilian space programs. But the result, according to industry officials and former NASA managers, could restrict his options in running the agency.\nAs a leading legislative voice on space issues, Mr. Bridenstine has supported greater emphasis on tracking orbital debris as various companies contemplate launching unprecedented numbers of low-earth orbit satellites.\n\n\nHe also has advocated the importance of using NASA missions to the moon as steppingstones to developing a host of technologies required for deep-space probes eventually including manned missions to Mars.\nContrary to expectations across the industry and on Capitol Hill, the White House statement didn\u2019t include a choice for the agency\u2019s No. 2 position.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Schumacher,\n\n\n\n a former senior agency official who runs the Washington office of rocket-engine maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n had been considered the leading candidate for that job, according to industry officials.\nMr. Schumacher had cleared background checks and was on track to be nominated along with Mr. Bridenstine, according to one person familiar with the details, but he recently pulled out of the running for family reasons. Now, White House aides are conducting a new search for a deputy, but it could be a protracted process identifying and vetting a candidate acceptable to lawmakers, commercial space advocates and leading aerospace contractors.\nThe choice of a deputy administrator for the agency with an annual budget of more than $19 billion has been watched closely by contractors and others. That is largely because Mr. Bridenstine, who previously ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, has limited business management experience.\nA major reason presidential aides delayed an announcement about Mr. Bridenstine for months was the desire to simultaneously announce a deputy with greater management experience and a history of working at senior levels inside the agency, according to industry officials and another person familiar with the details.\nReflecting Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s history of sometimes bucking the status quo when it comes to established space programs, his anticipated nomination over the months has been met with ambivalence among contractors working on NASA\u2019s most expensive rocket and spacecraft projects seeking to send astronauts to Mars after 2030. \nThe nomination, which needs approval from the Senate, could face a spirited debate there. Friday\u2019s announcement prompted criticism from Republican Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marco Rubio\n\n\n\n and Democratic Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson.\n\n\n\n The Florida senators focused on Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s partisan background\u00a0and lack of management experience as drawbacks. \nFlorida is among the states that have most to lose if the new NASA chief scales back, slows down or reconfigures the agency\u2019s big-ticket manned exploration programs.\nSome of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s past comments, which were critical of climate change stemming from human activity, also could prompt controversy as NASA considers whether to cut back spending on research programs examining such issues.\nThe prospective nominee has strongly supported government and industry partnerships as a way to accelerate space projects, often favoring them over traditional federal contracts to purchase hardware or services. In speeches and web postings over the years, he has warned about the threats Beijing\u2019s ambitions to explore the moon pose for U.S. businesses as well as America\u2019s national security.\nStressing the importance of U.S. efforts to promote private initiatives in space and establish permanent outposts on the moon\u2019s surface, Mr. Bridenstine used stark language last year in a talk to a lunar exploration group. \u201cThis is our Sputnik moment,\u201d he said. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration didn\u2019t back exploration of the moon\u2019s surface or establishing permanent settlements there.\nIf confirmed, the new NASA chief will confront significant budget pressures along with possible White House prodding to reduce costs by merging some Pentagon and NASA efforts to develop what are now slated to be totally separate families of heavy-lift launchers.\nLast year, Mr. Bridenstine introduced comprehensive legislation intended to maintain U.S. supremacy in all aspects of civilian and military space. He called on Congress to provide NASA with stability and clear priorities, asserting on his website that the agency \u201cmust not be a jack-of-all trades.\u201d\nWith a career NASA official running the agency since January, the White House has largely left the agency\u2019s budgets and priorities unchanged from the previous administration. But if Mr. Bridenstine takes over, he would need to set priorities to fit expected flat budgets in future years. \nThe agency i The Republican lawmaker faces tough policy, personnel and political challenges repositioning National Aeronautics and Space Administration in an era of booming commercial space ventures. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rep. Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma Tapped to Head NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7420",
        "date": "2017-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rep-jim-bridenstine-of-oklahoma-tapped-to-head-nasa-1504361235?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=78",
        "text": "Mr. Bridenstine, a strong supporter of private space endeavors such as minerals mining on the moon, has encouraged use of the council to better coordinate military and civilian space programs. But the result, according to industry officials and former NASA managers, could restrict his options in running the agency.\nAs a leading legislative voice on space issues, Mr. Bridenstine has supported greater emphasis on tracking orbital debris as various companies contemplate launching unprecedented numbers of low-earth orbit satellites.\n\n\nHe also has advocated the importance of using NASA missions to the moon as steppingstones to developing a host of technologies required for deep-space probes eventually including manned missions to Mars.\nContrary to expectations across the industry and on Capitol Hill, the White House statement didn\u2019t include a choice for the agency\u2019s No. 2 position.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Schumacher,\n\n\n\n a former senior agency official who runs the Washington office of rocket-engine maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n had been considered the leading candidate for that job, according to industry officials.\nMr. Schumacher had cleared background checks and was on track to be nominated along with Mr. Bridenstine, according to one person familiar with the details, but he recently pulled out of the running for family reasons. Now, White House aides are conducting a new search for a deputy, but it could be a protracted process identifying and vetting a candidate acceptable to lawmakers, commercial space advocates and leading aerospace contractors.\nThe choice of a deputy administrator for the agency with an annual budget of more than $19 billion has been watched closely by contractors and others. That is largely because Mr. Bridenstine, who previously ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, has limited business management experience.\nA major reason presidential aides delayed an announcement about Mr. Bridenstine for months was the desire to simultaneously announce a deputy with greater management experience and a history of working at senior levels inside the agency, according to industry officials and another person familiar with the details.\nReflecting Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s history of sometimes bucking the status quo when it comes to established space programs, his anticipated nomination over the months has been met with ambivalence among contractors working on NASA\u2019s most expensive rocket and spacecraft projects seeking to send astronauts to Mars after 2030. \nThe nomination, which needs approval from the Senate, could face a spirited debate there. Friday\u2019s announcement prompted criticism from Republican Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marco Rubio\n\n\n\n and Democratic Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson.\n\n\n\n The Florida senators focused on Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s partisan background\u00a0and lack of management experience as drawbacks. \nFlorida is among the states that have most to lose if the new NASA chief scales back, slows down or reconfigures the agency\u2019s big-ticket manned exploration programs.\nSome of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s past comments, which were critical of climate change stemming from human activity, also could prompt controversy as NASA considers whether to cut back spending on research programs examining such issues.\nThe prospective nominee has strongly supported government and industry partnerships as a way to accelerate space projects, often favoring them over traditional federal contracts to purchase hardware or services. In speeches and web postings over the years, he has warned about the threats Beijing\u2019s ambitions to explore the moon pose for U.S. businesses as well as America\u2019s national security.\nStressing the importance of U.S. efforts to promote private initiatives in space and establish permanent outposts on the moon\u2019s surface, Mr. Bridenstine used stark language last year in a talk to a lunar exploration group. \u201cThis is our Sputnik moment,\u201d he said. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration didn\u2019t back exploration of the moon\u2019s surface or establishing permanent settlements there.\nIf confirmed, the new NASA chief will confront significant budget pressures along with possible White House prodding to reduce costs by merging some Pentagon and NASA efforts to develop what are now slated to be totally separate families of heavy-lift launchers.\nLast year, Mr. Bridenstine introduced comprehensive legislation intended to maintain U.S. supremacy in all aspects of civilian and military space. He called on Congress to provide NASA with stability and clear priorities, asserting on his website that the agency \u201cmust not be a jack-of-all trades.\u201d\nWith a career NASA official running the agency since January, the White House has largely left the agency\u2019s budgets and priorities unchanged from the previous administration. But if Mr. Bridenstine takes over, he would need to set priorities to fit expected flat budgets in future years. \nThe agency i The Republican lawmaker faces tough policy, personnel and political challenges repositioning National Aeronautics and Space Administration in an era of booming commercial space ventures. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rep. Jim Bridenstine of Oklahoma Tapped to Head NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7421",
        "date": "2017-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rep-jim-bridenstine-of-oklahoma-tapped-to-head-nasa-1504361235?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=114",
        "text": "Mr. Bridenstine, a strong supporter of private space endeavors such as minerals mining on the moon, has encouraged use of the council to better coordinate military and civilian space programs. But the result, according to industry officials and former NASA managers, could restrict his options in running the agency.\n\n\n\n\nAs a leading legislative voice on space issues, Mr. Bridenstine has supported greater emphasis on tracking orbital debris as various companies contemplate launching unprecedented numbers of low-earth orbit satellites.\n\n\nHe also has advocated the importance of using NASA missions to the moon as steppingstones to developing a host of technologies required for deep-space probes eventually including manned missions to Mars.\nContrary to expectations across the industry and on Capitol Hill, the White House statement didn\u2019t include a choice for the agency\u2019s No. 2 position.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Schumacher,\n\n\n\n a former senior agency official who runs the Washington office of rocket-engine maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n had been considered the leading candidate for that job, according to industry officials.\nMr. Schumacher had cleared background checks and was on track to be nominated along with Mr. Bridenstine, according to one person familiar with the details, but he recently pulled out of the running for family reasons. Now, White House aides are conducting a new search for a deputy, but it could be a protracted process identifying and vetting a candidate acceptable to lawmakers, commercial space advocates and leading aerospace contractors.\nThe choice of a deputy administrator for the agency with an annual budget of more than $19 billion has been watched closely by contractors and others. That is largely because Mr. Bridenstine, who previously ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, has limited business management experience.\nA major reason presidential aides delayed an announcement about Mr. Bridenstine for months was the desire to simultaneously announce a deputy with greater management experience and a history of working at senior levels inside the agency, according to industry officials and another person familiar with the details.\nReflecting Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s history of sometimes bucking the status quo when it comes to established space programs, his anticipated nomination over the months has been met with ambivalence among contractors working on NASA\u2019s most expensive rocket and spacecraft projects seeking to send astronauts to Mars after 2030. \nThe nomination, which needs approval from the Senate, could face a spirited debate there. Friday\u2019s announcement prompted criticism from Republican Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marco Rubio\n\n\n\n and Democratic Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson.\n\n\n\n The Florida senators focused on Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s partisan background\u00a0and lack of management experience as drawbacks. \nFlorida is among the states that have most to lose if the new NASA chief scales back, slows down or reconfigures the agency\u2019s big-ticket manned exploration programs.\nSome of Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s past comments, which were critical of climate change stemming from human activity, also could prompt controversy as NASA considers whether to cut back spending on research programs examining such issues.\nThe prospective nominee has strongly supported government and industry partnerships as a way to accelerate space projects, often favoring them over traditional federal contracts to purchase hardware or services. In speeches and web postings over the years, he has warned about the threats Beijing\u2019s ambitions to explore the moon pose for U.S. businesses as well as America\u2019s national security.\nStressing the importance of U.S. efforts to promote private initiatives in space and establish permanent outposts on the moon\u2019s surface, Mr. Bridenstine used stark language last year in a talk to a lunar exploration group. \u201cThis is our Sputnik moment,\u201d he said. President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration didn\u2019t back exploration of the moon\u2019s surface or establishing permanent settlements there.\nIf confirmed, the new NASA chief will confront significant budget pressures along with possible White House prodding to reduce costs by merging some Pentagon and NASA efforts to develop what are now slated to be totally separate families of heavy-lift launchers.\nLast year, Mr. Bridenstine introduced comprehensive legislation intended to maintain U.S. supremacy in all aspects of civilian and military space. He called on Congress to provide NASA with stability and clear priorities, asserting on his website that the agency \u201cmust not be a jack-of-all trades.\u201d\nWith a career NASA official running the agency since January, the White House has largely left the agency\u2019s budgets and priorities unchanged from the previous administration. But if Mr. Bridenstine takes over, he would need to set priorities to fit expected flat budgets in future years. \nThe agen The Republican lawmaker faces tough policy, personnel and political challenges repositioning National Aeronautics and Space Administration in an era of booming commercial space ventures. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches Perseverance Rover on Mission to Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7422",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-launched-on-mission-to-mars-11596111859?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=11",
        "text": "Mission scientists believe that between three billion and four billion years ago the crater was a vast lake fed by an ancient river delta that deposited carbonite minerals and clay potentially preserving organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life. During a two-year mission, the nuclear-powered Perseverance rover will try to detect any such biosignatures, extract them from rocks or soil and pack the samples for eventual return to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA images shows Perseverance after liftoff.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA TV/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe expect the instruments onboard will be able to detect biosignatures, but it will be very difficult to confirm that until we get them back to Earth,\u201d said NASA planetary science division director Lori Glaze. It will require at least two additional Mars missions to pick up and return those samples, agency officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rocket with the Perseverance rover soars to space from Florida.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gregg newton/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe NASA Perseverance mission joins two spacecraft already on the way to Mars that were launched by China and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month. It is the first Mars mission for both countries. All three are expected to arrive at Mars at about the same time next year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The $2.7 billion Perseverance rover spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a 300-million-mile journey to Mars. The vehicle, equipped with cameras, computers and experiments, will search for signs of past life. Photo: John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\nNASA\u2019s 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex off-world vehicle NASA has ever launched, agency engineers said. In a cab the size of a compact car, it packs 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments designed to probe rocks and sediments for signs left by microscopic life-forms\u2014if any ever existed on the planet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rocket\u2019s journey to Mars will take months.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Red Huber/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAbout six weeks after a safe landing, the rover will unpack and deploy an experimental robotic helicopter called Ingenuity, which will be flight-tested in the first powered flights on another planet.\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover rocketed toward Mars on a mission to find signs of life there that might have existed billions of years ago when the solar system was a cradle of evolution. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches Perseverance Rover on Mission to Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7423",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-launched-on-mission-to-mars-11596111859?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=40",
        "text": "Mission scientists believe that between three billion and four billion years ago the crater was a vast lake fed by an ancient river delta that deposited carbonite minerals and clay potentially preserving organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life. During a two-year mission, the nuclear-powered Perseverance rover will try to detect any such biosignatures, extract them from rocks or soil and pack the samples for eventual return to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA images shows Perseverance after liftoff.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA TV/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe expect the instruments onboard will be able to detect biosignatures, but it will be very difficult to confirm that until we get them back to Earth,\u201d said NASA planetary science division director Lori Glaze. It will require at least two additional Mars missions to pick up and return those samples, agency officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rocket with the Perseverance rover soars to space from Florida.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gregg newton/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe NASA Perseverance mission joins two spacecraft already on the way to Mars that were launched by China and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month. It is the first Mars mission for both countries. All three are expected to arrive at Mars at about the same time next year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The $2.7 billion Perseverance rover spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a 300-million-mile journey to Mars. The vehicle, equipped with cameras, computers and experiments, will search for signs of past life. Photo: John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\nNASA\u2019s 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex off-world vehicle NASA has ever launched, agency engineers said. In a cab the size of a compact car, it packs 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments designed to probe rocks and sediments for signs left by microscopic life-forms\u2014if any ever existed on the planet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rocket\u2019s journey to Mars will take months.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Red Huber/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAbout six weeks after a safe landing, the rover will unpack and deploy an experimental robotic helicopter called Ingenuity, which will be flight-tested in the first powered flights on another planet.\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover rocketed toward Mars on a mission to find signs of life there that might have existed billions of years ago when the solar system was a cradle of evolution. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches Perseverance Rover on Mission to Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7424",
        "date": "2020-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-launched-on-mission-to-mars-11596111859?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=42",
        "text": "Mission scientists believe that between three billion and four billion years ago the crater was a vast lake fed by an ancient river delta that deposited carbonite minerals and clay potentially preserving organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life. During a two-year mission, the nuclear-powered Perseverance rover will try to detect any such biosignatures, extract them from rocks or soil and pack the samples for eventual return to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA images shows Perseverance after liftoff.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA TV/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe expect the instruments onboard will be able to detect biosignatures, but it will be very difficult to confirm that until we get them back to Earth,\u201d said NASA planetary science division director Lori Glaze. It will require at least two additional Mars missions to pick up and return those samples, agency officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rocket with the Perseverance rover soars to space from Florida.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n gregg newton/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe NASA Perseverance mission joins two spacecraft already on the way to Mars that were launched by China and the United Arab Emirates earlier this month. It is the first Mars mission for both countries. All three are expected to arrive at Mars at about the same time next year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The $2.7 billion Perseverance rover spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a 300-million-mile journey to Mars. The vehicle, equipped with cameras, computers and experiments, will search for signs of past life. Photo: John Raoux/Associated Press\n \n\n\nNASA\u2019s 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex off-world vehicle NASA has ever launched, agency engineers said. In a cab the size of a compact car, it packs 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments designed to probe rocks and sediments for signs left by microscopic life-forms\u2014if any ever existed on the planet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rocket\u2019s journey to Mars will take months.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Red Huber/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAbout six weeks after a safe landing, the rover will unpack and deploy an experimental robotic helicopter called Ingenuity, which will be flight-tested in the first powered flights on another planet.\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover rocketed toward Mars on a mission to find signs of life there that might have existed billions of years ago when the solar system was a cradle of evolution. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Postpones Capsule Launch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7425",
        "date": "2017-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-scrubs-capsule-launch-seconds-before-liftoff-1487432222?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=26",
        "text": "Minutes after the countdown was halted, SpaceX issued a statement indicating that the launch team was \u201cstanding down to take a closer look at an engine actuator on the second stage.\u201d \nSpaceX said it would attempt to redo the launch Sunday. \n\n\nIt wasn\u2019t immediately clear what type of warning launch officials received about engine-nozzle controls on the upper stage to prompt Saturday\u2019s scrub. \n\n\nRelated Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts (Feb. 8) \n\n\n Shortly before lifting off, the Falcon 9 rocket switches to a computerized launch-control sequence that automatically halts the countdown and alerts launch officials about unusual sensor readings or other problems.\nSaturday\u2019s launch was supposed to be the company\u2019s second mission in 2017, following the January launch of 10 commercial satellites \nthat marked a return to flight in the wake of a September 2016 Falcon 9 explosion during routine fueling on the ground. \n The cause of that accident was determined to be unexpected ignition stemming from swift, high-pressure loading of helium into vessels immersed in the rocket\u2019s supercooled liquid oxygen tank for the second stage. SpaceX has said it opted to change fueling procedures to eliminate the hazard, but also plans longer-term design changes.\nSaturday\u2019s scheduled launch initially was intended to carry a commercial payload partly because National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials wanted to wait before launching a cargo mission from the newly-refurbished pad at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. But in recent weeks, NASA officials decided to move up the cargo mission in light of the level of supplies and experiments on board the orbiting international laboratory.\nThe list of experiments headed into orbit includes an effort to see how certain bacteria behave and mutate in space, technology to study ozone levels in the atmosphere and a medical experiment to better understand how human tissue can regenerate in microgravity.\nSunday\u2019s flight plan also will call for Dragon to rendezvous with the space station two days after launch, but the rocket\u2019s main stage is intended to return to Earth and land vertically just miles from the launchpad.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter the thousands of people who gathered near Kennedy Space Center to observe the daytime launch had dispersed, entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s founder, chairman and chief rocket designer, shed some light on what happened in a series of messages posted on his Twitter account.\nMr. Musk said engineers wanted to investigate the \u201cslightly odd\u201d position of hydraulic controls on an upper-stage engine. He said there was a 99% chance the system would have corrected itself, \u201cbut that 1% chance isn\u2019t worth rolling the dice. Better to wait a day.\u201d\nMr. Musk also said SpaceX experts needed \u201cto make sure that it isn\u2019t symptomatic of a more significant upstream\u201d problem. The company\u2019s chief indicated the problem \u201cis not obviously related\u201d to a tiny helium leak in the second stage that was detected on Friday, but he added it is \u201calso not out of the question.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies scrubbed the launch of an unmanned capsule destined for the international space station on Saturday, roughly 10 seconds before scheduled liftoff in Florida. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Postpones Capsule Launch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7426",
        "date": "2017-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-scrubs-capsule-launch-seconds-before-liftoff-1487432222?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=87",
        "text": "Minutes after the countdown was halted, SpaceX issued a statement indicating that the launch team was \u201cstanding down to take a closer look at an engine actuator on the second stage.\u201d \nSpaceX said it would attempt to redo the launch Sunday. \n\n\nIt wasn\u2019t immediately clear what type of warning launch officials received about engine-nozzle controls on the upper stage to prompt Saturday\u2019s scrub. \n\n\nRelated Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts (Feb. 8) \n\n\n Shortly before lifting off, the Falcon 9 rocket switches to a computerized launch-control sequence that automatically halts the countdown and alerts launch officials about unusual sensor readings or other problems.\nSaturday\u2019s launch was supposed to be the company\u2019s second mission in 2017, following the January launch of 10 commercial satellites \nthat marked a return to flight in the wake of a September 2016 Falcon 9 explosion during routine fueling on the ground. \n The cause of that accident was determined to be unexpected ignition stemming from swift, high-pressure loading of helium into vessels immersed in the rocket\u2019s supercooled liquid oxygen tank for the second stage. SpaceX has said it opted to change fueling procedures to eliminate the hazard, but also plans longer-term design changes.\nSaturday\u2019s scheduled launch initially was intended to carry a commercial payload partly because National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials wanted to wait before launching a cargo mission from the newly-refurbished pad at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. But in recent weeks, NASA officials decided to move up the cargo mission in light of the level of supplies and experiments on board the orbiting international laboratory.\nThe list of experiments headed into orbit includes an effort to see how certain bacteria behave and mutate in space, technology to study ozone levels in the atmosphere and a medical experiment to better understand how human tissue can regenerate in microgravity.\nSunday\u2019s flight plan also will call for Dragon to rendezvous with the space station two days after launch, but the rocket\u2019s main stage is intended to return to Earth and land vertically just miles from the launchpad.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter the thousands of people who gathered near Kennedy Space Center to observe the daytime launch had dispersed, entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s founder, chairman and chief rocket designer, shed some light on what happened in a series of messages posted on his Twitter account.\nMr. Musk said engineers wanted to investigate the \u201cslightly odd\u201d position of hydraulic controls on an upper-stage engine. He said there was a 99% chance the system would have corrected itself, \u201cbut that 1% chance isn\u2019t worth rolling the dice. Better to wait a day.\u201d\nMr. Musk also said SpaceX experts needed \u201cto make sure that it isn\u2019t symptomatic of a more significant upstream\u201d problem. The company\u2019s chief indicated the problem \u201cis not obviously related\u201d to a tiny helium leak in the second stage that was detected on Friday, but he added it is \u201calso not out of the question.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies scrubbed the launch of an unmanned capsule destined for the international space station on Saturday, roughly 10 seconds before scheduled liftoff in Florida. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Postpones Capsule Launch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7427",
        "date": "2017-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-scrubs-capsule-launch-seconds-before-liftoff-1487432222?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=130",
        "text": "Minutes after the countdown was halted, SpaceX issued a statement indicating that the launch team was \u201cstanding down to take a closer look at an engine actuator on the second stage.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nSpaceX said it would attempt to redo the launch Sunday. \n\n\nIt wasn\u2019t immediately clear what type of warning launch officials received about engine-nozzle controls on the upper stage to prompt Saturday\u2019s scrub. \n\n\nRelated Florida\u2019s Space Coast Is Filling the \u2018Crater\u2019 Left by NASA (Feb. 17) NASA Official Highlights Risk of Manned-Spacecraft Efforts (Feb. 8) \n\n\n Shortly before lifting off, the Falcon 9 rocket switches to a computerized launch-control sequence that automatically halts the countdown and alerts launch officials about unusual sensor readings or other problems.\nSaturday\u2019s launch was supposed to be the company\u2019s second mission in 2017, following the January launch of 10 commercial satellites \nthat marked a return to flight in the wake of a September 2016 Falcon 9 explosion during routine fueling on the ground. \n The cause of that accident was determined to be unexpected ignition stemming from swift, high-pressure loading of helium into vessels immersed in the rocket\u2019s supercooled liquid oxygen tank for the second stage. SpaceX has said it opted to change fueling procedures to eliminate the hazard, but also plans longer-term design changes.\nSaturday\u2019s scheduled launch initially was intended to carry a commercial payload partly because National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials wanted to wait before launching a cargo mission from the newly-refurbished pad at Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center. But in recent weeks, NASA officials decided to move up the cargo mission in light of the level of supplies and experiments on board the orbiting international laboratory.\nThe list of experiments headed into orbit includes an effort to see how certain bacteria behave and mutate in space, technology to study ozone levels in the atmosphere and a medical experiment to better understand how human tissue can regenerate in microgravity.\nSunday\u2019s flight plan also will call for Dragon to rendezvous with the space station two days after launch, but the rocket\u2019s main stage is intended to return to Earth and land vertically just miles from the launchpad.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAfter the thousands of people who gathered near Kennedy Space Center to observe the daytime launch had dispersed, entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s founder, chairman and chief rocket designer, shed some light on what happened in a series of messages posted on his Twitter account.\nMr. Musk said engineers wanted to investigate the \u201cslightly odd\u201d position of hydraulic controls on an upper-stage engine. He said there was a 99% chance the system would have corrected itself, \u201cbut that 1% chance isn\u2019t worth rolling the dice. Better to wait a day.\u201d\nMr. Musk also said SpaceX experts needed \u201cto make sure that it isn\u2019t symptomatic of a more significant upstream\u201d problem. The company\u2019s chief indicated the problem \u201cis not obviously related\u201d to a tiny helium leak in the second stage that was detected on Friday, but he added it is \u201calso not out of the question.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Space Exploration Technologies scrubbed the launch of an unmanned capsule destined for the international space station on Saturday, roughly 10 seconds before scheduled liftoff in Florida. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Demurs on Explanation of Satellite Debacle (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7428",
        "date": "2018-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-demurs-on-explanation-of-satellite-debacle-1515710932?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=21",
        "text": "It was the first public statement by the Pentagon since Sunday\u2019s botched mission and represented an unusual stance, given that officials in the past typically have confirmed successful deployments of even secret national-security satellites.\nCode-named Zuma, the satellite was launched from Florida on board a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket, but didn\u2019t separate as planned from the upper part of the boosters, according to industry officials. Instead, it is believed to have plummeted back into the atmosphere and ended up in the Indian Ocean.\n\n\nEarlier this week,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX said it was not responsible for the loss of the satellite because its rocket performed exactly as planned. And\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which built the satellite and chose SpaceX for the mission, said its normal procedures barred commenting on classified projects.\nIn the wake of the event, industry and government officials focused on operation of certain hardware, called an adapter, which attached the payload to the rocket and was supposed to release it. The mechanism, according to some of these officials, was supplied by Northrop Grumman instead of SpaceX.\nLaunch contracts for classified payloads, they noted, frequently are structured so that the classified customer, rather than the rocket provider, calls the shots about separation decisions.\n\n\nREAD MORE SpaceX Successfully Launches Reused Booster for NASA, a First SpaceX Raises $100 Million More \n\n\nThe satellite\u2019s high price tag has sparked interest in its fate.\u00a0 But Ms. White did not provide any information, citing the classified nature of the launch.\nAsked whether the Pentagon owed the public an explanation for what appeared to be a costly failure, Ms. White told reporters she would \u201ccome back to you on that.\u201d\nOn Capitol Hill, lawmakers and staffers in both the House and Senate have been briefed about the satellite. In briefings following the botched mission, lawmakers have been told the spacecraft took eight years and about $3.5 billion to develop and build, according to industry officials familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX has said it isn\u2019t making any design or operational changes to its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDespite the lack of \u00a0government comment, officials from SpaceX and Northrop Grumman have a cache of video images and other information about the sequence of events during Sunday\u2019s launch. The data is believed to indicate precisely what went wrong, industry officials said, but it isn\u2019t clear why mission managers monitoring real-time video feeds weren\u2019t able to intervene.\nFor rapidly growing SpaceX, the failed mission came as the firm seeks to establish itself as a reliable, low-cost launch provider for the Pentagon. But the company has said it isn\u2019t making any design or operational changes to its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets.\nWrite to Nancy A. Youssef at Nancy.Youssef@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The Pentagon refused to say anything at a briefing Thursday about why a classified U.S. government satellite launched by a contractor failed to reach a stable orbit and instead plummeted back into the atmosphere in what is presumed to be a total loss over the weekend. ",
        "author": "Nancy A. Youssef and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Demurs on Explanation of Satellite Debacle (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7429",
        "date": "2018-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-demurs-on-explanation-of-satellite-debacle-1515710932?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=72",
        "text": "It was the first public statement by the Pentagon since Sunday\u2019s botched mission and represented an unusual stance, given that officials in the past typically have confirmed successful deployments of even secret national-security satellites.\nCode-named Zuma, the satellite was launched from Florida on board a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket, but didn\u2019t separate as planned from the upper part of the boosters, according to industry officials. Instead, it is believed to have plummeted back into the atmosphere and ended up in the Indian Ocean.\n\n\nEarlier this week,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX said it was not responsible for the loss of the satellite because its rocket performed exactly as planned. And\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which built the satellite and chose SpaceX for the mission, said its normal procedures barred commenting on classified projects.\nIn the wake of the event, industry and government officials focused on operation of certain hardware, called an adapter, which attached the payload to the rocket and was supposed to release it. The mechanism, according to some of these officials, was supplied by Northrop Grumman instead of SpaceX.\nLaunch contracts for classified payloads, they noted, frequently are structured so that the classified customer, rather than the rocket provider, calls the shots about separation decisions.\n\n\nREAD MORE SpaceX Successfully Launches Reused Booster for NASA, a First SpaceX Raises $100 Million More \n\n\nThe satellite\u2019s high price tag has sparked interest in its fate.\u00a0 But Ms. White did not provide any information, citing the classified nature of the launch.\nAsked whether the Pentagon owed the public an explanation for what appeared to be a costly failure, Ms. White told reporters she would \u201ccome back to you on that.\u201d\nOn Capitol Hill, lawmakers and staffers in both the House and Senate have been briefed about the satellite. In briefings following the botched mission, lawmakers have been told the spacecraft took eight years and about $3.5 billion to develop and build, according to industry officials familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX has said it isn\u2019t making any design or operational changes to its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDespite the lack of \u00a0government comment, officials from SpaceX and Northrop Grumman have a cache of video images and other information about the sequence of events during Sunday\u2019s launch. The data is believed to indicate precisely what went wrong, industry officials said, but it isn\u2019t clear why mission managers monitoring real-time video feeds weren\u2019t able to intervene.\nFor rapidly growing SpaceX, the failed mission came as the firm seeks to establish itself as a reliable, low-cost launch provider for the Pentagon. But the company has said it isn\u2019t making any design or operational changes to its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets.\nWrite to Nancy A. Youssef at Nancy.Youssef@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The Pentagon refused to say anything at a briefing Thursday about why a classified U.S. government satellite launched by a contractor failed to reach a stable orbit and instead plummeted back into the atmosphere in what is presumed to be a total loss over the weekend. ",
        "author": "Nancy A. Youssef and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pentagon Demurs on Explanation of Satellite Debacle (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7430",
        "date": "2018-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-demurs-on-explanation-of-satellite-debacle-1515710932?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=105",
        "text": "It was the first public statement by the Pentagon since Sunday\u2019s botched mission and represented an unusual stance, given that officials in the past typically have confirmed successful deployments of even secret national-security satellites.\n\n\n\n\nCode-named Zuma, the satellite was launched from Florida on board a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Falcon 9 rocket, but didn\u2019t separate as planned from the upper part of the boosters, according to industry officials. Instead, it is believed to have plummeted back into the atmosphere and ended up in the Indian Ocean.\n\n\nEarlier this week,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX said it was not responsible for the loss of the satellite because its rocket performed exactly as planned. And\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n , which built the satellite and chose SpaceX for the mission, said its normal procedures barred commenting on classified projects.\nIn the wake of the event, industry and government officials focused on operation of certain hardware, called an adapter, which attached the payload to the rocket and was supposed to release it. The mechanism, according to some of these officials, was supplied by Northrop Grumman instead of SpaceX.\nLaunch contracts for classified payloads, they noted, frequently are structured so that the classified customer, rather than the rocket provider, calls the shots about separation decisions.\n\n\nREAD MORE SpaceX Successfully Launches Reused Booster for NASA, a First SpaceX Raises $100 Million More \n\n\nThe satellite\u2019s high price tag has sparked interest in its fate.\u00a0 But Ms. White did not provide any information, citing the classified nature of the launch.\nAsked whether the Pentagon owed the public an explanation for what appeared to be a costly failure, Ms. White told reporters she would \u201ccome back to you on that.\u201d\nOn Capitol Hill, lawmakers and staffers in both the House and Senate have been briefed about the satellite. In briefings following the botched mission, lawmakers have been told the spacecraft took eight years and about $3.5 billion to develop and build, according to industry officials familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX has said it isn\u2019t making any design or operational changes to its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nDespite the lack of \u00a0government comment, officials from SpaceX and Northrop Grumman have a cache of video images and other information about the sequence of events during Sunday\u2019s launch. The data is believed to indicate precisely what went wrong, industry officials said, but it isn\u2019t clear why mission managers monitoring real-time video feeds weren\u2019t able to intervene.\nFor rapidly growing SpaceX, the failed mission came as the firm seeks to establish itself as a reliable, low-cost launch provider for the Pentagon. But the company has said it isn\u2019t making any design or operational changes to its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets.\nWrite to Nancy A. Youssef at Nancy.Youssef@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The Pentagon refused to say anything at a briefing Thursday about why a classified U.S. government satellite launched by a contractor failed to reach a stable orbit and instead plummeted back into the atmosphere in what is presumed to be a total loss over the weekend. ",
        "author": "Nancy A. Youssef and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Calls It Quits for Opportunity Mars Rover After 15-Year Mission (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7431",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-calls-it-quits-for-opportunity-mars-rover-after-15-years-on-the-red-planet-11550085362?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=16",
        "text": "It lasted longer than any other robot sent from Earth to another planet, agency officials said. Mission engineers made their last attempt to contact it Tuesday night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI learned this morning that our beloved Opportunity remains silent,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. \u201cI declare the Opportunity mission as complete. It\u2019s an emotional moment.\u201d\n\n\nLaunched as one in a pair of rovers in 2003, Opportunity touched down after a six-month voyage inside a giant impact crater just south of the Martian equator on terrain that scientists suspected might once have been a lake. \nAt about the same time, its identical robotic twin, called Spirit, landed on the opposite side of the planet. The Spirit rover, mired in a Martian sand trap, was shut down in 2011.\nLoaded with three spectrometers, three cameras, a microscope and a rock hammer, the Opportunity robot was a working field geologist, studying rocks and minerals in its path, including deposits of hematite and gypsum that could have formed in hot springs or running water. It spotted an iron-nickel meteorite near its own discarded heat shield\u2014the first meteorite ever identified on another planet. \n\n\n\n\nNASA Says Goodbye to Mars Rover OpportunityThe robot lasted longer than any other sent from Earth to another planet, NASA officials say\u00a0\u00a0In this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech1 of 12\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 12Hide CaptionIn this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech\n\n\nThe rover also found evidence that persuaded scientists the arid plains of Mars had once been awash with acidic water, although it found no signs that life ever existed on the planet. \n\u201cThis was not evidence of an evolutionary paradise, but it was a fascinating, fascinating environment,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Squyres,\n\n\n\n the project\u2019s principal investigator at Cornell University.\nMoving at a snail\u2019s pace, the wheeled craft traveled a little more than 28 miles in starts and stops over the years, setting a record for extraterrestrial ground travel. In its methodical journey, its cameras recorded hundreds of thousands of images and transmitted them to eager researchers on Earth. They included breathtaking panoramas of Martian craters and a picture of a swirling Martian dust devil. \n\n\nRelated NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites For Mars Rover, Really Remote Roadside Assistance Interactive: The New Race \n\n\nBy the summer of 2018, Opportunity had reached a spot that NASA mission engineers dubbed Perseverance Valley. There last year, a massive dust storm overcame it, likely smothering the solar panels that power the craft in dust. The rover had weathered a previous storm in 2007, but this one overwhelmed it.\n\u201cThe sky was so dark we could not see the sun and the solar panels couldn\u2019t recharge the batteries,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abigail Fraeman,\n\n\n\n deputy project scientist, who was a high-school junior when the rover landed in 2004. \u201cThose first images from Opportunity inspired me to become a planetary scientist.\u201d\nNASA\u2019s Mars Curiosity rover, which has been crawling across the surface of Mars since 2012, is plutonium-powered and wasn\u2019t affected.\nAgency engineers decided to call it quits now because the seasonal winds that might clear the dust from the rover\u2019s solar panels are dying down for the year and the bitter cold of approaching winter is likely to severely damage the rover\u2019s unheated batteries and electric systems.\n\u201cWe were meant to wear these rovers out,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Callas,\n\n\n\n Mars Exploration Rover project manager. \u201cWe had no idea it would take this long. Even so, this is a hard day. Even though it is machine, we have to say goodbye.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers are hanging up on the agency\u2019s Opportunity Mars rover after 835 unanswered wake-up calls, following 15 years on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Calls It Quits for Opportunity Mars Rover After 15-Year Mission (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7432",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-calls-it-quits-for-opportunity-mars-rover-after-15-years-on-the-red-planet-11550085362?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=59",
        "text": "It lasted longer than any other robot sent from Earth to another planet, agency officials said. Mission engineers made their last attempt to contact it Tuesday night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI learned this morning that our beloved Opportunity remains silent,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. \u201cI declare the Opportunity mission as complete. It\u2019s an emotional moment.\u201d\n\n\nLaunched as one in a pair of rovers in 2003, Opportunity touched down after a six-month voyage inside a giant impact crater just south of the Martian equator on terrain that scientists suspected might once have been a lake. \nAt about the same time, its identical robotic twin, called Spirit, landed on the opposite side of the planet. The Spirit rover, mired in a Martian sand trap, was shut down in 2011.\nLoaded with three spectrometers, three cameras, a microscope and a rock hammer, the Opportunity robot was a working field geologist, studying rocks and minerals in its path, including deposits of hematite and gypsum that could have formed in hot springs or running water. It spotted an iron-nickel meteorite near its own discarded heat shield\u2014the first meteorite ever identified on another planet. \n\n\n\n\nNASA Says Goodbye to Mars Rover OpportunityThe robot lasted longer than any other sent from Earth to another planet, NASA officials say\u00a0\u00a0In this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech1 of 12\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 12Hide CaptionIn this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech\n\n\nThe rover also found evidence that persuaded scientists the arid plains of Mars had once been awash with acidic water, although it found no signs that life ever existed on the planet. \n\u201cThis was not evidence of an evolutionary paradise, but it was a fascinating, fascinating environment,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Squyres,\n\n\n\n the project\u2019s principal investigator at Cornell University.\nMoving at a snail\u2019s pace, the wheeled craft traveled a little more than 28 miles in starts and stops over the years, setting a record for extraterrestrial ground travel. In its methodical journey, its cameras recorded hundreds of thousands of images and transmitted them to eager researchers on Earth. They included breathtaking panoramas of Martian craters and a picture of a swirling Martian dust devil. \n\n\nRelated NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites For Mars Rover, Really Remote Roadside Assistance Interactive: The New Race \n\n\nBy the summer of 2018, Opportunity had reached a spot that NASA mission engineers dubbed Perseverance Valley. There last year, a massive dust storm overcame it, likely smothering the solar panels that power the craft in dust. The rover had weathered a previous storm in 2007, but this one overwhelmed it.\n\u201cThe sky was so dark we could not see the sun and the solar panels couldn\u2019t recharge the batteries,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abigail Fraeman,\n\n\n\n deputy project scientist, who was a high-school junior when the rover landed in 2004. \u201cThose first images from Opportunity inspired me to become a planetary scientist.\u201d\nNASA\u2019s Mars Curiosity rover, which has been crawling across the surface of Mars since 2012, is plutonium-powered and wasn\u2019t affected.\nAgency engineers decided to call it quits now because the seasonal winds that might clear the dust from the rover\u2019s solar panels are dying down for the year and the bitter cold of approaching winter is likely to severely damage the rover\u2019s unheated batteries and electric systems.\n\u201cWe were meant to wear these rovers out,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Callas,\n\n\n\n Mars Exploration Rover project manager. \u201cWe had no idea it would take this long. Even so, this is a hard day. Even though it is machine, we have to say goodbye.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers are hanging up on the agency\u2019s Opportunity Mars rover after 835 unanswered wake-up calls, following 15 years on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Calls It Quits for Opportunity Mars Rover After 15-Year Mission (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7433",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-calls-it-quits-for-opportunity-mars-rover-after-15-years-on-the-red-planet-11550085362?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=65",
        "text": "It lasted longer than any other robot sent from Earth to another planet, agency officials said. Mission engineers made their last attempt to contact it Tuesday night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI learned this morning that our beloved Opportunity remains silent,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. \u201cI declare the Opportunity mission as complete. It\u2019s an emotional moment.\u201d\n\n\nLaunched as one in a pair of rovers in 2003, Opportunity touched down after a six-month voyage inside a giant impact crater just south of the Martian equator on terrain that scientists suspected might once have been a lake. \nAt about the same time, its identical robotic twin, called Spirit, landed on the opposite side of the planet. The Spirit rover, mired in a Martian sand trap, was shut down in 2011.\nLoaded with three spectrometers, three cameras, a microscope and a rock hammer, the Opportunity robot was a working field geologist, studying rocks and minerals in its path, including deposits of hematite and gypsum that could have formed in hot springs or running water. It spotted an iron-nickel meteorite near its own discarded heat shield\u2014the first meteorite ever identified on another planet. \n\n\n\n\nNASA Says Goodbye to Mars Rover OpportunityThe robot lasted longer than any other sent from Earth to another planet, NASA officials say\u00a0\u00a0In this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech1 of 12\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 12Hide CaptionIn this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech\n\n\nThe rover also found evidence that persuaded scientists the arid plains of Mars had once been awash with acidic water, although it found no signs that life ever existed on the planet. \n\u201cThis was not evidence of an evolutionary paradise, but it was a fascinating, fascinating environment,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Squyres,\n\n\n\n the project\u2019s principal investigator at Cornell University.\nMoving at a snail\u2019s pace, the wheeled craft traveled a little more than 28 miles in starts and stops over the years, setting a record for extraterrestrial ground travel. In its methodical journey, its cameras recorded hundreds of thousands of images and transmitted them to eager researchers on Earth. They included breathtaking panoramas of Martian craters and a picture of a swirling Martian dust devil. \n\n\nRelated NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites For Mars Rover, Really Remote Roadside Assistance Interactive: The New Race \n\n\nBy the summer of 2018, Opportunity had reached a spot that NASA mission engineers dubbed Perseverance Valley. There last year, a massive dust storm overcame it, likely smothering the solar panels that power the craft in dust. The rover had weathered a previous storm in 2007, but this one overwhelmed it.\n\u201cThe sky was so dark we could not see the sun and the solar panels couldn\u2019t recharge the batteries,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abigail Fraeman,\n\n\n\n deputy project scientist, who was a high-school junior when the rover landed in 2004. \u201cThose first images from Opportunity inspired me to become a planetary scientist.\u201d\nNASA\u2019s Mars Curiosity rover, which has been crawling across the surface of Mars since 2012, is plutonium-powered and wasn\u2019t affected.\nAgency engineers decided to call it quits now because the seasonal winds that might clear the dust from the rover\u2019s solar panels are dying down for the year and the bitter cold of approaching winter is likely to severely damage the rover\u2019s unheated batteries and electric systems.\n\u201cWe were meant to wear these rovers out,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Callas,\n\n\n\n Mars Exploration Rover project manager. \u201cWe had no idea it would take this long. Even so, this is a hard day. Even though it is machine, we have to say goodbye.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers are hanging up on the agency\u2019s Opportunity Mars rover after 835 unanswered wake-up calls, following 15 years on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Calls It Quits for Opportunity Mars Rover After 15-Year Mission (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7434",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-calls-it-quits-for-opportunity-mars-rover-after-15-years-on-the-red-planet-11550085362?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=78",
        "text": "It lasted longer than any other robot sent from Earth to another planet, agency officials said. Mission engineers made their last attempt to contact it Tuesday night.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI learned this morning that our beloved Opportunity remains silent,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. \u201cI declare the Opportunity mission as complete. It\u2019s an emotional moment.\u201d\n\n\nLaunched as one in a pair of rovers in 2003, Opportunity touched down after a six-month voyage inside a giant impact crater just south of the Martian equator on terrain that scientists suspected might once have been a lake. \nAt about the same time, its identical robotic twin, called Spirit, landed on the opposite side of the planet. The Spirit rover, mired in a Martian sand trap, was shut down in 2011.\nLoaded with three spectrometers, three cameras, a microscope and a rock hammer, the Opportunity robot was a working field geologist, studying rocks and minerals in its path, including deposits of hematite and gypsum that could have formed in hot springs or running water. It spotted an iron-nickel meteorite near its own discarded heat shield\u2014the first meteorite ever identified on another planet. \n\n\n\n\nNASA Says Goodbye to Mars Rover OpportunityThe robot lasted longer than any other sent from Earth to another planet, NASA officials say\u00a0\u00a0In this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech1 of 12\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 12Hide CaptionIn this navigation camera raw image, NASA's Mars rover Opportunity looks back over its own tracks on Aug. 4, 2010. NASA/JPL-Caltech\n\n\nThe rover also found evidence that persuaded scientists the arid plains of Mars had once been awash with acidic water, although it found no signs that life ever existed on the planet. \n\u201cThis was not evidence of an evolutionary paradise, but it was a fascinating, fascinating environment,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Squyres,\n\n\n\n the project\u2019s principal investigator at Cornell University.\nMoving at a snail\u2019s pace, the wheeled craft traveled a little more than 28 miles in starts and stops over the years, setting a record for extraterrestrial ground travel. In its methodical journey, its cameras recorded hundreds of thousands of images and transmitted them to eager researchers on Earth. They included breathtaking panoramas of Martian craters and a picture of a swirling Martian dust devil. \n\n\nRelated NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites For Mars Rover, Really Remote Roadside Assistance Interactive: The New Race \n\n\nBy the summer of 2018, Opportunity had reached a spot that NASA mission engineers dubbed Perseverance Valley. There last year, a massive dust storm overcame it, likely smothering the solar panels that power the craft in dust. The rover had weathered a previous storm in 2007, but this one overwhelmed it.\n\u201cThe sky was so dark we could not see the sun and the solar panels couldn\u2019t recharge the batteries,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abigail Fraeman,\n\n\n\n deputy project scientist, who was a high-school junior when the rover landed in 2004. \u201cThose first images from Opportunity inspired me to become a planetary scientist.\u201d\nNASA\u2019s Mars Curiosity rover, which has been crawling across the surface of Mars since 2012, is plutonium-powered and wasn\u2019t affected.\nAgency engineers decided to call it quits now because the seasonal winds that might clear the dust from the rover\u2019s solar panels are dying down for the year and the bitter cold of approaching winter is likely to severely damage the rover\u2019s unheated batteries and electric systems.\n\u201cWe were meant to wear these rovers out,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Callas,\n\n\n\n Mars Exploration Rover project manager. \u201cWe had no idea it would take this long. Even so, this is a hard day. Even though it is machine, we have to say goodbye.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers are hanging up on the agency\u2019s Opportunity Mars rover after 835 unanswered wake-up calls, following 15 years on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Gets Set for Historic First Flight on Another World (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7435",
        "date": "2021-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-gets-set-for-historic-first-flight-on-another-world-11617465600?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=25",
        "text": "Ingenuity reached Mars like a stowaway, folded up on the underside of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February after a seven-month, 293-million-mile voyage from Earth. For its maiden flight, the 4-pound, $85 million craft will simply rise about 10 feet above the surface and hover\u2014no higher than the rim of a regulation basketball hoop\u2014before returning to the surface. The whole flight should be over within 90 seconds.\nThe brief excursion\u2014one of five planned for a one-month period expected to start on or about April 11\u2014is a short hop by the measures of interplanetary travel. But agency officials said it would be a giant leap for Mars exploration. In the future, they said, autonomous drones like Ingenuity could take to the skies to explore canyons, ice caps and other terrain that is inaccessible to rovers. Should human explorers ever land on Mars, drones could serve as scouts and aerial sensors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) above Earth.\n\n\n(56 miles)\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\n(31 miles)\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth \ngenerally don\u2019t fly \nabove 10,000 ft.\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\n(7.5 miles)\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) \nabove Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth generally \ndon\u2019t fly above 10,000 ft.\n\n\n12km\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km)\nabove Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth generally \ndon\u2019t fly above 10,000 ft.\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) above Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth \ngenerally don\u2019t fly \nabove 10,000 ft.\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\nSources: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech; The Center for Planetary Science\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe are hoping that Ingenuity allows us to expand and open up aerial mobility on Mars,\u201d said Bob Balaram, the project\u2019s chief engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.\n\n\nThe flight of Ingenuity, part of a broader mission to seek signs of past life on the red planet, is the latest in a flurry of notable Mars moments this year. \nMissions from China and the United Arab Emirates also reached Mars in February, joining spacecraft from India, the European Space Agency and the U.S., all of which are actively studying the desert planet from space. In addition to the Perseverance mission, NASA has two science missions now exploring the surface.\nThe Emirates\u2019 $200 million Hope orbiter\u2014the Arab world\u2019s first interplanetary probe\u2014is conducting a two-year weather study. China\u2019s orbiting Tianwen-1 probe carries a rover, which is expected to descend to the Martian surface in May or June.\nTo create the solar-powered Ingenuity, NASA engineers took advantage of recent advances in lithium batteries, cameras, microprocessors and computer software\u2014and took into account the extreme conditions they knew the craft would encounter. The helicopter had to be featherweight yet sturdy enough to withstand the shake, rattle and roll of a rocket launch and the violent descent to the surface. It also had to be able to survive the extreme freeze and thaw cycles in deep space and on Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe helicopter had to be featherweight yet sturdy enough to withstand a rocket launch and the violent descent to the surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMembers of the NASA Mars helicopter team inspecting the flight model inside the Space Simulator in Pasadena, Calif., in early 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt isn\u2019t just a helicopter; it\u2019s also a spacecraft,\u201d said Ben Pipenberg, an aeromechanical engineer at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AeroVironment Inc.\n\n\n in Simi Valley, Calif., a specialty drone and tactical missile company that helped design and build Ingenuity. \u201cCombining those requirements was the challenge. In some ways, it\u2019s like trying to build a tractor to compete in a Formula One car race.\u201d\nOne big challenge for the Ingenuity team was creating a craft capable of generating lift in the rarefied Martian atmosphere, which is only 1% as dense as Earth\u2019s. The copter has four carbon-fiber rotor blades that spin in opposite directions at 2,400 revolutions a minute\u2014roughly five times faster than a conventional helicopter\u2019s. The 4-foot-long rotors are powered by six motors, each of which took a technician 100 hours working under a microscope to assemble. The pint-size power plants generate so much heat that Ingenuity can fly only 90 seconds before they risk a meltdown, project engineers said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn AeroVironment engineer works on Ingenuity's propeller.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AeroVironment\n \n\n\n\nAnother challenge was giving Ingenuity the ability to fly without human control, which is impossible given the 12 minutes it takes radio signals to cover the vast distance from Earth to Mars. To fly steadily in the unpredictable gusts of Martian wind, Ingenuity\u2019s onboard computer must adjust the copter\u2019s position 500 times a second, navigating by using continuously updated ground images to chart its path. All told, the drone\u2019s software runs to about 800,000 lines of code, project engineers said.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingNASA's Ingenuity Set to Begin Test Flights on MarsWhen NASA's Perseverance rover landed on the red planet in late February, it was carrying a stowaway: a small helicopter called Ingenuity. In the coming days, Ingenuity is set to begin a series of test flights that scientists are hoping could lead to breakthroughs in space exploration. Science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Amanda Lewellyn with the details.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\n\u201cWe needed a processor that was both very compact, weight-wise and size-wise, and also very powerful,\u201d said Tim Canham, Ingenuity\u2019s lead operations manager at the Jet Propulsion Lab. \u201cThe classic processors that they fly on the rover, for instance, are just not powerful enough or compact enough to do the job for us.\u201d\nSo NASA went with a microprocessor designed for consumer electronics, which NASA engineers said is 150 times more powerful than any the agency has launched to another planet. Made by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Qualcomm Inc.,\n\n\n the device packs a billion transistors into its tiny silicon wafer and comes with a popular open-source operating system called Linux already installed. That is the same operating system that runs most of the internet and many of the world\u2019s supercomputers and stock exchanges.\n\u201cThis is the exact same processor that went into a lot of consumer smartphones,\u201d said Dev Singh, Qualcomm\u2019s general manager of robotics, drones and intelligent machines.\nBy comparison, the radiation-hardened Power PC chip used in the Perseverance rover and about 150 other NASA spacecraft in the past few decades contains around 10.4 million transistors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on Mars more than two weeks ago. Jennifer Trosper from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains how the rover will explore the Martian landscape and search for signs of life. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\nIn recent days, Ingenuity has been unpacking itself in preparation for launch, dropping one carbon-fiber leg after another until its four struts were locked in position for an upright stance. By Friday it was ready to be positioned on a carefully selected patch of Martian soil that will serve as its makeshift helipad. Once its batteries are fully charged, NASA engineers will perform preflight system checks for several days. Plans call for the Perseverance rover to retreat to a nearby overlook, where it will photograph the coming flights. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat are your hopes for this latest advancement in space exploration? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nHowever well it performs on Mars, Ingenuity has already made a difference on Earth, project engineers said.\n\u201cThere has been a lot of technology transfer,\u201d said Mr. Pipenberg of AeroVironment. \u201cWhat we learned from early solar-powered airplanes helped significantly with developing Ingenuity. What we learned from Ingenuity has gone right into the next generation of solar-powered high-altitude aircraft.\u201d\nNASA officials have likened Ingenuity to the Wright brothers\u2019 Flyer, which in 1903 made the first controlled, powered flight on Earth\u2014a 12-second, 120-foot trip that opened the way to airmail, passenger jets and frequent-flier miles. In homage to that flight, Ingenuity carries a swatch of fabric from the Flyer on the underside of its solar panels.\n\n\nExploring MarsJuly 30, 2020Space Race: Mission to MarsFeb. 9, 2021U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission in Orbit Around Red PlanetJuly 30, 2020NASA Rover Sent to Find Signs of LifeJuly 21, 2020U.S. and China to Launch Mars MissionsJune 26, 2020Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the WorldsApril 9, 2019Welcome to Your Home on MarsFeb. 13, 2019End of the Road for Opportunity RoverSept. 28, 2015Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The brief excursion could help usher in a new era of space exploration in which drones play a vital role. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7436",
        "date": "2017-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-mars-vision-puts-pressure-on-nasas-manned-exploration-programs-1507143203?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=22",
        "text": "Industry officials and space experts consider the proposal by Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to land people on the red planet around the middle of the next decade extremely optimistic. Some supporters concede the deadline seems ambitious even for reaching the moon, while Mr. Musk himself acknowledged that some of his projected dates are merely \u201caspirational.\u201d\nBut NASA doesn\u2019t envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline the space agency is finding increasingly hard to defend amid criticism that it is too slow.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late September 2016, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nArguments over NASA\u2019s future coincide with Thursday\u2019s first meeting of a revived White House Space Council, intended to set governmentwide policy for launch programs and space priorities. Several of President Donald Trump\u2019s top national-security and economics advisers are expected to attend the public session, along with industry leaders such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg,\n\n\n\n chairman and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , one of NASA\u2019s most important legacy contractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n Chairman and CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marillyn Hewson\n\n\n\n also is expected to attend.\n\n\nNo major announcements are imminent, but some experts foresee the council taking the lead to reassess, and likely restructure, NASA\u2019s Mars endeavors. One possible scenario would involve eventually pitting Mr. Musk\u2019s unconventional SpaceX, as the company is known, against traditional NASA contractors, industry officials said.\n\nJeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n also has announced plans for heavy-lift rockets designed to take humans to the moon and beyond, though his space startup, Blue Origin LLC, has released fewer details.\nWhite House officials have privately said they are focused on private-public partnerships for space exploration. That should set the stage for \u201ca much better future for NASA with a competitive market\u201d for space exploration, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor who pushed that strategy as a senior member of the Trump administration\u2019s NASA transition team.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA image shows an artist's rendering of the Space Launch System.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t bet against Bezos and Musk,\u201d he said in an interview, adding that traditional contractors are likely to have escalating \u201cconcerns that we may see the private sector leapfrog them\u201d in exploring the solar system. Those contractors already are \u201cthinking of ways to deal with this,\u201d Mr. Autry said.\nConsultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n an outspoken proponent of commercial space projects and another member of the NASA transition team, sees SpaceX as a catalyst to dramatically reshape longstanding agency initiatives.\nCurrent programs \u201cwill look increasingly foolish,\u201d Mr. Miller said, \u201conce it becomes clear to everybody that alternatives are flying that are much more affordable.\u201d\nFor space historian Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University, Mr. Musk\u2019s latest announcement is bound to alter the relationship between public and private space goals.\n\u201cIt may not turn out exactly as [SpaceX] has proposed,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s likely to spark something\u201d different for NASA.\nA SpaceX spokesman said that \u201cto increase the probability of success and to build greater public excitement for deep space exploration, we have long encouraged multiple paths to Mars.\u201d\nIn a statement, NASA also stressed cooperation. \u201cA sustainable crew presence in deep space will require the best of NASA, our international partners and the private sector.\u201d Agency plans envision setting up a permanent base near the moon, complete with refueling capabilities, and using that as a jumping off point to Mars.\nMr. Musk initially talked about a price tag of roughly $10 billion to develop rockets and spacecraft that could refuel in orbit and then reach Mars, perhaps as soon as 2024. More recently, he has stayed away from cost estimates.\nMany outsiders, however, argue NASA\u2019s spending forecasts aren\u2019t realistic, considering other commitments and expected flat budgets for the foreseeable future. If SpaceX succeeds, \u201cit will make NASA\u2019s current rocket and space-vehicle development programs look like quaint 20th-century anachronisms,\u201d according to consultant Joel Sercel, a former government space researcher. \u201cBut that\u2019s a big if.\u201d\nFor NASA, funding remains even more murky. Despite expecting to spend as much as $22 billion to reach an initial manned test flight slated early in the next decade, agency officials currently h Elon Musk\u2019s announcement last week accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA\u2019s efforts to reach the same goal. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7437",
        "date": "2017-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-mars-vision-puts-pressure-on-nasas-manned-exploration-programs-1507143203?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=76",
        "text": "Industry officials and space experts consider the proposal by Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to land people on the red planet around the middle of the next decade extremely optimistic. Some supporters concede the deadline seems ambitious even for reaching the moon, while Mr. Musk himself acknowledged that some of his projected dates are merely \u201caspirational.\u201d\nBut NASA doesn\u2019t envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline the space agency is finding increasingly hard to defend amid criticism that it is too slow.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late September 2016, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nArguments over NASA\u2019s future coincide with Thursday\u2019s first meeting of a revived White House Space Council, intended to set governmentwide policy for launch programs and space priorities. Several of President Donald Trump\u2019s top national-security and economics advisers are expected to attend the public session, along with industry leaders such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg,\n\n\n\n chairman and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , one of NASA\u2019s most important legacy contractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n Chairman and CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marillyn Hewson\n\n\n\n also is expected to attend.\n\n\nNo major announcements are imminent, but some experts foresee the council taking the lead to reassess, and likely restructure, NASA\u2019s Mars endeavors. One possible scenario would involve eventually pitting Mr. Musk\u2019s unconventional SpaceX, as the company is known, against traditional NASA contractors, industry officials said.\n\nJeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n also has announced plans for heavy-lift rockets designed to take humans to the moon and beyond, though his space startup, Blue Origin LLC, has released fewer details.\nWhite House officials have privately said they are focused on private-public partnerships for space exploration. That should set the stage for \u201ca much better future for NASA with a competitive market\u201d for space exploration, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor who pushed that strategy as a senior member of the Trump administration\u2019s NASA transition team.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA image shows an artist's rendering of the Space Launch System.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t bet against Bezos and Musk,\u201d he said in an interview, adding that traditional contractors are likely to have escalating \u201cconcerns that we may see the private sector leapfrog them\u201d in exploring the solar system. Those contractors already are \u201cthinking of ways to deal with this,\u201d Mr. Autry said.\nConsultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n an outspoken proponent of commercial space projects and another member of the NASA transition team, sees SpaceX as a catalyst to dramatically reshape longstanding agency initiatives.\nCurrent programs \u201cwill look increasingly foolish,\u201d Mr. Miller said, \u201conce it becomes clear to everybody that alternatives are flying that are much more affordable.\u201d\nFor space historian Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University, Mr. Musk\u2019s latest announcement is bound to alter the relationship between public and private space goals.\n\u201cIt may not turn out exactly as [SpaceX] has proposed,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s likely to spark something\u201d different for NASA.\nA SpaceX spokesman said that \u201cto increase the probability of success and to build greater public excitement for deep space exploration, we have long encouraged multiple paths to Mars.\u201d\nIn a statement, NASA also stressed cooperation. \u201cA sustainable crew presence in deep space will require the best of NASA, our international partners and the private sector.\u201d Agency plans envision setting up a permanent base near the moon, complete with refueling capabilities, and using that as a jumping off point to Mars.\nMr. Musk initially talked about a price tag of roughly $10 billion to develop rockets and spacecraft that could refuel in orbit and then reach Mars, perhaps as soon as 2024. More recently, he has stayed away from cost estimates.\nMany outsiders, however, argue NASA\u2019s spending forecasts aren\u2019t realistic, considering other commitments and expected flat budgets for the foreseeable future. If SpaceX succeeds, \u201cit will make NASA\u2019s current rocket and space-vehicle development programs look like quaint 20th-century anachronisms,\u201d according to consultant Joel Sercel, a former government space researcher. \u201cBut that\u2019s a big if.\u201d\nFor NASA, funding remains even more murky. Despite expecting to spend as much as $22 billion to reach an initial manned test flight slated early in the next decade, agency officials currently h Elon Musk\u2019s announcement last week accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA\u2019s efforts to reach the same goal. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7438",
        "date": "2017-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacexs-mars-vision-puts-pressure-on-nasas-manned-exploration-programs-1507143203?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=112",
        "text": "Industry officials and space experts consider the proposal by Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to land people on the red planet around the middle of the next decade extremely optimistic. Some supporters concede the deadline seems ambitious even for reaching the moon, while Mr. Musk himself acknowledged that some of his projected dates are merely \u201caspirational.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBut NASA doesn\u2019t envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline the space agency is finding increasingly hard to defend amid criticism that it is too slow.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n In late September 2016, Elon Musk revealed his vision for sending humans to Mars to colonize the Red Planet. WSJ\u2019s Monika Auger reports. Photo: SpaceX (Originally published Sept. 27, 2016)\n \n\n\nArguments over NASA\u2019s future coincide with Thursday\u2019s first meeting of a revived White House Space Council, intended to set governmentwide policy for launch programs and space priorities. Several of President Donald Trump\u2019s top national-security and economics advisers are expected to attend the public session, along with industry leaders such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg,\n\n\n\n chairman and chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , one of NASA\u2019s most important legacy contractors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n Chairman and CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marillyn Hewson\n\n\n\n also is expected to attend.\n\n\nNo major announcements are imminent, but some experts foresee the council taking the lead to reassess, and likely restructure, NASA\u2019s Mars endeavors. One possible scenario would involve eventually pitting Mr. Musk\u2019s unconventional SpaceX, as the company is known, against traditional NASA contractors, industry officials said.\n\nJeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n founder and chairman of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n also has announced plans for heavy-lift rockets designed to take humans to the moon and beyond, though his space startup, Blue Origin LLC, has released fewer details.\nWhite House officials have privately said they are focused on private-public partnerships for space exploration. That should set the stage for \u201ca much better future for NASA with a competitive market\u201d for space exploration, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Greg Autry,\n\n\n\n a University of Southern California professor who pushed that strategy as a senior member of the Trump administration\u2019s NASA transition team.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA NASA image shows an artist's rendering of the Space Launch System.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t bet against Bezos and Musk,\u201d he said in an interview, adding that traditional contractors are likely to have escalating \u201cconcerns that we may see the private sector leapfrog them\u201d in exploring the solar system. Those contractors already are \u201cthinking of ways to deal with this,\u201d Mr. Autry said.\nConsultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n an outspoken proponent of commercial space projects and another member of the NASA transition team, sees SpaceX as a catalyst to dramatically reshape longstanding agency initiatives.\nCurrent programs \u201cwill look increasingly foolish,\u201d Mr. Miller said, \u201conce it becomes clear to everybody that alternatives are flying that are much more affordable.\u201d\nFor space historian Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University, Mr. Musk\u2019s latest announcement is bound to alter the relationship between public and private space goals.\n\u201cIt may not turn out exactly as [SpaceX] has proposed,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s likely to spark something\u201d different for NASA.\nA SpaceX spokesman said that \u201cto increase the probability of success and to build greater public excitement for deep space exploration, we have long encouraged multiple paths to Mars.\u201d\nIn a statement, NASA also stressed cooperation. \u201cA sustainable crew presence in deep space will require the best of NASA, our international partners and the private sector.\u201d Agency plans envision setting up a permanent base near the moon, complete with refueling capabilities, and using that as a jumping off point to Mars.\nMr. Musk initially talked about a price tag of roughly $10 billion to develop rockets and spacecraft that could refuel in orbit and then reach Mars, perhaps as soon as 2024. More recently, he has stayed away from cost estimates.\nMany outsiders, however, argue NASA\u2019s spending forecasts aren\u2019t realistic, considering other commitments and expected flat budgets for the foreseeable future. If SpaceX succeeds, \u201cit will make NASA\u2019s current rocket and space-vehicle development programs look like quaint 20th-century anachronisms,\u201d according to consultant Joel Sercel, a former government space researcher. \u201cBut that\u2019s a big if.\u201d\nFor NASA, funding remains even more murky. Despite expecting to spend as much as $22 billion to reach an initial manned test flight slated early in the next decade, agency officials current Elon Musk\u2019s announcement last week accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA\u2019s efforts to reach the same goal. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Final Mission: Solve Mysteries of Saturn\u2019s Rings (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7439",
        "date": "2017-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cassinis-final-mission-solve-the-mysteries-of-saturns-rings-1504958400?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=88",
        "text": "In its last days, the aging spacecraft is bringing Saturn\u2019s signature rings into sharp focus, detail that could help settle debates over their age, mass and origin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Cassini\u2019s Last Dance With Saturn\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n NASA\n\n\n\u201cThe ring scientists are having a field day,\u201d said NASA deputy project scientist Scott Edgington. \u201cWhen the navigators said we could come so close that we could dive through this gap, you can imagine how the scientists\u2019 eyes lit up.\u201d\n\n\nIt is the grand finale of a $3.27 billion mission that has involved 5,000 scientists in 17 countries. And it signals the end of an era of interplanetary exploration in which big multipurpose probes cruised the solar system as humanity\u2019s eyes and ears, such as the Magellan mission to Mercury and Venus, the Galileo probe to Jupiter, and the 40-year-old Voyager spacecraft now entering interstellar space.\nThe Cassini probe is one of the heaviest and most complex interplanetary spacecraft ever built. Its components included the European Space Agency\u2019s Huygens probe, which landed on one of Saturn\u2019s moons in 2005. It has a dozen sets of sensors.\n\u201cToday there isn\u2019t a U.S. launch vehicle that could lift Cassini,\u201d said Julie Webster, a spacecraft operations team manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.\nLaunched in 1997 on a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket, Cassini took seven years to reach Saturn. It has spent the past 13 years exploring the planet, revealing secrets that bedeviled astronomers for centuries.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmong its findings, the probe found evidence that three major moons\u2014Titan, Europa and Enceladus\u2014might support the chemistry of life. It spotted seven previously unknown moons.\nAnd in thousands of close-up images, the probe is detailing how Saturn\u2019s rings, studded with thousands of tiny moonlets coalescing out of grit, likely mirror the dynamics of the giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and all the planets in the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago.\n\u201cWe have actually been able to see the rings evolving and changing,\u201d said astrophysicist Robin Canup at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who studies the origins of planets.\nAll of the large planets in the solar system have rings, but none as extensive or puzzling as those encircling Saturn.\nAs documented by Cassini\u2019s sensors, the eight main bands of rings that surround Saturn are as flat as the broad brim of a stylish hat. They are composed mostly of unusually pure ice particles, with sprinkles of pink dust and rocks that range in size from a marble to a house.\nOverall the rings extend about 175,000 miles out from Saturn, but for all their breadth, they are on average only 30 feet thick. As Cassini discovered, the rings have kinks, spokes and ripples. They wobble.\n\u201cThey flap up and down,\u201d said planetary scientist Jeff Cuzzi at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., who uses Cassini data to study the rings. \u201cImagine a flag flapping in the breeze.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUsing Cassini data, scientists discovered that the rings trap debris coming from the outer limits of the solar system. Some of it is so large that the rings vibrate from the impact for decades, like a bell struck by a cosmic clapper. Scientists identified one set of ring ripples that appeared to date from a major impact in 1983.\n\u201cIt left an imprint in the rings that we can still see today,\u201d said Matthew Hedman, a University of Idaho physicist who studies planetary rings. \u201cThese structures are echoes of events.\u201d\nTwo of the most fundamental facts about Saturn\u2019s rings\u2014their mass and age\u2014are a mystery that Cassini may help solve in its final hours.\n\u201cThere are people who argue that the rings should be as old as the solar system,\u201d said Dr. Hedman. \u201cThere are others who argue that they can\u2019t be any older than the dinosaurs.\u201d\nResearchers hope that gravity measurements during Cassini\u2019s final orbits will pin down the true mass of the rings, which in turn would clarify their age. The more massive the rings, the older they likely are.\nBy NASA\u2019s calculation, Cassini has traveled more than 5 billion miles, and it is showing signs of its own age. Its bearings are almost out of lubricant; its reaction controls are wearing out; and the power supply for one sensor has failed.\n\u201cThe spacecraft is an amazing machine and it\u2019s operating almost flawlessly,\u201d said Cassini program manager Earl Maize. Even so, \u201cthe warning light is on,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are essentially out of gas.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The NASA spacecraft has been swooping back and forth at 77,000 miles an hour through the narrow gap between the rings and the planet\u2019s cloudy surface before making a suicide plunge into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Sept. 15. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Final Mission: Solve Mysteries of Saturn\u2019s Rings (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7440",
        "date": "2017-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cassinis-final-mission-solve-the-mysteries-of-saturns-rings-1504958400?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=114",
        "text": "In its last days, the aging spacecraft is bringing Saturn\u2019s signature rings into sharp focus, detail that could help settle debates over their age, mass and origin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Cassini\u2019s Last Dance With Saturn\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n NASA\n\n\n\u201cThe ring scientists are having a field day,\u201d said NASA deputy project scientist Scott Edgington. \u201cWhen the navigators said we could come so close that we could dive through this gap, you can imagine how the scientists\u2019 eyes lit up.\u201d\n\n\nIt is the grand finale of a $3.27 billion mission that has involved 5,000 scientists in 17 countries. And it signals the end of an era of interplanetary exploration in which big multipurpose probes cruised the solar system as humanity\u2019s eyes and ears, such as the Magellan mission to Mercury and Venus, the Galileo probe to Jupiter, and the 40-year-old Voyager spacecraft now entering interstellar space.\nThe Cassini probe is one of the heaviest and most complex interplanetary spacecraft ever built. Its components included the European Space Agency\u2019s Huygens probe, which landed on one of Saturn\u2019s moons in 2005. It has a dozen sets of sensors.\n\u201cToday there isn\u2019t a U.S. launch vehicle that could lift Cassini,\u201d said Julie Webster, a spacecraft operations team manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.\nLaunched in 1997 on a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket, Cassini took seven years to reach Saturn. It has spent the past 13 years exploring the planet, revealing secrets that bedeviled astronomers for centuries.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmong its findings, the probe found evidence that three major moons\u2014Titan, Europa and Enceladus\u2014might support the chemistry of life. It spotted seven previously unknown moons.\nAnd in thousands of close-up images, the probe is detailing how Saturn\u2019s rings, studded with thousands of tiny moonlets coalescing out of grit, likely mirror the dynamics of the giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and all the planets in the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago.\n\u201cWe have actually been able to see the rings evolving and changing,\u201d said astrophysicist Robin Canup at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who studies the origins of planets.\nAll of the large planets in the solar system have rings, but none as extensive or puzzling as those encircling Saturn.\nAs documented by Cassini\u2019s sensors, the eight main bands of rings that surround Saturn are as flat as the broad brim of a stylish hat. They are composed mostly of unusually pure ice particles, with sprinkles of pink dust and rocks that range in size from a marble to a house.\nOverall the rings extend about 175,000 miles out from Saturn, but for all their breadth, they are on average only 30 feet thick. As Cassini discovered, the rings have kinks, spokes and ripples. They wobble.\n\u201cThey flap up and down,\u201d said planetary scientist Jeff Cuzzi at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., who uses Cassini data to study the rings. \u201cImagine a flag flapping in the breeze.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUsing Cassini data, scientists discovered that the rings trap debris coming from the outer limits of the solar system. Some of it is so large that the rings vibrate from the impact for decades, like a bell struck by a cosmic clapper. Scientists identified one set of ring ripples that appeared to date from a major impact in 1983.\n\u201cIt left an imprint in the rings that we can still see today,\u201d said Matthew Hedman, a University of Idaho physicist who studies planetary rings. \u201cThese structures are echoes of events.\u201d\nTwo of the most fundamental facts about Saturn\u2019s rings\u2014their mass and age\u2014are a mystery that Cassini may help solve in its final hours.\n\u201cThere are people who argue that the rings should be as old as the solar system,\u201d said Dr. Hedman. \u201cThere are others who argue that they can\u2019t be any older than the dinosaurs.\u201d\nResearchers hope that gravity measurements during Cassini\u2019s final orbits will pin down the true mass of the rings, which in turn would clarify their age. The more massive the rings, the older they likely are.\nBy NASA\u2019s calculation, Cassini has traveled more than 5 billion miles, and it is showing signs of its own age. Its bearings are almost out of lubricant; its reaction controls are wearing out; and the power supply for one sensor has failed.\n\u201cThe spacecraft is an amazing machine and it\u2019s operating almost flawlessly,\u201d said Cassini program manager Earl Maize. Even so, \u201cthe warning light is on,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are essentially out of gas.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The NASA spacecraft has been swooping back and forth at 77,000 miles an hour through the narrow gap between the rings and the planet\u2019s cloudy surface before making a suicide plunge into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Sept. 15. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cassini\u2019s Final Mission: Solve Mysteries of Saturn\u2019s Rings (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7441",
        "date": "2017-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cassinis-final-mission-solve-the-mysteries-of-saturns-rings-1504958400?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=23",
        "text": "In its last days, the aging spacecraft is bringing Saturn\u2019s signature rings into sharp focus, detail that could help settle debates over their age, mass and origin.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Cassini\u2019s Last Dance With Saturn\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Interactive\n \n\n\n\n NASA\n\n\n\u201cThe ring scientists are having a field day,\u201d said NASA deputy project scientist Scott Edgington. \u201cWhen the navigators said we could come so close that we could dive through this gap, you can imagine how the scientists\u2019 eyes lit up.\u201d\n\n\nIt is the grand finale of a $3.27 billion mission that has involved 5,000 scientists in 17 countries. And it signals the end of an era of interplanetary exploration in which big multipurpose probes cruised the solar system as humanity\u2019s eyes and ears, such as the Magellan mission to Mercury and Venus, the Galileo probe to Jupiter, and the 40-year-old Voyager spacecraft now entering interstellar space.\nThe Cassini probe is one of the heaviest and most complex interplanetary spacecraft ever built. Its components included the European Space Agency\u2019s Huygens probe, which landed on one of Saturn\u2019s moons in 2005. It has a dozen sets of sensors.\n\u201cToday there isn\u2019t a U.S. launch vehicle that could lift Cassini,\u201d said Julie Webster, a spacecraft operations team manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.\nLaunched in 1997 on a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket, Cassini took seven years to reach Saturn. It has spent the past 13 years exploring the planet, revealing secrets that bedeviled astronomers for centuries.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmong its findings, the probe found evidence that three major moons\u2014Titan, Europa and Enceladus\u2014might support the chemistry of life. It spotted seven previously unknown moons.\nAnd in thousands of close-up images, the probe is detailing how Saturn\u2019s rings, studded with thousands of tiny moonlets coalescing out of grit, likely mirror the dynamics of the giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and all the planets in the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago.\n\u201cWe have actually been able to see the rings evolving and changing,\u201d said astrophysicist Robin Canup at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who studies the origins of planets.\nAll of the large planets in the solar system have rings, but none as extensive or puzzling as those encircling Saturn.\nAs documented by Cassini\u2019s sensors, the eight main bands of rings that surround Saturn are as flat as the broad brim of a stylish hat. They are composed mostly of unusually pure ice particles, with sprinkles of pink dust and rocks that range in size from a marble to a house.\nOverall the rings extend about 175,000 miles out from Saturn, but for all their breadth, they are on average only 30 feet thick. As Cassini discovered, the rings have kinks, spokes and ripples. They wobble.\n\u201cThey flap up and down,\u201d said planetary scientist Jeff Cuzzi at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., who uses Cassini data to study the rings. \u201cImagine a flag flapping in the breeze.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUsing Cassini data, scientists discovered that the rings trap debris coming from the outer limits of the solar system. Some of it is so large that the rings vibrate from the impact for decades, like a bell struck by a cosmic clapper. Scientists identified one set of ring ripples that appeared to date from a major impact in 1983.\n\u201cIt left an imprint in the rings that we can still see today,\u201d said Matthew Hedman, a University of Idaho physicist who studies planetary rings. \u201cThese structures are echoes of events.\u201d\nTwo of the most fundamental facts about Saturn\u2019s rings\u2014their mass and age\u2014are a mystery that Cassini may help solve in its final hours.\n\u201cThere are people who argue that the rings should be as old as the solar system,\u201d said Dr. Hedman. \u201cThere are others who argue that they can\u2019t be any older than the dinosaurs.\u201d\nResearchers hope that gravity measurements during Cassini\u2019s final orbits will pin down the true mass of the rings, which in turn would clarify their age. The more massive the rings, the older they likely are.\nBy NASA\u2019s calculation, Cassini has traveled more than 5 billion miles, and it is showing signs of its own age. Its bearings are almost out of lubricant; its reaction controls are wearing out; and the power supply for one sensor has failed.\n\u201cThe spacecraft is an amazing machine and it\u2019s operating almost flawlessly,\u201d said Cassini program manager Earl Maize. Even so, \u201cthe warning light is on,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are essentially out of gas.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The NASA spacecraft has been swooping back and forth at 77,000 miles an hour through the narrow gap between the rings and the planet\u2019s cloudy surface before making a suicide plunge into Saturn\u2019s atmosphere on Sept. 15. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7442",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-moves-to-extend-russian-space-contracts-1488422569?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=26",
        "text": "In an unusual twist, the latest seats eyed by NASA would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian\u00a0space\u00a0authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\u00a0But that fact isn\u2019t likely to do much to insulate NASA from Capitol Hill criticism about problems ending reliance on Moscow.\nBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities.\n\n\nOfficials from both Boeing and SpaceX have projected having certified systems ready to operate within the next two years, but in recent weeks congressional investigators and outside experts cast doubt on the likelihood of meeting those schedules.\nAs a result, last month NASA quietly signed an agreement to ensure that if neither of the two companies is ready to start flying U.S. crews to the international space station by the end of 2018, the agency has a backup of three seats reserved on Russian spacecraft in 2019.\nA statement posted on the agency\u2019s website at the time notes the seats \u201ccould be used to smooth (the) transition to U.S. commercial transportation services.\u201d\nSpaceX didn\u2019t have any immediate comment and a Boeing spokeswoman couldn\u2019t immediately be reached.\nDays before Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration in January, outgoing\u00a0NASA leaders released a contracting document indicating agency managers were considering securing up to five additional seats on Russian vehicles. But President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration\u2014which initially developed the concept of using commercial space taxis to ferry crews to the space station\u2014stopped short of taking the politically charged step to formally extend America\u2019s reliance on Moscow.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has relied entirely on Russian authorities for such services since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet in 2011.\nAccording to NASA, two seats are intended to increase crew size to boost scientific research on the orbiting international laboratory. They would be used in 2017 and 2018. \nBut NASA also opted to secure an option for three additional\u00a0seats, slated to be used in 2019. The decision on exercising\u00a0those options must be made by this fall.\nMr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet nominated a new NASA chief, and his aides\u00a0have emphasized policy decisions are basically on hold until a new team is in place. So far, internal administration discussions\u00a0have focused on the importance of promoting public-private\u00a0partnerships to accelerate manned space exploration.\nA month after the inauguration, however, NASA took its most\u00a0dramatic action yet to lock in alternate transportation options. In its statement, NASA said Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp, the formal name for Mr. Mr. Musk\u2019s company, \u201chave made\u00a0significant progress toward returning crew launches to the U.S.,\u201d but it added that \u201cexternal review groups have recommended\u201d\u00a0further protection against possible delays.\nIn January, NASA\u2019s top external safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that Boeing and SpaceX confront some daunting technical challenges. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report. \nAt the start of February, Government Accountability Office\u00a0investigators separately determined that both companies are likely to miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA kicked off its effort to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015.\nResponding to the GAO report, both companies have reiterated their programs remain on schedules that were last revised in 2016. But for NASA, which typically has to order seats directly from the Russians three years in advance, the Boeing option presents an important safety valve. And for Boeing\u2019s space business, which is struggling with cost pressures and cutbacks, the agreement could mean a significant cash infusion. \nAlong with its report urging contingency plans be put in place in the event the companies face further unexpected delays, the GAO released a NASA letter indicating the agency agreed with that conclusion. The agency\u2019s response also said it would soon take action to comply with the nonbinding recommendation. \nBefore the change in the White House, NASA leaders awarded four astronaut missions to each company \u201cto ensure reliable crew transportation\u201d in coming years. That was in addition to two earlier missions each company received from the agency.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the amount was about $8 million more per seat. (March 2) NASA\u2019s first big decision under President Donald Trump entails paying up to $373 million so Russia can continue flying U.S. astronauts into orbit potentially through 2019. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7443",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-moves-to-extend-russian-space-contracts-1488422569?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=101",
        "text": "In an unusual twist, the latest seats eyed by NASA would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian\u00a0space\u00a0authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\u00a0But that fact isn\u2019t likely to do much to insulate NASA from Capitol Hill criticism about problems ending reliance on Moscow.\nBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities.\n\n\nOfficials from both Boeing and SpaceX have projected having certified systems ready to operate within the next two years, but in recent weeks congressional investigators and outside experts cast doubt on the likelihood of meeting those schedules.\nAs a result, last month NASA quietly signed an agreement to ensure that if neither of the two companies is ready to start flying U.S. crews to the international space station by the end of 2018, the agency has a backup of three seats reserved on Russian spacecraft in 2019.\nA statement posted on the agency\u2019s website at the time notes the seats \u201ccould be used to smooth (the) transition to U.S. commercial transportation services.\u201d\nSpaceX didn\u2019t have any immediate comment and a Boeing spokeswoman couldn\u2019t immediately be reached.\nDays before Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration in January, outgoing\u00a0NASA leaders released a contracting document indicating agency managers were considering securing up to five additional seats on Russian vehicles. But President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration\u2014which initially developed the concept of using commercial space taxis to ferry crews to the space station\u2014stopped short of taking the politically charged step to formally extend America\u2019s reliance on Moscow.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has relied entirely on Russian authorities for such services since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet in 2011.\nAccording to NASA, two seats are intended to increase crew size to boost scientific research on the orbiting international laboratory. They would be used in 2017 and 2018. \nBut NASA also opted to secure an option for three additional\u00a0seats, slated to be used in 2019. The decision on exercising\u00a0those options must be made by this fall.\nMr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet nominated a new NASA chief, and his aides\u00a0have emphasized policy decisions are basically on hold until a new team is in place. So far, internal administration discussions\u00a0have focused on the importance of promoting public-private\u00a0partnerships to accelerate manned space exploration.\nA month after the inauguration, however, NASA took its most\u00a0dramatic action yet to lock in alternate transportation options. In its statement, NASA said Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp, the formal name for Mr. Mr. Musk\u2019s company, \u201chave made\u00a0significant progress toward returning crew launches to the U.S.,\u201d but it added that \u201cexternal review groups have recommended\u201d\u00a0further protection against possible delays.\nIn January, NASA\u2019s top external safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that Boeing and SpaceX confront some daunting technical challenges. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report. \nAt the start of February, Government Accountability Office\u00a0investigators separately determined that both companies are likely to miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA kicked off its effort to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015.\nResponding to the GAO report, both companies have reiterated their programs remain on schedules that were last revised in 2016. But for NASA, which typically has to order seats directly from the Russians three years in advance, the Boeing option presents an important safety valve. And for Boeing\u2019s space business, which is struggling with cost pressures and cutbacks, the agreement could mean a significant cash infusion. \nAlong with its report urging contingency plans be put in place in the event the companies face further unexpected delays, the GAO released a NASA letter indicating the agency agreed with that conclusion. The agency\u2019s response also said it would soon take action to comply with the nonbinding recommendation. \nBefore the change in the White House, NASA leaders awarded four astronaut missions to each company \u201cto ensure reliable crew transportation\u201d in coming years. That was in addition to two earlier missions each company received from the agency.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the amount was about $8 million more per seat. (March 2) NASA\u2019s first big decision under President Donald Trump entails paying up to $373 million so Russia can continue flying U.S. astronauts into orbit potentially through 2019. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7444",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-moves-to-extend-russian-space-contracts-1488422569?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=87",
        "text": "In an unusual twist, the latest seats eyed by NASA would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian\u00a0space\u00a0authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\u00a0But that fact isn\u2019t likely to do much to insulate NASA from Capitol Hill criticism about problems ending reliance on Moscow.\nBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities.\n\n\nOfficials from both Boeing and SpaceX have projected having certified systems ready to operate within the next two years, but in recent weeks congressional investigators and outside experts cast doubt on the likelihood of meeting those schedules.\nAs a result, last month NASA quietly signed an agreement to ensure that if neither of the two companies is ready to start flying U.S. crews to the international space station by the end of 2018, the agency has a backup of three seats reserved on Russian spacecraft in 2019.\nA statement posted on the agency\u2019s website at the time notes the seats \u201ccould be used to smooth (the) transition to U.S. commercial transportation services.\u201d\nSpaceX didn\u2019t have any immediate comment and a Boeing spokeswoman couldn\u2019t immediately be reached.\nDays before Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration in January, outgoing\u00a0NASA leaders released a contracting document indicating agency managers were considering securing up to five additional seats on Russian vehicles. But President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration\u2014which initially developed the concept of using commercial space taxis to ferry crews to the space station\u2014stopped short of taking the politically charged step to formally extend America\u2019s reliance on Moscow.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has relied entirely on Russian authorities for such services since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet in 2011.\nAccording to NASA, two seats are intended to increase crew size to boost scientific research on the orbiting international laboratory. They would be used in 2017 and 2018. \nBut NASA also opted to secure an option for three additional\u00a0seats, slated to be used in 2019. The decision on exercising\u00a0those options must be made by this fall.\nMr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet nominated a new NASA chief, and his aides\u00a0have emphasized policy decisions are basically on hold until a new team is in place. So far, internal administration discussions\u00a0have focused on the importance of promoting public-private\u00a0partnerships to accelerate manned space exploration.\nA month after the inauguration, however, NASA took its most\u00a0dramatic action yet to lock in alternate transportation options. In its statement, NASA said Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp, the formal name for Mr. Mr. Musk\u2019s company, \u201chave made\u00a0significant progress toward returning crew launches to the U.S.,\u201d but it added that \u201cexternal review groups have recommended\u201d\u00a0further protection against possible delays.\nIn January, NASA\u2019s top external safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that Boeing and SpaceX confront some daunting technical challenges. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report. \nAt the start of February, Government Accountability Office\u00a0investigators separately determined that both companies are likely to miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA kicked off its effort to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015.\nResponding to the GAO report, both companies have reiterated their programs remain on schedules that were last revised in 2016. But for NASA, which typically has to order seats directly from the Russians three years in advance, the Boeing option presents an important safety valve. And for Boeing\u2019s space business, which is struggling with cost pressures and cutbacks, the agreement could mean a significant cash infusion. \nAlong with its report urging contingency plans be put in place in the event the companies face further unexpected delays, the GAO released a NASA letter indicating the agency agreed with that conclusion. The agency\u2019s response also said it would soon take action to comply with the nonbinding recommendation. \nBefore the change in the White House, NASA leaders awarded four astronaut missions to each company \u201cto ensure reliable crew transportation\u201d in coming years. That was in addition to two earlier missions each company received from the agency.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the amount was about $8 million more per seat. (March 2) NASA\u2019s first big decision under President Donald Trump entails paying up to $373 million so Russia can continue flying U.S. astronauts into orbit potentially through 2019. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7445",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-moves-to-extend-russian-space-contracts-1488422569?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=129",
        "text": "In an unusual twist, the latest seats eyed by NASA would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian\u00a0space\u00a0authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\u00a0But that fact isn\u2019t likely to do much to insulate NASA from Capitol Hill criticism about problems ending reliance on Moscow.\n\n\n\n\nBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities.\n\n\nOfficials from both Boeing and SpaceX have projected having certified systems ready to operate within the next two years, but in recent weeks congressional investigators and outside experts cast doubt on the likelihood of meeting those schedules.\nAs a result, last month NASA quietly signed an agreement to ensure that if neither of the two companies is ready to start flying U.S. crews to the international space station by the end of 2018, the agency has a backup of three seats reserved on Russian spacecraft in 2019.\nA statement posted on the agency\u2019s website at the time notes the seats \u201ccould be used to smooth (the) transition to U.S. commercial transportation services.\u201d\nSpaceX didn\u2019t have any immediate comment and a Boeing spokeswoman couldn\u2019t immediately be reached.\nDays before Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration in January, outgoing\u00a0NASA leaders released a contracting document indicating agency managers were considering securing up to five additional seats on Russian vehicles. But President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration\u2014which initially developed the concept of using commercial space taxis to ferry crews to the space station\u2014stopped short of taking the politically charged step to formally extend America\u2019s reliance on Moscow.\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration has relied entirely on Russian authorities for such services since the retirement of the U.S. space shuttle fleet in 2011.\nAccording to NASA, two seats are intended to increase crew size to boost scientific research on the orbiting international laboratory. They would be used in 2017 and 2018. \nBut NASA also opted to secure an option for three additional\u00a0seats, slated to be used in 2019. The decision on exercising\u00a0those options must be made by this fall.\nMr. Trump hasn\u2019t yet nominated a new NASA chief, and his aides\u00a0have emphasized policy decisions are basically on hold until a new team is in place. So far, internal administration discussions\u00a0have focused on the importance of promoting public-private\u00a0partnerships to accelerate manned space exploration.\nA month after the inauguration, however, NASA took its most\u00a0dramatic action yet to lock in alternate transportation options. In its statement, NASA said Boeing and Space Exploration Technologies Corp, the formal name for Mr. Mr. Musk\u2019s company, \u201chave made\u00a0significant progress toward returning crew launches to the U.S.,\u201d but it added that \u201cexternal review groups have recommended\u201d\u00a0further protection against possible delays.\nIn January, NASA\u2019s top external safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that Boeing and SpaceX confront some daunting technical challenges. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report. \nAt the start of February, Government Accountability Office\u00a0investigators separately determined that both companies are likely to miss a 2018 deadline to commence regular missions ferrying astronauts into orbit. When NASA kicked off its effort to subsidize commercial transportation to the space station, proponents envisioned a start date of 2015.\nResponding to the GAO report, both companies have reiterated their programs remain on schedules that were last revised in 2016. But for NASA, which typically has to order seats directly from the Russians three years in advance, the Boeing option presents an important safety valve. And for Boeing\u2019s space business, which is struggling with cost pressures and cutbacks, the agreement could mean a significant cash infusion. \nAlong with its report urging contingency plans be put in place in the event the companies face further unexpected delays, the GAO released a NASA letter indicating the agency agreed with that conclusion. The agency\u2019s response also said it would soon take action to comply with the nonbinding recommendation. \nBefore the change in the White House, NASA leaders awarded four astronaut missions to each company \u201cto ensure reliable crew transportation\u201d in coming years. That was in addition to two earlier missions each company received from the agency.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tBoeing stands to receive an average of nearly $75 million per trip, or about $6 million less per seat than those purchased directly from Russian entities. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the amount was about $8 million more per seat. (March 2) NASA\u2019s first big decision under President Donald Trump entails paying up to $373 million so Russia can continue flying U.S. astronauts into orbit potentially through 2019. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Launch Its Most Ambitious Mars Rover Yet (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7446",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-launch-its-most-ambitious-mars-rover-yet-11596027106?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=40",
        "text": "If all goes as planned, the NASA effort will be the third Mars mission of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates independently launched maiden voyages to Mars earlier this month. Europe and Russia are set to follow with a joint Mars mission in 2022.\n\u201cA lot of countries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way and not just talking about it, but backing it up with budgets,\u201d said NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine.\n\n\n\n \u201cWe look forward to seeing what they are able to discover.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This summer, the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars using the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nNASA Planetary Science Division Director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lori Glaze\n\n\n\n said, \u201cChina\u2019s sending their first lander to Mars. We\u2019re all going to be watching that very, very carefully. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We know how challenging it is.\u201d\n\n\nNASA expects to launch its Mars Perseverance rover on Thursday from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It is the same launchpad from which in the 1970s the space agency launched its Viking probes, the first of eight NASA spacecraft to land successfully on Mars so far.\n\n\nJourneys to Mars China Blasts Off on Its Long March to Look for Life on Mars (July 23, 2020) U.S. and China to Launch Mars Missions, Vying for Space Supremacy (July 21, 2020) Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the Worlds (June 26, 2020) Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 7, 2018) \n\n\nThe two-hour launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT. If weather or technical problems force a delay, the agency has until Aug. 15 to try again. If unable to launch by mid-August, the agency will have to wait more than two years for Earth and Mars to align again, storing the spacecraft at a cost of about $500 million, agency officials said.\n\u201cWe are champing at the bit to take this nuclear-powered dune buggy to Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tory Bruno,\n\n\n\n chief executive of United Launch Alliance, which makes the mission\u2019s Atlas V launch vehicle.\nIf all goes well, the Perseverance rover is scheduled to land Feb. 18 at Jezero Crater, a 3.8 billion-year-old formation that once held a large lake and still bears traces of a fan-shaped river delta, NASA scientists said. Orbital images suggest it is rich in clay and minerals that might contain signs of microscopic life-forms from billions of years ago\u2014if any existed.\n\u201cIf life was going to start somewhere, this is a place that you would think you would be able to find it,\u201d said astrobiologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Luther Beegle\n\n\n\n at the agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He is the principal investigator for the rover\u2019s Sherloc scanner, which will use spectrometers, a laser and a camera to search for traces of life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Perseverance rover, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., last year, can move about 220 yards a day.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/jpl-caltech/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe robotic rover is designed to scoop up promising samples, load them into several dozen sterile tubes and cache them for eventual return to Earth, where they can be analyzed more thoroughly. Missions to collect those samples are planned for some time around 2028 or later, NASA officials said.\n\u201cThe burden of proof for finding life on another planet is extremely high,\u201d said mission project scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Farley\n\n\n\n at the California Institute of Technology. \u201cWe would like to get as many samples home as we can.\u201d\nThe 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex all-terrain self-guided vehicle NASA has ever built, with 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments wired together with 3 miles of cables, according to JPL Deputy Project Manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Trosper.\n\n\n\n It can move about 220 yards a day at a top speed of one-tenth of a mile an hour\u2014slowly to minimize the possibility of damage to the vehicle, but three times faster than any other rover on the planet.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think humans will ever live on Mars? Would you want to be one of them? Why, or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nAgency engineers hope to use its cameras to take high-definition video of the rover\u2019s plummet to the planet\u2019s surface in February\u2014the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet. The rover also has two microphones to record and relay sounds for the first time, from the whoosh of its huge parachute unfurling to the crunch of its wheels rolling across Martian soil and the zap of its laser vaporizing rocks for chemical analysis.\n\u201cIt is the first time we have taken this human sense to Mars,\u201d said Deputy Project Manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matthew Wallace\n\n\n\n at JPL. \u201cWe are hoping we will get some great audio.\u201d\nOnce the craft is settled safely on Mars, NASA mission engineers will order it to unpack one of its most innovative experiments: a 4-pound helicopter drone. The drone will attempt several test flights, starting about six weeks after the landing. If successful, it will be the first time any vehicle has flown on another world.\n\u201cIt is a little spacecraft in itself,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mimi Aung,\n\n\n\n project manager for the Ingenuity helicopter. \u201cThis is like a Wright Brothers test flight, but on another planet.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tA new NASA robotic rover mission to Mars is estimated to cost $2.70 billion. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it would cost $270 billion. (Corrected on July 29) The $2.7 billion National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission will seek signs of ancient life on Mars that can be packaged and, for the first time, returned to Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Launch Its Most Ambitious Mars Rover Yet (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7447",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-launch-its-most-ambitious-mars-rover-yet-11596027106?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=42",
        "text": "If all goes as planned, the NASA effort will be the third Mars mission of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates independently launched maiden voyages to Mars earlier this month. Europe and Russia are set to follow with a joint Mars mission in 2022.\n\u201cA lot of countries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way and not just talking about it, but backing it up with budgets,\u201d said NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine.\n\n\n\n \u201cWe look forward to seeing what they are able to discover.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This summer, the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars using the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nNASA Planetary Science Division Director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lori Glaze\n\n\n\n said, \u201cChina\u2019s sending their first lander to Mars. We\u2019re all going to be watching that very, very carefully. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We know how challenging it is.\u201d\n\n\nNASA expects to launch its Mars Perseverance rover on Thursday from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It is the same launchpad from which in the 1970s the space agency launched its Viking probes, the first of eight NASA spacecraft to land successfully on Mars so far.\n\n\nJourneys to Mars China Blasts Off on Its Long March to Look for Life on Mars (July 23, 2020) U.S. and China to Launch Mars Missions, Vying for Space Supremacy (July 21, 2020) Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the Worlds (June 26, 2020) Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 7, 2018) \n\n\nThe two-hour launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT. If weather or technical problems force a delay, the agency has until Aug. 15 to try again. If unable to launch by mid-August, the agency will have to wait more than two years for Earth and Mars to align again, storing the spacecraft at a cost of about $500 million, agency officials said.\n\u201cWe are champing at the bit to take this nuclear-powered dune buggy to Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tory Bruno,\n\n\n\n chief executive of United Launch Alliance, which makes the mission\u2019s Atlas V launch vehicle.\nIf all goes well, the Perseverance rover is scheduled to land Feb. 18 at Jezero Crater, a 3.8 billion-year-old formation that once held a large lake and still bears traces of a fan-shaped river delta, NASA scientists said. Orbital images suggest it is rich in clay and minerals that might contain signs of microscopic life-forms from billions of years ago\u2014if any existed.\n\u201cIf life was going to start somewhere, this is a place that you would think you would be able to find it,\u201d said astrobiologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Luther Beegle\n\n\n\n at the agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He is the principal investigator for the rover\u2019s Sherloc scanner, which will use spectrometers, a laser and a camera to search for traces of life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Perseverance rover, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., last year, can move about 220 yards a day.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/jpl-caltech/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe robotic rover is designed to scoop up promising samples, load them into several dozen sterile tubes and cache them for eventual return to Earth, where they can be analyzed more thoroughly. Missions to collect those samples are planned for some time around 2028 or later, NASA officials said.\n\u201cThe burden of proof for finding life on another planet is extremely high,\u201d said mission project scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Farley\n\n\n\n at the California Institute of Technology. \u201cWe would like to get as many samples home as we can.\u201d\nThe 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex all-terrain self-guided vehicle NASA has ever built, with 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments wired together with 3 miles of cables, according to JPL Deputy Project Manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Trosper.\n\n\n\n It can move about 220 yards a day at a top speed of one-tenth of a mile an hour\u2014slowly to minimize the possibility of damage to the vehicle, but three times faster than any other rover on the planet.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think humans will ever live on Mars? Would you want to be one of them? Why, or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nAgency engineers hope to use its cameras to take high-definition video of the rover\u2019s plummet to the planet\u2019s surface in February\u2014the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet. The rover also has two microphones to record and relay sounds for the first time, from the whoosh of its huge parachute unfurling to the crunch of its wheels rolling across Martian soil and the zap of its laser vaporizing rocks for chemical analysis.\n\u201cIt is the first time we have taken this human sense to Mars,\u201d said De The $2.7 billion National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission will seek signs of ancient life on Mars that can be packaged and, for the first time, returned to Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA to Launch Its Most Ambitious Mars Rover Yet (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7448",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-to-launch-its-most-ambitious-mars-rover-yet-11596027106?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=50",
        "text": "If all goes as planned, the NASA effort will be the third Mars mission of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates independently launched maiden voyages to Mars earlier this month. Europe and Russia are set to follow with a joint Mars mission in 2022.\n\u201cA lot of countries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way and not just talking about it, but backing it up with budgets,\u201d said NASA Administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine.\n\n\n\n \u201cWe look forward to seeing what they are able to discover.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This summer, the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars using the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nNASA Planetary Science Division Director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lori Glaze\n\n\n\n said, \u201cChina\u2019s sending their first lander to Mars. We\u2019re all going to be watching that very, very carefully. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We know how challenging it is.\u201d\n\n\nNASA expects to launch its Mars Perseverance rover on Thursday from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It is the same launchpad from which in the 1970s the space agency launched its Viking probes, the first of eight NASA spacecraft to land successfully on Mars so far.\n\n\nJourneys to Mars China Blasts Off on Its Long March to Look for Life on Mars (July 23, 2020) U.S. and China to Launch Mars Missions, Vying for Space Supremacy (July 21, 2020) Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the Worlds (June 26, 2020) Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 7, 2018) \n\n\nThe two-hour launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT. If weather or technical problems force a delay, the agency has until Aug. 15 to try again. If unable to launch by mid-August, the agency will have to wait more than two years for Earth and Mars to align again, storing the spacecraft at a cost of about $500 million, agency officials said.\n\u201cWe are champing at the bit to take this nuclear-powered dune buggy to Mars,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tory Bruno,\n\n\n\n chief executive of United Launch Alliance, which makes the mission\u2019s Atlas V launch vehicle.\nIf all goes well, the Perseverance rover is scheduled to land Feb. 18 at Jezero Crater, a 3.8 billion-year-old formation that once held a large lake and still bears traces of a fan-shaped river delta, NASA scientists said. Orbital images suggest it is rich in clay and minerals that might contain signs of microscopic life-forms from billions of years ago\u2014if any existed.\n\u201cIf life was going to start somewhere, this is a place that you would think you would be able to find it,\u201d said astrobiologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Luther Beegle\n\n\n\n at the agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He is the principal investigator for the rover\u2019s Sherloc scanner, which will use spectrometers, a laser and a camera to search for traces of life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Perseverance rover, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., last year, can move about 220 yards a day.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/jpl-caltech/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe robotic rover is designed to scoop up promising samples, load them into several dozen sterile tubes and cache them for eventual return to Earth, where they can be analyzed more thoroughly. Missions to collect those samples are planned for some time around 2028 or later, NASA officials said.\n\u201cThe burden of proof for finding life on another planet is extremely high,\u201d said mission project scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Farley\n\n\n\n at the California Institute of Technology. \u201cWe would like to get as many samples home as we can.\u201d\nThe 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex all-terrain self-guided vehicle NASA has ever built, with 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments wired together with 3 miles of cables, according to JPL Deputy Project Manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jennifer Trosper.\n\n\n\n It can move about 220 yards a day at a top speed of one-tenth of a mile an hour\u2014slowly to minimize the possibility of damage to the vehicle, but three times faster than any other rover on the planet.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDo you think humans will ever live on Mars? Would you want to be one of them? Why, or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nAgency engineers hope to use its cameras to take high-definition video of the rover\u2019s plummet to the planet\u2019s surface in February\u2014the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet. The rover also has two microphones to record and relay sounds for the first time, from the whoosh of its huge parachute unfurling to the crunch of its wheels rolling across Martian soil and the zap of its laser vaporizing rocks for chemical analysis.\n\u201cIt is the first time we have taken this human sense to Mars,\u201d said De The $2.7 billion National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission will seek signs of ancient life on Mars that can be packaged and, for the first time, returned to Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7449",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-sends-starliner-capsule-into-orbit-on-initial-demonstration-flight-11576843626?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=14",
        "text": "Friday\u2019s mistake\u2014particularly embarrassing because it stemmed from a fundamental error setting the capsule\u2019s internal clock\u2014rattled those NASA plans and raised new questions about Boeing management\u2019s ability to implement major programs while avoiding such relatively simple technical missteps.\nThere weren\u2019t any hardware issues with the capsule or the Atlas V rocket, powered by Russian-made engines, that lofted it into its initial orbit, according to preliminary indications from NASA and Boeing. The Starliner capsule separated from the booster precisely as planned after roughly 15 minutes, and it was supposed to coast for roughly the same amount of time. NASA didn\u2019t indicate any problems during that period.\n\n\nThat prompted a premature congratulatory message from Boeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg,\n\n\n\n who lauded program officials before NASA gave out public information about the improper orbit. In a message on Twitter, he praised the Boeing team and United Launch Alliance, the joint venture with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n that builds and operates the Atlas V rocket, for the \u201chistoric Starliner uncrewed launch.\u201d \nThe Starliner began firing its maneuvering thrusters at the wrong time after separating from the launcher, according to NASA, and ended up using too much fuel. Controllers were then unable to re-establish communication with the craft in time to keep the capsule on track to dock with the space station as planned. The communication gap, which could have lasted some seven minutes, according to NASA officials, may have occurred because during that phase of the flight, the capsule was out of range of NASA\u2019s communications satellites.\nBy the time flight controllers were able to send commands again to the Starliner, according to NASA, it already had used up roughly a quarter of its total fuel supply, and officials opted to prepare it for a return to earth at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico as early as Sunday. It had been scheduled to return to that location in nine days, after spending more than a week docked with the space station.\nAn hour after launch, NASA cut off its video feed after indicating the capsule was in a stable orbit and had electrical power, but failing to elaborate further. Flight controllers were \u201cassessing all their options\u201d and \u201ccontemplating the next maneuvers for the spacecraft,\u201d the agency said, around two hours before disclosing the propulsion malfunction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing launched the first test flight of its Starliner space capsule from Florida. Photo: Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\nLater in the morning, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine at a news conference stressed that any astronauts on board would have been safe.\nDespite the disappointment, Mr. Bridenstine told reporters \u201ca lot of things did, in fact, go right\u201d during the launch, adding that the rest of the mission will be used to vet the safety of various essential systems, including life-support features and heat shields.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left to right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine watch the Starliner launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/joel kowsky handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch businesses, told reporters \u201cwe don\u2019t understand the root cause\u201d of the timing discrepancy.\nFriday\u2019s incident and scramble to explain it illustrated the downside of excessive reliance on automation in the Starliner fleet. NASA engineers and managers over the years have repeatedly emphasized the risks of overreliance on automated systems, without giving human crews ways to take control in emergencies. Indeed, Mr. Bridenstine asserted that if there had been a crew on board, they could have commanded the capsule to adjust firing of its thrusters, and \u201cwe very well may [have been] docking with the international space station tomorrow.\u201d\nNicole Mann, one of two NASA astronauts slated to fly the first crewed mission on the Boeing spacecraft, reiterated the importance of maintaining manual-control alternatives. \u201cWe have the capability on board to stop the automation and take over manually to fly,\u201d she told reporters.\nBefore Friday\u2019s events. Boeing had signaled it hoped to fly the first crew to the space station by summer. Now, Messrs. Bridenstine and Chilton said that timetable is under review. The NASA chief said it was premature to comment on whether another demonstration flight without astronauts would be required.\nFor Boeing, the botched mission came amid struggles to deal with the crisis over its 737 MAX jetliner, which remains grounded after lapses in designing automation flight-control systems resulted in two fatal crashes that took 346 lives in less than five months. Before Friday\u2019s launch, some inside and outside Boeing had described it as a chance to demonstrate the Chicag Boeing\u2019s initial test flight of its Starliner space capsule without astronauts on board was stranded in the wrong orbit, scuttling a plan to dock with the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7450",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-sends-starliner-capsule-into-orbit-on-initial-demonstration-flight-11576843626?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=49",
        "text": "Friday\u2019s mistake\u2014particularly embarrassing because it stemmed from a fundamental error setting the capsule\u2019s internal clock\u2014rattled those NASA plans and raised new questions about Boeing management\u2019s ability to implement major programs while avoiding such relatively simple technical missteps.\nThere weren\u2019t any hardware issues with the capsule or the Atlas V rocket, powered by Russian-made engines, that lofted it into its initial orbit, according to preliminary indications from NASA and Boeing. The Starliner capsule separated from the booster precisely as planned after roughly 15 minutes, and it was supposed to coast for roughly the same amount of time. NASA didn\u2019t indicate any problems during that period.\n\n\nThat prompted a premature congratulatory message from Boeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg,\n\n\n\n who lauded program officials before NASA gave out public information about the improper orbit. In a message on Twitter, he praised the Boeing team and United Launch Alliance, the joint venture with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n that builds and operates the Atlas V rocket, for the \u201chistoric Starliner uncrewed launch.\u201d \nThe Starliner began firing its maneuvering thrusters at the wrong time after separating from the launcher, according to NASA, and ended up using too much fuel. Controllers were then unable to re-establish communication with the craft in time to keep the capsule on track to dock with the space station as planned. The communication gap, which could have lasted some seven minutes, according to NASA officials, may have occurred because during that phase of the flight, the capsule was out of range of NASA\u2019s communications satellites.\nBy the time flight controllers were able to send commands again to the Starliner, according to NASA, it already had used up roughly a quarter of its total fuel supply, and officials opted to prepare it for a return to earth at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico as early as Sunday. It had been scheduled to return to that location in nine days, after spending more than a week docked with the space station.\nAn hour after launch, NASA cut off its video feed after indicating the capsule was in a stable orbit and had electrical power, but failing to elaborate further. Flight controllers were \u201cassessing all their options\u201d and \u201ccontemplating the next maneuvers for the spacecraft,\u201d the agency said, around two hours before disclosing the propulsion malfunction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing launched the first test flight of its Starliner space capsule from Florida. Photo: Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\nLater in the morning, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine at a news conference stressed that any astronauts on board would have been safe.\nDespite the disappointment, Mr. Bridenstine told reporters \u201ca lot of things did, in fact, go right\u201d during the launch, adding that the rest of the mission will be used to vet the safety of various essential systems, including life-support features and heat shields.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left to right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine watch the Starliner launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/joel kowsky handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch businesses, told reporters \u201cwe don\u2019t understand the root cause\u201d of the timing discrepancy.\nFriday\u2019s incident and scramble to explain it illustrated the downside of excessive reliance on automation in the Starliner fleet. NASA engineers and managers over the years have repeatedly emphasized the risks of overreliance on automated systems, without giving human crews ways to take control in emergencies. Indeed, Mr. Bridenstine asserted that if there had been a crew on board, they could have commanded the capsule to adjust firing of its thrusters, and \u201cwe very well may [have been] docking with the international space station tomorrow.\u201d\nNicole Mann, one of two NASA astronauts slated to fly the first crewed mission on the Boeing spacecraft, reiterated the importance of maintaining manual-control alternatives. \u201cWe have the capability on board to stop the automation and take over manually to fly,\u201d she told reporters.\nBefore Friday\u2019s events. Boeing had signaled it hoped to fly the first crew to the space station by summer. Now, Messrs. Bridenstine and Chilton said that timetable is under review. The NASA chief said it was premature to comment on whether another demonstration flight without astronauts would be required.\nFor Boeing, the botched mission came amid struggles to deal with the crisis over its 737 MAX jetliner, which remains grounded after lapses in designing automation flight-control systems resulted in two fatal crashes that took 346 lives in less than five months. Before Friday\u2019s launch, some inside and outside Boeing had described it as a chance to demonstrate the Chicag Boeing\u2019s initial test flight of its Starliner space capsule without astronauts on board was stranded in the wrong orbit, scuttling a plan to dock with the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7451",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-sends-starliner-capsule-into-orbit-on-initial-demonstration-flight-11576843626?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=48",
        "text": "Friday\u2019s mistake\u2014particularly embarrassing because it stemmed from a fundamental error setting the capsule\u2019s internal clock\u2014rattled those NASA plans and raised new questions about Boeing management\u2019s ability to implement major programs while avoiding such relatively simple technical missteps.\nThere weren\u2019t any hardware issues with the capsule or the Atlas V rocket, powered by Russian-made engines, that lofted it into its initial orbit, according to preliminary indications from NASA and Boeing. The Starliner capsule separated from the booster precisely as planned after roughly 15 minutes, and it was supposed to coast for roughly the same amount of time. NASA didn\u2019t indicate any problems during that period.\n\n\nThat prompted a premature congratulatory message from Boeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg,\n\n\n\n who lauded program officials before NASA gave out public information about the improper orbit. In a message on Twitter, he praised the Boeing team and United Launch Alliance, the joint venture with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n that builds and operates the Atlas V rocket, for the \u201chistoric Starliner uncrewed launch.\u201d \nThe Starliner began firing its maneuvering thrusters at the wrong time after separating from the launcher, according to NASA, and ended up using too much fuel. Controllers were then unable to re-establish communication with the craft in time to keep the capsule on track to dock with the space station as planned. The communication gap, which could have lasted some seven minutes, according to NASA officials, may have occurred because during that phase of the flight, the capsule was out of range of NASA\u2019s communications satellites.\nBy the time flight controllers were able to send commands again to the Starliner, according to NASA, it already had used up roughly a quarter of its total fuel supply, and officials opted to prepare it for a return to earth at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico as early as Sunday. It had been scheduled to return to that location in nine days, after spending more than a week docked with the space station.\nAn hour after launch, NASA cut off its video feed after indicating the capsule was in a stable orbit and had electrical power, but failing to elaborate further. Flight controllers were \u201cassessing all their options\u201d and \u201ccontemplating the next maneuvers for the spacecraft,\u201d the agency said, around two hours before disclosing the propulsion malfunction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing launched the first test flight of its Starliner space capsule from Florida. Photo: Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\nLater in the morning, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine at a news conference stressed that any astronauts on board would have been safe.\nDespite the disappointment, Mr. Bridenstine told reporters \u201ca lot of things did, in fact, go right\u201d during the launch, adding that the rest of the mission will be used to vet the safety of various essential systems, including life-support features and heat shields.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left to right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine watch the Starliner launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/joel kowsky handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch businesses, told reporters \u201cwe don\u2019t understand the root cause\u201d of the timing discrepancy.\nFriday\u2019s incident and scramble to explain it illustrated the downside of excessive reliance on automation in the Starliner fleet. NASA engineers and managers over the years have repeatedly emphasized the risks of overreliance on automated systems, without giving human crews ways to take control in emergencies. Indeed, Mr. Bridenstine asserted that if there had been a crew on board, they could have commanded the capsule to adjust firing of its thrusters, and \u201cwe very well may [have been] docking with the international space station tomorrow.\u201d\nNicole Mann, one of two NASA astronauts slated to fly the first crewed mission on the Boeing spacecraft, reiterated the importance of maintaining manual-control alternatives. \u201cWe have the capability on board to stop the automation and take over manually to fly,\u201d she told reporters.\nBefore Friday\u2019s events. Boeing had signaled it hoped to fly the first crew to the space station by summer. Now, Messrs. Bridenstine and Chilton said that timetable is under review. The NASA chief said it was premature to comment on whether another demonstration flight without astronauts would be required.\nFor Boeing, the botched mission came amid struggles to deal with the crisis over its 737 MAX jetliner, which remains grounded after lapses in designing automation flight-control systems resulted in two fatal crashes that took 346 lives in less than five months. Before Friday\u2019s launch, some inside and outside Boeing had described it as a chance to demonstrate the Chicag Boeing\u2019s initial test flight of its Starliner space capsule without astronauts on board was stranded in the wrong orbit, scuttling a plan to dock with the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s First Test Flight of Uncrewed Space Capsule Stuck In Wrong Orbit (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7452",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/boeing-sends-starliner-capsule-into-orbit-on-initial-demonstration-flight-11576843626?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=61",
        "text": "Friday\u2019s mistake\u2014particularly embarrassing because it stemmed from a fundamental error setting the capsule\u2019s internal clock\u2014rattled those NASA plans and raised new questions about Boeing management\u2019s ability to implement major programs while avoiding such relatively simple technical missteps.\n\n\n\n\nThere weren\u2019t any hardware issues with the capsule or the Atlas V rocket, powered by Russian-made engines, that lofted it into its initial orbit, according to preliminary indications from NASA and Boeing. The Starliner capsule separated from the booster precisely as planned after roughly 15 minutes, and it was supposed to coast for roughly the same amount of time. NASA didn\u2019t indicate any problems during that period.\n\n\nThat prompted a premature congratulatory message from Boeing Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Muilenburg,\n\n\n\n who lauded program officials before NASA gave out public information about the improper orbit. In a message on Twitter, he praised the Boeing team and United Launch Alliance, the joint venture with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n that builds and operates the Atlas V rocket, for the \u201chistoric Starliner uncrewed launch.\u201d \nThe Starliner began firing its maneuvering thrusters at the wrong time after separating from the launcher, according to NASA, and ended up using too much fuel. Controllers were then unable to re-establish communication with the craft in time to keep the capsule on track to dock with the space station as planned. The communication gap, which could have lasted some seven minutes, according to NASA officials, may have occurred because during that phase of the flight, the capsule was out of range of NASA\u2019s communications satellites.\nBy the time flight controllers were able to send commands again to the Starliner, according to NASA, it already had used up roughly a quarter of its total fuel supply, and officials opted to prepare it for a return to earth at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico as early as Sunday. It had been scheduled to return to that location in nine days, after spending more than a week docked with the space station.\nAn hour after launch, NASA cut off its video feed after indicating the capsule was in a stable orbit and had electrical power, but failing to elaborate further. Flight controllers were \u201cassessing all their options\u201d and \u201ccontemplating the next maneuvers for the spacecraft,\u201d the agency said, around two hours before disclosing the propulsion malfunction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing launched the first test flight of its Starliner space capsule from Florida. Photo: Joe Skipper/Reuters\n \n\n\nLater in the morning, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine at a news conference stressed that any astronauts on board would have been safe.\nDespite the disappointment, Mr. Bridenstine told reporters \u201ca lot of things did, in fact, go right\u201d during the launch, adding that the rest of the mission will be used to vet the safety of various essential systems, including life-support features and heat shields.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left to right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine watch the Starliner launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/joel kowsky handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch businesses, told reporters \u201cwe don\u2019t understand the root cause\u201d of the timing discrepancy.\nFriday\u2019s incident and scramble to explain it illustrated the downside of excessive reliance on automation in the Starliner fleet. NASA engineers and managers over the years have repeatedly emphasized the risks of overreliance on automated systems, without giving human crews ways to take control in emergencies. Indeed, Mr. Bridenstine asserted that if there had been a crew on board, they could have commanded the capsule to adjust firing of its thrusters, and \u201cwe very well may [have been] docking with the international space station tomorrow.\u201d\nNicole Mann, one of two NASA astronauts slated to fly the first crewed mission on the Boeing spacecraft, reiterated the importance of maintaining manual-control alternatives. \u201cWe have the capability on board to stop the automation and take over manually to fly,\u201d she told reporters.\nBefore Friday\u2019s events. Boeing had signaled it hoped to fly the first crew to the space station by summer. Now, Messrs. Bridenstine and Chilton said that timetable is under review. The NASA chief said it was premature to comment on whether another demonstration flight without astronauts would be required.\nFor Boeing, the botched mission came amid struggles to deal with the crisis over its 737 MAX jetliner, which remains grounded after lapses in designing automation flight-control systems resulted in two fatal crashes that took 346 lives in less than five months. Before Friday\u2019s launch, some inside and outside Boeing had described it as a chance to demonstrate the Ch Boeing\u2019s initial test flight of its Starliner space capsule without astronauts on board was stranded in the wrong orbit, scuttling a plan to dock with the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. UFO Report Doesn\u2019t Explain Mystery Sightings But Finds No Sign of Aliens (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7453",
        "date": "2021-06-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-report-doesnt-explain-mystery-sightings-but-finds-no-sign-of-aliens-11622829295?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=7",
        "text": "Former President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n acknowledged last month that the U.S. government has no explanation for the strange objects.\n\u201cWhat is true, and I\u2019m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don\u2019t know exactly what they are,\u201d Mr. Obama told CBS. \u201cWe can\u2019t explain how they move, their trajectory,\u201d he said.\n\n\nThe draft report, the people familiar with it said, finds no evidence that the objects are alien spacecraft, but also no firm proof that they are not.\nThe New York Times, which first reported the study\u2019s contents, said that it concludes that the most of the incidents didn\u2019t originate from any advanced U.S. technology programs that might have been unknown to the pilots who witnessed them.\nOne possibility officials have debated is that the craft are the result of secret research programs by a foreign adversary, such as Russia or China, both of which are believed to have experimented with hypersonic craft, which can travel more than five times the speed of sound.\nA Defense Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is preparing the report, also declined to comment.\nThe intelligence report, which was mandated by U.S. lawmakers, is due to Congress by June 25.\nThe unexplained sightings have been occurring for nearly two decades, and some video footage of pilots\u2019 encounters with them\u2014as well as the pilots\u2019 reactions\u2014has leaked into the public domain.\nThe Pentagon last summer revived a small, secretive unit, called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, to study the encounters.\n\u2014Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article. The forthcoming intelligence report examines incidents in which pilots have observed objects conducting maneuvers that would be impossible using known technology. ",
        "author": "Gordon Lubold and Nancy A. Youssef"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7454",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-budget-will-earmark-12-boost-for-agency-in-2021-11581071402?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=13",
        "text": "Expected to be highlighted as part of the budget package set for release next week, the numbers indicate Mr. Trump is doubling down on oft-repeated pledges to have industry-government partnerships transport NASA back to the moon by 2024. The agency\u2019s budget for the current fiscal year is roughly $22.6 billion, and is separate from spending by the Air Force, the newly created Space Force and a wide range of classified space programs.\nThe president\u2019s State of the Union address stressed the administration\u2019s commitment to space, \u201cwhich is backed up by the 2021 budget numbers,\u201d said a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.\n\n\n\u201cSpace exploration will reinvigorate the landscape of American science,\u201d the spokesman said, adding that eventually it will result in a human mission to Mars, part of a broader strategy to reassert America\u2019s space dominance.\nNASA and White House officials view lunar missions as essential steppingstones for blasting astronauts to the Red Planet, perhaps in the next decade. To achieve that, NASA previously laid out plans to work with industry to create fleets of reusable rockets, landers and other vehicles supporting a sustainable, long-term presence for crews and robotic missions on the moon by 2028. \nHouse Democrats, however, are balking at the administration\u2019s plans for accelerated lunar landings and, a few years later, moon bases. More money and energy, they contend, ought to be directed toward technological advances needed for Mars exploration.\nBut the White House hopes to generate bipartisan support for its lunar objectives, the officials said, partly by arguing that unlike many NASA budgets over the years, this time other agency programs don\u2019t face significant cuts to provide stepped-up funding for human exploration. \nNASA aims to solicit competing plans for lunar landers, according to a senior administration official, which require a big initial government investment. Previously, NASA targeted some $600 million for such programs, which now are proposed to receive some $3.3 billion.\nBefore the latest spending blueprint, there appeared to be widespread consensus on Capitol Hill that NASA spending would remain essentially flat over the next few years. Mr. Trump has long favored accelerating lunar exploration, but it was unclear where the funds to do so would come from. The agency\u2019s annual budget includes fixed costs such as more than $3 billion for operating the international space station and billions more for deep-space programs such as the SLS rocket and Orion capsule.\nLast May, when NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n asked Congress to boost NASA\u2019s lunar programs to support the 2024 timetable, he told reporters: \u201cWe are going to need more money; we all understand that.\u201d At the time, neither the White House nor NASA indicated how funding would emerge.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA test version of NASA's Orion crew module.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/rami daud handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe 2021 budget proposal provides Mr. Trump\u2019s response by investing up front to jump-start commercial space efforts. According to the administration officials, OMB policy chiefs received orders directly from the Oval Office to include hefty increases for landers designed to carry astronauts to the moon from a new orbiting platform, which also is under development.\nEven as the White House prepares to roll out its budget, according to one administration adviser, NASA\u2019s leadership is still working to finalize spending and schedule details for moon missions and how they fit into the agency\u2019s Mars priorities. \nNASA astronauts haven\u2019t ventured beyond low-earth orbit since the moon landings in the early 1970s. The proposed budget sends a strong signal to industry and international partners \u201cthat the U.S. statement about going back to the moon in 2024 is actually backed up with real dollars,\u201d the senior official said. The program, called Artemis after the goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, is intended to have a female astronaut on the first lunar landing.\nRoughly $400 million is envisioned to demonstrate, among other things, extraction of water and oxygen from lunar sources and ways to produce fuel for both spacecraft and boosters on that surface. Human exploration to Mars and elsewhere will require such capabilities.\nThe anticipated budget also will reiterate Trump administration plans to promote commercial endeavors on the international space station, and ultimately replace the orbiting laboratory with smaller-scale projects sponsored by companies or entrepreneurs.\nThe impending budget debate will play out as billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, are stepping up moves to garner federal funds President Trump will propose a 12% boost to NASA\u2019s 2021 budget, with most of the increase aimed at fulfilling his goal of returning U.S. astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by 2024, according to administration officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7455",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-budget-will-earmark-12-boost-for-agency-in-2021-11581071402?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=48",
        "text": "Expected to be highlighted as part of the budget package set for release next week, the numbers indicate Mr. Trump is doubling down on oft-repeated pledges to have industry-government partnerships transport NASA back to the moon by 2024. The agency\u2019s budget for the current fiscal year is roughly $22.6 billion, and is separate from spending by the Air Force, the newly created Space Force and a wide range of classified space programs.\nThe president\u2019s State of the Union address stressed the administration\u2019s commitment to space, \u201cwhich is backed up by the 2021 budget numbers,\u201d said a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.\n\n\n\u201cSpace exploration will reinvigorate the landscape of American science,\u201d the spokesman said, adding that eventually it will result in a human mission to Mars, part of a broader strategy to reassert America\u2019s space dominance.\nNASA and White House officials view lunar missions as essential steppingstones for blasting astronauts to the Red Planet, perhaps in the next decade. To achieve that, NASA previously laid out plans to work with industry to create fleets of reusable rockets, landers and other vehicles supporting a sustainable, long-term presence for crews and robotic missions on the moon by 2028. \nHouse Democrats, however, are balking at the administration\u2019s plans for accelerated lunar landings and, a few years later, moon bases. More money and energy, they contend, ought to be directed toward technological advances needed for Mars exploration.\nBut the White House hopes to generate bipartisan support for its lunar objectives, the officials said, partly by arguing that unlike many NASA budgets over the years, this time other agency programs don\u2019t face significant cuts to provide stepped-up funding for human exploration. \nNASA aims to solicit competing plans for lunar landers, according to a senior administration official, which require a big initial government investment. Previously, NASA targeted some $600 million for such programs, which now are proposed to receive some $3.3 billion.\nBefore the latest spending blueprint, there appeared to be widespread consensus on Capitol Hill that NASA spending would remain essentially flat over the next few years. Mr. Trump has long favored accelerating lunar exploration, but it was unclear where the funds to do so would come from. The agency\u2019s annual budget includes fixed costs such as more than $3 billion for operating the international space station and billions more for deep-space programs such as the SLS rocket and Orion capsule.\nLast May, when NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n asked Congress to boost NASA\u2019s lunar programs to support the 2024 timetable, he told reporters: \u201cWe are going to need more money; we all understand that.\u201d At the time, neither the White House nor NASA indicated how funding would emerge.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA test version of NASA's Orion crew module.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/rami daud handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe 2021 budget proposal provides Mr. Trump\u2019s response by investing up front to jump-start commercial space efforts. According to the administration officials, OMB policy chiefs received orders directly from the Oval Office to include hefty increases for landers designed to carry astronauts to the moon from a new orbiting platform, which also is under development.\nEven as the White House prepares to roll out its budget, according to one administration adviser, NASA\u2019s leadership is still working to finalize spending and schedule details for moon missions and how they fit into the agency\u2019s Mars priorities. \nNASA astronauts haven\u2019t ventured beyond low-earth orbit since the moon landings in the early 1970s. The proposed budget sends a strong signal to industry and international partners \u201cthat the U.S. statement about going back to the moon in 2024 is actually backed up with real dollars,\u201d the senior official said. The program, called Artemis after the goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, is intended to have a female astronaut on the first lunar landing.\nRoughly $400 million is envisioned to demonstrate, among other things, extraction of water and oxygen from lunar sources and ways to produce fuel for both spacecraft and boosters on that surface. Human exploration to Mars and elsewhere will require such capabilities.\nThe anticipated budget also will reiterate Trump administration plans to promote commercial endeavors on the international space station, and ultimately replace the orbiting laboratory with smaller-scale projects sponsored by companies or entrepreneurs.\nThe impending budget debate will play out as billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, are stepping up moves to garner federal funds President Trump will propose a 12% boost to NASA\u2019s 2021 budget, with most of the increase aimed at fulfilling his goal of returning U.S. astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by 2024, according to administration officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7456",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-budget-will-earmark-12-boost-for-agency-in-2021-11581071402?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=49",
        "text": "Expected to be highlighted as part of the budget package set for release next week, the numbers indicate Mr. Trump is doubling down on oft-repeated pledges to have industry-government partnerships transport NASA back to the moon by 2024. The agency\u2019s budget for the current fiscal year is roughly $22.6 billion, and is separate from spending by the Air Force, the newly created Space Force and a wide range of classified space programs.\nThe president\u2019s State of the Union address stressed the administration\u2019s commitment to space, \u201cwhich is backed up by the 2021 budget numbers,\u201d said a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.\n\n\n\u201cSpace exploration will reinvigorate the landscape of American science,\u201d the spokesman said, adding that eventually it will result in a human mission to Mars, part of a broader strategy to reassert America\u2019s space dominance.\nNASA and White House officials view lunar missions as essential steppingstones for blasting astronauts to the Red Planet, perhaps in the next decade. To achieve that, NASA previously laid out plans to work with industry to create fleets of reusable rockets, landers and other vehicles supporting a sustainable, long-term presence for crews and robotic missions on the moon by 2028. \nHouse Democrats, however, are balking at the administration\u2019s plans for accelerated lunar landings and, a few years later, moon bases. More money and energy, they contend, ought to be directed toward technological advances needed for Mars exploration.\nBut the White House hopes to generate bipartisan support for its lunar objectives, the officials said, partly by arguing that unlike many NASA budgets over the years, this time other agency programs don\u2019t face significant cuts to provide stepped-up funding for human exploration. \nNASA aims to solicit competing plans for lunar landers, according to a senior administration official, which require a big initial government investment. Previously, NASA targeted some $600 million for such programs, which now are proposed to receive some $3.3 billion.\nBefore the latest spending blueprint, there appeared to be widespread consensus on Capitol Hill that NASA spending would remain essentially flat over the next few years. Mr. Trump has long favored accelerating lunar exploration, but it was unclear where the funds to do so would come from. The agency\u2019s annual budget includes fixed costs such as more than $3 billion for operating the international space station and billions more for deep-space programs such as the SLS rocket and Orion capsule.\nLast May, when NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n asked Congress to boost NASA\u2019s lunar programs to support the 2024 timetable, he told reporters: \u201cWe are going to need more money; we all understand that.\u201d At the time, neither the White House nor NASA indicated how funding would emerge.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA test version of NASA's Orion crew module.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/rami daud handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe 2021 budget proposal provides Mr. Trump\u2019s response by investing up front to jump-start commercial space efforts. According to the administration officials, OMB policy chiefs received orders directly from the Oval Office to include hefty increases for landers designed to carry astronauts to the moon from a new orbiting platform, which also is under development.\nEven as the White House prepares to roll out its budget, according to one administration adviser, NASA\u2019s leadership is still working to finalize spending and schedule details for moon missions and how they fit into the agency\u2019s Mars priorities. \nNASA astronauts haven\u2019t ventured beyond low-earth orbit since the moon landings in the early 1970s. The proposed budget sends a strong signal to industry and international partners \u201cthat the U.S. statement about going back to the moon in 2024 is actually backed up with real dollars,\u201d the senior official said. The program, called Artemis after the goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, is intended to have a female astronaut on the first lunar landing.\nRoughly $400 million is envisioned to demonstrate, among other things, extraction of water and oxygen from lunar sources and ways to produce fuel for both spacecraft and boosters on that surface. Human exploration to Mars and elsewhere will require such capabilities.\nThe anticipated budget also will reiterate Trump administration plans to promote commercial endeavors on the international space station, and ultimately replace the orbiting laboratory with smaller-scale projects sponsored by companies or entrepreneurs.\nThe impending budget debate will play out as billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, are stepping up moves to garner federal funds for human exploration using their rockets, capsules and potentially landers.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com President Trump will propose a 12% boost to NASA\u2019s 2021 budget, with most of the increase aimed at fulfilling his goal of returning U.S. astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by 2024, according to administration officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7457",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-budget-will-earmark-12-boost-for-agency-in-2021-11581071402?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=47",
        "text": "Expected to be highlighted as part of the budget package set for release next week, the numbers indicate Mr. Trump is doubling down on oft-repeated pledges to have industry-government partnerships transport NASA back to the moon by 2024. The agency\u2019s budget for the current fiscal year is roughly $22.6 billion, and is separate from spending by the Air Force, the newly created Space Force and a wide range of classified space programs.\nThe president\u2019s State of the Union address stressed the administration\u2019s commitment to space, \u201cwhich is backed up by the 2021 budget numbers,\u201d said a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.\n\n\n\u201cSpace exploration will reinvigorate the landscape of American science,\u201d the spokesman said, adding that eventually it will result in a human mission to Mars, part of a broader strategy to reassert America\u2019s space dominance.\nNASA and White House officials view lunar missions as essential steppingstones for blasting astronauts to the Red Planet, perhaps in the next decade. To achieve that, NASA previously laid out plans to work with industry to create fleets of reusable rockets, landers and other vehicles supporting a sustainable, long-term presence for crews and robotic missions on the moon by 2028. \nHouse Democrats, however, are balking at the administration\u2019s plans for accelerated lunar landings and, a few years later, moon bases. More money and energy, they contend, ought to be directed toward technological advances needed for Mars exploration.\nBut the White House hopes to generate bipartisan support for its lunar objectives, the officials said, partly by arguing that unlike many NASA budgets over the years, this time other agency programs don\u2019t face significant cuts to provide stepped-up funding for human exploration. \nNASA aims to solicit competing plans for lunar landers, according to a senior administration official, which require a big initial government investment. Previously, NASA targeted some $600 million for such programs, which now are proposed to receive some $3.3 billion.\nBefore the latest spending blueprint, there appeared to be widespread consensus on Capitol Hill that NASA spending would remain essentially flat over the next few years. Mr. Trump has long favored accelerating lunar exploration, but it was unclear where the funds to do so would come from. The agency\u2019s annual budget includes fixed costs such as more than $3 billion for operating the international space station and billions more for deep-space programs such as the SLS rocket and Orion capsule.\nLast May, when NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n asked Congress to boost NASA\u2019s lunar programs to support the 2024 timetable, he told reporters: \u201cWe are going to need more money; we all understand that.\u201d At the time, neither the White House nor NASA indicated how funding would emerge.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA test version of NASA's Orion crew module.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/rami daud handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe 2021 budget proposal provides Mr. Trump\u2019s response by investing up front to jump-start commercial space efforts. According to the administration officials, OMB policy chiefs received orders directly from the Oval Office to include hefty increases for landers designed to carry astronauts to the moon from a new orbiting platform, which also is under development.\nEven as the White House prepares to roll out its budget, according to one administration adviser, NASA\u2019s leadership is still working to finalize spending and schedule details for moon missions and how they fit into the agency\u2019s Mars priorities. \nNASA astronauts haven\u2019t ventured beyond low-earth orbit since the moon landings in the early 1970s. The proposed budget sends a strong signal to industry and international partners \u201cthat the U.S. statement about going back to the moon in 2024 is actually backed up with real dollars,\u201d the senior official said. The program, called Artemis after the goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, is intended to have a female astronaut on the first lunar landing.\nRoughly $400 million is envisioned to demonstrate, among other things, extraction of water and oxygen from lunar sources and ways to produce fuel for both spacecraft and boosters on that surface. Human exploration to Mars and elsewhere will require such capabilities.\nThe anticipated budget also will reiterate Trump administration plans to promote commercial endeavors on the international space station, and ultimately replace the orbiting laboratory with smaller-scale projects sponsored by companies or entrepreneurs.\nThe impending budget debate will play out as billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, are stepping up moves to garner federal funds President Trump will propose a 12% boost to NASA\u2019s 2021 budget, with most of the increase aimed at fulfilling his goal of returning U.S. astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by 2024, according to administration officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Budget Will Earmark 12% Boost for Agency in 2021 (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7458",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-budget-will-earmark-12-boost-for-agency-in-2021-11581071402?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=60",
        "text": "Expected to be highlighted as part of the budget package set for release next week, the numbers indicate Mr. Trump is doubling down on oft-repeated pledges to have industry-government partnerships transport NASA back to the moon by 2024. The agency\u2019s budget for the current fiscal year is roughly $22.6 billion, and is separate from spending by the Air Force, the newly created Space Force and a wide range of classified space programs.\nThe president\u2019s State of the Union address stressed the administration\u2019s commitment to space, \u201cwhich is backed up by the 2021 budget numbers,\u201d said a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.\n\n\n\u201cSpace exploration will reinvigorate the landscape of American science,\u201d the spokesman said, adding that eventually it will result in a human mission to Mars, part of a broader strategy to reassert America\u2019s space dominance.\nNASA and White House officials view lunar missions as essential steppingstones for blasting astronauts to the Red Planet, perhaps in the next decade. To achieve that, NASA previously laid out plans to work with industry to create fleets of reusable rockets, landers and other vehicles supporting a sustainable, long-term presence for crews and robotic missions on the moon by 2028. \nHouse Democrats, however, are balking at the administration\u2019s plans for accelerated lunar landings and, a few years later, moon bases. More money and energy, they contend, ought to be directed toward technological advances needed for Mars exploration.\nBut the White House hopes to generate bipartisan support for its lunar objectives, the officials said, partly by arguing that unlike many NASA budgets over the years, this time other agency programs don\u2019t face significant cuts to provide stepped-up funding for human exploration. \nNASA aims to solicit competing plans for lunar landers, according to a senior administration official, which require a big initial government investment. Previously, NASA targeted some $600 million for such programs, which now are proposed to receive some $3.3 billion.\nBefore the latest spending blueprint, there appeared to be widespread consensus on Capitol Hill that NASA spending would remain essentially flat over the next few years. Mr. Trump has long favored accelerating lunar exploration, but it was unclear where the funds to do so would come from. The agency\u2019s annual budget includes fixed costs such as more than $3 billion for operating the international space station and billions more for deep-space programs such as the SLS rocket and Orion capsule.\nLast May, when NASA chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n asked Congress to boost NASA\u2019s lunar programs to support the 2024 timetable, he told reporters: \u201cWe are going to need more money; we all understand that.\u201d At the time, neither the White House nor NASA indicated how funding would emerge.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA test version of NASA's Orion crew module.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n nasa/rami daud handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe 2021 budget proposal provides Mr. Trump\u2019s response by investing up front to jump-start commercial space efforts. According to the administration officials, OMB policy chiefs received orders directly from the Oval Office to include hefty increases for landers designed to carry astronauts to the moon from a new orbiting platform, which also is under development.\nEven as the White House prepares to roll out its budget, according to one administration adviser, NASA\u2019s leadership is still working to finalize spending and schedule details for moon missions and how they fit into the agency\u2019s Mars priorities. \nNASA astronauts haven\u2019t ventured beyond low-earth orbit since the moon landings in the early 1970s. The proposed budget sends a strong signal to industry and international partners \u201cthat the U.S. statement about going back to the moon in 2024 is actually backed up with real dollars,\u201d the senior official said. The program, called Artemis after the goddess of the moon and sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, is intended to have a female astronaut on the first lunar landing.\nRoughly $400 million is envisioned to demonstrate, among other things, extraction of water and oxygen from lunar sources and ways to produce fuel for both spacecraft and boosters on that surface. Human exploration to Mars and elsewhere will require such capabilities.\nThe anticipated budget also will reiterate Trump administration plans to promote commercial endeavors on the international space station, and ultimately replace the orbiting laboratory with smaller-scale projects sponsored by companies or entrepreneurs.\nThe impending budget debate will play out as billionaire entrepreneurs including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n head of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n who runs the fast-growing space startup Blue Origin LLC, are stepping up moves to garner federal funds President Trump will propose a 12% boost to NASA\u2019s 2021 budget, with most of the increase aimed at fulfilling his goal of returning U.S. astronauts to the moon\u2019s surface by 2024, according to administration officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Buzz Aldrin Fights Family for Control of His Space Legacy (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7459",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzz-aldrin-fights-family-for-control-of-his-space-legacy-1529872576?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=73",
        "text": "Col. Aldrin is grounded in a legal fight with two of his adult children and a former business manager, who he says are trying to\u00a0grab\u00a0his legacy and money. At issue are the operations of his private company, Buzz Aldrin Enterprises, and his nonprofit ShareSpace Foundation, overseen by\u00a0his son and daughter,\u00a0Andrew and Janice Aldrin. Col. Aldrin said in an interview he was\u00a0shocked last month\u00a0when his two children asked a Florida state court to appoint them\u00a0his\u00a0co-guardians because he is \u201cin cognitive decline\u201d and experiencing paranoia and confusion.\u00a0That would give them power to make decisions on his behalf, and give them control of his finances and business dealings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin photographed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mike Marsland/WireImage\n \n\n\n\nThey also requested that their father undergo a competency examination by three mental health specialists appointed by the court\u00a0because, they say, he is associating with new people who appear to be manipulating him, according to documents they filed with the court. Col. Aldrin denies that. He is scheduled to undergo the examination this\u00a0Tuesday\u00a0and\u00a0Wednesday,\u00a0he and his lawyers say. In an interview last week,\u00a0Col. Aldrin said: \u201cNobody is going to come close to thinking I should be under a guardianship.\u201d Col. Aldrin responded this month\u00a0with a lawsuit, accusing Andrew Aldrin and his business manager of recent\u00a0years, Christina Korp, of elder exploitation, unjust enrichment and of converting his property for themselves. The suit also accused his daughter Janice of conspiracy and breach of fiduciary duty. In a statement through a public-relations firm, Andrew Aldrin, 60 years old, and Janice Aldrin, 60, said they are \u201cdeeply disappointed and saddened by the unjustified lawsuit that has been brought against us individually and against the Foundation that we have built together as a family to carry on Dad\u2019s legacy for generations to come. We love and respect our father very much and remain hopeful that we can rise above this situation and recover the strong relationship that built this foundation in the first place.\u201d\n\n\n \u2190\u219219601980200020201966Buzz Aldrin sets a record for being outside a vehicle in space, staying outside his spacecraft for 5 1/2 hours. On Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong, becomes second man to walk on the moon. Appointed to National Space Council Advisory Board.Received U.S. patent for design of permanent space station. Appointed by President Bush to commission on future of U.S. Aerospace Industry.2002.Buzz\u00a0Aldrin ShareSpace Foundation is\u00a0revamped to spark excitement about space among\u00a0elementary school children. Col. Aldrin's son, Andrew Aldrin, is vice president.\u00a0Col.\u00a0Aldrin\u2019s business manager, Christina Korp, is a director.\u00a0Col. Aldrin travels with Ms. Korp to South Pole with small group who had paid for the trip to raise money for his foundation. Col. Aldrin becomes ill and has to be evacuated.Col. Aldrin\u2019s lawyer sends a cease and desist letter to Ms. Korp demanding that she stop representing that she has authority to promote or manage\u00a0Buzz\u00a0Aldrin.Col. Aldrin\u2019s children,\u00a0Andrew and Janice, file a petition with probate division of Florida circuit court saying Col. Aldrin \u201csuffers from cognitive decline,\u201d and asks the court appoint them co-guardians.\u00a0Col. Aldrin sues his two children and\u00a0Ms. Korp. He accuses Andrew and Ms. Korp of elder exploitation.Sources: NASA; Buzz Aldrin; court documents\n\n\nMs. Korp, 45,\u00a0didn\u2019t respond to an email seeking comment and couldn't be reached by telephone.\u00a0 In the Aldrin children\u2019s request for a mental examination of their father, they mention Ms. Korp as a person with knowledge of his \u201ccognitive decline.\u201d It isn\u2019t uncommon for family members to disagree over how aging parents spend their money or handle their affairs,\u00a0or\u00a0for some spats to escalate to all-out legal combat.\u00a0Rarely do\u00a0such disputes\u00a0involve a moonwalking American icon. Col. Aldrin, in his lawsuit,\u00a0accuses Andrew and Ms. Korp of improperly using his credit cards and bank accounts, and of transferring nearly a half million dollars in the past two years from his savings account to his\u00a0private company and his foundation\u00a0for their own purposes. They have also assumed control of Col. Aldrin\u2019s \u201cspace memorabilia, space artifacts, social media accounts and all elements of the Buzz Aldrin brand,\u201d according to the suit, filed in a Florida state court. It also alleges that Andrew Aldrin and Ms. Korp slandered Col. Aldrin by saying he has dementia. Robert Bauer, a lawyer in Gainesville, Fla., who represents Col. Aldrin there and has talked with Andrew Aldrin, says \u201cWhat Andy is doing is saying to Buzz, \u2018you\u2019re old, you\u2019re not in your right mind anymore because you don\u2019t agree with me\u2019.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin aboard the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, July 1969 in a photo taken by Neil Armstrong.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Neil Armstrong/Space Frontiers/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn April, Col. Aldrin voluntarily submitted\u00a0to a mental evaluation by Dr. James Spar, a professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral sciences at UCLA Medical School. Dr. Spar concluded that Col. Aldrin is \u201ccognitively intact and retains all forms of decisional capacity,\u201d according to the report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Col. Aldrin, who grew up in Montclair, N.J., graduated third in his class at West Point and earned a Ph.D. in astronautics\u00a0from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he has never paid much attention to money matters, said his longtime lawyer and friend Robert Tourtelot. \u201cBuzz is a genius, he\u2019s the smartest guy I ever met,\u201d Mr. Tourtelot said. \u201cBut Buzz has never been street smart.\u201d His relationship with his children has been a rocky ride, according to Mr. Tourtelot. There have been periodic estrangements, Mr. Tourtelot said. Col. Aldrin was rarely home when they were young. His eldest son, James Michael, isn\u2019t involved in the legal dispute between his father and siblings. Col. Aldrin said he has tried unsuccessfully to bring all the children together in recent years. \u201cI intend to disengage as a repairman of family ruptures,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJanice Aldrin, 11, and her brothers, Andrew, 11, and James Michael 13, give a thumbs-up after the 1969 launch of Apollo 11 spaceflight carrying their father.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nHe divorced his children\u2019s mother, Joan, in 1974,\u00a0remarried and divorced two more times after that. Mr. Aldrin has spoken publicly about his bouts with depression and alcoholism after he returned from the moon. He said he has been sober for nearly 40 years. It was after his last divorce in 2013 that Ms. Korp\u00a0gradually\u00a0took over the business,\u00a0according to Col. Aldrin and Mr. Tourtelot.\u00a0Hired as an executive secretary at the Aldrin operation around 2007, she is a director of the ShareSpace Foundation with\u00a0Janice Aldrin. Andrew Aldrin is president. An aspiring singer and songwriter, Ms. Korp had worked for radio personality John Tesh more than a decade ago, her LinkedIn profile says. In 2005, court records show, she filed for bankruptcy owing $22,500. After working for Buzz Aldrin Enterprises, she set up Christina Korp Management in 2016 \u201cto manage media and entertainment projects and interesting world changing personalities,\u201d according to her LinkedIn page. \u201cMy motto is: I bring astronauts back down to Earth.\u201d In 2015, the Aldrin operation was newly incorporated with a board consisting of Col. Aldrin, Andrew Aldrin and Janice Aldrin. After a share transaction, Col. Aldrin lost control of the company, and had just one vote out of three, according to Mr. Tourtelot who has examined the transaction.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin stands beside an American flag at Tranquility Base on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Corbis/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThat year, the Florida Institute of Technology launched the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute. Col. Aldrin\u00a0joined the university faculty as research professor of aeronautics and served as the institute\u2019s senior faculty adviser. Andrew wasn\u2019t working at the time, Col. Aldrin said, and he asked him to assume the position of a graduate assistant the university had offered him. In the interview, Col. Aldrin said his son \u201cbegan to broadly interpret that and soon he became the director of the Institute.\u201d Meanwhile, Ms. Korp continued to oversee Buzz Aldrin Enterprises, planning annual fundraising galas for ShareSpace and managing the former astronaut\u2019s \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n and other social-media accounts, according to Col. Aldrin and Mr. Tourtelot. The Florida Institute didn\u2019t immediately return an email seeking comment. She fired the agency\u00a0sometime after 2013\u00a0that had been booking Mr. Aldrin\u2019s speaking engagements and began making those arrangements herself, Mr. Tourtelot said. She received a 5% commission on any deals, he said, a set-up Col. Aldrin didn\u2019t know about or authorize. By 2016, Col. Aldrin said he increasingly grew frustrated that his foundation wasn\u2019t moving in the direction he wanted. While it focused on educating elementary-school children about Mars through maps, he wanted to work more urgently on getting a permanent human settlement on the planet. He said he also was booked for events he didn\u2019t want to attend and\u00a0encouraged to\u00a0pursue endorsement deals he didn\u2019t favor. For instance, he \u201cnever quite saw why I should get involved with Faberge eggs and French perfume,\u201d Col. Aldrin said. He rejected the suggestions, he said. Annual reports indicate that his foundation hasn\u2019t granted scholarships. Revenues are generated by annual galas and the sale of Mars maps and T-shirts, the reports shows; some, designed by Ms. Korp, say \u201cGet Your Ass to Mars.\u201d In 2016, the most recent figures available, those sales generated $59,101. Last year, Mr. Tourtelot said, Col. Aldrin expressed concerns that he didn\u2019t know how much money he had. In September, on his client\u2019s behalf, Mr. Tourtelot demanded seven years of financial records of Buzz Aldrin Enterprises and the ShareSpace Foundation. After months of back and forth, he said he recently received documents from 2017. They show Buzz Aldrin Enterprises paid the former astronaut a salary of $36,000 in 2017 and reimbursed him for expenses, according to Mr. Tourtelot and documents reviewed by the Journal. Andrew Aldrin and Ms. Korp, meanwhile, each received salaries of $153,000 from the company as well as reimbursements for expenses such as first-class air travel, according to Mr. Tourtelot and documents reviewed by the Journal. Over the years, Mr. Tourtelot said, Ms. Korp has exerted\u00a0control over Col. Aldrin. At a birthday party for him at a Los Angeles restaurant\u00a0a few years ago, Mr. Aldrin was speaking to the roughly 200 guests about his childhood, telling stories many had never heard.\u00a0Mr. Tourtelot, who was there, said\u00a0Ms. Korp strode to Mr. Aldrin and took the microphone away from him. \u201cThat\u2019s enough, Buzz,\u201d she said, according to Mr. Tourtelot. In October 2016, Col. Aldrin set up a new revocable trust with Andrew as trustee.\u00a0\u00a0In it, Andrew and Janice Aldrin are set to receive more than James\u00a0Michael, their sibling. The trust, which was reviewed by the Journal, stipulates that no changes can be made to its terms without Andrew\u2019s written permission. The rift in the Aldrin family deepened later that year, after a trip to the South Pole with Col. Aldrin to generate revenues for the foundation. Several people paid to join him on the trip, which he said he was reluctant to take. It required a long walk at over 9,000 feet above sea level from where the airplane landed near the Pole. Col. Aldrin tired and collapsed; medics said he appeared to have high-altitude pulmonary edema and had to be evacuated. He was flown to a New Zealand hospital to recover. After that, Col Aldrin said, Andrew and Janice started limiting his activities. They have also told him he can no longer scuba dive, his favorite hobby, and have taken away his passport. Recently, when Col. Aldrin fired Ms. Korp from his company, he said Andrew told him he did not have the authority to do so because the board had given Janice and Andrew control. Ms. Korp remains at the foundation. \u2014Jim Oberman contributed to this article. Write to Gretchen Morgenson at Gretchen.Morgenson@wsj.com Corrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tJanice Aldrin is 60 years old. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said she is 51. Also, Andrew Aldrin was 11 years old in a 1969 photo of him and his siblings. A caption with an earlier version of this article incorrectly said he was 10. Buzz Aldrin became the second man to walk on the moon in July 1969. The timeline in an earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was January 1969. (June 25, 2018) Also, Andrew and Janice Aldrin released a statement to the Journal through a public-relations firm. An earlier version of the article incorrectly said the statement came from lawyers. Buzz Aldrin was born Edwin Aldrin Jr. An earlier caption with a 1970 photo of the Aldrin family incorrectly gave his first name as Edward. (July 5, 2018) The former astronaut\u2019s children say their father is in mental decline and are asking a Florida court to appoint them his guardians. He says they are after his business, and is suing for \u201celder exploitation.\u201d ",
        "author": "Gretchen Morgenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA\u2019s Commercial Space-Projects Head to Step Down (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7460",
        "date": "2018-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-faas-commercial-space-activities-oversight-to-step-down-1519829927?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=20",
        "text": "But Mr. Nield\u2019s leaving, according to industry and government officials, was prompted at least partly by White House and cabinet-level criticism that his initiatives to ease licensing procedures for rocket launches are proceeding too slowly. Members of the White House Space Council, a senior policy-making group, and the Transportation Department\u2019s deputy secretary have expressed displeasure about the pace of change, these officials said.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Lifts Two of Its Own Prototype Satellites Into Orbit (Feb. 22) Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (Feb. 20) \n\n\nThe retirement, which was a surprise to some industry officials, also comes in the face of escalating pressure by budding commercial-space ventures\u00a0\u00a0to streamline federal rules, cutting the time and expense of obtaining launch licenses and approvals to operate spacecraft in orbit and beyond.\n\n\nMr. Nield\u2019s decision could end up accelerating moves by top FAA officials, along with other parts of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration, to ease or roll back regulations covering everything from earth-observation satellites to lunar landers to eventually mining minerals on asteroids.\nLast week, the White House policy group chose the Commerce Department to serve as the main catalyst to promote U.S. commercial space ventures, effectively taking that role away from the FAA. During internal administration debates leading up to that public meeting, FAA critics pushed to strip the agency of authority over launch licensing, according to two people familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Feb. 6. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nMr. Nield\u2019s office, which ultimately answers to the Transportation secretary, retained that responsibility but ended up with overall reduced stature.\nThe space council meeting featured Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n the group\u2019s chairman, sharply criticizing the FAA\u2019s launch licensing procedures. \u201cThe government has figured out how to honor drivers\u2019 licenses across state lines,\u201d Mr. Pence said. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason we can\u2019t do the same for rockets\u201d launched from multiple pads.\nAt an industry-government space conference in Washington two weeks earlier, one of Mr. Nield\u2019s lieutenants said revising launch regulations was anticipated to take several years and warned against scaling back rules too aggressively.\nMatthew Kopko, a senior Transportation Department official, told the same gathering the administration \u201cwould not be satisfied if the timeline\u201d stretched out that long. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve made enough progress,\u201d he said, promising that \u201cnow we\u2019re going to add some fuel to the fire\u201d on deregulation.\nAddressing the conference, Mr. Nield said creating a \u201crobust and sustainable space economy\u201d will require the government to serve as an \u201cinvestor, partner, customer and regulator\u201d for industry.\nMr. Nield joined the FAA\u2019s commercial space transportation office as the No.2 official in 2003 and went on to run it during a period of dramatic industry growth. He has been a staunch proponent of significantly expanding the office\u2019s purview and staff\u2014potentially expanding to take the lead in combating orbital debris hazards\u2014but those initiatives have been rejected by the Trump administration.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has been one of the most outspoken companies complaining about difficulties securing predictable and timely launch licenses.\nActing FAA chief Dan Elwell has said he is committed to reforms such as giving companies a single license to launch various rocket derivatives from different locations.\u00a0The FAA gave the green light to more than two dozen commercial launches last year and expects to license significantly more blastoffs in 2018.\nMr. Elwell told the same Washington conference that the \u201cFAA can\u2019t be a rubber stamp; nor can, or should, we be a hurdle.\u201d Even as the agency works on longer-term deregulation, he said, it is \u201ctaking steps that will provide more immediate relief to commercial space operators,\u201d including cutting administrative paperwork and associated costs.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The head of the FAA\u2019s office that oversees commercial activities in space is departing, following higher-level complaints about the pace of deregulation efforts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA\u2019s Commercial Space-Projects Head to Step Down (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7461",
        "date": "2018-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-faas-commercial-space-activities-oversight-to-step-down-1519829927?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=77",
        "text": "But Mr. Nield\u2019s leaving, according to industry and government officials, was prompted at least partly by White House and cabinet-level criticism that his initiatives to ease licensing procedures for rocket launches are proceeding too slowly. Members of the White House Space Council, a senior policy-making group, and the Transportation Department\u2019s deputy secretary have expressed displeasure about the pace of change, these officials said.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Lifts Two of Its Own Prototype Satellites Into Orbit (Feb. 22) Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (Feb. 20) \n\n\nThe retirement, which was a surprise to some industry officials, also comes in the face of escalating pressure by budding commercial-space ventures\u00a0\u00a0to streamline federal rules, cutting the time and expense of obtaining launch licenses and approvals to operate spacecraft in orbit and beyond.\n\n\nMr. Nield\u2019s decision could end up accelerating moves by top FAA officials, along with other parts of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration, to ease or roll back regulations covering everything from earth-observation satellites to lunar landers to eventually mining minerals on asteroids.\nLast week, the White House policy group chose the Commerce Department to serve as the main catalyst to promote U.S. commercial space ventures, effectively taking that role away from the FAA. During internal administration debates leading up to that public meeting, FAA critics pushed to strip the agency of authority over launch licensing, according to two people familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Feb. 6. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nMr. Nield\u2019s office, which ultimately answers to the Transportation secretary, retained that responsibility but ended up with overall reduced stature.\nThe space council meeting featured Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n the group\u2019s chairman, sharply criticizing the FAA\u2019s launch licensing procedures. \u201cThe government has figured out how to honor drivers\u2019 licenses across state lines,\u201d Mr. Pence said. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason we can\u2019t do the same for rockets\u201d launched from multiple pads.\nAt an industry-government space conference in Washington two weeks earlier, one of Mr. Nield\u2019s lieutenants said revising launch regulations was anticipated to take several years and warned against scaling back rules too aggressively.\nMatthew Kopko, a senior Transportation Department official, told the same gathering the administration \u201cwould not be satisfied if the timeline\u201d stretched out that long. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve made enough progress,\u201d he said, promising that \u201cnow we\u2019re going to add some fuel to the fire\u201d on deregulation.\nAddressing the conference, Mr. Nield said creating a \u201crobust and sustainable space economy\u201d will require the government to serve as an \u201cinvestor, partner, customer and regulator\u201d for industry.\nMr. Nield joined the FAA\u2019s commercial space transportation office as the No.2 official in 2003 and went on to run it during a period of dramatic industry growth. He has been a staunch proponent of significantly expanding the office\u2019s purview and staff\u2014potentially expanding to take the lead in combating orbital debris hazards\u2014but those initiatives have been rejected by the Trump administration.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has been one of the most outspoken companies complaining about difficulties securing predictable and timely launch licenses.\nActing FAA chief Dan Elwell has said he is committed to reforms such as giving companies a single license to launch various rocket derivatives from different locations.\u00a0The FAA gave the green light to more than two dozen commercial launches last year and expects to license significantly more blastoffs in 2018.\nMr. Elwell told the same Washington conference that the \u201cFAA can\u2019t be a rubber stamp; nor can, or should, we be a hurdle.\u201d Even as the agency works on longer-term deregulation, he said, it is \u201ctaking steps that will provide more immediate relief to commercial space operators,\u201d including cutting administrative paperwork and associated costs.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The head of the FAA\u2019s office that oversees commercial activities in space is departing, following higher-level complaints about the pace of deregulation efforts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "FAA\u2019s Commercial Space-Projects Head to Step Down (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7462",
        "date": "2018-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-faas-commercial-space-activities-oversight-to-step-down-1519829927?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=100",
        "text": "But Mr. Nield\u2019s leaving, according to industry and government officials, was prompted at least partly by White House and cabinet-level criticism that his initiatives to ease licensing procedures for rocket launches are proceeding too slowly. Members of the White House Space Council, a senior policy-making group, and the Transportation Department\u2019s deputy secretary have expressed displeasure about the pace of change, these officials said.\n\n\nRelated \n\n\n\n SpaceX Lifts Two of Its Own Prototype Satellites Into Orbit (Feb. 22) Trump Administration\u2019s Deregulation Push Heads for Outer Space (Feb. 20) \n\n\nThe retirement, which was a surprise to some industry officials, also comes in the face of escalating pressure by budding commercial-space ventures\u00a0\u00a0to streamline federal rules, cutting the time and expense of obtaining launch licenses and approvals to operate spacecraft in orbit and beyond.\n\n\nMr. Nield\u2019s decision could end up accelerating moves by top FAA officials, along with other parts of President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration, to ease or roll back regulations covering everything from earth-observation satellites to lunar landers to eventually mining minerals on asteroids.\nLast week, the White House policy group chose the Commerce Department to serve as the main catalyst to promote U.S. commercial space ventures, effectively taking that role away from the FAA. During internal administration debates leading up to that public meeting, FAA critics pushed to strip the agency of authority over launch licensing, according to two people familiar with the details.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Feb. 6. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nMr. Nield\u2019s office, which ultimately answers to the Transportation secretary, retained that responsibility but ended up with overall reduced stature.\nThe space council meeting featured Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n the group\u2019s chairman, sharply criticizing the FAA\u2019s launch licensing procedures. \u201cThe government has figured out how to honor drivers\u2019 licenses across state lines,\u201d Mr. Pence said. \u201cThere\u2019s no reason we can\u2019t do the same for rockets\u201d launched from multiple pads.\nAt an industry-government space conference in Washington two weeks earlier, one of Mr. Nield\u2019s lieutenants said revising launch regulations was anticipated to take several years and warned against scaling back rules too aggressively.\nMatthew Kopko, a senior Transportation Department official, told the same gathering the administration \u201cwould not be satisfied if the timeline\u201d stretched out that long. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve made enough progress,\u201d he said, promising that \u201cnow we\u2019re going to add some fuel to the fire\u201d on deregulation.\nAddressing the conference, Mr. Nield said creating a \u201crobust and sustainable space economy\u201d will require the government to serve as an \u201cinvestor, partner, customer and regulator\u201d for industry.\nMr. Nield joined the FAA\u2019s commercial space transportation office as the No.2 official in 2003 and went on to run it during a period of dramatic industry growth. He has been a staunch proponent of significantly expanding the office\u2019s purview and staff\u2014potentially expanding to take the lead in combating orbital debris hazards\u2014but those initiatives have been rejected by the Trump administration.\n\nElon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has been one of the most outspoken companies complaining about difficulties securing predictable and timely launch licenses.\nActing FAA chief Dan Elwell has said he is committed to reforms such as giving companies a single license to launch various rocket derivatives from different locations.\u00a0The FAA gave the green light to more than two dozen commercial launches last year and expects to license significantly more blastoffs in 2018.\nMr. Elwell told the same Washington conference that the \u201cFAA can\u2019t be a rubber stamp; nor can, or should, we be a hurdle.\u201d Even as the agency works on longer-term deregulation, he said, it is \u201ctaking steps that will provide more immediate relief to commercial space operators,\u201d including cutting administrative paperwork and associated costs.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The head of the FAA\u2019s office that oversees commercial activities in space is departing, following higher-level complaints about the pace of deregulation efforts. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manned Mission to Refurbish Hubble Telescope Under Consideration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7463",
        "date": "2017-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/officials-mull-proposal-for-manned-mission-to-refurbish-hubble-telescope-1486927198?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=26",
        "text": "But deliberations about sending a spacecraft to link up with NASA\u2019s pioneering orbiting telescope\u2014comparable to five earlier missions by the now-retired space shuttle fleet stretching back to 1993\u2014illustrate the Trump team\u2019s guiding principles when it comes to space investments. Industry and transition officials agree the focus is on seeking dramatic but relatively inexpensive space projects that can be readily understood by average Americans.\nThe Hubble repair proposal also has garnered administration officials\u2019 attention because it appears to meet still other important White House criteria, according to these people. The goal is to put a lid on federal expenditures for space by fostering public-private partnerships, while devising projects that can be completed within the president\u2019s current four-year term.\n\n\nThe concept was put forward by Sierra Nevada Corp., a closely held company based in Sparks, Nev., according to people familiar with the details. The company seeks to use a manned version of its winged spacecraft, called the Dream Chaser, that is already under development to ferry cargo and experiments to and from the international space station before the end of the decade.\nSierra Nevada is betting that the Trump administration\u2019s enhanced interest in commercial space projects\u2014including transition memos extolling the potential benefits of manned missions orbiting the moon\u2014could revive Hubble\u2019s rejuvenation bid. The company twice presented its proposal to transition officials, according to one person familiar with the details.\nAn administration representative declined to comment, except to say that transition officials lacked power to approve new projects and \u201cit will be the responsibility of the NASA administrator to set NASA policy.\u201d The White House hasn\u2019t nominated a new head for the space agency.\nYears ago NASA officials considered, on their own, a similar mission using basically the same spacecraft to link up with the 6-ton Hubble, circling the Earth roughly every 90 minutes at an altitude of more than 300 miles. But no formal program was developed or funded by Congress.\nFor Sierra Nevada, such a task would be a natural extension of its drive to find multiple uses for the Dream Chaser. It can be used \u201cas an exploration vehicle, a free-flight science laboratory and a servicing vehicle\u201d for in-orbit satellites and spacecraft, Mark Sirangelo, head of the company\u2019s space systems unit, told a conference in Washington last week. The spacecraft, which isn\u2019t due for its inaugural unmanned launch until 2019, also is intended to be capable of landing on any conventional runway long enough to handle a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 737 jetliner.\nOver the weekend, a company representative said a Hubble mission would allow valuable research to continue and \u201cinspire new generations of explorers and researchers.\u201d He said that Dream Chaser was \u201cdesigned from the beginning to be a multi-mission orbital transportation system\u201d eventually targeting \u201cservicing, repair and assembly of technology\u201d during space flight. \u201cThey have always been part of our vision,\u201d he said, and Sierra Nevada \u201ccontinues to actively evaluate a future on-orbit servicing variant.\u201d\nIn little more than a decade, Sierra Nevada has grown from a handful of employees to a company with a workforce of 2,000 and operations in 19 states. It manufactures small satellites, electronic systems, an array of spacecraft components and does considerable business with NASA.\nReplacing navigation hardware, aging sensors and other geriatric parts on Hubble would require relatively few additional dollars, because the telescope has a modular design and Dream Chaser\u2019s cargo variant already is undergoing flight tests. The vehicle would need additional life-support systems as well as a launch-abort system designed to protect the crew in the event of an explosion or serious problem on the pad or during early phases of its ascent.\nSierra Nevada previously designed both systems in detail, though additional resources would be needed to conduct further tests and build flight hardware. \nLaunched in 1990, Hubble made space history as the world\u2019s most powerful observatory and later garnered word-wide headlines when a defective mirror was repaired by U.S. astronauts during high-profile maneuvers in 1993. It persevered to become an icon for astronomers, peering deep into remote galaxies, changing scientific understanding of the age of the universe and sending back captivating images of supernovas and stars being born. Hubble\u2019s last servicing mission took place in 2009.\nSupporters of a repair flight say Hubble could serve as the ultimate insurance policy in case the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope, a much delayed, nearly $9-billion astronomy tool that relies on infrared signals, malfunctions or fails to live up to expectations after launch, which is slated before the end of the decade. That spacecraft will operate too far from Earth to allow serv President Donald Trump\u2019s advisers are considering an industry proposal to send a manned spacecraft to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope within the next few years. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manned Mission to Refurbish Hubble Telescope Under Consideration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7464",
        "date": "2017-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/officials-mull-proposal-for-manned-mission-to-refurbish-hubble-telescope-1486927198?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=101",
        "text": "But deliberations about sending a spacecraft to link up with NASA\u2019s pioneering orbiting telescope\u2014comparable to five earlier missions by the now-retired space shuttle fleet stretching back to 1993\u2014illustrate the Trump team\u2019s guiding principles when it comes to space investments. Industry and transition officials agree the focus is on seeking dramatic but relatively inexpensive space projects that can be readily understood by average Americans.\nThe Hubble repair proposal also has garnered administration officials\u2019 attention because it appears to meet still other important White House criteria, according to these people. The goal is to put a lid on federal expenditures for space by fostering public-private partnerships, while devising projects that can be completed within the president\u2019s current four-year term.\n\n\nThe concept was put forward by Sierra Nevada Corp., a closely held company based in Sparks, Nev., according to people familiar with the details. The company seeks to use a manned version of its winged spacecraft, called the Dream Chaser, that is already under development to ferry cargo and experiments to and from the international space station before the end of the decade.\nSierra Nevada is betting that the Trump administration\u2019s enhanced interest in commercial space projects\u2014including transition memos extolling the potential benefits of manned missions orbiting the moon\u2014could revive Hubble\u2019s rejuvenation bid. The company twice presented its proposal to transition officials, according to one person familiar with the details.\nAn administration representative declined to comment, except to say that transition officials lacked power to approve new projects and \u201cit will be the responsibility of the NASA administrator to set NASA policy.\u201d The White House hasn\u2019t nominated a new head for the space agency.\nYears ago NASA officials considered, on their own, a similar mission using basically the same spacecraft to link up with the 6-ton Hubble, circling the Earth roughly every 90 minutes at an altitude of more than 300 miles. But no formal program was developed or funded by Congress.\nFor Sierra Nevada, such a task would be a natural extension of its drive to find multiple uses for the Dream Chaser. It can be used \u201cas an exploration vehicle, a free-flight science laboratory and a servicing vehicle\u201d for in-orbit satellites and spacecraft, Mark Sirangelo, head of the company\u2019s space systems unit, told a conference in Washington last week. The spacecraft, which isn\u2019t due for its inaugural unmanned launch until 2019, also is intended to be capable of landing on any conventional runway long enough to handle a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 737 jetliner.\nOver the weekend, a company representative said a Hubble mission would allow valuable research to continue and \u201cinspire new generations of explorers and researchers.\u201d He said that Dream Chaser was \u201cdesigned from the beginning to be a multi-mission orbital transportation system\u201d eventually targeting \u201cservicing, repair and assembly of technology\u201d during space flight. \u201cThey have always been part of our vision,\u201d he said, and Sierra Nevada \u201ccontinues to actively evaluate a future on-orbit servicing variant.\u201d\nIn little more than a decade, Sierra Nevada has grown from a handful of employees to a company with a workforce of 2,000 and operations in 19 states. It manufactures small satellites, electronic systems, an array of spacecraft components and does considerable business with NASA.\nReplacing navigation hardware, aging sensors and other geriatric parts on Hubble would require relatively few additional dollars, because the telescope has a modular design and Dream Chaser\u2019s cargo variant already is undergoing flight tests. The vehicle would need additional life-support systems as well as a launch-abort system designed to protect the crew in the event of an explosion or serious problem on the pad or during early phases of its ascent.\nSierra Nevada previously designed both systems in detail, though additional resources would be needed to conduct further tests and build flight hardware. \nLaunched in 1990, Hubble made space history as the world\u2019s most powerful observatory and later garnered word-wide headlines when a defective mirror was repaired by U.S. astronauts during high-profile maneuvers in 1993. It persevered to become an icon for astronomers, peering deep into remote galaxies, changing scientific understanding of the age of the universe and sending back captivating images of supernovas and stars being born. Hubble\u2019s last servicing mission took place in 2009.\nSupporters of a repair flight say Hubble could serve as the ultimate insurance policy in case the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope, a much delayed, nearly $9-billion astronomy tool that relies on infrared signals, malfunctions or fails to live up to expectations after launch, which is slated before the end of the decade. That spacecraft will operate too far from Earth to allow serv President Donald Trump\u2019s advisers are considering an industry proposal to send a manned spacecraft to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope within the next few years. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manned Mission to Refurbish Hubble Telescope Under Consideration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7465",
        "date": "2017-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/officials-mull-proposal-for-manned-mission-to-refurbish-hubble-telescope-1486927198?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=100",
        "text": "But deliberations about sending a spacecraft to link up with NASA\u2019s pioneering orbiting telescope\u2014comparable to five earlier missions by the now-retired space shuttle fleet stretching back to 1993\u2014illustrate the Trump team\u2019s guiding principles when it comes to space investments. Industry and transition officials agree the focus is on seeking dramatic but relatively inexpensive space projects that can be readily understood by average Americans.\n\n\n\n\nThe Hubble repair proposal also has garnered administration officials\u2019 attention because it appears to meet still other important White House criteria, according to these people. The goal is to put a lid on federal expenditures for space by fostering public-private partnerships, while devising projects that can be completed within the president\u2019s current four-year term.\n\n\nThe concept was put forward by Sierra Nevada Corp., a closely held company based in Sparks, Nev., according to people familiar with the details. The company seeks to use a manned version of its winged spacecraft, called the Dream Chaser, that is already under development to ferry cargo and experiments to and from the international space station before the end of the decade.\nSierra Nevada is betting that the Trump administration\u2019s enhanced interest in commercial space projects\u2014including transition memos extolling the potential benefits of manned missions orbiting the moon\u2014could revive Hubble\u2019s rejuvenation bid. The company twice presented its proposal to transition officials, according to one person familiar with the details.\nAn administration representative declined to comment, except to say that transition officials lacked power to approve new projects and \u201cit will be the responsibility of the NASA administrator to set NASA policy.\u201d The White House hasn\u2019t nominated a new head for the space agency.\nYears ago NASA officials considered, on their own, a similar mission using basically the same spacecraft to link up with the 6-ton Hubble, circling the Earth roughly every 90 minutes at an altitude of more than 300 miles. But no formal program was developed or funded by Congress.\nFor Sierra Nevada, such a task would be a natural extension of its drive to find multiple uses for the Dream Chaser. It can be used \u201cas an exploration vehicle, a free-flight science laboratory and a servicing vehicle\u201d for in-orbit satellites and spacecraft, Mark Sirangelo, head of the company\u2019s space systems unit, told a conference in Washington last week. The spacecraft, which isn\u2019t due for its inaugural unmanned launch until 2019, also is intended to be capable of landing on any conventional runway long enough to handle a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 737 jetliner.\nOver the weekend, a company representative said a Hubble mission would allow valuable research to continue and \u201cinspire new generations of explorers and researchers.\u201d He said that Dream Chaser was \u201cdesigned from the beginning to be a multi-mission orbital transportation system\u201d eventually targeting \u201cservicing, repair and assembly of technology\u201d during space flight. \u201cThey have always been part of our vision,\u201d he said, and Sierra Nevada \u201ccontinues to actively evaluate a future on-orbit servicing variant.\u201d\nIn little more than a decade, Sierra Nevada has grown from a handful of employees to a company with a workforce of 2,000 and operations in 19 states. It manufactures small satellites, electronic systems, an array of spacecraft components and does considerable business with NASA.\nReplacing navigation hardware, aging sensors and other geriatric parts on Hubble would require relatively few additional dollars, because the telescope has a modular design and Dream Chaser\u2019s cargo variant already is undergoing flight tests. The vehicle would need additional life-support systems as well as a launch-abort system designed to protect the crew in the event of an explosion or serious problem on the pad or during early phases of its ascent.\nSierra Nevada previously designed both systems in detail, though additional resources would be needed to conduct further tests and build flight hardware. \nLaunched in 1990, Hubble made space history as the world\u2019s most powerful observatory and later garnered word-wide headlines when a defective mirror was repaired by U.S. astronauts during high-profile maneuvers in 1993. It persevered to become an icon for astronomers, peering deep into remote galaxies, changing scientific understanding of the age of the universe and sending back captivating images of supernovas and stars being born. Hubble\u2019s last servicing mission took place in 2009.\nSupporters of a repair flight say Hubble could serve as the ultimate insurance policy in case the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope, a much delayed, nearly $9-billion astronomy tool that relies on infrared signals, malfunctions or fails to live up to expectations after launch, which is slated before the end of the decade. That spacecraft will operate too far from Earth to allow servicing. In any case, scientists believe the two telescopes would offer complementary information, allowing them to merge visual and radio data and provide a more thorough understanding of deep space.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com President Donald Trump\u2019s advisers are considering an industry proposal to send a manned spacecraft to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope within the next few years. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manned Mission to Refurbish Hubble Telescope Under Consideration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7466",
        "date": "2017-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/officials-mull-proposal-for-manned-mission-to-refurbish-hubble-telescope-1486927198?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=88",
        "text": "But deliberations about sending a spacecraft to link up with NASA\u2019s pioneering orbiting telescope\u2014comparable to five earlier missions by the now-retired space shuttle fleet stretching back to 1993\u2014illustrate the Trump team\u2019s guiding principles when it comes to space investments. Industry and transition officials agree the focus is on seeking dramatic but relatively inexpensive space projects that can be readily understood by average Americans.\nThe Hubble repair proposal also has garnered administration officials\u2019 attention because it appears to meet still other important White House criteria, according to these people. The goal is to put a lid on federal expenditures for space by fostering public-private partnerships, while devising projects that can be completed within the president\u2019s current four-year term.\n\n\nThe concept was put forward by Sierra Nevada Corp., a closely held company based in Sparks, Nev., according to people familiar with the details. The company seeks to use a manned version of its winged spacecraft, called the Dream Chaser, that is already under development to ferry cargo and experiments to and from the international space station before the end of the decade.\nSierra Nevada is betting that the Trump administration\u2019s enhanced interest in commercial space projects\u2014including transition memos extolling the potential benefits of manned missions orbiting the moon\u2014could revive Hubble\u2019s rejuvenation bid. The company twice presented its proposal to transition officials, according to one person familiar with the details.\nAn administration representative declined to comment, except to say that transition officials lacked power to approve new projects and \u201cit will be the responsibility of the NASA administrator to set NASA policy.\u201d The White House hasn\u2019t nominated a new head for the space agency.\nYears ago NASA officials considered, on their own, a similar mission using basically the same spacecraft to link up with the 6-ton Hubble, circling the Earth roughly every 90 minutes at an altitude of more than 300 miles. But no formal program was developed or funded by Congress.\nFor Sierra Nevada, such a task would be a natural extension of its drive to find multiple uses for the Dream Chaser. It can be used \u201cas an exploration vehicle, a free-flight science laboratory and a servicing vehicle\u201d for in-orbit satellites and spacecraft, Mark Sirangelo, head of the company\u2019s space systems unit, told a conference in Washington last week. The spacecraft, which isn\u2019t due for its inaugural unmanned launch until 2019, also is intended to be capable of landing on any conventional runway long enough to handle a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 737 jetliner.\nOver the weekend, a company representative said a Hubble mission would allow valuable research to continue and \u201cinspire new generations of explorers and researchers.\u201d He said that Dream Chaser was \u201cdesigned from the beginning to be a multi-mission orbital transportation system\u201d eventually targeting \u201cservicing, repair and assembly of technology\u201d during space flight. \u201cThey have always been part of our vision,\u201d he said, and Sierra Nevada \u201ccontinues to actively evaluate a future on-orbit servicing variant.\u201d\nIn little more than a decade, Sierra Nevada has grown from a handful of employees to a company with a workforce of 2,000 and operations in 19 states. It manufactures small satellites, electronic systems, an array of spacecraft components and does considerable business with NASA.\nReplacing navigation hardware, aging sensors and other geriatric parts on Hubble would require relatively few additional dollars, because the telescope has a modular design and Dream Chaser\u2019s cargo variant already is undergoing flight tests. The vehicle would need additional life-support systems as well as a launch-abort system designed to protect the crew in the event of an explosion or serious problem on the pad or during early phases of its ascent.\nSierra Nevada previously designed both systems in detail, though additional resources would be needed to conduct further tests and build flight hardware. \nLaunched in 1990, Hubble made space history as the world\u2019s most powerful observatory and later garnered word-wide headlines when a defective mirror was repaired by U.S. astronauts during high-profile maneuvers in 1993. It persevered to become an icon for astronomers, peering deep into remote galaxies, changing scientific understanding of the age of the universe and sending back captivating images of supernovas and stars being born. Hubble\u2019s last servicing mission took place in 2009.\nSupporters of a repair flight say Hubble could serve as the ultimate insurance policy in case the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope, a much delayed, nearly $9-billion astronomy tool that relies on infrared signals, malfunctions or fails to live up to expectations after launch, which is slated before the end of the decade. That spacecraft will operate too far from Earth to allow serv President Donald Trump\u2019s advisers are considering an industry proposal to send a manned spacecraft to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope within the next few years. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Manned Mission to Refurbish Hubble Telescope Under Consideration (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7467",
        "date": "2017-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/officials-mull-proposal-for-manned-mission-to-refurbish-hubble-telescope-1486927198?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=131",
        "text": "But deliberations about sending a spacecraft to link up with NASA\u2019s pioneering orbiting telescope\u2014comparable to five earlier missions by the now-retired space shuttle fleet stretching back to 1993\u2014illustrate the Trump team\u2019s guiding principles when it comes to space investments. Industry and transition officials agree the focus is on seeking dramatic but relatively inexpensive space projects that can be readily understood by average Americans.\n\n\n\n\nThe Hubble repair proposal also has garnered administration officials\u2019 attention because it appears to meet still other important White House criteria, according to these people. The goal is to put a lid on federal expenditures for space by fostering public-private partnerships, while devising projects that can be completed within the president\u2019s current four-year term.\n\n\nThe concept was put forward by Sierra Nevada Corp., a closely held company based in Sparks, Nev., according to people familiar with the details. The company seeks to use a manned version of its winged spacecraft, called the Dream Chaser, that is already under development to ferry cargo and experiments to and from the international space station before the end of the decade.\nSierra Nevada is betting that the Trump administration\u2019s enhanced interest in commercial space projects\u2014including transition memos extolling the potential benefits of manned missions orbiting the moon\u2014could revive Hubble\u2019s rejuvenation bid. The company twice presented its proposal to transition officials, according to one person familiar with the details.\nAn administration representative declined to comment, except to say that transition officials lacked power to approve new projects and \u201cit will be the responsibility of the NASA administrator to set NASA policy.\u201d The White House hasn\u2019t nominated a new head for the space agency.\nYears ago NASA officials considered, on their own, a similar mission using basically the same spacecraft to link up with the 6-ton Hubble, circling the Earth roughly every 90 minutes at an altitude of more than 300 miles. But no formal program was developed or funded by Congress.\nFor Sierra Nevada, such a task would be a natural extension of its drive to find multiple uses for the Dream Chaser. It can be used \u201cas an exploration vehicle, a free-flight science laboratory and a servicing vehicle\u201d for in-orbit satellites and spacecraft, Mark Sirangelo, head of the company\u2019s space systems unit, told a conference in Washington last week. The spacecraft, which isn\u2019t due for its inaugural unmanned launch until 2019, also is intended to be capable of landing on any conventional runway long enough to handle a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n 737 jetliner.\nOver the weekend, a company representative said a Hubble mission would allow valuable research to continue and \u201cinspire new generations of explorers and researchers.\u201d He said that Dream Chaser was \u201cdesigned from the beginning to be a multi-mission orbital transportation system\u201d eventually targeting \u201cservicing, repair and assembly of technology\u201d during space flight. \u201cThey have always been part of our vision,\u201d he said, and Sierra Nevada \u201ccontinues to actively evaluate a future on-orbit servicing variant.\u201d\nIn little more than a decade, Sierra Nevada has grown from a handful of employees to a company with a workforce of 2,000 and operations in 19 states. It manufactures small satellites, electronic systems, an array of spacecraft components and does considerable business with NASA.\nReplacing navigation hardware, aging sensors and other geriatric parts on Hubble would require relatively few additional dollars, because the telescope has a modular design and Dream Chaser\u2019s cargo variant already is undergoing flight tests. The vehicle would need additional life-support systems as well as a launch-abort system designed to protect the crew in the event of an explosion or serious problem on the pad or during early phases of its ascent.\nSierra Nevada previously designed both systems in detail, though additional resources would be needed to conduct further tests and build flight hardware. \nLaunched in 1990, Hubble made space history as the world\u2019s most powerful observatory and later garnered word-wide headlines when a defective mirror was repaired by U.S. astronauts during high-profile maneuvers in 1993. It persevered to become an icon for astronomers, peering deep into remote galaxies, changing scientific understanding of the age of the universe and sending back captivating images of supernovas and stars being born. Hubble\u2019s last servicing mission took place in 2009.\nSupporters of a repair flight say Hubble could serve as the ultimate insurance policy in case the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope, a much delayed, nearly $9-billion astronomy tool that relies on infrared signals, malfunctions or fails to live up to expectations after launch, which is slated before the end of the decade. That spacecraft will operate too far from Earth to allow President Donald Trump\u2019s advisers are considering an industry proposal to send a manned spacecraft to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope within the next few years. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budget Proposal Emphasizes Public-Private Ventures (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7468",
        "date": "2018-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-budget-proposal-emphasizes-public-private-ventures-1518470011?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=20",
        "text": "But after the initial budget bump, overall National Aeronautics and Space Administration spending is expected to recede and plateau at today\u2019s levels starting in 2020. New funding would come primarily from ending the roughly $3 billion in annual U.S. support for the international space station by 2025.\nThe spending plan, which prompted sharp criticism from industry and congressional supporters of the space station even before its official release Monday, also calls for in-space robotic manufacturing followed by large-scale human outposts on the moon.\n\n\nThe proposal in many ways maintains NASA priorities\u2014including more than $3 billion annually to continue developing the agency\u2019s own deep-space capsule and rocket systems\u2014but it sets a new direction by \u201cdrawing two important lines in the sand,\u201d according to Mark Albrecht, an ex-\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n executive who was a top Republican White House space adviser in the early 1990s.\nMr. Albrecht, who also has advised the Trump administration, said officials assume flat NASA budgets for the foreseeable future, requiring the agency \u201cto cut or reduce current activities in order to fund new activities.\u201d\nThe ultimate goal remains sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s. Yet the latest budget documents shift greater emphasis to creating sustainable private ventures serving research, exploration and commercial goals in regions surrounding the moon. \u201cThe private sector has to lead the way,\u201d William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, said last week. The agency \u201ccan break down the barriers,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cbut then the private sector has to see how to start making money.\u201d\nAs private rockets and spacecraft prove their worth, the White House foresees steadily increasing funding for such purposes, most likely at the expense of more traditional programs.\nWith roughly $900 million earmarked to promote commercial activities in low-earth orbit over six years, however, critics contend the plan fails to allocate enough funds or provide clear-cut policy directives to effectively replace the functions the space station is now serving. Without a more detailed transition plan, some lawmakers have said Congress is likely to balk at effectively privatizing the international orbiting laboratory that took some $100 billion to assemble.\nCalling the budget package \u201ca nonstarter,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n the Florida Democrat who has championed expanding NASA budgets, on Monday said, \u201cIf we\u2019re ever going to get to Mars with humans on board and return them safely, then we need a larger funding increase for NASA.\u201d Mr. Nelson also said it \u201cmakes no sense\u201d to walk away from the space station.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n , the prime contractor on the station, has said it is anticipated to remain structurally sound for some 20 more years. But maintaining and upgrading systems on board past 2025 would be increasingly expensive.\u00a0Until now, NASA and White House officials have held open the possibility of continued U.S. funding through 2028.\n\u201cWe still want to have that toehold\u201d in space relatively close to the Earth, Scott Pace, the top staffer on the White House Space Council, told a government-sponsored conference last week. But if commercial entities are able to take over that role, Mr. Pace said NASA could begin directing resources now devoted to the space station \u201ctoward deeper space exploration.\u201d\nThe strategy has prompted negative blowback from many directions, including commercial-space advocates and longstanding NASA contractors such as Boeing. John Elbon, general manager of Boeing\u2019s space exploration unit, told the same conference in Washington that prematurely cutting off financial support for the orbiting laboratory means \u201call that investment (over the years) will be for naught\u201d and the U.S. \u201cwill cede the commercialization of low-Earth orbit to somebody else\u201d with an operational platform.\nNASA\u2019s revised plans, for the first time, also explicitly include returning samples from the Moon as early as 2020 and developing a more complex lunar lander several years later.\nAs in the past, parts of the latest budget submission expected to be rejected by lawmakers include proposed cuts to certain climate-research initiatives and elimination of education programs.\n\u2014Andy Pasztor\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The White House is seeking to jump-start human space exploration with seed money for new public-private missions orbiting the Earth and the Moon, but U.S. astronauts aren\u2019t projected to return to the lunar surface until at least the mid-2020\u2019s. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budget Proposal Emphasizes Public-Private Ventures (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7469",
        "date": "2018-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-budget-proposal-emphasizes-public-private-ventures-1518470011?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=71",
        "text": "But after the initial budget bump, overall National Aeronautics and Space Administration spending is expected to recede and plateau at today\u2019s levels starting in 2020. New funding would come primarily from ending the roughly $3 billion in annual U.S. support for the international space station by 2025.\nThe spending plan, which prompted sharp criticism from industry and congressional supporters of the space station even before its official release Monday, also calls for in-space robotic manufacturing followed by large-scale human outposts on the moon.\n\n\nThe proposal in many ways maintains NASA priorities\u2014including more than $3 billion annually to continue developing the agency\u2019s own deep-space capsule and rocket systems\u2014but it sets a new direction by \u201cdrawing two important lines in the sand,\u201d according to Mark Albrecht, an ex-\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n executive who was a top Republican White House space adviser in the early 1990s.\nMr. Albrecht, who also has advised the Trump administration, said officials assume flat NASA budgets for the foreseeable future, requiring the agency \u201cto cut or reduce current activities in order to fund new activities.\u201d\nThe ultimate goal remains sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s. Yet the latest budget documents shift greater emphasis to creating sustainable private ventures serving research, exploration and commercial goals in regions surrounding the moon. \u201cThe private sector has to lead the way,\u201d William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, said last week. The agency \u201ccan break down the barriers,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cbut then the private sector has to see how to start making money.\u201d\nAs private rockets and spacecraft prove their worth, the White House foresees steadily increasing funding for such purposes, most likely at the expense of more traditional programs.\nWith roughly $900 million earmarked to promote commercial activities in low-earth orbit over six years, however, critics contend the plan fails to allocate enough funds or provide clear-cut policy directives to effectively replace the functions the space station is now serving. Without a more detailed transition plan, some lawmakers have said Congress is likely to balk at effectively privatizing the international orbiting laboratory that took some $100 billion to assemble.\nCalling the budget package \u201ca nonstarter,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n the Florida Democrat who has championed expanding NASA budgets, on Monday said, \u201cIf we\u2019re ever going to get to Mars with humans on board and return them safely, then we need a larger funding increase for NASA.\u201d Mr. Nelson also said it \u201cmakes no sense\u201d to walk away from the space station.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n , the prime contractor on the station, has said it is anticipated to remain structurally sound for some 20 more years. But maintaining and upgrading systems on board past 2025 would be increasingly expensive.\u00a0Until now, NASA and White House officials have held open the possibility of continued U.S. funding through 2028.\n\u201cWe still want to have that toehold\u201d in space relatively close to the Earth, Scott Pace, the top staffer on the White House Space Council, told a government-sponsored conference last week. But if commercial entities are able to take over that role, Mr. Pace said NASA could begin directing resources now devoted to the space station \u201ctoward deeper space exploration.\u201d\nThe strategy has prompted negative blowback from many directions, including commercial-space advocates and longstanding NASA contractors such as Boeing. John Elbon, general manager of Boeing\u2019s space exploration unit, told the same conference in Washington that prematurely cutting off financial support for the orbiting laboratory means \u201call that investment (over the years) will be for naught\u201d and the U.S. \u201cwill cede the commercialization of low-Earth orbit to somebody else\u201d with an operational platform.\nNASA\u2019s revised plans, for the first time, also explicitly include returning samples from the Moon as early as 2020 and developing a more complex lunar lander several years later.\nAs in the past, parts of the latest budget submission expected to be rejected by lawmakers include proposed cuts to certain climate-research initiatives and elimination of education programs.\n\u2014Andy Pasztor\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The White House is seeking to jump-start human space exploration with seed money for new public-private missions orbiting the Earth and the Moon, but U.S. astronauts aren\u2019t projected to return to the lunar surface until at least the mid-2020\u2019s. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Budget Proposal Emphasizes Public-Private Ventures (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7470",
        "date": "2018-02-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-budget-proposal-emphasizes-public-private-ventures-1518470011?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=102",
        "text": "But after the initial budget bump, overall National Aeronautics and Space Administration spending is expected to recede and plateau at today\u2019s levels starting in 2020. New funding would come primarily from ending the roughly $3 billion in annual U.S. support for the international space station by 2025.\n\n\n\n\nThe spending plan, which prompted sharp criticism from industry and congressional supporters of the space station even before its official release Monday, also calls for in-space robotic manufacturing followed by large-scale human outposts on the moon.\n\n\nThe proposal in many ways maintains NASA priorities\u2014including more than $3 billion annually to continue developing the agency\u2019s own deep-space capsule and rocket systems\u2014but it sets a new direction by \u201cdrawing two important lines in the sand,\u201d according to Mark Albrecht, an ex-\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n executive who was a top Republican White House space adviser in the early 1990s.\nMr. Albrecht, who also has advised the Trump administration, said officials assume flat NASA budgets for the foreseeable future, requiring the agency \u201cto cut or reduce current activities in order to fund new activities.\u201d\nThe ultimate goal remains sending astronauts to Mars by the 2030s. Yet the latest budget documents shift greater emphasis to creating sustainable private ventures serving research, exploration and commercial goals in regions surrounding the moon. \u201cThe private sector has to lead the way,\u201d William Gerstenmaier, NASA\u2019s top human-exploration official, said last week. The agency \u201ccan break down the barriers,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cbut then the private sector has to see how to start making money.\u201d\nAs private rockets and spacecraft prove their worth, the White House foresees steadily increasing funding for such purposes, most likely at the expense of more traditional programs.\nWith roughly $900 million earmarked to promote commercial activities in low-earth orbit over six years, however, critics contend the plan fails to allocate enough funds or provide clear-cut policy directives to effectively replace the functions the space station is now serving. Without a more detailed transition plan, some lawmakers have said Congress is likely to balk at effectively privatizing the international orbiting laboratory that took some $100 billion to assemble.\nCalling the budget package \u201ca nonstarter,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n the Florida Democrat who has championed expanding NASA budgets, on Monday said, \u201cIf we\u2019re ever going to get to Mars with humans on board and return them safely, then we need a larger funding increase for NASA.\u201d Mr. Nelson also said it \u201cmakes no sense\u201d to walk away from the space station.\n\nBoeing Co.\n\n\n , the prime contractor on the station, has said it is anticipated to remain structurally sound for some 20 more years. But maintaining and upgrading systems on board past 2025 would be increasingly expensive.\u00a0Until now, NASA and White House officials have held open the possibility of continued U.S. funding through 2028.\n\u201cWe still want to have that toehold\u201d in space relatively close to the Earth, Scott Pace, the top staffer on the White House Space Council, told a government-sponsored conference last week. But if commercial entities are able to take over that role, Mr. Pace said NASA could begin directing resources now devoted to the space station \u201ctoward deeper space exploration.\u201d\nThe strategy has prompted negative blowback from many directions, including commercial-space advocates and longstanding NASA contractors such as Boeing. John Elbon, general manager of Boeing\u2019s space exploration unit, told the same conference in Washington that prematurely cutting off financial support for the orbiting laboratory means \u201call that investment (over the years) will be for naught\u201d and the U.S. \u201cwill cede the commercialization of low-Earth orbit to somebody else\u201d with an operational platform.\nNASA\u2019s revised plans, for the first time, also explicitly include returning samples from the Moon as early as 2020 and developing a more complex lunar lander several years later.\nAs in the past, parts of the latest budget submission expected to be rejected by lawmakers include proposed cuts to certain climate-research initiatives and elimination of education programs.\n\u2014Andy Pasztor\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The White House is seeking to jump-start human space exploration with seed money for new public-private missions orbiting the Earth and the Moon, but U.S. astronauts aren\u2019t projected to return to the lunar surface until at least the mid-2020\u2019s. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7471",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-return-to-the-moon-will-have-to-wait-a-year-11636501813?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=3",
        "text": "At a briefing Tuesday, Mr. Nelson questioned whether the original time frame for returning people to the moon was ever viable. \u201cTrump administration target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility,\u201d he said.\nMr. Nelson said the agency also had lost time in part because of Covid-19-related delays and because of a lawsuit that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 space company, Blue Origin, filed challenging NASA\u2019s decision to award a single contract for a moon-lander system to rival SpaceX. During the suit and an earlier administrative protest by Blue Origin and another company, NASA paused its work on the lander, though Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, continued to work on the vehicle, officials said.\n\n\nLast week, a federal judge dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit, and NASA has made contact again with SpaceX, according to Mr. Nelson. Mr. Bezos said in a tweet his company would respect the judge\u2019s decision.\nNASA\u2019s Artemis moon program is the agency\u2019s effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in decades as it faces new competition for moon-related activities from China\u2019s space agency. NASA leaders have said they expect to appoint a woman and person of color as the first astronauts who will go back to the moon on the agency\u2019s behalf, as it tries to pursue a broad agenda that includes scientific initiatives and exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nThe space agency has faced other questions about whether it could deliver people to the moon in 2024. NASA\u2019s inspector general said in an August report that spacesuits the agency has been developing likely wouldn\u2019t be ready until 2025, making a lunar landing in 2024 unlikely.\nIn February, NASA expects to conduct an uncrewed test of the Space Launch System, a deep-space rocket meant to be used for lunar missions, which\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n is overseeing as the agency\u2019s prime contractor. In 2024, astronauts are expected to board a spacecraft on top of the Space Launch System for a test flight, but not land on the moon\u2019s surface, officials said Tuesday. Previously, the agency had hoped that flight could occur in the spring of 2023.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com NASA is pushing its planned return to the moon by astronauts to 2025 as the agency\u2019s administrator questions whether original date was feasible. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7472",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-return-to-the-moon-will-have-to-wait-a-year-11636501813?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=18",
        "text": "At a briefing Tuesday, Mr. Nelson questioned whether the original time frame for returning people to the moon was ever viable. \u201cTrump administration target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility,\u201d he said.\nMr. Nelson said the agency also had lost time in part because of Covid-19-related delays and because of a lawsuit that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 space company, Blue Origin, filed challenging NASA\u2019s decision to award a single contract for a moon-lander system to rival SpaceX. During the suit and an earlier administrative protest by Blue Origin and another company, NASA paused its work on the lander, though Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, continued to work on the vehicle, officials said.\n\n\nLast week, a federal judge dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit, and NASA has made contact again with SpaceX, according to Mr. Nelson. Mr. Bezos said in a tweet his company would respect the judge\u2019s decision.\nNASA\u2019s Artemis moon program is the agency\u2019s effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in decades as it faces new competition for moon-related activities from China\u2019s space agency. NASA leaders have said they expect to appoint a woman and person of color as the first astronauts who will go back to the moon on the agency\u2019s behalf, as it tries to pursue a broad agenda that includes scientific initiatives and exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nThe space agency has faced other questions about whether it could deliver people to the moon in 2024. NASA\u2019s inspector general said in an August report that spacesuits the agency has been developing likely wouldn\u2019t be ready until 2025, making a lunar landing in 2024 unlikely.\nIn February, NASA expects to conduct an uncrewed test of the Space Launch System, a deep-space rocket meant to be used for lunar missions, which\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n is overseeing as the agency\u2019s prime contractor. In 2024, astronauts are expected to board a spacecraft on top of the Space Launch System for a test flight, but not land on the moon\u2019s surface, officials said Tuesday. Previously, the agency had hoped that flight could occur in the spring of 2023.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com NASA is pushing its planned return to the moon by astronauts to 2025 as the agency\u2019s administrator questions whether original date was feasible. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "America\u2019s Return to the Moon Will Have to Wait a Year (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7473",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-return-to-the-moon-will-have-to-wait-a-year-11636501813?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=17",
        "text": "At a briefing Tuesday, Mr. Nelson questioned whether the original time frame for returning people to the moon was ever viable. \u201cTrump administration target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\nMr. Nelson said the agency also had lost time in part because of Covid-19-related delays and because of a lawsuit that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n \u2019 space company, Blue Origin, filed challenging NASA\u2019s decision to award a single contract for a moon-lander system to rival SpaceX. During the suit and an earlier administrative protest by Blue Origin and another company, NASA paused its work on the lander, though Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for SpaceX, continued to work on the vehicle, officials said.\n\n\nLast week, a federal judge dismissed Blue Origin\u2019s suit, and NASA has made contact again with SpaceX, according to Mr. Nelson. Mr. Bezos said in a tweet his company would respect the judge\u2019s decision.\nNASA\u2019s Artemis moon program is the agency\u2019s effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in decades as it faces new competition for moon-related activities from China\u2019s space agency. NASA leaders have said they expect to appoint a woman and person of color as the first astronauts who will go back to the moon on the agency\u2019s behalf, as it tries to pursue a broad agenda that includes scientific initiatives and exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nThe space agency has faced other questions about whether it could deliver people to the moon in 2024. NASA\u2019s inspector general said in an August report that spacesuits the agency has been developing likely wouldn\u2019t be ready until 2025, making a lunar landing in 2024 unlikely.\nIn February, NASA expects to conduct an uncrewed test of the Space Launch System, a deep-space rocket meant to be used for lunar missions, which\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n is overseeing as the agency\u2019s prime contractor. In 2024, astronauts are expected to board a spacecraft on top of the Space Launch System for a test flight, but not land on the moon\u2019s surface, officials said Tuesday. Previously, the agency had hoped that flight could occur in the spring of 2023.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com NASA is pushing its planned return to the moon by astronauts to 2025 as the agency\u2019s administrator questions whether original date was feasible. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Zooms Past Ultima Thule (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7474",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-zooms-past-ultima-thule-11546372212?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=17",
        "text": "A huge spillover crowd in a nearby auditorium joined in the loud celebration, cheering each green, or good, status update. Scientists and other team members embraced, while hundreds of others gave a standing ovation.\n\u201cI don\u2019t know about all of you, but I\u2019m really liking this 2019 thing so far,\u201d lead scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n of Southwest Research Institute said to applause. \u201cI\u2019m here to tell you that last night, overnight, the U.S. spacecraft New Horizons conducted the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, and did so spectacularly.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis illustration provided by NASA shows the New Horizons spacecraft, which has successfully reached Ultima Thule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNew Horizons zoomed past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule 3 \u00bd years after its spectacular brush with Pluto. Scientists said it would take nearly two years for New Horizons to beam back all its observations of Ultima Thule, a full billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. At that distance, it takes six hours for the radio signals to reach Earth.\n\n\nScientists didn\u2019t want to interrupt observations as New Horizons swept past Ultima Thule, described as a bullet intersecting with another bullet, so they delayed radio transmissions. The spacecraft is believed to have come within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule.\nWeary from dual countdowns late Monday and early Tuesday, the New Horizons team members were visibly anxious as they reassembled in late morning. \u201cHappy New Year again,\u201d they bid one another. The hundreds of spectators went wild nonetheless when the good news came in.\nNew Horizons\u2019 2015 encounter with Pluto was the most distant exploration until Tuesday. The Ultima Thule rendezvous was more complicated, given its 4 billion-mile distance from Earth, the much closer gap between the spacecraft and its target, and all the unknowns surrounding Ultima Thule.\nBased on rudimentary pictures snapped just hundreds of thousands of miles before the 12:33 a.m. close approach, Ultima Thule is decidedly elongated, about 22 miles by 9 miles. Scientists say there are two possibilities: Ultima Thule is either one object with two connected lobes, sort of like a spinning bowling pin or peanut still in the shell, or two objects orbiting surprisingly close to one another. A single body is more likely, they noted. An answer should be forthcoming Wednesday, once new and better pictures arrive. The best color close-ups, though, won\u2019t be available until later in January and February.\nThe icy rock has been in a deep-freeze preservation state since the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists hope to learn about those origins through New Horizons\u2019 observations deep inside the so-called Kuiper belt, or frozen Twilight Zone, on the fringes of the solar system.\nNew Horizons will continue to zoom farther away. The hope is that the mission, now totaling $800 million, will be extended yet again and another target will be forthcoming sometime in the 2020s.\nUltima Thule is the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the spacecraft\u2019s launch. New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006.\n\u2014Copyright 2019 the Associated Press New Horizons swept past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule\u2014the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the mission\u2019s launch. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Zooms Past Ultima Thule (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7475",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-zooms-past-ultima-thule-11546372212?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=60",
        "text": "A huge spillover crowd in a nearby auditorium joined in the loud celebration, cheering each green, or good, status update. Scientists and other team members embraced, while hundreds of others gave a standing ovation.\n\u201cI don\u2019t know about all of you, but I\u2019m really liking this 2019 thing so far,\u201d lead scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n of Southwest Research Institute said to applause. \u201cI\u2019m here to tell you that last night, overnight, the U.S. spacecraft New Horizons conducted the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, and did so spectacularly.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis illustration provided by NASA shows the New Horizons spacecraft, which has successfully reached Ultima Thule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNew Horizons zoomed past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule 3 \u00bd years after its spectacular brush with Pluto. Scientists said it would take nearly two years for New Horizons to beam back all its observations of Ultima Thule, a full billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. At that distance, it takes six hours for the radio signals to reach Earth.\n\n\nScientists didn\u2019t want to interrupt observations as New Horizons swept past Ultima Thule, described as a bullet intersecting with another bullet, so they delayed radio transmissions. The spacecraft is believed to have come within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule.\nWeary from dual countdowns late Monday and early Tuesday, the New Horizons team members were visibly anxious as they reassembled in late morning. \u201cHappy New Year again,\u201d they bid one another. The hundreds of spectators went wild nonetheless when the good news came in.\nNew Horizons\u2019 2015 encounter with Pluto was the most distant exploration until Tuesday. The Ultima Thule rendezvous was more complicated, given its 4 billion-mile distance from Earth, the much closer gap between the spacecraft and its target, and all the unknowns surrounding Ultima Thule.\nBased on rudimentary pictures snapped just hundreds of thousands of miles before the 12:33 a.m. close approach, Ultima Thule is decidedly elongated, about 22 miles by 9 miles. Scientists say there are two possibilities: Ultima Thule is either one object with two connected lobes, sort of like a spinning bowling pin or peanut still in the shell, or two objects orbiting surprisingly close to one another. A single body is more likely, they noted. An answer should be forthcoming Wednesday, once new and better pictures arrive. The best color close-ups, though, won\u2019t be available until later in January and February.\nThe icy rock has been in a deep-freeze preservation state since the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists hope to learn about those origins through New Horizons\u2019 observations deep inside the so-called Kuiper belt, or frozen Twilight Zone, on the fringes of the solar system.\nNew Horizons will continue to zoom farther away. The hope is that the mission, now totaling $800 million, will be extended yet again and another target will be forthcoming sometime in the 2020s.\nUltima Thule is the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the spacecraft\u2019s launch. New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006.\n\u2014Copyright 2019 the Associated Press New Horizons swept past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule\u2014the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the mission\u2019s launch. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Zooms Past Ultima Thule (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7476",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-zooms-past-ultima-thule-11546372212?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=66",
        "text": "A huge spillover crowd in a nearby auditorium joined in the loud celebration, cheering each green, or good, status update. Scientists and other team members embraced, while hundreds of others gave a standing ovation.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know about all of you, but I\u2019m really liking this 2019 thing so far,\u201d lead scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n of Southwest Research Institute said to applause. \u201cI\u2019m here to tell you that last night, overnight, the U.S. spacecraft New Horizons conducted the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, and did so spectacularly.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis illustration provided by NASA shows the New Horizons spacecraft, which has successfully reached Ultima Thule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNew Horizons zoomed past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule 3 \u00bd years after its spectacular brush with Pluto. Scientists said it would take nearly two years for New Horizons to beam back all its observations of Ultima Thule, a full billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. At that distance, it takes six hours for the radio signals to reach Earth.\n\n\nScientists didn\u2019t want to interrupt observations as New Horizons swept past Ultima Thule, described as a bullet intersecting with another bullet, so they delayed radio transmissions. The spacecraft is believed to have come within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule.\nWeary from dual countdowns late Monday and early Tuesday, the New Horizons team members were visibly anxious as they reassembled in late morning. \u201cHappy New Year again,\u201d they bid one another. The hundreds of spectators went wild nonetheless when the good news came in.\nNew Horizons\u2019 2015 encounter with Pluto was the most distant exploration until Tuesday. The Ultima Thule rendezvous was more complicated, given its 4 billion-mile distance from Earth, the much closer gap between the spacecraft and its target, and all the unknowns surrounding Ultima Thule.\nBased on rudimentary pictures snapped just hundreds of thousands of miles before the 12:33 a.m. close approach, Ultima Thule is decidedly elongated, about 22 miles by 9 miles. Scientists say there are two possibilities: Ultima Thule is either one object with two connected lobes, sort of like a spinning bowling pin or peanut still in the shell, or two objects orbiting surprisingly close to one another. A single body is more likely, they noted. An answer should be forthcoming Wednesday, once new and better pictures arrive. The best color close-ups, though, won\u2019t be available until later in January and February.\nThe icy rock has been in a deep-freeze preservation state since the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists hope to learn about those origins through New Horizons\u2019 observations deep inside the so-called Kuiper belt, or frozen Twilight Zone, on the fringes of the solar system.\nNew Horizons will continue to zoom farther away. The hope is that the mission, now totaling $800 million, will be extended yet again and another target will be forthcoming sometime in the 2020s.\nUltima Thule is the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the spacecraft\u2019s launch. New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006.\n\u2014Copyright 2019 the Associated Press New Horizons swept past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule\u2014the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the mission\u2019s launch. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Spacecraft Zooms Past Ultima Thule (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7477",
        "date": "2019-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-spacecraft-zooms-past-ultima-thule-11546372212?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=81",
        "text": "A huge spillover crowd in a nearby auditorium joined in the loud celebration, cheering each green, or good, status update. Scientists and other team members embraced, while hundreds of others gave a standing ovation.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI don\u2019t know about all of you, but I\u2019m really liking this 2019 thing so far,\u201d lead scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Stern\n\n\n\n of Southwest Research Institute said to applause. \u201cI\u2019m here to tell you that last night, overnight, the U.S. spacecraft New Horizons conducted the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, and did so spectacularly.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis illustration provided by NASA shows the New Horizons spacecraft, which has successfully reached Ultima Thule.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNew Horizons zoomed past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule 3 \u00bd years after its spectacular brush with Pluto. Scientists said it would take nearly two years for New Horizons to beam back all its observations of Ultima Thule, a full billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. At that distance, it takes six hours for the radio signals to reach Earth.\n\n\nScientists didn\u2019t want to interrupt observations as New Horizons swept past Ultima Thule, described as a bullet intersecting with another bullet, so they delayed radio transmissions. The spacecraft is believed to have come within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule.\nWeary from dual countdowns late Monday and early Tuesday, the New Horizons team members were visibly anxious as they reassembled in late morning. \u201cHappy New Year again,\u201d they bid one another. The hundreds of spectators went wild nonetheless when the good news came in.\nNew Horizons\u2019 2015 encounter with Pluto was the most distant exploration until Tuesday. The Ultima Thule rendezvous was more complicated, given its 4 billion-mile distance from Earth, the much closer gap between the spacecraft and its target, and all the unknowns surrounding Ultima Thule.\nBased on rudimentary pictures snapped just hundreds of thousands of miles before the 12:33 a.m. close approach, Ultima Thule is decidedly elongated, about 22 miles by 9 miles. Scientists say there are two possibilities: Ultima Thule is either one object with two connected lobes, sort of like a spinning bowling pin or peanut still in the shell, or two objects orbiting surprisingly close to one another. A single body is more likely, they noted. An answer should be forthcoming Wednesday, once new and better pictures arrive. The best color close-ups, though, won\u2019t be available until later in January and February.\nThe icy rock has been in a deep-freeze preservation state since the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists hope to learn about those origins through New Horizons\u2019 observations deep inside the so-called Kuiper belt, or frozen Twilight Zone, on the fringes of the solar system.\nNew Horizons will continue to zoom farther away. The hope is that the mission, now totaling $800 million, will be extended yet again and another target will be forthcoming sometime in the 2020s.\nUltima Thule is the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the spacecraft\u2019s launch. New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006.\n\u2014Copyright 2019 the Associated Press New Horizons swept past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule\u2014the first destination to be reached that wasn\u2019t even known until after the mission\u2019s launch. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Astronaut Glen de Vries Dies in Plane Crash (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7478",
        "date": "2021-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-astronaut-glen-de-vries-who-went-to-space-with-william-shatner-dies-in-plane-crash-11636754091?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=10",
        "text": "\u201cWe are devastated to hear of the sudden passing of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Glen de Vries,\n\n\n\n \u201d Blue Origin said in a statement posted on Twitter on Friday. \u201cHe brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates. His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the fatal crash, the FAA said.\n\n\nThe FAA said that state police located a single-engine Cessna 172 in a wooded area of a state park near Lake Kemah, N.J. on Thursday. The flight departed Essex County Airport in Caldwell, N.J., for Sussex Airport. Two people were on board.\u00a0\nMr. de Vries was co-founder of the clinical-research software company Medidata Solutions. He and another individual bought their tickets on the Blue Origin flight for an undisclosed price.\nMr. de Vries was a trustee of Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his undergraduate degree in molecular biology and genetics. He worked as a research scientist at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and studied computer science at New York University\u2019s Courant Institute of Mathematics, according to his biography from Medidata.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Actor William Shatner and three crewmates blasted to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft that was launched from the company\u2019s West Texas facility on Wednesday. Photo: Blue Origin/Reuters\n \n\n\nMr. Bezos\u2019 girlfriend Lauren Sanchez posted on social media about Mr. de Vries\u2019 passing, saying she got to know him and his partner, Leah, last month during the launch of the space flight.\u201cLeah\u2019s love for Glen was visible every time we saw them together. When he took off for space she gripped my hand so tight it hurt. Thinking of that moment today with a broken heart,\u201d Ms. Sanchez wrote on Instagram.\u00a0\nMicah Maidenberg contributed to this article.\nWrite to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com The entrepreneur joined \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor William Shatner last month on a journey with Jeff Bezos\u2019 firm. ",
        "author": "Talal Ansari"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin Astronaut Glen de Vries Dies in Plane Crash (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7479",
        "date": "2021-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blue-origin-astronaut-glen-de-vries-who-went-to-space-with-william-shatner-dies-in-plane-crash-11636754091?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=11",
        "text": "\u201cWe are devastated to hear of the sudden passing of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Glen de Vries,\n\n\n\n \u201d Blue Origin said in a statement posted on Twitter on Friday. \u201cHe brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates. His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nThe Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the fatal crash, the FAA said.\n\n\nThe FAA said that state police located a single-engine Cessna 172 in a wooded area of a state park near Lake Kemah, N.J. on Thursday. The flight departed Essex County Airport in Caldwell, N.J., for Sussex Airport. Two people were on board.\u00a0\nMr. de Vries was co-founder of the clinical-research software company Medidata Solutions. He and another individual bought their tickets on the Blue Origin flight for an undisclosed price.\nMr. de Vries was a trustee of Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his undergraduate degree in molecular biology and genetics. He worked as a research scientist at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and studied computer science at New York University\u2019s Courant Institute of Mathematics, according to his biography from Medidata.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWatch: William Shatner Launches Into Space Aboard Blue Origin FlightSkip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 2:48ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.Watch: William Shatner Launches Into Space Aboard Blue Origin FlightPlay video: Watch: William Shatner Launches Into Space Aboard Blue Origin Flight\n\n Actor William Shatner and three crewmates blasted to the edge of space aboard Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spacecraft that was launched from the company\u2019s West Texas facility on Wednesday. Photo: Blue Origin/Reuters\n \n\n\nMr. Bezos\u2019 girlfriend Lauren Sanchez posted on social media about Mr. de Vries\u2019 passing, saying she got to know him and his partner, Leah, last month during the launch of the space flight.\u201cLeah\u2019s love for Glen was visible every time we saw them together. When he took off for space she gripped my hand so tight it hurt. Thinking of that moment today with a broken heart,\u201d Ms. Sanchez wrote on Instagram.\u00a0\nMicah Maidenberg contributed to this article.\nWrite to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com The entrepreneur joined \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor William Shatner last month on a journey with Jeff Bezos\u2019 firm. ",
        "author": "Talal Ansari"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7480",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-insight-spacecraft-lands-safely-on-mars-1543263187?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=17",
        "text": "\u201cTouchdown confirmed,\u201d announced a flight controller in the mission operations room at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. \u201cInsight is on the surface of Mars.\u201d\nIt was the eighth time that NASA managed to land a craft safely on Mars. More than half of such interplanetary touch-down plays by the world\u2019s space agencies have failed.\n\n\nRead More Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22) Scientists Find Evidence of Hidden Lake on Mars (July 25) Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 7) Graphic: A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\n\u201cFabulous. Fabulous,\u201d JPL chief engineer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Manning\n\n\n\n said on a live JPL video feed. \u201cWow. What a relief.\u201d\n\n\nThe risky landing procedure\u2014entirely encoded in an onboard algorithm\u2014began around 3 p.m. ET Monday when the robotic spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere traveling seven times faster than a speeding bullet. Had its angle of entry been even one degree off kilter, JPL mission engineers said, the spacecraft would have been deflected into deep space or burned up by friction in the thin Martian air.\nAiming for a landing site on the plain of Elysium Planitia, the 850-pound spacecraft had less than 7 minutes to slow itself from about 12,500 miles an hour to a freeway crawl of about 5 miles an hour. The craft operated on automatic pilot because commands transmitted from Earth take too long to reach Mars. As a lander\u2014not a mobile rover\u2014the InSight probe has to stay put wherever it landed. \nWith only one chance to hit the landing zone, the spacecraft\u2019s designers and engineers relied on spacecraft systems that had proved their worth in past missions.\nFor brakes, they relied on heat-absorbing shields, a supersonic parachute, a dozen rocket thrusters and shock-absorbing landing gear developed originally for NASA\u2019s Phoenix lander, which landed successfully on Mars in 2008. The craft also incorporated a flight computer and electronics developed for NASA\u2019s Maven mission, which has been orbiting Mars since 2013. \n\u201cWe are building on our previous success to minimize the risk,\u201d Insight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stu Spath\n\n\n\n of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , which designed and developed the craft, said in a pre-landing news briefing. The company has been involved in 23 previous Mars missions.\nBut the landing hardly ended the tension. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's InSight Mars lander acquired this image of the area in front of the lander using its lander-mounted, Instrument Context Camera on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JPL-Caltech/NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nFirst, the spacecraft has to successfully deploy its solar power panels. So far from the Sun and shaded by the dusty atmosphere of Mars, the panels are expected to generate about 300 watts\u2014about enough to power a cake mixer, mission engineers said. \n\u201cWe kick up quite a bit of dust on landing,\u201d said InSight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Hoffman\n\n\n\n at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cWe need to let that settle before we unfurl the solar panels.\u201d\nEven then, JPL mission engineers and scientists were in no hurry to proceed. \nBefore unpacking the lander\u2019s experiments, scientists expect to spend up to three months studying the patch of Martian soil on which the spacecraft now stands. They\u2019ll photograph the terrain and then recreate it as accurately as they can in a test site at JPL, where they expect to rehearse how to place the lander\u2019s scientific instruments on the ground.\n\u201cWe are going to practice deploying the instruments over and over and over again to make sure we get it exactly right,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jaime Singer,\n\n\n\n JPL\u2019s lead engineer for instrument deployment. \u201cThat\u2019s going to take us about two months. I wish it was 5 minutes.\u201d\nOnly then will the mission\u2019s science experiments begin. The craft carries a seismic sensor developed by the French National Centre for Space Studies, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Imperial College London. It also carries a heat probe developed by the German Aerospace Center in Berlin.\nIf all goes to plan, scientists hope that by studying the deep interior of Mars InSight will open a window into the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system, including Earth, more than four billion years ago. \n\u201cMars is the sweet spot,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Banerdt,\n\n\n\n the mission\u2019s principal investigator. \u201cIt is just right for investigating the early solar system.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers celebrated as the $828 million InSight lander signaled a safe landing on Mars, where it will take the pulse of the Red Planet by monitoring seismic waves from quakes and meteor strikes. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7481",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-insight-spacecraft-lands-safely-on-mars-1543263187?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=62",
        "text": "\u201cTouchdown confirmed,\u201d announced a flight controller in the mission operations room at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. \u201cInsight is on the surface of Mars.\u201d\nIt was the eighth time that NASA managed to land a craft safely on Mars. More than half of such interplanetary touch-down plays by the world\u2019s space agencies have failed.\n\n\nRead More Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22) Scientists Find Evidence of Hidden Lake on Mars (July 25) Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 7) Graphic: A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\n\u201cFabulous. Fabulous,\u201d JPL chief engineer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Manning\n\n\n\n said on a live JPL video feed. \u201cWow. What a relief.\u201d\n\n\nThe risky landing procedure\u2014entirely encoded in an onboard algorithm\u2014began around 3 p.m. ET Monday when the robotic spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere traveling seven times faster than a speeding bullet. Had its angle of entry been even one degree off kilter, JPL mission engineers said, the spacecraft would have been deflected into deep space or burned up by friction in the thin Martian air.\nAiming for a landing site on the plain of Elysium Planitia, the 850-pound spacecraft had less than 7 minutes to slow itself from about 12,500 miles an hour to a freeway crawl of about 5 miles an hour. The craft operated on automatic pilot because commands transmitted from Earth take too long to reach Mars. As a lander\u2014not a mobile rover\u2014the InSight probe has to stay put wherever it landed. \nWith only one chance to hit the landing zone, the spacecraft\u2019s designers and engineers relied on spacecraft systems that had proved their worth in past missions.\nFor brakes, they relied on heat-absorbing shields, a supersonic parachute, a dozen rocket thrusters and shock-absorbing landing gear developed originally for NASA\u2019s Phoenix lander, which landed successfully on Mars in 2008. The craft also incorporated a flight computer and electronics developed for NASA\u2019s Maven mission, which has been orbiting Mars since 2013. \n\u201cWe are building on our previous success to minimize the risk,\u201d Insight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stu Spath\n\n\n\n of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , which designed and developed the craft, said in a pre-landing news briefing. The company has been involved in 23 previous Mars missions.\nBut the landing hardly ended the tension. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's InSight Mars lander acquired this image of the area in front of the lander using its lander-mounted, Instrument Context Camera on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JPL-Caltech/NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nFirst, the spacecraft has to successfully deploy its solar power panels. So far from the Sun and shaded by the dusty atmosphere of Mars, the panels are expected to generate about 300 watts\u2014about enough to power a cake mixer, mission engineers said. \n\u201cWe kick up quite a bit of dust on landing,\u201d said InSight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Hoffman\n\n\n\n at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cWe need to let that settle before we unfurl the solar panels.\u201d\nEven then, JPL mission engineers and scientists were in no hurry to proceed. \nBefore unpacking the lander\u2019s experiments, scientists expect to spend up to three months studying the patch of Martian soil on which the spacecraft now stands. They\u2019ll photograph the terrain and then recreate it as accurately as they can in a test site at JPL, where they expect to rehearse how to place the lander\u2019s scientific instruments on the ground.\n\u201cWe are going to practice deploying the instruments over and over and over again to make sure we get it exactly right,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jaime Singer,\n\n\n\n JPL\u2019s lead engineer for instrument deployment. \u201cThat\u2019s going to take us about two months. I wish it was 5 minutes.\u201d\nOnly then will the mission\u2019s science experiments begin. The craft carries a seismic sensor developed by the French National Centre for Space Studies, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Imperial College London. It also carries a heat probe developed by the German Aerospace Center in Berlin.\nIf all goes to plan, scientists hope that by studying the deep interior of Mars InSight will open a window into the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system, including Earth, more than four billion years ago. \n\u201cMars is the sweet spot,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Banerdt,\n\n\n\n the mission\u2019s principal investigator. \u201cIt is just right for investigating the early solar system.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers celebrated as the $828 million InSight lander signaled a safe landing on Mars, where it will take the pulse of the Red Planet by monitoring seismic waves from quakes and meteor strikes. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7482",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-insight-spacecraft-lands-safely-on-mars-1543263187?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=68",
        "text": "\u201cTouchdown confirmed,\u201d announced a flight controller in the mission operations room at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. \u201cInsight is on the surface of Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nIt was the eighth time that NASA managed to land a craft safely on Mars. More than half of such interplanetary touch-down plays by the world\u2019s space agencies have failed.\n\n\nRead More Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22) Scientists Find Evidence of Hidden Lake on Mars (July 25) Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 7) Graphic: A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\n\u201cFabulous. Fabulous,\u201d JPL chief engineer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Manning\n\n\n\n said on a live JPL video feed. \u201cWow. What a relief.\u201d\n\n\nThe risky landing procedure\u2014entirely encoded in an onboard algorithm\u2014began around 3 p.m. ET Monday when the robotic spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere traveling seven times faster than a speeding bullet. Had its angle of entry been even one degree off kilter, JPL mission engineers said, the spacecraft would have been deflected into deep space or burned up by friction in the thin Martian air.\nAiming for a landing site on the plain of Elysium Planitia, the 850-pound spacecraft had less than 7 minutes to slow itself from about 12,500 miles an hour to a freeway crawl of about 5 miles an hour. The craft operated on automatic pilot because commands transmitted from Earth take too long to reach Mars. As a lander\u2014not a mobile rover\u2014the InSight probe has to stay put wherever it landed. \nWith only one chance to hit the landing zone, the spacecraft\u2019s designers and engineers relied on spacecraft systems that had proved their worth in past missions.\nFor brakes, they relied on heat-absorbing shields, a supersonic parachute, a dozen rocket thrusters and shock-absorbing landing gear developed originally for NASA\u2019s Phoenix lander, which landed successfully on Mars in 2008. The craft also incorporated a flight computer and electronics developed for NASA\u2019s Maven mission, which has been orbiting Mars since 2013. \n\u201cWe are building on our previous success to minimize the risk,\u201d Insight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stu Spath\n\n\n\n of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , which designed and developed the craft, said in a pre-landing news briefing. The company has been involved in 23 previous Mars missions.\nBut the landing hardly ended the tension. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's InSight Mars lander acquired this image of the area in front of the lander using its lander-mounted, Instrument Context Camera on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JPL-Caltech/NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nFirst, the spacecraft has to successfully deploy its solar power panels. So far from the Sun and shaded by the dusty atmosphere of Mars, the panels are expected to generate about 300 watts\u2014about enough to power a cake mixer, mission engineers said. \n\u201cWe kick up quite a bit of dust on landing,\u201d said InSight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Hoffman\n\n\n\n at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cWe need to let that settle before we unfurl the solar panels.\u201d\nEven then, JPL mission engineers and scientists were in no hurry to proceed. \nBefore unpacking the lander\u2019s experiments, scientists expect to spend up to three months studying the patch of Martian soil on which the spacecraft now stands. They\u2019ll photograph the terrain and then recreate it as accurately as they can in a test site at JPL, where they expect to rehearse how to place the lander\u2019s scientific instruments on the ground.\n\u201cWe are going to practice deploying the instruments over and over and over again to make sure we get it exactly right,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jaime Singer,\n\n\n\n JPL\u2019s lead engineer for instrument deployment. \u201cThat\u2019s going to take us about two months. I wish it was 5 minutes.\u201d\nOnly then will the mission\u2019s science experiments begin. The craft carries a seismic sensor developed by the French National Centre for Space Studies, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Imperial College London. It also carries a heat probe developed by the German Aerospace Center in Berlin.\nIf all goes to plan, scientists hope that by studying the deep interior of Mars InSight will open a window into the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system, including Earth, more than four billion years ago. \n\u201cMars is the sweet spot,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Banerdt,\n\n\n\n the mission\u2019s principal investigator. \u201cIt is just right for investigating the early solar system.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers celebrated as the $828 million InSight lander signaled a safe landing on Mars, where it will take the pulse of the Red Planet by monitoring seismic waves from quakes and meteor strikes. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7483",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-insight-spacecraft-lands-safely-on-mars-1543263187?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=83",
        "text": "\u201cTouchdown confirmed,\u201d announced a flight controller in the mission operations room at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. \u201cInsight is on the surface of Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nIt was the eighth time that NASA managed to land a craft safely on Mars. More than half of such interplanetary touch-down plays by the world\u2019s space agencies have failed.\n\n\nRead More Headed to Mars: A Big Experiment in Tiny Satellites (Nov. 22) Scientists Find Evidence of Hidden Lake on Mars (July 25) Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (June 7) Graphic: A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\n\u201cFabulous. Fabulous,\u201d JPL chief engineer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rob Manning\n\n\n\n said on a live JPL video feed. \u201cWow. What a relief.\u201d\n\n\nThe risky landing procedure\u2014entirely encoded in an onboard algorithm\u2014began around 3 p.m. ET Monday when the robotic spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere traveling seven times faster than a speeding bullet. Had its angle of entry been even one degree off kilter, JPL mission engineers said, the spacecraft would have been deflected into deep space or burned up by friction in the thin Martian air.\nAiming for a landing site on the plain of Elysium Planitia, the 850-pound spacecraft had less than 7 minutes to slow itself from about 12,500 miles an hour to a freeway crawl of about 5 miles an hour. The craft operated on automatic pilot because commands transmitted from Earth take too long to reach Mars. As a lander\u2014not a mobile rover\u2014the InSight probe has to stay put wherever it landed. \nWith only one chance to hit the landing zone, the spacecraft\u2019s designers and engineers relied on spacecraft systems that had proved their worth in past missions.\nFor brakes, they relied on heat-absorbing shields, a supersonic parachute, a dozen rocket thrusters and shock-absorbing landing gear developed originally for NASA\u2019s Phoenix lander, which landed successfully on Mars in 2008. The craft also incorporated a flight computer and electronics developed for NASA\u2019s Maven mission, which has been orbiting Mars since 2013. \n\u201cWe are building on our previous success to minimize the risk,\u201d Insight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stu Spath\n\n\n\n of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , which designed and developed the craft, said in a pre-landing news briefing. The company has been involved in 23 previous Mars missions.\nBut the landing hardly ended the tension. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's InSight Mars lander acquired this image of the area in front of the lander using its lander-mounted, Instrument Context Camera on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JPL-Caltech/NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nFirst, the spacecraft has to successfully deploy its solar power panels. So far from the Sun and shaded by the dusty atmosphere of Mars, the panels are expected to generate about 300 watts\u2014about enough to power a cake mixer, mission engineers said. \n\u201cWe kick up quite a bit of dust on landing,\u201d said InSight project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tom Hoffman\n\n\n\n at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cWe need to let that settle before we unfurl the solar panels.\u201d\nEven then, JPL mission engineers and scientists were in no hurry to proceed. \nBefore unpacking the lander\u2019s experiments, scientists expect to spend up to three months studying the patch of Martian soil on which the spacecraft now stands. They\u2019ll photograph the terrain and then recreate it as accurately as they can in a test site at JPL, where they expect to rehearse how to place the lander\u2019s scientific instruments on the ground.\n\u201cWe are going to practice deploying the instruments over and over and over again to make sure we get it exactly right,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jaime Singer,\n\n\n\n JPL\u2019s lead engineer for instrument deployment. \u201cThat\u2019s going to take us about two months. I wish it was 5 minutes.\u201d\nOnly then will the mission\u2019s science experiments begin. The craft carries a seismic sensor developed by the French National Centre for Space Studies, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Imperial College London. It also carries a heat probe developed by the German Aerospace Center in Berlin.\nIf all goes to plan, scientists hope that by studying the deep interior of Mars InSight will open a window into the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system, including Earth, more than four billion years ago. \n\u201cMars is the sweet spot,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Banerdt,\n\n\n\n the mission\u2019s principal investigator. \u201cIt is just right for investigating the early solar system.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA engineers celebrated as the $828 million InSight lander signaled a safe landing on Mars, where it will take the pulse of the Red Planet by monitoring seismic waves from quakes and meteor strikes. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches InSight Spacecraft to Mars to Dig Down Deep (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7484",
        "date": "2018-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-launches-insight-spacecraft-to-mars-to-dig-down-deep-1525537422?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=19",
        "text": "\u201cThis is a big day. We\u2019re going back to Mars!\u201d NASA\u2019s new boss, Jim Bridenstine, said following liftoff. \u201cThis is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts.\u201d\nThe spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 300 million miles to get there.\n\n\nMore Keep up with the Insight Mission New NASA Chief Mulls Public-Private Moon Exploration (April 29) \n\n\nInSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before\u2014nearly 16 feet, or 5 meters\u2014to take the planet\u2019s temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.\n\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s the real payoff of this whole mission and that\u2019s still lying ahead of us,\u201d said the mission\u2019s chief scientist, Bruce Banerdt of NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.\nAlthough fog prevented Mr. Banerdt from seeing the liftoff of the $1 billion U.S.-European mission, he heard the roar of the rocket and all the blaring car alarms it set off.\n\u201cIt was just an incredible moment,\u201d Mr. Banerdt told The Associated Press by phone. Despite the challenges still ahead, \u201cI think I can bask in a little bit of satisfaction and just feeling like we really accomplished something today.\u201d\nBesides InSight, the United Launch Alliance\u2019s Atlas V rocket gave a lift to a pair of mini-test satellites, or CubeSats, that are trailing InSight to Mars to serve as a potential communication link. The twin briefcase-size spacecraft popped off the rocket\u2019s upper stage in hot pursuit of InSight, as elated launch controllers applauded and shook hands following the morning\u2019s success.\nNASA hasn\u2019t put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The U.S., in fact, is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. It is tough, complicated stuff. Only about 40 percent of all missions to Mars from all countries\u2014orbiters and landers alike\u2014have proven successful over the decades.\nIf all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute and engine firings onto a flat equatorial region of Mars\u2014believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks\u2014on Nov. 26. Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the science instruments on the surface.\nMr. Banerdt said Mars is ideal for learning how the rocky planets of our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike our active Earth, Mars hasn\u2019t been transformed by plate tectonics and other processes, he noted. InSight might also help explain why some planet \u2014like ours\u2014went on to develop life, while others did not.\nOver the course of two Earth years\u2014or one Martian year\u2014NASA expects InSight\u2019s three main experiments to provide a true 3-D image of the interior of Mars. Scientists know Mars has an iron core and a crust, but beyond that, the inside is \u201cbasically, completely unknown,\u201d said Mr. Banerdt. A robotic geologist armed with a hammer and quake monitor rocketed toward Mars, aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7485",
        "date": "2018-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-budget-more-moon-less-space-station-1516873423?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=21",
        "text": "For the longer term, the Trump administration seeks to free up money for the moon effort by ending federal spending on the international space station by the end of 2024. Studies by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , prime contractor for the station, highlight escalating costs to maintain the 1990s\u2013vintage platform, which already costs the agency more than $3 billion a year.\nWithout new money for exploration, NASA would be hard pressed to create spacecraft able to ultimately establish human habitats on the lunar surface, as anticipated by White House officials.\n\n\nCertain details of the budget request still could change before the official release next month. Some aerospace companies and industry groups with advance information already are gearing up to lobby for a longer space-station phaseout.\nPresident Barack Obama committed the U.S. to at least 2024, and kept the door open to maintaining operations through 2028. The orbiting laboratory has been used for experiments on subjects ranging from drug and electronics manufacturing to the health effects of prolonged time in space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe late Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Harrison H. \u2018Jack\u2019 Schmitt/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nA rigid 2024 deadline could prompt concerns among the other partner countries in the station. Some haven\u2019t yet decided whether they support an extension.\nThe spending proposal also could spark opposition from U.S. lawmakers who have been demanding a detailed blueprint for shifting station function to private entities. NASA missed a December deadline to submit one.\nOn Thursday,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Bill Nelson\n\n\n\n of Florida, the senior Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees NASA, said White House officials are \u201cgoing to have a fight on their hands.\u201d In a statement, he said a mandatory 2025 funding shutoff \u201cwould likely decimate Florida\u2019s blossoming commercial space industry, which is one of the reasons why Congress has directed NASA to look at extending\u201d the space station to 2028 and to \u201cprovide a plan to help scientists and researchers continue experimenting\u201d beyond that date.\nThe proposed budget is expected to earmark some $100 million in seed money for what NASA envisions will be private spaceships, corporate research and other nongovernmental activities in low-earth orbit. That is a tiny sliver of NASA\u2019s current $19.7 billion budget, but it is intended to demonstrate the White House\u2019s commitment to commercial space endeavors.\nOne federal budget document indicates NASA hopes to enhance U.S. leadership by combining robotic and manned technologies \u201cinvolving commercial and international participation.\u201d\nThe proposal also paves the way for competition on some NASA launches between private boosters and the agency\u2019s own, ultra-heavy-lift SLS rocket.\nOverall, people familiar with the budget say, the plan underscores the White House\u2019s resolve to advance both robotic and manned exploration of the moon, as a step toward to blasting humans deeper into the solar system. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads space policy as chairman of the White House Space Council, has vowed to boost U.S. space leadership partly by encouraging private industry.\nOne complication is that partisan clashes have kept Congress from confirming a permanent NASA administrator. Many career agency engineers and managers favor extending station operations to 2028, so White House space and budget officials drafted parts of the proposal over their objections, according to one person familiar with the debate.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nU.S. President Donald Trump holding an astronaut figurine given to him by Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. Sen. Jack Schmitt during a signing ceremony for a space-policy directive in the White House last month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe Obama White House originally championed using commercial capsules and privately operated manned spacecraft to service the station, which circles roughly 250 miles above the Earth. Now, White House and NASA leaders want to expand the same contracting principles\u2014with less agency oversight than traditionally\u2014in developing landers and spacecraft to operate on or near the moon.\nEven some supporters of the approach say NASA and industry need to agree on a clear-cut path to deploy alternate platforms. Essential research \u201ccan be done much more effectively on a privately owned and operated\u201d platform, argues industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a former NASA official who advised Mr. Trump\u2019s team on space issues after the 2016 election.\nIf commercial entities spearhead lunar missions, \u201cyou could have humans on the moon in five to seven years,\u201d Mr. Miller said in an interview Thursday. He hadn\u2019t The White House\u2019s next NASA budget is expected to propose government-industry moon initiatives and ending space-station funding by the middle of next decade, according to people familiar with the details. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump\u2019s NASA Budget: More Moon, Less Space Station (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7486",
        "date": "2018-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-nasa-budget-more-moon-less-space-station-1516873423?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=103",
        "text": "For the longer term, the Trump administration seeks to free up money for the moon effort by ending federal spending on the international space station by the end of 2024. Studies by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , prime contractor for the station, highlight escalating costs to maintain the 1990s\u2013vintage platform, which already costs the agency more than $3 billion a year.\n\n\n\n\nWithout new money for exploration, NASA would be hard pressed to create spacecraft able to ultimately establish human habitats on the lunar surface, as anticipated by White House officials.\n\n\nCertain details of the budget request still could change before the official release next month. Some aerospace companies and industry groups with advance information already are gearing up to lobby for a longer space-station phaseout.\nPresident Barack Obama committed the U.S. to at least 2024, and kept the door open to maintaining operations through 2028. The orbiting laboratory has been used for experiments on subjects ranging from drug and electronics manufacturing to the health effects of prolonged time in space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe late Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, driving the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Harrison H. \u2018Jack\u2019 Schmitt/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nA rigid 2024 deadline could prompt concerns among the other partner countries in the station. Some haven\u2019t yet decided whether they support an extension.\nThe spending proposal also could spark opposition from U.S. lawmakers who have been demanding a detailed blueprint for shifting station function to private entities. NASA missed a December deadline to submit one.\nOn Thursday,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Bill Nelson\n\n\n\n of Florida, the senior Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees NASA, said White House officials are \u201cgoing to have a fight on their hands.\u201d In a statement, he said a mandatory 2025 funding shutoff \u201cwould likely decimate Florida\u2019s blossoming commercial space industry, which is one of the reasons why Congress has directed NASA to look at extending\u201d the space station to 2028 and to \u201cprovide a plan to help scientists and researchers continue experimenting\u201d beyond that date.\nThe proposed budget is expected to earmark some $100 million in seed money for what NASA envisions will be private spaceships, corporate research and other nongovernmental activities in low-earth orbit. That is a tiny sliver of NASA\u2019s current $19.7 billion budget, but it is intended to demonstrate the White House\u2019s commitment to commercial space endeavors.\nOne federal budget document indicates NASA hopes to enhance U.S. leadership by combining robotic and manned technologies \u201cinvolving commercial and international participation.\u201d\nThe proposal also paves the way for competition on some NASA launches between private boosters and the agency\u2019s own, ultra-heavy-lift SLS rocket.\nOverall, people familiar with the budget say, the plan underscores the White House\u2019s resolve to advance both robotic and manned exploration of the moon, as a step toward to blasting humans deeper into the solar system. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n who heads space policy as chairman of the White House Space Council, has vowed to boost U.S. space leadership partly by encouraging private industry.\nOne complication is that partisan clashes have kept Congress from confirming a permanent NASA administrator. Many career agency engineers and managers favor extending station operations to 2028, so White House space and budget officials drafted parts of the proposal over their objections, according to one person familiar with the debate.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nU.S. President Donald Trump holding an astronaut figurine given to him by Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. Sen. Jack Schmitt during a signing ceremony for a space-policy directive in the White House last month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe Obama White House originally championed using commercial capsules and privately operated manned spacecraft to service the station, which circles roughly 250 miles above the Earth. Now, White House and NASA leaders want to expand the same contracting principles\u2014with less agency oversight than traditionally\u2014in developing landers and spacecraft to operate on or near the moon.\nEven some supporters of the approach say NASA and industry need to agree on a clear-cut path to deploy alternate platforms. Essential research \u201ccan be done much more effectively on a privately owned and operated\u201d platform, argues industry consultant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Miller,\n\n\n\n a former NASA official who advised Mr. Trump\u2019s team on space issues after the 2016 election.\nIf commercial entities spearhead lunar missions, \u201cyou could have humans on the moon in five to seven years,\u201d Mr. Miller said in an interview Thursday. He ha The White House\u2019s next NASA budget is expected to propose government-industry moon initiatives and ending space-station funding by the middle of next decade, according to people familiar with the details. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Picks Three Contractors to Lead Lunar Lander Teams (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7487",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-picks-three-contractors-including-spacex-and-blue-origin-to-lead-lunar-lander-teams-11588280161?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=45",
        "text": "The contracts announced Thursday, totaling $967 million and including awards to rival companies led by prominent space entrepreneurs\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n mark the most concrete step by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to return humans to the lunar surface in some five decades.\nIn a break from traditional U.S. space programs, the plan envisions leveraging private-industry expertise and previous company investments to allow contractors to largely determine the design, testing and execution of their individual programs.\nBut even before NASA\u2019s decision, lawmakers and space experts questioned the lack of budget specifics and the accelerated schedule\u2014projected to get astronauts back to the moon years faster than the buildup to the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.\n\n\nOne of the winning proposals was submitted by Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which envisions using a version of its mega-spaceship, called Starship. \nA second team led by Blue Origin LLC, run by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n founder Jeff Bezos, plans to partner with NASA stalwarts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n It is the first major NASA contract for Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., which for years has telegraphed interest in pursuing such technology to land people on the moon even without federal funding. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Moon, a lunar landing vehicle, was unveiled by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in Washington, D.C., last year.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe third team is led by Dynetics, a unit of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Leidos Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n based in Reston, Va., another longtime NASA contractor. Participants include Sierra Nevada Corp. and a European partner.\n\nBoeing Co.,\n\n\n which has been part of all major NASA endeavors for decades, including helping oversee the international space station, wasn\u2019t part of any of the winning teams. In a statement, a Boeing spokesman said the company was disappointed not to have been selected but continues work with NASA on other human space exploration projects, including \u201cthe rocket that will take Americans to the moon and eventually to Mars.\u201d\nThe current plan is to have each team develop its own landers, which would be launched on rockets without astronauts on board. The astronauts, according to a briefing Thursday by NASA officials, would reach orbit on board the agency\u2019s mammoth SLS booster, which is under development by prime contractor Boeing and is struggling with multibillion-dollar cost overruns. Once in space, those crews would then rendezvous with the landers and board them for the trip to the lunar surface. \nStressing the historic nature of the contracts, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said the 2024 deadline is important for political and strategic reasons. The companies are willing to invest in the concepts he said, since \u201cthey\u2019re bringing to the table not just ideas, but resources.\u201d He added that \u201cgoing fast reduces the political risk\u201d and lessens chances that lawmakers will change their minds about supporting the overall project to return to the moon, called Artemis.\nThe total project is expected to cost more than $30 billion over the next four years, though the numbers are still in flux and Congress hasn\u2019t signed off on a comprehensive spending plan. For next year, Mr. Bridenstine told reporters NASA has recommended that the White House request an extra $3 billion in funding primarily for lander development. \nThe initial contract awards are intended to carry the companies through early design and validation phases. The 2024 date, which replaced NASA\u2019s original 2028 timeline, was partly established by the White House to coincide with the end of a possible second term for President Trump, according to industry and government officials familiar with the deliberations.\nEarly next year, NASA plans to decide which of the teams appears most likely to meet that deadline and then lay out a path to start performing demonstration missions. NASA officials have said they may require several such uncrewed flights before authorizing the first Artemis astronauts to land on the moon, which could make it difficult for the agency to stick with the 2024 date.\nPersistent manufacturing and testing delays for the SLS booster\u2014which is slated to cost about $1 billion per launch\u2014have added to NASA\u2019s challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic has further stressed the SLS schedule. But Mr. Bridenstine suggested that even after 2024, NASA likely would continue working with more than one team to ensure ways to establish a long-term human presence on the moon.\nNASA\u2019s tight schedule also reflects widespread and mounting concerns among U.S. military and civilian space leaders regarding ambitious Chinese efforts to send robotic as well as human missions to t NASA chose three separate corporate teams, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to develop landers intended to take astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024, relying on contractors to lead the way with dramatically different technical solutions. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Foxconn Tore Up a Small Town to Build a Big Factory\u2014Then Retreated (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7488",
        "date": "2019-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-tore-up-a-small-town-to-build-a-big-factorythen-retreated-11556557652?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=61",
        "text": "One thing largely missing: Foxconn.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018I don\u2019t want Foxconn to fail,\u2019 says Ms. Mahoney. \u2018It would be devastating to the people of Mount Pleasant.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lauren Justice for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nPresident Trump and Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou hatched the factory plan in 2017, and both attended last summer\u2019s gold-shovel groundbreaking in Mount Pleasant, 20 miles south of Milwaukee. As of Dec. 31, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant, famous as an \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.\n\n\n supplier, had spent only $99 million, 1% of its pledged investment, according to its latest state filings. The company projected as many as 2,080 in-state employees by the end of 2019 but had fewer than 200 at last year\u2019s end, state filings show. The village is still awaiting factory building plans for review. Locals said Foxconn contractors have recently been scarce on the site. The impact on Mount Pleasant, by contrast, is palpable. Its debt rating has slipped. Local politics has become fraught. Neighbors have fallen out over land seizures. \u201cAt some point we\u2019re talking about things that are just imaginary,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nick Demske,\n\n\n\n a commissioner in Racine County, where the plant is. \u201cWe\u2019re pretending.\u201d Mount Pleasant and the county referred inquiries to county executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Delagrave\n\n\n\n and an outside spokesman. A project this massive is bound to have hiccups, Mr. Delagrave said. \u201cI think it\u2019s fair for people to question it, absolutely. But I also think that it\u2019s fair to say a lot of good things are happening.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsHow much is too much to give to win a big facility like the Foxconn plant? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nFoxconn said it \u201cstands by the job creation commitments that we have made, and we look forward to completing\u201d the manufacturing facilities. \u201cAfter the winter break, which has an impact on construction projects of this scale, we are now looking forward to beginning the next phases of construction...by Summer 2019 with production expected to commence during the fourth quarter of 2020.\u201d It said it awarded contracts in the past months valued at nearly $34 million for construction of utilities and roadways. \u201cWe believe in Wisconsin, its people, and its potential to become a high technology hub.\u201d Communities across America are in an incentives race for marquee projects, but some big ones have collapsed. \nAmazon.com Inc.\n\n\n walked away from a $2.5 billion package from New York City. General Electric Co. returned $87 million in incentives after significantly scaling back its headquarters in Boston because it no longer needed the space. The Foxconn project is among the biggest U.S. public-incentive deals ever offered to a foreign company, a more than $4 billion package of state and local tax breaks and investments. A Foxconn video last year showed renderings of a futuristic campus resembling Apple\u2019s spaceshiplike Silicon Valley headquarters, with light rail shuttling workers. Foxconn said the video was for illustration purposes. Foxconn, known formally as \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Hon Hai \n\n\n Precision Industry Co., is the main assembler of Apple\u2019s iPhone and a major employer in China. It reported annual revenue of $5.29 trillion New Taiwan dollars (US$171 billion today) in 2018 and said profits have been under pressure from lower iPhone sales in China. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout 75 houses have been torn down to clear the Foxconn site.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lauren Justice for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFoxconn had planned to make large state-of-the-art screens in Mount Pleasant but said last summer it would make small screens of an older technology instead, citing the distance from the Asia supply chain after \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Corning Inc.\n\n\n said it wouldn\u2019t build a glass facility next door. In January, Foxconn said it was backing out of the plan to build an LCD factory in the village, citing high U.S. labor and material costs. Days later, after a phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Gou, Foxconn reversed course and said it would go ahead with the facility making small screens, adding some other functions.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe community of 27,000 people remained skeptical the project would materialize on the scale promised. Those doubts grew when Mr. Gou said this month he was giving up daily control of the company he founded to run for Taiwan\u2019s presidency. Foxconn said Mr. Gou will remain involved. On April 23, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers\n\n\n\n said that Foxconn told him it would seek changes to its state contract and that he asked it for details as soon as possible. The state hasn\u2019t paid incentives to Foxconn, because it missed employment goals.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJim Mahoney and his wife, Kim, are holdouts on the site. The village recently dropped its bid for their home.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lauren Justice for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFoxconn said in a media statement the same day it was eager to explore \u201careas of flexibility within the existing agreement\u201d though it remained committed to hiring 13,000 people in the state. Foxconn\u2019s chief U.S. strategist, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan S. Yeung,\n\n\n\n the next day tweeted: \u201cWho has the crystal ball to predict if 13,000 jobs will be created by the year 2032? Esp in April \u201919?\u201d He later told reporters he backed the 13,000-job commitment. Foxconn is still actively investing, local officials said. It built a multipurpose building in Mount Pleasant, largely a staging area for construction for now, and is using a nearby building as a training center. It has sponsored student engineering competitions at the University of Wisconsin and bought downtown buildings in Green Bay, Racine, Milwaukee and Madison; most are empty. Foxconn executives didn\u2019t participate in a village briefing on the plant in April. Foxconn said its construction contractor attended the meeting on its behalf. He spoke for about five minutes and excused himself without taking questions from the audience. Claude Lois, a consultant Mount Pleasant hired to manage the deal, said at the briefing the village must abide by its 170-page Foxconn contract, regardless of the company\u2019s delays or tweaks. It would be foolhardy to slow down public investment, he said. Leslie Maj, a 60-year-old former business manager, raised her hand. \u201cIs our village going to go bankrupt? Is our county going to go bankrupt?\u201d she asked. \u201cI\u2019m telling you, we\u2019re afraid.\u201d Mr. Lois told her he would try to get a Foxconn executive at the next meeting. The village spokesman said there were financial guarantees in the agreement that require Foxconn to cover the cost of public investments over time.Mr. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n prod Mount Pleasant\u2019s Foxconn odyssey started with a presidential suggestion. Mr. Trump was in a helicopter over Wisconsin in early 2017 after giving a \u201cBuild American, Hire American\u201d speech at a tool factory. He looked out on an abandoned manufacturing site south of Racine County, he said at the Foxconn groundbreaking. He had heard Mr. Gou was looking to expand, he said, so when they met soon thereafter, he suggested Foxconn look at southeastern Wisconsin\u2014a suggestion taken up and driven by the state\u2019s then-governor, Scott Walker. \u201cI had this incredible company going to invest someplace in the world\u2014not here necessarily,\u201d Mr. Trump said. \u201cAnd I will tell you they wouldn\u2019t have done it here, except that I became president.\u201d He didn\u2019t mention Foxconn on April 27 during a rally in Green Bay, Wis., though he touted manufacturing-job growth the state.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Trump at the groundbreaking last year with Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou, then-Gov. Scott Walker and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JEFFREY PHELPS/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nThe Racine County area was once among the wealthiest in the state, credited with inventing products from the garbage disposal to malted milk, and home of the \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Lloyd Wright\n\n\n\n -designed headquarters of SC Johnson, maker of Pledge, Raid and Drano. The county lost major employers with the manufacturing decline. The city of Racine has one of the state\u2019s highest poverty rates. Foxconn offered the chance to reinvent the area as Wisconn Valley Science and Technology Park, an advanced-manufacturing answer to Silicon Valley, said Mr. Delagrave, the Racine County executive. \u201cWhen you have a chance to transform your community,\u201d he said, \u201cmy philosophy is you take that opportunity.\u201d State and local governments and economic-development groups devised a complex deal in which the state offered $2.85 billion in tax credits, to be paid incrementally if Foxconn hit hiring and investment benchmarks. Mount Pleasant agreed to borrow money to acquire the land for the project within a year and meet aggressive timelines for clearing and preparing the infrastructure. Messrs. Trump and Gou in the White House in July 2017 announced Foxconn had chosen Wisconsin as the site. The state and local governments signed off on incentives and benchmarks that year. \u201cWhat they asked for was speed,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Sheehy,\n\n\n\n president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, which was involved in early talks with Foxconn. \u201cThey\u2019re used to the Chinese government saying, \u2018Oh, you need that property? You\u2019re on.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n Homes in Mount Pleasant, pictured earlier this year. The village has been bulldozing scores of homes and clearing soybean and cabbage farms to make room for the Foxconn construction site. Photos: LAUREN JUSTICE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\nThe village bought hundreds of pieces of property, holding out the possibility of enforcing eminent domain. It worked out deals with Racine County, the water authority and the power company to bring services to the site. The state legislature agreed to bypass some permitting processes, letting Foxconn fill wetlands without getting an environmental-impact statement. The state received a $160 million federal grant to help expand Interstate 94 a decade ahead of schedule. The public work has met or exceeded target dates, the village spokesman said. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like they were working triple time to make sure it gets done so nobody had the chance to change their mind,\u201d said Cathy Jensen, 50, a retired grandmother who is fighting seizure of her five-bedroom house in state court. She said she wants to stay in the house where she has lived for 23 years, although the neighborhood has changed. \u201cOut the back was cornfields one year, cabbage another, that was the only changes of scenery,\u201d she said. \u201cNow it\u2019s horrible, you don\u2019t even want to look at it.\u201d Most homeowners signed deals and moved out. Decisions divided friends, neighbors and couples, Mrs. Jensen said. \u201cIt was, \u2018Why are you doing this? Why are you fighting, or why are you not fighting?\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWorkers dismantle a former grain-storage bin on the Foxconn site in April.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Hertzberg/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Spodick,\n\n\n\n 62, a retired developer and co-host of a YouTube show, \u201cTalking Racine,\u201d regularly drives the 30 minutes around the property, photographing progress. \u201cPeople wanted to believe and they did believe,\u201d he said, watching contractors demolish a grain silo, \u201cand there\u2019s a whole lot of shock going on right now.\u201dHoldouts Kim and Jim Mahoney, 49 and 48, are rare holdouts still living on the vast site. Ms. Mahoney said the village recently dropped its bid for their 1,800-square-foot house, leaving them on a cul-de-sac with a view of Foxconn\u2019s multipurpose building. The village spokesman declined to comment, citing confidentiality requirements. \u201cI don\u2019t want Foxconn to fail,\u201d said Ms. Mahoney, a paralegal and a regular at public meetings who keeps an inventory of houses and farms that are cleared. \u201cIt would be devastating to the people of Mount Pleasant and this state. We just want Foxconn and the village and the state to be held accountable to the deal they made.\u201d\n\n\nRelated Major Apple Supplier Foxconn Suffers Profit Drop (March 29) Foxconn Says It Will Move Forward With Wisconsin Plant After Conversation with Trump (Feb. 1) \n\n\nMoody\u2019s Investors Service downgraded Mount Pleasant\u2019s credit rating in August over its debt for the project. Moody\u2019s in January said Foxconn\u2019s anemic hiring was a negative sign for the village, noting Foxconn has been lowering expectations for hiring and making \u201ccontinual changes in the scope of the project.\u201d The village spokesman said its credit rating is solid and it is confident it has adequate guarantees. The Foxconn agreement has a clause that acts as insurance, said the Milwaukee commerce association\u2019s Mr. Sheehy. Foxconn agreed to pay taxes starting in 2023 on at least $1.4 billion in property value, whether it built anything or not. So Foxconn is set to pay a minimum $31 million a year, or $886 million through 2047, roughly what the village committed to invest. \u201cWhether you have a yurt out there or a modern plant making screens,\u201d Mr. Sheehy said, \u201cit will be worth $1.4 billion.\u201d The village had bought additional sites, hoping to transfer them to Foxconn for expansion. This month, its board voted to lease back 966 acres to a farmer for $170,000 a year, after buying the property from him last August for $1.7 million.\n\n\n Students at Gateway Technical College near the construction site study robotics and motor control in an advanced-manufacturing degree program designed in collaboration with Foxconn. Photos: LAUREN JUSTICE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\nMr. Demske, a poet and librarian, ousted a 20-year Racine County supervisor last year. Mr. Demske initially campaigned on better jobs for Racine\u2019s poor and on criminal-justice reform and ended up focused on bringing more accountability to Foxconn, a topic he said came up constantly as he knocked on 1,600 doors. A Marquette University Law School poll found in April that 47% of registered Wisconsin voters think the project will cost more than it is worth. One of five newly elected supervisors, Mr. Demske said he wasn\u2019t certain Foxconn would produce anything there. He said the relationship between Foxconn and Mount Pleasant gives the company disproportionate say-so. \u201cWe\u2019ve dug ourselves in too deep,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat can you do with an entity that big other than ask them to play nice with you?\u201d Write to Valerie Bauerlein at valerie.bauerlein@wsj.com The iPhone maker got fat incentives to build a $10 billion LCD plant that largely hasn\u2019t materialized on land where Mount Pleasant, Wis., razed homes and crops. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about things that are just imaginary.\u201d ",
        "author": "Valerie Bauerlein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Foxconn Tore Up a Small Town to Build a Big Factory\u2014Then Retreated (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7489",
        "date": "2019-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-tore-up-a-small-town-to-build-a-big-factorythen-retreated-11556557652?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=73",
        "text": "One thing largely missing: Foxconn.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018I don\u2019t want Foxconn to fail,\u2019 says Ms. Mahoney. \u2018It would be devastating to the people of Mount Pleasant.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lauren Justice for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nPresident Trump and Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou hatched the factory plan in 2017, and both attended last summer\u2019s gold-shovel groundbreaking in Mount Pleasant, 20 miles south of Milwaukee. As of Dec. 31, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant, famous as an \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.\n\n\n supplier, had spent only $99 million, 1% of its pledged investment, according to its latest state filings. The company projected as many as 2,080 in-state employees by the end of 2019 but had fewer than 200 at last year\u2019s end, state filings show. The village is still awaiting factory building plans for review. Locals said Foxconn contractors have recently been scarce on the site. The impact on Mount Pleasant, by contrast, is palpable. Its debt rating has slipped. Local politics has become fraught. Neighbors have fallen out over land seizures. \u201cAt some point we\u2019re talking about things that are just imaginary,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nick Demske,\n\n\n\n a commissioner in Racine County, where the plant is. \u201cWe\u2019re pretending.\u201d Mount Pleasant and the county referred inquiries to county executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Delagrave\n\n\n\n and an outside spokesman. A project this massive is bound to have hiccups, Mr. Delagrave said. \u201cI think it\u2019s fair for people to question it, absolutely. But I also think that it\u2019s fair to say a lot of good things are happening.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsHow much is too much to give to win a big facility like the Foxconn plant? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nFoxconn said it \u201cstands by the job creation commitments that we have made, and we look forward to completing\u201d the manufacturing facilities. \u201cAfter the winter break, which has an impact on construction projects of this scale, we are now looking forward to beginning the next phases of construction...by Summer 2019 with production expected to commence during the fourth quarter of 2020.\u201d It said it awarded contracts in the past months valued at nearly $34 million for construction of utilities and roadways. \u201cWe believe in Wisconsin, its people, and its potential to become a high technology hub.\u201d Communities across America are in an incentives race for marquee projects, but some big ones have collapsed. \nAmazon.com Inc.\n\n\n walked away from a $2.5 billion package from New York City. General Electric Co. returned $87 million in incentives after significantly scaling back its headquarters in Boston because it no longer needed the space. The Foxconn project is among the biggest U.S. public-incentive deals ever offered to a foreign company, a more than $4 billion package of state and local tax breaks and investments. A Foxconn video last year showed renderings of a futuristic campus resembling Apple\u2019s spaceshiplike Silicon Valley headquarters, with light rail shuttling workers. Foxconn said the video was for illustration purposes. Foxconn, known formally as \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Hon Hai \n\n\n Precision Industry Co., is the main assembler of Apple\u2019s iPhone and a major employer in China. It reported annual revenue of $5.29 trillion New Taiwan dollars (US$171 billion today) in 2018 and said profits have been under pressure from lower iPhone sales in China. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAbout 75 houses have been torn down to clear the Foxconn site.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lauren Justice for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFoxconn had planned to make large state-of-the-art screens in Mount Pleasant but said last summer it would make small screens of an older technology instead, citing the distance from the Asia supply chain after \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Corning Inc.\n\n\n said it wouldn\u2019t build a glass facility next door. In January, Foxconn said it was backing out of the plan to build an LCD factory in the village, citing high U.S. labor and material costs. Days later, after a phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Gou, Foxconn reversed course and said it would go ahead with the facility making small screens, adding some other functions.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe community of 27,000 people remained skeptical the project would materialize on the scale promised. Those doubts grew when Mr. Gou said this month he was giving up daily control of the company he founded to run for Taiwan\u2019s presidency. Foxconn said Mr. Gou will remain involved. On April 23, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers\n\n\n\n said that Foxconn told him it would seek changes to its state contract and that he asked it for details as soon as possible. The state hasn\u2019t paid incentives to Foxconn, because it missed employment goals.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJim Mahoney and his wife, Kim, are holdouts on the site. The village recently dropped its bid for their home.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lauren Justice f The iPhone maker got fat incentives to build a $10 billion LCD plant that largely hasn\u2019t materialized on land where Mount Pleasant, Wis., razed homes and crops. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about things that are just imaginary.\u201d ",
        "author": "Valerie Bauerlein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bruce Blackburn, Designer of Ubiquitous NASA Logo, Dies at 82 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7490",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/us/bruce-blackburn-dead.html",
        "text": "He was known for the NASA \u201cworm,\u201d which has become synonymous with space exploration. He also designed the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star. He was known for the NASA \u201cworm,\u201d which has become synonymous with space exploration. He also designed the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star. Bruce Blackburn, a graphic designer whose modern and minimalist logos became ingrained in the nation\u2019s consciousness, including the four bold red letters for NASA known as the \u201cworm\u201d and the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star, died on Feb. 1 in Arvada, Colo., near Denver. He was 82.",
        "author": "By Alex Vadukul"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bruce Blackburn, Designer of Ubiquitous NASA Logo, Dies at 82 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7491",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/us/bruce-blackburn-dead.html",
        "text": "He was known for the NASA \u201cworm,\u201d which has become synonymous with space exploration. He also designed the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star. He was known for the NASA \u201cworm,\u201d which has become synonymous with space exploration. He also designed the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star. Bruce Blackburn, a graphic designer whose modern and minimalist logos became ingrained in the nation\u2019s consciousness, including the four bold red letters for NASA known as the \u201cworm\u201d and the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star, died on Feb. 1 in Arvada, Colo., near Denver. He was 82.",
        "author": "By Alex Vadukul"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bruce Blackburn, Designer of Ubiquitous NASA Logo, Dies at 82 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7492",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/us/bruce-blackburn-dead.html",
        "text": "He was known for the NASA \u201cworm,\u201d which has become synonymous with space exploration. He also designed the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star. He was known for the NASA \u201cworm,\u201d which has become synonymous with space exploration. He also designed the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star. Bruce Blackburn, a graphic designer whose modern and minimalist logos became ingrained in the nation\u2019s consciousness, including the four bold red letters for NASA known as the \u201cworm\u201d and the 1976 American Revolution Bicentennial star, died on Feb. 1 in Arvada, Colo., near Denver. He was 82.",
        "author": "By Alex Vadukul"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Helicopter Makes History as First Flight on Another Planet (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7493",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007717254/nasa-mars-helicopter-first-flight.html",
        "text": "A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the air. This was the first machine from Earth to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world. A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the air. This was the first machine from Earth to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world. A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the air. This was the first machine from Earth to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Cargo Mission Demonstrates Increasing Research on Space Station (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7494",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-cargo-mission-demonstrates-increasing-research-on-space-station-1502704804?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=79",
        "text": "Unlike earlier cargo deliveries, the focus of the launch from the Kennedy Space Center was less on the anticipated feats of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s partly reusable Falcon 9 rocket than on the contents of the Dragon capsule. Before launch, one senior NASA official told reporters experiments amounted to a record 75% of the cargo\u2019s overall weight.\n\u201cIt sets a new bar for the amount of research we\u2019ve been able to get\u201d on a cargo flight, said Dan Hartman, deputy manager of the international space station. He told reporters over the weekend that some 85 new experiments are expected to launch through January 2018.\n\n\nAt 12:31 p.m. local time, a modified Falcon 9 with slightly more thrust than earlier versions lifted off into mostly clear skies, reached supersonic speed in roughly one minute and the main engines shut off as designed about 90 seconds later. The upper stage propelled the capsule into its planned orbit, even as he rocket\u2019s lower stage gently landed vertically back on earth.\nTom Praderio, a SpaceX engineer narrating the launch on the company\u2019s website, called it \u201cyet another picture perfect landing.\u201d\nMonday\u2019s launch marked the 14th time SpaceX has managed to safely return that portion of the booster for refurbishment for a subsequent flight. \nBiological experiments on board included one sponsored by the foundation set up by actor Michael J. Fox, targeting potential genetic causes of Parkinson\u2019s disease.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eli Lilly Co.\n\n\n is testing whether freeze-drying pharmaceuticals can prolong their shelf life, and a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n scientist is delving into how roundworm genes react to prolonged radiation exposure.\nA Florida State University team is part of a multi-university experiment using rodents to explore human health problems\u2014particularly degradation of eyesight\u2014during prolonged space voyages. Astronauts stand to benefit the most initially, but\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Delp,\n\n\n\n one of the principal researchers, told reporters there could be longer-term benefits for patients with various eye diseases.\n\nHewlett Packard Enterprise Co.\n\n\n , as reported earlier, is sending the first commercial supercomputer outside the atmosphere. And U.S. Army researchers will dissect the performance of a tactical, super-flexible surveillance satellite intended to beam images to troops on the ground within two minutes of receiving a request.\nThis mission demonstrates the space station\u2019s function as \u201can innovative platform\u201d for cutting-edge research in diverse disciplines,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gregory Johnson,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut who now heads an organization helping the National Aeronautics and Space Administration maximize research on the space station, told reporters during a press conference Sunday.\nNASA is emphasizing the breadth and value of scientific work under way on the station. Making that case is vital for proponents who want to keep the international orbiting laboratory\u2014assembled at a cost of roughly $100 billion\u2014operating through most of the next decade.\nWhite House officials and NASA\u2019s current leadership, headed by a holdover from President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration, seek to transform the station into a thriving commercial platform. Industry officials say that requires demonstrating the promise of research conducted in the microgravity of space.\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n hasn\u2019t yet nominated a NASA chief or No. 2 agency administrator.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Bolden,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s last permanent administrator, last fall complained about what he described as undue emphasis on lower costs and increased availability of launch services to get to the station. Speaking at a conference in Long Beach, Calif., he urged a shift to emphasizing a \u201cstable, sustainable on-orbit environment\u201d for entrepreneurs and companies intent on developing businesses in space.\nNASA has related programs under way to boost private investment in research projects in orbit. But increasingly, agency officials hope to use experiments on the manifest of such cargo launches to showcase acceleration of research.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A successful cargo launch by SpaceX, the company\u2019s 12th such mission to the international space station, highlights the steady expansion of scientific research on the orbiting laboratory. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Cargo Mission Demonstrates Increasing Research on Space Station (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7495",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-cargo-mission-demonstrates-increasing-research-on-space-station-1502704804?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=116",
        "text": "Unlike earlier cargo deliveries, the focus of the launch from the Kennedy Space Center was less on the anticipated feats of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.\u2019s partly reusable Falcon 9 rocket than on the contents of the Dragon capsule. Before launch, one senior NASA official told reporters experiments amounted to a record 75% of the cargo\u2019s overall weight.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt sets a new bar for the amount of research we\u2019ve been able to get\u201d on a cargo flight, said Dan Hartman, deputy manager of the international space station. He told reporters over the weekend that some 85 new experiments are expected to launch through January 2018.\n\n\nAt 12:31 p.m. local time, a modified Falcon 9 with slightly more thrust than earlier versions lifted off into mostly clear skies, reached supersonic speed in roughly one minute and the main engines shut off as designed about 90 seconds later. The upper stage propelled the capsule into its planned orbit, even as he rocket\u2019s lower stage gently landed vertically back on earth.\nTom Praderio, a SpaceX engineer narrating the launch on the company\u2019s website, called it \u201cyet another picture perfect landing.\u201d\nMonday\u2019s launch marked the 14th time SpaceX has managed to safely return that portion of the booster for refurbishment for a subsequent flight. \nBiological experiments on board included one sponsored by the foundation set up by actor Michael J. Fox, targeting potential genetic causes of Parkinson\u2019s disease.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Eli Lilly Co.\n\n\n is testing whether freeze-drying pharmaceuticals can prolong their shelf life, and a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n scientist is delving into how roundworm genes react to prolonged radiation exposure.\nA Florida State University team is part of a multi-university experiment using rodents to explore human health problems\u2014particularly degradation of eyesight\u2014during prolonged space voyages. Astronauts stand to benefit the most initially, but\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Delp,\n\n\n\n one of the principal researchers, told reporters there could be longer-term benefits for patients with various eye diseases.\n\nHewlett Packard Enterprise Co.\n\n\n , as reported earlier, is sending the first commercial supercomputer outside the atmosphere. And U.S. Army researchers will dissect the performance of a tactical, super-flexible surveillance satellite intended to beam images to troops on the ground within two minutes of receiving a request.\nThis mission demonstrates the space station\u2019s function as \u201can innovative platform\u201d for cutting-edge research in diverse disciplines,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gregory Johnson,\n\n\n\n a former astronaut who now heads an organization helping the National Aeronautics and Space Administration maximize research on the space station, told reporters during a press conference Sunday.\nNASA is emphasizing the breadth and value of scientific work under way on the station. Making that case is vital for proponents who want to keep the international orbiting laboratory\u2014assembled at a cost of roughly $100 billion\u2014operating through most of the next decade.\nWhite House officials and NASA\u2019s current leadership, headed by a holdover from President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\u2019s\n\n\n\n administration, seek to transform the station into a thriving commercial platform. Industry officials say that requires demonstrating the promise of research conducted in the microgravity of space.\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n hasn\u2019t yet nominated a NASA chief or No. 2 agency administrator.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Bolden,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s last permanent administrator, last fall complained about what he described as undue emphasis on lower costs and increased availability of launch services to get to the station. Speaking at a conference in Long Beach, Calif., he urged a shift to emphasizing a \u201cstable, sustainable on-orbit environment\u201d for entrepreneurs and companies intent on developing businesses in space.\nNASA has related programs under way to boost private investment in research projects in orbit. But increasingly, agency officials hope to use experiments on the manifest of such cargo launches to showcase acceleration of research.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A successful cargo launch by SpaceX, the company\u2019s 12th such mission to the international space station, highlights the steady expansion of scientific research on the orbiting laboratory. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk\u2019s Amped-Up Timetable for Mars Spaceship Contrasts With Delays for NASA Capsules (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7496",
        "date": "2019-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/musks-amped-up-timetable-for-mars-spaceship-contrasts-with-delays-for-nasa-capsules-11569807210?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=53",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s announcement over the weekend sketched out a superambitious timetable for building and testing a privately funded, behemoth rocket intended to take people to the moon and eventually to Mars. But even before details emerged, the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration appeared to publicly rebuke Mr. Musk for extensive delays on a technically less-ambitious federal effort, much closer to Earth, aimed at transporting U.S. astronauts to and from the international space station.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Mars-oriented project includes a stainless-steel rocket, called Starship, reaching some 40 stories tall when mated with a booster and featuring fins at the nose as well as near the engine nozzles at the bottom. The design, including in-space refueling capabilities, is an evolution of preliminary versions Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has unveiled in recent years, with more specifics on timing. \nOn Saturday, Mr. Musk laid out a rapid timetable, sped up from his earlier projections and faster than any major space endeavor in memory. The hurry-up approach is particularly unusual considering the multibillion-dollar project hasn\u2019t yet flown a single full-scale prototype and its engineers haven\u2019t publicly disclosed what type of life-support systems they will employ.\n\n\nOver the years, both supporters and critics have acknowledged Mr. Musk\u2019s time lines often are intended more as tools to push employees and managers than firm or reliable deadlines.\nThis time, however, the purported timetable elicited an uncharacteristically sharp response from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n the administrator of NASA, one of SpaceX\u2019s biggest customers. Before the SpaceX event for media and employees at its Texas facility, Mr. Bridenstine said in a message on Twitter that he was looking forward to the announcement. \u201cIn the meantime,\u201d the NASA chief said SpaceX\u2019s commercial-crew capsule to take astronauts\u00a0to the orbiting international laboratory \u201cis years behind schedule\u201d and \u201cNASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the taxpayers.\u201d\nMr. Bridenstine added: \u201cIt\u2019s time to deliver.\u201d\nSpaceX\u2019s human-rated Dragon capsule is expected to go into service in 2020\u2014more than three years behind schedule\u2014but potentially barely months ahead of Starship\u2019s possible initial orbital test mission with a crew.\nDuring a freewheeling presentation and subsequent question-and-answer session, Mr. Musk said the company has earmarked the vast majority of its efforts delivering on existing programs, especially the agency\u2019s crewed capsule. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk has stoked excitement about accelerated development of private deep-space vehicles by projecting his proposed megarocket targeting Mars could take humans on an orbital test flight around Earth as soon as next year. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk\u2019s Amped-Up Timetable for Mars Spaceship Contrasts With Delays for NASA Capsules (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7497",
        "date": "2019-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/musks-amped-up-timetable-for-mars-spaceship-contrasts-with-delays-for-nasa-capsules-11569807210?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=50",
        "text": "Mr. Musk\u2019s announcement over the weekend sketched out a superambitious timetable for building and testing a privately funded, behemoth rocket intended to take people to the moon and eventually to Mars. But even before details emerged, the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration appeared to publicly rebuke Mr. Musk for extensive delays on a technically less-ambitious federal effort, much closer to Earth, aimed at transporting U.S. astronauts to and from the international space station.\nMr. Musk\u2019s Mars-oriented project includes a stainless-steel rocket, called Starship, reaching some 40 stories tall when mated with a booster and featuring fins at the nose as well as near the engine nozzles at the bottom. The design, including in-space refueling capabilities, is an evolution of preliminary versions Mr. Musk\u2019s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has unveiled in recent years, with more specifics on timing. \nOn Saturday, Mr. Musk laid out a rapid timetable, sped up from his earlier projections and faster than any major space endeavor in memory. The hurry-up approach is particularly unusual considering the multibillion-dollar project hasn\u2019t yet flown a single full-scale prototype and its engineers haven\u2019t publicly disclosed what type of life-support systems they will employ.\n\n\nOver the years, both supporters and critics have acknowledged Mr. Musk\u2019s time lines often are intended more as tools to push employees and managers than firm or reliable deadlines.\nThis time, however, the purported timetable elicited an uncharacteristically sharp response from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Bridenstine,\n\n\n\n the administrator of NASA, one of SpaceX\u2019s biggest customers. Before the SpaceX event for media and employees at its Texas facility, Mr. Bridenstine said in a message on Twitter that he was looking forward to the announcement. \u201cIn the meantime,\u201d the NASA chief said SpaceX\u2019s commercial-crew capsule to take astronauts\u00a0to the orbiting international laboratory \u201cis years behind schedule\u201d and \u201cNASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the taxpayers.\u201d\nMr. Bridenstine added: \u201cIt\u2019s time to deliver.\u201d\nSpaceX\u2019s human-rated Dragon capsule is expected to go into service in 2020\u2014more than three years behind schedule\u2014but potentially barely months ahead of Starship\u2019s possible initial orbital test mission with a crew.\nDuring a freewheeling presentation and subsequent question-and-answer session, Mr. Musk said the company has earmarked the vast majority of its efforts delivering on existing programs, especially the agency\u2019s crewed capsule. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk has stoked excitement about accelerated development of private deep-space vehicles by projecting his proposed megarocket targeting Mars could take humans on an orbital test flight around Earth as soon as next year. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Looks to Reserve More Seats on Russian Spacecraft (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7498",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-looks-to-reserve-more-seats-on-russian-spacecraft-for-u-s-astronauts-1484796879?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=27",
        "text": "Initially the deadline for the flights was 2015.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have promised to start ferrying astronauts to the international orbiting laboratory by 2018 at the latest.\u00a0At this point, NASA has secured Russian seats through the end of that year.\nNASA\u2019s latest document goes further than the agency has before in conceding the starting date for operational flights may continue to slip. Three additional seats that may be purchased for spring 2019 missions would provide \u201cprimary or backup transportation capability,\u201d according to the agency.\n\n\nRelated Trump in Space: Transition Focuses on Private-Public Initiatives SpaceX Resumes Rocket Launches by Lofting Cluster of Iridium Satellites \n\n\nIn an unusual twist, the seats would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\n\n\nBut signals that NASA is moving toward extending its reliance on Russian rockets and capsules is bound to cause consternation and prompt criticism on Capitol Hill. The price Russia charges for a single seat has averaged $81 million, but that could rise.\nStill, there is no other way for NASA to get its astronauts into orbit, or fly them back to Earth, since the agency retired its space-shuttle fleet six years ago.\nWhile the U.S. increases its seats in the Russian capsules, Moscow is reducing the number of its astronauts slated to be on the space station in coming years. Cutting its permanent crew complement to two from the typical three suggests support for the space station is waning among Russian authorities. NASA, by contrast, hopes to pick up some of those slots as part of its campaign to step up scientific activity onboard the station.\nTechnical problems encountered by the two American companies have been well publicized over the years, ranging from leaking capsules to propulsion issues. NASA\u2019s document noted that without assured transportation for U.S. crews to the station, the orbiting laboratory could stop functioning.\nDespite the pressure, senior managers at both companies have stressed they won\u2019t fly manned capsules until all safety issues are resolved.\nNASA\u2019s announcement doesn\u2019t commit the agency to procuring the extra seats, but it does reserve that option for President-elect\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration. Historically, Russian officials have demanded a three-year lead time for providing seats to NASA.\nLast week, NASA\u2019s safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that some technical issues remain challenging and of concern. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan\u00a0be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The American space agency admits that U.S.-built spacecraft won\u2019t be ready to routinely transport astronauts into orbit by 2018 as promised. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Looks to Reserve More Seats on Russian Spacecraft (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7499",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-looks-to-reserve-more-seats-on-russian-spacecraft-for-u-s-astronauts-1484796879?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=103",
        "text": "Initially the deadline for the flights was 2015.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have promised to start ferrying astronauts to the international orbiting laboratory by 2018 at the latest.\u00a0At this point, NASA has secured Russian seats through the end of that year.\nNASA\u2019s latest document goes further than the agency has before in conceding the starting date for operational flights may continue to slip. Three additional seats that may be purchased for spring 2019 missions would provide \u201cprimary or backup transportation capability,\u201d according to the agency.\n\n\nRelated Trump in Space: Transition Focuses on Private-Public Initiatives SpaceX Resumes Rocket Launches by Lofting Cluster of Iridium Satellites \n\n\nIn an unusual twist, the seats would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\n\n\nBut signals that NASA is moving toward extending its reliance on Russian rockets and capsules is bound to cause consternation and prompt criticism on Capitol Hill. The price Russia charges for a single seat has averaged $81 million, but that could rise.\nStill, there is no other way for NASA to get its astronauts into orbit, or fly them back to Earth, since the agency retired its space-shuttle fleet six years ago.\nWhile the U.S. increases its seats in the Russian capsules, Moscow is reducing the number of its astronauts slated to be on the space station in coming years. Cutting its permanent crew complement to two from the typical three suggests support for the space station is waning among Russian authorities. NASA, by contrast, hopes to pick up some of those slots as part of its campaign to step up scientific activity onboard the station.\nTechnical problems encountered by the two American companies have been well publicized over the years, ranging from leaking capsules to propulsion issues. NASA\u2019s document noted that without assured transportation for U.S. crews to the station, the orbiting laboratory could stop functioning.\nDespite the pressure, senior managers at both companies have stressed they won\u2019t fly manned capsules until all safety issues are resolved.\nNASA\u2019s announcement doesn\u2019t commit the agency to procuring the extra seats, but it does reserve that option for President-elect\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration. Historically, Russian officials have demanded a three-year lead time for providing seats to NASA.\nLast week, NASA\u2019s safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that some technical issues remain challenging and of concern. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan\u00a0be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The American space agency admits that U.S.-built spacecraft won\u2019t be ready to routinely transport astronauts into orbit by 2018 as promised. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Looks to Reserve More Seats on Russian Spacecraft (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7500",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-looks-to-reserve-more-seats-on-russian-spacecraft-for-u-s-astronauts-1484796879?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=89",
        "text": "Initially the deadline for the flights was 2015.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have promised to start ferrying astronauts to the international orbiting laboratory by 2018 at the latest.\u00a0At this point, NASA has secured Russian seats through the end of that year.\nNASA\u2019s latest document goes further than the agency has before in conceding the starting date for operational flights may continue to slip. Three additional seats that may be purchased for spring 2019 missions would provide \u201cprimary or backup transportation capability,\u201d according to the agency.\n\n\nRelated Trump in Space: Transition Focuses on Private-Public Initiatives SpaceX Resumes Rocket Launches by Lofting Cluster of Iridium Satellites \n\n\nIn an unusual twist, the seats would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\n\n\nBut signals that NASA is moving toward extending its reliance on Russian rockets and capsules is bound to cause consternation and prompt criticism on Capitol Hill. The price Russia charges for a single seat has averaged $81 million, but that could rise.\nStill, there is no other way for NASA to get its astronauts into orbit, or fly them back to Earth, since the agency retired its space-shuttle fleet six years ago.\nWhile the U.S. increases its seats in the Russian capsules, Moscow is reducing the number of its astronauts slated to be on the space station in coming years. Cutting its permanent crew complement to two from the typical three suggests support for the space station is waning among Russian authorities. NASA, by contrast, hopes to pick up some of those slots as part of its campaign to step up scientific activity onboard the station.\nTechnical problems encountered by the two American companies have been well publicized over the years, ranging from leaking capsules to propulsion issues. NASA\u2019s document noted that without assured transportation for U.S. crews to the station, the orbiting laboratory could stop functioning.\nDespite the pressure, senior managers at both companies have stressed they won\u2019t fly manned capsules until all safety issues are resolved.\nNASA\u2019s announcement doesn\u2019t commit the agency to procuring the extra seats, but it does reserve that option for President-elect\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration. Historically, Russian officials have demanded a three-year lead time for providing seats to NASA.\nLast week, NASA\u2019s safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that some technical issues remain challenging and of concern. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan\u00a0be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The American space agency admits that U.S.-built spacecraft won\u2019t be ready to routinely transport astronauts into orbit by 2018 as promised. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Looks to Reserve More Seats on Russian Spacecraft (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7501",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-looks-to-reserve-more-seats-on-russian-spacecraft-for-u-s-astronauts-1484796879?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=133",
        "text": "Initially the deadline for the flights was 2015.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. have promised to start ferrying astronauts to the international orbiting laboratory by 2018 at the latest.\u00a0At this point, NASA has secured Russian seats through the end of that year.\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s latest document goes further than the agency has before in conceding the starting date for operational flights may continue to slip. Three additional seats that may be purchased for spring 2019 missions would provide \u201cprimary or backup transportation capability,\u201d according to the agency.\n\n\nRelated Trump in Space: Transition Focuses on Private-Public Initiatives SpaceX Resumes Rocket Launches by Lofting Cluster of Iridium Satellites \n\n\nIn an unusual twist, the seats would be purchased from Boeing, which acquired them as part of a settlement with Russian space authorities in an unrelated legal dispute.\n\n\nBut signals that NASA is moving toward extending its reliance on Russian rockets and capsules is bound to cause consternation and prompt criticism on Capitol Hill. The price Russia charges for a single seat has averaged $81 million, but that could rise.\nStill, there is no other way for NASA to get its astronauts into orbit, or fly them back to Earth, since the agency retired its space-shuttle fleet six years ago.\nWhile the U.S. increases its seats in the Russian capsules, Moscow is reducing the number of its astronauts slated to be on the space station in coming years. Cutting its permanent crew complement to two from the typical three suggests support for the space station is waning among Russian authorities. NASA, by contrast, hopes to pick up some of those slots as part of its campaign to step up scientific activity onboard the station.\nTechnical problems encountered by the two American companies have been well publicized over the years, ranging from leaking capsules to propulsion issues. NASA\u2019s document noted that without assured transportation for U.S. crews to the station, the orbiting laboratory could stop functioning.\nDespite the pressure, senior managers at both companies have stressed they won\u2019t fly manned capsules until all safety issues are resolved.\nNASA\u2019s announcement doesn\u2019t commit the agency to procuring the extra seats, but it does reserve that option for President-elect\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n administration. Historically, Russian officials have demanded a three-year lead time for providing seats to NASA.\nLast week, NASA\u2019s safety watchdogs issued a report indicating that some technical issues remain challenging and of concern. Whether the necessary work to mitigate or eliminate those hazards \u201ccan\u00a0be accomplished without a substantial slip in the schedule remains to be seen,\u201d according to the advisory board\u2019s report.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The American space agency admits that U.S.-built spacecraft won\u2019t be ready to routinely transport astronauts into orbit by 2018 as promised. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Time Elon Musk Is Hosting \u2018SNL\u2019 and How to Watch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7502",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-time-elon-musk-is-hosting-snl-and-how-to-watch-11620503117?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=31",
        "text": "He also has become well-known for his prolific tweets and passion for cryptocurrencies.\n\n\n\n\nHere is what you need to know about Mr. Musk and the show.\n\n\nWhat time is Elon Musk hosting \u2018SNL\u2019?\n\u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d will air live on NBC at 11:30 p.m. ET from 30 Rockefeller Plaza\u2019s studio 8H in New York.\nHow can I watch Saturday Night Live?\nThe program will air on NBC and its streaming platform Peacock. The episode will also be available to stream live on other platforms (depending on region) including Hulu With Live TV, YouTube TV and AT&T TV.\nNBC said Saturday that, for the first time, the show would be livestreamed internationally via YouTube in more than 100 countries, including Australia, Brazil and South Africa. Mr. Musk tweeted the link to watch the show outside the U.S.\n\u201cSNL\u201d episodes are available to stream the next day on Hulu (generally by noon ET) as well as on Peacock. Clips will also be accessible on SNL\u2019s YouTube channel.\nWho is Elon Musk?\nMr. Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, in 2002. He also has various other interests, including co-founding brain-computer startup Neuralink.\nIn March, Mr. Musk picked up a new job title: Technoking of Tesla. The move came after Tesla\u2019s $1.5 billion investment in bitcoin.\nMr. Musk, like other entrepreneurs, has promoted cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and dogecoin. In April, Mr. Musk tweeted \u201cDoge Barking at the Moon.\u201d His cryptic comments prompted Dogecoin\u2019s price and popularity to skyrocket.\nSo far this year, dogecoin\u2014a cryptocurrency that was set up as a joke and serves no purpose\u2014has rallied by more than 12,000%. Investors are closely following how dogecoin\u2019s price will react to Mr. Musk\u2019s appearance.\nWhat do we know about the episode so far?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk will be joined by Miley Cyrus, who will be making her sixth official appearance as the musical guest. Earlier this week, the SNL host took to his\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account asking for sketch ideas, which have ranged from Dogecoin to \u201cBaby Shark Tank.\u201d\nCast member Michael Che said earlier this week on \u201cThe Ellen DeGeneres Show\u201d that Mr. Musk\u2019s hosting role is \u201cgoing to be interesting.\u201d Cast member and comedian Pete Davidson told Seth Meyers on Tuesday night, \u201cI don\u2019t know why people are freaking out.\u201d\nWrite to Eleanore Park at Eleanore.Park@wsj.com How and where you can watch the show Saturday, featuring the tech billionaire and Miley Cyrus. ",
        "author": "Eleanore Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "Across the U.S., the Spaceport Race Is On (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7503",
        "date": "2018-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/across-the-u-s-the-spaceport-race-is-on-1533999600?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=90",
        "text": "Companies like Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin LLC and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, are investing millions of dollars and trying to lead the way in a space gold rush. The Trump administration has emphasized a growing role for the private sector in space exploration and this week presented a plan for a sixth military branch dedicated to space.\n\n\n\n\nLocal and state officials across the U.S. are trying to get in on the action. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA rendering of Spaceport Camden.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Spaceport Camden\n \n\n\n\nThere are now 10 licensed commercial spaceports in the U.S., from Alaska to Florida, double the number in 2004. Some of them grew out of existing government launch sites. At least two other proposed spaceports are under federal review: Spaceport Camden and Spaceport Colorado, in Adams County, Colo.\n\n\nDespite the enthusiasm, the commercial sector is still nascent. Some facilities have hosted only a few launches, or none at all.\n\u201cI would caution against irrational exuberance,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Slazer,\n\n\n\n vice president of space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group.\nThe global space industry, including government and commercial activities, reached $384 billion in 2017, compared with $207 billion in 2007, according to Space Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group. It could top $1.1 trillion by 2040, Morgan Stanley Research estimated last year. The U.S. space industry reached $158 billion in 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.\nPrivate investment in commercial space companies has swelled in the past decade, reaching a record $3.9 billion world-wide in 2017, according to investment firm Space Angels.\n\u201cThe commercial sector is really driving the industry,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daniel Hicks,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Spaceport America, a commercial site in New Mexico. \u201cIt\u2019s an exciting time.\u201d\nOne expanding area: the creation of small rockets that can lift miniature satellites to low-earth orbit to provide internet coverage and other services.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRocket Lab, a Huntington Beach, Calif., startup focused on such launches, is considering contracting with spaceports in Alaska, California, Florida or Virginia for a U.S. launch site, said Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Beck.\n\n\n\n A key priority is finding \u201ca site that can support a relatively high launch frequency\u201d of at least once a month, he said. The company expects to announce its decision later this month.\nFlorida\u2019s top contender, Cape Canaveral Spaceport\u2014which encompasses the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station\u2014is one of the busiest existing facilities. Though the region took a hit with the end of the U.S. space shuttle program in 2011, it is now bustling with commercial activity.\nThe spaceport offers a rich aerospace history, plenty of launch infrastructure and a supply of workers\u2014benefits companies seek, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dale Ketcham,\n\n\n\n a vice president at Space Florida, the state\u2019s spaceport authority.\nSpaceX, which has created about 630 jobs in the area, launches rockets from Cape Canaveral and has outlined plans to build a booster-processing facility and launch-control center there. Blue Origin is building a $200 million rocket-manufacturing plant that is projected to create 330 jobs and plans to add a new testing facility.\nThe return on spaceport investments can be slow. Spaceport America in New Mexico\u2014a $220 million facility financed by the state and local counties\u2014stalled when its main tenant, Virgin Galactic, lost a rocket-powered aircraft in a 2014 crash.\n\n\n Taking OffA look at some of the top commercial spaceports in the U.S. (Note: Launches include ones licensed and permitted by the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Source: Federal Aviation Administration)FLORIDA; Current site(s): Cape Canaveral Spaceport, Cecil Field Spaceport (Jacksonville); First launch: 1989; Total launches: 161TEXAS; Current site(s): Midland International Air and Space Port, Houston Spaceport; First launch: 2006; Total launches: 26CALIFORNIA; Current site(s): California Spaceport (Vandenberg Air Force Base), Mojave Air and Space Port; First launch: 1989; Total launches: 62VIRGINIA; Current site(s): Wallops Flight Facility, home to Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport; First launch: 1993; Total launches: 15Photos: Associated Press; Reuters; Getty Images; European Pressphoto Agency\n\n\nBut Mr. Hicks said the payoff is finally arriving. Virgin is beginning to move staff to New Mexico\u2014about 40 so far, with another 100 or so to come\u2014as the company prepares to send passengers to suborbital flight. The spaceport also has landed tenants such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and UP Aerospace Inc.\nAs the federal government made clear in the past decade that it would increasingly rely on the private sector for space programs, officials in Houston, home to the Jo There are now 10 licensed commercial spaceports in the U.S., double the number in 2004, as local and state officials try to draw business from companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. ",
        "author": "Arian Campo-Flores"
    },
    {
        "title": "FCC Awards $9.2 Billion for Construction of Rural Broadband Networks (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7504",
        "date": "2020-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-awards-9-2-billion-for-construction-of-rural-broadband-networks-11607377472?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=32",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019m thrilled with the incredible success of this auction, which brings welcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans who for too long have been on the wrong side of the digital divide. They now stand to gain access to high-speed, high-quality broadband service,\u201d said FCC Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ajit Pai.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\nThe providers have 10 years to build the networks, with incentives to do so sooner rather than later. The FCC said the auction covered more than five million homes and businesses in 49 states. In about 85% of locations, the providers promised ultrafast \u201cgigabit\u201d speed, the agency said. Most of the remaining locations would see download speeds of at least 100 megabits a second, capable of large downloads.\n\n\nOf the 180 companies that made successful bids, LTD Broadband LLC secured the most funding\u2014about $1.3 billion\u2014to serve more than 500,000 homes and businesses. The company based in Las Vegas has primarily used tower-mounted, \u201cfixed wireless\u201d technology. The federal funds will allow it to vastly expand its relatively small fiber-optic cable offering, Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Corey Hauer\n\n\n\n said in an interview.\n\u201cWe\u2019re very excited about being able to serve those customers that we previously had had to say \u2018no\u2019 to,\u201d said Mr. Hauer. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be laying a lot of fiber.\u201d \nCharter, operator of the Spectrum brand, secured about $1.2 billion to serve more than one million locations across 24 states. A consortium of rural electric companies won about $1.1 billion.\nOther entrants offering new, less-tested technologies also won funding, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is launching a network of low-Earth-orbiting satellites. SpaceX sought eligibility for the auction over some objections from competitors using more established technologies, and secured $885 million to serve locations across 35 states.\nWindstream\u2019s vice president of federal government affairs,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Whitehead,\n\n\n\n expressed concern that a few of the top winners \u201cappear to be planning to deploy almost entirely novel technologies: gigabit fixed wireless and low-earth orbit satellite.\u201d\n\u201cMany rural Americans may be left out to dry,\u201d he said in a written statement, cautioning against \u201ctreating rural America as a science project\u201d in future auctions.\nSpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. A Charter spokeswoman declined to comment, citing rules that restrict auction participants from discussing bids.\nAmong states receiving funding, California topped the list with $695 million, followed by Mississippi at $495 million.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n As many schools around the country start the year virtually, residents in rural communities such as those in West Virginia are asking why they don\u2019t have reliable Internet service. The recent bankruptcy of Frontier Communications provides insight into how U.S. broadband policies have fallen short for many Americans. Photo Illustration: Carlos Waters/ Video: Jake Nicol/",
        "author": "Ryan Tracy"
    },
    {
        "title": "FCC Awards $9.2 Billion for Construction of Rural Broadband Networks (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7505",
        "date": "2020-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-awards-9-2-billion-for-construction-of-rural-broadband-networks-11607377472?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=42",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019m thrilled with the incredible success of this auction, which brings welcome news to millions of unconnected rural Americans who for too long have been on the wrong side of the digital divide. They now stand to gain access to high-speed, high-quality broadband service,\u201d said FCC Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ajit Pai.\n\n\n\n \nThe providers have 10 years to build the networks, with incentives to do so sooner rather than later. The FCC said the auction covered more than five million homes and businesses in 49 states. In about 85% of locations, the providers promised ultrafast \u201cgigabit\u201d speed, the agency said. Most of the remaining locations would see download speeds of at least 100 megabits a second, capable of large downloads.\n\n\nOf the 180 companies that made successful bids, LTD Broadband LLC secured the most funding\u2014about $1.3 billion\u2014to serve more than 500,000 homes and businesses. The company based in Las Vegas has primarily used tower-mounted, \u201cfixed wireless\u201d technology. The federal funds will allow it to vastly expand its relatively small fiber-optic cable offering, Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Corey Hauer\n\n\n\n said in an interview.\n\u201cWe\u2019re very excited about being able to serve those customers that we previously had had to say \u2018no\u2019 to,\u201d said Mr. Hauer. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be laying a lot of fiber.\u201d \nCharter, operator of the Spectrum brand, secured about $1.2 billion to serve more than one million locations across 24 states. A consortium of rural electric companies won about $1.1 billion.\nOther entrants offering new, less-tested technologies also won funding, including Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which is launching a network of low-Earth-orbiting satellites. SpaceX sought eligibility for the auction over some objections from competitors using more established technologies, and secured $885 million to serve locations across 35 states.\nWindstream\u2019s vice president of federal government affairs,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Whitehead,\n\n\n\n expressed concern that a few of the top winners \u201cappear to be planning to deploy almost entirely novel technologies: gigabit fixed wireless and low-earth orbit satellite.\u201d\n\u201cMany rural Americans may be left out to dry,\u201d he said in a written statement, cautioning against \u201ctreating rural America as a science project\u201d in future auctions.\nSpaceX didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment. A Charter spokeswoman declined to comment, citing rules that restrict auction participants from discussing bids.\nAmong states receiving funding, California topped the list with $695 million, followed by Mississippi at $495 million.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n As many schools around the country start the year virtually, residents in rural communities such as those in West Virginia are asking why they don\u2019t have reliable Internet service. The recent bankruptcy of Frontier Communications provides insight into how U.S. broadband policies have fallen short for many Americans. Photo Illustration: Carlos Waters/ Video: Jake Nicol/",
        "author": "Ryan Tracy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dilhan Eryurt\u2019s Legacy and Contributions to the Apollo 11 Moon Landing (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7506",
        "date": "2020-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dilhan-eryurts-legacy-and-contributions-to-the-apollo-11-moon-landing-11595269748?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=43",
        "text": "When did Ms. Eryurt join NASA and how did her research contribute to the Apollo 11 mission? In 1959, Dr. Eryurt moved to Canada where she worked with Mr. Cameron on a scholarship from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Eventually, Dr. Eryurt\u2019s career led her to Goddard Institute for Space Studies where her research proved crucial for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Her work surfaced previously unidentified facts about the sun, revealing that it had been much brighter and warmer in the past relative to its current position. Dr. Eryurt\u2019s findings helped shape the scientific and engineering research goals for future space mission by presenting data on the sun\u2019s effect on the lunar environment. In 1969, Ms. Eryurt was awarded the Apollo Achievement Award for her significant contribution to Apollo 11\u2019s mission as well as lunar exploration that ensued.\nWhy did Google celebrate Dilhan Eryurt? Google marked the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing by celebrating Dr. Eryurt. The technology firm honored her research, which contributed to NASA\u2019s moon landing. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are most commonly associated with the historic achievement of taking the first steps on the moon, Dr. Eryurt\u2019s research on the brightness of the sun made the monumental moment possible. The finding that the sun was cooling offered insight and data to NASA engineers to create models of the sun\u2019s and lunar environment interactions necessary for the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies sent Dr. Eryurt o go work at the University of California where her research focused on stellar astrophysics, specifically the formation of main-sequence stars.\nDeath Dr. Eryurt died of a heart attack on Sept. 13, 2012, in Ankara, Turkey. Today marks the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Today, Google is honoring astrophysicist Dilhan Eryurt for her significant contributions to the historic moon landing. ",
        "author": "Eleanore Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dilhan Eryurt\u2019s Legacy and Contributions to the Apollo 11 Moon Landing (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7507",
        "date": "2020-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dilhan-eryurts-legacy-and-contributions-to-the-apollo-11-moon-landing-11595269748?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=51",
        "text": "When did Ms. Eryurt join NASA and how did her research contribute to the Apollo 11 mission? In 1959, Dr. Eryurt moved to Canada where she worked with Mr. Cameron on a scholarship from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Eventually, Dr. Eryurt\u2019s career led her to Goddard Institute for Space Studies where her research proved crucial for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Her work surfaced previously unidentified facts about the sun, revealing that it had been much brighter and warmer in the past relative to its current position. Dr. Eryurt\u2019s findings helped shape the scientific and engineering research goals for future space mission by presenting data on the sun\u2019s effect on the lunar environment. In 1969, Ms. Eryurt was awarded the Apollo Achievement Award for her significant contribution to Apollo 11\u2019s mission as well as lunar exploration that ensued.\nWhy did Google celebrate Dilhan Eryurt? \n\n\n\nGoogle marked the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing by celebrating Dr. Eryurt. The technology firm honored her research, which contributed to NASA\u2019s moon landing. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are most commonly associated with the historic achievement of taking the first steps on the moon, Dr. Eryurt\u2019s research on the brightness of the sun made the monumental moment possible. The finding that the sun was cooling offered insight and data to NASA engineers to create models of the sun\u2019s and lunar environment interactions necessary for the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\nNASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies sent Dr. Eryurt o go work at the University of California where her research focused on stellar astrophysics, specifically the formation of main-sequence stars.\nDeath Dr. Eryurt died of a heart attack on Sept. 13, 2012, in Ankara, Turkey. Today marks the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Today, Google is honoring astrophysicist Dilhan Eryurt for her significant contributions to the historic moon landing. ",
        "author": "Eleanore Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Tries Again for the First All-Female Spacewalk (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7508",
        "date": "2019-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-tries-again-for-the-first-all-female-spacewalk-11571320145?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=50",
        "text": "Earlier this year, a spacewalk featuring Ms. Koch and NASA astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anne McClain\n\n\n\n was scheduled to be the first all-female walk, but plans were scrapped when NASA said it didn\u2019t have a spacesuit available in Ms. McClain\u2019s size. Ms. McClain\u2019s space mission ended this summer and she returned to Earth, but in September, Ms. Meir arrived at the International Space Station, joining Ms. Koch as the only other woman on board. Ms. Meir is now scheduled to join Ms. Koch on a spacewalk, NASA said.\nMs. Koch and Ms. Meir spoke on a video from the space station shown at a NASA media event previewing the spacewalks with reporters. \u201cWe don\u2019t even really think about it on a daily basis. It\u2019s just normal. We\u2019re part of the team. It\u2019s really nice to see how far we\u2019ve come,\u201d Ms. Meir said of their approaching all-female milestone.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Koch, who arrived at the space station March 14, is also on track to set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. Currently scheduled to be in orbit for 328 days, she would eclipse former NASA astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peggy Whitson\u2019s\n\n\n\n record of 288 days next year. The longest single spaceflight by a NASA astronaut was 340 days, set by former NASA astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Kelly.\n\n\n\n \n\n\nA properly fitting spacesuit is key to allowing for the range of motion needed to perform the work on spacewalk missions, according to NASA. The spacesuits, or Extravehicular Mobility Units, weigh from 350 to 500 pounds depending on the equipment and provide air and temperature controls, battery power, communications, and protection from radiation and space debris.\n\n\nOn Oct. 6, Ms. Koch and fellow NASA astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Morgan\n\n\n\n completed the first of five spacewalks scheduled for this month\u2014a seven-hour, one-minute operation to replace nickel-hydrogen batteries with newer, more powerful lithium-ion ones on the outside of the International Space Station. On Oct. 11, Ms. Koch and Mr. Morgan completed a six-hour and 45-minute spacewalk to continue work on the batteries.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA astronaut Anne McClain during a spacewalk on March 22\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMs. Koch and Ms. Meir were originally scheduled to perform the walk Oct. 21 to make upgrades to the batteries, but are instead set to replace a faulty power unit. The unit\u2019s failure \u201chas no impact on the crew\u2019s safety or ongoing laboratory experiments,\u201d but prevents a new lithium-ion battery installed earlier this month from providing additional station power, according to NASA.\nMore spacewalks are set to follow those to repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a cosmic ray catcher searching for evidence of \u201cdark matter\u201d in the universe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSince its inception in 1958, NASA has selected 350 astronaut candidates, 57 of whom have been women. Currently, of the 38 active astronauts and 11 candidates in training, 17 are women. All told, 65 women have flown in space, including women from France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Iran, South Korea, Japan, China and Italy.\nNASA is also planning on sending the first woman to the Moon by 2024. On Tuesday, the agency unveiled prototypes of the spacesuits to be used on that mission. NASA spacesuit engineer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kristine Davis\n\n\n\n wore one of the suits with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine describing the suits as being designed to \u201cfit all of our astronauts.\u201d\n\n\nRelated The Nation Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 Reach for the Moon: Four Lives, the Space Race and a Chaotic Decade The New Race to the Moon The Incredible Inventory of Things We\u2019ve Put on the Moon NASA is set to launch the first all-female spacewalk Friday, after canceling it earlier this year because it didn\u2019t have two spacesuits in the right size. ",
        "author": "Taylor Umlauf"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former Astronaut Pleads Guilty in Crash That Killed 2 Young Girls (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7509",
        "date": "2021-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/james-halsell-nasa-sentenced.html",
        "text": "James Halsell Jr., a veteran of five space shuttle missions, was sentenced to four years in prison and 10 years\u2019 probation. James Halsell Jr., a veteran of five space shuttle missions, was sentenced to four years in prison and 10 years\u2019 probation. A former NASA space shuttle commander, who had been indicted on murder and assault charges for his role in a 2016 car crash that killed two young sisters in Alabama, pleaded guilty to lesser charges on Thursday and was sentenced to four years in prison followed by 10 years of probation.",
        "author": "By Azi Paybarah"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Reorganizing Human Spaceflight Division (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7510",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-reorganizing-human-spaceflight-division-as-private-space-industry-expands-11632262883?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=22",
        "text": "The reorganization is \u201cabout helping us as we set the stage for the next 20 years and we are defining NASA\u2019s future in a growing space economy,\u201d agency administrator Bill Nelson said at a briefing Tuesday.\u00a0\nNASA\u2019s role for some space-related activity has been shifting. The agency has sought to foster a broader commercial-space sector it can tap into, and investors and entrepreneurs have been making bets on more business opportunities beyond Earth.\u00a0\n\n\nInstead of producing its own replacement for the new-retired space shuttle, the agency has used rockets from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n \u2018s SpaceX to resupply the International Space Station with cargo. SpaceX has flown astronauts to and from the space station.\nThe agency is also looking to the private sector to develop destinations in orbit that would replace the space station, drawing interest from such companies as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC, among other space enterprises, according to a document NASA posted to a website regarding that effort.\nSeparately, at a hearing before a House subcommittee focused on space on Tuesday, Robyn Gatens, NASA\u2019s director for the International Space Station, said the agency believes it could save more than $1 billion annually by purchasing services from private space facilities. The agency currently spends up to $4 billion each year on the research station, officials have said.\n\u201cThose savings are important because we can apply those savings to expand our exploration efforts\u201d to the moon, Mars and elsewhere, Ms. Gatens said at the hearing.\nThe agency is now starting to prepare for the transition out of the space station, which is expected to be structurally sound until 2028, although it can be used beyond that year, she said.\nNASA wants to have commercially run destinations available before it moves out of the space station so there isn\u2019t a gap in operations in orbit, according to Ms. Gatens.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com One new unit will focus on projects such as visiting Mars, while the other will manage commercial space activities closer to Earth. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Reorganizing Human Spaceflight Division (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7511",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-reorganizing-human-spaceflight-division-as-private-space-industry-expands-11632262883?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=22",
        "text": "The reorganization is \u201cabout helping us as we set the stage for the next 20 years and we are defining NASA\u2019s future in a growing space economy,\u201d agency administrator Bill Nelson said at a briefing Tuesday.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s role for some space-related activity has been shifting. The agency has sought to foster a broader commercial-space sector it can tap into, and investors and entrepreneurs have been making bets on more business opportunities beyond Earth.\u00a0\n\n\nInstead of producing its own replacement for the new-retired space shuttle, the agency has used rockets from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n \u2018s SpaceX to resupply the International Space Station with cargo. SpaceX has flown astronauts to and from the space station.\nThe agency is also looking to the private sector to develop destinations in orbit that would replace the space station, drawing interest from such companies as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin LLC, among other space enterprises, according to a document NASA posted to a website regarding that effort.\nSeparately, at a hearing before a House subcommittee focused on space on Tuesday, Robyn Gatens, NASA\u2019s director for the International Space Station, said the agency believes it could save more than $1 billion annually by purchasing services from private space facilities. The agency currently spends up to $4 billion each year on the research station, officials have said.\n\u201cThose savings are important because we can apply those savings to expand our exploration efforts\u201d to the moon, Mars and elsewhere, Ms. Gatens said at the hearing.\nThe agency is now starting to prepare for the transition out of the space station, which is expected to be structurally sound until 2028, although it can be used beyond that year, she said.\nNASA wants to have commercially run destinations available before it moves out of the space station so there isn\u2019t a gap in operations in orbit, according to Ms. Gatens.\nWrite to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com One new unit will focus on projects such as visiting Mars, while the other will manage commercial space activities closer to Earth. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neighbors Face Off Over Texas\u2019 Other Lucrative Resource: Water (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7512",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/neighbors-face-off-over-texas-other-lucrative-resource-water-11563286812?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=56",
        "text": "The plan is pitting neighbor against neighbor and rekindling a debate over who should control fresh water in a bone-dry region. Many of the region\u2019s farmers and ranchers depend on income from selling their water to oil producers. Desert towns like Fort Stockton, near the Williams farm, fear their water sources will dry up. \u201cI don\u2019t know why the hell you would want to pipe water out of the desert,\u201d said Kirby Warnock, 67, whose family has owned a ranch near the Williams farm for nearly a century. \u201cIt\u2019s like space shuttle astronauts selling their oxygen. It boggles my mind.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA pipe at a Williams property carries water to an oil rig nearby.\n\n\n\nAnother influential Texas oil family is suing the local water regulator, hoping to limit how much the Williamses can pump. The family investment office of the Cockrells, for whom the University of Texas engineering school is named, is worried over-pumping could deplete water wells on their farm and put their 68,000 pecan trees at risk. For the Williamses, the issue is straightforward: Under Texas law, they can pump water from under their land and use it for whatever commercial purpose they choose, with few limits. Their farm\u2019s main product is alfalfa, used to make hay, which is sold to customers as far away as China. \u201cIf we sell alfalfa to Saudi Arabia or China, it\u2019s basically us exporting water there, so what\u2019s the difference?\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Williams,\n\n\n\n 45, who runs the family farm for his father, in an interview last year. He didn\u2019t respond to fresh inquiries this month. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Tisdale,\n\n\n\n a lawyer for the family company, Clayton \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Williams\n\n\n Cos., said the area has more than enough water to support the Williamses\u2019 plans. Humans have fought over water for much of recorded history, especially in the American West, where it is scarce in many places and control of it can yield fortunes. The fight here comes as competition is heating up for water around the world, in dry regions and wet ones. Surging populations, rising demand for industrial-scale farming and manufacturing, and hotter temperatures are putting new stress on the constrained resource. There has never been a better time to sell West Texas water, thanks to the fracking boom. Shale companies use large volumes in hydraulic fracturing, blasting underground rock with water, sand and chemicals to unlock oil and gas. Drillers have made the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico the top-producing U.S. oil field, helping raise the country\u2019s total production to a record 12 million barrels a day. Permian water use grew nearly ninefold between 2011 and 2016 as drillers added more than 10,000 wells, according to a Duke University study published in August. An average well there in 2018 used more than 15 million gallons, compared with 7 million in 2013. Frackers in the region pay an average 50 to 75 cents for a barrel of water, according to Bluefield Research, a water advisory firm. That amounts to more than $200,000 a well. Supplying water for fracking in the Permian is a roughly $1.2 billion industry annually, and including transportation and other costs, water spending for fracking there will surge to as much as $54 billion over the next decade, the firm said. The Williams family has so far sold limited amounts of water for fracking, says Mr. Tisdale. The family wants to build a pipeline to sell water outside Pecos County\u2014a process called \u201cexporting\u201d\u2014to oil producers and others. It obtained a permit in 2017, following a decade of litigation that resulted in a settlement with the Middle Pecos Groundwater Conservation District, which regulates aquifer water levels. The Cockrell family sued the groundwater district last July in the District Court of Pecos County, calling the settlement with the Williams \u201ca sham\u201d and arguing the family should have been allowed to weigh in on the Williamses\u2019 plans.\n\n\n The Cockrell family is worried the Williamses' proposed water pumping could threaten the 68,000 pecan trees on their farm, above. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ernest Cockrell\n\n\n\n founded Cockrell Oil Corp. in 1901, and the family manages substantial oil-and-gas and real-estate assets. \u201cWe are a big believer in private property rights, but it\u2019s also a shared resource and it\u2019s a high-plains desert,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Hatcher,\n\n\n\n 56, who runs the family office, Cockrell Interests LLC. The Cockrells are worried the Williamses, if they export water, will pump year-round, limiting the aquifer\u2019s winter recharge. The lawsuit has been temporarily stayed as the parties attempt to negotiate how much of the aquifer can be drained at any given time before pumping must be halted.\u2018Water is for fighting\u2019 \u201cWhat\u2019s the old saying, \u2018whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting,\u2019 \u201d said Jeff Williams. \u201cMy father always understood the value of water.\u201d\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWho should be able to benefit from underground wa One powerful West Texas family wants to pipe millions of gallons daily from under its farmland to oil producers. Another wants to stanch that flow\u2014echoing battles around the world over the resource. ",
        "author": "Christopher M. Matthews | Photographs by Loren Elliott for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hubble Space Telescope Is Back in Action After NASA Fixes Odd Glitch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7513",
        "date": "2021-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-hubble-space-telescope-back-11626476087?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=19",
        "text": "\u201cWe are absolutely delighted that the observatory is up and running again,\u201d said Kenneth Sembach, director of the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, which handles the Hubble science operations. \u201cAll indications are that it\u2019s doing well and we will get back to doing science again this weekend.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nIn more than a million mind-expanding images of the universe snapped over the past 31 years, the solar-powered telescope has presented to astronomers and amateur stargazers alike a psychedelic tapestry of infant stars, dying supernovae, colliding galaxies, towering billows of stellar dust, dark matter and black holes feasting on spiral nebulae. \n\n\nHubble data has been used in more than 18,000 scientific papers that have documented the accelerating expansion of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and studies of planets beyond our solar system, NASA officials said. \n\u201cI think there\u2019s a very credible case that the Hubble Space Telescope is the most scientifically productive instrument ever made,\u201d said Paul Hertz, director of NASA\u2019s astrophysics division. \u201cThe output of peer-reviewed published papers from Hubble certainly exceeds any of its competitors in any field of science.\u201d\nBut then on June 13, Hubble was hobbled\u2014and not for the first time. Technical problems that threatened to end the mission have plagued the telescope since the moment it reached its orbital perch some 340 miles above our planet\u2019s surface on April 25, 1990.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSince its launch in 1990, five space shuttle missions have repaired, upgraded and replaced systems on the telescope.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSince its launch\u2014with flawed optics causing its photos to be so blurry that the $4.7 billion observatory was initially deemed an embarrassing failure\u2014five space shuttle missions repaired, upgraded and replaced systems on the telescope. All five of its main instruments were fixed, and a $50 million set of corrective lenses was installed to address its manufacturing flaws.\nLast repaired by space shuttle astronauts in 2009, Hubble has lasted twice as long as originally expected, space agency officials said. \nThe latest trouble began when a voltage overload in an onboard payload computer built in the 1980s tripped a circuit breaker and shut down the telescope. It was the most serious technical failure that NASA project engineers had encountered in the 11 years since the last shuttle repair.\n\u201cWe did a lot of debugging,\u201d said James Jeletic, deputy project manager for the Hubble Space Telescope Project at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. After three weeks of painstaking analysis, they decided to switch the telescope to its remaining backup systems.\n\u201cEvery single thing worked as planned,\u201d Mr. Jeletic said. \u201cThe computer came back up. All the backup hardware works fine. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re biting our fingernails anymore.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com A switch to backup hardware resurrects the orbiting observatory, which had been offline since June 13. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hubble Space Telescope Is Back in Action After NASA Fixes Odd Glitch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7514",
        "date": "2021-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-hubble-space-telescope-back-11626476087?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=27",
        "text": "\u201cWe are absolutely delighted that the observatory is up and running again,\u201d said Kenneth Sembach, director of the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute, which handles the Hubble science operations. \u201cAll indications are that it\u2019s doing well and we will get back to doing science again this weekend.\u201d\nIn more than a million mind-expanding images of the universe snapped over the past 31 years, the solar-powered telescope has presented to astronomers and amateur stargazers alike a psychedelic tapestry of infant stars, dying supernovae, colliding galaxies, towering billows of stellar dust, dark matter and black holes feasting on spiral nebulae. \n\n\nHubble data has been used in more than 18,000 scientific papers that have documented the accelerating expansion of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and studies of planets beyond our solar system, NASA officials said. \n\u201cI think there\u2019s a very credible case that the Hubble Space Telescope is the most scientifically productive instrument ever made,\u201d said Paul Hertz, director of NASA\u2019s astrophysics division. \u201cThe output of peer-reviewed published papers from Hubble certainly exceeds any of its competitors in any field of science.\u201d\nBut then on June 13, Hubble was hobbled\u2014and not for the first time. Technical problems that threatened to end the mission have plagued the telescope since the moment it reached its orbital perch some 340 miles above our planet\u2019s surface on April 25, 1990.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSince its launch in 1990, five space shuttle missions have repaired, upgraded and replaced systems on the telescope.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSince its launch\u2014with flawed optics causing its photos to be so blurry that the $4.7 billion observatory was initially deemed an embarrassing failure\u2014five space shuttle missions repaired, upgraded and replaced systems on the telescope. All five of its main instruments were fixed, and a $50 million set of corrective lenses was installed to address its manufacturing flaws.\nLast repaired by space shuttle astronauts in 2009, Hubble has lasted twice as long as originally expected, space agency officials said. \nThe latest trouble began when a voltage overload in an onboard payload computer built in the 1980s tripped a circuit breaker and shut down the telescope. It was the most serious technical failure that NASA project engineers had encountered in the 11 years since the last shuttle repair.\n\u201cWe did a lot of debugging,\u201d said James Jeletic, deputy project manager for the Hubble Space Telescope Project at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. After three weeks of painstaking analysis, they decided to switch the telescope to its remaining backup systems.\n\u201cEvery single thing worked as planned,\u201d Mr. Jeletic said. \u201cThe computer came back up. All the backup hardware works fine. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re biting our fingernails anymore.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com A switch to backup hardware resurrects the orbiting observatory, which had been offline since June 13. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rocket Advocates Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7515",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/advocates-of-big-nasa-rocket-seek-to-fend-off-foes-during-transition-1486335749?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=26",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n years ago tried to kill the projects, which have subcontractors scattered across every region of the U.S. and virtually every state. But Congress swiftly stepped in to rescue the high-profile hardware, and senior officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are now singing its praises.\nReferring to progress meeting Orion benchmarks, acting NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot\n\n\n\n said in an interview last week that \u201cthey\u2019re doing great.\u201d\n\n\nBut with both programs confronting technical challenges and the first manned mission currently not slated to blast off until 2021, industry and congressional proponents are seeking ways to insulate funding from likely attacks by commercial-space champions inside and outside the White House. Some of the moves are unusual and convoluted.\nA faction of holdover NASA officials tried to shield SLS from attacks by quietly trying to tap certain contract-termination accounts for ongoing development, according to one person who participated in the discussions. Using those designated dollars would make it more difficult and expensive for President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n appointees to kill the rocket\u2014if that\u2019s what they opt to do\u2014because NASA would have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars from other parts of the agency to cover mandatory termination costs.\nOnce Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team got wind of the gambit, it unequivocally shut down the moves, this person said.\nFor their part, SLS program managers recently broached the idea of accelerating their initial manned mission by a year, potentially circling the Moon in 2020, which would fit better into projected White House timelines.\nSuch a shift, however, poses significant\u00a0 budget and management difficulties.\nThroughout the transition process, SLS backers sought to shore up votes on Capitol Hill. The House is poised to pass a more-than-$19 billion NASA authorization bill shortly, bumping up spending for the rocket and its companion capsule. Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin,\n\n\n\n the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science Committee\u2019s space subcommittee, talked up the programs during a Capitol Hill reception last week.\nThe legislation \u201cdirects the new administration to maintain the course,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, while continuing to support \u201ca robust and well-planned human exploration program\u201d including Orion, SLS and commercial space-transportation initiatives.\nNevertheless, at least one of the candidates former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich\n\n\n\n has recommended for a top NASA job has a history of leaning toward commercial alternatives, according to transition emails. Further down the road, a newly reconstituted White House space-policy council is expected to assess the fate of SLS as part of a comprehensive policy spanning U.S. military, civilian and commercial boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Facing unpredictable White House decision-making and delays in appointing a new NASA leadership team, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and their supporters are taking extra precautions to safeguard deep-space exploration programs. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rocket Advocates Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7516",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/advocates-of-big-nasa-rocket-seek-to-fend-off-foes-during-transition-1486335749?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=102",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n years ago tried to kill the projects, which have subcontractors scattered across every region of the U.S. and virtually every state. But Congress swiftly stepped in to rescue the high-profile hardware, and senior officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are now singing its praises.\nReferring to progress meeting Orion benchmarks, acting NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot\n\n\n\n said in an interview last week that \u201cthey\u2019re doing great.\u201d\n\n\nBut with both programs confronting technical challenges and the first manned mission currently not slated to blast off until 2021, industry and congressional proponents are seeking ways to insulate funding from likely attacks by commercial-space champions inside and outside the White House. Some of the moves are unusual and convoluted.\nA faction of holdover NASA officials tried to shield SLS from attacks by quietly trying to tap certain contract-termination accounts for ongoing development, according to one person who participated in the discussions. Using those designated dollars would make it more difficult and expensive for President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n appointees to kill the rocket\u2014if that\u2019s what they opt to do\u2014because NASA would have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars from other parts of the agency to cover mandatory termination costs.\nOnce Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team got wind of the gambit, it unequivocally shut down the moves, this person said.\nFor their part, SLS program managers recently broached the idea of accelerating their initial manned mission by a year, potentially circling the Moon in 2020, which would fit better into projected White House timelines.\nSuch a shift, however, poses significant\u00a0 budget and management difficulties.\nThroughout the transition process, SLS backers sought to shore up votes on Capitol Hill. The House is poised to pass a more-than-$19 billion NASA authorization bill shortly, bumping up spending for the rocket and its companion capsule. Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin,\n\n\n\n the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science Committee\u2019s space subcommittee, talked up the programs during a Capitol Hill reception last week.\nThe legislation \u201cdirects the new administration to maintain the course,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, while continuing to support \u201ca robust and well-planned human exploration program\u201d including Orion, SLS and commercial space-transportation initiatives.\nNevertheless, at least one of the candidates former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich\n\n\n\n has recommended for a top NASA job has a history of leaning toward commercial alternatives, according to transition emails. Further down the road, a newly reconstituted White House space-policy council is expected to assess the fate of SLS as part of a comprehensive policy spanning U.S. military, civilian and commercial boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Facing unpredictable White House decision-making and delays in appointing a new NASA leadership team, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and their supporters are taking extra precautions to safeguard deep-space exploration programs. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rocket Advocates Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7517",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/advocates-of-big-nasa-rocket-seek-to-fend-off-foes-during-transition-1486335749?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=100",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n years ago tried to kill the projects, which have subcontractors scattered across every region of the U.S. and virtually every state. But Congress swiftly stepped in to rescue the high-profile hardware, and senior officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are now singing its praises.\n\n\n\n\nReferring to progress meeting Orion benchmarks, acting NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot\n\n\n\n said in an interview last week that \u201cthey\u2019re doing great.\u201d\n\n\nBut with both programs confronting technical challenges and the first manned mission currently not slated to blast off until 2021, industry and congressional proponents are seeking ways to insulate funding from likely attacks by commercial-space champions inside and outside the White House. Some of the moves are unusual and convoluted.\nA faction of holdover NASA officials tried to shield SLS from attacks by quietly trying to tap certain contract-termination accounts for ongoing development, according to one person who participated in the discussions. Using those designated dollars would make it more difficult and expensive for President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n appointees to kill the rocket\u2014if that\u2019s what they opt to do\u2014because NASA would have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars from other parts of the agency to cover mandatory termination costs.\nOnce Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team got wind of the gambit, it unequivocally shut down the moves, this person said.\nFor their part, SLS program managers recently broached the idea of accelerating their initial manned mission by a year, potentially circling the Moon in 2020, which would fit better into projected White House timelines.\nSuch a shift, however, poses significant\u00a0 budget and management difficulties.\nThroughout the transition process, SLS backers sought to shore up votes on Capitol Hill. The House is poised to pass a more-than-$19 billion NASA authorization bill shortly, bumping up spending for the rocket and its companion capsule. Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin,\n\n\n\n the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science Committee\u2019s space subcommittee, talked up the programs during a Capitol Hill reception last week.\nThe legislation \u201cdirects the new administration to maintain the course,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, while continuing to support \u201ca robust and well-planned human exploration program\u201d including Orion, SLS and commercial space-transportation initiatives.\nNevertheless, at least one of the candidates former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich\n\n\n\n has recommended for a top NASA job has a history of leaning toward commercial alternatives, according to transition emails. Further down the road, a newly reconstituted White House space-policy council is expected to assess the fate of SLS as part of a comprehensive policy spanning U.S. military, civilian and commercial boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Facing unpredictable White House decision-making and delays in appointing a new NASA leadership team, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and their supporters are taking extra precautions to safeguard deep-space exploration programs. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rocket Advocates Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7518",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/advocates-of-big-nasa-rocket-seek-to-fend-off-foes-during-transition-1486335749?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=88",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n years ago tried to kill the projects, which have subcontractors scattered across every region of the U.S. and virtually every state. But Congress swiftly stepped in to rescue the high-profile hardware, and senior officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are now singing its praises.\nReferring to progress meeting Orion benchmarks, acting NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot\n\n\n\n said in an interview last week that \u201cthey\u2019re doing great.\u201d\n\n\nBut with both programs confronting technical challenges and the first manned mission currently not slated to blast off until 2021, industry and congressional proponents are seeking ways to insulate funding from likely attacks by commercial-space champions inside and outside the White House. Some of the moves are unusual and convoluted.\nA faction of holdover NASA officials tried to shield SLS from attacks by quietly trying to tap certain contract-termination accounts for ongoing development, according to one person who participated in the discussions. Using those designated dollars would make it more difficult and expensive for President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n appointees to kill the rocket\u2014if that\u2019s what they opt to do\u2014because NASA would have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars from other parts of the agency to cover mandatory termination costs.\nOnce Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team got wind of the gambit, it unequivocally shut down the moves, this person said.\nFor their part, SLS program managers recently broached the idea of accelerating their initial manned mission by a year, potentially circling the Moon in 2020, which would fit better into projected White House timelines.\nSuch a shift, however, poses significant\u00a0 budget and management difficulties.\nThroughout the transition process, SLS backers sought to shore up votes on Capitol Hill. The House is poised to pass a more-than-$19 billion NASA authorization bill shortly, bumping up spending for the rocket and its companion capsule. Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin,\n\n\n\n the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science Committee\u2019s space subcommittee, talked up the programs during a Capitol Hill reception last week.\nThe legislation \u201cdirects the new administration to maintain the course,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, while continuing to support \u201ca robust and well-planned human exploration program\u201d including Orion, SLS and commercial space-transportation initiatives.\nNevertheless, at least one of the candidates former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich\n\n\n\n has recommended for a top NASA job has a history of leaning toward commercial alternatives, according to transition emails. Further down the road, a newly reconstituted White House space-policy council is expected to assess the fate of SLS as part of a comprehensive policy spanning U.S. military, civilian and commercial boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Facing unpredictable White House decision-making and delays in appointing a new NASA leadership team, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and their supporters are taking extra precautions to safeguard deep-space exploration programs. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Rocket Advocates Seek to Fend Off Foes During Transition (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7519",
        "date": "2017-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/advocates-of-big-nasa-rocket-seek-to-fend-off-foes-during-transition-1486335749?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=131",
        "text": "President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n years ago tried to kill the projects, which have subcontractors scattered across every region of the U.S. and virtually every state. But Congress swiftly stepped in to rescue the high-profile hardware, and senior officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are now singing its praises.\n\n\n\n\nReferring to progress meeting Orion benchmarks, acting NASA administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot\n\n\n\n said in an interview last week that \u201cthey\u2019re doing great.\u201d\n\n\nBut with both programs confronting technical challenges and the first manned mission currently not slated to blast off until 2021, industry and congressional proponents are seeking ways to insulate funding from likely attacks by commercial-space champions inside and outside the White House. Some of the moves are unusual and convoluted.\nA faction of holdover NASA officials tried to shield SLS from attacks by quietly trying to tap certain contract-termination accounts for ongoing development, according to one person who participated in the discussions. Using those designated dollars would make it more difficult and expensive for President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n appointees to kill the rocket\u2014if that\u2019s what they opt to do\u2014because NASA would have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars from other parts of the agency to cover mandatory termination costs.\nOnce Mr. Trump\u2019s transition team got wind of the gambit, it unequivocally shut down the moves, this person said.\nFor their part, SLS program managers recently broached the idea of accelerating their initial manned mission by a year, potentially circling the Moon in 2020, which would fit better into projected White House timelines.\nSuch a shift, however, poses significant\u00a0 budget and management difficulties.\nThroughout the transition process, SLS backers sought to shore up votes on Capitol Hill. The House is poised to pass a more-than-$19 billion NASA authorization bill shortly, bumping up spending for the rocket and its companion capsule. Rep.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Babin,\n\n\n\n the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science Committee\u2019s space subcommittee, talked up the programs during a Capitol Hill reception last week.\nThe legislation \u201cdirects the new administration to maintain the course,\u201d according to Mr. Babin, while continuing to support \u201ca robust and well-planned human exploration program\u201d including Orion, SLS and commercial space-transportation initiatives.\nNevertheless, at least one of the candidates former House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Newt Gingrich\n\n\n\n has recommended for a top NASA job has a history of leaning toward commercial alternatives, according to transition emails. Further down the road, a newly reconstituted White House space-policy council is expected to assess the fate of SLS as part of a comprehensive policy spanning U.S. military, civilian and commercial boosters.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Facing unpredictable White House decision-making and delays in appointing a new NASA leadership team, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and their supporters are taking extra precautions to safeguard deep-space exploration programs. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Gets Set for Historic First Flight on Another World (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7520",
        "date": "2021-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-gets-set-for-historic-first-flight-on-another-world-11617465600?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=8",
        "text": "Ingenuity reached Mars like a stowaway, folded up on the underside of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February after a seven-month, 293-million-mile voyage from Earth. For its maiden flight, the 4-pound, $85 million craft will simply rise about 10 feet above the surface and hover\u2014no higher than the rim of a regulation basketball hoop\u2014before returning to the surface. The whole flight should be over within 90 seconds.\nThe brief excursion\u2014one of five planned for a one-month period expected to start on or about April 11\u2014is a short hop by the measures of interplanetary travel. But agency officials said it would be a giant leap for Mars exploration. In the future, they said, autonomous drones like Ingenuity could take to the skies to explore canyons, ice caps and other terrain that is inaccessible to rovers. Should human explorers ever land on Mars, drones could serve as scouts and aerial sensors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) above Earth.\n\n\n(56 miles)\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\n(31 miles)\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth \ngenerally don\u2019t fly \nabove 10,000 ft.\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\n(7.5 miles)\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) \nabove Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStrat The brief excursion could help usher in a new era of space exploration in which drones play a vital role. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Gets Set for Historic First Flight on Another World (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7521",
        "date": "2021-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-gets-set-for-historic-first-flight-on-another-world-11617465600?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=32",
        "text": "Ingenuity reached Mars like a stowaway, folded up on the underside of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February after a seven-month, 293-million-mile voyage from Earth. For its maiden flight, the 4-pound, $85 million craft will simply rise about 10 feet above the surface and hover\u2014no higher than the rim of a regulation basketball hoop\u2014before returning to the surface. The whole flight should be over within 90 seconds.\nThe brief excursion\u2014one of five planned for a one-month period expected to start on or about April 11\u2014is a short hop by the measures of interplanetary travel. But agency officials said it would be a giant leap for Mars exploration. In the future, they said, autonomous drones like Ingenuity could take to the skies to explore canyons, ice caps and other terrain that is inaccessible to rovers. Should human explorers ever land on Mars, drones could serve as scouts and aerial sensors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) above Earth.\n\n\n(56 miles)\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\n(31 miles)\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth \ngenerally don\u2019t fly \nabove 10,000 ft.\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\n(7.5 miles)\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) \nabove Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStrat The brief excursion could help usher in a new era of space exploration in which drones play a vital role. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Gets Set for Historic First Flight on Another World (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7522",
        "date": "2021-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-gets-set-for-historic-first-flight-on-another-world-11617465600?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=33",
        "text": "Ingenuity reached Mars like a stowaway, folded up on the underside of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February after a seven-month, 293-million-mile voyage from Earth. For its maiden flight, the 4-pound, $85 million craft will simply rise about 10 feet above the surface and hover\u2014no higher than the rim of a regulation basketball hoop\u2014before returning to the surface. The whole flight should be over within 90 seconds.\nThe brief excursion\u2014one of five planned for a one-month period expected to start on or about April 11\u2014is a short hop by the measures of interplanetary travel. But agency officials said it would be a giant leap for Mars exploration. In the future, they said, autonomous drones like Ingenuity could take to the skies to explore canyons, ice caps and other terrain that is inaccessible to rovers. Should human explorers ever land on Mars, drones could serve as scouts and aerial sensors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) above Earth.\n\n\n(56 miles)\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\n(31 miles)\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth \ngenerally don\u2019t fly \nabove 10,000 ft.\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\n(7.5 miles)\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) \nabove Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nS The brief excursion could help usher in a new era of space exploration in which drones play a vital role. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fact-Checking Trump\u2019s Latest Claims About Space and Iran (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7523",
        "date": "2019-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/us/politics/trump-space-iran-factcheck.html",
        "text": "The president, in a wide-ranging conversation with the Australian prime minister on Friday in the presence of reporters, falsely claimed NASA facilities \u201cwere virtually closed\u201d before he took office. The president, in a wide-ranging conversation with the Australian prime minister on Friday in the presence of reporters, falsely claimed NASA facilities \u201cwere virtually closed\u201d before he took office. President Trump, like some of his predecessors, has retooled the government\u2019s space program. But space exploration had not grinded to a halt before he took office in 2017. In fact, NASA for years has been aiming for a trip to Mars.",
        "author": "By Linda Qiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fact-Checking Trump\u2019s Latest Claims About Space and Iran (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7524",
        "date": "2019-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/us/politics/trump-space-iran-factcheck.html",
        "text": "The president, in a wide-ranging conversation with the Australian prime minister on Friday in the presence of reporters, falsely claimed NASA facilities \u201cwere virtually closed\u201d before he took office. The president, in a wide-ranging conversation with the Australian prime minister on Friday in the presence of reporters, falsely claimed NASA facilities \u201cwere virtually closed\u201d before he took office. President Trump, like some of his predecessors, has retooled the government\u2019s space program. But space exploration had not grinded to a halt before he took office in 2017. In fact, NASA for years has been aiming for a trip to Mars.",
        "author": "By Linda Qiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fact-Checking Trump\u2019s Latest Claims About Space and Iran (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7525",
        "date": "2019-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/21/us/politics/trump-space-iran-factcheck.html",
        "text": "The president, in a wide-ranging conversation with the Australian prime minister on Friday in the presence of reporters, falsely claimed NASA facilities \u201cwere virtually closed\u201d before he took office. The president, in a wide-ranging conversation with the Australian prime minister on Friday in the presence of reporters, falsely claimed NASA facilities \u201cwere virtually closed\u201d before he took office. President Trump, like some of his predecessors, has retooled the government\u2019s space program. But space exploration had not grinded to a halt before he took office in 2017. In fact, NASA for years has been aiming for a trip to Mars.",
        "author": "By Linda Qiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Problems Predate the Virus. Should the U.S. Come to Its Rescue? (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7526",
        "date": "2020-04-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/coronavirus-boeing-federal-aid.html",
        "text": "The nation\u2019s largest aerospace company is in discussions about three different federal aid programs amid confusion created by its new chief executive about its intentions. The nation\u2019s largest aerospace company is in discussions about three different federal aid programs amid confusion created by its new chief executive about its intentions. Two deadly crashes that left its 737 Max airliner fleet grounded. An aborted mission of its new spacecraft. Problems with a tanker it makes for the Air Force, a depressed stock price and the abrupt dismissal of its chief executive.",
        "author": "By Natalie Kitroeff and Kenneth P. Vogel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Takeaways From the Developing Space War Between China and the U.S. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7527",
        "date": "2021-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/space-war-takeaways-us-china.html",
        "text": "The Biden administration is inheriting the menace of Chinese antisatellite arms as well as an innovative way of trying to defuse the escalating threat. The Biden administration is inheriting the menace of Chinese antisatellite arms as well as an innovative way of trying to defuse the escalating threat. The stars of the new space age include not only famous entrepreneurs but a rising generation of dreamers and doers. Small companies, developing states and even high schools now loft spacecraft into orbit.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "F.A.A. Investigates Errant Flight Involving Harrison Ford (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7528",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/harrison-ford-plane-crash.html",
        "text": "The actor mistakenly piloted a private plane over an airliner with more than 100 people on board in Santa Ana, Calif., according to a news report. The actor mistakenly piloted a private plane over an airliner with more than 100 people on board in Santa Ana, Calif., according to a news report. Harrison Ford, the actor known for his portrayal of a cocky smuggler and spacecraft pilot in the \u201cStar Wars\u201d movies, mistakenly flew a private plane over a commercial airliner carrying more than 100 people at a California airport on Monday, according to a news report.",
        "author": "By Christopher Mele"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can\u2019t Rule It Out, Either (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7529",
        "date": "2021-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/politics/ufos-sighting-alien-spacecraft-pentagon.html",
        "text": "A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. WASHINGTON \u2014 American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report.",
        "author": "By Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Beggs, 94, Is Dead; NASA Chief Championed Space Shuttle (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7530",
        "date": "2020-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/us/james-beggs-nasa-chief-dead.html",
        "text": "He was on leave during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and resigned shortly after what critics called a leadership vacuum. He was on leave during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and resigned shortly after what critics called a leadership vacuum. James M. Beggs, the NASA chief who oversaw more than 20 successful space shuttle launches and who was on leave during the fatal Challenger explosion in 1986, died on April 23 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 94.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Beggs, 94, Is Dead; NASA Chief Championed Space Shuttle (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7531",
        "date": "2020-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/us/james-beggs-nasa-chief-dead.html",
        "text": "He was on leave during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and resigned shortly after what critics called a leadership vacuum. He was on leave during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and resigned shortly after what critics called a leadership vacuum. James M. Beggs, the NASA chief who oversaw more than 20 successful space shuttle launches and who was on leave during the fatal Challenger explosion in 1986, died on April 23 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 94.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Beggs, 94, Is Dead; NASA Chief Championed Space Shuttle (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7532",
        "date": "2020-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/us/james-beggs-nasa-chief-dead.html",
        "text": "He was on leave during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and resigned shortly after what critics called a leadership vacuum. He was on leave during the Challenger disaster in 1986 and resigned shortly after what critics called a leadership vacuum. James M. Beggs, the NASA chief who oversaw more than 20 successful space shuttle launches and who was on leave during the fatal Challenger explosion in 1986, died on April 23 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 94.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Allan McDonald Dies at 83; Tried to Stop the Challenger Launch (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7533",
        "date": "2021-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/us/allan-mcdonald-dead.html",
        "text": "An engineer for the maker of the shuttle\u2019s booster rockets, he opposed letting it take off, worried that cold weather might affect them. He was right. An engineer for the maker of the shuttle\u2019s booster rockets, he opposed letting it take off, worried that cold weather might affect them. He was right. Allan J. McDonald, an engineer who on a chilly January morning in 1986 tried to stop the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, citing the possible effect of the cold on its booster rockets, and who, after it broke apart on liftoff, blew the whistle when government officials tried to cover up his dissent, died on Saturday in Ogden, Utah. He was 83.",
        "author": "By Clay Risen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Pence Advances Plan to Create a Space Force (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7534",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/us/politics/trump-pence-space-force.html",
        "text": "Vice President Mike Pence gave details about President Trump\u2019s plan to create a military force for space. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is now onboard with the plan. Vice President Mike Pence gave details about President Trump\u2019s plan to create a military force for space. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is now onboard with the plan. WASHINGTON \u2014 Vice President Mike Pence promoted a proposed Space Command on Thursday as \u201can idea whose time has come\u201d in comments at the Pentagon to unveil a few more details about President Trump\u2019s plan to create another military force, this one for outer space, and for it to be in operation by 2020.",
        "author": "By Helene Cooper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Orders Establishment of Space Force as Sixth Military Branch (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7535",
        "date": "2018-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/us/politics/trump-space-force-sixth-military-branch.html",
        "text": "The idea has troubled lawmakers and even some members of the administration, who have cautioned that it could create unnecessary bureaucratic responsibilities for a military burdened by conflicts. The idea has troubled lawmakers and even some members of the administration, who have cautioned that it could create unnecessary bureaucratic responsibilities for a military burdened by conflicts. WASHINGTON \u2014 President Trump said on Monday that he would direct the Pentagon to establish a sixth branch of the armed forces dedicated to protecting American interests in outer space, an idea that has troubled lawmakers and even some members of his administration, who have cautioned that the action could create unnecessary bureaucratic responsibilities for a military already burdened by conflicts.",
        "author": "By Katie Rogers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Those Mystery Lights Above Seattle and Portland? They Weren\u2019t Meteors. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7536",
        "date": "2021-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/us/seattle-rocket-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Harvard astronomer said the objects were debris \u2014 or \u201cspace junk\u201d \u2014 from a SpaceX rocket. Not everyone got the memo. A Harvard astronomer said the objects were debris \u2014 or  \u201cspace junk\u201d \u2014 from a SpaceX rocket. Not everyone got the memo. The mysterious bright lights streaking across the Pacific Northwest\u2019s night sky on Thursday were not planes or meteors, but debris from a SpaceX rocket.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "Those Mystery Lights Above Seattle and Portland? They Weren\u2019t Meteors. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7537",
        "date": "2021-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/us/seattle-rocket-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Harvard astronomer said the objects were debris \u2014 or \u201cspace junk\u201d \u2014 from a SpaceX rocket. Not everyone got the memo. A Harvard astronomer said the objects were debris \u2014 or  \u201cspace junk\u201d \u2014 from a SpaceX rocket. Not everyone got the memo. The mysterious bright lights streaking across the Pacific Northwest\u2019s night sky on Thursday were not planes or meteors, but debris from a SpaceX rocket.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "Those Mystery Lights Above Seattle and Portland? They Weren\u2019t Meteors. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7538",
        "date": "2021-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/us/seattle-rocket-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Harvard astronomer said the objects were debris \u2014 or \u201cspace junk\u201d \u2014 from a SpaceX rocket. Not everyone got the memo. A Harvard astronomer said the objects were debris \u2014 or  \u201cspace junk\u201d \u2014 from a SpaceX rocket. Not everyone got the memo. The mysterious bright lights streaking across the Pacific Northwest\u2019s night sky on Thursday were not planes or meteors, but debris from a SpaceX rocket.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Find Birthplace of Mysterious Ghost Particle (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7539",
        "date": "2018-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-track-neutrinos-through-ice-to-their-source-in-the-cosmos-1531407600?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=91",
        "text": "Unaffected by normal matter, radiation or gravity, ghostly neutrinos are the most abundant, energetic and least-understood particles in the universe, hurtling through space rarely interacting with ordinary stuff. Always traveling in an inflexible straight line, though, they lead unerringly back to the point where they were created\u2014a likely source of the high-energy cosmic rays that shower Earth, the scientists said.\n\n\n\n\nScientists are eager to learn all they can about cosmic rays because they produce cascades of subatomic particles, X-rays and other electromagnetic radiation when they hit Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\n Ice-Fishing for Neutrinos Under the ice of the South Pole, researchers constructed a $274 million observatory to map the universe using neutrinos. These unusual subatomic particles are almost impossible to detect because they usually are unaffected by normal matter, radiation or gravity. IceCube lab In-ice sensor network Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Bedrock Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. 2 3 1 Muon Muon Neutrino Collision Blue light Proton IceCube lab In-ice sensor network Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Bedrock Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. 2 3 1 Neutrino Muon Muon Collision Proton Blue light IceCube lab In-ice sensor network Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Bedrock Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. 2 3 1 Muon Neutrino Muon Blue light Collision Proton 1 2 3 Bedrock IceCube lab 1 In-ice sensor network 2 Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core 3 The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. 1 Neutrino Proton When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. 2 Muon Collision Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. 3 Muon Blue light Source: IceCube Project, University of Wisconsin-Madison \n\n\n\u201cThis is one of the oldest problems in astronomy,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Halzen,\n\n\n\n a physicist Astronomers for the first time traced a burst of powerful cosmic particles called neutrinos to a black hole firing like a ray gun aimed at Earth, by using an unusual observatory buried in a billion tons of ice under the South Pole. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Find Birthplace of Mysterious Ghost Particle (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7540",
        "date": "2018-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-track-neutrinos-through-ice-to-their-source-in-the-cosmos-1531407600?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=73",
        "text": "Unaffected by normal matter, radiation or gravity, ghostly neutrinos are the most abundant, energetic and least-understood particles in the universe, hurtling through space rarely interacting with ordinary stuff. Always traveling in an inflexible straight line, though, they lead unerringly back to the point where they were created\u2014a likely source of the high-energy cosmic rays that shower Earth, the scientists said.\n\n\n\n\nScientists are eager to learn all they can about cosmic rays because they produce cascades of subatomic particles, X-rays and other electromagnetic radiation when they hit Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\n\n\n Ice-Fishing for Neutrinos Under the ice of the South Pole, researchers constructed a $274 million observatory to map the universe using neutrinos. These unusual subatomic particles are almost impossible to detect because they usually are unaffected by normal matter, radiation or gravity. IceCube lab In-ice sensor network Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Bedrock Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. 2 3 1 Muon Muon Neutrino Collision Blue light Proton IceCube lab In-ice sensor network Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Bedrock Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. 2 3 1 Neutrino Muon Muon Collision Proton Blue light IceCube lab In-ice sensor network Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Bedrock Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. 2 3 1 Muon Neutrino Muon Blue light Collision Proton 1 2 3 Bedrock IceCube lab 1 In-ice sensor network 2 Engineers used hot-water drills to melt 86 holes, a mile deep or more, into the ice. There they lowered 5,160 electric-optical sensors into the holes, then allowed them to freeze in place. Deep core 3 The sensors detect the flare from the rare collision of a neutrino and a normal atom as the particle speeds through the array and relay the signal to the surface, accurate to within five-billionths of a second. Neutrino astronomy By plotting the direction of a neutrino through the ice, researchers expect to reconstruct its route back across the universe to its origin in a supernova or other cosmic cataclysm. On rare occasions, a neutrino will come in contact with a proton or neutron. 1 Neutrino Proton When the two collide, a particle known as a muon emerges. 2 Muon Collision Muons radiate blue light as they move through ice on the same path as the neutrino. 3 Muon Blue light Source: IceCube Project, University of Wisconsin-Madison \n\n\n\u201cThis is one of the oldest problems in astronomy,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Halzen,\n\n\n\n a physicist at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison and lead scientist for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. \u201cBy identifying the source of these neutrinos, we identified a source of cosmic rays.\u201d\n\n\nBy their reckoning, one of the most luminous objects in the known universe hurls these high-energy neutrinos toward Earth\u2014a galaxy called a blazar located in the constellation Orion about four billion light years away. This cloud of stars is being devoured by a black hole\u2014a maw with the mass of a million suns compressed into a space no larger than our own solar system, said physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kam-Biu Luk\n\n\n\n at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn\u2019t part of the project.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of the neutrino-catching probes at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. They had to be quickly lowered into the ice before it completely froze around them.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Krasberg/IceCube/National Science Foundation\n \n\n\n\nIn its astrophysical agony, the blazar spits a jet of charged cosmic ray particles coupled with neutrinos a million times more energetic than any particle accelerator on Earth could produce, but no one is sure how or why. \u201cThere is something complicated going on inside this source,\u201d said astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Naoko Kurahashi Neilson\n\n\n\n at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who analyzed the neutrino data. \u201cThis observation only deepens the mystery.\u201d\nThe find caps almost 20 years of work by the IceCube Collaboration, comprising more than 300 astrophysicists and astronomers at 48 research centers in a dozen countries, led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the $274 million Ice Cube Observatory at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is the largest astronomy project ever undertaken on the isolated southernmost continent.\nTheir initial discovery was confirmed by astronomers at 20 observatories, including NASA\u2019s orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. They spotted intense flares of gamma rays erupting at the same spot in space as the high-energy neutrinos. The astronomers and astrophysicists documented their work in a pair of research papers published in Science on Thursday.\nUntil now, astronomers had been able to identify sources of only the weakest neutrino particles, which trickle from the sun and a nearby supernova.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nResearchers uncover a mile-deep bore hole for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Robert Lee Hotz/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nIt takes a strange observatory to spot a particle that normally shies away from normal matter. In the hunt, scientists have erected detectors in a South Dakota cavern a mile underground, at the bottom of Lake Baikal in Siberia, under a mountain in Japan, and on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea.\nBut the largest is the IceCube, created from a cubic kilometer of the purest and most transparent ice in the world. Frozen in place are more than 5,000 basketball-size optical sensors designed to catch a trace of a passing neutrino on the rare occasion one of them interacts with the ice.\nLast Sept. 22, the IceCube detectors registered the eerie blue glow of light that signaled the passage of a single high-energy neutrino through the ice. In any given second, trillions of the high-energy neutrinos are passing by the sensors, but only about 10 a year trigger an alarm.\n\n\nRelated Phantom Particles That Would Have Redefined Physics Probably Aren\u2019t Real, Scientists Conclude (Aug. 8, 2016) Nobel Prize in Physics Won by Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for Work on Neutrinos (Oct. 6, 2015) Using Earth to Map the Cosmos (June 1, 2010) \n\n\n\u201cWe sent out a neutrino alert within a minute or two,\u201d said particle astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dawn Williams\n\n\n\n at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, who coordinates IceCube data analysis. \u201cThe telescopes were able to follow up on it and find compelling evidence that this blazar was associated with this high-energy neutrino.\u201d\nThe discovery heralds the next step in what scientists call multi-messenger astronomy, which probes the cosmos with telescopes working across different wavelengths and now with detectors of gravitational waves as well. The neutrinos, which penetrate matter, offer a way to explore a universe of material and energy hidden from ordinary light and the conventional electromagnetic spectrum, said\u00a0physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Olga Botner\n\n\n\n at Sweden\u2019s Uppsala University, a senior member of the project.\n\u201cThis is the first real step in being able to utilize neutrinos as a tool to view the most extreme astrophysical processes in the universe,\u201d said IceCube physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Darren Grant\n\n\n\n at the University of Alberta in Canada.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tA photo accompanying this story is credited to Mark Krasberg. The original credit was to Jim Haugen. \nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Astronomers for the first time traced a burst of powerful cosmic particles called neutrinos to a black hole firing like a ray gun aimed at Earth, by using an unusual observatory buried in a billion tons of ice under the South Pole. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years After Apollo Disaster, Memorial for 3 Men, and for Era (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7541",
        "date": "2017-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/us/apollo-1-memorial.html",
        "text": "Families of astronauts and fans of space travel gathered at Cape Canaveral for a memorial for three astronauts. Families of astronauts and fans of space travel gathered at Cape Canaveral for a memorial for three astronauts. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Back in his days as a test pilot at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Gus Grissom had a message for his wife, Betty.",
        "author": "By Lily Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years After Apollo Disaster, Memorial for 3 Men, and for Era (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7542",
        "date": "2017-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/us/apollo-1-memorial.html",
        "text": "Families of astronauts and fans of space travel gathered at Cape Canaveral for a memorial for three astronauts. Families of astronauts and fans of space travel gathered at Cape Canaveral for a memorial for three astronauts. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Back in his days as a test pilot at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Gus Grissom had a message for his wife, Betty.",
        "author": "By Lily Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years After Apollo Disaster, Memorial for 3 Men, and for Era (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7543",
        "date": "2017-01-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/us/apollo-1-memorial.html",
        "text": "Families of astronauts and fans of space travel gathered at Cape Canaveral for a memorial for three astronauts. Families of astronauts and fans of space travel gathered at Cape Canaveral for a memorial for three astronauts. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 Back in his days as a test pilot at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Gus Grissom had a message for his wife, Betty.",
        "author": "By Lily Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Godspeed, John Glenn\u2019 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7544",
        "date": "2017-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/john-glenn-arlington-national-cemetery.html",
        "text": "At a ceremony at Arlington National Ceremony, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth was laid to rest. At a ceremony at Arlington National Ceremony, the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth was laid to rest. America stood still that day \u2014 Feb. 20, 1962 \u2014 as John Glenn, a Marine pilot, climbed into the Mercury capsule, named the Friendship 7, sitting on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral in Florida.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronauts Head Back to Earth Aboard SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7545",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007268936/spacex-departs-international-space-station.html",
        "text": "The NASA astronauts Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley undocked their capsule and departed the International Space Station. The NASA astronauts Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley undocked their capsule and departed the International Space Station. The NASA astronauts Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley undocked their capsule and departed the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronaut Anne McClain Accused by Spouse of Crime in Space (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7546",
        "date": "2019-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/us/astronaut-space-investigation.html",
        "text": "NASA is examining a claim that an astronaut improperly accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the Space Station. NASA is examining a claim that an astronaut improperly accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the Space Station. [Update Aug. 27, 2020: An investigation subsequently cleared the astronaut Anne McClain of wrongdoing. Her former spouse, Summer Worden, was charged with lying to federal investigators. Read here for details on that case.]",
        "author": "By Mike Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Astronaut Anne McClain Accused by Spouse of Crime in Space (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7547",
        "date": "2019-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/us/astronaut-space-investigation.html",
        "text": "NASA is examining a claim that an astronaut improperly accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the Space Station. NASA is examining a claim that an astronaut improperly accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the Space Station. [Update Aug. 27, 2020: An investigation subsequently cleared the astronaut Anne McClain of wrongdoing. Her former spouse, Summer Worden, was charged with lying to federal investigators. Read here for details on that case.]",
        "author": "By Mike Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Annie Glenn, Champion of Those With Speech Disorders, Dies at 100 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7548",
        "date": "2020-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/19/us/annie-glenn-dead.html",
        "text": "Being an astronaut\u2019s wife thrust her into the spotlight, but a stutter left her struggling for words until she found help. Being an astronaut\u2019s wife thrust her into the spotlight, but a stutter left her struggling for words until she found help. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mike Hughes, 64, D.I.Y. Daredevil, Is Killed in Rocket Crash (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7549",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/us/mad-mike-hughes-dead.html",
        "text": "The launch that killed Mr. Hughes, known as Mad Mike, was being filmed for a new Science Channel series called \u201cHomemade Astronauts.\u201d The launch that killed Mr. Hughes, known as Mad Mike, was being filmed for a new Science Channel series called \u201cHomemade Astronauts.\u201d Mike Hughes, a go-it-alone daredevil, limousine stunt driver and self-taught astronaut who professed to believe that the Earth was flat and who was known to supporters as Mad Mike, died in a rocket launch in the California desert on Saturday. He was 64.",
        "author": "By Aimee Ortiz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mike Hughes, 64, D.I.Y. Daredevil, Is Killed in Rocket Crash (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7550",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/us/mad-mike-hughes-dead.html",
        "text": "The launch that killed Mr. Hughes, known as Mad Mike, was being filmed for a new Science Channel series called \u201cHomemade Astronauts.\u201d The launch that killed Mr. Hughes, known as Mad Mike, was being filmed for a new Science Channel series called \u201cHomemade Astronauts.\u201d Mike Hughes, a go-it-alone daredevil, limousine stunt driver and self-taught astronaut who professed to believe that the Earth was flat and who was known to supporters as Mad Mike, died in a rocket launch in the California desert on Saturday. He was 64.",
        "author": "By Aimee Ortiz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mike Hughes, 64, D.I.Y. Daredevil, Is Killed in Rocket Crash (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7551",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/us/mad-mike-hughes-dead.html",
        "text": "The launch that killed Mr. Hughes, known as Mad Mike, was being filmed for a new Science Channel series called \u201cHomemade Astronauts.\u201d The launch that killed Mr. Hughes, known as Mad Mike, was being filmed for a new Science Channel series called \u201cHomemade Astronauts.\u201d Mike Hughes, a go-it-alone daredevil, limousine stunt driver and self-taught astronaut who professed to believe that the Earth was flat and who was known to supporters as Mad Mike, died in a rocket launch in the California desert on Saturday. He was 64.",
        "author": "By Aimee Ortiz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong\u2019s Death, and a Stormy, Secret $6 Million Settlement (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7552",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/neil-armstrong-wrongful-death-settlement.html",
        "text": "The astronaut\u2019s sons contended that incompetent medical care had cost him his life, and threatened to go public. His widow says she wanted no part of the payout. The astronaut\u2019s sons contended that incompetent medical care had cost him his life, and threatened to go public. His widow says she wanted no part of the payout. When Neil Armstrong died in a Cincinnati hospital two weeks after undergoing heart surgery in 2012, his family released a touching tribute addressing the astronaut\u2019s millions of admirers around the globe.",
        "author": "By Scott Shane and Sarah Kliff"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Splashes Down in Gulf of Mexico (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7553",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007269118/spacex-splash-down.html",
        "text": "The capsule parachuted the NASA astronauts Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley back to Earth, landing in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The capsule parachuted the NASA astronauts Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley back to Earth, landing in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. The capsule parachuted the NASA astronauts Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley back to Earth, landing in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Pensacola, Fla.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mark Kelly Is Sworn In, Narrowing G.O.P.\u2019s Senate Majority (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7554",
        "date": "2020-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/us/politics/senator-mark-kelly-arizona.html",
        "text": "The induction of Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut who won a special election last month, marks the first time in decades that two Democrats have represented Arizona in the Senate. The induction of Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut who won a special election last month, marks the first time in decades that two Democrats have represented Arizona in the Senate. WASHINGTON \u2014 Senator Mark Kelly is no stranger to lonely missions.",
        "author": "By Catie Edmondson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mark Kelly Is Sworn In, Narrowing G.O.P.\u2019s Senate Majority (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7555",
        "date": "2020-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/us/politics/senator-mark-kelly-arizona.html",
        "text": "The induction of Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut who won a special election last month, marks the first time in decades that two Democrats have represented Arizona in the Senate. The induction of Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut who won a special election last month, marks the first time in decades that two Democrats have represented Arizona in the Senate. WASHINGTON \u2014 Senator Mark Kelly is no stranger to lonely missions.",
        "author": "By Catie Edmondson"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Cape Canaveral, Trump\u2019s Search for a Heroic Narrative Is Thwarted (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7556",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/politics/trump-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The president had hoped to watch the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. Nothing would say the U.S. is back with more verve than a rocket\u2019s red glare. The president had hoped to watch the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. Nothing would say the U.S. is back with more verve than a rocket\u2019s red glare. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 For President Trump, it was a chance to rewrite the story line from tragedy to triumph. Even as the United States reached the grim milestone on Wednesday of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, he would help mark the nation\u2019s trailblazing return to human spaceflight from American soil.",
        "author": "By Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Cape Canaveral, Trump\u2019s Search for a Heroic Narrative Is Thwarted (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7557",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/politics/trump-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The president had hoped to watch the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. Nothing would say the U.S. is back with more verve than a rocket\u2019s red glare. The president had hoped to watch the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. Nothing would say the U.S. is back with more verve than a rocket\u2019s red glare. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 For President Trump, it was a chance to rewrite the story line from tragedy to triumph. Even as the United States reached the grim milestone on Wednesday of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, he would help mark the nation\u2019s trailblazing return to human spaceflight from American soil.",
        "author": "By Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Cape Canaveral, Trump\u2019s Search for a Heroic Narrative Is Thwarted (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7558",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/politics/trump-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The president had hoped to watch the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. Nothing would say the U.S. is back with more verve than a rocket\u2019s red glare. The president had hoped to watch the first launch of NASA astronauts into orbit from the United States in nearly a decade. Nothing would say the U.S. is back with more verve than a rocket\u2019s red glare. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. \u2014 For President Trump, it was a chance to rewrite the story line from tragedy to triumph. Even as the United States reached the grim milestone on Wednesday of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, he would help mark the nation\u2019s trailblazing return to human spaceflight from American soil.",
        "author": "By Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Walked on the Moon (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7559",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/17/us/apollo-moon.html",
        "text": "Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. He did so almost 45 years ago. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface. Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. He did so almost 45 years ago. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface. Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. He did so almost 45 years ago. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By ROCHELLE OLIVER and AMISHA PADNANI"
    },
    {
        "title": "They Walked on the Moon (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7560",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/17/us/apollo-moon.html",
        "text": "Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. He did so almost 45 years ago. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface. Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. He did so almost 45 years ago. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface. Eugene A. Cernan, who died on Monday at the age of 82, was the last of a dozen men to leave footprints on the moon. He did so almost 45 years ago. Here is a look at the 12 astronauts who walked on the lunar surface.",
        "author": "By ROCHELLE OLIVER and AMISHA PADNANI"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Children Drop Guardianship Fight (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7561",
        "date": "2019-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-buzz-aldrin-children-drop-guardianship-fight-11552586029?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=58",
        "text": "The Aldrin battle broke into public view last spring, shortly after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Aldrin\n\n\n\n and his sister, Jan, filed an action in Florida state court to take over as guardians for their father. They contended that the former astronaut, now 89 years old, was experiencing \u201ccognitive decline.\u201d A guardianship would have given the children power to make decisions on their father\u2019s behalf as well as control of his finances and business dealings.\nLast June, Col. Aldrin responded by filing a civil suit against the two children, alleging elder exploitation by Andrew and breach of fiduciary duty by Jan. Col. Aldrin told The Wall Street Journal his children\u2019s suit had shocked him, saying: \u201cNobody is going to come close to thinking I should be under a guardianship.\u201d\n\n\nConfirming their dismissal of the guardianship effort Wednesday, the two Aldrin children said in a statement: \u201cWe truly appreciate the support we have received from so many and ask, again, for your understanding and respect as we continue to work through this as a family, in a private manner.\u201d\nThe Aldrin battle was a high-profile example of a problem faced by many families: how to resolve disagreements over the ways aging parents spend their money or handle their affairs. In his statement, Col. Aldrin said: \u201cThis was the most charitable way to manage a difficult situation.\u201d Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut and moon walker, said he and his two children had resolved their legal battles over guardianship of his legacy and money. ",
        "author": "Gretchen Morgenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Buzz Aldrin Fights Family for Control of His Space Legacy (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7562",
        "date": "2018-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/buzz-aldrin-fights-family-for-control-of-his-space-legacy-1529872576?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=92",
        "text": "Col. Aldrin is grounded in a legal fight with two of his adult children and a former business manager, who he says are trying to\u00a0grab\u00a0his legacy and money. At issue are the operations of his private company, Buzz Aldrin Enterprises, and his nonprofit ShareSpace Foundation, overseen by\u00a0his son and daughter,\u00a0Andrew and Janice Aldrin. Col. Aldrin said in an interview he was\u00a0shocked last month\u00a0when his two children asked a Florida state court to appoint them\u00a0his\u00a0co-guardians because he is \u201cin cognitive decline\u201d and experiencing paranoia and confusion.\u00a0That would give them power to make decisions on his behalf, and give them control of his finances and business dealings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin photographed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mike Marsland/WireImage\n \n\n\n\nThey also requested that their father undergo a competency examination by three mental health specialists appointed by the court\u00a0because, they say, he is associating with new people who appear to be manipulating him, according to documents they filed with the court. Col. Aldrin denies that. He is scheduled to undergo the examination this\u00a0Tuesday\u00a0and\u00a0Wednesday,\u00a0he and his lawyers say. In an interview last week,\u00a0Col. Aldrin said: \u201cNobody is going to come close to thinking I should be under a guardianship.\u201d Col. Aldrin responded this month\u00a0with a lawsuit, accusing Andrew Aldrin and his business manager of recent\u00a0years, Christina Korp, of elder exploitation, unjust enrichment and of converting his property for themselves. The suit also accused his daughter Janice of conspiracy and breach of fiduciary duty. In a statement through a public-relations firm, Andrew Aldrin, 60 years old, and Janice Aldrin, 60, said they are \u201cdeeply disappointed and saddened by the unjustified lawsuit that has been brought against us individually and against the Foundation that we have built together as a family to carry on Dad\u2019s legacy for generations to come. We love and respect our father very much and remain hopeful that we can rise above this situation and recover the strong relationship that built this foundation in the first place.\u201d\n\n\n \n\n\nMs. Korp, 45,\u00a0didn\u2019t respond to an email seeking comment and couldn't be reached by telephone.\u00a0 In the Aldrin children\u2019s request for a mental examination of their father, they mention Ms. Korp as a person with knowledge of his \u201ccognitive decline.\u201d It isn\u2019t uncommon for family members to disagree over how aging parents spend their money or handle their affairs,\u00a0or\u00a0for some spats to escalate to all-out legal combat.\u00a0Rarely do\u00a0such disputes\u00a0involve a moonwalking American icon. Col. Aldrin, in his lawsuit,\u00a0accuses Andrew and Ms. Korp of improperly using his credit cards and bank accounts, and of transferring nearly a half million dollars in the past two years from his savings account to his\u00a0private company and his foundation\u00a0for their own purposes. They have also assumed control of Col. Aldrin\u2019s \u201cspace memorabilia, space artifacts, social media accounts and all elements of the Buzz Aldrin brand,\u201d according to the suit, filed in a Florida state court. It also alleges that Andrew Aldrin and Ms. Korp slandered Col. Aldrin by saying he has dementia. Robert Bauer, a lawyer in Gainesville, Fla., who represents Col. Aldrin there and has talked with Andrew Aldrin, says \u201cWhat Andy is doing is saying to Buzz, \u2018you\u2019re old, you\u2019re not in your right mind anymore because you don\u2019t agree with me\u2019.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBuzz Aldrin aboard the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission, July 1969 in a photo taken by Neil Armstrong.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Neil Armstrong/Space Frontiers/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn April, Col. Aldrin voluntarily submitted\u00a0to a mental evaluation by Dr. James Spar, a professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral sciences at UCLA Medical School. Dr. Spar concluded that Col. Aldrin is \u201ccognitively intact and retains all forms of decisional capacity,\u201d according to the report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Col. Aldrin, who grew up in Montclair, N.J., graduated third in his class at West Point and earned a Ph.D. in astronautics\u00a0from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But he has never paid much attention to money matters, said his longtime lawyer and friend Robert Tourtelot. \u201cBuzz is a genius, he\u2019s the smartest guy I ever met,\u201d Mr. Tourtelot said. \u201cBut Buzz has never been street smart.\u201d His relationship with his children has been a rocky ride, according to Mr. Tourtelot. There have been periodic estrangements, Mr. Tourtelot said. Col. Aldrin was rarely home when they were young. His eldest son, James Michael, isn\u2019t involved in the legal dispute between his father and siblings. Col. Aldrin said he has tried unsuccessfully to bring all the children together in recent years. \u201cI intend to disengage as a repairman of family ruptures,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJanice Aldrin, 11, and her brothers, Andrew, 11, and James Michael 13, give a thumbs-up after the 1969 la The former astronaut\u2019s children say their father is in mental decline and are asking a Florida court to appoint them his guardians. He says they are after his business, and is suing for \u201celder exploitation.\u201d ",
        "author": "Gretchen Morgenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Maya Angelou and Sally Ride Will Be Honored on Quarters (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7563",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/us/quarters-maya-angelou-sally-ride.html",
        "text": "The coins are part of a new U.S. Mint program that will feature as many as 20 American women. The coins are part of a new U.S. Mint program that will feature as many as 20 American women. The writer and poet Maya Angelou and the astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, are the first women who will appear on a series of quarters to be issued by the U.S. Mint over the next four years.",
        "author": "By Bryan Pietsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Maya Angelou and Sally Ride Will Be Honored on Quarters (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7564",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/us/quarters-maya-angelou-sally-ride.html",
        "text": "The coins are part of a new U.S. Mint program that will feature as many as 20 American women. The coins are part of a new U.S. Mint program that will feature as many as 20 American women. The writer and poet Maya Angelou and the astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, are the first women who will appear on a series of quarters to be issued by the U.S. Mint over the next four years.",
        "author": "By Bryan Pietsch"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Boats Enter SpaceX Splashdown Area, Raising Concerns (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7565",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/us/flag-boat-SpaceX.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe need to do a better job next time\u201d of securing the area, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said. \u201cWe need to do a better job next time\u201d of securing the area, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said. Two American astronauts were greeted by a group of private boats on Sunday as their SpaceX capsule splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico, an encroachment that distracted from an otherwise triumphant milestone for the country\u2019s resurgent space program.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor and Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Boats Enter SpaceX Splashdown Area, Raising Concerns (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7566",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/us/flag-boat-SpaceX.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe need to do a better job next time\u201d of securing the area, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said. \u201cWe need to do a better job next time\u201d of securing the area, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said. Two American astronauts were greeted by a group of private boats on Sunday as their SpaceX capsule splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico, an encroachment that distracted from an otherwise triumphant milestone for the country\u2019s resurgent space program.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor and Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Boats Enter SpaceX Splashdown Area, Raising Concerns (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7567",
        "date": "2020-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/us/flag-boat-SpaceX.html",
        "text": "\u201cWe need to do a better job next time\u201d of securing the area, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said. \u201cWe need to do a better job next time\u201d of securing the area, the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said. Two American astronauts were greeted by a group of private boats on Sunday as their SpaceX capsule splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico, an encroachment that distracted from an otherwise triumphant milestone for the country\u2019s resurgent space program.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor and Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rene Carpenter, Astronaut\u2019s Wife Who Broke NASA Mold, Dies at 92 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7568",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/rene-carpenter-dead.html",
        "text": "The last living member of the Mercury 7 couples who helped define America\u2019s early space program, she went on to become a writer and television host. The last living member of the Mercury 7 couples who helped define America\u2019s early space program, she went on to become a writer and television host. Rene Carpenter, the last surviving member of the much-glorified cohort of Mercury 7 astronauts and their wives, whom Tom Wolfe immortalized in his best-selling 1979 book \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d died on Friday in Denver. She was 92. ",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rene Carpenter, Astronaut\u2019s Wife Who Broke NASA Mold, Dies at 92 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7569",
        "date": "2020-07-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/rene-carpenter-dead.html",
        "text": "The last living member of the Mercury 7 couples who helped define America\u2019s early space program, she went on to become a writer and television host. The last living member of the Mercury 7 couples who helped define America\u2019s early space program, she went on to become a writer and television host. Rene Carpenter, the last surviving member of the much-glorified cohort of Mercury 7 astronauts and their wives, whom Tom Wolfe immortalized in his best-selling 1979 book \u201cThe Right Stuff,\u201d died on Friday in Denver. She was 92. ",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Hopes for His Own Booster Shot From SpaceX Rocket Launch (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7570",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/politics/trump-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The president, beleaguered by a pandemic, economic troubles and racial unrest, viewed the liftoff as a welcome moment of triumph that he celebrated with a campaign rally-style speech. The president, beleaguered by a pandemic, economic troubles and racial unrest, viewed the liftoff as a welcome moment of triumph that he celebrated with a campaign rally-style speech. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 For President Trump, the launch of the sleek SpaceX rocket with two NASA astronauts on Saturday not only propelled America back into the heavens but, he hoped, gave a booster shot to his own beleaguered presidency after months of misery afflicting the country.",
        "author": "By Peter Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Hopes for His Own Booster Shot From SpaceX Rocket Launch (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7571",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/us/politics/trump-spacex-launch.html",
        "text": "The president, beleaguered by a pandemic, economic troubles and racial unrest, viewed the liftoff as a welcome moment of triumph that he celebrated with a campaign rally-style speech. The president, beleaguered by a pandemic, economic troubles and racial unrest, viewed the liftoff as a welcome moment of triumph that he celebrated with a campaign rally-style speech. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. \u2014 For President Trump, the launch of the sleek SpaceX rocket with two NASA astronauts on Saturday not only propelled America back into the heavens but, he hoped, gave a booster shot to his own beleaguered presidency after months of misery afflicting the country.",
        "author": "By Peter Baker"
    },
    {
        "title": "University of Texas Faces New Outcry Over Old Song With Minstrel Roots (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7572",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/eyes-of-texas-song-university.html",
        "text": "Many students want \u201cThe Eyes of Texas\u201d to go. Wealthy alumni insist it should stay. The dispute has become a flash point as universities struggle to deal with traditions spawned in earlier eras. Many students want \u201cThe Eyes of Texas\u201d to go. Wealthy alumni insist it should stay. The dispute has become a flash point as universities struggle to deal with traditions spawned in earlier eras. SAN ANTONIO \u2014 For generations, the fight song at the University of Texas at Austin has been etched into the state\u2019s very fabric. For students, the words \u201cthe eyes of Texas are upon you\u201d have been sung before and after every sporting event and commencement. Beyond the campus, the song is ever-present at weddings and funerals \u2014 and even space, where it was a wake-up call for astronauts on the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab missions.",
        "author": "By Edgar Sandoval and Simon Romero"
    },
    {
        "title": "University of Texas Faces New Outcry Over Old Song With Minstrel Roots (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7573",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/eyes-of-texas-song-university.html",
        "text": "Many students want \u201cThe Eyes of Texas\u201d to go. Wealthy alumni insist it should stay. The dispute has become a flash point as universities struggle to deal with traditions spawned in earlier eras. Many students want \u201cThe Eyes of Texas\u201d to go. Wealthy alumni insist it should stay. The dispute has become a flash point as universities struggle to deal with traditions spawned in earlier eras. SAN ANTONIO \u2014 For generations, the fight song at the University of Texas at Austin has been etched into the state\u2019s very fabric. For students, the words \u201cthe eyes of Texas are upon you\u201d have been sung before and after every sporting event and commencement. Beyond the campus, the song is ever-present at weddings and funerals \u2014 and even space, where it was a wake-up call for astronauts on the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab missions.",
        "author": "By Edgar Sandoval and Simon Romero"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Sanctions Iran\u2019s Space Agency After Failed Launch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7574",
        "date": "2019-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sanctions-irans-space-agency-after-failed-launch-11567554944?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=51",
        "text": "In a statement, the State Department said the new sanctions are the first to target Iran\u2019s civilian space agency. It said the technologies used to launch rockets are virtually identical to those used to test intercontinental ballistic missiles. Iran said its space efforts are peaceful.\n\u201cThis is simply another in a long line of illegal U.S. economic terrorism imposed on Iran in defiance of UNSC Resolution 2231, and which will have no effect on our development of peaceful space and satellite technologies,\u201d said Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman for Iran\u2019s mission to the United Nations.\n\n\nMissile tests don\u2019t violate the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and other world powers, which seeks to curb Iran\u2019s nuclear program. But Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo\n\n\n\n has warned Iran against conducting such tests, and the U.S. wants ballistic missiles to be part of any future deal with Tehran.\n\u201cThis is why Secretary Pompeo has called for a new comprehensive deal that addresses all elements of Iran\u2019s malign behavior,\u201d the State Department said.\nThe announced sanctions came as Mr. Pompeo met with incoming European leaders on Tuesday, during a short trip to Brussels that didn\u2019t include meetings with the departing leadership of the European Commission and Council,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jean-Claude Juncker\n\n\n\n and Donald Tusk.\nThe Trump administration, which withdrew from the nuclear accord last year, has tried unsuccessfully to persuade allies to toughen the agreement. European diplomats are working on a French initiative to provide Iran economic relief from U.S. sanctions in return for complete compliance with the nuclear accord.\nThe latest proposal would let Iran export more oil and draw on an international line of credit. If it works, Iran could sell at least 700,000 barrels of oil a day, more than double its current exports.\nIt couldn\u2019t be determined whether Mr. Pompeo held talks on the French proposal in Brussels on Tuesday, or on the possibility of a meeting between Mr. Trump and Iran\u2019s president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hassan Rouhani.\n\n\n\n \nMr. Trump has signaled an openness to both ideas, while national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Bolton\n\n\n\n has described any prospect of sanctions relief as a non-starter in the absence of a comprehensive new deal.\nThe new U.S. sanctions target both the Iranian Space Agency and two of its research institutes, and are the latest in a maximum-pressure campaign to target Iran\u2019s oil, leadership, economy and security apparatus. As part of this effort, the State Department issues regular \u201cThis Week In Iran Policy\u201d fact sheets listing new sanctions, with quotes from Mr. Pompeo.\nFollowing Iran\u2019s failed rocket launch, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that the U.S. wasn\u2019t behind the accident and wished Tehran luck investigating the cause of the explosion. Commercial satellite imagery has shown pictures of smoke rising from the launch site, debris and other damage.\nIran didn\u2019t blame the U.S. for the accident, but tensions have escalated between the countries after a series of attacks and ship seizures in the Persian Gulf that have brought Tehran to the edge of conflict with the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. in June launched cyberattacks against Iranian government computers, officials have said.\nA readout of Mr. Pompeo\u2019s meeting on Tuesday with the European Parliament\u2019s newly elected president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Sassoli\n\n\n\n of Italy, only listed the \u201ctransAtlantic security relationship\u201d as a topic for discussion. There was no specific mention of Iran.\nMr. Pompeo also met the European Council\u2019s president-elect,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Michel\n\n\n\n of Belgium, during the trip. No transcript of that meeting was available as of Tuesday.\nSpeaking to reporters Monday evening, the U.S. ambassador to the EU,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Sondland,\n\n\n\n said Mr. Pompeo organized the meetings in Brussels in hopes of resetting the EU-U.S. relationship at a time of major differences between the two sides over a range of issues, from trade to climate change.\nMr. Sondland said the incoming EU officials seemed to have views which were \u201cclosely aligned\u201d with Washington\u2019s views and he hoped this would mean progress for the \u201cmultiple impasses on multiple fronts\u201d between the two sides.\nMr. Michel tweeted on Monday that he discussed the two sides\u2019 \u201cshared values and common interests\u201d with Mr. Pompeo. \u201cEurope and the U.S.A. both benefit from a stronger transatlantic cooperation.\u201d\nAfter withdrawing last year from the 2015 nuclear accord, the Trump administration presented Iran with a list of 12 demands that include a prohibition on uranium enrichment and a wholesale change in Iran\u2019s military posture in the Middle East. The U.S. said it is not calling for regime change. Iran has said it would not meet the demands.\n\u2014Laurence Norman in Brussels contributed to this article.\nWrite to Jessica Donati at jessica.donati@wsj.com and Ian Talley at ian.tall The State Department imposed sanctions against Iran\u2019s space program following a failed attempt to launch a rocket last week, which the U.S. suspects was an effort to advance its ballistic missile program. ",
        "author": "Jessica Donati and Ian Talley"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Sanctions Iran\u2019s Space Agency After Failed Launch (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7575",
        "date": "2019-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sanctions-irans-space-agency-after-failed-launch-11567554944?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=51",
        "text": "In a statement, the State Department said the new sanctions are the first to target Iran\u2019s civilian space agency. It said the technologies used to launch rockets are virtually identical to those used to test intercontinental ballistic missiles. Iran said its space efforts are peaceful.\n\u201cThis is simply another in a long line of illegal U.S. economic terrorism imposed on Iran in defiance of UNSC Resolution 2231, and which will have no effect on our development of peaceful space and satellite technologies,\u201d said Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman for Iran\u2019s mission to the United Nations.\n\n\nMissile tests don\u2019t violate the 2015 nuclear accord between Iran and other world powers, which seeks to curb Iran\u2019s nuclear program. But Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo\n\n\n\n has warned Iran against conducting such tests, and the U.S. wants ballistic missiles to be part of any future deal with Tehran.\n\u201cThis is why Secretary Pompeo has called for a new comprehensive deal that addresses all elements of Iran\u2019s malign behavior,\u201d the State Department said.\nThe announced sanctions came as Mr. Pompeo met with incoming European leaders on Tuesday, during a short trip to Brussels that didn\u2019t include meetings with the departing leadership of the European Commission and Council,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jean-Claude Juncker\n\n\n\n and Donald Tusk.\nThe Trump administration, which withdrew from the nuclear accord last year, has tried unsuccessfully to persuade allies to toughen the agreement. European diplomats are working on a French initiative to provide Iran economic relief from U.S. sanctions in return for complete compliance with the nuclear accord.\nThe latest proposal would let Iran export more oil and draw on an international line of credit. If it works, Iran could sell at least 700,000 barrels of oil a day, more than double its current exports.\nIt couldn\u2019t be determined whether Mr. Pompeo held talks on the French proposal in Brussels on Tuesday, or on the possibility of a meeting between Mr. Trump and Iran\u2019s president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hassan Rouhani.\n\n\n\n \nMr. Trump has signaled an openness to both ideas, while national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Bolton\n\n\n\n has described any prospect of sanctions relief as a non-starter in the absence of a comprehensive new deal.\nThe new U.S. sanctions target both the Iranian Space Agency and two of its research institutes, and are the latest in a maximum-pressure campaign to target Iran\u2019s oil, leadership, economy and security apparatus. As part of this effort, the State Department issues regular \u201cThis Week In Iran Policy\u201d fact sheets listing new sanctions, with quotes from Mr. Pompeo.\nFollowing Iran\u2019s failed rocket launch, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that the U.S. wasn\u2019t behind the accident and wished Tehran luck investigating the cause of the explosion. Commercial satellite imagery has shown pictures of smoke rising from the launch site, debris and other damage.\nIran didn\u2019t blame the U.S. for the accident, but tensions have escalated between the countries after a series of attacks and ship seizures in the Persian Gulf that have brought Tehran to the edge of conflict with the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. in June launched cyberattacks against Iranian government computers, officials have said.\nA readout of Mr. Pompeo\u2019s meeting on Tuesday with the European Parliament\u2019s newly elected president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Sassoli\n\n\n\n of Italy, only listed the \u201ctransAtlantic security relationship\u201d as a topic for discussion. There was no specific mention of Iran.\nMr. Pompeo also met the European Council\u2019s president-elect,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Michel\n\n\n\n of Belgium, during the trip. No transcript of that meeting was available as of Tuesday.\nSpeaking to reporters Monday evening, the U.S. ambassador to the EU,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gordon Sondland,\n\n\n\n said Mr. Pompeo organized the meetings in Brussels in hopes of resetting the EU-U.S. relationship at a time of major differences between the two sides over a range of issues, from trade to climate change.\nMr. Sondland said the incoming EU officials seemed to have views which were \u201cclosely aligned\u201d with Washington\u2019s views and he hoped this would mean progress for the \u201cmultiple impasses on multiple fronts\u201d between the two sides.\nMr. Michel tweeted on Monday that he discussed the two sides\u2019 \u201cshared values and common interests\u201d with Mr. Pompeo. \u201cEurope and the U.S.A. both benefit from a stronger transatlantic cooperation.\u201d\nAfter withdrawing last year from the 2015 nuclear accord, the Trump administration presented Iran with a list of 12 demands that include a prohibition on uranium enrichment and a wholesale change in Iran\u2019s military posture in the Middle East. The U.S. said it is not calling for regime change. Iran has said it would not meet the demands.\n\u2014Laurence Norman in Brussels contributed to this article.\nWrite to Jessica Donati at jessica.donati@wsj.com and Ian Talley at ian.tall The State Department imposed sanctions against Iran\u2019s space program following a failed attempt to launch a rocket last week, which the U.S. suspects was an effort to advance its ballistic missile program. ",
        "author": "Jessica Donati and Ian Talley"
    },
    {
        "title": "No Cell Signal, No Wi-Fi, No Problem. Growing Up Inside America\u2019s \u2018Quiet Zone\u2019 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7576",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/green-bank-west-virginia-quiet-zone.html",
        "text": "Green Bank, W.Va., is home to a telescope so large that it requires near radio silence to operate, a technological restriction that has created a unique kind of modern childhood. Green Bank, W.Va., is home to a telescope so large that it requires near radio silence to operate, a technological restriction that has created a unique kind of modern childhood. GREEN BANK, W.Va. \u2014 Viral dance memes and dance challenges on TikTok largely bypass Green Bank, W.Va. So do viral sensations like augmented reality filters on Snapchat and Instagram.",
        "author": "By Dan Levin and Annie Flanagan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lights Out: 5 New \u2018Dark-Sky Places\u2019 for Top-Shelf Stargazing (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7577",
        "date": "2021-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/dark-sky-parks-us.html",
        "text": "The International Dark-Sky Association awards certifications to sites with exceptionally high-quality night skies, including national parks, sanctuaries and reserves. The International Dark-Sky Association awards certifications to sites with exceptionally high-quality night skies, including national parks, sanctuaries and reserves. Vast expanses of glittering stars. Pristine views of the night sky. And no glare to muddy the Milky Way.",
        "author": "By Johnny Diaz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lights Out: 5 New \u2018Dark-Sky Places\u2019 for Top-Shelf Stargazing (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7578",
        "date": "2021-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/dark-sky-parks-us.html",
        "text": "The International Dark-Sky Association awards certifications to sites with exceptionally high-quality night skies, including national parks, sanctuaries and reserves. The International Dark-Sky Association awards certifications to sites with exceptionally high-quality night skies, including national parks, sanctuaries and reserves. Vast expanses of glittering stars. Pristine views of the night sky. And no glare to muddy the Milky Way.",
        "author": "By Johnny Diaz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, Is Fake (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7579",
        "date": "2021-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/yale-vinland-map-fake.html",
        "text": "For decades, researchers at Yale and elsewhere have questioned the authenticity of a map that seemed to reflect Viking travels to North America. The school now says the case is closed. For decades, researchers at Yale and elsewhere have questioned the authenticity of a map that seemed to reflect Viking travels to North America. The school now says the case is closed. Doubts crept in around Greenland, which looked so good it was frankly suspicious, and questions soon spread all over the map: about the wormholes, the handwriting and, most important, the weirdly crumbling ink.",
        "author": "By Alan Yuhas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, Is Fake (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7580",
        "date": "2021-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/yale-vinland-map-fake.html",
        "text": "For decades, researchers at Yale and elsewhere have questioned the authenticity of a map that seemed to reflect Viking travels to North America. The school now says the case is closed. For decades, researchers at Yale and elsewhere have questioned the authenticity of a map that seemed to reflect Viking travels to North America. The school now says the case is closed. Doubts crept in around Greenland, which looked so good it was frankly suspicious, and questions soon spread all over the map: about the wormholes, the handwriting and, most important, the weirdly crumbling ink.",
        "author": "By Alan Yuhas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bitcoin, Virgin Galactic, Cisco: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7581",
        "date": "2021-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-cisco-carnival-chevron-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11621507809?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=20",
        "text": "U.S. stock futures wavered as the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits notched another weekly decline.\n\n Futures tied to the S&P 500 edged up 0.1% and contracts on the Dow Jones Industrial Average were down 0.1%. Futures on the technology-heavy Nasdaq-100 were up 0.3%. Read our full market wrap here.\n\n Bitcoin was back over $41,000 after a rough day of trading that saw its value fall as low as $30,202. \n\n Jobless claims fell by 34,000 to 444,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday.\n\n What\u2019s Coming Up Earnings are due from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Palo Alto Networks\n\n PANW -1.05%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ross Stores\n\n ROST -2.05%\n\n\n after the close.\n\n Shares of oat-milk maker Oatly will begin trading Thursday on the Nasdaq.\n\n Market Movers to Watch \nCisco\n\n CSCO -0.04%\n\n\n Systems shares dropped 4.8% ahead of the bell. The tech company\u2019s\u00a0revenue rose a stronger-than-expected 7% in the third quarter while total product orders rose 10% from the year earlier\u2014but apparently investors wanted more.\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Cisco booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Feb. 26, 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n rafael marchante/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n \nVirgin Galactic\n\n SPCE -3.83%\n\n\n shares rocketed 21% higher. The aerospace and space-travel company confirmed that the next test flight of its SpaceShipTwo Unity will be conducted Saturday, pending weather and technical checks.\n\n Shares of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n BJ\u2019s Wholesale Club\n\n BJ 1.31%\n\n\n fell 3.7% premarket after its earnings beat forecasts but it said its outlook was uncertain.\n\n \nKohl\u2019s\n\n KSS -0.95%\n\n\n shares dropped 7.1%. The department-store company raised its guidance for the fiscal year.\n\n \nL Brands\n\n\n dropped 1.1% premarket. The retailer\u00a0swung to a profit in the first quarter driven by an 83% increase in sales as\u00a0customers returned to shopping\u00a0at Bath & Body Works and Victoria\u2019s Secret.\n\n Market Facts The S&P 500 on Wednesday closed\u00a0just 2.8% below its all-time high, despite falling for six of the past eight trading days.\n\n \nKansas City Southern\n\n\n shares\u00a0hit an all-time high\u00a0above $315 a share last Thursday after the railroad deemed Canadian National\u2019s roughly $325-a-share bid to be superior to the one it had accepted from rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Canadian Pacific.\n\n CP -0.21%\n\n\n Since then, doubts have crept in and the shares have retreated to $295.\n\n Chart of the Day\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2U.S. consumer-price index by region, 12-month percentage changeSource: U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsNote: All items, not seasonally adjustedCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2%SouthWestMidwestNortheast2020'21-10123456\n\n\n\n Consumer prices measured in a monthly inflation report may not show the kind of changes you are seeing at the pump, the supermarket or brunch.\u00a0Use our tool to calculate the inflation rate for your spending.\n\n Must Reads Since You Went to Bed China\u2019s Mutual-Fund Stars Go From Boom to Backlash\n Oatly IPO Prices at $17 a Share, Notching $10 Billion Valuation\n Ford\u2019s Electric F-150 Undercuts Rivals With $40,000 Starting Price\n Tesla Drivers Test Autopilot\u2019s Limits, Attracting Audiences\u2014and Safety Concerns\n Colonial Pipeline CEO Tells Why He Paid Hackers a $4.4 Million Ransom\n Embattled Chinese Property Tycoon Turns to Electric Cars. Cue $87 Billion Valuation. Stock futures were mixed while bitcoin was crawling higher. ",
        "author": "James Willhite"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tech Stocks Lead Rebound After Jobless Claims Drop (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7582",
        "date": "2021-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-stock-markets-dow-update-05-20-2021-11621496568?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=20",
        "text": "Stocks and other risky assets had been under pressure this week following concerns that rising inflation and a speedy economic recovery could prompt central bankers to pare back easy-money policies. \n\u201cI think people are still concerned by the volatile moves that we\u2019re having in our market,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Corpina,\n\n\n\n senior managing partner at Meridian Equity Partners. \u201cIn reality, people are still apprehensive about what the economy will look like one month from now, two months from now, six months from now.\u201d \n\n\nThe S&P 500 edged up 43.44 points, or 1.1%, to 4159.12, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 188.11 points, or 0.6%, to 34084.15. The Nasdaq Composite added 236 points, or 1.8%, to 13535.74.\nAfter Thursday\u2019s rebound, the S&P 500 and Dow are off less than 2% from the records they set two weeks ago. The Nasdaq is down 4.3% from its late April high.\n\u201cTraders and investors, at least at the margin, are coming in and taking advantage of this selloff,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quincy Krosby,\n\n\n\n investment chief market strategist for Prudential Financial. \u201cWe\u2019ll see how enduring that is.\u201d\nThe technology and communication services sectors led the way in the S&P 500, both rising more than 1.6%. Stocks in those sectors have been particularly sensitive to worries about rising interest rates, in part because their earnings are expected to come further in the future. Rising yields increase the value of current earnings relative to future ones.\nOf the S&P 500\u2019s 11 sectors, only energy finished the day in the red.\nMarkets are likely to be volatile until additional economic data provides a clearer picture, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seema Shah,\n\n\n\n chief strategist at Principal Global Advisors. \u201cI don\u2019t think we could know anything really about which way inflation is going to go until September, but the market is unable to wait that long.\u201d\nBitcoin rose 4.5% to $40,107.62 as of 5 p.m. ET Thursday following a frenzied selloff the previous day when cryptocurrencies plunged. Ether rose 8.9% to $2,761.80, and dogecoin gained 15% to nearly 40 cents.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA banner for Squarespace hung at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Lennihan/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201c[Cryptocurrency] is no longer an asterisk for the general market,\u201d Ms. Krosby said. \u201cIt seems like it\u2019s becoming very much part of the general market, and questions whether or not the selloff in bitcoin is representative of concerns over risk-on risk-off over the larger market.\u201d\nThe continued retail struggle could signal a temporary change in consumer behavior as the vaccine rollout continues, Ms. Krosby said. Shares of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ralph Lauren \n\n\n dropped 7%, while\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Gap \n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n L Brands\n\n\n each fell about 4%.\n\u201cI think you\u2019re seeing the consumer using their freedom: traveling, dining out, using their pent-up money,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I think when consumers go back to work, you\u2019ll see them wanting more clothing and new outfits and going to stores.\u201d\nShares of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings \n\n\n rose 15% after the aerospace and space-travel company confirmed that the next test flight of its SpaceShipTwo Unity will be conducted Saturday, pending weather and technical checks.\nIn bond markets, the yield on 10-year Treasury notes fell to 1.631% from 1.680% Wednesday. Yields fall when bond prices rise.\nOverseas, the pan-continental Stoxx Europe 600 ticked up 1.3%. The major Asian indexes closed on a mixed note. The Shanghai Composite edged 0.1% lower, South Korea\u2019s Kospi fell 0.3% and Hong Kong\u2019s Hang Seng declined 0.5%. Japan\u2019s Nikkei 225 advanced 0.2%. \n\n\nReader FavoritesEnjoy some of the top articles for new WSJ readersTravelThe Best Ways to Drive Across CountryCryptocurrencyWhat Is Dogecoin and Why It\u2019s No Longer a JokeLive BetterHow to Prevent and Recover From Job BurnoutGlobalTrapped Aboard an Abandoned Ship: A Four-Year OrdealWellnessA Workout for Your Mental HealthCareerAsking How Much You Make Is No Longer a Taboo QuestionLifestyleDivorce Style Has ArrivedReal EstateYou\u2019ve Bought a House in the \u2019Burbs. Now Meet Your Neighbors\n\n\nWrite to Caitlin Ostroff at caitlin.ostroff@wsj.com and Julia Carpenter at Julia.Carpenter@wsj.com The S&P 500 snapped a three-day losing streak, led higher by a rally in technology shares. The Nasdaq Composite rose 1.8%. ",
        "author": "Caitlin Ostroff and Julia Carpenter"
    },
    {
        "title": "GameStop, Tesla, Carnival: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7583",
        "date": "2021-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-tesla-carnival-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11617620132?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=22",
        "text": "Futures tied to the S&P 500 gained 0.7%, indicating that the broad market gauge could rise after the New York opening bell. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures climbed 0.8% and Nasdaq-100 futures added 0.8%. Read our full market wrap here.\nWhat\u2019s Coming Up IHS Markit\u2019s U.S. services index for March is expected to tick up to 60.2 from a preliminary reading of 60 when figures are released at 9:45 a.m. ET.\n\n The Institute for Supply Management\u2019s services index for March, due at 10 a.m., is expected to rise to 59.2 from 55.3 a month earlier. \n\n U.S. factory orders for February, also out at 10 a.m., are expected to rise 0.3% from a month earlier. \n\n Market Movers to Watch \u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop\n\n GME -7.83%\n\n\n shares tumbled 12% premarket after after the videogame retailer announced plans to sell up to 3.5 million shares of its common stock.\n\n\n\u2014Shares in electric carmaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla\n\n TSLA -5.12%\n\n\n rallied 7.5% in premarket trading. \n\u2014Oil-and-gas producer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Pioneer Natural Resources\n\n\n shares declined 3.8% after it late Thursday announced a $6.4 billion deal to buy DoublePoint Energy.\n\u2014Shares in cruise operator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carnival\n\n CCL -2.49%\n\n\n rose 2.7% after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued updated guidance Friday for the eventual resumption of leisure cruises, stressing the need for vaccinating ship and port personnel against Covid-19.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings\n\n NCLH -1.74%\n\n\n asked U.S. federal health authorities to let it sail from U.S. ports starting July 4, saying its vaccination requirement for passengers and crew is a sufficient precaution against Covid-19. Shares gained 4.2% in premarket trading.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Carnival ship passed by South Beach in Miami Beach, Fla., Sept., 20, 2018.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andy Newman/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u2014A Maryland hotel magnate and a Swiss billionaire have made a bid for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tribune Publishing\n\n\n that the newspaper chain is expected to favor over a takeover deal it already struck with hedge fund Alden Global Capital LLC, The Wall Street Journal reported. Shares rose 1.1% premarket.\n\u2014The cryptocurrency XRP rallied 17% Monday. It fell sharply in December after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit claiming Ripple Labs violated investor-protection laws when it sold XRP.\n\u2014Shares in sports betting firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DraftKings\n\n\n rose 2.1% after the company said it acquired Blue Ribbon Software, a Tel Aviv-based jackpot and gamification company. \nMarket Facts \u2014In recent months, fund investors have been plowing loads of cash into funds focused on Japanese stocks. Inflows totaled $3.1 billion in the six months through January, according to data from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morningstar,\n\n\n compared with net outflows of $22.8 billion in five years from August 2015 through July 2020.\n\u2014About 70% of mortgages issued in 2020 went to borrowers with credit scores of at least 760, up from 61% in 2019, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.\nChart of the Day\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2Spaced OutWeight of top five holdings in ARK Space Exploration and Innovation ETFSource: ARK Investment ManagementCreated with Highcharts 8.2.28.6%6.15.854.9Trimble (Sector:Tech hardware & equipment)ARK 3D Printing ETFKratos Defense & Security (Aerospace & def.)L3Harris Tech (Aerospace & defense)JD.com (Internet retail)\n\n\n\nThe latest is ARK Investment Management\u2019s Space Exploration and Innovation ETF, known as ARKX, which promises to invest 80% of its assets in, naturally enough, space exploration and innovation. ARK has redefined the term to include beneficiaries of space technology, such as tractor maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deere\n\n DE 3.00%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix.\n\nMust Reads Since You Went to Bed The Pandemic Year\u2019s Top Stock-Fund Managers\n SoftBank to Lead $1.2 Billion Investment in Genetic-Testing Company Invitae\n Individual Investors Retreat From Markets After Show-Stopping Start to 2021\n If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund\n Carl Icahn Taps Former GE Executive to Be CEO of His Firm\n Billionaire Bill Foley Is SPAC Market\u2019s Overlooked Star\n Coinbase Independent Directors Have Close Company Ties Stock futures rose following a strong jobs report and ahead of fresh data on the services sector. ",
        "author": "Caitlin Ostroff"
    },
    {
        "title": "GameStop, Tesla, Carnival: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7584",
        "date": "2021-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-tesla-carnival-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11617620132?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=33",
        "text": "Futures tied to the S&P 500 gained 0.7%, indicating that the broad market gauge could rise after the New York opening bell. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures climbed 0.8% and Nasdaq-100 futures added 0.8%. Read our full market wrap here.\nWhat\u2019s Coming Up IHS Markit\u2019s U.S. services index for March is expected to tick up to 60.2 from a preliminary reading of 60 when figures are released at 9:45 a.m. ET.\n\n The Institute for Supply Management\u2019s services index for March, due at 10 a.m., is expected to rise to 59.2 from 55.3 a month earlier. \n\n U.S. factory orders for February, also out at 10 a.m., are expected to rise 0.3% from a month earlier. \n\n Market Movers to Watch \n\n\n\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GameStop\n\n GME -4.42%\n\n\n shares tumbled 12% premarket after after the videogame retailer announced plans to sell up to 3.5 million shares of its common stock.\n\n\n\u2014Shares in electric carmaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla\n\n TSLA -2.41%\n\n\n rallied 7.5% in premarket trading. \n\u2014Oil-and-gas producer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Pioneer Natural Resources\n\n\n shares declined 3.8% after it late Thursday announced a $6.4 billion deal to buy DoublePoint Energy.\n\u2014Shares in cruise operator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carnival\n\n CCL 2.20%\n\n\n rose 2.7% after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued updated guidance Friday for the eventual resumption of leisure cruises, stressing the need for vaccinating ship and port personnel against Covid-19.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings\n\n NCLH 2.83%\n\n\n asked U.S. federal health authorities to let it sail from U.S. ports starting July 4, saying its vaccination requirement for passengers and crew is a sufficient precaution against Covid-19. Shares gained 4.2% in premarket trading.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Carnival ship passed by South Beach in Miami Beach, Fla., Sept., 20, 2018.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andy Newman/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u2014A Maryland hotel magnate and a Swiss billionaire have made a bid for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tribune Publishing\n\n\n that the newspaper chain is expected to favor over a takeover deal it already struck with hedge fund Alden Global Capital LLC, The Wall Street Journal reported. Shares rose 1.1% premarket.\n\u2014The cryptocurrency XRP rallied 17% Monday. It fell sharply in December after the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit claiming Ripple Labs violated investor-protection laws when it sold XRP.\n\u2014Shares in sports betting firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DraftKings\n\n\n rose 2.1% after the company said it acquired Blue Ribbon Software, a Tel Aviv-based jackpot and gamification company. \nMarket Facts \u2014In recent months, fund investors have been plowing loads of cash into funds focused on Japanese stocks. Inflows totaled $3.1 billion in the six months through January, according to data from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Morningstar,\n\n\n compared with net outflows of $22.8 billion in five years from August 2015 through July 2020.\n\u2014About 70% of mortgages issued in 2020 went to borrowers with credit scores of at least 760, up from 61% in 2019, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.\nChart of the Day\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe latest is ARK Investment Management\u2019s Space Exploration and Innovation ETF, known as ARKX, which promises to invest 80% of its assets in, naturally enough, space exploration and innovation. ARK has redefined the term to include beneficiaries of space technology, such as tractor maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deere\n\n DE 2.52%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix.\n\nMust Reads Since You Went to Bed The Pandemic Year\u2019s Top Stock-Fund Managers\n SoftBank to Lead $1.2 Billion Investment in Genetic-Testing Company Invitae\n Individual Investors Retreat From Markets After Show-Stopping Start to 2021\n If You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund\n Carl Icahn Taps Former GE Executive to Be CEO of His Firm\n Billionaire Bill Foley Is SPAC Market\u2019s Overlooked Star\n Coinbase Independent Directors Have Close Company Ties Stock futures rose following a strong jobs report and ahead of fresh data on the services sector. ",
        "author": "Caitlin Ostroff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond Meat, DraftKings, Carnival: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7585",
        "date": "2021-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-meat-draftkings-carnival-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11617793795?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=22",
        "text": "\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carnival\n\n CCL -2.49%\n\n\n shares added 2% ahead of the bell. The cruise operator on Tuesday said it is extending its sailing pause out of the U.S. by a month through the end of June as U.S. authorities haven\u2019t laid out a clear timeline for a resumption of cruises.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Royal Caribbean\n\n RCL -1.57%\n\n\n was also up, by 1.6%.\n\n\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DraftKings\n\n DKNG -8.36%\n\n\n shares rose 1.2% premarket after New York officially approved legal online sports betting.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Smart Global Holdings\n\n SGH -2.47%\n\n\n shares ticked up 1.6% premarket on better-than-expected financial projections for the third quarter. \n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Chipotle Mexican Grill\n\n CMG 0.43%\n\n\n shares rose 1.2% premarket. Truist Securities on Tuesday raised its price target for the stock, noting that the chain had raised prices on its steak offerings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA customer wearing a protective mask enters a Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. restaurant in San Francisco, July 20, 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors\n\n GM -0.81%\n\n\n shares slipped 0.4% premarket. The auto maker\u00a0plans to roll out an\u00a0electric version of its Chevy Silverado\u00a0pickup truck, the latest in its efforts to convert its global lineup to electric vehicles.\nMarket Facts Gold prices on Tuesday gained for the fourth consecutive trading session, but are still down 8% this year.\n\n Trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday was the lowest of the year, as\u00a04,057,035,817 shares changed hands.\n\n On this day in\u00a01999, online traders spotted a Bloomberg News Service page reporting the news that PairGain Technologies had agreed to be acquired by ECI Telecom at a rich premium over its current stock price. PairGain stock promptly soared 31%, then crashed as PairGain and Bloomberg said the news page was a fraudulent announcement designed to look like a genuine Bloomberg news report.\n\n Chart of the Day\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2LiftoffInvestors have put more than $400 million into ARK Investment ManagementLLC's latest exchange-traded fund.ARK Space Exploration & Innovation ETF flows, by daySource: FactSetCreated with Highcharts 8.2.2millionMarch 30April050100150200250$300\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cathie Wood\u2019s\n\n\n\n new\u00a0ARK Space Exploration & Innovation ETF\u00a0is already on track to be one of the most successful fund launches ever despite criticism that it doesn\u2019t necessarily reflect the nascent space-exploration market.\nMust Reads Since You Went to Bed JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Sees \u2018Goldilocks Moment\u2019 for U.S. Economy\n China\u2019s Cosco Shipping Expects Profit Surge as Industry Flourishes\n China\u2019s Sportswear Giants Enjoy Big Market Run-Up\n Fed\u2019s Kaplan Says the Economy Still Needs Central Bank Support\n BlackRock Must Hit ESG Targets or Pay More to Borrow Money Minutes from the Federal Reserve's latest meeting are due Wednesday afternoon. ",
        "author": "James Willhite"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond Meat, DraftKings, Carnival: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7586",
        "date": "2021-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-meat-draftkings-carnival-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11617793795?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=33",
        "text": "\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carnival\n\n CCL 2.20%\n\n\n shares added 2% ahead of the bell. The cruise operator on Tuesday said it is extending its sailing pause out of the U.S. by a month through the end of June as U.S. authorities haven\u2019t laid out a clear timeline for a resumption of cruises.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Royal Caribbean\n\n RCL 2.15%\n\n\n was also up, by 1.6%.\n\n\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DraftKings\n\n DKNG -1.12%\n\n\n shares rose 1.2% premarket after New York officially approved legal online sports betting.\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Smart Global Holdings\n\n SGH -0.95%\n\n\n shares ticked up 1.6% premarket on better-than-expected financial projections for the third quarter. \n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Chipotle Mexican Grill\n\n CMG 3.41%\n\n\n shares rose 1.2% premarket. Truist Securities on Tuesday raised its price target for the stock, noting that the chain had raised prices on its steak offerings.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA customer wearing a protective mask enters a Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. restaurant in San Francisco, July 20, 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\n\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors\n\n GM -1.02%\n\n\n shares slipped 0.4% premarket. The auto maker\u00a0plans to roll out an\u00a0electric version of its Chevy Silverado\u00a0pickup truck, the latest in its efforts to convert its global lineup to electric vehicles.\nMarket Facts Gold prices on Tuesday gained for the fourth consecutive trading session, but are still down 8% this year.\n\n Trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday was the lowest of the year, as\u00a04,057,035,817 shares changed hands.\n\n On this day in\u00a01999, online traders spotted a Bloomberg News Service page reporting the news that PairGain Technologies had agreed to be acquired by ECI Telecom at a rich premium over its current stock price. PairGain stock promptly soared 31%, then crashed as PairGain and Bloomberg said the news page was a fraudulent announcement designed to look like a genuine Bloomberg news report.\n\n Chart of the Day\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cathie Wood\u2019s\n\n\n\n new\u00a0ARK Space Exploration & Innovation ETF\u00a0is already on track to be one of the most successful fund launches ever despite criticism that it doesn\u2019t necessarily reflect the nascent space-exploration market.\nMust Reads Since You Went to Bed JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Sees \u2018Goldilocks Moment\u2019 for U.S. Economy\n China\u2019s Cosco Shipping Expects Profit Surge as Industry Flourishes\n China\u2019s Sportswear Giants Enjoy Big Market Run-Up\n Fed\u2019s Kaplan Says the Economy Still Needs Central Bank Support\n BlackRock Must Hit ESG Targets or Pay More to Borrow Money Minutes from the Federal Reserve's latest meeting are due Wednesday afternoon. ",
        "author": "James Willhite"
    },
    {
        "title": "Didi, BioNTech, Carnival: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7587",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/didi-biontech-carnival-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11625827791?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=20",
        "text": "Must Reads Since You Went to Bed Meme Stock Fantasy Becomes a Reality for GameStop, AMC\n American Frackers Show Restraint as Oil Tops $70\n China Inflation Cools but Beijing Worries Economy Is Losing Heat\n Index of U.S.-Listed Chinese Firms Falls to Lowest Point in Over a Year\n China Inflation Cools but Beijing Worries Economy Is Losing Heat\n Pfizer to Ask Regulators to Authorize Covid-19 Vaccine Booster\n Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism\n Write to anna.hirtenstein@wsj.com Futures were mixed while U.S.-listed Chinese technology shares regained ground after a multi-day tumble ",
        "author": "Anna Hirtenstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Didi, BioNTech, Carnival: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7588",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/didi-biontech-carnival-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11625827791?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=7",
        "text": "Must Reads Since You Went to Bed Meme Stock Fantasy Becomes a Reality for GameStop, AMC\n American Frackers Show Restraint as Oil Tops $70\n China Inflation Cools but Beijing Worries Economy Is Losing Heat\n Index of U.S.-Listed Chinese Firms Falls to Lowest Point in Over a Year\n China Inflation Cools but Beijing Worries Economy Is Losing Heat\n Pfizer to Ask Regulators to Authorize Covid-19 Vaccine Booster\n Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism\n Write to anna.hirtenstein@wsj.com Futures were mixed while U.S.-listed Chinese technology shares regained ground after a multi-day tumble ",
        "author": "Anna Hirtenstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Didi, BioNTech, Carnival: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today (WSJ: U.S. Markets) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7589",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/didi-biontech-carnival-what-to-watch-when-the-stock-market-opens-today-11625827791?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=18",
        "text": "Must Reads Since You Went to Bed Meme Stock Fantasy Becomes a Reality for GameStop, AMC\n American Frackers Show Restraint as Oil Tops $70\n China Inflation Cools but Beijing Worries Economy Is Losing Heat\n Index of U.S.-Listed Chinese Firms Falls to Lowest Point in Over a Year\n China Inflation Cools but Beijing Worries Economy Is Losing Heat\n Pfizer to Ask Regulators to Authorize Covid-19 Vaccine Booster\n Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic Flight Kick-Starts Space Tourism\n Write to anna.hirtenstein@wsj.com Futures were mixed while U.S.-listed Chinese technology shares regained ground after a multi-day tumble ",
        "author": "Anna Hirtenstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "PS5 games event debuts new Spider-Man, Horizon, Demon\u2019s Souls remake and console design (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7590",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/06/11/ps5-games-live-event/",
        "text": "Sony Interactive Entertainment hosted the virtual \u201cFuture of Gaming\u201d livestream, Thursday debuting a number of new games for its upcoming PlayStation 5 before concluding the event with a first look at the console and its accessories.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlighting the games shown were new entries into existing, popular franchises, including \u201cRatchet & Clank,\u201d \u201cSpider-Man,\u201d \u201cGran Turismo,\u201d \u201cResident Evil,\u201d \u201cHitman\u201d and \u201cHorizon.\u201d A remake of \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d was also announced, alongside a slew of new IPs and smaller titles with indie aesthetics. Trailers and snippets of gameplay were punctuated by brief statements from the developers. The finale of the show was the unveiling of the PlayStation 5. Like the Xbox Series X, it was shown standing upright, though like the PS4 it can also be placed on its side. No pricing or release date information was shared.This is how Neil Druckmann created Ellie for 'The Last of Us'What follows is a series of updates provided by Launcher\u2019s staff from the livestream, starting with the end of the show.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere\u2019s what the PS5 looks likeFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (The Washington Post)The show concluded with our first glimpse at the PS5 system. Like the new DualSense controller debuted earlier, the console has a striking white and black design with hints of a blue glow. It was shown sitting upright, similar to how a PC tower is positioned.There will be two versions of the PS5, one that has a disk drive, and one that is digital only. While Microsoft has previously released the discless Xbox One S, this is the first time in Sony\u2019s history to have a console without a disc drive.'The Last of Us Part II' review: One of the best video games ever madeSome accessories were presented too, including a media remote, a charging station for the DualSense controllers, an HD camera and a \u201cPulse 3D\u201d headset.Story continues below advertisementNo pricing information was revealed.Horizon: Forbidden WestFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (The Washington Post)\u201cHorizon: Forbidden West\u201d is the sequel to the acclaimed \u201cZero Dawn\u201d game from Guerilla Games.AdvertisementGuerrilla Games has been a staple studio for PlayStation console launches. \u201cKillzone: Shadowfall\u201d debuted with the PlayStation 4, and still to this day is an excellent graphical showcase. \u201cHorizon: Zero Dawn\u201d was a marquee game for the PlayStation 4 Pro console, showing off its ability to hit 4K-level images.The sequel promises to continue Aloy\u2019s quest for the truth of civilization\u2019s collapse, and the trailer showed sweeping vistas, new robotic dinosaur enemy types, and a variety of environments.Pragmata\u201cPragmata\u201d is an intriguing-looking game, though we only saw a small glimpse. The trailer was so cryptic, we almost thought it was a tease for a new Hideo Kojima game. But alas, it seems that\u2019s likely not the case.Story continues below advertisementThe trailer showed a young girl with a cat, along with a man in a space combat suit who can see holograms with his helmet. Turns out the aforementioned cat is also a hologram. But then a satellite crashes from outer space and into the city streets, making the man and young girl fly upward. Eventually, the two blast off into space. What it all means? We don\u2019t know! But we\u2019re curious to see more.Resident Evil: Village\u201cResident Evil: Village\u201d was teased, signaling that the next game in the survival horror series returns to the first-person perspective and its story.AdvertisementChris Redfield returns in a seemingly antagonistic role, and you can bet the world\u2019s most evil company, Umbrella, is still involved too. The game probably features an evolution of the RE Engine that\u2019s powered Capcom\u2019s recent and well-received games, including the \u201cResident Evil\u201d sequel remakes and \u201cDevil May Cry 5.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDeathloop\u201cDeathloop,\u201d the upcoming action adventure game from the creators of \u201cDishonored,\u201d looks to be a blast. We saw a snippet of gameplay where you hunt down different foes with a variety of guns, but you also have some powers at your disposal, one in particular looking like \u201cDishonored\u2019s\u201d blink ability that lets you teleport seamlessly from one place to the next.The game takes place in a world stuck in a time-loop. A narrator described the premise as a \u201cnever-ending party\u201d where \u201chunting\u201d him down is the main attraction. With fast-paced gunplay and some interesting world-building, Deathloop is looking excellent.AdvertisementDemon\u2019s SoulsFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Bluepoint Games)The true origin of the \u201cSouls\u201d series, \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls,\u201d is finally being remade by Bluepoint Games, the studio that handled the seminal remake of \u201cShadow of the Colossus.\u201d This is a huge deal, since most Souls fans consider this game to not only be the best, but also the most difficult. \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d was the beginning of much of the genre staples later popularized by its spiritual sequel, \u201cDark Souls.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHowever, \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d was a Sony first-party exclusive made by From Software, whereas the \u201cDark Souls\u201d franchise was free to roam to any platform. The return of \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d is probably the best bit of news for longtime fans of the series and the genre.NBA 2K21\u201cNBA 2K21\u201d prominently featured \u201csweat\u201d graphics in a \u201cpre-alpha\u201d teaser starring Zion Williamson, but little else of the actual gameplay.Astro\u2019s PlayroomOne of the best PlayStation VR titles to date is getting a follow-up, named \u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom.\u201d The iconic robot is back for his next adventure, and we saw him performing some new tricks, using a hang-glider for traversal in one level. It\u2019ll be interesting to see how Japanese developer Team Asobi iterates on the previous, excellent title.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHitman IIIFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (IO Interactive)A CG trailer for \"Hitman III\u2019 debuted, with the tagline \u201cDeath Awaits.\u201d IOI Interactive said this is the end of the current trilogy of games, where its first game was released in episodes. A gameplay reel for \u201cHitman III\u201d showed Agent 47 climbing a skyscraper, so it seems his killing fields have not only expanded but risen.Solar Ash\u201cSolar Ash,\u201d the second game from the developer of \u201cHyper Light Drifter,\u201d features some of the general aesthetic qualities of the latter title, down to the music.Godfall\u201cGodfall\u201d was the first title announced for PS5. During today\u2019s livestream, we got to see more of it in action, especially when it comes to its weighty melee combat. This looter-slasher takes place in a futuristic and fantasy world, though much of its premise has been kept under wraps. Although we\u2019ve mostly seen the game associated in PS5, it\u2019s actually coming to PC as well, through the Epic Games Store.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJett: The Far Shore\u201cJett: The Far Shore\u201d appears to be a narrative-driven game about space exploration. Not much was shown besides sweeping, gray vistas of unexplored planets, but it\u2019s made by Superbrothers, the heralded developers of \u201cSword and Sworcery,\u201d a mobile game that debuted on iPhone and sold over 1.5 million copies.Ghostwire: TokyoWe got a better look at \u201cGhostwire: Tokyo,\u201d a game that was first revealed with a short teaser last year. This comes after Ikumi Nakamura left the developer, Tango Gameworks, rather unceremoniously without much word (from the studio, or herself) as to what caused the departure.\u201cGhostwire: Tokyo,\u201d however, lives on. The peek we saw during today\u2019s live event was brief, but it showed a horrifying view of Tokyo, where creepy beings (some without heads, or disrupted with a strange cyber interference) roam the world.Oddworld SoulstormLongtime strategy game series \u201cOddworld\u201d makes a much anticipated return, retaining its celebrated and dark art style, and looks to be the busiest, most action packed in the series yet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOddworld Soulstorm\u201d features the same gameplay of past games, with Abe leading an army against nightmarish captains of industry and capital to save the ecosystem.Goodbye Volcano High\u201cGoodbye Volcano High\u201d appears to be a narrative adventure, starring dinosaurs graduating from high school. The tag line that it\u2019s about \u201cthe end of an era\u201d portends a dark turn of events for the dinosaurs, but it also promises a tender love story. It\u2019s made by KO_OP Mode, an artist-run and -owned indie studio.It will release in 2021.Kena: Bridge of SpiritsCreated by two brothers, Josh Grier and Mike Grier of Ember Lab studio, \u201cKena: Bridge of Spirits\u201d looks to be a mix between an action game and a platformer. It\u2019s a story \u201cfilled with adventure and charm,\u201d with themes of \u201cpersonal growth and redemption.\u201dA young girl (presumably named Kena) wields a glowing-blue bow and arrow along with a magical staff. She seems in tune with the spirits of a strange land, where black, fuzzy beings run rampant (and sit on her shoulder) as well as beasts that roam who want to do harm.AdvertisementNo release date was given.Destruction Allstars\u201cDestruction Allstars,\u201d another first-party game, looks like it\u2019ll mix up demolition derby style car combat with third-person platforming action. It appears as if players can exit their cars to perform more maneuvers and tricks. Cars also seem to have certain abilities, like a fender shield.Sackboy: A Big AdventureTrailer released during Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Sumo Digital)\u201cLittleBigPlanet\u201d mascot Sackboy gets his own game with \u201cSackboy: A Big Adventure\u201d by Sumo Digital.The series was among the first games to encourage a bustling creative online community, where players made their own physics-based levels. The trailer showed much of the platforming, but it\u2019s not yet certain whether level editors will be available.Returnal\u201cReturnal\u201d is a PlayStation exclusive and the open-world game looks to have an intriguing premise: A woman is stuck in a time-loop where she experiences traumatic events on repeat. The planet that her spacecraft crashes on is ever-changing with alien horrors. It\u2019s also becoming \u201ca part\u201d of her, and affecting her sanity.Stray\u201cStray,\u201d from indie publisher Annapurna Interactive, appears to be about a cat navigating a cyberpunk future inhabited not by cyberpunks, but actual cyborgs, who appear to have early Macintosh computers as heads. Little information was given, but the art design and atmosphere were very intriguing, including an \u201cRIP Humans\u201d graffiti and various computer people living out various social activities like cooking, delivering food and feeding cats.Project Athia\u201cIn a world not her own, where resolve will be tested truths will be questioned, and devotions will be doubted \u2014 she will rise.\u201dThese words appeared during a cinematic trailer for a new game published by Square Enix and developed by Luminous Productions.Designed \u201cexclusively for PS5,\u201d Project Athia will feature a young woman. The teaser showed her on a journey through ruins filled with peril, beasts and dragons. It\u2019s difficult to say what genre it is, but it looks like it could be an RPG or action adventure game.Ratchet & Clank: Rift ApartInsomniac Games made a second big announcement, as its original mascot stars \u201cRatchet & Clank\u201d return. The series was a huge hit on the PlayStation 2 and 3, spawning several sequels that mixed platforming action with wildly inventive guns, including one that made the entire screen dance.The sequel looks to be a much more cinematic affair, mirroring the \u201cUncharted\u201d series from Naughty Dog, while still retaining the colorful, high-tech action.\u201cRatchet & Clank: Rift Apart\u201d also introduced a new female character.From Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Insomniac Games)In the middle of the presentation, Insomniac Games\u2019s Marcus Smith also boasted ray tracing lighting on Clank\u2019s skin, and that the game will feature the characters exploring alternate dimensions, rather than the different planets of the past game.Sony produced a Hollywood animated film for the two, but it ended as a critical and commercial failure, grossing $14 million in the box office, despite a $20 million budget. The tie-in game fared better, but critics said it lost much of the edgier charm that the past games had.Sony staple Gran Turismo 7 starts its next-gen engineThe critically-acclaimed Gran Turismo series is coming to PS5. \u201cGran Turismo 7\u201d comes after \u201cGran Turismo Sport,\u201d the 2017 title that released on PS4. A short cinematic trailer was followed by gameplay, showing a first-person view of a racer driving on a track.\u2018I want to drive real cars\u2019: The thinking that drove the development of PlayStation\u2019s first Gran TurismoSpider-man returnsTrailer released during Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Insomniac Games)Insomniac Games revealed a new entry to follow the critically acclaimed \u201cSpider-Man\u201d from 2018. It will star Miles Morales, the \u201cUltimate Spider-Man\u201d and the star of the hit Oscar-winning animated film \u201cSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.\u201dThe first game starred Peter Parker, but also featured prominent scenes with Morales. The game ended with Parker and Morales in a Spider-mentorship that appears to continue with \u201cSpider-Man: Miles Morales.\u201d After confusion Friday morning as to whether this game was meant as a DLC or a part of a PS5 remaster of \u201cSpider-Man,\u201d reports surfaced that indeed \u201cSpider-Man: Miles Morales\u201d will be a full game, though smaller in size than the 2018 PS4 game.A child in a dangerous world: Inside the creation of EllieIt begins with ... confusionAfter a tranquil introduction and a look back at some of Sony\u2019s most celebrated titles from the PS4 era, the show began with a teaser for Grand Theft Auto V, a game that came out in 2013.The trailer confirmed that the hugely popular action adventure game is coming to PS5, in an \u201cexpanded and enhanced\u201d form, in 2021. Additionally, GTA Online will be free for PS5 players. Sony also offered $1 million per month in GTA online cash to all PS4 players until the PS5 releases.The story so far ...On Thursday, Sony Interactive Entertainment is promising to show players \u201cthe Future of Gaming.\u201d The pretaped broadcast, which will stream on Twitch and YouTube at 1 p.m. Pacific time / 4 p.m. Eastern time, will show off the games coming to the PlayStation 5. Thus far, Sony has shown off the console\u2019s new controller, as well as numerous technical specifications; the console itself has not yet been revealed.The PlayStation 5 is scheduled to release around the holiday season, though some reports have raised questions around covid-19\u2032s impact on the console supply chain and the number of units that will be available at launch.\u201cWe\u2019ve shared technical specifications and shown you the new DualSense wireless controller. But what is a launch without games?\u201d wrote Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, in a blog post announcing the event. \u201cThe games coming to PS5 represent the best in the industry from innovative studios that span the globe. Studios, both larger and smaller, those newer and those more established, all have been hard at work developing games that will showcase the potential of the hardware.\u201dA child in a dangerous world: How the developers of The Last of Us created EllieSony\u2019s official announcement, published via the PlayStation blog, recommends watching the stream with headphones on, citing \u201ccool audio work in the show.\u201d In a March 18 tech presentation, Mark Cerny, the lead system architect of the PlayStation 4, announced a series of innovations to the audio tech packaged in the PlayStation 5.The event was previously scheduled for June 4, but was pushed back one week on account of the widespread protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis.\u201cWhile we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration and for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard,\u201d explained a Sony spokesperson at the time.Read more:How does \u2018The Last of Us Part II\u2019 play? The answer is extremely well.\u2018Valorant\u2019 plays like a finely tuned instrument. Is it really the next big thing?Animal Crossing\u2019s massive popularity has made it less like paradise and more like Wall Street Sony rolls out its planned PS5 titles via live stream. The event begins at 4 p.m. ET. PS5 games event debuts new Spider-Man, Horizon, Demon\u2019s Souls remake and console design",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "PS5 games event debuts new Spider-Man, Horizon, Demon\u2019s Souls remake and console design (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7591",
        "date": "2020-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/06/11/ps5-games-live-event/",
        "text": "Sony Interactive Entertainment hosted the virtual \u201cFuture of Gaming\u201d livestream, Thursday debuting a number of new games for its upcoming PlayStation 5 before concluding the event with a first look at the console and its accessories.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlighting the games shown were new entries into existing, popular franchises, including \u201cRatchet & Clank,\u201d \u201cSpider-Man,\u201d \u201cGran Turismo,\u201d \u201cResident Evil,\u201d \u201cHitman\u201d and \u201cHorizon.\u201d A remake of \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d was also announced, alongside a slew of new IPs and smaller titles with indie aesthetics. Trailers and snippets of gameplay were punctuated by brief statements from the developers. The finale of the show was the unveiling of the PlayStation 5. Like the Xbox Series X, it was shown standing upright, though like the PS4 it can also be placed on its side. No pricing or release date information was shared.This is how Neil Druckmann created Ellie for 'The Last of Us'What follows is a series of updates provided by Launcher\u2019s staff from the livestream, starting with the end of the show.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere\u2019s what the PS5 looks likeFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (The Washington Post)The show concluded with our first glimpse at the PS5 system. Like the new DualSense controller debuted earlier, the console has a striking white and black design with hints of a blue glow. It was shown sitting upright, similar to how a PC tower is positioned.There will be two versions of the PS5, one that has a disk drive, and one that is digital only. While Microsoft has previously released the discless Xbox One S, this is the first time in Sony\u2019s history to have a console without a disc drive.'The Last of Us Part II' review: One of the best video games ever madeSome accessories were presented too, including a media remote, a charging station for the DualSense controllers, an HD camera and a \u201cPulse 3D\u201d headset.Story continues below advertisementNo pricing information was revealed.Horizon: Forbidden WestFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (The Washington Post)\u201cHorizon: Forbidden West\u201d is the sequel to the acclaimed \u201cZero Dawn\u201d game from Guerilla Games.AdvertisementGuerrilla Games has been a staple studio for PlayStation console launches. \u201cKillzone: Shadowfall\u201d debuted with the PlayStation 4, and still to this day is an excellent graphical showcase. \u201cHorizon: Zero Dawn\u201d was a marquee game for the PlayStation 4 Pro console, showing off its ability to hit 4K-level images.The sequel promises to continue Aloy\u2019s quest for the truth of civilization\u2019s collapse, and the trailer showed sweeping vistas, new robotic dinosaur enemy types, and a variety of environments.Pragmata\u201cPragmata\u201d is an intriguing-looking game, though we only saw a small glimpse. The trailer was so cryptic, we almost thought it was a tease for a new Hideo Kojima game. But alas, it seems that\u2019s likely not the case.Story continues below advertisementThe trailer showed a young girl with a cat, along with a man in a space combat suit who can see holograms with his helmet. Turns out the aforementioned cat is also a hologram. But then a satellite crashes from outer space and into the city streets, making the man and young girl fly upward. Eventually, the two blast off into space. What it all means? We don\u2019t know! But we\u2019re curious to see more.Resident Evil: Village\u201cResident Evil: Village\u201d was teased, signaling that the next game in the survival horror series returns to the first-person perspective and its story.AdvertisementChris Redfield returns in a seemingly antagonistic role, and you can bet the world\u2019s most evil company, Umbrella, is still involved too. The game probably features an evolution of the RE Engine that\u2019s powered Capcom\u2019s recent and well-received games, including the \u201cResident Evil\u201d sequel remakes and \u201cDevil May Cry 5.\u201dStory continues below advertisementDeathloop\u201cDeathloop,\u201d the upcoming action adventure game from the creators of \u201cDishonored,\u201d looks to be a blast. We saw a snippet of gameplay where you hunt down different foes with a variety of guns, but you also have some powers at your disposal, one in particular looking like \u201cDishonored\u2019s\u201d blink ability that lets you teleport seamlessly from one place to the next.The game takes place in a world stuck in a time-loop. A narrator described the premise as a \u201cnever-ending party\u201d where \u201chunting\u201d him down is the main attraction. With fast-paced gunplay and some interesting world-building, Deathloop is looking excellent.AdvertisementDemon\u2019s SoulsFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Bluepoint Games)The true origin of the \u201cSouls\u201d series, \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls,\u201d is finally being remade by Bluepoint Games, the studio that handled the seminal remake of \u201cShadow of the Colossus.\u201d This is a huge deal, since most Souls fans consider this game to not only be the best, but also the most difficult. \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d was the beginning of much of the genre staples later popularized by its spiritual sequel, \u201cDark Souls.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHowever, \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d was a Sony first-party exclusive made by From Software, whereas the \u201cDark Souls\u201d franchise was free to roam to any platform. The return of \u201cDemon\u2019s Souls\u201d is probably the best bit of news for longtime fans of the series and the genre.NBA 2K21\u201cNBA 2K21\u201d prominently featured \u201csweat\u201d graphics in a \u201cpre-alpha\u201d teaser starring Zion Williamson, but little else of the actual gameplay.Astro\u2019s PlayroomOne of the best PlayStation VR titles to date is getting a follow-up, named \u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom.\u201d The iconic robot is back for his next adventure, and we saw him performing some new tricks, using a hang-glider for traversal in one level. It\u2019ll be interesting to see how Japanese developer Team Asobi iterates on the previous, excellent title.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHitman IIIFrom Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (IO Interactive)A CG trailer for \"Hitman III\u2019 debuted, with the tagline \u201cDeath Awaits.\u201d IOI Interactive said this is the end of the current trilogy of games, where its first game was released in episodes. A gameplay reel for \u201cHitman III\u201d showed Agent 47 climbing a skyscraper, so it seems his killing fields have not only expanded but risen.Solar Ash\u201cSolar Ash,\u201d the second game from the developer of \u201cHyper Light Drifter,\u201d features some of the general aesthetic qualities of the latter title, down to the music.Godfall\u201cGodfall\u201d was the first title announced for PS5. During today\u2019s livestream, we got to see more of it in action, especially when it comes to its weighty melee combat. This looter-slasher takes place in a futuristic and fantasy world, though much of its premise has been kept under wraps. Although we\u2019ve mostly seen the game associated in PS5, it\u2019s actually coming to PC as well, through the Epic Games Store.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJett: The Far Shore\u201cJett: The Far Shore\u201d appears to be a narrative-driven game about space exploration. Not much was shown besides sweeping, gray vistas of unexplored planets, but it\u2019s made by Superbrothers, the heralded developers of \u201cSword and Sworcery,\u201d a mobile game that debuted on iPhone and sold over 1.5 million copies.Ghostwire: TokyoWe got a better look at \u201cGhostwire: Tokyo,\u201d a game that was first revealed with a short teaser last year. This comes after Ikumi Nakamura left the developer, Tango Gameworks, rather unceremoniously without much word (from the studio, or herself) as to what caused the departure.\u201cGhostwire: Tokyo,\u201d however, lives on. The peek we saw during today\u2019s live event was brief, but it showed a horrifying view of Tokyo, where creepy beings (some without heads, or disrupted with a strange cyber interference) roam the world.Oddworld SoulstormLongtime strategy game series \u201cOddworld\u201d makes a much anticipated return, retaining its celebrated and dark art style, and looks to be the busiest, most action packed in the series yet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOddworld Soulstorm\u201d features the same gameplay of past games, with Abe leading an army against nightmarish captains of industry and capital to save the ecosystem.Goodbye Volcano High\u201cGoodbye Volcano High\u201d appears to be a narrative adventure, starring dinosaurs graduating from high school. The tag line that it\u2019s about \u201cthe end of an era\u201d portends a dark turn of events for the dinosaurs, but it also promises a tender love story. It\u2019s made by KO_OP Mode, an artist-run and -owned indie studio.It will release in 2021.Kena: Bridge of SpiritsCreated by two brothers, Josh Grier and Mike Grier of Ember Lab studio, \u201cKena: Bridge of Spirits\u201d looks to be a mix between an action game and a platformer. It\u2019s a story \u201cfilled with adventure and charm,\u201d with themes of \u201cpersonal growth and redemption.\u201dA young girl (presumably named Kena) wields a glowing-blue bow and arrow along with a magical staff. She seems in tune with the spirits of a strange land, where black, fuzzy beings run rampant (and sit on her shoulder) as well as beasts that roam who want to do harm.AdvertisementNo release date was given.Destruction Allstars\u201cDestruction Allstars,\u201d another first-party game, looks like it\u2019ll mix up demolition derby style car combat with third-person platforming action. It appears as if players can exit their cars to perform more maneuvers and tricks. Cars also seem to have certain abilities, like a fender shield.Sackboy: A Big AdventureTrailer released during Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Sumo Digital)\u201cLittleBigPlanet\u201d mascot Sackboy gets his own game with \u201cSackboy: A Big Adventure\u201d by Sumo Digital.The series was among the first games to encourage a bustling creative online community, where players made their own physics-based levels. The trailer showed much of the platforming, but it\u2019s not yet certain whether level editors will be available.Returnal\u201cReturnal\u201d is a PlayStation exclusive and the open-world game looks to have an intriguing premise: A woman is stuck in a time-loop where she experiences traumatic events on repeat. The planet that her spacecraft crashes on is ever-changing with alien horrors. It\u2019s also becoming \u201ca part\u201d of her, and affecting her sanity.Stray\u201cStray,\u201d from indie publisher Annapurna Interactive, appears to be about a cat navigating a cyberpunk future inhabited not by cyberpunks, but actual cyborgs, who appear to have early Macintosh computers as heads. Little information was given, but the art design and atmosphere were very intriguing, including an \u201cRIP Humans\u201d graffiti and various computer people living out various social activities like cooking, delivering food and feeding cats.Project Athia\u201cIn a world not her own, where resolve will be tested truths will be questioned, and devotions will be doubted \u2014 she will rise.\u201dThese words appeared during a cinematic trailer for a new game published by Square Enix and developed by Luminous Productions.Designed \u201cexclusively for PS5,\u201d Project Athia will feature a young woman. The teaser showed her on a journey through ruins filled with peril, beasts and dragons. It\u2019s difficult to say what genre it is, but it looks like it could be an RPG or action adventure game.Ratchet & Clank: Rift ApartInsomniac Games made a second big announcement, as its original mascot stars \u201cRatchet & Clank\u201d return. The series was a huge hit on the PlayStation 2 and 3, spawning several sequels that mixed platforming action with wildly inventive guns, including one that made the entire screen dance.The sequel looks to be a much more cinematic affair, mirroring the \u201cUncharted\u201d series from Naughty Dog, while still retaining the colorful, high-tech action.\u201cRatchet & Clank: Rift Apart\u201d also introduced a new female character.From Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Insomniac Games)In the middle of the presentation, Insomniac Games\u2019s Marcus Smith also boasted ray tracing lighting on Clank\u2019s skin, and that the game will feature the characters exploring alternate dimensions, rather than the different planets of the past game.Sony produced a Hollywood animated film for the two, but it ended as a critical and commercial failure, grossing $14 million in the box office, despite a $20 million budget. The tie-in game fared better, but critics said it lost much of the edgier charm that the past games had.Sony staple Gran Turismo 7 starts its next-gen engineThe critically-acclaimed Gran Turismo series is coming to PS5. \u201cGran Turismo 7\u201d comes after \u201cGran Turismo Sport,\u201d the 2017 title that released on PS4. A short cinematic trailer was followed by gameplay, showing a first-person view of a racer driving on a track.\u2018I want to drive real cars\u2019: The thinking that drove the development of PlayStation\u2019s first Gran TurismoSpider-man returnsTrailer released during Playstation's \"The Future of Gaming\" show. (Insomniac Games)Insomniac Games revealed a new entry to follow the critically acclaimed \u201cSpider-Man\u201d from 2018. It will star Miles Morales, the \u201cUltimate Spider-Man\u201d and the star of the hit Oscar-winning animated film \u201cSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.\u201dThe first game starred Peter Parker, but also featured prominent scenes with Morales. The game ended with Parker and Morales in a Spider-mentorship that appears to continue with \u201cSpider-Man: Miles Morales.\u201d After confusion Friday morning as to whether this game was meant as a DLC or a part of a PS5 remaster of \u201cSpider-Man,\u201d reports surfaced that indeed \u201cSpider-Man: Miles Morales\u201d will be a full game, though smaller in size than the 2018 PS4 game.A child in a dangerous world: Inside the creation of EllieIt begins with ... confusionAfter a tranquil introduction and a look back at some of Sony\u2019s most celebrated titles from the PS4 era, the show began with a teaser for Grand Theft Auto V, a game that came out in 2013.The trailer confirmed that the hugely popular action adventure game is coming to PS5, in an \u201cexpanded and enhanced\u201d form, in 2021. Additionally, GTA Online will be free for PS5 players. Sony also offered $1 million per month in GTA online cash to all PS4 players until the PS5 releases.The story so far ...On Thursday, Sony Interactive Entertainment is promising to show players \u201cthe Future of Gaming.\u201d The pretaped broadcast, which will stream on Twitch and YouTube at 1 p.m. Pacific time / 4 p.m. Eastern time, will show off the games coming to the PlayStation 5. Thus far, Sony has shown off the console\u2019s new controller, as well as numerous technical specifications; the console itself has not yet been revealed.The PlayStation 5 is scheduled to release around the holiday season, though some reports have raised questions around covid-19\u2032s impact on the console supply chain and the number of units that will be available at launch.\u201cWe\u2019ve shared technical specifications and shown you the new DualSense wireless controller. But what is a launch without games?\u201d wrote Jim Ryan, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, in a blog post announcing the event. \u201cThe games coming to PS5 represent the best in the industry from innovative studios that span the globe. Studios, both larger and smaller, those newer and those more established, all have been hard at work developing games that will showcase the potential of the hardware.\u201dA child in a dangerous world: How the developers of The Last of Us created EllieSony\u2019s official announcement, published via the PlayStation blog, recommends watching the stream with headphones on, citing \u201ccool audio work in the show.\u201d In a March 18 tech presentation, Mark Cerny, the lead system architect of the PlayStation 4, announced a series of innovations to the audio tech packaged in the PlayStation 5.The event was previously scheduled for June 4, but was pushed back one week on account of the widespread protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis.\u201cWhile we understand gamers worldwide are excited to see PS5 games, we do not feel that right now is a time for celebration and for now, we want to stand back and allow more important voices to be heard,\u201d explained a Sony spokesperson at the time.Read more:How does \u2018The Last of Us Part II\u2019 play? The answer is extremely well.\u2018Valorant\u2019 plays like a finely tuned instrument. Is it really the next big thing?Animal Crossing\u2019s massive popularity has made it less like paradise and more like Wall Street Sony rolls out its planned PS5 titles via live stream. The event begins at 4 p.m. ET. PS5 games event debuts new Spider-Man, Horizon, Demon\u2019s Souls remake and console design",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "From surgery simulators to medical mishaps in space, video-game tech is helping doctors at work (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7592",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/01/09/surgery-simulators-medical-mishaps-space-video-games-are-helping-doctors-do-their-jobs/",
        "text": "Justin Barad never would have guessed that he would help operate on a gorilla during his residency at the UCLA Medical Center, where he was training to be an orthopedic surgeon. But in August 2014, the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens needed specialists to help Jabari, a 400-pound gorilla who was limping and unable to put weight on his leg. The surgery was successful \u2014 but it was a challenging endeavor for a team that didn\u2019t normally operate on animals. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe zoo\u2019s request was an unusual one, even by industry standards, but unpredictability is commonplace in the medical world. His experience with Jabari is one of many reasons Barad sought a solution for surgeons and doctors so often faced with unknowns. These moments drove him to dedicate his career to making surgery training more efficient by using video-game technology.Along with a team of software developers and medical experts, he founded Osso VR in 2016. It\u2019s an attempt to curb unpredictability, giving surgeons on-demand information via a virtual reality headset and tools to properly assess how to best handle surgery. Its success is hard to ignore: It was one of Time\u2019s best inventions of 2019, and according to a study by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, training with Osso VR is 230 percent more efficient than traditional methods. Despite launching just three years ago for the Oculus Rift, the virtual reality-based surgery training program is now used to train over a thousand surgeons a month worldwide.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther training methods range in cost and effectiveness. Some surgeons use simulation centers, which are big, bulky machines used to simulate surgeries, but access to them is limited. Many residency programs and medical schools don\u2019t have one, because they are extremely expensive and require adequate space; and even at schools that do, certified doctors can\u2019t pop back into a simulation as easily as medical students can. Moreover, because the machines tend to be old, simulations are far from modern. Students practice on cadavers and animal labs more than they use virtual simulations.But even with these resources, surgeons still make frequent mistakes: A 2015 study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that its staff made drug-related errors in 50 percent of its surgeries.Osso VR is an attempt to bridge the gap, elevating the quality by bringing antiquated simulations to the modern era.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf there was a way, kind of like in the Matrix where you just plug in for five or 10 minutes and refresh yourself or get up to speed and then assess and make sure you\u2019re ready to go, that would be a total game changer and have a massive impact on patients and the health care system as a whole, all thanks to video game technology,\u201d Barad told The Washington Post in a phone interview.The 10 best VR games of 2019Osso VR may not exactly be equivalent to plugging in to the Matrix, but it allows surgeons to hone their skills by operating on virtual patients with tools they would normally find in an operating room. This lets trainees experience it first-hand without the fear of error. Right now, Osso VR is mainly used for orthopedic procedures, but Barad\u2019s team is working to expand into other areas, such as vascular, heart, urology and surgeries conducted with robotics.Barad says surgical training is still \u201cprimitive,\u201d relying heavily on learning through observation. He says it was during his residency at UCLA where he \u201cexperienced firsthand the biggest problem facing medicine today.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d be in on a surgery and they\u2019d be like, \u2018Hey, get up and go run to the computer real quick and Google what we\u2019re supposed to be doing,\u2019\u201d he said.Medical students would look up YouTube videos \u2014 the platform has become a popular resource for surgeons in training, with tens of thousands of videos on the subject \u2014 for guidance to prep for an operation. Sometimes Barad and his colleagues would even watch one in the operating theater if the surgery was especially complicated, or sprawl out an instruction manual to better understand medical devices.Osso VR has a multiplayer component, too, that allows surgeons to work together in virtual reality. Barad compares surgery to a \u201cteam sport.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s like soccer or like a symphony,\u201d he said. \u201cWith VR, you can get everyone in the same virtual operating room so you can train as a team and you can practice knowledge of technical skills.\u201dAdvertisementBecause of surgery\u2019s unpredictable nature, and because the bulk of its training relies on hands-on experience, Barad said, the only time he underwent a \u201ctechnical assessment\u201d was when he was asked to play the board game Operation during his residency interview. Part of the problem, Barad said, is that there are no \u201cscalable, low-cost ways\u201d to easily measure surgical skill. Osso VR offers a solution: It has built-in analytics that objectively measure surgical performance.Dept. of Veterans Affairs believes games can help soldiers reconnect, reduce suicidesOsso VR is one of many emerging medical technologies to come from virtual reality. \u201cSea Hero Quest,\u201d for example, is a VR game that has been used to research the early signs of dementia, and \u201cSnowWorld\u201d was one of the first virtual reality simulations to help burn victims with pain management; studies say it\u2019s more effective than morphine. But virtual reality is far from the only player in the future of health-care tech.Story continues below advertisementSaving lives by playing mobile gamesAdvertisementSchell Games, a studio based in Pittsburgh that built the VR action puzzler \u201cI Expect You to Die,\u201d has regularly produced games for education and entertainment. The bulk of its library is for a younger audience, and when it has tapped into the medical field, it has been mostly for patient-facing technology, such as therapy for children on the autism spectrum. With its new project, \u201cNight Shift,\u201d Schell Games pivoted toward making a mobile game designed specifically for emergency room physicians.Schell Games is working closely with Deepika Mohan, a medical professor at the University of Pittsburgh, to develop \u201cNight Shift,\u201d a training simulator designed as a story-driven adventure game that puts players in the shoes of a trauma doctor. It is currently in closed beta and accessible to a limited number of physicians before its launch.The response from doctors has already been positive. In 2017, Mohan published her research and shared that doctors who played \u201cNight Shift\u201d outperformed those who did not.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the big decisions that doctors have to make when a trauma comes in is, do they deal with it there or do they send this person to trauma center?\u201d said Jesse Schell, the chief executive of Schell Games. Mohan\u2019s \u201cobservation was that doctors don\u2019t get very good feedback about whether they made the right decision or not.\u201dThe idea was born out of Mohan\u2019s struggle to make training engaging, when past efforts had failed. She had a hypothesis: Would an interactive story with emotional beats to accompany training make it more memorable and effective? Night Shift is proof of that concept. Its physician protagonist moves to a new town and works in the emergency room. You spend shifts diagnosing and treating patients, then deciding whether their care is critical enough to transport them to a trauma center. But there\u2019s more to this world than just the hospital.\u201cIt\u2019s not just any town,\u201d Schell said. \u201cIt turns out it is the town where [the protagonist\u2019s] grandfather had lived. And part of the reason he\u2019s moving there is because his grandfather had recently passed away and he\u2019s moving there to help settle his grandfather\u2019s affairs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSchell calls Night Shift an \u201cinteractive soap opera\u201d with elements of mystery and adventure. Trying to understand who your grandfather was plays a big part, but you also develop relationships with your patients.\u201cYou get to know some of the patients,\" he said. \"If you end up making misdiagnoses and put them in a bad way, you see them suffer for it or sometimes you see them pass away, and then you\u2019re confronted with their sobbing relatives.\u201dWhile Night Shift has more of a cartoon-y aesthetic, Level Ex is a Chicago-based studio making mobile games for doctors, which feature \u201chyper-realistic\u201d simulations that physicians can play on the go.Level Ex CEO Sam Glassenberg has been in the video game industry for two decades. Despite coming from a long line of doctors, he decided against going to med school, making him the \u201cblack sheep\u201d in his family. Instead, he became a video game developer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGlassenberg worked at LucasArts making games for the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox, had a stint at Microsoft where he led the DirectX graphics team, and worked with publisher FTX Games to produce mobile games based off popular Hollywood movies like the Hunger Games and Mission Impossible. But things changed when his father, an anesthesiologist, requested that he make a game to help train his colleagues in fiberoptic intubation (a technique that opens up a patient\u2019s airways). With his father\u2019s help Glassenberg \u201cthrew together\u201d the game, called iLarynx, in a matter of weeks and published it to the App Store. To his surprise, it was so popular that a hundred thousand medical professionals were still playing it two years later.\u201cClearly there was demand for this,\" he said. \"[I wondered,] what if instead of just throwing something together, you put a team of top video game developers, designers and artists on the problem of capturing the challenges of the practice of medicine in video games? That\u2019s what started Level Ex.\u201dNow, half a million medical professionals worldwide are playing Glassenberg\u2019s free mobile games. Level Ex has a team consisting of video game industry veterans, medical experts and software engineers. The studio has created four games, each with their own focus on a different specialty: pulmonology, gastroenterology, anesthesiology, and cardiology.\u201dStudies have shown that if a surgeon plays an action game before they go into surgery, they will perform better at laparoscopic and endoscopic procedures, even if that game has nothing to do with their actual procedure. So we know that there is a lot that can be done there,\" Glassenberg said.Level Ex\u2019s realistic simulations \u2014 which run impressively well on a smartphone \u2014 let you see inside the human anatomy as you play through different cases, which involve scenarios like removing a foreign object from a patient\u2019s airways or performing a colonoscopy on a virtual Crohn\u2019s Disease sufferer. The better you are, the more you progress. And as you progress, you unlock new levels, tools and techniques. It was also important to Glassenberg to bring high graphical fidelity to his games, since most antiquated surgical simulators \u201clook like a video game out of 1995.\u201dLaunching games into spaceVideo game tech can also assist with highly irregular situations or those that would be impossible to replicate. For instance: What happens when an astronaut gets injured in space? Flight surgeons help in training and advising, but they\u2019re stuck at the NASA Mission Control Center rather than on the spacecraft. For astronauts, the onus is on them to be informed and take the right precautions and steps to stay safe.For example, if an astronaut clutches his chest and falls unconscious in zero gravity, then he needs to be brought over to an ultrasound as a radiologist in Houston navigates the situation.\u201cAn ultrasound is the only visualization you can do [in space],\u201d Glassenberg said. \"But the heart physically changes shape in micro-gravity depending on how long you\u2019ve been up there. So how do you know what you\u2019re looking at is normal for somebody who\u2019s been in space for nine months or if it\u2019s abnormal?\u201dSpace travel is challenging enough, and medical emergencies make it even tougher to navigate. That\u2019s why NASA asked Level Ex to build a video game simulation that shows \u201cthe human body\u2019s physiological and anatomical changes\u201d in space, and what procedures and devices are necessary to address them. This project is still underway and not yet available to NASA, but with a significant grant from TRISH (the Translational Research Institute for Space Health), Glassenberg is positive his team is equipped to make it happen.Glassenberg says he still has \u201ca million questions,\u201d but he\u2019s working hand-in-hand with TRISH, NASA\u2019s medical teams and astronauts to figure it out as best he can.\u201cWe\u2019re just one part of that puzzle,\u201d he said.Looking to the futureAs Level Ex focuses its ambitions on outer space, Osso VR is keeping its goals firmly within virtual reality. But the team still has big plans for 2020 and beyond.Osso VR isn\u2019t yet available on Oculus Quest, which is a powerful and wireless headset untethered from consoles and PCs, but it will be coming to the platform this year. When it does, surgeons will be able to bring a portable (and affordable, in comparison to the aforementioned traditional simulation centers) VR headset to any operating room.Barad is intrigued by Oculus Quest\u2019s hand-tracking innovations, which rolled out late last year, since surgery requires fine motor skills and accuracy to do right.\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of interest in like gloves and hand tracking and things like that, and those are very exciting areas that are still very early,\" Barad said. \"Using controllers works great for now, but we\u2019re trying to figure out how we can more intuitively get people\u2019s hands and fingers in the mix.\u201dLike many of his game development peers, Barad grew up on video games, and was coding them since middle school. He even has a game credit to his name (1998\u2032s Heretic II) with Activision. It was his \u201cdream\u201d to become a video game developer, and he also wanted to make a positive impact. That\u2019s where Osso VR came in.\u201cI\u2019m really grateful to the video game industry, video games and the art form in general,\" Barad said. \u201cThis wouldn\u2019t have been possible if it weren\u2019t for video games and everybody involved in the community that basically got VR up off the ground and into really a mature product.\u201dRead more:The hidden world and overlooked problems of acting in video gamesTwitter\u2019s most popular game is a Japanese mobile RPG that keeps beating FortniteThe most anticipated video games of 2020 Contemporary surgery training is primitive. Video game technology is changing that. From surgery simulators to medical mishaps in space, video-game tech is helping doctors at work",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "From surgery simulators to medical mishaps in space, video-game tech is helping doctors at work (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7593",
        "date": "2020-01-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/01/09/surgery-simulators-medical-mishaps-space-video-games-are-helping-doctors-do-their-jobs/",
        "text": "Justin Barad never would have guessed that he would help operate on a gorilla during his residency at the UCLA Medical Center, where he was training to be an orthopedic surgeon. But in August 2014, the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens needed specialists to help Jabari, a 400-pound gorilla who was limping and unable to put weight on his leg. The surgery was successful \u2014 but it was a challenging endeavor for a team that didn\u2019t normally operate on animals. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe zoo\u2019s request was an unusual one, even by industry standards, but unpredictability is commonplace in the medical world. His experience with Jabari is one of many reasons Barad sought a solution for surgeons and doctors so often faced with unknowns. These moments drove him to dedicate his career to making surgery training more efficient by using video-game technology.Along with a team of software developers and medical experts, he founded Osso VR in 2016. It\u2019s an attempt to curb unpredictability, giving surgeons on-demand information via a virtual reality headset and tools to properly assess how to best handle surgery. Its success is hard to ignore: It was one of Time\u2019s best inventions of 2019, and according to a study by researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, training with Osso VR is 230 percent more efficient than traditional methods. Despite launching just three years ago for the Oculus Rift, the virtual reality-based surgery training program is now used to train over a thousand surgeons a month worldwide.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOther training methods range in cost and effectiveness. Some surgeons use simulation centers, which are big, bulky machines used to simulate surgeries, but access to them is limited. Many residency programs and medical schools don\u2019t have one, because they are extremely expensive and require adequate space; and even at schools that do, certified doctors can\u2019t pop back into a simulation as easily as medical students can. Moreover, because the machines tend to be old, simulations are far from modern. Students practice on cadavers and animal labs more than they use virtual simulations.But even with these resources, surgeons still make frequent mistakes: A 2015 study conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that its staff made drug-related errors in 50 percent of its surgeries.Osso VR is an attempt to bridge the gap, elevating the quality by bringing antiquated simulations to the modern era.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf there was a way, kind of like in the Matrix where you just plug in for five or 10 minutes and refresh yourself or get up to speed and then assess and make sure you\u2019re ready to go, that would be a total game changer and have a massive impact on patients and the health care system as a whole, all thanks to video game technology,\u201d Barad told The Washington Post in a phone interview.The 10 best VR games of 2019Osso VR may not exactly be equivalent to plugging in to the Matrix, but it allows surgeons to hone their skills by operating on virtual patients with tools they would normally find in an operating room. This lets trainees experience it first-hand without the fear of error. Right now, Osso VR is mainly used for orthopedic procedures, but Barad\u2019s team is working to expand into other areas, such as vascular, heart, urology and surgeries conducted with robotics.Barad says surgical training is still \u201cprimitive,\u201d relying heavily on learning through observation. He says it was during his residency at UCLA where he \u201cexperienced firsthand the biggest problem facing medicine today.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI\u2019d be in on a surgery and they\u2019d be like, \u2018Hey, get up and go run to the computer real quick and Google what we\u2019re supposed to be doing,\u2019\u201d he said.Medical students would look up YouTube videos \u2014 the platform has become a popular resource for surgeons in training, with tens of thousands of videos on the subject \u2014 for guidance to prep for an operation. Sometimes Barad and his colleagues would even watch one in the operating theater if the surgery was especially complicated, or sprawl out an instruction manual to better understand medical devices.Osso VR has a multiplayer component, too, that allows surgeons to work together in virtual reality. Barad compares surgery to a \u201cteam sport.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s like soccer or like a symphony,\u201d he said. \u201cWith VR, you can get everyone in the same virtual operating room so you can train as a team and you can practice knowledge of technical skills.\u201dAdvertisementBecause of surgery\u2019s unpredictable nature, and because the bulk of its training relies on hands-on experience, Barad said, the only time he underwent a \u201ctechnical assessment\u201d was when he was asked to play the board game Operation during his residency interview. Part of the problem, Barad said, is that there are no \u201cscalable, low-cost ways\u201d to easily measure surgical skill. Osso VR offers a solution: It has built-in analytics that objectively measure surgical performance.Dept. of Veterans Affairs believes games can help soldiers reconnect, reduce suicidesOsso VR is one of many emerging medical technologies to come from virtual reality. \u201cSea Hero Quest,\u201d for example, is a VR game that has been used to research the early signs of dementia, and \u201cSnowWorld\u201d was one of the first virtual reality simulations to help burn victims with pain management; studies say it\u2019s more effective than morphine. But virtual reality is far from the only player in the future of health-care tech.Story continues below advertisementSaving lives by playing mobile gamesAdvertisementSchell Games, a studio based in Pittsburgh that built the VR action puzzler \u201cI Expect You to Die,\u201d has regularly produced games for education and entertainment. The bulk of its library is for a younger audience, and when it has tapped into the medical field, it has been mostly for patient-facing technology, such as therapy for children on the autism spectrum. With its new project, \u201cNight Shift,\u201d Schell Games pivoted toward making a mobile game designed specifically for emergency room physicians.Schell Games is working closely with Deepika Mohan, a medical professor at the University of Pittsburgh, to develop \u201cNight Shift,\u201d a training simulator designed as a story-driven adventure game that puts players in the shoes of a trauma doctor. It is currently in closed beta and accessible to a limited number of physicians before its launch.The response from doctors has already been positive. In 2017, Mohan published her research and shared that doctors who played \u201cNight Shift\u201d outperformed those who did not.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cOne of the big decisions that doctors have to make when a trauma comes in is, do they deal with it there or do they send this person to trauma center?\u201d said Jesse Schell, the chief executive of Schell Games. Mohan\u2019s \u201cobservation was that doctors don\u2019t get very good feedback about whether they made the right decision or not.\u201dThe idea was born out of Mohan\u2019s struggle to make training engaging, when past efforts had failed. She had a hypothesis: Would an interactive story with emotional beats to accompany training make it more memorable and effective? Night Shift is proof of that concept. Its physician protagonist moves to a new town and works in the emergency room. You spend shifts diagnosing and treating patients, then deciding whether their care is critical enough to transport them to a trauma center. But there\u2019s more to this world than just the hospital.\u201cIt\u2019s not just any town,\u201d Schell said. \u201cIt turns out it is the town where [the protagonist\u2019s] grandfather had lived. And part of the reason he\u2019s moving there is because his grandfather had recently passed away and he\u2019s moving there to help settle his grandfather\u2019s affairs.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSchell calls Night Shift an \u201cinteractive soap opera\u201d with elements of mystery and adventure. Trying to understand who your grandfather was plays a big part, but you also develop relationships with your patients.\u201cYou get to know some of the patients,\" he said. \"If you end up making misdiagnoses and put them in a bad way, you see them suffer for it or sometimes you see them pass away, and then you\u2019re confronted with their sobbing relatives.\u201dWhile Night Shift has more of a cartoon-y aesthetic, Level Ex is a Chicago-based studio making mobile games for doctors, which feature \u201chyper-realistic\u201d simulations that physicians can play on the go.Level Ex CEO Sam Glassenberg has been in the video game industry for two decades. Despite coming from a long line of doctors, he decided against going to med school, making him the \u201cblack sheep\u201d in his family. Instead, he became a video game developer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGlassenberg worked at LucasArts making games for the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox, had a stint at Microsoft where he led the DirectX graphics team, and worked with publisher FTX Games to produce mobile games based off popular Hollywood movies like the Hunger Games and Mission Impossible. But things changed when his father, an anesthesiologist, requested that he make a game to help train his colleagues in fiberoptic intubation (a technique that opens up a patient\u2019s airways). With his father\u2019s help Glassenberg \u201cthrew together\u201d the game, called iLarynx, in a matter of weeks and published it to the App Store. To his surprise, it was so popular that a hundred thousand medical professionals were still playing it two years later.\u201cClearly there was demand for this,\" he said. \"[I wondered,] what if instead of just throwing something together, you put a team of top video game developers, designers and artists on the problem of capturing the challenges of the practice of medicine in video games? That\u2019s what started Level Ex.\u201dNow, half a million medical professionals worldwide are playing Glassenberg\u2019s free mobile games. Level Ex has a team consisting of video game industry veterans, medical experts and software engineers. The studio has created four games, each with their own focus on a different specialty: pulmonology, gastroenterology, anesthesiology, and cardiology.\u201dStudies have shown that if a surgeon plays an action game before they go into surgery, they will perform better at laparoscopic and endoscopic procedures, even if that game has nothing to do with their actual procedure. So we know that there is a lot that can be done there,\" Glassenberg said.Level Ex\u2019s realistic simulations \u2014 which run impressively well on a smartphone \u2014 let you see inside the human anatomy as you play through different cases, which involve scenarios like removing a foreign object from a patient\u2019s airways or performing a colonoscopy on a virtual Crohn\u2019s Disease sufferer. The better you are, the more you progress. And as you progress, you unlock new levels, tools and techniques. It was also important to Glassenberg to bring high graphical fidelity to his games, since most antiquated surgical simulators \u201clook like a video game out of 1995.\u201dLaunching games into spaceVideo game tech can also assist with highly irregular situations or those that would be impossible to replicate. For instance: What happens when an astronaut gets injured in space? Flight surgeons help in training and advising, but they\u2019re stuck at the NASA Mission Control Center rather than on the spacecraft. For astronauts, the onus is on them to be informed and take the right precautions and steps to stay safe.For example, if an astronaut clutches his chest and falls unconscious in zero gravity, then he needs to be brought over to an ultrasound as a radiologist in Houston navigates the situation.\u201cAn ultrasound is the only visualization you can do [in space],\u201d Glassenberg said. \"But the heart physically changes shape in micro-gravity depending on how long you\u2019ve been up there. So how do you know what you\u2019re looking at is normal for somebody who\u2019s been in space for nine months or if it\u2019s abnormal?\u201dSpace travel is challenging enough, and medical emergencies make it even tougher to navigate. That\u2019s why NASA asked Level Ex to build a video game simulation that shows \u201cthe human body\u2019s physiological and anatomical changes\u201d in space, and what procedures and devices are necessary to address them. This project is still underway and not yet available to NASA, but with a significant grant from TRISH (the Translational Research Institute for Space Health), Glassenberg is positive his team is equipped to make it happen.Glassenberg says he still has \u201ca million questions,\u201d but he\u2019s working hand-in-hand with TRISH, NASA\u2019s medical teams and astronauts to figure it out as best he can.\u201cWe\u2019re just one part of that puzzle,\u201d he said.Looking to the futureAs Level Ex focuses its ambitions on outer space, Osso VR is keeping its goals firmly within virtual reality. But the team still has big plans for 2020 and beyond.Osso VR isn\u2019t yet available on Oculus Quest, which is a powerful and wireless headset untethered from consoles and PCs, but it will be coming to the platform this year. When it does, surgeons will be able to bring a portable (and affordable, in comparison to the aforementioned traditional simulation centers) VR headset to any operating room.Barad is intrigued by Oculus Quest\u2019s hand-tracking innovations, which rolled out late last year, since surgery requires fine motor skills and accuracy to do right.\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of interest in like gloves and hand tracking and things like that, and those are very exciting areas that are still very early,\" Barad said. \"Using controllers works great for now, but we\u2019re trying to figure out how we can more intuitively get people\u2019s hands and fingers in the mix.\u201dLike many of his game development peers, Barad grew up on video games, and was coding them since middle school. He even has a game credit to his name (1998\u2032s Heretic II) with Activision. It was his \u201cdream\u201d to become a video game developer, and he also wanted to make a positive impact. That\u2019s where Osso VR came in.\u201cI\u2019m really grateful to the video game industry, video games and the art form in general,\" Barad said. \u201cThis wouldn\u2019t have been possible if it weren\u2019t for video games and everybody involved in the community that basically got VR up off the ground and into really a mature product.\u201dRead more:The hidden world and overlooked problems of acting in video gamesTwitter\u2019s most popular game is a Japanese mobile RPG that keeps beating FortniteThe most anticipated video games of 2020 Contemporary surgery training is primitive. Video game technology is changing that. From surgery simulators to medical mishaps in space, video-game tech is helping doctors at work",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "EA Play 2020: \u2018Apex Legends\u2019 cross play, \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 gameplay, new \u2018Skate\u2019 coming (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7594",
        "date": "2020-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/06/18/watch-live-ea-play-2021-showcase-new-games-services/",
        "text": "Electronic Arts rolled out its upcoming releases and shared details on new products via its livestream event Thursday, a digital version of its usual live show in Los Angeles held just prior to E3. With covid-19 canceling both events, the reveals shifted online.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn June 11, Sony Interactive Entertainment hosted a similar event, unveiling the PlayStation 5 and showing off a slate of games that would appear on the console. The Launcher teams broke down the latest reveals from the game publisher behind popular franchises like The Sims and Star Wars, as well as EA Sports\u2019 Madden and FIFA.\u2018Apex Legends\u2019: Cross play coming, along with debuts on Steam, SwitchStory continues below advertisementOne of the key early highlights from the stream was the announcement of a new, open mindset from EA regarding the idea of cross play, or the ability for gamers across different platforms to play together.AdvertisementOn this front, the biggest news comes from Respawn Entertainment\u2019s \u201cApex Legends,\u201d currently EA\u2019s star for the popular \u201clive service\u201d model. The game is coming to the Nintendo Switch as well as Steam, and will feature cross play. Consumer advocates, as well as some industry leaders, have been calling on more big companies to adopt cross play functionality. It\u2019s a huge leap forward for the games industry if EA, the largest games publisher besides Activision Blizzard, is pursuing this philosophy.A new \u201cApex\u201d trailer also debuted a new limited-time mode, \u201cLost Treasure,\u201d for the current fifth season of the game, dropping Tuesday, June 23. The event centers around Crypto, the Korean hacker legend that debuted two seasons ago.Story continues below advertisement'The Sims 4\u2032 segment celebrates diversityThe mega-popular life simulator from EA and Maxis is coming to Steam, as a full edition including all of the game\u2019s DLC. A short clip was shown during the show, but rather than focusing on that news, it instead put the spotlight on The Sims 4 community.How The Sims navigated 20 years of change to become one of the most successful franchises everThe video focuses on marginalized and minority gamers, talking about how The Sims 4 has helped them craft a world that is safe and welcoming to everyone. These voices included players with different backgrounds, disabilities and sexual or gender identities.AdvertisementEA partnering with SteamAlong with \u201cThe Sims 4,\u201d EA proudly touted a large number of additional titles finally being brought to Steam, the most popular PC game digital storefront. EA Origins, the company\u2019s own storefront, competed with Steam for several years by being the only home for EA games. Last year\u2019s \u201cStar Wars Jedi: Fallen Order\u201d changed this. Thursday\u2019s announcement confirmed Steam versions of EA hits like \u201cBattlefield V,\u201d \u201cDragon Age: Inquisition,\u201d \u201cNeed for Speed Heat,\u201d \u201cTitanfall 2\u201d and \u201cStar Wars Battlefront 2.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNew batch of EA OriginalsThree indies releasing as EA Originals were revealed during the event: \u201cIt Takes Two,\u201d \u201cLost in Random\u201d and \u201cRocket Arena.\u201d\u201cIt Takes Two\u201d is a co-op action adventure platformer, created by Josef Fares, the same man behind 2018\u2032s \u201cA Way Out.\u201d While \u201cA Way Out\u201d told the story of a prison break, \u201cIt Takes Two\u201d is about a young girl named Rose whose parents are divorcing.Advertisement\u201cRose doesn\u2019t want them to separate,\u201d Fares says, and so she creates doll replicas of her parents out of wood and clay, and they magically come to life. As the player, you control these dolls, as well as something more unique \u2014 \u201cthere\u2019s even levels where we\u2019re making a mechanic for their emotions,\u201d he said. Fares describes the experience as a wild ride, a \u201croller-coaster of emotion,\" that crashes and sends us off into space. We\u2019ll have to wait to see exactly what this means; the game releases in 2021.Story continues below advertisement\u201cLost in Random,\" a game from the creators of \u201cFe,\" is like a dark fairy tale right out of a Tim Burton movie. In this title, a magical land and its people are shaped and changed by the roll of a die. AL s the narrator explains during the trailer, it\u2019s \u201cyour turn to rule,\u201d to break the town\u2019s curse. Though much of the trailer is cinematic, there were glimpses of combat where you control both the six-sided die and a young girl. It also comes out in 2021.\u201cRocket Arena\u201d is an action-packed multiplayer title with a bright, cartoon-y aesthetic, and it comes out July 14. Coming to PS4, Xbox One and PC (Steam and Origin), \u201cRocket Arena\u201d is a 3v3 team-based game where you launch rockets at your opponents. There are clear similarities between this game and \u201cOverwatch,\u201d particularly because of the heroes shown, the colorful and cartoonish aesthetics and its focus on abilities. You can also land combos with your multi-faceted attacks. It looks like a blast, both literally and figuratively. \u201cRocket Arena\u201d will have cross-play support, so you can play with friends no matter what platform they\u2019re on.\u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe live stream gave viewers the first taste of gameplay for the next Star Wars title to hit shelves, coming October 2 for PC, Xbox and PlayStation. The game will also feature VR for the PC and PlayStation versions. Cross play (there\u2019s that phrase again) is also part of the plan.The gameplay looked to be about what you\u2019d expect from a Star Wars space flight sim, and will remind older gamers of a sleeker \u201cX-Wing vs. TIE Fighter.\u201d Set in the days after the destruction of the second Death Star in \u201cReturn of the Jedi,\u201d the announcement showed four classes of flyable spacecraft for both the New Republic and Empire (Fighters, Interceptors, Bombers and Support), usable in several different game modes, including a multi-stage, 5-vs.-5 multiplayer mode in which teams must prevail in a dogfight, destroy capital ships and then a command ship (like a Star Destroyer) to claim victory.The ships (and pilots) will be customizable, with the ability for players to unlock various weapon or systems upgrades, as well as some cosmetics (like what appeared to be an Ewok tchotchke). According to EA, all customization options and upgrades will be unlockable through game-play. There are no in-game microtransactions, nor is there a plan for a live-service/battle pass system at this time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSquadrons will include a single-player mode that will follow a story for pilots in both the Republic and Empire. While the characters followed will be new to the Star Wars universe, the stream touted the presence of some familiar faces from the galaxy far, far away. Also, like \u201cJedi Fallen Order,\u201d the story will be considered canon.There\u2019s an open question over how robust this single-player campaign might be. The first \u201cBattlefront\u201d game famously didn\u2019t have one, so EA added one in for the sequel, \u201cBattlefront 2.\u201d That story, which was also about characters on two opposing sides of the star war, ended up being clumsy, and worst of all, criminally short.Revealed at EA Play Live. (Electronic Arts)EA Sports and Next-Gen ConsolesStory continues below advertisementAside from some pretty graphics that featured only engine footage, the big takeaway for the two games shown \u2014 \u201cFIFA 21\u201d and \u201cMadden 21\u201d \u2014 is that if players purchase the 2021 versions for Xbox One or PS4, they will be able to upgrade to Series X/PS5 versions for free. Those next-gen versions will also include additional features not found in the current generation versions, which will release in late August and September, respectively.AdvertisementNext-gen news ... meh. But Skate 4???After a segment designed around EA\u2019s games for next-gen consoles best summarized by the sentence \u201cEA will have games on next-gen consoles,\u201d there was one last surprise for the show.Story continues below advertisementLike the memes demanding the release of the Zach Snyder cut of \u201cJustice League,\u201d the \u201cSkate\u201d series is coming back. The \u201cSkate 4\u201d meme started several years ago after the series went dormant. Instead of competing with the mega-popular \u201cTony Hawk\u201d series, \u201cSkate\u201d opted to go for more realism, which fostered a cult following that remains so strong today, they somehow memed the next game into existence.correctionAn earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the EA Play announcement included news about \"Apex Legends\" coming to Google Stadia.Read more:Video game companies vow to fight racism in their communities, but offer few details\u2018Cyberpunk 2077\u2019 delayed again, fueling speculation around next-gen console release datesI saw the leaks and thought I knew. I was still not prepared for \u2018The Last of Us Part II\u2019 A look at the latest game reveals from Electronic Arts. EA Play 2020: \u2018Apex Legends\u2019 cross play, \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 gameplay, new \u2018Skate\u2019 coming",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "EA Play 2020: \u2018Apex Legends\u2019 cross play, \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 gameplay, new \u2018Skate\u2019 coming (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7595",
        "date": "2020-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/06/18/watch-live-ea-play-2021-showcase-new-games-services/",
        "text": "Electronic Arts rolled out its upcoming releases and shared details on new products via its livestream event Thursday, a digital version of its usual live show in Los Angeles held just prior to E3. With covid-19 canceling both events, the reveals shifted online.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn June 11, Sony Interactive Entertainment hosted a similar event, unveiling the PlayStation 5 and showing off a slate of games that would appear on the console. The Launcher teams broke down the latest reveals from the game publisher behind popular franchises like The Sims and Star Wars, as well as EA Sports\u2019 Madden and FIFA.\u2018Apex Legends\u2019: Cross play coming, along with debuts on Steam, SwitchStory continues below advertisementOne of the key early highlights from the stream was the announcement of a new, open mindset from EA regarding the idea of cross play, or the ability for gamers across different platforms to play together.AdvertisementOn this front, the biggest news comes from Respawn Entertainment\u2019s \u201cApex Legends,\u201d currently EA\u2019s star for the popular \u201clive service\u201d model. The game is coming to the Nintendo Switch as well as Steam, and will feature cross play. Consumer advocates, as well as some industry leaders, have been calling on more big companies to adopt cross play functionality. It\u2019s a huge leap forward for the games industry if EA, the largest games publisher besides Activision Blizzard, is pursuing this philosophy.A new \u201cApex\u201d trailer also debuted a new limited-time mode, \u201cLost Treasure,\u201d for the current fifth season of the game, dropping Tuesday, June 23. The event centers around Crypto, the Korean hacker legend that debuted two seasons ago.Story continues below advertisement'The Sims 4\u2032 segment celebrates diversityThe mega-popular life simulator from EA and Maxis is coming to Steam, as a full edition including all of the game\u2019s DLC. A short clip was shown during the show, but rather than focusing on that news, it instead put the spotlight on The Sims 4 community.How The Sims navigated 20 years of change to become one of the most successful franchises everThe video focuses on marginalized and minority gamers, talking about how The Sims 4 has helped them craft a world that is safe and welcoming to everyone. These voices included players with different backgrounds, disabilities and sexual or gender identities.AdvertisementEA partnering with SteamAlong with \u201cThe Sims 4,\u201d EA proudly touted a large number of additional titles finally being brought to Steam, the most popular PC game digital storefront. EA Origins, the company\u2019s own storefront, competed with Steam for several years by being the only home for EA games. Last year\u2019s \u201cStar Wars Jedi: Fallen Order\u201d changed this. Thursday\u2019s announcement confirmed Steam versions of EA hits like \u201cBattlefield V,\u201d \u201cDragon Age: Inquisition,\u201d \u201cNeed for Speed Heat,\u201d \u201cTitanfall 2\u201d and \u201cStar Wars Battlefront 2.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNew batch of EA OriginalsThree indies releasing as EA Originals were revealed during the event: \u201cIt Takes Two,\u201d \u201cLost in Random\u201d and \u201cRocket Arena.\u201d\u201cIt Takes Two\u201d is a co-op action adventure platformer, created by Josef Fares, the same man behind 2018\u2032s \u201cA Way Out.\u201d While \u201cA Way Out\u201d told the story of a prison break, \u201cIt Takes Two\u201d is about a young girl named Rose whose parents are divorcing.Advertisement\u201cRose doesn\u2019t want them to separate,\u201d Fares says, and so she creates doll replicas of her parents out of wood and clay, and they magically come to life. As the player, you control these dolls, as well as something more unique \u2014 \u201cthere\u2019s even levels where we\u2019re making a mechanic for their emotions,\u201d he said. Fares describes the experience as a wild ride, a \u201croller-coaster of emotion,\" that crashes and sends us off into space. We\u2019ll have to wait to see exactly what this means; the game releases in 2021.Story continues below advertisement\u201cLost in Random,\" a game from the creators of \u201cFe,\" is like a dark fairy tale right out of a Tim Burton movie. In this title, a magical land and its people are shaped and changed by the roll of a die. AL s the narrator explains during the trailer, it\u2019s \u201cyour turn to rule,\u201d to break the town\u2019s curse. Though much of the trailer is cinematic, there were glimpses of combat where you control both the six-sided die and a young girl. It also comes out in 2021.\u201cRocket Arena\u201d is an action-packed multiplayer title with a bright, cartoon-y aesthetic, and it comes out July 14. Coming to PS4, Xbox One and PC (Steam and Origin), \u201cRocket Arena\u201d is a 3v3 team-based game where you launch rockets at your opponents. There are clear similarities between this game and \u201cOverwatch,\u201d particularly because of the heroes shown, the colorful and cartoonish aesthetics and its focus on abilities. You can also land combos with your multi-faceted attacks. It looks like a blast, both literally and figuratively. \u201cRocket Arena\u201d will have cross-play support, so you can play with friends no matter what platform they\u2019re on.\u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe live stream gave viewers the first taste of gameplay for the next Star Wars title to hit shelves, coming October 2 for PC, Xbox and PlayStation. The game will also feature VR for the PC and PlayStation versions. Cross play (there\u2019s that phrase again) is also part of the plan.The gameplay looked to be about what you\u2019d expect from a Star Wars space flight sim, and will remind older gamers of a sleeker \u201cX-Wing vs. TIE Fighter.\u201d Set in the days after the destruction of the second Death Star in \u201cReturn of the Jedi,\u201d the announcement showed four classes of flyable spacecraft for both the New Republic and Empire (Fighters, Interceptors, Bombers and Support), usable in several different game modes, including a multi-stage, 5-vs.-5 multiplayer mode in which teams must prevail in a dogfight, destroy capital ships and then a command ship (like a Star Destroyer) to claim victory.The ships (and pilots) will be customizable, with the ability for players to unlock various weapon or systems upgrades, as well as some cosmetics (like what appeared to be an Ewok tchotchke). According to EA, all customization options and upgrades will be unlockable through game-play. There are no in-game microtransactions, nor is there a plan for a live-service/battle pass system at this time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSquadrons will include a single-player mode that will follow a story for pilots in both the Republic and Empire. While the characters followed will be new to the Star Wars universe, the stream touted the presence of some familiar faces from the galaxy far, far away. Also, like \u201cJedi Fallen Order,\u201d the story will be considered canon.There\u2019s an open question over how robust this single-player campaign might be. The first \u201cBattlefront\u201d game famously didn\u2019t have one, so EA added one in for the sequel, \u201cBattlefront 2.\u201d That story, which was also about characters on two opposing sides of the star war, ended up being clumsy, and worst of all, criminally short.Revealed at EA Play Live. (Electronic Arts)EA Sports and Next-Gen ConsolesStory continues below advertisementAside from some pretty graphics that featured only engine footage, the big takeaway for the two games shown \u2014 \u201cFIFA 21\u201d and \u201cMadden 21\u201d \u2014 is that if players purchase the 2021 versions for Xbox One or PS4, they will be able to upgrade to Series X/PS5 versions for free. Those next-gen versions will also include additional features not found in the current generation versions, which will release in late August and September, respectively.AdvertisementNext-gen news ... meh. But Skate 4???After a segment designed around EA\u2019s games for next-gen consoles best summarized by the sentence \u201cEA will have games on next-gen consoles,\u201d there was one last surprise for the show.Story continues below advertisementLike the memes demanding the release of the Zach Snyder cut of \u201cJustice League,\u201d the \u201cSkate\u201d series is coming back. The \u201cSkate 4\u201d meme started several years ago after the series went dormant. Instead of competing with the mega-popular \u201cTony Hawk\u201d series, \u201cSkate\u201d opted to go for more realism, which fostered a cult following that remains so strong today, they somehow memed the next game into existence.correctionAn earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the EA Play announcement included news about \"Apex Legends\" coming to Google Stadia.Read more:Video game companies vow to fight racism in their communities, but offer few details\u2018Cyberpunk 2077\u2019 delayed again, fueling speculation around next-gen console release datesI saw the leaks and thought I knew. I was still not prepared for \u2018The Last of Us Part II\u2019 A look at the latest game reveals from Electronic Arts. EA Play 2020: \u2018Apex Legends\u2019 cross play, \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 gameplay, new \u2018Skate\u2019 coming",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Fallout 76 just gave people a reason to play The Outer Worlds instead (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7596",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2019/10/23/fallout-just-gave-people-reason-play-outer-worlds-instead/",
        "text": "This week, fans of the legendary Fallout franchise are getting what they want: The Outer Worlds, a game by Obsidian Entertainment and made by Fallout\u2019s two original creators, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd Fallout fans finally got what they asked for, too, just not in the way they expected. Wednesday, Bethesda announced a $13-a-month (or $99 a year) premium subscription service to Fallout 76, a beleaguered game from last year that was oft-ridiculed before developers later steadied the ship and created a decent community experience. The price tag is attached to two features Fallout fans wanted since the game was announced: the ability to play by yourself or with just your friends without any interference from strangers.Story continues below advertisementThe subscription also adds unlimited storage for crafting materials, a monthly deposit of the game\u2019s in-game currency bought by real-world cash so you can buy virtual items, as well as exclusive items and emotes. Also of note, the player with the Fallout 1st account is the only one who can log into the private server. If they\u2019re logged off, your seven other friends will have to make do in the wild of random players.AdvertisementThe real stinger is the last piece of content you get: a ranger armor outfit that was made iconic by Fallout New Vegas, the beloved 2010 entry made by The Outer Worlds developer Obsidian Entertainment. It\u2019s a game original Fallout fans cite as the last \u201creal\u201d Fallout game, since Bethesda has increasingly turned the franchise closer to its own flagship role-playing games, the Elder Scrolls series.Presidential candidate Andrew Yang weighs in on loot boxes and moreThe word-of-mouth hype surrounding The Outer Worlds paints it as the \u201creal\u201d Fallout experience Fallout fans want, and it\u2019s rooted in truth. Indeed, Outer Worlds plays like the Fallout games of yesteryear.Story continues below advertisementThe game takes place in a post-capitalist society, where megacorporations not only run everything, but have created planetary fandoms \u2014 akin to Beyonc\u00e9 worship \u2014 all the while exploiting workers for corporate gain. As the only person to awaken in a ship of creatives frozen in stasis, the player is tasked to tackle the conspiracy behind a galactic corporate infrastructure.AdvertisementIt\u2019s easy to see the metaphor behind the player, but now The Outer Worlds has become a symbol of a dying breed of games: feature-complete packages that put player autonomy at the center of its experience.Fallout 76 is getting a membership program which is basically telling you to go buy The Outer Worlds\u00a0instead https://t.co/8D2YDQe47s pic.twitter.com/bO5Zbv46db\u2014 Final Weapon (@FinalWeaponX4) October 23, 2019\n\nI\u2019m not done with The Outer Worlds, but within the first few hours the difference between it and even the single-player Fallout 4 is staggering. Player choice is presented not as strange, binary \u201cgood and evil\u201d choices, but rather morality plays that force you to engage with your ethics and the social doctrines you follow.Story continues below advertisementEven with the first quest to obtain enough energy for your spaceship, the fate of a relatively peaceful worker rebellion is in your hands as you weigh the benefits of capital, the well-being of a small but happy community, or the player\u2019s selfish need to finish the game.There are metaphors upon metaphors as more decisions and choices branch out in front of you. Players praised how Fallout New Vegas made player choice have real, indelible impact on the game world, and Obsidian Entertainment took that element and ran with it. Every choice brings you a wildly different, but natural, outcome to the galaxy you inhabit, and the various planets you visit.AdvertisementNow back to Fallout 76, a game that removed the pillars of Fallout games: a quirky story with colorful characters that present you with experience-altering choices. All of this will be added in the upcoming (and free) \u201cWastelanders\u201d expansion, per Bethesda.\u2018Fallout 76\u2019 is supposed to be \u2018Fallout with friends.\u2019 What if you have none?Fallout 76 released last year and what followed was a series of public relations nightmares that made many compare it to Sideshow Bob hitting rakes. The game released with outrage over its microtransactions, a promised canvas bag for special editions that shipped with cheaper material, and Bethesda accidentally leaked personal information of players who preordered the collector\u2019s edition. This was on top of a bevy of bugs and glitches that made the game almost unplayable upon its release.Story continues below advertisementBugs have become a staple of Bethesda releases, so much so that the company jokes about it, but Fallout 76 was worse than usual. Obsidian Entertainment also shares that history, with Fallout New Vegas launching at a famously buggy state, and another 2010 release, Alpha Protocol, launching to the same fate.AdvertisementNot so with The Outer Worlds, which even in a prerelease state runs smoothly and without any of the expected hiccups that come with an open world game.However, The Outer Worlds\u2019s worlds are smaller than most maps in modern games, funneling the player through sections and cities rather than vast, open fields of nothingness. Instead, the game presents densely packed communities and areas of activities, all ready to flower whatever adventure your choices create.Story continues below advertisementBut when it comes to the new pay service, here\u2019s the real burn for the Fallout faithful: Even if players don\u2019t want to pay the full retail price for The Outer Worlds, the game will be available for all subscribers to Microsoft\u2019s Xbox Game Pass service, which charges $10 a month (less than the recurring Fallout 76 fee). The Netlfix-like service gives players access to hundreds of games, including new releases, on the Xbox and PC. First-time subscribers get charged only a buck for the first month. It means you could get an old-school, feature-complete, single-player Fallout experience, the kind we haven\u2019t seen in nine years, for a dollar.AdvertisementThis is not to say Fallout 76 has remained a failure. Again, it\u2019s maintained a small but loyal and joyful community of role players and traders, perfectly content to live in Bethesda\u2019s post-apocalyptic vision of West Virginia. On the Fallout 76 subreddit, the reaction to the news is only beginning to bubble. Some see it as unnecessary and easy to ignore. Others worry about the future of the game, since Bethesda is making a year-later play to keep milking money.Another top post warns: \u201cMark this day as the day Bethesda really prove they\u2019re not only idiots, but liars.\u201d And YouTube games industry critic Jim Sterling, who had been chronicling the game\u2019s multiple PR flubs, had a reaction video already up, opening the first few seconds with a breathless cackle.Read more:Her son is a pro gamer. Here\u2019s what she wants you to know.Overwatch League releases its 2020 scheduleThis man just bought some of gaming\u2019s \u2018holy grails.\u2019 It cost him $1 million.New Call of Duty esports league will begin play in home markets in 2020, start with 12 teams Bethesda's latest announcement couldn't come at a better time for a new game that aims to please fans of the Fallout franchise's legacy. Fallout 76 just gave people a reason to play The Outer Worlds instead",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018WarioWare: Get It Together!\u2019 turns the series into a multiplayer mad dash (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7597",
        "date": "2021-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/20/warioware-get-it-together-preview-nintendo-switch/",
        "text": "The WarioWare series is known for its frenetic pace and wacky microgames, but its newest entry adds a new component to that chaos: multiplayer co-op.It\u2019s one of several new features introduced in \u201cWarioWare: Get It Together!\u201d set to release Sept. 10 on the Nintendo Switch. And after previewing a demo hosted by Nintendo Treehouse, the product development arm of Nintendo of America, it\u2019s already clear that this is one of the most ambitious additions to the series. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor the first time, players can choose who to play as among the eccentric cast of characters at WarioWare Inc., the fictional video game company founded by Mario\u2019s nemesis. Each one has unique abilities that make them better suited for beating certain microgames than others. For example, Wario flies around in a jet pack and can body slam into anything in his path; Mona putters around on a scooter and sends a remote-control boomerang bouncing around on screen; the alien Orbulon zooms around in a spaceship that can suck up and move objects; and 18-Volt has limited movement but can fire off powerful discs from afar. Some characters can only be controlled with two players, with each player limited to firing from the left or the right side. Regardless of your choice, the controls are identical, pared down to moving with the joystick and hitting a single button to attack.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWarioWare: Get It Together!\u201d features more than 200 microgames and a dizzying number of game modes. In story mode, WarioWare Inc.\u2019s staff gets sucked into a video game they developed. You and a crew of up to three characters play through a collection of randomized, seconds-long microgames where you hurry to squeeze out a tube of toothpaste, pluck every last armpit hair, and other madcap objectives while the pace and difficulty steadily ramp up.Pok\u00e9mon Presents showcases ambitious changes to the formula in \u2018Pok\u00e9mon Legends Arceus\u2019Each collection of microgames has a different theme, such as fantasy or Nintendo\u2019s game library. Players are allowed four losses on each run and, after beating a certain number of microgames, enter a boss stage where they dodge enemy attacks and environmental dangers rather than race against the clock. Beating bosses earns you in-game currency, which can be spent to customize each character\u2019s appearance among other things.In another first for the series, you can tackle story mode with another player using the Switch\u2019s two JoyCon controllers or through local co-op with two Switch consoles (each person will need to own a copy of the game). Some of the characters, such as the cat and dog duo Dribble and Spitz, are only available in two-player mode, as each player fires projectiles from the left or right side. Technically both players are on the same team, but the gameplay\u2019s frantic pace means cooperation and communication often fall by the wayside, representatives from Nintendo Treehouse explained during the demo. This adds a new layer of difficulty to the WarioWare formula, since you have to avoid accidentally obstructing your teammate in the mad dash to complete each objective as quickly as possible.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYou can also play co-op with another person in party mode, a side-scrolling platforming-style minigame. Themed around office culture, players fight WarioWare Inc.\u2019s business competitors and collect contracts to rack up points for the chance at a high score, all the while switching randomly between characters each time they hit a character token.Up to four players can go up against each other in the game\u2019s variety mode. Each player tries to collect the most stars through a series of two-part rounds. During the first half, they compete to be the first to score a goal in an air hockey-style minigame, each playing as the same randomly selected character. The winner then plays a microgame to try to win stars while the loser does everything in their power to stop them. \u201cWarioWare: Get It Together!\u201d achieves this dynamic in a unique way. The winner\u2019s microgame takes place in a windowed, floating screen, similar to a phone\u2019s picture-in-picture display. As they rush to beat the game, the loser manipulates the shape of the screen itself, sending it bouncing around like the DVD logo screen saver or squishing it to the size of a pancake. The effects are randomized for each round, and are all designed to keep you on your toes even when playing a microgame you may have beaten a million times before.In addition to these modes, \u201cWarioWare: Get It Together!\u201d has a practice area where players can get used to each character\u2019s unique style of movement and attack. Then there\u2019s endless mode where, as the name suggests, players choose a single microgame and race through endless variations of it. The pace picks up each time they win, to see how long of a streak they can set before losing. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere will also be weekly challenges for players to compete worldwide through the console\u2019s online multiplayer service, Nintendo Switch Online. Nintendo Treehouse declined to go into too much detail about this feature, but said players would compete for the highest score in a set microgame with a specific objective, with more points awarded to those who opt for characters that aren\u2019t as suited for that particular game.Are video game pro controllers worth it? Here\u2019s a guide to find out.Curiously, none of the microgames in \u201cWarioWare: Get It Together!\u201d make use of the JoyCon\u2019s motion controls or HD rumble features. Previous entries in the series were designed to capitalize on the features unique to whatever system they released on, such as \u201cWarioWare: Smooth Moves\u201d for the Wii having motion controls baked into many of its microgames or \u201cWarioWare: Touched\u201d for the DS incorporating touch-based mechanics. So it was a surprise to see that none of the features that Nintendo hyped in its initial advertisements for the Switch made an appearance in the demo.When asked about this, Nintendo Treehouse said the team was more focused on integrating multiplayer co-op into WarioWare\u2019s formula of bite-size, frenetic gameplay. This decision also makes sense from a sales standpoint as well as a creative one: Nintendo dropped HD rumble from its console\u2019s budget version, the Switch Lite, so it could risk isolating those players by relying too heavily on a feature they can\u2019t use. Either way, this latest addition to the WarioWare series appears to have all the makings of the next big multiplayer hit for the Switch.Read More:\u2018Mario Golf: Super Rush\u2019 brings the putting green to your living roomHow to catch up on Metroid, the classic series shunned by NintendoI paid $100 to win in \u2018Pok\u00e9mon Unite.\u2019 The results were mixed. With a dizzying number of new game modes, it\u2019s already clear this is one of the most ambitious additions to the WarioWare series to date. \u2018WarioWare: Get It Together!\u2019 turns the series into a multiplayer mad dash",
        "author": "Alyse Stanley"
    },
    {
        "title": "The best games for couch co-op play (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7598",
        "date": "2020-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/07/03/best-games-couch-co-op-play/",
        "text": "Online gaming has pushed split-screen and couch cooperative play to the side. But offline multiplayer games are getting a lot more attention these days, thanks to the still-ongoing quarantine reality for many homes.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutside of the arcade, couch cooperative games was the only way to play multiplayer before the Internet. After all, the first Nintendo consoles came with two controllers right at the start. In Japan, the controllers were tethered to the console. In the last two decades, developers shifted resources to online multiplayer, a far more lucrative investment. But studios know that some of our best gaming memories are with friends on the couch, so they can hear the banter (or trash talk) in person. One subreddit forum, r/localmultiplayer, is totally dedicated to finding and promoting local multiplayer games. Definitely check it out, as well as this Steam bundle, for more recommendations once you finish this list.Minecraft DungeonsPlatforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PCAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cDiablo 3\u201d is always a standing recommendation, but it\u2019s also an obvious one. If you\u2019ve already played that series to hell and back and crave something simpler, the first real \u201cMinecraft\u201d spinoff title might do the trick. Just released this summer, \u201cMinecraft Dungeons\u201d is a great introduction to the action role-playing genre. It\u2019s a lot easier to understand than tried and true classics like \u201cDiablo,\u201d but it plays a bit more like arcade brawler \u201cGauntlet,\u201d with even shades of \u201cStreets of Rage.\u201d Unlike more complicated action RPGs, \u201cMinecraft Dungeons\u201d is less about playing with statistics and more about just collecting whatever items or weapons have the higher attribute number and feels better for you. Once you get deeper into the game, it\u2019ll require players to coordinate builds more, but that learning curve comes very naturally.Overcooked 2Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, MacThis frantic game about meal preparation involves 2-4 players, all working toward the same goal: Cook as much food as possible in the allotted time. Players work as chefs, divvying up tasks like cleaning plates, slicing up ingredients and cooking on stove tops to make all sorts of dishes. While that may sound mundane, the fast pace makes this charming game a blast, especially when playing in a larger group. \u201cOvercooked 2\u201d isn\u2019t terribly different from its predecessor, but some small tweaks, like being able to throw ingredients to a friend and more challenging gameplay across the board, make it a more polished and fun experience. Overcooked 2 can be played through local and online co-op.A Way OutPlatforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PCIt\u2019s both a prison-escape and buddy story, and probably the most \u201ccooperative\u201d game on the list. Each player will occupy a half of the screen, making their own choices but relying on the other for progress. The two male leads are charismatic and likable, and so is the story. The story requires a lot of coordination on key story decisions too. It\u2019s a very directed experience, so don\u2019t expect too much deviation from what\u2019s essentially a two-seater roller coaster ride. As far as video games go, it\u2019s less than 10 hours at most, and moderately priced at $30. (It\u2019s also frequently on sale.) It\u2019s a steal for one of the more memorable and unique games on the list.Streets of Rage 4Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PCAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementObjective fact: The best way to recreate the magic of playing a \u201cStreets of Rage\u201d game is to play a \u201cStreets of Rage\u201d game. Games like \u201cFinal Fight\u201d and \u201cTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles\u201d come to mind when you hear \u201cbrawler,\u201d but the Sega Genesis series was the creative apex of the genre. Indie-driven project \u201cStreets of Rage 4\u201d cements that legacy. The game does very little to the classic formula of \u201crun to the right and punch everything in your way,\u201d and thank goodness. Nothing else should get in the way of the pure adrenaline rush of cheering on your buddy as they\u2019re using your team\u2019s last life to take down a boss that looks like evil Freddie Mercury. Get this if you miss the smell of arcade popcorn and token copper.Here comes the drop(kick): The sick beats in \u2018Streets of Rage\u2019Halo: The Master Chief CollectionPlatforms: Xbox One, PCThe recent PC release of this collection has no split-screen feature, but the Xbox One release does, and it\u2019s still excellent. The \u201cHalo\u201d series was the real genesis of the console first-person shooter, and the original allowed for classic \u201cGoldeneye\u201d-style split-screen multiplayer. The updated five \u201cHalo\u201d games on this collection all feature a split-screen, two-player cooperative mode, all with adjustable difficulty modes. The games may be old, but the gameplay has rarely been outdone. The five \u201cHalo\u201d games in this collection represent the finest in the shooter genre, and they\u2019re even better with a friend. While the levels aren\u2019t necessarily designed for cooperative play like some of the other games on the list, it doesn\u2019t matter. The chaos that ensues from the physics, explosions and tactically intelligent enemies are more than enough to occupy two heads.Earth Defense Force 5Platforms: PlayStation 4, PCIt looks ugly. It\u2019s cheap. You\u2019ve never heard of it before. You can fix that problem now. If you want an even simpler shooter experience, everyone should try the underrated cult hit series \u201cEarth Defense Force.\u201d Get any of them, they\u2019re mostly the same. You can pick one of a handful of space soldier types, and you simply defend Earth from an invading swarm of space bugs. It\u2019s pure video game nonsense. The graphics aren\u2019t good, but the fun comes from you and a friend blasting away at an entire screen of giant ants, living out your purest \u201cStarship Troopers\u201d fantasies.Lovers in a Dangerous SpacetimePlatforms: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, MacWith a bright, abstract look that harks back to games like the PlayStation 2\u2032s \u201cKatamari Damacy,\u201d \u201cLovers in a Dangerous Spacetime\u201d is striking the moment you boot it up. It\u2019s also a lot of fun to play. You control two characters who control a spaceship and are making their way through perilous areas of space. Through local co-op, navigating through levels safely requires careful coordination: You both divide tasks like steering, shooting turrets, activating shields and fighting fearsome bosses. Things can get hectic, and you and your partner may yell and laugh as you attempt to maneuver through peril, but that just adds to the amusement and excitement of this title.CupheadPlatforms: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PC, MacEver since the game was first announced in 2014, indie gem \u201cCuphead\u201d has turned heads. It has a unique presentation, an homage to 1930s cartoons from Walt Disney and Fleisher Studios. Once released, it received attention not just for its aesthetic, but also for its tough-as-nails gameplay. Because of its difficulty, it\u2019s best played with a friend. Through local co-op, it becomes more accessible and morphs into a team effort to take down baddies and bosses through many colorful levels.Portal 2Platforms: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PCAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPuzzles and portals. That\u2019s essentially the pitch for Portal, a series where you play as a test subject for an antagonistic company called Aperture Science that has little interest in whether you live or die. \u201cPortal\u201d is best known for its puzzles and inventive story line, and those continue in its co-op mode in \u201cPortal 2.\u201d You and your partner coordinate to solve puzzles that slowly increase in difficulty. Nearing the end, you\u2019ll both have to be a master at reflecting lasers, jumping through portals at appropriate times and avoiding lethal situations like pools of acid. Careful timing and teamwork are the only ways to stay alive.GlaDOS, the female robot that finds pleasure in your misery, tries to sever you and your partner\u2019s trust, as she comments on your performances. As always, her humor shines through to make this a whimsical experience, even during the most difficult puzzles. \u201cThese tests are potentially lethal when communication, teamwork, and mutual respect are not employed at all times,\u201d she says to both players. \u201cNaturally, this will pose an interesting challenge for one of you, given the other\u2019s performance so far.\u201dKeep Talking and Nobody ExplodesPlatforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC (VR support for PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive), Mac, iOS, AndroidAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementExplosions are stressful, especially when you\u2019re trying to avoid them by learning to diffuse a bomb in a limited time. In \u201cKeep Talking and Nobody Explodes\u201d you print out a manual for one player to read, while the other pays attention to the screen and takes orders from the other who guides them through bomb diffusion. It\u2019s an intense experience often rife with panicked conversations and laughter, making it a great game to play for two, but also a ball for parties.Game Theorists Matt Patrick and Steph Patrick were gaming since the start of their relationship. See their recommended games and how to avoid co-op conflict. (The Washington Post)Read more:'The Last of Us Part II\u2019: The Evolution of EllieThe last days of MixerEditor in chief Andy McNamara leaves Game Informer after 29 years Great games to play with friends while stuck at home. The best games for couch co-op play",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "10 open-world games we want for Nintendo Switch (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7599",
        "date": "2020-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/03/04/10-open-world-games-we-want-nintendo-switch/",
        "text": "In its three years of existence, the Nintendo Switch has defied expectations with surprisingly powerful technology, letting you play open-world games on the go that were normally restricted to high-performance PCs and home consoles. We\u2019ve seen the first-ever portable versions of Skyrim, L.A. Noire and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, among other titles, ported to the Switch in a fairly robust and faithful fashion. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut now that we know the Switch can run open-world titles smoothly, we want more. Below we\u2019ve listed 10 games we\u2019re hoping will eventually make the jump to the console.Keep in mind, this list is restricted to multiplatform games, since it\u2019s unlikely (but not impossible!) that exclusives like Horizon Zero Dawn or Spider-Man jump to the platform.Grand Theft Auto VDespite releasing seven years ago, Grand Theft Auto V remains the single most profitable entertainment product in human history. So why isn\u2019t it on the Nintendo Switch?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Switch seems more than capable of running it. The game was first released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Since then, the Witcher 3, a more technically impressive game with a much larger map, has been ported to the Switch and runs just fine.The Witcher 3 on Switch points to gaming\u2019s future. Animal Crossing: New Horizons\u2019s save system is a step back.Now, GTA 5\u2019s continued success has a lot to do with its online component, which has kept players invested (literally, spending billions of real dollars) throughout the years. The Switch\u2019s online experience can be famously unreliable. But even a port of the long-forgotten story mode would be a real treat, since it offers dozens of hours of story and three different playable protagonists.Outside of some outdated pop culture references (no one talks about hipsters anymore), Rockstar\u2019s South Park-like skewering of the early 2010s has aged remarkably well, considering we\u2019re still dealing with the ramifications of Silicon Valley\u2019s \u201cdisruption,\u201d irrational fears about immigration, and pay-to-win mobile games. The base game, after all, launched first without GTA Online, and it still sold like gangbusters. The Switch needs more solid open-world crime simulators, as Rockstar\u2019s L.A. Noire is more of an adventure title. A one-way ticket to Los Santos would be an immediate correction.Far Cry 3Ubisoft\u2019s long-running series has taken us all over the world and even to different points in history, but 2012\u2032s Far Cry 3 may be its best outing. Ubisoft has refined and polished the open-world model in subsequent games, but what makes Far Cry 3 stand out is its fantastic, subversive storytelling. And that\u2019s mostly thanks to its villain, the teetering-towards-lunacy Vaas, whose commentary on insanity makes you rethink the relationship between good and evil.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile Far Cry 3\u2032s biggest strength is its story, that doesn\u2019t mean Rook Island isn\u2019t a thrill to explore. Ravaged by lawless pirates, the island has madness at every turn. Traversal is also one of the best parts: gliding around in a wingsuit and maneuvering jeeps makes Far Cry 3 a wild ride.Ubisoft has already ported some of its games to Nintendo Switch, including the open-world Assassin\u2019s Creed: Black Flag, which is similarly a handful of years old. Because Far Cry 3 is smaller than a lot of modern open world games, such as Breath of the Wild, it\u2019s not much of a stretch that it could join the Switch roster.No Man\u2019s SkyThis is understandably tough. Hello Games has struggled to get this running on high-end PCs, let alone baseline PlayStation 4 consoles. It\u2019ll be a tall order to port a game that creates a procedurally-generated universe (literally a near-endless universe) onto Nintendo\u2019s little console.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut indie developer Hello Games has also become a smarter, more capable group of developers since the early days of No Man Sky\u2019s rough launch. And there are many graphical compromises that could be made to the game, since it isn\u2019t exactly a title that thrives on fidelity. Nintendo players would adore the experience of flying and exploring an unknown universe with a customized spaceship. They\u2019ve already gotten a taste of it with Ubisoft\u2019s Starlink: Battle for Atlas, a spaceship game that allows you to seamlessly fly in and out of planetary atmospheres.Hello Games has already expressed interest in a Switch port, so it\u2019s well within the universe of possibility.Yakuza 0For years, Sega\u2019s Yakuza series flew under the radar in the West while being a sales behemoth in Japan. Finally, thanks to the 2017 prequel Yakuza 0, there\u2019s a surge of interest in the long-running RPG beat-em-up series.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementYakuza\u2019s early reputation as a \u201cJapanese Grand Theft Auto\u201d gave players the wrong impression about it. It\u2019s more like a Japanese role-playing game (a la Persona) mixed with classic Streets of Rage-style street fighting. But it\u2019s still very much a free-roaming game, giving players a densely packed Tokyo district to explore and play dozens of side activities in.Yakuza 0 is not only the actual starting point for the saga, it\u2019s also arguably the best game in the series. You need no familiarity with any other game. Also, even though Yakuza 0 first appeared on the PlayStation 4 in the U.S., the game was originally created for the PlayStation 3, much like its younger sequel Yakuza 5. So while we probably shouldn\u2019t expect the same 60 frames-per-second performance of the current generation consoles, there\u2019s no reason the Switch couldn\u2019t\u2019 handle a low-tech game like Yakuza 0 (or the remake of the first game, Yakuza Kiwami).The Switch is flush with games from Japan. It deserves one of the best-written series that country has ever produced.Red Dead Redemption 2Red Dead Redemption 2 took seven years for Rockstar to build, and it\u2019s easy to see why. It\u2019s one of the most sophisticated open-world games ever, and an excellent tale of a cowboy gang losing faith in a leader they once blindly followed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis Western romp has an open world that isn\u2019t just gigantic, but also filled to the brim with stories in every corner of its universe. It\u2019s a joy to ride your horse through foggy bayous or in bustling towns, because of the sheer amount of detail Rockstar implemented.3 years later, here\u2019s why Nintendo Switch is my favorite gaming console everCan the Switch run something as powerful as Red Dead Redemption 2? We can\u2019t know for sure, and it could prove difficult to port. This is a game that pushes consoles like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 to their limits Still, rumors swirled earlier this year after a listing for a Red Dead Redemption 2 Switch port appeared on Spanish retailer Instant Gaming\u2019s website. It could be nothing, but we have our fingers crossed.Batman: Arkham CityThe most beloved Batman game ever made actually appeared as a launch title for the ill-fated Nintendo Wii U. Perhaps that\u2019s why developer Rocksteady Studios has been reticent to port the Caped Crusader over to Nintendo\u2019s latest system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementArkham City, and its prequel Arkham Asylum, are both watershed titles for superhero video games. Technically, both would be easy to port, since they\u2019re fairly undemanding by today\u2019s technical standards. And both games hold up remarkably well, considering many action games have since aped Rocksteady\u2019s call-and-response combat system for Batman.Ultimately, though, Arkham City is better game, with a more original, innovative story, excellent voice acting from the animated series (including Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, as the Joker), and well-balanced pacing. There are many opportunities to play Arkham City, as it has been re-released multiple times on the PC and every other major console. But curiously when it comes to the Switch, this series is as blind as a bat.Fallout: New VegasAlthough Fallout 4 has a more impressive open world, we\u2019d argue that Fallout: New Vegas is the best of the series, and it\u2019s one we\u2019d love to have on Nintendo Switch. New Vegas would likely be easier to port than later games, too, due to its older tech: Fallout 4 uses the Creation Engine; New Vegas uses the comparatively older Gamebryo engine.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Fallout universe isn\u2019t the most eye-catching (it takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States, after all), and its bleak aesthetics continue in Fallout: New Vegas, but they have more punch. New Vegas leaves behind the blue-ish hues of Fallout 3 for a more vibrant color palette as you explore the Mojave Wasteland.But more than anything, New Vegas has a world rich with lore and storytelling. Its sharp writing still holds up today, representing what many view as the most authoritative entry to the Fallout universe.Bethesda has already ported Skyrim to Switch, and developer Obsidian is working with Nintendo to bring The Outer Worlds to the platform, too (though coronavirus has slowed this down). There\u2019s a good chance a Fallout entry will come to Switch \u2014 and we\u2019d put our money on New Vegas.Assassin\u2019s Creed OdysseyThe Switch release for Assassin\u2019s Creed: Black Flag made us hungry for more of the science fiction/historical adventure franchise. Similar to Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin\u2019s Creed Odyssey would be an ambitious port because of the enormity and detail of its world. But if it does happen, it would be incredible to experience Ancient Greece on the go.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBeginning with Origins, Ubisoft revamped the Assassin\u2019s Creed series to include more role-playing elements. And whereas earlier games made it easy to slice through enemies with your hidden blade, combat now requires more skill and precision. It was a big shift for the series, but one that has been largely met with positive reception.Assassin\u2019s Creed Odyssey is jaw-droppingly beautiful, with a depth to its world that rises to the ranks of what we saw in The Witcher 3 years prior. Its high quality and breadth might make the game challenging to port, but it\u2019s an endeavor we hope Ubisoft and Nintendo attempt.Just Cause 3This would be one tough port. The Just Cause series is wildly dynamic, featuring myriad particle effects across an obscenely large map. There\u2019s also the problem of how vertical the game gets: The game is basically \u201cGrand Theft Auto with base jumping.\u201dBut although we\u2019d probably get a choppy, lower-resolution version of Just Cause, the Switch could absolutely use some the series\u2019s signature highflying stunt work.Watch Dogs 2The original Watch Dogs, a game about being a hacker vigilante, failed to impress with a world and characters that rang hollow. But its sequel left those problems behind. Set in a colorful version of San Francisco, Watch Dogs 2 lets you explore everything from the tech-infused Silicon Valley to Alcatraz Island\u2019s massive prison. It\u2019s an impressive recreation of the seaside Californian city.Thanks to a wider array of hacking abilities and a tongue-in-cheek narrative that comments on issues plaguing our real world, like privacy and politics, Watch Dogs 2 is an entertaining action adventure game that is a far cry in quality from the original.The first Watch Dogs made its way to Wii U, so it\u2019s entirely possible for Nintendo to partner with Ubisoft again on this particular franchise. The two companies could get creative with the Switch\u2019s joy-cons, too, letting you operate drones or the RC jumper (a small, remote controllable car) with gyroscopes.Read more:The best games at PAX EastSix things we learned during the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo DirectThe Witcher 3 on Switch points to gaming\u2019s future. Animal Crossing: New Horizons\u2019s save system is a step back. With The Witcher 3 now available, here are some open-world gems we'd love to see on the console. 10 open-world games we want for Nintendo Switch",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Creator of \u2018Final Fantasy\u2019 reflects on his last game, his career and the puppetry of his works (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7600",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/13/final-fantasy-creator-sakaguchi-fantasian/",
        "text": "Hironobu Sakaguchi has released what is likely to be his final video game, capping off a career so long and busy, even he needs to check Wikipedia to remember what he\u2019s done.\u201cIn terms of reflecting on my career, I don\u2019t really do it that much,\u201d the creator of the Final Fantasy series said in an interview from his Honolulu home. \u201cVery occasionally, I might go onto Wikipedia when I need to recall some information and wonder, \u2018Hey when was \u201cFinal Fantasy VI\u201d released?\u2019 When I look up myself, it would just list everything that I\u2019ve worked on in some capacity. That to me is kind of a wow moment. I really have developed a lot of things! But that\u2019s the extent of the reflection that I do.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightToday, the Apple Arcade exclusive \u201cFantasian\u201d receives its second and final update, essentially the second half of Sakaguchi\u2019s return to form to the Japanese role-playing game genre. It\u2019s developed by Mistwalker, the studio he created after departing Square, now known as Square Enix, where he created the Final Fantasy series.Despite creating many games during the 1980s for Square, none were a success. \u201cFinal Fantasy\u201d was pitched as Sakaguchi\u2019s final game, as he considered leaving game development altogether. That\u2019s why it\u2019s called Final Fantasy.Perfecting 'Final Fantasy 7\u2032s' legacy, as told by its creatorsSakaguchi would go on to direct and produce nine Final Fantasy games before starting Mistwalker. And he says he sees \u201cFantasian\u201d as the final game and the final collaboration between him and legendary musician and composer Nobuo Uematsu, who scored the Final Fantasy series\u2019 most memorable tracks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI feel both Uematsu and I went into this almost thinking to ourselves, \u2018Hey, if this were to become our last project, we want to make sure we didn\u2019t leave anything on the table,\u2019\u201d Sakaguchi said. \u201cI\u2019m certain Uematsu will compose music in a smaller capacity, but something on this scale, 60 tracks for a game is quite a huge task.\u201dUematsu\u2019s compositions in \u201cFantasian\u201d are a mix of the classic, baroque-style melodies of his earliest work fused with synthesizer sounds to match the game\u2019s flirtations with science fiction fantasy. Sakaguchi said that, throughout his career, he hasn\u2019t given detailed directions to Uematsu. There\u2019s usually just an early exchange about overarching concepts and story themes; Uematsu is then left to his own devices.\u201cWe\u2019ve had a very unique relationship. While we\u2019re working, we\u2019ll have these very long email exchanges,\u201d Sakaguchi said, specifying that casual pleasantries and updates about their lives often ended up becoming long-winded philosophical debates about the nature of life and human interaction. Some of those thoughts would feed back into the game.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe seed for the \u201cFantasian\u201d project was planted several years ago, when Sakaguchi was replaying \u201cFinal Fantasy VI.\u201d In the past decade or so, since Sakaguchi\u2019s departure, the Final Fantasy series has become an incubator for new ideas about evolving or changing the role-playing genre. But Sakaguchi is still fond of the classic, turn-based format of the older games.\u201cIt reminded me how much I really like this style of gameplay, and I wanted to go back to my roots,\u201d Sakaguchi said. \u201cLet\u2019s be honest, I\u2019m nearing the end of my video game development career. So I thought, \u2018I\u2019m going to try to develop something in a style I know really, really well and personally like to play.\u2019 \u201d\u201cFantasian\u201d is the marquee title for Apple Arcade\u2019s recent resurgence. It\u2019s been well-received by players, and at about 100 hours of story and gameplay, it\u2019s a significant value add for Apple\u2019s gaming subscription service.Forget next-gen consoles. The biggest gaming platform is already in your pocket.Aside from being a compelling game with an interesting battle system, all the backgrounds and settings in \u201cFantasian\u201d are real-world, 3-D dioramas photographed to give the game a sense of place, which is evocative of the Renaissance-style painterly backgrounds of \u201cFinal Fantasy VI.\u201d The 3-D video game characters, monsters and other items are then digitally superimposed over the dioramas.I told Sakaguchi that since I was young, I always looked at Final Fantasy games as digital puppet shows. The limited expressions of the 2-D sprites would exaggerate emotion, much as they would in an old-time puppet show, or even Japanese Kabuki theater. This aesthetic comparison was only heightened during the memorable opera house scene of \u201cFinal Fantasy VI.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe diorama backdrop paired with 3-D models is not directly tied to \u2018Final Fantasy V\u2019 or \u2018[Final Fantasy] VI\u2019, but the puppet show element \u2014 there\u2019s a strong connection you can draw there,\u201d Sakaguchi said. \u201cThat was something I shared with the rest of the development team very early on as we were prototyping concepts. Yes, there are certain cut scenes and camera cuts where we get a little fancy, but the overall feeling or sensation is a puppet show. I\u2019m really glad that you specifically chose the word \u2018puppet show,\u2019 because that is kind of what we were going for.\u201dSakaguchi said Mistwalker was lucky that they completed much of the diorama work before the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, as the game\u2019s development required staff to be together in a physical space. The second half of \u201cFantasian\u201d was finished much sooner than anyone anticipated after the first part\u2019s release in April since much of the programming and development of systems was completed as work-from-home projects.\u201cI think there was a lot more energy coming from the team members because they were able to work in their own environments,\u201d he said.A year into the pandemic, game developers reflect on burnout, mental health and avoiding crunchEven if Sakaguchi may be at the end of a long, storied career, it wasn\u2019t until \u201cFantasian\u201d that he was able to achieve a long-held goal: to make a tribute to the 1996 Hollywood blockbuster film \u201cIndependence Day.\u201d He was captivated by the scene in which the alien spaceship blows up the White House, which was achieved using practical effects and explosives.Sakaguchi\u2019s staff created small indentations in one of the game\u2019s final areas to present the image of a magical explosion happening from within the structure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said his team was initially reluctant to blow up the beautiful dioramas and asked him if he really wanted to do this.Sakaguchi grinned from ear to ear as he recalled, \u201cI said yes! This is something that\u2019s been a long time in the making for me, knowing it\u2019s one of the last opportunities I can do this.\u201dIf \u201cFantasian\u201d truly is his last game, Sakaguchi\u2019s final fantasy ends not with a whimper, but with a bang.\u201cIt\u2019s been a dream of mine,\u201d he said.Read more:Marginalized streamers beg Twitch to \u2018do better\u2019 in wake of hate raids, poor payA Yale doctor is using a video game to fight the opioid crisisOn YouTube and Twitch, the Activision Blizzard harassment lawsuit leaves creators reeling In \"Fantasian,\" Hironobu Sakaguchi finally achieved his long-held dream. Creator of \u2018Final Fantasy\u2019 reflects on his last game, his career and the puppetry of his works",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "Creator of \u2018Final Fantasy\u2019 reflects on his last game, his career and the puppetry of his works (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7601",
        "date": "2021-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/13/final-fantasy-creator-sakaguchi-fantasian/",
        "text": "Hironobu Sakaguchi has released what is likely to be his final video game, capping off a career so long and busy, even he needs to check Wikipedia to remember what he\u2019s done.\u201cIn terms of reflecting on my career, I don\u2019t really do it that much,\u201d the creator of the Final Fantasy series said in an interview from his Honolulu home. \u201cVery occasionally, I might go onto Wikipedia when I need to recall some information and wonder, \u2018Hey when was \u201cFinal Fantasy VI\u201d released?\u2019 When I look up myself, it would just list everything that I\u2019ve worked on in some capacity. That to me is kind of a wow moment. I really have developed a lot of things! But that\u2019s the extent of the reflection that I do.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightToday, the Apple Arcade exclusive \u201cFantasian\u201d receives its second and final update, essentially the second half of Sakaguchi\u2019s return to form to the Japanese role-playing game genre. It\u2019s developed by Mistwalker, the studio he created after departing Square, now known as Square Enix, where he created the Final Fantasy series.Despite creating many games during the 1980s for Square, none were a success. \u201cFinal Fantasy\u201d was pitched as Sakaguchi\u2019s final game, as he considered leaving game development altogether. That\u2019s why it\u2019s called Final Fantasy.Perfecting 'Final Fantasy 7\u2032s' legacy, as told by its creatorsSakaguchi would go on to direct and produce nine Final Fantasy games before starting Mistwalker. And he says he sees \u201cFantasian\u201d as the final game and the final collaboration between him and legendary musician and composer Nobuo Uematsu, who scored the Final Fantasy series\u2019 most memorable tracks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI feel both Uematsu and I went into this almost thinking to ourselves, \u2018Hey, if this were to become our last project, we want to make sure we didn\u2019t leave anything on the table,\u2019\u201d Sakaguchi said. \u201cI\u2019m certain Uematsu will compose music in a smaller capacity, but something on this scale, 60 tracks for a game is quite a huge task.\u201dUematsu\u2019s compositions in \u201cFantasian\u201d are a mix of the classic, baroque-style melodies of his earliest work fused with synthesizer sounds to match the game\u2019s flirtations with science fiction fantasy. Sakaguchi said that, throughout his career, he hasn\u2019t given detailed directions to Uematsu. There\u2019s usually just an early exchange about overarching concepts and story themes; Uematsu is then left to his own devices.\u201cWe\u2019ve had a very unique relationship. While we\u2019re working, we\u2019ll have these very long email exchanges,\u201d Sakaguchi said, specifying that casual pleasantries and updates about their lives often ended up becoming long-winded philosophical debates about the nature of life and human interaction. Some of those thoughts would feed back into the game.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe seed for the \u201cFantasian\u201d project was planted several years ago, when Sakaguchi was replaying \u201cFinal Fantasy VI.\u201d In the past decade or so, since Sakaguchi\u2019s departure, the Final Fantasy series has become an incubator for new ideas about evolving or changing the role-playing genre. But Sakaguchi is still fond of the classic, turn-based format of the older games.\u201cIt reminded me how much I really like this style of gameplay, and I wanted to go back to my roots,\u201d Sakaguchi said. \u201cLet\u2019s be honest, I\u2019m nearing the end of my video game development career. So I thought, \u2018I\u2019m going to try to develop something in a style I know really, really well and personally like to play.\u2019 \u201d\u201cFantasian\u201d is the marquee title for Apple Arcade\u2019s recent resurgence. It\u2019s been well-received by players, and at about 100 hours of story and gameplay, it\u2019s a significant value add for Apple\u2019s gaming subscription service.Forget next-gen consoles. The biggest gaming platform is already in your pocket.Aside from being a compelling game with an interesting battle system, all the backgrounds and settings in \u201cFantasian\u201d are real-world, 3-D dioramas photographed to give the game a sense of place, which is evocative of the Renaissance-style painterly backgrounds of \u201cFinal Fantasy VI.\u201d The 3-D video game characters, monsters and other items are then digitally superimposed over the dioramas.I told Sakaguchi that since I was young, I always looked at Final Fantasy games as digital puppet shows. The limited expressions of the 2-D sprites would exaggerate emotion, much as they would in an old-time puppet show, or even Japanese Kabuki theater. This aesthetic comparison was only heightened during the memorable opera house scene of \u201cFinal Fantasy VI.\u201d AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe diorama backdrop paired with 3-D models is not directly tied to \u2018Final Fantasy V\u2019 or \u2018[Final Fantasy] VI\u2019, but the puppet show element \u2014 there\u2019s a strong connection you can draw there,\u201d Sakaguchi said. \u201cThat was something I shared with the rest of the development team very early on as we were prototyping concepts. Yes, there are certain cut scenes and camera cuts where we get a little fancy, but the overall feeling or sensation is a puppet show. I\u2019m really glad that you specifically chose the word \u2018puppet show,\u2019 because that is kind of what we were going for.\u201dSakaguchi said Mistwalker was lucky that they completed much of the diorama work before the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, as the game\u2019s development required staff to be together in a physical space. The second half of \u201cFantasian\u201d was finished much sooner than anyone anticipated after the first part\u2019s release in April since much of the programming and development of systems was completed as work-from-home projects.\u201cI think there was a lot more energy coming from the team members because they were able to work in their own environments,\u201d he said.A year into the pandemic, game developers reflect on burnout, mental health and avoiding crunchEven if Sakaguchi may be at the end of a long, storied career, it wasn\u2019t until \u201cFantasian\u201d that he was able to achieve a long-held goal: to make a tribute to the 1996 Hollywood blockbuster film \u201cIndependence Day.\u201d He was captivated by the scene in which the alien spaceship blows up the White House, which was achieved using practical effects and explosives.Sakaguchi\u2019s staff created small indentations in one of the game\u2019s final areas to present the image of a magical explosion happening from within the structure.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe said his team was initially reluctant to blow up the beautiful dioramas and asked him if he really wanted to do this.Sakaguchi grinned from ear to ear as he recalled, \u201cI said yes! This is something that\u2019s been a long time in the making for me, knowing it\u2019s one of the last opportunities I can do this.\u201dIf \u201cFantasian\u201d truly is his last game, Sakaguchi\u2019s final fantasy ends not with a whimper, but with a bang.\u201cIt\u2019s been a dream of mine,\u201d he said.Read more:Marginalized streamers beg Twitch to \u2018do better\u2019 in wake of hate raids, poor payA Yale doctor is using a video game to fight the opioid crisisOn YouTube and Twitch, the Activision Blizzard harassment lawsuit leaves creators reeling In \"Fantasian,\" Hironobu Sakaguchi finally achieved his long-held dream. Creator of \u2018Final Fantasy\u2019 reflects on his last game, his career and the puppetry of his works",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The best games at PAX East (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7602",
        "date": "2020-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/03/02/best-games-pax-east/",
        "text": "BOSTON \u2014 At PAX East, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the undisputed winner. The annual video game convention on the east coast, which drew large crowds last week and over the weekend despite coronavirus concerns, was abuzz with Animal Crossing chatter. At Nintendo\u2019s PAX East booth, fans could wait for photo ops with Isabelle and KK Slider on a set filled with plastic trees, a yellow tent and an adorable home with a red door. It was a peaceful respite from the crowded and chaotic convention. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe long-awaited life simulator from Nintendo stole my heart, and I\u2019ll be sharing my impressions of the game later this week. But while, to me, Animal Crossing was the main event, there was plenty to be excited about at PAX East, between Annapurna Interactive showing off a suite of impressive indies and Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 front and center with its worldwide gameplay reveal.Launcher saw plenty of games at PAX, some better than others. Here are the ones I loved.MaquetteMaquette, a game that is part love story and part puzzle game, was unveiled by Annapurna Interactive (creators of The Outer Wilds and What Remains of Edith Finch) at PAX East. It also has a concept we\u2019ve never quite seen before: Puzzles involve objects that are simultaneously big and small. Confused? I was too, but it makes sense once you play.You make your way through a garden with walls occasionally superimposed with text, telling the story of a broken relationship. In the middle of the garden, you find a diorama model of the same garden you\u2019re in. To progress, you have to swap objects from the actual garden and from the diorama, and changes you make in one impact the other. For example, placing a key in the model garden to cover a gap makes it appears in your real garden as a bridge. I enjoyed what I saw, but it\u2019s easy to be confounded right from the start. Hopefully Annapurna plugs in a short tutorial to get players acquainted with the concept.Doom EternalCombat in the Doom series has always been fast-paced, but its frenetic action feels more polished in Doom Eternal. This is thanks to a clever evolution of your character\u2019s mobility, like being able to nimbly swing on monkey bars and climb walls while fighting. Double jump lets you access better vantage points and dashing helps you escape enemy fire in a pinch. All these improvements make it easier to move around, which is important in a game that punishes you for standing still.During my 20-minute demo, I mowed down one enemy after another, slicing through them with my chainsaw and executing glory kills, which are fancy finishers. Killing demons has never felt so good.SpiritfarerIndie darling Spiritfarer, from developer Thunder Lotus Games, is a relaxing game with gorgeous 2D graphics. You play as Stella, who operates a boat for the deceased. You travel from one island to the next, befriending spirits in hopes that they\u2019ll join you on your ship. However, convincing them to hop aboard isn\u2019t always straightforward. Sometimes you have to complete quests for them, like gathering materials to build their dream home on your ship.The most anticipated games of 2020There\u2019s something heartwarming about Spiritfarer. You can hug spirits to improve their mood, a cute white cat follows you everywhere (which can be controlled by a second player in co-op), the islands are lush, and the boat you progressively build is eclectic but cozy, as you fill it with gardens and homes stacked over one another like towers.Hardspace: ShipbreakerIn Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you\u2019re at the mercy of your employer, who sends you on missions in space to salvage parts from valuable ships. It\u2019s a dangerous job, but you have cutting edge tools to make it through. If you\u2019re careful, that is.Hardspace: Shipbreaker joins the popular trend of games that find entertainment in menial tasks, like Death Stranding\u2019s package deliveries and Stardew Valley\u2019s farming. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is surprisingly fun, too, and that\u2019s partly because of its unpredictability. I screamed while playing the game on the show floor, because I accidentally caused a spaceship to blow up while I was inside it.Fall GuysImagine 60 players tumbling through a virtual obstacle course. Some might get bonked on the head by a gigantic balloon shaped like a hammer and fall behind. Others will make it through unscathed, if they\u2019re careful.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFall Guys is filled with chaotic moments like these, with swarms of players competing in arenas that look more like jungle gyms or bouncy castles. I tried four different mini-games. One of these included ramming my character into a series of doors to find out which open and which don\u2019t in order to get to a finish line, while a slew of competitors did the same. After each mini-game, a certain amount of players don\u2019t make the cut, and when you get to the final round, only one will emerge victorious.Fall Guys is silly and humorous in its presentation, making it a fun experience for players of all ages.Baldur\u2019s Gate 3Although we didn\u2019t get a chance to play Baldur\u2019s Gate 3, we still saw it in action as Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke played through a portion of the upcoming RPG in a presentation. It\u2019s an RPG with strong ties to Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), to the point where D&D veterans will recognize magic spells, creatures and dice rolls from the popular tabletop game. You can read my full impressions by heading here.FuserHarmonix is no stranger to expertly blending music in its games. They\u2019re the creators of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, after all. But Fuser does something special with impressive technology that lets you, ahem, fuse songs together. You play as a festival DJ and blend together pieces of songs (instrumentals, vocals and so on) into something entirely new. Launcher had a chance to play it at PAX East and had a lot of fun making dubious decisions, like mixing Lady Gaga with Smash Mouth.Read more:Three women dreamed of joining the NBA 2K League. The road to the draft was a gauntlet of abuse and adversity.Game Developers Conference postponed amid coronavirus fears, exhibitor withdrawalsHow accessibility consultants are building a more inclusive video game industry behind the scenes PAX East had many fantastic games on display, like the cozy Spiritfarer and the frenzied Doom Eternal. Here are the best. The best games at PAX East",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "The most anticipated video games of 2022 (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7603",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/23/2022-games-release-new/",
        "text": "The past year was primed to deliver a number of highly anticipated video games. Then covid-related delays pushed a number of them into 2022. The result was a so-so year for gaming in 2021 and massive hype for the year ahead starting as early as January, historically a dormant month on the game-release calendar. Though some titles expected to drop in 2022 still don\u2019t have firm release dates, we\u2019ve compiled the games we\u2019re most excited to see and play in the coming year.\u2018Elden Ring\u2019East meets West in \u201cElden Ring,\u201d a collaboration between the creators of \u201cDark Souls\u201d and \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d An open-world, Souls-like experience seemed a bold and risky proposition, especially since From Software has never made a game that big. But the network test we participated in showed that the studio just might pull it off. The test showcased awe-inspiring sights and myriad paths to follow and get lost in. Considering the pedigree and quality of From Software\u2019s previous titles, we may see 2022\u2019s game of the year as early as February. \u2014 Gene ParkRelease date: Feb. 25 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018Horizon Forbidden West\u2019I missed \u201cHorizon Zero Dawn\u201d when it first released, but after playing it during quarantine, it immediately kicked \u201cFallout New Vegas\u201d off the No. 1 spot on my list of all-time favorite games (which is no coincidence \u2014 the lead writer on \u201cNew Vegas,\u201d John Gonzalez, spearheaded the development of both \u201cHorizon Zero Dawn\u201d and its upcoming sequel). The first game ended on a cliffhanger and left some big questions unanswered, fueling the hype for its sequel, \u201cHorizon Forbidden West.\u201dThe follow-up continues the story of protagonist Aloy across a post-apocalyptic West Coast as she investigates a mysterious plague of red vines that\u2019s killing local flora and fauna. Trailers so far have revealed several new features that promise to shake up combat and exploration. Players will be able to navigate (frankly gorgeous) underwater environments, swing around like Spider-Man during battle using the \u201cPullcaster,\u201d a new wrist-mounted grappling hook, and glide down from high places. Several dilapidated versions of real-life landmarks make appearances, like San Francisco\u2019s Lombard Street and the Golden Gate Bridge, as do massive new enemy robots like a hulking mammoth and snapping turtle. \u2014 Alyse StanleyRelease date: Feb. 18 for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4For video games, February is the new November\u2018Pok\u00e9mon Legends: Arceus\u2019This is the game the Pok\u00e9mon franchise sorely needs. After a few lackluster generations of mainline game releases \u2014 releases that were iterative, uninspired and lacking any qualities that truly shook up the Pok\u00e9mon formula \u2014 developer Game Freak finally relented and offered a tantalizing glimpse of a game longtime fans of the series have wanted all along.\u201cPok\u00e9mon Legends: Arceus\u201d looks to be \u201cBreath of the Wild\u201d plus Pok\u00e9mon, eschewing the typical eight gym format in favor of a sprawling open world you navigate by riding Pok\u00e9mon. It takes place in the feudal Japan-inspired Hisui region, complete with lush vistas and new regional variants of old-time favorites like Hisuian Growlithe. Several other \u201cBreath of the Wild\u201d-inspired features also appear in this game, including a cooking and crafting system and customizable clothing.While some fans might not be pleased with the game\u2019s new system for catching Pok\u00e9mon \u2014 apparently a combination of \u201cPok\u00e9mon Go\u201d and reflex-based dodging \u2014 the game represents the series\u2019s efforts to evolve beyond a 25-year-old increasingly stale formula. \u2014 Jhaan ElkerRelease date: Jan. 28 for Nintendo SwitchAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sequel to \u2018Breath of the Wild\u2019Who isn\u2019t anticipating this game? Zelda fans have meticulously combed through every frame of both trailers Nintendo has released for the sequel (its actual title has yet to be announced) just to squeeze out every last drop of information.The original \u201cBreath of the Wild\u201d is responsible for the Nintendo Switch\u2019s launch-day success. With its simple beauty, the original open-world RPG had the power to turn nongamers into believers. People bought the console just to play that game.The direct sequel appears to be set in a fractured version of the Hyrule that Link first explored, with parts of the map floating in the clouds above Hyrule Castle. Beyond that, all we have is speculation. Can Link time travel? Will fans be able to play as Zelda? Will there be any connection to past entries in the franchise? \u2014 Teddy AmenabarRelease date: 2022 for Nintendo SwitchAs the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proofAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018God of War: Ragnarok\u2019When we last saw Kratos and Atreus in a bonus scene from 2018\u2032s \u201cGod of War,\u201d the father and son had returned to their home in the woods only to be roused by a Mj\u00f6lnir-wielding Thor who was likely a bit ticked off that the duo had killed his sons. There is plenty to suggest things are about to kick off in the game\u2019s Scandinavian setting: Kratos made enemies of Thor, Freya and likely the rest of the wrathful Norse gods by slaying Magni, Modi and Baldur, setting in motion the events of the prophesied Ragnarok. Now Kratos and Atreus are hoping to stave off the end of days by tracking down Tyr, the Norse God of War.Given the foreshadowing at the end of that game, which revealed a mural in the mountain halls of Jotunnheim that seemingly shows Kratos dead in Atreus\u2019s arms, the stakes figure to be pretty high for the upcoming installment of the God of War franchise. \u2014 Mike HumeRelease date: 2022 for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4One year in, how do the Xbox Series consoles and the PlayStation 5 stack up?\u2018Hogwarts Legacy\u2019The game adaptation for \u201cHarry Potter and the Sorcerer\u2019s Stone\u201d is one of the first video games I ever remember beating. I was 10 years old, at home on the family computer. I clicked and typed my way past Fluffy, the three-headed dog, around that dreaded chess set and on toward the Mirror of Erised \u2014 all while banging my head to Linkin Park\u2019s \u201cMeteora.\u201dSo, that\u2019s just to say: I\u2019ve been keeping tabs on \u201cHogwarts Legacy,\u201d an open-world role-playing game from Warner Bros. Games and Avalanche Software, the studio behind \u201cDisney Infinity.\u201d With just one cinematic trailer that\u2019s more than a year old, there\u2019s very little to say about the game. We do know \u201cHogwarts Legacy\u201d will be set in the late 1800s, before the wizarding world knew of \u201cyou-know-who\u201d or his predecessor, the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. The site for \u201cHogwarts Legacy\u201d says players will be able to craft potions, learn spell casting and master something called \u201cAncient Magic.\u201dLast March, Bloomberg reported that \u201cHogwarts Legacy\u201d will allow players to create transgender characters \u2014 a direct challenge to series creator J.K. Rowling who, in 2019, tweeted in support of a woman who lost her job over her anti-trans social media posts. Players will be able to independently select their characters, voice and appearances, according to the report. It\u2019s not clear whether all the customization options will be available once the game releases. \u2014 Teddy AmenabarRelease date: 2022 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018Sifu\u2019There are just not enough games that approach the balletic intricacies of hand-to-hand combat seriously, outside of a handful of brawlers and boxing games. \u201cSifu\u201d by Sloclap may just be the answer, with your hero dodging and weaving punches and kicks, and \u2014 like Jackie Chan \u2014 using the environment to his advantage. A preview build we played was a bit rough in performance, but the fundamentals are there. This\u2019ll be a must-play for anyone who craves brawler combat that looks like your favorite martial arts movies. \u2014 Gene ParkRelease date: Feb. 8 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PCVideo game franchises we want raised from the dead\u2018Starfield\u2019In a June interview with The Washington Post, Bethesda Managing Director Ashley Cheng billed the upcoming sci-fi space game as \u201cthe Han Solo simulator,\u201d allowing players to \u201cget in a ship, explore the galaxy [and] do fun stuff.\u201d That\u2019s pretty much all anyone needed to hear to further hype the already anticipated game.Players join a space exploration outfit, customizing their character backgrounds and making decisions that will affect how the game\u2019s story unfolds. While soaring through the far reaches of the cosmos, presumably players will encounter other forms of life \u2026 but hopefully not bugs.\u201cStarfield\u201d represents Bethesda\u2019s first new IP in 25 years. \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2018Skyrim\u2019 in space,\u201d Bethesda Game Studios Executive Producer Todd Howard has said of the role-playing game. \u2014 Mike HumeRelease date: Nov. 11 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S\u2018Redfall\u2019Announced at E3 this past June, \u201cRedfall,\u201d an upcoming, vampire-themed co-op FPS game, generated a bit of buzz during Microsoft\u2019s showcase. The game from Arkane Studios, the developer behind \u201cDishonored,\u201d \u201cPrey\u201d and the 2021 hit \u201cDeathloop,\u201d showed off a lengthy cinematic that featured a diverse cast of vampire hunters using customizable weapons to take down their bloodsucking foes.Not only are gamers geeked about the game because of Arkane\u2019s pedigree, but, along with \u201cStarfield,\u201d this is scheduled to be an Xbox/PC exclusive when it launches this summer. Compared to Sony, Microsoft has lacked standout exclusives in recent years. Can \u201cRedfall\u201d fill that bill? We\u2019re eager to find out. \u2014 Mike HumeRelease date: 2022 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S Delays in 2021 have only served to add to hype for 2022. The most anticipated video games of 2022",
        "author": "Washington Post Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "The most anticipated video games of 2022 (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7604",
        "date": "2021-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/12/23/2022-games-release-new/",
        "text": "The past year was primed to deliver a number of highly anticipated video games. Then covid-related delays pushed a number of them into 2022. The result was a so-so year for gaming in 2021 and massive hype for the year ahead starting as early as January, historically a dormant month on the game-release calendar. Though some titles expected to drop in 2022 still don\u2019t have firm release dates, we\u2019ve compiled the games we\u2019re most excited to see and play in the coming year.\u2018Elden Ring\u2019East meets West in \u201cElden Ring,\u201d a collaboration between the creators of \u201cDark Souls\u201d and \u201cGame of Thrones.\u201d An open-world, Souls-like experience seemed a bold and risky proposition, especially since From Software has never made a game that big. But the network test we participated in showed that the studio just might pull it off. The test showcased awe-inspiring sights and myriad paths to follow and get lost in. Considering the pedigree and quality of From Software\u2019s previous titles, we may see 2022\u2019s game of the year as early as February. \u2014 Gene ParkRelease date: Feb. 25 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018Horizon Forbidden West\u2019I missed \u201cHorizon Zero Dawn\u201d when it first released, but after playing it during quarantine, it immediately kicked \u201cFallout New Vegas\u201d off the No. 1 spot on my list of all-time favorite games (which is no coincidence \u2014 the lead writer on \u201cNew Vegas,\u201d John Gonzalez, spearheaded the development of both \u201cHorizon Zero Dawn\u201d and its upcoming sequel). The first game ended on a cliffhanger and left some big questions unanswered, fueling the hype for its sequel, \u201cHorizon Forbidden West.\u201dThe follow-up continues the story of protagonist Aloy across a post-apocalyptic West Coast as she investigates a mysterious plague of red vines that\u2019s killing local flora and fauna. Trailers so far have revealed several new features that promise to shake up combat and exploration. Players will be able to navigate (frankly gorgeous) underwater environments, swing around like Spider-Man during battle using the \u201cPullcaster,\u201d a new wrist-mounted grappling hook, and glide down from high places. Several dilapidated versions of real-life landmarks make appearances, like San Francisco\u2019s Lombard Street and the Golden Gate Bridge, as do massive new enemy robots like a hulking mammoth and snapping turtle. \u2014 Alyse StanleyRelease date: Feb. 18 for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4For video games, February is the new November\u2018Pok\u00e9mon Legends: Arceus\u2019This is the game the Pok\u00e9mon franchise sorely needs. After a few lackluster generations of mainline game releases \u2014 releases that were iterative, uninspired and lacking any qualities that truly shook up the Pok\u00e9mon formula \u2014 developer Game Freak finally relented and offered a tantalizing glimpse of a game longtime fans of the series have wanted all along.\u201cPok\u00e9mon Legends: Arceus\u201d looks to be \u201cBreath of the Wild\u201d plus Pok\u00e9mon, eschewing the typical eight gym format in favor of a sprawling open world you navigate by riding Pok\u00e9mon. It takes place in the feudal Japan-inspired Hisui region, complete with lush vistas and new regional variants of old-time favorites like Hisuian Growlithe. Several other \u201cBreath of the Wild\u201d-inspired features also appear in this game, including a cooking and crafting system and customizable clothing.While some fans might not be pleased with the game\u2019s new system for catching Pok\u00e9mon \u2014 apparently a combination of \u201cPok\u00e9mon Go\u201d and reflex-based dodging \u2014 the game represents the series\u2019s efforts to evolve beyond a 25-year-old increasingly stale formula. \u2014 Jhaan ElkerRelease date: Jan. 28 for Nintendo SwitchAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sequel to \u2018Breath of the Wild\u2019Who isn\u2019t anticipating this game? Zelda fans have meticulously combed through every frame of both trailers Nintendo has released for the sequel (its actual title has yet to be announced) just to squeeze out every last drop of information.The original \u201cBreath of the Wild\u201d is responsible for the Nintendo Switch\u2019s launch-day success. With its simple beauty, the original open-world RPG had the power to turn nongamers into believers. People bought the console just to play that game.The direct sequel appears to be set in a fractured version of the Hyrule that Link first explored, with parts of the map floating in the clouds above Hyrule Castle. Beyond that, all we have is speculation. Can Link time travel? Will fans be able to play as Zelda? Will there be any connection to past entries in the franchise? \u2014 Teddy AmenabarRelease date: 2022 for Nintendo SwitchAs the world weathers a pandemic, Nintendo may just be recession-proofAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018God of War: Ragnarok\u2019When we last saw Kratos and Atreus in a bonus scene from 2018\u2032s \u201cGod of War,\u201d the father and son had returned to their home in the woods only to be roused by a Mj\u00f6lnir-wielding Thor who was likely a bit ticked off that the duo had killed his sons. There is plenty to suggest things are about to kick off in the game\u2019s Scandinavian setting: Kratos made enemies of Thor, Freya and likely the rest of the wrathful Norse gods by slaying Magni, Modi and Baldur, setting in motion the events of the prophesied Ragnarok. Now Kratos and Atreus are hoping to stave off the end of days by tracking down Tyr, the Norse God of War.Given the foreshadowing at the end of that game, which revealed a mural in the mountain halls of Jotunnheim that seemingly shows Kratos dead in Atreus\u2019s arms, the stakes figure to be pretty high for the upcoming installment of the God of War franchise. \u2014 Mike HumeRelease date: 2022 for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4One year in, how do the Xbox Series consoles and the PlayStation 5 stack up?\u2018Hogwarts Legacy\u2019The game adaptation for \u201cHarry Potter and the Sorcerer\u2019s Stone\u201d is one of the first video games I ever remember beating. I was 10 years old, at home on the family computer. I clicked and typed my way past Fluffy, the three-headed dog, around that dreaded chess set and on toward the Mirror of Erised \u2014 all while banging my head to Linkin Park\u2019s \u201cMeteora.\u201dSo, that\u2019s just to say: I\u2019ve been keeping tabs on \u201cHogwarts Legacy,\u201d an open-world role-playing game from Warner Bros. Games and Avalanche Software, the studio behind \u201cDisney Infinity.\u201d With just one cinematic trailer that\u2019s more than a year old, there\u2019s very little to say about the game. We do know \u201cHogwarts Legacy\u201d will be set in the late 1800s, before the wizarding world knew of \u201cyou-know-who\u201d or his predecessor, the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. The site for \u201cHogwarts Legacy\u201d says players will be able to craft potions, learn spell casting and master something called \u201cAncient Magic.\u201dLast March, Bloomberg reported that \u201cHogwarts Legacy\u201d will allow players to create transgender characters \u2014 a direct challenge to series creator J.K. Rowling who, in 2019, tweeted in support of a woman who lost her job over her anti-trans social media posts. Players will be able to independently select their characters, voice and appearances, according to the report. It\u2019s not clear whether all the customization options will be available once the game releases. \u2014 Teddy AmenabarRelease date: 2022 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018Sifu\u2019There are just not enough games that approach the balletic intricacies of hand-to-hand combat seriously, outside of a handful of brawlers and boxing games. \u201cSifu\u201d by Sloclap may just be the answer, with your hero dodging and weaving punches and kicks, and \u2014 like Jackie Chan \u2014 using the environment to his advantage. A preview build we played was a bit rough in performance, but the fundamentals are there. This\u2019ll be a must-play for anyone who craves brawler combat that looks like your favorite martial arts movies. \u2014 Gene ParkRelease date: Feb. 8 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PCVideo game franchises we want raised from the dead\u2018Starfield\u2019In a June interview with The Washington Post, Bethesda Managing Director Ashley Cheng billed the upcoming sci-fi space game as \u201cthe Han Solo simulator,\u201d allowing players to \u201cget in a ship, explore the galaxy [and] do fun stuff.\u201d That\u2019s pretty much all anyone needed to hear to further hype the already anticipated game.Players join a space exploration outfit, customizing their character backgrounds and making decisions that will affect how the game\u2019s story unfolds. While soaring through the far reaches of the cosmos, presumably players will encounter other forms of life \u2026 but hopefully not bugs.\u201cStarfield\u201d represents Bethesda\u2019s first new IP in 25 years. \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2018Skyrim\u2019 in space,\u201d Bethesda Game Studios Executive Producer Todd Howard has said of the role-playing game. \u2014 Mike HumeRelease date: Nov. 11 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S\u2018Redfall\u2019Announced at E3 this past June, \u201cRedfall,\u201d an upcoming, vampire-themed co-op FPS game, generated a bit of buzz during Microsoft\u2019s showcase. The game from Arkane Studios, the developer behind \u201cDishonored,\u201d \u201cPrey\u201d and the 2021 hit \u201cDeathloop,\u201d showed off a lengthy cinematic that featured a diverse cast of vampire hunters using customizable weapons to take down their bloodsucking foes.Not only are gamers geeked about the game because of Arkane\u2019s pedigree, but, along with \u201cStarfield,\u201d this is scheduled to be an Xbox/PC exclusive when it launches this summer. Compared to Sony, Microsoft has lacked standout exclusives in recent years. Can \u201cRedfall\u201d fill that bill? We\u2019re eager to find out. \u2014 Mike HumeRelease date: 2022 for PC, Xbox Series X and Series S Delays in 2021 have only served to add to hype for 2022. The most anticipated video games of 2022",
        "author": "Washington Post Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Sackboy: A Big Adventure\u2019 ditches create mode for a new direction (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7605",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/10/26/sackboy-big-adventure-ditches-create-mode-new-direction/",
        "text": "With less than a month away from the PS5\u2032s release, information has slowly trickled out about hardware details and launch titles. \u201cSackboy: A Big Adventure,\" a spin-off game of the LittleBigPlanet series that blends platforming and user creation, is one of the big releases coming out alongside the PS5\u2032s launch. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA question fans have pondered is whether this title has the series\u2019 famed creation mode, which lets players build their own levels and share them online. The answer, unfortunately, is no, but that doesn\u2019t mean \u201cSackboy\u201d is lacking.\u201cThis is a whole new direction for Sackboy,\u201d Sumo Digital design director Ned Waterhouse said. \u201cOur decision was to focus on the gameplay experience to basically make the best co-op 3D platformer we could. For us, that meant great character controls, a really rich and highly interactive world, and loads of variety so that each each level feels unique.\u201dIn \u201cSackboy: A Big Adventure,\u201d you journey to different worlds like a jungle and outer space. As Sackboy, you must put a stop to the antagonist Vex, a \u201cshapeshifting jester\" who hopes to turn everything upside down \u2014 literally \u2014 with a machine called the topsy turver.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe game marks the series\u2019 first foray into 3D, leaving behind its 2.5D (a 2D environment with depth and a restricted camera perspective) roots for a more open gameplay experience. Developer Sumo Digital says the shift was a \u201cchallenge,\" and it\u2019s fundamentally different from what long-time fans would expect. But it allowed them to design levels that wouldn\u2019t have been possible otherwise.\u2018Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart\u2019 and the power of the PS5\u201cWe have exploration levels in the game where you have to search all the nooks and crannies of a level or an environment to uncover its secrets,\" he said.Sackboy has a new move set, too: he can jump, roll, dive and \u201cflutter jump,\u201d which lets him run in mid-air briefly to reach far away platforms. He can also pick things up and throw them. In local and online co-op, which can be played with up to four players, you can pick your friends up and toss them around, as well as slap them, which brings a silly, \u201cmischievous\u201d feel that\u2019s right at home in LittleBigPlanet.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a PS5 title, \u201cSackboy: A Big Adventure\u201d takes advantage of the system\u2019s new tech and features, some of which we saw Sony\u2019s UI reveal. This includes a hint menu, a checklist of achievements for completionists, and the ability to drop in and out of specific levels or areas instantly. The latter is made possible with the PS5\u2032s ultra-fast SSD, which we\u2019ve seen teased for games like \u201cRatchet & Clank: Rift Apart\u201d as well.\u201cI still can\u2019t quite get over how a level loads on our game in a matter of seconds,\u201d Waterhouse said.Some features extend to the DualSense controller, particularly when it comes to haptic feedback. \u201cSackboy\u201d takes place in a world with crafted materials, like yarn and other threaded objects. Different vibrations can be felt depending on what kind of flooring Sackboy is walking, jumping or running across.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"We ended up having arguments about, what does it feel like [for Sackboy] to jump on a balloon?\u201d Waterhouse said.For Waterhouse, it was important to create a LittleBigPlanet game that had \u201cquirky characters\u201d and \u201ca bit of British sensibility,\" much like the rest of the franchise.\u201cI hope that what players will find is that this is very much a game with LittleBigPlanet in its DNA,\u201d Waterhouse said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s very much true to the sensibilities of the franchise.\u201dRead more:30 minutes with \u2018Little Nightmares II\u2019: Building upon the scares of the original\u2018Spellbreak\u2019 wants to focus on the game\u2019s magic and it starts with team deathmatchThe gamer vote: Democrats lean into video games to aid Biden campaign Developer Sumo Digital shifted its focus away from create mode, and more toward perfecting the co-op platforming experience. \u2018Sackboy: A Big Adventure\u2019 ditches create mode for a new direction",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Murder on Eridanos\u2019 DLC is \u2018Outer Worlds\u2019 at its comedic best (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7606",
        "date": "2021-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/murder-eridanos-review/",
        "text": "One of the core strengths of the 2019 role-playing game \u201cThe Outer Worlds\u201d is its gallows humor. Set within a fictional star system, this space-faring adventure revels in its dark jokes about cartoonishly evil corporations that exert far too much control over galactic societies \u2014 so much that their employees may blurt out company slogans while dying. Comedy also happens to be one of the best qualities of its newest DLC, \u201cMurder on Eridanos.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cMurder on Eridanos,\u201d released on Wednesday, is the second story-based expansion following \u201cPeril on Gorgon.\u201d The DLC transports you and your party members to a luxurious hotel, the Grand Colonial, on the colorful planet of Eridanos. But this is no vacation: You\u2019re here to investigate what happened after a star actress (Halcyon Helen) was murdered in cold blood. The result is an entertaining noir-style adventure about conspiracies and intrigue that constantly left me in stitches.Decisions, decisions: Expanse of choices helps The Outer Worlds transcend in a familiar universeWalking through Eridanos can often feel like you\u2019re touring the Wonka factory. I was constantly dazzled by the striking design, including a distillery housing glass pipes flowing with colorful, bubbling beverages and a purple-colored meadow on the outskirts. It\u2019s glamour with a hint of unease, as something terrible brews behind the scenes.\u201cI think [the colorful aesthetic] juxtaposes really well with the darker, dangerous theme that\u2019s going on behind the scenes,\u201d said Megan Starks, game director on the DLC.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a big step up from the previous story DLC, \u201cPeril on Gorgon,\u201d which took place on an aesthetically dull asteroid that was difficult to navigate without getting lost. Eridanos, in comparison, is a gas planet, with small slabs of rock and earth hovering in the air, connected by long bridges. Even the plant life looks like something straight out of a Dr. Seuss children\u2019s book.Despite centering around a murder, this DLC is ceaselessly funny, from the strange characters you meet (i.e. a dealer selling \u201calternative drugs\u201d that are really just vitamin C or homeopathic remedies, in a world brainwashed by pharmaceutical corporations) to the bizarre enemies you encounter. It\u2019s clear that something strange is afoot on Eridanos. Certain Rizzo employees, for example, have a purple parasite growing out of their necks and just can\u2019t stop devilishly smiling. Uncovering why unravels a wacky, entertaining and occasionally dark story.One of the standout characters, for example, is an actor named Spencer Woolrich, who lives in the shadow of Halcyon Helen\u2019s success. But he\u2019s still convinced he\u2019s better than everyone.\u201cEven our designers made fun of him, because his signed autographed photos show up in trash cans all over the hotel area,\u201d said Tim Cain, co-game director on the DLC.Just like I felt sorry for Spencer, I also felt a tinge of remorse when gunning down crazed Rizzo employees on Eridanos, who clearly have little to no control over their behavior. But killing them is also \u2026 absolutely hilarious. They spew cotton-candy colored goo all over you, slowing you down temporarily during combat, all while exclaiming, \u201cI just want to see you smile!\u201d The encounters are so weird, I couldn\u2019t help but laugh.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCombat isn\u2019t too different from \u201cThe Outer Worlds\u201d as a whole, but there are some small tweaks, including three new science weapons to find and use. Science weapons \u2014 which are special weapons that have a wacky function, like shrinking down an opponent \u2014 are entertaining, and one of the new ones is used mostly outside of combat. Called the discrepancy amplifier, this tool is \u201cThe Outer World\u2019s\u201d version of a technologically advanced magnifying glass that can perceive the past and future.\u201cIt\u2019s more like a science device, using mathematical equations to try and predict the outcome of the universe,\u201d Starks said. \u201cIf there was a blood pool that existed and someone\u2019s mopped it up and it\u2019s no longer visible to the naked eye, you can actually look into the short-term past and see that it was there.\u201dThe discrepancy amplifier can talk, and it guides you in a monotone, robotic voice, not unlike ADA (your spaceship\u2019s sentient A.I.) or your robot party member S.A.M. It gives you baseline information, often in a comedically obvious fashion, such as, \u201cThis person is most definitely dead! But recently, they were still alive!\u201d It\u2019s also useful for collecting clues and following tracks. It introduces a new way to interact with the world, letting you analyze clues and collect data.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe idea for [the tool] actually came from Nitai Poddar, who is my co-lead narrative designer on the project,\u201d Starks said. \u201cWe were writing all these ideas on a whiteboard about the murder mystery and key suspects, and talking about the different ways you could role play as a detective. He was like, \u2018we really need a magnifying glass.\u2019\u201dLike \u201cOuter Worlds\u201d as a whole, the decisions you make have an impact on the story, characters and world around you. Though you may see small implications to your choices along the way, the biggest and most compelling consequences are found once you accuse someone of murder. Your success in discovering the culprit is based on a variety of factors, including how much side content you complete and how deeply you explore environments.\u201cYou can accuse the wrong suspect or you can frame an innocent person,\u201d Starks said. \u201cYou can learn part of the truth. Or if you dig around enough, you can learn the exact details of what happened.\u201dStarks cites 1974\u2032s \u201cMurder on the Orient Express,\u201d along with other classic detective stories, as inspiration for the DLC. \u201cMurder on Eridanos\u201d feels like a playable murder mystery film, similar to the mission within \u201cHitman 3\u201d where Agent 47 can solve a murder at a British manor. This newest DLC is dialogue heavy, and striking a balance between interrogating suspects and meaningful gameplay was challenging but important for Obsidian to get right.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe had to make sure there were lots of opportunities for combat as you\u2019re going from point A to B in your quest,\u201d Starks said. \u201cAnd then also accounting for players doing anything in a different order, we wanted to make sure that the DLC is highly reactive to that.\u201dThe making of the \u2018Hitman 3\u2019 murder mystery mansionThough much of \u201cMurder on Eridanos\u201d works well, there are certain moments that are stronger than others. Nearing the end, some of the conclusions can feel anti-climactic, but it really depends on what ending you receive. Another issue is the overwhelming amount of loot. The recommended level for playing \u201cMurder on Eridanos\u201d is 30, and a lot of players will likely have completed the game already, meaning they\u2019ll already own lots of gear, loot and weapons. On many occasions, I just didn\u2019t feel compelled to pick up loot.\u201cWe had a lot of discussions even before the base game shipped, that especially among consumables, we had too much loot to track,\u201d Cain said. \u201cWe tried to handle that through making most of it something we\u2019re hoping people will consume, like mods, foods and drugs. But we always seem to run into that inflation with every RPG we make.\u201dRead more:PSA: \u2018AC: Valhalla\u2019 still has a game-breaking bug four months later, even after the new updateRiot Games board finds no wrongdoing by CEO Nicolo Laurent, denies misconduct allegations in new court filingAs \u2018Valheim\u2019 grows, its developer reflects on bugs, updates and the prospect of acquisition Solving a murder on an alien planet has never been so fun. \u2018Murder on Eridanos\u2019 DLC is \u2018Outer Worlds\u2019 at its comedic best",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Murder on Eridanos\u2019 DLC is \u2018Outer Worlds\u2019 at its comedic best (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7607",
        "date": "2021-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/murder-eridanos-review/",
        "text": "One of the core strengths of the 2019 role-playing game \u201cThe Outer Worlds\u201d is its gallows humor. Set within a fictional star system, this space-faring adventure revels in its dark jokes about cartoonishly evil corporations that exert far too much control over galactic societies \u2014 so much that their employees may blurt out company slogans while dying. Comedy also happens to be one of the best qualities of its newest DLC, \u201cMurder on Eridanos.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cMurder on Eridanos,\u201d released on Wednesday, is the second story-based expansion following \u201cPeril on Gorgon.\u201d The DLC transports you and your party members to a luxurious hotel, the Grand Colonial, on the colorful planet of Eridanos. But this is no vacation: You\u2019re here to investigate what happened after a star actress (Halcyon Helen) was murdered in cold blood. The result is an entertaining noir-style adventure about conspiracies and intrigue that constantly left me in stitches.Decisions, decisions: Expanse of choices helps The Outer Worlds transcend in a familiar universeWalking through Eridanos can often feel like you\u2019re touring the Wonka factory. I was constantly dazzled by the striking design, including a distillery housing glass pipes flowing with colorful, bubbling beverages and a purple-colored meadow on the outskirts. It\u2019s glamour with a hint of unease, as something terrible brews behind the scenes.\u201cI think [the colorful aesthetic] juxtaposes really well with the darker, dangerous theme that\u2019s going on behind the scenes,\u201d said Megan Starks, game director on the DLC.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a big step up from the previous story DLC, \u201cPeril on Gorgon,\u201d which took place on an aesthetically dull asteroid that was difficult to navigate without getting lost. Eridanos, in comparison, is a gas planet, with small slabs of rock and earth hovering in the air, connected by long bridges. Even the plant life looks like something straight out of a Dr. Seuss children\u2019s book.Despite centering around a murder, this DLC is ceaselessly funny, from the strange characters you meet (i.e. a dealer selling \u201calternative drugs\u201d that are really just vitamin C or homeopathic remedies, in a world brainwashed by pharmaceutical corporations) to the bizarre enemies you encounter. It\u2019s clear that something strange is afoot on Eridanos. Certain Rizzo employees, for example, have a purple parasite growing out of their necks and just can\u2019t stop devilishly smiling. Uncovering why unravels a wacky, entertaining and occasionally dark story.One of the standout characters, for example, is an actor named Spencer Woolrich, who lives in the shadow of Halcyon Helen\u2019s success. But he\u2019s still convinced he\u2019s better than everyone.\u201cEven our designers made fun of him, because his signed autographed photos show up in trash cans all over the hotel area,\u201d said Tim Cain, co-game director on the DLC.Just like I felt sorry for Spencer, I also felt a tinge of remorse when gunning down crazed Rizzo employees on Eridanos, who clearly have little to no control over their behavior. But killing them is also \u2026 absolutely hilarious. They spew cotton-candy colored goo all over you, slowing you down temporarily during combat, all while exclaiming, \u201cI just want to see you smile!\u201d The encounters are so weird, I couldn\u2019t help but laugh.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCombat isn\u2019t too different from \u201cThe Outer Worlds\u201d as a whole, but there are some small tweaks, including three new science weapons to find and use. Science weapons \u2014 which are special weapons that have a wacky function, like shrinking down an opponent \u2014 are entertaining, and one of the new ones is used mostly outside of combat. Called the discrepancy amplifier, this tool is \u201cThe Outer World\u2019s\u201d version of a technologically advanced magnifying glass that can perceive the past and future.\u201cIt\u2019s more like a science device, using mathematical equations to try and predict the outcome of the universe,\u201d Starks said. \u201cIf there was a blood pool that existed and someone\u2019s mopped it up and it\u2019s no longer visible to the naked eye, you can actually look into the short-term past and see that it was there.\u201dThe discrepancy amplifier can talk, and it guides you in a monotone, robotic voice, not unlike ADA (your spaceship\u2019s sentient A.I.) or your robot party member S.A.M. It gives you baseline information, often in a comedically obvious fashion, such as, \u201cThis person is most definitely dead! But recently, they were still alive!\u201d It\u2019s also useful for collecting clues and following tracks. It introduces a new way to interact with the world, letting you analyze clues and collect data.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe idea for [the tool] actually came from Nitai Poddar, who is my co-lead narrative designer on the project,\u201d Starks said. \u201cWe were writing all these ideas on a whiteboard about the murder mystery and key suspects, and talking about the different ways you could role play as a detective. He was like, \u2018we really need a magnifying glass.\u2019\u201dLike \u201cOuter Worlds\u201d as a whole, the decisions you make have an impact on the story, characters and world around you. Though you may see small implications to your choices along the way, the biggest and most compelling consequences are found once you accuse someone of murder. Your success in discovering the culprit is based on a variety of factors, including how much side content you complete and how deeply you explore environments.\u201cYou can accuse the wrong suspect or you can frame an innocent person,\u201d Starks said. \u201cYou can learn part of the truth. Or if you dig around enough, you can learn the exact details of what happened.\u201dStarks cites 1974\u2032s \u201cMurder on the Orient Express,\u201d along with other classic detective stories, as inspiration for the DLC. \u201cMurder on Eridanos\u201d feels like a playable murder mystery film, similar to the mission within \u201cHitman 3\u201d where Agent 47 can solve a murder at a British manor. This newest DLC is dialogue heavy, and striking a balance between interrogating suspects and meaningful gameplay was challenging but important for Obsidian to get right.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe had to make sure there were lots of opportunities for combat as you\u2019re going from point A to B in your quest,\u201d Starks said. \u201cAnd then also accounting for players doing anything in a different order, we wanted to make sure that the DLC is highly reactive to that.\u201dThe making of the \u2018Hitman 3\u2019 murder mystery mansionThough much of \u201cMurder on Eridanos\u201d works well, there are certain moments that are stronger than others. Nearing the end, some of the conclusions can feel anti-climactic, but it really depends on what ending you receive. Another issue is the overwhelming amount of loot. The recommended level for playing \u201cMurder on Eridanos\u201d is 30, and a lot of players will likely have completed the game already, meaning they\u2019ll already own lots of gear, loot and weapons. On many occasions, I just didn\u2019t feel compelled to pick up loot.\u201cWe had a lot of discussions even before the base game shipped, that especially among consumables, we had too much loot to track,\u201d Cain said. \u201cWe tried to handle that through making most of it something we\u2019re hoping people will consume, like mods, foods and drugs. But we always seem to run into that inflation with every RPG we make.\u201dRead more:PSA: \u2018AC: Valhalla\u2019 still has a game-breaking bug four months later, even after the new updateRiot Games board finds no wrongdoing by CEO Nicolo Laurent, denies misconduct allegations in new court filingAs \u2018Valheim\u2019 grows, its developer reflects on bugs, updates and the prospect of acquisition Solving a murder on an alien planet has never been so fun. \u2018Murder on Eridanos\u2019 DLC is \u2018Outer Worlds\u2019 at its comedic best",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Want to buy a gift for a gamer? Start by reading this. (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7608",
        "date": "2020-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/video-game-gifts/",
        "text": "Odds are that any video game fan would appreciate the new PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X, if you can find one. The next-gen systems make an obvious-but-expensive gift for anyone who loves video games, but aside from tracking down the latest, greatest and priciest consoles, finding a good gift for a gamer can be tricky if you\u2019re not familiar with gaming. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightYeah, sure, you could hedge and buy a gift card to let the recipient pick out whatever they want, but purchasing a specific gift for the game enthusiast in your life better shows you understand and care for their passion. And that can be a gift as valuable as the present itself.So, Step 1: Engage with your gamer. Find out what platform they use (is it a PC or a console like a PlayStation? Or do they mainly play on their smartphones?) and what types of games they like to play. Once you know those key factors, you can start figuring out how your gift can make their experience better based on how they like to interact with games.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIdentifying age-appropriate options is easy, but understanding how the player approaches their passion is a little more nuanced. The gifts they may enjoy most likely hinge on how they like to spend their time gaming. Below are some broad types and some specific characteristics to define different types of gamers, as well as some gift ideas that may fit well for those in that category. And if you do opt for the PS5/Series X/S route, the video below can help you decide which is the best fit.Launcher's Gene Park and Elise Favis share their experiences with the next-gen consoles, and explain the pros and cons of both. (The Washington Post)Are they competitive?If they approach gaming like they would a sport, you may want to look into adopting a similar take on gifting. Look into ways you can help them improve their skills and win through better equipment.Story continues below advertisementSuggestionsA customizable controllerThere\u2019s nothing bad about the standard controllers that ship with consoles \u2014 heck, the PS5\u2032s DualSense is revolutionary \u2014 but truly competitive players may like a chance to shape their handset to best suit their play, whether in the form of a modified, re-mappable controller or an amped-up keyboard and mouse.AdvertisementThe first aspect to consider is the number of inputs. Modern games can be complex with more commands than there are buttons on standard controllers. A gaming mouse with buttons on side (in addition to the standard scroll wheel and left/right top buttons) puts more commands at your finger tips. Likewise, adding some back buttons to a console controller not only adds more moves to a player\u2019s menu, it can put actions in an easier-to-reach position. Many of these options are also made with materials that tend to be more durable than stock hardware.Be sure to check out the individual features for each controller, as they are not universal and your gamer may have a preference in how the buttons are laid out.Xbox Elite Controller Series 2: Adjustable thumb-stick tension, hair-trigger locks and a snug-and-comfy rubber grip offer a serious upgrade on the standard Xbox controller you can use on the Xbox One, Series X/S or on PCs using Windows 7 or later. ($179.99 through Microsoft Store)Xbox Series X and S review and comparison: The next gen feels awfully familiarScuf Impact/Prestige: Super customizable, the Impact lets you tinker with pretty much every major feature to get the most out of a controller compatible with PS4 and PC. They\u2019ll also work with PS4 games played on a PS5, but not PS5-specific games. (Starting at $149.99 through Scuf) Playing on an Xbox? The Prestige provides the same benefits for Series X/S as well. (Starting at $159.99 through Scuf)Dualshock 4 Back Button Attachment: Even adding two extra buttons can go a long way and clip-on accessory delivers that help at a super-affordable price for PS4 users. Alas, it does not work with the new PS5 controllers as well. ($29.99 through PlayStation)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHori Real Arcade Pro.V Kai: Some fighting game competitors prefer the feel of an arcade-like setup that uses a joystick and buttons instead of a controller (where buttons tend to be smaller and closer together), this one, recommended by Wired, provides all you need to get that arcade cabinet feel at home. Note, there are specific models for Xbox and PlayStation, be sure to get the right one. ($169.99 through Amazon)Razer Deathadder V2 mouse: There are plenty of options for any budget when it comes to good gaming mice, but PC Gamer tops its list with a model that feels good, adds buttons and doesn\u2019t break the bank. You may also want to check out their full list in case another option better aligns with your gamer\u2019s preferences. ($69.99 through Lenovo)Satisfye ZenGrip for Nintendo Switch and Switch Lite: The Switch consoles can be a pain to hold for long periods of time. The Satisfye grips may seem odd because of the asymmetrical design, but that\u2019s to replicate the movement of extended thumbs on a real controller. There are two versions available for the regular Switch and Switch Lite. You won\u2019t want to go handheld with the Switch without these again. ($28.99 for Switch, $26.99 for Switch Lite through Amazon)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA better headsetWhen it comes to cooperative, team-based games, communication is essential. And as games become more immersive, sounds and audio cues have never been more important to fully comprehending an in-game situation. If your teammates can\u2019t hear you, that\u2019s a problem. If you can\u2019t hear an enemy\u2019s footsteps approaching your position, that\u2019s a problem too.Like anything, headset prices span the spectrum and some budget options (like those found in the series below) yield a great result, even if they don\u2019t have a premium feel or lack some high-end features. If you want to make the most of the next-gen consoles though, be sure to snag a set with 3-D audio abilities.Story continues below advertisementJBL Quantum series: There are plenty of impressive headsets out there, but the Quantum line delivers a lot of features at a lot of different price points, making for a simple recommendation.AdvertisementAll of the Quantum models from the 300 series ($39.95) and higher offer surround sound and PC software for personalization. While they work with all platforms via a 3.5mm cord, they deliver the best experience when playing on a PC. The higher-end models include active noise cancellation and the top-of-the-line Quantum One ($249.99) even has a head-tracking feature, so if there\u2019s a sound originating in front of you and you turn your head to the right, you\u2019ll hear if in your left ear and quieter or not at all in your right. A directional mic with echo-cancelling features keeps you loud and clear, even if you\u2019re playing in a noisy environment. The best aspect of these sets though is the snug and supple feel when you put one on your head. (Starting at $39.95 through JBL)Are they into immersive games that demand a time investment?If your gamer prefers a lean-back approach with lengthy, story-driven games that emphasize immersive entertainment, you could consider some accessories to improve their overall experience with their games, or even introduce them to new ones.SuggestionsSony Pulse 3-D Wireless Headset: Games can be cinematic experiences, so why not put the audio on par with the stunning visuals? For those that want to experience the PlayStation 5\u2019s 3-D audio at its best, we recommend Sony\u2019s Pulse 3-D wireless headset.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe headset offers clean, bass-y audio, and a similar experience to surround sound \u2014 making audio feel as though it\u2019s happening all around you. You may hear an arrow zoom past your ear or an enemy approaching from behind, which further embellishes the realism of the digital worlds you inhabit. It also has excellent dual, noise-cancelling microphones to pick up your voice clearly during party chat. (Starting at $99.99 through PlayStation)PS5 review: A beast in size and performanceA Soundbar: If you want to fill the room with the sounds of the world surrounding your character, enhancing a sound system is a great way to take advantage of the native 3-D sound and Dolby Vision technology in the Xbox Series X/S, or the PS5\u2032s 3-D Tempest AudioTech. The difference between 3-D sound and surround sound is that the former can produce a mass of audio sources that envelop the listener from a number of directions, not just wherever the speakers are located.The options here aren\u2019t particularly cheap, particularly if you\u2019re trying to please an audiophile/snob, but a pair of more moderately priced soundbar/subwoofer packages (one from Sony priced at $398.99 through Crutchfield and one from Samsung at $397.99) can still unlock the audio potential of the new consoles. If you\u2019re looking for other options, just remember to look for models that utilize Dolby Atmos.\u201cThe Last of Us Part II\u201d: Full of rich storytelling, meaningful combat and a world ripe with both wonder and danger, \u201cThe Last of Us Part II\u201d does not disappoint \u2014 especially if you enjoyed the first installment. In this new chapter, you play as Ellie, who is older and angrier than the wide-eyed young girl she used to be. Witnessing her evolution is fascinating and heartbreaking, but it\u2019s also a game that surprises in how it handles its wide cast of characters. Be sure the person your buying for can stomach violent content, however. There is no shortage of it. (On sale at $29.99 via Target)'The Last of Us Part II' review: One of the best video games ever made\u201cSpiritfarer\u201d: In \u201cSpiritfarer,\u201d death is not the end \u2014 it\u2019s the beginning. This management sim casts you as Stella, a young girl who becomes a ferrymaster for the dead, guiding them to the afterlife. You visit islands to convince spirits to hop aboard, and bring them comfort in their final moments by building them homes on the boat, feeding them their favorite meals, completing their final demands and sometime simply giving them a hug. This heartwarming tale is elevated by gorgeous visuals, as well as excellent platforming and a consistent feeling of discovery during exploration. ($29.99 through Steam, free with a Game Pass subscription through Xbox)\u2018Spiritfarer,\u2019 a game about the afterlife, seeks to ease the terror of death\u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed Valhalla\u201d: Vikings. Need we say more? The newest chapter to the open-world \u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed\u201d franchise puts you in the shoes of Eivor, a Viking leader who forms alliances across England to help their clan settle in the new land. Ubisoft marries old and new concepts, bridging the gap between stealth, combat, role-playing mechanics and lore in the most meaningful way for the series in years. (Starting at $59.99 for the standard edition through Ubisoft)\u2018Assassin\u2019s Creed Valhalla\u2019 impressions: Rekindling the spirit of the seriesThe Scuf Exo: You\u2019re probably going to think of this as a gaming pillow, and you\u2019re not wrong. And don\u2019t buy this unless your intended recipient is the practical sort that doesn\u2019t care what they look like while playing, because you\u2019ll win no coolness points with this thing. What you do get is support for your wrists, allowing you to lay your hands and the controller on the pillow, which sits on your lap and supports your elbows as well. It eases tension in your shoulders, too, but the biggest aid is in allowing longer use of the PS5 controller, which is as weighty as it is awesome and can cause some strain during long gaming sessions. ($39.99 through Scuf)Are they casual or extroverted players?For a lot of people during the pandemic, and for school kids even before that, gaming has become a go-to way to socialize. Here\u2019s how you can help them get a little more from their casual game sessions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuggestions\u201cAmong Us\u201d (on PC): \u201cAmong Us\u201d is a fun and sometimes broken social deduction game about rooting out killers on a spaceship. Its popularity partially stems from the boost it got from content creators playing the game together \u2014 not to mention the nearly record-breaking stream of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) \u2014 but another likely factor is that the game is free on mobile devices. That\u2019s a fine way to play, but the optimal experience is on PC, where the game costs $5. It\u2019s a minor upgrade, mostly sparing players of accidentally pressing the wrong button or steering their avatar in the wrong direction on a smaller screen, but it\u2019s well worth the cost of admission. ($5 through itch.io)Jackbox Party Pack: The Jackbox Party Packs are the easiest way to get a group of people with little to no game experience together for a session \u2014 bar none. The only requirement is for one person in the group to own a party pack, and for everyone else to own a phone or computer. Each party pack includes a sampling of minigames, though our recommendation would be to choose a pack with \u201cQuiplash,\u201d which is likely the most intuitive and fun of the bunch. The latest entry is Party Pack 7, though 3 is generally viewed as the gold standard of the bunch (and 4 is great too). (Starting at $12.49 through Jackbox Games)The best games to play with friends and family on ZoomDiscord Nitro subscription: It\u2019s likely that the social player in your life is already spending tons of time on Discord, the voice and chat service primarily geared toward gamers. It\u2019s a great place to organize game sessions, host chats and private streams, and just goof off with friends. It\u2019s a versatile free service by default, but a Discord Nitro subscription ($9.99 per month) \u2014 or even the cheaper Discord Nitro Classic package ($4.99 per month) \u2014 will open up some new features for power-users, including a higher upload cap and the ability to use custom emotes across servers. (Starting at $4.99 per month through Discord)Are they experiential?Some people enjoy gaming for its ability to approximate an experience they can\u2019t replicate in everyday life. In the current pandemic, that can include things like getting outside, finding safe ways to socialize or seeing parts of the world you can\u2019t currently access.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuggestionsOculus Quest 2: Between an affordable price and the simplicity of just pairing your headset with a modern smartphone, the barrier to entry for virtual reality has never been lower. And while super-deep games aren\u2019t yet the norm for VR (though that\u2019s changing) there are a plethora of apps already on the market that allow users to sink into immersive 3-D experiences. If you want to dive into higher-powered games that require a PC connection, you can also snag the Link cable for an additional $79.99. ($299.99 through Oculus)Oculus Quest 2 review: Lighter, faster, better ... cheaper? Yup, cheaper.\u201cMicrosoft Flight Simulator\u201d: The latest entry in Microsoft\u2019s long-running flight simulator series flew under the radar for the wider industry when it was released, but that\u2019s because the game can be tough to run, even on the most beastly PC setups today. But if you know someone who has a hankering for travel and has a decent PC rig, \u201cMicrosoft Flight Simulator\u201d is a groundbreaking new project that recreates the entire Earth and all of its airports for travel. It\u2019s a one-of-a-kind title, and the most impressive tech showcase of the year. ($59.99 through Xbox)Are they streaming?The pandemic has further boosted a growing trend of gamers streaming themselves and their gameplay on outlets like Twitch, YouTube and Facebook. If they\u2019re trying to put themselves out there and grow their audience, you can help them put their best foot forward.SuggestionsMaono AU-04 USB Microphone Kit: As streamers acquire more and more technical capabilities with their streams, a higher expectation on quality is expected, one that the easy-to-use Maono USB Microphone Kit meets with style. The mic plugs in directly using USB, comes with an adjustable stand and offers industry-level audio capabilities like cardioid recording and high sampling rates. A great entry-level mic if you\u2019re serious about streaming. (Starting at $49.71 per month through Amazon)Aduro U-Stream Ring Light: The aforementioned heightened expectations of game streams also extend to the picture-in-picture quality of the streamer cams themselves. While several laptops and computers come with cameras capable of streaming at high quality, lighting on your face is the key ingredient to making your face pop. The Aduro U-Stream Ring Light, which comes with an adjustable stand and brightness controller, is one of the less expensive models out there but gets the job done. (Starting at $39.99 per month through Amazon)Streamlabs: The final step to your streaming success is software that can tie everything together, and Streamlabs more than answers the call. It not only provides standard streaming capabilities like picture-in-picture and direct linking with sites like Twitch, but it also provides search engine optimization services to help your channel acquire more views. The best part? It\u2019s free! (Starting at no cost through Streamlabs)Are they nostalgic?If they like to indulge on classic consoles or play vintage games, there may be a number of ways to recapture that \u201cthe time I got an NES for Christmas\u201d feeling with throwback games and platforms.SuggestionsTurbo Grafx Mini: The mini-retro-console trend is overshadowed by the big box releases this holiday, but don\u2019t sleep on Konami\u2019s packaging of 16-bit-era classics. Anyone who grew up on gaming in the late last century would at least remember hearing about these games, even if you didn\u2019t play them. With 57 titles, some of them impossible to find on the free market, it\u2019s an incredible value for the retro gamer. You may need some luck to find one, however, as it is largely out of stock. (Normally $99.99 through Amazon)Turbo Grafx Mini review: A welcome visit back to Xennial consoles\u201cStreets of Rage 4\u201d: Remakes and rehashes were huge in 2020, but none of them captured early 1990s arcade nostalgia quite like indie developers Dotemu and LizardCube did with their update to the Sega Genesis series. The core gameplay of \u201cwalk right, punch bad guys\u201d is mercifully left alone, peppered with a few tweaks to tighten up the experience. \u201cStreets of Rage 4\u201d offers one of the purest brawling experiences today, a pixel-perfect present for purists. ($34.99 through Best Buy)'Streets of Rage 4' review: Old-school, beat-em-up action\u201cSuper Mario 3-D All-Stars\u201d: Nintendo has finally collected three of the most memorable 3-D Mario games into a single package for the Switch: \u201cSuper Mario 64,\u201d \u201cSuper Mario Sunshine\u201d and \u201cSuper Mario Galaxy.\u201d Beyond an HD update, Nintendo did little to update these games, so with all of their original blemishes intact, they\u2019re exactly how you remember them. ($59.99 through Amazon)\u201cSonic Mania\u201d: This celebration of the Genesis-era Sonic games combines remixed versions of the original zones with brand new areas like Mirage Saloon and Titanic Monarch Zone. Clever tweaks have been made to the gameplay and level design, done with an incredible attention to detail. With the sleeker, modern sheen that Sega gave to \u201cMania,\u201d it\u2019s not a stretch to say that this is the best Sonic game ever made. ($19.99 through Best Buy)Mega Man Legacy collections: It has been more than 30 years since the original \u201cMega Man\u201d was released on the NES, but these platformers still hold up as a master class in gameplay and level design. Capcom has published several of these comprehensive collections, spanning decades of \u201cMega Man,\u201d \u201cMega Man X\u201d and \u201cMega Man Zero\u201d games. In addition to extra game modes, the cherry on top of these archival compilations are the \u201cmuseums,\u201d which are packed with sketches, art and other visual materials from the original games. (Prices vary but normally $14.99 through Nintendo)Read more:\u2018Demon\u2019s Souls\u2019 review: The ideal PlayStation 5 launch game\u2018The Pathless\u2019: Less than the sum of its partsThe enduring and ongoing legacy of Bjergsen It can be dicey buying a gift for a gamer if you're not familiar with gaming. Here are some things to keep in mind. Want to buy a gift for a gamer? Start by reading this.",
        "author": "Washington Post Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | The 10 best VR games of 2019 (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7609",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/best-vr-games/",
        "text": "For a medium that was supposed to be forged in artfulness and creativity, virtual reality\u2019s last few years have been good enough but not astounding. It\u2019s this past year, however, that the medium\u2019s promise is finally being met.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe numbers bear this out. Nielsen SuperData noted that sales of VR hardware will be up 31 percent in 2019, from 1.6 billion last year to 2.1 billion this year. The newest Oculus hardware is a generally a joy; Oculus Quest is even about to eschew using the controller on some games. Sony\u2019s PS VR continues to win big when it sticks to its studios\u2019 love and appreciation for narrative. Beyond the big players, if extraordinary experiences like War Remains, The Collider and Unceded Territories were more game oriented, they definitely would have made this list. Asgard\u2019s WrathPublisher: Sanzaru Games, Oculus Studios | Platform: PC VRThe first feeling when playing this game? It\u2019s the childlike amazement that comes with the promise of VR fulfilled. Look up at the milky, starry skies and see a mystical aurora as you walk through a wintry forest. That\u2019s just the cherry on top of a game that feels like the very idea of magic realized. Even the sound design is perfection \u2014 from the crunch of boots on the snow to the band playing in a roadhouse. Combine that with the brutality of battle and gameplay as taut as that in God of War. Fun addition: Loki looks and acts a bit like an older Adam Lambert when he\u2019s onstage with Queen. Big and sometimes over the top, Asgard\u2019s Wrath is an essential RPG opera of godliness.L.A. Noire: The VR Case FilesRockstar Games | PC VR, PS VRL.A. Noire, with its fedoras, tough talk and Dashiell Hammett-inspired interrogations of potential criminals, is arguably one of the best games of the decade. For the VR version, the open world is transformed to include seven in-your-face cases, so you\u2019ll really feel the essence of its 1940s Tinseltown. If your powers of observation were key to questioning witnesses and crooks in the original, it\u2019s even more useful observing the give and take between the cops and the creeps in the VR version. Yes, there are occasional stutters in frames rate, but the overall experience makes you realize why the acclaimed author Hammett wrote that murder \u201cmakes you sick, or you get to like it.\u201dNo Man\u2019s Sky BeyondHello Games | PC VR, PS VRBecause of the ever-changing nature of the far-flung planets and their unique denizens in No Man\u2019s Sky Beyond, I can\u2019t think of a game more suited to the wonders of VR. I even enjoyed the physical nature of mining, which I usually hate to do in any sort of game. When I\u2019ve had enough of exploring and making note of the odd monsters and creatures, my ship is its own delight: Zipping through space to another mystery planet is a thrill ride.Are games art? We asked the developers behind No Man\u2019s Sky, Concrete Genie and Dreams.StormlandInsomniac Games | PC VRWhen I played Stormland at E3, it totally crashed. Once it rebooted, there was a power outage in the convention center. I left frustrated because I knew it had potential. Once Stormland was polished and released, the brilliance of its luxuriant world and sci-fi narrative was evident. As you move so, so smoothly through islands high in the sky, you can switch between shooting and stealth play and discover new weapons to make Vesper, the android you play, superior to those who dare to engage you in battle. It\u2019s a step forward for Oculus VR games, and I didn\u2019t get dizzy as I tread its paths. An added bonus: Insomniac often adds new challenges to this alien universe.Blood and Truth London Studio | PS VRDeveloped by the acclaimed studio that created The Getaway: Black Monday and The London Heist for the launch of this headset, Blood and Truth goes farther in its efforts of immersion. Where Heist relied on cheeky British humor to get by, Blood and Truth has humor along with the kind of high tech action that includes burning planes and missiles whizzing around your head. In other words, you\u2019re in the middle of war and panic. The detailed visuals, including jumping off a plank high above terra firma surrounded a night city panorama, make this shooter full of high drama and vertigo-filled beauty.Five Nights At Freddy\u2019s VR: Help WantedSteel Wool Studios | PC VR, PS VRYou will scream despite yourself. When you cut to the chase, Five Nights has always been about jump scares. The hair-raising panic of creepy animatronic animals sneaking up on you works even better in this collection of VR mini games, especially during one snippet when you\u2019re in a room with security monitors. You see the horror moving toward you and you have to keep it out. The fever of terror washes over you in two ways. There\u2019s the possibility of impending doom, and there\u2019s the fear of being stuck in that small room. It\u2019s utterly claustrophobic. And that\u2019s just one of 50 small nuggets of eeriness.Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR SeriesILMxLAB | PC VRIs it an Oculus experience or is it an Oculus game? It doesn\u2019t matter because it\u2019s so damn exciting. Meeting an intimidating Darth Vader and battling eight-foot droids with your lightsaber takes you into the world of Star Wars\u2019s dark side like no prior offering has. And ZOE3, your droid, is played by Maya Rudolph, brilliantly voicing scenes written by David S. Goyer (of Dark Knight and Blade fame). Yes, the second and third episodes are half the length of the first. But especially because the Skywalker trilogy is ending, play it, you must.Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a good game. So why am I so unhappy playing it?Stardust OdysseyAgharta Studio | PS VRWhen a studio begins the game development process by researching the Silk Road and Berber history, and looking into M\u0153bius and Jean-Claude Mezi\u00e8res for sci-fi inspiration, that\u2019s a good sign. Especially awesome here is undersea travel in your spaceship. The mix of strategy as you level up your ship, stealth to avoid battle and crazy shooting of the evildoers is well-balanced. While the narrative is generally uninspired compared to the artwork, this one\u2019s on the list because of the exotic mash-up of ingenious, gilded environments and futuristic riffs on times past.Trover Saves The UniverseSquanch Games | PS VRIt\u2019s not the graphics that make Trover Saves The Universe a winner, although they are properly cartoony. Nor is it the virtual reality, though it does allow you to get inside Trover\u2019s wacky world. What accentuates the characterizations and enhances the whole experience is the mature humor that will make you laugh \u2014 loudly \u2014 despite yourself. Trover, a purple being with face-eyes that pop out, is lovable and funny. It\u2019s important, too, that Justin Roiland, Rick and Morty\u2019s co-creator, worked on this endeavor. Games in general don\u2019t have enough humor, and humor is probably the hardest genre to pull off. It doesn\u2019t seem difficult for Roiland, who knows games well. That\u2019s the golden key to Trover\u2019s guffaw-filled excellence.Ghost GiantZoink AB | PS VRSomewhat like Moss in 2018, Ghost Giant features a touching, cute and charismatic character you view from above \u2014 this time a forlorn feline named Louis, not a brave mouse. But if you look at this as a funny animal story, you\u2019re not looking closely. There are broken lives in the story, and you\u2019re there to witness the struggle and try to soothe Louis as a helpful Ghost Giant with mystical, blue, see-through hands. As you solve puzzles and explore the joyful moments of non-playable beasts in a fairy tale village, you\u2019re emotionally moved again and again during the four hours it takes to play this gem.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHarold Goldberg has written for the New York Times, Playboy, Vanity Fair and elsewhere. He\u2019s the founder of the New York Video Game Critics Circle and New York Game Awards. Follow him on Twitter @haroldgoldberg.Read more:Twitch Streamer DrLupo aims to raise a record $2 million for St. Jude with livestream fundraiserThe 10 best video games of 2019This 12-year-old made a video game to cope with his father\u2019s suicide. He was recognized for it at The Game Awards. These titles make the most of the immersive platform. The 10 best VR games of 2019",
        "author": "Harold Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The 10 best video games of 2019 (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7610",
        "date": "2019-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/best-video-games/",
        "text": "As the gaming industry revs up for the next console cycle \u2014 set to begin late next year when Sony and Microsoft kickoff the ninth console generation \u2014 economic tallies show the industry to be in good shape. According to an industry report published by Newzoo, consumers will spend over $152 billion on games this year, an increase of more than 9% over last year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAlthough this year didn\u2019t see the emergence of any industry-shaking trends, there were plenty of games released in 2019 to cater to a wide variety of tastes, from all-ages titles such as \u201cLuigi\u2019s Mansion 3\u201d to games such as \u201cSekiro: Shadows: Die Twice,\u201d targeted at challenge-hungry players. In assembling this year\u2019s top 10 list, I leaned toward the titles that surprised me with their forward-thinking aesthetics, challenges to convention or sheer ability to dazzle.Death Stranding (PlayStation 4)The word \u201cdivisive\u201d probably popped into the head of every reviewer who played \u201cDeath Stranding\u201d before it launched. It was (and is) easy to wonder who will get behind a AAA game about a delivery man who plies his trade across an arduous landscape overrun with ghostly entities. If the idea of making deliveries back and forth sounds a bit grindy, well, it is. But \u201cDeath Stranding\u201d rewards commitment. Here is a game with an aggressively imaginative story line, memorable characters (O\u2019 Mama!), an innovative take on co-op and a raft of interesting gameplay systems. Don\u2019t be surprised if, in the years to come, the merits of this game are debated vigorously.Telling Lies (iOS, PC)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPushing the boundaries of what video games can be, Sam Barlow\u2019s latest live-action game turns players into voyeurs and asks them to comb through a trove of video messages related to an undercover law enforcement operation that went sideways. This unusually intimate game offers a snapshot of our era, where the boundaries between work and home life have grown increasingly tenuous and privacy is an illusion. (If you play this and read Edward Snowden\u2019s biography, \u201cPermanent Record,\u201d you will be chilled.) Excellent performances by Alexandra Shipp, Logan Marshall-Green and Kerry Bish\u00e9 are why awards for best acting in a video game deserve increasing visibility.Neo Cab (Mac, PC, Nintendo Switch)This socially-conscious visual novel imagines what the future of the gig-economy might look like in a world where tech firms hold more sway over how we live and work. \u201cNeo Cab\u201d tells the story of Lina, a woman struggling to make ends meet as one of the last human cabdrivers in a city dominated by driverless cars. Though Lina has deep misgivings about the tech industry, she wears a Feelgrid bracelet which monitors the fluctuations in her body and displays her emotional state to the world via different colors. Because certain conversational options are linked to Lina\u2019s emotional state \u201cNeo Cab\u201d encourages artful manipulation. For anyone revolted by the exploitative nature of hustle culture, this one\u2019s for you.Disco Elysium (PC)You\u2019re a wreck, but what kind of wreck are you? That\u2019s one of the things you\u2019ll have to decide if you step into the shoes of the bloated, disheveled, amnesiac cop at the center of this peculiar RPG. In \u201cDisco Elysium\u201d the demands of your body for comfort and stimulation are pronounced \u2014 literally. As you progress through the game, you\u2019ll have an ongoing conversation with various aspects of your body, including various centers of cognition (e.g. logic, perception, empathy). As you plumb your character\u2019s psychology and physiology, you\u2019ll investigate a knotty murder mystery that thrusts you into a world of clashing political ideologies. \u201cDisco Elysium\u201d proves that you don\u2019t need spells, swords or bullets to anchor a compelling 40+ hour RPG.Observation (PC, PlayStation 4)There are a number of video games that revolve around space station disaster plotlines but \u201cObservation\u201d brings something different to the table. Rather than casting players in the familiar role of a distressed astronaut, this sci-fi game with an analog look asks players to assume the responsibilities of a ship\u2019s A.I. computer to help said astronaut. This setup undercuts the usual identification with an avatar, which is such an important component of so much video game design. Instead, it emphasizes difference \u2014 how dissimilar a player is to a machine. Moving through and outside the spaceship in the Connection Sphere, a small floating extension of the ship\u2019s A.I., may remind movie buffs of those mesmerizing shots in films like \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d and \u201cGravity. \u201dSunless Skies (Mac, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)If you relish the cadence of a well-turned sentence and delight in the trappings of steampunk genre, then this text-heavy RPG about the ill-fated travels of space-faring adventures should be just the ticket. \u201cSunless Skies\u201d projects a world where the British used locomotives to travel the stars and establish trading outposts. The game offers a wealth of fantastical tales that will take players to an artist colony built on a gigantic orchard and beyond. Expect the worst. You will be tricked. You will be cheated. You will be treated to abominable sights. You will die many times. No matter, \u201cSunless Skies\u201d is hard to let go.A Plague Tale: Innocence (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)Set during the time of the Black Death in a southern French province, \u201cA Plague Tale: Innocence\u201d tells the story of a sister and brother on the run from a renegade faction of the Church. The young stars of the game are sympathetic figures. They don\u2019t hopscotch from one perilous situation to another. Rather, they take the time to process their circumstances. Featuring some of the best use of HDR lighting of any recent game, \u201cA Plague Tale\u201d is visually sumptuous and boasts one of the more memorable final boss fights in recent memory.Outer Wilds (Mac, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)All too often sci-fi games hew to overly familiar templates, making feelings of genuine wonder hard to come by. The space exploration game \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d eludes this fate by cultivating an aura of mystery. Embark on a mission to discover the fate of a vanished civilization whose remaining traces seem genuinely strange. \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d is very much a game of the Internet era. Some of its puzzles might seem too opaque if there weren\u2019t guides a click away.Gears 5 (Xbox One, PC)When Microsoft purchased the rights to the \u201cGears of War\u201d franchise from Epic Games in 2016 many wondered if the series, which popularized cover-based shooters, would stagnate. \u201cGears 5\u201d should lay to rest those concerns for the time being. A well-paced paced campaign, which varies the tempo from firefight to firefight, coupled with some best-in-class visuals on the Xbox One X, make this a perfect treat for itchy trigger fingers.Sayonara Wild Hearts (iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSail into the night on a skateboard, motorcycle or car in this hybrid racing and rhythm game. \u201cSayonara Wild Hearts\u201d tells the story of a brokenhearted girl who becomes drafted to set things right in another universe. Backed by an amazing soundtrack, this dreamy, stylish, bite-sized game is meant to be played over and over.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Read more:The Game Awards: How Geoff Keighley helped create The Oscars for gamingAn Overwatch star at 16, elite gamer will weigh college offers against turning proA Twitch streamer spent nearly the entire month of November live on camera In a year without industry-shaking trends, this year's list leans toward the titles with forward-thinking aesthetics, challenges to convention or a sheer ability to dazzle. The 10 best video games of 2019",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The 10 best video games of 2019 (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7611",
        "date": "2019-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/best-video-games/",
        "text": "As the gaming industry revs up for the next console cycle \u2014 set to begin late next year when Sony and Microsoft kickoff the ninth console generation \u2014 economic tallies show the industry to be in good shape. According to an industry report published by Newzoo, consumers will spend over $152 billion on games this year, an increase of more than 9% over last year. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAlthough this year didn\u2019t see the emergence of any industry-shaking trends, there were plenty of games released in 2019 to cater to a wide variety of tastes, from all-ages titles such as \u201cLuigi\u2019s Mansion 3\u201d to games such as \u201cSekiro: Shadows: Die Twice,\u201d targeted at challenge-hungry players. In assembling this year\u2019s top 10 list, I leaned toward the titles that surprised me with their forward-thinking aesthetics, challenges to convention or sheer ability to dazzle.Death Stranding (PlayStation 4)The word \u201cdivisive\u201d probably popped into the head of every reviewer who played \u201cDeath Stranding\u201d before it launched. It was (and is) easy to wonder who will get behind a AAA game about a delivery man who plies his trade across an arduous landscape overrun with ghostly entities. If the idea of making deliveries back and forth sounds a bit grindy, well, it is. But \u201cDeath Stranding\u201d rewards commitment. Here is a game with an aggressively imaginative story line, memorable characters (O\u2019 Mama!), an innovative take on co-op and a raft of interesting gameplay systems. Don\u2019t be surprised if, in the years to come, the merits of this game are debated vigorously.Telling Lies (iOS, PC)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPushing the boundaries of what video games can be, Sam Barlow\u2019s latest live-action game turns players into voyeurs and asks them to comb through a trove of video messages related to an undercover law enforcement operation that went sideways. This unusually intimate game offers a snapshot of our era, where the boundaries between work and home life have grown increasingly tenuous and privacy is an illusion. (If you play this and read Edward Snowden\u2019s biography, \u201cPermanent Record,\u201d you will be chilled.) Excellent performances by Alexandra Shipp, Logan Marshall-Green and Kerry Bish\u00e9 are why awards for best acting in a video game deserve increasing visibility.Neo Cab (Mac, PC, Nintendo Switch)This socially-conscious visual novel imagines what the future of the gig-economy might look like in a world where tech firms hold more sway over how we live and work. \u201cNeo Cab\u201d tells the story of Lina, a woman struggling to make ends meet as one of the last human cabdrivers in a city dominated by driverless cars. Though Lina has deep misgivings about the tech industry, she wears a Feelgrid bracelet which monitors the fluctuations in her body and displays her emotional state to the world via different colors. Because certain conversational options are linked to Lina\u2019s emotional state \u201cNeo Cab\u201d encourages artful manipulation. For anyone revolted by the exploitative nature of hustle culture, this one\u2019s for you.Disco Elysium (PC)You\u2019re a wreck, but what kind of wreck are you? That\u2019s one of the things you\u2019ll have to decide if you step into the shoes of the bloated, disheveled, amnesiac cop at the center of this peculiar RPG. In \u201cDisco Elysium\u201d the demands of your body for comfort and stimulation are pronounced \u2014 literally. As you progress through the game, you\u2019ll have an ongoing conversation with various aspects of your body, including various centers of cognition (e.g. logic, perception, empathy). As you plumb your character\u2019s psychology and physiology, you\u2019ll investigate a knotty murder mystery that thrusts you into a world of clashing political ideologies. \u201cDisco Elysium\u201d proves that you don\u2019t need spells, swords or bullets to anchor a compelling 40+ hour RPG.Observation (PC, PlayStation 4)There are a number of video games that revolve around space station disaster plotlines but \u201cObservation\u201d brings something different to the table. Rather than casting players in the familiar role of a distressed astronaut, this sci-fi game with an analog look asks players to assume the responsibilities of a ship\u2019s A.I. computer to help said astronaut. This setup undercuts the usual identification with an avatar, which is such an important component of so much video game design. Instead, it emphasizes difference \u2014 how dissimilar a player is to a machine. Moving through and outside the spaceship in the Connection Sphere, a small floating extension of the ship\u2019s A.I., may remind movie buffs of those mesmerizing shots in films like \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d and \u201cGravity. \u201dSunless Skies (Mac, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)If you relish the cadence of a well-turned sentence and delight in the trappings of steampunk genre, then this text-heavy RPG about the ill-fated travels of space-faring adventures should be just the ticket. \u201cSunless Skies\u201d projects a world where the British used locomotives to travel the stars and establish trading outposts. The game offers a wealth of fantastical tales that will take players to an artist colony built on a gigantic orchard and beyond. Expect the worst. You will be tricked. You will be cheated. You will be treated to abominable sights. You will die many times. No matter, \u201cSunless Skies\u201d is hard to let go.A Plague Tale: Innocence (PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)Set during the time of the Black Death in a southern French province, \u201cA Plague Tale: Innocence\u201d tells the story of a sister and brother on the run from a renegade faction of the Church. The young stars of the game are sympathetic figures. They don\u2019t hopscotch from one perilous situation to another. Rather, they take the time to process their circumstances. Featuring some of the best use of HDR lighting of any recent game, \u201cA Plague Tale\u201d is visually sumptuous and boasts one of the more memorable final boss fights in recent memory.Outer Wilds (Mac, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One)All too often sci-fi games hew to overly familiar templates, making feelings of genuine wonder hard to come by. The space exploration game \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d eludes this fate by cultivating an aura of mystery. Embark on a mission to discover the fate of a vanished civilization whose remaining traces seem genuinely strange. \u201cOuter Wilds\u201d is very much a game of the Internet era. Some of its puzzles might seem too opaque if there weren\u2019t guides a click away.Gears 5 (Xbox One, PC)When Microsoft purchased the rights to the \u201cGears of War\u201d franchise from Epic Games in 2016 many wondered if the series, which popularized cover-based shooters, would stagnate. \u201cGears 5\u201d should lay to rest those concerns for the time being. A well-paced paced campaign, which varies the tempo from firefight to firefight, coupled with some best-in-class visuals on the Xbox One X, make this a perfect treat for itchy trigger fingers.Sayonara Wild Hearts (iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSail into the night on a skateboard, motorcycle or car in this hybrid racing and rhythm game. \u201cSayonara Wild Hearts\u201d tells the story of a brokenhearted girl who becomes drafted to set things right in another universe. Backed by an amazing soundtrack, this dreamy, stylish, bite-sized game is meant to be played over and over.Christopher Byrd is a Brooklyn-based writer. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Byrd.Read more:The Game Awards: How Geoff Keighley helped create The Oscars for gamingAn Overwatch star at 16, elite gamer will weigh college offers against turning proA Twitch streamer spent nearly the entire month of November live on camera In a year without industry-shaking trends, this year's list leans toward the titles with forward-thinking aesthetics, challenges to convention or a sheer ability to dazzle. The 10 best video games of 2019",
        "author": "Christopher Byrd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Pikmin 3 Deluxe\u2019 loses some of its original charm (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7612",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/pikmin-3-deluxe-review/",
        "text": "\u201cPikmin 3 Deluxe\u201d opens on a note of exhaustion. The inhabitants of a planet named Koppai have almost run out of food, the opening monologue tells us, due to \u201ca booming population, a booming appetite and a basic lack of planning.\u201d After sending out a fleet of scout ships to scour the galaxy for planets that haven\u2019t yet depleted their ecosystems, only one shows any promise, the lush and Earthlike PNF-404. With the future of their species at stake, three diminutive astronauts \u2014 Brittany, Alph, and Captain Charlie \u2014 set off in a treehouse-sized spaceship, hoping to filch every last piece of fruit they can find on PNF-404\u2019s surface. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe catch is that the Koppaites are too tiny to actually scavenge anything themselves. Instead, have to rely on Pikmin to do the dirty work for them. Part mandrake and part pack mule, Pikmin are sprout-sized creatures with bulging white eyes and no mouths, who spend their days lolling on leaves of grass or burrowing under the PNF-404\u2019s topsoil to nap. They can travel in swarms of up to 100, and come in five varieties: Red Pikmin are flame resistant fighters; Blue Pikmin can swim underwater; Yellow Pikmin conduct electricity; Pink Pikmin can fly; and Purple Pikmin are made from an onyx-like material that makes them useful for shattering glass barriers. They\u2019re also capable of pooling their collective strength to pick up and carry the building-sized pieces of fruit scattered across PNF-404 with antlike efficiency.\u201cDeluxe\u201d is a straightforward rerelease of the original \u201cPikmin 3,\u201d which arrived on the Wii U in 2013 from makers Eighting Co. Ltd./Nintendo. In addition to the original story mode, the \u201cDeluxe\u201d version includes two new difficulty options for experienced players, a two-player co-op mode, and 14 extra side story missions featuring Olimar and Louie, the respective heroes from \u201cPikmin\u201d and \u201cPikmin 2\u201d who have ended up on PNF-404 at the same time as the Koppaites. These extra missions sound promising, but they are little more than scrambled combat arenas, mostly set in the same maps used in the main story mode. They\u2019re mildly diverting, but rarely as clever or demanding as the Mission stages that came included in the original game seven years ago.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe most consequential change is the new control scheme to account for the Switch\u2019s input limitations compared to the Wii U, something that feels more like a subtraction than addition. The original game was tuned for a control setup that initially seemed ludicrous and jumbled, with the Wii remote and Nunchuk used for movement and aiming, while the Wii U gamepad, placed in one\u2019s lap or propped up on a coffee table, displayed a map that players could use to plan out their days and draw routes for secondary characters (two of the three astronauts that weren\u2019t under direct control).\u2018Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit\u2019 is not a good Mario Kart gameSwitching between the two control layers was cumbersome and confusing, but after a few hours it began to seem like an unexpectedly elegant design. The precision of the pointer aim gave the game a methodical pace that quietly favored parsimony and careful deployment of just as many Pikmin were necessary to get the job done and no more. The secondary map screen on the Wii U gamepad would shift the TV to an overhead view that made it possible to compare the actual game world to the map, which let players scout routes in advance, to minimize the chances of an unexpected enemy encounter while controlling another character.Playing without either of these options in \u201cDeluxe\u201d somehow feels even clunkier and shallower than the original. In place of pointer aiming, the \u201cDeluxe\u201d version defaults to a lock-on system that forces players to repeatedly tap a shoulder button to cycle through targets. In areas with more enemies and objects on screen, cycling through targets creates real confusion and the lock-on often jumps between targets, and I started to feel like I was spending more time overcompensating for the interface\u2019s unreliability than I was playing the game. When I finally finished the game, I was convinced that the ideas behind \u201cDeluxe\u2019s\u201d control scheme aren\u2019t bad, they just weren\u2019t meant for a game with the kind of level layout and pace of the original \u201cPikmin 3.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDespite the ill-suited controls, \u201cPikmin 3\u201d still has many vestiges of its original charm. There\u2019s a sense of teasing wonderment in the way the Koappites rename each unfamiliar piece of fruit. Cherries are Cupid\u2019s Grenades; cantaloupes are Wayward Moons; red grapes become Dusk Pustules; peaches are dubbed Mock Bottoms; and plums, Lesser Mock Bottoms. Likewise, unlocking all the game\u2019s secret nooks and caverns in search of those fruit can often be enchanting. A newly acquired type of Pikmin in one area can be brought back to another to break down an electric fence, or lift up a line of bamboo stakes, opening a path into an area with even more secrets to dismantle. It feels like unfolding an elaborate piece of origami step by step, a sequence of secret creases that show how easily a humming bird or dragon can become an ordinary piece of paper again.For me, playing \u201cPikmin 3 Deluxe\u201d felt a little bit more like playing with a creased up piece of paper.Michael Thomsen is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, Edge, and Gamasutra. Follow him on Twitter @mike_thomsen. Read more:The PlayStation 5 is titanic. Here\u2019s how we fit it in our home setups.Pulling back the curtain on the tech and politics behind \u2018Watch Dogs: Legion\u2019Is aim assist fair? Pros, streamers and developers can\u2019t seem to agree. Adapting the controls for the Switch leaves the game feeling clunkier and shallower than the original. \u2018Pikmin 3 Deluxe\u2019 loses some of its original charm",
        "author": "Michael Thomsen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Astro\u2019s Playroom\u2019 review: A delightful jaunt through PlayStation history (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7613",
        "date": "2020-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/astros-playroom-review/",
        "text": "\u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom\u201d comes installed on every PlayStation 5, and at first glance, you may mistake it for a technical demo, or even a tutorial to introduce you to the DualSense controller. While \u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom\u201d succeeds in that regard, the delightful 3D platformer is much more than simply a technical showcase: It\u2019s a must-play. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere\u2019s something uniquely Nintendo-like about the game: It has an excellent balance of charm, nostalgia and carefully-tuned difficulty that feels just right. The DualSense controller\u2019s haptic feedback and adaptive trigger elevate the experience, too, bringing a unique, tactile feel to platforming. Combined, these elements make it an unexpected next-gen hit.\u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom\u201d has you exploring digital worlds inspired by hardware components of the PS5, like \u201cGPU Jungle\u201d and \u201cSSD Speedway.\u201d Each area has a controller-specific gimmick, like using gyroscope features to control a spaceship or the adaptive triggers to feel the tension in the pull of a bow string. Every level has enemies to kill or obstacles to climb, but the most fun comes purely from movement.With every step and jump, the DualSense controller responds. A powerful gust of wind can be felt in the palms of your hands. Lasers shooting out of your feet, allowing you to hover, produce a low hum from the controller\u2019s speakers along with a subtle vibration. Surfaces, like grass and mud, produce a distinct feel through the controller\u2019s effects: A muddy hill, for example, astounded me in how it actually felt like a slippery slope. These moments are technical marvels, showing the potential of how the DualSense controller can change how we interact with video game environments.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPlayStation 5 review: A sensory game-changer\u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom\u201d elevates DualSense-specific features by placing them into a game that is genuinely a blast to play. I loved every moment. Each area felt like an attraction at a theme park: In one, you transform into a huge ball that rolls down a series of slides, which you control with the touchpad. In another, your feet become a spring, and you can feel the tension of the spring through the adaptive triggers as you find the proper level of compression to clear a gap.There\u2019s also an incredible attention to detail, making me stop in my tracks multiple times just to marvel at an easter egg. \u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom\u201d is a love letter to PlayStation, in which you find collectibles based off previous consoles and accessories made by the mega publisher. The experience is filled with callbacks to specific games, too, from recent hits like \u201cGhost of Tsushima\u201d to classics such as \u201cFinal Fantasy VII.\u201d I loved the feeling of discovery, and the \u201ca-ha\" moments these nuggets provide.Despite beating the game, I find myself returning to \u201cAstro\u2019s Playroom\" for its pure joy. With so many secrets hidden in its deepest corners, there are still collectibles and missed moments for me to uncover. But most of all, it\u2019s an experience that feels especially \u201cnew\u201d in how it plays and feels. There\u2019s no other platformer like it.Read more:\u2018Demon\u2019s Souls\u2019 review: The ideal PlayStation 5 launch game\u2018The Pathless\u2019: Less than the sum of its partsThe enduring and ongoing legacy of Bjergsen This delightful platformer is much more than just a technical demo. \u2018Astro\u2019s Playroom\u2019 review: A delightful jaunt through PlayStation history",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Eight fun party games you can play over Zoom with friends and family (WP: Video Game Tips) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7614",
        "date": "2020-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/tips/six-fun-party-games-you-can-play-over-zoom-call/",
        "text": "For yet another holiday season, the pandemic has forced Americans to think creatively about get-togethers with family or friends. Many of us are staying in touch with loved ones via the tiny cameras embedded in the fronts of our phones and laptops.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFederal and state officials are warning of an oncoming wave of coronavirus infections fueled by the omicron variant of the virus. In light of the news, Americans are preparing to forgo in-person gatherings once again this holiday season for some virtual \u2014 but not identical \u2014 replacements. If you want to move beyond just conversations and try to recapture some of the spirit of person-to-person interaction, there are a number of games involving cards, phones and boards that can be played through Zoom or other videoconferencing tools. The great video chat faceoff: Six apps. Dozens of heads. One came out on top.With enough time and resources, almost any board or party game can be played via videoconferencing. But for the purposes of this guide, we\u2019ll be focusing on those that are easy to set up and fun. The games below are ordered from least to most complex, with the last few requiring a bit more planning, resources and/or ingenuity, like screensharing or broadcasting video of a tabletop game.ChessThe classic two-player game for those who prefer traditional solutions to virtual gaming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat you need to play: Zoom and a version of chess on your computer, tablet or smartphone. (2 players)Chess regained a spotlight thanks to Netflix last year. The coronavirus has forced Americans to dust off our old hobbies, but \u201cThe Queens Gambit,\u201d a Netflix original series about an American chess prodigy, has propelled the centuries-old game to a newfound popularity that doesn\u2019t appear to be fading away any time soon.Luckily, there are countless ways to play chess online. One of the most popular is through chess.com, where you can create an account and then challenge friends or family for a match over Zoom. You can also download the game, as an app, on iOS or the Google Play Store. Both options are free, but chess.com does offer a membership program for lessons, training puzzles and tournaments.The pandemic sparked interest in chess. \u2018The Queen\u2019s Gambit\u2019 made it explode.Turn on Zoom during a match to practice your icy stare as a coldblooded chess champion. Or just for a friendly chat while mulling over your next move. This is one of the simplest games on the list to re-create virtually.Heads Up!A quick trivia-guessing game with a slew of categories.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat you need to play: Zoom and phones or tablets with the game. (2-\u221e players)Heads Up! is a fast-paced game of charades in which each player has to guess a person, place or thing with help from the audience.To play remotely, everyone needs to download the Heads Up! app on their phone. Players then select a deck of cards from a certain category, like movies, celebrities or brand names. At the start of every round, one person holds a phone to their forehead that displays the answer, showing the audience the answer, but leaving the phone-holder in the dark. Zoom allows users to hide their own reflected video display. Otherwise, you\u2019ll be able to see the answer written right above your forehead.Story continues below advertisementYou can play Heads Up! on teams or individually. The fun comes from thinking of witty hints to help the phone-holder say the correct name. When they guess correctly, they flip the phone down and score points. The goal is to correctly guess as many terms as possible in one minute.AdvertisementA warning from experience: It can get a bit unwieldy trying to hold an iPad on your forehead without flipping it onto the living room carpet. The app is free, but if you\u2019re having fun, you can download more decks with other categories such as Star Wars, Seinfeld or trivia from past decades.Two boys bonded over gaming. Now they fight cancer side by side.Battleship(No, not this \u2018Battleship\u2019)What you need to play: any video call app and two boards of Battleship; or paper and a writing utensil. (2 players)Story continues below advertisementThe objective of Battleship is to find and sink all the vessels on your opponent\u2019s board before they destroy yours. The catch is that neither of you know where the other has placed their battleships. It\u2019s a guessing game with a bit of strategy in the later rounds.Battleship is for two players, and both will need a version of the game. If you\u2019re feeling crafty, all you need is a ruler, some paper and some markers. The \u201cbattle stations\u201d in the game are laid out on grids, and at the start of each game, players place their five ships in various places on the grid. Every round, the two players guess where their opponents boats may be \u2014 like \u201cGo Fish\u201d but with imaginary ships and torpedoes.AdvertisementThe first player to sink all their enemy\u2019s ships wins. All around, it\u2019s a pretty simple war game.Outburst\u2018Family Feud,\u2019 but it\u2019s on Zoom instead of ABC.Story continues below advertisementWhat you need to play: Any video call app and at least one copy of the game. (4-10 players)We asked people on Twitter to share what games they\u2019re playing remotely and found Outburst, a timed party game from Hasbro that requires you to quickly name the top ten terms in a particular category, such as \u201cchores parents ask their kids to do.\u201d There\u2019s a lot of shouting in this game, so you\u2019ll want to take your Zoom off mute.The game splits players into two teams that switch places every round between judging and guessing the answers. The more terms you correctly name, the more points for your team.It\u2019s a simple game, and if you have one person playing the role of Steve Harvey for the entire time, you only need to buy one set of the game to play.35 essential games to play while stuck at homeQuiplashFor the people who love Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat you need to play: A video conferencing app, like Zoom, where you can share screens and a version of Quiplash using Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Steam, PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. (3-8 players)Quiplash is a Mad Libs party game where players respond to prompts with the wittiest answers they can come up with. The entire group then votes on the best responses, and players receive points for winning each round out of three.Up to eight players can play the fill-in-the-blank game. Like Apples to Apples, the game requires you play to your audience, but there\u2019s no limit or guidance on what direction you can take a prompt. When playing with friends, feel free to reference or use an inside joke that only your group of friends would understand.Story continues below advertisementQuiplash is a title from Jackbox Games, a developer that publishes party games for groups to play together. The game is built to be played with all participants watching one screen (typically a TV).AdvertisementTo play Quiplash remotely, the quickest solution will be to buy the game on Steam and play it from your computer to then share on Zoom, Google Hangouts, Twitch, Discord or any service that lets you communicate and share your screen.If you\u2019re playing Quiplash on the PlayStation or Xbox, screensharing gets a bit more complicated. You\u2019ll need to stream your gameplay from your television to Twitch or YouTube and have everyone tune in to the stream while on FaceTime or another videoconferencing app.Drawful 2Like Pictionary, a game for those who are more artistically inclined.Story continues below advertisementWhat you need to play: A videoconferencing app, like Zoom, where you can share screens and a version of Drawful2 using Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Steam, or a PlayStation or Xbox console. (3-8 players)Drawful 2 challenges players to use their fingers and some imagination to create art. The game is from the company behind Quiplash, and follows a similar format: Players must draw a given prompt and then guess what each piece of art is supposed to represent. Players can use their phones, tablets or computers to sketch out responses to the prompts, such as \u201ctree surgeon\u201d and \u201cdeadly hula hoop.\u201dAdvertisementDrawful 2 and Quiplash have the same complication \u2014 if you\u2019re playing on a gaming console, like PlayStation or Xbox, you\u2019ll need to stream the gameplay on Twitch or YouTube. The easiest solution for Zoom is buying the game on Steam and playing it from your computer.For physically disabled gamers, the Switch is incredibly accessible. Here\u2019s why.Among UsAn interstellar murder mystery that requires teamwork (and back-stabbing).What you need to play: Zoom or Discord and a computer, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, smartphone, tablet or Xbox. (4-10 players)In \u201cAmong Us,\u201d crewmates aboard a spaceship must work together to uncover the impostor(s) sabotaging their vessel and murdering teammates. The game is a live-action rendition of Clue. And, in many ways, \u201cAmong Us\u201d has become the game of the pandemic. The title first released in 2018, but it gained a viral following in 2020 after big-name steamers on Twitch and YouTube started to play the game for millions of fans.AOC plays 'Among Us' on Twitch to get out the voteAt the start of each round, players are privately told whether they\u2019re an average crewmate or an impostor. The crew then sets off to accomplish a series of tasks, and the impostors must blend in to the monotony, waiting to strike at the right moment. The crew can call all-hands meetings when they find a dead body or by running back to the starting point in the cafeteria to hit a buzzer. All of the players, including the impostor(s), then deliberate to decide who they want to vote off the spaceship to save everyone else. The crew wins when they eject all of the impostors. The impostors win if they successfully cause chaos and kill off most of the crew.AdvertisementThe game can be played a few different ways depending on the agreed upon rules and your settings. \u201cAmong Us\u201d works across platforms on PC, tablets and smartphones as well as gaming consoles like Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Xbox. You\u2019ll just need to set up a Zoom, Skype or Discord team where everyone can discuss suspected impostors during crew meetings.\u201cAmong Us\u201d is free on the Google Play and Apple App Store, but, for a few bucks, you can pay for a version that\u2019s rid of pesky advertisements. On Steam, and elsewhere on PC, \u201cAmong Us\u201d costs $4.99.CodenamesA guessing game that requires some creative thinking.What you need to play: Zoom and Codenames.game, where you can play the board game online. (4-10 players)In Codenames, two teams \u2014 red and blue \u2014 race to correctly guess all their assigned cards in a grid of 25.Every card has a word/code name, like \u201cghost,\u201d and each team elects a spymaster who will provide one-word hints for their teammates to guess which words/code names belong to their team. For example, a spymaster might say \u201cspecter\u201d to hint to their team that \u201cghost\u201d is in fact an allied agent. If your team correctly guesses a card, you get to continue playing. The round stops when your team finds all your agents, stumbles upon a card belonging to the other team or finds a neutral card, dubbed a \u201cbystander.\u201d Spymasters can associate a number with their clue word to try to get their teammates to select more cards in one turn, increasing the difficulty but allowing for a bigger reward.The entire game is a tabletop version of a minefield. Spymasters provide hints that are usually synonyms to the code names in play, but it can be easy to question whether one hint is referring to two or three different cards. Maybe the hint is \u201ccity,\u201d but Paris, Berlin and Moscow are all on the table. On top of all this, there\u2019s one card that\u2019s designated as the assassin, and if you select it, your team automatically loses.Earlier in the pandemic, a game of Codenames over Zoom required an extra camera to display the board of cards to the entire group, like this. You can still try this alternative but you no longer need a fancy rig with a webcam or a broomstick and phone with duct tape. The game\u2019s developer, Czech Games Edition, released a web version of Codenames to play with friends. Espionage just became a heck of a lot simpler. Simply create a room and send the URL to whoever wants to play.This story has been updated. Virtual Zoom games to play with family and friends for the holidays. Eight fun party games you can play over Zoom with friends and family",
        "author": "Teddy Amenabar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The 10 most promising games at E3 2019 (WP: Video Gaming) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7615",
        "date": "2019-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/13/most-promising-games-e/",
        "text": "LOS ANGELES \u2014 It was an unusual E3 this year in Los Angeles, and not always in a good way. Sony had no presence at all at the expo. Microsoft wasn\u2019t on the show floor. Neither was Electronic Arts, nor Activision. The absences left things eerily quieter on the convention floor, but that didn\u2019t mean there were slim pickings when it came to upcoming titles stirring excitement from gamers. It just meant you had to dig deeper to find the most promising games the showcase had to offer. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u2018Shenmue III,\u2019 Deep Silver When the first Shenmue was released for Sega\u2019s Dreamcast in 1999, it was the biggest financial flop of the era. But fans loved its gorgeous graphics and homage to Japanese myths and lore. The long-awaited, Kickstarter-fueled third edition is the real deal, with challenging hand-to-hand fighting and wise, wry snippets of dialogue from the older adults in the villages. One frantic writer nearby exclaimed, \u201cI can\u2019t believe I\u2019m finally playing Shenmue!\u201d It is exciting, if not in a cry-out-loud kind of way.'Draugen' is a picturesque game about delusional thinking\u2018Wolfenstein: Youngblood,\u2019 Bethesda Softworks AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe decades-old Wolfenstein series now supplements its Nazi themes with potent satire and an engaging, hard-charging narrative. In this edition, set in the 1980s, humor and fear in the face of bloodshed bedeck a campaign for two starring twin women, one of whom vomits seconds before her first kill. Later, she gleefully remarks, \u201cCan you believe we\u2019re shooting Nazis on a [expletive] zeppelin?\u201d Alas, it\u2019s been reported that micro transactions will be available to \u201cspeed things up. But only if you want to.\u201d Do not want.\u2018Halo Infinite,\u2019 Xbox Game StudiosWhile I\u2019m not a huge series fan, the trailer for \u201cHalo Infinite\u201d was so moving, my heart skipped a beat. Taking inspiration from Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s \u201cGravity,\u201d uber hero Master Chief is floating aimlessly, lost in space. But it\u2019s the worried astronaut who pulls him into the spaceship that won the presentation in a touching scene of \u201cRocket Man\u201d loneliness. Microsoft has never gotten narrative right in this otherwise worthy franchise, but it\u2019s on the right track. The game will be out in tandem with Microsoft\u2019s next Xbox in late 2020, so Halo has to be stellar.\u2018Watch Dogs 3,\u2019 UbisoftAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUbisoft\u2019s stealth hacking series set in a dark, devious post-Brexit London has finally hit its stride. Here, you\u2019re an operative that can engage anyone on the street to work with you to destroy evil, mission by mission. The most exhilarating part is flying on top of a drone, Green Goblin-style, and shooting your enemies below with a shock-wave gun. The politics of the game weren\u2019t brought to the fore in the demo I played, though, something Ubisoft has avoided in the past. If they\u2019re ever going to take a stand, the time is now.\u2018CyberPunk 2077,\u2019 CD ProjektWhen Keanu Reeves stepped onstage at E3 to promote CD Projekt Red\u2019s sci-fi epic, the crowd gave him a lengthy, rousing standing ovation. Beyond the superstar hype, the Polish gamemaker showed off a thrillingly busy, slightly eerie, righteously dystopian Night City. Here, you\u2019ll get a feel for its RPG and novel source material, but it appears to be so much more. Whether this open world will be as rich with uniqueness as the studio\u2019s landmark \u201cWitcher 3\u201d won\u2019t be known until after release day next year (April 16, 2020), but it\u2019s off to a generally impressive start.Even in a 'golden age' for gaming, new video game lobby CEO faces challenges\u2018The Outer Worlds,\u2019 Private DivisionAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Cystypigs got me. Gross yet imaginative, the porcine entities are farmed for their bacon-flavored tumors. That kind of parody is rife throughout \u201cThe Outer Wilds,\u201d an open-world game made by two creators of the lauded, dystopian Fallout series. The ideas here are compelling, too. If your character has a flaw, you get skill points to level up your character. Oh, and you can play as a hero ... or a psychopath.\u2018Forza Horizon 4: Lego Speed Champions,\u2019 Xbox Game StudiosIt\u2019s a pure, exhilarating thrill ride in the competitive world of Forza \u2014 except everything has Lego skins and environments. Racing seems just as exacting as any Horizon game. But with a wacky announcer and a sudden rain of giant soccer balls on the track, you\u2019ll giggle like a kid when you put your pedal to the metal. It was so enjoyable, I enthusiastically demanded to play the E3 demo twice. Unlike most E3 games, this expansion pack is available now.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018Final Fantasy VII,\u2019 Square EnixArguably the best game in the long-running role playing game series, \u201cFinal Fantasy VII\u201d holds a special place in my soul because it was my first review for Wired magazine. After years of work, extraordinary graphics, extra dialogue and a new combat system may make playing again more adventuresome and, because of a certain tragic plot point, more heartbreaking. Hopefully the story will be clearer than it was in the past. It\u2019ll come out in parts, the first so big it will fill two Blu-ray discs. Wow!\u2018Marvel\u2019s Avengers,\u2019 Square EnixWhile the quips need to hit harder, especially from Iron Man, the incoming disaster sequence cinematically set around a fictional San Francisco is so stunning, you feel the rising tension. The bridge is about to crumble, while Hulk smashes, throwing enemies hither and yon. Elsewhere, the agile Captain America drops his foes with fantastic form, at one point banking his shield off his foot (which I wanted to try in the game immediately). Yes, there have been numerous games featuring these comic book veterans, but if they tweak this with attention to every detail, they\u2019ll have a game that will be remembered. Free post-release content downloads are also something to get excited about.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2018Luigi\u2019s Mansion 3,\u2019 NintendoIt\u2019s creepy, but it\u2019s the kind of humorous creepiness that attracts kids and parents alike. Here, Mario\u2019s brother deals with all manner of ghosts, goblins and things that go bump in the night, all in a haunted hotel. The persnickety masters of Nintendo level design assure an unusual, even soulful, experience that will be as challenging as it is charming. When Luigi is startled, gets big-eyed and tiptoes back, Disney at its best has nothing on these animators.Harold Goldberg has written for the New York Times, Playboy, Vanity Fair and elsewhere. He\u2019s the founder of the New York Video Game Critics Circle and New York Game Awards. Follow him on Twitter @haroldgoldberg.Story continues below advertisementRead more from The Post:From Ancestor Glade to Hyrule Castle, these are the 8 wonders of the virtual worldAdvertisementEverything we know about \u2018Call of Duty: Modern Warfare\u2019A pro \u2018Fortnite\u2019 player is suing his team and the entire esports world could feel the falloutWith changes coming to \u2018Call of Duty\u2019 league, these amateurs took their last, best shot at the pros\u2018Fortnite\u2019 competitor \u2018Apex Legends\u2019 is losing steam, highlighting questions of content and crunchA powerful combination of art direction, action and voice acting makes \u2018A Plague Tale: Innocence\u2019 a game worth your time From \"CyberPunk 2077\" to \"Luigi's Mansion 3,\" there were plenty of titles to get excited about. The 10 most promising games at E3 2019",
        "author": "Harold Goldberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Corpus linguistics and the temporal difficulty in statutory interpretation (WP: Volokh Conspiracy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7616",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/08/10/corpus-linguistics-and-the-temporal-difficulty-in-statutory-interpretation/",
        "text": "Judges sometimes make reference to the temporal aspects of interpretation and insist that they are seeking the meaning of the text at the time it was drafted. Yet in practice, judges often ignore the temporal aspect of interpretation or attempt to address it using tools of questionable utility, such as historical dictionaries. Our linguistic intuition about usage and meaning in our own time and our own speech community can be highly unreliable. But this problem is amplified when we are interpreting a text that dates from a time from which we have no linguistic memory or experience. And historical dictionaries, like their contemporary counterparts, set forth a range of possible meanings of a given word but cannot be relied upon to show the ordinary meaning of a given word in a particular context. We can see this play out in the evolving scope of the word \u201cvehicle.\u201d The \u201cno vehicles in the park\u201d problem seems a mandatory subject for any serious treatment of statutory interpretation. It was introduced initially by Professor HLA Hart in his famous debate with Professor Lon Fuller. Hart says that \u201c[p]lainly\u201d the rule \u201cforbids an automobile,\u201d but asks what about \u201cbicycles, roller skates, [and] toy automobiles\u201d? (The airplane example invokes an actual case \u2014 McBoyle v. United States, in which the Supreme Court held that an airplane was not a vehicle under the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act.)Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightCommentators continue to opine on the \u201cno vehicles\u201d problem. In their text, \u201cReading Law,\u201d Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner say that the Hart prohibition should extend to any \u201csizable wheeled conveyance,\u201d and thus to automobiles \u2014 including \u201cambulances, golf carts, mopeds, motorcycles, and (perhaps) Segways\u201d \u2014 but not \u201cremote-controlled cars, baby carriages, tricycles, or perhaps even bicycles.\u201d Professor William N. Eskridge Jr., in his recent text, \u201cInterpreting Law,\u201d disagrees with Scalia\u2019s assertion as to bicycles; he says that \u201cbicycles are commonly considered vehicles.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe scope of the word \u201cvehicle\u201d is relevant in discussions of legal interpretation today. It was relevant at the time of the Hart/Fuller debate in the 1950s. And it was relevant in McBoyle, which interpreted a statute enacted in 1919.We do not propose to answer the \u201cno vehicles\u201d problem here. Instead, we use the problem to illustrate one way (certainly not the only way) in which historical corpus data can be used to illustrate ordinary meaning at a given point in history.One way to examine the range of possible uses of a word and the lexical environment in which it occurs is to look at collocation. With respect to contemporary usage, we can view the most common contemporary collocates of \u201cvehicle\u201d in the NOW Corpus.Story continues below advertisementelectric, motor, plug-in, unmanned, armored, connected, cars, aerial, charging, pure, launch, owners, hybrid, traffic, fuel, driving, gas, autonomous, struck, operating, road, safety, accidents, battery, ownership, emergency, batteries, emissions, seat, advanced, driver, primary, demand, gmv, commandeered, fuel-efficient, uavs, automakers, demonstrators, excluding, lunar, passenger, fleet, gasoline, luxury, drove, parking, retirement, vehicles, infrastructureMany of the collocates of \u201cvehicle\u201d in the NOW Corpus strongly indicate \u201cautomobile\u201d as a likely candidate for the most common use of \u201cvehicle.\u201d (A supposition we would need to confirm with key word in context [KWIC] data). The NOW Corpus lists a number of automotive collocates (like \u201cmotor,\u201d \u201ccar,\u201d \u201ctraffic,\u201d \u201cfuel,\u201d \u201cdriving,\u201d \u201cgas,\u201d \u201cbattery,\u201d \u201cparking\u201d etc.) Some of the collocates by themselves have a range of possible uses (\u201cowners,\u201d \u201coperating,\u201d etc.), but when examined in the key word in context (KWIC) in the environment of \u201cvehicle,\u201d these almost always indicate an automotive meaning. \u201cAirplane\u201d doesn\u2019t appear, though two particular types of aircraft are attested \u2014 unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) and spacecraft. Similarly, \u201cbicycle\u201d doesn\u2019t appear.AdvertisementWe can also examine the collocates of \u201cvehicle\u201d during the 1950s, the decade of the Hart/Fuller debate, in the COHA.motor, space, trucks, moving, wheeled, tax, self-propelled, passenger, unit, tracked, orbit, test, b.g., launching, highways, tanks, license, robot, emergency, units, taxes, streets, equipment, manned, armored, vehicles, fees, vehicle, traveling, operate, loaded, fuel, commercial, driver, ride, traffic, designed, weight, speed, cars, carrying, operation, unsafe, horse-drawn, high-powered, amphibious, administrators, tactical, registration, deliveryThe meaning of \u201cvehicle\u201d evolved significantly from this period, though the automotive use of \u201cvehicle\u201d still predominated. And, again, none of the top 50 collocates of \u201cvehicle\u201d include the notion of \u201cairplane\u201d and \u201cbicycles.\u201dStory continues below advertisementWith respect to the McBoyle case, because the statute at issue in McBoyle was enacted in 1919, and because the COHA allows us to search only in 10-year increments, it may make sense to include data from the decades of 1910 through 1930. The collocate data from this period (consistent with the collocate data above) allow us to draw a similar inference that the automotive use is the most common use of \u201cvehicle,\u201d and that the \u201cairplane\u201d and \u201cbicycle\u201d sense remain unattested.Advertisementmotor, horse-drawn, wheeled, horses, pedestrians, kinds, expression, sqdriver, passing, moving, various, horse, automobiles, tax, heavy, drawn, carry, roadless, rickety, trucks, communication, approaching, traffic, electric, mental, physical, 3500000, astral, belonging, steam, transportation, commissioner, rear, total, carrying, propulsion, propelled, oncoming, carriages, registration, ego, conceivable, tires, drivers, vehicle, carriers, 45, loaded, halted, manufacturersIt should be noted that only a few of the collocates in their period occur more than once, and only four \u2014 \u201cmotor,\u201d \u201chorse-drawn,\u201d \u201cwheeled\u201d and \u201chorses\u201d \u2014 occur 10 times or more, with \u201cmotor\u201d occurring twice the number of times as the other three combined.From this data, we can make a few preliminary observations (observations that we can later confirm by reviewing KWIC data.) First, the collocates of \u201cvehicle\u201d strongly suggest that the most common use of \u201cvehicle\u201d is with reference to automobiles. Second, the absence of \u201cairplane\u201d and \u201cbicycle\u201d in the top 50 collocates of \u201cvehicle\u201d raises an important question about ordinary meaning. If we accept that the necessary and sufficient conditions of \u201cvehicle\u201d are \u201ca means of carrying or transporting something,\u201d then there seems little question that both an \u201cairplane\u201d and a \u201cbicycle\u201d are possible readings of \u201cvehicle.\u201d But can a given use of a word be ordinary if it is possible, but unattested? (In our article, we confirm that \u201cbicycle\u201d as \u201cvehicle\u201d is rare, but attested in other corpus data. \u201cAirplane\u201d as \u201cvehicle\u201d is not.)Story continues below advertisementThis is merely an illustration. An analysis of the use of \u201cvehicle\u201d during a given time period or an assessment of the ordinary meaning of \u201cvehicle\u201d in a particular historical statute would require a much more granular review of KWIC data from the corpus. But the illustration demonstrates that over the decades the range of possible meanings of the term \u201cvehicle\u201d has changed dramatically. The possible uses of \u201cvehicle\u201d are reflected with different frequencies at different points in time in the corpus. The question of the possible meanings of \u201cvehicle\u201d would have a different set of answers based on the date in which the statute was enacted. Our intuition alone cannot tell us when spacecraft or unmanned aerial drone became possible answers to this question, nor can our intuition tell us at what point in history (if ever) horse-drawn buggy was no longer a likely or viable answer.We have no introspective access to historical usage from periods for which we have no linguistic experience or memory. To the extent that the law wishes to take into account the meaning of a text at the time of its enactment, some empirical measure of historical usage is necessary and corpus linguistics presents itself as an attractive option. The resolution of questions of historical meaning requires access to historical usage data. Opinion: Corpus linguistics and the temporal difficulty in statutory interpretation",
        "author": "Justice Thomas Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Required guns on planes, Soviet shotguns in space (WP: Volokh Conspiracy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7617",
        "date": "2017-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/08/31/required-guns-on-planes-soviet-shotguns-in-space/",
        "text": "From Alaska Stats. 2.35.110, as it existed from 1949 to 2001:Except as hereinafter provided, no airman shall make a flight with any aircraft within the Territory unless emergency equipment is carried as hereinafter set forth:\nThe minimum equipment to be carried during the summer months is as follows:\nFood for each occupant sufficient to sustain life for two weeks.\nOne axe or hatchet.\nOne first aid kit.\nOne pistol, revolver, shotgun or rifle, and ammunition for same.\nOne small gill net, and an assortment of tackle such as hooks, flies, lines, sinkers etc.\nOne Knife.\nTwo small boxes of matches.\nOne mosquito headnet for each occupant.\nTwo small signalling devices such as colored smoke bombs, railroad fusees, or Very pistol shells, in sealed metal containers.\nIn addition to the above, the following must be carried as minimum equipment from October 15 to April 1 of each year:\nOne pair snowshoes.\nOne sleeping bag.\nOne wool blanket for each occupant over four.\nProvided, however, that operators of multi-engine aircraft licensed to carry more than fifteen passengers need carry only the food, mosquito nets and signalling equipment at all times other than the period from October 15 to April 1 of each year, when two sleeping bags, and one blanket for every two passengers shall also be carried.The current\u00a0version updates things a bit, among other things removing the gun requirement and the gill net requirement, allowing a \u201cfire starter\u201d instead of the matches, allowing \u201cequivalent[s]\u201d to the wool blankets, and requiring only one week\u2019s worth of food rather than two weeks\u2019 worth. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLikewise, James Simpson (Medium) wrote in 2015 that \u201cSoviet cosmonauts carried a shotgun into space\u201d:Having a gun inside a thin-walled spacecraft filled with oxygen sounds crazy, but the Soviets had their reasons. Much of Russia is desolate wilderness. A single mishap during descent could strand cosmonauts in the middle of nowhere.In March 1965, cosmonaut Alexey Leonov landed a mechanically-faulty Voskhod space capsule in the snowy forests of the western Urals \u2026 600 miles from his planned landing site.For protection, Leonov had a nine-millimeter pistol. He feared the bears and wolves that prowled the forest \u2014 though he never encountered any. But the fear stayed with him. Later in his career, he made sure the Soviet military provided all its cosmonauts with a survival weapon.Thanks to Joseph Horton for the pointer on the Soviet shotgun story. An interesting Alaska statute (in effect from 1949 to 2001), and a related Soviet practice. Opinion: Required guns on planes, Soviet shotguns in space",
        "author": "Eugene Volokh"
    },
    {
        "title": "The pizza box hasn\u2019t evolved in decades, but now Pizza Hut is trying out a new round design (WP: Voraciously) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7618",
        "date": "2019-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/10/22/the-pizza-box-hasnt-evolved-in-decades-but-now-pizza-hut-is-trying-out-a-new-round-design/",
        "text": "Consider the pizza box. Not a specific pizza box, because they all pretty much look the same, but all the pizza boxes you might have encountered anytime in the last half century or so. They\u2019re probably some combination of red, white and green, and maybe feature an Italian-looking chef with a swirly mustache.\u00a0They\u2019re bulky, and you struggle to fit them in your fridge when there are leftovers, or even in your trash can when they\u2019re empty. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe pizza box has been this way for decades, even as cars have gone electric and phones have become pocket-size, portable means of accessing the whole of human knowledge (or at least a lot of cat videos). Innovation in the pizza-box space has consisted of the addition of those miniature plastic platforms that keep the top of the box from sticking to the cheese below. Maybe a vent or two to keep air circulating. Little cupholders for garlic butter or ranch dressing.Where does your go-to frozen pizza rank? We tried 15, and the worst one might surprise you.And so what might seem like a small step \u2014 Pizza Hut\u2019s announcement Tuesday that it\u2019s trying out a high-tech new design that\u2019s round instead of square \u2014 feels like a giant leap for pizza-kind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFor the most part, only marginal changes have been made to pizza boxes through the years,\u201d\u00a0Nicolas Burquier, Pizza Hut\u2019s chief customer and operations officer, said in an email. \u201cThis round box leverages new technology and represents step change innovation.\u201dThe pie chain\u2019s claims about the new box are many. Some of its shiny new features are meant to improve its function and use: The round shape means there\u2019s less waste (i.e., it\u2019s better for the environment), and it\u2019s made of sustainably harvested plant fiber. It\u2019s industrially compostable. Less material also means it takes up less space on the shelves of Pizza Hut locations \u2014 and in your fridge.The box (can you even call a disc-shaped vessel a box? Discuss.) has ridges on the bottom exterior and grooves in the top, so multiples can lock together, meaning there\u2019s no slipping during delivery or when you\u2019re toting a stack into a party. They don\u2019t require time-consuming assembling by employees, and they break down easily \u2014 you can fold them over multiple times until you have something compact enough to drop into your trash can.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd there are taste claims, too. Grooves along the bottom\u00a0help catch grease and circulate air to prevent soggy crust, says Pizza Hut, and the latch closure keeps heat in, so your pie ostensibly stays warmer longer.\u201cI think one day in the future we\u2019ll reminisce about the idea of round pizzas in square boxes and laugh,\u201d\u00a0Burquier said.Should you order Pizza Hut, Domino\u2019s or Papa John\u2019s? Our blind taste test picks a winner.Burquier described the box as the result of a two-year\u00a0development process along with Zume, the Silicon Valley start-up company whose pizza-delivery innovations include robots assembling the pies and trucks that bake your pizza en route to your home to cut down on what\u2019s known in the industry as \u201cdwell time.\u201d Their method, he said, was hands \u2014 and taste buds \u2014 on: \u201cWe ate a LOT of pizza.\u201dStory continues below advertisementZume first introduced a round pizza box, which it called the Pizza Pod, in 2017. And Apple has a patented circular pizza box that it uses for the pizzas served in its campus cafeterias.But Scott Wiener, a pizza-box collector and author of \u201cViva la Pizza!: The Art of the Pizza Box,\u201d says it\u2019s potentially significant for a giant like Pizza Hut to start using a 2.0-style box. \u201cThat could be huge,\u201d he said. He said cost is the primary factor stifling pizza-box innovation. Most pizza joints are content with the cheap-to-produce cardboard versions. \u201cThere was this cool pizza box out of India that had perforations that allowed steam to escape indirectly \u2014 basically it vented out but kept the heat in,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it didn\u2019t take off because it\u2019s expensive to produce.\u201d\u00a0Burquier didn\u2019t say how much the new box costs in comparison to the standard version, though he said that \u201cinnovative manufacturing processes\u201d would keep it from impacting the price the chain charges. Initially, Pizza Hut is testing the new design in Phoenix, with plans to roll it out to other areas in the future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a big change for the company, which has been using standard boxes since the 1970s, with designs that included a 1972 version printed to look like a newspaper called the Pizza Hut Gazette and an early-1980s style with a classic Italian checked tablecloth motif. Before boxes, the company relied on a delivery system called the\u00a0\u201cSack and Circle,\u201d which sounds like a football play but actually describes packaging a pizza on a round of corrugated cardboard inside a bag.How to master homemade pizza, from crust to toppingsOh, how times have changed. We had Pizza Hut ship us a few samples of the new whiz-bang receptacle so we could kick its tires. Out of the box (yes, the box arrived in a box \u2014 so very meta) it looked promising: sturdy (no center sag) but relatively lightweight, with an easy-to-snap lid. The stacking feature felt nice and secure.But all that assessment was simply of an empty box. The real question was: How would it perform in the field? We mocked up a trial wherein we ordered two identical pizzas from Pizza Hut, each with half cheese and half sausage and onion. We gave the bottom of the new box to the friendly people behind the counter and asked that one of the pizzas be placed on it, with the other going into the standard box, which comes lined with a corrugated liner and one of the aforementioned plastic tabletop thingees. When they were both ready, we clicked the top on the new box and took both pies back to the office.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe new box felt much more secure and easy to handle. We didn\u2019t have to palm it in the center of the pie like you often do with the classic pizza tote. And it didn\u2019t seem to slide around while it was perched on the seat of the Uber.About 30 minutes later, we opened both boxes and found \u2026 almost no discernible differences between the two. In fact, the pizza that had traveled in the traditional box was 2 degrees warmer (we used both an instant-read and gun thermometer). The crusts and integrity of the toppings were completely indistinguishable. Now, it\u2019s entirely possible that this was the fault of our imperfect test.But when it came time to toss the remnants of lunch, we appreciated the way the new container folded up for easy disposal.Story continues below advertisementWas it possible we were witnessing the future? That someday, when we\u2019re picking up a pie by spaceship \u2014 or drone \u2014 we won\u2019t even remember a time when pizza came in square boxes with mustachioed chefs on them and cursive fonts proclaiming the contents to be fresh, hot and delicious?AdvertisementMaybe, says Wiener, though he thinks that whatever shape our pizza vessels take and whatever snazzy improvements are made, the traditional one will always be an icon.\u201cWe\u2019ll always have that connotation,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s such a classic.\u201dMore from\u00a0Voraciously:Impossible vs. Beyond: We tested cook-at-home versions to see who makes a better vegan burgerThis high-tech vegan ice cream may be good enough to fool even die-hard dairy loversKFC\u2019s new fried chicken and doughnut sandwich is terrifying and delicious It's round. It's compostable. It seals with a snap. Is this the future of pizza delivery? The pizza box hasn\u2019t evolved in decades, but now Pizza Hut is trying out a new round design",
        "author": "Emily Heil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Every fall, I celebrate the Moon Festival with mooncakes. This year, I\u2019m ordering them online. (WP: Voraciously) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7619",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/09/18/every-fall-i-celebrate-the-moon-festival-with-mooncakes-this-year-im-ordering-them-online/",
        "text": "People may be all about pumpkin spice lattes for fall, but for me, it\u2019s not complete without mooncakes.Chinese people around the world eat them in celebration of the Moon Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on Oct. 1 this year. The festival is all about \u201cfamily reunions and expressing love to the faraway family members, friends and lovers,\u201d said Pu Wang, associate professor of Chinese literature, language and culture at Brandeis University. \u201cThe roundness, yuan, of the full moon then symbolizes a complete gathering, tuanyuan, of a loving family.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUsually shaped like the full moon, the confections come in all sorts of flavors, with flowers, fruit, lotus and salted ham. Newer styles are even molded like animals and stamped with the Avengers\u2019 symbol.Story continues below advertisementEver since I moved away from Fremont, Calif., my parents would mail mooncakes every fall to wherever I lived. During my freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, fellow Chinese students shared their mooncakes in one big dorm party. It was a beautiful way to commiserate over homesickness \u2014 and perfectly in line with the philosophy of the Moon Festival.AdvertisementIt \u201cis a time of joy, a time to reunite with loved ones and appreciate the significance of family and friends,\u201d said Janice Wong, corporate manager of Kee Wah Bakery in Los Angeles and granddaughter of its founder, who started the Hong Kong bakery in 1938.During the pandemic, that kind of connection is even more important.Story continues below advertisementAnd now that it\u2019s tougher to get together, to buy and share these delicacies, some bakeries have enhanced their sites to better sell mooncakes online. With more than 60 shops in California, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, Kee Wah established its first online store in 1997, and due to the pandemic, added a second Los Angeles website to allow local customers to order for pickup and delivery. It also has a store on Amazon with free shipping.Another bakery, Sheng Kee, which has 11 stores in California and was founded in Taiwan in 1948, has been online for six years. It added an option to track shipments with an app.Advertisement\u201cA lot of people are afraid to go out,\u201d said Janet Li, a 53-year-old from Palo Alto who organizes mooncake orders for groups over WeChat and helps distribute them from a San Francisco Chinese restaurant, HL Peninsula. \u201cWe used to go to the restaurant and eat together, and now we order the mooncakes together. Ordering together is more convenient now.\u201dIf you want to join the celebration, you\u2019d better buy your mooncakes soon to get them in time, because while these bakeries do offer options for shipping, it may cost more than the confections themselves.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey aren\u2019t honestly the cheapest thing to ship just because they\u2019re pretty dense and heavy,\u201d said Arthur Kao, marketing director for Sheng Kee and grandson of the founders.Specializing in mooncakes, Sheng Kee sells around 1.5 million a year. During the pandemic, Kao found that while supermarket sales have decreased around 20 percent, online sales have increased by 10 to 15 percent. The bakery\u2019s most popular is the Green Bean Puff Pastry, but my favorite of theirs has a date filling.AdvertisementMany of the more traditional mooncakes include an egg yolk in the middle, which Wang of Brandeis University says is linked to good luck.The older generation likes the classic kinds with egg yolk, said Christina Liu, from HL Peninsula, which started selling them online this year. And the younger generation likes a more contemporary taste, such as lava, similar to a lava chocolate cake, but with egg custard.Story continues below advertisementThe egg yolk lends a saltiness to the sweet filling. Personally, I\u2019m not a fan and will carve the egg out, but like pickles in sandwiches, egg yolks affect the taste of the entire mooncake. If you like them, Kee Wah has mooncakes that include five of them. In case you want to create your own mooncake, realize that it\u2019s not exactly easy. Besides needing a specific mooncake mold, the recipe I found required more than three kinds of flour.AdvertisementMooncakes are usually gifts, so while demand has been similar to last year because folks are working at home, they are no longer buying in bulk to give away to clients, said Dave Lazaro, marketing manager for 85 Degrees. They are instead purchasing single mooncakes for themselves. The bakery chain, which has more than 1,000 shops worldwide, is also offering online ordering for the first time, with free shipping for mooncakes. My favorites are its Taiwanese-style ones with a flaky crust, stuffed with taro and mochi.Kao says that single servings have been more popular at Sheng Kee as well. Traditionally, mooncakes are quite large. Growing up, he remembers slicing them down to share with the entire family. But as family sizes and gatherings have become smaller, especially during the pandemic, Sheng Kee bakery has made its mooncakes smaller.Story continues below advertisementAs gifts, mooncake boxes are often ornate, many times decorated with images of a rabbit or a goddess, both based on folklore. The goddess is Chang\u2019e, who, according to myth, gained immortality, but as a trade-off, she had to live on the moon forever, with only a rabbit as her companion, Wang said.Advertisement\u201cTogether, they have long been the symbol of the moon in Chinese culture, so much so they come up on mooncake box decorations routinely,\u201d he said. \u201cChina\u2019s lunar exploration space mission is named after Chang\u2019e, and its robotic lunar rover is named after Jade Rabbit.\u201dSo this year, instead of having my parents go to the bakery and post office during the pandemic, I ordered them mooncakes online. And even though we\u2019re on different coasts, we can celebrate the festival together, enjoying the cakes under the full moon.Story continues below advertisementWhere to find mooncakes online (with shipping to the continental U.S.):85 Degrees\nCantonese-style with four types (walnut-date mochi, almond-lotus seed, pineapple-yolk and red bean-yolk) or Taiwanese-style with three types (taro mochi, dong-po or dried pork and golden yolk red bean pastry). $58 to $60 for the minimum of two sets of eight or nine mooncakes to ship. Shipping: free for seven to 10 business days, $20 for three days.AdvertisementSheng Kee\nFourteen types, from green bean to mango, with three sizes. $14 to $64 per set of four to 14 mooncakes. Shipping starts at $15 for ground to more than $70 (depending on weight) for second-day air.Kee WahAmazon store\nTraditional Cantonese-style mooncakes, most available with or without yolks: lotus seed, red bean, mixed nuts (with or without ham), date, pineapple and yolk custard. $4.50-$175 per set of one to nine mooncakes. Shipping: ranges from free on Amazon to more than $95 (depending on weight) for next business day.HL Peninsula\nDouble-yolked pure white lotus paste and lava egg custard. $36 to $42 per set of four to eight mooncakes. Shipping: $15 for FedEx ground. Mooncakes are about joy and connection, even during a pandemic. Every fall, I celebrate the Moon Festival with mooncakes. This year, I\u2019m ordering them online.",
        "author": "Marian Chia-Ming Liu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Every fall, I celebrate the Moon Festival with mooncakes. This year, I\u2019m ordering them online. (WP: Voraciously) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7620",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/09/18/every-fall-i-celebrate-the-moon-festival-with-mooncakes-this-year-im-ordering-them-online/",
        "text": "People may be all about pumpkin spice lattes for fall, but for me, it\u2019s not complete without mooncakes.Chinese people around the world eat them in celebration of the Moon Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on Oct. 1 this year. The festival is all about \u201cfamily reunions and expressing love to the faraway family members, friends and lovers,\u201d said Pu Wang, associate professor of Chinese literature, language and culture at Brandeis University. \u201cThe roundness, yuan, of the full moon then symbolizes a complete gathering, tuanyuan, of a loving family.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUsually shaped like the full moon, the confections come in all sorts of flavors, with flowers, fruit, lotus and salted ham. Newer styles are even molded like animals and stamped with the Avengers\u2019 symbol.Story continues below advertisementEver since I moved away from Fremont, Calif., my parents would mail mooncakes every fall to wherever I lived. During my freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, fellow Chinese students shared their mooncakes in one big dorm party. It was a beautiful way to commiserate over homesickness \u2014 and perfectly in line with the philosophy of the Moon Festival.AdvertisementIt \u201cis a time of joy, a time to reunite with loved ones and appreciate the significance of family and friends,\u201d said Janice Wong, corporate manager of Kee Wah Bakery in Los Angeles and granddaughter of its founder, who started the Hong Kong bakery in 1938.During the pandemic, that kind of connection is even more important.Story continues below advertisementAnd now that it\u2019s tougher to get together, to buy and share these delicacies, some bakeries have enhanced their sites to better sell mooncakes online. With more than 60 shops in California, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, Kee Wah established its first online store in 1997, and due to the pandemic, added a second Los Angeles website to allow local customers to order for pickup and delivery. It also has a store on Amazon with free shipping.Another bakery, Sheng Kee, which has 11 stores in California and was founded in Taiwan in 1948, has been online for six years. It added an option to track shipments with an app.Advertisement\u201cA lot of people are afraid to go out,\u201d said Janet Li, a 53-year-old from Palo Alto who organizes mooncake orders for groups over WeChat and helps distribute them from a San Francisco Chinese restaurant, HL Peninsula. \u201cWe used to go to the restaurant and eat together, and now we order the mooncakes together. Ordering together is more convenient now.\u201dIf you want to join the celebration, you\u2019d better buy your mooncakes soon to get them in time, because while these bakeries do offer options for shipping, it may cost more than the confections themselves.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey aren\u2019t honestly the cheapest thing to ship just because they\u2019re pretty dense and heavy,\u201d said Arthur Kao, marketing director for Sheng Kee and grandson of the founders.Specializing in mooncakes, Sheng Kee sells around 1.5 million a year. During the pandemic, Kao found that while supermarket sales have decreased around 20 percent, online sales have increased by 10 to 15 percent. The bakery\u2019s most popular is the Green Bean Puff Pastry, but my favorite of theirs has a date filling.AdvertisementMany of the more traditional mooncakes include an egg yolk in the middle, which Wang of Brandeis University says is linked to good luck.The older generation likes the classic kinds with egg yolk, said Christina Liu, from HL Peninsula, which started selling them online this year. And the younger generation likes a more contemporary taste, such as lava, similar to a lava chocolate cake, but with egg custard.Story continues below advertisementThe egg yolk lends a saltiness to the sweet filling. Personally, I\u2019m not a fan and will carve the egg out, but like pickles in sandwiches, egg yolks affect the taste of the entire mooncake. If you like them, Kee Wah has mooncakes that include five of them. In case you want to create your own mooncake, realize that it\u2019s not exactly easy. Besides needing a specific mooncake mold, the recipe I found required more than three kinds of flour.AdvertisementMooncakes are usually gifts, so while demand has been similar to last year because folks are working at home, they are no longer buying in bulk to give away to clients, said Dave Lazaro, marketing manager for 85 Degrees. They are instead purchasing single mooncakes for themselves. The bakery chain, which has more than 1,000 shops worldwide, is also offering online ordering for the first time, with free shipping for mooncakes. My favorites are its Taiwanese-style ones with a flaky crust, stuffed with taro and mochi.Kao says that single servings have been more popular at Sheng Kee as well. Traditionally, mooncakes are quite large. Growing up, he remembers slicing them down to share with the entire family. But as family sizes and gatherings have become smaller, especially during the pandemic, Sheng Kee bakery has made its mooncakes smaller.Story continues below advertisementAs gifts, mooncake boxes are often ornate, many times decorated with images of a rabbit or a goddess, both based on folklore. The goddess is Chang\u2019e, who, according to myth, gained immortality, but as a trade-off, she had to live on the moon forever, with only a rabbit as her companion, Wang said.Advertisement\u201cTogether, they have long been the symbol of the moon in Chinese culture, so much so they come up on mooncake box decorations routinely,\u201d he said. \u201cChina\u2019s lunar exploration space mission is named after Chang\u2019e, and its robotic lunar rover is named after Jade Rabbit.\u201dSo this year, instead of having my parents go to the bakery and post office during the pandemic, I ordered them mooncakes online. And even though we\u2019re on different coasts, we can celebrate the festival together, enjoying the cakes under the full moon.Story continues below advertisementWhere to find mooncakes online (with shipping to the continental U.S.):85 Degrees\nCantonese-style with four types (walnut-date mochi, almond-lotus seed, pineapple-yolk and red bean-yolk) or Taiwanese-style with three types (taro mochi, dong-po or dried pork and golden yolk red bean pastry). $58 to $60 for the minimum of two sets of eight or nine mooncakes to ship. Shipping: free for seven to 10 business days, $20 for three days.AdvertisementSheng Kee\nFourteen types, from green bean to mango, with three sizes. $14 to $64 per set of four to 14 mooncakes. Shipping starts at $15 for ground to more than $70 (depending on weight) for second-day air.Kee WahAmazon store\nTraditional Cantonese-style mooncakes, most available with or without yolks: lotus seed, red bean, mixed nuts (with or without ham), date, pineapple and yolk custard. $4.50-$175 per set of one to nine mooncakes. Shipping: ranges from free on Amazon to more than $95 (depending on weight) for next business day.HL Peninsula\nDouble-yolked pure white lotus paste and lava egg custard. $36 to $42 per set of four to eight mooncakes. Shipping: $15 for FedEx ground. Mooncakes are about joy and connection, even during a pandemic. Every fall, I celebrate the Moon Festival with mooncakes. This year, I\u2019m ordering them online.",
        "author": "Marian Chia-Ming Liu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Every fall, I celebrate the Moon Festival with mooncakes. This year, I\u2019m ordering them online. (WP: Voraciously) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7621",
        "date": "2020-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/09/18/every-fall-i-celebrate-the-moon-festival-with-mooncakes-this-year-im-ordering-them-online/",
        "text": "People may be all about pumpkin spice lattes for fall, but for me, it\u2019s not complete without mooncakes.Chinese people around the world eat them in celebration of the Moon Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on Oct. 1 this year. The festival is all about \u201cfamily reunions and expressing love to the faraway family members, friends and lovers,\u201d said Pu Wang, associate professor of Chinese literature, language and culture at Brandeis University. \u201cThe roundness, yuan, of the full moon then symbolizes a complete gathering, tuanyuan, of a loving family.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUsually shaped like the full moon, the confections come in all sorts of flavors, with flowers, fruit, lotus and salted ham. Newer styles are even molded like animals and stamped with the Avengers\u2019 symbol.Story continues below advertisementEver since I moved away from Fremont, Calif., my parents would mail mooncakes every fall to wherever I lived. During my freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley, fellow Chinese students shared their mooncakes in one big dorm party. It was a beautiful way to commiserate over homesickness \u2014 and perfectly in line with the philosophy of the Moon Festival.AdvertisementIt \u201cis a time of joy, a time to reunite with loved ones and appreciate the significance of family and friends,\u201d said Janice Wong, corporate manager of Kee Wah Bakery in Los Angeles and granddaughter of its founder, who started the Hong Kong bakery in 1938.During the pandemic, that kind of connection is even more important.Story continues below advertisementAnd now that it\u2019s tougher to get together, to buy and share these delicacies, some bakeries have enhanced their sites to better sell mooncakes online. With more than 60 shops in California, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, Kee Wah established its first online store in 1997, and due to the pandemic, added a second Los Angeles website to allow local customers to order for pickup and delivery. It also has a store on Amazon with free shipping.Another bakery, Sheng Kee, which has 11 stores in California and was founded in Taiwan in 1948, has been online for six years. It added an option to track shipments with an app.Advertisement\u201cA lot of people are afraid to go out,\u201d said Janet Li, a 53-year-old from Palo Alto who organizes mooncake orders for groups over WeChat and helps distribute them from a San Francisco Chinese restaurant, HL Peninsula. \u201cWe used to go to the restaurant and eat together, and now we order the mooncakes together. Ordering together is more convenient now.\u201dIf you want to join the celebration, you\u2019d better buy your mooncakes soon to get them in time, because while these bakeries do offer options for shipping, it may cost more than the confections themselves.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThey aren\u2019t honestly the cheapest thing to ship just because they\u2019re pretty dense and heavy,\u201d said Arthur Kao, marketing director for Sheng Kee and grandson of the founders.Specializing in mooncakes, Sheng Kee sells around 1.5 million a year. During the pandemic, Kao found that while supermarket sales have decreased around 20 percent, online sales have increased by 10 to 15 percent. The bakery\u2019s most popular is the Green Bean Puff Pastry, but my favorite of theirs has a date filling.AdvertisementMany of the more traditional mooncakes include an egg yolk in the middle, which Wang of Brandeis University says is linked to good luck.The older generation likes the classic kinds with egg yolk, said Christina Liu, from HL Peninsula, which started selling them online this year. And the younger generation likes a more contemporary taste, such as lava, similar to a lava chocolate cake, but with egg custard.Story continues below advertisementThe egg yolk lends a saltiness to the sweet filling. Personally, I\u2019m not a fan and will carve the egg out, but like pickles in sandwiches, egg yolks affect the taste of the entire mooncake. If you like them, Kee Wah has mooncakes that include five of them. In case you want to create your own mooncake, realize that it\u2019s not exactly easy. Besides needing a specific mooncake mold, the recipe I found required more than three kinds of flour.AdvertisementMooncakes are usually gifts, so while demand has been similar to last year because folks are working at home, they are no longer buying in bulk to give away to clients, said Dave Lazaro, marketing manager for 85 Degrees. They are instead purchasing single mooncakes for themselves. The bakery chain, which has more than 1,000 shops worldwide, is also offering online ordering for the first time, with free shipping for mooncakes. My favorites are its Taiwanese-style ones with a flaky crust, stuffed with taro and mochi.Kao says that single servings have been more popular at Sheng Kee as well. Traditionally, mooncakes are quite large. Growing up, he remembers slicing them down to share with the entire family. But as family sizes and gatherings have become smaller, especially during the pandemic, Sheng Kee bakery has made its mooncakes smaller.Story continues below advertisementAs gifts, mooncake boxes are often ornate, many times decorated with images of a rabbit or a goddess, both based on folklore. The goddess is Chang\u2019e, who, according to myth, gained immortality, but as a trade-off, she had to live on the moon forever, with only a rabbit as her companion, Wang said.Advertisement\u201cTogether, they have long been the symbol of the moon in Chinese culture, so much so they come up on mooncake box decorations routinely,\u201d he said. \u201cChina\u2019s lunar exploration space mission is named after Chang\u2019e, and its robotic lunar rover is named after Jade Rabbit.\u201dSo this year, instead of having my parents go to the bakery and post office during the pandemic, I ordered them mooncakes online. And even though we\u2019re on different coasts, we can celebrate the festival together, enjoying the cakes under the full moon.Story continues below advertisementWhere to find mooncakes online (with shipping to the continental U.S.):85 Degrees\nCantonese-style with four types (walnut-date mochi, almond-lotus seed, pineapple-yolk and red bean-yolk) or Taiwanese-style with three types (taro mochi, dong-po or dried pork and golden yolk red bean pastry). $58 to $60 for the minimum of two sets of eight or nine mooncakes to ship. Shipping: free for seven to 10 business days, $20 for three days.AdvertisementSheng Kee\nFourteen types, from green bean to mango, with three sizes. $14 to $64 per set of four to 14 mooncakes. Shipping starts at $15 for ground to more than $70 (depending on weight) for second-day air.Kee WahAmazon store\nTraditional Cantonese-style mooncakes, most available with or without yolks: lotus seed, red bean, mixed nuts (with or without ham), date, pineapple and yolk custard. $4.50-$175 per set of one to nine mooncakes. Shipping: ranges from free on Amazon to more than $95 (depending on weight) for next business day.HL Peninsula\nDouble-yolked pure white lotus paste and lava egg custard. $36 to $42 per set of four to eight mooncakes. Shipping: $15 for FedEx ground. Mooncakes are about joy and connection, even during a pandemic. Every fall, I celebrate the Moon Festival with mooncakes. This year, I\u2019m ordering them online.",
        "author": "Marian Chia-Ming Liu"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Girl Scouts\u2019 new lemon cookie delivers positivity, but not flavor (WP: Voraciously) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7622",
        "date": "2020-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2020/01/10/the-girl-scouts-new-lemon-cookie-delivers-positivity-but-not-flavor/",
        "text": "Girl Scout cookies have never been just about the sweets, and now the organization is wearing its message on its sleeves, and its products.This season, a new flavor has joined the lineup of classic confections hawked by those badge-collecting kiddos. They\u2019re called Lemon-Ups, and they feature a crisp, citrus-imbued flavor and positive messages pressed into their tops. \u201cI am a risk-taker,\u201d reads one. \u201cI am a leader,\u201d proclaims another. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightTake the sweetest trip around the country with these 14 American regional cookie recipesThe Scouting organization debuted the new cookie along with a redesign in the packaging for its entire lineup of familiar names, such as Samoas, Tagalongs and Thin Mints. The packaging now feature photos of Girl Scouts in action, the organization says, doing things like \u201cadventure-packed camping and canoeing, to exploring space science and designing robots, to taking action to improve their communities.\u201d Those changes reflect the organization\u2019s broadening focus in recent years from traditional camping and crafts into more modern concerns such as leadership, technology and social issues.The Lemon-Ups are available in limited markets and replace the retiring Savannah Smiles, another lemon-flavored offering that also featured a confectioners\u2019 sugar dusting. It joins the existing Lemonades, which are shortbread cookies sandwiching a lemony icing. Which naturally leads us to a question that\u2019s maybe beside the point: Are they any good?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe tried a bag at the office and the consensus was \u2026 well, let\u2019s just say that there\u2019s no need to chisel a new spot in the Mt. Rushmore of Girl Scout cookies. The golden-colored discs made us smile with their affirmations, but the message was better than the messenger, which delivered a decidedly underwhelming dose of lemon. \u201cPretty generic,\u201d said one taster. \u201cLike a grocery store cookie,\u201d volunteered another. (And these folks are avowed Girl Scout cookie fans, each with their own favorite, so it\u2019s not like there\u2019s pastry snobbery at work in their evaluations.)The biscuit-like consistency and weak citrus notes weren\u2019t enough to distinguish it from its snappier shortbread sister, the classic Trefoil. Which means when you pick a cookie that proclaims, \u201cI am strong,\u201d you should take that as a personal compliment and not a promise about the treat you\u2019re about to snarf.Quibbles aside, the organization says that the girls selling these confectioneries could be the business tycoons, tech titans and leaders we\u2019ll see in a few years. \u201cGirls learn about entrepreneurship as they run their own cookie businesses,\u201d\u00a0CEO Sylvia Acevedo wrote in a news release. \u201cThe important business and financial literacy skills girls learn through the program are\u00a0proven to build their leadership skills\u00a0and position them for success in the future.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year, prices for many cookie boxes went up $1, to $5. Prices vary nationally, according to the organization, and you can locate a local booth to buy them using their website\u2019s cookie finder (in case you haven\u2019t already been given the hard sell by a child in a green vest).\u00a0Cookies are sold at different times depending on your local council, but many start in January.More from\u00a0Voraciously:\u2018Veganuary\u2019 wants to be your new food resolution for 2020 \u2014 and beyondWho makes the best store-bought hummus around? We tried 11 top brands to find out.The Happy Meal, a triumph of marketing blamed for childhood obesity, is turning 40 The organization has also redesigned its cookie packaging to show scouts in action.  The Girl Scouts\u2019 new lemon cookie delivers positivity, but not flavor",
        "author": "Emily Heil"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | 2015 Bryce Harper or 2016 Bryce Harper? Best- and worst-case scenarios for 2017 Nationals. (WP: Washington Nationals) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7623",
        "date": "2017-04-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/nationals-journal/wp/2017/04/03/nationals-2017-the-best-case-and-the-worst-case/",
        "text": "With that in mind, it\u2019s time our annual dive into frivolous projections: the best-case and worst-case scenarios for every Nationals player in 2017. As always, these are going to be outlandish and not very fair. In most\u00a0cases, they\u2019re going to be ridiculous, on both ends.\u00a0Without further ado:WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJayson WerthBest case: Werth\u2019s left wrist is as strong as it was before the\u00a0three surgeries and he enjoys his best season since 2014. He stays healthy, missing games only to give his 37-year-old body a periodic respite, and thrives in the two-hole with his patient approach. He slugs 30 home runs with a .900 on-base-plus-slugging percentage and makes his second all-star team. The strong year and his invaluable clubhouse presence lead to the Nationals re-signing him. A Head and Shoulders endorsement follows. Did we just become best friends? The \u2018Step Brothers\u2019 story of Werth and HarperWorst case: Father Time catches up to Werth and a series of injuries mar his final season in Washington. He plays just 95 games and can never find a rhythm, hitting eight home runs with a .630 OPS. Come playoff time, the Nationals platoon Werth with Adam Lind in left field. Werth then signs with the Baltimore Orioles during the offseason to finish his career with the team that drafted him in 1997 as a designated hitter and shaves his beard, hoping looking younger will reinvigorate him.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAdam EatonBest case: Eaton\u2019s moves to the NL and back to center field don\u2019t interrupt his incredible consistency. He registers an .850 OPS and smacks a career-high 20 home runs while stealing 20 bases for the first time. He plays center field as he did in 2014, when he was a Gold Glove finalist, not as he did in 2015, when he was one of the worst center fielders in baseball, and wins his first Gold Glove. By the end of the year, the Nationals look likes geniuses as Lucas Giolito\u2019s luster continues to diminish and the Chicago White Sox convert Reynaldo Lopez to reliever while the 5-foot-8 Eaton becomes a fan favorite with his gritty style. Mighty Mouse becomes the Nationals\u2019 version of the Rally Monkey.Worst case: Eaton struggles batting lower in the lineup and is even worse in center field. He has his worst offensive season since becoming an everyday player in 2014, posting a Revere-like .650 OPS with five home runs. He steals 15 bases but is caught 10 times. Defensively, the metrics indicate he\u2019s the worst center fielder in baseball, supporting claims that he\u2019s better suited for a corner outfield spot. Meanwhile, the White Sox call up Giolito and Lopez midseason and the two right-handers fuel a surprise playoff push while Dane Dunning emerges as one of the top prospects in baseball. Mighty Mouse T-shirts are burned on South Capitol Street.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBryce HarperBest case: He proves last year was a farce and stays healthy to return to his 2015 out-of-this-world form. He gets pitches to hit because Daniel Murphy and others provide ample protection, and he remains in the hunt for a Triple Crown into September, finishing with 55\u00a0home runs, 135 RBI, 30 steals and an OPS over 1.100. The monster season earns Harper his second NL MVP award and he adds World Series MVP to his mantel after leading the Nationals to a championship with 10 postseason home runs. Over the winter, ownership decides he\u2019s worth the money and give him the biggest contract in professional sports history, making him by far the most famous baseball player in the world and shutting down any offseason speculation before it could begin.Worst case: Another underwhelming campaign makes 2015 appear more and more like an outlier. He hits .250 with 20 home runs and a .775 OPS. Nagging injuries surface, but he plays in 145 games and critics question his place in baseball\u2019s hierarchy. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Nationals debate whether to trade Harper to a team thirsting for star power in exchange for a massive prospect haul, but they decide not to. One year from free agency the question becomes: Will the hype ever again match the production?Anthony RendonBest case: The baseball world realizes just how good Rendon is. He bats up and down the order, from second to six, and rakes in every spot, becoming the right-handed power source the Nationals need following Wilson Ramos\u2019s departure. The reigning NL comeback player of the year makes his first all-star team as he slugs 30 home runs, smacks 40 doubles and wins his first Gold Glove with his smooth defense, making it all look so effortless, sometimes with his hair braided. To top it off for Rendon \u2014 a die-hard fan of the Houston Rockets \u2014 James Harden is named NBA MVP and the Rockets outlast the Golden State Warriors en route to the championship.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWorst case: A slow start and more injuries mar Rendon\u2019s season. He plays 100 games and nothing comes easy. He bats .260 with 10 home runs and 15 doubles. His defense suffers, too, as the left side of Washington\u2019s infield becomes one of the weakest defensive duos in baseball. Looking for a change, he goes with a buzz cut, but he can\u2019t snap out of it. Harden loses the MVP to Russell Westbrook and the Rockets are bounced in the first round.Trea TurnerBest case: Turner duplicates his mesmerizing 2016 second half over the course of a full campaign while seamlessly transitioning back to shortstop. He collects the batting title with a .340 average and registers 30 home runs, a 1.000 OPS and 70 stolen bases. He makes the all-star team and is named the NL MVP, becoming the Nationals\u2019 clear best player. People recognize him when he goes to pizza places with Harper.\u00a0Worst case: The move to shortstop is disastrous and Turner can\u2019t adjust to the adjustments the league makes against him. His aggressiveness becomes a problem and he struggles to hit anything that isn\u2019t a fastball. He bats .250 with 10 home runs and 20 steals. Eaton eventually replaces him as the leadoff hitter and he makes 40 errors at shortstop. People start recognizing him when he goes to pizza places with Harper \u2014 and it\u2019s not a good thing.Daniel MurphyAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest case: He fights off the anticipated regression and replicates his MVP-like 2016 production, cementing his spot as the best pure hitter in baseball with another ridiculous stat line: .375 batting average, 30 home runs, 45 doubles, 1.000 OPS in 150 games. That\u2019s more than enough to mask his defensive limitations, which aren\u2019t significant as he starts for the NL all-stars, claims the batting crown, and is named NL MVP. Lululemon comes calling with a multimillion dollar endorsement deal.Worst case: Murphy\u2019s regression is worse than expected. After a strange spring training \u2014 he saw limited at-bats because he barely played for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic \u2014 Murphy gets off to a slow start and never snaps out of it. His glute injury resurfaces midseason and he misses a chunk of time. His numbers are reminiscent of his time with the Mets: .275 batting average, .735 OPS and 10 home runs. And his defense is worse, warranting him more time at first base.Ryan ZimmermanAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest case: Zimmerman\u2019s tweaks and upper-echelon exit velocity produce exit hits (credit: Dusty Baker), and he bounces back from the worst season of his career to resurrect peak face-of-the-franchise Zimmerman. He smacks 25 home runs and posts a .900 OPS in 150 games. He makes his second all-star team, wins a Silver Slugger and earns a Gold Glove. Major League Baseball then announces spring training has been cut in half starting in 2018.Worst case: Exit velocity is irrelevant again as Zimmerman\u2019s career continues tumbling with another injury-riddled season. He hits .210/.270/.360 with 10 home runs in 100 games, ultimately replaced by Adam Lind at the everyday first baseman in September. There is no denying Zimmerman\u2019s best days are far behind him and the Nationals enter the offseason needing to address first base. Major League Baseball then announces all teams must begin spring training Feb. 1.Matt WietersBest case: Wieters, 30, finally meets the expectations he garnered as a prospect a decade ago. The catcher more than replaces Wilson Ramos\u2019s production and registerscareer highs across the board: .300 batting average, 30 home runs, 100 RBI and a .900 OPS. He stays healthy, catches 140 games and becomes one of the best pitch framers in baseball. The all-star season \u2014 his fifth \u2014 produces a $100 million contract.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWorst case: He is a steep, steep dropoff from Ramos. He can\u2019t stay healthy and catches just 100 games. When he is on the field, he hits .240/.300/.700 with 10 home runs. He remains one of baseball\u2019s worst pitch framers, and his caught stealing rate tumbles from 29 to 20 percent three years after Tommy John surgery. The forgettable season forces Wieters to opt into his contract for 2018 instead of testing free agency again. Meanwhile, down in Tampa, Derek Norris and Wilson Ramos become the American League\u2019s best catching duo and combine to bat .320 with 40 home runs.The benchBest case: Michael A. Taylor cuts down his strikeout rate and proves he is a legitimate big leaguer. Adam Lind provides his typical power regularly filling in for Zimmerman and Werth. Stephen Drew avoids any vertigo-like symptoms and records an .850 OPS with his usual steady defense at three positions. Chris Heisey continues delivering in pinch-hit situations, and Jose Lobaton provides outstanding defense with the occasional timely hit, none bigger than the game-winning grand slam in a hailstorm off Wade Davis at Wrigley Field in Game 6 of the NLCS.Worst case: Taylor is sent down to the minors by the middle of April because his strikeout rate is still huge, leaving the Nationals without a natural backup center fielder. The Difo outfield experiment doesn\u2019t go nearly as well as Trea Turner\u2019s last year, but he sticks around as the utility infielder because Drew can\u2019t stay healthy. Heisey can\u2019t continue his pinch-hit prowess and Lind struggles coming off the bench for the first time in his career. Meanwhile, Lobaton\u2019s offensive struggles lead to the Nationals trading him and promoting Pedro Severino to back up Wieters.Max ScherzerAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest case: Mad Max shows no signs of slowing down. His ring finger stress fracture is quickly forgotten as he takes the ball every fifth day with his typical vigor, regularly flirting with no-hitters while anchoring the best rotation in baseball. His home run problem doesn\u2019t resurface, and he sets career bests with 22 wins, 300 strikeouts and a 2.30 ERA in 230 innings pitched. He is even better in the postseason, which he concludes with a shutout victory in Game 7 of the World Series. When he wins the Cy Young Award, his third, he\u2019s on a spaceship, not a boat, and he conducts his interview with the MLB Network while floating.Worst case: The stress fracture resurfaces and Scherzer ends up on the disabled list by the end of April for the first time since 2009. He misses a month and can\u2019t get on track when he returns. He has his worst season since 2011, recording an ERA over 4.00 and winning just 10 games. Having turned 33 in July, some wonder whether Scherzer\u2019s best days are behind him.Stephen StrasburgAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBest case: Strasburg\u2019s decision to pitch from the stretch is a massive success. He stays healthy and confirms that when he is healthy he is one of the best \u2014 if not the best \u2014 pitchers in baseball. He makes every start for just the second time in his career and throws a career-high 220 innings. He wins 20 games, has a 2.30 ERA, leads the majors with 275 strikeouts, wins his first Cy Young, and the Nationals ride the one-two punch of Scherzer and Strasburg to a World Series five years after the infamous shutdown.Worst case: Strasburg struggles early and bails on his plan to exclusively pitch out of the stretch after a month. Returning to the windup doesn\u2019t change the results, and another series of nagging injuries shuttle Strasburg on and off the disabled list. An MRI exam reveals he needs a second Tommy John surgery, ending his season and placing his career in jeopardy.Tanner RoarkBest case: Another standout season provides further evidence that Roark is indeed one of the best starting pitchers in baseball, and he finally garners the recognition. He makes his first all-star team and finishes in the top five in the Cy Young vote after going 18-6 with a 2.75 ERA and 180 strikeouts in 215 innings.Worst case: Roark\u2019s 2016 workload and an unusual spring training \u2014 he, too, was idle for a long stretch on the Team USA roster \u2014 catch up to him. The 30-year-old right-hander has his worst season, by far, as a major league starter and lands on the disabled list for the first time. His ERA soars over 4.00, and he is left off the playoff rotation.Gio GonzalezBest case: Gonzalez reaches his goal of making his third all-star team and first since 2012. He isn\u2019t as dominant as he was then, but he avoids the high pitch counts that haunted him in recent years and regularly pitches deeper into games, reaching 200 innings for the first time since the 2011 season, which vests his $12 million option for 2018. After posting a 4.57 ERA in 2016, he slices the number to 3.30 and wins 15 games.Worst case: Gonzalez\u2019s maddening inability to put hitters away continues, and the left-hander\u2019s steady downhill trajectory reaches its end with an ERA over 5.00 at the all-star break. The Nationals decide to trade Gonzalez, who has an option for 2018 that vests if he logs 180 innings, concluding his career in Washington after 5 1/2 seasons.Joe RossBest case: Ross adds an effective change-up to his sinker-slider repertoire and, most importantly, stays healthy to become the best fifth starter in baseball. He pitches 175 innings and wins 15 games as a groundball specialist at the back end of the top rotation in the majors, sealing the case that the Nationals\u2019 trade for him and Turner was one of the most lopsided in recent history.Worst case: Consistency eludes Ross as injuries interrupt another season. When he pitches, his mechanics are erratic and that change-up doesn\u2019t develop into anything useful, leaving him with two pitches to get through lineups a second and third time. The lack of an effective third pitch means Ross might be best suited as a reliever in the future.The bullpenBest case: Blake Treinen disproves the closer stereotype and excels in the role, nice guy and all. He emerges as the National League\u2019s Zach Britton and the rest of the bullpen takes shape around him. Shawn Kelley and his twice-repaired elbow continue defying science by pumping sliders past hitters as the primary eighth-inning option. Joe Blanton and Koda Glover \u2014 veteran and rookie \u2014 are just as effective when Kelley needs a day off, while Enny Romero\u2019s 100 mph fastball, Sammy Solis\u2019s success against both righties and lefties, and Oliver Perez\u2019s experience round the bullpen \u2014 baseball\u2019s deepest \u2014 from the left side.Worst case: Trienen flops as closer, forcing Glover into the role by the end of May \u2014 earlier than the Nationals would prefer \u2014 and he also flounders, which compels the Nationals to address closer at the trade deadline for the third straight year. Kelley\u2019s elbow doesn\u2019t hold up, age catches up to Blanton, Romero can\u2019t find the plate again, Solis can\u2019t stay healthy and Perez can\u2019t reverse his downward spiral. Mark Melancon saves 50 games and closes Game 7 of the World Series for the Giants. It's time for our annual dive into frivolous projections: The best-case and worst-case scenarios for every Nationals player in 2017.  2015 Bryce Harper or 2016 Bryce Harper? Best- and worst-case scenarios for 2017 Nationals.",
        "author": "Jorge Castillo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7624",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/06/08/transcript-ufos-national-security-with-luis-elizondo-former-director-advanced-aerospace-threat-identification-program/",
        "text": "MS. ALEMANY: [In progress] --UFOs or as it\u2019s officially identified--officially called, unidentified aerial phenomenon, UAPs. While we\u2019re waiting for the unclassified report from Congress on the matter, our guest, Lue Elizondo, the former director for AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, has some answers. So excited to welcome you today, Lue. Thanks for joining us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, it is my sincere pleasure to be with you and your audience today. Thank you very much for having me.MS. ALEMANY: So, I want to take us back for a second and set the table for this conversation. How exactly did you get signed in the first place to investigate UFOs for the intelligence community?Story continues below advertisementMR. ELIZONDO: Well, Jackie, quite frankly, I was voluntold. In essence I had some--I guess some prerequisite experience that they were looking for. At the time, the organization was fairly new, and they were looking for someone to create a counterintelligence and security portfolio. And I guess because of some of my background running investigations, counterintelligence investigations, and some of my background in technology protection, specifically with aerospace systems, that probably, I suspect, was a fairly lucrative skillset that they were looking for to create this sub portfolio under AATIP. And that\u2019s how I got into the program. I entered the program in 2008. I was asked by its director to come on board and establish this program, and then in 2010 was when I was asked to take over the effort.AdvertisementMS. ALEMANY: And I\u2019m sure many of you are well aware of this. If you are tuning in, you\u2019ve probably watched the documentary that came out this year, \"The Phenomenon.\" Senator Harry Reid, which this doc outlines, got the program funded. Did you brief him in Congress on these unexplained pilot sightings when you were running the program?MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, we provide many briefings, mostly through DOD and intelligence community leadership. That information was also provided to times to the staffers and of course our elected officials. It\u2019s very important that when you\u2019re working in a national security construct that you try to follow the chain of command as much as possible. So, a lot of my briefings were really to more senior level folks in the Department of Defense and within our intelligence architecture. But there were times, yes, that we were--we would be asked to brief other officials, particularly in the legislative branch and in the executive branch as well.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: And right now, everyone in Washington and really a lot of people around this country are hotly anticipating this unclassified government report on aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots. It\u2019s expected to be delivered to the Senate Intelligence community by the director of national intelligence, hopefully by June 25th. The New York Times reported that senior administration officials who were briefed on the findings said that the unusual movements witnessed by pilots did not originate from American military or advanced U.S. government technology, but that\u2019s really about the only conclusive finding that has been so far teased from the report. What do you think the likelihood that aerial phenomena are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: Well, Jackie, that\u2019s really the question, isn\u2019t it? The bottom line is, up until very recently there were really only three possibilities of what this could be. And the first possibility is that it is some sort of secret U.S. tech that somehow, we have managed to keep secret even from ourselves for a long period of time. The second option is that it is some sort of foreign adversarial technology that has somehow managed to technology leapfrog ahead of our country despite having a fairly robust and comprehensive intelligence apparatus. And of course, the third option is something quite entirely different. It\u2019s a different paradigm completely.Now as of this week we now know through some of the discussions at senior-level leadership that this report has definitively stated once and for all that it\u2019s not our technology. And that\u2019s hugely important. For 30 years there has always been this undercurrent, if you will, these conspiracies that there was some sort of TR-3B program and some sort of a super special technology that has been implemented and we\u2019ve been--just been very careless about it. And I think that argument was finally put to bed this week. So that really only leaves two other options, and that\u2019s--again, it\u2019s foreign adversarial or it\u2019s something quite different. And I think we\u2019re now beginning to learn, as we\u2019ve heard from the director of national intelligence--and I can certainly tell you from my experience--that we\u2019re pretty confident that it\u2019s not Russian or Chinese technology, and there\u2019s several reason for that that, if you like, I\u2019m more than happy to go into.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: Yeah, actually, could you go into that. I know you\u2019ve explained it in previous interviews, but these sightings have happened for the past 70 years, and I know you\u2019ve said before that you didn\u2019t think it was possible for one of our foreign adversaries who have been helpful actually in providing information on this issue, would be capable of keeping something a secret for so long. Is that accurate?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: That\u2019s precisely one of the counterarguments. In fact, if I\u2019m not mistaken, as of today, we had an announcement by former Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe who said this isn\u2019t Russian technology. And as we know during Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was this five-year romance period, if you will, between the United States and Russia where we began really sharing a lot of information. And a lot of their--ironically enough, a lot of their UFO information wound up in our hands, and it turns out that they were experiencing the exact same issues from a UFO or a UAP perspective that we were. So, if you look at really the timelines here, you know, it\u2019s looking increasingly less likely that this is some sort of Russian technology.So that really leaves China. And some of these reports, you\u2019re absolutely correct, Jackie, they go back into the early 1950s, and even earlier. And so, what that says is that you have pilots, whether we\u2019re describing what we call a white flying tic-tac or a white flying butane tank in the 1950s or a white flying lozenge, if you will--they\u2019re all describing the exact same vehicle, craft, if you will, doing exactly the same thing, performing in ways well beyond our current capabilities.Story continues below advertisementAnd if you look at that from a--from a temporal perspective, from a time perspective, it simply doesn\u2019t make sense that China back in 1950 would have this beyond next generation technology, mastered it, is able to fly at will anywhere it wants on the face of the planet, and the last 70 years, despite the billions of dollars we\u2019ve put into our intelligence community infrastructure and architecture, it has--it has managed to evade us. In fact, China is a country that has stolen quite a bit--spends a lot of time stealing technology from us. And so, one has to ask the question that if really a country had this technology, would it be necessary to steal, you know, much more basic technology from another country. Furthermore, if you had this type of technology, you probably wouldn\u2019t need to invest so much in military because you had this, if you will, checkmate type technology or capability where everything else now becomes obsolete.AdvertisementAnd so, this goes to your last part of your question. So, I feel or do I believe this is, quote, \u201cextraterrestrial\u201d? Let me be very careful before I answer that by saying at the end of the day, Jackie, it doesn\u2019t matter what I think or what I believe. What matters is what the data and the facts tell us. And from that perspective, it\u2019s very important that--I\u2019ve always--I had a very simple job, and that is to collect the truth and speak the truth. That\u2019s it. Very much as an investigator, which I used to be. We applied the same level of rigor and methodologies we did at hunting terrorists and spies as we did in hunting UFOs. So, we really didn\u2019t care what these were. We were just trying to get to the bottom of what they were. And so therein lies, if you will, a little bit of our approach. We were--we were very agnostic, if you will, or objective about this topic and tried to allow the facts to lead us down a certain path. And that is really what we\u2019re doing today. What we\u2019re realizing is that the facts are painting a far more compelling picture than what we thought. In this case, you, your audience, they\u2019re the jury. So what matters is really what you think about this. And so, the hope here is that the U.S. government can provide the data and the evidence and information and then allow the American people to decide what we think this is about.I think, if I may just digress for a moment here, you mentioned something very interesting that a lot of people want to talk about and say is this extraterrestrial. And I want to just if I can for just briefly delve into where we are with modern day science. We are human beings that a lot of now people in psychology refer to as cardio-social animals. It means we look at things in extremes because for the first nine months of our existence we were in our mother\u2019s womb and we heard that binary heartbeat of our mother. And so, we tend to look at the life, if you will, in our universe in that binary way. It\u2019s either good or it\u2019s bad. It\u2019s hot or cold, black or white, up and down, and that\u2019s how we tend to judge things. But in reality, the universe and physics isn\u2019t binary. It\u2019s not binary at all. In fact, there\u2019s all sorts of options and opportunities of what this could be.Story continues below advertisementSo again, back to your question. Is it from here, or is it from out there? We don\u2019t really know. In fact, there\u2019s lots of other options on the table. It could be from--as I\u2019ve said before, it could be from outer space, inner space, or the space in between. As we begin to learn what quantum physics is and we begin to understand our place here on this little planet, we begin to realize that there\u2019s a lot of other options. We judge the universe in five fundamental senses, the ways that we perceive the universe, and that\u2019s touch, taste, hear, smell, et cetera. And if you can\u2019t--if you can\u2019t use those senses to look at something or measure it, then we really can\u2019t interact with it.AdvertisementAnd yet we know the majority of the universe around us--99 percent of it, in fact--is not perceivable. There are right now Wi-Fi signals coursing through your body. There\u2019s cosmic radiation coming in from the cosmos. There\u2019s neutrinos coming in from the sun. There\u2019s radar hitting you from the local airport. And yet these are all realities and you can\u2019t interact with it because we just don\u2019t have the tools to do so. Take a beautiful night sky, look at the stars, and you might say, wow, that\u2019s really a pretty sky. But if you now take a radio telescope and look at that same spot in the sky, all of a sudden you begin to see things that you couldn\u2019t see before. You see the ultraviolet, you see the infrared spectrum, you see nebula.So, I guess my longwinded point to all this is that we must keep all options open. If we already know that 99 percent of the universe we cannot perceive or interact with, then there may be other options here. This may not necessarily be something from outer space. In fact, this could be something as natural to our very own planet as us, we\u2019re just now at a point we\u2019re beginning to technologically be able to interact and collect data. This could be something from under the oceans. This could be something from, yes, from outer space. We really don\u2019t know. And this is why I think we really need to take a whole of government approach and look at this, because it is--day by day, it is seeming like more and more this conversation is shifting from a human technology--quite possibly, we don\u2019t know for sure yet--but to something far more profound.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: But as someone who is more steeped and in the know on the data and the facts, do you have any more narrow idea in that 99 percent of things that we are unaware of what this could be exactly?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: You know, through observations we are--we are quite convinced that we\u2019re dealing with a technology that is multigenerational, several generations ahead of what we consider next generation technology, so what we would consider beyond next generation technology. Something that could be anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us. And for us, I think it\u2019s when you\u2019re looking at the observations and these things, how they can outperform frankly anything that we have in our inventory and we\u2019re pretty certain anything that our foreign adversaries have in their inventory, then, yes, obviously as human beings we tend to go down that rabbit hole of speculation.I want to be very careful that I don\u2019t offer my opinion in an unqualified manner. I\u2019ve always stated this is exactly why we need a UAP taskforce. In fact, this is why we need a much bigger, whole of government enduring capability, because at the end of the day we don\u2019t know what we\u2019re dealing with. And frankly, all options have to be on the table until they\u2019re no longer on the table.Story continues below advertisementI could offer you my opinion right now, but, Jackie, in all honesty it would probably be a bit of disservice because we frankly don\u2019t have enough information yet. We\u2019re just now getting to the point as a government, as a society that we are accepting the reality that this is real, whatever it is. I think--I think we need to do a little bit more. And so out of respect to you and your journalistic integrity and to your audience, I\u2019m probably going to refrain from offering more of my opinion on that particular aspect only because the one thing I\u2019ve learned in intelligence is you can be absolutely sure of something and still be absolutely wrong, and I don\u2019t want to mislead anybody.AdvertisementMS. ALEMANY: I\u2019m going to be a little bit of a pest here, and I apologize for my desire for a more black and white answer.MR. ELIZONDO: Sure.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: But in common parlance, I guess, is that something that you would refer to as an alien or a time traveler. Is there any sort of way you could, you know, more specifically [audio distortion]?MR. ELIZONDO: Sure, so, yeah, I\u2019ve said before this is something--and I guess I may have just said it again--but that this could be something from outer space, inner space, or frankly the space in between. There\u2019s a lot of options out there. This could be something that is extra hyper dimensional. Now I don\u2019t mean extradimensional in a woo-woo sense. I mean, extradimensional in a quantum physics sense. We know that the universe is full of shortcuts and loopholes.AdvertisementWe know--so let me if I may backtrack for just a moment, it took the Renaissance to come to the point where we understand Newtonian physics. We understand what gravity looks like. We still don\u2019t quite understand what it is yet, but we understand what it looks like, and we understand force equal mass times acceleration, and whatnot. So, we had these really elegant solutions for our observations of the--of the natural world. And then it took a couple hundred years, but along comes some cat with crazy hair we call Einstein who now introduces the notion of relativity. It kind of upends really science and turns it 180 degrees and says, well, actually there\u2019s a thing called spacetime, and space and time are actually connected, and they\u2019re also stretchable and compressible. And as bizarre as that may be, that is precisely what we\u2019re seeing. And so, spacetime can be warped based upon mass or a lot of energy.And then of course 40-some years ago we really start getting into this whole other paradigm of science, and it's quantum physics. And someone once described it as you have this box sitting on the ground, and in walks a dog, and all of a sudden two cats walk out. And as crazy as that may seem, that\u2019s precisely what we\u2019re seeing in these observations with quantum physics, proverbially speaking of course. So, it doesn\u2019t make sense, and yet there\u2019s this weird duality. Maybe the universe, the speed of light although may be the universal speed limit, there may be some shortcuts and offramps in our--in our--in this understanding of our universe.So, we are--we are just now scratching the surface of understanding what type of science it may take to do what we are seeing with these vehicles. There\u2019s five specific observables associated with these--with these UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, that really separate them from the rest of anything that we would consider terrestrial aircraft or manned aircraft or some type of human-based technology. And again, I want to be careful not to go too far out on the limb because that\u2019s where the speculation starts, and that\u2019s also where the danger starts, because we simply don\u2019t know yet.MS. ALEMANY: Well, and I guess the other key question here is what do you think the likelihood is that the U.S. government is actually going to confirm anything?[Pause]MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, I think I lost you, but I\u2019m going to go ahead and try to answer the best I can. I think you were asking me what the likelihood is of the U.S. government going ahead and confirming anything in this 180-day report. So let me see if I can go ahead and answer that. Hopefully that was your question because I seem to have lost signal.So, the 180-day report is, first of all, not substantial enough time to do a comprehensive report. In fact, I\u2019ve told people it takes longer to remodel a household kitchen sometimes than it does to conduct one of these 180-day reports.Secondly, there\u2019s the other issue here that we had COVID and this pandemic that kept a lot of people home for most of that time.And then thirdly, I think if this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that has happened to leapfrog ahead of us for the last seven years, Jackie, we\u2019re talking about one of the greatest intelligence failures this country has ever seen, probably eclipsing 9/11 by an order of magnitude. It took us nearly three years to come up with a 9/11 Commission report. If this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that did happen to technologically leapfrog us, 180 days I don\u2019t think is going to be sufficient.I think what we can expect the report to say is something like this. There are about 100 and some odd cases out there that are compelling enough that they are definitely displaying some sort of capability, technology that we don\u2019t have. Secondly, we don\u2019t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time we have no evidence to suggest that they\u2019re not. And so, this report will probably be a bit of a placeholder. The one thing we know for sure at this point is that it\u2019s not U.S. secret technology. So that takes part of the 30-year argument that this is some sort of secret Air Force, if you will, weapon platform being tested. That\u2019s now off the table. And so now we can focus more, I think, on the foreign adversarial perspective, or hopefully maybe something quite frankly sufficiently different than anything that we had--we had possibly considered before.MS. ALEMANY: And when we\u2019re actually talking about this as a national security threat or as a foreign adversarial threat as you just mentioned, you know, I think we need to talk about China here, which the United States government also views as a national security threat. And China is making big investments at the moment to identify extraterrestrial life as a part of their military mission. There\u2019s discussion within the community about whether it\u2019s better for us to lead the way with confirmation versus China doing so and possibly being dishonest about what they\u2019ve found--essentially a new modern-day space race. Do you think, in your opinion, does it matter which national takes the lead on confirming the presence of extraterrestrial life and who gets to the bottom of this answer first?MR. ELIZONDO: I think--well, you\u2019re right, Jackie. And not only that, they\u2019ve just announced they\u2019ve established a new UAP taskforce similar to ours and they\u2019re using artificial intelligence to do this. We also know that there\u2019s a play by them to try to lead this conversation at the United Nations. That--for me, it\u2019s a multifaceted question you\u2019re asking me. There\u2019s two parts of me, and I\u2019m a little bit I guess you\u2019d say schizophrenic about the response. There is the national security side of me that has said always we have these adversaries, these traditional adversaries, and they\u2019re going to steal everything they can from us. We should--don\u2019t trust them. Try to cooperate, but don\u2019t trust them.But then there\u2019s the other side, which is the non-governmental side of me that tends to be a little bit more optimistic. And perhaps this is an opportunity for our countries, rather than to find disagreement, maybe to find some sort of common ground. Maybe this may be a new renaissance. Maybe this is an opportunity for our countries to work together on a common good that involves all of humanity. Maybe this is like we did in the Cold War where we started working with the Russians to, you know, this era of cooperation where we start meeting each other in space. I would certainly hope the latter is what happens, but I don\u2019t know. You know, that\u2019s a great question, because what I hope for may be different than what I expect. And that still needs to be reconciled. So, I don\u2019t know if I answered your question appropriately, but that\u2019s how I feel.I would love nothing more than an opportunity to work with our adversaries, our conventional adversaries--Russia, China, let\u2019s get everybody to the table. I believe this is a topic that involves all of humanity. I think it affects all of us equally and yet differently, depending on our philosophical, sociological and theological belief systems. So, I--you know, I guess maybe--maybe guess the kid in me wants this to be an opportunity for us to work together. But I also have a very realistic side, because I\u2019ve seen what those countries are capable of doing, and you know, I--it would have to take a lot of trust for us to do that.MS. ALEMANY: And several of these UFO sightings have been above secret nuclear weapons facilities. Almost every major nuclear power across the globe really has reported and declassified these sightings. You have talked extensively about the connection here, which might be helpful I think for some people to hear in advance of my next question, which is whether or not the U.S. government has considered utilizing nuclear-powered naval fleets to lure these kinds of things to further study them.MR. ELIZONDO: Wow. So first of all, Jackie, thank you for asking such a thoughtful question. Obviously, you\u2019ve done some homework. And I also want to, by the way, thank you as a journalist for following this topic, because I know there\u2019s a lot of risk involved, and I also know there\u2019s been traditionally a lot of stigma and taboo associated with it. So, I want to congratulate you for your courage and thank you and your audience for at least having this conversation.But secondly, yes, that is--that is one of the concerns we have from a national security perspective, that there does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sightings and our nuclear technology with nuclear propulsion, nuclear power generation, or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, those same observations have been seen overseas in other countries. They too have had the same incidents. So that tells us this is a global issue.Now in this country we\u2019ve had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities. And I think to some they would probably say, well, that\u2019s a sign that whatever this is, is something that is peaceful. But in the same context, we also have data suggesting that in other countries these things have interfered with their nuclear technology and actually turned them on, put them online. So that is equally, for me, just as concerning. I think that there is certainly at this point enough data to demonstrate there is an interest in our nuclear technology, a potential to even interfere with that nuclear technology. And when you look at all these naval ships out there--let\u2019s take the Nimitz battle carrier fleet for example--in some cases you\u2019re talking about a nuclear footprint probably bigger than most cities. You have a nuclear-powered carrier with aircraft on board that--and then you have nuclear-powered destroyers. You have nuclear-powered submarines, some of those with nuclear weapons on board, or nuclear--certainly nuclear capabilities. I\u2019ll just say that. So, I think--I think, yeah, it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that maybe there is an increased interest in our capabilities as it relates to our nuclear technology. And the Navy is certainly not immune to that.MS. ALEMANY: [Inaudible]MR. ELIZONDO: Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, I think the--there\u2019s two--there\u2019s two congruencies that we see. We see a--we see an interest in our nuclear capabilities, and then we have this really bizarre what--I don\u2019t know if you call it an interest, but there seems to be a connection with water, and these things have a tendency to be seen in and around water, which kind of leads to one of the observables that we\u2019ve had. There\u2019s five distinct observables that set this technology, as I mentioned earlier, aside from everything we have in our inventory.The first is hypersonic velocity. The ability to change directions instantly. And when I say instantly, I mean human beings can withstand about 9 g forces or some of our best aircraft can withstand about 16 Gs. These things are doing 3-, 4-, 600 Gs in midflight.Then there\u2019s hypersonic velocity. That is speeds that by definition are Mach 5 or above, very, very fast. We do have some technology. You mentioned Russian hypersonic and things like that. You know, there are technologies that can go that fast, but then again, you don\u2019t expect a hypersonic aircraft to do a 90-degree turn. To put that into context, our SR-71 Blackbird when at 3,200 miles an hour wants to take a right-hand turn, it takes roughly half the state of Ohio to do it. You don\u2019t expect it to just kind of do this. And that\u2019s precisely what we\u2019re seeing.And then the third observable is a bit like cloaking. We call it low observability.But the fourth observable is what we were talking about, and that is trans medium travel and water. The ability for an object to fly not only in our atmosphere, low and high altitudes, but also potentially in a vacuum environment like space and even underwater. Now we do have vehicles that can do that. We have, for example, a seaplane. A seaplane is a plane that can fly, and it can float on the water. But when you look at it, it\u2019s neither really a very good aircraft or a boat because it\u2019s a design compromise. And yet what we are seeing are objects that can operate in all these domains or all these environments, seemingly without any type of performance compromise.And so why are we seeing these things around--in and around water is something that we\u2019re really--we\u2019re really kind of scratching our heads with, because we\u2019ve seen these things. They\u2019ve been recorded not only in our atmosphere but there\u2019s data to suggest that they\u2019ve also been tracked by some of our capabilities underwater as well and being able to perform in ways that frankly exceed anything that we know on the planet right now.MS. ALEMANY: And, Lue, unfortunately we only have time for one more question. But I should make it clear to our viewers that you actually signed an NDA when you were working on this at the Pentagon. Is there any scenario that would cause you to break that NDA if you feel like, for example, this report obfuscates or peddles disinformation about what the findings actually are here?MR. ELIZONDO: No, ma\u2019am. I will now violate my non-disclosure agreement with the government. I still maintain a security clearance. And the reason is that not because it\u2019s my loyalty to the government, because it\u2019s my loyalty to the American people. That contract I signed those many years ago was a promise to the American people that I would never violate their trust, period. And I can\u2019t violate their trust in order to gain their trust. It doesn\u2019t work that way. So, what I\u2019s going to continue to do is doing what I\u2019m doing now and pushing for this disclosure, pushing for the information that I know to be true because I saw it and so did my colleagues, continue to have this conversation the way I can.And I\u2019ll tell you, if it looks like the Pentagon continues to obfuscate, I have made it clear before that there\u2019s a possibility I would consider running for some sort of congressional office. I don\u2019t want to do that. I\u2019m not a politician. I don\u2019t have the political savvy. But if I have to put my boots back on in order to make sure this conversation is had and ultimately allow the American people to have this conversation amongst themselves, then I will do what\u2019s necessary short of violating my non-disclosure agreement and violating my trust with the American people.MS. ALEMANY: Well, we hope you\u2019ll come to us if and when you make that decision to run for office. Thank you so much for joining us today, Lue, and thanks for your work on all this.MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, thank you sincerely to you and your audience. You\u2019ve been wonderful. Any time.MS. ALEMANY: And everyone, I\u2019m going to be back at 4:30 for a special program, Life After Vaccines: The Future of Travel and Live Events, with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and Kayak CEO Steve Hafner. Thanks for joining us.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7625",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/06/08/transcript-ufos-national-security-with-luis-elizondo-former-director-advanced-aerospace-threat-identification-program/",
        "text": "MS. ALEMANY: [In progress] --UFOs or as it\u2019s officially identified--officially called, unidentified aerial phenomenon, UAPs. While we\u2019re waiting for the unclassified report from Congress on the matter, our guest, Lue Elizondo, the former director for AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, has some answers. So excited to welcome you today, Lue. Thanks for joining us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, it is my sincere pleasure to be with you and your audience today. Thank you very much for having me.MS. ALEMANY: So, I want to take us back for a second and set the table for this conversation. How exactly did you get signed in the first place to investigate UFOs for the intelligence community?Story continues below advertisementMR. ELIZONDO: Well, Jackie, quite frankly, I was voluntold. In essence I had some--I guess some prerequisite experience that they were looking for. At the time, the organization was fairly new, and they were looking for someone to create a counterintelligence and security portfolio. And I guess because of some of my background running investigations, counterintelligence investigations, and some of my background in technology protection, specifically with aerospace systems, that probably, I suspect, was a fairly lucrative skillset that they were looking for to create this sub portfolio under AATIP. And that\u2019s how I got into the program. I entered the program in 2008. I was asked by its director to come on board and establish this program, and then in 2010 was when I was asked to take over the effort.AdvertisementMS. ALEMANY: And I\u2019m sure many of you are well aware of this. If you are tuning in, you\u2019ve probably watched the documentary that came out this year, \"The Phenomenon.\" Senator Harry Reid, which this doc outlines, got the program funded. Did you brief him in Congress on these unexplained pilot sightings when you were running the program?MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, we provide many briefings, mostly through DOD and intelligence community leadership. That information was also provided to times to the staffers and of course our elected officials. It\u2019s very important that when you\u2019re working in a national security construct that you try to follow the chain of command as much as possible. So, a lot of my briefings were really to more senior level folks in the Department of Defense and within our intelligence architecture. But there were times, yes, that we were--we would be asked to brief other officials, particularly in the legislative branch and in the executive branch as well.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: And right now, everyone in Washington and really a lot of people around this country are hotly anticipating this unclassified government report on aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots. It\u2019s expected to be delivered to the Senate Intelligence community by the director of national intelligence, hopefully by June 25th. The New York Times reported that senior administration officials who were briefed on the findings said that the unusual movements witnessed by pilots did not originate from American military or advanced U.S. government technology, but that\u2019s really about the only conclusive finding that has been so far teased from the report. What do you think the likelihood that aerial phenomena are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: Well, Jackie, that\u2019s really the question, isn\u2019t it? The bottom line is, up until very recently there were really only three possibilities of what this could be. And the first possibility is that it is some sort of secret U.S. tech that somehow, we have managed to keep secret even from ourselves for a long period of time. The second option is that it is some sort of foreign adversarial technology that has somehow managed to technology leapfrog ahead of our country despite having a fairly robust and comprehensive intelligence apparatus. And of course, the third option is something quite entirely different. It\u2019s a different paradigm completely.Now as of this week we now know through some of the discussions at senior-level leadership that this report has definitively stated once and for all that it\u2019s not our technology. And that\u2019s hugely important. For 30 years there has always been this undercurrent, if you will, these conspiracies that there was some sort of TR-3B program and some sort of a super special technology that has been implemented and we\u2019ve been--just been very careless about it. And I think that argument was finally put to bed this week. So that really only leaves two other options, and that\u2019s--again, it\u2019s foreign adversarial or it\u2019s something quite different. And I think we\u2019re now beginning to learn, as we\u2019ve heard from the director of national intelligence--and I can certainly tell you from my experience--that we\u2019re pretty confident that it\u2019s not Russian or Chinese technology, and there\u2019s several reason for that that, if you like, I\u2019m more than happy to go into.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: Yeah, actually, could you go into that. I know you\u2019ve explained it in previous interviews, but these sightings have happened for the past 70 years, and I know you\u2019ve said before that you didn\u2019t think it was possible for one of our foreign adversaries who have been helpful actually in providing information on this issue, would be capable of keeping something a secret for so long. Is that accurate?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: That\u2019s precisely one of the counterarguments. In fact, if I\u2019m not mistaken, as of today, we had an announcement by former Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe who said this isn\u2019t Russian technology. And as we know during Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was this five-year romance period, if you will, between the United States and Russia where we began really sharing a lot of information. And a lot of their--ironically enough, a lot of their UFO information wound up in our hands, and it turns out that they were experiencing the exact same issues from a UFO or a UAP perspective that we were. So, if you look at really the timelines here, you know, it\u2019s looking increasingly less likely that this is some sort of Russian technology.So that really leaves China. And some of these reports, you\u2019re absolutely correct, Jackie, they go back into the early 1950s, and even earlier. And so, what that says is that you have pilots, whether we\u2019re describing what we call a white flying tic-tac or a white flying butane tank in the 1950s or a white flying lozenge, if you will--they\u2019re all describing the exact same vehicle, craft, if you will, doing exactly the same thing, performing in ways well beyond our current capabilities.Story continues below advertisementAnd if you look at that from a--from a temporal perspective, from a time perspective, it simply doesn\u2019t make sense that China back in 1950 would have this beyond next generation technology, mastered it, is able to fly at will anywhere it wants on the face of the planet, and the last 70 years, despite the billions of dollars we\u2019ve put into our intelligence community infrastructure and architecture, it has--it has managed to evade us. In fact, China is a country that has stolen quite a bit--spends a lot of time stealing technology from us. And so, one has to ask the question that if really a country had this technology, would it be necessary to steal, you know, much more basic technology from another country. Furthermore, if you had this type of technology, you probably wouldn\u2019t need to invest so much in military because you had this, if you will, checkmate type technology or capability where everything else now becomes obsolete.AdvertisementAnd so, this goes to your last part of your question. So, I feel or do I believe this is, quote, \u201cextraterrestrial\u201d? Let me be very careful before I answer that by saying at the end of the day, Jackie, it doesn\u2019t matter what I think or what I believe. What matters is what the data and the facts tell us. And from that perspective, it\u2019s very important that--I\u2019ve always--I had a very simple job, and that is to collect the truth and speak the truth. That\u2019s it. Very much as an investigator, which I used to be. We applied the same level of rigor and methodologies we did at hunting terrorists and spies as we did in hunting UFOs. So, we really didn\u2019t care what these were. We were just trying to get to the bottom of what they were. And so therein lies, if you will, a little bit of our approach. We were--we were very agnostic, if you will, or objective about this topic and tried to allow the facts to lead us down a certain path. And that is really what we\u2019re doing today. What we\u2019re realizing is that the facts are painting a far more compelling picture than what we thought. In this case, you, your audience, they\u2019re the jury. So what matters is really what you think about this. And so, the hope here is that the U.S. government can provide the data and the evidence and information and then allow the American people to decide what we think this is about.I think, if I may just digress for a moment here, you mentioned something very interesting that a lot of people want to talk about and say is this extraterrestrial. And I want to just if I can for just briefly delve into where we are with modern day science. We are human beings that a lot of now people in psychology refer to as cardio-social animals. It means we look at things in extremes because for the first nine months of our existence we were in our mother\u2019s womb and we heard that binary heartbeat of our mother. And so, we tend to look at the life, if you will, in our universe in that binary way. It\u2019s either good or it\u2019s bad. It\u2019s hot or cold, black or white, up and down, and that\u2019s how we tend to judge things. But in reality, the universe and physics isn\u2019t binary. It\u2019s not binary at all. In fact, there\u2019s all sorts of options and opportunities of what this could be.Story continues below advertisementSo again, back to your question. Is it from here, or is it from out there? We don\u2019t really know. In fact, there\u2019s lots of other options on the table. It could be from--as I\u2019ve said before, it could be from outer space, inner space, or the space in between. As we begin to learn what quantum physics is and we begin to understand our place here on this little planet, we begin to realize that there\u2019s a lot of other options. We judge the universe in five fundamental senses, the ways that we perceive the universe, and that\u2019s touch, taste, hear, smell, et cetera. And if you can\u2019t--if you can\u2019t use those senses to look at something or measure it, then we really can\u2019t interact with it.AdvertisementAnd yet we know the majority of the universe around us--99 percent of it, in fact--is not perceivable. There are right now Wi-Fi signals coursing through your body. There\u2019s cosmic radiation coming in from the cosmos. There\u2019s neutrinos coming in from the sun. There\u2019s radar hitting you from the local airport. And yet these are all realities and you can\u2019t interact with it because we just don\u2019t have the tools to do so. Take a beautiful night sky, look at the stars, and you might say, wow, that\u2019s really a pretty sky. But if you now take a radio telescope and look at that same spot in the sky, all of a sudden you begin to see things that you couldn\u2019t see before. You see the ultraviolet, you see the infrared spectrum, you see nebula.So, I guess my longwinded point to all this is that we must keep all options open. If we already know that 99 percent of the universe we cannot perceive or interact with, then there may be other options here. This may not necessarily be something from outer space. In fact, this could be something as natural to our very own planet as us, we\u2019re just now at a point we\u2019re beginning to technologically be able to interact and collect data. This could be something from under the oceans. This could be something from, yes, from outer space. We really don\u2019t know. And this is why I think we really need to take a whole of government approach and look at this, because it is--day by day, it is seeming like more and more this conversation is shifting from a human technology--quite possibly, we don\u2019t know for sure yet--but to something far more profound.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: But as someone who is more steeped and in the know on the data and the facts, do you have any more narrow idea in that 99 percent of things that we are unaware of what this could be exactly?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: You know, through observations we are--we are quite convinced that we\u2019re dealing with a technology that is multigenerational, several generations ahead of what we consider next generation technology, so what we would consider beyond next generation technology. Something that could be anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us. And for us, I think it\u2019s when you\u2019re looking at the observations and these things, how they can outperform frankly anything that we have in our inventory and we\u2019re pretty certain anything that our foreign adversaries have in their inventory, then, yes, obviously as human beings we tend to go down that rabbit hole of speculation.I want to be very careful that I don\u2019t offer my opinion in an unqualified manner. I\u2019ve always stated this is exactly why we need a UAP taskforce. In fact, this is why we need a much bigger, whole of government enduring capability, because at the end of the day we don\u2019t know what we\u2019re dealing with. And frankly, all options have to be on the table until they\u2019re no longer on the table.Story continues below advertisementI could offer you my opinion right now, but, Jackie, in all honesty it would probably be a bit of disservice because we frankly don\u2019t have enough information yet. We\u2019re just now getting to the point as a government, as a society that we are accepting the reality that this is real, whatever it is. I think--I think we need to do a little bit more. And so out of respect to you and your journalistic integrity and to your audience, I\u2019m probably going to refrain from offering more of my opinion on that particular aspect only because the one thing I\u2019ve learned in intelligence is you can be absolutely sure of something and still be absolutely wrong, and I don\u2019t want to mislead anybody.AdvertisementMS. ALEMANY: I\u2019m going to be a little bit of a pest here, and I apologize for my desire for a more black and white answer.MR. ELIZONDO: Sure.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: But in common parlance, I guess, is that something that you would refer to as an alien or a time traveler. Is there any sort of way you could, you know, more specifically [audio distortion]?MR. ELIZONDO: Sure, so, yeah, I\u2019ve said before this is something--and I guess I may have just said it again--but that this could be something from outer space, inner space, or frankly the space in between. There\u2019s a lot of options out there. This could be something that is extra hyper dimensional. Now I don\u2019t mean extradimensional in a woo-woo sense. I mean, extradimensional in a quantum physics sense. We know that the universe is full of shortcuts and loopholes.AdvertisementWe know--so let me if I may backtrack for just a moment, it took the Renaissance to come to the point where we understand Newtonian physics. We understand what gravity looks like. We still don\u2019t quite understand what it is yet, but we understand what it looks like, and we understand force equal mass times acceleration, and whatnot. So, we had these really elegant solutions for our observations of the--of the natural world. And then it took a couple hundred years, but along comes some cat with crazy hair we call Einstein who now introduces the notion of relativity. It kind of upends really science and turns it 180 degrees and says, well, actually there\u2019s a thing called spacetime, and space and time are actually connected, and they\u2019re also stretchable and compressible. And as bizarre as that may be, that is precisely what we\u2019re seeing. And so, spacetime can be warped based upon mass or a lot of energy.And then of course 40-some years ago we really start getting into this whole other paradigm of science, and it's quantum physics. And someone once described it as you have this box sitting on the ground, and in walks a dog, and all of a sudden two cats walk out. And as crazy as that may seem, that\u2019s precisely what we\u2019re seeing in these observations with quantum physics, proverbially speaking of course. So, it doesn\u2019t make sense, and yet there\u2019s this weird duality. Maybe the universe, the speed of light although may be the universal speed limit, there may be some shortcuts and offramps in our--in our--in this understanding of our universe.So, we are--we are just now scratching the surface of understanding what type of science it may take to do what we are seeing with these vehicles. There\u2019s five specific observables associated with these--with these UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, that really separate them from the rest of anything that we would consider terrestrial aircraft or manned aircraft or some type of human-based technology. And again, I want to be careful not to go too far out on the limb because that\u2019s where the speculation starts, and that\u2019s also where the danger starts, because we simply don\u2019t know yet.MS. ALEMANY: Well, and I guess the other key question here is what do you think the likelihood is that the U.S. government is actually going to confirm anything?[Pause]MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, I think I lost you, but I\u2019m going to go ahead and try to answer the best I can. I think you were asking me what the likelihood is of the U.S. government going ahead and confirming anything in this 180-day report. So let me see if I can go ahead and answer that. Hopefully that was your question because I seem to have lost signal.So, the 180-day report is, first of all, not substantial enough time to do a comprehensive report. In fact, I\u2019ve told people it takes longer to remodel a household kitchen sometimes than it does to conduct one of these 180-day reports.Secondly, there\u2019s the other issue here that we had COVID and this pandemic that kept a lot of people home for most of that time.And then thirdly, I think if this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that has happened to leapfrog ahead of us for the last seven years, Jackie, we\u2019re talking about one of the greatest intelligence failures this country has ever seen, probably eclipsing 9/11 by an order of magnitude. It took us nearly three years to come up with a 9/11 Commission report. If this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that did happen to technologically leapfrog us, 180 days I don\u2019t think is going to be sufficient.I think what we can expect the report to say is something like this. There are about 100 and some odd cases out there that are compelling enough that they are definitely displaying some sort of capability, technology that we don\u2019t have. Secondly, we don\u2019t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time we have no evidence to suggest that they\u2019re not. And so, this report will probably be a bit of a placeholder. The one thing we know for sure at this point is that it\u2019s not U.S. secret technology. So that takes part of the 30-year argument that this is some sort of secret Air Force, if you will, weapon platform being tested. That\u2019s now off the table. And so now we can focus more, I think, on the foreign adversarial perspective, or hopefully maybe something quite frankly sufficiently different than anything that we had--we had possibly considered before.MS. ALEMANY: And when we\u2019re actually talking about this as a national security threat or as a foreign adversarial threat as you just mentioned, you know, I think we need to talk about China here, which the United States government also views as a national security threat. And China is making big investments at the moment to identify extraterrestrial life as a part of their military mission. There\u2019s discussion within the community about whether it\u2019s better for us to lead the way with confirmation versus China doing so and possibly being dishonest about what they\u2019ve found--essentially a new modern-day space race. Do you think, in your opinion, does it matter which national takes the lead on confirming the presence of extraterrestrial life and who gets to the bottom of this answer first?MR. ELIZONDO: I think--well, you\u2019re right, Jackie. And not only that, they\u2019ve just announced they\u2019ve established a new UAP taskforce similar to ours and they\u2019re using artificial intelligence to do this. We also know that there\u2019s a play by them to try to lead this conversation at the United Nations. That--for me, it\u2019s a multifaceted question you\u2019re asking me. There\u2019s two parts of me, and I\u2019m a little bit I guess you\u2019d say schizophrenic about the response. There is the national security side of me that has said always we have these adversaries, these traditional adversaries, and they\u2019re going to steal everything they can from us. We should--don\u2019t trust them. Try to cooperate, but don\u2019t trust them.But then there\u2019s the other side, which is the non-governmental side of me that tends to be a little bit more optimistic. And perhaps this is an opportunity for our countries, rather than to find disagreement, maybe to find some sort of common ground. Maybe this may be a new renaissance. Maybe this is an opportunity for our countries to work together on a common good that involves all of humanity. Maybe this is like we did in the Cold War where we started working with the Russians to, you know, this era of cooperation where we start meeting each other in space. I would certainly hope the latter is what happens, but I don\u2019t know. You know, that\u2019s a great question, because what I hope for may be different than what I expect. And that still needs to be reconciled. So, I don\u2019t know if I answered your question appropriately, but that\u2019s how I feel.I would love nothing more than an opportunity to work with our adversaries, our conventional adversaries--Russia, China, let\u2019s get everybody to the table. I believe this is a topic that involves all of humanity. I think it affects all of us equally and yet differently, depending on our philosophical, sociological and theological belief systems. So, I--you know, I guess maybe--maybe guess the kid in me wants this to be an opportunity for us to work together. But I also have a very realistic side, because I\u2019ve seen what those countries are capable of doing, and you know, I--it would have to take a lot of trust for us to do that.MS. ALEMANY: And several of these UFO sightings have been above secret nuclear weapons facilities. Almost every major nuclear power across the globe really has reported and declassified these sightings. You have talked extensively about the connection here, which might be helpful I think for some people to hear in advance of my next question, which is whether or not the U.S. government has considered utilizing nuclear-powered naval fleets to lure these kinds of things to further study them.MR. ELIZONDO: Wow. So first of all, Jackie, thank you for asking such a thoughtful question. Obviously, you\u2019ve done some homework. And I also want to, by the way, thank you as a journalist for following this topic, because I know there\u2019s a lot of risk involved, and I also know there\u2019s been traditionally a lot of stigma and taboo associated with it. So, I want to congratulate you for your courage and thank you and your audience for at least having this conversation.But secondly, yes, that is--that is one of the concerns we have from a national security perspective, that there does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sightings and our nuclear technology with nuclear propulsion, nuclear power generation, or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, those same observations have been seen overseas in other countries. They too have had the same incidents. So that tells us this is a global issue.Now in this country we\u2019ve had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities. And I think to some they would probably say, well, that\u2019s a sign that whatever this is, is something that is peaceful. But in the same context, we also have data suggesting that in other countries these things have interfered with their nuclear technology and actually turned them on, put them online. So that is equally, for me, just as concerning. I think that there is certainly at this point enough data to demonstrate there is an interest in our nuclear technology, a potential to even interfere with that nuclear technology. And when you look at all these naval ships out there--let\u2019s take the Nimitz battle carrier fleet for example--in some cases you\u2019re talking about a nuclear footprint probably bigger than most cities. You have a nuclear-powered carrier with aircraft on board that--and then you have nuclear-powered destroyers. You have nuclear-powered submarines, some of those with nuclear weapons on board, or nuclear--certainly nuclear capabilities. I\u2019ll just say that. So, I think--I think, yeah, it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that maybe there is an increased interest in our capabilities as it relates to our nuclear technology. And the Navy is certainly not immune to that.MS. ALEMANY: [Inaudible]MR. ELIZONDO: Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, I think the--there\u2019s two--there\u2019s two congruencies that we see. We see a--we see an interest in our nuclear capabilities, and then we have this really bizarre what--I don\u2019t know if you call it an interest, but there seems to be a connection with water, and these things have a tendency to be seen in and around water, which kind of leads to one of the observables that we\u2019ve had. There\u2019s five distinct observables that set this technology, as I mentioned earlier, aside from everything we have in our inventory.The first is hypersonic velocity. The ability to change directions instantly. And when I say instantly, I mean human beings can withstand about 9 g forces or some of our best aircraft can withstand about 16 Gs. These things are doing 3-, 4-, 600 Gs in midflight.Then there\u2019s hypersonic velocity. That is speeds that by definition are Mach 5 or above, very, very fast. We do have some technology. You mentioned Russian hypersonic and things like that. You know, there are technologies that can go that fast, but then again, you don\u2019t expect a hypersonic aircraft to do a 90-degree turn. To put that into context, our SR-71 Blackbird when at 3,200 miles an hour wants to take a right-hand turn, it takes roughly half the state of Ohio to do it. You don\u2019t expect it to just kind of do this. And that\u2019s precisely what we\u2019re seeing.And then the third observable is a bit like cloaking. We call it low observability.But the fourth observable is what we were talking about, and that is trans medium travel and water. The ability for an object to fly not only in our atmosphere, low and high altitudes, but also potentially in a vacuum environment like space and even underwater. Now we do have vehicles that can do that. We have, for example, a seaplane. A seaplane is a plane that can fly, and it can float on the water. But when you look at it, it\u2019s neither really a very good aircraft or a boat because it\u2019s a design compromise. And yet what we are seeing are objects that can operate in all these domains or all these environments, seemingly without any type of performance compromise.And so why are we seeing these things around--in and around water is something that we\u2019re really--we\u2019re really kind of scratching our heads with, because we\u2019ve seen these things. They\u2019ve been recorded not only in our atmosphere but there\u2019s data to suggest that they\u2019ve also been tracked by some of our capabilities underwater as well and being able to perform in ways that frankly exceed anything that we know on the planet right now.MS. ALEMANY: And, Lue, unfortunately we only have time for one more question. But I should make it clear to our viewers that you actually signed an NDA when you were working on this at the Pentagon. Is there any scenario that would cause you to break that NDA if you feel like, for example, this report obfuscates or peddles disinformation about what the findings actually are here?MR. ELIZONDO: No, ma\u2019am. I will now violate my non-disclosure agreement with the government. I still maintain a security clearance. And the reason is that not because it\u2019s my loyalty to the government, because it\u2019s my loyalty to the American people. That contract I signed those many years ago was a promise to the American people that I would never violate their trust, period. And I can\u2019t violate their trust in order to gain their trust. It doesn\u2019t work that way. So, what I\u2019s going to continue to do is doing what I\u2019m doing now and pushing for this disclosure, pushing for the information that I know to be true because I saw it and so did my colleagues, continue to have this conversation the way I can.And I\u2019ll tell you, if it looks like the Pentagon continues to obfuscate, I have made it clear before that there\u2019s a possibility I would consider running for some sort of congressional office. I don\u2019t want to do that. I\u2019m not a politician. I don\u2019t have the political savvy. But if I have to put my boots back on in order to make sure this conversation is had and ultimately allow the American people to have this conversation amongst themselves, then I will do what\u2019s necessary short of violating my non-disclosure agreement and violating my trust with the American people.MS. ALEMANY: Well, we hope you\u2019ll come to us if and when you make that decision to run for office. Thank you so much for joining us today, Lue, and thanks for your work on all this.MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, thank you sincerely to you and your audience. You\u2019ve been wonderful. Any time.MS. ALEMANY: And everyone, I\u2019m going to be back at 4:30 for a special program, Life After Vaccines: The Future of Travel and Live Events, with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and Kayak CEO Steve Hafner. Thanks for joining us.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7626",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/06/08/transcript-ufos-national-security-with-luis-elizondo-former-director-advanced-aerospace-threat-identification-program/",
        "text": "MS. ALEMANY: [In progress] --UFOs or as it\u2019s officially identified--officially called, unidentified aerial phenomenon, UAPs. While we\u2019re waiting for the unclassified report from Congress on the matter, our guest, Lue Elizondo, the former director for AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, has some answers. So excited to welcome you today, Lue. Thanks for joining us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, it is my sincere pleasure to be with you and your audience today. Thank you very much for having me.MS. ALEMANY: So, I want to take us back for a second and set the table for this conversation. How exactly did you get signed in the first place to investigate UFOs for the intelligence community?Story continues below advertisementMR. ELIZONDO: Well, Jackie, quite frankly, I was voluntold. In essence I had some--I guess some prerequisite experience that they were looking for. At the time, the organization was fairly new, and they were looking for someone to create a counterintelligence and security portfolio. And I guess because of some of my background running investigations, counterintelligence investigations, and some of my background in technology protection, specifically with aerospace systems, that probably, I suspect, was a fairly lucrative skillset that they were looking for to create this sub portfolio under AATIP. And that\u2019s how I got into the program. I entered the program in 2008. I was asked by its director to come on board and establish this program, and then in 2010 was when I was asked to take over the effort.AdvertisementMS. ALEMANY: And I\u2019m sure many of you are well aware of this. If you are tuning in, you\u2019ve probably watched the documentary that came out this year, \"The Phenomenon.\" Senator Harry Reid, which this doc outlines, got the program funded. Did you brief him in Congress on these unexplained pilot sightings when you were running the program?MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, we provide many briefings, mostly through DOD and intelligence community leadership. That information was also provided to times to the staffers and of course our elected officials. It\u2019s very important that when you\u2019re working in a national security construct that you try to follow the chain of command as much as possible. So, a lot of my briefings were really to more senior level folks in the Department of Defense and within our intelligence architecture. But there were times, yes, that we were--we would be asked to brief other officials, particularly in the legislative branch and in the executive branch as well.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: And right now, everyone in Washington and really a lot of people around this country are hotly anticipating this unclassified government report on aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots. It\u2019s expected to be delivered to the Senate Intelligence community by the director of national intelligence, hopefully by June 25th. The New York Times reported that senior administration officials who were briefed on the findings said that the unusual movements witnessed by pilots did not originate from American military or advanced U.S. government technology, but that\u2019s really about the only conclusive finding that has been so far teased from the report. What do you think the likelihood that aerial phenomena are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: Well, Jackie, that\u2019s really the question, isn\u2019t it? The bottom line is, up until very recently there were really only three possibilities of what this could be. And the first possibility is that it is some sort of secret U.S. tech that somehow, we have managed to keep secret even from ourselves for a long period of time. The second option is that it is some sort of foreign adversarial technology that has somehow managed to technology leapfrog ahead of our country despite having a fairly robust and comprehensive intelligence apparatus. And of course, the third option is something quite entirely different. It\u2019s a different paradigm completely.Now as of this week we now know through some of the discussions at senior-level leadership that this report has definitively stated once and for all that it\u2019s not our technology. And that\u2019s hugely important. For 30 years there has always been this undercurrent, if you will, these conspiracies that there was some sort of TR-3B program and some sort of a super special technology that has been implemented and we\u2019ve been--just been very careless about it. And I think that argument was finally put to bed this week. So that really only leaves two other options, and that\u2019s--again, it\u2019s foreign adversarial or it\u2019s something quite different. And I think we\u2019re now beginning to learn, as we\u2019ve heard from the director of national intelligence--and I can certainly tell you from my experience--that we\u2019re pretty confident that it\u2019s not Russian or Chinese technology, and there\u2019s several reason for that that, if you like, I\u2019m more than happy to go into.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: Yeah, actually, could you go into that. I know you\u2019ve explained it in previous interviews, but these sightings have happened for the past 70 years, and I know you\u2019ve said before that you didn\u2019t think it was possible for one of our foreign adversaries who have been helpful actually in providing information on this issue, would be capable of keeping something a secret for so long. Is that accurate?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: That\u2019s precisely one of the counterarguments. In fact, if I\u2019m not mistaken, as of today, we had an announcement by former Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe who said this isn\u2019t Russian technology. And as we know during Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was this five-year romance period, if you will, between the United States and Russia where we began really sharing a lot of information. And a lot of their--ironically enough, a lot of their UFO information wound up in our hands, and it turns out that they were experiencing the exact same issues from a UFO or a UAP perspective that we were. So, if you look at really the timelines here, you know, it\u2019s looking increasingly less likely that this is some sort of Russian technology.So that really leaves China. And some of these reports, you\u2019re absolutely correct, Jackie, they go back into the early 1950s, and even earlier. And so, what that says is that you have pilots, whether we\u2019re describing what we call a white flying tic-tac or a white flying butane tank in the 1950s or a white flying lozenge, if you will--they\u2019re all describing the exact same vehicle, craft, if you will, doing exactly the same thing, performing in ways well beyond our current capabilities.Story continues below advertisementAnd if you look at that from a--from a temporal perspective, from a time perspective, it simply doesn\u2019t make sense that China back in 1950 would have this beyond next generation technology, mastered it, is able to fly at will anywhere it wants on the face of the planet, and the last 70 years, despite the billions of dollars we\u2019ve put into our intelligence community infrastructure and architecture, it has--it has managed to evade us. In fact, China is a country that has stolen quite a bit--spends a lot of time stealing technology from us. And so, one has to ask the question that if really a country had this technology, would it be necessary to steal, you know, much more basic technology from another country. Furthermore, if you had this type of technology, you probably wouldn\u2019t need to invest so much in military because you had this, if you will, checkmate type technology or capability where everything else now becomes obsolete.AdvertisementAnd so, this goes to your last part of your question. So, I feel or do I believe this is, quote, \u201cextraterrestrial\u201d? Let me be very careful before I answer that by saying at the end of the day, Jackie, it doesn\u2019t matter what I think or what I believe. What matters is what the data and the facts tell us. And from that perspective, it\u2019s very important that--I\u2019ve always--I had a very simple job, and that is to collect the truth and speak the truth. That\u2019s it. Very much as an investigator, which I used to be. We applied the same level of rigor and methodologies we did at hunting terrorists and spies as we did in hunting UFOs. So, we really didn\u2019t care what these were. We were just trying to get to the bottom of what they were. And so therein lies, if you will, a little bit of our approach. We were--we were very agnostic, if you will, or objective about this topic and tried to allow the facts to lead us down a certain path. And that is really what we\u2019re doing today. What we\u2019re realizing is that the facts are painting a far more compelling picture than what we thought. In this case, you, your audience, they\u2019re the jury. So what matters is really what you think about this. And so, the hope here is that the U.S. government can provide the data and the evidence and information and then allow the American people to decide what we think this is about.I think, if I may just digress for a moment here, you mentioned something very interesting that a lot of people want to talk about and say is this extraterrestrial. And I want to just if I can for just briefly delve into where we are with modern day science. We are human beings that a lot of now people in psychology refer to as cardio-social animals. It means we look at things in extremes because for the first nine months of our existence we were in our mother\u2019s womb and we heard that binary heartbeat of our mother. And so, we tend to look at the life, if you will, in our universe in that binary way. It\u2019s either good or it\u2019s bad. It\u2019s hot or cold, black or white, up and down, and that\u2019s how we tend to judge things. But in reality, the universe and physics isn\u2019t binary. It\u2019s not binary at all. In fact, there\u2019s all sorts of options and opportunities of what this could be.Story continues below advertisementSo again, back to your question. Is it from here, or is it from out there? We don\u2019t really know. In fact, there\u2019s lots of other options on the table. It could be from--as I\u2019ve said before, it could be from outer space, inner space, or the space in between. As we begin to learn what quantum physics is and we begin to understand our place here on this little planet, we begin to realize that there\u2019s a lot of other options. We judge the universe in five fundamental senses, the ways that we perceive the universe, and that\u2019s touch, taste, hear, smell, et cetera. And if you can\u2019t--if you can\u2019t use those senses to look at something or measure it, then we really can\u2019t interact with it.AdvertisementAnd yet we know the majority of the universe around us--99 percent of it, in fact--is not perceivable. There are right now Wi-Fi signals coursing through your body. There\u2019s cosmic radiation coming in from the cosmos. There\u2019s neutrinos coming in from the sun. There\u2019s radar hitting you from the local airport. And yet these are all realities and you can\u2019t interact with it because we just don\u2019t have the tools to do so. Take a beautiful night sky, look at the stars, and you might say, wow, that\u2019s really a pretty sky. But if you now take a radio telescope and look at that same spot in the sky, all of a sudden you begin to see things that you couldn\u2019t see before. You see the ultraviolet, you see the infrared spectrum, you see nebula.So, I guess my longwinded point to all this is that we must keep all options open. If we already know that 99 percent of the universe we cannot perceive or interact with, then there may be other options here. This may not necessarily be something from outer space. In fact, this could be something as natural to our very own planet as us, we\u2019re just now at a point we\u2019re beginning to technologically be able to interact and collect data. This could be something from under the oceans. This could be something from, yes, from outer space. We really don\u2019t know. And this is why I think we really need to take a whole of government approach and look at this, because it is--day by day, it is seeming like more and more this conversation is shifting from a human technology--quite possibly, we don\u2019t know for sure yet--but to something far more profound.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: But as someone who is more steeped and in the know on the data and the facts, do you have any more narrow idea in that 99 percent of things that we are unaware of what this could be exactly?AdvertisementMR. ELIZONDO: You know, through observations we are--we are quite convinced that we\u2019re dealing with a technology that is multigenerational, several generations ahead of what we consider next generation technology, so what we would consider beyond next generation technology. Something that could be anywhere between 50 to 1,000 years ahead of us. And for us, I think it\u2019s when you\u2019re looking at the observations and these things, how they can outperform frankly anything that we have in our inventory and we\u2019re pretty certain anything that our foreign adversaries have in their inventory, then, yes, obviously as human beings we tend to go down that rabbit hole of speculation.I want to be very careful that I don\u2019t offer my opinion in an unqualified manner. I\u2019ve always stated this is exactly why we need a UAP taskforce. In fact, this is why we need a much bigger, whole of government enduring capability, because at the end of the day we don\u2019t know what we\u2019re dealing with. And frankly, all options have to be on the table until they\u2019re no longer on the table.Story continues below advertisementI could offer you my opinion right now, but, Jackie, in all honesty it would probably be a bit of disservice because we frankly don\u2019t have enough information yet. We\u2019re just now getting to the point as a government, as a society that we are accepting the reality that this is real, whatever it is. I think--I think we need to do a little bit more. And so out of respect to you and your journalistic integrity and to your audience, I\u2019m probably going to refrain from offering more of my opinion on that particular aspect only because the one thing I\u2019ve learned in intelligence is you can be absolutely sure of something and still be absolutely wrong, and I don\u2019t want to mislead anybody.AdvertisementMS. ALEMANY: I\u2019m going to be a little bit of a pest here, and I apologize for my desire for a more black and white answer.MR. ELIZONDO: Sure.Story continues below advertisementMS. ALEMANY: But in common parlance, I guess, is that something that you would refer to as an alien or a time traveler. Is there any sort of way you could, you know, more specifically [audio distortion]?MR. ELIZONDO: Sure, so, yeah, I\u2019ve said before this is something--and I guess I may have just said it again--but that this could be something from outer space, inner space, or frankly the space in between. There\u2019s a lot of options out there. This could be something that is extra hyper dimensional. Now I don\u2019t mean extradimensional in a woo-woo sense. I mean, extradimensional in a quantum physics sense. We know that the universe is full of shortcuts and loopholes.AdvertisementWe know--so let me if I may backtrack for just a moment, it took the Renaissance to come to the point where we understand Newtonian physics. We understand what gravity looks like. We still don\u2019t quite understand what it is yet, but we understand what it looks like, and we understand force equal mass times acceleration, and whatnot. So, we had these really elegant solutions for our observations of the--of the natural world. And then it took a couple hundred years, but along comes some cat with crazy hair we call Einstein who now introduces the notion of relativity. It kind of upends really science and turns it 180 degrees and says, well, actually there\u2019s a thing called spacetime, and space and time are actually connected, and they\u2019re also stretchable and compressible. And as bizarre as that may be, that is precisely what we\u2019re seeing. And so, spacetime can be warped based upon mass or a lot of energy.And then of course 40-some years ago we really start getting into this whole other paradigm of science, and it's quantum physics. And someone once described it as you have this box sitting on the ground, and in walks a dog, and all of a sudden two cats walk out. And as crazy as that may seem, that\u2019s precisely what we\u2019re seeing in these observations with quantum physics, proverbially speaking of course. So, it doesn\u2019t make sense, and yet there\u2019s this weird duality. Maybe the universe, the speed of light although may be the universal speed limit, there may be some shortcuts and offramps in our--in our--in this understanding of our universe.So, we are--we are just now scratching the surface of understanding what type of science it may take to do what we are seeing with these vehicles. There\u2019s five specific observables associated with these--with these UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, that really separate them from the rest of anything that we would consider terrestrial aircraft or manned aircraft or some type of human-based technology. And again, I want to be careful not to go too far out on the limb because that\u2019s where the speculation starts, and that\u2019s also where the danger starts, because we simply don\u2019t know yet.MS. ALEMANY: Well, and I guess the other key question here is what do you think the likelihood is that the U.S. government is actually going to confirm anything?[Pause]MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, I think I lost you, but I\u2019m going to go ahead and try to answer the best I can. I think you were asking me what the likelihood is of the U.S. government going ahead and confirming anything in this 180-day report. So let me see if I can go ahead and answer that. Hopefully that was your question because I seem to have lost signal.So, the 180-day report is, first of all, not substantial enough time to do a comprehensive report. In fact, I\u2019ve told people it takes longer to remodel a household kitchen sometimes than it does to conduct one of these 180-day reports.Secondly, there\u2019s the other issue here that we had COVID and this pandemic that kept a lot of people home for most of that time.And then thirdly, I think if this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that has happened to leapfrog ahead of us for the last seven years, Jackie, we\u2019re talking about one of the greatest intelligence failures this country has ever seen, probably eclipsing 9/11 by an order of magnitude. It took us nearly three years to come up with a 9/11 Commission report. If this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that did happen to technologically leapfrog us, 180 days I don\u2019t think is going to be sufficient.I think what we can expect the report to say is something like this. There are about 100 and some odd cases out there that are compelling enough that they are definitely displaying some sort of capability, technology that we don\u2019t have. Secondly, we don\u2019t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time we have no evidence to suggest that they\u2019re not. And so, this report will probably be a bit of a placeholder. The one thing we know for sure at this point is that it\u2019s not U.S. secret technology. So that takes part of the 30-year argument that this is some sort of secret Air Force, if you will, weapon platform being tested. That\u2019s now off the table. And so now we can focus more, I think, on the foreign adversarial perspective, or hopefully maybe something quite frankly sufficiently different than anything that we had--we had possibly considered before.MS. ALEMANY: And when we\u2019re actually talking about this as a national security threat or as a foreign adversarial threat as you just mentioned, you know, I think we need to talk about China here, which the United States government also views as a national security threat. And China is making big investments at the moment to identify extraterrestrial life as a part of their military mission. There\u2019s discussion within the community about whether it\u2019s better for us to lead the way with confirmation versus China doing so and possibly being dishonest about what they\u2019ve found--essentially a new modern-day space race. Do you think, in your opinion, does it matter which national takes the lead on confirming the presence of extraterrestrial life and who gets to the bottom of this answer first?MR. ELIZONDO: I think--well, you\u2019re right, Jackie. And not only that, they\u2019ve just announced they\u2019ve established a new UAP taskforce similar to ours and they\u2019re using artificial intelligence to do this. We also know that there\u2019s a play by them to try to lead this conversation at the United Nations. That--for me, it\u2019s a multifaceted question you\u2019re asking me. There\u2019s two parts of me, and I\u2019m a little bit I guess you\u2019d say schizophrenic about the response. There is the national security side of me that has said always we have these adversaries, these traditional adversaries, and they\u2019re going to steal everything they can from us. We should--don\u2019t trust them. Try to cooperate, but don\u2019t trust them.But then there\u2019s the other side, which is the non-governmental side of me that tends to be a little bit more optimistic. And perhaps this is an opportunity for our countries, rather than to find disagreement, maybe to find some sort of common ground. Maybe this may be a new renaissance. Maybe this is an opportunity for our countries to work together on a common good that involves all of humanity. Maybe this is like we did in the Cold War where we started working with the Russians to, you know, this era of cooperation where we start meeting each other in space. I would certainly hope the latter is what happens, but I don\u2019t know. You know, that\u2019s a great question, because what I hope for may be different than what I expect. And that still needs to be reconciled. So, I don\u2019t know if I answered your question appropriately, but that\u2019s how I feel.I would love nothing more than an opportunity to work with our adversaries, our conventional adversaries--Russia, China, let\u2019s get everybody to the table. I believe this is a topic that involves all of humanity. I think it affects all of us equally and yet differently, depending on our philosophical, sociological and theological belief systems. So, I--you know, I guess maybe--maybe guess the kid in me wants this to be an opportunity for us to work together. But I also have a very realistic side, because I\u2019ve seen what those countries are capable of doing, and you know, I--it would have to take a lot of trust for us to do that.MS. ALEMANY: And several of these UFO sightings have been above secret nuclear weapons facilities. Almost every major nuclear power across the globe really has reported and declassified these sightings. You have talked extensively about the connection here, which might be helpful I think for some people to hear in advance of my next question, which is whether or not the U.S. government has considered utilizing nuclear-powered naval fleets to lure these kinds of things to further study them.MR. ELIZONDO: Wow. So first of all, Jackie, thank you for asking such a thoughtful question. Obviously, you\u2019ve done some homework. And I also want to, by the way, thank you as a journalist for following this topic, because I know there\u2019s a lot of risk involved, and I also know there\u2019s been traditionally a lot of stigma and taboo associated with it. So, I want to congratulate you for your courage and thank you and your audience for at least having this conversation.But secondly, yes, that is--that is one of the concerns we have from a national security perspective, that there does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sightings and our nuclear technology with nuclear propulsion, nuclear power generation, or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, those same observations have been seen overseas in other countries. They too have had the same incidents. So that tells us this is a global issue.Now in this country we\u2019ve had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities. And I think to some they would probably say, well, that\u2019s a sign that whatever this is, is something that is peaceful. But in the same context, we also have data suggesting that in other countries these things have interfered with their nuclear technology and actually turned them on, put them online. So that is equally, for me, just as concerning. I think that there is certainly at this point enough data to demonstrate there is an interest in our nuclear technology, a potential to even interfere with that nuclear technology. And when you look at all these naval ships out there--let\u2019s take the Nimitz battle carrier fleet for example--in some cases you\u2019re talking about a nuclear footprint probably bigger than most cities. You have a nuclear-powered carrier with aircraft on board that--and then you have nuclear-powered destroyers. You have nuclear-powered submarines, some of those with nuclear weapons on board, or nuclear--certainly nuclear capabilities. I\u2019ll just say that. So, I think--I think, yeah, it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that maybe there is an increased interest in our capabilities as it relates to our nuclear technology. And the Navy is certainly not immune to that.MS. ALEMANY: [Inaudible]MR. ELIZONDO: Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, I think the--there\u2019s two--there\u2019s two congruencies that we see. We see a--we see an interest in our nuclear capabilities, and then we have this really bizarre what--I don\u2019t know if you call it an interest, but there seems to be a connection with water, and these things have a tendency to be seen in and around water, which kind of leads to one of the observables that we\u2019ve had. There\u2019s five distinct observables that set this technology, as I mentioned earlier, aside from everything we have in our inventory.The first is hypersonic velocity. The ability to change directions instantly. And when I say instantly, I mean human beings can withstand about 9 g forces or some of our best aircraft can withstand about 16 Gs. These things are doing 3-, 4-, 600 Gs in midflight.Then there\u2019s hypersonic velocity. That is speeds that by definition are Mach 5 or above, very, very fast. We do have some technology. You mentioned Russian hypersonic and things like that. You know, there are technologies that can go that fast, but then again, you don\u2019t expect a hypersonic aircraft to do a 90-degree turn. To put that into context, our SR-71 Blackbird when at 3,200 miles an hour wants to take a right-hand turn, it takes roughly half the state of Ohio to do it. You don\u2019t expect it to just kind of do this. And that\u2019s precisely what we\u2019re seeing.And then the third observable is a bit like cloaking. We call it low observability.But the fourth observable is what we were talking about, and that is trans medium travel and water. The ability for an object to fly not only in our atmosphere, low and high altitudes, but also potentially in a vacuum environment like space and even underwater. Now we do have vehicles that can do that. We have, for example, a seaplane. A seaplane is a plane that can fly, and it can float on the water. But when you look at it, it\u2019s neither really a very good aircraft or a boat because it\u2019s a design compromise. And yet what we are seeing are objects that can operate in all these domains or all these environments, seemingly without any type of performance compromise.And so why are we seeing these things around--in and around water is something that we\u2019re really--we\u2019re really kind of scratching our heads with, because we\u2019ve seen these things. They\u2019ve been recorded not only in our atmosphere but there\u2019s data to suggest that they\u2019ve also been tracked by some of our capabilities underwater as well and being able to perform in ways that frankly exceed anything that we know on the planet right now.MS. ALEMANY: And, Lue, unfortunately we only have time for one more question. But I should make it clear to our viewers that you actually signed an NDA when you were working on this at the Pentagon. Is there any scenario that would cause you to break that NDA if you feel like, for example, this report obfuscates or peddles disinformation about what the findings actually are here?MR. ELIZONDO: No, ma\u2019am. I will now violate my non-disclosure agreement with the government. I still maintain a security clearance. And the reason is that not because it\u2019s my loyalty to the government, because it\u2019s my loyalty to the American people. That contract I signed those many years ago was a promise to the American people that I would never violate their trust, period. And I can\u2019t violate their trust in order to gain their trust. It doesn\u2019t work that way. So, what I\u2019s going to continue to do is doing what I\u2019m doing now and pushing for this disclosure, pushing for the information that I know to be true because I saw it and so did my colleagues, continue to have this conversation the way I can.And I\u2019ll tell you, if it looks like the Pentagon continues to obfuscate, I have made it clear before that there\u2019s a possibility I would consider running for some sort of congressional office. I don\u2019t want to do that. I\u2019m not a politician. I don\u2019t have the political savvy. But if I have to put my boots back on in order to make sure this conversation is had and ultimately allow the American people to have this conversation amongst themselves, then I will do what\u2019s necessary short of violating my non-disclosure agreement and violating my trust with the American people.MS. ALEMANY: Well, we hope you\u2019ll come to us if and when you make that decision to run for office. Thank you so much for joining us today, Lue, and thanks for your work on all this.MR. ELIZONDO: Jackie, thank you sincerely to you and your audience. You\u2019ve been wonderful. Any time.MS. ALEMANY: And everyone, I\u2019m going to be back at 4:30 for a special program, Life After Vaccines: The Future of Travel and Live Events, with WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and Kayak CEO Steve Hafner. Thanks for joining us.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space  with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson  (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7627",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/22/transcript-path-forward-new-frontiers-space-with-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. Our program today is The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space. And we\u2019re pleased that our guest is the NASA administrator, former U.S. Senator Bill Nelson. Senator Nelson represented Florida for 18 years, and maybe more to the point, he was a former astronaut. Senator Nelson, welcome to Washington Post Live. Thanks for joining us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. NELSON: Thanks, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So as our introduction suggested, this is a big week for space, with Jeff Bezos yesterday in making his flight to the edge of space, joyful return. A few weeks earlier, Richard Branson making a similar trip. I want to ask you with the obvious initial caveat for readers that Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, what you make of these flights, the billionaires in space. You were beginning in our introduction to say some positive things. Let me let you continue with your thoughts about what these journeys mean.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. NELSON: Well, they\u2019re spending their own money, and they are doing incredible things. You just think about what Elon Musk has already done. He is spending money and has cut the cost of going to space because he is reusing his first stages of the rockets. And that is dramatically now, as he competes for launches--government launches, commercial launches--he\u2019s saving everybody money, going into space. When you take Branson and Jeff Bezos, they are making it accessible to go to the edge of space, a 10-, 15-minute flight, experience weightlessness as they start to fall back to Earth. And the cost of that will come down over time so that more people will be able to experience that. Plus, Bezos is building a big rocket that will ultimately compete with Elon Musk\u2019s rocket. And in that competition, we\u2019ll see all the more the costs come down. And then, when you add all of that with these new startup companies that are doing things like printing, 3D printing rocket engines and rockets, then you\u2019re going to see the costs come all the more. So space is going to be more accessible as a result of all of this activity.MR. IGNATIUS: You\u2019ve been positive in noting that these private sector efforts that you\u2019ve said recently, speaking about these trips by prominent billionaire businessmen, we never want to lose our character as explorers or adventurers. Let me just ask you to respond to a criticism that you do see in print, that these are joyrides. Space tourism isn\u2019t really where we should be focused. What\u2019s your own reaction to that?MR. NELSON: Well, for example, Elon has such a mission. It will not go to the International Space Station. It will not have NASA astronauts on it. And yet, it is--a paying customer can experience that. But they would have never had that had Elon not been under contract with the United States government, with NASA--a fixed-price contract, I might say--to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so I don\u2019t look at it as something just completely separate, that this is just for billionaires. We\u2019re all going to benefit from this kind of activity. And the same is true, David, as we venture further out, as we go back to the moon, as we are sending a number of commercial rockets and payloads to the moon to try to discover the water there that we can turn into fuel. And that, of course, is our quest to go out and explore the heavens, and to go to Mars with humans.MR. IGNATIUS: I want to ask you about those larger ambitions for space in a moment. But just to finish with this question of space tourism, what rules should there be? Is this a scenario that NASA should try to have some regulation? Is there a way that this can be made more accessible so that more people can experience this extraordinary adventure? How are you thinking about space tourism going forward?MR. NELSON: All of the above. If the so-called space tourists are going to the International Space Station, then what I am insisting on, that they go through all the training, the medical exams, the psychological/psychiatric exams that any one of our astronauts would do because they are going to a space station with astronauts and cosmonauts that is doing genuine productive work in research. And I don\u2019t want somebody getting up there and going crazy. So NASA is all over this and will require that. If they\u2019re going on a venture on their own, then that\u2019s a different matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, I might say, David, that all of this started 11 years ago when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and I, along with the Obama administration, formulated this dual path that we\u2019re on, a commercial path as well as the government path. And we are seeing that happening now in 3D technicolor in front of our eyes. We\u2019re also seeing an expansion of that public/private partnership, and a good example is the efforts on the moon. And I\u2019ll tell you about that if you want to hear.MR. IGNATIUS: I do. I want to come to that in just a minute. But let me ask you about the larger ambition that Musk, Jeff Bezos and you have as you think forward. Elon Musk has talked about colonizing Mars. Jeff Bezos has talked about having people live in space. And I want to ask you how you think about the future not in the next five or 10 years but what our future is in space in 50 or 100 years. Just give us some of your thoughts about that.MR. NELSON: Well, I\u2019m glad that they are thinking that, expansive ideas. Before Elon, people really didn\u2019t think about reusing the first stage of a rocket. We had always thrown them away when they landed in the ocean. But think back, David, to 60 years ago. The first time that President Kennedy, right after Alan Shepard had only gone into sub orbit, Kennedy goes to a joint session of Congress, and he was not met with a great deal of applause. There was a lot of skepticism when he said we\u2019re going to the moon and back in this decade. And it actually took 10 months later John Glenn going into orbit and we were in this fierce competition with the Soviet Union, which had surprised us way back with Sputnik and then with Gagarin and Titov before we could ever get into orbit. Once Glenn made that flight, then the nation really got energized. And Kennedy gave that second speech at Rice University, and he said we\u2019re not going to do this because it\u2019s easy, because it\u2019s hard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo you\u2019ve got to have vision. You\u2019ve got to have goals. You\u2019ve got to look beyond the lines as to what can be done. And I think we are coming up on the cusp of this new era where we are thinking that way now.MR. IGNATIUS: And I\u2019m curious, in your own thinking as a former astronaut, as head of our leading space agency NASA, what your own thoughts are. Obviously, this is speculative, but do you imagine a future in which we will be, in effect, colonizing space, doing manufacturing or other economic processes in space?MR. NELSON: Did we think when the Wright brothers flew that within that span of time that we were going to land on the moon? I think that illustrates the point. No telling what we\u2019re going to develop, David. No telling the spinoffs for the betterment of Earth, of us Earthlings, of what we are doing in developing technologies to go into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019ll give--I\u2019ll give you a couple right now. In your pocket is a cellphone, and it has a camera that is unbelievably clear pictures. That camera is on a chip. That chip was developed by NASA for our Earth-observing satellites.Another example. We have a phalanx of satellites that are now measuring all the different things that is happening with the climate. In the next 10 years, we\u2019re going to put five great observatories, and we\u2019re going to look at oceans and land and ice and the atmosphere, and we\u2019re going to compile a 3D composite of the minute changes that are occurring so that we can better project what we\u2019ve got to do in order to save our planet by saving our climate. These are the things.What I\u2019m saying, to answer your question is, don\u2019t limit yourself. Yes, there may be Bezos\u2019 ideas of colonies out in space. Yes, there may be colonizing Mars. But we\u2019ve got to have the vision to get there and develop the technologies in order to sustain human life, and then who knows what will happen in the future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: Your point about being able to observe and do something about methane emissions or other things that are threatening to our climate as the climate crisis deepens is an important one.I want to ask you, Senator, part of the new fasciation I think is the right word with space is driven by a new interest, curiosity, seriousness about the possibility that we\u2019re being visited by intelligence from outside our solar system. The director of national intelligence just issued a report on unidentified aerial phenomenon, what we often call UFOs. There\u2019s going to be more study coming. How do you look at that question of life beyond Earth? What is NASA itself doing to think about this question? Give us some ways to think about this.MR. NELSON: Well, NASA is looking for life. For example, when we are getting a return sample from Mars, we\u2019re going to examine that sample to see if there are any of the chemical elements that would indicate there are microbes there. The mission that we just announced going to Venus, Venus is shrouded by an atmosphere that causes it to be so hot on the surface that it would melt lead. But what about in that atmosphere? There are moons of other planets that we think there are oceans. If there are oceans, there is very likely to be life. So we are looking at that very, very aggressively.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then at the end of this year, we\u2019re going to put up the new space telescope. And unlike Hubble, which has had this incredible three-decade run, far beyond its design life, and looks at the expanse of the universe, this telescope, a million miles from Earth on the other side of the Earth and the sun, with a blanket behind it to shield out any sunlight, looking out through a keyhole in the sky--believe me, this is true, looking back 13.35 billion years to the source of light which is shortly after the big bang and the formation of the first galaxies.And it\u2019s going to be able as we examine those early galaxies, and then examine the solar systems that formed in those galaxies, and then in our search for other planets--which are already undergoing, but this telescope\u2019s going to help us--find those planets and see if we see a planet with an atmosphere that is similar to Earth. I personally think that the universe is so big, which I cannot even conceive in my mind, that, yes, there are other possibilities of other Earth-like planets that have intelligent life.MR. IGNATIUS: That\u2019s exciting just to hear you describe the process that\u2019s ahead. I have to ask you the question, what would NASA do, what would you do as our space leaders, as head of NASA, if we did one day get evidence that showed that there is intelligent life beyond our planet. How would NASA respond to that?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. NELSON: Well, the first thing is, I bet it would be a page one story on The Washington Post.MR. IGNATIUS: I think that\u2019s--we can--we can agree on that.MR. NELSON: So what would I do? If we get any kind of message of intelligent life, then I\u2019m going to suggest our scientists try to make contact with it. And I don\u2019t know when this is coming. You know, a lot of people are excited about what these Navy jet pilots have seen. Back in my old days as senator, I met with those in a classified session. I\u2019ve talked to those pilots. They know they saw something. They followed it. They locked their radar on it. And now this unclassified portion of this report that you mention now has over 140 sightings all over the globe. So there\u2019s something to this. What is it? I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t think anybody knows at this point. I hope it\u2019s not one of our enemies, because that thing the pilot said it was there and then suddenly it\u2019s there in an instant. I hope it\u2019s not one of our enemies, because if it is, they\u2019ve got some real serious advances on us on technology.MR. IGNATIUS: So let me return to the question of what\u2019s next in terms of what you\u2019re immediately planning, and that is the mission with SpaceX to send astronauts back to the moon. You\u2019ve just issued I think a $2.9 billion contract for that, and you\u2019ve talked about the possibility that would happen by the end of 2024. Give us an update on that, what you imagine that mission accomplishing beyond what we did in our earlier trips to the moon.And then if you could talk a little bit about the plans that NASA has announced for it sounds like a permanent orbiting station, what you call \"Gateway,\" that would be orbiting the moon. What would that be available for? What purpose does NASA see for it?MR. NELSON: The contract to SpaceX is held obeyance right now as it is contested and the procedures of the federal government by the GAO, we\u2019re expecting an announcement in the next few weeks. And on the basis of that, we will then proceed. Whatever way we proceed, we want competition, and therefore, we need some more money to enhance and procure that competition so that there are other players that get involved.And a good example of that, when the competition was occurring between Boeing and SpaceX for crew going to the space station, everybody thought Boeing was going to win it hands-down. Well, look, SpaceX has already delivered three crews, and Boeing\u2019s not off the ground yet. So that\u2019s why we want competition.So where\u2019s it going? It\u2019s going back to the moon. Astronauts will ride on the largest rocket ever, which, by the way, will launch at the end of this year. They will take our astronauts into lunar orbit. They will transfer into a commercial lander, which of course NASA will be all over because it\u2019s involving human life. That lander will go down, do their activities, meet up with other commercial experiments on the moon that have already landed, and then come back when we return our astronauts, hitch up in lunar orbit, and the spacecraft called Orion will go back to Earth.The follow-on is what you just mentioned--Gateway--which is--some call it a station but it\u2019s more like an outpost that will be in lunar orbit, and it will serve a number of purposes. It can be the waystation to transfer astronauts and then to go down to the surface of the moon in different locations on the surface. It will be a place for research. It will be a place for assembling the huge rocket and the supplies that will ultimately take us to Mars. So that is what the function of the gateway is. We\u2019re looking at late in the decade of the 2030s by the time we would develop all the technology of how you sustain human life all the way to Mars, stay on the surface maybe six months, and then come all the way back.MR. IGNATIUS: So that would be the timetable we should imagine, late 2030s, a mission to Mars that begins from this gateway habitation that orbits the moon, if I\u2019ve got you right.MR. NELSON: That\u2019s [audio distortion]--now others have said that they can go there earlier. Have at it. I want to see that. But when it comes to human life, NASA is going to be very particular, and there are a lot of ifs out there. It\u2019s one thing going into low Earth orbit, which is, you know, some 300 miles up. It\u2019s another thing going three days to the moon, 250,000 miles away. It\u2019s another thing going to Mars that can be as far as 100 million miles away.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator, I want to turn from these quite exhilarating issues about space to another part of the new frontier that\u2019s darker, and that\u2019s the way in which space is becoming a domain of military action. I want to ask you specifically about the Chinese development of what are believed to be anti-satellite weapons, both on the ground and I\u2019m told in orbit as well, and that the threat that that poses not simply to our communications and other systems that are based in space but to the--to the very idea of space, which becomes a contested domain that\u2019s a theater of war, not a theater of adventure and experimentation. Talk about that danger, if you would.MR. NELSON: This Chinese space program is also a military space program. They are very aggressive, and they are very good. And a lot of that success has come within the last few years. They are now the second nation to have landed successfully on Mars a rover, which is going to gather a small sample. And in the future, they will try to return it to Earth, probably within the same timeframe that we, the U.S., will try to return our sample that our rover up there, Perseverance, is scouting around with a little helicopter right now trying to find the sample that we want to send back. The Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program. They are very inflexible. They are not very transparent.Now contrast this, David, with the difference of a mortal enemy 60 years ago, the Soviet Union, each of us pointing nuclear warheads at each other, and out of that in 1975, in the Soviet Union, an American spacecraft and a Soviet spacecraft rendezvoused and docked, and the crews lived together for nine days. And ever since, we have had on the civilian program in space, cooperation with the Soviets until 1991, now the Russians. And to this day, we still have that cooperation. As a matter of fact, this morning in Kazakhstan at Baikonur Cosmodrome they launched another major component of the International Space Station that will be attached to this huge space station. And they continue to be our partners and to operate that space station with us and do the experimentations together. Contrast that with China.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator--MR. NELSON: They don\u2019t want you messing around.MR. IGNATIUS: My question is whether you\u2019d like to see cooperation and partnership with China similar to what we\u2019ve experienced with Russia. Is that something that you as NASA administrator would support?MR. NELSON: If, in fact, they would open up, of course. If they would be cooperative in a very transparent way. But they haven\u2019t. You mentioned the ASAT. They blew one of their satellites up, and it has proliferated junk all over that low Earth orbit area where there\u2019s so many satellites and our International Space Station.Just recently, the rocket that put up their space station, which technically is very good, but they didn\u2019t provide for a controlled reentry. We didn\u2019t know where that rocket was going to come down, as it ended up in the Indian Ocean. Fortunately, nobody got hit. But they wouldn\u2019t tell us.So I think we are in a space race with China. They are aggressive. They are good. But I wish they\u2019d do what the old Soviet Union did. When it came to civilian space, I wish they\u2019d cooperate and be transparent.MR. IGNATIUS: Senator, I have one last question for you. We have a new branch of our military in the last year called the Space Force. Its creation was something that was widely debated, and you expressed some concerns at the time that it would have a damaging effect on the Air Force which had overseen space activities. How do you think the Space Force is doing, and what suggestions, if any, would you have about how it could do its mission better?MR. NELSON: Well, General Raymond I think has done an incredible job. He\u2019s been very successful putting together a new organization that is a multi-military force. And my initial objection three, four years ago was I didn\u2019t want to just see another bureaucracy created. But that decision was made by the previous administration. And he\u2019s doing it, and he\u2019s doing it well. And there is indeed a need for a Space Force because more and more, when it comes to the defense of this country, space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country and the free world.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, thank you for an absolutely fascinating conversation. We\u2019d love to have you come back and talk about these issues with us again. Thank you for joining us today.MR. NELSON: Thanks, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So if you\u2019d like to know what other interviews we\u2019ve got coming up, please head to washingtonpostlive.com to register and find out more information. I\u2019m David Ignatius. Thank you for joining us today. We\u2019ll see you soon.[End recorded session]  Transcript: The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space  with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson ",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space  with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson  (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7628",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/22/transcript-path-forward-new-frontiers-space-with-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. Our program today is The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space. And we\u2019re pleased that our guest is the NASA administrator, former U.S. Senator Bill Nelson. Senator Nelson represented Florida for 18 years, and maybe more to the point, he was a former astronaut. Senator Nelson, welcome to Washington Post Live. Thanks for joining us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. NELSON: Thanks, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So as our introduction suggested, this is a big week for space, with Jeff Bezos yesterday in making his flight to the edge of space, joyful return. A few weeks earlier, Richard Branson making a similar trip. I want to ask you with the obvious initial caveat for readers that Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, what you make of these flights, the billionaires in space. You were beginning in our introduction to say some positive things. Let me let you continue with your thoughts about what these journeys mean.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. NELSON: Well, they\u2019re spending their own money, and they are doing incredible things. You just think about what Elon Musk has already done. He is spending money and has cut the cost of going to space because he is reusing his first stages of the rockets. And that is dramatically now, as he competes for launches--government launches, commercial launches--he\u2019s saving everybody money, going into space. When you take Branson and Jeff Bezos, they are making it accessible to go to the edge of space, a 10-, 15-minute flight, experience weightlessness as they start to fall back to Earth. And the cost of that will come down over time so that more people will be able to experience that. Plus, Bezos is building a big rocket that will ultimately compete with Elon Musk\u2019s rocket. And in that competition, we\u2019ll see all the more the costs come down. And then, when you add all of that with these new startup companies that are doing things like printing, 3D printing rocket engines and rockets, then you\u2019re going to see the costs come all the more. So space is going to be more accessible as a result of all of this activity.MR. IGNATIUS: You\u2019ve been positive in noting that these private sector efforts that you\u2019ve said recently, speaking about these trips by prominent billionaire businessmen, we never want to lose our character as explorers or adventurers. Let me just ask you to respond to a criticism that you do see in print, that these are joyrides. Space tourism isn\u2019t really where we should be focused. What\u2019s your own reaction to that?MR. NELSON: Well, for example, Elon has such a mission. It will not go to the International Space Station. It will not have NASA astronauts on it. And yet, it is--a paying customer can experience that. But they would have never had that had Elon not been under contract with the United States government, with NASA--a fixed-price contract, I might say--to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so I don\u2019t look at it as something just completely separate, that this is just for billionaires. We\u2019re all going to benefit from this kind of activity. And the same is true, David, as we venture further out, as we go back to the moon, as we are sending a number of commercial rockets and payloads to the moon to try to discover the water there that we can turn into fuel. And that, of course, is our quest to go out and explore the heavens, and to go to Mars with humans.MR. IGNATIUS: I want to ask you about those larger ambitions for space in a moment. But just to finish with this question of space tourism, what rules should there be? Is this a scenario that NASA should try to have some regulation? Is there a way that this can be made more accessible so that more people can experience this extraordinary adventure? How are you thinking about space tourism going forward?MR. NELSON: All of the above. If the so-called space tourists are going to the International Space Station, then what I am insisting on, that they go through all the training, the medical exams, the psychological/psychiatric exams that any one of our astronauts would do because they are going to a space station with astronauts and cosmonauts that is doing genuine productive work in research. And I don\u2019t want somebody getting up there and going crazy. So NASA is all over this and will require that. If they\u2019re going on a venture on their own, then that\u2019s a different matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, I might say, David, that all of this started 11 years ago when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and I, along with the Obama administration, formulated this dual path that we\u2019re on, a commercial path as well as the government path. And we are seeing that happening now in 3D technicolor in front of our eyes. We\u2019re also seeing an expansion of that public/private partnership, and a good example is the efforts on the moon. And I\u2019ll tell you about that if you want to hear.MR. IGNATIUS: I do. I want to come to that in just a minute. But let me ask you about the larger ambition that Musk, Jeff Bezos and you have as you think forward. Elon Musk has talked about colonizing Mars. Jeff Bezos has talked about having people live in space. And I want to ask you how you think about the future not in the next five or 10 years but what our future is in space in 50 or 100 years. Just give us some of your thoughts about that.MR. NELSON: Well, I\u2019m glad that they are thinking that, expansive ideas. Before Elon, people really didn\u2019t think about reusing the first stage of a rocket. We had always thrown them away when they landed in the ocean. But think back, David, to 60 years ago. The first time that President Kennedy, right after Alan Shepard had only gone into sub orbit, Kennedy goes to a joint session of Congress, and he was not met with a great deal of applause. There was a lot of skepticism when he said we\u2019re going to the moon and back in this decade. And it actually took 10 months later John Glenn going into orbit and we were in this fierce competition with the Soviet Union, which had surprised us way back with Sputnik and then with Gagarin and Titov before we could ever get into orbit. Once Glenn made that flight, then the nation really got energized. And Kennedy gave that second speech at Rice University, and he said we\u2019re not going to do this because it\u2019s easy, because it\u2019s hard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo you\u2019ve got to have vision. You\u2019ve got to have goals. You\u2019ve got to look beyond the lines as to what can be done. And I think we are coming up on the cusp of this new era where we are thinking that way now.MR. IGNATIUS: And I\u2019m curious, in your own thinking as a former astronaut, as head of our leading space agency NASA, what your own thoughts are. Obviously, this is speculative, but do you imagine a future in which we will be, in effect, colonizing space, doing manufacturing or other economic processes in space?MR. NELSON: Did we think when the Wright brothers flew that within that span of time that we were going to land on the moon? I think that illustrates the point. No telling what we\u2019re going to develop, David. No telling the spinoffs for the betterment of Earth, of us Earthlings, of what we are doing in developing technologies to go into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019ll give--I\u2019ll give you a couple right now. In your pocket is a cellphone, and it has a camera that is unbelievably clear pictures. That camera is on a chip. That chip was developed by NASA for our Earth-observing satellites.Another example. We have a phalanx of satellites that are now measuring all the different things that is happening with the climate. In the next 10 years, we\u2019re going to put five great observatories, and we\u2019re going to look at oceans and land and ice and the atmosphere, and we\u2019re going to compile a 3D composite of the minute changes that are occurring so that we can better project what we\u2019ve got to do in order to save our planet by saving our climate. These are the things.What I\u2019m saying, to answer your question is, don\u2019t limit yourself. Yes, there may be Bezos\u2019 ideas of colonies out in space. Yes, there may be colonizing Mars. But we\u2019ve got to have the vision to get there and develop the technologies in order to sustain human life, and then who knows what will happen in the future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: Your point about being able to observe and do something about methane emissions or other things that are threatening to our climate as the climate crisis deepens is an important one.I want to ask you, Senator, part of the new fasciation I think is the right word with space is driven by a new interest, curiosity, seriousness about the possibility that we\u2019re being visited by intelligence from outside our solar system. The director of national intelligence just issued a report on unidentified aerial phenomenon, what we often call UFOs. There\u2019s going to be more study coming. How do you look at that question of life beyond Earth? What is NASA itself doing to think about this question? Give us some ways to think about this.MR. NELSON: Well, NASA is looking for life. For example, when we are getting a return sample from Mars, we\u2019re going to examine that sample to see if there are any of the chemical elements that would indicate there are microbes there. The mission that we just announced going to Venus, Venus is shrouded by an atmosphere that causes it to be so hot on the surface that it would melt lead. But what about in that atmosphere? There are moons of other planets that we think there are oceans. If there are oceans, there is very likely to be life. So we are looking at that very, very aggressively.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then at the end of this year, we\u2019re going to put up the new space telescope. And unlike Hubble, which has had this incredible three-decade run, far beyond its design life, and looks at the expanse of the universe, this telescope, a million miles from Earth on the other side of the Earth and the sun, with a blanket behind it to shield out any sunlight, looking out through a keyhole in the sky--believe me, this is true, looking back 13.35 billion years to the source of light which is shortly after the big bang and the formation of the first galaxies.And it\u2019s going to be able as we examine those early galaxies, and then examine the solar systems that formed in those galaxies, and then in our search for other planets--which are already undergoing, but this telescope\u2019s going to help us--find those planets and see if we see a planet with an atmosphere that is similar to Earth. I personally think that the universe is so big, which I cannot even conceive in my mind, that, yes, there are other possibilities of other Earth-like planets that have intelligent life.MR. IGNATIUS: That\u2019s exciting just to hear you describe the process that\u2019s ahead. I have to ask you the question, what would NASA do, what would you do as our space leaders, as head of NASA, if we did one day get evidence that showed that there is intelligent life beyond our planet. How would NASA respond to that?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. NELSON: Well, the first thing is, I bet it would be a page one story on The Washington Post.MR. IGNATIUS: I think that\u2019s--we can--we can agree on that.MR. NELSON: So what would I do? If we get any kind of message of intelligent life, then I\u2019m going to suggest our scientists try to make contact with it. And I don\u2019t know when this is coming. You know, a lot of people are excited about what these Navy jet pilots have seen. Back in my old days as senator, I met with those in a classified session. I\u2019ve talked to those pilots. They know they saw something. They followed it. They locked their radar on it. And now this unclassified portion of this report that you mention now has over 140 sightings all over the globe. So there\u2019s something to this. What is it? I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t think anybody knows at this point. I hope it\u2019s not one of our enemies, because that thing the pilot said it was there and then suddenly it\u2019s there in an instant. I hope it\u2019s not one of our enemies, because if it is, they\u2019ve got some real serious advances on us on technology.MR. IGNATIUS: So let me return to the question of what\u2019s next in terms of what you\u2019re immediately planning, and that is the mission with SpaceX to send astronauts back to the moon. You\u2019ve just issued I think a $2.9 billion contract for that, and you\u2019ve talked about the possibility that would happen by the end of 2024. Give us an update on that, what you imagine that mission accomplishing beyond what we did in our earlier trips to the moon.And then if you could talk a little bit about the plans that NASA has announced for it sounds like a permanent orbiting station, what you call \"Gateway,\" that would be orbiting the moon. What would that be available for? What purpose does NASA see for it?MR. NELSON: The contract to SpaceX is held obeyance right now as it is contested and the procedures of the federal government by the GAO, we\u2019re expecting an announcement in the next few weeks. And on the basis of that, we will then proceed. Whatever way we proceed, we want competition, and therefore, we need some more money to enhance and procure that competition so that there are other players that get involved.And a good example of that, when the competition was occurring between Boeing and SpaceX for crew going to the space station, everybody thought Boeing was going to win it hands-down. Well, look, SpaceX has already delivered three crews, and Boeing\u2019s not off the ground yet. So that\u2019s why we want competition.So where\u2019s it going? It\u2019s going back to the moon. Astronauts will ride on the largest rocket ever, which, by the way, will launch at the end of this year. They will take our astronauts into lunar orbit. They will transfer into a commercial lander, which of course NASA will be all over because it\u2019s involving human life. That lander will go down, do their activities, meet up with other commercial experiments on the moon that have already landed, and then come back when we return our astronauts, hitch up in lunar orbit, and the spacecraft called Orion will go back to Earth.The follow-on is what you just mentioned--Gateway--which is--some call it a station but it\u2019s more like an outpost that will be in lunar orbit, and it will serve a number of purposes. It can be the waystation to transfer astronauts and then to go down to the surface of the moon in different locations on the surface. It will be a place for research. It will be a place for assembling the huge rocket and the supplies that will ultimately take us to Mars. So that is what the function of the gateway is. We\u2019re looking at late in the decade of the 2030s by the time we would develop all the technology of how you sustain human life all the way to Mars, stay on the surface maybe six months, and then come all the way back.MR. IGNATIUS: So that would be the timetable we should imagine, late 2030s, a mission to Mars that begins from this gateway habitation that orbits the moon, if I\u2019ve got you right.MR. NELSON: That\u2019s [audio distortion]--now others have said that they can go there earlier. Have at it. I want to see that. But when it comes to human life, NASA is going to be very particular, and there are a lot of ifs out there. It\u2019s one thing going into low Earth orbit, which is, you know, some 300 miles up. It\u2019s another thing going three days to the moon, 250,000 miles away. It\u2019s another thing going to Mars that can be as far as 100 million miles away.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator, I want to turn from these quite exhilarating issues about space to another part of the new frontier that\u2019s darker, and that\u2019s the way in which space is becoming a domain of military action. I want to ask you specifically about the Chinese development of what are believed to be anti-satellite weapons, both on the ground and I\u2019m told in orbit as well, and that the threat that that poses not simply to our communications and other systems that are based in space but to the--to the very idea of space, which becomes a contested domain that\u2019s a theater of war, not a theater of adventure and experimentation. Talk about that danger, if you would.MR. NELSON: This Chinese space program is also a military space program. They are very aggressive, and they are very good. And a lot of that success has come within the last few years. They are now the second nation to have landed successfully on Mars a rover, which is going to gather a small sample. And in the future, they will try to return it to Earth, probably within the same timeframe that we, the U.S., will try to return our sample that our rover up there, Perseverance, is scouting around with a little helicopter right now trying to find the sample that we want to send back. The Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program. They are very inflexible. They are not very transparent.Now contrast this, David, with the difference of a mortal enemy 60 years ago, the Soviet Union, each of us pointing nuclear warheads at each other, and out of that in 1975, in the Soviet Union, an American spacecraft and a Soviet spacecraft rendezvoused and docked, and the crews lived together for nine days. And ever since, we have had on the civilian program in space, cooperation with the Soviets until 1991, now the Russians. And to this day, we still have that cooperation. As a matter of fact, this morning in Kazakhstan at Baikonur Cosmodrome they launched another major component of the International Space Station that will be attached to this huge space station. And they continue to be our partners and to operate that space station with us and do the experimentations together. Contrast that with China.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator--MR. NELSON: They don\u2019t want you messing around.MR. IGNATIUS: My question is whether you\u2019d like to see cooperation and partnership with China similar to what we\u2019ve experienced with Russia. Is that something that you as NASA administrator would support?MR. NELSON: If, in fact, they would open up, of course. If they would be cooperative in a very transparent way. But they haven\u2019t. You mentioned the ASAT. They blew one of their satellites up, and it has proliferated junk all over that low Earth orbit area where there\u2019s so many satellites and our International Space Station.Just recently, the rocket that put up their space station, which technically is very good, but they didn\u2019t provide for a controlled reentry. We didn\u2019t know where that rocket was going to come down, as it ended up in the Indian Ocean. Fortunately, nobody got hit. But they wouldn\u2019t tell us.So I think we are in a space race with China. They are aggressive. They are good. But I wish they\u2019d do what the old Soviet Union did. When it came to civilian space, I wish they\u2019d cooperate and be transparent.MR. IGNATIUS: Senator, I have one last question for you. We have a new branch of our military in the last year called the Space Force. Its creation was something that was widely debated, and you expressed some concerns at the time that it would have a damaging effect on the Air Force which had overseen space activities. How do you think the Space Force is doing, and what suggestions, if any, would you have about how it could do its mission better?MR. NELSON: Well, General Raymond I think has done an incredible job. He\u2019s been very successful putting together a new organization that is a multi-military force. And my initial objection three, four years ago was I didn\u2019t want to just see another bureaucracy created. But that decision was made by the previous administration. And he\u2019s doing it, and he\u2019s doing it well. And there is indeed a need for a Space Force because more and more, when it comes to the defense of this country, space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country and the free world.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, thank you for an absolutely fascinating conversation. We\u2019d love to have you come back and talk about these issues with us again. Thank you for joining us today.MR. NELSON: Thanks, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So if you\u2019d like to know what other interviews we\u2019ve got coming up, please head to washingtonpostlive.com to register and find out more information. I\u2019m David Ignatius. Thank you for joining us today. We\u2019ll see you soon.[End recorded session]  Transcript: The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space  with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson ",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space  with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson  (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7629",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/22/transcript-path-forward-new-frontiers-space-with-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. Our program today is The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space. And we\u2019re pleased that our guest is the NASA administrator, former U.S. Senator Bill Nelson. Senator Nelson represented Florida for 18 years, and maybe more to the point, he was a former astronaut. Senator Nelson, welcome to Washington Post Live. Thanks for joining us. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. NELSON: Thanks, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So as our introduction suggested, this is a big week for space, with Jeff Bezos yesterday in making his flight to the edge of space, joyful return. A few weeks earlier, Richard Branson making a similar trip. I want to ask you with the obvious initial caveat for readers that Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, what you make of these flights, the billionaires in space. You were beginning in our introduction to say some positive things. Let me let you continue with your thoughts about what these journeys mean.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. NELSON: Well, they\u2019re spending their own money, and they are doing incredible things. You just think about what Elon Musk has already done. He is spending money and has cut the cost of going to space because he is reusing his first stages of the rockets. And that is dramatically now, as he competes for launches--government launches, commercial launches--he\u2019s saving everybody money, going into space. When you take Branson and Jeff Bezos, they are making it accessible to go to the edge of space, a 10-, 15-minute flight, experience weightlessness as they start to fall back to Earth. And the cost of that will come down over time so that more people will be able to experience that. Plus, Bezos is building a big rocket that will ultimately compete with Elon Musk\u2019s rocket. And in that competition, we\u2019ll see all the more the costs come down. And then, when you add all of that with these new startup companies that are doing things like printing, 3D printing rocket engines and rockets, then you\u2019re going to see the costs come all the more. So space is going to be more accessible as a result of all of this activity.MR. IGNATIUS: You\u2019ve been positive in noting that these private sector efforts that you\u2019ve said recently, speaking about these trips by prominent billionaire businessmen, we never want to lose our character as explorers or adventurers. Let me just ask you to respond to a criticism that you do see in print, that these are joyrides. Space tourism isn\u2019t really where we should be focused. What\u2019s your own reaction to that?MR. NELSON: Well, for example, Elon has such a mission. It will not go to the International Space Station. It will not have NASA astronauts on it. And yet, it is--a paying customer can experience that. But they would have never had that had Elon not been under contract with the United States government, with NASA--a fixed-price contract, I might say--to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so I don\u2019t look at it as something just completely separate, that this is just for billionaires. We\u2019re all going to benefit from this kind of activity. And the same is true, David, as we venture further out, as we go back to the moon, as we are sending a number of commercial rockets and payloads to the moon to try to discover the water there that we can turn into fuel. And that, of course, is our quest to go out and explore the heavens, and to go to Mars with humans.MR. IGNATIUS: I want to ask you about those larger ambitions for space in a moment. But just to finish with this question of space tourism, what rules should there be? Is this a scenario that NASA should try to have some regulation? Is there a way that this can be made more accessible so that more people can experience this extraordinary adventure? How are you thinking about space tourism going forward?MR. NELSON: All of the above. If the so-called space tourists are going to the International Space Station, then what I am insisting on, that they go through all the training, the medical exams, the psychological/psychiatric exams that any one of our astronauts would do because they are going to a space station with astronauts and cosmonauts that is doing genuine productive work in research. And I don\u2019t want somebody getting up there and going crazy. So NASA is all over this and will require that. If they\u2019re going on a venture on their own, then that\u2019s a different matter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow, I might say, David, that all of this started 11 years ago when Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and I, along with the Obama administration, formulated this dual path that we\u2019re on, a commercial path as well as the government path. And we are seeing that happening now in 3D technicolor in front of our eyes. We\u2019re also seeing an expansion of that public/private partnership, and a good example is the efforts on the moon. And I\u2019ll tell you about that if you want to hear.MR. IGNATIUS: I do. I want to come to that in just a minute. But let me ask you about the larger ambition that Musk, Jeff Bezos and you have as you think forward. Elon Musk has talked about colonizing Mars. Jeff Bezos has talked about having people live in space. And I want to ask you how you think about the future not in the next five or 10 years but what our future is in space in 50 or 100 years. Just give us some of your thoughts about that.MR. NELSON: Well, I\u2019m glad that they are thinking that, expansive ideas. Before Elon, people really didn\u2019t think about reusing the first stage of a rocket. We had always thrown them away when they landed in the ocean. But think back, David, to 60 years ago. The first time that President Kennedy, right after Alan Shepard had only gone into sub orbit, Kennedy goes to a joint session of Congress, and he was not met with a great deal of applause. There was a lot of skepticism when he said we\u2019re going to the moon and back in this decade. And it actually took 10 months later John Glenn going into orbit and we were in this fierce competition with the Soviet Union, which had surprised us way back with Sputnik and then with Gagarin and Titov before we could ever get into orbit. Once Glenn made that flight, then the nation really got energized. And Kennedy gave that second speech at Rice University, and he said we\u2019re not going to do this because it\u2019s easy, because it\u2019s hard.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo you\u2019ve got to have vision. You\u2019ve got to have goals. You\u2019ve got to look beyond the lines as to what can be done. And I think we are coming up on the cusp of this new era where we are thinking that way now.MR. IGNATIUS: And I\u2019m curious, in your own thinking as a former astronaut, as head of our leading space agency NASA, what your own thoughts are. Obviously, this is speculative, but do you imagine a future in which we will be, in effect, colonizing space, doing manufacturing or other economic processes in space?MR. NELSON: Did we think when the Wright brothers flew that within that span of time that we were going to land on the moon? I think that illustrates the point. No telling what we\u2019re going to develop, David. No telling the spinoffs for the betterment of Earth, of us Earthlings, of what we are doing in developing technologies to go into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI\u2019ll give--I\u2019ll give you a couple right now. In your pocket is a cellphone, and it has a camera that is unbelievably clear pictures. That camera is on a chip. That chip was developed by NASA for our Earth-observing satellites.Another example. We have a phalanx of satellites that are now measuring all the different things that is happening with the climate. In the next 10 years, we\u2019re going to put five great observatories, and we\u2019re going to look at oceans and land and ice and the atmosphere, and we\u2019re going to compile a 3D composite of the minute changes that are occurring so that we can better project what we\u2019ve got to do in order to save our planet by saving our climate. These are the things.What I\u2019m saying, to answer your question is, don\u2019t limit yourself. Yes, there may be Bezos\u2019 ideas of colonies out in space. Yes, there may be colonizing Mars. But we\u2019ve got to have the vision to get there and develop the technologies in order to sustain human life, and then who knows what will happen in the future.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: Your point about being able to observe and do something about methane emissions or other things that are threatening to our climate as the climate crisis deepens is an important one.I want to ask you, Senator, part of the new fasciation I think is the right word with space is driven by a new interest, curiosity, seriousness about the possibility that we\u2019re being visited by intelligence from outside our solar system. The director of national intelligence just issued a report on unidentified aerial phenomenon, what we often call UFOs. There\u2019s going to be more study coming. How do you look at that question of life beyond Earth? What is NASA itself doing to think about this question? Give us some ways to think about this.MR. NELSON: Well, NASA is looking for life. For example, when we are getting a return sample from Mars, we\u2019re going to examine that sample to see if there are any of the chemical elements that would indicate there are microbes there. The mission that we just announced going to Venus, Venus is shrouded by an atmosphere that causes it to be so hot on the surface that it would melt lead. But what about in that atmosphere? There are moons of other planets that we think there are oceans. If there are oceans, there is very likely to be life. So we are looking at that very, very aggressively.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then at the end of this year, we\u2019re going to put up the new space telescope. And unlike Hubble, which has had this incredible three-decade run, far beyond its design life, and looks at the expanse of the universe, this telescope, a million miles from Earth on the other side of the Earth and the sun, with a blanket behind it to shield out any sunlight, looking out through a keyhole in the sky--believe me, this is true, looking back 13.35 billion years to the source of light which is shortly after the big bang and the formation of the first galaxies.And it\u2019s going to be able as we examine those early galaxies, and then examine the solar systems that formed in those galaxies, and then in our search for other planets--which are already undergoing, but this telescope\u2019s going to help us--find those planets and see if we see a planet with an atmosphere that is similar to Earth. I personally think that the universe is so big, which I cannot even conceive in my mind, that, yes, there are other possibilities of other Earth-like planets that have intelligent life.MR. IGNATIUS: That\u2019s exciting just to hear you describe the process that\u2019s ahead. I have to ask you the question, what would NASA do, what would you do as our space leaders, as head of NASA, if we did one day get evidence that showed that there is intelligent life beyond our planet. How would NASA respond to that?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. NELSON: Well, the first thing is, I bet it would be a page one story on The Washington Post.MR. IGNATIUS: I think that\u2019s--we can--we can agree on that.MR. NELSON: So what would I do? If we get any kind of message of intelligent life, then I\u2019m going to suggest our scientists try to make contact with it. And I don\u2019t know when this is coming. You know, a lot of people are excited about what these Navy jet pilots have seen. Back in my old days as senator, I met with those in a classified session. I\u2019ve talked to those pilots. They know they saw something. They followed it. They locked their radar on it. And now this unclassified portion of this report that you mention now has over 140 sightings all over the globe. So there\u2019s something to this. What is it? I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t think anybody knows at this point. I hope it\u2019s not one of our enemies, because that thing the pilot said it was there and then suddenly it\u2019s there in an instant. I hope it\u2019s not one of our enemies, because if it is, they\u2019ve got some real serious advances on us on technology.MR. IGNATIUS: So let me return to the question of what\u2019s next in terms of what you\u2019re immediately planning, and that is the mission with SpaceX to send astronauts back to the moon. You\u2019ve just issued I think a $2.9 billion contract for that, and you\u2019ve talked about the possibility that would happen by the end of 2024. Give us an update on that, what you imagine that mission accomplishing beyond what we did in our earlier trips to the moon.And then if you could talk a little bit about the plans that NASA has announced for it sounds like a permanent orbiting station, what you call \"Gateway,\" that would be orbiting the moon. What would that be available for? What purpose does NASA see for it?MR. NELSON: The contract to SpaceX is held obeyance right now as it is contested and the procedures of the federal government by the GAO, we\u2019re expecting an announcement in the next few weeks. And on the basis of that, we will then proceed. Whatever way we proceed, we want competition, and therefore, we need some more money to enhance and procure that competition so that there are other players that get involved.And a good example of that, when the competition was occurring between Boeing and SpaceX for crew going to the space station, everybody thought Boeing was going to win it hands-down. Well, look, SpaceX has already delivered three crews, and Boeing\u2019s not off the ground yet. So that\u2019s why we want competition.So where\u2019s it going? It\u2019s going back to the moon. Astronauts will ride on the largest rocket ever, which, by the way, will launch at the end of this year. They will take our astronauts into lunar orbit. They will transfer into a commercial lander, which of course NASA will be all over because it\u2019s involving human life. That lander will go down, do their activities, meet up with other commercial experiments on the moon that have already landed, and then come back when we return our astronauts, hitch up in lunar orbit, and the spacecraft called Orion will go back to Earth.The follow-on is what you just mentioned--Gateway--which is--some call it a station but it\u2019s more like an outpost that will be in lunar orbit, and it will serve a number of purposes. It can be the waystation to transfer astronauts and then to go down to the surface of the moon in different locations on the surface. It will be a place for research. It will be a place for assembling the huge rocket and the supplies that will ultimately take us to Mars. So that is what the function of the gateway is. We\u2019re looking at late in the decade of the 2030s by the time we would develop all the technology of how you sustain human life all the way to Mars, stay on the surface maybe six months, and then come all the way back.MR. IGNATIUS: So that would be the timetable we should imagine, late 2030s, a mission to Mars that begins from this gateway habitation that orbits the moon, if I\u2019ve got you right.MR. NELSON: That\u2019s [audio distortion]--now others have said that they can go there earlier. Have at it. I want to see that. But when it comes to human life, NASA is going to be very particular, and there are a lot of ifs out there. It\u2019s one thing going into low Earth orbit, which is, you know, some 300 miles up. It\u2019s another thing going three days to the moon, 250,000 miles away. It\u2019s another thing going to Mars that can be as far as 100 million miles away.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator, I want to turn from these quite exhilarating issues about space to another part of the new frontier that\u2019s darker, and that\u2019s the way in which space is becoming a domain of military action. I want to ask you specifically about the Chinese development of what are believed to be anti-satellite weapons, both on the ground and I\u2019m told in orbit as well, and that the threat that that poses not simply to our communications and other systems that are based in space but to the--to the very idea of space, which becomes a contested domain that\u2019s a theater of war, not a theater of adventure and experimentation. Talk about that danger, if you would.MR. NELSON: This Chinese space program is also a military space program. They are very aggressive, and they are very good. And a lot of that success has come within the last few years. They are now the second nation to have landed successfully on Mars a rover, which is going to gather a small sample. And in the future, they will try to return it to Earth, probably within the same timeframe that we, the U.S., will try to return our sample that our rover up there, Perseverance, is scouting around with a little helicopter right now trying to find the sample that we want to send back. The Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program. They are very inflexible. They are not very transparent.Now contrast this, David, with the difference of a mortal enemy 60 years ago, the Soviet Union, each of us pointing nuclear warheads at each other, and out of that in 1975, in the Soviet Union, an American spacecraft and a Soviet spacecraft rendezvoused and docked, and the crews lived together for nine days. And ever since, we have had on the civilian program in space, cooperation with the Soviets until 1991, now the Russians. And to this day, we still have that cooperation. As a matter of fact, this morning in Kazakhstan at Baikonur Cosmodrome they launched another major component of the International Space Station that will be attached to this huge space station. And they continue to be our partners and to operate that space station with us and do the experimentations together. Contrast that with China.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator--MR. NELSON: They don\u2019t want you messing around.MR. IGNATIUS: My question is whether you\u2019d like to see cooperation and partnership with China similar to what we\u2019ve experienced with Russia. Is that something that you as NASA administrator would support?MR. NELSON: If, in fact, they would open up, of course. If they would be cooperative in a very transparent way. But they haven\u2019t. You mentioned the ASAT. They blew one of their satellites up, and it has proliferated junk all over that low Earth orbit area where there\u2019s so many satellites and our International Space Station.Just recently, the rocket that put up their space station, which technically is very good, but they didn\u2019t provide for a controlled reentry. We didn\u2019t know where that rocket was going to come down, as it ended up in the Indian Ocean. Fortunately, nobody got hit. But they wouldn\u2019t tell us.So I think we are in a space race with China. They are aggressive. They are good. But I wish they\u2019d do what the old Soviet Union did. When it came to civilian space, I wish they\u2019d cooperate and be transparent.MR. IGNATIUS: Senator, I have one last question for you. We have a new branch of our military in the last year called the Space Force. Its creation was something that was widely debated, and you expressed some concerns at the time that it would have a damaging effect on the Air Force which had overseen space activities. How do you think the Space Force is doing, and what suggestions, if any, would you have about how it could do its mission better?MR. NELSON: Well, General Raymond I think has done an incredible job. He\u2019s been very successful putting together a new organization that is a multi-military force. And my initial objection three, four years ago was I didn\u2019t want to just see another bureaucracy created. But that decision was made by the previous administration. And he\u2019s doing it, and he\u2019s doing it well. And there is indeed a need for a Space Force because more and more, when it comes to the defense of this country, space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country and the free world.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Senator Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, thank you for an absolutely fascinating conversation. We\u2019d love to have you come back and talk about these issues with us again. Thank you for joining us today.MR. NELSON: Thanks, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So if you\u2019d like to know what other interviews we\u2019ve got coming up, please head to washingtonpostlive.com to register and find out more information. I\u2019m David Ignatius. Thank you for joining us today. We\u2019ll see you soon.[End recorded session]  Transcript: The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space  with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson ",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "WATCH: How do we balance the STEM equation? (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7630",
        "date": "2019-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-live/wp/2015/08/07/how-do-we-balance-the-stem-equation-join-educators-students-and-policymakers-sept-10/",
        "text": "Balancing the Equation | Sept. 10, 2015\n3:00 \u2013 5:00 p.m. ET, The Washington PostEducators, students and policymakers gathered in Washington Thursday to discuss innovative efforts in classrooms around the country to strengthen STEM education, especially for girls and students in underserved communities.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlights:Former astronaut Mae C. Jemison gave opening remarks at The Washington Post's Balancing the Equation live event. (The Washington Post)New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman, Maury Elementary teacher Vanessa Ford, sixth grade student Samantha Garcia and Bezoz Family Foundation advisor Mark Hofer, Senior Advisor, Bezos Family Foundation discuss ways to inspire the youngest generations to study science, technology, engineering and math. (Washington Post Live)D.C. Public Schools chancellor Kaya Henderson, Education Deputy Secretary John King, UNCF president Michael Lomax and Washington Post high education writer Nick Anderson discuss the challenges in Washington and across the country of funding public schools and training teachers. (Washington Post Live)Agenda:3:00 p.m. Welcome remarks\n\u2013Lois Romano, Editor, Washington Post Live Expanding their universe\nHow to inspire the youngest generations\n\u2013Alice Bowman, Mission Operations Manager for New Horizons, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab\n\u2013Vanessa Ford, Think Tank Teacher, Maury Elementary, D.C. Public Schools\n\u2013Samantha Garcia, Student, Basis D.C. Public Charter School\n\u2013Mark Hofer, Senior Advisor, Bezos Family FoundationModerated by Kathleen Schwille, Executive Director, National Geographic Education FoundationAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTable discussionsFrom theory to law\nWhat it takes to reform national education policies and the future of STEM initiatives\n\u2013Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)\n\u2013Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.)Moderated by Josh White, Education Editor, The Washington PostWhat\u2019s working and what\u2019s next\nHighlighting innovative efforts to close the STEM education gap\n\u2013Kaya Henderson, Chancellor, D.C. Public Schools\n\u2013John King, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Education\n\u2013Michael Lomax, President and Chief Executive, UNCFModerated by Nick Anderson, Higher Education Writer, The Washington PostSpeakers:Alice BowmanNew Horizons Mission Operations Manager, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics LaboratoryAs mission operations manager, Alice Bowman leads the team controlling NASA\u2019s New Horizons spacecraft on its voyage to Pluto and beyond from \u201cmission control\u201d at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. Previously, Bowman was a satellite technical advisor to U.S. Space Command. At the California Institute of Technology, she developed tumor-targeting micelles, programmed computer simulations to study how explosions affect soil compression and wave propagation, and developed silicon-based semiconductors that detected infrared waves emitted by cruise missiles and stars. Bowman joined the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in 1997 and has served on various spacecraft teams such as the Midcourse Space Experiment, CONTOUR and New Horizons.Vanessa Ford has taught in D.C. Public and D.C. Public Charter Schools since 2002. She currently leads the Think Tank program at Maury Elementary \u2014 a class in which students explore STEM concepts while building problem-solving skills. Ford is a 2014 Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science finalist, a Next Generation Science Standards @ National Science Teachers Association curator and a member of the\u00a0 2014 Honeywell Educator @ Space Academy class. She was trained as a teacher-leader by Engineering is Elementary and Project Lead the Way. She was also selected as a 2015 recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Educational Activities Board Pre-University Educator Award.Samantha GarciaStudent, Basis D.C. Public Charter SchoolAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSamantha Garcia is in sixth grade at Basis Public Charter School. She is a former student of Maury Elementary and loves to travel, play softball and practice the flute. Garcia says she has always dreamed of becoming an astronaut and hopes to be one of the first people to visit Mars. At the White House\u2019s SoSTEM event, she interviewed NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and chief scientist Ellen Stofan.Kaya Henderson has served as chancellor of D.C. Public Schools since 2010. Henderson joined DCPS in 2007 as deputy chancellor of human capital. Previously, she was a partner at The New Teacher Project, responsible for helping urban school districts retain and recruit effective teachers. She was also the executive director of Teach For America \u2013 D.C. Region, a national admissions director and recruiter for Teach for America and a middle school Spanish teacher in the South Bronx.Sen. John Hoeven has represented North Dakota in the United States Senate since 2011 following ten years of service as the state\u2019s governor. He is a member of the Senate Appropriations, Agriculture, Energy and Indian Affairs Committees. Hoeven served as executive vice president of First Western Bank in Minot from 1986 to 1993. From 1993 to 2000, he served as president and chief executive of the Bank of North Dakota.Mark Hofer is a senior advisor at the Bezos Family Foundation in Seattle. He has worked in psychology, physiology, biology and aerospace engineering research labs and taught high school science and psychology. Hofer received his doctorate in Educational Leadership and Organizational Development from Seattle University. His main focus currently is the development and facilitation of leadership curriculum for the Bezos Scholars Program and preparing the next generation of leaders.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohn B. King, Jr. is the senior advisor of delegated duties for the Deputy Secretary of Education at the U.S. Department of Education. Previously, King served as the commissioner of education for the state of New York. In this role, he was the chief executive officer of the State Education Department and president of the University of the State of New York . Before becoming commissioner, King served as senior deputy commissioner for P\u201312 education at the New York State Education Department and managing director with Uncommon Schools, a non-profit charter management organization that operates urban public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. King was a co-founder and co-director for curriculum and instruction of Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. He also taught high school social studies in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Boston, Massachusetts. King was a 1995 Truman Scholar and received the James Madison Memorial Fellowship for secondary-level teaching of American history, American government and social studies. In February 2011, King was appointed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to serve on the U.S. Department of Education\u2019s Equity and Excellence Commission.Michael L. Lomax is president and chief executive of United Negro College Fund, a private provider of scholarships and educational support to African-American college students. Annually, UNCF enables 60,000 students to attend UNCF-member historically black colleges and universities. Previously, Lomax was president of Dillard University in New Orleans, a literature professor at Morehouse and Spelman colleges in Atlanta and the elected chairman of the Fulton County Commission in Atlanta. He currently serves on the boards of Teach For America and the KIPP Foundation.Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSen. Jeanne Shaheen has represented New Hampshire in the United States Senatesince 2009. She is a member of the Senate Committees on Armed Services, Foreign Relations, Appropriations, and Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Shaheen served as governor of New Hampshire from 1997 to 2003. Between her time as governor and senator, she was the director of Harvard University\u2019s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government.Table Hosts:Donna Harris-Aikens is director of the Education Policy and Practice Department at the National Education Association. The Education Policy and Practice Department is NEA\u2019s primary policy center on elementary and secondary education issues, as well as early education, higher education, and career technical education. Harris-Aikens is the association\u2019s primary liaison to the U.S. Department of Education. She was selected to serve as a member of the Democratic Party\u2019s Platform Drafting Committee in 2008 and 2012. Previously, she served as the policy manager for Service Employees International Union\u2019s Public Services Division. She was also director of government relations for the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium and an attorney in an education boutique law firm.Bob Black is chief executive and co-founder of Start Engineering. Through its books and resources, the company aims to engage students, particularly women and minorities, in engineering. Previously, Black served as deputy executive director of the American Society for Engineering Education. He was also deputy business editor at U.S News and World Report, one of the original members of the Congressional Budget Office and a senior economist at the Urban Institute.Charles Britt is the manager of STEM outreach programs at Northern Virginia Community College Annandale campus. He is responsible for developing collaborative partnerships with industry, local government and the public school system to build and expand science, technology, engineering and math focused co-curricular and experiential learning programs for Fairfax County\u2019s K-12 student population.\u00a0 Previously, Britt spent over 12 years working within the Central Intelligence Agency, specifically in the area of cybersecurity. Britt is vice chair of the Fairfax County Public Schools Career and Technical Education Committee. He also serves as an advisory board member with Per Scholas and the USA Science and Engineering Festival.Michael CasserlyExecutive Director, Council of the Great City SchoolsMichael Casserly has served as executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools since January 1992. He also served as the organization\u2019s director of legislation and research for 15 years. As head of the urban school group, Casserly led the nation\u2019s largest urban school districts to volunteer for the National Assessment of Educational Progress and guided the organization to call for the Common Core Standards. He is currently spearheading efforts to boost academic performance in big city schools and improve the public\u2019s image of urban education.David Evans is the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, a professional organization representing educators in science. Previously, Evans was director of the Center for Sustainability: Earth, Energy, and Climate at Noblis, Inc., undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution, assistant administrator for oceanic and atmospheric research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, deputy assistant administrator at the National Marine Fisheries Service and senior scientist at the National Ocean Services. In 2001, Evans led the White House Global Climate Change Initiative, coordinating related activities of some 12 federal agencies. He was also a tenured professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island and was a classroom teacher in Media, Penn.\u00a0Maria Voles Ferguson \nExecutive Director, Center on Education Policy, George Washington UniversityMaria Voles Ferguson is the executive director of the Center on Education Policy at George Washington University, an independent nonprofit organization that studies and reports on education policy and practice. Previously, Ferguson served as the vice president for policy at the Alliance for Excellent Education and as director of the National School Boards Foundation. She worked as an independent consultant specializing in research, communications and strategic planning for clients including Target Corporation, The Brookings Institution, the U.S. Department of Education\u2019s Regional Education Laboratories and Sidwell Friends School. She served for three years as the director of field operations for New American Schools and was a political appointee for the Clinton administration at the U.S. Department of Education, serving as the director of communication and outreach services for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. Ferguson also co-chaired the department\u2019s annual Improving America\u2019s Schools Conferences, which annually attracted over 4,000 participants.Bart Gordon joined K&L Gates as partner in the Washington, D.C. office after 26 years representing the state of Tennessee in the United States House of Representatives. Gordon served as chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology from 2007 to 2010. He was also a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Committee on Rules, Transatlantic Parliamentary Dialogue and NATO Parliamentary Assembly.Peter GuttmacherDirector of Programming and Curricula Development, D.C. Trust for YouthPeter Guttmacher is the director of programming and curricula development at D.C. Trust for Youth, where his work focuses on citywide learning, practitioner professional development and program quality. A former teacher, tutor and trainer of adults and young people in Boston, Los Angeles and New York City, he is also the author of a series of seven books on film. Most recently, Guttmacher served as education advisor to the exhibit, \u201cGenome: Unlocking Life\u2019s Code\u201d for the National Institutes of Health and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Guttmacher first trained as an actor, and performed at New Haven\u2019s Long Wharf Theater, the Boston Shakespeare Company and the Manhattan Theater Club. He premiered several plays with the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner.Carol O\u2019Donnell is the executive director of the Smithsonian Science Education Center, a unit of the Smithsonian Institution that aims to transform the science and learning education. Previously, O\u2019Donnell was a leader in the Office of State Support at the U.S. Department of Education, supporting states and districts as they implement and sustain education reforms and achieve continued improvement in student outcomes. A former K-12 teacher and curriculum developer, O\u2019Donnell is still in the classroom today \u2014 serving on the part-time faculty of the physics department at George Washington University.Devon RollinsCo-founder and Managing Partner, STEMLYDevon Rollins is the co-founder and managing partner of STEMLY, a nonprofit organization aimed at connecting groups developing programming across STEM subjects to retrofit curriculums in culturally relevant ways. Rollins is also a cyber-economics consultant at Ernst & Young. He\u2019s written on policy issues for the Center for American Progress and has been a featured speaker for Capital Partners for Education.Duane Rollins is an user-experience designer at Threespot and co-founder of STEMLY, a nonprofit organization aimed at connecting groups developing programming across STEM subjects to retrofit curriculums in culturally relevant ways. He also teaches user experience design at General Assembly. Previously, he worked as a UX/UI designer at Juice Analytics where he helped design data visualization projects. He currently serves on the board for the Washington Leadership Academy.Daniel Alcazar-Roman currently serves as a K-12 science and technology instructional specialist at Alexandria City Public Schools. Previously, he was a science teacher and a curriculum and assessment specialist supporting schools in the Houston Independent School District. Alcazar-Roman also serves as a STEM expert on the faculty of the Smithsonian Science Education Center, working on national and international science education reform efforts.Heidi Schweingruber is the director of the Board on Science Education at the National Research Council. Schweingruber co-authored two award-winning books for practitioners that translate findings of NRC reports for a broader audience: \u201cReady, Set, Science! Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms\u201d and \u201cSurrounded by Science.\u201d Previously, she worked as a senior research associate at the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education where she administered the preschool curriculum evaluation program and a grant program in mathematics education. She was director of research for the Rice University School Mathematics Project and has served on the advisory boards for the Merck Institute for Science Education, the Discovery Learning Research Center at Purdue University and Building Capacity for State Science Education.Meeta Sharma-Holt is the executive director of Techbridge\u2019s Washington D.C. office. Techbridge\u2019s programs aim to inspire middle and high school-aged girls in underserved communities to discover an interest in science, technology and engineering. Sharma-Holt began her career developing corporate mentoring programs for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, and later operating a large multi-site after-school teen center, and summer program for at a settlement house. Once in Washington, D.C., she initially assisted over 20 charter school sites to develop their after-school services, and then directed a citywide effort to create the model of after-school program delivery called Project My Time.Russell ShillingExecutive Director of STEM, U.S. Department of EducationAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRussell Shilling is the executive director of STEM at the U.S. Department of Education, overseeing the department\u2019s policies to drive innovation in science, technology, engineering and math education and enhance interagency coordination. Previously, Shilling served as a Navy captain, retiring after 22 years of service as a Navy aerospace experimental psychologist focusing on education, training and psychological health. Shilling has also held several program management positions at the Office of Naval Research\u00a0 and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.Michelle Thaller is the assistant director of science at NASA\u2019s Goddard Spaceflight Center. Thaller has a Ph.D. from Georgia State University. After a post-doctoral research fellowship at Caltech, she became particularly interested in public outreach and science communication and served as the public outreach lead for the Spitzer Space Telescope at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory before moving to Goddard. She is currently serving a one-year leadership fellowship in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in D.C. Thaller is one of the regular hosts of \u201cThe Universe\u201d series on the History Channel, NatGeo\u2019s \u201cthe Known Universe\u201d and Discovery Science Channel\u2019s \u201cHow the Universe Works,\u201d and \u201cThe Stripped Universe.\u201d She also serves as a science advisor for John and Hank Greene\u2019s Crash Course series on PBS Home Video.Biographies are provided by speakers and edited only for length and clarity. Educators, students and policymakers gathered in Washington Thursday to discuss innovative efforts in classrooms around the country to strengthen STEM education, especially for girls and students in underserved communities. WATCH: How do we balance the STEM equation?",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: CEO Series with Richard Branson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7631",
        "date": "2017-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-live/wp/2017/04/28/transcript-ceo-series-executive-actions-with-richard-branson/",
        "text": "This transcript has been\u00a0edited for length and readability.Ryan:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Good afternoon everyone.\u00a0 Welcome to The Washington Post.\u00a0 I am Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO.\u00a0 We\u2019d like to thank all of you who are here with us today at The Washington Post Live Center, as well as the many that are joining us across us across our digital platforms.\u00a0 We\u2019re excited to continue our CEO series, where globally recognized business leaders discuss how they are addressing some of the most pressing issues of the day, and the impact of those actions on consumers, countries, and the planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightToday, we\u2019re delighted to welcome Sir Richard Branson to the series.\u00a0 A prolific entrepreneur, Sir Richard has business interests that have spanned the globe.\u00a0 Literally spanned the globe, covering sea, land, air, and space.\u00a0 Over the past five decades, he as built and invested in companies that have challenged industry norms across entertainment, financial, transportation, technology, and health sectors to name a few.\u00a0 His pioneering Virgin Group has consistently demonstrated the importance of innovation and expansion.\u00a0 And in his own words, \u201cMaking business a force for good.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe CEO Series comes at a unique time for our country, and for the global community.\u00a0 Today, decisions made by political leaders and business executives alike have enormous impact, reaching far beyond their direct constituents and customers.\u00a0 Sir Richard has embraced this reality through his personal and professional commitments to issues of climate change, energy efficiency, and conservation.\u00a0 So we look forward to hearing from him about those and other important subjects in his conversation with Jonathan Capehart, Washington Post opinion writer, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and host of the Cape Up podcast series.So now, please join me in welcoming Sir Richard Branson and Jonathan Capehart.[APPLAUSE]Story continues below advertisementCapehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 Look at all these people, Sir Richard.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] It\u2019s amazing.\u00a0 Well, good afternoon.\u00a0 I\u2019m Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post, as our publisher just said.\u00a0 I\u2019m excited to welcome you to our CEO interview series with Sir Richard Branson.\u00a0 Thank you again very much for joining us today.\u00a0 And before we get started, a quick reminder to our audience here, and folks who might be watching livestream, that I have a tablet here, on stage, to take a few of your questions throughout our conversation.\u00a0 Tweet your questions to @PostLive using #CEOLive, and do it early and often, because I\u2019m sure Sir Richard will run through all my questions.AdvertisementBut you are in town to march in the Climate March tomorrow.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Before we talk about that\u2014[LAUGHTER]Story continues below advertisementCapehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Anytime I go on stage, I normally bring a pair \u2014you assistant actually gave me this, saying that your tie should be cut off.\u00a0 But he\u2019s got a very\u2014[LAUGHTER] You\u2019ve got a very nice tie so I think\u2014we\u2019ll spare you.\u00a0 All right.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER]Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, on behalf of my tie drawer, I thank you, but Hermes is probably upset because they just lost out on getting a new tie.\u00a0 Well, with that\u2014[LAUGHTER]Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m in town for the climate\u2014[OVERLAPPING]Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes.\u00a0 You\u2019re in town for the Climate March tomorrow.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You know, in this town, and in the country, there are a lot of climate-change skeptics.\u00a0 [LAUGHS] Where do you think that comes from, and why don\u2019t you think\u2014even though, what is it, 99% of the climate scientists say there\u2019s human cause of this\u2014the information and the science doesn\u2019t go through?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, it seems to be unique to America, the climate skeptic.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] As America\u2019s got quite a few things unique things about it at the moment, but the climate change is one of those things.\u00a0 Since now you have the Republicans running America, what we, as business leaders, are trying to do is to get the message across to those skeptics that even if you are a skeptic, it makes sense for America and the rest of the world to be powered by clean energy.I mean, I think even the biggest climate skeptic must like their children to breathe clean air.\u00a0 So if we can power the world by the sun, and by wind, and by wonderful innovations in batteries, we\u2019re going to create hundreds of thousands, millions of jobs. \u00a0We\u2019re going to have clean air, and we\u2019ll have a fuel price, energy price, globally, which is about half what the current energy price is.\u00a0 And it will be like that forever.\u00a0 Whereas if we don\u2019t invest in clean energy, and get out there and create those millions of jobs, fuel prices could be back up at $150 a barrel again.\u00a0 And in my opinion, we\u2019ll be polluting and damaging the world we live in as well.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But can any of those goals, that you just outlined, be achieved if the United States is not an active partner in all of that?\u00a0 I mean, you\u2019re a big supporter of COP 21, but who knows where the United States government is right now, and whether it\u2019s in or it\u2019s out.\u00a0 But if the United States officially gets out of the Paris agreement, can any of these goals be reached?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBranson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, the United States will be left way behind if it doesn\u2019t keep the momentum going.\u00a0 I mean, China has got a clean-energy revolution going on.\u00a0 I mean, millions of jobs have been created in the clean energy.\u00a0 Europe\u2019s got a clean-energy revolution going on.\u00a0 South America\u2019s got a clean-energy revolution going on.\u00a0 And fortunately, in America, 95% of business leaders believe in climate change, and they want to do something about it.\u00a0 Most of the oil companies in America are investing heavily in technology that will be the technology of the future, when the demand for oil disappears.So it\u2019s not going to be as easy, obviously, if you\u2019ve got an administration that puts barriers up rather than encouraging it.\u00a0 You know, but I think we\u2019ve got to make it happen.\u00a0 And we\u2019ve got to get to the that carbon neutrality by 2050.\u00a0 One interesting thing that I learnt yesterday, in one of the TED Talks, James Hansen came up with this brilliant idea a few years ago.\u00a0 And that was put a tax on carbon, but give 100% of that tax back to people in their wage packets, and equally, right across the board.There\u2019s a group of Republicans, George Schultz and others, who have taken up that idea, and are pushing the White House right now to accept it.\u00a0 And if you can create a differential between carbon and clean energy, then it just gives the clean-energy revolution, I think, a change to move even quicker, and even more jobs to be created.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCapehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, what you just said actually works perfectly with this question that just chimed in from Twitter.\u00a0 And that is, when it comes to energy alternatives, do you think there\u2019s a place for nuclear energy?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think there could be a place if you think that, politically, it could ever get through.\u00a0 I think that it\u2019s unlikely that, politically, it will ever get.\u00a0 Therefore, I think, fortunately, there\u2019s enough\u2014I mean, the price of solar has come down so dramatically.\u00a0 The price of wind is coming down so dramatically.\u00a0 The price of batteries are coming down dramatically.\u00a0 And new innovations; we\u2019re working with Bill Gates on a breakthrough energy coalition, looking at new innovations.There are so many exciting new innovations coming through.\u00a0 So I think some of these things have a better change, I think, than nuclear.\u00a0 Although, nuclear, arguably, needs to be a part of the equations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCapehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You have something called the \u201cVirgin Earth Challenge.\u201d\u00a0 And you started this in 2007.\u00a0 It\u2019s a prize to a company.\u00a0 I want you to talk about it, because the point of this challenge is to come up with sustainable, scalable ways of removing carbon, greenhouse gases, from the atmosphere.\u00a0 How many winners have you had?\u00a0 If you talk about one or some of the ideas that have come forward?\u00a0 Have they gone to scale?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You know, longitude, latitude was only discovered because of a prize.\u00a0 One of the reasons we\u2019re going to space is because of X Prize and SpaceShipOne.\u00a0 So prizes can have a fantastic, catalyzing effect.\u00a0 We set up the Virgin Earth prize, a $25 million prize, to see if anybody could come up with a way of extracting carbon out of the earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u00a0 And we wanted them to be able to extract enough carbon that would basically solve the problem.It was a big task, but just to get people thinking.\u00a0 A lot of people have put their mind to it.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got 10 organizations that we\u2019ve watching closely.\u00a0 Nobody has come up with the winning formula yet.\u00a0 It took 75 years for the longitude prize to be won. \u00a0Hopefully, it will take a lot less.\u00a0 But in the meantime, I mean, this prize is there in case everything else fails.\u00a0 In the meantime, I think we\u2019ve just got to get on, and do the nuts and bolts of getting clean energy out there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThere are many new technologies that are being developed.\u00a0 Like in Manchester University, there were two professors that won the prize for inventing something called \u201cgraphene.\u201d\u00a0 We built a plane a few years ago called the \u201cVirgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer,\u201d 100% out of carbon fiber, to show Boeing and Airbus that carbon fiber should be part of the mix for aeroplanes.\u00a0 When it successfully flew nonstop around the world, with Steve Fossett piloting it, Airbus came to where we had built it.\u00a0 I think partly as a result of that and other things, you\u2019ve got the 787.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got the A350 planes, which are 50, 60% carbon fiber.\u00a0 That means we\u2019re saving 20% fuel burn on them.We\u2019re now working with Manchester University and others on graphene.\u00a0 Graphene is maybe nine times lighter than carbon fiber.\u00a0 It\u2019s maybe nine times strong, very roughly, than carbon fiber.\u00a0 You can\u2019t use it in quite the same way as carbon fiber, because it\u2019s incredibly thin.\u00a0 But you can mix it into the mix.\u00a0 And so, future planes, hopefully, will then be another big step forward to the much lighter .So, you know, lots and lots of these things are going on around the world, which, hopefully, if every country works hard towards fulfilling them, we will get there.AdvertisementCapehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You\u2019ve mentioned space.\u00a0 You\u2019ve mentioned airlines.\u00a0 Two subjects that I want to get to, but before I do that, I want to ask you about the assertion that we heard over, and over, and over again here, in this country, that coal is coming back; that we\u2019re going to bring the coal jobs back.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] You firmly believe that renewable energy will win the day.\u00a0 Will it win the day, or has it already won the day, renewable energy?\u00a0 Not necessarily here, in this country, but globally?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I can\u2019t think of anything more stupid than to talk about bringing coal back.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] Actually, there are some things which are even more stupid, but anyway.\u00a0 I mean, first of all, digging coal is a pretty horrible job.\u00a0 It kills a lot of people that work in coal mines.\u00a0 Most countries have got rid of that now.\u00a0 The people who were digging coal in coal mines are now working, you know, putting solar panels on peoples\u2019 roofs.\u00a0 You know, working on creating windmills.\u00a0 A whole new revolution of new jobs is being created.America should be setting an example to other countries that are still reliant on coal, to show that you don\u2019t have to be reliant on coal anymore.\u00a0 Fortunately, China was new coal-power station every week, and now moving rapidly towards clean energy.\u00a0 They have dirty energy in their face.\u00a0 I mean, the coal, if you go into Beijing and other places, you can hardly see.\u00a0 So they have another incentive as well to\u2014[OVERLAPPING]Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Would you say that China is leading the renewable energy revolution?\u00a0 Or is that too\u2014Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 No, China is definitely leading the clean energy revolution today.\u00a0 They\u2019ve already, I would say, overtaken America.\u00a0 And the reason that the clean-energy revolution is really taking off now is the price they\u2019ve managed to drive solar panels down.\u00a0 I think on some of the more technical things, like battery power, America is still ahead, and Europe.\u00a0 But as far as just replacing dirty energy, China, I would say, is moving the quickest.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Is the reason why you\u2019re getting into space travel is because you\u2019re trying to ensure that we have a way, and some place to go, before Earth turns into a galactic raisin?\u00a0 [LAUGHTER]Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Generally speaking, the Earth is a pretty good place to be, and we\u2019ve got to make sure that we keep it a good place to be, and make it an even better place to be.\u00a0 I mean, if you look at the last six decades, and study the last six decades, every decade has got better, and better, and better; whether it\u2019s famine; whether it\u2019s poverty; even wars.\u00a0 Pretty well everything has got better.\u00a0 Obviously, Syria has been the most ghastly blight there.But by and large, things have got better.\u00a0 You wouldn\u2019t believe it if you saw 24-hour news, but things have got better.\u00a0 Gay rights in America.\u00a0 Things have got better.\u00a0 Other countries, there\u2019s a lot of work still to do.So I don\u2019t think we need to all go live on the moon or Mars.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] And they\u2019re not very hospitable places.\u00a0 But I do think that space can play, and already has played, a massive, positive role back here on Earth.\u00a0 I mean, we\u2019re involved in putting a big array of satellites around the Earth, which will continue to make a big difference.\u00a0 There are still 4.5 billion people who don\u2019t have internet or Wi-Fi access.\u00a0 They are at a big disadvantage to those of us who do.\u00a0 And a lot of those people don\u2019t even have the access to telephones as well, the education that you get through the internet, and other things.I think that people should, if they want, be able to go to space, and become astronauts, and marvel back at the wonderful world we live in\u2014[OVERLAPPING]Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think you called it \u201cVirgin Galactic astronauts.\u201d\u00a0 So could I, right now, say to you, \u201cHey, Richard, I want to be one of your astronauts?\u201d\u00a0 How does that even work?\u00a0 How does that happen?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, you have to work hard and make a bit of money.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER]Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A bit of money?\u00a0 And how much are we talking?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Initially, it\u2019s expensive.\u00a0 I mean, it\u2019s about $250,000.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The same price as a certain club membership I heard about. \u00a0[LAUGHTER] So, 250,000.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What club are we talking about?\u00a0 You go to expensive clubs.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ve never been.\u00a0 I\u2019ve only seen pictures.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Anyway, it has to start somewhere.\u00a0 Like the aviation travel was the equivalent price in the 1920s.\u00a0 And it will come down quite a lot in the years to come.\u00a0 I think through space travel, we\u2019re going to get point-to-point travel at much quicker speeds.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to get almost completely environmentally friendly travel.\u00a0 There\u2019s a whole lot of breakthroughs I think that which will take place.\u00a0 One day we will have a Virgin Hotel in space.\u00a0 It\u2019s something that I know my children are looking forward to.\u00a0 I hope we can hurry up and so I can look forward to it.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I believe a test flight is going to happen this year.\u00a0 And then is the hope 2018, to have like a full-on, full-fledged, the first Virgin Galactic astronauts to go up?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ve made the mistake of giving dates before and being wrong.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] But if you say so, that sounds\u2014[LAUGHTER] That sounds good.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s all about being helpful.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s been tough.\u00a0 Space is tough.\u00a0 I think all of us who\u2019ve been in it have found it tougher than we thought.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And yet you stick with it though?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 You know, we\u2019ve got 800 astronauts signed up to go to space.\u00a0 Their commitment has helped us keep our commitment to it.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got 650 wonderful engineers, here in the states, working on it.\u00a0 And space is becoming a big, new industry in America.\u00a0 You\u2019ve got Elon, Jeff Bezos, who I think has something to do with a company\u2014[LAUGHTER]Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, that would be the beloved Jeff Bezos\u2014[OVERLAPPING]Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 So you\u2019ve got three people who really are putting a lot of energy, and time, and effort into it.\u00a0 And I think we\u2019ll hopefully create some magic through it.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let\u2019s talk about another kind of travel that is probably as strenuous, but a little closer to Earth, and that\u2019s airline travel.\u00a0 I can\u2019t imagine a situation happening on a Virgin flight that happened on a certain United flight.\u00a0 But if it had happened on a Virgin flight, what would you have done?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think it wouldn\u2019t have happened on a Virgin flight.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] The whole reason that Virgin set up 33 years ago with Virgin Atlantic was because airline travel was pretty dire.\u00a0 The way that people were treated, it was not great.\u00a0 We set up Virgin Atlantic just with one secondhand 747, taking on TWA, and Pan Am, and Air Florida, and People Express.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s a name I haven\u2019t heard in a long time.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER]Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I mention those four because these, between them, had something like 800 planes.\u00a0 And we had one plane.\u00a0 All of those airlines have disappeared.\u00a0 The reason they disappeared was they didn\u2019t look after the people who traveled on them.\u00a0 They got replaced by United, and American, and others.\u00a0 Those airlines have been bust three or four times.\u00a0 And in America, you have something called \u201cChapter 11,\u201d which is great.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] If your management mess up, they just then get rid of all their creditors, and they start all over again.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER]Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s like an inside joke.\u00a0 Everyone is sort of giggling.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In Britain, if we messed up, you know, we\u2019re like a tree.\u00a0 If a tree dies, we\u2019re dead.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] We leave for new, young saplings to grow.\u00a0 So we had to look after our passengers.\u00a0 We can\u2019t afford to go into Chapter 11.\u00a0 We can\u2019t\u2019 afford to go bankrupt.\u00a0 You know, we have to be great.\u00a0 And it\u2019s a lot more fun running an airline that has people who smile and are friendly to their passengers, rather than the reverse.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So you still have Virgin Atlantic, but it broke my heart to read that you sold Virgin America to Alaska\u2014Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I didn\u2019t sell Virgin.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Okay, Virgin America was sold to Alaska Airlines.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It broke my heart too.\u00a0 You have this rather strange situation in America that British people, we can own banks in America.\u00a0 We can own spaceship companies in America.\u00a0 We can own hospitals in America.\u00a0 We can own lots of things, but we\u2019re not allowed to own an airline.And this has been a really clever move by the big airlines to try to protect their patch, and they\u2019ve managed to lobby and fight and keep a situation where only people who\u2014with American passports can own American airlines.\u00a0 And so, when we set up Virgin America, we had to bring in venture capital organizations to own it, and we were a minority shareholder, and sadly, they had an offer they couldn\u2019t refuse, and they sold it.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, there goes the cabin with the purple lights.\u00a0 I have to\u2014since you\u2019re here, let me ask you this.\u00a0 What\u2019s up with the purple light?\u00a0 Is the mood\u2014am I supposed to feel like I\u2019m walking into a club in South Beach or Ibiza?\u00a0 Or is there some other thing at work with the purple light?\u00a0 Because no one else does it.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The exciting thing about starting a company or starting an airline is you take out a big blank sheet of paper, and you think\u2014or this is what you should do, I think, and you\u2019re painting a\u2014you\u2019re painting a painting; you\u2019re trying to get every little single thing right on that canvas, and obviously, number one priority is you get the friendliest, best people to work within this canvas, work within your airline.But then, every little detail must be right, so when you walk on, you must feel\u2014into an airline, you must feel, wow, I feel at home, I feel welcome.\u00a0 And the quality of the seats, everything must be right, and I think that\u2019s what the team at Virgin America achieved, but anyway, what\u2019s the space on that?\u00a0 We\u2019re not\u2014Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Do you think there will come a time when there will be another airline like Virgin America?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Look, it would be too sad for there not to be.\u00a0 That\u2019s all I can say at this stage.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a whole lot of time to go dive in on that, because you have a lot of interests and a lot of passions, and I\u2019m sort of hard-pressed to find an issue that you not only care about, but that you haven\u2019t also written about and have campaigned for.\u00a0 One of those is criminal justice reform and from that is concern about the war on drugs, concerned about the death penalty.\u00a0 Of all the things that you have to do, and all of the companies that you\u2019re running, and all of the issues that you are passionate about, what is it about criminal justice that pulls you in?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, I suppose\u2014I mean, I started in business when I was 15, so I\u2019ve been 50 years of traveling the world, and seeing\u2014learning about what\u2019s going on in the world, and seeing a lot of things that are wrong in the world that I feel need to be fixed.\u00a0 One of the things that took place 40-odd years ago was the infamous war on drugs, a similar war that took place on the war on alcohol back in the \u201820s here in America.\u00a0 And that war has done untold damage on a global basis, because the war started in America, but America has imposed their will on the rest of the world.\u00a0 And it\u2019s resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being incarcerated in America, mainly minority groups.\u00a0 It\u2019s resulted in people who have drugs problems not being able to come and get help.\u00a0 And so, with this particular problem, we\u2019ve got involved with something called the global drug commission, which is 15 ex-presidents, Kofi Annan, and myself, to try to get governments to change their approach and treat drugs as a health problem, not a criminal problem.And to experiment with new approaches.\u00a0 We\u2019ve welcomed the states in America that have legalized; we\u2019ve welcomed the states that have set up medical marijuana centers, and we pray that this new administration does not interfere, and just lets this experiment continue, because the experiment is working.\u00a0 It\u2019s not resulting in thousands more people taking drugs, and in fact, with the medical marijuana centers, it\u2019s actually helping a lot of people who are benefitting from them.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, first, have you had any\u2014you personally had any kind of contact with the new administration\u2014anyone in the new administration?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m the best person to talk to them, because I spoke out quite strongly against the administration before it came into power.\u00a0 But so, I will send other people into talk to them.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, if you could talk to anyone in the administration, on this issue, presumably the war on drugs and what you said about marijuana, what message would you want to impart?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I would say that they need to do what the global drug commission did; they need to look at example closely about\u2014I mean, look at Portugal.\u00a0 They had a massive heroin problem the turn of the century.\u00a0 And the president of Portugal went on television, said, \u201cNobody is ever going to prison ever again for taking drugs, we\u2019re going to help.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to sit down and help you with heroin.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to have places you can come to get your heroin fix.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to give you clean needles.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to make sure you don\u2019t overdose.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to make sure you don\u2019t catch Hepatitis C or HIV.\u00a0 And when you\u2019re ready, we\u2019re going to help you get into a clinic and ween you off.\u201dAnd within very short period of time, the heroin problem had disappeared from Portugal.\u00a0 America has now got a big heroin problem.\u00a0 That is the way to deal with it; not to leave these people in this sort of shady underworld, having to go and break and enter into people\u2019s homes to get their fix.\u00a0 People who are addicted to heroin, generally speaking, want to get off it.\u00a0 They want help, and you can\u2019t leave them to the underworld.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, according to my reporting, President Obama, when he was president, was reading an article on criminal justice reform, and you were mentioned in this article, and he was so impressed, he turned to an aid and said, \u201cHe\u2019s doing some interesting things.\u00a0 I\u2019d like to meet him.\u201d\u00a0 You eventually went to lunch at the White House with President Obama.\u00a0 You found a kindred spirit in him, didn\u2019t you?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, I suspect we agree on a lot of things, and we had\u2014that was a first time of really getting to know each other well, and whether it was death penalty reform or climate change or pretty well all areas, I would say, we\u2019re on the same page.\u00a0 And yeah, it was a privilege spending time with him.\u00a0 I went that night to\u2014I\u2019ll tell a story against myself.\u00a0 I went that night to his birthday party at the White House, and I was walking in with a friend, and there was a picture of him with this lovely little girl, sitting next to him, and I said to my friend, \u201cIs that his daughter?\u201d\u00a0 She said, \u201cRichard, his daughter is black.\u201dCapehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, whose daughter was it?\u00a0 No idea?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Anyway.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, one of the things that President Obama\u2014when he was president and now that he\u2019s no longer president, he\u2019s doing the My Brother\u2019s Keeper initiative.\u00a0 It was in the White House; now it\u2019s My Brother\u2019s Keeper alliance, and it covers a lot of the things that obviously, he\u2019s interested in, but also that you\u2019re interested in.\u00a0 Are you involved in any way with MBK?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think we will be working.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got a foundation that covers many of the areas that he covers and we\u2019ve agreed that the two foundations will overlap on things and work together on things.\u00a0 And I think he\u2019s in an incredible position globally to make a formidable difference in the years to come, and I think that\u2019s what he wants to do.\u00a0 So, if we can help in any way, we\u2019ll certainly be there to help.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, Obama and his wife Michelle, they spent some time with you at your home on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands, a beautiful part of the world.\u00a0 You live there.\u00a0 Every morning, from my research, you get up every morning around 5:00, you do emails, you kitesurf every day.\u00a0 Now, here\u2019s the thing.\u00a0 You do that every day and here come the Obamas, and you put out this minute video of the two of you in a kitesurfing contest, and he beat you.\u00a0 The man was the leader of the free world for eight years, had no time really for any kind of real exercise, and yet he rolls up on your island and beats you.\u00a0 Did you expect him to beat you?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was humiliating.\u00a0 Well, they\u2014yeah, my only defense was I was learning to do something called foil boarding against him learning to kitesurf.\u00a0 Foil boarding is very strange; you\u2019re going along on a board, and the board then comes out three foot out of the water, and generally you just end up falling, and I fell a lot.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It looks like it hurts.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Consumed a lot of the water, but we had a lot of fun.\u00a0 And I\u2019m such a gracious loser.\u00a0 Yeah, he\u2019s extraordinarily fit man.\u00a0 And it was\u2014he had the biggest grin on his face for 10 days.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah, he sure did.\u00a0 That picture ricocheted around the United States.\u00a0 He looked like that ex-boyfriend who looks happier and healthier after he left you.\u00a0 It\u2019s like, thanks a lot.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think that\u2014yeah, I mean, look.\u00a0 There\u2019s nothing he can\u2014when you step down from being Prime Minister or president of a country, I think you\u2019re absolutely right.\u00a0 The best way of doing it is to\u2014you\u2019ve done your bit, and then you have to hand the keys over for a year or so, and do your best not to interfere.\u00a0 And it must be very difficult, but I\u2019m sure that\u2019s sensible advice, and it seems to be the way he\u2019s behaving.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, one thing I found very surprising to read and tell me if I\u2019ve read something that\u2019s not true, and that is, you are very, very shy.\u00a0 You\u2019re naturally shy.\u00a0 You\u2019re an introvert, which runs completely counter to everything that I\u2019ve seen just from what you\u2019ve done, just in terms of branding the Virgin brand around the world.\u00a0 Shy is not what I get.\u00a0 I get brash, confident, extrovert, hard-charging.\u00a0 How do you do that?\u00a0 How do you put the shyness aside to be a very public showman?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, my mum tried to teach me how to get over my shyness.\u00a0 She would shove us on the stage and tell us that shyness was a selfish thing, and you\u2019re thinking of yourself, and you\u2019ve got to get out there and think about other people, and so I think, you know, I\u2019ve hopefully largely overcome it, over the years.\u00a0 If I\u2019m talking about subjects that I know about, and that maybe that\u2019s why I love to learn about everything that\u2019s going on in the world.\u00a0 I find it relatively easy, and I\u2019m talking about things you don\u2019t know about, and having to bullshit about things you don\u2019t know about, I find really tough.But if I\u2019ve got a basic knowledge of it, I can overcome the shyness, I think.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, ten years ago, you were asked, what do you want your legacy to be?\u00a0 And you told the interviewer, look, my mother lived until she was 101. \u00a0I\u2019ve got a lot of time, so it\u2019s too early for that question.\u00a0 That was ten years ago.\u00a0 Are you in legacy mode yet?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, my mum\u2019s still alive.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So that makes her how old now?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah, she\u2019s 93 now.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Your grandmother lived to\u2014Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My grandmother, that\u2019s right.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But your mother is 93.\u00a0 That\u2019s some good genes.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You know, we\u2019re fortunate with the genes.\u00a0 Now, look, I\u2019m trying not to think about legacy yet, but I love life, I live life to its full every day.\u00a0 I pinch myself because it\u2019s just such a fascinating journey, and I think we\u2019re\u2014if you get into a position where you can make a difference, then you don\u2019t want to waste that position, so I suppose I spend quite a lot of my time on issues.\u00a0 If I go back and the last two times I\u2019ve marched\u2014I\u2019ve only marched twice in my life, so far.\u00a0 I\u2019ve marched against the Vietnamese war when I was a teenager, shouting, \u201cLBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?\u201d\u00a0 And I think the Vietnamese marches by young people really helped bring an end to that very unjust war.I marched against the Iraq war, and then sadly, despite massive marches but maybe not massive enough, that war didn\u2019t\u2014was not stopped.\u00a0 And climate change is the third time, and just as important, I think, for the world, as those other two are.\u00a0 And just as important for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and so looking forward to tomorrow\u2019s march, and hopefully lots of people will turn up.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let me ask you a question here that\u2019s come in from Twitter, and that is, with the rise of populism around the world, can people like you create real change on global humanitarian and civic issues?\u00a0 How, and is one of the ways through business?Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, I mean, we\u2019ve set up various not for profit organizations to address some of these issues, so we set up the elders with Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan and Archbishop Tutu and a number of wonderful ladies like Mary Robinson and so on, to go into conflict regions.\u00a0 We set up the B team, which is a group of business leaders to\u2014wonderful people like Paul Pullman from Unilever, and Mohammed Younis and others to get out and talk about\u2014and we were all there in force at the Paris talks, going along and seeing the Indian ministers, seeing the Chinese ministers, trying to show them that there\u2019s a business reason why they should support COP 21.And so, I think a group of business leaders can make a big difference in the world.\u00a0 And we\u2019re trying to get\u2014you know, we\u2019re setting up a Chinese group and an Indian group, and other groups around the world with like-minded individuals.\u00a0 And there are a number of organizations like that we set up, which I think can help push some of these issues forward.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, we only have about five minutes left, and I never like to let anyone go without asking them some rapid fire, silly, unrelated questions.Branson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 I was drinking an empty tea cup.\u00a0 Thank you.Capehart:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: \u201cUFO\u201d A Conversation with Mark Monroe & Greg Eghigian, PhD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7632",
        "date": "2021-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/08/06/transcript-ufo-conversation-with-mark-monroe-greg-eghigian-phd/",
        "text": "MS. STEAD SELLERS: Good afternoon and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at the Post.This afternoon, we're going to be talking about a new Showtime docuseries \"UFO,\" with director, Mark Monroe, and a professor of history and an expert interviewed in this series, Greg Eghigian. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA very warm welcome to you both.MR. EGHIGIAN: Hi, delighted to be here.MR. MONROE: Nice to be here.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you for joining us.Mark, if I can start with you, you've produced movies on the Beatles, the BGs, Pavarotti, Before the Flood with Leonardo di Caprio. So, why UFOs?MR. MONROE: Well, this project really came about through Bad Robot, my partners, and Showtime. A great producer, Glen Zipper, with Zipper Brothers, they got together and talked about how much this topic has come to infuse and dominate a lot of our talk in the culture.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, they had an idea to really dive into this article that came out in 2017, a story that was covered by The Washington Post and the New York Times, Politico, and a lot of really--institutions in terms of credibility and the way news is reported. And suddenly, you're seeing UFOs in these publications. And so, they really wanted to examine why and what is happening here in our culture to bring UFOs to the fore.So, I'm always attracted to stories that have mystery, whether it's a music doc or an environmental piece, and characters who are committed. And the UFO topic, that's what you find: commitment, obsession, and a mystery that doesn't ever seem to ever go away.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Greg, I watched episode four earlier this week, and talk about somebody committed. You were interested from your early years in this phenomenon, but could you talk to me now a little bit as a historian about the interest you had developing the background of this history, and why it's important, you believe, to see this in a historical context.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. EGHIGIAN: Yeah, sure. Oh, like so many people who've been gotten interested in UFOs over the years, my interest really sprouted in my youth. I was fascinated with UFOs. I could not stop reading books about UFOs and people who said they had been contacted by aliens or been kidnapped by aliens. I was always quite mesmerized by the subject matter, for a lot of the reasons that Mark just outlined.But I will say that other interests occupied my time and energies over the years and but several years ago, I became really struck by this topic again and I started diving into it a little more, and I started to realize something I thought was really quite shocking, and that was to find out that no academic historian had ever written a book on the subject of UFOs since 1975. And so, that made me think there's something to this, right? There's something actually to look into this. So, what I think is interesting about UFOs from a historical standpoint, right, is that what we historians bring to any topic is an interest in understanding how things became the way they are. Why are they looking like and playing out in the way they're playing out?And it strikes me that one of the things you come to realize very quickly about UFOs is, first of all, UFOs haven't just made news. There have always been people, boosters, champions, who have helped make them make news. The second thing that you start to realize--and related to this is UFOs don't just appear and, more importantly, disappear. You have always had people in groups who have been very interested in making sense of and interpreting those appearances and disappearances.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, from my standpoint and as a historian that over time what we see is you really can't divorce the speculation about UFOs from the sightings, from the reports about UFOs.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, that brings to me a question again for you, Mark, about bringing credibility to this investigation in your moviemaking. How did you go about that? How do you do the sort of storytelling that's also an investigation?MR. MONROE: Well, really, it's going to the source. I think a main feature or focus of this docuseries, really, is to dive behind the headlines and to look deeply at that one article.You know, really, prior to 2017, there was not a lot of recent credibility in terms of UFOs, largely because the government had stopped looking at them, and it was left to the private sector and smaller UFO organizations--UFOlogists, they call them or people who had witnessed things going to conventions. That's really where the story was living, in The National Enquirer, right, in tabloid-style magazines. So, when The New York Times reports that the government actually has been looking at UFOs, they just haven't been telling us about it, that suddenly changes the story dynamic completely. And so, we went immediately to the people who wrote the article, as well as kind of trying to get to the stories behind the article, where it came from, why the story was being reported now. And I think that's--you know, where we found characters, as Greg suggests, you know, are carrying the torch here to try to get the public to look, advocating, in a sense, to try to make the story line credible. And after all, if the government thinks it's worth looking into, maybe we should be, as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: One of the very compelling characters in episode four is this Harvard Psychiatrist, John Mack.And Greg, maybe you can talk to us about the conclusions he reached and actually how he reached those conclusions about whether people were truly witnessing these close encounters.MR. EGHIGIAN: Right. So, John Mack was a quite renowned, quite well-respected psychiatrist at Harvard University, professor of psychiatry. He actually came to the subject fairly late, relatively speaking, in the sense that he hadn't--from my understanding, had any kind of particular interest in UFOs or stories about people contacting or meeting aliens.But at some point, around the early '90s, he had started to reach out and talk to and engage with a number of people, in particular the artist Budd Hopkins who had been, for some time, dating back to the early '80s, been chatting with people who had said that they had not only seen UFOs but they had, in fact, had encounters with the occupants of these vessels and that these aliens, these extraterrestrials, were kidnapping them, were abducting them. And this is the '80s and '90s are really this heyday of this phenomenon that we all associate with the term alien abduction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohn Mack got fascinated with this and started to meet some of the people who were making these claims and started to work with them. He started to work with them professionally. They started to want to see him in order to work through what they felt is this very traumatic experience. And over the course of talking with them, he became more and more convinced, as he said privately but also publicly, being more and more convinced that he couldn't just simply dismiss this all as confabulation, as the ravings of people who have either fevered imaginations or were mentally ill. He never quite got around to the point of just full-throatedly saying, I think these people must be believed. They are having actual physical experiences with aliens, though he at times goes in that direction. But what he wanted to make an argument for was this idea that they were having an experience that he considered to be genuine, that something really was going on, here, that it was something that defied standard scientific and medical explanation. And so, he became a very vocal advocate for their perspective throughout the '90s.MS. STEAD SELLERS: And Mark, you choose to tell this story with sort of spooky lighting and great yawning libraries in the background, and certainly a kind of ghost story atmosphere. Why?MR. MONROE: Well, there's two--there's a couple reasons why I turned to Mack, which is I think one of the--you know, almost kind of reveal in terms of the series. We, as a culture, have been kind of obsessed with these things that are flying around our air spaces, these scientific-looking things, we see them on the radar footage. That's really what the story was about in 2017. And what I find fascinating about Mack is that really--that challenges your notion of belief. It's one thing to think there's something in the sky and I can't explain it, I don't know what it is; and it's another to take kind of a larger step towards these stories of encounters, right, of actual physical encounters in which the people John Mack talked to, one of the defining characteristics of them was that they were eminently normal. They were not looking for publicity. They were not running to The National Enquirer to tell their story. And so, I found that fascinating.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe other thing about Mack which I do think has a haunting kind of aspect to is it's remotely kind of connected to this 2017 story. Ralph Blumenthal, one of the authors of the 2017 story, prior to many years earlier in the '90s, early 2000s, I think, he had stumbled across a book by John Mack and was so taken by it as an investigative journalist, he thought this guy would make a great story. So, he started to reach out to find him, and he died suddenly before he could get to him. And he died in a, you know, somewhat strange manner, at least he was run down in London and, by all accounts, he just looked the wrong way. You know, traffic is going in the opposite direction. He's an American man and he simply looked the wrong way, but much was made of the fact that he was suddenly taken in the midst of all of this talk about UFOs and abductions, and I found that fascinating and Ralph obviously did because he went on, many years later to write the definitive book on John Mack. So, here's a guy, an investigative journalist that was connected to both stories.And the third thing I love about the Mack story is, much like The New York Times, when a Harvard Psychiatrist says we should look at this, it adds instant credibility. It's like the whole thing happened again in 2017 when The Post and the Times and Politico and these other organizations picked up this story. That's what happened with Mack. You know, prior to that, it was all about alien autopsies and Fox News channel kind of crazy stories in The National Enquirer. And Mack made the academic world sit up and go, what's going on here? And so, I loved that aspect of credibility being kind of put onto this subject.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, there's no doubt about the interest in this topic. We've had a huge number of reader questions, and I'd love to ask you each one of them. I think they're going to come up on the screen, but the first one I have is for you, Greg, and it's from Taylor Messenger in the Virgin Islands, and the question is: \"Do you feel that UFO lore in cinema detracts from the reality of the subject? Does it make it easier or harder for serious discussions to occur?\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. EGHIGIAN: Yeah, that's a--that is a great question because, again, as I said before about speculation, film, literature, they played an enormous role in how we have come to conceive of aliens, of extraterrestrial worlds, of spaceships and things like that.There's no question that in many ways it's muddied the waters and it becomes very difficult to tease out what represents science fiction, what represents science fact, particularly in this murky world, right, where all we ever get, we seemingly get, are stories from people who--that are very compelling but don't provide us with maybe enough information or enough photographic evidence or anything like that to confirm what they're saying, or we have vague, grainy images. So, it's very easy for these other kinds of sources, these other things like film to sort of become our kind of default setting. We turn to them for sort of an easy answer to maybe imagining certain things.The other thing is I do think what's historically interesting in this regard, which is why I think it's such a good question to sort of think about is, if you take a look at something like the 1950s, for instance, 1950s films about aliens, right, were overwhelmingly, with very few exceptions, were overwhelmingly about alien invasions, aliens coming to take over. Aliens are these horrible beings who want to conquer the world, right.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut what's interesting is that in reality, at the time, most of the people who were claiming in the 1950s that they were having encounters with aliens, were in fact telling a very, very different story. Their story was about very benevolent aliens who were very kind and gentle, were here to help us sort of extricate ourselves from the menace of the Cold War and nuclear holocaust. And so, what's interesting is there's this kind of, at times, disconnect between things like cinema and things like the realities on the ground.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, I'd like to turn to a question for you, Mark, and this one comes from Ryan Sprague in New York, I believe. The question is:\"What was the most revelatory moment in filming the series that made you question what you knew about UFOs?\"MR. MONROE: Wow.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Big one.MR. MONROE: I think probably the stories from--hearing personal stories about this topic is really affecting to me. So, it's one thing, I guess, to see the radar images of what they call the Tic Tac crafts, the Tic Tac videos, these smallish objects that are caught by military cameras, Navy airship cameras and radar on ships.But hearing firsthand from, you know, Kevin Day--hearing the story how it affected his life, and just thinking, here's a guy who had gone through the military, had been trained and was at the top of his class, clearly, to be in the position he was in, to see things on radar to interpret radar, to use his training to determine what is going on, and he was emotionally changed by the incident. And you know, I wish I could tell you, oh, I discovered through doing this that piece of a craft exists in this building or that and they're doing these things, whatever, that's not possible to know, really, from our position. It's really hard but seeing someone who seemed to be on one lifepath trajectory and that being changed by this event, that's revelatory to me. And I think you see that again and again.And that's why people--you know, I don't think anyone sets out to be a UFO journalist or UFO Ufologist. They--something happens to them, right? And it becomes something that takes over their lives. They can't not do it or not follow it. It's not possible for them. And I think that's what's revelatory for me.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, let me follow up with another question. The government, in late June, released this report. Mark, what's your thinking about what the government knows and what we're not being told?MR. MONROE: Well, certainly I would think we're not being told a lot if all that has happened over the course of even this last stretch of time in which the government says that they were investigating and looking into these instances, and all we get are nine pages of incredibly inconclusive material, I would think that there's more to be known.So, in a way, it felt like they were kind of kicking the can down the road, and I think that's what you see happen again and again. So, you know, I do think though we're in a new world in the sense that, with the government saying we have been paying attention to this, you also have elected officials saying we should be paying attention to this. And I think when you have more incidents--if another incident happens in the future that's captured with better quality cameras or interrupts some sort of defensive exercise, I think you're going to have more attention to it and more demand to find out what is known, what is being hidden from view, right?So, it's baby steps, you know? It's hard to move forward on that front.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Greg, it was only a nine-page report. Just briefly, was it anticlimactic or a gamechanger?MR. EGHIGIAN: I don't see it as a gamechanger, per se. I think it does add a few more things to sort of the discussion. I think the admission that these are--the vast majority of sightings were, in fact, real objects, and I think the admission that perhaps the military has a bit of a problem on its hands in terms of a kind of culture of ridicule surrounding discussing the subject within at least military and intelligence circles.I think those were actually fairly important admissions from my standpoint, from a historical standpoint. But I do think that we are still, as Mark said, the can got kicked down the road. We're still living in a sort of atmosphere of ambiguity. So, everything's still on the table, and I think all it means now is there's going to be more wait-and-see and more and more people are going to sort of have to chime in.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, let's see a short clip from your show in which we'll hear from you, Greg, and also see a reporter and one of the experts from the series.[Video plays]MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, just to follow-up on that, Greg, are these mysteries that can be solved?MR. EGHIGIAN: I think a great deal of it will involve mysteries that will simply be perpetual, that there are large questions--and I mean, this is also the nature of this phenomenon, right?I mean, UFOs, that term, that very vague, impenetrable term, that seems to mean nothing and everything, it refers to really black boxes, things that, as I said, we never get a good glance at, we never quite understand. Is it an \"it\"? Is it a \"they\"? Is it some \"thing\"? It's always been and, I think, will be shrouded in deep ideas and notions of mystery.And therefore, people will impart to it a significance that oftentimes goes much farther than just sort of material culture and material questions. That said, there are, in fact, and will be cases and instances and have been where what we have on our plate is really something that needs to be investigated, that simply means we need to get to the bottom of it. And you can largely get to the bottom of it, right? So, I think the reality that we have to live with and that UFOs have, in a sense, shown us, is the need to, in fact, live in a world where there is ambiguity and ambivalences and that can be, I think, troubling for some people.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Mark, do you have any explanation or hunch for why so many Americans report sightings, more than any other nation in the world, I think?MR. MONROE: I don't. I'm going to lay it on the line and say I don't have an explanation for that. I think maybe our curiosity is--about this particular topic is at a higher level than maybe a lot of other places. I think that might be one reason.But you know, I would like to add to what Greg said earlier about the ridicule. I hope that even though the can has been kicked down the road, I think the one thing the government report and the government's admission that they have been looking into this, and this is something that needs to be looked into will prevent some of the ridicule of the past.Imagine if this was not a laughing matter for all these years. Maybe we would know more, now. Maybe more people who have seen things or had things happen to them would step up. Maybe our military--you know, we still have people in the military who have seen things, strange things, who have not gone on the record. We know this, because they're afraid of the repercussions. So, what I hope happens in the wake of the government's admission as well as I certainly hope this series helps is maybe stop or slow down on the ridicule.Yes, a lot of it is bunk. We have people in our film say 95 percent of this stuff can probably be easily explained, but there is a percentage, a small percentage, that's really hard to explain. And I think laughing at it is not maybe helping.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Right. So, Greg, you're a historian, but look ahead for me. What's next? Is it time for the U.S. and Russia and China and maybe the UK to get together and say we're not responsible for all these strange flying objects? We should be investigating together.MR. EGHIGIAN: Well, I think we're starting to see the first indications of something that I do think are, from my perspective, really, really positive, and that is the beginnings of civilian scientific concerted efforts and investigations of the phenomenon.So, we just heard recently about this new project coming out of Harvard, the Galileo project, that among other things is a search for extraterrestrial intelligence beyond our solar system project, but it also will involve, supposedly at least, an effort aimed at trying to get to the bottom of certain kinds of unidentified aerial phenomenon within earth's atmosphere and at least orbiting earth.What I've heard from scientific colleagues of mine who believe that the subject warrants more serious attention on the part of academia, what they've been looking for is an opportunity for scientists, for academicians to get involved in this in a way that won't rely on the military. And I think the reason for that are things that Mark alluded to earlier. The military, I think, for some very good reasons and the intelligence community for very good reasons, can be quite secretive, right, about the data and the information they have.So, I think now we are at the next step where I think we're beginning to see some movement with regard to now opening up the investigation of this phenomenon in a way, scientifically, academically, with all the rigor that comes with that, and I think that's a positive thing.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Mark, Bill Nelson of NASA administration, said not very long ago that we should be communicating. I think we're listening as we've been talking about. Is that your belief? Should we be reaching out to potential intelligent life beyond our own solar system?MR. MONROE: Well, I mean, that's one of the things we've done in the past, right, sent satellites into space with emitting sounds and hoping that someone hears on the other side.You know, I think that the notion that we're alone seems, from where I sit, quite silly. I mean, you look at how vast our universe is and you wonder how can we not have--be sharing it in some way, shape, or form. So, you know, I think we stay the course. If you think a hundred years ago we just learned how to fly a plane and now we're remotely flying planes on Mars--or helicopters on Mars, we got to keep trying to answer these big questions about, are we here alone or are we not? What is the meaning? Why? Why are we here? That's all wrapped up in this topic.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, we have this very growing notion that we're probably not alone. At the same time, and maybe we can finish with you, Greg, we have very little time left, if the pandemic has taught us anything it is that people are willing to believe in conspiracy theories and dismiss science. Has that realization changed your thinking at all in the past year-and-a-half, about how to understand people's belief systems and what to make of UFOs?MR. EGHIGIAN: In some ways, I think it has. I mean, I think there's no question that the whole UFO topic has, over the decades, found itself enmeshed in conspiracy theories and all sorts of rather spurious ideas about nefarious parties both on earth and outside of earth, working their machinations to try to undermine our way of life. And that has always played a role within the UFO world.But it's also very clear that many, many people--I'd go so far as to say maybe in the vast majority of people who I've come to know involved in the UFO world are not of that ilk. They do not view the world that way, and they actually have great respect for science and medicine. So, I think there is a lot of space and a lot of room here in this world and in this--when discussing this topic to in fact get grounded very firmly in science and medicine while also simultaneously asking what I think need to be tough questions about scientific authority and medical authority.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Greg Eghigian and Mark Monroe, thank you so much for joining me. It was a fascinating discussion.MR. EGHIGIAN: Pleasure. Thanks very much.MR. MONROE: Thank you so much for having us.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, I'm sorry we didn't have time for more.If you would like to see more of upcoming programs on Washington Post Live, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com.As always, I'm Frances Stead Sellers. Thank you for joining me.[End recorded session]  Transcript: \u201cUFO\u201d A Conversation with Mark Monroe & Greg Eghigian, PhD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: \u201cUFO\u201d A Conversation with Mark Monroe & Greg Eghigian, PhD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7633",
        "date": "2021-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/08/06/transcript-ufo-conversation-with-mark-monroe-greg-eghigian-phd/",
        "text": "MS. STEAD SELLERS: Good afternoon and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at the Post.This afternoon, we're going to be talking about a new Showtime docuseries \"UFO,\" with director, Mark Monroe, and a professor of history and an expert interviewed in this series, Greg Eghigian. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA very warm welcome to you both.MR. EGHIGIAN: Hi, delighted to be here.MR. MONROE: Nice to be here.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Thank you for joining us.Mark, if I can start with you, you've produced movies on the Beatles, the BGs, Pavarotti, Before the Flood with Leonardo di Caprio. So, why UFOs?MR. MONROE: Well, this project really came about through Bad Robot, my partners, and Showtime. A great producer, Glen Zipper, with Zipper Brothers, they got together and talked about how much this topic has come to infuse and dominate a lot of our talk in the culture.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, they had an idea to really dive into this article that came out in 2017, a story that was covered by The Washington Post and the New York Times, Politico, and a lot of really--institutions in terms of credibility and the way news is reported. And suddenly, you're seeing UFOs in these publications. And so, they really wanted to examine why and what is happening here in our culture to bring UFOs to the fore.So, I'm always attracted to stories that have mystery, whether it's a music doc or an environmental piece, and characters who are committed. And the UFO topic, that's what you find: commitment, obsession, and a mystery that doesn't ever seem to ever go away.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Greg, I watched episode four earlier this week, and talk about somebody committed. You were interested from your early years in this phenomenon, but could you talk to me now a little bit as a historian about the interest you had developing the background of this history, and why it's important, you believe, to see this in a historical context.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. EGHIGIAN: Yeah, sure. Oh, like so many people who've been gotten interested in UFOs over the years, my interest really sprouted in my youth. I was fascinated with UFOs. I could not stop reading books about UFOs and people who said they had been contacted by aliens or been kidnapped by aliens. I was always quite mesmerized by the subject matter, for a lot of the reasons that Mark just outlined.But I will say that other interests occupied my time and energies over the years and but several years ago, I became really struck by this topic again and I started diving into it a little more, and I started to realize something I thought was really quite shocking, and that was to find out that no academic historian had ever written a book on the subject of UFOs since 1975. And so, that made me think there's something to this, right? There's something actually to look into this. So, what I think is interesting about UFOs from a historical standpoint, right, is that what we historians bring to any topic is an interest in understanding how things became the way they are. Why are they looking like and playing out in the way they're playing out?And it strikes me that one of the things you come to realize very quickly about UFOs is, first of all, UFOs haven't just made news. There have always been people, boosters, champions, who have helped make them make news. The second thing that you start to realize--and related to this is UFOs don't just appear and, more importantly, disappear. You have always had people in groups who have been very interested in making sense of and interpreting those appearances and disappearances.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, from my standpoint and as a historian that over time what we see is you really can't divorce the speculation about UFOs from the sightings, from the reports about UFOs.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, that brings to me a question again for you, Mark, about bringing credibility to this investigation in your moviemaking. How did you go about that? How do you do the sort of storytelling that's also an investigation?MR. MONROE: Well, really, it's going to the source. I think a main feature or focus of this docuseries, really, is to dive behind the headlines and to look deeply at that one article.You know, really, prior to 2017, there was not a lot of recent credibility in terms of UFOs, largely because the government had stopped looking at them, and it was left to the private sector and smaller UFO organizations--UFOlogists, they call them or people who had witnessed things going to conventions. That's really where the story was living, in The National Enquirer, right, in tabloid-style magazines. So, when The New York Times reports that the government actually has been looking at UFOs, they just haven't been telling us about it, that suddenly changes the story dynamic completely. And so, we went immediately to the people who wrote the article, as well as kind of trying to get to the stories behind the article, where it came from, why the story was being reported now. And I think that's--you know, where we found characters, as Greg suggests, you know, are carrying the torch here to try to get the public to look, advocating, in a sense, to try to make the story line credible. And after all, if the government thinks it's worth looking into, maybe we should be, as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: One of the very compelling characters in episode four is this Harvard Psychiatrist, John Mack.And Greg, maybe you can talk to us about the conclusions he reached and actually how he reached those conclusions about whether people were truly witnessing these close encounters.MR. EGHIGIAN: Right. So, John Mack was a quite renowned, quite well-respected psychiatrist at Harvard University, professor of psychiatry. He actually came to the subject fairly late, relatively speaking, in the sense that he hadn't--from my understanding, had any kind of particular interest in UFOs or stories about people contacting or meeting aliens.But at some point, around the early '90s, he had started to reach out and talk to and engage with a number of people, in particular the artist Budd Hopkins who had been, for some time, dating back to the early '80s, been chatting with people who had said that they had not only seen UFOs but they had, in fact, had encounters with the occupants of these vessels and that these aliens, these extraterrestrials, were kidnapping them, were abducting them. And this is the '80s and '90s are really this heyday of this phenomenon that we all associate with the term alien abduction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohn Mack got fascinated with this and started to meet some of the people who were making these claims and started to work with them. He started to work with them professionally. They started to want to see him in order to work through what they felt is this very traumatic experience. And over the course of talking with them, he became more and more convinced, as he said privately but also publicly, being more and more convinced that he couldn't just simply dismiss this all as confabulation, as the ravings of people who have either fevered imaginations or were mentally ill. He never quite got around to the point of just full-throatedly saying, I think these people must be believed. They are having actual physical experiences with aliens, though he at times goes in that direction. But what he wanted to make an argument for was this idea that they were having an experience that he considered to be genuine, that something really was going on, here, that it was something that defied standard scientific and medical explanation. And so, he became a very vocal advocate for their perspective throughout the '90s.MS. STEAD SELLERS: And Mark, you choose to tell this story with sort of spooky lighting and great yawning libraries in the background, and certainly a kind of ghost story atmosphere. Why?MR. MONROE: Well, there's two--there's a couple reasons why I turned to Mack, which is I think one of the--you know, almost kind of reveal in terms of the series. We, as a culture, have been kind of obsessed with these things that are flying around our air spaces, these scientific-looking things, we see them on the radar footage. That's really what the story was about in 2017. And what I find fascinating about Mack is that really--that challenges your notion of belief. It's one thing to think there's something in the sky and I can't explain it, I don't know what it is; and it's another to take kind of a larger step towards these stories of encounters, right, of actual physical encounters in which the people John Mack talked to, one of the defining characteristics of them was that they were eminently normal. They were not looking for publicity. They were not running to The National Enquirer to tell their story. And so, I found that fascinating.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe other thing about Mack which I do think has a haunting kind of aspect to is it's remotely kind of connected to this 2017 story. Ralph Blumenthal, one of the authors of the 2017 story, prior to many years earlier in the '90s, early 2000s, I think, he had stumbled across a book by John Mack and was so taken by it as an investigative journalist, he thought this guy would make a great story. So, he started to reach out to find him, and he died suddenly before he could get to him. And he died in a, you know, somewhat strange manner, at least he was run down in London and, by all accounts, he just looked the wrong way. You know, traffic is going in the opposite direction. He's an American man and he simply looked the wrong way, but much was made of the fact that he was suddenly taken in the midst of all of this talk about UFOs and abductions, and I found that fascinating and Ralph obviously did because he went on, many years later to write the definitive book on John Mack. So, here's a guy, an investigative journalist that was connected to both stories.And the third thing I love about the Mack story is, much like The New York Times, when a Harvard Psychiatrist says we should look at this, it adds instant credibility. It's like the whole thing happened again in 2017 when The Post and the Times and Politico and these other organizations picked up this story. That's what happened with Mack. You know, prior to that, it was all about alien autopsies and Fox News channel kind of crazy stories in The National Enquirer. And Mack made the academic world sit up and go, what's going on here? And so, I loved that aspect of credibility being kind of put onto this subject.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, there's no doubt about the interest in this topic. We've had a huge number of reader questions, and I'd love to ask you each one of them. I think they're going to come up on the screen, but the first one I have is for you, Greg, and it's from Taylor Messenger in the Virgin Islands, and the question is: \"Do you feel that UFO lore in cinema detracts from the reality of the subject? Does it make it easier or harder for serious discussions to occur?\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. EGHIGIAN: Yeah, that's a--that is a great question because, again, as I said before about speculation, film, literature, they played an enormous role in how we have come to conceive of aliens, of extraterrestrial worlds, of spaceships and things like that.There's no question that in many ways it's muddied the waters and it becomes very difficult to tease out what represents science fiction, what represents science fact, particularly in this murky world, right, where all we ever get, we seemingly get, are stories from people who--that are very compelling but don't provide us with maybe enough information or enough photographic evidence or anything like that to confirm what they're saying, or we have vague, grainy images. So, it's very easy for these other kinds of sources, these other things like film to sort of become our kind of default setting. We turn to them for sort of an easy answer to maybe imagining certain things.The other thing is I do think what's historically interesting in this regard, which is why I think it's such a good question to sort of think about is, if you take a look at something like the 1950s, for instance, 1950s films about aliens, right, were overwhelmingly, with very few exceptions, were overwhelmingly about alien invasions, aliens coming to take over. Aliens are these horrible beings who want to conquer the world, right.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut what's interesting is that in reality, at the time, most of the people who were claiming in the 1950s that they were having encounters with aliens, were in fact telling a very, very different story. Their story was about very benevolent aliens who were very kind and gentle, were here to help us sort of extricate ourselves from the menace of the Cold War and nuclear holocaust. And so, what's interesting is there's this kind of, at times, disconnect between things like cinema and things like the realities on the ground.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, I'd like to turn to a question for you, Mark, and this one comes from Ryan Sprague in New York, I believe. The question is:\"What was the most revelatory moment in filming the series that made you question what you knew about UFOs?\"MR. MONROE: Wow.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Big one.MR. MONROE: I think probably the stories from--hearing personal stories about this topic is really affecting to me. So, it's one thing, I guess, to see the radar images of what they call the Tic Tac crafts, the Tic Tac videos, these smallish objects that are caught by military cameras, Navy airship cameras and radar on ships.But hearing firsthand from, you know, Kevin Day--hearing the story how it affected his life, and just thinking, here's a guy who had gone through the military, had been trained and was at the top of his class, clearly, to be in the position he was in, to see things on radar to interpret radar, to use his training to determine what is going on, and he was emotionally changed by the incident. And you know, I wish I could tell you, oh, I discovered through doing this that piece of a craft exists in this building or that and they're doing these things, whatever, that's not possible to know, really, from our position. It's really hard but seeing someone who seemed to be on one lifepath trajectory and that being changed by this event, that's revelatory to me. And I think you see that again and again.And that's why people--you know, I don't think anyone sets out to be a UFO journalist or UFO Ufologist. They--something happens to them, right? And it becomes something that takes over their lives. They can't not do it or not follow it. It's not possible for them. And I think that's what's revelatory for me.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, let me follow up with another question. The government, in late June, released this report. Mark, what's your thinking about what the government knows and what we're not being told?MR. MONROE: Well, certainly I would think we're not being told a lot if all that has happened over the course of even this last stretch of time in which the government says that they were investigating and looking into these instances, and all we get are nine pages of incredibly inconclusive material, I would think that there's more to be known.So, in a way, it felt like they were kind of kicking the can down the road, and I think that's what you see happen again and again. So, you know, I do think though we're in a new world in the sense that, with the government saying we have been paying attention to this, you also have elected officials saying we should be paying attention to this. And I think when you have more incidents--if another incident happens in the future that's captured with better quality cameras or interrupts some sort of defensive exercise, I think you're going to have more attention to it and more demand to find out what is known, what is being hidden from view, right?So, it's baby steps, you know? It's hard to move forward on that front.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Greg, it was only a nine-page report. Just briefly, was it anticlimactic or a gamechanger?MR. EGHIGIAN: I don't see it as a gamechanger, per se. I think it does add a few more things to sort of the discussion. I think the admission that these are--the vast majority of sightings were, in fact, real objects, and I think the admission that perhaps the military has a bit of a problem on its hands in terms of a kind of culture of ridicule surrounding discussing the subject within at least military and intelligence circles.I think those were actually fairly important admissions from my standpoint, from a historical standpoint. But I do think that we are still, as Mark said, the can got kicked down the road. We're still living in a sort of atmosphere of ambiguity. So, everything's still on the table, and I think all it means now is there's going to be more wait-and-see and more and more people are going to sort of have to chime in.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, let's see a short clip from your show in which we'll hear from you, Greg, and also see a reporter and one of the experts from the series.[Video plays]MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, just to follow-up on that, Greg, are these mysteries that can be solved?MR. EGHIGIAN: I think a great deal of it will involve mysteries that will simply be perpetual, that there are large questions--and I mean, this is also the nature of this phenomenon, right?I mean, UFOs, that term, that very vague, impenetrable term, that seems to mean nothing and everything, it refers to really black boxes, things that, as I said, we never get a good glance at, we never quite understand. Is it an \"it\"? Is it a \"they\"? Is it some \"thing\"? It's always been and, I think, will be shrouded in deep ideas and notions of mystery.And therefore, people will impart to it a significance that oftentimes goes much farther than just sort of material culture and material questions. That said, there are, in fact, and will be cases and instances and have been where what we have on our plate is really something that needs to be investigated, that simply means we need to get to the bottom of it. And you can largely get to the bottom of it, right? So, I think the reality that we have to live with and that UFOs have, in a sense, shown us, is the need to, in fact, live in a world where there is ambiguity and ambivalences and that can be, I think, troubling for some people.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Mark, do you have any explanation or hunch for why so many Americans report sightings, more than any other nation in the world, I think?MR. MONROE: I don't. I'm going to lay it on the line and say I don't have an explanation for that. I think maybe our curiosity is--about this particular topic is at a higher level than maybe a lot of other places. I think that might be one reason.But you know, I would like to add to what Greg said earlier about the ridicule. I hope that even though the can has been kicked down the road, I think the one thing the government report and the government's admission that they have been looking into this, and this is something that needs to be looked into will prevent some of the ridicule of the past.Imagine if this was not a laughing matter for all these years. Maybe we would know more, now. Maybe more people who have seen things or had things happen to them would step up. Maybe our military--you know, we still have people in the military who have seen things, strange things, who have not gone on the record. We know this, because they're afraid of the repercussions. So, what I hope happens in the wake of the government's admission as well as I certainly hope this series helps is maybe stop or slow down on the ridicule.Yes, a lot of it is bunk. We have people in our film say 95 percent of this stuff can probably be easily explained, but there is a percentage, a small percentage, that's really hard to explain. And I think laughing at it is not maybe helping.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Right. So, Greg, you're a historian, but look ahead for me. What's next? Is it time for the U.S. and Russia and China and maybe the UK to get together and say we're not responsible for all these strange flying objects? We should be investigating together.MR. EGHIGIAN: Well, I think we're starting to see the first indications of something that I do think are, from my perspective, really, really positive, and that is the beginnings of civilian scientific concerted efforts and investigations of the phenomenon.So, we just heard recently about this new project coming out of Harvard, the Galileo project, that among other things is a search for extraterrestrial intelligence beyond our solar system project, but it also will involve, supposedly at least, an effort aimed at trying to get to the bottom of certain kinds of unidentified aerial phenomenon within earth's atmosphere and at least orbiting earth.What I've heard from scientific colleagues of mine who believe that the subject warrants more serious attention on the part of academia, what they've been looking for is an opportunity for scientists, for academicians to get involved in this in a way that won't rely on the military. And I think the reason for that are things that Mark alluded to earlier. The military, I think, for some very good reasons and the intelligence community for very good reasons, can be quite secretive, right, about the data and the information they have.So, I think now we are at the next step where I think we're beginning to see some movement with regard to now opening up the investigation of this phenomenon in a way, scientifically, academically, with all the rigor that comes with that, and I think that's a positive thing.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Mark, Bill Nelson of NASA administration, said not very long ago that we should be communicating. I think we're listening as we've been talking about. Is that your belief? Should we be reaching out to potential intelligent life beyond our own solar system?MR. MONROE: Well, I mean, that's one of the things we've done in the past, right, sent satellites into space with emitting sounds and hoping that someone hears on the other side.You know, I think that the notion that we're alone seems, from where I sit, quite silly. I mean, you look at how vast our universe is and you wonder how can we not have--be sharing it in some way, shape, or form. So, you know, I think we stay the course. If you think a hundred years ago we just learned how to fly a plane and now we're remotely flying planes on Mars--or helicopters on Mars, we got to keep trying to answer these big questions about, are we here alone or are we not? What is the meaning? Why? Why are we here? That's all wrapped up in this topic.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, we have this very growing notion that we're probably not alone. At the same time, and maybe we can finish with you, Greg, we have very little time left, if the pandemic has taught us anything it is that people are willing to believe in conspiracy theories and dismiss science. Has that realization changed your thinking at all in the past year-and-a-half, about how to understand people's belief systems and what to make of UFOs?MR. EGHIGIAN: In some ways, I think it has. I mean, I think there's no question that the whole UFO topic has, over the decades, found itself enmeshed in conspiracy theories and all sorts of rather spurious ideas about nefarious parties both on earth and outside of earth, working their machinations to try to undermine our way of life. And that has always played a role within the UFO world.But it's also very clear that many, many people--I'd go so far as to say maybe in the vast majority of people who I've come to know involved in the UFO world are not of that ilk. They do not view the world that way, and they actually have great respect for science and medicine. So, I think there is a lot of space and a lot of room here in this world and in this--when discussing this topic to in fact get grounded very firmly in science and medicine while also simultaneously asking what I think need to be tough questions about scientific authority and medical authority.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Greg Eghigian and Mark Monroe, thank you so much for joining me. It was a fascinating discussion.MR. EGHIGIAN: Pleasure. Thanks very much.MR. MONROE: Thank you so much for having us.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, I'm sorry we didn't have time for more.If you would like to see more of upcoming programs on Washington Post Live, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com.As always, I'm Frances Stead Sellers. Thank you for joining me.[End recorded session]  Transcript: \u201cUFO\u201d A Conversation with Mark Monroe & Greg Eghigian, PhD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "TRANSCRIPT: Ad Astra: A Conversation with Brad Pitt, James Gray and NASA Officialsd Astra: (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7634",
        "date": "2019-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2019/09/17/transcript-ad-astra-conversation-with-brad-pitt-james-gray-nasa-officialsd-astra/",
        "text": "Opening RemarksMR. RYAN: Good afternoon. Welcome to The Washington Post. I'm Fred Ryan, Publisher, and we're delighted to have you here for this special discussion of the new science fiction film, Ad Astra. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd looking at the room, I see about half of our newsroom. I hope there's not any big, breaking story this afternoon. We're pleased to have with us today the star of the movie, Brad Pitt;The film's director, James Gray;And NASA officials Sarah Noble and Lindsay Aitchison. We're looking forward to their firsthand insights about space exploration and the power of storytelling. As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing this summer reminded us, space still captivates the public imagination. Even as unmanned probes photograph distant corners of our universe, we still feel the natural human longing to explore beyond our known world. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is why NASA is preparing for the next phase of human space flight, with ambitious plans to launch sustainable missions to the moon within the next decade. Eventually, they intend to send astronauts to Mars. For those of us to remain earthbound, films like Ad Astra can help us share in the thrill of these experiences. The movie follows an astronaut's journey into deep space, including stops on the moon and Mars, and shows what early colonization of our solar system might look like. It's among the most realistic depictions of space travel ever committed to film. Today's speakers will talk about the movie's parallels with this exciting moment in the development of space travel and the role of storytelling in inspiring continued scientific exploration and discovery. Story continues below advertisementAs we get started, let's take a look at a few scenes from Ad Astra. Advertisement[Video plays][Applause]Ad Astra: Pushing Boundaries in Space and FilmmakingMS. HORNADAY: Good evening, and thanks again for joining us for this exciting discussion about Ad Astra and space exploration. I feel confident that you all know our guest to our immediate left, Brad Pitt. [Applause]MS. HORNADAY: As well as Ad Astra writer and director, James Gray. [Applause]MS. HORNADAY: And please give a special welcome to two NASA officials: Lindsay Aitchison, a space suit engineer;[Applause]MS. HORNADAY: And Dr. Sarah Noble, a lunar scientist. [Applause]MS. HORNADAY: Thank you both so much for being here. Story continues below advertisementBefore we get started, I wanted to remind the audience in the room and also watching on the livestream that you can tweet your questions for Brad, James, Lindsay, and Sarah, using #PostLive, and I will get to some of those later in the discussion. AdvertisementJames, you have said that you approached this movie, Ad Astra, with the intention of creating the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put into a movie. You've even coined the term \"science future fact\" to describe it. Can you talk a little bit about how you set out to accomplish that and what the aesthetic and conceptual framework was for it? MR. GRAY: You know, a lot of times when you start working on a project, you say unbelievably dumb things, and things that you can't actually ever--here's what I would say: I would say the word I used was wrong: not \"realistic.\" I would say \"plausible.\"Story continues below advertisementAnd what you find is that sometimes you cannot do what is realistic. Or even when you do something that is realistic, it looks fake, because movie believability is a whole other thing. So, what I would say, as a longwinded way to answer your question, would be that we tried as best we could to adhere to the science as best as we could and veer from it when we had to. And that was kind the governing idea. And a lot of times we looked 50 years in the past to try and see what the development was for 50 years, maybe, in the future. That was kind of the governing principle to it, really. AdvertisementMS. HORNADAY: How deep into the weeds did you get with research? I mean--Story continues below advertisementMR. GRAY: I got very deep. I mean, I got--my wife will tell you, you know, I'm hiding in the--you know, hiding in the corner of the house, sitting around with 1960s transcripts. Well, I mean, you can go down--it's almost a bit of a wormhole, in a way, because the movie has to dictate what it needs. And you can sit there and, like I said, you can study Buzz Aldrin's orbital mechanics dissertation, but in the end, you have to know it so you can forget about it; do you know what I mean?MS. HORNADAY: Right, right. And what--Brad--MR. GRAY: What does that mean? He's shaking his head. What does that mean? MR. PITT: You have to know. I don't have to know. Story continues below advertisementMS. HORNADAY: That's what I was going to ask. That's exactly what I was going to ask.AdvertisementI remember when I interviewed Steven Spielberg about Minority Report. He said he did all this research and he consulted all these futurists, and then he threw it away. MR. GRAY: Yeah. MS. HORNADAY: --because it was really about something--you know, it wasn't about the effects. And I wanted to--you know, can research almost get in the way of a performance like this for you?MR. PITT: Well, I mean, fortunately, it's not--it's not my responsibility. I mean, my man here, our DP, Hoyte van Hoytema, production designer. But we would talk about, like, what James was going after. He always talked about the banality of travel, that, you know, we have this idea it's going to be super sleek and sexy and streamlined. Story continues below advertisementBut really, I mean, you look from stagecoach to flying today and the economics that will define what it's going to be in the future, it's probably going to be a little uncomfortable and you're going to have to be waiting to get your baggage, and so on and so forth. AdvertisementAnd the other--the thing that I really liked is that they had talked about, you know, the design would be based upon function, purely function. And certainly, when you get to see images of the space station today, that's it. MS. HORNADAY: Right, right. I was fascinated that you didn't--that you--it seemed like you avoided using green screen and CG--MR. GRAY: To his detriment. To his detriment. Story continues below advertisementMS. HORNADAY: Tell me more. MR. GRAY: Well, because, you know, you have Brad Pitt hanging 30 feet in the air from wires. It's a little bit crazy. And by the way, he was a troop--he's not here, we're just talking about him. [Laughter]MR. GRAY: No, you were a huge trooper, actually. And he never complained. But we built the set horizontally and we built the same set vertically, and you do the closeups horizontally and then, on the horizontal set. And then, two weeks later, you know, you'd have Brad hanging from wires looking up, and you'd say, \"Okay, Brad, when you stop swaying, we're going to go, okay?\"Advertisement\"All right, buddy.\"\"Okay. And action. Oh, you're swaying a little bit, Brad.\"\"Oh, okay, James, my core's hurting a little bit. Got a good port\"--[Laughter]MR. GRAY: So, you know, you get three, four takes and five shots a day or whatever. And if we had green screen, maybe I wouldn't have had to put this poor fellow 50 feet in the air. MR. PITT: Yes, but--MS. HORNADAY: But would you have done it if it had--I mean, it seems like that's something you enjoy doing. MR. PITT: Yeah. MR. GRAY: Nobody enjoys it. Really? Did you enjoy that? MR. PITT: A little bit. MR. GRAY: I didn't think anybody enjoyed that. MR. PITT: Well, you got to suffer a little bit. But the--but this was also by design, and this is what I signed onto. I thought it was really brilliant on, again, James and Hoytema's vision of the thing. AdvertisementAnd that is, they tried to rely on--okay, we had--we're going to need CG. We're going out to Neptune, for Christ's sake. We're going to have to rely on some CG. But these guys tried to work in as much analog effects, meaning things that they could capture in the lens, real, like, flares or things we're accustomed to in nature and in life. And so, when you look at something CG, you can kind of feel there is a patina of--it's been colored. And by bringing in natural, optical effects, it's more believable to us, the audience, subliminal--subliminally.Someone say that word for me. MR. GRAY: I think you did it. MR. PITT: And I thought this was really smart. It's something that we would have a more visceral experience as an audience and not really be aware of it. I thought that was really pretty brilliant. MR. GRAY: There is one other practical reason why we did it. MR. PITT: It's cheaper.MR. GRAY: No, act--[Laughter]MR. GRAY: Actors need and should need a set with which they can interact. Actors are very sensory creatures. And to put an actor in a green box, you know, that doesn't help. So, it was really also for performance. It was. MR. PITT: We were still in garage, so...[Laughter]MR. GRAY: Let's say \"by degrees,\" then. MS. HORNADAY: You know, one of the things I love about this movie, and there are many things I love about this movie--and just for the record, I have filed my review. So, you know, this--you know, I'm immune to any charm offensive that occur. [Laughter]MS. HORNADAY: Full disclosure, but I really did enjoy this movie. [Laughter]MS. HORNADAY: And one of the things I loved is how it is a part of this living continuum of space movies--and not just space movies. I mean, there's some Apocalypse--there's a lot of Apocalypse. MR. GRAY: A lot of Apocalypse, a lot. But that's because--that's because--can I--pretend--I'm going to be pretentious as hell for about the next 30 seconds. MS. HORNADAY: Oh, please, that's why we're here.MR. GRAY: Okay, so--\"why we're here\"? Oh, God. MS. HORNADAY: We wouldn\u2019t have it any other way. MR. GRAY: My cowriter, Ethan Gross and I, when we started on this, which was, you know, in--you know, 1783. No, we started in 2011, and we thought we would try to--we were going to do a mythic story in outer space, and then we said, \"Okay, let's do the Odyssey from Telemachus' point of view.\" Right, Odysseus goes away for 20 years and Telemachus is--so, of course, it ends very differently in the film, now, and it changes and all that. But the idea was, originally, a very mythic story. And for that, you then all of a sudden--we started reading a lot of Joseph Campbell, you know, Hero with a Thousand Faces, and all that. So, then, you get to Apocalypse Now because you realize that John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola were trying to do a Campbellian myth. In fact, it was so much so--you know, we know that George Lucas is obsessed with Campbell--the Star Wars movies were. And you know who the original director of Apocalypse Now was? It was George Lucas. He was supposed to go off and do it in 60 millimeter in Vietnam during the war. Not a practical idea. But they were all into that, and so it became a rip-off, in a way, of Joseph Campbell, but that--it's all part of the same stew. And so, it does steal from Apocalypse Now, inspired by, whatever euphemism you want to use, but everybody steals from everything. And it was very much our idea to be in this continuum, as you put it. MR. PITT: I have to jump in again, if I may. MS. HORNADAY: Please. MR. PITT: What--another intriguing idea--I mean, there's been a lot of sci-fi films, and done really, really well. And you hope to add something different or in addition to the genre, instead of repeating. When James--another thing he hooked me with when he first started talking about this was he called on a quote that was attributed to Arthur Clarke, which said--and I'm going to get wrong--MR. GRAY: Right. MR. PITT: --so you can correct me. Basically, he said, \"We're either not alone in the universe or we are completely and utterly alone; and either idea is equally frightening.\" And it--I can't think of any other film where actually--we're usually dealing with either benevolent aliens who are going to impart some wisdom or some are going to destroy us and we have to stand up and fight. But this idea, this question of what if we are actually alone, at least in the reachable universe, through our lifetimes, what does that mean? And are we missing something between us? Yeah. MR. GRAY: That's true. No, that is true. We did try--we were trying to find new ground, territory. You know, we were. I mean, we can talk about Apocalypse now or Kubrick or whatever, but that is certainly--the governing principle was, okay, we're going to make the first movie that might pose that question. Because to Brad's point, benevolent aliens or bad aliens, it's still an idea--in a sense false gods, right? Kubrick beats the trap brilliantly. He's got these astronauts, they find a black slab on the moon that looks like some '60s minimalist structure. And you can project anything you want on it. Oh, it's good aliens, bad--I do not know what they are. It's just a black monolith floating around. E.T. beats the trap, because he pitches it like a fable. So, it's--I don't think you watch E.T. wanting a disquisition on alien life. You know, it's--really, what it is it's a lonely kid and dealing with a divorce. That's really what it is, a metaphor. MS. HORNADAY: Exactly. MR. GRAY: So, we thought, no false gods. No one's going to save us. No little green man is going to help us out of climate change or anything like that. No bad alien is going to come and unify the whole planet and make us realize we're the same. Not coming, not happening. What does that mean? MS. HORNADAY: That thought sets up--I'd like to play a clip and talk a little bit about the extent to which Ad Astra is anticipatory. Your vision, and I think it's part and parcel to what you just said, it's kind of this unsentimental vision of the future. And then, I'd like to bring in our NASA experts to talk about this, but let's play a clip that gives us a glimpse of what the base on the moon might look like in the future. Let's take a look at that. [Video plays]MS. HORNADAY: It's a really cool scene. MR. GRAY: Can I--can I defend us for one second? MS. HORNADAY: Please. MR. GRAY: It's very clear that there's no sound in space. And that little clip, it doesn't really allow you to understand that, but we did it here, to the no sound in space thing, don't worry. I just want to put this out. MS. HORNADAY: Well, and I wanted to get to that--I'm going to get to that a little later, about, like, do these movies drive you crazy, but we'll get to that in a minute. But this scene is a great scene, and the whole trip when Brad's character flies to the moon, he flies commercial. It's just this fabulous, fabulous scene. And you are--there are lots of ideas flying around: One is the commercialization of space; one is the militarization of space; one is the kind of Wild West notion that you get at the end. But Lindsay, I wanted to ask you, where is NASA right now in terms of lunar ambitions? And if you'd like to tell us about Project Artemis, I know we'd love to hear about it. MS. AITCHISON: Yeah, excellent.So, Artemis is our new program. It's going to bring the first woman and the next man back to the surface of the moon by 2024. And it's really part of a broader exploration plan that we have. We're not just going to the moon; we're going to the moon for a purpose. And that's to learn what it's like to live off the Earth and what technologies we need and figure out a few more questions we have about human physiology before we move on to Mars. Because we want to keep going. We don't just want to just stay here. We want to open up the commercial space, let other people come enjoy the moon. And we're going to go off and keep exploring. MS. HORNADAY: So, why--and is this because you think we're going to need to colonize these areas at some point or that people will actively want to? MS. AITCHISON: There are a lot of reasons for us to go back to the moon. There are opportunities--if you look at the soil and some of the mineralogy--and Sarah can definitely talk more about that than I can. But there are things that we can do there to open up commercial space. And it's just about spurring the economy, it's about getting people interested in math and science and to make sure we're the leaders of that area. MS. HORNADAY: Interesting.And Sarah, can you talk a little bit about the scenario of it all? DR. NOBLE: Yeah, sure. We like to talk about now--now, we're not just going back to the moon, but we're actually going forward to the moon. We've spent the last couple of decades learning about the moon and we now have a very different concept of it than we had during the Apollo era. We know a lot more. We know where to go to get the answers we need to move forward in lunar science. And one of the reasons we're going to the South Pole is because there is a lot of exciting new science we can do there. We think there are a lot of resources there, particularly water, that we can use not only as a resource for our astronauts to use, but to learn about the moon, too, and to understand how the moon has evolved over the last few billion years. MS. HORNADAY: So--MR. PITT: Can I ask you a couple of questions?MS. HORNADAY: Please, please, yes. MR. PITT: Well, I heard--I just heard a couple of things that I thought were really interesting: one--one, that we would have to take--if we were going to make a trip to Mars, we would have to take off from the moon because of the lack of gravity. DR. NOBLE: So, it's helpful. The gravity well from Earth is a lot. So, if you do leave from the moon or from near-Earth space, you have a lot less gravity to overcome. So, it does save us a lot on fuel, which is the big cost of lifting things off. MR. PITT: And one more? MS. HORNADAY: Please. This is why we convene you all. MR. PITT: And that there--they believe there is water on the moon on the South--at the South Pole? DR. NOBLE: Yes, at both poles. MR. PITT: And that they would use--one of the things they would use this is to make hydrogen, which is a fuel source? DR. NOBLE: Yeah, water--H20, right, is made up of hydrogen and oxygen and we can split it apart and use both hydrogen and oxygen as fuel sources, but oxygen also to breath and also good uses for it. MR. PITT: Okay, I'm done. MS. HORNADAY: Well, no, please. And I wanted to stipulate that. Please jump in and--MR. GRAY: We got that right. MR. PITT: Yeah. MS. HORNADAY: --ask--you got that right? MR. PITT: You did. MR. GRAY: We did--actually, we got it wrong, but we got it right. Well, the one-sixth gravity thing, we got right that they'd have to--deep space rockets launching from the--from the moon. But I hear now the plan is changed. The Gateway is itself going to be the craft that's going to go to the--to Mars. MS. AITCHISON: It's one of our options. So, Gateway is kind of like a very small space station that will be orbiting around the moon. And so, we're going to use that as a point, because it's very easy to get to that orbit, but it also allows you to go anywhere you want on the lunar surface from there. And once we have that, it's going to be a great analog for a Mars transfer vehicle, if you wanted to use that going forward. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. HORNADAY: But again, like, so these expeditions, I think one of the ideas that Ad Astra engages so beautifully, is that, you know, there is this impulse to explore and to always go further, but basically we're taking--what if we export the same problems we haven't solved here, you know?I mean, is that--I know this is a philosophical question, but does that--is that a conversation you ever have, like, maybe we shouldn't be doing this until we actually solve some of our human, tribal issues here on Earth. DR. NOBLE: I mean, I think then you're just admitting defeat and we're never going to go anywhere, right?But you know, opportunities to develop new technology and whatever can often help the problems we have here on Earth. Many of the technologies that we've done at NASA have been spun off to actually do helpful things here on Earth and to solve some of those difficult problems. MS. HORNADAY: Can you talk a little--is it possible for you to put in layman's terms the other scientific--the scientific discoveries or experiments that excite you personally that can only be done on the moon? DR. NOBLE: Sure. Let's see--you know, when we went on Apollo, we mostly landed all on the same part of the near side of the moon. So, now, we're going to go to a totally different part of the moon. And so, that's an opportunity to see, like, new and different kinds of soils and things--MS. HORNADAY: Right. So, you'll be seeing completely different resources, different natural--DR. NOBLE: The--a lot of--yes, yeah, exactly. And it also gives us, again, a more global perspective. And with the Gateway, we can actually land in other places. So, in addition to the humans, we actually will have robotic landers going to many different places on the moon. And because we have all this great orbital data--I mean, we know exactly where to go to get these different answers. We know that there are minerals that we didn't sample during Apollo, because they're only in specific places.We want to put a seismic network down, and that's going to call--require several different landers so that we can, you know, get multiple seismic stations to coordinate together, right? So, there's lots of good reasons to go to all sorts of different places. MS. HORNADAY: Right. How do you feel, James? I mean, I think there's enough questioning kind of embedded into this film. I mean, do you have--are you a space exploration fan? I mean, do you-- MR. GRAY: Yeah, I am. And I don't know if the movie actually would indicate that, would it? No, I'm a huge fan. MS. HORNADAY: It raises good questions. MR. GRAY: No, but here's what I would say: I would say I'm a huge fan of--I mean, I had a little picture of Neal Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on my wall as a kid. It was tremendously aspirational. It really is--was. And I'm hugely in favor of it. Here's what I would say: When--I guess it was Pete Conrad and Alan Bean. It would have been Apollo 12, I guess, in November. I think it was November in '69, Armstrong did a talk show appearance, which he didn't do much of, and somebody said to him, \"Well, what's it going to be like in the year 2001?\"And he said, \"Well, we're going to have lunar bases and we're going to be traveling every two weeks and\"--he was completely wrong as a prediction, but he was not wrong on the technology. The national will started to slip. And I just feel like part of the issue was we were trying to just beat the Russians. And once that happened, the kind of national will got drained a bit. Like, \"Okay, we did the moon. We did that. Fine, move on.\"And I feel like if you go and explore for pure science or basic science, pure research reasons, that's actually great. If you're going to beat the Russians or some military payload garbage, I have no interest in it. And the reason I think I'm right is because you see the progress we made was extraordinary and once the Russians couldn't do it, that was--it was over. I don't know, these guys would have more interesting things to say about it than I would, but my own view is, if the motive is right, it's fantastic. MS. HORNADAY: But now, I think we're going to--it seems like we're tipping more into a commercial motive than any--you know, that's now starting to kind of overtake the nationalistic or patriotic one. Is that--I mean, we don't--I'm not even aware of all the different commercial companies from around the world that are vying to get a piece of the action, as it were. Is it a hot area now? DR. NOBLE: It is. The moon is pretty hot, both internationally and commercially, right? It's the--MS. HORNADAY: You heard it here first, folks. DR. NOBLE: Everyone wants to go, right? There are a number of other nations that are seeking to join us in our adventure to the moon. And we're working with a lot of commercial companies. I was talking about landing on other places on the moon right now. We have a program where--where commercial companies, a lot of them were former Google Lunar X Prize competition members, right, who have built landers and we're going to use them to deliver stuff to the moon for us, right? It's like, you know, FedEx or DHL, right? They're going to take our packages on their commercial landers to wherever on the moon they want to send them. MR. PITT: When they start selling advertising space, then we call it quits. [Laughter]MR. GRAY: I want to ask something. Do you guys--this may be an obnoxious question, but do you guys get, like, irritated by all the commercial companies or are you like, \"Bring them on in,\" or is it like, \"No, Elon, come on. Sit down with us. You know, have some dinner.\" I mean, how does that work? Because I feel like there is a mix of motives. I mean, it's a weird thing. You guys are much more pure science, aren't you? DR. NOBLE: Sure, but if they help us do the science...MS. AITCHISON: As an engineer, I get excited when they have innovative ideas. I don't actually care where they come from, and it's really a great community that we built up, working with each other to move forward faster. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: And so, from that perspective, I think it's great. And Elon's gotten people really exciting. People glue themselves to a computer screen to watch rockets. That hasn't happened since the Apollo program, right? MR. GRAY: Absolutely. MS. AITCHISON: So, I'm really excited to have the commercial entities come in and help us do this. We're working together and I think that's great. MS. HORNADAY: But can you foresee, to your point, you know, if agreements are not hashed out down here on Earth, it could turn into a Wild West. I mean, you can see where people--you know, like, if they haven't figured some stuff out by the time they get there, will it--could it turn into more of a dystopian situation? MR. GRAY: The number of treaties that European-Americans adhered to that they made with the indigenous people of the Americas is somewhere over 400--the number that they made. The number they adhered to is zero. So, I find it hard to believe that we would make some space treaties, which I guess we--there are some, aren't there? Who's going to govern that? I--really? Are we going to be evolved that much? I don't know, maybe I'm just being cynical, but it seems like that's an inevitability to some degree, isn't it? I mean, nobody knows--Helium-3--they know, like, obviously, way more than we do about this, but Helium-3, we don't know what the practical commercial implications of that are. It's apparently plentiful on the moon. So, what if there is a commercial implication to that, that all of a sudden you're going to have certain territories of the moon that have it more than others. Meanwhile, some countries have control of more Helium-3 than others, and what is that going to mean? MS. HORNADAY: Are these discussions that happen at NASA? DR. NOBLE: They do among the lawyers. [Laughter]DR. NOBLE: Not so much among the scientists. MS. HORNADAY: Well, thank God for that. I remember reading along the way that you did research, like, will guns fire--can you fire a gun on the moon, right?MR. GRAY: We did. And if you fire a gun--these guys can tell you more about it than I could, but the bullet--if you stood in the same place and fired a gun, the bullet would travel all around the moon's orbit and come back and kill you. That's true. MS. HORNADAY: Is that a little cheat? I mean, did you decide to--okay.MR. GRAY: No, it's not. It's not a cheat, because we researched something called \"stilettos,\" which the--DARPA, which is the defend--the research--they're basically molten lead that they'd be shooting. So, we tried to steal from DARPA their idea of lunar weaponry, because they have been doing research on that stuff--MS. HORNADAY: Okay, all right. MR. GRAY: --which is disturbing. [Laughter]MS. HORNADAY: There is--I'm not sure if it was in that clip, there's a moment where--it's a beautiful shot of Roy McBride, Brad's character, putting his glove up and having that moon dust sift through the fingers. Which one of you brought the moon--who brought the space glove? We need to see this. This is an amazing...MS. AITCHISON: So, this is what our space suit gloves look like. You know, they can tell they're kind of bulky, but that's because, as you mentioned before, space suits, they have to have function before form, really. So, you guys can touch that if you've never seen one of these guys before. MR. GRAY: I have, indeed. They're insane.MS. HORNADAY: Does that look familiar? MR. GRAY: Look how heavy the damn thing is. It's--wow. MS. AITCHISON: It's partly because it's the different layers. So, when you think about a space suit, the first thing you have to do is you have to keep an atmosphere around your body. And so, that's what the bladder does; it holds all the air inside the space suit so you have something to breathe and keep pressure on your skin, all good things. MR. PITT: How does it seal? MS. AITCHISON: So, there's a bearing that goes into the bolt-hold pattern here, and then that connects to the lower arm of your space suit. And so, it swivels around so you can move your wrist. And then, on top of that, you have what we call the restraint layer. And so, this is the part that keeps the shape of your glove and has all the mobility. You can see the rings down here that allow your wrist to rotate, on the top part of your wrist, and then back and forth. And then, each of the fingers are sizable so everybody has a custom glove. MS. HORNADAY: So, these are all in that, right? MS. AITCHISON: Yup.MS. HORNADAY: All these layers. MS. AITCHISON: These two go on the bottom, and then you put your protective layer on the outside. So, this is the thing that protects from all that sharp lunar dust, as well as the temperature extremes when you're outside. So, it has all your thermal insulation. So, it's kind of like an oven mitt, I guess, a very sophisticated one. MR. GRAY: May I ask some quest--so, I--MS. HORNADAY: No thanks. MR. GRAY: Obviously, the Apollo missions--[Laughter]MR. GRAY: The Apollo missions, they all look like--you know, they're sort of Michelin men kind of outfits, right? We tried to project some measure of miniaturization or at least less sort of bulky. Have you made a lot of progress in that way or do they still look kind of like hugely inflate--I mean, I--MS. AITCHISON: I think they look very svelte, personally. MR. GRAY: \"Svelte.\"MS. AITCHISON: So, when we look at those suits, a lot of what it is, is we've learned about how to design the suits to make them more mobile. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: And so, as opposed to having the cables and pulleys that you have underneath all the white stuff on the Apollo suits, we actually have hard elements that make it a--easy to move all of your joints. So, it is very graceful. You can kneel down instead of fall down to pick up a rock, things like that. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: So, they still look--look big. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: But they're actually much smaller and much easier to move than anywhere in Apollo. MR. GRAY: Wasn't there that thing where Charlie Duke kind of did like a dip or something and almost tore his suit? MS. AITCHISON: I don't know about tearing the suit, but--MR. GRAY: He got really scared about that. It was something like they were really--Charlie Duke was one of the Apollo astronauts. He said, \"I clearly don't get out very much,\" but he apparently did some dip and he was--I read somewhere he was worried about--are these--is this a different material than the Apollo mission? MS. AITCHISON: Yeah. MR. GRAY: What's the difference? What is this? MS. AITCHISON: So, this is what we call ortho fabric and in the prior Apollo suits it was a beta cloth. And so, this is much more durable just based on the blend of materials that actually go into the fabric. So, it's a lot more cut resistant than you would find on the old Apollo suits. And so, the Apollo suits, yeah, the outer layers, they definitely wore through those and they gummed up all the bearings and it was hard to move the wrist. These are things that we've learned from that program. And so, when you look at our next generation of space suits, we're not going to have those problems, hopefully. MS. HORNADAY: Right, you're constantly--and I would imagine you're getting feedback from the astronauts, themselves: what worked, what didn't, what could be more comfortable, \"I'd like to be able to kneel to pick up the moon rock and not fall.\"DR. NOBLE: Yeah, that's the great thing about ex ",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "TRANSCRIPT: Ad Astra: A Conversation with Brad Pitt, James Gray and NASA Officialsd Astra: (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7635",
        "date": "2019-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2019/09/17/transcript-ad-astra-conversation-with-brad-pitt-james-gray-nasa-officialsd-astra/",
        "text": "Opening RemarksMR. RYAN: Good afternoon. Welcome to The Washington Post. I'm Fred Ryan, Publisher, and we're delighted to have you here for this special discussion of the new science fiction film, Ad Astra. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd looking at the room, I see about half of our newsroom. I hope there's not any big, breaking story this afternoon. We're pleased to have with us today the star of the movie, Brad Pitt;The film's director, James Gray;And NASA officials Sarah Noble and Lindsay Aitchison. We're looking forward to their firsthand insights about space exploration and the power of storytelling. As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing this summer reminded us, space still captivates the public imagination. Even as unmanned probes photograph distant corners of our universe, we still feel the natural human longing to explore beyond our known world. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis is why NASA is preparing for the next phase of human space flight, with ambitious plans to launch sustainable missions to the moon within the next decade. Eventually, they intend to send astronauts to Mars. For those of us to remain earthbound, films like Ad Astra can help us share in the thrill of these experiences. The movie follows an astronaut's journey into deep space, including stops on the moon and Mars, and shows what early colonization of our solar system might look like. It's among the most realistic depictions of space travel ever committed to film. Today's speakers will talk about the movie's parallels with this exciting moment in the development of space travel and the role of storytelling in inspiring continued scientific exploration and discovery. Story continues below advertisementAs we get started, let's take a look at a few scenes from Ad Astra. Advertisement[Video plays][Applause]Ad Astra: Pushing Boundaries in Space and FilmmakingMS. HORNADAY: Good evening, and thanks again for joining us for this exciting discussion about Ad Astra and space exploration. I feel confident that you all know our guest to our immediate left, Brad Pitt. [Applause]MS. HORNADAY: As well as Ad Astra writer and director, James Gray. [Applause]MS. HORNADAY: And please give a special welcome to two NASA officials: Lindsay Aitchison, a space suit engineer;[Applause]MS. HORNADAY: And Dr. Sarah Noble, a lunar scientist. [Applause]MS. HORNADAY: Thank you both so much for being here. Story continues below advertisementBefore we get started, I wanted to remind the audience in the room and also watching on the livestream that you can tweet your questions for Brad, James, Lindsay, and Sarah, using #PostLive, and I will get to some of those later in the discussion. AdvertisementJames, you have said that you approached this movie, Ad Astra, with the intention of creating the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put into a movie. You've even coined the term \"science future fact\" to describe it. Can you talk a little bit about how you set out to accomplish that and what the aesthetic and conceptual framework was for it? MR. GRAY: You know, a lot of times when you start working on a project, you say unbelievably dumb things, and things that you can't actually ever--here's what I would say: I would say the word I used was wrong: not \"realistic.\" I would say \"plausible.\"Story continues below advertisementAnd what you find is that sometimes you cannot do what is realistic. Or even when you do something that is realistic, it looks fake, because movie believability is a whole other thing. So, what I would say, as a longwinded way to answer your question, would be that we tried as best we could to adhere to the science as best as we could and veer from it when we had to. And that was kind the governing idea. And a lot of times we looked 50 years in the past to try and see what the development was for 50 years, maybe, in the future. That was kind of the governing principle to it, really. AdvertisementMS. HORNADAY: How deep into the weeds did you get with research? I mean--Story continues below advertisementMR. GRAY: I got very deep. I mean, I got--my wife will tell you, you know, I'm hiding in the--you know, hiding in the corner of the house, sitting around with 1960s transcripts. Well, I mean, you can go down--it's almost a bit of a wormhole, in a way, because the movie has to dictate what it needs. And you can sit there and, like I said, you can study Buzz Aldrin's orbital mechanics dissertation, but in the end, you have to know it so you can forget about it; do you know what I mean?MS. HORNADAY: Right, right. And what--Brad--MR. GRAY: What does that mean? He's shaking his head. What does that mean? MR. PITT: You have to know. I don't have to know. Story continues below advertisementMS. HORNADAY: That's what I was going to ask. That's exactly what I was going to ask.AdvertisementI remember when I interviewed Steven Spielberg about Minority Report. He said he did all this research and he consulted all these futurists, and then he threw it away. MR. GRAY: Yeah. MS. HORNADAY: --because it was really about something--you know, it wasn't about the effects. And I wanted to--you know, can research almost get in the way of a performance like this for you?MR. PITT: Well, I mean, fortunately, it's not--it's not my responsibility. I mean, my man here, our DP, Hoyte van Hoytema, production designer. But we would talk about, like, what James was going after. He always talked about the banality of travel, that, you know, we have this idea it's going to be super sleek and sexy and streamlined. Story continues below advertisementBut really, I mean, you look from stagecoach to flying today and the economics that will define what it's going to be in the future, it's probably going to be a little uncomfortable and you're going to have to be waiting to get your baggage, and so on and so forth. AdvertisementAnd the other--the thing that I really liked is that they had talked about, you know, the design would be based upon function, purely function. And certainly, when you get to see images of the space station today, that's it. MS. HORNADAY: Right, right. I was fascinated that you didn't--that you--it seemed like you avoided using green screen and CG--MR. GRAY: To his detriment. To his detriment. Story continues below advertisementMS. HORNADAY: Tell me more. MR. GRAY: Well, because, you know, you have Brad Pitt hanging 30 feet in the air from wires. It's a little bit crazy. And by the way, he was a troop--he's not here, we're just talking about him. [Laughter]MR. GRAY: No, you were a huge trooper, actually. And he never complained. But we built the set horizontally and we built the same set vertically, and you do the closeups horizontally and then, on the horizontal set. And then, two weeks later, you know, you'd have Brad hanging from wires looking up, and you'd say, \"Okay, Brad, when you stop swaying, we're going to go, okay?\"Advertisement\"All right, buddy.\"\"Okay. And action. Oh, you're swaying a little bit, Brad.\"\"Oh, okay, James, my core's hurting a little bit. Got a good port\"--[Laughter]MR. GRAY: So, you know, you get three, four takes and five shots a day or whatever. And if we had green screen, maybe I wouldn't have had to put this poor fellow 50 feet in the air. MR. PITT: Yes, but--MS. HORNADAY: But would you have done it if it had--I mean, it seems like that's something you enjoy doing. MR. PITT: Yeah. MR. GRAY: Nobody enjoys it. Really? Did you enjoy that? MR. PITT: A little bit. MR. GRAY: I didn't think anybody enjoyed that. MR. PITT: Well, you got to suffer a little bit. But the--but this was also by design, and this is what I signed onto. I thought it was really brilliant on, again, James and Hoytema's vision of the thing. AdvertisementAnd that is, they tried to rely on--okay, we had--we're going to need CG. We're going out to Neptune, for Christ's sake. We're going to have to rely on some CG. But these guys tried to work in as much analog effects, meaning things that they could capture in the lens, real, like, flares or things we're accustomed to in nature and in life. And so, when you look at something CG, you can kind of feel there is a patina of--it's been colored. And by bringing in natural, optical effects, it's more believable to us, the audience, subliminal--subliminally.Someone say that word for me. MR. GRAY: I think you did it. MR. PITT: And I thought this was really smart. It's something that we would have a more visceral experience as an audience and not really be aware of it. I thought that was really pretty brilliant. MR. GRAY: There is one other practical reason why we did it. MR. PITT: It's cheaper.MR. GRAY: No, act--[Laughter]MR. GRAY: Actors need and should need a set with which they can interact. Actors are very sensory creatures. And to put an actor in a green box, you know, that doesn't help. So, it was really also for performance. It was. MR. PITT: We were still in garage, so...[Laughter]MR. GRAY: Let's say \"by degrees,\" then. MS. HORNADAY: You know, one of the things I love about this movie, and there are many things I love about this movie--and just for the record, I have filed my review. So, you know, this--you know, I'm immune to any charm offensive that occur. [Laughter]MS. HORNADAY: Full disclosure, but I really did enjoy this movie. [Laughter]MS. HORNADAY: And one of the things I loved is how it is a part of this living continuum of space movies--and not just space movies. I mean, there's some Apocalypse--there's a lot of Apocalypse. MR. GRAY: A lot of Apocalypse, a lot. But that's because--that's because--can I--pretend--I'm going to be pretentious as hell for about the next 30 seconds. MS. HORNADAY: Oh, please, that's why we're here.MR. GRAY: Okay, so--\"why we're here\"? Oh, God. MS. HORNADAY: We wouldn\u2019t have it any other way. MR. GRAY: My cowriter, Ethan Gross and I, when we started on this, which was, you know, in--you know, 1783. No, we started in 2011, and we thought we would try to--we were going to do a mythic story in outer space, and then we said, \"Okay, let's do the Odyssey from Telemachus' point of view.\" Right, Odysseus goes away for 20 years and Telemachus is--so, of course, it ends very differently in the film, now, and it changes and all that. But the idea was, originally, a very mythic story. And for that, you then all of a sudden--we started reading a lot of Joseph Campbell, you know, Hero with a Thousand Faces, and all that. So, then, you get to Apocalypse Now because you realize that John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola were trying to do a Campbellian myth. In fact, it was so much so--you know, we know that George Lucas is obsessed with Campbell--the Star Wars movies were. And you know who the original director of Apocalypse Now was? It was George Lucas. He was supposed to go off and do it in 60 millimeter in Vietnam during the war. Not a practical idea. But they were all into that, and so it became a rip-off, in a way, of Joseph Campbell, but that--it's all part of the same stew. And so, it does steal from Apocalypse Now, inspired by, whatever euphemism you want to use, but everybody steals from everything. And it was very much our idea to be in this continuum, as you put it. MR. PITT: I have to jump in again, if I may. MS. HORNADAY: Please. MR. PITT: What--another intriguing idea--I mean, there's been a lot of sci-fi films, and done really, really well. And you hope to add something different or in addition to the genre, instead of repeating. When James--another thing he hooked me with when he first started talking about this was he called on a quote that was attributed to Arthur Clarke, which said--and I'm going to get wrong--MR. GRAY: Right. MR. PITT: --so you can correct me. Basically, he said, \"We're either not alone in the universe or we are completely and utterly alone; and either idea is equally frightening.\" And it--I can't think of any other film where actually--we're usually dealing with either benevolent aliens who are going to impart some wisdom or some are going to destroy us and we have to stand up and fight. But this idea, this question of what if we are actually alone, at least in the reachable universe, through our lifetimes, what does that mean? And are we missing something between us? Yeah. MR. GRAY: That's true. No, that is true. We did try--we were trying to find new ground, territory. You know, we were. I mean, we can talk about Apocalypse now or Kubrick or whatever, but that is certainly--the governing principle was, okay, we're going to make the first movie that might pose that question. Because to Brad's point, benevolent aliens or bad aliens, it's still an idea--in a sense false gods, right? Kubrick beats the trap brilliantly. He's got these astronauts, they find a black slab on the moon that looks like some '60s minimalist structure. And you can project anything you want on it. Oh, it's good aliens, bad--I do not know what they are. It's just a black monolith floating around. E.T. beats the trap, because he pitches it like a fable. So, it's--I don't think you watch E.T. wanting a disquisition on alien life. You know, it's--really, what it is it's a lonely kid and dealing with a divorce. That's really what it is, a metaphor. MS. HORNADAY: Exactly. MR. GRAY: So, we thought, no false gods. No one's going to save us. No little green man is going to help us out of climate change or anything like that. No bad alien is going to come and unify the whole planet and make us realize we're the same. Not coming, not happening. What does that mean? MS. HORNADAY: That thought sets up--I'd like to play a clip and talk a little bit about the extent to which Ad Astra is anticipatory. Your vision, and I think it's part and parcel to what you just said, it's kind of this unsentimental vision of the future. And then, I'd like to bring in our NASA experts to talk about this, but let's play a clip that gives us a glimpse of what the base on the moon might look like in the future. Let's take a look at that. [Video plays]MS. HORNADAY: It's a really cool scene. MR. GRAY: Can I--can I defend us for one second? MS. HORNADAY: Please. MR. GRAY: It's very clear that there's no sound in space. And that little clip, it doesn't really allow you to understand that, but we did it here, to the no sound in space thing, don't worry. I just want to put this out. MS. HORNADAY: Well, and I wanted to get to that--I'm going to get to that a little later, about, like, do these movies drive you crazy, but we'll get to that in a minute. But this scene is a great scene, and the whole trip when Brad's character flies to the moon, he flies commercial. It's just this fabulous, fabulous scene. And you are--there are lots of ideas flying around: One is the commercialization of space; one is the militarization of space; one is the kind of Wild West notion that you get at the end. But Lindsay, I wanted to ask you, where is NASA right now in terms of lunar ambitions? And if you'd like to tell us about Project Artemis, I know we'd love to hear about it. MS. AITCHISON: Yeah, excellent.So, Artemis is our new program. It's going to bring the first woman and the next man back to the surface of the moon by 2024. And it's really part of a broader exploration plan that we have. We're not just going to the moon; we're going to the moon for a purpose. And that's to learn what it's like to live off the Earth and what technologies we need and figure out a few more questions we have about human physiology before we move on to Mars. Because we want to keep going. We don't just want to just stay here. We want to open up the commercial space, let other people come enjoy the moon. And we're going to go off and keep exploring. MS. HORNADAY: So, why--and is this because you think we're going to need to colonize these areas at some point or that people will actively want to? MS. AITCHISON: There are a lot of reasons for us to go back to the moon. There are opportunities--if you look at the soil and some of the mineralogy--and Sarah can definitely talk more about that than I can. But there are things that we can do there to open up commercial space. And it's just about spurring the economy, it's about getting people interested in math and science and to make sure we're the leaders of that area. MS. HORNADAY: Interesting.And Sarah, can you talk a little bit about the scenario of it all? DR. NOBLE: Yeah, sure. We like to talk about now--now, we're not just going back to the moon, but we're actually going forward to the moon. We've spent the last couple of decades learning about the moon and we now have a very different concept of it than we had during the Apollo era. We know a lot more. We know where to go to get the answers we need to move forward in lunar science. And one of the reasons we're going to the South Pole is because there is a lot of exciting new science we can do there. We think there are a lot of resources there, particularly water, that we can use not only as a resource for our astronauts to use, but to learn about the moon, too, and to understand how the moon has evolved over the last few billion years. MS. HORNADAY: So--MR. PITT: Can I ask you a couple of questions?MS. HORNADAY: Please, please, yes. MR. PITT: Well, I heard--I just heard a couple of things that I thought were really interesting: one--one, that we would have to take--if we were going to make a trip to Mars, we would have to take off from the moon because of the lack of gravity. DR. NOBLE: So, it's helpful. The gravity well from Earth is a lot. So, if you do leave from the moon or from near-Earth space, you have a lot less gravity to overcome. So, it does save us a lot on fuel, which is the big cost of lifting things off. MR. PITT: And one more? MS. HORNADAY: Please. This is why we convene you all. MR. PITT: And that there--they believe there is water on the moon on the South--at the South Pole? DR. NOBLE: Yes, at both poles. MR. PITT: And that they would use--one of the things they would use this is to make hydrogen, which is a fuel source? DR. NOBLE: Yeah, water--H20, right, is made up of hydrogen and oxygen and we can split it apart and use both hydrogen and oxygen as fuel sources, but oxygen also to breath and also good uses for it. MR. PITT: Okay, I'm done. MS. HORNADAY: Well, no, please. And I wanted to stipulate that. Please jump in and--MR. GRAY: We got that right. MR. PITT: Yeah. MS. HORNADAY: --ask--you got that right? MR. PITT: You did. MR. GRAY: We did--actually, we got it wrong, but we got it right. Well, the one-sixth gravity thing, we got right that they'd have to--deep space rockets launching from the--from the moon. But I hear now the plan is changed. The Gateway is itself going to be the craft that's going to go to the--to Mars. MS. AITCHISON: It's one of our options. So, Gateway is kind of like a very small space station that will be orbiting around the moon. And so, we're going to use that as a point, because it's very easy to get to that orbit, but it also allows you to go anywhere you want on the lunar surface from there. And once we have that, it's going to be a great analog for a Mars transfer vehicle, if you wanted to use that going forward. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. HORNADAY: But again, like, so these expeditions, I think one of the ideas that Ad Astra engages so beautifully, is that, you know, there is this impulse to explore and to always go further, but basically we're taking--what if we export the same problems we haven't solved here, you know?I mean, is that--I know this is a philosophical question, but does that--is that a conversation you ever have, like, maybe we shouldn't be doing this until we actually solve some of our human, tribal issues here on Earth. DR. NOBLE: I mean, I think then you're just admitting defeat and we're never going to go anywhere, right?But you know, opportunities to develop new technology and whatever can often help the problems we have here on Earth. Many of the technologies that we've done at NASA have been spun off to actually do helpful things here on Earth and to solve some of those difficult problems. MS. HORNADAY: Can you talk a little--is it possible for you to put in layman's terms the other scientific--the scientific discoveries or experiments that excite you personally that can only be done on the moon? DR. NOBLE: Sure. Let's see--you know, when we went on Apollo, we mostly landed all on the same part of the near side of the moon. So, now, we're going to go to a totally different part of the moon. And so, that's an opportunity to see, like, new and different kinds of soils and things--MS. HORNADAY: Right. So, you'll be seeing completely different resources, different natural--DR. NOBLE: The--a lot of--yes, yeah, exactly. And it also gives us, again, a more global perspective. And with the Gateway, we can actually land in other places. So, in addition to the humans, we actually will have robotic landers going to many different places on the moon. And because we have all this great orbital data--I mean, we know exactly where to go to get these different answers. We know that there are minerals that we didn't sample during Apollo, because they're only in specific places.We want to put a seismic network down, and that's going to call--require several different landers so that we can, you know, get multiple seismic stations to coordinate together, right? So, there's lots of good reasons to go to all sorts of different places. MS. HORNADAY: Right. How do you feel, James? I mean, I think there's enough questioning kind of embedded into this film. I mean, do you have--are you a space exploration fan? I mean, do you-- MR. GRAY: Yeah, I am. And I don't know if the movie actually would indicate that, would it? No, I'm a huge fan. MS. HORNADAY: It raises good questions. MR. GRAY: No, but here's what I would say: I would say I'm a huge fan of--I mean, I had a little picture of Neal Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on my wall as a kid. It was tremendously aspirational. It really is--was. And I'm hugely in favor of it. Here's what I would say: When--I guess it was Pete Conrad and Alan Bean. It would have been Apollo 12, I guess, in November. I think it was November in '69, Armstrong did a talk show appearance, which he didn't do much of, and somebody said to him, \"Well, what's it going to be like in the year 2001?\"And he said, \"Well, we're going to have lunar bases and we're going to be traveling every two weeks and\"--he was completely wrong as a prediction, but he was not wrong on the technology. The national will started to slip. And I just feel like part of the issue was we were trying to just beat the Russians. And once that happened, the kind of national will got drained a bit. Like, \"Okay, we did the moon. We did that. Fine, move on.\"And I feel like if you go and explore for pure science or basic science, pure research reasons, that's actually great. If you're going to beat the Russians or some military payload garbage, I have no interest in it. And the reason I think I'm right is because you see the progress we made was extraordinary and once the Russians couldn't do it, that was--it was over. I don't know, these guys would have more interesting things to say about it than I would, but my own view is, if the motive is right, it's fantastic. MS. HORNADAY: But now, I think we're going to--it seems like we're tipping more into a commercial motive than any--you know, that's now starting to kind of overtake the nationalistic or patriotic one. Is that--I mean, we don't--I'm not even aware of all the different commercial companies from around the world that are vying to get a piece of the action, as it were. Is it a hot area now? DR. NOBLE: It is. The moon is pretty hot, both internationally and commercially, right? It's the--MS. HORNADAY: You heard it here first, folks. DR. NOBLE: Everyone wants to go, right? There are a number of other nations that are seeking to join us in our adventure to the moon. And we're working with a lot of commercial companies. I was talking about landing on other places on the moon right now. We have a program where--where commercial companies, a lot of them were former Google Lunar X Prize competition members, right, who have built landers and we're going to use them to deliver stuff to the moon for us, right? It's like, you know, FedEx or DHL, right? They're going to take our packages on their commercial landers to wherever on the moon they want to send them. MR. PITT: When they start selling advertising space, then we call it quits. [Laughter]MR. GRAY: I want to ask something. Do you guys--this may be an obnoxious question, but do you guys get, like, irritated by all the commercial companies or are you like, \"Bring them on in,\" or is it like, \"No, Elon, come on. Sit down with us. You know, have some dinner.\" I mean, how does that work? Because I feel like there is a mix of motives. I mean, it's a weird thing. You guys are much more pure science, aren't you? DR. NOBLE: Sure, but if they help us do the science...MS. AITCHISON: As an engineer, I get excited when they have innovative ideas. I don't actually care where they come from, and it's really a great community that we built up, working with each other to move forward faster. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: And so, from that perspective, I think it's great. And Elon's gotten people really exciting. People glue themselves to a computer screen to watch rockets. That hasn't happened since the Apollo program, right? MR. GRAY: Absolutely. MS. AITCHISON: So, I'm really excited to have the commercial entities come in and help us do this. We're working together and I think that's great. MS. HORNADAY: But can you foresee, to your point, you know, if agreements are not hashed out down here on Earth, it could turn into a Wild West. I mean, you can see where people--you know, like, if they haven't figured some stuff out by the time they get there, will it--could it turn into more of a dystopian situation? MR. GRAY: The number of treaties that European-Americans adhered to that they made with the indigenous people of the Americas is somewhere over 400--the number that they made. The number they adhered to is zero. So, I find it hard to believe that we would make some space treaties, which I guess we--there are some, aren't there? Who's going to govern that? I--really? Are we going to be evolved that much? I don't know, maybe I'm just being cynical, but it seems like that's an inevitability to some degree, isn't it? I mean, nobody knows--Helium-3--they know, like, obviously, way more than we do about this, but Helium-3, we don't know what the practical commercial implications of that are. It's apparently plentiful on the moon. So, what if there is a commercial implication to that, that all of a sudden you're going to have certain territories of the moon that have it more than others. Meanwhile, some countries have control of more Helium-3 than others, and what is that going to mean? MS. HORNADAY: Are these discussions that happen at NASA? DR. NOBLE: They do among the lawyers. [Laughter]DR. NOBLE: Not so much among the scientists. MS. HORNADAY: Well, thank God for that. I remember reading along the way that you did research, like, will guns fire--can you fire a gun on the moon, right?MR. GRAY: We did. And if you fire a gun--these guys can tell you more about it than I could, but the bullet--if you stood in the same place and fired a gun, the bullet would travel all around the moon's orbit and come back and kill you. That's true. MS. HORNADAY: Is that a little cheat? I mean, did you decide to--okay.MR. GRAY: No, it's not. It's not a cheat, because we researched something called \"stilettos,\" which the--DARPA, which is the defend--the research--they're basically molten lead that they'd be shooting. So, we tried to steal from DARPA their idea of lunar weaponry, because they have been doing research on that stuff--MS. HORNADAY: Okay, all right. MR. GRAY: --which is disturbing. [Laughter]MS. HORNADAY: There is--I'm not sure if it was in that clip, there's a moment where--it's a beautiful shot of Roy McBride, Brad's character, putting his glove up and having that moon dust sift through the fingers. Which one of you brought the moon--who brought the space glove? We need to see this. This is an amazing...MS. AITCHISON: So, this is what our space suit gloves look like. You know, they can tell they're kind of bulky, but that's because, as you mentioned before, space suits, they have to have function before form, really. So, you guys can touch that if you've never seen one of these guys before. MR. GRAY: I have, indeed. They're insane.MS. HORNADAY: Does that look familiar? MR. GRAY: Look how heavy the damn thing is. It's--wow. MS. AITCHISON: It's partly because it's the different layers. So, when you think about a space suit, the first thing you have to do is you have to keep an atmosphere around your body. And so, that's what the bladder does; it holds all the air inside the space suit so you have something to breathe and keep pressure on your skin, all good things. MR. PITT: How does it seal? MS. AITCHISON: So, there's a bearing that goes into the bolt-hold pattern here, and then that connects to the lower arm of your space suit. And so, it swivels around so you can move your wrist. And then, on top of that, you have what we call the restraint layer. And so, this is the part that keeps the shape of your glove and has all the mobility. You can see the rings down here that allow your wrist to rotate, on the top part of your wrist, and then back and forth. And then, each of the fingers are sizable so everybody has a custom glove. MS. HORNADAY: So, these are all in that, right? MS. AITCHISON: Yup.MS. HORNADAY: All these layers. MS. AITCHISON: These two go on the bottom, and then you put your protective layer on the outside. So, this is the thing that protects from all that sharp lunar dust, as well as the temperature extremes when you're outside. So, it has all your thermal insulation. So, it's kind of like an oven mitt, I guess, a very sophisticated one. MR. GRAY: May I ask some quest--so, I--MS. HORNADAY: No thanks. MR. GRAY: Obviously, the Apollo missions--[Laughter]MR. GRAY: The Apollo missions, they all look like--you know, they're sort of Michelin men kind of outfits, right? We tried to project some measure of miniaturization or at least less sort of bulky. Have you made a lot of progress in that way or do they still look kind of like hugely inflate--I mean, I--MS. AITCHISON: I think they look very svelte, personally. MR. GRAY: \"Svelte.\"MS. AITCHISON: So, when we look at those suits, a lot of what it is, is we've learned about how to design the suits to make them more mobile. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: And so, as opposed to having the cables and pulleys that you have underneath all the white stuff on the Apollo suits, we actually have hard elements that make it a--easy to move all of your joints. So, it is very graceful. You can kneel down instead of fall down to pick up a rock, things like that. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: So, they still look--look big. MR. GRAY: Right. MS. AITCHISON: But they're actually much smaller and much easier to move than anywhere in Apollo. MR. GRAY: Wasn't there that thing where Charlie Duke kind of did like a dip or something and almost tore his suit? MS. AITCHISON: I don't know about tearing the suit, but--MR. GRAY: He got really scared about that. It was something like they were really--Charlie Duke was one of the Apollo astronauts. He said, \"I clearly don't get out very much,\" but he apparently did some dip and he was--I read somewhere he was worried about--are these--is this a different material than the Apollo mission? MS. AITCHISON: Yeah. MR. GRAY: What's the difference? What is this? MS. AITCHISON: So, this is what we call ortho fabric and in the prior Apollo suits it was a beta cloth. And so, this is much more durable just based on the blend of materials that actually go into the fabric. So, it's a lot more cut resistant than you would find on the old Apollo suits. And so, the Apollo suits, yeah, the outer layers, they definitely wore through those and they gummed up all the bearings and it was hard to move the wrist. These are things that we've learned from that program. And so, when you look at our next generation of space suits, we're not going to have those problems, hopefully. MS. HORNADAY: Right, you're constantly--and I would imagine you're getting feedback from the astronauts, themselves: what worked, what didn't, what could be more comfortable, \"I'd like to be able to kneel to pick up the moon rock and not fall.\"DR. NOBLE: Yeah, that's the great thing about ex ",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7636",
        "date": "2021-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/08/transcript-race-america-hispanic-heritage-month-with-diana-trujillo/",
        "text": "MS. HERNANDEZ: Good afternoon and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez, a reporter with The Washington Post. Joining me today is Diana Trujillo, a mission lead for the Mars Perseverance rover at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab, as we continue our conversations marking Hispanic Heritage Month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWelcome, Diana.MS. TRUJILLO: Hi. Thank you for having me. MS. HERNANDEZ: So good to have you here, and I wonder if we could start with your personal journey, if that's okay. I want to know how did your fascination and ambition with space start? Did it start growing up in Colombia?MS. TRUJILLO: It did. And so thank you for asking that question. Yes. So I was born and raised in Colombia. I moved to the States when I was 17, like you saw in the video. But for me, the fascination for space started back in my hometown, in my home country. It was mainly the trying to understand when you look at the sky how beautiful everything is, how majestic it is, and the recognition that behind that night sky there's these amazing, amazing planets, all different, going around the sun, and they're giant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so my question always was: How's that all work? How is it that all these outside objects can actually get along, but within my arm's reach we have more problems of trying to figure out how we can get along and be together? So I always wanted to understand is there some magic salsa out there that is working that I need to understand so we can do better here.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I remember the first time I told my dad, who's from Puerto Rico, that I was going to be a journalist. And he was like, \"Oh, you're going to live in my house for the rest of your life.\"So I wonder, what did your family think when you said, you know, I'm going to pursue, you know, the mysteries of space, and this is what I was going to do?Story continues below advertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Oh, I love your question. And by the way, I see your Puerto Rican flag in the background. So, pretty awesome.AdvertisementSo I would say, I didn't. I didn't tell them I wanted to do space until I actually applied to work at NASA, and then it was like, okay, there's no way back. This is what it's going to be like. I apply. I gotta accept it. No way you're going to tell me, don't go to NASA.But it was funny because actually a few days after I applied, I did call my dad and I mentioned to him like, \"Hey, I applied to NASA. I'm going to go work for NASA.\"And his answer to that question was, \"I love you, mijita. I want to protect you. I don't think they're going to call you back.\"Story continues below advertisementAnd so it was very interesting for me to be like, oh, I thought this was going to be like a high-five moment. But, no, that was not what happened.MS. HERNANDEZ: Typical Latino father, right? Well, tell me about your journey because your journey to the United States involves your father. Right? You arrived with roughly $300 in your pocket, and somehow you put yourself through community college. Tell me about that journey if you would.AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So the journey for me to get to the U.S. was I came here when I was 17, like we were talking about earlier. I had 300 bucks in my pocket. I didn't know any English, and I really didn't have like the support system. You know, you grow up with that support system of the neighborhood, the community. You know everybody on the--on the street, really. And when I came here, I didn't come with that.Story continues below advertisementBut what was amazing to me is the Latinx blood that we all have, that we all share, because when I came to the States, I went to Miami. I'm so glad I went to Miami because I could speak Spanish while I was learning English. And the Cuban community in Miami like took me under their wing. Right? And they were the ones that were telling me, you know, it's hard. Keep going. We can do it. And so they were the ones pushing me forward and telling me, [speaking Spanish]. Right?And so, yeah. So I got here. I worked really hard. I had three jobs. I put myself through college to first learn English, and then, you know, I went to Miami Dade Community College for English and then later on for space science, and then I took off to university.AdvertisementAnd it was interesting to me--what was interesting to me at that point was that I was--you know, first I was focused on survival mode. Right? Like where am I going to eat? Where am I going to sleep? How am I going to--you know, what's the transportation situation for me? Which is where again my Latinx community was like \"Go, go, go, mija. Go.\"Story continues below advertisementBut after that, you know, when I--when I reached steady state, when those three things, which sound simple but are huge, enabled me to then start thinking about my dreams and where I wanted to go next.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, then how did NASA figure into part of your dreams? How did you decide you wanted to work there?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, so, you know, when--this is kind of funny. It all happened because one night I went for a run and I had these pants that I brought from Colombia I really like, but I didn't bring gym clothes. You know, like I pack. I could only bring one bag. So I put the things, and I'm like, okay, what are the things that I'm going to use the most. Gym clothes, not the thing that I'm going to use the most. I need my jeans. Whatever I'm going to do I'm going to be working with jeans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo, anyway. So I didn't bring gym clothes, but I brought in these pajama pants that I really like.And so I went for a run in my pajama pants, and I fall on my run. Right? I scratch my knees, and like my only and favorite pajama pants like ripped on my knee. And I remember sitting there, holding my knee, alone, crying, thinking I don't have anybody to call. I don't have--you know, like I feel lonely just because I fell that day. And I remember that was the moment where I'm like, is this it? Is this it for me? Is this everything that I am going to be doing? Is there anything else?And then I remember that dream of working in space, that dream of understanding how the solar system, the planets, everything out there works. And I thought, maybe it's not too far. I mean, I am in the country where NASA exists. So I'm a teeny bit closer. So let's just give it a shot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then I started to learn about people that had gone to space, about their backgrounds, about what they have done. And then I started to go closer and closer.And after that, I took a class in Miami Dade Community College where it was an astronomy class, and my professor mentioned that she knew a friend that had a friend that was an astronaut. And it felt to me like this is the closest I have ever been to an astronaut.This is like the Kevin--the Kevin Bacon kind of thing, where everybody says, who has--who's in that sphere of influence. I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like in the sphere of influence of an astronaut. This is awesome. And I think that that's when I'm like let me seriously look into it.Story continues below advertisementMS. HERNANDEZ: And yet, when you started to apply for--it's like a NASA Academy, right, you didn't actually submit your own application. Is that right? Can you tell me that story?AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So, well, this is now later on, right? I go to college. I'm a senior at the University of Florida, like the best time ever. Go, Gators. And I--yeah, so I'm a senior, and I'm about to graduate and like, do you remember you wanted to work in space? Like I'm in Florida. Maybe.So I told a professor about it. I'm like \"Hey, I know--I know this is our last class. You might not see me ever again, but I want to work in space.\"And to my surprise, this individual was like, apply to this, which was the NASA Academy. So I went to the website, fill everything in. And then of course, you know, I don't know about you, but my--my imposter syndrome is like, no. What are you doing? This is not going to happen.And so I fill everything in. And then I did the craziest thing--I think that a lot of people go through this--where I like sat in front of the clock and looked at the clock, like waiting for like the--you know, the expiration time to submit the application. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to sit there and look at the clock and cheers to me not actually submitting it.AdvertisementAnd my roommate came in and grabbed my computer, was like, let me just read your application. I'm like, okay. And my roommate sends it for me. And yes, then you know, later on I get the phone call that I made it. It was just crazy.MS. HERNANDEZ: I hope you're still friends with that roommate.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. At the same time, I was very petrified. Like, no, wait. My perfectionism just came out and was like, but I didn't write this well, and all of that stuff that holds you back.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, you've said that the women in your family gave you a lot of strength. Your mom. Your--I think your aunts and your grandmother. How did they teach you to fight? Because I just remember being myself in journalism school and getting constantly these messages that I don't belong, that this is not the field for me. I can imagine something similar happened to you.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. I will tell you, that's an excellent question. How did they teach me how to fight? There were several things in my life that I feel like allowed me to do--to learn how to do that. And so I will say one of them was I used to go to my grandma's house. I used to go--yeah, I used to go to my grandma's house, and in my grandma's house, once a week my grandma, my--my grandma and my great grandma, and my mom, my aunt, my grandma's sisters will all get together at my grandma's house, and I will go with mom. And so I will sit on the kitchen floor, and they were all talking, drinking coffee.And they will be--they will be just like having this weekly, I don't know, reflection moment where they tell each other what's going on at home, and then somehow, they just--they will just snap into this laughter of \"Do you remember when I wanted to do this?\" and \"Remember when I wore this?\" and \"Remember when I did that?\"And all of those stories were leading to them saying, when I wanted to have a restaurant, when I wanted to own a candy store, when I wanted to be the boss, when I wanted--and it was all past tense. And so to me it was scary to hear them say, \"I wanted, but you know, life happened. You know, life happened.\"And then--so to me, I was like, oh, no. Like is this what is in store for me?But then later on, like on the same conversation\u2011\u2011it was very funny. On the same conversation, they will turn to me and be like, \"But not to you, mija. No? Not to you. You fight. You get what you need. You get to where you need to go. You think about other stuff later, but take--count you in first.\"And so that was, to me, a pretty strong lesson, to hear like the cadre of all the generations of women in my family tell me, \"This happened to me, but not you.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Wow. And so this reminiscence circle almost, right, like of dreams deferred or dreams unfulfilled was all about pushing you to then to do what they weren't able to do? Was that like subtly the message that they were giving you?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, it wasn't too subtle. It was very straight. It was like, \"I wanted this, but I didn't, but you should.\" And so--and I think that, you know, I--you know, my family, God is always in the center of everything for us. So my family is like, you know, you pray. You ask. Right? You give everything. You did it with excellence. You push hard. And you don't forget where you come from. I think that all of that helped me.So when I came here and again the Cuban community like brought me in--I mean, the Latino blood, the Latinx blood. I mean, we work hard. We're the first ones in; we're the last ones out. There's no job that we say no to. And so it's not like nobody else works hard. I'm just saying that the--that the work ethic from the Latinx community is strong because in many cases, right, we are pushing constantly everything we have and putting it on the line. Right?Like there's plan B, I do everything. Sorry. There's plan A, I do everything. There's no plan B. I mean, plan B is like I do everything more. And so, you know, it's always like that.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, let's transition to everything you do do on a daily basis for the Jet Propulsion Lab and talk about your work. You're one of four, right, mission leads for the Perseverance rover. What have you learned in doing all that work because you also worked on Curiosity, right?MS. TRUJILLO: I did, and I think that at this point we're one of six. I'm one of six, but--MS. HERNANDEZ: Oh, okay.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, yeah. No, no. But you know, we're bringing people in. That's the beauty of the job that we do. Right? Like we bring in more people. We bring in more ways of thinking. We bring in diversity. Diversity on thought. Diversity on approaching problems because like you were asking me, what have we learned? I mean, we have learned what we don't know and how to solve it.So I will tell you, lots of amazing things have happened with this mission. Right? We landed on February 18, and since then not only we did a series of firsts, back to back to back, which I am so proud to be part of the NASA family. Right? Like when you are in a situation, I think, that you are like breaking barriers one after another, and in this specific case, the barriers are: We can't do that; we did it. We can't do that; we did it. Never before have we flown a helicopter on another planet, and we did it. Right? And so that's just amazing.So, yeah. So lots of firsts. Right? Like from the first time we took that image when we landed to the first panorama to the first drive to the first time we touched the surface to the first time we deployed a helicopter and flew on the surface of Mars.And then after that, doing the sample collection. Right? And I think that the most amazing thing about the sample collection for me is also that we are seeding. With the sample collection, with the core collection, we are seeding the next mission, which is Mars sample return.So we're almost--you know, I see it more like [speaking Spanish]. Right? And you hand it to the next runner, and you're like, \"Here you go. Run!\" And so it just feels--it feels like a team effort even across years, across planets, in the most amazing thing. In the most amazing way.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so to the question of the hour. Right? Is there, or has there been, life on Mars?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, we don't know the answer yet, but we're on it. So first we found out that with Curiosity that there was the ability to sustain life on Mars in the past. So, check.Now the next question was: Was there life on Mars? And we are on the search. I mean, I think that the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that that question is, you know, coming into, you know, front and center for all of us is just--is just crazy. I don't think that I ever thought that in my lifetime I was going to be part of a team that will answer that question.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I once interviewed a lawmaker who told me just, you know, randomly that they'd want to be part of the first human mission or colony on Mars. Would you sign up as well?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, first, I don't see it as a colony. Right? I see it--so this is the reason I love working for NASA. We go there--we go there, and whatever there next is, with respect, with humility, understanding that we know very little and that we are there to learn and to appreciate.So I think that the question then is: Would I want to go to any of those planets or moon? 100 percent.MS. HERNANDEZ: So, okay. So if we find out that there is, you know, life or there has been life on Mars, what do you think that means then for us and our understanding of our place in the universe?MS. TRUJILLO: If we find out that there was life on the surface of another planet, what I think--so this is my personal opinion. I hope that that's going to inevitably give us reflection moment. Right? A moment where we have to--we have to realize that we aren't alone. We are not the center--I mean, we are not the center of the universe, that nothing revolves around us and that, honestly, we're plugged into something into something bigger, that we are assisting, you know, and being part of it, but not necessarily driving it.And I think that, you know, when you--when you think about it that way, you inevitably start thinking about a human connection. You start thinking about my day to day, my how do I--how do I connect with you? How do we make community? How do I make community in my neighborhood, in my city, around me? How do we all get better as people? Right?And so I think that you realize, I think, that instead of thinking \"me, me, me, me,\" it's like this is \"we.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so I'm curious. You know, we're watching on the news billionaires blasting off into space and regular folks that are taking these trips to the\u2011\u2011to the edge of space. I wonder if we're--you know, with the rover and other things, are we at an inflection point for space exploration? I mean, what do you see happening here?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, I mean, when we talk about the last mission finding that there was the ability to sustain life, the current mission trying to find out if there was life in the past, the next mission trying to pick it up and bring it back, and parallel to that we're talking about going back to the moon and hopefully going back to the moon with people and hopefully going to Mars with people, I mean, I think that, yes. The answer to your question is I can't wait for us to get to the point where we're like, \"Hey, 5:00, let's go take the shuttle to the moon.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: That would be something, wouldn't it?MS. TRUJILLO: It will be.MS. HERNANDEZ: I'm going to pivot a little bit towards something that I know that you're incredibly passionate about, which is STEM education and STEM education particularly for Latinas. In the opening credits, we saw you talking about how few Latinas are, you know, in STEM fields. And I'm curious about what you think, you know, it will take to change that.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that's a really question. I will say that, you know, sometimes people ask me, what is your advice to the young women, young Latinx people, that are coming behind to get into the industry? And I like the way that you phrase your question because I think that the responsibility is on us to help them.And so I think that in my opinion the way that we get to change this is by recognizing that we need to make space. We need to make space for the rest of the next generation to come in. It is not about the next generation trying to come in and knocking the door hard. It is about us opening the door. Right?And sometimes we think, well, I unlocked the door, so you can walk in. And it's like, no, no. It's we're going to have to open the door and welcome everybody else in.How do we do that? I think that it just--it comes in many different ways. Right? It comes in the way of how we direct ourselves to our own children or to the young people. Right?It is--it is not about, like you were saying earlier, \"Oh, no, that will never happen. Oh, no, you will live in my house your whole life because you're not going to make money of that.\" It's not about that.It's about us supporting their dreams and in a way recognizing that it is their dreams after all. As much as I will want my kids to do something, it is their lives. My job is to support them and guide them, but the best way in my opinion to support them and guide them is by showing them examples of people that are doing the thing that they want to do successfully. So it is almost the \"do what you want, and here's how you can do it well.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: And I'm also curious about at the college level. Like my sister actually is an agricultural engineer, and I just remember her suffering. She went to the University of Maryland as well and suffering and feeling very much alone in her classes and feeling like she was the only Latina. In fact, she was the only Latina in her classes.What can--like in terms of support, what does support look like at the collegiate level? Once the interest is born, once they've made it to the college level, how do--how do we support then Latinas who do reach sort of the beginning stages of that career?MS. TRUJILLO: Love your question. I will say right now, with the limited effort that I am doing, I will tell all of those Latinx people that are in college to check out the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship. Those are two fellowships that actually reach out to a big network of the aerospace industry, where they can apply to these fellowships and have a shot at 1 of 33 companies to get a job for the summer and then also get, you know, the mentorship that we all need-- mean, I still need mentorship--where you talk with an executive mentor, a person that is working in the industry now, who can actually guide you through your career and say, \"Hey, think about this. Think about this\" and help you figure out what you like. So that's one way.But now as to the question that you're asking me, yes, it is--it is hard. I think that in my opinion--you know, when I was in college, I was one of three women, and out of those three women I was the only Latinx. And so I think that I just looked for support on other ways that I can reach.So this is why I'm telling you about the--these two fellowships because I think that you find a way of understanding what you like, other people supporting you, and then you create this network of people that can be there for you. Right? The NASA Academy did that for me. I mean, I was so happy to see my NASA Academy friends' email on the last three weeks and we were all talking about what we were going to do, including this interview. And they were all cheering for me, and that felt like, okay, I can do this.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, cool. As we're nearing the end of our time together, I want to talk about Hispanic Heritage Month in general and why you think it's important to celebrate it and to celebrate it beyond, you know, the weird sort of mid-month celebration that we have right now.MS. TRUJILLO: So, okay. So for me, why is it important to celebrate it? Is that your question? It's important for me to celebrate it, personally, because, I mean, we're taking the time to recognize all the amazing contribution that we as a Hispanic community have done in many areas. Right? In my particular case, the contribution of the Hispanic community in our quest for space exploration, the way that we continue to push that, the way that we are part of it, the way that we are here, and not only just on the space side, right, but in every single way and every single discipline.And having the ability to celebrate that also tells the next generation, \"Listen. We are here. You are here. If I can do it, you can do it. I will give you my hand, and I can pull you in so that you can keep going because if we can do it you can do it better than us.\"And so I think that that is a powerful message, not only among us peers and recognition of what we have done to better the country and where we are contributing and how proud we are of who we are, but we're also sending the message to the next generation that we're here for them.MS. HERNANDEZ: I want to talk just--I have a little question about womanhood. Right? Like you talk a lot about being a woman and how you had received these messages early on in your childhood and throughout your life that women couldn't do certain things. How did--what was it--I know you had the example of your family. But what was it that, you know, pushed you past the point of the limitations that had stopped other members--other women in your family?MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that is a good question. I will say that it goes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is that sense of community that we as Latinx people have. You know, you make a community in a way that everybody around you is rooting for you. And so when I came to the U.S. and I have all this community that was telling me \"\u00c1ndale, mija. \u00c1ndale, \u00e1ndale,\" I think there was no option. Right?At that point, the rhetorical--the story that you tell yourself changes from \"not you, not you\" to \"go, go, go, go, go.\" And so I realized at that point that I had no other option for me than just to do it. Right?And I think that part of that also is the fact that when I came here and I had only $300 I felt like I was running against my--a race against my endurance, against the 300 bucks I had in my pocket, and I was hoping that when the--you know, the stopwatch stops, I was going to be in a place where I was going to be happy and proud of what I had done.So I think that, yeah, I mean, those circumstances and the community pushing me forward is the instance where I just felt like what else--I don't--I need to honor this. I need to honor the effort of all of these people that are, you know, strangers putting on me and helping me. I'm going to honor them, so let's just go.MS. HERNANDEZ: That's an amazing story. And unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. Thank you. Thank you, Diana, for speaking with me.MS. TRUJILLO: Thank you for having me.MS. HERNANDEZ: And thanks to all of you for joining us today and check out \u201cwww.WashingtonPost.com\u201d for extensive coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month. We also have right here onscreen our link to the Somos Latinos interactive feature that you can visit and peruse as part of our continuing coverage.I am Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez and thank you for watching Washington Post Live.[End recorded session]  Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7637",
        "date": "2021-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/08/transcript-race-america-hispanic-heritage-month-with-diana-trujillo/",
        "text": "MS. HERNANDEZ: Good afternoon and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez, a reporter with The Washington Post. Joining me today is Diana Trujillo, a mission lead for the Mars Perseverance rover at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab, as we continue our conversations marking Hispanic Heritage Month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWelcome, Diana.MS. TRUJILLO: Hi. Thank you for having me. MS. HERNANDEZ: So good to have you here, and I wonder if we could start with your personal journey, if that's okay. I want to know how did your fascination and ambition with space start? Did it start growing up in Colombia?MS. TRUJILLO: It did. And so thank you for asking that question. Yes. So I was born and raised in Colombia. I moved to the States when I was 17, like you saw in the video. But for me, the fascination for space started back in my hometown, in my home country. It was mainly the trying to understand when you look at the sky how beautiful everything is, how majestic it is, and the recognition that behind that night sky there's these amazing, amazing planets, all different, going around the sun, and they're giant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so my question always was: How's that all work? How is it that all these outside objects can actually get along, but within my arm's reach we have more problems of trying to figure out how we can get along and be together? So I always wanted to understand is there some magic salsa out there that is working that I need to understand so we can do better here.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I remember the first time I told my dad, who's from Puerto Rico, that I was going to be a journalist. And he was like, \"Oh, you're going to live in my house for the rest of your life.\"So I wonder, what did your family think when you said, you know, I'm going to pursue, you know, the mysteries of space, and this is what I was going to do?Story continues below advertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Oh, I love your question. And by the way, I see your Puerto Rican flag in the background. So, pretty awesome.AdvertisementSo I would say, I didn't. I didn't tell them I wanted to do space until I actually applied to work at NASA, and then it was like, okay, there's no way back. This is what it's going to be like. I apply. I gotta accept it. No way you're going to tell me, don't go to NASA.But it was funny because actually a few days after I applied, I did call my dad and I mentioned to him like, \"Hey, I applied to NASA. I'm going to go work for NASA.\"And his answer to that question was, \"I love you, mijita. I want to protect you. I don't think they're going to call you back.\"Story continues below advertisementAnd so it was very interesting for me to be like, oh, I thought this was going to be like a high-five moment. But, no, that was not what happened.MS. HERNANDEZ: Typical Latino father, right? Well, tell me about your journey because your journey to the United States involves your father. Right? You arrived with roughly $300 in your pocket, and somehow you put yourself through community college. Tell me about that journey if you would.AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So the journey for me to get to the U.S. was I came here when I was 17, like we were talking about earlier. I had 300 bucks in my pocket. I didn't know any English, and I really didn't have like the support system. You know, you grow up with that support system of the neighborhood, the community. You know everybody on the--on the street, really. And when I came here, I didn't come with that.Story continues below advertisementBut what was amazing to me is the Latinx blood that we all have, that we all share, because when I came to the States, I went to Miami. I'm so glad I went to Miami because I could speak Spanish while I was learning English. And the Cuban community in Miami like took me under their wing. Right? And they were the ones that were telling me, you know, it's hard. Keep going. We can do it. And so they were the ones pushing me forward and telling me, [speaking Spanish]. Right?And so, yeah. So I got here. I worked really hard. I had three jobs. I put myself through college to first learn English, and then, you know, I went to Miami Dade Community College for English and then later on for space science, and then I took off to university.AdvertisementAnd it was interesting to me--what was interesting to me at that point was that I was--you know, first I was focused on survival mode. Right? Like where am I going to eat? Where am I going to sleep? How am I going to--you know, what's the transportation situation for me? Which is where again my Latinx community was like \"Go, go, go, mija. Go.\"Story continues below advertisementBut after that, you know, when I--when I reached steady state, when those three things, which sound simple but are huge, enabled me to then start thinking about my dreams and where I wanted to go next.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, then how did NASA figure into part of your dreams? How did you decide you wanted to work there?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, so, you know, when--this is kind of funny. It all happened because one night I went for a run and I had these pants that I brought from Colombia I really like, but I didn't bring gym clothes. You know, like I pack. I could only bring one bag. So I put the things, and I'm like, okay, what are the things that I'm going to use the most. Gym clothes, not the thing that I'm going to use the most. I need my jeans. Whatever I'm going to do I'm going to be working with jeans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo, anyway. So I didn't bring gym clothes, but I brought in these pajama pants that I really like.And so I went for a run in my pajama pants, and I fall on my run. Right? I scratch my knees, and like my only and favorite pajama pants like ripped on my knee. And I remember sitting there, holding my knee, alone, crying, thinking I don't have anybody to call. I don't have--you know, like I feel lonely just because I fell that day. And I remember that was the moment where I'm like, is this it? Is this it for me? Is this everything that I am going to be doing? Is there anything else?And then I remember that dream of working in space, that dream of understanding how the solar system, the planets, everything out there works. And I thought, maybe it's not too far. I mean, I am in the country where NASA exists. So I'm a teeny bit closer. So let's just give it a shot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then I started to learn about people that had gone to space, about their backgrounds, about what they have done. And then I started to go closer and closer.And after that, I took a class in Miami Dade Community College where it was an astronomy class, and my professor mentioned that she knew a friend that had a friend that was an astronaut. And it felt to me like this is the closest I have ever been to an astronaut.This is like the Kevin--the Kevin Bacon kind of thing, where everybody says, who has--who's in that sphere of influence. I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like in the sphere of influence of an astronaut. This is awesome. And I think that that's when I'm like let me seriously look into it.Story continues below advertisementMS. HERNANDEZ: And yet, when you started to apply for--it's like a NASA Academy, right, you didn't actually submit your own application. Is that right? Can you tell me that story?AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So, well, this is now later on, right? I go to college. I'm a senior at the University of Florida, like the best time ever. Go, Gators. And I--yeah, so I'm a senior, and I'm about to graduate and like, do you remember you wanted to work in space? Like I'm in Florida. Maybe.So I told a professor about it. I'm like \"Hey, I know--I know this is our last class. You might not see me ever again, but I want to work in space.\"And to my surprise, this individual was like, apply to this, which was the NASA Academy. So I went to the website, fill everything in. And then of course, you know, I don't know about you, but my--my imposter syndrome is like, no. What are you doing? This is not going to happen.And so I fill everything in. And then I did the craziest thing--I think that a lot of people go through this--where I like sat in front of the clock and looked at the clock, like waiting for like the--you know, the expiration time to submit the application. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to sit there and look at the clock and cheers to me not actually submitting it.AdvertisementAnd my roommate came in and grabbed my computer, was like, let me just read your application. I'm like, okay. And my roommate sends it for me. And yes, then you know, later on I get the phone call that I made it. It was just crazy.MS. HERNANDEZ: I hope you're still friends with that roommate.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. At the same time, I was very petrified. Like, no, wait. My perfectionism just came out and was like, but I didn't write this well, and all of that stuff that holds you back.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, you've said that the women in your family gave you a lot of strength. Your mom. Your--I think your aunts and your grandmother. How did they teach you to fight? Because I just remember being myself in journalism school and getting constantly these messages that I don't belong, that this is not the field for me. I can imagine something similar happened to you.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. I will tell you, that's an excellent question. How did they teach me how to fight? There were several things in my life that I feel like allowed me to do--to learn how to do that. And so I will say one of them was I used to go to my grandma's house. I used to go--yeah, I used to go to my grandma's house, and in my grandma's house, once a week my grandma, my--my grandma and my great grandma, and my mom, my aunt, my grandma's sisters will all get together at my grandma's house, and I will go with mom. And so I will sit on the kitchen floor, and they were all talking, drinking coffee.And they will be--they will be just like having this weekly, I don't know, reflection moment where they tell each other what's going on at home, and then somehow, they just--they will just snap into this laughter of \"Do you remember when I wanted to do this?\" and \"Remember when I wore this?\" and \"Remember when I did that?\"And all of those stories were leading to them saying, when I wanted to have a restaurant, when I wanted to own a candy store, when I wanted to be the boss, when I wanted--and it was all past tense. And so to me it was scary to hear them say, \"I wanted, but you know, life happened. You know, life happened.\"And then--so to me, I was like, oh, no. Like is this what is in store for me?But then later on, like on the same conversation\u2011\u2011it was very funny. On the same conversation, they will turn to me and be like, \"But not to you, mija. No? Not to you. You fight. You get what you need. You get to where you need to go. You think about other stuff later, but take--count you in first.\"And so that was, to me, a pretty strong lesson, to hear like the cadre of all the generations of women in my family tell me, \"This happened to me, but not you.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Wow. And so this reminiscence circle almost, right, like of dreams deferred or dreams unfulfilled was all about pushing you to then to do what they weren't able to do? Was that like subtly the message that they were giving you?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, it wasn't too subtle. It was very straight. It was like, \"I wanted this, but I didn't, but you should.\" And so--and I think that, you know, I--you know, my family, God is always in the center of everything for us. So my family is like, you know, you pray. You ask. Right? You give everything. You did it with excellence. You push hard. And you don't forget where you come from. I think that all of that helped me.So when I came here and again the Cuban community like brought me in--I mean, the Latino blood, the Latinx blood. I mean, we work hard. We're the first ones in; we're the last ones out. There's no job that we say no to. And so it's not like nobody else works hard. I'm just saying that the--that the work ethic from the Latinx community is strong because in many cases, right, we are pushing constantly everything we have and putting it on the line. Right?Like there's plan B, I do everything. Sorry. There's plan A, I do everything. There's no plan B. I mean, plan B is like I do everything more. And so, you know, it's always like that.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, let's transition to everything you do do on a daily basis for the Jet Propulsion Lab and talk about your work. You're one of four, right, mission leads for the Perseverance rover. What have you learned in doing all that work because you also worked on Curiosity, right?MS. TRUJILLO: I did, and I think that at this point we're one of six. I'm one of six, but--MS. HERNANDEZ: Oh, okay.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, yeah. No, no. But you know, we're bringing people in. That's the beauty of the job that we do. Right? Like we bring in more people. We bring in more ways of thinking. We bring in diversity. Diversity on thought. Diversity on approaching problems because like you were asking me, what have we learned? I mean, we have learned what we don't know and how to solve it.So I will tell you, lots of amazing things have happened with this mission. Right? We landed on February 18, and since then not only we did a series of firsts, back to back to back, which I am so proud to be part of the NASA family. Right? Like when you are in a situation, I think, that you are like breaking barriers one after another, and in this specific case, the barriers are: We can't do that; we did it. We can't do that; we did it. Never before have we flown a helicopter on another planet, and we did it. Right? And so that's just amazing.So, yeah. So lots of firsts. Right? Like from the first time we took that image when we landed to the first panorama to the first drive to the first time we touched the surface to the first time we deployed a helicopter and flew on the surface of Mars.And then after that, doing the sample collection. Right? And I think that the most amazing thing about the sample collection for me is also that we are seeding. With the sample collection, with the core collection, we are seeding the next mission, which is Mars sample return.So we're almost--you know, I see it more like [speaking Spanish]. Right? And you hand it to the next runner, and you're like, \"Here you go. Run!\" And so it just feels--it feels like a team effort even across years, across planets, in the most amazing thing. In the most amazing way.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so to the question of the hour. Right? Is there, or has there been, life on Mars?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, we don't know the answer yet, but we're on it. So first we found out that with Curiosity that there was the ability to sustain life on Mars in the past. So, check.Now the next question was: Was there life on Mars? And we are on the search. I mean, I think that the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that that question is, you know, coming into, you know, front and center for all of us is just--is just crazy. I don't think that I ever thought that in my lifetime I was going to be part of a team that will answer that question.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I once interviewed a lawmaker who told me just, you know, randomly that they'd want to be part of the first human mission or colony on Mars. Would you sign up as well?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, first, I don't see it as a colony. Right? I see it--so this is the reason I love working for NASA. We go there--we go there, and whatever there next is, with respect, with humility, understanding that we know very little and that we are there to learn and to appreciate.So I think that the question then is: Would I want to go to any of those planets or moon? 100 percent.MS. HERNANDEZ: So, okay. So if we find out that there is, you know, life or there has been life on Mars, what do you think that means then for us and our understanding of our place in the universe?MS. TRUJILLO: If we find out that there was life on the surface of another planet, what I think--so this is my personal opinion. I hope that that's going to inevitably give us reflection moment. Right? A moment where we have to--we have to realize that we aren't alone. We are not the center--I mean, we are not the center of the universe, that nothing revolves around us and that, honestly, we're plugged into something into something bigger, that we are assisting, you know, and being part of it, but not necessarily driving it.And I think that, you know, when you--when you think about it that way, you inevitably start thinking about a human connection. You start thinking about my day to day, my how do I--how do I connect with you? How do we make community? How do I make community in my neighborhood, in my city, around me? How do we all get better as people? Right?And so I think that you realize, I think, that instead of thinking \"me, me, me, me,\" it's like this is \"we.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so I'm curious. You know, we're watching on the news billionaires blasting off into space and regular folks that are taking these trips to the\u2011\u2011to the edge of space. I wonder if we're--you know, with the rover and other things, are we at an inflection point for space exploration? I mean, what do you see happening here?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, I mean, when we talk about the last mission finding that there was the ability to sustain life, the current mission trying to find out if there was life in the past, the next mission trying to pick it up and bring it back, and parallel to that we're talking about going back to the moon and hopefully going back to the moon with people and hopefully going to Mars with people, I mean, I think that, yes. The answer to your question is I can't wait for us to get to the point where we're like, \"Hey, 5:00, let's go take the shuttle to the moon.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: That would be something, wouldn't it?MS. TRUJILLO: It will be.MS. HERNANDEZ: I'm going to pivot a little bit towards something that I know that you're incredibly passionate about, which is STEM education and STEM education particularly for Latinas. In the opening credits, we saw you talking about how few Latinas are, you know, in STEM fields. And I'm curious about what you think, you know, it will take to change that.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that's a really question. I will say that, you know, sometimes people ask me, what is your advice to the young women, young Latinx people, that are coming behind to get into the industry? And I like the way that you phrase your question because I think that the responsibility is on us to help them.And so I think that in my opinion the way that we get to change this is by recognizing that we need to make space. We need to make space for the rest of the next generation to come in. It is not about the next generation trying to come in and knocking the door hard. It is about us opening the door. Right?And sometimes we think, well, I unlocked the door, so you can walk in. And it's like, no, no. It's we're going to have to open the door and welcome everybody else in.How do we do that? I think that it just--it comes in many different ways. Right? It comes in the way of how we direct ourselves to our own children or to the young people. Right?It is--it is not about, like you were saying earlier, \"Oh, no, that will never happen. Oh, no, you will live in my house your whole life because you're not going to make money of that.\" It's not about that.It's about us supporting their dreams and in a way recognizing that it is their dreams after all. As much as I will want my kids to do something, it is their lives. My job is to support them and guide them, but the best way in my opinion to support them and guide them is by showing them examples of people that are doing the thing that they want to do successfully. So it is almost the \"do what you want, and here's how you can do it well.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: And I'm also curious about at the college level. Like my sister actually is an agricultural engineer, and I just remember her suffering. She went to the University of Maryland as well and suffering and feeling very much alone in her classes and feeling like she was the only Latina. In fact, she was the only Latina in her classes.What can--like in terms of support, what does support look like at the collegiate level? Once the interest is born, once they've made it to the college level, how do--how do we support then Latinas who do reach sort of the beginning stages of that career?MS. TRUJILLO: Love your question. I will say right now, with the limited effort that I am doing, I will tell all of those Latinx people that are in college to check out the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship. Those are two fellowships that actually reach out to a big network of the aerospace industry, where they can apply to these fellowships and have a shot at 1 of 33 companies to get a job for the summer and then also get, you know, the mentorship that we all need-- mean, I still need mentorship--where you talk with an executive mentor, a person that is working in the industry now, who can actually guide you through your career and say, \"Hey, think about this. Think about this\" and help you figure out what you like. So that's one way.But now as to the question that you're asking me, yes, it is--it is hard. I think that in my opinion--you know, when I was in college, I was one of three women, and out of those three women I was the only Latinx. And so I think that I just looked for support on other ways that I can reach.So this is why I'm telling you about the--these two fellowships because I think that you find a way of understanding what you like, other people supporting you, and then you create this network of people that can be there for you. Right? The NASA Academy did that for me. I mean, I was so happy to see my NASA Academy friends' email on the last three weeks and we were all talking about what we were going to do, including this interview. And they were all cheering for me, and that felt like, okay, I can do this.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, cool. As we're nearing the end of our time together, I want to talk about Hispanic Heritage Month in general and why you think it's important to celebrate it and to celebrate it beyond, you know, the weird sort of mid-month celebration that we have right now.MS. TRUJILLO: So, okay. So for me, why is it important to celebrate it? Is that your question? It's important for me to celebrate it, personally, because, I mean, we're taking the time to recognize all the amazing contribution that we as a Hispanic community have done in many areas. Right? In my particular case, the contribution of the Hispanic community in our quest for space exploration, the way that we continue to push that, the way that we are part of it, the way that we are here, and not only just on the space side, right, but in every single way and every single discipline.And having the ability to celebrate that also tells the next generation, \"Listen. We are here. You are here. If I can do it, you can do it. I will give you my hand, and I can pull you in so that you can keep going because if we can do it you can do it better than us.\"And so I think that that is a powerful message, not only among us peers and recognition of what we have done to better the country and where we are contributing and how proud we are of who we are, but we're also sending the message to the next generation that we're here for them.MS. HERNANDEZ: I want to talk just--I have a little question about womanhood. Right? Like you talk a lot about being a woman and how you had received these messages early on in your childhood and throughout your life that women couldn't do certain things. How did--what was it--I know you had the example of your family. But what was it that, you know, pushed you past the point of the limitations that had stopped other members--other women in your family?MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that is a good question. I will say that it goes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is that sense of community that we as Latinx people have. You know, you make a community in a way that everybody around you is rooting for you. And so when I came to the U.S. and I have all this community that was telling me \"\u00c1ndale, mija. \u00c1ndale, \u00e1ndale,\" I think there was no option. Right?At that point, the rhetorical--the story that you tell yourself changes from \"not you, not you\" to \"go, go, go, go, go.\" And so I realized at that point that I had no other option for me than just to do it. Right?And I think that part of that also is the fact that when I came here and I had only $300 I felt like I was running against my--a race against my endurance, against the 300 bucks I had in my pocket, and I was hoping that when the--you know, the stopwatch stops, I was going to be in a place where I was going to be happy and proud of what I had done.So I think that, yeah, I mean, those circumstances and the community pushing me forward is the instance where I just felt like what else--I don't--I need to honor this. I need to honor the effort of all of these people that are, you know, strangers putting on me and helping me. I'm going to honor them, so let's just go.MS. HERNANDEZ: That's an amazing story. And unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. Thank you. Thank you, Diana, for speaking with me.MS. TRUJILLO: Thank you for having me.MS. HERNANDEZ: And thanks to all of you for joining us today and check out \u201cwww.WashingtonPost.com\u201d for extensive coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month. We also have right here onscreen our link to the Somos Latinos interactive feature that you can visit and peruse as part of our continuing coverage.I am Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez and thank you for watching Washington Post Live.[End recorded session]  Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7638",
        "date": "2021-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/08/transcript-race-america-hispanic-heritage-month-with-diana-trujillo/",
        "text": "MS. HERNANDEZ: Good afternoon and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez, a reporter with The Washington Post. Joining me today is Diana Trujillo, a mission lead for the Mars Perseverance rover at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab, as we continue our conversations marking Hispanic Heritage Month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWelcome, Diana.MS. TRUJILLO: Hi. Thank you for having me. MS. HERNANDEZ: So good to have you here, and I wonder if we could start with your personal journey, if that's okay. I want to know how did your fascination and ambition with space start? Did it start growing up in Colombia?MS. TRUJILLO: It did. And so thank you for asking that question. Yes. So I was born and raised in Colombia. I moved to the States when I was 17, like you saw in the video. But for me, the fascination for space started back in my hometown, in my home country. It was mainly the trying to understand when you look at the sky how beautiful everything is, how majestic it is, and the recognition that behind that night sky there's these amazing, amazing planets, all different, going around the sun, and they're giant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so my question always was: How's that all work? How is it that all these outside objects can actually get along, but within my arm's reach we have more problems of trying to figure out how we can get along and be together? So I always wanted to understand is there some magic salsa out there that is working that I need to understand so we can do better here.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I remember the first time I told my dad, who's from Puerto Rico, that I was going to be a journalist. And he was like, \"Oh, you're going to live in my house for the rest of your life.\"So I wonder, what did your family think when you said, you know, I'm going to pursue, you know, the mysteries of space, and this is what I was going to do?Story continues below advertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Oh, I love your question. And by the way, I see your Puerto Rican flag in the background. So, pretty awesome.AdvertisementSo I would say, I didn't. I didn't tell them I wanted to do space until I actually applied to work at NASA, and then it was like, okay, there's no way back. This is what it's going to be like. I apply. I gotta accept it. No way you're going to tell me, don't go to NASA.But it was funny because actually a few days after I applied, I did call my dad and I mentioned to him like, \"Hey, I applied to NASA. I'm going to go work for NASA.\"And his answer to that question was, \"I love you, mijita. I want to protect you. I don't think they're going to call you back.\"Story continues below advertisementAnd so it was very interesting for me to be like, oh, I thought this was going to be like a high-five moment. But, no, that was not what happened.MS. HERNANDEZ: Typical Latino father, right? Well, tell me about your journey because your journey to the United States involves your father. Right? You arrived with roughly $300 in your pocket, and somehow you put yourself through community college. Tell me about that journey if you would.AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So the journey for me to get to the U.S. was I came here when I was 17, like we were talking about earlier. I had 300 bucks in my pocket. I didn't know any English, and I really didn't have like the support system. You know, you grow up with that support system of the neighborhood, the community. You know everybody on the--on the street, really. And when I came here, I didn't come with that.Story continues below advertisementBut what was amazing to me is the Latinx blood that we all have, that we all share, because when I came to the States, I went to Miami. I'm so glad I went to Miami because I could speak Spanish while I was learning English. And the Cuban community in Miami like took me under their wing. Right? And they were the ones that were telling me, you know, it's hard. Keep going. We can do it. And so they were the ones pushing me forward and telling me, [speaking Spanish]. Right?And so, yeah. So I got here. I worked really hard. I had three jobs. I put myself through college to first learn English, and then, you know, I went to Miami Dade Community College for English and then later on for space science, and then I took off to university.AdvertisementAnd it was interesting to me--what was interesting to me at that point was that I was--you know, first I was focused on survival mode. Right? Like where am I going to eat? Where am I going to sleep? How am I going to--you know, what's the transportation situation for me? Which is where again my Latinx community was like \"Go, go, go, mija. Go.\"Story continues below advertisementBut after that, you know, when I--when I reached steady state, when those three things, which sound simple but are huge, enabled me to then start thinking about my dreams and where I wanted to go next.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, then how did NASA figure into part of your dreams? How did you decide you wanted to work there?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, so, you know, when--this is kind of funny. It all happened because one night I went for a run and I had these pants that I brought from Colombia I really like, but I didn't bring gym clothes. You know, like I pack. I could only bring one bag. So I put the things, and I'm like, okay, what are the things that I'm going to use the most. Gym clothes, not the thing that I'm going to use the most. I need my jeans. Whatever I'm going to do I'm going to be working with jeans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo, anyway. So I didn't bring gym clothes, but I brought in these pajama pants that I really like.And so I went for a run in my pajama pants, and I fall on my run. Right? I scratch my knees, and like my only and favorite pajama pants like ripped on my knee. And I remember sitting there, holding my knee, alone, crying, thinking I don't have anybody to call. I don't have--you know, like I feel lonely just because I fell that day. And I remember that was the moment where I'm like, is this it? Is this it for me? Is this everything that I am going to be doing? Is there anything else?And then I remember that dream of working in space, that dream of understanding how the solar system, the planets, everything out there works. And I thought, maybe it's not too far. I mean, I am in the country where NASA exists. So I'm a teeny bit closer. So let's just give it a shot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then I started to learn about people that had gone to space, about their backgrounds, about what they have done. And then I started to go closer and closer.And after that, I took a class in Miami Dade Community College where it was an astronomy class, and my professor mentioned that she knew a friend that had a friend that was an astronaut. And it felt to me like this is the closest I have ever been to an astronaut.This is like the Kevin--the Kevin Bacon kind of thing, where everybody says, who has--who's in that sphere of influence. I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like in the sphere of influence of an astronaut. This is awesome. And I think that that's when I'm like let me seriously look into it.Story continues below advertisementMS. HERNANDEZ: And yet, when you started to apply for--it's like a NASA Academy, right, you didn't actually submit your own application. Is that right? Can you tell me that story?AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So, well, this is now later on, right? I go to college. I'm a senior at the University of Florida, like the best time ever. Go, Gators. And I--yeah, so I'm a senior, and I'm about to graduate and like, do you remember you wanted to work in space? Like I'm in Florida. Maybe.So I told a professor about it. I'm like \"Hey, I know--I know this is our last class. You might not see me ever again, but I want to work in space.\"And to my surprise, this individual was like, apply to this, which was the NASA Academy. So I went to the website, fill everything in. And then of course, you know, I don't know about you, but my--my imposter syndrome is like, no. What are you doing? This is not going to happen.And so I fill everything in. And then I did the craziest thing--I think that a lot of people go through this--where I like sat in front of the clock and looked at the clock, like waiting for like the--you know, the expiration time to submit the application. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to sit there and look at the clock and cheers to me not actually submitting it.AdvertisementAnd my roommate came in and grabbed my computer, was like, let me just read your application. I'm like, okay. And my roommate sends it for me. And yes, then you know, later on I get the phone call that I made it. It was just crazy.MS. HERNANDEZ: I hope you're still friends with that roommate.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. At the same time, I was very petrified. Like, no, wait. My perfectionism just came out and was like, but I didn't write this well, and all of that stuff that holds you back.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, you've said that the women in your family gave you a lot of strength. Your mom. Your--I think your aunts and your grandmother. How did they teach you to fight? Because I just remember being myself in journalism school and getting constantly these messages that I don't belong, that this is not the field for me. I can imagine something similar happened to you.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. I will tell you, that's an excellent question. How did they teach me how to fight? There were several things in my life that I feel like allowed me to do--to learn how to do that. And so I will say one of them was I used to go to my grandma's house. I used to go--yeah, I used to go to my grandma's house, and in my grandma's house, once a week my grandma, my--my grandma and my great grandma, and my mom, my aunt, my grandma's sisters will all get together at my grandma's house, and I will go with mom. And so I will sit on the kitchen floor, and they were all talking, drinking coffee.And they will be--they will be just like having this weekly, I don't know, reflection moment where they tell each other what's going on at home, and then somehow, they just--they will just snap into this laughter of \"Do you remember when I wanted to do this?\" and \"Remember when I wore this?\" and \"Remember when I did that?\"And all of those stories were leading to them saying, when I wanted to have a restaurant, when I wanted to own a candy store, when I wanted to be the boss, when I wanted--and it was all past tense. And so to me it was scary to hear them say, \"I wanted, but you know, life happened. You know, life happened.\"And then--so to me, I was like, oh, no. Like is this what is in store for me?But then later on, like on the same conversation\u2011\u2011it was very funny. On the same conversation, they will turn to me and be like, \"But not to you, mija. No? Not to you. You fight. You get what you need. You get to where you need to go. You think about other stuff later, but take--count you in first.\"And so that was, to me, a pretty strong lesson, to hear like the cadre of all the generations of women in my family tell me, \"This happened to me, but not you.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Wow. And so this reminiscence circle almost, right, like of dreams deferred or dreams unfulfilled was all about pushing you to then to do what they weren't able to do? Was that like subtly the message that they were giving you?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, it wasn't too subtle. It was very straight. It was like, \"I wanted this, but I didn't, but you should.\" And so--and I think that, you know, I--you know, my family, God is always in the center of everything for us. So my family is like, you know, you pray. You ask. Right? You give everything. You did it with excellence. You push hard. And you don't forget where you come from. I think that all of that helped me.So when I came here and again the Cuban community like brought me in--I mean, the Latino blood, the Latinx blood. I mean, we work hard. We're the first ones in; we're the last ones out. There's no job that we say no to. And so it's not like nobody else works hard. I'm just saying that the--that the work ethic from the Latinx community is strong because in many cases, right, we are pushing constantly everything we have and putting it on the line. Right?Like there's plan B, I do everything. Sorry. There's plan A, I do everything. There's no plan B. I mean, plan B is like I do everything more. And so, you know, it's always like that.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, let's transition to everything you do do on a daily basis for the Jet Propulsion Lab and talk about your work. You're one of four, right, mission leads for the Perseverance rover. What have you learned in doing all that work because you also worked on Curiosity, right?MS. TRUJILLO: I did, and I think that at this point we're one of six. I'm one of six, but--MS. HERNANDEZ: Oh, okay.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, yeah. No, no. But you know, we're bringing people in. That's the beauty of the job that we do. Right? Like we bring in more people. We bring in more ways of thinking. We bring in diversity. Diversity on thought. Diversity on approaching problems because like you were asking me, what have we learned? I mean, we have learned what we don't know and how to solve it.So I will tell you, lots of amazing things have happened with this mission. Right? We landed on February 18, and since then not only we did a series of firsts, back to back to back, which I am so proud to be part of the NASA family. Right? Like when you are in a situation, I think, that you are like breaking barriers one after another, and in this specific case, the barriers are: We can't do that; we did it. We can't do that; we did it. Never before have we flown a helicopter on another planet, and we did it. Right? And so that's just amazing.So, yeah. So lots of firsts. Right? Like from the first time we took that image when we landed to the first panorama to the first drive to the first time we touched the surface to the first time we deployed a helicopter and flew on the surface of Mars.And then after that, doing the sample collection. Right? And I think that the most amazing thing about the sample collection for me is also that we are seeding. With the sample collection, with the core collection, we are seeding the next mission, which is Mars sample return.So we're almost--you know, I see it more like [speaking Spanish]. Right? And you hand it to the next runner, and you're like, \"Here you go. Run!\" And so it just feels--it feels like a team effort even across years, across planets, in the most amazing thing. In the most amazing way.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so to the question of the hour. Right? Is there, or has there been, life on Mars?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, we don't know the answer yet, but we're on it. So first we found out that with Curiosity that there was the ability to sustain life on Mars in the past. So, check.Now the next question was: Was there life on Mars? And we are on the search. I mean, I think that the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that that question is, you know, coming into, you know, front and center for all of us is just--is just crazy. I don't think that I ever thought that in my lifetime I was going to be part of a team that will answer that question.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I once interviewed a lawmaker who told me just, you know, randomly that they'd want to be part of the first human mission or colony on Mars. Would you sign up as well?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, first, I don't see it as a colony. Right? I see it--so this is the reason I love working for NASA. We go there--we go there, and whatever there next is, with respect, with humility, understanding that we know very little and that we are there to learn and to appreciate.So I think that the question then is: Would I want to go to any of those planets or moon? 100 percent.MS. HERNANDEZ: So, okay. So if we find out that there is, you know, life or there has been life on Mars, what do you think that means then for us and our understanding of our place in the universe?MS. TRUJILLO: If we find out that there was life on the surface of another planet, what I think--so this is my personal opinion. I hope that that's going to inevitably give us reflection moment. Right? A moment where we have to--we have to realize that we aren't alone. We are not the center--I mean, we are not the center of the universe, that nothing revolves around us and that, honestly, we're plugged into something into something bigger, that we are assisting, you know, and being part of it, but not necessarily driving it.And I think that, you know, when you--when you think about it that way, you inevitably start thinking about a human connection. You start thinking about my day to day, my how do I--how do I connect with you? How do we make community? How do I make community in my neighborhood, in my city, around me? How do we all get better as people? Right?And so I think that you realize, I think, that instead of thinking \"me, me, me, me,\" it's like this is \"we.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so I'm curious. You know, we're watching on the news billionaires blasting off into space and regular folks that are taking these trips to the\u2011\u2011to the edge of space. I wonder if we're--you know, with the rover and other things, are we at an inflection point for space exploration? I mean, what do you see happening here?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, I mean, when we talk about the last mission finding that there was the ability to sustain life, the current mission trying to find out if there was life in the past, the next mission trying to pick it up and bring it back, and parallel to that we're talking about going back to the moon and hopefully going back to the moon with people and hopefully going to Mars with people, I mean, I think that, yes. The answer to your question is I can't wait for us to get to the point where we're like, \"Hey, 5:00, let's go take the shuttle to the moon.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: That would be something, wouldn't it?MS. TRUJILLO: It will be.MS. HERNANDEZ: I'm going to pivot a little bit towards something that I know that you're incredibly passionate about, which is STEM education and STEM education particularly for Latinas. In the opening credits, we saw you talking about how few Latinas are, you know, in STEM fields. And I'm curious about what you think, you know, it will take to change that.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that's a really question. I will say that, you know, sometimes people ask me, what is your advice to the young women, young Latinx people, that are coming behind to get into the industry? And I like the way that you phrase your question because I think that the responsibility is on us to help them.And so I think that in my opinion the way that we get to change this is by recognizing that we need to make space. We need to make space for the rest of the next generation to come in. It is not about the next generation trying to come in and knocking the door hard. It is about us opening the door. Right?And sometimes we think, well, I unlocked the door, so you can walk in. And it's like, no, no. It's we're going to have to open the door and welcome everybody else in.How do we do that? I think that it just--it comes in many different ways. Right? It comes in the way of how we direct ourselves to our own children or to the young people. Right?It is--it is not about, like you were saying earlier, \"Oh, no, that will never happen. Oh, no, you will live in my house your whole life because you're not going to make money of that.\" It's not about that.It's about us supporting their dreams and in a way recognizing that it is their dreams after all. As much as I will want my kids to do something, it is their lives. My job is to support them and guide them, but the best way in my opinion to support them and guide them is by showing them examples of people that are doing the thing that they want to do successfully. So it is almost the \"do what you want, and here's how you can do it well.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: And I'm also curious about at the college level. Like my sister actually is an agricultural engineer, and I just remember her suffering. She went to the University of Maryland as well and suffering and feeling very much alone in her classes and feeling like she was the only Latina. In fact, she was the only Latina in her classes.What can--like in terms of support, what does support look like at the collegiate level? Once the interest is born, once they've made it to the college level, how do--how do we support then Latinas who do reach sort of the beginning stages of that career?MS. TRUJILLO: Love your question. I will say right now, with the limited effort that I am doing, I will tell all of those Latinx people that are in college to check out the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship. Those are two fellowships that actually reach out to a big network of the aerospace industry, where they can apply to these fellowships and have a shot at 1 of 33 companies to get a job for the summer and then also get, you know, the mentorship that we all need-- mean, I still need mentorship--where you talk with an executive mentor, a person that is working in the industry now, who can actually guide you through your career and say, \"Hey, think about this. Think about this\" and help you figure out what you like. So that's one way.But now as to the question that you're asking me, yes, it is--it is hard. I think that in my opinion--you know, when I was in college, I was one of three women, and out of those three women I was the only Latinx. And so I think that I just looked for support on other ways that I can reach.So this is why I'm telling you about the--these two fellowships because I think that you find a way of understanding what you like, other people supporting you, and then you create this network of people that can be there for you. Right? The NASA Academy did that for me. I mean, I was so happy to see my NASA Academy friends' email on the last three weeks and we were all talking about what we were going to do, including this interview. And they were all cheering for me, and that felt like, okay, I can do this.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, cool. As we're nearing the end of our time together, I want to talk about Hispanic Heritage Month in general and why you think it's important to celebrate it and to celebrate it beyond, you know, the weird sort of mid-month celebration that we have right now.MS. TRUJILLO: So, okay. So for me, why is it important to celebrate it? Is that your question? It's important for me to celebrate it, personally, because, I mean, we're taking the time to recognize all the amazing contribution that we as a Hispanic community have done in many areas. Right? In my particular case, the contribution of the Hispanic community in our quest for space exploration, the way that we continue to push that, the way that we are part of it, the way that we are here, and not only just on the space side, right, but in every single way and every single discipline.And having the ability to celebrate that also tells the next generation, \"Listen. We are here. You are here. If I can do it, you can do it. I will give you my hand, and I can pull you in so that you can keep going because if we can do it you can do it better than us.\"And so I think that that is a powerful message, not only among us peers and recognition of what we have done to better the country and where we are contributing and how proud we are of who we are, but we're also sending the message to the next generation that we're here for them.MS. HERNANDEZ: I want to talk just--I have a little question about womanhood. Right? Like you talk a lot about being a woman and how you had received these messages early on in your childhood and throughout your life that women couldn't do certain things. How did--what was it--I know you had the example of your family. But what was it that, you know, pushed you past the point of the limitations that had stopped other members--other women in your family?MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that is a good question. I will say that it goes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is that sense of community that we as Latinx people have. You know, you make a community in a way that everybody around you is rooting for you. And so when I came to the U.S. and I have all this community that was telling me \"\u00c1ndale, mija. \u00c1ndale, \u00e1ndale,\" I think there was no option. Right?At that point, the rhetorical--the story that you tell yourself changes from \"not you, not you\" to \"go, go, go, go, go.\" And so I realized at that point that I had no other option for me than just to do it. Right?And I think that part of that also is the fact that when I came here and I had only $300 I felt like I was running against my--a race against my endurance, against the 300 bucks I had in my pocket, and I was hoping that when the--you know, the stopwatch stops, I was going to be in a place where I was going to be happy and proud of what I had done.So I think that, yeah, I mean, those circumstances and the community pushing me forward is the instance where I just felt like what else--I don't--I need to honor this. I need to honor the effort of all of these people that are, you know, strangers putting on me and helping me. I'm going to honor them, so let's just go.MS. HERNANDEZ: That's an amazing story. And unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. Thank you. Thank you, Diana, for speaking with me.MS. TRUJILLO: Thank you for having me.MS. HERNANDEZ: And thanks to all of you for joining us today and check out \u201cwww.WashingtonPost.com\u201d for extensive coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month. We also have right here onscreen our link to the Somos Latinos interactive feature that you can visit and peruse as part of our continuing coverage.I am Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez and thank you for watching Washington Post Live.[End recorded session]  Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7639",
        "date": "2021-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/08/transcript-race-america-hispanic-heritage-month-with-diana-trujillo/",
        "text": "MS. HERNANDEZ: Good afternoon and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez, a reporter with The Washington Post. Joining me today is Diana Trujillo, a mission lead for the Mars Perseverance rover at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab, as we continue our conversations marking Hispanic Heritage Month.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWelcome, Diana.MS. TRUJILLO: Hi. Thank you for having me. MS. HERNANDEZ: So good to have you here, and I wonder if we could start with your personal journey, if that's okay. I want to know how did your fascination and ambition with space start? Did it start growing up in Colombia?MS. TRUJILLO: It did. And so thank you for asking that question. Yes. So I was born and raised in Colombia. I moved to the States when I was 17, like you saw in the video. But for me, the fascination for space started back in my hometown, in my home country. It was mainly the trying to understand when you look at the sky how beautiful everything is, how majestic it is, and the recognition that behind that night sky there's these amazing, amazing planets, all different, going around the sun, and they're giant.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so my question always was: How's that all work? How is it that all these outside objects can actually get along, but within my arm's reach we have more problems of trying to figure out how we can get along and be together? So I always wanted to understand is there some magic salsa out there that is working that I need to understand so we can do better here.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I remember the first time I told my dad, who's from Puerto Rico, that I was going to be a journalist. And he was like, \"Oh, you're going to live in my house for the rest of your life.\"So I wonder, what did your family think when you said, you know, I'm going to pursue, you know, the mysteries of space, and this is what I was going to do?Story continues below advertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Oh, I love your question. And by the way, I see your Puerto Rican flag in the background. So, pretty awesome.AdvertisementSo I would say, I didn't. I didn't tell them I wanted to do space until I actually applied to work at NASA, and then it was like, okay, there's no way back. This is what it's going to be like. I apply. I gotta accept it. No way you're going to tell me, don't go to NASA.But it was funny because actually a few days after I applied, I did call my dad and I mentioned to him like, \"Hey, I applied to NASA. I'm going to go work for NASA.\"And his answer to that question was, \"I love you, mijita. I want to protect you. I don't think they're going to call you back.\"Story continues below advertisementAnd so it was very interesting for me to be like, oh, I thought this was going to be like a high-five moment. But, no, that was not what happened.MS. HERNANDEZ: Typical Latino father, right? Well, tell me about your journey because your journey to the United States involves your father. Right? You arrived with roughly $300 in your pocket, and somehow you put yourself through community college. Tell me about that journey if you would.AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So the journey for me to get to the U.S. was I came here when I was 17, like we were talking about earlier. I had 300 bucks in my pocket. I didn't know any English, and I really didn't have like the support system. You know, you grow up with that support system of the neighborhood, the community. You know everybody on the--on the street, really. And when I came here, I didn't come with that.Story continues below advertisementBut what was amazing to me is the Latinx blood that we all have, that we all share, because when I came to the States, I went to Miami. I'm so glad I went to Miami because I could speak Spanish while I was learning English. And the Cuban community in Miami like took me under their wing. Right? And they were the ones that were telling me, you know, it's hard. Keep going. We can do it. And so they were the ones pushing me forward and telling me, [speaking Spanish]. Right?And so, yeah. So I got here. I worked really hard. I had three jobs. I put myself through college to first learn English, and then, you know, I went to Miami Dade Community College for English and then later on for space science, and then I took off to university.AdvertisementAnd it was interesting to me--what was interesting to me at that point was that I was--you know, first I was focused on survival mode. Right? Like where am I going to eat? Where am I going to sleep? How am I going to--you know, what's the transportation situation for me? Which is where again my Latinx community was like \"Go, go, go, mija. Go.\"Story continues below advertisementBut after that, you know, when I--when I reached steady state, when those three things, which sound simple but are huge, enabled me to then start thinking about my dreams and where I wanted to go next.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, then how did NASA figure into part of your dreams? How did you decide you wanted to work there?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, so, you know, when--this is kind of funny. It all happened because one night I went for a run and I had these pants that I brought from Colombia I really like, but I didn't bring gym clothes. You know, like I pack. I could only bring one bag. So I put the things, and I'm like, okay, what are the things that I'm going to use the most. Gym clothes, not the thing that I'm going to use the most. I need my jeans. Whatever I'm going to do I'm going to be working with jeans.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo, anyway. So I didn't bring gym clothes, but I brought in these pajama pants that I really like.And so I went for a run in my pajama pants, and I fall on my run. Right? I scratch my knees, and like my only and favorite pajama pants like ripped on my knee. And I remember sitting there, holding my knee, alone, crying, thinking I don't have anybody to call. I don't have--you know, like I feel lonely just because I fell that day. And I remember that was the moment where I'm like, is this it? Is this it for me? Is this everything that I am going to be doing? Is there anything else?And then I remember that dream of working in space, that dream of understanding how the solar system, the planets, everything out there works. And I thought, maybe it's not too far. I mean, I am in the country where NASA exists. So I'm a teeny bit closer. So let's just give it a shot.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then I started to learn about people that had gone to space, about their backgrounds, about what they have done. And then I started to go closer and closer.And after that, I took a class in Miami Dade Community College where it was an astronomy class, and my professor mentioned that she knew a friend that had a friend that was an astronaut. And it felt to me like this is the closest I have ever been to an astronaut.This is like the Kevin--the Kevin Bacon kind of thing, where everybody says, who has--who's in that sphere of influence. I'm like, oh, my God. I'm like in the sphere of influence of an astronaut. This is awesome. And I think that that's when I'm like let me seriously look into it.Story continues below advertisementMS. HERNANDEZ: And yet, when you started to apply for--it's like a NASA Academy, right, you didn't actually submit your own application. Is that right? Can you tell me that story?AdvertisementMS. TRUJILLO: Yeah. So, well, this is now later on, right? I go to college. I'm a senior at the University of Florida, like the best time ever. Go, Gators. And I--yeah, so I'm a senior, and I'm about to graduate and like, do you remember you wanted to work in space? Like I'm in Florida. Maybe.So I told a professor about it. I'm like \"Hey, I know--I know this is our last class. You might not see me ever again, but I want to work in space.\"And to my surprise, this individual was like, apply to this, which was the NASA Academy. So I went to the website, fill everything in. And then of course, you know, I don't know about you, but my--my imposter syndrome is like, no. What are you doing? This is not going to happen.And so I fill everything in. And then I did the craziest thing--I think that a lot of people go through this--where I like sat in front of the clock and looked at the clock, like waiting for like the--you know, the expiration time to submit the application. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to sit there and look at the clock and cheers to me not actually submitting it.AdvertisementAnd my roommate came in and grabbed my computer, was like, let me just read your application. I'm like, okay. And my roommate sends it for me. And yes, then you know, later on I get the phone call that I made it. It was just crazy.MS. HERNANDEZ: I hope you're still friends with that roommate.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. At the same time, I was very petrified. Like, no, wait. My perfectionism just came out and was like, but I didn't write this well, and all of that stuff that holds you back.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, you've said that the women in your family gave you a lot of strength. Your mom. Your--I think your aunts and your grandmother. How did they teach you to fight? Because I just remember being myself in journalism school and getting constantly these messages that I don't belong, that this is not the field for me. I can imagine something similar happened to you.MS. TRUJILLO: Yes. I will tell you, that's an excellent question. How did they teach me how to fight? There were several things in my life that I feel like allowed me to do--to learn how to do that. And so I will say one of them was I used to go to my grandma's house. I used to go--yeah, I used to go to my grandma's house, and in my grandma's house, once a week my grandma, my--my grandma and my great grandma, and my mom, my aunt, my grandma's sisters will all get together at my grandma's house, and I will go with mom. And so I will sit on the kitchen floor, and they were all talking, drinking coffee.And they will be--they will be just like having this weekly, I don't know, reflection moment where they tell each other what's going on at home, and then somehow, they just--they will just snap into this laughter of \"Do you remember when I wanted to do this?\" and \"Remember when I wore this?\" and \"Remember when I did that?\"And all of those stories were leading to them saying, when I wanted to have a restaurant, when I wanted to own a candy store, when I wanted to be the boss, when I wanted--and it was all past tense. And so to me it was scary to hear them say, \"I wanted, but you know, life happened. You know, life happened.\"And then--so to me, I was like, oh, no. Like is this what is in store for me?But then later on, like on the same conversation\u2011\u2011it was very funny. On the same conversation, they will turn to me and be like, \"But not to you, mija. No? Not to you. You fight. You get what you need. You get to where you need to go. You think about other stuff later, but take--count you in first.\"And so that was, to me, a pretty strong lesson, to hear like the cadre of all the generations of women in my family tell me, \"This happened to me, but not you.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Wow. And so this reminiscence circle almost, right, like of dreams deferred or dreams unfulfilled was all about pushing you to then to do what they weren't able to do? Was that like subtly the message that they were giving you?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, it wasn't too subtle. It was very straight. It was like, \"I wanted this, but I didn't, but you should.\" And so--and I think that, you know, I--you know, my family, God is always in the center of everything for us. So my family is like, you know, you pray. You ask. Right? You give everything. You did it with excellence. You push hard. And you don't forget where you come from. I think that all of that helped me.So when I came here and again the Cuban community like brought me in--I mean, the Latino blood, the Latinx blood. I mean, we work hard. We're the first ones in; we're the last ones out. There's no job that we say no to. And so it's not like nobody else works hard. I'm just saying that the--that the work ethic from the Latinx community is strong because in many cases, right, we are pushing constantly everything we have and putting it on the line. Right?Like there's plan B, I do everything. Sorry. There's plan A, I do everything. There's no plan B. I mean, plan B is like I do everything more. And so, you know, it's always like that.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, let's transition to everything you do do on a daily basis for the Jet Propulsion Lab and talk about your work. You're one of four, right, mission leads for the Perseverance rover. What have you learned in doing all that work because you also worked on Curiosity, right?MS. TRUJILLO: I did, and I think that at this point we're one of six. I'm one of six, but--MS. HERNANDEZ: Oh, okay.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, yeah. No, no. But you know, we're bringing people in. That's the beauty of the job that we do. Right? Like we bring in more people. We bring in more ways of thinking. We bring in diversity. Diversity on thought. Diversity on approaching problems because like you were asking me, what have we learned? I mean, we have learned what we don't know and how to solve it.So I will tell you, lots of amazing things have happened with this mission. Right? We landed on February 18, and since then not only we did a series of firsts, back to back to back, which I am so proud to be part of the NASA family. Right? Like when you are in a situation, I think, that you are like breaking barriers one after another, and in this specific case, the barriers are: We can't do that; we did it. We can't do that; we did it. Never before have we flown a helicopter on another planet, and we did it. Right? And so that's just amazing.So, yeah. So lots of firsts. Right? Like from the first time we took that image when we landed to the first panorama to the first drive to the first time we touched the surface to the first time we deployed a helicopter and flew on the surface of Mars.And then after that, doing the sample collection. Right? And I think that the most amazing thing about the sample collection for me is also that we are seeding. With the sample collection, with the core collection, we are seeding the next mission, which is Mars sample return.So we're almost--you know, I see it more like [speaking Spanish]. Right? And you hand it to the next runner, and you're like, \"Here you go. Run!\" And so it just feels--it feels like a team effort even across years, across planets, in the most amazing thing. In the most amazing way.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so to the question of the hour. Right? Is there, or has there been, life on Mars?MS. TRUJILLO: I mean, we don't know the answer yet, but we're on it. So first we found out that with Curiosity that there was the ability to sustain life on Mars in the past. So, check.Now the next question was: Was there life on Mars? And we are on the search. I mean, I think that the fact that we're having this conversation, the fact that that question is, you know, coming into, you know, front and center for all of us is just--is just crazy. I don't think that I ever thought that in my lifetime I was going to be part of a team that will answer that question.MS. HERNANDEZ: So I once interviewed a lawmaker who told me just, you know, randomly that they'd want to be part of the first human mission or colony on Mars. Would you sign up as well?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, first, I don't see it as a colony. Right? I see it--so this is the reason I love working for NASA. We go there--we go there, and whatever there next is, with respect, with humility, understanding that we know very little and that we are there to learn and to appreciate.So I think that the question then is: Would I want to go to any of those planets or moon? 100 percent.MS. HERNANDEZ: So, okay. So if we find out that there is, you know, life or there has been life on Mars, what do you think that means then for us and our understanding of our place in the universe?MS. TRUJILLO: If we find out that there was life on the surface of another planet, what I think--so this is my personal opinion. I hope that that's going to inevitably give us reflection moment. Right? A moment where we have to--we have to realize that we aren't alone. We are not the center--I mean, we are not the center of the universe, that nothing revolves around us and that, honestly, we're plugged into something into something bigger, that we are assisting, you know, and being part of it, but not necessarily driving it.And I think that, you know, when you--when you think about it that way, you inevitably start thinking about a human connection. You start thinking about my day to day, my how do I--how do I connect with you? How do we make community? How do I make community in my neighborhood, in my city, around me? How do we all get better as people? Right?And so I think that you realize, I think, that instead of thinking \"me, me, me, me,\" it's like this is \"we.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, so I'm curious. You know, we're watching on the news billionaires blasting off into space and regular folks that are taking these trips to the\u2011\u2011to the edge of space. I wonder if we're--you know, with the rover and other things, are we at an inflection point for space exploration? I mean, what do you see happening here?MS. TRUJILLO: Well, I mean, when we talk about the last mission finding that there was the ability to sustain life, the current mission trying to find out if there was life in the past, the next mission trying to pick it up and bring it back, and parallel to that we're talking about going back to the moon and hopefully going back to the moon with people and hopefully going to Mars with people, I mean, I think that, yes. The answer to your question is I can't wait for us to get to the point where we're like, \"Hey, 5:00, let's go take the shuttle to the moon.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: That would be something, wouldn't it?MS. TRUJILLO: It will be.MS. HERNANDEZ: I'm going to pivot a little bit towards something that I know that you're incredibly passionate about, which is STEM education and STEM education particularly for Latinas. In the opening credits, we saw you talking about how few Latinas are, you know, in STEM fields. And I'm curious about what you think, you know, it will take to change that.MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that's a really question. I will say that, you know, sometimes people ask me, what is your advice to the young women, young Latinx people, that are coming behind to get into the industry? And I like the way that you phrase your question because I think that the responsibility is on us to help them.And so I think that in my opinion the way that we get to change this is by recognizing that we need to make space. We need to make space for the rest of the next generation to come in. It is not about the next generation trying to come in and knocking the door hard. It is about us opening the door. Right?And sometimes we think, well, I unlocked the door, so you can walk in. And it's like, no, no. It's we're going to have to open the door and welcome everybody else in.How do we do that? I think that it just--it comes in many different ways. Right? It comes in the way of how we direct ourselves to our own children or to the young people. Right?It is--it is not about, like you were saying earlier, \"Oh, no, that will never happen. Oh, no, you will live in my house your whole life because you're not going to make money of that.\" It's not about that.It's about us supporting their dreams and in a way recognizing that it is their dreams after all. As much as I will want my kids to do something, it is their lives. My job is to support them and guide them, but the best way in my opinion to support them and guide them is by showing them examples of people that are doing the thing that they want to do successfully. So it is almost the \"do what you want, and here's how you can do it well.\"MS. HERNANDEZ: And I'm also curious about at the college level. Like my sister actually is an agricultural engineer, and I just remember her suffering. She went to the University of Maryland as well and suffering and feeling very much alone in her classes and feeling like she was the only Latina. In fact, she was the only Latina in her classes.What can--like in terms of support, what does support look like at the collegiate level? Once the interest is born, once they've made it to the college level, how do--how do we support then Latinas who do reach sort of the beginning stages of that career?MS. TRUJILLO: Love your question. I will say right now, with the limited effort that I am doing, I will tell all of those Latinx people that are in college to check out the Brooke Owens Fellowship and the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship. Those are two fellowships that actually reach out to a big network of the aerospace industry, where they can apply to these fellowships and have a shot at 1 of 33 companies to get a job for the summer and then also get, you know, the mentorship that we all need-- mean, I still need mentorship--where you talk with an executive mentor, a person that is working in the industry now, who can actually guide you through your career and say, \"Hey, think about this. Think about this\" and help you figure out what you like. So that's one way.But now as to the question that you're asking me, yes, it is--it is hard. I think that in my opinion--you know, when I was in college, I was one of three women, and out of those three women I was the only Latinx. And so I think that I just looked for support on other ways that I can reach.So this is why I'm telling you about the--these two fellowships because I think that you find a way of understanding what you like, other people supporting you, and then you create this network of people that can be there for you. Right? The NASA Academy did that for me. I mean, I was so happy to see my NASA Academy friends' email on the last three weeks and we were all talking about what we were going to do, including this interview. And they were all cheering for me, and that felt like, okay, I can do this.MS. HERNANDEZ: Well, cool. As we're nearing the end of our time together, I want to talk about Hispanic Heritage Month in general and why you think it's important to celebrate it and to celebrate it beyond, you know, the weird sort of mid-month celebration that we have right now.MS. TRUJILLO: So, okay. So for me, why is it important to celebrate it? Is that your question? It's important for me to celebrate it, personally, because, I mean, we're taking the time to recognize all the amazing contribution that we as a Hispanic community have done in many areas. Right? In my particular case, the contribution of the Hispanic community in our quest for space exploration, the way that we continue to push that, the way that we are part of it, the way that we are here, and not only just on the space side, right, but in every single way and every single discipline.And having the ability to celebrate that also tells the next generation, \"Listen. We are here. You are here. If I can do it, you can do it. I will give you my hand, and I can pull you in so that you can keep going because if we can do it you can do it better than us.\"And so I think that that is a powerful message, not only among us peers and recognition of what we have done to better the country and where we are contributing and how proud we are of who we are, but we're also sending the message to the next generation that we're here for them.MS. HERNANDEZ: I want to talk just--I have a little question about womanhood. Right? Like you talk a lot about being a woman and how you had received these messages early on in your childhood and throughout your life that women couldn't do certain things. How did--what was it--I know you had the example of your family. But what was it that, you know, pushed you past the point of the limitations that had stopped other members--other women in your family?MS. TRUJILLO: Yeah, that is a good question. I will say that it goes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is that sense of community that we as Latinx people have. You know, you make a community in a way that everybody around you is rooting for you. And so when I came to the U.S. and I have all this community that was telling me \"\u00c1ndale, mija. \u00c1ndale, \u00e1ndale,\" I think there was no option. Right?At that point, the rhetorical--the story that you tell yourself changes from \"not you, not you\" to \"go, go, go, go, go.\" And so I realized at that point that I had no other option for me than just to do it. Right?And I think that part of that also is the fact that when I came here and I had only $300 I felt like I was running against my--a race against my endurance, against the 300 bucks I had in my pocket, and I was hoping that when the--you know, the stopwatch stops, I was going to be in a place where I was going to be happy and proud of what I had done.So I think that, yeah, I mean, those circumstances and the community pushing me forward is the instance where I just felt like what else--I don't--I need to honor this. I need to honor the effort of all of these people that are, you know, strangers putting on me and helping me. I'm going to honor them, so let's just go.MS. HERNANDEZ: That's an amazing story. And unfortunately, that's all the time we have today. Thank you. Thank you, Diana, for speaking with me.MS. TRUJILLO: Thank you for having me.MS. HERNANDEZ: And thanks to all of you for joining us today and check out \u201cwww.WashingtonPost.com\u201d for extensive coverage of Hispanic Heritage Month. We also have right here onscreen our link to the Somos Latinos interactive feature that you can visit and peruse as part of our continuing coverage.I am Arelis Hern\u00e1ndez and thank you for watching Washington Post Live.[End recorded session]  Transcript: Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7640",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/01/transcript-race-america-mae-jemison-md/",
        "text": "MR. CAPEHART: Good morning. I\u2019m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m 1992, aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor, Dr. Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to go into space. But her history-making voyage might not have happened. In her memoir, \u201cFind Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life,\u201d Dr. Mae relives an encounter with her kindergarten teacher who asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. When Dr. Mae answered scientist, the teacher encouraged her to become a nurse. Why was she so determined? What did she--why did she desire to become a scientist? Where did it come from? How did she end up in space? Well, let\u2019s find out. Dr. Mae Jemison, welcome to Washington Post Live. DR. JEMISON: Thank you so much. I'm very pleased to be here, and very pleased to be with you, Jonathan.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. CAPEHART: Thank you very much. So, let's talk about your memoir and this encounter that you had. In the book you write from the perspective of a 16-year-old, so your 16-year-old self. Take us back to being a 16-year-old. And also, I should point out you were a 16-year-old attending Stanford.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: Yes. So, it's really sort of a little bit of me writing what I think my 16-year-old self would have want to know about the adventures that she would have in life, and some of the clues to make it through. And what I mean about the clues are paying attention. In the book, it was really sort of moments that--I think about the fact that it was who I intended to be that made a difference versus a job. It was a person I wanted to be. And that person was one of discovery that always wanted new challenges, that hoped to make a difference in this world, at the same time keeping my integrity and my smile and my humanity.That child grew up during the 1960s. I wasn't quite old enough to be a hippie. Always wanted to be one, though. But the reason why was because the world was changing. All around us, we saw new norms coming in. People were challenging what was established, and also asserting their right to participate. And I remember growing up everyone talked about anarchy--right?--that the 60s were just too chaotic. But the reality was, again, people wanted to participate, and that's the environment I grew up in, one where there was a women's right moment. There was a civil rights movement. Space exploration was exploding, which I was very excited about. Science, we're breaking records. Culture was changing. Arts, music. And we were reaching around the world.All of a sudden, the world became much closer, which I learned about decolonization in all these countries. So, it was this assertion. And that's the world I grew up in, and that very much affected me and who I wanted to be. And so, I always assumed I could do so many things and follow so many paths. I knew the world had to come along with me at times, but I always assumed I'd go into space. And I thought that people who didn't have women included were just wrongheaded. That's my little self.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. CAPEHART: Well, you have said that you were a little arrogant about attending college at 16. I mean, why wouldn't you be? You're 16, and you're in collage, and you're in Stanford. But you say some arrogance is necessary for women and people of color to be successful in a White male-dominated society. How were you able to, well, have that perspective and to have the perseverance to push through and succeed?DR. JEMISON: So, I use the term \"arrogance\" because I had done very well in all standardized tests. I went to another grade in high school. I'd been student council president, all these things. And I was very excited about the world around me. And I had had teachers of all kinds, and I wanted to push. But you know, at 16 you're not well-socialized yet, right? You still have--you still have that little edge on you, right?When I got to Stanford, I ran into teachers, professors who were not as excited about me being in their class. And I still needed that edge in order just to assert that I was there, to go ahead and unabashedly claim my place. If I had been better socialized to believe and take to heart these emotions, these things that I was getting from people, from the professors, I might not have been here. I may have said, oh, well, I need to do something else versus chemical engineering. What I did instead was I took lots of classes with dance and linguistics and politics of Africa--things that really held my interest, as well as the engineering. And it made a really incredible--it created a balance in my life and in my world, and I had professors who were excited about my intellectual curiosity. And let me be clear, I think Stanford was the best school I could have gone to, and I had ran into some wonderful professors there in the sciences, as well. But the overall feel was, hmm, should you be here?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. CAPEHART: You know, Dr. Mae, as you were talking, I was sitting here wondering, you know, one, you're 16 years old. Two, you're in a space, as you said, where people are like, why are you here, we don't want you here. As a 16-year-old who were your mentors? Were there people you could--were there people you could turn to for support? It's one thing to be in a place where you're not made to feel welcome. It's another to be in a place where you're not made to feel welcome and you're 16.DR. JEMISON: Well, again, I think that 16-year-old helped me. Really, I do. She was--she was pretty assertive.MR. CAPEHART: A little na\u00efve. Assertive but a little na\u00efve in that not really knowing how the world worked.Story continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: No, she knew how the world worked. She knew how it is. Some of the stories that I tell there were just about--like even pushing against school principals and doing things and--but I had teachers who really cared about my intellect--right?--and who I was. But I think when you ask about the mentors, we have to be careful in assuming that everybody has to be in the field you're in, right? Sometimes it's that support that you need in terms of just energy.AdvertisementSo, I had these incredible people that I worked with. I tell the story about Dr. Halifu Osumare, who was the dance instructor for Black performing arts at Stanford, and that's where I started learning African dance and so many other things that I had danced all the way through high school. And she used to always have this smile, and she'd push me to do better as a dancer.But the other part of it is that I had professors in the political science fields that I worked with that were excited about what I did. All along, though, you have people that you can work with, and they help you to look at a view of the world. I had a scholarship that was sponsored by Bell Laboratories, and every summer I had this--I would have an incredible job at Bell Labs that would range from things like working on computer programming, writing computer programming and code for special projects at the laboratory, to working on one of two nuclear magnetic resonance machines in the world, and I got to work on it. So it was that range of experience. I don't think that there's a single person.Story continues below advertisementAnd sometimes we use the word \"mentor\" and we throw it around really loosely like we throw around the word \"role model\" loosely. I think that mentors usually take you throughout your career, and I did not have anyone who took me throughout my career except for my parents and things, and they were there in my corner.AdvertisementBut you run into people. You run into different people. You see different things. And you can transfer them. You can translate that energy into who you are to unabashedly be you.MR. CAPEHART: You know, I call those people guardian angels. Those are the people who see you before you see yourself. They see your potential. They see what you can do, and they push you. They sometimes push you real hard in those directions.Story continues below advertisementLet me ask you about someone who--and I want you to talk about how--what an inspiration she was for you. You've said that as a child, watching actress Nichelle Nichols portray Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek also inspired you, your desire to pursue a career with NASA. And in fact, Nichols went on to become a recruiter for NASA, and she told them--and this is a quote--\"I'm going to bring you so many qualified women and minority astronaut applicants for this position that if you don't choose one, everybody in the newspapers across the country will know about it.\" So, Dr. Mae, what was it about Nichols or her fictional character that spoke to you?AdvertisementDR. JEMISON: So, growing up as a little girl, I always assumed I'd go into space, and I wanted to go into space before Star Trek came on. But I think the piece was Star Trek was an affirmation, and Nichelle Nichols' character Lieutenant Uhura was one that spoke to being involved technologically. Star Trek spoke to the fact that other people believed in the universe that I believed in, that I have the right to participate and to be involved. So, the incredible thing about Nichelle Nichols, and as I became her friend later on in life, is that she brought such character, strength, and assertiveness to Lieutenant Uhura. So, you never thought of her as a lesser member of the crew. I was always irritated that they didn't give her a bigger role when I was a little girl. I was that--I was that kid, right? But she brought such gravitas, let us say, to the portrayal that, you know, you wanted to be like--you could channel that gravitas, that stature, that confidence, that competence in your own life. So, I think that fiction also helps us to see that. Our stories that people put in front of us help us to see different ways of interacting with the world.MR. CAPEHART: In 1983, the flight of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, motivated you to apply to NASA's astronaut program. Nine years later, you yourself go up into space. One, what was that like, going into space? And two, what was it like going into space knowing the history you were taking with you on that voyage?Story continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: So, I'm going to--I just want to go back to the--the reason why I want to correct this is because sometimes--actually, I was going to apply to the astronaut program as soon as I had the qualifications. Because when--in 1978 I was still in college, so there was no way for me to apply to the astronaut program then. So that's when they first recruited the shuttle astronauts and stuff. So, I was going to go no matter what, and always want to recognize that, you know, there were--there were six women who came into the astronaut program in 1978. There were three African American men. There was Ellison Onizuka, a Japanese American. And so, I was really excited about applying as soon as I got the skill set. And so, I was just--I was there.AdvertisementWhat it was like going up into space, I should first say that I didn't want to go into space necessarily because--you know, people said did you want to be the first African American woman in space. I didn't care if there had been thousands of people in space before, or if there had never been a single person. I wanted to go up. I wanted to be involved.I think there was a recognition that you have a responsibility to use your platform. For me, it was making sure that I included others, people who would not necessarily be involved. So, the way I did that inclusion, particularly around the flight, was that I took up various things with me. I took up a poster of Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, an Alvin Ailey poster. For all Black woman everywhere, I took up a Bundu statue, B-U-N-D-U, which is a women's society in West Africa. I took up a certificate for Chicago Public School students that promise to do well in math and science, which was duplicated and given to students in Chicago, which is where I grew up. I took up an Alpha Kappa Alpha flag, the oldest African American women sorority in the country. And I wanted to do that because I wanted other people to know that they were a part of this universe and this world as well. I took up a flag for the OAU, the Organization of African Unity so that I could give these things back so that people were included. I didn't need to take up another Stanford banner, as much as I love Stanford, or Cornell. They had those up there.Story continues below advertisementBut the--all along, my issue has been how do we make sure that we include people and we use the talent that's there. One of the things we forget when we look at science, when we look at space, is it's not just about, oh, you get up there and you do everything that everyone else would do. We each bring our own perspectives to our work. And you know, what a shame it would be if I were to go into space and I did not use what I had learned from having worked in West Africa for two and a half years, having been a doctor, having grown up in the South Side of Chicago, if I did not use that perspective to ask questions to understand how the technologies work, what are some possible applications. And what a shame it would be if I had the experience of being an astronaut and I did not take that and use it to the work that I do now and all along to ask those same--you know, to use that to bring my perspective to what's happening in the world now. And each time it should be iterative.AdvertisementMR. CAPEHART: So, you're Alpha Kappa Alpha. The colors are pink and green. Was there any pink and green on your--on any of your astronaut wear?DR. JEMISON: No. [Laughs]MR. CAPEHART: Okay. I had to ask. I had to ask.DR. JEMISON: You're going to get me in trouble.MR. CAPEHART: Please, I've already gotten in trouble with the sorority. But, you know, following your mission to space in '92, there have been 11 Black astronauts who've been on space missions. Currently, out of the 47 active astronauts, only three are Black women. How should NASA work to make sure there are more Dr. Maes?DR. JEMISON: Well, they don't need to have Dr. Maes. They need to have the people who--that are full representation, and they need to fly them, and they need to use their perspectives as well. I think that there has been some evolution. But a lot of times it's about being able to hear and understand and go to the places that people are to be able to recruit them.I should also talk about the fact that there are incredible other positions within NASA that we sometimes forget. We always look at NASA and space exploration as astronauts, but I can be clear that the astronauts would not go anywhere without the work that was done before--right?--or that's done with other people. So, from mission control to the technicians who put the shuttle together, or who put the vehicles together, that's what we also fail to highlight. So, they're the technicians, they're the engineers, they're the people who are doing the work day to day, whether it's in legal systems. It's much bigger than the astronauts.Let me also say that the applications are much bigger than what we see on space station or what we see when we just think about it as humans in space. It's how do we apply what we've learned to improve life down here on Earth. And again, I would assert that who's involved makes a difference to the application of the technologies.MR. CAPEHART: Well, let's talk more about space travel. Do you really believe we will be able to travel beyond our solar system within a hundred years?DR. JEMISON: So, you're asking that because I lead this project called 100 Year Starship, which is about making sure the capabilities for human travel beyond our solar system exist within the next hundred years. And so, notice I say make sure the capabilities exist. I didn't say that it's about having the Starship Enterprise ready to go and warp out. No, I don't think that's it.But why do we want the capabilities to exist? Because it pushes us very radically to come up with new ideas. Just take for example the kind of energy that's needed to get to another star. Without going too far into it, there's not enough chemical propulsion in the entire solar system to really power a ship that would carry humans to another star within a reasonable period of time. So, we have to learn how to control incredible amounts of energy. We have to do it through fission, which we do now, but you have to control it and store that energy, and it has to be safely done. Or fusion, what powers the sun. Or anti-matter. We don't know how to do any of those to the level that we need to do. But imagine if we could, how it would change life here on Earth. And just by having that, people thinking about it and pushing those technologies, it makes a difference. And what we look at are the whole range of things that could happen, whether it's how do we understand human biology and our connection to the microbiome system on this planet, which we cannot live without, to even understanding human behavior, because you know that's the long pole in the tent to everything that we do on this planet, it's the long pole on the tent to solving poverty--not of the people who are impoverished or who don't have as much, but the people who have control of so many resources and overuse them, or the fact that we don't understand that we need to share this planet. But that human behavior is a major part of what we look at as well.MR. CAPEHART: Sorry, I cut you off there because I was excited to jump in and ask you about the Mars rover Perseverance. And what--how big--I mean, as a layperson, it's a big deal. But you're a scientist. You're an astronaut. How big of a deal was that rover landing on Mars late last month?DR. JEMISON: It was a big deal, and I think the other part of it is that the excitement around it is because of the new type of landing and some of the experiments that it was carrying with it. So, from the helicopter that will be deployed that will be able to do surveys so--and people are going to look at it like a drone on Mars, so you can look at different things, too, the possibility of doing a sample return back to Earth. Those were incredibly important pieces.I've been impressed this past February by what happened on Mars and around Mars because three probes from Earth entered Martian orbit this past February. There's a probe from the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, which was its first interplanetary probe called Hope, and there was also a probe from China, Tianwen, that entered Mars orbit and may actually have a rover land on Mars in May or June. The reason why I consider this very exciting, and it helps to put perspective on Perseverance, is because it says that humanity is pushing forward and this venture is becoming more global. And I think that will help us in terms of perhaps using some of the technologies and the possibilities.So, yeah, we geeked out. I was watching the landing. It was exciting. And but I always pull us into understanding the impact that these things have. The impact is, yes, we're going to learn more about Mars. People might ask, so what? Right? What's the big deal. The big deal is we learn more about another planet. That's like being a doctor, right? Do you want your doctor to know only about your physiology, or would you prefer them to know about a lot of people's physiology and health and perspective? You want that second one, right? And the reason why, it helps us to understand perhaps the evolution of the Earth and weather patterns and all the things that go--are attendant with it.MR. CAPEHART: You know, actually, to that point, in the images that have been beamed back to Earth and that you have seen, do you see anything in those--in those images that sparked your curiosity, or gave you an a-ha that we in the lay public might not even notice?DR. JEMISON: I don't have any a-has. I'm just, like, thrilled that we're seeing another planet, right? I probably--I'm probably right there with you. All of those things are going to take time. And you know, that's the reason why we have geologists--right?--and those kinds of folks, and people are going to spend a lot of time analyzing what are the components of Martian soil.And remember, we've been on Mars before. We are going to be building on knowledge. There are probes that are orbiting Mars now that are sending back information and data. So, it's really building a picture of this planet that appears at one point in time had a lot of water on it, that perhaps had even oxygen in its atmosphere. We're spending time and understanding what happened to that planet in its evolution.MR. CAPEHART: Let's come back to Earth, here. And sorry to keep coming back to you being the first Black woman in space and your history-making effort, but I think we're all focused on firsts, not just because we've just, you know, left Black History month but because this nation has gone through another first with the election of Vice president Kamala Harris, the first woman to be elected in that role, the first Black woman to be elected in that role, the first woman of Indian descent to be in that role. And I would just love to know from you what it means to you to see that, to see a Vice President Kamala Harris in the history-making role that she is in.DR. JEMISON: Well, of course it's very exciting. And what I always say is it tells us that we are progressing. So, we're at this really interesting point in time right now where there is a pendulum swinging back where folks say they want to go back to things, right? And that's what struck me about this time period and the reason why I thought it was important to do a revision and release \"Find Where the Wind Goes\" again, because it very much parallels the '60s, and when I was growing up, even parts of the 70s, where there was--the world was changing. And so many things have happened between then and now. We may forget that there was some evolution, there was some progress. And the fact that we had a woman--this is the first woman elected to national office, the first Black woman elected to national office, is really important because we say--we see that there is progress. But we have to hold onto it, and we have to use it. So, I'm really excited that, you know, she uses her platform to push ahead, to include others, to include agendas from the perspective that she's grown up in, the knowledge base that she has. So, it's just exciting all around.Let me add one other piece to that.MR. CAPEHART: Sure.DR. JEMISON: Very frequently, people look at--they would look at me and they say, oh, it's a really great image for young Black girls. They look at Kamala Harris. We can go on and on. And they'll say it's a great image for young girls of color. But here's the reality check as well. It's an important image for everyone to see, because the gatekeepers very frequently make their decisions because they say, oh, I haven't seen anybody like that around, so I don't know that they can do things. It never goes away. But that image is really important. You may not have seen it, but Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States, period. So, everyone knows that it's not only possible, it's a reality. And she has the authority that goes along with that.MR. CAPEHART: Dr.--yeah, go ahead.DR. JEMISON: She has the authority that goes along with that position.MR. CAPEHART: I want to end with this question, and that is, we have seen over the last almost year, after the killing of George Floyd, a reignitement of social justice and racial justice protests around the country. Black Lives Matter is the mantra of the day. And I'm wondering what would you say to those young activists who are out there marching still--even though they don't make the news, they are still marching--given your lived experience, what you've been through. What would you say to them to encourage them in those movements that they might be in now or might be coming when they feel--might feel discouraged, might feel that no one's listening, might feel that they aren't making progress? What do you say to them?DR. JEMISON: So, we are making progress. And I can tell you, I'm so excited about the fact that people are not sitting back and letting the world just take shape. They're asserting their right to shape it. So, when I look at the Black Lives Matter movement, it's about the fact that all--that we can make a difference in this world. There's so many things that I have been excited about that I'm seeing from the--sort of the term Black Girl Magic, which I was discussing with someone yesterday, which is not leaving others out. It's asserting that we have the right to participate and that we have been there all along doing incredible work even under the most trying of circumstances. I would--I say that you're on the right path, that asserting your right to participate is the correct thing to do. You know, we have your back.I also want to add before I leave that one of the things that has struck me about being in first and this position is, forever I'm the person in the orange flight suit--right?--[unclear] with the helmet. But we keep doing other work. So, since the time I left NASA, I spent a lot of time in environment sciences and education and actually building a connection between the sciences and society. And I would be remiss if I don't bring up how important it is that we understand that issues around race and gender affect the sciences. Who does science affects the outcome, the research that's done, the technologies that are done. And part of this movement that we see from Black Lives Matter to Black Girl Magic to whatever you want to call--whatever they are, they also are impacting the sciences, what our world will become. And I think that's really crucial, because the perspective, the ambitions of the world impact its technology. We live in a world today where things are rapidly changing, not necessarily for the better, and there's a lot of it that's being impacted and being done, are facilitated by the technologies we design and who uses them and what they're for.MR. CAPEHART: We have not only run out of time. We have gone overtime and barely scratched the surface. I'm glad we got--you got to mention 100 Year Starship global initiative, but there's also the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, and The Earth We Share science camps, and the second edition of \"Find Where the Wind Goes.\" There's so much. But, Dr. Jemison, we are out of time. Thank you so very much for coming to Washington Post Live.DR. JEMISON: You're very welcome. Thank you all for having me here, and it's great to see you again virtually.MR. CAPEHART: Likewise. And as always, thank you for watching. My colleague David Ignatius has two special events today. First, at noon Eastern David will interview Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric on the global challenges business leaders face today. Then he'll be back at 3:30 Eastern to discuss a new documentary, NASRIN, about the imprisoned human rights activist. His guests will be CNN's Christiane Amanpour and Washington Post journalist and executive producer of the film Jason Rezaian and filmmaker Jeff Kaufman. So that's today starting at noon Eastern. In the meantime, I'm Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Thank you very much for tuning in to Washington Post Live.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7641",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/01/transcript-race-america-mae-jemison-md/",
        "text": "MR. CAPEHART: Good morning. I\u2019m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m 1992, aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor, Dr. Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to go into space. But her history-making voyage might not have happened. In her memoir, \u201cFind Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life,\u201d Dr. Mae relives an encounter with her kindergarten teacher who asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. When Dr. Mae answered scientist, the teacher encouraged her to become a nurse. Why was she so determined? What did she--why did she desire to become a scientist? Where did it come from? How did she end up in space? Well, let\u2019s find out. Dr. Mae Jemison, welcome to Washington Post Live. DR. JEMISON: Thank you so much. I'm very pleased to be here, and very pleased to be with you, Jonathan.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. CAPEHART: Thank you very much. So, let's talk about your memoir and this encounter that you had. In the book you write from the perspective of a 16-year-old, so your 16-year-old self. Take us back to being a 16-year-old. And also, I should point out you were a 16-year-old attending Stanford.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: Yes. So, it's really sort of a little bit of me writing what I think my 16-year-old self would have want to know about the adventures that she would have in life, and some of the clues to make it through. And what I mean about the clues are paying attention. In the book, it was really sort of moments that--I think about the fact that it was who I intended to be that made a difference versus a job. It was a person I wanted to be. And that person was one of discovery that always wanted new challenges, that hoped to make a difference in this world, at the same time keeping my integrity and my smile and my humanity.That child grew up during the 1960s. I wasn't quite old enough to be a hippie. Always wanted to be one, though. But the reason why was because the world was changing. All around us, we saw new norms coming in. People were challenging what was established, and also asserting their right to participate. And I remember growing up everyone talked about anarchy--right?--that the 60s were just too chaotic. But the reality was, again, people wanted to participate, and that's the environment I grew up in, one where there was a women's right moment. There was a civil rights movement. Space exploration was exploding, which I was very excited about. Science, we're breaking records. Culture was changing. Arts, music. And we were reaching around the world.All of a sudden, the world became much closer, which I learned about decolonization in all these countries. So, it was this assertion. And that's the world I grew up in, and that very much affected me and who I wanted to be. And so, I always assumed I could do so many things and follow so many paths. I knew the world had to come along with me at times, but I always assumed I'd go into space. And I thought that people who didn't have women included were just wrongheaded. That's my little self.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. CAPEHART: Well, you have said that you were a little arrogant about attending college at 16. I mean, why wouldn't you be? You're 16, and you're in collage, and you're in Stanford. But you say some arrogance is necessary for women and people of color to be successful in a White male-dominated society. How were you able to, well, have that perspective and to have the perseverance to push through and succeed?DR. JEMISON: So, I use the term \"arrogance\" because I had done very well in all standardized tests. I went to another grade in high school. I'd been student council president, all these things. And I was very excited about the world around me. And I had had teachers of all kinds, and I wanted to push. But you know, at 16 you're not well-socialized yet, right? You still have--you still have that little edge on you, right?When I got to Stanford, I ran into teachers, professors who were not as excited about me being in their class. And I still needed that edge in order just to assert that I was there, to go ahead and unabashedly claim my place. If I had been better socialized to believe and take to heart these emotions, these things that I was getting from people, from the professors, I might not have been here. I may have said, oh, well, I need to do something else versus chemical engineering. What I did instead was I took lots of classes with dance and linguistics and politics of Africa--things that really held my interest, as well as the engineering. And it made a really incredible--it created a balance in my life and in my world, and I had professors who were excited about my intellectual curiosity. And let me be clear, I think Stanford was the best school I could have gone to, and I had ran into some wonderful professors there in the sciences, as well. But the overall feel was, hmm, should you be here?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. CAPEHART: You know, Dr. Mae, as you were talking, I was sitting here wondering, you know, one, you're 16 years old. Two, you're in a space, as you said, where people are like, why are you here, we don't want you here. As a 16-year-old who were your mentors? Were there people you could--were there people you could turn to for support? It's one thing to be in a place where you're not made to feel welcome. It's another to be in a place where you're not made to feel welcome and you're 16.DR. JEMISON: Well, again, I think that 16-year-old helped me. Really, I do. She was--she was pretty assertive.MR. CAPEHART: A little na\u00efve. Assertive but a little na\u00efve in that not really knowing how the world worked.Story continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: No, she knew how the world worked. She knew how it is. Some of the stories that I tell there were just about--like even pushing against school principals and doing things and--but I had teachers who really cared about my intellect--right?--and who I was. But I think when you ask about the mentors, we have to be careful in assuming that everybody has to be in the field you're in, right? Sometimes it's that support that you need in terms of just energy.AdvertisementSo, I had these incredible people that I worked with. I tell the story about Dr. Halifu Osumare, who was the dance instructor for Black performing arts at Stanford, and that's where I started learning African dance and so many other things that I had danced all the way through high school. And she used to always have this smile, and she'd push me to do better as a dancer.But the other part of it is that I had professors in the political science fields that I worked with that were excited about what I did. All along, though, you have people that you can work with, and they help you to look at a view of the world. I had a scholarship that was sponsored by Bell Laboratories, and every summer I had this--I would have an incredible job at Bell Labs that would range from things like working on computer programming, writing computer programming and code for special projects at the laboratory, to working on one of two nuclear magnetic resonance machines in the world, and I got to work on it. So it was that range of experience. I don't think that there's a single person.Story continues below advertisementAnd sometimes we use the word \"mentor\" and we throw it around really loosely like we throw around the word \"role model\" loosely. I think that mentors usually take you throughout your career, and I did not have anyone who took me throughout my career except for my parents and things, and they were there in my corner.AdvertisementBut you run into people. You run into different people. You see different things. And you can transfer them. You can translate that energy into who you are to unabashedly be you.MR. CAPEHART: You know, I call those people guardian angels. Those are the people who see you before you see yourself. They see your potential. They see what you can do, and they push you. They sometimes push you real hard in those directions.Story continues below advertisementLet me ask you about someone who--and I want you to talk about how--what an inspiration she was for you. You've said that as a child, watching actress Nichelle Nichols portray Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek also inspired you, your desire to pursue a career with NASA. And in fact, Nichols went on to become a recruiter for NASA, and she told them--and this is a quote--\"I'm going to bring you so many qualified women and minority astronaut applicants for this position that if you don't choose one, everybody in the newspapers across the country will know about it.\" So, Dr. Mae, what was it about Nichols or her fictional character that spoke to you?AdvertisementDR. JEMISON: So, growing up as a little girl, I always assumed I'd go into space, and I wanted to go into space before Star Trek came on. But I think the piece was Star Trek was an affirmation, and Nichelle Nichols' character Lieutenant Uhura was one that spoke to being involved technologically. Star Trek spoke to the fact that other people believed in the universe that I believed in, that I have the right to participate and to be involved. So, the incredible thing about Nichelle Nichols, and as I became her friend later on in life, is that she brought such character, strength, and assertiveness to Lieutenant Uhura. So, you never thought of her as a lesser member of the crew. I was always irritated that they didn't give her a bigger role when I was a little girl. I was that--I was that kid, right? But she brought such gravitas, let us say, to the portrayal that, you know, you wanted to be like--you could channel that gravitas, that stature, that confidence, that competence in your own life. So, I think that fiction also helps us to see that. Our stories that people put in front of us help us to see different ways of interacting with the world.MR. CAPEHART: In 1983, the flight of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, motivated you to apply to NASA's astronaut program. Nine years later, you yourself go up into space. One, what was that like, going into space? And two, what was it like going into space knowing the history you were taking with you on that voyage?Story continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: So, I'm going to--I just want to go back to the--the reason why I want to correct this is because sometimes--actually, I was going to apply to the astronaut program as soon as I had the qualifications. Because when--in 1978 I was still in college, so there was no way for me to apply to the astronaut program then. So that's when they first recruited the shuttle astronauts and stuff. So, I was going to go no matter what, and always want to recognize that, you know, there were--there were six women who came into the astronaut program in 1978. There were three African American men. There was Ellison Onizuka, a Japanese American. And so, I was really excited about applying as soon as I got the skill set. And so, I was just--I was there.AdvertisementWhat it was like going up into space, I should first say that I didn't want to go into space necessarily because--you know, people said did you want to be the first African American woman in space. I didn't care if there had been thousands of people in space before, or if there had never been a single person. I wanted to go up. I wanted to be involved.I think there was a recognition that you have a responsibility to use your platform. For me, it was making sure that I included others, people who would not necessarily be involved. So, the way I did that inclusion, particularly around the flight, was that I took up various things with me. I took up a poster of Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, an Alvin Ailey poster. For all Black woman everywhere, I took up a Bundu statue, B-U-N-D-U, which is a women's society in West Africa. I took up a certificate for Chicago Public School students that promise to do well in math and science, which was duplicated and given to students in Chicago, which is where I grew up. I took up an Alpha Kappa Alpha flag, the oldest African American women sorority in the country. And I wanted to do that because I wanted other people to know that they were a part of this universe and this world as well. I took up a flag for the OAU, the Organization of African Unity so that I could give these things back so that people were included. I didn't need to take up another Stanford banner, as much as I love Stanford, or Cornell. They had those up there.Story continues below advertisementBut the--all along, my issue has been how do we make sure that we include people and we use the talent that's there. One of the things we forget when we look at science, when we look at space, is it's not just about, oh, you get up there and you do everything that everyone else would do. We each bring our own perspectives to our work. And you know, what a shame it would be if I were to go into space and I did not use what I had learned from having worked in West Africa for two and a half years, having been a doctor, having grown up in the South Side of Chicago, if I did not use that perspective to ask questions to understand how the technologies work, what are some possible applications. And what a shame it would be if I had the experience of being an astronaut and I did not take that and use it to the work that I do now and all along to ask those same--you know, to use that to bring my perspective to what's happening in the world now. And each time it should be iterative.AdvertisementMR. CAPEHART: So, you're Alpha Kappa Alpha. The colors are pink and green. Was there any pink and green on your--on any of your astronaut wear?DR. JEMISON: No. [Laughs]MR. CAPEHART: Okay. I had to ask. I had to ask.DR. JEMISON: You're going to get me in trouble.MR. CAPEHART: Please, I've already gotten in trouble with the sorority. But, you know, following your mission to space in '92, there have been 11 Black astronauts who've been on space missions. Currently, out of the 47 active astronauts, only three are Black women. How should NASA work to make sure there are more Dr. Maes?DR. JEMISON: Well, they don't need to have Dr. Maes. They need to have the people who--that are full representation, and they need to fly them, and they need to use their perspectives as well. I think that there has been some evolution. But a lot of times it's about being able to hear and understand and go to the places that people are to be able to recruit them.I should also talk about the fact that there are incredible other positions within NASA that we sometimes forget. We always look at NASA and space exploration as astronauts, but I can be clear that the astronauts would not go anywhere without the work that was done before--right?--or that's done with other people. So, from mission control to the technicians who put the shuttle together, or who put the vehicles together, that's what we also fail to highlight. So, they're the technicians, they're the engineers, they're the people who are doing the work day to day, whether it's in legal systems. It's much bigger than the astronauts.Let me also say that the applications are much bigger than what we see on space station or what we see when we just think about it as humans in space. It's how do we apply what we've learned to improve life down here on Earth. And again, I would assert that who's involved makes a difference to the application of the technologies.MR. CAPEHART: Well, let's talk more about space travel. Do you really believe we will be able to travel beyond our solar system within a hundred years?DR. JEMISON: So, you're asking that because I lead this project called 100 Year Starship, which is about making sure the capabilities for human travel beyond our solar system exist within the next hundred years. And so, notice I say make sure the capabilities exist. I didn't say that it's about having the Starship Enterprise ready to go and warp out. No, I don't think that's it.But why do we want the capabilities to exist? Because it pushes us very radically to come up with new ideas. Just take for example the kind of energy that's needed to get to another star. Without going too far into it, there's not enough chemical propulsion in the entire solar system to really power a ship that would carry humans to another star within a reasonable period of time. So, we have to learn how to control incredible amounts of energy. We have to do it through fission, which we do now, but you have to control it and store that energy, and it has to be safely done. Or fusion, what powers the sun. Or anti-matter. We don't know how to do any of those to the level that we need to do. But imagine if we could, how it would change life here on Earth. And just by having that, people thinking about it and pushing those technologies, it makes a difference. And what we look at are the whole range of things that could happen, whether it's how do we understand human biology and our connection to the microbiome system on this planet, which we cannot live without, to even understanding human behavior, because you know that's the long pole in the tent to everything that we do on this planet, it's the long pole on the tent to solving poverty--not of the people who are impoverished or who don't have as much, but the people who have control of so many resources and overuse them, or the fact that we don't understand that we need to share this planet. But that human behavior is a major part of what we look at as well.MR. CAPEHART: Sorry, I cut you off there because I was excited to jump in and ask you about the Mars rover Perseverance. And what--how big--I mean, as a layperson, it's a big deal. But you're a scientist. You're an astronaut. How big of a deal was that rover landing on Mars late last month?DR. JEMISON: It was a big deal, and I think the other part of it is that the excitement around it is because of the new type of landing and some of the experiments that it was carrying with it. So, from the helicopter that will be deployed that will be able to do surveys so--and people are going to look at it like a drone on Mars, so you can look at different things, too, the possibility of doing a sample return back to Earth. Those were incredibly important pieces.I've been impressed this past February by what happened on Mars and around Mars because three probes from Earth entered Martian orbit this past February. There's a probe from the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, which was its first interplanetary probe called Hope, and there was also a probe from China, Tianwen, that entered Mars orbit and may actually have a rover land on Mars in May or June. The reason why I consider this very exciting, and it helps to put perspective on Perseverance, is because it says that humanity is pushing forward and this venture is becoming more global. And I think that will help us in terms of perhaps using some of the technologies and the possibilities.So, yeah, we geeked out. I was watching the landing. It was exciting. And but I always pull us into understanding the impact that these things have. The impact is, yes, we're going to learn more about Mars. People might ask, so what? Right? What's the big deal. The big deal is we learn more about another planet. That's like being a doctor, right? Do you want your doctor to know only about your physiology, or would you prefer them to know about a lot of people's physiology and health and perspective? You want that second one, right? And the reason why, it helps us to understand perhaps the evolution of the Earth and weather patterns and all the things that go--are attendant with it.MR. CAPEHART: You know, actually, to that point, in the images that have been beamed back to Earth and that you have seen, do you see anything in those--in those images that sparked your curiosity, or gave you an a-ha that we in the lay public might not even notice?DR. JEMISON: I don't have any a-has. I'm just, like, thrilled that we're seeing another planet, right? I probably--I'm probably right there with you. All of those things are going to take time. And you know, that's the reason why we have geologists--right?--and those kinds of folks, and people are going to spend a lot of time analyzing what are the components of Martian soil.And remember, we've been on Mars before. We are going to be building on knowledge. There are probes that are orbiting Mars now that are sending back information and data. So, it's really building a picture of this planet that appears at one point in time had a lot of water on it, that perhaps had even oxygen in its atmosphere. We're spending time and understanding what happened to that planet in its evolution.MR. CAPEHART: Let's come back to Earth, here. And sorry to keep coming back to you being the first Black woman in space and your history-making effort, but I think we're all focused on firsts, not just because we've just, you know, left Black History month but because this nation has gone through another first with the election of Vice president Kamala Harris, the first woman to be elected in that role, the first Black woman to be elected in that role, the first woman of Indian descent to be in that role. And I would just love to know from you what it means to you to see that, to see a Vice President Kamala Harris in the history-making role that she is in.DR. JEMISON: Well, of course it's very exciting. And what I always say is it tells us that we are progressing. So, we're at this really interesting point in time right now where there is a pendulum swinging back where folks say they want to go back to things, right? And that's what struck me about this time period and the reason why I thought it was important to do a revision and release \"Find Where the Wind Goes\" again, because it very much parallels the '60s, and when I was growing up, even parts of the 70s, where there was--the world was changing. And so many things have happened between then and now. We may forget that there was some evolution, there was some progress. And the fact that we had a woman--this is the first woman elected to national office, the first Black woman elected to national office, is really important because we say--we see that there is progress. But we have to hold onto it, and we have to use it. So, I'm really excited that, you know, she uses her platform to push ahead, to include others, to include agendas from the perspective that she's grown up in, the knowledge base that she has. So, it's just exciting all around.Let me add one other piece to that.MR. CAPEHART: Sure.DR. JEMISON: Very frequently, people look at--they would look at me and they say, oh, it's a really great image for young Black girls. They look at Kamala Harris. We can go on and on. And they'll say it's a great image for young girls of color. But here's the reality check as well. It's an important image for everyone to see, because the gatekeepers very frequently make their decisions because they say, oh, I haven't seen anybody like that around, so I don't know that they can do things. It never goes away. But that image is really important. You may not have seen it, but Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States, period. So, everyone knows that it's not only possible, it's a reality. And she has the authority that goes along with that.MR. CAPEHART: Dr.--yeah, go ahead.DR. JEMISON: She has the authority that goes along with that position.MR. CAPEHART: I want to end with this question, and that is, we have seen over the last almost year, after the killing of George Floyd, a reignitement of social justice and racial justice protests around the country. Black Lives Matter is the mantra of the day. And I'm wondering what would you say to those young activists who are out there marching still--even though they don't make the news, they are still marching--given your lived experience, what you've been through. What would you say to them to encourage them in those movements that they might be in now or might be coming when they feel--might feel discouraged, might feel that no one's listening, might feel that they aren't making progress? What do you say to them?DR. JEMISON: So, we are making progress. And I can tell you, I'm so excited about the fact that people are not sitting back and letting the world just take shape. They're asserting their right to shape it. So, when I look at the Black Lives Matter movement, it's about the fact that all--that we can make a difference in this world. There's so many things that I have been excited about that I'm seeing from the--sort of the term Black Girl Magic, which I was discussing with someone yesterday, which is not leaving others out. It's asserting that we have the right to participate and that we have been there all along doing incredible work even under the most trying of circumstances. I would--I say that you're on the right path, that asserting your right to participate is the correct thing to do. You know, we have your back.I also want to add before I leave that one of the things that has struck me about being in first and this position is, forever I'm the person in the orange flight suit--right?--[unclear] with the helmet. But we keep doing other work. So, since the time I left NASA, I spent a lot of time in environment sciences and education and actually building a connection between the sciences and society. And I would be remiss if I don't bring up how important it is that we understand that issues around race and gender affect the sciences. Who does science affects the outcome, the research that's done, the technologies that are done. And part of this movement that we see from Black Lives Matter to Black Girl Magic to whatever you want to call--whatever they are, they also are impacting the sciences, what our world will become. And I think that's really crucial, because the perspective, the ambitions of the world impact its technology. We live in a world today where things are rapidly changing, not necessarily for the better, and there's a lot of it that's being impacted and being done, are facilitated by the technologies we design and who uses them and what they're for.MR. CAPEHART: We have not only run out of time. We have gone overtime and barely scratched the surface. I'm glad we got--you got to mention 100 Year Starship global initiative, but there's also the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, and The Earth We Share science camps, and the second edition of \"Find Where the Wind Goes.\" There's so much. But, Dr. Jemison, we are out of time. Thank you so very much for coming to Washington Post Live.DR. JEMISON: You're very welcome. Thank you all for having me here, and it's great to see you again virtually.MR. CAPEHART: Likewise. And as always, thank you for watching. My colleague David Ignatius has two special events today. First, at noon Eastern David will interview Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric on the global challenges business leaders face today. Then he'll be back at 3:30 Eastern to discuss a new documentary, NASRIN, about the imprisoned human rights activist. His guests will be CNN's Christiane Amanpour and Washington Post journalist and executive producer of the film Jason Rezaian and filmmaker Jeff Kaufman. So that's today starting at noon Eastern. In the meantime, I'm Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Thank you very much for tuning in to Washington Post Live.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7642",
        "date": "2021-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/01/transcript-race-america-mae-jemison-md/",
        "text": "MR. CAPEHART: Good morning. I\u2019m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m 1992, aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor, Dr. Mae Jemison became the first Black woman to go into space. But her history-making voyage might not have happened. In her memoir, \u201cFind Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life,\u201d Dr. Mae relives an encounter with her kindergarten teacher who asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. When Dr. Mae answered scientist, the teacher encouraged her to become a nurse. Why was she so determined? What did she--why did she desire to become a scientist? Where did it come from? How did she end up in space? Well, let\u2019s find out. Dr. Mae Jemison, welcome to Washington Post Live. DR. JEMISON: Thank you so much. I'm very pleased to be here, and very pleased to be with you, Jonathan.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMR. CAPEHART: Thank you very much. So, let's talk about your memoir and this encounter that you had. In the book you write from the perspective of a 16-year-old, so your 16-year-old self. Take us back to being a 16-year-old. And also, I should point out you were a 16-year-old attending Stanford.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: Yes. So, it's really sort of a little bit of me writing what I think my 16-year-old self would have want to know about the adventures that she would have in life, and some of the clues to make it through. And what I mean about the clues are paying attention. In the book, it was really sort of moments that--I think about the fact that it was who I intended to be that made a difference versus a job. It was a person I wanted to be. And that person was one of discovery that always wanted new challenges, that hoped to make a difference in this world, at the same time keeping my integrity and my smile and my humanity.That child grew up during the 1960s. I wasn't quite old enough to be a hippie. Always wanted to be one, though. But the reason why was because the world was changing. All around us, we saw new norms coming in. People were challenging what was established, and also asserting their right to participate. And I remember growing up everyone talked about anarchy--right?--that the 60s were just too chaotic. But the reality was, again, people wanted to participate, and that's the environment I grew up in, one where there was a women's right moment. There was a civil rights movement. Space exploration was exploding, which I was very excited about. Science, we're breaking records. Culture was changing. Arts, music. And we were reaching around the world.All of a sudden, the world became much closer, which I learned about decolonization in all these countries. So, it was this assertion. And that's the world I grew up in, and that very much affected me and who I wanted to be. And so, I always assumed I could do so many things and follow so many paths. I knew the world had to come along with me at times, but I always assumed I'd go into space. And I thought that people who didn't have women included were just wrongheaded. That's my little self.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. CAPEHART: Well, you have said that you were a little arrogant about attending college at 16. I mean, why wouldn't you be? You're 16, and you're in collage, and you're in Stanford. But you say some arrogance is necessary for women and people of color to be successful in a White male-dominated society. How were you able to, well, have that perspective and to have the perseverance to push through and succeed?DR. JEMISON: So, I use the term \"arrogance\" because I had done very well in all standardized tests. I went to another grade in high school. I'd been student council president, all these things. And I was very excited about the world around me. And I had had teachers of all kinds, and I wanted to push. But you know, at 16 you're not well-socialized yet, right? You still have--you still have that little edge on you, right?When I got to Stanford, I ran into teachers, professors who were not as excited about me being in their class. And I still needed that edge in order just to assert that I was there, to go ahead and unabashedly claim my place. If I had been better socialized to believe and take to heart these emotions, these things that I was getting from people, from the professors, I might not have been here. I may have said, oh, well, I need to do something else versus chemical engineering. What I did instead was I took lots of classes with dance and linguistics and politics of Africa--things that really held my interest, as well as the engineering. And it made a really incredible--it created a balance in my life and in my world, and I had professors who were excited about my intellectual curiosity. And let me be clear, I think Stanford was the best school I could have gone to, and I had ran into some wonderful professors there in the sciences, as well. But the overall feel was, hmm, should you be here?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. CAPEHART: You know, Dr. Mae, as you were talking, I was sitting here wondering, you know, one, you're 16 years old. Two, you're in a space, as you said, where people are like, why are you here, we don't want you here. As a 16-year-old who were your mentors? Were there people you could--were there people you could turn to for support? It's one thing to be in a place where you're not made to feel welcome. It's another to be in a place where you're not made to feel welcome and you're 16.DR. JEMISON: Well, again, I think that 16-year-old helped me. Really, I do. She was--she was pretty assertive.MR. CAPEHART: A little na\u00efve. Assertive but a little na\u00efve in that not really knowing how the world worked.Story continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: No, she knew how the world worked. She knew how it is. Some of the stories that I tell there were just about--like even pushing against school principals and doing things and--but I had teachers who really cared about my intellect--right?--and who I was. But I think when you ask about the mentors, we have to be careful in assuming that everybody has to be in the field you're in, right? Sometimes it's that support that you need in terms of just energy.AdvertisementSo, I had these incredible people that I worked with. I tell the story about Dr. Halifu Osumare, who was the dance instructor for Black performing arts at Stanford, and that's where I started learning African dance and so many other things that I had danced all the way through high school. And she used to always have this smile, and she'd push me to do better as a dancer.But the other part of it is that I had professors in the political science fields that I worked with that were excited about what I did. All along, though, you have people that you can work with, and they help you to look at a view of the world. I had a scholarship that was sponsored by Bell Laboratories, and every summer I had this--I would have an incredible job at Bell Labs that would range from things like working on computer programming, writing computer programming and code for special projects at the laboratory, to working on one of two nuclear magnetic resonance machines in the world, and I got to work on it. So it was that range of experience. I don't think that there's a single person.Story continues below advertisementAnd sometimes we use the word \"mentor\" and we throw it around really loosely like we throw around the word \"role model\" loosely. I think that mentors usually take you throughout your career, and I did not have anyone who took me throughout my career except for my parents and things, and they were there in my corner.AdvertisementBut you run into people. You run into different people. You see different things. And you can transfer them. You can translate that energy into who you are to unabashedly be you.MR. CAPEHART: You know, I call those people guardian angels. Those are the people who see you before you see yourself. They see your potential. They see what you can do, and they push you. They sometimes push you real hard in those directions.Story continues below advertisementLet me ask you about someone who--and I want you to talk about how--what an inspiration she was for you. You've said that as a child, watching actress Nichelle Nichols portray Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek also inspired you, your desire to pursue a career with NASA. And in fact, Nichols went on to become a recruiter for NASA, and she told them--and this is a quote--\"I'm going to bring you so many qualified women and minority astronaut applicants for this position that if you don't choose one, everybody in the newspapers across the country will know about it.\" So, Dr. Mae, what was it about Nichols or her fictional character that spoke to you?AdvertisementDR. JEMISON: So, growing up as a little girl, I always assumed I'd go into space, and I wanted to go into space before Star Trek came on. But I think the piece was Star Trek was an affirmation, and Nichelle Nichols' character Lieutenant Uhura was one that spoke to being involved technologically. Star Trek spoke to the fact that other people believed in the universe that I believed in, that I have the right to participate and to be involved. So, the incredible thing about Nichelle Nichols, and as I became her friend later on in life, is that she brought such character, strength, and assertiveness to Lieutenant Uhura. So, you never thought of her as a lesser member of the crew. I was always irritated that they didn't give her a bigger role when I was a little girl. I was that--I was that kid, right? But she brought such gravitas, let us say, to the portrayal that, you know, you wanted to be like--you could channel that gravitas, that stature, that confidence, that competence in your own life. So, I think that fiction also helps us to see that. Our stories that people put in front of us help us to see different ways of interacting with the world.MR. CAPEHART: In 1983, the flight of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, motivated you to apply to NASA's astronaut program. Nine years later, you yourself go up into space. One, what was that like, going into space? And two, what was it like going into space knowing the history you were taking with you on that voyage?Story continues below advertisementDR. JEMISON: So, I'm going to--I just want to go back to the--the reason why I want to correct this is because sometimes--actually, I was going to apply to the astronaut program as soon as I had the qualifications. Because when--in 1978 I was still in college, so there was no way for me to apply to the astronaut program then. So that's when they first recruited the shuttle astronauts and stuff. So, I was going to go no matter what, and always want to recognize that, you know, there were--there were six women who came into the astronaut program in 1978. There were three African American men. There was Ellison Onizuka, a Japanese American. And so, I was really excited about applying as soon as I got the skill set. And so, I was just--I was there.AdvertisementWhat it was like going up into space, I should first say that I didn't want to go into space necessarily because--you know, people said did you want to be the first African American woman in space. I didn't care if there had been thousands of people in space before, or if there had never been a single person. I wanted to go up. I wanted to be involved.I think there was a recognition that you have a responsibility to use your platform. For me, it was making sure that I included others, people who would not necessarily be involved. So, the way I did that inclusion, particularly around the flight, was that I took up various things with me. I took up a poster of Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, an Alvin Ailey poster. For all Black woman everywhere, I took up a Bundu statue, B-U-N-D-U, which is a women's society in West Africa. I took up a certificate for Chicago Public School students that promise to do well in math and science, which was duplicated and given to students in Chicago, which is where I grew up. I took up an Alpha Kappa Alpha flag, the oldest African American women sorority in the country. And I wanted to do that because I wanted other people to know that they were a part of this universe and this world as well. I took up a flag for the OAU, the Organization of African Unity so that I could give these things back so that people were included. I didn't need to take up another Stanford banner, as much as I love Stanford, or Cornell. They had those up there.Story continues below advertisementBut the--all along, my issue has been how do we make sure that we include people and we use the talent that's there. One of the things we forget when we look at science, when we look at space, is it's not just about, oh, you get up there and you do everything that everyone else would do. We each bring our own perspectives to our work. And you know, what a shame it would be if I were to go into space and I did not use what I had learned from having worked in West Africa for two and a half years, having been a doctor, having grown up in the South Side of Chicago, if I did not use that perspective to ask questions to understand how the technologies work, what are some possible applications. And what a shame it would be if I had the experience of being an astronaut and I did not take that and use it to the work that I do now and all along to ask those same--you know, to use that to bring my perspective to what's happening in the world now. And each time it should be iterative.AdvertisementMR. CAPEHART: So, you're Alpha Kappa Alpha. The colors are pink and green. Was there any pink and green on your--on any of your astronaut wear?DR. JEMISON: No. [Laughs]MR. CAPEHART: Okay. I had to ask. I had to ask.DR. JEMISON: You're going to get me in trouble.MR. CAPEHART: Please, I've already gotten in trouble with the sorority. But, you know, following your mission to space in '92, there have been 11 Black astronauts who've been on space missions. Currently, out of the 47 active astronauts, only three are Black women. How should NASA work to make sure there are more Dr. Maes?DR. JEMISON: Well, they don't need to have Dr. Maes. They need to have the people who--that are full representation, and they need to fly them, and they need to use their perspectives as well. I think that there has been some evolution. But a lot of times it's about being able to hear and understand and go to the places that people are to be able to recruit them.I should also talk about the fact that there are incredible other positions within NASA that we sometimes forget. We always look at NASA and space exploration as astronauts, but I can be clear that the astronauts would not go anywhere without the work that was done before--right?--or that's done with other people. So, from mission control to the technicians who put the shuttle together, or who put the vehicles together, that's what we also fail to highlight. So, they're the technicians, they're the engineers, they're the people who are doing the work day to day, whether it's in legal systems. It's much bigger than the astronauts.Let me also say that the applications are much bigger than what we see on space station or what we see when we just think about it as humans in space. It's how do we apply what we've learned to improve life down here on Earth. And again, I would assert that who's involved makes a difference to the application of the technologies.MR. CAPEHART: Well, let's talk more about space travel. Do you really believe we will be able to travel beyond our solar system within a hundred years?DR. JEMISON: So, you're asking that because I lead this project called 100 Year Starship, which is about making sure the capabilities for human travel beyond our solar system exist within the next hundred years. And so, notice I say make sure the capabilities exist. I didn't say that it's about having the Starship Enterprise ready to go and warp out. No, I don't think that's it.But why do we want the capabilities to exist? Because it pushes us very radically to come up with new ideas. Just take for example the kind of energy that's needed to get to another star. Without going too far into it, there's not enough chemical propulsion in the entire solar system to really power a ship that would carry humans to another star within a reasonable period of time. So, we have to learn how to control incredible amounts of energy. We have to do it through fission, which we do now, but you have to control it and store that energy, and it has to be safely done. Or fusion, what powers the sun. Or anti-matter. We don't know how to do any of those to the level that we need to do. But imagine if we could, how it would change life here on Earth. And just by having that, people thinking about it and pushing those technologies, it makes a difference. And what we look at are the whole range of things that could happen, whether it's how do we understand human biology and our connection to the microbiome system on this planet, which we cannot live without, to even understanding human behavior, because you know that's the long pole in the tent to everything that we do on this planet, it's the long pole on the tent to solving poverty--not of the people who are impoverished or who don't have as much, but the people who have control of so many resources and overuse them, or the fact that we don't understand that we need to share this planet. But that human behavior is a major part of what we look at as well.MR. CAPEHART: Sorry, I cut you off there because I was excited to jump in and ask you about the Mars rover Perseverance. And what--how big--I mean, as a layperson, it's a big deal. But you're a scientist. You're an astronaut. How big of a deal was that rover landing on Mars late last month?DR. JEMISON: It was a big deal, and I think the other part of it is that the excitement around it is because of the new type of landing and some of the experiments that it was carrying with it. So, from the helicopter that will be deployed that will be able to do surveys so--and people are going to look at it like a drone on Mars, so you can look at different things, too, the possibility of doing a sample return back to Earth. Those were incredibly important pieces.I've been impressed this past February by what happened on Mars and around Mars because three probes from Earth entered Martian orbit this past February. There's a probe from the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, which was its first interplanetary probe called Hope, and there was also a probe from China, Tianwen, that entered Mars orbit and may actually have a rover land on Mars in May or June. The reason why I consider this very exciting, and it helps to put perspective on Perseverance, is because it says that humanity is pushing forward and this venture is becoming more global. And I think that will help us in terms of perhaps using some of the technologies and the possibilities.So, yeah, we geeked out. I was watching the landing. It was exciting. And but I always pull us into understanding the impact that these things have. The impact is, yes, we're going to learn more about Mars. People might ask, so what? Right? What's the big deal. The big deal is we learn more about another planet. That's like being a doctor, right? Do you want your doctor to know only about your physiology, or would you prefer them to know about a lot of people's physiology and health and perspective? You want that second one, right? And the reason why, it helps us to understand perhaps the evolution of the Earth and weather patterns and all the things that go--are attendant with it.MR. CAPEHART: You know, actually, to that point, in the images that have been beamed back to Earth and that you have seen, do you see anything in those--in those images that sparked your curiosity, or gave you an a-ha that we in the lay public might not even notice?DR. JEMISON: I don't have any a-has. I'm just, like, thrilled that we're seeing another planet, right? I probably--I'm probably right there with you. All of those things are going to take time. And you know, that's the reason why we have geologists--right?--and those kinds of folks, and people are going to spend a lot of time analyzing what are the components of Martian soil.And remember, we've been on Mars before. We are going to be building on knowledge. There are probes that are orbiting Mars now that are sending back information and data. So, it's really building a picture of this planet that appears at one point in time had a lot of water on it, that perhaps had even oxygen in its atmosphere. We're spending time and understanding what happened to that planet in its evolution.MR. CAPEHART: Let's come back to Earth, here. And sorry to keep coming back to you being the first Black woman in space and your history-making effort, but I think we're all focused on firsts, not just because we've just, you know, left Black History month but because this nation has gone through another first with the election of Vice president Kamala Harris, the first woman to be elected in that role, the first Black woman to be elected in that role, the first woman of Indian descent to be in that role. And I would just love to know from you what it means to you to see that, to see a Vice President Kamala Harris in the history-making role that she is in.DR. JEMISON: Well, of course it's very exciting. And what I always say is it tells us that we are progressing. So, we're at this really interesting point in time right now where there is a pendulum swinging back where folks say they want to go back to things, right? And that's what struck me about this time period and the reason why I thought it was important to do a revision and release \"Find Where the Wind Goes\" again, because it very much parallels the '60s, and when I was growing up, even parts of the 70s, where there was--the world was changing. And so many things have happened between then and now. We may forget that there was some evolution, there was some progress. And the fact that we had a woman--this is the first woman elected to national office, the first Black woman elected to national office, is really important because we say--we see that there is progress. But we have to hold onto it, and we have to use it. So, I'm really excited that, you know, she uses her platform to push ahead, to include others, to include agendas from the perspective that she's grown up in, the knowledge base that she has. So, it's just exciting all around.Let me add one other piece to that.MR. CAPEHART: Sure.DR. JEMISON: Very frequently, people look at--they would look at me and they say, oh, it's a really great image for young Black girls. They look at Kamala Harris. We can go on and on. And they'll say it's a great image for young girls of color. But here's the reality check as well. It's an important image for everyone to see, because the gatekeepers very frequently make their decisions because they say, oh, I haven't seen anybody like that around, so I don't know that they can do things. It never goes away. But that image is really important. You may not have seen it, but Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States, period. So, everyone knows that it's not only possible, it's a reality. And she has the authority that goes along with that.MR. CAPEHART: Dr.--yeah, go ahead.DR. JEMISON: She has the authority that goes along with that position.MR. CAPEHART: I want to end with this question, and that is, we have seen over the last almost year, after the killing of George Floyd, a reignitement of social justice and racial justice protests around the country. Black Lives Matter is the mantra of the day. And I'm wondering what would you say to those young activists who are out there marching still--even though they don't make the news, they are still marching--given your lived experience, what you've been through. What would you say to them to encourage them in those movements that they might be in now or might be coming when they feel--might feel discouraged, might feel that no one's listening, might feel that they aren't making progress? What do you say to them?DR. JEMISON: So, we are making progress. And I can tell you, I'm so excited about the fact that people are not sitting back and letting the world just take shape. They're asserting their right to shape it. So, when I look at the Black Lives Matter movement, it's about the fact that all--that we can make a difference in this world. There's so many things that I have been excited about that I'm seeing from the--sort of the term Black Girl Magic, which I was discussing with someone yesterday, which is not leaving others out. It's asserting that we have the right to participate and that we have been there all along doing incredible work even under the most trying of circumstances. I would--I say that you're on the right path, that asserting your right to participate is the correct thing to do. You know, we have your back.I also want to add before I leave that one of the things that has struck me about being in first and this position is, forever I'm the person in the orange flight suit--right?--[unclear] with the helmet. But we keep doing other work. So, since the time I left NASA, I spent a lot of time in environment sciences and education and actually building a connection between the sciences and society. And I would be remiss if I don't bring up how important it is that we understand that issues around race and gender affect the sciences. Who does science affects the outcome, the research that's done, the technologies that are done. And part of this movement that we see from Black Lives Matter to Black Girl Magic to whatever you want to call--whatever they are, they also are impacting the sciences, what our world will become. And I think that's really crucial, because the perspective, the ambitions of the world impact its technology. We live in a world today where things are rapidly changing, not necessarily for the better, and there's a lot of it that's being impacted and being done, are facilitated by the technologies we design and who uses them and what they're for.MR. CAPEHART: We have not only run out of time. We have gone overtime and barely scratched the surface. I'm glad we got--you got to mention 100 Year Starship global initiative, but there's also the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, and The Earth We Share science camps, and the second edition of \"Find Where the Wind Goes.\" There's so much. But, Dr. Jemison, we are out of time. Thank you so very much for coming to Washington Post Live.DR. JEMISON: You're very welcome. Thank you all for having me here, and it's great to see you again virtually.MR. CAPEHART: Likewise. And as always, thank you for watching. My colleague David Ignatius has two special events today. First, at noon Eastern David will interview Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric on the global challenges business leaders face today. Then he'll be back at 3:30 Eastern to discuss a new documentary, NASRIN, about the imprisoned human rights activist. His guests will be CNN's Christiane Amanpour and Washington Post journalist and executive producer of the film Jason Rezaian and filmmaker Jeff Kaufman. So that's today starting at noon Eastern. In the meantime, I'm Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Thank you very much for tuning in to Washington Post Live.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7643",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/01/race-america-mae-jemison-md/",
        "text": "Mae Jemison made history as the first woman of color in the world to go to space on Sept. 12, 1992, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which carried her and six other astronauts on 126 orbits around the Earth. A physician, engineer, educator, social scientist and entrepreneur, Jemison has led an inspiring life of breaking barriers and continually \u201ctesting limits\u201d for herself and others. A Cornell-educated physician who served in the Peace Corps in Africa, Jemison is a member of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame and currently leads the 100 Year Starship global initiative. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightClick here for transcript.HighlightsAstronaut Mae Jemison says that when she went into space in 1992 she wanted to make sure she included others in the historic experience by taking items to represent them on her flight. The items included: a poster of Alvin Ailey dancer Judith Jameson performing \u201cCry,\u201d a bundu statue from the women\u2019s society in West Africa and a flag from Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the oldest historically Black sorority in the U.S. \u201cFor me it was making sure that I included others. People who would not necessarily be involved.\u201d (Washington Post Live)When asked how NASA can increase the diversity in its ranks, Mae Jemison said, \u201cI think there has been some evolution, but a lot of times it\u2019s about being able to hear and understand and go to the places that people are to recruit them.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Astronaut Mae Jemison says the election of Vice President Harris shows that progress is being made. \u201cIt\u2019s an important image for everyone to see\u2026so everyone knows that it\u2019s not only possible, it\u2019s a reality.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Mae JemisonDr. Mae C. Jemison leads 100 Year Starship (100YSS), a bold, far reaching nonprofit initiative to assure the capabilities exist for human travel beyond our solar system to another star within the next 100 years. Jemison is building a multi-faceted global community to foster the cultural, scientific, social and technical commitment, support and financial framework to accomplish the 100YSS vision\u2014An Inclusive, Audacious Journey (that) Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond. 100YSS programs include: annual public conference NEXUS \u2013 Pathway to the Stars: Footprints on Earth; the Canopus Awards for Excellence in Interstellar Writing; the 100YSS Crucibles\u2014invitation only, transdisciplinary workshops to generate new disciplines to disrupt technological and systemic hurdles; and 100YSS True Books to engage elementary students. The 100YSS Way Research Institute seeks to generate the radical leaps that accelerate knowledge, technology, design, and thinking not just for space travel, but to enhance life on Earth. Jemison led the team that won the competitive, single awardee seed funding grant in February 2012 from premiere research agency DARPA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJemison, the first woman of color in the world to go into space, served six years as a NASA astronaut. Aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS-47 Spacelab J mission in September 1992, she performed experiments in material science, life sciences and human adaptation to weightlessness.Jemison started The Jemison Group, Inc. (JG) a technology consulting firm integrating critical socio-cultural issues into the design of engineering and science projects, such as satellite technology for health care delivery and solar dish Stirling engine electricity in developing countries. JG researches and develops stand-alone science and technology companies. BioSentient Corporation, a medical devices and services company focused on improving health and human performance is such a company. An Environmental Studies professor at Dartmouth College, Jemison worked on sustainable development and technology design particularly for the developing world. Before joining NASA she was the Area Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia and a general practice physician in Los Angeles.LOOK UP, led by Jemison, focuses people, on a single day worldwide, to weave a global tapestry of what individually see, feel, think, love, fear, offer, need and hope as we look up at the sky. Jemison is Bayer Corporation USA\u2019s national science literacy ambassador. She is a series hosts for NatGeo\u2019s \u201cOne Strange Rock\u201d and advisor for its global miniseries MARS.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1994 Jemison founded the international science camp The Earth We Share\u2122 (TEWS) for 12-16 years old students from around the world, a program of the non-profit Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence (DJF). From 2011 to 2014, DJF held TEWS-Space Race in collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District training hundreds of middles school teachers in experiential science education and over thousands of middle school students. Other foundation programs include Reality Leads Fantasy\u2014Celebrating Women of Color in Flight that highlighted women in aviation and space from around the world. EXPO Inspire is a hands-on public STEM fair.Jemison is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and is on the boards of directors of Kimberly-Clark, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and the Texas Medical Center. She was the Founding Chair of the Texas State Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board, Chair the Texas State Biotechnology and Life Sciences Industry Cluster, Chair of the Greater Houston Partnership Disaster Planning and Recovery Task Force and served on the board of Scholastic, Inc. and Valspar Corporation. Jemison is an inductee of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame, the National Medical Association Hall of Fame and Texas Science Hall of Fame, International Space Hall of Fame as well as a recipient of the National Organization for Women\u2019s Intrepid Award, the Kilby Science Award and National Association of Corporate Directors\u2019 Directorship 100 most influential people in the boardroom in 2014, Honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and the New York Academy of Sciences among many honors. She was a featured panelist on the CNBC special \u201cThe Business of Science\u201d (9/2011) and was one of the teachers on \u201cThe Dream School\u201d. Jemison is an author including \u201cFind Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life True Books series on space exploration. She was the first real astronaut to appear on Star Trek TV series and is a LEGO figurine in the LEGO Women of NASA kit. Mae Jemison made history as the first woman of color in the world to go to space on Sept. 12, 1992, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which carried her and six other astronauts on 126 orbits around the Earth. A physician, engineer, educator, social scientist and entrepreneur, Jemison has led an inspiring life of breaking barriers and continually \u201ctesting limits\u201d for herself and others. A Cornell-educated physician who served in the Peace Corps in Africa, Jemison is a member of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame and currently leads the 100 Year Starship global initiative. Join Washington Post opinions writer Jonathan Capehart for this important conversation on Washington Post Live on Monday, March 1 at 9:30am ET. Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7644",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/01/race-america-mae-jemison-md/",
        "text": "Mae Jemison made history as the first woman of color in the world to go to space on Sept. 12, 1992, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which carried her and six other astronauts on 126 orbits around the Earth. A physician, engineer, educator, social scientist and entrepreneur, Jemison has led an inspiring life of breaking barriers and continually \u201ctesting limits\u201d for herself and others. A Cornell-educated physician who served in the Peace Corps in Africa, Jemison is a member of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame and currently leads the 100 Year Starship global initiative. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightClick here for transcript.HighlightsAstronaut Mae Jemison says that when she went into space in 1992 she wanted to make sure she included others in the historic experience by taking items to represent them on her flight. The items included: a poster of Alvin Ailey dancer Judith Jameson performing \u201cCry,\u201d a bundu statue from the women\u2019s society in West Africa and a flag from Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the oldest historically Black sorority in the U.S. \u201cFor me it was making sure that I included others. People who would not necessarily be involved.\u201d (Washington Post Live)When asked how NASA can increase the diversity in its ranks, Mae Jemison said, \u201cI think there has been some evolution, but a lot of times it\u2019s about being able to hear and understand and go to the places that people are to recruit them.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Astronaut Mae Jemison says the election of Vice President Harris shows that progress is being made. \u201cIt\u2019s an important image for everyone to see\u2026so everyone knows that it\u2019s not only possible, it\u2019s a reality.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Mae JemisonDr. Mae C. Jemison leads 100 Year Starship (100YSS), a bold, far reaching nonprofit initiative to assure the capabilities exist for human travel beyond our solar system to another star within the next 100 years. Jemison is building a multi-faceted global community to foster the cultural, scientific, social and technical commitment, support and financial framework to accomplish the 100YSS vision\u2014An Inclusive, Audacious Journey (that) Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond. 100YSS programs include: annual public conference NEXUS \u2013 Pathway to the Stars: Footprints on Earth; the Canopus Awards for Excellence in Interstellar Writing; the 100YSS Crucibles\u2014invitation only, transdisciplinary workshops to generate new disciplines to disrupt technological and systemic hurdles; and 100YSS True Books to engage elementary students. The 100YSS Way Research Institute seeks to generate the radical leaps that accelerate knowledge, technology, design, and thinking not just for space travel, but to enhance life on Earth. Jemison led the team that won the competitive, single awardee seed funding grant in February 2012 from premiere research agency DARPA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJemison, the first woman of color in the world to go into space, served six years as a NASA astronaut. Aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS-47 Spacelab J mission in September 1992, she performed experiments in material science, life sciences and human adaptation to weightlessness.Jemison started The Jemison Group, Inc. (JG) a technology consulting firm integrating critical socio-cultural issues into the design of engineering and science projects, such as satellite technology for health care delivery and solar dish Stirling engine electricity in developing countries. JG researches and develops stand-alone science and technology companies. BioSentient Corporation, a medical devices and services company focused on improving health and human performance is such a company. An Environmental Studies professor at Dartmouth College, Jemison worked on sustainable development and technology design particularly for the developing world. Before joining NASA she was the Area Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia and a general practice physician in Los Angeles.LOOK UP, led by Jemison, focuses people, on a single day worldwide, to weave a global tapestry of what individually see, feel, think, love, fear, offer, need and hope as we look up at the sky. Jemison is Bayer Corporation USA\u2019s national science literacy ambassador. She is a series hosts for NatGeo\u2019s \u201cOne Strange Rock\u201d and advisor for its global miniseries MARS.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1994 Jemison founded the international science camp The Earth We Share\u2122 (TEWS) for 12-16 years old students from around the world, a program of the non-profit Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence (DJF). From 2011 to 2014, DJF held TEWS-Space Race in collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District training hundreds of middles school teachers in experiential science education and over thousands of middle school students. Other foundation programs include Reality Leads Fantasy\u2014Celebrating Women of Color in Flight that highlighted women in aviation and space from around the world. EXPO Inspire is a hands-on public STEM fair.Jemison is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and is on the boards of directors of Kimberly-Clark, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and the Texas Medical Center. She was the Founding Chair of the Texas State Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board, Chair the Texas State Biotechnology and Life Sciences Industry Cluster, Chair of the Greater Houston Partnership Disaster Planning and Recovery Task Force and served on the board of Scholastic, Inc. and Valspar Corporation. Jemison is an inductee of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame, the National Medical Association Hall of Fame and Texas Science Hall of Fame, International Space Hall of Fame as well as a recipient of the National Organization for Women\u2019s Intrepid Award, the Kilby Science Award and National Association of Corporate Directors\u2019 Directorship 100 most influential people in the boardroom in 2014, Honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and the New York Academy of Sciences among many honors. She was a featured panelist on the CNBC special \u201cThe Business of Science\u201d (9/2011) and was one of the teachers on \u201cThe Dream School\u201d. Jemison is an author including \u201cFind Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life True Books series on space exploration. She was the first real astronaut to appear on Star Trek TV series and is a LEGO figurine in the LEGO Women of NASA kit. Mae Jemison made history as the first woman of color in the world to go to space on Sept. 12, 1992, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which carried her and six other astronauts on 126 orbits around the Earth. A physician, engineer, educator, social scientist and entrepreneur, Jemison has led an inspiring life of breaking barriers and continually \u201ctesting limits\u201d for herself and others. A Cornell-educated physician who served in the Peace Corps in Africa, Jemison is a member of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame and currently leads the 100 Year Starship global initiative. Join Washington Post opinions writer Jonathan Capehart for this important conversation on Washington Post Live on Monday, March 1 at 9:30am ET. Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7645",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/01/race-america-mae-jemison-md/",
        "text": "Mae Jemison made history as the first woman of color in the world to go to space on Sept. 12, 1992, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which carried her and six other astronauts on 126 orbits around the Earth. A physician, engineer, educator, social scientist and entrepreneur, Jemison has led an inspiring life of breaking barriers and continually \u201ctesting limits\u201d for herself and others. A Cornell-educated physician who served in the Peace Corps in Africa, Jemison is a member of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame and currently leads the 100 Year Starship global initiative. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightClick here for transcript.HighlightsAstronaut Mae Jemison says that when she went into space in 1992 she wanted to make sure she included others in the historic experience by taking items to represent them on her flight. The items included: a poster of Alvin Ailey dancer Judith Jameson performing \u201cCry,\u201d a bundu statue from the women\u2019s society in West Africa and a flag from Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the oldest historically Black sorority in the U.S. \u201cFor me it was making sure that I included others. People who would not necessarily be involved.\u201d (Washington Post Live)When asked how NASA can increase the diversity in its ranks, Mae Jemison said, \u201cI think there has been some evolution, but a lot of times it\u2019s about being able to hear and understand and go to the places that people are to recruit them.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Astronaut Mae Jemison says the election of Vice President Harris shows that progress is being made. \u201cIt\u2019s an important image for everyone to see\u2026so everyone knows that it\u2019s not only possible, it\u2019s a reality.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Mae JemisonDr. Mae C. Jemison leads 100 Year Starship (100YSS), a bold, far reaching nonprofit initiative to assure the capabilities exist for human travel beyond our solar system to another star within the next 100 years. Jemison is building a multi-faceted global community to foster the cultural, scientific, social and technical commitment, support and financial framework to accomplish the 100YSS vision\u2014An Inclusive, Audacious Journey (that) Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond. 100YSS programs include: annual public conference NEXUS \u2013 Pathway to the Stars: Footprints on Earth; the Canopus Awards for Excellence in Interstellar Writing; the 100YSS Crucibles\u2014invitation only, transdisciplinary workshops to generate new disciplines to disrupt technological and systemic hurdles; and 100YSS True Books to engage elementary students. The 100YSS Way Research Institute seeks to generate the radical leaps that accelerate knowledge, technology, design, and thinking not just for space travel, but to enhance life on Earth. Jemison led the team that won the competitive, single awardee seed funding grant in February 2012 from premiere research agency DARPA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJemison, the first woman of color in the world to go into space, served six years as a NASA astronaut. Aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, STS-47 Spacelab J mission in September 1992, she performed experiments in material science, life sciences and human adaptation to weightlessness.Jemison started The Jemison Group, Inc. (JG) a technology consulting firm integrating critical socio-cultural issues into the design of engineering and science projects, such as satellite technology for health care delivery and solar dish Stirling engine electricity in developing countries. JG researches and develops stand-alone science and technology companies. BioSentient Corporation, a medical devices and services company focused on improving health and human performance is such a company. An Environmental Studies professor at Dartmouth College, Jemison worked on sustainable development and technology design particularly for the developing world. Before joining NASA she was the Area Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia and a general practice physician in Los Angeles.LOOK UP, led by Jemison, focuses people, on a single day worldwide, to weave a global tapestry of what individually see, feel, think, love, fear, offer, need and hope as we look up at the sky. Jemison is Bayer Corporation USA\u2019s national science literacy ambassador. She is a series hosts for NatGeo\u2019s \u201cOne Strange Rock\u201d and advisor for its global miniseries MARS.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 1994 Jemison founded the international science camp The Earth We Share\u2122 (TEWS) for 12-16 years old students from around the world, a program of the non-profit Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence (DJF). From 2011 to 2014, DJF held TEWS-Space Race in collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District training hundreds of middles school teachers in experiential science education and over thousands of middle school students. Other foundation programs include Reality Leads Fantasy\u2014Celebrating Women of Color in Flight that highlighted women in aviation and space from around the world. EXPO Inspire is a hands-on public STEM fair.Jemison is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and is on the boards of directors of Kimberly-Clark, the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards and the Texas Medical Center. She was the Founding Chair of the Texas State Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board, Chair the Texas State Biotechnology and Life Sciences Industry Cluster, Chair of the Greater Houston Partnership Disaster Planning and Recovery Task Force and served on the board of Scholastic, Inc. and Valspar Corporation. Jemison is an inductee of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame, the National Medical Association Hall of Fame and Texas Science Hall of Fame, International Space Hall of Fame as well as a recipient of the National Organization for Women\u2019s Intrepid Award, the Kilby Science Award and National Association of Corporate Directors\u2019 Directorship 100 most influential people in the boardroom in 2014, Honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and the New York Academy of Sciences among many honors. She was a featured panelist on the CNBC special \u201cThe Business of Science\u201d (9/2011) and was one of the teachers on \u201cThe Dream School\u201d. Jemison is an author including \u201cFind Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life True Books series on space exploration. She was the first real astronaut to appear on Star Trek TV series and is a LEGO figurine in the LEGO Women of NASA kit. Mae Jemison made history as the first woman of color in the world to go to space on Sept. 12, 1992, aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, which carried her and six other astronauts on 126 orbits around the Earth. A physician, engineer, educator, social scientist and entrepreneur, Jemison has led an inspiring life of breaking barriers and continually \u201ctesting limits\u201d for herself and others. A Cornell-educated physician who served in the Peace Corps in Africa, Jemison is a member of the National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame and currently leads the 100 Year Starship global initiative. Join Washington Post opinions writer Jonathan Capehart for this important conversation on Washington Post Live on Monday, March 1 at 9:30am ET. Race in America: Mae Jemison, MD",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Securing Tomorrow with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7646",
        "date": "2018-07-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-live/wp/2018/07/25/transcript-securing-tomorrow-with-air-force-secretary-heather-wilson/",
        "text": "Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thank you very much every for coming to this latest installment of Securing Tomorrow.\u00a0 It\u2019s really my pleasure to have as our guest today Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson.\u00a0 As I\u2019m going to explain, Secretary Wilson has pretty much the ultimate Washington and certainly Air Force secretary resume.\u00a0 Just briefly to go through it, she was a graduate of the Air Force Academy in 1982.\u00a0 I think that was the third year that women graduated from the academy, so she was one of the very first women to graduate as an Air Force cadet.\u00a0 And like any Air Force cadet, she wanted to fly planes.\u00a0 She had one problem, which was that she won a Rhodes Scholarship.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] And so she went to Oxford and got her doctorate in 1985? Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mm-hmm.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIgnatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So that\u2019s one of the most distinguished tokens that I think of.\u00a0 She then served with the Air Force in various positions in Europe, came back during the Bush 41\u2014George H.W. Bush Administration and worked in the NSC staff, one of the most exciting times in terms of foreign policy that we\u2019ve had.\u00a0 Left Washington and the Air Force to go form her own defense company.\u00a0 After that, worked in state government doing public social service work, then ran for Congress and was a member of Congress for 10 years, then ran a university, specializing in technology, and is now back as secretary of the Air Force.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo an unusually talented person with special expertise so it\u2019s really a pleasure to have you here.\u00a0 I want to start with the issue that is really preoccupying the Pentagon and in particular, the Air Force and that\u2019s the threat that we\u2019re seeing to our defense assets in space.\u00a0 We have this image of space as the area where NASA had its incredible missions and we kind of know that we have all of these communication satellites up in space.\u00a0 If we think about it, we know that the Defense Department has a lot its capabilities in space.\u00a0 But I\u2019d ask you to lead us off by talking about what in recent years we have come to understand about the threats that exist in space in a way in which space is now a warfighting domain.Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah, in 2007, the Chinese launched a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon and destroyed one of their own dead weather satellites, it created a huge amount of debris on orbit.\u00a0 But they demonstrated the ability to do that.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not only that.\u00a0 I think the director of National Intelligence acknowledged publicly earlier this year that they\u2019re developing the capability to try to jam satellites, dazzle satellites, and deny us the use of satellites in crisis or war.\u00a0 And they\u2019re doing that because we\u2019re really good at it.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been very good at it and we\u2019re the best in the world at space and we have been since the 1950s and they\u2019ve watched us.\u00a0 There\u2019s not a mission today that we do in the military that doesn\u2019t in some way depend upon space, but we built that architecture in space at a time when it was benign.\u00a0 And now so, you know, we built the glass houses before the invention of stones.\u00a0 So now, we have to adjust and make sure that we can defend what we do in space and deter anyone from challenging us there.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So if I am to understand your point about building glass houses before stones, we have a Defense architecture in space through which we project power around the world that\u2019s fundamentally vulnerable today.\u00a0 Would that be an accurate statement?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is vulnerable, but I may need to explain a little bit about what we do.\u00a0 The Air Force has most of the Defense Department\u2019s space assets.\u00a0 The Navy has some.\u00a0 They have about 12 satellites that they use for some special communications.\u00a0 We have 77 satellites we operate around the globe.\u00a0 Of those 77, 31 are global positioning system satellites so that your blue dot on your phone is provided by the United States Air Force.\u00a0 It\u2019s provided by 40 airmen working in Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thank you.\u00a0 Thank you, Air Force.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER]Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So remember that when you\u2014Story continues below advertisementIgnatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We wouldn\u2019t know what to do with that, then.Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So a global positioning system, weather satellites, communication satellites, including secure communication so that the president can be in touch with his forces with anywhere in the world if he needs to be.\u00a0 And we provide that service to combatant commanders.\u00a0 So those are the things we have and yes, they are\u2014satellites are really pretty fragile thing and so we have to think now about how do we defend the constellation?\u00a0 And it\u2019s not always just direct defense.\u00a0 It may be that we distribute a network.\u00a0 So if you have multiple nodes, it\u2019s inherently more resilient than if you\u2019re relying on one thing.\u00a0 Some of it may be maneuverability.\u00a0 Some of it may be deception.\u00a0 So there\u2019s a variety of ways to make sure that the United States can take a punch and keep on operating.AdvertisementIgnatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let me, before we go any further, invite the audience here and if we have a streaming audience on television, to ask questions, which I\u2019ll see on my little iPad.\u00a0 The hashtag is SecuringTomorrow.\u00a0 So if you have a question for Secretary Wilson as our conversation goes forward, please use that hashtag, #SecuringTomorrow.\u00a0 So Madam Secretary, the problem that we\u2019re facing as I understand it from reading what\u2019s in the literature is that our principal adversaries, Russia and China, have already jumped into space, are already in the process of militarizing space.\u00a0 This is not a future challenge; this is a challenge right now, today.\u00a0 And I\u2019d ask you tell us as much as you can\u2014these are tricky, sensitive areas, but as much as you can about what\u2019s already happened, that the American people can understand what\u2019s already vulnerable.Story continues below advertisementWilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, as I mentioned, the Chinese demonstrated the ability to launch a rocket, so they have a\u2014launch a telephone pole and hit an object in low-Earth orbit and destroy it.\u00a0 That was a pretty significant demonstration.\u00a0 And so there are other things that we believe they\u2019re developing the ability to do.\u00a0 For example, publicly reported, TASS, the Russian news agency last summer, said that the Russians were launching the ability to repair their satellites on orbit.\u00a0 Well, if they can repair their own, they could also interfere\u2014Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They could repair ours.AdvertisementWilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 So I think that\u2019s probably what\u2019s publicly discussed, where I\u2019d feel comfortable going, David, but we believe that they are developing those capabilities and that we need to be prepared to defend ourselves.Story continues below advertisementIgnatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Is it possible that there are already weapons up there in space that are not on the ground trying to get ready to shoot something down, but up there in space already that could pose a threat?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I believe that\u2019s possible.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So that\u2019s an important baseline for us to think about, that it\u2019s already possible that our near-peer adversaries have these weapons in space.\u00a0 This is a situation where we\u2019re trying to now respond to that.\u00a0 So let me ask you to talk a little bit more about your thoughts about how best to respond.\u00a0 The satellites that we put up\u2014because we didn\u2019t think about this as a warfighting domain are soft.\u00a0 What about just hardening satellites, so they would be better able to resist the detonation of weapons, nuclear or otherwise, in space?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Just think about the problem.\u00a0 First of all, you need to understand the threat.\u00a0 What are the capabilities they\u2019re developing?\u00a0 And for example, it\u2019s different on our different satellites systems.\u00a0 So I mentioned GPS.\u00a0 GPS is actually a really weak radio signal.\u00a0 From four different satellites at the same time, it does a heck of a lot of math and tells you how far you are from each of those satellites by the timing signal coming off those satellites.\u00a0 We use the timing signal, by the way, also for the ATM machine so you can\u2019t take money out of two ATM machines at exactly the same time, so you don\u2019t get double the credit from your bank.\u00a0 We do that from GPS.\u00a0 So the biggest risk to GPS is jamming because it\u2019s a really weak signal so you think about\u2014for those of you who have teenagers who play their music really loud, you can\u2019t hear the whisper next to the loud noise.\u00a0 So jamming is the biggest risk there.So how are we going to deal with that?\u00a0 The Air Force is accelerating the deployment of jam-resistant GPS.\u00a0 So on some of our other satellites, the threats may be different.\u00a0 So how do we deal with that?\u00a0 The first thing we need is near real-time situational awareness.\u00a0 Now, right now, we keep the catalog\u2014the Air Force keeps the catalog for all objects in space greater than about the size of a softball.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not good enough now to just check them every week; we need to know, are they moving?\u00a0 And if so, where are they going?\u00a0 So it\u2019s a little bit\u2014instead of a catalog\u2014or let\u2019s take a flight analogy.\u00a0 Instead of knowing the flight schedule coming into Reagan Airport today, you\u2019d need the radar scanning to know exactly where that airplane is right now and where you think this is going.So near real-time situational awareness is the first thing.\u00a0 The second is the ability to command and control the things we have in space.\u00a0 Make them move, make them do things so that they can protect themselves.\u00a0 So command and control is the second and the third is the ability to create effects.\u00a0 In other words, get out of the way.\u00a0 Take some action and I won\u2019t go into detail there, but you can have the same analogy in the aerospace.\u00a0 If somebody sends a missile at one of our aircraft, well, we might use chaff and flairs.\u00a0 We might maneuver out of the way.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of different ways to think about defending yourself.\u00a0 So space situational awareness, near real-time, the ability to command and control, and the ability to create effects.\u00a0 And those things oriented toward the threat are the way that we\u2019re trying to make space a defendable domain.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIgnatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And let me ask about a final kind of defense that\u2019s most familiar to us.\u00a0 When we think about significant military assets in any other domain, we think about attack weapon systems that would accompany us, that would accompany them.\u00a0 So you wouldn\u2019t have a carrier task force that didn\u2019t have fighter jets that could provide air cover and other assets that could protect those big, expensive systems.\u00a0 Is there a good analogy for that in space?\u00a0 Do you think, in effect, attack satellites that would accompany our precious communications in other satellites?\u00a0 Is that something that we should be thinking about?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, I think the United States is determined to protect our capability on orbit.\u00a0 We\u2019re going to defend ourselves and we\u2019re developing the capability to do that, and I think probably going beyond that, this is not just a conversation among us.\u00a0 Our adversaries listen to what I say, too.\u00a0 And I want them to have no doubt that if they seek to contest the United States in space, that we will defend ourselves.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 All right, adversaries, it\u2019s #SecuringTomorrow. [LAUGHTER] Don\u2019t send questions.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER] So let me come to the question of what to do about this threat, which you\u2019ve described well.\u00a0 In the sense of how to organize for it, this has been a big issue that you\u2019ve been thinking about now for many months.\u00a0 The president in June at a speech at a space forum said that he wanted to create a space force he said that would be separate but equal to the Air Force.\u00a0 The Pentagon, as I understand it, is studying this and it will complete a feasibility study next month, the first of two.\u00a0 But tell us, if you can, about that process of studying this idea.\u00a0 I think one thing we worry about is the possible bureaucratic and other costs that could delay response to this very serious and immediate real-time challenge.\u00a0 How should we think about how to organize for this?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One of the things, to put this in context, when I was going through the process of confirmation, my opening statement had to be approved by the then\u2014and I was only the second one approved in the Defense Department, so I had to go around the interagency and most of the people were people who were here from before and they actually took out the sentence in my statement that referred to space as a warfighting domain.\u00a0 So that was a little more than a year ago.\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t even say \u201cspace\u201d and \u201cwarfighting\u201d in the same sentence.\u00a0 We now have the president, the vice president, the reestablishment of a National Space Council.\u00a0 We have a national space strategy, a national defense strategy that both recognize those and in this year\u2019s president\u2019s budget, the fiscal year \u201819 budget increased and accelerated defendable space with $7 billion in addition to the base budget and reprogrammed another $5 billion within the budget to accelerate defendable space.Both the chief of staff and I are actually very glad that this is now becoming\u2014people are becoming more aware and having a debate about what do we do about this as a nation?\u00a0 And that just wasn\u2019t really there before, and I think it\u2019s tremendously helpful as we advance what we\u2019re trying to do to defend our assets on orbit.\u00a0 For me, one of the biggest issues is how do we accelerate acquisition?\u00a0 How do we move the Pentagon forward quickly?\u00a0 Because there\u2019s a huge bureaucracy around the acquisition and we\u2019re doing a number of things to be able\u2014not just in space, but more generally to accelerate acquisitions.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I want to come back to acquisition in a moment because that\u2019s been a key area that you\u2019ve focused on and one where you\u2019ve tried to innovate.\u00a0 But just before we leave this question of the president\u2019s desire to do more in space.\u00a0 If I hear you, you\u2019re saying, \u201cWe couldn\u2019t agree more.\u201dAdvertisementWilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mm-hmm.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The question is how best to organize for that.\u00a0 Are there any thoughts you\u2019d offer us about the transition and transitional issues?\u00a0 I\u2019ve studied enough military history to see that when we make these transitions, they can sometimes be pretty bumpy.\u00a0 When the Air Force was initially created out of the Army Air Corps, that was not easy.Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Brilliant idea, by the way.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, the Marine Corps goes way back in our history so it\u2019s not as relevant an idea.\u00a0 But when missiles first came in, there was a terrible food fight between the Army and the Air Force about who should run the missile program to the point that the Army missile commander locked out the Air Force general, wouldn\u2019t let him come into his base.\u00a0 So there\u2019s a history here.\u00a0 As you look at this, what would be your sort of cautionary points about the things that could end up hurting us if we\u2019re not careful as we make the transition?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think the most important thing is to stay focused on the warfighter and maintaining the lethality of the service, no matter how the org chart boxes go, it\u2019s all about the ability to fight and if we keep focused on that and not on which boxes move around in which place in the Pentagon, then we\u2019ll do the right thing for the nation.\u00a0 So focus on the lethality of the force.\u00a0 To me, that\u2019s the most important thing.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And if that\u2019s primary, that will then drive the decisions in a sensible way?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It will.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I want to talk a little bit about a favorite topic of mine and that\u2019s new weapons technologies, the weapon systems that are just over the horizon that often people don\u2019t know about but that are interesting and also pose some often-interesting dilemmas about what\u2019s appropriate, what\u2019s affordable.\u00a0 And let me start with one that\u2019s been in the news a little bit, and that\u2019s hypersonic aircraft.\u00a0 Hypersonic aircraft I think are defined as those that can fly at Mach 5 or\u2014Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Five or six, yeah.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, you know, they\u2019re just an order of magnitude faster than anything that we now see.\u00a0 And hypersonic aircraft are of interest in part because according to our former PACOM commander, Admiral Harry Harris, I\u2019m quoting him, \u201cBack in February, China\u2019s hypersonic weapons development outpaces ours.\u00a0 We\u2019re falling behind.\u201d\u00a0 They were already pretty far along in testing these things.\u00a0 So tell this audience a little bit, Madam Secretary, about how hypersonic technology works, why it has military advantages, and what we think the Chinese and Russians have already done?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Interesting question.\u00a0 First, it\u2019s not actually hypersonic aircraft we\u2019re looking at right now, it\u2019s hypersonic weapons.\u00a0 So think more about cruise missile analogy rather than aircraft.\u00a0 Although I did recently see an article that someone\u2019s coming back with the idea of a very fast commercial aircraft again, which will be interesting.\u00a0 But so hypersonic, five to six times the speed of sound.\u00a0 The advantage it gives you militarily is you combine speed with precision and range.\u00a0 They\u2019re very difficult to defend against because they\u2019re moving so fast.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Would our existing anti-missile technology be ineffective against something moving that fast through space?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a difficult problem because of speed and size, but it\u2019s also a difficult technical problem to get them to work.\u00a0 The temperatures, the aerodynamics are extremely difficult technical problems.\u00a0 What the military has done and this is actually kind of interesting\u2014this just happened in the last few weeks here, is the service secretary\u2014as we get together for breakfast now every couple of weeks and we talk about things we can do together.\u00a0 One of our first meetings, we talked about science and technology and where we were and identified this as a high-priority project to work together.\u00a0 Because we each had pieces of programs.\u00a0 The Army\u2019s warhead had worked much better than the Air Force\u2019s.\u00a0 The Navy would have to scope that down in diameter, which takes longer.\u00a0 We came up with a memorandum of understanding.\u00a0 We\u2019ve got all of our people working together doing best technology.\u00a0 So we\u2019re going to take the Army warhead, put it on an Air Force booster, launch it off of a B-52 while the Army is developing on the ground and the Navy wants to put it on the deck of a ship.This kind of collaboration will accelerate testing and deployment by several years and I think that that kind of cooperation is\u2014people tell me in the Pentagon it\u2019s not supposed to work that way, that the service secretaries aren\u2019t supposed to get along that well, but we do and we think that we can accelerate the prototyping and testing of a hypersonic weapon by several years.\u00a0 So we\u2019re talking 2021, 2020, possibly to test.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 2020, you could test a prototype?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Weapon, yeah.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That is fast and I must say, the idea of the Army, Navy, and Air Force working collaboratively on any new weapon system, that would be\u2014Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Except for football.\u00a0 We don\u2019t\u2014we have a big rivalry there.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019re not expecting a joint Army-Navy-Air Force team anytime soon.\u00a0 Another area of technology, which is one that the United States has possessed\u2014I want to say unique advantages and that\u2019s been crucial for the Air Force is stealth technology that allows our planes, drones, et cetera, to pass pretty much unobserved by radar waves.\u00a0 And reading\u2014I have a particular interest in quantum technology because I recently wrote a novel about the Chinese efforts to beat us at the race to develop quantum computers.\u00a0 I noted recently that the Chinese say they\u2019re working on \u201cquantum radars,\u201d which would have, if they could be made to work, enormous advantages because they would, in effect, split photons and see with light what you couldn\u2019t see with radar waves.So it\u2019s potentially a very significant breakthrough that could render a lot of our stealth technology vulnerable.\u00a0 And I want to ask you, is this\u2014a lot of the stuff that comes out of China, I think is kind of overhyped.\u00a0 It\u2019s not as far along as the reports imply.\u00a0 What\u2019s your sense about this development?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think the Chinese particularly are seeking to deny us advantages where they see we do have advantages and one of them clearly is in low-observable technology.\u00a0 We\u2019re really good at it.\u00a0 We never take it for granted and we are always looking at how do we improve our low-observable technology, what new capabilities might be out there that could reduce the advantage of it or make it more vulnerable and to try to stay ahead of that.\u00a0 One of the things that the chief of staff talks about, you can see a low-observable plane, even with radar you can, but obviously, with the naked eye, you can.\u00a0 But no country can put a block of wood around their country and kind of set it on the map and make it impenetrable.\u00a0 At best, it\u2019s Swiss cheese and it\u2019s really more like fondue because the bubbles move [LAUGHTER].\u00a0 Our job is to find the bubbles and exploit them when we need to.\u00a0 And we don\u2019t need to all the time.For example, if a carrier strike group is coming through the Straits of Hormuz, we need air superiority over them for the time in which they transit.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need it continuously, 365 days a year.\u00a0 So we are constantly looking at the fondue from an airspace point of view and how we continue to be able to dominate when and where we want to.\u00a0 We take air superiority for granted in this country because we\u2019ve been so good at it.\u00a0 When you think about it, the last time an American soldier or marine was killed on the ground from enemy aircraft\u2014the last time\u2014was April 15, 1953. When soldiers or marines from the United States or our allies hear aircraft over them, they don\u2019t even have to look up, because they know it\u2019s us.\u00a0 That brings a certain complacency about how difficult it is to maintain air superiority, but we\u2019re determined to maintain it.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I should just interrupt to ack you about one thing that we\u2019re beginning to think about, just in terms of the air traffic control problems, but it\u2019s a war-fighting problem too, and that\u2019s adversaries\u2019 acquisition of drones.\u00a0 Is that something that you\u2019re spending time thinking about?\u00a0 And how should our audience think about the proliferation of drone technology?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, it\u2019s an issue in American airspace, and not just for the military; it\u2019s an issue for commercial and civil aviation as well, because they\u2019re now much cheaper, much smaller, much faster, and even kids have them.\u00a0 And it\u2019s an issue, it\u2019s a safety issue, a safety of flight issue.\u00a0 But, there are more and more countries that have, we call them remotely-piloted aircraft, or drones, and the United States has a lot of them, as well, so a lot of emphasis has gone into the development of that technology over time.\u00a0 And there are places where we would put a drone where we would not put a manned aircraft because of the risk.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Unfortunately, nobody has sent in a question to #SecuringTomorrow about the bubbles in the fondue, but I invite somebody to\u2014Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Did you know what I\u2019m talking about?Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think so, but I want to have somebody pose a question so we can think more about those bubbles, and how to get inside them.\u00a0 But there is a question from Charles on Twitter, who asks, \u201cHow has the emergence of commercial launch-providers like Orbital and SpaceX affected the Air Force space mission?\u201d\u00a0 Good question.Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A great question.\u00a0 So, the Air Force runs the launch facilities at Cape and also at Vandenberg.\u00a0 And we also launch\u2014we\u2019re responsible for the launching of national security payloads.\u00a0 We no longer build rockets; we buy launches.\u00a0 And we have invested in research and development in many of these companies.\u00a0 But we buy launches form SpaceX; we bought one just recently from Virgin Galactic, which has a new way\u2014they have a 747 and launch a rocket from under the wig, so they fly up to 30,000 feet or so and then launch the payload from there on a rocket to go up to orbit.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very different approach.\u00a0 And then, United Launch Alliance, we buy launches from them.So, there\u2019s a lot of innovation going on in the launch industry, driven by commercial providers, and we\u2019re benefiting from it.\u00a0 The cost of launch is plummeting; you combine that with the decreasing size of payloads and there\u2019s a lot more you can do from space today commercially than you could do a decade ago, so it\u2019s really changing and we\u2019re trying to benefit from it.\u00a0 We also were trying to benefit from it\u2014and we talked a little about acquisition\u2014but we, and how do we drive forward national security space?In January, we decided to set up a consortium.\u00a0 It now has I think 160-some companies that are part of it.\u00a0 We initially put $100 million into it to try to get innovation into our own systems.\u00a0 Of those 160 or so, 124 are small companies, innovative companies that don\u2019t normally do business with the Defense Department, because we\u2019re too hard to do business with.\u00a0 We had so many companies want to participate, we increased it to $500 million.\u00a0 We\u2019ve already signed three contracts; we\u2019ve got another one in negotiation for small satellite tests and payloads.And it\u2019s 93 days between solicitation and contract award, so very fast, very simple contracts to get rapidly-innovating companies involved with national security space.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let\u2019s talk about acquisitions a little bit more.\u00a0 We\u2019ll come back to weapons systems if we have time.\u00a0 But I know, acquisition procurement issues have been a big focus of yours.\u00a0 Talk a little bit about what the nature of the problem is.\u00a0 Why does it take so darn long for the Pentagon to buy things?\u00a0 Why do they cost so much?\u00a0 We all know the examples from back in Les Aspen\u2019s day of the toilet seats that cost, you know, $500, and that go down the list\u2014but this has been a problem really since the creation of the Defense Department, and it does seem as if, for all the innovative small projects to try to speed up acquisition, the kind of behemoth survives and continues lumbering into the future.Why does it take so darn long and cost so much?\u00a0 And what really can you do to change that?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, we\u2019ve set it up really that way, with regulations and so forth.\u00a0 Fortunately, the Congress has given us some new authorities to get faster and to move, delegate authorities further down to program managers, who can be held accountable.\u00a0 Right now, accountability is kind of diffuse around this huge bureaucracy and it\u2019s very, very slow.\u00a0 So, we\u2019re trying to take advantage of those new authorities.We\u2019ve delegated a lot of authority down to program managers; we\u2019re changing the way we govern our acquisition enterprise to look at speed, performance, and accountability\u2014not like we\u2019re managing 500 small projects, but across the enterprise.\u00a0 We\u2019re also doing more prototyping experimentation.\u00a0 The old way of doing procurement of a new system is, we\u2019d have two or three years of studying the analysis of alternatives to a complicated cup, and then we\u2019d set a requirement for it, and you\u2019d be two or three years into this before you\u2019d even built anything.\u00a0 Then we build it, but we didn\u2019t really know a lot about what the challenges would be, and so there\u2019s\u2014people are then unhappy that you didn\u2019t meet the requirements.Instead, we\u2019re now going to start prototyping early; figuring out what\u2019s within the realm of the possible; then setting the requirements and going rapidly to acquisition.\u00a0 Those are new authorities.\u00a0 The other one is, 70% of our costs of aircraft is actually in the maintaining of the aircraft.\u00a0 It\u2019s the spare parts and all of those things.\u00a0 We are just setting up, we call it the rapid sustainment office.\u00a0 There are new technologies in manufacturing that mean we don\u2019t have to go out to a supplier, some of whom are no longer in business.\u00a0 Just in the first quarter of this year, we had 10,000 requests for parts that there wasn\u2019t even a single bidder because the company is no longer in business; they have\u2014there\u2019s no business case for one part.This was actually the trim wheel for the rudder trim on a KC135 tanker.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t have it, you can\u2019t fly.\u00a0 It\u2019s a vital piece of equipment.\u00a0 The company that makes them is no longer in business.\u00a0 We reverse-engineered this and 3D printed it.\u00a0 We are announcing this week that we are starting a rapid sustainment office to do more 3D printing, robotics on the depot line.\u00a0 Another one is called cold spray, which is repairing of metals rather than replacing them. \u00a0So, using advanced techniques to drive down the cost of parts.\u00a0 This part cost about 50 bucks, 55 bucks, including all the engineering and everything else.\u00a0 If I had to go out to industry and have them set up the traditional way to do it and buy one part, this is over 700 bucks.\u00a0 So, we can drive down the cost for a part that is airworthy.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Let me ask you about a particular innovation, or set of innovations, that your new Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Will Roper, has proposed.\u00a0 I heard him when I was traveling with Secretary Wilson to this space symposium, so called, in Colorado Springs.\u00a0 And he talked the language, if you will, of Silicon Valley, the language of fail fast, of take risks\u2014not what you hear from government procurement officers.Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it great?Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So, it is new and refreshing.\u00a0 But, tell us a little bit about your charge to Will Roper; why you think he\u2019s the right person for that job; and what you hope he might do in shaking up the whole way we think about acquisitions?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 First, he\u2019s technically highly-competent.\u00a0 He\u2019s, actually, a physics from Georgia Tech, and then another Rhodes Scholar Ph.D. in Mathematics, worked at the MIT Lincoln Lab; came in and worked for DARPA, which is one of the most admired technology agencies in the country; and then set up the equivalent of the rapid capabilities office, it\u2019s called the SCO, for the Defense Department, before he came to be our assistant secretary.\u00a0 So he understands technology, but also, how to move technology fast.And we\u2019ve now given him the portfolio to be able to say, all right, push authorities down; go quickly; empower your program managers to prototype and experiment; connect to the war fighter.\u00a0 And we\u2019re doing it across the board.\u00a0 It\u2019s actually kind of an exciting time in Air Force acquisition.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We like to say take risks and fail fast, but one thing I\u2019ve observed over many years is that Washington, and the military in some ways most of all, whatever we say, is a zero-defect culture.\u00a0 You screw up once and you\u2019re basically finished.\u00a0 How do you change that?Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You know, it didn\u2019t used to be that way, and I think we\u2019re in some ways getting back to our roots.\u00a0 I call it\u2014it used to be with engineering students\u2014to failing productively.\u00a0 You want productive failure.\u00a0 There\u2019s a reason we call these experiments.\u00a0 It\u2019s because you\u2019re learning something.\u00a0 If you prototype something, you\u2019ve learned from it, and then you tweak your design.\u00a0 So you\u2019re failing productively, and then you move on.\u00a0 You reduce the risk.And in fact, one of the best examples of this is software.\u00a0 The military has been terrible about guying software.\u00a0 Anybody who has ever written\u2014and it doesn\u2019t really need to be software code\u2014imagine if your novel\u2014you wrote it all the way through and never went back to check anything, got to the end and turned it in to be checked.\u00a0 What is the probability that you\u2019ve got a mistake?\u00a0 102%, almost.\u00a0 I mean\u2014sorry, but\u2014Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s just embarrassing even to think about that.\u00a0 [LAUGHTER]Wilson:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You do that with software, and it\u2019s inevitable you\u2019re going to have problems, and it\u2019s a lot harder to find the problems if you do it in bug chunks.\u00a0 We are now shifting to agile development of software, in some cases updates overnight, so the risk is just yesterday\u2019s work that you have to debug.\u00a0 And that agile development gets capability to war-fighter faster and reduces the risk of having bugs in your code.\u00a0 And so, you debug it as you go.\u00a0 It\u2019s much faster, much better, and we\u2019re having a lot of success with it.Ignatius:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Makes me think of a question that if I don\u2019t ask you I\u2019d get a hard time from my wife, ",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7647",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/21/path-forward-new-frontiers-space-with-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Click here for transcriptWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsBill Nelson said he believes the technology to transport humans to Mars and allow them to stay there \u201cmaybe six months\u201d will exist by the late 2030s. \n\u201cWe\u2019re looking at late in the decade of the 2030s by the time we would develop all the technology of how you sustain human life all the way to Mars, stay on the surface maybe six months and then come all the way back.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said NASA is looking closely at planetary moons believed to have oceans that could contain life. \n\u201cThere are moons of other planets that we think there are oceans. If there are oceans, there is very likely to be life. So we are looking at that very, very aggressively. Then, at the end of this year, we\u2019re going to put up the new space telescope\u2026 this telescope, a million miles from Earth on the other side of the Earth than the sun, with a blanket behind it to shield out any sunlight, looking out through a keyhole in the sky\u2026 looking back 13.35 billion years to the source of light which is shortly after the big bang.\u201d\n\nNASA Administrator on reaching out to intelligent life:\n\u201cIf we get any kind of message of intelligent life, then I\u2019m going to suggest our scientists try to make contact with it.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said anyone going to the International Space Station would have to undergo NASA training which would not necessarily be required for private venture spaceflights. \n\u201cIf the so-called space tourists are going to the International Space Station, then what I am insisting on that they go through all the training\u2026 that any one of our astronauts would do\u2026NASA would require it... If they\u2019re going on a venture on their own, then that\u2019s a different matter.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson sees a need for a space military force and explained his objection to such a force in recent years was worry over creating a new bureaucracy. \n\u201cMy initial objection three, four years ago was I didn\u2019t want to see another bureaucracy created\u2026 There is indeed a need for a space force because more and more when it comes to the defense of this country, space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson is also wary of China\u2019s lack of transparency and cooperation when it comes to their space program. \n\u201cThe Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program. They are very inflexible, they are not very transparent\u2026 I think we are in a space race with China, they\u2019re aggressive, they are good, but I wish they\u2019d do what the old Soviet Union did when it came to civilian space, I wish they\u2019d cooperate and be transparent.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson commended Elon Musk for lowering the cost of rocket launches and was enthusiastic about Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos\u2019 recent flights to the edge of space. \n\u201cWell they\u2019re spending their own money, they are doing incredible things. You just think about what Elon Musk has already done He is spending money and has cut the cost of going to space because he is reusing his first stages of the rockets\u2026 He\u2019s saving everybody money going into space... When you take Branson and Jeff Bezos, they are making it accessible to go to the edge of space\u2026 the cost of that will come down over time so that more people will be able to experience that.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill NelsonProvided by NASA.Story continues below advertisementSen. Bill Nelson was sworn in as the 14th NASA administrator on May 3, 2021, tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris administration\u2019s vision for the agency.AdvertisementNelson chaired the Space Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives for six years and later served as the Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where he was recognized as the leading space program advocate in Congress.During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for NASA\u2019s Earth science programs and authored numerous pieces of legislation to combat and mitigate the effects of climate change. Nelson was also a vocal proponent for STEM career training and education programs to create and fill the jobs of the future.Story continues below advertisementIn 2010, Nelson and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) passed the landmark NASA legislation that mapped out a new future for NASA and set the agency on its present dual course of both government and commercial missions. In 2017, Nelson and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) authored the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, which expanded NASA\u2019s commercial activities in space. After leaving the Senate, Nelson continued to be engaged in NASA activities, serving on the NASA Advisory Council under former Administrator Jim Bridenstine.AdvertisementFrom president of 4-H to international president of the Key Club in high school, Nelson has always known the importance of investing in your neighbors and community to create a better future. Nelson continued to serve his community and country while in college at the University of Florida, Yale, and University of Virginia Law School through various service organizations, school leadership positions. He served on active duty as a Captain in the U.S. Army.Nelson has served in public office over four decades, first in the state legislature and U.S. Congress, then as State Treasurer. He was elected three times to the United States Senate, representing Florida for 18 years. His committees included the breadth of government policy from defense, intelligence and foreign policy to finance, commerce, and health care.Story continues below advertisementIn 1986 he flew on the 24th flight of the Space Shuttle. The mission on Columbia orbited the earth 98 times over six days. Nelson conducted 12 medical experiments including the first American stress test in space and a cancer research experiment sponsored by university researchers.AdvertisementIn 1971, Bill met Grace Cavert of Jacksonville, Florida, while speaking at a statewide young leader convention. Grace has been an active partner in Bill\u2019s public service career. From his first race for a seat in the Florida Legislature, Grace has been by his side knocking on doors and talking to folks about issues that mattered to them and their families. They have two grown children, Bill Jr. and Nan Ellen. 2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Join the conversation on Wednesday, July 21 at 12:00pm ET. The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7648",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/21/path-forward-new-frontiers-space-with-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Click here for transcriptWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsBill Nelson said he believes the technology to transport humans to Mars and allow them to stay there \u201cmaybe six months\u201d will exist by the late 2030s. \n\u201cWe\u2019re looking at late in the decade of the 2030s by the time we would develop all the technology of how you sustain human life all the way to Mars, stay on the surface maybe six months and then come all the way back.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said NASA is looking closely at planetary moons believed to have oceans that could contain life. \n\u201cThere are moons of other planets that we think there are oceans. If there are oceans, there is very likely to be life. So we are looking at that very, very aggressively. Then, at the end of this year, we\u2019re going to put up the new space telescope\u2026 this telescope, a million miles from Earth on the other side of the Earth than the sun, with a blanket behind it to shield out any sunlight, looking out through a keyhole in the sky\u2026 looking back 13.35 billion years to the source of light which is shortly after the big bang.\u201d\n\nNASA Administrator on reaching out to intelligent life:\n\u201cIf we get any kind of message of intelligent life, then I\u2019m going to suggest our scientists try to make contact with it.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said anyone going to the International Space Station would have to undergo NASA training which would not necessarily be required for private venture spaceflights. \n\u201cIf the so-called space tourists are going to the International Space Station, then what I am insisting on that they go through all the training\u2026 that any one of our astronauts would do\u2026NASA would require it... If they\u2019re going on a venture on their own, then that\u2019s a different matter.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson sees a need for a space military force and explained his objection to such a force in recent years was worry over creating a new bureaucracy. \n\u201cMy initial objection three, four years ago was I didn\u2019t want to see another bureaucracy created\u2026 There is indeed a need for a space force because more and more when it comes to the defense of this country, space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson is also wary of China\u2019s lack of transparency and cooperation when it comes to their space program. \n\u201cThe Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program. They are very inflexible, they are not very transparent\u2026 I think we are in a space race with China, they\u2019re aggressive, they are good, but I wish they\u2019d do what the old Soviet Union did when it came to civilian space, I wish they\u2019d cooperate and be transparent.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson commended Elon Musk for lowering the cost of rocket launches and was enthusiastic about Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos\u2019 recent flights to the edge of space. \n\u201cWell they\u2019re spending their own money, they are doing incredible things. You just think about what Elon Musk has already done He is spending money and has cut the cost of going to space because he is reusing his first stages of the rockets\u2026 He\u2019s saving everybody money going into space... When you take Branson and Jeff Bezos, they are making it accessible to go to the edge of space\u2026 the cost of that will come down over time so that more people will be able to experience that.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill NelsonProvided by NASA.Story continues below advertisementSen. Bill Nelson was sworn in as the 14th NASA administrator on May 3, 2021, tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris administration\u2019s vision for the agency.AdvertisementNelson chaired the Space Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives for six years and later served as the Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where he was recognized as the leading space program advocate in Congress.During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for NASA\u2019s Earth science programs and authored numerous pieces of legislation to combat and mitigate the effects of climate change. Nelson was also a vocal proponent for STEM career training and education programs to create and fill the jobs of the future.Story continues below advertisementIn 2010, Nelson and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) passed the landmark NASA legislation that mapped out a new future for NASA and set the agency on its present dual course of both government and commercial missions. In 2017, Nelson and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) authored the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, which expanded NASA\u2019s commercial activities in space. After leaving the Senate, Nelson continued to be engaged in NASA activities, serving on the NASA Advisory Council under former Administrator Jim Bridenstine.AdvertisementFrom president of 4-H to international president of the Key Club in high school, Nelson has always known the importance of investing in your neighbors and community to create a better future. Nelson continued to serve his community and country while in college at the University of Florida, Yale, and University of Virginia Law School through various service organizations, school leadership positions. He served on active duty as a Captain in the U.S. Army.Nelson has served in public office over four decades, first in the state legislature and U.S. Congress, then as State Treasurer. He was elected three times to the United States Senate, representing Florida for 18 years. His committees included the breadth of government policy from defense, intelligence and foreign policy to finance, commerce, and health care.Story continues below advertisementIn 1986 he flew on the 24th flight of the Space Shuttle. The mission on Columbia orbited the earth 98 times over six days. Nelson conducted 12 medical experiments including the first American stress test in space and a cancer research experiment sponsored by university researchers.AdvertisementIn 1971, Bill met Grace Cavert of Jacksonville, Florida, while speaking at a statewide young leader convention. Grace has been an active partner in Bill\u2019s public service career. From his first race for a seat in the Florida Legislature, Grace has been by his side knocking on doors and talking to folks about issues that mattered to them and their families. They have two grown children, Bill Jr. and Nan Ellen. 2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Join the conversation on Wednesday, July 21 at 12:00pm ET. The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7649",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/21/path-forward-new-frontiers-space-with-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Click here for transcriptWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsBill Nelson said he believes the technology to transport humans to Mars and allow them to stay there \u201cmaybe six months\u201d will exist by the late 2030s. \n\u201cWe\u2019re looking at late in the decade of the 2030s by the time we would develop all the technology of how you sustain human life all the way to Mars, stay on the surface maybe six months and then come all the way back.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said NASA is looking closely at planetary moons believed to have oceans that could contain life. \n\u201cThere are moons of other planets that we think there are oceans. If there are oceans, there is very likely to be life. So we are looking at that very, very aggressively. Then, at the end of this year, we\u2019re going to put up the new space telescope\u2026 this telescope, a million miles from Earth on the other side of the Earth than the sun, with a blanket behind it to shield out any sunlight, looking out through a keyhole in the sky\u2026 looking back 13.35 billion years to the source of light which is shortly after the big bang.\u201d\n\nNASA Administrator on reaching out to intelligent life:\n\u201cIf we get any kind of message of intelligent life, then I\u2019m going to suggest our scientists try to make contact with it.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said anyone going to the International Space Station would have to undergo NASA training which would not necessarily be required for private venture spaceflights. \n\u201cIf the so-called space tourists are going to the International Space Station, then what I am insisting on that they go through all the training\u2026 that any one of our astronauts would do\u2026NASA would require it... If they\u2019re going on a venture on their own, then that\u2019s a different matter.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson sees a need for a space military force and explained his objection to such a force in recent years was worry over creating a new bureaucracy. \n\u201cMy initial objection three, four years ago was I didn\u2019t want to see another bureaucracy created\u2026 There is indeed a need for a space force because more and more when it comes to the defense of this country, space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson is also wary of China\u2019s lack of transparency and cooperation when it comes to their space program. \n\u201cThe Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program. They are very inflexible, they are not very transparent\u2026 I think we are in a space race with China, they\u2019re aggressive, they are good, but I wish they\u2019d do what the old Soviet Union did when it came to civilian space, I wish they\u2019d cooperate and be transparent.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson commended Elon Musk for lowering the cost of rocket launches and was enthusiastic about Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos\u2019 recent flights to the edge of space. \n\u201cWell they\u2019re spending their own money, they are doing incredible things. You just think about what Elon Musk has already done He is spending money and has cut the cost of going to space because he is reusing his first stages of the rockets\u2026 He\u2019s saving everybody money going into space... When you take Branson and Jeff Bezos, they are making it accessible to go to the edge of space\u2026 the cost of that will come down over time so that more people will be able to experience that.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill NelsonProvided by NASA.Story continues below advertisementSen. Bill Nelson was sworn in as the 14th NASA administrator on May 3, 2021, tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris administration\u2019s vision for the agency.AdvertisementNelson chaired the Space Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives for six years and later served as the Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where he was recognized as the leading space program advocate in Congress.During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for NASA\u2019s Earth science programs and authored numerous pieces of legislation to combat and mitigate the effects of climate change. Nelson was also a vocal proponent for STEM career training and education programs to create and fill the jobs of the future.Story continues below advertisementIn 2010, Nelson and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) passed the landmark NASA legislation that mapped out a new future for NASA and set the agency on its present dual course of both government and commercial missions. In 2017, Nelson and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) authored the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, which expanded NASA\u2019s commercial activities in space. After leaving the Senate, Nelson continued to be engaged in NASA activities, serving on the NASA Advisory Council under former Administrator Jim Bridenstine.AdvertisementFrom president of 4-H to international president of the Key Club in high school, Nelson has always known the importance of investing in your neighbors and community to create a better future. Nelson continued to serve his community and country while in college at the University of Florida, Yale, and University of Virginia Law School through various service organizations, school leadership positions. He served on active duty as a Captain in the U.S. Army.Nelson has served in public office over four decades, first in the state legislature and U.S. Congress, then as State Treasurer. He was elected three times to the United States Senate, representing Florida for 18 years. His committees included the breadth of government policy from defense, intelligence and foreign policy to finance, commerce, and health care.Story continues below advertisementIn 1986 he flew on the 24th flight of the Space Shuttle. The mission on Columbia orbited the earth 98 times over six days. Nelson conducted 12 medical experiments including the first American stress test in space and a cancer research experiment sponsored by university researchers.AdvertisementIn 1971, Bill met Grace Cavert of Jacksonville, Florida, while speaking at a statewide young leader convention. Grace has been an active partner in Bill\u2019s public service career. From his first race for a seat in the Florida Legislature, Grace has been by his side knocking on doors and talking to folks about issues that mattered to them and their families. They have two grown children, Bill Jr. and Nan Ellen. 2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Join the conversation on Wednesday, July 21 at 12:00pm ET. The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7650",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/21/path-forward-new-frontiers-space-with-nasa-administrator-bill-nelson/",
        "text": "2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Click here for transcriptWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsBill Nelson said he believes the technology to transport humans to Mars and allow them to stay there \u201cmaybe six months\u201d will exist by the late 2030s. \n\u201cWe\u2019re looking at late in the decade of the 2030s by the time we would develop all the technology of how you sustain human life all the way to Mars, stay on the surface maybe six months and then come all the way back.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said NASA is looking closely at planetary moons believed to have oceans that could contain life. \n\u201cThere are moons of other planets that we think there are oceans. If there are oceans, there is very likely to be life. So we are looking at that very, very aggressively. Then, at the end of this year, we\u2019re going to put up the new space telescope\u2026 this telescope, a million miles from Earth on the other side of the Earth than the sun, with a blanket behind it to shield out any sunlight, looking out through a keyhole in the sky\u2026 looking back 13.35 billion years to the source of light which is shortly after the big bang.\u201d\n\nNASA Administrator on reaching out to intelligent life:\n\u201cIf we get any kind of message of intelligent life, then I\u2019m going to suggest our scientists try to make contact with it.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson said anyone going to the International Space Station would have to undergo NASA training which would not necessarily be required for private venture spaceflights. \n\u201cIf the so-called space tourists are going to the International Space Station, then what I am insisting on that they go through all the training\u2026 that any one of our astronauts would do\u2026NASA would require it... If they\u2019re going on a venture on their own, then that\u2019s a different matter.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson sees a need for a space military force and explained his objection to such a force in recent years was worry over creating a new bureaucracy. \n\u201cMy initial objection three, four years ago was I didn\u2019t want to see another bureaucracy created\u2026 There is indeed a need for a space force because more and more when it comes to the defense of this country, space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill Nelson is also wary of China\u2019s lack of transparency and cooperation when it comes to their space program. \n\u201cThe Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program. They are very inflexible, they are not very transparent\u2026 I think we are in a space race with China, they\u2019re aggressive, they are good, but I wish they\u2019d do what the old Soviet Union did when it came to civilian space, I wish they\u2019d cooperate and be transparent.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Nelson commended Elon Musk for lowering the cost of rocket launches and was enthusiastic about Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos\u2019 recent flights to the edge of space. \n\u201cWell they\u2019re spending their own money, they are doing incredible things. You just think about what Elon Musk has already done He is spending money and has cut the cost of going to space because he is reusing his first stages of the rockets\u2026 He\u2019s saving everybody money going into space... When you take Branson and Jeff Bezos, they are making it accessible to go to the edge of space\u2026 the cost of that will come down over time so that more people will be able to experience that.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Bill NelsonProvided by NASA.Story continues below advertisementSen. Bill Nelson was sworn in as the 14th NASA administrator on May 3, 2021, tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris administration\u2019s vision for the agency.AdvertisementNelson chaired the Space Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives for six years and later served as the Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where he was recognized as the leading space program advocate in Congress.During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for NASA\u2019s Earth science programs and authored numerous pieces of legislation to combat and mitigate the effects of climate change. Nelson was also a vocal proponent for STEM career training and education programs to create and fill the jobs of the future.Story continues below advertisementIn 2010, Nelson and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) passed the landmark NASA legislation that mapped out a new future for NASA and set the agency on its present dual course of both government and commercial missions. In 2017, Nelson and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) authored the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, which expanded NASA\u2019s commercial activities in space. After leaving the Senate, Nelson continued to be engaged in NASA activities, serving on the NASA Advisory Council under former Administrator Jim Bridenstine.AdvertisementFrom president of 4-H to international president of the Key Club in high school, Nelson has always known the importance of investing in your neighbors and community to create a better future. Nelson continued to serve his community and country while in college at the University of Florida, Yale, and University of Virginia Law School through various service organizations, school leadership positions. He served on active duty as a Captain in the U.S. Army.Nelson has served in public office over four decades, first in the state legislature and U.S. Congress, then as State Treasurer. He was elected three times to the United States Senate, representing Florida for 18 years. His committees included the breadth of government policy from defense, intelligence and foreign policy to finance, commerce, and health care.Story continues below advertisementIn 1986 he flew on the 24th flight of the Space Shuttle. The mission on Columbia orbited the earth 98 times over six days. Nelson conducted 12 medical experiments including the first American stress test in space and a cancer research experiment sponsored by university researchers.AdvertisementIn 1971, Bill met Grace Cavert of Jacksonville, Florida, while speaking at a statewide young leader convention. Grace has been an active partner in Bill\u2019s public service career. From his first race for a seat in the Florida Legislature, Grace has been by his side knocking on doors and talking to folks about issues that mattered to them and their families. They have two grown children, Bill Jr. and Nan Ellen. 2021 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for space travel and exploration. With NASA and the private sector working in tandem to launch human spaceflights from the United States, a new commitment to sending rockets to the moon and making space more accessible to the public, we are poised to see decades of space enterprise planning finally realized. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joins Washington Post columnist David Ignatius for a wide-ranging conversation focused on the Biden Administration\u2019s goals in space, the state of the international space race, and the latest developments on private-public partnerships aimed at commercializing space travel, accelerating human spaceflight, and exploring the universe like never before. Join the conversation on Wednesday, July 21 at 12:00pm ET. The Path Forward: New Frontiers in Space with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Path Forward: The Economy with Neel Kashkari, President & CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7651",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/05/path-forward-economy-with-neel-kashkari-president-ceo-federal-reserve-bank-minneapolis/",
        "text": "America is coming through a financial crisis many say is worse than the 2007-2008 recession. On Friday, March 5 at 12:00pm ET, Washington Post Live will hear from one of the men who helped guide the United States through that most recent economic crash. Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will discuss with Washington Post economics correspondent Heather Long his views on the long-term outlook for America\u2019s economic recovery, his belief that quality public education is a fundamental right, and the critical role his running of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) played in the United States weathering the crash of 2007-2008. Click here for a transcript. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsThe most recent jobs report says the unemployment rate fell to 6.2 percent, but Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says the unemployment rate is probably closer to 9.5 percent. \u201cMany people have left the labor force, they\u2019ve given up looking for work, so they\u2019re not counted as unemployed.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says women, low income workers and those who work in the service industry have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. \u201cThat\u2019s where we see the most economic pain, and those are the folks that we really need to work hard to reach to bring back in. It\u2019s not only important for them, of course that\u2019s true, it\u2019s also important for our economy\u2019s potential. (Washington Post Live)Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says any economic relief package Congress passes has to last as long as the pandemic does. \u201cIt really, in my mind, is not meant to be stimulus, it\u2019s meant to be relief for those families who have lost jobs and for those small businesses who have been dramatically affected by this. I just firmly believe, and I applaud Congress for being aggressive, that they should continue to support people who have lost their jobs until we can get this pandemic behind us.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Neel KashkariNeel Kashkari took office as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Jan. 1, 2016, following a national search conducted by the Bank\u2019s independent board of directors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn this role, he serves on the Federal Open Market Committee, bringing the Ninth District\u2019s perspective to monetary policy discussions in Washington, D.C. In addition to his responsibilities as a monetary policymaker, Kashkari oversees all operations of the Bank, including supervision and regulation, treasury services, and payments services.Kashkari leads the Bank\u2019s many initiatives. Among them, he was instrumental in establishing the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute, whose mission is to ensure that world-class research helps to improve the economic well-being of all Americans.Most recently, he has joined with retired Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page to propose amending Minnesota\u2019s constitution to make a quality public education a fundamental right. This effort supports the Fed\u2019s mandate to achieve maximum employment, with education being a key to obtaining a good job.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder Kashkari\u2019s leadership, the Minneapolis Fed also released an action plan on \u201cEnding Too Big to Fail,\u201d which calls for tighter bank regulations to avoid future taxpayer bailouts of large financial institutions.Committed to increasing transparency at the Fed, Kashkari has published in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Financial Times and is active on Twitter and Instagram. He also serves on the board of the Economic Club of Minnesota and as a member of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.Kashkari began his career as an aerospace engineer at TRW in Redondo Beach, Calif., where he developed technology for NASA space science missions. Following graduate school, he joined Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, where he helped technology companies raise capital and pursue strategic transactions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom 2006 to 2009, Kashkari served in several senior positions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In 2008, he was confirmed as assistant secretary of the Treasury. In this role, he oversaw the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis. Kashkari received the Alexander Hamilton Award, the Treasury Department\u2019s highest honor for distinguished service.Following his tenure in Washington, Kashkari returned to California in 2009 and joined PIMCO as managing director and member of the executive office. He left the firm in 2013 to explore returning to public service and, in 2014, ran for governor of California on a platform focused on economic opportunity.Raised in Ohio, Kashkari earned his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.He lives with his wife, Christine, children, Uly and Tecumseh, and Newfoundland dogs\u2014Webster and Newsome\u2014in Orono, Minn. America is coming through a financial crisis many say is worse than the 2007-2008 recession.  On Friday, March 5 at 12:00pm ET, Washington Post Live will hear from one of the men who helped guide the United States through that most recent economic crash. Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will discuss with Washington Post economics correspondent Heather Long his views on the long-term outlook for America\u2019s economic recovery, his belief that quality public education is a fundamental right, and the critical role his running of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) played in the United States weathering the crash of 2007-2008. The Path Forward: The Economy with Neel Kashkari, President & CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Path Forward: The Economy with Neel Kashkari, President & CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7652",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/03/05/path-forward-economy-with-neel-kashkari-president-ceo-federal-reserve-bank-minneapolis/",
        "text": "America is coming through a financial crisis many say is worse than the 2007-2008 recession. On Friday, March 5 at 12:00pm ET, Washington Post Live will hear from one of the men who helped guide the United States through that most recent economic crash. Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will discuss with Washington Post economics correspondent Heather Long his views on the long-term outlook for America\u2019s economic recovery, his belief that quality public education is a fundamental right, and the critical role his running of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) played in the United States weathering the crash of 2007-2008. Click here for a transcript. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsThe most recent jobs report says the unemployment rate fell to 6.2 percent, but Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says the unemployment rate is probably closer to 9.5 percent. \u201cMany people have left the labor force, they\u2019ve given up looking for work, so they\u2019re not counted as unemployed.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says women, low income workers and those who work in the service industry have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. \u201cThat\u2019s where we see the most economic pain, and those are the folks that we really need to work hard to reach to bring back in. It\u2019s not only important for them, of course that\u2019s true, it\u2019s also important for our economy\u2019s potential. (Washington Post Live)Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says any economic relief package Congress passes has to last as long as the pandemic does. \u201cIt really, in my mind, is not meant to be stimulus, it\u2019s meant to be relief for those families who have lost jobs and for those small businesses who have been dramatically affected by this. I just firmly believe, and I applaud Congress for being aggressive, that they should continue to support people who have lost their jobs until we can get this pandemic behind us.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Neel KashkariNeel Kashkari took office as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Jan. 1, 2016, following a national search conducted by the Bank\u2019s independent board of directors.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn this role, he serves on the Federal Open Market Committee, bringing the Ninth District\u2019s perspective to monetary policy discussions in Washington, D.C. In addition to his responsibilities as a monetary policymaker, Kashkari oversees all operations of the Bank, including supervision and regulation, treasury services, and payments services.Kashkari leads the Bank\u2019s many initiatives. Among them, he was instrumental in establishing the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute, whose mission is to ensure that world-class research helps to improve the economic well-being of all Americans.Most recently, he has joined with retired Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page to propose amending Minnesota\u2019s constitution to make a quality public education a fundamental right. This effort supports the Fed\u2019s mandate to achieve maximum employment, with education being a key to obtaining a good job.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnder Kashkari\u2019s leadership, the Minneapolis Fed also released an action plan on \u201cEnding Too Big to Fail,\u201d which calls for tighter bank regulations to avoid future taxpayer bailouts of large financial institutions.Committed to increasing transparency at the Fed, Kashkari has published in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Financial Times and is active on Twitter and Instagram. He also serves on the board of the Economic Club of Minnesota and as a member of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.Kashkari began his career as an aerospace engineer at TRW in Redondo Beach, Calif., where he developed technology for NASA space science missions. Following graduate school, he joined Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, where he helped technology companies raise capital and pursue strategic transactions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrom 2006 to 2009, Kashkari served in several senior positions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In 2008, he was confirmed as assistant secretary of the Treasury. In this role, he oversaw the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis. Kashkari received the Alexander Hamilton Award, the Treasury Department\u2019s highest honor for distinguished service.Following his tenure in Washington, Kashkari returned to California in 2009 and joined PIMCO as managing director and member of the executive office. He left the firm in 2013 to explore returning to public service and, in 2014, ran for governor of California on a platform focused on economic opportunity.Raised in Ohio, Kashkari earned his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.He lives with his wife, Christine, children, Uly and Tecumseh, and Newfoundland dogs\u2014Webster and Newsome\u2014in Orono, Minn. America is coming through a financial crisis many say is worse than the 2007-2008 recession.  On Friday, March 5 at 12:00pm ET, Washington Post Live will hear from one of the men who helped guide the United States through that most recent economic crash. Neel Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will discuss with Washington Post economics correspondent Heather Long his views on the long-term outlook for America\u2019s economic recovery, his belief that quality public education is a fundamental right, and the critical role his running of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) played in the United States weathering the crash of 2007-2008. The Path Forward: The Economy with Neel Kashkari, President & CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7653",
        "date": "2021-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/06/08/ufos-national-security-with-luis-elizondo-former-director-advanced-aerospace-threat-identification-program-aatip/",
        "text": "There is a bipartisan push in Congress to find out once and for all: Are we alone? It isn\u2019t a philosophical query, but a demand to disclose any information the U.S. government has been gathering on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP), also popularly known as UFOs. Last December, as part of the omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package, Congress stipulated a report conducted by multiple agencies must be handed over this month with detailed analysis of UAP sightings by U.S. military members. Luis \u201cLue\u201d Elizondo is the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an unpublicized U.S. government program created in 2007 committed to the investigation of UAPs. Elizondo joins Jacqueline Alemany, author of the \u201cPower Up\u201d newsletter and congressional correspondent, on Tuesday, June 8 at 3:30pm ET. Click here for transcriptWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsLuis Elizondo said UAPs have been observed at U.S. nuclear sites as well as at sites all over the globe. \n \u201cThere does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sightings and our nuclear technology, whether it\u2019s nuclear propulsion, nuclear power and generation, or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, those same observations have been made overseas in other countries. They too have had the same incidents, so that tells us this a global issue. Now in this country, we\u2019ve had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis Elizondo said he believes the report will say there are around 100 UAP cases compelling enough to warrant further scrutiny, and that we don\u2019t know what UAPs are or where they come from. \n \u201cIf this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that did happen to technologically leapfrog us, 180 days I don\u2019t think is going to be sufficient. I think what we can expect the report to say is something like this: There are about a hundred some-odd cases out there that are compelling enough, that they are definitely displaying some sort of capability, technology that we don\u2019t have. Secondly, we don\u2019t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time, we have no evidence to suggest that they\u2019re not.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis Elizondo says the new report on UAPs definitely states the observed technology is not of the U.S.\u2019s creation, and says he doesn\u2019t believe its from China or Russia either. \n\u201cAs of this week\u2026 discussions at senior level leadership that this report has definitively stated once and for all that it\u2019s not our technology\u2026. So that really only leaves two other options, and again it\u2019s foreign adversarial or it\u2019s something quite different. And I think as we\u2019re now beginning to learn as we\u2019ve heard from the director of national intelligence and I can certainly tell you from my experience, that we\u2019re pretty confident that it\u2019s not Russian or Chinese technology.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Former AATIP Director Luis Elizondo explains the observables associated with UAPs, and says current observation technology has record them underwater. \n\u201cThere\u2019s five distinct observables that set this technology as I mentioned earlier aside from everything we have in our inventory. The first is hyper sonic velocity, the ability to change directions instantly\u2026 the third observable is a bit like \u2018cloaking,\u2019 we call it low observability, but the forth observable is\u2026 trans-medium travel\u2026 the ability for an object to not only fly in our atmosphere\u2013low and high altitudes\u00ac\u2013but also potentially in a vacuum environment like space and even underwater\u2026 We\u2019ve seen these things, they\u2019ve been recorded not only in our atmosphere, but there\u2019s data to suggest that they\u2019ve also been tracked by some of our capabilities underwater as well.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis \u201cLue\u201d ElizondoProvided by Luis Elizondo.I\u2019m the son of a Cuban immigrant father who was a dissident of the Castro regime. My father spent time as a political prisoner for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs. I grew up in South Florida and, as a young man, I was often exposed to my father\u2019s efforts in helping change the political situation in Cuba.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater, I attended the University of Miami, with double majors in Microbiology and Immunology and minors in Chemistry. I also gained advanced research experience in Parasitology and certain tropical diseases such as Malaria and Trypanosomiasis.My goal with these degrees was to enter the medical field. During my research experience I was tangentially exposed to government agencies that were interested in biological research and intelligence. It was at this point I decided to pursue a career in intelligence and realized my true passion. I also decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.During my short tenure in the U.S. Army, I had the honor and privilege to serve in various assignments. As a Counterintelligence Special Agent, I was assigned to the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and later, throughout America\u2019s Southwest. As a young Agent, I conducted counterespionage investigations, provided technology protection of advanced aerospace systems and platforms, supported U.S./Russia Treaties (Open Skies & START-II), and conducted routine security background investigations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShortly thereafter, I was recruited into a Special Activities Program with the Department of the Army. This led me to new assignments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. As an Intelligence Operations Officer, my responsibilities included oversight of sensitive source operations, counter-insurgency missions, and support to counter-narcotics.Immediately following the aftermath of the attacks on September 11th, I spent the following years working alongside our brave men and women in uniform in Afghanistan and the Middle East.In these environments, I worked with the full spectrum of U.S. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, focusing our efforts along with Special Operations to identify and defeat terrorist organizations. In this environment I was able to work within a multi-national effort supporting the global war on terror.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter several assignments in the Middle East, I was assigned to Washington D.C. as the Overseas Investigations Desk Officer. There I had the responsibility of managing foreign intelligence and terrorist investigations worldwide. Over the next several years, I worked within a variety of intelligence agencies and organizations.In 2008 I was asked to be part of the now-famous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). In 2010, as a Staff member for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), I assumed the lead role for this endeavor. Our mission was to conduct scientific-based, intelligence investigations of incursions by Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) into controlled U.S. airspace.In 2017, with a heavy heart, I resigned from my position inside the Pentagon in an effort to raise awareness of the UAP issue. The decision to resign was based on my sense of loyalty to the Secretary and my beloved Department, in order to dismantle the bureaucratic silos and stovepipes hindering the conversation about this important topic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2017, I joined a private company comprised of former intelligence officers, engineers, scientists, and an entertainer to advocate UFO/UAP transparency. This effort provided us a platform to engage U.S. Congressional leadership, Executive level policy makers, and the media.In early 2018, I began working with A&E\u2019s History Channel to help expose the truth about the phenomena on the television series UNIDENTIFIED: Inside America\u2019s UFO Investigation. This collaboration allowed several of my colleagues and I to raise awareness of UFOs/UAPs while showcasing the investigative process and legitimizing the science behind our work. In this series, I was both a Host and Technical Producer.In late 2020, I decided to focus on disclosure advocacy at the global level\u2026and this is where our journey begins!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn my personal time, I enjoy spending time with my family and experiencing new cultures and the process of learning new perspectives on all aspects of society.My passion involves anything having to do with science and trying to uncover the hidden language of the universe.I spend much of my free time with my family and our two beloved German Shepherds, Paris and Hercules, and hiking the trails in the mountains.I also enjoy stargazing with friends and family over a warm bonfire.I am a staunch supporter of individual freedoms.I\u2019m an inventor holding multiple patents in marine transportation and I\u2019m a classic car enthusiast.My greatest accomplishments are my two daughters.I\u2019m also a champion of veteran groups and a supporter of animal rights.My hope for the future is to engage more people and learn from each other, based on our varied backgrounds, unique experiences, and rich diversity There is a bipartisan push in Congress to find out once and for all: Are we alone? It isn\u2019t a philosophical query, but a demand to disclose any information the U.S. government has been gathering on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP), also popularly known as UFOs. Last December, as part of the omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package, Congress stipulated a report conducted by multiple agencies must be handed over this month with detailed analysis of UAP sightings by U.S. military members. Luis \u201cLue\u201d Elizondo is the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an unpublicized U.S. government program created in 2007 committed to the investigation of UAPs. Elizondo joins Jacqueline Alemany, author of the \u201cPower Up\u201d newsletter and congressional correspondent, on Tuesday, June 8 at 3:30pm ET. UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7654",
        "date": "2021-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/06/08/ufos-national-security-with-luis-elizondo-former-director-advanced-aerospace-threat-identification-program-aatip/",
        "text": "There is a bipartisan push in Congress to find out once and for all: Are we alone? It isn\u2019t a philosophical query, but a demand to disclose any information the U.S. government has been gathering on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP), also popularly known as UFOs. Last December, as part of the omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package, Congress stipulated a report conducted by multiple agencies must be handed over this month with detailed analysis of UAP sightings by U.S. military members. Luis \u201cLue\u201d Elizondo is the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an unpublicized U.S. government program created in 2007 committed to the investigation of UAPs. Elizondo joins Jacqueline Alemany, author of the \u201cPower Up\u201d newsletter and congressional correspondent, on Tuesday, June 8 at 3:30pm ET. Click here for transcriptWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsLuis Elizondo said UAPs have been observed at U.S. nuclear sites as well as at sites all over the globe. \n \u201cThere does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sightings and our nuclear technology, whether it\u2019s nuclear propulsion, nuclear power and generation, or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, those same observations have been made overseas in other countries. They too have had the same incidents, so that tells us this a global issue. Now in this country, we\u2019ve had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis Elizondo said he believes the report will say there are around 100 UAP cases compelling enough to warrant further scrutiny, and that we don\u2019t know what UAPs are or where they come from. \n \u201cIf this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that did happen to technologically leapfrog us, 180 days I don\u2019t think is going to be sufficient. I think what we can expect the report to say is something like this: There are about a hundred some-odd cases out there that are compelling enough, that they are definitely displaying some sort of capability, technology that we don\u2019t have. Secondly, we don\u2019t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time, we have no evidence to suggest that they\u2019re not.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis Elizondo says the new report on UAPs definitely states the observed technology is not of the U.S.\u2019s creation, and says he doesn\u2019t believe its from China or Russia either. \n\u201cAs of this week\u2026 discussions at senior level leadership that this report has definitively stated once and for all that it\u2019s not our technology\u2026. So that really only leaves two other options, and again it\u2019s foreign adversarial or it\u2019s something quite different. And I think as we\u2019re now beginning to learn as we\u2019ve heard from the director of national intelligence and I can certainly tell you from my experience, that we\u2019re pretty confident that it\u2019s not Russian or Chinese technology.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Former AATIP Director Luis Elizondo explains the observables associated with UAPs, and says current observation technology has record them underwater. \n\u201cThere\u2019s five distinct observables that set this technology as I mentioned earlier aside from everything we have in our inventory. The first is hyper sonic velocity, the ability to change directions instantly\u2026 the third observable is a bit like \u2018cloaking,\u2019 we call it low observability, but the forth observable is\u2026 trans-medium travel\u2026 the ability for an object to not only fly in our atmosphere\u2013low and high altitudes\u00ac\u2013but also potentially in a vacuum environment like space and even underwater\u2026 We\u2019ve seen these things, they\u2019ve been recorded not only in our atmosphere, but there\u2019s data to suggest that they\u2019ve also been tracked by some of our capabilities underwater as well.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis \u201cLue\u201d ElizondoProvided by Luis Elizondo.I\u2019m the son of a Cuban immigrant father who was a dissident of the Castro regime. My father spent time as a political prisoner for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs. I grew up in South Florida and, as a young man, I was often exposed to my father\u2019s efforts in helping change the political situation in Cuba.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater, I attended the University of Miami, with double majors in Microbiology and Immunology and minors in Chemistry. I also gained advanced research experience in Parasitology and certain tropical diseases such as Malaria and Trypanosomiasis.My goal with these degrees was to enter the medical field. During my research experience I was tangentially exposed to government agencies that were interested in biological research and intelligence. It was at this point I decided to pursue a career in intelligence and realized my true passion. I also decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.During my short tenure in the U.S. Army, I had the honor and privilege to serve in various assignments. As a Counterintelligence Special Agent, I was assigned to the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and later, throughout America\u2019s Southwest. As a young Agent, I conducted counterespionage investigations, provided technology protection of advanced aerospace systems and platforms, supported U.S./Russia Treaties (Open Skies & START-II), and conducted routine security background investigations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShortly thereafter, I was recruited into a Special Activities Program with the Department of the Army. This led me to new assignments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. As an Intelligence Operations Officer, my responsibilities included oversight of sensitive source operations, counter-insurgency missions, and support to counter-narcotics.Immediately following the aftermath of the attacks on September 11th, I spent the following years working alongside our brave men and women in uniform in Afghanistan and the Middle East.In these environments, I worked with the full spectrum of U.S. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, focusing our efforts along with Special Operations to identify and defeat terrorist organizations. In this environment I was able to work within a multi-national effort supporting the global war on terror.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter several assignments in the Middle East, I was assigned to Washington D.C. as the Overseas Investigations Desk Officer. There I had the responsibility of managing foreign intelligence and terrorist investigations worldwide. Over the next several years, I worked within a variety of intelligence agencies and organizations.In 2008 I was asked to be part of the now-famous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). In 2010, as a Staff member for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), I assumed the lead role for this endeavor. Our mission was to conduct scientific-based, intelligence investigations of incursions by Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) into controlled U.S. airspace.In 2017, with a heavy heart, I resigned from my position inside the Pentagon in an effort to raise awareness of the UAP issue. The decision to resign was based on my sense of loyalty to the Secretary and my beloved Department, in order to dismantle the bureaucratic silos and stovepipes hindering the conversation about this important topic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2017, I joined a private company comprised of former intelligence officers, engineers, scientists, and an entertainer to advocate UFO/UAP transparency. This effort provided us a platform to engage U.S. Congressional leadership, Executive level policy makers, and the media.In early 2018, I began working with A&E\u2019s History Channel to help expose the truth about the phenomena on the television series UNIDENTIFIED: Inside America\u2019s UFO Investigation. This collaboration allowed several of my colleagues and I to raise awareness of UFOs/UAPs while showcasing the investigative process and legitimizing the science behind our work. In this series, I was both a Host and Technical Producer.In late 2020, I decided to focus on disclosure advocacy at the global level\u2026and this is where our journey begins!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn my personal time, I enjoy spending time with my family and experiencing new cultures and the process of learning new perspectives on all aspects of society.My passion involves anything having to do with science and trying to uncover the hidden language of the universe.I spend much of my free time with my family and our two beloved German Shepherds, Paris and Hercules, and hiking the trails in the mountains.I also enjoy stargazing with friends and family over a warm bonfire.I am a staunch supporter of individual freedoms.I\u2019m an inventor holding multiple patents in marine transportation and I\u2019m a classic car enthusiast.My greatest accomplishments are my two daughters.I\u2019m also a champion of veteran groups and a supporter of animal rights.My hope for the future is to engage more people and learn from each other, based on our varied backgrounds, unique experiences, and rich diversity There is a bipartisan push in Congress to find out once and for all: Are we alone? It isn\u2019t a philosophical query, but a demand to disclose any information the U.S. government has been gathering on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP), also popularly known as UFOs. Last December, as part of the omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package, Congress stipulated a report conducted by multiple agencies must be handed over this month with detailed analysis of UAP sightings by U.S. military members. Luis \u201cLue\u201d Elizondo is the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an unpublicized U.S. government program created in 2007 committed to the investigation of UAPs. Elizondo joins Jacqueline Alemany, author of the \u201cPower Up\u201d newsletter and congressional correspondent, on Tuesday, June 8 at 3:30pm ET. UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7655",
        "date": "2021-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/06/08/ufos-national-security-with-luis-elizondo-former-director-advanced-aerospace-threat-identification-program-aatip/",
        "text": "There is a bipartisan push in Congress to find out once and for all: Are we alone? It isn\u2019t a philosophical query, but a demand to disclose any information the U.S. government has been gathering on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP), also popularly known as UFOs. Last December, as part of the omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package, Congress stipulated a report conducted by multiple agencies must be handed over this month with detailed analysis of UAP sightings by U.S. military members. Luis \u201cLue\u201d Elizondo is the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an unpublicized U.S. government program created in 2007 committed to the investigation of UAPs. Elizondo joins Jacqueline Alemany, author of the \u201cPower Up\u201d newsletter and congressional correspondent, on Tuesday, June 8 at 3:30pm ET. Click here for transcriptWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHighlightsLuis Elizondo said UAPs have been observed at U.S. nuclear sites as well as at sites all over the globe. \n \u201cThere does seem to be some sort of congruency or some sort of intersection between these UAP or UFO sightings and our nuclear technology, whether it\u2019s nuclear propulsion, nuclear power and generation, or nuclear weapons systems. Furthermore, those same observations have been made overseas in other countries. They too have had the same incidents, so that tells us this a global issue. Now in this country, we\u2019ve had incidents where these UAPs have interfered and actually brought offline our nuclear capabilities.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis Elizondo said he believes the report will say there are around 100 UAP cases compelling enough to warrant further scrutiny, and that we don\u2019t know what UAPs are or where they come from. \n \u201cIf this turns out to be some sort of adversarial technology that did happen to technologically leapfrog us, 180 days I don\u2019t think is going to be sufficient. I think what we can expect the report to say is something like this: There are about a hundred some-odd cases out there that are compelling enough, that they are definitely displaying some sort of capability, technology that we don\u2019t have. Secondly, we don\u2019t know what these things are. We have no evidence to suggest that they are from outer space, but at the same time, we have no evidence to suggest that they\u2019re not.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis Elizondo says the new report on UAPs definitely states the observed technology is not of the U.S.\u2019s creation, and says he doesn\u2019t believe its from China or Russia either. \n\u201cAs of this week\u2026 discussions at senior level leadership that this report has definitively stated once and for all that it\u2019s not our technology\u2026. So that really only leaves two other options, and again it\u2019s foreign adversarial or it\u2019s something quite different. And I think as we\u2019re now beginning to learn as we\u2019ve heard from the director of national intelligence and I can certainly tell you from my experience, that we\u2019re pretty confident that it\u2019s not Russian or Chinese technology.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Former AATIP Director Luis Elizondo explains the observables associated with UAPs, and says current observation technology has record them underwater. \n\u201cThere\u2019s five distinct observables that set this technology as I mentioned earlier aside from everything we have in our inventory. The first is hyper sonic velocity, the ability to change directions instantly\u2026 the third observable is a bit like \u2018cloaking,\u2019 we call it low observability, but the forth observable is\u2026 trans-medium travel\u2026 the ability for an object to not only fly in our atmosphere\u2013low and high altitudes\u00ac\u2013but also potentially in a vacuum environment like space and even underwater\u2026 We\u2019ve seen these things, they\u2019ve been recorded not only in our atmosphere, but there\u2019s data to suggest that they\u2019ve also been tracked by some of our capabilities underwater as well.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Luis \u201cLue\u201d ElizondoProvided by Luis Elizondo.I\u2019m the son of a Cuban immigrant father who was a dissident of the Castro regime. My father spent time as a political prisoner for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs. I grew up in South Florida and, as a young man, I was often exposed to my father\u2019s efforts in helping change the political situation in Cuba.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLater, I attended the University of Miami, with double majors in Microbiology and Immunology and minors in Chemistry. I also gained advanced research experience in Parasitology and certain tropical diseases such as Malaria and Trypanosomiasis.My goal with these degrees was to enter the medical field. During my research experience I was tangentially exposed to government agencies that were interested in biological research and intelligence. It was at this point I decided to pursue a career in intelligence and realized my true passion. I also decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.During my short tenure in the U.S. Army, I had the honor and privilege to serve in various assignments. As a Counterintelligence Special Agent, I was assigned to the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and later, throughout America\u2019s Southwest. As a young Agent, I conducted counterespionage investigations, provided technology protection of advanced aerospace systems and platforms, supported U.S./Russia Treaties (Open Skies & START-II), and conducted routine security background investigations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShortly thereafter, I was recruited into a Special Activities Program with the Department of the Army. This led me to new assignments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. As an Intelligence Operations Officer, my responsibilities included oversight of sensitive source operations, counter-insurgency missions, and support to counter-narcotics.Immediately following the aftermath of the attacks on September 11th, I spent the following years working alongside our brave men and women in uniform in Afghanistan and the Middle East.In these environments, I worked with the full spectrum of U.S. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, focusing our efforts along with Special Operations to identify and defeat terrorist organizations. In this environment I was able to work within a multi-national effort supporting the global war on terror.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter several assignments in the Middle East, I was assigned to Washington D.C. as the Overseas Investigations Desk Officer. There I had the responsibility of managing foreign intelligence and terrorist investigations worldwide. Over the next several years, I worked within a variety of intelligence agencies and organizations.In 2008 I was asked to be part of the now-famous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). In 2010, as a Staff member for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), I assumed the lead role for this endeavor. Our mission was to conduct scientific-based, intelligence investigations of incursions by Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) into controlled U.S. airspace.In 2017, with a heavy heart, I resigned from my position inside the Pentagon in an effort to raise awareness of the UAP issue. The decision to resign was based on my sense of loyalty to the Secretary and my beloved Department, in order to dismantle the bureaucratic silos and stovepipes hindering the conversation about this important topic.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2017, I joined a private company comprised of former intelligence officers, engineers, scientists, and an entertainer to advocate UFO/UAP transparency. This effort provided us a platform to engage U.S. Congressional leadership, Executive level policy makers, and the media.In early 2018, I began working with A&E\u2019s History Channel to help expose the truth about the phenomena on the television series UNIDENTIFIED: Inside America\u2019s UFO Investigation. This collaboration allowed several of my colleagues and I to raise awareness of UFOs/UAPs while showcasing the investigative process and legitimizing the science behind our work. In this series, I was both a Host and Technical Producer.In late 2020, I decided to focus on disclosure advocacy at the global level\u2026and this is where our journey begins!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn my personal time, I enjoy spending time with my family and experiencing new cultures and the process of learning new perspectives on all aspects of society.My passion involves anything having to do with science and trying to uncover the hidden language of the universe.I spend much of my free time with my family and our two beloved German Shepherds, Paris and Hercules, and hiking the trails in the mountains.I also enjoy stargazing with friends and family over a warm bonfire.I am a staunch supporter of individual freedoms.I\u2019m an inventor holding multiple patents in marine transportation and I\u2019m a classic car enthusiast.My greatest accomplishments are my two daughters.I\u2019m also a champion of veteran groups and a supporter of animal rights.My hope for the future is to engage more people and learn from each other, based on our varied backgrounds, unique experiences, and rich diversity There is a bipartisan push in Congress to find out once and for all: Are we alone? It isn\u2019t a philosophical query, but a demand to disclose any information the U.S. government has been gathering on unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP), also popularly known as UFOs. Last December, as part of the omnibus spending and coronavirus-relief package, Congress stipulated a report conducted by multiple agencies must be handed over this month with detailed analysis of UAP sightings by U.S. military members. Luis \u201cLue\u201d Elizondo is the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), an unpublicized U.S. government program created in 2007 committed to the investigation of UAPs. Elizondo joins Jacqueline Alemany, author of the \u201cPower Up\u201d newsletter and congressional correspondent, on Tuesday, June 8 at 3:30pm ET. UFOs & National Security with Luis Elizondo, Former Director, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: The Path Forward: Space Force with Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7656",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/04/30/transcript-path-forward-space-force-with-chief-space-operations-gen-john-w-jay-raymond/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I am David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. Today our special guest on \u201cThe Path Forward\u201d is General Jay Raymond, who is the Chief of Space Operations for the U.S. Space Force, is the newest member of the joint chiefs of staff. General Raymond is a space guy. While he was still serving as an Air Force officer, he was commander of Space Command. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGeneral Raymond, it is great to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us.GEN. RAYMOND: Oh, David, I can't thank you enough. I really appreciate it. It is good to see you again.MR. IGNATIUS: Good to see you, sir. So, folks probably don't know a whole lot about the Space Force, and maybe we could begin by your describing for our viewers what you see as the mission of this newly created branch of the military, and what you see as the nature of the threat that you are facing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGEN. RAYMOND: Absolutely, and again I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. As you showed in that opening video, you showed pictures and you described a little bit about what the Space Force is and what NASA is. Let me start by saying we are not NASA. NASA is a civilian agency that is all about exploring space and planetary exploration and science. We are an armed service, and our service is focused on providing capabilities for our nation that fuel our American way of life, and they also fuel our American way of war.And so, the average American, you know, before you get up in the morning or after you get up in the morning and before you have your first cup of coffee, you have used space on several occasions. We operate a GPS constellation. We operate communications satellites, missile-warning satellites. We launch those satellites into orbit. We acquire those satellites. And more importantly, today, we protect and defend those satellites, because they have become so critical for our nation and for our military. There are adversaries out there that are building capabilities to keep us from accessing those critical space capabilities for our advantage. And so, we are in the protect-and-defend business as well.So it is a complete cradle-to-grave, from acquiring to launching to operating those capabilities to tracking those capabilities to acting as the space traffic control for the world to make sure that the domain is safe for all, to integrating those capabilities into operations of every single service and joint partner that we have, and to make sure that just as every American, when you walk in the room and you turn on the light switch, the lights come on, that when America needs space it is always there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: General Raymond, I want to ask you to take that a little further. Strange as it seems to most of us, when we gaze up into the sky, space is now potentially a warfighting domain. And I want to ask you how you think, as a military commander, about defense and offense in this warfighting domain.GEN. RAYMOND: It is clear, David, that space is a warfighting domain, just like air, land, and sea, and it is something that has really materialized here over the last handful of years as both China, which is our pacing threat, and Russia have developed weapons that can either disrupt our satellites or destroy our satellites, from on the ground or in space, or in cyber.And so, our view is that although it is a warfighting domain, our goal is to not get into a conflict that begins or extends into space. Our goal is to deter that from happening, and to do that, in my opinion, the way you do that is you do that from a position of strength, and you do that by denying--or changing the deterrence calculus of a competitor and adversary. And that is either denying benefits or imposing costs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, our goal is, again, to deter that conflict. We do not want to get into a conflict that begins or extends into space. We want to keep the domain safe for all. We want to make sure that every American and every one of our global partners around the world has those space capabilities at their fingertips when they need it, and to do so we've got to be able to protect and defend, and we have also got to be able to imposes costs, if needed, to change that calculus.MR. IGNATIUS: Something you and I have talked about a little bit in the past is how deterrence might work in this domain. What we know of deterrence is largely from the era of nuclear weapons, it basically meant the ability to inflict the same damage on your adversary that the adversary might try to inflict on you. Is that the same model of deterrence that you are adopting as you think about space?GEN. RAYMOND: Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything--I get asked a lot about space deterrence. I don't view it as space deterrence. I think it is just deterrence, and it feeds into the broader deterrence calculus. You can deter in multiple domains, in multiple ways, and we can amplify that from space as well. So again, it is all about the calculus. The deterrence calculus is either denying somebody an advantage or an opportunity or imposing costs. We think there are things that we can do in space that can contribute to that overall deterrence calculus. I think it is broader today than just the nuclear deterrence piece. And our goal is if we can deter conflict from beginning or extending into space, we can then deter conflict from spilling over into other domains as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: You described China a moment ago, General Raymond, as the pacing threat, and I thought that was an interesting phrase. Looking at the testimony that was given by the director of National Intelligence and the CIA director this month in their annual threat assessment, they said this about China: \"China has counter-space weapons capabilities intended to target U.S. and allied satellites, that China has fielded space-based, anti-satellite weapons, weapons in space, prepared to attack our weapons, and has ground-based lasers probably intended to blind or damage sensitive optical sensors.\" You have also talked about Chinese satellite Shijian 17 that has got a robot arm that can reach out and grab other satellites.So, the basic question is, is China seeking dominance in this domain, and what can you do to prevent China from establishing that dominance?GEN. RAYMOND: So, first of all, and I agree with the testimony that you just read from DNI. There is a whole spectrum of threats, everything from reversible jamming of communications satellites and GPS satellites to lasers that can blind or dazzle our satellites, as you described, or satellites on orbit, like the SJ-17, that has that robotic arm, or missiles that can launch from the ground and blow up a satellite, like they did in 2007, when they blew up one of their own satellites to demonstrate this capability, and blew that satellite into 3,000 pieces of debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAgain, our goal is to deter that, and the way that you do that, in my opinion, is to be able to do so from a position of strength. So, there is not just one thing. It is a multi-domain effort. It is the full weight of the Joint Force that will be employed to be able to deter that conflict from happening. It is going to require an increase in how we train our operators, and we have already done that with the establishment of Space Force. It is going to require increased partnerships with our allies, and we have taken that from what used to be largely a one-way data-sharing arrangement. So now, two-way partnerships, just like we enjoy in other domains, to where we operate together, we train together, we exercise together, we wargame together, and today, for the first time, we are actually building capabilities together.It is partnerships with our interagency partners. You talked about the intelligence community today. We enjoy the best relationship that we have ever enjoyed with the intelligence community. In fact, earlier this week I was out at Vandenberg Air Force Base with the DNI, and we spent about a day and a half together, along with the director of the National Reconnaissance Office.And it is developing partnerships with our commercial partners. And if you look at what is going on in space, in all three sectors, whether it is the National Security Space Sector, which is the Space Force, and whether it is civil sector, which is NASA, and going back to the moon, you know, with the goal of going back to the moon here in the coming years, and with commercial industry, which is very visible and has--it is a terrible word to use when you are describing commercial space--but an explosion of commercial space activity. We think all of that comes together and provides our nation advantage, and would give an adversary pause from beginning or extending a conflict into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: I want to come back to this question of partnerships, both with other parts of the government and with the private industry. You mentioned something, talking about the Chinese having shot down a satellite and created 3,000 pieces of debris, that made me think about the problem of--I'm going to call it, for use of a better term--space junk, all these debris objects in space. I have seen accounts that there are 30,000 objects in space, only 4,000 of which are actually satellites.Space sounds like it's getting messy, and I'm wondering whether you have begun to think about picking up the litter, whether there is some way to clean up the mess so it is less potentially dangerous.GEN. RAYMOND: Absolutely. Your stats are pretty accurate. We track about 30,000 pieces of debris, or 30,000 objects in space. Of that, the vast majority of that is debris. A couple of years ago, the number of active satellites was probably only 1,500. What we are seeing is an increase, a significant increase in the numbers of satellites, and largely they are commercial satellites, in great numbers, in lower orbit. You will hear a term referred to as \"proliferated, low-earth orbit constellations.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, we are seeing an increase in the amount of objects that are going in space. The reason why that is happening is the cost of launch has gone down, and satellites that are smaller are more operationally relevant. And so, what used to be great power competition between then the Soviet Union and the United States is now down to students at universities launching satellites.And so, the trend is putting things in space. There are about probably a half a million other objects that are too small for us to track. And so clearly the domain is a congested domain. We act as the space traffic control. We warn the world. We do all the analysis to make sure that two objects in space don't collide, and we warn the world if we see that that is about to happen.So, for example, if there is a Chinese satellite on orbit and it is about to potentially collide with a piece of debris that they created when they blew up their satellite, we will warn them and tell them to maneuver. And satellites prefer to just stay away, to keep from colliding with other objects. We do that because we want to keep the domain safe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the trends on this are going to where there are more objects. So how do you solve that challenge? The first thing you do is you quit creating debris in the first place. And so, it is irresponsible behavior to take action to where you blow a satellite into 3,000 pieces of debris, for example. You increase your engineering standards to make sure that the satellite at its end of life doesn't break up into pieces. You increase your engineering standards so when you launch something into space that you don't litter the space domain with debris upon launch. And you share data broadly to be able to make sure that objects don't collide.And so, our view of this is the way you solve this debris problem is to help from creating debris in the first place. There are a lot of folks out there thinking through how would you then go clean up space? It is a big challenge. Space is a very vast domain, and objects in space are going at 17,500 miles an hour, just to stay in space. And so, it's a big challenge. Our goal is to be responsible users of space, to be transparent in what we are doing to keep the domain safe for all, and to limit the creation of debris in the first place.MR. IGNATIUS: Just to press this issue, because it is an interesting one, would you be an advocate in the debates that are going on of having some effort, maybe an international cooperative effort, to clean up some of the debris? Is that a thing that people should be working on for the future?GEN. RAYMOND: I would encourage people to work on that. I think it is going to be important. You know, most of the objects in low-earth orbit eventually will come down, you know, will burn up in the atmosphere. It depends on the size of the object and how high they object is. But I would encourage people to continue to work on that.I would also encourage--I'm sorry--the other thing I would encourage is norms of behavior, and they talk a little bit about responsible behavior in space. Right now, it is the wild wild west. Short of you can't put a weapons of mass destruction in space, or you can't build a military base on a celestial body--those are both mandated out of the Outer Space Treaty in 1968--other than that, it is pretty much the wild wild west. And we are also working very closely with our international partners and our interagency partners to try to put together a framework for here's how we're going to operate, and then to operate that way and demonstrate that good behavior like we do each and every day, and then to attract partners to adopt those same things.MR. IGNATIUS: I wanted to ask you about partners and other key actors in space, starting with the return of the SpaceX Crew 1, if I am describing that the right way, tomorrow. I assume that will be principally a NASA SpaceX mission, but will Space Force be involved? What is your interface with that event tomorrow?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, so on that specific event, when we launched--those crew members launched into space, they launched off of Cape Canaveral in the range that we operate in Florida, and so we support the launch of that. We have got a very close partnership with NASA. One of the astronauts that you just talked about, Colonel Mike Hopkins, is a Space Force member that we gave to NASA, to serve as a NASA astronaut. For the landing of the capsule and the crew we will track that object, just like we track all the other objects in space. One of our highest priorities is to make sure that our astronauts that are either on the Space Station or coming home from the Space Station are safe.And then, actually, U.S. Space Command, which is the warfighting organization, if you will, the operational command for space, has a recovery mission that will support this event as well, to make sure that we can safely recover those astronauts upon landing.MR. IGNATIUS: Would you foresee, General Raymond, greater collaboration going forward between Space Force and NASA? So many of the missions do seem to have some overlap. Does it make sense to have more coordination and integration?GEN. RAYMOND: We enjoy a great partnership today, a really strong partnership. We have enjoyed that for 50 years. I think it is important that we distinguish between the two organizations. We have different missions, but we operate in the same domain. We have members of NASA that sit in our Operations Center that does all the tracking of objects, again, to help us protect and defend those astronauts and the International Space Station.We have just here, since the establishment of the Space Force, we have partnered with NASA for some training opportunities. There are some capabilities that they have that they used in training--their procedures, and it started back in the Apollo days, that we thought would be really helpful to us as we train our crews. And so, we entered into a partnership with NASA on that front.There is also, I mentioned on the norms of behavior front, NASA has a program called the Artemis Program, which is the program that is going to return astronauts to the moon. They have something called the Artemis Accords, and that is the international partners that they have that are part of that mission. They are developing standards and norms of behavior. And so, we think there are some opportunities there as we also develop those norms of behavior.And I think there are opportunities to leverage the partnerships that we both enjoy. And so, I really believe that although we are separate, we operate in the same domain, there are partnership opportunities that allow us to do things more effectively, allows us to save costs, and allows us to provide for the security of our nation, either through exploration or through national security.I would like to take a moment and congratulate former Senator Bill Nelson for his recent confirmation as the new NASA administrator. I really look forward to working with him in the future as we build this partnership and continue to strengthen.MR. IGNATIUS: And another question about government space agencies, organizations that have similar functions. You mentioned visiting Vandenberg Air Force Base and your relationship with the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Organization. Again, a common-sense question would be, do we really need two military organizations that are doing these space-based activities? It is like the question people ask about Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. But are you convinced that we need both an NRO and Space Force?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, let me just say, right up front, that the partnership that we enjoy with NRO has never been better--never been better. We operate very closely with that organization. Again, we have a shared view of the space domain. We have a shared view of the need to protect and defend. We have a shared ConOps on how we go about doing that. We share people. About 800 Guardians in the Space Force are assigned to that organization. We share capabilities. We develop capabilities together. And so that partnership has never been stronger. We operate our command and control centers together, focusing on protecting and defending.But there is a different mission set today. They are in the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance business and we are in the DoD space business. So, there is a different mission set. The law that established the Space Force back in December of 2019, did not include the NRO as part of it. Our job is to work very closely with them for advantage, and I will tell you, we are doing that today.MR. IGNATIUS: And, General, maybe you could just briefly tell folks that don't know the origin story of the Space Force. This is a new branch of the military. Just briefly explain why, after so many years when the Air Force was minding space, when you, as combatant commander of Space Command, were part of the Air Force, why was the decision made to create a separate force? What are the benefits of that?GEN. RAYMOND: I think there are a lot of benefits, and I think the decision to do so was absolutely the right decision. The United States--this has long been debated. This was debated for 30-something years, and over the course of the last, I would say, 5 or 6 years, the debate really picked up. And the thought was we're the best in the world at space, and that is absolutely true. We remain the premier space power around the globe. The thought was our competitors, our adversaries, are moving really fast. China has gone from 0 to 60 really quick, and not only have they gone from 0 to 60, they have operationalized these capabilities that we have been talking about throughout the course of this interview.And so, the thought was if you stood up an organization that was focused on this primarily, that you could move at speed and be able to stay ahead of the front. And so, the advantages of establishing this service that we purpose-built this from scratch for the domain in which we operate in. We elevated the leadership to a service chief position and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That allows us to ensure that space is fully integrated into the thinking across the department. We elevate from a service chief our voice and requirements. We elevate our voice in budget. We elevate our voice in being able to have international partners. And, in fact, after the United States established the Space Force, France, the U.K., Australia, and Japan have all elevated space in their organizations as well. And we elevate our voice and our ability to interact with commercial industry.And so, on all accounts, I would tell you that we are better postured today, just 18 months after establishing the Space Force, than we were even back then, and we were the best in the world at space. We are the best in the world today, and because of the changes that have been made, I am convinced that we will remain the best in the world going forward.MR. IGNATIUS: One of the good things about creating something new is that you can break from past practices and procurement, in rules and procedures. You don't have legacy systems because you are new. And I want to ask you what you are doing to try to see how the Space Force can buy things, develop things more efficiently, more quickly, make better use of the incredible--you used the word \"explosion\" earlier; it is right--explosion of commercial interests in space. How can you tap into that effectively and at lower cost?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, I think, David, this is probably the biggest opportunity that we have. I would bet on U.S. commercial industry any day. We are the leaders across the globe, and I couldn't be more proud of what is going on in the commercial industry, and it is from multiple sources.Historically, what has been commercially viable are commercial launch operations and big commercial satellites that provide communication satellites. That are what was commercially viable. As launch costs have gone down, largely due to commercial space, and as technology has allowed smaller satellites to be more relevant, we now have opportunities to expand those partnerships. And if you look at what commercial industry is doing, commercial industry is doing in months what it has taken the government to do in years. We have got to go faster. We believe, with the Space Force, we can build this service that has a more fused relationship with commercial industry.Just look at what NASA did. I mean, we launched a rocket from Florida, a commercial rocket with a commercial capsule, with a NASA crew, from a DoD range, a Space Force range, and sent it to the International Space Station. We really believe a business model that is developing with commercial industry, an assembly line type of model, will allow us to diversify our architectures to be able to do so at much lower costs, and to actually posture ourselves for advantage in the future.So, one of the big things that we worked on the first year of our existence is being able to develop this capability of development process that moves just towards digital. And it is a digital force design, and what does the architecture of space need to look like, what does the satellite architecture, if you will, need to look like, how do you do the requirements, and to do that requirements process at speed and do it digitally, how do you acquire differently. And so, we reorganized our Space and Missile Systems Center out in California to be able to tap into commercial industry more effectively. We have synchronized unity of effort across the department with other acquisition organizations that also do space acquisitions. We have built a--or planned a, how do you test these capabilities and do it at speed? Our goal is to harness and leverage commercial industry to reduce costs for the taxpayers, increase capability for our nation, and to make sure that any time anybody needs space, it is there.MR. IGNATIUS: This is an incredibly fertile area of innovation. Some of our best-known entrepreneurs--Elon Musk, our own Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post are passionately interested in space, so I'm sure you going to work with them.I want to ask you a question that is a little bit off-the-wall, maybe, but hey, what the heck? We are talking about space. Two former CIA directors, John Brennan and Jim Woolsey, have said that based on what they know, what they think, they think it's possible that there is intelligent life in the universe that is trying to communicate with us. And thinking about our conversation I wondered, what would Space Force do if we were presented with evidence that there were other civilizations trying to connect with the United States? Would it be treated initially as an issue that the military would handle, or would it be other parts of the government? I am sure you must have thought a little bit about this. What can you share with us?GEN. RAYMOND: Well, I'll tell you, a priority for us today is focusing on building a service that can protect and defend the national security interests that we face near term. But as we build this service, we are building this service not just for today and tomorrow but for the next 100 years. And so, we need to build this service to be able to respond to any threat that our nation might face, and if that were to materialize in the future, then I am sure we would have a part in this, as part of a broader whole-of-government approach. But our goal is a little bit more near term. It is focusing on what it is that we need to do today to make sure that every American has the space capabilities they need.It is really hard for them to understand how reliant we all are on space, because you can't see it. You know, satellites are traveling 17,500 miles an hour, far overhead, and it's hard to have that connection. But every single American relies on space each and every day, and it underpins every instrument of our national power, whether it's our national security, our economic, diplomatic instrument of national power, and our job is to make sure that that foundation for all those remains unharmed.MR. IGNATIUS: I'll save more Star Wars questions for the next time we invite you back. But I want to close with a question of space diplomacy, if you will. From where you sit, as commander, chief of this warfighting entity, the Space Force, what do you think about the wisdom of international agreements about space that go beyond the ones that exist today? Does it make sense to pursue that, to seek more rules, more limitations, or is this one of those situations where it will be so difficult to verify compliance with the rules that were set that we are just better off not going down that road? What do you think?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, I get asked a lot, you know, what do you want your successors to have? What kind of technology do you want them to have? I answer that question this way: I want my successors to have some norms of behavior, some rules of the road. And so, it would be very tricky to be able to ascertain and to verify what is going on in space. I am not na\u00efve to think that if we have rules of the road that everybody is going to just follow them. But I think if we have them, and we can build those with our international partners, that we would at least be able to identify those that are running the red lights.And so, I am in favor of coming up with norms of behavior. I am in favor of working that with our allies and our partners, and we are doing that each and every day. And again, our goal is to keep this domain safe for the world. We are doing so by our actions, and I am really pleased with where we are and how we are postured to do that, after just 18 months after establishing.MR. IGNATIUS: I feel like we've just begun a conversation about one of the most interesting, challenging, new things that the Pentagon is doing, that our country is doing as a whole. So, I want to thank General Raymond. Thank you for coming to talk to us today, and we hope you will come back.GEN. RAYMOND: David, I sure will. I wish we could do this for longer. It's always good to talk to you. I'm really proud of the guardians of the Space Force. We have about 5,200 folks that have been hand-picked to come in the service. They come to work each and every day, focusing on providing for our nation, and protecting and defending this great country. And I couldn't be more proud to represent them, and I appreciate the opportunity to tell their story and to have a chance to chat with you and your viewers. So, thank you very much.MR. IGNATIUS: We will see General Raymond again down the road, I hope.I will be back on Monday with an interview with Jane Harman, former member of Congress, former head of the Woodrow Wilson Center, who has just written an interesting new book that discusses national security issues she has been involved in.So, everybody have a good weekend. Thank you for joining Washington Post Live.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: The Path Forward: Space Force with Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: The Path Forward: Space Force with Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7657",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/04/30/transcript-path-forward-space-force-with-chief-space-operations-gen-john-w-jay-raymond/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I am David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. Today our special guest on \u201cThe Path Forward\u201d is General Jay Raymond, who is the Chief of Space Operations for the U.S. Space Force, is the newest member of the joint chiefs of staff. General Raymond is a space guy. While he was still serving as an Air Force officer, he was commander of Space Command. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGeneral Raymond, it is great to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us.GEN. RAYMOND: Oh, David, I can't thank you enough. I really appreciate it. It is good to see you again.MR. IGNATIUS: Good to see you, sir. So, folks probably don't know a whole lot about the Space Force, and maybe we could begin by your describing for our viewers what you see as the mission of this newly created branch of the military, and what you see as the nature of the threat that you are facing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGEN. RAYMOND: Absolutely, and again I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. As you showed in that opening video, you showed pictures and you described a little bit about what the Space Force is and what NASA is. Let me start by saying we are not NASA. NASA is a civilian agency that is all about exploring space and planetary exploration and science. We are an armed service, and our service is focused on providing capabilities for our nation that fuel our American way of life, and they also fuel our American way of war.And so, the average American, you know, before you get up in the morning or after you get up in the morning and before you have your first cup of coffee, you have used space on several occasions. We operate a GPS constellation. We operate communications satellites, missile-warning satellites. We launch those satellites into orbit. We acquire those satellites. And more importantly, today, we protect and defend those satellites, because they have become so critical for our nation and for our military. There are adversaries out there that are building capabilities to keep us from accessing those critical space capabilities for our advantage. And so, we are in the protect-and-defend business as well.So it is a complete cradle-to-grave, from acquiring to launching to operating those capabilities to tracking those capabilities to acting as the space traffic control for the world to make sure that the domain is safe for all, to integrating those capabilities into operations of every single service and joint partner that we have, and to make sure that just as every American, when you walk in the room and you turn on the light switch, the lights come on, that when America needs space it is always there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: General Raymond, I want to ask you to take that a little further. Strange as it seems to most of us, when we gaze up into the sky, space is now potentially a warfighting domain. And I want to ask you how you think, as a military commander, about defense and offense in this warfighting domain.GEN. RAYMOND: It is clear, David, that space is a warfighting domain, just like air, land, and sea, and it is something that has really materialized here over the last handful of years as both China, which is our pacing threat, and Russia have developed weapons that can either disrupt our satellites or destroy our satellites, from on the ground or in space, or in cyber.And so, our view is that although it is a warfighting domain, our goal is to not get into a conflict that begins or extends into space. Our goal is to deter that from happening, and to do that, in my opinion, the way you do that is you do that from a position of strength, and you do that by denying--or changing the deterrence calculus of a competitor and adversary. And that is either denying benefits or imposing costs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, our goal is, again, to deter that conflict. We do not want to get into a conflict that begins or extends into space. We want to keep the domain safe for all. We want to make sure that every American and every one of our global partners around the world has those space capabilities at their fingertips when they need it, and to do so we've got to be able to protect and defend, and we have also got to be able to imposes costs, if needed, to change that calculus.MR. IGNATIUS: Something you and I have talked about a little bit in the past is how deterrence might work in this domain. What we know of deterrence is largely from the era of nuclear weapons, it basically meant the ability to inflict the same damage on your adversary that the adversary might try to inflict on you. Is that the same model of deterrence that you are adopting as you think about space?GEN. RAYMOND: Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything--I get asked a lot about space deterrence. I don't view it as space deterrence. I think it is just deterrence, and it feeds into the broader deterrence calculus. You can deter in multiple domains, in multiple ways, and we can amplify that from space as well. So again, it is all about the calculus. The deterrence calculus is either denying somebody an advantage or an opportunity or imposing costs. We think there are things that we can do in space that can contribute to that overall deterrence calculus. I think it is broader today than just the nuclear deterrence piece. And our goal is if we can deter conflict from beginning or extending into space, we can then deter conflict from spilling over into other domains as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: You described China a moment ago, General Raymond, as the pacing threat, and I thought that was an interesting phrase. Looking at the testimony that was given by the director of National Intelligence and the CIA director this month in their annual threat assessment, they said this about China: \"China has counter-space weapons capabilities intended to target U.S. and allied satellites, that China has fielded space-based, anti-satellite weapons, weapons in space, prepared to attack our weapons, and has ground-based lasers probably intended to blind or damage sensitive optical sensors.\" You have also talked about Chinese satellite Shijian 17 that has got a robot arm that can reach out and grab other satellites.So, the basic question is, is China seeking dominance in this domain, and what can you do to prevent China from establishing that dominance?GEN. RAYMOND: So, first of all, and I agree with the testimony that you just read from DNI. There is a whole spectrum of threats, everything from reversible jamming of communications satellites and GPS satellites to lasers that can blind or dazzle our satellites, as you described, or satellites on orbit, like the SJ-17, that has that robotic arm, or missiles that can launch from the ground and blow up a satellite, like they did in 2007, when they blew up one of their own satellites to demonstrate this capability, and blew that satellite into 3,000 pieces of debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAgain, our goal is to deter that, and the way that you do that, in my opinion, is to be able to do so from a position of strength. So, there is not just one thing. It is a multi-domain effort. It is the full weight of the Joint Force that will be employed to be able to deter that conflict from happening. It is going to require an increase in how we train our operators, and we have already done that with the establishment of Space Force. It is going to require increased partnerships with our allies, and we have taken that from what used to be largely a one-way data-sharing arrangement. So now, two-way partnerships, just like we enjoy in other domains, to where we operate together, we train together, we exercise together, we wargame together, and today, for the first time, we are actually building capabilities together.It is partnerships with our interagency partners. You talked about the intelligence community today. We enjoy the best relationship that we have ever enjoyed with the intelligence community. In fact, earlier this week I was out at Vandenberg Air Force Base with the DNI, and we spent about a day and a half together, along with the director of the National Reconnaissance Office.And it is developing partnerships with our commercial partners. And if you look at what is going on in space, in all three sectors, whether it is the National Security Space Sector, which is the Space Force, and whether it is civil sector, which is NASA, and going back to the moon, you know, with the goal of going back to the moon here in the coming years, and with commercial industry, which is very visible and has--it is a terrible word to use when you are describing commercial space--but an explosion of commercial space activity. We think all of that comes together and provides our nation advantage, and would give an adversary pause from beginning or extending a conflict into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: I want to come back to this question of partnerships, both with other parts of the government and with the private industry. You mentioned something, talking about the Chinese having shot down a satellite and created 3,000 pieces of debris, that made me think about the problem of--I'm going to call it, for use of a better term--space junk, all these debris objects in space. I have seen accounts that there are 30,000 objects in space, only 4,000 of which are actually satellites.Space sounds like it's getting messy, and I'm wondering whether you have begun to think about picking up the litter, whether there is some way to clean up the mess so it is less potentially dangerous.GEN. RAYMOND: Absolutely. Your stats are pretty accurate. We track about 30,000 pieces of debris, or 30,000 objects in space. Of that, the vast majority of that is debris. A couple of years ago, the number of active satellites was probably only 1,500. What we are seeing is an increase, a significant increase in the numbers of satellites, and largely they are commercial satellites, in great numbers, in lower orbit. You will hear a term referred to as \"proliferated, low-earth orbit constellations.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, we are seeing an increase in the amount of objects that are going in space. The reason why that is happening is the cost of launch has gone down, and satellites that are smaller are more operationally relevant. And so, what used to be great power competition between then the Soviet Union and the United States is now down to students at universities launching satellites.And so, the trend is putting things in space. There are about probably a half a million other objects that are too small for us to track. And so clearly the domain is a congested domain. We act as the space traffic control. We warn the world. We do all the analysis to make sure that two objects in space don't collide, and we warn the world if we see that that is about to happen.So, for example, if there is a Chinese satellite on orbit and it is about to potentially collide with a piece of debris that they created when they blew up their satellite, we will warn them and tell them to maneuver. And satellites prefer to just stay away, to keep from colliding with other objects. We do that because we want to keep the domain safe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the trends on this are going to where there are more objects. So how do you solve that challenge? The first thing you do is you quit creating debris in the first place. And so, it is irresponsible behavior to take action to where you blow a satellite into 3,000 pieces of debris, for example. You increase your engineering standards to make sure that the satellite at its end of life doesn't break up into pieces. You increase your engineering standards so when you launch something into space that you don't litter the space domain with debris upon launch. And you share data broadly to be able to make sure that objects don't collide.And so, our view of this is the way you solve this debris problem is to help from creating debris in the first place. There are a lot of folks out there thinking through how would you then go clean up space? It is a big challenge. Space is a very vast domain, and objects in space are going at 17,500 miles an hour, just to stay in space. And so, it's a big challenge. Our goal is to be responsible users of space, to be transparent in what we are doing to keep the domain safe for all, and to limit the creation of debris in the first place.MR. IGNATIUS: Just to press this issue, because it is an interesting one, would you be an advocate in the debates that are going on of having some effort, maybe an international cooperative effort, to clean up some of the debris? Is that a thing that people should be working on for the future?GEN. RAYMOND: I would encourage people to work on that. I think it is going to be important. You know, most of the objects in low-earth orbit eventually will come down, you know, will burn up in the atmosphere. It depends on the size of the object and how high they object is. But I would encourage people to continue to work on that.I would also encourage--I'm sorry--the other thing I would encourage is norms of behavior, and they talk a little bit about responsible behavior in space. Right now, it is the wild wild west. Short of you can't put a weapons of mass destruction in space, or you can't build a military base on a celestial body--those are both mandated out of the Outer Space Treaty in 1968--other than that, it is pretty much the wild wild west. And we are also working very closely with our international partners and our interagency partners to try to put together a framework for here's how we're going to operate, and then to operate that way and demonstrate that good behavior like we do each and every day, and then to attract partners to adopt those same things.MR. IGNATIUS: I wanted to ask you about partners and other key actors in space, starting with the return of the SpaceX Crew 1, if I am describing that the right way, tomorrow. I assume that will be principally a NASA SpaceX mission, but will Space Force be involved? What is your interface with that event tomorrow?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, so on that specific event, when we launched--those crew members launched into space, they launched off of Cape Canaveral in the range that we operate in Florida, and so we support the launch of that. We have got a very close partnership with NASA. One of the astronauts that you just talked about, Colonel Mike Hopkins, is a Space Force member that we gave to NASA, to serve as a NASA astronaut. For the landing of the capsule and the crew we will track that object, just like we track all the other objects in space. One of our highest priorities is to make sure that our astronauts that are either on the Space Station or coming home from the Space Station are safe.And then, actually, U.S. Space Command, which is the warfighting organization, if you will, the operational command for space, has a recovery mission that will support this event as well, to make sure that we can safely recover those astronauts upon landing.MR. IGNATIUS: Would you foresee, General Raymond, greater collaboration going forward between Space Force and NASA? So many of the missions do seem to have some overlap. Does it make sense to have more coordination and integration?GEN. RAYMOND: We enjoy a great partnership today, a really strong partnership. We have enjoyed that for 50 years. I think it is important that we distinguish between the two organizations. We have different missions, but we operate in the same domain. We have members of NASA that sit in our Operations Center that does all the tracking of objects, again, to help us protect and defend those astronauts and the International Space Station.We have just here, since the establishment of the Space Force, we have partnered with NASA for some training opportunities. There are some capabilities that they have that they used in training--their procedures, and it started back in the Apollo days, that we thought would be really helpful to us as we train our crews. And so, we entered into a partnership with NASA on that front.There is also, I mentioned on the norms of behavior front, NASA has a program called the Artemis Program, which is the program that is going to return astronauts to the moon. They have something called the Artemis Accords, and that is the international partners that they have that are part of that mission. They are developing standards and norms of behavior. And so, we think there are some opportunities there as we also develop those norms of behavior.And I think there are opportunities to leverage the partnerships that we both enjoy. And so, I really believe that although we are separate, we operate in the same domain, there are partnership opportunities that allow us to do things more effectively, allows us to save costs, and allows us to provide for the security of our nation, either through exploration or through national security.I would like to take a moment and congratulate former Senator Bill Nelson for his recent confirmation as the new NASA administrator. I really look forward to working with him in the future as we build this partnership and continue to strengthen.MR. IGNATIUS: And another question about government space agencies, organizations that have similar functions. You mentioned visiting Vandenberg Air Force Base and your relationship with the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Organization. Again, a common-sense question would be, do we really need two military organizations that are doing these space-based activities? It is like the question people ask about Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. But are you convinced that we need both an NRO and Space Force?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, let me just say, right up front, that the partnership that we enjoy with NRO has never been better--never been better. We operate very closely with that organization. Again, we have a shared view of the space domain. We have a shared view of the need to protect and defend. We have a shared ConOps on how we go about doing that. We share people. About 800 Guardians in the Space Force are assigned to that organization. We share capabilities. We develop capabilities together. And so that partnership has never been stronger. We operate our command and control centers together, focusing on protecting and defending.But there is a different mission set today. They are in the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance business and we are in the DoD space business. So, there is a different mission set. The law that established the Space Force back in December of 2019, did not include the NRO as part of it. Our job is to work very closely with them for advantage, and I will tell you, we are doing that today.MR. IGNATIUS: And, General, maybe you could just briefly tell folks that don't know the origin story of the Space Force. This is a new branch of the military. Just briefly explain why, after so many years when the Air Force was minding space, when you, as combatant commander of Space Command, were part of the Air Force, why was the decision made to create a separate force? What are the benefits of that?GEN. RAYMOND: I think there are a lot of benefits, and I think the decision to do so was absolutely the right decision. The United States--this has long been debated. This was debated for 30-something years, and over the course of the last, I would say, 5 or 6 years, the debate really picked up. And the thought was we're the best in the world at space, and that is absolutely true. We remain the premier space power around the globe. The thought was our competitors, our adversaries, are moving really fast. China has gone from 0 to 60 really quick, and not only have they gone from 0 to 60, they have operationalized these capabilities that we have been talking about throughout the course of this interview.And so, the thought was if you stood up an organization that was focused on this primarily, that you could move at speed and be able to stay ahead of the front. And so, the advantages of establishing this service that we purpose-built this from scratch for the domain in which we operate in. We elevated the leadership to a service chief position and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That allows us to ensure that space is fully integrated into the thinking across the department. We elevate from a service chief our voice and requirements. We elevate our voice in budget. We elevate our voice in being able to have international partners. And, in fact, after the United States established the Space Force, France, the U.K., Australia, and Japan have all elevated space in their organizations as well. And we elevate our voice and our ability to interact with commercial industry.And so, on all accounts, I would tell you that we are better postured today, just 18 months after establishing the Space Force, than we were even back then, and we were the best in the world at space. We are the best in the world today, and because of the changes that have been made, I am convinced that we will remain the best in the world going forward.MR. IGNATIUS: One of the good things about creating something new is that you can break from past practices and procurement, in rules and procedures. You don't have legacy systems because you are new. And I want to ask you what you are doing to try to see how the Space Force can buy things, develop things more efficiently, more quickly, make better use of the incredible--you used the word \"explosion\" earlier; it is right--explosion of commercial interests in space. How can you tap into that effectively and at lower cost?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, I think, David, this is probably the biggest opportunity that we have. I would bet on U.S. commercial industry any day. We are the leaders across the globe, and I couldn't be more proud of what is going on in the commercial industry, and it is from multiple sources.Historically, what has been commercially viable are commercial launch operations and big commercial satellites that provide communication satellites. That are what was commercially viable. As launch costs have gone down, largely due to commercial space, and as technology has allowed smaller satellites to be more relevant, we now have opportunities to expand those partnerships. And if you look at what commercial industry is doing, commercial industry is doing in months what it has taken the government to do in years. We have got to go faster. We believe, with the Space Force, we can build this service that has a more fused relationship with commercial industry.Just look at what NASA did. I mean, we launched a rocket from Florida, a commercial rocket with a commercial capsule, with a NASA crew, from a DoD range, a Space Force range, and sent it to the International Space Station. We really believe a business model that is developing with commercial industry, an assembly line type of model, will allow us to diversify our architectures to be able to do so at much lower costs, and to actually posture ourselves for advantage in the future.So, one of the big things that we worked on the first year of our existence is being able to develop this capability of development process that moves just towards digital. And it is a digital force design, and what does the architecture of space need to look like, what does the satellite architecture, if you will, need to look like, how do you do the requirements, and to do that requirements process at speed and do it digitally, how do you acquire differently. And so, we reorganized our Space and Missile Systems Center out in California to be able to tap into commercial industry more effectively. We have synchronized unity of effort across the department with other acquisition organizations that also do space acquisitions. We have built a--or planned a, how do you test these capabilities and do it at speed? Our goal is to harness and leverage commercial industry to reduce costs for the taxpayers, increase capability for our nation, and to make sure that any time anybody needs space, it is there.MR. IGNATIUS: This is an incredibly fertile area of innovation. Some of our best-known entrepreneurs--Elon Musk, our own Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post are passionately interested in space, so I'm sure you going to work with them.I want to ask you a question that is a little bit off-the-wall, maybe, but hey, what the heck? We are talking about space. Two former CIA directors, John Brennan and Jim Woolsey, have said that based on what they know, what they think, they think it's possible that there is intelligent life in the universe that is trying to communicate with us. And thinking about our conversation I wondered, what would Space Force do if we were presented with evidence that there were other civilizations trying to connect with the United States? Would it be treated initially as an issue that the military would handle, or would it be other parts of the government? I am sure you must have thought a little bit about this. What can you share with us?GEN. RAYMOND: Well, I'll tell you, a priority for us today is focusing on building a service that can protect and defend the national security interests that we face near term. But as we build this service, we are building this service not just for today and tomorrow but for the next 100 years. And so, we need to build this service to be able to respond to any threat that our nation might face, and if that were to materialize in the future, then I am sure we would have a part in this, as part of a broader whole-of-government approach. But our goal is a little bit more near term. It is focusing on what it is that we need to do today to make sure that every American has the space capabilities they need.It is really hard for them to understand how reliant we all are on space, because you can't see it. You know, satellites are traveling 17,500 miles an hour, far overhead, and it's hard to have that connection. But every single American relies on space each and every day, and it underpins every instrument of our national power, whether it's our national security, our economic, diplomatic instrument of national power, and our job is to make sure that that foundation for all those remains unharmed.MR. IGNATIUS: I'll save more Star Wars questions for the next time we invite you back. But I want to close with a question of space diplomacy, if you will. From where you sit, as commander, chief of this warfighting entity, the Space Force, what do you think about the wisdom of international agreements about space that go beyond the ones that exist today? Does it make sense to pursue that, to seek more rules, more limitations, or is this one of those situations where it will be so difficult to verify compliance with the rules that were set that we are just better off not going down that road? What do you think?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, I get asked a lot, you know, what do you want your successors to have? What kind of technology do you want them to have? I answer that question this way: I want my successors to have some norms of behavior, some rules of the road. And so, it would be very tricky to be able to ascertain and to verify what is going on in space. I am not na\u00efve to think that if we have rules of the road that everybody is going to just follow them. But I think if we have them, and we can build those with our international partners, that we would at least be able to identify those that are running the red lights.And so, I am in favor of coming up with norms of behavior. I am in favor of working that with our allies and our partners, and we are doing that each and every day. And again, our goal is to keep this domain safe for the world. We are doing so by our actions, and I am really pleased with where we are and how we are postured to do that, after just 18 months after establishing.MR. IGNATIUS: I feel like we've just begun a conversation about one of the most interesting, challenging, new things that the Pentagon is doing, that our country is doing as a whole. So, I want to thank General Raymond. Thank you for coming to talk to us today, and we hope you will come back.GEN. RAYMOND: David, I sure will. I wish we could do this for longer. It's always good to talk to you. I'm really proud of the guardians of the Space Force. We have about 5,200 folks that have been hand-picked to come in the service. They come to work each and every day, focusing on providing for our nation, and protecting and defending this great country. And I couldn't be more proud to represent them, and I appreciate the opportunity to tell their story and to have a chance to chat with you and your viewers. So, thank you very much.MR. IGNATIUS: We will see General Raymond again down the road, I hope.I will be back on Monday with an interview with Jane Harman, former member of Congress, former head of the Woodrow Wilson Center, who has just written an interesting new book that discusses national security issues she has been involved in.So, everybody have a good weekend. Thank you for joining Washington Post Live.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: The Path Forward: Space Force with Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: The Path Forward: Space Force with Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7658",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/04/30/transcript-path-forward-space-force-with-chief-space-operations-gen-john-w-jay-raymond/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I am David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. Today our special guest on \u201cThe Path Forward\u201d is General Jay Raymond, who is the Chief of Space Operations for the U.S. Space Force, is the newest member of the joint chiefs of staff. General Raymond is a space guy. While he was still serving as an Air Force officer, he was commander of Space Command. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightGeneral Raymond, it is great to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us.GEN. RAYMOND: Oh, David, I can't thank you enough. I really appreciate it. It is good to see you again.MR. IGNATIUS: Good to see you, sir. So, folks probably don't know a whole lot about the Space Force, and maybe we could begin by your describing for our viewers what you see as the mission of this newly created branch of the military, and what you see as the nature of the threat that you are facing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGEN. RAYMOND: Absolutely, and again I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. As you showed in that opening video, you showed pictures and you described a little bit about what the Space Force is and what NASA is. Let me start by saying we are not NASA. NASA is a civilian agency that is all about exploring space and planetary exploration and science. We are an armed service, and our service is focused on providing capabilities for our nation that fuel our American way of life, and they also fuel our American way of war.And so, the average American, you know, before you get up in the morning or after you get up in the morning and before you have your first cup of coffee, you have used space on several occasions. We operate a GPS constellation. We operate communications satellites, missile-warning satellites. We launch those satellites into orbit. We acquire those satellites. And more importantly, today, we protect and defend those satellites, because they have become so critical for our nation and for our military. There are adversaries out there that are building capabilities to keep us from accessing those critical space capabilities for our advantage. And so, we are in the protect-and-defend business as well.So it is a complete cradle-to-grave, from acquiring to launching to operating those capabilities to tracking those capabilities to acting as the space traffic control for the world to make sure that the domain is safe for all, to integrating those capabilities into operations of every single service and joint partner that we have, and to make sure that just as every American, when you walk in the room and you turn on the light switch, the lights come on, that when America needs space it is always there.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: General Raymond, I want to ask you to take that a little further. Strange as it seems to most of us, when we gaze up into the sky, space is now potentially a warfighting domain. And I want to ask you how you think, as a military commander, about defense and offense in this warfighting domain.GEN. RAYMOND: It is clear, David, that space is a warfighting domain, just like air, land, and sea, and it is something that has really materialized here over the last handful of years as both China, which is our pacing threat, and Russia have developed weapons that can either disrupt our satellites or destroy our satellites, from on the ground or in space, or in cyber.And so, our view is that although it is a warfighting domain, our goal is to not get into a conflict that begins or extends into space. Our goal is to deter that from happening, and to do that, in my opinion, the way you do that is you do that from a position of strength, and you do that by denying--or changing the deterrence calculus of a competitor and adversary. And that is either denying benefits or imposing costs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, our goal is, again, to deter that conflict. We do not want to get into a conflict that begins or extends into space. We want to keep the domain safe for all. We want to make sure that every American and every one of our global partners around the world has those space capabilities at their fingertips when they need it, and to do so we've got to be able to protect and defend, and we have also got to be able to imposes costs, if needed, to change that calculus.MR. IGNATIUS: Something you and I have talked about a little bit in the past is how deterrence might work in this domain. What we know of deterrence is largely from the era of nuclear weapons, it basically meant the ability to inflict the same damage on your adversary that the adversary might try to inflict on you. Is that the same model of deterrence that you are adopting as you think about space?GEN. RAYMOND: Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything--I get asked a lot about space deterrence. I don't view it as space deterrence. I think it is just deterrence, and it feeds into the broader deterrence calculus. You can deter in multiple domains, in multiple ways, and we can amplify that from space as well. So again, it is all about the calculus. The deterrence calculus is either denying somebody an advantage or an opportunity or imposing costs. We think there are things that we can do in space that can contribute to that overall deterrence calculus. I think it is broader today than just the nuclear deterrence piece. And our goal is if we can deter conflict from beginning or extending into space, we can then deter conflict from spilling over into other domains as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: You described China a moment ago, General Raymond, as the pacing threat, and I thought that was an interesting phrase. Looking at the testimony that was given by the director of National Intelligence and the CIA director this month in their annual threat assessment, they said this about China: \"China has counter-space weapons capabilities intended to target U.S. and allied satellites, that China has fielded space-based, anti-satellite weapons, weapons in space, prepared to attack our weapons, and has ground-based lasers probably intended to blind or damage sensitive optical sensors.\" You have also talked about Chinese satellite Shijian 17 that has got a robot arm that can reach out and grab other satellites.So, the basic question is, is China seeking dominance in this domain, and what can you do to prevent China from establishing that dominance?GEN. RAYMOND: So, first of all, and I agree with the testimony that you just read from DNI. There is a whole spectrum of threats, everything from reversible jamming of communications satellites and GPS satellites to lasers that can blind or dazzle our satellites, as you described, or satellites on orbit, like the SJ-17, that has that robotic arm, or missiles that can launch from the ground and blow up a satellite, like they did in 2007, when they blew up one of their own satellites to demonstrate this capability, and blew that satellite into 3,000 pieces of debris.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAgain, our goal is to deter that, and the way that you do that, in my opinion, is to be able to do so from a position of strength. So, there is not just one thing. It is a multi-domain effort. It is the full weight of the Joint Force that will be employed to be able to deter that conflict from happening. It is going to require an increase in how we train our operators, and we have already done that with the establishment of Space Force. It is going to require increased partnerships with our allies, and we have taken that from what used to be largely a one-way data-sharing arrangement. So now, two-way partnerships, just like we enjoy in other domains, to where we operate together, we train together, we exercise together, we wargame together, and today, for the first time, we are actually building capabilities together.It is partnerships with our interagency partners. You talked about the intelligence community today. We enjoy the best relationship that we have ever enjoyed with the intelligence community. In fact, earlier this week I was out at Vandenberg Air Force Base with the DNI, and we spent about a day and a half together, along with the director of the National Reconnaissance Office.And it is developing partnerships with our commercial partners. And if you look at what is going on in space, in all three sectors, whether it is the National Security Space Sector, which is the Space Force, and whether it is civil sector, which is NASA, and going back to the moon, you know, with the goal of going back to the moon here in the coming years, and with commercial industry, which is very visible and has--it is a terrible word to use when you are describing commercial space--but an explosion of commercial space activity. We think all of that comes together and provides our nation advantage, and would give an adversary pause from beginning or extending a conflict into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: I want to come back to this question of partnerships, both with other parts of the government and with the private industry. You mentioned something, talking about the Chinese having shot down a satellite and created 3,000 pieces of debris, that made me think about the problem of--I'm going to call it, for use of a better term--space junk, all these debris objects in space. I have seen accounts that there are 30,000 objects in space, only 4,000 of which are actually satellites.Space sounds like it's getting messy, and I'm wondering whether you have begun to think about picking up the litter, whether there is some way to clean up the mess so it is less potentially dangerous.GEN. RAYMOND: Absolutely. Your stats are pretty accurate. We track about 30,000 pieces of debris, or 30,000 objects in space. Of that, the vast majority of that is debris. A couple of years ago, the number of active satellites was probably only 1,500. What we are seeing is an increase, a significant increase in the numbers of satellites, and largely they are commercial satellites, in great numbers, in lower orbit. You will hear a term referred to as \"proliferated, low-earth orbit constellations.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, we are seeing an increase in the amount of objects that are going in space. The reason why that is happening is the cost of launch has gone down, and satellites that are smaller are more operationally relevant. And so, what used to be great power competition between then the Soviet Union and the United States is now down to students at universities launching satellites.And so, the trend is putting things in space. There are about probably a half a million other objects that are too small for us to track. And so clearly the domain is a congested domain. We act as the space traffic control. We warn the world. We do all the analysis to make sure that two objects in space don't collide, and we warn the world if we see that that is about to happen.So, for example, if there is a Chinese satellite on orbit and it is about to potentially collide with a piece of debris that they created when they blew up their satellite, we will warn them and tell them to maneuver. And satellites prefer to just stay away, to keep from colliding with other objects. We do that because we want to keep the domain safe.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the trends on this are going to where there are more objects. So how do you solve that challenge? The first thing you do is you quit creating debris in the first place. And so, it is irresponsible behavior to take action to where you blow a satellite into 3,000 pieces of debris, for example. You increase your engineering standards to make sure that the satellite at its end of life doesn't break up into pieces. You increase your engineering standards so when you launch something into space that you don't litter the space domain with debris upon launch. And you share data broadly to be able to make sure that objects don't collide.And so, our view of this is the way you solve this debris problem is to help from creating debris in the first place. There are a lot of folks out there thinking through how would you then go clean up space? It is a big challenge. Space is a very vast domain, and objects in space are going at 17,500 miles an hour, just to stay in space. And so, it's a big challenge. Our goal is to be responsible users of space, to be transparent in what we are doing to keep the domain safe for all, and to limit the creation of debris in the first place.MR. IGNATIUS: Just to press this issue, because it is an interesting one, would you be an advocate in the debates that are going on of having some effort, maybe an international cooperative effort, to clean up some of the debris? Is that a thing that people should be working on for the future?GEN. RAYMOND: I would encourage people to work on that. I think it is going to be important. You know, most of the objects in low-earth orbit eventually will come down, you know, will burn up in the atmosphere. It depends on the size of the object and how high they object is. But I would encourage people to continue to work on that.I would also encourage--I'm sorry--the other thing I would encourage is norms of behavior, and they talk a little bit about responsible behavior in space. Right now, it is the wild wild west. Short of you can't put a weapons of mass destruction in space, or you can't build a military base on a celestial body--those are both mandated out of the Outer Space Treaty in 1968--other than that, it is pretty much the wild wild west. And we are also working very closely with our international partners and our interagency partners to try to put together a framework for here's how we're going to operate, and then to operate that way and demonstrate that good behavior like we do each and every day, and then to attract partners to adopt those same things.MR. IGNATIUS: I wanted to ask you about partners and other key actors in space, starting with the return of the SpaceX Crew 1, if I am describing that the right way, tomorrow. I assume that will be principally a NASA SpaceX mission, but will Space Force be involved? What is your interface with that event tomorrow?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, so on that specific event, when we launched--those crew members launched into space, they launched off of Cape Canaveral in the range that we operate in Florida, and so we support the launch of that. We have got a very close partnership with NASA. One of the astronauts that you just talked about, Colonel Mike Hopkins, is a Space Force member that we gave to NASA, to serve as a NASA astronaut. For the landing of the capsule and the crew we will track that object, just like we track all the other objects in space. One of our highest priorities is to make sure that our astronauts that are either on the Space Station or coming home from the Space Station are safe.And then, actually, U.S. Space Command, which is the warfighting organization, if you will, the operational command for space, has a recovery mission that will support this event as well, to make sure that we can safely recover those astronauts upon landing.MR. IGNATIUS: Would you foresee, General Raymond, greater collaboration going forward between Space Force and NASA? So many of the missions do seem to have some overlap. Does it make sense to have more coordination and integration?GEN. RAYMOND: We enjoy a great partnership today, a really strong partnership. We have enjoyed that for 50 years. I think it is important that we distinguish between the two organizations. We have different missions, but we operate in the same domain. We have members of NASA that sit in our Operations Center that does all the tracking of objects, again, to help us protect and defend those astronauts and the International Space Station.We have just here, since the establishment of the Space Force, we have partnered with NASA for some training opportunities. There are some capabilities that they have that they used in training--their procedures, and it started back in the Apollo days, that we thought would be really helpful to us as we train our crews. And so, we entered into a partnership with NASA on that front.There is also, I mentioned on the norms of behavior front, NASA has a program called the Artemis Program, which is the program that is going to return astronauts to the moon. They have something called the Artemis Accords, and that is the international partners that they have that are part of that mission. They are developing standards and norms of behavior. And so, we think there are some opportunities there as we also develop those norms of behavior.And I think there are opportunities to leverage the partnerships that we both enjoy. And so, I really believe that although we are separate, we operate in the same domain, there are partnership opportunities that allow us to do things more effectively, allows us to save costs, and allows us to provide for the security of our nation, either through exploration or through national security.I would like to take a moment and congratulate former Senator Bill Nelson for his recent confirmation as the new NASA administrator. I really look forward to working with him in the future as we build this partnership and continue to strengthen.MR. IGNATIUS: And another question about government space agencies, organizations that have similar functions. You mentioned visiting Vandenberg Air Force Base and your relationship with the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Organization. Again, a common-sense question would be, do we really need two military organizations that are doing these space-based activities? It is like the question people ask about Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. But are you convinced that we need both an NRO and Space Force?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, let me just say, right up front, that the partnership that we enjoy with NRO has never been better--never been better. We operate very closely with that organization. Again, we have a shared view of the space domain. We have a shared view of the need to protect and defend. We have a shared ConOps on how we go about doing that. We share people. About 800 Guardians in the Space Force are assigned to that organization. We share capabilities. We develop capabilities together. And so that partnership has never been stronger. We operate our command and control centers together, focusing on protecting and defending.But there is a different mission set today. They are in the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance business and we are in the DoD space business. So, there is a different mission set. The law that established the Space Force back in December of 2019, did not include the NRO as part of it. Our job is to work very closely with them for advantage, and I will tell you, we are doing that today.MR. IGNATIUS: And, General, maybe you could just briefly tell folks that don't know the origin story of the Space Force. This is a new branch of the military. Just briefly explain why, after so many years when the Air Force was minding space, when you, as combatant commander of Space Command, were part of the Air Force, why was the decision made to create a separate force? What are the benefits of that?GEN. RAYMOND: I think there are a lot of benefits, and I think the decision to do so was absolutely the right decision. The United States--this has long been debated. This was debated for 30-something years, and over the course of the last, I would say, 5 or 6 years, the debate really picked up. And the thought was we're the best in the world at space, and that is absolutely true. We remain the premier space power around the globe. The thought was our competitors, our adversaries, are moving really fast. China has gone from 0 to 60 really quick, and not only have they gone from 0 to 60, they have operationalized these capabilities that we have been talking about throughout the course of this interview.And so, the thought was if you stood up an organization that was focused on this primarily, that you could move at speed and be able to stay ahead of the front. And so, the advantages of establishing this service that we purpose-built this from scratch for the domain in which we operate in. We elevated the leadership to a service chief position and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That allows us to ensure that space is fully integrated into the thinking across the department. We elevate from a service chief our voice and requirements. We elevate our voice in budget. We elevate our voice in being able to have international partners. And, in fact, after the United States established the Space Force, France, the U.K., Australia, and Japan have all elevated space in their organizations as well. And we elevate our voice and our ability to interact with commercial industry.And so, on all accounts, I would tell you that we are better postured today, just 18 months after establishing the Space Force, than we were even back then, and we were the best in the world at space. We are the best in the world today, and because of the changes that have been made, I am convinced that we will remain the best in the world going forward.MR. IGNATIUS: One of the good things about creating something new is that you can break from past practices and procurement, in rules and procedures. You don't have legacy systems because you are new. And I want to ask you what you are doing to try to see how the Space Force can buy things, develop things more efficiently, more quickly, make better use of the incredible--you used the word \"explosion\" earlier; it is right--explosion of commercial interests in space. How can you tap into that effectively and at lower cost?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, I think, David, this is probably the biggest opportunity that we have. I would bet on U.S. commercial industry any day. We are the leaders across the globe, and I couldn't be more proud of what is going on in the commercial industry, and it is from multiple sources.Historically, what has been commercially viable are commercial launch operations and big commercial satellites that provide communication satellites. That are what was commercially viable. As launch costs have gone down, largely due to commercial space, and as technology has allowed smaller satellites to be more relevant, we now have opportunities to expand those partnerships. And if you look at what commercial industry is doing, commercial industry is doing in months what it has taken the government to do in years. We have got to go faster. We believe, with the Space Force, we can build this service that has a more fused relationship with commercial industry.Just look at what NASA did. I mean, we launched a rocket from Florida, a commercial rocket with a commercial capsule, with a NASA crew, from a DoD range, a Space Force range, and sent it to the International Space Station. We really believe a business model that is developing with commercial industry, an assembly line type of model, will allow us to diversify our architectures to be able to do so at much lower costs, and to actually posture ourselves for advantage in the future.So, one of the big things that we worked on the first year of our existence is being able to develop this capability of development process that moves just towards digital. And it is a digital force design, and what does the architecture of space need to look like, what does the satellite architecture, if you will, need to look like, how do you do the requirements, and to do that requirements process at speed and do it digitally, how do you acquire differently. And so, we reorganized our Space and Missile Systems Center out in California to be able to tap into commercial industry more effectively. We have synchronized unity of effort across the department with other acquisition organizations that also do space acquisitions. We have built a--or planned a, how do you test these capabilities and do it at speed? Our goal is to harness and leverage commercial industry to reduce costs for the taxpayers, increase capability for our nation, and to make sure that any time anybody needs space, it is there.MR. IGNATIUS: This is an incredibly fertile area of innovation. Some of our best-known entrepreneurs--Elon Musk, our own Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post are passionately interested in space, so I'm sure you going to work with them.I want to ask you a question that is a little bit off-the-wall, maybe, but hey, what the heck? We are talking about space. Two former CIA directors, John Brennan and Jim Woolsey, have said that based on what they know, what they think, they think it's possible that there is intelligent life in the universe that is trying to communicate with us. And thinking about our conversation I wondered, what would Space Force do if we were presented with evidence that there were other civilizations trying to connect with the United States? Would it be treated initially as an issue that the military would handle, or would it be other parts of the government? I am sure you must have thought a little bit about this. What can you share with us?GEN. RAYMOND: Well, I'll tell you, a priority for us today is focusing on building a service that can protect and defend the national security interests that we face near term. But as we build this service, we are building this service not just for today and tomorrow but for the next 100 years. And so, we need to build this service to be able to respond to any threat that our nation might face, and if that were to materialize in the future, then I am sure we would have a part in this, as part of a broader whole-of-government approach. But our goal is a little bit more near term. It is focusing on what it is that we need to do today to make sure that every American has the space capabilities they need.It is really hard for them to understand how reliant we all are on space, because you can't see it. You know, satellites are traveling 17,500 miles an hour, far overhead, and it's hard to have that connection. But every single American relies on space each and every day, and it underpins every instrument of our national power, whether it's our national security, our economic, diplomatic instrument of national power, and our job is to make sure that that foundation for all those remains unharmed.MR. IGNATIUS: I'll save more Star Wars questions for the next time we invite you back. But I want to close with a question of space diplomacy, if you will. From where you sit, as commander, chief of this warfighting entity, the Space Force, what do you think about the wisdom of international agreements about space that go beyond the ones that exist today? Does it make sense to pursue that, to seek more rules, more limitations, or is this one of those situations where it will be so difficult to verify compliance with the rules that were set that we are just better off not going down that road? What do you think?GEN. RAYMOND: Yeah, I get asked a lot, you know, what do you want your successors to have? What kind of technology do you want them to have? I answer that question this way: I want my successors to have some norms of behavior, some rules of the road. And so, it would be very tricky to be able to ascertain and to verify what is going on in space. I am not na\u00efve to think that if we have rules of the road that everybody is going to just follow them. But I think if we have them, and we can build those with our international partners, that we would at least be able to identify those that are running the red lights.And so, I am in favor of coming up with norms of behavior. I am in favor of working that with our allies and our partners, and we are doing that each and every day. And again, our goal is to keep this domain safe for the world. We are doing so by our actions, and I am really pleased with where we are and how we are postured to do that, after just 18 months after establishing.MR. IGNATIUS: I feel like we've just begun a conversation about one of the most interesting, challenging, new things that the Pentagon is doing, that our country is doing as a whole. So, I want to thank General Raymond. Thank you for coming to talk to us today, and we hope you will come back.GEN. RAYMOND: David, I sure will. I wish we could do this for longer. It's always good to talk to you. I'm really proud of the guardians of the Space Force. We have about 5,200 folks that have been hand-picked to come in the service. They come to work each and every day, focusing on providing for our nation, and protecting and defending this great country. And I couldn't be more proud to represent them, and I appreciate the opportunity to tell their story and to have a chance to chat with you and your viewers. So, thank you very much.MR. IGNATIUS: We will see General Raymond again down the road, I hope.I will be back on Monday with an interview with Jane Harman, former member of Congress, former head of the Woodrow Wilson Center, who has just written an interesting new book that discusses national security issues she has been involved in.So, everybody have a good weekend. Thank you for joining Washington Post Live.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: The Path Forward: Space Force with Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. \u201cJay\u201d Raymond",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post to host summit on the future of spaceflight (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7659",
        "date": "2018-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2018/08/21/the-washington-post-to-host-summit-on-the-future-of-spaceflight/",
        "text": "On Friday, September 14, The Washington Post will bring together renowned scientists, key government officials, astronauts and other leaders in the space industry to examine the new \u201cspace race.\u201dThe \u201cTransformers: Space\u201d program will feature Chris Ferguson, Director of the Starliner Crew and Mission Systems at Boeing, who will make his fourth spaceflight when he and NASA astronauts take the new Boeing CST-100 Starliner commercial crew spacecraft to the International Space Station. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOther speakers including NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, former NASA Astronaut Leland Melvin, and Bill Nye, CEO of The Planetary Society will examine developments in research, technology, propulsion, design and mission planning as America takes a leading role in the future of spaceflight.Story continues below advertisementSpeakers include:Jim Bridenstine, NASA AdministratorChris Ferguson, Director of the Starliner Crew and Mission Systems, BoeingLeland Melvin, former NASA AstronautBill Nye, CEO of The Planetary SocietyScott Pace, Executive Secretary of the National Space CouncilBritney Schmidt, Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia TechMore speakers to be announced.AdvertisementThe program is produced in partnership with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Association of Space Explorers (ASE).This event is open to press and will be streamed on The Post\u2019s site at wapo.st/transformersspace \u00a0Media who wish to cover must RSVP.EVENT DETAILS\nFriday, September 14, 2018\n9:00 AM \u2013 11:00 AM (Doors open at 8:30 AM)\nThe Washington Post Live Center\n1301 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20071Transformers: Space is produced with support from The University of Virginia  The Washington Post to host summit on the future of spaceflight",
        "author": "Nancy Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vice President Mike Pence to headline Washington Post Live summit on the future of spaceflight (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7660",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2018/10/03/vice-president-mike-pence-headline-washington-post-live-summit-future-spaceflight/",
        "text": "Vice President Mike Pence is confirmed to speak at The Washington Post on October 23 as part of a \u201cTransformers: Space\u201d event. Pence, who serves as chairman of the National Space Council, will talk one-on-one with National Political Reporter Robert Costa about the Trump administration\u2019s plan to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military and other important space policy matters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe event will also feature NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye and current and former astronauts who will examine the future of human spaceflight, the new \u201cspace race\u201d and discuss the launch of the first flights from American soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011.Additional speakers include:Story continues below advertisementRep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), Member, Planetary Science Caucus, U.S. House of RepresentativesAdvertisementEllen Stofan, Director, Smithsonian National Air and Space MuseumChris Ferguson, Director, Starliner Crew and Mission Systems, BoeingVictor Glover, NASA AstronautLeland Melvin, NASA Astronaut, RetiredNicole Stott, NASA Astronaut, RetiredSandra Magnus, Principal, AstroPlanetview, LLC; NASA Astronaut, RetiredHeidi Hammel, Executive Vice President, Association of Universities for Research in AstronomyThe program is produced in partnership with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Association of Space Explorers (ASE).This event is open to press and will be streamed on The Post\u2019s site at wapo.st/transformersspace. Media who wish to cover must RSVP.EVENT DETAILSTuesday, October 23, 20189:00 AM \u2013 11:00 AM (Doors open at 8:00 AM)The Washington Post Live Center1301 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20071Transformers: Space is presented by Boeing with support from The University of Virginia. Pence will speak at the October 23 event with National Political Reporter Robert Costa about the Trump administration\u2019s plan to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military Vice President Mike Pence to headline Washington Post Live summit on the future of spaceflight",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vice President Mike Pence to headline Washington Post Live summit on the future of spaceflight (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7661",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2018/10/03/vice-president-mike-pence-headline-washington-post-live-summit-future-spaceflight/",
        "text": "Vice President Mike Pence is confirmed to speak at The Washington Post on October 23 as part of a \u201cTransformers: Space\u201d event. Pence, who serves as chairman of the National Space Council, will talk one-on-one with National Political Reporter Robert Costa about the Trump administration\u2019s plan to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military and other important space policy matters. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe event will also feature NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye and current and former astronauts who will examine the future of human spaceflight, the new \u201cspace race\u201d and discuss the launch of the first flights from American soil since the space shuttle retired in 2011.Additional speakers include:Story continues below advertisementRep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), Member, Planetary Science Caucus, U.S. House of RepresentativesAdvertisementEllen Stofan, Director, Smithsonian National Air and Space MuseumChris Ferguson, Director, Starliner Crew and Mission Systems, BoeingVictor Glover, NASA AstronautLeland Melvin, NASA Astronaut, RetiredNicole Stott, NASA Astronaut, RetiredSandra Magnus, Principal, AstroPlanetview, LLC; NASA Astronaut, RetiredHeidi Hammel, Executive Vice President, Association of Universities for Research in AstronomyThe program is produced in partnership with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Association of Space Explorers (ASE).This event is open to press and will be streamed on The Post\u2019s site at wapo.st/transformersspace. Media who wish to cover must RSVP.EVENT DETAILSTuesday, October 23, 20189:00 AM \u2013 11:00 AM (Doors open at 8:00 AM)The Washington Post Live Center1301 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20071Transformers: Space is presented by Boeing with support from The University of Virginia. Pence will speak at the October 23 event with National Political Reporter Robert Costa about the Trump administration\u2019s plan to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. military Vice President Mike Pence to headline Washington Post Live summit on the future of spaceflight",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post to host live coverage of SpaceX launch (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7662",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/05/20/washington-post-host-live-coverage-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "The Washington Post will air special live coverage of the SpaceX launch scheduled for May 27, which will be the first time NASA astronauts will be launched into space from the United States since 2011 and the first crewed flight by a private company. Anchored by The Post\u2019s Libby Casey, the live programming will feature Post Space Industry Reporter Christian Davenport, who has had unmatched, exclusive access throughout the leadup to the launch including the training of the astronauts and the preparations taken at the launch site. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe Post has made an immense investment in space coverage in recent years. We\u2019ve embedded with NASA, chronicled the resurgence of Florida\u2019s Space Coast and more,\u201d said Christian Davenport, space industry reporter for The Post. \u201cThis launch marks a new era in space exploration, and it\u2019s a significant moment when we can all see astronauts fly from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade.\u201dThe live show will air on May 27, 2020 from 3 p.m.-5 p.m. ET and will be available at washingtonpost.com and on The Post\u2019s YouTube page. The launch is planned to take place at 4:32 p.m. ET. Post science reporters and former astronauts will also join the discussion and analyze this event.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLive programming is core to The Washington Post, and we continue to provide engaging ways for users to find the news they are looking for when it is happening,\u201d said Director of Video, Micah Gelman. \u201cWith this live show, we can showcase the unique access Christian has to key sources in the space industry and his unparalleled reporting, as well as document this historic launch.\u201dIn addition to the live show, The Post will air a documentary in partnership with Discovery that takes viewers behind the scenes of this space mission and includes a first-hand look at the preparation the astronauts have taken in advance of the SpaceX launch. The documentary will air Monday, May 25 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Science Channel and will be rebroadcasted on Tuesday, May 26 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery. The Washington Post will air special live coverage of the SpaceX launch scheduled for May 27, which will be the first time NASA astronauts will be launched into space from the United States since 2011 and the first crewed flight by a private company. The Washington Post to host live coverage of SpaceX launch",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post to host live coverage of SpaceX launch (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7663",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/05/20/washington-post-host-live-coverage-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "The Washington Post will air special live coverage of the SpaceX launch scheduled for May 27, which will be the first time NASA astronauts will be launched into space from the United States since 2011 and the first crewed flight by a private company. Anchored by The Post\u2019s Libby Casey, the live programming will feature Post Space Industry Reporter Christian Davenport, who has had unmatched, exclusive access throughout the leadup to the launch including the training of the astronauts and the preparations taken at the launch site. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe Post has made an immense investment in space coverage in recent years. We\u2019ve embedded with NASA, chronicled the resurgence of Florida\u2019s Space Coast and more,\u201d said Christian Davenport, space industry reporter for The Post. \u201cThis launch marks a new era in space exploration, and it\u2019s a significant moment when we can all see astronauts fly from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade.\u201dThe live show will air on May 27, 2020 from 3 p.m.-5 p.m. ET and will be available at washingtonpost.com and on The Post\u2019s YouTube page. The launch is planned to take place at 4:32 p.m. ET. Post science reporters and former astronauts will also join the discussion and analyze this event.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLive programming is core to The Washington Post, and we continue to provide engaging ways for users to find the news they are looking for when it is happening,\u201d said Director of Video, Micah Gelman. \u201cWith this live show, we can showcase the unique access Christian has to key sources in the space industry and his unparalleled reporting, as well as document this historic launch.\u201dIn addition to the live show, The Post will air a documentary in partnership with Discovery that takes viewers behind the scenes of this space mission and includes a first-hand look at the preparation the astronauts have taken in advance of the SpaceX launch. The documentary will air Monday, May 25 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Science Channel and will be rebroadcasted on Tuesday, May 26 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery. The Washington Post will air special live coverage of the SpaceX launch scheduled for May 27, which will be the first time NASA astronauts will be launched into space from the United States since 2011 and the first crewed flight by a private company. The Washington Post to host live coverage of SpaceX launch",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post to host live coverage of SpaceX launch (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7664",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/05/20/washington-post-host-live-coverage-spacex-launch/",
        "text": "The Washington Post will air special live coverage of the SpaceX launch scheduled for May 27, which will be the first time NASA astronauts will be launched into space from the United States since 2011 and the first crewed flight by a private company. Anchored by The Post\u2019s Libby Casey, the live programming will feature Post Space Industry Reporter Christian Davenport, who has had unmatched, exclusive access throughout the leadup to the launch including the training of the astronauts and the preparations taken at the launch site. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe Post has made an immense investment in space coverage in recent years. We\u2019ve embedded with NASA, chronicled the resurgence of Florida\u2019s Space Coast and more,\u201d said Christian Davenport, space industry reporter for The Post. \u201cThis launch marks a new era in space exploration, and it\u2019s a significant moment when we can all see astronauts fly from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade.\u201dThe live show will air on May 27, 2020 from 3 p.m.-5 p.m. ET and will be available at washingtonpost.com and on The Post\u2019s YouTube page. The launch is planned to take place at 4:32 p.m. ET. Post science reporters and former astronauts will also join the discussion and analyze this event.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cLive programming is core to The Washington Post, and we continue to provide engaging ways for users to find the news they are looking for when it is happening,\u201d said Director of Video, Micah Gelman. \u201cWith this live show, we can showcase the unique access Christian has to key sources in the space industry and his unparalleled reporting, as well as document this historic launch.\u201dIn addition to the live show, The Post will air a documentary in partnership with Discovery that takes viewers behind the scenes of this space mission and includes a first-hand look at the preparation the astronauts have taken in advance of the SpaceX launch. The documentary will air Monday, May 25 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Science Channel and will be rebroadcasted on Tuesday, May 26 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery. The Washington Post will air special live coverage of the SpaceX launch scheduled for May 27, which will be the first time NASA astronauts will be launched into space from the United States since 2011 and the first crewed flight by a private company. The Washington Post to host live coverage of SpaceX launch",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "Brad Pitt joins The Washington Post Live to discuss new film Ad Astra  (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7665",
        "date": "2019-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2019/09/12/brad-pitt-joins-washington-post-live-discuss-new-film-ad-astra/",
        "text": "On Monday, September 16 Brad Pitt will discuss his new film Ad Astra on The Washington Post Live stage. Pitt, who plays an astronaut in the film, will be joined by writer, director and producer James Gray as well as NASA officials, Dr. Sarah Noble and Lindsay Aitchison.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe conversation, moderated by Washington Post Chief Film Critic Ann Hornaday, will focus on the making of the film and how the movie foreshadows the future of space exploration, as well as Pitt\u2019s decades-long, successful acting and producing career. Ad Astra is a science fiction, adventure film that was created with the intention of presenting \u201cthe most realistic depiction of space travel that\u2019s been put in a movie\u201d to date. The filmmakers worked with experts to fully capture and convey the dynamism and power of the astronaut experience in outer space.This event will be livestreamed at wapo.st/adastra. Media who wish to cover in-person must RSVP to nancy.murphy@washpost.com.Event DetailsMonday, September 16Networking Reception: 3:30 p.m.Program: 4:30 p.m.The Washington Post Live Center1301 K St NW, Washington, DC 20071 The conversation will focus on the making of the film and how the movie foreshadows the future of space exploration, as well as Pitt\u2019s decades-long, successful acting and producing career. Brad Pitt joins The Washington Post Live to discuss new film Ad Astra ",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "Brad Pitt joins The Washington Post Live to discuss new film Ad Astra  (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7666",
        "date": "2019-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2019/09/12/brad-pitt-joins-washington-post-live-discuss-new-film-ad-astra/",
        "text": "On Monday, September 16 Brad Pitt will discuss his new film Ad Astra on The Washington Post Live stage. Pitt, who plays an astronaut in the film, will be joined by writer, director and producer James Gray as well as NASA officials, Dr. Sarah Noble and Lindsay Aitchison.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe conversation, moderated by Washington Post Chief Film Critic Ann Hornaday, will focus on the making of the film and how the movie foreshadows the future of space exploration, as well as Pitt\u2019s decades-long, successful acting and producing career. Ad Astra is a science fiction, adventure film that was created with the intention of presenting \u201cthe most realistic depiction of space travel that\u2019s been put in a movie\u201d to date. The filmmakers worked with experts to fully capture and convey the dynamism and power of the astronaut experience in outer space.This event will be livestreamed at wapo.st/adastra. Media who wish to cover in-person must RSVP to nancy.murphy@washpost.com.Event DetailsMonday, September 16Networking Reception: 3:30 p.m.Program: 4:30 p.m.The Washington Post Live Center1301 K St NW, Washington, DC 20071 The conversation will focus on the making of the film and how the movie foreshadows the future of space exploration, as well as Pitt\u2019s decades-long, successful acting and producing career. Brad Pitt joins The Washington Post Live to discuss new film Ad Astra ",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vice President Mike Pence to headline Washington Post Live summit on the future of space (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7667",
        "date": "2018-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2018/09/04/vice-president-mike-pence-to-headline-washington-post-live-summit-on-the-future-of-space/",
        "text": "NOTE:\u00a0Due to weather concerns Transformers: Space, originally scheduled for Friday. September 14, will be postponed. A new date will be announced shortly.Vice President Mike Pence is confirmed to speak at The Washington Post on September 14 as part of its Transformers: Space event. Pence will talk one-on-one with national political reporter Robert Costa about the Trump administration\u2019s plan to establish a \u201cSpace Force\u201d as the sixth branch of the U.S. military. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe event, which will examine the future of spaceflight and the new \u201cspace race,\u201d will also feature NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Executive Secretary of the National Space Council Scott Pace.Story continues below advertisementAdditional speakers include:Chris Ferguson, Director of the Starliner Crew and Mission Systems, BoeingVictor Glover, NASA AstronautLeland Melvin, Former NASA AstronautBill Nye, CEO of The Planetary SocietyBritney Schmidt, Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia TechEllen Stofan, Director of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Air and Space MuseumNicole Stott, Former NASA AstronautGeorge Whitesides, CEO of Virgin GalacticAdvertisementThe program is produced in partnership with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Association of Space Explorers (ASE).This event is open to press and will be streamed on The Post\u2019s site at wapo.st/transformersspace. Media who wish to cover must RSVP.EVENT DETAILS\nFriday, September 14, 2018\n9:00 AM \u2013 11:00 AM (Doors open at 8:30 AM)\nThe Washington Post Live Center\n1301 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20071Transformers: Space is produced with support from The University of Virginia. Pence will speak at the September 14 event with national political reporter Robert Costa about the Trump administration\u2019s plan to establish a \u201cSpace Force\u201d as the sixth branch of the U.S. military. Vice President Mike Pence to headline Washington Post Live summit on the future of space",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andrew Freedman joins Capital Weather Gang as deputy weather editor (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7668",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2019/07/11/andrew-freedman-joins-capital-weather-gang-deputy-weather-editor/",
        "text": "Announcement from Local Editor Mike Semel, Deputy Local Editor Monica Norton and Weather Editor Jason Samenow:We are delighted to announce that Andrew Freedman will be joining Capital Weather Gang as deputy weather editor to help expand and strengthen our local, national and international weather and climate coverage.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAndrew comes to us from Axios, where he was science editor, directing breaking news coverage and deep dives into climate and health. He also wrote the weekly Axios science newsletter. Before joining Axios, Andrew was science editor at Mashable, where he established and expanded its science vertical by focusing on extreme weather events, climate change, clean energy technology, space exploration and species conservation. Story continues below advertisementHis previous experience includes writing positions at Congressional Quarterly, Environment and Energy Publishing, and Climate Central, where he was among the first reporters to use the term \u201cpolar vortex.\u201d AdvertisementA lifelong weather enthusiast, Andrew was one of the original members of Capital Weather Gang when it launched in 2004. A Boston native, he earned a degree in political science from Tufts University, a master\u2019s in international environmental policy from The Fletcher School and a master\u2019s in climate and society from Columbia University. When not geeking out about weather maps or cranking out copy, you might find Andrew on a stage, performing or teaching improvisational comedy. Please join us in welcoming Andrew to The Washington Post when he arrives July 15. A lifelong weather enthusiast, Andrew was one of the original members of Capital Weather Gang when it launched in 2004. A Boston native, he earned a degree in political science from Tufts University, a master\u2019s in international environmental policy from The Fletcher School and a master\u2019s in climate and society from Columbia University. Andrew Freedman joins Capital Weather Gang as deputy weather editor",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "Andrew Freedman joins Capital Weather Gang as deputy weather editor (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7669",
        "date": "2019-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2019/07/11/andrew-freedman-joins-capital-weather-gang-deputy-weather-editor/",
        "text": "Announcement from Local Editor Mike Semel, Deputy Local Editor Monica Norton and Weather Editor Jason Samenow:We are delighted to announce that Andrew Freedman will be joining Capital Weather Gang as deputy weather editor to help expand and strengthen our local, national and international weather and climate coverage.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAndrew comes to us from Axios, where he was science editor, directing breaking news coverage and deep dives into climate and health. He also wrote the weekly Axios science newsletter. Before joining Axios, Andrew was science editor at Mashable, where he established and expanded its science vertical by focusing on extreme weather events, climate change, clean energy technology, space exploration and species conservation. Story continues below advertisementHis previous experience includes writing positions at Congressional Quarterly, Environment and Energy Publishing, and Climate Central, where he was among the first reporters to use the term \u201cpolar vortex.\u201d AdvertisementA lifelong weather enthusiast, Andrew was one of the original members of Capital Weather Gang when it launched in 2004. A Boston native, he earned a degree in political science from Tufts University, a master\u2019s in international environmental policy from The Fletcher School and a master\u2019s in climate and society from Columbia University. When not geeking out about weather maps or cranking out copy, you might find Andrew on a stage, performing or teaching improvisational comedy. Please join us in welcoming Andrew to The Washington Post when he arrives July 15. A lifelong weather enthusiast, Andrew was one of the original members of Capital Weather Gang when it launched in 2004. A Boston native, he earned a degree in political science from Tufts University, a master\u2019s in international environmental policy from The Fletcher School and a master\u2019s in climate and society from Columbia University. Andrew Freedman joins Capital Weather Gang as deputy weather editor",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post and Discovery Announce Live Coverage of Blue Origin\u2019s Space Launch on July 20 (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7670",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2021/07/19/washington-post-discovery-announce-live-coverage-blue-origins-space-launch-july-20/",
        "text": "The Washington Post and Discovery today announced live coverage of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 first flight to space Tuesday, July 20. The program will air live on washingtonpost.com and be broadcast live and on both Discovery and Science Channels. The live show, \u2018Space Launch LIVE: Blue Origin & Jeff Bezos Go To Space,\u2019 will be anchored by The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey and Discovery\u2019s Chris Jacobs from The Post\u2019s Washington, D.C. studios and will feature on-the-ground analysis from The Washington Post\u2019s space reporter Christian Davenport and commentary from astronaut Leland Melvin, Dr. Ellen Stofan, the Smithsonian\u2019s Undersecretary for Science and Research and a team of experts from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. The program will be co-produced by The Washington Post, Discovery and Storied Media Group. \u201cThe Washington Post has made a distinct investment in live coverage of major news events, drawing in tens of millions of viewers to its programs featuring the latest developments alongside real-time analysis and commentary from our top journalists,\u201d said Micah Gelman, director of editorial video at The Washington Post. \u201cAfter the success of our Emmy award winning joint coverage of SpaceX\u2019s first crewed mission last summer, we are thrilled to be partnering with Discovery and Science Channels once again to bring this historic launch to the eyes of Americans nationwide as the appetite for space tourism intensifies.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\"We are delighted to be joining forces with The Washington Post to once again cover the next major chapter in space advancement,\u201d said Scott Lewers, Executive Vice President of Multiplatform Programming, Factual & Head of Content, Science. \u201cWith no on-site public viewing areas in the vicinity of the launch site, this broadcast continues Discovery and Science Channel's mission to bring the world to our viewers.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWatch live at washingtonpost.com or on Discovery and Science Channels at 8:00am ET. The program will be rebroadcast in primetime on Discovery and Science Channels. That night at 10:00pm ET/PT, Discovery will air a one-hour special, \u2018Jeff Bezos in Space: Blue Origin Takes Flight\u2019, highlighting coverage of the morning\u2019s event, along with interviews from after the launch, behind-the-scenes material and background stories of Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos. The special will also air the following evening on primetime at 8:00pm ET/PT on Science Channel. Coverage will be anchored by The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey, include on-the-ground commentary from The Post\u2019s space reporter Christian Davenport, analysis from former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin The Washington Post and Discovery Announce Live Coverage of Blue Origin\u2019s Space Launch on July 20",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post and Discovery Announce Live Coverage of Blue Origin\u2019s Space Launch on July 20 (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7671",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2021/07/19/washington-post-discovery-announce-live-coverage-blue-origins-space-launch-july-20/",
        "text": "The Washington Post and Discovery today announced live coverage of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 first flight to space Tuesday, July 20. The program will air live on washingtonpost.com and be broadcast live and on both Discovery and Science Channels. The live show, \u2018Space Launch LIVE: Blue Origin & Jeff Bezos Go To Space,\u2019 will be anchored by The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey and Discovery\u2019s Chris Jacobs from The Post\u2019s Washington, D.C. studios and will feature on-the-ground analysis from The Washington Post\u2019s space reporter Christian Davenport and commentary from astronaut Leland Melvin, Dr. Ellen Stofan, the Smithsonian\u2019s Undersecretary for Science and Research and a team of experts from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. The program will be co-produced by The Washington Post, Discovery and Storied Media Group. \u201cThe Washington Post has made a distinct investment in live coverage of major news events, drawing in tens of millions of viewers to its programs featuring the latest developments alongside real-time analysis and commentary from our top journalists,\u201d said Micah Gelman, director of editorial video at The Washington Post. \u201cAfter the success of our Emmy award winning joint coverage of SpaceX\u2019s first crewed mission last summer, we are thrilled to be partnering with Discovery and Science Channels once again to bring this historic launch to the eyes of Americans nationwide as the appetite for space tourism intensifies.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\"We are delighted to be joining forces with The Washington Post to once again cover the next major chapter in space advancement,\u201d said Scott Lewers, Executive Vice President of Multiplatform Programming, Factual & Head of Content, Science. \u201cWith no on-site public viewing areas in the vicinity of the launch site, this broadcast continues Discovery and Science Channel's mission to bring the world to our viewers.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWatch live at washingtonpost.com or on Discovery and Science Channels at 8:00am ET. The program will be rebroadcast in primetime on Discovery and Science Channels. That night at 10:00pm ET/PT, Discovery will air a one-hour special, \u2018Jeff Bezos in Space: Blue Origin Takes Flight\u2019, highlighting coverage of the morning\u2019s event, along with interviews from after the launch, behind-the-scenes material and background stories of Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos. The special will also air the following evening on primetime at 8:00pm ET/PT on Science Channel. Coverage will be anchored by The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey, include on-the-ground commentary from The Post\u2019s space reporter Christian Davenport, analysis from former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin The Washington Post and Discovery Announce Live Coverage of Blue Origin\u2019s Space Launch on July 20",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post and Discovery Announce Live Coverage of Blue Origin\u2019s Space Launch on July 20 (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7672",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2021/07/19/washington-post-discovery-announce-live-coverage-blue-origins-space-launch-july-20/",
        "text": "The Washington Post and Discovery today announced live coverage of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 first flight to space Tuesday, July 20. The program will air live on washingtonpost.com and be broadcast live and on both Discovery and Science Channels. The live show, \u2018Space Launch LIVE: Blue Origin & Jeff Bezos Go To Space,\u2019 will be anchored by The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey and Discovery\u2019s Chris Jacobs from The Post\u2019s Washington, D.C. studios and will feature on-the-ground analysis from The Washington Post\u2019s space reporter Christian Davenport and commentary from astronaut Leland Melvin, Dr. Ellen Stofan, the Smithsonian\u2019s Undersecretary for Science and Research and a team of experts from the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. The program will be co-produced by The Washington Post, Discovery and Storied Media Group. \u201cThe Washington Post has made a distinct investment in live coverage of major news events, drawing in tens of millions of viewers to its programs featuring the latest developments alongside real-time analysis and commentary from our top journalists,\u201d said Micah Gelman, director of editorial video at The Washington Post. \u201cAfter the success of our Emmy award winning joint coverage of SpaceX\u2019s first crewed mission last summer, we are thrilled to be partnering with Discovery and Science Channels once again to bring this historic launch to the eyes of Americans nationwide as the appetite for space tourism intensifies.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\"We are delighted to be joining forces with The Washington Post to once again cover the next major chapter in space advancement,\u201d said Scott Lewers, Executive Vice President of Multiplatform Programming, Factual & Head of Content, Science. \u201cWith no on-site public viewing areas in the vicinity of the launch site, this broadcast continues Discovery and Science Channel's mission to bring the world to our viewers.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWatch live at washingtonpost.com or on Discovery and Science Channels at 8:00am ET. The program will be rebroadcast in primetime on Discovery and Science Channels. That night at 10:00pm ET/PT, Discovery will air a one-hour special, \u2018Jeff Bezos in Space: Blue Origin Takes Flight\u2019, highlighting coverage of the morning\u2019s event, along with interviews from after the launch, behind-the-scenes material and background stories of Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos. The special will also air the following evening on primetime at 8:00pm ET/PT on Science Channel. Coverage will be anchored by The Washington Post\u2019s Libby Casey, include on-the-ground commentary from The Post\u2019s space reporter Christian Davenport, analysis from former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin The Washington Post and Discovery Announce Live Coverage of Blue Origin\u2019s Space Launch on July 20",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post wins first-ever Daytime Emmy Award for \u201cSpace Launch Live: America Returns to Space\" (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7673",
        "date": "2021-06-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2021/06/28/washington-post-wins-first-ever-daytime-emmy-award-space-launch-live-america-returns-space/",
        "text": "Announcement from Director of Editorial Video Micah Gelman, Deputy Director of Video Phoebe Connelly, Deputy Business Editor Zachary Goldfarb, Technology Editor Christina Passariello and Technology Policy Editor Mark Siebel:WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWe are excited to announce The Washington Post and Chris Davenport have won a Daytime Emmy Award for Space Launch Live: America Returns to Space. The program, produced by The Washington Post and Storied Media Group for Discovery and Science Channels, won for Outstanding Daytime Special Event at a ceremony Friday night. Last summer\u2019s Space Launch Live chronicled the return to crewed missions from the United States in nearly a decade after the last Space Shuttle launch. Chris Davenport was on the award-winning team as a consulting producer and co-host. It was the #1 rated non-prime program in the history of Discovery Channel and the top program ever for Science Channel. Please join us in congratulating Chris and video department contributors Whitney Leaming, David Bruns and Kyle Barss for The Post\u2019s first-ever Daytime Emmy Award. The program, produced by The Washington Post and Storied Media Group for Discovery and Science Channels, won for Outstanding Daytime Special Event at a ceremony Friday night. The Washington Post wins first-ever Daytime Emmy Award for \u201cSpace Launch Live: America Returns to Space\"",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Washington Post launches new science, family programming on YouTube (WP: Washington Post PR Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7674",
        "date": "2018-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2018/05/31/the-washington-post-launches-new-science-family-programming-on-youtube/",
        "text": "The Washington Post today announced the launch of \u201cAnna\u2019s Science Magic Show Hooray,\u201d an original YouTube channel that brings variety show-style storytelling to science, health and technology. In addition to the full-length animated show, Anna Rothschild, science reporter for The Post\u2019s Video team, will field children\u2019s science questions in a weekly feature called \u201cAnna\u2019s Help Desk.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cAnna is the best ambassador for science and curiosity on YouTube and now she is part of the world class newsroom of the Washington Post. This is an important and exciting step in audience building to speak to many generations with the values that are core to our mission \u2013 truth, storytelling and asking great questions,\u201d Michelle Jaconi, executive producer of creative video said.With a focus on audience interaction, Rothschild will answer viewer-submitted science questions in weekly \u201cHelp Desk\u201d videos, bringing the answers to life through self-produced animation, interviews, songs and whimsical commentary.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLonger episodes of \u201cAnna\u2019s Science Magic Show Hooray\u201d will be released every other month on YouTube and will feature a question from a celebrity, interviews with scientists and in-house animation. In the first episode, Rothschild explores the answer to wrestling star John Cena\u2019s question, \u201cWhy do we have butts?\u201dRothschild aims to create a family viewing experience that help kids and their parents learn more about science together.\u201cFrom slime to outer space, this channel values inquiry \u2013 from the small to the big. There is still so much we have to learn, even about things that are part of our daily life,\u201d said Rothschild. \u201cI hope this show helps parents be emissaries of curiosity since kids absorb so much information when their parents are along for the ride.\u201dRothschild is a science reporter known for her PBS/NOVA YouTube series, \u201cGross Science,\u201d which has amassed over 22 million views and won the 2016 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for Children\u2019s Science News.Watch \u201cAnna\u2019s Science Magic Show Hooray\u201d on YouTube. \u201cAnna\u2019s Science Magic Show Hooray\u201d aims to teach children about science The Washington Post launches new science, family programming on YouTube",
        "author": "WashPostPR"
    },
    {
        "title": "Democrats Split Over Scope of Coronavirus Oversight (WSJ: Washington Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7675",
        "date": "2020-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-delays-sending-war-powers-resolution-to-trump-11586511003?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=57",
        "text": "HOUSE CORONAVIRUS OVERSIGHT responsibilities get chopped up and spread among committees. Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nancy Pelosi\n \n\n\n\n and newly designated chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Clyburn\n\n\n\n of the special coronavirus committee say that panel will be used for oversight of the $2 trillion stimulus package and its many loan programs. Many Democrats and progressive groups have been distressed by Clyburn\u2019s comment that the committee wouldn\u2019t \u201cbe looking back on what the president may or may not have done back before this crisis hit.\u201d\nIntelligence Committee Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adam Schiff\n\n\n\n wants a 9/11-style independent commission to review the administration\u2019s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The House Oversight Committee has started some reviews, including an inquiry into the Federal Emergency Management Agency\u2019s medical equipment stockpiles. Rep. Katie Porter has begun her own investigations; this week her office released a report on the Defense Production Act and medical equipment exports to China during the first months of the pandemic.\nMOON MINING gets a boost from Trump executive order. The administration put out new guidelines relating to commercial activities in outer space, including mineral and water extraction. The order takes a strongly nationalist approach to commercial activities on the moon and other celestial bodies, saying that \u201cthe United States does not view space as a global commons.\u201d Top NASA officials say the order will make it easier to work with private industry on space exploration projects.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTS\n\n\n\nDo you think there should be a 9/11-style independent commission to review the administration\u2019s response to the coronavirus pandemic? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nTHE HOUSE FINISHED work on a war-powers resolution after an unusual delay.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Don Beyer\n\n\n\n (D., Va.) signed the resolution Friday in the absence of Mrs. Pelosi, who isn\u2019t in Washington at the moment. Now it goes to the Senate for signatures on Monday at the earliest, then on to the White House, where President Trump is expected to veto it.\n\n\nThe measure, which would limit the president\u2019s ability to take military action against Iran without approval from Congress, passed the House 227-186 last month after passing the Senate with a bipartisan 55-45 vote after the U.S. strike in January that killed Iranian Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Qassem Soleimani.\n\n\n\n Those vote totals suggest Congress wouldn\u2019t have the two-thirds support necessary to overcome President Trump\u2019s veto. The president vetoed a war-powers resolution last year that would have ended America\u2019s role in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.\nTRUMP VOTERS took fewer precautions and sought out less information about the coronavirus as it spread, according to economists at the University of Chicago. John Barrios and Yael V. Hochberg used cellphone-tracking data and internet searches to find that Trump voters were less concerned about the virus than others, as measured by searches about the virus, distance traveled and visits to nonessential businesses. Those perceptions didn\u2019t change until some people at a large conservative political conference outside Washington were infected, and the White House issued social distancing guidelines.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n79,455,163\nconfirmed cases in the U.S.\n\n\n965,466\ntotal deaths in the U.S.\n\n\nHawaiiCalif.Nev.Ariz.N.M.Colo.UtahFla.TexasOkla.Kan.La.Miss.Ala.Ga.Ark.Mo.Ill.Tenn.Ky.Ore.Wash.Wyo.IdahoMont.Neb.S.D.N.D.IowaWis.Ind.Mich.Minn.S.C.N.C.Va.W.V.Md.D.C.Del.OhioPa.N.J.Conn.N.Y.R.I.Mass.Vt.N.H.MaineAlaskaConfirmed casesas of March 11, at 6:00 a.m.500,000100,00010,000California9,030,973 cases\n\n\n\n\n Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering\n \n\n\n\n\nDEMOCRATS DELAYED their national convention to mid-August, settling on \u201cthe only date that made sense,\u201d a person involved in the conversations told the Journal\u2019s Emily Glazer. Behind the scenes, convention planners had been discussing contingency scenarios for several weeks amid the coronavirus, but there was still some rush in confirming the stage and arena dates, the person said. In mid-March, the Democratic National Convention Committee talked with Milwaukee officials about possible postponement dates in August. Aug. 3 was seen as too soon after the Democrats\u2019 initial mid-July dates, and Aug. 31 fell after the Republicans\u2019 Aug. 24-27 convention. They eventually landed on Aug. 17 as the best compromise, but the final length and format of the gathering remain unsettled.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n STEPHANIE GRISHAM\n\n\n\n , who left her role as White House press secretary after less than a year, has a quirky claim to fame: She leaves what is normally the highest-profile press job in D.C. with no C-Span clips to her name. The public affairs broadcaster archives hundreds of thousands of hours of footage of Washington policy makers; a search for her predecessor,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sarah House leaders taking on oversight of the administration\u2019s response have different priorities and approaches; President Trump is expected to veto the latest war-powers resolution from Congress; Trump order on moon mining takes a nationalistic approach, and more in Washington Wire. ",
        "author": "Gabriel T. Rubin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Funding for Bezos Space Company Fails to Launch in House (WSJ: Washington Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7676",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/funding-for-bezos-space-company-fails-to-launch-in-house-11624008601?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=20",
        "text": "Blue Origin filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office after SpaceX won the contract, urging the government to reassess and award a second contract. Senate progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have urged their House colleagues to remove the measure.\nHouse Science Committee Chairwoman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eddie Bernice Johnson\n\n\n\n and top Republican Frank Lucas this week put out a bill that takes a markedly different approach to U.S.-China competition and technological innovation, principally by spending much less, and it doesn\u2019t include additional authorization for moon lander funds. Johnson has been skeptical of NASA\u2019s goal of returning to the moon by 2024. NASA head\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson\n\n\n\n is supportive of the Senate measure, saying it \u201csets us on a path to execute many landings on the Moon in this decade.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBeyond the expense and wisdom of pursuing another moon landing, House opponents of the measure take aim at its likely beneficiary: Bezos, whose primary company,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon,\n\n\n is in the House\u2019s antitrust crosshairs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Ken Buck,\n\n\n\n the top Republican on the House Judiciary Antitrust subcommittee, flatly said \u201cno\u201d to whether he would consider funds for Blue Origin in China competition legislation. The top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, said he expected the legislation to \u201cchange a lot\u201d from what the Senate passed, and that he was giving priority to funding for semiconductor production over space exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Pramila Jayapal,\n\n\n\n whose Seattle district is full of Amazon employees, told The Wall Street Journal she didn\u2019t think Blue Origin needed a \u201chandout.\u201d \u201cIf Jeff Bezos wants to explore space, that\u2019s great, but I don\u2019t think he needs federal dollars.\u201d Blue Origin didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nTEXAS LEADERS set up clash over the limits of state power. Texas Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Lloyd Doggett,\n\n\n\n who leads the Ways and Means Health subcommittee, unveiled legislation to go around Republican-led states (like Texas) that haven\u2019t expanded Medicaid by giving money directly to \u201cwilling\u201d local governments under the Affordable Care Act. His bill has the support of the vast majority of Democratic representatives from states that haven\u2019t expanded Medicaid. The bill would allow city, county and other local governments to apply directly to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide coverage through demonstration projects with 100% funding for the first three years and eventually phased down to 90%. It would strip states of some administrative Medicaid funds if their legislatures tried to bar localities from accepting funds. Doggett hopes to include the measure in a budget-reconciliation package.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Capital Journal Scoops, analysis and insights driving Washington from the WSJ's D.C. bureau. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe bill is the latest clash between Republican Texas state authorities and the Democratic-majority Congress and Biden White House. Gov. Greg Abbott signed a resolution this week that \u201cnotifies the President & Congress to cease acts of encroaching upon the powers of states.\u201d \u201cTheir whole attitude about state sovereignty doesn\u2019t apply to local sovereignty,\u201d Doggett said in an interview. A spokeswoman for Abbott didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment on Doggett\u2019s bill. The Texas House held a vote on Medicaid expansion in April, rejecting it mostly along party lines. It is one of 13 states that hasn\u2019t implemented the expansion. \n7-ELEVEN, rather than a technology or agribusiness giant, is likely to be the first major company to find itself in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission\u2019s new Democratic majority. The convenience store giant is currently caught in the middle of a standoff between the commission\u2019s two Democratic and two Republican members, with the Democrats raising antitrust concerns about 7-Eleven\u2019s acquisition of 3,800 Speedway stores from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Marathon Petroleum,\n\n\n and the Republicans supporting a plan that would allow the deal if 7-Eleven sells around 300 of the stores.\nWith the confirmation of Commissioner Lina Khan, Democrats now have a majority on the FTC, and they could choose to sue to get 7-Eleven to sell more stores, or stick with the agreement already negotiated by FTC lawyers. \u201cIf the Commissioners approve that settlement, it will resolve all of the competitive concerns,\u201d 7-Eleven said in a testy statement last month, in response to the Democratic commissioners\u2019 concerns. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould NASA try to return to the moon? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nCLEVELAND-AREA HOUSE RACE becomes yet another round of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, with Bernie Sanders supporters on one side and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hillary Clinton\n\n\n\n supporters on the other. Top Sanders surrogate Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, is running against Shontel Brown, the local Democratic Party chairwoman who is endorsed by Clinton. Clinton sent out a fundraising appeal for Brown this week, and former Clinton allies in the Congressional Black Caucus hosted a D.C. fundraiser for her on Wednesday. Turner has been endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus\u2019s PAC.\nMINOR MEMOS: National Park Service gives tips for dealing with bears in Yellowstone: \u201cDo not push a slower friend down\u2026even if you feel the friendship has run its course.\u201d \u2026 Female senators invited to dine at vice president\u2019s residence rave over Kamala Harris\u2019s homemade cheese puffs. \u2026\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Tom Carper\n\n\n\n finally retires his 20-year-old minivan nicknamed the \u201csilver bullet,\u201d buys a Tesla.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nWrite to Gabriel T. Rubin at gabriel.rubin@wsj.com Members from both parties made clear the Senate\u2019s $10 billion authorization was a nonstarter. ",
        "author": "Gabriel T. Rubin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Funding for Bezos Space Company Fails to Launch in House (WSJ: Washington Wire) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7677",
        "date": "2021-06-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/funding-for-bezos-space-company-fails-to-launch-in-house-11624008601?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=28",
        "text": "Blue Origin filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office after SpaceX won the contract, urging the government to reassess and award a second contract. Senate progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have urged their House colleagues to remove the measure.\nHouse Science Committee Chairwoman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eddie Bernice Johnson\n\n\n\n and top Republican Frank Lucas this week put out a bill that takes a markedly different approach to U.S.-China competition and technological innovation, principally by spending much less, and it doesn\u2019t include additional authorization for moon lander funds. Johnson has been skeptical of NASA\u2019s goal of returning to the moon by 2024. NASA head\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson\n\n\n\n is supportive of the Senate measure, saying it \u201csets us on a path to execute many landings on the Moon in this decade.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nBeyond the expense and wisdom of pursuing another moon landing, House opponents of the measure take aim at its likely beneficiary: Bezos, whose primary company,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon,\n\n\n is in the House\u2019s antitrust crosshairs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Ken Buck,\n\n\n\n the top Republican on the House Judiciary Antitrust subcommittee, flatly said \u201cno\u201d to whether he would consider funds for Blue Origin in China competition legislation. The top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, said he expected the legislation to \u201cchange a lot\u201d from what the Senate passed, and that he was giving priority to funding for semiconductor production over space exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Pramila Jayapal,\n\n\n\n whose Seattle district is full of Amazon employees, told The Wall Street Journal she didn\u2019t think Blue Origin needed a \u201chandout.\u201d \u201cIf Jeff Bezos wants to explore space, that\u2019s great, but I don\u2019t think he needs federal dollars.\u201d Blue Origin didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nTEXAS LEADERS set up clash over the limits of state power. Texas Democratic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rep. Lloyd Doggett,\n\n\n\n who leads the Ways and Means Health subcommittee, unveiled legislation to go around Republican-led states (like Texas) that haven\u2019t expanded Medicaid by giving money directly to \u201cwilling\u201d local governments under the Affordable Care Act. His bill has the support of the vast majority of Democratic representatives from states that haven\u2019t expanded Medicaid. The bill would allow city, county and other local governments to apply directly to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide coverage through demonstration projects with 100% funding for the first three years and eventually phased down to 90%. It would strip states of some administrative Medicaid funds if their legislatures tried to bar localities from accepting funds. Doggett hopes to include the measure in a budget-reconciliation package.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Capital Journal Scoops, analysis and insights driving Washington from the WSJ's D.C. bureau. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe bill is the latest clash between Republican Texas state authorities and the Democratic-majority Congress and Biden White House. Gov. Greg Abbott signed a resolution this week that \u201cnotifies the President & Congress to cease acts of encroaching upon the powers of states.\u201d \u201cTheir whole attitude about state sovereignty doesn\u2019t apply to local sovereignty,\u201d Doggett said in an interview. A spokeswoman for Abbott didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment on Doggett\u2019s bill. The Texas House held a vote on Medicaid expansion in April, rejecting it mostly along party lines. It is one of 13 states that hasn\u2019t implemented the expansion. \n7-ELEVEN, rather than a technology or agribusiness giant, is likely to be the first major company to find itself in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission\u2019s new Democratic majority. The convenience store giant is currently caught in the middle of a standoff between the commission\u2019s two Democratic and two Republican members, with the Democrats raising antitrust concerns about 7-Eleven\u2019s acquisition of 3,800 Speedway stores from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Marathon Petroleum,\n\n\n and the Republicans supporting a plan that would allow the deal if 7-Eleven sells around 300 of the stores.\nWith the confirmation of Commissioner Lina Khan, Democrats now have a majority on the FTC, and they could choose to sue to get 7-Eleven to sell more stores, or stick with the agreement already negotiated by FTC lawyers. \u201cIf the Commissioners approve that settlement, it will resolve all of the competitive concerns,\u201d 7-Eleven said in a testy statement last month, in response to the Democratic commissioners\u2019 concerns. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould NASA try to return to the moon? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nCLEVELAND-AREA HOUSE RACE becomes yet another round of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, with Bernie Sanders supporters on one side and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hillary Clinton\n\n\n\n supporters on the other. Top Sanders surrogate Ni Members from both parties made clear the Senate\u2019s $10 billion authorization was a nonstarter. ",
        "author": "Gabriel T. Rubin"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Official Acknowledges Hyperloop Hype (WSJ: Washwire Blog) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7678",
        "date": "2017-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-official-acknowledges-hyperloop-hype-1504132951?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=88",
        "text": "The comment, which drew chuckles from a gathering of state and local officials, comes a little more than one month after Mr. Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc. and the Space Exploration Technologies Corp., generated a flurry of news coverage by tweeting that he had received \"verbal government approval\" for one of his ventures to construct a tunnel from Boston to Washington for his proposed high-speed conveyance. It remains unclear what sort of approval he sought or received.\nJust received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.\n\n\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2017\nMr. Musk's The Boring Company isn't seeking any government funding for the Hyperloop or tunneling projects, according to a company statement.\nMr. Trump's administration says it can generate $1 trillion worth of investment in roads, bridges, and other public works by providing incentives to local government and the private sector to invest their own capital in new projects. The administration says it is still crafting legislative principles to be presented to Congress this fall.\nSpeaking on Wednesday to a gathering at the Old Executive Office Building, near the White House, Mr. Mulvaney said some of those funds will be earmarked for new technologies that are \"close to being ready for the market\" but need a final boost.\nAfter triggering a storm of interest with his tweet in July, Mr. Musk has kept up his PR push for the Hyperloop concept, in which pods would travel at high speeds through low-pressure tubes, but whose safety and feasibility remains unproven.\nOn Sunday, Mr. Musk tweeted congratulations to a team participating in a Hyperloop design competition whose unoccupied vehicle reached a peak speed of 324 kilometers an hour, or just above the top operating speeds currently reached by Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains.\nThe entrepreneur also sees promise in the massive flooding of Houston by Hurricane Harvey. Asked by a Twitter user on Wednesday if his tunnel boring business would be able to dig drainage tunnels to prevent devastation from future storms, Mr. Musk tweeted back in reply: \"Not sure, but probably.\" If billionaire Elon Musk was hoping to hear more verbal government approval for his Hyperloop high-speed transportation system, he wasn't getting it from a top White House official Wednesday. ",
        "author": "Ted Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Official Acknowledges Hyperloop Hype (WSJ: Washwire Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7679",
        "date": "2017-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-official-acknowledges-hyperloop-hype-1504132951?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=115",
        "text": "The comment, which drew chuckles from a gathering of state and local officials, comes a little more than one month after Mr. Musk, the CEO of Tesla Inc. and the Space Exploration Technologies Corp., generated a flurry of news coverage by tweeting that he had received \"verbal government approval\" for one of his ventures to construct a tunnel from Boston to Washington for his proposed high-speed conveyance. It remains unclear what sort of approval he sought or received.\n\n\n\n\nJust received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.\n\n\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2017\nMr. Musk's The Boring Company isn't seeking any government funding for the Hyperloop or tunneling projects, according to a company statement.\nMr. Trump's administration says it can generate $1 trillion worth of investment in roads, bridges, and other public works by providing incentives to local government and the private sector to invest their own capital in new projects. The administration says it is still crafting legislative principles to be presented to Congress this fall.\nSpeaking on Wednesday to a gathering at the Old Executive Office Building, near the White House, Mr. Mulvaney said some of those funds will be earmarked for new technologies that are \"close to being ready for the market\" but need a final boost.\nAfter triggering a storm of interest with his tweet in July, Mr. Musk has kept up his PR push for the Hyperloop concept, in which pods would travel at high speeds through low-pressure tubes, but whose safety and feasibility remains unproven.\nOn Sunday, Mr. Musk tweeted congratulations to a team participating in a Hyperloop design competition whose unoccupied vehicle reached a peak speed of 324 kilometers an hour, or just above the top operating speeds currently reached by Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains.\nThe entrepreneur also sees promise in the massive flooding of Houston by Hurricane Harvey. Asked by a Twitter user on Wednesday if his tunnel boring business would be able to dig drainage tunnels to prevent devastation from future storms, Mr. Musk tweeted back in reply: \"Not sure, but probably.\" If billionaire Elon Musk was hoping to hear more verbal government approval for his Hyperloop high-speed transportation system, he wasn't getting it from a top White House official Wednesday. ",
        "author": "Ted Mann"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Engineer\u2019s Bid to Modernize the Girl Scouts (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7680",
        "date": "2018-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-engineers-bid-to-modernize-the-girl-scouts-1538766325?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=18",
        "text": "Now as head of the Girl Scouts, Ms. Acevedo, 61, faces an even more challenging task: reviving the storied organization, founded in 1912. The number of girls enrolled has fallen from 3.8 million in 2003 to 2.5 million today as the group struggles with its old-fashioned reputation. \u201cWe are always trying to look at: How are we relevant to girls?\u201d she says. \nTitle IX, the 1972 civil rights law, opened more opportunities for women, but it also left female-only organizations like the Girl Scouts in the position of having to explain their value in a coed world. \u201cWhat we failed to do for Girl Scouts is communicate how staying in Girl Scouts would be a way to get scholarships and earn our difficult awards,\u201d says Ms. Acevedo. \n\n\nShe sees the Girl Scouts\u2019 mission as relevant today, as a single-sex environment that can foster girls\u2019 confidence and provide a safe venue for expression. \u201cWhen girls are trying to do something nontraditional in a coed environment, they typically don\u2019t get called on first\u2026and there\u2019s typically peer pressure not to do that,\u201d she says. \u201cToday\u2019s coed environment puts so much pressure on them.\u201d\nSince being named CEO in spring 2017, Ms. Acevedo, a former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n executive with degrees in industrial engineering, has emphasized science and technology. When she told staffers that she wanted to add badges in coding, robotics and cybersecurity to the traditional lineup including cooking, craft and first aid, they said they\u2019d do it by 2025. Ms. Acevedo wanted it done faster. \nShe has also pushed technology in other ways, rolling out efforts to recruit new members on social media and testing a mobile app for planning and communication. Earlier this year, the Girl Scouts opened a center in Texas dedicated to teaching girls science and math skills.\nPart of Ms. Acevedo\u2019s strategy has been to raise awareness of the organization through her own story. In September, she released a memoir called \u201cPath to the Stars\u201d about her childhood as a Girl Scout. She grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the daughter and granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. Her father was a chemist in the Physical Science Laboratories at New Mexico State University while her mother stayed home with her and her siblings.\nShe joined the Girl Scouts at age 7. Initially shy, she says that the group helped her to gain confidence. Selling cookies gave her a sense of how to set goals, she says, and activities such as stargazing helped to stoke an interest in science and math. \nShe went to college at New Mexico State University, majoring in industrial engineering, which focuses on making processes more efficient. After graduating, she spent five months working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where she helped to analyze data from the Voyager Spacecraft as it passed by Jupiter.\nAfter working at the lab, she attended graduate school at Stanford, studying systems engineering and industrial engineering. She landed a job at IBM, working first as an industrial engineer and then as a marketing representative. Eight years later, she moved to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple.\n\n\n She fought to win promotion to a post as regional business development manager, overcoming her superiors\u2019 concern that businessmen in South America, which was part of the region, might not want to work with a woman. She traveled to Chile and Ecuador in an effort to prove that she could successfully do the job, and she got it.\nAfter stints at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Autodesk\n\n\n and Dell, she launched and sold her own business software startup, before founding and running a consulting company focused on children\u2019s health and education. Her work launching campaigns to provide fitness programs, books, toothbrushes and reading glasses to underserved school districts in cities such as Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles helped to earn Ms. Acevedo a spot as a Commissioner on the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2011.\nIn 2016, she was named the interim head of the Girl Scouts after serving on their board of directors since 2009. She officially took over as CEO last year. \nMs. Acevedo says that her push to broaden the Girl Scouts\u2019 tech offerings hasn\u2019t rattled traditionalists who cherish activities such as camping and cooking. She says that she has ensured that outdoor activities remain an important focus\u2014in her own life, too. \u201cAs much as I love technology, all my vacations are outside, doing all the things Girl Scouts has to offer like kayaking and horseback riding,\u201d she says. \nShe is undaunted by the Boy Scouts\u2019 announcement last spring that they would allow girls to join their ranks, and she has no plans to incorporate boys. \u201cWe are only going to focus on the girls in Girl Scouts.\u201d\n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nCEO David Novak Learned Leadership by Making Mistakes\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MI Sylvia Acevedo, a former IBM executive with degrees in industrial engineering, is emphasizing science and technology in her effort to revive the storied organization. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Engineer\u2019s Bid to Modernize the Girl Scouts (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7681",
        "date": "2018-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-engineers-bid-to-modernize-the-girl-scouts-1538766325?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=69",
        "text": "Now as head of the Girl Scouts, Ms. Acevedo, 61, faces an even more challenging task: reviving the storied organization, founded in 1912. The number of girls enrolled has fallen from 3.8 million in 2003 to 2.5 million today as the group struggles with its old-fashioned reputation. \u201cWe are always trying to look at: How are we relevant to girls?\u201d she says. \n\n\n\n\nTitle IX, the 1972 civil rights law, opened more opportunities for women, but it also left female-only organizations like the Girl Scouts in the position of having to explain their value in a coed world. \u201cWhat we failed to do for Girl Scouts is communicate how staying in Girl Scouts would be a way to get scholarships and earn our difficult awards,\u201d says Ms. Acevedo. \n\n\nShe sees the Girl Scouts\u2019 mission as relevant today, as a single-sex environment that can foster girls\u2019 confidence and provide a safe venue for expression. \u201cWhen girls are trying to do something nontraditional in a coed environment, they typically don\u2019t get called on first\u2026and there\u2019s typically peer pressure not to do that,\u201d she says. \u201cToday\u2019s coed environment puts so much pressure on them.\u201d\nSince being named CEO in spring 2017, Ms. Acevedo, a former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n executive with degrees in industrial engineering, has emphasized science and technology. When she told staffers that she wanted to add badges in coding, robotics and cybersecurity to the traditional lineup including cooking, craft and first aid, they said they\u2019d do it by 2025. Ms. Acevedo wanted it done faster. \nShe has also pushed technology in other ways, rolling out efforts to recruit new members on social media and testing a mobile app for planning and communication. Earlier this year, the Girl Scouts opened a center in Texas dedicated to teaching girls science and math skills.\nPart of Ms. Acevedo\u2019s strategy has been to raise awareness of the organization through her own story. In September, she released a memoir called \u201cPath to the Stars\u201d about her childhood as a Girl Scout. She grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the daughter and granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. Her father was a chemist in the Physical Science Laboratories at New Mexico State University while her mother stayed home with her and her siblings.\nShe joined the Girl Scouts at age 7. Initially shy, she says that the group helped her to gain confidence. Selling cookies gave her a sense of how to set goals, she says, and activities such as stargazing helped to stoke an interest in science and math. \nShe went to college at New Mexico State University, majoring in industrial engineering, which focuses on making processes more efficient. After graduating, she spent five months working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where she helped to analyze data from the Voyager Spacecraft as it passed by Jupiter.\nAfter working at the lab, she attended graduate school at Stanford, studying systems engineering and industrial engineering. She landed a job at IBM, working first as an industrial engineer and then as a marketing representative. Eight years later, she moved to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple.\n\n\n She fought to win promotion to a post as regional business development manager, overcoming her superiors\u2019 concern that businessmen in South America, which was part of the region, might not want to work with a woman. She traveled to Chile and Ecuador in an effort to prove that she could successfully do the job, and she got it.\nAfter stints at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Autodesk\n\n\n and Dell, she launched and sold her own business software startup, before founding and running a consulting company focused on children\u2019s health and education. Her work launching campaigns to provide fitness programs, books, toothbrushes and reading glasses to underserved school districts in cities such as Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles helped to earn Ms. Acevedo a spot as a Commissioner on the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2011.\nIn 2016, she was named the interim head of the Girl Scouts after serving on their board of directors since 2009. She officially took over as CEO last year. \nMs. Acevedo says that her push to broaden the Girl Scouts\u2019 tech offerings hasn\u2019t rattled traditionalists who cherish activities such as camping and cooking. She says that she has ensured that outdoor activities remain an important focus\u2014in her own life, too. \u201cAs much as I love technology, all my vacations are outside, doing all the things Girl Scouts has to offer like kayaking and horseback riding,\u201d she says. \nShe is undaunted by the Boy Scouts\u2019 announcement last spring that they would allow girls to join their ranks, and she has no plans to incorporate boys. \u201cWe are only going to focus on the girls in Girl Scouts.\u201d\n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nPsychiatrist Thomas Insel Looks for a Cure to America\u2019s Mental Health Crisis\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\nEntrepreneur Nataly Kogan Discovered That Well-Being Is Key to Success\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nWrite to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com Sylvia Acevedo, a former IBM executive with degrees in industrial engineering, is emphasizing science and technology in her effort to revive the storied organization. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Engineer\u2019s Bid to Modernize the Girl Scouts (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7682",
        "date": "2018-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-engineers-bid-to-modernize-the-girl-scouts-1538766325?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=63",
        "text": "Now as head of the Girl Scouts, Ms. Acevedo, 61, faces an even more challenging task: reviving the storied organization, founded in 1912. The number of girls enrolled has fallen from 3.8 million in 2003 to 2.5 million today as the group struggles with its old-fashioned reputation. \u201cWe are always trying to look at: How are we relevant to girls?\u201d she says. \nTitle IX, the 1972 civil rights law, opened more opportunities for women, but it also left female-only organizations like the Girl Scouts in the position of having to explain their value in a coed world. \u201cWhat we failed to do for Girl Scouts is communicate how staying in Girl Scouts would be a way to get scholarships and earn our difficult awards,\u201d says Ms. Acevedo. \n\n\nShe sees the Girl Scouts\u2019 mission as relevant today, as a single-sex environment that can foster girls\u2019 confidence and provide a safe venue for expression. \u201cWhen girls are trying to do something nontraditional in a coed environment, they typically don\u2019t get called on first\u2026and there\u2019s typically peer pressure not to do that,\u201d she says. \u201cToday\u2019s coed environment puts so much pressure on them.\u201d\nSince being named CEO in spring 2017, Ms. Acevedo, a former\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n executive with degrees in industrial engineering, has emphasized science and technology. When she told staffers that she wanted to add badges in coding, robotics and cybersecurity to the traditional lineup including cooking, craft and first aid, they said they\u2019d do it by 2025. Ms. Acevedo wanted it done faster. \nShe has also pushed technology in other ways, rolling out efforts to recruit new members on social media and testing a mobile app for planning and communication. Earlier this year, the Girl Scouts opened a center in Texas dedicated to teaching girls science and math skills.\nPart of Ms. Acevedo\u2019s strategy has been to raise awareness of the organization through her own story. In September, she released a memoir called \u201cPath to the Stars\u201d about her childhood as a Girl Scout. She grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the daughter and granddaughter of Mexican immigrants. Her father was a chemist in the Physical Science Laboratories at New Mexico State University while her mother stayed home with her and her siblings.\nShe joined the Girl Scouts at age 7. Initially shy, she says that the group helped her to gain confidence. Selling cookies gave her a sense of how to set goals, she says, and activities such as stargazing helped to stoke an interest in science and math. \nShe went to college at New Mexico State University, majoring in industrial engineering, which focuses on making processes more efficient. After graduating, she spent five months working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where she helped to analyze data from the Voyager Spacecraft as it passed by Jupiter.\nAfter working at the lab, she attended graduate school at Stanford, studying systems engineering and industrial engineering. She landed a job at IBM, working first as an industrial engineer and then as a marketing representative. Eight years later, she moved to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple.\n\n\n She fought to win promotion to a post as regional business development manager, overcoming her superiors\u2019 concern that businessmen in South America, which was part of the region, might not want to work with a woman. She traveled to Chile and Ecuador in an effort to prove that she could successfully do the job, and she got it.\nAfter stints at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Autodesk\n\n\n and Dell, she launched and sold her own business software startup, before founding and running a consulting company focused on children\u2019s health and education. Her work launching campaigns to provide fitness programs, books, toothbrushes and reading glasses to underserved school districts in cities such as Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles helped to earn Ms. Acevedo a spot as a Commissioner on the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2011.\nIn 2016, she was named the interim head of the Girl Scouts after serving on their board of directors since 2009. She officially took over as CEO last year. \nMs. Acevedo says that her push to broaden the Girl Scouts\u2019 tech offerings hasn\u2019t rattled traditionalists who cherish activities such as camping and cooking. She says that she has ensured that outdoor activities remain an important focus\u2014in her own life, too. \u201cAs much as I love technology, all my vacations are outside, doing all the things Girl Scouts has to offer like kayaking and horseback riding,\u201d she says. \nShe is undaunted by the Boy Scouts\u2019 announcement last spring that they would allow girls to join their ranks, and she has no plans to incorporate boys. \u201cWe are only going to focus on the girls in Girl Scouts.\u201d\n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nCEO David Novak Learned Leadership by Making Mistakes\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MI Sylvia Acevedo, a former IBM executive with degrees in industrial engineering, is emphasizing science and technology in her effort to revive the storied organization. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Samantha Cristoforetti Is Heading Back to Space (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7683",
        "date": "2021-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/samantha-cristoforetti-is-heading-back-to-space-11630686207?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=5",
        "text": "Next spring, Ms. Cristoforetti, 44, will return to the International Space Station (ISS) as its commander, after spending nearly 200 days there in 2014-15. Life as an extraterrestrial was a delight, says Ms. Cristoforetti: She slept well and never felt sick, unlike many of her peers, and she enjoyed executing a range of experiments, often on herself, in what is essentially a zero-gravity lab. One study involved repeating a series of movements with sensors attached to her body, to investigate how the brain controls balance and motion in a weightless environment. Although Ms. Cristoforetti grew to miss proper toilets and showers\u2014\u201dthat feeling of water flowing, feeling clean\u201d\u2014her only real disappointment was that she never left the station for a spacewalk, after a cargo vehicle bringing her personal equipment to the ISS exploded en route. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019m definitely more patient and more understanding of situations than I was, which helps as an astronaut.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nThe return to Earth \u201cis in many ways harder,\u201d Ms. Cristoforetti observes on a video call from Los Angeles, where she is training for her next mission. After experiencing a \u201cworld of effortlessness,\u201d she felt aches and pains as her body readjusted to gravity. Even little things, like wearing a structured bra, felt newly uncomfortable: \u201cI was like \u2018What is this thing? I can\u2019t breathe!\u2019\u201d she recalls. Ms. Cristoforetti suspects her age will make coming back even harder next time, but she is otherwise grateful for the gifts of time. \u201cI\u2019m definitely more patient and more understanding of situations than I was, which helps as an astronaut,\u201d she says.\nIn her book, Ms. Cristoforetti recalls that her parents worked punishing hours running a small hotel, but they never demanded anything from her or her brother except that they seize whatever opportunities they were given. \u201cIt takes a lot of generosity, I think, to give your children that freedom,\u201d she says. As a teenager, she discovered a knack for languages and a taste for adventure, and went on to study mechanical engineering in Germany, aerodynamics in France and solid rocket propellants in Russia. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSamantha Cristoforetti, left, with fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, March 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe Italian air force began to accept women when Ms. Cristoforetti was 24, so she enlisted and trained to become a test pilot, a \u201cprivileged gateway to space.\u201d She was 31 and still accumulating flight hours when she heard that the European Space Agency (ESA) would be selecting a new group of astronauts, a \u201conce-in-a-lifetime\u201d opportunity. In 2009, after a series of rigorous physical and cognitive tests, she beat out some 8,400 other applicants to become an ESA astronaut. \n\n\nPreparing for space flight involved training around the world, including at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Star City in Russia, the Tsukuba space center in Japan and ESA\u2019s headquarters in Cologne, Germany. Ms. Cristoforetti now lives in Cologne with her partner, Lionel Ferra, and their two young children. Although space exploration began as a fraught Cold War contest, Ms. Cristoforetti says that it has become a model of international collaboration: \u201cAstronauts are more similar than different from each other.\u201d\nYet she notes that there are cultural differences among the various programs. In Europe and the U.S., decision-making is more formal and transparent; in Russia, policy choices are often opaque. \u201cYou may not quite understand the choice because it\u2019s not based on a process,\u201d she says. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nCEO David Novak Learned Leadership by Making Mistakes\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nFor her first mission in 2014, Ms. Cristoforetti went to space on the Soyuz, a Russian spacecraft that ferried astronauts to the space station for years after NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011. But in 2022 she will fly on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, a spacecraft designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX Corp. In a summer that has seen billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n launch themselves into space, Ms. Cristoforetti applauds NASA\u2019s efforts to encourage a commercial space industry. \u201cAny extra launch will help us improve our hardware and operations,\u201d she says, noting that competition for NASA contracts among companies such as Boeing, SpaceX and Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin promises to spur innovation and lower costs.\nCritics of space expeditions argue that they are simply costly jobs programs for astronauts with little payoff for taxpayers. Ms. Cristoforetti is quick to point to the practical benefits of these missions, which have helped develop satellite telecommunications, After publishing a memoir, the Italian astronaut will return to the International Space Station next year as its commander. ",
        "author": "Emily Bobrow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Samantha Cristoforetti Is Heading Back to Space (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7684",
        "date": "2021-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/samantha-cristoforetti-is-heading-back-to-space-11630686207?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=23",
        "text": "Next spring, Ms. Cristoforetti, 44, will return to the International Space Station (ISS) as its commander, after spending nearly 200 days there in 2014-15. Life as an extraterrestrial was a delight, says Ms. Cristoforetti: She slept well and never felt sick, unlike many of her peers, and she enjoyed executing a range of experiments, often on herself, in what is essentially a zero-gravity lab. One study involved repeating a series of movements with sensors attached to her body, to investigate how the brain controls balance and motion in a weightless environment. Although Ms. Cristoforetti grew to miss proper toilets and showers\u2014\u201dthat feeling of water flowing, feeling clean\u201d\u2014her only real disappointment was that she never left the station for a spacewalk, after a cargo vehicle bringing her personal equipment to the ISS exploded en route. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019m definitely more patient and more understanding of situations than I was, which helps as an astronaut.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nThe return to Earth \u201cis in many ways harder,\u201d Ms. Cristoforetti observes on a video call from Los Angeles, where she is training for her next mission. After experiencing a \u201cworld of effortlessness,\u201d she felt aches and pains as her body readjusted to gravity. Even little things, like wearing a structured bra, felt newly uncomfortable: \u201cI was like \u2018What is this thing? I can\u2019t breathe!\u2019\u201d she recalls. Ms. Cristoforetti suspects her age will make coming back even harder next time, but she is otherwise grateful for the gifts of time. \u201cI\u2019m definitely more patient and more understanding of situations than I was, which helps as an astronaut,\u201d she says.\nIn her book, Ms. Cristoforetti recalls that her parents worked punishing hours running a small hotel, but they never demanded anything from her or her brother except that they seize whatever opportunities they were given. \u201cIt takes a lot of generosity, I think, to give your children that freedom,\u201d she says. As a teenager, she discovered a knack for languages and a taste for adventure, and went on to study mechanical engineering in Germany, aerodynamics in France and solid rocket propellants in Russia. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSamantha Cristoforetti, left, with fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, March 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe Italian air force began to accept women when Ms. Cristoforetti was 24, so she enlisted and trained to become a test pilot, a \u201cprivileged gateway to space.\u201d She was 31 and still accumulating flight hours when she heard that the European Space Agency (ESA) would be selecting a new group of astronauts, a \u201conce-in-a-lifetime\u201d opportunity. In 2009, after a series of rigorous physical and cognitive tests, she beat out some 8,400 other applicants to become an ESA astronaut. \n\n\nPreparing for space flight involved training around the world, including at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Star City in Russia, the Tsukuba space center in Japan and ESA\u2019s headquarters in Cologne, Germany. Ms. Cristoforetti now lives in Cologne with her partner, Lionel Ferra, and their two young children. Although space exploration began as a fraught Cold War contest, Ms. Cristoforetti says that it has become a model of international collaboration: \u201cAstronauts are more similar than different from each other.\u201d\nYet she notes that there are cultural differences among the various programs. In Europe and the U.S., decision-making is more formal and transparent; in Russia, policy choices are often opaque. \u201cYou may not quite understand the choice because it\u2019s not based on a process,\u201d she says. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nCEO David Novak Learned Leadership by Making Mistakes\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nFor her first mission in 2014, Ms. Cristoforetti went to space on the Soyuz, a Russian spacecraft that ferried astronauts to the space station for years after NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011. But in 2022 she will fly on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, a spacecraft designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX Corp. In a summer that has seen billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n launch themselves into space, Ms. Cristoforetti applauds NASA\u2019s efforts to encourage a commercial space industry. \u201cAny extra launch will help us improve our hardware and operations,\u201d she says, noting that competition for NASA contracts among companies such as Boeing, SpaceX and Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin promises to spur innovation and lower costs.\nCritics of space expeditions argue that they are simply costly jobs programs for astronauts with little payoff for taxpayers. Ms. Cristoforetti is quick to point to the practical benefits of these missions, which have helped develop satellite telecommunications, After publishing a memoir, the Italian astronaut will return to the International Space Station next year as its commander. ",
        "author": "Emily Bobrow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Samantha Cristoforetti Is Heading Back to Space (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7685",
        "date": "2021-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/samantha-cristoforetti-is-heading-back-to-space-11630686207?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=23",
        "text": "Next spring, Ms. Cristoforetti, 44, will return to the International Space Station (ISS) as its commander, after spending nearly 200 days there in 2014-15. Life as an extraterrestrial was a delight, says Ms. Cristoforetti: She slept well and never felt sick, unlike many of her peers, and she enjoyed executing a range of experiments, often on herself, in what is essentially a zero-gravity lab. One study involved repeating a series of movements with sensors attached to her body, to investigate how the brain controls balance and motion in a weightless environment. Although Ms. Cristoforetti grew to miss proper toilets and showers\u2014\u201dthat feeling of water flowing, feeling clean\u201d\u2014her only real disappointment was that she never left the station for a spacewalk, after a cargo vehicle bringing her personal equipment to the ISS exploded en route. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018I\u2019m definitely more patient and more understanding of situations than I was, which helps as an astronaut.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe return to Earth \u201cis in many ways harder,\u201d Ms. Cristoforetti observes on a video call from Los Angeles, where she is training for her next mission. After experiencing a \u201cworld of effortlessness,\u201d she felt aches and pains as her body readjusted to gravity. Even little things, like wearing a structured bra, felt newly uncomfortable: \u201cI was like \u2018What is this thing? I can\u2019t breathe!\u2019\u201d she recalls. Ms. Cristoforetti suspects her age will make coming back even harder next time, but she is otherwise grateful for the gifts of time. \u201cI\u2019m definitely more patient and more understanding of situations than I was, which helps as an astronaut,\u201d she says.\nIn her book, Ms. Cristoforetti recalls that her parents worked punishing hours running a small hotel, but they never demanded anything from her or her brother except that they seize whatever opportunities they were given. \u201cIt takes a lot of generosity, I think, to give your children that freedom,\u201d she says. As a teenager, she discovered a knack for languages and a taste for adventure, and went on to study mechanical engineering in Germany, aerodynamics in France and solid rocket propellants in Russia. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSamantha Cristoforetti, left, with fellow astronauts aboard the International Space Station, March 2015.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe Italian air force began to accept women when Ms. Cristoforetti was 24, so she enlisted and trained to become a test pilot, a \u201cprivileged gateway to space.\u201d She was 31 and still accumulating flight hours when she heard that the European Space Agency (ESA) would be selecting a new group of astronauts, a \u201conce-in-a-lifetime\u201d opportunity. In 2009, after a series of rigorous physical and cognitive tests, she beat out some 8,400 other applicants to become an ESA astronaut. \n\n\nPreparing for space flight involved training around the world, including at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Star City in Russia, the Tsukuba space center in Japan and ESA\u2019s headquarters in Cologne, Germany. Ms. Cristoforetti now lives in Cologne with her partner, Lionel Ferra, and their two young children. Although space exploration began as a fraught Cold War contest, Ms. Cristoforetti says that it has become a model of international collaboration: \u201cAstronauts are more similar than different from each other.\u201d\nYet she notes that there are cultural differences among the various programs. In Europe and the U.S., decision-making is more formal and transparent; in Russia, policy choices are often opaque. \u201cYou may not quite understand the choice because it\u2019s not based on a process,\u201d she says. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor her first mission in 2014, Ms. Cristoforetti went to space on the Soyuz, a Russian spacecraft that ferried astronauts to the space station for years after NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011. But in 2022 she will fly on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, a spacecraft designed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX Corp. In a summer that has seen billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n launch themselves into space, Ms. Cristoforetti applauds NASA\u2019s efforts to encourage a commercial space industry. \u201cAny extra launch will help us improve our hardware and operations,\u201d she says, noting that competition for NASA contracts among companies such as Boeing, SpaceX and Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin promises to spur innovation and lower costs.\nCritics of space expeditions argue that they are simply costly jobs programs for astronauts with little payoff for taxpayers. Ms. Cristoforetti is quick to point to the practical benefits of these missions, which have helped develop satellite telecommunications, weather forecasting, water filtration and global-positioning technology, among other advances. But she adds that space exploration \u201cspeaks to that part of the human experience that\u2019s not pragmatic. It\u2019s not about costs and benefits, it\u2019s not about what I get out of it tomorrow. It\u2019s about doin After publishing a memoir, the Italian astronaut will return to the International Space Station next year as its commander. ",
        "author": "Emily Bobrow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tales of an Asteroid Hunter (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7686",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tales-of-an-asteroid-hunter-1495811109?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=24",
        "text": "In March, Dr. Nugent released her first book, \u201cAsteroid Hunters,\u201d about the science of tracking and studying space rocks. Most of the asteroids in our solar system\u2014an estimated 1.1 to 1.9 million of them measuring at least 0.6 of a mile in diameter\u2014orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The largest known asteroid is Vesta, which is some 350 miles across. But there are other asteroids closer to Earth. Scientists have classified 1,808 of them within 28 million miles of the Earth\u2019s orbit as potentially hazardous\u2014posing some danger should they enter our atmosphere.\nThe good news, says Dr. Nugent, is that no known asteroids currently pose any significant hazard to humans. Only one American is known definitively to have been hit by a meteorite (what an asteroid is called after it lands on Earth). In 1954, Ann Hodges of Alabama was struck by one that fell through her roof, leaving a nearly foot-long bruise on her side. \nMore recently, in February 2013, an asteroid fell and exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia. The resulting waves of pressure shattered windows and damaged some 3,000 buildings. A big collision has the potential to be catastrophic, such as the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that some scientists think killed off the dinosaurs and changed the Earth\u2019s axis of rotation. \n\n\n\n\u201cObviously we\u2019d like to find all the ones that are big and are close to Earth.\u201d\n\n\n\nScientists have so far identified roughly 700,000 individual asteroids. With enough study of an asteroid, they can project where it will be every day for up to 800 years. \u201cObviously we\u2019d like to find all the ones that are big and are close to Earth,\u201d says Dr. Nugent.\n\n\nShe grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of an engineer mother and a father who taught auto shop at community colleges. She earned her Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics in 2013 at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was drawn to asteroids in part because of the potential for humans to control them\u2014and because they\u2019re concrete objects. \u201cIt\u2019s really exciting to study something you can see in the sky and also hold pieces of in your hand,\u201d she says. \u201cYou don\u2019t get to do that when you study black holes.\u201d\nNow at Caltech\u2019s IPAC science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science, she finds new asteroids by looking for tiny, previously unknown points of light in images from high-powered telescopes, then tracks their movement. That process still requires a real person, she says: \u201cHuman eyes are a lot better than technology at this point.\u201d \nSo what could we do if an asteroid actually does threaten life on Earth? One option is to put a massive spacecraft in orbit around the asteroid. The spacecraft could use its own gravity to shift the asteroid to a new trajectory over the course of years or even decades. Or scientists could send a large, high-speed spacecraft either to collide with the asteroid or to release a part that would hit it and move it off course. \nFinally, there\u2019s the \u201cArmageddon\u201d option: a nuclear detonation. In the movie, the crew blows up the asteroid from within. But in real life, \u201cyou don\u2019t Bruce Willis it and put [the bomb] inside\u201d the asteroid, says Dr. Nugent. \u201cYou detonate the nuclear device nearby and give it a shove aside.\u201d\nDr. Nugent spends most of her time on her computer looking at images of space, writing computer code and checking her email. \u201cMy personal job has a lot more in common with most people\u2019s desk jobs than people expect,\u201d she says. \nFor fun, she hosts a podcast called Spacepod. \u201cI sound like some kind of L.A. stereotype here, since everyone\u2019s got a podcast,\u201d she jokes. Every week, she interviews a different scientist over a drink. In her last episode, she spoke with glaciologist Michele Koppes of the University of British Columbia over a green tea cucumber smoothie about her travels to some of the iciest places on Earth. When Dr. Nugent isn\u2019t thinking about space, she likes to run and read.\nShe also likes the stories behind asteroid names. She had one named after her at a conference in 2013, officially called 8801 Nugent. Another name that amuses her is Dioretsa, which is \u201casteroid\u201d spelled backward, because its orbit goes the opposite direction of most other asteroids.\nBeyond the possible threat posed by an impact, studying asteroids helps scientists to understand what the solar system was like billions of years ago. They hold promise for the future as well: Companies are looking into asteroid mining to harvest natural resources such as platinum. \nStill, Dr. Nugent\u2019s main goal remains finding near-Earth asteroids that could pose a future problem to humanity. \u201cHopefully we\u2019ll find that they\u2019re all on trajectories that lead them away from Earth,\u201d she says. \u201cBut of course, I\u2019m an optimist.\u201d\nWrite to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com\n\n\nMore from Review What We Remember on Memorial Day Rules for Modern Living From the Ancient Stoics What\u2019s in a Scientific Name? Does Facebook Make Us Unhappy and Unheal Scientist Carrie Nugent is on a mission to protect the planet from asteroids. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tales of an Asteroid Hunter (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7687",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tales-of-an-asteroid-hunter-1495811109?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=94",
        "text": "In March, Dr. Nugent released her first book, \u201cAsteroid Hunters,\u201d about the science of tracking and studying space rocks. Most of the asteroids in our solar system\u2014an estimated 1.1 to 1.9 million of them measuring at least 0.6 of a mile in diameter\u2014orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The largest known asteroid is Vesta, which is some 350 miles across. But there are other asteroids closer to Earth. Scientists have classified 1,808 of them within 28 million miles of the Earth\u2019s orbit as potentially hazardous\u2014posing some danger should they enter our atmosphere.\nThe good news, says Dr. Nugent, is that no known asteroids currently pose any significant hazard to humans. Only one American is known definitively to have been hit by a meteorite (what an asteroid is called after it lands on Earth). In 1954, Ann Hodges of Alabama was struck by one that fell through her roof, leaving a nearly foot-long bruise on her side. \n\n\n\n\nMore recently, in February 2013, an asteroid fell and exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia. The resulting waves of pressure shattered windows and damaged some 3,000 buildings. A big collision has the potential to be catastrophic, such as the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that some scientists think killed off the dinosaurs and changed the Earth\u2019s axis of rotation. \n\n\n\n\u201cObviously we\u2019d like to find all the ones that are big and are close to Earth.\u201d\n\n\n\nScientists have so far identified roughly 700,000 individual asteroids. With enough study of an asteroid, they can project where it will be every day for up to 800 years. \u201cObviously we\u2019d like to find all the ones that are big and are close to Earth,\u201d says Dr. Nugent.\n\n\nShe grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of an engineer mother and a father who taught auto shop at community colleges. She earned her Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics in 2013 at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was drawn to asteroids in part because of the potential for humans to control them\u2014and because they\u2019re concrete objects. \u201cIt\u2019s really exciting to study something you can see in the sky and also hold pieces of in your hand,\u201d she says. \u201cYou don\u2019t get to do that when you study black holes.\u201d\nNow at Caltech\u2019s IPAC science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science, she finds new asteroids by looking for tiny, previously unknown points of light in images from high-powered telescopes, then tracks their movement. That process still requires a real person, she says: \u201cHuman eyes are a lot better than technology at this point.\u201d \nSo what could we do if an asteroid actually does threaten life on Earth? One option is to put a massive spacecraft in orbit around the asteroid. The spacecraft could use its own gravity to shift the asteroid to a new trajectory over the course of years or even decades. Or scientists could send a large, high-speed spacecraft either to collide with the asteroid or to release a part that would hit it and move it off course. \nFinally, there\u2019s the \u201cArmageddon\u201d option: a nuclear detonation. In the movie, the crew blows up the asteroid from within. But in real life, \u201cyou don\u2019t Bruce Willis it and put [the bomb] inside\u201d the asteroid, says Dr. Nugent. \u201cYou detonate the nuclear device nearby and give it a shove aside.\u201d\nDr. Nugent spends most of her time on her computer looking at images of space, writing computer code and checking her email. \u201cMy personal job has a lot more in common with most people\u2019s desk jobs than people expect,\u201d she says. \nFor fun, she hosts a podcast called Spacepod. \u201cI sound like some kind of L.A. stereotype here, since everyone\u2019s got a podcast,\u201d she jokes. Every week, she interviews a different scientist over a drink. In her last episode, she spoke with glaciologist Michele Koppes of the University of British Columbia over a green tea cucumber smoothie about her travels to some of the iciest places on Earth. When Dr. Nugent isn\u2019t thinking about space, she likes to run and read.\nShe also likes the stories behind asteroid names. She had one named after her at a conference in 2013, officially called 8801 Nugent. Another name that amuses her is Dioretsa, which is \u201casteroid\u201d spelled backward, because its orbit goes the opposite direction of most other asteroids.\nBeyond the possible threat posed by an impact, studying asteroids helps scientists to understand what the solar system was like billions of years ago. They hold promise for the future as well: Companies are looking into asteroid mining to harvest natural resources such as platinum. \nStill, Dr. Nugent\u2019s main goal remains finding near-Earth asteroids that could pose a future problem to humanity. \u201cHopefully we\u2019ll find that they\u2019re all on trajectories that lead them away from Earth,\u201d she says. \u201cBut of course, I\u2019m an optimist.\u201d\nWrite to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com\n\n\nMore from Review What We Remember on Memorial Day Rules for Modern Living From the Ancient Stoics What\u2019s in a Scientific Name? Does Facebook Make Us Unhappy and Unhealthy? Scientist Carrie Nugent is on a mission to protect the planet from asteroids. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tales of an Asteroid Hunter (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7688",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tales-of-an-asteroid-hunter-1495811109?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=82",
        "text": "In March, Dr. Nugent released her first book, \u201cAsteroid Hunters,\u201d about the science of tracking and studying space rocks. Most of the asteroids in our solar system\u2014an estimated 1.1 to 1.9 million of them measuring at least 0.6 of a mile in diameter\u2014orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The largest known asteroid is Vesta, which is some 350 miles across. But there are other asteroids closer to Earth. Scientists have classified 1,808 of them within 28 million miles of the Earth\u2019s orbit as potentially hazardous\u2014posing some danger should they enter our atmosphere.\nThe good news, says Dr. Nugent, is that no known asteroids currently pose any significant hazard to humans. Only one American is known definitively to have been hit by a meteorite (what an asteroid is called after it lands on Earth). In 1954, Ann Hodges of Alabama was struck by one that fell through her roof, leaving a nearly foot-long bruise on her side. \nMore recently, in February 2013, an asteroid fell and exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia. The resulting waves of pressure shattered windows and damaged some 3,000 buildings. A big collision has the potential to be catastrophic, such as the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that some scientists think killed off the dinosaurs and changed the Earth\u2019s axis of rotation. \n\n\n\n\u201cObviously we\u2019d like to find all the ones that are big and are close to Earth.\u201d\n\n\n\nScientists have so far identified roughly 700,000 individual asteroids. With enough study of an asteroid, they can project where it will be every day for up to 800 years. \u201cObviously we\u2019d like to find all the ones that are big and are close to Earth,\u201d says Dr. Nugent.\n\n\nShe grew up in Los Angeles, the daughter of an engineer mother and a father who taught auto shop at community colleges. She earned her Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics in 2013 at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was drawn to asteroids in part because of the potential for humans to control them\u2014and because they\u2019re concrete objects. \u201cIt\u2019s really exciting to study something you can see in the sky and also hold pieces of in your hand,\u201d she says. \u201cYou don\u2019t get to do that when you study black holes.\u201d\nNow at Caltech\u2019s IPAC science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science, she finds new asteroids by looking for tiny, previously unknown points of light in images from high-powered telescopes, then tracks their movement. That process still requires a real person, she says: \u201cHuman eyes are a lot better than technology at this point.\u201d \nSo what could we do if an asteroid actually does threaten life on Earth? One option is to put a massive spacecraft in orbit around the asteroid. The spacecraft could use its own gravity to shift the asteroid to a new trajectory over the course of years or even decades. Or scientists could send a large, high-speed spacecraft either to collide with the asteroid or to release a part that would hit it and move it off course. \nFinally, there\u2019s the \u201cArmageddon\u201d option: a nuclear detonation. In the movie, the crew blows up the asteroid from within. But in real life, \u201cyou don\u2019t Bruce Willis it and put [the bomb] inside\u201d the asteroid, says Dr. Nugent. \u201cYou detonate the nuclear device nearby and give it a shove aside.\u201d\nDr. Nugent spends most of her time on her computer looking at images of space, writing computer code and checking her email. \u201cMy personal job has a lot more in common with most people\u2019s desk jobs than people expect,\u201d she says. \nFor fun, she hosts a podcast called Spacepod. \u201cI sound like some kind of L.A. stereotype here, since everyone\u2019s got a podcast,\u201d she jokes. Every week, she interviews a different scientist over a drink. In her last episode, she spoke with glaciologist Michele Koppes of the University of British Columbia over a green tea cucumber smoothie about her travels to some of the iciest places on Earth. When Dr. Nugent isn\u2019t thinking about space, she likes to run and read.\nShe also likes the stories behind asteroid names. She had one named after her at a conference in 2013, officially called 8801 Nugent. Another name that amuses her is Dioretsa, which is \u201casteroid\u201d spelled backward, because its orbit goes the opposite direction of most other asteroids.\nBeyond the possible threat posed by an impact, studying asteroids helps scientists to understand what the solar system was like billions of years ago. They hold promise for the future as well: Companies are looking into asteroid mining to harvest natural resources such as platinum. \nStill, Dr. Nugent\u2019s main goal remains finding near-Earth asteroids that could pose a future problem to humanity. \u201cHopefully we\u2019ll find that they\u2019re all on trajectories that lead them away from Earth,\u201d she says. \u201cBut of course, I\u2019m an optimist.\u201d\nWrite to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com\n\n\nMore from Review What We Remember on Memorial Day Rules for Modern Living From the Ancient Stoics What\u2019s in a Scientific Name? Does Facebook Make Us Unhappy and Unheal Scientist Carrie Nugent is on a mission to protect the planet from asteroids. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the Worlds (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7689",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lisa-pratt-is-out-to-save-the-worlds-11593189823?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=12",
        "text": "Dr. Pratt, 69, is the planetary protection officer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Her job is to ensure that NASA\u2019s interplanetary spacecraft don\u2019t taint the alien worlds they are designed to explore. NASA takes that risk so seriously that next year, it plans to crash its $1.1 billion Juno space probe into Jupiter to avoid contaminating two nearby moons, Europa and Ganymede, that might harbor life. The probe, launched in 2011, is ending its mission there and, if left orbiting aimlessly, might crash into one of them. It is also her task to make sure that extraterrestrial microbes and viruses\u2014should any exist\u2014never blight Earth.\n\u201cWe have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cI find it hard to imagine there isn\u2019t Earthlike life other places in our solar system. I think it\u2019s a reflection of the fundamental nature of the physics and chemistry of carbon,\u201d on which all known life is based.\nFor Dr. Pratt, the unanswered question of astrobiology can be read in the genetic sequence of every microscopic spore clinging to a space-bound circuit board or heat shield. Imagine the heartbreak, she says, if we ever do discover life on another world only to find that it is just microbes seeded carelessly from our home planet.\n\n\n\u201cI expect us to find life in other places. It would change everything. The question will be, \u2018Where did it originate?\u2019\u201d she says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018We have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u2019 says Dr. Pratt.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Stephen Voss for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFor the first time in almost 50 years, NASA officials are moving to loosen protective biological restrictions on the Moon and much of Mars for human missions, to lower costs and promote private space ventures. That is a dramatic departure from a standard that took shape for the first U.S. Mars landing in 1976, when NASA sanitized its four-ton Viking lander by baking it in an oven for 30 hours. \nThe changes now being debated internationally reflect, in part, the suspicion that humankind may have already contaminated areas of the Moon and Mars. Only last April, a private company accidentally crash-landed a cargo of human DNA samples and thousands of microscopic, eight-legged creatures called tardigrades on the Moon.\n\u201cWe are at a watershed moment,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cIt was pretty simple to decide what the right thing to do was when there were just a handful of national agencies involved. There are corporations that can do as much if not more now than the national agencies. And they have a different perspective on what they\u2019d like to do on the Moon and Mars.\u201d\nWhile debates continue, the pace of interplanetary landings is picking up. So are plans to bring home samples from alien worlds.\nThis summer, NASA and China each expect to launch spacecraft to land on Mars, while the United Arab Emirates plans to launch its first interplanetary mission to the red planet. Europe and Russia are readying their own Mars lander. By the end of the year, China plans to bring back samples from the Moon, while Japan is due to return samples from the asteroid Ryugu. NASA is set to sample an asteroid called Bennu for return to Earth in 2023. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nCEO David Novak Learned Leadership by Making Mistakes\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs the new coronavirus grew out of control, Dr. Pratt and her team of clean-room specialists oversaw the assembly of NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars lander, which is scheduled for launch in late July on the agency\u2019s $2.45 billion Mars 2020 mission. Due to public health precautions, she has been working almost a thousand miles away from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where the Mars rocket is being stacked on Space Launch Complex 41. She has been isolated in her family home outside Bloomington, Ind., conducting meticulous daily spacecraft inspections via tiny\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GoPro\n\n\n cameras worn by launchpad engineers. Bolt by bolt, they sterilized and tested every part to eliminate bacteria that might hitchhike across the airless void between planets.\nDr. Pratt never intended to become an astrobiologist. She grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in Rochester, Minn., the middle of three children in a neighborhood in which almost every house was home to a doctor. Her father was a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic; her mother was a manager at the Kahler Grand Hotel downtown.\n\u201cFrom as early as I can remember, I experienced conversations about disease, infection, surgical intervention, quality of life issues and matters of life and death,\u201d she says. \u201cI spent a lot of time on my own outside, pokin NASA\u2019s \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 works to keep alien microbes and viruses away from Earth\u2014and to avoid contaminating distant planets and moons. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the Worlds (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7690",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lisa-pratt-is-out-to-save-the-worlds-11593189823?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=42",
        "text": "Dr. Pratt, 69, is the planetary protection officer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Her job is to ensure that NASA\u2019s interplanetary spacecraft don\u2019t taint the alien worlds they are designed to explore. NASA takes that risk so seriously that next year, it plans to crash its $1.1 billion Juno space probe into Jupiter to avoid contaminating two nearby moons, Europa and Ganymede, that might harbor life. The probe, launched in 2011, is ending its mission there and, if left orbiting aimlessly, might crash into one of them. It is also her task to make sure that extraterrestrial microbes and viruses\u2014should any exist\u2014never blight Earth.\n\u201cWe have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cI find it hard to imagine there isn\u2019t Earthlike life other places in our solar system. I think it\u2019s a reflection of the fundamental nature of the physics and chemistry of carbon,\u201d on which all known life is based.\n\n\n\n\nFor Dr. Pratt, the unanswered question of astrobiology can be read in the genetic sequence of every microscopic spore clinging to a space-bound circuit board or heat shield. Imagine the heartbreak, she says, if we ever do discover life on another world only to find that it is just microbes seeded carelessly from our home planet.\n\n\n\u201cI expect us to find life in other places. It would change everything. The question will be, \u2018Where did it originate?\u2019\u201d she says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018We have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u2019 says Dr. Pratt.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Stephen Voss for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFor the first time in almost 50 years, NASA officials are moving to loosen protective biological restrictions on the Moon and much of Mars for human missions, to lower costs and promote private space ventures. That is a dramatic departure from a standard that took shape for the first U.S. Mars landing in 1976, when NASA sanitized its four-ton Viking lander by baking it in an oven for 30 hours. \nThe changes now being debated internationally reflect, in part, the suspicion that humankind may have already contaminated areas of the Moon and Mars. Only last April, a private company accidentally crash-landed a cargo of human DNA samples and thousands of microscopic, eight-legged creatures called tardigrades on the Moon.\n\u201cWe are at a watershed moment,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cIt was pretty simple to decide what the right thing to do was when there were just a handful of national agencies involved. There are corporations that can do as much if not more now than the national agencies. And they have a different perspective on what they\u2019d like to do on the Moon and Mars.\u201d\nWhile debates continue, the pace of interplanetary landings is picking up. So are plans to bring home samples from alien worlds.\nThis summer, NASA and China each expect to launch spacecraft to land on Mars, while the United Arab Emirates plans to launch its first interplanetary mission to the red planet. Europe and Russia are readying their own Mars lander. By the end of the year, China plans to bring back samples from the Moon, while Japan is due to return samples from the asteroid Ryugu. NASA is set to sample an asteroid called Bennu for return to Earth in 2023. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nPsychiatrist Thomas Insel Looks for a Cure to America\u2019s Mental Health Crisis\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs the new coronavirus grew out of control, Dr. Pratt and her team of clean-room specialists oversaw the assembly of NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars lander, which is scheduled for launch in late July on the agency\u2019s $2.45 billion Mars 2020 mission. Due to public health precautions, she has been working almost a thousand miles away from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where the Mars rocket is being stacked on Space Launch Complex 41. She has been isolated in her family home outside Bloomington, Ind., conducting meticulous daily spacecraft inspections via tiny\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GoPro\n\n\n cameras worn by launchpad engineers. Bolt by bolt, they sterilized and tested every part to eliminate bacteria that might hitchhike across the airless void between planets.\nDr. Pratt never intended to become an astrobiologist. She grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in Rochester, Minn., the middle of three children in a neighborhood in which almost every house was home to a doctor. Her father was a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic; her mother was a manager at the Kahler Grand Hotel downtown.\n\u201cFrom as early as I can remember, I experienced conversations about disease, infection, surgical intervention, quality of life issues and matters of life and death,\u201d she says. \u201cI spent a lot of time on my own outside, poking around creeks and streams and the edges of fields. Looking back, I was primed for a combination of science and exploration of the out-of-doors.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018By senior year, I had dropped out of all science classes because there was just too much social pressure.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nEven so, she struggled against the prevailing tide of sexism in science. \u201cMy father was pretty outspoken in his opposition to women in medicine,\u201d she says. High-school classmates resented her presence in advanced math and physics classes. \u201cBy senior year, I had dropped out of all science classes because there was just too much social pressure. I just got tired of being the only young woman in these classes,\u201d she says. At college, she initially majored in Spanish, \u201cfor which I had no aptitude.\u201d\nOvercoming doubts, she earned a doctorate in geology at Princeton University in 1982. Her optimism about life on other planets was shaped by seeing how life adapted to Earth\u2019s most extreme environments, from the briny dregs at the bottom of a South African gold mine to the Greenland Ice Sheet. In 30 years on the faculty of Indiana University, she\u2019s published more than 100 research papers on life at the extremes.\n\u201cI could see that the more we learned about life on Earth, the more it changed our thinking about whether other planets were habitable for Earthlike life,\u201d she says.\n\n\n\n\u201cCould evolution yield a worm or a fish on the moons of the outer solar system?\u201d\n\n\n\nEven so, she has modest expectations for the potential of life on Mars. \u201cI limit my thoughts about Mars to something that can fit in the spaces between grains of rock and can cling to the walls of cracks and fissures,\u201d she says. Her hopes soar when her thoughts turn to the moons of the outer solar system, such as Europa (orbiting Jupiter) and Enceladus (circling Saturn), which have ice-covered oceans. \u201cCould the experiment of evolution there yield a worm? A fish? My imagination runs wild,\u201d she says.\nIf all goes according to plan, NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover will land on Mars next February. The rover will search for signs of past microbial life and will be the first planetary mission to collect Martian rock and dust for later analysis on Earth. A follow-up robotic mission is being planned to retrieve those sometime in the next decade or so.\n\u201cWe have a responsibility to do the sample return in the safest possible way, with layer upon layer of protection,\u201d she says. \u201cThe chance of a Martian organism being able to come to life on Earth is vanishingly small,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is going to be challenged by our warmth and the chemistry of our atmosphere. I think the difficult thing for us right now, in the face of Covid-19, is to not be pulled into science-fiction scenarios.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA\u2019s \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 works to keep alien microbes and viruses away from Earth\u2014and to avoid contaminating distant planets and moons. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the Worlds (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7691",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lisa-pratt-is-out-to-save-the-worlds-11593189823?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=43",
        "text": "Dr. Pratt, 69, is the planetary protection officer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Her job is to ensure that NASA\u2019s interplanetary spacecraft don\u2019t taint the alien worlds they are designed to explore. NASA takes that risk so seriously that next year, it plans to crash its $1.1 billion Juno space probe into Jupiter to avoid contaminating two nearby moons, Europa and Ganymede, that might harbor life. The probe, launched in 2011, is ending its mission there and, if left orbiting aimlessly, might crash into one of them. It is also her task to make sure that extraterrestrial microbes and viruses\u2014should any exist\u2014never blight Earth.\n\u201cWe have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cI find it hard to imagine there isn\u2019t Earthlike life other places in our solar system. I think it\u2019s a reflection of the fundamental nature of the physics and chemistry of carbon,\u201d on which all known life is based.\nFor Dr. Pratt, the unanswered question of astrobiology can be read in the genetic sequence of every microscopic spore clinging to a space-bound circuit board or heat shield. Imagine the heartbreak, she says, if we ever do discover life on another world only to find that it is just microbes seeded carelessly from our home planet.\n\n\n\u201cI expect us to find life in other places. It would change everything. The question will be, \u2018Where did it originate?\u2019\u201d she says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018We have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u2019 says Dr. Pratt.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Stephen Voss for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFor the first time in almost 50 years, NASA officials are moving to loosen protective biological restrictions on the Moon and much of Mars for human missions, to lower costs and promote private space ventures. That is a dramatic departure from a standard that took shape for the first U.S. Mars landing in 1976, when NASA sanitized its four-ton Viking lander by baking it in an oven for 30 hours. \nThe changes now being debated internationally reflect, in part, the suspicion that humankind may have already contaminated areas of the Moon and Mars. Only last April, a private company accidentally crash-landed a cargo of human DNA samples and thousands of microscopic, eight-legged creatures called tardigrades on the Moon.\n\u201cWe are at a watershed moment,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cIt was pretty simple to decide what the right thing to do was when there were just a handful of national agencies involved. There are corporations that can do as much if not more now than the national agencies. And they have a different perspective on what they\u2019d like to do on the Moon and Mars.\u201d\nWhile debates continue, the pace of interplanetary landings is picking up. So are plans to bring home samples from alien worlds.\nThis summer, NASA and China each expect to launch spacecraft to land on Mars, while the United Arab Emirates plans to launch its first interplanetary mission to the red planet. Europe and Russia are readying their own Mars lander. By the end of the year, China plans to bring back samples from the Moon, while Japan is due to return samples from the asteroid Ryugu. NASA is set to sample an asteroid called Bennu for return to Earth in 2023. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nCEO David Novak Learned Leadership by Making Mistakes\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs the new coronavirus grew out of control, Dr. Pratt and her team of clean-room specialists oversaw the assembly of NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars lander, which is scheduled for launch in late July on the agency\u2019s $2.45 billion Mars 2020 mission. Due to public health precautions, she has been working almost a thousand miles away from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where the Mars rocket is being stacked on Space Launch Complex 41. She has been isolated in her family home outside Bloomington, Ind., conducting meticulous daily spacecraft inspections via tiny\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GoPro\n\n\n cameras worn by launchpad engineers. Bolt by bolt, they sterilized and tested every part to eliminate bacteria that might hitchhike across the airless void between planets.\nDr. Pratt never intended to become an astrobiologist. She grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in Rochester, Minn., the middle of three children in a neighborhood in which almost every house was home to a doctor. Her father was a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic; her mother was a manager at the Kahler Grand Hotel downtown.\n\u201cFrom as early as I can remember, I experienced conversations about disease, infection, surgical intervention, quality of life issues and matters of life and death,\u201d she says. \u201cI spent a lot of time on my own outside, pokin NASA\u2019s \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 works to keep alien microbes and viruses away from Earth\u2014and to avoid contaminating distant planets and moons. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the Worlds (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7692",
        "date": "2020-06-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lisa-pratt-is-out-to-save-the-worlds-11593189823?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=52",
        "text": "Dr. Pratt, 69, is the planetary protection officer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Her job is to ensure that NASA\u2019s interplanetary spacecraft don\u2019t taint the alien worlds they are designed to explore. NASA takes that risk so seriously that next year, it plans to crash its $1.1 billion Juno space probe into Jupiter to avoid contaminating two nearby moons, Europa and Ganymede, that might harbor life. The probe, launched in 2011, is ending its mission there and, if left orbiting aimlessly, might crash into one of them. It is also her task to make sure that extraterrestrial microbes and viruses\u2014should any exist\u2014never blight Earth.\n\u201cWe have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cI find it hard to imagine there isn\u2019t Earthlike life other places in our solar system. I think it\u2019s a reflection of the fundamental nature of the physics and chemistry of carbon,\u201d on which all known life is based.\n\n\n\n\nFor Dr. Pratt, the unanswered question of astrobiology can be read in the genetic sequence of every microscopic spore clinging to a space-bound circuit board or heat shield. Imagine the heartbreak, she says, if we ever do discover life on another world only to find that it is just microbes seeded carelessly from our home planet.\n\n\n\u201cI expect us to find life in other places. It would change everything. The question will be, \u2018Where did it originate?\u2019\u201d she says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018We have a responsibility to not contaminate and potentially inoculate another world with something from Earth,\u2019 says Dr. Pratt.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Stephen Voss for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nFor the first time in almost 50 years, NASA officials are moving to loosen protective biological restrictions on the Moon and much of Mars for human missions, to lower costs and promote private space ventures. That is a dramatic departure from a standard that took shape for the first U.S. Mars landing in 1976, when NASA sanitized its four-ton Viking lander by baking it in an oven for 30 hours. \nThe changes now being debated internationally reflect, in part, the suspicion that humankind may have already contaminated areas of the Moon and Mars. Only last April, a private company accidentally crash-landed a cargo of human DNA samples and thousands of microscopic, eight-legged creatures called tardigrades on the Moon.\n\u201cWe are at a watershed moment,\u201d Dr. Pratt says. \u201cIt was pretty simple to decide what the right thing to do was when there were just a handful of national agencies involved. There are corporations that can do as much if not more now than the national agencies. And they have a different perspective on what they\u2019d like to do on the Moon and Mars.\u201d\nWhile debates continue, the pace of interplanetary landings is picking up. So are plans to bring home samples from alien worlds.\nThis summer, NASA and China each expect to launch spacecraft to land on Mars, while the United Arab Emirates plans to launch its first interplanetary mission to the red planet. Europe and Russia are readying their own Mars lander. By the end of the year, China plans to bring back samples from the Moon, while Japan is due to return samples from the asteroid Ryugu. NASA is set to sample an asteroid called Bennu for return to Earth in 2023. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nPsychiatrist Thomas Insel Looks for a Cure to America\u2019s Mental Health Crisis\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nAs the new coronavirus grew out of control, Dr. Pratt and her team of clean-room specialists oversaw the assembly of NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars lander, which is scheduled for launch in late July on the agency\u2019s $2.45 billion Mars 2020 mission. Due to public health precautions, she has been working almost a thousand miles away from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, where the Mars rocket is being stacked on Space Launch Complex 41. She has been isolated in her family home outside Bloomington, Ind., conducting meticulous daily spacecraft inspections via tiny\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n GoPro\n\n\n cameras worn by launchpad engineers. Bolt by bolt, they sterilized and tested every part to eliminate bacteria that might hitchhike across the airless void between planets.\nDr. Pratt never intended to become an astrobiologist. She grew up during the 1950s and 1960s in Rochester, Minn., the middle of three children in a neighborhood in which almost every house was home to a doctor. Her father was a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic; her mother was a manager at the Kahler Grand Hotel downtown.\n\u201cFrom as early as I can remember, I experienced conversations about disease, infection, surgical intervention, quality of life issues and matters of life and death,\u201d she says. \u201cI spent a lot of NASA\u2019s \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 works to keep alien microbes and viruses away from Earth\u2014and to avoid contaminating distant planets and moons. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is That an Alien Probe? A Harvard Astronomer Thinks It Might Be (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7693",
        "date": "2019-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-that-an-alien-probe-a-harvard-astronomer-thinks-it-might-be-11549638889?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=16",
        "text": "Dr. Loeb, 57, relishes the attention as a teaching moment. \u201cI want to bring the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into the mainstream of astronomy,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is a taboo about discussing anything related to that.\u201d\nThe discovery of solar systems around other stars has supercharged the question of alien life and intelligence. So many exoplanets, as these worlds are called, have been found that astronomers calculate each star in the Milky Way likely has at least one planet in orbit around it. \u201cTherefore if you roll the dice billions of times within our galaxy, it\u2019s likely we are not alone,\u201d Dr. Loeb says. \u201cIt is necessary to go out and look. We cannot put blinders on our telescopes because of prejudice.\u201d\n\n\nA healthy scientific culture, he says, ought to encourage all interpretations of the evidence. In his view, it\u2019s worthwhile to find a way to identify artificial light on distant asteroids, or how to detect industrial pollution in alien atmospheres, or whether unusually intense blasts of extra-galactic energy might be powering alien spacecraft\u2014all theories he\u2019s published in recent research papers.\nAs astronomers scrutinized \u2018Oumuamua, it stood out in a half dozen ways, he says. The quarter-mile-long object was more elongated than a typical asteroid and appeared unusually thin. It accelerated like a comet but without the distinctive tail of out-gassing ice to propel it. Researchers couldn\u2019t account for its speed. \nWriting in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last year, Dr. Loeb and his Harvard colleague Shmuel Bialy calculated the alternatives: It might be a hitherto unknown interstellar material, a shard of a planet that never quite formed, or artificial. It might even be \u201ca fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth,\u201d they wrote. That part went viral.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn artist\u2019s rendering of \u2018Oumuamua.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser\n \n\n\n\nDr. Loeb often opts for the road not taken, something he traces to his Israeli childhood. He grew up on his parent\u2019s farm about 12 miles from Tel Aviv. As he recalls, he collected the eggs every afternoon, drove a tractor on weekends and cultivated a taste for the works of the Existentialist philosophers. \u201cI loved being alone, embedded in nature, because I could develop my own thoughts,\u201d he says. \u201cSince that time, I don\u2019t like being in a crowd. I don\u2019t like thinking in a crowd.\u201d\nAt age 18, he reported for military service. The Israel Defense Forces tapped the wiry recruit for accelerated courses in mathematics and physics in addition to his regular military training. \u201cWe parachuted. We drove tanks. I was curious more about the principles of physics,\u201d he says. At age 24, he finished his doctorate in plasma physics and entered the Israeli defense department\u2019s industrial program. He spurned the military\u2019s list of practical problems, though, and organized a project at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center to explore propulsion theories. \nIn short order, he was invited to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton\u2014once home to Albert Einstein\u2014on the condition that he change his specialty to astrophysics. Some years later, Harvard offered him a junior post. Now Dr. Loeb is the longest-serving chairman in the history of the astronomy department.\nThese days, his uniform is a tailored gray suit by Canali. He wears the latest Apple watch. He recently lost 60 pounds on a low-carb diet that includes a daily bar of chocolate. He keeps gourmet Neuhaus chocolates in his office credenza and displays in his work space more than a dozen photographs of his wife and two daughters. \nEven in repose, he seems coiled to spring, like a cat poised expectantly at the mouse hole of a new idea. He pounces on data. \u201cIf I hear something, I immediately think of something,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is not a matter of incubation. That\u2019s my luck in a way. It allows me to earn a living by doing something that is easy for me.\u201d \nThe center drawer of his filing cabinet is labeled \u201cIdeas.\u201d Inside is a folder fat with potential lines of inquiry, some of them no more than an equation scribbled on a scrap of paper. So far, he has published more than 700 research papers and four books. He\u2019s working with a colleague on a textbook about the search for signs of alien presence. On his desk is a draft of a new technical paper on black hole binary stars. \nThe data needed to test his hypothesis about \u2018Oumuamua may be available soon. He predicts that a new telescope in northern Chile called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled to open in 2020, ought to detect 10 similar interstellar objects every year. In addition, he and his colleagues have identified eight objects among the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter with unusual orbits that make them likely candidates for investigation. \n\u201cMost civilizations may all be dead by now, and that\u2019s why we haven\u2019t heard from them,\u201d Dr. Loeb says. \u201cThe only way to look for them is not by signals, but by looking Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard\u2019s astronomy department, created a media maelstrom by suggesting that a mysterious space object might be from another civilization. He\u2019s relishing the attention as a teaching moment. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is That an Alien Probe? A Harvard Astronomer Thinks It Might Be (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7694",
        "date": "2019-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-that-an-alien-probe-a-harvard-astronomer-thinks-it-might-be-11549638889?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=79",
        "text": "Dr. Loeb, 57, relishes the attention as a teaching moment. \u201cI want to bring the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into the mainstream of astronomy,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is a taboo about discussing anything related to that.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe discovery of solar systems around other stars has supercharged the question of alien life and intelligence. So many exoplanets, as these worlds are called, have been found that astronomers calculate each star in the Milky Way likely has at least one planet in orbit around it. \u201cTherefore if you roll the dice billions of times within our galaxy, it\u2019s likely we are not alone,\u201d Dr. Loeb says. \u201cIt is necessary to go out and look. We cannot put blinders on our telescopes because of prejudice.\u201d\n\n\nA healthy scientific culture, he says, ought to encourage all interpretations of the evidence. In his view, it\u2019s worthwhile to find a way to identify artificial light on distant asteroids, or how to detect industrial pollution in alien atmospheres, or whether unusually intense blasts of extra-galactic energy might be powering alien spacecraft\u2014all theories he\u2019s published in recent research papers.\nAs astronomers scrutinized \u2018Oumuamua, it stood out in a half dozen ways, he says. The quarter-mile-long object was more elongated than a typical asteroid and appeared unusually thin. It accelerated like a comet but without the distinctive tail of out-gassing ice to propel it. Researchers couldn\u2019t account for its speed. \nWriting in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last year, Dr. Loeb and his Harvard colleague Shmuel Bialy calculated the alternatives: It might be a hitherto unknown interstellar material, a shard of a planet that never quite formed, or artificial. It might even be \u201ca fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth,\u201d they wrote. That part went viral.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn artist\u2019s rendering of \u2018Oumuamua.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser\n \n\n\n\nDr. Loeb often opts for the road not taken, something he traces to his Israeli childhood. He grew up on his parent\u2019s farm about 12 miles from Tel Aviv. As he recalls, he collected the eggs every afternoon, drove a tractor on weekends and cultivated a taste for the works of the Existentialist philosophers. \u201cI loved being alone, embedded in nature, because I could develop my own thoughts,\u201d he says. \u201cSince that time, I don\u2019t like being in a crowd. I don\u2019t like thinking in a crowd.\u201d\nAt age 18, he reported for military service. The Israel Defense Forces tapped the wiry recruit for accelerated courses in mathematics and physics in addition to his regular military training. \u201cWe parachuted. We drove tanks. I was curious more about the principles of physics,\u201d he says. At age 24, he finished his doctorate in plasma physics and entered the Israeli defense department\u2019s industrial program. He spurned the military\u2019s list of practical problems, though, and organized a project at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center to explore propulsion theories. \nIn short order, he was invited to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton\u2014once home to Albert Einstein\u2014on the condition that he change his specialty to astrophysics. Some years later, Harvard offered him a junior post. Now Dr. Loeb is the longest-serving chairman in the history of the astronomy department.\nThese days, his uniform is a tailored gray suit by Canali. He wears the latest Apple watch. He recently lost 60 pounds on a low-carb diet that includes a daily bar of chocolate. He keeps gourmet Neuhaus chocolates in his office credenza and displays in his work space more than a dozen photographs of his wife and two daughters. \nEven in repose, he seems coiled to spring, like a cat poised expectantly at the mouse hole of a new idea. He pounces on data. \u201cIf I hear something, I immediately think of something,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is not a matter of incubation. That\u2019s my luck in a way. It allows me to earn a living by doing something that is easy for me.\u201d \nThe center drawer of his filing cabinet is labeled \u201cIdeas.\u201d Inside is a folder fat with potential lines of inquiry, some of them no more than an equation scribbled on a scrap of paper. So far, he has published more than 700 research papers and four books. He\u2019s working with a colleague on a textbook about the search for signs of alien presence. On his desk is a draft of a new technical paper on black hole binary stars. \nThe data needed to test his hypothesis about \u2018Oumuamua may be available soon. He predicts that a new telescope in northern Chile called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled to open in 2020, ought to detect 10 similar interstellar objects every year. In addition, he and his colleagues have identified eight objects among the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter with unusual orbits that make them likely candidates for investigation. \n\u201cMost civilizations may all be dead by now, and that\u2019s why we haven\u2019t heard from them,\u201d Dr. Loeb says. \u201cThe only way to look for them is not by signals, but by loo Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard\u2019s astronomy department, created a media maelstrom by suggesting that a mysterious space object might be from another civilization. He\u2019s relishing the attention as a teaching moment. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ann Druyan Wants to Share Her Enthusiasm for Science (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7695",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ann-druyan-wants-to-share-her-enthusiasm-for-science-11604073020?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=10",
        "text": "Ms. Druyan, who grew up in Queens, N.Y., served as creative director for the Voyager discs. She has long pushed to bring scientific ideas to larger audiences as a writer, producer and director, often working with her late husband, the astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan.\n\n\n\n She doesn\u2019t have a formal science education but says her parents instilled in her an intellectual curiosity that helped her to launch into ambitious projects like a solar-sailing mission (which she has called \u201ca way to move through the cosmos at speeds unprecedented\u201d) and a production company focused on making science documentaries. Both solar-sail attempts were \u201csuborbital failures,\u201d she said, but one of the documentaries earned her an Emmy. She was also a co-producer of the 1997 science-fiction movie \u201cContact,\u201d starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jodie Foster.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Science has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cScience has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves,\u201d Ms. Druyan said in a phone interview earlier this year. That is a core message in the most recent season of \u201cCosmos,\u201d the television series that she launched with Sagan in 1980. The show got a reboot in 2014, and the most recent season, dubbed \u201cPossible Worlds,\u201d is now airing on Fox after a first run on National Geographic earlier this year. Ms. Druyan serves as an executive producer, writer and director for the show. With each of this season\u2019s 13 episodes, she aims to take viewers on scientific voyages that span worlds big and small, from faraway galaxies to the constellation of neurons in the brain that give us each our unique personalities. \nMs. Druyan said that the show \u201cis kind of a love poem to the sciences.\u201d She hopes the new \u201cCosmos\u201d will help awaken and inspire passion and appreciation among its nonscientist viewers. \u201cI know that if I don\u2019t understand it, it\u2019s no good,\u201d she said of the concepts the show explores. \n\n\n\u201cCosmos\u201d aims to show scientific advancements as human stories rooted in human struggles. One episode recounts early quests to understand epilepsy, the long-confounding brain condition, as a phenomenon rooted in biology rather than a punishment from the gods. The curiosity and out-of-the box thinking of early scientific explorers spurred innovations like medical imaging and brainwave-recording devices that led, over time, to a shift in thinking about epilepsy, how the brain works and what happens when it malfunctions. All this, in turn, paved the way for modern treatments. \nEven as she has plunged into these new ventures, Ms. Druyan has still found herself thinking about the progress of those Voyager spaceships launched decades ago. \u201cMaps are dreams, and dreams are maps,\u201d she said. \u201cThe fantasy that one of those two spacecraft will be intersected by spacefaring extraterrestrials at some point in the impossibly distant future when the whole surface of the Earth will be unrecognizable to what we know now\u2014I love that idea!\u201d\nShe worries, though, about what climate change will do to the Earth in the meantime. This year, wildfires fueled by dry conditions and intense heat have ravaged the western U.S., the Arctic has experienced record temperatures, and the 2020 hurricane season has seen so many storms that forecasters ran out of names for them. Ms. Druyan fears that we are ignoring critical data and losing ourselves in webs of partisanship and misinformation, on major problems from climate change to the Covid-19 pandemic. \u201cMy theory is that unless we start taking the revelations of science to heart\u2026then we are doomed,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Druyan with her late husband, the astronomer Carl Sagan, in the 1990s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\nMs. Druyan hopes to draw attention to the sort of scientific research that has produced awe-inspiring feats in recent history, from mapping the human genome to the recent preliminary evidence that alien life may be closer than previously thought\u2014in the clouds of Venus. Sagan, whom Ms. Druyan met at a dinner party hosted by the late writer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nora Ephron,\n\n\n\n proposed the idea of life on Venus back in the 1960s. \nShe is also inspired by the multiple landings of rovers on Mars, which she says underscores the importance of meticulous engineering and a deep understanding of physics. \u201cYou can\u2019t lie your way to Mars,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018You can\u2019t lie your way to Mars.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nYet she is concerned that our partisan times are seeping into Americans\u2019 views of science. Despite powerful evidence to the contrary, roughly a third of Americans think that the new coronavirus was cooked up in a lab in China, and 15% think it was created by pharmaceutical companies looking to sell vaccines, according to a study recently published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. \nMs. Druyan thinks that part of the problem is the way science is communicated to the public\u2014often as a \u201cjumble\u201d of hard-to-follow and sometimes f One of the creators of \u201cCosmos\u201d hopes to bring the optimism, drama and inspiration of scientific discovery to a wide audience. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ann Druyan Wants to Share Her Enthusiasm for Science (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7696",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ann-druyan-wants-to-share-her-enthusiasm-for-science-11604073020?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=34",
        "text": "Ms. Druyan, who grew up in Queens, N.Y., served as creative director for the Voyager discs. She has long pushed to bring scientific ideas to larger audiences as a writer, producer and director, often working with her late husband, the astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan.\n\n\n\n She doesn\u2019t have a formal science education but says her parents instilled in her an intellectual curiosity that helped her to launch into ambitious projects like a solar-sailing mission (which she has called \u201ca way to move through the cosmos at speeds unprecedented\u201d) and a production company focused on making science documentaries. Both solar-sail attempts were \u201csuborbital failures,\u201d she said, but one of the documentaries earned her an Emmy. She was also a co-producer of the 1997 science-fiction movie \u201cContact,\u201d starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jodie Foster.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Science has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cScience has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves,\u201d Ms. Druyan said in a phone interview earlier this year. That is a core message in the most recent season of \u201cCosmos,\u201d the television series that she launched with Sagan in 1980. The show got a reboot in 2014, and the most recent season, dubbed \u201cPossible Worlds,\u201d is now airing on Fox after a first run on National Geographic earlier this year. Ms. Druyan serves as an executive producer, writer and director for the show. With each of this season\u2019s 13 episodes, she aims to take viewers on scientific voyages that span worlds big and small, from faraway galaxies to the constellation of neurons in the brain that give us each our unique personalities. \nMs. Druyan said that the show \u201cis kind of a love poem to the sciences.\u201d She hopes the new \u201cCosmos\u201d will help awaken and inspire passion and appreciation among its nonscientist viewers. \u201cI know that if I don\u2019t understand it, it\u2019s no good,\u201d she said of the concepts the show explores. \n\n\n\u201cCosmos\u201d aims to show scientific advancements as human stories rooted in human struggles. One episode recounts early quests to understand epilepsy, the long-confounding brain condition, as a phenomenon rooted in biology rather than a punishment from the gods. The curiosity and out-of-the box thinking of early scientific explorers spurred innovations like medical imaging and brainwave-recording devices that led, over time, to a shift in thinking about epilepsy, how the brain works and what happens when it malfunctions. All this, in turn, paved the way for modern treatments. \nEven as she has plunged into these new ventures, Ms. Druyan has still found herself thinking about the progress of those Voyager spaceships launched decades ago. \u201cMaps are dreams, and dreams are maps,\u201d she said. \u201cThe fantasy that one of those two spacecraft will be intersected by spacefaring extraterrestrials at some point in the impossibly distant future when the whole surface of the Earth will be unrecognizable to what we know now\u2014I love that idea!\u201d\nShe worries, though, about what climate change will do to the Earth in the meantime. This year, wildfires fueled by dry conditions and intense heat have ravaged the western U.S., the Arctic has experienced record temperatures, and the 2020 hurricane season has seen so many storms that forecasters ran out of names for them. Ms. Druyan fears that we are ignoring critical data and losing ourselves in webs of partisanship and misinformation, on major problems from climate change to the Covid-19 pandemic. \u201cMy theory is that unless we start taking the revelations of science to heart\u2026then we are doomed,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Druyan with her late husband, the astronomer Carl Sagan, in the 1990s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\nMs. Druyan hopes to draw attention to the sort of scientific research that has produced awe-inspiring feats in recent history, from mapping the human genome to the recent preliminary evidence that alien life may be closer than previously thought\u2014in the clouds of Venus. Sagan, whom Ms. Druyan met at a dinner party hosted by the late writer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nora Ephron,\n\n\n\n proposed the idea of life on Venus back in the 1960s. \nShe is also inspired by the multiple landings of rovers on Mars, which she says underscores the importance of meticulous engineering and a deep understanding of physics. \u201cYou can\u2019t lie your way to Mars,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018You can\u2019t lie your way to Mars.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nYet she is concerned that our partisan times are seeping into Americans\u2019 views of science. Despite powerful evidence to the contrary, roughly a third of Americans think that the new coronavirus was cooked up in a lab in China, and 15% think it was created by pharmaceutical companies looking to sell vaccines, according to a study recently published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. \nMs. Druyan thinks that part of the problem is the way science is communicated to the public\u2014often as a \u201cjumble\u201d of hard-to-follow and sometimes frightening facts, she said. \u201cWe need to engage as many people in the scientific enterprise as possible so all of us feel like we understand something of the values and methods of science,\u201d she said. \nMs. Druyan\u2019s efforts to share her enthusiasm for science, she said, reflect a deep-seated optimism that she traces back to her grandparents, who were working class Orthodox Jews from Bayside, Queens. Her grandfather, she recalls, sometimes didn\u2019t have enough money to pay his synagogue fees, so he would work stints as a night watchman instead, she said. But they always had hope, faith and a strong work ethic. All that stuck with her, as did their deep respect for others, including people holding different beliefs. \n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nPsychiatrist Thomas Insel Looks for a Cure to America\u2019s Mental Health Crisis\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMs. Druyan recalls a story that her late father, Harry, who co-owned a knitwear company, told her. He came home from New York University, heart pounding, to tell her devout grandparents that he wasn\u2019t going to keep kosher anymore and didn\u2019t believe in God. Her grandparents were so strict about keeping kosher that if a fork reserved for dairy food touched one reserved for meat, her grandmother would bury it in the ground for a year for ritual cleansing, said Ms. Druyan. So her dad\u2019s confession was no small feat; he feared his parents would disown him. \nBut her grandfather responded differently, offering a lesson that Ms. Druyan says has guided her throughout her life: \u201cThe only sin,\u201d he said, \u201cwould be to pretend.\u201d \nWrite to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com One of the creators of \u201cCosmos\u201d hopes to bring the optimism, drama and inspiration of scientific discovery to a wide audience. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ann Druyan Wants to Share Her Enthusiasm for Science (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7697",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ann-druyan-wants-to-share-her-enthusiasm-for-science-11604073020?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=39",
        "text": "Ms. Druyan, who grew up in Queens, N.Y., served as creative director for the Voyager discs. She has long pushed to bring scientific ideas to larger audiences as a writer, producer and director, often working with her late husband, the astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan.\n\n\n\n She doesn\u2019t have a formal science education but says her parents instilled in her an intellectual curiosity that helped her to launch into ambitious projects like a solar-sailing mission (which she has called \u201ca way to move through the cosmos at speeds unprecedented\u201d) and a production company focused on making science documentaries. Both solar-sail attempts were \u201csuborbital failures,\u201d she said, but one of the documentaries earned her an Emmy. She was also a co-producer of the 1997 science-fiction movie \u201cContact,\u201d starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jodie Foster.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Science has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cScience has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves,\u201d Ms. Druyan said in a phone interview earlier this year. That is a core message in the most recent season of \u201cCosmos,\u201d the television series that she launched with Sagan in 1980. The show got a reboot in 2014, and the most recent season, dubbed \u201cPossible Worlds,\u201d is now airing on Fox after a first run on National Geographic earlier this year. Ms. Druyan serves as an executive producer, writer and director for the show. With each of this season\u2019s 13 episodes, she aims to take viewers on scientific voyages that span worlds big and small, from faraway galaxies to the constellation of neurons in the brain that give us each our unique personalities. \nMs. Druyan said that the show \u201cis kind of a love poem to the sciences.\u201d She hopes the new \u201cCosmos\u201d will help awaken and inspire passion and appreciation among its nonscientist viewers. \u201cI know that if I don\u2019t understand it, it\u2019s no good,\u201d she said of the concepts the show explores. \n\n\n\u201cCosmos\u201d aims to show scientific advancements as human stories rooted in human struggles. One episode recounts early quests to understand epilepsy, the long-confounding brain condition, as a phenomenon rooted in biology rather than a punishment from the gods. The curiosity and out-of-the box thinking of early scientific explorers spurred innovations like medical imaging and brainwave-recording devices that led, over time, to a shift in thinking about epilepsy, how the brain works and what happens when it malfunctions. All this, in turn, paved the way for modern treatments. \nEven as she has plunged into these new ventures, Ms. Druyan has still found herself thinking about the progress of those Voyager spaceships launched decades ago. \u201cMaps are dreams, and dreams are maps,\u201d she said. \u201cThe fantasy that one of those two spacecraft will be intersected by spacefaring extraterrestrials at some point in the impossibly distant future when the whole surface of the Earth will be unrecognizable to what we know now\u2014I love that idea!\u201d\nShe worries, though, about what climate change will do to the Earth in the meantime. This year, wildfires fueled by dry conditions and intense heat have ravaged the western U.S., the Arctic has experienced record temperatures, and the 2020 hurricane season has seen so many storms that forecasters ran out of names for them. Ms. Druyan fears that we are ignoring critical data and losing ourselves in webs of partisanship and misinformation, on major problems from climate change to the Covid-19 pandemic. \u201cMy theory is that unless we start taking the revelations of science to heart\u2026then we are doomed,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Druyan with her late husband, the astronomer Carl Sagan, in the 1990s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\nMs. Druyan hopes to draw attention to the sort of scientific research that has produced awe-inspiring feats in recent history, from mapping the human genome to the recent preliminary evidence that alien life may be closer than previously thought\u2014in the clouds of Venus. Sagan, whom Ms. Druyan met at a dinner party hosted by the late writer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nora Ephron,\n\n\n\n proposed the idea of life on Venus back in the 1960s. \nShe is also inspired by the multiple landings of rovers on Mars, which she says underscores the importance of meticulous engineering and a deep understanding of physics. \u201cYou can\u2019t lie your way to Mars,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018You can\u2019t lie your way to Mars.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nYet she is concerned that our partisan times are seeping into Americans\u2019 views of science. Despite powerful evidence to the contrary, roughly a third of Americans think that the new coronavirus was cooked up in a lab in China, and 15% think it was created by pharmaceutical companies looking to sell vaccines, according to a study recently published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. \nMs. Druyan thinks that part of the problem is the way science is communicated to the public\u2014often as a \u201cjumble\u201d of hard-to-follow and sometimes f One of the creators of \u201cCosmos\u201d hopes to bring the optimism, drama and inspiration of scientific discovery to a wide audience. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ann Druyan Wants to Share Her Enthusiasm for Science (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7698",
        "date": "2020-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ann-druyan-wants-to-share-her-enthusiasm-for-science-11604073020?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=45",
        "text": "Ms. Druyan, who grew up in Queens, N.Y., served as creative director for the Voyager discs. She has long pushed to bring scientific ideas to larger audiences as a writer, producer and director, often working with her late husband, the astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Carl Sagan.\n\n\n\n She doesn\u2019t have a formal science education but says her parents instilled in her an intellectual curiosity that helped her to launch into ambitious projects like a solar-sailing mission (which she has called \u201ca way to move through the cosmos at speeds unprecedented\u201d) and a production company focused on making science documentaries. Both solar-sail attempts were \u201csuborbital failures,\u201d she said, but one of the documentaries earned her an Emmy. She was also a co-producer of the 1997 science-fiction movie \u201cContact,\u201d starring\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jodie Foster.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Science has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cScience has the power to uplift us and to give us back a sense of ourselves,\u201d Ms. Druyan said in a phone interview earlier this year. That is a core message in the most recent season of \u201cCosmos,\u201d the television series that she launched with Sagan in 1980. The show got a reboot in 2014, and the most recent season, dubbed \u201cPossible Worlds,\u201d is now airing on Fox after a first run on National Geographic earlier this year. Ms. Druyan serves as an executive producer, writer and director for the show. With each of this season\u2019s 13 episodes, she aims to take viewers on scientific voyages that span worlds big and small, from faraway galaxies to the constellation of neurons in the brain that give us each our unique personalities. \nMs. Druyan said that the show \u201cis kind of a love poem to the sciences.\u201d She hopes the new \u201cCosmos\u201d will help awaken and inspire passion and appreciation among its nonscientist viewers. \u201cI know that if I don\u2019t understand it, it\u2019s no good,\u201d she said of the concepts the show explores. \n\n\n\u201cCosmos\u201d aims to show scientific advancements as human stories rooted in human struggles. One episode recounts early quests to understand epilepsy, the long-confounding brain condition, as a phenomenon rooted in biology rather than a punishment from the gods. The curiosity and out-of-the box thinking of early scientific explorers spurred innovations like medical imaging and brainwave-recording devices that led, over time, to a shift in thinking about epilepsy, how the brain works and what happens when it malfunctions. All this, in turn, paved the way for modern treatments. \nEven as she has plunged into these new ventures, Ms. Druyan has still found herself thinking about the progress of those Voyager spaceships launched decades ago. \u201cMaps are dreams, and dreams are maps,\u201d she said. \u201cThe fantasy that one of those two spacecraft will be intersected by spacefaring extraterrestrials at some point in the impossibly distant future when the whole surface of the Earth will be unrecognizable to what we know now\u2014I love that idea!\u201d\nShe worries, though, about what climate change will do to the Earth in the meantime. This year, wildfires fueled by dry conditions and intense heat have ravaged the western U.S., the Arctic has experienced record temperatures, and the 2020 hurricane season has seen so many storms that forecasters ran out of names for them. Ms. Druyan fears that we are ignoring critical data and losing ourselves in webs of partisanship and misinformation, on major problems from climate change to the Covid-19 pandemic. \u201cMy theory is that unless we start taking the revelations of science to heart\u2026then we are doomed,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Druyan with her late husband, the astronomer Carl Sagan, in the 1990s.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\nMs. Druyan hopes to draw attention to the sort of scientific research that has produced awe-inspiring feats in recent history, from mapping the human genome to the recent preliminary evidence that alien life may be closer than previously thought\u2014in the clouds of Venus. Sagan, whom Ms. Druyan met at a dinner party hosted by the late writer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nora Ephron,\n\n\n\n proposed the idea of life on Venus back in the 1960s. \nShe is also inspired by the multiple landings of rovers on Mars, which she says underscores the importance of meticulous engineering and a deep understanding of physics. \u201cYou can\u2019t lie your way to Mars,\u201d she said.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018You can\u2019t lie your way to Mars.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nYet she is concerned that our partisan times are seeping into Americans\u2019 views of science. Despite powerful evidence to the contrary, roughly a third of Americans think that the new coronavirus was cooked up in a lab in China, and 15% think it was created by pharmaceutical companies looking to sell vaccines, according to a study recently published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. \nMs. Druyan thinks that part of the problem is the way science is communicated to the public\u2014often as a \u201cjumble\u201d of hard-to-follow and sometim One of the creators of \u201cCosmos\u201d hopes to bring the optimism, drama and inspiration of scientific discovery to a wide audience. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Kathryn Sullivan Became the First U.S. Woman to Walk in Space (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7699",
        "date": "2019-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kathryn-sullivan-became-the-first-american-woman-to-walk-in-space-11575050548?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=48",
        "text": "The mission lasted eight days, and on the sixth, Dr. Sullivan performed a three-hour extravehicular activity (or EVA, in NASA parlance) alongside\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Leestma,\n\n\n\n thereby becoming the first American woman to walk in space. She would return to the heavens in April 1990, as part of the crew that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and again in March 1992 for a NASA research mission\u2014adventures that she recounts in her new memoir, \u201cHandprints on Hubble: An Astronaut\u2019s Story of Invention.\u201d If her life had taken a slightly different turn, however, she might have spent her career thousands of feet below Earth\u2019s surface rather than hundreds of miles above it. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan checks the latch of an antenna in the Space Shuttle Challenger's open cargo bay during her historic walk in space, Oct. 11, 1984.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan\u2019s lifetime of exploration started with maps. As a child, she would disappear to her room with any kind of map that she could get her hands on. \u201cI\u2019d do random dives,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan, now 68. \u201cA really rich map or world atlas is multiple layers of stories\u2014what kinds of people live there, what kinds of animals, what sort of landscape.\u201d She loved creating maps too, plotting routes for family trips. Her parents were \u201clike co-explorers\u201d with her and her brother, she says. \u201cThey were brilliant at making us feel we were peers in exploring something rather than always being pronouncers of wisdom.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Nothing ever goes exactly as planned.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nWith the vague idea that languages would be the best ticket to an adventurous life, Dr. Sullivan set out to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to study Russian. But the university\u2019s science requirements landed her in geology and oceanography courses, and she found herself captivated by the enthusiasm of her professors and the excitement of going out into the field. Deciding that earth sciences\u2014not languages\u2014held the key to a life of inquiry and adventure, she switched majors. Next came a Ph.D. in geology and expeditions to study the floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. She describes a successful research expedition as being akin to a symphony: The pre-trip planning is like writing a score, weaving together the science, the ship and the sea, and then the expedition brings the notes to life in performance. \n\n\n\u201cHow do you think ahead, how do you plan, how do you get the equipment organized? Then nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and how do you deal with that? How do you keep thinking and adjusting and responding as life deals out cards which you\u2019re not expecting?\u201d she says. \u201cI loved that stuff.\u201d \nAs she was nearing the end of her Ph.D., her brother, a corporate-jet pilot, tossed out a crazy idea: NASA was developing a new kind of spaceship and looking to recruit an array of scientists\u2014including, for the first time, women. She dismissed the suggestion as silly, but while reading over the recruitment ad, it dawned on her that what NASA was building was a research ship\u2014\u201ca very different and wildly faster vessel than any I had ever worked on, to be sure, but a research ship nonetheless.\u201d Could the skills that she had developed exploring the ocean floor translate to exploring another unknown realm?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn her second venture into space, Dr. Sullivan poses with a space suit in the airlock of the Space Shuttle Discovery, April 1990.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nBy November 1977, she was sitting for an interview before a panel of NASA scientists and astronauts. \u201cTell us about yourself. Start with high school,\u201d she recalls the lead interviewer saying. Dr. Sullivan decided to play it straight. \u201cSomething I knew from going out to sea\u2014I really want to know who you are. I don\u2019t want to discover four weeks out on an expedition that I can\u2019t trust you, that you\u2019re a charlatan. So I wasn\u2019t going to fake it. If I\u2019m not who you think fits, fine. This is who I am.\u201d \nThe interview was followed by an array of physical and psychological tests. (\u201cPrivacy and dignity went out the window,\u201d she writes in her memoir.) A few months later, she was joining NASA\u2019s new class of astronauts, who called themselves the \u201c35 new guys\u201d\u201429 men and six women. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA had growing pains trying to accommodate women in a system built for men. \u201cYou could sense moments when you walked in a room of all men, and the only woman who had walked in before was a secretary,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan. Many of the snags were technical\u2014hangars that had been built with no expectation of hosting female crew members, suits that didn\u2019t quite fit. Some of those problems have, notoriously, persisted. This March, NASA had to scrap its first all-female spacewalk for want of two spacesuits that fit women. The walk happened in October. \u201cIt\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress and how slow this kind of progress always is,\u201d sa A pioneering NASA astronaut is now working to save the Earth\u2019s environment. ",
        "author": "Elizabeth Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Kathryn Sullivan Became the First U.S. Woman to Walk in Space (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7700",
        "date": "2019-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kathryn-sullivan-became-the-first-american-woman-to-walk-in-space-11575050548?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=51",
        "text": "The mission lasted eight days, and on the sixth, Dr. Sullivan performed a three-hour extravehicular activity (or EVA, in NASA parlance) alongside\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Leestma,\n\n\n\n thereby becoming the first American woman to walk in space. She would return to the heavens in April 1990, as part of the crew that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and again in March 1992 for a NASA research mission\u2014adventures that she recounts in her new memoir, \u201cHandprints on Hubble: An Astronaut\u2019s Story of Invention.\u201d If her life had taken a slightly different turn, however, she might have spent her career thousands of feet below Earth\u2019s surface rather than hundreds of miles above it. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan checks the latch of an antenna in the Space Shuttle Challenger's open cargo bay during her historic walk in space, Oct. 11, 1984.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan\u2019s lifetime of exploration started with maps. As a child, she would disappear to her room with any kind of map that she could get her hands on. \u201cI\u2019d do random dives,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan, now 68. \u201cA really rich map or world atlas is multiple layers of stories\u2014what kinds of people live there, what kinds of animals, what sort of landscape.\u201d She loved creating maps too, plotting routes for family trips. Her parents were \u201clike co-explorers\u201d with her and her brother, she says. \u201cThey were brilliant at making us feel we were peers in exploring something rather than always being pronouncers of wisdom.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Nothing ever goes exactly as planned.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nWith the vague idea that languages would be the best ticket to an adventurous life, Dr. Sullivan set out to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to study Russian. But the university\u2019s science requirements landed her in geology and oceanography courses, and she found herself captivated by the enthusiasm of her professors and the excitement of going out into the field. Deciding that earth sciences\u2014not languages\u2014held the key to a life of inquiry and adventure, she switched majors. Next came a Ph.D. in geology and expeditions to study the floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. She describes a successful research expedition as being akin to a symphony: The pre-trip planning is like writing a score, weaving together the science, the ship and the sea, and then the expedition brings the notes to life in performance. \n\n\n\u201cHow do you think ahead, how do you plan, how do you get the equipment organized? Then nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and how do you deal with that? How do you keep thinking and adjusting and responding as life deals out cards which you\u2019re not expecting?\u201d she says. \u201cI loved that stuff.\u201d \nAs she was nearing the end of her Ph.D., her brother, a corporate-jet pilot, tossed out a crazy idea: NASA was developing a new kind of spaceship and looking to recruit an array of scientists\u2014including, for the first time, women. She dismissed the suggestion as silly, but while reading over the recruitment ad, it dawned on her that what NASA was building was a research ship\u2014\u201ca very different and wildly faster vessel than any I had ever worked on, to be sure, but a research ship nonetheless.\u201d Could the skills that she had developed exploring the ocean floor translate to exploring another unknown realm?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn her second venture into space, Dr. Sullivan poses with a space suit in the airlock of the Space Shuttle Discovery, April 1990.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nBy November 1977, she was sitting for an interview before a panel of NASA scientists and astronauts. \u201cTell us about yourself. Start with high school,\u201d she recalls the lead interviewer saying. Dr. Sullivan decided to play it straight. \u201cSomething I knew from going out to sea\u2014I really want to know who you are. I don\u2019t want to discover four weeks out on an expedition that I can\u2019t trust you, that you\u2019re a charlatan. So I wasn\u2019t going to fake it. If I\u2019m not who you think fits, fine. This is who I am.\u201d \nThe interview was followed by an array of physical and psychological tests. (\u201cPrivacy and dignity went out the window,\u201d she writes in her memoir.) A few months later, she was joining NASA\u2019s new class of astronauts, who called themselves the \u201c35 new guys\u201d\u201429 men and six women. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA had growing pains trying to accommodate women in a system built for men. \u201cYou could sense moments when you walked in a room of all men, and the only woman who had walked in before was a secretary,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan. Many of the snags were technical\u2014hangars that had been built with no expectation of hosting female crew members, suits that didn\u2019t quite fit. Some of those problems have, notoriously, persisted. This March, NASA had to scrap its first all-female spacewalk for want of two spacesuits that fit women. The walk happened in October. \u201cIt\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress and how slow this kind of progress always is,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan. \nWhat has stayed with her over the years is the view of Earth from space. \u201cTo get up there and be able to see the whole Tibetan plateau at once, thousands of miles wide\u2014it was suddenly like, \u2018I get it!\u2019 \u201d she says. \u201cI had this sense of comprehension of the whole that\u2019s very hard to get when you\u2019re learning it piece by piece. But when the curtain opens and you see it all in front of you, that was very cool.\u201d\n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\nObstetrician Neel Shah Joined the Telehealth Revolution\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nPatrick Scannon Searches the Globe for American MIAs\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nAvant-Garde Chef Ferran Adri\u00e0 Sets His Sights on Breakfast\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nPsychiatrist Thomas Insel Looks for a Cure to America\u2019s Mental Health Crisis\nFebruary 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan has used her extraterrestrial adventures in the service of her original fascination: environmental issues on Earth. After retiring from NASA in 1993, she went on to positions in academia and policy-making, including serving in 2013-17 as both the administrator of the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\n\n\n\n and the undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere. \n\u201cWe need people who can take the power of the space perspective and ensure that it connects to real issues on Earth\u2014how we live better with our environment, how we protect ourselves from natural disasters,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you step back and look at the whole, you can make wiser decisions.\u201d \nShe hasn\u2019t given up hope, though, for one last mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Glenn\n\n\n\n returned to space when he was 77, she notes, arguing that he could provide biometric data on aging. \u201cYou did one old guy, you gotta do one old gal,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan. \u201cWhy not? Maybe a little stint on the moon. A girl can dream.\u201d \nWrite to Elizabeth Winkler at elizabeth.winkler@wsj.com A pioneering NASA astronaut is now working to save the Earth\u2019s environment. ",
        "author": "Elizabeth Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Kathryn Sullivan Became the First U.S. Woman to Walk in Space (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7701",
        "date": "2019-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kathryn-sullivan-became-the-first-american-woman-to-walk-in-space-11575050548?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=49",
        "text": "The mission lasted eight days, and on the sixth, Dr. Sullivan performed a three-hour extravehicular activity (or EVA, in NASA parlance) alongside\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Leestma,\n\n\n\n thereby becoming the first American woman to walk in space. She would return to the heavens in April 1990, as part of the crew that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and again in March 1992 for a NASA research mission\u2014adventures that she recounts in her new memoir, \u201cHandprints on Hubble: An Astronaut\u2019s Story of Invention.\u201d If her life had taken a slightly different turn, however, she might have spent her career thousands of feet below Earth\u2019s surface rather than hundreds of miles above it. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan checks the latch of an antenna in the Space Shuttle Challenger's open cargo bay during her historic walk in space, Oct. 11, 1984.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan\u2019s lifetime of exploration started with maps. As a child, she would disappear to her room with any kind of map that she could get her hands on. \u201cI\u2019d do random dives,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan, now 68. \u201cA really rich map or world atlas is multiple layers of stories\u2014what kinds of people live there, what kinds of animals, what sort of landscape.\u201d She loved creating maps too, plotting routes for family trips. Her parents were \u201clike co-explorers\u201d with her and her brother, she says. \u201cThey were brilliant at making us feel we were peers in exploring something rather than always being pronouncers of wisdom.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Nothing ever goes exactly as planned.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nWith the vague idea that languages would be the best ticket to an adventurous life, Dr. Sullivan set out to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to study Russian. But the university\u2019s science requirements landed her in geology and oceanography courses, and she found herself captivated by the enthusiasm of her professors and the excitement of going out into the field. Deciding that earth sciences\u2014not languages\u2014held the key to a life of inquiry and adventure, she switched majors. Next came a Ph.D. in geology and expeditions to study the floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. She describes a successful research expedition as being akin to a symphony: The pre-trip planning is like writing a score, weaving together the science, the ship and the sea, and then the expedition brings the notes to life in performance. \n\n\n\u201cHow do you think ahead, how do you plan, how do you get the equipment organized? Then nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and how do you deal with that? How do you keep thinking and adjusting and responding as life deals out cards which you\u2019re not expecting?\u201d she says. \u201cI loved that stuff.\u201d \nAs she was nearing the end of her Ph.D., her brother, a corporate-jet pilot, tossed out a crazy idea: NASA was developing a new kind of spaceship and looking to recruit an array of scientists\u2014including, for the first time, women. She dismissed the suggestion as silly, but while reading over the recruitment ad, it dawned on her that what NASA was building was a research ship\u2014\u201ca very different and wildly faster vessel than any I had ever worked on, to be sure, but a research ship nonetheless.\u201d Could the skills that she had developed exploring the ocean floor translate to exploring another unknown realm?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn her second venture into space, Dr. Sullivan poses with a space suit in the airlock of the Space Shuttle Discovery, April 1990.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nBy November 1977, she was sitting for an interview before a panel of NASA scientists and astronauts. \u201cTell us about yourself. Start with high school,\u201d she recalls the lead interviewer saying. Dr. Sullivan decided to play it straight. \u201cSomething I knew from going out to sea\u2014I really want to know who you are. I don\u2019t want to discover four weeks out on an expedition that I can\u2019t trust you, that you\u2019re a charlatan. So I wasn\u2019t going to fake it. If I\u2019m not who you think fits, fine. This is who I am.\u201d \nThe interview was followed by an array of physical and psychological tests. (\u201cPrivacy and dignity went out the window,\u201d she writes in her memoir.) A few months later, she was joining NASA\u2019s new class of astronauts, who called themselves the \u201c35 new guys\u201d\u201429 men and six women. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA had growing pains trying to accommodate women in a system built for men. \u201cYou could sense moments when you walked in a room of all men, and the only woman who had walked in before was a secretary,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan. Many of the snags were technical\u2014hangars that had been built with no expectation of hosting female crew members, suits that didn\u2019t quite fit. Some of those problems have, notoriously, persisted. This March, NASA had to scrap its first all-female spacewalk for want of two spacesuits that fit women. The walk happened in October. \u201cIt\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress and how slow this kind of progress always is,\u201d sa A pioneering NASA astronaut is now working to save the Earth\u2019s environment. ",
        "author": "Elizabeth Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Kathryn Sullivan Became the First U.S. Woman to Walk in Space (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7702",
        "date": "2019-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kathryn-sullivan-became-the-first-american-woman-to-walk-in-space-11575050548?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=62",
        "text": "The mission lasted eight days, and on the sixth, Dr. Sullivan performed a three-hour extravehicular activity (or EVA, in NASA parlance) alongside\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Leestma,\n\n\n\n thereby becoming the first American woman to walk in space. She would return to the heavens in April 1990, as part of the crew that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and again in March 1992 for a NASA research mission\u2014adventures that she recounts in her new memoir, \u201cHandprints on Hubble: An Astronaut\u2019s Story of Invention.\u201d If her life had taken a slightly different turn, however, she might have spent her career thousands of feet below Earth\u2019s surface rather than hundreds of miles above it. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan checks the latch of an antenna in the Space Shuttle Challenger's open cargo bay during her historic walk in space, Oct. 11, 1984.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nDr. Sullivan\u2019s lifetime of exploration started with maps. As a child, she would disappear to her room with any kind of map that she could get her hands on. \u201cI\u2019d do random dives,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan, now 68. \u201cA really rich map or world atlas is multiple layers of stories\u2014what kinds of people live there, what kinds of animals, what sort of landscape.\u201d She loved creating maps too, plotting routes for family trips. Her parents were \u201clike co-explorers\u201d with her and her brother, she says. \u201cThey were brilliant at making us feel we were peers in exploring something rather than always being pronouncers of wisdom.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Nothing ever goes exactly as planned.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nWith the vague idea that languages would be the best ticket to an adventurous life, Dr. Sullivan set out to the University of California, Santa Cruz, to study Russian. But the university\u2019s science requirements landed her in geology and oceanography courses, and she found herself captivated by the enthusiasm of her professors and the excitement of going out into the field. Deciding that earth sciences\u2014not languages\u2014held the key to a life of inquiry and adventure, she switched majors. Next came a Ph.D. in geology and expeditions to study the floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. She describes a successful research expedition as being akin to a symphony: The pre-trip planning is like writing a score, weaving together the science, the ship and the sea, and then the expedition brings the notes to life in performance. \n\n\n\u201cHow do you think ahead, how do you plan, how do you get the equipment organized? Then nothing ever goes exactly as planned, and how do you deal with that? How do you keep thinking and adjusting and responding as life deals out cards which you\u2019re not expecting?\u201d she says. \u201cI loved that stuff.\u201d \nAs she was nearing the end of her Ph.D., her brother, a corporate-jet pilot, tossed out a crazy idea: NASA was developing a new kind of spaceship and looking to recruit an array of scientists\u2014including, for the first time, women. She dismissed the suggestion as silly, but while reading over the recruitment ad, it dawned on her that what NASA was building was a research ship\u2014\u201ca very different and wildly faster vessel than any I had ever worked on, to be sure, but a research ship nonetheless.\u201d Could the skills that she had developed exploring the ocean floor translate to exploring another unknown realm?\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn her second venture into space, Dr. Sullivan poses with a space suit in the airlock of the Space Shuttle Discovery, April 1990.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nBy November 1977, she was sitting for an interview before a panel of NASA scientists and astronauts. \u201cTell us about yourself. Start with high school,\u201d she recalls the lead interviewer saying. Dr. Sullivan decided to play it straight. \u201cSomething I knew from going out to sea\u2014I really want to know who you are. I don\u2019t want to discover four weeks out on an expedition that I can\u2019t trust you, that you\u2019re a charlatan. So I wasn\u2019t going to fake it. If I\u2019m not who you think fits, fine. This is who I am.\u201d \nThe interview was followed by an array of physical and psychological tests. (\u201cPrivacy and dignity went out the window,\u201d she writes in her memoir.) A few months later, she was joining NASA\u2019s new class of astronauts, who called themselves the \u201c35 new guys\u201d\u201429 men and six women. \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nNASA had growing pains trying to accommodate women in a system built for men. \u201cYou could sense moments when you walked in a room of all men, and the only woman who had walked in before was a secretary,\u201d says Dr. Sullivan. Many of the snags were technical\u2014hangars that had been built with no expectation of hosting female crew members, suits that didn\u2019t quite fit. Some of those problems have, notoriously, persisted. This March, NASA had to scrap its first all-female spacewalk for want of two spacesuits that fit women. The walk happened in October. \u201cIt\u2019s an amusing, small sign of some forward progress and how slow this kind of progress always is, A pioneering NASA astronaut is now working to save the Earth\u2019s environment. ",
        "author": "Elizabeth Winkler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Norah O\u2019Donnell Anchors a New Era at CBS (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7703",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/norah-odonnell-anchors-a-new-era-at-cbs-11562947327?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=70",
        "text": "On Monday, after seven years co-hosting \u201cCBS This Morning,\u201d Ms. O\u2019Donnell will become the anchor of \u201cCBS Evening News,\u201d taking the seat once held by the TV news legend Walter Cronkite. The move makes her just the second woman to anchor the network\u2019s evening newscast solo, after Katie Couric, who held the job from 2006 to 2011. (Connie Chung also co-anchored the broadcast with Dan Rather in 1993-95.) The 45-year-old Ms. O\u2019Donnell will also be the show\u2019s managing editor and CBS\u2019s lead anchor for coverage of the 2020 elections.\n\n\n\n\nThe switch is the most prominent in a series of changes aimed at reviving CBS\u2019s news division, which has been bruised by sexual-harassment scandals and declining ratings. Ms. O\u2019Donnell can still recite verbatim the words she said on-air on Nov. 21, 2017, the day her \u201cCBS This Morning\u201d co-host\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Rose\n\n\n\n was fired after multiple women, in a Washington Post article, accused him of sexual misconduct. \u201cI made a very clear statement I hoped would stand the test of time, and I think it\u2019s still true today, which is: Women cannot achieve equality in the workplace until there\u2019s a reckoning and a taking of responsibility,\u201d Ms. O\u2019Donnell says.\n\n\nTen months later,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n CBS Corp.\n\n\n ousted its CEO,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leslie Moonves,\n\n\n\n over allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Within a week,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Fager,\n\n\n\n the longtime executive producer of \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d was also let go after sending a CBS News reporter a text warning her to tread carefully in her reporting of allegations he\u2019d behaved inappropriately toward women. (Mr. Rose has apologized for his behavior but denied the accuracy of certain claims; Mr. Moonves and Mr. Fager have denied any wrongdoing.)\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. O\u2019Donnell will take over as anchor of the \u2018CBS Evening News\u2019 on July 15.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Axel Dupeux for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMs. O\u2019Donnell would prefer not to dwell on those days. \u201cThe best way to put it is, we went through a tough time. We did. But it\u2019s over. And I think everybody here wants to return the focus to our work, not the bad actors,\u201d she says. \nWomen are now at the heart of nearly all of CBS\u2019s main news platforms, including \u201cCBS This Morning,\u201d where Ms. O\u2019Donnell\u2019s former co-host Gayle King is now front and center; \u201cFace the Nation,\u201d moderated by Margaret Brennan; and its lead-in, \u201cSunday Morning,\u201d hosted by Jane Pauley. The new CBS News president,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Susan Zirinsky,\n\n\n\n has driven many of these changes and calls the constellation part of a \u201cnew era at CBS.\u201d \nMs. O\u2019Donnell says the evening newscast will remain the temple of Cronkite, aiming to position itself as \u201cthe most trusted voice\u201d amid a deluge of information coming over the airwaves and the internet. \u201cThat\u2019s not a heavy lift for us at CBS\u2014that\u2019s who we are already,\u201d she says from her new office, perched above the evening news set in New York. \n\n\n\n\u201cHer dream \u2018get\u2019 would be an interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, she says. \u201d\n\n\n\nMs. O\u2019Donnell\u2019s evening news kickoff on July 15 hopes to hark back to CBS News\u2019s glory days\u2014in particular, Cronkite\u2019s coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 years ago next week. Her first night will feature a joint interview with Amazon CEO and space entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n and former U.S. ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy about the future of space exploration. The next evening, Ms. O\u2019Donnell will anchor the show live from the Kennedy Space Center, as Cronkite did in 1969. Then she will go to Washington to anchor the network\u2019s coverage of former special counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s planned testimony before Congress. \nDown the line, Ms. O\u2019Donnell says, she can\u2019t wait to do a deep dive into the issue of student-loan debt\u2014\u201cI love that kind of stuff\u201d\u2014and says her dream \u201cget\u201d would be an interview with North Korean dictator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kim Jong Un.\n \n\n\n\n \u201cThat\u2019s the greatest foreign-policy crisis that the president faces,\u2019\u201d she says. \nMs. O\u2019Donnell made her TV debut when she was a 10-year-old living in Seoul, where her father was stationed as a U.S. Army doctor. She landed an after-school gig on a South Korean TV show teaching locals English: She would open the show with a few phrases in Korean, then give the English translation. She spent her tiny paycheck at the local market on indulgences like cassette tapes and parachute pants. \u201cMy parents didn\u2019t have a lot of money, so it was nice,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve always had a job since.\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018We\u2019re going to have a massive amount of foreign influence that is spreading misinformation and disinformation.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n\nAfter 12 years at NBC, Ms. O\u2019Donnell jumped to CBS in 2011, drawn by the lure of \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d She recalls telling her agent that she badly wanted to do pieces for the show, \u201cand my agent said, \u2018Well, that\u2019s great, so does everybody.\u2019 I said, \u2018Well, yeah, but make the call.\u2019\u201d Her fir As she takes over the \u2018CBS Evening News,\u2019 a veteran TV journalist hopes to sort \u2018fact from fiction\u2019\u2014and plans a long stay in the job ",
        "author": "Vanessa Fuhrmans"
    },
    {
        "title": "Astronaut Scott Kelly Trains His Sights on Earth (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7704",
        "date": "2018-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astronaut-scott-kelly-trains-his-sights-on-earth-1541172128?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=62",
        "text": "Mr. Kelly took it to heart. Last year, he published a memoir, \u201cEndurance.\u201d And this past week, he came out with \u201cInfinite Wonder,\u201d which illustrates his year in orbit with a series of vivid photographs that he took of the Earth as it passed below. \nMr. Kelly has been to space four times, starting in 1999 with a mission piloting the Space Shuttle Discovery to service the Hubble Space Telescope and ending in 2016 with his trip to the international space station. During his NASA career, he spent a total of 520 days in space, the record for an American astronaut (since broken) at the time he retired from spaceflight in 2016. He still holds the U.S. record for the most days spent in space at one time\u2014340.\n\n\nHis feats were as much mental as physical. To prepare for spending such a long time in high-pressure, cramped conditions on his last mission, he lived in an undersea laboratory in Key Largo for two weeklong stints and spent about a week in a freezing snow cave in Wyoming. He met regularly with a psychiatrist with whom he spoke every few weeks from the space station. \u201cI definitely think I developed a talent for living in an uncomfortable environment,\u201d he says. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean I like to fly in economy class on an airline,\u201d he jokes, \u201cbut I can if I have to.\u201d\nAs a child growing up in West Orange, New Jersey, Mr. Kelly and his twin brother Mark (also an astronaut and the husband of former Arizona congresswoman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gabrielle Giffords\n\n\n\n ) were energetic and rebellious. \u201cWe had two speeds, fast and stop,\u201d he says. His father was a police officer, and his mother eventually became one, too. \nMr. Kelly first read \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d while in college at the State University of New York Maritime College, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering in 1987. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t just an exciting adventure story,\u201d he wrote in his memoir. \u201cThis was more like a life plan.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Kelly took pictures to help scientists observe environmental changes and document natural disasters.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Winni Wintermeyer for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nHe joined the Navy, where he served as a fighter pilot and test pilot until NASA chose him to be an astronaut in 1996. \u201cI never felt more rewarded in work\u2026than when I was doing something that had very serious consequences of not doing it correctly,\u201d he says.\nIn space, he learned to function in zero gravity. Any time he made a movement as small as pushing a button, he had to anchor himself with a foot or toe, and he had to secure objects such as forks and knives with Velcro. Fluid that would normally have settled in his lower body pooled in his head, giving him an uncomfortably full feeling in his skull.\nBut none of it stopped him from marveling at the sights below. He started photographing earth from space in earnest in 2010, during a 159-day flight, finding ways to support himself and his camera without gravity as the space station moved past the planet at 17,500 miles an hour. \u201cI had to pan the camera steadily and quickly as the shutter released, otherwise the image would smear and appear out of focus,\u201d he writes. He used a long 800 mm lens with a 1.4x magnifying zoom lens and then used software to enhance the color.\nDuring his last mission, he took some pictures to help scientists observe environmental changes and document natural disasters. The photos in his new book range from the veined landscapes of Egyptian deserts to the vibrant blues and greens of the Bahamas. \u201cI really liked taking those photos\u2026that made Earth look like abstract art,\u201d he says.\nHe took most of his photographs for fun. During football season, he tried to take photos of stadiums during games and managed to get a shot of Super Bowl 50 in California. He also shot locations where people he missed lived.\nHe undertook several dangerous spacewalks to fix parts of the space station, putting him at risk of becoming untethered as he struggled to move in his ungainly suit. The worst part of his journey, he says, was getting bad news from earth. He had two months left in his 159-day mission in 2011 when he found out that his sister-in-law Ms. Giffords had been shot at an event in Tucson. At first he heard that she had died; only hours later did he find out that she had survived. From space, he led a moment of silence for his crew and flight control centers around the world.\nSince retiring, Mr. Kelly has devoted most of his time to writing and giving speeches, which he finds enough to keep him busy for now. He and his wife Amiko have decided to give up their home in Houston and travel, staying in hotels, Airbnbs and the occasional tent or yurt, such as when they visited Everest Base Camp. He has two daughters from his previous marriage. \nMr. Kelly thinks that someday soon we\u2019ll be able to fly halfway around the world in 45 minutes by going up briefly to space and descending again, and he thinks that human travel to Mars is \u201cinevitable.\u201d Given the chance, wou Mr. Kelly, who holds the U.S. record for the most days spent in space at one time, has published a new book called \u201cInfinite Wonder,\u201d featuring vivid photographs of Earth that he took from the international space station. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Liu Cixin Writes Science Fiction Epics That Transcend the Moment (WSJ: Weekend Confidential) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7705",
        "date": "2020-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/liu-cixin-writes-science-fiction-epics-that-transcend-the-moment-11598026134?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=48",
        "text": "But Mr. Liu insists that this is \u201cthe biggest misinterpretation of my work.\u201d Speaking through an interpreter over Skype from his home in Shanxi Province, he says that his books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, shouldn\u2019t be read as commentaries on China\u2019s history or aspirations. In his books, he maintains, \u201caliens are aliens, space is space.\u201d Although he has acknowledged, in an author\u2019s note to one of his books, that \u201cevery era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it,\u201d he says that he writes science fiction because he enjoys imagining a world beyond the \u201cnarrow\u201d one we live in. \u201cFor me, the essence of science fiction is using my imagination to fill in the gaps of my dreams,\u201d says Mr. Liu. \nIn China, science fiction has often been inseparable from ideology. A century ago, early efforts in the genre were conspicuously nationalistic: \u201cElites used it as a way of expressing their hopes for a stronger China,\u201d says Mr. Liu. But the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution banned science fiction as subversive, and critics in the 1980s argued that it promoted capitalist ideas. \u201cAfter that, science fiction was discouraged,\u201d Mr. Liu remembers.\n\n\nMore Weekend Confidential\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn recent years, however, the genre has been making a comeback. This is partly because China\u2019s breakneck pace of modernization \u201cmakes people more future-oriented,\u201d Mr. Liu says. But the country\u2019s science fiction revival also has quite a lot to do with Mr. Liu himself. \n\n\nIn 2015, he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science fiction prize. A 2019 adaptation of his short story \u201cThe Wandering Earth\u201d became China\u2019s third-highest-grossing film of all time, and a movie version of his bestselling novel \u201cThe Three-Body Problem\u201d is in the works. His new book, \u201cTo Hold Up the Sky,\u201d a collection of stories, will be published in the U.S. in October. (His American books render his name as Cixin Liu, with the family name last, but Chinese convention is to put the family name first.)\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Liu wrote his first books while working full-time as an engineer at a state-owned power plant.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alamy\n \n\n\n\nMr. Liu\u2019s obsession with outer space began in childhood. At first, he hoped to explore it as an astronaut or astronomer, but he settled for reading and writing about it instead. Early exposure to books by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jules Verne,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.G. Wells\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arthur C. Clarke\n\n\n\n \u2014hidden under a bed by his father during the Cultural Revolution\u2014tickled Mr. Liu\u2019s imagination and spurred his pen. \nHis first book appeared in 1989, and for years he wrote while working as an engineer at a state-owned power plant. The publication of \u201cThe Three-Body Problem,\u201d in 2006, made him famous, and after a pollution problem shut the plant down in 2010, he devoted himself to writing full-time. \nMr. Liu\u2019s renowned trilogy \u201cRemembrance of Earth\u2019s Past,\u201d published in China between 2006 and 2010, tells the story of a war between humans on Earth and an alien civilization called the Trisolarans who inhabit a planet in decline. The story begins in the 1960s, in the years of the Cultural Revolution, and eventually zooms millions of years into the future. The aliens\u2019 technological superiority and aggressive desire to exploit Earth\u2019s resources have made some readers see them as a metaphor for the colonial Western powers China struggled against for more than a century. But Mr. Liu says this is too limited a view of his intentions. What makes science fiction \u201cso special,\u201d he says, is that its narratives often encourage us to \u201clook past boundaries of nations and cultures and races, and instead really consider the fate of humankind as a whole.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018Whatever we think is important right now, in our mundane lives, will no longer be important against a grander sense of time and space.\u2019 \u201d\n\n\n\nThe English version of \u201cThe Three-Body Problem,\u201d the first book in the trilogy, differs from the original in a small but telling way. In this 2014 translation, the story begins with an episode from the Cultural Revolution, in which a character\u2019s father is publicly humiliated and killed for his \u201creactionary\u201d views. The translator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Liu\n\n\n\n (no relation to the author) moved the scene to the start of the book from the middle, where Mr. Liu admits he had buried it in the original Chinese because he was wary of government censors\u2014particularly since the book was published on the 30th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution. But he is quick to say that the \u201cenvironment is pretty free\u201d for science fiction writers. \u201cI\u2019ve never heard of anyone who couldn\u2019t publish something because they wrote about a certain topic,\u201d he says. The rules are stricter for Chinese films, he concedes, but here too he believes things are \u201cloosening up.\u201d\nA common criticism of Mr. Liu\u2019s books is that he is more interested in science th The acclaimed Chinese writer wants to offer readers \u201ca grander sense of time and space.\u201d ",
        "author": "Emily Bobrow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vitamins Gone Gummy (NYT: Well) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7706",
        "date": "2017-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/eat/vitamins-gone-gummy.html",
        "text": "Vitamin makers have discovered that consumers have a sweet tooth for gummy candy versions of their products. Vitamin makers have discovered that consumers have a sweet tooth for gummy candy versions of their products. For nearly 100 years, candy companies have made gummy treats \u2014 those chewy, gelatin-based, fruit-flavored bears, worms and fish that kids love to eat.",
        "author": "By Abby Ellin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Vitamins Gone Gummy (NYT: Well) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7707",
        "date": "2017-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/eat/vitamins-gone-gummy.html",
        "text": "Vitamin makers have discovered that consumers have a sweet tooth for gummy candy versions of their products. Vitamin makers have discovered that consumers have a sweet tooth for gummy candy versions of their products. For nearly 100 years, candy companies have made gummy treats \u2014 those chewy, gelatin-based, fruit-flavored bears, worms and fish that kids love to eat.",
        "author": "By Abby Ellin"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Do if You or a Loved One Might Have the Coronavirus (NYT: Well) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7708",
        "date": "2020-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/well/what-if-i-have-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "A vast majority of those infected with the coronavirus will develop only mild to moderate symptoms. But many people remain frightened and wonder how and when to seek medical care. A vast majority of those infected with the coronavirus will develop only mild to moderate symptoms. But many people remain frightened and wonder how and when to seek medical care. As the coronavirus spreads around the globe, the reality is that many of us will probably get it at some point. Fortunately, a vast majority of people will develop only mild to moderate symptoms that will not require hospitalization.",
        "author": "By Tara Parker-Pope"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Alums From Supreme and Dior Are Reinvigorating Jil Sander (WSJ: What's News) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7709",
        "date": "2018-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-alums-from-supreme-and-dior-are-reinvigorating-jil-sander-1518271200?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=78",
        "text": "CLEAN LINES Crisp shirting for both women and men from the spring 2018 fashion show.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n FIRSTVIEW\n \n\n\n\nSo strong was Lucie Meier\u2019s connection to the brand that when her husband, Luke Meier, 42, was approached last spring about the creative director position (Rodolfo Paglialunga departed after three years of lukewarm reviews), it became obvious that the Meiers should go for it as a duo. Lucie was just off a stint at Dior, where she headed up the design studios for Raf Simons and then filled in as co\u2013creative director after his tenure ended. Luke had spent eight years as head of design for streetwear phenomenon Supreme before launching his own menswear line, OAMC, in 2014. \nThe Meiers were hired, moving from Paris to Milan and presenting their first collection in fall 2017. It riffed on Jil Sander classics: Shirting appeared as white dresses and striped coats, while minimalist tailoring for men and women was mixed with oversize knits and anoraks.\nTheir contrasting skills and approaches are symbiotic, they say. \u201cLucie\u2019s very intuitive: She reacts naturally without overthinking anything,\u201d says Luke, who hails from Vancouver and met Lucie in 2001 when they were students at the Polimoda fashion school in Florence. \u201cLuke is more analytical,\u201d Lucie chimes in. \u201cIt\u2019s the perfect combination.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Luca Campri for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nBut how do they plan on breathing life into a 50-year-old brand that has seen its share of ups and downs, frequently changing management and designers? (The current owners, Japanese conglomerate Onward Holdings, bought the fashion house in 2008 for $244 million, while Sander herself left and returned twice before her final exit in 2013.) After so much upheaval, \u201cthe biggest challenge was to give back a believable identity to the brand,\u201d said Jil Sander\u2019s CEO, Alessandra Bettari, by email. \n\n\n\u201cIt has been totally off the radar,\u201d Lucie says. \u201cWe have to build awareness with a lot of younger people,\u201d says Luke, who is a longtime fan of the brand\u2019s imagery. Signature ad campaigns include minimalist photos from the \u201990s by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig McDean\n\n\n\n and David Sims featuring models Amber Valletta and Stella Tennant. \u201cJil Sander always represented a strong universe,\u201d he adds. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot more than just clothing.\u201d \nHe and Lucie have worked to develop their own visual language, tapping photographer Larry Fink to shoot behind-the-scenes images during their first show, which they used for social media. For this spring\u2019s print ads, they asked German director Wim Wenders to create a five-part series called Paused by (which was posted on YouTube) and used stills for publication. Interpretation Project, a series of collaborations they\u2019ve launched, debuted in December with T-shirts featuring Mario Sorrenti photographs; the images were also posted on the brand\u2019s Instagram feed.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSamples being developed for the fall 2018 collection hang in the Jil Sander design studio in Milan.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Luca Campri for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nAs for the clothes, \u201cit\u2019s things that you can do your daily routine in,\u201d Luke explains. \u201cI try all the [women\u2019s] stuff on myself,\u201d says Lucie. For pre-fall 2018, this meant a soft-edged collection of suiting, wrap coats and stretchy materials, punctuated by bright upholstery-style florals. \u201cReality is not so positive. It was really to make people feel good\u2014comfort clothes,\u201d she adds. And the fall 2018 collection will continue the theme, but transported to outer space. \u201cNot that it\u2019s going to be all astronauts,\u201d Lucie says, laughing. \u201cMore like the feeling of technology in our lives, and an airiness to make everything feel light.\u201d\nThe Meiers are trying not to worry about what fans of the original Jil Sander line might think; as for Sander herself, \u201cwhen we met her, she was very encouraging,\u201d says Lucie. \u201cShe said, \u2018It\u2019s not easy, but you have to really believe in what you do, and you have to push it through.\u2019 \u201d \n\n\nMore from WSJ. Magazine\n\n\n\n\nWhat Reshma Saujani Can\u2019t Stop Bingeing on Netflix\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nThe Gallery Where Fine Art Meets Vintage Cars: The Best Designed Items of March\nMarch 2, 2022 \n\n\nLindsey Vonn\u2019s Best Alarm Clock Are Her Dogs\nJanuary 31, 2022 \n\n\nGamer Tyler \u201cNinja\u201d Blevins Has All-Day Phone Alarms\nDecember 3, 2021 \n\n\nEverything Worth the Splurge During the Holidays\nDecember 2, 2021 Fashion designers Lucie and Luke Meier have been married for a decade\u2014and now they\u2019re together at the helm of the house of Jil Sander ",
        "author": "Florence Kane"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s News: World-Wide (WSJ: Whats News World Wide) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7710",
        "date": "2021-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-news-world-wide-11622862520?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=7",
        "text": "A forthcoming U.S. report contains no evidence that unexplained objects moving through the skies and witnessed by Navy pilots are alien spacecraft, but offers no conclusive explanation. What\u2019s News: World-Wide ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s News: World-Wide (WSJ: Whats News World Wide) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7711",
        "date": "2021-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-news-world-wide-11621049201?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=30",
        "text": "An ex-Florida tax collector is set to plead guilty to sex trafficking and other counts in an investigation that is examining possible misconduct involving U.S. Rep. Gaetz. \nChina landed a rover on Mars, a crucial landmark in its quest to be at the forefront of space exploration. What\u2019s News: World-Wide ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Out of this world amenities \u2014 including a trip to space \u2014 come with sale of $85 million New York penthouse (WP: Where We Live) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7712",
        "date": "2019-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/15/out-this-world-amenities-including-trip-outer-space-come-with-sale-million-new-york-penthouse/",
        "text": "Inside an $85 million New York penthouseShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe lobby of the Atelier building in New York, which houses the $85 million listing. The 15,000-square-foot penthouse is currently set up as 13 separate units, which the buyer will be able to combine or continue renting out. (River 2 River Realty)An $85 million penthouse-level suite of condos for sale in the Atelier building in New York\u2019s Hell\u2019s Kitchen neighborhood comes with an unusual array of amenities.Along with the 13 condos totaling 15,000 square feet, the buyer can get a $1 million yacht with docking fees for five years, two Rolls- Royce Phantoms (one convertible, one hardtop), a Lamborghini Aventador Roadster, dinner for two weekly at Daniel Bolud\u2019s restaurant for one year, courtside season tickets to the Brooklyn Nets for a year, a Hamptons mansion rental for a summer, a private chef and live-in butler services for one year and two round-trip tourist tickets to outer space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Atelier building overlooks the Hudson River and has been home to a number of celebrities over the years, including actors Jeremy Piven, Brendan Fraser, Hilary Duff, Dane Cook, Lindsay Lohan and Mekhi Phifer, as well as rapper and Maryland native Logic, according to Daniel Neiditch, owner of both the penthouse for sale and the brokerage River 2 River Realty, which represents the building.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe sale also comes with a $2 million construction credit, allowing the buyer to renovate the 13 condos, which have tenants on month-to-month leases or to reconfigure the space to their preferred layout.Inside two of Aretha Franklin\u2019s Detroit-area mansions\u201cEssentially we\u2019re offering someone a floor and a half, a full floor up top, a half floor, so a duplex,\u201d says Neiditch. \u201cFifteen thousand square feet \u2014 whether they\u2019re individual apartments or not \u2014 you\u2019re getting it all in one shot. We\u2019re going to give all the amenities and the construction credit so we can build out the space to their specifications.\u201dThe typical entrance to the condos is designed to have flow-through views of the Hudson River. Operable windows allow for fresh air if desired. Also visible is white oak flooring that comes with each unit.Story continues below advertisementThe kitchens in the existing units come with granite countertops and Sub-Zero and Bosch stainless-steel appliances.AdvertisementThe model unit shows a possible orientation for an open-plan kitchen layout on the main floor. One of the rooms in the model unit is a smaller media room, facing the tall buildings on the other side of the street so there isn\u2019t a strong glare against the screen.Inside the Brooklyn \u2018Saturday Night Fever\u2019 Dutch ColonialThe property has ample space for corner bedrooms with river views.The building also has indoor and outdoor pools, a tennis court, a basketball court, a dog park, an indoor billiard room and an outdoor kids' play area.Residents have access to an indoor kids' playroom with a variety of toys and art supplies. The building also has a co-working space, including the option to have a private room for meetings.The communal outdoor gathering spaces at the Atelier building include landscaped patios, a rooftop deck and a barbecue grilling area. They include a $1 million yacht with docking fees for five years, two Rolls-Royce Phantoms (one convertible, one hardtop), a Lamborghini Aventador Roadster and two round trip tourist tickets to space. Out of this world amenities \u2014 including a trip to space \u2014 come with sale of $85 million New York penthouse",
        "author": "Amy Dobson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden pitches his far-reaching spending plans as he marks 100th day in office  (WP: White House) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7713",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/29/joe-biden-live-updates/",
        "text": "On his 100th day in office, President Biden pitched his far-reaching investment and tax plans at a post-speech, drive-in car rally in Georgia, where he credited the state\u2019s voters for electing two Democrats to the Senate and helping him win the White House. Earlier, Biden met with former president Jimmy Carter in Plains, Ga. His trip Thursday is part of a blitz of travel by senior administration officials, including Vice President Harris, to continue the sales pitch for an ambitious agenda laid out by Biden on Wednesday in his first address to a joint session of Congress. Harris visited a vaccination site in Baltimore on Thursday.Here\u2019s what to know:The U.S. economic recovery picked up speed in early 2021, with the economy growing 1.6 percent in the first three months of the year amid a coronavirus vaccination campaign and massive stimulus spending from the federal government.Biden said that he was not given advance notice of a search warrant executed at the Manhattan home and law offices of Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former attorney for former president Donald Trump.Congressional Democrats are planning to pursue a massive expansion of Medicare as part of Biden\u2019s new $1.8 trillion economic relief package, defying the White House after it opted against including a major health overhaul as part of its plan.Florida legislature approves measure that curbs mail voting and use of drop boxes; DeSantis vows to sign the billReturn to menuBy Amy Gardner and Amy Wang11:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkFlorida\u2019s legislature on Thursday night became the latest to approve far-reaching legislation imposing new rules on voting and new penalties for those who do not follow them, passing a measure critics said would make it harder for millions of voters to cast ballots in the Sunshine State.Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who named voting security one of his top legislative priorities this year, said Thursday night he would \u201cof course\u201d sign the bill in the coming weeks.\u201cIn Florida, we have voter ID, we\u2019ve had voter ID,\u201d DeSantis said on Fox News\u2019s \u201cThe Laura Ingraham Show\u201d on Thursday. \u201cIt works. It\u2019s the right thing to do.\u201dDeSantis also vowed to sue if Congress passed H.R. 1, a comprehensive voting rights bill that would establish national standards, because he believed it would be unconstitutional. He boasted that in Florida, election officials counted 11 million votes by midnight on Election Night.\u201cSo we think we led the nation, but we\u2019re trying to stay ahead of the curve to make sure that these elections are run well,\" DeSantis added. \u201cBut in Florida, you can have confidence that your vote counts.\u201dLike similar bills Republicans are pushing in dozens of state legislatures across the country, the Florida measure adds hurdles to voting by mail, restricts the use of drop boxes and prohibits any actions that could influence those standing in line to vote, which voting rights advocates said is likely to discourage nonpartisan groups from offering food or water to voters as they wait in the hot Florida sun.The passage of the bill was preceded by an hour of emotional debate, as Black lawmakers stood up to decry a measure they said was aimed squarely at curbing the clout of voters of color.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump calls in to support Texas congressional candidateReturn to menuBy David Weigel9:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkFormer president Donald Trump on Thursday night made his first appearance on behalf of a candidate since Georgia\u2019s Senate runoffs, calling in to a virtual event on behalf of Susan Wright, a candidate in the race for Texas\u2019s 6th Congressional District.\u201cAll of the things I said in the campaign are true,\u201d Trump said on a call organized with the Club for Growth, which has endorsed Wright. He criticized President Biden\u2019s record since taking office, and his speech before Wednesday\u2019s joint session of Congress (\u201cnot a good performance\u201d), telling voters on the call that Wright would oppose Biden\u2019s agenda.\u201cYou will be very happy with this vote,\u201d Trump added. He praised the late Rep. Ron Wright, the candidate\u2019s husband, whose death prompted the May 1 special election. \u201cHe is looking down and he is so proud of Susan.\u201dThe call was brief, with Club for Growth President David McIntosh introducing Wright, the candidate introducing Trump, and the ex-president speaking for fewer than seven minutes. He endorsed Wright well into the early voting period, after the candidate had been outspent by several rivals.The Club, which backed Wright and her husband, was on the air on her behalf before Trump\u2019s endorsement, and cut a radio ad this week to spread it. Trump thanked McIntosh and the Club for his 2020 victory in Texas, the closest GOP win in decades..AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFBI warned Giuliani, key Trump ally in Senate of Russian disinformation campaign targeting BidenReturn to menuBy Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris and Tom Hamburger9:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe FBI warned Rudolph W. Giuliani in late 2019 that he was the target of a Russian influence operation aimed at circulating falsehoods intended to damage Joe Biden politically ahead of last year\u2019s presidential election, according to people familiar with the matter.The warning was part of an extensive effort by the bureau to alert members of Congress and at least one conservative media outlet, One America News, that they faced a risk of being used to further Russia\u2019s attempt to influence the election\u2019s outcome, said several current and former U.S. officials. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains highly sensitive.Giuliani received the FBI\u2019s warning while deeply involved with President Donald Trump\u2019s 2020 reelection campaign and related activities in Ukraine to surface unflattering or incriminating information about the Biden family. The revelation comes as the FBI this week seized Giuliani\u2019s cellphone and other electronic devices as part of a long-running criminal investigation into whether the onetime New York mayor and personal attorney for Trump acted as an unregistered foreign agent.The warning, made by counterintelligence agents, was separate from the Justice Department\u2019s ongoing criminal probe, but it reflects a broader concern by U.S. intelligence and federal investigators that Giuliani \u2014 among other influential Americans and U.S. institutions \u2014 was being manipulated by the Russian government to promote its interests and that he appears to have brazenly disregarded such fears.The FBI last summer also gave what is known as a defensive briefing to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who ahead of the election used his perch as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to investigate Biden\u2019s dealings with Ukraine while he was vice president and his son Hunter Biden held a lucrative seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSouth Korean President Moon to visit White House May 21Return to menuBy Amy Wang8:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkSouth Korean President Moon Jae-in will visit the White House on May 21 to meet with President Biden, the White House announced Thursday.\u201cPresident Moon\u2019s visit will highlight the ironclad alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea, and the broad and deep ties between our governments, people, and economies,\u201d White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.\u201cPresident Biden looks forward to working with President Moon to further strengthen our alliance and expand our close cooperation,\u201d she added.Moon\u2019s visit will mark the second in-person visit by another world leader to the White House since Biden took office. This month, Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga as the first foreign leader at the White House. Because of precautions around the coronavirus pandemic, Biden\u2019s meetings and summits with other world leaders have so far been virtual ones.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBiden, GOP Sen. Capito spoke about \u2018willingness to negotiate\u2019 on infrastructure bill, White House saysReturn to menuBy Amy Wang8:13 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Biden and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who is leading Republican efforts to counter Biden\u2019s infrastructure bill, spoke on the phone Thursday afternoon, the White House said.According to a White House readout off the call, Biden and Capito had \u201ca warm, friendly conversation and continued their dialogue about infrastructure and jobs, reiterating their willingness to negotiate. They also discussed having another potential in-person meeting in the near future.\u201dCapito later described it as a \u201cconstructive and substantive\u201d phone call.\u201cWe both expressed our mutual desire to work together and find common ground to address these challenges and deliver results for the American people,\u201d Capito said in a statement. \u201cI stand ready to be a partner in advancing infrastructure legislation in a bipartisan way \u2014 just as we\u2019ve done in the past.\u201dBiden has put forth a $2 trillion infrastructure and climate plan, dubbing it the \u201cAmerican Jobs Plan,\u201d and has urged Congress to pass it \u2014 including in his first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night and at a rally in Duluth, Ga., on Thursday. He has indicated he is willing to compromise but has so far not worked out a deal with Republicans.Republicans have balked at the size and scope of Biden\u2019s plan, arguing that several of the items included within it should not be considered infrastructure. Last week, a group of GOP lawmakers, led by Capito, countered Biden with a $568 billion infrastructure plan of their own.Speaking to reporters Thursday night, Biden said Capito could come to the White House next week or later.Read more about the proposed infrastructure plans here.Tyler Pager contributed to this report.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSen. Tim Scott\u2019s comments on race ignite a fiery debateReturn to menuBy Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Mike DeBonis8:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkRepublicans rallied Thursday behind comments on race made by Sen. Tim Scott as part of his response to President Biden\u2019s address to Congress, embracing what they hoped was an effective message in the ongoing debate over the role of racism in America that has sometimes left them struggling to articulate a clear position.Scott, delivering the official GOP response Wednesday, suggested that liberals are using race as a political weapon, defining all White people as oppressors and seeking to use the language of civil rights to rig elections.\u201cHear me clearly: America is not a racist country,\u201d Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, said in the televised GOP rebuttal to Biden\u2019s speech. \u201cIt\u2019s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it\u2019s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.\u201dRepublicans, who have sometimes found themselves on the defensive in recent months when it comes to race, praised the South Carolina senator for addressing the notion that Democrats and Black activists are too quick to shout down those who disagree with them by calling them racists.Democrats generally treated Scott\u2019s words with caution, but many Black activists, who publicly criticized Scott into the wee hours Thursday morning, deemed him the latest in a line of Black apologists who give political and racial cover to White grievance.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBiden channels optimism at Georgia rally: \u2018We\u2019re working again. We\u2019re dreaming again.\u2019Return to menuBy Amy Wang7:13 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt a rally in Duluth, Ga., on Thursday, President Biden touted the accomplishments of his first 100 days in office and sought to cast an optimistic vision of a country \u201cback on track,\u201d echoing several of the themes from his first address to a joint session of Congress the night before.\u201cWe\u2019re working again. We\u2019re dreaming again. We\u2019re discovering again. And we\u2019re leading the world again,\u201d Biden told the crowd at a car rally Thursday, against large letters that spelled: \u201cGETTING BACK ON TRACK.\u201dBiden boasted of hitting the vaccination goals he had set when he took office, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, but encouraged those who had not yet received the shot to do so as soon as possible. He also touted the passage of the American Rescue Plan, his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that resulted in many families receiving stimulus checks.Biden gave Georgia voters credit for making such accomplishments possible, by mobilizing in record numbers to elect not only Biden in November but also Democratic Sens. Raphael G. Warnock and Jon Ossoff in two hotly contested runoffs in January. Were it not for Warnock and Ossoff\u2019s victories, which gave Democrats control of the Senate, the American Rescue Plan might not have passed, Biden said.\u201cThose two votes made the difference. It passed by a single vote. And that means we owe a special thanks to the people of Georgia,\u201d Biden said. \u201cBecause of you \u2026 the rest of America was able to get the help they got. So if you ever wonder if elections make a difference, just remember what you did here in Georgia when you elected us.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBiden responds to private-prison protesters: \u2018They should not exist\u2019Return to menuBy Amy Wang6:43 p.m.Link copiedLinkProtesters interrupted President Biden\u2019s rally on April 29 in Duluth, Ga., with shouts of \u201cEnd detention now!\" (The Washington Post)Protesters interrupted Biden\u2019s rally Thursday in Duluth, Ga., with shouts of \u201cEnd detention now!\u201d and \u201cAbolish ICE!\u201dBiden, who was in Georgia to tout his accomplishments from his first 100 days in office, paused a few times, then called out toward the protesters: \u201cI\u2019m working on it, man! Give me another five days.\u201dThe president then turned back to the crowd and said, \u201cFolks, y\u2019all know what they\u2019re talking about. There should be no private prisons, period. None, period. That\u2019s what we\u2019re talking about in private detention centers. They should not exist.\u201dBiden speech interrupted by protesters shouting \u201cend detention now\u201d and \u201cabolish ice\u201d. They were escorted out by staff pic.twitter.com/KB70pqjlho\u2014 Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) April 29, 2021\n\nStaff escorted the protesters out of the rally, according to Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller.As a candidate, Biden promised to end the federal government\u2019s use of private prisons. Shortly after taking office, Biden signed an executive order that would phase out the Justice Department\u2019s use of private prisons, but it has been criticized for falling short of what he promised on the campaign trail.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSenate confirms Gayle Manchin to Appalachian boardReturn to menuBy Colby Itkowitz5:29 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Senate unanimously approved Gayle Manchin to serve as co-chairwoman on the Appalachian Regional Commission.Manchin, whose husband is Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), was nominated by Biden last month.The Appalachian Regional Commission works on behalf of the 13 Appalachian states, which includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states, to secure funding and other resources for the region.\u201cI am pleased the Senate has confirmed my wife, Gayle Manchin, to lead the Appalachian Regional Commission. ARC is a vital partner to all those working and living in Appalachia, and I know that Gayle will bring the experience and skills necessary to successfully lead the commission as it serves the region,\u201d Joe Manchin said in a statement.\u201cI know that she will make the states of the Appalachian region, including our home state of West Virginia, and our entire nation extremely proud.\u201dSenate confirms Bill Nelson as NASA administratorReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkFormer Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) was confirmed by unanimous consent by the Senate Thursday as the next NASA administrator.Nelson assumes the role as the space agency is pushing to get astronauts back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program, and is restoring regular human spaceflight missions from United States soil.As a longtime member of Congress, Nelson was a key supporter of space exploration and even flew on the space shuttle in 1986. His confirmation came swiftly \u2014 less than a week after his hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.In it, he said the Biden administration had embraced NASA\u2019s ambitious moon program, born under the Trump administration, saying it had to transcend politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201dHe received praise from both Republicans and Democrats. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), said his \u201creputation as a tireless advocate for the space program is well deserved. And at this moment, NASA needs a great advocate that we all can be confident in.\u201dThe administration\u2019s budget request for NASA, $24.7 billion, is an increase of more than 6 percent over what the agency received this year. Biden has nominated former NASA astronaut Pamela Melroy to be deputy administrator.U.S. prosecutors release video of rioters spraying Officer Brian Sicknick in Jan. 6 Capitol attackReturn to menuBy Spencer Hsu, Aaron Davis, Dalton Bennett, Joyce Lee and Sarah Cahlan5:07 p.m.Link copiedLinkVideo footage released Wednesday of the January attack on the Capitol shows the moments when rioters appeared to spray an unknown substance at Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, forcing him to retreat behind police lines.Sicknick, 42, was among the vastly outnumbered officers attempting to hold back a violent crowd on the west side of the Capitol at around 2:30 p.m. Jan. 6. He died the next day of natural causes, officials said, and has been hailed as a hero.The video has been played in federal court at hearings for men charged with assaulting Sicknick by spraying a chemical irritant. Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania, and George Pierre Tanios, 39, of W.Va. are charged with assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon, conspiracy to impede or injure an officer and other related counts. Neither man is charged in Sicknick\u2019s death, which the D.C. medical examiner\u2019s office concluded was the result of strokes.Read the full storyArrowRight'We\u2019re looking to the future, not the past,\u2019 McConnell says in response to Trump calling for his ouster as Senate GOP leaderReturn to menuBy Eugene Scott4:23 p.m.Link copiedLinkSenate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) responded to former president Donald Trump\u2019s criticism of him Thursday by saying his attention is focused on the next generation of GOP leaders \u2014 not the past.\u201cWe\u2019re looking to the future, not the past. And if you want to see the future of the Republican Party, watch Tim Scott\u2019s response to President Biden last night,\u201d McConnell said, referring to the junior Republican senator from South Carolina. \u201cHe\u2019s the future. That\u2019s where we\u2019re headed. We\u2019re not preoccupied with the past but looking forward.\u201dFrustrated with the GOP\u2019s inability to effectively stonewall Biden\u2019s agenda, Trump criticized McConnell earlier Thursday saying that Republicans should oust the Capitol Hill veteran as the Republican leader.\u201cMitch McConnell has not done a great job,\u201d Trump said on Fox Business. \u201cI think they should change Mitch McConnell.\u201dTrump has repeatedly criticized McConnell since December when the Republican senator acknowledged Biden\u2019s win; the two men have not spoken since. After a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop certification of the election results, McConnell\u2019s wife, Elaine Chao, resigned as Trump\u2019s transportation secretary, citing the violence.McConnell voted to acquit Trump on the single impeachment charge of incitement of insurrection on Feb. 13, but then delivered a speech condemning the former president, saying he was \u201cpractically and morally responsible\u201d for provoking the riot.Although McConnell has faced Trump\u2019s wrath, he did say in February that he would support Trump if he were the GOP presidential nominee in 2024.Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, delivered the GOP\u2019s response to Biden\u2019s address to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, and he has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. In his rebuttal, Scott largely credited the former president \u2014 who remains popular among Republican voters \u2014 for the progress being made in response to the coronavirus pandemic and accused the Biden White House of being partisan and extreme.Senate passes clean-water bill, with only Cruz and Lee voting against itReturn to menuBy Colby Itkowitz4:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Senate overwhelmingly passed in an 89-to-2 vote a bill to repair and improve the nation\u2019s water systems, with only GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Mike Lee (Utah) voting against it.The clean-water bill authorizes $35 billion to update drinking water and wastewater systems, including replacing lead pipes. The Senate also approved an amendment from Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) to require schools and buildings to replace their lead pipes.The rare bipartisan feat was heralded by Democrats and Republicans.\u201cWE DID IT! The Senate just passed the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act of 2021. See? We CAN do infrastructure together. Let\u2019s continue with this momentum and finish our work on core infrastructure next!\u201d tweeted the account for Republicans on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.The bipartisan work even caught the attention of activist Erin Brockovich, whose legal battle for clean water became an Oscar-winning movie. She tweeted: \u201cGOOD NEWS ALERT \u2014 Senate Passes Clean Water Bill in true bipartisan fashion!! Good job red and blue with only our old friend @tedcruz and one other voting against. Government can work!! We want more!!Harris makes case for broadband as \u2018critical infrastructure\u2019Return to menuBy Colby Itkowitz3:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkHarris took the administration\u2019s pitch for an ambitious, multitrillion-dollar jobs plan on the road and sought to rebuff Republican claims that the proposal\u2019s scope is too wide.Speaking in Baltimore, the vice president made her strongest case around building more broadband Internet access, calling it \u201ccritical infrastructure.\u201dHarris compared the need to get broadband access to rural communities to Congress in 1936 ensuring everyone had access to electricity because they saw there were \u201cfolks that are being left out and that\u2019s not going to be right because they will be left behind,\u201d Harris said.The need for reliable Internet access began more stark during the pandemic when people worked from home, children learned remotely and family gathered by video.\u201cLet\u2019s be clear,\u201d Harris said, \u201cwhen we connect Americans to affordable and accessible broadband, we are connecting our children to education, we are connecting our seniors to telemedicine, we are connecting families to each other, and we connect Americans to economic opportunity.\u201dUnder Biden\u2019s plan, the goal would be for every American to have access to broadband Internet access by the end of the decade. Senate Republicans have offered a more limited infrastructure plan that includes $65 billion for broadband Internet access. Biden plans to visit former president Jimmy Carter in Plains, Ga., before holding a rally in Duluth, Ga., to tout the early successes of his White House tenure. Biden pitches his far-reaching spending plans as he marks 100th day in office ",
        "author": "John Wagner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Biden pitches his far-reaching spending plans as he marks 100th day in office  (WP: White House) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7714",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/29/joe-biden-live-updates/",
        "text": "On his 100th day in office, President Biden pitched his far-reaching investment and tax plans at a post-speech, drive-in car rally in Georgia, where he credited the state\u2019s voters for electing two Democrats to the Senate and helping him win the White House. Earlier, Biden met with former president Jimmy Carter in Plains, Ga. His trip Thursday is part of a blitz of travel by senior administration officials, including Vice President Harris, to continue the sales pitch for an ambitious agenda laid out by Biden on Wednesday in his first address to a joint session of Congress. Harris visited a vaccination site in Baltimore on Thursday.Here\u2019s what to know:The U.S. economic recovery picked up speed in early 2021, with the economy growing 1.6 percent in the first three months of the year amid a coronavirus vaccination campaign and massive stimulus spending from the federal government.Biden said that he was not given advance notice of a search warrant executed at the Manhattan home and law offices of Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former attorney for former president Donald Trump.Congressional Democrats are planning to pursue a massive expansion of Medicare as part of Biden\u2019s new $1.8 trillion economic relief package, defying the White House after it opted against including a major health overhaul as part of its plan.Florida legislature approves measure that curbs mail voting and use of drop boxes; DeSantis vows to sign the billReturn to menuBy Amy Gardner and Amy Wang11:06 p.m.Link copiedLinkFlorida\u2019s legislature on Thursday night became the latest to approve far-reaching legislation imposing new rules on voting and new penalties for those who do not follow them, passing a measure critics said would make it harder for millions of voters to cast ballots in the Sunshine State.Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who named voting security one of his top legislative priorities this year, said Thursday night he would \u201cof course\u201d sign the bill in the coming weeks.\u201cIn Florida, we have voter ID, we\u2019ve had voter ID,\u201d DeSantis said on Fox News\u2019s \u201cThe Laura Ingraham Show\u201d on Thursday. \u201cIt works. It\u2019s the right thing to do.\u201dDeSantis also vowed to sue if Congress passed H.R. 1, a comprehensive voting rights bill that would establish national standards, because he believed it would be unconstitutional. He boasted that in Florida, election officials counted 11 million votes by midnight on Election Night.\u201cSo we think we led the nation, but we\u2019re trying to stay ahead of the curve to make sure that these elections are run well,\" DeSantis added. \u201cBut in Florida, you can have confidence that your vote counts.\u201dLike similar bills Republicans are pushing in dozens of state legislatures across the country, the Florida measure adds hurdles to voting by mail, restricts the use of drop boxes and prohibits any actions that could influence those standing in line to vote, which voting rights advocates said is likely to discourage nonpartisan groups from offering food or water to voters as they wait in the hot Florida sun.The passage of the bill was preceded by an hour of emotional debate, as Black lawmakers stood up to decry a measure they said was aimed squarely at curbing the clout of voters of color.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementTrump calls in to support Texas congressional candidateReturn to menuBy David Weigel9:28 p.m.Link copiedLinkFormer president Donald Trump on Thursday night made his first appearance on behalf of a candidate since Georgia\u2019s Senate runoffs, calling in to a virtual event on behalf of Susan Wright, a candidate in the race for Texas\u2019s 6th Congressional District.\u201cAll of the things I said in the campaign are true,\u201d Trump said on a call organized with the Club for Growth, which has endorsed Wright. He criticized President Biden\u2019s record since taking office, and his speech before Wednesday\u2019s joint session of Congress (\u201cnot a good performance\u201d), telling voters on the call that Wright would oppose Biden\u2019s agenda.\u201cYou will be very happy with this vote,\u201d Trump added. He praised the late Rep. Ron Wright, the candidate\u2019s husband, whose death prompted the May 1 special election. \u201cHe is looking down and he is so proud of Susan.\u201dThe call was brief, with Club for Growth President David McIntosh introducing Wright, the candidate introducing Trump, and the ex-president speaking for fewer than seven minutes. He endorsed Wright well into the early voting period, after the candidate had been outspent by several rivals.The Club, which backed Wright and her husband, was on the air on her behalf before Trump\u2019s endorsement, and cut a radio ad this week to spread it. Trump thanked McIntosh and the Club for his 2020 victory in Texas, the closest GOP win in decades..AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementFBI warned Giuliani, key Trump ally in Senate of Russian disinformation campaign targeting BidenReturn to menuBy Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris and Tom Hamburger9:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe FBI warned Rudolph W. Giuliani in late 2019 that he was the target of a Russian influence operation aimed at circulating falsehoods intended to damage Joe Biden politically ahead of last year\u2019s presidential election, according to people familiar with the matter.The warning was part of an extensive effort by the bureau to alert members of Congress and at least one conservative media outlet, One America News, that they faced a risk of being used to further Russia\u2019s attempt to influence the election\u2019s outcome, said several current and former U.S. officials. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains highly sensitive.Giuliani received the FBI\u2019s warning while deeply involved with President Donald Trump\u2019s 2020 reelection campaign and related activities in Ukraine to surface unflattering or incriminating information about the Biden family. The revelation comes as the FBI this week seized Giuliani\u2019s cellphone and other electronic devices as part of a long-running criminal investigation into whether the onetime New York mayor and personal attorney for Trump acted as an unregistered foreign agent.The warning, made by counterintelligence agents, was separate from the Justice Department\u2019s ongoing criminal probe, but it reflects a broader concern by U.S. intelligence and federal investigators that Giuliani \u2014 among other influential Americans and U.S. institutions \u2014 was being manipulated by the Russian government to promote its interests and that he appears to have brazenly disregarded such fears.The FBI last summer also gave what is known as a defensive briefing to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who ahead of the election used his perch as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to investigate Biden\u2019s dealings with Ukraine while he was vice president and his son Hunter Biden held a lucrative seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSouth Korean President Moon to visit White House May 21Return to menuBy Amy Wang8:55 p.m.Link copiedLinkSouth Korean President Moon Jae-in will visit the White House on May 21 to meet with President Biden, the White House announced Thursday.\u201cPresident Moon\u2019s visit will highlight the ironclad alliance between the United States and the Republic of Korea, and the broad and deep ties between our governments, people, and economies,\u201d White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.\u201cPresident Biden looks forward to working with President Moon to further strengthen our alliance and expand our close cooperation,\u201d she added.Moon\u2019s visit will mark the second in-person visit by another world leader to the White House since Biden took office. This month, Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga as the first foreign leader at the White House. Because of precautions around the coronavirus pandemic, Biden\u2019s meetings and summits with other world leaders have so far been virtual ones.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBiden, GOP Sen. Capito spoke about \u2018willingness to negotiate\u2019 on infrastructure bill, White House saysReturn to menuBy Amy Wang8:13 p.m.Link copiedLinkPresident Biden and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who is leading Republican efforts to counter Biden\u2019s infrastructure bill, spoke on the phone Thursday afternoon, the White House said.According to a White House readout off the call, Biden and Capito had \u201ca warm, friendly conversation and continued their dialogue about infrastructure and jobs, reiterating their willingness to negotiate. They also discussed having another potential in-person meeting in the near future.\u201dCapito later described it as a \u201cconstructive and substantive\u201d phone call.\u201cWe both expressed our mutual desire to work together and find common ground to address these challenges and deliver results for the American people,\u201d Capito said in a statement. \u201cI stand ready to be a partner in advancing infrastructure legislation in a bipartisan way \u2014 just as we\u2019ve done in the past.\u201dBiden has put forth a $2 trillion infrastructure and climate plan, dubbing it the \u201cAmerican Jobs Plan,\u201d and has urged Congress to pass it \u2014 including in his first address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night and at a rally in Duluth, Ga., on Thursday. He has indicated he is willing to compromise but has so far not worked out a deal with Republicans.Republicans have balked at the size and scope of Biden\u2019s plan, arguing that several of the items included within it should not be considered infrastructure. Last week, a group of GOP lawmakers, led by Capito, countered Biden with a $568 billion infrastructure plan of their own.Speaking to reporters Thursday night, Biden said Capito could come to the White House next week or later.Read more about the proposed infrastructure plans here.Tyler Pager contributed to this report.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSen. Tim Scott\u2019s comments on race ignite a fiery debateReturn to menuBy Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Mike DeBonis8:04 p.m.Link copiedLinkRepublicans rallied Thursday behind comments on race made by Sen. Tim Scott as part of his response to President Biden\u2019s address to Congress, embracing what they hoped was an effective message in the ongoing debate over the role of racism in America that has sometimes left them struggling to articulate a clear position.Scott, delivering the official GOP response Wednesday, suggested that liberals are using race as a political weapon, defining all White people as oppressors and seeking to use the language of civil rights to rig elections.\u201cHear me clearly: America is not a racist country,\u201d Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, said in the televised GOP rebuttal to Biden\u2019s speech. \u201cIt\u2019s backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it\u2019s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.\u201dRepublicans, who have sometimes found themselves on the defensive in recent months when it comes to race, praised the South Carolina senator for addressing the notion that Democrats and Black activists are too quick to shout down those who disagree with them by calling them racists.Democrats generally treated Scott\u2019s words with caution, but many Black activists, who publicly criticized Scott into the wee hours Thursday morning, deemed him the latest in a line of Black apologists who give political and racial cover to White grievance.Read the full storyArrowRightAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBiden channels optimism at Georgia rally: \u2018We\u2019re working again. We\u2019re dreaming again.\u2019Return to menuBy Amy Wang7:13 p.m.Link copiedLinkAt a rally in Duluth, Ga., on Thursday, President Biden touted the accomplishments of his first 100 days in office and sought to cast an optimistic vision of a country \u201cback on track,\u201d echoing several of the themes from his first address to a joint session of Congress the night before.\u201cWe\u2019re working again. We\u2019re dreaming again. We\u2019re discovering again. And we\u2019re leading the world again,\u201d Biden told the crowd at a car rally Thursday, against large letters that spelled: \u201cGETTING BACK ON TRACK.\u201dBiden boasted of hitting the vaccination goals he had set when he took office, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, but encouraged those who had not yet received the shot to do so as soon as possible. He also touted the passage of the American Rescue Plan, his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that resulted in many families receiving stimulus checks.Biden gave Georgia voters credit for making such accomplishments possible, by mobilizing in record numbers to elect not only Biden in November but also Democratic Sens. Raphael G. Warnock and Jon Ossoff in two hotly contested runoffs in January. Were it not for Warnock and Ossoff\u2019s victories, which gave Democrats control of the Senate, the American Rescue Plan might not have passed, Biden said.\u201cThose two votes made the difference. It passed by a single vote. And that means we owe a special thanks to the people of Georgia,\u201d Biden said. \u201cBecause of you \u2026 the rest of America was able to get the help they got. So if you ever wonder if elections make a difference, just remember what you did here in Georgia when you elected us.\u201dAdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementBiden responds to private-prison protesters: \u2018They should not exist\u2019Return to menuBy Amy Wang6:43 p.m.Link copiedLinkProtesters interrupted President Biden\u2019s rally on April 29 in Duluth, Ga., with shouts of \u201cEnd detention now!\" (The Washington Post)Protesters interrupted Biden\u2019s rally Thursday in Duluth, Ga., with shouts of \u201cEnd detention now!\u201d and \u201cAbolish ICE!\u201dBiden, who was in Georgia to tout his accomplishments from his first 100 days in office, paused a few times, then called out toward the protesters: \u201cI\u2019m working on it, man! Give me another five days.\u201dThe president then turned back to the crowd and said, \u201cFolks, y\u2019all know what they\u2019re talking about. There should be no private prisons, period. None, period. That\u2019s what we\u2019re talking about in private detention centers. They should not exist.\u201dBiden speech interrupted by protesters shouting \u201cend detention now\u201d and \u201cabolish ice\u201d. They were escorted out by staff pic.twitter.com/KB70pqjlho\u2014 Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) April 29, 2021\n\nStaff escorted the protesters out of the rally, according to Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller.As a candidate, Biden promised to end the federal government\u2019s use of private prisons. Shortly after taking office, Biden signed an executive order that would phase out the Justice Department\u2019s use of private prisons, but it has been criticized for falling short of what he promised on the campaign trail.AdvertisementUpdates continue below advertisementSenate confirms Gayle Manchin to Appalachian boardReturn to menuBy Colby Itkowitz5:29 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Senate unanimously approved Gayle Manchin to serve as co-chairwoman on the Appalachian Regional Commission.Manchin, whose husband is Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), was nominated by Biden last month.The Appalachian Regional Commission works on behalf of the 13 Appalachian states, which includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states, to secure funding and other resources for the region.\u201cI am pleased the Senate has confirmed my wife, Gayle Manchin, to lead the Appalachian Regional Commission. ARC is a vital partner to all those working and living in Appalachia, and I know that Gayle will bring the experience and skills necessary to successfully lead the commission as it serves the region,\u201d Joe Manchin said in a statement.\u201cI know that she will make the states of the Appalachian region, including our home state of West Virginia, and our entire nation extremely proud.\u201dSenate confirms Bill Nelson as NASA administratorReturn to menuBy Christian Davenport5:26 p.m.Link copiedLinkFormer Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) was confirmed by unanimous consent by the Senate Thursday as the next NASA administrator.Nelson assumes the role as the space agency is pushing to get astronauts back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo program, and is restoring regular human spaceflight missions from United States soil.As a longtime member of Congress, Nelson was a key supporter of space exploration and even flew on the space shuttle in 1986. His confirmation came swiftly \u2014 less than a week after his hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.In it, he said the Biden administration had embraced NASA\u2019s ambitious moon program, born under the Trump administration, saying it had to transcend politics and that it \u201chas to be continued, regardless of who\u2019s in the majority, of who\u2019s in the presidency.\u201dHe received praise from both Republicans and Democrats. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), said his \u201creputation as a tireless advocate for the space program is well deserved. And at this moment, NASA needs a great advocate that we all can be confident in.\u201dThe administration\u2019s budget request for NASA, $24.7 billion, is an increase of more than 6 percent over what the agency received this year. Biden has nominated former NASA astronaut Pamela Melroy to be deputy administrator.U.S. prosecutors release video of rioters spraying Officer Brian Sicknick in Jan. 6 Capitol attackReturn to menuBy Spencer Hsu, Aaron Davis, Dalton Bennett, Joyce Lee and Sarah Cahlan5:07 p.m.Link copiedLinkVideo footage released Wednesday of the January attack on the Capitol shows the moments when rioters appeared to spray an unknown substance at Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick, forcing him to retreat behind police lines.Sicknick, 42, was among the vastly outnumbered officers attempting to hold back a violent crowd on the west side of the Capitol at around 2:30 p.m. Jan. 6. He died the next day of natural causes, officials said, and has been hailed as a hero.The video has been played in federal court at hearings for men charged with assaulting Sicknick by spraying a chemical irritant. Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania, and George Pierre Tanios, 39, of W.Va. are charged with assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon, conspiracy to impede or injure an officer and other related counts. Neither man is charged in Sicknick\u2019s death, which the D.C. medical examiner\u2019s office concluded was the result of strokes.Read the full storyArrowRight'We\u2019re looking to the future, not the past,\u2019 McConnell says in response to Trump calling for his ouster as Senate GOP leaderReturn to menuBy Eugene Scott4:23 p.m.Link copiedLinkSenate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) responded to former president Donald Trump\u2019s criticism of him Thursday by saying his attention is focused on the next generation of GOP leaders \u2014 not the past.\u201cWe\u2019re looking to the future, not the past. And if you want to see the future of the Republican Party, watch Tim Scott\u2019s response to President Biden last night,\u201d McConnell said, referring to the junior Republican senator from South Carolina. \u201cHe\u2019s the future. That\u2019s where we\u2019re headed. We\u2019re not preoccupied with the past but looking forward.\u201dFrustrated with the GOP\u2019s inability to effectively stonewall Biden\u2019s agenda, Trump criticized McConnell earlier Thursday saying that Republicans should oust the Capitol Hill veteran as the Republican leader.\u201cMitch McConnell has not done a great job,\u201d Trump said on Fox Business. \u201cI think they should change Mitch McConnell.\u201dTrump has repeatedly criticized McConnell since December when the Republican senator acknowledged Biden\u2019s win; the two men have not spoken since. After a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop certification of the election results, McConnell\u2019s wife, Elaine Chao, resigned as Trump\u2019s transportation secretary, citing the violence.McConnell voted to acquit Trump on the single impeachment charge of incitement of insurrection on Feb. 13, but then delivered a speech condemning the former president, saying he was \u201cpractically and morally responsible\u201d for provoking the riot.Although McConnell has faced Trump\u2019s wrath, he did say in February that he would support Trump if he were the GOP presidential nominee in 2024.Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, delivered the GOP\u2019s response to Biden\u2019s address to the joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, and he has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. In his rebuttal, Scott largely credited the former president \u2014 who remains popular among Republican voters \u2014 for the progress being made in response to the coronavirus pandemic and accused the Biden White House of being partisan and extreme.Senate passes clean-water bill, with only Cruz and Lee voting against itReturn to menuBy Colby Itkowitz4:17 p.m.Link copiedLinkThe Senate overwhelmingly passed in an 89-to-2 vote a bill to repair and improve the nation\u2019s water systems, with only GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Mike Lee (Utah) voting against it.The clean-water bill authorizes $35 billion to update drinking water and wastewater systems, including replacing lead pipes. The Senate also approved an amendment from Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) to require schools and buildings to replace their lead pipes.The rare bipartisan feat was heralded by Democrats and Republicans.\u201cWE DID IT! The Senate just passed the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act of 2021. See? We CAN do infrastructure together. Let\u2019s continue with this momentum and finish our work on core infrastructure next!\u201d tweeted the account for Republicans on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.The bipartisan work even caught the attention of activist Erin Brockovich, whose legal battle for clean water became an Oscar-winning movie. She tweeted: \u201cGOOD NEWS ALERT \u2014 Senate Passes Clean Water Bill in true bipartisan fashion!! Good job red and blue with only our old friend @tedcruz and one other voting against. Government can work!! We want more!!Harris makes case for broadband as \u2018critical infrastructure\u2019Return to menuBy Colby Itkowitz3:57 p.m.Link copiedLinkHarris took the administration\u2019s pitch for an ambitious, multitrillion-dollar jobs plan on the road and sought to rebuff Republican claims that the proposal\u2019s scope is too wide.Speaking in Baltimore, the vice president made her strongest case around building more broadband Internet access, calling it \u201ccritical infrastructure.\u201dHarris compared the need to get broadband access to rural communities to Congress in 1936 ensuring everyone had access to electricity because they saw there were \u201cfolks that are being left out and that\u2019s not going to be right because they will be left behind,\u201d Harris said.The need for reliable Internet access began more stark during the pandemic when people worked from home, children learned remotely and family gathered by video.\u201cLet\u2019s be clear,\u201d Harris said, \u201cwhen we connect Americans to affordable and accessible broadband, we are connecting our children to education, we are connecting our seniors to telemedicine, we are connecting families to each other, and we connect Americans to economic opportunity.\u201dUnder Biden\u2019s plan, the goal would be for every American to have access to broadband Internet access by the end of the decade. Senate Republicans have offered a more limited infrastructure plan that includes $65 billion for broadband Internet access. Biden plans to visit former president Jimmy Carter in Plains, Ga., before holding a rally in Duluth, Ga., to tout the early successes of his White House tenure. Biden pitches his far-reaching spending plans as he marks 100th day in office ",
        "author": "John Wagner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Swimming on Atomic and Cosmic Levels (WSJ: Wilczek's Universe) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7715",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/swimming-on-atomic-and-cosmic-levels-1533825120?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=18",
        "text": "Viewed at a microscopic scale, water no longer seems smooth and placid. Its true nature, as a collection of jiggling atoms, gets revealed. Dust from pollen grains, for example, gets buffeted in random directions, driven to \u201cswim\u201d aimlessly and inefficiently. The botanist Thomas Brown first noted such agitated micro-motion in 1827.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Albert Einstein,\n\n\n\n in the \u201cmiracle year\u201d of 1905 when he published on relativity, E=mc\u00b2 and photons, interpreted Brown\u2019s observations on the basis of atomic theory. By connecting the so-called Brownian motion to other observations about diffusion and viscosity, he was able to make a convincing case for the existence of atoms and to derive a good estimate of atomic sizes. \nOrganisms slightly larger than dust, like bacteria, can resist the molecular weather, but its influence remains. To appreciate the problem, imagine trying to walk through rapidly shifting gusty winds, or to swim through ever-shifting currents. To a bacterium, water feels extremely viscous. \nThe rules that govern bacterial swimming are peculiar. Progress requires continuous effort. Inertia is quickly dissipated. Then we have the dynamics proposed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aristotle,\n\n\n\n dominated by friction, where no force means no progress and velocity is proportional to force. To-and-fro strokes, whatever their timing, don\u2019t work either. If scallops were bacteria-sized, their usual strategy, to progress by closing their shells fast and opening them slowly, would get them nowhere. Real bacteria, to move forward, often resort to using screwlike flagella which they turn in only one direction. \n\n\nOther swimming situations feature far less resistance\u2014or none at all. That\u2019s not an unmixed blessing. It makes swimming challenging in different ways. \nEven with nothing to push against, there is one important thing you can still do. By contorting your body, you can change your orientation. Divers \u201cswim\u201d through air and must arrange to hit the water just so. They generally do their reorientations in a practiced way, aiming for a chosen angle. But if divers slip off their diving board unexpectedly, like cats falling from a tree, they have to improvise.\nIn contrast to reorienting yourself, lacking something to push against you can\u2019t change your forward motion, or momentum. (Though if you happen to have a jetpack, you can eject mass and recoil.) This brings to mind the peculiar horror of astronauts losing connection with their spacecraft, and then drifting forever helplessly through outer space, doomed by the laws of physics. In an iconic scene from \u201c2001,\u201d the highly advanced computer HAL ejects astronaut Frank Poole into space. That seals Frank\u2019s fate. It also seals HAL\u2019s, as the surviving astronaut, Dave, resolves then and there to lobotomize him. \n\n\nMore in Wilczek\u2019s Universe\n\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re All Still Living in Euclid\u2019s World\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\nThe Models That Made Modern Science\nDecember 30, 2021 \n\n\nThe Cosmic Origins of Silver and Gold\nNovember 24, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nElectrons swim, too\u2014through materials\u2014and a lot of technology revolves around helping them do so efficiently. Even when electrons are not bound in atoms, and are therefore nominally free to move, they have to weave their way through a lattice of nuclei and get buffeted both by vibrations (phonons) and by each other. That\u2019s what underlies electrical resistance in metals. \nBut in superconductivity\u2014a state of matter that, at least for now, requires very low temperatures\u2014electrons learn to cooperate. Resistance vanishes, and currents will flow without generating heat, in principle forever. It\u2019s as if the ocean were chock-a-block with fish, all moving together. To swim, you\u2019d simply go with the flow. \nAthletes speak of being \u201cin the zone,\u201d when you do wonderful things automatically, without conscious effort. Superconductivity is electrons swimming in the zone. And sometimes while swimming, when my thoughts take me out of body, I get there too. Reflections on how bacteria, cats, divers and an unlucky astronaut in \u20182001\u2019 move through air, water and outer space. ",
        "author": "Frank Wilczek"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gyroscopes, Pulsars and the Power of Spin (WSJ: Wilczek's Universe) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7716",
        "date": "2018-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/gyroscopes-pulsars-and-the-power-of-spin-1536849185?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=18",
        "text": "The book is only 79 pages long (plus appendices). It contains 58 drawings but no equations. It weaves together demonstrations\u2014which you have to imagine\u2014and explanations. The technique is to build up gradually from simple situations to more complicated ones, so that each bite is digestible. \nPerry devotes much of the book to the gyroscope\u2014basically a top mounted in a frame, so that it can spin freely. The most amazing thing about gyroscopes is the simple but profound fact that they lock into a particular orientation. A rapidly spinning gyro resists attempts to change the direction of its axis, even as you carry it from one place to another. A gyro\u2019s axis thus serves as a reference, enabling you to tell which way you\u2019re pointing.\n\n\nBy contrast, no simple device can lock into your position in space. To get your location, the best you can do is to keep track of your varying accelerations over time and calculate to determine how much you\u2019ve moved. Alternatively, the satellites that empower your GPS can do that work, and then your device triangulates to determine your position. \nWhen Perry was writing, gyrocompasses were cutting-edge, immature technology. Today they\u2019re a staple of nautical navigation. The axis of a north-pointing gyro appears to slowly reorient, but its direction actually remains fixed as the Earth\u2019s rotation carries the observer with it. More generally, the use of gyros has blossomed into the field of inertial guidance. Airplanes and spacecraft would be lost (or, more accurately, dizzy) without them. \nThe Earth itself is a giant gyro, rotating daily. The near-constant tilt of its axis\u201423.5 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit around the Sun\u2014leads to the predictable cycle of our seasons. Some of the most interesting objects in astrophysics are pulsars, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars. And now we\u2019re beginning to observe, in spinning black holes, the embodied gyroscopic motion of geometry itself. \nAt the other extreme of size, we find gyroscopic motion in the heart of matter. Electrons, photons and most other fundamental particles have an intrinsic \u201cspin.\u201d Rotation is an essential part of their being, on the same footing as their mass. These little guys make ideally perfect gyros, since they\u2019re insulated from friction. \nUsing lasers, magnetic fields and some newer tricks with quantum entanglement, we\u2019re learning how to grip and reorient the axes of these elemental gyros. A revolution in quantum technology is emerging from our improving ability to manipulate the spins of photons and electrons (and atomic nuclei). \nOne of the charms of old books that make predictions is that you can see whether they got it right. John Perry looks prescient. After reading through his book in one sitting, I found that I wasn\u2019t done with it. It kept tugging at my mind, and I kept coming back to it. As a practicing quantum mechanic, I\u2019m accustomed to thinking about spin through equations. Bringing that abstract variable to life, as an aspect of strange but wonderfully tangible objects, has opened a new perspective and suggested new questions. Whether it will lead to anything important, I don\u2019t know. In any case, I\u2019m asking Santa to bring me some high-quality tops and gyros. \n\n\nMore Wilczek\u2019s Universe\n\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re All Still Living in Euclid\u2019s World\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\nThe Models That Made Modern Science\nDecember 30, 2021 \n\n\nThe Cosmic Origins of Silver and Gold\nNovember 24, 2021 \n\n\nWe Are All Cyborgs \nOctober 14, 2021 A famous 19th-century lecture on tops anticipated a key force in all of nature. ",
        "author": "Frank Wilczek"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Appreciation: Nobelist Frank Wilczek Remembers Stephen Hawking (WSJ: Wilczek's Universe) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7717",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-appreciation-frank-wilczek-remembers-stephen-hawking-1521210625?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=78",
        "text": "We were at a workshop on cosmology at Cambridge University. Stephen had co-organized the workshop and chosen a group of about 15 people, mostly in their 30s, to attend. Many of us later became leaders in the field, but at the time we were certainly not. \n\n\n\n\nIn fact, most of us were outsiders to cosmology, doing our main work in the fields of particle physics and quantum-field theory. We felt as though we were a band of insurgents, hungry to seize some territory. It was remarkable that Hawking, already a leading figure in classical cosmology, not only welcomed us in but led the charge. \n\n\nIt was a very unusual conference, lasting over a week, with a loose schedule of formal talks and lots of time for informal discussions. Cambridge was at its glorious best, lush and green and fair, so we spent a lot of time outdoors.\n\n\nRelated Reading Stephen Hawking, Who Bridged Science and Popular Culture, Dies at Age 76 Remembering Physicist Stephen Hawking in Photos Stephen Hawking joins futuristic bid to explore outer space \n\n\nThat conference has approached legendary status in the scientific community, as the moment when the \u201cinflationary universe\u201d model came of age and began to be predictive. The central realization that emerged has its roots in Hawking\u2019s famous earlier discovery\u2014that black holes emit what came to be known as Hawking radiation or, as he liked to put it, that \u201cblack holes ain\u2019t so black.\u201d\nBack in 1972, Hawking had showed that the distortions in space-time accompanying the formation of a black hole cause particles to be produced. When space-time is rapidly expanding\u2014as occurred during the early moments of the big bang\u2014a similar process causes the universe to fill with various exotic forms of matter. \nPeople came into the workshop with different ideas about the amount of such matter and how uniformly it would be distributed. The answers to those questions are central to cosmology, because all the structure in today\u2019s universe grows from those initial seeds of non-uniformity.\nGoing into the conference, estimates of the size of the effect ranged from essentially zero to values too large to describe our universe. By the end, a consensus had emerged. It is consistent with observations and has held up to this day. \n\n\nMore in Wilczek\u2019s Universe\n\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re All Still Living in Euclid\u2019s World\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\nThe Models That Made Modern Science\nDecember 30, 2021 \n\n\nThe Cosmic Origins of Silver and Gold\nNovember 24, 2021 \n\n\nWe Are All Cyborgs \nOctober 14, 2021 \n\n\nThe Road to Self-Reproducing Machines\nSeptember 2, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nAt the same conference, axion cosmology was born. Axions are a hypothetical particle whose existence would explain why the laws of physics look almost the same if you run events backward in time. At the conference, we realized that the early universe can produce axions abundantly. They might provide the universe\u2019s \u201cdark matter,\u201d which astronomers have observed but not yet identified.\nI spent a lot of time with Hawking during the conference. Soon I could understand his speech without an interpreter. It was a joy to probe his deep knowledge and opinions and to share family experiences and jokes.\nOne day, my very young daughter crawled up and started playing with his shoelaces. He watched her succeed in untying them and then told her, with a gleam in his eye, \u201cGood work.\u201d And then, turning to me: \u201cNow, about the universe\u2026.\u201d\nIt was a magical time, when the universe, channeled through Hawking, paid a visit to Cambridge. When Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek heard of Stephen Hawking\u2019s death, his mind flew back to a lush, highly productive week in the early 1980s when he got to know the late scientist. ",
        "author": "Frank Wilczek"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Appreciation: Nobelist Frank Wilczek Remembers Stephen Hawking (WSJ: Wilczek's Universe) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7718",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-appreciation-frank-wilczek-remembers-stephen-hawking-1521210625?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=99",
        "text": "We were at a workshop on cosmology at Cambridge University. Stephen had co-organized the workshop and chosen a group of about 15 people, mostly in their 30s, to attend. Many of us later became leaders in the field, but at the time we were certainly not. \n\n\n\n\nIn fact, most of us were outsiders to cosmology, doing our main work in the fields of particle physics and quantum-field theory. We felt as though we were a band of insurgents, hungry to seize some territory. It was remarkable that Hawking, already a leading figure in classical cosmology, not only welcomed us in but led the charge. \n\n\nIt was a very unusual conference, lasting over a week, with a loose schedule of formal talks and lots of time for informal discussions. Cambridge was at its glorious best, lush and green and fair, so we spent a lot of time outdoors.\n\n\nRelated Reading Stephen Hawking, Who Bridged Science and Popular Culture, Dies at Age 76 Remembering Physicist Stephen Hawking in Photos Stephen Hawking joins futuristic bid to explore outer space \n\n\nThat conference has approached legendary status in the scientific community, as the moment when the \u201cinflationary universe\u201d model came of age and began to be predictive. The central realization that emerged has its roots in Hawking\u2019s famous earlier discovery\u2014that black holes emit what came to be known as Hawking radiation or, as he liked to put it, that \u201cblack holes ain\u2019t so black.\u201d\nBack in 1972, Hawking had showed that the distortions in space-time accompanying the formation of a black hole cause particles to be produced. When space-time is rapidly expanding\u2014as occurred during the early moments of the big bang\u2014a similar process causes the universe to fill with various exotic forms of matter. \nPeople came into the workshop with different ideas about the amount of such matter and how uniformly it would be distributed. The answers to those questions are central to cosmology, because all the structure in today\u2019s universe grows from those initial seeds of non-uniformity.\nGoing into the conference, estimates of the size of the effect ranged from essentially zero to values too large to describe our universe. By the end, a consensus had emerged. It is consistent with observations and has held up to this day. \n\n\nMore in Wilczek\u2019s Universe\n\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re All Still Living in Euclid\u2019s World\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\nThe Models That Made Modern Science\nDecember 30, 2021 \n\n\nThe Cosmic Origins of Silver and Gold\nNovember 24, 2021 \n\n\nWe Are All Cyborgs \nOctober 14, 2021 \n\n\nThe Road to Self-Reproducing Machines\nSeptember 2, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nAt the same conference, axion cosmology was born. Axions are a hypothetical particle whose existence would explain why the laws of physics look almost the same if you run events backward in time. At the conference, we realized that the early universe can produce axions abundantly. They might provide the universe\u2019s \u201cdark matter,\u201d which astronomers have observed but not yet identified.\nI spent a lot of time with Hawking during the conference. Soon I could understand his speech without an interpreter. It was a joy to probe his deep knowledge and opinions and to share family experiences and jokes.\nOne day, my very young daughter crawled up and started playing with his shoelaces. He watched her succeed in untying them and then told her, with a gleam in his eye, \u201cGood work.\u201d And then, turning to me: \u201cNow, about the universe\u2026.\u201d\nIt was a magical time, when the universe, channeled through Hawking, paid a visit to Cambridge. When Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek heard of Stephen Hawking\u2019s death, his mind flew back to a lush, highly productive week in the early 1980s when he got to know the late scientist. ",
        "author": "Frank Wilczek"
    },
    {
        "title": "Caught Napping by Coronavirus (WSJ: Wonder Land) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7719",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/caught-napping-by-coronavirus-11586387404?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=46",
        "text": "The most famous book written on the causes of this massive intelligence failure is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roberta Wohlstetter\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cPearl Harbor: Warning and Decision.\u201d Substitute \u201cCoronavirus Pandemic\u201d for \u201cPearl Harbor\u201d and Wohlstetter\u2019s book could have been written yesterday.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIf our intelligence systems and all our other channels of information failed to produce an accurate image of Japanese intentions and capabilities,\u201d she wrote, \u201cit was not for want of the relevant materials.\u201d\n\n\nPresumably relevant authorities in our time\u2014the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific bodies\u2014after analyzing Ebola, SARS, MERS and Zika, have known of a coming pandemic long enough to have a good idea of what we were in for.\nWohlstetter notes myriad factors undermining decisions on Pearl Harbor: false alarms, which eroded urgency; interservice rivalries, which impeded coherence; and of course the multiple distractions of wartime. Today even normal life feels like the fog of war, with no one having enough hours in the day to focus on unfinished to-do lists.\n\u201cThey had no opportunity or time to make a critical review of the material,\u201d Wohlstetter wrote of the war planners, \u201cand each one assumed that others who had seen it would arrive at identical interpretations.\u201d They didn\u2019t do it then, and we haven\u2019t now.\nLet\u2019s tighten the focus on the current crisis. Andrew Lakoff, of the University of Southern California, is a historian and analyst of modern pandemics. His book\u2019s all-too-apt title is \u201cUnprepared.\u201d\nIn a conversation this week, Mr. Lakoff made a modest admission: \u201cEven people like me who have been studying this material for a while find it quite strange to be living through it.\u201d As Americans argue over the apparent lack of preparedness, he said, it\u2019s important to note the important relationship between having experienced a national health crisis in real time and successfully preparing for one.\nSouth Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong are being cited for their effective coronavirus responses. From 2002 to 2010, all had mortal battles with SARS, MERS and H1N1 swine flu. In the minimally affected U.S. and Europe, those threats were largely secondary, almost intellectualized abstractions.\nAs well, the idea of transparency or information-sharing about infectious diseases is relatively new. During the 1990s, India and Latin American countries were reluctant to give the WHO access to reported outbreaks for fear the news would damage their trade and travel. China has re-proved the problem.\nAt the center of these issues of preparedness\u2014or more often unpreparedness\u2014sit disagreements about the role of central authority and expert knowledge. President Trump says he might withdraw U.S. funding from WHO. But then what? Unlike the United Nations, if we kill WHO, we will have to reinvent it. Someone has to make these pandemic calls. Someone has to do detection and data collection.\nTime to make authoritative decisions is always short. Mr. Trump blames WHO for making a late pandemic call in March. His critics blame him for not more fully mobilizing domestically until March. Bottom line: A January call would have been better for both.\nBy tradition and history many Americans resist the idea of central authority, commonly called \u201cWashington.\u201d The strong performances by governors and local public-health authorities (whose function by tradition is sovereign) affirms the federalist idea of distributed authority, now under media demands for pre-emption.\nBut 50 states are not individually equipped to solve the science of a rampant unknown virus. A pandemic of its nature requires a national clearinghouse of knowledge and consistent central-government direction, while leaving space for decisions by lower levels of government.\nNext time, the federal government should operate a forum for broader scientific discussion and productive dissent. Whether virus patients may be treated with approved drugs such as hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin is not the call of any one expert but instead falls inside the legally protected \u201cpractice of medicine.\u201d\nThe White House\u2019s daily briefings have served as a kind of national clearinghouse, but the format is flawed. Mr. Trump\u2019s Q&A sessions with the press and the data presentations by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Deborah Birx,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anthony Fauci,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adm. Brett Giroir\n\n\n\n and Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pence\n\n\n\n should be separate events. The current format is mixing oil and water, with the result an unclear muddle.\n*** A final thought on preparedness. For Christians and Jews, this is among the holiest weeks of the year, when, in a word, all prepare spiritually for Easter and Passover. Both events are about passing into and out of a crucible. Inside these faiths, loss becomes endurable through the promise of deliverance. It\u2019s worth remembering for at least one week. \nWrite henninger@wsj.com.\nWrite to Daniel Henninger at henninger@wsj.com Surgeon General Jerome Adams was right: This virus is our Pearl Harbor, a catastrophic failure. ",
        "author": "Daniel Henninger"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Pod\u2019: From English Gardens to \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\ta Place to Protect Your Family and Friends (WSJ: Word on the Street) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7720",
        "date": "2020-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pod-from-english-gardens-to-a-place-to-protect-your-family-and-friends-11594332738?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=12",
        "text": "When this shared approach to self-isolation started taking off this spring, the new type of social agglomeration went by many names. \u201cCall it your cohort, your pod, your bubble, your squad, or your quaranteam,\u201d began a how-to guide from CNN in April. \u201cWhatever you call it, forming a group to go through the next few months could be key to getting through the summer with your mental health intact.\u201d Of these novel names, \u201cpod\u201d appears to be taking the lead in popularity, even generating verb forms like \u201cpodding\u201d or \u201cpodding up.\u201d\nThe terse term \u201cpod\u201d entered the English language in the mid-16th century to refer to the long, narrow part of plants such as beans and peas that contain the seeds. While the roots of the word are uncertain, it may have come about from clipping a longer word like \u201cpodder\u201d or \u201cpodware,\u201d regionalisms in England for field crops and their seed grains. Later, \u201ctwo peas in a pod\u201d became a handy idiom for people or things that are so similar as to be indistinguishable.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe spaceship pods in \u20182001: A Space Odyssey\u2019 eventually inspired the name of apple\u2019s iPod, and in turn, podcasts. \u201d\n\n\n\nFrom these leguminous origins, \u201cpod\u201d got extended to other types of cozy compartments. Starting in the 1950s, \u201cpod\u201d could be used for a detachable module on an aircraft, such as one that encloses a jet engine, cargo or fuel. The \u201950s also ushered in a more ominous kind of \u201cpod\u201d: In the movie \u201cInvasion of the Body Snatchers,\u201d aliens are able to replace humans with exact replicas by growing them in giant pods. That eerie vision introduced the phrase \u201cpod people\u201d into the lexicon to label those who display soulless conformity.\n\n\nAnother sci-fi classic, \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d featured round, white extravehicular pods on its spacecraft, leading to the famous line, \u201cOpen the pod bay doors, HAL,\u201d in astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Bowman\u2019s\n\n\n\n tense standoff with the HAL 9000 computer. Those pods ended up inspiring Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter tasked with naming a new portable media player introduced by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple\n\n\n in the nonfictional year of 2001. He suggested calling it \u201cthe iPod.\u201d The runaway success of the iPod inspired novel coinages like \u201cpodcast,\u201d blending the name of the device with \u201cbroadcast.\u201d Podcasts in turn were so successful that now you often hear them simply called \u201cpods.\u201d\n\n\nMore \u2018Word on the Street\u2019\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Slav\u2019: A Regional Heritage Linked Through Speech\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Tranche\u2019: A Slice of Meat\u2014or a Portion of Punishment \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Convoy\u2019: Breaker One-Nine, Truckers Are Lining Up Again\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nIn the age of coronavirus, sterilized \u201cisolation pods\u201d were employed early on by hospitals as a safety measure to treat Covid-19 patients. But that term took on a new meaning as people tried to make sense of how to live under lockdowns. On March 15, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account \u201ctwo moms in an isolation pod\u201d kicked off with its first message: \u201cHow to keep our sanity with five children between us? Shared isolation pod. Shared live tweeting.\u201d A few days later, pop singer Harry Styles said in an interview that he was \u201cwith friends in our little safe self-isolation pod.\u201d \nThe shorter form \u201cpod\u201d showed up soon thereafter. For instance, the Calgary game designer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Matt Hayles\n\n\n\n tweeted on March 24, \u201cI\u2019m hearing from people who are calling this their \u2018Pod\u2019 or \u2018Quaranteam,\u2019 which is A++ language-ing.\u201d With households partnering up, news outlets like The Guardian began providing guides for \u201cpodding successfully.\u201d If you do decide to \u201cpod up,\u201d make sure you choose your pod-mates well. A green sleeve for peas has quickly become a way to describe a bubble of safety from Covid-19 infection ",
        "author": "Ben Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Re-Releasing the \u2018Kraken\u2019: Mythical  Beast of the Sea, Movies and Now, Election Disputes (WSJ: Word on the Street) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7721",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/re-releasing-the-kraken-mythical-beast-of-the-sea-movies-and-now-election-disputes-11607039146?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=28",
        "text": "How did this name for a mighty, mythical Scandinavian sea monster become one of the most significant terms of 2020? The answer has to do with movie memes, professional hockey and electoral conspiracy theories.\nStories of the \u201ckraken\u201d originated in the tall tales told by sailors of a gigantic creature living in the waters off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. The word itself can be traced back to the Old Norse \u201ckraki,\u201d which became \u201ckrake\u201d in Norwegian and Swedish, referring to something twisted or crooked. (\u201cCrooked,\u201d in fact, comes from the same source.) In the form \u201ckraken,\u201d the word got applied to twisty underwater animals both real and imagined. The kraken of Nordic legends was likely based on actual sightings of giant squid and octopuses, but folklore embellished it into a monstrosity capable of creating massive whirlpools and swallowing up even the largest ships.\n\n\nThe word \u201ckraken\u201d entered English in the mid-18th century thanks to translations of a natural history written by the Norwegian bishop\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Pontoppidan,\n\n\n\n who described the beast in vivid detail. Stories of the kraken captivated the imagination of many writers, including Alfred Lord\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tennyson,\n\n\n\n who titled an 1830 poem \u201cThe Kraken.\u201d Tennyson imagined the Kraken slumbering in an \u201cancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep\u201d before awaking with apocalyptic fury.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe legend was likely based on sightings of giant squid and octopuses, but folklore embellished it into a ship-swallowing monstrosity. \u201d\n\n\n\nTennyson\u2019s poem helped inspire a 1953 science-fiction novel by John Wyndham, \u201cThe Kraken Wakes,\u201d about aliens from outer space who land in Earth\u2019s oceans before launching attacks on humans. That same year, Captain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marvel\n\n\n\n battled a Kraken in an issue of Whiz Comics.\nBut the key pop-cultural appearance of the Kraken came in 1981, with the special-effects-heavy movie \u201cClash of the Titans.\u201d Screenwriter Beverley Cross spruced up Greek mythology by fancifully adding the Kraken to the mix. Whereas the original myth has Perseus saving Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus, the movie has Zeus (portrayed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Laurence Olivier\n\n\n\n ) issuing the command to Poseidon, \u201cLet loose the Kraken!\u201d Perseus then must battle the Kraken, \u201cthe last of the Titans,\u201d memorably rendered in stop-motion animation.\nWhen \u201cClash of the Titans\u201d was remade as a big-budget 3-D movie in 2010,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Liam Neeson\n\n\n\n as Zeus gave the dramatic order, \u201cRelease the Kraken!\u201d Even before the film was released, the trailer inspired countless Internet memes mocking Mr. Neeson\u2019s over-the-top reading of the line.\n\n\nMore \u2018Word on the Street\u2019\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Slav\u2019: A Regional Heritage Linked Through Speech\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Tranche\u2019: A Slice of Meat\u2014or a Portion of Punishment \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Convoy\u2019: Breaker One-Nine, Truckers Are Lining Up Again\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThanks in part to the success of those memes, the Kraken became such a prominent cultural icon that it beat out the competition as the name for Seattle\u2019s new National Hockey League expansion team. When the franchise announced the team name of the Seattle Kraken in July, promotional materials connected it to the city\u2019s maritime tradition and to the giant Pacific octopus species living off its shores.\nThe tale of the Kraken took another unlikely turn after the presidential election, as President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and his allies have continued to contest the outcome.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sidney Powell,\n\n\n\n a lawyer for former national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael T. Flynn,\n\n\n\n claimed in a Fox Business Network interview that she would \u201crelease the Kraken\u201d by revealing evidence of widespread electoral fraud. Since then, the phrase has become a rallying cry for pro-Trump groups, including QAnon conspiracy theorists, who have adopted it as a hashtag on social media. In a series of failed court filings, however, Ms. Powell\u2019s \u201cKraken\u201d has appeared less mighty than in the original myth. An Old Norse word for a twisty underwater creature has surfaced in a Liam Neeson meme and a pro-Trump legal threat ",
        "author": "Ben Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Re-Releasing the \u2018Kraken\u2019: Mythical  Beast of the Sea, Movies and Now, Election Disputes (WSJ: Word on the Street) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7722",
        "date": "2020-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/re-releasing-the-kraken-mythical-beast-of-the-sea-movies-and-now-election-disputes-11607039146?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=32",
        "text": "How did this name for a mighty, mythical Scandinavian sea monster become one of the most significant terms of 2020? The answer has to do with movie memes, professional hockey and electoral conspiracy theories.\n\n\n\n\nStories of the \u201ckraken\u201d originated in the tall tales told by sailors of a gigantic creature living in the waters off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. The word itself can be traced back to the Old Norse \u201ckraki,\u201d which became \u201ckrake\u201d in Norwegian and Swedish, referring to something twisted or crooked. (\u201cCrooked,\u201d in fact, comes from the same source.) In the form \u201ckraken,\u201d the word got applied to twisty underwater animals both real and imagined. The kraken of Nordic legends was likely based on actual sightings of giant squid and octopuses, but folklore embellished it into a monstrosity capable of creating massive whirlpools and swallowing up even the largest ships.\n\n\nThe word \u201ckraken\u201d entered English in the mid-18th century thanks to translations of a natural history written by the Norwegian bishop\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erik Pontoppidan,\n\n\n\n who described the beast in vivid detail. Stories of the kraken captivated the imagination of many writers, including Alfred Lord\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tennyson,\n\n\n\n who titled an 1830 poem \u201cThe Kraken.\u201d Tennyson imagined the Kraken slumbering in an \u201cancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep\u201d before awaking with apocalyptic fury.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe legend was likely based on sightings of giant squid and octopuses, but folklore embellished it into a ship-swallowing monstrosity. \u201d\n\n\n\nTennyson\u2019s poem helped inspire a 1953 science-fiction novel by John Wyndham, \u201cThe Kraken Wakes,\u201d about aliens from outer space who land in Earth\u2019s oceans before launching attacks on humans. That same year, Captain\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marvel\n\n\n\n battled a Kraken in an issue of Whiz Comics.\nBut the key pop-cultural appearance of the Kraken came in 1981, with the special-effects-heavy movie \u201cClash of the Titans.\u201d Screenwriter Beverley Cross spruced up Greek mythology by fancifully adding the Kraken to the mix. Whereas the original myth has Perseus saving Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus, the movie has Zeus (portrayed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Laurence Olivier\n\n\n\n ) issuing the command to Poseidon, \u201cLet loose the Kraken!\u201d Perseus then must battle the Kraken, \u201cthe last of the Titans,\u201d memorably rendered in stop-motion animation.\nWhen \u201cClash of the Titans\u201d was remade as a big-budget 3-D movie in 2010,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Liam Neeson\n\n\n\n as Zeus gave the dramatic order, \u201cRelease the Kraken!\u201d Even before the film was released, the trailer inspired countless Internet memes mocking Mr. Neeson\u2019s over-the-top reading of the line.\n\n\nMore \u2018Word on the Street\u2019\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Slav\u2019: A Regional Heritage Linked Through Speech\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Tranche\u2019: A Slice of Meat\u2014or a Portion of Punishment \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Convoy\u2019: Breaker One-Nine, Truckers Are Lining Up Again\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThanks in part to the success of those memes, the Kraken became such a prominent cultural icon that it beat out the competition as the name for Seattle\u2019s new National Hockey League expansion team. When the franchise announced the team name of the Seattle Kraken in July, promotional materials connected it to the city\u2019s maritime tradition and to the giant Pacific octopus species living off its shores.\nThe tale of the Kraken took another unlikely turn after the presidential election, as President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n and his allies have continued to contest the outcome.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sidney Powell,\n\n\n\n a lawyer for former national security adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael T. Flynn,\n\n\n\n claimed in a Fox Business Network interview that she would \u201crelease the Kraken\u201d by revealing evidence of widespread electoral fraud. Since then, the phrase has become a rallying cry for pro-Trump groups, including QAnon conspiracy theorists, who have adopted it as a hashtag on social media. In a series of failed court filings, however, Ms. Powell\u2019s \u201cKraken\u201d has appeared less mighty than in the original myth. An Old Norse word for a twisty underwater creature has surfaced in a Liam Neeson meme and a pro-Trump legal threat ",
        "author": "Ben Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "From a Texas dental office to the Canadian tundra, here\u2019s where space debris has crashed to Earth (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7723",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/08/space-debris-crashes/",
        "text": "This much is certain: An out-of-control Chinese booster rocket went up and will come down \u2014 one of the largest objects to reenter the atmosphere without any controls to guide its trajectory.With oceans and unpopulated areas covering much of the globe, it\u2019s statistically unlikely that any piece of falling space junk would land in someone\u2019s suburban backyard. But it\u2019s also not outside the realm of the possibility: Ever since humans began sending rockets into space, pieces of debris have turned up in unexpected places. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere\u2019s a look at where some notable debris falls have occurred over the years.\u2022 Sea of Japan (East Sea)The first known report of damage caused by space debris came as early as 1969. Japanese diplomats informed a United Nations committee that an unidentified object had fallen from space and hit a freighter that was traveling off the coast of Siberia, seriously injuring five crewmen. Soviet ships soon showed up looking for the wreckage.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJapanese officials said that experts identified the debris as part of a Soviet spacecraft. But Tokyo initially kept that information a secret, out of a desire to avoid provoking a conflict with Moscow, according to the Associated Press.\u2022 Northwestern CanadaThe hazards of space junk became abundantly clear in 1978, when the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 plummeted to Earth, scattering potentially radioactive debris across the Northwest Territories, Alberta and Saskatchewan. A massive cleanup effort dubbed \u201cOperation Morning Light,\u201d which involved searching for tiny pieces of radioactive material in the Arctic tundra, ended up costing close to $14 million in Canadian dollars.Story continues below advertisementCanada billed the Soviet Union for $6 million, but Moscow ended up paying only half that amount.\u2022 Western AustraliaWhen NASA\u2019s first space station, Skylab, disintegrated on reentry in 1979, it scattered debris across the previously obscure Western Australia farming community of Esperance. \u201cIt was the best fireworks display you would ever see,\u201d Brendan Freeman, a retired farmer, later told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. AdvertisementNo major damage was done, but Esperance jokingly issued a $400 fine for littering to NASA. The agency didn\u2019t pay up \u2014 perhaps due to fear of setting a precedent \u2014 but a disc jockey in Barstow, Calif., later crowdfunded the money and traveled to Esperance to deliver a novelty check. \u2022 Lakeport, Calif.Early one weekend morning in 1987, a retired aircraft mechanic living in a small town outside the Mendocino National Forest in Northern California heard a loud noise that sounded like a gunshot outside his bedroom window. Later that day, he discovered a seven-foot-long, singed-looking piece of metal lying in the alleyway next to his house.Story continues below advertisementAir Force analysts determined that the object was most likely a piece of a Soviet rocket that had been seen streaking through the sky as it burned up and fell to Earth. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting because something like that usually doesn\u2019t happen around here,\u201d a neighbor, Maggie Pickle, told the Associated Press. \u2022 Tulsa, Okla.In 1997, Lottie Williams was taking an early-morning walk with friends in a Tulsa park when she saw something that looked like a shooting star hurtling through the sky. It hit her on the shoulder \u2014 so lightly that she barely even felt it. Scientists later determined that the object was most likely a piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket. Williams kept it as a souvenir.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think I was blessed that it doesn\u2019t weigh that much,\u201d she told NPR years later. \u201cI mean, that was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me.\u201d\u2022 East Texas and LouisianaWhen the space shuttle Columbia broke apart in 2003 upon reentering the atmosphere, killing seven astronauts on board, impromptu memorials popped up in places where debris had landed. People in the rural area along the Texas-Louisiana border reported seeing pieces of the shuttle crash into a reservoir and come hurtling through the roof of a dentist\u2019s office, and one enterprising individual attempted to sell a piece of the debris for $10,000 on eBay.Roughly 84,000 pieces of the space shuttle were located after extensive searches through swamplands, forests and pastures. That debris was then used to reconstruct the shuttle and determine the cause of the disaster.\u2022 Ivory CoastAlmost exactly one year ago, in May 2020, a Chinese rocket nearly identical to the one falling now hurtled back to Earth. Though it initially appeared to land in the Atlantic Ocean, reports of sonic booms and metallic debris falling from the sky suggested that some parts of the rocket had hit the Ivory Coast village of Mahounou.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWhen you have a big chunk of metal screaming through the upper atmosphere in a particular direction at a particular time, and you get reports of things falling out of the sky at that location, at that time, it\u2019s not a big leap to connect them,\u201d Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told the Verge at the time.No injuries were reported, and the discovery of a nearly 40-foot-long piece of tubing appears to have provoked more curiosity than concern in the area.\u2022 Grant County, Wash.The most recent incident involving falling space debris took place a little over a month ago, when a SpaceX rocket disintegrated over the Pacific Northwest and created a dramatic light display that some initially mistook for falling stars.Story continues below advertisementOne piece of equipment landed in a Washington state farm, leaving a four-inch dent in the soil, the Verge reported. A similar object was found on an Oregon beach by a fisherman days later, though officials haven\u2019t confirmed that it came from the SpaceX launch.Read more:A proliferation of space junk is blocking our view of the cosmos, research showsA rocket booster and a dead satellite avoided a collision, illustrating the \u2018ticking time bomb\u2019 of space debrisChina says out-of-control space rocket booster probably won\u2019t cause any harm With oceans and unpopulated areas covering much of the globe, it\u2019s statistically unlikely that a piece of falling space junk will land in someone\u2019s suburban backyard. But there have been a handful of high-profile incidents. From a Texas dental office to the Canadian tundra, here\u2019s where space debris has crashed to Earth",
        "author": "Antonia Noori Farzan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Watch a rocket carrying two Americans and one Russian blast into space (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7724",
        "date": "2018-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/21/watch-a-rocket-carrying-two-americans-and-one-russian-blast-into-space/",
        "text": "The United States and Russia seem to be in opposing camps on issue after issue of late. To list a few: the war in Syria, alleged\u00a0interference in U.S. elections, Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, and the poisoning of a former spy in Britain.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOutgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson addressed some of the U.S. concerns with Russia\u00a0in a speech at the State Department on March 13. But there is one\u00a0area where Russia and the United States can still get along: outer space.On Wednesday, NASA streamed video of a Russian cosmonaut and two American astronauts\u00a0leaving Earth together in\u00a0a rocket.Expedition 55-56 Soyuz commander Oleg Artemyev of Roscosmos boarded the\u00a0Russian Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft alongside\u00a0flight engineers Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold of NASA.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe launch took place in Kazakhstan. Before entering the spacecraft,\u00a0they participated in some local traditions, including receiving a blessing from a Russian Orthodox priest.The\u00a0three men\u00a0are bound for the International Space Station, where\u00a0NASA says they will join\u00a0colleagues from Russia, the United States\u00a0and Japan to\u00a0spend more than five months engaged in scientific and technological research.In August, David Filipov\u00a0wrote\u00a0in The Washington Post that space was one of the few matters on which the United States and Russia could still agree:American astronauts have been relying on Russia to fly them to the International Space Station since the U.S. space shuttle program shut down in 2011.Despite\u00a0muttering\u00a0in Moscow about cosmic retaliation for the latest U.S. sanctions, the Kremlin is not expected to follow through.Not when NASA pays\u00a0$80\u00a0million for a seat\u00a0on a Soyuz\u00a0rocket. Despite tensions between the two countries, Russia and the U.S. are still working together in space. Watch a rocket carrying two Americans and one Russian blast into space",
        "author": "Sarah Parnass"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Releases Rover\u2019s First Photos After Mars Landing (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7725",
        "date": "2021-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/world/asia/china-mars-photos.html",
        "text": "The country\u2019s space agency said that the components of the spacecraft had \u201cdeployed in place normally.\u201d The country\u2019s space agency said that the components of the spacecraft had \u201cdeployed in place normally.\u201d Four days after landing a spacecraft on Mars, China\u2019s space agency released its first photographs from the red planet on Wednesday, announcing that the mission was going as planned.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Releases Rover\u2019s First Photos After Mars Landing (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7726",
        "date": "2021-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/world/asia/china-mars-photos.html",
        "text": "The country\u2019s space agency said that the components of the spacecraft had \u201cdeployed in place normally.\u201d The country\u2019s space agency said that the components of the spacecraft had \u201cdeployed in place normally.\u201d Four days after landing a spacecraft on Mars, China\u2019s space agency released its first photographs from the red planet on Wednesday, announcing that the mission was going as planned.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Releases Rover\u2019s First Photos After Mars Landing (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7727",
        "date": "2021-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/world/asia/china-mars-photos.html",
        "text": "The country\u2019s space agency said that the components of the spacecraft had \u201cdeployed in place normally.\u201d The country\u2019s space agency said that the components of the spacecraft had \u201cdeployed in place normally.\u201d Four days after landing a spacecraft on Mars, China\u2019s space agency released its first photographs from the red planet on Wednesday, announcing that the mission was going as planned.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Says It Has Located Chandrayaan-2 Lander on Moon\u2019s Surface (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7728",
        "date": "2019-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/world/asia/india-chandrayaan-2-lander-moon.html",
        "text": "The chief of the Indian space agency told reporters that the spacecraft\u2019s condition was unclear, but that he expected it had experienced a \u201chard landing.\u201d The chief of the Indian space agency told reporters that the spacecraft\u2019s condition was unclear, but that he expected it had experienced a \u201chard landing.\u201d NEW DELHI \u2014 A day after India lost contact with a robotic spacecraft that was launched toward the moon\u2019s South Pole, the chairman of the country\u2019s space agency said on Sunday that the lander had been detected on the moon\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Says It Has Located Chandrayaan-2 Lander on Moon\u2019s Surface (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7729",
        "date": "2019-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/world/asia/india-chandrayaan-2-lander-moon.html",
        "text": "The chief of the Indian space agency told reporters that the spacecraft\u2019s condition was unclear, but that he expected it had experienced a \u201chard landing.\u201d The chief of the Indian space agency told reporters that the spacecraft\u2019s condition was unclear, but that he expected it had experienced a \u201chard landing.\u201d NEW DELHI \u2014 A day after India lost contact with a robotic spacecraft that was launched toward the moon\u2019s South Pole, the chairman of the country\u2019s space agency said on Sunday that the lander had been detected on the moon\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Says It Has Located Chandrayaan-2 Lander on Moon\u2019s Surface (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7730",
        "date": "2019-09-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/world/asia/india-chandrayaan-2-lander-moon.html",
        "text": "The chief of the Indian space agency told reporters that the spacecraft\u2019s condition was unclear, but that he expected it had experienced a \u201chard landing.\u201d The chief of the Indian space agency told reporters that the spacecraft\u2019s condition was unclear, but that he expected it had experienced a \u201chard landing.\u201d NEW DELHI \u2014 A day after India lost contact with a robotic spacecraft that was launched toward the moon\u2019s South Pole, the chairman of the country\u2019s space agency said on Sunday that the lander had been detected on the moon\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz"
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: Dec. 5, 2020 (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7731",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/world-digest-dec-5-2020/2020/12/05/a3f47934-36ff-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html",
        "text": "Police brutality protest turns violent in ParisWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDozens of hooded protesters launched projectiles at riot police, smashed shop windows, torched cars and burned barricades during a demonstration in the French capital Saturday against police violence. Police fired volleys of tear gas in response.Thousands of people had begun marching peacefully in Paris when clashes erupted between police and pockets of protesters, most dressed in black with faces covered. Some used hammers to break up paving stones. The protesters were denouncing police brutality and President Emmanuel Macron\u2019s security policy plans, which the demonstrators say would restrict civil liberties.Story continues below advertisementFrance has been hit by a wave of street protests since the government introduced a bill in Parliament aimed at increasing its surveillance tools and restricting rights on circulating images of police officers in the media and online.AdvertisementThe bill is part of Macron\u2019s drive to get tougher on law and order ahead of elections in 2022.\u2014 ReutersLegislative elections proceed amid crisesKuwaitis voted in legislative elections Saturday with the Persian Gulf state mired in its worst economic crisis in decades \u2014 which poses a challenge for the government\u2019s often stormy relationship with parliament \u2014 and struggling to deal with the coronavirus.More than 300 candidates, including 29 women, are vying for 50 seats in the gulf\u2019s oldest and most outspoken assembly with legislative powers. Critics say it has stalled investment and economic and fiscal reform in the cradle-to-grave welfare state.Story continues below advertisementCampaigning, which took place mostly on social media and TV due to covid-19 restrictions, has focused on the economy, corruption and demographics in a country where foreigners make up the bulk of the workforce.AdvertisementTurnout is expected to be lower than usual because of the coronavirus, which, along with low crude prices, has battered state finances.A low turnout could strengthen the hand of tribal, Islamist and other candidates, analysts said.\u2014 ReutersKing leads public in tribute to late fatherThousands of yellow-clad supporters greeted Thailand\u2019s king Saturday as he led a birthday commemoration for his revered late father, the latest in a string of public appearances at a time of unprecedented challenge to the monarchy from student-led protesters.Story continues below advertisementKing Vajiralongkorn, accompanied by Queen Suthida, led the crowd in a candlelit tribute to his father, whose giant image was at the center of a stage outside the Grand Palace.King Bhumibhol Adulyadej, who died in 2016, was widely respected, a status reinforced by strict l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9 laws that can bring jail terms of up to 15 years. But since the accession of Vajiralongkorn, the monarchy\u2019s standing has been under threat, with dissent on the rise.Advertisement\u2014 Associated PressU.K. and Europe agree to more trade talks: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen instructed their negotiators to resume trade talks Sunday in a last-ditch bid to bridge significant differences. Britain left the European Union on Jan.\u00a031, but rules governing trade, travel and business have remained unchanged during a transition period that ends Dec.\u00a031, when a new relationship will be established \u2014 with or without a deal.Story continues below advertisementBerlin protest targets German defense budget: Hundreds of peace protesters formed a human chain outside Germany's parliament, urging disarmament and an end to weapons exports, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported. The demonstration, under the motto \"Peace, not armaments,\" came as the German government prepares to approve its budget proposals for the next two years, which include hefty defense spending.Advertisement'Mass trespass' shutters Stonehenge: The prehistoric monument of Stonehenge in southern England was closed to visitors after protesters staged a \"mass trespass\" against the British government's road-building plans, including a new tunnel near the World Heritage Site. Tunnel opponents, who have also launched a legal action, say it will damage the environment, wildlife and potential underground archaeological finds.Japan awaits asteroid soil samples: Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully released a small capsule and sent it toward Earth to deliver samples from a distant asteroid that could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on our planet, the country's space agency said.\u2014 From news services Violence erupts in Paris during protest against police brutality; Kuwaitis turn out for legislative elections. World Digest: Dec. 5, 2020",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018New Chapter\u2019 in Space Exploration as China Reaches Far Side of the Moon (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7732",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html",
        "text": "It was China\u2019s second moon landing, and the first spacecraft to touch down on the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth. It was China\u2019s second moon landing, and the first spacecraft to touch down on the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth. BEIJING \u2014 China reached a milestone in space exploration on Thursday, landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon for the first time in history, the country\u2019s space agency announced.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Zoe Mou"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018New Chapter\u2019 in Space Exploration as China Reaches Far Side of the Moon (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7733",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html",
        "text": "It was China\u2019s second moon landing, and the first spacecraft to touch down on the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth. It was China\u2019s second moon landing, and the first spacecraft to touch down on the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth. BEIJING \u2014 China reached a milestone in space exploration on Thursday, landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon for the first time in history, the country\u2019s space agency announced.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Zoe Mou"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018New Chapter\u2019 in Space Exploration as China Reaches Far Side of the Moon (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7734",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html",
        "text": "It was China\u2019s second moon landing, and the first spacecraft to touch down on the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth. It was China\u2019s second moon landing, and the first spacecraft to touch down on the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth. BEIJING \u2014 China reached a milestone in space exploration on Thursday, landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon for the first time in history, the country\u2019s space agency announced.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Zoe Mou"
    },
    {
        "title": "From the Chilean miners to Elon Musk, the world is watching rescue efforts for boys in Thailand (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7735",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/07/06/from-the-chilean-miners-to-elon-musk-the-world-is-watching-rescue-efforts-for-boys-in-thailand/",
        "text": "It was a Thursday afternoon nearly eight years ago when Omar Reygadas heard the explosion that would seal him and 32 others inside a mine in the Atacama Desert in Chile.\u00a0He wouldn\u2019t see the light of day again for 69 days.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightReygadas, a 64-year-old widower, was the 17th miner lifted out of the 2,300-foot-deep refuge in a dramatic rescue effort that captured the attention of the world.\u00a0Now, he is watching from Chile as international experts race to free a team of 12 boys and their assistant soccer coach from a flooded cave complex in northern Thailand. \u201cIt\u2019s terrible for them \u2014 they\u2019re little \u2014 but I believe that boys with a lot of strength are going to manage to be whole when they get out,\u201d Reygadas told the Associated Press. While he said that it is difficult for him to provide any advice, he encouraged the boys to focus on \u201creuniting with their families.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThey shouldn\u2019t be ashamed to be scared,\u201d he added to the AP. \u201cBecause we were scared, too. Our tears also ran. Even as adult men, we cried.\u201d\"My advice is to be firm... I want them to know that being scared is normal. We were also scared, we also shed tears.\"This Chilean miner survived 69 days trapped underground - he has this advice for the young boys trapped in a cave in Thailand. pic.twitter.com/xIOJXgR6PH\u2014 Channel 5 News (@5_News) July 4, 2018\n\nMario Sep\u00falveda, another Chilean miner who developed the nickname \u201cSuper Mario\u201d in 2010 as the dynamic spokesman on the videos sent up from below, also sent his support. \u201cI have no doubt that if the government of this country puts in everything it can .\u2009.\u2009. this rescue will be successful,\u201d he said to Agence France-Presse in a video message. \u201cWe are praying for each of you.\u201dThe team of Thai boys, ranging in age from 11 to 16, were exploring a six-mile-long cave 12 days ago with their assistant coach when the water level rose, trapping them in one of the chambers in the complex. In the two weeks since their disappearance, the effort to find, and now rescue, the group has drawn the attention of communities across the globe. More than 1,000 people from various countries are reportedly involved in the rescue efforts, and even more have volunteered to help.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter saying on Twitter that he is \u201chappy to help,\u00a0Tesla chief executive Elon Musk on Friday confirmed that engineers from two of his companies, Space X and Boring, would be headed to the town of Mae Sai in northern Thailand to help the rescue team on the ground. Space X develops and manufactures spacecraft, while Boring is an infrastructure construction company that \u201chas advanced ground penetrating radar & is pretty good at digging holes,\u201d Musk tweeted.The Thai government posted a image of Musk's tweet on Facebook, adding that the American engineers would arrive on Saturday to help with the rescue. \u201cHe may provide services for location tracking, water pumping or battery power,\u201d the government wrote.Earlier Friday, Musk said it be worth trying to\u00a0\u201cinsert a 1m diameter nylon tube (or shorter set of tubes for most difficult sections) through cave network & inflate with air like a bouncy castle.\u201dMaybe worth trying: insert a 1m diameter nylon tube (or shorter set of tubes for most difficult sections) through cave network & inflate with air like a bouncy castle. Should create an air tunnel underwater against cave roof & auto-conform to odd shapes like the 70cm hole.\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2018\n\nPortuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo told\u00a0reporters at a FIFA event this week that \u201cthe world of football hopes that someone can find a way to take these kids out of there,\u201d\u00a0CNN reported.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBear Grylls, the British adventurer and television host behind survival series \u201cMan vs. Wild,\u201d has also weighed in. \u201cSo proud of you Jon Volanthen helping orchestrate this rescue \u2014 and no surprise you are a Scout volunteer Leader!\u201d he tweeted, referring to one of the two British divers who first discovered the group. \u201cWe are here for you if you need any extra help,\u201d Grylls added.Anxiety grows in Thailand as trapped boys are being given diving lessonsOthers have expressed their support over social media, with many pitching ideas on how to extract the boys. Some suggest building a \u201csmall capsule\u201d or \u201cmini-submarine\u201d while others, like Musk, have floated the idea of inserting an inflatable tube into the cave that will allow the group to crawl out.So far, however, the rescue team in Mae Sai has focused on searching for alternative entrances, pumping water out of the cave complex and teaching the boys how to dive. Experts say the currents in the cave are still too strong for novice divers to risk an escape, though the forecast of rain for this weekend has raised concerns that if a rescue is not done soon, the monsoon season in Thailand may leave the group trapped for months more.A Thai soccer team has been trapped in a cave since June 23. While their situation is dire, dozens of people have been rescued from underground emergencies. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)In his message to the group,\u00a0Reygadas encouraged the boys to lean on one another for psychological support as a rescue plan is put in place. According to\u00a0BBC Southeast Asia correspondent\u00a0Jonathan Head, the head coach of the Wild Boars soccer team, Naparat Guntawong, described the 12 boys in the cave as top athletes who had bonded closely.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe was talking about what a tightknit team this is,\u201d Head said on the BBC World Service. \u201cHe\u2019s been training them for five years, and he said they\u2019re the top athletes in his group. .\u2009.\u2009. They\u2019ve all been very strong-willed, and he\u2019s sure that their tight group mentality has probably helped them through this ordeal.\u201d\u2018It was just a normal day\u2019: Teammate of trapped Thai boys remembers day his friends vanished People around the globe are watching and holding their breath as experts develop a plan to rescue the 12 boys and their coach trapped in a cave complex in northern Thailand. From the Chilean miners to Elon Musk, the world is watching rescue efforts for boys in Thailand",
        "author": "Rebecca Tan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | China\u2019s failing satellite is just one example of a massive space debris problem (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7736",
        "date": "2018-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/29/you-know-that-chinese-satellite-crashing-to-earth-within-days-its-not-alone/",
        "text": "BERLIN\u00a0\u2014 If you want to catch a last glimpse of Chinese satellite\u00a0Tiangong-1, you better hurry. Circling the Earth at a speed of\u00a017,500 miles per hour every 90 minutes, the 19,000-pound satellite\u00a0will probably have vanished by the end of this weekend, to reappear as a fireball for up to a minute or more somewhere over the skies of southern Europe \u2014 or perhaps somewhere else. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile nobody can be certain where exactly the disintegrating satellite may literally fall from the sky\u00a0\u2014 with\u00a0pieces weighing up to 220 pounds expected to\u00a0hit\u00a0Earth\u2019s surface\u00a0\u2014 the satellite\u2019s fate has long been sealed. Even if you miss this one, scientists say there\u2019s plenty more to come in the junk-strewn skies of our planet\u2019s near orbit.A Chinese spacecraft is falling out of the sky. It\u2019s not supposed to happen like this.The first warning signs for the Chinese station came in\u00a02016 when it failed to respond to commands by its operators.\u00a0Tiangong-1, which translates as\u00a0\u201cheavenly palace,\u201d\u00a0would eventually,\u00a0according to my colleagues,\u00a0turn\u00a0\u201cinto a man-made\u201d meteor.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its latest estimate, the European Space Agency (ESA) predicts the satellite pieces will probably hit Earth \u201cfrom midday on 31 March to the early afternoon of 1 April\u00a0(in UTC time).\" UTC is ahead of\u00a0Eastern Time\u00a0by four hours. The estimate will continue to be updated by ESA over the next days.While the\u00a0threat of the debris hitting a human is extremely small, the drama that could unfold over Europe\u2019s skies this weekend may be only be a first glimpse into a problem that will worsen over the next decades, according to some bleak predictions.T-minus one week until China\u2019s space lab crashes to Earth. Here\u2019s what it will look like.The European Space Agency estimates that there are now\u00a0more than 170 million pieces of space debris in circulation, though only 29,000 of those are larger than\u00a0about four inches. While the smaller space debris objects may not pose a threat to Earth because they would disintegrate before reaching the surface, \u201cany of these objects can cause harm to an operational spacecraft. For example, a collision with a (four-inch) object would entail a catastrophic fragmentation of a typical satellite,\u201d according to the European Space Agency. Smaller pieces could still destroy spacecraft systems\u00a0or penetrate shields, possibly making bigger satellites such as\u00a0Tiangong-1 unresponsive and turning them into massive pieces of debris themselves.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSince the first satellites were launched in the mid-20th century, Earth\u2019s orbit has long been treated by nations as a waste site nobody felt responsible for. Spent rockets or old satellites now mingle with\u00a0other pieces of trash left behind by human space programs. All of those pieces\u00a0zoom around faster than speeding bullets.Journey from our solar system to Earth and explore the man-made objects along the way. (European Space Agency)And while\u00a0the international community\u00a0is gradually becoming more aware of the challenges this poses, much of the damage is already done.Speaking at a conference in 2011,\u00a0Gen. William Shelton, a commander with the U.S. Air Force Space Command, predicted much of the\u00a0orbit around Earth \u201cmay be a pretty tough neighborhood ... in the not too distant future,\u201d according to the astronomy news website\u00a0Space.com. The U.S. military and NASA are both in charge of perhaps the most elaborate scheme to track objects bigger than\u00a0four inches to predict their flight paths and move active equipment out of the way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe problem, Shelton indicated at the time,\u00a0is that there's already enough debris in space\u00a0to cause an exponential rise in the number of circulating pieces. The more pieces there are, the higher the likelihood that they will eventually collide, creating\u00a0even more smaller objects that can still be dangerous to other satellites or space labs.On Earth, ecosystems can sometimes fix\u00a0themselves to some extent, even if it takes decades or hundreds of years. But in space, the problem of debris will only get worse.One proposed\u00a0solution would\u00a0be to persuade nations to limit their debris and to prevent a repeat of past mistakes. China, for example, is estimated to have produced up to 25 percent of today\u2019s objects in circulation during an antisatellite test in 2007 in the low Earth orbit.On these NASA graphics, you can see why the international community was outraged when China added to that zone\u2019s debris density. Congestion isn\u2019t spread evenly around Earth: While\u00a0there are some scattered pieces farther away, there is a concentration of objects within the so-called geosynchronous region,\u00a0at about 22,235 miles altitude.But the highest density of objects can be found in low Earth orbit \u2014 within 1,240 miles of our planet\u00a0\u2014 which is the area China targeted in its test. That\u2019s also where most satellites can be found.China has\u00a0continued its military missile tests since 2007, although it has refrained from destroying another satellite in orbit. Observers still fear that other nations may launch their own antisatellite programs, provoking a sort of arms race in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith\u00a0more than 50 nations now operating their own space programs, initiatives to limit the release of space debris have hardly become any easier. Some technological advances have had a limited impact\u00a0\u2014 for instance by making spent rocket boosters fall back to Earth quicker than in the past. (Following that rationale, one could argue that this weekend\u2019s satellite crash may\u00a0in fact help to\u00a0decongest the orbit.) Meanwhile, other\u00a0nations, such as Britain and Switzerland, have experimented with\u00a0schemes to clean up the mess by collecting the debris in circulation. But the proposed programs are costly\u00a0and inefficient, legal challenges aside.\u201cThere are no salvage laws in space. Even if we had the political will to [salvage junk], which I don\u2019t think we do, we couldn\u2019t bring down the big pieces because we don\u2019t own them,\u201d Joan Johnson-Freese,\u00a0a Naval War College professor, told The Washington Post in 2014.That\u2019s why some academics are arguing that the lower orbit might soon be lost altogether. Instead, they believe, scientists should develop smaller satellites that can circulate closer to Earth\u00a0\u2014 and in a safe distance from a part of the orbit that may eventually become a satellite kill zone.More on WorldViews:\u00a0Three big questions about a Trump-Kim summitShe was Ukraine\u2019s \u2018Joan of Arc.\u2019 Now she\u2019s accused of plotting a coup in Kiev.Kim Jong Un follows his father\u2019s blueprint with a secret armored train journey to China Aside from that 19,000-pound Chinese satellite set to crash down this weekend, there are many more pieces of space junk in orbit. China\u2019s failing satellite is just one example of a massive space debris problem",
        "author": "Rick Noack"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.A.E. Mars Mission Is Ready for Launch (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7737",
        "date": "2020-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000007246135/uae-japan-mars-mission.html",
        "text": "The United Arab Emirates mission, known as Hope, is an orbiter spacecraft that was brought to the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, where it is scheduled for liftoff Sunday afternoon. The United Arab Emirates mission, known as Hope, is an orbiter spacecraft that was brought to the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, where it is scheduled for liftoff Sunday afternoon. The United Arab Emirates mission, known as Hope, is an orbiter spacecraft that was brought to the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, where it is scheduled for liftoff Sunday afternoon.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Successfully Docks at International Space Station (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7738",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000007893264/russia-module-space-station-dock.html",
        "text": "The new 23-ton module called Nauka acts as a science and housing laboratory. The spacecraft, equipped with solar panels, also makes the Russian segment of the station less dependent on energy coming from the American side. The new 23-ton module called Nauka acts as a science and housing laboratory. The spacecraft, equipped with solar panels, also makes the Russian segment of the station less dependent on energy coming from the American side. The new 23-ton module called Nauka acts as a science and housing laboratory. The spacecraft, equipped with solar panels, also makes the Russian segment of the station less dependent on energy coming from the American side.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Successfully Docks at International Space Station (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7739",
        "date": "2021-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000007893264/russia-module-space-station-dock.html",
        "text": "The new 23-ton module called Nauka acts as a science and housing laboratory. The spacecraft, equipped with solar panels, also makes the Russian segment of the station less dependent on energy coming from the American side. The new 23-ton module called Nauka acts as a science and housing laboratory. The spacecraft, equipped with solar panels, also makes the Russian segment of the station less dependent on energy coming from the American side. The new 23-ton module called Nauka acts as a science and housing laboratory. The spacecraft, equipped with solar panels, also makes the Russian segment of the station less dependent on energy coming from the American side.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 4 Astronauts to Space (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7740",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000007726547/spacex-nasa-astronaut-launch.html",
        "text": "A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft took off Friday morning from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts who will begin their six-month stay in space. A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft took off Friday morning from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts who will begin their six-month stay in space. A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft took off Friday morning from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts who will begin their six-month stay in space.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches 4 Astronauts to Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7741",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000007726547/spacex-nasa-astronaut-launch.html",
        "text": "A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft took off Friday morning from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts who will begin their six-month stay in space. A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft took off Friday morning from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts who will begin their six-month stay in space. A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft took off Friday morning from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts who will begin their six-month stay in space.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Agrees to Cooperate with NASA\u2019s Deep Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7742",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-agrees-to-cooperate-with-nasas-deep-space-gateway-program-1506529465?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=112",
        "text": "With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration leading the way, and other national partners on the current space station leaning toward participation, the concept of a Deep Space Gateway is gaining momentum.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Igor Komarov,\n\n\n\n director general of Roscosmos, told the conference in Adelaide that the project would refine technologies needed to pursue the long-term exploration of Mars.\n\n\nNASA is still studying design options and budget questions are still unresolved. A number U.S. aerospace contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n have been asked to develop proposed construction and risk-reduction plans. The earliest sections of the proposed modular gateway\u2014which is expected to include crew quarters and space for scientific experiments\u2014won\u2019t be launched for several more years.\nBut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n the acting NASA administrator, said in a statement that the agency was \u201cpleased to see growing international interest in moving\u201d in this direction.\n\u201cStatements such as the one signed with Roscosmos show the gateway concept as an enabler\u201d for \u201caffordable and sustainable manned exploration,\u201d Mr. Lightfoot said.\nNASA in the past has stressed that broad international cooperation is an essential ingredient of any plans to explore the red planet.\nIn spite of the ongoing diplomatic friction over the Kremlin\u2019s effort to influence the 2016 presidential election and subsequent clashes with Washington, Russian activities on the space station have been unaffected. Russian rockets and spacecraft continue to routinely transport U.S. astronauts to and from orbit, offering a bright spot in an otherwise troubled relationship between the two governments.\nOthers considering participation in the gateway include Japan, the European Space Agency and Canada. While those groups have been engaged in extensive private discussions with NASA leaders about a potential framework for joining forces, until now Russia has equivocated about its desire to participate.\nIn recent months, various Kremlin officials have been quoted as saying they may prefer to build an all-Russian replacement for the space station, or possibly team up with Beijing on a different project. Still others have stressed returning to the surface of the moon as the top priority.\nMany U.S. space experts, however, discounted such statements on the grounds that the Kremlin doesn\u2019t have the financial wherewithal to develop projects that would compete directly with NASA\u2019s blueprint for manned exploration through the mid-2030s. The Kremlin recently delayed development of a proposed heavy-lift rocket powerful enough to carry cosmonauts to the surface of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe International Space Station in Earth orbit on Aug. 21, 2017, as the shadow of the moon is cast across the U.S. during the solar eclipse.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Randy Bresnik/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe current space station, constructed at a cost of roughly $100 billion as an orbiting laboratory, is slated to go out of service in 2024. But some supporters, including certain NASA officials, advocate extending that to 2028. The U.S. spends over $3 billion annually on space station operations, while NASA and industry officials envision most of those dollars eventually shifting to work on the gateway.\nAs outlined by NASA, the proposed gateway would be open to companies as well as foreign governments seeking to conduct research. The project also would be used to perfect technologies, ranging from electric propulsion to in-orbit refueling of spacecraft, required for long-distance missions to Mars.\nNASA is spending roughly $2 billion annually to develop a heavy-lift rocket, called the Space Launch System, able to launch the building blocks of such a gateway and then send astronauts to the facility.\nAt the conference, the president of JAXA, Japan\u2019s space agency, confirmed talks are under way for its participation in the gateway project. But Boeing, which is the prime contractor for the current space station, has warned against establishing an arbitrary deadline for phasing out the station before a clear-cut replacement is available.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite increasingly strained diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow, Russia\u2019s top space official agreed to participate in U.S.-led efforts to devise a replacement for the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Agrees to Cooperate with NASA\u2019s Deep Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7743",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-agrees-to-cooperate-with-nasas-deep-space-gateway-program-1506529465?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=22",
        "text": "With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration leading the way, and other national partners on the current space station leaning toward participation, the concept of a Deep Space Gateway is gaining momentum.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Igor Komarov,\n\n\n\n director general of Roscosmos, told the conference in Adelaide that the project would refine technologies needed to pursue the long-term exploration of Mars.\n\n\nNASA is still studying design options and budget questions are still unresolved. A number U.S. aerospace contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n have been asked to develop proposed construction and risk-reduction plans. The earliest sections of the proposed modular gateway\u2014which is expected to include crew quarters and space for scientific experiments\u2014won\u2019t be launched for several more years.\nBut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n the acting NASA administrator, said in a statement that the agency was \u201cpleased to see growing international interest in moving\u201d in this direction.\n\u201cStatements such as the one signed with Roscosmos show the gateway concept as an enabler\u201d for \u201caffordable and sustainable manned exploration,\u201d Mr. Lightfoot said.\nNASA in the past has stressed that broad international cooperation is an essential ingredient of any plans to explore the red planet.\nIn spite of the ongoing diplomatic friction over the Kremlin\u2019s effort to influence the 2016 presidential election and subsequent clashes with Washington, Russian activities on the space station have been unaffected. Russian rockets and spacecraft continue to routinely transport U.S. astronauts to and from orbit, offering a bright spot in an otherwise troubled relationship between the two governments.\nOthers considering participation in the gateway include Japan, the European Space Agency and Canada. While those groups have been engaged in extensive private discussions with NASA leaders about a potential framework for joining forces, until now Russia has equivocated about its desire to participate.\nIn recent months, various Kremlin officials have been quoted as saying they may prefer to build an all-Russian replacement for the space station, or possibly team up with Beijing on a different project. Still others have stressed returning to the surface of the moon as the top priority.\nMany U.S. space experts, however, discounted such statements on the grounds that the Kremlin doesn\u2019t have the financial wherewithal to develop projects that would compete directly with NASA\u2019s blueprint for manned exploration through the mid-2030s. The Kremlin recently delayed development of a proposed heavy-lift rocket powerful enough to carry cosmonauts to the surface of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe International Space Station in Earth orbit on Aug. 21, 2017, as the shadow of the moon is cast across the U.S. during the solar eclipse.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Randy Bresnik/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe current space station, constructed at a cost of roughly $100 billion as an orbiting laboratory, is slated to go out of service in 2024. But some supporters, including certain NASA officials, advocate extending that to 2028. The U.S. spends over $3 billion annually on space station operations, while NASA and industry officials envision most of those dollars eventually shifting to work on the gateway.\nAs outlined by NASA, the proposed gateway would be open to companies as well as foreign governments seeking to conduct research. The project also would be used to perfect technologies, ranging from electric propulsion to in-orbit refueling of spacecraft, required for long-distance missions to Mars.\nNASA is spending roughly $2 billion annually to develop a heavy-lift rocket, called the Space Launch System, able to launch the building blocks of such a gateway and then send astronauts to the facility.\nAt the conference, the president of JAXA, Japan\u2019s space agency, confirmed talks are under way for its participation in the gateway project. But Boeing, which is the prime contractor for the current space station, has warned against establishing an arbitrary deadline for phasing out the station before a clear-cut replacement is available.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite increasingly strained diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow, Russia\u2019s top space official agreed to participate in U.S.-led efforts to devise a replacement for the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Agrees to Cooperate with NASA\u2019s Deep Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7744",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-agrees-to-cooperate-with-nasas-deep-space-gateway-program-1506529465?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=86",
        "text": "With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration leading the way, and other national partners on the current space station leaning toward participation, the concept of a Deep Space Gateway is gaining momentum.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Igor Komarov,\n\n\n\n director general of Roscosmos, told the conference in Adelaide that the project would refine technologies needed to pursue the long-term exploration of Mars.\n\n\nNASA is still studying design options and budget questions are still unresolved. A number U.S. aerospace contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n have been asked to develop proposed construction and risk-reduction plans. The earliest sections of the proposed modular gateway\u2014which is expected to include crew quarters and space for scientific experiments\u2014won\u2019t be launched for several more years.\nBut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n the acting NASA administrator, said in a statement that the agency was \u201cpleased to see growing international interest in moving\u201d in this direction.\n\u201cStatements such as the one signed with Roscosmos show the gateway concept as an enabler\u201d for \u201caffordable and sustainable manned exploration,\u201d Mr. Lightfoot said.\nNASA in the past has stressed that broad international cooperation is an essential ingredient of any plans to explore the red planet.\nIn spite of the ongoing diplomatic friction over the Kremlin\u2019s effort to influence the 2016 presidential election and subsequent clashes with Washington, Russian activities on the space station have been unaffected. Russian rockets and spacecraft continue to routinely transport U.S. astronauts to and from orbit, offering a bright spot in an otherwise troubled relationship between the two governments.\nOthers considering participation in the gateway include Japan, the European Space Agency and Canada. While those groups have been engaged in extensive private discussions with NASA leaders about a potential framework for joining forces, until now Russia has equivocated about its desire to participate.\nIn recent months, various Kremlin officials have been quoted as saying they may prefer to build an all-Russian replacement for the space station, or possibly team up with Beijing on a different project. Still others have stressed returning to the surface of the moon as the top priority.\nMany U.S. space experts, however, discounted such statements on the grounds that the Kremlin doesn\u2019t have the financial wherewithal to develop projects that would compete directly with NASA\u2019s blueprint for manned exploration through the mid-2030s. The Kremlin recently delayed development of a proposed heavy-lift rocket powerful enough to carry cosmonauts to the surface of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe International Space Station in Earth orbit on Aug. 21, 2017, as the shadow of the moon is cast across the U.S. during the solar eclipse.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Randy Bresnik/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe current space station, constructed at a cost of roughly $100 billion as an orbiting laboratory, is slated to go out of service in 2024. But some supporters, including certain NASA officials, advocate extending that to 2028. The U.S. spends over $3 billion annually on space station operations, while NASA and industry officials envision most of those dollars eventually shifting to work on the gateway.\nAs outlined by NASA, the proposed gateway would be open to companies as well as foreign governments seeking to conduct research. The project also would be used to perfect technologies, ranging from electric propulsion to in-orbit refueling of spacecraft, required for long-distance missions to Mars.\nNASA is spending roughly $2 billion annually to develop a heavy-lift rocket, called the Space Launch System, able to launch the building blocks of such a gateway and then send astronauts to the facility.\nAt the conference, the president of JAXA, Japan\u2019s space agency, confirmed talks are under way for its participation in the gateway project. But Boeing, which is the prime contractor for the current space station, has warned against establishing an arbitrary deadline for phasing out the station before a clear-cut replacement is available.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite increasingly strained diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow, Russia\u2019s top space official agreed to participate in U.S.-led efforts to devise a replacement for the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Agrees to Cooperate with NASA\u2019s Deep Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7745",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-agrees-to-cooperate-with-nasas-deep-space-gateway-program-1506529465?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=76",
        "text": "With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration leading the way, and other national partners on the current space station leaning toward participation, the concept of a Deep Space Gateway is gaining momentum.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Igor Komarov,\n\n\n\n director general of Roscosmos, told the conference in Adelaide that the project would refine technologies needed to pursue the long-term exploration of Mars.\n\n\nNASA is still studying design options and budget questions are still unresolved. A number U.S. aerospace contractors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n have been asked to develop proposed construction and risk-reduction plans. The earliest sections of the proposed modular gateway\u2014which is expected to include crew quarters and space for scientific experiments\u2014won\u2019t be launched for several more years.\nBut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n the acting NASA administrator, said in a statement that the agency was \u201cpleased to see growing international interest in moving\u201d in this direction.\n\u201cStatements such as the one signed with Roscosmos show the gateway concept as an enabler\u201d for \u201caffordable and sustainable manned exploration,\u201d Mr. Lightfoot said.\nNASA in the past has stressed that broad international cooperation is an essential ingredient of any plans to explore the red planet.\nIn spite of the ongoing diplomatic friction over the Kremlin\u2019s effort to influence the 2016 presidential election and subsequent clashes with Washington, Russian activities on the space station have been unaffected. Russian rockets and spacecraft continue to routinely transport U.S. astronauts to and from orbit, offering a bright spot in an otherwise troubled relationship between the two governments.\nOthers considering participation in the gateway include Japan, the European Space Agency and Canada. While those groups have been engaged in extensive private discussions with NASA leaders about a potential framework for joining forces, until now Russia has equivocated about its desire to participate.\nIn recent months, various Kremlin officials have been quoted as saying they may prefer to build an all-Russian replacement for the space station, or possibly team up with Beijing on a different project. Still others have stressed returning to the surface of the moon as the top priority.\nMany U.S. space experts, however, discounted such statements on the grounds that the Kremlin doesn\u2019t have the financial wherewithal to develop projects that would compete directly with NASA\u2019s blueprint for manned exploration through the mid-2030s. The Kremlin recently delayed development of a proposed heavy-lift rocket powerful enough to carry cosmonauts to the surface of the moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe International Space Station in Earth orbit on Aug. 21, 2017, as the shadow of the moon is cast across the U.S. during the solar eclipse.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Randy Bresnik/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe current space station, constructed at a cost of roughly $100 billion as an orbiting laboratory, is slated to go out of service in 2024. But some supporters, including certain NASA officials, advocate extending that to 2028. The U.S. spends over $3 billion annually on space station operations, while NASA and industry officials envision most of those dollars eventually shifting to work on the gateway.\nAs outlined by NASA, the proposed gateway would be open to companies as well as foreign governments seeking to conduct research. The project also would be used to perfect technologies, ranging from electric propulsion to in-orbit refueling of spacecraft, required for long-distance missions to Mars.\nNASA is spending roughly $2 billion annually to develop a heavy-lift rocket, called the Space Launch System, able to launch the building blocks of such a gateway and then send astronauts to the facility.\nAt the conference, the president of JAXA, Japan\u2019s space agency, confirmed talks are under way for its participation in the gateway project. But Boeing, which is the prime contractor for the current space station, has warned against establishing an arbitrary deadline for phasing out the station before a clear-cut replacement is available.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Despite increasingly strained diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow, Russia\u2019s top space official agreed to participate in U.S.-led efforts to devise a replacement for the international space station. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Tests an Anti-Satellite Weapon, U.S. Officials Say (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7746",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-tests-an-anti-satellite-weapon-u-s-officials-say-11595545670?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=12",
        "text": "The test comes as U.S. and Russians officials are scheduled to meet next week in Vienna\n to discuss security of space systems and arms control issues.\nThe U.S. military depends heavily on its reconnaissance and communications satellites,\n and Russia\u2019s efforts to develop the means to attack them is a serious concern for\n the Pentagon.\n\n\nIn addition to its development of orbiting killer satellites, Russia tested an anti-satellite\n weapon in April in which a missile was fired into space from a site in northern Russia,\n U.S. officials and non-governmental experts said at the time.\nNo target was destroyed in that test. But the April operation and July\u2019s test demonstrated\n Russia\u2019s determination to develop multiple means of attacking U.S. and allied space\n systems, Gen. John Raymond, the head of the U.S. Space Command, said in a statement.\nThe stage for the July test was set late last year when the Russians launched a satellite\n labeled Cosmos 2542 into orbit. That satellite released a smaller, armed satellite\n labeled Cosmos 2543.\nU.S. officials expressed concern in February that the two Russian satellites were\n maneuvering near an American KH-11 spy satellite.\nIn July, however, Cosmos 2543 moved close to another Russian satellite and \u201cinjected\n a new object into orbit,\u201d the U.S. Space Command said. No target was hit, but the\n U.S. military says Russia\u2019s intent was to test the ability to attack a satellite.\n\n\n\n\n\n From the Archives\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Russian President Vladimir Putin used his annual state of the union address to show\n off a series of new armaments, including nuclear weapons he claims are capable of\n penetrating U.S. air-defense systems.\n \n\n\nRussia has been urging a treaty to ban the deployment of weapons in space. It asserts\n that it wasn\u2019t test-firing a weapon but was carrying out a trial of a new \u201cinspector\n satellite\u201d that is intended to monitor Russian space assets in orbit and transmit\n that data to Russian ground stations.\n\u201cOne of the domestically produced satellites was examined from a close distance by\n specialized equipment of a small spacecraft during trials of state-of-the-art items,\u201d\n the Russian Defense ministry said in a July 15 statement, according to the Interfax\n news agency.\nChristopher Ford, a senior State Department official, said Russia was being hypocritical\n by testing anti-satellite weapons while urging space arms control.\n\u201cRussia aims to restrict the capabilities of the United States while clearly having\n no intention of halting its own counterspace program,\u201d Mr. Ford said in a statement.\nThere are no arms control agreements that prohibit the Russian anti-satellite tests.\n The Trump administration asserts that it wouldn\u2019t be practical to negotiate an arms\n control accord banning space weapons because it would be difficult to verify, but\n it favors the development of voluntary norms of behavior and more transparency.\nBrian Weeden, a former Air Force officer who is at the Secure World Foundation, a\n think tank on the safe use of space, said it was possible Cosmos 2543 was both an\n inspector satellite and an anti-satellite weapon.\n\u201cThe way this object was released suggests it was a weapons test,\u201d he said. \u201cBut before\n that, it was behaving like an inspector satellite.\u201d\nPresident Trump spoke with Russian President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Vladimir Putin\n \n\n\n\n on Thursday on arms control, the coronavirus pandemic and Mr. Putin\u2019s proposal for\n a meeting of the permanent members of the Security Council, the White House and Kremlin\n said. Neither side said if space was discussed.\n\u2014Georgi Kanchev contributed to this article.\nWrite to Michael R. Gordon at \n michael.gordon@wsj.com Russia conducted an unusual anti-satellite test earlier this month, provoking concern\n            that Moscow is working to improve its capability to attack American space-based systems,\n            the U.S Space Command said. ",
        "author": "Michael R. Gordon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Two Bags of Cash for Boko Haram: The Untold Story of How Nigeria Freed Its Kidnapped Girls (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7747",
        "date": "2017-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-bags-of-cash-for-boko-haram-the-untold-story-of-how-nigeria-freed-its-kidnapped-girls-1513957354?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=82",
        "text": "Inside the trucks sat five captured fighters, freshly extracted from prison, the first piece of the government\u2019s proposed bargain. In a separate vehicle, according to people involved in the deal, a security detail guarded Nigeria\u2019s principal concession to the Islamist terror group, a black duffel bag containing \u20ac2 million in plastic-wrapped cash. The journey had started under a drizzling rain in a town torched by insurgents and bombed by jets during a decade of war. Lookouts were charting their progress, the passengers assumed, and the road was notorious for improvised explosives. One misstep could derail months of planning. The two men most responsible for engineering this moment had split up that afternoon. For nearly three years, they had roamed the world together, organizing secret talks with Boko Haram. One of them was \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zannah Mustapha,\n\n\n\n a former Nigerian barrister who had founded a school for orphans. He had listened to endless diatribes and broken up fights at the negotiating table. He had mourned when other deals collapsed in a hail of gunfire.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nZannah Mustapha, a former barrister, served as lead mediator in talks that freed 103 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram.\n\n\n\nThe other man was a Swiss government agent who had served as Mustapha\u2019s partner and mentor during the talks. He monitored the scene from a staging ground a few kilometers behind. The man\u2019s identity was such a closely guarded secret that even high-ranking Nigerians didn\u2019t know his full name. As an operative for the Human Security Division, a little-known cog in Switzerland\u2019s diplomatic machine, he preferred it that way. Not far away, 82 young women cloaked in black veils stumbled through the tall grass toward the rendezvous point, flanked by masked militants with guns. Hours earlier, their captors had ordered them to pack their belongings and start walking. They weren\u2019t told where. They had no idea they were the world\u2019s most famous hostages. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Naomi Adamu\n\n\n\n had once been an ordinary student at the Chibok Government Secondary School. She was older than most of her classmates. She played soccer. She studied mathematics in her dormitory bunk bed. Now, as she shuffled through the wilderness at gunpoint after 1,102 days in captivity, her eyes were hollow, her skin drawn tightly over her cheekbones. The Chibok schoolgirls carried only a few visible possessions: strips of colored cloth, flip-flops and small twigs for pinning their hair. Tied around Adamu\u2019s waist, concealed from view, was something the men with guns didn\u2019t know about\u2014an article of defiance. It was a diary, one of the few surviving written records of the girls\u2019 ordeal. When the Red Cross convoy arrived at the rendezvous point, the drivers pulled to the side of the road. Hiding in the bushes and in branches of acacia trees, snipers were training their rifles. Zannah Mustapha, 58 years old, stepped out of the truck. He wore a pair of Calvin Klein spectacles and, in honor of the occasion, a crisp gray Kaftan-style robe. From the scrubland opposite him, a group of wiry young fighters in tattered fatigues gathered, cradling Kalashnikovs. Behind them stood Boko Haram\u2019s end of the bargain: Naomi Adamu and 81 of her classmates, the subjects of one of the largest manhunts in world history. The captives huddled close and stared ahead, their eyes fixed. Some linked arms, others held hands. Mustapha noticed that one girl\u2019s arm was in a sling. Another was missing a leg. Since their 2014 kidnapping, the Chibok students had faced every manner of hardship, dragged from one remote camp to the next. More than a dozen had died from illness or military airstrikes. For all the girls knew, this could be the moment their ordeal ended, or a cruel disappointment. Mustapha began to read the girls\u2019 names aloud from a list. As a sign of respect, he had practiced how to pronounce them. He did not make eye contact with the hostages, however. If the transaction unraveled, he did not want to be haunted by the memories. One of the militants removed the lens cap from a battered camcorder and began filming. A Boko Haram commander asked each hostage the same two questions: \u201cWere you raped?\u201d \u201cWere you abused?\u201d No, they all answered.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoko Haram released 82 abducted girls to Nigerian authorities on May 6, 2017, in exchange for five imprisoned commanders and two million euros in cash.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ZANNAH Mustapha/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBoko Haram fighters embrace members of the insurgent group after their release from prison.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ZANNAH Mustapha/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nThe trauma the Chibok girls had endured as Boko Haram\u2019s captives was extraordinary, but not unprecedented. As a tenet of its ideology and business model, the insurgents had taken thousands of other young Nigerians, many of whom were raped or conscripted as fighters. Most of these abductions went unnoticed. This one didn\u2019t. News of this particular kidnapping caught fire as celebrities started a global outcry demanding their release. As it grew, it became the most prominent example of mass global activism on social media. The high point came on May 7, 2014, when then-First Lady \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michelle Obama\n\n\n\n tweeted a photo of herself holding a placard with the hashtag: #BringBackOurGirls. All at once, a desperately poor and warring region of Nigeria\u2014and the hostages hidden there\u2014became a central preoccupation of the global war on terror.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe remote, rugged topography of northern Nigeria.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe extreme poverty of northern Nigeria has helped Boko Haram build an insurgency around an apocalyptic vision.\n\n\n\nThe story of the Chibok girls, as it is commonly understood, reflects a landmark moment in world history. A simple hashtag on Twitter spurred seven nations to dispatch billions of dollars in armed forces, drones, satellites and sophisticated surveillance equipment. That combination of digital activism and international cooperation cut through the battle lines of a near decadelong civil war and helped Nigeria bring the girls home. The full story, never before reported, says otherwise. In interviews, many Nigerians involved in negotiations for the girls, from cabinet ministers to soldiers at the front, expressed bewilderment that a series of tweets could so thoroughly distort the priorities of a conflict that had been grinding to a stalemate. Nigerian officials complained bitterly of social media\u2019s intrusion and the compromises it forced them to consider. Some believed the girls\u2019 fame only prolonged their captivity. Others resented the lack of focus placed on tens of thousands of other children the insurgents had abducted or murdered. Then there is the matter of the ransom, which has never before been disclosed. Nigeria\u2019s government hasn\u2019t publicly detailed what it offered Boko Haram, or where any funds came from. Several senior officials confirmed that the swap included the release of five captured militants and a total of three million euros, delivered in two drop-offs. \u201cWe had no choice,\u201d said one cabinet minister. \u201cAnd if we had to pay the same price again, we would.\u201d To a threadbare insurgency that had been driven into the mountains, the two payments in 2016 and 2017 represented a timely windfall. Since they collected the money, the group has stepped up its terrorist attacks. The number of suicide bombs detonated in Nigeria, most strapped to children, has seen a fourfold increase from the previous year.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVictims of a November 15 suicide bombing in Maiduguri. A young boy and a woman seven months pregnant were among the victims.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nResidents gather to mourn the victims of a suicide bombing and prepare their bodies for burial. Since Nigeria paid Boko Haram for its kidnapped girls, the reinvigorated group has increased its terror attacks. Published Credit: Glenna Gordon for The Wall Street Journal\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBodies of victims from the Nov. 15 suicide bombing.\n\n\n\nAt the exchange point, as he recited the list of names, Mustapha had a different view on the potential consequences of the deal. Bringing back these girls was, for him, the crowning achievement of his second act\u2014a humanitarian mission devoted to helping Nigeria\u2019s children. To analyze the cost of freeing the girls was to miss the central point. Their release, he thought, was a prelude to ending the war. \u201c#Bringbackourgirls had become the lock to the conflict,\u201d he said, in an interview after the girls were freed. \u201cI am trying to pick the lock.\u201d When asked about the price paid for the girls\u2019 freedom, he pointed a finger skyward: \u201cThat\u2019s between me and God.\u201d The following account of the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, their captivity and Nigeria\u2019s attempts to free them is based on dozens of interviews on three continents with West African, European and American officials, including intermediaries between the warring parties. Details of the girls\u2019 captivity come from their handlers, the officials who debriefed them, and Naomi Adamu, the first of the Chibok girls to talk so extensively about the ordeal.The Kidnapping Nearly three years earlier, close to midnight on April 14, 2014, the girls of the Chibok school sat up in their bunk beds. A group of men in pickup trucks were bearing down on the small town of Chibok, firing rockets and assault rifles. A dozen or so soldiers stationed nearby ran for their lives. There was no electricity in the single-story schoolhouse and the girls had only flashlights to guide them. Outside their dormitory windows, they could hear the rumble of approaching engines. Many of their parents and neighbors had fled to the nearby mountains, some wearing nightgowns. Hiding behind shrubs and in the crevices of rocks, the adults watched the fighters swarm toward their target\u2014the Chibok school. Parents furiously dialed their children. Cowering in his boxer shorts on the side of the mountain, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samuel Yama\n\n\n\n saw his phone light up. It was his sister, Margaret, a student. \u201cShe could not even speak and I was telling her to flee,\u201d he said; \u201cShe was in tears...then the call cut off.\u201d Outside, the girls heard voices. \u201cDon\u2019t worry! We are soldiers. Gather!\u201d The school\u2019s elderly security guard had fled. The girls didn\u2019t know what to make of the men ordering them to come into the moonlit courtyard. \u201cDon\u2019t worry, we are soldiers,\u201d they repeated. The students, some carrying Bibles, tiptoed through their rooms toward the voices outside, swimming through darkness.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA view of the small town of Chibok, where militants abducted 276 schoolgirls from their dormitory in 2014.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA house in Chibok. Corruption, military coups and a limping economy have made northern Nigeria one of the world\u2019s poorest regions.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe twisted metal frames of bunk beds are all that remains of the Chibok Government Secondary School. After abducting its students, Boko Haram burned it to the ground.\n\n\n\nFor centuries, Chibok had been a place of refuge, remote and shielded by mountains. Families had settled there in the 1700s to escape the slave trade. It was among the last outposts to fall under British colonial rule. In 1941, a missionary couple arrived from the Illinois-based Church of the Brethren. Chibok became a majority-Christian hamlet in Nigeria\u2019s Muslim heartland, a place where people of both faiths lived side by side. By the turn of the 21st century, corruption, military coups and a limping economy created a wave of unemployment across the impoverished north. Thousands of disillusioned young men\u2014including jobless college graduates\u2014began listening to the teachings of radical Islam.\n\n\n 200 miles niger chad 200 km Maiduguri benin Chibok nigeria Abuja Lagos cameroon Gulf of Guinea \n\n\nIn Maiduguri, a city of roughly one million people 80 miles from Chibok, a baby-faced cleric named \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mohammed Yusuf\n\n\n\n built a following by declaring that Western education, or boko, was haram, sinful. The earth was flat, the cleric argued, and evaporation was a lie\u2014Allah caused rain. Western education was a scam to distance Nigerians from their maker, he said, and democracy was an affront to God. As Boko Haram\u2019s ranks swelled, Yusuf and his lieutenants toured the northeast in buses strapped with speakers, urging Muslims to sever their ties to the government and follow Shariah law. During a 2009 street battle between his followers and police, Yusuf was handcuffed and pulled into a station. A crowd watched as officers shot him in the chest.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA still from a video released in October, 2014 by Boko Haram\u2019s commander, Abubakar Shekau.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nThe leader who took charge after Yusuf\u2019s murder pursued a more radical path. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abubakar Shekau,\n\n\n\n a bearded and bellowing cleric, burned with anger and wrath, propagating an apocalyptic vision. The Nigerian government sent envoys to reason with Shekau. They came back in disbelief. He demanded all of Nigeria adopt Shariah as a precondition for peace talks. Shekau redirected Boko Haram into the countryside, shedding its reclusiveness in favor of a full-blown insurgency. His army commandeered tanks and antiaircraft guns from the military and exacted revenge on communities that resisted them. In hourlong video sermons, Shekau threw tirades at Queen Elizabeth II and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abraham Lincoln,\n\n\n\n rambling, cackling and jabbing his finger into the lens. \u201cWe will kill whoever practices democracy!\u201d he screamed. \u201cWe should decapitate them! We should amputate their limbs! We should mutilate!\u201d \u201cKill, kill, kill!\u201d By the early 2010s, Boko Haram was regularly slaughtering moderate Muslim leaders and dispatching suicide bombers to crowded markets. Kalashnikov-wielding militants hanging off the backs of scooters attacked villages, spraying bullets indiscriminately at adults and children and setting everything on fire. Tens of thousands died. Hundreds of thousands fled. Schools closed by the hundreds. Some were burned down by their own students, converts to Shekau\u2019s army, now one of the world\u2019s most deadly. To keep feeding its ranks, Boko Haram began kidnapping children. In their red-tin-roofed schoolhouse, the Chibok girls were learning that the earth was round. \u201cPROOF THE EARTH IS SPHERICAL,\u201d the students were told to copy in their notebooks. \u201cPictures taken from spacecraft at great height clearly show the curvature of the earth.\u201d It wasn\u2019t just this school\u2019s curriculum that violated Shekau\u2019s vision\u2014it was the mixing of faiths. Its students included Muslims and Christians. Their parents were neighbors and friends. The students seemed destined to become northeastern Nigeria\u2019s next generation of educated women. Hauwa Nkeki, a star volleyball player, was studying to be a nurse, or maybe an economist. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Elizabeth Joseph\n\n\n\n read the Bible at night by lantern. Dorcas Yakuba passed the days writing love letters to a boy who had nicknamed her \u201cthe remote control of my life.\u201d Naomi Adamu was one of the school\u2019s more serious students, \u201ca hardworking girl,\u201d as her mother, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kolo Adamu,\n\n\n\n described her. She also had a goofy sense of humor she shared with a few close friends. As she prepared for final exams, she was looking forward to the next stage of her life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPhotos of the Chibok girls taken before their kidnapping. The girl in the yellow dress is Naomi Adamu, one of the 103 captives released.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n GLENNA GORDON\n \n\n\n\nOutside the school grounds, Chibok had come to feel less safe. Earlier that year, Boko Haram torched six nearby villages. Distant gunfire sometimes thundered. One day, a school administrator found a piece of paper on the ground warning of a Boko Haram attack, but dismissed it as a prank. The girls didn\u2019t live in fear, but understood the gathering threat. Families seeking sanctuary in Chibok brought stories of the insurgents\u2019 brutality. In March, three weeks before the attack, Shekau appeared on YouTube, threatening the region\u2019s young women: \u201cGirls, you should return to your homes\u2026In due course we will start taking women away.\u201d The night of the attack, when the girls emerged in the courtyard, they could see the men were not soldiers. They wore unkempt beards, flip-flops and tattered uniforms. Several were raiding the school cafeteria, stealing sacks of rice, beans and pasta. Others poured gasoline on the school to torch it. Boko Haram had not come to abduct the students. It had come to steal the school\u2019s brickmaking machine. The insurgents had been on a kidnapping spree, and their camps faced a housing shortage. A commander fired his rifle in the air and demanded to know where the machine was kept. Once they found it, the fighters hoisted it onto a truck. As they prepared to leave, one militant, motioning to the students, asked a fateful question. What shall we do with them? A few weeks earlier, Boko Haram had barricaded dozens of schoolboys in their dormitory at the Federal Government College of Buni Yadi and burned them alive. At other colleges, they had tossed grenades into the dorms while the students slept. The unit\u2019s commander turned to the girls. \u201cShekau will know what to do with them,\u201d he said. The fighters ordered the students to climb into their trucks. The teenagers linked hands and arms as they stumbled through the dark.The Hashtag Hours after the attack on Chibok, the first intelligence reports flashed across screens at the White House. The details coming through were terrifying: More than 100 girls were missing from a school in northeastern Nigeria, making it one of modern history\u2019s largest abductions. It was Monday morning in Washington. President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n was scheduled to meet faith leaders to discuss immigration policy, then hold a strategy session to discuss the escalating conflict in Ukraine. To the surprise of Obama\u2019s Africa team, the abduction of an entire student body barely registered in the press at home or abroad. In Nigeria, the reaction was muffled by military leaders who informed their president the kidnapping seemed to be a hoax. \u201cWe knew this was going to be big,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Grant T. Harris,\n\n\n\n Obama\u2019s Africa director. \u201cBut it was initially met with a deafening silence.\u201d On the afternoon of April 15, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oby Ezekwesili\n\n\n\n thumbed through her phone and found a short article from the British Broadcasting Corporation. More than 100 girls had been kidnapped in Nigeria the previous night. At first, she figured it was an error. She walked through the office of the aid organization where she worked, in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, and checked the story again. What if it wasn\u2019t? When Boko Haram burned the schoolboys in Buni Yadi, Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian education minister and mother of three sons, felt she had failed them. That evening, her son found her in her bedroom in tears. \u201cThese people\u2019s children are missing, and nobody is talking about it or doing anything,\u201d she told him.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOby Ezekwesili, second from right, at a recent meeting in Abuja. The former government official led daily protests on the girls\u2019 behalf and popularized the famous #BringBackOurGirls Twitter hashtag.\n\n\n\nIn the following days, Ezekwesili began leading daily protests at a decrepit fountain near the Hilton. \u201cWhat are we demanding?\u201d the few demonstrators chanted. \u201cBring back our girls, now and alive!\u201d One day, police shot tear gas at them. On another, hoodlums ran through the crowd, whacking protesters with plastic chairs. As a former government official who had worked at the World Bank, Ezekwesili had developed a following on Twitter. For nine days, she posted a series of hashtags aimed at needling the Nigerian government. None caught on. Then a lawyer who followed her account tagged a post with #BringBackOurGirls. Ezekwesili had picked up a handful of celebrity followers during her trans-Atlantic travels. On April 30, in the space of five hours, recording artists \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mary J. Blige,\n\n\n\n Common and Young Jeezy tweeted the hashtag. Actors \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Reese Witherspoon,\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Whoopi Goldberg\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anne Hathaway\n\n\n\n followed suit, while \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harrison Ford\n\n\n\n held up a placard on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. \u201c#BRINGBACKOURGIRLS You crazy mothaf\u2014ers,\u201d wrote comedian Chris Rock.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe cast of \u201cThe Expendables 3,\u201d posing on the red carpet during the 67th Cannes Film Festival.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nBy mid-May, the hashtag had been mentioned more than 3.4 million times. Ezekwesili\u2019s Twitter account became so overwhelmed that she stopped checking her mentions. While Obama was preoccupied, another resident of the White House embraced the cause. His wife, Michelle, asked the National Security Council for regular briefings on the hunt for the missing students. On May 7, to the surprise of her husband\u2019s staff, she called a photographer into the White House\u2019s Diplomatic Room.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStanding opposite a portrait of \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Washington\n\n\n\n and wearing a somber expression, she held up her placard. The tweet was liked or retweeted more than 179,000 times. The first lady\u2019s photo would front nearly every Nigerian newspaper, blindsiding President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Goodluck Jonathan,\n\n\n\n whose military still suspected the kidnapping had never happened. Facing an unprecedented form of public pressure from his most powerful ally, Jonathan had few options. He accepted the White House\u2019s request to launch a rescue effort. Days later, a rapid-response team of roughly 40 officials deployed to the U.S. embassy in Abuja, including CIA analysts, two of the FBI\u2019s top hostage negotiators and a therapist to treat the girls upon their return. The team even brought its own receptionist. Within days, a U.S. Predator drone was circling northeastern Nigeria, scouring the forest floor. U.S. and Nigerian officials began to gather regularly around a table at a so-called intelligence fusion center. Other nations followed suit. The U.K. sent a spy plane. Canada deployed special forces soldiers as advisers, and China pledged to send satellite imagery. \u201cThe line that came down from Obama,\u201d said a U.S. diplomat in Abuja, \u201cwas do everything you can to get those girls.\u201dConvert or Die At their camp in the forest, the Boko Haram militants lined up gasoline cans, rounded up the Christian girls they had taken from the Chibok school and told them it was time to choose. They could convert to Islam and marry a fighter. Or they could die. Ever since the girls arrived, the insurgents had been pressuring them to embrace the group\u2019s creed. \u201cWe were initially threatened that seven men would rape us if we refused to get married to their members,\u201d Naomi Adamu said. \u201cBut we stood our ground.\u201d This tactic was new. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to be Muslim?\u201d the girls recalled the captors saying. \u201cWe are going to burn you.\u201d The girls were terrified. Still, they refused. The militants shook the cans menacingly. Then they broke into laughter. The cans were full of water. For refusing to marry a member and convert, the girls became slaves. The militants assumed hard labor and deprivations would wear them down. The girls said it strengthened their bond. \u201cAnything that happens, happens,\u201d Adamu and her classmates told each other. The road to captivity had been a two-day journey for the girls, often on foot. Several students had suffered gashes, broken limbs and scorpion bites. After passing through a labyrinth of backwoods tracks, they arrived at the beating heart of the insurgency: a thousands-strong encampment of mud-brick homes powered by stolen generators. The Sambisa Forest, where the hideout was located, consisted of 250 square miles of forbidding wilderness. During colonial times, the forest had been set aside as a game reserve. Boko Haram saw advantages in its topography. Gunmen riding motorcycles and pickups launched deadly raids on military outposts, then retreated into scrubland only they could navigate. On reaching the camp, Adamu said, she cried through the night. She and her classmates had no idea a world-wide social media campaign was being waged on their behalf. \u201cWe were just on our own,\u201d Adamu said. \u201cThey are going to kill us, or even burn us\u2014that was what I was thinking.\u201d For the Muslim students, and a handful of their Christian classmates who agreed to convert, captivity brought a different, though no less harrowing set of consequences. They were pushed into sexual bondage. In the early days of captivity, two of Adamu\u2019s closest friends succumbed to the pressure to marry. That night, Adamu said, she cried herself to sleep. She felt sick for a week. \u201cI was thinking about what was happening to them,\u201d she said. Christian girls who refused to yield were denied tents and forced to sleep under trees and in the rain. They cooked beans, rice and yams for the militants, and ate little themselves, usually one meal near sunset. They were sent to repair roads, treat injuries and amputate the limbs of wounded fighters. They buried the dead in shallow graves. To keep the girls hidden, their guards split them into small groups and relocated them constantly. \u201cThey were moved through every kind of terrain: desert, forest, mountain,\u201d said one official who debriefed them. One asset the Chibok hostages had was their bond, developed over years of sharing bunk beds and dorms. Many of their families were friends. They also had a common language, Kibaku, spoken almost exclusively in Chibok and understood by 0.1% of Nigerians. In captivity, it was an uncrackable code, allowing them to communicate privately. To force the girls to study the teachings of Islam, the guards gave them flimsy notepads, some with cartoon characters on the cover, for transcribing recitations from the Quran. The girls were accustomed to copying lessons verbatim from the blackboard. Here, under the watchful eyes of violent captors, they turned the notebooks into diaries, to tell their own stories.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA page of a secret diary kept by the Chibok girls during their captivity.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani/THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWe were hoping that we would eventually be released,\u201d Adamu said. Or if they died, that the diaries might someday be found. \u201cWe wanted the world to see what we witnessed,\u201d she said. The girls continued to show no enthusiasm for their religious studies, and their captors decided to try a new tactic. They took Adamu and 21 others to meet Shekau. The warlord who controlled their fate sat on a chair flanked by two deputies with guns, each of them shooting video of the meeting on tablet computers. Shekau was dressed in a Nigerian military uniform underneath a sweater, balancing a rifle and a Quran on his lap. \u201cYou have shown that you do not like the Islamic religion,\u201d he began. He launched into a long lecture about Boko Haram fighters in Nigerian prisons being denied food and water. \u201cGod will not hold me responsible for any one of you,\u201d Shekau said. Kidnapping the girls had helped Boko Haram by deflating the morale of Nigeria\u2019s soldiers. The insurgency had been notching battlefield victories. But Shekau seemed to view them as a nuisance. The thousands of young boys he\u2019d kidnapped could be pulled into his army to fight, but the girls had little military value. It took money and manpower to feed and guard them. Thinking back on the meeting, Adamu said, Shekau didn\u2019t show any sign that he had grasped how valuable social media had made the young women seated before him. \u201cI will sell them in the market, swear to God,\u201d he shouted in a YouTube video posted around the same time. \u201cBecause they are our slaves!\u201dThe Mediators In May 2014, American intelligence officers monitoring feeds from drones high above the Sambisa Forest had begun piecing together a picture of the militants\u2019 whereabouts. The Nigerians, anxious for a breakthrough, decided to try a simpler approach. It began when a presidential aide placed a call to a security guard working the late shift at a grocery store in Dubai. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ahmad Salkida\n\n\n\n was a difficult person for Nigerian officials to petition for help. A Muslim convert from a poor background who had dropped out of grade school, he was a self-employed journalist, blogger and government critic who had fled Nigeria for his family\u2019s safety. But by teaching himself fluent English and mastering social media, Salkida had become a widely known expert on Boko Haram who often scooped Nigeria\u2019s journalists. He had built such a rapport with the insurgency that before it turned violent, the group had asked him to run its newspaper. Salkida wasn\u2019t interested in the job or in being anyone\u2019s mouthpiece. His business card said \u201cINDEPENDENT JOURNALIST.\u201d He was an avowed nonconformist down to the five-fingered toe shoes he wore under his Muslim robes. He avoided any situation where his advice could be ignored or his integrity compromised. \u201cI have a set of values,\u201d he said, \u201cand it is these values that have allowed me to survive.\u201d Nigerian officials felt leery about Salkida\u2019s fixation with social media. \u201cEverything he does has to be in the public domain. He has to tweet about it,\u201d one official said. They weren\u2019t sure if Salkida was loyal to them, Boko Haram or his own brand. They also knew that he, better than anyone, understood how to communicate with Boko Haram. The government invited Salkida to Abuja. He asked a Ugandan co-worker to cover his shifts at the grocery store. \u201cI\u2019m going to meet my president,\u201d he explained. Alongside Salkida, another quiet effort to negotiate with Boko Haram was taking shape. For years, Swiss officials in Bern had been discreetly monitoring the conflict in Nigeria\u2019s north, looking for an opportunity to bring the warring parties to the table. Winning the release of the girls struck them as an ideal place to focus. After years of inserting themselves into some of the world\u2019s most intractable conflicts, the Swiss had learned that one key to successful negotiations was finding the right local person to kick-start it\u2014an \u201cinside mediator.\u201d The ideal candidate was wealthy and prominent enough to engage in a protracted peace process and to be credible to both sides. In a civil conflict like Nigeria\u2019s, it was crucial to find a mediator the insurgents couldn\u2019t ignore. To the Swiss, Zannah Mustapha\u2019s long career as a lawyer, part-time professor and local luminary checked one important box. Boko Haram might not like his views on education and the law, but they had a compelling reason to listen to him. He looked after their children. In 1959, the year Mustapha was born, the northeastern city of Maiduguri was a British imperial garrison in the last year of colonial rule. Mustapha was the son of a prominent family who opened his own legal practice. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFuture Prowess, a school founded by Zannah Mustapha, seated at center, took in the children of fallen Boko Haram fighters when no one else would.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of 10 schoolrooms at Future Prowess.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMustapha had to persuade the widows of Boko Haram that teaching subjects like English, math and science was in keeping with Islam.\n\n\n\nNigeria\u2019s independence brought civil war and military coups. The economy was sputtering and the Sahara was encroaching, wiping out crops. As he rode through the streets in air-conditioned sedans, Mustapha would pass scores of young men unable to find work. Over time, he came to resent the corruption and inequity of the system he helped defend. He became obsessed with redeeming Maiduguri and leaving a legacy. \u201cWe realized that we weren\u2019t models for our own children,\u201d he said. In 2007, he left his law practice, took over an abandoned building and opened Future Prowess, a school and orphanage for children between 3 and 8. He bought uniforms, food and secondhand books. He persuaded a respected principal to run the school by buying him a car. The inaugural class welcomed 36 students. He bought each one a pair of shoes. Future Prowess, a school founded by Zannah Mustapha, seated at center, took in the children of fallen Boko Haram fighters when no one else would. Mustapha had to persuade the widows of Boko Haram that teaching subjects like English, math and science was in keeping with Islam. Two years later, a The fate of the Chibok schoolgirls sparked a social-media sensation, a global manhunt and a secret negotiation. At the center of the deal, which has been largely unreported, was a payment of \u20ac3 million, which revitalized the fortunes of the militant group and sparked a new wave of suicide bombings. ",
        "author": "Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw | Photographs by Glenna Gordon for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Blasts Off on Long March to Look for Life on Mars (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7748",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-blasts-off-on-long-march-to-look-for-life-on-mars-11595490336?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=12",
        "text": "If all goes as planned, China will join the U.S. and Russia as the only countries\n to successfully put a lander or rover on Mars.\nAnd now the spotlight shifts to the U.S.\u2019s National Aeronautics and Space Administration,\n which is due to launch its Mars probe in a week\u2019s time.\n\n\nThe version of the Long March 5 used in Thursday\u2019s launch had flown only three times\n before, including a 2017 failure that became one of the most major setbacks to date\n for the Chinese space program. \nBut the latest launch went smoothly, the state news agency Xinhua said. The spacecraft\n entered Earth orbit as planned before embarking on its journey to Mars.\n\u201cMars! China is coming!\u201d Xinhua said on social media when it announced the launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least\n amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working\n on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo\n Composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nThe Tianwen-1 program was named after an ancient series of poems, \u201cHeavenly Questions,\u201d\n by Qu Yuan, a writer from China\u2019s Warring States period who was revered for his patriotism.\nA latecomer to modern space exploration, China has made steady advances since first\n putting a man into space 17 years ago. The country landed its first rover on the moon\n in 2013 \n and became the first country to deploy a rover on the moon\u2019s far side five years later. Another Chinese lunar mission scheduled for late 2020 is expected to collect rock\n samples and return them to Earth.\nMartian missions are fraught with risk and roughly half end in failure. The European\n Space Agency has tried to land a craft on Mars twice, in 2003 and 2016. The first\n probe landed but never returned any data and the second was destroyed after crashing\n into the planet\u2019s surface. Although Russia\u2019s craft touched down successfully, it lost\n contact after only 14 seconds. \nThe U.S. has landed on Mars multiple times since the Viking-1 probe touched down there\n in 1976. The latest American craft bound for the red planet, the Perseverance rover,\n is due to blast off from Cape Canaveral on July 30.\nChina\u2019s arrival as a space power has presented the U.S. with a serious rival in celestial\n exploration for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union. China\u2019s stated\n ambitions in space include the establishment of a manned lunar base by 2045, as well\n as the capability to send people to Mars by the same year. A Chinese space station\n orbiting the Earth is due for completion in 2022.\nHowever, China\u2019s advances have galvanized American space efforts. NASA aims to return\n astronauts to the moon by 2024 before launching a manned Mars mission in the 2030s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Tianwen-1 blasted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan\n at 12:40 p.m. local time aboard the newly developed Long March 5 rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cai Yang/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Trefor Moss at \n Trefor.Moss@wsj.com China launched its first mission to Mars, aiming to join the short list of nations\n            that have landed a spacecraft on another planet. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Blasts Off on Long March to Look for Life on Mars (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7749",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-blasts-off-on-long-march-to-look-for-life-on-mars-11595490336?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=42",
        "text": "If all goes as planned, China will join the U.S. and Russia as the only countries\n to successfully put a lander or rover on Mars.\nAnd now the spotlight shifts to the U.S.\u2019s National Aeronautics and Space Administration,\n which is due to launch its Mars probe in a week\u2019s time.\n\n\nThe version of the Long March 5 used in Thursday\u2019s launch had flown only three times\n before, including a 2017 failure that became one of the most major setbacks to date\n for the Chinese space program. \nBut the latest launch went smoothly, the state news agency Xinhua said. The spacecraft\n entered Earth orbit as planned before embarking on its journey to Mars.\n\u201cMars! China is coming!\u201d Xinhua said on social media when it announced the launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least\n amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working\n on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo\n Composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nThe Tianwen-1 program was named after an ancient series of poems, \u201cHeavenly Questions,\u201d\n by Qu Yuan, a writer from China\u2019s Warring States period who was revered for his patriotism.\nA latecomer to modern space exploration, China has made steady advances since first\n putting a man into space 17 years ago. The country landed its first rover on the moon\n in 2013 \n and became the first country to deploy a rover on the moon\u2019s far side five years later. Another Chinese lunar mission scheduled for late 2020 is expected to collect rock\n samples and return them to Earth.\nMartian missions are fraught with risk and roughly half end in failure. The European\n Space Agency has tried to land a craft on Mars twice, in 2003 and 2016. The first\n probe landed but never returned any data and the second was destroyed after crashing\n into the planet\u2019s surface. Although Russia\u2019s craft touched down successfully, it lost\n contact after only 14 seconds. \nThe U.S. has landed on Mars multiple times since the Viking-1 probe touched down there\n in 1976. The latest American craft bound for the red planet, the Perseverance rover,\n is due to blast off from Cape Canaveral on July 30.\nChina\u2019s arrival as a space power has presented the U.S. with a serious rival in celestial\n exploration for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union. China\u2019s stated\n ambitions in space include the establishment of a manned lunar base by 2045, as well\n as the capability to send people to Mars by the same year. A Chinese space station\n orbiting the Earth is due for completion in 2022.\nHowever, China\u2019s advances have galvanized American space efforts. NASA aims to return\n astronauts to the moon by 2024 before launching a manned Mars mission in the 2030s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Tianwen-1 blasted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan\n at 12:40 p.m. local time aboard the newly developed Long March 5 rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cai Yang/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Trefor Moss at \n Trefor.Moss@wsj.com China launched its first mission to Mars, aiming to join the short list of nations\n            that have landed a spacecraft on another planet. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Blasts Off on Long March to Look for Life on Mars (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7750",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-blasts-off-on-long-march-to-look-for-life-on-mars-11595490336?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=50",
        "text": "If all goes as planned, China will join the U.S. and Russia as the only countries\n to successfully put a lander or rover on Mars.\n\n\n\n\nAnd now the spotlight shifts to the U.S.\u2019s National Aeronautics and Space Administration,\n which is due to launch its Mars probe in a week\u2019s time.\n\n\nThe version of the Long March 5 used in Thursday\u2019s launch had flown only three times\n before, including a 2017 failure that became one of the most major setbacks to date\n for the Chinese space program. \nBut the latest launch went smoothly, the state news agency Xinhua said. The spacecraft\n entered Earth orbit as planned before embarking on its journey to Mars.\n\u201cMars! China is coming!\u201d Xinhua said on social media when it announced the launch.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least\n amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working\n on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo\n Composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\nThe Tianwen-1 program was named after an ancient series of poems, \u201cHeavenly Questions,\u201d\n by Qu Yuan, a writer from China\u2019s Warring States period who was revered for his patriotism.\nA latecomer to modern space exploration, China has made steady advances since first\n putting a man into space 17 years ago. The country landed its first rover on the moon\n in 2013 \n and became the first country to deploy a rover on the moon\u2019s far side five years later. Another Chinese lunar mission scheduled for late 2020 is expected to collect rock\n samples and return them to Earth.\nMartian missions are fraught with risk and roughly half end in failure. The European\n Space Agency has tried to land a craft on Mars twice, in 2003 and 2016. The first\n probe landed but never returned any data and the second was destroyed after crashing\n into the planet\u2019s surface. Although Russia\u2019s craft touched down successfully, it lost\n contact after only 14 seconds. \nThe U.S. has landed on Mars multiple times since the Viking-1 probe touched down there\n in 1976. The latest American craft bound for the red planet, the Perseverance rover,\n is due to blast off from Cape Canaveral on July 30.\nChina\u2019s arrival as a space power has presented the U.S. with a serious rival in celestial\n exploration for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union. China\u2019s stated\n ambitions in space include the establishment of a manned lunar base by 2045, as well\n as the capability to send people to Mars by the same year. A Chinese space station\n orbiting the Earth is due for completion in 2022.\nHowever, China\u2019s advances have galvanized American space efforts. NASA aims to return\n astronauts to the moon by 2024 before launching a manned Mars mission in the 2030s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Tianwen-1 blasted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan\n at 12:40 p.m. local time aboard the newly developed Long March 5 rocket.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cai Yang/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Trefor Moss at \n Trefor.Moss@wsj.com China launched its first mission to Mars, aiming to join the short list of nations\n            that have landed a spacecraft on another planet. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Behind North Korea\u2019s Nuclear Advance: Scientists Who Bring Technology Home (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7751",
        "date": "2017-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-north-koreas-nuclear-advance-scientists-who-bring-technology-home-1504711605?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=23",
        "text": "Hundreds of North Korean scientists have studied outside the country in recent years, according to a Wall Street Journal review of official figures, academic papers and data from universities, many in areas the U.N. says could help Pyongyang\u2019s weapons programs.\nEarly in its six-decade quest for a nuclear arsenal, North Korea relied on technology and experts from the Soviet Union, then later from Iran and Pakistan. That it can now draw on its own scientists indicates it will only become harder to contain Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear ambitions.\n\n\n\u201cWe should be very concerned about North Korean researchers abroad, particularly in China,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Katsuhisa Furukawa,\n\n\n\n a member from 2011-2016 of the U.N. panel of experts monitoring sanctions enforcement on North Korea. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nHarbin Institute of Technology during celebration of the First China Aerospace Day in April 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tao Zhang/NurPhoto/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\nAmong those scientists is Kim Kyong Sol, who was still at China\u2019s elite Harbin Institute of Technology more than a year after the U.N. introduced its sanctions, doing a Ph.D. in mechatronics\u2014a blend of mechanical engineering, electronics and programming\u2014according to university staff. In March this year, he published a paper in China co-written by a senior engineer in Beijing\u2019s military-run space program.\nAfter reviewing Mr. Kim\u2019s paper at the Journal\u2019s request, Mr. Furukawa concluded it fell into a category banned by U.N. sanctions.\nForeign-educated North Koreans\u2019 work in multiple disciplines, said Mr. Furukawa, now an independent analyst, has \u201csurely contributed to the accumulation of scientific know-how and information relevant to its weapons program.\u201d\nNorth Korea\u2019s technological advances go beyond nuclear science. Any research or contacts abroad that could help North Korea launch objects into space is of concern to the U.S. as it tries to stop Pyongyang from perfecting ways to attack America or its allies.\nPyongyang has launched Earth-observation satellites, which can be used for reconnaissance and targeting. It has also test-fired missiles from a submarine and said it could conduct an electromagnetic-pulse attack, designed to cripple electric grids by detonating a nuclear device on a satellite.\nThe technology Mr. Kim studied, called MR damping, can be used to stabilize spacecraft and absorb shock in missile-launch systems, including in submarines, as well as to reduce vibration in cars, buildings and helicopters, U.S. experts in the field said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKim Kyong Sol\u2019s entry in a registration book at his former accommodation block at Harbin Institute of Technology.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeremy Page/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMr. Kim returned home in June, university staff said. He didn\u2019t respond to emails. China\u2019s foreign ministry said Beijing was \u201cstrictly implementing\u201d all U.N. resolutions on North Korea. It didn\u2019t respond to questions about Mr. Kim, nor did Harbin Institute of Technology.\nThe concern among U.S. officials is that Pyongyang exploited a lack of strict education sanctions before the 2016 U.N. ban to dispatch scientists and bring back \u201cdual use\u201d expertise\u2014with civilian and military applications\u2014and could continue to benefit from any lax enforcement of the ban.\nSome of those officials said they fear that even with strict sanctions enforcement, Pyongyang may already have sufficient indigenous know-how for its nuclear goals. There is evidence North Korea produces its own rocket engines, the Journal reported in August, citing a U.S. intelligence official, contradicting a recent think-tank report suggesting its engines are from Ukraine or Russia.\nHomemade claims\n\n\n Advanced Studies Hundreds of North Korean scientists have studied abroad or collaborated with foreign scholars in recent years, some in fields subject to 2016 U.N. sanctions. Number of research papers by North Korean academics in the Web of Science Core Collection*, 2006-2016 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2006 \u201909 \u201908 2010 \u201912 \u201913 \u201914 \u201915 \u201907 \u201916 \u201911 Research fields of North Korean academics in the Web of Science Core Collection, 2011-2016 Materials science (23)** Mathematics, applied (20) Mathematics (20) Optics (19) Physics applied (13)** Engineering, electrical/electronic (13)** Metallurgy/metallurgical engineering (11)** Physics, multidisciplinary (10)** Mathematics applications (9) Geology (9) Other 75 fields (174) *The Web of Science Core Collection is a database of information from more than 18,000 major academic journals **All or partly banned by the U.N. for training or teaching to North Korean nationals Source: Geum Hee Jeong and Sun Huh; Hallym University (co-authoring and research fields); U.N. Security Council Resolutions (U.N. banned subjects) \n\n\n\nKim Jong Un\n \n\n\n\n made a point of bragging that his claimed hydrogen bomb was indigenous: \u201cAl Pyongyang\u2019s recent weapons tests are a reminder of a conundrum: How has the nation advanced in arms despite international efforts to keep expertise out of its hands? The answer may lie in students it sends abroad. ",
        "author": "Jeremy Page and Alastair Gale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Behind North Korea\u2019s Nuclear Advance: Scientists Who Bring Technology Home (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7752",
        "date": "2017-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-north-koreas-nuclear-advance-scientists-who-bring-technology-home-1504711605?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=88",
        "text": "Hundreds of North Korean scientists have studied outside the country in recent years, according to a Wall Street Journal review of official figures, academic papers and data from universities, many in areas the U.N. says could help Pyongyang\u2019s weapons programs.\n\n\n\n\nEarly in its six-decade quest for a nuclear arsenal, North Korea relied on technology and experts from the Soviet Union, then later from Iran and Pakistan. That it can now draw on its own scientists indicates it will only become harder to contain Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear ambitions.\n\n\n\u201cWe should be very concerned about North Korean researchers abroad, particularly in China,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Katsuhisa Furukawa,\n\n\n\n a member from 2011-2016 of the U.N. panel of experts monitoring sanctions enforcement on North Korea. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nHarbin Institute of Technology during celebration of the First China Aerospace Day in April 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tao Zhang/NurPhoto/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\nAmong those scientists is Kim Kyong Sol, who was still at China\u2019s elite Harbin Institute of Technology more than a year after the U.N. introduced its sanctions, doing a Ph.D. in mechatronics\u2014a blend of mechanical engineering, electronics and programming\u2014according to university staff. In March this year, he published a paper in China co-written by a senior engineer in Beijing\u2019s military-run space program.\nAfter reviewing Mr. Kim\u2019s paper at the Journal\u2019s request, Mr. Furukawa concluded it fell into a category banned by U.N. sanctions.\nForeign-educated North Koreans\u2019 work in multiple disciplines, said Mr. Furukawa, now an independent analyst, has \u201csurely contributed to the accumulation of scientific know-how and information relevant to its weapons program.\u201d\nNorth Korea\u2019s technological advances go beyond nuclear science. Any research or contacts abroad that could help North Korea launch objects into space is of concern to the U.S. as it tries to stop Pyongyang from perfecting ways to attack America or its allies.\nPyongyang has launched Earth-observation satellites, which can be used for reconnaissance and targeting. It has also test-fired missiles from a submarine and said it could conduct an electromagnetic-pulse attack, designed to cripple electric grids by detonating a nuclear device on a satellite.\nThe technology Mr. Kim studied, called MR damping, can be used to stabilize spacecraft and absorb shock in missile-launch systems, including in submarines, as well as to reduce vibration in cars, buildings and helicopters, U.S. experts in the field said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKim Kyong Sol\u2019s entry in a registration book at his former accommodation block at Harbin Institute of Technology.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeremy Page/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMr. Kim returned home in June, university staff said. He didn\u2019t respond to emails. China\u2019s foreign ministry said Beijing was \u201cstrictly implementing\u201d all U.N. resolutions on North Korea. It didn\u2019t respond to questions about Mr. Kim, nor did Harbin Institute of Technology.\nThe concern among U.S. officials is that Pyongyang exploited a lack of strict education sanctions before the 2016 U.N. ban to dispatch scientists and bring back \u201cdual use\u201d expertise\u2014with civilian and military applications\u2014and could continue to benefit from any lax enforcement of the ban.\nSome of those officials said they fear that even with strict sanctions enforcement, Pyongyang may already have sufficient indigenous know-how for its nuclear goals. There is evidence North Korea produces its own rocket engines, the Journal reported in August, citing a U.S. intelligence official, contradicting a recent think-tank report suggesting its engines are from Ukraine or Russia.\nHomemade claims\n\n\n Advanced Studies Hundreds of North Korean scientists have studied abroad or collaborated with foreign scholars in recent years, some in fields subject to 2016 U.N. sanctions. Number of research papers by North Korean academics in the Web of Science Core Collection*, 2006-2016 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2006 \u201909 \u201908 2010 \u201912 \u201913 \u201914 \u201915 \u201907 \u201916 \u201911 Research fields of North Korean academics in the Web of Science Core Collection, 2011-2016 Materials science (23)** Mathematics, applied (20) Mathematics (20) Optics (19) Physics applied (13)** Engineering, electrical/electronic (13)** Metallurgy/metallurgical engineering (11)** Physics, multidisciplinary (10)** Mathematics applications (9) Geology (9) Other 75 fields (174) *The Web of Science Core Collection is a database of information from more than 18,000 major academic journals **All or partly banned by the U.N. for training or teaching to North Korean nationals Source: Geum Hee Jeong and Sun Huh; Hallym University (co-authoring and research fields); U.N. Security Council Resolutions (U.N. banned subjects) \n\n\n\nKim Jong Un\n \n\n\n\n made a point of bragging that his claimed hydrogen bomb was indigenous: \u201cAll components of the H-bomb were homemade and all the processes ranging from the production of weapons-grade nuclear materials to precision processing of components and their assembling,\u201d the nation\u2019s official Korean Central News Agency quoted him as saying.\nFollowing North Korea\u2019s second nuclear-bomb test in 2009, the U.N. in a package of sanctions in response called on countries to \u201cprevent specialized teaching or training\u201d within their territories or by their nationals that could help Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear and missile development.\nThe U.N. imposed the 2016 ban on teaching specific subjects in response to a fourth nuclear test in January of that year and broadened it to encompass disciplines such as advanced engineering and materials science after another test last September.\nIn a report this February, U.N. experts said they found several North Koreans studying physics in Italy and four studying material science, engineering and electronic communications in Romania last year after the ban. The report said all were redirected to permitted subjects. The institutions didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nIn 2016, U.N. experts said two North Koreans were training that year before the ban at an Indian space technology center where 32 others had attended since 1996, including one who recently headed Pyongyang\u2019s satellite control center. The Indian center said it no longer accepts North Koreans.\nChina in recent years has accounted for the bulk of North Korean scientists abroad, the Journal found in a review of official figures and data from universities in countries where the most North Koreans typically have studied. In China, 1,086 North Korean postgraduates studied in 2015, the last year for which official data are available, according to a Chinese Ministry of Education publication, up from 354 in 2009. The publication doesn\u2019t show which schools they attended or what they studied.\nThe Education Ministry didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\n\n\n Scholarly Exchange China has accounted for many North Korean academics studying abroad or collaborating with foreign scholars. North Korean postgraduates in China, 2006-2015 With Chinese government scholarship Without Chinese government scholarship 1,100 1,000 900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 \u201912 2010 \u201907 2006 \u201913 \u201911 \u201915 \u201914 \u201909 \u201908 Number of papers North Koreans co-authored with academics from other countries in the Web of Science Core Collection*, 2011-2016 China (114) Germany (29) Australia (4) Italy (4) United States (3) Other 24 countries (35) *The Web of Science Core Collection is a database of information from more than 18,000 major academic journals Source: Ministry of Education of China (North Korean postgraduate numbers); Geum Hee Jeong and Sun Huh; Hallym University (co-authorship) \n\n\nChina accounted for 60% of research papers by North Koreans in foreign journals from 2011 through 2016, mostly in physics, engineering, math, metallurgy and materials science, a study of academic databases by researchers from South Korea\u2019s Hallym University found. \nPapers published by North Koreans in China since the 2016 U.N. sanctions span civilian fields such as medicine and mining but also include several in fields now prohibited, including metallic foams that protect against radiation.\nSending more scientists abroad, and giving them perks at home, has been central to Kim Jong Un\u2019s policy of byungjin, or parallel progress, to develop nuclear weapons and the economy\u2014a policy he introduced publicly after taking power on his father\u2019s 2011 death.\nNorth Korea has said it needs nuclear weapons to prevent an attack by the U.S. It began its nuclear-arms program with Soviet backing in the 1950s and for years had small exchanges of scientists with the Eastern Bloc. After the Cold War\u2019s end, Pyongyang traded for nuclear and missile expertise, mainly with Iran and Pakistan, according to historians, while continuing to send a few scientists abroad.\nSince North Korea\u2019s first nuclear test in 2006, U.S. and U.N. sanctions have focused on curbing the flow of money and dual-use materials to Pyongyang\u2019s weapons programs. The regime has compensated by trying to develop more indigenous weapons know-how, experts on North Korea said.\nKim Jong Un\u2019s byungjin policy has helped Pyongyang develop a wide spectrum of technical expertise\u2014including metallurgists to make strong, lightweight alloys for rockets, mathematicians to help guide missiles and satellite engineers to improve targeting and reconnaissance, said experts and Western government officials.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA team member of an intelligent-vehicle club at Harbin Institute of Technology, October 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Wang Kai/Xinhua/ZUMA PRESS\n \n\n\n\nMr. Kim\u2019s studies It isn\u2019t clear how the mechatronics scientist, Mr. Kim, planned to use his expertise in MR damping. \u201cCould it be turned into military applications? Possibly,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mehdi Ahmadian,\n\n\n\n a Virginia Tech professor who said he had done similar research on MR damping in space structures, which could include satellites, antennas or mirrors.\nFootnotes in the paper Mr. Kim published show funding came from a project led by his Chinese supervisor, Chen Zhaobo, on hypersonic vehicles, which can fly at more than 3,800 mph and are being developed by China, Russia and the U.S. to deliver nuclear or conventional weapons.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n As tensions rise around the Korean Peninsula, American leaders have been openly discussing what was once unthinkable: A military intervention in North Korea. If this were to happen, here\u2019s how specialists on North Korean security see things playing out.\n \n\n\nProf. Chen said that, after four years in Harbin on a Chinese government scholarship, Mr. Kim returned home because of the sanctions shortly before defending his Ph.D. thesis. \u201cI tried to comfort him a little,\u201d Prof. Chen said. \u201cHe knew that after going back, he\u2019d feel disappointed. He didn\u2019t express it, but you could still tell.\u201d\nHe said Mr. Kim didn\u2019t have access to secret Chinese defense technology but said his former student\u2019s work, with further development, had potential civilian and military uses, including in space. He and two other professors who worked with Mr. Kim said they learned of the U.N. sanctions from students and colleagues only around May or June of this year.\nMr. Kim arrived as part of a cooperative agreement of the type several Chinese universities have signed since 2010 with North Korean universities, including two that U.N. experts have reported provide personnel and technology for Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear-weapons program. They are Kim Il Sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology, Mr. Kim\u2019s alma mater.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Albright,\n\n\n\n a former U.N. weapons inspector and expert in nuclear proliferation, said it is common among nations seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction to seek knowledge abroad, including by sending scientists to take courses and attend conferences. China\u2019s engineering schools and training programs, he said, offer \u201copportunities to mingle with people who may have sensitive information, such as Chinese who have been in military programs.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAt the controls of a robot at Harbin Institute of Technology, May 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Wang Kai/Xinhua/ZUMA Press\n \n\n\n\nThe Harbin university, known as HIT, is one of China\u2019s top engineering schools and conducts classified defense and space-related research, as well as regular civilian studies. The school has cooperation agreements with Kim Chaek and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kim Il Sung\n\n\n\n universities, which in 2013 sent the first group of 12 doctoral and postdoctoral students to enroll there, according to the HIT website. That number increased to 28 by 2015.\nMr. Kim was in the first group. Born in 1975, he studied mechanical engineering in North Korea before enrolling in HIT\u2019s School of Mechatronic Engineering, according to his research papers. The school boasts on its website it has trained personnel for China\u2019s manned space program and has facilities for defense research, including on ultraprecision machining. \nMr. Kim and the other North Koreans at HIT kept low profiles, sharing two-bedroom apartments and rarely socializing, university staff said. The North Koreans all had Chinese government scholarships, they said, which provided free housing and tuition and monthly stipends of about 3,000 yuan ($450).\n\u201cThey were easy to recognize from their clothes and their looks,\u201d said one Chinese postgraduate student at HIT. They appeared to be supervised by one individual among them, other students said. \nUpon arrival, Mr. Kim \u201clooked at the direction of my research and thought it was quite interesting,\u201d said Prof. Chen, a vibration-control expert who has worked on defense projects. He said he now focuses on civilian research because \u201cmilitary project management is very strict and not conducive to academic exchanges.\u201d\nIn 2007, Prof. Chen co-wrote a paper on designing composite laminates to control vibration in spacecraft. From 2012-2015, he ran a project on vibration control for hypersonic vehicles, according to his profile and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.\nThat project sponsored Mr. Kim\u2019s paper in March, whose co-authors included Wang Xiaoyu from the Beijing Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering, which has worked on Chinese satellites and China\u2019s manned spacecraft and lunar rover. Ms. Wang declined to comment.\nProf. Chen said Mr. Kim\u2019s work was more directly related to helicopters but could be used in multiple fields. He and Mr. Kim applied for a patent in February, saying their technology has applications in areas including aerospace, according to China\u2019s patent registry.\nNorman Wereley, a University of Maryland aerospace-engineering professor and MR-damping expert, said Mr. Kim\u2019s research was fairly basic but would allow him to do more sophisticated work at home. \u201cHe could think about, \u2018well, hey if I want to do vibration control in a missile system, I have a much better understanding of how to do that,\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s getting this education for scholarly reasons.\u201d\nAt least 11 other North Korean Ph.D. students left HIT in June, while others switched to subjects such as management studies that aren\u2019t banned by the U.N., university staff said.\nSome may have taken home a little extra know-how. North Koreans are suspected of violating library regulations by downloading tens of thousands of papers from subscription-based databases in recent months at at least two Chinese schools, including HIT, according to university staff and students. \nOn May 16, 57,000 papers were downloaded by nine foreign students from the mechatronics and other faculties at HIT, according to a notice from its library. Staff and students said the culprits were North Korean.\n\u2014Daniel Stacey and Kersten Zhang contributed to this article. Pyongyang\u2019s recent weapons tests are a reminder of a conundrum: How has the nation advanced in arms despite international efforts to keep expertise out of its hands? The answer may lie in students it sends abroad. ",
        "author": "Jeremy Page and Alastair Gale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos of the Week (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7753",
        "date": "2020-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/photos-of-the-week-oct-19-25-2020-11603623601?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=10",
        "text": "Homemade signs that read \u2018We Love Them\u2019 stand in the front yards of two next-door neighbors in Mt. Lebanon, Pa., alongside signs for opposing presidential candidates. The message, say members of the two households, is this: People on opposite ends of the political spectrum can actually like each other and be civil.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ross Mantle for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCyclists ride up Monte Bondone in northern Italy on Wednesday during the 17th stage of the Giro d'Italia, a three-week bicycle race around the country.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n luca bettini/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Nina Robinson for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n Alex Gumbs says he wants to settle the racial-discrimination complaint he brought this year against his former employer, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Medtronic\n\n\n PLC. He also doesn\u2019t want to be quiet about what he says he experienced as a Black employee at the medical-device maker. Because of a mechanism routinely used by U.S. companies, lawyers and employees to resolve such disputes, he believes he might not be able to do both. Read More.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPoll workers collect vote-by-mail ballots at a polling station in Doral, Fla., on Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joe Raedle/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jenn Ackerman for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nAn actor scares attendees through their windows at the Deadly Drive-In, a haunted-house-style event, in a parking lot at Rosedale Center in Roseville, Minn. Parking lots tend to be little more than an afterthought for real-estate investors. But during the pandemic, asphalt has never been hotter. Shopping malls and garages are opening their parking lots to tenants and other vendors for open-air stores and other events. Read more.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gabriella Demczuk for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nNo lobbyist has benefited more in the Trump era than \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Ballard,\n\n\n\n a longtime Florida political operative who didn\u2019t have so much as an office in Washington four years ago. Central to Mr. Ballard\u2019s success, according to associates, clients and competitors, are his ties to a president he has known for years. Read more.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTourists on the beaches of Okaloosa Island in Fort Walton Beach, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Mark Wallheiser for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFans watch Game 2 of the World Series, between the Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers, at a drive-in on the grounds of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n etienne laurent/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Osiris-REx spacecraft gently brushed the face of an asteroid named Bennu on Tuesday in an attempt to pick up and return primordial grit, the first such U.S. mission to try to bring back clues on the origins of the planets from an asteroid\u2019s surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Malik Rainey for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMovie-theater companies of all sizes are confronting unprecedented financial strain during the pandemic as capacity restrictions, moviegoers\u2019 reluctance to return to cinemas and a dearth of high-profile movies from big studios limit their chances of mounting a comeback. Lynn Kinsella, the co-owner of an upstate New York movie theater, started selling popcorn curbside after coronavirus restrictions barred her and other small cinemas in the state from showing movies. But the snack sales were only a fraction of the missing box-office money. \u2018It doesn\u2019t make up for the 90% of revenue that we\u2019ve lost,\u2019 said Ms. Kinsella, who bought the vintage Aurora Theatre in East Aurora, N.Y., with her husband a decade ago. Read More.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sasha Maslov for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nRural areas, like this part of Ghent, N.Y., still often lack broadband internet access. The digital divide hasn\u2019t gone away, despite much money spent and many speeches made. A patchwork of conflicting government programs, flawed maps and weak enforcement have left broad swaths of the country without access to high-speed or even basic internet service when people need it more than ever. The result is a longstanding source of personal frustration and economic disadvantage for many rural communities in areas where spread-out housing makes adding new wires expensive. Read More.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRed deer stags lock antlers during the rutting season in Richmond Park, London.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n John Walton/PA Wire/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Spanish Steps, in Rome, amid a Early voting in the U.S. continues, protesters defy a ban on gatherings in Thailand, a spacecraft touches down on an asteroid and more from The Wall Street Journal\u2019s photo editors. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. and China to Launch Mars Missions, Vying for Space Supremacy (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7754",
        "date": "2020-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-china-to-launch-mars-missions-vying-for-space-supremacy-11595325822?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=12",
        "text": "China\u2019s first mission to another planet, the Tianwen-1 is set to blast off this week\u2014the exact day has yet to be announced\u2014on a seven-month journey to Mars. It will orbit the red planet for two to three months before deploying a rover that will conduct scientific experiments on the Martian surface.\nThe U.S. mission, due to launch July 30, will land the Perseverance rover on Mars. It will also deploy the Ingenuity Mars helicopter\u2014the first craft capable of powered flight on another planet.\n\n\nChinese officials have framed space exploration as a contest between nations and sometimes likened the conquest of space to China\u2019s territorial disputes here on Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\n\u201cThe U.S. is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that China could overtake it in all manner of ways,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dean Cheng,\n\n\n\n a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a U.S. think tank. \u201cIt matters to the U.S. psyche that it stays ahead in space.\u201d\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n has put China\u2019s national space program at the heart of a quest for \u201cgreat rejuvenation\u201d after a century of perceived humiliation in which China fell behind the West. In a letter to Chinese space scientists published this year, Mr. Xi urged China\u2019s space scientists to \u201cachieve the early realization of the great dream of building a powerful space nation.\u201d\nChina first put a man into space in 2003, more than four decades after Russia and the U.S., but since then its space program has steadily chalked up new milestones.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould the U.S. invest enough in Mars exploration to ensure it lands people on the red planet before China? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLast year a Chinese probe, the Chang\u2019e-4, became the first to touch down on the far side of the moon. In June, China put the 35th and final BeiDou-3 navigation satellite into orbit, completing its homegrown rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System.\nThere have been setbacks, too: The failure of China\u2019s new Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket during a 2017 test set back the country\u2019s space program by a couple of years. But two successful flights in December and May suggest the rocket\u2019s glitches have now been resolved. The Long March 5 will power this week\u2019s Mars mission, and put a planned Chinese space station into orbit by 2022.\nBy 2030, China aims to have collected Martian rock samples and returned them to earth, and it wants a manned lunar base and the capability to send men to Mars by 2045.\nThe timing of this month\u2019s launches is primarily dictated by the motion of the planets.\nEvery 26 months, the Earth and Mars swing relatively close to one another\u2014if 34 million miles can be considered close\u2014providing a narrow window for Martian missions. The United Arab Emirates also took advantage of the latest alignment by launching a Mars probe Sunday. The U.S. and Russia have launched multiple probes to Mars in the past, while Europe, India and Japan have also sent spacecraft there.\nThe latest American Mars mission will gather samples for return to Earth on a future mission. The U.S. then aims to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024, and to launch a manned Mars mission in the 2030s. The Science and Technology Policy Institute said last year that the U.S. could realistically aim to launch a manned Mars mission in 2037 at the earliest, at a cost of more than $120 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's Perseverance Mars rover late last year during testing in Pasadena, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s one-party system provides a measure of certainty for the country\u2019s space program, whereas National Aeronautics and Space Administration missions have sometimes fallen victim to shifts in spending priorities with new administrations. However, the U.S. has the advantage of a flourishing space private sector\u2014led by companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin\u2014that China so far hasn\u2019t been able to replicate. \nThe race to land astronauts on the moon is highly symbolic, said Mr. Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, with relations between the world\u2019s two largest economies at their lowest ebb in decades as Beijing and Washington spar over issues ranging from technology and trade to the political status of Hong Kong and human rights in Xinjiang in China\u2019s far west.\nLast year, the U.S. created a military Space Force to counter space-based threats, chiefly from China and Russia. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said at the time that the U.S.\u2019s new military branch would \u201cpose a direct threat to outer space peace and security.\u201d\nEven though the U.S. won the original race to the moon long ago, it would be politically embarrass The rivalry between the U.S. and China assumes cosmic proportions, as both countries prepare to send spacecraft to Mars within days of each other. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. and China to Launch Mars Missions, Vying for Space Supremacy (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7755",
        "date": "2020-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-china-to-launch-mars-missions-vying-for-space-supremacy-11595325822?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=40",
        "text": "China\u2019s first mission to another planet, the Tianwen-1 is set to blast off this week\u2014the exact day has yet to be announced\u2014on a seven-month journey to Mars. It will orbit the red planet for two to three months before deploying a rover that will conduct scientific experiments on the Martian surface.\n\n\n\n\nThe U.S. mission, due to launch July 30, will land the Perseverance rover on Mars. It will also deploy the Ingenuity Mars helicopter\u2014the first craft capable of powered flight on another planet.\n\n\nChinese officials have framed space exploration as a contest between nations and sometimes likened the conquest of space to China\u2019s territorial disputes here on Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\n\u201cThe U.S. is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that China could overtake it in all manner of ways,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dean Cheng,\n\n\n\n a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a U.S. think tank. \u201cIt matters to the U.S. psyche that it stays ahead in space.\u201d\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n has put China\u2019s national space program at the heart of a quest for \u201cgreat rejuvenation\u201d after a century of perceived humiliation in which China fell behind the West. In a letter to Chinese space scientists published this year, Mr. Xi urged China\u2019s space scientists to \u201cachieve the early realization of the great dream of building a powerful space nation.\u201d\nChina first put a man into space in 2003, more than four decades after Russia and the U.S., but since then its space program has steadily chalked up new milestones.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould the U.S. invest enough in Mars exploration to ensure it lands people on the red planet before China? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLast year a Chinese probe, the Chang\u2019e-4, became the first to touch down on the far side of the moon. In June, China put the 35th and final BeiDou-3 navigation satellite into orbit, completing its homegrown rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System.\nThere have been setbacks, too: The failure of China\u2019s new Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket during a 2017 test set back the country\u2019s space program by a couple of years. But two successful flights in December and May suggest the rocket\u2019s glitches have now been resolved. The Long March 5 will power this week\u2019s Mars mission, and put a planned Chinese space station into orbit by 2022.\nBy 2030, China aims to have collected Martian rock samples and returned them to earth, and it wants a manned lunar base and the capability to send men to Mars by 2045.\nThe timing of this month\u2019s launches is primarily dictated by the motion of the planets.\nEvery 26 months, the Earth and Mars swing relatively close to one another\u2014if 34 million miles can be considered close\u2014providing a narrow window for Martian missions. The United Arab Emirates also took advantage of the latest alignment by launching a Mars probe Sunday. The U.S. and Russia have launched multiple probes to Mars in the past, while Europe, India and Japan have also sent spacecraft there.\nThe latest American Mars mission will gather samples for return to Earth on a future mission. The U.S. then aims to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024, and to launch a manned Mars mission in the 2030s. The Science and Technology Policy Institute said last year that the U.S. could realistically aim to launch a manned Mars mission in 2037 at the earliest, at a cost of more than $120 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's Perseverance Mars rover late last year during testing in Pasadena, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s one-party system provides a measure of certainty for the country\u2019s space program, whereas National Aeronautics and Space Administration missions have sometimes fallen victim to shifts in spending priorities with new administrations. However, the U.S. has the advantage of a flourishing space private sector\u2014led by companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin\u2014that China so far hasn\u2019t been able to replicate. \nThe race to land astronauts on the moon is highly symbolic, said Mr. Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, with relations between the world\u2019s two largest economies at their lowest ebb in decades as Beijing and Washington spar over issues ranging from technology and trade to the political status of Hong Kong and human rights in Xinjiang in China\u2019s far west.\nLast year, the U.S. created a military Space Force to counter space-based threats, chiefly from China and Russia. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said at the time that the U.S.\u2019s new military branch would \u201cpose a direct threat to outer space peace and security.\u201d\nEven though the U.S. won the original race to the moon long ago, it would be politically embarrassing for the U.S. should China be the first to get there in the 2020s, Mr. Cheng said. Likewise, either country faces humiliation should its Mars mission fail while the other succeeds.\nRoughly half of the missions sent to Mars since exploration of the planet began in the 1960s have failed. Most recently, the European Space Agency\u2019s Schiaparelli lander was destroyed when it crashed into the Martian surface in 2016, though the U.S. successfully reached Mars with its InSight lander two years ago.\n\n\nRelated The New Race to the Moon (July 14, 2019) What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race (April 11, 2019) China Lands Probe on the \u2018Dark Side\u2019 of the Moon (Jan. 3, 2019) China Pushes for Primacy in Space (Dec. 31, 2018) NASA\u2019s InSight Spacecraft Lands Safely on Mars (Nov. 26, 2018) In China\u2019s New Space Odyssey, 80 Startups Race to Get Into Orbit (Nov. 11, 2018) The New Space Race \n\n\n\u2014Xiao Xiao in Beijing contributed to this article.\nWrite to Trefor Moss at Trefor.Moss@wsj.com The rivalry between the U.S. and China assumes cosmic proportions, as both countries prepare to send spacecraft to Mars within days of each other. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. and China to Launch Mars Missions, Vying for Space Supremacy (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7756",
        "date": "2020-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-china-to-launch-mars-missions-vying-for-space-supremacy-11595325822?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=43",
        "text": "China\u2019s first mission to another planet, the Tianwen-1 is set to blast off this week\u2014the exact day has yet to be announced\u2014on a seven-month journey to Mars. It will orbit the red planet for two to three months before deploying a rover that will conduct scientific experiments on the Martian surface.\nThe U.S. mission, due to launch July 30, will land the Perseverance rover on Mars. It will also deploy the Ingenuity Mars helicopter\u2014the first craft capable of powered flight on another planet.\n\n\nChinese officials have framed space exploration as a contest between nations and sometimes likened the conquest of space to China\u2019s territorial disputes here on Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\n\u201cThe U.S. is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that China could overtake it in all manner of ways,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dean Cheng,\n\n\n\n a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a U.S. think tank. \u201cIt matters to the U.S. psyche that it stays ahead in space.\u201d\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n has put China\u2019s national space program at the heart of a quest for \u201cgreat rejuvenation\u201d after a century of perceived humiliation in which China fell behind the West. In a letter to Chinese space scientists published this year, Mr. Xi urged China\u2019s space scientists to \u201cachieve the early realization of the great dream of building a powerful space nation.\u201d\nChina first put a man into space in 2003, more than four decades after Russia and the U.S., but since then its space program has steadily chalked up new milestones.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould the U.S. invest enough in Mars exploration to ensure it lands people on the red planet before China? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLast year a Chinese probe, the Chang\u2019e-4, became the first to touch down on the far side of the moon. In June, China put the 35th and final BeiDou-3 navigation satellite into orbit, completing its homegrown rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System.\nThere have been setbacks, too: The failure of China\u2019s new Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket during a 2017 test set back the country\u2019s space program by a couple of years. But two successful flights in December and May suggest the rocket\u2019s glitches have now been resolved. The Long March 5 will power this week\u2019s Mars mission, and put a planned Chinese space station into orbit by 2022.\nBy 2030, China aims to have collected Martian rock samples and returned them to earth, and it wants a manned lunar base and the capability to send men to Mars by 2045.\nThe timing of this month\u2019s launches is primarily dictated by the motion of the planets.\nEvery 26 months, the Earth and Mars swing relatively close to one another\u2014if 34 million miles can be considered close\u2014providing a narrow window for Martian missions. The United Arab Emirates also took advantage of the latest alignment by launching a Mars probe Sunday. The U.S. and Russia have launched multiple probes to Mars in the past, while Europe, India and Japan have also sent spacecraft there.\nThe latest American Mars mission will gather samples for return to Earth on a future mission. The U.S. then aims to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024, and to launch a manned Mars mission in the 2030s. The Science and Technology Policy Institute said last year that the U.S. could realistically aim to launch a manned Mars mission in 2037 at the earliest, at a cost of more than $120 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's Perseverance Mars rover late last year during testing in Pasadena, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s one-party system provides a measure of certainty for the country\u2019s space program, whereas National Aeronautics and Space Administration missions have sometimes fallen victim to shifts in spending priorities with new administrations. However, the U.S. has the advantage of a flourishing space private sector\u2014led by companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin\u2014that China so far hasn\u2019t been able to replicate. \nThe race to land astronauts on the moon is highly symbolic, said Mr. Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, with relations between the world\u2019s two largest economies at their lowest ebb in decades as Beijing and Washington spar over issues ranging from technology and trade to the political status of Hong Kong and human rights in Xinjiang in China\u2019s far west.\nLast year, the U.S. created a military Space Force to counter space-based threats, chiefly from China and Russia. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said at the time that the U.S.\u2019s new military branch would \u201cpose a direct threat to outer space peace and security.\u201d\nEven though the U.S. won the original race to the moon long ago, it would be politically embarrass The rivalry between the U.S. and China assumes cosmic proportions, as both countries prepare to send spacecraft to Mars within days of each other. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. and China to Launch Mars Missions, Vying for Space Supremacy (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7757",
        "date": "2020-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-china-to-launch-mars-missions-vying-for-space-supremacy-11595325822?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=51",
        "text": "China\u2019s first mission to another planet, the Tianwen-1 is set to blast off this week\u2014the exact day has yet to be announced\u2014on a seven-month journey to Mars. It will orbit the red planet for two to three months before deploying a rover that will conduct scientific experiments on the Martian surface.\nThe U.S. mission, due to launch July 30, will land the Perseverance rover on Mars. It will also deploy the Ingenuity Mars helicopter\u2014the first craft capable of powered flight on another planet.\n\n\nChinese officials have framed space exploration as a contest between nations and sometimes likened the conquest of space to China\u2019s territorial disputes here on Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n This summer the planets favorably align for spacecraft to reach Mars with the least amount of fuel. China is among the countries undertaking the mission while working on bigger ambitions that could one day challenge the U.S.\u2019s leadership in space. Photo Composite: Crystal Tai\n \n\n\n\u201cThe U.S. is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that China could overtake it in all manner of ways,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dean Cheng,\n\n\n\n a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a U.S. think tank. \u201cIt matters to the U.S. psyche that it stays ahead in space.\u201d\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n has put China\u2019s national space program at the heart of a quest for \u201cgreat rejuvenation\u201d after a century of perceived humiliation in which China fell behind the West. In a letter to Chinese space scientists published this year, Mr. Xi urged China\u2019s space scientists to \u201cachieve the early realization of the great dream of building a powerful space nation.\u201d\nChina first put a man into space in 2003, more than four decades after Russia and the U.S., but since then its space program has steadily chalked up new milestones.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould the U.S. invest enough in Mars exploration to ensure it lands people on the red planet before China? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nLast year a Chinese probe, the Chang\u2019e-4, became the first to touch down on the far side of the moon. In June, China put the 35th and final BeiDou-3 navigation satellite into orbit, completing its homegrown rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System.\nThere have been setbacks, too: The failure of China\u2019s new Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket during a 2017 test set back the country\u2019s space program by a couple of years. But two successful flights in December and May suggest the rocket\u2019s glitches have now been resolved. The Long March 5 will power this week\u2019s Mars mission, and put a planned Chinese space station into orbit by 2022.\nBy 2030, China aims to have collected Martian rock samples and returned them to earth, and it wants a manned lunar base and the capability to send men to Mars by 2045.\nThe timing of this month\u2019s launches is primarily dictated by the motion of the planets.\nEvery 26 months, the Earth and Mars swing relatively close to one another\u2014if 34 million miles can be considered close\u2014providing a narrow window for Martian missions. The United Arab Emirates also took advantage of the latest alignment by launching a Mars probe Sunday. The U.S. and Russia have launched multiple probes to Mars in the past, while Europe, India and Japan have also sent spacecraft there.\nThe latest American Mars mission will gather samples for return to Earth on a future mission. The U.S. then aims to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024, and to launch a manned Mars mission in the 2030s. The Science and Technology Policy Institute said last year that the U.S. could realistically aim to launch a manned Mars mission in 2037 at the earliest, at a cost of more than $120 billion.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA's Perseverance Mars rover late last year during testing in Pasadena, Calif.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s one-party system provides a measure of certainty for the country\u2019s space program, whereas National Aeronautics and Space Administration missions have sometimes fallen victim to shifts in spending priorities with new administrations. However, the U.S. has the advantage of a flourishing space private sector\u2014led by companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin\u2014that China so far hasn\u2019t been able to replicate. \nThe race to land astronauts on the moon is highly symbolic, said Mr. Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, with relations between the world\u2019s two largest economies at their lowest ebb in decades as Beijing and Washington spar over issues ranging from technology and trade to the political status of Hong Kong and human rights in Xinjiang in China\u2019s far west.\nLast year, the U.S. created a military Space Force to counter space-based threats, chiefly from China and Russia. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said at the time that the U.S.\u2019s new military branch would \u201cpose a direct threat to outer space peace and security.\u201d\nEven though the U.S. won the original race to the moon long ago, it would be politically embarrass The rivalry between the U.S. and China assumes cosmic proportions, as both countries prepare to send spacecraft to Mars within days of each other. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.K. Studies Alternative Satellite Network (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7758",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-studies-alternative-satellite-network-1535491800?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=18",
        "text": "Britain has been a core member of the GPS-like, pan-European Galileo satellite network since it was conceived almost two decades ago. Europe embarked on the Galileo system to become less reliant on the Pentagon\u2019s Global Positioning System. GPS is used to provide accurate coordinates for things as diverse as cellphones and U.S. weapons. It also beams signals to allow precise time stamps that have become the backbone of global business transactions.\nEurope\u2019s rival Galileo system went live almost two years ago, with 14 satellites now in orbit and 16 more planned in the coming years. But Britain\u2019s future involvement in Galileo is in doubt.\n\n\nThough the public Galileo signal is openly available, only EU members have access to an encrypted, more secure service intended for government use. London is poised to lose that access unless an agreement with the EU can be reached to maintain the status quo. British companies also could be barred from bidding on future Galileo-related contracts.\nBritish government officials have said they want to remain part of Galileo. But faced with the prospect no deal can be reached with the EU over retaining full Galileo membership, London said Tuesday that it would spend an initial \u00a392 million ($119 million) to help determine how the U.K. could establish an independent precision-navigation and timing capability. The money is being provided out of \u00a33 billion the British government has set aside to prepare for Brexit, the government said.\nThe British armed forces already can tap the U.S. GPS signal. But U.K. military officials have said they want access to a second system to provide greater accuracy and to protect against adversaries trying to disrupt GPS. Russia and China both have demonstrated GPS-jamming systems during military exercises.\n\u201cIt is absolutely right that we waste no time in going it alone if we need an independent satellite system to combat those emerging threats,\u201d Britain\u2019s defense secretary,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gavin Williamson,\n\n\n\n said in a written statement announcing the investment.\nThe U.K. government hasn\u2019t said what form an independent system might take. Deploying a large constellation of spacecraft like GPS or Galileo could cost billions of dollars at a time the British defense budget already is stretched.\nIndustry officials have said that options being explored range from building dedicated satellites, to placing payloads on other spacecraft to reduce cost, to the use of highflying drones referred to as pseudo-satellites. The British government says the study now being launched is expected to run about 18 months and aims to define the potential path forward.\nThe new system would provide both a secure military and civilian signal, according to Britain\u2019s space agency, which would lead the study with support by the country\u2019s defense ministry. The new system would be compatible with the U.S. GPS constellation, the space agency said.\nCompanies have already said they were ready to work with the U.K. government.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Paynter,\n\n\n\n managing director of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE\u2019s U.K. defense and space business, said Tuesday that the company welcomed the British government\u2019s move.\nThe British government also said Tuesday that it would continue to work with the EU to try to remain a full participant in Galileo. Britain is studying the development of an independent, satellite-based navigation system in case Brexit leads to the U.K.\u2019s exclusion from the European Union\u2019s Galileo project. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.K. Studies Alternative Satellite Network (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7759",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-studies-alternative-satellite-network-1535491800?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=88",
        "text": "Britain has been a core member of the GPS-like, pan-European Galileo satellite network since it was conceived almost two decades ago. Europe embarked on the Galileo system to become less reliant on the Pentagon\u2019s Global Positioning System. GPS is used to provide accurate coordinates for things as diverse as cellphones and U.S. weapons. It also beams signals to allow precise time stamps that have become the backbone of global business transactions.\n\n\n\n\nEurope\u2019s rival Galileo system went live almost two years ago, with 14 satellites now in orbit and 16 more planned in the coming years. But Britain\u2019s future involvement in Galileo is in doubt.\n\n\nThough the public Galileo signal is openly available, only EU members have access to an encrypted, more secure service intended for government use. London is poised to lose that access unless an agreement with the EU can be reached to maintain the status quo. British companies also could be barred from bidding on future Galileo-related contracts.\nBritish government officials have said they want to remain part of Galileo. But faced with the prospect no deal can be reached with the EU over retaining full Galileo membership, London said Tuesday that it would spend an initial \u00a392 million ($119 million) to help determine how the U.K. could establish an independent precision-navigation and timing capability. The money is being provided out of \u00a33 billion the British government has set aside to prepare for Brexit, the government said.\nThe British armed forces already can tap the U.S. GPS signal. But U.K. military officials have said they want access to a second system to provide greater accuracy and to protect against adversaries trying to disrupt GPS. Russia and China both have demonstrated GPS-jamming systems during military exercises.\n\u201cIt is absolutely right that we waste no time in going it alone if we need an independent satellite system to combat those emerging threats,\u201d Britain\u2019s defense secretary,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gavin Williamson,\n\n\n\n said in a written statement announcing the investment.\nThe U.K. government hasn\u2019t said what form an independent system might take. Deploying a large constellation of spacecraft like GPS or Galileo could cost billions of dollars at a time the British defense budget already is stretched.\nIndustry officials have said that options being explored range from building dedicated satellites, to placing payloads on other spacecraft to reduce cost, to the use of highflying drones referred to as pseudo-satellites. The British government says the study now being launched is expected to run about 18 months and aims to define the potential path forward.\nThe new system would provide both a secure military and civilian signal, according to Britain\u2019s space agency, which would lead the study with support by the country\u2019s defense ministry. The new system would be compatible with the U.S. GPS constellation, the space agency said.\nCompanies have already said they were ready to work with the U.K. government.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Paynter,\n\n\n\n managing director of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Airbus\n\n\n SE\u2019s U.K. defense and space business, said Tuesday that the company welcomed the British government\u2019s move.\nThe British government also said Tuesday that it would continue to work with the EU to try to remain a full participant in Galileo. Britain is studying the development of an independent, satellite-based navigation system in case Brexit leads to the U.K.\u2019s exclusion from the European Union\u2019s Galileo project. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Pushes Arms-Control Talks as China Ups Nuclear Arsenal (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7760",
        "date": "2021-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-pushes-arms-control-talks-as-chinas-nuclear-arsenal-grows-11637231400?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=3",
        "text": "Beijing didn\u2019t mention any such developments in its description of the meeting. A Chinese official briefed on the matter told The Wall Street Journal that the two sides could start a so-called Track II dialogue, among nongovernment defense analysts and academics.\nIn the Chinese Foreign Ministry\u2019s daily press briefing Thursday, a spokesman said he \u201cnoted the clarification made by the U.S. side\u201d but didn\u2019t elaborate.\n\n\nChina has about 350 nuclear warheads, according to the Pentagon\u2019s latest annual assessment of Chinese military power. That is a fraction of the 3,750 warheads the U.S. has stockpiled. But the Pentagon says China is on track to have 1,000 warheads by the end of the decade.\nBeijing has also developed missiles and other systems that can carry the warheads, the Pentagon says. A test of a hypersonic glide vehicle in August demonstrated a new way that Beijing could seek to evade U.S. missile defenses\u2014in what Gen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Milley,\n\n\n\n chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, described as a near \u201cSputnik moment.\u201d\nAll of that makes for a Chinese nuclear arsenal more likely to survive an initial nuclear exchange in a full-blown war and potentially useful in a more limited conflict. What worries the Pentagon, U.S. officials and defense experts say, is that Beijing has yet to publicly explain the reasons for its buildup.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPresident Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a virtual meeting this week.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Sarah Silbiger - Pool via CNP/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cAt the basic level, the U.S. wants to understand what\u2019s going on in China and what\u2019s the basic motivation behind China\u2019s expansion,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Zhao Tong,\n\n\n\n a Beijing-based nuclear-arms expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.\nAs with Washington\u2019s arms control dialogue with Russia, Mr. Zhao said, \u201cthere are no easy solutions.\u201d\nOn Wednesday, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan panel, warned in its annual report to Congress that the scale of China\u2019s nuclear buildup could be intended to support a \u201cnew strategy of limited nuclear first use\u201d and be used by Chinese leaders to attempt to prevent U.S. intervention in a war over Taiwan.\nChina\u2019s Defense Ministry has said little about its nuclear weapons and didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.\nThe Foreign Ministry referred to its daily press briefing. The department\u2019s spokesman rejected the contents of the U.S. report, saying it interferes in China\u2019s domestic affairs, undermines U.S.-China relations, and \u201cmirrors the commission\u2019s persistent ignorance and entrenched bias against China.\u201d\nIn the past, spokespeople for the Foreign Ministry, when asked about media reports and scholarly commentary in the West pointing to more missile silos, have said they are unaware of any increase. They have referred to the hypersonic-missile test, earlier reported by the Financial Times, as not a missile launch but rather a routine spacecraft test to verify its reusability.\nU.S. officials say China has long kept its nuclear stockpile at relatively low levels\u2014sufficient to ensure that it could respond to a nuclear strike with nuclear weapons of its own. But some analysts believe Beijing\u2019s concerns about recent U.S. advances in its ability to detect and defend against small numbers of such weapons might be driving its attempts to expand the arsenal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The U.S. Army is testing the missile-defense system known as the Iron Dome at a military base in Guam amid concerns from Washington about China\u2019s rapid development of missiles. Image: Adam Falk/WSJ\n \n\n\nTension between the U.S. and China over areas such as the South China Sea and Taiwan might also have encouraged Beijing to ensure its nuclear capabilities are strong enough to deter the use of nuclear weapons by its rivals, some analysts say.\n\u201cChinese leaders might believe there is some risk of a conventional war between China and the United States, so they may have to increase nuclear deterrence,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wu Riqiang,\n\n\n\n an arms-control expert at Renmin University in Beijing.\nDuring China\u2019s annual legislative session in March, Mr. Xi called for accelerated construction of high-level strategic deterrence systems, which some analysts have interpreted as a signal that Beijing could be in the early stages of a larger effort to reorganize its nuclear program.\nMr. Xi has also overseen moves to build up China\u2019s ability to launch nuclear strikes from submarines and aircraft, and with land-based missiles. \u201cOur sea-based nuclear capabilities need to massively develop,\u201d Mr. Xi said during a visit to a submarine base in 2018.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine seen during a military display in the South China Sea in 2018.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n china stringer network/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nMr. Zhao at the Carnegie Endowment said that in addition to acquiring a se What worries the Pentagon is that Beijing has yet to publicly explain the reasons for expanding its nuclear arsenal with more warheads and more weapons to carry them. ",
        "author": "Chao Deng and Alastair Gale"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Flight on Mars (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7761",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-successfully-makes-historic-first-flight-on-mars-11618830461?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=24",
        "text": "As flight data streamed from Ingenuity to Earth on Monday, mission engineers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California cheered and clapped. \n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s real. It\u2019s real,\u201d said Ingenuity project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n MiMi Aung,\n\n\n\n slapping the table in front of her with glee and showing a thumbs-up. \u201cWe can now say human beings have flown a drone on another planet.\u201d \n\n\nIngenuity arrived at Mars\u2019s Jezero Crater in February along with NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which was on hand to capture the historic flight on camera. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photos: NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Mars Flight\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n NASA/JPL\n\n\nThe drone\u2014stiff-legged and smaller than a picnic basket\u2014was designed as an engineering experiment to prove that powered flight is possible on the Red Planet and to help NASA plan for a future in which drones play a key role in planetary exploration. Such drones could one day provide access to terrain that is too remote or rugged for rovers to reach\u2014like Mars\u2019s Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, or its Olympus Mons shield volcano, which is about 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest.\n\u201cIt\u2019s the next step in expanding our capabilities to explore another planet,\u201d NASA acting administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Jurczyk\n\n\n\n said of Ingenuity. \u201cA helicopter could be used as a scout for robotic missions to look over the horizon and eventually as a partner for astronauts on Mars.\u201d\nIngenuity was on autopilot for its entire flight, out of sight, direct control or contact with the men and women on Earth who had ordered it aloft. Radio signals take too long to travel between the planets for any human operator to intervene.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) above Earth.\n\n\n(56 miles)\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\n(31 miles)\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth \ngenerally don\u2019t fly \nabove 10,000 ft.\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\n(7.5 miles)\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) \nabove Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth generally \ndon\u2019t fly above 10,000 ft.\n\n\n12km\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km)\nabove Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth generally \ndon\u2019t fly above 10,000 ft.\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude of about 22 miles (35 km) above Earth.\n\n\nMesosphere\n\n\n50km\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\nStratosphere\n\n\n12km\n\n\nHelicopters on Earth \ngenerally don\u2019t fly \nabove 10,000 ft.\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nTroposphere\n\n\nEarth\u2019s surface\n\n\n\nSources: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech; The Center for Planetary Science\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn Sunday, Ingenuity\u2019s chief pilot,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H\u00e5vard Grip,\n\n\n\n and his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had transmitted commands across 173 million miles of space to set Ingenuity\u2019s flight in motion. Given the time lag in radio transmissions resulting from the relative positions of Earth and Mars and the satellites sending back the data, the controllers had no way of knowing that the flight was a success until almost 16 hours later when the flight data trickled back to Earth.\nPreflight weather forecasts for Mars had NASA worried. Sensors aboard Perseverance showed winds within Ingenuity\u2019s flight zone of 13 to 45 miles an hour\u2014almost twice the maximum wind speed used in flight tests of Ingenuity on Earth. Computer simulations, though, suggested Ingenuity\u2019s autonomous flight-control systems could handle even stronger winds safely, the engineers said.\nThey timed the flight for around midday Mars time when the winds in Jezero Crater were expected to be at their lightest.\n\u201cWe upload the commands we want to run, and then we die inside for hours waiting to learn what happened,\u201d said Ingenuity lead operations manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Canham.\n\n\n\n \u201cThen, when all the data comes back, we frantically get online and look at it to make sure that everything went the way we wanted it to go.\u201d\nOn Monday, Dr. Grip and his colleagues analyzed the altitude and position measurements from the helicopter\u2019s laser altimeter and sensors to confirm that Ingenuity had actually flown as intended.\nThe history-making flight was the latest milestone in Mars exploration this year. In February, the United Arab Emirates successfully put its $200 million Hope spacecraft in orbit around Mars to begin a two-year weather mission. Days later, a Chinese probe named Tianwen-1 entered Mars orbit. China plans to land its first rover on the surface there sometime in May or June.\nThe Hope and Tianwen-1 missions are the first forays to the Red Planet for both countries. They joined spacecraft already in orbit there from the European Space Agency, the U.S. and India. NASA also has two other active missions under way on the surface, in addition to Perseverance.\nIngenuity combines high-speed rotors and featherweight carbon-fiber materials with inexpensive electronics hardware used in smartphones\u2014off the shelf but 150 times more powerful than the computer microprocessors NASA has used previously in space.\nThe thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere of Mars posed a special challenge, Ingenuity engineers said. The air at the Martian surface has the same density as air at an altitude above Earth of about 22 miles\u2014far beyond the operating range of any conventional helicopter. The thin Martian air made it hard for Ingenuity to generate sufficient lift and to control its rotor blades\u2014and hard to dissipate the heat generated by the tiny motors that power the rotors, the engineers said.\n\u201cWhat we didn\u2019t fully appreciate initially is how much that density changed the way the vehicle handled,\u201d Dr. Grip said. \u201cIt would be like riding a bicycle with grocery bags hanging from the handle bars, swinging back and forth. In other words, when you try to control it, you don\u2019t get a crisp clean response. You get a sluggish, oscillatory response, what we call flapping.\u201d \nIngenuity\u2019s designers damped the effect by making Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades unusually rigid.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEngineers in the control room at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., celebrated after news of the flight\u2019s success became clear Monday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/EPA/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nTo survive its long journey from Earth to Mars, Ingenuity traveled aboard Perseverance folded up like an ironing board in a compartment on the rover\u2019s underside. After landing safely, the drone cautiously unpacked itself and then charged its solar-powered batteries, which are needed not only to fly but to power heaters that protect the drone\u2019s fragile components. NASA engineers had worried that it might not withstand night-time temperatures that can plunge as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit.\nIngenuity survived the bitter cold. A flaw in its autopilot software, however, forced NASA to cancel its first flight attempt on April 11, when the craft abruptly shut itself down during its final preflight check, NASA officials said.\nA flaw in just a few lines of Ingenuity\u2019s 800,000 lines of flight code caused the tiny drone\u2019s onboard computer to wrongly conclude that the software had malfunctioned and aborted the flight test, the officials said. The system had been performing normally when the shutdown occurred. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhy do you think it is important to explore Mars? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nNASA engineers had tested the software thoroughly before Ingenuity left Earth but had failed to detect the problem, in part, because they were afraid to run the rotors at their full flight speed of 2,400 rpm in Earth\u2019s denser atmosphere. \u201cWe did not want to spin the rotors above 75 rpm on Earth because we\u2019d actually destroy them because the density is so high,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Braun,\n\n\n\n JPL director for planetary science. \u201cIt\u2019s an insidious problem.\u201d\nThe flaw required only a few new commands to fix, the officials said. But even a simple software update can take days when tech support is 173 million miles away. \nOnce Ingenuity completes its scheduled flights, Perseverance is expected to begin a two-year search for signs of past life on Mars. The rover will cache soil samples for eventual return to Earth by a series of retrieval missions carried out jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency. \n\u201cRight now, the target is to launch the sample return mission in 2026,\u201d Dr. Jurczyk said.\nBarring the unforeseen, NASA engineers will attempt to launch Ingenuity on its second flight in about four days, then conduct one additional flight every three days. \u201cWe will be taking bolder and bolder flights,\u201d Ms. Aung said. \u201cWe are going to be very adventurous.\u201d\n\n\nExploring MarsJuly 30, 2020Space Race: Mission to MarsFeb. 9, 2021U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission in Orbit Around Red PlanetJuly 30, 2020NASA Rover Sent to Find Signs of LifeJuly 21, 2020U.S. and China to Launch Mars MissionsJune 26, 2020Lisa Pratt Is Out to Save the WorldsApril 9, 2019Welcome to Your Home on MarsFeb. 13, 2019End of the Road for Opportunity RoverSept. 28, 2015Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history early Monday when the small but intrepid drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands on Mars in Crowning Moment for Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7762",
        "date": "2021-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-on-mars-in-crowning-moment-for-space-program-11621040108?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=8",
        "text": "After the landing, state media ran triumphant videos, with one state agency piece lauding President Xi Jinping for his longheld \u201cspace dream.\u201d\nThe landing also drew praise from the head of science missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the chief of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla \n\n\n and SpaceX.\n\n\n\u201cCongratulations!! Mars is very difficult,\u201d Mr. Musk tweeted.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n an associate administrator of NASA, said on Twitter: \u201cTogether with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity\u2019s understanding of the Red Planet.\u201d\nThe nine-minute automated landing on Mars came with considerable difficulties given the planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the inability to communicate with Earth after the process is initiated. That China succeeded on its first try\u2014where other nations have failed\u2014is an important milestone for its space program.\n\u201cThis is a crowning moment for China,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Namrata Goswami,\n\n\n\n a co-author of the book \u201cScramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space.\u201d \u201cIt sends a signal to the world that it has caught up with the U.S. in capacity for interplanetary exploration, and that it can be an alternative to the U.S. for space leadership,\u201d she said.\nOn Saturday, Mr. Xi extended his congratulations to the members of the mission, according to remarks published by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.\n\u201cThe landing left a Chinese mark on Mars for the first time,\u201d Mr. Xi said. \u201cThanks to your courage in face of challenges and pursuit of excellence, China is now among the leading countries in planetary exploration.\u201d \nTop officials witnessed the landing at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, Xinhua reported, including vice premiers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Han Zheng\n\n\n\n and Liu He, who read out Mr. Xi\u2019s message. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China\u2019s Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars early Saturday, according to Chinese state media, marking a milestone in the country\u2019s ambitious space program. China is the third nation after the U.S. and the Soviet Union to land on the red planet. Photo illustration: Beijing Aerospace Control Center\n \n\n\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 reached orbit around Mars in February shortly after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope spacecraft, which was the first interplanetary probe launched by an Arab country. They joined six other spacecraft already orbiting Mars from the U.S., the European Space Agency and India, all actively studying the desert planet.\nNine days later, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the Jezero Crater of Mars, where it will spend the next two years looking for evidence of past life. The rover also carried with it the Ingenuity helicopter drone, which carried out the first controlled powered flight on another planet.\nSo far, the only space agency that has successfully landed and operated on Mars is NASA. Its first lander, the Viking 1, touched down on the planet in 1976. Its first rover, the microwave-oven-sized Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997 in a location called Ares Vallis and sent back more than 500 photos. The U.S. has successfully operated five rovers on Mars.\nThe European Space Agency has tried twice unsuccessfully in the past decades. The Soviet Union also tried twice in the early 1970s at the height of the Cold War space race. Its Mars 2 probe crashed and its Mars 3 lander touched down in 1971, but survived only long enough to transmit a single image back to Earth before failing.\nZhurong will now carry out imaging of the landing site, conduct self-checks and eventually depart from its landing platform, though there hasn\u2019t been official confirmation on when it will begin its journey. It is expected to spend 90 Martian days\u2014known as sols\u2014on the red planet. Sols are about 39 minutes longer than days on Earth.\nChina\u2019s space agencies got vital practice landing rovers on the moon, but Mars presented tougher challenges and was seen as a barometer of the country\u2019s technological prowess.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeijing Aerospace Control Center personnel celebrated Saturday after the Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rao Aimin/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nEarly Saturday, Tianwen-1 began to descend from its parking orbit, according to China\u2019s space agency. The lander and rover separated from the orbiter at about 4 a.m. before flying for around three hours and hurtling toward Mars. The craft entered Mars\u2019s atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometers before landing at 7:18 a.m. \nThe mission\u2019s Mars entry, descent and landing were automated and took around 9 minutes, the agency said. The lander carried out the landing on its own, given the communication delays with Earth.\nTianwen-1, or \u201cQuestions to Heaven,\u201d consists of an orbiter, lander and rover. The symbolically named Zhurong is a six-wheeled solar-po The success of the Tianwen-1 mission makes China the third nation after the U.S. and Soviet Union to land on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands on Mars in Crowning Moment for Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7763",
        "date": "2021-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-on-mars-in-crowning-moment-for-space-program-11621040108?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=30",
        "text": "After the landing, state media ran triumphant videos, with one state agency piece lauding President Xi Jinping for his longheld \u201cspace dream.\u201d\nThe landing also drew praise from the head of science missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the chief of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla \n\n\n and SpaceX.\n\n\n\u201cCongratulations!! Mars is very difficult,\u201d Mr. Musk tweeted.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n an associate administrator of NASA, said on Twitter: \u201cTogether with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity\u2019s understanding of the Red Planet.\u201d\nThe nine-minute automated landing on Mars came with considerable difficulties given the planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the inability to communicate with Earth after the process is initiated. That China succeeded on its first try\u2014where other nations have failed\u2014is an important milestone for its space program.\n\u201cThis is a crowning moment for China,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Namrata Goswami,\n\n\n\n a co-author of the book \u201cScramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space.\u201d \u201cIt sends a signal to the world that it has caught up with the U.S. in capacity for interplanetary exploration, and that it can be an alternative to the U.S. for space leadership,\u201d she said.\nOn Saturday, Mr. Xi extended his congratulations to the members of the mission, according to remarks published by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.\n\u201cThe landing left a Chinese mark on Mars for the first time,\u201d Mr. Xi said. \u201cThanks to your courage in face of challenges and pursuit of excellence, China is now among the leading countries in planetary exploration.\u201d \nTop officials witnessed the landing at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, Xinhua reported, including vice premiers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Han Zheng\n\n\n\n and Liu He, who read out Mr. Xi\u2019s message. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China\u2019s Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars early Saturday, according to Chinese state media, marking a milestone in the country\u2019s ambitious space program. China is the third nation after the U.S. and the Soviet Union to land on the red planet. Photo illustration: Beijing Aerospace Control Center\n \n\n\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 reached orbit around Mars in February shortly after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope spacecraft, which was the first interplanetary probe launched by an Arab country. They joined six other spacecraft already orbiting Mars from the U.S., the European Space Agency and India, all actively studying the desert planet.\nNine days later, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the Jezero Crater of Mars, where it will spend the next two years looking for evidence of past life. The rover also carried with it the Ingenuity helicopter drone, which carried out the first controlled powered flight on another planet.\nSo far, the only space agency that has successfully landed and operated on Mars is NASA. Its first lander, the Viking 1, touched down on the planet in 1976. Its first rover, the microwave-oven-sized Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997 in a location called Ares Vallis and sent back more than 500 photos. The U.S. has successfully operated five rovers on Mars.\nThe European Space Agency has tried twice unsuccessfully in the past decades. The Soviet Union also tried twice in the early 1970s at the height of the Cold War space race. Its Mars 2 probe crashed and its Mars 3 lander touched down in 1971, but survived only long enough to transmit a single image back to Earth before failing.\nZhurong will now carry out imaging of the landing site, conduct self-checks and eventually depart from its landing platform, though there hasn\u2019t been official confirmation on when it will begin its journey. It is expected to spend 90 Martian days\u2014known as sols\u2014on the red planet. Sols are about 39 minutes longer than days on Earth.\nChina\u2019s space agencies got vital practice landing rovers on the moon, but Mars presented tougher challenges and was seen as a barometer of the country\u2019s technological prowess.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeijing Aerospace Control Center personnel celebrated Saturday after the Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rao Aimin/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nEarly Saturday, Tianwen-1 began to descend from its parking orbit, according to China\u2019s space agency. The lander and rover separated from the orbiter at about 4 a.m. before flying for around three hours and hurtling toward Mars. The craft entered Mars\u2019s atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometers before landing at 7:18 a.m. \nThe mission\u2019s Mars entry, descent and landing were automated and took around 9 minutes, the agency said. The lander carried out the landing on its own, given the communication delays with Earth.\nTianwen-1, or \u201cQuestions to Heaven,\u201d consists of an orbiter, lander and rover. The symbolically named Zhurong is a six-wheeled solar-po The success of the Tianwen-1 mission makes China the third nation after the U.S. and Soviet Union to land on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands on Mars in Crowning Moment for Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7764",
        "date": "2021-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-on-mars-in-crowning-moment-for-space-program-11621040108?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=30",
        "text": "After the landing, state media ran triumphant videos, with one state agency piece lauding President Xi Jinping for his longheld \u201cspace dream.\u201d\nThe landing also drew praise from the head of science missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the chief of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla \n\n\n and SpaceX.\n\n\n\u201cCongratulations!! Mars is very difficult,\u201d Mr. Musk tweeted.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n an associate administrator of NASA, said on Twitter: \u201cTogether with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity\u2019s understanding of the Red Planet.\u201d\nThe nine-minute automated landing on Mars came with considerable difficulties given the planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the inability to communicate with Earth after the process is initiated. That China succeeded on its first try\u2014where other nations have failed\u2014is an important milestone for its space program.\n\u201cThis is a crowning moment for China,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Namrata Goswami,\n\n\n\n a co-author of the book \u201cScramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space.\u201d \u201cIt sends a signal to the world that it has caught up with the U.S. in capacity for interplanetary exploration, and that it can be an alternative to the U.S. for space leadership,\u201d she said.\nOn Saturday, Mr. Xi extended his congratulations to the members of the mission, according to remarks published by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.\n\u201cThe landing left a Chinese mark on Mars for the first time,\u201d Mr. Xi said. \u201cThanks to your courage in face of challenges and pursuit of excellence, China is now among the leading countries in planetary exploration.\u201d \nTop officials witnessed the landing at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, Xinhua reported, including vice premiers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Han Zheng\n\n\n\n and Liu He, who read out Mr. Xi\u2019s message. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China\u2019s Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars early Saturday, according to Chinese state media, marking a milestone in the country\u2019s ambitious space program. China is the third nation after the U.S. and the Soviet Union to land on the red planet. Photo illustration: Beijing Aerospace Control Center\n \n\n\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 reached orbit around Mars in February shortly after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope spacecraft, which was the first interplanetary probe launched by an Arab country. They joined six other spacecraft already orbiting Mars from the U.S., the European Space Agency and India, all actively studying the desert planet.\nNine days later, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the Jezero Crater of Mars, where it will spend the next two years looking for evidence of past life. The rover also carried with it the Ingenuity helicopter drone, which carried out the first controlled powered flight on another planet.\nSo far, the only space agency that has successfully landed and operated on Mars is NASA. Its first lander, the Viking 1, touched down on the planet in 1976. Its first rover, the microwave-oven-sized Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997 in a location called Ares Vallis and sent back more than 500 photos. The U.S. has successfully operated five rovers on Mars.\nThe European Space Agency has tried twice unsuccessfully in the past decades. The Soviet Union also tried twice in the early 1970s at the height of the Cold War space race. Its Mars 2 probe crashed and its Mars 3 lander touched down in 1971, but survived only long enough to transmit a single image back to Earth before failing.\nZhurong will now carry out imaging of the landing site, conduct self-checks and eventually depart from its landing platform, though there hasn\u2019t been official confirmation on when it will begin its journey. It is expected to spend 90 Martian days\u2014known as sols\u2014on the red planet. Sols are about 39 minutes longer than days on Earth.\nChina\u2019s space agencies got vital practice landing rovers on the moon, but Mars presented tougher challenges and was seen as a barometer of the country\u2019s technological prowess.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeijing Aerospace Control Center personnel celebrated Saturday after the Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rao Aimin/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nEarly Saturday, Tianwen-1 began to descend from its parking orbit, according to China\u2019s space agency. The lander and rover separated from the orbiter at about 4 a.m. before flying for around three hours and hurtling toward Mars. The craft entered Mars\u2019s atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometers before landing at 7:18 a.m. \nThe mission\u2019s Mars entry, descent and landing were automated and took around 9 minutes, the agency said. The lander carried out the landing on its own, given the communication delays with Earth.\nTianwen-1, or \u201cQuestions to Heaven,\u201d consists of an orbiter, lander and rover. The symbolically named Zhurong is a six-wheeled solar-po The success of the Tianwen-1 mission makes China the third nation after the U.S. and Soviet Union to land on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Lands on Mars in Crowning Moment for Space Program (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7765",
        "date": "2021-05-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lands-on-mars-in-crowning-moment-for-space-program-11621040108?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=22",
        "text": "After the landing, state media ran triumphant videos, with one state agency piece lauding President Xi Jinping for his longheld \u201cspace dream.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe landing also drew praise from the head of science missions at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n the chief of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla \n\n\n and SpaceX.\n\n\n\u201cCongratulations!! Mars is very difficult,\u201d Mr. Musk tweeted.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Zurbuchen,\n\n\n\n an associate administrator of NASA, said on Twitter: \u201cTogether with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity\u2019s understanding of the Red Planet.\u201d\nThe nine-minute automated landing on Mars came with considerable difficulties given the planet\u2019s thin atmosphere and the inability to communicate with Earth after the process is initiated. That China succeeded on its first try\u2014where other nations have failed\u2014is an important milestone for its space program.\n\u201cThis is a crowning moment for China,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Namrata Goswami,\n\n\n\n a co-author of the book \u201cScramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space.\u201d \u201cIt sends a signal to the world that it has caught up with the U.S. in capacity for interplanetary exploration, and that it can be an alternative to the U.S. for space leadership,\u201d she said.\nOn Saturday, Mr. Xi extended his congratulations to the members of the mission, according to remarks published by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.\n\u201cThe landing left a Chinese mark on Mars for the first time,\u201d Mr. Xi said. \u201cThanks to your courage in face of challenges and pursuit of excellence, China is now among the leading countries in planetary exploration.\u201d \nTop officials witnessed the landing at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, Xinhua reported, including vice premiers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Han Zheng\n\n\n\n and Liu He, who read out Mr. Xi\u2019s message. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n China\u2019s Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars early Saturday, according to Chinese state media, marking a milestone in the country\u2019s ambitious space program. China is the third nation after the U.S. and the Soviet Union to land on the red planet. Photo illustration: Beijing Aerospace Control Center\n \n\n\nChina\u2019s Tianwen-1 reached orbit around Mars in February shortly after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 Hope spacecraft, which was the first interplanetary probe launched by an Arab country. They joined six other spacecraft already orbiting Mars from the U.S., the European Space Agency and India, all actively studying the desert planet.\nNine days later, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on the Jezero Crater of Mars, where it will spend the next two years looking for evidence of past life. The rover also carried with it the Ingenuity helicopter drone, which carried out the first controlled powered flight on another planet.\nSo far, the only space agency that has successfully landed and operated on Mars is NASA. Its first lander, the Viking 1, touched down on the planet in 1976. Its first rover, the microwave-oven-sized Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997 in a location called Ares Vallis and sent back more than 500 photos. The U.S. has successfully operated five rovers on Mars.\nThe European Space Agency has tried twice unsuccessfully in the past decades. The Soviet Union also tried twice in the early 1970s at the height of the Cold War space race. Its Mars 2 probe crashed and its Mars 3 lander touched down in 1971, but survived only long enough to transmit a single image back to Earth before failing.\nZhurong will now carry out imaging of the landing site, conduct self-checks and eventually depart from its landing platform, though there hasn\u2019t been official confirmation on when it will begin its journey. It is expected to spend 90 Martian days\u2014known as sols\u2014on the red planet. Sols are about 39 minutes longer than days on Earth.\nChina\u2019s space agencies got vital practice landing rovers on the moon, but Mars presented tougher challenges and was seen as a barometer of the country\u2019s technological prowess.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeijing Aerospace Control Center personnel celebrated Saturday after the Zhurong rover successfully landed on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rao Aimin/Xinhua/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nEarly Saturday, Tianwen-1 began to descend from its parking orbit, according to China\u2019s space agency. The lander and rover separated from the orbiter at about 4 a.m. before flying for around three hours and hurtling toward Mars. The craft entered Mars\u2019s atmosphere at an altitude of 125 kilometers before landing at 7:18 a.m. \nThe mission\u2019s Mars entry, descent and landing were automated and took around 9 minutes, the agency said. The lander carried out the landing on its own, given the communication delays with Earth.\nTianwen-1, or \u201cQuestions to Heaven,\u201d consists of an orbiter, lander and rover. The symbolically named Zhurong is a six-wheeled solar-powered rover. It is smaller than NASA\u2019s nuclear-powered Perseverance, which is currently roving Mars, and not as technologically advanced.\nZhurong is equipped with scientific instruments including remote-sensing cameras and particle analyzers. The mission\u2019s goals include investigating the planet\u2019s soil and looking for signs of subsurface water ice.\n\u201cThe mission is very ambitious,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roberto Orosei,\n\n\n\n a scientist at the Institute for Radioastronomy in Bologna, Italy, said before the landing. \u201cThey plan to do, in one go, three steps NASA took several decades to achieve: getting into orbit, landing on the surface and then driving a rover around.\u201d\nChina conducted its first human space flight in 2003, four decades after the Soviet Union and the U.S. achieved that milestone. Since then, China\u2019s leaders have often equated progress in space with the nation\u2019s rise, financing initiatives with deep pockets and tackling plans with the same precision as its five-year economic plans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA photo of Mars taken from the orbiting Tianwen-1 probe that was released by the China National Space Administration in March.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n CNSA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nNow it is rapidly achieving new milestones. Last month, China sent the first section of a planned space station into orbit, and is scheduled to launch more components in coming months. It hopes to have the station, seen as a rival to the International Space Station, operational by next year.\nWhile Chinese space technology is still catching up to that of the U.S., China has in recent years moved to bolster its space leadership credentials through international collaborations. In March, China\u2019s space agency and Russia\u2019s Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities agreed to team up to form a permanent lunar base and invited other nations to take part.\nChina was cut off from NASA in 2011 after the U.S. Congress passed a spending bill barring collaboration, in part citing the risk of espionage. Planetary exploration was made a national priority in China\u2019s 2016 economic plan, building off three successful lunar missions\u2014the Chang\u2019e 1, 2 and 3\u2014in 2007, 2010 and 2013. Those missions, scientists say, gave China engineering experience, as well as soft-landing technology know-how. \nChina became the first nation to land on the far side of the moon in early 2019. After it successfully conducted a lunar sample return mission in 2020, it revealed that it had done 600 practice landings in simulation facilities on Earth, a sign of its heavy investment in space.\nReaching Mars was the bigger goal, and in 2017 Ye Peijian, commander in chief of China\u2019s Chang\u2019e series, stressed the need to exploit a window for landing that occurs every 26 months. He lamented lost opportunities in 2013 and 2015, and said in a televised interview that China \u201cabsolutely can\u2019t miss\u201d the window that was open last year. \nIn China, expectations for the landing had been carefully couched, with scientists repeatedly explaining the extreme challenges of the feat. State media highlighted the high stakes for the team behind the mission: One China Daily article in April detailed how a member of the Tianwen-1 team had postponed her wedding three times to focus on the mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michel Blanc,\n\n\n\n who was executive director of the International Space Science Institute-Beijing from 2016 to 2018, said he had been impressed by the rapid development of research and infrastructure at the time he was there. Particularly striking, he said, was the development of research in the major labs of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and at top Chinese universities.\nHaving followed China\u2019s space trajectory for 15 years, Ms. Goswami, the author, said that what sets the country\u2019s space ambitions apart is its vision of space as an economic opportunity. \n\u201cFor China, space is a critical part of the nation\u2019s infrastructure,\u201d Ms. Goswami said. \u201cIts goal is to become the lead space nation in 20 years, and they will continue marching steadily until they reach that dream.\u201d\n\n\nMissions to MarsRelated coverage, selected by the editors NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Makes Historic First Flight (April 19) NASA Lands Perseverance Rover Safely on Mars After \u2018Seven Minutes of Terror\u2019 (Feb. 18) U.A.E.\u2019s Hope Mars Mission Puts SUV-Size Craft in Orbit Around Red Planet (Feb. 9) \n\n\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com The success of the Tianwen-1 mission makes China the third nation after the U.S. and Soviet Union to land on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7766",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-could-become-fourth-country-to-reach-the-moon-with-space-shot-this-week/2019/02/20/c0c8b026-346c-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html",
        "text": "TEL AVIV \u2014 Israel is aiming to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon with the scheduled launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., of Beresheet, the first homegrown Israeli spaceship.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt stake are not only $100\u00a0million of investment and eight years of hard work, says the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs involved in the venture, but also\u00a0possibly the future of independent privatized space travel.\u00a0 Beresheet, named for the Hebrew word for Genesis, will be the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, say those behind the project. Measuring only 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, the vessel is aiming to make a lunar landing on April\u00a011.Story continues below advertisementPrevious moon landings \u2014 including the first by the former Soviet Union in 1966, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 and China in 2013 \u2014 were all government-sponsored endeavors. This initiative, spearheaded by Israeli nonprofit\u00a0SpaceIL, is being funded mainly by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world.\u00a0AdvertisementSpaceIL\u2019s chief executive, Ido Anteby, said that as long as there are no last-minute hiccups on Thursday night \u2014 the launch has already been postponed at least once \u2014 Beresheet will leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere by hitching a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Once the spaceship disengages from the Falcon 9 rocket, the craft will travel a roundabout route to the moon, covering a total distance of about 4 million miles, orbiting both the Earth and the moon several times. As it reaches the moon\u2019s orbit, Beresheet will reduce its speed, with the goal of being picked up by the moon\u2019s gravity.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThere are still challenges before it reaches a lunar landing and puts Israel on the space industry\u2019s map. Israelis have already experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.AdvertisementMorris Kahn, SpaceIL\u2019s president and its largest investor, said Monday he hoped the initiative, as the first commercial, nongovernment flight to the moon, would contribute significantly to future space exploration.\u00a0\u00a0He also said he was \u201cgifting\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project.\u00a0\u201cNot only every Israeli, but also every Jew will remember where he was when the Israeli spacecraft landed on the moon,\u201d said Kahn, a South African-born Israeli billionaire.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes according to plan, future visitors to the moon will also have a reminder of Israel\u2019s inaugural space flight because the craft, which is making a one-way journey, is carrying capsules filled with Israeli national symbols, Jewish cultural items, and digital files detailing how this project came about.\u00a0It is also carrying a tiny nanotech version of the Bible.\u00a0AdvertisementAs part of its mission, Beresheet will engage in scientific research for Israel\u2019s Weizmann Institute of Science, measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic fields with specially installed computers and cameras, said SpaceIL\u2019s Anteby.The seeds of the Beresheet initiative started to sprout in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now defunct Google Lunar X Prize.\u00a0Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yehonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20\u00a0million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon \u2014 and to turn Israeli schoolchildren on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThough the three Israelis did not win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL. Since then, the project not only gained financial backing from private investors but also support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Opher Doron, IAI\u2019s general manager, said a goal of this undertaking is to inspire a generation of children to study science and technology.\u00a0\u201cWe want to make them feel that they can achieve anything,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0 After hitching a ride on a rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the Beresheet craft is to make a lunar landing April 11. Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week (WP: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7767",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-could-become-fourth-country-to-reach-the-moon-with-space-shot-this-week/2019/02/20/c0c8b026-346c-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html",
        "text": "TEL AVIV \u2014 Israel is aiming to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon with the scheduled launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., of Beresheet, the first homegrown Israeli spaceship.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt stake are not only $100\u00a0million of investment and eight years of hard work, says the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs involved in the venture, but also\u00a0possibly the future of independent privatized space travel.\u00a0 Beresheet, named for the Hebrew word for Genesis, will be the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, say those behind the project. Measuring only 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, the vessel is aiming to make a lunar landing on April\u00a011.Story continues below advertisementPrevious moon landings \u2014 including the first by the former Soviet Union in 1966, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 and China in 2013 \u2014 were all government-sponsored endeavors. This initiative, spearheaded by Israeli nonprofit\u00a0SpaceIL, is being funded mainly by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world.\u00a0AdvertisementSpaceIL\u2019s chief executive, Ido Anteby, said that as long as there are no last-minute hiccups on Thursday night \u2014 the launch has already been postponed at least once \u2014 Beresheet will leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere by hitching a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Once the spaceship disengages from the Falcon 9 rocket, the craft will travel a roundabout route to the moon, covering a total distance of about 4 million miles, orbiting both the Earth and the moon several times. As it reaches the moon\u2019s orbit, Beresheet will reduce its speed, with the goal of being picked up by the moon\u2019s gravity.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThere are still challenges before it reaches a lunar landing and puts Israel on the space industry\u2019s map. Israelis have already experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.AdvertisementMorris Kahn, SpaceIL\u2019s president and its largest investor, said Monday he hoped the initiative, as the first commercial, nongovernment flight to the moon, would contribute significantly to future space exploration.\u00a0\u00a0He also said he was \u201cgifting\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project.\u00a0\u201cNot only every Israeli, but also every Jew will remember where he was when the Israeli spacecraft landed on the moon,\u201d said Kahn, a South African-born Israeli billionaire.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes according to plan, future visitors to the moon will also have a reminder of Israel\u2019s inaugural space flight because the craft, which is making a one-way journey, is carrying capsules filled with Israeli national symbols, Jewish cultural items, and digital files detailing how this project came about.\u00a0It is also carrying a tiny nanotech version of the Bible.\u00a0AdvertisementAs part of its mission, Beresheet will engage in scientific research for Israel\u2019s Weizmann Institute of Science, measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic fields with specially installed computers and cameras, said SpaceIL\u2019s Anteby.The seeds of the Beresheet initiative started to sprout in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now defunct Google Lunar X Prize.\u00a0Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yehonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20\u00a0million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon \u2014 and to turn Israeli schoolchildren on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThough the three Israelis did not win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL. Since then, the project not only gained financial backing from private investors but also support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Opher Doron, IAI\u2019s general manager, said a goal of this undertaking is to inspire a generation of children to study science and technology.\u00a0\u201cWe want to make them feel that they can achieve anything,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0 After hitching a ride on a rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the Beresheet craft is to make a lunar landing April 11. Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week (WP: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7768",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-could-become-fourth-country-to-reach-the-moon-with-space-shot-this-week/2019/02/20/c0c8b026-346c-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html",
        "text": "TEL AVIV \u2014 Israel is aiming to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon with the scheduled launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., of Beresheet, the first homegrown Israeli spaceship.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt stake are not only $100\u00a0million of investment and eight years of hard work, says the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs involved in the venture, but also\u00a0possibly the future of independent privatized space travel.\u00a0 Beresheet, named for the Hebrew word for Genesis, will be the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, say those behind the project. Measuring only 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, the vessel is aiming to make a lunar landing on April\u00a011.Story continues below advertisementPrevious moon landings \u2014 including the first by the former Soviet Union in 1966, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 and China in 2013 \u2014 were all government-sponsored endeavors. This initiative, spearheaded by Israeli nonprofit\u00a0SpaceIL, is being funded mainly by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world.\u00a0AdvertisementSpaceIL\u2019s chief executive, Ido Anteby, said that as long as there are no last-minute hiccups on Thursday night \u2014 the launch has already been postponed at least once \u2014 Beresheet will leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere by hitching a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Once the spaceship disengages from the Falcon 9 rocket, the craft will travel a roundabout route to the moon, covering a total distance of about 4 million miles, orbiting both the Earth and the moon several times. As it reaches the moon\u2019s orbit, Beresheet will reduce its speed, with the goal of being picked up by the moon\u2019s gravity.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThere are still challenges before it reaches a lunar landing and puts Israel on the space industry\u2019s map. Israelis have already experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.AdvertisementMorris Kahn, SpaceIL\u2019s president and its largest investor, said Monday he hoped the initiative, as the first commercial, nongovernment flight to the moon, would contribute significantly to future space exploration.\u00a0\u00a0He also said he was \u201cgifting\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project.\u00a0\u201cNot only every Israeli, but also every Jew will remember where he was when the Israeli spacecraft landed on the moon,\u201d said Kahn, a South African-born Israeli billionaire.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes according to plan, future visitors to the moon will also have a reminder of Israel\u2019s inaugural space flight because the craft, which is making a one-way journey, is carrying capsules filled with Israeli national symbols, Jewish cultural items, and digital files detailing how this project came about.\u00a0It is also carrying a tiny nanotech version of the Bible.\u00a0AdvertisementAs part of its mission, Beresheet will engage in scientific research for Israel\u2019s Weizmann Institute of Science, measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic fields with specially installed computers and cameras, said SpaceIL\u2019s Anteby.The seeds of the Beresheet initiative started to sprout in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now defunct Google Lunar X Prize.\u00a0Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yehonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20\u00a0million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon \u2014 and to turn Israeli schoolchildren on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThough the three Israelis did not win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL. Since then, the project not only gained financial backing from private investors but also support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Opher Doron, IAI\u2019s general manager, said a goal of this undertaking is to inspire a generation of children to study science and technology.\u00a0\u201cWe want to make them feel that they can achieve anything,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0 After hitching a ride on a rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the Beresheet craft is to make a lunar landing April 11. Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week (WP: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7769",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-could-become-fourth-country-to-reach-the-moon-with-space-shot-this-week/2019/02/20/c0c8b026-346c-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html",
        "text": "TEL AVIV \u2014 Israel is aiming to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon with the scheduled launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., of Beresheet, the first homegrown Israeli spaceship.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt stake are not only $100\u00a0million of investment and eight years of hard work, says the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs involved in the venture, but also\u00a0possibly the future of independent privatized space travel.\u00a0 Beresheet, named for the Hebrew word for Genesis, will be the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, say those behind the project. Measuring only 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, the vessel is aiming to make a lunar landing on April\u00a011.Story continues below advertisementPrevious moon landings \u2014 including the first by the former Soviet Union in 1966, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 and China in 2013 \u2014 were all government-sponsored endeavors. This initiative, spearheaded by Israeli nonprofit\u00a0SpaceIL, is being funded mainly by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world.\u00a0AdvertisementSpaceIL\u2019s chief executive, Ido Anteby, said that as long as there are no last-minute hiccups on Thursday night \u2014 the launch has already been postponed at least once \u2014 Beresheet will leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere by hitching a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Once the spaceship disengages from the Falcon 9 rocket, the craft will travel a roundabout route to the moon, covering a total distance of about 4 million miles, orbiting both the Earth and the moon several times. As it reaches the moon\u2019s orbit, Beresheet will reduce its speed, with the goal of being picked up by the moon\u2019s gravity.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThere are still challenges before it reaches a lunar landing and puts Israel on the space industry\u2019s map. Israelis have already experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.AdvertisementMorris Kahn, SpaceIL\u2019s president and its largest investor, said Monday he hoped the initiative, as the first commercial, nongovernment flight to the moon, would contribute significantly to future space exploration.\u00a0\u00a0He also said he was \u201cgifting\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project.\u00a0\u201cNot only every Israeli, but also every Jew will remember where he was when the Israeli spacecraft landed on the moon,\u201d said Kahn, a South African-born Israeli billionaire.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes according to plan, future visitors to the moon will also have a reminder of Israel\u2019s inaugural space flight because the craft, which is making a one-way journey, is carrying capsules filled with Israeli national symbols, Jewish cultural items, and digital files detailing how this project came about.\u00a0It is also carrying a tiny nanotech version of the Bible.\u00a0AdvertisementAs part of its mission, Beresheet will engage in scientific research for Israel\u2019s Weizmann Institute of Science, measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic fields with specially installed computers and cameras, said SpaceIL\u2019s Anteby.The seeds of the Beresheet initiative started to sprout in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now defunct Google Lunar X Prize.\u00a0Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yehonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20\u00a0million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon \u2014 and to turn Israeli schoolchildren on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThough the three Israelis did not win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL. Since then, the project not only gained financial backing from private investors but also support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Opher Doron, IAI\u2019s general manager, said a goal of this undertaking is to inspire a generation of children to study science and technology.\u00a0\u201cWe want to make them feel that they can achieve anything,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0 After hitching a ride on a rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the Beresheet craft is to make a lunar landing April 11. Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week (WP: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7770",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-could-become-fourth-country-to-reach-the-moon-with-space-shot-this-week/2019/02/20/c0c8b026-346c-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html",
        "text": "TEL AVIV \u2014 Israel is aiming to become the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the moon with the scheduled launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., of Beresheet, the first homegrown Israeli spaceship.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt stake are not only $100\u00a0million of investment and eight years of hard work, says the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs involved in the venture, but also\u00a0possibly the future of independent privatized space travel.\u00a0 Beresheet, named for the Hebrew word for Genesis, will be the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, say those behind the project. Measuring only 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, the vessel is aiming to make a lunar landing on April\u00a011.Story continues below advertisementPrevious moon landings \u2014 including the first by the former Soviet Union in 1966, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969 and China in 2013 \u2014 were all government-sponsored endeavors. This initiative, spearheaded by Israeli nonprofit\u00a0SpaceIL, is being funded mainly by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world.\u00a0AdvertisementSpaceIL\u2019s chief executive, Ido Anteby, said that as long as there are no last-minute hiccups on Thursday night \u2014 the launch has already been postponed at least once \u2014 Beresheet will leave the Earth\u2019s atmosphere by hitching a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Once the spaceship disengages from the Falcon 9 rocket, the craft will travel a roundabout route to the moon, covering a total distance of about 4 million miles, orbiting both the Earth and the moon several times. As it reaches the moon\u2019s orbit, Beresheet will reduce its speed, with the goal of being picked up by the moon\u2019s gravity.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThere are still challenges before it reaches a lunar landing and puts Israel on the space industry\u2019s map. Israelis have already experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into the Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.AdvertisementMorris Kahn, SpaceIL\u2019s president and its largest investor, said Monday he hoped the initiative, as the first commercial, nongovernment flight to the moon, would contribute significantly to future space exploration.\u00a0\u00a0He also said he was \u201cgifting\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project.\u00a0\u201cNot only every Israeli, but also every Jew will remember where he was when the Israeli spacecraft landed on the moon,\u201d said Kahn, a South African-born Israeli billionaire.Story continues below advertisementIf all goes according to plan, future visitors to the moon will also have a reminder of Israel\u2019s inaugural space flight because the craft, which is making a one-way journey, is carrying capsules filled with Israeli national symbols, Jewish cultural items, and digital files detailing how this project came about.\u00a0It is also carrying a tiny nanotech version of the Bible.\u00a0AdvertisementAs part of its mission, Beresheet will engage in scientific research for Israel\u2019s Weizmann Institute of Science, measuring the moon\u2019s magnetic fields with specially installed computers and cameras, said SpaceIL\u2019s Anteby.The seeds of the Beresheet initiative started to sprout in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now defunct Google Lunar X Prize.\u00a0Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yehonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20\u00a0million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon \u2014 and to turn Israeli schoolchildren on to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThough the three Israelis did not win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL. Since then, the project not only gained financial backing from private investors but also support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Opher Doron, IAI\u2019s general manager, said a goal of this undertaking is to inspire a generation of children to study science and technology.\u00a0\u201cWe want to make them feel that they can achieve anything,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0 After hitching a ride on a rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, the Beresheet craft is to make a lunar landing April 11. Israel could become fourth country to reach the moon with space shot this week",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israeli spacecraft reaches the moon \u2014 with a crash (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7771",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-spacecraft-reaches-the-moon--with-a-crash/2019/04/11/2fb1791e-5c7c-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html",
        "text": "JERUSALEM \u2014 Israel was hoping on Thursday to become the fourth nation ever to land a spacecraft on the moon, but the lunar mission, which was broadcast live on Israeli TV and on social media, went awry as the main engine appeared to go into failure and the control center suddenly lost communication with the craft a few minutes before it was to touch down. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019ve landed, but not in the way we wanted to,\u201d Opher Doron, general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries, which assisted in building the vessel, informed a crowd of onlookers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.The newly reelected leader told the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered at the control center in Yehud, in central Israel, that they should not be disappointed and that it was still a great achievement. Israel, he said, would try again soon to reach the moon and land properly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve reached the moon, but we want to land more comfortably, and there will be another attempt. The very experience is a tremendous achievement, and we will become the fourth country to land on the moon if we persevere,\u201d he said. \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, the eagle has landed, the state of Israel is taking off \u2014 next time even better.\u201dEarlier he had said that for the unmanned spacecraft, named Beresheet,\u00a0the Hebrew word for Genesis, the first book of the Bible, to make such a journey \u201cwas a great step for mankind and a huge leap for Israel.\u201d\u00a0Morris Kahn, president of\u00a0SpaceIL, which spearheaded the complicated and ambitious project, said: \u201cIsrael made it to the moon. Beresheet\u2019s journey hasn\u2019t ended. I expect Israel\u2019s next generation to complete the mission for us.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe $100 million initiative was almost entirely funded by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world, though some government agencies offered support. Kahn, a South African-born millionaire, \u201cgifted\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project. He said he was hopeful that the\u00a0initiative would contribute significantly to future space exploration and also to inspire a new generation of Israeli children to embrace science and realize that anything is possible.AdvertisementMeasuring 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, Beresheet was the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, said those behind the project.Departing the Earth\u2019s atmosphere on Feb. 21, the spacecraft initially hitched a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX from Cape Canaveral, Fla.Story continues below advertisementOver the past seven weeks, Beresheet covered a total distance of about 4 million miles, circling Earth several times before reaching the\u00a0moon\u2019s orbit on April 4. The craft had began preparing to land\u00a0on a flatter part of the moon\u2019s rocky surface, and right before it crashed managed to capture an image of the moon showing how close it had been to completing its mission.Seven countries have attempted to land on the moon, but only three have succeeded so far \u2014 the first unmanned landing was by the Soviet Union in 1966, then American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the moon in 1969, and in 2013, there was an unmanned landing by China. All were government-sponsored endeavors.AdvertisementThe idea for Beresheet began in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now-defunct Google Lunar X Prize. Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20 million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon. Though they failed to win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe project not only gained financial backing from private investors, it also got support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Israelis have experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to EarthToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The homegrown spacecraft was supposed to touch down but crashed at the last minute. Israeli spacecraft reaches the moon \u2014 with a crash",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israeli spacecraft reaches the moon \u2014 with a crash (WP: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7772",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-spacecraft-reaches-the-moon--with-a-crash/2019/04/11/2fb1791e-5c7c-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html",
        "text": "JERUSALEM \u2014 Israel was hoping on Thursday to become the fourth nation ever to land a spacecraft on the moon, but the lunar mission, which was broadcast live on Israeli TV and on social media, went awry as the main engine appeared to go into failure and the control center suddenly lost communication with the craft a few minutes before it was to touch down. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019ve landed, but not in the way we wanted to,\u201d Opher Doron, general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries, which assisted in building the vessel, informed a crowd of onlookers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.The newly reelected leader told the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered at the control center in Yehud, in central Israel, that they should not be disappointed and that it was still a great achievement. Israel, he said, would try again soon to reach the moon and land properly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve reached the moon, but we want to land more comfortably, and there will be another attempt. The very experience is a tremendous achievement, and we will become the fourth country to land on the moon if we persevere,\u201d he said. \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, the eagle has landed, the state of Israel is taking off \u2014 next time even better.\u201dEarlier he had said that for the unmanned spacecraft, named Beresheet,\u00a0the Hebrew word for Genesis, the first book of the Bible, to make such a journey \u201cwas a great step for mankind and a huge leap for Israel.\u201d\u00a0Morris Kahn, president of\u00a0SpaceIL, which spearheaded the complicated and ambitious project, said: \u201cIsrael made it to the moon. Beresheet\u2019s journey hasn\u2019t ended. I expect Israel\u2019s next generation to complete the mission for us.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe $100 million initiative was almost entirely funded by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world, though some government agencies offered support. Kahn, a South African-born millionaire, \u201cgifted\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project. He said he was hopeful that the\u00a0initiative would contribute significantly to future space exploration and also to inspire a new generation of Israeli children to embrace science and realize that anything is possible.AdvertisementMeasuring 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, Beresheet was the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, said those behind the project.Departing the Earth\u2019s atmosphere on Feb. 21, the spacecraft initially hitched a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX from Cape Canaveral, Fla.Story continues below advertisementOver the past seven weeks, Beresheet covered a total distance of about 4 million miles, circling Earth several times before reaching the\u00a0moon\u2019s orbit on April 4. The craft had began preparing to land\u00a0on a flatter part of the moon\u2019s rocky surface, and right before it crashed managed to capture an image of the moon showing how close it had been to completing its mission.Seven countries have attempted to land on the moon, but only three have succeeded so far \u2014 the first unmanned landing was by the Soviet Union in 1966, then American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the moon in 1969, and in 2013, there was an unmanned landing by China. All were government-sponsored endeavors.AdvertisementThe idea for Beresheet began in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now-defunct Google Lunar X Prize. Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20 million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon. Though they failed to win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe project not only gained financial backing from private investors, it also got support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Israelis have experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to EarthToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The homegrown spacecraft was supposed to touch down but crashed at the last minute. Israeli spacecraft reaches the moon \u2014 with a crash",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Israeli spacecraft reaches the moon \u2014 with a crash (WP: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7773",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israeli-spacecraft-reaches-the-moon--with-a-crash/2019/04/11/2fb1791e-5c7c-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html",
        "text": "JERUSALEM \u2014 Israel was hoping on Thursday to become the fourth nation ever to land a spacecraft on the moon, but the lunar mission, which was broadcast live on Israeli TV and on social media, went awry as the main engine appeared to go into failure and the control center suddenly lost communication with the craft a few minutes before it was to touch down. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cWe\u2019ve landed, but not in the way we wanted to,\u201d Opher Doron, general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries, which assisted in building the vessel, informed a crowd of onlookers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.The newly reelected leader told the team of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered at the control center in Yehud, in central Israel, that they should not be disappointed and that it was still a great achievement. Israel, he said, would try again soon to reach the moon and land properly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019ve reached the moon, but we want to land more comfortably, and there will be another attempt. The very experience is a tremendous achievement, and we will become the fourth country to land on the moon if we persevere,\u201d he said. \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, the eagle has landed, the state of Israel is taking off \u2014 next time even better.\u201dEarlier he had said that for the unmanned spacecraft, named Beresheet,\u00a0the Hebrew word for Genesis, the first book of the Bible, to make such a journey \u201cwas a great step for mankind and a huge leap for Israel.\u201d\u00a0Morris Kahn, president of\u00a0SpaceIL, which spearheaded the complicated and ambitious project, said: \u201cIsrael made it to the moon. Beresheet\u2019s journey hasn\u2019t ended. I expect Israel\u2019s next generation to complete the mission for us.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe $100 million initiative was almost entirely funded by Jewish donors and foundations from around the world, though some government agencies offered support. Kahn, a South African-born millionaire, \u201cgifted\u201d the project to Israel and declared it a national project. He said he was hopeful that the\u00a0initiative would contribute significantly to future space exploration and also to inspire a new generation of Israeli children to embrace science and realize that anything is possible.AdvertisementMeasuring 1.5 meters in height and two meters in diameter, Beresheet was the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to attempt the journey from Earth to the moon, said those behind the project.Departing the Earth\u2019s atmosphere on Feb. 21, the spacecraft initially hitched a ride on a Falcon 9 commercial rocket belonging to Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX from Cape Canaveral, Fla.Story continues below advertisementOver the past seven weeks, Beresheet covered a total distance of about 4 million miles, circling Earth several times before reaching the\u00a0moon\u2019s orbit on April 4. The craft had began preparing to land\u00a0on a flatter part of the moon\u2019s rocky surface, and right before it crashed managed to capture an image of the moon showing how close it had been to completing its mission.Seven countries have attempted to land on the moon, but only three have succeeded so far \u2014 the first unmanned landing was by the Soviet Union in 1966, then American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the moon in 1969, and in 2013, there was an unmanned landing by China. All were government-sponsored endeavors.AdvertisementThe idea for Beresheet began in 2010, when three young Israeli entrepreneurs signed up to compete for the now-defunct Google Lunar X Prize. Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Weintraub hoped to win the $20 million prize by landing an Israeli-built unmanned spaceship on the moon. Though they failed to win the prize \u2014 no one did \u2014 they went on to create SpaceIL.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe project not only gained financial backing from private investors, it also got support from Israeli government agencies such as Israel Aerospace Industries and the Israel Space Agency. It was these connections that last summer helped facilitate agreements with NASA and Musk\u2019s SpaceX.Israelis have experienced their share of disappointment and tragedy when it comes to space travel. Israel\u2019s only astronaut, Ilan Ramon, was among the seven-member crew of the space shuttle Columbia when it disintegrated upon reentry into Earth\u2019s atmosphere in 2003.NASA Kelly twins study shows harsh effects of space flight and a brutal return to EarthToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The homegrown spacecraft was supposed to touch down but crashed at the last minute. Israeli spacecraft reaches the moon \u2014 with a crash",
        "author": "Ruth Eglash"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Diego Maradona and the passing of a global icon (WP: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7774",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/12/04/maradona-death-legacy-soccer/",
        "text": "You\u2019re reading an excerpt from the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest, including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt\u2019s been more than a week since the death of Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona, but the wave of grief triggered by his passing is still cresting around the planet. In his native country, where he lay in state before a chaotic funeral, lamentation gave way to recrimination. Authorities raided the homes and offices first of his doctor and then his psychiatrist as investigations into Maradona\u2019s complex medical history have picked up steam. Maradona died at 60 after a lifetime of notorious excess, overindulging in cocaine, booze and pizza. He had mental breakdowns, emergency surgeries and even a stomach-stapling operation. Yet still, to so many who idolized him, including yours truly, it\u2019s hard to accept that he\u2019s gone \u2014 the improbability of an immortal fading from the scene before the telling of his myth has finished.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch is the global power of both soccer and Maradona\u2019s legend that his death wasn\u2019t just an Argentine tragedy. Memorials and murals to the irrepressible attacker \u2014 arguably the greatest player in the sport\u2019s history \u2014 sprang up on almost every continent. In his adopted city of Naples, where figurines of Maradona often sit alongside those of Christ in seasonal Nativity displays, countless fans converged on the cavernous stadium that bore witness to perhaps his greatest triumph. In the Indian state of Kerala, thousands of miles away from the sites of Maradona\u2019s celebrated exploits, the local government declared two days of official mourning.From a sporting perspective, Maradona sits atop soccer\u2019s pantheon, with perhaps only the Brazilian Pel\u00e9 for company. In years to come, they\u2019ll likely be joined by the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, another Argentine, both players whose lists of personal accolades surpass those of the older pair.VIDEO: India Maradona fans mourn 'Our God' Diego.Emotional fans in Kolkata and Kannur mourn the passing of Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, who is revered as their \"legend\" and even \"God\" pic.twitter.com/zwrV4pwvXa\u2014 AFP News Agency (@AFP) November 27, 2020\n\nBut the extent of Maradona\u2019s celebrity \u2014 and the fervor of his admirers \u2014 may never be seen again. When he cemented his fame by leading Argentina to victory in the 1986 World Cup, he did so at a time when World Cups mattered more. The surfeit of soccer on show now and the ubiquitousness of its stars on social media have demystified the game from the days when many fans would have to wait four years to get a real glimpse of its heroes. Moreover, neither Ronaldo nor Messi seems to possess the same powers of transcendence that coursed through Maradona\u2019s career and life.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn this age of hyper-marketing and commercial packaging, these immense footballers seem like alien creatures cut from steel, polished with hair gel,\u201d wrote my twin Kanishk Tharoor in a 2014 essay for the Times of India. \u201cOne gets the sense that at the end of the day, Messi and Ronaldo return to their spaceship-like mansions to power off, to sleep a dreamless robotic sleep. Maradona, on the other hand, offered the illusion that no barrier separated the field of his renown from the world beyond. Both on and off the pitch, he was the scrappy child of the slums, snarling exuberance and desire.\u201dMaradona was a true populist. He grew up in a shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and would be defined by his determination to both escape and yet still represent his origins. He absorbed the pejoratives of his place \u2014 both the \u201cnegrito,\u201d the little \u201cBlack\u201d boy with Indigenous blood looked down upon by more well-to-do (and White) Argentines, and the \u201cpibe,\u201d the cunning rascal of the streets.It was the impudent \u201cpibe\u201d who scored the infamous \u201chand of God\u201d goal against England in the 1986 World Cup, where he knocked in the ball with a clenched fist. He followed up that act of cheating with one of genius, a slaloming run through the English team that ended with the ball in the net and a weeping commentator for Argentina thanking God mid-broadcast \u201cfor football, for Maradona, for these tears.\u201d Four years after the humiliation of the Falklands War, Maradona \u201cgave us the best (and probably the only) payback we could get as a nation,\u201d wrote Argentine journalist Juan Manuel R\u00f3tulo. \u201cOne hero to mend the open wound of millions.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd it was the \u201cnegrito\u201d who captured the hearts of Naples. Maradona arrived in one of Europe\u2019s poorest cities and took its middling team, Napoli, to unprecedented glory. He internalized the widespread bigotry that northern Italians voiced against Neapolitans and channeled it into an almost moral mission on the pitch. In footage of those matches, you don\u2019t see Maradona just wearing his heart on his sleeve. In the ferocious churn of his elbows, the surge of his stocky frame, you can almost hear that heart beating.\u201cIt had been more than half a century since this city, condemned to suffer the furies of Vesuvius and eternal defeat on the soccer field, had last won a [major trophy], and thanks to Maradona the dark south finally managed to humiliate the white north that scorned it,\u201d wrote the late Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. \u201cIn the stadiums of Italy and all Europe, Napoli kept on winning, cup after cup, and each goal constituted a desecration of the established order and a revenge against history.\u201dMaradona perhaps took the mantle of champion of the global South too far. Much to his critics\u2019 ire, he embraced leftist Latin American strongmen such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Ch\u00e1vez. In his own life, he was no moral exemplar, leaving behind a trail of lavish waste, mafia ties, unpaid taxes, allegedly abused women and neglected children. At his death, it seemed there was no closure to his endless struggle with addiction.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cHe was a perfect embodiment of the human ability to be contradictory, to do and convey ugly and beautiful at once, good and evil in the same stroke,\u201d wrote Marcela Mora y Araujo, a Buenos Aires-based journalist who translated Maradona\u2019s autobiography into English. \u201cHis celebrity was not separate from his private self \u2014 he was achingly human in every way, yet a superstar at all times.\u201dAs Galeano put it, Maradona was \u201cthe most human of the gods.\u201d He also may be one of the last.Read more Macron\u2019s liberal double standardsThe trickle-down tragedies of the pandemicThe assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientist raises the stakes for Biden The extent of the Argentine soccer legend's celebrity \u2014 and the fervor of his admirers \u2014 may never be seen again. Diego Maradona and the passing of a global icon",
        "author": "Ishaan Tharoor"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the collapse of the Soviet Union aided the birth of space tourism (WP: World) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7775",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/20/space-tourists-russia-soviet/",
        "text": "Western billionaires are dominating the race to open up space to fee-paying tourists. However, much of the origins of this new brand of outer orbit globe-trotting lie not in the United States or Europe, but in Russia.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe economic turmoil after the collapse of the Soviet Union helped open space travel to wealthy private individuals \u2014 with one of the world\u2019s most advanced space-race programs forced to look for new sources of funding amid perestroika and the fall of Communism. On Tuesday, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and a small team onboard the New Shepard rocket flew past the edge of space. The launch was part of Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin space venture.Story continues below advertisementOnly nine days before, the British business magnate Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory onboard the SpaceShipTwo Unity before landing at a runway at Virgin Galactic\u2019s facility in the New Mexico desert.AdvertisementBut despite their wealth, neither man is considered the first space tourist. Instead, that title goes to a lesser-known U.S. business executive: entrepreneur Dennis Tito, who on April 30, 2001, paid roughly $20 million to hitch a ride on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station (ISS).Unlike Branson and Bezos, as well as another commercially minded project from Elon Musk called Space X, Tito\u2019s journey was not an independent proof of concept. Instead, he worked with the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, to get a ride on the Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan.Story continues below advertisementIn an interview with CNN last week, Tito said he had been inspired by the 1961 voyage of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who beat his American rivals to become the first human to go into space.Knowing that NASA did not support private citizens buying tickets aboard flights, he first contacted the Soviet program shortly before its collapse in 1991. It was only later, however, that the newly independent Russia\u2019s economic woes would make his dream a reality.Advertisement\u201cAmericans don\u2019t need the money, so if you go and offer NASA $20 million, that\u2019s a drop in the bucket,\u201d Tito told The Washington Post at the time. \u201cBut that\u2019s a lot of money for the Russian space program.\u201d Indeed, it\u2019s nearly one-seventh of this year\u2019s $145 million budget.Story continues below advertisementTito\u2019s journey to the ISS two decades ago was far higher than those of Bezos and Branson, both of whom made comparatively moderate up-and-down trips to the very border of space. Bezos\u2019s suborbital trip was 66.5 miles, compared with the 250-mile trip Tito took.While Tito was the first person to pay for himself to fly to space with the Russian help, he wasn\u2019t the first person whose spot on a Roscosmos flight was paid for.Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow officials had agreed to let journalist Toyohiro Akiyama travel to the Mir space station. Akiyama\u2019s employer, Tokyo Broadcasting System, agreed to pay the cash-strapped space agency around $12 million for his voyage on the Soyuz rocket.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Post reported the \u201cSoyuz rocket was so commercialized it looked like a flying billboard when it blasted off Sunday\u201d with its \u201cnose cone and fins \u2026 festooned with the logos of TBS and other Japanese corporate sponsors, including a toothpaste firm and a producer of paper diapers.\u201dLater, during Russia\u2019s economically turbulent 1990s, a logo for Pizza Hut was painted on the side of a Russian rocket and commercials were filmed at the Mir space station.But Tito\u2019s voyage was a new concept \u2014 that a wealthy person could go to space for no reason other than they want to \u2014 and was criticized by some U.S. space officials. \u201cSpace is not about egos,\u201d NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin told reporters at the time.Story continues below advertisementMore wealthy space tourists would follow in Tito\u2019s footsteps, including Richard Garriott, a computer-game designer, whose U.S. company Space Adventures had worked with the Russian space agency to arrange Tito\u2019s flight. (Garriott had originally intended to take the first flight himself, but lost out after his wealth suffered during the dot-com bubble crash.)AdvertisementIn total, seven Space Adventures clients would travel to space with Russian rockets, while other clients would travel to Russia and Kazakhstan to complete training.Russian involvement in commercial space travel has effectively stopped since 2009, with NASA buying up seats on Russian rockets for its own trips to the ISS after the end of the U.S. space shuttle program.Story continues below advertisementAround that time, well out of the economic doldrums of the 1990s, Russia also tried to move away from the more commercial aspects of its space program, which had become notorious for scandal and corruption.But with the explosion of interest in space travel, the Russian move away from it may now be looked upon with regret. After Branson\u2019s space flight last week, Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter that it was a \u201clandmark event\u201d \u2014 though, he noted pointedly, only a \u201csuborbital flight.\u201dAdvertisementRogozin also criticized Russian billionaires for spending their money on yachts and other vanities.Roscosmos has a number of commercial trips to the ISS set for later this year, as well as plans for the first tourist spacewalk at the station in 2023, an event planned with Space Adventures.But Russia is no longer the only space program interested in tourism. Despite its earlier opposition, NASA now works closely with private space ventures and in 2019 announced it would open up the ISS to commercial businesses.The cost would be roughly $35,000 per night at the station, the U.S. space agency said \u2014 and an estimated $50 million for a seat on the flight there, officials told The Post. Western billionaires may be taking the lead now, but it was a cash-strapped Russian space agency that opened the door. How the collapse of the Soviet Union aided the birth of space tourism",
        "author": "Adam Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "An euthanasia expert just unveiled his \u2018suicide machine\u2019 at an Amsterdam funeral fair (WP: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7776",
        "date": "2018-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/15/a-euthanasia-expert-just-unveiled-his-suicide-machine-at-an-amsterdam-funeral-fair/",
        "text": "Experience your own virtual VR #euthanasia death in the 3D printed Sarco at the Amsterdam Funeral Expo this Sat 14th and meet the designershttps://t.co/Eb7CZpGf5S pic.twitter.com/gdHX9pVM7e\u2014 Philip Nitschke (@philipnitschke) April 10, 2018\n\nIt is not the most cheerful offering.\u00a0But euthanasia activist Philip Nitschke says he is about to revolutionize\u00a0how we die.At a funeral fair in Amsterdam last week, he showed off his \u201csuicide machine.\u201d\u00a0The \u201cSarco,\u201d short for sarcophagus, is\u00a0designed to \u201cprovide people with a death when they wish to die,\u201d Nitschke, an Australian national, told the news agency Agence France-Presse.\u00a0It\u00a0comes with a detachable coffin and a hookup for a nitrogen container. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere is how it would work, according to Nitschke. Users would first take an online test to determine whether\u00a0they were sane. If they cleared the test, they would be sent an access code, valid for 24 hours. They would then get into the capsule, close the door and press a button to\u00a0have the nitrogen pipe in. Nitschke says users would pass out within a minute.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe person who wants to die presses the button, and the capsule is filled with nitrogen. He or she will feel a bit dizzy but will then rapidly lose consciousness and die,\u201d he\u00a0told AFP.The Sarco's design is meant to echo that of a spaceship, Nitschke told Newsweek. It is intended to give users the feel that they are traveling to the \u201cgreat beyond.\u201dAssembling the 3D printed Sarco #euthanasia machine display @ Amsterdam Funeral Fair Sat 14 from 10am - 4 pm. Come and take a virtual ride to your peaceful elective death... where \u2018art meets its end\u2019! https://t.co/PwLnWmkPL8 pic.twitter.com/Tdcn5dP6JB\u2014 Philip Nitschke (@philipnitschke) April 13, 2018\n\nNitschke developed the\u00a0Sarco alongside\u00a0Dutch designer Alexander Bannink. At the event, people also had an opportunity to don virtual-reality glasses that give users a sense of what sitting in the pod might look and feel like. Attendees at the Westerkerk event lined up to try on the glasses, AFP reported.Story continues below advertisementThe inventors said they hope to have a\u00a0fully functioning pod by the end of the year. Nitschke then plans to put the design online and allow anyone to download it.\u00a0 \u201cThat means that anybody who wants to build the machine can download the plans and 3D-print their own device,\u201d he said, according to AFP.AdvertisementThe machine has been controversial since its inception.One critic,\u00a0Georgetown professor of biomedical ethics Daniel Sulmasy, told Newsweek that it's\u00a0\u201ca\u00a0bad medicine, ethics, and bad public policy.\u201d\u201cIt converts killing into a form of healing and doesn\u2019t acknowledge that we can now do more for symptoms through palliative [care] than ever before,\u201d Sulmasy said.Elderly couple got \u2018deepest wish\u2019 \u2014 to die together \u2014 in rare euthanasia caseNitschke, 70, has been a euthanasia advocate for decades. As a medical student, he said, he was inspired by Jack Kevorkian's work. (Kevorkian, the late American pathologist nicknamed Dr. Death, said he helped at least 130 patients commit suicide.) As a young man, Nitschke created the \u201cDeliverance,\u201d a computer program hooked up to an IV that would trigger a lethal injection of barbiturates after a patient confirmed he or she wanted to die. Later, he developed something called an \u201cExit Bag,\u201d a breathing mask that funnels carbon monoxide.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNitschke used the system on four patients before Australia's euthanasia law was rescinded. In 1997, he founded Exit International, a euthanasia advocacy group. Newsweek has called him the \u201cElon Musk\u201d of assisted suicide.Euthanasia is not legal in most places, but it\u00a0is legal in several European countries and in parts of the United States. Nitschke told AFP his machine will allow those interested in euthanasia an easier path forward.\u00a0\u201cIn many countries, suicide is not against the law, only assisting a person to commit suicide is,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a situation where one person chooses to press a button ... rather than, for instance, standing in front of a train.\u201d It is designed to \u201cprovide people with a death when they wish to die.\u201d  An euthanasia expert just unveiled his \u2018suicide machine\u2019 at an Amsterdam funeral fair",
        "author": "Amanda Erickson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The strange and very cold city of Astana could be where Syria\u2019s war is solved (WP: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7777",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/27/the-strange-and-very-cold-city-of-astana-could-be-where-syrias-war-is-solved/",
        "text": "ASTANA, Kazakhstan \u2014 The snowbound, futuristic capital of Kazakhstan seems an odd venue for an effort to bring peace to Syria, a part of the Middle East that lays claim to being one of the world\u2019s longest-inhabited lands.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAstana\u2019s chief claim to fame is that it is the second-coldest capital city in the world, with temperatures in winter dropping as low as minus-40 degrees. (The coldest is Ulaanbaatar, in Mongolia.) It is also one of the newest, an agglomeration of glass, steel and gold sprouting implausibly from the flat wilderness of the Central Asian steppe.But there is a certain logic to the choice of Astana, which has emerged over the past two decades to become not only a showcase for Kazakhstan\u2019s grand ambitions but also for Russia\u2019s expanding global aspirations. One result of the peace talks this week is that Astana is to be the headquarters of a military mechanism to monitor the shaky cease-fire that it is hoped will pave an end to the Syrian war.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUntil 1997 it was a tiny village, a remote outpost of the former Soviet empire renowned mainly as the site of one of Stalin\u2019s notorious Gulag prisons because of its forbidding climate. Its former name, Akmola, meant \u201cwhite grave,\u201d summoning images of the icy death that awaited those condemned to internment there. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Liz Sly (@lizslywp)\nKazakhstan became independent in 1991 after the Soviet Union broke apart. Russia was keen nonetheless to keep it from falling into the clutches of neighboring China, which was eyeing Kazakhstan\u2019s considerable oil reserves to fuel its expanding economy. So in an act of post-imperial bombast, the capital was moved 750 miles from its previous location near the Chinese border, Almaty, to Akmola, which is close to Russia \u2014 and not much else. It was renamed Astana, which means, simply, \u201cthe capital.\u201dOver the next two decades, no expense was spared to transform \u201cthe capital\u201d into a world-class city. Glittering skyscrapers rose from the empty landscape. Top world architects were recruited to lend pizazz to the emerging metropolis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAstana became a showcase also for some of the wackier expressions of post-Soviet architecture. One of them is Khan Shatyr, a giant, translucent shopping mall designed in the shape of a tent by the British architect Norman Foster and built from a kind of fiberglass that helps trap warmth. Inside is an artificial beach, where families lie under parasols on sand imported from Dubai while snow falls on the roof above them. Illuminated at night in various shades of mauve, it hovers over the city like a glowing purple spaceship.The buildings, like the ambitions, are vast. There\u2019s a glowing blue pyramid called the Palace of Peace and Accord, also designed by Foster, that houses a 1,350-seat opera house. The parliament buildings are flanked by two giant gold cylinders that recall Ancient Egypt but have been nicknamed the \u201cBeer Cans.\u201d The 344-foot Bayterek, or \u201cTree of Life,\u201d monument looms over the skyline like a golden lollipop and features inside a gilded handprint of the country\u2019s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Liz Sly (@lizslywp)\nMany of the structures are built to glorify Nazarbayev, who took office in 1991 and is Kazakhstan\u2019s first and only president. Though the constitution stipulates that presidents should serve no more than two five-year terms, it exempts the first president from this requirement. Nazarbayev has now won five consecutive elections, the most recent by a margin of 97.7 percent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s an election performance paralleled by the Assad family, which has run Syria since 1970. President Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000, and one of his sons, now-President Bashar al-Assad, have between them won eight consecutive elections, by similarly impressive margins.One of the issues not on the agenda for the Syria peace talks is the fate of Assad, whose hold on power has been assured, at least for the foreseeable future, by Russia\u2019s military intervention. Now Russia is hoping Astana will be the place where the terms of ending the rebellion that sought to topple him are negotiated.Read more:Syria deal draws Iran into alliance with Russia and TurkeyRussia\u2019s new influence may limit Trump\u2019s scope in Middle East The futuristic city has become a showcase for Kazakhstan\u2019s grand ambitions, and for Russia\u2019s expanding global aspirations.  The strange and very cold city of Astana could be where Syria\u2019s war is solved",
        "author": "Liz Sly"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | As crises rock Earth, humans look to Mars (WP: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7778",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/07/29/crises-rock-earth-humans-look-mars/",
        "text": "Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday, along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter.On Thursday, NASA is slated to launch another mission to Mars. The U.S. space exploration agency plans to deploy a new rover \u2014 a $2.7 billion, six-legged, car-size machine dubbed Perseverance \u2014 to continue the prowl over the Red Planet\u2019s rocks and craters, scanning the grounds of what\u2019s believed, billions of years ago, to have been a river delta and deep lake in search of fossilized microbial evidence of Martian life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt a time when the United States is struggling to contend with a viral pandemic at home, its pioneering capacity to explore the solar system may provide a boost to its battered national prestige.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it would also be the second such mission to Mars in the space of a week. Last Thursday, China launched its first attempt to land on the planet, sending off probe Tianwen-1 (meaning \u201cto question the heavens\u201d) from a site on the southern island of Hainan. It includes both an orbiter that will take images and measurements while circling the planet and a rover intended for the Martian surface.China successfully launched an unmanned probe to Mars on July 23 in its first independent mission to another planet. (Reuters)The Chinese launch came four days after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 first major foray beyond the Earth\u2019s orbit \u2014 the Amal probe rocketed off from a facility in Japan and is scheduled to enter the Martian orbit around February 2021, in time for the Arab monarchy\u2019s celebration of the 50th anniversary of its country\u2019s formation.\u201cAmal, about the size of a small car, carries three instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change while circling the red planet for at least two years,\u201d noted the Associated Press. \u201cIt is set to follow up on NASA\u2019s Maven orbiter sent to Mars in 2014 to study how the planet went from a warm, wet world that may have harbored microbial life during its first billion years, to the cold, barren place of today.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCongrats to the UAE on launching its @HopeMarsMission! Proud that American expertise from @NASA and U.S. universities supported the first Arab nation to join the Mars space community. Hope will inspire Emirati youth, just as Neil Armstrong inspired Americans 51 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/vwwDnm4jlL\u2014 Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) July 20, 2020\n\nThough these missions \u2014 especially the Chinese and Emirati ones \u2014 mark major national milestones, some experts doubt a new \u201cspace race\u201d is in the offing. \u201cThey are competitive because scientists are competitive and everyone wants to do the best kind of science and discovery on Mars possible, but in the broader scheme of the things the world profits by multiple missions,\u201d John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute, told ABC News. \u201cWe want to learn about Mars, and the more missions that are aimed at learning about Mars, the better off we are. The one mission can\u2019t keep the other one from working.\u201dMars, as it has for centuries, offers a tantalizing mirror to those on Earth, as a nearby world whose geology may contain secrets about our own. \u201cWe have one data point for life on a planet,\u201d planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology, part of the science team for Perseverance, told my colleagues. \u201cMars is the second data point. We know from the investments that we\u2019ve made from exploration that there was this habitable world right next door. Right about the time that Earth was developing its life, Mars was also habitable, with lakes and rivers.\u201dBut it\u2019s not just the deep past that motivates scientists and researchers. \u201cScientists have long hoped to find another celestial body in the solar system and transform it into a second Earth, which would allow humankind to migrate there in great numbers. At the moment, the only possibility is Mars,\u201d Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China\u2019s lunar project, told Chinese media last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe once-fantastical idea of Martian (and lunar) colonization has become a tangible goal thanks to a flurry of investment from U.S.-based billionaires like Tesla founder Elon Musk, who has championed human settlement on Mars. Their private projects have helped re-energize the idea of an eventual crewed mission to Mars, followed by attempts at transforming its unforgiving landscape into a world suitable for human habitation centuries from now. Musk last year even floated the idea of conducting nuclear explosions on the planet to raise its temperatures.We should bring Life to Mars\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2020\n\nHuman expansion through space may remain in the realms of speculative theory and absurdist fancy. But those planning for it are spurred by a sense of looming existential peril on Earth \u2014 a planet facing epochal climatic change, human overpopulation and the steady depletion of its resources. Proponents of space exploration and colonization see them as necessities for the preservation of the human species.Political philosophers are already puzzling over the kind of human society that would emerge in space, whenever such settlement takes place. \u201cMartian liberation movements are a staple of science fiction. First, people from Earth build tiny settlements on Mars. Then, after a century or so, the settlements grow into vibrant planetwide civilizations,\u201d wrote Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. \u201cEventually, these new \u2018Martians\u2019 fight to throw off the yoke of Earth\u2019s tyranny. In these stories, space represents an opportunity to create social arrangements that look profoundly different from what we\u2019ve been locked into on Earth. In space, maybe, we could be more free.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Frank and other critics fear that the tech oligarchs pushing the boundaries of aerospace aren\u2019t interested in such an emancipatory future as much as their own vanity projects. \u201cIt\u2019s a complete fantasy that colonies on Mars or anywhere else in the solar system will be affordable or accessible to anyone on an average income \u2014 unless they\u2019re sent as initial colonizers to survive the hostile conditions and lay the foundations for the rich to come later,\u201d wrote the left-wing Jacobin magazine earlier this year. \u201cMusk\u2019s Mars colonies are nothing but the escape hatch for the rich \u2014 they are not our salvation.\u201d\u201cSpace expansion, far from being a form of freedom insurance, is more likely to produce the perfection of despotism and the complete subordination of the individual to the collective,\u201d wrote political scientist Daniel Deudney in \u201cDark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity.\u201d \u201cThose who value individual liberty should be strong skeptics and opponents of space expansion, not enthusiastic supporters.\u201dOthers argue that the vast resources and utopian ambitions being funneled into these extraplanetary endeavors could be better directed toward reckoning with the challenges at home, namely the need to mitigate climate change and make the world\u2019s economies more environmentally sustainable. \u201cPerhaps instead of worrying about being swallowed up by an expiring star in an impossibly distant future we might devote an equivalent amount of intellectual and political energy to avoiding climate catastrophe on this planet within the next decade or two,\u201d wrote climate philosopher Byron Williston.Read more: Trump, Merkel and the U.S.\u2019s waning global cloutThe echoes of Hong Kong in PortlandThe U.S. ramps up its confrontation with China In the space of a couple of weeks, three countries launched separate ambitious missions to the Red Planet. As crises rock Earth, humans look to Mars",
        "author": "Ishaan Tharoor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | As crises rock Earth, humans look to Mars (WP: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7779",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/07/29/crises-rock-earth-humans-look-mars/",
        "text": "Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday, along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter.On Thursday, NASA is slated to launch another mission to Mars. The U.S. space exploration agency plans to deploy a new rover \u2014 a $2.7 billion, six-legged, car-size machine dubbed Perseverance \u2014 to continue the prowl over the Red Planet\u2019s rocks and craters, scanning the grounds of what\u2019s believed, billions of years ago, to have been a river delta and deep lake in search of fossilized microbial evidence of Martian life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt a time when the United States is struggling to contend with a viral pandemic at home, its pioneering capacity to explore the solar system may provide a boost to its battered national prestige.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it would also be the second such mission to Mars in the space of a week. Last Thursday, China launched its first attempt to land on the planet, sending off probe Tianwen-1 (meaning \u201cto question the heavens\u201d) from a site on the southern island of Hainan. It includes both an orbiter that will take images and measurements while circling the planet and a rover intended for the Martian surface.China successfully launched an unmanned probe to Mars on July 23 in its first independent mission to another planet. (Reuters)The Chinese launch came four days after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 first major foray beyond the Earth\u2019s orbit \u2014 the Amal probe rocketed off from a facility in Japan and is scheduled to enter the Martian orbit around February 2021, in time for the Arab monarchy\u2019s celebration of the 50th anniversary of its country\u2019s formation.\u201cAmal, about the size of a small car, carries three instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change while circling the red planet for at least two years,\u201d noted the Associated Press. \u201cIt is set to follow up on NASA\u2019s Maven orbiter sent to Mars in 2014 to study how the planet went from a warm, wet world that may have harbored microbial life during its first billion years, to the cold, barren place of today.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCongrats to the UAE on launching its @HopeMarsMission! Proud that American expertise from @NASA and U.S. universities supported the first Arab nation to join the Mars space community. Hope will inspire Emirati youth, just as Neil Armstrong inspired Americans 51 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/vwwDnm4jlL\u2014 Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) July 20, 2020\n\nThough these missions \u2014 especially the Chinese and Emirati ones \u2014 mark major national milestones, some experts doubt a new \u201cspace race\u201d is in the offing. \u201cThey are competitive because scientists are competitive and everyone wants to do the best kind of science and discovery on Mars possible, but in the broader scheme of the things the world profits by multiple missions,\u201d John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute, told ABC News. \u201cWe want to learn about Mars, and the more missions that are aimed at learning about Mars, the better off we are. The one mission can\u2019t keep the other one from working.\u201dMars, as it has for centuries, offers a tantalizing mirror to those on Earth, as a nearby world whose geology may contain secrets about our own. \u201cWe have one data point for life on a planet,\u201d planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology, part of the science team for Perseverance, told my colleagues. \u201cMars is the second data point. We know from the investments that we\u2019ve made from exploration that there was this habitable world right next door. Right about the time that Earth was developing its life, Mars was also habitable, with lakes and rivers.\u201dBut it\u2019s not just the deep past that motivates scientists and researchers. \u201cScientists have long hoped to find another celestial body in the solar system and transform it into a second Earth, which would allow humankind to migrate there in great numbers. At the moment, the only possibility is Mars,\u201d Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China\u2019s lunar project, told Chinese media last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe once-fantastical idea of Martian (and lunar) colonization has become a tangible goal thanks to a flurry of investment from U.S.-based billionaires like Tesla founder Elon Musk, who has championed human settlement on Mars. Their private projects have helped re-energize the idea of an eventual crewed mission to Mars, followed by attempts at transforming its unforgiving landscape into a world suitable for human habitation centuries from now. Musk last year even floated the idea of conducting nuclear explosions on the planet to raise its temperatures.We should bring Life to Mars\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2020\n\nHuman expansion through space may remain in the realms of speculative theory and absurdist fancy. But those planning for it are spurred by a sense of looming existential peril on Earth \u2014 a planet facing epochal climatic change, human overpopulation and the steady depletion of its resources. Proponents of space exploration and colonization see them as necessities for the preservation of the human species.Political philosophers are already puzzling over the kind of human society that would emerge in space, whenever such settlement takes place. \u201cMartian liberation movements are a staple of science fiction. First, people from Earth build tiny settlements on Mars. Then, after a century or so, the settlements grow into vibrant planetwide civilizations,\u201d wrote Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. \u201cEventually, these new \u2018Martians\u2019 fight to throw off the yoke of Earth\u2019s tyranny. In these stories, space represents an opportunity to create social arrangements that look profoundly different from what we\u2019ve been locked into on Earth. In space, maybe, we could be more free.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Frank and other critics fear that the tech oligarchs pushing the boundaries of aerospace aren\u2019t interested in such an emancipatory future as much as their own vanity projects. \u201cIt\u2019s a complete fantasy that colonies on Mars or anywhere else in the solar system will be affordable or accessible to anyone on an average income \u2014 unless they\u2019re sent as initial colonizers to survive the hostile conditions and lay the foundations for the rich to come later,\u201d wrote the left-wing Jacobin magazine earlier this year. \u201cMusk\u2019s Mars colonies are nothing but the escape hatch for the rich \u2014 they are not our salvation.\u201d\u201cSpace expansion, far from being a form of freedom insurance, is more likely to produce the perfection of despotism and the complete subordination of the individual to the collective,\u201d wrote political scientist Daniel Deudney in \u201cDark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity.\u201d \u201cThose who value individual liberty should be strong skeptics and opponents of space expansion, not enthusiastic supporters.\u201dOthers argue that the vast resources and utopian ambitions being funneled into these extraplanetary endeavors could be better directed toward reckoning with the challenges at home, namely the need to mitigate climate change and make the world\u2019s economies more environmentally sustainable. \u201cPerhaps instead of worrying about being swallowed up by an expiring star in an impossibly distant future we might devote an equivalent amount of intellectual and political energy to avoiding climate catastrophe on this planet within the next decade or two,\u201d wrote climate philosopher Byron Williston.Read more: Trump, Merkel and the U.S.\u2019s waning global cloutThe echoes of Hong Kong in PortlandThe U.S. ramps up its confrontation with China In the space of a couple of weeks, three countries launched separate ambitious missions to the Red Planet. As crises rock Earth, humans look to Mars",
        "author": "Ishaan Tharoor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | As crises rock Earth, humans look to Mars (WP: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7780",
        "date": "2020-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/07/29/crises-rock-earth-humans-look-mars/",
        "text": "Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday, along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter.On Thursday, NASA is slated to launch another mission to Mars. The U.S. space exploration agency plans to deploy a new rover \u2014 a $2.7 billion, six-legged, car-size machine dubbed Perseverance \u2014 to continue the prowl over the Red Planet\u2019s rocks and craters, scanning the grounds of what\u2019s believed, billions of years ago, to have been a river delta and deep lake in search of fossilized microbial evidence of Martian life. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt a time when the United States is struggling to contend with a viral pandemic at home, its pioneering capacity to explore the solar system may provide a boost to its battered national prestige.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut it would also be the second such mission to Mars in the space of a week. Last Thursday, China launched its first attempt to land on the planet, sending off probe Tianwen-1 (meaning \u201cto question the heavens\u201d) from a site on the southern island of Hainan. It includes both an orbiter that will take images and measurements while circling the planet and a rover intended for the Martian surface.China successfully launched an unmanned probe to Mars on July 23 in its first independent mission to another planet. (Reuters)The Chinese launch came four days after the United Arab Emirates\u2019 first major foray beyond the Earth\u2019s orbit \u2014 the Amal probe rocketed off from a facility in Japan and is scheduled to enter the Martian orbit around February 2021, in time for the Arab monarchy\u2019s celebration of the 50th anniversary of its country\u2019s formation.\u201cAmal, about the size of a small car, carries three instruments to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change while circling the red planet for at least two years,\u201d noted the Associated Press. \u201cIt is set to follow up on NASA\u2019s Maven orbiter sent to Mars in 2014 to study how the planet went from a warm, wet world that may have harbored microbial life during its first billion years, to the cold, barren place of today.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCongrats to the UAE on launching its @HopeMarsMission! Proud that American expertise from @NASA and U.S. universities supported the first Arab nation to join the Mars space community. Hope will inspire Emirati youth, just as Neil Armstrong inspired Americans 51 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/vwwDnm4jlL\u2014 Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) July 20, 2020\n\nThough these missions \u2014 especially the Chinese and Emirati ones \u2014 mark major national milestones, some experts doubt a new \u201cspace race\u201d is in the offing. \u201cThey are competitive because scientists are competitive and everyone wants to do the best kind of science and discovery on Mars possible, but in the broader scheme of the things the world profits by multiple missions,\u201d John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University\u2019s Space Policy Institute, told ABC News. \u201cWe want to learn about Mars, and the more missions that are aimed at learning about Mars, the better off we are. The one mission can\u2019t keep the other one from working.\u201dMars, as it has for centuries, offers a tantalizing mirror to those on Earth, as a nearby world whose geology may contain secrets about our own. \u201cWe have one data point for life on a planet,\u201d planetary geologist Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology, part of the science team for Perseverance, told my colleagues. \u201cMars is the second data point. We know from the investments that we\u2019ve made from exploration that there was this habitable world right next door. Right about the time that Earth was developing its life, Mars was also habitable, with lakes and rivers.\u201dBut it\u2019s not just the deep past that motivates scientists and researchers. \u201cScientists have long hoped to find another celestial body in the solar system and transform it into a second Earth, which would allow humankind to migrate there in great numbers. At the moment, the only possibility is Mars,\u201d Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China\u2019s lunar project, told Chinese media last week.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe once-fantastical idea of Martian (and lunar) colonization has become a tangible goal thanks to a flurry of investment from U.S.-based billionaires like Tesla founder Elon Musk, who has championed human settlement on Mars. Their private projects have helped re-energize the idea of an eventual crewed mission to Mars, followed by attempts at transforming its unforgiving landscape into a world suitable for human habitation centuries from now. Musk last year even floated the idea of conducting nuclear explosions on the planet to raise its temperatures.We should bring Life to Mars\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2020\n\nHuman expansion through space may remain in the realms of speculative theory and absurdist fancy. But those planning for it are spurred by a sense of looming existential peril on Earth \u2014 a planet facing epochal climatic change, human overpopulation and the steady depletion of its resources. Proponents of space exploration and colonization see them as necessities for the preservation of the human species.Political philosophers are already puzzling over the kind of human society that would emerge in space, whenever such settlement takes place. \u201cMartian liberation movements are a staple of science fiction. First, people from Earth build tiny settlements on Mars. Then, after a century or so, the settlements grow into vibrant planetwide civilizations,\u201d wrote Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. \u201cEventually, these new \u2018Martians\u2019 fight to throw off the yoke of Earth\u2019s tyranny. In these stories, space represents an opportunity to create social arrangements that look profoundly different from what we\u2019ve been locked into on Earth. In space, maybe, we could be more free.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Frank and other critics fear that the tech oligarchs pushing the boundaries of aerospace aren\u2019t interested in such an emancipatory future as much as their own vanity projects. \u201cIt\u2019s a complete fantasy that colonies on Mars or anywhere else in the solar system will be affordable or accessible to anyone on an average income \u2014 unless they\u2019re sent as initial colonizers to survive the hostile conditions and lay the foundations for the rich to come later,\u201d wrote the left-wing Jacobin magazine earlier this year. \u201cMusk\u2019s Mars colonies are nothing but the escape hatch for the rich \u2014 they are not our salvation.\u201d\u201cSpace expansion, far from being a form of freedom insurance, is more likely to produce the perfection of despotism and the complete subordination of the individual to the collective,\u201d wrote political scientist Daniel Deudney in \u201cDark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity.\u201d \u201cThose who value individual liberty should be strong skeptics and opponents of space expansion, not enthusiastic supporters.\u201dOthers argue that the vast resources and utopian ambitions being funneled into these extraplanetary endeavors could be better directed toward reckoning with the challenges at home, namely the need to mitigate climate change and make the world\u2019s economies more environmentally sustainable. \u201cPerhaps instead of worrying about being swallowed up by an expiring star in an impossibly distant future we might devote an equivalent amount of intellectual and political energy to avoiding climate catastrophe on this planet within the next decade or two,\u201d wrote climate philosopher Byron Williston.Read more: Trump, Merkel and the U.S.\u2019s waning global cloutThe echoes of Hong Kong in PortlandThe U.S. ramps up its confrontation with China In the space of a couple of weeks, three countries launched separate ambitious missions to the Red Planet. As crises rock Earth, humans look to Mars",
        "author": "Ishaan Tharoor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The UAE\u2019s ambitious plan to build a new city \u2014 on Mars (WP: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7781",
        "date": "2017-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/16/the-uaes-ambitious-plan-to-build-a-new-city-on-mars/",
        "text": "The project, to be named \"Mars 2117\", integrates a vision to create a mini-city and community on Mars involving international cooperation. pic.twitter.com/v27jA3K3pS\u2014 HH Sheikh Mohammed (@HHShkMohd) February 14, 2017\n\nOver the past few decades, oil and gas revenue has helped the United Arab Emirates develop at a breakneck pace. Its glistening megacity Dubai is now home to the world's tallest building and countless other accolades, while just last year there were new plans announced to build a completely new \u201ccity of happiness.\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe UAE\u2019s latest venture may set new heights in terms of ambition, however. On Tuesday, at the sidelines of the World Government Summit in Dubai, the UAE announced that it\u00a0was planning to build the first city on Mars by 2117. According to CNBC, UAE engineers presented a concept city at the event\u00a0about the size of Chicago\u00a0for guests to explore.In a statement, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and vice president of the UAE, sounded confident about the project. \u201cHuman ambitions have no limits, and whoever looks into the scientific breakthroughs in the current century believes that human abilities can realize the most important human dream,\u201d\u00a0Maktoum said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd despite the grandiose\u00a0nature of the idea, the 100-year-plan does emphasize\u00a0some practical steps. \u201cThe Mars 2117 Project is a long-term project,\u201d Maktoum explained in the statement, adding that the first\u00a0order of business would be making space travel appeal to young Emiratis, with special programs in space sciences being set up at universities in the UAE.The project will also create an Emirati scientific team, but that would expand to include international scientists. In particular, these teams would be seeking to develop faster transportation to and from the planet, as well as researching what the settlement would look like and how it will be sustainable in terms of food, energy and transportation.This won't be the Gulf state's first foray into space travel. The UAE\u00a0launched its own space agency in 2014,\u00a0which launched partnerships with French and British space agencies the next year. It is planning to send an unmanned probe to Mars by 2021, a project that was described as \u201con track\u201d just last month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOf course, whether the plan for a city on Mars will actually come to fruition a century from now is hard to predict. However, in a strange way, this might be a good thing. Other recently announced space exploration plans, particularly\u00a0those focused on Mars, have been criticized for setting too ambitious a time frame given the huge costs of such a mission. By setting such a distant goal, the UAE's ambitious city becomes a little more realistic.For the UAE, these attempts to break into space technology may also reveal an anxious attempt to break away from the country's reliance on oil and gas and related industries, having been hit hard by falling prices recently.\u00a0Thankfully for them, there's still plenty of money in sovereign wealth funds to invest in Mars.More on WorldViewsThe UAE created a minister of happiness, but what does that even mean? The city is due to be completed by 2117. The UAE\u2019s ambitious plan to build a new city \u2014 on Mars",
        "author": "Adam Taylor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Secret tunnels were hidden beneath London since WWI. Soon you can visit them. (WP: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7782",
        "date": "2017-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/06/22/secret-tunnels-were-hidden-beneath-london-since-wwi-soon-you-can-visit-them/",
        "text": "It was the early years of the 20th century, and London had a parcel problem.Before World War I, the streets\u00a0of the largest city in Europe were choked with buggies and, increasingly, new inventions called automobiles.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPostal workers carrying the lifeblood of commerce and communication found themselves stuck behind stalled horses or marooned by the capital city's notorious fog. So the city fathers concocted a solution for the growing mail crisis:\u00a0Go underground.Electric\u00a0mail cars that rumbled under the streets of London wouldn't have to contend with blinding fog or traffic congestion. And with that, the Mail Rail system was born.The 6.5-mile-long network of tunnels sits 70 feet below street level. Its heartbeat was electric-powered, driverless trains that shuttled mail beneath the city for nearly a century, before rising costs shut the system down.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was quite a remarkable thing for what they did in the 1920s,\u201d said Peter Johnson, a historian who has written about the mail rail. \u201cThey basically kept it going until the Internet killed it. People started using email.\u201dNow, nearly a decade after the mail rail system was mothballed, it is being resurrected \u2014 but to shuttle people not parcels. Starting in July, the tunnels, tracks and replicas of cars will be used to take\u00a0visitors to the National Postal Museum on a tour of the city's past. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Postal Museum London (@thepostalmuseum)\nAs early as 1855, London leaders worried about mail delays began hatching plans for an underground network of parcel trains, but the costs in the 19th century always proved too high, according to the Postal Museum.Story continues below advertisementWhat would become the mail rail was the brainchild of a feasibility committee set up in 1909. Four years later, London lawmakers\u00a0passed the railway bill, and construction began in 1914.AdvertisementThat was also the beginning of World War I, and although digging continued as England was sucked into the turmoil,\u00a0metal at that time went to guns and ammunition, not railroad tracks. Thus, tunnels were dug, but tracks were not laid till later.Australian scientists went looking for deep sea creatures and pulled up your nightmares insteadAnd the country found another use for a network of secret tunnels.\u201cThe tunnels were used during the First World War to store and protect art treasures belonging to the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate Gallery,\u201d according to the Postal Museum. Those treasures included the Rosetta Stone, which had been used to translate hieroglyphic language.Mail rail construction resumed after the war, and the first segment opened in 1927, a few days before Christmas. By March, the rest of the mail rail was up and running.The route of the Post Office Railway, after being diverted to the West London Letter Office in 1958. (Map courtesy of Peter Johnson)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJohnson's book described a massive, round-the-clock operation:\u00a0\u201cThere were 90 cars in all, built by English Electric, and the practice was to run them as trains groups of three coupled together.\u201dNew cars and expanded stations came over the years, but the flow of mail rarely\u00a0slowed.During World War II, the mail rail slowed down when its stations were used as dormitories for troops. During Nazi Germany's blitz of London, the tunnels flooded several times, Johnson wrote. Still, the longest period of disruption was three weeks. Even then, the mail simply traveled by road.According to Johnson, mail rail traffic hit a peak in 1962, but even two decades after that, a Post Office survey found the rail could still deliver letters for 40 percent less than the cost of moving letters by road.Story continues below advertisementBy 2003, that equation had flipped. Roads were expanded and improved, Johnson said. And transport by truck was more economical.\u00a0The mail rail system was shut down.AdvertisementFor more than a decade, the rails and tunnels have remained silent, attended to by a team of three engineers.That changes in July, when the mail cars will be put back in service.But instead of ferrying letters and parcels, they'll carry tourists who, as Smithsonian Magazine put it, \u201cwill be able to ride through these abandoned tunnels for the first time in the railway\u2019s history.\u201dRead more:\u00a0Australian scientists went looking for deep sea creatures and pulled up your nightmares insteadIs bragging about the Panama Canal Trump\u2019s latest gaffe? The Internet thinks so.An airline tried to get a musician to check her 17th-century violin. A \u2018wrestling match\u2019 ensued.This millionaire has a promising idea for space exploration. But he says aliens are already here. For nearly a century the mail rail carried parcels through a congested London. Soon it will carry tourists and history buffs.  Secret tunnels were hidden beneath London since WWI. Soon you can visit them.",
        "author": "Cleve R. Wootson Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon, Mars and Beyond: China\u2019s Ambitious Plans in Space (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7783",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/china-mars-space.html",
        "text": "China has launched a second crew to the country\u2019s new orbiting space station. The mission is one of many challenging U.S. dominance of space exploration. China has launched a second crew to the country\u2019s new orbiting space station. The mission is one of many challenging U.S. dominance of space exploration. China launched a new crew of three astronauts into space on Saturday, beginning the longest trip so far to the country\u2019s orbiting space station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon, Mars and Beyond: China\u2019s Ambitious Plans in Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7784",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/china-mars-space.html",
        "text": "China has launched a second crew to the country\u2019s new orbiting space station. The mission is one of many challenging U.S. dominance of space exploration. China has launched a second crew to the country\u2019s new orbiting space station. The mission is one of many challenging U.S. dominance of space exploration. China launched a new crew of three astronauts into space on Saturday, beginning the longest trip so far to the country\u2019s orbiting space station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Moon, Mars and Beyond: China\u2019s Ambitious Plans in Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7785",
        "date": "2021-05-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/china-mars-space.html",
        "text": "China has launched a second crew to the country\u2019s new orbiting space station. The mission is one of many challenging U.S. dominance of space exploration. China has launched a second crew to the country\u2019s new orbiting space station. The mission is one of many challenging U.S. dominance of space exploration. China launched a new crew of three astronauts into space on Saturday, beginning the longest trip so far to the country\u2019s orbiting space station, called Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Full transcript: Theresa May\u2019s speech on Brexit (WP: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7786",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/17/full-transcript-theresa-mays-speech-on-brexit/",
        "text": "British Prime Minister Theresa May's long-anticipated speech on Tuesday offered the clearest indication yet of the country's departure plans: A clean break.Britain\u2019s May promises clean break from Europe in Brexit speechHere's the full transcript of her speech.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA little over 6 months ago, the British people voted for change.They voted to shape a brighter future for our country.They voted to leave the European Union and embrace the world.And they did so with their eyes open: accepting that the road ahead will be uncertain at times, but believing that it leads towards a brighter future for their children \u2014 and their grandchildren too.And it is the job of this government to deliver it. That means more than negotiating our new relationship with the E.U. It means taking the opportunity of this great moment of national change to step back and ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be.My answer is clear. I want this United Kingdom to emerge from this period of change stronger, fairer, more united and more outward-looking than ever before. I want us to be a secure, prosperous, tolerant country \u2014 a magnet for international talent and a home to the pioneers and innovators who will shape the world ahead. I want us to be a truly Global Britain \u2014 the best friend and neighbor to our European partners, but a country that reaches beyond the borders of Europe too. A country that goes out into the world to build relationships with old friends and new allies alike.I want Britain to be what we have the potential, talent and ambition to be. A great, global trading nation that is respected around the world and strong, confident and united at home.That is why this government has a Plan for Britain. One that gets us the right deal abroad but also ensures we get a better deal for ordinary working people at home.It\u2019s why that plan sets out how we will use this moment of change to build a stronger economy and a fairer society by embracing genuine economic and social reform.Why our new Modern Industrial Strategy is being developed, to ensure every nation and area of the United Kingdom can make the most of the opportunities ahead.Why we will go further to reform our schools to ensure every child has the knowledge and the skills they need to thrive in post-Brexit Britain.Why as we continue to bring the deficit down, we will take a balanced approach by investing in our economic infrastructure \u2014 because it can transform the growth potential of our economy and improve the quality of people\u2019s lives across the whole country.It\u2019s why we will put the preservation of our precious Union at the heart of everything we do. Because it is only by coming together as one great union of nations and people that we can make the most of the opportunities ahead. The result of the referendum was not a decision to turn inward and retreat from the world.Because Britain\u2019s history and culture is profoundly internationalist.We are a European country \u2014 and proud of our shared European heritage \u2014 but we are also a country that has always looked beyond Europe to the wider world. That is why we are one of the most racially diverse countries in Europe, one of the most multicultural members of the European Union, and why \u2014 whether we are talking about India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, countries in Africa or those that are closer to home in Europe \u2014 so many of us have close friends and relatives from across the world.Instinctively, we want to travel to, study in, trade with countries not just in Europe but beyond the borders of our continent. Even now as we prepare to leave the E.U., we are planning for the next biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in 2018 \u2014 a reminder of our unique and proud global relationships.And it is important to recognize this fact. June the 23rd was not the moment Britain chose to step back from the world. It was the moment we chose to build a truly Global Britain.I know that this \u2014 and the other reasons Britain took such a decision \u2014 is not always well understood among our friends and allies in Europe. And I know many fear that this might herald the beginning of a greater unravelling of the E.U.But let me be clear: I do not want that to happen. It would not be in the best interests of Britain. It remains overwhelmingly and compellingly in Britain\u2019s national interest that the E.U. should succeed. And that is why I hope in the months and years ahead we will all reflect on the lessons of Britain\u2019s decision to leave.So let me take this opportunity to set out the reasons for our decision and to address the people of Europe directly.It\u2019s not simply because our history and culture is profoundly internationalist, important though that is. Many in Britain have always felt that the United Kingdom\u2019s place in the European Union came at the expense of our global ties, and of a bolder embrace of free trade with the wider world.There are other important reasons too.Our political traditions are different. Unlike other European countries, we have no written constitution, but the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty is the basis of our unwritten constitutional settlement. We have only a recent history of devolved governance \u2014 though it has rapidly embedded itself \u2014 and we have little history of coalition government.The public expect to be able to hold their governments to account very directly, and as a result supranational institutions as strong as those created by the European Union sit very uneasily in relation to our political history and way of life.And, while I know Britain might at times have been seen as an awkward member state, the European Union has struggled to deal with the diversity of its member countries and their interests. It bends towards uniformity, not flexibility.David Cameron\u2019s negotiation was a valiant final attempt to make it work for Britain \u2014 and I want to thank all those elsewhere in Europe who helped him reach an agreement \u2014 but the blunt truth, as we know, is that there was not enough flexibility on many important matters for a majority of British voters.Now I do not believe that these things apply uniquely to Britain. Britain is not the only member state where there is a strong attachment to accountable and democratic government, such a strong internationalist mind-set, or a belief that diversity within Europe should be celebrated. And so I believe there is a lesson in Brexit not just for Britain but, if it wants to succeed, for the E.U. itself.Because our continent\u2019s great strength has always been its diversity. And there are 2 ways of dealing with different interests. You can respond by trying to hold things together by force, tightening a vice-like grip that ends up crushing into tiny pieces the very things you want to protect. Or you can respect difference, cherish it even, and reform the E.U. so that it deals better with the wonderful diversity of its member states.So to our friends across Europe, let me say this.Our vote to leave the European Union was no rejection of the values we share. The decision to leave the E.U. represents no desire to become more distant to you, our friends and neighbors. It was no attempt to do harm to the E.U. itself or to any of its remaining member states. We do not want to turn the clock back to the days when Europe was less peaceful, less secure and less able to trade freely. It was a vote to restore, as we see it, our parliamentary democracy, national self-determination, and to become even more global and internationalist in action and in spirit.We will continue to be reliable partners, willing allies and close friends. We want to buy your goods and services, sell you ours, trade with you as freely as possible, and work with one another to make sure we are all safer, more secure and more prosperous through continued friendship.You will still be welcome in this country as we hope our citizens will be welcome in yours. At a time when together we face a serious threat from our enemies, Britain\u2019s unique intelligence capabilities will continue to help to keep people in Europe safe from terrorism. And at a time when there is growing concern about European security, Britain\u2019s servicemen and women, based in European countries including Estonia, Poland and Romania, will continue to do their duty.We are leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe.And that is why we seek a new and equal partnership \u2014 between an independent, self-governing, Global Britain and our friends and allies in the E.U.Not partial membership of the European Union, associate membership of the European Union, or anything that leaves us half-in, half-out. We do not seek to adopt a model already enjoyed by other countries. We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave.No, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union. And my job is to get the right deal for Britain as we do.So today I want to outline our objectives for the negotiation ahead. Twelve objectives that amount to one big goal: a new, positive and constructive partnership between Britain and the European Union.And as we negotiate that partnership, we will be driven by some simple principles: we will provide as much certainty and clarity as we can at every stage. And we will take this opportunity to make Britain stronger, to make Britain fairer, and to build a more Global Britain too.The first objective is crucial. We will provide certainty wherever we can.We are about to enter a negotiation. That means there will be give and take. There will have to be compromises. It will require imagination on both sides. And not everybody will be able to know everything at every stage.But I recognize how important it is to provide business, the public sector, and everybody with as much certainty as possible as we move through the process.So where we can offer that certainty, we will do so.That is why last year we acted quickly to give clarity about farm payments and university funding. And it is why, as we repeal the European Communities Act, we will convert the \u201cacquis\u201d \u2014 the body of existing E.U. law \u2014 into British law.This will give the country maximum certainty as we leave the E.U. The same rules and laws will apply on the day after Brexit as they did before. And it will be for the British Parliament to decide on any changes to that law after full scrutiny and proper Parliamentary debate.And when it comes to Parliament, there is one other way in which I would like to provide certainty. I can confirm today that the Government will put the final deal that is agreed between the UK and the E.U. to a vote in both Houses of Parliament, before it comes into force.Our second guiding principle is to build a stronger Britain.That means taking control of our own affairs, as those who voted in their millions to leave the European Union demanded we must.So we will take back control of our laws and bring an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in Britain. Leaving the European Union will mean that our laws will be made in Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. And those laws will be interpreted by judges not in Luxembourg but in courts across this country.Because we will not have truly left the European Union if we are not in control of our own laws.A stronger Britain demands that we do something else \u2014 strengthen the precious union between the 4 nations of the United Kingdom.At this momentous time, it is more important than ever that we face the future together, united by what makes us strong: the bonds that unite us as a people, and our shared interest in the UK being an open, successful trading nation in the future.And I hope that same spirit of unity will apply in Northern Ireland in particular over the coming months in the Assembly elections, and the main parties there will work together to reestablish a partnership government as soon as possible.Foreign affairs are of course the responsibility of the UK government, and in dealing with them we act in the interests of all parts of the United Kingdom. As prime minister, I take that responsibility seriously.I have also been determined from the start that the devolved administrations should be fully engaged in this process.That is why the government has set up a Joint Ministerial Committee on E.U. Negotiations, so ministers from each of the UK\u2019s devolved administrations can contribute to the process of planning for our departure from the European Union.We have already received a paper from the Scottish government, and look forward to receiving a paper from the Welsh government shortly. Both papers will be considered as part of this important process. We won\u2019t agree on everything, but I look forward to working with the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to deliver a Brexit that works for the whole of the United Kingdom.Part of that will mean working very carefully to ensure that \u2014 as powers are repatriated from Brussels back to Britain \u2014 the right powers are returned to Westminster, and the right powers are passed to the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.As we do so, our guiding principle must be to ensure that \u2014 as we leave the European Union \u2014 no new barriers to living and doing business within our own Union are created,That means maintaining the necessary common standards and frameworks for our own domestic market, empowering the UK as an open, trading nation to strike the best trade deals around the world, and protecting the common resources of our islands.And as we do this, I should equally be clear that no decisions currently taken by the devolved administrations will be removed from them.We cannot forget that, as we leave, the United Kingdom will share a land border with the E.U., and maintaining that Common Travel Area with the Republic of Ireland will be an important priority for the UK in the talks ahead. There has been a Common Travel Area between the UK and the Republic of Ireland for many years.Indeed, it was formed before either of our 2 countries were members of the European Union. And the family ties and bonds of affection that unite our 2 countries mean that there will always be a special relationship between us.So we will work to deliver a practical solution that allows the maintenance of the Common Travel Area with the Republic, while protecting the integrity of the United Kingdom\u2019s immigration system.Nobody wants to return to the borders of the past, so we will make it a priority to deliver a practical solution as soon as we can.The third principle is to build a fairer Britain. That means ensuring it is fair to everyone who lives and works in this country.And that is why we will ensure we can control immigration to Britain from Europe.We will continue to attract the brightest and the best to work or study in Britain \u2014 indeed openness to international talent must remain one of this country\u2019s most distinctive assets \u2014 but that process must be managed properly so that our immigration system serves the national interest.So we will get control of the number of people coming to Britain from the E.U.Because while controlled immigration can bring great benefits \u2014 filling skills shortages, delivering public services, making British businesses the world-beaters they often are \u2014 when the numbers get too high, public support for the system falters.In the last decade or so, we have seen record levels of net migration in Britain, and that sheer volume has put pressure on public services, like schools, stretched our infrastructure, especially housing, and put a downward pressure on wages for working class people. As home secretary for 6 years, I know that you cannot control immigration overall when there is free movement to Britain from Europe.Britain is an open and tolerant country. We will always want immigration, especially high-skilled immigration, we will always want immigration from Europe, and we will always welcome individual migrants as friends. But the message from the public before and during the referendum campaign was clear: Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe. And that is what we will deliver.Fairness demands that we deal with another issue as soon as possible too. We want to guarantee the rights of E.U. citizens who are already living in Britain, and the rights of British nationals in other member states, as early as we can.I have told other E.U. leaders that we could give people the certainty they want straight away, and reach such a deal now.Many of them favor such an agreement \u2014 1 or 2 others do not \u2014 but I want everyone to know that it remains an important priority for Britain \u2014 and for many other member states \u2014 to resolve this challenge as soon as possible. Because it is the right and fair thing to do.And a fairer Britain is a country that protects and enhances the rights people have at work. That is why, as we translate the body of European law into our domestic regulations, we will ensure that workers' rights are fully protected and maintained.Indeed, under my leadership, not only will the government protect the rights of workers set out in European legislation, we will build on them. Because under this government, we will make sure legal protection for workers keeps pace with the changing labor market \u2014 and that the voices of workers are heard by the boards of publicly-listed companies for the first time.But the great prize for this country \u2014 the opportunity ahead \u2014 is to use this moment to build a truly Global Britain. A country that reaches out to old friends and new allies alike. A great, global, trading nation. And one of the firmest advocates for free trade anywhere in the world.That starts with our close friends and neighbors in Europe. So as a priority, we will pursue a bold and ambitious Free Trade Agreement with the European Union.This agreement should allow for the freest possible trade in goods and services between Britain and the EU\u2019s member states. It should give British companies the maximum freedom to trade with and operate within European markets \u2014 and let European businesses do the same in Britain.But I want to be clear. What I am proposing cannot mean membership of the Single Market.European leaders have said many times that membership means accepting the \u201c4 freedoms\u201d of goods, capital, services and people. And being out of the E.U. but a member of the Single Market would mean complying with the EU\u2019s rules and regulations that implement those freedoms, without having a vote on what those rules and regulations are. It would mean accepting a role for the European Court of Justice that would see it still having direct legal authority in our country.It would to all intents and purposes mean not leaving the E.U. at all.And that is why both sides in the referendum campaign made it clear that a vote to leave the E.U. would be a vote to leave the Single Market.So we do not seek membership of the Single Market. Instead we seek the greatest possible access to it through a new, comprehensive, bold and ambitious Free Trade Agreement.That agreement may take in elements of current Single Market arrangements in certain areas \u2014 on the export of cars and lorries for example, or the freedom to provide financial services across national borders \u2014 as it makes no sense to start again from scratch when Britain and the remaining Member States have adhered to the same rules for so many years.But I respect the position taken by European leaders who have been clear about their position, just as I am clear about mine. So an important part of the new strategic partnership we seek with the E.U. will be the pursuit of the greatest possible access to the Single Market, on a fully reciprocal basis, through a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement.And because we will no longer be members of the Single Market, we will not be required to contribute huge sums to the E.U. budget. There may be some specific European programs in which we might want to participate. If so, and this will be for us to decide, it is reasonable that we should make an appropriate contribution. But the principle is clear: the days of Britain making vast contributions to the European Union every year will end.But it is not just trade with the E.U. we should be interested in. A Global Britain must be free to strike trade agreements with countries from outside the European Union too.Because important though our trade with the E.U. is and will remain, it is clear that the UK needs to increase significantly its trade with the fastest growing export markets in the world.Since joining the E.U., trade as a percentage of GDP has broadly stagnated in the UK. That is why it is time for Britain to get out into the world and rediscover its role as a great, global, trading nation.This is such a priority for me that when I became Prime Minister I established, for the first time, a Department for International Trade, led by Liam Fox.We want to get out into the wider world, to trade and do business all around the globe. Countries including China, Brazil, and the Gulf States have already expressed their interest in striking trade deals with us. We have started discussions on future trade ties with countries like Australia, New Zealand and India. And President-Elect Trump has said Britain is not \u201cat the back of the queue\u201d for a trade deal with the United States, the world\u2019s biggest economy, but front of the line.I know my emphasis on striking trade agreements with countries outside Europe has led to questions about whether Britain seeks to remain a member of the EU\u2019s Customs Union. And it is true that full Customs Union membership prevents us from negotiating our own comprehensive trade deals.Now, I want Britain to be able to negotiate its own trade agreements. But I also want tariff-free trade with Europe and cross-border trade there to be as frictionless as possible.That means I do not want Britain to be part of the Common Commercial Policy and I do not want us to be bound by the Common External Tariff. These are the elements of the Customs Union that prevent us from striking our own comprehensive trade agreements with other countries. But I do want us to have a customs agreement with the E.U.Whether that means we must reach a completely new customs agreement, become an associate member of the Customs Union in some way, or remain a signatory to some elements of it, I hold no preconceived position. I have an open mind on how we do it. It is not the means that matter, but the ends.And those ends are clear: I want to remove as many barriers to trade as possible. And I want Britain to be free to establish our own tariff schedules at the World Trade Organization, meaning we can reach new trade agreements not just with the European Union but with old friends and new allies from outside Europe too.A Global Britain must also be a country that looks to the future. That means being one of the best places in the world for science and innovation.One of our great strengths as a nation is the breadth and depth of our academic and scientific communities, backed up by some of the world\u2019s best universities. And we have a proud history of leading and supporting cutting-edge research and innovation.So we will also welcome agreement to continue to collaborate with our European partners on major science, research, and technology initiatives.From space exploration to clean energy to medical technologies, Britain will remain at the forefront of collective endeavors to better understand, and make better, the world in which we live.And a Global Britain will continue to cooperate with its European partners in important areas such as crime, terrorism and foreign affairs.All of us in Europe face the challenge of cross-border crime, a deadly terrorist threat, and the dangers presented by hostile states. All of us share interests and values in common, values we want to see projected around the world.With the threats to our common security becoming more serious, our response cannot be to cooperate with one another less, but to work together more. I therefore want our future relationship with the European Union to include practical arrangements on matters of law enforcement and the sharing of intelligence material with our E.U. allies.I am proud of the role Britain has played and will continue to play in promoting Europe\u2019s security. Britain has led Europe on the measures needed to keep our continent secure \u2014 whether it is implementing sanctions against Russia following its action in Crimea, working for peace and stability in the Balkans, or securing Europe\u2019s external border. We will continue to work closely with our European allies in foreign and defense policy even as we leave the E.U. itself.These are our objectives for the negotiation ahead \u2014 objectives that will help to realize our ambition of shaping that stronger, fairer, Global Britain that we want to see.They are the basis for a new, strong, constructive partnership with the European Union \u2014 a partnership of friends and allies, of interests and values. A partnership for a strong E.U. and a strong UK.But there is one further objective we are setting. For as I have said before \u2014 it is in no one\u2019s interests for there to be a cliff-edge for business or a threat to stability, as we change from our existing relationship to a new partnership with the E.U.By this, I do not mean that we will seek some form of unlimited transitional status, in which we find ourselves stuck forever in some kind of permanent political purgatory. That would not be good for Britain, but nor do I believe it would be good for the E.U.Instead, I want us to have reached an agreement about our future partnership by the time the 2-year Article 50 process has concluded. From that point onwards, we believe a phased process of implementation, in which both Britain and the E.U. institutions and member states prepare for the new arrangements that will exist between us will be in our mutual self-interest. This will give businesses enough time to plan and prepare for those new arrangements.This might be about our immigration controls, customs systems or the way in which we cooperate on criminal justice matters. Or it might be about the future legal and regulatory framework for financial services. For each issue, the time we need to phase-in the new arrangements may differ. Some might be introduced very quickly, some might take longer. And the interim arrangements we rely upon are likely to be a matter of negotiation.But the purpose is clear: we will seek to avoid a disruptive cliff-edge, and we will do everything we can to phase in the new arrangements we require as Britain and the E.U. move towards our new partnership.So, these are the objectives we have set. Certainty wherever possible. Control of our own laws. Strengthening the United Kingdom. Maintaining the Common Travel Area with Ireland. Control of immigration. Rights for E.U. nationals in Britain, and British nationals in the E.U. Enhancing rights for workers. Free trade with European markets. New trade agreements with other countries. A leading role in science and innovation. Cooperation on crime, terrorism and foreign affairs. And a phased approach, delivering a smooth and orderly Brexit.This is the framework of a deal that will herald a new partnership between the UK and the E.U.It is a comprehensive and carefully considered plan that focuses on the ends, not just the means \u2014 with its eyes fixed firmly on the future, and on the kind of country we will be once we leave.It reflects the hard work of many in this room today who have worked tirelessly to bring it together and to prepare this country for the negotiation ahead.And it will, I know, be debated and discussed at length. That is only right. But those who urge us to reveal more \u2014 such as the blow-by-blow details of our negotiating strategy, the areas in which we might compromise, the places where we think there are potential trade-offs \u2014 will not be acting in the national interest.Because this is not a game or a time for opposition for opposition\u2019s sake. It is a crucial and sensitive negotiation that will define the interests and the success of our country for many years to come. And it is vital that we maintain our discipline.That is why I have said before \u2014 and will continue to say \u2014 that every stray word and every hyped up media report is going to make it harder for us to get the right deal for Britain. Our opposite numbers in the European Commission know it, which is why they are keeping their discipline. And the ministers in this government know it too, which is why we will also maintain ours.So however frustrating some people find it, the government will not be pressured into saying more than I believe it is in our national interest to say. Because it is not my job to fill column inches with daily updates, but to get the right deal for Britain. And that is what I intend to do.I am confident that a deal \u2014 and a new strategic partnership between the UK and the E.U. \u2014 can be achieved.This is firstly because, having held conversations with almost every leader from every single E.U. member state; having spent time talking to the senior figures from the European institutions, including President Tusk, President Juncker, and President Schulz; and after my Cabinet colleagues David Davis, Philip Hammond and Boris Johnson have done the same with their interlocutors, I am confident that the vast majority want a positive relationship between the UK and the E.U. after Brexit.And I am confident that the objectives I am setting out today are consistent with the needs of the E.U. and its member states.That is why our objectives include a proposed Free Trade Agreement between Britain and the European Union, and explicitly rule out membership of the EU\u2019s Single Market. Because when the EU\u2019s leaders say they believe the 4 freedoms of the Single Market are indivisible, we respect that position. When the 27 member states say they want to continue their journey inside the European Union, we not only respect that fact but support it.Because we do not want to undermine the Single Market, and we do not want to undermine the European Union. We want the E.U. to be a success and we want its remaining member states to prosper. And of course we want the same for Britain.And the second reason I believe it is possible to reach a good deal is that the kind of agreement I have described today is the economically rational thing that both Britain and the E.U. should aim for. Because trade is not a zero sum game: more of it makes us all more prosperous. Free trade between Britain and the European Union means more trade, and more trade means more jobs and more wealth creation. The erection of new barriers to trade, meanwhile, means the reverse: less trade, fewer jobs, lower growth.The third and final reason I believe we can come to the right agreement is that cooperation between Britain and the E.U. is needed not just when it comes to trade but when it comes to our security too.Britain and France are Europe\u2019s only 2 nuclear powers. We are the only 2 European countries with permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. Britain\u2019s armed forces are a crucial part of Europe\u2019s collective defense.And our intelligence capabilities \u2014 unique in Europe \u2014 have already saved countless lives in very many terrorist plots that have been thwarted in countries across our continent. After Brexit, Britain wants to be a good friend and neighbor in every way, and that includes defending the safety and security of all of our citizens.So I believe the framework I have outlined today is in Britain\u2019s interests. It is in Europe\u2019s interests. And it is in the interests of the wider world.But I must be clear. Britain wants to remain a good friend and neighbor to Europe. Yet I know there are some voices calling for a punitive deal that punishes Britain and discourages other countries from taking the same path.That would be an act of calamitous self-harm for the countries of Europe. And it would not be the act of a friend. Britain would not \u2014 indeed we could not \u2014 accept such an approach. And while I am confident that this scenario need never arise \u2014 while I am sure a positive agreement can be reached \u2014 I am equally clear that no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain.Because we would still be able to trade with Europe. We would be free to strike trade deals across the world. And we would have the freedom to set the competitive tax rates and embrace the policies that would attract the world\u2019s best companies and biggest investors to Britain. And \u2014 if we were excluded from accessing the Single Ma",
        "author": "Jennifer Amur"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 years after America\u2019s moon mission, some of the smallest nations on Earth have joined the space race (WP: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7787",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/07/17/years-after-americas-moon-mission-some-smallest-nations-earth-have-joined-space-race/",
        "text": "AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND \u2014 For a generation, space was the exclusive playground of the world\u2019s super powers \u2014 and for those who wanted to become one. Exactly 50 years ago this week, the United States launched its Apollo 11 lunar landing mission and the Trump administration is seeking to go back to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNewcomer India\u2019s aspirations to become the first country to land on the south pole of the moon hit a snag this week, with its second lunar mission aborted hours before launch time because of a technical issue.While those nations vie to expand space exploration to new frontiers, some smaller countries have eagerly stepped-up to fill gaps in less ambitious \u2014 but not less critical \u2014 space projects.Story continues below advertisementNew Zealand, Singapore and Luxembourg headline this emerging space race between minnows.Each country has grown its space industry by adopting policies to lure private sector and government contracts, focusing on research or the production and launch of rockets. The satellites those rockets catapult into space are powering everything from intelligence gathering to the supervision of construction or agricultural projects.AdvertisementWhile their approaches differ greatly, all of them benefit from being small and nimble: Instead of red tape, they can offer quick solutions to legal challenges that would otherwise delay projects \u2014 while also providing funding for research or tax incentives.Story continues below advertisementTiny Luxembourg, which is less populous than Washington, created a $110 million fund last fall to attract space technology start-ups. While it does not launch its own satellites, Luxembourg in 2017 became the second nation worldwide, after the United States, guaranteeing the rights of private companies to resources they extract in space. The move was meant to attract companies seeking to one day mine asteroids, for instance. Dozens of enterprises struck agreements to set up bases in the country after the legislation was passed. Overall, about 50 space research labs and companies are now based in Luxembourg.Singapore\u2019s satellite manufacturing industry has grown from being virtually nonexistent to now boasting some 1,000 employees working for suppliers and research facilities.AdvertisementBut each faces one fundamental challenge: location. They are situated in central parts of Europe and Asia that are already heavily trafficked and wouldn\u2019t support the needs of high-frequency rocket launch sites.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s where New Zealand has found its niche.\u201cIn order to launch a rocket you have to close down thousands of kilometers of airspace,\u201d said Peter Beck, the CEO of U.S. company Rocket Lab, which built New Zealand\u2019s first launch site in a remote part of the country\u2019s North Island.As the aviation industry has grown more protective of North America\u2019s and Europe\u2019s crowded skies in recent years, more rocket launch companies are exploring alternatives farther away. Those alternatives also need to be located in stable countries \u201cwith a stable government,\u201d Beck said earlier this year.\u201cBasically, you end up with a small island nation in the middle of nowhere,\u201d he said against the backdrop of two giant U.S. and New Zealand flags in his Auckland production facility. \u201cIt\u2019s New Zealand.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe U.S.-based company was originally founded in New Zealand and it has recently expanded its operations there with a larger rocket factory.From its remote Mahia launch site, the company shoots small satellites into space for a fraction of what similar missions would have cost a decade ago. The far cheaper satellites are the size of a small box and no longer need a gigantic infrastructure to be produced and launched.Producing and launching conventional, heavy satellites can cost more than $400 million, according to U.S. Air Force budget estimates for national security-relevant payloads, but smaller alternatives can now be sent to space for less than 1 percent of that.Story continues below advertisementRocket Lab\u2019s clients include private foreign corporations, but New Zealand\u2019s status as a member of the coveted Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance with the United States has also attracted U.S. government agencies, which would normally opt for U.S. launch sites.AdvertisementNow, an increasing number of them \u2014 including NASA and the Defense Department \u2014 are choosing to launch their satellites from New Zealand, which is raising hopes here that the country\u2019s nascent space industry is heading toward a bright future.Luxembourg has similarly benefited from being an innovation-friendly member of another exclusive club: the European Union. As an E.U. member, the country has access to lucrative grants and projects.While officials in New Zealand, Luxembourg and Singapore are hopeful that their performance in the space industry will attract global corporate giants, some have urged caution about overly optimistic expectations \u2014 warning that the increasingly crowded field of private space companies may be heading toward a retraction as many underestimate the challenges to building a profitable space business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, even as a number of competitors may eventually be forced out of the market, demand for the companies that succeed is expected to rise significantly, experts say.\"There will be an increased demand globally for small satellite launches as space becomes more democratized,\u201d said Alexandra Stickings, a space policy research fellow with the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).In New Zealand, the rocket race has triggered an unprecedented interest in space science.Christopher Eric Hann, who created a rocketry course for New Zealand\u2019s University of Canterbury in 2014, said he had seen a \u201cmajor increase in students wishing to get into aerospace or rocketry-related postgraduate study.\"Story continues below advertisementMost of his graduates, he said, move onto careers at Rocket Lab in New Zealand. Others have moved on to larger American-based aerospace firms \u2014 only to make it back home where Hann said many of them preferred working for a smaller company with local roots, rather than for competitors that offered \u201cvery little opportunity to contribute to new innovation.\u201dRead more: Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space explorationCompanies in the cosmosA new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moon New Zealand, Singapore and Luxembourg headline this emerging space-race between minnows. 50 years after America\u2019s moon mission, some of the smallest nations on Earth have joined the space race",
        "author": "Rick Noack"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 years after America\u2019s moon mission, some of the smallest nations on Earth have joined the space race (WP: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7788",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/07/17/years-after-americas-moon-mission-some-smallest-nations-earth-have-joined-space-race/",
        "text": "AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND \u2014 For a generation, space was the exclusive playground of the world\u2019s super powers \u2014 and for those who wanted to become one. Exactly 50 years ago this week, the United States launched its Apollo 11 lunar landing mission and the Trump administration is seeking to go back to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNewcomer India\u2019s aspirations to become the first country to land on the south pole of the moon hit a snag this week, with its second lunar mission aborted hours before launch time because of a technical issue.While those nations vie to expand space exploration to new frontiers, some smaller countries have eagerly stepped-up to fill gaps in less ambitious \u2014 but not less critical \u2014 space projects.Story continues below advertisementNew Zealand, Singapore and Luxembourg headline this emerging space race between minnows.Each country has grown its space industry by adopting policies to lure private sector and government contracts, focusing on research or the production and launch of rockets. The satellites those rockets catapult into space are powering everything from intelligence gathering to the supervision of construction or agricultural projects.AdvertisementWhile their approaches differ greatly, all of them benefit from being small and nimble: Instead of red tape, they can offer quick solutions to legal challenges that would otherwise delay projects \u2014 while also providing funding for research or tax incentives.Story continues below advertisementTiny Luxembourg, which is less populous than Washington, created a $110 million fund last fall to attract space technology start-ups. While it does not launch its own satellites, Luxembourg in 2017 became the second nation worldwide, after the United States, guaranteeing the rights of private companies to resources they extract in space. The move was meant to attract companies seeking to one day mine asteroids, for instance. Dozens of enterprises struck agreements to set up bases in the country after the legislation was passed. Overall, about 50 space research labs and companies are now based in Luxembourg.Singapore\u2019s satellite manufacturing industry has grown from being virtually nonexistent to now boasting some 1,000 employees working for suppliers and research facilities.AdvertisementBut each faces one fundamental challenge: location. They are situated in central parts of Europe and Asia that are already heavily trafficked and wouldn\u2019t support the needs of high-frequency rocket launch sites.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s where New Zealand has found its niche.\u201cIn order to launch a rocket you have to close down thousands of kilometers of airspace,\u201d said Peter Beck, the CEO of U.S. company Rocket Lab, which built New Zealand\u2019s first launch site in a remote part of the country\u2019s North Island.As the aviation industry has grown more protective of North America\u2019s and Europe\u2019s crowded skies in recent years, more rocket launch companies are exploring alternatives farther away. Those alternatives also need to be located in stable countries \u201cwith a stable government,\u201d Beck said earlier this year.\u201cBasically, you end up with a small island nation in the middle of nowhere,\u201d he said against the backdrop of two giant U.S. and New Zealand flags in his Auckland production facility. \u201cIt\u2019s New Zealand.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe U.S.-based company was originally founded in New Zealand and it has recently expanded its operations there with a larger rocket factory.From its remote Mahia launch site, the company shoots small satellites into space for a fraction of what similar missions would have cost a decade ago. The far cheaper satellites are the size of a small box and no longer need a gigantic infrastructure to be produced and launched.Producing and launching conventional, heavy satellites can cost more than $400 million, according to U.S. Air Force budget estimates for national security-relevant payloads, but smaller alternatives can now be sent to space for less than 1 percent of that.Story continues below advertisementRocket Lab\u2019s clients include private foreign corporations, but New Zealand\u2019s status as a member of the coveted Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance with the United States has also attracted U.S. government agencies, which would normally opt for U.S. launch sites.AdvertisementNow, an increasing number of them \u2014 including NASA and the Defense Department \u2014 are choosing to launch their satellites from New Zealand, which is raising hopes here that the country\u2019s nascent space industry is heading toward a bright future.Luxembourg has similarly benefited from being an innovation-friendly member of another exclusive club: the European Union. As an E.U. member, the country has access to lucrative grants and projects.While officials in New Zealand, Luxembourg and Singapore are hopeful that their performance in the space industry will attract global corporate giants, some have urged caution about overly optimistic expectations \u2014 warning that the increasingly crowded field of private space companies may be heading toward a retraction as many underestimate the challenges to building a profitable space business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, even as a number of competitors may eventually be forced out of the market, demand for the companies that succeed is expected to rise significantly, experts say.\"There will be an increased demand globally for small satellite launches as space becomes more democratized,\u201d said Alexandra Stickings, a space policy research fellow with the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).In New Zealand, the rocket race has triggered an unprecedented interest in space science.Christopher Eric Hann, who created a rocketry course for New Zealand\u2019s University of Canterbury in 2014, said he had seen a \u201cmajor increase in students wishing to get into aerospace or rocketry-related postgraduate study.\"Story continues below advertisementMost of his graduates, he said, move onto careers at Rocket Lab in New Zealand. Others have moved on to larger American-based aerospace firms \u2014 only to make it back home where Hann said many of them preferred working for a smaller company with local roots, rather than for competitors that offered \u201cvery little opportunity to contribute to new innovation.\u201dRead more: Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space explorationCompanies in the cosmosA new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moon New Zealand, Singapore and Luxembourg headline this emerging space-race between minnows. 50 years after America\u2019s moon mission, some of the smallest nations on Earth have joined the space race",
        "author": "Rick Noack"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 years after America\u2019s moon mission, some of the smallest nations on Earth have joined the space race (WP: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7789",
        "date": "2019-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/07/17/years-after-americas-moon-mission-some-smallest-nations-earth-have-joined-space-race/",
        "text": "AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND \u2014 For a generation, space was the exclusive playground of the world\u2019s super powers \u2014 and for those who wanted to become one. Exactly 50 years ago this week, the United States launched its Apollo 11 lunar landing mission and the Trump administration is seeking to go back to the moon by 2024. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNewcomer India\u2019s aspirations to become the first country to land on the south pole of the moon hit a snag this week, with its second lunar mission aborted hours before launch time because of a technical issue.While those nations vie to expand space exploration to new frontiers, some smaller countries have eagerly stepped-up to fill gaps in less ambitious \u2014 but not less critical \u2014 space projects.Story continues below advertisementNew Zealand, Singapore and Luxembourg headline this emerging space race between minnows.Each country has grown its space industry by adopting policies to lure private sector and government contracts, focusing on research or the production and launch of rockets. The satellites those rockets catapult into space are powering everything from intelligence gathering to the supervision of construction or agricultural projects.AdvertisementWhile their approaches differ greatly, all of them benefit from being small and nimble: Instead of red tape, they can offer quick solutions to legal challenges that would otherwise delay projects \u2014 while also providing funding for research or tax incentives.Story continues below advertisementTiny Luxembourg, which is less populous than Washington, created a $110 million fund last fall to attract space technology start-ups. While it does not launch its own satellites, Luxembourg in 2017 became the second nation worldwide, after the United States, guaranteeing the rights of private companies to resources they extract in space. The move was meant to attract companies seeking to one day mine asteroids, for instance. Dozens of enterprises struck agreements to set up bases in the country after the legislation was passed. Overall, about 50 space research labs and companies are now based in Luxembourg.Singapore\u2019s satellite manufacturing industry has grown from being virtually nonexistent to now boasting some 1,000 employees working for suppliers and research facilities.AdvertisementBut each faces one fundamental challenge: location. They are situated in central parts of Europe and Asia that are already heavily trafficked and wouldn\u2019t support the needs of high-frequency rocket launch sites.Story continues below advertisementThat\u2019s where New Zealand has found its niche.\u201cIn order to launch a rocket you have to close down thousands of kilometers of airspace,\u201d said Peter Beck, the CEO of U.S. company Rocket Lab, which built New Zealand\u2019s first launch site in a remote part of the country\u2019s North Island.As the aviation industry has grown more protective of North America\u2019s and Europe\u2019s crowded skies in recent years, more rocket launch companies are exploring alternatives farther away. Those alternatives also need to be located in stable countries \u201cwith a stable government,\u201d Beck said earlier this year.\u201cBasically, you end up with a small island nation in the middle of nowhere,\u201d he said against the backdrop of two giant U.S. and New Zealand flags in his Auckland production facility. \u201cIt\u2019s New Zealand.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe U.S.-based company was originally founded in New Zealand and it has recently expanded its operations there with a larger rocket factory.From its remote Mahia launch site, the company shoots small satellites into space for a fraction of what similar missions would have cost a decade ago. The far cheaper satellites are the size of a small box and no longer need a gigantic infrastructure to be produced and launched.Producing and launching conventional, heavy satellites can cost more than $400 million, according to U.S. Air Force budget estimates for national security-relevant payloads, but smaller alternatives can now be sent to space for less than 1 percent of that.Story continues below advertisementRocket Lab\u2019s clients include private foreign corporations, but New Zealand\u2019s status as a member of the coveted Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance with the United States has also attracted U.S. government agencies, which would normally opt for U.S. launch sites.AdvertisementNow, an increasing number of them \u2014 including NASA and the Defense Department \u2014 are choosing to launch their satellites from New Zealand, which is raising hopes here that the country\u2019s nascent space industry is heading toward a bright future.Luxembourg has similarly benefited from being an innovation-friendly member of another exclusive club: the European Union. As an E.U. member, the country has access to lucrative grants and projects.While officials in New Zealand, Luxembourg and Singapore are hopeful that their performance in the space industry will attract global corporate giants, some have urged caution about overly optimistic expectations \u2014 warning that the increasingly crowded field of private space companies may be heading toward a retraction as many underestimate the challenges to building a profitable space business.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStill, even as a number of competitors may eventually be forced out of the market, demand for the companies that succeed is expected to rise significantly, experts say.\"There will be an increased demand globally for small satellite launches as space becomes more democratized,\u201d said Alexandra Stickings, a space policy research fellow with the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).In New Zealand, the rocket race has triggered an unprecedented interest in space science.Christopher Eric Hann, who created a rocketry course for New Zealand\u2019s University of Canterbury in 2014, said he had seen a \u201cmajor increase in students wishing to get into aerospace or rocketry-related postgraduate study.\"Story continues below advertisementMost of his graduates, he said, move onto careers at Rocket Lab in New Zealand. Others have moved on to larger American-based aerospace firms \u2014 only to make it back home where Hann said many of them preferred working for a smaller company with local roots, rather than for competitors that offered \u201cvery little opportunity to contribute to new innovation.\u201dRead more: Why 2019 is shaping up to be a stellar year for space explorationCompanies in the cosmosA new space power is born as China lands on the far side of the moon New Zealand, Singapore and Luxembourg headline this emerging space-race between minnows. 50 years after America\u2019s moon mission, some of the smallest nations on Earth have joined the space race",
        "author": "Rick Noack"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Asteroid Mission Retrieves Large Sample (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7790",
        "date": "2020-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-asteroid-mission-retrieves-lots-of-black-dirt-11608037250?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=40",
        "text": "The Hayabusa2 mission was launched in 2014. It collected samples from the surface of Ryugu and from an artificial crater on the asteroid created by firing a projectile.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018It was so far beyond our predictions that we were practically at a loss for words.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Hirotaka Sawada, JAXA scientist \n\n\n\nAfter traveling more than 3.2 billion miles, Hayabusa2 flew by earth early this month and dropped a capsule with the samples inside. The capsule created a fiery trail as it plummeted through the atmosphere and, after extending a parachute, it landed in Australia on Dec. 6. \n\n\nThe Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, had said it hoped to collect at least 0.1 gram of material, the equivalent of a few grains of rice. But it couldn\u2019t be sure at first whether anything was inside the capsule and whether there was leakage during the descent.\nOn Tuesday, after flying the capsule back to Japan, JAXA scientists opened the chamber expected to contain Ryugu surface samples. A surprise awaited them.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe sample was successfully recovered after being dropped to Earth by the Hayabusa2 probe.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JAXA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt was so far beyond our predictions that we were practically at a loss for words. It was really emotional,\u201d said JAXA scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hirotaka Sawada,\n\n\n\n who was present at the opening. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just tiny powdery particles. There were crumbly samples in there with a size of several millimeters.\u201d\nHe added, \u201cWe were able to obtain an amount far exceeding our expectations,\u201d although he declined to estimate the weight of the material.\nJAXA scientists said the capsule stayed well-sealed throughout, and the crumbly dirt was confirmed to come\u00a0from carbon-rich Ryugu, as its black hue suggested. They said they also secured gases emitted by the asteroid material, in what they described as the first sample of extraterrestrial gases collected by humans.\nOne theory about the origin of life on earth holds that amino acids, life\u2019s building blocks, were brought to earth by asteroids or meteorites. The samples of dirt and gas from Ryugu might help prove that theory.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe capsule landed in Australia with help from a parachute.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JAXA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Peter Landers at peter.landers@wsj.com Japan\u2019s space agency said it recovered far more black dirt than it was targeting from the asteroid Ryugu, confirming the success of its Hayabusa2 mission. ",
        "author": "Peter Landers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Report Links North Korea Rocket Engines to Russia, Ukraine (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7791",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/north-korea-obtained-rocket-engines-on-black-market-report-says-1502740949?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=116",
        "text": "Michael Elleman, author of the report, said the single combustion-chamber version of the RD-250 rocket engine that resembles what the North Koreans are testing likely traces back to Ukraine\u2019s Yuzhnoye State Design Office or Russia\u2019s Energomash, two state defense companies involved in designing the engine in the past. Both defense contractors played critical roles in the Soviet Union\u2019s ballistic missile program.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe actual sourcing to me is still an open question,\u201d Mr. Elleman, a missile expert, said in an interview. He said it was unlikely that either the Ukrainian or Russian governments had any knowledge about a rocket engine sale to North Korea and posited that Mr. Kim\u2019s regime somehow obtained the engines through illicit networks.\n\n\nEnergomash didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment.\nWhether North Korea has the capacity to produce such rocket engines itself domestically is a matter of debate. Mr. Elleman believes it\u2019s far more likely that Pyongyang somehow smuggled dozens of engines from a place such as Ukraine, where they may have been available in factories or storage facilities, given the complexity of the technology.\n\u201cThe engine itself could fit into a box that\u2019s one by one by two meters,\u201d Mr. Elleman said. \u201cThey put them usually in wooden crates for protection. You could load them onto an aircraft, trains or even trucks.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n An escalation of threats between Washington and Pyongyang has rattled world leaders, injected uncertainty into markets, and sparked fear of a nuclear showdown. The WSJ's Shelby Holliday takes a look back at the week. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nSuch a transaction would explain why North Korea has advanced its missile program so quickly. Mr. Kim\u2019s regime conducted two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month, an indication that the country is rapidly approaching the ability to strike the continental U.S. with nuclear weapons.\nNorth Korea has conducted five nuclear weapons tests since 2006.\nThe situation has created one of the most pressing national security challenges for President Donald Trump, who has vowed to prevent Pyongyang from obtaining the capability to strike U.S. cities with nuclear weapons. Mr. Trump called on Mr. Kim last week to stop threatening the U.S. and said North Korea would face \u201cfire and fury like the world has never seen.\u201d\nThe\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n New York Times\n\n\n on Monday reported that U.S. investigators have focused on the possibility that North Korea executed black market purchases of rocket engines originating from the Yuzhmash factory, a Ukrainian state-owned rocket engine maker that produces models from the associated Yuzhnoye State Design Office. The focus of the U.S. investigators couldn\u2019t be independently confirmed by The Wall Street Journal.\n Yuzhmash is located in Dnipro, about 150 miles west of the front between Ukrainian troops and the Russian-backed separatists fighting in the country\u2019s east. Formerly known as Dnipropetrovsk, Dnipro is on the Ukrainian government-controlled side of the line.\nYuzhmash denied any connection with the North Korean weapons program and said the report was \u201cfantasies.\u201d\n\u201cYuzhmash has not produced military missiles or missile systems during the years of independence,\u201d the company said, referring to Ukraine\u2019s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It said that the company fully adheres to international missile non-proliferation agreements, and the only series-production engine it has exported in recent years was sent to Italy and could only be used for space exploration.\nMr. Elleman said it was unlikely the company\u2019s officials would have known about any such deal with the North Koreans, suggesting instead the equipment could have been smuggled out of Ukraine by \u201crogue characters somewhere down the chain.\u201d\nMr. Elleman, a former missile engineer, said it\u2019s unclear how many engines the North Koreans obtained, but guessed the number was likely in the dozens because Mr. Kim\u2019s government appears to feel comfortable expending them during tests. \n\u201cI\u2019m very skeptical of claims about reverse engineering complex pieces of machinery like this engine,\u201d said Mr. Elleman, noting that even U.S. technicians have been unable to duplicate some high-level rocket engines with roots in the Soviet era. \u201cIt\u2019s very sophisticated,\u201d he said.\nYuzhmash was for decades a hub for the Soviet ballistic-missile industry considered so important that the city it was located in was closed to foreigners.\nAfter the collapse of the Soviet Union, the company continued to work with Russia, but orders dried up after the Russia-Ukraine conflict began in 2014, and the company had to send some workers on unpaid leave.\nUkrainian government officials suggested the reports could be part of a campaign by Russia, which is covertly supporting a conflict in Ukraine\u2019s east, to blacken its neighbor\u2019s name.\n\u201cThere is no basis for this information, it is inflammatory in content and, most likely, was instigated The rocket engines North Korea has used in recent tests were probably acquired through illicit channels originating in Ukraine or Russia, where the complex rocket engine was designed, a Washington think tank wrote in a report Monday. ",
        "author": "Paul Sonne in Washington and James Marson in Kiev"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Pushes for Primacy in Space (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7792",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-pushes-for-primacy-in-space-11546171206?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=60",
        "text": "For its part, the U.S. is reviving its manned space program after letting it languish in favor of unmanned exploration.\u00a0A space-policy directive signed in December 2017 by President Trump outlined plans for manned missions to the moon and Mars and started preparations for a new space force to counter the Chinese military\u2019s development of space weapons. These moves came after experts testified at a House Subcommittee on Space hearing in 2016 entitled \u201cAre we losing the space race to China?\u201d that the U.S. risked being eclipsed in the field. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s budget, set at $21.5 billion in 2019, is still nearly double that of its Chinese counterpart.\nAlready rivals on Earth, the U.S. and China are now the main contenders in a race to determine \u201cwho will be in a position to obtain the vast resources in space, secure the routes of trade and write the rules of space commerce,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an expert on China\u2019s space program at Auburn University Futures Lab in Alabama.\n\n\nChina, she added, \u201cis best placed to win,\u201d thanks to a methodical program that has mapped out clearly defined objectives decades into the future.\n\n\n\n\n\nA late entrant to the space race, China conducted its first manned space flight in 2003, 42 years after the Soviet Union and the U.S. first achieved the feat.\nSince then, Chinese leaders have portrayed the conquest of space as an essential marker in the nation\u2019s rise and backed that ambition with ready financing. China National Space Administration is the world\u2019s best-funded space agency after NASA, and its development of military capabilities such as antisatellite weapons and its busy schedule of missions have jolted the U.S.\nThis \u201cis a competition with high strategic stakes,\u201d said Dean Cheng, an expert on China\u2019s space capabilities at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.\nWhile space matters again to American policy makers, the U.S. effort has lost its focus, having been underfunded since the Reagan era, according to Mr. Cheng. The U.S. has had to rely on other countries to send American astronauts into space since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Timetables to put astronauts on the moon by 2023 and on Mars by 2033 look difficult to achieve, some analysts said, and could easily fall victim to shifting political priorities.\nChina has seen its own setbacks. A crash in 2017 of the country\u2019s new heavy-lift rocket, the Long March 5, on its maiden flight set the space program back around two years, according to changes to mission schedules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The New Space Race\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n David Chan/The Wall Street Journal\n\n\nEven so, Chinese spending has been better targeted over a long period, with clear goals, achievable timelines and unwavering top-level backing, the analysts said. The U.S., by contrast, earlier funded a program to return astronauts to the moon and then canceled it in 2010.\n\u201cChina sets long-term goals and meets them,\u201d said Auburn\u2019s Ms. Goswami. \u201cThey see the moon as a vast energy resource for sustainable development. Their plan is to industrialize the moon.\u201d \nIn 2018, China sent more rockets into orbit than any other country for the first time: 36, compared with the U.S.\u2019s 30. Beyond the current moon mission, China is scheduled to deploy a space station by 2022 and set up mankind\u2019s first permanent lunar base eight years later.\nThe Beidou satellite navigation system, comprising 35 location satellites, is due to go fully online in 2020, becoming a genuine rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System, which currently has 31 operational satellites.\nPresident Xi Jinping, in a nationally broadcast call to Chinese astronauts aboard the country\u2019s first orbital space lab in 2013, portrayed space exploration as \u201cpart of the dream to make China stronger.\u201d Since then, senior officials at China\u2019s space agency have likened the race for space to China\u2019s tussle to claim disputed islands in the East and South China Seas.\n\u201cThe universe is like the ocean: the moon is like the Diaoyu Islands and Mars is like Scarborough Shoal,\u201d Ye Peijian, head of China\u2019s moon missions, said in a 2017 interview with state TV, using China\u2019s names for contested territories in the South China Sea. \u201cWe will be blamed by our descendants if we don\u2019t go there\u2026and others get there before us.\u201d\nAn early harvest of China\u2019s long-range planning should be evident in coming weeks with the lunar mission. Operating on the moon\u2019s far side is a feat in itself since direct communications with Earth aren\u2019t possible. In June, China placed a relay satellite 50,000 miles beyond the moon to enable communication with the lunar rover.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA 1:8 scale model of the Chang\u2019e-4 lunar probe\u2014with astronaut models that don\u2019t reflect the current mission\u2014on display in November at a Maisto Tech plant in Dongguan, China.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n VCG/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe rover will comb the lunar surface\u2019s far side, scraping up samples. In a year\u2019s time, another China is poised to realize an ambitious mission to the far side of the moon, the most immediate of many planned milestones in its effort to challenge America\u2019s half-century long supremacy in space. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Pushes for Primacy in Space (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7793",
        "date": "2018-12-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-pushes-for-primacy-in-space-11546171206?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=81",
        "text": "For its part, the U.S. is reviving its manned space program after letting it languish in favor of unmanned exploration.\u00a0A space-policy directive signed in December 2017 by President Trump outlined plans for manned missions to the moon and Mars and started preparations for a new space force to counter the Chinese military\u2019s development of space weapons. These moves came after experts testified at a House Subcommittee on Space hearing in 2016 entitled \u201cAre we losing the space race to China?\u201d that the U.S. risked being eclipsed in the field. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s budget, set at $21.5 billion in 2019, is still nearly double that of its Chinese counterpart.\n\n\n\n\nAlready rivals on Earth, the U.S. and China are now the main contenders in a race to determine \u201cwho will be in a position to obtain the vast resources in space, secure the routes of trade and write the rules of space commerce,\u201d said Namrata Goswami, an expert on China\u2019s space program at Auburn University Futures Lab in Alabama.\n\n\nChina, she added, \u201cis best placed to win,\u201d thanks to a methodical program that has mapped out clearly defined objectives decades into the future.\n\n\n\n\n\nA late entrant to the space race, China conducted its first manned space flight in 2003, 42 years after the Soviet Union and the U.S. first achieved the feat.\nSince then, Chinese leaders have portrayed the conquest of space as an essential marker in the nation\u2019s rise and backed that ambition with ready financing. China National Space Administration is the world\u2019s best-funded space agency after NASA, and its development of military capabilities such as antisatellite weapons and its busy schedule of missions have jolted the U.S.\nThis \u201cis a competition with high strategic stakes,\u201d said Dean Cheng, an expert on China\u2019s space capabilities at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.\nWhile space matters again to American policy makers, the U.S. effort has lost its focus, having been underfunded since the Reagan era, according to Mr. Cheng. The U.S. has had to rely on other countries to send American astronauts into space since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Timetables to put astronauts on the moon by 2023 and on Mars by 2033 look difficult to achieve, some analysts said, and could easily fall victim to shifting political priorities.\nChina has seen its own setbacks. A crash in 2017 of the country\u2019s new heavy-lift rocket, the Long March 5, on its maiden flight set the space program back around two years, according to changes to mission schedules.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The New Space Race\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n David Chan/The Wall Street Journal\n\n\nEven so, Chinese spending has been better targeted over a long period, with clear goals, achievable timelines and unwavering top-level backing, the analysts said. The U.S., by contrast, earlier funded a program to return astronauts to the moon and then canceled it in 2010.\n\u201cChina sets long-term goals and meets them,\u201d said Auburn\u2019s Ms. Goswami. \u201cThey see the moon as a vast energy resource for sustainable development. Their plan is to industrialize the moon.\u201d \nIn 2018, China sent more rockets into orbit than any other country for the first time: 36, compared with the U.S.\u2019s 30. Beyond the current moon mission, China is scheduled to deploy a space station by 2022 and set up mankind\u2019s first permanent lunar base eight years later.\nThe Beidou satellite navigation system, comprising 35 location satellites, is due to go fully online in 2020, becoming a genuine rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System, which currently has 31 operational satellites.\nPresident Xi Jinping, in a nationally broadcast call to Chinese astronauts aboard the country\u2019s first orbital space lab in 2013, portrayed space exploration as \u201cpart of the dream to make China stronger.\u201d Since then, senior officials at China\u2019s space agency have likened the race for space to China\u2019s tussle to claim disputed islands in the East and South China Seas.\n\u201cThe universe is like the ocean: the moon is like the Diaoyu Islands and Mars is like Scarborough Shoal,\u201d Ye Peijian, head of China\u2019s moon missions, said in a 2017 interview with state TV, using China\u2019s names for contested territories in the South China Sea. \u201cWe will be blamed by our descendants if we don\u2019t go there\u2026and others get there before us.\u201d\nAn early harvest of China\u2019s long-range planning should be evident in coming weeks with the lunar mission. Operating on the moon\u2019s far side is a feat in itself since direct communications with Earth aren\u2019t possible. In June, China placed a relay satellite 50,000 miles beyond the moon to enable communication with the lunar rover.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA 1:8 scale model of the Chang\u2019e-4 lunar probe\u2014with astronaut models that don\u2019t reflect the current mission\u2014on display in November at a Maisto Tech plant in Dongguan, China.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n VCG/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe rover will comb the lunar surface\u2019s far side, scraping up samples. In a year\u2019s time, anot China is poised to realize an ambitious mission to the far side of the moon, the most immediate of many planned milestones in its effort to challenge America\u2019s half-century long supremacy in space. ",
        "author": "Trefor Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Moon Landing: Lunar Rover Begins Its Exploration (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7794",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html",
        "text": "Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. BEIJING \u2014 Hours after a space probe from China made humanity\u2019s first landing on the far side of the moon, sending images of its surroundings back to Earth, the spacecraft deployed a rover on Thursday to take still more photographs and scan the surface of terrain never before traversed.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Moon Landing: Lunar Rover Begins Its Exploration (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7795",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html",
        "text": "Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. BEIJING \u2014 Hours after a space probe from China made humanity\u2019s first landing on the far side of the moon, sending images of its surroundings back to Earth, the spacecraft deployed a rover on Thursday to take still more photographs and scan the surface of terrain never before traversed.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Moon Landing: Lunar Rover Begins Its Exploration (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7796",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html",
        "text": "Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. BEIJING \u2014 Hours after a space probe from China made humanity\u2019s first landing on the far side of the moon, sending images of its surroundings back to Earth, the spacecraft deployed a rover on Thursday to take still more photographs and scan the surface of terrain never before traversed.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Moon Landing: Lunar Rover Begins Its Exploration (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7797",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html",
        "text": "Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. Reaction in China to the landing was muted \u2014 a sign that the novelty of space missions has faded. But it also appeared to reflect political and economic anxieties. BEIJING \u2014 Hours after a space probe from China made humanity\u2019s first landing on the far side of the moon, sending images of its surroundings back to Earth, the spacecraft deployed a rover on Thursday to take still more photographs and scan the surface of terrain never before traversed.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China \u2018Welcomes\u2019 Mnuchin\u2019s Interest in Traveling to Beijing for Trade Talks (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7798",
        "date": "2018-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-welcomes-mnuchins-interest-in-traveling-to-beijing-for-trade-talks-1524387189?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=76",
        "text": "The display of good will, following weeks of harsh words from both sides, gives rise to hope of a thaw in a trade stalemate that has seen both countries slap tariffs on some goods and threaten to impose them on a lengthening list of products.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s very likely\u201d that Mr. Mnuchin will make the trip, said a Chinese official with knowledge of Beijing\u2019s decision-making process. Mr. Mnuchin, who declined to comment on the timing of the visit, said he is \u201ccautiously optimistic\u201d about reaching an agreement with Beijing that could defuse the bilateral trade conflict that has rattled world markets in recent weeks.\n\n\nMr. Mnuchin told reporters Saturday that he met with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yi Gang,\n\n\n\n China\u2019s central-bank governor, at the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Yi passed along Mr. Mnuchin\u2019s message about his interest in going to Beijing, according to people familiar with the matter.\nU.S. officials say Mr. Mnuchin might be accompanied by other U.S. officials, including U.S. Trade Representative\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lighthizer.\n\n\n\n The prospect of a Mnuchin trip to Beijing has divided administration advisers, some of whom argue he could get ensnared in negotiations that would yield marginal results. The Trump administration has criticized prior administrations for being too willing to accept minor changes in Chinese practices.\nThe overtures come as tensions between the governments have already affected major technology companies on both sides. Last week, the U.S. barred American businesses from supplying technology to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n ZTE Corp.\n\n\n , a large Chinese maker of telecom equipment, for seven years.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related\n \n\n\n\n\n\n \u201cMade in China 2025\u201d is Beijing\u2019s industrial plan to dominate high-tech industries including robotics, aerospace and computer chips. The Trump administration argues China is using the plan to give its tech companies unfair advantage over foreign rivals. But what is it exactly?\n \n\n\nShortly after that announcement, China\u2019s antitrust regulators warned that they have \u201chard-to-resolve\u201d concerns about\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Qualcomm Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n planned $44 billion purchase of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n NXP Semiconductors\n\n\n NV.\nBoth countries could get hurt in the trade battle, but anxiety is running particularly high in China following the U.S. ban on ZTE, long viewed as a national champion for its effort to take a global lead in establishing 5G mobile internet networks.\nIn an internal report dated April 20, an economist at China\u2019s state-run Assets Supervision and Administration Commission said the U.S. action against ZTE would have a crippling impact on a wide swath of the state-owned sector, including China\u2019s three large telecom carriers and their suppliers.\n\u201cAgainst the backdrop of a trade war, this incident has triggered a lot of anxiety,\u201d wrote\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wang Jiang,\n\n\n\n author of the report, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.\nThe U.S. Commerce Department took the action after concluding that ZTE had broken a year-old settlement to resolve alleged violations involving sales to Iran and other countries.\nOn Friday, the Commerce Department said it was willing to consider new information from ZTE, which, in a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange Sunday said it was \u201cmaking active communications with relevant parties and seeking a solution.\u201d\nStill, the U.S. action threatens to cut off ZTE\u2019s supply chain and disrupt those of other Chinese companies such as the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp., the main contractor for the Chinese space program, Mr. Wang wrote in the report. He said ZTE couldn't find substitutes for most of the chips and other products it purchased from its American suppliers.\nWhile calling ZTE\u2019s actions \u201cextremely stupid,\u201d Mr. Wang suggested that the government put in place contingency plans to protect other Chinese companies that could be targeted by the U.S.\nOn the U.S.\u2019s part, President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\n \n\n\n\n on April 5 threatened to hit another $100 billion in Chinese imports with tariffs in a separate dispute over intellectual property. U.S. business groups with ties to the administration said a list of items to be targeted has largely been completed.\nDelaying the publication of the list, however, could signal to Beijing that the U.S. is interested in talks, and it could serve as a way of encouraging Beijing to keep up the pressure on North Korea over nuclear weapons.\nOver the weekend, Ben Purser, deputy assistant secretary of state for counter-proliferation, met with Chinese officials in Beijing, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. \u201cChina has been very helpful on the sanctions with us,\u201d Mr. Mnuchin said.\nBut it is far from clear how long the Trump administration will hold off on the tariffs, and the administration is divided over how to pursue trade issues with China.\nMr. Mnuchin is joined by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Kudlow,\n\n\n\n director of the National Economic Council, in favoring a softer approach. They see Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\u2019s\n\n\n\n recent speech pledging to ease restrictions on foreign autos as a significant concession, say individuals familiar with the deliberations.\nOthers, including White House trade adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Navarro,\n\n\n\n favor a tougher line. They argue that Mr. Xi\u2019s pledges don\u2019t represent a significant liberalization and that recent tariffs imposed by China on U.S. agriculture require a sharp response.\nThose arguing for a tougher response have been pushing to expand any possible trip to include Mr. Lighthizer, who has long been a critic of Chinese economic practices, and perhaps others.\nWrite to Lingling Wei at lingling.wei@wsj.com and Bob Davis at bob.davis@wsj.com U.S. Treasury secretary a trip to China was \u201cunder consideration\u201d to discuss ways to defuse trade tensions between the two countries. ",
        "author": "Lingling Wei and Bob Davis"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Exploits Fleet of U.S. Satellites to Strengthen Police and Military Power (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7799",
        "date": "2019-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-exploits-fleet-of-u-s-satellites-to-strengthen-police-and-military-power-11556031771?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=61",
        "text": "A tenth satellite, under construction by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , would enhance China\u2019s competitor to the U.S. Global Positioning System. Besides civilian uses, the navigation system could help China in a potential conflict, such as in guiding missiles to their targets. U.S. law effectively prohibits American companies from exporting satellites to China, where domestic technology lags well behind America\u2019s. But the U.S. doesn\u2019t regulate how a satellite\u2019s bandwidth is used once the device is in space. That has allowed China to essentially rent the capacity of U.S.-built satellites it wouldn\u2019t be allowed to buy, a Wall Street Journal investigation found. Tangled webs of satellite ownership and offshore firms have helped China\u2019s government achieve its goals. Some of America\u2019s biggest companies, including private-equity firm \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carlyle Group\n\n\n in addition to Boeing, have indirectly facilitated China\u2019s efforts, the Journal found.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAsiaSat 9, the Hong Kong company\u2019s most powerful U.S.-made satellite to date, being prepared for launch in September 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AsiaSat\n \n\n\n\nAll this appears to run counter to the U.S.\u2019s stance of confronting China\u2019s military buildup and condemning what international watchdog groups describe as widespread human-rights abuses by China\u2019s police. That includes in far-flung territories, where the satellites help the government beam communications. Current and former U.S. officials who reviewed the Journal\u2019s findings called the satellite deals worrisome examples of China using U.S. commercial technology for strategic gain. \u201cIt\u2019s a serious ethical and moral problem as well as a national-security issue,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Wortzel,\n\n\n\n a former chairman of the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group that advises Congress.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsShould the U.S. permit its satellite technology to be used by Chinese police and military? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBoeing, in response to questions, said it has put on hold its latest satellite deal involving China, the one that would bolster the Chinese rival to GPS. Boeing said it complies with all U.S. laws, as did Carlyle. China and the U.S. are locked in a battle to dominate the world\u2019s top technologies, such as biotech, chips and communications. U.S. officials say Beijing at times turns to espionage and cyberhacking to achieve its goals. In other cases, such as in the commercial satellite industry, it creatively sidesteps U.S. regulations and leverages American companies\u2019 eagerness for revenue to reap the benefits of the technology it needs to further its strategic goals.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Chinese satellite workaround has persisted for years. U.S. officials and industry players have said the profits American satellite exports generated could be reinvested in development to keep the U.S ahead. Some defense officials also said China\u2019s use of U.S. satellites gave Washington valuable insight into its rival\u2019s space capabilities. They assumed China would use U.S.-built satellites for benign purposes such as broadcasting sports. A Hong Kong company called Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co. has long been a bridge between mainland China and U.S. satellite makers. AsiaSat is jointly controlled by Citic Group\u2014a conglomerate owned by China\u2019s central government\u2014and Carlyle, which together own about 75% of the firm.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUnder U.S. export controls, semiautonomous Hong Kong is considered separate from mainland China, so AsiaSat could buy U.S. satellites despite being partly Chinese-owned. Over the years, AsiaSat has put in orbit nine satellites built by U.S. companies, including Boeing and SSL, a Palo Alto, Calif., unit of Colorado-based \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Maxar Technologies Inc.\n\n\n A majority are still operating. AsiaSat offers communications services across the Asia-Pacific, such as news and sports broadcasting. Its English-language financial filings and other statements make little mention of the use of its bandwidth by China\u2019s government. A fuller picture emerges in dozens of Chinese-language statements on the website of a Citic unit that has been responsible for marketing AsiaSat\u2019s bandwidth in mainland China over the past decade. Since AsiaSat launched its first satellite around 30 years ago, the Chinese government has used it to link state-run broadcasters to the provinces. \u201cThe country is rich and the military is mighty,\u201d Citic said on its website in 2015 after AsiaSat helped broadcast a lavish military parade in Beijing. \u201cSatellite communications are evidence of the nation\u2019s development.\u201d China\u2019s Ministry of Public Security has described satellites as core to police operations. Its records show the ministry relied on a satellite called AsiaSat 4, manufactured by Boeing, and one called AsiaSat 5, made by SSL, as it worked to build rapid-response forces capable of providing real-time audio and video from the field. Citic\u2019s satellite unit for years touted its links to the Chinese government. In 2008 and 2009, Citic said, AsiaSat\u2019s satellites helped ensure communications for authorities as they quelled antigovernment protests and riots in Tibet and in Xinjiang, a heavily Muslim region in far-northwest China.\n\n\n Mission Accomplished China is effectively blocked from buying U.S. satellites. China\u2019s government found a way to reap their benefits. A Chinese and a U.S. company jointly control Asia Satellite Telecommunications, based in Hong Kong. 1 Chinese government controls provides compliance reports to Citic Group Carlyle Group jointly control U.S. government AsiaSat buys satellites from sells satellite capacity on behalf of AsiaSat to approves satellite exports AsiaSat purchases satellites from U.S. companies. Inside mainland China, Citic markets AsiaSat\u2019s bandwidth to state telecom operators and other users. 2 U.S. companies SSL Boeing State telecom operator The satellites ultimately serve numerous Chinese strategic interests. 3 Chinese end users Chinese authorities acting in restive regions Soldiers on contested outposts in the South China Sea State broadcasters connecting remote territory A Chinese and a U.S. company jointly control Asia Satellite Telecommunications, based in Hong Kong. 1 Chinese government controls jointly control Citic Group Carlyle Group provides compliance reports to AsiaSat U.S. government AsiaSat purchases satellites from U.S. companies. Inside mainland China, Citic markets AsiaSat\u2019s bandwidth to state telecom operators and other users. 2 approves satellite exports sells satellite capacity on behalf of AsiaSat to buys satellites from U.S. companies SSL Boeing State telecom operator The satellites ultimately serve numerous Chinese strategic interests. 3 Chinese end users Soldiers on contested outposts in the South China Sea Chinese authorities acting in restive regions State broadcasters connecting remote territory A Chinese and a U.S. company jointly control Asia Satellite Telecommunications, based in Hong Kong. 1 Chinese government controls provides compliance reports to Citic Group Carlyle Group jointly control U.S. government AsiaSat buys satellites from approves satellite exports sells satellite capacity on behalf of AsiaSat to AsiaSat purchases satellites from U.S. companies. Inside mainland China, Citic markets AsiaSat\u2019s bandwidth to state telecom operators and other users. 2 U.S. companies Boeing SSL State telecom operator The satellites ultimately serve numerous Chinese strategic interests. 3 Chinese end users Chinese authorities acting in restive regions Soldiers on contested outposts in the South China Sea State broadcasters connecting remote territory A Chinese and a U.S. company jointly control Asia Satellite Telecommunications, based in Hong Kong. 1 Chinese government controls jointly control Citic Group Carlyle Group provides compliance reports to AsiaSat U.S. government AsiaSat purchases satellites from U.S. companies. Inside mainland China, Citic markets AsiaSat\u2019s bandwidth to state telecom operators and other users. 2 approves satellite exports buys satellites from sells satellite capacity on behalf of AsiaSat to U.S. companies Boeing SSL State telecom operator The satellites ultimately serve numerous Chinese strategic interests. 3 Chinese end users Soldiers on contested outposts in the South China Sea Chinese authorities acting in restive regions State broadcasters connecting remote territory Sources: Asia Satellite Telecommunications; Citic Group (Chinese end users); Carlyle Group (compliance reports) \n\n\nAt a 2011 industry conference, a Citic manager listed the Ministry of State Security, China\u2019s main spy agency, and the military as among a long list of end users of its satellite capacity for emergency responses, according to a copy of the presentation reviewed by the Journal. Citic referred questions from the Journal to AsiaSat. AsiaSat declined to comment on individual users of its bandwidth. In a statement, AsiaSat said China\u2019s military wasn\u2019t a direct customer but used capacity that was first procured by telecommunications operators for disaster relief. AsiaSat said it didn\u2019t know how the authorities used its bandwidth in response to the Tibet and Xinjiang uprisings. It declined to comment directly on whether its bandwidth is being used today by the police in Xinjiang, where authorities have been building an all-encompassing surveillance state and sending as many as a million ethnic Uighurs to internment camps. AsiaSat said it had no ability to retroactively monitor the contents transmitted via its satellites. AsiaSat\u2019s chairman is a managing director of Carlyle, which is among the largest and most politically connected private-equity firms, investing in sectors including defense, telecom and health care. Former U.S. Defense Secretary \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Carlucci\n\n\n\n was Carlyle\u2019s chairman for a decade. Former Secretary of State \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Baker\n\n\n\n and the late President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George H.W. Bush\n\n\n\n served as paid advisers at one time. Carlyle said in a statement that AsiaSat\u2019s equipment supports phone and web communications for Chinese phone companies\u2019 customers, \u201cjust as IntelSat provides service to Verizon or AT&T in the U.S.\u201d \u201cIt is effectively a pipe,\u201d Carlyle added, \u201cand AsiaSat, because of privacy issues, doesn\u2019t monitor or regulate the content that flows through it.\u201d A spokesman for Carlyle, which invested in AsiaSat in May 2015, added that the private-equity firm sends annual reports to the State Department to confirm AsiaSat\u2019s compliance with U.S. export controls, ensuring that sensitive technical information is shared with authorized users only. Starting in 2013, Citic said a Chinese state telecom operator tapped the Boeing-built AsiaSat 4 to provide 3G mobile internet to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. There, China has been building military infrastructure in a bid to control waters also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam and others. \u201cCommunications have always been a difficult problem for the soldiers and civilians facing hardships on the islands, making their lives, work and battle preparations hugely inconvenient,\u201d Citic said at the time. U.S. officials began objecting to what they saw as Beijing\u2019s militarization of the South China Sea, but China pushed ahead, with Citic saying connection speeds had been boosted to 4G in 2016. A year later, Citic pledged to help China \u201cuphold the country\u2019s maritime rights and interests,\u201d repeating a phrase the military and Foreign Ministry often use. AsiaSat described its services in the South China Sea as being available for any user who needed it, including \u201cfishermen and people on cruise ships or public vessels.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Tong,\n\n\n\n AsiaSat\u2019s chief executive, said in an interview the company also previously provided coverage to China\u2019s coast guard, but it didn\u2019t engage directly with the military. He said AsiaSat\u2019s American purchases added more than $1.5 billion to the U.S. economy. \u201cAsiaSat should be seen as a success story in how two superpowers should work together,\u201d Mr. Tong said. The company\u2019s financial filings show it earns around a quarter of its revenue from China, with the rest coming from offering connectivity elsewhere such as rural Australia. AsiaSat said its commercial technology doesn\u2019t have advanced security features required for military communications. It said it takes regulatory obligations seriously.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAsiaSat 6, based on Space Systems Loral 1300 platform, was launched in September 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AsiaSat\n \n\n\n\nChina\u2019s Defense Ministry, in response to questions about the deals, said: \u201cCovering the full extent of our country\u2019s territorial sovereignty is a very ordinary matter.\u201d Meanwhile, AsiaSat decided to drop U.S. government-funded outlets Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. They have been a thorn in the side for Beijing, beaming coverage of politically sensitive topics. AsiaSat in recent months told the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which manages the outlets\u2019 contract, that it wouldn\u2019t extend satellite services beyond June. AsiaSat\u2019s Mr. Tong said the decision was made for purely commercial reasons. SSL, the Palo Alto satellite maker, has sold five satellites to AsiaSat in the past decade. SSL said it complied with all relevant U.S. laws, and the satellites didn\u2019t include military encryption technology. \u201cOur satellites are built for commercial use,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Lihani,\n\n\n\n the company\u2019s chief trade compliance officer. Boeing said the satellite that became AsiaSat 4 was built under a deal negotiated by Hughes Space & Communications, pushed forward by Boeing after it acquired Hughes. Boeing said it wasn\u2019t aware of any transfer of satellite technology that would have violated its export license. It said it was neither possible nor required by law to monitor each bandwidth user after a satellite it built is in space. \u201cThe State and Commerce departments over four administrations\u2014and most recently in 2017\u2014have reviewed and approved export licenses for the AsiaSat satellite constellation to provide commercial bandwidth services to the Asia region, including China,\u201d Boeing said. A separate Journal investigation in December showed how a Chinese state-owned firm used offshore financing to funnel around $200 million to a commercial satellite project under development by Boeing. The company cancelled that deal following the report, citing customer default, and federal agencies launched investigations. A Commerce Department spokesman said that though the agency regulates satellite exports, it doesn\u2019t regulate bandwidth usage. Commerce \u201cregularly updates its regulations to counter evolving national security threats,\u201d the spokesman said, and has a policy of denying export licenses when exports are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the U.S., including promoting human rights. The State Department, which also regulates satellite technology, said the U.S. \u201cstrongly urges companies to implement stringent safeguards to ensure that their commercial activities do not contribute to China\u2019s human-rights abuses.\u201d It condemned Beijing\u2019s militarization in the South China Sea. One of the latest transactions involving offshore companies and U.S. space technology involves an advanced satellite Boeing has contracted to build called Silkwave-1. At the center of the deal is a Hong Kong company called \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n CMMB Vision Holdings Ltd.\n\n\n Its founder, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chau-Chi Wong,\n\n\n\n was born in mainland China and attended Harvard University before eventually working for \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs\n\n\n Group Inc.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChau-Chi Wong, CEO of CMMB Vision Holdings, playing violin at a company office in Hong Kong last month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Billy H.C. Kwok for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMr. Wong said he had a deep affinity for the U.S. but was also a Chinese patriot. \u201cWe need the best technology for China,\u201d he said. Mr. Wong said his company could help alleviate congestion on China\u2019s cellular network by using Silkwave-1 to broadcast content to connected devices, such as cars, rather than have people rely solely on cellular data. In a national emergency or wartime, he said, this could theoretically enable China\u2019s leaders to connect to its 1.4 billion people with rapid nationwide alerts. A U.S.-based partner of CMMB Vision, called New York Broadband LLC, which Mr. Wong also partly owns, will purchase the Boeing satellite, then essentially lease its capacity to CMMB Vision, Mr. Wong said. It\u2019s a complicated arrangement that he and Boeing said U.S. officials had approved. Soon after it inked the deal, CMMB Vision said China\u2019s top economic planning body designated its work a \u201ckey national development project.\u201d In Beijing, CMMB Vision then gave a majority stake in its China operation to a state-run broadcaster, a move Mr. Wong said was to comply with Chinese regulations. Mr. Wong said his company wants to support President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\u2019s\n\n\n\n Belt and Road initiative to deepen China\u2019s influence in the developing world, with plans to extend the Silkwave-1\u2019s services beyond China\u2019s borders. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nA cyclist riding past satellite dishes at AsiaSat offices in Hong Kong.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bobby yip/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe company also plans to use the Boeing-built satellite to increase the precision of Beidou, China\u2019s military-backed alternative to the U.S. GPS. In late 2017, CMMB Vision\u2019s China joint venture partnered with a unit of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.\u2014a state-owned space equipment and weapons producer\u2014to use satellite signals from CMMB Vision to make Beidou more accurate. U.S. officials have described Beidou as critical to China\u2019s global ambitions. An April report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said Beidou could both improve China\u2019s missile guidance and reduce its reliance on GPS. Mr. Wong said Silkwave-1 would support Beidou\u2019s commercial applications only. Pressed on whether he could guarantee China\u2019s military wouldn\u2019t benefit from his satellite, he said it would be illogical for the military to use such commercial technology. \u201cIf out of desperation they want to use it, that they can do,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not our business model.\u201d Write to Brian Spegele at brian.spegele@wsj.com and Kate O\u2019Keeffe at kathryn.okeeffe@wsj.com Tangled ownership and offshore firms helped Beijing win access to superior technology, despite U.S. law preventing satellite sales to China. U.S. firms including private-equity giant Carlyle Group and Boeing Co. indirectly facilitate the efforts. ",
        "author": "Brian Spegele and Kate O\u2019Keeffe"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Advances in Cosmology (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7800",
        "date": "2019-10-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nobel-prize-in-physics-awarded-to-u-s-swiss-scientists-11570528806?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=54",
        "text": "Each scientist will receive a gold medal, a diploma and a share of $908,000 in cash.\n\n\n\n\nThe prize honored both scientific theory and practical observation, several physicists said. Taken together, the work of the three scientists encompasses the entire known history of the cosmos: from the first sparks of light after the Big Bang some 14 billion-or-so years ago through the proliferation of planets around almost every star in the universe today.\n\n\n\u201cIt is not only about the universe but about us and our place in that bigger canvas,\u201d said Robbert Dijkgraaf, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who wasn\u2019t involved in the award. \u201cIt answers the existential questions of where did it all come from and what is it made of. The big lesson is that our solar system is not unique.\u201d\nStarting as a graduate student in 1964, Canadian-born Dr. Peebles developed precise models of cosmic creation, transforming cosmology \u201cfrom speculation to science,\u201d the academy said.\nWhen he began, there was little direct evidence of how the universe might have expanded into its current form. At the suggestion of his lab director, he studied observations of ancient light embodied in cosmic background radiation\u2014itself the subject of a 1978 Nobel physics prize\u2014and, step by step, calculated how the cosmos might have expanded into the stars, galaxies, dark matter and dark energy of the present-day universe. \nThat early radiation he analyzed was like a \u201cbaby photo\u201d of the universe, he said.\n\u201cWe have very clear evidence that our universe did expand from a hot, dense state, but although the theory is thoroughly tested, we still must admit that dark matter and dark energy are mysterious,\u201d Dr. Peebles said. \u201cAlthough we have made great advances in understanding the nature and evolution of our universe, there are still many open questions.\u201d\n\n\nRelated NASA Announces More Than 1,200 Newly Discovered Planets (May 10, 2016) The Sky Is Orange! How NASA Artists Draw Planets No One Can See (March 29, 2019) Is That an Alien Probe? Harvard Astronomer Thinks It Might Be (Feb. 8, 2019) Discovery Bolsters Big-Bang Theory (March 17, 2014) Another Earth in Outer Space? (Jan. 27, 2011) \n\n\nHe never had a plan of discovery, he said. He followed where his ideas led. \u201cI have an iconoclastic turn of mind,\u201d he said. \u201cThe subject grew, and I grew with it. Progress was slow, halting at first. It speeded up. I started working on this 65 years ago. Where did all that time go?\u201d\nWhile Dr. Peebles labored to build a theory, Dr. Mayor and Dr. Queloz, who also work at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., searched for concrete evidence that creation had seeded planets beyond our own solar system. They searched for subtle shifts in starlight that would indicate a wobble caused by an orbiting planet.\n\u201cNo one knew whether exoplanets existed or not,\u201d Dr. Mayor recalled, in a statement. \u201cFor years prestigious astronomers had been looking for them in vain. Indeed, the technologies to enable such a discovery did not exist at the time.\u201d\nIn 1995, using a new observatory instrument, they announced the discovery of a planet orbiting around another star called 51 Pegasi, named for the constellation of the flying horse Pegasus, about 51 light years from Earth. The Jupiter-sized planet orbits so closely to its star that its year lasts just 4 \u00bd days.\n\u201cThis was a revelation that forever changed Earth\u2019s place in the universe,\u201d said physicist Mats Larsen, chairman of the academy\u2019s physics committee.\nAs of last month, astronomers have discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets, as worlds around alien stars are called, with several thousand more awaiting formal confirmation. Astronomers have calculated that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars in the Milky Way.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com and Joanna Sugden at joanna.sugden@wsj.com The prize was awarded to three scientists for work advancing the understanding of Earth\u2019s place in the cosmos\u2014from the history of the universe since the big bang to the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Joanna Sugden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Wants to Extend U.S. Space Partnership. Or It Could Turn to China. (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7801",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/world/europe/russia-space-us.html",
        "text": "Moscow argues that it has much to offer, but analysts say it is short of cash. In any event, Washington is already planning an American-led lunar station. Moscow argues that it has much to offer, but analysts say it is short of cash. In any event, Washington is already planning an American-led lunar station. MOSCOW \u2014 Russia\u2019s Museum of Cosmonautics displays with rightful pride artifacts from its early years of storied achievements in space exploration: the first satellite, the first dog in space, the first man and, soon thereafter, the first toolbox.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Wants to Extend U.S. Space Partnership. Or It Could Turn to China. (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7802",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/world/europe/russia-space-us.html",
        "text": "Moscow argues that it has much to offer, but analysts say it is short of cash. In any event, Washington is already planning an American-led lunar station. Moscow argues that it has much to offer, but analysts say it is short of cash. In any event, Washington is already planning an American-led lunar station. MOSCOW \u2014 Russia\u2019s Museum of Cosmonautics displays with rightful pride artifacts from its early years of storied achievements in space exploration: the first satellite, the first dog in space, the first man and, soon thereafter, the first toolbox.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Putin\u2019s Grim Reality: Public Fury Over Children\u2019s Deaths in Mall (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7803",
        "date": "2018-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/world/europe/russia-kemerovo-fire.html",
        "text": "The Russian president visited Siberia to demand an inquiry into a fire there that killed at least 64 people. Thousands protested nearby. The Russian president visited Siberia to demand an inquiry into a fire there that killed at least 64 people. Thousands protested nearby. MOSCOW \u2014 At the end of a month that has seen him unveil new \u201cinvincible\u201d missiles, announce a space mission to Mars and secure a sky-high vote in Russia\u2019s election, President Vladimir V. Putin faced a grim reality on the ground Tuesday: a nation enraged by the deaths of children trapped in a burning mall in Siberia.",
        "author": "By Andrew Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "1969: Soviet Spacecraft Reaches Moon, but Crash Landing Is Suspected (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7804",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/world/europe/luna-15-soviet-moon.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11. But an abrupt end to its work raised suspicions it had crashed. The uncrewed Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11. But an abrupt end to its work raised suspicions it had crashed. MOSCOW, July 22 (NYT) \u2014 The Soviet Union today virtually ignored Luna-15, its unmanned spacecraft that held the world in suspense for more than a week before apparently crashing on the moon\u2019s surface yesterday.",
        "author": "By The International Herald Tribune"
    },
    {
        "title": "1969: Soviet Spacecraft Reaches Moon, but Crash Landing Is Suspected (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7805",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/world/europe/luna-15-soviet-moon.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11. But an abrupt end to its work raised suspicions it had crashed. The uncrewed Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11. But an abrupt end to its work raised suspicions it had crashed. MOSCOW, July 22 (NYT) \u2014 The Soviet Union today virtually ignored Luna-15, its unmanned spacecraft that held the world in suspense for more than a week before apparently crashing on the moon\u2019s surface yesterday.",
        "author": "By The International Herald Tribune"
    },
    {
        "title": "1969: Soviet Spacecraft Reaches Moon, but Crash Landing Is Suspected (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7806",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/world/europe/luna-15-soviet-moon.html",
        "text": "The uncrewed Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11. But an abrupt end to its work raised suspicions it had crashed. The uncrewed Luna 15 was launched three days before Apollo 11. But an abrupt end to its work raised suspicions it had crashed. MOSCOW, July 22 (NYT) \u2014 The Soviet Union today virtually ignored Luna-15, its unmanned spacecraft that held the world in suspense for more than a week before apparently crashing on the moon\u2019s surface yesterday.",
        "author": "By The International Herald Tribune"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Accuses Iran of Using Space Launch as Cover for Missile Program (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7807",
        "date": "2019-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/world/middleeast/iran-spacecraft-pompeo.html",
        "text": "Responding to a warning from the secretary of state, Iran\u2019s foreign minister said the U.S. was \u201cin no position to lecture\u201d about violating global deals after withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal. Responding to a warning from the secretary of state, Iran\u2019s foreign minister said the U.S. was \u201cin no position to lecture\u201d about violating global deals after withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal. WASHINGTON \u2014 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Iran on Thursday against launching three spacecraft in the coming months, describing them as a cover for testing technology that is necessary to lob a warhead at the United States and other nations.",
        "author": "By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket and Submarine Inventor Under Scrutiny in Disappearance of Swedish Journalist (NYT: World) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7808",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/europe/peter-madsen-kim-wall-submarine-inventor-under-scrutiny-in-death-of-swedish-journalist-.html",
        "text": "Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. COPENHAGEN \u2014 He was the rare middle-school science whiz to realize his dreams of becoming a celebrated inventor. He started building rockets as a teenager, and mused about making space tourism a reality. Fellow Danes admired his prowess in technology and design, though his temper at times seemed out of place in a society that treasures politeness.",
        "author": "By Martin Selsoe Sorensen and Sewell Chan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket and Submarine Inventor Under Scrutiny in Disappearance of Swedish Journalist (NYT: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7809",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/europe/peter-madsen-kim-wall-submarine-inventor-under-scrutiny-in-death-of-swedish-journalist-.html",
        "text": "Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. COPENHAGEN \u2014 He was the rare middle-school science whiz to realize his dreams of becoming a celebrated inventor. He started building rockets as a teenager, and mused about making space tourism a reality. Fellow Danes admired his prowess in technology and design, though his temper at times seemed out of place in a society that treasures politeness.",
        "author": "By Martin Selsoe Sorensen and Sewell Chan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket and Submarine Inventor Under Scrutiny in Disappearance of Swedish Journalist (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7810",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/europe/peter-madsen-kim-wall-submarine-inventor-under-scrutiny-in-death-of-swedish-journalist-.html",
        "text": "Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. COPENHAGEN \u2014 He was the rare middle-school science whiz to realize his dreams of becoming a celebrated inventor. He started building rockets as a teenager, and mused about making space tourism a reality. Fellow Danes admired his prowess in technology and design, though his temper at times seemed out of place in a society that treasures politeness.",
        "author": "By Martin Selsoe Sorensen and Sewell Chan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket and Submarine Inventor Under Scrutiny in Disappearance of Swedish Journalist (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7811",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/world/europe/peter-madsen-kim-wall-submarine-inventor-under-scrutiny-in-death-of-swedish-journalist-.html",
        "text": "Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. Peter Madsen, 46, has been detained and had changed his account of what happened on the night that Kim Wall, 30, a reporter, went missing. COPENHAGEN \u2014 He was the rare middle-school science whiz to realize his dreams of becoming a celebrated inventor. He started building rockets as a teenager, and mused about making space tourism a reality. Fellow Danes admired his prowess in technology and design, though his temper at times seemed out of place in a society that treasures politeness.",
        "author": "By Martin Selsoe Sorensen and Sewell Chan"
    },
    {
        "title": "France Nudges Europe Into Space Race, Where It Lags Behind (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7812",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/world/europe/france-europe-space-race-apollo-11-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, a new French plan for a space command must overcome the reluctance of its European allies to weaponize space. Fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, a new French plan for a space command must overcome the reluctance of its European allies to weaponize space. PARIS \u2014 Thousands of soldiers paraded down the Avenue des Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, on foot, on horseback, in tanks and even on a flying hoverboard. But the real action, increasingly, was somewhere far away: outer space.",
        "author": "By Norimitsu Onishi"
    },
    {
        "title": "France Nudges Europe Into Space Race, Where It Lags Behind (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7813",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/world/europe/france-europe-space-race-apollo-11-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, a new French plan for a space command must overcome the reluctance of its European allies to weaponize space. Fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, a new French plan for a space command must overcome the reluctance of its European allies to weaponize space. PARIS \u2014 Thousands of soldiers paraded down the Avenue des Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, on foot, on horseback, in tanks and even on a flying hoverboard. But the real action, increasingly, was somewhere far away: outer space.",
        "author": "By Norimitsu Onishi"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year in Pictures 2019 (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7814",
        "date": "2019-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/world/year-in-pictures.html",
        "text": "Sifting through images of conflict, triumph and catastrophe from around the world, our editors chose photos to represent the year. Sifting through images of conflict, triumph and catastrophe from around the world, our editors chose photos to represent the year. Sifting through images of conflict, triumph and catastrophe from around the world, our editors chose photos to represent the year.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "U.N. General Assembly: China Calls on World to Reject Politicization of Covid (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7815",
        "date": "2020-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/world/asia/un-general-assembly-live-updates.html",
        "text": "Deepening tensions are on display, with President Trump blaming \u2018the China virus\u2019 for global catastrophe, and Xi Jinping claiming the mantle of environmental champion. Deepening tensions are on display, with President Trump blaming \u2018the China virus\u2019 for global catastrophe, and Xi Jinping claiming the mantle of environmental champion. The presidents of the United States and China squared off in their speeches to the annual General Assembly on Tuesday, punctuating a superpower rivalry that the leader of the 193-member organization, Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres, has called a great global risk.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Searching for the (Star) Light at the Vatican Observatory (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7816",
        "date": "2017-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/world/europe/vatican-observatory-consolmagno.html",
        "text": "Brother Guy Consolmagno once taught astronomy at Lafayette College. Now, he leads the Vatican\u2019s centuries-old observatory at Castel Gandolfo. Brother Guy Consolmagno once taught astronomy at Lafayette College. Now, he leads the Vatican\u2019s centuries-old observatory at Castel Gandolfo. ALBANO LAZIALE, Italy \u2014 Some 2,000 years ago, a celestial phenomenon is believed to have lit up the sky. Guiding the wise men of New Testament lore to the birthplace of Jesus, the star of Bethlehem has since become a planetarium and Christmas carol favorite.",
        "author": "By Elisabetta Povoledo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Searching for the (Star) Light at the Vatican Observatory (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7817",
        "date": "2017-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/world/europe/vatican-observatory-consolmagno.html",
        "text": "Brother Guy Consolmagno once taught astronomy at Lafayette College. Now, he leads the Vatican\u2019s centuries-old observatory at Castel Gandolfo. Brother Guy Consolmagno once taught astronomy at Lafayette College. Now, he leads the Vatican\u2019s centuries-old observatory at Castel Gandolfo. ALBANO LAZIALE, Italy \u2014 Some 2,000 years ago, a celestial phenomenon is believed to have lit up the sky. Guiding the wise men of New Testament lore to the birthplace of Jesus, the star of Bethlehem has since become a planetarium and Christmas carol favorite.",
        "author": "By Elisabetta Povoledo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aiming for the Stars, and a Chunk of Rock, in Senegal (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7818",
        "date": "2018-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/world/africa/astronomy-senegal-nasa-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 When Salma Sylla was a little girl, she tried to find relief from Senegal\u2019s steamy hot season by retreating to the roof of her home to sleep. Restless and overheated, she would lie awake staring at the stars.",
        "author": "By Jaime Yaya Barry and Dionne Searcey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aiming for the Stars, and a Chunk of Rock, in Senegal (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7819",
        "date": "2018-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/world/africa/astronomy-senegal-nasa-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 When Salma Sylla was a little girl, she tried to find relief from Senegal\u2019s steamy hot season by retreating to the roof of her home to sleep. Restless and overheated, she would lie awake staring at the stars.",
        "author": "By Jaime Yaya Barry and Dionne Searcey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aiming for the Stars, and a Chunk of Rock, in Senegal (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7820",
        "date": "2018-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/world/africa/astronomy-senegal-nasa-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 When Salma Sylla was a little girl, she tried to find relief from Senegal\u2019s steamy hot season by retreating to the roof of her home to sleep. Restless and overheated, she would lie awake staring at the stars.",
        "author": "By Jaime Yaya Barry and Dionne Searcey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aiming for the Stars, and a Chunk of Rock, in Senegal (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7821",
        "date": "2018-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/world/africa/astronomy-senegal-nasa-new-horizons.html",
        "text": "On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. On a mission to improve science education, the country got a lift with the arrival of an international team of astronomers viewing the far reaches of space. DAKAR, Senegal \u2014 When Salma Sylla was a little girl, she tried to find relief from Senegal\u2019s steamy hot season by retreating to the roof of her home to sleep. Restless and overheated, she would lie awake staring at the stars.",
        "author": "By Jaime Yaya Barry and Dionne Searcey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seven Earth-Size Planets Discovered Orbiting Nearby Star (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7822",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/seven-earth-size-worlds-discovered-orbiting-nearby-star-1487786401?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=99",
        "text": "\u201cThe star is so small and cold that the planets are temperate, which means they could have liquid water and possibly life on their surface,\u201d said astronomer Micha\u00ebl Gillon from the University of Li\u00e8ge in Belgium, who led the discovery team. In all, 30 astronomers from eight countries were involved in verifying the observations last year, working at seven major telescopes, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Spitzer Space Telescope.\n\n\n\n\nThe discovery adds to mounting evidence that billions of such worlds may exist in the Milky Way galaxy, the researchers said. The new findings \u201cindicate that these planets are even more common than previously thought,\u201d said astronomer Ignas Snellen at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who wasn\u2019t involved in the project.\n\n\nAll told, astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 3,500 exoplanets, as worlds around distant stars are called, and about 15 of them are considered potentially habitable, not counting the newest find, according to the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOn the top row, artist conceptions of the seven planets of Trappist-1 with their orbital periods, distances from their star, radii and masses as compared to those of Earth; bottom row shows data about Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nIn the latest discovery, the astronomers have calculated the size, mass and likely orbits of the seven exoplanets, based on changes in the brightness of the star as the various worlds pass in front of it. Because the star is so small, these shadows of speeding planets block more light and are easier to detect than with larger stars.\nFive of the worlds are just about the size of Earth. Two appear smaller than Earth but larger than Mars, the astronomers said. They don\u2019t know yet whether these worlds are rocky, like Earth, or composed of ice and frozen gases.\nDiscussing their find at a news briefing, the researchers speculated that conditions on three of the worlds might allow for the existence of oceans, but they acknowledged that they have no direct evidence of water on any of these alien planets, nor do they know whether any of them have an atmosphere.\nThere is no evidence so far that life exists on any of these newly found exoplanets, they said.\n\u201cWe have made a crucial step in finding out if there is life out there,\u201d said astronomer Amaury Triaud at the University of Li\u00e8ge. \u201cNow we have the right target.\u201d\nIn the years ahead, they hope to be able to detect oxygen, ozone, carbon dioxide or other atmospheric compounds suggestive of life with the help of NASA\u2019s $8.7-billion James Webb Space Telescope, which is expected to launch in 2018.\nThe star itself is young by stellar standards, and about 1/200th as bright as our own sun. It burns so slowly that it will still be aglow long after our sun has died, casting a dim, pinkish glow across the landscapes of these distant worlds.\n\u201cThe spectacle would be beautiful because every once in a while you would see another planet in the sky bigger than the moon,\u201d Dr. Triaud said.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Seven alien worlds about the size of Earth have been discovered orbiting a tiny nearby star, and six of them appear warm enough that water could exist on their surfaces, European astronomers said. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia Acknowledges Antisatellite Missile Test That Created a Mess in Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7823",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/world/europe/russia-antisatellite-missile-test.html",
        "text": "The test forced astronauts on the International Space Station to briefly take shelter in re-entry capsules. The test forced astronauts on the International Space Station to briefly take shelter in re-entry capsules. MOSCOW \u2014 Russia\u2019s military acknowledged on Tuesday that it had conducted a test of an antisatellite weapon that obliterated a target in orbit, sending a vast cloud of debris zipping around Earth and forcing astronauts on the International Space Station to seek shelter.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Astronauts Dock, China Takes Up Long-Term Residence in Orbit (NYT: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7824",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/world/asia/china-space.html",
        "text": "Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts docked with the country\u2019s still-under-construction space station on Thursday, beginning what their government expects will be a decade or more of continuous presence by Chinese astronauts in Earth\u2019s orbit.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Astronauts Dock, China Takes Up Long-Term Residence in Orbit (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7825",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/world/asia/china-space.html",
        "text": "Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts docked with the country\u2019s still-under-construction space station on Thursday, beginning what their government expects will be a decade or more of continuous presence by Chinese astronauts in Earth\u2019s orbit.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Astronauts Dock, China Takes Up Long-Term Residence in Orbit (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7826",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/world/asia/china-space.html",
        "text": "Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts docked with the country\u2019s still-under-construction space station on Thursday, beginning what their government expects will be a decade or more of continuous presence by Chinese astronauts in Earth\u2019s orbit.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Astronauts Dock, China Takes Up Long-Term Residence in Orbit (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7827",
        "date": "2021-06-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/world/asia/china-space.html",
        "text": "Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts arrived on Thursday to help build their country\u2019s rival to the International Space Station. Three Chinese astronauts docked with the country\u2019s still-under-construction space station on Thursday, beginning what their government expects will be a decade or more of continuous presence by Chinese astronauts in Earth\u2019s orbit.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Photo From Space Shows Belgium Shining Bright, and Social Media Lights Up (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7828",
        "date": "2017-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/world/europe/belgium-lights-energy-space-astronaut.html",
        "text": "Photos taken by a French astronaut sparked a discussion about their beauty \u2014 and also raised questions about energy use. Photos taken by a French astronaut sparked a discussion about their beauty \u2014 and also raised questions about energy use. PARIS \u2014 Suspended 250 miles above Earth on Tuesday evening, Thomas Pesquet looked down on Europe. Through a little window he saw a dark blue continent, sparkling with golden stars and the aurora borealis in the background. He could pick out most of the cities by their lights.",
        "author": "By Milan Schreuer"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Photo From Space Shows Belgium Shining Bright, and Social Media Lights Up (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7829",
        "date": "2017-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/world/europe/belgium-lights-energy-space-astronaut.html",
        "text": "Photos taken by a French astronaut sparked a discussion about their beauty \u2014 and also raised questions about energy use. Photos taken by a French astronaut sparked a discussion about their beauty \u2014 and also raised questions about energy use. PARIS \u2014 Suspended 250 miles above Earth on Tuesday evening, Thomas Pesquet looked down on Europe. Through a little window he saw a dark blue continent, sparkling with golden stars and the aurora borealis in the background. He could pick out most of the cities by their lights.",
        "author": "By Milan Schreuer"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Is Breaking Glass Ceilings in Space, but Facing Sexism on Earth (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7830",
        "date": "2021-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/world/asia/china-space-women-wang-yaping.html",
        "text": "Sanitary pads and makeup: A Chinese astronaut\u2019s six-month stay aboard the country\u2019s space station has revealed conflicted cultural values toward gender. Sanitary pads and makeup: A Chinese astronaut\u2019s six-month stay aboard the country\u2019s space station has revealed conflicted cultural values toward gender. Col. Wang Yaping is a pilot in the People\u2019s Liberation Army\u2019s Air Force. She is a space veteran, now making her second trip into orbit. She is set in the coming weeks to be the first Chinese woman to walk in space as China\u2019s space station glides around Earth at 17,100 miles per hour.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Is Breaking Glass Ceilings in Space, but Facing Sexism on Earth (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7831",
        "date": "2021-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/world/asia/china-space-women-wang-yaping.html",
        "text": "Sanitary pads and makeup: A Chinese astronaut\u2019s six-month stay aboard the country\u2019s space station has revealed conflicted cultural values toward gender. Sanitary pads and makeup: A Chinese astronaut\u2019s six-month stay aboard the country\u2019s space station has revealed conflicted cultural values toward gender. Col. Wang Yaping is a pilot in the People\u2019s Liberation Army\u2019s Air Force. She is a space veteran, now making her second trip into orbit. She is set in the coming weeks to be the first Chinese woman to walk in space as China\u2019s space station glides around Earth at 17,100 miles per hour.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "In 2020, casting a ballot from space may be easier than casting one on Earth   (WP: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7832",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/10/22/voting-space-nasa-election/",
        "text": "When U.S. astronaut Andrew R. Morgan began his mission to the International Space Station last year, he knew he would miss plenty of things back on Earth \u2014 including his home state of Pennsylvania\u2019s off-year elections.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLuckily for Morgan, he was able to send his ballot to Lawrence County\u2019s Department of Voter Services electronically, from the thermosphere. \u201cTo be perfectly honest, outside of presidential years, I don\u2019t always make the effort to vote,\u201d Morgan told The Washington Post. \u201cBut I wanted to exercise that right from the International Space Station.\u201dIn 2020, space is once again in play: American Kate Rubins voted Thursday from the International Space Station in the upcoming presidential election.Story continues below advertisementSome 250 miles below, many voters are struggling to do the same.The U.S. Postal Service has seen an inundation of mail-in ballots amid the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic. Americans abroad are worried about making sure their votes count, and officials in Pennsylvania and other states are fielding complaints from first-time and absentee voters having difficulty registering to vote or requesting a mail ballot, The Post reported.How do astronauts vote from space?Last-minute registrants are running into particular confusion. But astronauts prepare to vote before they leave Earth.AdvertisementMorgan is not the only one to have voted from orbit. Since 1997, U.S. astronauts have been able to cast their votes from space, after John Blaha raised the issue with NASA ahead of the 1996 presidential election, during which he would be aboard the Russian Space Station Mir.Story continues below advertisementOne year later, the opportunity to \u201cvote while you float\u201d was enshrined \u2014 a sometimes year-long process that begins on Earth before launch and culminates in the submission of an encrypted electronic ballot from space. Morgan said Lawrence County emailed him a ballot he could fill out using a special passcode known only to him.You can vote from anywhere! The crew on board @Space_Station will be able to vote from Earth orbit much like I did in last year\u2019s fall elections with @FVAP. pic.twitter.com/SdvJILKAom\u2014 Andrew Morgan (@AstroDrewMorgan) October 6, 2020\n\nAmid pandemic, Americans overseas worry about making sure their vote countsOther countries have followed suit.In June, Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin cast his vote from orbit. Using an online ballot, Ivanishin weighed in on President Vladimir Putin\u2019s proposed constitutional changes, aimed at keeping him in power until 2036. Ivan Vagner, another Russian in orbit, cast his vote on the matter days later through a proxy \u2014 a voter deputized to represent him back on Earth.Trump says mail-in voting could be \u2018catastrophic.\u2019 Here\u2019s how other countries do it.The European Space Agency\u2019s Thomas Pesquet, during his tour on the International Space Station, also used a proxy, to cast his vote for the next leader of France in 2017. Though a resident of Frankfurt, Germany, at the time, the French citizen was able to have a colleague vote on his behalf.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s important. I think you have to vote,\u201d Pesquet told FranceInfo at the time. \u201cYou can\u2019t complain about the political results and grumble if you don\u2019t do your duty.\u201dThe other International Space Station partners, Canada and Japan, do not appear to have had astronauts vote from space, but they do not have the continuous presence aboard that Russia and the United States do.Politics and current events were frequent topics of conversation with international counterparts in space, Morgan said. And while the planet looks very different from 250 miles up, there is no escaping the gravity of earthly politics.\u201cWe do get a special perspective looking down at the Earth without political borders and boundaries. And we think about those things that bond us all,\u201d he said. \u201cWe think about things like this pandemic and things like climate change that affect us all equally.\u201dThis report has been updated. \"Vote while you float\": NASA astronauts weigh in from orbit. In 2020, casting a ballot from space may be easier than casting one on Earth  ",
        "author": "Ruby Mellen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Deliveroo Ad Implying Delivery Anywhere (Even Space) Is Banned in U.K. (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7833",
        "date": "2019-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/world/europe/deliveroo-ad-ban-uk.html",
        "text": "A British regulator said the commercials were misleading because the food delivery service is not available throughout the country. A British regulator said the commercials were misleading because the food delivery service is not available throughout the country. LONDON \u2014 A cyclist pedals furiously in space with only one mission: delivering a sushi order to a hungry astronaut. A man gets a pizza in a field after seemingly tunneling underground to escape from prison, and a woman receives a delivery during a car chase.",
        "author": "By Iliana Magra"
    },
    {
        "title": "Belgium\u2019s Lavish Energy Use Sheds Light on More Than Just Its Roads (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7834",
        "date": "2017-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/europe/belgium-electricity.html",
        "text": "The country keeps two million streetlights on overnight, generating profits for utilities and politicians at a cost for consumers and the environment. The country keeps two million streetlights on overnight, generating profits for utilities and politicians at a cost for consumers and the environment. BRUSSELS \u2014 When an astronaut took nighttime pictures of Europe from the International Space Station this year, one nation stood out far below on the twinkling surface of the earth: Belgium.",
        "author": "By Milan Schreuer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Europe Wants to Diversify Its Pool of Astronauts (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7835",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/world/europe/women-disabled-astronauts.html",
        "text": "In its first hiring drive in over a decade, the continent\u2019s space agency is looking to recruit disabled people and more women. In its first hiring drive in over a decade, the continent\u2019s space agency is looking to recruit disabled people and more women. BRUSSELS \u2014 In a rare opportunity for Europeans dreaming of leaving the mundane duties of life on Earth, the European Space Agency is recruiting new astronauts for the first time in over a decade, with more diversity as the goal.",
        "author": "By Monika Pronczuk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Europe Wants to Diversify Its Pool of Astronauts (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7836",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/world/europe/women-disabled-astronauts.html",
        "text": "In its first hiring drive in over a decade, the continent\u2019s space agency is looking to recruit disabled people and more women. In its first hiring drive in over a decade, the continent\u2019s space agency is looking to recruit disabled people and more women. BRUSSELS \u2014 In a rare opportunity for Europeans dreaming of leaving the mundane duties of life on Earth, the European Space Agency is recruiting new astronauts for the first time in over a decade, with more diversity as the goal.",
        "author": "By Monika Pronczuk"
    },
    {
        "title": "Europe Wants to Diversify Its Pool of Astronauts (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7837",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/22/world/europe/women-disabled-astronauts.html",
        "text": "In its first hiring drive in over a decade, the continent\u2019s space agency is looking to recruit disabled people and more women. In its first hiring drive in over a decade, the continent\u2019s space agency is looking to recruit disabled people and more women. BRUSSELS \u2014 In a rare opportunity for Europeans dreaming of leaving the mundane duties of life on Earth, the European Space Agency is recruiting new astronauts for the first time in over a decade, with more diversity as the goal.",
        "author": "By Monika Pronczuk"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Teacher, an Artist, a Scientist and More. They\u2019re All Visionaries. (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7838",
        "date": "2019-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/world/visionaries-pushing-boundaries.html",
        "text": "The New York Times selected people from all over the world who are pushing the boundaries in their fields, from business and technology to culture and sports. The New York Times selected people from all over the world who are pushing the boundaries in their fields, from business and technology to culture and sports. One wanted to be a professional basketball player. Another wanted to be a dancer. And someone else wanted to be an astronaut. They all ended up making impacts in different careers. ",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.R. Rao, Pioneer of India\u2019s Space Program, Dies at 85 (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7839",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/world/asia/ur-rao-dead-india-space-program.html",
        "text": "Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. The roof leaked and equipment was being transported by ox carts and bicycles, but in the abandoned St. Mary Magdalene Church, along the southern coast of India, there was no room for pessimism. There, in 1962, with rocket prototypes crowding the pews, India\u2019s space program was being born.",
        "author": "By Amisha Padnani"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.R. Rao, Pioneer of India\u2019s Space Program, Dies at 85 (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7840",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/world/asia/ur-rao-dead-india-space-program.html",
        "text": "Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. The roof leaked and equipment was being transported by ox carts and bicycles, but in the abandoned St. Mary Magdalene Church, along the southern coast of India, there was no room for pessimism. There, in 1962, with rocket prototypes crowding the pews, India\u2019s space program was being born.",
        "author": "By Amisha Padnani"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.R. Rao, Pioneer of India\u2019s Space Program, Dies at 85 (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7841",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/world/asia/ur-rao-dead-india-space-program.html",
        "text": "Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. The roof leaked and equipment was being transported by ox carts and bicycles, but in the abandoned St. Mary Magdalene Church, along the southern coast of India, there was no room for pessimism. There, in 1962, with rocket prototypes crowding the pews, India\u2019s space program was being born.",
        "author": "By Amisha Padnani"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.R. Rao, Pioneer of India\u2019s Space Program, Dies at 85 (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7842",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/world/asia/ur-rao-dead-india-space-program.html",
        "text": "Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. Mr. Rao helped India propel its first satellites into space, providing television signals and weather forecasting data to the most rural parts of the country. The roof leaked and equipment was being transported by ox carts and bicycles, but in the abandoned St. Mary Magdalene Church, along the southern coast of India, there was no room for pessimism. There, in 1962, with rocket prototypes crowding the pews, India\u2019s space program was being born.",
        "author": "By Amisha Padnani"
    },
    {
        "title": "Monolith in Turkey Is Revealed to Be Government Stunt (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7843",
        "date": "2021-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/world/asia/turkey-monolith.html",
        "text": "The inscription on the monolith read \u201cLook at the sky, see the moon.\u201d President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used the same slogan in announcing Turkey\u2019s new space program this week. The inscription on the monolith read \u201cLook at the sky, see the moon.\u201d President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used the same slogan in announcing Turkey\u2019s new space program this week. A mysterious metal slab that appeared in southeastern Turkey last week, then quietly disappeared, turned out to be a government publicity stunt to promote Turkey\u2019s new space program.",
        "author": "By Allyson Waller"
    },
    {
        "title": "Iran displays satellite after Trump tweet showing damaged launch site (WP: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7844",
        "date": "2019-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/iran-displays-satellite-after-trump-tweet-showing-damaged-launch-site/2019/08/31/7fac01e0-cbe5-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html",
        "text": "ISTANBUL \u2014 Iran on Saturday displayed for reporters what it said was an intact satellite ready for orbit, hitting back against President Trump\u2019s comments suggesting a\u00a0\u201ccatastrophic accident\u201d had delayed its launch.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOfficials presented the satellite, Nahid-1, at a space research center in Tehran, where it is awaiting the preparation of a rocket launcher, Iranian media reported. Iran has successfully sent several satellites into orbit in recent years.\u00a0 \u201cThe latest tests .\u2009.\u2009. have been carried out, and the satellite will be delivered as soon as the launcher is ready,\u201d Iran\u2019s information and communications technology minister, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, told Iran\u2019s state broadcaster.Story continues below advertisementEarlier Saturday, the minister posted on Twitter a photo of himself next to the satellite.\u00a0\u201cMe & Nahid I right now, Good Morning Donald Trump!\u201d he wrote.\u00a0AdvertisementOn Friday, Trump had posted on Twitter a detailed aerial image of an Iranian launchpad that showed extensive damage, the apparent result of a failed rocket launch earlier in the week.\u00a0\u201cThe United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations\u201d at the space site in Iran\u2019s Semnan province, Trump said.\u00a0In a taunting jab, he added:\u00a0\u201cI wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened\u201d at the site.President Trump says that sweeping sanctions have fundamentally changed Iran\u2019s behavior. But have they? (The Washington Post)Trump shares potentially revealing image of Iranian launch site on TwitterThe United States has criticized Iran\u2019s space program as a cover for ballistic missile development. Iran maintains its satellite launches are not linked to its missile program, which it says is a key element of its national defense strategy.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe controversy over the satellite comes as the Trump administration has ramped up its pressure on Iran to negotiate everything from its nuclear activities to its ballistic missiles and its support for militant proxy forces in the Middle East.\u00a0AdvertisementTrump abandoned a 2015 nuclear deal \u2014 signed by Iran and world powers \u2014 that curbed Tehran\u2019s atomic energy activities in exchange for major sanctions relief. His administration reimposed a near-total embargo on Iran and has sought to completely halt its oil exports.\u00a0Also Friday, the Treasury Department\u2019s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced new sanctions on an Iranian oil tanker in the Mediterranean. The tanker, Adrian Darya 1, was seized near Gibraltar in July after authorities there suspected it was headed to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIt was released earlier this month, despite a warrant from the U.S. Justice Department seeking its detention. The warrant alleged an illegal scheme to access the U.S. financial system to finance Iran\u2019s sale of oil products to Syria.\u00a0AdvertisementIn a news release Friday, OFAC said the tanker, which is carrying 2.1\u00a0million barrels of light crude oil, was being identified as\u00a0\u201cblocked property\u201d for enabling Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to ship and transfer oil to Syria, an ally of Iran. OFAC also targeted the tanker\u2019s captain, Akhilesh Kumar.\u201cWe have reliable information that the tanker is underway and headed to Tartus, Syria,\u201d Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday on Twitter.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementThe vessel has been sailing through the Mediterranean Sea since it departed Gibraltar, a British overseas territory, two weeks ago.\u00a0U.S. military carried out secret cyberstrike on Iran to prevent it from interfering with shippingIf Trump wants to meet Iran\u2019s Rouhani, both allies and enemies will stand in his wayUAE\u2019s ambitions backfire as it finds itself on the front line of U.S.-Iran tensionsToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news The United States has criticized Iran\u2019s space program as a cover for ballistic missile development. Iran maintains its satellite launches are not linked to its missile program. Iran displays satellite after Trump tweet showing damaged launch site",
        "author": "Erin Cunningham"
    },
    {
        "title": "A World Divided by Covid and Other Ills United to Explore Space (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7845",
        "date": "2021-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/world/europe/webb-telescope-launch-space.html",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019ve always seen space as an area where we cooperate, through all the trying times,\u201d said a professor who oversaw mission control for the global effort to launch a $10 billion telescope into space. \u201cI\u2019ve always seen space as an area where we cooperate, through all the trying times,\u201d said a professor who oversaw mission control for the global effort to launch a $10 billion telescope into space. America was a nation divided, but that did not stop it from building parts of the James Webb Space Telescope in a red state and testing them in a blue one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Casey"
    },
    {
        "title": "A World Divided by Covid and Other Ills United to Explore Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7846",
        "date": "2021-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/world/europe/webb-telescope-launch-space.html",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019ve always seen space as an area where we cooperate, through all the trying times,\u201d said a professor who oversaw mission control for the global effort to launch a $10 billion telescope into space. \u201cI\u2019ve always seen space as an area where we cooperate, through all the trying times,\u201d said a professor who oversaw mission control for the global effort to launch a $10 billion telescope into space. America was a nation divided, but that did not stop it from building parts of the James Webb Space Telescope in a red state and testing them in a blue one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Casey"
    },
    {
        "title": "A World Divided by Covid and Other Ills United to Explore Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7847",
        "date": "2021-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/world/europe/webb-telescope-launch-space.html",
        "text": "\u201cI\u2019ve always seen space as an area where we cooperate, through all the trying times,\u201d said a professor who oversaw mission control for the global effort to launch a $10 billion telescope into space. \u201cI\u2019ve always seen space as an area where we cooperate, through all the trying times,\u201d said a professor who oversaw mission control for the global effort to launch a $10 billion telescope into space. America was a nation divided, but that did not stop it from building parts of the James Webb Space Telescope in a red state and testing them in a blue one.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Casey"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Looks Hopefully to the Moon Ahead of Chandrayaan-2 Landing (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7848",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/world/asia/chandrayaan-moon-landing-india.html",
        "text": "On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India is within reach of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Looks Hopefully to the Moon Ahead of Chandrayaan-2 Landing (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7849",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/world/asia/chandrayaan-moon-landing-india.html",
        "text": "On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India is within reach of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Looks Hopefully to the Moon Ahead of Chandrayaan-2 Landing (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7850",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/world/asia/chandrayaan-moon-landing-india.html",
        "text": "On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India is within reach of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Looks Hopefully to the Moon Ahead of Chandrayaan-2 Landing (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7851",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/world/asia/chandrayaan-moon-landing-india.html",
        "text": "On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. On Saturday, India could become the fourth country ever to land on the lunar surface. BANGALORE, India \u2014 India is within reach of the moon.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz and Hari Kumar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Solve a Puzzle: What\u2019s Really in a Fatberg (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7852",
        "date": "2019-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/world/europe/sidmouth-fatberg.html",
        "text": "The grisly results of an autopsy in the U.K. were made public on Friday, and they were not pretty. But they did hold a few surprises. The grisly results of an autopsy in the U.K. were made public on Friday, and they were not pretty. But they did hold a few surprises. LONDON \u2014 When a giant fatberg was discovered in the sewer of a small coastal town in southwestern England last year, the company that manages the pipes was so mystified by the greasy mass of solidified fats and waste materials that it enlisted the help of scientists to discover what it was made of.",
        "author": "By Anna Schaverien"
    },
    {
        "title": "The C.D.C. links restaurant dining and a lack of mask mandates to the virus\u2019s spread in the U.S. (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7853",
        "date": "2021-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/world/cdc-masks-dining-virus.html",
        "text": "As officials in Texas and Mississippi lifted statewide mask requirements, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered a new study with fresh evidence of masks\u2019 importance. As officials in Texas and Mississippi lifted statewide mask requirements, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered a new study with fresh evidence of masks\u2019 importance. As officials in Texas and Mississippi lifted statewide mask mandates, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offered fresh evidence of the importance of mask use in a new study on Friday. Wearing masks, the study reported, was linked to fewer infections with the coronavirus and Covid-19 deaths in counties across the United States.",
        "author": "By Roni Caryn Rabin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Donald Trump and his team are dodging climate science (WP: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7854",
        "date": "2017-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/19/donald-trump-and-his-team-are-dodging-climate-science/",
        "text": "Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today's WorldView newsletter.According to U.S. science agencies, 2016 was the hottest year on record. Hotter than 2015, the previous hottest year on record, which was, in turn, hotter than 2014, the previous record year. The news came two days before President-elect Donald Trump, who has called a climate change a \"hoax,\" takes the oath of office. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHere's a quick refresher on Trump's\u00a0views on climate change, in four\u00a0tweets:No matter how much he tweets, Trump can't change the numbers and the science. The average temperature across the world\u2019s land and ocean surfaces in 2016 was 58.69 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.69 degrees above the 20th century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. NASA, using its own data, concurred. The space agency declared it had \"greater than 95 percent certainty\" in its conclusion, according to the Post's Chris Mooney.2016 was a record in all surface data sets pic.twitter.com/25aQKrOQqb\u2014 Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) January 18, 2017\n\nThe Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang\u00a0gauged the reaction of a host of scientists,\u00a0many of whom\u00a0came away with a similar, inescapable conclusion: It's well past time to recognize the human impact on our climate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"Some years will be warmer and some years will be cooler than others, but as long as human-produced greenhouse gases continue to increase in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, the long-term global temperature trend averaged over multiple decades will be upward.\"\u00a0\u2014 Gerald Meehl, senior scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research\"The box of ammunition used by those who try to spread misinformation about the influences of humans on the climate system is rapidly dwindling...\u00a0Can it be stopped? No. Can it be slowed down? Certainly, but it will take a concerted effort by all of us on many fronts, and we cannot wait any longer.\"\u00a0\u2014 Jennifer Francis, research professor, Rutgers University\"For the first time in recorded history, we have now had three consecutive record-warm years for both the globe and the Northern Hemisphere. The likelihood of this having happened in the absence of human-caused global warming is minimal... he effect of human activity on our climate is no longer subtle. It\u2019s plain as day, as are the impacts \u2014 in the form of record floods, droughts, superstorms and wildfires \u2014 that it is having on us and our planet.\"\u00a0\u2014 Michael Mann, director of Earth System Science Center, Penn State UniversityBut a Trump administration is unlikely to get the message.\u00a0On the same day these revelations came out, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Trump's pick to helm the country's Environmental Protection Agency, went before a Senate hearing to prove his bona fides. Pruitt, the bete noire of climate activists \u2014 and a recipient of numerous donations from energy companies\u00a0\u2014\u00a0was grilled on his views on climate change:\u00a0He said it isn't a \"hoax,\" but still equivocated\u00a0in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus.\"I believe the ability to measure with precision the degree of human activity's impact on the climate is subject to more debate on whether the climate is changing or whether human activity contributes to it,\" Pruitt said at the hearing.That earned\u00a0a tart response from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: \"So you are applying for a job as administrator for the EPA to protect our environment, overwhelming majority of scientists say we have got to act boldly, and you're telling me that there needs to be more debate on this issue?\" Pruitt demurred.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn the subject of climate change, Trump and his allies in the Republican Party remain considerably out of sync with the bulk of the international community.\u00a0A Tory\u00a0government in Britain, for example, is far ahead\u00a0of its conservative counterparts across the Atlantic in reckoning with the challenge.It ultimately may not be a big deal. Executives at a number of big corporations recently told the Wall Street Journal\u00a0they intend to stay the course and stick to low emissions targets, no matter Trump's climate skepticism. And, by and large, the real political initiatives\u00a0that address climate change are taking place at\u00a0the local level,\u00a0with state governors and city mayors pushing through reforms that encourage alternative energy solutions and reduce emissions.But if there's any meaningful progress to be made in the coming years, it'll be likely in spite of Trump.May's Brexit speech sparks a backlashBritish Prime Minister Theresa May\u00a0announced her intention\u00a0on Tuesday to lead her nation fully out of the European Union, prompting a great deal of commentary the next day. It was celebrated by supporters as a declaration of independence from the diktats of Brussels. But others cautioned against British delusions that they could secure a better trade deal with Europe than what\u00a0the\u00a0E.U. already offers them.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere's a quick survey of some of the smarter pieces:\"Britain will not try to stay in Europe's Single Market, and only on a limited basis in its Customs Union. It will instead try to negotiate new free trade deals with Europe, and the rest of the world for that matter. In other words, Britain really is going to make itself poorer so that it can restrict immigration. Welcome to the new nationalism.\"\u00a0Washington Post's Wonkblog\"The prime minister might have seized control of the agenda but she has sacrificed time. In calling for everything, including a new trade deal between Britain and the EU, to be wrapped up in two years she has bound herself in a schedule most people in Brussels think is impossible. A successful\u00a0deal will rest on the length and scope of 'the transition,' which May admitted was crucial to avoiding a cliff edge for the economy.\" Politico EUAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"The truth is that when Mrs May formally triggers Brexit she will find the cards stacked against her. Subject to an imminent Supreme Court ruling on needing parliamentary approval, she plans to initiate the process in March...\u00a0As she conceded, the other 27 EU countries have been impressively united over Brexit. They may welcome her new clarity, but for them the preservation of the union is more pressing than all else. As several leaders have said, Britain cannot have a better deal outside than inside the club.\" The Economist\"Brexit will be a sad, surreal and exhausting process. The EU must use the UK\u2019s departure to reform and move\u00a0forward. Britain can choose to be a partner in this process, or it can be\u00a0an impediment to it.\"\u00a0Guy Verhofstadt, the E.U.'s chief negotiator for BrexitWant smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today's WorldView newsletter. But things are different at the local and state levels. Donald Trump and his team are dodging climate science",
        "author": "Ishaan Tharoor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Logistics Movers: Honeywell Names Former SpaceX, Amazon Executive to Run Supply Chain (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7855",
        "date": "2018-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/logistics-movers-honeywell-names-former-spacex-amazon-executive-to-run-supply-chain-1531164237?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=19",
        "text": "More in Logistics\n\n\n\n\nXPO Logistics Adjusts Guidance Off Customer Bankruptcy\nOctober 31, 2018 \n\n\nOcean Carriers Brace for Orders Surge Ahead of Potential New Tariffs\nOctober 30, 2018 \n\n\nTrucking Companies Boost Prices Amid Capacity Squeeze\nOctober 25, 2018 \n\n\n\n\nMr. Pilz was vice president overseeing the supply chain operations at SpaceX, the ambitious rocket and spacecraft company founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n for 18 months. Before that, he was at Amazon for three years, where he was vice president of world-wide operations and oversaw business including Amazon Fresh and the company\u2019s Prime Pantry operations.\nBefore Amazon, Mr. Pilz worked at Germany\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Henkel AG\n\n HENKY -0.53%\n\n\n & Co. for eight years, ultimately leading global operations for the company\u2019s \u201cbeauty care\u201d division. While at Henkel, Mr. Pilz led an effort to outsource its North American logistics operations by hiring a third-logistics provider to manage all its relationships with shipping and logistics providers.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Logistics Report Top news and in-depth analysis on the world of logistics, from supply chain to transport and technology. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIn a statement, Honeywell Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Darius Adamczyk\n\n\n\n said, \u201cThe integrated supply chain is a critical enabling factor for Honeywell\u2019s continued growth,\u201d adding that Mr. Pilz would be working on \u201csimplifying our manufacturing footprint and enhancing our ability to execute with speed and precision across our operations.\u201d\n\nMr. Pilz\u2019s hiring comes as freight costs in the U.S. are skyrocketing and companies are spending record amounts to ship their goods. At the same time, new tariffs on component parts and materials are raising production costs for many U.S. manufacturers. Honeywell\u2019s leaders have said tariffs could lead to higher prices for some items in the U.S., but it believes it can offset the impact.\nHoneywell has seen strong growth in several of its segments recently, particularly its largest aerospace unit, where net sales rose 12% to almost $4 billion in the most recent quarter.\nHoneywell is working to spin off its home and transportation businesses into two new separate companies by the end of this year, the first efforts to streamline the conglomerate under Mr. Adamczyk, who became CEO in April of last year.\nWrite to Erica E. Phillips at erica.phillips@wsj.com Honeywell International named Torsten Pilz, a former senior supply-chain executive at SpaceX and Amazon to a new position leading its global supply chain operations as the industrial conglomerate works to mitigate the impact of rising transportation costs and new tariffs. ",
        "author": "Erica E. Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Logistics Movers: Honeywell Names Former SpaceX, Amazon Executive to Run Supply Chain (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7856",
        "date": "2018-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/logistics-movers-honeywell-names-former-spacex-amazon-executive-to-run-supply-chain-1531164237?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=71",
        "text": "More in Logistics\n\n\n\n\nXPO Logistics Adjusts Guidance Off Customer Bankruptcy\nOctober 31, 2018 \n\n\nOcean Carriers Brace for Orders Surge Ahead of Potential New Tariffs\nOctober 30, 2018 \n\n\nTrucking Companies Boost Prices Amid Capacity Squeeze\nOctober 25, 2018 \n\n\n\n\nMr. Pilz was vice president overseeing the supply chain operations at SpaceX, the ambitious rocket and spacecraft company founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n for 18 months. Before that, he was at Amazon for three years, where he was vice president of world-wide operations and oversaw business including Amazon Fresh and the company\u2019s Prime Pantry operations.\nBefore Amazon, Mr. Pilz worked at Germany\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Henkel AG\n\n HENKY -0.53%\n\n\n & Co. for eight years, ultimately leading global operations for the company\u2019s \u201cbeauty care\u201d division. While at Henkel, Mr. Pilz led an effort to outsource its North American logistics operations by hiring a third-logistics provider to manage all its relationships with shipping and logistics providers.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Logistics Report Top news and in-depth analysis on the world of logistics, from supply chain to transport and technology. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIn a statement, Honeywell Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Darius Adamczyk\n\n\n\n said, \u201cThe integrated supply chain is a critical enabling factor for Honeywell\u2019s continued growth,\u201d adding that Mr. Pilz would be working on \u201csimplifying our manufacturing footprint and enhancing our ability to execute with speed and precision across our operations.\u201d\n\nMr. Pilz\u2019s hiring comes as freight costs in the U.S. are skyrocketing and companies are spending record amounts to ship their goods. At the same time, new tariffs on component parts and materials are raising production costs for many U.S. manufacturers. Honeywell\u2019s leaders have said tariffs could lead to higher prices for some items in the U.S., but it believes it can offset the impact.\nHoneywell has seen strong growth in several of its segments recently, particularly its largest aerospace unit, where net sales rose 12% to almost $4 billion in the most recent quarter.\nHoneywell is working to spin off its home and transportation businesses into two new separate companies by the end of this year, the first efforts to streamline the conglomerate under Mr. Adamczyk, who became CEO in April of last year.\nWrite to Erica E. Phillips at erica.phillips@wsj.com Honeywell International named Torsten Pilz, a former senior supply-chain executive at SpaceX and Amazon to a new position leading its global supply chain operations as the industrial conglomerate works to mitigate the impact of rising transportation costs and new tariffs. ",
        "author": "Erica E. Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Logistics Movers: Honeywell Names Former SpaceX, Amazon Executive to Run Supply Chain (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7857",
        "date": "2018-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/logistics-movers-honeywell-names-former-spacex-amazon-executive-to-run-supply-chain-1531164237?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=66",
        "text": "More in Logistics\n\n\n\n\nXPO Logistics Adjusts Guidance Off Customer Bankruptcy\nOctober 31, 2018 \n\n\nOcean Carriers Brace for Orders Surge Ahead of Potential New Tariffs\nOctober 30, 2018 \n\n\nTrucking Companies Boost Prices Amid Capacity Squeeze\nOctober 25, 2018 \n\n\n\n\nMr. Pilz was vice president overseeing the supply chain operations at SpaceX, the ambitious rocket and spacecraft company founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n for 18 months. Before that, he was at Amazon for three years, where he was vice president of world-wide operations and oversaw business including Amazon Fresh and the company\u2019s Prime Pantry operations.\nBefore Amazon, Mr. Pilz worked at Germany\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Henkel AG\n\n HENKY -0.53%\n\n\n & Co. for eight years, ultimately leading global operations for the company\u2019s \u201cbeauty care\u201d division. While at Henkel, Mr. Pilz led an effort to outsource its North American logistics operations by hiring a third-logistics provider to manage all its relationships with shipping and logistics providers.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Logistics Report Top news and in-depth analysis on the world of logistics, from supply chain to transport and technology. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIn a statement, Honeywell Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Darius Adamczyk\n\n\n\n said, \u201cThe integrated supply chain is a critical enabling factor for Honeywell\u2019s continued growth,\u201d adding that Mr. Pilz would be working on \u201csimplifying our manufacturing footprint and enhancing our ability to execute with speed and precision across our operations.\u201d\n\nMr. Pilz\u2019s hiring comes as freight costs in the U.S. are skyrocketing and companies are spending record amounts to ship their goods. At the same time, new tariffs on component parts and materials are raising production costs for many U.S. manufacturers. Honeywell\u2019s leaders have said tariffs could lead to higher prices for some items in the U.S., but it believes it can offset the impact.\nHoneywell has seen strong growth in several of its segments recently, particularly its largest aerospace unit, where net sales rose 12% to almost $4 billion in the most recent quarter.\nHoneywell is working to spin off its home and transportation businesses into two new separate companies by the end of this year, the first efforts to streamline the conglomerate under Mr. Adamczyk, who became CEO in April of last year.\nWrite to Erica E. Phillips at erica.phillips@wsj.com Honeywell International named Torsten Pilz, a former senior supply-chain executive at SpaceX and Amazon to a new position leading its global supply chain operations as the industrial conglomerate works to mitigate the impact of rising transportation costs and new tariffs. ",
        "author": "Erica E. Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Today\u2019s Top Supply Chain and Logistics News From WSJ (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7858",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/todays-top-supply-chain-and-logistics-news-from-wsj-1496660696?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=24",
        "text": "A spat between China\u2019s biggest e-commerce marketplace and one of the country\u2019s top delivery services shows how the tight relationship between online retailers and their logistics providers isn\u2019t always smooth sailing. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. briefly removed S.F. Express as a delivery option, leaving merchants scrambling to line up alternative ways to ship online orders, the WSJ\u2019s Alyssa Abkowitz reports. The two patched things up over the weekend after a state agency intervened, according to the South China Morning Post. The dispute appeared to center on how much customer data S.F. Express is required to turn over to Cainiao, the online marketplace\u2019s logistics subsidiary. Data on consumer shopping habits and the mechanics of order fulfillment are among the most value commodities in the e-commerce world. Logistics companies crunch the numbers to optimize shipping routes and online retailers rely on sales data to determine how much inventory to buy and where to store it to minimize transportation costs. For many smaller firms, proprietary data is a key asset, and one potentially worth preserving even at the risk of losing a major customer. It\u2019s a dynamic that\u2019s not unique to China, and such conflicts could become more common as the value of customer data grows. \nToyota is calling it quits with Tesla. The Japanese auto maker sold its nearly $500 million stake in the electric vehicle manufacturer sometime last year, ending a relationship that stretches back to 2010, the WSJ\u2019s Sean McLain writes. The partnership\u2019s end shows just how much the auto industry\u2019s approach to battery-powered vehicles has changed, with conventional auto makers like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota\n\n\n no longer content to take a backseat to Silicon Valley in perfecting the technology. In 2010, Toyota anticipated a small investment in Tesla would give the company a toehold in electric cars, in exchange for Tesla manufacturing certain parts for a battery-powered version of the RAV4 crossover sport-utility vehicle. Tesla stopped manufacturing for Toyota in 2014, and is positioning itself as a major player in the auto industry by attempting to mass-produce more-affordable models. Toyota, previously skeptical of pure-electric cars, is now accelerating plans to produce such vehicles of its own. If it\u2019s going to catch up to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nissan Motor Co.\n\n\n and others, it can\u2019t rely on a third party to lead the way. \nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement is unlikely to sway U.S. companies that have begun to factor climate change into their supply-chain strategies. The heads of corporations ranging from big industrial firms like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dow Chemical Co.\n\n\n to financial institutions such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.\nexpressed disappointment in Mr. Trump\u2019s move, which removes the U.S. from an international consensus to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Many companies have already made sweeping changes to improve energy efficiency and increase their use of renewable power, often in response to shareholders and activists who are unlikely to let up now, the WSJ\u2019s Russell Gold and Lynn Cook report. For example,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n has made technologies that reduce energy consumption a core part of its business. Coal and steel companies, among the industries most threatened by the Paris Agreement, largely support Mr. Trump\u2019s actions. But even the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n American Electric Power Co.\n\n\n , a utility that generates nearly half its power from coal, called the withdrawal a mistake. \n\n\nSPACE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/nasa handout/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nThe logistics of outer space just got a lot easier. SpaceX\u2019s launch of a refurbished cargo capsule carrying three tons of supplies to the international space station is a milestone that could drastically reduce the cost of building and maintaining structures in orbit, the WSJ\u2019s Andy Pasztor writes. The capsule had made a similar journey in 2014, making last week\u2019s launch the first to reuse such a vessel. If such repeat launches become routine, it would allow for cheaper and more-frequent trips to space. By relying on a single model of spacecraft, the Dragon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX can also lower production costs on the ground. The next hurdle will be certifying that the capsules\u2019 heat shields can survive multiple trips intact, a key benchmark for safely transporting humans into orbit. \nQUOTABLE\n\n\n\n\u201cThere are lots of different players collecting data, and as the tech industry has become further consolidated it means that smaller players are increasingly in a position where they need t Delivering up-to-the minute news, analysis, interviews and explanatory journalism on logistics, supply-chain management, e-commerce and more ",
        "author": "Brian Baskin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Today\u2019s Top Supply Chain and Logistics News From WSJ (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7859",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/todays-top-supply-chain-and-logistics-news-from-wsj-1496660696?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=94",
        "text": "A spat between China\u2019s biggest e-commerce marketplace and one of the country\u2019s top delivery services shows how the tight relationship between online retailers and their logistics providers isn\u2019t always smooth sailing. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. briefly removed S.F. Express as a delivery option, leaving merchants scrambling to line up alternative ways to ship online orders, the WSJ\u2019s Alyssa Abkowitz reports. The two patched things up over the weekend after a state agency intervened, according to the South China Morning Post. The dispute appeared to center on how much customer data S.F. Express is required to turn over to Cainiao, the online marketplace\u2019s logistics subsidiary. Data on consumer shopping habits and the mechanics of order fulfillment are among the most value commodities in the e-commerce world. Logistics companies crunch the numbers to optimize shipping routes and online retailers rely on sales data to determine how much inventory to buy and where to store it to minimize transportation costs. For many smaller firms, proprietary data is a key asset, and one potentially worth preserving even at the risk of losing a major customer. It\u2019s a dynamic that\u2019s not unique to China, and such conflicts could become more common as the value of customer data grows. \nToyota is calling it quits with Tesla. The Japanese auto maker sold its nearly $500 million stake in the electric vehicle manufacturer sometime last year, ending a relationship that stretches back to 2010, the WSJ\u2019s Sean McLain writes. The partnership\u2019s end shows just how much the auto industry\u2019s approach to battery-powered vehicles has changed, with conventional auto makers like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota\n\n\n no longer content to take a backseat to Silicon Valley in perfecting the technology. In 2010, Toyota anticipated a small investment in Tesla would give the company a toehold in electric cars, in exchange for Tesla manufacturing certain parts for a battery-powered version of the RAV4 crossover sport-utility vehicle. Tesla stopped manufacturing for Toyota in 2014, and is positioning itself as a major player in the auto industry by attempting to mass-produce more-affordable models. Toyota, previously skeptical of pure-electric cars, is now accelerating plans to produce such vehicles of its own. If it\u2019s going to catch up to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nissan Motor Co.\n\n\n and others, it can\u2019t rely on a third party to lead the way. \nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement is unlikely to sway U.S. companies that have begun to factor climate change into their supply-chain strategies. The heads of corporations ranging from big industrial firms like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dow Chemical Co.\n\n\n to financial institutions such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.\nexpressed disappointment in Mr. Trump\u2019s move, which removes the U.S. from an international consensus to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Many companies have already made sweeping changes to improve energy efficiency and increase their use of renewable power, often in response to shareholders and activists who are unlikely to let up now, the WSJ\u2019s Russell Gold and Lynn Cook report. For example,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n has made technologies that reduce energy consumption a core part of its business. Coal and steel companies, among the industries most threatened by the Paris Agreement, largely support Mr. Trump\u2019s actions. But even the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n American Electric Power Co.\n\n\n , a utility that generates nearly half its power from coal, called the withdrawal a mistake. \n\n\nSPACE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/nasa handout/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nThe logistics of outer space just got a lot easier. SpaceX\u2019s launch of a refurbished cargo capsule carrying three tons of supplies to the international space station is a milestone that could drastically reduce the cost of building and maintaining structures in orbit, the WSJ\u2019s Andy Pasztor writes. The capsule had made a similar journey in 2014, making last week\u2019s launch the first to reuse such a vessel. If such repeat launches become routine, it would allow for cheaper and more-frequent trips to space. By relying on a single model of spacecraft, the Dragon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX can also lower production costs on the ground. The next hurdle will be certifying that the capsules\u2019 heat shields can survive multiple trips intact, a key benchmark for safely transporting humans into orbit. \nQUOTABLE\n\n\n\n\u201cThere are lots of different players collecting data, and as the tech industry has become further consolidated it means that smaller players are increasingly in a position where they need t Delivering up-to-the minute news, analysis, interviews and explanatory journalism on logistics, supply-chain management, e-commerce and more ",
        "author": "Brian Baskin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Today\u2019s Top Supply Chain and Logistics News From WSJ (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7860",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/todays-top-supply-chain-and-logistics-news-from-wsj-1496660696?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=86",
        "text": "A spat between China\u2019s biggest e-commerce marketplace and one of the country\u2019s top delivery services shows how the tight relationship between online retailers and their logistics providers isn\u2019t always smooth sailing. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. briefly removed S.F. Express as a delivery option, leaving merchants scrambling to line up alternative ways to ship online orders, the WSJ\u2019s Alyssa Abkowitz reports. The two patched things up over the weekend after a state agency intervened, according to the South China Morning Post. The dispute appeared to center on how much customer data S.F. Express is required to turn over to Cainiao, the online marketplace\u2019s logistics subsidiary. Data on consumer shopping habits and the mechanics of order fulfillment are among the most value commodities in the e-commerce world. Logistics companies crunch the numbers to optimize shipping routes and online retailers rely on sales data to determine how much inventory to buy and where to store it to minimize transportation costs. For many smaller firms, proprietary data is a key asset, and one potentially worth preserving even at the risk of losing a major customer. It\u2019s a dynamic that\u2019s not unique to China, and such conflicts could become more common as the value of customer data grows. \nToyota is calling it quits with Tesla. The Japanese auto maker sold its nearly $500 million stake in the electric vehicle manufacturer sometime last year, ending a relationship that stretches back to 2010, the WSJ\u2019s Sean McLain writes. The partnership\u2019s end shows just how much the auto industry\u2019s approach to battery-powered vehicles has changed, with conventional auto makers like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota\n\n\n no longer content to take a backseat to Silicon Valley in perfecting the technology. In 2010, Toyota anticipated a small investment in Tesla would give the company a toehold in electric cars, in exchange for Tesla manufacturing certain parts for a battery-powered version of the RAV4 crossover sport-utility vehicle. Tesla stopped manufacturing for Toyota in 2014, and is positioning itself as a major player in the auto industry by attempting to mass-produce more-affordable models. Toyota, previously skeptical of pure-electric cars, is now accelerating plans to produce such vehicles of its own. If it\u2019s going to catch up to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nissan Motor Co.\n\n\n and others, it can\u2019t rely on a third party to lead the way. \nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement is unlikely to sway U.S. companies that have begun to factor climate change into their supply-chain strategies. The heads of corporations ranging from big industrial firms like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dow Chemical Co.\n\n\n to financial institutions such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.\nexpressed disappointment in Mr. Trump\u2019s move, which removes the U.S. from an international consensus to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Many companies have already made sweeping changes to improve energy efficiency and increase their use of renewable power, often in response to shareholders and activists who are unlikely to let up now, the WSJ\u2019s Russell Gold and Lynn Cook report. For example,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n has made technologies that reduce energy consumption a core part of its business. Coal and steel companies, among the industries most threatened by the Paris Agreement, largely support Mr. Trump\u2019s actions. But even the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n American Electric Power Co.\n\n\n , a utility that generates nearly half its power from coal, called the withdrawal a mistake. \n\n\nSPACE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/nasa handout/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nThe logistics of outer space just got a lot easier. SpaceX\u2019s launch of a refurbished cargo capsule carrying three tons of supplies to the international space station is a milestone that could drastically reduce the cost of building and maintaining structures in orbit, the WSJ\u2019s Andy Pasztor writes. The capsule had made a similar journey in 2014, making last week\u2019s launch the first to reuse such a vessel. If such repeat launches become routine, it would allow for cheaper and more-frequent trips to space. By relying on a single model of spacecraft, the Dragon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX can also lower production costs on the ground. The next hurdle will be certifying that the capsules\u2019 heat shields can survive multiple trips intact, a key benchmark for safely transporting humans into orbit. \nQUOTABLE\n\n\n\n\u201cThere are lots of different players collecting data, and as the tech industry has become further consolidated it means that smaller players are increasingly in a position where they need t Delivering up-to-the minute news, analysis, interviews and explanatory journalism on logistics, supply-chain management, e-commerce and more ",
        "author": "Brian Baskin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Today\u2019s Top Supply Chain and Logistics News From WSJ (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7861",
        "date": "2017-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/todays-top-supply-chain-and-logistics-news-from-wsj-1496660696?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=121",
        "text": "A spat between China\u2019s biggest e-commerce marketplace and one of the country\u2019s top delivery services shows how the tight relationship between online retailers and their logistics providers isn\u2019t always smooth sailing. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. briefly removed S.F. Express as a delivery option, leaving merchants scrambling to line up alternative ways to ship online orders, the WSJ\u2019s Alyssa Abkowitz reports. The two patched things up over the weekend after a state agency intervened, according to the South China Morning Post. The dispute appeared to center on how much customer data S.F. Express is required to turn over to Cainiao, the online marketplace\u2019s logistics subsidiary. Data on consumer shopping habits and the mechanics of order fulfillment are among the most value commodities in the e-commerce world. Logistics companies crunch the numbers to optimize shipping routes and online retailers rely on sales data to determine how much inventory to buy and where to store it to minimize transportation costs. For many smaller firms, proprietary data is a key asset, and one potentially worth preserving even at the risk of losing a major customer. It\u2019s a dynamic that\u2019s not unique to China, and such conflicts could become more common as the value of customer data grows. \nToyota is calling it quits with Tesla. The Japanese auto maker sold its nearly $500 million stake in the electric vehicle manufacturer sometime last year, ending a relationship that stretches back to 2010, the WSJ\u2019s Sean McLain writes. The partnership\u2019s end shows just how much the auto industry\u2019s approach to battery-powered vehicles has changed, with conventional auto makers like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota\n\n\n no longer content to take a backseat to Silicon Valley in perfecting the technology. In 2010, Toyota anticipated a small investment in Tesla would give the company a toehold in electric cars, in exchange for Tesla manufacturing certain parts for a battery-powered version of the RAV4 crossover sport-utility vehicle. Tesla stopped manufacturing for Toyota in 2014, and is positioning itself as a major player in the auto industry by attempting to mass-produce more-affordable models. Toyota, previously skeptical of pure-electric cars, is now accelerating plans to produce such vehicles of its own. If it\u2019s going to catch up to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nissan Motor Co.\n\n\n and others, it can\u2019t rely on a third party to lead the way. \n\n\n\n\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement is unlikely to sway U.S. companies that have begun to factor climate change into their supply-chain strategies. The heads of corporations ranging from big industrial firms like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Dow Chemical Co.\n\n\n to financial institutions such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Goldman Sachs Group Inc.\nexpressed disappointment in Mr. Trump\u2019s move, which removes the U.S. from an international consensus to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Many companies have already made sweeping changes to improve energy efficiency and increase their use of renewable power, often in response to shareholders and activists who are unlikely to let up now, the WSJ\u2019s Russell Gold and Lynn Cook report. For example,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Electric Co.\n\n\n has made technologies that reduce energy consumption a core part of its business. Coal and steel companies, among the industries most threatened by the Paris Agreement, largely support Mr. Trump\u2019s actions. But even the chief executive of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n American Electric Power Co.\n\n\n , a utility that generates nearly half its power from coal, called the withdrawal a mistake. \n\n\nSPACE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/nasa handout/European Pressphoto Agency\n \n\n\n\nThe logistics of outer space just got a lot easier. SpaceX\u2019s launch of a refurbished cargo capsule carrying three tons of supplies to the international space station is a milestone that could drastically reduce the cost of building and maintaining structures in orbit, the WSJ\u2019s Andy Pasztor writes. The capsule had made a similar journey in 2014, making last week\u2019s launch the first to reuse such a vessel. If such repeat launches become routine, it would allow for cheaper and more-frequent trips to space. By relying on a single model of spacecraft, the Dragon,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX can also lower production costs on the ground. The next hurdle will be certifying that the capsules\u2019 heat shields can survive multiple trips intact, a key benchmark for safely transporting humans into orbit. \nQUOTABLE\n\n\n\n\u201cThere are lots of different players collecting data, and as the tech industry has become further consolidated it means that smaller players are increasingly in a position where they ne Delivering up-to-the minute news, analysis, interviews and explanatory journalism on logistics, supply-chain management, e-commerce and more ",
        "author": "Brian Baskin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Today\u2019s Top Supply Chain and Logistics News From WSJ (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7862",
        "date": "2018-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/todays-top-supply-chain-and-logistics-news-from-wsj-1538147386?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=87",
        "text": "Hershey Co.\n\n HSY 0.67%\n\n\n wants to get customers their chocolate fix right at their doorsteps. The company is among candy-makers facing lost sales as e-commerce grows and cuts into the store visits that generate impulse sales at the checkout line. The WSJ\u2019s Julie Jargon and Annie Gasparro write that one idea Hershey has is to still sell candy to customers when they come to pick up groceries ordered online--while they wait, a smartphone app can ping them with an offer to add candy or snacks. Hershey is also working with goPuff, an app that delivers on-demand items like candy and beer typically found in a convenience store. Placement on an e-commerce site is the new equivalent of great shelf space at the grocery store, says Hershey\u2019s Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michele Buck\n\n\n\n : \u201cThe lines are blurring between physical stores and digital shopping.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\nAmazon.com Inc.\u2019s\nJeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n wants to conquer space, or at least the space supply business. His Blue Origin LLC won a contract to provide engines for United Launch Alliance LLC, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n that launches U.S. military and spy satellites into orbit, the WSJ\u2019s Andy Pasztor and Doug Cameron write. The selection highlights some of the tough choices stemming from President Trump\u2019s national defense strategy, which favors attracting more high-technology companies with little or no military background. The Air Force is working to source lower-cost, more versatile rockets from the likes of Blue Origin, United Launch,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Northrop Grumman Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Innovation Systems unit\u2014all competing for federal contracts worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.\n\n\nSUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGIES\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Arconic Inc., aluminum manufacturing facility in Alcoa, Tenn.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bloomberg News\n \n\n\n\nThe U.S. livestock industry is taking a fresh look at its supply chains in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. The storm dealt the worst blow to North Carolina\u2019s livestock industry in nearly 20 years, killing 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 hogs, the WSJ\u2019s Jacob Bunge writes. Five hog-waste lagoons sustained structural damage, at least two were reported breached and heavy rains caused manure to overflow from at least 30 other sites, threatening to contaminate groundwater. Environmental groups say the spate of recent strong storms, including Florence and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, merits further effort to shore up the pork industry\u2019s defenses. Smithfield Foods chief executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ken Sullivan\n\n\n\n said the company has relocated farms away from floodplains over the last 20 years, and its North Carolina farms fared better this time around than they did after Hurricane Floyd in 1999.\nQUOTABLE\n\n\n\n\u201cThe shopping cart, shelf and checkout still exist but now it\u2019s in your pocket, on your phone.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Hershey CEO Michele Buck\n\n\n\n\n\nNumber of the Day11.2%Year-over-year growth in the value of truck freight that moved between the U.S., Canada and Mexico in July, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.\n\n\nIN OTHER NEWS U.S. exports declined 1.6% in August, expanding the goods trade deficit. (WSJ)\nU.S durable goods rose 4.5% in August. (WSJ)\nThe World Trade Organization cut its forecast for global trade growth. (WSJ)\nThe number of Americans applying for new unemployment benefits rose by 12,000 last week. (WSJ) \nU.S. securities regulators are suing Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk for fraud. (WSJ)\nNew manufacturing orders slowed and consumer confidence weakened in the eurozone last quarter. (WSJ) \nIndia raised tariffs on some imports to bolster the rupee and tackle its widening current-account deficit. (WSJ)\nBrazil\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Petrobras\n\n\n will pay $853.2 million to settle yearslong corruption investigations. (WSJ)\nQuarterly gross profits at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Conagra Brands Inc.\n\n\n rose as improved supply-chain productivity and higher prices offset higher ingredient and transportation costs. (WSJ)\nSecond-quarter sales fell by nearly half at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Bed, Bath & Beyond.\n\n\n (WSJ)\nInventories at\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n H&M\n\n\n reached a record high of 18.9% of total sales, as its new logistics platform disrupted business in key markets. (WSJ)\nPayments technology company Stripe Inc. raised $245 million in new funding. (WSJ)\nA report found\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Johnson & Johnson\n\n\n supplier GenScript Biotech Corp. didn\u2019t follow safety protocols in testing a gene therapy on Chinese patients. (WSJ)\n\nWalmart Inc.\n\n\n plans to open a site exclusively for online-order pickups in the Chicago suburbs. (Supermarket News)\n\nHome Depot Inc.\n\n\n is now offering same-day delivery to customers across the U.S. (Bloomberg)\nDirect Delivering up-to-the minute news, analysis, interviews and explanatory journalism on logistics, supply-chain management, e-commerce and more ",
        "author": "Erica E. Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Today\u2019s Top Supply Chain and Logistics News From WSJ (WSJ: WSJ Logistics Report) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7863",
        "date": "2018-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/todays-top-supply-chain-and-logistics-news-from-wsj-1522232527?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=78",
        "text": "The \u201csharing economy\u201d is coming to trucking.\nRyder System Inc.\n\n R -0.82%\n\n\n is launching a kind of Airbnb for cargo transportation, a vehicle-sharing marketplace for commercial vehicles. The WSJ\u2019s Austen Hufford writes the service will help companies with idle vehicles rent them out, and give other companies some leeway in making the big investment behind commercial trucks. The Ryder plan reflects the growth of the so-called sharing economy in consumer markets, which has been slow to expand in industrial shipping. Ryder\u2019s plan may set a formula for more shared space in a trucking market that has shippers straining for capacity. But the company is rolling out its marketplace in measured steps, starting only in the Atlanta area. And Ryder may have to manage a delicate balance by serving customers in its new marketplace without having that secondary market drive down prices in its core leasing and fleet-management operations. \nConcerns over a deepening U.S.-China trade conflict are reaching into supply chains around the Pacific Rim. From Japan\u2019s electronics to Australia\u2019s iron ore miners, the Asia-Pacific region\u2019s economies depend on selling parts and materials to feed China\u2019s export machine. The WSJ\u2019s Ben Otto, Rhiannon Hoyle and Chieko Tsuneoka write that countries and companies that ship parts and raw materials around the region are worried about getting caught in the crossfire. Australia, for instance, sends 30% of its exports to China, including iron ore and metallurgical coal, the main ingredients in steel. The impact is already being felt in some areas. U.S. tariffs on imported solar panels were aimed at China but also hurt a Singapore manufacturer that has been a big exporter to the U.S. Yet the U.S. actions may not be bad news for everyone. Greater restrictions on Chinese auto exports, for instance, could boost Japanese and German car shipments. \n\n\n\n\nThere\u2019s no secret to the growth strategy at online lingerie seller Adore Me Inc. The New York-based startup plans to open 200 to 300 stores in the U.S. over the next five years, the WSJ\u2019s Khadeeja Safdar writes, hoping storefronts help it take market share from industry leader Victoria\u2019s Secret. It\u2019s the latest step by web-based retailers to build their own version of a multi-channel distribution strategy. Several online startups, including eyeglass maker Warby Parker and sneaker brand Greats, have opened physical stores even as some traditional brick-and-mortar chains have retreated. Lingerie has been protected somewhat from web sales because fit and comfort can be hard to assess online. But a shift toward simpler sizing and lenient return policies has made the category more viable online. Adore Me says its annual revenue has reached $100 million, and the store strategy is one way to kick the growth into a higher gear. \n\n\nECONOMY & TRADE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe NLMK Indiana steel mill in Portage, Ind.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThere are sighs of relief from some steel-focused U.S. supply chains now that the Trump administration has temporarily exempted selected countries from new tariffs. That\u2019s especially true for some of the largest customers of imported steel, the processors of semifinished steel. The U.S. imported nearly 8 million metric tons of such steel last year, the WSJ\u2019s Bob Tita reports, more than a fifth of all steel imports. Most arrived as the mattress-sized slabs that are reheated and rolled into sheet steel for products including pipe and automotive components. Companies that rely on it say the material should be treated like feedstock, and not subject to the same tariffs as finished products. U.S. steelmakers roll nearly all their production into finished goods, and American manufacturers fear the tariffs will lead to a shortage of slabs. That could change if the tariffs encourage steel companies to restart or build more domestic production capacity, adding new wrinkles to the slab competition.\nQUOTABLE\n\n\n\n\u201cBecause Singapore also makes solar panels, we also become collateral damage.\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore\u2019s foreign minister, on U.S. tariffs. \n\n\n\n\n\nNumber of the Day3%Increase in U.S. refrigerated truck volumes in the week ending March 24 after a 9% increase the week before, according to DAT Solutions LLC. \n\n\nIN OTHER NEWS U.S. consumer confidence fell in March from an 18-year high the month before. (WSJ)\nBusinesses across the eurozone were less upbeat about their prospects in March. (WSJ) \nU.S. home prices grew 6.2% in January on strong demand and short supply. (WSJ)\nCanada\u2019s government will set new rules to prevent transshipping of steel and aluminum to the U.S. (WSJ) \nJapan\u2019s Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. is considering making an offer for rival drug maker Shire PLC. (WSJ) \nMoody\u2019s Investor Service downgraded Tesla Inc., pushing the car maker\u2019s debt deeper into junk territory. (WSJ) \nA unit of Foxconn Technology Group is buying smartphone and electronics accessories maker Belkin International Inc. for $866 million. (WSJ) \nSoutheastern Grocers LLC, owner of the Bi-Lo and Winn-Dixie chains, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. (WSJ) \nA consortium led by private-equity giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carlyle Group\n\n\n LP is buying the specialty chemicals business of Dutch paints giant\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Akzo Nobel\n\n\n NV. (WSJ) \n\nAlphabet Inc.\n\n\n unit Waymo ordered 20,000 Jaguar SUVs for its autonomous vehicle fleet. (WSJ) \nChina is considering restoring restrictions on coal imports to boost the domestic price of the commodity. (Lloyd\u2019s List) \nOn-demand shipping startup Shyp is shutting down. (TechCrunch) \n\n\n\n\n French car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PSA Group\n\n\n is shifting some parts production from Asia to Europe to cut supply times and logistics costs. (Automotive Logistics) \n\nFedEx Corp.\n\n\n acquired U.K.-based P2P Mailing Ltd., a specialist in cross-border e-commerce payments. (Logistics Manager) \nSouth Korean regional container lines Sinokor Merchant Marine and Heung-A Shipping agreed to merge operations. (Splash 247)\nChina State Shipbuilding Corp. named Lei Fanpei, former chief of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., to replace Dong Qiang as chairman after two years of heavy losses. (MarineLink) \nNet profit at Kerry Logistics Network Ltd. rose 7% in 2017 despite declines in forwarding and logistics operating profits in its China business. (The Loadstar)\nThe ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach pushed containers through their docks at a faster pace in February. (Logistics Management) \n\nWalmart Inc.\n\n\n began offering pickup of online purchases for the first time at one of its stores in Mexico. (Mexico News Daily) \nABOUT US Paul Page is deputy editor of WSJ Logistics Report. Follow him at @PaulPage, and follow the WSJ Logistics Report team: @jensmithWSJ and @EEPhillips_WSJ. Follow the WSJ Logistics Report on Twitter at @WSJLogistics.\nWrite to Paul Page at paul.page@wsj.com Truck capacity is for sharing, countries wary of the crossfire in a trade war, and delivering bricks-and-mortar to online strategies retail strategies. ",
        "author": "Paul Page"
    },
    {
        "title": "El Salvador Becomes the First Country to Adopt Bitcoin as Legal Tender (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7864",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/el-salvador-becomes-the-first-country-to-adopt-bitcoin-as-legal-tender/F3CE4394-6FB4-4165-8131-BF8CEF8370E3?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=5",
        "text": " Aerospace contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman invest in a spacecraft-refueling startup. One of Boeing's biggest customers, Ireland's Ryanair, walks away from talks for a new 737 MAX order. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Robinhood Hack Exposes Millions of Customers' Personal Information (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7865",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/robinhood-hack-exposes-millions-of-customers-personal-information/00C2BA1F-F043-47BF-A75A-030E691543F7?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=3",
        "text": " SpaceX returns four astronauts to Earth after about 200 days on the international space station, the Associated Press reports. Heavily indebted Chinese property developer Evergrande sells a tech company stake in an effort to raise cash to avert a default. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Robinhood Hack Exposes Millions of Customers' Personal Information (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7866",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/robinhood-hack-exposes-millions-of-customers-personal-information/00C2BA1F-F043-47BF-A75A-030E691543F7?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=18",
        "text": " SpaceX returns four astronauts to Earth after about 200 days on the international space station, the Associated Press reports. Heavily indebted Chinese property developer Evergrande sells a tech company stake in an effort to raise cash to avert a default. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Future of Everything Festival: When Humans Invade Space (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7867",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/the-future-of-everything-festival-when-humans-invade-space/6F506039-FCBB-49DB-B5D9-3C236B1FB191?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=95",
        "text": " How will we travel to outer space? And what will we do when get there? Relativity Space CEO Tim Ellis and TransAstra founder Joel C. Sercel explain how everything from 3D-printed rockets to asteroid mining will help us explore, live and work in the final frontier. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Frozen Frontiers: The Alien, Iron-Breathing Microbes of Blood Falls (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7868",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/frozen-frontiers-the-alien-iron-breathing-microbes-of-blood-falls/FDE448BF-75D4-4AD9-AD7C-1171EC78DC86?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=73",
        "text": " Scientists are looking to Earth's most extreme environments for clues about what alien lifeforms might look like. The data they gather could help future space explorers to understand the origins of life in the universe. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming May 19th: The Future of Everything from WSJ (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7869",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/coming-may-19th-the-future-of-everything-from-wsj/BAF800F3-B78C-4046-9008-73702478503A?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=123",
        "text": " Prepare for a new podcast experience from The Wall Street Journal on Friday, May 19th. Introducing The Future of Everything. Join Jennifer Strong as she examines what's ahead for space exploration, high-tech guns, brain implants, meat production and urban farming. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Frozen Frontiers: Meet the Robot Explorers Hunting for Alien Life (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7870",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/frozen-frontiers-meet-the-robot-explorers-hunting-for-alien-life/E43023DE-5538-48E3-A93A-3A9E6367EA4F?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=56",
        "text": " In Antarctica, robots are helping scientists explore how life evolves in extreme environments. Such missions are dress-rehearsals for future space exploration to the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn, where alien life could be thriving. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Frozen Frontiers: Meet the Robot Explorers Hunting for Alien Life (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7871",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/frozen-frontiers-meet-the-robot-explorers-hunting-for-alien-life/E43023DE-5538-48E3-A93A-3A9E6367EA4F?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=74",
        "text": " In Antarctica, robots are helping scientists explore how life evolves in extreme environments. Such missions are dress-rehearsals for future space exploration to the ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn, where alien life could be thriving. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Adapting Medicine for Outer Space (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7872",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/adapting-medicine-for-outer-space/8F57EA22-D11D-42F2-9F55-10A79BB2455F?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=65",
        "text": " What happens when an injury occurs on a commercial space flight or manned mission to Mars? Meet the scientists and astronauts studying how to keep us safe where routine care is impossible--and the closest hospital is a million miles away. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Adapting Medicine for Outer Space (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7873",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/adapting-medicine-for-outer-space/1B71832C-7D0E-4CF5-A800-C161994A1D0E?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=54",
        "text": " What happens when an injury occurs on a commercial space flight or manned mission to Mars? Meet the scientists and astronauts studying how to keep us safe where routine care is impossible-and the closest hospital is a million miles away. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "James Turrell\u2019s New Masterpiece in the Desert (WSJ: WSJ. Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7874",
        "date": "2019-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-turrells-new-masterpiece-in-the-desert-11547480071?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=66",
        "text": "\u201cIt was November, right before Thanksgiving,\u201d he says. Turrell, an expert pilot, had spent months by then tearing through a $10,000 Guggenheim grant\u2014 soaring over the landscape in his 1967 Helio Courier H295, eyeing every butte and extinct volcano west of the Rockies, searching for the perfect site on which to build a monumental work of art. \n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt was the end of the day,\u201d he recalls, \u201cand I was getting ready to hang it all up.\u201d \n\n\nAnd that\u2019s when he saw it. \n\u201cThere\u2019s a tree right in front of us,\u201d he says. \u201cThat tree where the rock is\u2014that\u2019s where Roden Crater will come up. There it is. See it?\u201d \nAs we drive on, a gently curving slope emerges from a barren stretch of scrub brush in the distance, its soil fading black into red as it reaches a concave plateau. \u201cSo, it\u2019s out there by itself,\u201d he continues, \u201cone of the few beautifully two-tone volcanoes without too much growth on it. That looks pretty terrific, I thought. I went and landed right out below it and then hiked up in it, then spent the night in it, in a sleeping bag.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSKY HIGH \u201cEvery single piece of it engages your perception,\u201d says ASU\u2019s Steven Tepper of the crater; above, the East Portal (2018).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JAMES TURRELL, Roden Crater, \u00a9 James Turrell, Photo by Klaus Obermeyer (2018)\n \n\n\n\nTurrell, 75, has spent more than half his life sculpting the inside and outside of the 2.5-mile-wide 380,000-year-old shell of a volcano he first spied that day in 1974. He has shaped the rim to frame the sky and carved tunnels and chambers that let the cosmos in, working with astronomers to harness light from the sun, moon, stars and planets. His vast work-in-progress is inspired by archaeological sites like the Mayan pyramids in Mexico and Central America.\nNow, after more than four decades, Turrell\u2019s massive project finally has a finish line. A new partnership with Arizona State University promises to bring his revised master plan to completion in the next five years, building a sprawling creative and scientific community around the crater in the process, with the ASU Foundation and Skystone Foundation (the crater\u2019s nonprofit umbrella) working together to raise the $200 million or so still needed.\nTurrell, a pioneer in manipulating natural and electric light as a medium, is one of the seminal figures of Southern California\u2019s Light and Space movement. A gregarious, voracious intellectual with an unruly white beard and wide-ranging interests in art and science, he\u2019s best known for his projection work\u2014interior spaces filled with light that appears to inhabit physical form\u2014and his \u201cSkyspaces,\u201d mixing natural and electric light to alter one\u2019s perceptions of the earth\u2019s atmosphere while creating places for quiet meditation. Six years ago, his work achieved broad attention with shows simultaneously at New York\u2019s Guggenheim Museum, Houston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The exhibitions also brought renewed attention to his mythic, and largely unseen, masterpiece in the desert. \u201c[To me], an art historian interested in ancient art and modern art, it\u2019s an amazing vision,\u201d says LACMA\u2019s CEO and director, Michael Govan, who visited the crater for the first time almost 25 years ago. \u201cIt relates to the whole history of art, not just art of the last decades.\u201d\nBut while its neighbor, Sunset Crater Volcano, gets over 100,000 tourists a year, most of them en route to the Grand Canyon 70 miles due north, few visitors to the area have any idea one of the most ambitious works ever attempted by a single artist has been hiding in plain sight. Not many people have seen the place up close in the many years since Turrell first acquired Roden Crater (named for an early owner) in the late \u201970s. Visitors have included mostly art world insiders, who\u2019ve supported the project with donations and exhibitions. A few interlopers, though, have made it inside. \u201cWe had a group come in after Burning Man, about 12 years ago, and they graffitied the tunnel,\u201d recalls Turrell. \u201cAnd a couple of women came in, totally nude. \u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVIEW FROM THE TOP \u201cThat looks pretty terrific, I thought,\u201d recalls Turrell of first seeing the Roden Crater (pictured above in 1973). \u201cI landed right out below it and then hiked up in it, then spent the night in it, in a sleeping bag.\u201d\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JAMES TURRELL, Roden Crater, \u00a9 James Turrell, Photo by James Turrell (1973).\n \n\n\n\nSoon enough, curiosity seekers won\u2019t need to sneak by security. After many missed deadlines, an opening day is finally in sight. \u201cI was so naive when I started,\u201d says Turrell. \u201cEmbarrassing to think about it. But if you really knew what it would take to do some of these things, you probably would never start on them.\u201d\nFollowing a long hiatus, across almost a good decade of fundraising struggles that began during the last recession, work at the crater kicked into high gear three years ago, with major new backers and partners and a new master plan all clicking into place at once. \nThe American West is covered in monumental works by artists of Turrell\u2019s generation, a group of remarkably single-minded obsessives. Some, like Michael Heizer\u2019s mile-and-a-half-long City in the Nevada desert, have been in progress longer than Turrell\u2019s Roden Crater, struggling with funding and upkeep. Even the late Donald Judd\u2019s West Texas art complex at Marfa is often strapped for cash. \u201cThey have to raise their budget every year,\u201d says Turrell. \nTo avoid a similar uncertain fate, Turrell has lined up long-term stewards for his life\u2019s work and the 100 square miles or so of ranchland he controls as a buffer around it, partnering with ASU and LACMA (which has been involved with the crater for years) to ensure the project lives on. \u201cThere are difficulties in fundraising when you have no answer to what happens when I\u2019m gone,\u201d he says. With a $2 million initial planning grant, ASU spent much of 2018 formulating a long-range strategy for the site.\nNew urgency arrived when Turrell had a health scare in June, a heart attack right before a major exhibition opened at the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany. After the press conference announcing the show, Turrell walked out of the museum, he says, and it was \u201clike Mike Tyson hitting me right in the chest.\u201d The hospital was just four minutes away. \u201cSo they\u2019re operating on me 12 minutes after the heart attack,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIf I\u2019d had it here [in Arizona], I never would have made it.\u201d \nThe ASU Foundation is already working to raise the funds to get construction done, while the university is developing a broad academic program that will offer crater access to students and faculty beginning this spring. \u201cJames would be the first to tell you he isn\u2019t immortal,\u201d says ASU president\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Crow.\n\n\n\n \u201cWe began talking some time ago about how we could become involved intellectually, pedagogically, and then that led to other discussions about how we might be able to then sustain the project for the next hundreds of years.\u201d\nWith the new infrastructure, Turrell has already sketched plans for welcoming the wider public, imagining a museum and orientation facility, lodges to rent along the crater rim, even a restaurant serving food from cookbook author Deborah Madison. Turrell, who splits his time between a home on the eastern shore of Maryland and a modest ranch house 13 miles from the crater, is sticking around Arizona more these days, newly energized to push his project toward completion. The first major addition in ages, the new $13 million South Space, is expected to finish this spring. The space, which includes an enormous domed instrument for tracking celestial bodies, is modeled on the Jai Prakash Yantra timepiece at Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, India. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nJames Turrell\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Alec Soth for WSJ. Magazine\n \n\n\n\nThe revised master plan includes many more spaces, most 3-D modeled and priced for donors. A series of water-filled chambers are coming, fed by underground wells. One 8-foot-deep pool will reflect every sunrise. In a light-spa complex, bathers will dive under a barrier, emerging outdoors looking out across the horizon. In the fumarole, the volcano\u2019s secondary vent, Turrell imagines a brass bath where transducers hooked to a radio telescope will broadcast the sounds of passing planets and the Milky Way underwater. In another space a visitor will sometimes be able to see his or her shadow with the light of Venus. An amphitheater is on the drawing boards too, as well as a wine cellar.\nOut on his ranchland, Turrell envisions at least 10 artist residency homes dotting the landscape, each designed by a different architect. These will be the foundation for a creative retreat along the lines of Yaddo or the MacDowell Colony or Skowhegan, where Turrell spent a few weeks in the 1970s. On a ledge overlooking the crater he hopes to install facilities for ASU. \u201cI don\u2019t want people to come here, see it once, and then you\u2019ve checked it off your bucket list and can forget it,\u201d says Turrell, \u201cso you have to have an ongoing program.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoden Crater, 1983\n\n\n\nTurrell has put almost his entire artistic career in the service of this single monumental project, funneling proceeds from other work and testing concepts around the world that are ultimately destined for the crater. \u201cI often do pieces at museums that I\u2019m trying out to see how that will work out here,\u201d he says. In 1991, he built his first bathing piece, Heavy Water, light-filled pools in France accompanied by swimwear he designed. His first amphitheater debuted in the Yucat\u00e1n in 2012 with an opening performance by Philip Glass. Turrell, who likes to guide visitors to Roden Crater himself, has often struggled to explain the experience. \u201cIt\u2019s indescribable, completely immersive, designed in a way so every single piece of it engages your perception,\u201d says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steven Tepper,\n\n\n\n dean of ASU\u2019s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. \nIt might be the altitude\u2014Roden Crater begins around 5,000 feet above sea level\u2014but my head\u2019s already spinning as I follow Turrell through the entrance one evening into the Sun | Moon Chamber. A black stone monolith with a circle of white marble in its center rises from a base of volcanic black silica. Low lights line the edges of the black-clad Alpha (East) Tunnel stretching up about 900 feet toward what looks like a bright orb. \u201cAs you walk up, pay attention to the sound of your voice,\u201d instructs Turrell. An enormous lens, built by the University of Arizona\u2019s Mirror Lab and the McDonald Observatory in Texas, is hidden in a recess halfway up the tunnel. It\u2019s occasionally deployed to focus sunsets, moonsets and other celestial events onto the marble \u201cimage stone,\u201d transforming the tunnel into a refractor telescope. \nWorking with astronomers Larry Wasserman and the late Richard Walker, Turrell integrated precise long-range calculations into his tunnel and chamber designs. The northernmost and southernmost moons, for example, alternately hit the image stone every 9.3 years (a phenomenon known as a major lunar standstill). The tunnel, meanwhile, will be most precisely aligned with the moon in 2,000 years. \nReaching the tunnel\u2019s midpoint, my voice goes flat, as Turrell said it would. He worked with an acoustician so that the crater is a finely honed audio and visual instrument. As we approach the East Portal at the end of the tunnel, the orb of bright sky transforms from circle to ellipse as I enter the space. A set of golden stairs with no railings rises up into the light. \nFarther in, an enormous Skyspace frames the eye of the crater. Turrell has been making variations on this same theme since the early 1970s, when he started cutting holes in the walls and roof of his studio at the Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica, California, turning the sky itself into a work of art. He has since produced dozens of Skyspaces around the world, nearly 100 of them in 21 states and 29 countries. Though many are private collector commissions, just as many are publicly accessible, purchased by museums and universities. Late this past summer, he opened a ski-in Skyspace in the Austrian Alps for a local arts association. The Crater\u2019s Eye, among his largest Skyspaces, is an acoustic marvel. \nOur tour concludes outside at sunset, in the Crater Bowl, where four stone plinths encircle the Crater\u2019s Eye. I lie down on one, as Turrell instructs, the blood rushing to my head as it rests on a stone pillow, angled below my feet. From my upside-down vantage point, the sky seems to fish-eye, curved up from the earth, offering a 360-degree view of the horizon, across the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon\u2019s rim in the distance as day fades into night. To achieve this visual effect, Turrell moved more than a million cubic yards of dirt and stone from the bowl, bringing an experience that pilots know from flying down to earth: a \u201cphenomenon where we perceive the sky as a closely fitted vault covering us from horizon to horizon rather than a limitless void extending into space,\u201d as Turrell has described it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRoden Crater, 1983\n\n\n\nTo understand aviation is to have a deeper grasp of Turrell and his work. Early on he supported his art with crop-dusting, delivering airmail and restoring old planes, a hobby he still enjoys. \nAnd Turrell\u2019s work at the crater has been as much about keeping out light as bringing it in. He lobbied the county to pass an extra-stringent dark skies ordinance that includes a ban on large signage. \u201cNow you see why I wanted to have no lights,\u201d he says, standing on the edge of the rim, night rising in the distance, the sky striped shades of black and blue. \nTo secure land around the crater nearly as far as the eye can see, Turrell raised funds by selling prints, drawings, models and other works of art. \u201cWe\u2019re definitely not in the moneymaking business; we\u2019re in the money-spending business in Turrell world,\u201d says his longtime gallerist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marc Glimcher\n\n\n\n of Pace in New York. Turrell has been buying plots 10 to 40 acres at a time, amassing a buffer against development, snapping up fallow tracts from investors who were duped in a big land fraud in the 1950s. Two years ago he sold his apartment in New York\u2019s Gramercy Park, using the proceeds to buy an additional 16,000 acres, which he closed on this fall. This new land grab will extend the cattle-ranching operation that also helps keep Roden Crater going. Turrell\u2019s Walking Cane Ranch supplies prime steaks to purveyors of top restaurants like Keens Steakhouse in New York.\nThe seeds of the crater project go back to the beginning of Turrell\u2019s artistic career, to the early \u201960s when, as a conscientious objector, he flew reconnaissance missions over Southeast Asia for the CIA\u2019s Civil Air Transport unit, soaring over the temple compounds of Borobudur and Angkor Wat. (It\u2019s a period he prefers not to talk much about.) Those ancient sites, and others he later visited in Mexico, India and the British Isles, formed the basis for the big project he dreamed of when he took to the skies fueled by that $10,000 Guggenheim grant, which Turrell used specifically for the crater hunt (most of it was spent on airplane fuel and lodging). \nThree years after he found Roden Crater, he convinced the rancher who owned it to sell. Funding for the first work there came from art patron Patrick Lannan\u2019s foundation, from Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (another early Turrell supporter) and from the newly emerging Dia Art Foundation. The crater\u2019s ambient-lit chambers are all building on concepts he first developed as a young artist carving up the old Mendota Hotel, which he moved into in 1966 after graduating from Pomona College with a degree in perceptual psychology. He initially paid $125 a month for the former restaurant and pharmacy spaces on the ground floor. He eventually took over most of the building, slicing holes in the walls and ceiling, turning much of the structure into an immersive art installation. \u201cThat was the kind of work I\u2019m doing at the crater, where things from the outside come in and make a piece,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThere I did it with the urban landscape of light at night. That was an important place for me, where I really did a lot of the things that sort of fueled the tank for quite a while.\u201d \nHe left the Mendota to begin his search for the crater after developers bought the hotel in 1974.\nTurrell\u2019s first marriage, to a harpist, dissolved a few years later, and in the early \u201980s, he moved full time to the crater. (He\u2019s now married to artist Kyung-Lim Lee Turrell and has six grown kids from previous relationships.) For two years he lived in isolation in an octagon-shaped house on the fumarole there. \u201cThat\u2019s when I got most of the ideas and designs of it done,\u201d he says. By 1983 the initial master plans were complete. \nTurrell spent the first decade consolidating control over the land around the site. Work on the tunnels and chambers wouldn\u2019t begin until the 1990s. The plans have become much more elaborate as the decades have dragged on. \u201cThe lesson here is, Get the money to an artist soon,\u201d says Turrell. \u201cIf you wait it gets more involved, and it gets more expensive.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Credit: Alec Soth\n \n\n\n\nEven with Roden Crater consuming so much time and mental energy, Turrell\u2019s other work hasn\u2019t slowed. Demand has increased, in fact, as whispered news of his close call circulates. After the heart attack, Turrell says, \u201cmany people who were perhaps thinking of getting my work or doing something are now calling up and demanding to get it.\u201d \nWhile he discusses new commissions at his ranch house, a call comes in from a prospective client representing a museum in Vermont. \u201cWhat would you like to do?\u201d Turrell asks. \u201cHave you seen any of the outdoor works? I think the best is to go see some things, and then come visit me here.\u201d Turrell gets a steady stream of inquiries like this. Most never lead to anything. \u201cI would say there are 100 requests to every one that can really be done,\u201d says Glimcher. \nTurrell\u2019s current pipeline includes an architectural installation at Denmark\u2019s ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum as well as four new Skyspaces in Mexico and another in a public park for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. More Skyspaces are planned for the addition to the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, and in four new buildings underway from architects Herzog & de Meuron. \nAnd Mass MoCA, the Massachusetts museum that opened a semipermanent Turrell retrospective in 2017, will soon welcome two more major works, a Skyspace in an industrial water tank and a massive topographical model of Roden Crater showing the planned work to come. \u201cUnless you\u2019re at the crater, it\u2019s so difficult to get your mind around the scale and how it works,\u201d says Mass MoCA director Joseph Thompson. \u201cI know [James has] been frustrated by that.\u201d\nTurrell, who was raised conservative Quaker in Pasadena, California, is also reviving his Lapsed Quaker Ware, a line of black basalt dishware he introduced in the 1990s. An expanded collection, produced in partnership with Irish potter Nicholas Mosse, debuted at the FOG Design+Art fair in San Francisco this winter. Turrell and Mosse have also partnered with an Irish distillery to produce their own Lapsed Quaker whiskey and gin\u2014although it will be a while still before those are ready to drink. Turrell is also working on a collaboration with crystal maker Lalique that will include the artist\u2019s own cologne and perfume, which will be produced by the company using wild purple sage from his ranch. \u201cHe\u2019s Santa Claus with a bag of aesthetic experiences for all the girls and boys,\u201d says Glimcher. \nFor Turrell, though, Roden Crater remains the reason for everything. With ASU and LACMA on board, that dream, long delayed, looks unlikely to end up one more incomplete artist\u2019s folly. The university plans to fully integrate the project into its academic DNA, beginning with a pilot program this spring involving its art and design school along with new schools of sustainability, earth and space exploration and social transformation. \u201cThat crater, that project, touches on almost every discipline at the university,\u201d says Tepper. \u201cWe see it as an extraordinary learning object that we\u2019re prepared to build hundreds of learning opportunities around.\u201d \nFive interdisciplinary field labs will debut this spring, interacting with the crater and partly working out of a new building in nearby Flagstaff that will house Turrell\u2019s Roden Crater archive, studio and model shop. And Govan, who is also chairman of the Skystone Foundation board, is developing an online course with Turrell that will be accessible to the wider world through ASU\u2019s EdPlus online degree platform. \n\u201cPart of the inspiration for Roden Crater was the Space Age of the \u201960s and James\u2019s delightfully perverse notion that one could bring the cosmos to earth,\u201d says Govan. \u201cSo there\u2019s a beautiful poetry in thinking about Roden Crater as being able to inspire scientists to think differently about the cosmos.\u201d\nBut Turrell\u2019s monument to light, his lifelong obsession, is also a monument to life. \u201cLight itself is amazing,\u201d he says. \u201cThere is this strange truth in light, and I\u2019ve been very interested in that. And we have a very amazing relationship to it. We drink light through the skin and create vitamin D. Light is actually food.\u201d \u2022 The artist has dedicated half his life to creating a massive\u2014yet largely unseen\u2014work of art. After more than four decades, he reveals a new master plan to the public. ",
        "author": "JAY CHESHES"
    },
    {
        "title": "Former Interns Say SpaceX Ignored Sexual Harassment (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7875",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/science/spacex-sexual-harassment.html",
        "text": "Some women at the company, founded by Elon Musk, described feelings of powerlessness and a failure by the company\u2019s human resources office to discipline male employees. Some women at the company, founded by Elon Musk, described feelings of powerlessness and a failure by the company\u2019s human resources office to discipline male employees. Three women who interned at SpaceX said they faced sexual harassment and unwanted advances from other interns as well as men in more senior positions across a range of workplace incidents, some of which went without punishment.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Chicken Sandwich Hitches a Balloon Ride to the Stratosphere (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7876",
        "date": "2017-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/science/world-view-stratollite-balloon-kfc-sandwich-space-stratosphere.html",
        "text": "The first customer for a high-tech balloon that will be able to hover in the stratosphere for months at a time is KFC, as part of a marketing campaign. The first customer for a high-tech balloon that will be able to hover in the stratosphere for months at a time is KFC, as part of a marketing campaign. An Arizona company, World View Enterprises, plans to send tourists on balloons into the stratosphere, high enough to see the curves of Earth and the blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Chicken Sandwich Hitches a Balloon Ride to the Stratosphere (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7877",
        "date": "2017-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/science/world-view-stratollite-balloon-kfc-sandwich-space-stratosphere.html",
        "text": "The first customer for a high-tech balloon that will be able to hover in the stratosphere for months at a time is KFC, as part of a marketing campaign. The first customer for a high-tech balloon that will be able to hover in the stratosphere for months at a time is KFC, as part of a marketing campaign. An Arizona company, World View Enterprises, plans to send tourists on balloons into the stratosphere, high enough to see the curves of Earth and the blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Chicken Sandwich Hitches a Balloon Ride to the Stratosphere (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7878",
        "date": "2017-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/science/world-view-stratollite-balloon-kfc-sandwich-space-stratosphere.html",
        "text": "The first customer for a high-tech balloon that will be able to hover in the stratosphere for months at a time is KFC, as part of a marketing campaign. The first customer for a high-tech balloon that will be able to hover in the stratosphere for months at a time is KFC, as part of a marketing campaign. An Arizona company, World View Enterprises, plans to send tourists on balloons into the stratosphere, high enough to see the curves of Earth and the blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Says He Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7879",
        "date": "2017-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/science/blue-origin-rocket-jeff-bezos-amazon-stock.html",
        "text": "Standing with a reusable booster and a model of a capsule for carrying humans into space, the billionaire disclosed that he had been financing his rocket company by selling shares in his company. Standing with a reusable booster and a model of a capsule for carrying humans into space, the billionaire disclosed that he had been financing his rocket company by selling shares in his company. COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 Standing against the backdrop of his New Shepard rocket booster and a full-scale mock capsule for carrying humans into space, Jeff Bezos revealed on Wednesday that he was selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year to finance his Blue Origin rocket company.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Says He Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7880",
        "date": "2017-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/science/blue-origin-rocket-jeff-bezos-amazon-stock.html",
        "text": "Standing with a reusable booster and a model of a capsule for carrying humans into space, the billionaire disclosed that he had been financing his rocket company by selling shares in his company. Standing with a reusable booster and a model of a capsule for carrying humans into space, the billionaire disclosed that he had been financing his rocket company by selling shares in his company. COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 Standing against the backdrop of his New Shepard rocket booster and a full-scale mock capsule for carrying humans into space, Jeff Bezos revealed on Wednesday that he was selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year to finance his Blue Origin rocket company.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Says He Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7881",
        "date": "2017-04-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/science/blue-origin-rocket-jeff-bezos-amazon-stock.html",
        "text": "Standing with a reusable booster and a model of a capsule for carrying humans into space, the billionaire disclosed that he had been financing his rocket company by selling shares in his company. Standing with a reusable booster and a model of a capsule for carrying humans into space, the billionaire disclosed that he had been financing his rocket company by selling shares in his company. COLORADO SPRINGS \u2014 Standing against the backdrop of his New Shepard rocket booster and a full-scale mock capsule for carrying humans into space, Jeff Bezos revealed on Wednesday that he was selling about $1 billion in Amazon stock a year to finance his Blue Origin rocket company.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Orca Calf Offers Hope for a Fading Group in the Pacific Northwest (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7882",
        "date": "2019-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/science/orca-calf-seattle.html",
        "text": "The newborn killer whale, called L124, looks healthy. But its family is still in danger of extinction. The newborn killer whale, called L124, looks healthy. But its family is still in danger of extinction. A killer whale has been born in the Pacific Northwest, and so far, it looks happy and healthy.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Hot-Weather Guide to Coronavirus, Air-Conditioning and Airflow (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7883",
        "date": "2020-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/science/coronavirus-spread-air-conditioning.html",
        "text": "Indoor air is riskier than outdoor air. So what do you do if it\u2019s really hot out? Indoor air is riskier than outdoor air. So what do you do if it\u2019s really hot out? Despite its critical role in our daily lives, air is not something most of us spend a great deal of time thinking about. It\u2019s that easy to take for granted. Unlike water, we don\u2019t need to fill up a cup to consume it. If some escapes from the room, more will find its way back in, whether we open the door or not.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Katie Bouman Accidentally Became the Face of the Black Hole Project (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7884",
        "date": "2019-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/katie-bouman-black-hole.html",
        "text": "The project included more than 200 researchers around the world, about 40 of them women, including Dr. Bouman. The project included more than 200 researchers around the world, about 40 of them women, including Dr. Bouman. As the first-ever picture of a black hole was unveiled this week, another image began making its way around the internet: a photo of a young scientist, clasping her hands over her face and reacting with glee to an image of an orange ring of light, circling a deep, dark abyss.",
        "author": "By Sarah Mervosh"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Flat Earthers Nearly Derailed a Space Photo Book (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7885",
        "date": "2019-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/science/nasa-flat-earth.html",
        "text": "What a photographer\u2019s struggle to raise money for his book of images tells us about Facebook and conspiracy theorists. What a photographer\u2019s struggle to raise money for his book of images tells us about Facebook and conspiracy theorists. A highly engaged group of conspiracy theorists can override a fact-based endeavor\u2019s internet ads.",
        "author": "By Heather Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Huge Dust Storm on Mars Is Threatening NASA\u2019s Opportunity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7886",
        "date": "2018-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/science/mars-dust-storm-martian.html",
        "text": "The storm, which has blanketed a quarter of the planet, has plunged the rover into a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d The storm, which has blanketed a quarter of the planet, has plunged the rover into a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d A vast dust storm blanketing about a quarter of the surface of Mars has threatened NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, plunging the solar-powered vehicle into what the space agency has described as a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Huge Dust Storm on Mars Is Threatening NASA\u2019s Opportunity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7887",
        "date": "2018-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/science/mars-dust-storm-martian.html",
        "text": "The storm, which has blanketed a quarter of the planet, has plunged the rover into a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d The storm, which has blanketed a quarter of the planet, has plunged the rover into a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d A vast dust storm blanketing about a quarter of the surface of Mars has threatened NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, plunging the solar-powered vehicle into what the space agency has described as a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Huge Dust Storm on Mars Is Threatening NASA\u2019s Opportunity Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7888",
        "date": "2018-06-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/science/mars-dust-storm-martian.html",
        "text": "The storm, which has blanketed a quarter of the planet, has plunged the rover into a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d The storm, which has blanketed a quarter of the planet, has plunged the rover into a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d A vast dust storm blanketing about a quarter of the surface of Mars has threatened NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, plunging the solar-powered vehicle into what the space agency has described as a \u201cdark, perpetual night.\u201d",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "How\u2019s Your Internship Going? This Teen Found a Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7889",
        "date": "2020-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/science/space/teen-discovers-new-planet-nasa.html",
        "text": "Wolf Cukier, 17, was analyzing brightness of stars during an internship with NASA last year when he made the discovery. Wolf Cukier, 17, was analyzing brightness of stars during an internship with NASA last year when he made the discovery. The summer before senior year of high school can be a stressful time for a teenager. Childhood is winding down. College applications loom large. Many students are looking for an edge that will help them get into the right school. Last year, Wolf Cukier, 17, spent his summer vacation as few other rising seniors have: He helped discover a planet. ",
        "author": "By Christine Hauser"
    },
    {
        "title": "How\u2019s Your Internship Going? This Teen Found a Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7890",
        "date": "2020-01-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/science/space/teen-discovers-new-planet-nasa.html",
        "text": "Wolf Cukier, 17, was analyzing brightness of stars during an internship with NASA last year when he made the discovery. Wolf Cukier, 17, was analyzing brightness of stars during an internship with NASA last year when he made the discovery. The summer before senior year of high school can be a stressful time for a teenager. Childhood is winding down. College applications loom large. Many students are looking for an edge that will help them get into the right school. Last year, Wolf Cukier, 17, spent his summer vacation as few other rising seniors have: He helped discover a planet. ",
        "author": "By Christine Hauser"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Red Algae Are Threatening Hawaii\u2019s Coral Reefs, Scientists Say (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7891",
        "date": "2020-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/science/hawaii-seaweed-coral-reef.html",
        "text": "The recently discovered species covers coral in a thick layer and suffocates it. Scientists don\u2019t know where it came from. The recently discovered species covers coral in a thick layer and suffocates it. Scientists don\u2019t know where it came from. On a routine trip to monitor ocean wildlife near the northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2016, researchers noticed small patches of red algae they had never seen before growing on the coral reefs.",
        "author": "By Marie Fazio"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Red Algae Are Threatening Hawaii\u2019s Coral Reefs, Scientists Say (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7892",
        "date": "2020-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/science/hawaii-seaweed-coral-reef.html",
        "text": "The recently discovered species covers coral in a thick layer and suffocates it. Scientists don\u2019t know where it came from. The recently discovered species covers coral in a thick layer and suffocates it. Scientists don\u2019t know where it came from. On a routine trip to monitor ocean wildlife near the northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 2016, researchers noticed small patches of red algae they had never seen before growing on the coral reefs.",
        "author": "By Marie Fazio"
    },
    {
        "title": "First All-Female Spacewalk Is Back On, NASA Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7893",
        "date": "2019-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/science/NASA-female-spacewalk.html",
        "text": "The mission was canceled in March after the agency said it did not have two properly fitted spacesuits readily available. The mission was canceled in March after the agency said it did not have two properly fitted spacesuits readily available. The first spacewalk to be conducted entirely by women is scheduled for Oct. 21, NASA announced, nearly seven months after an all-female spacewalk was canceled because two properly fitted spacesuits were not readily available. ",
        "author": "By Mariel Padilla"
    },
    {
        "title": "First All-Female Spacewalk Is Back On, NASA Says (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7894",
        "date": "2019-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/science/NASA-female-spacewalk.html",
        "text": "The mission was canceled in March after the agency said it did not have two properly fitted spacesuits readily available. The mission was canceled in March after the agency said it did not have two properly fitted spacesuits readily available. The first spacewalk to be conducted entirely by women is scheduled for Oct. 21, NASA announced, nearly seven months after an all-female spacewalk was canceled because two properly fitted spacesuits were not readily available. ",
        "author": "By Mariel Padilla"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Bright Green \u2018Christmas Comet\u2019 Will Fly the Closest to Earth in Centuries (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7895",
        "date": "2018-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/science/green-comet-46p-wirtanen.html",
        "text": "The comet, called 46P/Wirtanen, will streak near Earth on Sunday and be visible in some places with the naked eye. The comet, called 46P/Wirtanen, will streak near Earth on Sunday and be visible in some places with the naked eye. Look into the night sky on Sunday and you just might see a bright, fuzzy ball with a greenish-gray tint.",
        "author": "By Christina Caron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking Auction: Bid on an Invitation to a Party for Time Travelers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7896",
        "date": "2018-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/science/stephen-hawking-auction-christies.html",
        "text": "Starting on Oct. 31, Christie\u2019s is auctioning 52 items that belonged to Dr. Hawking, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. Starting on Oct. 31, Christie\u2019s is auctioning 52 items that belonged to Dr. Hawking, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. In 2009, the physicist and author Stephen W. Hawking gave a party for time travelers.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Renames Facility After Katherine Johnson of \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 Fame (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7897",
        "date": "2019-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/science/nasa-hidden-figures-katherine-johnson.html",
        "text": "It is yet another honor for Ms. Johnson, one of the trailblazing African-American mathematicians who inspired the 2016 book and movie. It is yet another honor for Ms. Johnson, one of the trailblazing African-American mathematicians who inspired the 2016 book and movie. NASA on Friday officially renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician and centenarian whose barrier-breaking career was depicted in the film \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d",
        "author": "By Elisha Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Renames Facility After Katherine Johnson of \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 Fame (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7898",
        "date": "2019-02-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/science/nasa-hidden-figures-katherine-johnson.html",
        "text": "It is yet another honor for Ms. Johnson, one of the trailblazing African-American mathematicians who inspired the 2016 book and movie. It is yet another honor for Ms. Johnson, one of the trailblazing African-American mathematicians who inspired the 2016 book and movie. NASA on Friday officially renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician and centenarian whose barrier-breaking career was depicted in the film \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d",
        "author": "By Elisha Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Worried About Your Eyes After the Eclipse? Here\u2019s What You Should Know (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7899",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/science/eclipse-eyes-sun.html",
        "text": "You were warned about looking at the solar eclipse without protection, but you did it anyway. Eye specialists are ready to help. You were warned about looking at the solar eclipse without protection, but you did it anyway. Eye specialists are ready to help. Despite all the warnings about looking at the eclipse without safety glasses, some may have been tempted to defy scientific advice and steal a peek. Don\u2019t feel bad \u2014 even the president of the United States did it.",
        "author": "By Christine Hauser"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will You Be Able to See the Northern Lights This Weekend? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7900",
        "date": "2021-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/science/space/aurora-northern-lights.html",
        "text": "The dazzling phenomenon could be visible on Saturday night or early Sunday morning, experts said, depending on the weather and local light pollution. The dazzling phenomenon could be visible on Saturday night or early Sunday morning, experts said, depending on the weather and local light pollution. Magnetic energy had been building up in the sun this week like a rubber band twisted into a corkscrew. On Thursday morning, the rubber band snapped, and the pent-up energy was released as a solar flare, ejecting about a billion tons of plasma gas that could result in the dazzling display known as the northern lights once it reaches Earth this weekend.",
        "author": "By Eduardo Medina"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Academy Pushes to Eject Sexual Harassers (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7901",
        "date": "2019-05-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/science/national-academy-sciences-sexual-harassment.html",
        "text": "A preliminary vote by the National Academy of Sciences was the latest move to address discrimination against women in historically male-dominated science fields. A preliminary vote by the National Academy of Sciences was the latest move to address discrimination against women in historically male-dominated science fields. The National Academy of Sciences moved this week toward a landmark shift in policy that would allow it for the first time to eject members who have violated its code of conduct, including in cases of sexual harassment.",
        "author": "By Christine Hauser"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stratolaunch, World\u2019s Largest Airplane by Wingspan, Takes Its First Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7902",
        "date": "2019-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/science/stratolaunch-first-flight.html",
        "text": "The crew said it was a smooth maiden voyage for the Stratolaunch, which is designed to carry rockets to blast commercial satellites into space. The crew said it was a smooth maiden voyage for the Stratolaunch, which is designed to carry rockets to blast commercial satellites into space. Its wingspan is longer than a football field. The tail is 50 feet from the ground. It was made by reassembling parts from two used Boeing jetliners.",
        "author": "By Mihir Zaveri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking\u2019s Wheelchair and Thesis Fetch More Than $1 Million at Auction (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7903",
        "date": "2018-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/science/stephen-hawking-wheelchair-auction-.html",
        "text": "Bids far exceeded expectations at the Christie\u2019s auction, which also included items that once belonged to Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Bids far exceeded expectations at the Christie\u2019s auction, which also included items that once belonged to Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. The final price for an old red wheelchair exceeded expectations at a Christie\u2019s auction in London that ended on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "That First Black Hole Seen in an Image Is Now Called P\u014dwehi, at Least in Hawaii (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7904",
        "date": "2019-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/science/powehi-black-hole.html",
        "text": "The word, which means \u201cadorned fathomless dark creation,\u201d is derived from the Kumulipo, a centuries-old Hawaiian creation chant, said a professor who helped with the naming. The word, which means \u201cadorned fathomless dark creation,\u201d is derived from the Kumulipo, a centuries-old Hawaiian creation chant, said a professor who helped with the naming. When Jessica Dempsey, deputy director of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Maunakea, Hawaii, wanted help last year naming an upgrade to a deep-space detection system, she turned to Uncle Larry.",
        "author": "By Christopher Mele"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Radar Blip, a Flash of Light: How U.F.O.s \u2018Exploded\u2019 Into Public View (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7905",
        "date": "2018-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/science/UFO-sightings-USA.html",
        "text": "Sightings of U.F.O.s in Washington in July 1952 garnered headlines around the world and caused so much concern that the government was forced to speak out. Sightings of U.F.O.s in Washington in July 1952 garnered headlines around the world and caused so much concern that the government was forced to speak out. In the early morning of July 20, 1952, Capt. S.C. \u201cCasey\u201d Pierman was ready for takeoff at Washington National Airport, when a bright light skimmed the horizon and disappeared. He did not think much of it until he was airborne, bound for Detroit, and an air traffic controller told him two or three unidentified flying objects were spotted on radar traveling at high speed.",
        "author": "By Laura M. Holson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Missed the Solar Eclipse? You\u2019ll Have Another Chance in 7 Years (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7906",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/science/next-solar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse will traverse the United States from Texas to Maine. After that, your next shot won\u2019t be until 2045. On April 8, 2024, a total solar eclipse will traverse the United States from Texas to Maine. After that, your next shot won\u2019t be until 2045. So you missed the Great Eclipse of 2017.",
        "author": "By Maggie Astor"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Place Is Extraordinary\u2019: Well-Preserved Artifacts Are Found Under Maya Ruins (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7907",
        "date": "2019-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/science/chichen-itza-mexico-mayan.html",
        "text": "In a cave under the ancient city of Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1, Mexican archaeologists discovered a trove of ceramic artifacts that appear to be over 1,000 years old. In a cave under the ancient city of Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1, Mexican archaeologists discovered a trove of ceramic artifacts that appear to be over 1,000 years old. Archaeologists announced this week that they had discovered an extraordinary trove of well-preserved Maya artifacts under the ancient city of Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1 in Mexico\u2019s Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula. ",
        "author": "By Karen Zraick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can You Have More Than 150 Friends? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7908",
        "date": "2021-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/science/dunbars-number-debunked.html",
        "text": "A new study questions that figure, known as Dunbar\u2019s number. The Oxford professor for whom it is named, Robin Dunbar, dismissed the findings as \u201cabsolutely bonkers.\u201d A new study questions that figure, known as Dunbar\u2019s number. The Oxford professor for whom it is named, Robin Dunbar, dismissed the findings as \u201cabsolutely bonkers.\u201d LONDON \u2014 Just how many friends can one person have?",
        "author": "By Jenny Gross"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Birds Are Not on Lockdown, and More People Are Watching Them (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7909",
        "date": "2020-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/science/bird-watching-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Bird-watching has surged in popularity during the pandemic. It\u2019s easy to start, and you can do it anywhere \u2014 even from inside, and even in urban spaces. Bird-watching has surged in popularity during the pandemic. It\u2019s easy to start, and you can do it anywhere \u2014 even from inside, and even in urban spaces. The adult male scarlet tanager is a medium-size songbird with glaring crimson feathers and jet-black wings.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did Nazis Produce These Uranium Cubes? Researchers Look for an Answer. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7910",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/science/nazi-uranium-nuclear-program.html",
        "text": "Determining whether the cubes were produced by Nazi Germany could lead to more questions, such as whether the Nazis could have had enough to create a critical reaction. Determining whether the cubes were produced by Nazi Germany could lead to more questions, such as whether the Nazis could have had enough to create a critical reaction. The failure of Nazi Germany\u2019s nuclear program is well established in the historical record. What is less documented is how a handful of uranium cubes, possibly produced by the Nazis, ended up at laboratories in the United States.",
        "author": "By Jesus Jim\u00e9nez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trigger Warnings May Not Do Much, Early Studies Suggest (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7911",
        "date": "2019-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/science/trigger-warnings-studies.html",
        "text": "Researchers found that the warnings, which alert people to disturbing material, may pose little benefit or harm to those who view them. But more study is needed, they agree. Researchers found that the warnings, which alert people to disturbing material, may pose little benefit or harm to those who view them. But more study is needed, they agree. For years, trigger warnings have been the subject of impassioned academic debate: Do they protect people from distress or encourage fragility?",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Mask Guidelines Have Evolved (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7912",
        "date": "2021-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/science/face-mask-guidelines-timeline.html",
        "text": "Officials offered mixed messages about masks in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic before embracing them as a simple but effective tool for slowing the spread of Covid-19. Officials offered mixed messages about masks in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic before embracing them as a simple but effective tool for slowing the spread of Covid-19. A lot has changed since early 2020, when countries around the world first realized the potential threat of a highly contagious, and still mysterious, flulike virus.",
        "author": "By Marie Fazio"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Mask Guidelines Have Evolved (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7913",
        "date": "2021-04-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/science/face-mask-guidelines-timeline.html",
        "text": "Officials offered mixed messages about masks in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic before embracing them as a simple but effective tool for slowing the spread of Covid-19. Officials offered mixed messages about masks in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic before embracing them as a simple but effective tool for slowing the spread of Covid-19. A lot has changed since early 2020, when countries around the world first realized the potential threat of a highly contagious, and still mysterious, flulike virus.",
        "author": "By Marie Fazio"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northern Lights in the Northern U.S.? Maybe So, or Maybe a \u2018Dud\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7914",
        "date": "2019-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/science/northern-lights-united-states.html",
        "text": "The most likely time the phenomenon will occur is at 11 a.m. Eastern, experts say, but it can\u2019t be seen during the daytime. Bad weather would also hamper a sighting. The most likely time the phenomenon will occur is at 11 a.m. Eastern, experts say, but it can\u2019t be seen during the daytime. Bad weather would also hamper a sighting. People travel to the world\u2019s farthest reaches to see the northern lights, camping on glaciers in Greenland or flying in helicopters over Iceland in their pursuit.",
        "author": "By Mihir Zaveri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Sends a Rocket Plane to Space Again, in Its Highest Flight Yet (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7915",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/science/virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After its first spaceflight in December, Virgin Galactic sent the same vessel past the edge of the atmosphere for a second time on Friday. This time, the rocket plane went higher and faster than before \u2014 and it had three crew members on board instead of two.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Sends a Rocket Plane to Space Again, in Its Highest Flight Yet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7916",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/science/virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After its first spaceflight in December, Virgin Galactic sent the same vessel past the edge of the atmosphere for a second time on Friday. This time, the rocket plane went higher and faster than before \u2014 and it had three crew members on board instead of two.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Sends a Rocket Plane to Space Again, in Its Highest Flight Yet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7917",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/science/virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After its first spaceflight in December, Virgin Galactic sent the same vessel past the edge of the atmosphere for a second time on Friday. This time, the rocket plane went higher and faster than before \u2014 and it had three crew members on board instead of two.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Sends a Rocket Plane to Space Again, in Its Highest Flight Yet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7918",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/science/virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After sending pilots to the edge of space in December, the company moved a step closer to commercial space travel with another safe flight, this time carrying a test passenger. After its first spaceflight in December, Virgin Galactic sent the same vessel past the edge of the atmosphere for a second time on Friday. This time, the rocket plane went higher and faster than before \u2014 and it had three crew members on board instead of two.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jupiter and Saturn Head for Closest Visible Alignment in 800 Years (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7919",
        "date": "2020-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/science/space/jupiter-saturn-align-christmas-star.html",
        "text": "On Dec. 21, Jupiter and Saturn will appear to be no more than a dime\u2019s width apart in the night sky. The last time that could be seen was in 1226. On Dec. 21, Jupiter and Saturn will appear to be no more than a dime\u2019s width apart in the night sky. The last time that could be seen was in 1226. For months, Saturn and Jupiter have appeared to be courting, as the giant celestial bodies have gradually drawn nearer in the night sky.",
        "author": "By Michael Levenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Young Island on Earth May Reveal Clues to How Water Shaped Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7920",
        "date": "2019-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/science/tonga-island.html",
        "text": "NASA has closely studied the island, created four years ago by a volcanic eruption in the Pacific. Recently, one of its scientists was able to travel there to take on-the-ground measurements. NASA has closely studied the island, created four years ago by a volcanic eruption in the Pacific. Recently, one of its scientists was able to travel there to take on-the-ground measurements. Four years ago, an underwater volcano erupted in the South Pacific, creating a new island. And NASA took notice.",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "The H.M.S. Terror Sank in the 1840s. See What It Looks Like Now. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7921",
        "date": "2019-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/science/hms-terror-wreck-franklin-expedition.html",
        "text": "An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. About 170 years ago, a pair of English naval ships and their crew vanished while exploring in the Canadian arctic.",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "The H.M.S. Terror Sank in the 1840s. See What It Looks Like Now. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7922",
        "date": "2019-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/science/hms-terror-wreck-franklin-expedition.html",
        "text": "An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. About 170 years ago, a pair of English naval ships and their crew vanished while exploring in the Canadian arctic.",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "The H.M.S. Terror Sank in the 1840s. See What It Looks Like Now. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7923",
        "date": "2019-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/science/hms-terror-wreck-franklin-expedition.html",
        "text": "An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. About 170 years ago, a pair of English naval ships and their crew vanished while exploring in the Canadian arctic.",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "The H.M.S. Terror Sank in the 1840s. See What It Looks Like Now. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7924",
        "date": "2019-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/science/hms-terror-wreck-franklin-expedition.html",
        "text": "An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. An underwater exploration this month revealed the wreckage, much of it well preserved by cold water, lack of light and layers of silt, that likely contains documents with information about an ill-fated expedition that set sail in 1845. About 170 years ago, a pair of English naval ships and their crew vanished while exploring in the Canadian arctic.",
        "author": "By Niraj Chokshi"
    },
    {
        "title": "David E.H. Jones, Scientist Whose Alter Ego Challenged Conventions, Dies at 79 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7925",
        "date": "2017-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/science/david-joins-dead-wrote-science-columns-as-daedalus.html",
        "text": "In columns and books and on TV, Dr. Jones\u2019s clever fictional creation, Daedalus, tweaked laymen and scientists alike. In columns and books and on TV, Dr. Jones\u2019s clever fictional creation, Daedalus, tweaked laymen and scientists alike. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a cunning craftsman who occasionally outsmarted himself. The labyrinth he designed to contain the bovine Minotaur was so disorienting that even Daedalus got lost. He fashioned waxed wings that enabled him and his son, Icarus, to flee Crete, but Icarus drowned when the wax melted as he defiantly overreached and soared too close to the blazing sun.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Actress and Director to Start Making First Movie on Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7926",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/science/russia-space-launch.html",
        "text": "The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The first dog in space. The first man and woman. Now Russia has clinched another spaceflight first before the United States: Beating Hollywood to orbit.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Actress and Director to Start Making First Movie on Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7927",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/science/russia-space-launch.html",
        "text": "The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The first dog in space. The first man and woman. Now Russia has clinched another spaceflight first before the United States: Beating Hollywood to orbit.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Actress and Director to Start Making First Movie on Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7928",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/science/russia-space-launch.html",
        "text": "The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The first dog in space. The first man and woman. Now Russia has clinched another spaceflight first before the United States: Beating Hollywood to orbit.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Actress and Director to Start Making First Movie on Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7929",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/science/russia-space-launch.html",
        "text": "The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The first dog in space. The first man and woman. Now Russia has clinched another spaceflight first before the United States: Beating Hollywood to orbit.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Actress and Director to Start Making First Movie on Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7930",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/science/russia-space-launch.html",
        "text": "The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The pair arrived at the International Space Station on Tuesday, aiming to shoot scenes for the first feature film made in orbit. The first dog in space. The first man and woman. Now Russia has clinched another spaceflight first before the United States: Beating Hollywood to orbit.",
        "author": "By Joey Roulette"
    },
    {
        "title": "Black Rhinos Roam Chad for the First Time in 46 Years (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7931",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/science/rhinos-africa-extinction.html",
        "text": "The rhinoceroses were flown from South Africa to Chad in an effort to re-establish a population there. They will live \u2014 and hopefully breed \u2014 at Zakouma National Park. The rhinoceroses were flown from South Africa to Chad in an effort to re-establish a population there. They will live \u2014 and hopefully breed \u2014 at Zakouma National Park. Pigs don\u2019t fly yet, but rhinos do.",
        "author": "By Sandra E. Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "Black Rhinos Roam Chad for the First Time in 46 Years (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7932",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/science/rhinos-africa-extinction.html",
        "text": "The rhinoceroses were flown from South Africa to Chad in an effort to re-establish a population there. They will live \u2014 and hopefully breed \u2014 at Zakouma National Park. The rhinoceroses were flown from South Africa to Chad in an effort to re-establish a population there. They will live \u2014 and hopefully breed \u2014 at Zakouma National Park. Pigs don\u2019t fly yet, but rhinos do.",
        "author": "By Sandra E. Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Ghostly, Glowing Light Above Canada? It\u2019s Just Steve (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7933",
        "date": "2017-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/science/aurora-borealis-steve.html",
        "text": "Scientists are investigating a stream of hot, bright gas visible not far from the northern lights. Amateurs saw it first, and they gave it a name from a 2006 animated movie. Scientists are investigating a stream of hot, bright gas visible not far from the northern lights. Amateurs saw it first, and they gave it a name from a 2006 animated movie. If you happen to be in Canada on a clear night, look to the stars and maybe you\u2019ll see it: a strip of light stretching from east to west, all the way from the banks of Hudson Bay to the fjords of British Columbia.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Ghostly, Glowing Light Above Canada? It\u2019s Just Steve (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7934",
        "date": "2017-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/science/aurora-borealis-steve.html",
        "text": "Scientists are investigating a stream of hot, bright gas visible not far from the northern lights. Amateurs saw it first, and they gave it a name from a 2006 animated movie. Scientists are investigating a stream of hot, bright gas visible not far from the northern lights. Amateurs saw it first, and they gave it a name from a 2006 animated movie. If you happen to be in Canada on a clear night, look to the stars and maybe you\u2019ll see it: a strip of light stretching from east to west, all the way from the banks of Hudson Bay to the fjords of British Columbia.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s what to know about breakthrough infections and the Delta variant. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7935",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/science/heres-what-to-know-about-breakthrough-infections-and-the-delta-variant.html",
        "text": "Amid new evidence that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections can carry as much coronavirus as unvaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged people in high-transmission areas to wear masks in public indoor spaces, regardless of their vaccination status.  Amid new evidence that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections can carry as much coronavirus as unvaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has urged people in high-transmission areas to wear masks in public indoor spaces, regardless of their vaccination status.",
        "author": "By Apoorva Mandavilli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Women Who Made the Moon Landing Possible (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7936",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/science/moon-landing-women-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "That \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d happened thanks to plenty of women. That \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d happened thanks to plenty of women. You\u2019re reading In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. ",
        "author": "By Maya Salam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Women Who Made the Moon Landing Possible (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7937",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/science/moon-landing-women-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "That \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d happened thanks to plenty of women. That \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d happened thanks to plenty of women. You\u2019re reading In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. ",
        "author": "By Maya Salam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Five Women Who Made the Moon Landing Possible (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7938",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/science/moon-landing-women-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "That \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d happened thanks to plenty of women. That \u201cgiant leap for mankind\u201d happened thanks to plenty of women. You\u2019re reading In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. ",
        "author": "By Maya Salam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Most Wikipedia Profiles Are of Men. This Scientist Is Changing That. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7939",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/science/jess-wade-wikipedia-science-women.html",
        "text": "Jessica Wade has added nearly 700 Wikipedia biographies for important female and minority scientists in less than two years. Jessica Wade has added nearly 700 Wikipedia biographies for important female and minority scientists in less than two years. You\u2019re reading In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. ",
        "author": "By Maya Salam"
    },
    {
        "title": "Most Wikipedia Profiles Are of Men. This Scientist Is Changing That. (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7940",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/science/jess-wade-wikipedia-science-women.html",
        "text": "Jessica Wade has added nearly 700 Wikipedia biographies for important female and minority scientists in less than two years. Jessica Wade has added nearly 700 Wikipedia biographies for important female and minority scientists in less than two years. You\u2019re reading In Her Words, where women rule the headlines. ",
        "author": "By Maya Salam"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Has Crashed Into the Moon? (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7941",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/20/science/chandrayaan-2-moon-india.html",
        "text": "60 years of moon crashes. 60 years of moon crashes. 60 years of moon crashes.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Has Crashed Into the Moon? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7942",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/20/science/chandrayaan-2-moon-india.html",
        "text": "60 years of moon crashes. 60 years of moon crashes. 60 years of moon crashes.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Has Crashed Into the Moon? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7943",
        "date": "2019-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/20/science/chandrayaan-2-moon-india.html",
        "text": "60 years of moon crashes. 60 years of moon crashes. 60 years of moon crashes.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "That Tiny Dot? It\u2019s the 2019 Transit of Mercury (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7944",
        "date": "2019-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/08/science/mercury-transits-the-sun.html",
        "text": "The planet slid across the face of the sun on Monday. The planet slid across the face of the sun on Monday. The planet slid across the face of the sun on Monday.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Corum"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Tour of China\u2019s Future Tiangong Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7945",
        "date": "2021-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/science/tiangong-space-station.html",
        "text": "An illustrated guide to the different sections of China\u2019s new space station. An illustrated guide to the different sections of China\u2019s new space station. An illustrated guide to the different sections of China\u2019s new space station.",
        "author": "By Eleanor Lutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Tour of China\u2019s Future Tiangong Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7946",
        "date": "2021-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/science/tiangong-space-station.html",
        "text": "An illustrated guide to the different sections of China\u2019s new space station. An illustrated guide to the different sections of China\u2019s new space station. An illustrated guide to the different sections of China\u2019s new space station.",
        "author": "By Eleanor Lutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Flu Vanished During Covid. What Will Its Return Look Like? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7947",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/22/science/flu-season-coronavirus-pandemic.html",
        "text": "The latest flu season, which normally would have run until next month, essentially never happened. The latest flu season, which normally would have run until next month, essentially never happened. The latest flu season, which normally would have run until next month, essentially never happened.",
        "author": "By Keith Collins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Opening Windows Is a Key to Reopening Schools (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7948",
        "date": "2021-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/26/science/reopen-schools-safety-ventilation.html",
        "text": "A simulation of airflow in a real New York City classroom shows how simple ventilation and filtration can reduce the probability of coronavirus exposure. A simulation of airflow in a real New York City classroom shows how simple ventilation and filtration can reduce the probability of coronavirus exposure. A simulation of airflow in a real New York City classroom shows how simple ventilation and filtration can reduce the probability of coronavirus exposure.",
        "author": "By Nick Bartzokas, Mika Gr\u00f6ndahl, Karthik Patanjali, Miles Peyton, Bedel Saget and Umi Syam"
    },
    {
        "title": "This 3-D Simulation Shows Why Social Distancing Is So Important (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7949",
        "date": "2020-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/14/science/coronavirus-transmission-cough-6-feet-ar-ul.html",
        "text": "We visualized a cough to show how far respiratory droplets can spread. If you haven\u2019t been keeping your distance to fight the coronavirus, this may persuade you. We visualized a cough to show how far respiratory droplets can spread. If you haven\u2019t been keeping your distance to fight the coronavirus, this may persuade you. We visualized a cough to show how far respiratory droplets can spread. If you haven\u2019t been keeping your distance to fight the coronavirus, this may persuade you.",
        "author": "By Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Bedel Saget, Karthik Patanjali, Or Fleisher and Gabriel Gianordoli"
    },
    {
        "title": "No Data Manipulation in 2015 Climate Study, Researchers Say (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7950",
        "date": "2017-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/science/2015-climate-study-data.html",
        "text": "A British tabloid said American government scientists overstated global temperatures to influence climate talks. Other scientists say that did not happen. A British tabloid said American government scientists overstated global temperatures to influence climate talks. Other scientists say that did not happen. In an article that appeared online in The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid, the journalist David Rose described \u201castonishing evidence\u201d that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States had \u201crushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris agreement on climate change.\u201d",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket, Its First Since Explosion on Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7951",
        "date": "2017-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/science/spacex-falcon-9-iridium-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The return to business for Elon Musk\u2019s company was successful, despite being overshadowed by questions about the viability of his long-range plans. The return to business for Elon Musk\u2019s company was successful, despite being overshadowed by questions about the viability of his long-range plans. VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. \u2014 A Falcon 9 rocket roared into the sky on Saturday carrying 10 communications satellites \u2014 a return by SpaceX and its billionaire leader, Elon Musk, to the business of launching satellites to orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket, Its First Since Explosion on Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7952",
        "date": "2017-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/science/spacex-falcon-9-iridium-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The return to business for Elon Musk\u2019s company was successful, despite being overshadowed by questions about the viability of his long-range plans. The return to business for Elon Musk\u2019s company was successful, despite being overshadowed by questions about the viability of his long-range plans. VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. \u2014 A Falcon 9 rocket roared into the sky on Saturday carrying 10 communications satellites \u2014 a return by SpaceX and its billionaire leader, Elon Musk, to the business of launching satellites to orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Rocket, Its First Since Explosion on Launchpad (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7953",
        "date": "2017-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/science/spacex-falcon-9-iridium-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The return to business for Elon Musk\u2019s company was successful, despite being overshadowed by questions about the viability of his long-range plans. The return to business for Elon Musk\u2019s company was successful, despite being overshadowed by questions about the viability of his long-range plans. VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. \u2014 A Falcon 9 rocket roared into the sky on Saturday carrying 10 communications satellites \u2014 a return by SpaceX and its billionaire leader, Elon Musk, to the business of launching satellites to orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Will Suffer Under Trump\u2019s Travel Ban, Researchers Say (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7954",
        "date": "2017-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/science/scientists-donald-trump-travel-ban.html",
        "text": "College officials and policy makers say that new restrictions on travel will affect thousands of students and researchers and set back scientific inquiry. College officials and policy makers say that new restrictions on travel will affect thousands of students and researchers and set back scientific inquiry. Researchers, academic officials and science policy makers are expressing alarm at President Trump\u2019s order barring entry to the United States to people from certain predominantly Muslim countries, saying it could hinder research, affect recruitment of top scientists and dampen the free exchange of scientific ideas.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Recycled Rockets Could Drop Costs, Speed Space Travel (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7955",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/space-x-reuseable-rockets-launch.html",
        "text": "Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. SpaceX did something on Thursday that really hadn\u2019t been done before: launch a cheaper, partially-used rocket into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Recycled Rockets Could Drop Costs, Speed Space Travel (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "7956",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/space-x-reuseable-rockets-launch.html",
        "text": "Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. SpaceX did something on Thursday that really hadn\u2019t been done before: launch a cheaper, partially-used rocket into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Recycled Rockets Could Drop Costs, Speed Space Travel (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7957",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/space-x-reuseable-rockets-launch.html",
        "text": "Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. SpaceX did something on Thursday that really hadn\u2019t been done before: launch a cheaper, partially-used rocket into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Recycled Rockets Could Drop Costs, Speed Space Travel (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7958",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/space-x-reuseable-rockets-launch.html",
        "text": "Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. SpaceX did something on Thursday that really hadn\u2019t been done before: launch a cheaper, partially-used rocket into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Recycled Rockets Could Drop Costs, Speed Space Travel (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7959",
        "date": "2017-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/science/space-x-reuseable-rockets-launch.html",
        "text": "Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. Reusing boosters are not a new idea, but SpaceX proved on Thursday the technology works. It may be a faster gateway to the solar system. SpaceX did something on Thursday that really hadn\u2019t been done before: launch a cheaper, partially-used rocket into orbit.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7960",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/science/spacex-moon-tourists.html",
        "text": "If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back to Earth before the end of next year. If they manage that feat, the passengers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7961",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/science/spacex-moon-tourists.html",
        "text": "If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back to Earth before the end of next year. If they manage that feat, the passengers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7962",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/science/spacex-moon-tourists.html",
        "text": "If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back to Earth before the end of next year. If they manage that feat, the passengers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7963",
        "date": "2017-02-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/science/spacex-moon-tourists.html",
        "text": "If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. If the mission proceeds as planned, the private space travelers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back to Earth before the end of next year. If they manage that feat, the passengers would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Edward E. David Jr., Who Elevated Science Under Nixon, Dies at 92 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "7964",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/science/edward-david-dead-science-adviser-to-nixon.html",
        "text": "Dr. David sought to make science more relevant and accessible to presidents and to the public, saying, \u201cWe can\u2019t leave science and technology to the experts.\u201d Dr. David sought to make science more relevant and accessible to presidents and to the public, saying, \u201cWe can\u2019t leave science and technology to the experts.\u201d Edward E. David Jr., a researcher who sought to make science more relevant and accessible to presidents and to the public, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Bedminster, N.J. He was 92.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Edward E. David Jr., Who Elevated Science Under Nixon, Dies at 92 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7965",
        "date": "2017-03-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/science/edward-david-dead-science-adviser-to-nixon.html",
        "text": "Dr. David sought to make science more relevant and accessible to presidents and to the public, saying, \u201cWe can\u2019t leave science and technology to the experts.\u201d Dr. David sought to make science more relevant and accessible to presidents and to the public, saying, \u201cWe can\u2019t leave science and technology to the experts.\u201d Edward E. David Jr., a researcher who sought to make science more relevant and accessible to presidents and to the public, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Bedminster, N.J. He was 92.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Charles R. Bentley, 87, Pioneer of Polar Science, Is Dead (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "7966",
        "date": "2017-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/science/earth/charles-r-bentley-87-pioneer-of-polar-science-is-dead.html",
        "text": "His answer to the question \u201cWould anybody like to go to the Antarctic?\u201d led him to go where no one else had gone and measure what no one else had measured. His answer to the question \u201cWould anybody like to go to the Antarctic?\u201d led him to go where no one else had gone and measure what no one else had measured. Charles R. Bentley, who in the 1950s led a team of scientists that measured the West Antarctic Ice Sheet for the first time, and who later explained the mechanics of the fast-moving ice streams that drain the sheet, died on Aug. 19 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 87.",
        "author": "By William Grimes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Charles R. Bentley, 87, Pioneer of Polar Science, Is Dead (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7967",
        "date": "2017-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/science/earth/charles-r-bentley-87-pioneer-of-polar-science-is-dead.html",
        "text": "His answer to the question \u201cWould anybody like to go to the Antarctic?\u201d led him to go where no one else had gone and measure what no one else had measured. His answer to the question \u201cWould anybody like to go to the Antarctic?\u201d led him to go where no one else had gone and measure what no one else had measured. Charles R. Bentley, who in the 1950s led a team of scientists that measured the West Antarctic Ice Sheet for the first time, and who later explained the mechanics of the fast-moving ice streams that drain the sheet, died on Aug. 19 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 87.",
        "author": "By William Grimes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Radio Bursts Traced to Faraway Galaxy, but Caller Is Probably \u2018Ordinary Physics\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7968",
        "date": "2017-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio-burst-galaxy.html",
        "text": "Researchers say the bursts could be caused by reactions between a neutron star and debris, or perhaps from some unexpected quirk of a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. Researchers say the bursts could be caused by reactions between a neutron star and debris, or perhaps from some unexpected quirk of a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. Astronomers have traced a series of brief, enigmatic bursts of radio waves to a galaxy far, far away and indeed a long time ago \u2014 some three billion years or so.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 02/06/2007 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7969",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/",
        "text": "This week: Space trash, the insula and skin bacteria. This week: Space trash, the insula and skin bacteria. This week: Space trash, the insula and skin bacteria.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 04/04/2006 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7970",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/",
        "text": "This week: Iran in space, flying ants and snakes vs. toads. This week: Iran in space, flying ants and snakes vs. toads. This week: Iran in space, flying ants and snakes vs. toads.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 06/08/2010 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7971",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2010/06/08/science/08scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This Week: An assault on Alzheimer\u2019s, inflatable space stations, and mongoose culture. This Week: An assault on Alzheimer\u2019s, inflatable space stations, and mongoose culture. This Week: An assault on Alzheimer\u2019s, inflatable space stations, and mongoose culture.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 05/30/2006 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7972",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/",
        "text": "This week: Intelligent space robots, why the New Orleans levees failed and sick lobsters. This week: Intelligent space robots, why the New Orleans levees failed and sick lobsters. This week: Intelligent space robots, why the New Orleans levees failed and sick lobsters.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Update for 05/02/2006 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7973",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/",
        "text": "The topics discussed are space time, building better bridges, and the mustard garlic weed. The topics discussed are space time, building better bridges, and the mustard garlic weed. The topics discussed are space time, building better bridges, and the mustard garlic weed.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 8/11/2009 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7974",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2009/08/11/science/11scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This week: The Science of naming; crows and pitchers; and the ethics of space travel.\n This week: The Science of naming; crows and pitchers; and the ethics of space travel.\n This week: The Science of naming; crows and pitchers; and the ethics of space travel.\n",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 12/21/2010 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7975",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2010/12/20/science/21scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This week: a hard look at the human heart, the fear factor, and suiting up for space. This week: a hard look at the human heart, the fear factor, and suiting up for space. This week: a hard look at the human heart, the fear factor, and suiting up for space.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 03/09/2010 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7976",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2010/03/09/science/09scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This Week: The nuclear plot thickens in Iran, lizards just keep getting smarter, and mad men in space. This Week: The nuclear plot thickens in Iran, lizards just keep getting smarter, and mad men in space. This Week: The nuclear plot thickens in Iran, lizards just keep getting smarter, and mad men in space.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 09/16/2008 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7977",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2008/09/16/science/16scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This week: Leaving the Emergency Room in the dark, tracking climate changes since 1896 and creatures that can survive in space. This week: Leaving the Emergency Room in the dark, tracking climate changes since 1896 and creatures that can survive in space. This week: Leaving the Emergency Room in the dark, tracking climate changes since 1896 and creatures that can survive in space.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NYT: Science Times for 10/14/2008 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7978",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2008/10/13/science/14scienceupdate-pod.html",
        "text": "This week: The U.S. and Russia together in space, shoes and invasive species, and a few things you might want to know about medical scans.\n\n\n\n This week: The U.S. and Russia together in space, shoes and invasive species, and a few things you might want to know about medical scans.\n\n\n\n This week: The U.S. and Russia together in space, shoes and invasive species, and a few things you might want to know about medical scans.\n\n\n\n",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Martinus Veltman, Who Made Key Contribution in Physics, Dies at 89 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7979",
        "date": "2021-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/science/martinus-veltman-dead.html",
        "text": "He shared a Nobel Prize for research that helped explain the fundamental forces in the universe. He shared a Nobel Prize for research that helped explain the fundamental forces in the universe. Martinus J.G. Veltman, a Dutch theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for work that explained the structure of some of the fundamental forces in the universe, helping to lay the groundwork for the development of the Standard Model, the backbone of quantum physics, died on Jan. 4 in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. He was 89.",
        "author": "By Dylan Loeb McClain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Joan Feynman, Who Shined Light on the Aurora Borealis, Dies at 93 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7980",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/science/joan-feynman-dead.html",
        "text": "Her mother told her that women\u2019s brains \u201ccan\u2019t do science.\u201d She would prove her mother very wrong. Her mother told her that women\u2019s brains \u201ccan\u2019t do science.\u201d She would prove her mother very wrong. Joan Feynman grew up in the shadow of her older brother, the brilliant scientist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. When she expressed interest in following in his footsteps, her mother crushed the impulse.",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Joan Feynman, Who Shined Light on the Aurora Borealis, Dies at 93 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7981",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/science/joan-feynman-dead.html",
        "text": "Her mother told her that women\u2019s brains \u201ccan\u2019t do science.\u201d She would prove her mother very wrong. Her mother told her that women\u2019s brains \u201ccan\u2019t do science.\u201d She would prove her mother very wrong. Joan Feynman grew up in the shadow of her older brother, the brilliant scientist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. When she expressed interest in following in his footsteps, her mother crushed the impulse.",
        "author": "By Katharine Q. Seelye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Steven Gubser, a Bright Star in the Physics Universe, Dies at 47 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7982",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/science/steven-gubser-dead.html",
        "text": "He did groundbreaking work toward finding a \u201ctheory of everything.\u201d He died in an Alpine rock-climbing accident. He did groundbreaking work toward finding a \u201ctheory of everything.\u201d He died in an Alpine rock-climbing accident. Steven Gubser, a Princeton theoretical physicist who did groundbreaking work in trying to unite the two great fields of physics \u2014 quantum mechanics and general relativity \u2014 as part of a broad effort in the scientific community to devise \u201ca theory of everything,\u201d died on Aug. 3 in a rock-climbing accident in the French Alps. He was 47.",
        "author": "By Dylan Loeb McClain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lotfi Zadeh, Father of Mathematical \u2018Fuzzy Logic,\u2019 Dies at 96 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7983",
        "date": "2017-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/science/lotfi-zadeh-father-of-mathematical-fuzzy-logic-dies-at-96.html",
        "text": "Professor Zadeh sought to apply mathematics to the ambiguous ways people talk, think and interact with the world. Professor Zadeh sought to apply mathematics to the ambiguous ways people talk, think and interact with the world. Lotfi Zadeh, the computer scientist and electrical engineer whose theories of \u201cfuzzy logic\u201d rippled across academia and industry, influencing everything from linguistics, economics and medicine to air-conditioners, vacuum cleaners and rice cookers, died on Wednesday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 96.",
        "author": "By Cade Metz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stuart Bowyer, Astronomer Who Lent His Ear to the Cosmos, Dies at 86 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7984",
        "date": "2020-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/science/space/stuart-bowyer-dead.html",
        "text": "He was a scientist who succeeded in seeing the unseeable and hoped to tune in to extraterrestrial life. He was a scientist who succeeded in seeing the unseeable and hoped to tune in to extraterrestrial life. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stuart Bowyer, Astronomer Who Lent His Ear to the Cosmos, Dies at 86 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7985",
        "date": "2020-10-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/science/space/stuart-bowyer-dead.html",
        "text": "He was a scientist who succeeded in seeing the unseeable and hoped to tune in to extraterrestrial life. He was a scientist who succeeded in seeing the unseeable and hoped to tune in to extraterrestrial life. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "George Coyne, 87, Vatican Astronomer and Galileo Defender, Dies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7986",
        "date": "2020-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/science/the-rev-george-c-coyne-dead.html",
        "text": "While seeking to reconcile science and religion, Father Coyne also vigorously supported Darwin and challenged believers in intelligent design. While seeking to reconcile science and religion, Father Coyne also vigorously supported Darwin and challenged believers in intelligent design. The Rev. George V. Coyne, a Jesuit astrophysicist who as the longtime director of the Vatican Observatory defended Galileo and Darwin against doctrinaire Roman Catholics, and also challenged atheists by insisting that science and religion could coexist, died on Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y. He was 87.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Donald Klein, Who Expanded the Psychiatric Toolbox, Dies at 90 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7987",
        "date": "2019-08-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/science/donald-klein-dead.html",
        "text": "His studies of the use of drugs to treat disorders led many to consider him \u201cthe father of psychopharmacology.\u201d His studies of the use of drugs to treat disorders led many to consider him \u201cthe father of psychopharmacology.\u201d Dr. Donald F. Klein, whose research into panic attacks, depression, childhood anxiety disorders and related areas reshaped how such conditions are thought about and treated, died on Aug. 7 in Manhattan. He was 90.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Masatoshi Koshiba, 94, Dies; Nobel Winner Tracked Ghostly Neutrinos (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7988",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/science/masatoshi-koshiba-dead.html",
        "text": "A physics teacher had flunked him, denigrating his abilities. Dr. Koshiba set out to prove the teacher was wrong. A physics teacher had flunked him, denigrating his abilities. Dr. Koshiba set out to prove the teacher was wrong. Masatoshi Koshiba, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for studies of the ghostly cosmic particles known as neutrinos, died on Thursday  in Edogawa Hospital in Tokyo. He was 94.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Maurice Bluestein, Who Modernized the Wind Chill Index, Dies at 76 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7989",
        "date": "2017-09-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/science/maurice-bluestein-who-modernized-the-wind-chill-index-dies-at-76.html",
        "text": "While shoveling his daughter\u2019s driveway one winter day, Dr. Bluestein, a scientist, realized something: The wind chill index was wrong. While shoveling his daughter\u2019s driveway one winter day, Dr. Bluestein, a scientist, realized something: The wind chill index was wrong. On frigid winter mornings, when weather forecasters are trying to describe whether it\u2019s a hat-scarf-gloves day or if just a warm coat will do, they will take the temperature (T) and wind speed (V) and plug the numbers into a handy equation: WCT = 35.74 + 0.6215T \u2013 35.75V0.16 + 0.4275TV0.16.",
        "author": "By Amisha Padnani"
    },
    {
        "title": "George A. Keyworth II, Reagan Science Adviser, Dies at 77 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7990",
        "date": "2017-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/science/george-a-keyworth-ii-reagan-science-adviser-dies-at-77.html",
        "text": "In the face of stiff opposition, Dr. Keyworth was a strong advocate of the antimissile plan known as Star Wars. In the face of stiff opposition, Dr. Keyworth was a strong advocate of the antimissile plan known as Star Wars. George A. Keyworth II, a science adviser to President Ronald Reagan who strongly backed the antimissile plan known as Star Wars and came to see it as an important factor in the Soviet collapse, died on Wednesday in Monterey, Calif. He was 77.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Allan Rechtschaffen, Eminent Sleep Researcher, Dies at 93 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7991",
        "date": "2021-12-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/science/allan-rechtschaffen-dead.html",
        "text": "He studied sleep deprivation, dreams, narcolepsy and insomnia. But he was puzzled by the ultimate question: Why do we sleep? He studied sleep deprivation, dreams, narcolepsy and insomnia. But he was puzzled by the ultimate question: Why do we sleep? Allan Rechtschaffen, an indefatigable sleep researcher at the University of Chicago who tested the effects of sleep deprivation, studied dreaming, narcolepsy, napping and insomnia and standardized the measurement of sleep stages, died on Nov. 29 at his home in Chicago. He was 93.",
        "author": "By Richard Sandomir"
    },
    {
        "title": "Christopher Kraft, NASA Mission Control\u2019s Founding Father, Dies at 95 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7992",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/christopher-kraft-dead-nasa.html",
        "text": "He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the legendary founder of NASA\u2019s mission control, who directed America\u2019s first piloted orbital flights, oversaw the Apollo 11 lunar landing and was director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, died on Monday in Houston, two days after the 50th anniversary of that historic moment on the moon. He was 95.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Christopher Kraft, NASA Mission Control\u2019s Founding Father, Dies at 95 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7993",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/christopher-kraft-dead-nasa.html",
        "text": "He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the legendary founder of NASA\u2019s mission control, who directed America\u2019s first piloted orbital flights, oversaw the Apollo 11 lunar landing and was director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, died on Monday in Houston, two days after the 50th anniversary of that historic moment on the moon. He was 95.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Christopher Kraft, NASA Mission Control\u2019s Founding Father, Dies at 95 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7994",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/christopher-kraft-dead-nasa.html",
        "text": "He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the legendary founder of NASA\u2019s mission control, who directed America\u2019s first piloted orbital flights, oversaw the Apollo 11 lunar landing and was director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, died on Monday in Houston, two days after the 50th anniversary of that historic moment on the moon. He was 95.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Christopher Kraft, NASA Mission Control\u2019s Founding Father, Dies at 95 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "7995",
        "date": "2019-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/christopher-kraft-dead-nasa.html",
        "text": "He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. He directed the first piloted orbital flights, orchestrated spacewalks, oversaw the first lunar landing and led the space center in Houston. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the legendary founder of NASA\u2019s mission control, who directed America\u2019s first piloted orbital flights, oversaw the Apollo 11 lunar landing and was director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, died on Monday in Houston, two days after the 50th anniversary of that historic moment on the moon. He was 95.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Frank Press, White House Science Adviser, Is Dead at 95 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7996",
        "date": "2020-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/science/frank-press-dead.html",
        "text": "After serving as President Jimmy Carter\u2019s chief aide on scientific matters, he led the National Academy of Sciences for 12 years. After serving as President Jimmy Carter\u2019s chief aide on scientific matters, he led the National Academy of Sciences for 12 years. Frank Press, who was a key voice in American science policy as chief science adviser to President Jimmy Carter and then as president of the National Academy of Sciences, promoting international cooperation at a time when Cold War tensions still predominated, died on Wednesday in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he lived in a retirement community. He was 95.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gilbert V. Levin, Who Said He Found Signs of Life on Mars, Dies at 97 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "7997",
        "date": "2021-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/science/space/gilbert-v-levin-dead.html",
        "text": "Most planetary scientists dismissed his conclusions, but he remained steadfast that the experiment he conducted in the mid-1970s had been a success. Most planetary scientists dismissed his conclusions, but he remained steadfast that the experiment he conducted in the mid-1970s had been a success. Gilbert V. Levin, whose experiment on NASA\u2019s Viking mission in the 1970s seemed to suggest that there might be life in the soil of Mars, died on July 26 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 97.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gilbert V. Levin, Who Said He Found Signs of Life on Mars, Dies at 97 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "7998",
        "date": "2021-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/science/space/gilbert-v-levin-dead.html",
        "text": "Most planetary scientists dismissed his conclusions, but he remained steadfast that the experiment he conducted in the mid-1970s had been a success. Most planetary scientists dismissed his conclusions, but he remained steadfast that the experiment he conducted in the mid-1970s had been a success. Gilbert V. Levin, whose experiment on NASA\u2019s Viking mission in the 1970s seemed to suggest that there might be life in the soil of Mars, died on July 26 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 97.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gilbert V. Levin, Who Said He Found Signs of Life on Mars, Dies at 97 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "7999",
        "date": "2021-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/science/space/gilbert-v-levin-dead.html",
        "text": "Most planetary scientists dismissed his conclusions, but he remained steadfast that the experiment he conducted in the mid-1970s had been a success. Most planetary scientists dismissed his conclusions, but he remained steadfast that the experiment he conducted in the mid-1970s had been a success. Gilbert V. Levin, whose experiment on NASA\u2019s Viking mission in the 1970s seemed to suggest that there might be life in the soil of Mars, died on July 26 at a hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 97.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ronald L. Graham, Who Unlocked the Magic of Numbers, Dies at 84 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8000",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/science/ronald-l-graham-who-unlocked-the-magic-of-numbers-dies-at-84.html",
        "text": "He was pre-eminent in the field of discrete mathematics, coming up with \u201csome really pretty cool stuff.\u201d (He was also a world-class juggler.) He was pre-eminent in the field of discrete mathematics, coming up with \u201csome really pretty cool stuff.\u201d (He was also a world-class juggler.) Ronald L. Graham, who gained renown with wide-ranging theorems in a field known as discrete mathematics that have found uses in diverse areas, ranging from making telephone and computer networks more efficient to explaining the dynamics of juggling, died on July 6 at his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 84.",
        "author": "By Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8001",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/science/katherine-johnson-dead.html",
        "text": "She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.",
        "author": "By Margalit Fox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8002",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/science/katherine-johnson-dead.html",
        "text": "She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.",
        "author": "By Margalit Fox"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ron Drever, Physicist Who Helped Confirm Einstein Theory, Dies at 85 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8003",
        "date": "2017-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/science/ron-drever-physicist-who-helped-confirm-einstein-theory-dies-at-85.html",
        "text": "Dr. Drever, a Scotsman long associated with Caltech, played a key role in the detection of gravitational waves \u2014 space-time ripples predicted by Einstein. Dr. Drever, a Scotsman long associated with Caltech, played a key role in the detection of gravitational waves \u2014 space-time ripples predicted by Einstein. Ron Drever, a physicist whose experimental ingenuity helped enable scientists to tap into the deepest levels of reality and detect vibrations of the void known as gravitational waves \u2014 space-time ripples that had been predicted by Einstein a century ago but had never before been seen \u2014 died on March 7 in Edinburgh. He was 85.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "R. Allen Gardner, 91, Dies; Taught Sign Language to a Chimp Named Washoe (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8004",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/science/r-allen-gardner-dead.html",
        "text": "He and his wife and collaborator made headlines with their finding that they could communicate with a young ape using the language of the deaf. He and his wife and collaborator made headlines with their finding that they could communicate with a young ape using the language of the deaf. Washoe was 10 months old when her foster parents began teaching her to talk, and five months later they were already trumpeting her success. Not only had she learned words; she could also string them together, creating expressions like \u201cwater birds\u201d when she saw a pair of swans and \u201copen flower\u201d to gain admittance to a garden.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aleksei Leonov, First to Walk in Space, Dies at 85 (NYT: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8005",
        "date": "2019-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/science/space/aleksei-leonov-dead.html",
        "text": "The Russian cosmonaut\u2019s thrilling feat in 1965 nearly cost him his life, but raised Soviet prestige during the Cold War space race against the United States. The Russian cosmonaut\u2019s thrilling feat in 1965 nearly cost him his life, but raised Soviet prestige during the Cold War space race against the United States. ",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aleksei Leonov, First to Walk in Space, Dies at 85 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8006",
        "date": "2019-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/science/space/aleksei-leonov-dead.html",
        "text": "The Russian cosmonaut\u2019s thrilling feat in 1965 nearly cost him his life, but raised Soviet prestige during the Cold War space race against the United States. The Russian cosmonaut\u2019s thrilling feat in 1965 nearly cost him his life, but raised Soviet prestige during the Cold War space race against the United States. ",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Aleksei Leonov, First to Walk in Space, Dies at 85 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8007",
        "date": "2019-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/science/space/aleksei-leonov-dead.html",
        "text": "The Russian cosmonaut\u2019s thrilling feat in 1965 nearly cost him his life, but raised Soviet prestige during the Cold War space race against the United States. The Russian cosmonaut\u2019s thrilling feat in 1965 nearly cost him his life, but raised Soviet prestige during the Cold War space race against the United States. ",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard C. Lewontin, Eminent Geneticist With a Sharp Pen, Dies at 92 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8008",
        "date": "2021-07-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/science/richard-c-lewontin-dead.html",
        "text": "He demonstrated that differences in DNA between groups of people were far smaller than originally believed. He was also a noted opponent of aspects of sociobiology. He demonstrated that differences in DNA between groups of people were far smaller than originally believed. He was also a noted opponent of aspects of sociobiology. Richard C. Lewontin, widely considered one of the most brilliant geneticists of the modern era and a prolific, elegant and often caustic writer who condemned the facile use of genetics and evolutionary biology to \u201cexplain\u201d human nature, died on Sunday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92.",
        "author": "By Natalie Angier"
    },
    {
        "title": "Antony Hewish, Astronomer Honored for the Discovery of Pulsars, Dies at 97 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8009",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/science/space/antony-hewish-dead.html",
        "text": "He received a Nobel Prize for his finding. Some criticized the prize because it was a graduate student in his lab who had first detected the signals. He received a Nobel Prize for his finding. Some criticized the prize because it was a graduate student in his lab who had first detected the signals. Antony Hewish, a pioneer of radio astronomy and a discoverer of a surprising class of stars known as pulsars, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize, died on Monday. He was 97.",
        "author": "By Nicholas Wade"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robert Barth, a Pioneer of Deep-Sea Diving, Dies at 89 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8010",
        "date": "2020-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/robert-barth-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Barth was the sole \u201caquanaut\u201d to play a major role in all four stages of the Navy\u2019s landmark program to open the depths to long-term habitation. Mr. Barth was the sole \u201caquanaut\u201d to play a major role in all four stages of the Navy\u2019s landmark program to open the depths to long-term habitation. The hatch would not open.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robert Barth, a Pioneer of Deep-Sea Diving, Dies at 89 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8011",
        "date": "2020-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/robert-barth-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Barth was the sole \u201caquanaut\u201d to play a major role in all four stages of the Navy\u2019s landmark program to open the depths to long-term habitation. Mr. Barth was the sole \u201caquanaut\u201d to play a major role in all four stages of the Navy\u2019s landmark program to open the depths to long-term habitation. The hatch would not open.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robert Barth, a Pioneer of Deep-Sea Diving, Dies at 89 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8012",
        "date": "2020-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/robert-barth-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Barth was the sole \u201caquanaut\u201d to play a major role in all four stages of the Navy\u2019s landmark program to open the depths to long-term habitation. Mr. Barth was the sole \u201caquanaut\u201d to play a major role in all four stages of the Navy\u2019s landmark program to open the depths to long-term habitation. The hatch would not open.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Toshihide Maskawa, 81, Dies; Nobelist Helped Unlock a Cosmic Mystery (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8013",
        "date": "2021-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/science/space/toshihide-maskawa-dead.html",
        "text": "Why did the universe not destroy itself in the Big Bang, in a collision of matter and antimatter? A eureka moment in the bathtub led to an answer. Why did the universe not destroy itself in the Big Bang, in a collision of matter and antimatter? A eureka moment in the bathtub led to an answer. Toshihide Maskawa, a theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for correctly predicting the existence of three families of fundamental particles called quarks, which helped explain one of the most important phenomena in nature and one of the enduring mysteries of the universe \u2014 how it is that we even exist \u2014 died on July 23 in Kyoto, Japan. He was 81.",
        "author": "By Dylan Loeb McClain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Staring at the Sun, as It Disappeared (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8014",
        "date": "2019-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/science/staring-at-the-sun-as-it-disappeared.html",
        "text": "Vintage eclipse photos show our fascination with celestial shadows. Vintage eclipse photos show our fascination with celestial shadows. Watching a total eclipse is an emotional experience. \u201cNo language will ever be adequate to describe the divine beauty of this phenomenon,\u201d the astronomer Willem Jacob Luyten wrote in The New York Times in January 1925. \u201cIf you have seen it, the magnificence of the corona will forever stay in your memory with ineffable accuracy as the most overwhelming spectacle that nature affords.\u201d",
        "author": "By Jessie Wender"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Creative Force in Understanding Genes (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8015",
        "date": "2019-09-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/science/a-creative-force-in-understanding-genes.html",
        "text": "Edith Heard grew up wanting to be a musician and is now an expert in epigenetics. Edith Heard grew up wanting to be a musician and is now an expert in epigenetics. This is the first article in a new series on Visionaries. The New York Times selected people from all over the world who are pushing the boundaries of their fields, from science and technology to culture and sports. ",
        "author": "By Karen Weintraub"
    },
    {
        "title": "Taking On Climate Change (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8016",
        "date": "2018-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/science/taking-on-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Trying to solve the problems that are affecting our world, and believing that they can make a difference. Trying to solve the problems that are affecting our world, and believing that they can make a difference. Nathaniel Stinnett rarely talks about the environment; climate change even less.",
        "author": "By Tatiana Schlossberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "A.I. Is Helping Scientists Understand an Ocean\u2019s Worth of Data (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8017",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/ai-ocean-whales-study.html",
        "text": "Machine-learning applications are proving to be especially useful to the scientific community studying the planet\u2019s largest bodies of water. Machine-learning applications are proving to be especially useful to the scientific community studying the planet\u2019s largest bodies of water. This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.",
        "author": "By Tatiana Schlossberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "A.I. Is Helping Scientists Understand an Ocean\u2019s Worth of Data (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8018",
        "date": "2020-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/ai-ocean-whales-study.html",
        "text": "Machine-learning applications are proving to be especially useful to the scientific community studying the planet\u2019s largest bodies of water. Machine-learning applications are proving to be especially useful to the scientific community studying the planet\u2019s largest bodies of water. This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.",
        "author": "By Tatiana Schlossberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking\u2019s farewell: As his ashes were buried, his voice was beamed into space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8019",
        "date": "2018-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/15/stephen-hawkings-farewell-as-his-ashes-were-buried-his-voice-was-beamed-into-space/",
        "text": "The universe\u00a0that Stephen\u00a0Hawking spent a lifetime studying now knows his voice.Following Hawking's death in March, the renowned British physicist, who had battled\u00a0a debilitating degenerative motor neuron disease for decades,\u00a0was remembered at\u00a0a memorial service Friday at Westminster Abbey.\u00a0His ashes were buried\u00a0between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton and\u00a0later covered\u00a0with a gravestone \u2014\u00a0etched\u00a0with\u00a0an equation\u00a0he used to teach\u00a0the world about black holes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut at the same time his ashes were lowered into the ground,\u00a0his voice was beamed\u00a0from Earth\u00a0thousands of light-years away toward the nearest known black hole in the universe.It was a \u201csymbolic gesture,\u201d his loved ones said, that\u00a0finally let him\u00a0travel into space.Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76Family members, friends, fellow scientists and celebrities gathered Friday afternoon at Hawking's memorial service in London to celebrate his life and legacy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe come to celebrate the life and achievements of Stephen Hawking in this holy place where God has been worshiped\u00a0for over a thousand years and where kings and queens and the great men and women of our national history and international influence are memorialized. We shall bury his mortal remains with those of his fellow scientists,\u201d the Rev.\u00a0John Hall, dean of Westminster, said during the ceremony,\u00a0according to Westminster.\u201cWe shall give thanks for Stephen Hawking's remarkable gifts and for his life: for his years as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and for his international reach and influence as a scientist; for his personal courage, endurance, and perseverance living with motor neuron disease; and for his family and friends. We shall with love commend his immortal soul to almighty God.\u201dHawking's ashes were interred in the\u00a0Scientists' Corner in\u00a0Westminster Abbey and then fittingly\u00a0covered with a gravestone\u00a0etched\u00a0with the equation he used to\u00a0theorize\u00a0that black holes are not completely black\u00a0but faintly leak\u00a0thermal radiation. That equation accompanied\u00a0a depiction of a black hole along with the words, \u201cHere lies what was mortal of\u00a0Stephen\u00a0Hawking, 1942-2018.\u201dThe memorial stone has now been placed on top of #StephenHawking's grave in Westminster Abbey. pic.twitter.com/bUTgm2UI7U\u2014 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) June 15, 2018\n\nDuring the ceremony, Hawking's voice was also being beamed into the cosmos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGreek composer Vangelis \u2014 most famous for his\u00a0Academy Award-winning score\u00a0to \u201cChariots of Fire\u201d \u2014 set\u00a0Hawking's voice to an original piece of music,\u00a0which was sent into space through a massive antenna at European Space Agency's\u00a0ground station in Spain.\u201cAround the time that our father was laid to rest, the Vangelis composition with our father\u2019s voice was broadcast into space,\u201d\u00a0Hawking's daughter,\u00a0Lucy Hawking, said in a statement, according to the European Space Agency. \u201cThis is a beautiful and symbolic gesture that creates a link between our father's presence on this planet, his wish to go into space, and his explorations of the universe in his mind.\u201dDuring today's Service of Thanksgiving, the ashes of #StephenHawking were buried in Scientists' Corner. Professor Hawking's family placed flowers and a medal in the grave. pic.twitter.com/CgwoVYlDKU\u2014 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) June 15, 2018\n\nVangelis said in a statement posted on Hawking's website that he created the piece to \u201cpay tribute and express my high esteem and respect to this extraordinary man.\u201d\u00a0The composer added:\u00a0\u201cI imagine he will continue to travel with the same devotion, wherever he may be, in the known unknown.\u00a0Farewell Professor Hawking.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt's unclear what Hawking said\u00a0in the recording, but\u00a0CDs were created for those who attended the memorial service Friday afternoon.The\u00a0European Space Agency\u00a0said the ceremonial broadcast\u00a0was\u00a0beamed\u00a0toward\u00a01A 0620\u201300,\u00a0a\u00a0binary\u00a0star\u00a0system that includes a\u00a0stellar-mass\u00a0black hole\u00a0\u2014 which is about\u00a03,500 light-years from Earth.\u201cIt is fascinating and at the same time moving to imagine that Stephen Hawking's voice together with the music by Vangelis will reach the black hole in about 3,500 years, where it will be frozen in by the event horizon,\u201d the agency's director of science, G\u00fcnther Hasinger, said in the statement.In March, Hawking, who was said to be perhaps the greatest scientist of his generation,\u00a0died at 76\u00a0in his home in Cambridge, England.Story continues below advertisementAs The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach reported,\u00a0Hawking is most notably remembered for his theory that black holes \u201ccan emanate thermal radiation from subatomic processes at their boundary\u201d \u2014 which is known as\u00a0\u201cHawking radiation.\u201dAccording to\u00a0Achenbach:This revelation impressed other scientists with the way it took Einstein\u2019s general theory of relativity, which is essential for understanding the gravity of black holes, and connected it to newer theories of quantum mechanics, which cover subatomic processes.Plus, he threw in a dash of old-fashioned thermodynamics \u2014 achieving a kind of physics trifecta.\u201cBlack holes ain\u2019t as black as they are painted,\u201d Dr. Hawking\u00a0once said in a lecture, characteristically describing complicated physics in ordinary language. \u201cThey are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside and, possibly, to another universe. So, if you feel you are in a black hole, don\u2019t give up. There\u2019s a way out.\u201dHe also hypothesized that miniature black holes, remnants of the big bang, may be strewn through space, though he noted that they haven\u2019t been discovered. \u201cThis is a pity, because if they had, I would have got a Nobel Prize,\u201d he joked.Read more:Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76One of Stephen Hawking\u2019s final scientific acts: Tackling the multiverse\u2018I\u2019m not afraid\u2019: What Stephen Hawking said about God, his atheism and his own death \"This is a beautiful and symbolic gesture that creates a link between our father's presence on this planet, his wish to go into space, and his explorations of the universe in his mind,\u201d his daughter said. Stephen Hawking\u2019s farewell: As his ashes were buried, his voice was beamed into space",
        "author": "Lindsey Bever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking\u2019s farewell: As his ashes were buried, his voice was beamed into space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8020",
        "date": "2018-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/06/15/stephen-hawkings-farewell-as-his-ashes-were-buried-his-voice-was-beamed-into-space/",
        "text": "The universe\u00a0that Stephen\u00a0Hawking spent a lifetime studying now knows his voice.Following Hawking's death in March, the renowned British physicist, who had battled\u00a0a debilitating degenerative motor neuron disease for decades,\u00a0was remembered at\u00a0a memorial service Friday at Westminster Abbey.\u00a0His ashes were buried\u00a0between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton and\u00a0later covered\u00a0with a gravestone \u2014\u00a0etched\u00a0with\u00a0an equation\u00a0he used to teach\u00a0the world about black holes. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut at the same time his ashes were lowered into the ground,\u00a0his voice was beamed\u00a0from Earth\u00a0thousands of light-years away toward the nearest known black hole in the universe.It was a \u201csymbolic gesture,\u201d his loved ones said, that\u00a0finally let him\u00a0travel into space.Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76Family members, friends, fellow scientists and celebrities gathered Friday afternoon at Hawking's memorial service in London to celebrate his life and legacy.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe come to celebrate the life and achievements of Stephen Hawking in this holy place where God has been worshiped\u00a0for over a thousand years and where kings and queens and the great men and women of our national history and international influence are memorialized. We shall bury his mortal remains with those of his fellow scientists,\u201d the Rev.\u00a0John Hall, dean of Westminster, said during the ceremony,\u00a0according to Westminster.\u201cWe shall give thanks for Stephen Hawking's remarkable gifts and for his life: for his years as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and for his international reach and influence as a scientist; for his personal courage, endurance, and perseverance living with motor neuron disease; and for his family and friends. We shall with love commend his immortal soul to almighty God.\u201dHawking's ashes were interred in the\u00a0Scientists' Corner in\u00a0Westminster Abbey and then fittingly\u00a0covered with a gravestone\u00a0etched\u00a0with the equation he used to\u00a0theorize\u00a0that black holes are not completely black\u00a0but faintly leak\u00a0thermal radiation. That equation accompanied\u00a0a depiction of a black hole along with the words, \u201cHere lies what was mortal of\u00a0Stephen\u00a0Hawking, 1942-2018.\u201dThe memorial stone has now been placed on top of #StephenHawking's grave in Westminster Abbey. pic.twitter.com/bUTgm2UI7U\u2014 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) June 15, 2018\n\nDuring the ceremony, Hawking's voice was also being beamed into the cosmos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGreek composer Vangelis \u2014 most famous for his\u00a0Academy Award-winning score\u00a0to \u201cChariots of Fire\u201d \u2014 set\u00a0Hawking's voice to an original piece of music,\u00a0which was sent into space through a massive antenna at European Space Agency's\u00a0ground station in Spain.\u201cAround the time that our father was laid to rest, the Vangelis composition with our father\u2019s voice was broadcast into space,\u201d\u00a0Hawking's daughter,\u00a0Lucy Hawking, said in a statement, according to the European Space Agency. \u201cThis is a beautiful and symbolic gesture that creates a link between our father's presence on this planet, his wish to go into space, and his explorations of the universe in his mind.\u201dDuring today's Service of Thanksgiving, the ashes of #StephenHawking were buried in Scientists' Corner. Professor Hawking's family placed flowers and a medal in the grave. pic.twitter.com/CgwoVYlDKU\u2014 Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) June 15, 2018\n\nVangelis said in a statement posted on Hawking's website that he created the piece to \u201cpay tribute and express my high esteem and respect to this extraordinary man.\u201d\u00a0The composer added:\u00a0\u201cI imagine he will continue to travel with the same devotion, wherever he may be, in the known unknown.\u00a0Farewell Professor Hawking.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt's unclear what Hawking said\u00a0in the recording, but\u00a0CDs were created for those who attended the memorial service Friday afternoon.The\u00a0European Space Agency\u00a0said the ceremonial broadcast\u00a0was\u00a0beamed\u00a0toward\u00a01A 0620\u201300,\u00a0a\u00a0binary\u00a0star\u00a0system that includes a\u00a0stellar-mass\u00a0black hole\u00a0\u2014 which is about\u00a03,500 light-years from Earth.\u201cIt is fascinating and at the same time moving to imagine that Stephen Hawking's voice together with the music by Vangelis will reach the black hole in about 3,500 years, where it will be frozen in by the event horizon,\u201d the agency's director of science, G\u00fcnther Hasinger, said in the statement.In March, Hawking, who was said to be perhaps the greatest scientist of his generation,\u00a0died at 76\u00a0in his home in Cambridge, England.Story continues below advertisementAs The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach reported,\u00a0Hawking is most notably remembered for his theory that black holes \u201ccan emanate thermal radiation from subatomic processes at their boundary\u201d \u2014 which is known as\u00a0\u201cHawking radiation.\u201dAccording to\u00a0Achenbach:This revelation impressed other scientists with the way it took Einstein\u2019s general theory of relativity, which is essential for understanding the gravity of black holes, and connected it to newer theories of quantum mechanics, which cover subatomic processes.Plus, he threw in a dash of old-fashioned thermodynamics \u2014 achieving a kind of physics trifecta.\u201cBlack holes ain\u2019t as black as they are painted,\u201d Dr. Hawking\u00a0once said in a lecture, characteristically describing complicated physics in ordinary language. \u201cThey are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside and, possibly, to another universe. So, if you feel you are in a black hole, don\u2019t give up. There\u2019s a way out.\u201dHe also hypothesized that miniature black holes, remnants of the big bang, may be strewn through space, though he noted that they haven\u2019t been discovered. \u201cThis is a pity, because if they had, I would have got a Nobel Prize,\u201d he joked.Read more:Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76One of Stephen Hawking\u2019s final scientific acts: Tackling the multiverse\u2018I\u2019m not afraid\u2019: What Stephen Hawking said about God, his atheism and his own death \"This is a beautiful and symbolic gesture that creates a link between our father's presence on this planet, his wish to go into space, and his explorations of the universe in his mind,\u201d his daughter said. Stephen Hawking\u2019s farewell: As his ashes were buried, his voice was beamed into space",
        "author": "Lindsey Bever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Quantum entanglement, science\u2019s \u2018spookiest\u2019 phenomenon, achieved in space (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8021",
        "date": "2017-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/06/15/quantum-entanglement-sciences-spookiest-phenomenon-achieved-in-space/",
        "text": "Imagine you are a photon, a packet of light.\u00a0You are a tiny blip of energy, hurtling through the universe on your own. But you have a\u00a0twin, another photon to whom you have been intimately connected since the day you were born. No matter what distance separates you, be it the width of a lab bench or the breadth of the universe, you mirror each other. Whatever happens to your twin instantaneously affects\u00a0you, and vice versa. You are like\u00a0the mouse siblings in \u201cAn American Tail\u201d, wrenched apart by fate but\u00a0feeling the same feelings and singing the same song\u00a0beneath the same\u00a0glowing moon. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis is quantum entanglement. To non-physicists it sounds about as fantastical as singing mice, and indeed, plenty of physicists have problems with the phenomenon. Albert Einstein, whose own research helped give rise to quantum theory, derisively called the concept \u201cspooky action at a distance.\u201d Quantum entanglement seems to break\u00a0some of the bedrock rules of standard physics: that nothing can travel faster than light, that objects are only influenced by their immediate surroundings.\u00a0And scientists still can't explain how the particles are linked. Is it wormholes? An unknown dimension? The power of love? (That last one's a joke.)Luckily for quantum physicists, you don't always need to explain a phenomenon in order to use it. Ancient humans didn't know about friction before inventing the wheel; doctors in medieval China didn't know about antibodies when they began inoculating people against smallpox 600 years ago. Not knowing what's behind quantum entanglement didn't stop Jian-Wei Pan, a physicist at the University\u00a0of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, from\u00a0rocketing\u00a0it into space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn a new study in the journal Science, Pan and his colleagues report that they were able to produce entangled photons on a satellite orbiting 300 miles above the planet and beam the particles\u00a0to two different ground-based labs that were 750 miles apart, all without losing the particles' strange\u00a0linkage. It is the first time anyone has ever generated entangled particles in space, and represents a 10-fold increase in the distance over which entanglement has been maintained.\u201cIt's a really stunning achievement, and\u00a0I think it's going to be the first of possibly many such interesting\u00a0and exciting studies that this particular\u00a0satellite will open up,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0Shohini Ghose, a physicist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. \u201cWho knows, maybe there\u2019ll be a space entanglement\u00a0race?\u201dThere's good a reason world governments may soon\u00a0race to test out quantum theory in orbit, and it's not just so they can claim the title of \u201cspookiest.\u201d Entangled particles could\u00a0one day be used for\u00a0\u201cquantum communication\u201d \u2014 a means of sending super secure messages that doesn't rely on cables, wireless signals, or code. Because any interference with an entangled particle, even the mere act of observing it, automatically affects its partner, these missives\u00a0can't be hacked. To hear quantum physicists tell it, entangled particles could help build a \u201cquantum internet,\u201d\u00a0give rise to new kinds of coding, and allow for faster-than-light communication \u2014 possibilities that\u00a0have\u00a0powerful appeal in an era where hospitals, credit card companies, government agencies, even election systems are falling victim to cyber attacks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut until Pan and his colleagues started\u00a0their experiments\u00a0in space, quantum communication faced a serious limitation. Entangled photons don't need wires or cables to link them, but on Earth it is necessary to use a fiber optic cable to transmit\u00a0one of the particles to its desired location. But fibers absorb light as the photon travels through, so\u00a0the quantum connection weakens with every mile the particle is transmitted.\u00a0The previous\u00a0distance record for what's known as quantum teleportation, or sending information via entangled particles, was about 140 kilometers, or 86\u00a0miles.But no light gets absorbed\u00a0in space, because there's nothing to do the absorbing. Space is empty. This means that entangled particles can be transmitted long distances across the vacuum\u00a0and not lose information.\u00a0Recognizing this, Pan proposed that entangled particles sent through space could vastly extend the distance across which entangled particles communicate.On board the Chinese satellite\u00a0Micius, which launched last year, a high energy laser was fired through a special kind of crystal, generating entangled photon pairs. This in itself was a feat: the process is sensitive to turbulence, and\u00a0before the experiment launched scientists weren't completely sure it would work. These photons were transmitted to ground stations in Delingha, a city on the Tibetan Plateau, and Lijiang, in\u00a0China's far southwest. The cities are about 750 miles apart \u2014 a bit farther than New York and Chicago. For comparison, the fiber optic method for quantum teleportation couldn't get a New York photon\u00a0much farther than Trenton, N.J.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMultiple tests on the\u00a0ground confirmed that the particles from the Micius satellite were indeed still entangled. Now Pan wants to try even more ambitious experiments:\u00a0sending quantum particles from the ground to the satellite; setting up a distribution channel that will allow for transmission of tens of thousands of entangled pairs per second. \"\u201cThen the satellite can really be used for quantum communication,\u201d he said.\u00a0The Micius satellite can also be used to probe more fundamental questions, Pan added.\u00a0The behavior of entangled particles in space and across vast distances offers insight into the nature of space-time and the validity of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Plus there's the whole issue of what is\u00a0going on with these bizarre linked photons in the first\u00a0place.Story continues below advertisement\u201cMathematically we know exactly how to describe what happens,\u201d\u00a0Ghose\u00a0said.\u00a0\u201cWe know how to connect, physically, these particles in the lab, and\u00a0we know what to expect when we generate\u00a0and manipulate and transmit them.\u201dAdvertisementBut as for how it all happens, how entangled photons know what their partner is doing, \u201cthat\u00a0is not part of the equation,\u201d she continued. \u201cThat\u2019s what makes it so mysterious and\u00a0interesting.\u201dRead more:Why don't birds get lost? They may have mastered quantum mechanics.Astronomers just achieved something Einstein said was impossibleJupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites showWhy is the solar eclipse moving backward?Scientists just smashed the distance record for quantum teleportation Scientists beamed particles from a satellite to two locations on Earth 750 miles apart \u2014 and the particles were still mysteriously connected. Quantum entanglement, science\u2019s \u2018spookiest\u2019 phenomenon, achieved in space",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stem cell research finds a unique lab \u2014 the International Space Station (WP: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8022",
        "date": "2020-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/stem-cells-in-space/2020/12/04/8915f700-2471-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html",
        "text": "Space is a long way to go to learn about human tissues, yet researchers have their gazes trained at the stars.Earlier this year, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich (UZH) sent 250 test tubes of carefully prepped human stem cells to the U.S. National Laboratory on the International Space Station (ISS). They wanted to study how the near-weightless, microgravitational environment of the ISS affects these building-block cells in the hope of understanding some of the secrets of how they grow, divide and form into tissues. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightStem cells are special \u201cgeneric\u201d cells that have the potential to evolve into specialized ones, such as those that form muscle, blood, brain and other tissues. They can also divide and renew themselves. Researchers say this makes them invaluable as a potential backup resource to repair the body in case of damage from illness or injury.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementStem-cell-based therapies have begun to be used in cancers, heart conditions, neurological diseases, liver cirrhosis, arthritis and spinal cord injuries. Scientists are even considering stem-cell-based therapies for the treatment of covid-19, and are testing these in the lab.Human stem cells come from different sources, including embryonic tissue (discarded embryos, cord blood or amniotic fluid) and nonembryonic tissue (present in organs and tissues of human bodies). There are still plenty of unknowns about these cells \u2014 such as, how they differentiate into other kinds of cells, or how they divide and repair themselves.Scientists hope that studying the properties in low Earth orbit (up to 1,200 miles from the planet\u2019s surface) might help answer some of these questions. This will, in turn, guide researchers working to develop better stem cell therapies and also potentially help them test drugs on human cells without needing to conduct experiments on animals.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWeightlessness creates a completely different .\u2009.\u2009. environment that has fundamental effects on biological processes,\u201d says Oliver Ullrich, director of the UZH Space Hub and chair of Anatomy/Gravitational Biology and Cell Biomechanics. \u201cOn the ISS, we succeeded in producing significantly larger .\u2009.\u2009. differentiated tissue from human stem cells [than we could on Earth] .\u2009.\u2009. We do not know why stem cells differentiate so excellently .\u2009.\u2009. in weightlessness. Basic research will one day be able to answer this question.\u201dUntil then, he says, the goal is to develop biotechnologies that can help humans on Earth.Some of the mysteries of stem cells might emerge from another space effort, a collaboration between the University of California at San Diego\u2019s Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center and Space Tango, a Lexington, Ky.-based engineering company manufacturing specialized automated platforms that allow scientists to carry out health and technology research in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn April, NASA awarded a $5 million grant to UCSD and Space Tango to develop a new lab called the Integrated Space Stem Cell Orbital Research (ISSCOR, pronounced \u201cI score\u201d) on ISS, and launch a bunch of stem cell experiments next year.Catriona Jamieson, deputy director of the Moores Cancer Center at UCSD, is one of the participants in the collaboration. Her project looks at how\u00a0cells turn cancerous as they age, the ways cancer begins in people and the breakdown of the human body\u2019s immune system.Sometimes, she says, mutations in our bone marrow stem cells give rise to precancerous cells that can lead to leukemia. On Earth, under the protection of the ozone layer that keeps out ultraviolet radiation from the sun, this process of good cells turning cancerous can take decades. In space, on the other side of the ozone layer, blood-forming stem cells are exposed to the sun\u2019s ionizing radiation, causing them to become precancerous much faster.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis accelerated time frame allows her team to study how healthy blood cells become malignant without needing to wait for years to replicate the process on Earth.Cell cultures in a lab on Earth grow in a single layer \u2014 think of it as a two-dimensional structure \u2014 because gravity causes sedimentation and the culture medium presses down on the cells. As a result, Ullrich says, scientists need a matrix or scaffold to support the growing tissue in three dimensions.\u201cIn a weightless environment [like space], cells exhibit spatially unrestricted growth and assemble into complex 3-D [structures],\u201d he says. This opens up the possibility of \u201cmacro-tissues\u201d \u2014 organs \u2014 to be generated from these 3-D cell aggregates. Ullrich says.Story continues below advertisementThe UZH test tubes of Ullrich\u2019s experiment returned to Earth at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in April, but covid-19 restrictions on travel prevented the safe, temperature-controlled transport of the samples to Zurich for detailed analysis. Ullrich\u2019s team, however, could confirm from remote, virtual observation that the samples had grown more bone, cartilage and other living tissue than would have been possible in the same amount of time on Earth. Ullrich is cautious with his analysis \u2014 \u201clooking good,\u201d is all he\u2019s willing to say for now.AdvertisementAnother ongoing stem cell experiment in space comes from the lab of Alysson Muotri at UCSD. Muotri\u2019s team works with stem cells that differentiate into brain tissue. \u201cIf we understand how microgravity can speed up [cell] maturation, we can understand [its] effect in the brain of the astronauts, but also .\u2009.\u2009. use that as a model to understand diseases that have long onset, such as Alzheimer\u2019s or dementia,\u201d he says. Apart from the NASA collaboration, Muotri has another stem cell experiment going on at the ISS. The first payload of that went up in late 2019, and he expects to send a follow-up by the end of 2020, before his NASA project early next year.Room is limited on ISS, so one of the challenges in biomedical space research is keeping the experiments\u2019 physical footprints as small as possible.Story continues below advertisementThis happens using a specialized \u201cresearch-in-a-box\u201d module, called CubeLab, where the stem cell experiments are run while in orbit. The CubeLab is small enough \u201cto fit in the trunk of my car,\u201d Jamieson says. Within it, the physical parts of the experiment, as well as the automation and remote monitoring of the system, have to be precisely calibrated.AdvertisementObserving and monitoring the experiments from afar is a major challenge, Jamieson adds, because, unlike in a lab on Earth, the scientists cannot pop in and out as needed, and limited adjustments can be done remotely.\u201cSometimes microgravity can be a bummer,\u201d Muotri says.For instance, gravity on Earth plays a role in keeping electrodes, necessary to record electrical activity, in place in the tissues. \u201cIn space, they\u2019re going to be floating,\u201d Muotri says, which means, for accurate readings, scientists and engineers have to figure out ways to keep them attached to the tissues.Story continues below advertisementLooking ahead, could stem cells altered or grown in space be used in humans to cure ailments or for other reasons? It\u2019s too early to say, but Ullrich believes it may happen one day.Scientists hope that these experiments will help develop customized treatments, therapies and even medicines for patients with specific requirements, for whom generic medications and treatments are often not enough. \u201cTransplantation .\u2009.\u2009. is of course the greatest possible goal,\u201d Ullrich says, \u201cbut [these tissues] also serve testing in precision medicine or to replace animal experiments.\u201dAdvertisementJamieson adds: \u201cIn this unique environment 250 miles above us, [we might be] able to discover truths about biology that we never understood before.\u201d And that could lead to new drugs, new antibodies, new therapies. \u201cI really do think that [space, and the ISSCOR lab in particular] is .\u2009.\u2009. a great place to do science.\u201d\n\nWhat you should know about stem cells, from promising research to dubious usesHumans have been living aboard the International Space Station for 20 years. What comes next?KidsPost: Could astronauts grow plants in soil? Scientists hope ISS will help them get the dirt.50 astronauts, in their own words Scientists look at how the near-weightless, microgravitational environment affects these building blocks of life, hoping to discover new therapies for diseases, cancer, even covid. Stem cell research finds a unique lab \u2014 the International Space Station",
        "author": "Payal Dhar"
    },
    {
        "title": "User Generated Content Terms of Service (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8023",
        "date": "2017-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/science/space/nyteclipsewatch-terms-of-service.html",
        "text": "Before sharing your photo, please review our Terms of Service for User Generated Content. Before sharing your photo, please review our Terms of Service for User Generated Content. Before sharing your photo, please review our Terms of Service for User Generated Content. ",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Soviets Launched Sputnik, C.I.A. Was Not Surprised (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8024",
        "date": "2017-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/science/sputnik-launch-cia.html",
        "text": "Declassified documents show that intelligence officers, and President Eisenhower, knew that the Soviet Union was close to launching a man-made satellite. Declassified documents show that intelligence officers, and President Eisenhower, knew that the Soviet Union was close to launching a man-made satellite. When the news broke on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had sent the world\u2019s first man-made satellite into space, the American public was shocked. The C.I.A., it now appears, much less so.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Soviets Launched Sputnik, C.I.A. Was Not Surprised (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8025",
        "date": "2017-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/science/sputnik-launch-cia.html",
        "text": "Declassified documents show that intelligence officers, and President Eisenhower, knew that the Soviet Union was close to launching a man-made satellite. Declassified documents show that intelligence officers, and President Eisenhower, knew that the Soviet Union was close to launching a man-made satellite. When the news broke on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had sent the world\u2019s first man-made satellite into space, the American public was shocked. The C.I.A., it now appears, much less so.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspectives on the Eclipse (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8026",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005381016/perspectives-on-the-eclipse.html",
        "text": "The 2017 solar eclipse seen from up above and down below. The 2017 solar eclipse seen from up above and down below. The 2017 solar eclipse seen from up above and down below.",
        "author": "By NATALIE RENEAU"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eclipsing the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8027",
        "date": "2017-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005343495/solar-eclipse-2017.html",
        "text": "On Aug. 21, the moon will paint a swath of North America in darkness. On Aug. 21, the moon will paint a swath of North America in darkness. On Aug. 21, the moon will paint a swath of North America in darkness.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch: \u2018Manhattanhenge\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8028",
        "date": "2019-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000006609163/watch-live-manhattanhenge.html",
        "text": "On Friday, the sunset lined up with Manhattan\u2019s street grid, drawing crowds for the \u2018Instagram holiday.\u2019 On Friday, the sunset lined up with Manhattan\u2019s street grid, drawing crowds for the \u2018Instagram holiday.\u2019 On Friday, the sunset lined up with Manhattan\u2019s street grid, drawing crowds for the \u2018Instagram holiday.\u2019",
        "author": "By Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Landing, All the Way Down (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8029",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007618348/nasas-mars-landing-all-the-way-down.html",
        "text": "NASA released video from cameras aboard the Perseverance mission as it landed on the surface of Mars. NASA released video from cameras aboard the Perseverance mission as it landed on the surface of Mars. NASA released video from cameras aboard the Perseverance mission as it landed on the surface of Mars.",
        "author": "By Nasa/jpl-Caltech"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Landing, All the Way Down (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8030",
        "date": "2021-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007618348/nasas-mars-landing-all-the-way-down.html",
        "text": "NASA released video from cameras aboard the Perseverance mission as it landed on the surface of Mars. NASA released video from cameras aboard the Perseverance mission as it landed on the surface of Mars. NASA released video from cameras aboard the Perseverance mission as it landed on the surface of Mars.",
        "author": "By Nasa/jpl-Caltech"
    },
    {
        "title": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner Launched in Test Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8031",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006886232/boeings-starliner-space-launch.html",
        "text": "Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday, but failed to reach its correct orbit. Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday, but failed to reach its correct orbit. Boeing\u2019s Starliner capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday, but failed to reach its correct orbit.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv, Via Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Back Story With The Times\u2019s John Schwartz (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8032",
        "date": "2018-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/podcast/2008/06/11/science/12backstory-schwartz.mp3.html",
        "text": "The Times's John Schwartz on Google co-founder Sergey Brin booking a space flight on a Russian Soyuz rocket. The Times's John Schwartz on Google co-founder Sergey Brin booking a space flight on a Russian Soyuz rocket.  The Times's John Schwartz on Google co-founder Sergey Brin booking a space flight on a Russian Soyuz rocket. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Touching the Sun (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8033",
        "date": "2018-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000006012333/nasa-parker-solar-probe.html",
        "text": "From Aug. 2018: NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe is flying through the punishing heat of the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere. From Aug. 2018: NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe is flying through the punishing heat of the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere. From Aug. 2018: NASA\u2019s Parker Solar Probe is flying through the punishing heat of the sun\u2019s outer atmosphere.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Corum and Jason Drakeford"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA: \u2018Mission Complete\u2019 for Mars Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8034",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006358634/nasa-mars-rover-mission-complete.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, which provided detailed views of Mars, is dead. It was the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface. NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, which provided detailed views of Mars, is dead. It was the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface. NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, which provided detailed views of Mars, is dead. It was the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA: \u2018Mission Complete\u2019 for Mars Rover (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8035",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006358634/nasa-mars-rover-mission-complete.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, which provided detailed views of Mars, is dead. It was the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface. NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, which provided detailed views of Mars, is dead. It was the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface. NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover, which provided detailed views of Mars, is dead. It was the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Blasts Off for the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8036",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006623224/india-moon-launch.html",
        "text": "India\u2019s first moon lander, Chandrayaan-2, launched on Monday, a week after a first attempt was canceled at the last minute. India\u2019s first moon lander, Chandrayaan-2, launched on Monday, a week after a first attempt was canceled at the last minute. India\u2019s first moon lander, Chandrayaan-2, launched on Monday, a week after a first attempt was canceled at the last minute.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic Rocket Plane Reaches Edge of Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8037",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006374663/virgin-galactic-space.html",
        "text": "This was Virgin Galactic\u2019s fifth supersonic-powered test flight. The venture marked another step forward in a new kind of space race. This was Virgin Galactic\u2019s fifth supersonic-powered test flight. The venture marked another step forward in a new kind of space race. This was Virgin Galactic\u2019s fifth supersonic-powered test flight. The venture marked another step forward in a new kind of space race.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Data Is Being Analyzed\u2019: India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Loses Contact (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8038",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000006700490/indian-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The Chandrayaan-2 mission appeared to end in failure, thwarting India\u2019s bid to become the fourth country to land on the moon. The Chandrayaan-2 mission appeared to end in failure, thwarting India\u2019s bid to become the fourth country to land on the moon. The Chandrayaan-2 mission appeared to end in failure, thwarting India\u2019s bid to become the fourth country to land on the moon.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Data Is Being Analyzed\u2019: India\u2019s Chandrayaan-2 Loses Contact (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8039",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000006700490/indian-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The Chandrayaan-2 mission appeared to end in failure, thwarting India\u2019s bid to become the fourth country to land on the moon. The Chandrayaan-2 mission appeared to end in failure, thwarting India\u2019s bid to become the fourth country to land on the moon. The Chandrayaan-2 mission appeared to end in failure, thwarting India\u2019s bid to become the fourth country to land on the moon.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "3-D Printing for Space Exploration (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8040",
        "date": "2017-09-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005449852/3-d-printing-for-space-exploration.html",
        "text": "Branch Technology is developing a 3-D printing process that can build structures on Mars. Step into their Tennessee workspace in 360 degrees. Branch Technology is developing a 3-D printing process that can build structures on Mars. Step into their Tennessee workspace in 360 degrees. Branch Technology is developing a 3-D printing process that can build structures on Mars. Step into their Tennessee workspace in 360 degrees.",
        "author": "By CHRIS CARMICHAEL, JEAN YVES CHAINON and KAITLYN MULLIN"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Lands Perseverance on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8041",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007612791/nasa-perseverance-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "NASA successfully landed its new robotic rover on Mars Thursday, a mission to directly study if there was ever life on the planet. NASA successfully landed its new robotic rover on Mars Thursday, a mission to directly study if there was ever life on the planet. NASA successfully landed its new robotic rover on Mars Thursday, a mission to directly study if there was ever life on the planet.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Lands Perseverance on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8042",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007612791/nasa-perseverance-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "NASA successfully landed its new robotic rover on Mars Thursday, a mission to directly study if there was ever life on the planet. NASA successfully landed its new robotic rover on Mars Thursday, a mission to directly study if there was ever life on the planet. NASA successfully landed its new robotic rover on Mars Thursday, a mission to directly study if there was ever life on the planet.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "7 New Planets Could Host Alien Life (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8043",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000004946809/nasa-planets-trappist.html",
        "text": "These new Earth-size planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1 about 40 light years from Earth. Some of them could have water on their surfaces. These new Earth-size planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1 about 40 light years from Earth. Some of them could have water on their surfaces. These new Earth-size planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1 about 40 light years from Earth. Some of them could have water on their surfaces.",
        "author": "By Neeti Upadhye"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Shares Pictures Snapped by Its Perseverance Rover on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8044",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007614989/nasa-mars-perseverance-rover-pictures.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists and engineers on Friday showed some of the first images received from the Perseverance rover\u2019s first day and night on the surface of Mars. NASA scientists and engineers on Friday showed some of the first images received from the Perseverance rover\u2019s first day and night on the surface of Mars. NASA scientists and engineers on Friday showed some of the first images received from the Perseverance rover\u2019s first day and night on the surface of Mars.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity Helicopter Completes Second Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8045",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007725752/nasa-mars-ingenuity-helicopter.html",
        "text": "Ingenuity, Nasa\u2019s experimental helicopter on Mars, soared higher and longer during its second test flight, on Thursday, than it did during its first flight, on Monday. Ingenuity, Nasa\u2019s experimental helicopter on Mars, soared higher and longer during its second test flight, on Thursday, than it did during its first flight, on Monday. Ingenuity, Nasa\u2019s experimental helicopter on Mars, soared higher and longer during its second test flight, on Thursday, than it did during its first flight, on Monday.",
        "author": "By NASA"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Completes Historic First Trip (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8046",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006400968/spacex-crew-dragon-landing.html",
        "text": "The SpaceX Crew Dragon landed in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, marking the first time an American private company completed a trip to and from orbit successfully. The SpaceX Crew Dragon landed in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, marking the first time an American private company completed a trip to and from orbit successfully. The SpaceX Crew Dragon landed in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, marking the first time an American private company completed a trip to and from orbit successfully.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon Completes Historic First Trip (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8047",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006400968/spacex-crew-dragon-landing.html",
        "text": "The SpaceX Crew Dragon landed in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, marking the first time an American private company completed a trip to and from orbit successfully. The SpaceX Crew Dragon landed in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, marking the first time an American private company completed a trip to and from orbit successfully. The SpaceX Crew Dragon landed in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday, marking the first time an American private company completed a trip to and from orbit successfully.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Starship Prototype (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8048",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007747937/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "The SN15 Starship prototype touched down in one piece after a brief test flight over Texas in May 2021. Several previous landings had ended in fiery explosions. The SN15 Starship prototype touched down in one piece after a brief test flight over Texas in May 2021. Several previous landings had ended in fiery explosions. The SN15 Starship prototype touched down in one piece after a brief test flight over Texas in May 2021. Several previous landings had ended in fiery explosions.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Starship Prototype (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8049",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007747937/spacex-starship-launch.html",
        "text": "The SN15 Starship prototype touched down in one piece after a brief test flight over Texas in May 2021. Several previous landings had ended in fiery explosions. The SN15 Starship prototype touched down in one piece after a brief test flight over Texas in May 2021. Several previous landings had ended in fiery explosions. The SN15 Starship prototype touched down in one piece after a brief test flight over Texas in May 2021. Several previous landings had ended in fiery explosions.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking, Pop Culture Icon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8050",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005797956/stephen-hawking-pop-culture-icon.html",
        "text": "Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest physicists of our time, died on Wednesday. He is immortalized by his brilliant research, but also by his pop culture appearances. Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest physicists of our time, died on Wednesday. He is immortalized by his brilliant research, but also by his pop culture appearances. Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest physicists of our time, died on Wednesday. He is immortalized by his brilliant research, but also by his pop culture appearances.",
        "author": "By Camilla Schick"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Ride for the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8051",
        "date": "2017-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005290939/a-ride-for-the-red-planet.html",
        "text": "Step inside this Mars rover concept vehicle created as part of the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s \u201cSummer of Mars\u201d campaign to celebrate advances in exploration of the planet. Step inside this Mars rover concept vehicle created as part of the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s \u201cSummer of Mars\u201d campaign to celebrate advances in exploration of the planet. Step inside this Mars rover concept vehicle created as part of the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s \u201cSummer of Mars\u201d campaign to celebrate advances in exploration of the planet.",
        "author": "By A.J. CHAVAR, NATHAN GRIFFITHS, SAMANTHA QUICK and JOSHUA THOMAS"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Ride for the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8052",
        "date": "2017-08-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005290939/a-ride-for-the-red-planet.html",
        "text": "Step inside this Mars rover concept vehicle created as part of the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s \u201cSummer of Mars\u201d campaign to celebrate advances in exploration of the planet. Step inside this Mars rover concept vehicle created as part of the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s \u201cSummer of Mars\u201d campaign to celebrate advances in exploration of the planet. Step inside this Mars rover concept vehicle created as part of the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s \u201cSummer of Mars\u201d campaign to celebrate advances in exploration of the planet.",
        "author": "By A.J. CHAVAR, NATHAN GRIFFITHS, SAMANTHA QUICK and JOSHUA THOMAS"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Makes a First With Second-Hand Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8053",
        "date": "2017-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005017635/spacex-makes-a-first-with-second-hand-rocket.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched a \u201cpre-flown\u201d rocket into space on Thursday. If the company can repeat it, this method could slash the price of space travel in the future. SpaceX launched a \u201cpre-flown\u201d rocket into space on Thursday. If the company can repeat it, this method could slash the price of space travel in the future. SpaceX launched a \u201cpre-flown\u201d rocket into space on Thursday. If the company can repeat it, this method could slash the price of space travel in the future.",
        "author": "By NEETI UPADHYE and SUSAN JOAN ARCHER"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ride a Weather Balloon Into (Near) Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8054",
        "date": "2017-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005433524/noaa-ozone-balloon.html",
        "text": "Take a trip into the stratosphere on one of NOAA\u2019s weather balloons. It rises 21 miles into the sky collecting data before bursting and falling back to Earth. Take a trip into the stratosphere on one of NOAA\u2019s weather balloons. It rises 21 miles into the sky collecting data before bursting and falling back to Earth. Take a trip into the stratosphere on one of NOAA\u2019s weather balloons. It rises 21 miles into the sky collecting data before bursting and falling back to Earth.",
        "author": "By Benjamin Wilhelm, Kaitlyn Mullin, Nathan Griffiths and Joshua Thomas"
    },
    {
        "title": "Video of NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter in Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8055",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007718188/nasa-mars-helicopter.html",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter, took its initial flight over Mars on Monday making history as the first powered aircraft from Earth to fly on another planet. NASA\u2019s Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter, took its initial flight over Mars on Monday making history as the first powered aircraft from Earth to fly on another planet. NASA\u2019s Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter, took its initial flight over Mars on Monday making history as the first powered aircraft from Earth to fly on another planet.",
        "author": "By NASA"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did Asteroids Bring Water to Earth? (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8056",
        "date": "2018-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005865737/did-asteroids-bring-water-to-earth.html",
        "text": "Lab experiments to recreate what happens when asteroids hit the Earth show how these rocky objects could have transferred water to terrestrial rock in the intense heat of impact. Lab experiments to recreate what happens when asteroids hit the Earth show how these rocky objects could have transferred water to terrestrial rock in the intense heat of impact. Lab experiments to recreate what happens when asteroids hit the Earth show how these rocky objects could have transferred water to terrestrial rock in the intense heat of impact.",
        "author": "By James Gorman and Christopher Whitworth"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Is First to Reach the Far Side of the Moon (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8057",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006288617/china-far-side-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "China landed a probe called Chang\u2019e-4 on the far side of the moon for the first time on Thursday. The probe captured never-before-seen images of the moon\u2019s far side. China landed a probe called Chang\u2019e-4 on the far side of the moon for the first time on Thursday. The probe captured never-before-seen images of the moon\u2019s far side. China landed a probe called Chang\u2019e-4 on the far side of the moon for the first time on Thursday. The probe captured never-before-seen images of the moon\u2019s far side.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Crew Peeks at Earth From Capsule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8058",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007980512/inspiration4-spacex-capsule-cupola-earth-video.html",
        "text": "The space travelers shared their view of the planet through the capsule\u2019s dome, which features a single piece of glass with a viewing area of more than 2,000 square inches. The space travelers shared their view of the planet through the capsule\u2019s dome, which features a single piece of glass with a viewing area of more than 2,000 square inches. The space travelers shared their view of the planet through the capsule\u2019s dome, which features a single piece of glass with a viewing area of more than 2,000 square inches.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Crew Peeks at Earth From Capsule (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8059",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007980512/inspiration4-spacex-capsule-cupola-earth-video.html",
        "text": "The space travelers shared their view of the planet through the capsule\u2019s dome, which features a single piece of glass with a viewing area of more than 2,000 square inches. The space travelers shared their view of the planet through the capsule\u2019s dome, which features a single piece of glass with a viewing area of more than 2,000 square inches. The space travelers shared their view of the planet through the capsule\u2019s dome, which features a single piece of glass with a viewing area of more than 2,000 square inches.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the \u2018Blood Moon\u2019 Lunar Eclipse Looked Like (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8060",
        "date": "2018-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006029254/what-the-blood-moon-lunar-eclipse-looked-like.html",
        "text": "The entire moon was in shadow for 103 minutes, about 15 minutes longer than the average eclipse, and was visible from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and parts of South America. The entire moon was in shadow for 103 minutes, about 15 minutes longer than the average eclipse, and was visible from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and parts of South America. The entire moon was in shadow for 103 minutes, about 15 minutes longer than the average eclipse, and was visible from Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and parts of South America.",
        "author": "By Robin Lindsay"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Tests Engines of Giant New Moon Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8061",
        "date": "2021-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007662582/nasa-moon-rocket-test.html",
        "text": "Firing its engines for more than eight minutes, the Space Launch System ran a successful stationary test of its rocket stage on Thursday at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Firing its engines for more than eight minutes, the Space Launch System ran a successful stationary test of its rocket stage on Thursday at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Firing its engines for more than eight minutes, the Space Launch System ran a successful stationary test of its rocket stage on Thursday at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Secret of the Sun\u2019s Magnetic Cycles (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8062",
        "date": "2017-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005252834/the-secret-of-the-suns-magnetic-cycles.html",
        "text": "Step inside a simulation of the interior of the sun as its magnetic field reverses, a process that creates solar storms that can interrupt power grids and satellite communications on Earth. Step inside a simulation of the interior of the sun as its magnetic field reverses, a process that creates solar storms that can interrupt power grids and satellite communications on Earth. Step inside a simulation of the interior of the sun as its magnetic field reverses, a process that creates solar storms that can interrupt power grids and satellite communications on Earth.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur, Nathan Griffiths and Kaitlyn Mullin"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Unveils Image of the Most Distant Object Ever Visited (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8063",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006287885/nasa-ultima-thule-images.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists revealed images of Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from the sun. Pictures of the so-called contact binary were captured by the New Horizons mission on Jan. 1. NASA scientists revealed images of Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from the sun. Pictures of the so-called contact binary were captured by the New Horizons mission on Jan. 1. NASA scientists revealed images of Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from the sun. Pictures of the so-called contact binary were captured by the New Horizons mission on Jan. 1.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Unveils Image of the Most Distant Object Ever Visited (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8064",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006287885/nasa-ultima-thule-images.html",
        "text": "NASA scientists revealed images of Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from the sun. Pictures of the so-called contact binary were captured by the New Horizons mission on Jan. 1. NASA scientists revealed images of Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from the sun. Pictures of the so-called contact binary were captured by the New Horizons mission on Jan. 1. NASA scientists revealed images of Ultima Thule, an object 4 billion miles from the sun. Pictures of the so-called contact binary were captured by the New Horizons mission on Jan. 1.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s InSight Lands on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8065",
        "date": "2018-11-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006233087/nasa-insight-mars-landing.html",
        "text": "The lander touched down on Mars \u2014 more than six months and 300 million miles after it launched from California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base. InSight has already transmitted back its first image. The lander touched down on Mars \u2014 more than six months and 300 million miles after it launched from California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base. InSight has already transmitted back its first image. The lander touched down on Mars \u2014 more than six months and 300 million miles after it launched from California\u2019s Vandenberg Air Force Base. InSight has already transmitted back its first image.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Is Brought to Tears Describing His Trip to Space (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8066",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008023041/william-shatner-blue-origin-rocket-launch.html",
        "text": "The actor who played Captain Kirk in \u201cStar Trek\u201d told Jeff Bezos his visit to the edge of space in the Blue Origin rocket was the most profound experience he could imagine. The actor who played Captain Kirk in \u201cStar Trek\u201d told Jeff Bezos his visit to the edge of space in the Blue Origin rocket was the most profound experience he could imagine. The actor who played Captain Kirk in \u201cStar Trek\u201d told Jeff Bezos his visit to the edge of space in the Blue Origin rocket was the most profound experience he could imagine.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russian Film Crew Returns From Shoot on Space Station (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8067",
        "date": "2021-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000008029059/russian-film-crew-space-station.html",
        "text": "The Russian actress Yulia Peresild and the film director Klim Shipenko returned to Earth after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station filming the first feature-length drama with scenes shot in space. The Russian actress Yulia Peresild and the film director Klim Shipenko returned to Earth after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station filming the first feature-length drama with scenes shot in space. The Russian actress Yulia Peresild and the film director Klim Shipenko returned to Earth after spending 12 days aboard the International Space Station filming the first feature-length drama with scenes shot in space.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv and The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Launches Into Space on Virgin Galactic Flight (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8068",
        "date": "2021-07-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007860813/virgin-galactic-richard-branson-space-flight.html",
        "text": "The 70-year-old British billionaire and crew members of Virgin Galactic launched the commercial space plane Unity from New Mexico, reached the edge of space and landed safely back at the spaceport on Sunday. The 70-year-old British billionaire and crew members of Virgin Galactic launched the commercial space plane Unity from New Mexico, reached the edge of space and landed safely back at the spaceport on Sunday. The 70-year-old British billionaire and crew members of Virgin Galactic launched the commercial space plane Unity from New Mexico, reached the edge of space and landed safely back at the spaceport on Sunday.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press and Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Experience Eclipse Totality (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8069",
        "date": "2017-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005367835/experience-eclipse-totality.html",
        "text": "Squeeze in among the crowds and witness the first total solar eclipse to cross the entire continental United States since 1918. An exclusive video by The New York Times in partnership with NOVA/PBS. Squeeze in among the crowds and witness the first total solar eclipse to cross the entire continental United States since 1918. An exclusive video by The New York Times in partnership with NOVA/PBS. Squeeze in among the crowds and witness the first total solar eclipse to cross the entire continental United States since 1918. An exclusive video by The New York Times in partnership with NOVA/PBS.",
        "author": "By Kaitlyn Mullin, Nathan Griffiths and Guglielmo Mattioli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: Preparing for the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8070",
        "date": "2017-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000004863551/life-on-mars-preparing-for-the-red-planet.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video.",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Niko Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: Preparing for the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8071",
        "date": "2017-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000004863551/life-on-mars-preparing-for-the-red-planet.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video.",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Niko Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: Preparing for the Red Planet (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8072",
        "date": "2017-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000004863551/life-on-mars-preparing-for-the-red-planet.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. We chronicle their mission in 360 video.",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Niko Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Extends Ingenuity Helicopter\u2019s Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8073",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007739978/mars-ingenuity-helicopter.html",
        "text": "NASA said on Friday that it would continue tests of the Ingenuity helicopter by another 30 Martian days, moving from a technology demonstration to studies of how it can support the Perseverance rover. NASA said on Friday that it would continue tests of the Ingenuity helicopter by another 30 Martian days, moving from a technology demonstration to studies of how it can support the Perseverance rover. NASA said on Friday that it would continue tests of the Ingenuity helicopter by another 30 Martian days, moving from a technology demonstration to studies of how it can support the Perseverance rover.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Extends Ingenuity Helicopter\u2019s Mission on Mars (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8074",
        "date": "2021-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000007739978/mars-ingenuity-helicopter.html",
        "text": "NASA said on Friday that it would continue tests of the Ingenuity helicopter by another 30 Martian days, moving from a technology demonstration to studies of how it can support the Perseverance rover. NASA said on Friday that it would continue tests of the Ingenuity helicopter by another 30 Martian days, moving from a technology demonstration to studies of how it can support the Perseverance rover. NASA said on Friday that it would continue tests of the Ingenuity helicopter by another 30 Martian days, moving from a technology demonstration to studies of how it can support the Perseverance rover.",
        "author": "By The New York Times"
    },
    {
        "title": "Object Streaks Across Midwestern Skies (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8075",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008036357/object-michigan-night-sky-satellite-space-russia.html",
        "text": "During pre-dawn hours on Wednesday, the object \u2014 possibly a Russian military satellite \u2014 flew over Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, leaving a fiery trail and breaking apart into smaller pieces during its descent. During pre-dawn hours on Wednesday, the object \u2014 possibly a Russian military satellite \u2014 flew over Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, leaving a fiery trail and breaking apart into smaller pieces during its descent. During pre-dawn hours on Wednesday, the object \u2014 possibly a Russian military satellite \u2014 flew over Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, leaving a fiery trail and breaking apart into smaller pieces during its descent.",
        "author": "By Storyful"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches a Robotic Explorer Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8076",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008028635/nasa-lucy-asteroids-trojan-swarms.html",
        "text": "The space probe embarked on a 12-year mission to study two clusters of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojan swarms, in an effort to unlock clues about the origins of our solar system. The space probe embarked on a 12-year mission to study two clusters of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojan swarms, in an effort to unlock clues about the origins of our solar system. The space probe embarked on a 12-year mission to study two clusters of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojan swarms, in an effort to unlock clues about the origins of our solar system.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Launches a Robotic Explorer Named Lucy (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8077",
        "date": "2021-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008028635/nasa-lucy-asteroids-trojan-swarms.html",
        "text": "The space probe embarked on a 12-year mission to study two clusters of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojan swarms, in an effort to unlock clues about the origins of our solar system. The space probe embarked on a 12-year mission to study two clusters of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojan swarms, in an effort to unlock clues about the origins of our solar system. The space probe embarked on a 12-year mission to study two clusters of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojan swarms, in an effort to unlock clues about the origins of our solar system.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Successfully Launches Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8078",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007976387/inspiration4-spacex-launch-orbit.html",
        "text": "The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles. The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles. The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles.",
        "author": "By Spacex Via Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Successfully Launches Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8079",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007976387/inspiration4-spacex-launch-orbit.html",
        "text": "The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles. The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles. The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles.",
        "author": "By Spacex Via Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Inspiration4 Successfully Launches Into Orbit (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8080",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000007976387/inspiration4-spacex-launch-orbit.html",
        "text": "The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles. The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles. The four crew members of the Inspiration4 mission, all civilians, reached orbit. The capsule they are riding in, named Resilience, will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of up to 360 miles.",
        "author": "By Spacex Via Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Says Space Force Creation a \u2018National Security Priority\u2019 (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8081",
        "date": "2019-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006368485/trump-space-force.html",
        "text": "President Trump signed an order to begin the process for establishing a new branch of the military that would be dedicated to handling threats in space. But critics say it still raises the danger of militarizing space. President Trump signed an order to begin the process for establishing a new branch of the military that would be dedicated to handling threats in space. But critics say it still raises the danger of militarizing space. President Trump signed an order to begin the process for establishing a new branch of the military that would be dedicated to handling threats in space. But critics say it still raises the danger of militarizing space.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: The Crew Answers Your Questions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8082",
        "date": "2017-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005173767/life-on-mars-the-crew-answers-your-questions.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fourth episode of this 360-video series, the crew answers audience questions. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fourth episode of this 360-video series, the crew answers audience questions. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fourth episode of this 360-video series, the crew answers audience questions.",
        "author": "By NICK CAPEZZERA and NIKO KOPPEL"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: The Crew Answers Your Questions (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8083",
        "date": "2017-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005173767/life-on-mars-the-crew-answers-your-questions.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fourth episode of this 360-video series, the crew answers audience questions. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fourth episode of this 360-video series, the crew answers audience questions. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fourth episode of this 360-video series, the crew answers audience questions.",
        "author": "By NICK CAPEZZERA and NIKO KOPPEL"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8084",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006578277/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch-video.html",
        "text": "The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Tuesday. The Falcon Heavy was carrying an assortment of cargo to orbit, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Tuesday. The Falcon Heavy was carrying an assortment of cargo to orbit, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Tuesday. The Falcon Heavy was carrying an assortment of cargo to orbit, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy Launch (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8085",
        "date": "2019-06-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000006578277/falcon-heavy-spacex-launch-video.html",
        "text": "The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Tuesday. The Falcon Heavy was carrying an assortment of cargo to orbit, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Tuesday. The Falcon Heavy was carrying an assortment of cargo to orbit, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people. The world\u2019s most powerful operating rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Tuesday. The Falcon Heavy was carrying an assortment of cargo to orbit, including a solar sail, an atomic clock and the ashes of 152 people.",
        "author": "By Nasa Tv Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Blasts off to Space on Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8086",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008022807/william-shatner-blue-origin-rocket-launch-bezos.html",
        "text": "At 90 years old, the actor William Shatner became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line. The \u201cStar Trek\u201d star traveled to space with three other passengers on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes. At 90 years old, the actor William Shatner became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line. The \u201cStar Trek\u201d star traveled to space with three other passengers on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes. At 90 years old, the actor William Shatner became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line. The \u201cStar Trek\u201d star traveled to space with three other passengers on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner Blasts off to Space on Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin Rocket (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8087",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000008022807/william-shatner-blue-origin-rocket-launch-bezos.html",
        "text": "At 90 years old, the actor William Shatner became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line. The \u201cStar Trek\u201d star traveled to space with three other passengers on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes. At 90 years old, the actor William Shatner became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line. The \u201cStar Trek\u201d star traveled to space with three other passengers on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes. At 90 years old, the actor William Shatner became the oldest person to travel to space and cross the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line. The \u201cStar Trek\u201d star traveled to space with three other passengers on a mission that lasted about 10 minutes.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: An Interplanetary Marriage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8088",
        "date": "2017-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005365254/life-on-mars-an-interplanetary-marriage.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the sixth episode of this 360-video series, we observe the challenges of an interplanetary marriage. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the sixth episode of this 360-video series, we observe the challenges of an interplanetary marriage... Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the sixth episode of this 360-video series, we observe the challenges of an interplanetary marriage.",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Veda Shastri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: An Interplanetary Marriage (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8089",
        "date": "2017-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005365254/life-on-mars-an-interplanetary-marriage.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the sixth episode of this 360-video series, we observe the challenges of an interplanetary marriage. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the sixth episode of this 360-video series, we observe the challenges of an interplanetary marriage... Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the sixth episode of this 360-video series, we observe the challenges of an interplanetary marriage.",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Veda Shastri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: Mirages of Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8090",
        "date": "2017-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005307409/life-on-mars-virtual-reality-isolation.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fifth episode of this 360-video series, experience the virtual environments the crew uses to relieve stress. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fifth episode of this 360-video series, experience the virtual environments the crew uses to re... Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fifth episode of this 360-video series, experience the virtual environments the crew uses to relieve stress.",
        "author": "By NICK CAPEZZERA and NIKO KOPPEL"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: Mirages of Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8091",
        "date": "2017-07-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005307409/life-on-mars-virtual-reality-isolation.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fifth episode of this 360-video series, experience the virtual environments the crew uses to relieve stress. Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fifth episode of this 360-video series, experience the virtual environments the crew uses to re... Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the fifth episode of this 360-video series, experience the virtual environments the crew uses to relieve stress.",
        "author": "By NICK CAPEZZERA and NIKO KOPPEL"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: Return to Earth (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8092",
        "date": "2017-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/space/100000005457886/life-on-mars-return-to-earth.html",
        "text": "In the series finale of our 360 video series, \"Life on Mars,\" the six crew members living in isolation for a NASA-funded research study exit their habitat in Hawaii after eight months. Follow their return from Mars-like conditions and how they adjust to everyday life. In the series finale of our 360 video series, \"Life on Mars,\" the six crew members living in isolation for a NASA-funded research study exit their habitat in Hawaii after eight months. Follow their return from Mars-like conditions and how they adj... In the series finale of our 360 video series, \"Life on Mars,\" the six crew members living in isolation for a NASA-funded research study exit their habitat in Hawaii after eight months. Follow their return from Mars-like conditions and how they adjust to everyday life.",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Veda Shastri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: At Home in the Habitat (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8093",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005108770/life-on-mars-at-home-in-the-habitat.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the third episode of this 360-video series, take a tour of the home they have made for themselves after four months Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the third episode of this 360-video series, take a tour of the home they have made for themselves a... Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the third episode of this 360-video series, take a tour of the home they have made for themselves after four months",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Niko Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars: At Home in the Habitat (NYT: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8094",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000005108770/life-on-mars-at-home-in-the-habitat.html",
        "text": "Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the third episode of this 360-video series, take a tour of the home they have made for themselves after four months Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the third episode of this 360-video series, take a tour of the home they have made for themselves a... Six people are living in isolation for eight months on a volcano in Hawaii as part of a NASA-funded study to simulate human exploration of Mars. In the third episode of this 360-video series, take a tour of the home they have made for themselves after four months",
        "author": "By Nick Capezzera and Niko Koppel"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Water on the Moon? New Finding Deepens Puzzle (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8095",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-water-on-the-moon-new-finding-deepens-puzzle-11603747022?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=39",
        "text": "\u201cTo be clear, they are not puddles of water but instead they are water molecules that are so far apart that they do not [form] ice or liquid water,\u201d said Casey Honniball, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The study formed part of her graduate thesis work at the University of Hawaii at M\u0101noa in Honolulu.\nScientists said the finding only deepened the puzzle of lunar water.\n\n\n\u201cThe discovery raises new questions about how water is created and how it can persist in the harsh airless conditions of the sunlit lunar surface,\u201d said Paul Hertz, director of NASA\u2019s astrophysics division.\nSince 2008, scientists have known that ice deposits existed in the deep freeze of lunar polar craters. But space agency planners preparing for crewed missions to the moon have expected that astronauts will have to bring their own water with them to survive because such caches of lunar ice may be too inaccessible or hazardous to mine.\n\u201cWe know there\u2019s water on the Moon, but we don\u2019t know exactly how accessible lunar water is for our future explorers,\u201d said Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for NASA\u2019s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. \u201cSo, finding water that is easier to reach is really important to us.\u201d\nIn a news briefing Monday, the agency scientists offered two theories. A steady rain of micrometeorites over millions of years may have deposited the water on the lunar surface in a pitter-patter of tiny but violent impacts. The water molecules also might have been created in a series of chemical reactions between hydrogen borne on the solar wind and oxygen-bearing minerals, the scientists said.\nUsing an infrared telescope aboard a NASA jet flying over Nevada, the researchers spotted the distinctive spectral wavelength emitted by water molecules on the sun-bleached surface of the moon. That suggested water may be locked inside grains of lunar grit, just like liquid in a thermos bottle, the scientists said.\nDr. Honniball and her colleagues detected the water molecules in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the moon\u2019s sunny southern hemisphere. By extrapolating from the infrared signal, the scientists calculated that the concentration appeared to be roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water within a cubic meter of lunar soil. If that estimation is correct, the Sahara Desert contains about 100 times more water.\nThe aerial observatory used to spot the new water deposits\u2014a modified Boeing 747 jet\u2014is called the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. Operating at an altitude of up to 45,000 feet, it normally studies some of the most distant, dim objects in the universe, such as black holes and far-flung galaxies.\n\u201cThis was actually the first time that SOFIA observed the Moon,\u201d said SOFIA project scientist Naseem Rangwala at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Ca. \u201cAnd we did it as a test case because the questions surrounding the Moon\u2019s water were so compelling.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tCasey Honniball is the lead author of a new study about water molecules on the moon. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled her name in one instance as Honnibal. (Corrected on Oct. 26.) Water molecules have been detected in one of the largest, sunniest lunar craters visible from Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Water on the Moon? New Finding Deepens Puzzle (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8096",
        "date": "2020-10-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-water-on-the-moon-new-finding-deepens-puzzle-11603747022?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=45",
        "text": "\u201cTo be clear, they are not puddles of water but instead they are water molecules that are so far apart that they do not [form] ice or liquid water,\u201d said Casey Honniball, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The study formed part of her graduate thesis work at the University of Hawaii at M\u0101noa in Honolulu.\n\n\n\n\nScientists said the finding only deepened the puzzle of lunar water.\n\n\n\u201cThe discovery raises new questions about how water is created and how it can persist in the harsh airless conditions of the sunlit lunar surface,\u201d said Paul Hertz, director of NASA\u2019s astrophysics division.\nSince 2008, scientists have known that ice deposits existed in the deep freeze of lunar polar craters. But space agency planners preparing for crewed missions to the moon have expected that astronauts will have to bring their own water with them to survive because such caches of lunar ice may be too inaccessible or hazardous to mine.\n\u201cWe know there\u2019s water on the Moon, but we don\u2019t know exactly how accessible lunar water is for our future explorers,\u201d said Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist for NASA\u2019s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. \u201cSo, finding water that is easier to reach is really important to us.\u201d\nIn a news briefing Monday, the agency scientists offered two theories. A steady rain of micrometeorites over millions of years may have deposited the water on the lunar surface in a pitter-patter of tiny but violent impacts. The water molecules also might have been created in a series of chemical reactions between hydrogen borne on the solar wind and oxygen-bearing minerals, the scientists said.\nUsing an infrared telescope aboard a NASA jet flying over Nevada, the researchers spotted the distinctive spectral wavelength emitted by water molecules on the sun-bleached surface of the moon. That suggested water may be locked inside grains of lunar grit, just like liquid in a thermos bottle, the scientists said.\nDr. Honniball and her colleagues detected the water molecules in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the moon\u2019s sunny southern hemisphere. By extrapolating from the infrared signal, the scientists calculated that the concentration appeared to be roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water within a cubic meter of lunar soil. If that estimation is correct, the Sahara Desert contains about 100 times more water.\nThe aerial observatory used to spot the new water deposits\u2014a modified Boeing 747 jet\u2014is called the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. Operating at an altitude of up to 45,000 feet, it normally studies some of the most distant, dim objects in the universe, such as black holes and far-flung galaxies.\n\u201cThis was actually the first time that SOFIA observed the Moon,\u201d said SOFIA project scientist Naseem Rangwala at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center near Mountain View, Ca. \u201cAnd we did it as a test case because the questions surrounding the Moon\u2019s water were so compelling.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tCasey Honniball is the lead author of a new study about water molecules on the moon. An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled her name in one instance as Honnibal. (Corrected on Oct. 26.) Water molecules have been detected in one of the largest, sunniest lunar craters visible from Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "World\u2019s Ice Is Melting Faster Than Ever, Climate Scientists Say (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8097",
        "date": "2021-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-ice-is-melting-faster-than-ever-climate-scientists-say-11611565200?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=35",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s such a huge amount it\u2019s hard to imagine it,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Slater,\n\n\n\n a research fellow at the U.K.\u2019s University of Leeds Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling and the lead author of a paper describing the new research. \u201cIce plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate, and losses will increase the frequency of extreme weather events such as flooding, fires, storm surges and heat waves.\u201d\nThe paper was published Monday in the European Geophysical Union\u2019s journal the Cryosphere.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Big Melt\nPrevious research based on NASA satellite data showed that the land ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland have been losing mass since 2002.\nAntarctica mass (Gt)\n\n\n\n0\n\n\n\u00a0Gigatons\n\n\n\u2013500\n\n\n\u20131,000\n\n\n\u20131,500\n\n\n\u20132,000\n\n\n\u20132,500\n\n\n\u20133,000\n\n\n2002\n\n\n2010\n\n\n2020\n\n\nGreenland mass (Gt)\n\n\n0\n\n\n\u00a0Gigatons\n\n\n\u20131,000\n\n\n\u20132,000\n\n\n\u20133,000\n\n\n\u20134,000\n\n\n\u20135,000\n\n\n\u20136,000\n\n\n2002\n\n\n2010\n\n\n2020\n\n\n\nNote: Gap represents time between missions.\nSource: NASA\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAdding up the loss from glaciers, ice shelves, polar ice caps and sea ice, Dr. Slater and his colleagues determined that the rate of global melting has accelerated 65% since the 1990s.\n\n\nThe ice loss has grown from 0.8 trillion tons a year to 1.3 trillion tons a year, driven by rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures resulting from greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said. Slightly more than half the ice loss occurred in the Northern Hemisphere.\nDr. Slater and a team of eight other scientists from the University of Edinburgh, University College London and a Edinburgh-based climate data company called Earth Wave Ltd. based their findings on 50 studies of ice loss, field measurements and data from 17 satellite missions.\nThe researchers employed a variety of techniques to reach their conclusions. These included the use of satellite altimeters and gravity sensors to measure the volume and mass of ice on the ground below. They also used satellite imagery of ice shelves and glaciers to detect changes over the years.\n\u201cIt\u2019s a reminder that dangerous climate change is already here, in this case in the form of melting ice, rising sea level and the inundation of our coastlines,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Mann,\n\n\n\n a Pennsylvania State University climatologist and author of \u201cThe New Climate War.\u201d He wasn\u2019t involved in the research.\nThe new research comes as the U.S. moved last week to rejoin the Paris Agreement, an international climate accord designed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 and keep the rise in global temperature to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), compared with preindustrial levels.\nFormer President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n officially withdrew from the accord last year after vowing to do so for several years.\nThe average global temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1880s, when systematic record-keeping began, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n World leaders welcomed President Biden\u2019s move to rejoin the Paris climate accord. As the president reverses many of his predecessor\u2019s climate policies, here\u2019s what it means for the global race to meet ambitious emissions targets. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images\n \n\n\nLast week, NASA and the European Union\u2019s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that Earth\u2019s average global surface temperature in 2020 tied 2016 as the warmest year on record.\nIndependent studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a private climate-analysis group called Berkeley Earth found that 2020 was slightly colder than 2016 but warmer than every other year since 1850.\nAll told, the past seven years have been the warmest in the modern record, according to NASA.\n\u201cIt\u2019s important that we keep up with the big picture for ice because the story there is very dramatic, despite the possibility that one glacier here or there might be doing something different,\u201d said climate scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gavin Schmidt,\n\n\n\n director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com From Antarctica to the Arctic, the Earth lost 28 trillion metric tons of ice, an amount roughly equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the state of Michigan\u2014and enough to raise the sea level just over an inch or so world-wide. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Collects Mars Rock Samples in Historic First for Perseverance Rover (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8098",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-mars-rock-sample-11631124341?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=23",
        "text": "\u201cThis is truly a historic moment,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science in Washington, D.C., after the first sample\u2019s collection. \u201cWe expect jaw-dropping discoveries across a broad set of science areas, including exploration into the question of whether life once existed on Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis composite image shows the hole drilled by NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover during a successful collection of a rock sample from Jezero Crater on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nIn pursuit of any evidence of life signs, Perseverance is exploring an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater just north of the Martian equator. The six-wheeled, $2.2-billion robotic rover landed there on Feb. 18 after a seven-month, 300-million-mile voyage from Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro-imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rover has been driving along the rocky outcrops and boulders of a half-mile-long ridgeline called \u201cArtuby\u201d that borders two geologic zones believed to contain the crater\u2019s deepest and most ancient layers of exposed bedrock.\n\n\nThere the rover used its intricate drilling rig to extract two core samples from a flat, briefcase-sized rock\u2014apparently a remnant of lava from an ancient volcanic eruption\u2014that mission engineers nicknamed \u201cRochette.\u201d The rig\u2019s hollow coring bit and a percussive drill are at the end of the rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe samples, named \u201cMontdenier\u201d and \u201cMontagnac,\u201d were retrieved on Sept. 6 and Sept. 8 from the same rock and are 5.9 centimeters, or 2.3 inches, and 6.1 centimeters, respectively, in length. \nInitial analysis of rock revealed that they are likely volcanic in origin, and contain salts that likely formed in the presence of water.\n\u201cIt looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,\u201d said mission project scientist Ken Farley, of the California Institute of Technology. \u201cIt\u2019s a big deal that the water was there a long time.\u201d\nMartian soil, called regolith, is an arid mixture of several minerals, including silicon, calcium and sulfur, NASA scientists said. They hope that rocks, however, might be more likely to retain traces of organic compounds\u2014possible evidence of an alien biology, if any ever existed on the now-barren planet.\nThe rover carries 43 tubes into which rock samples will be placed over the next two years, with the expectation that a subsequent Mars mission will collect the tubes and return them to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore sample The two pencil-sized samples were placed in airtight tubes and will eventually be brought back to Earth for analysis. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Collects Mars Rock Samples in Historic First for Perseverance Rover (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8099",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-mars-rock-sample-11631124341?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=23",
        "text": "\u201cThis is truly a historic moment,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science in Washington, D.C., after the first sample\u2019s collection. \u201cWe expect jaw-dropping discoveries across a broad set of science areas, including exploration into the question of whether life once existed on Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis composite image shows the hole drilled by NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover during a successful collection of a rock sample from Jezero Crater on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn pursuit of any evidence of life signs, Perseverance is exploring an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater just north of the Martian equator. The six-wheeled, $2.2-billion robotic rover landed there on Feb. 18 after a seven-month, 300-million-mile voyage from Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro-imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rover has been driving along the rocky outcrops and boulders of a half-mile-long ridgeline called \u201cArtuby\u201d that borders two geologic zones believed to contain the crater\u2019s deepest and most ancient layers of exposed bedrock.\n\n\nThere the rover used its intricate drilling rig to extract two core samples from a flat, briefcase-sized rock\u2014apparently a remnant of lava from an ancient volcanic eruption\u2014that mission engineers nicknamed \u201cRochette.\u201d The rig\u2019s hollow coring bit and a percussive drill are at the end of the rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe samples, named \u201cMontdenier\u201d and \u201cMontagnac,\u201d were retrieved on Sept. 6 and Sept. 8 from the same rock and are 5.9 centimeters, or 2.3 inches, and 6.1 centimeters, respectively, in length. \nInitial analysis of rock revealed that they are likely volcanic in origin, and contain salts that likely formed in the presence of water.\n\u201cIt looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,\u201d said mission project scientist Ken Farley, of the California Institute of Technology. \u201cIt\u2019s a big deal that the water was there a long time.\u201d\nMartian soil, called regolith, is an arid mixture of several minerals, including silicon, calcium and sulfur, NASA scientists said. They hope that rocks, however, might be more likely to retain traces of organic compounds\u2014possible evidence of an alien biology, if any ever existed on the now-barren planet.\nThe rover carries 43 tubes into which rock samples will be placed over the next two years, with the expectation that a subsequent Mars mission will collect the tubes and return them to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore sa The two pencil-sized samples were placed in airtight tubes and will eventually be brought back to Earth for analysis. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Perseverance Mission on Track for Ambitious Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8100",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-mission-2021-rover-perseverance-nasa-11613595107?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=37",
        "text": "\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission.\n\n\n\n\nBristling with sensors, cameras, microphones and a robotic arm, the one-ton, SUV-size Perseverance rover is designed to look for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life and pack what it finds into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis. NASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return these samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0\n\n\n250,000\n\n\n500,000\n\n\n750,000\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328.1 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSpirit\n(2004)\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighe The SUV-size rover and a tiny robotic helicopter are scheduled to touch down on Mars on Thursday, beginning a two-year quest to find evidence of past biological activity on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Perseverance Mission on Track for Ambitious Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8101",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-mission-2021-rover-perseverance-nasa-11613595107?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=9",
        "text": "\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission.\nBristling with sensors, cameras, microphones and a robotic arm, the one-ton, SUV-size Perseverance rover is designed to look for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life and pack what it finds into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis. NASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return these samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0\n\n\n250,000\n\n\n500,000\n\n\n750,000\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328.1 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSpirit\n(2004)\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed ab The SUV-size rover and a tiny robotic helicopter are scheduled to touch down on Mars on Thursday, beginning a two-year quest to find evidence of past biological activity on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Perseverance Mission on Track for Ambitious Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8102",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-mission-2021-rover-perseverance-nasa-11613595107?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=27",
        "text": "\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission.\nBristling with sensors, cameras, microphones and a robotic arm, the one-ton, SUV-size Perseverance rover is designed to look for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life and pack what it finds into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis. NASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return these samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0\n\n\n250,000\n\n\n500,000\n\n\n750,000\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328.1 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSpirit\n(2004)\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed ab The SUV-size rover and a tiny robotic helicopter are scheduled to touch down on Mars on Thursday, beginning a two-year quest to find evidence of past biological activity on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Mars Perseverance Mission on Track for Ambitious Landing (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8103",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-mission-2021-rover-perseverance-nasa-11613595107?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=34",
        "text": "\u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission.\nBristling with sensors, cameras, microphones and a robotic arm, the one-ton, SUV-size Perseverance rover is designed to look for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life and pack what it finds into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis. NASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return these samples by 2031, NASA officials said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0\n\n\n250,000\n\n\n500,000\n\n\n750,000\n\n\n328 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nSpirit (2004)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed about 383 pounds. Spirit found rocks suggestive of hot springs, photographed a dust devil, and scaled a Martian mountain before becoming trapped in loose sands.\n\n\nOpportunity (2004)\n\n\nCuriosity (2012)\n\n\nStill active, the Curiosity rover is about 9 feet long and weighs almost a ton. It gathered evidence that the crater basin where it landed was once an oasis.\n\n\nIdentical to Spirit, Opportunity landed on the opposite side of Mars. There, it discovered convincing signs that water had once flowed on the surface.\n\n\nTotal distance traveled\n\n\nTotal pictures taken\n\n\n0 miles\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\n30\n\n\n0 thousand\n\n\n250\n\n\n500\n\n\n750\n\n\n328.1 feet\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\n550 pictures\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nStill\nactive!\n\n\nYears active on Mars\n\n\nInitial mission length\n\n\nActual\n\n\n0\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n5\n\n\n6\n\n\n7\n\n\n8\n\n\n9\n\n\n10\n\n\n11\n\n\n12\n\n\n13\n\n\n14\n\n\n15\n\n\nSojourner\n\n\nSpirit\n\n\nOpportunity\n\n\nCuriosity\n\n\nPerseverance\n(planned)\n\n\nPerseverance (2021)\n\n\nSet to land on Feb. 18, NASA\u2019s newest rover, Perseverance, is about 10 feet long and weighs just over a ton. It carries seven instruments to test for evidence of past Martian life and prepare samples for return to Earth. It also carries an experimental helicopter for test flights. \n\n\nSource: NASA\nDylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\nPrevious Ventures\n\n\nIf all goes well, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet.\n\n\nSpirit\n(2004)\n\n\nSojourner (1997)\n\n\nAs the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple. It was about as long as a clarinet and weighed 25 lbs. It took pictures and sampled rocks. The winds of Mars kept dust off its solar panels, allowing it to last longer than expected.\n\n\nSpirit was one of two larger rovers sent as a pair. Each one was about 5 feet long and weighed ab The SUV-size rover and a tiny robotic helicopter are scheduled to touch down on Mars on Thursday, beginning a two-year quest to find evidence of past biological activity on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz | Graphics by Brian McGill and Dylan Moriarty"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Christmas Star? Jupiter and Saturn Alignment Sparks Comparisons (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8104",
        "date": "2020-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-christmas-star-jupiter-and-saturn-alignment-sparks-comparisons-11608472851?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=31",
        "text": "\u201cJupiter and Saturn will have an unusually close approach,\u201d said astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Wasserman\n\n\n\n at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Christmas Crossing\nConjunctions happen when two celestial objects appear to pass close to one another as seen from Earth. They aren't physically close, they simply look that way because of their orbital alignment. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn hasn\u2019t occurred under a dark sky for some 800 years.\n\n\nSaturn\n\n\nJupiter\n\n\n0\u00b0\n\n\n2\n\n\n4\n\n\n6\n\n\n8\n\n\nOct. 2 \n\n\nOct. 7\n\n\nOct. 12 \n\n\nOct. 17\n\n\nOct. 22 \n\n\nOct. 27 \n\n\nNov. 1 \n\n\nNov. 6\n\n\nNov. 11 \n\n\nNov. 16\n\n\nNov. 21 \n\n\nNov. 26\n\n\nDec. 1 \n\n\nDec. 6\n\n\nDec. 11 \n\n\nDec. 16\n\n\nDec. 21 \n\n\nThe two planets will be visible looking toward the western horizon in the hour or so after sunset throughout most of the world and will appear to be separated by about one-fifth the diameter of the moon.\n\n\nSaturn\n\n\nJupiter\n\n\n\nSources: NASA; Perth Observatory\nAlberto Cervantes/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe two worlds will appear so close on Dec. 21 that they will resemble a double planet, separated by a distance equal to only one-fifth the diameter of the full Moon\u2014about a dime\u2019s thickness\u2014as seen from Earth, astronomers say. They will be visible just above the western horizon during the hour after sunset almost world-wide in the days before and after they make their closest approach on the solstice.\n\n\nThis month\u2019s planetary conjunction is part of the solar system\u2019s celestial clockworks. Jupiter orbits the sun every 11.86 years. Ringed Saturn circles every 29.46 years. They regularly line up in the sky about once every 20 years or so but only rarely are they quite so closely aligned.\n\u201cIt is almost like watching two runners going around a very large track, one faster than the other,\u201d said Rice University astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Hartigan\n\n\n\n in Houston, who has charted these conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn dating back 2,000 years and calculated future alignments of the pair for the next 1,000 years. \u201cEvery once in a while, they line up.\u201d\nAstronomers often use these apparent alignments to help calculate orbits more precisely, to estimate the sizes of distant worlds and to study planetary systems circling other stars.\nThe two planets had a more recent conjunction that was just as close, Dr. Hartigan said, in 1623, only 14 years after Galileo made his first telescope. But it appears to have attracted no notice at the time, occurring so close to the setting sun that no one likely could see it. \u201cAs far as I know, there are no records of anyone actually seeing that one,\u201d Dr. Hartigan said.\nAmong some sky watchers, the pairing of the planets during the Christmas season has stirred comparisons to the star of Bethlehem mentioned in the New Testament. No one knows what astronomical occurrence, if any, might have prompted that biblical portent, Dr. Wasserman said.\nJupiter and Saturn have aligned about 100 times in the past 2,000 years. In the year 7 B.C., they lined up, as seen from Earth, in May, September and early December in a rare triplet, astronomers say. At those junctures, though, the planets were relatively far apart and would have appeared much dimmer than the one expected this month.\nThere are many other celestial events that could have been the Christmas star, astronomers say. In much a brighter and more readily visible event, for example, Jupiter aligned with Venus in 2 B.C.\nFor many, the coming winter solstice conjunction offers a moment to appreciate the beauty of the night sky.\n\u201cIt is really a lovely connection between generations going into the far distant past and into the future, to mark eras and the passage of time,\u201d said Dr. Hartigan. \u201cRegardless of whatever travails or problems we as humans may be having, this grand celestial clock just keeps ticking and moving along.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com\n\n\nA Look Up\n\n\n\n\nSpace Junk Digs New Moon Crater, Astronomers Say\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nSpace Junk Set to Crash Into Moon Shows Debris Problem Is Spreading Beyond Earth \nMarch 3, 2022 \n\n\nCrispr Patent Ruling Picks Winners in Fight Over Gene-Editing Technology\nMarch 2, 2022 \n\n\nImpacts of Climate Change Now Severe and Widespread, U.N. Panel Says\nFebruary 28, 2022 \n\n\nWildfires Will Become More Intense and Frequent, U.N. Study Finds\nFebruary 23, 2022 The two planets will appear to nearly touch in the night sky on the winter solstice on Monday, in a rare celestial occurrence that has happened only twice since the Middle Ages. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science & Health Briefing: The Ethics of Genetics Research, What\u2019s Next in Space, and More (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8105",
        "date": "2019-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-health-briefing-the-ethics-of-genetics-research-whats-next-in-space-and-more-11558962000?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=72",
        "text": "Ethics of the future. The world\u2019s first known gene-edited babies are less than a year old, and serious questions surround the ethics of their creation. Meanwhile, ongoing breakthroughs in understanding about DNA and disease are whipsawing families. And last month, researchers reported they found a way to restore some activity to pig brains hours after death, in a series of experiments that medical and legal experts said could reshape our understanding of the brain\u2019s limits.\nMedical cures. Researchers recently said they treated a teenager\u2019s antibiotic-resistant infection with the help of genetically engineered viruses. That could point to a potential path for countering the growing threat of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.\n\n\nClimate change. A new model suggests a slower decline in glaciers than most scientists thought. Some shareholders, meanwhile, are successfully pushing company boards with demands that they improve disclosures on topics including greenhouse-gas emissions.\n2. Peering into the future.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDennis Danzik, an industrial engineer, says about the devices he has invented, \u2018Honestly, there are things about the phenomenon I don\u2019t understand.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jesse Rieser for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nNew inventions. One man is on a quest to power the world with magnets. Dennis Danzik, the science and technology officer for Wyoming-based Inductance Energy, says he has invented a magnetic generator, a flywheel system that extracts usable energy from the interplay of exotic magnets\u2014also known as a free-energy device, a cousin to the fabled perpetual-motion machine.\nNew ideas. At the recent WSJ Future of Everything Festival in New York, we explored the future of inventions, medicine, technology and more. Alexis Ohanian hopes for a future of work that moves away from \u201chustle culture.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IBM\n\n\n tech executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Arvind Krishna\n\n\n\n predicts quantum computing is about to become mainstream. And Land O\u2019Lakes CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beth Ford\n\n\n\n isn\u2019t afraid of the explosion in meatless food\u2019s popularity.\nRead more from our Future of Everything series.\n\nExpanding the imagination. New discoveries don\u2019t always guarantee complete understanding. Accurate measurement of time is one of the glories of physics, but also one of the most exciting frontiers of current research, for example. Today\u2019s atomic clocks are more accurate than ever, but the nature of time itself remains enigmatic.\n3. A new study last month hailed a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn example array of intracranial electrodes of the type used to record brain activity in the current study.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n University of California|, San Francisco\n \n\n\n\nHarnessing AI. A research team introduced an experimental brain decoder that combined direct recording of signals from the brains of subjects with artificial intelligence, machine learning and a speech synthesizer. The findings could be a step toward brain implants that one day let people with impaired abilities speak their minds. Scientists utilized the motor-nerve impulses generated by the brain to control the muscles that articulate our thoughts once we\u2019ve decided to express them aloud.\nResponsible AI. Today\u2019s middle-schoolers may be the first \u201cartificial intelligence natives,\u201d a generation that has grown up interacting with YouTube\u2019s algorithm or Amazon\u2019s Alexa smart speaker. Educators are grappling with how to teach children to be responsible consumers of the technology. Blakeley H. Payne, a graduate research assistant at MIT Media Lab, has an idea.\n4. What\u2019s next for the global space race?\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nNew players. Half a century after the U.S. landed on the moon, a new space race is gathering pace. China has particularly ambitious plans: It wants to build a manned lunar base within the next decade and start mining for energy resources. Other governments have plans, too. In the U.S., NASA recently unveiled plans to return to the moon, and requested a $1.6 billion budget increase for 2020. President Trump has also proposed a Space Force, a military branch dedicated to space, though some lawmakers are skeptical.\nPrivate enterprise. It isn\u2019t just governments that are looking to the skies. Amazon chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n funds the Blue Origin space company, which employs more than 2,000 people at five sites and is looking to be a player in the lucrative market for government and commercial business in space. And\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX has raised millions in funding, though there are questions about the financial viability of an internet-via-satellite business considered key to its growth.\nFrom science writer Robert Lee Hotz:\nWhat a difference a half-century makes. When the U.S. landed the first humans on the moon in 1969, it w A special edition of The 10-Point newsletter ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Detect for the First Time Quakes on Mars (WSJ: Science) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8106",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-detect-for-the-first-time-quakes-on-mars-11582560000?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=13",
        "text": "\u201cWe have finally for the first time established that Mars is a seismically active planet,\u201d said geophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Banerdt\n\n\n\n at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He directs an international science team drawn from more than three dozen research facilities. \u201cThe seismicity is greater than the Moon but less than the Earth.\u201d\nOn Monday, the scientists published their initial findings about the Martian interior, atmosphere and magnetic field from the $828 million mission in a series of research papers in Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications.\n\n\nQuakes may be common on Mars, the scientists said. However, the atmosphere around the shallow impact crater\u2014nicknamed Homestead Hollow\u2014where the InSight probe landed is stirred by thousands of dust-devil swirls that make the area home to the planet\u2019s most turbulent winds.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\nSource: NASA, Nature Geosciences\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMoreover, surprisingly strong traces of the planet\u2019s primordial magnetic field billions of years ago still linger in some rocks around the landing zone, the scientists said. Unlike Mars, Earth today has a protective magnetic field generated by electric currents from the motion of molten iron in the planet\u2019s core, shielding the surface from cosmic rays and charged solar particles.\n\u201cWe unexpectedly see that there is today a [magnetic] field about 10 times stronger than predicted by satellite observations,\u201d said mission scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Catherine Johnson,\n\n\n\n a geophysicist at the University of British Co Faint tremors on Mars are detected by scientists for the first time, according to new findings from NASA\u2019s InSight lander, which landed on the red planet almost 15 months ago. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Detect for the First Time Quakes on Mars (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8107",
        "date": "2020-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-detect-for-the-first-time-quakes-on-mars-11582560000?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=47",
        "text": "\u201cWe have finally for the first time established that Mars is a seismically active planet,\u201d said geophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Banerdt\n\n\n\n at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He directs an international science team drawn from more than three dozen research facilities. \u201cThe seismicity is greater than the Moon but less than the Earth.\u201d\nOn Monday, the scientists published their initial findings about the Martian interior, atmosphere and magnetic field from the $828 million mission in a series of research papers in Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications.\n\n\nQuakes may be common on Mars, the scientists said. However, the atmosphere around the shallow impact crater\u2014nicknamed Homestead Hollow\u2014where the InSight probe landed is stirred by thousands of dust-devil swirls that make the area home to the planet\u2019s most turbulent winds.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\n\n\nInside Mars\n\n\nSensors on NASA's Mars InSight lander recorded 450 marsquakes in the past year or so, giving scientists their first look at the planet's interior.\n\n\nEstimated depth of Mars layers\n\n\nWind-blown sand and rocky grit make up a surface crust about 16 feet or so deep. It is so compacted that the probe has been unable to drill more than a few inches deep.\n\n\n\u00a0miles\n\n\n0\n\n\nAncient lava flows make up a layer of heavily fractured bedrock about 3.1 miles thick. \n\n\nCompetent basaltic \nlava flows\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\nRocks with traces of a magnetic field make up a layer from 3.1 miles to about 18.6 miles thick.\n\n\nStrongly\nmagnetized\nbasement rock\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe deep mantle and core of Mars remain a mystery. Scientists hope that stronger marsquakes in the year ahead will generate seismic waves powerful enough to reveal its composition.\n\n\nMantle\n\n\n25\n\n\n30\n\n\n\nSource: NASA, Nature Geosciences\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMoreover, surprisingly strong traces of the planet\u2019s primordial magnetic field billions of years ago still linger in some rocks around the landing zone, the scientists said. Unlike Mars, Earth today has a protective magnetic field generated by electric currents from the motion of molten iron in the planet\u2019s core, shielding the surface from cosmic rays and charged solar particles.\n\u201cWe unexpectedly see that there is today a [magnetic] field about 10 times stronger than predicted by satellite observations,\u201d said mission scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Catherine Johnson,\n\n\n\n a geophysicist at the University of British Co Faint tremors on Mars are detected by scientists for the first time, according to new findings from NASA\u2019s InSight lander, which landed on the red planet almost 15 months ago. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Discover New Evidence of the Asteroid That Killed Off the Dinosaurs (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8108",
        "date": "2019-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-discover-new-evidence-of-the-asteroid-that-killed-off-the-dinosaurs-11568055601?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=51",
        "text": "The sediments also offer chemical evidence that the cataclysm blew hundreds of billions of tons of sulfur from pulverized ocean rock into the atmosphere, triggering a global winter in which temperatures world-wide dropped by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit for decades, the scientists said.\n\u201cIt tells us what went on inside the crater on that day of doom that killed the dinosaurs,\u201d said Jay Melosh, a geophysicist at Purdue University who studies impact craters and wasn\u2019t a member of the drilling team. \u201cAll of this mayhem is directly recorded in the core.\u201d\n\n\nThe scientists in the drilling consortium, led by geophysicist Sean Gulick at the University of Texas in Austin, who was co-chief of the $10 million project, published their research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The project was sponsored by the International Ocean Discovery Program and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom the platform, scientists drilled into the inner rim of the asteroid crater, buried in the seafloor of the Gulf under about 1,500 feet of limestone.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ronaldo schemidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe scientists worked aboard a drilling ship called Lifeboat Myrtle anchored offshore from the Mexican port of Progreso. In 2016, they drilled into the crater\u2019s inner rim for the first time, buried in the seafloor under about 1,500 feet of limestone deposited in the millions of years since the impact.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDrilling Into A Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Impact\n\n\nGeologists discover new details of the asteroid that wiped out much of the life on Earth 65 million years ago.\n\n\nImpact area\ninvestigated\n\n\nWithin one minute after impact\n\n\n1\n\n\nAn asteroid blasts a 100-kilometer-wide crater into the sulfur-rich seafloor off the Yucatan, spewing a vast plume of limestone, granite and water vapor into the atmosphere.\n\n\nSedimentary\nrocks\n\n\nWater\n\n\nImpact\nplume\n\n\nImpact\nmelt\n\n\nCrust\n\n\nWithin three minutes after impact\n\n\n2\n\n\nThe crater collapses inward, sending an immense jet of molten rock upwards temporarily creating a peak higher than Mount Everest.\n\n\nImpact melt\n\n\nMantle\n\n\nAn hour after impact\n\n\n3\n\n\nWaves of seawater surging back and forth cover the ring of crater peaks with shards of volcanic glass and splintered rock.\n\n\nResurge\n\n\nBy the end of the day\n\n\n4\n\n\nThe backwash of waves adds more and more finely graded debris, including traces of charcoal from distant wildfires caused by the impact.\n\n\nBreccia*\n\n\nSorted\nsuevite\u2020\n\n\nSedimentary\nrocks\n\n\nTsunami\n\n\n*Shattered rocks cemented together \u2020Shards of volcanic glass and rock\n\n\nSource: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeologists study rocks as a record of compressed time, with ticks of the geologic clock typically measured in layers that accumulate over thousands of years. In the Chicxulub crater, though, hundreds of feet of sediments built up rapidly, recording impact effects like a high-speed stop-action camera, the scientists said.\n\u201cHere we have 130 meters in a single day,\u201d said Dr. Gulick. \u201cWe can read it on the scale of minutes and hours, which is amazing.\u201d\nThe asteroid blasted a cavity between 25 and 30 miles deep in the first seconds of impact, creating a boiling cauldron of molten rocks and super-heated steam, according to the scientists\u2019 interpretation of the rock. Rebounding from the hammer blow, a plume of molten rock splashed up into a peak higher than Mount Everest.\nWithin minutes, it collapsed into itself, splashing gigantic waves of lava outward that solidified into a ring of high peaks, the scientists said.\nAbout 20 minutes or so later, sea water surged back over the newly formed peaks, covering them in a blanket of impact rocks, the scientists said. As minutes became hours, waves choked with shards of volcanic glass and splintered rock rippled back and forth, coating the peaks in a layer of impact rock called suevite, the scientists said. As the hours passed, the backwash of waves added more and more finely graded debris.\nAt the very top of the rock core, the scientists detected traces of organic matter and charcoal. \u201cWe think the reflected tsunami brought back these traces of land and these tiny, tiny charcoal fragments,\u201d said Dr. Gulick. \u201cThe land was clearly on fire.\u201d\nEarth normally speeds through a cosmic rain of debris. In 2013, a relatively small meteor about 30 meters in diameter and weighing about 13,000 metric tons exploded in the air over Russia, damaging about 7,200 buildings and injuring about 1,400 people.\nInspired by the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in the 1970s, astronomers and NASA now routinely map the orbits of nearby asteroids and meteor swarms for signs of potentially lethal collisions. The space agency is planning a mission in 2021 to a nearby asteroid called Didymos to test ways to safely deflect a dangerous comet or asteroid before it strikes.\nThere are currently no sizeable asteroids known to be on a collision cours Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the day 65 million years ago when a city-sized asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all life on Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Discover New Evidence of the Asteroid That Killed Off the Dinosaurs (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8109",
        "date": "2019-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-discover-new-evidence-of-the-asteroid-that-killed-off-the-dinosaurs-11568055601?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=51",
        "text": "The sediments also offer chemical evidence that the cataclysm blew hundreds of billions of tons of sulfur from pulverized ocean rock into the atmosphere, triggering a global winter in which temperatures world-wide dropped by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit for decades, the scientists said.\n\u201cIt tells us what went on inside the crater on that day of doom that killed the dinosaurs,\u201d said Jay Melosh, a geophysicist at Purdue University who studies impact craters and wasn\u2019t a member of the drilling team. \u201cAll of this mayhem is directly recorded in the core.\u201d\n\n\nThe scientists in the drilling consortium, led by geophysicist Sean Gulick at the University of Texas in Austin, who was co-chief of the $10 million project, published their research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The project was sponsored by the International Ocean Discovery Program and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom the platform, scientists drilled into the inner rim of the asteroid crater, buried in the seafloor of the Gulf under about 1,500 feet of limestone.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ronaldo schemidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe scientists worked aboard a drilling ship called Lifeboat Myrtle anchored offshore from the Mexican port of Progreso. In 2016, they drilled into the crater\u2019s inner rim for the first time, buried in the seafloor under about 1,500 feet of limestone deposited in the millions of years since the impact.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDrilling Into A Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Impact\n\n\nGeologists discover new details of the asteroid that wiped out much of the life on Earth 65 million years ago.\n\n\nImpact area\ninvestigated\n\n\nWithin one minute after impact\n\n\n1\n\n\nAn asteroid blasts a 100-kilometer-wide crater into the sulfur-rich seafloor off the Yucatan, spewing a vast plume of limestone, granite and water vapor into the atmosphere.\n\n\nSedimentary\nrocks\n\n\nWater\n\n\nImpact\nplume\n\n\nImpact\nmelt\n\n\nCrust\n\n\nWithin three minutes after impact\n\n\n2\n\n\nThe crater collapses inward, sending an immense jet of molten rock upwards temporarily creating a peak higher than Mount Everest.\n\n\nImpact melt\n\n\nMantle\n\n\nAn hour after impact\n\n\n3\n\n\nWaves of seawater surging back and forth cover the ring of crater peaks with shards of volcanic glass and splintered rock.\n\n\nResurge\n\n\nBy the end of the day\n\n\n4\n\n\nThe backwash of waves adds more and more finely graded debris, including traces of charcoal from distant wildfires caused by the impact.\n\n\nBreccia*\n\n\nSorted\nsuevite\u2020\n\n\nSedimentary\nrocks\n\n\nTsunami\n\n\n*Shattered rocks cemented together \u2020Shards of volcanic glass and rock\n\n\nSource: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeologists study rocks as a record of compressed time, with ticks of the geologic clock typically measured in layers that accumulate over thousands of years. In the Chicxulub crater, though, hundreds of feet of sediments built up rapidly, recording impact effects like a high-speed stop-action camera, the scientists said.\n\u201cHere we have 130 meters in a single day,\u201d said Dr. Gulick. \u201cWe can read it on the scale of minutes and hours, which is amazing.\u201d\nThe asteroid blasted a cavity between 25 and 30 miles deep in the first seconds of impact, creating a boiling cauldron of molten rocks and super-heated steam, according to the scientists\u2019 interpretation of the rock. Rebounding from the hammer blow, a plume of molten rock splashed up into a peak higher than Mount Everest.\nWithin minutes, it collapsed into itself, splashing gigantic waves of lava outward that solidified into a ring of high peaks, the scientists said.\nAbout 20 minutes or so later, sea water surged back over the newly formed peaks, covering them in a blanket of impact rocks, the scientists said. As minutes became hours, waves choked with shards of volcanic glass and splintered rock rippled back and forth, coating the peaks in a layer of impact rock called suevite, the scientists said. As the hours passed, the backwash of waves added more and more finely graded debris.\nAt the very top of the rock core, the scientists detected traces of organic matter and charcoal. \u201cWe think the reflected tsunami brought back these traces of land and these tiny, tiny charcoal fragments,\u201d said Dr. Gulick. \u201cThe land was clearly on fire.\u201d\nEarth normally speeds through a cosmic rain of debris. In 2013, a relatively small meteor about 30 meters in diameter and weighing about 13,000 metric tons exploded in the air over Russia, damaging about 7,200 buildings and injuring about 1,400 people.\nInspired by the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in the 1970s, astronomers and NASA now routinely map the orbits of nearby asteroids and meteor swarms for signs of potentially lethal collisions. The space agency is planning a mission in 2021 to a nearby asteroid called Didymos to test ways to safely deflect a dangerous comet or asteroid before it strikes.\nThere are currently no sizeable asteroids known to be on a collision cours Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the day 65 million years ago when a city-sized asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all life on Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "James Webb Space Telescope Launches After Years of Delay (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8110",
        "date": "2021-12-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/james-webb-telescopes-complicated-launch-has-astronomers-nervously-waiting-11640428205?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=2",
        "text": "For scientists world-wide, the sun-orbiting observatory\u2014the largest, most powerful instrument of its type ever built\u2014will herald a new era of discovery in space. One hundred times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb will help astronomers peer at some of the oldest galaxies and stars in the universe, search for signs of habitability in the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system and study mysterious forces like dark energy using its infrared sensors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTesting mirror segments for the James Webb Space Telescope.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chris Gunn/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cWhat an emotional day,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA\u2019s Science Mission Directorate. The launch marks \u201cthe beginning of one of the most amazing missions that humanity has ever conceived,\u201d he said.\n\nThe launch was delayed twice in recent weeks, first because of technical issues and then because of poor weather.\nTo fit it into the rocket\u2019s 18-foot-wide, 56-foot-high nose cone, mission scientists had to build the telescope\u2019s gold-plated mirror\u2014measuring 21.5 feet in diameter when fully deployed\u2014as 18 separate segments that have to fold together like petals of an origami flower.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Grapevine A weekly look at our most colorful, thought-provoking and original feature stories on the business of life. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nShortly after launch, the telescope successfully separated from the rocket and deployed its solar array so that it can begin generating electricity and charging its batteries, NASA said. Within the next 24 hours, plans call for mission scientists to command Webb to course-correct using on-board rockets so that it heads toward a point four times as distant as the moon called the second Lagrange point.\nThen, complicated unfolding processes will begin, taking about two weeks to complete. Seventy hinges, 90 cables, 140 releases and 400 pulleys will be involved in unfolding the telescope\u2019s tennis court-size sunshield by issuing commands to Webb from Earth. Webb will then open the two wings of its primary mirror and lock them in place.\n\u201cNow we have to realize there are still innumerable things that have to work, and they have to work perfectly,\u201d NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said. \u201cBut we know that with great reward there is great risk.\u201d\nWebb has 344 \u201csingle-point failure\u201d items. A single-point failure is a piece of equipment or part of the system that, should it fail, could scuttle the entire mission.\n\n\n\n\u201c\u2018If Webb is a spectacular success, and there\u2019s no reason to think it won\u2019t be if everything works, then it makes future flagship missions more likely\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\u2014 Robert Smith, a historian of astronomy at the University of Alberta in Canada \n\n\n\nAbout 80% of those items are associated with the sunshield deployment. If a deployment mechanism malfunctions, or the sunshield snags as it unfolds, there is no way to repair it from Earth.\nBut if a malfunction were to occur, that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean Webb would become a $10 billion piece of space junk.\n\u201cThere are enough redundancies built in that everything will be OK,\u201d said Michael Maseda, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. \u201cIf one thing doesn\u2019t work it won\u2019t completely cancel the mission.\u201d\nA malfunction might affect Webb\u2019s ability to see fainter stars or galaxies. \n\u201cEven with Webb at 90%, we\u2019re still going to be seeing things we\u2019ve never seen before,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Ariane 5 rocket with the James Webb Space Telescope on board, in Kourou, French Guiana, on Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n bill ingalls/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIt will take Webb 29 days to reach the second Lagrange point. There it will orbit the sun, 1 million miles from Earth, until at least 2026.\nIf all goes well, Webb can start conducting its first science experiments about six months after launch and is expected to produce its first photo this summer. It takes that long to completely unfold and align its mirrors, calibrate its cameras and infrared light spectrographs, and cool the telescope to its operating temperature. The telescope was jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.\nWebb\u2019s mission is expected to last at least five years, though it will likely be 10, Dr. Maseda said. That timeline is constrained by the amount of fuel Webb has on board\u2014fuel that is necessary to keep the telescope in its proper orbit and pointed in the direction that astronomers want it.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat questions about our cosmos are you hoping the new space telescope will answer? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWebb is designed to complement Hubble, which is orbiting Earth after being launched in 1990 on what was planned to be a 15-year mission. A series of technical issues shut it down twice this year.\n\u201cHubble\u2019s really elderly,\u201d said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics \u201cMilestone achieved\u201d: The biggest, most powerful space-based observatory ever built lifted off early Saturday from a launchpad in French Guiana. ",
        "author": "Aylin Woodward"
    },
    {
        "title": "Invasive Insects and Plants Spread Northward (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8111",
        "date": "2021-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/invasive-insects-and-plants-spread-northward-11628427602?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=18",
        "text": "Week after week, Mr. Steigerwald drives and hikes Long Island\u2019s Central Pine Barrens, tags trees infested with the beetle and chainsaws them down. Since the invasive insect was discovered on Long Island in 2014, the New York Department of Conservation reports that foresters have cut down more than 10,000 pines in the network of state and federal preserves there. Eradication is impossible, agency documents say; they can only hope to slow it down.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAerial view of trees damaged by southern pine beetles in the Bienville National Forest in Mississippi.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n USDA Forest Service\n \n\n\n\nJust a few decades ago, it seemed unlikely that the southern pine beetle\u2014a species native to the Southeastern U.S., Mexico and Central America\u2014could make its way to New York. Today, invasive-species researchers say this beetle is one in a rising tide of plants and pests marching north. Invasive species like the southern pine beetle, emerald ash borer and kudzu already cost the U.S. economy $120 billion a year in damage and removal costs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They choke crops, topple telephone poles, devalue timber and require extraordinary effort to beat back. The Northeastern U.S. has long been vulnerable to invasive species because of its transportation hubs, through which travelers and goods inadvertently spread non-native species, and the hurricanes and other wind events that move seeds and insects up the Eastern Seaboard. Research also shows that state laws governing the sale of non-native plants in the region are inconsistent. A body of evidence suggests that the problem here and nationwide is growing worse as a result of climate change\u2014in particular, a warming of winter\u2019s lowest temperatures. The coldest temperature of the year at some measurement sites in New York and New England has risen more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1960s, according to the most recent National Climate Assessment, a federal government report released in 2018.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe southern pine beetle is one of the invasive species that attack trees.\n\n\n\n\u201cThis is a massive change from an ecological perspective,\u201d said Matt Ayres, a Dartmouth College entomologist whose work in the 1990s was among an early body of research suggesting rising temperatures could have profound impacts on invasive species. Back then, his research team sought to understand why the southern pine beetle\u2014an aggressive insect ubiquitous in the South\u2014hadn\u2019t yet invaded pine habitats in other parts of the country. They tested every barrier they could think of: Did habitat factors limit their food supply? Did summer warmth limit their breeding? The researchers determined that the factor limiting northward expansion of the beetle seemed to be the temperature on the coldest night of the year. \u201cSitting in the laboratory watching the temperature of the beetle, it goes down, down, down, down, and then there\u2019s a spike,\u201d Dr. Ayres said, recalling their experiments. \u201cThat\u2019s the heat of fusion the moment the fluids in the beetle crystallize.\u201d At about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, it is the precise moment of its death. Beetles couldn\u2019t thrive much farther than Delaware, his team surmised, because of the cold winters. Based on regional temperature data, Dr. Ayres predicted in the 1990s that should the coldest night of the year warm up by 5 degrees, infestations could spread about 100 miles north to threaten pine ecosystems.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn old house in South Carolina is partly covered by kudzu, a rapidly spreading vine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n UPPA/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWhat they didn\u2019t expect, Dr. Ayres said, was how fast the temperature shift would occur. By 2018, U.S. Forest Service researchers confirmed the southern pine beetle had reached as far as Connecticut and Rhode Island, a 140-mile expansion northward. Carrie Brown-Lima, head of the New York Invasive Species Research Institute at Cornell University, said pests are now thriving here that she never thought could. \u201cWe really need to shift our thinking to understand that those rules don\u2019t apply anymore,\u201d she said. Otherwise, she added, \u201cwe\u2019ll end up spending more money and having less impact\u201d managing them. Kudzu\u2014a fast-growing vine already causing $100 million in annual damage to the agricultural and timber industries, power and railroad companies and public lands, according to plant researchers\u2014has recently been found thriving along the Garden State Parkway by New Jersey invasive-species managers. Hemlock woolly adelgid, a sap-sucking insect that the National Park Service says has destroyed up to 80% of the eastern hemlocks along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Appalachia, is now killing trees as far north as Maine and Nova Scotia, according to the Maine Forest Service and Canadian government.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA tree infested with the southern pine beetle.\n\n\n\nThe emerald ash borer, which according to the U.S. Forest Service has eaten its way from the Midwest to the Nor From tree-eating beetles to crop-smothering vines, pests once found only in more southerly latitudes are expanding their ranges as climate change spurs warmer winters. ",
        "author": "Sarah Trent | Photographs by Johnny Milano for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "Invasive Insects and Plants Spread Northward (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8112",
        "date": "2021-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/invasive-insects-and-plants-spread-northward-11628427602?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=15",
        "text": "Week after week, Mr. Steigerwald drives and hikes Long Island\u2019s Central Pine Barrens, tags trees infested with the beetle and chainsaws them down. Since the invasive insect was discovered on Long Island in 2014, the New York Department of Conservation reports that foresters have cut down more than 10,000 pines in the network of state and federal preserves there. Eradication is impossible, agency documents say; they can only hope to slow it down.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAerial view of trees damaged by southern pine beetles in the Bienville National Forest in Mississippi.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n USDA Forest Service\n \n\n\n\nJust a few decades ago, it seemed unlikely that the southern pine beetle\u2014a species native to the Southeastern U.S., Mexico and Central America\u2014could make its way to New York. Today, invasive-species researchers say this beetle is one in a rising tide of plants and pests marching north. Invasive species like the southern pine beetle, emerald ash borer and kudzu already cost the U.S. economy $120 billion a year in damage and removal costs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They choke crops, topple telephone poles, devalue timber and require extraordinary effort to beat back. The Northeastern U.S. has long been vulnerable to invasive species because of its transportation hubs, through which travelers and goods inadvertently spread non-native species, and the hurricanes and other wind events that move seeds and insects up the Eastern Seaboard. Research also shows that state laws governing the sale of non-native plants in the region are inconsistent. A body of evidence suggests that the problem here and nationwide is growing worse as a result of climate change\u2014in particular, a warming of winter\u2019s lowest temperatures. The coldest temperature of the year at some measurement sites in New York and New England has risen more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1960s, according to the most recent National Climate Assessment, a federal government report released in 2018.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe southern pine beetle is one of the invasive species that attack trees.\n\n\n\n\u201cThis is a massive change from an ecological perspective,\u201d said Matt Ayres, a Dartmouth College entomologist whose work in the 1990s was among an early body of research suggesting rising temperatures could have profound impacts on invasive species. Back then, his research team sought to understand why the southern pine beetle\u2014an aggressive insect ubiquitous in the South\u2014hadn\u2019t yet invaded pine habitats in other parts of the country. They tested every barrier they could think of: Did habitat factors limit their food supply? Did summer warmth limit their breeding? The researchers determined that the factor limiting northward expansion of the beetle seemed to be the temperature on the coldest night of the year. \u201cSitting in the laboratory watching the temperature of the beetle, it goes down, down, down, down, and then there\u2019s a spike,\u201d Dr. Ayres said, recalling their experiments. \u201cThat\u2019s the heat of fusion the moment the fluids in the beetle crystallize.\u201d At about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, it is the precise moment of its death. Beetles couldn\u2019t thrive much farther than Delaware, his team surmised, because of the cold winters. Based on regional temperature data, Dr. Ayres predicted in the 1990s that should the coldest night of the year warm up by 5 degrees, infestations could spread about 100 miles north to threaten pine ecosystems.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn old house in South Carolina is partly covered by kudzu, a rapidly spreading vine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n UPPA/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nWhat they didn\u2019t expect, Dr. Ayres said, was how fast the temperature shift would occur. By 2018, U.S. Forest Service researchers confirmed the southern pine beetle had reached as far as Connecticut and Rhode Island, a 140-mile expansion northward. Carrie Brown-Lima, head of the New York Invasive Species Research Institute at Cornell University, said pests are now thriving here that she never thought could. \u201cWe really need to shift our thinking to understand that those rules don\u2019t apply anymore,\u201d she said. Otherwise, she added, \u201cwe\u2019ll end up spending more money and having less impact\u201d managing them. Kudzu\u2014a fast-growing vine already causing $100 million in annual damage to the agricultural and timber industries, power and railroad companies and public lands, according to plant researchers\u2014has recently been found thriving along the Garden State Parkway by New Jersey invasive-species managers. Hemlock woolly adelgid, a sap-sucking insect that the National Park Service says has destroyed up to 80% of the eastern hemlocks along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Appalachia, is now killing trees as far north as Maine and Nova Scotia, according to the Maine Forest Service and Canadian government.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA tree infested with the southern pine beetle.\n\n\n\nThe emerald ash borer, which according to the U.S. Forest Service has eaten its way from the Midwest to the Nor From tree-eating beetles to crop-smothering vines, pests once found only in more southerly latitudes are expanding their ranges as climate change spurs warmer winters. ",
        "author": "Sarah Trent | Photographs by Johnny Milano for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Is the Summer Solstice 2021 and How Is the First Day of Summer Celebrated? (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8113",
        "date": "2021-06-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-solstice-2021-11624052627?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=20",
        "text": "The term \u201csolstice\u201d comes from the Latin words \u201csol,\u201d which means sun, and \u201csistere\u201d which means to stop. The name reflects the fact that the sun seems to pause briefly when it reaches its annual southernmost or northernmost position in the sky before reversing direction. \u201cIt\u2019s called \u2018solstice\u2019 because they are the points in the year where the sun appears to stand still in the sky from the perspective of a watcher watching the sunrise or sunset,\u201d Dr. Faherty said. What is the science behind the solstice? As it orbits the sun, the Earth traces an ellipse, not a circle, and like a child\u2019s top spinning off-kilter, the planet\u2019s axis of rotation is tilted by about 23.5 degrees. The summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurs at the moment when the planet\u2019s tilt brings the North Pole closest to the sun. In the months leading up to the Northern Hemisphere\u2019s summer solstice, the sun\u2019s rays gradually shift northward from the equator until the sun appears directly overhead at noon when seen at 23.5 degrees north latitude, a mapmaker\u2019s boundary line called the Tropic of Cancer. At this point, daylight lingers longer than 12 hours everywhere north of the equator and less than 12 hours everywhere to the south.\n\n\n\n\n A time-lapse video shows the shift of seasons as captured by a satellite in geosynchronous orbit with the Earth. VIDEO: ROBERT SIMMON/NASA\n \n\n\n\u201cThe sun\u2019s path across the sky is higher in the sky and therefore it\u2019s up for more hours,\u201d said astronomer Larry Wasserman at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. \u201cIt\u2019s warmer than it is with the winter when the sun is as low as it can be south.\u201d After the summer solstice, the days get shorter each day until the winter solstice in December, when the days begin to lengthen. \u201cIt reverses like a little zigzag that it does back and forth across your horizon from solstice to solstice,\u201d said Dr. Faherty. When exactly does the solstice occur? While its effects differ on opposite sides of the equator, the solstice takes place at the same moment world-wide. This year the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere falls on Monday June 21 at 03:32 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international standard time used by astronomers. The solstice arrives on Sunday June 20 at 8:32 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time in Los Angeles and at 11:32 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in New York. The solstice arrives at the same moment in the Southern Hemisphere, but there it is the winter solstice. Daylight in Sydney on the solstice will last about 9 hours and 53 minutes, which is about 4 1/2 hours less than at the Southern Hemisphere\u2019s summer solstice in December. How have people through the ages celebrated the solstice? For thousands of years, the solstice has been marked as precisely as technology allowed, first by etching rocks, then by erecting immense stone structures. On the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun rises directly above the Heel Stone of the prehistoric Stonehenge in England. Two thousand miles away in Egypt, the winter solstice\u2019s sunbeams light the inner sanctum of the temple of Karnak, arguably the largest religious structure ever built. At the Mayan pyramid of Chichen Itza in Mexico, the summer solstice sunlight casts perfect shadows on the south and west sides so that the immense structure looks to be split in two. During the spring and fall equinoxes, when day and night are of equal length,\u00a0the unique pattern of sunlight and shadow makes it seem that a serpent is slithering down the pyramid\u2019s grand staircase.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe eve of the 2019 summer solstice was marked at Stonehenge, where the celebration has been canceled this year because of Covid-19.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Hannah McKay/Reuters\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThey built monuments aligned to them, not just to measure them but also to commemorate them, to acknowledge what seemed to be the power that they represented in driving the seasons and in defining the environment,\u201d E.C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, said of the builders of the ancient monuments. Dr. Krupp has studied about 2,200 ancient astronomical sites. Now astronomers calculate the exact minute of the solstice using a complex mathematical model of the solar system that encompasses the precise orbits of the planets and their moons and hundreds of asteroids, their second-by-second positions and how they influence each other. The data is prepared by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cWhat we\u2019re really talking about is the continuity of human experience with the sky over their heads and what that has meant for people,\u201d Dr. Krupp said. \u201cIt\u2019s grounding and uplifting.\u201d Modern-day Druids and others by the thousands typically gather at Stonehenge to celebrate the rising sun of the solstice. This year English Heritage, which manages the site, canceled the celebration because of Covid-19 restrictions on public gatherings.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsDo you have any plans to celebrate the summer solstice? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Earth\u2019s tilted rotation brings a shift of seasons and the longest day of the year north of the equator. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Discover New Evidence of the Asteroid That Killed Off the Dinosaurs (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8114",
        "date": "2019-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-discover-new-evidence-of-the-asteroid-that-killed-off-the-dinosaurs-11568055601?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=55",
        "text": "The sediments also offer chemical evidence that the cataclysm blew hundreds of billions of tons of sulfur from pulverized ocean rock into the atmosphere, triggering a global winter in which temperatures world-wide dropped by as much as 30 degrees Fahrenheit for decades, the scientists said.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt tells us what went on inside the crater on that day of doom that killed the dinosaurs,\u201d said Jay Melosh, a geophysicist at Purdue University who studies impact craters and wasn\u2019t a member of the drilling team. \u201cAll of this mayhem is directly recorded in the core.\u201d\n\n\nThe scientists in the drilling consortium, led by geophysicist Sean Gulick at the University of Texas in Austin, who was co-chief of the $10 million project, published their research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The project was sponsored by the International Ocean Discovery Program and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom the platform, scientists drilled into the inner rim of the asteroid crater, buried in the seafloor of the Gulf under about 1,500 feet of limestone.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ronaldo schemidt/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nThe scientists worked aboard a drilling ship called Lifeboat Myrtle anchored offshore from the Mexican port of Progreso. In 2016, they drilled into the crater\u2019s inner rim for the first time, buried in the seafloor under about 1,500 feet of limestone deposited in the millions of years since the impact.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDrilling Into A Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Impact\n\n\nGeologists discover new details of the asteroid that wiped out much of the life on Earth 65 million years ago.\n\n\nImpact area\ninvestigated\n\n\nWithin one minute after impact\n\n\n1\n\n\nAn asteroid blasts a 100-kilometer-wide crater into the sulfur-rich seafloor off the Yucatan, spewing a vast plume of limestone, granite and water vapor into the atmosphere.\n\n\nSedimentary\nrocks\n\n\nWater\n\n\nImpact\nplume\n\n\nImpact\nmelt\n\n\nCrust\n\n\nWithin three minutes after impact\n\n\n2\n\n\nThe crater collapses inward, sending an immense jet of molten rock upwards temporarily creating a peak higher than Mount Everest.\n\n\nImpact melt\n\n\nMantle\n\n\nAn hour after impact\n\n\n3\n\n\nWaves of seawater surging back and forth cover the ring of crater peaks with shards of volcanic glass and splintered rock.\n\n\nResurge\n\n\nBy the end of the day\n\n\n4\n\n\nThe backwash of waves adds more and more finely graded debris, including traces of charcoal from distant wildfires caused by the impact.\n\n\nBreccia*\n\n\nSorted\nsuevite\u2020\n\n\nSedimentary\nrocks\n\n\nTsunami\n\n\n*Shattered rocks cemented together \u2020Shards of volcanic glass and rock\n\n\nSource: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGeologists study rocks as a record of compressed time, with ticks of the geologic clock typically measured in layers that accumulate over thousands of years. In the Chicxulub crater, though, hundreds of feet of sediments built up rapidly, recording impact effects like a high-speed stop-action camera, the scientists said.\n\u201cHere we have 130 meters in a single day,\u201d said Dr. Gulick. \u201cWe can read it on the scale of minutes and hours, which is amazing.\u201d\nThe asteroid blasted a cavity between 25 and 30 miles deep in the first seconds of impact, creating a boiling cauldron of molten rocks and super-heated steam, according to the scientists\u2019 interpretation of the rock. Rebounding from the hammer blow, a plume of molten rock splashed up into a peak higher than Mount Everest.\nWithin minutes, it collapsed into itself, splashing gigantic waves of lava outward that solidified into a ring of high peaks, the scientists said.\nAbout 20 minutes or so later, sea water surged back over the newly formed peaks, covering them in a blanket of impact rocks, the scientists said. As minutes became hours, waves choked with shards of volcanic glass and splintered rock rippled back and forth, coating the peaks in a layer of impact rock called suevite, the scientists said. As the hours passed, the backwash of waves added more and more finely graded debris.\nAt the very top of the rock core, the scientists detected traces of organic matter and charcoal. \u201cWe think the reflected tsunami brought back these traces of land and these tiny, tiny charcoal fragments,\u201d said Dr. Gulick. \u201cThe land was clearly on fire.\u201d\nEarth normally speeds through a cosmic rain of debris. In 2013, a relatively small meteor about 30 meters in diameter and weighing about 13,000 metric tons exploded in the air over Russia, damaging about 7,200 buildings and injuring about 1,400 people.\nInspired by the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in the 1970s, astronomers and NASA now routinely map the orbits of nearby asteroids and meteor swarms for signs of potentially lethal collisions. The space agency is planning a mission in 2021 to a nearby asteroid called Didymos to test ways to safely deflect a dangerous comet or asteroid before it strikes.\nThere are currently no sizeable asteroids known to be on a collision course with Earth, NASA astronomers say. The dinosaur-killing asteroid, estimated to have been up to 50 miles or so across, was likely an event that occurs only once every billion years, the scientists said.\n\u201cImpacts are a fact of life on Earth,\u201d said Dr. Melosh. \u201cBut we know there are no big asteroids crossing Earth\u2019s orbit.\u201d\n\n\nRelated New Species of Dinosaur Identified in Australia New Imaging Method Helps Scientists Look Beyond Dinosaur Bones Fossil Proves T. Rex Wasn\u2019t Just a Scavenger WSJ\u2019s The Future of Everything Podcasts \n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the day 65 million years ago when a city-sized asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all life on Earth. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Get Ready for the \u2018Super Blood Wolf Moon\u2019 (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8115",
        "date": "2019-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-supermoon-lunar-eclipse-will-appear-sunday-night-across-the-u-s-11547741356?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=66",
        "text": "Bloody Big \n\n\n\nThe year's only total lunar eclipse will happen on Jan. 20 and will coincide with the appearance of a supermoon. The next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. Supermoon A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point of orbit to Earth, making it appear about 14% larger. Why lunar eclipses and supermoons occur Moon\u2019s orbit Umbra (full shadow) Earth\u2019s atmosphere causes colors in the light spectrum with shorter wavelengths to scatter more, filtering colors such as violet and blue out, making the moon appear red during the eclipse. Penumbra (partial shadow) Eclipse A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is directly in Earth\u2019s full shadow and lined up with the sun. Bloody Big The year's only total lunar eclipse will happen on Jan. 20 and will coincide with the appearance of a supermoon. The next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. Supermoon A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point of orbit to Earth, making it appear about 14% larger. Why lunar eclipses and supermoons occur Moon\u2019s orbit Umbra (full shadow) Penumbra (partial shadow) Earth\u2019s atmosphere causes colors in the light spectrum with shorter wavelengths to scatter more, filtering colors such as violet and blue out, making the moon appear red during the eclipse. Eclipse A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is directly in Earth\u2019s full shadow and lined up with the sun. Bloody Big The year's only total lunar eclipse will happen on Jan. 20 and will coincide with the appearance of a supermoon. The next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. Supermoon A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point of orbit to Earth, making it appear about 14% larger. Why lunar eclipses and supermoons occur Moon\u2019s orbit Umbra (full shadow) Earth\u2019s atmosphere causes colors in the light spectrum with shorter wavelengths to scatter more, filtering colors such as violet and blue out, making the moon appear red during the eclipse. Penumbra (partial shadow) Eclipse A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is directly in Earth\u2019s full shadow and lined up with the sun. Bloody Big The year's only total lunar eclipse will happen on Jan. 20 and will coincide with the appearance of a supermoon. The next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. Why lunar eclipses and supermoons occur Supermoon A supermoon occurs when the moon is at its closest point of orbit to Earth, making it appear about 14% larger. Moon\u2019s orbit Eclipse A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is directly in Earth\u2019s full shadow and lined up with the sun. Earth\u2019s atmosphere causes colors in the light spectrum with shorter wavelengths to scatter more, filtering colors such as violet and blue out, making the moon appear red during the eclipse. Note: Diagram not to scale Source: NASA \n\n\nA total lunar eclipse is a relatively common event, with 70 to 80 occurring every century, according to Harvard University astronomy educator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patricia Udomprasert.\n\n\n\n Sunday\u2019s eclipse is also a \u201csuper moon\u201d because the moon will be at the closest point to Earth in its orbit, making it appear larger than usual. This combination happens roughly 20 times in a century.\nThe event will also create what some call a \u201cblood moon,\u201d a moon with a reddish tint. Because particles in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere scatter blue light, only the remaining red light will reach the moon when the Earth blocks the sun. That red light will bounce off the moon, resulting in a coppery hue.\n\n\nThe name \u201cwolf moon\u201d just means a full moon in January, according to The Old Farmer\u2019s Almanac. Combining the terms together, some skygazers are calling the event a \u201csuper blood wolf moon,\u201d though scientists still refer to the event as a total lunar eclipse.\nThe eclipse is completely safe to look at, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Udomprasert,\n\n\n\n and the date and time make it relatively easy for people to take notice. \u201cWhat\u2019s nice about this is that the next day is a holiday, so kids aren\u2019t going to be in school,\u201d said Dr. Udomprasert. \u201cI\u2019m planning to let my kids stay up so they can see it.\u201d\n\n\nRelated \u2018Super Blood Wolf Moon\u2019 Makes Astronomers Howl Lunar Eclipse Turns Blood Red The Most \u2018Supermoon\u2019 Since 1948 Photos: Super Blue Blood Moon \n\n\nThe eclipse will begin at 9:36 p.m. Eastern time, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. At that time, the moon will move into the outer part of the Earth\u2019s shadow and appear slightly dim for the next 57 minutes. Around 10:33 p.m. Eastern time, the moon will start to pass into the inner, darker part of the shadow, creating a partial eclipse. \u201cIt\u2019ll look like a little bite was taken out if it,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Hartigan,\n\n\n\n an astrophysicist at Rice University.\nBy 11:41 p.m. Eastern time, the moon will be completely enveloped by the Earth\u2019s shadow and take on the reddish hue.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA similar event, the \"Super Blue Blood Moon,\" over Cairo, Egypt, in July 2018.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n amr abdallah dalsh/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nThe total lunar eclipse will last until 12:43 a.m. Eastern time, when the moon will begin to gradually retreat out of the Earth\u2019s inner shadow, and the eclipse will end at 2:48 a.m. Eastern time.\nCloudy weather may obstruct the view in some parts of the country. But astronomers are encouraging everyone who can to take an extra-long look at the moon on Sunday night. \u201cPeople should bust out the old telescope, point it at the moon, and have some fun,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dr. Hartigan.\n\n\n\n \nThe next total lunar eclipse will be in May 2021. The only total lunar eclipse of 2019 is set to happen Sunday night, with a little something extra. As the full moon passes through the shadow of the Earth, a number of factors will combine to create a \u201csuper blood wolf moon.\u201d ",
        "author": "Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Collects Mars Rock Samples in Historic First for Perseverance Rover (WSJ: Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8116",
        "date": "2021-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-mars-rock-sample-11631124341?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=16",
        "text": "\u201cThis is truly a historic moment,\u201d said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA\u2019s associate administrator for science in Washington, D.C., after the first sample\u2019s collection. \u201cWe expect jaw-dropping discoveries across a broad set of science areas, including exploration into the question of whether life once existed on Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis composite image shows the hole drilled by NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover during a successful collection of a rock sample from Jezero Crater on Mars.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn pursuit of any evidence of life signs, Perseverance is exploring an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater just north of the Martian equator. The six-wheeled, $2.2-billion robotic rover landed there on Feb. 18 after a seven-month, 300-million-mile voyage from Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro-imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\nPrimary instruments\n\n\nMastcam-Z\nZoomable panoramic cameras\n\n\nSuperCam\nLaser micro- imager\n\n\nMEDA\nWeather sensors\n\n\nSHERLOC\nUltraviolet spectrometer\n\n\nPIXL\nX-ray spectrometer\n\n\nCoring drill\nRotary percussive drill\n\n\nRIMFAX\nSubsurface radar\n\n\n6-foot person\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe rover has been driving along the rocky outcrops and boulders of a half-mile-long ridgeline called \u201cArtuby\u201d that borders two geologic zones believed to contain the crater\u2019s deepest and most ancient layers of exposed bedrock.\n\n\nThere the rover used its intricate drilling rig to extract two core samples from a flat, briefcase-sized rock\u2014apparently a remnant of lava from an ancient volcanic eruption\u2014that mission engineers nicknamed \u201cRochette.\u201d The rig\u2019s hollow coring bit and a percussive drill are at the end of the rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\nCollecting samples\n\n\n1. Rover\u2019s 7-foot-long robotic arm drills about 2 inches into the soil to gather core samples or rock from promising areas and collects them into sample tubes.\n\n\n2. Samples are placed in a storage rack inside the rover and sealed.\n\n\nSample\ntube\n\n\n3. It carries the sealed tubes until it finds an appropriate place on Mars to deposit them, to be retrieved by a future mission.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe samples, named \u201cMontdenier\u201d and \u201cMontagnac,\u201d were retrieved on Sept. 6 and Sept. 8 from the same rock and are 5.9 centimeters, or 2.3 inches, and 6.1 centimeters, respectively, in length. \nInitial analysis of rock revealed that they are likely volcanic in origin, and contain salts that likely formed in the presence of water.\n\u201cIt looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,\u201d said mission project scientist Ken Farley, of the California Institute of Technology. \u201cIt\u2019s a big deal that the water was there a long time.\u201d\nMartian soil, called regolith, is an arid mixture of several minerals, including silicon, calcium and sulfur, NASA scientists said. They hope that rocks, however, might be more likely to retain traces of organic compounds\u2014possible evidence of an alien biology, if any ever existed on the now-barren planet.\nThe rover carries 43 tubes into which rock samples will be placed over the next two years, with the expectation that a subsequent Mars mission will collect the tubes and return them to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\n\n\n\nSample collection tube\n\n\nBall lock\n\n\nTitanium nitride coating\n\n\nSerial number\n\n\nAlumina coating\n\n\nTitanium\n\n\nCore samples\nTubes gather samples of about 0.5 x 2.4 inches, averaging about 0.4- 0.5 ounces a tube.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe failed first collection effort highlighted the exasperating complexity of trying to work on another world.\nThe second attempt began on Sept. 1 and appeared to go smoothly. Photos transmitted to anxious mission engineers and scientists on Earth showed that the rover had successfully drilled a hole into the rock without shattering it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA sample of Mars rock is visible (at center) inside a titanium collection tube before being sealed by NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover for eventual return to Earth.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nBut they waited to celebrate until additional images confirmed the first core sample was intact and could be safely stored.\n\u201cI\u2019ve got it!\u201d the space agency said in a tweet. \u201cWith better lighting down the sample tube, you can see the rock core I collected is still in there. Up next, I\u2019ll process this sample and seal the tube,\u201d\nWhile the Perseverance rover lingered over its first successful rock sample collection, the Ingenuity helicopter\u2014ferried to Mars aboard the rover\u2014continued to explore new vistas for possible exploration.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity captured the Perseverance rover in an image taken during its 11th flight at Mars on Aug. 4.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nIn a series of flights, it captured aerial views of sand dunes, boulders and rocky outcrops of the nearby \u201cSouth S\u00e9\u00edtah\u201d region of the Jezero Crater. \nDuring a flight on Aug. 4, it relayed a view of Perseverance hard at work.\n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier\n \n\n\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover landed on Mars in early March. Jennifer Trosper from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains how the rover will explore the Martian landscape and search for signs of life. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\n\u2014Merrill Sherman, David Cole and Talal Ansari contributed to this article.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com The two pencil-sized samples were placed in airtight tubes and will eventually be brought back to Earth for analysis. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Effects of Massive Wildfires Can Reach the Stratosphere and Linger for Months (WSJ: Science Journal) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8117",
        "date": "2020-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-effects-of-massive-wildfires-can-reach-the-stratosphere-and-linger-for-months-11605535207?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=33",
        "text": "\u201cIt is a new form of severe weather,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Peterson,\n\n\n\n a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Monterey, Calif. In the highest of such plumes so far, Australian wildfires this past January generated firestorms that spewed a swirling vortex of smoke as wide as the state of Montana up to a record 21 miles high. The smoke circled the world twice before dissipating in April, according to two new independent studies. The scientists tracked the plume using sensors on four satellites and aboard the International Space Station.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Jan. 4 photograph taken by astronauts on the International Space Station shows smoke rising from extreme fire activity on the east coast of Australia.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA Crew Earth Observations\n \n\n\n\nTheir data shows that the smoke blocked sunlight to an extent never before recorded from wildfires, comparable to the cumulative effect of all the moderate volcanic eruptions of the past 30 years. Moreover, the plume contained enough noxious fumes to etch a temporary hole in the planet\u2019s protective ozone layer, an international team of scientists from France, the U.K. and Canada reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment in September. \u201cThat Australian smoke plume was really a jaw-dropping phenomenon,\u201d said lead author \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergey Khaykin,\n\n\n\n who studies the stratosphere at the Latmos laboratory of atmospheric research and space observations at Sorbonne University in France. \u201cWe should be expecting more of these events as the climate warms.\u201d The fire-induced thunderstorms, known technically as pyrocumulonimbus events, are becoming more frequent. In the past three years, these firestorms occurred during wildfires in places such as Portugal, South Africa and Argentina where they were previously unknown. Wildfire storms this fall in California and Colorado sent smoke plumes up to 10 miles high that altered air quality as far away as Europe. The 21-mile-high Australian plume earlier this year was the third major outburst of wildfire smoke to set a stratospheric record since 2009, each one progressively higher and more severe. \u201cIt appears as though the intensity of the major events is getting stronger,\u201d said NRL meteorologist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Kablick III\n\n\n\n in Washington, D.C., who led a team of researchers studying the Australian smoke plume. They reported their findings earlier this year in Geophysical Research Letters.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe fierce updraft of the Hog Fire in Northern California, pictured here last July, sucked embers, soot and fumes into the fire-induced thunderhead of a towering pyrocumulonimbus cloud.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n josh edelson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nTaken together, the new research offers evidence of how the pollution and smoke from regional wildfires driven by severe droughts and heat waves can become a global event, affecting people far from the scene of a major conflagration, the scientists said. On average, smoke from burning forests and grasslands results in an estimated 339,000 additional deaths a year world-wide due to smoke inhalation, says an international research team that conducted a systematic global health study in 2012 of air pollution from wildfires. The carbon particles and other pollutants in the smoke can aggravate chronic heart and lung diseases, such as asthma or bronchitis, and worsen diabetes, particularly among children and the elderly, according to the American Lung Association. Even so, no one knows yet whether there are any long-term consequences from injecting so much smoke into the stratosphere. \u201cThere are a lot of unknowns,\u201d said the NRL\u2019s Dr. Peterson, who studied pyrocumulonimbus clouds that formed during the 2019 Williams Flats Fire in Washington state. To generate high-altitude smoke, these thunderstorms require a mixture of extreme drought, hellish heat waves, moisture and strong surface winds, according to meteorologists who study fire-related weather. When conditions are right, the hot updraft from burning woodlands and brush can supercharge the towering anvil-shaped thunderhead of a major storm, sucking up smoke at ground level and speeding it to extreme heights. \u201cThe fire heating drives the updraft that feeds the storm. This ends up acting like a giant chimney,\u201d Dr. Peterson says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA pyrocumulonimbus cloud formation seen from a plane as bushfires continued in New South Wales, Australia, on Jan. 4.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n aidan morrison twitter @quixotic/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nIn Australia and elsewhere, such conditions are in line with a long-term increase in extreme heat events linked to a century of rising regional temperatures, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology\u2019s \u201c2018 State of the Climate report.\u201d Globally, the last five years have been the warmest since modern record-keeping began, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Generally, fire seasons in many parts of the world are getting longer and more frequent, according to a 2015 analysis of 35 years of meteorological data by the U.S. Forest Service Fire Sciences Laboratory. Overall, 54% of the world\u2019s vegetated areas experienced long fire weather seasons more frequently between 1996 and 2013 as compared with 1979-1996, the study published in Nature Communications showed. The fire-driven thunderstorms were first identified about 20 years ago. But their impact on the stratosphere was \u201cdeemed small\u201d until 2017, scientists said. In that year, wildfires raging through Canada\u2019s Pacific Northwest triggered a cluster of seven fire-driven thunderstorms in a single five-hour period. Together, they lofted record amounts of smoke high into the stratosphere, where there is no rain to wash the clouds away, the scientists said.\n\n\nMore Science Journals\n\n\n\n\nGenetically Altered Mosquitoes Target Deadly Dengue Fever and Zika\nMay 31, 2021 \n\n\nCreation of First Human-Monkey Embryos Sparks Concern\nApril 26, 2021 \n\n\nSearch for Alien Life Moves Well Beyond Mars\nMarch 29, 2021 \n\n\nFace Masks Are Disrupting a Key Tool of Communication\nJanuary 18, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nAt that altitude, the wildfire plume blocked more sunlight than the 2009 eruption of Russia\u2019s Sarychev Peak, an active volcano in the Kuril Islands northeast of Japan. That eruption spewed so much ash into the atmosphere that commercial airline flights had to skirt the region to keep engines from choking on ash intake. But the stratospheric plume from Australia earlier this year was even larger, \u201ca super-outbreak,\u201d in Dr. Peterson\u2019s words.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe smoke plume from Australia\u2019s wildfires earlier this year, shown at center left in this composite satellite image, soared to a record 21 miles high in the stratosphere and circled the globe twice. This image was recorded on Jan. 6 by the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA Earth Observatory\n \n\n\n\n As New Year\u2019s Eve approached last December, Australia was already in its 35th month of extreme drought\u2014the country\u2019s hottest and driest period in modern times, scientists said. Wildfires had consumed 14.3 million acres\u2014about one-fifth of the country\u2019s temperate forests. Temperatures topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. Wind speeds gusted up to 80 mph. On New Year\u2019s Day, fire scientists counted 18 fire-driven thunderstorms along the Australian coast of New South Wales, the scientists said. By Jan. 7, the soaring embers, ash and soot from so many firestorms compacted itself into one self-contained bubble of fumes. Warmed by the sun, it started to spin. Like a balloon, it rose ever higher in the air as it circled the world, the scientists said. All told, the plume injected between 300,000 tons and 400,000 tons of carbon-rich smoke into the stratosphere, the scientists said. \u201cThis plume was unprecedented in size, scale and longevity,\u201d said Dr. Kablick. \u201cIt was something we had never seen at this intensity before. I keep using the word unprecedented, but it\u2019s true.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n As large wildfires burned across parts of the Western U.S. this fall, unhealthy levels of smoke spread across the region. WSJ\u2019s Caitlin McCabe explains the potential health impacts, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: Etienne Laurent/Shutterstock (Originally published 9/18/20)\n \n\n\n Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Australian smoke plumes created an ozone-layer hole, but the extent of damage from such novel weather events remains unclear. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch an Opera and Run a Race From Home (NYT: At Home) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8118",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/at-home/things-to-do-this-week.html",
        "text": "This week, check in with NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, listen to orchestral music or celebrate Eid al-Fitr by making a custard dessert. This week, check in with NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, listen to orchestral music or celebrate Eid al-Fitr by making a custard dessert. Here is a sampling of the week\u2019s events and how to tune in (all times are Eastern). Note that events are subject to change after publication.",
        "author": "By Emma Grillo and Danya Issawi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Norwegian Taxis, Wirelessly Charging While They Wait for a Fare (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8119",
        "date": "2020-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/business/jaguar-i-pace-oslo-taxis-charging.html",
        "text": "Electric Jaguars in Oslo, using tech from a former NASA architect, will soon be able to recharge on special pads embedded under the road. Electric Jaguars in Oslo, using tech from a former NASA architect, will soon be able to recharge on special pads embedded under the road. Starting next year, two dozen specially outfitted electric Jaguar taxis will roam the streets of the very green capital of Norway. And when they are idling at special taxi lines, they will be able to be recharged from the ground up.",
        "author": "By Jamie Lincoln Kitman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Norwegian Taxis, Wirelessly Charging While They Wait for a Fare (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8120",
        "date": "2020-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/business/jaguar-i-pace-oslo-taxis-charging.html",
        "text": "Electric Jaguars in Oslo, using tech from a former NASA architect, will soon be able to recharge on special pads embedded under the road. Electric Jaguars in Oslo, using tech from a former NASA architect, will soon be able to recharge on special pads embedded under the road. Starting next year, two dozen specially outfitted electric Jaguar taxis will roam the streets of the very green capital of Norway. And when they are idling at special taxi lines, they will be able to be recharged from the ground up.",
        "author": "By Jamie Lincoln Kitman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Norwegian Taxis, Wirelessly Charging While They Wait for a Fare (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8121",
        "date": "2020-08-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/business/jaguar-i-pace-oslo-taxis-charging.html",
        "text": "Electric Jaguars in Oslo, using tech from a former NASA architect, will soon be able to recharge on special pads embedded under the road. Electric Jaguars in Oslo, using tech from a former NASA architect, will soon be able to recharge on special pads embedded under the road. Starting next year, two dozen specially outfitted electric Jaguar taxis will roam the streets of the very green capital of Norway. And when they are idling at special taxi lines, they will be able to be recharged from the ground up.",
        "author": "By Jamie Lincoln Kitman"
    },
    {
        "title": "As hurricane season looms, Biden doubles funding to prepare for extreme weather  (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8122",
        "date": "2021-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/24/biden-hurricanes-fema/",
        "text": "President Biden announced Monday that he was doubling the amount of money the U.S. government will spend helping communities get set for extreme weather events, proclaiming the need for full readiness as he visited government workers and told them to prepare for another season of natural disasters.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightIn announcing $1 billion in spending, Biden also emphasized his administration\u2019s attempts to steer the country toward confronting the looming effects of climate change, which scientists say will make severe weather events more frequent and less predictable. He announced a new NASA-led effort to collect more sophisticated climate data. \u201cWe can never be too prepared,\u201d Biden said during an afternoon visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters. \u201cWe\u2019re going to spare no expense, no effort, to keep Americans safe and respond to crises when they arise. And they certainly will.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president warned of a busy season of hurricanes in the South and East, and fires in the West. The event followed the government\u2019s response to a brief shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline, which threatened to lead to significant gas shortages across large swaths of the country. And it also comes as his administration continues trying to de-emphasize the impact of the country\u2019s divisive politics amid natural disasters.Last year, there were more storms strong enough to warrant a name than any year on record. The worst of the storms claimed dozens of lives and did tens of billions of dollars in damage.\u201cWe all know that the storms are coming and we\u2019re going to be prepared. We have to be ready,\u201d Biden said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about red states and blue states. You all know that. It\u2019s about having people\u2019s backs in the toughest moments that they face, ready with food, water, blankets, shelters and more.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden has been determined not to get caught off guard, and he has learned lessons from watching his predecessors. A disaster can become one of the most politically treacherous areas to confront, where events can arise unexpectedly and put on vivid display any failure to respond.George W. Bush was heavily criticized for his administration\u2019s failure to prepare for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and then for not providing adequate resources in the storm\u2019s aftermath.Donald Trump at times criticized states during a crisis, often focusing his ire on areas that had not supported him in the 2016 presidential election. In 2019, he threatened to cut off federal aid to California as it dealt with wildfires. He accused Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) of mismanagement but relented when Newsom called to make a personal appeal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump also held up an aid package for Puerto Rico for three years, calling its leaders corrupt and only releasing the aid weeks before the 2020 election in what Democrats called a bid to win votes in Florida.In a 2019 incident known as \u201cSharpiegate,\u201d Trump and his deputies pressured the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to contradict its own experts and say that Hurricane Dorian was on a path that would severely affect Alabama. He also repeatedly questioned the link between rising temperatures and more frequent and intense wildfires.Biden has tried to make a conscious break from his predecessor.Early in his presidency, Biden mobilized his administration to respond to weather-related incidents across the South. He held several calls with governors of seven states, many of them Republicans. Some credited Biden with approving states of emergency \u2014 which can deliver federal resources and funding \u2014 with more urgency than Trump.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe also called Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) on her cellphone hours after she toured the site of a tornado that killed a 14-year-old boy in her state.\u201cThe president has made a commitment to do two things starkly different from the prior administration,\u201d White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy said in an interview. \u201cThe focus on science and using the government to solve problems and highlight them, and really tell the public the truth, and helping them prepare for that, is a breath of fresh air right now.\u201dBiden\u2019s actions, she said, were aimed at conveying to Americans how the climate has already changed and what the United States must do to respond.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s really going to make this climate issue real and relevant to people,\u201d she said. \u201cWe just have to prepare for this, and the president is a realist. This is the world we\u2019re living in.\u201dAdvertisementWhile the $1 billion in funding is a fraction of what taxpayers spend each year on disasters, it underscores a broader effort to account for the damage wrought by climate change and curb it. Last week, the president signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to identify and disclose the perils a warming world poses to federal programs, assets and liabilities, while also requiring federal suppliers to reveal their own climate-related risks.The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program helps communities prepare in advance for hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters. The administration will target about 40 percent of the additional money to disadvantaged areas.Story continues below advertisementBrock Long, who headed FEMA from June 2017 to March 2019, praised the decision to increase funding for a program that he helped launch under the Trump administration. But he cautioned that the administration would have to do more to bolster everything from digital systems to private supply chains in the face of more extreme weather.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re stuck in this unsustainable disaster-recovery cycle. We\u2019re putting out massive amounts of money to help communities recover, instead of preparing for disasters,\u201d he said in a phone interview Monday, adding that under current law the administration could direct up to $3.7 billion to the BRIC program. \u201cWhile I applaud the increase in funding, providing $1 billion to mitigating our nation\u2019s infrastructure is just scratching the surface.\u201dOn May 24, President Biden announced that the federal government will make $1 billion available to help communities prepare for\u00a0extreme weather events. (The Washington Post)Story continues below advertisementNOAA\u2019s outlook last week said a 60 percent chance exists for an above-average storm season this year, with a 70 percent probability of 13 to 20 named storms.Biden\u2019 orders federal agencies, vendors to assess their climate-related riskIn addition to the funding that Biden announced Monday, the administration also said it is starting to develop a NASA mission concept for an Earth System Observatory, which will deploy advanced technology in space so scientists and policymakers can better understand the interactions between Earth\u2019s atmosphere, land, ocean and ice.Advertisement\u201cIf you want to mitigate climate change, you\u2019ve got to measure it,\u201d NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview Monday.Nelson said the agency plans to assemble a \u201ccomprehensive observatory\u201d in coming years that will give scientists unprecedented insight into what is happening on Earth \u2014 and how to better anticipate and react to key shifts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the big picture, I think understanding and preparing for extremes is the core of the climate challenge,\u201d said Stanford University Professor Chris Field, who chairs the school\u2019s Woods Institute for the Environment, in an email. \u201cExtreme events are always the sharp end of the climate spear. But they are also super challenging to understand and forecast.\u201dLast year not only marked a record hurricane season, it also saw a startling number of billion-dollar disasters, according to a NOAA report released early this year. That research found that such catastrophes in the United States alone amounted to $95 billion from 22 separate billion-dollar events. The previous record for billion-dollar disasters was 16 in 2011 and in 2017.How escalating temperatures fueled California\u2019s infernosAdvertisementThe year marked the most severe wildfire season across the West to date, with California logging five of its six biggest wildfires in state history. Hurricanes and tropical storms battered parts of the Gulf Coast.In addition, 2020 essentially tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, according to scientists. It also capped the hottest decade in recorded history.Long, now executive vice president at Hagerty Consulting, said it was too early to judge Biden\u2019s handling of natural disasters. But he warned that these events are only escalating: The toll during his time as FEMA administrator equaled nearly $456.7 billion in damage and associated costs, which was more than under the past nine administrators combined.\u201cDisasters can make or break a president\u2019s legacy,\u201d he said. President Biden will announce Monday after that he\u2019s doubling the amount of funding the U.S. government will spend helping communities prepare to withstand extreme weather events, while launching a new effort at NASA to collect climate data. While the $1 billion in preparedness funding is a fraction of what taxpayers spend each year on disasters, it underscores a broader effort to account for the risks posed by climate change, and reduce their impact. As hurricane season looms, Biden doubles funding to prepare for extreme weather ",
        "author": "Juliet Eilperin"
    },
    {
        "title": "As hurricane season looms, Biden doubles funding to prepare for extreme weather  (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8123",
        "date": "2021-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/24/biden-hurricanes-fema/",
        "text": "President Biden announced Monday that he was doubling the amount of money the U.S. government will spend helping communities get set for extreme weather events, proclaiming the need for full readiness as he visited government workers and told them to prepare for another season of natural disasters.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightIn announcing $1 billion in spending, Biden also emphasized his administration\u2019s attempts to steer the country toward confronting the looming effects of climate change, which scientists say will make severe weather events more frequent and less predictable. He announced a new NASA-led effort to collect more sophisticated climate data. \u201cWe can never be too prepared,\u201d Biden said during an afternoon visit to the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters. \u201cWe\u2019re going to spare no expense, no effort, to keep Americans safe and respond to crises when they arise. And they certainly will.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president warned of a busy season of hurricanes in the South and East, and fires in the West. The event followed the government\u2019s response to a brief shutdown of the Colonial Pipeline, which threatened to lead to significant gas shortages across large swaths of the country. And it also comes as his administration continues trying to de-emphasize the impact of the country\u2019s divisive politics amid natural disasters.Last year, there were more storms strong enough to warrant a name than any year on record. The worst of the storms claimed dozens of lives and did tens of billions of dollars in damage.\u201cWe all know that the storms are coming and we\u2019re going to be prepared. We have to be ready,\u201d Biden said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about red states and blue states. You all know that. It\u2019s about having people\u2019s backs in the toughest moments that they face, ready with food, water, blankets, shelters and more.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBiden has been determined not to get caught off guard, and he has learned lessons from watching his predecessors. A disaster can become one of the most politically treacherous areas to confront, where events can arise unexpectedly and put on vivid display any failure to respond.George W. Bush was heavily criticized for his administration\u2019s failure to prepare for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and then for not providing adequate resources in the storm\u2019s aftermath.Donald Trump at times criticized states during a crisis, often focusing his ire on areas that had not supported him in the 2016 presidential election. In 2019, he threatened to cut off federal aid to California as it dealt with wildfires. He accused Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) of mismanagement but relented when Newsom called to make a personal appeal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump also held up an aid package for Puerto Rico for three years, calling its leaders corrupt and only releasing the aid weeks before the 2020 election in what Democrats called a bid to win votes in Florida.In a 2019 incident known as \u201cSharpiegate,\u201d Trump and his deputies pressured the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to contradict its own experts and say that Hurricane Dorian was on a path that would severely affect Alabama. He also repeatedly questioned the link between rising temperatures and more frequent and intense wildfires.Biden has tried to make a conscious break from his predecessor.Early in his presidency, Biden mobilized his administration to respond to weather-related incidents across the South. He held several calls with governors of seven states, many of them Republicans. Some credited Biden with approving states of emergency \u2014 which can deliver federal resources and funding \u2014 with more urgency than Trump.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe also called Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) on her cellphone hours after she toured the site of a tornado that killed a 14-year-old boy in her state.\u201cThe president has made a commitment to do two things starkly different from the prior administration,\u201d White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy said in an interview. \u201cThe focus on science and using the government to solve problems and highlight them, and really tell the public the truth, and helping them prepare for that, is a breath of fresh air right now.\u201dBiden\u2019s actions, she said, were aimed at conveying to Americans how the climate has already changed and what the United States must do to respond.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThat\u2019s really going to make this climate issue real and relevant to people,\u201d she said. \u201cWe just have to prepare for this, and the president is a realist. This is the world we\u2019re living in.\u201dAdvertisementWhile the $1 billion in funding is a fraction of what taxpayers spend each year on disasters, it underscores a broader effort to account for the damage wrought by climate change and curb it. Last week, the president signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to identify and disclose the perils a warming world poses to federal programs, assets and liabilities, while also requiring federal suppliers to reveal their own climate-related risks.The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program helps communities prepare in advance for hurricanes, wildfires and other natural disasters. The administration will target about 40 percent of the additional money to disadvantaged areas.Story continues below advertisementBrock Long, who headed FEMA from June 2017 to March 2019, praised the decision to increase funding for a program that he helped launch under the Trump administration. But he cautioned that the administration would have to do more to bolster everything from digital systems to private supply chains in the face of more extreme weather.Advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re stuck in this unsustainable disaster-recovery cycle. We\u2019re putting out massive amounts of money to help communities recover, instead of preparing for disasters,\u201d he said in a phone interview Monday, adding that under current law the administration could direct up to $3.7 billion to the BRIC program. \u201cWhile I applaud the increase in funding, providing $1 billion to mitigating our nation\u2019s infrastructure is just scratching the surface.\u201dOn May 24, President Biden announced that the federal government will make $1 billion available to help communities prepare for\u00a0extreme weather events. (The Washington Post)Story continues below advertisementNOAA\u2019s outlook last week said a 60 percent chance exists for an above-average storm season this year, with a 70 percent probability of 13 to 20 named storms.Biden\u2019 orders federal agencies, vendors to assess their climate-related riskIn addition to the funding that Biden announced Monday, the administration also said it is starting to develop a NASA mission concept for an Earth System Observatory, which will deploy advanced technology in space so scientists and policymakers can better understand the interactions between Earth\u2019s atmosphere, land, ocean and ice.Advertisement\u201cIf you want to mitigate climate change, you\u2019ve got to measure it,\u201d NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview Monday.Nelson said the agency plans to assemble a \u201ccomprehensive observatory\u201d in coming years that will give scientists unprecedented insight into what is happening on Earth \u2014 and how to better anticipate and react to key shifts.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the big picture, I think understanding and preparing for extremes is the core of the climate challenge,\u201d said Stanford University Professor Chris Field, who chairs the school\u2019s Woods Institute for the Environment, in an email. \u201cExtreme events are always the sharp end of the climate spear. But they are also super challenging to understand and forecast.\u201dLast year not only marked a record hurricane season, it also saw a startling number of billion-dollar disasters, according to a NOAA report released early this year. That research found that such catastrophes in the United States alone amounted to $95 billion from 22 separate billion-dollar events. The previous record for billion-dollar disasters was 16 in 2011 and in 2017.How escalating temperatures fueled California\u2019s infernosAdvertisementThe year marked the most severe wildfire season across the West to date, with California logging five of its six biggest wildfires in state history. Hurricanes and tropical storms battered parts of the Gulf Coast.In addition, 2020 essentially tied 2016 as the hottest year on record, according to scientists. It also capped the hottest decade in recorded history.Long, now executive vice president at Hagerty Consulting, said it was too early to judge Biden\u2019s handling of natural disasters. But he warned that these events are only escalating: The toll during his time as FEMA administrator equaled nearly $456.7 billion in damage and associated costs, which was more than under the past nine administrators combined.\u201cDisasters can make or break a president\u2019s legacy,\u201d he said. President Biden will announce Monday after that he\u2019s doubling the amount of funding the U.S. government will spend helping communities prepare to withstand extreme weather events, while launching a new effort at NASA to collect climate data. While the $1 billion in preparedness funding is a fraction of what taxpayers spend each year on disasters, it underscores a broader effort to account for the risks posed by climate change, and reduce their impact. As hurricane season looms, Biden doubles funding to prepare for extreme weather ",
        "author": "Juliet Eilperin"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years On, the Omega Watch That Went to the Moon (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8124",
        "date": "2019-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/29/fashion/watches-omega-speedmaster-moonwatch-anniversary.html",
        "text": "A NASA engineer, Omega executives and a fan talk about the Speedmaster Moonwatch. A NASA engineer, Omega executives and a fan talk about the Speedmaster Moonwatch. Lunar landings have become part of a common complaint: \u201cWe can put a man on the Moon, but we can\u2019t \u2026 \u201c(fill in the grievance of the day).",
        "author": "By Robin Swithinbank"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo\u2019s Daring Mission\u2019 explores troubles and triumph of the first manned mission to orbit the moon (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8125",
        "date": "2018-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/apollos-daring-mission-explores-troubles-and-triumph-of-the-first-manned-mission-to-orbit-the-moon/2018/12/21/8d25d6dc-031f-11e9-b5df-5d3874f1ac36_story.html",
        "text": "On Christmas Eve in 1968, the world paused to watch telecasts of something people had never seen: pictures of the moon and Earth taken from lunar orbit. As they circled the moon, the American astronauts read passages from the Book of Genesis in a powerful moment of calm.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut the first manned mission to orbit the moon was rocky, chaotic and fearful. The space race wasn\u2019t all guts and glory \u2014 and \u201cApollo\u2019s Daring Mission,\u201d premiering on PBS stations at 9 p.m. Wednesday, reveals one of its tensest chapters.The Nova TV series documentary shows how NASA turned tragedy into triumph after Apollo 1, the mission originally tasked with orbiting the moon, went up in flames. In 1967, during a rehearsal for that mission, three NASA astronauts died in a fire. The film includes audio of their sarcastic reaction to communication problems with Mission Control, and their realization that the cockpit was burning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Apollo 1 tragedy changed the course of the U.S. space program. \u201cWe redoubled our efforts,\u201d Jerry Bostick, who worked in Mission Control, says in the film. \u201cThose were our friends.\u201dMotivated by the astronauts\u2019 deaths and top-secret revelations that the Soviet Union planned to beat the United States to the moon, NASA\u2019s leaders undertook something risky. They converted the Apollo 8 mission, which had been intended to orbit Earth, into a manned moon mission instead.Instead of orbiting Earth, the astronauts of Apollo 8 would become the first humans to leave low Earth orbit. Along the way, they would prove that the United States had what it took to push even further, putting the first men on the moon with the Apollo 11 mission less than a year later.Story continues below advertisementSuccess was anything but guaranteed.To get Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell into lunar orbit, NASA would have to get creative, building the world\u2019s most powerful rocket, redesigning the orbiter and figuring out the most ambitious flight plan ever undertaken.The documentary captures those grim, nerve-racking days, and the sheer will that helped the mission succeed.Astronomy site is your guide to the universeNASA now has its own podcastWhat it took to become an astronaut On PBS, the Nova episode reveals NASA\u2019s rocky, chaotic and fearful journey to launch Apollo 8 in 1968. \u2018Apollo\u2019s Daring Mission\u2019 explores troubles and triumph of the first manned mission to orbit the moon",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "What should the Mars 2020 rover be named? Nine kids think they know. (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8126",
        "date": "2020-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/what-should-the-mars-2020-rover-be-named-nine-kids-think-they-know/2020/01/24/fcc48146-37b7-11ea-9541-9107303481a4_story.html",
        "text": "Among the posters of planets, rockets and rovers pasted on the sky-blue walls in 9-year-old Oliver Jacobs\u2019s bedroom in Arlington, Virginia, one object is missing. The Barrett Elementary student\u2019s space shrine doesn\u2019t include the under-construction Mars 2020 rover.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOr as Oliver always corrects: the Mars Endurance rover.He thinks Endurance should be the name of the rover scheduled to launch in July or August. The name would be a nod to Ernest Shackleton, who sailed a ship called Endurance to explore Antarctica, a \u201charsh and unforgiving surface and environment\u201d similar to Mars, Oliver says. The fourth-grader is among nine students, ages 9 to 19, who are finalists in the \u201cName the Rover\u201d essay contest. NASA started with more than 28,000 submissions. The possible names are Clarity, Courage, Endurance, Fortitude, Ingenuity, Perseverance, Promise, Tenacity and Vision. People can vote for their favorite on the NASA website until January 27 at midnight. The new name will be announced in March.This isn\u2019t the first time NASA has contracted out to young space enthusiasts \u2014 the past four rovers (Curiosity, Spirit, Opportunity and Sojourner) were named by kids.Each name relates to the rover\u2019s mission, said Carolina Martinez, who works on public engagement for NASA\u2019s Mars programs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. For instance, Curiosity\u2019s purpose was to search for signs of past life on Mars.\u201cThe name builds a character and personality, and people connect to that,\u201d she said. \u201cThe rovers are like us; they have names.\u201dThe Mars 2020 rover will search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet and collect soil and rock samples. NASA expects it will land February 18, 2021, on the Jezero Crater.The contest winner will be flown to Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch the launch. In their essays, the finalists wrote about their interest in science and seeing the rover discovering Mars.Nora Benitez, 14, and her family drove twice from their home in San Diego, California,to see the lab where the rover was built in Pasadena. That\u2019s where she heard about the contest from her tour guide.Nora, who is in eighth grade, chose the name Clarity because 2020 reminded her of 20/20, or perfect, vision. She said having that name considered is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.\u201cThe rover is something that will be a part of my future, and getting to name it will be like being a part of the history,\u201d she said.Vaneeza Rupani, an 11th-grader from Northport, Alabama, submitted the name Ingenuity because of the inventiveness of the rover.\u201cIngenuity perfectly captured humanity\u2019s wonderful capability of creating a machine that could travel to and do science on another world,\u201d the 17-year-old said.When she gets to be an aerospace engineer, Vaneeza hopes to embody the enterprising spirit of the rovers.The last winner of a rover naming contest, to name Curiosity in 2008, was Clara Ma, who is now 23.Ma was inspired by the rover\u2019s purpose to inquire and learn but also how she felt growing up.\u201cCuriosity is what motivated me to ask questions,\u201d she said. \u201cI asked questions about literally everything. I wanted to learn about everything.\u201dMa is now in England, completing a master\u2019s degree at the University of Cambridge in science, technology and environmental policy. She credits her accomplishments partly to naming the rover.\u201cA piece of me went up in that rocket that day,\u201d she said.Alex Mather, a seventh-grader at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, said he felt special when he found out his name suggestion, Perseverance, was picked out of thousands of Mars 2020 submissions, but he was also excited for the other finalists.\u201cI may never get to meet them, but when I read their essays I knew these are my people,\u201d the 13-year-old said. \u201cThese are fellow space nerds.\u201dName the Rover Contest finalists' entriesClarity: Nora Benitez is an eighth-grader in San Diego, California.Courage: Tori Gray is a 12th-grader in Grand Isle, Louisiana.Endurance: Oliver Jacobs is a fourth-grader in Arlington, Virginia.Fortitude: Anthony Yoon is a 10th-grader in Norman, Oklahoma.Ingenuity: Vaneeza Rupani is an 11th-grader in Northport, Alabama.Perseverance: Alex Mather is a seventh-grader in Springfield, Virginia.Promise: Amira Shanshiry is a fourth-grader in Westwood, Massachusetts.Tenacity: Eamon Reilly is a fourth-grader in York, Pennsylvania.Vision: Hadley Green is a seventh-grader in Oxford, Mississippi.More in KidsPostNASA lander detects a \u2018marsquake\u2019 on the Red PlanetNASA\u2019s Opportunity rover says goodbye after 15 yearsRead all of KidsPost stories about a new era in space travel The public can vote on the next rover\u2019s name on NASA\u2019s website. What should the Mars 2020 rover be named? Nine kids think they know.",
        "author": "Meryl Kornfield"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo 11\u2019 Documentary: Piecing Together a Visual and Audio Puzzle (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8127",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/movies/apollo11-documentary.html",
        "text": "A mesmerizing movie matched footage, some of it never seen before, with audio in a tale involving NASA, archivists, hobbyists and some luck. A mesmerizing movie matched footage, some of it never seen before, with audio in a tale involving NASA, archivists, hobbyists and some luck. By NASA\u2019s estimate, 530 million people watched Neil Armstrong\u2019s walk on the moon in July 1969, making it one of the most widely seen television events in history. Now a new film allows moviegoers to experience the Apollo 11 mission from unexpected angles through mesmerizing footage and recordings that were never intended for a large viewership \u2014 or even necessarily for the public.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo 11\u2019 Documentary: Piecing Together a Visual and Audio Puzzle (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8128",
        "date": "2019-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/movies/apollo11-documentary.html",
        "text": "A mesmerizing movie matched footage, some of it never seen before, with audio in a tale involving NASA, archivists, hobbyists and some luck. A mesmerizing movie matched footage, some of it never seen before, with audio in a tale involving NASA, archivists, hobbyists and some luck. By NASA\u2019s estimate, 530 million people watched Neil Armstrong\u2019s walk on the moon in July 1969, making it one of the most widely seen television events in history. Now a new film allows moviegoers to experience the Apollo 11 mission from unexpected angles through mesmerizing footage and recordings that were never intended for a large viewership \u2014 or even necessarily for the public.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Does \u2018First Man\u2019 Say Gemini as \u2018Geminee\u2019? NASA Explains. Sorta. (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8129",
        "date": "2018-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/movies/first-man-gemini-nasa.html",
        "text": "The pronunciation of the 1965-66 program is a space agency thing. Sometimes it was pronounced normally. NASA\u2019s chief historian gives the back story. The pronunciation of the 1965-66 program is a space agency thing. Sometimes it was pronounced normally. NASA\u2019s chief historian gives the back story. So which is it? How do you pronounce Gemini?",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Does \u2018First Man\u2019 Say Gemini as \u2018Geminee\u2019? NASA Explains. Sorta. (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8130",
        "date": "2018-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/movies/first-man-gemini-nasa.html",
        "text": "The pronunciation of the 1965-66 program is a space agency thing. Sometimes it was pronounced normally. NASA\u2019s chief historian gives the back story. The pronunciation of the 1965-66 program is a space agency thing. Sometimes it was pronounced normally. NASA\u2019s chief historian gives the back story. So which is it? How do you pronounce Gemini?",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Steve Hann, Sidewalk Bookseller With a Brainy Following, Dies at 67 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8131",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/obituaries/steve-hann-dead-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Mr. Hann, who tested positive for the novel coronavirus, drew customers from Columbia University and a NASA office to his folding tables covered with used books. Mr. Hann, who tested positive for the novel coronavirus, drew customers from Columbia University and a NASA office to his folding tables covered with used books. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.",
        "author": "By Corey Kilgannon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocketing to the Sun and Its Flaming Secrets (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8132",
        "date": "2017-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/opinion/sunday/rocketing-to-the-sun-and-its-flaming-secrets.html",
        "text": "NASA is launching the first satellite aimed at our own star to uncover the mysteries of its atmosphere. NASA is launching the first satellite aimed at our own star to uncover the mysteries of its atmosphere. Like the countless stars that come and go, flaring and dying across the universe, the sun still holds many mysteries. That should change markedly next year when NASA launches the first satellite aimed at our own star to reveal the secrets of the sun\u2019s atmosphere, the corona.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "I Was the First Woman of Color in Space. Here\u2019s What Katherine Johnson Means to Me. (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8133",
        "date": "2020-02-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/opinion/contributors/Katherine-johnson-nasa.html",
        "text": "In my years in NASA and since, I\u2019ve seen the untapped potential of women, particularly women of color. In my years in NASA and since, I\u2019ve seen the untapped potential of women, particularly women of color. Two years after I joined NASA in 1987, I was preparing for a trip to Brazil to help the United States Information Service celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The souvenir posters I would give out referred to the \u201cfirst American men on the moon.\u201d I suggested it would be more appropriate if they read \u201cfirst humans on the moon.\u201d",
        "author": "By Mae Jemison"
    },
    {
        "title": "I Was the First Woman of Color in Space. Here\u2019s What Katherine Johnson Means to Me. (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8134",
        "date": "2020-02-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/opinion/contributors/Katherine-johnson-nasa.html",
        "text": "In my years in NASA and since, I\u2019ve seen the untapped potential of women, particularly women of color. In my years in NASA and since, I\u2019ve seen the untapped potential of women, particularly women of color. Two years after I joined NASA in 1987, I was preparing for a trip to Brazil to help the United States Information Service celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The souvenir posters I would give out referred to the \u201cfirst American men on the moon.\u201d I suggested it would be more appropriate if they read \u201cfirst humans on the moon.\u201d",
        "author": "By Mae Jemison"
    },
    {
        "title": "I Was the First Woman of Color in Space. Here\u2019s What Katherine Johnson Means to Me. (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8135",
        "date": "2020-02-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/opinion/contributors/Katherine-johnson-nasa.html",
        "text": "In my years in NASA and since, I\u2019ve seen the untapped potential of women, particularly women of color. In my years in NASA and since, I\u2019ve seen the untapped potential of women, particularly women of color. Two years after I joined NASA in 1987, I was preparing for a trip to Brazil to help the United States Information Service celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The souvenir posters I would give out referred to the \u201cfirst American men on the moon.\u201d I suggested it would be more appropriate if they read \u201cfirst humans on the moon.\u201d",
        "author": "By Mae Jemison"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars, a Robotic Arm, and the Most Important Question of Our Time (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8136",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-diana-trujillo.html",
        "text": "Diana Trujillo, a NASA flight director, discusses the future of space travel and the search for signs of life on the red planet. Diana Trujillo, a NASA flight director, discusses the future of space travel and the search for signs of life on the red planet. In a few days, a helicopter is slated to take off \u2014 on Mars. If successful, it would be a historic moment for NASA: the first powered flight of an aircraft in the atmosphere of another planet.",
        "author": "By \u2018Sway'"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA again postpones historic Ingenuity helicopter flight on Mars (WP: Space) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8137",
        "date": "2021-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/13/mars-ingenuity-helicopter-delay/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity helicopter project on Mars is having trouble getting off the ground.The space agency\u2019s much-buzzed-about first powered flight on another planet has been rescheduled a second time because of technical concerns.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInitially, NASA\u2019s \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d was slated for Sunday but was pushed back to Wednesday after the space agency discovered an issue with the aircraft\u2019s rotors. Then, late Monday, NASA said it is pushing the launch back again to modify and reinstall the helicopter\u2019s flight control software. The situation is now \u201cfluid,\u201d the space administration says.\u201cIngenuity is healthy, but it needs a flight software update. While the development of the software is straightforward, validating and uplinking it will take time. We will set a new flight date next week,\u201d NASA said in a tweet.April is the first test flight window for NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, what NASA calls the \"first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet.\" (NASA/JPL-Caltech)It\u2019s no wonder NASA is being careful and taking a high-risk, high-reward approach to test-flying the aircraft on the Red Planet. It\u2019s an expensive undertaking that has been years in the making. If successful, it could open avenues for exploration on other planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity, which rocketed from Earth inside the belly of the space rover Perseverance on July 30, made it to Mars in February and spent just over a week getting ready for the spotlight. Perseverance, a $3 billion project to check for signs of life on Mars, is the main attraction. The robotic drone worth about $80 million is the follow-up act.The aircraft went through the multiday process of descending from the rover, unfurling its solar panels and powering itself up to prepare for what was supposed to be its first launch on Sunday. However two days before the big event, its rotors failed.\u201cDuring a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a \u2018watchdog\u2019 timer expiration,\u201d according to NASA. The timer was designed to stop the operation if it detects issues.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe glitch occurred when the helicopter tried switching from preflight mode to flight mode. NASA said a software update is necessary to address the issue. The agency now has to develop, test and upload new software onto flight controllers. Then it has to reboot Ingenuity to move forward with its mission.The software trouble postponed what is supposed to be only a brief flight. The plan was for Ingenuity to take off, hover for about 30 seconds, then safely land in place. It\u2019s an easy accomplishment for drones on Earth, but a challenging feat on the Red Planet, currently more than 100 million miles away.Mars\u2019s atmosphere is thinner than Earth\u2019s by a ratio of about 100, making liftoff more difficult. To compensate for this, Ingenuity\u2019s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute (RPM). That\u2019s far faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso, since Mars is so far away, joystick control isn\u2019t an option. The entire operation has to happen autonomously. The helicopter also contends with temperatures that can drop to minus 130-degrees Fahrenheit, pushing the tiny aircraft\u2019s parts to their limits.Still, NASA hopes the eventual liftoff will serve as the kickoff of five aerial demonstrations, each designed to be more challenging than the previous one, over about 30 days. Step one was to prove the craft can fly. Step five is to test how far it can go. The goal for Ingenuity is to expand how the space agency can investigate other planets.\u201cAs we\u2019re exploring the surface, we might find terrain that is too hazardous, too distant, or too large of an area for a rover to do the job effectively or efficiently,\u201d said Dave Lavery, program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA\u2019s headquarters in Washington.Once a launch date is set, NASA plans to beam the helicopter\u2019s flight plan to Mars in advance and wait for the helicopter to wake up, complete the task and send back information on its performance.Then, there\u2019s always the potential for crosswinds and unforeseen mishaps. While NASA has never attempted a mission quite like this one, about half of the missions on Mars have failed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe European Space Agency\u2019s Schiaparelli lander crashed on the Red Planet in 2016 due to a data glitch. NASA\u2019s Mars Polar Lander launched in January 1999 for the frigid terrain near Mars\u2019s south pole to dig for water ice but crashed on arrival due to an engineering issue.One thing stands in Ingenuity\u2019s favor: Gravity.The force pulling objects to the ground is more forgiving on Mars, with about one-third the force compared with Earth. That means the drone only has to generate one-third of the lift to launch from the surface.The helicopter carries only the essentials \u2014 two cameras, along with a nod to a past aviation milestone.It\u2019s been more than a century since Orville and Wilbur Wright\u2019s glider took flight in North Carolina, ushering in the age of air transportation. NASA attached a piece of fabric from the 1903 flier underneath the helicopter\u2019s solar panel to mark the moment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cJust as Ingenuity was inspired by the Wright brothers, future explorers will take off using both the data and inspiration from this mission,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said in a statement.The aircraft had already demonstrated it was possible to fly in Mars-like conditions back on Earth. In 2019, well before the device rocketed to Mars inside Perseverance, it was put through tests inside a cylindrical vacuum chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.Air was sucked out and carbon dioxide was pumped into the 85-foot-tall chamber to mimic the atmosphere on Mars. Martian temperature shifts were replicated, as was the potential for crosswinds. The helicopter passed and was moved to Lockheed Martin Space in Denver to meet the rover that carried the helicopter against its belly all the way to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe area where NASA hopes to begin test flights is less than 50 yards from where Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater almost two months ago.Weeks later, the rover dropped Ingenuity off on a flat patch of land just before continuing on its primary mission to hunt for signs of past life. Scientists will use the instruments aboard the rover to collect soil samples for potential return-to-Earth missions. NASA's historic attempt to operate a helicopter on the Red Planet for the first time is postponed. The situation is \"fluid.\" NASA again postpones historic Ingenuity helicopter flight on Mars",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA again postpones historic Ingenuity helicopter flight on Mars (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8138",
        "date": "2021-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/13/mars-ingenuity-helicopter-delay/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity helicopter project on Mars is having trouble getting off the ground.The space agency\u2019s much-buzzed-about first powered flight on another planet has been rescheduled a second time because of technical concerns.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInitially, NASA\u2019s \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d was slated for Sunday but was pushed back to Wednesday after the space agency discovered an issue with the aircraft\u2019s rotors. Then, late Monday, NASA said it is pushing the launch back again to modify and reinstall the helicopter\u2019s flight control software. The situation is now \u201cfluid,\u201d the space administration says.\u201cIngenuity is healthy, but it needs a flight software update. While the development of the software is straightforward, validating and uplinking it will take time. We will set a new flight date next week,\u201d NASA said in a tweet.April is the first test flight window for NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, what NASA calls the \"first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet.\" (NASA/JPL-Caltech)It\u2019s no wonder NASA is being careful and taking a high-risk, high-reward approach to test-flying the aircraft on the Red Planet. It\u2019s an expensive undertaking that has been years in the making. If successful, it could open avenues for exploration on other planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity, which rocketed from Earth inside the belly of the space rover Perseverance on July 30, made it to Mars in February and spent just over a week getting ready for the spotlight. Perseverance, a $3 billion project to check for signs of life on Mars, is the main attraction. The robotic drone worth about $80 million is the follow-up act.The aircraft went through the multiday process of descending from the rover, unfurling its solar panels and powering itself up to prepare for what was supposed to be its first launch on Sunday. However two days before the big event, its rotors failed.\u201cDuring a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a \u2018watchdog\u2019 timer expiration,\u201d according to NASA. The timer was designed to stop the operation if it detects issues.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe glitch occurred when the helicopter tried switching from preflight mode to flight mode. NASA said a software update is necessary to address the issue. The agency now has to develop, test and upload new software onto flight controllers. Then it has to reboot Ingenuity to move forward with its mission.The software trouble postponed what is supposed to be only a brief flight. The plan was for Ingenuity to take off, hover for about 30 seconds, then safely land in place. It\u2019s an easy accomplishment for drones on Earth, but a challenging feat on the Red Planet, currently more than 100 million miles away.Mars\u2019s atmosphere is thinner than Earth\u2019s by a ratio of about 100, making liftoff more difficult. To compensate for this, Ingenuity\u2019s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute (RPM). That\u2019s far faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso, since Mars is so far away, joystick control isn\u2019t an option. The entire operation has to happen autonomously. The helicopter also contends with temperatures that can drop to minus 130-degrees Fahrenheit, pushing the tiny aircraft\u2019s parts to their limits.Still, NASA hopes the eventual liftoff will serve as the kickoff of five aerial demonstrations, each designed to be more challenging than the previous one, over about 30 days. Step one was to prove the craft can fly. Step five is to test how far it can go. The goal for Ingenuity is to expand how the space agency can investigate other planets.\u201cAs we\u2019re exploring the surface, we might find terrain that is too hazardous, too distant, or too large of an area for a rover to do the job effectively or efficiently,\u201d said Dave Lavery, program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA\u2019s headquarters in Washington.Once a launch date is set, NASA plans to beam the helicopter\u2019s flight plan to Mars in advance and wait for the helicopter to wake up, complete the task and send back information on its performance.Then, there\u2019s always the potential for crosswinds and unforeseen mishaps. While NASA has never attempted a mission quite like this one, about half of the missions on Mars have failed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe European Space Agency\u2019s Schiaparelli lander crashed on the Red Planet in 2016 due to a data glitch. NASA\u2019s Mars Polar Lander launched in January 1999 for the frigid terrain near Mars\u2019s south pole to dig for water ice but crashed on arrival due to an engineering issue.One thing stands in Ingenuity\u2019s favor: Gravity.The force pulling objects to the ground is more forgiving on Mars, with about one-third the force compared with Earth. That means the drone only has to generate one-third of the lift to launch from the surface.The helicopter carries only the essentials \u2014 two cameras, along with a nod to a past aviation milestone.It\u2019s been more than a century since Orville and Wilbur Wright\u2019s glider took flight in North Carolina, ushering in the age of air transportation. NASA attached a piece of fabric from the 1903 flier underneath the helicopter\u2019s solar panel to mark the moment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cJust as Ingenuity was inspired by the Wright brothers, future explorers will take off using both the data and inspiration from this mission,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said in a statement.The aircraft had already demonstrated it was possible to fly in Mars-like conditions back on Earth. In 2019, well before the device rocketed to Mars inside Perseverance, it was put through tests inside a cylindrical vacuum chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.Air was sucked out and carbon dioxide was pumped into the 85-foot-tall chamber to mimic the atmosphere on Mars. Martian temperature shifts were replicated, as was the potential for crosswinds. The helicopter passed and was moved to Lockheed Martin Space in Denver to meet the rover that carried the helicopter against its belly all the way to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe area where NASA hopes to begin test flights is less than 50 yards from where Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater almost two months ago.Weeks later, the rover dropped Ingenuity off on a flat patch of land just before continuing on its primary mission to hunt for signs of past life. Scientists will use the instruments aboard the rover to collect soil samples for potential return-to-Earth missions. NASA's historic attempt to operate a helicopter on the Red Planet for the first time is postponed. The situation is \"fluid.\" NASA again postpones historic Ingenuity helicopter flight on Mars",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA again postpones historic Ingenuity helicopter flight on Mars (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8139",
        "date": "2021-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/13/mars-ingenuity-helicopter-delay/",
        "text": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity helicopter project on Mars is having trouble getting off the ground.The space agency\u2019s much-buzzed-about first powered flight on another planet has been rescheduled a second time because of technical concerns.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightInitially, NASA\u2019s \u201cWright brothers moment\u201d was slated for Sunday but was pushed back to Wednesday after the space agency discovered an issue with the aircraft\u2019s rotors. Then, late Monday, NASA said it is pushing the launch back again to modify and reinstall the helicopter\u2019s flight control software. The situation is now \u201cfluid,\u201d the space administration says.\u201cIngenuity is healthy, but it needs a flight software update. While the development of the software is straightforward, validating and uplinking it will take time. We will set a new flight date next week,\u201d NASA said in a tweet.April is the first test flight window for NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, what NASA calls the \"first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet.\" (NASA/JPL-Caltech)It\u2019s no wonder NASA is being careful and taking a high-risk, high-reward approach to test-flying the aircraft on the Red Planet. It\u2019s an expensive undertaking that has been years in the making. If successful, it could open avenues for exploration on other planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIngenuity, which rocketed from Earth inside the belly of the space rover Perseverance on July 30, made it to Mars in February and spent just over a week getting ready for the spotlight. Perseverance, a $3 billion project to check for signs of life on Mars, is the main attraction. The robotic drone worth about $80 million is the follow-up act.The aircraft went through the multiday process of descending from the rover, unfurling its solar panels and powering itself up to prepare for what was supposed to be its first launch on Sunday. However two days before the big event, its rotors failed.\u201cDuring a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a \u2018watchdog\u2019 timer expiration,\u201d according to NASA. The timer was designed to stop the operation if it detects issues.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe glitch occurred when the helicopter tried switching from preflight mode to flight mode. NASA said a software update is necessary to address the issue. The agency now has to develop, test and upload new software onto flight controllers. Then it has to reboot Ingenuity to move forward with its mission.The software trouble postponed what is supposed to be only a brief flight. The plan was for Ingenuity to take off, hover for about 30 seconds, then safely land in place. It\u2019s an easy accomplishment for drones on Earth, but a challenging feat on the Red Planet, currently more than 100 million miles away.Mars\u2019s atmosphere is thinner than Earth\u2019s by a ratio of about 100, making liftoff more difficult. To compensate for this, Ingenuity\u2019s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute (RPM). That\u2019s far faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlso, since Mars is so far away, joystick control isn\u2019t an option. The entire operation has to happen autonomously. The helicopter also contends with temperatures that can drop to minus 130-degrees Fahrenheit, pushing the tiny aircraft\u2019s parts to their limits.Still, NASA hopes the eventual liftoff will serve as the kickoff of five aerial demonstrations, each designed to be more challenging than the previous one, over about 30 days. Step one was to prove the craft can fly. Step five is to test how far it can go. The goal for Ingenuity is to expand how the space agency can investigate other planets.\u201cAs we\u2019re exploring the surface, we might find terrain that is too hazardous, too distant, or too large of an area for a rover to do the job effectively or efficiently,\u201d said Dave Lavery, program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA\u2019s headquarters in Washington.Once a launch date is set, NASA plans to beam the helicopter\u2019s flight plan to Mars in advance and wait for the helicopter to wake up, complete the task and send back information on its performance.Then, there\u2019s always the potential for crosswinds and unforeseen mishaps. While NASA has never attempted a mission quite like this one, about half of the missions on Mars have failed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe European Space Agency\u2019s Schiaparelli lander crashed on the Red Planet in 2016 due to a data glitch. NASA\u2019s Mars Polar Lander launched in January 1999 for the frigid terrain near Mars\u2019s south pole to dig for water ice but crashed on arrival due to an engineering issue.One thing stands in Ingenuity\u2019s favor: Gravity.The force pulling objects to the ground is more forgiving on Mars, with about one-third the force compared with Earth. That means the drone only has to generate one-third of the lift to launch from the surface.The helicopter carries only the essentials \u2014 two cameras, along with a nod to a past aviation milestone.It\u2019s been more than a century since Orville and Wilbur Wright\u2019s glider took flight in North Carolina, ushering in the age of air transportation. NASA attached a piece of fabric from the 1903 flier underneath the helicopter\u2019s solar panel to mark the moment.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cJust as Ingenuity was inspired by the Wright brothers, future explorers will take off using both the data and inspiration from this mission,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said in a statement.The aircraft had already demonstrated it was possible to fly in Mars-like conditions back on Earth. In 2019, well before the device rocketed to Mars inside Perseverance, it was put through tests inside a cylindrical vacuum chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.Air was sucked out and carbon dioxide was pumped into the 85-foot-tall chamber to mimic the atmosphere on Mars. Martian temperature shifts were replicated, as was the potential for crosswinds. The helicopter passed and was moved to Lockheed Martin Space in Denver to meet the rover that carried the helicopter against its belly all the way to Mars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe area where NASA hopes to begin test flights is less than 50 yards from where Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater almost two months ago.Weeks later, the rover dropped Ingenuity off on a flat patch of land just before continuing on its primary mission to hunt for signs of past life. Scientists will use the instruments aboard the rover to collect soil samples for potential return-to-Earth missions. NASA's historic attempt to operate a helicopter on the Red Planet for the first time is postponed. The situation is \"fluid.\" NASA again postpones historic Ingenuity helicopter flight on Mars",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s all-female spacewalk makes history: \u2018One giant leap for WOMANkind!\u2019  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8140",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/18/nasa-live-spacewalk-christina-koch-jessica-meir/",
        "text": "NASA made history Friday morning when astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir stepped outside the International Space Station to replace a faulty battery charger.The all-female spacewalk \u2014 the first of its kind \u201cin human history,\u201d the agency said \u2014 began at 7:38 a.m. Eastern time as the two American astronauts set their suits to battery power mode. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightKoch was first to venture out of the ISS with a red tether attached to her suit.Meir soon followed, carrying a tool bag as she made her way out of the hatch at 7:49 a.m. The spacewalk was originally scheduled for 5\u00bd hours, but the crews successfully completed their main task and the mission was extended to more than seven hours so the astronauts could perform some additional jobs.Story continues below advertisementThe historic float outside the orbiting laboratory into the vacuum of space came several months after another all-female spacewalk was canceled because NASA did not have enough spacesuits in the right size. It\u2019s being heralded as a huge step forward for the agency at a time when NASA continues to work to highlight the contributions of women.AdvertisementRiffing on the renowned quote by first moonwalker Neil Armstrong in 1969, Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) tweeted: \u201cOne giant leap for WOMANkind!\u201dHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) celebrated Koch and Meir \u201cfor leaving their mark on history\u201d and called them \u201can inspiration to women & girls across America.\u201dStory continues below advertisement3, 2, 1\u2026blast off! Here's to making history and two more female role models girls everywhere can look up to! \ud83d\udc69",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s all-female spacewalk makes history: \u2018One giant leap for WOMANkind!\u2019  (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8141",
        "date": "2019-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/18/nasa-live-spacewalk-christina-koch-jessica-meir/",
        "text": "NASA made history Friday morning when astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir stepped outside the International Space Station to replace a faulty battery charger.The all-female spacewalk \u2014 the first of its kind \u201cin human history,\u201d the agency said \u2014 began at 7:38 a.m. Eastern time as the two American astronauts set their suits to battery power mode. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightKoch was first to venture out of the ISS with a red tether attached to her suit.Meir soon followed, carrying a tool bag as she made her way out of the hatch at 7:49 a.m. The spacewalk was originally scheduled for 5\u00bd hours, but the crews successfully completed their main task and the mission was extended to more than seven hours so the astronauts could perform some additional jobs.Story continues below advertisementThe historic float outside the orbiting laboratory into the vacuum of space came several months after another all-female spacewalk was canceled because NASA did not have enough spacesuits in the right size. It\u2019s being heralded as a huge step forward for the agency at a time when NASA continues to work to highlight the contributions of women.AdvertisementRiffing on the renowned quote by first moonwalker Neil Armstrong in 1969, Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.) tweeted: \u201cOne giant leap for WOMANkind!\u201dHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) celebrated Koch and Meir \u201cfor leaving their mark on history\u201d and called them \u201can inspiration to women & girls across America.\u201dStory continues below advertisement3, 2, 1\u2026blast off! Here's to making history and two more female role models girls everywhere can look up to! \ud83d\udc69",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Ad Astra\u2019 star Brad Pitt still has a lot of questions about space (WP: Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8142",
        "date": "2019-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ad-astra-star-brad-pitt-still-has-a-lot-of-questions-about-space/2019/09/16/b1239bc8-d89e-11e9-ac63-3016711543fe_story.html",
        "text": "When Brad Pitt is on a panel with NASA officials, he\u2019s the one with the questions.\u201cIf we were going to make a trip to Mars, we would have to take off from the moon, because of the lack of gravity?\u201d he hesitantly asked spacesuit engineer Lindsay Aitchison Monday afternoon, as part of a Washington Post Live event centered on Pitt\u2019s latest film, \u201cAd Astra.\u201d Joining them were the writer-director, James Gray; lunar scientist Sarah Noble; and panel moderator Ann Hornaday, chief film critic at The Post. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAitchison\u2019s affirmative response (\u201cIt\u2019s helpful\u201d), coupled with a distilled scientific explanation, was characteristic of much of her and Noble\u2019s responses to Pitt\u2019s earnest questions. He was soon outdone by an inquisitive Gray, who explained his granular knowledge of Neil Armstrong\u2019s talk-show appearances by joking, \u201cI don\u2019t get out much.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGray\u2019s commitment to portraying space with accuracy over allure is obvious throughout \u201cAd Astra.\u201d The sci-fi thriller, set for a Friday release, takes place in the near future and centers on Maj. Roy McBride (Pitt), a skilled but emotionally worn astronaut recruited to determine and shut down the source of unbridled energy causing destructive power surges throughout the solar system. The source is believed to be near Neptune, which also happens to be the last known location of the Lima Project, a decades-old effort to discover extraterrestrial life commandeered by Roy\u2019s father (Tommy Lee Jones).Roy had long presumed his father to be dead, and the revelation that he might not be \u2014 and that the Lima Project might be causing the surges \u2014 leads Roy to embark on two journeys: the literal one to Neptune, and an equally harrowing exploration of solitude.\u201cI can\u2019t think of any other film that actually\u201d meditates on that topic, Pitt said. \u201cWe\u2019re usually dealing with benevolent aliens who are going to impart some wisdom, or they\u2019re going to destroy us and we have to stand up and fight. But this question of, what if we\u2019re actually alone? . . . What does that mean? Are we missing something?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGiven that Pitt is largely seen on-screen alone, the film often forgoes interpersonal conversations as a means of establishing Roy\u2019s head space throughout the journey and favors voice-overs pulled from the daily psychological evaluations Roy must complete. (During the panel, Hornaday drew a parallel between this method and the narrative technique Francis Ford Coppola employed in \u201cApocalypse Now.\u201d)\u201cThat\u2019s kind of what we were after, in a sense,\u201d Gray said. \u201cWe have to look so far out that way to recognize that our interiority is what\u2019s really astounding.\u201dThough Pitt joked that he is the sort of actor who doesn't do much research beforehand, he and Gray frequently wondered how much \"Ad Astra\" got right. (The scientists seemed to skirt around this answer.) Nonetheless, the men conversed with Aitchison and Noble about the current state of NASA's lunar exploration \u2014 Noble said she hopes the moon will become a commercial destination within her lifetime \u2014 and tried on spacesuit gloves that Aitchison brought with her.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPitt followed the panel\u2019s formal conclusion with a couple more questions of his own.The first: Isn\u2019t it true that NASA is working on a rover that \u201cwill launch next year to Mars, that will collect samples, and then, they\u2019re working on the return of those samples to pave the way for the return of humans?\u201d Noble responded, \u201cVery good, yes!\u201dThe second: \u201cWho was more believable, Clooney or Pitt?\u201dAitchison and Noble laughed, and Pitt concluded, \u201cIt was Damon.\u201d The actor chatted with NASA officials about exploration, both fictional and real, alongside director James Gray at a Washington Post Live event. \u2018Ad Astra\u2019 star Brad Pitt still has a lot of questions about space",
        "author": "Sonia Rao"
    },
    {
        "title": "Learning With: \u2018NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft Is Triumphant in Encounter With the Most Distant Object Ever Visited\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8143",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/learning/learning-with-nasas-new-horizons-spacecraft-is-triumphant-in-encounter-with-the-most-distant-object-ever-visited.html",
        "text": "How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Shannon Doyne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Learning With: \u2018NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft Is Triumphant in Encounter With the Most Distant Object Ever Visited\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8144",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/learning/learning-with-nasas-new-horizons-spacecraft-is-triumphant-in-encounter-with-the-most-distant-object-ever-visited.html",
        "text": "How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Shannon Doyne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Learning With: \u2018NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft Is Triumphant in Encounter With the Most Distant Object Ever Visited\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8145",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/learning/learning-with-nasas-new-horizons-spacecraft-is-triumphant-in-encounter-with-the-most-distant-object-ever-visited.html",
        "text": "How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Shannon Doyne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Learning With: \u2018NASA\u2019s New Horizons Spacecraft Is Triumphant in Encounter With the Most Distant Object Ever Visited\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8146",
        "date": "2019-01-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/learning/learning-with-nasas-new-horizons-spacecraft-is-triumphant-in-encounter-with-the-most-distant-object-ever-visited.html",
        "text": "How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? How did NASA capture images of Ultima Thule? Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Shannon Doyne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lesson of the Day: \u2018NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8147",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/learning/lesson-of-the-day-nasas-perseverance-rover-lands-on-mars-to-renew-search-for-extinct-life.html",
        "text": "In this lesson, students will learn about NASA\u2019s most ambitious effort in decades. Then they will consider whether life has ever existed on other planets and whether it is worth searching for. In this lesson, students will learn about NASA\u2019s most ambitious effort in decades. Then they will consider whether life has ever existed on other planets and whether it is worth searching for. Featured Article: \u201cNASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life\u201d by Kenneth Chang",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lesson of the Day: \u2018NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8148",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/learning/lesson-of-the-day-nasas-perseverance-rover-lands-on-mars-to-renew-search-for-extinct-life.html",
        "text": "In this lesson, students will learn about NASA\u2019s most ambitious effort in decades. Then they will consider whether life has ever existed on other planets and whether it is worth searching for. In this lesson, students will learn about NASA\u2019s most ambitious effort in decades. Then they will consider whether life has ever existed on other planets and whether it is worth searching for. Featured Article: \u201cNASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life\u201d by Kenneth Chang",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lesson of the Day: \u2018NASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8149",
        "date": "2021-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/learning/lesson-of-the-day-nasas-perseverance-rover-lands-on-mars-to-renew-search-for-extinct-life.html",
        "text": "In this lesson, students will learn about NASA\u2019s most ambitious effort in decades. Then they will consider whether life has ever existed on other planets and whether it is worth searching for. In this lesson, students will learn about NASA\u2019s most ambitious effort in decades. Then they will consider whether life has ever existed on other planets and whether it is worth searching for. Featured Article: \u201cNASA\u2019s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars to Renew Search for Extinct Life\u201d by Kenneth Chang",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Celebrate the Moon Landing, From Coast to Coast (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8150",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/travel/moon-landing-festivals-nasa.html",
        "text": "This summer marks the 50th anniversary of mankind\u2019s giant leap, and NASA centers, museums and even entire cities are gearing up to celebrate. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of mankind\u2019s giant leap, and NASA centers, museums and even entire cities are gearing up to celebrate. It was one small step for man, and \u2026 well, you know. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of mankind\u2019s giant leap, and NASA centers, museums and even entire cities are gearing up to celebrate, planning late-night moon parties, symphony performances and alien autopsies.",
        "author": "By Lauren Sloss"
    },
    {
        "title": "She Couldn\u2019t Afford to Take a NASA Internship. Internet Strangers Stepped In. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8151",
        "date": "2019-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/nasa-internship-single-mom-gofundme.html",
        "text": "India Jackson, a doctoral student in physics, landed a coveted NASA internship in Houston. Within 24 hours, a GoFundMe campaign raised enough money to make it possible. India Jackson, a doctoral student in physics, landed a coveted NASA internship in Houston. Within 24 hours, a GoFundMe campaign raised enough money to make it possible. \u201cPeople think I am, like, some valedictorian,\u201d India Jackson said with a laugh on Wednesday. \u201cNo, I\u2019m not. I am just driven and ambitious.\u201d",
        "author": "By Laura M. Holson"
    },
    {
        "title": "California Today: Xavier Becerra on California vs. Trump (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8152",
        "date": "2018-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/california-today-xavier-becerra-trump.html",
        "text": "Friday: The attorney general on the state\u2019s legal actions, Tesla stocks fall after Elon Musk\u2019s comments, and NASA\u2019s first planetary launch from California. Friday: The attorney general on the state\u2019s legal actions, Tesla stocks fall after Elon Musk\u2019s comments, and NASA\u2019s first planetary launch from California. Good morning.",
        "author": "By Adam Nagourney and Inyoung Kang"
    },
    {
        "title": "California Today: Xavier Becerra on California vs. Trump (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8153",
        "date": "2018-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/california-today-xavier-becerra-trump.html",
        "text": "Friday: The attorney general on the state\u2019s legal actions, Tesla stocks fall after Elon Musk\u2019s comments, and NASA\u2019s first planetary launch from California. Friday: The attorney general on the state\u2019s legal actions, Tesla stocks fall after Elon Musk\u2019s comments, and NASA\u2019s first planetary launch from California. Good morning.",
        "author": "By Adam Nagourney and Inyoung Kang"
    },
    {
        "title": "California Today: Xavier Becerra on California vs. Trump (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8154",
        "date": "2018-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/california-today-xavier-becerra-trump.html",
        "text": "Friday: The attorney general on the state\u2019s legal actions, Tesla stocks fall after Elon Musk\u2019s comments, and NASA\u2019s first planetary launch from California. Friday: The attorney general on the state\u2019s legal actions, Tesla stocks fall after Elon Musk\u2019s comments, and NASA\u2019s first planetary launch from California. Good morning.",
        "author": "By Adam Nagourney and Inyoung Kang"
    },
    {
        "title": "3 Distorted Claims From Trump\u2019s Rally in Duluth (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8155",
        "date": "2018-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/us/politics/fact-check-trump-duluth-rally-.html",
        "text": "At a campaign rally in Minnesota on Wednesday, President Trump misstated facts about the cost of illegal immigration, access to experimental medicine and NASA\u2019s activities. At a campaign rally in Minnesota on Wednesday, President Trump misstated facts about the cost of illegal immigration, access to experimental medicine and NASA\u2019s activities.  Mr. Trump is most likely referring to an estimate from an anti-immigration group that has been heavily criticized by other researchers for its methodological flaws. ",
        "author": "By Linda Qiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8156",
        "date": "2021-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/08/race-america-hispanic-heritage-month-with-diana-trujillo/",
        "text": "Diana Trujillo was part of a small team to land a robot on Mars and is now studying whether there is life on the planet. Trujillo joins Washington Post Live to discuss her work with NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab, advocacy around STEM education and journey immigrating to the United States from Colombia in our conversations marking Hispanic Heritage Month. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightClick here for transcriptHighlights\u201cThe fascination for space started back in my hometown\u2026 Trying to understand when you look at the sky, how beautiful everything is, how majestic it is, and the recognition that behind that night sky there\u2019s this amazing\u2026 planets all different going around the sun\u2026 And so my question always was, \u2018How does that all work?\u2019\u201d (Washington Post Live)\u201cI think the responsibility is on us to help them\u2026 The way that we get to change this is recognizing that we need to make space\u2026 It is not about the next generation trying to come in and knocking the door hard, it is about us opening the door. (Washington Post Live)\u201cWe\u2019re taking the time to recognize all the amazing contributions that we as a Hispanic community have done in many areas\u2026 Having the ability to celebrate that also tells the next generation\u2026 \u2018We are here, you are here, if I can do it, you can do it.\u2019\u201d (Washington Post Live)Diana TrujilloProvided by NASA JPL.Diana Trujillo, an aerospace engineer, is currently Technical Group Supervisor for Planning and Sequencing and a Tactical Mission Lead for the Mars Perseverance rover. Born and raised in Colombia, Trujillo immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 17 to pursue her dream of working for NASA. While enrolled in English-as-a-second-language courses, she also worked full time to support her studies in community college and later the University of Florida and University of Maryland. She has held several roles for NASA and JPL, including Mars Curiosity rover mission lead, deputy project system engineer, and Deputy Team Chief of Engineering Operations on Curiosity. Trujillo has also been active in sharing the excitement and opportunities of STEM with the public. She co-created and hosted #JuntosPerseveramos, NASA\u2019s first-ever Spanish-language live broadcast of a planetary landing, for Perseverance\u2019s arrival on Mars, which attracted millions of viewers worldwide. Diana Trujillo was part of a small team to land a robot on Mars and is now studying whether there is life on the planet. On Friday, Oct. 8 at 12:00 p.m. ET, Trujillo joins Washington Post Live to discuss her work with NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab, advocacy around STEM education and journey immigrating to the United States from Colombia in our conversations marking Hispanic Heritage Month. Race in America: Hispanic Heritage Month with Diana Trujillo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia to Open New Frontier in Space, Shooting First Full-Length Movie (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8157",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/world/europe/russia-movie-space.html",
        "text": "Racing to beat NASA, an actress and a film director will blast off next month for the International Space Station, where they will film \u201cThe Challenge.\u201d Racing to beat NASA, an actress and a film director will blast off next month for the International Space Station, where they will film \u201cThe Challenge.\u201d MOSCOW \u2014 The first satellite in space, the first dog, the first man, the first woman and now \u2014 if all goes as planned \u2014 the first movie.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia to Open New Frontier in Space, Shooting First Full-Length Movie (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8158",
        "date": "2021-09-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/world/europe/russia-movie-space.html",
        "text": "Racing to beat NASA, an actress and a film director will blast off next month for the International Space Station, where they will film \u201cThe Challenge.\u201d Racing to beat NASA, an actress and a film director will blast off next month for the International Space Station, where they will film \u201cThe Challenge.\u201d MOSCOW \u2014 The first satellite in space, the first dog, the first man, the first woman and now \u2014 if all goes as planned \u2014 the first movie.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Probes Former NASA Official\u2019s Contacts With Boeing Executive (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8159",
        "date": "2020-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-probes-former-nasa-officials-contacts-with-boeing-executive-on-lunar-contracts-11597433060?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=41",
        "text": "The grand-jury investigation, which hasn\u2019t been previously reported, is being led by the U.S. attorney\u2019s office for the District of Columbia and is focused on communication that occurred early this year outside established contracting channels, these people said. Prosecutors, they said, are looking into contacts between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Loverro,\n\n\n\n before he resigned as head of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs in May, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch division.\nMr. Loverro, who wasn\u2019t part of NASA\u2019s official contracting staff, informed Mr. Chilton that the Chicago aerospace giant was about to be eliminated from the competition based on cost and technical evaluations, according to some of the people. Within days, Boeing submitted a revised proposal, they said. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration formally determined the bid changes came too late to be considered, and three other companies won contracts in April totaling nearly $1 billion.\nThe investigation is in the early stages, according to the people familiar with it, and it isn\u2019t known whether the probe will result in a criminal case. Regardless of how it ends, the investigation heightens scrutiny of Mr. Loverro\u2019s conduct and raises new questions about Boeing\u2019s decision-making and internal contracting safeguards. Several mid-level Boeing officials, including an attorney, were pushed out of the company as a result of the controversy, people familiar with the personnel changes said.\n\n\nThe company has taken steps to improve compliance training following the episode, said a person briefed on Boeing\u2019s internal response.\nBoeing, which faces a separate criminal probe into its development of the 737 MAX passenger jet, declined to comment on the investigation or on behalf of Mr. Chilton. A NASA spokesman said it is \u201cinappropriate to discuss personnel actions\u201d but added, \u201cWe are confident in our procurement process.\u201d A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney\u2019s office didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Loverro\u2019s lawyers couldn\u2019t be reached for comment.\nMr. Loverro has told investigators he was trying to help the lunar-lander program and taxpayers rather than pursuing anything ill-intended, according to some of the people familiar with the investigation, by reducing the likelihood that the bidding process would be slowed down by potential challenges or appeals to the outcome.\nMr. Loverro\u2019s communications with Boeing, and the company\u2019s actions following those communications, prompted complaints within parts of NASA, the people familiar with the inquiry said. The complaints sparked a previously reported probe by the agency\u2019s inspector general into whether Boeing gained unusual insight or any advantage in the competition. Weeks after the awards were announced, Mr. Loverro stepped down as an associate administrator under pressure from NASA\u2019s leadership.\nIn a farewell message to staff sent on May 19, Mr. Loverro suggested he had overstepped his authority or otherwise might have run afoul of contracting rules. He wrote that \u201crisk-taking is part of the job description\u201d of someone in his role. Without elaborating, the message said, \u201cI took such a risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission.\u201d\nAfter Mr. Loverro left NASA, some of these people said, prosecutors opened their probe into whether procurement integrity laws were violated, requesting written statements and issuing at least one subpoena. The inspector general\u2019s civil inquiry has been put on hold pending resolution of the criminal probe, according to people familiar with both inquiries. A spokeswoman for the inspector general declined comment.\nIn his statements to NASA and Justice Department investigators, these people said, Mr. Loverro indicated his goal was to prevent disruptions to NASA\u2019s lander plans. Prosecutors also are looking at his contact with another bidder, these people said, without identifying that party.\nBoth of the contacts with bidders might have breached established NASA procedures designed to insulate contracting decisions from improper influence, according to these people, and could have reflected efforts by a newcomer to NASA\u2019s leadership ranks to rev up competition. Mr. Loverro is a former senior Pentagon space official who played an important role in establishing the goals and broad design of NASA\u2019s human-lander program after coming to the agency in December. He didn\u2019t make the final contracting decisions.\nAt the end of April, NASA chose the three corporate teams to develop landers intended to take astronauts to the moon for the first time in nearly half a century, relying on a blend of startup and established contractors to lead the way with dramatically different technical solutions. Totaling $967 million, the contracts are intended to be a down payment for billions of additional tax dollars NASA plans to spend on lander prototypes and testing. There is no indicat The criminal inquiry focuses on whether a NASA official improperly shared information about a lunar-lander project with an executive at Boeing, which acted on his guidance. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor, Andrew Tangel and Aruna Viswanatha"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Probes Former NASA Official\u2019s Contacts With Boeing Executive (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8160",
        "date": "2020-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-probes-former-nasa-officials-contacts-with-boeing-executive-on-lunar-contracts-11597433060?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=48",
        "text": "The grand-jury investigation, which hasn\u2019t been previously reported, is being led by the U.S. attorney\u2019s office for the District of Columbia and is focused on communication that occurred early this year outside established contracting channels, these people said. Prosecutors, they said, are looking into contacts between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Loverro,\n\n\n\n before he resigned as head of NASA\u2019s human-exploration programs in May, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Chilton,\n\n\n\n senior vice president of Boeing\u2019s space and launch division.\nMr. Loverro, who wasn\u2019t part of NASA\u2019s official contracting staff, informed Mr. Chilton that the Chicago aerospace giant was about to be eliminated from the competition based on cost and technical evaluations, according to some of the people. Within days, Boeing submitted a revised proposal, they said. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration formally determined the bid changes came too late to be considered, and three other companies won contracts in April totaling nearly $1 billion.\n\n\n\n\nThe investigation is in the early stages, according to the people familiar with it, and it isn\u2019t known whether the probe will result in a criminal case. Regardless of how it ends, the investigation heightens scrutiny of Mr. Loverro\u2019s conduct and raises new questions about Boeing\u2019s decision-making and internal contracting safeguards. Several mid-level Boeing officials, including an attorney, were pushed out of the company as a result of the controversy, people familiar with the personnel changes said.\n\n\nThe company has taken steps to improve compliance training following the episode, said a person briefed on Boeing\u2019s internal response.\nBoeing, which faces a separate criminal probe into its development of the 737 MAX passenger jet, declined to comment on the investigation or on behalf of Mr. Chilton. A NASA spokesman said it is \u201cinappropriate to discuss personnel actions\u201d but added, \u201cWe are confident in our procurement process.\u201d A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney\u2019s office didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. Mr. Loverro\u2019s lawyers couldn\u2019t be reached for comment.\nMr. Loverro has told investigators he was trying to help the lunar-lander program and taxpayers rather than pursuing anything ill-intended, according to some of the people familiar with the investigation, by reducing the likelihood that the bidding process would be slowed down by potential challenges or appeals to the outcome.\nMr. Loverro\u2019s communications with Boeing, and the company\u2019s actions following those communications, prompted complaints within parts of NASA, the people familiar with the inquiry said. The complaints sparked a previously reported probe by the agency\u2019s inspector general into whether Boeing gained unusual insight or any advantage in the competition. Weeks after the awards were announced, Mr. Loverro stepped down as an associate administrator under pressure from NASA\u2019s leadership.\nIn a farewell message to staff sent on May 19, Mr. Loverro suggested he had overstepped his authority or otherwise might have run afoul of contracting rules. He wrote that \u201crisk-taking is part of the job description\u201d of someone in his role. Without elaborating, the message said, \u201cI took such a risk earlier in the year because I judged it necessary to fulfill our mission.\u201d\nAfter Mr. Loverro left NASA, some of these people said, prosecutors opened their probe into whether procurement integrity laws were violated, requesting written statements and issuing at least one subpoena. The inspector general\u2019s civil inquiry has been put on hold pending resolution of the criminal probe, according to people familiar with both inquiries. A spokeswoman for the inspector general declined comment.\nIn his statements to NASA and Justice Department investigators, these people said, Mr. Loverro indicated his goal was to prevent disruptions to NASA\u2019s lander plans. Prosecutors also are looking at his contact with another bidder, these people said, without identifying that party.\nBoth of the contacts with bidders might have breached established NASA procedures designed to insulate contracting decisions from improper influence, according to these people, and could have reflected efforts by a newcomer to NASA\u2019s leadership ranks to rev up competition. Mr. Loverro is a former senior Pentagon space official who played an important role in establishing the goals and broad design of NASA\u2019s human-lander program after coming to the agency in December. He didn\u2019t make the final contracting decisions.\nAt the end of April, NASA chose the three corporate teams to develop landers intended to take astronauts to the moon for the first time in nearly half a century, relying on a blend of startup and established contractors to lead the way with dramatically different technical solutions. Totaling $967 million, the contracts are intended to be a down payment for billions of additional tax dollars NASA plans to spend on lander prototypes and testing. There is no ind The criminal inquiry focuses on whether a NASA official improperly shared information about a lunar-lander project with an executive at Boeing, which acted on his guidance. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor, Andrew Tangel and Aruna Viswanatha"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ozone Hole Above Antarctica Shrinks to Smallest Size on Record (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8161",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ozone-hole-above-antarctica-shrinks-to-smallest-size-on-record-11571847944?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=53",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s great news for ozone in the Southern Hemisphere,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Newman,\n\n\n\n chief scientist for Earth Sciences at NASA, in a report on the ozone released this week. \u201cBut it\u2019s important to recognize that what we\u2019re seeing this year is due to warmer stratospheric temperatures. It\u2019s not a sign that atmospheric ozone is suddenly on a fast track to recovery.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nLocated between seven to 25 miles above Earth\u2019s surface, in a part of the atmosphere called the stratosphere, the ozone layer shields the planet from ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancer, cataracts and other hazardous conditions.\n\n\nDuring normal weather patterns, the hole in the ozone above Antarctica grows to a maximum area of about 8 million square miles in late September or early October, according to NASA. This year, it reached a maximum of 6.3 million square miles on Sept. 6, but then fell to fewer than 3.9 million square miles later that month, where it has stayed. \nThis is the third time in the past 40 years that weather systems have caused conditions that limited ozone depletion, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Susan Strahan,\n\n\n\n an atmospheric scientist with Universities Space Research Association, who works at NASA Goddard. Smaller ozone holes were also observed in September 1988 and 2002 due to similar weather patterns, she said in the NASA report.\n\u201cIt\u2019s a rare event that we\u2019re still trying to understand,\u201d Dr. Strahan said.\nThe hole in the ozone over Antarctica was first discovered in 1985. Researchers linked it to man-made substances such as chlorofluorocarbons, commonly found in refrigerators and other coolants. In 1987, nearly 200 countries signed a treaty regulating the production of such ozone-depleting compounds, and over time the hole began to slowly recover. NASA and NOAA expect it to reach 1980s levels by 2070.\nDespite a gradual decline in the annual ozone hole, emissions of the prohibited chemicals have risen in some regions.\nEarlier this year, an international research team reported in the journal Nature that, despite a world-wide ban, emissions of an ozone-depleting chemical from eastern mainland China is jeopardizing the ozone layer at mid-latitudes where much of the world\u2019s population is concentrated.\nUsing air-monitoring equipment in Japan and Korea, the scientists detected steady emissions of a chlorofluorocarbon known as trichlorofluoromethane (CFC-11), which the world had agreed to phase out beginning in 2010. Emissions of the banned CFC-11, often used in home insulation, have increased in China by around 7,000 tons each year, the scientists said in May.\n\u2014Robert Lee Hotz contributed to this article.\nWrite to Talal Ansari at Talal.Ansari@wsj.com A hole in the ozone layer located near the Earth\u2019s South Pole is the smallest it has been since first being discovered in the 1980s, NASA said. ",
        "author": "Talal Ansari"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scenes From Outer Space (WSJ: Exhibit) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8162",
        "date": "2017-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scenes-from-outer-space-1512663122?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=83",
        "text": "Venus\u2019s silhouette is visible in the top right as the planet crosses the face of the sun in 2012. The transit of Venus across the sun won\u2019t be visible from Earth again until 2117.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe solar-observing satellite Hinode captured this view of the 2012 transit of Venus across the sun.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\n\n\nMore from Exhibit\n\n\n\n\nPortraits in Depth\nMarch 15, 2019 \n\n\nLeaps for Humankind\nFebruary 22, 2019 \n\n\nHow George Lucas Created \u2018Star Wars\u2019\nJanuary 18, 2019 \n\n\nChickens With a Surprisingly Literary Look\nDecember 27, 2018 \n\n\nAnimal Magnetism: This Year\u2019s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards \nNovember 23, 2018 A new book features striking images from the past 50 years of NASA\u2019s archives. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Tiangong vs. International Space Station: Tech, Design Unpacked (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8163",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/chinas-tiangong-vs-international-space-station-tech-design-unpacked/63ECB569-CC4E-4470-9951-A5F4417A4975?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=17",
        "text": " While the future of the nearly 23-year-old International Space Station remains uncertain after 2024, China says its newly equipped Tiangong station will be up and running by next year. WSJ unpacks the design and technology of both space stations. Photo: CCTV; NASA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Tiangong vs. International Space Station: Tech, Design Unpacked (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8164",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/chinas-tiangong-vs-international-space-station-tech-design-unpacked/63ECB569-CC4E-4470-9951-A5F4417A4975?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=24",
        "text": " While the future of the nearly 23-year-old International Space Station remains uncertain after 2024, China says its newly equipped Tiangong station will be up and running by next year. WSJ unpacks the design and technology of both space stations. Photo: CCTV; NASA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Restorers Try to Get Lunar Module Guidance Computer Up and Running (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8165",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/restorers-try-to-get-lunar-module-guidance-computer-up-and-running/55526F08-0CC6-4CF7-9BCC-6BE6A20FE31C?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=70",
        "text": " In 1976 in a warehouse in Texas, Jimmie Loocke bought two tons of scrapped NASA equipment. Years later he realized it included a computer from an Apollo lunar module, like the one used to guide the lander to the surface of the moon during Apollo 11. Fifty years after that mission, computer restoration experts in Silicon Valley are trying to get his computer working again. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Seeks Water on the Moon to Fuel Its Mission to Get Humans to Mars (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8166",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/nasa-seeks-water-on-the-moon-to-fuel-its-mission-to-get-humans-to-mars/78BA5336-C0D8-469B-8488-41042AB5CBEA?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=32",
        "text": " NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Seeks Water on the Moon to Fuel Its Mission to Get Humans to Mars (WSJ: Feature Explainer) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8167",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-explains/nasa-seeks-water-on-the-moon-to-fuel-its-mission-to-get-humans-to-mars/78BA5336-C0D8-469B-8488-41042AB5CBEA?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=34",
        "text": " NASA is partnering with SpaceX, Blue Origin and others to search for water on the moon. Water is the foundation for rocket propellant, which could supply refueling stations in the cosmos and make Mars trips cheaper. Photo illustration: Crystal Tai ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellite Maker Terran Orbital Strikes $1.58 Billion SPAC Deal (WSJ: Finance) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8168",
        "date": "2021-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellite-maker-terran-orbital-strikes-1-58-billion-spac-deal-11635451260?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=2",
        "text": "Terran is developing its own constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites, with plans to launch next year and targeting customers such as shippers that need to track their vessels and governments monitoring conflict zones.\n\n\n\n\nTerran, founded in 2013, is merging with Tailwind Two Acquisition Corp., a SPAC listed on the New York Stock Exchange and led by Casper Sleep Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philip Krim.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nVirgin Orbit, a satellite-launching startup backed by British billionaire Richard Branson, in August agreed to merge with a blank-check company in a $3.2 billion deal.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Virgin Galactic/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nSeveral space companies have gone public through SPAC mergers, which offer some advantages over traditional initial public offerings for early-stage companies with scant track records. They are tapping into investors\u2019 expectations that space travel for business, tourism and research will get much cheaper in the coming years.\n\nToday, insurance companies, for example, can afford to map out rooftops in Florida the day before a hurricane hit and the day after to protect themselves against insurance fraud, said Terran Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marc Bell\n\n\n\n in an interview. \u201cThat couldn\u2019t happen 10 years ago because the satellite technology was too expensive,\u201d he said.\nVirgin Orbit, a satellite-launching startup backed by British billionaire\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n in August agreed to merge with a blank-check company in a $3.2 billion deal that included an investment from Boeing Co. Shares of the SPAC,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n NextGen Acquisition Corp. II,\n\n\n are up 3.6% since the deal was announced.\nSPACs raise money by going public and then have a set period, usually two years, to hunt for an acquisition target. They were hot investments early this year then faded in popularity after many companies that went public this way struggled to meet their business targets.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nTerran\u2019s Mr. Bell is unfazed. SPACs offer a faster way than the traditional route of an initial public offering and offer greater certainty of the deal closing, he said.\nThe Tailwind merger gives Terran access to about $345 million held by the SPAC. It will also get $125 million in additional funds from investors including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.40%\n\n\n , an existing Terran investor and customer, and private-equity firms AE Industrial Partners and Francisco Partners.\nMr. Bell said the money would be used to expand Terran\u2019s two manufacturing plants in California while it builds a new, bigger facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla., over the next three years. Florida\u2019s government has contributed $300 million to that project, which Terran says will be able to produce more than 1,000 satellites annually.\nWrite to Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com Backed by Lockheed Martin, Terran customers include NASA and the U.S. Defense Department. ",
        "author": "Ben Dummett"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an Asteroid (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8169",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/how-nasa-plans-to-defend-earth-crash-a-probe-into-an-asteroid/6850ECD4-D28E-4A79-8A4B-3F0189335FA7?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=3",
        "text": " NASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an Asteroid (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8170",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/how-nasa-plans-to-defend-earth-crash-a-probe-into-an-asteroid/6850ECD4-D28E-4A79-8A4B-3F0189335FA7?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=10",
        "text": " NASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an Asteroid (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8171",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/how-nasa-plans-to-defend-earth-crash-a-probe-into-an-asteroid/6850ECD4-D28E-4A79-8A4B-3F0189335FA7?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=17",
        "text": " NASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an Asteroid (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8172",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/how-nasa-plans-to-defend-earth-crash-a-probe-into-an-asteroid/6850ECD4-D28E-4A79-8A4B-3F0189335FA7?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=16",
        "text": " NASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Auditioning for Life on Mars (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8173",
        "date": "2021-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/auditioning-for-life-on-mars-11629468523?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=24",
        "text": "It\u2019s enough to leave anyone on edge. \nHere\u2019s the good news: Mars is taking applications. \n\n\nHold up\u2026. I don\u2019t mean actual Mars, the red planet/\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n future HQ tens of millions of miles from earth. I\u2019m talking about NASA\u2019s earthbound Hogwarts for Mars, the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA. According to the space agency\u2019s website, this coming simulator program will be \u201ca step toward Mars\u201d\u2014\u201ca series of analog missions that will simulate yearlong stays on the surface of Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not exactly Matt Damon, but how hard can it be?\u201d\n\n\n\nEach mission will consist of four crew members living in Mars Dune Alpha, an isolated 1,700 square foot habitat. During the mission, the crew will conduct simulated spacewalks and provide data on a variety of factors, which may include physical and behavioral health and performance.\nThe 3-D printed habitat will include private crew quarters, a kitchen and dedicated areas for medical, recreation, fitness, work and crop growth activities, as well as a technical work area and two bathrooms.\nTwo bathrooms! The height of simulator luxury!\nBasically, you\u2019ll be helping NASA figure stuff out for when it sends real astronauts up to do the actual missions to the real-life Mars. The demo CHAPEA-nauts will attempt \u201csimulated spacewalks including virtual reality,\u201d \u201cmaintenance work,\u201d \u201cscience work\u201d \u201chygiene activities\u201d (I do not want to know) and one of my areas of great personal expertise, \u201cmeal preparation and consumption.\u201d \n(I\u2019m imagining a Mars-habitat version of the jailhouse scene in \u201cGoodfellas,\u201d me sitting at a table in an astronaut suit, slicing garlic with a razor.) \nInterested? NASA\u2019s now taking applications; the deadline is Sep. 17, which means you have a couple of weeks to get your act together. \nI really think I\u2019m in. I know it\u2019s not real Mars\u2014honestly, it sounds more like an extended stay in an airport hotel\u2014but I wouldn\u2019t mind escaping to a 3-D printed habitat right about now. They just have to promise to have NFL Sunday Ticket and to let me out every couple of weeks to go to Chipotle. \nMy family won\u2019t mind. They\u2019ll probably help me pack. My kids are tired of me asking them to do their summer reading. It\u2019ll take six weeks for them to notice I\u2019m gone. \n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nThe Over-the-Top Stress of College Acceptance Season\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nI\u2019ve never thought of myself as the NASA type. I\u2019m not exactly Matt Damon, but how hard can it be? I probably have something to add to the habitat. I know a lot of meaningless sports tidbits, and I can make an Old Fashioned that will put you flat on the couch. I can make my own bed, and I play most forms of poker. \nI bet my fellow Mars demo astronauts can handle all the hard work, and when they return from the lab after a hard day of work, I can serve them up some Old Fashioneds and regale them with light Dad humor from the Saturday section of a financial newspaper. \nUh-oh, wait. There appears to be a hiccup. I meet some of NASA\u2019s requirements: I am a U.S. citizen, I am between the ages of 30-55, I am pretty sure I can pass a physical, but what\u2019s this about needing a \u201cmaster\u2019s degree in a STEM field?\u201d I ran screaming from college science and math. I barely finished \u201cHeart of Darkness\u201d in my comp lit class. I didn\u2019t sign up for classes that met on Mondays and Fridays. \nIt appears I may not be Mars material. \nTell me: When do we get serious about Jupiter? \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you live in a Mars simulator for an extended period? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com An upcoming NASA program will test how humans fare in a simulated space habitat. Applications are due Sep.17. Are you in? ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "Auditioning for Life on Mars (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8174",
        "date": "2021-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/auditioning-for-life-on-mars-11629468523?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=17",
        "text": "It\u2019s enough to leave anyone on edge. \n\n\n\n\nHere\u2019s the good news: Mars is taking applications. \n\n\nHold up\u2026. I don\u2019t mean actual Mars, the red planet/\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n future HQ tens of millions of miles from earth. I\u2019m talking about NASA\u2019s earthbound Hogwarts for Mars, the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA. According to the space agency\u2019s website, this coming simulator program will be \u201ca step toward Mars\u201d\u2014\u201ca series of analog missions that will simulate yearlong stays on the surface of Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not exactly Matt Damon, but how hard can it be?\u201d\n\n\n\nEach mission will consist of four crew members living in Mars Dune Alpha, an isolated 1,700 square foot habitat. During the mission, the crew will conduct simulated spacewalks and provide data on a variety of factors, which may include physical and behavioral health and performance.\nThe 3-D printed habitat will include private crew quarters, a kitchen and dedicated areas for medical, recreation, fitness, work and crop growth activities, as well as a technical work area and two bathrooms.\nTwo bathrooms! The height of simulator luxury!\nBasically, you\u2019ll be helping NASA figure stuff out for when it sends real astronauts up to do the actual missions to the real-life Mars. The demo CHAPEA-nauts will attempt \u201csimulated spacewalks including virtual reality,\u201d \u201cmaintenance work,\u201d \u201cscience work\u201d \u201chygiene activities\u201d (I do not want to know) and one of my areas of great personal expertise, \u201cmeal preparation and consumption.\u201d \n(I\u2019m imagining a Mars-habitat version of the jailhouse scene in \u201cGoodfellas,\u201d me sitting at a table in an astronaut suit, slicing garlic with a razor.) \nInterested? NASA\u2019s now taking applications; the deadline is Sep. 17, which means you have a couple of weeks to get your act together. \nI really think I\u2019m in. I know it\u2019s not real Mars\u2014honestly, it sounds more like an extended stay in an airport hotel\u2014but I wouldn\u2019t mind escaping to a 3-D printed habitat right about now. They just have to promise to have NFL Sunday Ticket and to let me out every couple of weeks to go to Chipotle. \nMy family won\u2019t mind. They\u2019ll probably help me pack. My kids are tired of me asking them to do their summer reading. It\u2019ll take six weeks for them to notice I\u2019m gone. \n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\nStop Reading This Lousy Column, and Read a Book Instead\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nI\u2019ve never thought of myself as the NASA type. I\u2019m not exactly Matt Damon, but how hard can it be? I probably have something to add to the habitat. I know a lot of meaningless sports tidbits, and I can make an Old Fashioned that will put you flat on the couch. I can make my own bed, and I play most forms of poker. \nI bet my fellow Mars demo astronauts can handle all the hard work, and when they return from the lab after a hard day of work, I can serve them up some Old Fashioneds and regale them with light Dad humor from the Saturday section of a financial newspaper. \nUh-oh, wait. There appears to be a hiccup. I meet some of NASA\u2019s requirements: I am a U.S. citizen, I am between the ages of 30-55, I am pretty sure I can pass a physical, but what\u2019s this about needing a \u201cmaster\u2019s degree in a STEM field?\u201d I ran screaming from college science and math. I barely finished \u201cHeart of Darkness\u201d in my comp lit class. I didn\u2019t sign up for classes that met on Mondays and Fridays. \nIt appears I may not be Mars material. \nTell me: When do we get serious about Jupiter? \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you live in a Mars simulator for an extended period? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com An upcoming NASA program will test how humans fare in a simulated space habitat. Applications are due Sep.17. Are you in? ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "Auditioning for Life on Mars (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8175",
        "date": "2021-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/auditioning-for-life-on-mars-11629468523?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=23",
        "text": "It\u2019s enough to leave anyone on edge. \n\n\n\n\nHere\u2019s the good news: Mars is taking applications. \n\n\nHold up\u2026. I don\u2019t mean actual Mars, the red planet/\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n future HQ tens of millions of miles from earth. I\u2019m talking about NASA\u2019s earthbound Hogwarts for Mars, the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA. According to the space agency\u2019s website, this coming simulator program will be \u201ca step toward Mars\u201d\u2014\u201ca series of analog missions that will simulate yearlong stays on the surface of Mars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not exactly Matt Damon, but how hard can it be?\u201d\n\n\n\nEach mission will consist of four crew members living in Mars Dune Alpha, an isolated 1,700 square foot habitat. During the mission, the crew will conduct simulated spacewalks and provide data on a variety of factors, which may include physical and behavioral health and performance.\nThe 3-D printed habitat will include private crew quarters, a kitchen and dedicated areas for medical, recreation, fitness, work and crop growth activities, as well as a technical work area and two bathrooms.\nTwo bathrooms! The height of simulator luxury!\nBasically, you\u2019ll be helping NASA figure stuff out for when it sends real astronauts up to do the actual missions to the real-life Mars. The demo CHAPEA-nauts will attempt \u201csimulated spacewalks including virtual reality,\u201d \u201cmaintenance work,\u201d \u201cscience work\u201d \u201chygiene activities\u201d (I do not want to know) and one of my areas of great personal expertise, \u201cmeal preparation and consumption.\u201d \n(I\u2019m imagining a Mars-habitat version of the jailhouse scene in \u201cGoodfellas,\u201d me sitting at a table in an astronaut suit, slicing garlic with a razor.) \nInterested? NASA\u2019s now taking applications; the deadline is Sep. 17, which means you have a couple of weeks to get your act together. \nI really think I\u2019m in. I know it\u2019s not real Mars\u2014honestly, it sounds more like an extended stay in an airport hotel\u2014but I wouldn\u2019t mind escaping to a 3-D printed habitat right about now. They just have to promise to have NFL Sunday Ticket and to let me out every couple of weeks to go to Chipotle. \nMy family won\u2019t mind. They\u2019ll probably help me pack. My kids are tired of me asking them to do their summer reading. It\u2019ll take six weeks for them to notice I\u2019m gone. \n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\nStop Reading This Lousy Column, and Read a Book Instead\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nI\u2019ve never thought of myself as the NASA type. I\u2019m not exactly Matt Damon, but how hard can it be? I probably have something to add to the habitat. I know a lot of meaningless sports tidbits, and I can make an Old Fashioned that will put you flat on the couch. I can make my own bed, and I play most forms of poker. \nI bet my fellow Mars demo astronauts can handle all the hard work, and when they return from the lab after a hard day of work, I can serve them up some Old Fashioneds and regale them with light Dad humor from the Saturday section of a financial newspaper. \nUh-oh, wait. There appears to be a hiccup. I meet some of NASA\u2019s requirements: I am a U.S. citizen, I am between the ages of 30-55, I am pretty sure I can pass a physical, but what\u2019s this about needing a \u201cmaster\u2019s degree in a STEM field?\u201d I ran screaming from college science and math. I barely finished \u201cHeart of Darkness\u201d in my comp lit class. I didn\u2019t sign up for classes that met on Mondays and Fridays. \nIt appears I may not be Mars material. \nTell me: When do we get serious about Jupiter? \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWould you live in a Mars simulator for an extended period? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com An upcoming NASA program will test how humans fare in a simulated space habitat. Applications are due Sep.17. Are you in? ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Mars Rover Writes From Space: \u2018When Can I Come Home?\u2019 (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8176",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mars-rover-writes-from-space-when-can-i-come-home-11614351116?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=33",
        "text": "Anyways, I am just checking in. I\u2019ve been up here on Mars for a few days, everything\u2019s fine, Mars is good, Mars is neat, the crater\u2019s nice, trip of a lifetime, I\u2019m not complaining, I\u2019m not upset, but, um, I just had a question: \nWhen can I come back to Earth? \n\n\nOK. I really don\u2019t want to sound like a whiner. Don\u2019t misread me. I appreciate the opportunity to go on this trip, and besides, it took me nearly eight months of hurtling through space to get here. I don\u2019t need to come home tomorrow. My SkyMiles don\u2019t expire until 2022.\nBut I miss everyone back home. A lot!\nWhat\u2019s going on down there, anyway? Am I missing anything good? What are people talking about? Who\u2019s mad at whom? Any good fights? Controversies? Celebrity divorces? Cat memes? \n\n\n\n\u201cI examined the surface. I tested the air. I got rocks. Lots of rocks. \u201d\n\n\n\nIs there snow on the ground where you are? Are your kids in school or still virtual? Is it true Daft Punk broke up? That\u2019s pretty major robot news. Did the Eagles really send Carson Wentz to the Colts? \nDid you watch \u201cTenet?\u201d I watched it 7,000 times on the trip to Mars. I still don\u2019t get it. \nPlease know: I have been working. The space nerds gave me a bunch of assignments\u2014look for habitability, seek out signs of past life, collect some rocks, test the oxygen in the atmosphere. \nI did all that stuff. I examined the surface. I tested the air. I got rocks. Lots of rocks. \nElton and Bernie had it right: This ain\u2019t the kind of place to raise your kids. I don\u2019t want to sound bleak, but there have been moments when I\u2019m buzzing about, and I feel haunted by existential despair. I have worked my whole life for this, but now I am stuck on this planet like Matt Damon in that movie, and wondering if I\u2019m going to have to keep doing this forever. Is this really it? \nI know what the space nerds will say: Why don\u2019t you play with Ingenuity?\n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nThe Over-the-Top Stress of College Acceptance Season\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nYes, the space nerds flew me here with a buddy: Ingenuity, a little space helicopter. And Ingenuity is OK. But talks a lot. A lot. You think it\u2019s rough when a chatty stranger sits next to you on an airplane without a book? Try doing that all the way to Mars. I\u2019ve heard enough from Ingenuity. I don\u2019t need to hear Ingenuity go on and on about every pet it ever had, the best pizza it ever ate, the time it had to hitchhike home from a party on Cape Cod during a hailstorm. I don\u2019t need to hear Ingenuity\u2019s Top 10 desert island album list one more time. \u201cRumours\u201d over \u201cLondon Calling?\u201d Come on. \nAnd yes, there\u2019s an older rover up here, named Curiosity, who\u2019s been here since 2012, but rover friends say that Curiosity is kind of a lone wolf, and so he\u2019s probably not going to be thrilled to run into me and Ingenuity. Word at rover school is that Curiosity is kinda\u2026grumpy. \nI bet NASA\u2019s thinking: Percy needs time. Every kid who gets sent off to summer camp sends some version of this letter, and within a few weeks I\u2019ll be drag racing the craters with Ingenuity and Curiosity and I\u2019ll never want to leave. A few weeks from now, they think I\u2019m going to write: Muddah, Faddah kindly disregard this letter. \nBut can we be sure? It\u2019s been said before, but I think it\u2019s going to be a long, long time \u2019til touchdown brings me \u2019round again. \nPlease write back.\nYours, Percy\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n On Monday, NASA shared video footage from the Perseverance rover\u2019s descent and touchdown on the Martian surface. Photo: NASA\n \n\n\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSCould you spend the rest of your life conducting experiments on Mars? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tThe name of the Jezero Crater was misspelled as Jerzero in a previous version of this column. (Corrected on March 4, 2021) Barely a week into its mission, a NASA robot is thinking of Elton John and worrying it\u2019s going to be a long, long time. ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Satellite Lets Scientists See Antarctica\u2019s Melting Like Never Before (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8177",
        "date": "2020-04-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/climate/antarctica-ice-climate-change.html",
        "text": "NASA's new ICESat-2 satellite provides the most detailed look yet of where the continent is losing and gaining ice. NASA's new ICESat-2 satellite provides the most detailed look yet of where the continent is losing and gaining ice. NASA's new ICESat-2 satellite provides the most detailed look yet of where the continent is losing and gaining ice.",
        "author": "By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Henry Fountain and Denise Lu"
    },
    {
        "title": "It\u2019s Official: 2018 Was the Fourth-Warmest Year on Record (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8178",
        "date": "2019-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/06/climate/fourth-hottest-year.html",
        "text": "The only warmer years were 2015, 2016 and 2017, according to NASA records that go back more than a century. The only warmer years were 2015, 2016 and 2017, according to NASA records that go back more than a century. The only warmer years were 2015, 2016 and 2017, according to NASA records that go back more than a century.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz and Nadja Popovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where 2020's Record Heat Was Felt the Most (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8179",
        "date": "2021-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/climate/hottest-year-2020-global-map.html",
        "text": "Data issued Thursday by NASA confirmed that 2020 has effectively tied the hottest year on record. That means the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping. Data issued Thursday by NASA confirmed that 2020 has effectively tied the hottest year on record. That means the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping. Data issued Thursday by NASA confirmed that 2020 has effectively tied the hottest year on record. That means the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain, Blacki Migliozzi and Nadja Popovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where 2020's Record Heat Was Felt the Most (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8180",
        "date": "2021-01-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/14/climate/hottest-year-2020-global-map.html",
        "text": "Data issued Thursday by NASA confirmed that 2020 has effectively tied the hottest year on record. That means the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping. Data issued Thursday by NASA confirmed that 2020 has effectively tied the hottest year on record. That means the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping. Data issued Thursday by NASA confirmed that 2020 has effectively tied the hottest year on record. That means the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain, Blacki Migliozzi and Nadja Popovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opportunity, the NASA Rover Who Showed Us Mars (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8181",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/23/magazine/opportunity-rover.html",
        "text": "A NASA rover set the beyond-Earth record for overland exploration, and revealed that the basis of life \u2014 water \u2014 once existed on the red planet. A NASA rover set the beyond-Earth record for overland exploration, and revealed that the basis of life \u2014 water \u2014 once existed on the red planet. A NASA rover set the beyond-Earth record for overland exploration, and revealed that the basis of life \u2014 water \u2014 once existed on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Gareth Cook"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opportunity, the NASA Rover Who Showed Us Mars (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8182",
        "date": "2019-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/23/magazine/opportunity-rover.html",
        "text": "A NASA rover set the beyond-Earth record for overland exploration, and revealed that the basis of life \u2014 water \u2014 once existed on the red planet. A NASA rover set the beyond-Earth record for overland exploration, and revealed that the basis of life \u2014 water \u2014 once existed on the red planet. A NASA rover set the beyond-Earth record for overland exploration, and revealed that the basis of life \u2014 water \u2014 once existed on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Gareth Cook"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Have Some Good News on the California Drought. Take a Look. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8183",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/22/us/california-measuring-snowpack.html",
        "text": "Using NASA data, we compared this year's snowpack in the Sierra Nevada with that of 2015, when the state was in the grip of drought. Using NASA data, we compared this year's snowpack in the Sierra Nevada with that of 2015, when the state was in the grip of drought. Using NASA data, we compared this year's snowpack in the Sierra Nevada with that of 2015, when the state was in the grip of drought.",
        "author": "By MIKE McPHATE, DEREK WATKINS and JIM WILSON"
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Mars Rover Images Were Delayed for Days. Here\u2019s Why (WSJ: NA PKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8184",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/chinas-mars-rover-images-were-delayed-for-days-heres-why/5E4F177A-C081-4A88-BA8A-40CD568A32A7.html?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=30",
        "text": " China\u2019s space agency took four days to release images from Mars after its Zhurong rover landed. Here\u2019s why the wait was longer than for NASA's Perseverance rover, whose first photo was released the day it touched down. Photo: CNSA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Zhurong vs. NASA's Perseverance: Rover Tech in Mars Space Race (WSJ: News Explainer) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8185",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/chinas-zhurong-vs-nasa-perseverance-rover-tech-in-mars-space-race/F3A65379-68F0-4576-8713-A5A7C30956EE?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=8",
        "text": " The U.S. and China are in a race to explore Mars. China successfully landed its Zhurong rover on the red planet, according to state media, just months after NASA landed its Perseverance rover. Photos: NASA; CCTV ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Zhurong vs. NASA's Perseverance: Rover Tech in Mars Space Race (WSJ: News Explainer) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8186",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/chinas-zhurong-vs-nasa-perseverance-rover-tech-in-mars-space-race/F3A65379-68F0-4576-8713-A5A7C30956EE?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=30",
        "text": " The U.S. and China are in a race to explore Mars. China successfully landed its Zhurong rover on the red planet, according to state media, just months after NASA landed its Perseverance rover. Photos: NASA; CCTV ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China\u2019s Zhurong vs. NASA's Perseverance: Rover Tech in Mars Space Race (WSJ: News Explainer) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8187",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/news-explainers/chinas-zhurong-vs-nasa-perseverance-rover-tech-in-mars-space-race/F3A65379-68F0-4576-8713-A5A7C30956EE?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=30",
        "text": " The U.S. and China are in a race to explore Mars. China successfully landed its Zhurong rover on the red planet, according to state media, just months after NASA landed its Perseverance rover. Photos: NASA; CCTV ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion: How Apollo 11 Got to the Moon (WSJ: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8188",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-how-apollo-11-got-to-the-moon/BBE30E92-B852-4E4E-92F4-7C594D019A33.html?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=58",
        "text": " Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion: How Apollo 11 Got to the Moon (WSJ: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8189",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-how-apollo-11-got-to-the-moon/BBE30E92-B852-4E4E-92F4-7C594D019A33.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=70",
        "text": " Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Road to \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 (WSJ: Playlist) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8190",
        "date": "2017-01-31",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-road-to-hidden-figures-1485882051?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=102",
        "text": "At the time, I didn\u2019t know that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Weldon Irvine\n\n\n\n had written the lyric in tribute to playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote \u201cA Raisin in the Sun\u201d and died at age 34. Or that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nina Simone\n\n\n\n had written the music and first recorded the song in 1969.\nOf course, when I heard the single some years later, listening to a black woman sing with such confidence didn\u2019t come as a shock. I had grown up hearing\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aretha Franklin,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gladys Knight\n\n\n\n and so many other great female artists sing, not to mention women singing in church.\n\n\nWhat stood out was how Nina sang the song and how it was arranged. Delivered in her earthy, insistent voice, \u201cTo Be Young, Gifted and Black\u201d was exuberant, proud and political. \nThe single opens with Nina playing a piano run, followed by a large gospel choir singing. Nina joins in and leads, and the expansive music rushes at you like a wall of sound:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNina Simone\u2019s \u2018To Be Young, Gifted and Black.\n\n\n\n\u201cYoung, gifted and black / Oh what a lovely precious dream / To be young, gifted and black / Open your heart to what I mean.\u201d\nTo me, the song is about being on center stage, about saying to oneself, \u201cI\u2019m supposed to be here, and I\u2019m not making any apologies for that.\u201d\nI grew up in a household that embraced the space program\u2019s optimism about the future. I heard that same hope in Nina\u2019s voice. It\u2019s not subtle or shy but a direct statement about personal freedom and self-worth.\nWhile writing my book, \u201cHidden Figures,\u201d I felt transported by the song, and I relived what these NASA women and their generation of black Americans experienced. I also was reminded of the hope that we all share\u2014to be seen and to see ourselves as fully realized.\n\n\nMore in Icons\n\n\n\n\nA Road-Trip Playlist Curated for the Summer of 2020\nAugust 13, 2020 \n\n\nA Playlist That Takes You Around the World\u2014and Beyond \nMay 6, 2020 \n\n\nAn Adult Education in Rock: Martha Grimes on Lou Reed\nApril 3, 2018 \n\n\nMusic to Stitch By: Daymond John, Sewing and \u2018Risin to the Top\u2019\nMarch 27, 2018 \n\n\nStuck in a Beach Town, Rosanne Cash Turned to Joni Mitchell\u2019s Music\nMarch 20, 2018 Nina Simone\u2019s \u2018To Be Young, Gifted and Black\u2019 inspired \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 author Margot Lee Shetterly during NASA\u2019s glory days. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Taps Veteran Congressional Staffer for No.2 NASA Post (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8191",
        "date": "2018-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-taps-veteran-congressional-staffer-for-no-2-nasa-post-1531445102?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=66",
        "text": "Traditionally, the NASA post has been filled by someone with a scientific or management background primarily responsible for day-to-day oversight of budget and policy priorities at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But the\u00a0Trump administration harbors long-term plans to shake up some legacy programs favored by committee chairmen in favor of boosting commercially oriented human exploration efforts. People familiar with the details said Mr. Morhard\u2019s political ties seem particularly suited to assist in striving for those goals.\nDespite Republican control of both the Senate and the House, GOP leaders generally have been reluctant to trim jobs or federal work from major NASA contractors. President Barack Obama\u2019s administration faced many of the same hurdles.\n\n\nThe anticipated nomination, these people said, could be a catalyst to make NASA more nimble and build traction for changes. Mr. Morhard previously was staff director for the Senate appropriations panel responsible for NASA.\nMany Democrats are bound to criticize the choice, but Mr. Morhard\u00a0has longstanding ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and outgoing House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Ryan\n\n\n\n of Wisconsin. In his current role, Mr. Morhard also has forged relationships with Democratic lawmakers.\nIn addition, White House aides and outside space advisers have laid the groundwork for Mr. Morhard to receive the backing of prominent industry and former government officials, according to one person familiar with the strategy.\nThursday\u2019s White House announcement also is likely to spark controversy because it followed what amounted to an unusual public campaign by NASA chief Jim Bridenstine on behalf of another potential nominee. Last month, Mr. Bridenstine repeatedly said he was pushing for the nomination of Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut with a doctorate in chemistry and currently director of NASA\u2019s\u00a0John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. He took the unusual step of explaining he favored a deputy with \u201ca lot of space experience\u201d and said \u201ca scientist would be great.\u201d Mr. Trump decided otherwise.\nMr. Bridenstine, a former GOP House member from Oklahoma, barely won confirmation after months of delay during which Democratic leaders assailed his previous partisan stances and attacked his staunchly conservative views on social issues.\nSince Mr. Bridenstine began running the agency, he has pledged to remain apolitical and renounced earlier views that played down human activity as the primary cause of climate change.\nEchoing views of Mr. Trump and Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n the administration\u2019s point man on space, the NASA chief has stressed the importance of enlisting more commercial involvement in robotic and human missions to the moon and beyond.\nMr. Trump has said, only half\u00a0 jokingly, that he would be pleased to see space\u00a0entrepreneurs such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n or\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc. chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n beat\u00a0NASA in eventually sending humans deep into solar system.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com President Donald Trump intends to nominate veteran congressional staffer James Morhard as NASA\u2019s deputy administrator, hoping that strong bipartisan connections on Capitol Hill will compensate for lack of technical expertise. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Taps Veteran Congressional Staffer for No.2 NASA Post (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8192",
        "date": "2018-07-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-taps-veteran-congressional-staffer-for-no-2-nasa-post-1531445102?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=91",
        "text": "Traditionally, the NASA post has been filled by someone with a scientific or management background primarily responsible for day-to-day oversight of budget and policy priorities at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But the\u00a0Trump administration harbors long-term plans to shake up some legacy programs favored by committee chairmen in favor of boosting commercially oriented human exploration efforts. People familiar with the details said Mr. Morhard\u2019s political ties seem particularly suited to assist in striving for those goals.\n\n\n\n\nDespite Republican control of both the Senate and the House, GOP leaders generally have been reluctant to trim jobs or federal work from major NASA contractors. President Barack Obama\u2019s administration faced many of the same hurdles.\n\n\nThe anticipated nomination, these people said, could be a catalyst to make NASA more nimble and build traction for changes. Mr. Morhard previously was staff director for the Senate appropriations panel responsible for NASA.\nMany Democrats are bound to criticize the choice, but Mr. Morhard\u00a0has longstanding ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and outgoing House Speaker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Ryan\n\n\n\n of Wisconsin. In his current role, Mr. Morhard also has forged relationships with Democratic lawmakers.\nIn addition, White House aides and outside space advisers have laid the groundwork for Mr. Morhard to receive the backing of prominent industry and former government officials, according to one person familiar with the strategy.\nThursday\u2019s White House announcement also is likely to spark controversy because it followed what amounted to an unusual public campaign by NASA chief Jim Bridenstine on behalf of another potential nominee. Last month, Mr. Bridenstine repeatedly said he was pushing for the nomination of Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut with a doctorate in chemistry and currently director of NASA\u2019s\u00a0John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. He took the unusual step of explaining he favored a deputy with \u201ca lot of space experience\u201d and said \u201ca scientist would be great.\u201d Mr. Trump decided otherwise.\nMr. Bridenstine, a former GOP House member from Oklahoma, barely won confirmation after months of delay during which Democratic leaders assailed his previous partisan stances and attacked his staunchly conservative views on social issues.\nSince Mr. Bridenstine began running the agency, he has pledged to remain apolitical and renounced earlier views that played down human activity as the primary cause of climate change.\nEchoing views of Mr. Trump and Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence,\n \n\n\n\n the administration\u2019s point man on space, the NASA chief has stressed the importance of enlisting more commercial involvement in robotic and human missions to the moon and beyond.\nMr. Trump has said, only half\u00a0 jokingly, that he would be pleased to see space\u00a0entrepreneurs such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n or\u00a0Amazon.com\u00a0Inc. chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n beat\u00a0NASA in eventually sending humans deep into solar system.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com President Donald Trump intends to nominate veteran congressional staffer James Morhard as NASA\u2019s deputy administrator, hoping that strong bipartisan connections on Capitol Hill will compensate for lack of technical expertise. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hunters of Zombie Retailers Chase Acquisition Deals (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8193",
        "date": "2020-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pair-of-entrepreneurs-aim-to-refashion-zombie-retailers-into-online-powerhouses-11598383497?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=33",
        "text": "Retail Ecommerce Ventures LLC, founded last year by Mr. Mehr and fellow entrepreneur Taino \u201cTai\u201d Lopez, has been on the hunt for distressed retailers. Since October, their Miami-based company has made six retail acquisitions, running the brands as online businesses.\nThis summer, REV took over online housewares retailer Linens \u2019n Things and collectibles purveyor Franklin Mint. It also purchased the Book People, a bookseller based in the U.K.\n\nE-commerce is expected to get stronger as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage brick-and-mortar stores. Online sales could give struggling brands a second life, the entrepreneurs said.\n\u201cIt is about the strength of the brands,\u201d Mr. Mehr, REV\u2019s chief executive who last year sold online-dating platform Zoosk Inc. for about $300 million, told WSJ Pro Bankruptcy. \u201cWe buy companies that are failing to operate and turn them around.\u201d\nThe REV co-founders met during a conference panel a decade ago and joined forces in 2016 to form book-shipping club MentorBox LLC. \nMr. Mehr was born in Iran and immigrated to the U.S. in 2000. He earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland in 2003.\n\u201cI didn\u2019t grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur,\u201d he said. \u201cIn fact, I grew up wanting to be a scientist since I was five.\u201d\nHe quit his NASA job after co-founding his first business venture in 2007, a company that eventually morphed into Zoosk.\n\u201cThis is the very beginning of apps,\u201d Mr. Mehr said. \u201cIn fact, it was so new that sometimes when I told people we\u2019re building apps, they thought I meant appetizers. I had to explain to people, \u2018No, these are not the edible kind of apps. These are applications.\u2019\u201d\n\n\nMore From WSJ Pro Bankruptcy\n\n\n\n\nAmerican Apparel Founder Dov Charney Files for Bankruptcy\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoy Scouts Head to Trial in Largest Sex-Abuse Bankruptcy\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoy Scouts Win Over More Abuse Survivors For $2.7 Billion Bankruptcy Deal \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMr. Lopez was born in Long Beach, Calif., and raised by his mother and grandmother. He studied for one semester at North Carolina State University.\n\u201cUnlike Alex, I was a college dropout,\u201d Mr. Lopez said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t afford college.\u201d He later lived with the Amish for 2\u00bd years and started an agricultural consulting business.\n\u201cThat\u2019s when I first realized you can make a lot of money on your own,\u201d said Mr. Lopez, who went on to work at GE Financial and at a wealth-management company and to form a nightclub entertainment company.\nThe entrepreneurs see REV as an e-commerce incubator, with the goal of nurturing businesses that can bring in at least $10 million a week in revenue by leveraging social media, among other things. They also operate FarmersCart, an online meat market and food store, which they founded in 2018.\n\u201cWe use social media for everything,\u201d including finding talent and investors, selling products and driving brand awareness, said Mr. Lopez. The REV executive chairman is a social-media influencer with millions of followers and the president of his personal investment group, Tai Lopez Capital Group.\nWhether that translates to sales is an open question.\n\u201cThe challenge is, how do you maintain your brands?\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Guyder,\n\n\n\n a partner in the bankruptcy practice of Allen & Overy LLP. \u201cHow do you maintain connection to a customer once you\u2019ve removed yourself entirely onto an online platform? How do you promote your brand and keep that customer relationship?\u201d\nThe acquisition price matters. REV had been interested in buying retailers such as American Apparel, Barnes & Noble and Forever 21, but ultimately decided the prices for the intellectual property were too high.\nThe recent wave of corporate bankruptcies has shown intellectual property, or IP, is one of the most valuable assets a struggling business holds, especially for retailers dealing with the expedited shift to online shopping due to the pandemic.\n\u201cThe market has shifted toward the sellers when it comes to IP and it\u2019s been proven that this can be a very lucrative business for both the seller and the purchaser,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erika Morabito,\n\n\n\n a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP representing the committee for Pier 1\u2019s unsecured creditors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Dressbarn store in El Cerrito, Calif., last year. The business is now online-only.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Justin Sullivan/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nTroubled companies have been selling their intellectual property out of bankruptcy to cash in on brand names, trademarks, website domains and social-media accounts, as well as lists with mailing and email addresses of customers.\n\u201cBuilding something from scratch and trying to market a new product costs a lot of money,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Gayda,\n\n\n\n a bankruptcy lawyer at Seward & Kissel LLP. \u201cBy buying the intellectual property, you\u2019re basically buying a built in customer base and your overhead is drastically reduced.\u201d\nOther companies are also moving to profit fr A former NASA scientist and his partner are looking to make a killing from the e-commerce businesses of bankrupt retailers Dressbarn, Pier 1, Modell\u2019s and others. ",
        "author": "Aisha Al-Muslim"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hunters of Zombie Retailers Chase Acquisition Deals (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8194",
        "date": "2020-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/pair-of-entrepreneurs-aim-to-refashion-zombie-retailers-into-online-powerhouses-11598383497?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=38",
        "text": "Retail Ecommerce Ventures LLC, founded last year by Mr. Mehr and fellow entrepreneur Taino \u201cTai\u201d Lopez, has been on the hunt for distressed retailers. Since October, their Miami-based company has made six retail acquisitions, running the brands as online businesses.\n\n\n\n\nThis summer, REV took over online housewares retailer Linens \u2019n Things and collectibles purveyor Franklin Mint. It also purchased the Book People, a bookseller based in the U.K.\n\nE-commerce is expected to get stronger as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage brick-and-mortar stores. Online sales could give struggling brands a second life, the entrepreneurs said.\n\u201cIt is about the strength of the brands,\u201d Mr. Mehr, REV\u2019s chief executive who last year sold online-dating platform Zoosk Inc. for about $300 million, told WSJ Pro Bankruptcy. \u201cWe buy companies that are failing to operate and turn them around.\u201d\nThe REV co-founders met during a conference panel a decade ago and joined forces in 2016 to form book-shipping club MentorBox LLC. \nMr. Mehr was born in Iran and immigrated to the U.S. in 2000. He earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland in 2003.\n\u201cI didn\u2019t grow up wanting to be an entrepreneur,\u201d he said. \u201cIn fact, I grew up wanting to be a scientist since I was five.\u201d\nHe quit his NASA job after co-founding his first business venture in 2007, a company that eventually morphed into Zoosk.\n\u201cThis is the very beginning of apps,\u201d Mr. Mehr said. \u201cIn fact, it was so new that sometimes when I told people we\u2019re building apps, they thought I meant appetizers. I had to explain to people, \u2018No, these are not the edible kind of apps. These are applications.\u2019\u201d\n\n\nMore From WSJ Pro Bankruptcy\n\n\n\n\nOpioid Victims Confront Purdue Pharma\u2019s Sacklers in Bankruptcy Court \nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nPurdue Pharma\u2019s Sackler Family Approved for $6 Billion Opioid Deal With States\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nPuerto Rico Governor Axes Utility Deal\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nMr. Lopez was born in Long Beach, Calif., and raised by his mother and grandmother. He studied for one semester at North Carolina State University.\n\u201cUnlike Alex, I was a college dropout,\u201d Mr. Lopez said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t afford college.\u201d He later lived with the Amish for 2\u00bd years and started an agricultural consulting business.\n\u201cThat\u2019s when I first realized you can make a lot of money on your own,\u201d said Mr. Lopez, who went on to work at GE Financial and at a wealth-management company and to form a nightclub entertainment company.\nThe entrepreneurs see REV as an e-commerce incubator, with the goal of nurturing businesses that can bring in at least $10 million a week in revenue by leveraging social media, among other things. They also operate FarmersCart, an online meat market and food store, which they founded in 2018.\n\u201cWe use social media for everything,\u201d including finding talent and investors, selling products and driving brand awareness, said Mr. Lopez. The REV executive chairman is a social-media influencer with millions of followers and the president of his personal investment group, Tai Lopez Capital Group.\nWhether that translates to sales is an open question.\n\u201cThe challenge is, how do you maintain your brands?\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dan Guyder,\n\n\n\n a partner in the bankruptcy practice of Allen & Overy LLP. \u201cHow do you maintain connection to a customer once you\u2019ve removed yourself entirely onto an online platform? How do you promote your brand and keep that customer relationship?\u201d\nThe acquisition price matters. REV had been interested in buying retailers such as American Apparel, Barnes & Noble and Forever 21, but ultimately decided the prices for the intellectual property were too high.\nThe recent wave of corporate bankruptcies has shown intellectual property, or IP, is one of the most valuable assets a struggling business holds, especially for retailers dealing with the expedited shift to online shopping due to the pandemic.\n\u201cThe market has shifted toward the sellers when it comes to IP and it\u2019s been proven that this can be a very lucrative business for both the seller and the purchaser,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Erika Morabito,\n\n\n\n a partner at Foley & Lardner LLP representing the committee for Pier 1\u2019s unsecured creditors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Dressbarn store in El Cerrito, Calif., last year. The business is now online-only.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Justin Sullivan/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nTroubled companies have been selling their intellectual property out of bankruptcy to cash in on brand names, trademarks, website domains and social-media accounts, as well as lists with mailing and email addresses of customers.\n\u201cBuilding something from scratch and trying to market a new product costs a lot of money,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Gayda,\n\n\n\n a bankruptcy lawyer at Seward & Kissel LLP. \u201cBy buying the intellectual property, you\u2019re basically buying a built in customer base and your overhead is drastically reduced.\u201d\nOther companies are also moving to profit from the demise of brick-and-mortar retailers.\nSparc Group LLC, a partnership between licensing firm Authentic Brands Group LLC and mall owner\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Simon Property Group Inc.,\noperates IP assets tied to Lucky Brand Dungarees LLC, A\u00e9ropostale and Nautica. Sparc is set to also operate Brooks Brothers Inc., pending the expected closing of a deal. Together, Authentic Brands and Simon also own 75% of Forever 21 in partnership with Brookfield Property Partners LP. \nAnother brand acquirer is WHP Global Inc., founded in 2018 with backing from Oaktree Capital Management LP. WHP owns women\u2019s clothing line Anne Klein and recently bought midprice men\u2019s apparel brand Joseph Abboud from Men\u2019s Wearhouse owner\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tailored Brands Inc.\n\n\n for $115 million.\nEarlier this month, REV officially acquired Modell\u2019s trademark assets, including its domain names, social-media assets and the \u201cGotta Go to Mo\u2019s\u201d jingle for more than $3.6 million out of bankruptcy. REV purchased home-goods retailer Pier 1 Imports Inc.\u2019s branding and e-commerce business out of bankruptcy for $31 million and bought the e-commerce business of Dressbarn from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ascena Retail Group Inc.\n\n\n for about $5 million.\nRevenue at Dressbarn, which is run by 30 people, more than doubled between the first and second quarter. \nWrite to Aisha Al-Muslim at aisha.al-muslim@wsj.com A former NASA scientist and his partner are looking to make a killing from the e-commerce businesses of bankrupt retailers Dressbarn, Pier 1, Modell\u2019s and others. ",
        "author": "Aisha Al-Muslim"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars? Let\u2019s Go Find It (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8195",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-on-mars-lets-go-find-it-11613691931?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=34",
        "text": "That feat will probably be repeated this weekend by more than a few youngsters who can find enough LEGO bricks. But don\u2019t be deceived by the scale: The Perseverance rover is 10 feet long and seven feet tall. Here on Earth it weighed 2,260 pounds, although in Mars\u2019s weaker gravity the scale would read more like 866 pounds. \nOh, and the rover carries a helicopter with four-foot rotors, setting up mankind\u2019s first Kitty Hawk moment on another planet, one with an atmosphere that\u2019s only about 1% the thickness of Earth\u2019s.\nPerseverance\u2019s mission is to poke around the Jezero Crater, a basin in Mars\u2019s northern hemisphere that\u2019s about 28 miles wide. NASA says the crater might have been a lake the size of Lake Tahoe, fed by a river that formed a delta, 3.5 billion years or so ago. The rover will scan for organic molecules and drill rock samples for a future return to Earth. Maybe someday Elon Musk can pick them up on his way home.\n\n\nNASA says the mission has cost about $2.4 billion so far, which these days is a rounding error for the federal government. But NASA is also the kind of discretionary program that could come under increasing pressure as entitlement spending gobbles up ever more of the federal fisc. Mars exploration is worth doing for its own sake, to push back the veil of ignorance about a planet that was known to the ancient Egyptians and seen through a telescope by Galileo. \nSuch missions also maintain America\u2019s pre-eminence in the heavens, a soft power that inspires and attracts talent to these shores. A new space race might be joined before too long: China\u2019s Mars rover, about the size of a golf cart, is scheduled to land in a few months.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Jason Riley and Dan Henninger. Images: Reuters/AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly NASA\u2019s newest rover offers inspiration and soft power at a bargain. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars? Let\u2019s Go Find It (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8196",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-on-mars-lets-go-find-it-11613691931?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=36",
        "text": "That feat will probably be repeated this weekend by more than a few youngsters who can find enough LEGO bricks. But don\u2019t be deceived by the scale: The Perseverance rover is 10 feet long and seven feet tall. Here on Earth it weighed 2,260 pounds, although in Mars\u2019s weaker gravity the scale would read more like 866 pounds. \nOh, and the rover carries a helicopter with four-foot rotors, setting up mankind\u2019s first Kitty Hawk moment on another planet, one with an atmosphere that\u2019s only about 1% the thickness of Earth\u2019s.\n\n\n\n\nPerseverance\u2019s mission is to poke around the Jezero Crater, a basin in Mars\u2019s northern hemisphere that\u2019s about 28 miles wide. NASA says the crater might have been a lake the size of Lake Tahoe, fed by a river that formed a delta, 3.5 billion years or so ago. The rover will scan for organic molecules and drill rock samples for a future return to Earth. Maybe someday Elon Musk can pick them up on his way home.\n\n\nNASA says the mission has cost about $2.4 billion so far, which these days is a rounding error for the federal government. But NASA is also the kind of discretionary program that could come under increasing pressure as entitlement spending gobbles up ever more of the federal fisc. Mars exploration is worth doing for its own sake, to push back the veil of ignorance about a planet that was known to the ancient Egyptians and seen through a telescope by Galileo. \nSuch missions also maintain America\u2019s pre-eminence in the heavens, a soft power that inspires and attracts talent to these shores. A new space race might be joined before too long: China\u2019s Mars rover, about the size of a golf cart, is scheduled to land in a few months.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Jason Riley and Dan Henninger. Images: Reuters/AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly NASA\u2019s newest rover offers inspiration and soft power at a bargain. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "The \u2018Nasa Archives\u2019 Open Up in a New Book (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8197",
        "date": "2019-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nasa-archives-11550859908?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=16",
        "text": " The \u2018Nasa Archives\u2019 ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Make a Tiny Satellite (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8198",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-make-a-tiny-satellite-1505225509?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=77",
        "text": " Cornell University\u2019s Cis Lunar Explorer, planned to be launched alongside a NASA mission in 2019, is one example of how universities can piggyback their ideas into space ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Make a Tiny Satellite (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8199",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-make-a-tiny-satellite-1505225509?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=114",
        "text": " Cornell University\u2019s Cis Lunar Explorer, planned to be launched alongside a NASA mission in 2019, is one example of how universities can piggyback their ideas into space ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Goodbye to Mars Rover Opportunity (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8200",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-says-goodbye-to-mars-rover-opportunity-11550103086?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=59",
        "text": " After hundreds of unanswered calls, NASA mission engineers on Wednesday abandoned efforts to revive Opportunity, the space agency\u2019s most durable Mars robot rover, which lasted longer than any other robot sent from Earth to another planet. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Goodbye to Mars Rover Opportunity (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8201",
        "date": "2019-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-says-goodbye-to-mars-rover-opportunity-11550103086?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=78",
        "text": " After hundreds of unanswered calls, NASA mission engineers on Wednesday abandoned efforts to revive Opportunity, the space agency\u2019s most durable Mars robot rover, which lasted longer than any other robot sent from Earth to another planet. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How an Energy Startup\u2019s Plan to Disrupt the Power Grid Got Disrupted (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8202",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloom-energy-fuel-cell-silicon-valley-11606496855?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=28",
        "text": "Fuel cells use chemical reactions to generate electricity, and proponents hold they will go mainstream one day as a clean, reliable energy source. They have defied broad commercialization, but Mr. Sridhar told a powerful story: Bloom would sell the technology in \u201cBloom Boxes\u201d running on natural gas and providing power more cheaply than the utilities on the electric grid.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGas to Power\nWithin Bloom\u2019s fuel cells, oxygen ions mix with the hydrogen and carbon atoms that form natural gas, producing electricity, water and carbon dioxide.\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\n3\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\n1\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\n3\n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\nCARBON \nATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSilicon Valley bought in, and media attention followed. Bloom\u2019s first investor was venture capitalist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Doerr,\n\n\n\n known for early bets on \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google. Its board includes \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. Colin Powell\n\n\n\n and former General Electric Co. chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Immelt.\n\n\n\n Among early customers were Google, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n eBay Inc.\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart Inc.\n As with many Silicon Valley startups, Bloom presented the kind of bold technological and revenue prospects that persuade investors to look beyond profitability. Mr. Sridhar\u2019s vision: a Bloom Box in every American home. \u201cIt\u2019s about seeing the world as what it can be,\u201d he told \u201c60 Minutes\u201d in 2010, \u201cand not what it is.\u201d The world Mr. Sridhar foresaw hasn\u2019t arrived. His San Jose, Calif., startup hasn\u2019t put fuel cells in homes and instead has a niche clientele among companies willing to pay a premium for a continuous on-site energy source. In 2009, it projected profits by 2010, according to board materials reviewed by The Wall Street Journal; but it has never reported a profit, losing over $3 billion since inception. Mr. Sridhar\u2019s proposition to disrupt the energy market came as the world was trying to figure out how to wean off fossil fuels. Instead, the energy industry has disrupted Mr. Sridhar\u2019s strategy, turning to wind and solar power, which have lower costs and deliver cleaner energy than Bloom\u2019s cells, which emit carbon dioxide. Grid power is still less expensive than Bloom\u2019s in most places. Along the way, Bloom ran into supply issues, its cells remained expensive and it fell short of its projections for how many customers it would win, according to former executives and employees, board materials and public filings. After Bloom\u2019s auditor raised concerns about how the company had reported revenue, it restated results in March for the two years since its $270 million initial public offering, cutting its reported revenue by 15%. Bloom\u2019s growth is sometimes difficult to assess because of its accounting practices.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar with a fuel cell at the 2010 product launch at eBay.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Justin Sullivan/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nLast year, Hindenburg Research\u2014the short seller that in September claimed electric-truck startup\nNikola Corp.\n\n\n misled investors, which Nikola has denied\u2014released a report saying Bloom\u2019s technology wasn\u2019t \u201cclean, green, or remotely profitable\u201d and citing an estimated $2.2 billion in undisclosed liabilities. A Bloom spokesman, Justin Saia, said the company stands by its response at the time that Hindenburg \u201cdrew erroneous conclusions.\u201d Mr. Sridhar, who declined to be interviewed, said in an emailed statement: \u201cI know that a small group of detractors wants to write a spurious version of our history,\u201d adding: \u201cInnovations in the energy sector have always been controversial. The light bulb, the first power plants, wind turbines, solar power, electric cars\u2014they all had their naysayers.\u201d Mr. Sridhar\u2019s challenge has been to balance his vision with the real world, said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Kurtz,\n\n\n\n Bloom\u2019s chief commercial officer from 2008 through 2018 and also chief financial officer through 2015, who remains a shareholder and supporter. \u201cIt is a long journey,\u201d Mr. Kurtz said. \u201cHow do you sell the dream but still give them a sense of reality?\u201d He and other former executives praised Bloom\u2019s technology and Mr. Sridhar\u2019s charismatic leadership, expressing confidence in the CEO\u2019s aim to revolutionize the energy industry but saying obstacles to profitability remain s Bloom Energy founder KR Sridhar aimed to supplant electric utilities with fuel-cell technology honed for NASA, presenting the kind of revenue prospects that persuade investors to look beyond profitability. Instead, his company is a reminder of how a rapidly changing industry can foil an entrepreneur\u2019s vision. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Davis O\u2019Brien and Katherine Blunt"
    },
    {
        "title": "How an Energy Startup\u2019s Plan to Disrupt the Power Grid Got Disrupted (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8203",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloom-energy-fuel-cell-silicon-valley-11606496855?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=37",
        "text": "Fuel cells use chemical reactions to generate electricity, and proponents hold they will go mainstream one day as a clean, reliable energy source. They have defied broad commercialization, but Mr. Sridhar told a powerful story: Bloom would sell the technology in \u201cBloom Boxes\u201d running on natural gas and providing power more cheaply than the utilities on the electric grid.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGas to Power\nWithin Bloom\u2019s fuel cells, oxygen ions mix with the hydrogen and carbon atoms that form natural gas, producing electricity, water and carbon dioxide.\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\n3\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\n1\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\n3\n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\nCARBON \nATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSilicon Valley bought in, and media attention followed. Bloom\u2019s first investor was venture capitalist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Doerr,\n\n\n\n known for early bets on \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google. Its board includes \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. Colin Powell\n\n\n\n and former General Electric Co. chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Immelt.\n\n\n\n Among early customers were Google, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n eBay Inc.\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart Inc.\n As with many Silicon Valley startups, Bloom presented the kind of bold technological and revenue prospects that persuade investors to look beyond profitability. Mr. Sridhar\u2019s vision: a Bloom Box in every American home. \u201cIt\u2019s about seeing the world as what it can be,\u201d he told \u201c60 Minutes\u201d in 2010, \u201cand not what it is.\u201d The world Mr. Sridhar foresaw hasn\u2019t arrived. His San Jose, Calif., startup hasn\u2019t put fuel cells in homes and instead has a niche clientele among companies willing to pay a premium for a continuous on-site energy source. In 2009, it projected profits by 2010, according to board materials reviewed by The Wall Street Journal; but it has never reported a profit, losing over $3 billion since inception. Mr. Sridhar\u2019s proposition to disrupt the energy market came as the world was trying to figure out how to wean off fossil fuels. Instead, the energy industry has disrupted Mr. Sridhar\u2019s strategy, turning to wind and solar power, which have lower costs and deliver cleaner energy than Bloom\u2019s cells, which emit carbon dioxide. Grid power is still less expensive than Bloom\u2019s in most places. Along the way, Bloom ran into supply issues, its cells remained expensive and it fell short of its projections for how many customers it would win, according to former executives and employees, board materials and public filings. After Bloom\u2019s auditor raised concerns about how the company had reported revenue, it restated results in March for the two years since its $270 million initial public offering, cutting its reported revenue by 15%. Bloom\u2019s growth is sometimes difficult to assess because of its accounting practices.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar with a fuel cell at the 2010 product launch at eBay.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Justin Sullivan/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nLast year, Hindenburg Research\u2014the short seller that in September claimed electric-truck startup\nNikola Corp.\n\n\n misled investors, which Nikola has denied\u2014released a report saying Bloom\u2019s technology wasn\u2019t \u201cclean, green, or remotely profitable\u201d and citing an estimated $2.2 billion in undisclosed liabilities. A Bloom spokesman, Justin Saia, said the company stands by its response at the time that Hindenburg \u201cdrew erroneous conclusions.\u201d Mr. Sridhar, who declined to be interviewed, said in an emailed statement: \u201cI know that a small group of detractors wants to write a spurious version of our history,\u201d adding: \u201cInnovations in the energy sector have always been controversial. The light bulb, the first power plants, wind turbines, solar power, electric cars\u2014they all had their naysayers.\u201d Mr. Sridhar\u2019s challenge has been to balance his vision with the real world, said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Kurtz,\n\n\n\n Bloom\u2019s chief commercial officer from 2008 through 2018 and also chief financial officer through 2015, who remains a shareholder and supporter. \u201cIt is a long journey,\u201d Mr. Kurtz said. \u201cHow do you sell the dream but still give them a sense of reality?\u201d He and other former executives praised Bloom\u2019s technology and Mr. Sridhar\u2019s charismatic leadership, expressing confidence in the CEO\u2019s aim to revolutionize the energy industry but saying obstacles to profitability remain s Bloom Energy founder KR Sridhar aimed to supplant electric utilities with fuel-cell technology honed for NASA, presenting the kind of revenue prospects that persuade investors to look beyond profitability. Instead, his company is a reminder of how a rapidly changing industry can foil an entrepreneur\u2019s vision. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Davis O\u2019Brien and Katherine Blunt"
    },
    {
        "title": "How an Energy Startup\u2019s Plan to Disrupt the Power Grid Got Disrupted (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8204",
        "date": "2020-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bloom-energy-fuel-cell-silicon-valley-11606496855?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=41",
        "text": "Fuel cells use chemical reactions to generate electricity, and proponents hold they will go mainstream one day as a clean, reliable energy source. They have defied broad commercialization, but Mr. Sridhar told a powerful story: Bloom would sell the technology in \u201cBloom Boxes\u201d running on natural gas and providing power more cheaply than the utilities on the electric grid.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nGas to Power\nWithin Bloom\u2019s fuel cells, oxygen ions mix with the hydrogen and carbon atoms that form natural gas, producing electricity, water and carbon dioxide.\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\n3\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\n1\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\nCARBON ATOM\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\n3\n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n\n\n\nHYDROGEN ATOM\n\n\nCARBON \nATOM\n\n\nOXYGEN (O2)\n\n\n1\n\n\nSTEAM\n\n\n2\n\n\nNATURAL \nGAS (CH4)\n\n\nCATHODE (+) \n\n\nELECTROLYTE \n\n\nANODE (\u2014) \n\n\n3\n\n\nCO2 AND WATER\n\n\nELECTRICITY\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n\nSource: the company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSilicon Valley bought in, and media attention followed. Bloom\u2019s first investor was venture capitalist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Doerr,\n\n\n\n known for early bets on \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google. Its board includes \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. Colin Powell\n\n\n\n and former General Electric Co. chief \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Immelt.\n\n\n\n Among early customers were Google, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n eBay Inc.\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walmart Inc.\n As with many Silicon Valley startups, Bloom presented the kind of bold technological and revenue prospects that persuade investors to look beyond profitability. Mr. Sridhar\u2019s vision: a Bloom Box in every American home. \u201cIt\u2019s about seeing the world as what it can be,\u201d he told \u201c60 Minutes\u201d in 2010, \u201cand not what it is.\u201d The world Mr. Sridhar foresaw hasn\u2019t arrived. His San Jose, Calif., startup hasn\u2019t put fuel cells in homes and instead has a niche clientele among companies willing to pay a premium for a continuous on-site energy source. In 2009, it projected profits by 2010, according to board materials reviewed by The Wall Street Journal; but it has never reported a profit, losing over $3 billion since inception. Mr. Sridhar\u2019s proposition to disrupt the energy market came as the world was trying to figure out how to wean off fossil fuels. Instead, the energy industry has disrupted Mr. Sridhar\u2019s strategy, turning to wind and solar power, which have lower costs and deliver cleaner energy than Bloom\u2019s cells, which emit carbon dioxide. Grid power is still less expensive than Bloom\u2019s in most places. Along the way, Bloom ran into supply issues, its cells remained expensive and it fell short of its projections for how many customers it would win, according to former executives and employees, board materials and public filings. After Bloom\u2019s auditor raised concerns about how the company had reported revenue, it restated results in March for the two years since its $270 million initial public offering, cutting its reported revenue by 15%. Bloom\u2019s growth is sometimes difficult to assess because of its accounting practices.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar with a fuel cell at the 2010 product launch at eBay.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Justin Sullivan/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nLast year, Hindenburg Research\u2014the short seller that in September claimed electric-truck startup\nNikola Corp.\n\n\n misled investors, which Nikola has denied\u2014released a report saying Bloom\u2019s technology wasn\u2019t \u201cclean, green, or remotely profitable\u201d and citing an estimated $2.2 billion in undisclosed liabilities. A Bloom spokesman, Justin Saia, said the company stands by its response at the time that Hindenburg \u201cdrew erroneous conclusions.\u201d Mr. Sridhar, who declined to be interviewed, said in an emailed statement: \u201cI know that a small group of detractors wants to write a spurious version of our history,\u201d adding: \u201cInnovations in the energy sector have always been controversial. The light bulb, the first power plants, wind turbines, solar power, electric cars\u2014they all had their naysayers.\u201d Mr. Sridhar\u2019s challenge has been to balance his vision with the real world, said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Kurtz,\n\n\n\n Bloom\u2019s chief commercial officer from 2008 through 2018 and also chief financial officer through 2015, who remains a shareholder and supporter. \u201cIt is a long journey,\u201d Mr. Kurtz said. \u201cHow do you sell the dream but still give them a sense of reality?\u201d He and other former executives praised Bloom\u2019s technology and Mr. Sridhar\u2019s charismatic leadership, expressing confidence in the CEO\u2019s aim to revolutionize the energy industry but saying obstacles to profitability remain s Bloom Energy founder KR Sridhar aimed to supplant electric utilities with fuel-cell technology honed for NASA, presenting the kind of revenue prospects that persuade investors to look beyond profitability. Instead, his company is a reminder of how a rapidly changing industry can foil an entrepreneur\u2019s vision. ",
        "author": "Rebecca Davis O\u2019Brien and Katherine Blunt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apple Hires Rocket Scientists as It Tries to Catch Up in Driverless Cars (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8205",
        "date": "2017-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-permit-reveals-self-driving-car-testers-with-nasa-experience-1493042728?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=124",
        "text": "The road tests are critical for Apple as it tries to catch up in the race to develop self-driving cars.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\u2019s\n\n GOOG -0.66%\n\n\n Waymo has been testing autonomous vehicles on roads since 2009, with senior engineers in the front seat for many early tests.\n\n\n\n\nAt stake is a shuffling of the auto industry and the $2 trillion in annual revenue tied to it, according to estimates by Deloitte. Traditional auto makers such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\n\n , as well as Silicon Valley companies such as Uber Technologies Inc. and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n are investing heavily in self-driving technology.\n\n\nThough Apple has been working since at least 2014 on self-driving cars\u2014an effort dubbed Project Titan\u2014it has been guarded publicly about the people working on the project.\n\n\nRelated Amazon Studies Driverless Ideas Tesla to Double Number of EV Chargers at Stations \n\n\nShilpa Gulati, the first person named on the Apple permit, has been in the field since at least 2009, when she was part of a team working in Antarctica on a NASA-funded project to develop an autonomous vehicle to explore one of Jupiter\u2019s moons.\nShe later worked on self-driving cars at Robert Bosch GmbH, a German technology and auto-parts supplier. According to her LinkedIn page, she is a manager working on special projects at a \u201cSilicon Valley company,\u201d where she built a team of about 30 researchers and engineers.\nCalifornia in recent years began issuing permits specifically for road-testing driverless vehicles. The permit granted Apple also names three engineers who worked at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Hebert,\n\n\n\n who designed a robot that could unlock a door;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeremy Ma,\n\n\n\n who focused on algorithms for detecting three-dimensional objects; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Victor Hwang,\n\n\n\n who has worked on motion-planning algorithms for robots, according to their LinkedIn pages, which list them as working at Apple.\nRivals such as Waymo and Uber have more vehicles on the road than Apple. Waymo, for example, now mainly relies on technicians for testing, industry watchers say. For Apple, keeping engineers close to the technology could allow them to make quicker improvements,\u00a0said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeremy Carlson,\n\n\n\n an automotive analyst with research firm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n IHS Markit.\n\nApple declined to comment on its autonomous-driving plans or employees named in the document. The drivers named in the permit\u00a0didn\u2019t reply to requests for comment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe\u00a0employees named in the permit are among an estimated 1,000 people working\u00a0on Project Titan, said people familiar with the effort. Their experience in robotics and camera vision from their work on space programs would be valuable to a self-driving program. Ms. Gulati, for example, has researched making autonomous wheelchairs move more gracefully, work that would be applicable in a car program.\n\u201cThe fundamental problems of controlling a wheelchair overlap a great deal with the fundamental problems of controlling a car,\u201d said Benjamin Kuipers, the University of Michigan professor who oversaw Ms. Gulati\u2019s wheelchair research when she was a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas.\nHiring experts with self-driving car experience has become fiercely competitive and expensive in recent years.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sebastian Thrun,\n\n\n\n the so-called godfather\u00a0of Google\u2019s self-driving car project, created a stir last fall when he told Recode that experienced autonomous-vehicle researchers were valued at $10 million each, based on GM\u2019s acquisition of Cruise Automation Inc., which had about 40 employees,\u00a0and Uber\u2019s acquisition of Ottomotto LLC, which had about 70 employees.\nMs. Gulati brought to Apple her experience in robotics and time spent at an automotive supplier.\u00a0A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, she went from working on the NASA-funded Jupiter project to joining a Bosch team that developed algorithms for a car that could drive on highways, according to her personal website.\nIn a 2013 Bosch marketing video, she is featured riding in a BMW car retrofitted with sensors and computers to make it drive autonomously. Apple listed Bosch for the first time as one of its top 200 suppliers in 2016 and included an address for a Bosch facility focused on automotive electronics and mobility solutions.\nThe permit also includes a 10-page training plan for test drivers, outlining moments when they might need to take control of a vehicle on the road. Each driver is given two practice runs and three trials to pass tests such as responding to a vehicle\u2019s rapid acceleration by tapping the brakes.\nWrite to Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com and Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com Apple\u2019s plan for testing autonomous vehicles calls for putting senior engineers\u2014some with NASA experience\u2014in its cars, a move that suggests the company\u2019s technology is still in early phases. ",
        "author": "Tripp Mickle and Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Woman in Motion\u2019 Review: Nichelle Nichols\u2019s Real-Life Mission (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8206",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/woman-in-motion-review-nichelle-nicholss-real-life-mission-11622583606?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=29",
        "text": "Woman in Motion Thursday, Paramount+\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Last Exit: Space\u2019 Review: The Final Frontier Is Here on Earth\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nOne of the film\u2019s more effective techniques is the convening of Ms. Nichols\u2019s various selves at different ages\u2014from different times and a variety of interviews\u2014and having them lead into and out of each other. The actress sometimes seems to finish her own sentences, even with pauses of 20 or 30 years. (Editor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andy Painter\n\n\n\n gives the film\u2019s many satellite elements fluid, forward motion.) The central story is the one in which Ms. Nichols launched both an astronaut-recruiting company (Women in Motion) and a campaign aimed at diversifying recruitment at NASA. It wasn\u2019t policy that she changed at NASA, exactly, but a prevailing attitude that the John Glenn-Neil Armstrong model of astronaut would, and should, continue in perpetuity. As a high-profile though fictional space traveler, she was able convince NASA that if it wanted more support from the American public, it needed to better represent that public. (It\u2019s estimated that she has recruited more than 8,000 Black, Asian and Latino women and men to the agency.)\nNow 88 years old, Ms. Nichols tells most of her own story, which includes her childhood dream of becoming the first Black prima ballerina, and her later plan to star in musical theater (a stint with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Duke Ellington\n\n\n\n is recalled, with some humor). What she thought would be a stepping-stone in her career was the role of Uhura on \u201cStar Trek.\u201d When it made its debut in 1966, the show was intended by creator Gene Roddenberry to have a social message and reflect an integrated future: The crew on the bridge of the Enterprise included the European Chekov and the Asian Sulu (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Koenig\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Takei,\n\n\n\n both of whom appear in the show), the white American Kirk (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Shatner,\n\n\n\n who is markedly absent except in clips) and the Vulcan\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Spock\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leonard Nimoy,\n\n\n\n who died in 2015). Adding to the mix was Uhura, one of the first recurring Black characters on a predominantly white network program. In the 1968 episode \u201cPlato\u2019s Stepchildren,\u201d Uhura and Captain Kirk shared what is credited as the first interracial kiss on series television. It caused a sensation.\nAs Ms. Nichols recalls, the role of Uhura was extremely limited and her importance to the storylines usually peripheral. She was convinced to remain on the show only by \u201cher biggest fan\u201d\u2014the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.\n\n\n\n As recalled in the show by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Luther King III,\n\n\n\n \u201cStar Trek\u201d was the only TV program his father encouraged the King children to watch. And he watched with them. The mere presence of Ms. Nichols on the show, he told her, was far more important than what she did, or how many lines she read. It also gave her a credibility among Black audiences that she was able to parlay once she got involved with NASA.\n\n\u201cWoman in Motion\u201d feels like it wanders a bit, into aspects of the space program that feel disconnected from Ms. Nichols and which seem to be digressions\u2014until they all coalesce. The Challenger disaster, for instance, occurred years after Ms. Nichols\u2019s initial recruitment drive, but several members of the doomed crew\u2014including a close friend,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Judith Resnik\n\n\n\n \u2014had been inspired to join NASA through Ms. Nichols\u2019 efforts (she ended her NASA relationship only in 2015). When the event comes up in the interview, Ms. Nichols tries, and fails, to maintain her composure.\nMr. Thompson follows a fairly well-trod track with \u201cWoman in Motion,\u201d intercutting his subject\u2019s own recollections with reflections by prominent people in aeronautics and activism. The interviews with actual astronauts\u2014among them\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mae Jemison\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frederick Gregory\n\n\n\n \u2014provide the most enlightening commentary; Neil deGrasse Tyson\u2019s appearance makes perfect sense. Others\u2014among them lawyer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Crump,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Al Sharpton,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maxine Waters\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pharrell Williams\n\n\n\n \u2014feel obligatory, at best. None of the extraneous people, however, deflect from Ms. Nichols, who is the program\u2019s star in a most luminescent sense. In Todd Thompson\u2019s documentary, the actress best known for her groundbreaking role as Lieutenant Uhura on \u2018Star Trek\u2019 reflects on her efforts to diversify NASA\u2019s workforce. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Condo Fa\u00e7ade That Cleans Itself\u2014and the Air Around It (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8207",
        "date": "2018-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-condo-facade-that-cleans-itselfand-the-air-around-it-1527602400?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=94",
        "text": "The technology is getting its first residential application at 570 Broome Street in Manhattan, a 54-unit apartment tower where the Pureti-treated fa\u00e7ade is currently being installed. According to Pureti chief executive Glen Finkel, the treatment increases a developer\u2019s cost by less than 5%. The technology was developed in partnership with Neolith by TheSize, the company behind the sintered stone slabs used at 570 Broome.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nResearchers at Louisiana State University performed lab tests and a field study with Pureti\u2019s technology and determined it was effective 50% to 70% of the time, depending on environmental conditions. Using that research as a foundation, Pureti calculated that the treated fa\u00e7ade at 570 Broome will have an environmental impact equivalent to removing 625 cars from the road. \u201cOne building is not going to really change things,\u201d Mr. Finkel says. \u201cBut if cities begin to adopt this technology, they could transform their outdoor environments.\u201d\nPureti is collaborating with several European countries through a program known as iScape, backed by the European Commission, that helps cities develop sustainable strategies to fight air pollution. As part of the project, Pureti is finalizing an agreement to treat a portion of the port of Barcelona later this year. \n\nPureti has also partnered with NASA to develop new products for the agency, which has explored self-cleaning-surfaces and photocatalytic solutions for use on Earth and in space. A spokeswoman for NASA said its work with Pureti demonstrated that the coatings could keep surfaces clean and reduce maintenance costs\u2014a benefit for space agencies and luxury developers alike.\nWrite to Katherine Clarke at katherine.clarke@wsj.com 570 Broome in Manhattan incorporates an exterior treatment that fights grime and air pollution with NASA-approved technology ",
        "author": "Katherine Clarke"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Village One: A Vision for Life Beyond Earth (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8208",
        "date": "2018-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-village-one-a-vision-for-life-beyond-earth-1526567016?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=95",
        "text": "Among the designs commissioned by NASA: Space Village One, an expandable space station meant to house up to 8,000 people. It would orbit the Sun on a parallel track with Earth but deeper into space, beyond the Moon.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe periphery features a series of graded terraces to mimic sloping hillsides.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ProductionManager.com\n \n\n\n\nFrom the outside it resembles a giant top, which can spin to create gravity. Around the midsection, a series of overlapping flexible panels can move to expand its circumference when it needs to grow, using a concept called \u201ctensegrity\u201d in which tension between components creates stability. Inside sits another top-shaped translucent structure, in which humans would live. A cutaway 3D-printed model shows an oblong chandelier-like reflector bouncing light around the interior, which is meant to brim with life. The periphery features a series of graded terraces to mimic sloping hillsides. Those abut the town\u2019s aquaponic agricultural fields and fish farms, built as a series of shelves along the inside walls.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything \n\n\n\n A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThe structure\u2019s midsection looks like a valley. There, trees, rivers and lakes would take up 90 acres, under which houses and shops would be built, illuminated via skylights. \n\n\u201cThe fundamental premise and assumption ... is that unless we take what we love about Earth with us, we won\u2019t want to live in space,\u201d says co-designer Anthony Longman, an architect and CEO of Skyframe Research & Development. \nNASA, which also is sponsoring space-settlement design contests, has provided $600,000 in a pair of grants to develop the Space Village One project. Building it would depend in large part on obtaining raw materials from mining asteroids, a still-theoretical industry; a prospective asteroid-mining firm, Trans Astronautica Corp., is consulting on the project.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWrite to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com NASA has commissioned designs for future space stations, among them this expandable colony that would house up to 8,000 people. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can This Mask Make Jet Lag a Thing of the Past? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8209",
        "date": "2017-10-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-this-mask-make-jet-lag-a-thing-of-the-past-1509115689?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=85",
        "text": "The technology grew out of research conducted in the early 2000s by Jamie Marc Zeitzer, an assistant professor at Stanford\u2019s Center for Sleep Sciences. Zeitzer has spent his career studying circadian rhythms\u2014the (roughly) 24-hour cycles of our physiological processes\u2014which can get thrown off by air travel, causing jet lag. \u201cNearly all 24-hour rhythms in our bodies are controlled by a small group of cells in the brain called the SCN,\u201d Zeitzer says. Situated in the hypothalamus near the crossing of the optic nerves, the SCN takes most of its cues from visual stimuli, especially light.\n\n\nMore from The Future of Everything\n\n\n\n\nWhat\u2019s Ahead for Energy & Climate\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nThe Next Bets for Renewable Energy\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nCould a \u2018Carbon Coin\u2019 Save the Planet?\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn 2003, after extensive human experiments, he determined that flashes of light at nine-second intervals, delivered through the eyelids while the subject was asleep, were the most effective way to influence the SCN. The implications, Zeitzer says, were game-changing: \u201cFlashing lights can powerfully change the timing of your biological clock. And these lights can change circadian timing while you\u2019re sleeping\u2014and do so without disrupting your sleep.\u201d \nStanford\u2019s Office of Technology Licensing filed for a patent based on Zeitzer\u2019s findings and spent the next decade trying to find a commercial application. In 2013, Vanessa Burns and Biquan Luo, two graduate students and seasoned travelers enrolled in Stanford\u2019s iFarm program (see below), stumbled on Zeitzer\u2019s patent and wondered if light therapy could cure their frequent jet lag.\n\n\nThe pair spent four years developing the software\u2014and a mask comfortable enough to sleep in. The app asks for your flight details and a few data points\u2014your usual bedtime, waking time and light sensitivity\u2014and then tells you when and for how long to sleep with the mask over your eyes. \n\n\n\n\n\n A NEW WSJ PODCAST SERIES\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSUBSCRIBE: APPLE PODCASTS | IHEARTRADIO | STITCHER | SPOTIFY | GOOGLE PLAY MUSIC\n\n\nThe rule of thumb for jet lag calls for one night per time zone traveled for your sleeping patterns to adjust. Burns says the Lumos \u201ccan shift you three or four hours in a single night.\u201d Think New York to Los Angeles with no circadian disruption. \nThe technology isn\u2019t one size fits all, Burns says: Light-colored eyes require less light therapy; sensitivity of the circadian system varies from person to person. She believes user feedback will help refine the timing and duration of the sessions. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nLumosTech Sleep Mask, $175, lumos.tech\n\n\n\nThe mask has fans in high places. Dorit Donoviel, the deputy chief scientist at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, a NASA-funded organization, says she hopes that astronauts on the International Space Station will use the Lumos instead of pharmaceuticals to \u201cslam-shift\u201d their time zones.\nBut what about those of us who never leave the stratosphere? Based on my sleep habits and the timing of a recent flight from London to New York, the app prescribed two nights in the mask, one before my flight and one after. \nI slept soundly on my last night in London, undisturbed by the snug but nicely padded headset and the gently flashing lights. On my first night back in New York, I slept even more soundly\u2014and a few minutes past my 6 a.m. alarm\u2014with none of my usual fitful wakefulness or daytime drowsiness.\nInside Stanford\u2019s IP-Mining OperationHow the university\u2019s iFarm program turns unused patents into start-up gold The list of industry-shaking technologies developed at Stanford gets longer by the week, but the university is also sitting on over 1,300 patents that have yet to be commercialized. Enter the Stanford Innovation Farm Teams Program, aka iFarm. Luis Meija, a former faculty member and the program\u2019s founder, says that the idea for iFarm came from his experience mentoring a pair of graduate students named\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sergey Brin\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n \u2014a partnership that eventually earned Stanford $336 million from Google. Think of the iFarm program as a kind of after-school club in which students, alumni, faculty and friends trawl Stanford\u2019s intellectual-property archive, brainstorm products and companies around unrealized patents, and seek out VC funding for the most impressive business plans. Of the 30 projects to emerge from iFarm so far, four have formed the basis of start-ups, including Lumos. The Lumos Smart Sleep Mask, funded by Stanford and NASA, claims to have a cure for your long-haul travel hangover ",
        "author": "Mark Ellwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an Asteroid (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8210",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/how-nasa-plans-to-defend-earth-crash-a-probe-into-an-asteroid/7FA379A1-801A-4FF2-9306-F3ADFC3FF81B?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=3",
        "text": " NASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an Asteroid (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8211",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/how-nasa-plans-to-defend-earth-crash-a-probe-into-an-asteroid/7FA379A1-801A-4FF2-9306-F3ADFC3FF81B?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=10",
        "text": " NASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Plans to Defend Earth: Crash a Probe Into an Asteroid (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8212",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/how-nasa-plans-to-defend-earth-crash-a-probe-into-an-asteroid/7FA379A1-801A-4FF2-9306-F3ADFC3FF81B?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=17",
        "text": " NASA is testing a system designed to protect the Earth from a massive meteor strike. WSJ science writer Robert Lee Hotz joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how the technology works and what to expect from the test run now underway. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8213",
        "date": "2018-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-rover-curiosity-finds-more-clues-to-the-potential-for-life-1528403549?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=74",
        "text": "In the new research, scientists analyzed about six years of atmospheric measurements collected by the NASA robot rover and concluded that Martian methane rises and falls with the seasons, peaking near the end of summer in the planet\u2019s northern hemisphere. On Mars, methane levels ranged between 0.24 to 0.65 parts per billion, compared with levels of about 1800 parts per billion in the air on Earth, the scientists said.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThat is a huge change, completely unexpected,\u201d said Christopher R. Webster at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s jet propulsion laboratory in California. He leads the team that is sampling the Martian air with a sensor aboard the rover called the tunable laser spectrometer, an instrument specially designed for measuring the gas on Mars.\n\n\nThe researchers discussed their findings at a NASA briefing\u00a0Thursday\u00a0and published their research in Science.\n\n\nRead More New Study Adds to Mystery of Water on Mars (Feb. 6, 2017) Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water (Sept. 28, 2015) Life on Mars: NASA Finds New Evidence (Jan. 28, 2014) From Mars to Earth, These Landscapes Traverse Time (Sept. 15, 2016) The Many Faces of Mars\u2019 Weathered Exterior (June 30, 2016) A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\nAfter ruling out several potential sources, the researchers suggested that methane might be leaking from water-based crystals called clathrates buried in the cold Martian soil.\u00a0Seasonal changes in temperature could cause the variations in methane levels the rover detected.\n\u201cThe idea that best fits our data is subsurface storage,\u201d said Dr. Webster. \u201cWay under the surface of Mars there is methane trapped. We don\u2019t know if that methane is modern or if it is ancient.\u201d\nIn a related finding also published in Science\u00a0Thursday, space agency scientists said that the Curiosity rover found organic molecules contained in samples of three-billion-year-old mudstone on Mars. There is no way, though, to determine if it is evidence of ancient Martian life or not, the researchers said.\n\u201cAre there signs of life on Mars?\u201d said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA\u2019s Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters. \u201cWe don\u2019t know, but these results tell us we are on the right track.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA researchers suspect methane gas detected on Mars by the rover Curiosity are emanating from buried deposits and not from microbes living there now, space agency scientists said\u00a0Thursday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Rover Curiosity Finds More Clues to the Potential for Life (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8214",
        "date": "2018-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-rover-curiosity-finds-more-clues-to-the-potential-for-life-1528403549?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=94",
        "text": "In the new research, scientists analyzed about six years of atmospheric measurements collected by the NASA robot rover and concluded that Martian methane rises and falls with the seasons, peaking near the end of summer in the planet\u2019s northern hemisphere. On Mars, methane levels ranged between 0.24 to 0.65 parts per billion, compared with levels of about 1800 parts per billion in the air on Earth, the scientists said.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThat is a huge change, completely unexpected,\u201d said Christopher R. Webster at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s jet propulsion laboratory in California. He leads the team that is sampling the Martian air with a sensor aboard the rover called the tunable laser spectrometer, an instrument specially designed for measuring the gas on Mars.\n\n\nThe researchers discussed their findings at a NASA briefing\u00a0Thursday\u00a0and published their research in Science.\n\n\nRead More New Study Adds to Mystery of Water on Mars (Feb. 6, 2017) Mars Shows Signs of Flowing Salt Water (Sept. 28, 2015) Life on Mars: NASA Finds New Evidence (Jan. 28, 2014) From Mars to Earth, These Landscapes Traverse Time (Sept. 15, 2016) The Many Faces of Mars\u2019 Weathered Exterior (June 30, 2016) A Dress Rehearsal For Life on Mars \n\n\nAfter ruling out several potential sources, the researchers suggested that methane might be leaking from water-based crystals called clathrates buried in the cold Martian soil.\u00a0Seasonal changes in temperature could cause the variations in methane levels the rover detected.\n\u201cThe idea that best fits our data is subsurface storage,\u201d said Dr. Webster. \u201cWay under the surface of Mars there is methane trapped. We don\u2019t know if that methane is modern or if it is ancient.\u201d\nIn a related finding also published in Science\u00a0Thursday, space agency scientists said that the Curiosity rover found organic molecules contained in samples of three-billion-year-old mudstone on Mars. There is no way, though, to determine if it is evidence of ancient Martian life or not, the researchers said.\n\u201cAre there signs of life on Mars?\u201d said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA\u2019s Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters. \u201cWe don\u2019t know, but these results tell us we are on the right track.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com NASA researchers suspect methane gas detected on Mars by the rover Curiosity are emanating from buried deposits and not from microbes living there now, space agency scientists said\u00a0Thursday. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perseverance Rover Displays Its First Visions of Mars (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8215",
        "date": "2021-02-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-photos-see-nasas-perseverance-rovers-first-visions-of-red-planet-11613775893?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=34",
        "text": "Hanging from the cables used to lower it from the lander to the ground, the rover resembled a high-tech marionette dangling on strings. \u201cYou can see the dust kicked up by the rovers\u2019 engines,\u201d said Adam Steltzner, Perseverance chief engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. \u201cIt was stunning and the team was awestruck. And, you know, there is just a feeling of victory that we were able to take these.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Perseverance rover being lowered by the Sky Crane to the surface of Mars on Thursday in a photo released by NASA.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAs it prospects for past life on Mars over the next two years, NASA\u2019s $2.7 billion rover will be transmitting a vast portfolio of high-resolution images, panoramic views and 3-D color stereo landscapes back to mission engineers and scientists. In all, the robotic vehicle carries 23 cameras, the most ever for a Mars rover. It will be using them as it drives across the rugged terrain of Jezero Crater, where it landed, to measure nearby rocks, avoid trenches or sand dunes and scrutinize suitable test samples. For the first time, NASA attempted to photograph a craft\u2019s daring descent from space to Mars, capturing all the sights and sounds of an interplanetary landing. NASA officials said Friday they expect to release those images and video footage next week, along with the sounds of the descent and landing recorded by the rover\u2019s two onboard microphones. Space agency officials also released the first color image taken by the rover of the Martian landscape where it landed, using a hazard avoidance camera mounted on the rear of the vehicle. Jezero Crater is 28 miles wide and is located on the western edge of a flat plain called Isidis Planitia, just north of the Martian equator. \u201cWhen I look at this image, first of all, I feel a great sense of relief,\u201d that the craft had landed intact, said Aaron Stehura, an operations manager for the entry, descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cAnd second of all, I see a landing site that looks relatively safe, free of boulders, free of cliffs, free of great slopes.\u201d A close-up of one of the rover\u2019s six high-tech wheels, below, revealed some of the rocks that NASA scientists hope to sample in the months ahead for return to Earth for more intensive study.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nThis photo below shows the first image sent by Perseverance from Mars. It shows the planet\u2019s surface just after the rover\u2019s landing in the Jezero crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The view, from one of Perseverance\u2019s Hazard Cameras, is partially obscured by a dust cover.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe surface of Mars, as seen from the rover.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nScientists believe the area was once flooded with water 3.5 billion years ago and was home to an ancient river delta, where clay minerals washed in from the surrounding area could have fostered microbial life.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe second image sent by the Perseverance rover showing the surface of Mars, just after landing in the Jezero crater, on Thursday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Elated NASA scientists pored through the first landing scenes transmitted by the space agency\u2019s Perseverance rover, which is on a mission to find evidence of past microbial life on the red planet. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Look at Mars Interior Yields Big Surprise (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8216",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-insight-lander-gives-first-look-at-mars-interior-yielding-a-big-surprise-11626976810?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=19",
        "text": "The scientists said their findings, which were described in three papers published Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that Mars formed millions of years before Earth, when the sun was still condensing from a cloud of glowing gas. \u201cIt gives us our first sample of the inside of another rocky planet like Earth, built out of the same materials but very, very different,\u201d Sanne Cottaar, a seismologist at the U.K.\u2019s University of Cambridge, said of the new research. \u201cIt is impressive.\u201d Dr. Cottaar, who wasn\u2019t involved in the new research, called the findings \u201ca major leap forward in planetary seismology.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Peek Inside\nThe interior structure of Mars has been directly observed for the first time, revealing that the planet\u2019s core is larger than previously believed. Seismic waves from marsquakes, recorded by the InSight rover, which landed on Mars in 2018, yielded the discovery. \n\n\n\nHow it was done\n\n\nInSight\n\n\nSeismic waves\ntravel through the planet, the strength and frequency of their reflections reveal the planet\u2019s structure. \n\n\nQuake\n\n\nCore\n\n\n\n\n\nHow it was done\n\n\nInSight\n\n\nSeismic waves\ntravel through the planet, the strength and frequency of their reflections reveal the planet\u2019s structure. \n\n\nQuake\n\n\nCore\n\n\n\n\n\nHow it was done\n\n\nSeismic waves\ntravel through the planet, the strength and frequency of their reflections reveal the planet\u2019s structure. \n\n\nInSight\n\n\nQuake\n\n\nCore\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe new in-depth portrait of Mars was assembled by an international team of more than 40 scientists working at research centers from Pasadena to Moscow. The scientists peered into the innards of the red planet using French-built seismometers on board the space agency\u2019s $828 million InSight lander, which in 2018 landed on a smooth plain along the Martian equator called Elysium Planitia. The instruments captured detailed information about hundreds of marsquakes, including the way the vibrations caused by the alien temblors were reflected and refracted by subsurface layers to reveal their positions and densities. \u201cThe clues don\u2019t lie on the surface,\u201d said Amir Khan, a geophysicist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and a member of the research team. \u201cYou have to look inside for the fundamental building blocks that make a planet: the crust, the mantle, the core and the separation of materials that happens as the planet forms.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s InSight lander retracted its robotic arm last year, revealing the spot where the self-digging \u2018mole\u2019 is attempting to burrow into the planet's surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nThe InSight lander has recorded more than 700 marsquakes since beginning operations in February 2019, fewer and less intense than the scientists had expected. Even the strongest of them, registering at about magnitude 4.0, would barely rattle the windows on Earth. The largest quake on Earth in 2020\u2014a magnitude 7.8 temblor that struck Perryville, Alaska\u2014was about 6,000 times more powerful than the biggest marsquake recorded by InSight. Mars is so seismically stable that InSight\u2019s sensors were able to detect tiny shivers from faults thousands of kilometers away, the scientists said. \u201cIt is a testament to the quietness of Mars,\u201d said team leader Mark Panning, InSight project scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cYou would never get that quiet on Earth because, no matter where you go, the oceans are always making seismic noise.\u201d The research showed that the core of Mars has a radius of nearly 1,137 miles (1,830 kilometers) and extends about midway to the planet\u2019s surface. As best as the scientists can tell, the molten core isn\u2019t very dense and likely contains a mixture of light elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and sulfur.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApproximate average thickness of layers\n\n\n1. Crust\n14-44 miles\n\n\nMars\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n2. Mantle\n990 miles\nLess layered than Earth's mantle, without a layer of the mineral bridgmanite.\n\n\n3. Liquid core\n1,137 miles\nLiquid core containing mixture of lighter volatile elements.\n\n\n3\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n1\n\n\n1. Crust\n0-60 miles\nThin, rigid outer layer\n\n\n3. Liquid outer core\n1,370 miles\nSpins creating the earth\u2019s magnetic field.\n\n\n2\n\n\n2. Mantle\n1,800 miles\nHot, dense semi-solid rock, cooler and more rigid near the surface.\n\n\n3\n\n\n4. Solid inner core\n780 miles\nIron and nickel alloy.\n\n\n4\n\n\n\n\n\nApproximate average thickness of layers\n\n\n1. Crust, 14-44 miles\n\n\nMars\n\n\n2. Mantle, 990 miles\nLess layered than Earth's mantle, without a layer of the mineral bridgmanite.\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n3. Liquid core, \n1,137 miles\nLiquid core containing mixture of lighter volatile elements.\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n1. Crust, 0-60 miles\nThin, rigid outer layer\n\n\n1\n\n\n2. Mantle, 1,800 miles\nHot, dense semi-solid rock, cooler and more rigid near the surface.\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n3. Liquid outer core, 1,370 miles\nSpins creating the earth\u2019s magnetic field.\n\n\n4. Solid inner core, \n780 miles\nIron and nickel alloy.\n\n\n\n\n\nApproximate average thickness of layers\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\nMars\n\n\n Analysis of marsquakes detected by NASA\u2019s Mars InSight lander reveals a planet with a large molten region and inner structures markedly different from Earth\u2019s. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Merrill Sherman"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Likely to Name Rep. Bridenstine to be NASA Chief (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8217",
        "date": "2017-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-likely-to-name-rep-jim-bridenstine-nasa-chief-next-month-1503155015?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=115",
        "text": "Such positions are in line with the views of senior White House officials, these people said, as is his desire to save money\u2014and improve efficiency\u2014by more closely coordinating NASA programs with those at other civilian agencies and the Defense Department. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n recently was named to lead a revived White House space council responsible for crafting high-level policies and mediating disagreements among agencies.\n\n\n\n\nA White House spokeswoman said \u201cwe have no announcement at this time.\u201d A NASA spokeswoman didn\u2019t have any comment, and Mr. Bridenstine couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment.\n\n\nAs an outspoken champion of U.S. supremacy in all aspects of military and civilian space, Mr. Bridenstine is a choice who could help bridge some of the deep policy and philosophical disagreements that initially split the Trump administration. Through the transition and early months in office, there were clashes between a faction emphasizing commercial efforts and other White House advisers focusing on traditional NASA programs favored by longstanding contractors.\nIn his current role, the three-term legislator has emphasized the need for strong governmentwide goals harnessing both civilian and military programs. \u201cSpace is critically involved in improving all of our lives\u201d and in coming years \u201cit\u2019s going to be so even more,\u201d Mr. Bridenstine told a conference in Colorado earlier this year. Decrying \u201ca lot of overlap, a lot of areas where there could be synergies\u201d between agencies as well as among military services, he said the Trump administration should recognize that rockets and satellites are essential elements \u201cto enhance America\u2019s comprehensive national power.\u201d The key to achieving that goal, he said, is to start \u201clooking at space comprehensively.\u201d\nMr. Bridenstine, among other things, has advocated greater emphasis on tracking space debris as various companies contemplate launching unprecedented numbers of low-earth orbit satellites. He also has supported relieving the Pentagon of primary responsibility for preventing collisions between satellites, and devising new air-traffic control procedures to cope with the expected surge in commercial launches. Most of these goals are broadly supported by industry.\nStill, the anticipated nomination has prompted renewed worries on Capitol Hill and among some industry officials that Mr. Bridenstine might seek to scale back NASA\u2019s largest manned exploration initiatives targeting deep space and eventually manned missions to Mars. Annual spending on those programs, featuring the Orion capsule and the heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, significantly exceed NASA\u2019s budgets for using commercial vehicles and privately developed space taxis to ferry cargo and astronauts into orbit.\nPartly to allay such concerns, people familiar with the details said, President Trump intends to nominate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Schumacher,\n\n\n\n a former senior agency official who runs the Washington office of rocket engine-maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n as the No. 2 NASA official. \nFor\u00a0established contractors such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and others with a legacy of conventional programs, Mr. Schumacher, a former NASA chief of staff, is likely to be seen as a symbol of continuity, offering a history of management expertise and providing a signal that those traditional, big-ticket programs aren\u2019t in imminent jeopardy.\nBarring a last-minute holdup, these people said, announcements could come as soon as next week and not later than the first week of September. It isn\u2019t clear why the decisions, which Mr. Bridenstine and his supporters expected several months ago, took longer than had been anticipated.\u00a0The likely timing of the nomination was first reported by NASA Watch, an independent website that tracks the agency and space issues.\nOne goal that isn\u2019t likely to flourish under Mr. Bridenstine is the idea of quickly devising or adjusting strategies to get astronauts to Mars. Over the years he has questioned whether NASA budgets\u2014expected to stay basically flat through the middle of the next decade\u2014can swiftly pave the way for effective exploration of the Red Planet. The agency, for example, has acknowledged it currently doesn\u2019t have any funds to start developing a manned lander capable of touching down on the Martian surface.\nBy contrast, Mr. Bridenstine has stressed the importance of moon missions as steppingstones to developing a host of technologies required for deep-space probes carrying astronauts. Bipartisan support also has been growing on Capitol Hill for a moon-first approach. And Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is the top staffer on the White House space council, has a history of favoring a similar exploration strategy.\nSo far, the Trump administration has largely embraced a status quo direction for NASA, while leaving the d The White House by early September plans to nominate Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine as NASA administrator, tapping a Republican legislator who is a strong proponent of commercial space ventures. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "White House Likely to Name Rep. Bridenstine to be NASA Chief (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8218",
        "date": "2017-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-likely-to-name-rep-jim-bridenstine-nasa-chief-next-month-1503155015?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=89",
        "text": "Such positions are in line with the views of senior White House officials, these people said, as is his desire to save money\u2014and improve efficiency\u2014by more closely coordinating NASA programs with those at other civilian agencies and the Defense Department. Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n recently was named to lead a revived White House space council responsible for crafting high-level policies and mediating disagreements among agencies.\n\n\n\n\nA White House spokeswoman said \u201cwe have no announcement at this time.\u201d A NASA spokeswoman didn\u2019t have any comment, and Mr. Bridenstine couldn\u2019t immediately be reached for comment.\n\n\nAs an outspoken champion of U.S. supremacy in all aspects of military and civilian space, Mr. Bridenstine is a choice who could help bridge some of the deep policy and philosophical disagreements that initially split the Trump administration. Through the transition and early months in office, there were clashes between a faction emphasizing commercial efforts and other White House advisers focusing on traditional NASA programs favored by longstanding contractors.\nIn his current role, the three-term legislator has emphasized the need for strong governmentwide goals harnessing both civilian and military programs. \u201cSpace is critically involved in improving all of our lives\u201d and in coming years \u201cit\u2019s going to be so even more,\u201d Mr. Bridenstine told a conference in Colorado earlier this year. Decrying \u201ca lot of overlap, a lot of areas where there could be synergies\u201d between agencies as well as among military services, he said the Trump administration should recognize that rockets and satellites are essential elements \u201cto enhance America\u2019s comprehensive national power.\u201d The key to achieving that goal, he said, is to start \u201clooking at space comprehensively.\u201d\nMr. Bridenstine, among other things, has advocated greater emphasis on tracking space debris as various companies contemplate launching unprecedented numbers of low-earth orbit satellites. He also has supported relieving the Pentagon of primary responsibility for preventing collisions between satellites, and devising new air-traffic control procedures to cope with the expected surge in commercial launches. Most of these goals are broadly supported by industry.\nStill, the anticipated nomination has prompted renewed worries on Capitol Hill and among some industry officials that Mr. Bridenstine might seek to scale back NASA\u2019s largest manned exploration initiatives targeting deep space and eventually manned missions to Mars. Annual spending on those programs, featuring the Orion capsule and the heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, significantly exceed NASA\u2019s budgets for using commercial vehicles and privately developed space taxis to ferry cargo and astronauts into orbit.\nPartly to allay such concerns, people familiar with the details said, President Trump intends to nominate\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Schumacher,\n\n\n\n a former senior agency official who runs the Washington office of rocket engine-maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Inc.,\n\n\n as the No. 2 NASA official. \nFor\u00a0established contractors such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n and others with a legacy of conventional programs, Mr. Schumacher, a former NASA chief of staff, is likely to be seen as a symbol of continuity, offering a history of management expertise and providing a signal that those traditional, big-ticket programs aren\u2019t in imminent jeopardy.\nBarring a last-minute holdup, these people said, announcements could come as soon as next week and not later than the first week of September. It isn\u2019t clear why the decisions, which Mr. Bridenstine and his supporters expected several months ago, took longer than had been anticipated.\u00a0The likely timing of the nomination was first reported by NASA Watch, an independent website that tracks the agency and space issues.\nOne goal that isn\u2019t likely to flourish under Mr. Bridenstine is the idea of quickly devising or adjusting strategies to get astronauts to Mars. Over the years he has questioned whether NASA budgets\u2014expected to stay basically flat through the middle of the next decade\u2014can swiftly pave the way for effective exploration of the Red Planet. The agency, for example, has acknowledged it currently doesn\u2019t have any funds to start developing a manned lander capable of touching down on the Martian surface.\nBy contrast, Mr. Bridenstine has stressed the importance of moon missions as steppingstones to developing a host of technologies required for deep-space probes carrying astronauts. Bipartisan support also has been growing on Capitol Hill for a moon-first approach. And Scott Pace, a former NASA official who is the top staffer on the White House space council, has a history of favoring a similar exploration strategy.\nSo far, the Trump administration has largely embraced a status quo direction for NASA, while leaving the door open for possible dramatic changes once a permanent administrator and team are in place.\nLast year, Mr. Bridenstine introduced comprehensive legislation spanning everything from mining heavenly bodies to controlling space junk orbiting the earth and called for Congress to provide NASA with stability and clear priorities. The agency \u201cmust not be a jack-of-all-trades,\u201d he wrote on his website, but rather should be \u201ccommitted to a space pioneering doctrine\u201d aiming to push humans far into the solar system.\nMr. Bridenstine also has pushed hard to revamp the nation\u2019s weather-satellite systems, including changes to have the government rely on commercially-available forecasting data. \nAnother major issue confronting him is how and when to certify that fleets of commercial capsules will be ready to safely carry U.S. crews to and from the orbiting international space station.\nIf confirmed by the Senate, the new NASA chief will confront significant budget pressures along with possible White House prodding to reduce costs by merging some Pentagon and NASA efforts to develop what are now slated to be totally separate families of heavy-lift launchers for future decades.\nWhen Mr. Bridenstine\u2019s name initially emerged, Trump transition and administration officials expected any announcement also would be accompanied by the choice of someone to fill the White House top science adviser\u2019s post. Now, it isn\u2019t clear if that will occur.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com The White House by early September plans to nominate Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine as NASA administrator, tapping a Republican legislator who is a strong proponent of commercial space ventures. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Look at Mars Interior Yields Big Surprise (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8219",
        "date": "2021-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-insight-lander-gives-first-look-at-mars-interior-yielding-a-big-surprise-11626976810?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=18",
        "text": "The scientists said their findings, which were described in three papers published Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that Mars formed millions of years before Earth, when the sun was still condensing from a cloud of glowing gas. \u201cIt gives us our first sample of the inside of another rocky planet like Earth, built out of the same materials but very, very different,\u201d Sanne Cottaar, a seismologist at the U.K.\u2019s University of Cambridge, said of the new research. \u201cIt is impressive.\u201d Dr. Cottaar, who wasn\u2019t involved in the new research, called the findings \u201ca major leap forward in planetary seismology.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Peek Inside\nThe interior structure of Mars has been directly observed for the first time, revealing that the planet\u2019s core is larger than previously believed. Seismic waves from marsquakes, recorded by the InSight rover, which landed on Mars in 2018, yielded the discovery. \n\n\n\nHow it was done\n\n\nInSight\n\n\nSeismic waves\ntravel through the planet, the strength and frequency of their reflections reveal the planet\u2019s structure. \n\n\nQuake\n\n\nCore\n\n\n\n\n\nHow it was done\n\n\nInSight\n\n\nSeismic waves\ntravel through the planet, the strength and frequency of their reflections reveal the planet\u2019s structure. \n\n\nQuake\n\n\nCore\n\n\n\n\n\nHow it was done\n\n\nSeismic waves\ntravel through the planet, the strength and frequency of their reflections reveal the planet\u2019s structure. \n\n\nInSight\n\n\nQuake\n\n\nCore\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe new in-depth portrait of Mars was assembled by an international team of more than 40 scientists working at research centers from Pasadena to Moscow. The scientists peered into the innards of the red planet using French-built seismometers on board the space agency\u2019s $828 million InSight lander, which in 2018 landed on a smooth plain along the Martian equator called Elysium Planitia. The instruments captured detailed information about hundreds of marsquakes, including the way the vibrations caused by the alien temblors were reflected and refracted by subsurface layers to reveal their positions and densities. \u201cThe clues don\u2019t lie on the surface,\u201d said Amir Khan, a geophysicist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and a member of the research team. \u201cYou have to look inside for the fundamental building blocks that make a planet: the crust, the mantle, the core and the separation of materials that happens as the planet forms.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNASA\u2019s InSight lander retracted its robotic arm last year, revealing the spot where the self-digging \u2018mole\u2019 is attempting to burrow into the planet's surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA/JPL-Caltech\n \n\n\n\nThe InSight lander has recorded more than 700 marsquakes since beginning operations in February 2019, fewer and less intense than the scientists had expected. Even the strongest of them, registering at about magnitude 4.0, would barely rattle the windows on Earth. The largest quake on Earth in 2020\u2014a magnitude 7.8 temblor that struck Perryville, Alaska\u2014was about 6,000 times more powerful than the biggest marsquake recorded by InSight. Mars is so seismically stable that InSight\u2019s sensors were able to detect tiny shivers from faults thousands of kilometers away, the scientists said. \u201cIt is a testament to the quietness of Mars,\u201d said team leader Mark Panning, InSight project scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cYou would never get that quiet on Earth because, no matter where you go, the oceans are always making seismic noise.\u201d The research showed that the core of Mars has a radius of nearly 1,137 miles (1,830 kilometers) and extends about midway to the planet\u2019s surface. As best as the scientists can tell, the molten core isn\u2019t very dense and likely contains a mixture of light elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and sulfur.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApproximate average thickness of layers\n\n\n1. Crust\n14-44 miles\n\n\nMars\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n2. Mantle\n990 miles\nLess layered than Earth's mantle, without a layer of the mineral bridgmanite.\n\n\n3. Liquid core\n1,137 miles\nLiquid core containing mixture of lighter volatile elements.\n\n\n3\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n1\n\n\n1. Crust\n0-60 miles\nThin, rigid outer layer\n\n\n3. Liquid outer core\n1,370 miles\nSpins creating the earth\u2019s magnetic field.\n\n\n2\n\n\n2. Mantle\n1,800 miles\nHot, dense semi-solid rock, cooler and more rigid near the surface.\n\n\n3\n\n\n4. Solid inner core\n780 miles\nIron and nickel alloy.\n\n\n4\n\n\n\n\n\nApproximate average thickness of layers\n\n\n1. Crust, 14-44 miles\n\n\nMars\n\n\n2. Mantle, 990 miles\nLess layered than Earth's mantle, without a layer of the mineral bridgmanite.\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n3. Liquid core, \n1,137 miles\nLiquid core containing mixture of lighter volatile elements.\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n1. Crust, 0-60 miles\nThin, rigid outer layer\n\n\n1\n\n\n2. Mantle, 1,800 miles\nHot, dense semi-solid rock, cooler and more rigid near the surface.\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\n3. Liquid outer core, 1,370 miles\nSpins creating the earth\u2019s magnetic field.\n\n\n4. Solid inner core, \n780 miles\nIron and nickel alloy.\n\n\n\n\n\nApproximate average thickness of layers\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\nMars\n\n\n1. Crust, 14-44 miles\n\n\n2. Mantle, 990 miles\nLess layered than Earth's mantle, without a layer of the mineral bridgmanite.\n\n\n3. Liquid core, 1,137 miles\nLiquid core containing mixture of lighter volatile elements.\n\n\n1\n\n\n2\n\n\n3\n\n\n4\n\n\nEarth\n\n\n1. Crust, 0-60 miles\nThin, rigid outer layer\n\n\n2. Mantle, 1,800 miles\nHot, dense semi-solid rock, cooler and more rigid near the surface.\n\n\n3. Liquid outer core, 1,370 miles\nSpins creating the earth\u2019s magnetic field.\n\n\n4. Solid inner core, 780 miles\nIron and nickel alloy.\n\n\n\nSources: Science Magazine, July 2021 articles \u201cThe interior of Mars revealed,\u201d Sanne Cottaar and Paula Koelemeijer (Seismic waves); \u201cSeismic detection of the martian core\u201d Simon C. St\u00e4hler,Amir Khan, et al. (Seismic waves, Core); \u201cThickness and structure of the martian crust fromInSight seismic data,\u201d Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun, Mark P. Panning, Et al. (Crust); \u201cUpper mantle structure of Mars from InSight seismic data,\u201d Amir Khan, Savas Ceylan, Et al. (Mantle); NASA (Mars); USGS (Earth)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWrapped around the core is a relatively thin mantle, composed perhaps of just two or three rocky layers. These are topped by an unusually thick and rigid outer shell of upper mantle and crust, called the lithosphere, which the scientists said seems to be two or three times thicker than a similar formation on Earth. The crust itself was found to have a thickness of between 14 and 44 miles (24 and 72 kilometers). But Mars might not have given up all its structural secrets. The scientists discovered that the rocky soil beneath the lander dissipates seismic energy, meaning that the 794-pound, solar-powered craft may be located within a vast seismic \u201cshadow\u201d where some marsquakes might elude detection. The new findings from InSight come as NASA\u2019s six-wheeled Perseverance rover prepared to collect its first samples of Martian rock at its landing site, located 2,100 miles from InSight in the Jezero crater. Plans call for the $2.7 billion rover to collect up to 43 samples that might contain chemical traces of ancient microbial life\u2014if any ever existed on the now-barren planet\u2014for eventual transport back to Earth.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this artist\u2019s concept of NASA's InSight lander on Mars, layers of the planet's subsurface can be seen below and dust devils can be seen in the background.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n IPGP/Nicolas Sarter\n \n\n\n\nInSight has been struggling in recent months, as wind-whipped Martian dust collected on its solar panels and cut their ability to generate electrical power. In May, NASA engineers directed the probe\u2019s digging tool to pile sand on the lander\u2019s deck so that the wind would blow it across the solar panels and, like a whisk broom, sweep away the dust. \u201cWe dump sand on ourselves to get rid of dust,\u201d Dr. Panning said, adding that the fix seemed to be working. The lander recently was granted a two-year extension for scientific work, now lasting until the end of 2022. Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Analysis of marsquakes detected by NASA\u2019s Mars InSight lander reveals a planet with a large molten region and inner structures markedly different from Earth\u2019s. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz and Merrill Sherman"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Flight on Mars (WSJ: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8220",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-successfully-makes-historic-first-flight-on-mars-11618830461?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=8",
        "text": "As flight data streamed from Ingenuity to Earth on Monday, mission engineers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California cheered and clapped. \n\u201cIt\u2019s real. It\u2019s real,\u201d said Ingenuity project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n MiMi Aung,\n\n\n\n slapping the table in front of her with glee and showing a thumbs-up. \u201cWe can now say human beings have flown a drone on another planet.\u201d \n\n\nIngenuity arrived at Mars\u2019s Jezero Crater in February along with NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which was on hand to capture the historic flight on camera. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photos: NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Mars Flight\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n NASA/JPL\n\n\nThe drone\u2014stiff-legged and smaller than a picnic basket\u2014was designed as an engineering experiment to prove that powered flight is possible on the Red Planet and to help NASA plan for a future in which drones play a key role in planetary exploration. Such drones could one day provide access to terrain that is too remote or rugged for rovers to reach\u2014like Mars\u2019s Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, or its Olympus Mons shield volcano, which is about 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest.\n\u201cIt\u2019s the next step in expanding our capabilities to explore another planet,\u201d NASA acting administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Jurczyk\n\n\n\n said of Ingenuity. \u201cA helicopter could be used as a scout for robotic missions to look over the horizon and eventually as a partner for astronauts on Mars.\u201d\nIngenuity was on autopilot for its entire flight, out of sight, direct control or contact with the men and women on Earth who had ordered it aloft. Radio signals take too long to travel between the planets for any human operator to intervene.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history early Monday when the small but intrepid drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Flight on Mars (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8221",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-successfully-makes-historic-first-flight-on-mars-11618830461?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=31",
        "text": "As flight data streamed from Ingenuity to Earth on Monday, mission engineers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California cheered and clapped. \n\u201cIt\u2019s real. It\u2019s real,\u201d said Ingenuity project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n MiMi Aung,\n\n\n\n slapping the table in front of her with glee and showing a thumbs-up. \u201cWe can now say human beings have flown a drone on another planet.\u201d \n\n\nIngenuity arrived at Mars\u2019s Jezero Crater in February along with NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which was on hand to capture the historic flight on camera. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photos: NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Mars Flight\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n NASA/JPL\n\n\nThe drone\u2014stiff-legged and smaller than a picnic basket\u2014was designed as an engineering experiment to prove that powered flight is possible on the Red Planet and to help NASA plan for a future in which drones play a key role in planetary exploration. Such drones could one day provide access to terrain that is too remote or rugged for rovers to reach\u2014like Mars\u2019s Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, or its Olympus Mons shield volcano, which is about 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest.\n\u201cIt\u2019s the next step in expanding our capabilities to explore another planet,\u201d NASA acting administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Jurczyk\n\n\n\n said of Ingenuity. \u201cA helicopter could be used as a scout for robotic missions to look over the horizon and eventually as a partner for astronauts on Mars.\u201d\nIngenuity was on autopilot for its entire flight, out of sight, direct control or contact with the men and women on Earth who had ordered it aloft. Radio signals take too long to travel between the planets for any human operator to intervene.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an altitude NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history early Monday when the small but intrepid drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Flight on Mars (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8222",
        "date": "2021-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-successfully-makes-historic-first-flight-on-mars-11618830461?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=32",
        "text": "As flight data streamed from Ingenuity to Earth on Monday, mission engineers at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California cheered and clapped. \n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s real. It\u2019s real,\u201d said Ingenuity project manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n MiMi Aung,\n\n\n\n slapping the table in front of her with glee and showing a thumbs-up. \u201cWe can now say human beings have flown a drone on another planet.\u201d \n\n\nIngenuity arrived at Mars\u2019s Jezero Crater in February along with NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, which was on hand to capture the historic flight on camera. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photos: NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Historic First Mars Flight\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n VIEW Photos\n \n\n\n\n NASA/JPL\n\n\nThe drone\u2014stiff-legged and smaller than a picnic basket\u2014was designed as an engineering experiment to prove that powered flight is possible on the Red Planet and to help NASA plan for a future in which drones play a key role in planetary exploration. Such drones could one day provide access to terrain that is too remote or rugged for rovers to reach\u2014like Mars\u2019s Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, or its Olympus Mons shield volcano, which is about 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest.\n\u201cIt\u2019s the next step in expanding our capabilities to explore another planet,\u201d NASA acting administrator\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Steve Jurczyk\n\n\n\n said of Ingenuity. \u201cA helicopter could be used as a scout for robotic missions to look over the horizon and eventually as a partner for astronauts on Mars.\u201d\nIngenuity was on autopilot for its entire flight, out of sight, direct control or contact with the men and women on Earth who had ordered it aloft. Radio signals take too long to travel between the planets for any human operator to intervene.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIngenuity Up Close\nIngenuity, NASA\u2019s first helicopter flight on another planet, flies autonomously and has special features to help it stay aloft in the thin Martian atmosphere. \n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge Ingenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors and batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\n\n\n\nAntenna\n\n\nTransmits flight data to the Perseverance rover, which relays it via satellite to Earth.\n\n\nRotor blades\nThe carbon fiber blades are bigger, stiffer and spin faster than would be necessary if Ingenuity were designed for flight on Earth.\n\n\nTotal weight: 4 lbs.\n\n\nSolar cells\n\n\nCharge \nIngenuity\u2019s lithium-ion batteries.\n\n\nHeight:\n19 in. \n\n\nCarbon fiber legs\n\n\nWidth:\n4 ft.\n\n\nAutopilot, sensors \nand batteries\nThe drone\u2019s insulated main body packs a navigation camera, a microprocessor like the one used in many smartphones and lithium-ion batteries designed to withstand nighttime temperatures that reach minus 130\u2070 F.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nACHIEVING LIFTOFF\n\n\nNo conventional aircraft could fly on Mars because the Martian atmosphere is too thin. To enable Ingenuity to fly there, NASA engineers gave it ultra-light, compact parts and rotors capable of generating enough lift to carry it aloft. Ingenuity\u2019s rotor blades spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter.\n\n\n90km\n\n\nMars\u2019s air density \nThe air on Mars is less than 1% as dense as air on Earth, with the density at the surface roughly equivalent to the density at an alti NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history early Monday when the small but intrepid drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bipartisan Group Backs Gas-Tax Hike to Fund Infrastructure Spending (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8223",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/bipartisan-group-backs-gas-tax-hike-to-fund-infrastructure-spending/FEA3F6D1-37FE-476C-9505-DB24311269D3?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=31",
        "text": " Plus: Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny ends hunger strike. SpaceX launches crewed rocket into space in latest NASA mission. J.R. Whalen reports. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Federal Judge Blocks Enforcement of Texas Abortion Law (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8224",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/federal-judge-blocks-enforcement-of-texas-abortion-law/BF0BCAE2-BC81-4C4B-9F22-236F5A6AA827?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=11",
        "text": " General Motors aims to challenge Tesla with a planned $30,000 electric SUV. NASA says Boeing's Starliner space capsule won't make another launch attempt this year. The U.S. is set to release weekly jobless claims data this morning. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Federal Judge Blocks Enforcement of Texas Abortion Law (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8225",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/federal-judge-blocks-enforcement-of-texas-abortion-law/BF0BCAE2-BC81-4C4B-9F22-236F5A6AA827?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=21",
        "text": " General Motors aims to challenge Tesla with a planned $30,000 electric SUV. NASA says Boeing's Starliner space capsule won't make another launch attempt this year. The U.S. is set to release weekly jobless claims data this morning. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Ends Opportunity Mission After Rover Goes Silent (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8226",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/nasa-ends-opportunity-mission-after-rover-goes-silent/6F417D93-A9A5-4803-ABF7-92C5EE0D159B.html?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=78",
        "text": " The Opportunity rover landed on Mars nearly 15 years ago, logging more than 28 miles and recording hundreds of thousands of extraterrestrial images. NASA lost communication with the rover during massive dust storm eight months ago and pronounced it dead on Tuesday. WSJ\u2019s Jason Bellini reports. Illustration: NASA ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Launches Reused Rocket (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8227",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-successfully-launches-reused-rocket/E1328B23-27B7-4687-8F47-3AAF8188A3C4.html?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=126",
        "text": " SpaceX successfully launched a reused Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a major milestone in rocket reusability. Photo: SpaceX/ XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Announces Two Discovery Missions (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8228",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/nasa-announces-two-discovery-missions/F2758348-3BCE-4E8E-A9F3-5EE4781F1731.html?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=134",
        "text": " NASA announced on Wednesday two discovery missions it plans to launch in 2021 and 2023. Lucy, the first mission, will explore Jupiter\u2019s Trojan asteroids, while the second, called Psyche, will focus on a unique metal asteroid. Photo: NASA- SwRI and SSL/Peter Rubin ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Thousands still need rescuing as aid agencies struggle with aftermath of Cyclone Idai (WP: Africa) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8229",
        "date": "2019-03-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/thousands-still-need-rescuing-as-aid-agencies-struggle-with-cyclone-aftermath-in-mozambique/2019/03/21/c5b2eaba-4b51-11e9-8cfc-2c5d0999c21e_story.html",
        "text": "BEIRA, Mozambique \u2014 Rain and widespread devastation hampered rescue operations Thursday as underequipped aid agencies struggled to cope with the extensive damage inflicted on central Mozambique by Cyclone Idai, which has killed at least 500 people here and in Zimbabwe and Malawi.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSatellite images from the European Space Agency still show a vast inland sea of more than 1,000 square miles stretching away from the port town of Beira, where the cyclone landed Friday. The storm shattered this town of a half-million people, who already suffered from poor infrastructure. \u201cIt\u2019s quite tragic what we\u2019re seeing,\u201d said Hugo Du Plessis, an aviation operations official for the World Food Program. \u201cMy pilots are telling me that people are still up in trees, but so are snakes. Imagine, having to choose between a snake and drowning.\u201dMozambique officials said March 21 that more than 200 people had died and an estimated 15,000 still needed to be rescued after Cyclone Idai hit the country. (Reuters)Though the waters are slowly receding, they are waist-level in many areas, and tens of thousands of people are still stranded, with aid agencies estimating that 400,000 people have lost their homes and will need to be housed in emergency shelters.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLand and Environment Minister Celso Correia told journalists Thursday that the death toll in Mozambique was 242, while 15,000 people still needed to be rescued. So far, 3,000 have been saved. Zimbabwe\u2019s defense minister said Thursday that the death toll in his country was 259. An additional 56 are believed to have died in neighboring Malawi.There are fears that the toll could soar into the thousands once some of the more-remote affected areas are reached.\u201cOur biggest fight is against the clock,\u201d Correia told a news conference, adding that rescuers are working 24 hours a day. \u201cThe situation is still critical.\u201dThe plan is ultimately to create vast camps to house the displaced, but the immediate goal, six days after the cyclone hit, was simply to rescue people and feed them.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe grand plan is to set up two mega camps,\u201d said Gerald Bourke, a spokesman for WFP. \u201cThe question is how to get people there. There\u2019s talk of using a combination of boats and helicopters.\u201dAdvertisementFor now, the aid agencies and local authorities struggling to help people are woefully underequipped, with just two U.N. helicopters that arrived from Uganda and South Africa and one cargo aircraft. There is also an urgent need for flat-bottomed boats to venture out into the flooded areas to find people.Choppy seas and washed-out roads have made getting the necessary equipment to Beira difficult.Most of the rescues have been carried out by the overburdened helicopters, which can take up to 30 people at a time.The Indian navy was the first to provide major sea power to the rescue effort, diverting three ships from a mission in Mauritius.Story continues below advertisementA navy official, P.S. Sugesh, said that personnel began by training local commercial fishermen in rescue techniques, and that the naval operation and the locals\u2019 effort had rescued about 300 people each. Still, the going has been tough, and constant rain and the full moon have made Beira\u2019s drastic tides even more unpredictable.Advertisement\u201cIn the first few days, we saw many dead bodies in the water,\u201d said Sugesh. \u201cIt is hard to say how many, but the numbers will go up. The bodies are all in the sea, so it will take weeks or even years to know the real number.\u201dOn a flight operated by Mission Aviation Fellowship delivering tents and sanitation kits to Beira on behalf of Save the Children, the extent of the damage came into stark relief.Vast stretches of farmland were inundated. The region\u2019s mango trees, apparently weaker than its palms, were uprooted as if a comb had run through them, plucking them out of the ground. Roads gave way to gushing, muddy water, and the debris of thousands of tin roofs was everywhere.The area\u2019s endless cornfields were flattened, ruined right on the verge of harvest. The annihilation of the crop by the floods ensures a prolonged humanitarian crisis here.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDave Holmes, the flight\u2019s pilot, once surveyed floods for the U.S. Geological Survey, including the epic ones that followed Hurricane Floyd in North Carolina in 1999. \u201cThat was nothing compared to this,\u201d he said, banking his Cessna left. \u201cFlying over this is intimidating. This feels like flying out into the sea.\u201dWhile the port of Beira itself has reopened, allowing in much-needed supplies such as fuel, signs of the damage to the city are everywhere. Metal sheeting from roofs lies in piles, and trees have been robbed of their leaves and branches. The aid agency Oxfam said 90\u00a0percent of the city was underwater.\u201cFood prices are skyrocketing,\u201d Rotafina Donco, Oxfam country director for Mozambique, said in a statement. Some people in transit camps have not eaten for days, she added.Story continues below advertisementThere were some positive developments Thursday. The first regular container ship left ",
        "author": "Max Bearak"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Big Idea and a Big Donor Bring a New Art Museum to Austria (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8230",
        "date": "2020-03-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/arts/design/albertina-modern-vienna.html",
        "text": "The Albertina Modern, a satellite of the venerable Vienna institution, aims to highlight overlooked Austrian artists in a newly restored historic building. The Albertina Modern, a satellite of the venerable Vienna institution, aims to highlight overlooked Austrian artists in a newly restored historic building. VIENNA \u2014 Amid hammering and drilling, works by the Austrian artists Valie Export, Arnulf Rainer and G\u00fcnter Brus waited quietly in a row against a white wall, ready to be hung.",
        "author": "By Kimberly Bradley"
    },
    {
        "title": "At the Hayden Planetarium, a Joyride Across the Cosmos (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8231",
        "date": "2018-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/arts/mars-hayden-planetarium-solar-system.html",
        "text": "The planetarium has a multimillion dollar project that uses computers and satellite images to simulate a flight to distant galaxies. The planetarium has a multimillion dollar project that uses computers and satellite images to simulate a flight to distant galaxies. Carter Emmart used to want to go to space. Now he does, all the time \u2014 but virtually. And he likes to share.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "At the Hayden Planetarium, a Joyride Across the Cosmos (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8232",
        "date": "2018-03-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/arts/mars-hayden-planetarium-solar-system.html",
        "text": "The planetarium has a multimillion dollar project that uses computers and satellite images to simulate a flight to distant galaxies. The planetarium has a multimillion dollar project that uses computers and satellite images to simulate a flight to distant galaxies. Carter Emmart used to want to go to space. Now he does, all the time \u2014 but virtually. And he likes to share.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "When Science Fiction Comes True (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8233",
        "date": "2019-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/books/review/namwali-serpell.html",
        "text": "Sci-fi writers gave us satellite communication, army tanks, tablets, CCTV and the internet \u2014 before these things existed in real life. What explains their powers of foresight? Sci-fi writers gave us satellite communication, army tanks, tablets, CCTV and the internet \u2014 before these things existed in real life. What explains their powers of foresight? Maybe because we\u2019re living in a dystopia, it feels as if we\u2019ve become obsessed with prophecy of late. Protest signs at the 2017 Women\u2019s March read \u201cMake Margaret Atwood Fiction Again!\u201d and \u201cOctavia Warned Us.\u201d News headlines about abortion bans and the defunding of Planned Parenthood do seem ripped from the pages of Atwood\u2019s novel \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale\u201d (1985). And Octavia Butler\u2019s \u201cParable\u201d series, published in the 1990s, did eerily feature a presidential candidate who vows to \u201cmake America great again.\u201d",
        "author": "By Namwali Serpell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellite imagery shows the scale of the traffic congestion at the ports of Los Angeles (WP: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8234",
        "date": "2021-09-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/17/port-los-angeles-satellite/",
        "text": "Traffic jams are nothing new for Southern California. But what\u2019s happening at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach is truly historic. Record demand for imported goods, beginning in mid-2020, coupled with shortages of truckers, shipping containers and other equipment, has slowed ship unloading and left dozens of vessels waiting offshore. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSatellite images, collected from the European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel 2 satellite show typical congestion before and during the pandemic. Each dot on the graphic below shows an unscientific census of ships large enough to see from space. Each image is from the middle of the month.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tShips visible in\n\t\t\tsatellite image\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t5 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSep. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLos Angeles\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tShips visible in\n\t\t\tsatellite image\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t5 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSep. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLos Angeles\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tShips visible in\n\t\t\tsatellite image\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t5 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSep. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLos Angeles\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tShips visible in\n\t\t\tsatellite image\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t5 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSep. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tLos Angeles\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tShips visible in\n\t\t\tsatellite image\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t5 MILES\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2019\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSep. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNov. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDec. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOct. 2020\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJan. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMay. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tFeb. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tMarch 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApril 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJune 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tJuly 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAug. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSept. 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom ports to rail yards, global supply lines struggle amid virus outbreaks in the developing worldThe L.A.-Long Beach port complex is the principal gateway for products that American consumers and businesses buy from Asia. It is also Exhibit A for the supply chain issues that are dogging the economic recovery.Ship placements are approximations based on satellite imagery and placed manually. Clouds and other imagery issues can result in undercounts.David Lynch contributed to this report.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement Satellite images show congestion at the L.A.-Long Beach port complex. Record demand for imported goods, beginning in mid-2020, coupled with shortages of truckers, shipping containers and other equipment, has slowed ship unloading and left dozens of vessels waiting offshore. Satellite imagery shows the scale of the traffic congestion at the ports of Los Angeles",
        "author": "Tim Meko"
    },
    {
        "title": "Britain Is Getting Ready for Its Space Race (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8235",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/business/britain-satellites-brexit.html",
        "text": "Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. Cornwall, in England\u2019s far southwest, is known for antique fishing villages and snug, cliff-lined beaches. Soon it may be the scene of something very different: a small but growing space industry.",
        "author": "By Stanley Reed"
    },
    {
        "title": "Britain Is Getting Ready for Its Space Race (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8236",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/business/britain-satellites-brexit.html",
        "text": "Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. Cornwall, in England\u2019s far southwest, is known for antique fishing villages and snug, cliff-lined beaches. Soon it may be the scene of something very different: a small but growing space industry.",
        "author": "By Stanley Reed"
    },
    {
        "title": "Britain Is Getting Ready for Its Space Race (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8237",
        "date": "2020-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/business/britain-satellites-brexit.html",
        "text": "Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. Spurred by Brexit, London is backing companies that will build satellites and haul them into orbit. Cornwall, in England\u2019s far southwest, is known for antique fishing villages and snug, cliff-lined beaches. Soon it may be the scene of something very different: a small but growing space industry.",
        "author": "By Stanley Reed"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Apollo 11 Mission Was Also a Global Media Sensation (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8238",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/business/media/apollo-11-television-media.html",
        "text": "The satellites were finally ready to beam images back to Earth in 1969. And some 600 million people watched the event live. The satellites were finally ready to beam images back to Earth in 1969. And some 600 million people watched the event live. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Tiffany Hsu"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Apollo 11 Mission Was Also a Global Media Sensation (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8239",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/business/media/apollo-11-television-media.html",
        "text": "The satellites were finally ready to beam images back to Earth in 1969. And some 600 million people watched the event live. The satellites were finally ready to beam images back to Earth in 1969. And some 600 million people watched the event live. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Tiffany Hsu"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Apollo 11 Mission Was Also a Global Media Sensation (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8240",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/business/media/apollo-11-television-media.html",
        "text": "The satellites were finally ready to beam images back to Earth in 1969. And some 600 million people watched the event live. The satellites were finally ready to beam images back to Earth in 1969. And some 600 million people watched the event live. [Read all Times reporting on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. | Sign up for the weekly Science Times email.]",
        "author": "By Tiffany Hsu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellite Images Find \u2018Substantial\u2019 Oil Spill in Gulf After Ida (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8241",
        "date": "2021-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/climate/oil-spill-hurricane-ida.html",
        "text": "Satellite and aerial survey images show oil spreading off the coast of an oil and gas hub in Louisiana. Satellite and aerial survey images show oil spreading off the coast of an oil and gas hub in Louisiana. Cleanup crews are working to contain what experts called a substantial oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to an examination of satellite and aerial survey images, ship tracking data and interviews with local officials and others involved in the spill response.",
        "author": "By Hiroko Tabuchi and Blacki Migliozzi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellite Images Find \u2018Substantial\u2019 Oil Spill in Gulf After Ida (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8242",
        "date": "2021-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/climate/oil-spill-hurricane-ida.html",
        "text": "Satellite and aerial survey images show oil spreading off the coast of an oil and gas hub in Louisiana. Satellite and aerial survey images show oil spreading off the coast of an oil and gas hub in Louisiana. Cleanup crews are working to contain what experts called a substantial oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to an examination of satellite and aerial survey images, ship tracking data and interviews with local officials and others involved in the spill response.",
        "author": "By Hiroko Tabuchi and Blacki Migliozzi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellite Images Find \u2018Substantial\u2019 Oil Spill in Gulf After Ida (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8243",
        "date": "2021-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/climate/oil-spill-hurricane-ida.html",
        "text": "Satellite and aerial survey images show oil spreading off the coast of an oil and gas hub in Louisiana. Satellite and aerial survey images show oil spreading off the coast of an oil and gas hub in Louisiana. Cleanup crews are working to contain what experts called a substantial oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to an examination of satellite and aerial survey images, ship tracking data and interviews with local officials and others involved in the spill response.",
        "author": "By Hiroko Tabuchi and Blacki Migliozzi"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Eye in the Sky Could Detect Planet-Warming Plumes on the Ground (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8244",
        "date": "2018-04-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/climate/methane-monitoring-satellite.html",
        "text": "An environmental group says it will spend millions to launch a satellite that could help fight climate change by identifying methane leaks with pinpoint accuracy. An environmental group says it will spend millions to launch a satellite that could help fight climate change by identifying methane leaks with pinpoint accuracy. Tom Ingersoll, a longtime satellite entrepreneur, admits being startled by a call he received last year: A nonprofit foundation wanted to build a satellite and launch it into orbit to help fight climate change. \u201cI thought, \u2018Wow, that\u2019s kind of crazy.\u2019\u201d",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Trouble With Florence, and a New Set of Eyes in Space (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8245",
        "date": "2018-09-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/climate/climate-fwd-hurricane-florence.html",
        "text": "This week: A look at what kind of trouble the record-breaking rainfall from Hurricane Florence might cause, a new climate satellite, and one thing you can do. This week: A look at what kind of trouble the record-breaking rainfall from Hurricane Florence might cause, a new climate satellite, and one thing you can do.  Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellites Could Help Track if Nations Keep Their Carbon Pledges (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8246",
        "date": "2021-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/climate/satellites-carbon-dioxide.html",
        "text": "Scientists used satellite measurements of carbon dioxide to detect small atmospheric reductions over areas under coronavirus lockdowns. The approach could help track emissions more quickly in the future. Scientists used satellite measurements of carbon dioxide to detect small atmospheric reductions over areas under coronavirus lockdowns. The approach could help track emissions more quickly in the future. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming, nations must measure and report progress toward their pledged reductions in emissions. They regularly submit greenhouse gas inventories, detailing emission sources as well as removals, or sinks, of the gases within their borders. These are then reviewed by technical experts.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "How satellites could help hold countries to emissions promises made at COP26 summit  (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8247",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/09/cop26-satellites-emissions/",
        "text": "GLASGOW, Scotland \u2014 On a recent day inside the sprawling conference center where United Nations climate talks are taking place, a small crowd gathered to hear a panel with an intriguing title: \u201cThe Space Race to Save the Planet.\u201d10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightIt wasn\u2019t, despite the name, a tale of science fiction. Rather, the event was about satellites and the promising ways that scientists are using them to track greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. \u201cIf you had told me this a decade ago, you could have knocked me over with a feather,\u201d Riley Duren, a University of Arizona research scientist and engineering fellow at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said of the boom in emissions-monitoring satellites.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is becoming real,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is real. And it\u2019s super exciting.\u201dSentinels in the sky reveal how Russia's methane leaks imperil planet's climate goalsPreviously, scientists were forced to rely largely on estimates of greenhouse gas emissions, based on formulas that take into account the burning of fossil fuel and industrial and agricultural activities, among other contributors. But the proliferation of satellites is further enabling measurements of greenhouse gases in the air, around the globe. That\u2019s helping to pinpoint emissions sources and to hold countries and corporations accountable for their climate promises.Advertisement\u201cThere\u2019s an old cliche that I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard a million times: that you can only manage what you can measure,\u201d former vice president Al Gore said at an event on the sidelines of the COP26 climate summit. Gore is behind Climate Trace, a coalition of nonprofits and academic institutions using satellite imagery and machine learning to bring what he told The Washington Post will be \u201ca new regime of radical transparency.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe halls of COP26, as might be expected, are peppered with new innovations that promise to help combat climate change. There\u2019s a hydrogen-powered ambulance on display, not far from the world\u2019s first electric two-seat Formula racecar. There are technologies aimed at making farms more sustainable and others to help reduce food waste.But both here and outside in the real world, satellites are increasingly seen as a critical tool to locate, measure and disclose the extent of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Governments have launched them and have plans to launch more. Private companies and advocacy groups are pursuing the new frontier, too, as are data analytics firms focused on interpreting vast amounts of atmospheric information.AdvertisementAt its pavilion inside the summit, Japan has a display on the half-dozen satellites its space agency maintains to observe land, ocean and atmospheric changes.Story continues below advertisementThe European Space Agency also used the summit as a chance to showcase the \u201cunprecedented\u201d insights its satellites are already providing about the planet, including reams of data about greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.\u201cEarth observation is playing a key role in enabling the international community to determine the progress made toward the [Paris] agreement,\u201d the agency said.Countries\u2019 climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation findsThe ever-growing number of sentinels in the sky \u2014 with more in the pipeline \u2014 has begun to offer revealing glimpses into the sources and scale of greenhouse gas pollution. One key example: methane.\u201cOur world is rapidly becoming a place in which methane emissions will have nowhere to hide,\u201d Columbia University researchers wrote in October 2020 in a paper detailing the fast-moving push to more accurately monitor emissions from space and to make it tougher for those emitting greenhouse gases to shield them from public view.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn particular, the group wrote, the \u201cpoor grasp of methane emissions appears likely to become a thing of the past.\u201d The report found that over the next five years, new satellite systems, in concert with measurements taken from airplanes and ground-based monitors, \u201ccan increase markedly the transparency surrounding methane leakage.\u201dThose planes and monitoring systems on the ground have been helpful in taking measurements within countries and regions. But satellites offer a far more holistic picture.\u201cIf this were a truly local or regional or national problem, you wouldn\u2019t necessarily need a satellite to do this,\u201d said Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy at the Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group. \u201cThe satellite becomes important because it allows you to gather data efficiently and routinely on a global scale.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome methane-detecting satellites act like wide-angle lenses, sweeping around the globe day after day and gathering massive amounts of data that can help scientists flag significant sources of the climate-warming gas.The most prominent example is the European Space Agency\u2019s Sentinel-5P, which was launched in 2017. The hexagonal device, weighing in at nearly 500 pounds, relies on solar wings in orbit. It circles the globe 14 times a day from 500 miles above the surface, continuously taking measurements of a 1,600-mile swath of the Earth\u2019s surface. It covers the entire surface of the Earth roughly twice a month, providing key information on a range of atmospheric gases that affect air quality and climate.Other satellites act more like a telephoto lens, able to zoom in on a more granular level to pinpoint emissions from particular facilities. One company pioneering that approach is Canada-based GHGSat, which in January launched the second in a fleet of 10 high-resolution satellites it plans to eventually have in orbit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re literally seeing individual sites,\u201d including a single coal mine or gas well, the company\u2019s chief executive, Stephane Germain, said in an interview with The Post this year.That sort of close-up view can help the company\u2019s customers, which include oil and gas companies, identify and repair existing methane leaks. But it also can help offer regulators more visibility into sites in need of oversight.At the COP26 event, Germain added that the private firm recently released a collection of its data from its first five years in operation.\u201cIt starts to show some pretty alarming trends,\u201d Germain said. \u201cWe have seen, just in the last year, dramatic acceleration in emissions of methane from oil and gas, and a dramatic acceleration in emissions of coal. \u2026 The patterns are very clear.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe proliferation of satellites is set to continue at a dizzying pace over the coming years.AdvertisementIn 2022, after years of planning and construction, EDF plans to launch MethaneSat, a system able to identify methane emissions across a broad geographic area, as well as measure leaks at predetermined locations. The group says the satellite will be able to regularly monitor regions that account for more than 80 percent of global oil and gas production and quantify the emissions rate of specific sources of methane.In April, California announced Carbon Mapper, a public-private partnership with NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Earth observation firm Planet that plans to launch satellites into orbit to track emissions of greenhouse gases. Duren, who is in charge of the project, says he believes it will help fill in gaps in knowledge and lead to actionable information about specific sources \u2014 from landfills and dairy farms to leaky oil and gas wells.Story continues below advertisementThe U.S. government also has plans to step up monitoring. This spring, President Biden announced a NASA-led effort to collect more-sophisticated climate data in coming years. NASA already has plans in 2024 to launch the Geostationary Carbon Observatory, or GeoCarb \u2014 a satellite that will be perched 22,000 miles above the Americas and will collect millions of daily observations about concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases.AdvertisementIt is not just the physical satellites that have led to more insight into the world\u2019s emissions, but also more-sophisticated analyses of the data they collect.The French firm Kayrros, for example, has used data from Europe\u2019s Sentinel-5P to spot methane \u201csuper-emitters\u201d in different parts of the globe \u2014 including a massive, leaking landfill in Bangladesh and a startling methane plume over gas fields in Alberta, Canada, and Appalachian coal mines.Less than a decade ago, \u201cyou had no clue where the methane was coming from,\u201d Antoine Halff, Kayrros\u2019s chief analyst and co-founder, told The Post. \u201cNow, it\u2019s really night and day. \u2026 The technology is a game changer.\u201dHe and others acknowledge that plenty of work remains and limitations exist.Cloud cover can thwart satellite measurements. And no one device covers every corner of the Earth all the time, potentially allowing large but intermittent leaks to go undetected. The surveillance system, for now, also remains a patchwork of sorts, but one that is quickly improving.Advertisement\u201cThere is no Swiss army knife to solve this problem; these sources are so different,\u201d Duren said at the Glasgow panel. \u201cYou need different observing systems to be able to get the whole elephant.\u201dBut with each passing year, scientists are doing more to bring the elephant into view and to provide what EDF\u2019s chief scientist, Steven Hamburg, calls \u201cpolicy-relevant\u201d data that leaders cannot ignore.\u201cThat isn\u2019t to say the technology is totally there, but over the last few years, it\u2019s gotten so much better,\u201d said Hamburg. \u201cIn two years, it will look different than it does now. The revolution is ongoing and rapid.\u201dSign up for the latest news about climate change, energy and the environment, delivered every Thursday The proliferation of satellites is helping to pinpoint emissions sources and to hold countries and corporations accountable. How satellites could help hold countries to emissions promises made at COP26 summit ",
        "author": "Brady Dennis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The Amazon is in flames. But Brazil\u2019s past can show the path forward. (WP: Global Opinions) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8248",
        "date": "2019-08-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/22/amazon-is-flames-brazils-past-can-show-path-forward/",
        "text": "Ruth DeFries is the Denning university professor of sustainable development at Columbia University, a MacArthur fellow and the author of \u201cThe Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis.\u201d Doug Morton is chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center. The views expressed are their own. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightJust over 16 years ago, on a sweltering day along the southeastern fringe of the Amazon forest, we sat down to catch our breath on a half-burnt log. Plumes of smoke on the horizon wafted to the sky, and the sound of chainsaws whirred in the distance. We couldn\u2019t have known that we were sitting in a time and place that was rapidly approaching peak deforestation this century in the Amazon. It was July 2003 in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.Leer en espa\u00f1olThat moment comes to mind this week, with reports that Brazil\u2019s Amazon has experienced a record number of fires this year \u2014 the result of both drier conditions and intentional burning to clear the forest. As smoke from deforestation fires blankets the Amazon once more, those in power have responded by attacking government scientists and attempting to bury facts that the satellite record makes clear. But lessons from Brazil\u2019s own past highlight the importance of these data \u2014 and could show the path forward.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn 2003, we were on a mission with our colleagues from the Brazilian space agency, INPE, as part of a collaboration between U.S. and Brazilian scientists. The goal was to understand how the Amazon forest stores massive amounts of carbon that would otherwise trap heat in the atmosphere and how trees recycle water into clouds that sustain forests and water crops far away.Before we headed into the field, we had huddled with our Brazilian colleagues around computers to analyze data from a recently launched satellite that sent images of the forest every day. The new data were full of promise, suggesting it might be possible to shrink the time between a chainsaw crew cutting a forest tract and INPE\u2019s ability to map where that deforestation occurred. With older satellites, the gap between the event and the information could be weeks or months.Could we trust the algorithms? The only way to find out was to see for ourselves. So we marked on a map the places to check. After crossing rivers on shaky wooden bridges, changing numerous flat tires and pushing vehicles out of the sand, we arrived at one of the spots marked on the map. Sure enough, a thick chain dragged between two tractors had ripped out the trees by their roots. At a second spot, piles of dead trees still smoldered. A third spot also had telltale signs of recent deforestation. And a fourth, fifth and sixth. Each clearing was as big as an Iowa cornfield. The algorithm was spot on.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs we sat on the log, we looked at each other in dismay. We were thrilled with the accuracy of the algorithm, but distraught at what it meant. Pasture for cattle and fields for soy to ship to Europe and Asia were replacing towering trees. Satellite images provided the big picture. The Amazon forest was disappearing before our eyes.Our Brazilian colleagues put their technical skill and dedication to their mandate into action. For decades, the Brazilian government has had the best system in the world to track its forests. INPE\u2019s estimates are the gold standard to officially document changes in the forest. The key has been transparency: Satellite images, methods and results are all shared with the world. And their work made a difference. Data alone cannot keep the forest standing, but without data, even the best policies cannot go into action.In the following years, deforestation rates plunged with government policies that combined carrots and sticks for ranchers and farmers. The tired rationale that standing forests get in the way of progress toppled. With better-managed pastures and fields, ranchers and farmers produced even more beef and soy despite restrictions on new clearings. Brazil became the shining example for other countries blessed with vast remaining tracts of lush tropical forest. Tracking deforestation from satellites became nearly as routine as an annual checkup.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the seemingly pervasive shift in political winds, the shining model of Brazil\u2019s success is losing its sheen. Deforestation is inching upward, an observable fact known from INPE\u2019s own system and other sources. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro \u2014 who has made opposition to environmental policies a pillar of his platform \u2014 doesn\u2019t like these facts. Because the reality gets in the way of unearthing valuable minerals, satisfying the clamor for cash crops and building massive infrastructure, he is using the all-too-familiar tactic of claiming truth is a lie and cutting off the fact-checkers. Yet this comes at great cost.In the years since we sat on the log at the edge of the deforestation frontier, Brazil demonstrated to the world that effective policies can curb the damage. But our planet\u2019s most vital assets can never be completely safe from political upheavals that reverse course on earlier gains. Successes take years of hard work and technical expertise from many talented people, such as our INPE colleagues. As the chainsaws buzz once again, we stand in solidarity with the truth \u2014 the satellite record of forest loss for the world to see.Read more:The Post\u2019s View: Without the Amazon, the planet is doomedDeb Haaland and Jo\u00eania Wapichana: Protecting indigenous lands protects the environment. Trump and Bolsonaro threaten both.Raphael Tsavkko Garcia: Brazil\u2019s democracy suffers another blow with \u2018Operation Car Wash\u2019 leaksThe Post\u2019s View: Will Jair Bolsonaro rip up environmental protections and endanger the Amazon? As the chainsaws buzz once again, we stand in solidarity with the truth \u2014 the satellite record of forest loss for the world to see. Opinion: The Amazon is in flames. But Brazil\u2019s past can show the path forward.",
        "author": "Ruth DeFries"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Italygate\u2019 election conspiracy theory was pushed by two firms led by woman who also falsely claimed $30 million mansion was hers (WP: Investigations) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8249",
        "date": "2021-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/italygate-michele-edwards-meadows-trump/2021/06/19/2f6314d2-d05f-11eb-8014-2f3926ca24d9_story.html",
        "text": "Late last December, as President Donald Trump pressed senior officials to find proof of election fraud, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows emailed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen a letter detailing an outlandish theory of how an Italian defense contractor had conspired with U.S. intelligence to rig the 2020 presidential contest. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe letter, which was among records released by Congress this past week, was printed under the letterhead of USAerospace Partners, a little-known Virginia aviation company. In early January, a second Virginia firm, the Institute for Good Governance, and a partner organization released a statement from an Italian attorney who claimed that a hacker had admitted involvement in the supposed conspiracy.According to the conspiracy theory known as \u201cItalygate,\u201d people working for the Italian defense contractor, in coordination with senior CIA officials, used military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden and swing the result of the election.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough her name was not mentioned in either document, both Virginia organizations are led by Michele Roosevelt Edwards, according to state corporate filings reviewed by The Washington Post. Edwards is a former Republican congressional candidate who built a reputation as an advocate for the Somali people and as someone who could negotiate with warlords and pirates in the war-torn region.Edwards was formerly known as Michele Ballarin but changed her name last year, court records show. In 2013, The Post\u2019s magazine explored how Edwards, once a struggling single mom, had reinvented herself as a business executive and then as a well-connected horse-country socialite who cultivated ties with senior Somali officials.The Institute for Good Governance\u2019s registered headquarters since late last year has been the historical North Wales Farm, a 22-bedroom mansion in Warrenton, Va., state records show. The property is listed for sale at just under $30 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOn the day after the 2020 election, Edwards sat for an interview at North Wales with a television crew from Iceland, where she has business interests. Edwards told the crew that the estate was her property, according to their footage. \u201cThis is my bedroom,\u201d she said, showing the crew around. \u201cThis is very private space.\u201dShe was pressed on the lack of personal items in the house.\u201cSo this is where you live?\u201d she was asked.\u201cYes.\u201d\u201cThis is your property?\u201d\u201cYes.\u201dWhen the interviewer noted that website listings showed the property for sale, Edwards said it was a \u201crecent acquisition for us.\u201d She said it was not for sale.But North Wales was then \u2014 and is now \u2014 owned by a company formed by David B. Ford, a retired financier who died in September. Ford\u2019s widow said in an interview that she did not know Edwards. The Post showed her the footage of Edwards inside the property.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cShe\u2019s in my house,\u201d the widow said. \u201cHow is she in my house?\u201dThe North Wales mansion was for sale at the time, and Edwards was a licensed Realtor in the area, according to the firm\u2019s website. Hers was not the firm Ford\u2019s widow had hired to sell the property.Edwards declined to comment. \u201cI am not giving media interviews at this time,\u201d she said in a text message.In November 2020, businesswoman Michele Roosevelt Edwards gave a television crew from Iceland a tour of what she claimed was her home in Warrenton, Va. (R\u00daV \u201cKveikur\u201d)The discovery of the role Edwards\u2019s two firms had in spreading the Italygate conspiracy theory, as well as the roles others played, sheds new light on its origins and on how the claims made their way from feverish online speculation to some of the most powerful figures in the government. As Trump refused to concede defeat, his die-hard supporters pushed the conspiracy theory on social media and other channels as part of an effort to discredit Biden\u2019s presidency that continues today.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementProsecutors in Rome told The Post that they are now investigating whether false claims were made against the Italian defense contractor. The prosecutor\u2019s office said it was examining \u201cvarious subjects, both Italian and non-Italian.\u201d A conservative Italian news site owned by a politician who has written about Italygate reported this month that the politician and Edwards are among those under investigation.Italygate appears to be partly rooted in a news article published on Dec. 1 by the Italian newspaper La Verit\u00e0. In the article, Daniele Capezzone, a reporter and TV commentator described as \u201cthe Sean Hannity of the Italian press\u201d by some Italygate proponents, wrote that Trump\u2019s team was investigating whether an official in the U.S. Embassy in Rome conspired with an unnamed Italian defense contractor to manipulate the U.S. election.Bradley Johnson, a Virginia-based commentator on intelligence matters who says he is a retired senior CIA officer, then advanced a version of the theory in a video interview recorded on Dec. 5 and later posted online. Johnson identified the defense contractor involved as Leonardo, an Italian firm that was coincidentally in the news that day because two men had been arrested in an unrelated hacking case involving the company.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLeonardo did not respond to questions from The Post.Johnson cited Capezzone as his source. But Capezzone told The Post in an email that he did not identify Leonardo as the contractor in his reporting, and said that Johnson had not contacted him.Johnson did not respond to phone calls, messages sent via LinkedIn and the website of his nonprofit, Americans for Intelligence Reform, or to a letter left at the nonprofit\u2019s office in Manassas, Va.In the wake of Johnson\u2019s video, Italygate began to gather momentum. Maria Strollo Zack, a Republican operative from Georgia who has embraced the conspiracy theory, told The Post that she has been in contact with Johnson about it.Story continues below advertisementZack, 57, has said in interviews with right-wing media outlets that she told Trump about the conspiracy theory on Christmas Eve at Mar-a-Lago, the president\u2019s private club in Palm Beach, Fla.AdvertisementZack, who formed a super PAC that backed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in the 2016 presidential campaign, said on a conference call with supporters that Trump\u2019s second wife, Marla Maples, and their daughter, Tiffany, helped Zack and her husband obtain invitations to the club. A woman who identified herself as Maples was on the call.Representatives for Maples and Tiffany Trump did not respond to questions. Zack told The Post that she had a \u201cpersonal friendship\u201d with them.Story continues below advertisementIn Zack\u2019s telling, Trump wished her a Merry Christmas, and she used that opening to pass him a written note about Italy and the promise of a whistleblower who knew of the scheme to flip votes. \u201cWe know the guy who did it and how he did it,\u201d she said she told Trump, according to an interview on a talk show broadcast by the Reno, Nev.-based outlet America Matters Media.AdvertisementOn Christmas Eve, Zack\u2019s husband posted a photograph of Trump to Facebook that he indicated was taken at Mar-a-Lago, but The Post was unable to confirm Zack\u2019s version of events there. Zack claimed in a second media interview that Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Trump\u2019s personal attorney, called her the following morning to set up a meeting to discuss her claims.A spokeswoman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment. Messages left for Giuliani\u2019s attorneys seeking comment were not returned.Story continues below advertisementOn Dec. 29, Meadows sent Rosen the letter from Edwards\u2019s company, USAerospace Partners. The letter was written in Italian and signed by Carlo Goria, who was identified in past news releases as a company contact. USAerospace said last year that it was interested in buying the troubled Italian airline Alitalia, and suggested it would \u201cmake Alitalia great again.\u201dAdvertisementGoria did not respond to messages. In a story published Saturday, Talking Points Memo reported that, in a brief interview, Edwards denied any knowledge of the letter.Several current and former Trump advisers said they were shocked that Meadows would pass along such a fantastical conspiracy theory, but one former senior administration official said Meadows \u201cbought into some of the more bizarre claims and would push them to the president as well.\u201d The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.It was not clear from the emails released by Congress how Meadows obtained the USAerospace letter. A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment.On New Year\u2019s Day, Meadows sent Rosen a link to a video of Johnson, who has said he served as a CIA station chief, discussing Italygate. On Jan.\u00a04, Zack held the conference call with supporters, the audio of which was posted online. Zack told The Post that the call was with volunteers for her Florida-based nonprofit, Nations in Action.On the call, Zack claimed that she had also supplied documents to senior White House adviser Peter Navarro. In an email to The Post, Navarro said this was \u201cnot accurate.\u201dOn Jan. 6, Zack\u2019s nonprofit released a statement claiming that it had conducted an election-fraud investigation with the Institute for Good Governance \u2014 Edwards\u2019s Virginia-based group \u2014 and that their efforts had \u201cyielded the long awaited proof that a flawless plot to take down America was executed with extraordinary resources and global involvement.\u201dEdwards, 65, has charted a colorful path in and around Washington. She has founded several businesses in fields including security, investment management and aviation.After she married Edward Golden, a real estate executive, and had a son, Edwards ran for Congress as a Republican in West Virginia in 1986 but lost in the general election.After that marriage ended, she married Iginio Ballarin, a New York restaurant maitre d\u2019, with whom she owns a farmhouse in Markham, Va. Edwards is registered to vote as a Republican at a condominium in Palm Beach, Fla., state records show.Because of her efforts to bring stability to Somalia, beginning nearly two decades ago, Somalis came to refer to her as Amira, which means \u201cprincess\u201d in Arabic, The Post\u2019s magazine story reported. In 2009, the Somali president named her \u201cpresidential advisor for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.\u201d She claimed to have played pivotal roles in securing the release of hostages.Yet a diplomatic cable released as part of a trove posted online by WikiLeaks revealed that, in 2009, Ukraine\u2019s foreign minister had complained to U.S. officials that Edwards was hindering efforts to negotiate with Somali pirates who had captured a ship and its crew. One retired naval intelligence officer who partnered with Edwards during the 2008 to 2010 period was quoted in The Post story as saying: \u201cThe problem with Michele is separating fact from fiction. What is real, and what is made up?\u201dIn September 2019, Edwards announced that her USAerospace group had bought the assets of Iceland\u2019s bankrupt airline Wow Air and said it would soon resume flights. It has not.Asked by The Post how she came to work with Edwards, Zack said in an email: \u201cThis is an ongoing investigation and we do not disclose information on our methods and sources.\u201dTheir joint news release linked to a copy of a sworn statement signed by a Sicily-based lawyer, Alfio D\u2019Urso. In that document, D\u2019Urso said he knew from a \u201chigh level army security services official\u201d that one of the alleged hackers in the unrelated case had told a judge that he had undertaken an operation to flip votes from Trump to Biden \u2014 and that he had done so at the direction of Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.Nicola Naponiello, an attorney for the alleged hacker, told The Post that this was false and that neither he nor his client had ever heard of D\u2019Urso. \u201cHe\u2019s not accused of anything connected to that,\u201d Naponiello said of his client. Naponiello, who previously spoke to Reuters, said the whole story was a \u201cclassic fake\u201d into which his client had inexplicably been dragged.D\u2019Urso did not respond to emails and messages left with his office.The news release from the Zack and Edwards groups also linked to a PDF copy of a story about Italygate from an Italian news site. Edwards\u2019s name appears in the PDF\u2019s metadata as the creator.Chatter about the conspiracy theory exploded among Trump\u2019s base. Among other influential figures, the former Trump advisers Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos \u2014 both of whom Trump pardoned for lying to the FBI during the inquiry into Russia\u2019s 2016 election interference \u2014 posted about the conspiracy theory on Twitter. \u201cItaly did it,\u201d Flynn wrote.In appearances on right-wing online media, Zack has said she tried to raise the alarm by reaching out to members of Congress and others in Washington, including Christopher C. Miller, then the acting defense secretary. Miller was \u201cvery involved,\u201d Zack claimed in an interview with America Matters Media in April. \u201cThere were a lot of people working hard to help us,\u201d she said.Miller was aware of the claims but did not believe them and considered them \u201cfabricated,\u201d according to a former Defense Department official familiar with the situation. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter\u2019s sensitivity.Zack said she is still pushing for law enforcement to investigate the allegations. \u201cIt is the duty of the Department of Justice to ensure the US election was free of foreign interference and election fraud,\u201d she said in an email.Others, however, are unconvinced.\u201cPure insanity,\u201d Justice Department official Richard Donoghue wrote to his boss, Rosen, after Meadows sent his emails containing the claims, the records released by Congress show.Even Capezzone, the Italian journalist whose Dec. 1 article set off speculation about the conspiracy theory, said he has since concluded that it was false. In an email to The Post, Capezzone said Italygate was \u201cfake news, a conspiracy theory, [a] poisoned chalice.\u201d\n\n\n\nChico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli in Rome and Alice Crites, Julie Tate, Josh Dawsey and Ellen Nakashima in Washington contributed to this report.Follow @wpinvestigates on Twitter | Like Investigations on FacebookLatest investigative newsSign up for updates on our new investigative podcast Two firms led by Virginia business executive Michele Roosevelt Edwards promoted outlandish claims that an Italian defense contractor conspired with CIA officials to switch votes from Trump to Biden using satellite technology. \u2018Italygate\u2019 election conspiracy theory was pushed by two firms led by woman who also falsely claimed $30 million mansion was hers",
        "author": "Jon Swaine"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Could We Lose if a NASA Climate Mission Goes Dark? (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8250",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/magazine/what-could-we-lose-if-a-nasa-mission-goes-dark.html",
        "text": "Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts. Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts. In late August, as Hurricane Harvey began smashing into the Texas coast, a flood of data began pouring in along with the catastrophic quantities of rainwater. It wasn\u2019t from the nonstop news coverage on CNN and elsewhere; it was from the transmissions that lay behind it, in the pulses of information coming down from space. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites, crucial tools for monitoring big storms in the Gulf of Mexico, were capturing cloud formations, surface temperatures and barometric pressures, which were then fed into computer models tracking the storm\u2019s strength and intensity. At the same time, NASA was using a group of satellites to keep tabs on soil moisture, flood patterns and power failures all over East Texas. In various ways, this torrent of data was being collected continuously from hundreds (or even thousands) of miles overhead, through radar instruments and spectroradiometer sensors and exquisitely calibrated imaging cameras. The machines being used aren\u2019t household names \u2014 they go by acronyms like GOES-13, Modis and SMAP \u2014 but they demonstrate why the popular view of Earth as a big blue planet with only the Moon as its companion could do with some revising. We are also surrounded by a constellation of satellites spinning elliptical webs of environmental observation, day and night.",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Could We Lose if a NASA Climate Mission Goes Dark? (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8251",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/magazine/what-could-we-lose-if-a-nasa-mission-goes-dark.html",
        "text": "Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts. Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts. In late August, as Hurricane Harvey began smashing into the Texas coast, a flood of data began pouring in along with the catastrophic quantities of rainwater. It wasn\u2019t from the nonstop news coverage on CNN and elsewhere; it was from the transmissions that lay behind it, in the pulses of information coming down from space. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites, crucial tools for monitoring big storms in the Gulf of Mexico, were capturing cloud formations, surface temperatures and barometric pressures, which were then fed into computer models tracking the storm\u2019s strength and intensity. At the same time, NASA was using a group of satellites to keep tabs on soil moisture, flood patterns and power failures all over East Texas. In various ways, this torrent of data was being collected continuously from hundreds (or even thousands) of miles overhead, through radar instruments and spectroradiometer sensors and exquisitely calibrated imaging cameras. The machines being used aren\u2019t household names \u2014 they go by acronyms like GOES-13, Modis and SMAP \u2014 but they demonstrate why the popular view of Earth as a big blue planet with only the Moon as its companion could do with some revising. We are also surrounded by a constellation of satellites spinning elliptical webs of environmental observation, day and night.",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Could We Lose if a NASA Climate Mission Goes Dark? (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8252",
        "date": "2017-09-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/magazine/what-could-we-lose-if-a-nasa-mission-goes-dark.html",
        "text": "Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts. Researchers are racing to replace the pioneering Grace satellites, which are threatened by both dying batteries and Trump-era budget cuts. In late August, as Hurricane Harvey began smashing into the Texas coast, a flood of data began pouring in along with the catastrophic quantities of rainwater. It wasn\u2019t from the nonstop news coverage on CNN and elsewhere; it was from the transmissions that lay behind it, in the pulses of information coming down from space. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites, crucial tools for monitoring big storms in the Gulf of Mexico, were capturing cloud formations, surface temperatures and barometric pressures, which were then fed into computer models tracking the storm\u2019s strength and intensity. At the same time, NASA was using a group of satellites to keep tabs on soil moisture, flood patterns and power failures all over East Texas. In various ways, this torrent of data was being collected continuously from hundreds (or even thousands) of miles overhead, through radar instruments and spectroradiometer sensors and exquisitely calibrated imaging cameras. The machines being used aren\u2019t household names \u2014 they go by acronyms like GOES-13, Modis and SMAP \u2014 but they demonstrate why the popular view of Earth as a big blue planet with only the Moon as its companion could do with some revising. We are also surrounded by a constellation of satellites spinning elliptical webs of environmental observation, day and night.",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: Aug. 31, 2019 (WP: National) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8253",
        "date": "2019-08-31",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-aug-31-2019/2019/08/31/44e2189a-cbf6-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html",
        "text": "U.S. forces strike WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightal-Qaeda facility U.S. forces struck an al-Qaeda facility north of Idlib in Syria on Saturday in an attack aimed at the organization\u2019s leadership, U.S. Central Command said.\u201cThis operation targeted AQ-S leaders responsible for attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians,\u201d Lt. Col. Earl Brown, Central Command Chief of Media Operations, said in a statement. Brown said the destruction of the facility would further constrain al-Qaeda\u2019s ability to carry out attacks and destabilize the region.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said airstrikes pounded bases belonging to Islamist militants in Syria\u2019s northwest.Story continues below advertisementThe U.K.-based monitor said the strikes killed more than 40 militants, including some commanders.\u2014 ReutersSatellite shown to counter Trump tweetIran on Saturday displayed for reporters what it said was an intact satellite ready for orbit, a rebuttal to President Trump\u2019s comments suggesting that a\u00a0\u201ccatastrophic accident\u201d had delayed its launch.\u00a0AdvertisementOfficials presented the satellite, Nahid-1, at a space research center in Tehran, where it is awaiting the preparation of a rocket launcher, Iranian media\u00a0reported. Iran has successfully sent several satellites into orbit.\u00a0\u201cThe latest tests \u2026 have been carried out, and the satellite will be delivered as soon as the launcher is ready,\u201d Iran\u2019s information and communications technology minister, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, told Iran\u2019s state broadcaster.Story continues below advertisementOn Friday, Trump posted on Twitter a detailed aerial image of an Iranian launchpad that showed extensive damage, the apparent result of a failed rocket launch, while saying the United States \u201cwas not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations.\u201d\u2014 Erin CunninghamVenezuela claims proof that Colombia harbors attackers: Venezuela says it has proof of paramilitary training camps operating in neighboring Colombia where groups are purportedly plotting attacks to undermine President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. Communications Minister Jorge Rodr\u00edguez, appearing on state television, showed satellite images and coordinates of what he described as three paramilitary training camps along the border in Colombia. The accusation comes amid mounting tensions between the nations: Colombia has accused Venezuela's socialist government of harboring leftist rebel guerrillas.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThousands again march in Moscow, but no mass arrests: Thousands of people marched across central Moscow on Saturday to protest the exclusion of some city council candidates from the Russian capital's local election, but there were no mass arrests or beatings by riot police as there have been at previous demonstrations. Opposition-led protests erupted in Moscow this summer after election officials barred more than a dozen opposition and independent candidates from running in the Sept.\u20098 election.Iranian oil tanker no longer headed for Turkey: An Iranian oil tanker at the center of a dispute between Washington and Tehran is no longer heading toward Turkey and has no specified destination, Refinitiv ship tracking data shows. The tanker, Adrian Darya 1, was detained by Britain off Gibraltar in July due to British suspicions that it was carrying Iranian oil to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions. Refinitiv tracking data registered the ship's destination as \"for order,\" after previously listing it as Iskenderun. \"For order\" usually means a vessel is available for charter. Turkey said on Friday that the tanker was headed to Lebanon's waters, but the United States later said the ship was sailing to Syria.\u2014 From news services U.S. forces strike al-Qaeda facility; Iran shows off satellite to counter Trump tweet World Digest: Aug. 31, 2019",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Passman, Space-Age Engineer Who Kept His Secrets, Dies at 94 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8254",
        "date": "2020-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/obituaries/richard-passman-dead-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Mr. Passman had a leadership role in many of the technologies that gave the United States strength in aircraft, spy satellites and missiles. Mr. Passman had a leadership role in many of the technologies that gave the United States strength in aircraft, spy satellites and missiles. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Passman, Space-Age Engineer Who Kept His Secrets, Dies at 94 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8255",
        "date": "2020-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/obituaries/richard-passman-dead-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Mr. Passman had a leadership role in many of the technologies that gave the United States strength in aircraft, spy satellites and missiles. Mr. Passman had a leadership role in many of the technologies that gave the United States strength in aircraft, spy satellites and missiles. This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is striving to win the race to build the Internet in space (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8256",
        "date": "2019-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/15/can-we-get-wifi-outer-space-elon-musk-others-are-trying/",
        "text": "SpaceX was poised to launch 60 satellites to space Wednesday night, a significant step forward in the race to provide Internet service across the globe from a constellation of satellites whizzing around the planet.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe launch would be the first step in a competition that pits Elon Musk\u2019s company SpaceX against other companies, notably OneWeb, the enterprise backed by Softbank, Airbus, Richard Branson and other big investors that launched its first satellites in February. Amazon also recently confirmed it plans to put up a constellation of its own, adding yet another high-profile billionaire, Jeff Bezos, to what has become a new space race. (Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisementOn Twitter, Musk recently wrote that the company would need to put up six more batches of 60 satellites for \u201cminor\u201d coverage for what it calls its Starlink program, and an additional 12 batches for \u201cmoderate\u201d coverage. But he warned that \u201cmuch will likely go wrong on 1st mission.\u201dAdvertisementIn a call with reporters, Musk cautioned that \u201cthere is a lot of new technology here, and so it\u2019s possible that some of these satellites may not work. In fact there is a small possibility that all of the satellites might not work.\u201dFirst 60 @SpaceX Starlink satellites loaded into Falcon fairing. Tight fit. pic.twitter.com/gZq8gHg9uK\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2019\n\nIn the race to put up large constellations, it\u2019s unclear which of the companies, if any, will be successful. At stake is the chance to be one of the world\u2019s largest Internet providers by building the architecture in space, giving WiFi access to billions of people without it.Story continues below advertisementIn the past, others have tried and failed to do just what SpaceX, OneWeb and others are hoping to accomplish. Teledesic, a company funded by Bill Gates in the mid-1990s, failed after costs soared into the billions. Attempts by Iridium and Globalstar failed after both ended up in bankruptcy.Musk said he was well aware of that history.Advertisement\u201cI do believe we will be successful, but it is far from a sure thing.\u201d He declined to comment on his competitors, saying only that the company was focused on Starlink and that \u201cit\u2019s always good to have competition.\u201d He added, though, that SpaceX would be happy to launch any of his competitors\u2019 satellites.OneWeb, founded by Greg Wyler in 2012, has said his goal is to \u201cconnect every school in the world, and bridge the digital divide.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a statement, Amazon said that its program, known as Project Kuiper, is designed to bring broadband to \u201cunserved and underserved communities around the world. This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband Internet.\u201dMusk said his company has a similar goal to connect the disconnected. But at the moment the company was not actively seeking customers, he said.AdvertisementSpaceX has the advantage of being able to fly its satellites on its own rockets. But putting up a constellation of thousands of satellites is a very expensive proposition. And SpaceX faces significant funding challenges, said Tim Farrar, the founder of Telecom, Media and Finance Associates.Story continues below advertisementAccording to a filing last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX sought to raise $400 million, but had only raised $44 million as of the filing, required 15 days after the round opens. In an earlier fundraising round, when it attempted to raise $500 million, it sold only $273 million in equity, according to an SEC filing from January. Musk said that data was out of date, and that the company\u2019s recent funding rounds have been \u201coversubscribed.\" He didn\u2019t provide amounts for how much capital the company raised, but said: \u201cAt this point, it looks like we have sufficient capital to get to an operational level.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThe big issue is: Do people believe in Elon Musk\u2019s vision,\u201d Farrar said. \u201cThat\u2019s ultimately going to be a critical factor as to whether they can raise money.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut that fact that the company already has 60 satellites built and ready will impress people that the company \u201chas moved that far, that fast,\u201d he said.Putting up gigantic constellations of satellites has worried some in the space industry given the large amount of debris in orbit. But SpaceX\u2019s satellites would be equipped with thrusters and be able to autonomously maneuver around the debris and avoiding collisions, Musk said.If SpaceX is successful, Musk said it would be able to generate revenue that far outpaces what it earns launching satellites into space on its rockets. That, in turn, would help the compete fund its next generation rocket, known as Starship, the company hopes to use to fly to the moon and eventually to Mars, he said. SpaceX faces competition in its quest to encircle the globe with satellites to beam WiFi from OneWeb and even Jeff Bezos' Amazon Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is striving to win the race to build the Internet in space",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Orbit rocket reaches Earth orbit, adding an entrant to the commercial space race (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8257",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/17/richard-branson-virgin-orbit-launch-success/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit flew a rocket into orbit on Sunday in a test flight that marks the introduction of a new method for low-cost satellite launches and the likely shake-up of the aerospace industry.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight was the company\u2019s first successful trip into space, launching a small rocket from the wing of a 747 airplane flying over the Pacific Ocean. And it marked a triumph for Branson, the starry-eyed British billionaire who now has two companies that have reached space successfully with two different vehicles. In tweets, the company chronicled the flight of its LauncherOne rocket, celebrating each milestone, from engine ignition to second-stage separation. \u201cAccording to telemetry, LauncherOne has reached orbit!\u201d the company tweeted at about 2:50 p.m. Eastern. \u201cEveryone on the team who is not in mission control right now is going absolutely bonkers.\u201dHere's what today's takeoff looked like from Mojave Air and Space Port. pic.twitter.com/9Ki0QHFtNk\u2014 Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) January 17, 2021\n\nIn a statement, Branson said, \u201cthis magnificent flight is the culmination of many years of hard work and will also unleash a whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company hopes to be a disruptive force in the launch market by offering a small, 70-foot long, two-stage rocket suited to take advantage of a revolution in satellite technology that is shrinking their size and lowering their costs. LauncherOne would be able to hoist payloads of up to a few hundred pounds \u2014 satellites that would range \u201cfrom the size of a very big refrigerator to the size of a toaster oven,\u201d Will Pomerantz, Virgin Orbit\u2019s vice president of special projects, said in a call with reporters before the test flight.Instead of launching vertically from a pad on the ground, the company tethers LauncherOne under the wing of a modified 747, which carries the rocket to an altitude of about 35,000 feet. The rocket is then released, fires its engine and heads into space.The \u201cair launch\u201d technique means the rocket is already above much of the atmosphere and traveling just under Mach 1, or the speed of sound, when it fires its engines. And instead of requiring a lot of ground infrastructure, the company can be flexible, essentially taking off from any runway that can accommodate a 747.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted its first launch on Memorial Day last year. The rocket dropped, but its engine cut off shortly after ignition. After an investigation, the company said there was a \u201cbreach in the high-pressure line\u201d that carried liquid oxygen to the first-stage combustion chamber. Without the oxidizer, \u201cthat engine soon stopped providing thrust, ending our powered flight and ultimately the test itself.\u201dThe company said it had fixed the problem and has done \u201can enormous amount of testing since then,\u201d Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s president and CEO, said before Sunday\u2019s launch.While a test flight, Sunday\u2019s mission was carrying 10 satellites in cooperation with a NASA program that allows universities and others to launch small satellites for Earth observation, weather prediction and other science and research projects. After a delay in getting data back to the ground, the company confirmed that all the satellites \u201csuccessfully deployed into our target orbit.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Orbit is entering a crowded market of companies that want to capitalize on launching small satellites. Rocket Lab, a company that launches from New Zealand, has already sent several payloads into orbit for commercial and government customers. It plans to begin launches soon from Wallops Island on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore. The companies are following in the footsteps of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which upended the launch market by offering discount launch prices with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket.Virgin Orbit said it thinks the market for small satellites is going to grow. Ultimately, it hopes to expand its business to include commercial companies as well as satellites for the Space Force and U.S. intelligence agencies that need to be able to respond rapidly to potential threats.Companies flood Earth\u2019s orbit with satellites, but no one\u2019s directing trafficOver the past couple of years, the Pentagon has been \u201ctaking note of the utility of small satellites in this environment of space becoming a contested, I\u2019ll say a dangerous, environment to operate in,\u201d Hart said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the launch, Gen. Jay Raymond, Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, wrote on Twitter: \u201cCongratulations to the Virgin Orbit Team!\u201dVirgin Orbit is the sister company of Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, a venture that vows to become the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d by flying tourists to the edge of space and back. It has twice flown people on suborbital trips to the edge of space and is gearing up to fly paying passengers as soon as this year.Virgin Galactic suffered a setback during a launch attempt last year: A flight was aborted after the company said an \u201conboard computer that monitors the propulsion system lost connection,\u201d halting the ignition of the rocket\u2019s motor.Virgin Galactic has not said when it intends to fly again. Branson has said he\u2019s optimistic that he will be able to be on board a flight later this year, fulfilling his dream of going to space. The rocket was carrying 10 small satellites when it was launched from a 747 flying over the Pacific Ocean. Virgin Orbit rocket reaches Earth orbit, adding an entrant to the commercial space race",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Orbit rocket reaches Earth orbit, adding an entrant to the commercial space race (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8258",
        "date": "2021-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/17/richard-branson-virgin-orbit-launch-success/",
        "text": "Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit flew a rocket into orbit on Sunday in a test flight that marks the introduction of a new method for low-cost satellite launches and the likely shake-up of the aerospace industry.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe flight was the company\u2019s first successful trip into space, launching a small rocket from the wing of a 747 airplane flying over the Pacific Ocean. And it marked a triumph for Branson, the starry-eyed British billionaire who now has two companies that have reached space successfully with two different vehicles. In tweets, the company chronicled the flight of its LauncherOne rocket, celebrating each milestone, from engine ignition to second-stage separation. \u201cAccording to telemetry, LauncherOne has reached orbit!\u201d the company tweeted at about 2:50 p.m. Eastern. \u201cEveryone on the team who is not in mission control right now is going absolutely bonkers.\u201dHere's what today's takeoff looked like from Mojave Air and Space Port. pic.twitter.com/9Ki0QHFtNk\u2014 Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) January 17, 2021\n\nIn a statement, Branson said, \u201cthis magnificent flight is the culmination of many years of hard work and will also unleash a whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company hopes to be a disruptive force in the launch market by offering a small, 70-foot long, two-stage rocket suited to take advantage of a revolution in satellite technology that is shrinking their size and lowering their costs. LauncherOne would be able to hoist payloads of up to a few hundred pounds \u2014 satellites that would range \u201cfrom the size of a very big refrigerator to the size of a toaster oven,\u201d Will Pomerantz, Virgin Orbit\u2019s vice president of special projects, said in a call with reporters before the test flight.Instead of launching vertically from a pad on the ground, the company tethers LauncherOne under the wing of a modified 747, which carries the rocket to an altitude of about 35,000 feet. The rocket is then released, fires its engine and heads into space.The \u201cair launch\u201d technique means the rocket is already above much of the atmosphere and traveling just under Mach 1, or the speed of sound, when it fires its engines. And instead of requiring a lot of ground infrastructure, the company can be flexible, essentially taking off from any runway that can accommodate a 747.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe company attempted its first launch on Memorial Day last year. The rocket dropped, but its engine cut off shortly after ignition. After an investigation, the company said there was a \u201cbreach in the high-pressure line\u201d that carried liquid oxygen to the first-stage combustion chamber. Without the oxidizer, \u201cthat engine soon stopped providing thrust, ending our powered flight and ultimately the test itself.\u201dThe company said it had fixed the problem and has done \u201can enormous amount of testing since then,\u201d Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit\u2019s president and CEO, said before Sunday\u2019s launch.While a test flight, Sunday\u2019s mission was carrying 10 satellites in cooperation with a NASA program that allows universities and others to launch small satellites for Earth observation, weather prediction and other science and research projects. After a delay in getting data back to the ground, the company confirmed that all the satellites \u201csuccessfully deployed into our target orbit.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementVirgin Orbit is entering a crowded market of companies that want to capitalize on launching small satellites. Rocket Lab, a company that launches from New Zealand, has already sent several payloads into orbit for commercial and government customers. It plans to begin launches soon from Wallops Island on Virginia\u2019s Eastern Shore. The companies are following in the footsteps of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which upended the launch market by offering discount launch prices with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket.Virgin Orbit said it thinks the market for small satellites is going to grow. Ultimately, it hopes to expand its business to include commercial companies as well as satellites for the Space Force and U.S. intelligence agencies that need to be able to respond rapidly to potential threats.Companies flood Earth\u2019s orbit with satellites, but no one\u2019s directing trafficOver the past couple of years, the Pentagon has been \u201ctaking note of the utility of small satellites in this environment of space becoming a contested, I\u2019ll say a dangerous, environment to operate in,\u201d Hart said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the launch, Gen. Jay Raymond, Space Force\u2019s chief of space operations, wrote on Twitter: \u201cCongratulations to the Virgin Orbit Team!\u201dVirgin Orbit is the sister company of Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, a venture that vows to become the \u201cworld\u2019s first commercial spaceline\u201d by flying tourists to the edge of space and back. It has twice flown people on suborbital trips to the edge of space and is gearing up to fly paying passengers as soon as this year.Virgin Galactic suffered a setback during a launch attempt last year: A flight was aborted after the company said an \u201conboard computer that monitors the propulsion system lost connection,\u201d halting the ignition of the rocket\u2019s motor.Virgin Galactic has not said when it intends to fly again. Branson has said he\u2019s optimistic that he will be able to be on board a flight later this year, fulfilling his dream of going to space. The rocket was carrying 10 small satellites when it was launched from a 747 flying over the Pacific Ocean. Virgin Orbit rocket reaches Earth orbit, adding an entrant to the commercial space race",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos scores a first paying customer for his growing space company (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8259",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/07/jeff-bezos-scores-a-first-paying-customer-for-his-growing-space-company/",
        "text": "After years of relying almost exclusively on Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s fortune, Blue Origin now has a paying customer that will bring in a precious resource that has been scarce in the company\u2019s 17-year existence: revenue.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt a satellite conference Tuesday morning, Bezos announced that Eutelsat Communications, a French-based satellite company, has signed on to be the first customer of Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn orbital rocket, which is under development but slated\u00a0to fly by the end of the decade. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.) The deal\u00a0marks a significant milestone in the growth of the company, which for years had remained obsessively secretive. Bezos has said he has poured more than $500 million of his own money into it \u2014 but has received relatively little outside revenue.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut recently Blue Origin has stepped into the spotlight \u2014 as a sponsor of the satellite conference, its banners and logos are all over the Walter E. Washington Convention Center \u2014 and it is starting to accelerate its activities. It is working to revamp a launch complex at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while also building a massive rocket manufacturing facility nearby.Blue Origin\u2019s entrance into the commercial satellite market would put it in competition with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has been flying satellites for commercial companies for years.\u201cI think this is a sign that the industry has actually got some legs that both of these companies are going to be moving forward,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Story continues below advertisementThe mission to launch Eutelsat\u2019s satellite to geostationary orbit would come in 2021 or 2022.AdvertisementScott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, noted that Blue Origin probably would also be\u00a0competing against Arianespace, a French launch company.\u201cWhile there is a significant risk in using a new vehicle, satellite operators have shown that they want a diverse range of suppliers and not be tied to just one or two launch providers. Thus they will practice 'strategic sourcing' to ensure competitive alternatives,\u201d Pace said.During a 23-minute question-and-answer session Tuesday, Bezos offered some new details about New Glenn, named after the late John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. The rocket\u2019s first stage, or booster, is designed to be reusable. Once it delivers its payload to orbit, it would then fly back to Earth, landing on a ship at sea \u2014 a feat that SpaceX has been performing for about a year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe New Glenn would be outfitted with strakes, or aerodynamic fins, to help fly the booster back to Earth without having to refire the engine. He also said that the rocket\u2019s BE-4 engines are designed to fly as many as 100 times. (Traditionally rockets dumped into the ocean after delivering their payload to orbit.)\u201cOur goal, and we won\u2019t stop until we achieve it, is to dramatically lower launch costs,\u201d Bezos said. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be easy. It\u2019s going to take time. But we when we do achieve that goal, it will grow the entire industry. We\u2019ll reach a new equilibrium in this industry.\u201dBlue Origin has also pitched NASA on a public-private partnership to fly cargo and science experiments to the surface of the moon, a mission it has dubbed Blue Moon.This year, it plans to begin crewed test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket. By next year, it could start flying paying tourists on trips that would cross the 62-mile barrier that\u2019s considered the edge of space. The deal to launch a French communications satellite is a coming out of sorts for the once-secretive Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos scores a first paying customer for his growing space company",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos scores a first paying customer for his growing space company (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8260",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/07/jeff-bezos-scores-a-first-paying-customer-for-his-growing-space-company/",
        "text": "After years of relying almost exclusively on Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s fortune, Blue Origin now has a paying customer that will bring in a precious resource that has been scarce in the company\u2019s 17-year existence: revenue.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt a satellite conference Tuesday morning, Bezos announced that Eutelsat Communications, a French-based satellite company, has signed on to be the first customer of Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn orbital rocket, which is under development but slated\u00a0to fly by the end of the decade. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.) The deal\u00a0marks a significant milestone in the growth of the company, which for years had remained obsessively secretive. Bezos has said he has poured more than $500 million of his own money into it \u2014 but has received relatively little outside revenue.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut recently Blue Origin has stepped into the spotlight \u2014 as a sponsor of the satellite conference, its banners and logos are all over the Walter E. Washington Convention Center \u2014 and it is starting to accelerate its activities. It is working to revamp a launch complex at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while also building a massive rocket manufacturing facility nearby.Blue Origin\u2019s entrance into the commercial satellite market would put it in competition with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has been flying satellites for commercial companies for years.\u201cI think this is a sign that the industry has actually got some legs that both of these companies are going to be moving forward,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Story continues below advertisementThe mission to launch Eutelsat\u2019s satellite to geostationary orbit would come in 2021 or 2022.AdvertisementScott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, noted that Blue Origin probably would also be\u00a0competing against Arianespace, a French launch company.\u201cWhile there is a significant risk in using a new vehicle, satellite operators have shown that they want a diverse range of suppliers and not be tied to just one or two launch providers. Thus they will practice 'strategic sourcing' to ensure competitive alternatives,\u201d Pace said.During a 23-minute question-and-answer session Tuesday, Bezos offered some new details about New Glenn, named after the late John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. The rocket\u2019s first stage, or booster, is designed to be reusable. Once it delivers its payload to orbit, it would then fly back to Earth, landing on a ship at sea \u2014 a feat that SpaceX has been performing for about a year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe New Glenn would be outfitted with strakes, or aerodynamic fins, to help fly the booster back to Earth without having to refire the engine. He also said that the rocket\u2019s BE-4 engines are designed to fly as many as 100 times. (Traditionally rockets dumped into the ocean after delivering their payload to orbit.)\u201cOur goal, and we won\u2019t stop until we achieve it, is to dramatically lower launch costs,\u201d Bezos said. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be easy. It\u2019s going to take time. But we when we do achieve that goal, it will grow the entire industry. We\u2019ll reach a new equilibrium in this industry.\u201dBlue Origin has also pitched NASA on a public-private partnership to fly cargo and science experiments to the surface of the moon, a mission it has dubbed Blue Moon.This year, it plans to begin crewed test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket. By next year, it could start flying paying tourists on trips that would cross the 62-mile barrier that\u2019s considered the edge of space. The deal to launch a French communications satellite is a coming out of sorts for the once-secretive Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos scores a first paying customer for his growing space company",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos scores a first paying customer for his growing space company (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8261",
        "date": "2017-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/07/jeff-bezos-scores-a-first-paying-customer-for-his-growing-space-company/",
        "text": "After years of relying almost exclusively on Jeffrey P. Bezos\u2019s fortune, Blue Origin now has a paying customer that will bring in a precious resource that has been scarce in the company\u2019s 17-year existence: revenue.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAt a satellite conference Tuesday morning, Bezos announced that Eutelsat Communications, a French-based satellite company, has signed on to be the first customer of Blue Origin\u2019s New Glenn orbital rocket, which is under development but slated\u00a0to fly by the end of the decade. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, owns The Washington Post.) The deal\u00a0marks a significant milestone in the growth of the company, which for years had remained obsessively secretive. Bezos has said he has poured more than $500 million of his own money into it \u2014 but has received relatively little outside revenue.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut recently Blue Origin has stepped into the spotlight \u2014 as a sponsor of the satellite conference, its banners and logos are all over the Walter E. Washington Convention Center \u2014 and it is starting to accelerate its activities. It is working to revamp a launch complex at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, while also building a massive rocket manufacturing facility nearby.Blue Origin\u2019s entrance into the commercial satellite market would put it in competition with Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, which has been flying satellites for commercial companies for years.\u201cI think this is a sign that the industry has actually got some legs that both of these companies are going to be moving forward,\u201d said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Story continues below advertisementThe mission to launch Eutelsat\u2019s satellite to geostationary orbit would come in 2021 or 2022.AdvertisementScott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, noted that Blue Origin probably would also be\u00a0competing against Arianespace, a French launch company.\u201cWhile there is a significant risk in using a new vehicle, satellite operators have shown that they want a diverse range of suppliers and not be tied to just one or two launch providers. Thus they will practice 'strategic sourcing' to ensure competitive alternatives,\u201d Pace said.During a 23-minute question-and-answer session Tuesday, Bezos offered some new details about New Glenn, named after the late John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. The rocket\u2019s first stage, or booster, is designed to be reusable. Once it delivers its payload to orbit, it would then fly back to Earth, landing on a ship at sea \u2014 a feat that SpaceX has been performing for about a year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe New Glenn would be outfitted with strakes, or aerodynamic fins, to help fly the booster back to Earth without having to refire the engine. He also said that the rocket\u2019s BE-4 engines are designed to fly as many as 100 times. (Traditionally rockets dumped into the ocean after delivering their payload to orbit.)\u201cOur goal, and we won\u2019t stop until we achieve it, is to dramatically lower launch costs,\u201d Bezos said. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be easy. It\u2019s going to take time. But we when we do achieve that goal, it will grow the entire industry. We\u2019ll reach a new equilibrium in this industry.\u201dBlue Origin has also pitched NASA on a public-private partnership to fly cargo and science experiments to the surface of the moon, a mission it has dubbed Blue Moon.This year, it plans to begin crewed test flights of its suborbital New Shepard rocket. By next year, it could start flying paying tourists on trips that would cross the 62-mile barrier that\u2019s considered the edge of space. The deal to launch a French communications satellite is a coming out of sorts for the once-secretive Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos scores a first paying customer for his growing space company",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Satellite Hopes Meet Internet Reality (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8262",
        "date": "2021-11-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/technology/satellite-internet.html",
        "text": "Satellite internet is exciting, but it needs to be part of a bigger effort to get more people online. Satellite internet is exciting, but it needs to be part of a bigger effort to get more people online. This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here is a collection of past columns.",
        "author": "By Shira Ovide"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Moon Shot, Gets First Paying Customer (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8263",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/technology/blue-origin-jeff-bezoss-moon-shot-gets-first-paying-customer.html",
        "text": "In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. WASHINGTON \u2014 Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, founded a rocket company as a hobby 16 years ago. Now that company, Blue Origin, finally has its first paying customer as it ramps up to become a full-fledged business.",
        "author": "By Cecilia Kang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Moon Shot, Gets First Paying Customer (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8264",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/technology/blue-origin-jeff-bezoss-moon-shot-gets-first-paying-customer.html",
        "text": "In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. WASHINGTON \u2014 Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, founded a rocket company as a hobby 16 years ago. Now that company, Blue Origin, finally has its first paying customer as it ramps up to become a full-fledged business.",
        "author": "By Cecilia Kang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Moon Shot, Gets First Paying Customer (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8265",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/technology/blue-origin-jeff-bezoss-moon-shot-gets-first-paying-customer.html",
        "text": "In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. WASHINGTON \u2014 Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, founded a rocket company as a hobby 16 years ago. Now that company, Blue Origin, finally has its first paying customer as it ramps up to become a full-fledged business.",
        "author": "By Cecilia Kang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos\u2019s Moon Shot, Gets First Paying Customer (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8266",
        "date": "2017-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/technology/blue-origin-jeff-bezoss-moon-shot-gets-first-paying-customer.html",
        "text": "In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. In about five years, Eutelsat, a satellite TV provider, will strap one of its satellites to a new Blue Origin rocket to be delivered to space. WASHINGTON \u2014 Jeff Bezos, the billionaire chief executive of Amazon, founded a rocket company as a hobby 16 years ago. Now that company, Blue Origin, finally has its first paying customer as it ramps up to become a full-fledged business.",
        "author": "By Cecilia Kang"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Businesses Will Not Be Able to Hide\u2019: Spy Satellites May Give Edge From Above (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8267",
        "date": "2019-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/technology/satellites-artificial-intelligence.html",
        "text": "With 2,200 observation satellites going into orbit in the next decade, start-ups are trying to use them to churn out financially useful information that could help companies track their rivals. With 2,200 observation satellites going into orbit in the next decade, start-ups are trying to use them to churn out financially useful information that could help companies track their rivals. SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 In October, the Chinese province of Guangdong \u2014 the manufacturing center on the southern coast that drives 12 percent of the country\u2019s economy \u2014 stopped publishing a monthly report on the health of its local factories.",
        "author": "By Cade Metz"
    },
    {
        "title": "This high school science project is bound for space (WP: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8268",
        "date": "2017-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/this-high-school-science-project-is-bound-for-space/2017/05/07/7c73d3f2-31a7-11e7-9dec-764dc781686f_story.html",
        "text": " Thomas Jefferson High in Fairfax County is building a tiny satellite to launch next year. This high school science project is bound for space",
        "author": " Moriah Balingit Moriah Balingit"
    },
    {
        "title": "Intelligence Agencies Pushed to Use More Commercial Satellites (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8269",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/politics/intelligence-agencies-commercial-satellites.html",
        "text": "Congress wants the government to turn to the private sector to augment the capabilities of highly classified spy satellites. Congress wants the government to turn to the private sector to augment the capabilities of highly classified spy satellites. WASHINGTON \u2014 A cluster of satellites operated by an American company called HawkEye 360 looked down on the Middle East early this year and discovered radar and radio waves associated with a Chinese-based fishing fleet off the coast of Oman.",
        "author": "By Julian E. Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Space Became the Next \u2018Great Power\u2019 Contest Between the U.S. and China (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8270",
        "date": "2021-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/trump-biden-pentagon-space-missiles-satellite.html",
        "text": "The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat. The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat. Beijing\u2019s rush for antisatellite arms began 15 years ago. Now, it can threaten the orbital fleets that give the United States military its technological edge. Advanced weapons at China\u2019s military bases can fire warheads that smash satellites and can shoot laser beams that have a potential to blind arrays of delicate sensors.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Space Became the Next \u2018Great Power\u2019 Contest Between the U.S. and China (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8271",
        "date": "2021-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/trump-biden-pentagon-space-missiles-satellite.html",
        "text": "The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat. The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat. Beijing\u2019s rush for antisatellite arms began 15 years ago. Now, it can threaten the orbital fleets that give the United States military its technological edge. Advanced weapons at China\u2019s military bases can fire warheads that smash satellites and can shoot laser beams that have a potential to blind arrays of delicate sensors.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Space Became the Next \u2018Great Power\u2019 Contest Between the U.S. and China (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8272",
        "date": "2021-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/trump-biden-pentagon-space-missiles-satellite.html",
        "text": "The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat. The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat. Beijing\u2019s rush for antisatellite arms began 15 years ago. Now, it can threaten the orbital fleets that give the United States military its technological edge. Advanced weapons at China\u2019s military bases can fire warheads that smash satellites and can shoot laser beams that have a potential to blind arrays of delicate sensors.",
        "author": "By William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "Iran Again Fails to Put Satellite Into Orbit (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8273",
        "date": "2020-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/09/world/middleeast/iran-again-fails-to-put-satellite-into-orbit.html",
        "text": "Repeated failures with a communications satellite don\u2019t halt an official\u2019s assertions that the country is \u201cUNSTOPPABLE!\u201d Repeated failures with a communications satellite don\u2019t halt an official\u2019s assertions that the country is \u201cUNSTOPPABLE!\u201d TEHRAN, Iran (AP) \u2014 Iran tried but failed to put a satellite into orbit on Sunday, state television reported, the latest setback for work that the United States says helps Tehran advance its ballistic missile program.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Now U.S. Has Company in Raising Pressure on Iran Over Missile (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8274",
        "date": "2017-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/iran-missiles-nuclear-sanctions-united-nations.html",
        "text": "In a letter to the United Nations Security Council, the four Western allies called Iran\u2019s satellite launch last week \u201cthreatening and provocative.\u201d In a letter to the United Nations Security Council, the four Western allies called Iran\u2019s satellite launch last week \u201cthreatening and provocative.\u201d Joined by three Western allies, the United States on Wednesday escalated pressure on Iran over its space launch last week, saying the act disregarded a United Nations Security Council resolution on the use of missiles and was \u201cthreatening and provocative.\u201d",
        "author": "By Rick Gladstone"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Sweden\u2019s Far North, a Space Complex Takes Shape (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8275",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/europe/sweden-space-arctic-satellites.html",
        "text": "The government is turning an old research base above the Arctic Circle into a state-of-the-art satellite launching center. The reindeer will not be happy. The government is turning an old research base above the Arctic Circle into a state-of-the-art satellite launching center. The reindeer will not be happy. KIRUNA, Sweden \u2014 The path to the reindeer herder\u2019s spring home took him across four frozen lakes and countless snowy hilltops. Arriving to a light dusting of snow, the herder, Aslak Allas, switched off his snowmobile, and the overwhelming silence of Sweden\u2019s Arctic settled in.",
        "author": "By Thomas Erdbrink and Christina Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Sweden\u2019s Far North, a Space Complex Takes Shape (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8276",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/europe/sweden-space-arctic-satellites.html",
        "text": "The government is turning an old research base above the Arctic Circle into a state-of-the-art satellite launching center. The reindeer will not be happy. The government is turning an old research base above the Arctic Circle into a state-of-the-art satellite launching center. The reindeer will not be happy. KIRUNA, Sweden \u2014 The path to the reindeer herder\u2019s spring home took him across four frozen lakes and countless snowy hilltops. Arriving to a light dusting of snow, the herder, Aslak Allas, switched off his snowmobile, and the overwhelming silence of Sweden\u2019s Arctic settled in.",
        "author": "By Thomas Erdbrink and Christina Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tiny Satellites From Silicon Valley May Help Track North Korea Missiles (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8277",
        "date": "2017-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/asia/pentagon-spy-satellites-north-korea-missiles.html",
        "text": "Civilian satellites developed to count cars in Target parking lots and monitor crops are being reconfigured to help the American military detect North Korea\u2019s missile launches. Civilian satellites developed to count cars in Target parking lots and monitor crops are being reconfigured to help the American military detect North Korea\u2019s missile launches. For years before North Korea fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile this week, the Pentagon and intelligence experts had sounded a warning: Not only was the North making progress quickly, spy satellite coverage was so spotty that the United States might not see a missile being prepared for launch.",
        "author": "By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad"
    },
    {
        "title": "As America Looks Inward, China Looks to Outer Space (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8278",
        "date": "2018-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/world/asia/china-space-moon.html",
        "text": "China\u2019s launch of a satellite this week, part of a mission to the far side of the moon, is but one of its recent endeavors into space. China\u2019s launch of a satellite this week, part of a mission to the far side of the moon, is but one of its recent endeavors into space. HONG KONG \u2014 While President Trump refocuses American industry on the earthbound technologies of the 20th century \u2014 coal, steel and aluminum \u2014 China is setting its sights on the far reaches of the solar system.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "As America Looks Inward, China Looks to Outer Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8279",
        "date": "2018-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/world/asia/china-space-moon.html",
        "text": "China\u2019s launch of a satellite this week, part of a mission to the far side of the moon, is but one of its recent endeavors into space. China\u2019s launch of a satellite this week, part of a mission to the far side of the moon, is but one of its recent endeavors into space. HONG KONG \u2014 While President Trump refocuses American industry on the earthbound technologies of the 20th century \u2014 coal, steel and aluminum \u2014 China is setting its sights on the far reaches of the solar system.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ren Xinmin, Pioneering Chinese Satellite Designer, Dies at 101 (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8280",
        "date": "2017-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/world/asia/ren-xinmin-dead-china-rockets.html",
        "text": "Dr. Ren, best known for designing China\u2019s first satellite to be successfully launched, was the chief designer for six major space projects, according to the state news media. Dr. Ren, best known for designing China\u2019s first satellite to be successfully launched, was the chief designer for six major space projects, according to the state news media. HONG KONG \u2014 In the winter of 1967, a group of Chinese space experts trudged across a desert in China\u2019s western borderlands in search of a crashed test rocket.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "Iran Is Moving Key Facility at Nuclear Site Underground, Satellite Images Show (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8281",
        "date": "2020-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/world/natanz-nuclear-facility-iran.html",
        "text": "In July, an explosion rocked a key Iranian nuclear facility. Iran called it sabotage and vowed to rebuild a destroyed building underground. Iran is now turning that promise into a reality, new satellite images show. In July, an explosion rocked a key Iranian nuclear facility. Iran called it sabotage and vowed to rebuild a destroyed building underground. Iran is now turning that promise into a reality, new satellite images show. The mysterious July explosion that destroyed a centrifuge assembly hall at Iran\u2019s main nuclear fuel enrichment facility in Natanz was deemed by the Iranian authorities to be enemy sabotage, and provoked a defiant response: The wrecked building would be rebuilt in \u201cthe heart of the mountains,\u201d the head of Iran\u2019s Atomic Energy Organization said.",
        "author": "By Christoph Koettl and Arielle Ray"
    },
    {
        "title": "Smuggling of U.S. Technology Is Outpacing Cold War Levels, Experts Say (NYT: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8282",
        "date": "2018-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/world/asia/us-technology-smuggling-foreign-weapons.html",
        "text": "China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are relying on smuggling rings to secure equipment that can be used for weapons, satellites and fighter jets. China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are relying on smuggling rings to secure equipment that can be used for weapons, satellites and fighter jets. WASHINGTON \u2014 Foreign smugglers are trying to ship advanced American technologies \u2014 which can be used for weapons and spy equipment \u2014 to China, Russia and other adversaries at rates that outpace shadowy and illegal exports during the Cold War, according to United States officials and experts.",
        "author": "By Ron Nixon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Smuggling of U.S. Technology Is Outpacing Cold War Levels, Experts Say (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8283",
        "date": "2018-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/world/asia/us-technology-smuggling-foreign-weapons.html",
        "text": "China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are relying on smuggling rings to secure equipment that can be used for weapons, satellites and fighter jets. China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are relying on smuggling rings to secure equipment that can be used for weapons, satellites and fighter jets. WASHINGTON \u2014 Foreign smugglers are trying to ship advanced American technologies \u2014 which can be used for weapons and spy equipment \u2014 to China, Russia and other adversaries at rates that outpace shadowy and illegal exports during the Cold War, according to United States officials and experts.",
        "author": "By Ron Nixon"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos and videos reveal crowded checkpoints, chaos at Kabul airport on day of the attack (WP: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8284",
        "date": "2021-08-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/28/afghanistan-airport-attack-videos/",
        "text": "Jon arrived on Thursday to Kabul\u2019s airport hoping to secure permission to leave Afghanistan with his wife and four young children. It was the fourth time he had made that trip.The 46-year-old former translator for coalition forces had already paid a high price for his service. He shared his story on the condition that The Washington Post use the name given to him by foreign contractors for security reasons, Jon. He was shot eight times during a targeted attack that ultimately left a metal rod in his leg. He made his way through a canal near Abbey Gate, on the southeast side of Kabul\u2019s airport. His leg with the metal rod ached as he waded through the putrid water. No matter the difficulty or danger in attempting to leave Afghanistan, he worried the consequences of staying would be much worse. At around 5 p.m., he was at the Abbey Gate in the canal, where U.S. troops were operating a checkpoint.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSource: Satellite image \u00a92021 Maxar Technologies\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSource: Satellite image \u00a92021 Maxar Technologies\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSource: Satellite image \u00a92021 Maxar Technologies\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAs he reached to hand them his documents, a suicide bomber detonated explosives. \u201cThere was people\u2019s flesh all over my face, all over my body,\u201d Jon told The Post.\u2018Dead people were everywhere\u2019: Carnage and chaos at Kabul airportMultiple gunmen then opened fire on the civilians and military forces. A local affiliate of the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe bombing killed more than 170 people and injured more than 150. That number is expected to rise. Thirteen U.S. service members were also killed in the deadliest attack on American forces in a decade.The Post reviewed dozens of photos and videos, analyzed satellite imagery and spoke to witnesses to understand the events before and after the devastating blast. Taken together, they reveal a complex web of checkpoints and visualize a chaotic scene in the wake of the bombing.Suicide bombing lays bare challenges of gate security mission at Kabul airportAn analysis of photos and videos from Wednesday, the previous day, found multiple routes to the blast site. A path leading to the Abbey Gate had at least two Taliban checkpoints and a coalition checkpoint. The security perimeter near the Abbey Gate was guarded by coalition forces. It\u2019s unclear how the bomber gained access to the area.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSatellite image \u00a92021 Maxar Technologies\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSatellite image \u00a92021 Maxar Technologies\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSource: Satellite image via Planet\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe U.S. Defense Department did not immediately respond for comment, but American security officials have said the investigation into how the suicide bomber ultimately reached American forces is ongoing. Taliban leaders have said the attack was the result of poor American security.Before the attackMohammad Paimani, a 27-year-old journalist, was one of hundreds of Afghans near Abbey Gate on Thursday morning who had ignored days of warnings by the United States to avoid the airport. Hours before the attack, he shot a video showing large crowds in the area.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tVideo\n\t\t\tlocation\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApproximate\n\t\t\tblast location\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tVideo\n\t\t\tlocation\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApproximate\n\t\t\tblast location\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n (Mohammad Paimani)A few feet away, Jon watched those trying to reach the other side of the canal to present their documents to American soldiers. Shortly before the blast, he took a photo showing throngs of people tightly packed into the small space and a child on the ledge next to military personnel.The blastIn a brief moment of opportunity, Jon thought he could get the soldier\u2019s attention. He reached out with his documents. Then the bomb detonated.\u201cIt was chaos and soon as I was going to call one of them to get their attention, I just heard boom,\u201d Jon said. Dazed by the blast, a loud tone rang in his ear as he tried to escape.Kabul airport bombing underscores Taliban\u2019s challenges in securing a volatile AfghanistanPaimani also saw, then felt, an explosion.\u201cIt was like doomsday \u2026 no one was helping injured or dead people,\u201d Paimani wrote in a text message.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFearing a second suicide bomber or the possibility of being trapped, he fled with the panicked crowd. He witnessed women and children trampled in the chaos.\u201cI never thought this would happen because the Taliban had an agreement with the Americans,\u201d Paimani said. \u201cPeople thought that Americans warned people of threats just to scare them not to crowd the airport but indeed the [Americans\u2019] warnings came true.\u201dAli, who worked for the U.S. Embassy and spoke on the condition that he only be identified by his first name for security concerns, went to the airport with his documents, his ID and an email from the embassy that told him to go to the East Gate of the airport, about a 10-minute walk to the Abbey Gate.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter hearing the explosion, and the gunshots that followed, he quickly took a photo of U.S. troops who looked in the direction of the blast. Then the soldiers threw smoke bombs to disperse the crowd, injuring several bystanders, according to Ali.\u201cLots of women, I saw many of them where their faces were burned and they didn\u2019t move,\u201d he said. He took a photo of a man who he said was injured by canisters.\n\n \n \n U.S. troops stand outside the East Gate at the Kabul airport Aug. 26. (Obtained by The Washington Post)\n \n \n \n An injured man is helped by others outside the Kabul airport after the explosion Aug. 26. (Obtained by The Washington Post)\n \n\nLEFT: U.S. troops stand outside the East Gate at the Kabul airport Aug. 26. RIGHT: An injured man is helped by others outside the Kabul airport after the explosion Aug. 26. (Obtained by The Washington Post)\n\n\nThe aftermathVideos filmed in the immediate aftermath, near where Jon stood, show dozens of bloodied bodies, mangled and piled on top of one another. Some lie in a sewage canal; others are on the ground or the retaining walls just outside the airport\u2019s barricaded perimeter. Survivors can be seen making their way through human remains and personal belongings to pull limp bodies from the water.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tVideo\n\t\t\tlocation\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApproximate\n\t\t\tblast location\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tVideo\n\t\t\tlocation\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApproximate\n\t\t\tblast location\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\n (Asvaka News Agency via AP)In another video, someone cries out, \u201cOh God, we repent to you, we repent to you.\u201dAs the injured escaped the blast site down a dirt path, away from the airport, a young boy looked for his father. Then a man yelled, \u201cDon\u2019t stop here! Go, go.\u201d (@samiull57940027 via Spectee)Ambulances transported some of the injured to the Emergency Hospital, a medical center for victims of war, about three miles away from the blast site. (Reuters)By nightfall, video showed people had again gathered near the area of the blast.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApproximate\n\t\t\tblast location\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tVideo\n\t\t\tlocation\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tApproximate\n\t\t\tblast location\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tVideo\n\t\t\tlocation\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Kabul resident filmed crowds back near the Abbey Gate just hours after the deadly blast at the Kabul airport. (AfghanUrdu/Twitter)Satellite imagery on Friday showed far fewer people in front of the entrances to the airport, especially at Abbey Gate, which appeared deserted compared with previous days.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBefore\n\t\t\tAugust 26 at 3:10 P.M.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCrowds attempting\n\t\t\tto enter the airport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAfter\n\t\t\tAugust 27 at 10:17 A.M.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSource: Planet Labs Inc. \u00a9 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBefore\n\t\t\tAugust 26 at 3:10 P.M.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCrowds attempting\n\t\t\tto enter the airport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAfter\n\t\t\tAugust 27 at 10:17 A.M.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSource: Planet Labs Inc. \u00a9 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tAfter\n\t\t\tAugust 27 at 10:17 A.M.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tBefore\n\t\t\tAugust 26 at 3:10 P.M.\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCrowds attempting\n\t\t\tto enter the airport\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t200 FEET\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tSource: Planet Labs Inc. \u00a9 2021\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople did try to reach the airport through the north gate, however. A video obtained by The Post showed they were dispersed with flash bangs. Evacuation flights resumed. On Saturday, Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, said those who worked with the United States were still being allowed into the airport. (Aamaj News Agency)U.S. commanders have said the evacuation mission will continue, despite warnings that another terrorist attack in Kabul is likely. They have requested changes to the security perimeter and road closures in an effort to improve security. Kirby said Friday that airport operations are still under U.S. military control.For Jon, like so many Afghans still desperate to leave, he made plans to return again to the airport after the attack. \u201cIf I stay, I am dead. I have no choice but to return to the gates again.\u201dMahnaz Rezaie, Laris Karklis and Karly Domb Sadof contributed to this report.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement The Washington Post reviewed dozens of photos and videos, analyzed satellite imagery and spoke to witnesses to understand the events before and after the devastating blast. Taken together, they reveal complex a web of checkpoints and visualize a chaotic scene in the wake of the bombing. Photos and videos reveal crowded checkpoints, chaos at Kabul airport on day of the attack",
        "author": "Dalton Bennett"
    },
    {
        "title": "South Korea Launches First Homegrown Rocket, Satellite Into Space (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8285",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korea-launches-first-homegrown-rocket-and-satellite-into-space-11634815655?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=19",
        "text": "The three-stage, liquid-fuel rocket\u2014called Korea Satellite Launch Vehicle II, or Nuri\u2014blasted off at 5 p.m. local time Thursday from the Naro Space Center in Goheung, a city on the country\u2019s south coast. The 200-ton rocket, with a 1.5 ton dummy satellite, launched into space and reached an altitude of about 435 miles. But the satellite failed to reach orbit.\n\n\n\n\nThe launch comes at a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula, just two days after the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kim Jong Un\n \n\n\n\n regime said it had test-fired a ballistic missile launched from a submarine\u2014Pyongyang\u2019s fifth weapons test in recent weeks.\n\n\nNorth Korean state media didn\u2019t immediately respond to the launch, but Pyongyang has been swift to criticize Seoul\u2019s efforts to bolster its national defenses. In a speech last week, Mr. Kim said his country had to boost its own defenses due to South Korea\u2019s \u201cexcessive military obesity and covetousness.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople at Seoul Railway Station cheered as they watched a broadcast of the launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nIn recent weeks, North Korea has pointed to \u201cdouble standards\u201d from South Korea and the U.S., for accelerating their own weapons development while calling Pyongyang\u2019s missile tests provocations.\nPyongyang said Wednesday that it had launched a ballistic missile from a submarine, which was the latest in a series of recent weapons tests by both Koreas that some have called an arms race. But even as Pyongyang and Seoul launch competing weaponry, from water, from land and into space, the countries are more aligned than they appear.\n\u201cNorth Korea is saying strengthening their military capability will prevent war and South Korea is saying it will ensure peace,\u201d said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. \u201cThe purposes are symmetrical.\u201d\nMr. Kim, earlier this month, said his neighbors to the south weren\u2019t the enemy. South Korean President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Moon Jae-in\n\n\n\n has recently called for an end-of-war declaration and argued that a strong defense is always aimed at ensuring peace.\n\u201cWe envision a smart yet strong military based on advanced science and technology, and promote peace together with the international community,\u201d said Mr. Moon, at a South Korean defense exhibition Wednesday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 200-ton rocket reached an altitude of about 435 miles, but the satellite failed to reach orbit.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n YONHAP NEWS AGENCY/via REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nA narrative of an inter-Korean arms race plays into the Kim regime\u2019s hands, giving Pyongyang an ability to accuse Seoul, Washington and the international community of holding double standards. This perception helps create an environment for North Korea to negotiate back to stability, gives it cover to upgrade nuclear missile technology and limit South Korea\u2019s military capabilities, said Lee Ho-ryung, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a state-run think tank in Seoul.\n\u201cNorth Korea has every incentive during a time when it has serious internal problems to carry out an arms race so that it does not look like the North is inferior in any military capability,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bruce Bennett,\n\n\n\n a senior defense analyst at Rand Corp., a think tank based in Santa Monica, Calif.\nSouth Korea\u2019s arms exports from 2016 to 2020 were 210% higher than between 2011 and 2015, ranking ninth world-wide, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data. Britain, Iraq and Indonesia are some of the main buyers of South Korea\u2019s defense products. The country is one of the largest arms importers in the world, buying weapons such as the U.S.\u2019s F-35 jet fighters. South Korea had the world\u2019s 10th-largest defense budget in 2019.\nNorth Korea is one of the most secretive exporters of arms. But it spends more on its military, as a ratio of gross domestic product, than any other of the 170 countries tracked by the U.S. State Department.\nIn 2013, South Korea, on its third try, sent its 140-ton Naro rocket, carrying a 220-pound satellite, into space. The main rocket was built in Russia and Thursday\u2019s launch was the first domestically built space launch vehicle. The Nuri rocket was developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute.\nSouth Korea\u2019s ambitions are to join the elite space club. Just six countries have successfully launched satellites over 1 ton into orbit. South Korea has been seeking to acquire this technology for more than a decade, investing around $1.6 billion in building the Nuri rocket since 2010. South Korea has now secured the key technology to develop and launch space rockets carrying domestic satellites instead of relying on U.S. satellite technology for information. The space program will contribute to South Korea\u2019s goals such as establishing a 6G network and launching spy satellites.\nBut the Nuri rocket likely won\u2019t be modified for use in a military The technology could help expand Seoul\u2019s military satellite surveillance of Kim Jong Un\u2019s regime to the north amid heightened tensions. ",
        "author": "Dasl Yoon and Timothy W. Martin"
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Air Force Missile-Tracking Satellite Launch Scrubbed From Florida (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8286",
        "date": "2017-01-19",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-air-force-missile-tracking-satellite-launch-scrubbed-from-florida-1484880410?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=27",
        "text": "The launch would have been the first of 11 blastoffs slated for the year by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -1.21%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -1.20%\n\n\nLockheed Martin also built the satellite, called by the acronym SBIRS, part of a wide-ranging constellation of satellites intended to detect and track ballistic missiles using infrared sensors from various orbits. Two of the same type of satellites already are in orbit roughly 22,000 miles high, and the fourth such satellite is anticipated to be launched later in 2017.\n\n\nSBIRS over the years suffered some of the biggest technical problems, schedule delays and budget overruns affecting any Pentagon satellite program. But since the first batch of SBIRS satellites was launched and started sending information to the ground nearly a decade ago, military officials and senior Lockheed Martin officials have said the quality of the data exceeded their expectations.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com An aircraft flying near the launch area forced the cancellation of Thursday\u2019s planned liftoff of a $1.2-billion Air Force missile-tracking satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SoftBank Orchestrates Satellite Deal to Expand Internet Reach (WSJ: Business) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8287",
        "date": "2017-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellite-startup-oneweb-intelsat-to-merge-1488286307?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=26",
        "text": "The deal, which is subject to approval by Intelsat bondholders, would lower Intelsat\u2019s roughly $14.5 billion debt by about $3.6 billion, while allowing OneWeb to further expand its ambitious satellite-production and deployment plans in the next decade.\nThe combination comes amid escalating efforts by other tech giants to find the recipe for ubiquitous internet links in the sky.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook Inc.\n\n\n is developing a high-altitude, solar-powered drone, called Aquila, to provide web access to remote locations.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n Google is working on high-altitude balloons, dubbed Project Loon, and specialized satellites. Even\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n Co, which in the past resisted the trend toward small satellites, is pursuing plans to possibly launch its own downsized fleet.\n\n\nSoftBank, which runs a major cellphone provider in Japan and controls\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Sprint Corp.\n\n S -6.61%\n\n\n in the U.S., is chasing new deals as it seeks to control technologies it sees as essential in an age of increased connectivity, automation and artificial intelligence.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA Russian rocket carrying an Intelsat satellite ahead of its launch in Kazakhstan in 2012.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n STR/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nLast year, it closed a $32 billion deal to buy U.K. chip designer ARM Holdings PLC, a key supplier of chip architecture for cellphones. ARM aims to double the number of its engineers in five years to accelerate research in areas such as chip security and robotics.\nSoftBank Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Masayoshi Son\n\n\n\n is preparing to open a $100 billion fund, with the backing of Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign-wealth fund and other partners, in an attempt to become the world\u2019s biggest investor in technology over the next decade.\nThe proposed deal between OneWeb and Intelsat would be a major departure from the traditional way satellite-service providers have operated. It would feature a hybrid fleet of large Intelsat craft operating at high altitudes and eventually perhaps more than 2,500 smaller satellites circling much closer to the Earth.\nThe move is the latest marrying a startup space company with a more established player at a time many incumbent satellite-services companies are struggling with a capacity glut that is weighing on earnings. Luxembourg\u2019s SES SA last year agreed to buy all of O3b Networks Ltd. OneWeb\u2019s founder, Greg Wyler, also founded and served on the board of O3b.\nFor Intelsat, which has been struggling under a heavy debt load and sluggish growth, the proposed deal amounts to a lifeline to reinvigorate its offerings by teaming up with a more-nimble partner. \nIntelsat has weathered a string of acquisitions and leveraged buyouts stretching back more than a decade. Several private-equity firms acquired the company in 2004 for $3.1 billion. Four years later, a different set of private-equity partners closed a deal for the company relying on only $5 billion of equity and the assumption of more than $11 billion of debt. Recently, Intelsat\u2019s management has been seeking strategies to manage its debt and boost sales. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Spengler,\n\n\n\n Intelsat\u2019s chief executive, described the move as \u201can acceleration of the plans of both companies.\u201d He said Softbank\u2019s agreement to inject $1.7 billion into the new entity wasn\u2019t intended to underwrite the proposed fleet expansion.\nBut by paring debt and capitalizing on some of OneWeb\u2019s assets, Mr. Spengler envisions offering customers more options as data rates and user patterns shift around the world. \n\u201cWe need to bring multiple solutions to the table\u201d to persuade customers the combined fleets offer long-term stability under fast-changing conditions, he said during a call with analysts hours after the announcement. With annual revenue projected to stay at roughly $2.1 billion for 2017, Mr. Spengler said Intelsat also would benefit from foregoing some capital expenditures, But company officials said it was too early to release specifics.\nBuilding, testing and launching large commercial-communications satellites that hover over a specific spot on the Earth can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take several years from the time designs are started.\nBy contrast, OneWeb projects initially assembling its satellites over a matter of days\u2014and eventually in less than 24 hours\u2014at a cost below $1 million apiece. \nPending approvals by bondholders and regulators, Mr. Spengler is slated to be chief executive and Mr. Wyler executive chairman of the combined company.\nThe deal\u2019s goal is to unlock new applications and markets, including faster and less-expensive internet links for mobile devices and homes and business in developing regions. By building on OneWeb\u2019s technical advances and Intelsat\u2019s experience serving mature and emerging areas, the transaction provides \u201can opportunity to utilize\u201d diverse assets and \u201ccreate Japanese telecom giant SoftBank is orchestrating a deal between U.S. satellite startup\u00a0OneWeb and debt-laden satellite operator Intelsat in an attempt to deliver cheaper internet connectivity world-wide. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor and Mayumi Negishi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk\u2019s SpaceX Looking to Compete for $16 Billion in Federal Broadband Subsidies (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8288",
        "date": "2020-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/musk-s-spacex-looking-to-compete-for-16-billion-in-federal-broadband-subsidies-11583953210?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=58",
        "text": "The FCC has yet to decide whether the company will be awarded funding. SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, Calif., didn\u2019t return requests for comment. But in a Feb. 20 letter to the FCC, SpaceX said its satellite system has demonstrated it can provide high-speed internet. \n\n\n\n\nThe FCC has earmarked $16 billion to improve internet service in rural areas over the next 10 years. The money, generated by fees on Americans\u2019 phone bills, is set to be doled out in an October auction to low bidders offering the best service in locations across the country.\n\n\nFor SpaceX, federal subsidies could support the closely held firm\u2019s plan to deliver high-speed internet by satellite across the globe\u2014a venture considered crucial to its bottom line.\nIn meetings with FCC staff last month, representatives of SpaceX said it should qualify for the money alongside companies that already provide broadband in remote areas through fiber-optic cable, according to a lobbying disclosure filed by SpaceX with the FCC.\nRural phone and electric companies that provide broadband via fiber-optic cable say granting funds for SpaceX\u2019s satellite technology is a gamble because the company doesn\u2019t have a record of providing broadband to consumers.\n\u201cWe don\u2019t let people speculate with the public\u2019s money,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Chambers,\n\n\n\n a former FCC official and partner at Conexon LLC, which contracts with rural electric companies to build fiber-optic cable broadband networks.\nThe pushback has reached Capitol Hill, where congressional aides and lobbyists have been discussing how to pressure the FCC to keep SpaceX out of the auction, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.\n\u201cThis will be a political disaster if Elon F\u2019ing Musk gobbles up billions of dollars of the public\u2019s money,\u201d a congressional aide told industry lobbyists last week in one of the emails.\nIn its letter to the FCC, SpaceX said its technology would expand choices for rural consumers.\n\u201cA prohibition on SpaceX from participating in the auction at the levels that match the true capabilities of its system could have the unintended consequence of denying consumers in rural areas the best possible service and choices,\u201d wrote David Goldman, SpaceX\u2019s director of satellite policy.\nThe FCC subsequently asked for public input on SpaceX\u2019s idea as part of a notice about proposed rules for the distributing the funds.\nAn FCC spokesman said in a statement the agency looks forward to receiving public comments on its proposal.\n\u201cThe goal of Chairman [Ajit]\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pai\u2019s\n\n\n\n Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is to use the agency\u2019s limited universal service dollars to bring the fastest broadband networks possible to as many Americans as we can,\u201d the statement said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSShould the FCC approve SpaceX\u2019s petition? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nSpaceX\u2019s pitch is based on Starlink, a system of low-Earth-orbiting satellites it is launching to deliver internet service around the globe.\nBecause the Starlink satellites are closer to Earth than traditional satellites, the signal doesn\u2019t have to travel as far. SpaceX says this will allow it to lower the latency, or lag time, of satellite transmissions and offer service on par with fiber-based networks.\nA public draft version of the FCC\u2019s proposed auction procedures, dated Feb. 7, contained language prohibiting satellite companies from qualifying as low-latency services, making their bids less attractive than bidders with land-based networks.\nSpaceX met with FCC staff on Feb. 18 and 19, it said in the letter to the FCC, arguing that low-Earth-orbiting satellites generate low-latency signals.\n\u201cLow-latency service is not an aspirational feature of a proposed system\u2014it results from the laws of physics,\u201d Mr. Goldman said in the Feb. 20 letter.\nIn the version of the proposal the FCC approved on Feb. 28, the agency left open the possibility that low-Earth-orbit satellite services could qualify as low-latency and asked for public comments on SpaceX\u2019s assertions.\nThe agency could ultimately decide that SpaceX\u2019s technology isn\u2019t proven enough to qualify for public funds. Besides latency, the FCC is proposing other criteria to judge bidders, including network capacity. It also has proposed a case-by-case review of firms with nascent technologies.\nOn the other hand, if the FCC were to adopt SpaceX\u2019s suggestions, that could allow the company to bid in the auction on equal footing with more established technologies, such as fiber-optic cable.\nA trade group called NTCA\u2014The Rural Broadband Association, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, whose members sometimes offer internet service along with electricity, said they are lobbying congressional offices and the FCC against SpaceX\u2019s proposals.\nNTCA emailed congressional offices last week urging them to contact the FCC and share concerns about low-Earth-orbit satellite companies participating in the auction.\n\u201cWhile this is just a proposal, The company is seeking to qualify for federal subsidies to provide broadband service to rural areas, over the objections of competitors who say its satellite-based technology is unproven. ",
        "author": "Ryan Tracy and Brody Mullins"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Has Built Mock-Up of U.S. Aircraft Carrier, Warships in the Desert (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8289",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-has-built-mock-ups-of-u-s-aircraft-carrier-warships-in-the-desert-11636403790?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=8",
        "text": "Evidence of the ship mock-ups\u2014presumably designed for target practice\u2014comes amid concerns over Taiwan, the self-governed island Beijing claims is its sovereign territory and the U.S. supplies with military hardware. The PLA is increasingly active in the skies and seas around Taiwan, while the U.S. and Western allies step up naval patrols in apparent efforts to deter Beijing from taking action to gain control of the island.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA mock warship on rails is visible in a satellite image of a northwestern desert in China.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n maxar technologies handout/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nPhotographs of the ship-like structures by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Maxar Technologies Inc.\n\n\n and interpreted by AllSource Analysis Inc. show their dimensions match the hull size of U.S. naval vessels, but with minimal or no deck equipment or other features of a real ship.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.What\u2019s NewsDoes Taiwan's Military Stand a Chance Against China?A.M. Edition for Oct. 26. There is mounting concern that China might try to seize Taiwan. But American military planners and local officials question whether Taiwan's military could hold the line. WSJ's Joyu Wang discusses what's driving recent tensions and whether allies would step in to help the island in the event of an attack. Keith Collins hosts.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherAmazon AlexaRSS\n\n\n\nThere are about eight mock-ups of vessels plus unidentified equipment that appears to be sensors spread over a vast area that China in the past has used for training, said Renny Babiarz, an analyst at AllSource Analysis, which first discovered the site.\n\n\n\u201cPart of China\u2019s testing for weapons systems is now incorporating detailed examples of U.S. equipment, and U.S. equipment that is in the Pacific Theater,\u201d said Mr. Babiarz.\nA spokesman for China\u2019s Foreign Ministry,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wang Wenbin,\n\n\n\n told a briefing Monday in Beijing that he wasn\u2019t aware of the situation when asked about the satellite images.\nThe photos of the ship-like structures are the latest illustration of how satellite imagery can give clues to the priorities of China\u2019s secretive military. Earlier imagery from space has demonstrated construction of runways and other signs of military-base building on islands in the South China Sea, while other such photography has shown road-making and new structures along China\u2019s contested borders with Bhutan and India. This year, satellites have also detected signs of missile silo construction around China as Beijing expands its nuclear arsenal.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA satellite image from a site in northwestern China featuring mock target warships.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n /Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nSatellite photography has likewise been instrumental in opening the world\u2019s eyes to the scale of camps in Xinjiang that human-rights groups say have interned Muslim minorities and which Beijing calls training facilities.\nNavies around the world construct realistic-looking targets for practice; Iran for instance has used a copy of a U.S. aircraft carrier. For around two decades, China is known to have used ship mock-ups in its remote deserts for target practice, and in 2013 a Taiwan media report reported strikes by a missile dubbed the \u201ccarrier killer,\u201d the DF-21D, on a structure designed to look like the body of a U.S. aircraft carrier.\nPentagon press secretary\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Kirby\n\n\n\n declined to address the boat mock-ups, saying he hadn\u2019t seen the images. \nMr. Kirby pointed to an annual Pentagon report on China\u2019s military power released last week as an indicator of Defense Department concerns about Chinese capabilities. The report charts an overall increase in the size and potency of China\u2019s armed forces.\nIt also points to significant efforts by the PLA to make more realistic its training of the armed forces, including by stepping up live-fire target missile practice. \n\u201cI think it makes it very clear what our understanding of their intentions are and their capabilities are and how they\u2019re developing those capabilities and to what ends,\u201d Mr. Kirby said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n As tensions between China and Taiwan escalate, WSJ\u2019s Gerald F. Seib examines the debate on whether the time has come for the U.S. to change its longstanding strategic ambiguity approach and openly declare that it would come to the island\u2019s defense. Photo Illustration: Nikki Walker\n \n\n\n\u2014Gordon Lubold contributed to this article.\nWrite to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com Satellite images indicate the People\u2019s Liberation Army is focused on increasingly realistic training methods as tension over Taiwan rises. ",
        "author": "James T. Areddy"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Shipping Industry, Fighting Cyber Threat, Revives Radio Navigation (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8290",
        "date": "2017-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-shipping-industry-fighting-cyber-threat-revives-radio-navigation-1502107688?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=89",
        "text": "Back to the future.\u00a0\"South Korea is developing an alternative system using an earth-based navigation technology known as eLoran, while the United States is planning to follow suit. Britain and Russia have also explored adopting versions of the technology, which works on radio signals,\u201d said Reuters.\nA new deterrent. U.S. engineer Brad Parkinson, known as the \"father of GPS,\u201d supports eLoran as a backup, even though it is not as accurate, according to Reuters. He maintains that the signal is 1.3 million times stronger than a space-based signal and is therefore a deterrent to deliberate jamming or spoofing, which involves the use of wrong positions. Says Reuters: \u201cThe cyber threat has grown steadily over the past decade as vessels have switched increasingly to satellite systems and paper charts have largely disappeared due to a loss of traditional skills among seafarers.\u201d\nIs blockchain ready to cross the chasm? Lessons from the internet. The impact of blockchain could well be enormous, but its full transformational impact, like that of the internet, will play out over decades rather than years, Columnist Irving Wlasdawsky-Berger writes. And like the internet, blockchain's transition to a more mainstream market will require the establishment of standards, killer applications and effective governance.\n\nSECURITY AND PRIVACY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMarcus Hutchins, digital security researcher for Kryptos Logic, in front of his computer in his bedroom in Ilfracombe, U.K., on July 4, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n CHRIS RATCLIFFE/BLOOMBERG NEWS\n \n\n\n\nCyber community shocked by U.K. hacking expert\u2019s arrest in the U.S. The arrest in the U.S. on hacking-related charges of Marcus Hutchins, a British computer whiz hailed for slowing the WannaCry \u00a0cyberattack in May, has stunned and divided the cybersecurity community. It also shines a spotlight on a gray area in cybersecurity, the often hidden forums where experts trying to protect corporate and government interests interact clandestinely with suspected criminals. The WSJ's Stu Woo has the story.\nLEADERSHIP\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBacklash over the memo drew a response from Danielle Brown, who joined Google in late June.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n NOAM GALAI/GETTY IMAGES FOR TECHCRUNCH\n \n\n\n\nGoogle\u2019s new diversity chief criticizes employee\u2019s memo. Google\u2019s new diversity chief criticized the contents of an employee\u2019s memo that went viral inside the company for suggesting Google has fewer female engineers because men are better suited for the job, the Journal's Jack Nicas reports. \"Given the heated debate we\u2019ve seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words,\u201d Danielle Brown, Google\u2019s vice president for diversity and inclusion,\u00a0\u00a0said in a\u00a0statement.\u00a0Google said in its annual diversity report in June that 31% of its employees are women, unchanged from a year prior.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRay Kurzweil\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n DREW KELLY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nSingularity prophet tackles email. Ray Kurzweil's involvement in Smart Reply, an AI-based Gmail mobile app feature that offers suggested email replies, is just the\u00a0first\u00a0visible step toward a Google project aimed at understanding the meaning of language. \"Codenamed Kona, the effort is aiming for nothing less than creating software as linguistically fluent as you or me,\" Wired reports. Mr. Kurzweil, known for popularizing the idea of singularity, maintains that computers will have a human-level understanding of language by 2029.\nNot enough chargers, electricity for electric cars. Most owners of electric vehicles charge them overnight at home, but a few companies are looking ahead to an era of rapid adoption\u2014and building a charging-station infrastructure. But therein lies another problem. America\u2019s often-overtaxed power grids won\u2019t be able to handle a large influx of new demand without careful management.\u00a0\u201cChargers in parking garages or superchargers at rest stops are not a solution for charging EVs en masse unless we are OK with significant costs to upgrade distribution grids,\u201d\u00a0Jesse Jenkins, a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, tells WSJ Columnist Christopher Mims.\nApple plans Apple Watch with wireless functionality.Apple Inc. is planning to introduce a smartwatch this year capable of connecting to cellular networks, the Journal's Tripp Mickle and Ryan Knutson report. The new Apple Watch would have LTE capabilities similar to the data connection on a phone, which could allow it to access data, send and receive texts and make phone calls. Currently, the Apple Watch must be paired with an iPhone and use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to transmit data and texts.\nSilicon Valley's vesters.Business Insider reports on the 'secret'\u00a0community of Silicon Valley engineers who are paid gobs of money yet do virtually nothing save wait for their stock to vest. They are called \"coasters\" or \"resters and vesters\"\u00a0and\u00a0their existence\u00a0may indica The market-warping effects of cyber threats are evident in the shipping industry, where companies are lessening their reliance upon vulnerable satellite global-positioning systems, according to a recent report. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: Shipping Industry, Fighting Cyber Threat, Revives Radio Navigation (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8291",
        "date": "2017-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-shipping-industry-fighting-cyber-threat-revives-radio-navigation-1502107688?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=82",
        "text": "Back to the future.\u00a0\"South Korea is developing an alternative system using an earth-based navigation technology known as eLoran, while the United States is planning to follow suit. Britain and Russia have also explored adopting versions of the technology, which works on radio signals,\u201d said Reuters.\nA new deterrent. U.S. engineer Brad Parkinson, known as the \"father of GPS,\u201d supports eLoran as a backup, even though it is not as accurate, according to Reuters. He maintains that the signal is 1.3 million times stronger than a space-based signal and is therefore a deterrent to deliberate jamming or spoofing, which involves the use of wrong positions. Says Reuters: \u201cThe cyber threat has grown steadily over the past decade as vessels have switched increasingly to satellite systems and paper charts have largely disappeared due to a loss of traditional skills among seafarers.\u201d\nIs blockchain ready to cross the chasm? Lessons from the internet. The impact of blockchain could well be enormous, but its full transformational impact, like that of the internet, will play out over decades rather than years, Columnist Irving Wlasdawsky-Berger writes. And like the internet, blockchain's transition to a more mainstream market will require the establishment of standards, killer applications and effective governance.\n\nSECURITY AND PRIVACY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMarcus Hutchins, digital security researcher for Kryptos Logic, in front of his computer in his bedroom in Ilfracombe, U.K., on July 4, 2017.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n CHRIS RATCLIFFE/BLOOMBERG NEWS\n \n\n\n\nCyber community shocked by U.K. hacking expert\u2019s arrest in the U.S. The arrest in the U.S. on hacking-related charges of Marcus Hutchins, a British computer whiz hailed for slowing the WannaCry \u00a0cyberattack in May, has stunned and divided the cybersecurity community. It also shines a spotlight on a gray area in cybersecurity, the often hidden forums where experts trying to protect corporate and government interests interact clandestinely with suspected criminals. The WSJ's Stu Woo has the story.\nLEADERSHIP\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBacklash over the memo drew a response from Danielle Brown, who joined Google in late June.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n NOAM GALAI/GETTY IMAGES FOR TECHCRUNCH\n \n\n\n\nGoogle\u2019s new diversity chief criticizes employee\u2019s memo. Google\u2019s new diversity chief criticized the contents of an employee\u2019s memo that went viral inside the company for suggesting Google has fewer female engineers because men are better suited for the job, the Journal's Jack Nicas reports. \"Given the heated debate we\u2019ve seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words,\u201d Danielle Brown, Google\u2019s vice president for diversity and inclusion,\u00a0\u00a0said in a\u00a0statement.\u00a0Google said in its annual diversity report in June that 31% of its employees are women, unchanged from a year prior.\nMORE TECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRay Kurzweil\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n DREW KELLY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL\n \n\n\n\nSingularity prophet tackles email. Ray Kurzweil's involvement in Smart Reply, an AI-based Gmail mobile app feature that offers suggested email replies, is just the\u00a0first\u00a0visible step toward a Google project aimed at understanding the meaning of language. \"Codenamed Kona, the effort is aiming for nothing less than creating software as linguistically fluent as you or me,\" Wired reports. Mr. Kurzweil, known for popularizing the idea of singularity, maintains that computers will have a human-level understanding of language by 2029.\nNot enough chargers, electricity for electric cars. Most owners of electric vehicles charge them overnight at home, but a few companies are looking ahead to an era of rapid adoption\u2014and building a charging-station infrastructure. But therein lies another problem. America\u2019s often-overtaxed power grids won\u2019t be able to handle a large influx of new demand without careful management.\u00a0\u201cChargers in parking garages or superchargers at rest stops are not a solution for charging EVs en masse unless we are OK with significant costs to upgrade distribution grids,\u201d\u00a0Jesse Jenkins, a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, tells WSJ Columnist Christopher Mims.\nApple plans Apple Watch with wireless functionality.Apple Inc. is planning to introduce a smartwatch this year capable of connecting to cellular networks, the Journal's Tripp Mickle and Ryan Knutson report. The new Apple Watch would have LTE capabilities similar to the data connection on a phone, which could allow it to access data, send and receive texts and make phone calls. Currently, the Apple Watch must be paired with an iPhone and use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to transmit data and texts.\nSilicon Valley's vesters.Business Insider reports on the 'secret'\u00a0community of Silicon Valley engineers who are paid gobs of money yet do virtually nothing save wait for their stock to vest. They are called \"coasters\" or \"resters and vesters\"\u00a0and\u00a0their existence\u00a0may indica The market-warping effects of cyber threats are evident in the shipping industry, where companies are lessening their reliance upon vulnerable satellite global-positioning systems, according to a recent report. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Dish Network CEO Sees Pickup in Wireless Deal-Making (WSJ: Earnings) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8292",
        "date": "2017-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/dish-network-swings-to-profit-1487765040?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=129",
        "text": "\u201cThere\u2019s probably going to be M&A activity out there in the future,\u201d Mr. Ergen said, and \u201dthis probably aligns the assets in a better way to participate in that.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMr. Ergen\u2019s comments came as Dish swung to a profit and added net pay-TV subscribers in the fourth quarter. Its streaming service Sling TV powered the satellite operator\u2019s first positive period of net customer additions in seven quarters, according to Guggenheim Securities.\n\n\nAnalysts have been speculating that as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Verizon Communications Inc.\n\n\n has transitioned to offering unlimited data packages, the wireless giant may look to acquire Dish to get at its hoard of airwaves. It isn\u2019t clear whether Verizon is interested; Verizon has been exploring a combination with cable provider\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Charter Communications Inc.,\n\n\n The Wall Street Journal has reported.\nMoreover, Mr. Ergen, Dish\u2019s founder and controlling shareholder, would have to be convinced to sell in order for a transaction to happen. He has often come to the altar only to walk away.\nOther potential dance partners for Dish include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Softbank Corp.\u2019s\nSprint\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n T-Mobile US Inc.\n\n\n Dish in 2015 held merger talks with T-Mobile, which is majority-owned by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Deutsche Telekom AG\n\n\n , the WSJ has reported, though those later fell apart. All the players have held off on talks as a government auction for airwaves is underway that restricts participants\u2019 communications with each other.\nMr. Ergen predicts deal activity will pick up after the auction ends. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to drive that process because we\u2019re not the biggest company, but obviously many of the assets we hold probably could be involved in that mix.\u201d\nBecause Dish\u2019s core satellite pay-TV business has been losing subscribers, Mr. Ergen has spent billions of dollars over the past several years buying up airwaves to enter the wireless business. He has yet to do so.\nAsked about his willingness to build a new business in his sixties, Mr. Ergen said \u201canytime you\u2019re passionate about something\u2026you can get pretty invigorated.\u201d\nSince Dish isn\u2019t hamstrung by old mobile technologies, Mr. Ergen said, it has a path to build a next-generation 5G wireless network that is less expensive compared with other carriers\u2019 networks, requiring fewer cell towers to offer wide coverage. He declined to estimate a cost for such a \u201cgreenfield\u201d network buildout.\nThe clock is ticking for Dish. It faces a deadline next month to meet a government mandate that it build out a slice of its airwaves to cover a certain percentage of the U.S. population. Mr. Ergen said Dish is likely to miss that deadline, which means it must meet a requirement to build out to at least 70% of the covered population by March 2020.\nMr. Ergen said there is an opportunity to reduce Dish\u2019s buildout cost by working to share tower space with carriers such as T-Mobile and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AT&T,\n\n\n who will be building more infrastructure to handle ballooning bandwidth needs. \u201cWe do not need to do an M&A transaction to meet the buildout schedule,\u201d he said.\nFor the fourth quarter, the company beat Wall Street analysts\u2019 expectations for subscriber growth by adding 28,000 net pay-TV customers, compared with a loss of 12,000 in the prior-year period. Some analysts were expecting losses as steep as 87,000 customers and credited growth at Sling TV for boosting the numbers. New Street Research analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jonathan Chaplin\n\n\n\n pegged Sling TV total customers at 1.1 million at quarter\u2019s end, while MoffettNathanson analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig Moffett\n\n\n\n put the total closer to 1.2 million.\nOverall Dish reported a profit of $342.7 million, or 70 cents a share, compared with a loss of $125.3 million, or 27 cents a share, a year earlier.\nRevenue dropped 1.6% to $3.72 billion.\nAnalysts polled by Thomson Reuters had forecast earnings of 66 cents a share on $3.76 billion in revenue.\nWrite to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com and Imani Moise at imani.moise@wsj.com Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen signaled interest in participating in potential deal-making in the wireless industry, though he maintained that the satellite operator also has a clear path to build a wireless network on its own. ",
        "author": "Shalini Ramachandran and Imani Moise"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Vulnerable U.S. Really Does Need a Space Force (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8293",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-vulnerable-u-s-really-does-need-a-space-force-11557480601?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=59",
        "text": "The team at the space operations center watched for the next few days as that seeming piece of space debris made 11 close approaches to one of the rocket\u2019s discarded stages. Such an elaborate space dance would be possible only if the object had thrusters and enough fuel to maneuver very precisely. These are the basic capabilities necessary for what defense experts call a \u201ckamikaze satellite\u201d\u2014that is, one capable of zeroing in on other satellites to attack them. \nMonths later, China launched its own new space weapon: a satellite with a grappling arm capable of lifting other satellites out of orbit. China has now conducted multiple successful tests of this \u201ckidnapper satellite,\u201d some of them at geostationary orbit, where America\u2019s most sensitive space assets reside, including satellites for communications, surveillance and early warning of a nuclear launch. \nLate-night comedians have had a field day with President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n declaration that the U.S. military needs a separate \u201cSpace Force.\u201d \u201cSpace, that\u2019s the next step, and we have to be prepared,\u201d Mr. Trump has said, even as he has run into opposition from lawmakers worried about the cost of a sprawling new bureaucracy. On her TBS show \u201cFull Frontal,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samantha Bee\n\n\n\n offered a \u201cSpace Force Anthem,\u201d featuring a choir in shiny silver suits and futuristic sunglasses making laser noises and singing, \u201cPew pew pew, we got you!\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cWar is coming to space, and the U.S. must prepare for it.\u201d\n\n\n\nA \u201cStar Wars\u201d-like space service is an easy comic target, but Mr. Trump has a point. U.S. commanders are deadly serious about the need to confront the new threats in space. Call it what you like\u2014Space Force or a better-resourced version of the existing Air Force Space Command\u2014but one thing is clear: War is coming to space, and the U.S. must prepare for it. \n\n\nThe U.S. military has staged numerous simulations of war in space, based on the assumption that such attacks could presage all-out war on the ground, including cyber and even nuclear conflict. Even a more limited clash in space could be devastating because so many everyday technologies depend on satellites: from air, sea and land navigation to communications to financial transactions to traffic lights. \nShould it happen, space war against the U.S. would begin without a sound, likely coupled with a coordinated series of cyberattacks racing through the country. Televisions would go dark. Internet connections would sputter. ATMs would malfunction. Early on, it might seem like a series of unfortunate cyber glitches, spurring little alarm. Meanwhile, the front lines would extend from the cyber realm into the far reaches of space.\nGround-based lasers would target U.S. communications satellites in lower orbits. Missiles launched from enemy ships and aircraft would destroy GPS satellites circling more than 12,000 miles above the Earth. Thousands of miles higher, in geostationary orbits\u2014the \u201choliest\u201d orbit of all, as some space commanders say\u2014kamikaze satellites would disable America\u2019s most essential nuclear early warning and surveillance satellites. A broad-based attack could create enough wreckage to render orbits unusable for years. \nThe loss of U.S. satellites would have sweeping effects. The financial markets\u2014with trades dependent on time stamps provided by the military\u2019s constellation of GPS satellites\u2014would be paralyzed. The internet would stop altogether. Business would halt as credit cards and bank machines became useless. Mobile phone services would fail completely.\n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe loss of GPS satellites would cause widespread disruptions. Traffic lights and railroad signals\u2014also timed by GPS\u2014would default to red, bringing transport to a standstill. Air traffic would be suspended as pilots lose navigation. Without NASA and NOAA satellites, we would have no weather forecasts. The U.S. power grid and water-treatment plants would be disrupted. Government officials would have to consider a state of emergency. As the cyberwarfare expert\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Singer\n\n\n\n and others have written, America would screech to a halt. \nA space war would be confusing for civilians but paralyzing for the military, disabling much modern weaponry. \u201cWe\u2019d go back to the way we fought in World War II,\u201d says retired\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. William Shelton,\n\n\n\n a former commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command. \u201cThink of all the things that won\u2019t exist without space\u2014remotely piloted aircraft, all-weather precision-guided munitions. Now we can target anyplace on the planet, anytime, anywhere, any weather. That will be lost.\u201d\nIn space, a smaller, weaker rival could quickly level the playing field. With GPS down, the U.S. co China and Russia are developing new weapons that can attack crucial American satellites, and the U.S. has been slow to respond to the danger ",
        "author": "Jim Sciutto"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Vulnerable U.S. Really Does Need a Space Force (WSJ: Essay) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8294",
        "date": "2019-05-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-vulnerable-u-s-really-does-need-a-space-force-11557480601?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=55",
        "text": "The team at the space operations center watched for the next few days as that seeming piece of space debris made 11 close approaches to one of the rocket\u2019s discarded stages. Such an elaborate space dance would be possible only if the object had thrusters and enough fuel to maneuver very precisely. These are the basic capabilities necessary for what defense experts call a \u201ckamikaze satellite\u201d\u2014that is, one capable of zeroing in on other satellites to attack them. \nMonths later, China launched its own new space weapon: a satellite with a grappling arm capable of lifting other satellites out of orbit. China has now conducted multiple successful tests of this \u201ckidnapper satellite,\u201d some of them at geostationary orbit, where America\u2019s most sensitive space assets reside, including satellites for communications, surveillance and early warning of a nuclear launch. \nLate-night comedians have had a field day with President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Donald Trump\u2019s\n\n\n\n declaration that the U.S. military needs a separate \u201cSpace Force.\u201d \u201cSpace, that\u2019s the next step, and we have to be prepared,\u201d Mr. Trump has said, even as he has run into opposition from lawmakers worried about the cost of a sprawling new bureaucracy. On her TBS show \u201cFull Frontal,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samantha Bee\n\n\n\n offered a \u201cSpace Force Anthem,\u201d featuring a choir in shiny silver suits and futuristic sunglasses making laser noises and singing, \u201cPew pew pew, we got you!\u201d \n\n\n\n\u201cWar is coming to space, and the U.S. must prepare for it.\u201d\n\n\n\nA \u201cStar Wars\u201d-like space service is an easy comic target, but Mr. Trump has a point. U.S. commanders are deadly serious about the need to confront the new threats in space. Call it what you like\u2014Space Force or a better-resourced version of the existing Air Force Space Command\u2014but one thing is clear: War is coming to space, and the U.S. must prepare for it. \n\n\nThe U.S. military has staged numerous simulations of war in space, based on the assumption that such attacks could presage all-out war on the ground, including cyber and even nuclear conflict. Even a more limited clash in space could be devastating because so many everyday technologies depend on satellites: from air, sea and land navigation to communications to financial transactions to traffic lights. \nShould it happen, space war against the U.S. would begin without a sound, likely coupled with a coordinated series of cyberattacks racing through the country. Televisions would go dark. Internet connections would sputter. ATMs would malfunction. Early on, it might seem like a series of unfortunate cyber glitches, spurring little alarm. Meanwhile, the front lines would extend from the cyber realm into the far reaches of space.\nGround-based lasers would target U.S. communications satellites in lower orbits. Missiles launched from enemy ships and aircraft would destroy GPS satellites circling more than 12,000 miles above the Earth. Thousands of miles higher, in geostationary orbits\u2014the \u201choliest\u201d orbit of all, as some space commanders say\u2014kamikaze satellites would disable America\u2019s most essential nuclear early warning and surveillance satellites. A broad-based attack could create enough wreckage to render orbits unusable for years. \nThe loss of U.S. satellites would have sweeping effects. The financial markets\u2014with trades dependent on time stamps provided by the military\u2019s constellation of GPS satellites\u2014would be paralyzed. The internet would stop altogether. Business would halt as credit cards and bank machines became useless. Mobile phone services would fail completely.\n\n\nMore Essays\n\n\n\n\nJack Kerouac Found Rapture Off the Road\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nBoycotting Russian Culture Doesn\u2019t Help Ukraine\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nOn the Pleasures of Eating With Your Fingers\nMarch 5, 2022 \n\n\nHow Paper Money Saved the Union\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThe loss of GPS satellites would cause widespread disruptions. Traffic lights and railroad signals\u2014also timed by GPS\u2014would default to red, bringing transport to a standstill. Air traffic would be suspended as pilots lose navigation. Without NASA and NOAA satellites, we would have no weather forecasts. The U.S. power grid and water-treatment plants would be disrupted. Government officials would have to consider a state of emergency. As the cyberwarfare expert\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Singer\n\n\n\n and others have written, America would screech to a halt. \nA space war would be confusing for civilians but paralyzing for the military, disabling much modern weaponry. \u201cWe\u2019d go back to the way we fought in World War II,\u201d says retired\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. William Shelton,\n\n\n\n a former commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command. \u201cThink of all the things that won\u2019t exist without space\u2014remotely piloted aircraft, all-weather precision-guided munitions. Now we can target anyplace on the planet, anytime, anywhere, any weather. That will be lost.\u201d\nIn space, a smaller, weaker rival could quickly level the playing field. With GPS down, the U.S. co China and Russia are developing new weapons that can attack crucial American satellites, and the U.S. has been slow to respond to the danger ",
        "author": "Jim Sciutto"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Successfully Tests Satellite-Killing Missile (WSJ: India) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8295",
        "date": "2019-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-successfully-tests-satellite-killer-missile-11553679166?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=57",
        "text": "Indian Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\n\n\n\n announced the development in an afternoon address to the nation and social-media blitz.\n\u201cIndia stands tall as a space power,\u201d he said. \u201cIt will make India stronger, even more secure and will further peace and harmony.\u201d\n\n\nThe test will likely trigger further discussions about the weaponization of space, an issue that has flared up since President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n called for the U.S. to add a \u201cspace force\u201d to its military to defend and target the crucial systems in space.\nAmerica started developing space weapons systems in the 1950s, and by the 1980s space was expected to be the next frontier for its arms race with the former Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan pushed for development of a space-based missile shield\u2014dubbed \u201cStar Wars\u201d by doubters\u2014but the issue of conflict in space faded after the end of the Cold War.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChina tested an antisatellite system in 2007, sparking concerns about its growing military presence and spending.\u00a0India\u2019s test was seen as a show of strength, particularly for rival Pakistan.\n\u201cPotential adversaries will have to take note, and this certainly indicates India\u2019s ambitions and capabilities in both space generally and military space particularly,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mark Hilborne,\n\n\n\n a lecturer in security studies at King\u2019s College London. \u201cThus the nations who will be paying most close attention would be China and Pakistan.\u201d\nIn February, Indian warplanes bombed targets inside Pakistan in retaliation for a suicide attack that killed 40 Indian paramilitary police and which Pakistani militant group claimed responsibility. There was fear that the two countries, which have fought three wars in the past 72 years, were at the brink of a fourth, but tensions eased after Pakistan released a captured Indian pilot.\nPakistan responded to the tests, saying peace in space needs to be protected.\n\u201cSpace is the common heritage of mankind and every nation has the responsibility to avoid actions which can lead to the militarization of this arena,\u201d Pakistan\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. \u201cWe believe that there is a need to address gaps in the international space laws with a view to ensuring that no one threatens peaceful activities and applications of space technologies for socio-economic development.\u201d\nWhile some may see this as a win in an arms race with Pakistan, it is geopolitics at a higher level, meant to underscore India\u2019s rising global profile, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kartik Bommakanti,\n\n\n\n an associate fellow with the Strategic Studies Program at Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank\n\u201cI don\u2019t believe it really has any implications for Pakistan per se. Our test is more directed at the Chinese, and Pakistanis don\u2019t have much of a space program,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat matters is how the Chinese react, how the Americans react, how the Russians react.\u201d\nIndians\u2019 initial reaction to the missile test, as reflected on local television and in social media, was a mixture of pride and suspicion. National elections are scheduled to start around mid-April, and critics of Mr. Modi saw the test as a show of strength meant to bolster his chance at re-election.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Akhilesh Yadav,\n\n\n\n the leader of an opposition party and former chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, said Mr. Modi is trying to distract voters from the problems in the economy.\n\u201cToday @narendramodi got himself an hour of free TV & divert nation\u2019s attention away from issues on ground\u2014#Unemployment #RuralCrisis & #WomensSecurity\u2014by pointing at the sky,\u201d he tweeted.\nIn the test, called Mission Shakti (Hindi for power), the ballistic missile was launched from an island off India\u2019s east coast and took around three minutes to reach its target. It was carried out in accordance with all international laws and treaties, Prime Minister Modi declared, and wouldn\u2019t threaten peace in the region.\n\u201cFor maintaining peace in the region, it\u2019s essential that India be strong,\u201d he said. \u201dWe have been against any arms race in the space and we still maintain that policy.\u201d\n\u2014Krishna Pokharel and Saeed Shah contributed to this article.\nWrite to Rajesh Roy at rajesh.roy@wsj.com and Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com\nCorrection\n\t\t\n\tAkhilesh Yadav is former chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that he is the current chief minister. (March 27) India said it successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile, becoming just the fourth country with the proven ability to carry war into space. ",
        "author": "Rajesh Roy and Eric Bellman"
    },
    {
        "title": "See Amazing Photos of India\u2019s Record-Breaking Launch of 104 Satellites (WSJ: Indiarealtime Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8296",
        "date": "2017-02-16",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2017/02/16/see-amazing-photos-of-indias-record-breaking-launch-of-104-satellites/?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=99",
        "text": " India's space agency on Wednesday broke a world record by launching 104 satellites from a single rocket. These photos show the moment the Indian Space Research Organization's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle released the satellites. ",
        "author": "Karan Deep Singh"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is How India\u2019s Space Agency Plans to Launch a Record 104 Satellites in One Go (WSJ: Indiarealtime Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8297",
        "date": "2017-01-30",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2017/01/30/this-is-how-indias-space-agency-plans-to-launch-a-record-104-satellites-in-one-go/?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=101",
        "text": " India\u2019s space agency will next month attempt to launch 104 satellites from a single rocket, a mission that could land it in the record books. ",
        "author": "Santanu Choudhury"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Is How India\u2019s Space Agency Plans to Launch a Record 104 Satellites in One Go (WSJ: Indiarealtime Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8298",
        "date": "2017-01-30",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2017/01/30/this-is-how-indias-space-agency-plans-to-launch-a-record-104-satellites-in-one-go/?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=89",
        "text": " India\u2019s space agency will next month attempt to launch 104 satellites from a single rocket, a mission that could land it in the record books. ",
        "author": "Santanu Choudhury"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Breaks Record for Launching Most Satellites From Single Rocket (WSJ: Indiarealtime Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8299",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2017/02/15/india-breaks-record-for-launching-most-satellites-from-single-rocket/?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=99",
        "text": " India\u2019s space agency on Wednesday reached a new milestone by launching a record 104 satellites using a single rocket. ",
        "author": "Santanu Choudhury"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Breaks Record for Launching Most Satellites From Single Rocket (WSJ: Indiarealtime Blog) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8300",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2017/02/15/india-breaks-record-for-launching-most-satellites-from-single-rocket/?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=88",
        "text": " India\u2019s space agency on Wednesday reached a new milestone by launching a record 104 satellites using a single rocket. ",
        "author": "Santanu Choudhury"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Breaks Record for Launching Most Satellites From Single Rocket (WSJ: Indiarealtime Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8301",
        "date": "2017-02-15",
        "link": "http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2017/02/15/india-breaks-record-for-launching-most-satellites-from-single-rocket/?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=130",
        "text": " India\u2019s space agency on Wednesday reached a new milestone by launching a record 104 satellites using a single rocket. ",
        "author": "Santanu Choudhury"
    },
    {
        "title": "How the Internet Is Finally Helping the World\u2019s Poorest People (Smartphones Optional) (WSJ: Keywords) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8302",
        "date": "2018-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-internet-is-changing-life-for-the-worlds-poorest-people-smartphones-optional-1519560000?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=79",
        "text": "WSJ\u2019s Financial Inclusion Challenge Health Care in America: Insurance Gaps and Medical Deserts \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne thing that isn\u2019t necessarily required: a smartphone. While the narrative from U.S. tech giants like Google and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Facebook\n\n\n implies that economic development comes from directly connecting people to the internet, billions of people can\u2019t afford smartphones, and many might never get them. Innovators must think around that barrier.\nThe global poor often pay more per unit for what they consume, be it energy, consumer goods or bandwidth, precisely because they can\u2019t afford to buy these things in the volumes that wealthier people do. They also appear to be credit risks, because they\u2019re short on assets.\n\n\n\u201cWhen microfinance appeared a few years ago, the big innovation was to be able to offer a loan to a person who had no credit history,\u201d says Xavier Faz, head of business model innovation at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, part of the World Bank. Now, there is \u201ca very wide variety of lending models which leverage alternative information to assess risk,\u201d he says.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPayGo Energy markets internet-connected canisters that meter out small amounts of gas for cooking and automatically charges customers through a mobile money system.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n PayGo Energy\n \n\n\n\nThese services are still nascent, reaching tens of thousands of households out of a potential market of hundreds of millions. And as rich countries have discovered, connecting everyone has its downsides, as the networks that underlie communications and finance create new vulnerabilities for nations and individuals. But it\u2019s also true that using the internet to access basic services can significantly boost the fortunes of the world\u2019s poorest people.\nInsuring the uninsurable\nFor WorldCover, which offers low-cost crop insurance to farmers in rural Africa, most customers \u201ccan\u2019t even type a number into a feature phone,\u201d says Chief Executive Christopher Sheehan. (A feature phone is any cellphone without a touch screen, the same kind we all used to rely on before the iPhone and which still constitutes the majority of phones in the poorest parts of the developing world.) For farmers who don\u2019t have irrigation, much less a smartphone, getting access to crop insurance is a potential life-saver.\nWorldCover charges a few dollars (prices vary) to insure, say, a bag of harvested maize in Ghana worth around $25, Mr. Sheehan says. If there\u2019s a drought, the farmer gets between 50% and 100% of the bag\u2019s value, depending on the severity.\nThe company sends salespeople into rural villages to explain the service. Afterward, it connects with its customers via a handful of people in the village who have simple feature phones and some ability to read. When possible, mobile money services such as M-Pesa are used to collect premiums and make payouts. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nWorldCover sends salespeople to rural village to explain its crop insurance: It charges a few dollars to insure a bag of harvested maize worth, say, $25, and if there\u2019s a drought, the farmer gets 50% to 100% of the value.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WorldCover\n \n\n\n\nWeather data from satellites can be used to trigger claims instantly. \u201cWhen a customer becomes eligible for a claim because a drought situation has been detected, we send them an SMS or voice message alert,\u201d says Mr. Sheehan. \u201cThen we transfer the funds directly to their mobile wallet, so they can immediately cash-out or use the funds for relief.\u201d \nBecause M-Pesa was born on feature phones, citizens of many countries in Africa can access mobile wallets without a smartphone. And those who lack even a feature phone can get payouts in cash directly from WorldCover.\nWorldCover raises money from institutional investors who are used to \u201ccatastrophe bond\u201d returns of 5% to 7%. It charges farmers enough to get an additional margin on top of that.\nEventually, WorldCover hopes to have its portfolio underwritten not only by institutional investors but also by retail investors. It\u2019s a model similar to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n LendingClub.\n\n\n Because WorldCover is taking money from investors, it\u2019s passing on the risk of a big drought hitting its entire portfolio to those investors, who in theory are happy to take on the risk as long as it\u2019s part of a larger diversified portfolio.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor farmers who don\u2019t have irrigation, much less a smartphone, getting access to crop insurance via a company like WorldCover is a potential life-saver.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WorldCover\n \n\n\n\nLoans without collateral\nAfter Reeza Zarook cashed out of Anything.lk, Sri Lanka\u2019s first-ever e-commerce company, he decided to tackle a big concern: 40% of the population couldn\u2019t buy from his company. They were so poor, traditional banks wouldn\u2019t extend them any credit.\nMr. Zarook wanted to help poor people buy consumer goods they need\u2014a smartphone, a computer, a gas stove\u2014which typical microfinance loans don\u2019t cover.\nIn late 2014, he launched Rukula, which enables vendors of pretty much any type of consumer good to sell it to customers on credit. A Rukula staffer in a call center evaluates, over the phone, potential customers\u2019 creditworthiness in three-to-four minute interviews.\n\u201cWe want to know if they have no ties, commitments or stability and they\u2019ll just disappear into the night, or are they in very entrenched family units with young kids at school,\u201d Mr. Zarook says. \u201cSchool is very, very important here\u2014 even if you move, you don\u2019t move schools. So that lets us decide whether this person will pay us back.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn Sri Lanka, loans from Rukula help people buy smartphones and other consumer goods.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rukula\n \n\n\n\nRukula charges 40% interest on a six-month loan. This might sound usurious, but it\u2019s typical for microloans, which have relatively higher service costs than loans available in rich countries. The firm doesn\u2019t take collateral, and it caps the interest: A customer will never pay more than $140 back for a $100 loan, no matter how long that takes.\nOn average, loans are paid back in 15 months, and 95% of the company\u2019s loans have been paid off by the two-year mark. The company turned a profit within two years.\nClean fuel where it\u2019s needed\nPeople in the world\u2019s informal settlements (aka shantytowns) burn solid fuel such as charcoal, wood\u2014even dung. It\u2019s the deadliest environmental problem on Earth, the World Health Organization says, killing between 3.5 million and 4.3 million people a year.\nCooking with gas is cleaner and more convenient, but it\u2019s hard to pay $50 for a canister and $10 for refills when you live on less than $5 a day, says Nick Quintong, chief executive of PayGo Energy, based in Nairobi, Kenya.\nPayGo\u2019s solution is an internet-connected canister that meters very small amounts of gas, automatically charging customers through the mobile money system M-Pesa. While someone in the household needs access to a phone, the service doesn\u2019t require users to be online: PayGo canisters have their own cellular connections.\nBusinesses like these face huge hurdles, beyond what normal tech startups contend with. \u201cIn the fintech space in many countries, there is a high rate of failure, and that failure can happen for many reasons,\u201d Mr. Faz says.\nCatalyst Fund, supported by the Gates Foundation and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n JPMorgan Chase,\n\n\n doles out $100,000 grants\u2014not investments\u2014to companies including PayGo. The fund pays in two installments, at the beginning and end of its engagement. That doesn\u2019t mean these companies are charities, however\u2014all three have received investment from venture capital and other more traditional sources.\nThere are risks associated with connecting poor people to broader networks that can be instruments of control as well as of liberation. But despite the threat of some new form of colonialism, research on microfinance has shown again and again that getting credit to people who would otherwise have none does transform lives.\nWrite to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com First-world services are finally arriving in the developing world\u2014because of mobile money, unconventional credit scoring, data science and even satellite imaging\u2014and they don\u2019t require a smartphone. ",
        "author": "Christopher Mims"
    },
    {
        "title": "Argentina Steps Up Search for Missing Submarine (WSJ: Latin America) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8303",
        "date": "2017-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/argentina-steps-up-search-for-missing-submarine-with-44-crew-1511055810?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=108",
        "text": "Argentine authorities clarified that it hasn\u2019t been confirmed the calls came from the submarine, the ARA San Juan, though that is the working hypothesis.\nEarlier Saturday, Navy spokesman Enrique Balbi said that the area being searched off the country\u2019s southern Atlantic coast has been doubled as concerns about the 44 crew members grew.\n\n\n\u201cWe are not discounting any hypothesis,\u201d Mr. Balbi said. Possibilities could include \u201ca problem with communications\u201d or with its power system, he said.\nAuthorities last had contact with the German-built diesel-electric sub on Wednesday as it was on a voyage from the extreme southern port of Ushuaia to Mar del Plata.\nPresident\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mauricio Macri\n\n\n\n said in a tweet that the country will use \u201call resources national and international that are necessary to find the submarine.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn undated photo provided by the Argentine Navy of the ARA San Juan submarine.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Argentina Navy/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nPledges of help came from Chile, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil, as well as the U.S., which sent a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientific aircraft and a Navy plane. Britain was sending a polar exploration vessel, the HMS Protector, which British officials said should arrive Sunday.\nThe U.S. Navy ordered its Undersea Rescue Command based in San Diego to deploy to Argentina to support the search for the submarine. The command includes a remotely operated vehicle and vessels capable of rescuing people from bottomed submarines.\nAdm. Gabriel Gonzalez, chief of the Mar del Plata Naval Base, said they are coordinating \u201cwith units from the United Kingdom and the United States.\u201d Britain and Argentina fought a war in 1982 over the Falkland Islands, which are called the Malvinas in Argentina.\nRelatives of the crew members gathered at the Mar del Plata Naval Base in the hopes of hearing news about their loved ones.\n\u201cWe feel anguish. We are reserved but will not lose our hope that they will return,\u201d Marcela Moyano, wife of machinist Hernan Rodriguez, told television network TN.\nShe said she spoke with her husband when the submarine departed and is still sending him WhatsApp messages, though he hasn\u2019t responded.\nFrom the Vatican, Argentine\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pope Francis\n\n\n\n said he was making \u201cfervent prayers\u201d for the crew.\n\u2014Copyright 2017 The Associated Press The Argentine Navy detected seven brief satellite calls Saturday that officials believe may have come from a submarine with 44 crew members that hadn\u2019t been heard from in three days. ",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Iran Says It Launched First Military Satellite (WSJ: Middle East) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8304",
        "date": "2020-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-says-it-launched-first-military-satellite-amid-tensions-with-u-s-11587570959?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=45",
        "text": "Top officials of both nations have sought to demonstrate that the pandemic hasn\u2019t exhausted their ability to focus elsewhere. The Trump administration explicitly has warned adversaries not to seek advantage, while the Iranian satellite launch was meant to show \u201cit\u2019s business as usual for them,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dina Esfandiary\n\n\n\n of the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.\nThe satellite launch was of particular concern to U.S. officials, who have said the rockets used for Iran\u2019s satellites help advance its ballistic-missile program as the technology in the two types of launches is similar.\n\n\n\u201cThey have now had a military organization that the United States has designated a terrorist attempt to launch a satellite,\u201d said Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Pompeo,\n\n\n\n adding that Iran must be held accountable for the satellite launch.\nThe satellite, named Nour, or \u201cLight,\u201d reached an orbit about 264 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said, the first time an Iranian satellite has surpassed 124 miles.\nThe threat by Mr. Trump came in a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n message early Wednesday addressing an incident last week in which a group of armed Iranian fast boats sped around a group of U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf.\n\u201cI have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea,\u201d he tweeted. \nPentagon lawyers are reviewing Mr. Trump\u2019s tweet to determine what, if anything, it means for operations, defense officials said. The Pentagon has received no other orders so far, the officials said.\nAir Force Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Twitter message was a \u201cwarning\u201d that helps put Iran on notice without changing the Navy\u2019s existing authorities to take action to protect its ships and crew members.\n\u201cIf you cross that line, we know what that line is and we will respond,\u201d Gen. Hyten told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday. \u201cYou can\u2019t let a fast boat get into a position where they can threaten your ship.\u201d\nAddressing the issue later Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he hasn\u2019t changed the military\u2019s rules of engagement, while warning of a U.S. response. \u201cWe\u2019ll shoot them out of the water,\u201d he said.\nResponding to Mr. Trump\u2019s tweet, Brig.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi,\n\n\n\n a senior spokesman of Iran\u2019s armed forces, said the U.S. should focus on saving its own soldiers from the coronavirus \u201cinstead of bullying others.\u201d\nSatellite launches don\u2019t violate Iran\u2019s 2015 international nuclear accord, which the Trump administration pulled out of in 2018. The Trump administration has said it opposed the nuclear deal because it didn\u2019t do enough to curb Iran\u2019s conventional military capabilities, including its missile program. The U.S. last year imposed sanctions on Iran\u2019s space program.\nThe commander of the Revolutionary Guard,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami,\n\n\n\n said the Nour satellite amplifies Iran\u2019s capabilities in defense and information gathering. Gen. Salami said the launch is evidence that Iran, which has been increasingly isolated since the reimposition of U.S. sanctions in 2018, doesn\u2019t need to rely on foreign powers.\n\u201cThe message of this important achievement is not only that sanctions are not a barrier to our way forward, but that they ignite the engine of modern technology,\u201d he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.\nHostility between Tehran and Washington has been growing, most markedly since the U.S. in April 2019 designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization.\nIn January, the two sides appeared to be building toward battle after a U.S. drone strike killed Iran\u2019s most prominent commander,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani,\n\n\n\n in Iraq following attacks on U.S. forces there by Iran-backed militias. Iran retaliated by attacking bases in Iraq that housed U.S. troops. After that, Mr. Trump signaled an ease in tensions.\nWednesday\u2019s satellite launch shows Iran\u2019s continued willingness to invest in military development during an economic crisis that has been compounded by U.S. sanctions and, most recently, the pandemic that has paralyzed swaths of its economy. \n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Videos show worshippers in Iran trying to break into a holy shrine and car traffic in the country despite travel restrictions. WSJ\u2019s Sune Rasmussen explains why some Iranians aren\u2019t following their government\u2019s advice on coronavirus. Photo: Mehdi Marizad/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\nFor the Revolutionary Guard, the launch\u2014timed to coincide with the anniversary of its founding after the 1979 Iranian revolution\u2014also was an attempt to show that the military\u2019s core mission of defending the country remains intact, experts said.\nThe satellite was sent into orbit from Iran\u2019s central desert near the city of Shahroud using a three-phased satellite carr Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard said it launched its first military satellite into space, a move American officials have warned could advance Tehran\u2019s missile capabilities, amid renewed tensions with the U.S. ",
        "author": "Gordon Lubold in Washington, Aresu Eqbali in Tehran and Sune Engel Rasmussen in London"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Hurricane Ida, Oil Infrastructure Springs Dozens of Leaks (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8305",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/26/climate/ida-oil-spills.html",
        "text": "The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms. The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms. The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms.",
        "author": "By Blacki Migliozzi and Hiroko Tabuchi"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Hurricane Ida, Oil Infrastructure Springs Dozens of Leaks (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8306",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/26/climate/ida-oil-spills.html",
        "text": "The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms. The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms. The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms.",
        "author": "By Blacki Migliozzi and Hiroko Tabuchi"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Hurricane Ida, Oil Infrastructure Springs Dozens of Leaks (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8307",
        "date": "2021-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/26/climate/ida-oil-spills.html",
        "text": "The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms. The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms. The 55 oil spill reports, a record since NOAA began tracking them with satellites, were in an area full of abandoned oil and gas pipelines and drilling platforms.",
        "author": "By Blacki Migliozzi and Hiroko Tabuchi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the Footprint of Coronavirus Spread Across Countries (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8308",
        "date": "2020-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/coronavirus-pollution.html",
        "text": "A satellite that detects pollution from human activity shows how the coronavirus is shutting down whole countries. A satellite that detects pollution from human activity shows how the coronavirus is shutting down whole countries. A satellite that detects pollution from human activity shows how the coronavirus is shutting down whole countries.",
        "author": "By Nadja Popovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down for Coronavirus (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8309",
        "date": "2020-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/22/climate/coronavirus-usa-traffic.html",
        "text": "A satellite that detects pollution linked to cars and trucks shows declines over major metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. A satellite that detects pollution linked to cars and trucks shows declines over major metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. A satellite that detects pollution linked to cars and trucks shows declines over major metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York.",
        "author": "By Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich"
    },
    {
        "title": "South Korea Tests Its First Domestically Produced Rocket (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8310",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000008036926/south-korea-rocket-test.html",
        "text": "South Korea\u2019s Aerospace Research Institute launched its first homemade rocket on Thursday. The mission was only partly successful, but officials called it an important step toward ",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "South Korea Tests Its First Domestically Produced Rocket (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8311",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asia/100000008036926/south-korea-rocket-test.html",
        "text": "South Korea\u2019s Aerospace Research Institute launched its first homemade rocket on Thursday. The mission was only partly successful, but officials called it an important step toward ",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX's First 2021 Mission Blasts Off as Elon Musk Tops World\u2019s Rich List (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8312",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-first-2021-mission-blasts-off-as-elon-musk-tops-worlds-rich-list/99D10108-9748-4AC3-A81F-8A0EC57F3612.html?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=36",
        "text": " SpaceX launched its first mission of the year with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Turkish satellite, the same day an 8% jump in Tesla\u2019s stock made the founder of both companies, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. Photo: SpaceX ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch: Latest SpaceX Starlink Mission Breaks Launch Record (WSJ: NA Factbox) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8313",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-latest-spacex-starlink-mission-breaks-launch-record/892676DF-5754-4202-B4B1-78336AC5ABEC.html?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=17",
        "text": " SpaceX carried out its 27th mission this year, launching nearly 50 Starlink satellites into orbit. Elon Musk\u2019s space company has now launched more carrier rockets in 2021 than any previous year. Photo: Malcolm Denemark/Associated Press ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Wins Approval to Buy Vector Launch\u2019s GalacticSky Business (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8314",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockheed-wins-approval-to-buy-vector-launchs-galacticsky-business-11582910388?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=13",
        "text": " A bankruptcy judge approved Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s purchase of space-technology company Vector Launch Inc.\u2019s GalacticSky satellite business. ",
        "author": "Patrick Fitzgerald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lockheed Wins Approval to Buy Vector Launch\u2019s GalacticSky Business (WSJ: Pro Bankruptcy) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8315",
        "date": "2020-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/lockheed-wins-approval-to-buy-vector-launchs-galacticsky-business-11582910388?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=47",
        "text": " A bankruptcy judge approved Lockheed Martin Corp.\u2019s purchase of space-technology company Vector Launch Inc.\u2019s GalacticSky satellite business. ",
        "author": "Patrick Fitzgerald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Private Equity Daily: ATL Partners Bets on Space Technology | Prudential Earmarks $200 Million for Emerging Managers (WSJ: Pro PE Newsletter) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8316",
        "date": "2021-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-equity-daily-atl-partners-bets-on-space-technology-prudential-earmarks-200-million-for-emerging-managers-11629379949?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=17",
        "text": " Laura Kreutzer reports on an emerging market\u2014this one much farther afield\u2014with a story on ATL Partners\u2019 acquisition of a majority interest in sensor maker Geost, which focuses on space technology to guard satellites. And joined by Dave Sebastian, our Laura Cooper reports on a $200 million plan from giant life insurer Prudential Financial to provide capital to emerging investment managers owned or run by women or minorities. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Astranis Raises Capital as It Readies First Commercial Launch (WSJ: Pro VC New Money) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8317",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/astranis-raises-capital-as-it-readies-first-commercial-satellite-launch-11581639044?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=59",
        "text": " The debt will be used to cover hardware and launch costs for the satellite. Astranis is set to lease the capacity of the satellite to Alaska-based telecommunications provider Microcom. ",
        "author": "Marc Vartabedian"
    },
    {
        "title": "Iran\u2019s Syrian Front (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8318",
        "date": "2018-02-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-syrian-front-1519259074?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=70",
        "text": "Iran has propped up Assad since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, and along with Russia is largely responsible for the regime\u2019s survival. After its 2016 victory in Aleppo and the ouster of Islamic State from Raqqa, this axis is now trying to roll up the last opposition strongholds. The trio will then use Russia-sponsored peace talks to re-establish Assad\u2019s control over Syria. Russia will keep its military bases, and Iran wants to establish a new imperial outpost on the border with Israel.\nToward that end, Iran is building a robust military presence of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) troops, Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah, foreign fighters from Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, and local Syrian militias in Assad-controlled areas. Iran\u2019s ultimate goal is \u201cthe eradication of Israel,\u201d as the leader of the IRGC\u2019s Quds Force,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Qasem Soleimani,\n\n\n\n said recently. \nMilitary analysts estimate Hezbollah could have more than 100,000 rockets pointed at Israel from its home base in Lebanon and possibly from Syria too. An Iranian redoubt in Syria would open another front in a war with Israel from which to launch more rocket and other attacks. U.S. National Security Adviser\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n H.R. McMaster\n\n\n\n worried publicly in December about \u201cthe prospect of Iran having a proxy army on the borders of Israel.\u201d \n\n\nTehran\u2019s confidence abroad is growing despite its recent protests at home. Earlier this month Iran-backed forces launched a drone from Syria\u2019s Homs area into Israeli air space. The Israeli military shot down the drone and sent F-16s to bomb the base from where the drone operated, as well as other military targets. The mission was a success, but the Israelis lost a fighter jet, the first such loss since the early 1980s. \nThe provocation is a sign that Iran is turning its attention from propping up Assad and toward establishing a more permanent presence in Syria, including the construction of military bases and weapons factories. Iranians are investing in Syria\u2019s local economy to help Assad \u201crebuild,\u201d and working to convert local Alawites to Shiite Islam.\nIran is also exploiting a \u201ccease-fire\u201d in southwestern Syria that the U.S. negotiated with Russia last year. Russia is supposed to stop Iran from building up its forces there, but the U.S. has been left to protest feebly as Russia lets Iran continue. \nThat leaves the policing to Israel, which has bombed Iranian and Hezbollah sites in Syria many times in the last year, including an Iranian base southwest of Damascus in December. On Sunday at the Munich security conference, Israeli Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Benjamin Netanyahu\n\n\n\n said, \u201cWe will act without hesitation to defend ourselves\u201d and \u201cnot just against Iran\u2019s proxies that are attacking us, but against Iran itself.\u201d\nIsrael\u2019s military is formidable, and the country is protected by a robust antimissile system. But even Israel\u2019s defenses would be strained by 1,500 to 2,000 incoming missiles a day from Syria and Lebanon, especially if Iran succeeds in upgrading Hezbollah\u2019s arsenal to precision-guided weapons. Hezbollah attacks from civilian centers, which means an Israel-Lebanon conflict would be an extensive and bloody undertaking, as Israeli forces would have to attack fighters near homes and hospitals.\nIf the Trump Administration is worried about this gathering storm, you can\u2019t tell from its actions. Secretary of State\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rex Tillerson\n\n\n\n toured the region last week and called for a \u201cwhole, independent, democratic Syria with no special demarcations dividing Syria and with the Syrian people selecting their leadership through free and fair elections.\u201d That\u2019s something\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Kerry\n\n\n\n might have said, with a similar lack of credibility with Iran or Russia.\nMr. Trump promised in October to work with allies to counter Iran\u2019s \u201cdestabilizing activity and support for terrorist proxies in the region,\u201d but in Syria the U.S. has shown no strategy for doing so. Meanwhile, an Iran-Israel conflict grows more likely by the day. Assad\u2019s atrocities grow as Tehran builds a new anti-Israel satellite. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Benefits From Customer Help Devising Reusable Rockets (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8319",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-benefits-from-customer-help-devising-reusable-rockets-1490693404?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=99",
        "text": "Reasoning that increased competition in the launch business will bring down prices for all of them, rival satellite operators SES SA,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC and Eutelsat SA have separately given important pointers to SpaceX and Blue Origin, the growing space startup founded and run by Amazon.com Inc. chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \n\u201cThere is definitely a role played by the satellite operators\u201d to help launch providers \u201cmake their service something viable and repeatable,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michele Franci,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer at London-based Inmarsat. When it comes to sorting out practicalities of the satellite industry, he said, \u201cwe can essentially share with them lessons learned\u201d over decades.\n\n\nSES, which on Thursday is scheduled to have a refurbished SpaceX rocket carry one of its satellites intended to provide video and internet services across Latin America, previously assigned a small cadre of engineers to work with SpaceX to avoid mission disruptions.\u00a0One of the main complaints expressed by SES, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Halliwell,\n\n\n\n its chief technology officer, was the sometimes exaggerated can-do attitude of SpaceX officials.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Readies Reusable Booster Elon Musk\u2019s Latest Startup: Brains Linked to Computers SpaceX Scores Another Win in Push for Military Satellite Launches (March 15) Amazon Chief Bezos Reveals Launch Deal With European Satellite Operator Eutelsat (March 7) NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (March 1) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (Feb. 28) SpaceX Delivers Cargo to International Space Station After Delay (Feb. 23) SpaceX Launches Its First Rocket From Iconic Florida Pad (Feb. 19) \n\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t come with the optimistic rosy glass approach\u201d regarding estimated launch schedules, he told his counterparts. \u201cBe absolutely hard-line realistic.\u201d As a result of accidents and a generally slower-than-anticipated launch tempo, SpaceX is years late meeting some benchmarks.\nIn this vein, SES engineers have examined how prior launcher accidents were resolved, and they have performed independent analyses to double-check SpaceX\u2019s calculations.\nA particularly sensitive point for reusable Falcon 9 rockets is the amount of reserve fuel needed to control the returning first stage\u2014plummeting at more than 4,000 miles an hour\u2014to achieve a soft vertical touchdown. The more fuel required for such return maneuvers, the less payload the rocket can deliver to orbit.\nIf the fuel penalty prevents the simultaneous launch of two satellites, the business case no longer is attractive, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yohann Leroy,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer at Paris-based Eutelsat, Blue Origin\u2019s first commercial customer.\nOther constraints stem from the cost of refurbishing and testing engines. Flying used engines \u201cwill bring some benefit,\u201d according to Mr. Franci, \u201cbut it may not be as dramatic as we\u2019d like to think.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Legacy satellite operators aiming to launch payloads on previously-flown hardware have been quietly providing engineering expertise to assist younger rocket companies pursuing the same goal. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Benefits From Customer Help Devising Reusable Rockets (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8320",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-benefits-from-customer-help-devising-reusable-rockets-1490693404?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=86",
        "text": "Reasoning that increased competition in the launch business will bring down prices for all of them, rival satellite operators SES SA,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Inmarsat\n\n\n PLC and Eutelsat SA have separately given important pointers to SpaceX and Blue Origin, the growing space startup founded and run by Amazon.com Inc. chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n \n\u201cThere is definitely a role played by the satellite operators\u201d to help launch providers \u201cmake their service something viable and repeatable,\u201d according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michele Franci,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer at London-based Inmarsat. When it comes to sorting out practicalities of the satellite industry, he said, \u201cwe can essentially share with them lessons learned\u201d over decades.\n\n\nSES, which on Thursday is scheduled to have a refurbished SpaceX rocket carry one of its satellites intended to provide video and internet services across Latin America, previously assigned a small cadre of engineers to work with SpaceX to avoid mission disruptions.\u00a0One of the main complaints expressed by SES, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Martin Halliwell,\n\n\n\n its chief technology officer, was the sometimes exaggerated can-do attitude of SpaceX officials.\n\n\nRelated SpaceX Readies Reusable Booster Elon Musk\u2019s Latest Startup: Brains Linked to Computers SpaceX Scores Another Win in Push for Military Satellite Launches (March 15) Amazon Chief Bezos Reveals Launch Deal With European Satellite Operator Eutelsat (March 7) NASA Moves to Extend Russian Space Contracts (March 1) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (Feb. 28) SpaceX Delivers Cargo to International Space Station After Delay (Feb. 23) SpaceX Launches Its First Rocket From Iconic Florida Pad (Feb. 19) \n\n\n\u201cDon\u2019t come with the optimistic rosy glass approach\u201d regarding estimated launch schedules, he told his counterparts. \u201cBe absolutely hard-line realistic.\u201d As a result of accidents and a generally slower-than-anticipated launch tempo, SpaceX is years late meeting some benchmarks.\nIn this vein, SES engineers have examined how prior launcher accidents were resolved, and they have performed independent analyses to double-check SpaceX\u2019s calculations.\nA particularly sensitive point for reusable Falcon 9 rockets is the amount of reserve fuel needed to control the returning first stage\u2014plummeting at more than 4,000 miles an hour\u2014to achieve a soft vertical touchdown. The more fuel required for such return maneuvers, the less payload the rocket can deliver to orbit.\nIf the fuel penalty prevents the simultaneous launch of two satellites, the business case no longer is attractive, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yohann Leroy,\n\n\n\n chief technology officer at Paris-based Eutelsat, Blue Origin\u2019s first commercial customer.\nOther constraints stem from the cost of refurbishing and testing engines. Flying used engines \u201cwill bring some benefit,\u201d according to Mr. Franci, \u201cbut it may not be as dramatic as we\u2019d like to think.\u201d\nWrite to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Legacy satellite operators aiming to launch payloads on previously-flown hardware have been quietly providing engineering expertise to assist younger rocket companies pursuing the same goal. ",
        "author": "Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts Two of Its Own Prototype Satellites Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8321",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-lifts-two-of-its-own-prototype-satellites-into-orbit-1519319051?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=77",
        "text": "In a message on Twitter, Mr. Musk said that using a larger parachute in the future to slow the descent should allow SpaceX to land the nose cone directly in the boat\u2019s netting, which he called a giant-size version of a baseball \u201ccatcher\u2019s mitt.\u201d\nThe main mission, blasting a Spanish radar-imaging satellite into a 320\u2014mile high orbit, went off without a hitch as the Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 6:17 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California\u2019s central coast. Bright orange exhaust plumes produced a light show in the dawn sky, before the nine main engines shut off as planned, about 2\u00bd minutes into the flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. in early February. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe pair of much smaller experimental satellites, which piggybacked on the launch, could be seen attached to the primary payload as it deployed. SpaceX plans to test their antennas and other systems. The demonstration satellites are intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites SpaceX hopes to deploy in coming years.\n\n\nThursday\u2019s mission also was unusual because it marked the first attempt by the closely held Southern California company to use a boat equipped with a large V-shaped net on its deck to catch at least part of a Falcon 9 nose cone returning from space. The nose cone, or fairing, is attached to the upper stage and protects payloads during ascent. It separates into two parts and is jettisoned once the proper orbit is reached.\nAs part of the company\u2019s drive to maximize Falcon 9 reusability, Mr. Musk\u2019s team aims to recover and then relaunch fairings, which have their own thrusters and guidance systems to steer them toward the boat. Reusing the parts could save SpaceX millions of dollars per mission, and avoid production roadblocks that could hamper boosting launch rates.\u00a0No other major space-transportation company reuses fairing.\n\n\n \n\n\nBefore the attempted recovery, Mr. Musk said on Instagram the fairing would be falling back to Earth\u00a0\u201cabout eight times the speed of sound.\u201d After touchdown, he said on social media that half the nose cone hit the water a few hundred yards from its intended target.\nUntil early this week, SpaceX press officials didn\u2019t confirm the two prototype satellites would be on board. But on Twitter on Thursday morning following the launch, Mr. Musk wrote that both were \u201cdeployed and communicating to Earth stations.\u201d\nIn documents previously filed with federal regulators, SpaceX laid out a phased plan to launch some 4,400 satellites, each weighing hundreds of pounds and orbiting at altitudes up to roughly 800 miles. The company has said that would be followed by deployment of more than 7,000 additional satellites operating at lower altitudes.\nIt isn\u2019t clear when initial operations would commence. As part of its original concept, SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission limited service could start by 2021, but the company recently indicated its development efforts have taken longer than originally projected.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com SpaceX launched into orbit a commercial payload with two prototype communications satellites intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts Two of Its Own Prototype Satellites Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8322",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-lifts-two-of-its-own-prototype-satellites-into-orbit-1519319051?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=70",
        "text": "In a message on Twitter, Mr. Musk said that using a larger parachute in the future to slow the descent should allow SpaceX to land the nose cone directly in the boat\u2019s netting, which he called a giant-size version of a baseball \u201ccatcher\u2019s mitt.\u201d\nThe main mission, blasting a Spanish radar-imaging satellite into a 320\u2014mile high orbit, went off without a hitch as the Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 6:17 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California\u2019s central coast. Bright orange exhaust plumes produced a light show in the dawn sky, before the nine main engines shut off as planned, about 2\u00bd minutes into the flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. in early February. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe pair of much smaller experimental satellites, which piggybacked on the launch, could be seen attached to the primary payload as it deployed. SpaceX plans to test their antennas and other systems. The demonstration satellites are intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites SpaceX hopes to deploy in coming years.\n\n\nThursday\u2019s mission also was unusual because it marked the first attempt by the closely held Southern California company to use a boat equipped with a large V-shaped net on its deck to catch at least part of a Falcon 9 nose cone returning from space. The nose cone, or fairing, is attached to the upper stage and protects payloads during ascent. It separates into two parts and is jettisoned once the proper orbit is reached.\nAs part of the company\u2019s drive to maximize Falcon 9 reusability, Mr. Musk\u2019s team aims to recover and then relaunch fairings, which have their own thrusters and guidance systems to steer them toward the boat. Reusing the parts could save SpaceX millions of dollars per mission, and avoid production roadblocks that could hamper boosting launch rates.\u00a0No other major space-transportation company reuses fairing.\n\n\n \n\n\nBefore the attempted recovery, Mr. Musk said on Instagram the fairing would be falling back to Earth\u00a0\u201cabout eight times the speed of sound.\u201d After touchdown, he said on social media that half the nose cone hit the water a few hundred yards from its intended target.\nUntil early this week, SpaceX press officials didn\u2019t confirm the two prototype satellites would be on board. But on Twitter on Thursday morning following the launch, Mr. Musk wrote that both were \u201cdeployed and communicating to Earth stations.\u201d\nIn documents previously filed with federal regulators, SpaceX laid out a phased plan to launch some 4,400 satellites, each weighing hundreds of pounds and orbiting at altitudes up to roughly 800 miles. The company has said that would be followed by deployment of more than 7,000 additional satellites operating at lower altitudes.\nIt isn\u2019t clear when initial operations would commence. As part of its original concept, SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission limited service could start by 2021, but the company recently indicated its development efforts have taken longer than originally projected.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com SpaceX launched into orbit a commercial payload with two prototype communications satellites intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lifts Two of Its Own Prototype Satellites Into Orbit (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8323",
        "date": "2018-02-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-lifts-two-of-its-own-prototype-satellites-into-orbit-1519319051?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=101",
        "text": "In a message on Twitter, Mr. Musk said that using a larger parachute in the future to slow the descent should allow SpaceX to land the nose cone directly in the boat\u2019s netting, which he called a giant-size version of a baseball \u201ccatcher\u2019s mitt.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThe main mission, blasting a Spanish radar-imaging satellite into a 320\u2014mile high orbit, went off without a hitch as the Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 6:17 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California\u2019s central coast. Bright orange exhaust plumes produced a light show in the dawn sky, before the nine main engines shut off as planned, about 2\u00bd minutes into the flight.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. in early February. Photo: AP\n \n\n\nThe pair of much smaller experimental satellites, which piggybacked on the launch, could be seen attached to the primary payload as it deployed. SpaceX plans to test their antennas and other systems. The demonstration satellites are intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites SpaceX hopes to deploy in coming years.\n\n\nThursday\u2019s mission also was unusual because it marked the first attempt by the closely held Southern California company to use a boat equipped with a large V-shaped net on its deck to catch at least part of a Falcon 9 nose cone returning from space. The nose cone, or fairing, is attached to the upper stage and protects payloads during ascent. It separates into two parts and is jettisoned once the proper orbit is reached.\nAs part of the company\u2019s drive to maximize Falcon 9 reusability, Mr. Musk\u2019s team aims to recover and then relaunch fairings, which have their own thrusters and guidance systems to steer them toward the boat. Reusing the parts could save SpaceX millions of dollars per mission, and avoid production roadblocks that could hamper boosting launch rates.\u00a0No other major space-transportation company reuses fairing.\n\n\n \n\n\nBefore the attempted recovery, Mr. Musk said on Instagram the fairing would be falling back to Earth\u00a0\u201cabout eight times the speed of sound.\u201d After touchdown, he said on social media that half the nose cone hit the water a few hundred yards from its intended target.\nUntil early this week, SpaceX press officials didn\u2019t confirm the two prototype satellites would be on board. But on Twitter on Thursday morning following the launch, Mr. Musk wrote that both were \u201cdeployed and communicating to Earth stations.\u201d\nIn documents previously filed with federal regulators, SpaceX laid out a phased plan to launch some 4,400 satellites, each weighing hundreds of pounds and orbiting at altitudes up to roughly 800 miles. The company has said that would be followed by deployment of more than 7,000 additional satellites operating at lower altitudes.\nIt isn\u2019t clear when initial operations would commence. As part of its original concept, SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission limited service could start by 2021, but the company recently indicated its development efforts have taken longer than originally projected.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com SpaceX launched into orbit a commercial payload with two prototype communications satellites intended to pave the way for an eventual constellation of thousands of similar internet-via-space satellites. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Maker SpaceX\u2019s Valuation Soars to $21 Billion (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8324",
        "date": "2017-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-maker-spacexs-valuation-soars-to-21-billion-1501199444?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=80",
        "text": "Investors in the new round couldn\u2019t be learned. SpaceX\u2019s previous valuation was set in 2015 at $12 billion when Google parent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\n\n\n and mutual-fund company Fidelity Investments invested $1 billion.\nA SpaceX spokesman declined to comment. The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n New York Times\n\n\n reported news of the fundraising Thursday.\n\n\nRelated Coverage After Two Aborted Attempts, SpaceX Launches Large Satellite Into Orbit (July 6) Latest SpaceX Launch Succeeds on Third Try (July 6) SpaceX Executes Back-to-Back Launches in Roughly 48 Hours (June 25) \n\n\nWith some $10 billion in launch business on its books, including contracts from the Pentagon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, SpaceX has set the pace for the budding commercial space industry. But in addition to its swift growth and lofty exploration ambitions\u2014including a manned flyby of the moon as early as next year\u2014much of the company\u2019s growth starting in the next few years is predicated on swiftly launching a separate, multibillion-dollar satellite-communication business.\n\n\nThe valuation markup is a sign investors believe that SpaceX is on the path to meeting Mr. Musk\u2019s ambitious financial forecasts laid out in 2016. \nThe company told investors last year that its satellite-internet business, still in development, would generate more than $30 billion of revenue by 2025, over six times as much as the launch business, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.\nThe latest financing round would follow seven months of reliable launches and a marked increase in the cadence of SpaceX\u2019s missions. SpaceX has rebounded from launch delays stemming from explosions of a pair of Falcon 9 rockets in 2015 and 2016 as it tries to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers that it is safely ramping up its launch tempo.\nSo far this year, SpaceX has launched 10 rockets, surpassing its previous record of eight in 2016. By year-end, some company officials envision launches occurring roughly every two weeks. \nInternal company documents from 2016 projected an average of one launch a week by 2019, or five times as many as its primary U.S. and European rivals.\nSpaceX needs to boost the cadence of launches, not only to deliver payloads for customers, but also to launch the proposed constellation of more than 4,000 communication satellites that would provide internet service.\nLast year, SpaceX projected the constellation would produce more than $15 billion in operating income by 2025. Another internal projections pegged the number of global subscribers above 40 million at that juncture. Indeed, deploying all the anticipated satellites would require roughly 180 separate rocket launches through 2025, according to the internal documents.\nIn the latest funding round, SpaceX issued new stock at a price of $135 per share, a 74% increase over the price investors paid for shares in the company\u2019s last funding round in January 2015.\nInvestors in the latest round secured a guarantee they would be paid back the amount of their investment before other earlier investors in the event SpaceX sells itself or is forced to liquidate. Such a provision, known as a senior liquidation preference, is a sweetener for investors that can encourage them to pay a bit more for their shares.\nWrite to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com SpaceX has raised as much as $350 million in a new round of financing that boosted the company\u2019s valuation, a vote of confidence for founder Elon Musk who is seeking to prove the rocket maker can become a major satellite operator. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Maker SpaceX\u2019s Valuation Soars to $21 Billion (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8325",
        "date": "2017-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/rocket-maker-spacexs-valuation-soars-to-21-billion-1501199444?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=117",
        "text": "Investors in the new round couldn\u2019t be learned. SpaceX\u2019s previous valuation was set in 2015 at $12 billion when Google parent\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Alphabet Inc.\n\n\n and mutual-fund company Fidelity Investments invested $1 billion.\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX spokesman declined to comment. The\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n New York Times\n\n\n reported news of the fundraising Thursday.\n\n\nRelated Coverage After Two Aborted Attempts, SpaceX Launches Large Satellite Into Orbit (July 6) Latest SpaceX Launch Succeeds on Third Try (July 6) SpaceX Executes Back-to-Back Launches in Roughly 48 Hours (June 25) \n\n\nWith some $10 billion in launch business on its books, including contracts from the Pentagon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, SpaceX has set the pace for the budding commercial space industry. But in addition to its swift growth and lofty exploration ambitions\u2014including a manned flyby of the moon as early as next year\u2014much of the company\u2019s growth starting in the next few years is predicated on swiftly launching a separate, multibillion-dollar satellite-communication business.\n\n\nThe valuation markup is a sign investors believe that SpaceX is on the path to meeting Mr. Musk\u2019s ambitious financial forecasts laid out in 2016. \nThe company told investors last year that its satellite-internet business, still in development, would generate more than $30 billion of revenue by 2025, over six times as much as the launch business, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.\nThe latest financing round would follow seven months of reliable launches and a marked increase in the cadence of SpaceX\u2019s missions. SpaceX has rebounded from launch delays stemming from explosions of a pair of Falcon 9 rockets in 2015 and 2016 as it tries to reassure commercial and U.S. government customers that it is safely ramping up its launch tempo.\nSo far this year, SpaceX has launched 10 rockets, surpassing its previous record of eight in 2016. By year-end, some company officials envision launches occurring roughly every two weeks. \nInternal company documents from 2016 projected an average of one launch a week by 2019, or five times as many as its primary U.S. and European rivals.\nSpaceX needs to boost the cadence of launches, not only to deliver payloads for customers, but also to launch the proposed constellation of more than 4,000 communication satellites that would provide internet service.\nLast year, SpaceX projected the constellation would produce more than $15 billion in operating income by 2025. Another internal projections pegged the number of global subscribers above 40 million at that juncture. Indeed, deploying all the anticipated satellites would require roughly 180 separate rocket launches through 2025, according to the internal documents.\nIn the latest funding round, SpaceX issued new stock at a price of $135 per share, a 74% increase over the price investors paid for shares in the company\u2019s last funding round in January 2015.\nInvestors in the latest round secured a guarantee they would be paid back the amount of their investment before other earlier investors in the event SpaceX sells itself or is forced to liquidate. Such a provision, known as a senior liquidation preference, is a sweetener for investors that can encourage them to pay a bit more for their shares.\nWrite to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com SpaceX has raised as much as $350 million in a new round of financing that boosted the company\u2019s valuation, a vote of confidence for founder Elon Musk who is seeking to prove the rocket maker can become a major satellite operator. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Not Just Rockets? SpaceX Gets Boost for Internet Satellite\u00a0Venture (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8326",
        "date": "2018-02-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-chairman-recommends-approval-of-spacexs-internetsatelliteplan-1518647894?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=102",
        "text": "But questions still linger over the broadband project, and SpaceX officials have provided few details in public comments. SpaceX has said it plans to launch its first prototype satellite as early as this year aboard one of the company\u2019s own rockets.\n\n\n\n\nA SpaceX spokesman had no immediate comment\n\n\nFederal Communications Commission Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ajit Pai\n\n\n\n said he had proposed that the agency approve the SpaceX application to use satellite constellations to provide broadband both in the U.S. and on a global basis. Fellow FCC commissioners will consider the matter in coming days.\n\n\nRelated Coverage SpaceX Launches World\u2019s Biggest Rocket The Falcon Heavy: A Good Show, but Not Necessarily Great Business SpaceX Rocket Launch Is Latest Step Toward the Moon, Mars and Beyond \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: AP\n \n\n\n\u201cTo bridge America\u2019s digital divide, we\u2019ll have to use innovative technologies,\u201d Mr. Pai said in a statement. \u201cSatellite technology can help reach Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach. And it can offer more competition where terrestrial internet access is already available.\u201d\nMr. Pai said the proposed approval would be the first given to an American-based company to provide broadband services using a new generation of low-earth-orbit satellites. \nOver the past year, the FCC has approved similar requests by OneWeb,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Space Norway \n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Telesat of Canada \n\n\n to provide broadband in the U.S. using satellite technology. Those approvals have been the first of their kind. The FCC continues to process other similar requests, it said.\nDespite Wednesday\u2019s announcement, it isn\u2019t clear how far along SpaceX is in firming up its design, manufacturing and launch plans for the planned constellation. In public statements, senior company officials have said little and provided scant details.\nAnd when there were comments, they generally indicated the broadband effort was on the back burner until the company completed pending development efforts involving bigger rockets and crew capsules to take astronauts into orbit. Work, testing and government approval on the manned space vehicles is still under way, with activities accelerating through the coming year.\nOver the months, satellite industry officials have said SpaceX solicited some proposals from prospective subcontractors for the satellite venture but only for selected components or systems.\nWhen it was conceived, the satellite initiative was viewed inside SpaceX as vital for the closely held Southern California company\u2019s long-term success. The vision of Mr. Musk, chief executive and top designer for SpaceX, was spelled out in internal corporate planning and financial documents drafted in of 2015. \nThe project has progressed much more slowly than anticipated since then. Those documents, among other things, projected a total of some 4,800 low-earth orbit satellites would be launched by 2025, creating a system with a capacity of nearly 50 million subscribers. At the time, the first 800 satellites were anticipated to be launched by the end of 2019. The plan projected satellites costing less than $1 million apiece, a price point also targeted by OneWeb.\nSpaceX\u2019s plans envisioned launching 32 of its Falcon 9 rockets over roughly two years to deploy the first phase of the proposed satellite constellation. Its highest annual launch rate so far is 18 missions, and it already has contracts with dozens of paying customers waiting to have their payloads blasted into orbit before SpaceX satellites become primary payloads for company rockets.\nWrite to John McKinnon at john.mckinnon@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com A top U.S. regulator recommended approving SpaceX\u2019s plan to provide internet service through satellites, a move that could expand broadband availability across the U.S. and beyond. ",
        "author": "John D. McKinnon and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Scraps Launch Again (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8327",
        "date": "2017-07-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-scraps-launch-for-second-time-in-two-days-1499132639?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=80",
        "text": "A previous launch attempt was aborted on Sunday, also 10 seconds before liftoff, when the same automated safety alert system detected some problems with the Falcon 9\u2019s navigation or flight-control systems.\nOn Monday, the company ended its webcast without providing any details about the reason for the aborted launch. Neither the satellite nor the rocket appeared to be damaged, but industry reaction to the twin aborts will depend partly on the explanation SpaceX officials provide.\n\n\nThe launch won\u2019t take place before Wednesday, Mr. Musk said via\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter,\n\n\n while the company conducts a \u201cfull review\u201d of rocket and launchpad systems. \u201cOnly one chance to get it right,\u201d the SpaceX founder said.\nMonday\u2019s events surprised some industry officials partly because prior to the latest scrub SpaceX indicated it had fixed the computer issue behind Sunday\u2019s problems. Moreover, SpaceX\u2019s recent launches, stretching back to January, generally have played out without any countdown delays or technical glitches requiring resolution.\nThe nearly 15,000-pound satellite, believed to be the heaviest payload SpaceX has ever tried to launch, would have required the full thrust and all of the fuel loaded on board SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket to reach its desired orbit. So in this case, there were no plans to bring the main part of the rocket back.\nReusing rockets and even unmanned cargo capsules, however, has now become part of SpaceX\u2019s everyday operations, with commercial customers lining up to put satellites on top of what the company calls \u201cflight tested\u201d main stages. Pentagon officials also are talking more favorably about the prospect of contracting to put national-security payloads on top of reused rockets, perhaps sometime in the next few years.\nThe aim of reusing boosters is to lower costs and speed up launches, though the practice also provides SpaceX somewhat of a respite from having to manufacture boosters at a breakneck pace to meet its launch commitments.\nLast week, Claire Leon, who heads the Air Force\u2019s launch directorate, told reporters, \u201cit\u2019s going to take a little more time\u201d for Pentagon brass to become comfortable contracting for reused rockets. She said the military intends to further study the issue but the hope is \u201cto move in that direction.\u201d\nAfter the Intelsat launch, one of the company\u2019s next big challenges in coming months will be to start flying what it has described as the final variant of its Falcon 9 family of launchers, a design optimized for reusing the main part of the rocket along with its nine engines.\nAlso later this year, SpaceX\u2019s management team intends to carry out the maiden launch of the company\u2019s Falcon Heavy, a beefed-up derivative of the Falcon 9, which is several years delayed and features 27 separate main engines.\nOver the years, SpaceX has talked about its automated pre-launch abort system and related design features of the Falcon 9 as important safety enhancements to traditional rocketry. Immediately after the main engines ignite, for example, mechanical arms restrain the Falcon 9 and prevent it from starting to rise for a fleeting instant, to ensure everything is operating normally. \nThe company also has stressed that the Falcon 9 can afford to lose thrust from one of its nine main engines, or in some circumstance even two, and still deliver payload to space. More recently, SpaceX and the Air Force have worked together to use an automated system\u2014rather than relying on human intervention\u2014to instantly destroy a faulty rocket if it is seriously off course or threatens to cause damage on the ground. \nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com For the second time in two days, entrepreneur Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX was forced to scrub blastoff of a large commercial communications satellite after an automated system aborted the launch within seconds of liftoff. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink Could Get Boost From German Subsidies (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8328",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-starlink-could-get-boost-from-german-subsidies-11622551956?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=22",
        "text": "The program could pay out a total of \u20ac100 million, according to the government minister in charge of the project, and could launch within weeks.\nBroadband access in Germany is limited outside large cities\u2014and sometimes within them\u2014due to a low penetration of fiber-optic cables compared with other European countries. In international rankings, Germany often features behind less-developed nations. According to the Speedtest Global Index, Germany ranked 35th in April, behind Panama and Poland.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX's new Starlink satellite internet service is being touted as a rural internet game changer. WSJ spent time with a few beta testers in a very remote area of Washington state to see if it's truly the solution to the global broadband gap. Photo Illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s Starlink has emerged as an early market leader, offering high-speed internet services beamed from one of its nearly 1,500 satellites directly to users on Earth. Starlink is currently offering its service across swaths of Germany and says that it will achieve broad coverage by the end of 2021.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingElon Musk's Starlink Could Get a Boost From German SubsidiesGermany could become the first large nation to subsidize the use of consumer satellite internet services like those offered by Elon Musk's Starlink. Germany correspondent Bojan Pancevski joins host Amanda Lewellyn to explain why Germany is turning to satellite internet, and why Starlink is a top candidate.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nStarlink offers internet speed of around 100 megabits per second, compared with around 10 Mbps in some parts of rural Germany. The service costs \u20ac99 a month in Germany, substantially more than internet-service providers in the country normally charge for wired broadband access. Reviews of Starlink in the U.S. have found the quality of the connectivity depends on the weather and requires an unobstructed line of sight to the satellites. The service is still in a beta, or testing, phase.\n\n\nGermany\u2019s minister for transport and digital infrastructure,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andreas Scheuer,\n\n\n\n who met Mr. Musk in Berlin last month, said that around 200,000 households in rural areas with poor broadband infrastructure could receive a voucher to cover the one-off costs of connecting to wireless internet. Mr. Scheuer told reporters these households would gain access to fast internet overnight, in what he described as a quick, unbureaucratic procedure.\nA spokeswoman for Mr. Scheuer said that details of the federal subsidy program, including the overall budget and the number of eligible households, were still being negotiated with the authorities of Germany\u2019s 16 states.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAndreas Scheuer, Germany\u2019s minister for transport and digital infrastructure, said the pandemic had exposed Germany\u2019s weaknesses in internet access.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bernd Von Jutrczenka/DPA/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe subsidies would be available not just to Starlink customers but would apply to any high-speed wireless internet service offering, though not to mobile internet connections such as 5G services, according to the Transport Ministry. Starlink rivals such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Viasat Inc.,\n\n\n GlobalTT and skyDSL Global GmbH either already provide or will soon roll out satellite internet services in Germany.\nUsers of fixed wireless broadband, which is beamed to households via microwave emitters from base stations, could get up to \u20ac10,000 worth of vouchers for the setup costs.\nMr. Scheuer said the pandemic had exposed Germany\u2019s weaknesses in internet access.\n\u201cThere are houses in very remote areas that even today only get extremely slow internet\u2026That has a very negative impact, especially now regarding home office or home schooling,\u201d Mr. Scheuer said in a statement on Tuesday. \u201cThat is why I want to start a voucher program that will offer the affected households a short-term perspective for reasonable internet access.\u201d\nThe hardware required to use the Starlink service includes a small satellite dish, a Wi-Fi router, power supply, cables and mounting tripod, which the company provides at the cost of \u20ac499, with \u20ac59 charged for shipping.\nThe company has said it has 10,000 active users globally, while more than 500,000 have expressed interest.\nRival firms and some space experts have voiced concern that Starlink, which aims to launch another 12,000 satellites, could endanger orbital traffic and the environment.\nDeutsche Telekom AG has said it was talking to Starlink about a possible partnership.\n\u201cI believe this is a good technology to reach people who have not had access to infrastructure so far,\u201d Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Timotheus H\u00f6ttges\n\n\n\n said at a conference earlier this year.\nWrite to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancev Germany could become the first large nation to subsidize use of consumer satellite internet services such as that offered by Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink. ",
        "author": "Bojan Pancevski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink Could Get Boost From German Subsidies (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8329",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-starlink-could-get-boost-from-german-subsidies-11622551956?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=20",
        "text": "The program could pay out a total of \u20ac100 million, according to the government minister in charge of the project, and could launch within weeks.\nBroadband access in Germany is limited outside large cities\u2014and sometimes within them\u2014due to a low penetration of fiber-optic cables compared with other European countries. In international rankings, Germany often features behind less-developed nations. According to the Speedtest Global Index, Germany ranked 35th in April, behind Panama and Poland.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX's new Starlink satellite internet service is being touted as a rural internet game changer. WSJ spent time with a few beta testers in a very remote area of Washington state to see if it's truly the solution to the global broadband gap. Photo Illustration: Laura Kammermann\n \n\n\nMr. Musk\u2019s Starlink has emerged as an early market leader, offering high-speed internet services beamed from one of its nearly 1,500 satellites directly to users on Earth. Starlink is currently offering its service across swaths of Germany and says that it will achieve broad coverage by the end of 2021.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingElon Musk's Starlink Could Get a Boost From German SubsidiesGermany could become the first large nation to subsidize the use of consumer satellite internet services like those offered by Elon Musk's Starlink. Germany correspondent Bojan Pancevski joins host Amanda Lewellyn to explain why Germany is turning to satellite internet, and why Starlink is a top candidate.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nStarlink offers internet speed of around 100 megabits per second, compared with around 10 Mbps in some parts of rural Germany. The service costs \u20ac99 a month in Germany, substantially more than internet-service providers in the country normally charge for wired broadband access. Reviews of Starlink in the U.S. have found the quality of the connectivity depends on the weather and requires an unobstructed line of sight to the satellites. The service is still in a beta, or testing, phase.\n\n\nGermany\u2019s minister for transport and digital infrastructure,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andreas Scheuer,\n\n\n\n who met Mr. Musk in Berlin last month, said that around 200,000 households in rural areas with poor broadband infrastructure could receive a voucher to cover the one-off costs of connecting to wireless internet. Mr. Scheuer told reporters these households would gain access to fast internet overnight, in what he described as a quick, unbureaucratic procedure.\nA spokeswoman for Mr. Scheuer said that details of the federal subsidy program, including the overall budget and the number of eligible households, were still being negotiated with the authorities of Germany\u2019s 16 states.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAndreas Scheuer, Germany\u2019s minister for transport and digital infrastructure, said the pandemic had exposed Germany\u2019s weaknesses in internet access.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Bernd Von Jutrczenka/DPA/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nThe subsidies would be available not just to Starlink customers but would apply to any high-speed wireless internet service offering, though not to mobile internet connections such as 5G services, according to the Transport Ministry. Starlink rivals such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Viasat Inc.,\n\n\n GlobalTT and skyDSL Global GmbH either already provide or will soon roll out satellite internet services in Germany.\nUsers of fixed wireless broadband, which is beamed to households via microwave emitters from base stations, could get up to \u20ac10,000 worth of vouchers for the setup costs.\nMr. Scheuer said the pandemic had exposed Germany\u2019s weaknesses in internet access.\n\u201cThere are houses in very remote areas that even today only get extremely slow internet\u2026That has a very negative impact, especially now regarding home office or home schooling,\u201d Mr. Scheuer said in a statement on Tuesday. \u201cThat is why I want to start a voucher program that will offer the affected households a short-term perspective for reasonable internet access.\u201d\nThe hardware required to use the Starlink service includes a small satellite dish, a Wi-Fi router, power supply, cables and mounting tripod, which the company provides at the cost of \u20ac499, with \u20ac59 charged for shipping.\nThe company has said it has 10,000 active users globally, while more than 500,000 have expressed interest.\nRival firms and some space experts have voiced concern that Starlink, which aims to launch another 12,000 satellites, could endanger orbital traffic and the environment.\nDeutsche Telekom AG has said it was talking to Starlink about a possible partnership.\n\u201cI believe this is a good technology to reach people who have not had access to infrastructure so far,\u201d Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Timotheus H\u00f6ttges\n\n\n\n said at a conference earlier this year.\nWrite to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancev Germany could become the first large nation to subsidize use of consumer satellite internet services such as that offered by Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink. ",
        "author": "Bojan Pancevski"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Raising $500 Million Amid Internal Questions Over Satellite Plan (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8330",
        "date": "2019-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-is-raising-500-million-amid-internal-questions-over-satellite-internet-business-11555345384?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=74",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, and his team have been telling investors for years that Starlink is expected to power the company\u2019s bottom line well into the future.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s president, chief operating officer and a longtime lieutenant of Mr. Musk, raised questions in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in February about the financial prospects for the proposed multibillion-dollar Starlink venture. \n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure we can launch satellites into orbit,\u201d Ms. Shotwell said. But one question SpaceX is still asking itself, she said: \u201cCan you make money out of it?\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShe also struck a broadly optimistic note about the industry overall. \u201cI think global internet and telecommunications is something like a trillion dollars. So it\u2019s worthy of the hard thought and the hard work we\u2019re putting into it. But is it feasible with our approach or not? It\u2019s still [to be determined],\u201d she said.\nSpaceX representatives didn\u2019t respond to several requests for comment in recent days. \nMs. Shotwell\u2019s remarks appear to be her most ambivalent public comments yet about Starlink\u2019s future. They come as the satellite industry is roiled by differing opinions about the likely success of plans to use low-Earth-orbiting satellites to provide internet service.\nSome industry estimates suggest it will cost $10 billion to launch Starlink, a proposed constellation that eventually could amount to as many as 11,000 interconnected satellites providing ubiquitous broadband connectivity world-wide. The largest such network operating today has fewer than 100 satellites aloft.\nAdding pressure for SpaceX\u2019s business is a proposed satellite network from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and its chief executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n Last month Amazon disclosed in regulatory filings plans for a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites to provide internet service. \nMr. Musk recently took to Twitter to call Mr. Bezos a copycat. The two tycoons are longtime rivals, as Mr. Bezos separately runs a rocket company called Blue Origin. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nSpaceX has previously shared rosy projections for Starlink, telling investors in 2015 to expect it to generate more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025. That would dwarf revenue from the company\u2019s core rocket business, which Ms. Shotwell said in the interview has a stable addressable market of roughly $6 billion a year. But over the years, Ms. Shotwell has publicly discussed the financial challenges of internet-via-satellite ventures, citing ground terminal costs.\nSpaceX\u2019s rocket business impressed observers on Thursday, landing the three boosters of its Falcon Heavy rocket back on Earth after it delivered its first commercial payload.\nMs. Shotwell estimated that less than 5% of SpaceX\u2019s roughly 6,000 employees are assigned to Starlink and said the project remains in the initial stages, focused on the technology. The company earlier projected it would have 400 satellites aloft by the end of last year but had only two prototypes at that point.\nLast year, Mr. Musk in comments to the Journal signaled that Starlink\u2019s development was emerging as seemingly more complex than many inside and outside SpaceX originally anticipated. \nEven so, Mr. Musk has strong support among venture investors. The latest fundraising was disclosed in a corporate filing obtained by Lagniappe Labs LLC, publisher of the Prime Unicorn Index that tracks valuations of private companies. \n\n\nRelated SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (March 3) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Is Raising $500 Million in Funding (Dec. 18, 2018) SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record (Dec. 3, 2018) SpaceX Launches World\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7, 2018) \n\n\nNew SpaceX shares in this round are priced at $204 each, according to the filing, a 10% uptick from the $186 at which the company sold shares in December. That $500 million round of funding, which Ms. Shotwell said was fully raised, valued the company at $30.5 billion.\nThe new funding would bring the company\u2019s total equity capital to $3 billion, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. The new valuation couldn\u2019t be immediately determined.\nMs. Shotwell said management is closely monitoring its level of investment for the satellite business. \u201cWe can\u2019t be unwise in what we spend on that,\u201d she said, especially \u201cif we\u2019re not sure about whether we can make money or not.\u201d\nSpaceX faces increased competition. To help lead its initiative, code-named Project Kuiper, Amazon hired a former SpaceX executive, CNBC first reported, and Amazon this month posted dozens of job openings for the project in Bellevue, Wash., a few miles from Starlink\u2019s office. \nA Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is raising another $500 million in funding as its president has raised questions about the viability of an internet-via-satellite business considered key to the company\u2019s growth. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Raising $500 Million Amid Internal Questions Over Satellite Plan (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8331",
        "date": "2019-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-is-raising-500-million-amid-internal-questions-over-satellite-internet-business-11555345384?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=16",
        "text": "Mr. Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, and his team have been telling investors for years that Starlink is expected to power the company\u2019s bottom line well into the future.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gwynne Shotwell,\n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s president, chief operating officer and a longtime lieutenant of Mr. Musk, raised questions in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in February about the financial prospects for the proposed multibillion-dollar Starlink venture. \n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure we can launch satellites into orbit,\u201d Ms. Shotwell said. But one question SpaceX is still asking itself, she said: \u201cCan you make money out of it?\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShe also struck a broadly optimistic note about the industry overall. \u201cI think global internet and telecommunications is something like a trillion dollars. So it\u2019s worthy of the hard thought and the hard work we\u2019re putting into it. But is it feasible with our approach or not? It\u2019s still [to be determined],\u201d she said.\nSpaceX representatives didn\u2019t respond to several requests for comment in recent days. \nMs. Shotwell\u2019s remarks appear to be her most ambivalent public comments yet about Starlink\u2019s future. They come as the satellite industry is roiled by differing opinions about the likely success of plans to use low-Earth-orbiting satellites to provide internet service.\nSome industry estimates suggest it will cost $10 billion to launch Starlink, a proposed constellation that eventually could amount to as many as 11,000 interconnected satellites providing ubiquitous broadband connectivity world-wide. The largest such network operating today has fewer than 100 satellites aloft.\nAdding pressure for SpaceX\u2019s business is a proposed satellite network from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and its chief executive,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos.\n \n\n\n\n Last month Amazon disclosed in regulatory filings plans for a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites to provide internet service. \nMr. Musk recently took to Twitter to call Mr. Bezos a copycat. The two tycoons are longtime rivals, as Mr. Bezos separately runs a rocket company called Blue Origin. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nSpaceX has previously shared rosy projections for Starlink, telling investors in 2015 to expect it to generate more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025. That would dwarf revenue from the company\u2019s core rocket business, which Ms. Shotwell said in the interview has a stable addressable market of roughly $6 billion a year. But over the years, Ms. Shotwell has publicly discussed the financial challenges of internet-via-satellite ventures, citing ground terminal costs.\nSpaceX\u2019s rocket business impressed observers on Thursday, landing the three boosters of its Falcon Heavy rocket back on Earth after it delivered its first commercial payload.\nMs. Shotwell estimated that less than 5% of SpaceX\u2019s roughly 6,000 employees are assigned to Starlink and said the project remains in the initial stages, focused on the technology. The company earlier projected it would have 400 satellites aloft by the end of last year but had only two prototypes at that point.\nLast year, Mr. Musk in comments to the Journal signaled that Starlink\u2019s development was emerging as seemingly more complex than many inside and outside SpaceX originally anticipated. \nEven so, Mr. Musk has strong support among venture investors. The latest fundraising was disclosed in a corporate filing obtained by Lagniappe Labs LLC, publisher of the Prime Unicorn Index that tracks valuations of private companies. \n\n\nRelated SpaceX Crew Capsule, With a Dummy Astronaut, Docks With Space Station (March 3) Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Is Raising $500 Million in Funding (Dec. 18, 2018) SpaceX Launches 19th Rocket in a Year, a Company Record (Dec. 3, 2018) SpaceX Launches World\u2019s Biggest Rocket (Feb. 7, 2018) \n\n\nNew SpaceX shares in this round are priced at $204 each, according to the filing, a 10% uptick from the $186 at which the company sold shares in December. That $500 million round of funding, which Ms. Shotwell said was fully raised, valued the company at $30.5 billion.\nThe new funding would bring the company\u2019s total equity capital to $3 billion, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. The new valuation couldn\u2019t be immediately determined.\nMs. Shotwell said management is closely monitoring its level of investment for the satellite business. \u201cWe can\u2019t be unwise in what we spend on that,\u201d she said, especially \u201cif we\u2019re not sure about whether we can make money or not.\u201d\nSpaceX faces increased competition. To help lead its initiative, code-named Project Kuiper, Amazon hired a former SpaceX executive, CNBC first reported, and Amazon this month posted dozens of job openings for the project in Bellevue, Wash., a few miles from Starlink\u2019s office. \nAn Am Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX is raising another $500 million in funding as its president has raised questions about the viability of an internet-via-satellite business considered key to the company\u2019s growth. ",
        "author": "Rolfe Winkler and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8332",
        "date": "2021-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-data-deluge-has-scientists-scrambling-for-solutions-11638720016?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=6",
        "text": "For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise\u2014and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance\u2014scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere. Reliable, readily available data is of critical importance to governments working to set policy and monitor compliance with international climate pacts, as well as to local authorities trying to help their communities adapt to unusual weather patterns or rising seas. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\u201cNow we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,\u201d says Suresh Vannan, who manages the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s physical oceanography archive center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California\u2014one of a dozen earth sciences data centers maintained by the space agency. \u201cWhen you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,\u201d says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA\u2019s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. \u201cIt\u2019s irreplaceable data.\u201d And with ever-rising numbers of sensor-studded satellites, aircraft, ocean buoys and the like, there\u2019s more data all the time. Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives\u2019 total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes. One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1Climate Data ExplosionThe volume of data in NASA's Earth",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8333",
        "date": "2021-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-data-deluge-has-scientists-scrambling-for-solutions-11638720016?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=9",
        "text": "For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise\u2014and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance\u2014scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere. Reliable, readily available data is of critical importance to governments working to set policy and monitor compliance with international climate pacts, as well as to local authorities trying to help their communities adapt to unusual weather patterns or rising seas. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\u201cNow we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,\u201d says Suresh Vannan, who manages the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s physical oceanography archive center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California\u2014one of a dozen earth sciences data centers maintained by the space agency. \u201cWhen you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,\u201d says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA\u2019s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. \u201cIt\u2019s irreplaceable data.\u201d And with ever-rising numbers of sensor-studded satellites, aircraft, ocean buoys and the like, there\u2019s more data all the time. Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives\u2019 total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes. One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAll that information, though, is more than conventional data storage can handle and more than any human mind can readily assimilate, data scientists say. To accommodate it all, the federal workers tasked with managing the data are moving it into the cloud, which offers almost unlimited memory storage while eliminating the need for scientists to maintain their own on-site archives. In addition, these archive managers are devising new analytical techniques and adapting a standard format for the data no matter who collected it and who wants to study it. In essence, they are reinventing climate science from the ground up. \u201cWe are in the midst of a technology evolution,\u201d says Nancy Ritchie, archive branch chief at the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, N.C., which maintains a trove of data about the weather, land, atmosphere and oceans for the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA). Satellites are key to the story. As of last September, government agencies and private companies had about 900 Earth-orbiting satellites gathering data about our planet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That is almost three times as many as were aloft in 2008. More are being readied for launch. \u201cThis is a new era for Earth observation missions, and the huge amount of data they will generate requires a new era of data handling,\u201d Dr. Murphy says. \u201cWe are about to launch a series of really high data rate missions.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Are certain storms, fires or droughts connected to climate change? Thanks to a relatively new field called attribution science, climate experts are now more able to provide answers. WSJ\u2019s Daniela Hernandez explains. Illustration: Adele Morgan \n \n\n\nNASA\u2019s $1 billion Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will measure Earth\u2019s lakes, rivers and oceans in the first detailed global survey of the planet\u2019s surface water. The SUV-size satellite, which is slated to launch in November, is expected to transmit about a terabyte of data every day. That is a drop in the data bucket compared with the space agency\u2019s $1.5 billion Nisar radar imaging satellite, which is scheduled for launch in January 2023. Its sensors will detect movements of the planet\u2019s land, ice sheets and sea ice as small as 0.4 inches, transmitting 80 terabytes of data every day. With current data handling systems and typical internet connections, it would take a climate researcher about a year to download just four days\u2019 worth of Nisar data, according to Dr. Murphy. To speed access to the data and lower the cost of computer equipment, NASA and NOAA are working with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft Corp.\n\n\n to move their climate databases into the cloud. NOAA expects to upload its entire Earth science archive into the cloud by 2027, Ms. Ritchie says. In addition to hundreds o As earth-observing satellites, aircraft and ocean buoys churn out ever-rising amounts of information about our planet, data managers turn to cloud computing and artificial intelligence. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8334",
        "date": "2021-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-data-deluge-has-scientists-scrambling-for-solutions-11638720016?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=17",
        "text": "For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise\u2014and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance\u2014scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere. Reliable, readily available data is of critical importance to governments working to set policy and monitor compliance with international climate pacts, as well as to local authorities trying to help their communities adapt to unusual weather patterns or rising seas. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\u201cNow we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,\u201d says Suresh Vannan, who manages the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s physical oceanography archive center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California\u2014one of a dozen earth sciences data centers maintained by the space agency. \u201cWhen you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,\u201d says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA\u2019s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. \u201cIt\u2019s irreplaceable data.\u201d And with ever-rising numbers of sensor-studded satellites, aircraft, ocean buoys and the like, there\u2019s more data all the time. Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives\u2019 total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes. One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAll that information, though, is more than conventional data storage can handle and more than any human mind can readily assimilate, data scientists say. To accommodate it all, the federal workers tasked with managing the data are moving it into the cloud, which offers almost unlimited memory storage while eliminating the need for scientists to maintain their own on-site archives. In addition, these archive managers are devising new analytical techniques and adapting a standard format for the data no matter who collected it and who wants to study it. In essence, they are reinventing climate science from the ground up. \u201cWe are in the midst of a technology evolution,\u201d says Nancy Ritchie, archive branch chief at the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, N.C., which maintains a trove of data about the weather, land, atmosphere and oceans for the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA). Satellites are key to the story. As of last September, government agencies and private companies had about 900 Earth-orbiting satellites gathering data about our planet, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. That is almost three times as many as were aloft in 2008. More are being readied for launch. \u201cThis is a new era for Earth observation missions, and the huge amount of data they will generate requires a new era of data handling,\u201d Dr. Murphy says. \u201cWe are about to launch a series of really high data rate missions.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n Are certain storms, fires or droughts connected to climate change? Thanks to a relatively new field called attribution science, climate experts are now more able to provide answers. WSJ\u2019s Daniela Hernandez explains. Illustration: Adele Morgan \n \n\n\nNASA\u2019s $1 billion Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will measure Earth\u2019s lakes, rivers and oceans in the first detailed global survey of the planet\u2019s surface water. The SUV-size satellite, which is slated to launch in November, is expected to transmit about a terabyte of data every day. That is a drop in the data bucket compared with the space agency\u2019s $1.5 billion Nisar radar imaging satellite, which is scheduled for launch in January 2023. Its sensors will detect movements of the planet\u2019s land, ice sheets and sea ice as small as 0.4 inches, transmitting 80 terabytes of data every day. With current data handling systems and typical internet connections, it would take a climate researcher about a year to download just four days\u2019 worth of Nisar data, according to Dr. Murphy. To speed access to the data and lower the cost of computer equipment, NASA and NOAA are working with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Microsoft Corp.\n\n\n to move their climate databases into the cloud. NOAA expects to upload its entire Earth science archive into the cloud by 2027, Ms. Ritchie says. In addition to hundreds o As earth-observing satellites, aircraft and ocean buoys churn out ever-rising amounts of information about our planet, data managers turn to cloud computing and artificial intelligence. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate Change Data Deluge Has Scientists Scrambling for Solutions (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8335",
        "date": "2021-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-data-deluge-has-scientists-scrambling-for-solutions-11638720016?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=10",
        "text": "For decades, scientists working to predict changes in the climate relied mostly on calculations involving simple laws of physics and chemistry but little data from the real world. But with temperatures world-wide continuing to rise\u2014and with data-collection techniques and technologies continuing to advance\u2014scientists now rely on meticulous measurements of temperatures, ocean currents, soil moisture, air quality, cloud cover and hundreds of other phenomena on Earth and in its atmosphere. Reliable, readily available data is of critical importance to governments working to set policy and monitor compliance with international climate pacts, as well as to local authorities trying to help their communities adapt to unusual weather patterns or rising seas. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\u201cNow we can truly do climate studies because now we have observations to precisely say how weather trends have changed and are changing,\u201d says Suresh Vannan, who manages the National Aeronautics and Space Administration\u2019s physical oceanography archive center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California\u2014one of a dozen earth sciences data centers maintained by the space agency. \u201cWhen you are trying to develop long-term environmental records, including climate records, consistent measurement is incredibly valuable,\u201d says Kevin Murphy, who as NASA\u2019s chief science data officer oversees an archive of Earth observation data used by 3.9 million people last year. \u201cIt\u2019s irreplaceable data.\u201d And with ever-rising numbers of sensor-studded satellites, aircraft, ocean buoys and the like, there\u2019s more data all the time. Over the next decade, officials managing the main U.S. repositories of climate-related information expect their archives\u2019 total volume to grow from about 83 petabytes today to more than 650 petabytes. One petabyte of digital memory can hold thousands of feature-length movies, with 650 enough to hold the contents of the Library of Congress 30 times over.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1Climate Data ExplosionThe volume of data in NASA's Earth",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Probes Point to Northrop Grumman Errors in Spy-Satellite Failure (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8336",
        "date": "2018-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/probes-point-to-northrop-grumman-errors-in-january-spy-satellite-failure-1523220500?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=69",
        "text": "Specifics of the Zuma adapter still aren\u2019t known, and Northrop Grumman spokesmen didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment over the weekend. The Pentagon has repeatedly declined to comment on Zuma\u2019s fate, and on Friday the Pentagon\u2019s missile defense agency didn\u2019t respond to an email seeking comment.\nThe device, purchased from a subcontractor, was significantly modified and then successfully tested three times on the ground by Northrop Grumman, according to one person familiar with the process. But upon reaching orbit, this person said, the adapter didn\u2019t uncouple the satellite from the rocket in zero-gravity conditions.\n\n\nSensors on board failed to immediately report what happened, this person said, so officials tracking the launch weren\u2019t aware of the major malfunction until the satellite was dragged back into the atmosphere by the returning second stage. The satellite ultimately broke free but by then had dropped to an altitude that was too low for a rescue.\nNorthrop Grumman built the satellite, which was so highly classified that its purpose still hasn\u2019t been disclosed. Likewise, no particular agency has been publicly identified as the customer. Industry officials and military-space analysts have said it likely was an advanced type of space radar or missile-warning satellite.\nInvestigators have focused on the satellite\u2019s unique design, which was particularly vulnerable to shock and vibration, according to people familiar with its characteristics. That prompted Northrop Grumman to specially modify the adapter to cushion separation of the satellite in orbit, according to one of these people. Adapters typically use explosive bolts or other powerful systems to break satellites free of their attachments to rockets.\nShortly after the failed mission, leaders of several congressional committees and their top staffers were briefed about the bungled launch. They were told the satellite was a total loss and no salvage attempts were anticipated, according to industry officials informed about the sessions. The satellite is believed to have splashed down in the Indian Ocean.\nSpaceX, as the rocket provider is commonly called, moved quickly to defend its Falcon 9 booster, saying it performed exactly as expected. Other industry officials backed up the company. SpaceX\u2019s initial public statements reassuring customers about the rocket\u2019s performance were made without the explicit approval of U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the sequence of events.\nBut since then, defense officials have publicly and privately signaled the rocket wasn\u2019t at fault. \nNorthrop Grumman\u2019s troubles also have shined the spotlight on the extent of congressional review of classified space programs. Championed by a handful of lawmakers including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Dianne Feinstein\n\n\n\n of California, the former Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Zuma was funded outside of normal channels. According to industry officials, it also received less formal congressional oversight than typical national-security satellite projects.\nIt isn\u2019t clear when, or even if, a summary of the Zuma findings will be released. But the investigations are wrapping up while Northrop Grumman\u2019s management is reeling from a series of embarrassing design and production snafus affecting the space telescope the company is building for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Two weeks ago, NASA disclosed that production and testing slip-ups forced another delay in development of the James Webb Space Telescope.In blunt language, the agency blamed some of the factory setbacks, including damage to satellite thrusters and a sun shield, on \u201cavoidable errors\u201d by prime contractor Northrop Grumman.\nNASA officials also laid out an unusually stringent oversight plan, mandating personnel changes and twice monthly updates by senior Northrop Grumman management to agency headquarters. Northrop Grumman has revamped production procedures for James Webb and other projects, from stepped-up quality control checks to enhanced training\u00a0in an effort to lock in tighter testing requirements and prevent employee burnout.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Government and industry experts have tentatively concluded engineering and testing errors by Northrop Grumman caused a spy satellite to plummet into the ocean shortly after a January launch. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Probes Point to Northrop Grumman Errors in Spy-Satellite Failure (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8337",
        "date": "2018-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/probes-point-to-northrop-grumman-errors-in-january-spy-satellite-failure-1523220500?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=98",
        "text": "Specifics of the Zuma adapter still aren\u2019t known, and Northrop Grumman spokesmen didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment over the weekend. The Pentagon has repeatedly declined to comment on Zuma\u2019s fate, and on Friday the Pentagon\u2019s missile defense agency didn\u2019t respond to an email seeking comment.\n\n\n\n\nThe device, purchased from a subcontractor, was significantly modified and then successfully tested three times on the ground by Northrop Grumman, according to one person familiar with the process. But upon reaching orbit, this person said, the adapter didn\u2019t uncouple the satellite from the rocket in zero-gravity conditions.\n\n\nSensors on board failed to immediately report what happened, this person said, so officials tracking the launch weren\u2019t aware of the major malfunction until the satellite was dragged back into the atmosphere by the returning second stage. The satellite ultimately broke free but by then had dropped to an altitude that was too low for a rescue.\nNorthrop Grumman built the satellite, which was so highly classified that its purpose still hasn\u2019t been disclosed. Likewise, no particular agency has been publicly identified as the customer. Industry officials and military-space analysts have said it likely was an advanced type of space radar or missile-warning satellite.\nInvestigators have focused on the satellite\u2019s unique design, which was particularly vulnerable to shock and vibration, according to people familiar with its characteristics. That prompted Northrop Grumman to specially modify the adapter to cushion separation of the satellite in orbit, according to one of these people. Adapters typically use explosive bolts or other powerful systems to break satellites free of their attachments to rockets.\nShortly after the failed mission, leaders of several congressional committees and their top staffers were briefed about the bungled launch. They were told the satellite was a total loss and no salvage attempts were anticipated, according to industry officials informed about the sessions. The satellite is believed to have splashed down in the Indian Ocean.\nSpaceX, as the rocket provider is commonly called, moved quickly to defend its Falcon 9 booster, saying it performed exactly as expected. Other industry officials backed up the company. SpaceX\u2019s initial public statements reassuring customers about the rocket\u2019s performance were made without the explicit approval of U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the sequence of events.\nBut since then, defense officials have publicly and privately signaled the rocket wasn\u2019t at fault. \nNorthrop Grumman\u2019s troubles also have shined the spotlight on the extent of congressional review of classified space programs. Championed by a handful of lawmakers including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sen. Dianne Feinstein\n\n\n\n of California, the former Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Zuma was funded outside of normal channels. According to industry officials, it also received less formal congressional oversight than typical national-security satellite projects.\nIt isn\u2019t clear when, or even if, a summary of the Zuma findings will be released. But the investigations are wrapping up while Northrop Grumman\u2019s management is reeling from a series of embarrassing design and production snafus affecting the space telescope the company is building for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Two weeks ago, NASA disclosed that production and testing slip-ups forced another delay in development of the James Webb Space Telescope.In blunt language, the agency blamed some of the factory setbacks, including damage to satellite thrusters and a sun shield, on \u201cavoidable errors\u201d by prime contractor Northrop Grumman.\nNASA officials also laid out an unusually stringent oversight plan, mandating personnel changes and twice monthly updates by senior Northrop Grumman management to agency headquarters. Northrop Grumman has revamped production procedures for James Webb and other projects, from stepped-up quality control checks to enhanced training\u00a0in an effort to lock in tighter testing requirements and prevent employee burnout.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Government and industry experts have tentatively concluded engineering and testing errors by Northrop Grumman caused a spy satellite to plummet into the ocean shortly after a January launch. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Exploits Fleet of U.S. Satellites to Strengthen Police and Military Power (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8338",
        "date": "2019-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-exploits-fleet-of-u-s-satellites-to-strengthen-police-and-military-power-11556031771?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=56",
        "text": "A tenth satellite, under construction by \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n , would enhance China\u2019s competitor to the U.S. Global Positioning System. Besides civilian uses, the navigation system could help China in a potential conflict, such as in guiding missiles to their targets. U.S. law effectively prohibits American companies from exporting satellites to China, where domestic technology lags well behind America\u2019s. But the U.S. doesn\u2019t regulate how a satellite\u2019s bandwidth is used once the device is in space. That has allowed China to essentially rent the capacity of U.S.-built satellites it wouldn\u2019t be allowed to buy, a Wall Street Journal investigation found. Tangled webs of satellite ownership and offshore firms have helped China\u2019s government achieve its goals. Some of America\u2019s biggest companies, including private-equity firm \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Carlyle Group\n\n\n in addition to Boeing, have indirectly facilitated China\u2019s efforts, the Journal found.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAsiaSat 9, the Hong Kong company\u2019s most powerful U.S.-made satellite to date, being prepared for launch in September 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n AsiaSat\n \n\n\n\nAll this appears to run counter to the U.S.\u2019s stance of confronting China\u2019s military buildup and condemning what international watchdog groups describe as widespread human-rights abuses by China\u2019s police. That includes in far-flung territories, where the satellites help the government beam communications. Current and former U.S. officials who reviewed the Journal\u2019s findings called the satellite deals worrisome examples of China using U.S. commercial technology for strategic gain. \u201cIt\u2019s a serious ethical and moral problem as well as a national-security issue,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Wortzel,\n\n\n\n a former chairman of the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group that advises Congress.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsShould the U.S. permit its satellite technology to be used by Chinese police and military? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nBoeing, in response to questions, said it has put on hold its latest satellite deal involving China, the one that would bolster the Chinese rival to GPS. Boeing said it complies with all U.S. laws, as did Carlyle. China and the U.S. are locked in a battle to dominate the world\u2019s top technologies, such as biotech, chips and communications. U.S. officials say Beijing at times turns to espionage and cyberhacking to achieve its goals. In other cases, such as in the commercial satellite industry, it creatively sidesteps U.S. regulations and leverages American companies\u2019 eagerness for revenue to reap the benefits of the technology it needs to further its strategic goals.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Chinese satellite workaround has persisted for years. U.S. officials and industry players have said the profits American satellite exports generated could be reinvested in development to keep the U.S ahead. Some defense officials also said China\u2019s use of U.S. satellites gave Washington valuable insight into its rival\u2019s space capabilities. They assumed China would use U.S.-built satellites for benign purposes such as broadcasting sports. A Hong Kong company called Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co. has long been a bridge between mainland China and U.S. satellite makers. AsiaSat is jointly controlled by Citic Group\u2014a conglomerate owned by China\u2019s central government\u2014and Carlyle, which together own about 75% of the firm.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 6.0.4Space RaceChina\u2019s communications satellite technology trails the U.S.Estimated maximum achieved capacity, gigabits a second, by companySources: Northern Sky Research (U.S.); China Satellite Communications(China)Created with Highcharts 6.0.426022010020Boeing (U.S.)SSL (U.S.)Orbital ATK (U.S.)China Academy of Space Technology (China)\n\n\n\nUnder U.S. export controls, semiautonomous Hong Kong is considered separate from mainland China, so AsiaSat could buy U.S. satellites despite being partly Chinese-owned. Over the years, AsiaSat has put in orbit nine satellites built by U.S. companies, including Boeing and SSL, a Palo Alto, Calif., unit of Colorado-based \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Maxar Technologies Inc.\n\n\n A majority are still operating. AsiaSat offers communications services across the Asia-Pacific, such as news and sports broadcasting. Its English-language financial filings and other statements make little mention of the use of its bandwidth by China\u2019s government. A fuller picture emerges in dozens of Chinese-language statements on the website of a Citic unit that has been responsible for marketing AsiaSat\u2019s bandwidth in mainland China over the past decade. Since AsiaSat launched its first satellite around 30 years ago, the Chinese government has used it to link state-run broadcasters to the provinces. \u201cThe country is rich and the military is mighty,\u201d Citic said on its website in 2015 after AsiaSat helped broadcast a lavish military parade in Beijing. \u201cSatellite commun Tangled ownership and offshore firms helped Beijing win access to superior technology, despite U.S. law preventing satellite sales to China. U.S. firms including private-equity giant Carlyle Group and Boeing Co. indirectly facilitate the efforts. ",
        "author": "Brian Spegele and Kate O\u2019Keeffe"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Maneuvers to Snag Top-Secret Boeing Satellite Technology (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8339",
        "date": "2018-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-maneuvers-to-snag-top-secret-boeing-satellite-technology-1543943490?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=83",
        "text": "About $200 million flowed to the satellite project from a state-owned Chinese financial firm in a complex deal that used offshore companies to channel China\u2019s money to Boeing. It included a discussion with a longtime friend of China\u2019s president, said the startup\u2019s founders. Such technology would help fill in a missing piece of the puzzle for China as it seeks to secure its status as a superpower alongside the U.S. It would bolster China\u2019s burgeoning space program, as well as initiatives to dominate cutting-edge industries and expand its influence in the developing world. A web of U.S. laws effectively prohibits exporting satellite technology to China, and its satellites lag far behind those made in America. Current and former U.S. officials, and people close to the startup, called Global IP, fear the satellite could ultimately be used by China\u2019s government or military once in space, or its technology reverse-engineered. The deal, playing out over three years, is a reminder that even though the U.S. and China have agreed to a temporary ceasefire in their battle over trade, the two powers are still locked in a deeper struggle that won\u2019t be easy to quell. The American founders of the startup, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Emil Youssefzadeh\n\n\n\n and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Umar Javed,\n\n\n\n said they told Boeing from the outset over two years ago that Chinese government money was financing their satellite order. Later, they warned Boeing the Chinese financiers were actively interfering in the project.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEmil Youssefzadeh, left, and Umar Javed started a company to build a communications satellite for Africa.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Andrew Cullen for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI am baffled that Boeing would proceed with the project knowing about Chinese government involvement,\u201d said retired Adm. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Blair,\n\n\n\n a former U.S. director of national intelligence, after reviewing the transaction. \u201cThey deal with projects like this all the time. They know the intent and letter of U.S. law in this area.\u201d Adm. Blair chairs an advisory committee for Lockheed Martin Space Systems, a Boeing competitor. Boeing said in a written statement it \u201cundertakes rigorous measures to comply with U.S. export regulations and protect national interests.\u201d The company, the second-largest federal contractor after \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , said it obtained an export license from the Commerce Department for the Global IP satellite \u201cand will continue to work closely with Commerce officials to ensure appropriate protection of satellite technology.\u201d Boeing declined to say what it told Commerce officials about the deal or its financing when seeking the license, or to answer most other specific questions from The Wall Street Journal. The Commerce Department said it couldn\u2019t comment on an individual application. Details of the satellite deal began to emerge after tensions boiled over last year between founders of the startup and the state-owned Chinese company that provided financing, China Orient Asset Management Co. China Orient is owned by China\u2019s Ministry of Finance, and its top executives are senior Communist Party members. In an essay published this year by the official Xinhua News Agency, China Orient\u2019s chairman stressed the firm\u2019s role as a financier for providers of China\u2019s military technology. Global IP\u2019s founders eventually resigned and sued a subsidiary of China Orient, alleging the subsidiary took control of the project in violation of U.S. law. Lawyers for the defendant have denied the allegations in federal court in California. \u201cThe inflammatory allegations in the complaints brought by Emil Youssefzadeh and Umar Javed have no merit,\u201d lawyers for the China Orient subsidiary said in a written statement to the Journal. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bahram Pourmand,\n\n\n\n Global IP\u2019s chief executive, said the company isn\u2019t controlled by China. He said strict firewalls will prevent any sensitive U.S. technology from leaking. Global IP and its backers should have flagged the satellite transaction to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, a panel that can recommend the president block transactions on national-security grounds, said legal experts and former and current U.S. officials who reviewed the founders\u2019 allegations at the Journal\u2019s request. After the Journal began looking into the project this past summer, U.S. officials referred the transaction to CFIUS, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokesman for the Treasury Department, which leads the interagency CFIUS panel, declined to comment. U.S. officials say Chinese state companies\u2019 attempts to gain critical technologies, sometimes using illicit tactics, are among Washington\u2019s toughest challenges. \u201cIt\u2019s a multi-pronged, multi-faceted kind of attack,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Eric Hirschhorn,\n\n\n\n undersecretary at the Commerce Department overseeing ex The founders of a small Los Angeles company, which ordered a satellite from Boeing, say the firm was financed and is now controlled by China, in violation of rules designed to keep such technology out of Beijing\u2019s hands. Some worry China could use the technology for military purposes. ",
        "author": "Brian Spegele and Kate O\u2019Keeffe"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Worries Its Moon Rocks Will Moonwalk Away (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8340",
        "date": "2019-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-worries-its-moon-rocks-will-moonwalk-away-11561140745?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=58",
        "text": "It\u2019s lighter now.\n\n\n\nInside are moon rocks\u2014samples of lunar rock and soil collected by astronauts as part of the \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo\n\n\n\n program in the 1960s and 1970s. The lunar samples she and other researchers study are the property of the U.S. government. They are among the most precious specimens available to scientists to probe questions about the origins of our own planet, its moon and the universe. To protect them, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has strict security protocols befitting a heist film. It isn\u2019t just paranoia. Over the years, some pieces of the moon have escaped NASA\u2019s gravitational pull. One night in 2002, three interns absconded with a 600-pound safe full of moon rocks from Apollo missions. The rocks were retrieved, but couldn\u2019t be used for scientific research. The interns pleaded guilty and the ringleader was sentenced to more than eight years in prison. President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon\n\n\n\n gifted some lunar rocks to foreign luminaries. Typically, they were tiny slivers of moon embedded in a plaque\u2014some of which have found their way into the marketplace. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe vault inside the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at the Johnson Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Blair/NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn a 2003 court case titled \u201cUnited States of America v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque,\u201d the Justice Department went after an item bought by an American businessman from a retired Honduran colonel for $15,000 plus a refrigerated truck. A U.S. District Judge ruled the U.S. was \u201centitled to forfeiture because the items were stolen from the Republic of Honduras and then introduced into the United States.\u201d The plaque was returned to Honduras. NASA itself isn\u2019t blameless. \u201cPoor record keeping contributed to the Agency losing possession of an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles,\u201d according to a 2018 Office of Inspector General audit of NASA\u2019s historic property. \n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsShould NASA stop being so protective of its moon rocks and just sell them off to pay down the national debt? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe agency says it is vigilant. \u201cWe don\u2019t go into a lot of details about our security countermeasures, but they are significant,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ryan Zeigler,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Apollo sample curator. NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston houses the country\u2019s collection of lunar samples in a facility built to withstand hurricanes and outfitted with backup generators to keep the special storage protocols going in case of a power outage, according to Dr. Zeigler. Yearly, the staff goes through an extensive hurricane drill in which they practice bagging samples and rescuing moon rocks on display at Space Center Houston, a museum nearby. \u201cWe drive over with a security escort by a secret way,\u201d Dr. Zeigler said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA moon rock sample at the Johnson Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BILL STAFFORD/NASA\n \n\n\n\nWithin its cosmic coffers, the agency has roughly 110,000 lunar specimens from the Apollo program. Astronauts brought back 2,200, which have been divvied up into sub-samples for research. When scientists return samples they\u2019ve studied, they go into the return sample vault. Never-before-studied specimens, roughly 70% of the collection, are stored in the so-called pristine lunar vault to avoid contamination, according to Dr. Zeigler. One, known as Sample 73001, is an 809-gram slab of moon rock stored in a vacuum-sealed tube inside a second vacuum-sealed container. The contraption is covered in hardy Teflon bags. It hasn\u2019t been opened since the rock was put in. Now, the agency is making it, along with some frozen rocks and others stored in helium-filled containers, available for the first time to nine research groups across the country, among them Dr. Dyar\u2019s. New technologies are available to probe them for compounds that could give scientists fresh insights into the composition of the moon\u2019s interior and crust, as well as clues about the distribution of molecules needed for life within our solar system. It is also fitting to release them now in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing on July 20, researchers said. Cracking 73001\u2019s sheath open will require extreme precautions, as the gases trapped inside could also be a precious scientific resource, according to researchers familiar with the lunar matter. In June, scientists from the nine groups met to discuss how best to unseal the sample, known as a core. \u201cWe\u2019re doing this very, very systematically,\u201d studying old protocols and instruction manuals from the 1970s to see what problems scientists encountered previously, said University of New Mexico lunar scientist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Shearer,\n\n\n\n one of the scientists leading the mission to study the new samples. The last Security is tight as space agency prepares to release old lunar samples for study; the case of the missing 600-pound safe. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Worries Its Moon Rocks Will Moonwalk Away (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8341",
        "date": "2019-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-worries-its-moon-rocks-will-moonwalk-away-11561140745?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=54",
        "text": "It\u2019s lighter now.\n\n\n\nInside are moon rocks\u2014samples of lunar rock and soil collected by astronauts as part of the \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo\n\n\n\n program in the 1960s and 1970s. The lunar samples she and other researchers study are the property of the U.S. government. They are among the most precious specimens available to scientists to probe questions about the origins of our own planet, its moon and the universe. To protect them, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has strict security protocols befitting a heist film. It isn\u2019t just paranoia. Over the years, some pieces of the moon have escaped NASA\u2019s gravitational pull. One night in 2002, three interns absconded with a 600-pound safe full of moon rocks from Apollo missions. The rocks were retrieved, but couldn\u2019t be used for scientific research. The interns pleaded guilty and the ringleader was sentenced to more than eight years in prison. President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon\n\n\n\n gifted some lunar rocks to foreign luminaries. Typically, they were tiny slivers of moon embedded in a plaque\u2014some of which have found their way into the marketplace. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe vault inside the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at the Johnson Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Blair/NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn a 2003 court case titled \u201cUnited States of America v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque,\u201d the Justice Department went after an item bought by an American businessman from a retired Honduran colonel for $15,000 plus a refrigerated truck. A U.S. District Judge ruled the U.S. was \u201centitled to forfeiture because the items were stolen from the Republic of Honduras and then introduced into the United States.\u201d The plaque was returned to Honduras. NASA itself isn\u2019t blameless. \u201cPoor record keeping contributed to the Agency losing possession of an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles,\u201d according to a 2018 Office of Inspector General audit of NASA\u2019s historic property. \n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsShould NASA stop being so protective of its moon rocks and just sell them off to pay down the national debt? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe agency says it is vigilant. \u201cWe don\u2019t go into a lot of details about our security countermeasures, but they are significant,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ryan Zeigler,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Apollo sample curator. NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston houses the country\u2019s collection of lunar samples in a facility built to withstand hurricanes and outfitted with backup generators to keep the special storage protocols going in case of a power outage, according to Dr. Zeigler. Yearly, the staff goes through an extensive hurricane drill in which they practice bagging samples and rescuing moon rocks on display at Space Center Houston, a museum nearby. \u201cWe drive over with a security escort by a secret way,\u201d Dr. Zeigler said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA moon rock sample at the Johnson Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BILL STAFFORD/NASA\n \n\n\n\nWithin its cosmic coffers, the agency has roughly 110,000 lunar specimens from the Apollo program. Astronauts brought back 2,200, which have been divvied up into sub-samples for research. When scientists return samples they\u2019ve studied, they go into the return sample vault. Never-before-studied specimens, roughly 70% of the collection, are stored in the so-called pristine lunar vault to avoid contamination, according to Dr. Zeigler. One, known as Sample 73001, is an 809-gram slab of moon rock stored in a vacuum-sealed tube inside a second vacuum-sealed container. The contraption is covered in hardy Teflon bags. It hasn\u2019t been opened since the rock was put in. Now, the agency is making it, along with some frozen rocks and others stored in helium-filled containers, available for the first time to nine research groups across the country, among them Dr. Dyar\u2019s. New technologies are available to probe them for compounds that could give scientists fresh insights into the composition of the moon\u2019s interior and crust, as well as clues about the distribution of molecules needed for life within our solar system. It is also fitting to release them now in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing on July 20, researchers said. Cracking 73001\u2019s sheath open will require extreme precautions, as the gases trapped inside could also be a precious scientific resource, according to researchers familiar with the lunar matter. In June, scientists from the nine groups met to discuss how best to unseal the sample, known as a core. \u201cWe\u2019re doing this very, very systematically,\u201d studying old protocols and instruction manuals from the 1970s to see what problems scientists encountered previously, said University of New Mexico lunar scientist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Shearer,\n\n\n\n one of the scientists leading the mission to study the new samples. The last Security is tight as space agency prepares to release old lunar samples for study; the case of the missing 600-pound safe. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Worries Its Moon Rocks Will Moonwalk Away (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8342",
        "date": "2019-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-worries-its-moon-rocks-will-moonwalk-away-11561140745?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=54",
        "text": "It\u2019s lighter now.\n\n\n\nInside are moon rocks\u2014samples of lunar rock and soil collected by astronauts as part of the \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo\n\n\n\n program in the 1960s and 1970s. The lunar samples she and other researchers study are the property of the U.S. government. They are among the most precious specimens available to scientists to probe questions about the origins of our own planet, its moon and the universe. To protect them, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has strict security protocols befitting a heist film. It isn\u2019t just paranoia. Over the years, some pieces of the moon have escaped NASA\u2019s gravitational pull. One night in 2002, three interns absconded with a 600-pound safe full of moon rocks from Apollo missions. The rocks were retrieved, but couldn\u2019t be used for scientific research. The interns pleaded guilty and the ringleader was sentenced to more than eight years in prison. President \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Nixon\n\n\n\n gifted some lunar rocks to foreign luminaries. Typically, they were tiny slivers of moon embedded in a plaque\u2014some of which have found their way into the marketplace. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe vault inside the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at the Johnson Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n James Blair/NASA\n \n\n\n\nIn a 2003 court case titled \u201cUnited States of America v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque,\u201d the Justice Department went after an item bought by an American businessman from a retired Honduran colonel for $15,000 plus a refrigerated truck. A U.S. District Judge ruled the U.S. was \u201centitled to forfeiture because the items were stolen from the Republic of Honduras and then introduced into the United States.\u201d The plaque was returned to Honduras. NASA itself isn\u2019t blameless. \u201cPoor record keeping contributed to the Agency losing possession of an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles,\u201d according to a 2018 Office of Inspector General audit of NASA\u2019s historic property. \n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsShould NASA stop being so protective of its moon rocks and just sell them off to pay down the national debt? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe agency says it is vigilant. \u201cWe don\u2019t go into a lot of details about our security countermeasures, but they are significant,\u201d said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ryan Zeigler,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s Apollo sample curator. NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center in Houston houses the country\u2019s collection of lunar samples in a facility built to withstand hurricanes and outfitted with backup generators to keep the special storage protocols going in case of a power outage, according to Dr. Zeigler. Yearly, the staff goes through an extensive hurricane drill in which they practice bagging samples and rescuing moon rocks on display at Space Center Houston, a museum nearby. \u201cWe drive over with a security escort by a secret way,\u201d Dr. Zeigler said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA moon rock sample at the Johnson Space Center.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BILL STAFFORD/NASA\n \n\n\n\nWithin its cosmic coffers, the agency has roughly 110,000 lunar specimens from the Apollo program. Astronauts brought back 2,200, which have been divvied up into sub-samples for research. When scientists return samples they\u2019ve studied, they go into the return sample vault. Never-before-studied specimens, roughly 70% of the collection, are stored in the so-called pristine lunar vault to avoid contamination, according to Dr. Zeigler. One, known as Sample 73001, is an 809-gram slab of moon rock stored in a vacuum-sealed tube inside a second vacuum-sealed container. The contraption is covered in hardy Teflon bags. It hasn\u2019t been opened since the rock was put in. Now, the agency is making it, along with some frozen rocks and others stored in helium-filled containers, available for the first time to nine research groups across the country, among them Dr. Dyar\u2019s. New technologies are available to probe them for compounds that could give scientists fresh insights into the composition of the moon\u2019s interior and crust, as well as clues about the distribution of molecules needed for life within our solar system. It is also fitting to release them now in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing on July 20, researchers said. Cracking 73001\u2019s sheath open will require extreme precautions, as the gases trapped inside could also be a precious scientific resource, according to researchers familiar with the lunar matter. In June, scientists from the nine groups met to discuss how best to unseal the sample, known as a core. \u201cWe\u2019re doing this very, very systematically,\u201d studying old protocols and instruction manuals from the 1970s to see what problems scientists encountered previously, said University of New Mexico lunar scientist \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Shearer,\n\n\n\n one of the scientists leading the mission to study the new samples. The last Security is tight as space agency prepares to release old lunar samples for study; the case of the missing 600-pound safe. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is not aliens. It\u2019s an aurora named Steve. (Seriously.) (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8343",
        "date": "2017-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/04/26/this-is-not-aliens-its-an-aurora-named-steve-seriously/",
        "text": " The European Space Agency said so! This is not aliens. It\u2019s an aurora named Steve. (Seriously.)",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is not aliens. It\u2019s an aurora named Steve. (Seriously.) (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8344",
        "date": "2017-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/04/26/this-is-not-aliens-its-an-aurora-named-steve-seriously/",
        "text": " The European Space Agency said so! This is not aliens. It\u2019s an aurora named Steve. (Seriously.)",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "This is not aliens. It\u2019s an aurora named Steve. (Seriously.) (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8345",
        "date": "2017-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/04/26/this-is-not-aliens-its-an-aurora-named-steve-seriously/",
        "text": " The European Space Agency said so! This is not aliens. It\u2019s an aurora named Steve. (Seriously.)",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "China plans to build a moon base (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8346",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/china-plans-to-build-a-moon-base/2019/04/26/d22406f2-6768-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html",
        "text": "China plans to build a scientific research station on the moon in \u201cabout 10 years,\u201d according to the state news agency Xinhua.The China National Space Administration intends to build the research station in the region of the moon\u2019s south pole, Zhang Kejian, head of the agency, said in a public statement, Xinhua reported. That\u2019s a bit of a departure from the six successful NASA Apollo moon landings, which took place closer to the moon\u2019s equator between 1969 and 1972. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDetails of China\u2019s long-term lunar plans are still sketchy, but its space agency has made significant steps toward exploration of the moon. This year, the Chinese successfully landed the unmanned Chang\u2019e-4 on the far side of the moon, and have also placed astronauts aboard two temporary space stations, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2. Their space agency also plans to put a larger, more permanent station into orbit in the coming years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first parts of that permanent station will reach orbit aboard the country\u2019s new Long March-5B rocket in the first half of 2020, Agence France-Presse reported; the mission will not be associated with the International Space Station, which is reaching the end of its operational lifetime. Plus, the United States and China do not cooperate on spaceflight endeavors.Kejian also announced that Chang\u2019e-5, an unmanned lunar lander originally scheduled for launch in 2017, will attempt to reach the moon and return with samples in 2019, Xinhua reported.China spends more on spaceflight than any country except the United States, according to AFP. At the moment, the United States is unable to put humans in space without hitching a ride on a Russian rocket; plans to change that model by using for-profit rockets \u2014 such as those owned by SpaceX \u2014 have hit snags.Still, U.S. officials have also suggested that there are plans to return to the moon and stay on it for an extended period in the near future.\u2014 Live Science\n The nation\u2019s space agency wants the research station to be operational in a decade. China plans to build a moon base",
        "author": "Rafi Letzter"
    },
    {
        "title": "China plans to build a moon base (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8347",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/china-plans-to-build-a-moon-base/2019/04/26/d22406f2-6768-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html",
        "text": "China plans to build a scientific research station on the moon in \u201cabout 10 years,\u201d according to the state news agency Xinhua.The China National Space Administration intends to build the research station in the region of the moon\u2019s south pole, Zhang Kejian, head of the agency, said in a public statement, Xinhua reported. That\u2019s a bit of a departure from the six successful NASA Apollo moon landings, which took place closer to the moon\u2019s equator between 1969 and 1972. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDetails of China\u2019s long-term lunar plans are still sketchy, but its space agency has made significant steps toward exploration of the moon. This year, the Chinese successfully landed the unmanned Chang\u2019e-4 on the far side of the moon, and have also placed astronauts aboard two temporary space stations, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2. Their space agency also plans to put a larger, more permanent station into orbit in the coming years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first parts of that permanent station will reach orbit aboard the country\u2019s new Long March-5B rocket in the first half of 2020, Agence France-Presse reported; the mission will not be associated with the International Space Station, which is reaching the end of its operational lifetime. Plus, the United States and China do not cooperate on spaceflight endeavors.Kejian also announced that Chang\u2019e-5, an unmanned lunar lander originally scheduled for launch in 2017, will attempt to reach the moon and return with samples in 2019, Xinhua reported.China spends more on spaceflight than any country except the United States, according to AFP. At the moment, the United States is unable to put humans in space without hitching a ride on a Russian rocket; plans to change that model by using for-profit rockets \u2014 such as those owned by SpaceX \u2014 have hit snags.Still, U.S. officials have also suggested that there are plans to return to the moon and stay on it for an extended period in the near future.\u2014 Live Science\n The nation\u2019s space agency wants the research station to be operational in a decade. China plans to build a moon base",
        "author": "Rafi Letzter"
    },
    {
        "title": "China plans to build a moon base (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8348",
        "date": "2019-04-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/china-plans-to-build-a-moon-base/2019/04/26/d22406f2-6768-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html",
        "text": "China plans to build a scientific research station on the moon in \u201cabout 10 years,\u201d according to the state news agency Xinhua.The China National Space Administration intends to build the research station in the region of the moon\u2019s south pole, Zhang Kejian, head of the agency, said in a public statement, Xinhua reported. That\u2019s a bit of a departure from the six successful NASA Apollo moon landings, which took place closer to the moon\u2019s equator between 1969 and 1972. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDetails of China\u2019s long-term lunar plans are still sketchy, but its space agency has made significant steps toward exploration of the moon. This year, the Chinese successfully landed the unmanned Chang\u2019e-4 on the far side of the moon, and have also placed astronauts aboard two temporary space stations, Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2. Their space agency also plans to put a larger, more permanent station into orbit in the coming years.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe first parts of that permanent station will reach orbit aboard the country\u2019s new Long March-5B rocket in the first half of 2020, Agence France-Presse reported; the mission will not be associated with the International Space Station, which is reaching the end of its operational lifetime. Plus, the United States and China do not cooperate on spaceflight endeavors.Kejian also announced that Chang\u2019e-5, an unmanned lunar lander originally scheduled for launch in 2017, will attempt to reach the moon and return with samples in 2019, Xinhua reported.China spends more on spaceflight than any country except the United States, according to AFP. At the moment, the United States is unable to put humans in space without hitching a ride on a Russian rocket; plans to change that model by using for-profit rockets \u2014 such as those owned by SpaceX \u2014 have hit snags.Still, U.S. officials have also suggested that there are plans to return to the moon and stay on it for an extended period in the near future.\u2014 Live Science\n The nation\u2019s space agency wants the research station to be operational in a decade. China plans to build a moon base",
        "author": "Rafi Letzter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Curry Doubts Moon Landings. NASA Offers to Show Him the Rocks. (NYT: Sports) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8349",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/sports/stephen-curry-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The space agency invited the Golden State star to visit the Johnson Space Center, \u201cperhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets.\u201d The space agency invited the Golden State star to visit the Johnson Space Center, \u201cperhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets.\u201d It has been a big 24 hours for Stephen Curry. His team was named Sports Illustrated\u2019s \u201cSportsperson of the Year,\u201d he was named the Western Conference\u2019s player of the week, and his comments denying the moon landing happened made him the enemy of science teachers everywhere.",
        "author": "By Benjamin Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Curry Doubts Moon Landings. NASA Offers to Show Him the Rocks. (NYT: Sports) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8350",
        "date": "2018-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/sports/stephen-curry-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The space agency invited the Golden State star to visit the Johnson Space Center, \u201cperhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets.\u201d The space agency invited the Golden State star to visit the Johnson Space Center, \u201cperhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets.\u201d It has been a big 24 hours for Stephen Curry. His team was named Sports Illustrated\u2019s \u201cSportsperson of the Year,\u201d he was named the Western Conference\u2019s player of the week, and his comments denying the moon landing happened made him the enemy of science teachers everywhere.",
        "author": "By Benjamin Hoffman"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Woman Putting Australia Into Space (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8351",
        "date": "2018-11-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/world/australia/megan-clark-space-agency.html",
        "text": "Megan Clark has always thirsted after adventure, and in heading the nation\u2019s first space agency she has definitely set herself a challenge. Megan Clark has always thirsted after adventure, and in heading the nation\u2019s first space agency she has definitely set herself a challenge. CANBERRA, Australia \u2014 Australia is late to the space party. The leader of its new space agency, Megan Clark, said so herself. This continent, at the perfect location in the southern hemisphere to peer into the galaxy, has been one of the last developed countries to get a space agency, and she could not figure out why.",
        "author": "By Brittany Hope Flamik"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Says Debris From India\u2019s Antisatellite Test Puts Space Station at Risk (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8352",
        "date": "2019-04-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/world/asia/nasa-india-space-debris.html",
        "text": "India\u2019s test launch last week \u201cis not compatible with the future of human spaceflight that we need to see have happen,\u201d the space agency\u2019s administrator said. India\u2019s test launch last week \u201cis not compatible with the future of human spaceflight that we need to see have happen,\u201d the space agency\u2019s administrator said. NEW DELHI \u2014 NASA has criticized India for the antisatellite test it carried out with great fanfare last week, saying it was riskier than officials claimed and created debris that could threaten the International Space Station.",
        "author": "By Kai Schultz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Iran Drops Plan to Send Human Into Space, Citing Cost (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8353",
        "date": "2017-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/world/middleeast/iran-space.html",
        "text": "In a country with persistent economic problems, a semiofficial news agency quoted the deputy head of the space agency as saying the $15 billion to $20 billion cost was too high. In a country with persistent economic problems, a semiofficial news agency quoted the deputy head of the space agency as saying the $15 billion to $20 billion cost was too high. When Iran\u2019s scientists sent a monkey into space in 2013, the country\u2019s president volunteered to be the first Iranian to blast aloft in a domestically built rocket, possibly as early as 2018.",
        "author": "By Rick Gladstone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japan\u2019s Asteroid Odyssey: 3 Billion Miles for a Pinch of Dust (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8354",
        "date": "2020-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/japans-space-agency-retrieves-capsule-of-asteroid-dust-11607220531?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=37",
        "text": "On Dec. 1, China said it landed a probe on the moon in humanity\u2019s first bid since the 1970s to return lunar rocks to the Earth. The U.S. has its own asteroid mission that recently grabbed as much as 2 pounds of material from the asteroid Bennu, with return to Earth scheduled in 2023.\nJapan\u2019s Hayabusa2 probe blasted off six years ago on its journey to Ryugu, a boxy miniplanet about a half-mile across that circles the sun mostly between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Last year, the probe collected two samples from the asteroid, including one from beneath the surface after firing a projectile to create an artificial crater.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Ryugu asteroid\n\n\n Photo: \n \n JAXA/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nAfter a journey of more than 3.2 billion miles, Hayabusa2 flew by Earth this weekend and released a capsule that Japanese officials hope will contain at least 0.1 gram of asteroid material, the equivalent of a few grains of rice. The capsule sped through Earth\u2019s atmosphere at 7 miles a second before extending a parachute that allowed it to glide down to a landing spot in Australia on Sunday morning local time.\n\n\nAsteroids such as Ryugu, which is carbon-rich and includes water-containing minerals, are thought to retain the same materials that existed some 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system first coalesced from a cloud of gas and dust.\nThe Earth and other planets formed when such materials melted, cooled and solidified, erasing evidence of what they were originally like.\n\u201cEven if you study a larger planet like the Earth, you cannot obtain information about the substances that existed 4.6 billion years ago,\u201d said Hayabusa2 mission manager Makoto Yoshikawa. \u201cHowever, when it comes to smaller planets or smaller asteroids, these substances were not melted.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat are you hoping to learn from studies of asteroid dust? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nHe said scientists intended to study what kinds of amino acids, the building blocks of life, are to be found in the asteroid dust.\nThe first Hayabusa mission, which returned to Earth in 2010, visited a different type of asteroid with less carbon. The dust it brought back from the asteroid Itokawa, the first time humans obtained asteroid material, demonstrated that the most abundant meteorites found on Earth come from asteroids of that type. \nUnlike the first Hayabusa, which burned up in Earth\u2019s atmosphere on its return, Hayabusa2 is staying in space and will be sent toward another asteroid, with plans for a rendezvous in July 2031.\nJapan also plans to send a probe to the moons of Mars, departing as soon as 2024. It is intended to collect samples from the moon Phobos and return to Earth five years later.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA capsule of asteroid dust dropped to Earth in Australia on Sunday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n morgan sette/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nWrite to Peter Landers at peter.landers@wsj.com Japan\u2019s space agency successfully retrieved a capsule of asteroid dust, with hopes it will carry hints about how life started on Earth. ",
        "author": "Peter Landers"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Sunday: \u2018Connected\u2019 and the SpaceX Landing (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8355",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/arts/television/whats-on-tv-sunday-connected-and-the-spacex-landing.html",
        "text": "\u201cRadiolab\u201d journalist Latif Nasser hosts a new show on Netflix, and the SpaceX craft makes its return to Earth. \u201cRadiolab\u201d journalist Latif Nasser hosts a new show on Netflix, and the SpaceX craft makes its return to Earth. CONNECTED Stream on Netflix. As the director of research for \u201cRadiolab,\u201d Latif Nasser has covered all sorts of fascinating stories for the science podcast, like that of a Guant\u00e1namo Bay detainee who shares his name, or what the 2016 N.H.L. All-Star Game can teach us about democracy. Now, as the host of this new Netflix show, Nasser will uncover the surprising ways humans are connected to one another, the world and the universe at large. It\u2019s a fascinating topic \u2014 one that highlights how a law of numerical probability applies to classical music, social media and tax fraud, or how a shipwreck laid the ground work for weather forecasting and cloud computing.",
        "author": "By Lauren Messman"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Sunday: \u2018Connected\u2019 and the SpaceX Landing (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8356",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/arts/television/whats-on-tv-sunday-connected-and-the-spacex-landing.html",
        "text": "\u201cRadiolab\u201d journalist Latif Nasser hosts a new show on Netflix, and the SpaceX craft makes its return to Earth. \u201cRadiolab\u201d journalist Latif Nasser hosts a new show on Netflix, and the SpaceX craft makes its return to Earth. CONNECTED Stream on Netflix. As the director of research for \u201cRadiolab,\u201d Latif Nasser has covered all sorts of fascinating stories for the science podcast, like that of a Guant\u00e1namo Bay detainee who shares his name, or what the 2016 N.H.L. All-Star Game can teach us about democracy. Now, as the host of this new Netflix show, Nasser will uncover the surprising ways humans are connected to one another, the world and the universe at large. It\u2019s a fascinating topic \u2014 one that highlights how a law of numerical probability applies to classical music, social media and tax fraud, or how a shipwreck laid the ground work for weather forecasting and cloud computing.",
        "author": "By Lauren Messman"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Sunday: \u2018Connected\u2019 and the SpaceX Landing (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8357",
        "date": "2020-08-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/arts/television/whats-on-tv-sunday-connected-and-the-spacex-landing.html",
        "text": "\u201cRadiolab\u201d journalist Latif Nasser hosts a new show on Netflix, and the SpaceX craft makes its return to Earth. \u201cRadiolab\u201d journalist Latif Nasser hosts a new show on Netflix, and the SpaceX craft makes its return to Earth. CONNECTED Stream on Netflix. As the director of research for \u201cRadiolab,\u201d Latif Nasser has covered all sorts of fascinating stories for the science podcast, like that of a Guant\u00e1namo Bay detainee who shares his name, or what the 2016 N.H.L. All-Star Game can teach us about democracy. Now, as the host of this new Netflix show, Nasser will uncover the surprising ways humans are connected to one another, the world and the universe at large. It\u2019s a fascinating topic \u2014 one that highlights how a law of numerical probability applies to classical music, social media and tax fraud, or how a shipwreck laid the ground work for weather forecasting and cloud computing.",
        "author": "By Lauren Messman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Hosts a Mother\u2019s Day Episode of \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8358",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/arts/television/elon-musk-snl.html",
        "text": "The much-discussed Tesla and SpaceX executive took a self-deprecating approach, telling viewers, \u201cI\u2019m pretty good at running human in emulation mode.\u201d The much-discussed Tesla and SpaceX executive took a self-deprecating approach, telling viewers, \u201cI\u2019m pretty good at running human in emulation mode.\u201d In the end, an episode of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d hosted by Elon Musk turned out to be exactly that, no more and no less.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Hosts a Mother\u2019s Day Episode of \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8359",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/arts/television/elon-musk-snl.html",
        "text": "The much-discussed Tesla and SpaceX executive took a self-deprecating approach, telling viewers, \u201cI\u2019m pretty good at running human in emulation mode.\u201d The much-discussed Tesla and SpaceX executive took a self-deprecating approach, telling viewers, \u201cI\u2019m pretty good at running human in emulation mode.\u201d In the end, an episode of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d hosted by Elon Musk turned out to be exactly that, no more and no less.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Hosts a Mother\u2019s Day Episode of \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8360",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/arts/television/elon-musk-snl.html",
        "text": "The much-discussed Tesla and SpaceX executive took a self-deprecating approach, telling viewers, \u201cI\u2019m pretty good at running human in emulation mode.\u201d The much-discussed Tesla and SpaceX executive took a self-deprecating approach, telling viewers, \u201cI\u2019m pretty good at running human in emulation mode.\u201d In the end, an episode of \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d hosted by Elon Musk turned out to be exactly that, no more and no less.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk to Host \u2018Saturday Night Live\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8361",
        "date": "2021-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/arts/television/elon-musk-snl.html",
        "text": "Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, will become the rare \u201cS.N.L.\u201d host not from the worlds of entertainment, politics or sports. Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, will become the rare \u201cS.N.L.\u201d host not from the worlds of entertainment, politics or sports. There have been some unexpected \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d hosts over the years.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Monday Briefing (NYT: Briefing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8362",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/briefing/us-protests-coronavirus-hong-kong-spacex.html",
        "text": "U.S. protests, Hong Kong, SpaceX: Here\u2019s what you need to know. U.S. protests, Hong Kong, SpaceX: Here\u2019s what you need to know. Cities across the U.S. were smoldering on Sunday after a largely peaceful day of protests on Saturday turned into a night of chaos and violence.",
        "author": "By Carole Landry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Monday Briefing (NYT: Briefing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8363",
        "date": "2020-05-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/briefing/us-protests-coronavirus-hong-kong-spacex.html",
        "text": "U.S. protests, Hong Kong, SpaceX: Here\u2019s what you need to know. U.S. protests, Hong Kong, SpaceX: Here\u2019s what you need to know. Cities across the U.S. were smoldering on Sunday after a largely peaceful day of protests on Saturday turned into a night of chaos and violence.",
        "author": "By Carole Landry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s New Rocket Plan, Tax Overhaul Pushback: DealBook Briefing (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8364",
        "date": "2017-09-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/business/dealbook/elon-musk-spacex-rocket.html",
        "text": "The SpaceX founder insists that he can ferry cargo into space and fly people anywhere in the world in less than an hour, and make money doing it. The SpaceX founder insists that he can ferry cargo into space and fly people anywhere in the world in less than an hour, and make money doing it. Elon Musk has finally explained how SpaceX could make money: through a rocket that can both deliver goods to space and fly people from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes.",
        "author": "By Amie Tsang and Michael J. de la Merced"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will an Island in Indonesia Become a New Frontier in the Space Race? (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8365",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/business/indonesia-spaceport-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "An Indigenous clan fears it will lose its place in the world as the government pursues a quest to open a spaceport and lure the billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk. An Indigenous clan fears it will lose its place in the world as the government pursues a quest to open a spaceport and lure the billionaire SpaceX founder Elon Musk. BIAK, Indonesia \u2014 For 15 generations, members of the Abrauw clan have lived much like their ancestors. They farm with wooden plows in patches of the rainforest, gather medicinal plants and set traps to catch snakes and wild boar.",
        "author": "By Dera Menra Sijabat, Richard C. Paddock and Ulet Ifansasti"
    },
    {
        "title": "Work Colleagues, Friends, Then Something More (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8366",
        "date": "2018-04-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/fashion/weddings/work-colleagues-friends-then-something-more.html",
        "text": "The couple met when both worked at SpaceX, but didn\u2019t begin dating until he gave her his SpaceX watch with the promise that she would return it. The couple met when both worked at SpaceX, but didn\u2019t begin dating until he gave her his SpaceX watch with the promise that she would return it. Margaret Anne Abernathy and Joshua Gerald Brost were married April 28 at the Stockdale Country Club, a golf course in Bakersfield, Calif. Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the House majority leader, officiated.",
        "author": "By Nina Reyes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Yusaku Maezawa just purchased every seat on the SpaceX flight to the moon. Who is he? (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8367",
        "date": "2018-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/18/yusaku-maezawa-just-purchased-every-seat-on-the-spacex-flight-to-the-moon-who-is-he/",
        "text": "On Monday, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa stood in front of a crowd of reporters at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., and declared jubilantly, \u201cFinally, I can tell you that I choose to go to the moon.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAnd the 42-year-old announced he purchased not one but all the seats aboard SpaceX\u2019s Big Falcon Rocket. Maezawa is not only a high-profile entrepreneur specializing in online retail and a world-famous art collector, but he is also set to be SpaceX\u2019s first paying tourist to take a trip around the moon.\u00a0Maezawa\u2019s roughly week-long journey is tentatively scheduled for 2023, as The Washington Post\u2019s Christian Davenport reported.\u201cEver since I was a kid, I have loved the moon,\u201d he said during a\u00a0news conference. \u201cJust staring at the moon filled my imagination. It\u2019s always there and has continued to inspire humanity. That is why I could not pass up this opportunity to see the moon up close.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClad in a dark blue blazer over a white graphic T-shirt, Maezawa, with\u00a0a giant grin dominating his youthful features, looked more like a boy band member than a person ranked 18th on Forbes\u2019s 2018 list of Japan\u2019s 50 richest people. But anyone who has tracked his meteoric rise would know that being different is normal for a man whose life has been defined by surprising moments.\u201cJapanese people think I\u2019m a weirdo,\u201d Maezawa told British auction house Christie\u2019s in 2017. \u201cThey say, who is this Maezawa person?\u201dTo put it simply, Maezawa is a former punk rocker-turned-self-made e-commerce billionaire with a love of expensive art.More than two decades ago, Maezawa, then just a sprightly teen, had an epiphany \u2014 he envisioned the rest of his life and was disheartened by what he foresaw.Story continues below advertisementAt the time, he was a student at a prestigious feeder high school in Tokyo, which meant he was destined for university and after that a career, most likely in business, the Times\u00a0in London reported. But as he rode the train for an hour and a half every morning from his home in Japan\u2019s Chiba prefecture, he told the Times\u00a0he started noticing how\u00a0all the people headed to their jobs appeared to be \u201ctired and unhappy.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cI think what I hated was the feeling that I was running along tracks that had already been laid down,\u201d he told the British publication in July. \u201cI could see the rails stretching in front of me \u2014 school, university, career. I could picture myself as one of those people jam-packed in a rush-hour train. I wanted to derail myself.\u201dArmed with a fierce desire to be more than just a worker drone, Maezawa took swift action making a series of decisions leading to a life that has been nothing short of extraordinary.Story continues below advertisementIt all began in the \u201990s, when Maezawa followed his then-girlfriend to the United States where he spent most of his time skateboarding along the streets of Santa Monica, Calif., he told reporters Monday. While in the United States, Maezawa, an avid musician, also followed one of his favorite bands, the Gorilla Biscuits, a New York-based hardcore punk group, the Times reported. Back in Japan, Maezawa was a drummer for Switch Style, a punk band he formed with friends that achieved moderate commercial success, according to the Nikkei Asian Review,\u00a0a Japanese publication.AdvertisementHis six-month stint in the United States would turn out to be a pivotal moment in his career, for it was there that he got the idea to sell music merchandise from Japan, Forbes reported. Upon returning to his home country, he launched a mail-order business selling T-shirts and CDs out of his kitchen, which became the foundation for a company he named Start Today, also the name of a Gorilla Biscuits album, according to the Japan Times. It was 1998 and Maezawa was 22 years old.Still touring and recording with his band, Maezawa started getting overwhelmed by the responsibilities that came with juggling a music career and running a company. After a few years, something had to give.Story continues below advertisement\u201cWhen it became physically impossible to handle both, I chose my company \u2014 that was around when I was 25 or 26,\u201d he told the Japan Times.AdvertisementThis was a decision that would prove fruitful for Maezawa. Start Today had shifted to focus more on fashion and apparel, eventually spawning an immensely popular e-commerce site called Zozotown, Forbes reported.According to the Japan Times, the website now features around 6,300 brands and the company employs nearly 900 people. In July, the site launched its own in-house fashion line called Zozo, available in 72 countries, Racked reported. Maezawa now has a net worth of $2.9 billion, according to Forbes.While his company\u2019s success earned him fame in Japan, Maezawa dominated international news last year when he dropped more than $110 million on a painting by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat at a Sotheby\u2019s auction. The painting\u2019s sale price broke records and threw the art world into a tizzy. Called \u201cUntitled,\u201d the colorful graffiti-style depiction of a screaming skull became the sixth-most expensive piece ever sold at auction, the New York Times reported. According to NPR, the price Maezawa paid was the highest amount ever spent at auction for a work made in the United States.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the Basquiat wouldn\u2019t just be decoration for Maezawa\u2019s home or office never to be seen by the public again. In May 2017, Maezawa posted\u00a0on Instagram a series of photos of himself alongside the work, writing, \u201cWhen I first encountered this painting, I was struck with so much excitement and gratitude for my love of art. I want to share that experience with as many people as possible.\u201d View this post on Instagram A post shared by \u524d\u6fa4\u53cb\u4f5c Yusaku Maezawa (MZ) (@yusaku2020)\nTrue to his word, Maezawa has sponsored an international tour for the artwork. Earlier this year, it was displayed at the Brooklyn Museum and the Seattle Art Museum, and is now making its way through Europe, the magazine Art News reported. Maezawa, whose extensive personal collection features works by Picasso, Alexander Calder and Willem de Kooning, among others, told Christie\u2019s he has plans to open an art museum in his hometown of Chiba.Like his sharing of art, Maezawa said Monday that he also wants to share his experience of seeing the moon, explaining why he purchased every seat on the rocket for an undisclosed amount.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself, that would be a little lonely,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t like being alone. I want to share these experiences and things with as many people as possible.\u201dThe interstellar trip is all part of Maezawa\u2019s grand project, which he has named Dear Moon. His plan is to bring with him six to eight artists from various disciplines, including film, architecture, painting, sculpture and photography, with the goal that upon their return to Earth they create works inspired by the\u00a0experience. View this post on Instagram A post shared by \u524d\u6fa4\u53cb\u4f5c Yusaku Maezawa (MZ) (@yusaku2020)\nThe idea came to him as he was looking at a Basquiat painting.\u201cI thought, what if Basquiat had gone to space and had seen the moon up close or saw the Earth in full view?\u201d he said. \u201cWhat wonderful masterpiece would he have created?\u201dStory continues below advertisementSoon, he started imagining if his other favorite artists, such as Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, John Lennon and Coco Chanel, were also given the same privilege.Advertisement\u201cThese are all artists that I adore, but sadly they are no longer with us,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are so many artists with us today that I wish could create amazing works of art for humankind, for children of the next generation.\u201dIn a video promoting Dear Moon, which is aptly set to Claude Debussy\u2019s \u201cClair de Lune,\u201d the project is described as \u201cawe-inspiring.\u201dMaezawa said his team of artists will be recruited from around the world, adding, \u201cIf you should hear from me, please say yes and accept my invitation. Please don\u2019t say no.\u201dMore from Morning Mix:\u00a0To Catholics, Jun\u00edpero Serra is a saint. To Stanford University, he\u2019s a mailing address worth eliminating.Anderson Cooper accuses Donald Trump Jr. of \u2018tweeting lies\u2019 with old hurricane photo Maezawa plans to take artists on the SpaceX voyage with him as part of a global art project called Dear Moon. Yusaku Maezawa just purchased every seat on the SpaceX flight to the moon. Who is he?",
        "author": "Allyson Chiu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Travel, Privatized (NYT: Podcasts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8368",
        "date": "2020-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/podcasts/the-daily/spacex-launch-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "How SpaceX is ushering in a new era in the exploration of the cosmos. How SpaceX is ushering in a new era in the exploration of the cosmos. Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device:Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Stitcher",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Travel, Privatized (NYT: Podcasts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8369",
        "date": "2020-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/podcasts/the-daily/spacex-launch-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "How SpaceX is ushering in a new era in the exploration of the cosmos. How SpaceX is ushering in a new era in the exploration of the cosmos. Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device:Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Stitcher",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Travel, Privatized (NYT: Podcasts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8370",
        "date": "2020-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/podcasts/the-daily/spacex-launch-space-nasa.html",
        "text": "How SpaceX is ushering in a new era in the exploration of the cosmos. How SpaceX is ushering in a new era in the exploration of the cosmos. Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device:Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Stitcher",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa Calls Off TV Search for Moon Trip \u2018Life Partner\u2019 (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8371",
        "date": "2020-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/style/yusaku-maezawa-love-documentary.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa had posted an advertisement seeking a woman to go with him on a SpaceX flight around the moon. He said he canceled the search for \u201cpersonal reasons\u201d and apologized. Yusaku Maezawa had posted an advertisement seeking a woman to go with him on a SpaceX flight around the moon. He said he canceled the search for \u201cpersonal reasons\u201d and apologized. Yusaku Maezawa sought love in the way only a lonely, 44-year-old fashion billionaire could: asking the women of the internet to apply for a chance to accompany him on a spaceflight around the moon \u2014 if they had \u201cbright and positive\u201d personalities and were over 20.",
        "author": "By Mihir Zaveri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa Calls Off TV Search for Moon Trip \u2018Life Partner\u2019 (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8372",
        "date": "2020-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/style/yusaku-maezawa-love-documentary.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa had posted an advertisement seeking a woman to go with him on a SpaceX flight around the moon. He said he canceled the search for \u201cpersonal reasons\u201d and apologized. Yusaku Maezawa had posted an advertisement seeking a woman to go with him on a SpaceX flight around the moon. He said he canceled the search for \u201cpersonal reasons\u201d and apologized. Yusaku Maezawa sought love in the way only a lonely, 44-year-old fashion billionaire could: asking the women of the internet to apply for a chance to accompany him on a spaceflight around the moon \u2014 if they had \u201cbright and positive\u201d personalities and were over 20.",
        "author": "By Mihir Zaveri"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Joins #DeleteFacebook With a Barrage of Tweets (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8373",
        "date": "2018-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/elon-musk-deletefacebook.html",
        "text": "Mr. Musk deleted the Facebook pages of two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla. He and the Facebook C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, have, er, not always gotten along. Mr. Musk deleted the Facebook pages of two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla. He and the Facebook C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, have, er, not always gotten along. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed on artificial intelligence, space travel and the direction of technology.",
        "author": "By Nellie Bowles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Joins #DeleteFacebook With a Barrage of Tweets (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8374",
        "date": "2018-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/elon-musk-deletefacebook.html",
        "text": "Mr. Musk deleted the Facebook pages of two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla. He and the Facebook C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, have, er, not always gotten along. Mr. Musk deleted the Facebook pages of two of his companies, SpaceX and Tesla. He and the Facebook C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, have, er, not always gotten along. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have clashed on artificial intelligence, space travel and the direction of technology.",
        "author": "By Nellie Bowles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Teaching Activities for: \u2018Falcon Heavy, in a Roar of Thunder, Carries SpaceX\u2019s Ambition Into Orbit\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8375",
        "date": "2018-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/learning/teaching-activities-for-falcon-heavy-in-a-roar-of-thunder-carries-spacexs-ambition-into-orbit.html",
        "text": "What will the success of Elon Musk\u2019s largest SpaceX rocket mean for the future of space travel? What will the success of Elon Musk\u2019s largest SpaceX rocket mean for the future of space travel? Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Caroline Crosson Gilpin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Think You Will Ever Travel to Space? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8376",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/do-you-think-you-will-ever-travel-to-space.html",
        "text": "A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? There\u2019s a new space race!",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Think You Will Ever Travel to Space? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8377",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/do-you-think-you-will-ever-travel-to-space.html",
        "text": "A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? There\u2019s a new space race!",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Think You Will Ever Travel to Space? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8378",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/do-you-think-you-will-ever-travel-to-space.html",
        "text": "A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? There\u2019s a new space race!",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Think You Will Ever Travel to Space? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8379",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/do-you-think-you-will-ever-travel-to-space.html",
        "text": "A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? There\u2019s a new space race!",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do You Think You Will Ever Travel to Space? (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8380",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/do-you-think-you-will-ever-travel-to-space.html",
        "text": "A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? A SpaceX rocket launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit. Do you think spaceflight will one day become as ordinary as air travel? There\u2019s a new space race!",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Serene Shore Resort, Except for the SpaceX \u2018Ball of Fire\u2019 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8381",
        "date": "2021-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/us/space-x-boca-chica-texas.html",
        "text": "For years, those in a rural Texas village cherished living among nature and wildlife. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has brought new fears and the promise of an economic boost to one of America\u2019s poorest corners. For years, those in a rural Texas village cherished living among nature and wildlife. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has brought new fears and the promise of an economic boost to one of America\u2019s poorest corners. BOCA CHICA, Texas \u2014 The text arrived late at night: For your own safety, leave home by morning, it read. Nancy and James Crawford, no longer surprised but still unsettled, raced away in their S.U.V. after sunrise, occasionally twisting their necks to catch a glimpse of the space rocket towering behind them.",
        "author": "By Edgar Sandoval and Richard Webner"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Serene Shore Resort, Except for the SpaceX \u2018Ball of Fire\u2019 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8382",
        "date": "2021-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/us/space-x-boca-chica-texas.html",
        "text": "For years, those in a rural Texas village cherished living among nature and wildlife. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has brought new fears and the promise of an economic boost to one of America\u2019s poorest corners. For years, those in a rural Texas village cherished living among nature and wildlife. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has brought new fears and the promise of an economic boost to one of America\u2019s poorest corners. BOCA CHICA, Texas \u2014 The text arrived late at night: For your own safety, leave home by morning, it read. Nancy and James Crawford, no longer surprised but still unsettled, raced away in their S.U.V. after sunrise, occasionally twisting their necks to catch a glimpse of the space rocket towering behind them.",
        "author": "By Edgar Sandoval and Richard Webner"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Serene Shore Resort, Except for the SpaceX \u2018Ball of Fire\u2019 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8383",
        "date": "2021-05-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/us/space-x-boca-chica-texas.html",
        "text": "For years, those in a rural Texas village cherished living among nature and wildlife. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has brought new fears and the promise of an economic boost to one of America\u2019s poorest corners. For years, those in a rural Texas village cherished living among nature and wildlife. Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has brought new fears and the promise of an economic boost to one of America\u2019s poorest corners. BOCA CHICA, Texas \u2014 The text arrived late at night: For your own safety, leave home by morning, it read. Nancy and James Crawford, no longer surprised but still unsettled, raced away in their S.U.V. after sunrise, occasionally twisting their necks to catch a glimpse of the space rocket towering behind them.",
        "author": "By Edgar Sandoval and Richard Webner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Billionaire Seeks Space Friends for a Moon Shot (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8384",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/world/asia/japan-spacex-moon.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, who previously sought a new girlfriend for the trip, issued a call for eight people to join him on a SpaceX journey around the moon. Yusaku Maezawa, who previously sought a new girlfriend for the trip, issued a call for eight people to join him on a SpaceX journey around the moon. Since announcing his intentions to travel to the moon in 2023, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has fluctuated in his choice of desired companions.",
        "author": "By Tiffany May"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Billionaire Seeks Space Friends for a Moon Shot (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8385",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/world/asia/japan-spacex-moon.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, who previously sought a new girlfriend for the trip, issued a call for eight people to join him on a SpaceX journey around the moon. Yusaku Maezawa, who previously sought a new girlfriend for the trip, issued a call for eight people to join him on a SpaceX journey around the moon. Since announcing his intentions to travel to the moon in 2023, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has fluctuated in his choice of desired companions.",
        "author": "By Tiffany May"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Billionaire Seeks Space Friends for a Moon Shot (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8386",
        "date": "2021-03-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/world/asia/japan-spacex-moon.html",
        "text": "Yusaku Maezawa, who previously sought a new girlfriend for the trip, issued a call for eight people to join him on a SpaceX journey around the moon. Yusaku Maezawa, who previously sought a new girlfriend for the trip, issued a call for eight people to join him on a SpaceX journey around the moon. Since announcing his intentions to travel to the moon in 2023, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has fluctuated in his choice of desired companions.",
        "author": "By Tiffany May"
    },
    {
        "title": "Japanese Tycoon Plans to Fly With SpaceX, but His Latest Projects Have Failed to Launch (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8387",
        "date": "2019-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/japanese-billionaires-e-commerce-site-hits-turbulence-11549112401?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=65",
        "text": "Zozo Inc.\n\n\n made it to the top of Japan\u2019s fashion e-commerce world by offering leading brands on its Zozotown site that previously were available only in elite department stores. But the chief executive, who became globally known when he paid $110.5 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting of a black skull in 2017, acknowledged that his attempts to develop a Zozo house brand of clothing haven\u2019t taken off. \n\n\n\n\nThe label is expected to lose more than $100 million in the year ending in March.\n\n\n\u201cIt was an expensive learning experience,\u201d Mr. Maezawa told analysts Thursday . \u201cWe launched new steps one after another, and they failed to produce significant effects.\u201d \nHe said one of his most innovative ideas\u2014offering customers a free \u201cZozosuit\u201d to measure their bodies\u2014hadn\u2019t done much to boost sales. \nThe stretchy, form-fitting body suit covered in dots was supposed to take precise measurements at dozens of points so customers could order the correct size of Zozo\u2019s house-brand clothing. Many customers complained that using the suit didn\u2019t result in a particularly good fit and some call it a publicity stunt. The cost of making and delivering the Zozosuits free of charge weighed on Zozo\u2019s profits. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nYusaku Maezawa photographed at home in Tokyo in 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Irwin Wong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nMr. Maezawa said in October he planned to phase out the Zozosuit in Japan, although it will still be offered to customers in Zozo\u2019s relatively small overseas business.\nThe company said profit fell 16% in the nine months through December from the same period a year earlier, and downgraded its profit forecast for the full fiscal year ending in March. Profit for the year is now projected at about $160 million, below the previous year\u2019s level for the first time since Zozo shares went public in 2007.\nThe company\u2019s shares are trading at less than half their peak level last year.\nThe 43-year-old Mr. Maezawa, a former punk-rock drummer, founded Zozotown 20 years ago. It originally sold imported records and CDs and shifted into fashion. Mr. Maezawa amassed his fortune through the company, and has drawn publicity with his flashy personal life, dating famous actresses and offering provocative comments on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter.\n\nHis biggest publicity stunt came last September, when he appeared in the U.S. alongside Mr. Musk, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.\n\n\n founder, and said he would travel on Mr. Musk\u2019s vehicle on a journey around the moon in 2023. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThen on Jan. 5, Mr. Maezawa offered on Twitter to personally give away one million yen, or about $9,000, to 100 followers who shared the tweet, saying he wanted to thank customers for successful New Year\u2019s sales. That tweet was shared more than 5 million times and became the world\u2019s most retweeted post ever, according to a Twitter spokeswoman.\nLate last year, Zozo started a membership program that would entitle members to get 10% off all purchases. Brands rebelled, fearing their merchandise would be tainted with a discount image.\n\u201cConstant discounts could damage the value of our brand,\u201d said a spokesman at one of Japan\u2019s biggest apparel makers, Onward Holdings Co. The company stopped sales of all of its clothing brands on Zozotown immediately after the membership discount service was announced.\nMr. Maezawa said 42 of the 1,255 shops selling their clothes on Zozotown pulled out because of the service. He said the company was looking at ways to improve and bring back the brands that left.\nJefferies Financial Group Inc. analyst Hiroko Sato said the membership program was badly timed because many brands were already looking to enhance their own e-commerce sites rather than working through middlemen such as Zozo. \nIn November, U.S. outdoor clothing company Patagonia left all online shopping malls in Japan, including Zozotown, as part of the company\u2019s world-wide strategy to focus on its own online channel, a company spokesman said. \nMeanwhile, Amazon is trying to lure more high-fashion customers in Japan, its fourth-largest market after the U.S., Germany and the U.K. Amazon has introduced a \u201cPrime Wardrobe\u201d service that allows customers to order multiple sizes at once, try them on at home and keep the items that fit best\u2014addressing the same concern over fit that Mr. Maezawa tried to tackle with his Zozosuit.\n\u201cSo far, Zozo has the advantage in Japan over Amazon because of its expertise in fashion and the high usability of its website and app,\u201d said Rakuten Securities analyst Rika Matsumura. \u201cHowever, Amazon could become a big threat to Zozo if Amazon comes up with technology that allows customers to buy clothes that fit perfectly without measuring their height and weight.\u201d\nAn Amazon spokeswoman said the company was doing its best \u201cto remove any barriers that will prevent customers from purchasing fashion items online.\u201d\nWrite to Megumi Fujikawa at megumi.fujikawa@wsj.com Yusaku Maezawa, who bought the first ticket to fly around the moon on Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX vehicle, is losing momentum on Earth. After years of rapid growth for his fashion e-commerce site, some big brands are backing away and competition from the likes of Amazon.com is rising. ",
        "author": "Megumi Fujikawa"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Proposes Taking Tourists Around the Moon (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8388",
        "date": "2017-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-proposes-a-private-manned-mission-to-orbit-moon-1488238007?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=28",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX has proposed taking tourists around the moon in as soon as two years, touting such missions as the evolution of public-private partnerships favored by the Trump administration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "FCC Delays Decision on Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Broadband Subsidies (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8389",
        "date": "2020-06-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fcc-delays-decision-on-elon-musks-spacex-and-broadband-subsidies-11591742638?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=53",
        "text": "The FCC\u2019s final rules for distributing the funds, adopted Tuesday in an online video meeting, would dole out the dollars over a decade based on the results of an auction this October. Companies will make offers to build out broadband in rural parts of the country that don\u2019t have high-speed internet service, and the FCC will select the lowest bidders meeting its criteria in various areas.\n\n\n\n\nThe auction rules are designed to favor the fastest technology available in each area. For example, if a company meets the FCC\u2019s definition for a \u201clow-latency\u201d network, it could have a leg up on competitors that don\u2019t qualify for that label. Latency refers to the lag time it takes signals to travel through a network.\n\n\nSpaceX says its technology should be considered \u201clow-latency,\u201d though competitors disagree. The FCC decided Tuesday to allow low-Earth-orbit satellite companies to apply for the label, FCC Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ajit Pai\n\n\n\n told reporters after meeting in which the agency adopted final rules for distributing the funds.\nThat wasn\u2019t part of the agency\u2019s initial plan, which would have barred low-Earth-orbiting technologies from qualifying for preferred \u201clow-latency\u201d status. The change was made after a May 29 phone call between SpaceX and FCC staff, during which the firm argued its technology \u201ceasily clears\u201d the agency\u2019s definition for low-latency, according to a disclosure the company filed with the FCC.\nMr. Pai said SpaceX\u2019s application will be evaluated by FCC staff along with applications from other potential bidders in the auction. \u201cThe bottom line is of course we want to make sure that the participants in the auction, if successful, would in fact be able to deliver,\u201d he said.\nSpaceX didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment.\nEarlier this year, FCC officials opened the door to SpaceX qualifying as a preferred bidder after the company pressed FCC staff in letters and a private meeting.\n\u201cFar from seeking any special treatment, SpaceX has asked only that it have the same opportunity to participate in the auction and be subject to the same auction procedures as all other potential bidders, consistent with their network capabilities,\u201d the company said in an April 10 letter to the FCC.\nTuesday\u2019s news didn\u2019t appear all good for SpaceX. FCC Commissioners\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Geoffrey Starks\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael O\u2019Rielly\n\n\n\n both said they felt the auction rules could have been friendlier to low-earth-orbit satellite companies.\nMr. Starks during the public meeting criticized the auction rules for making \u201cpredictive judgments about the merits of short-form applications from low-Earth-orbit satellite operators.\u201d Mr. O\u2019Rielly told reporters after the meeting: \u201cI would have preferred a more technology-neutral approach.\u201d\nNeither commissioner described the exact language that raised their concern. As of late afternoon Tuesday, the FCC had voted to approve the final rules but hadn\u2019t released the document describing them in detail.\nWrite to Ryan Tracy at ryan.tracy@wsj.com The Federal Communications Commission delayed a final decision on whether Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX will be able to qualify as a preferred bidder when the agency prepares to distribute up to $16 billion in funding to expand broadband service in rural areas. ",
        "author": "Ryan Tracy"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Returns to Earth (WSJ: Clip from Asia Today) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8390",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-dragon-cargo-spacecraft-returns-to-earth/D5CBB8D0-87A0-46D0-A15D-9DF06C91BCA5.html?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=25",
        "text": " The SpaceX Dragon capsule made a safe return to Earth on March 19 after leaving the International Space Station, bringing back with it a full load of space samples and other cargo. Photo: AP ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Dragon Cargo Spacecraft Returns to Earth (WSJ: Clip from Asia Today) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8391",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-dragon-cargo-spacecraft-returns-to-earth/D5CBB8D0-87A0-46D0-A15D-9DF06C91BCA5.html?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=97",
        "text": " The SpaceX Dragon capsule made a safe return to Earth on March 19 after leaving the International Space Station, bringing back with it a full load of space samples and other cargo. Photo: AP ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Men Are Looking to Space for Style Tips (WSJ: Fashion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8392",
        "date": "2018-09-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-men-are-looking-to-space-for-style-tips-1536694281?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=64",
        "text": "The promise of space travel first resonated through fashion in the 1960s and \u201970s with designers like Andr\u00e9 Courr\u00e8ges and Pierre Cardin serving up kooky Jetsons-style looks. But according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patricia Mears,\n\n\n\n deputy director of the Museum at FIT and co-author of \u201cExpedition: Fashion from the Extreme,\u201d what we\u2019re seeing now is more about time traveling. \u201cThere are so many seismic shifts going on in society today,\u201d said Ms. Mears. \u201cOne of the solutions is to look back in time. The other is to look forward.\u201d\n\n\nREAD MORE: THE OFF DUTY FALL 5050 Elements of Style: Your Fall Guide\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHumberto Leon, co-creative director of Kenzo, sees one of those shifts in the \u201chuman rights that are being challenged day to day,\u201d which he said helped make \u201cthe idea of escaping to a new planet more alluring than ever before\u201d when he was designing the fall collection. Kenzo\u2019s take on space falls in the backward-looking camp, with its nostalgic spaceman graphics referencing the sci-fi films of Mr. Leon\u2019s youth, as well as the days when Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon.\n\n\nAbdulwaheed Abasi, co-designer of New York label Abasi Rosborough, grew up dreaming of the promise of space travel, too. But these days the former missile technician, who makes modern suiting and futurist sportswear, looks ahead at the consequences that can come with those advancements. \u201cThe advent of technology is a gift. It could create a utopia, it could create a dystopia,\u201d he said. Pieces from his brand\u2019s fall collection include hoodies and T-shirts with an infrared graphic of an ominous rocket flying over a barren terrain. \nRegardless of how you view space and the technology that will take us there, wearing clothes inspired by the final frontier is fairly straightforward. Stylist Dominick Barcelona recommends that you focus on one statement piece, like a top with rocket ship graphics or an astronaut-inspired quilted coat. \u201cWork around that item, and tone down everything else,\u201d he said, \u201cto let the piece speak for itself.\u201d If you overdo it, your style won\u2019t go to infinity, let alone beyond.\n\n\n\n\nSTAR SCORES // Space-Inspired Pieces for the Most Cosmopolitan Cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom left: Hoodie, $325, kenzo.com; Heron Preston Jacket, $1,895, mrporter.com; Raf Simons T-shirt, $471, matchesfashion.com\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Joshua Scott for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas\n \n\n\n\n\n\nMore in Style & Fashion\n\n\n\n\nYes, What You Wear on Social Media Matters. How to Master It.\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nHow to Wear a Shearling Coat Like a Leading Man\nMarch 2, 2022 \n\n\nWhy Asics and Salomon Sneakers Are Fashion\u2019s Hottest Shoes\nFebruary 23, 2022 \n\n\nHow to Wear a Tux\u2014And 4 Other Men\u2019s Classics\u2014in 2022\nFebruary 19, 2022 \n\n\nHow to Revamp Your Wardrobe Without Buying Anything \u2018New\u2019\nFebruary 18, 2022 SpaceX and Virgin Galactic may be dominating the business pages, but space is just as influential in men\u2019s fashion this fall. ",
        "author": "Wilbert L. Cooper"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Uncontested 3-Pointers (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8393",
        "date": "2018-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-uncontested-3-pointers-1519595032?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=77",
        "text": "Mr. Curry often takes shots from several feet behind the 3-point line. Defenders, figuring no one would be stupid enough to shoot from that far away, leave him open. And he makes baskets with surprising accuracy. At one point in 2016, he made 35 out of 52 shots from between 28 and 50 feet. Uncontested indeed.\nElon Musk\u2019s business strategy isn\u2019t so different: Go far enough into the future that there are no other competitors. Mr. Musk\u2019s first success was X.com, an email payment company. It merged with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\u2019s\n\n\n\n Confinity to form\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal\n\n\n \u2014and avoid competition. They had the market to themselves for a long time because fraud, especially from Eastern Europe, was so rampant on early internet payment platforms. They solved the fraud problem and enjoyed an uncontested market, eventually selling for $1.5 billion to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n eBay.\n\n\n\nThen Mr. Musk headed further into the future. He took the nine-figure payout from PayPal and pushed ahead with SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City. Literally his last $20 million went to Tesla in 2008. \u201cI was tapped out. I had to borrow money for rent after that,\u201d he later recalled. Private space launches, electric cars and rooftop-solar financing were all huge Muskian pushes into the future, where no one else dared play. Today, Tesla is worth around $60 billion. SpaceX raised money last summer at a $21 billion valuation. Mr. Musk is no longer borrowing to pay his rent. \nQuite impressive, even though I find all the handouts offensive. When I see someone driving a Tesla I greet him with, \u201cYou\u2019re welcome.\u201d When he inevitably asks for what, I roll out the long list of subsidies: a $465 million Energy Department loan in 2009, a $7,500-a-car income-tax credit from the feds, $1.3 billion in incentives from Nevada for a factory, and more. Removing competition by racing to the future is one thing. Seeking special treatment to boost your advantage is cheating.\nMr. Musk still pushes the boundaries. Some ideas will work and some will go up in flames, maybe literally. Work is progressing on the sonic-speed Hyperloop transportation system. The Boring Co., which Mr. Musk founded in 2016 to undertake the project, proposes to dig tunnels under cities fast\u2014and to reduce costs by a factor of 10. For some reason, the Boring Company recently presold 20,000 flamethrowers at $500 each, complimentary fire extinguisher included. The entrepreneur is even funding a \u201cneural lace,\u201d a still theoretical brain-to-computer interface. Is a holodeck next? All these ideas are far-fetched, but they\u2019re mostly uncontested.\nIn his 2014 book, \u201cZero to One,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Thiel\n\n\n\n badmouths competition. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tolstoy\n\n\n\n opens\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anna Karenina\n\n\n\n by observing: \u2018All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\u2019 Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.\u201d Google founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n agrees. \u201cIf you\u2019re not doing some things that are crazy, then you\u2019re doing the wrong things.\u201d I agree, as long as there are market forces to allow competition from anyone who dares.\nThe future is almost always uncomfortable for everyone except the leading risk taker. What\u2019s the catch? Even an innovator has to be right in betting that there\u2019s a market for his innovations. Sometimes there is no competition because the risk takers are dead wrong. But Mr. Musk has been right, as have Messrs. Thiel and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Page.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Page\n\n\n\n reportedly once told a venture capitalist, \u201cYou know, if I were to get hit by a bus today, I should leave all of it to Elon Musk.\u201d He later explained to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Rose\n\n\n\n he liked Mr. Musk\u2019s idea of going to Mars \u201cto back up humanity.\u201d Good luck with that. But then again, I would love to see them try. Like Mr. Curry\u2019s 3s, it will certainly be uncontested. What does the Tesla and SpaceX founder have in common with Stephen Curry? ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Uncontested 3-Pointers (WSJ: Inside View) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8394",
        "date": "2018-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-uncontested-3-pointers-1519595032?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=79",
        "text": "Mr. Curry often takes shots from several feet behind the 3-point line. Defenders, figuring no one would be stupid enough to shoot from that far away, leave him open. And he makes baskets with surprising accuracy. At one point in 2016, he made 35 out of 52 shots from between 28 and 50 feet. Uncontested indeed.\n\n\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s business strategy isn\u2019t so different: Go far enough into the future that there are no other competitors. Mr. Musk\u2019s first success was X.com, an email payment company. It merged with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel\u2019s\n\n\n\n Confinity to form\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal\n\n\n \u2014and avoid competition. They had the market to themselves for a long time because fraud, especially from Eastern Europe, was so rampant on early internet payment platforms. They solved the fraud problem and enjoyed an uncontested market, eventually selling for $1.5 billion to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n eBay.\n\n\n\nThen Mr. Musk headed further into the future. He took the nine-figure payout from PayPal and pushed ahead with SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City. Literally his last $20 million went to Tesla in 2008. \u201cI was tapped out. I had to borrow money for rent after that,\u201d he later recalled. Private space launches, electric cars and rooftop-solar financing were all huge Muskian pushes into the future, where no one else dared play. Today, Tesla is worth around $60 billion. SpaceX raised money last summer at a $21 billion valuation. Mr. Musk is no longer borrowing to pay his rent. \nQuite impressive, even though I find all the handouts offensive. When I see someone driving a Tesla I greet him with, \u201cYou\u2019re welcome.\u201d When he inevitably asks for what, I roll out the long list of subsidies: a $465 million Energy Department loan in 2009, a $7,500-a-car income-tax credit from the feds, $1.3 billion in incentives from Nevada for a factory, and more. Removing competition by racing to the future is one thing. Seeking special treatment to boost your advantage is cheating.\nMr. Musk still pushes the boundaries. Some ideas will work and some will go up in flames, maybe literally. Work is progressing on the sonic-speed Hyperloop transportation system. The Boring Co., which Mr. Musk founded in 2016 to undertake the project, proposes to dig tunnels under cities fast\u2014and to reduce costs by a factor of 10. For some reason, the Boring Company recently presold 20,000 flamethrowers at $500 each, complimentary fire extinguisher included. The entrepreneur is even funding a \u201cneural lace,\u201d a still theoretical brain-to-computer interface. Is a holodeck next? All these ideas are far-fetched, but they\u2019re mostly uncontested.\nIn his 2014 book, \u201cZero to One,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Thiel\n\n\n\n badmouths competition. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tolstoy\n\n\n\n opens\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anna Karenina\n\n\n\n by observing: \u2018All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\u2019 Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.\u201d Google founder\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Larry Page\n\n\n\n agrees. \u201cIf you\u2019re not doing some things that are crazy, then you\u2019re doing the wrong things.\u201d I agree, as long as there are market forces to allow competition from anyone who dares.\nThe future is almost always uncomfortable for everyone except the leading risk taker. What\u2019s the catch? Even an innovator has to be right in betting that there\u2019s a market for his innovations. Sometimes there is no competition because the risk takers are dead wrong. But Mr. Musk has been right, as have Messrs. Thiel and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Page.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Page\n\n\n\n reportedly once told a venture capitalist, \u201cYou know, if I were to get hit by a bus today, I should leave all of it to Elon Musk.\u201d He later explained to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Rose\n\n\n\n he liked Mr. Musk\u2019s idea of going to Mars \u201cto back up humanity.\u201d Good luck with that. But then again, I would love to see them try. Like Mr. Curry\u2019s 3s, it will certainly be uncontested. What does the Tesla and SpaceX founder have in common with Stephen Curry? ",
        "author": "Andy Kessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches First Loan (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8395",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-first-loan-1542748292?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=84",
        "text": "Based in Hawthorne, Calif., SpaceX makes money by launching commercial and government satellites but has larger ambitions to send astronauts into orbit and eventually to carry humans to Mars. It has previously relied on private-equity funding that valued the company at more than $20 billion.\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX marketed its loan only to a select group of investors.\n\n\nSome investors who were offered the loan expressed misgivings about the company\u2019s record of burning through cash and its experience with high-profile accidents, which have previously led to dips in revenue. Other concerns include the company\u2019s large investment plans and its connection to Mr. Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, whose volatile behavior has led to turmoil at the electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n where he also is chief executive.\nStill, the loan intrigued some, based in part on SpaceX\u2019s lofty equity valuation, which implies its assets are worth more than its debt. SpaceX also holds a prominent position in a business with high barriers to entry.\nDoug Wooden, a senior analyst at DDJ Capital Management, said DDJ had been interested in buying the loan based on the value of SpaceX\u2019s core business. The firm passed on the debt only after it was shrunk to $250 million, because that promised to make it harder to trade in the secondary market, he said.\n\n\nMore Elon Musk\u2019s Right-Hand Woman Is Steadying Force at SpaceX (Sept. 30) Jeff Bezos\u2019 Space Startup to Supply Engines for Boeing-Lockheed Rocket Venture (Sept. 27) One Small Step for Yusaku Maezawa, One Giant Leap for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (Sept. 18) \n\n\nThe environment for issuing new bonds and loans has deteriorated in recent weeks, making SpaceX\u2019s debt sale more difficult. Demand for loans has generally outpaced other fixed-income assets because their variable-rate coupons rise as the Federal Reserve lifts benchmark interest rates. Even so, the average price of loans in the S&P/LSTA Leveraged Loan Index has dropped by 0.3 percentage point over the past week to 97.7 cents on the dollar as of Monday, according to LCD, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, indicating investors see greater risk in the asset class.\nThe SpaceX loan was issued late Monday at 99 cents on the dollar with a coupon of 4.25 percentage points above the benchmark London interbank offered rate. That was at the high end of original guidance.\nIn a gesture to investors in the late stages of the debt sale, SpaceX tweaked certain terms, generally making it likelier that the company will be on solid financial footing before it does things in the future like issue more debt or make certain investments. \nDespite shrinking the size of the loan, Bank of America received more than $750 million in orders from investors for the debt, according to a person familiar with the situation\u2014enough to sell the loan at its original size. SpaceX decided to go with the smaller loan because it is comfortable with its cash-generating ability, the person said.",
        "author": "Sam Goldfarb and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches First Loan (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8396",
        "date": "2018-11-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-launches-first-loan-1542748292?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=66",
        "text": "Based in Hawthorne, Calif., SpaceX makes money by launching commercial and government satellites but has larger ambitions to send astronauts into orbit and eventually to carry humans to Mars. It has previously relied on private-equity funding that valued the company at more than $20 billion.\nSpaceX marketed its loan only to a select group of investors.\n\n\nSome investors who were offered the loan expressed misgivings about the company\u2019s record of burning through cash and its experience with high-profile accidents, which have previously led to dips in revenue. Other concerns include the company\u2019s large investment plans and its connection to Mr. Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, whose volatile behavior has led to turmoil at the electric-car maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n where he also is chief executive.\nStill, the loan intrigued some, based in part on SpaceX\u2019s lofty equity valuation, which implies its assets are worth more than its debt. SpaceX also holds a prominent position in a business with high barriers to entry.\nDoug Wooden, a senior analyst at DDJ Capital Management, said DDJ had been interested in buying the loan based on the value of SpaceX\u2019s core business. The firm passed on the debt only after it was shrunk to $250 million, because that promised to make it harder to trade in the secondary market, he said.\n\n\nMore Elon Musk\u2019s Right-Hand Woman Is Steadying Force at SpaceX (Sept. 30) Jeff Bezos\u2019 Space Startup to Supply Engines for Boeing-Lockheed Rocket Venture (Sept. 27) One Small Step for Yusaku Maezawa, One Giant Leap for Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX (Sept. 18) \n\n\nThe environment for issuing new bonds and loans has deteriorated in recent weeks, making SpaceX\u2019s debt sale more difficult. Demand for loans has generally outpaced other fixed-income assets because their variable-rate coupons rise as the Federal Reserve lifts benchmark interest rates. Even so, the average price of loans in the S&P/LSTA Leveraged Loan Index has dropped by 0.3 percentage point over the past week to 97.7 cents on the dollar as of Monday, according to LCD, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence, indicating investors see greater risk in the asset class.\nThe SpaceX loan was issued late Monday at 99 cents on the dollar with a coupon of 4.25 percentage points above the benchmark London interbank offered rate. That was at the high end of original guidance.\nIn a gesture to investors in the late stages of the debt sale, SpaceX tweaked certain terms, generally making it likelier that the company will be on solid financial footing before it does things in the future like issue more debt or make certain investments. \nDespite shrinking the size of the loan, Bank of America received more than $750 million in orders from investors for the debt, according to a person familiar with the situation\u2014enough to sell the loan at its original size. SpaceX decided to go with the smaller loan because it is comfortable with its cash-generating ability, the person said.",
        "author": "Sam Goldfarb and Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Astronaut Launch Postponed Because of Poor Weather (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8397",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000007159002/spacex-launch-live-may-27.html",
        "text": "Weather conditions did not clear up in time for the SpaceX mission planned for Wednesday. The next opportunity to launch is Saturday afternoon. Weather conditions did not clear up in time for the SpaceX mission planned for Wednesday. The next opportunity to launch is Saturday afternoon. Weather conditions did not clear up in time for the SpaceX mission planned for Wednesday. The next opportunity to launch is Saturday afternoon.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8398",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005723124/watch-the-spacex-falcon-heavy-launch.html",
        "text": "The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk\u2019s dream of sending people to Mars. The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk\u2019s dream of sending people to Mars. The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk\u2019s dream of sending people to Mars.",
        "author": "By Spacex, Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8399",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005723124/watch-the-spacex-falcon-heavy-launch.html",
        "text": "The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk\u2019s dream of sending people to Mars. The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk\u2019s dream of sending people to Mars. The success of this launch gives SpaceX momentum to begin developing even larger rockets, which could help fulfill Elon Musk\u2019s dream of sending people to Mars.",
        "author": "By Spacex, Via Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lands Starship Rocket for the First Time (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8400",
        "date": "2021-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007635284/space-x-launch-explode.html",
        "text": "SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Starship rocket prototype this month, an important milestone for the company\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, and his hope to one day send humans to Mars and beyond. SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Starship rocket prototype this month, an important milestone for the company\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, and his hope to one day send humans to Mars and beyond. SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Starship rocket prototype this month, an important milestone for the company\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, and his hope to one day send humans to Mars and beyond.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Lands Starship Rocket for the First Time (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8401",
        "date": "2021-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007635284/space-x-launch-explode.html",
        "text": "SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Starship rocket prototype this month, an important milestone for the company\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, and his hope to one day send humans to Mars and beyond. SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Starship rocket prototype this month, an important milestone for the company\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, and his hope to one day send humans to Mars and beyond. SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Starship rocket prototype this month, an important milestone for the company\u2019s founder, Elon Musk, and his hope to one day send humans to Mars and beyond.",
        "author": "By The Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Latest Test Launch for Mars Explodes (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8402",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/what-in-the-world/100000007682223/spacex-latest-test-launch-for-mars-explodes.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched another Starship prototype test on Tuesday for a mission to Mars. However, the mission was unsuccessful due to a landing sequence failure. SpaceX launched another Starship prototype test on Tuesday for a mission to Mars. However, the mission was unsuccessful due to a landing sequence failure. SpaceX launched another Starship prototype test on Tuesday for a mission to Mars. However, the mission was unsuccessful due to a landing sequence failure.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Latest Test Launch for Mars Explodes (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8403",
        "date": "2021-03-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/what-in-the-world/100000007682223/spacex-latest-test-launch-for-mars-explodes.html",
        "text": "SpaceX launched another Starship prototype test on Tuesday for a mission to Mars. However, the mission was unsuccessful due to a landing sequence failure. SpaceX launched another Starship prototype test on Tuesday for a mission to Mars. However, the mission was unsuccessful due to a landing sequence failure. SpaceX launched another Starship prototype test on Tuesday for a mission to Mars. However, the mission was unsuccessful due to a landing sequence failure.",
        "author": "By Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Starship for the First Time (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8404",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacex-successfully-lands-starship-for-the-first-time/C3F8EF47-27BE-4D43-B84E-946883717110?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=30",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully landed its Starship test vehicle on the fifth attempt, after some previous efforts ended with crashes. The ship is designed to eventually take people to the moon and Mars. Photo: Gene Blevins/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Starship for the First Time (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8405",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacex-successfully-lands-starship-for-the-first-time/C3F8EF47-27BE-4D43-B84E-946883717110?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=31",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX successfully landed its Starship test vehicle on the fifth attempt, after some previous efforts ended with crashes. The ship is designed to eventually take people to the moon and Mars. Photo: Gene Blevins/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Prototype Landed Without Crashing. Then It Exploded. (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8406",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacexs-starship-prototype-landed-without-crashing-then-it-exploded/5A02077F-B933-40EC-8642-6AD9C216A55B?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=8",
        "text": " After two fiery test flights, SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototype successfully touched down for the first time. But minutes later, it exploded with so much force it was tossed into the air. Photo: SpaceX via AP ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX\u2019s Starship Prototype Landed Without Crashing. Then It Exploded. (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8407",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/spacexs-starship-prototype-landed-without-crashing-then-it-exploded/5A02077F-B933-40EC-8642-6AD9C216A55B?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=36",
        "text": " After two fiery test flights, SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototype successfully touched down for the first time. But minutes later, it exploded with so much force it was tossed into the air. Photo: SpaceX via AP ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Launches Inspiration4 With Four Civilians (WSJ: NA SOT) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8408",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/elon-musks-spacex-launches-inspiration4-with-four-civilians/87975E50-3291-488E-BBC3-B59D221B4CB3.html?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=22",
        "text": " SpaceX launched four civilians into orbit Wednesday, as Elon Musk looks to cement the company\u2019s position as a leading space enterprise. The Inspiration4 mission plans to place the crew in orbit for about three days and then return them to Earth. Photo: Thom Baur/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year in Space Travel (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8409",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-year-in-space-travel-11608594372?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=40",
        "text": " SpaceX keeps making remarkable rocket launches look routine. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Venture Capitalist Steps Back From Tesla Amid Misconduct Inquiry (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8410",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-spacex-director-steve-jurvetson-on-leave-amid-misconduct-probe-1510609169?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=109",
        "text": "The firm didn\u2019t specify the nature of those allegations.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cDFJ\u2019s culture has been, and will continue to be, built on the values of respect and integrity in all of our interactions,\u201d DFJ spokeswoman Carol Wentworth said in an email Monday.\n\n\nIn a statement, Mr. Jurvetson said, \u201cI am leaving DFJ to focus on personal matters, including taking legal action against those whose false statements have defamed me.\u201d\nMr. Jurvetson\u2019s leave from the boards of Tesla and SpaceX, the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n -led companies, is in place \u201cpending resolution of these allegations,\u201d said John Taylor, a SpaceX spokesman, via email. \nA longtime friend and confidant of Mr. Musk, Mr. Jurvetson was an early investor in Tesla through DFJ and joined the company\u2019s board in 2009, ahead of the auto maker\u2019s 2010 initial public offering. His social media accounts have posted several photos of Tesla cars and events with Mr. Musk, including the entrepreneur\u2019s birthday party. In 2012, Mr. Jurvetson received Tesla\u2019s first Model S sedan.\nIn addition to those boards, Mr. Jurvetson most recently has held board roles with Planet, D-Wave, Memphis Meats, Mythic, and Synthetic Genomics, according to the DFJ website. Those firms didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.\nLast year, Mr. Jurvetson was named a presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama.\n\n\n\n \nNews of his departure from DFJ, based in Menlo Park, Calif., was reported earlier by Recode.\n\u2014Tim Higgins contributed reporting.\nWrite to Cat Zakrzewski at cat.zakrzewski@wsj.com Prominent venture investor Steve Jurvetson is exiting DFJ, the company he co-founded, and stepping back from the boards of Tesla and SpaceX as part of a probe by his firm into alleged misconduct. ",
        "author": "Cat Zakrzewski"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Lays Out Worst-Case Scenario for AI Threat (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8411",
        "date": "2017-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-warns-nations-governors-of-looming-ai-threat-calls-for-regulations-1500154345?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=83",
        "text": "Related Google Gives Artificial Intelligence More Power in Its Products (May 17) Artificial Intelligence Still Needs a Human Touch (March 12) Mulling the Economic Effect of Artificial Intelligence (Jan. 18) \n\n\nMr. Musk has been vocal about his concerns about AI and helped create OpenAI, a nonprofit research group that aims for the safe development of the technology. He suggested to the governors that a regulatory agency needs to be formed to begin gaining insight into fast-moving AI development, followed by putting regulations into place.\n\u201cRight now the government doesn\u2019t even have insight,\u201d he said. \u201cOnce there is awareness people will be extremely afraid, as they should be.\u201d\n\n\nProponents of AI say such concerns are premature, given the current state of the technology. Arizona Gov.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Ducey,\n\n\n\n a Republican who said that he has spent his own career trying to reduce government regulations, questioned Mr. Musk over the suggestion of creating new rules, saying that he was unsure what policy makers could do beyond pushing for a slowdown in development. \u201cI was surprised by your suggestion to bring regulations before we know what we are dealing with,\u201d Mr. Ducey said.\n\u201cFor sure the companies doing AI\u2014most of them, not mine\u2014will squawk and say this is really going to stop innovation,\u201d Mr. Musk said. But he said he doubted that such a move would cause companies to leave the U.S.\nDuring his talk, Mr. Musk also was asked about the pressures that come from the valuation of Tesla, whose stock has risen more than 50% this year ahead of the introduction of a new sedan. The market capitalization has made Tesla bigger than\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n and, at times, larger than\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\nThose auto makers, unlike Tesla, are profitable and sell many more vehicles than the niche luxury brand.\nMr. Musk reiterated that shares of Tesla are trading at a price \u201chigher than we have any right to deserve\u201d and that the high price reflects optimism over the company\u2019s future.\n\u201cThose expectations sometimes get out of control,\u201d he said. But Mr. Musk said he is committed to making Tesla a success. Besides selling shares to pay for taxes, Mr. Musk said he is avoiding selling company shares. \u201cI\u2019m going down with the ship,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com Artificial intelligence will threaten all human jobs and could even spark a war, Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk told the National Governors Association, as he called for the creation of a regulatory body to guide development of the powerful technology. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Lays Out Worst-Case Scenario for AI Threat (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8412",
        "date": "2017-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-warns-nations-governors-of-looming-ai-threat-calls-for-regulations-1500154345?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=118",
        "text": "Related Google Gives Artificial Intelligence More Power in Its Products (May 17) Artificial Intelligence Still Needs a Human Touch (March 12) Mulling the Economic Effect of Artificial Intelligence (Jan. 18) \n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Musk has been vocal about his concerns about AI and helped create OpenAI, a nonprofit research group that aims for the safe development of the technology. He suggested to the governors that a regulatory agency needs to be formed to begin gaining insight into fast-moving AI development, followed by putting regulations into place.\n\u201cRight now the government doesn\u2019t even have insight,\u201d he said. \u201cOnce there is awareness people will be extremely afraid, as they should be.\u201d\n\n\nProponents of AI say such concerns are premature, given the current state of the technology. Arizona Gov.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Ducey,\n\n\n\n a Republican who said that he has spent his own career trying to reduce government regulations, questioned Mr. Musk over the suggestion of creating new rules, saying that he was unsure what policy makers could do beyond pushing for a slowdown in development. \u201cI was surprised by your suggestion to bring regulations before we know what we are dealing with,\u201d Mr. Ducey said.\n\u201cFor sure the companies doing AI\u2014most of them, not mine\u2014will squawk and say this is really going to stop innovation,\u201d Mr. Musk said. But he said he doubted that such a move would cause companies to leave the U.S.\nDuring his talk, Mr. Musk also was asked about the pressures that come from the valuation of Tesla, whose stock has risen more than 50% this year ahead of the introduction of a new sedan. The market capitalization has made Tesla bigger than\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Ford Motor Co.\n\n\n and, at times, larger than\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors Co.\n\nThose auto makers, unlike Tesla, are profitable and sell many more vehicles than the niche luxury brand.\nMr. Musk reiterated that shares of Tesla are trading at a price \u201chigher than we have any right to deserve\u201d and that the high price reflects optimism over the company\u2019s future.\n\u201cThose expectations sometimes get out of control,\u201d he said. But Mr. Musk said he is committed to making Tesla a success. Besides selling shares to pay for taxes, Mr. Musk said he is avoiding selling company shares. \u201cI\u2019m going down with the ship,\u201d he said.\nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com Artificial intelligence will threaten all human jobs and could even spark a war, Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk told the National Governors Association, as he called for the creation of a regulatory body to guide development of the powerful technology. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Congressional Investigators Warn of SpaceX Rocket Defects (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8413",
        "date": "2017-02-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/congressional-investigators-warn-of-spacex-rocket-defects-1486067874?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=89",
        "text": "Related SpaceX Resumes Rocket Launches by Lofting Cluster of Iridium Satellites (Jan. 16) Exclusive Peek at SpaceX Data Shows Loss in 2015, Heavy Expectations for Nascent Internet Service (Jan. 13) SpaceX Launches Set to Resume in January (Jan. 3) \n\n\nThe crack-prone parts are considered a potentially major threat to rocket safety, the industry officials said, and may require redesign of what are commonly called the Falcon 9\u2019s turbopumps. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, they said, has warned SpaceX that such cracks pose an unacceptable risk for manned flights.\nA SpaceX spokesman said \u201cwe have qualified our engines to be robust\u201d to such cracks but are \u201cmodifying the design to avoid them altogether.\u201d The pending changes \u201cwill be part of the final design\u201d for the Falcon 9, he added, \u201cin partnership with NASA to qualify engines for manned spaceflight.\u201d\n\n\nThe red flags are appearing as entrepreneur\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n closely held company has delayed for at least two weeks its first unmanned launch from a newly renovated Cape Canaveral, Fla., pad, pending further tests of ground facilities. SpaceX\u2019s initial blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center\u2019s pad 39A\u2014a historic site used to launch NASA\u2019s Apollo missions to the moon\u2014is now scheduled no earlier than mid-February.\nTaken together, the moves underscore technical and schedule challenges facing Southern California-based SpaceX as it seeks to accelerate its launch tempo. This year, the company aims to launch more than double the eight rockets it launched last year to meet commitments to NASA, and whittle away at a bulging backlog of delayed commercial missions.\nSpaceX\u2019s internal projections envision ramping up total launches to roughly one a week past the end of the decade, including at least a handful of its most-powerful Falcon Heavy boosters annually. Development of the Falcon Heavy is years behind schedule, but SpaceX hopes to conduct its maiden flight later this year.\nIndustry officials have known about problems with cracked blades on Falcon 9 versions for many months or even years. But cracks continued to be found during tests as recently as September 2016,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Lightfoot,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s acting administrator, confirmed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this week.\nNASA officials have been briefed on the focus of the GAO\u2019s preliminary findings.\nMr. Lightfoot said \u201cwe\u2019re talking to [SpaceX] about turbo machinery,\u201d adding that he thinks \u201cwe know how to fix them.\u201d In the interview, Mr. Lightfoot said he didn\u2019t know if the solution would require a potentially time-consuming switch to bigger turbopumps.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX has identified the likely variables that led to the launchpad explosion of its Falcon 9 rocket back in September. Photo: U.S. Launch Report\n \n\n\nThe final GAO report also will to delve into unrelated issues that threaten to delay initial launches of manned capsules by SpaceX and rival\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n Echoing conclusions of other studies by outside experts, GAO investigators have determined that both companies are likely to miss a 2018 deadline to start regular missions ferrying astronauts to the international space station.\nAccording to industry officials familiar with the draft report, the GAO also pinpointed frequent modifications of Falcon 9 designs as a potential source of delays in obtaining NASA certification of the booster.\nFor Boeing, these officials said, GAO investigators\u2014among other items\u2014raised questions about the status of tests to determine the reliability of its parachute systems designed to help returning manned capsules land safely.\nThe GAO also has determined that both companies face an uphill struggle to meet NASA\u2019s statistical goal of no more than one projected astronaut fatality in 270 flights, industry officials said.\nThe turbine issue doesn\u2019t appear to be connected to SpaceX\u2019s most recent launch delay.\nThe company days ago announced it was temporarily scrubbing the scheduled launch of a commercial-communications satellite for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n EchoStar Corp.\n\n\n At the time, SpaceX lacked a federal launch license, which the company expected to have to permit blastoff from pad 39A on Feb. 3.\nSpaceX said the change \u201callows time for additional testing of ground systems,\u201d but it didn\u2019t elaborate.\nThe spokesman said \u201cwe\u2019ve been working closely with the FAA for six months on getting our vehicles licensed from 39A\u201d and are anticipating approval.\nThe Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for issuing launch licenses, earlier this week said it is \u201cworking closely with SpaceX\u201d to ensure the company\u2019s application \u201cmeets all applicable regulations\u201d related to protection of public health and safety.\nInstead of the EchoStar satellite, SpaceX intends to launch a NASA cargo mission to the international space station around mid-February. Though some NASA officials originally wanted the new pad The Government Accountability Office\u2019s preliminary findings reveal a pattern of problems with turbine blades that pump fuel into SpaceX\u2019s rocket engines, a potentially major threat to safety, according to government and industry officials. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Set to Resume (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8414",
        "date": "2017-01-03",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-plans-to-resume-rocket-launches-1483363705?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=134",
        "text": "But if everything checks out,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.,\n\n\n which has been eagerly waiting to get the first 10 of its next-generation communications satellites into orbit since the September 2016 fireball, can anticipate a launch next Sunday morning.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Investigators believe that the SpaceX Falcon 9 blast last month was likely caused by issues linked to fueling procedures rather than manufacturing flaws. However, they say it is too early for definitive answers. Photo: USLaunchReport.com\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nSpaceX, as the closely held Southern California company is called, previously said the explosion on the launchpad, which destroyed the rocket and a single commercial satellite, was the result of problematic fueling procedures rather than a design or manufacturing flaw.\n\n\nAbout eight minutes before a scheduled test firing, according to the company, a pressurized helium bottle inside the rocket\u2019s second stage ruptured, leading to a nearly instantaneous explosion.\nInvestigators have determined that a complex interplay of variables during fueling, including temperature and pressure, caused a breach in the helium vessel that resulted in ignition.\n\n\nRead More SpaceX Postpones Launch to Early January Investigation Focuses on Fueling Snafu \n\n\nIn its latest statement, SpaceX said the extensive investigation concluded the accident \u201cwas likely due to accumulation of oxygen\u201d between the vessel\u2019s aluminum liner and what is called the composite overwrap. The company said testing revealed that supercooled fuel can pool in \u201ca void or buckle in the liner,\u201d subsequently breaking carbon fibers or creating an ignition source.\nBut the statement also highlighted the complex, somewhat tentative nature of the detailed conclusions. SpaceX noted that in the end, investigators \u201cidentified several credible causes\u201d for the failure of the helium container, and that \u201ccorrective actions address all credible causes.\u201d\nThe helium container, immersed in a larger tank containing liquid oxygen propellant, is used to pressurize the fuel tank in flight. As oxygen flows out of the tank during ascent, helium fills the empty spaces.\nFor the short term, the company plans to load helium into the rocket at a slower pace than previously, and it said the temperature of the helium will be higher than it was the day of the 2016 accident. In the long term, however, SpaceX said it intends to implement design changes to prevent such buckling altogether, \u201cwhich will allow for faster [fuel] loading operations.\u201d\nThe statement is notable because it indicates SpaceX intends to stick with plans to fuel its future manned rockets with supercooled oxygen and helium, while astronauts already would be strapped into capsules stacked on top. Such novel fueling procedures have been shunned by U.S. and foreign boosters for decades as potentially too dangerous in case something sparks an explosion before blastoff. The practice also has been challenged twice in the past year on safety grounds by a NASA advisory panel of outside experts.\nBut Monday\u2019s investigative update, posted on the company\u2019s website, suggests SpaceX is sticking with the general concept, which is primarily aimed at speeding up processing of boosters for launch. Expected design changes, though, are likely to be implemented before the first Falcon 9 is slated to lift off with astronauts in 2018 or later.\nMr. Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder, chairman and chief executive, previously said the explosion prompted the most challenging investigation in the company\u2019s 14-year history. \nHe also has said that fueling practices involving supercooled fuel can result in the formation of solid oxygen, which can interact with layers of carbon-fiber wrapped around helium vessels and lead to ignition.\nMonday\u2019s statement confirmed that the helium being loaded last September was \u201ccold enough to create solid oxygen, which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen being trapped\u201d between layers of the helium vessel, creating an ignition source. SpaceX also said part of the operational changes entail returning to \u201cflight proven\u201d fueling procedures that have been used successfully hundreds of times over the years. \nSpaceX has been heading up the accident probe, with cooperation from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Air Force and other government and industry experts. The company is responsible for determining the cause of the explosion, while the FAA has authority to accept the final report and issue a launch license.\nAn FAA spokesman wasn\u2019t immediately available for comment.\nThe Falcon 9\u2019s return to flight has slipped from mid-November to mid-December to early January, as investigators wrapped up their probe and continued to assess a number of specific variables that may have caused the explosion.\nThe impending mission carries huge stakes for both SpaceX and Iridium. Mr. Musk\u2019s company, which has a roughly a $10 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it plans to resume rocket launches on Jan. 8, using revised operational practices developed in response to a fiery accident that occurred during routine ground preparations last fall. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Launches Set to Resume (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8415",
        "date": "2017-01-03",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-plans-to-resume-rocket-launches-1483363705?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=90",
        "text": "But if everything checks out,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Iridium Communications Inc.,\n\n\n which has been eagerly waiting to get the first 10 of its next-generation communications satellites into orbit since the September 2016 fireball, can anticipate a launch next Sunday morning.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Investigators believe that the SpaceX Falcon 9 blast last month was likely caused by issues linked to fueling procedures rather than manufacturing flaws. However, they say it is too early for definitive answers. Photo: USLaunchReport.com\n \n\n\nSpaceX, as the closely held Southern California company is called, previously said the explosion on the launchpad, which destroyed the rocket and a single commercial satellite, was the result of problematic fueling procedures rather than a design or manufacturing flaw.\n\n\nAbout eight minutes before a scheduled test firing, according to the company, a pressurized helium bottle inside the rocket\u2019s second stage ruptured, leading to a nearly instantaneous explosion.\nInvestigators have determined that a complex interplay of variables during fueling, including temperature and pressure, caused a breach in the helium vessel that resulted in ignition.\n\n\nRead More SpaceX Postpones Launch to Early January Investigation Focuses on Fueling Snafu \n\n\nIn its latest statement, SpaceX said the extensive investigation concluded the accident \u201cwas likely due to accumulation of oxygen\u201d between the vessel\u2019s aluminum liner and what is called the composite overwrap. The company said testing revealed that supercooled fuel can pool in \u201ca void or buckle in the liner,\u201d subsequently breaking carbon fibers or creating an ignition source.\nBut the statement also highlighted the complex, somewhat tentative nature of the detailed conclusions. SpaceX noted that in the end, investigators \u201cidentified several credible causes\u201d for the failure of the helium container, and that \u201ccorrective actions address all credible causes.\u201d\nThe helium container, immersed in a larger tank containing liquid oxygen propellant, is used to pressurize the fuel tank in flight. As oxygen flows out of the tank during ascent, helium fills the empty spaces.\nFor the short term, the company plans to load helium into the rocket at a slower pace than previously, and it said the temperature of the helium will be higher than it was the day of the 2016 accident. In the long term, however, SpaceX said it intends to implement design changes to prevent such buckling altogether, \u201cwhich will allow for faster [fuel] loading operations.\u201d\nThe statement is notable because it indicates SpaceX intends to stick with plans to fuel its future manned rockets with supercooled oxygen and helium, while astronauts already would be strapped into capsules stacked on top. Such novel fueling procedures have been shunned by U.S. and foreign boosters for decades as potentially too dangerous in case something sparks an explosion before blastoff. The practice also has been challenged twice in the past year on safety grounds by a NASA advisory panel of outside experts.\nBut Monday\u2019s investigative update, posted on the company\u2019s website, suggests SpaceX is sticking with the general concept, which is primarily aimed at speeding up processing of boosters for launch. Expected design changes, though, are likely to be implemented before the first Falcon 9 is slated to lift off with astronauts in 2018 or later.\nMr. Musk, SpaceX\u2019s founder, chairman and chief executive, previously said the explosion prompted the most challenging investigation in the company\u2019s 14-year history. \nHe also has said that fueling practices involving supercooled fuel can result in the formation of solid oxygen, which can interact with layers of carbon-fiber wrapped around helium vessels and lead to ignition.\nMonday\u2019s statement confirmed that the helium being loaded last September was \u201ccold enough to create solid oxygen, which exacerbates the possibility of oxygen being trapped\u201d between layers of the helium vessel, creating an ignition source. SpaceX also said part of the operational changes entail returning to \u201cflight proven\u201d fueling procedures that have been used successfully hundreds of times over the years. \nSpaceX has been heading up the accident probe, with cooperation from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Air Force and other government and industry experts. The company is responsible for determining the cause of the explosion, while the FAA has authority to accept the final report and issue a launch license.\nAn FAA spokesman wasn\u2019t immediately available for comment.\nThe Falcon 9\u2019s return to flight has slipped from mid-November to mid-December to early January, as investigators wrapped up their probe and continued to assess a number of specific variables that may have caused the explosion.\nThe impending mission carries huge stakes for both SpaceX and Iridium. Mr. Musk\u2019s company, which has a roughly a $10 bil Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX said it plans to resume rocket launches on Jan. 8, using revised operational practices developed in response to a fiery accident that occurred during routine ground preparations last fall. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk on Why He Wants More Robots and Less Government (WSJ: The Journal) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8416",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/elon-musk-on-why-he-wants-more-robots-and-less-government/2504773D-8111-494C-A4E6-1F708D2526F8?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=8",
        "text": " What does the world's richest person think about the role of government and the future of robots and space travel? Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, shared his views in a wide-ranging interview with WSJ's Joanna Stern. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Robinhood's College Tour to Recruit New Customers (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8417",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/robinhood-college-tour-to-recruit-new-customers/8422D653-2ACE-43EA-8A04-A022A9FD1D9F?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=15",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Sept. 16. WSJ's Caitlin McCabe discusses the effort by the popular trading app to court students nationwide. Elon Musk's SpaceX marks new terrain with an all-civilian mission to orbit. WSJ's Anna Hirtenstein on rising transportation costs for everyday products. And, the growing popularity of \"buy now, pay later\" services for shoppers. Marc Stewart hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Robinhood's College Tour to Recruit New Customers (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8418",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/robinhood-college-tour-to-recruit-new-customers/8422D653-2ACE-43EA-8A04-A022A9FD1D9F?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=13",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Sept. 16. WSJ's Caitlin McCabe discusses the effort by the popular trading app to court students nationwide. Elon Musk's SpaceX marks new terrain with an all-civilian mission to orbit. WSJ's Anna Hirtenstein on rising transportation costs for everyday products. And, the growing popularity of \"buy now, pay later\" services for shoppers. Marc Stewart hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Robinhood's College Tour to Recruit New Customers (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8419",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/robinhood-college-tour-to-recruit-new-customers/8422D653-2ACE-43EA-8A04-A022A9FD1D9F?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=22",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Sept. 16. WSJ's Caitlin McCabe discusses the effort by the popular trading app to court students nationwide. Elon Musk's SpaceX marks new terrain with an all-civilian mission to orbit. WSJ's Anna Hirtenstein on rising transportation costs for everyday products. And, the growing popularity of \"buy now, pay later\" services for shoppers. Marc Stewart hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "California Gov. Gavin Newsom Defeats Recall Effort (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8420",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/california-gov-gavin-newsom-defeats-recall-effort/07E7972F-E014-4A7A-A124-62F4C2687C5E?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=23",
        "text": " President Biden is expected to meet with executives from Disney, Microsoft and other companies today to promote his Covid-19 vaccination plan for the private sector. North Korea test-launches two ballistic missiles off its east coast. Elon Musk's SpaceX is scheduled to launch the first all-civilian mission into orbit tonight. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Who Will Win The Space Tourism Race? Virgin, Blue Origin or SpaceX (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8421",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/george-downs/who-will-win-the-space-tourism-race-virgin-blue-origin-or-spacex/50C78206-BD9A-48F4-B80A-51CB419F1022?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=4",
        "text": " SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Two of Three Booster Rockets (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8422",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-successfully-lands-two-of-three-booster-rockets/0D9F1112-A6A4-44F7-BE61-CDBD7F7D1AA3.html?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=20",
        "text": " SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Successfully Lands Two of Three Booster Rockets (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8423",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/spacex-successfully-lands-two-of-three-booster-rockets/0D9F1112-A6A4-44F7-BE61-CDBD7F7D1AA3.html?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=102",
        "text": " SpaceX landed two of its three reusable rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Tuesday. Photo: Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s Starbase Mission Meets Resistance in Texas Border Town (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8424",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/elon-musks-starbase-mission-meets-resistance-in-texas-border-town/B13EBF18-0C47-484D-BE15-DBFB4E01FFB2.html?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=30",
        "text": " Elon Musk\u2019s proposed SpaceX expansion in South Texas is dividing Brownsville area residents. Some in the small border town believe the aerospace company could be the economically depressed region's ticket to development, jobs and education. Others say it's a threat to the community and the local environment. Photo: Adele Morgan ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Reveals SpaceX's First Moon Tourist, a Japanese Billionaire (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8425",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/musk-reveals-spacex-first-moon-tourist-a-japanese-billionaire/682651E1-A118-4F39-9EC4-C2705C44ABE9.html?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=87",
        "text": " Elon Musk introduced e-commerce mogul Yusaku Maezawa at a news conference Monday in California. The Japanese billionaire, who will be the first paying passenger for SpaceX's planned 2023 trip around the moon, said up to eight artists will join him. Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Men Pick Up Grandpa\u2019s Razor for a Close Shave\u2014Too Close (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8426",
        "date": "2019-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/men-pick-up-grandpas-razor-for-a-close-shavetoo-close-11569177023?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=53",
        "text": "Mr. Young is among the growing ranks of men risking a little bloodletting to return to simpler times when razors didn\u2019t have flexballs and lubrication strips and can cost more than $4 to replace a blade. They are ditching cutting-edge technology for double-edge or \u201csafety\u201d razors.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSafety is something of a misnomer for what is basically a straight razor attached perpendicularly to a handle with only a metal guard separating blade from skin. Popularized in standard-issue World War I field kits, the razors are so-named because they replaced the barbershop-style straight razor that was simply blade-on-skin. \n\nMen are looking to reconnect with the past, \u201ceither their own family or a romanticized version of a 1950s barber shop,\u201d says Mark Herro, who runs Sharpologist.com, a kind of online shaving bible, and started using a safety razor over decade ago. \n\u201cHow many of us remember standing at the feet of your father in the bathroom, watching him shave?\u201d the site says. \nMr. Young says he switched from multi-blade razor refills because \u201cit offended me on a moral level\u201d to pay so much \u201cfor something that gets thrown in the trash.\u201d A double-edge razor costs as little a 15 cents for a blade that is typically recyclable.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nReady for a good old shave: safety-razor handle, blade, shave soap.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tampa Bay Times/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nHe started using a safety razor intermittently about a year ago, then ditched modern blades altogether early this year. He bought a styptic pencil, an essential tool to stanch bleeding from mishaps. \nThe perils of grandpa\u2019s razor have driven users to virtual communities of men who share tips on surviving an old-timey shave. Without the safety features of a modern razor cartridge, pressure is paramount. Too little leaves behind stubble; too much causes razor burn or worse. A careless lateral swipe can leave a nasty gash. \nCritical is getting to know your razor, says\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shawn Burns,\n\n\n\n who runs men\u2019s grooming site toolsofmen.com. \u201cNo two safety razors are the same, they all weigh differently and have different blade gaps,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd with the neck especially, you get irritation because the hair grows in eight different directions.\u201d \nA downside is that the Transportation Security Administration doesn\u2019t allow safety-razor blades in airline carry-on luggage.\n\n\n 'You have this razor from 1955 or from 1909, and it\u2019s weird to think about where that has been,' says Paul Bissonnette, who keeps a collection of 83 safety razors. Photos: Paul Bissonnette (2)\n\n\n\nMen who have mastered the shave say it can help to have the right shaving cream, brush, handle and soap. Baxter of California, a maker of men\u2019s grooming products, recommends a brush made from a badger\u2019s belly hair.\nNick Theccanat, a New Yorker who works in public relations, came across a blog suggesting the razors as a way to cut costs while attending college a decade ago. \u201cThe first couple of shaves were not that successful,\u201d he says. Early attempts left his face covered in nicks and often a Band-Aid or two. \u201cIt was embarrassing.\u201d \nHe sought suggestions online for a less bloody shave and came upon a world of how-to videos, passionate writings on the safety razor\u2019s merits and collectors showing off rare razors.\nOn the Double Edge Safety Razor Club Facebook group, around 1,000 members go for advice on things like \u201cWhat is the best way to clean shaving cream residue/buildup off the razor brass\u201d or \u201cIs it normal for your face to look like a war zone?\u201d The community wasn\u2019t kind to one who announced he was returning to modern razors, criticizing him for giving up too soon.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat would you rename the safety razor? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe safety razor\u2019s recorded history dates to an 1847 U.S. patent application, filed by British-born inventor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William S. Henson,\n\n\n\n describing a device resembling a \u201ccommon hoe.\u201d A second iteration made its debut in the late 1800s, with Brooklyn brothers Frederic and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Otto Kampfe\n\n\n\n submitting a patent for \u201cnew and useful improvements in Safety-Razors.\u201d \nMore pivotal was the 1901 introduction of a safety razor with a disposable blade. Behind it was American businessman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n King C. Gillette,\n\n\n\n founder of the namesake razor giant that\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Procter & Gamble Co.\n\n\n acquired for $57 billion in 2005. Mr. Gillette won a contract to supply American troops in World War I. Soldiers returning home began the device\u2019s path toward becoming a mainstay.\nA spokesman for P&G, which still sells Gillette safety-razor blades, said there was no meaningful shift to safety razors. The consumer-products giant in 2009 acquired The Art of Shaving, which sells high-end safety razors and accessories, among other items.\nSafety razors represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. razor industry, with around $2 billion-a-year in annual sales, according t \u2018Is it normal for your face to look like a war zone?\u2019 People are ditching cutting-edge technology for old-style double-edge blades to reconnect with the past, cut costs and save the planet, at the risk of a little bloodletting. ",
        "author": "Sharon Terlep"
    },
    {
        "title": "On the Met Roof, Alicja Kwade\u2019s Test of Faith (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8427",
        "date": "2019-03-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/arts/design/met-roof-alicja-kwade.html",
        "text": "Known for confronting the laws of physics, the Polish-German artist builds a planetary sculpture and ponders our place in the universe Known for confronting the laws of physics, the Polish-German artist builds a planetary sculpture and ponders our place in the universe BERLIN \u2014 On a recent afternoon in her studio, the Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade was inspecting a model for the work she designed for this spring\u2019s Roof Garden Commission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The piece, titled \u201cParaPivot,\u201d consists of two large sculptures made of steel, rectangular frames and several enormous spherical rocks. Ms. Kwade hopes that visitors will be able to walk under the spheres, some of which weigh over a ton, if the museum is able to secure the necessary city approvals. ",
        "author": "By Thomas Rogers"
    },
    {
        "title": "12 Family-Friendly Nature Documentaries (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8428",
        "date": "2020-04-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/arts/television/nature-documentaries-virus.html",
        "text": "\u201cMarch of the Penguins,\u201d \u201cMonkey Kingdom\u201d and more illuminate the wonders of our planet from the safety of your couch. \u201cMarch of the Penguins,\u201d \u201cMonkey Kingdom\u201d and more illuminate the wonders of our planet from the safety of your couch. Children under quarantine are enjoying an excess of \u201cscreen time,\u201d if only to give their overtaxed parents a break. But there\u2019s no reason they can\u2019t learn a few things in the process. These nature documentaries have educational value for the whole family, while also offering a chance to experience the great outdoors from inside your living room.",
        "author": "By Scott Tobias"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 2, Episode 12: Time Is a Flat Circle on Boreth (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8429",
        "date": "2019-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-through-the-valley-of-shadows-recap.html",
        "text": "In this week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d we travel to Boreth, a sacred Klingon planet, where Pike finds out about his future. In this week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d we travel to Boreth, a sacred Klingon planet, where Pike finds out about his future. The most problematic episodes of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d have involved Klingons, and \u201cThrough the Valley of Shadows\u201d continues that trend of writers on the show having difficulty getting themselves out of self-created holes from past episodes. But I\u2019ll say this: The scenes on Boreth, the sacred Klingon planet, gave a depth to Klingons rarely seen in the Trek franchise. Instead of lusting for battle and honor, we see a thoughtful, contemplative version of the race. (We\u2019ve spent time on Boreth before, in a \u201cNext Generation\u201d episode called \u201cRightful Heir.\u201d)",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Climate Changes Before Your Eyes (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8430",
        "date": "2020-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/arts/climate-change-science.html",
        "text": "The American Museum of Natural History focuses on science, not politics, in its display of an environmentally challenged planet. The American Museum of Natural History focuses on science, not politics, in its display of an environmentally challenged planet. This article is part of our latest Museums special section, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.",
        "author": "By Laurel Graeber"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Climate Changes Before Your Eyes (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8431",
        "date": "2020-03-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/arts/climate-change-science.html",
        "text": "The American Museum of Natural History focuses on science, not politics, in its display of an environmentally challenged planet. The American Museum of Natural History focuses on science, not politics, in its display of an environmentally challenged planet. This article is part of our latest Museums special section, which focuses on the intersection of art and politics.",
        "author": "By Laurel Graeber"
    },
    {
        "title": "Celestial Visions on the Met Roof (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8432",
        "date": "2019-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/arts/design/met-roof-garden-alicja-kwade.html",
        "text": "High above Manhattan, Alicja Kwade\u2019s planetary sculpture captures the music of the spheres. High above Manhattan, Alicja Kwade\u2019s planetary sculpture captures the music of the spheres. Last week, when I looked at the first image ever made of a black hole \u2014 erroneously called a \u201cphotograph,\u201d it is in fact a digital composition stitched together from the observations of eight telescopes \u2014 I could hardly make it out. The supermassive void at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy is about as large as our solar system, with a mass outstripping the sun\u2019s more than 6 billion times over, from which no light escapes. What the picture shows is the event horizon that surrounds it, an aureole of blazing fire; but the halo appears blurry and indistinct, and within seconds it had been repurposed for all manner of pathetic digital jokes. Try to capture the infinitude of space and this is what you get: a fall from grace, a descent from the heavens to earth.",
        "author": "By Jason Farago"
    },
    {
        "title": "China becomes second country to drive a rover on Mars (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8433",
        "date": "2021-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/22/china-successfully-deploys-rover-explore-mars/",
        "text": "China became the world\u2019s second nation to deploy a vehicle on the surface of Mars when a solar-powered rover began an exploration for potential evidence of life.The Zhurong rover started roaming the Red Planet late Saturday morning Beijing time, Chinese authorities said. This comes a week after China joined the United States and the former Soviet Union in being the only countries to have landed a mission on Mars, which scientists say is a more technically difficult feat than doing the same on the moon. (The Soviet Union lost contact with its Mars probe seconds after landing.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina is the only country to have successfully orbited, landed and deployed a land vehicle on its debut Mars mission, according to Reuters. Zhurong, which is named after the Chinese god of fire, is equipped with ground-penetrative radar and a topography camera for a mission that is scheduled for 90 days. Other solar-powered rovers have survived for longer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo Zhurong is now active and actually on Mars. Early pics here, so better versions incoming. pic.twitter.com/pQeTFtf0ut\u2014 Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) May 22, 2021\n\nThe Chinese rover is situated on Utopia Planitia, a plain on Mars that scientists see as a relatively smooth spot for a first landing. The United States has previously used the basin to land a mission.NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated China on the Zhurong landing last week. In testimony before a House subcommittee on Wednesday, he used its example to urge Congress to \u201cget serious\u201d about investing in space, SpaceNews reported.NASA operates three landed missions on Mars, as well as a helicopter that will soon make its sixth flight on the planet. The European Space Agency and its Russian counterpart, the Roscosmos Space Corporation, plan to jointly land a rover on Mars next year.Beijing was heavily criticized earlier this month after debris from a Chinese rocket fell into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. There were concerns at the time that parts from the Long March rocket might fall over populated areas; there were no reports of significant damage. It is the first country to successfully orbit, land and deploy a vehicle on the Red Planet on its initial try. China becomes second country to drive a rover on Mars",
        "author": "Katerina Ang"
    },
    {
        "title": "China becomes second country to drive a rover on Mars (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8434",
        "date": "2021-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/22/china-successfully-deploys-rover-explore-mars/",
        "text": "China became the world\u2019s second nation to deploy a vehicle on the surface of Mars when a solar-powered rover began an exploration for potential evidence of life.The Zhurong rover started roaming the Red Planet late Saturday morning Beijing time, Chinese authorities said. This comes a week after China joined the United States and the former Soviet Union in being the only countries to have landed a mission on Mars, which scientists say is a more technically difficult feat than doing the same on the moon. (The Soviet Union lost contact with its Mars probe seconds after landing.) WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina is the only country to have successfully orbited, landed and deployed a land vehicle on its debut Mars mission, according to Reuters. Zhurong, which is named after the Chinese god of fire, is equipped with ground-penetrative radar and a topography camera for a mission that is scheduled for 90 days. Other solar-powered rovers have survived for longer.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo Zhurong is now active and actually on Mars. Early pics here, so better versions incoming. pic.twitter.com/pQeTFtf0ut\u2014 Andrew Jones (@AJ_FI) May 22, 2021\n\nThe Chinese rover is situated on Utopia Planitia, a plain on Mars that scientists see as a relatively smooth spot for a first landing. The United States has previously used the basin to land a mission.NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated China on the Zhurong landing last week. In testimony before a House subcommittee on Wednesday, he used its example to urge Congress to \u201cget serious\u201d about investing in space, SpaceNews reported.NASA operates three landed missions on Mars, as well as a helicopter that will soon make its sixth flight on the planet. The European Space Agency and its Russian counterpart, the Roscosmos Space Corporation, plan to jointly land a rover on Mars next year.Beijing was heavily criticized earlier this month after debris from a Chinese rocket fell into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. There were concerns at the time that parts from the Long March rocket might fall over populated areas; there were no reports of significant damage. It is the first country to successfully orbit, land and deploy a vehicle on the Red Planet on its initial try. China becomes second country to drive a rover on Mars",
        "author": "Katerina Ang"
    },
    {
        "title": "Memory, That Unreliable Narrator: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8435",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/new-science-fiction-fantasy.html",
        "text": "Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. The year\u2019s nearly over, and it\u2019s hard to remember where it went. Most people I know have complained about memory problems, provoked by difficult times and traumatic events, and compounded by the redactions and distortions of social media. We know we all remember things a little differently, with reality fracturing into competing narratives the further we get from any given occurrence. But when disaster is near-universal and the gulf of disagreement vast, it\u2019s easy to question our own recollections as suspect. Here, then, are books full of dueling paradigms, uncertain and chancy remembrance \u2014 with the past looming both as a resource and as a nightmare, and the future at its mercy.",
        "author": "By Amal El-Mohtar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Memory, That Unreliable Narrator: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8436",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/new-science-fiction-fantasy.html",
        "text": "Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. The year\u2019s nearly over, and it\u2019s hard to remember where it went. Most people I know have complained about memory problems, provoked by difficult times and traumatic events, and compounded by the redactions and distortions of social media. We know we all remember things a little differently, with reality fracturing into competing narratives the further we get from any given occurrence. But when disaster is near-universal and the gulf of disagreement vast, it\u2019s easy to question our own recollections as suspect. Here, then, are books full of dueling paradigms, uncertain and chancy remembrance \u2014 with the past looming both as a resource and as a nightmare, and the future at its mercy.",
        "author": "By Amal El-Mohtar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Memory, That Unreliable Narrator: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8437",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/new-science-fiction-fantasy.html",
        "text": "Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. The year\u2019s nearly over, and it\u2019s hard to remember where it went. Most people I know have complained about memory problems, provoked by difficult times and traumatic events, and compounded by the redactions and distortions of social media. We know we all remember things a little differently, with reality fracturing into competing narratives the further we get from any given occurrence. But when disaster is near-universal and the gulf of disagreement vast, it\u2019s easy to question our own recollections as suspect. Here, then, are books full of dueling paradigms, uncertain and chancy remembrance \u2014 with the past looming both as a resource and as a nightmare, and the future at its mercy.",
        "author": "By Amal El-Mohtar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Memory, That Unreliable Narrator: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8438",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/new-science-fiction-fantasy.html",
        "text": "Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. Seven books comb through history, travel to distant planets and imagine our A.I. future. The year\u2019s nearly over, and it\u2019s hard to remember where it went. Most people I know have complained about memory problems, provoked by difficult times and traumatic events, and compounded by the redactions and distortions of social media. We know we all remember things a little differently, with reality fracturing into competing narratives the further we get from any given occurrence. But when disaster is near-universal and the gulf of disagreement vast, it\u2019s easy to question our own recollections as suspect. Here, then, are books full of dueling paradigms, uncertain and chancy remembrance \u2014 with the past looming both as a resource and as a nightmare, and the future at its mercy.",
        "author": "By Amal El-Mohtar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alone on a Spaceship, Trying to Save the World (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8439",
        "date": "2021-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/books/review/andy-weir-project-hail-mary.html",
        "text": "In \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d by Andy Weir, a former science teacher is the planet\u2019s only hope. In \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d by Andy Weir, a former science teacher is the planet\u2019s only hope. PROJECT HAIL MARYBy Andy Weir",
        "author": "By Alec Nevala-Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alone on a Spaceship, Trying to Save the World (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8440",
        "date": "2021-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/books/review/andy-weir-project-hail-mary.html",
        "text": "In \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d by Andy Weir, a former science teacher is the planet\u2019s only hope. In \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d by Andy Weir, a former science teacher is the planet\u2019s only hope. PROJECT HAIL MARYBy Andy Weir",
        "author": "By Alec Nevala-Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alone on a Spaceship, Trying to Save the World (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8441",
        "date": "2021-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/books/review/andy-weir-project-hail-mary.html",
        "text": "In \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d by Andy Weir, a former science teacher is the planet\u2019s only hope. In \u201cProject Hail Mary,\u201d by Andy Weir, a former science teacher is the planet\u2019s only hope. PROJECT HAIL MARYBy Andy Weir",
        "author": "By Alec Nevala-Lee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Misfit Creatures, Otherwise Known as Kids Today (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8442",
        "date": "2017-08-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/books/review/jomny-sun-gabe-hudson-gork-the-teenage-dragon.html",
        "text": "Gabe Hudson\u2019s \u201cGork, the Teenage Dragon\u201d and Jomny Sun\u2019s \u201cEveryone\u2019s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too\u201d star anxious heroes navigating unfamiliar planets. Gabe Hudson\u2019s \u201cGork, the Teenage Dragon\u201d and Jomny Sun\u2019s \u201cEveryone\u2019s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too\u201d star anxious heroes navigating unfamiliar planets. GORK, THE TEENAGE DRAGONBy Gabe Hudson380 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.",
        "author": "By Ethan Gilsdorf"
    },
    {
        "title": "Three New Books That Stare Up at the Stars (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8443",
        "date": "2020-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/books/review/the-human-cosmos-jo-merchant-the-secret-lives-of-planets-paul-murdin-meteorite-tim-gregory.html",
        "text": "From the secret lives of planets to the mysteries contained in meteors, a look at books that explore the vast and fascinating cosmos. From the secret lives of planets to the mysteries contained in meteors, a look at books that explore the vast and fascinating cosmos. ",
        "author": "By Kate Greene"
    },
    {
        "title": "To Understand Our Future on Earth, Look to the Laws That Govern Nature (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8444",
        "date": "2021-12-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/books/review/a-natural-history-of-the-future-rob-dunn.html",
        "text": "In \u201cA Natural History of the Future,\u201d Rob Dunn turns to ecology as a way of figuring out just how the planet will be altered by climate change. In \u201cA Natural History of the Future,\u201d Rob Dunn turns to ecology as a way of figuring out just how the planet will be altered by climate change. A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FUTUREWhat the Laws of Biology Tell Us About the Destiny of the Human SpeciesBy Rob Dunn",
        "author": "By Peter Brannen"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Gospel of Hydrogen Power (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8445",
        "date": "2020-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/business/hydrogen-power-cars.html",
        "text": "Mike Strizki powers his house and cars with hydrogen he home-brews. He is using his retirement to evangelize for the planet-saving advantages of hydrogen batteries. Mike Strizki powers his house and cars with hydrogen he home-brews. He is using his retirement to evangelize for the planet-saving advantages of hydrogen batteries. In December, the California Fuel Cell Partnership tallied 8,890 electric cars and 48 electric buses running on hydrogen batteries, which are refillable in minutes at any of 42 stations there. On the East Coast, the number of people who own and drive a hydrogen electric car is somewhat lower. In fact, there\u2019s just one. His name is Mike Strizki. He is so devoted to hydrogen fuel-cell energy that he drives a Toyota Mirai even though it requires him to refine hydrogen fuel in his yard himself.",
        "author": "By Roy Furchgott"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Gospel of Hydrogen Power (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8446",
        "date": "2020-12-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/business/hydrogen-power-cars.html",
        "text": "Mike Strizki powers his house and cars with hydrogen he home-brews. He is using his retirement to evangelize for the planet-saving advantages of hydrogen batteries. Mike Strizki powers his house and cars with hydrogen he home-brews. He is using his retirement to evangelize for the planet-saving advantages of hydrogen batteries. In December, the California Fuel Cell Partnership tallied 8,890 electric cars and 48 electric buses running on hydrogen batteries, which are refillable in minutes at any of 42 stations there. On the East Coast, the number of people who own and drive a hydrogen electric car is somewhat lower. In fact, there\u2019s just one. His name is Mike Strizki. He is so devoted to hydrogen fuel-cell energy that he drives a Toyota Mirai even though it requires him to refine hydrogen fuel in his yard himself.",
        "author": "By Roy Furchgott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | The Day After Earth Day: A screenwriter\u2019s draft for a sequel (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8447",
        "date": "2020-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/04/23/day-after-earth-day-screenwriters-draft-sequel/",
        "text": "Sixteen years ago I co-wrote the ecological disaster movie \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d along with director Roland Emmerich.Since other movies had already destroyed planet Earth by asteroid, alien invasion and giant lizard, we made abrupt climate change our villain. The film is primarily popcorn fun, but it\u2019s also a cautionary tale; in one scene, chastened Americans abandon their gas guzzlers and cross the Rio Grande to plead for asylum in Mexico. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile writing the movie, I spoke with a number of climate experts and the future scenarios they laid out were anything but entertaining. Over the intervening years, the forecasts have only become gloomier as we blow by a seemingly endless cascade of tipping points. I\u2019ve grown increasingly pessimistic that anything can shake us from our stupor short of some cataclysmic disaster like the kind we invent in Hollywood movies.This year is on track to be Earth\u2019s warmest on record, beating 2016, NOAA saysAnd now \u2026AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe one positive side effect of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has been a dramatic reduction in emissions from vehicles and heavy industry. In my neighborhood the birds are suddenly louder than the cars, and the mountains are sharp as cutouts. And that\u2019s just visible air pollution.Overnight, the entire world has been forced to go on a crash carbon diet. Not that this is an ideal way to go green; it\u2019s like losing 15 pounds when you get food poisoning. Plus it\u2019s unlikely to stick. As soon as this pandemic is over, manufacturers will want to crank up production, consumers will be urged to buy, buy, buy, everybody will be desperate to get back to work and climate concerns will take a back seat.Alternately, we could use this as an opportunity to start fresh.Story continues below advertisementIf we look beyond the clear skies and Instagram pix of dolphins in canals, there is a bigger lesson to be gleaned; we are witnessing a remarkable example of collective action.AdvertisementSure it\u2019s messy and mismanaged, but it is also global in scale. Covid-19, like the climate crisis, poses a threat that transcends borders and language. But unlike the slow-motion disaster of climate change, the pandemic is playing out in real time. Confronted with an undeniable problem, governments have made unprecedented changes practically overnight, and people have radically altered virtually every aspect of their daily lives.If we can do it for a disease that threatens a portion of the population, why not for a threat that is existential to us as a species?Story continues below advertisementThe idea of social distancing was completely unheard of by the general public two months ago; today it is the new normal. Apparently we can adapt our behavior after all.If a percentage of commuters continues to work from home, even a few days a week, the reduction in transportation emissions would be significant. Businesses could slash travel costs and reduce their carbon footprint now that they realize how many meetings can be efficiently conducted over Zoom.Extreme climate change in the United States: Here are America\u2019s fastest-warming placesMore local shopping could avoid unnecessary trucking and shipping. Fewer trips to the grocery store have made us all conscious of food waste. Many of these habits would be relatively painless to maintain. Why go back to more wasteful ways?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRestarting the economy will involve a vast amount of stimulus spending; where that money goes will make all the difference in what happens next. Do we want to use it to prop up our broken and unsustainable pattern of dependence on fossil fuels?Or do we want to create new jobs by investing in an alternative energy economy? Up until now, \u201cpolitics as usual\u201d has doomed serious attempts to address the climate crisis. But we are in a rare moment when there is no politics as usual.At the end of \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow\u201d (after we destroyed half the world), a cosmonaut on the International Space Station looks down at a pristine view of planet Earth and exclaims that he\u2019s never seen the air so clear. At the time, I liked to imagine that if humanity got a chance to start over again with a clean slate, maybe we\u2019d learn our lesson.I don\u2019t get to write a happy ending for what comes next. But if we have the opportunity to hit the reset button, it would be a shame to let it go to waste.Jeffrey Nachmanoff is a writer, producer and director in Los Angeles who co-wrote the film \u201cThe Day After Tomorrow,\u201d and is also known for \u201cChicago P.D.,\u201d \u201cTraitor\u201d and \u201cHomeland.\u201d The coronavirus pandemic provides us with a chance for a planetary reset on climate change. The Day After Earth Day: A screenwriter\u2019s draft for a sequel",
        "author": "Jeffrey Nachmanoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch this \u2018surreal\u2019 Jupiter eclipse that you probably missed (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8448",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/21/jupiter-transit-moons-mutual-2021/",
        "text": "Jupiter presented a stunning gift last weekend, at least to those who had a clear view from Earth. On Aug. 15, Jupiter\u2019s largest moons, known as the Galilean moons, aligned to give two stunning, rare astronomical events.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFirst, Earthlings could see three of Jupiter\u2019s Galilean moons \u2014 Europa, Ganymede and Callisto \u2014 simultaneously crossing in front of the planet, known as a triple transit. Then, a dance among Europa, Ganymede and their shadows delighted sky watchers with displays known as \u201cmutual events.\u201d Amateur astronomer Christopher Go captured the marvels from the Philippines around midnight in what might be the one of the best documentations to date. Each second of the above animation represents 30 minutes of the event.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a very difficult data to capture, and I am convinced that this is the best movie ever made of Jupiter\u2019s triple transit event,\u201d Kunio Sayanagi, a planetary scientist at Hampton University and an affiliate of the Imaging Science Team of NASA\u2019s Cassini mission to Saturn, wrote in an email. Sayanagi helped assemble the above animation from Go\u2019s frames.Triple moonsJupiter has four Galilean moons, Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede, which were discovered by Galileo Galilei in the 1600s. A transit occurs when one of these moons or its shadow passes in front of the planet as seen from Earth. 2021 has more than 600 transit events.AdvertisementSingle and double transits are fairly common and have several occurrences just this month. Three moons passing at the same time, however, is rarer. Before 2021, the last triple transit occurred in 2015; the next one will occur in 2032.Sayanagi explains that triple transits are rare because only two of the three innermost Galilean moons (Io, Europa and Ganymede) ever line up due to their orbital periods.Therefore, a triple transit only occurs when two of these moons happen to line up with the fourth moon, Callisto. Callisto, the farthest Galilean moon from Jupiter, is not in \u201corbital resonance\u201d with the rest of the moons though.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the triple transit on Aug. 15, Europa and Ganymede were having the usual regularly-occurring alignment, and Callisto just happened to pass by them during that time,\u201d wrote Sayanagi.AdvertisementDue to the differences in orbital resonance, all four moons will never cross in front of Jupiter simultaneously.Behold, the solar system\u2019s best planet: JupiterDuring the transit, the moons can be difficult to distinguish from the light colors on Jupiter. The moons\u2019 shadows, though, clearly darken the planet.In the image above, Europa appears yellow-white and casts a shadow on Jupiter. Europa, which is slightly smaller than Earth\u2019s moon, is the smallest of the Galilean moons and thus casts a relatively small shadow.Story continues below advertisementGanymede and its shadow are the largest transits in the image. Not only is Ganymede the biggest satellite around Jupiter, it is the largest satellite in our solar system. Ganymede is only slightly smaller than Mars.Callisto, which appears brown, has one of the most cratered surfaces in our solar system.Rare Jupiter and Saturn conjunction dazzles skywatchers worldwide in 2020The triple transit was not visible from North America, but Go could see it from Cebu Island in the Philippines. However, good weather conditions were not a given. August falls within monsoon season in the Philippines and can bring winds from the mountains that interfere with astrophotography. Go said the winds from the mountain make everything look like mush and the planet \u201cwill dance around like a jellyfish.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe winds shifted the night of the event though, which helped produce good photos. Rain also fell every day that week but miraculously cleared up the night before the event.\u201cI was so lucky. The sky was clear all throughout the event,\u201d said Go, who shot the event from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. \u201cI was just so shocked because the following day it was raining again.\u201dMutual moonsShortly after the triple transit ended, two of the moons put on another show. Europa passed under Ganymede, appearing to hide behind the large moon from our perspective on Earth (known as an occultation). As Europa reappeared, Ganymede cast its shadow on Europa (known as an eclipse). Astronomers refer to these occultations and eclipses as \u201cmutual events.\u201dThe image on the left shows Europa hiding behind Ganymede, while the image on the right shows the eclipse. In the right image, Europa is partially darkened by Ganymede\u2019s shadow. On Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede\u2019s shadows overlap, hence why the large dark outline on the planet appears as a deformed circle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis thing this is so surreal,\u201d said Go. \u201cGanymede is projecting a shadow toward Jupiter, but part of the shadow hit Europa.\u201dMutual events are scientifically important because they allow researchers to easily record the moons\u2019 positions, said Sayanagi. Researchers have been able to record the precise positions of Jupiter\u2019s moons as far back as 1881.Today\u2019s instruments do not rely on mutual events for those position measurements. Sayanagi said NASA and the European Space Agency\u2019s upcoming Europa Clipper and JUICE missions will use more sophisticated techniques to measure the moons\u2019 orbital evolution. However, the older measurements from the 19th and 20th centuries provide valuable reference points.Story continues below advertisementAmateur photographs and data like Go\u2019s are extremely valuable to planetary scientists and shared with the science community. Although he is not a professional astronomer (he works in furniture manufacturing full-time), he has made discoveries through his images and has been listed as an author on numerous studies, along with professional astronomers. He has also helped NASA process images of Jupiter from the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201cThey\u2019re actually a lot of us doing very good images of the planets all over the world from Australia to Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Africa,\u201d said Go, who describes himself as a citizen scientist. \u201cWe need to get people to understand science, and this is one of the ways.\u201d In a rare occurrence, three of Jupiter's largest moons passed in front of the planet simultaneously. Watch this \u2018surreal\u2019 Jupiter eclipse that you probably missed",
        "author": "Kasha Patel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch this \u2018surreal\u2019 Jupiter eclipse that you probably missed (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8449",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/08/21/jupiter-transit-moons-mutual-2021/",
        "text": "Jupiter presented a stunning gift last weekend, at least to those who had a clear view from Earth. On Aug. 15, Jupiter\u2019s largest moons, known as the Galilean moons, aligned to give two stunning, rare astronomical events.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFirst, Earthlings could see three of Jupiter\u2019s Galilean moons \u2014 Europa, Ganymede and Callisto \u2014 simultaneously crossing in front of the planet, known as a triple transit. Then, a dance among Europa, Ganymede and their shadows delighted sky watchers with displays known as \u201cmutual events.\u201d Amateur astronomer Christopher Go captured the marvels from the Philippines around midnight in what might be the one of the best documentations to date. Each second of the above animation represents 30 minutes of the event.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThis is a very difficult data to capture, and I am convinced that this is the best movie ever made of Jupiter\u2019s triple transit event,\u201d Kunio Sayanagi, a planetary scientist at Hampton University and an affiliate of the Imaging Science Team of NASA\u2019s Cassini mission to Saturn, wrote in an email. Sayanagi helped assemble the above animation from Go\u2019s frames.Triple moonsJupiter has four Galilean moons, Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede, which were discovered by Galileo Galilei in the 1600s. A transit occurs when one of these moons or its shadow passes in front of the planet as seen from Earth. 2021 has more than 600 transit events.AdvertisementSingle and double transits are fairly common and have several occurrences just this month. Three moons passing at the same time, however, is rarer. Before 2021, the last triple transit occurred in 2015; the next one will occur in 2032.Sayanagi explains that triple transits are rare because only two of the three innermost Galilean moons (Io, Europa and Ganymede) ever line up due to their orbital periods.Therefore, a triple transit only occurs when two of these moons happen to line up with the fourth moon, Callisto. Callisto, the farthest Galilean moon from Jupiter, is not in \u201corbital resonance\u201d with the rest of the moons though.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIn the triple transit on Aug. 15, Europa and Ganymede were having the usual regularly-occurring alignment, and Callisto just happened to pass by them during that time,\u201d wrote Sayanagi.AdvertisementDue to the differences in orbital resonance, all four moons will never cross in front of Jupiter simultaneously.Behold, the solar system\u2019s best planet: JupiterDuring the transit, the moons can be difficult to distinguish from the light colors on Jupiter. The moons\u2019 shadows, though, clearly darken the planet.In the image above, Europa appears yellow-white and casts a shadow on Jupiter. Europa, which is slightly smaller than Earth\u2019s moon, is the smallest of the Galilean moons and thus casts a relatively small shadow.Story continues below advertisementGanymede and its shadow are the largest transits in the image. Not only is Ganymede the biggest satellite around Jupiter, it is the largest satellite in our solar system. Ganymede is only slightly smaller than Mars.Callisto, which appears brown, has one of the most cratered surfaces in our solar system.Rare Jupiter and Saturn conjunction dazzles skywatchers worldwide in 2020The triple transit was not visible from North America, but Go could see it from Cebu Island in the Philippines. However, good weather conditions were not a given. August falls within monsoon season in the Philippines and can bring winds from the mountains that interfere with astrophotography. Go said the winds from the mountain make everything look like mush and the planet \u201cwill dance around like a jellyfish.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe winds shifted the night of the event though, which helped produce good photos. Rain also fell every day that week but miraculously cleared up the night before the event.\u201cI was so lucky. The sky was clear all throughout the event,\u201d said Go, who shot the event from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. \u201cI was just so shocked because the following day it was raining again.\u201dMutual moonsShortly after the triple transit ended, two of the moons put on another show. Europa passed under Ganymede, appearing to hide behind the large moon from our perspective on Earth (known as an occultation). As Europa reappeared, Ganymede cast its shadow on Europa (known as an eclipse). Astronomers refer to these occultations and eclipses as \u201cmutual events.\u201dThe image on the left shows Europa hiding behind Ganymede, while the image on the right shows the eclipse. In the right image, Europa is partially darkened by Ganymede\u2019s shadow. On Jupiter, Europa and Ganymede\u2019s shadows overlap, hence why the large dark outline on the planet appears as a deformed circle.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThis thing this is so surreal,\u201d said Go. \u201cGanymede is projecting a shadow toward Jupiter, but part of the shadow hit Europa.\u201dMutual events are scientifically important because they allow researchers to easily record the moons\u2019 positions, said Sayanagi. Researchers have been able to record the precise positions of Jupiter\u2019s moons as far back as 1881.Today\u2019s instruments do not rely on mutual events for those position measurements. Sayanagi said NASA and the European Space Agency\u2019s upcoming Europa Clipper and JUICE missions will use more sophisticated techniques to measure the moons\u2019 orbital evolution. However, the older measurements from the 19th and 20th centuries provide valuable reference points.Story continues below advertisementAmateur photographs and data like Go\u2019s are extremely valuable to planetary scientists and shared with the science community. Although he is not a professional astronomer (he works in furniture manufacturing full-time), he has made discoveries through his images and has been listed as an author on numerous studies, along with professional astronomers. He has also helped NASA process images of Jupiter from the Hubble Space Telescope.\u201cThey\u2019re actually a lot of us doing very good images of the planets all over the world from Australia to Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Africa,\u201d said Go, who describes himself as a citizen scientist. \u201cWe need to get people to understand science, and this is one of the ways.\u201d In a rare occurrence, three of Jupiter's largest moons passed in front of the planet simultaneously. Watch this \u2018surreal\u2019 Jupiter eclipse that you probably missed",
        "author": "Kasha Patel"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Climate Disasters Pile Up, a Radical Proposal Gains Traction (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8450",
        "date": "2020-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/climate/climate-change-geoengineering.html",
        "text": "The idea of modifying Earth\u2019s atmosphere to cool the planet, once seen as too risky to seriously consider, is attracting new money and attention. The idea of modifying Earth\u2019s atmosphere to cool the planet, once seen as too risky to seriously consider, is attracting new money and attention. WASHINGTON \u2014 As the effects of climate change become more devastating, prominent research institutions and government agencies are focusing new money and attention on an idea once dismissed as science fiction: Artificially cooling the planet, in the hopes of buying humanity more time to cut greenhouse gas emissions.",
        "author": "By Christopher Flavelle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fracking Firms Fail, Rewarding Executives and Raising Climate Fears (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8451",
        "date": "2020-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/climate/oil-fracking-bankruptcy-methane-executive-pay.html",
        "text": "Oil and gas companies are hurtling toward bankruptcy, raising fears that wells will be left leaking planet-warming pollutants, with cleanup costs left to taxpayers. Oil and gas companies are hurtling toward bankruptcy, raising fears that wells will be left leaking planet-warming pollutants, with cleanup costs left to taxpayers. The day the debt-ridden Texas oil producer MDC Energy filed for bankruptcy eight months ago, a tank at one of its wells was furiously leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. As of last week, dangerous, invisible gases were still spewing into the air.",
        "author": "By Hiroko Tabuchi"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Next Big Volcano Could Briefly Cool Earth. NASA Wants to Be Ready. (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8452",
        "date": "2018-02-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/climate/volcano-geoengineering.html",
        "text": "By studying the natural effects of a large volcanic eruption, scientists could learn about how we might deliberately cool the planet in the future. By studying the natural effects of a large volcanic eruption, scientists could learn about how we might deliberately cool the planet in the future. A quarter-century ago, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, blew its top in a big way: It spewed a cubic mile of rock and ash and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere. The gas spread around the world and combined with water vapor to make aerosols, tiny droplets that reflected some sunlight away from the Earth. As a result, average global temperatures dropped by about one degree Fahrenheit for several years.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain"
    },
    {
        "title": "Saving History With Sandbags: Climate Change Threatens the Smithsonian (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8453",
        "date": "2021-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/climate/smithsonian-museum-flooding.html",
        "text": "Beneath the National Museum of American History, floodwaters are intruding into collection rooms, a consequence of a warming planet. A fix remains years away. Beneath the National Museum of American History, floodwaters are intruding into collection rooms, a consequence of a warming planet. A fix remains years away. WASHINGTON \u2014 President Warren Harding\u2019s blue silk pajamas. Muhammad Ali\u2019s boxing gloves. The Star Spangled Banner. Scripts from the television show \u201cM*A*S*H.\u201d",
        "author": "By Christopher Flavelle"
    },
    {
        "title": "World\u2019s Oceans Are Losing Oxygen Rapidly, Study Finds (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8454",
        "date": "2019-12-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/climate/ocean-acidification-climate-change.html",
        "text": "A new report found that oxygen levels in the world\u2019s oceans declined by 2 percent over 50 years, threatening marine life around the planet. A new report found that oxygen levels in the world\u2019s oceans declined by 2 percent over 50 years, threatening marine life around the planet. The world\u2019s oceans are gasping for breath, a report issued Saturday at the annual global climate talks in Madrid has concluded.",
        "author": "By Kendra Pierre-Louis"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Jair Bolsonaro\u2019s Victory Could Mean for the Amazon, and the Planet (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8455",
        "date": "2018-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/climate/brazil-election-amazon-environment.html",
        "text": "The next president of Brazil may shape the destiny of the Amazon, which is vital to reining in climate change. The stakes for the planet are huge. The next president of Brazil may shape the destiny of the Amazon, which is vital to reining in climate change. The stakes for the planet are huge. Jair Bolsonaro, the strident far-right politician who triumphed in Brazil\u2019s presidential election on Sunday, will not only shape the destiny of Latin America\u2019s largest country. His election is also a referendum on the fate of the Amazon: the world\u2019s largest tropical forest, sometimes known as the lungs of the Earth.",
        "author": "By Somini Sengupta"
    },
    {
        "title": "Should We Block the Sun? Scientists Say the Time Has Come to Study It. (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8456",
        "date": "2021-03-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/climate/geoengineering-sunlight.html",
        "text": "The National Academies said the United States must study technologies that would artificially cool the planet by reflecting away some sunlight, citing the lack of progress fighting global warming. The National Academies said the United States must study technologies that would artificially cool the planet by reflecting away some sunlight, citing the lack of progress fighting global warming. WASHINGTON \u2014 The idea of artificially cooling the planet to blunt climate change \u2014 in effect, blocking sunlight before it can warm the atmosphere \u2014 got a boost on Thursday when an influential scientific body urged the United States government to spend at least $100 million to research the technology.",
        "author": "By Christopher Flavelle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cities Are Not Only Tackling Covid, But Its Pollution, Too (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8457",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/climate/ppe-coronavirus-waste.html",
        "text": "All around the world the remnants of a global pandemic are testing the resolve of governments and private firms to rid the planet of its waste. All around the world the remnants of a global pandemic are testing the resolve of governments and private firms to rid the planet of its waste. The River Thames, the tidal artery that squiggles through central London, holds up a mirror to life on dry land: scraggly remains of fir trees float by after Christmas; in the first days of a fresh year, bobbing champagne bottles hint at recent revelry.",
        "author": "By Jessica Leigh Hester"
    },
    {
        "title": "England plans to end legal mandates for masks and social distancing on July 19, Boris Johnson says (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8458",
        "date": "2021-07-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/boris-johnson-masks-voluntary/2021/07/05/bb44cace-dd78-11eb-a27f-8b294930e95b_story.html",
        "text": "At an evening news conference from 10 Downing Street, the British prime minister said the country was ready to move beyond one of the longest, most restrictive series of lockdowns on the planet, turning away from a public health strategy that relied on \"government legal diktat\" to one based on \"personal responsibility.\" WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHe cautioned that the pandemic was not over, but said it was time for restrictions to end soon. He said this was possible only because vaccines were doing their job and protecting the population from infection and serious illness.If the current trends hold, and Johnson suggested they would, he expected the full reopening to take effect July 19, dubbed \"Freedom Day\" by the press. Johnson foresaw all nightclubs, museums, concert halls, theaters and sports arenas to be allowed to operate without capacity limits or distancing measures.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter the reopening, the government will no longer press people to work from home if they can. Customers will no longer be required to \"check in\" at pubs and restaurants or use government test-and-trace apps.If you want to crowd into a packed bar in Soho and fight the scrum for a pint at the counter, the government says it is up to you to decide whether to mask.\u00a0Though some buses, subways and taxis may ask riders to wear face coverings, the government said it would not legally enforce the measures.One newspaper called it \"the big bang\" of reopenings.\u00a0Scientific advisers said that after July 19, the government will essentially be treating covid-19 like seasonal flu, with a few exceptions. The government will still legally mandate that those who test positive for the virus self-isolate. New rules regarding international travel and schools are expected later this week.Boris Johnson delays end of England\u2019s coronavirus restrictions as delta variant cases climbDuring the long arc of the pandemic, Johnson and the British government have loved to deploy snappy slogans. The latest is \u201cHands, Face, Space.\u201d Before that, \u201cStay alert, control the virus, save lives.\u201d And quite a few more prior to that.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGovernment ministers are now repeating the line that the public must \u201clearn to live with the virus,\u201d which does raise the question of what people have been doing for the past 16\u00a0months, through three national lockdowns and more than 128,000 deaths.In his remarks, Johnson urged the people to \u201cact responsibly\u201d and \u201cexercise judgment\u201d and \u201ccarefully manage\u201d their risks.Johnson said, \u201cI will obviously wear a mask in crowded places where you meet people you do not know .\u2009.\u2009. to protect others and as a matter of simple courtesy.\u201dAs an example of allowing people to weigh their own risks, Johnson said that it would make sense to wear a mask on a crowded car in the London Underground, but that a passenger might feel safe without a covering on an empty train out in the countryside.Story continues below advertisementMinisters concede that infections will probably rise when mandates are eased, but the government hopes that the number of hospitalizations and deaths will be limited by the ongoing vaccination campaign, one of the most successful in the world. Some 45 million people in Britain have had at least a first vaccine dose \u2014 about 85 percent of the adult population \u2014 and 33 million are fully vaccinated.AdvertisementJohnson\u2019s plan to lift all restrictions applies only to England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are in charge of their own public health rules. Scotland may keep mask-wearing in place, for example, until a review in August.Johnson\u2019s decision to fully open for commerce, domestic travel and summer fun comes with risks. The prime minister has lifted lockdowns and eased measures in the past, only to see the virus come roaring back.Story continues below advertisementBritain may arguably be in the middle of a third wave of infections, with new cases soaring to 25,000 a day, twice the number seen in the much larger United States.At Monday\u2019s news conference, England\u2019s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, warned that the country could see 50,000 new cases a day in two weeks\u2019 time.The rising cases, doubling every eight days, are driven by the delta variant, which was first detected in India. The new strain is now dominant in Britain, and scientists estimate it may be 40 to 60 percent more transmissible than the alpha variant that was earlier predominant.AdvertisementIn a sign of how widespread the new surge is, Kensington Palace on Monday said Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was in quarantine after coming into contact last week with someone who has subsequently tested positive for the coronavirus.\u201cHer Royal Highness is not experiencing any symptoms, but is following all relevant government guidelines and is self-isolating at home,\u201d the palace said. Her last public event was a visit to Wimbledon on Friday.Johnson\u2019s move to make mask-wearing voluntary has been met with criticism by some scientists who fear a surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths.Story continues below advertisementOne researcher, Susan Michie, a psychologist at University College London, and a member of the government\u2019s SAGE committee of scientific advisers, tweeted: \u201cAllowing community transmission to surge is like building new \u2018variant factories\u2019 at a very fast rate.\u201dAdvertisementPeter English, an expert in communicable disease and former editor of the journal Vaccines in Practice, told science reporters that \u201cgovernment ministers who have declared that they will not show consideration to vulnerable people by wearing a mask \u2014 and thereby encouraged others in this approach \u2014 have been hugely irresponsible, and shown a gross failure of leadership.\u201dThe British Medical Association was urging the government to continue to advise the public to wear masks in public areas, such as shops and public transport, and to stress the importance of good ventilation.Story continues below advertisementBritain has a new health secretary, Sajid Javid, replacing Matt Hancock, who resigned in June after a tabloid obtained footage of the married minister passionately kissing a top aide inside his office \u2014 violating the very social distancing rules he had written.AdvertisementIn contrast with Hancock\u2019s more-cautious rules, Javid is gung-ho to move forward and open the country fully. He acknowledged that some people will become sick and some will die, but said the pandemic is under control and it is time to move on.\u201cNo date we choose comes with zero risk for covid,\u201d Javid told the House of Commons. \u201cWe cannot eliminate it; instead we have to learn to live with it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a piece for the Mail on Sunday, Javid wrote that the months of restrictions have come at great cost: \u201cRules that we have had to put in place have caused a shocking rise in domestic violence and a terrible impact on so many people\u2019s mental health.\u201d\n\nIt wasn\u2019t the \u2018snogging\u2019 but the snub of social distancing that forced Britain\u2019s health chief to resignDelta variant spread puts Boris Johnson in a tough spot, as he weighs whether U.K. should fully reopenCoronavirus variant from India could quickly become dominant, U.K. scientists warn The prime minister said the country was ready to move beyond one of the longest, most restrictive series of lockdowns on the planet. England plans to end legal mandates for masks and social distancing on July 19, Boris Johnson says",
        "author": "William Booth"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Watch That Is Blacker Than Black (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8459",
        "date": "2020-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/fashion/watches-h-moser-and-cie-switzerland.html",
        "text": "The spray coating on these dials is said to be the darkest material on the planet. The spray coating on these dials is said to be the darkest material on the planet. A new limited-edition watch has a tourbillon swirling in what appears to be a deep, infinite black hole. But, in fact, the mesmerizing dial is covered with what the National Physical Laboratory, Britain\u2019s measurements standards institute, has verified as the darkest material on Earth. ",
        "author": "By Kathleen Beckett"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking the big picture of our planet? Check out satellite images on NOAA\u2019s site. (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8460",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/seeking-the-big-picture-of-our-planet-check-out-satellite-images-on-noaas-site/2019/02/15/dae21406-2fb3-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html",
        "text": "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has some of the world\u2019s most advanced satellites. At any given moment, our planet is circled by NOAA satellites that transmit detailed information back to Earth, informing weather forecasts, climatological research \u2014 and you.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf you didn\u2019t get the memo, don\u2019t worry. Just head over to NOAA\u2019s website to play with its satellite imagery tools. The website draws on data from NOAA satellites and presents them in a variety of formats, each packed with fascinating views of Earth from space.The site\u2019s most fun and interactive tool is its most advanced. \u201cSatellite Maps 3D Scene\u201d lets you spin around and zoom in on a globe that shows real-time imagery from NOAA\u2019s GOES-16 and NOAA-20 satellites.Story continues below advertisementMost imagery is updated every 15 minutes. You can view the globe\u2019s atmospheric water vapor and infrared radiation.AdvertisementThe site also offers a 24-hour map of the Western Hemisphere that lets you see changes over time or capture and save an image. There\u2019s a global archive of satellite imagery, too.Want more scientific details? Head on over to the site\u2019s Satellite Image of the Day gallery. Selected imagery \u2014 such as a satellite view of the snowy Pacific Northwest \u2014 is accompanied by information that can help you interpret all of those puffy and sweeping clouds. A historical archive gives you images of major events, such as the plumes of smoke produced by the recent California wildfires and the landfalls of all sorts of hurricanes and other storms.Story continues below advertisementOr would you rather admire the view of Earth from space? Try out the \u201cSatellite Images of Beautiful Places\u201d archive. From blooming phytoplankton to the glistening beauty of a chilly winter morning, nothing compares to a much-higher-than-bird\u2019s-eye view of our dynamic planet.Earthrise: The stunning photo that changed how we see our planetNASA\u2019s New Horizons aircraft just visited the farthest object ever exploredBehold the solar system\u2019s best planet The agency draws on its data and presents them in a variety of formats, each packed with fascinating views of our planet from space. Seeking the big picture of our planet? Check out satellite images on NOAA\u2019s site.",
        "author": "Erin Blakemore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ever wondered why Pluto is no longer a planet? (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8461",
        "date": "2021-08-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/pluto-not-a-planet/2021/08/23/ae8fd57c-fbb8-11eb-8a67-f14cd1d28e47_story.html",
        "text": "At the edge of our solar system, there\u2019s a tiny, icy world with a diameter \u2014 or length across at its widest point \u2014 only 18.5\u00a0percent as large as Earth\u2019s. You know it as Pluto.When your parents were kids, Pluto was actually considered a planet. But 15 years ago, a group of scientists known as the International Astronomical Union voted to make the definition of \u201cplanets\u201d more specific, and Pluto no longer made the cut. According to the IAU, Pluto is technically a \u201cdwarf planet,\u201d because it has not \u201ccleared its neighboring region of other objects.\u201d This means that Pluto still has lots of asteroids and other space rocks along its flight path, rather than having absorbed them over time, like the larger planets have done. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBelieve it or not, each year on August\u00a024, the international scientific community recognizes Pluto\u2019s historic downgrade with a holiday called Pluto Demoted Day.But just because Pluto lost its planet status doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t fascinating, says Cathy Olkin, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.For instance, Pluto can be more than 4\u00a0billion miles away from Earth, depending on where it is in its wonky orbit, and the dwarf planet\u2019s average temperature dips to -387 degrees Fahrenheit. That\u2019s so cold, things get a little bit weird.\u201cPluto has this huge glacier on its surface, but the glacier is made of exotic ices,\u201d says Olkin, who is also a scientist on NASA\u2019s New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. \u201cSo, not water-ice, like we have here on Earth, but ice made out of nitrogen and methane, things that are gases in our atmosphere.\u201dPluto is also really dark, because the sun is much farther away than it is here on Earth. In fact, NASA has a handy website that allows you to catch a glimpse of what scientists call \u201cPluto Time.\u201d With an adult, simply enter your location and the website will tell you to look outside at a certain time of the day, usually right at dusk, when the light here on Earth looks almost exactly like it would on Pluto at noon, or its brightest time of the day.Another interesting fact about Pluto is that it has five moons. One of them, called Charon, is half of Pluto\u2019s size. (For comparison, our moon is just over ",
        "author": "Jason Bittel"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? With a Telescope as Big as the Earth (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8462",
        "date": "2018-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/magazine/how-do-you-take-a-picture-of-a-black-hole-with-a-telescope-as-big-as-the-earth.html",
        "text": "A planet-spanning virtual observatory, years in the making, could change how we think about space, time and the nature of reality. Will it work? A planet-spanning virtual observatory, years in the making, could change how we think about space, time and the nature of reality. Will it work? We live 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. That\u2019s a rounding error by cosmological standards, but still \u2014 it\u2019s far. When the light now reaching Earth from the galactic center first took flight, people were crossing the Bering Strait land bridge, hunting woolly mammoths along the way.",
        "author": "By Seth Fletcher"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? With a Telescope as Big as the Earth (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8463",
        "date": "2018-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/magazine/how-do-you-take-a-picture-of-a-black-hole-with-a-telescope-as-big-as-the-earth.html",
        "text": "A planet-spanning virtual observatory, years in the making, could change how we think about space, time and the nature of reality. Will it work? A planet-spanning virtual observatory, years in the making, could change how we think about space, time and the nature of reality. Will it work? We live 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. That\u2019s a rounding error by cosmological standards, but still \u2014 it\u2019s far. When the light now reaching Earth from the galactic center first took flight, people were crossing the Bering Strait land bridge, hunting woolly mammoths along the way.",
        "author": "By Seth Fletcher"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is It O.K. to Tinker With the Environment to Fight Climate Change? (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8464",
        "date": "2017-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/magazine/is-it-ok-to-engineer-the-environment-to-fight-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Scientists are investigating whether releasing tons of particulates into the atmosphere might be good for the planet. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Scientists are investigating whether releasing tons of particulates into the atmosphere might be good for the planet. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. For the past few years, the Harvard professor David Keith has been sketching this vision: Ten Gulfstream jets, outfitted with special engines that allow them to fly safely around the stratosphere at an altitude of 70,000 feet, take off from a runway near the Equator. Their cargo includes thousands of pounds of a chemical compound \u2014 liquid sulfur, let\u2019s suppose \u2014 that can be sprayed as a gas from the aircraft. It is not a one-time event; the flights take place throughout the year, dispersing a load that amounts to 25,000 tons. If things go right, the gas converts to an aerosol of particles that remain aloft and scatter sunlight for two years. The payoff? A slowing of the earth\u2019s warming \u2014 for as long as the Gulfstream flights continue.",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: In \u2018Life,\u2019 Extraterrestrial Fun, Until Someone Gets Hurt (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8465",
        "date": "2017-03-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/movies/life-review-jake-gyllenhaal-ryan-reynolds.html",
        "text": "This movie offers proof of life on another planet, sure, but it is also the occasion for another \u201cAlien\u201d-type deadly game of hide-and-seek. This movie offers proof of life on another planet, sure, but it is also the occasion for another \u201cAlien\u201d-type deadly game of hide-and-seek. In an opening sequence, \u201cLife\u201d allows viewers to float through an international space station. The camera zips around corners and turns upside-down in a feat of impossible (and most likely effects-massaged) cinematography. It\u2019s tempting to tune out the exposition and simply concentrate on the director Daniel Espinosa\u2019s dazzling imagery, even if it now looks familiar from \u201cGravity\u201d and \u201cAvatar.\u201d",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "See some of the most compelling space images and discoveries (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8466",
        "date": "2020-03-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/see-some-of-the-most-compelling-space-images-and-discoveries/2020/03/18/571f41fe-4c3e-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_gallery.html",
        "text": " From the Sun to distant planets to galaxy clusters and more. Images from our solar system and beyond. See some of the most compelling space images and discoveries",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8467",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/stephen-hawking-physicist-who-came-to-symbolize-the-power-of-the-human-mind-dies-at-76/2018/03/14/d4298e14-273a-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html",
        "text": "Stephen W. Hawking, the British theoretical physicist who overcame a devastating neurological disease to probe the greatest mysteries of the cosmos and become a globally celebrated symbol of the power of the human mind, died March 14 at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis family announced the death but did not provide any further details. Unable to move nearly any of his muscles, speechless but for a computer-synthesized voice, Dr. Hawking had suffered since the age of 21 from a degenerative motor neuron disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease.Initially given two years to live, a diagnosis that threw him into a profound depression, he found the strength to complete his doctorate and rise to the position of Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the same post held by Isaac Newton 300 years earlier.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDr. Hawking eventually became one of the planet\u2019s most renowned science popularizers, and he embraced the attention, traveling the world, meeting with presidents, visiting Antarctica and Easter Island, and flying on a special \u201czero gravity\u201d jet whose parabolic flight let Dr. Hawking float through the cabin as if he were in space.\u201cMy goal is simple,\u201d he once said. \u201cIt is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.\u201d He spent much of his career searching for a way to reconcile Albert Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity with quantum physics and produce a \u201ctheory of everything.\u201dHe wrote an international bestseller, \u201cA Brief History of Time\u201d (1988), that delved into the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. He deliberately set out to write a mass-market primer on an often incomprehensible subject.AdvertisementNotable deaths in 2018 and 2019: Nipsey Hussle, George H.W. Bush, Stan Lee, John McCain, Aretha Franklin and other famous faces we\u2019ve lostShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageNipsey Hussle, a Grammy nominated rapper who sought to revive South Los Angeles, died at age 33 on March 31. Read the obituary (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Warner Music)Story continues below advertisementAlthough the book was sometimes derided as being dense and had a reputation for being owned more than read, it sold millions of copies, was translated into more than 20 languages and inspired a mini-empire of similar books from Dr. Hawking, including \u201cThe Universe in a Nutshell\u201d and \u201cA Briefer History of Time.\u201dWith his daughter, Lucy, he wrote a series of children\u2019s books about a young intergalactic traveler named George. His blunt 2013 memoir, \u201cMy Brief History,\u201d explored his development in science as well as his turbulent marriages. In addition, Dr. Hawking was the subject of a 1991 documentary, \u201cA Brief History of Time,\u201d directed by Errol Morris, and countless newspaper and magazine articles.With the aid of a voice synthesizer, controlled by his fingers on a keyboard, he gave speeches around the world, from Chile to China. He played himself on TV programs such as \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation\u201d and \u201cThe Simpsons,\u201d the latter featuring Dr. Hawking telling the show\u2019s lazy animated patriarch: \u201cYour theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is interesting, Homer. I may have to steal it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe insisted that his reputation as the second coming of Einstein had gotten out of control through \u201cmedia hype.\u201d\u201cI fit the part of a disabled genius,\u201d he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. \u201cAt least, I\u2019m disabled \u2014 even though I\u2019m not a genius like Einstein. .\u2009.\u2009. The public wants heroes. They made Einstein a hero, and now they\u2019re making me a hero, though with much less justification.\u201dHis scientific achievements included breakthroughs in understanding the extreme conditions of black holes, objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravity.His most famous theoretical breakthrough was to find an exception to this seemingly unforgiving law of physics: Black holes are not really black, he realized, but rather can emanate thermal radiation from subatomic processes at their boundary and can potentially evaporate. Scientists refer to such theoretical emanations as \u201cHawking radiation.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis revelation impressed other scientists with the way it took Einstein\u2019s general theory of relativity, which is essential for understanding the gravity of black holes, and connected it to newer theories of quantum mechanics, which cover subatomic processes.Plus, he threw in a dash of old-fashioned thermodynamics \u2014 achieving a kind of physics trifecta.\u201cBlack holes ain\u2019t as black as they are painted,\u201d Dr. Hawking once said in a lecture, characteristically describing complicated physics in ordinary language. \u201cThey are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside and, possibly, to another universe. So, if you feel you are in a black hole, don\u2019t give up. There\u2019s a way out.\u201dStory continues below advertisementHe also hypothesized that miniature black holes, remnants of the big bang, may be strewn through space, though he noted that they haven\u2019t been discovered. \u201cThis is a pity, because if they had, I would have got a Nobel Prize,\u201d he joked.Early life\nStephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on Jan.\u00a08, 1942 \u2014 the 300th anniversary of Galileo\u2019s death, he liked to point out. His father was a physician and specialist in tropical diseases; his mother was active in the Liberal Party.AdvertisementBoth parents were Oxford-educated, and Stephen \u2014 the eldest of four siblings \u2014 grew up surrounded by books. But he did not show particular academic promise, despite an obvious streak of brilliance that prompted his friends to nickname him \u201cEinstein.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cI always wanted to know how everything worked,\u201d he told Omni magazine. \u201cI would take things apart to see how they worked, but they didn\u2019t often go back together.\u201dHe was a bit lazy and a bon vivant, as he later would acknowledge. After being admitted to the University of Oxford, he skimped on his studies and enjoyed carousing with fellow members of the Oxford Boat Club, for which he was a tactically savvy coxswain. He graduated in 1962 and did just well enough on his final exam to earn admission to the University of Cambridge to pursue a doctorate.Advertisement\u201cPhysics was always the most boring subject at school because it was so easy and obvious. Chemistry was much more fun because unexpected things, such as explosions, kept happening,\u201d Dr. Hawking wrote in his memoir. \u201cBut physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from and why we are here. I wanted to fathom the depths of the Universe.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThen came what he later referred to as \u201cthat terrible thing.\u201d He had noticed at Oxford that he\u2019d become increasingly clumsy and would sometimes stumble and fall for no obvious reason. Tests revealed motor neuron disease; he could not expect to live more than a couple of years.After a period of despondency in which he holed up in his room and listened to Wagner, he attended a New Year\u2019s Eve party at which he met a young student named Jane Wilde. Their courtship spurred his will to live. They married in 1965.Advertisement\u201cWe had this very strong sense at the time that our generation lived anyway under this most awful nuclear cloud \u2014 that with a four-minute warning the world itself could likely end,\u201d Jane Hawking later told the British newspaper the Observer. \u201cThat made us feel above all that we had to do our bit, that we had to follow an idealistic course in life. That may seem naive now, but that was exactly the spirit in which Stephen and I set out in the Sixties \u2014 to make the most of whatever gifts were given us.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThey would have three children before his condition deteriorated to near-complete paralysis.He received a doctorate in 1966 and became a postgraduate research physicist at Cambridge, where he hoped to study under the celebrated astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. Instead, he was assigned to Dennis Sciama \u2014 a disappointment, at first.AdvertisementAs he later wrote: \u201cThis turned out to be a good thing. Hoyle was abroad a lot and I wouldn\u2019t have seen much of him. Sciama on the other hand was there, and was always stimulating.\u201dA few years later, while on the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, he formed a close collaboration with Cambridge colleague Roger Penrose. They developed a theorem that the universe has not always existed.The two showed that if the theory of relativity is true, the universe must have sprung into existence, out of what appeared to be nothing, at a specific moment in the past and from a place where gravity became so strong that space and time are curved beyond recognition \u2014 what is known as a \u201csingularity.\u201dAt the remarkably young age of 32, Dr. Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society. He received the Albert Einstein Award, the most prestigious award in theoretical physics. He joined the Cambridge faculty in 1973 as a research assistant in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics; he was promoted to professor of gravitational physics in 1977.Early fame\nWhile at Cambridge, Dr. Hawking began to question the big-bang theory, which by then most people had accepted.Perhaps, he suggested, there was never a start and would be no end, but just change \u2014 a constant transition of one \u201cuniverse\u201d giving way to another through glitches in space-time. All the while, Dr. Hawking was digging into exploding black holes, string theory and the birth of black holes in our galaxy.Dr. Hawking was known to weigh in rather playfully on grand cosmological questions. He once suggested that if the universe stopped expanding and began to contract, time would run backward. He later said that he had changed his mind on that.He gained headlines when he declared that humans should colonize other worlds to hedge their bets against the possible destruction of this one.In an updated, illustrated (and easier-to-handle) version of \u201cA Brief History of Time,\u201d he added a chapter on wormholes \u2014 back-alley cosmic tunnels that might conceivably let someone travel back in time. Prancing on the edge of the plausible, he nonetheless stuck to what science can tell us.\u201cHe thought about the deep and important questions in novel ways,\u201d said David Spergel, Princeton University\u2019s chairman of astrophysics. \u201cHawking\u2019s important contribution was identifying new ways to answer those questions and formulating mathematically sophisticated ways of connecting general relativity and quantum mechanics.\u201dDr. Hawking had sought to come up with a \u201ctheory of everything\u201d that would essentially put an end to theoretical physics by answering all the outstanding questions. But whether such a theory can ever be substantiated is unclear.Dr. Hawking said our universe might not be the only one there is \u2014 that many more may be popping into existence all around us. He suggested that \u201ccosmic wormholes\u201d briefly link those universes to ours and that subatomic particles may travel from one universe to another through them, accounting for some of the strange behavior of particles that physicists observe.The power of Dr. Hawking\u2019s celebrity was measured at times by the tabloid coverage he drew for his complicated personal life. His wife, Jane, spent hours every day bathing, washing and feeding Dr. Hawking, who required constant nursing care. He developed pneumonia in 1985 on a trip to Geneva, and Jane battled doctors who wanted to turn off his life support.But the marriage grew strained, in part because of her Christian faith and his adamant atheism, and in part because of what she called his remote and stoic temperament. She described him as an \u201call-powerful emperor\u201d who seemed blind to how demanding his illness became for her as she also took care of their young children. He refused measures that would have made life easier for her, she said, and she felt it was \u201ctoo cruel\u201d to coerce him to see it her way.They grew apart and, in 1990, just shy of their 25th wedding anniversary, separated when Dr. Hawking left Jane for his nurse, Elaine Mason. He married Mason five years later after his divorce from Jane became final. Dr. Hawking called his second marriage, which also ended in divorce, \u201cpassionate and tempestuous.\u201dSurvivors include his children, Lucy, Robert and Tim.Dr. Hawking\u2019s offices were filled with photographs of him standing with admirers, from popes (he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) to Soviet physicist and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov.He once described his heroes as \u201cGalileo, Einstein, Darwin and Marilyn Monroe.\u201d The last was of particular appeal to the scientist, who hung posters of her and collected Monroe-related bric-a-brac.\u201cMy daughter and secretary gave me posters of her, my son gave me a Marilyn bag and my wife a Marilyn towel,\u201d he once said. \u201cI suppose you could say she was a model of the universe.\u201dRensberger is a former Washington Post science writer and editor.Read more Washington Post obituaries\n\nJoaquin Avila, civil rights lawyer involved in significant court victories for Hispanics, dies at 69\nT. Berry Brazelton, pediatrician who soothed generations of parents, dies at 99\nOskar Groening, \u2018Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,\u2019 convicted of war crimes, dies at 96\nNokie Edwards, influential lead guitarist of the Ventures, dies at 82\nJohn Boyd, milliner who helped make Princess Diana a fashion icon, dies at 92\n He overcame a devastating neurological disease to probe the greatest mysteries of the cosmos and become one of the planet\u2019s most renowned science popularizers. Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Earth Is Just as Alive as You Are (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8468",
        "date": "2019-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/opinion/sunday/amazon-earth-rain-forest-environment.html",
        "text": "Scientists once ridiculed the idea of a living planet. Not anymore. Scientists once ridiculed the idea of a living planet. Not anymore. Every year the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon rain forest and all the creatures that depend on them are drenched in seven feet of rain \u2014 four times the annual rainfall in London. This deluge is partly due to geographical serendipity. Intense equatorial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean, and bordering mountains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense. Rain forests happen where it happens to rain.",
        "author": "By Ferris Jabr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Alone Won\u2019t Save the Earth. People Have to Do That.  (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8469",
        "date": "2018-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/opinion/sunday/science-people-environment-earth.html",
        "text": "We need to start talking about what kind of planet we want to live on. We need to start talking about what kind of planet we want to live on.  This planet is in crisis. The safe limits within which human societies can be sustained, the earth\u2019s \u201cplanetary boundaries,\u201d are being exceeded, a path leading inevitably toward collapse. The experts have spoken. Only if humanity heeds the science, reverses course and lives within earth\u2019s natural limits can disaster be avoided.",
        "author": "By Erle C. Ellis"
    },
    {
        "title": "If Politicians Can\u2019t Face Climate Change, Extinction Rebellion Will (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8470",
        "date": "2019-05-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/extinction-rebellion-climate-change.html",
        "text": "A new movement is demanding solutions. They may just be in time to save the planet. A new movement is demanding solutions. They may just be in time to save the planet. On April 15, thousands of activists from a movement called Extinction Rebellion started occupying several sites in central London, shutting down major roads and demanding the country\u2019s politicians take immediate, drastic action in the face of climate change. ",
        "author": "By David Graeber"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos So Interested in Space? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8471",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/mars-nasa-musk.html",
        "text": "We the people need to take more control of how we move into the brave new worlds beyond our planet. We the people need to take more control of how we move into the brave new worlds beyond our planet. Why do the world\u2019s two richest men want to get off the planet so badly?",
        "author": "By Kara Swisher"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos So Interested in Space? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8472",
        "date": "2021-02-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/mars-nasa-musk.html",
        "text": "We the people need to take more control of how we move into the brave new worlds beyond our planet. We the people need to take more control of how we move into the brave new worlds beyond our planet. Why do the world\u2019s two richest men want to get off the planet so badly?",
        "author": "By Kara Swisher"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Cosmos Is Calling. What Do We Say? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8473",
        "date": "2017-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/opinion/bill-nye-trappist-1.html",
        "text": "If we find alien life on another planet, can we survive long enough to meet it? If we find alien life on another planet, can we survive long enough to meet it? Turning Point: Seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor life are discovered orbiting a star.",
        "author": "By Bill Nye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Assessing life in space (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8474",
        "date": "2017-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/assessing-life-in-space/2017/05/07/2d06d03e-3112-11e7-a335-fa0ae1940305_story.html",
        "text": " The April 30 Business article \u201cSpace mining may be a decade away. Really \u201d likely surprised many readers. It\u2019s no longer science fiction. Projects on asteroids, moons and planets potentially dwarf... Assessing life in space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "An Astronomer\u2019s Guide to Stargazing with Your Space-Obsessed Kid (NYT: Parenting) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8475",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/parenting/big-kid/blue-moon-stargazing-kids.html",
        "text": "How to find constellations, planets and stories in the sky. How to find constellations, planets and stories in the sky. As a little girl growing up in Portugal, Raquel Nuno made birthday wishes upon shooting stars. She was born near the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, one of the most prolific annual cosmic light shows. Every year her father whisked her and her family away to the beach to celebrate under the celestial fireworks. There, she gazed up at the dazzling display amid a backdrop of stars as countless as the grains of sand at her feet.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Astronomer\u2019s Guide to Stargazing with Your Space-Obsessed Kid (NYT: Parenting) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8476",
        "date": "2020-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/parenting/big-kid/blue-moon-stargazing-kids.html",
        "text": "How to find constellations, planets and stories in the sky. How to find constellations, planets and stories in the sky. As a little girl growing up in Portugal, Raquel Nuno made birthday wishes upon shooting stars. She was born near the peak of the Perseids meteor shower, one of the most prolific annual cosmic light shows. Every year her father whisked her and her family away to the beach to celebrate under the celestial fireworks. There, she gazed up at the dazzling display amid a backdrop of stars as countless as the grains of sand at her feet.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How to understand the numbers of climate change (WP: Politics) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8477",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/22/how-understand-numbers-climate-change/",
        "text": "Thursday is Earth Day, a day that a decade or two ago transitioned from being a weirdo-hippie celebration to being an opportunity for businesses to sell things made out of wood instead of plastic. There\u2019s probably a term for the tipping point at which something goes from a national joke to a national marketing opportunity, but if there is, I don\u2019t know it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThis quick flip was useful for politicians uninterested in addressing the central threat the Earth faces. Instead of there being a day when Americans are reminded that the world is warming and that the effects and scale of that warming are unclear, there is a day in which people can talk about how good trees are. Trees are good; no offense to trees. But it\u2019s a lot harder to sell things that are focused on addressing the buildup of gas in the atmosphere than it is to sell a thing that will protect a sea turtle. So the latter gets a lot of attention and the former less so.I\u2019ve found over the years that there is a pretty widespread lack of familiarity with how climate change actually works and what contributes to it. So, in the interest of selling nothing more than a subscription to a newspaper, I decided it was worth putting together something of a primer on the subject, centered on how it is measured.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe natural place to begin is by explaining how the warming process works.If you live in a house in a cold-weather climate, you are probably aware that your attic is insulated. That\u2019s to keep heat in your house and prevent it from escaping into the outside air. The Earth is not similarly insulated, so heat often radiates off the planet\u2019s surface and into space.Sometimes, though, that heat radiates into the atmosphere, where it is absorbed by one of the countless gas molecules floating around up there, a layer of protection that has an insulating effect. Some of those molecules, excited (literally) by the absorbed energy, then release the energy back out. Sometimes it\u2019s released up toward space. Sometimes it strikes another molecule. And sometimes it heads back toward Earth.Story continues below advertisementThis is oversimplified, but you get the point. Heat headed for space ends up being redirected back toward the Earth. And the more molecules floating around in the atmosphere, the more likely it is that one will absorb heat before it escapes and the more likely it is that the heat will be aimed back down.AdvertisementThat\u2019s the most basic element of warming. There are knock-on effects: Warming air holds more water vapor which can absorb more heat, warming temperatures can thaw permafrost that then releases methane into the atmosphere. But the central issue is the buildup of those gas molecules.Scientists track the density of those molecules in the atmosphere. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has an online tool that shows the densities of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and sulfur hexaflouride in the atmosphere. In the past several decades, each has climbed higher.You\u2019ll notice we flagged a particular point on the methane graph. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, one that traps more radiation than carbon dioxide. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, \u201cthe comparative impact of CH4\u2033 \u2014 methane \u2014 \u201cis 25 times greater than CO2 over a 100-year period.\u201d So remember that September 2006 point on that graph for later.It\u2019s important to note that the measurements above track global concentrations. If a molecule of carbon dioxide is released in Paris, it contributes to that total as surely as one released in Pittsburgh. Over the past 60 years, the amount of carbon dioxide released by the United States as a percentage of the global total annually has decreased as other countries, particularly China, have seen big increases in emissions. (The data below come from the Global Carbon Atlas.)This is why climate change is a global problem. Curtailing emissions entirely in the United States would neither remove the existing molecules from the atmosphere or mean that no new molecules would be added. It\u2019s why activists and politicians targeting the issue have embraced international compacts such as the Paris climate accord in an effort to instantiate international rules aimed at cutting emissions across the board. The goal, at the very least, is to slow the rate at which gas is emitted into the atmosphere.So let\u2019s look at the sources and types of emissions in the United States. EPA data for 2019 show that most of the emissions in this country come from transportation and electricity generation: burning gasoline in cars and burning coal in power plants, both of which release carbon dioxide (among other things). Carbon dioxide made up more than three-quarters of emissions in 2019. (Notice that agriculture makes up 10 percent of emissions. We\u2019ll come back to that, too.)If you\u2019d looked at the EPA\u2019s website in 2016 (which you still can, thanks to the Internet Archive), you\u2019d have seen that electricity generation was a larger contributor to carbon dioxide emissions than transportation by a 37 percent to 31 percent margin. Now, those percentages have flipped: Transportation is responsible for 35 percent of carbon dioxide emissions and electricity generation only 31 percent.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne reason for that is the change in how electricity is generated in the United States. Until 2009 or so, coal was the most common generation method for producing electricity in power plants. But then that changed. Natural gas became much cheaper and it burned more cleanly than coal, releasing far less carbon dioxide. So electricity-generating facilities began switching over.In the past 20 years or so, the amount of electricity generated from natural gas and renewable sources (wind, solar and hydroelectric) has climbed. The amount produced by nuclear plants has held steady. Coal generation has plunged.A key driver of that dynamic was the surge in hydraulic fracturing. About 20 years ago, oil drillers figured out how to extract vast amounts of oil and gas from shale deposits underground: drill down and then sideways, injecting water at high pressure into the hole. The rock shatters and gas and oil are released. Areas of North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas boomed and the market was suddenly saturated with natural gas.After holding steady for decades, natural gas production in the United States began to surge in about 2006.Natural gas is primarily methane. Remember that first graph showing the increase in atmospheric methane beginning in the same period? That\u2019s not a coincidence. While natural gas burns more cleanly, a lot of it can escape into the atmosphere at drilling sites.It\u2019s a reminder of how complex this all is. Consider that shift in carbon dioxide emissions between electricity production and transportation. The electricity production emissions have dropped (thanks to the transition away from coal) but transportation emissions have recovered after the recession a decade ago. That\u2019s a key reason the Biden administration has recently targeted emissions from automobiles.Then there\u2019s that chunk of emissions from agriculture. There are a lot of jokes about how cows contribute to climate change but \u2014 cows contribute to climate change! The amount of nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere is a function of practices such as fertilization. That methane, though, is from what the EPA tenderly refers to as \u201cpart of [animals\u2019] normal digestive process,\u201d meaning flatulence and belching. Pools of manure also contribute to methane emissions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe come to the question that many have asked recently: Does eating less meat help the planet? The answer to that is similar to the answer to a lot of environment-related questions. It does, a little. But scaled up? If lots of people eat less meat or drive less? If they drive cars that emit less carbon dioxide? If they get their power from wind turbines? If that becomes the norm not just here but in China and India?All of a sudden, the picture changes. The warming of the planet is a function of a build-up of gases in the atmosphere. Here are the basics of how it works. How to understand the numbers of climate change",
        "author": "Philip Bump"
    },
    {
        "title": "A teenager discovered a new planet on the third day of his NASA internship (WP: Space) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8478",
        "date": "2020-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/10/teenager-discovered-new-planet-third-day-his-nasa-internship/",
        "text": "Most people sit through countless orientations on the first few days of their job, but one teen discovered a planet \u2014 on his third day.Wolf Cukier, 17, of Scarsdale, N.Y., had wrapped up his junior year of high school when he headed off to intern in the summer at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where he discovered a planet orbiting two stars. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe planet, now known as TOI 1338 b, is nearly seven times as large as Earth and has two stars \u2014 one that\u2019s about 10 percent more massive than our sun and another only a third of the sun\u2019s mass and less bright, according to NASA.It was the second time he had interned at the space research laboratory, having spent the summer of 2018 working on a Goldilocks Zone project under the mentorship of NASA aerospace technology researcher Ravi Kopparapu.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCukier was invited back to intern at the spaceflight complex, but Kopparapu was not available to provide guidance. Cukier was placed under the tutelage of NASA research scientist Veselin Kostov, who had never had a high school intern, Kostov told The Washington Post.\u201cI gave him a brief outline of what we do, and he learned everything by himself,\u201d Kostov said. \u201cHe learned really quickly. He really developed a very good understanding of the field.\u201dThe summer was the first time Cukier had worked with NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, known as TESS, the teen said.TESS monitors the brightness of stars for periodic drops caused by planetary transits, according to NASA.Story continues below advertisementCukier had a framework of what to look for based on his exploration of the Planet Hunters TESS citizen science project, which allows people to comb through TESS data and categorize star systems, he said.AdvertisementWhile looking at an image during his internship, he thought something looked \u201csuspicious,\u201d he said, noting that the image had an additional feature that made him alert Kostov.\u201cAfter we saw the original transit, we looked at the full light curve and saw three transits,\u201d Cukier said.Cukier and Kostov spent hours verifying that the additional features they were seeing were real, by looking through multiple data sets.\u201cIt was just Wolf and me in the first couple of hours, and when we were 99 percent certain the two traits we saw were real, we started reaching out to colleagues,\u201d Kostov said.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt definitely colored the rest of the internship,\u201d Cukier said of his planet discovery. \u201cNow, not only was I working on searching for additional planets, I was learning the full verification that goes into verifying a planet when we suspect it to be one.\u201dAdvertisementThat process included using different data tools and involving researchers from the University of Chicago, MIT and San Diego State.The process was much faster than normal, taking about two to three months to confirm Cukier\u2019s discovery as a planet, Kostov said.The finding is a positive sign for the TESS\u2019s capabilities, Kostov said, adding that he believes there will be more planets to be found.Story continues below advertisement\u201cTESS is the only instrument that would allow us to discover this type of planet,\u201d Kostov said.Cukier co-wrote a paper about his internship find with scientists from Goddard and other institutions that has been submitted for scientific review.TOI 1338 b was featured in a panel discussion Monday at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Honolulu, according to NASA.Cukier couldn\u2019t name the planet, but his brother offered a better sobriquet: Wolftopia.AdvertisementNow a high school senior, Cukier has his sights set on colleges such as Princeton University, Stanford University and MIT where he can major in astrophysics or physics.He\u2019s still figuring out his summer plans, he said.Read more: Scientists find \u2018monster\u2019 black hole so big they didn\u2019t think it was possible Remnants of a supernova were found in Antarctic snow. The space dust could be 20 million years old. Scientists are baffled: What\u2019s up with the universe? The Mars 2020 rover will visit the perfect spot to find signs of life, new studies show Seventeen-year-old Wolf Cukier found a rare planet with two stars only three days into his internship. A teenager discovered a new planet on the third day of his NASA internship",
        "author": "Lateshia Beachum"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Arena Where the Goal Is \u2018Net Zero\u2019 Carbon Emissions, Even From Fans (NYT: Sports) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8479",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/sports/climate-pledge-arena-seattle.html",
        "text": "The operators of Climate Pledge Arena, home to the N.H.L.\u2019s newest team, the Seattle Kraken, plan to reduce and offset its entire planet-warming footprint. They still have a lot to prove. The operators of Climate Pledge Arena, home to the N.H.L.\u2019s newest team, the Seattle Kraken, plan to reduce and offset its entire planet-warming footprint. They still have a lot to prove. SEATTLE \u2014 Fans of the Seattle Kraken, who joined the N.H.L. this season as the league\u2019s 32nd team, had a lot to take in at the club\u2019s first-ever home game last Saturday. There were new players on the ice to cheer, new seats to find and new concession stands to seek.",
        "author": "By Ken Belson and Lindsey Wasson"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Arena Where the Goal Is \u2018Net Zero\u2019 Carbon Emissions, Even From Fans (NYT: Sports) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8480",
        "date": "2021-10-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/sports/climate-pledge-arena-seattle.html",
        "text": "The operators of Climate Pledge Arena, home to the N.H.L.\u2019s newest team, the Seattle Kraken, plan to reduce and offset its entire planet-warming footprint. They still have a lot to prove. The operators of Climate Pledge Arena, home to the N.H.L.\u2019s newest team, the Seattle Kraken, plan to reduce and offset its entire planet-warming footprint. They still have a lot to prove. SEATTLE \u2014 Fans of the Seattle Kraken, who joined the N.H.L. this season as the league\u2019s 32nd team, had a lot to take in at the club\u2019s first-ever home game last Saturday. There were new players on the ice to cheer, new seats to find and new concession stands to seek.",
        "author": "By Ken Belson and Lindsey Wasson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Learning With: \u2018NASA\u2019s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8481",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/learning/learning-with-nasas-mars-rover-opportunity-concludes-a-15-year-mission.html",
        "text": "What can we learn from the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface? What can we learn from the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface?  Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Learning With: \u2018NASA\u2019s Mars Rover Opportunity Concludes a 15-Year Mission\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8482",
        "date": "2019-02-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/learning/learning-with-nasas-mars-rover-opportunity-concludes-a-15-year-mission.html",
        "text": "What can we learn from the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface? What can we learn from the longest-lived robot on another planet\u2019s surface?  Before reading the article: ",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lesson of the Day: \u2018How\u2019s Your Internship Going? This Teen Found a Planet\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8483",
        "date": "2020-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/learning/internship-planet-lesson-plan.html",
        "text": "In this lesson, students will understand one way that planets are identified, and they\u2019ll have an opportunity to participate in a citizen science project. In this lesson, students will understand one way that planets are identified, and they\u2019ll have an opportunity to participate in a citizen science project. Featured Article: \u201cHow\u2019s Your Internship Going? This Teen Found a Planet\u201d",
        "author": "By Nicole Daniels"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lesson of the Day: \u2018How\u2019s Your Internship Going? This Teen Found a Planet\u2019 (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8484",
        "date": "2020-01-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/learning/internship-planet-lesson-plan.html",
        "text": "In this lesson, students will understand one way that planets are identified, and they\u2019ll have an opportunity to participate in a citizen science project. In this lesson, students will understand one way that planets are identified, and they\u2019ll have an opportunity to participate in a citizen science project. Featured Article: \u201cHow\u2019s Your Internship Going? This Teen Found a Planet\u201d",
        "author": "By Nicole Daniels"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Dennis Overbye Makes Space-Time Relatable (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8485",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/insider/dennis-overbye-science-reporting.html",
        "text": "From exosolar planets to colliding stars, The Times\u2019s cosmic affairs correspondent introduces readers to the universe they live in. From exosolar planets to colliding stars, The Times\u2019s cosmic affairs correspondent introduces readers to the universe they live in. Dennis Overbye, The New York Times\u2019s cosmic affairs correspondent, has never owned a telescope. They were of little use in the cloudy environs of Mercer Island, Wash., where he grew up.",
        "author": "By Raillan Brooks"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Dennis Overbye Makes Space-Time Relatable (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8486",
        "date": "2017-10-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/insider/dennis-overbye-science-reporting.html",
        "text": "From exosolar planets to colliding stars, The Times\u2019s cosmic affairs correspondent introduces readers to the universe they live in. From exosolar planets to colliding stars, The Times\u2019s cosmic affairs correspondent introduces readers to the universe they live in. Dennis Overbye, The New York Times\u2019s cosmic affairs correspondent, has never owned a telescope. They were of little use in the cloudy environs of Mercer Island, Wash., where he grew up.",
        "author": "By Raillan Brooks"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Kamala Harris\u2019s Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other, in a Black Study Group (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8487",
        "date": "2020-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/us/kamala-harris-parents.html",
        "text": "Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan grew up under British colonial rule on different sides of the planet. They were each drawn to Berkeley, and became part of an intellectual circle that shaped the rest of their lives. Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan grew up under British colonial rule on different sides of the planet. They were each drawn to Berkeley, and became part of an intellectual circle that shaped the rest of their lives. At an off-campus space at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1962, a tall, thin Jamaican Ph.D. student addressed a small crowd, drawing parallels between his native country and the United States.",
        "author": "By Ellen Barry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart\u2019 is the best PlayStation exclusive since \u2018Bloodborne\u2019 (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8488",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/ratchet-clank-rift-apart-review/",
        "text": "The best traits of modern Sony titles are manifest in \u201cRatchet and Clank: Rift Apart.\u201d It is the greatest exclusive title for a PlayStation platform since 2015\u2032s \u201cBloodborne.\u201d\u201cRift Apart\u201d calls to mind the believable and heart-wrenching interpersonal drama of \u201cThe Last of Us.\u201d There\u2019s the fast-paced, dodge-and-shoot rhythm and screen-filling particle effects of the other recent PS5 exclusive, \u201cReturnal.\u201d Ratchet\u2019s charisma and charm feel natural in ways that would shake \u201cUncharted\u201d hero Nathan Drake\u2019s confidence. And of course, developer Insomniac Games uses its experience from \u201cMarvel\u2019s Spider-Man\u201d to stage dazzling set-piece action like we\u2019ve never seen in the platformer genre. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSometimes, it even reminds me of the best games from other platforms and genres. As Ratchet, I visited the barren, mystical planet of Sevali and rocketed around it as I might across a map in \u201cDestiny.\u201d As Rivet, Ratchet\u2019s alternate dimension counterpart, I sailed through the skies and between enemy ship formations on a fire-breathing dragon, recalling the classic video game propensity to reimagine wyverns as fighter jets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEventually, the game breaks into all-out war, and it becomes easier to imagine a next-generation \u201cHalo\u201d game thanks to bewitching creature designs and lively animation popping through a mobbed, action-packed battlefield. As more dimensional rifts open to unleash armies upon you, I realized I was playing the inverse of the \u201cAvengers: Endgame\u201d finale. Instead of Thanos facing portals of Marvel\u2019s heroes, it\u2019s a pair of fuzzy space cats against a never-ending stream of alien hordes.This alone would make \u201cRift Apart,\u201d the first major game released exclusively for the modern console generation, easy to recommend to almost anyone. But everything, from the game\u2019s presentation to its writing, elevates it above even the series\u2019s past high watermarks.Let\u2019s start with the remarkable animation work. It\u2019s been an old aspiration for video games to surpass Pixar films in visual quality; the Ratchet and Clank series has quietly led that march. The original games, whose development team included PlayStation console architect Mark Cerny, were already the best showcases for those earlier consoles. On the PlayStation 5, Rivet\u2019s tight-lipped smile and reserved nods belie her reluctance to trust anyone else, and it\u2019s in sharp contrast to Ratchet\u2019s wide-mouthed, teeth-baring, all-too-eager disposition. The animation fulfills an actor\u2019s duty to communicate the unspoken.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFeature: With the PS5, Sony is betting that what\u2019s good for developers will be great for playersWhile Insomniac has always employed top-shelf animators in the games industry, \u201cRift Apart\u201d proves the studio stands at the vanguard of modern-day animation. They carry on a proud cartooning tradition of painting the rich tapestry of human expression as bold, bright faces on anything, be it a robot or a Lombax, the nearly extinct race of alien space cats of which Ratchet and Rivet remain the sole survivors.\u201cRift Apart\u201d is no profound innovation for its genre or medium. Rather, it\u2019s a refinement of the satisfying gameplay loop Insomniac created for the second sequel, \u201cGoing Commando.\u201d This is welcome news, since longtime fans consider Ratchet and Clank the best platformer series outside of Mario\u2019s galaxy.The dimensional rifts, the game\u2019s headlining feature, held much promise for novel gameplay possibilities, but sadly there\u2019s little that approaches the playfulness and creativity of even 2007\u2019s \u201cPortal.\u201d The rifts mostly operate as a way for the player to navigate maps, whether it\u2019s to swing to \u201copen rifts\u201d like they\u2019re grappling points, or warping you to a completely different location. Otherwise, it\u2019s an enchanting visual trick, made possible with the PlayStation 5\u2032s powerful hardware.What it lacks in gameplay innovation, it makes up for by being practically flawless. The controls were perfected in the PS2 days and remain perfect today. Upgrading the game\u2019s 18 diverse weapons by collecting literal millions of bolts is still a rewarding preoccupation. And each of the nine planets offers memorable, distinctive experiences and cultures. There\u2019s Rivet\u2019s home planet of delightful Minnesotan-accented beings who are all called Mort. There\u2019s the mining installation sporting an anxiety-ridden crew \u2014 understandable given that their drilling work constantly toes the line of planetary destruction.The adventure bounces between the two heroes at the player\u2019s whim, with Rivet exploring one part of the galaxy and Ratchet the other. They\u2019re both on a mission to fix the interdimensional mess left by fan favorite villain Dr. Nefarious, who dragged the heroes into a universe where he\u2019s already won and dominates as an emperor. The pacing of depicting two different heroes working separately toward the same goal feels like a practice run for the inevitable Spider-Man sequel with more than one web slinger, and \u201cRift Apart\u201d both displays and instills confidence in this balancing act. It\u2019s also important to note that playing as Rivet is no different from controlling Ratchet, which makes sense, considering the premise of alternate dimensions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClank and Ratchet\u2019s new AI companion Glitch each get gameplay elements of their own, per series tradition. Clank must fix the dimensional problem via \u201cLemmings\u201d-style puzzles, in which the player must lead all possibilities of Clank toward a single goal. Glitch is an endearing mess of self-consciousness, and her tiny little slice of the story became an inspiring tale of perseverance and determination.The score, by Devo founder and composer Mark Mothersbaugh, paints a sci-fi sonic palette for \u201cRift Apart\u201d that recalls the synth-driven brass of his \u201cThor: Ragnarok\u201d pieces. While longtime fans of the game will always miss original composer David Bergeaud\u2019s sample-heavy, breakbeat tracks, Mothersbaugh pays tribute to those older games by retaining much of the classic, radio-show vibe, complete with notes from the theremin, a 1928-patented instrument created by Russian inventor Leon Theremin. Those spooky notes, set against driving arpeggio melodies, highlight the uncertainty of space, a perfect mood-setter for a daring adventure across the galaxies.Video: Playing \"Mass Effect Legendary Edition\" with Shepard and Liara's voice actresses, Jennifer Hale and Ali HillisThe cast is as colorful as the stages they\u2019re set upon. Legendary voice talent Jennifer Hale (of \u201cMass Effect\u201d fame) is unrecognizable in the youthful, cautious Rivet. She leads a slate of other great performances that humanize this story about robots and space cats. Dr. Nefarious is also a comedic highlight, with long-running jokes about his out-of-character progressive work policies and his losing streak getting the incredible payoffs they deserve.And the game\u2019s accessibility features make this family-friendly story more playable across many skill levels, include a slow-motion option that makes its busy bullet hell easier to navigate. Slowing down the action gave me the opportunity to stare in awe at the work of the Insomniac developers, who clearly relished in their newfound technological freedom. The color, movement and textures shine in the game\u2019s 60 frames-per-second \u201cPerformance Ray Tracing\u201d mode, which will be available at launch. It\u2019s never been easier to appreciate the creativity behind the series\u2019 traditionally wacky weapons, including my personal favorites: a crackling energy beam and a Gatling gun that produces black holes.Without Rivet and her relationships to characters old and new (one of whom I won\u2019t spoil here) \u201cRift Apart\u201d probably wouldn\u2019t be as special. Game director Marcus Smith told me that the studio wanted to tell a story that was less timely (like the early game\u2019s criticisms of corporatism and pop culture) and more timeless. Lead writer Lauren Mee has spun a yarn that succeeds on those merits, with Rivet coming to grips with a lonely life. Life experiences inform how we bridge relationships and who we trust, but Rivet has grown up in a world full of lies and deceit. How do you work with anyone when almost everyone you\u2019ve ever met is a liar?As the world changes, so will the voice of the hero. Where does that leave Nolan North?Rivet\u2019s journey to finding faith in others hits its own, heart-rending rough patches. When she feels a sense of betrayal, you can tell she doesn\u2019t know what to do with the reopened wound, and it ends up hurting more people than just herself. Although some contrived urgency ensures all will be well in the end, these moments still pack a punch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe story of \u201cRift Apart\u201d hits at deep, unspoken insecurities. It will prick at them before reassuring you. It might remind you of your own evolving friendships. In a time when sneering, ironic detachment remains in fashion, Insomniac Games has created the rare modern masterpiece with no convoluted agenda, no subtext \u2014 just so many reasons to smile and laugh. This purity is felt through every pixel, every line reading and every planet. We\u2019re lucky to have it in \u201cRatchet and Clank: Rift Apart,\u201d the first great game of the new console generation.Read more:Activision, an indie developer and the battle over the \u2018Warzone\u2019 nameThe games that got us through the pandemic\u2018Biomutant\u2019 review: A cool world that needs better combat The game's purity comes across in every pixel, every line reading and every planet. \u2018Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart\u2019 is the best PlayStation exclusive since \u2018Bloodborne\u2019",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart\u2019 is the best PlayStation exclusive since \u2018Bloodborne\u2019 (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8489",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/ratchet-clank-rift-apart-review/",
        "text": "The best traits of modern Sony titles are manifest in \u201cRatchet and Clank: Rift Apart.\u201d It is the greatest exclusive title for a PlayStation platform since 2015\u2032s \u201cBloodborne.\u201d\u201cRift Apart\u201d calls to mind the believable and heart-wrenching interpersonal drama of \u201cThe Last of Us.\u201d There\u2019s the fast-paced, dodge-and-shoot rhythm and screen-filling particle effects of the other recent PS5 exclusive, \u201cReturnal.\u201d Ratchet\u2019s charisma and charm feel natural in ways that would shake \u201cUncharted\u201d hero Nathan Drake\u2019s confidence. And of course, developer Insomniac Games uses its experience from \u201cMarvel\u2019s Spider-Man\u201d to stage dazzling set-piece action like we\u2019ve never seen in the platformer genre. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSometimes, it even reminds me of the best games from other platforms and genres. As Ratchet, I visited the barren, mystical planet of Sevali and rocketed around it as I might across a map in \u201cDestiny.\u201d As Rivet, Ratchet\u2019s alternate dimension counterpart, I sailed through the skies and between enemy ship formations on a fire-breathing dragon, recalling the classic video game propensity to reimagine wyverns as fighter jets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEventually, the game breaks into all-out war, and it becomes easier to imagine a next-generation \u201cHalo\u201d game thanks to bewitching creature designs and lively animation popping through a mobbed, action-packed battlefield. As more dimensional rifts open to unleash armies upon you, I realized I was playing the inverse of the \u201cAvengers: Endgame\u201d finale. Instead of Thanos facing portals of Marvel\u2019s heroes, it\u2019s a pair of fuzzy space cats against a never-ending stream of alien hordes.This alone would make \u201cRift Apart,\u201d the first major game released exclusively for the modern console generation, easy to recommend to almost anyone. But everything, from the game\u2019s presentation to its writing, elevates it above even the series\u2019s past high watermarks.Let\u2019s start with the remarkable animation work. It\u2019s been an old aspiration for video games to surpass Pixar films in visual quality; the Ratchet and Clank series has quietly led that march. The original games, whose development team included PlayStation console architect Mark Cerny, were already the best showcases for those earlier consoles. On the PlayStation 5, Rivet\u2019s tight-lipped smile and reserved nods belie her reluctance to trust anyone else, and it\u2019s in sharp contrast to Ratchet\u2019s wide-mouthed, teeth-baring, all-too-eager disposition. The animation fulfills an actor\u2019s duty to communicate the unspoken.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFeature: With the PS5, Sony is betting that what\u2019s good for developers will be great for playersWhile Insomniac has always employed top-shelf animators in the games industry, \u201cRift Apart\u201d proves the studio stands at the vanguard of modern-day animation. They carry on a proud cartooning tradition of painting the rich tapestry of human expression as bold, bright faces on anything, be it a robot or a Lombax, the nearly extinct race of alien space cats of which Ratchet and Rivet remain the sole survivors.\u201cRift Apart\u201d is no profound innovation for its genre or medium. Rather, it\u2019s a refinement of the satisfying gameplay loop Insomniac created for the second sequel, \u201cGoing Commando.\u201d This is welcome news, since longtime fans consider Ratchet and Clank the best platformer series outside of Mario\u2019s galaxy.The dimensional rifts, the game\u2019s headlining feature, held much promise for novel gameplay possibilities, but sadly there\u2019s little that approaches the playfulness and creativity of even 2007\u2019s \u201cPortal.\u201d The rifts mostly operate as a way for the player to navigate maps, whether it\u2019s to swing to \u201copen rifts\u201d like they\u2019re grappling points, or warping you to a completely different location. Otherwise, it\u2019s an enchanting visual trick, made possible with the PlayStation 5\u2032s powerful hardware.What it lacks in gameplay innovation, it makes up for by being practically flawless. The controls were perfected in the PS2 days and remain perfect today. Upgrading the game\u2019s 18 diverse weapons by collecting literal millions of bolts is still a rewarding preoccupation. And each of the nine planets offers memorable, distinctive experiences and cultures. There\u2019s Rivet\u2019s home planet of delightful Minnesotan-accented beings who are all called Mort. There\u2019s the mining installation sporting an anxiety-ridden crew \u2014 understandable given that their drilling work constantly toes the line of planetary destruction.The adventure bounces between the two heroes at the player\u2019s whim, with Rivet exploring one part of the galaxy and Ratchet the other. They\u2019re both on a mission to fix the interdimensional mess left by fan favorite villain Dr. Nefarious, who dragged the heroes into a universe where he\u2019s already won and dominates as an emperor. The pacing of depicting two different heroes working separately toward the same goal feels like a practice run for the inevitable Spider-Man sequel with more than one web slinger, and \u201cRift Apart\u201d both displays and instills confidence in this balancing act. It\u2019s also important to note that playing as Rivet is no different from controlling Ratchet, which makes sense, considering the premise of alternate dimensions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementClank and Ratchet\u2019s new AI companion Glitch each get gameplay elements of their own, per series tradition. Clank must fix the dimensional problem via \u201cLemmings\u201d-style puzzles, in which the player must lead all possibilities of Clank toward a single goal. Glitch is an endearing mess of self-consciousness, and her tiny little slice of the story became an inspiring tale of perseverance and determination.The score, by Devo founder and composer Mark Mothersbaugh, paints a sci-fi sonic palette for \u201cRift Apart\u201d that recalls the synth-driven brass of his \u201cThor: Ragnarok\u201d pieces. While longtime fans of the game will always miss original composer David Bergeaud\u2019s sample-heavy, breakbeat tracks, Mothersbaugh pays tribute to those older games by retaining much of the classic, radio-show vibe, complete with notes from the theremin, a 1928-patented instrument created by Russian inventor Leon Theremin. Those spooky notes, set against driving arpeggio melodies, highlight the uncertainty of space, a perfect mood-setter for a daring adventure across the galaxies.Video: Playing \"Mass Effect Legendary Edition\" with Shepard and Liara's voice actresses, Jennifer Hale and Ali HillisThe cast is as colorful as the stages they\u2019re set upon. Legendary voice talent Jennifer Hale (of \u201cMass Effect\u201d fame) is unrecognizable in the youthful, cautious Rivet. She leads a slate of other great performances that humanize this story about robots and space cats. Dr. Nefarious is also a comedic highlight, with long-running jokes about his out-of-character progressive work policies and his losing streak getting the incredible payoffs they deserve.And the game\u2019s accessibility features make this family-friendly story more playable across many skill levels, include a slow-motion option that makes its busy bullet hell easier to navigate. Slowing down the action gave me the opportunity to stare in awe at the work of the Insomniac developers, who clearly relished in their newfound technological freedom. The color, movement and textures shine in the game\u2019s 60 frames-per-second \u201cPerformance Ray Tracing\u201d mode, which will be available at launch. It\u2019s never been easier to appreciate the creativity behind the series\u2019 traditionally wacky weapons, including my personal favorites: a crackling energy beam and a Gatling gun that produces black holes.Without Rivet and her relationships to characters old and new (one of whom I won\u2019t spoil here) \u201cRift Apart\u201d probably wouldn\u2019t be as special. Game director Marcus Smith told me that the studio wanted to tell a story that was less timely (like the early game\u2019s criticisms of corporatism and pop culture) and more timeless. Lead writer Lauren Mee has spun a yarn that succeeds on those merits, with Rivet coming to grips with a lonely life. Life experiences inform how we bridge relationships and who we trust, but Rivet has grown up in a world full of lies and deceit. How do you work with anyone when almost everyone you\u2019ve ever met is a liar?As the world changes, so will the voice of the hero. Where does that leave Nolan North?Rivet\u2019s journey to finding faith in others hits its own, heart-rending rough patches. When she feels a sense of betrayal, you can tell she doesn\u2019t know what to do with the reopened wound, and it ends up hurting more people than just herself. Although some contrived urgency ensures all will be well in the end, these moments still pack a punch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe story of \u201cRift Apart\u201d hits at deep, unspoken insecurities. It will prick at them before reassuring you. It might remind you of your own evolving friendships. In a time when sneering, ironic detachment remains in fashion, Insomniac Games has created the rare modern masterpiece with no convoluted agenda, no subtext \u2014 just so many reasons to smile and laugh. This purity is felt through every pixel, every line reading and every planet. We\u2019re lucky to have it in \u201cRatchet and Clank: Rift Apart,\u201d the first great game of the new console generation.Read more:Activision, an indie developer and the battle over the \u2018Warzone\u2019 nameThe games that got us through the pandemic\u2018Biomutant\u2019 review: A cool world that needs better combat The game's purity comes across in every pixel, every line reading and every planet. \u2018Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart\u2019 is the best PlayStation exclusive since \u2018Bloodborne\u2019",
        "author": "Gene Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Your Kid Likes Comparing Neptune to a Dust Mite (NYT: Well) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8490",
        "date": "2021-05-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/well/family/youtube-size-comparison-videos-kids.html",
        "text": "Bigger than a planet? Smaller than an atom? Size comparison videos are all the rage and may scratch a very old itch. Bigger than a planet? Smaller than an atom? Size comparison videos are all the rage and may scratch a very old itch. Not long ago, my 7-year-old son looked up from a picture he was drawing.",
        "author": "By Jenny Marder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Brazil Fires Burn World\u2019s Largest Tropical Wetlands at \u2018Unprecedented\u2019 Scale (NYT: World) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8491",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/world/americas/brazil-wetlands-fires-pantanal.html",
        "text": "The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet. The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet. PORTO JOFRE, Brazil \u2014 A record amount of the world\u2019s largest tropical wetland has been lost to the fires sweeping Brazil this year, scientists said, devastating a delicate ecosystem that is one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.",
        "author": "By Maria Magdalena Arr\u00e9llaga, Ernesto Londo\u00f1o and Let\u00edcia Casado"
    },
    {
        "title": "Brazil Fires Burn World\u2019s Largest Tropical Wetlands at \u2018Unprecedented\u2019 Scale (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8492",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/world/americas/brazil-wetlands-fires-pantanal.html",
        "text": "The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet. The blazes in Brazil, often intentionally set, have scorched a record-setting 10 percent of the Pantanal, one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet. PORTO JOFRE, Brazil \u2014 A record amount of the world\u2019s largest tropical wetland has been lost to the fires sweeping Brazil this year, scientists said, devastating a delicate ecosystem that is one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet.",
        "author": "By Maria Magdalena Arr\u00e9llaga, Ernesto Londo\u00f1o and Let\u00edcia Casado"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Fighting Plastic in \u2018Paradise Lost,\u2019 Sisters Take On Climate Change (NYT: World) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8493",
        "date": "2020-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/world/asia/bali-sisters-plastic-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Melati and Isabel Wijsen began campaigning to reduce plastic waste in Bali seven years ago. Now 19 and 17, they say the pandemic shows that stark measures to protect the planet are possible. Melati and Isabel Wijsen began campaigning to reduce plastic waste in Bali seven years ago. Now 19 and 17, they say the pandemic shows that stark measures to protect the planet are possible. SEMINYAK, Indonesia \u2014 It was trash season on Bali, the time of year when monsoon storms wash up tons of plastic debris onto the island\u2019s beaches. It was also the time for two teenage sisters, Melati and Isabel Wijsen, to organize their annual island cleanup.",
        "author": "By Richard C. Paddock and Nyimas Laula"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Fighting Plastic in \u2018Paradise Lost,\u2019 Sisters Take On Climate Change (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8494",
        "date": "2020-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/world/asia/bali-sisters-plastic-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Melati and Isabel Wijsen began campaigning to reduce plastic waste in Bali seven years ago. Now 19 and 17, they say the pandemic shows that stark measures to protect the planet are possible. Melati and Isabel Wijsen began campaigning to reduce plastic waste in Bali seven years ago. Now 19 and 17, they say the pandemic shows that stark measures to protect the planet are possible. SEMINYAK, Indonesia \u2014 It was trash season on Bali, the time of year when monsoon storms wash up tons of plastic debris onto the island\u2019s beaches. It was also the time for two teenage sisters, Melati and Isabel Wijsen, to organize their annual island cleanup.",
        "author": "By Richard C. Paddock and Nyimas Laula"
    },
    {
        "title": "Geoff Crowther, 77, Dies; Guided Travelers Looking to Get Lost (NYT: World) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8495",
        "date": "2021-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/world/geoff-crowther-77-dead.html",
        "text": "An early author for Lonely Planet, he tempted a generation of adventurers on journeys to exotic locales full of surprises. An early author for Lonely Planet, he tempted a generation of adventurers on journeys to exotic locales full of surprises. Geoff Crowther, whose advice in artisanal Baedekers and later as a pioneering author for the Lonely Planet backpackers\u2019 guidebooks lured intrepid travelers to offbeat destinations, died on April 13 in South East Queensland, Australia. He was 77.",
        "author": "By Sam Roberts"
    },
    {
        "title": "A World-Class World Expo (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8496",
        "date": "2021-10-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/world/world-expo-dubai.html",
        "text": "The event in Dubai dazzles with extraordinary architectural achievements and a focus on the future of the planet. The event in Dubai dazzles with extraordinary architectural achievements and a focus on the future of the planet. Since its inception, the World\u2019s Fair has been a way of telling a story through architecture, planning and experience. The first fair, set in London in 1851, was called the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. Its message \u2014 told through the soaring iron and glass Crystal Palace, as well as hundreds of exhibits \u2014 was about showcasing the rising industrial capabilities of the world. (And, more specifically, those of Britain.)",
        "author": "By Sam Lubell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Afghanistan became the graveyard of American hubris (WP: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8497",
        "date": "2021-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/14/afghanistan-graveyard-hubris/",
        "text": "You\u2019re reading an excerpt from the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest, including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere\u2019s power in cliches, even if they may not always be true. In recent years, myriad commentators have invoked the old saw about Afghanistan as a \u201cgraveyard of empires,\u201d a land where the designs of mighty powers fall into ruin. The expression is so oft-quoted that it\u2019s not even clear who first coined it. It conjures a tidy, if simplistic, history: Waves of hubristic foreign invaders found their comeuppance in the country\u2019s mountain redoubts and arid wastes, foiled by its rugged terrain, its inhospitable climes and its indomitable tribesmen. Plenty of empires thrived in what\u2019s now Afghanistan, but our modern memory is shaped by a narrative of disaster. Over the space of almost a century, the British launched three variously ill-fated incursions beyond the Khyber Pass, bloody expeditions and short-lived occupations mostly remembered outside the country, if at all, as colonial storybook adventures of the original \u201cGreat Game.\u201d The grueling, decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s became the miserable coda to the entire project of the U.S.S.R. \u2014 a quagmire, deepened by the supply of U.S. aid and weaponry to the Afghan mujahideen, that preceded the end of the Cold War.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then there\u2019s the experience of the United States. President Biden announced Wednesday that the United States would unconditionally withdraw its forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 \u2014 exactly 20 years after the events of 9/11, hatched by al-Qaeda on Afghan soil, provoked a U.S. invasion to topple the then-ruling Taliban. The initial punitive mission might have succeeded, but it turned into America\u2019s longest war, a Sisyphean exercise in counterinsurgency and state-building that has seen more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers die, more than 20,000 wounded in action and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians perish.\u201cWe cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create ideal conditions for our withdrawal, and expecting a different result,\u201d Biden said. \u201cI am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth.\u201dI am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan.I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth. pic.twitter.com/OpZK1Na5KP\u2014 President Biden (@POTUS) April 14, 2021\n\nWhat comes next is bound to be tricky. In his remarks, Biden said he was moving ahead with the basic outline of an agreement secured by then-President Donald Trump after months of negotiations with the Taliban, though Trump had set the withdrawal date for May 1. The Taliban still controls swaths of Afghan territory and may yet launch a new spring offensive in the coming weeks, even as Western and regional officials pin their hopes on a slow-moving peace process between the militants and the Afghan government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe Taliban \u2014 once derided as an implacable terrorist threat that needed to be crushed \u2014 will almost certainly seize a far greater role in the future Afghan government than U.S. officials were willing to contemplate when the war started,\u201d wrote my colleague Greg Jaffe. \u201cSome analysts worry that the U.S. exit could precipitate the collapse of the struggling Afghan army and a worsening of the country\u2019s civil war as various warlords fight for power. And Afghan civilians, particularly women who enjoyed new rights and freedoms after the Taliban\u2019s initial defeat in 2001, will probably suffer immensely.\u201dIn Washington, there are many skeptics. Hawkish Republicans insisted that Biden was effectively ceding Afghanistan back to extremist elements and paving the way for a new 9/11. In a conference call, David Petraeus, former commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said he doubted the Biden administration\u2019s ability to check the Taliban\u2019s advance without a troop presence in the country. \u201cI\u2019m really afraid that we\u2019re going to look back two years from now and regret the decision and just wonder if whether we might not have sought to manage it with a modest, sustainable, sustained commitment,\u201d he said.The Washington Post\u2019s editorial board warned that, if the Biden administration\u2019s assessments prove wrong \u2014 and the Taliban doesn\u2019t moderate its fundamentalist views or participate in a good-faith political transition \u2014 it \u201cmay simply result in the restoration of the 2001 status quo, including terrorist bases that could force a renewed U.S.\u2009intervention.\u201dExtraordinary levels of harm inflicted on civilians in #Afghanistan conflict continues unabated, says new UN report issued today. Urgent action required by all parties to stop the violence. Read report https://t.co/ks9tJ9Ct8N pic.twitter.com/0T0VxMf85Z\u2014 UNAMA News (@UNAMAnews) April 14, 2021\n\nThe president responded to this line of argument. \u201cThere are many who loudly insist that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage,\u201d Biden said during his Wednesday speech, in which he emphasized the need for the country to pivot and face new challenges, from China to cyberwarfare to reckoning with the pandemic. \u201cWe gave that argument a decade. It\u2019s never proved effective. \u2026 Our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm\u2019s way.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a mammoth 2019 Washington Post investigation into internal government documents exposed, U.S. policymakers and military officials for years recognized the futility of some of their efforts in Afghanistan as the militant threat metastasized and U.S. aid cultivated whole economies built on government corruption. But the need to both justify the American presence in the country and also assert that the United States was winning \u2014 or could, ultimately, win \u2014 in Afghanistan led officials to \u201cdeliberately mislead the public,\u201d my colleagues concluded.The lessons of the past 20 years are still being measured. Some suggest a political solution with the Taliban ought to have been secured far earlier. \u201cNegotiate early and negotiate often,\u201d Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told my colleagues. \u201cYou don\u2019t win a war by destroying an opposing army and occupying their capital. You win by making possible a settlement that was not possible before the conflict started.\u201dWill Ruger, Trump\u2019s nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan, told Today\u2019s WorldView that one of the legacies of the war ought to be \u201cgreater humility about what the best military on the planet can achieve and more thoughtfulness about how we deploy it.\u201d Speaking during a conference call held by the Defense Priorities think tank, he added that Biden and future American leaders may still struggle with \u201cright-sizing American grand strategy for the challenges ahead of us.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAfter 9/11, the United States set out to prove that it was the indispensable nation \u2014 that it could not merely address a security threat but use spectacular power to transform other countries,\u201d Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that advocates foreign policy restraint, told Today\u2019s WorldView.Biden may not even believe this, but \u201chis action implies that the United States is a nation among nations, with limited interests and responsibilities,\u201d Wertheim added. \u201cIn that recognition lies the start of a better foreign policy for the American people and the world. Afghanistan is not the graveyard of the American empire \u2014 far from it. But it may be the graveyard of America\u2019s pretensions to global indispensability.\u201dRead more:Israel plays spoiler in Biden\u2019s Iran gambitTwo Andean elections reflect an age of global discontentShould the U.S. boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in China? One of the legacies of the Afghanistan war ought to be \u201cgreater humility about what the best military on the planet can achieve and more thoughtfulness about how we deploy it.\u201d Afghanistan became the graveyard of American hubris",
        "author": "Ishaan Tharoor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | Afghanistan became the graveyard of American hubris (WP: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8498",
        "date": "2021-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/14/afghanistan-graveyard-hubris/",
        "text": "You\u2019re reading an excerpt from the Today\u2019s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest, including news from around the globe, interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThere\u2019s power in cliches, even if they may not always be true. In recent years, myriad commentators have invoked the old saw about Afghanistan as a \u201cgraveyard of empires,\u201d a land where the designs of mighty powers fall into ruin. The expression is so oft-quoted that it\u2019s not even clear who first coined it. It conjures a tidy, if simplistic, history: Waves of hubristic foreign invaders found their comeuppance in the country\u2019s mountain redoubts and arid wastes, foiled by its rugged terrain, its inhospitable climes and its indomitable tribesmen. Plenty of empires thrived in what\u2019s now Afghanistan, but our modern memory is shaped by a narrative of disaster. Over the space of almost a century, the British launched three variously ill-fated incursions beyond the Khyber Pass, bloody expeditions and short-lived occupations mostly remembered outside the country, if at all, as colonial storybook adventures of the original \u201cGreat Game.\u201d The grueling, decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s became the miserable coda to the entire project of the U.S.S.R. \u2014 a quagmire, deepened by the supply of U.S. aid and weaponry to the Afghan mujahideen, that preceded the end of the Cold War.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd then there\u2019s the experience of the United States. President Biden announced Wednesday that the United States would unconditionally withdraw its forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 \u2014 exactly 20 years after the events of 9/11, hatched by al-Qaeda on Afghan soil, provoked a U.S. invasion to topple the then-ruling Taliban. The initial punitive mission might have succeeded, but it turned into America\u2019s longest war, a Sisyphean exercise in counterinsurgency and state-building that has seen more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers die, more than 20,000 wounded in action and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians perish.\u201cWe cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create ideal conditions for our withdrawal, and expecting a different result,\u201d Biden said. \u201cI am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth.\u201dI am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan.I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth. pic.twitter.com/OpZK1Na5KP\u2014 President Biden (@POTUS) April 14, 2021\n\nWhat comes next is bound to be tricky. In his remarks, Biden said he was moving ahead with the basic outline of an agreement secured by then-President Donald Trump after months of negotiations with the Taliban, though Trump had set the withdrawal date for May 1. The Taliban still controls swaths of Afghan territory and may yet launch a new spring offensive in the coming weeks, even as Western and regional officials pin their hopes on a slow-moving peace process between the militants and the Afghan government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe Taliban \u2014 once derided as an implacable terrorist threat that needed to be crushed \u2014 will almost certainly seize a far greater role in the future Afghan government than U.S. officials were willing to contemplate when the war started,\u201d wrote my colleague Greg Jaffe. \u201cSome analysts worry that the U.S. exit could precipitate the collapse of the struggling Afghan army and a worsening of the country\u2019s civil war as various warlords fight for power. And Afghan civilians, particularly women who enjoyed new rights and freedoms after the Taliban\u2019s initial defeat in 2001, will probably suffer immensely.\u201dIn Washington, there are many skeptics. Hawkish Republicans insisted that Biden was effectively ceding Afghanistan back to extremist elements and paving the way for a new 9/11. In a conference call, David Petraeus, former commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said he doubted the Biden administration\u2019s ability to check the Taliban\u2019s advance without a troop presence in the country. \u201cI\u2019m really afraid that we\u2019re going to look back two years from now and regret the decision and just wonder if whether we might not have sought to manage it with a modest, sustainable, sustained commitment,\u201d he said.The Washington Post\u2019s editorial board warned that, if the Biden administration\u2019s assessments prove wrong \u2014 and the Taliban doesn\u2019t moderate its fundamentalist views or participate in a good-faith political transition \u2014 it \u201cmay simply result in the restoration of the 2001 status quo, including terrorist bases that could force a renewed U.S.\u2009intervention.\u201dExtraordinary levels of harm inflicted on civilians in #Afghanistan conflict continues unabated, says new UN report issued today. Urgent action required by all parties to stop the violence. Read report https://t.co/ks9tJ9Ct8N pic.twitter.com/0T0VxMf85Z\u2014 UNAMA News (@UNAMAnews) April 14, 2021\n\nThe president responded to this line of argument. \u201cThere are many who loudly insist that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage,\u201d Biden said during his Wednesday speech, in which he emphasized the need for the country to pivot and face new challenges, from China to cyberwarfare to reckoning with the pandemic. \u201cWe gave that argument a decade. It\u2019s never proved effective. \u2026 Our diplomacy does not hinge on having boots in harm\u2019s way.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs a mammoth 2019 Washington Post investigation into internal government documents exposed, U.S. policymakers and military officials for years recognized the futility of some of their efforts in Afghanistan as the militant threat metastasized and U.S. aid cultivated whole economies built on government corruption. But the need to both justify the American presence in the country and also assert that the United States was winning \u2014 or could, ultimately, win \u2014 in Afghanistan led officials to \u201cdeliberately mislead the public,\u201d my colleagues concluded.The lessons of the past 20 years are still being measured. Some suggest a political solution with the Taliban ought to have been secured far earlier. \u201cNegotiate early and negotiate often,\u201d Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told my colleagues. \u201cYou don\u2019t win a war by destroying an opposing army and occupying their capital. You win by making possible a settlement that was not possible before the conflict started.\u201dWill Ruger, Trump\u2019s nominee for ambassador to Afghanistan, told Today\u2019s WorldView that one of the legacies of the war ought to be \u201cgreater humility about what the best military on the planet can achieve and more thoughtfulness about how we deploy it.\u201d Speaking during a conference call held by the Defense Priorities think tank, he added that Biden and future American leaders may still struggle with \u201cright-sizing American grand strategy for the challenges ahead of us.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAfter 9/11, the United States set out to prove that it was the indispensable nation \u2014 that it could not merely address a security threat but use spectacular power to transform other countries,\u201d Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank that advocates foreign policy restraint, told Today\u2019s WorldView.Biden may not even believe this, but \u201chis action implies that the United States is a nation among nations, with limited interests and responsibilities,\u201d Wertheim added. \u201cIn that recognition lies the start of a better foreign policy for the American people and the world. Afghanistan is not the graveyard of the American empire \u2014 far from it. But it may be the graveyard of America\u2019s pretensions to global indispensability.\u201dRead more:Israel plays spoiler in Biden\u2019s Iran gambitTwo Andean elections reflect an age of global discontentShould the U.S. boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in China? One of the legacies of the Afghanistan war ought to be \u201cgreater humility about what the best military on the planet can achieve and more thoughtfulness about how we deploy it.\u201d Afghanistan became the graveyard of American hubris",
        "author": "Ishaan Tharoor"
    },
    {
        "title": "While Houston Has Problems, a Touchdown on Mars (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8499",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/while-houston-has-problems-a-touchdown-on-mars-11613689099?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=28",
        "text": "The rugged can-do Texas culture admired around the world is sadly not expressed in the architecture of its power market, which has for years featured the Enron-promoted model of competition. It is not market competition but rather government-managed competition in which regulators tell various private entities how they will interact with the nonprofit operator of the grid. Sadly for Texas residents, the attorneys, bureaucrats and politicians who created and oversee this system turned out to be all hat and no baseload.\nBut far above Texas today there\u2019s a stirring example of politicians and bureaucrats staying out of the way of engineers at least enough to enable another fascinating achievement.\n\n\n\n\nThe Journal\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz reports:\n\n\nNow the search for life on Mars begins in earnest. After a seven-month, 292-million-mile journey, NASA\u2019s fastest and best-equipped rover ever\u2014Perseverance\u2014touched down safely Thursday on the red planet, NASA officials said... Bristling with 23 cameras, sensors, a laser and a drill-equipped robotic arm, Perseverance will spend the next two years prospecting for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life. \u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: Whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission... Though it is now a barren place of icy dunes, dust devils, dead volcanoes and subzero winds, scientists believe Mars in its remote past may have been a comparatively lush, warm world\u2014one suitable for the chemistry of life. CNN described the challenge overcome today by the Perseverance team:\nNASA engineers refer to the\u201c seven minutes of terror\u201d when landing on Mars because the rover essentially lands itself \u2014 and NASA can\u2019t do anything to help if something goes wrong because of a one-way 11-minute time delay. It takes seven minutes for the rover, which enters the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour, to hurtle down to the surface. Parachutes and retrorockets help slow it down to zero mph for a... safe and soft landing. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most critical and dangerous part of the mission, according to Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing lead at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With this part of the mission accomplished, the possibilities are exciting. The SUV-sized Perseverance landed in a lake bed called the Jezero Crater. Mike Wall writes at Space.com:\nThe crater, which lies about 18 degrees north of the Martian equator, hosted a lake the size of Lake Tahoe long ago and also sports an ancient river delta. In addition, Mars orbiters have spied on Jezero\u2019s floor clay minerals, which form in the presence of liquid water. Perseverance will scrutinize Martian dirt and rock with a variety of high-tech science gear, including multiple spectrometers, high-resolution cameras and ground-penetrating radar. One of the rover\u2019s seven instruments, called SuperCam, will zap rocks with a laser and gauge the composition of the resulting vapor. ***\nMeanwhile down in Houston, residents hoping to return to their warm everyday lives from a punishing week of icy winds must now attempt to answer a question that has eluded humanity for much of the last week: Does intelligent life exist at the Public Utility Commission?\n***\nMr. Freeman is the co-author of \u201cThe Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.\u201d\n***\nFollow James Freeman on Twitter and Parler.\nSubscribe to the Best of the Web email.\nTo suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.\n(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Jacqueline Tillman Harty.)\n*** American engineering lands another rover on the red planet. Imagine what it could do for Texas. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "While Houston Has Problems, a Touchdown on Mars (WSJ: Best of the Web) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8500",
        "date": "2021-02-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/while-houston-has-problems-a-touchdown-on-mars-11613689099?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=34",
        "text": "The rugged can-do Texas culture admired around the world is sadly not expressed in the architecture of its power market, which has for years featured the Enron-promoted model of competition. It is not market competition but rather government-managed competition in which regulators tell various private entities how they will interact with the nonprofit operator of the grid. Sadly for Texas residents, the attorneys, bureaucrats and politicians who created and oversee this system turned out to be all hat and no baseload.\nBut far above Texas today there\u2019s a stirring example of politicians and bureaucrats staying out of the way of engineers at least enough to enable another fascinating achievement.\nThe Journal\u2019s Robert Lee Hotz reports:\n\n\nNow the search for life on Mars begins in earnest. After a seven-month, 292-million-mile journey, NASA\u2019s fastest and best-equipped rover ever\u2014Perseverance\u2014touched down safely Thursday on the red planet, NASA officials said... Bristling with 23 cameras, sensors, a laser and a drill-equipped robotic arm, Perseverance will spend the next two years prospecting for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life. \u201cIt will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: Whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,\u201d Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency\u2019s science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission... Though it is now a barren place of icy dunes, dust devils, dead volcanoes and subzero winds, scientists believe Mars in its remote past may have been a comparatively lush, warm world\u2014one suitable for the chemistry of life. CNN described the challenge overcome today by the Perseverance team:\nNASA engineers refer to the\u201c seven minutes of terror\u201d when landing on Mars because the rover essentially lands itself \u2014 and NASA can\u2019t do anything to help if something goes wrong because of a one-way 11-minute time delay. It takes seven minutes for the rover, which enters the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour, to hurtle down to the surface. Parachutes and retrorockets help slow it down to zero mph for a... safe and soft landing. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most critical and dangerous part of the mission, according to Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing lead at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With this part of the mission accomplished, the possibilities are exciting. The SUV-sized Perseverance landed in a lake bed called the Jezero Crater. Mike Wall writes at Space.com:\nThe crater, which lies about 18 degrees north of the Martian equator, hosted a lake the size of Lake Tahoe long ago and also sports an ancient river delta. In addition, Mars orbiters have spied on Jezero\u2019s floor clay minerals, which form in the presence of liquid water. Perseverance will scrutinize Martian dirt and rock with a variety of high-tech science gear, including multiple spectrometers, high-resolution cameras and ground-penetrating radar. One of the rover\u2019s seven instruments, called SuperCam, will zap rocks with a laser and gauge the composition of the resulting vapor. ***\nMeanwhile down in Houston, residents hoping to return to their warm everyday lives from a punishing week of icy winds must now attempt to answer a question that has eluded humanity for much of the last week: Does intelligent life exist at the Public Utility Commission?\n***\nMr. Freeman is the co-author of \u201cThe Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.\u201d\n***\nFollow James Freeman on Twitter and Parler.\nSubscribe to the Best of the Web email.\nTo suggest items, please email best@wsj.com.\n(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Jacqueline Tillman Harty.)\n*** American engineering lands another rover on the red planet. Imagine what it could do for Texas. ",
        "author": "James Freeman"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Family of Origin\u2019 Review: When Did It All Go Wrong? (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8501",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/family-of-origin-review-when-did-it-all-go-wrong-11563572565?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=56",
        "text": "\u201cPeople came to Watch Landing to forget things,\u201d Ms. Hauser begins. \u201cThey gave themselves over to its Gulf Coast fug, its boardwalk amble, its funnel-cake smell, its open-carry vodka . . . because they were on vacation.\u201d Most of the visitors aim to \u201cforget climate change, forget police brutality, forget opioids, forget refugees, forget their inboxes.\u201d Not Elsa and Nolan Grey, however, who \u201cmight have been happier if they could be forgetful, or dead,\u201d but are instead \u201cscab-pickers and dead-horse-beaters and wallowers of the first order.\u201d And chief among their cherished grudges is Dr. Ian Grey, their father, who recently drowned near Leap\u2019s Island, an hour\u2019s boat ride south of Watch Landing.\n\n\nFamily of OriginBy C.J. Hauser\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDoubleday, 287 pages, $26.95\n\n\nShimmering yet precise, Ms. Hauser\u2019s opening scene conjures all at once place and time, mood and character. Here is 35-year-old Elsa, an elementary-school teacher living with her mother in Minnesota, and her half-brother, Nolan, six years younger, who works in publicity for the San Francisco Giants. The two meet this time, as always, under the storm cloud of their shared history, its rumblings invariably caused by Elsa, who believes that \u201cso long as you ran headlong into trouble, it could never take you by surprise.\u201d In contrast, Nolan, the coddled child of Ian\u2019s second marriage, would rather avoid reality. And now Ian\u2019s possible suicide forces both Greys to spend a week together on an island rarely visited \u201cbecause the people who lived there were all crazy.\u201d The islanders call themselves Reversalists and study ducks. Specifically \u201cthe world\u2019s smallest known sea duck, the undowny bufflehead,\u201d whose apparently porous feathers support \u201cthe Reversalists\u2019 core belief: that evolution had begun to run backward.\u201d The undowny buffleheads nest only on Leap\u2019s Island, long owned by one Mitchell Townes, whose parents founded the \u201cLeap-Backers\u201d commune there in 1968 in an attempt to return to \u201cidyllic preindustrial times.\u201d By rejecting \u201cthe sloppy spiritual nature of his childhood and supplanting it with sloppy science,\u201d Mitchell has attracted a handful of disaffected academics, among them the late Ian Grey, whose children, increasingly mystified by his death, wonder what the islanders are hiding.\nOn this wonderfully cockeyed armature Ms. Hauser assembles the lives of the Greys. From the \u201cFirst Moment of Badness\u201d (toddler Nolan abandoned in a well) to this island reunion, through parental deceit and a pivotal transgression (Elsa, 20; Nolan, 14; you guessed it), a family emerges in vivid flashbacks. \u201cEven now, the grown Grey children had the habit of counting their years backward, searching for a time when they\u2019d been happy,\u201d Ms. Hauser observes. \u201cDetermining the moment wouldn\u2019t make them happy again,\u201d of course, \u201cbut at least then they\u2019d know who to blame\u201d for their lives going wrong. And where better to probe old wounds than among students of evolutionary doom? \u201cNone of us would be on this island if we had the nerve to just kill ourselves,\u201d Esther the ornithologist reassures Elsa and Nolan, who, in a pleasing twist, uncover evidence not of Ian\u2019s despair but of his obsession with \u201cDuck Twelve,\u201d an inexplicably playful bufflehead. \u201cThe duck has uncommonly wide feet,\u201d Ian\u2019s field journal reveals, \u201cwhich enable it to swim not faster, but in greater bursts of power, so the effect of this specimen is one of undecided motivation but great conviction.\u201d Could it be . . . happy? (\u201cHow is a duck happy?\u201d Nolan asks. \u201cHow is anyone?\u201d Elsa replies.)\n\nSuch zaniness is a far cry from the straightforward charm of Ms. Hauser\u2019s first novel, \u201cThe From-Aways\u201d (2014), which depicted coastal Maine through the eyes of two newcomers hired as reporters for a local newspaper. But the same deadpan wit and deft portraiture that elevated \u201cThe From-Aways\u201d above the summer-reading throng is recognizable here. There is also the perennial theme of wayward adults seeking vanished parents, one that Ms. Hauser reinvigorates by exposing character and plot elliptically, in scenes that could stand alone as short stories and yet mysteriously coalesce, as memories do, to summon the indelible past. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIn one of the finest vignettes, 7-year-old Nolan watches his namesake,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nolan Ryan,\n\n\n\n hitting\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robin Ventura\n\n\n\n with a pitch and then, in the ensuing clinch, repeatedly punching him. The television announcers dismiss the fight as just another episode in the White Sox-Rangers rivalry, but, young Nolan realizes, \u201cno amount of history could excuse the fact that Ryan would rather punch some young player in the face than play baseball.\u201d \u201cIf such a thing as the Moment It All Went Wrong did exist,\u201d Nolan will later reflect, \u201cit was a moment you made yourself. . . . It was the moment you decided to give up and spend t C.J. Hauser\u2019s latest work may be the most oddly enticing novel you will read this year, no matter how you feel about ducks, baseball, evolution, the state of our planet or the fate of our run-amok species. ",
        "author": "Anna Mundow"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Family of Origin\u2019 Review: When Did It All Go Wrong? (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8502",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/family-of-origin-review-when-did-it-all-go-wrong-11563572565?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=58",
        "text": "\u201cPeople came to Watch Landing to forget things,\u201d Ms. Hauser begins. \u201cThey gave themselves over to its Gulf Coast fug, its boardwalk amble, its funnel-cake smell, its open-carry vodka . . . because they were on vacation.\u201d Most of the visitors aim to \u201cforget climate change, forget police brutality, forget opioids, forget refugees, forget their inboxes.\u201d Not Elsa and Nolan Grey, however, who \u201cmight have been happier if they could be forgetful, or dead,\u201d but are instead \u201cscab-pickers and dead-horse-beaters and wallowers of the first order.\u201d And chief among their cherished grudges is Dr. Ian Grey, their father, who recently drowned near Leap\u2019s Island, an hour\u2019s boat ride south of Watch Landing.\n\n\nFamily of OriginBy C.J. Hauser\n\t\t\n\t\t\tDoubleday, 287 pages, $26.95\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShimmering yet precise, Ms. Hauser\u2019s opening scene conjures all at once place and time, mood and character. Here is 35-year-old Elsa, an elementary-school teacher living with her mother in Minnesota, and her half-brother, Nolan, six years younger, who works in publicity for the San Francisco Giants. The two meet this time, as always, under the storm cloud of their shared history, its rumblings invariably caused by Elsa, who believes that \u201cso long as you ran headlong into trouble, it could never take you by surprise.\u201d In contrast, Nolan, the coddled child of Ian\u2019s second marriage, would rather avoid reality. And now Ian\u2019s possible suicide forces both Greys to spend a week together on an island rarely visited \u201cbecause the people who lived there were all crazy.\u201d The islanders call themselves Reversalists and study ducks. Specifically \u201cthe world\u2019s smallest known sea duck, the undowny bufflehead,\u201d whose apparently porous feathers support \u201cthe Reversalists\u2019 core belief: that evolution had begun to run backward.\u201d The undowny buffleheads nest only on Leap\u2019s Island, long owned by one Mitchell Townes, whose parents founded the \u201cLeap-Backers\u201d commune there in 1968 in an attempt to return to \u201cidyllic preindustrial times.\u201d By rejecting \u201cthe sloppy spiritual nature of his childhood and supplanting it with sloppy science,\u201d Mitchell has attracted a handful of disaffected academics, among them the late Ian Grey, whose children, increasingly mystified by his death, wonder what the islanders are hiding.\nOn this wonderfully cockeyed armature Ms. Hauser assembles the lives of the Greys. From the \u201cFirst Moment of Badness\u201d (toddler Nolan abandoned in a well) to this island reunion, through parental deceit and a pivotal transgression (Elsa, 20; Nolan, 14; you guessed it), a family emerges in vivid flashbacks. \u201cEven now, the grown Grey children had the habit of counting their years backward, searching for a time when they\u2019d been happy,\u201d Ms. Hauser observes. \u201cDetermining the moment wouldn\u2019t make them happy again,\u201d of course, \u201cbut at least then they\u2019d know who to blame\u201d for their lives going wrong. And where better to probe old wounds than among students of evolutionary doom? \u201cNone of us would be on this island if we had the nerve to just kill ourselves,\u201d Esther the ornithologist reassures Elsa and Nolan, who, in a pleasing twist, uncover evidence not of Ian\u2019s despair but of his obsession with \u201cDuck Twelve,\u201d an inexplicably playful bufflehead. \u201cThe duck has uncommonly wide feet,\u201d Ian\u2019s field journal reveals, \u201cwhich enable it to swim not faster, but in greater bursts of power, so the effect of this specimen is one of undecided motivation but great conviction.\u201d Could it be . . . happy? (\u201cHow is a duck happy?\u201d Nolan asks. \u201cHow is anyone?\u201d Elsa replies.)\n\nSuch zaniness is a far cry from the straightforward charm of Ms. Hauser\u2019s first novel, \u201cThe From-Aways\u201d (2014), which depicted coastal Maine through the eyes of two newcomers hired as reporters for a local newspaper. But the same deadpan wit and deft portraiture that elevated \u201cThe From-Aways\u201d above the summer-reading throng is recognizable here. There is also the perennial theme of wayward adults seeking vanished parents, one that Ms. Hauser reinvigorates by exposing character and plot elliptically, in scenes that could stand alone as short stories and yet mysteriously coalesce, as memories do, to summon the indelible past. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up Books Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nIn one of the finest vignettes, 7-year-old Nolan watches his namesake,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Nolan Ryan,\n\n\n\n hitting\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robin Ventura\n\n\n\n with a pitch and then, in the ensuing clinch, repeatedly punching him. The television announcers dismiss the fight as just another episode in the White Sox-Rangers rivalry, but, young Nolan realizes, \u201cno amount of history could excuse the fact that Ryan would rather punch some young player in the face than play baseball.\u201d \u201cIf such a thing as the Moment It All Went Wrong did exist,\u201d Nolan will later reflect, \u201cit was a moment you made yourself. . . . It was the moment you decided to give up and spend the rest of your life explaining why you were giving up, instead of just playing the goddamn game.\u201d Perfect in itself, the vignette is also an inspired evocation of childhood, a time to which Ms. Hauser repeatedly transports us. \nLooping back and forth, the novel\u2019s plot advances stealthily while the Greys, tracking their dead father, gradually comprehend the island\u2019s individual crackpots and their collective predicament. \u201cElsa had expected the Reversalists to be crazy,\u201d she admits, \u201cbut instead . . . found them willfully alone, playing out their misery in weird scientific pageants without audience.\u201d Yet Esther, Mitchell and their colleagues materialize here not simply as types but as distinct characters, each with a life in tow. As, indeed, does Elsa\u2019s mother, Ingrid, a hospice nurse in Minnesota and a powerful antidote to the Grey family\u2019s histrionics. When, for example, Elsa announces that Mars Origins has accepted her for a manned expedition to the planet (one-way ticket only), Ingrid responds, \u201cIf you were going to kill yourself, I\u2019d think you\u2019d have the good sense to jump off a cliff or take pills . . . and not bring the whole US space community into it.\u201d And there you have Ms. Hauser\u2019s comic gift\u2014for launching the outlandish and simultaneously shooting it down. In this eccentric portrait of dented hearts and wacko science, her aim is unerring. \n\u2014Ms. Mundow is a writer living in central Massachusetts. C.J. Hauser\u2019s latest work may be the most oddly enticing novel you will read this year, no matter how you feel about ducks, baseball, evolution, the state of our planet or the fate of our run-amok species. ",
        "author": "Anna Mundow"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Bezos Can Influence Climate (WSJ: Business World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8503",
        "date": "2020-02-25",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-bezos-can-influence-climate-11582675904?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=48",
        "text": "Based on the best science, or at least the most officially condoned, Mr. Bezos would have only the vaguest idea what he was getting for his money. That\u2019s because scientists can estimate only within a giant, squishy margin of error how much warming might be avoided from a given cut in emissions. Plus the atmosphere is just so big: If he spent the entire sum to take 10 million cars off the road (at $1,000 a pop) and somehow make sure they weren\u2019t replaced, the effect on future warming would be practically zero. \nIn more indirect fashion, maybe Mr. Bezos could use his money to change the public appetite for climate policy the way\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mike Bloomberg\n\n\n\n has used his millions to change (briefly) its appetite for him as president. But the risk of this approach is one Mr. Bloomberg is now discovering: Mr. Bloomberg\u2019s spending is suddenly having the opposite of the desired effect on Democratic politics and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n re-election chances.\n\n\n\n\nSince Mr. Bezos\u2019 motive is partly to improve his reputation and his company\u2019s, he would likely direct his money to the existing climate crowd. That is, to groups and politicians whose outstanding feature is their complete failure, over many decades, to deliver meaningful climate policy. In politics, when you fail so big for so long, it isn\u2019t merely because your efforts are unproductive but because they are counterproductive, driving away the public, turning potential allies into enemies.\n\n\nMr. Bezos would have to be willing to court unpopularity if he really wanted to revolutionize climate advocacy. He could tell the truth: If the current path of economic growth and technological change is maintained, future emissions will be about half the worst-case scenarios constantly sold to the public. \nThis path could be tilted in the direction of even less CO2 with public policy but not the kind of public policy the green left promotes. The policy has to be enacted\u2014which the Green New Deal is decidedly not meant to be. Democrats invest their rhetorical dollars in things that aren\u2019t enactable for a reason. They preen and vilify though preening and vilifying are exactly the opposite of how you move legislation in a democracy. They care less about advancing a policy ball than about fostering a kind of green tribalism that they can be in charge of.\nMr. Bezos could steer clear of this by quietly focusing on safe nuclear technology except that Bill Gates is already there and has been working this vein for decades. He might work on tax reform, to advance the cause of a revenue-neutral carbon tax\u2014but would find himself on the wrong side of the climate left who have lately started indicting a carbon tax as a \u201cright wing\u201d plot to short-circuit the full-on socialist revolution the climate emergency requires.\nThere\u2019s one way Mr. Bezos might make a real splash and possibly even a difference. With his Blue Origin venture he adopted a \u201cjust do it\u201d attitude toward spaceflight. Mr. Bezos could adopt the same \u201cjust do it\u201d approach to testing the hypothesis that warming could be halted by using aircraft to distribute inert aerosols in the upper atmosphere to block a small amount of sunlight reaching the earth. A highly reputable climate warrior, New York University\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gernot Wagner,\n\n\n\n estimates that around $2 billion a year would be enough to offset the warming seen so far. Other researchers have produced similar estimates.\nMany in the peanut gallery would have aneurysms. Mr. Bezos would be accused of arrogantly deciding by himself what the planet\u2019s temperature should be. Green groups would become apoplectic and then only more apoplectic when reminded that they\u2019ve been the ones insisting that global warming is a dire emergency in need of immediate action.\nIt\u2019s impossible to know where the discussion might lead but any outcome cannot fail to be an improvement over today\u2019s debate. Mr. Bezos\u2019 experiment would be a lot more targeted and infinitely more controllable than the numerous uncontrolled experiments now under way concerning a human impact on the environment. The public would learn something of practical value in evaluating climate risk. For the 35 years that global warming has been a front-page issue, demographic change, industrial development and technological progress have been the factors shaping the path of emissions. Politics and policy, for the billions of dollars wasted on them, have had no significant effect.\nThe debate, which has cost America and the world plenty, might as well have not taken place. If Mr. Bezos has more of the same in mind, his money would be better spent somewhere else. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Peterson and Dan Henninger. Image: Aleksey Nikolskyi/Getty Images His \u2018just do it\u2019 approach to space travel can also be used to cool the planet. ",
        "author": "Holman W. Jenkins, Jr."
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth Isn\u2019t as Special as Astronomers (and Other Earthlings) Think (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8504",
        "date": "2017-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/earth-isnt-as-special-as-astronomers-and-other-earthlings-think-1492810515?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=96",
        "text": "Over the past quarter-century, scientists have identified thousands of planets orbiting stars other than the sun, confirming that our solar system is merely one among tens of billions or more in the Milky Way galaxy alone. The diversity of planets and planetary systems they have uncovered is truly astounding: speedy gas giants in star-hugging orbits, Tatooine-like worlds with double sunsets, rocky globes both scorched and frozen. \n\n\n\n\nYet we continue to obsess over finding an identical twin of our planet circling an identical twin of our sun. The reasoning is that such a setting would offer the best odds of harboring life. Some have called this idealized world Earth 2.0; others have dubbed it Mirror Earth. \n\n\nLast August, when evidence of a planet around Proxima Centauri, the sun\u2019s nearest stellar neighbor, came to light, both the researchers themselves and the media reports emphasized its \u201cEarthlike\u201d characteristics. Some glossed over glaring differences between that world and ours. Proxima b, as the planet was dubbed, orbits an active red dwarf star, much less massive than the sun and much more prone to releasing hazardous flares. With a year that is only 11 Earth-days long, Proxima b is almost certainly tidally locked, with one hemisphere baked in constant heat while the other remains in eternal darkness. What\u2019s more, the planet may have lost much of its water and other volatile substances long ago. \nIn February, when astronomers reported the discovery of a remarkable retinue of seven planets around the nearby star Trappist-1, again the headlines highlighted that they are \u201cEarth-size,\u201d roughly speaking, and that at least three may possess \u201ctemperate\u201d climates, like that of the Earth. Trappist-1 is so puny that it barely qualifies as a star, though it may emit lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation. Its planetary orbits are so squashed that all seven would fit well inside Mercury\u2019s orbit around the sun. Does that sound remotely like a replica of our solar system? Obviously not. \nBut I would argue that we have more to learn from the Trappist-1 planetary system precisely because it is so starkly different from ours. Its mere existence\u2014a prosaic star with a rich entourage of potentially rocky planets\u2014speaks to the ubiquity of such worlds in the galaxy. \nIt is tempting to believe that there is something extraordinary, or special, about our cosmic circumstances. In fact, some have argued that complex life on Earth emerged through a series of improbable events that are unlikely to be repeated elsewhere, despite the vastness of space and the immensity of cosmic time. \nBut the real reason for our preoccupation with finding a carbon copy of the Earth is that we don\u2019t know any better. So far, we are aware of only one planet with life\u2014ours\u2014so we are inclined to believe that it must represent the platonic ideal, just as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gottfried Leibniz\n\n\n\n argued three centuries ago. \nIn fact, there are good reasons to think that in some cases planets somewhat bigger than ours, so called super-Earths, would provide more-stable conditions. What\u2019s more, planets around red dwarfs, with lifetimes much longer than the sun\u2019s, would offer much more time for the emergence and evolution of life. As a practical matter, it is easier to search for signs of life from afar on a super-Earth around a red dwarf than on a smaller, Earth-size world orbiting a bigger, sun-like star. That\u2019s why the exoplanet announced this week will be a prime target for the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Webb\n\n\n\n Space Telescope, to be launched next year.\nIf the plethora of exoplanet discoveries to date has taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected. Thus, focusing narrowly on \u201cEarthlike\u201d planets in our search for habitable abodes seems unwise. Five centuries after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Copernicus,\n\n\n\n it is about time that we cast aside our geocentric perspective of other worlds and life in the universe. \nMr. Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and the dean of science at York University in Toronto, is author of \u201cStrange New Worlds\u201d (Princeton University Press, 2011). We have more to learn from planetary systems that are starkly different from our own. ",
        "author": "Ray Jayawardhana"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Messages in the Marsquakes (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8505",
        "date": "2021-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/marsquakes-insight-lander-mars-space-exploration-seismic-activity-11627499094?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=25",
        "text": "One might have imagined Mars to be a smaller version of Earth, but the seismic noises detected by InSight suggest not only different geological composition but different formation and heat-flow dynamics as well. Petroleum engineers use seismic waves that travel and refract though deep layers of the Earth\u2019s crust to search for pockets of oil and gas. The InSight team designed the lander to record seismic waves reverberating on the surface of Mars and use them to explore the inner structure of the planet. \nThe science of seismology is relatively young. It wasn\u2019t until the early 20th century that seismologists discovered the nature of the Earth\u2019s crust, core and mantle. Geologists and planetary scientists have since come to rely on seismology as an essential tool.\n\n\n\n\nMars is seismically more active than expected, although the marsquakes recorded by InSight are smaller and substantially less powerful than earthquakes. Without oceans, there\u2019s less background seismic noise on Mars, so the lander can detect signals from small tremors located thousands of miles away. \n\n\nDespite these advantages, challenges remain for the three groups that reported their analyses this week in the magazine Science. Most of the marsquakes originate in the crust, and only a fraction of seismic waves probe deeper regions. Petrologists, geochemists, mineral physicist and geodynamicists looked at data from 10 of these deep quakes as well as data from Martian meteorites and other direct surface observations of Mars. \nMars appears to have a molten core, which may be almost half the size of the planet and seems liquid all the way to the center. The Red Planet\u2019s core also seems far less dense than previously thought. Unlike Earth it is probably not primarily nickel and iron but full of lighter elements like sulfur as well. This suggests that Mars formed earlier than Earth did, perhaps while the sun was still condensing from a gas cloud. \nOutside Mars\u2019s core is a relatively thin mantle that is less dense and rigid than Earth\u2019s mantle. With less insulation, Mars\u2019s core would have cooled much quicker than Earth\u2019s did, so a rotating iron dynamo, like the one that creates Earth\u2019s magnetic field, would have ceased rapid motion long ago. But it also means the magnetic field could initially have been quite large, which could explain both the magnetized rocks on Mars\u2019s surface and the power of the planet\u2019s magnetic field. According to a finding in the journal Nature Geoscience, the Red Planet\u2019s magnetic field is \u201cten times stronger than predicted by satellite-based models.\u201d Mars also has a relatively thick upper mantle and crustal region\u2014two to three times as thick as Earth\u2019s\u2014that appears to be less dense than the surface by varying degrees, suggesting this region has evolved significantly over the eons. \nMars is the Earth\u2019s closest cousin in the solar system, and mankind has long wondered whether it ever supported life. Mars\u2019s atmosphere was once thicker than it is now, and liquid water once flowed on its surface. Could there have been life on Mars? If so, perhaps Martian microbes hitched a ride to Earth on rocks blasted off the Red Planet\u2019s surface and seeded life here. \nThe Perseverance rover will soon begin drilling in search of signs of extinct or extant life below Mars\u2019s surface. Early formation and strong initial magnetism might have helped life get a foothold. But significant volcanic activity means that Mars\u2019s early surface conditions might have been inhospitable to the evolution of life as we know it over the longer term. It could also make the search for signs of extinct life more difficult.\nThe InSight lander\u2019s work is a timely reminder of science\u2019s capacity to astonish. Even as mankind probes the far depths of the universe and explores the secret workings of subatomic particles, our often myopic picture of our local surroundings can still dramatically change. Every time we open a new window on the universe, we are surprised. \nAs we learn more about Mars, we also learn more about our own origins. This can\u2019t help but change how we view our position and purpose in the cosmos. What we think of as typical might actually be unusual; what we consider otherworldly might in fact be the cosmic norm. Life\u2019s burdens can seem enormous and our parochial political disputes often close our minds to the views of even friends and neighbors. We could all benefit from remembering that the universe is larger, more mysterious and awe-inspiring than we realize. Myopia, cosmic or otherwise, is misplaced.\nMr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of \u201cThe Physics of Star Trek,\u201d \u201cA Universe From Nothing\u201d and, most recently, \u201cThe Physics of Climate Change.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Set against highlights from the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, science historian James Burke says \"my phone could take Apollo 11 to the moon and back, compared with the computer they had on board at the time.\" Image: NASA/AFP/Getty Some surprising findings as the InSight lander uses seismology to map out the inside of the Red Planet. ",
        "author": "Lawrence Krauss"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Study Adds to Mystery of Water on Mars (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8506",
        "date": "2017-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/mars-didnt-have-enough-carbon-to-warm-planet-study-finds-1486412126?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=100",
        "text": "Geological evidence from the Curiosity rover shows evidence of lake beds and river deposits on Mars that planetary scientists generally believe could have been formed only by the presence of liquid water billions of years ago. But they have pondered how a young Sun, shining more faintly than it does today, could possibly keep the red planet above freezing long enough for liquid water to shape the land.\n\n\n\n\nOne theory suggests Mars\u2019s atmosphere, thin today, once contained much more carbon dioxide warming the planet as a greenhouse gas. Previous work has failed to find a sufficient quantity of carbonates, minerals expected to form on the surface of Mars if carbon dioxide were present in the atmosphere, and the new research throws another monkey wrench in this theory. \n\n\nThe research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzes data from Curiosity\u2019s analysis of rocks from Gale Crater, which scientists believe was home to an ancient and long-lived lake. The analyzed rocks were approximately 3.5 billion years old, dating from the time scientists believe was the end of Mars\u2019s wet period.\nThe rover\u2019s X-ray diffraction instrument, which identifies the minerals present in a rock sample, didn't turn up any carbonates. Using that evidence and the amount of other minerals present, the researchers calculated that the Mars atmosphere must have contained very little carbon dioxide. \u201cWhat we see is a lot lower than the amount needed to produce the greenhouse effect to have lakes and rivers around at that time,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Bristow,\n\n\n\n a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author on the paper. An atmosphere with plenty of carbon dioxide would be the simplest answer, Dr. Bristow said, but \u201cit doesn\u2019t seem that easy solution will work in this case.\u201d \nThe puzzle remains of how Mars was once warm enough to support liquid water.\nOne potential explanation is that Mars was icy overall with brief repeated warm periods in which water melted and formed the suggestive features, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Niles,\n\n\n\n a planetary scientist at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center who wasn\u2019t involved in the research. \u201cI think the key problem is how long these liquid water events lasted,\u201d Dr. Niles said, but determining the date of geologic features on Mars is difficult. Meanwhile, chemical data like that from the new research seem to conflict with geological data, which makes for \u201ca big divide\u201d in scientific opinion, he said. \nThe geologic evidence from Curiosity \u201cdoes demand a lake over a long period of time,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Raymond Arvidson,\n\n\n\n a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and scientist on the Curiosity and Opportunity rover teams who wasn\u2019t involved in the research. Glaciers couldn\u2019t have formed the features observed such as river deposits and mud cracks, which he said would have developed when a shallow lake evaporated. \nOther gases might have contributed to warming Mars in the absence of carbon dioxide, Dr. Arvidson said. The Opportunity rover has found large amounts of rocks containing sulfur, which in other forms is also an effective greenhouse gas. Dr. Arvidson posits that gases released from volcanic eruptions and high-speed impacts could provide the missing warming element.\n\u201cLet\u2019s not be Earth chauvinists\u201d and assume carbon dioxide must be important on Mars because it is here, he said.\nWrite to Ellie Kincaid at ellie.kincaid@wsj.com The early Martian atmosphere likely didn\u2019t contain enough carbon dioxide to keep the planet warm enough for liquid water, further complicating the mystery of how it could have once been home to the lakes and rivers that left their marks on its surface. ",
        "author": "Ellie Kincaid"
    },
    {
        "title": "Under Antarctica's Ice, Scientists Practice Exploring Space With Robots (WSJ: Feature) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8507",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/under-antarctica-ice-scientists-practice-exploring-space-with-robots/94B78439-DE61-4FD6-ADD9-CB92F77C747D?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=75",
        "text": " Scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology are using a robot called Icefin to explore the world beneath Antarctica's sea ice. WSJ followed the team during a recent deployment to find out why the project might one day enable exploration of the solar system\u2019s far-flung planets and moons. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Voyagers\u2019 Review: 2063: A Spaced-Out Odyssey (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8508",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/voyagers-review-2063-a-spaced-out-odyssey-11617917006?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=22",
        "text": "The premise is as follows. By the year 2063\u2014which looks remarkably like the present\u2014Earth has become nearly uninhabitable, due to global warming and environmental degradation, so a scouting mission is launched to a nearby planet that looks like it will support terrestrial life. But \u201cnearby\u201d is a relative notion. The voyage will take 86 years, meaning the crew will have to reproduce on board the space ship and their grandchildren will be the ones who reach the planet, if anyone does.\n\n\nMore Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nEighty-six years is a long time to cover in a 108-minute film. The production must travel, at least in theory, at the rate of 1.25 years per minute. Actually, though, the entire running time minus a short, silly coda is spent with the first generation of the crew\u201430 specially bred, supersmart 20-somethings who don\u2019t seem to be having any fun, and no wonder. Their libidos are being suppressed, in order to avoid a population explosion en route, by an anaphrodisiac they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re taking. In other words, a long stretch of the movie is devoted to glum prodigies sulking in deep space.\nThat is changed, thank goodness, when certain members of the crew decide to get off the suppression juice and stage a rebellion that restores limited amounts of libidinous behavior. Even so, the film\u2019s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since \u201cLast Year at Marienbad,\u201d and its actors\u2019 shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.\n\nAnd it\u2019s not as if \u201cVoyagers\u201d has nothing more on its mind. The screenplay explores\u2014or in any case devotes some talk to\u2014the dialectic of altruism and selfishness. How much can these young people be asked to do when they won\u2019t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their efforts on a planet they won\u2019t get to see? (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Farrell\n\n\n\n has a small part as the program\u2019s director, who also functions as a role model and den father.) There is also the not-so-minor matter of how much human nature is shaped by sexual desire. When the insurrection comes, it\u2019s led by those with newly raging hormones as well as guns.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Voyagers\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lionsgate\n \n\n\n\nLest you think the film turns irreversibly high-minded, however, rest assured that it descends into a frantic m\u00e9lange of \u201cAnimal House\u201d and \u201cLord of the Flies,\u201d with undigested traces of the Salem witch trials and every ghost story you\u2019ve ever encountered in which the ghost is heard and felt but never quite seen. The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tye Sheridan,\n\n\n\n Lily-Rose Depp,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Fionn Whitehead,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chant\u00e9 Adams,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quintessa Swindell\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Madison Hu.\n\n\n\n They are willing, every one, in circumstances that render them unable. \nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com Lily-Rose Depp and Tye Sheridan play crew members on an 86-year journey to another planet in a science-fiction movie that examines the role of desire in human nature ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Voyagers\u2019 Review: 2063: A Spaced-Out Odyssey (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8509",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/voyagers-review-2063-a-spaced-out-odyssey-11617917006?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=24",
        "text": "The premise is as follows. By the year 2063\u2014which looks remarkably like the present\u2014Earth has become nearly uninhabitable, due to global warming and environmental degradation, so a scouting mission is launched to a nearby planet that looks like it will support terrestrial life. But \u201cnearby\u201d is a relative notion. The voyage will take 86 years, meaning the crew will have to reproduce on board the space ship and their grandchildren will be the ones who reach the planet, if anyone does.\n\n\nMore Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEighty-six years is a long time to cover in a 108-minute film. The production must travel, at least in theory, at the rate of 1.25 years per minute. Actually, though, the entire running time minus a short, silly coda is spent with the first generation of the crew\u201430 specially bred, supersmart 20-somethings who don\u2019t seem to be having any fun, and no wonder. Their libidos are being suppressed, in order to avoid a population explosion en route, by an anaphrodisiac they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re taking. In other words, a long stretch of the movie is devoted to glum prodigies sulking in deep space.\nThat is changed, thank goodness, when certain members of the crew decide to get off the suppression juice and stage a rebellion that restores limited amounts of libidinous behavior. Even so, the film\u2019s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since \u201cLast Year at Marienbad,\u201d and its actors\u2019 shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.\n\nAnd it\u2019s not as if \u201cVoyagers\u201d has nothing more on its mind. The screenplay explores\u2014or in any case devotes some talk to\u2014the dialectic of altruism and selfishness. How much can these young people be asked to do when they won\u2019t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their efforts on a planet they won\u2019t get to see? (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Farrell\n\n\n\n has a small part as the program\u2019s director, who also functions as a role model and den father.) There is also the not-so-minor matter of how much human nature is shaped by sexual desire. When the insurrection comes, it\u2019s led by those with newly raging hormones as well as guns.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Voyagers\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lionsgate\n \n\n\n\nLest you think the film turns irreversibly high-minded, however, rest assured that it descends into a frantic m\u00e9lange of \u201cAnimal House\u201d and \u201cLord of the Flies,\u201d with undigested traces of the Salem witch trials and every ghost story you\u2019ve ever encountered in which the ghost is heard and felt but never quite seen. The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tye Sheridan,\n\n\n\n Lily-Rose Depp,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Fionn Whitehead,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chant\u00e9 Adams,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quintessa Swindell\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Madison Hu.\n\n\n\n They are willing, every one, in circumstances that render them unable. \nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com Lily-Rose Depp and Tye Sheridan play crew members on an 86-year journey to another planet in a science-fiction movie that examines the role of desire in human nature ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Voyagers\u2019 Review: 2063: A Spaced-Out Odyssey (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8510",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/voyagers-review-2063-a-spaced-out-odyssey-11617917006?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=32",
        "text": "The premise is as follows. By the year 2063\u2014which looks remarkably like the present\u2014Earth has become nearly uninhabitable, due to global warming and environmental degradation, so a scouting mission is launched to a nearby planet that looks like it will support terrestrial life. But \u201cnearby\u201d is a relative notion. The voyage will take 86 years, meaning the crew will have to reproduce on board the space ship and their grandchildren will be the ones who reach the planet, if anyone does.\n\n\nMore Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nEighty-six years is a long time to cover in a 108-minute film. The production must travel, at least in theory, at the rate of 1.25 years per minute. Actually, though, the entire running time minus a short, silly coda is spent with the first generation of the crew\u201430 specially bred, supersmart 20-somethings who don\u2019t seem to be having any fun, and no wonder. Their libidos are being suppressed, in order to avoid a population explosion en route, by an anaphrodisiac they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re taking. In other words, a long stretch of the movie is devoted to glum prodigies sulking in deep space.\nThat is changed, thank goodness, when certain members of the crew decide to get off the suppression juice and stage a rebellion that restores limited amounts of libidinous behavior. Even so, the film\u2019s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since \u201cLast Year at Marienbad,\u201d and its actors\u2019 shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.\n\nAnd it\u2019s not as if \u201cVoyagers\u201d has nothing more on its mind. The screenplay explores\u2014or in any case devotes some talk to\u2014the dialectic of altruism and selfishness. How much can these young people be asked to do when they won\u2019t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their efforts on a planet they won\u2019t get to see? (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Farrell\n\n\n\n has a small part as the program\u2019s director, who also functions as a role model and den father.) There is also the not-so-minor matter of how much human nature is shaped by sexual desire. When the insurrection comes, it\u2019s led by those with newly raging hormones as well as guns.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Voyagers\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lionsgate\n \n\n\n\nLest you think the film turns irreversibly high-minded, however, rest assured that it descends into a frantic m\u00e9lange of \u201cAnimal House\u201d and \u201cLord of the Flies,\u201d with undigested traces of the Salem witch trials and every ghost story you\u2019ve ever encountered in which the ghost is heard and felt but never quite seen. The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tye Sheridan,\n\n\n\n Lily-Rose Depp,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Fionn Whitehead,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chant\u00e9 Adams,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quintessa Swindell\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Madison Hu.\n\n\n\n They are willing, every one, in circumstances that render them unable. \nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com Lily-Rose Depp and Tye Sheridan play crew members on an 86-year journey to another planet in a science-fiction movie that examines the role of desire in human nature ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Voyagers\u2019 Review: 2063: A Spaced-Out Odyssey (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8511",
        "date": "2021-04-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/voyagers-review-2063-a-spaced-out-odyssey-11617917006?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=33",
        "text": "The premise is as follows. By the year 2063\u2014which looks remarkably like the present\u2014Earth has become nearly uninhabitable, due to global warming and environmental degradation, so a scouting mission is launched to a nearby planet that looks like it will support terrestrial life. But \u201cnearby\u201d is a relative notion. The voyage will take 86 years, meaning the crew will have to reproduce on board the space ship and their grandchildren will be the ones who reach the planet, if anyone does.\n\n\nMore Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\nWhat to Watch: The 18 Best New Movies and TV Shows From February\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nEighty-six years is a long time to cover in a 108-minute film. The production must travel, at least in theory, at the rate of 1.25 years per minute. Actually, though, the entire running time minus a short, silly coda is spent with the first generation of the crew\u201430 specially bred, supersmart 20-somethings who don\u2019t seem to be having any fun, and no wonder. Their libidos are being suppressed, in order to avoid a population explosion en route, by an anaphrodisiac they don\u2019t realize they\u2019re taking. In other words, a long stretch of the movie is devoted to glum prodigies sulking in deep space.\nThat is changed, thank goodness, when certain members of the crew decide to get off the suppression juice and stage a rebellion that restores limited amounts of libidinous behavior. Even so, the film\u2019s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since \u201cLast Year at Marienbad,\u201d and its actors\u2019 shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.\n\nAnd it\u2019s not as if \u201cVoyagers\u201d has nothing more on its mind. The screenplay explores\u2014or in any case devotes some talk to\u2014the dialectic of altruism and selfishness. How much can these young people be asked to do when they won\u2019t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their efforts on a planet they won\u2019t get to see? (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Colin Farrell\n\n\n\n has a small part as the program\u2019s director, who also functions as a role model and den father.) There is also the not-so-minor matter of how much human nature is shaped by sexual desire. When the insurrection comes, it\u2019s led by those with newly raging hormones as well as guns.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Voyagers\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lionsgate\n \n\n\n\nLest you think the film turns irreversibly high-minded, however, rest assured that it descends into a frantic m\u00e9lange of \u201cAnimal House\u201d and \u201cLord of the Flies,\u201d with undigested traces of the Salem witch trials and every ghost story you\u2019ve ever encountered in which the ghost is heard and felt but never quite seen. The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tye Sheridan,\n\n\n\n Lily-Rose Depp,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Fionn Whitehead,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chant\u00e9 Adams,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Quintessa Swindell\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Madison Hu.\n\n\n\n They are willing, every one, in circumstances that render them unable. \nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com Lily-Rose Depp and Tye Sheridan play crew members on an 86-year journey to another planet in a science-fiction movie that examines the role of desire in human nature ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ozone Layer May Be Thinning Over Heavily Populated Areas (WSJ: General News) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8512",
        "date": "2018-02-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ozone-layer-may-be-thinning-over-earths-heavily-populated-areas-1517896800?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=80",
        "text": "Since 1987, the treaty has banned production of known ozone-destroying chemicals, and in January NASA scientists reported concrete signs that, as a result, the ozone layer in the stratosphere over the polar region is recovering.\n\n\n\n\nIn the new analysis, however, scientists detected a drop in the amount of ozone in recent years at lower levels of the stratosphere over the Earth\u2019s nonpolar regions, where most of the population lives. Moreover, the decline is larger than the rise measured at higher altitudes over Antarctica, they said. By their calculation, the total amount of ozone in the entire stratosphere hasn\u2019t improved since the 1990s.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe purple and blue colors, covering Antarctica, indicate areas with the least ozone\u2014an area that recently appeared to be recovering. Other colors cover nonpolar regions that are more heavily populated, and where new research shows the ozone shield is thinning. At its peak, the ozone hole extended across an area nearly 2\u00bd times the size of the continental U.S.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Katy Mersmann/NASA Ozone Watch/NASA\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt means that overall we are not seeing a recovery,\u201d said data scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Justin Alsing\n\n\n\n at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York, who was one of 22 scientists at research centers in the U.S. and Europe involved in the study. \u201cThe ozone layer at mid-latitudes is at least as bad as it has ever been.\u201d\n\nThe scientists, led by physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n William Ball\n\n\n\n at the Davos World Radiation Center and ETH Zurich in Switzerland, reported their research Tuesday in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, which is published by the European Geosciences Union.\n\u201cThe results are pretty convincing,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rolando Garcia,\n\n\n\n a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who wasn\u2019t involved in the project.\nEven so, the trend could be just a temporary variation within the broader band of ozone in the stratosphere, where changes are unusually difficult to measure and may take decades to unfold, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sophie Godin-Beekmann,\n\n\n\n at the French National Center for Scientific Research and president of the International Ozone Commission.\n\u201cWe may have a gap in our knowledge,\u201d said atmospheric scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Daan Hubert\n\n\n\n at the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy in Brussels, who studies ozone trends. \u201cOur expectation from simulations is that ozone in the lower stratosphere should have gone up or at least remained stable since the end of the 1990s. This work suggests there has been a decline.\u201c\nScientists have sought for decades to understand the chemistry of the colorless gas in the thinning air between around 6 miles and 32 miles above the surface of the Earth. Variables include seasonal changes in global winds and temperatures, as well as periodic outbursts of gases from volcanic eruptions, the effects of El Ni\u00f1o ocean currents, and the subtle influence of solar cycles.\n\u201cDetecting an ozone response at middle latitudes, where the chemical changes were small to begin with and the dynamic variability is much larger, remains challenging,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anne R. Douglass,\n\n\n\n an atmospheric scientist at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was part of a team that last month reported rising levels of protective ozone over Antarctica.\nThey attribute the recovery to the ban on ozone-destroying chemicals imposed under an environmental treaty called the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which has been ratified by 197 countries.\nTo assess ozone in the lower stratosphere, Dr. Ball and his colleagues combined data from around 20 satellite sensors to create a record of ozone levels world-wide from 1985 to 2016. The sensors, however, were different, rarely overlapped in coverage, and each had its own built-in biases. The researchers developed new algorithms to merge the data and account for the individual variations.\n\u201cThe new statistical techniques allow us to tie together data from the various disparate satellite instruments in a way that we can now analyze these longer term trends,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joanna Haigh,\n\n\n\n co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change & Environment at Imperial College in London.\nThey don\u2019t know why this protective layer is weakening at lower altitudes.\nAmong their suspects are unregulated chemicals used in paint thinner and solvents, and in production of a safer substitute for the ozone-destroying chemicals banned decades ago. Global changes in high-altitude winds due to climate change could also be at fault by altering the distribution of ozone throughout the atmosphere, the scientists said.\n\u201cThis was really a surprise,\u201d said Dr. Ball. \u201cThis is a warning sign that there is something going on that we don\u2019t understand.\u201d In new analysis, scientists detect shrinking of the planet\u2019s protective shield at lower levels of the stratosphere over Earth\u2019s nonpolar regions ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Environmental Investing Frenzy Stretches Meaning of \u2018Green\u2019 (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8513",
        "date": "2021-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-investing-frenzy-stretches-meaning-of-green-11624554045?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=28",
        "text": "TMC is set to receive nearly $600 million in investor cash in a deal slated to take the company public in July. If successful, that would value TMC at $2.9 billion\u2014more than any mining company ever to go public in the U.S. with no revenue. \u201cWe were positioning this incorrectly as a big mining, deep-sea mining project, which it was,\u201d says Mr. Barron, who says the metallic nodules he hopes to bring up are crucial to building electric-vehicle batteries. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t the way that we were going to garner support from investors to make this industry a reality.\u201d Green investing has grown so fast that there is a flood of money chasing a limited number of viable companies that produce renewable energy, electric cars and the like. Some money managers are stretching the definition of green in how they deploy investors\u2019 funds. Now billions of dollars earmarked for sustainable investment are going to companies with questionable environmental credentials and, in some cases, huge business risks. They include a Chinese incinerator company, an animal-waste processor that recently settled a state lawsuit over its emissions and a self-driving-truck technology company.\n\n\nShare your thoughtsDo you care if companies you invest in have strong ESG ratings? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOne way to stretch the definition is to fund companies that supply products for the green economy, even if they harm the environment to do so. Last year an investment company professing a \u201cstrong commitment to sustainability\u201d merged with the operator of an open-pit rare-earth mine in California at a $1.5 billion valuation. Although the mine has a history of environmental problems and has to bury low-level radioactive uranium waste, the company says it qualifies as green because rare earths are important for electric cars and because it doesn\u2019t do as much harm as overseas rivals operating under looser regulations. The stretching has been true for special-purpose acquisition companies, one of the hottest investments on Wall Street. More than 45 SPACs that have declared themselves green have raised nearly $15 billion, according to data provider SPAC Track. SPACs raise money on the stock market from investors who give them broad latitude to look for an existing private company to acquire. SPACs typically promise shareholders they will invest their cash within two years. With so much money looking for deals, they can\u2019t be too picky. Sometimes multiple suitors converge on the same operating company, in a frenzy known as a \u201cSPAC-off.\u201d A SPAC that is set to merge with TMC, the Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Corp., or SOAC, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020 and met more than 90 companies before deciding on the deep-sea miner. \u201cIt\u2019s like speed dating,\u201d says Gina Stryker, the SPAC\u2019s general counsel.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA polymetallic, or manganese, nodule displayed by TMC at a mining convention in Toronto in 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n chris helgren/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nEven more money is coming from mutual funds and other big investment vehicles. Since the beginning of 2019, stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with ESG as part of their mandate\u2014meaning they prefer to invest in companies with certain environmental, social and governance characteristics\u2014have received a net $473 billion from investors; just $103 billion net has gone into all other stock funds, according to a Goldman Sachs Group compilation of data from fund tracker Morningstar Inc. When it comes to green companies, \u201cthere just isn\u2019t enough\u201d to absorb investor demand, says Laura Nishikawa, a managing director at MSCI, a research company that compiles indexes of companies, including ESG indexes, that many fund managers follow to decide how to allocate green investment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCumulative value of sustainability-focused SPAC initial public offerings\n\n\n\n$20\n\n\n\u00a0billion\n\n\nSPACs have filed for\n another $6 billion of IPOs\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\n5\n\n\n0\n\n\n2021\n\n\n\n\n\n$20\n\n\n\u00a0billion\n\n\nSPACs have filed for\n another $6 billion of IPOs\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\n5\n\n\n0\n\n\n2021\n\n\n\n\n\n$20\n\n\n\u00a0billion\n\n\nSPACs have filed for\n another $6 billion of IPOs\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\n5\n\n\n0\n\n\n2021\n\n\n\nNote: Through June 15\nSource: SPAC Track\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn response, MSCI has looked at other ways to rank companies for environmentally minded investors, for example ranking \u201cthe greenest within a dirty industry,\u201d Ms. Nishikawa says. \u201cIf you were to be too purist about where you set these thresholds you would end up with a not-really-investable universe,\u201d she says. The second-biggest firm on MSCI\u2019s Global Pollution Prevention Index is Darling Ingredients Inc., an $11 billion animal-waste-rendering company. New Jersey\u2019s attorney general sued the company in 2019 alleging rotting-animal odors from a Newark plant were so pervasive that neighbors suffered migraines. As of March, green-investment funds held more than $300 million in Darling stock, according to FactSet Research data. The company settled the New Jersey suit last year with A seabed miner is positioning itself as an ecological crusader with a planned $2.9 billion valuation, even as oceanographers warn of ruined habitats; \u201cI\u2019m doing it for the planet.\u201d ",
        "author": "Justin Scheck, Eliot Brown and Ben Foldy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Environmental Investing Frenzy Stretches Meaning of \u2018Green\u2019 (WSJ: Markets) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8514",
        "date": "2021-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/environmental-investing-frenzy-stretches-meaning-of-green-11624554045?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=28",
        "text": "TMC is set to receive nearly $600 million in investor cash in a deal slated to take the company public in July. If successful, that would value TMC at $2.9 billion\u2014more than any mining company ever to go public in the U.S. with no revenue. \u201cWe were positioning this incorrectly as a big mining, deep-sea mining project, which it was,\u201d says Mr. Barron, who says the metallic nodules he hopes to bring up are crucial to building electric-vehicle batteries. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t the way that we were going to garner support from investors to make this industry a reality.\u201d Green investing has grown so fast that there is a flood of money chasing a limited number of viable companies that produce renewable energy, electric cars and the like. Some money managers are stretching the definition of green in how they deploy investors\u2019 funds. Now billions of dollars earmarked for sustainable investment are going to companies with questionable environmental credentials and, in some cases, huge business risks. They include a Chinese incinerator company, an animal-waste processor that recently settled a state lawsuit over its emissions and a self-driving-truck technology company.\n\n\nShare your thoughtsDo you care if companies you invest in have strong ESG ratings? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nOne way to stretch the definition is to fund companies that supply products for the green economy, even if they harm the environment to do so. Last year an investment company professing a \u201cstrong commitment to sustainability\u201d merged with the operator of an open-pit rare-earth mine in California at a $1.5 billion valuation. Although the mine has a history of environmental problems and has to bury low-level radioactive uranium waste, the company says it qualifies as green because rare earths are important for electric cars and because it doesn\u2019t do as much harm as overseas rivals operating under looser regulations. The stretching has been true for special-purpose acquisition companies, one of the hottest investments on Wall Street. More than 45 SPACs that have declared themselves green have raised nearly $15 billion, according to data provider SPAC Track. SPACs raise money on the stock market from investors who give them broad latitude to look for an existing private company to acquire. SPACs typically promise shareholders they will invest their cash within two years. With so much money looking for deals, they can\u2019t be too picky. Sometimes multiple suitors converge on the same operating company, in a frenzy known as a \u201cSPAC-off.\u201d A SPAC that is set to merge with TMC, the Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Corp., or SOAC, went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020 and met more than 90 companies before deciding on the deep-sea miner. \u201cIt\u2019s like speed dating,\u201d says Gina Stryker, the SPAC\u2019s general counsel.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA polymetallic, or manganese, nodule displayed by TMC at a mining convention in Toronto in 2019.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n chris helgren/Reuters\n \n\n\n\nEven more money is coming from mutual funds and other big investment vehicles. Since the beginning of 2019, stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with ESG as part of their mandate\u2014meaning they prefer to invest in companies with certain environmental, social and governance characteristics\u2014have received a net $473 billion from investors; just $103 billion net has gone into all other stock funds, according to a Goldman Sachs Group compilation of data from fund tracker Morningstar Inc. When it comes to green companies, \u201cthere just isn\u2019t enough\u201d to absorb investor demand, says Laura Nishikawa, a managing director at MSCI, a research company that compiles indexes of companies, including ESG indexes, that many fund managers follow to decide how to allocate green investment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCumulative value of sustainability-focused SPAC initial public offerings\n\n\n\n$20\n\n\n\u00a0billion\n\n\nSPACs have filed for\n another $6 billion of IPOs\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\n5\n\n\n0\n\n\n2021\n\n\n\n\n\n$20\n\n\n\u00a0billion\n\n\nSPACs have filed for\n another $6 billion of IPOs\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\n5\n\n\n0\n\n\n2021\n\n\n\n\n\n$20\n\n\n\u00a0billion\n\n\nSPACs have filed for\n another $6 billion of IPOs\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\n5\n\n\n0\n\n\n2021\n\n\n\nNote: Through June 15\nSource: SPAC Track\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn response, MSCI has looked at other ways to rank companies for environmentally minded investors, for example ranking \u201cthe greenest within a dirty industry,\u201d Ms. Nishikawa says. \u201cIf you were to be too purist about where you set these thresholds you would end up with a not-really-investable universe,\u201d she says. The second-biggest firm on MSCI\u2019s Global Pollution Prevention Index is Darling Ingredients Inc., an $11 billion animal-waste-rendering company. New Jersey\u2019s attorney general sued the company in 2019 alleging rotting-animal odors from a Newark plant were so pervasive that neighbors suffered migraines. As of March, green-investment funds held more than $300 million in Darling stock, according to FactSet Research data. The company settled the New Jersey suit last year with A seabed miner is positioning itself as an ecological crusader with a planned $2.9 billion valuation, even as oceanographers warn of ruined habitats; \u201cI\u2019m doing it for the planet.\u201d ",
        "author": "Justin Scheck, Eliot Brown and Ben Foldy"
    },
    {
        "title": "BTS, \u2018Parasite\u2019 and Baseball: South Korean Pop Culture Is Having a Moment (WSJ: MLB) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8515",
        "date": "2020-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/bts-parasite-and-now-baseball-south-korean-pop-culture-is-having-a-moment-11588932001?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=55",
        "text": "Now another Korean cultural export has an unexpected opportunity to find an audience on the other side of the world: its version of America\u2019s pastime. But can the Korea Baseball Organization really replace Major League Baseball for U.S. fans\u2014even for just a little while? \n\n\n\n\nThe KBO began its season Tuesday after a five-week pandemic delay, making Korea\u2019s 10-team professional baseball league the highest profile sports entity on the planet that\u2019s currently operating. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nHanwha Eagles players wear masks before a recent game.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIn its unending quest to provide 24-hour sports content in a world with no sports, ESPN jumped in, reaching an agreement to broadcast six KBO games a week live. Despite the difficult start times\u2014contests begin between 1 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. ET\u2014baseball fans desperate for something other than replays of games from 20 years ago have a prospective outlet. It has left longtime KBO followers wondering if, like music and movies, Korean baseball can find a place in the U.S.\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not saying the KBO has the potential to be as big as K-Pop in the States,\u201d said Sung Min Kim, a former American baseball writer who now works in the front office of the KBO\u2019s Lotte Giants. \u201cBut there is something to it.\u201d\nThe longer Major League Baseball is on pause, the more likely it is that Americans will sample the KBO. MLB hopes to open its season in July and is exploring different ideas for how that might be doable, but the viability of any plan remains unknown as cases of Covid-19 continue to climb. \nIn Korea, which has a population of more than 51 million, new cases of the coronavirus have slowed to a trickle. KBO games are being played with no fans in attendance. Barehanded high-fives are prohibited and chewing tobacco has been banned to deter spitting, but for the most, normal life has resumed.\n\u201cThe handling of the pandemic is a huge source of national pride,\u201d said Christopher Park, the president of East Rock Institute, a Connecticut-based nonprofit devoted to Korean and Korean-American studies.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStadium seats are empty as a part of precaution against the coronavirus during a baseball game between the Hanwha Eagles and SK Wyverns.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lee Jin-man/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nKnowledge about the KBO in America is limited, especially when compared with the Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan. About two dozen Koreans have played in the major leagues, from former pitchers Chan Ho Park and Byung-Hyun Kim to current talents like Shin-Soo Choo, Ji-Man Choi and Hyun-Jin Ryu. Some American players have also had success returning to MLB after a stint in the KBO, like Washington Nationals first baseman Eric Thames. \nThough KBO\u2019s fan base in the U.S. is small, one part of its profile is big: social-media clips of the league\u2019s ostentatious bat flips. In the KBO, home runs are typically accompanied with a dramatic, over-the-top bat flip\u2014the kind of behavior that would result in a fastball to the rib cage in MLB. The showmanship and displays of emotion had turned KBO highlights into viral sensations even before full games were available on the nation\u2019s most popular sports network.\nTo \u201csee live baseball on ESPN and it\u2019s the KBO, I literally have to pinch myself,\u201d said Dan Kurtz, who has run the English-language website MyKBO.net for nearly two decades. \u201cIt\u2019s like, is this true?\u201d \u2028\nIt\u2019s definitely true. ESPN has put most of its A-list baseball talent on the KBO games. The announcers are staying awake through the night\u2014or waking up well before dawn\u2014to call the action on monitors from their homes. For Eduardo P\u00e9rez, that means carving out a spot in his garage. Karl Ravech is announcing the games from a space just off his bedroom, where he\u2019s trying not to bother his family too much.\nThe telecasts have had technical glitches and some minor hiccups as the announcers grow accustomed to working together while physically apart. They\u2019ve also had to learn an entirely new league in a matter of days, something Ravech said has been made easier by his experience broadcasting South Korean teams in the Little League World Series over the years. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nEduardo Perez's home studio setup for ESPN.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n ESPN\n \n\n\n\nThe goal, P\u00e9rez said, is to \u201cgive this league an opportunity and introduce a new set of athletes to fans of the game.\u201d For the first couple of weeks, Ravech said he intends to try to simply introduce viewers to some of the differences between KBO and MLB, in the hopes of ultimately turning the broadcast into a \u201cthree-hour baseball hangout.\u201d\n\u201cThis is the time of year people look to baseball,\u201d Ravech said. \u201cThis returns, to some extent, the regularity and rhythm that the absence of Major League Baseball has left.\u201d\nNobody expects Korean baseball played in the wee hours of the morning to completely fill the sports-sized hole in the hearts of Americans. But The Korea Baseball Organization began its season this week, making the 10-team professional baseball league the highest profile sports entity on the planet that\u2019s currently operating. ",
        "author": "Jared Diamond"
    },
    {
        "title": "As Greenland Melts, Where\u2019s the Water Going? (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8516",
        "date": "2017-12-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/climate/greenland-ice-melting.html",
        "text": "Each year, Greenland loses 270 billion tons of ice as the planet warms. New research shows that some of the water may be trapped in the ice sheet, which could change how scientists think about global sea levels. Each year, Greenland loses 270 billion tons of ice as the planet warms. New research shows that some of the water may be trapped in the ice sheet, which could change how scientists think about global sea levels. Each year, Greenland loses 270 billion tons of ice as the planet warms. New research shows that some of the water may be trapped in the ice sheet, which could change how scientists think about global sea levels.",
        "author": "By Henry Fountain and Derek Watkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Konrad Steffen Was a Prophet of Climate Change, and its Victim (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8517",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/23/magazine/konrad-steffen-death.html",
        "text": "The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing. The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing. The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing.",
        "author": "By Mark Binelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Konrad Steffen Was a Prophet of Climate Change, and its Victim (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8518",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/23/magazine/konrad-steffen-death.html",
        "text": "The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing. The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing. The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing.",
        "author": "By Mark Binelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Konrad Steffen Was a Prophet of Climate Change, and its Victim (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8519",
        "date": "2020-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/23/magazine/konrad-steffen-death.html",
        "text": "The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing. The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing. The very ice melt he warned would threaten the planet turned out to be his undoing.",
        "author": "By Mark Binelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hiro Made Fashion Photography Otherworldly (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8520",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/22/magazine/hiro-death.html",
        "text": "The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work.",
        "author": "By Stella Bugbee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hiro Made Fashion Photography Otherworldly (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8521",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/22/magazine/hiro-death.html",
        "text": "The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work.",
        "author": "By Stella Bugbee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hiro Made Fashion Photography Otherworldly (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8522",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/22/magazine/hiro-death.html",
        "text": "The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work.",
        "author": "By Stella Bugbee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hiro Made Fashion Photography Otherworldly (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8523",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/22/magazine/hiro-death.html",
        "text": "The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work. The devastation that men inflict upon one another and the planet informed his most surrealist work.",
        "author": "By Stella Bugbee"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nathalie Cabrol Searches the Earth for the Secrets of Life on Mars (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8524",
        "date": "2018-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-nathalie-cabrol-searching-mars-life-on-earth.html",
        "text": "In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Helen Macdonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nathalie Cabrol Searches the Earth for the Secrets of Life on Mars (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8525",
        "date": "2018-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-nathalie-cabrol-searching-mars-life-on-earth.html",
        "text": "In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Helen Macdonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nathalie Cabrol Searches the Earth for the Secrets of Life on Mars (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8526",
        "date": "2018-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-nathalie-cabrol-searching-mars-life-on-earth.html",
        "text": "In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Helen Macdonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nathalie Cabrol Searches the Earth for the Secrets of Life on Mars (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8527",
        "date": "2018-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-nathalie-cabrol-searching-mars-life-on-earth.html",
        "text": "In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Helen Macdonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Nathalie Cabrol Searches the Earth for the Secrets of Life on Mars (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8528",
        "date": "2018-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/magazine/voyages-nathalie-cabrol-searching-mars-life-on-earth.html",
        "text": "In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet. In some of the world\u2019s most extreme and dangerous environments she hunts for organisms that live in conditions like those on the red planet.",
        "author": "By Helen Macdonald"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Dangerous Sprint Into the Future (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8529",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/07/magazine/tech-design-future-autonomous-cars-factory-tesla-sustainability-gigafactory.html",
        "text": "For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there?",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Dangerous Sprint Into the Future (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8530",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/07/magazine/tech-design-future-autonomous-cars-factory-tesla-sustainability-gigafactory.html",
        "text": "For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there?",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Dangerous Sprint Into the Future (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8531",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/07/magazine/tech-design-future-autonomous-cars-factory-tesla-sustainability-gigafactory.html",
        "text": "For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there?",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tesla\u2019s Dangerous Sprint Into the Future (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8532",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/07/magazine/tech-design-future-autonomous-cars-factory-tesla-sustainability-gigafactory.html",
        "text": "For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there? For Elon Musk\u2019s company, autonomous driving is just a pit stop on the road to a better planet. Can it survive long enough to get there?",
        "author": "By Jon Gertner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Planetary Health is Human Health. We Must Protect Both. (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8533",
        "date": "2021-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/novartis/planetary-health-is-human-health-we-must-protect-both.html",
        "text": "The planetary emergency is a human health crisis we cannot ignore. We must all act now! The planetary emergency is a human health crisis we cannot ignore. We must all act now! ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "San Diego Zoo\u2019s Transformation (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8534",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/san-diego-zoo-wildlife-alliance-paid-post/san-diego-zoos-transformation.html",
        "text": "The need to protect all life on our planet has never been more important. A world-renowned wildlife organization is doubling down on its commitment to create a brighter future for everyone. And it needs our help. The need to protect all life on our planet has never been more important. A world-renowned wildlife organization is doubling down on its commitment to create a brighter future for everyone. And it needs our help. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "San Diego Zoo\u2019s Transformation (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8535",
        "date": "2021-03-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/san-diego-zoo-wildlife-alliance-paid-post/san-diego-zoos-transformation.html",
        "text": "The need to protect all life on our planet has never been more important. A world-renowned wildlife organization is doubling down on its commitment to create a brighter future for everyone. And it needs our help. The need to protect all life on our planet has never been more important. A world-renowned wildlife organization is doubling down on its commitment to create a brighter future for everyone. And it needs our help. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Raised by Wolves\u2019 Review: A Snarling Sci-Fi Provocation (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8536",
        "date": "2020-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/raised-by-wolves-review-a-snarling-sci-fi-provocation-11598992542?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=38",
        "text": "In the middle of the next century, the series proposes, the Earth is left uninhabitable by a religious war involving fundamentalists and atheists, which necessitates flight to another planet (Kepler-22b, a real planet, one on which NASA believes water might exist). But before the Ark of Heaven can bring the cultists to their destination, a smaller craft containing two androids\u2014Mother (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Amanda Collin\n\n\n\n ) and Father (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Abubakar Salim\n\n\n\n )\u2014arrives there, along with six human embryos that will become the planet\u2019s first sextet of atheists. Over the ensuing decade, five will die, leaving only Campion (the terrific\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Winta McGrath\n\n\n\n ) to await the arrival of the Ark. And the presumed resumption of religious warfare.\n\u201cRaised by Wolves,\u201d created by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Aaron Guzikowski,\n\n\n\n is a provocation. And an utterly absorbing one. The storyline is involved, but keeps a viewer off-balance in a good way. It looks great. And Mother, the lethal android \u201cnecromancer\u201d with the abundance of maternal instinct, is the most memorable female/female-like space entity since\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sigourney Weaver\u2019s\n\n\n\n Ripley in \u201cAlien\u201d\u2014or the alien in \u201cAliens.\u201d Which may not be so strange, since one of the executive producers, and the director of the first two episodes, is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ridley Scott.\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAmanda Collin, Winta McGrath and Abubakar Salim\n\n\n Photo: \n \n HBO Max/Coco Van Oppens\n \n\n\n\nThe pacing of the 10-part series could be quicker, but the dramatic, cinematographic and musical aspects of \u201cRaised by Wolves\u201d\u2014which will make its debut with three episodes, the remainder rolling out over the following four Thursdays\u2014are delivered with such seamless, dread-inducing care that viewers might willingly suspend their disbelief regarding the religious goings-on. But nothing could be that distracting for long.\n\nThe fundamentalists, who during Campion\u2019s childhood have been making their way\u2014in suspended animation\u2014toward Kepler-22b (which is actually 600 light-years away from Earth circa 2020), are described as Mithraists. Which would make them believers in a religion rooted in Zoroastrianism and followed in imperial, pre-Constantine Rome. According to legend, Rome was founded by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Romulus\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Remus,\n\n\n\n who were raised by wolves (a she-wolf, anyway). Rome is also the seat of the Catholic Church, and if there were any mistaking the \u201cMithraists\u201d for other-than-Christians, their dialogue is lifted from both the Old and New Testaments and during an onboard ceremony seen in flashback, men in priestly garments distribute what look suspiciously like Communion hosts.\nHow the evidence of life on other planets might be reconciled with a literal reading of Genesis is not something that happens to come up, at least during the opening episodes. What the Apocalypse would mean if there were other planets to escape to isn\u2019t spelled out either.\nFor her part, Mother assumes a crucifixion pose when flying over Kepler, crash-landing the hijacked Ark into a mountain and making Mithraists evaporate in Pollock-like splashes of blood. (\u201cI would study their remains,\u201d Father says, \u201cif you left any.\u201d) But during those times, Mother also resembles the hood ornament of a 1930s Buick. So there\u2019s a risk of reading too much into it.\nThe complexities of \u201cRaised by Wolves\u201d extend beyond belief systems to the characters themselves. Not everyone is who or what they appear initially to be\u2014including Marcus (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Travis Fimmel\n\n\n\n ), who arrives on Kepler with his wife, Sue (Niamh Algar), and a child, Paul (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Felix Jamieson\n\n\n\n ), whom they\u2019ve more or less adopted while on board. But the most endearing characters are Father and Mother\u2014Ms. Collin is incandescent\u2014not just because they exhibit human traits or strength of character, but because, as atheists, they represent the nonaggressors, albeit in a show with a fairly aggressive point of view. \u201cRaised by Wolves\u201d is a fascinating watch, but may have viewers asking questions. Like, where\u2019s the line between excitement and incitement?\nCorrection: An earlier version of this review misstated the rollout of episodes. A series on HBO Max depicts an Earth left uninhabitable by religious war and the subsequent flight to another planet. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will Elevators to Outer Space Ever Get Off the Ground? (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8537",
        "date": "2018-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-elevators-to-outer-space-ever-get-off-the-ground-1537452000?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=22",
        "text": "Are space elevators the future of extra-planetary travel? Supporters see them as a way to ferry people and goods to space for a lower cost than rocket trips and with little need for passenger training. But this far-off goal faces significant engineering and political challenges.\nResearchers from Japan\u2019s Shizuoka University plan to launch a miniature elevator of sorts from the International Space Station. In a proof-of-concept, a motorized container would move up and down a 33-foot cable connecting two four-inch cube-shape satellites. (A launch planned for earlier this month was reportedly delayed by Typhoon Mangkhut.)\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything \n\n\n\n A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nThese astronautical acrobatics build on a 350-page report published in 2014 by the International Academy of Astronautics suggesting fully fledged space elevators could become a reality by 2035.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Obayashi Corp.\n\n\n , a Japanese construction conglomerate, says it can have one up and running by 2050, using motors powered by magnets. One Kickstarter campaign with an $8,000 goal raised more than $100,000 to research the concept. Eventually, the cost to get a couple of pounds of cargo into orbit could fall as low as $500, according to the IAA report\u2014a fraction of the cost of trips proposed by space-tourism outfits such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. \n\nThe biggest hurdle is figuring out what material to use to build the elevator\u2019s cable. It has to be incredibly strong, yet lightweight. It would have to be 100 million times as long as it is across\u2014like a human hair more than 6 miles long. The thin, flexible cylinders of carbon known as carbon nanotubes might fit the bill. Single crystal graphene, a material only one atom thick but many times stronger than steel, is another possibility.\nThe counterweight that anchors the cable in space would have to weigh hundreds of thousands of pounds. The International Space Elevator Consortium, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based advisory group, and others have suggested different possibilities for the counterweight. One suggestion is to use existing space junk (such as discarded rocket boosters and satellites), solving two problems at once, or to repurpose the climbers used to construct the cable.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingHack the Vote: How Safe Are Elections?In this episode, we watch hackers compromise voting machines and hear from technologists hoping to safeguard democracy with help from blockchain and mobile voting. Can tech protect our democratic process from foreign interference?ADLoading advertisement...00:00 / 17:451xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nPowering the elevator is another challenge. Above 25 miles, there would be sufficient solar energy to use solar panels on the climbers. Below that threshold, lasers might help. In 2009, a company now known as PowerLight Technologies won a NASA-backed competition for its method of propelling a robotic lift up a 0.6-mile cable using lasers directed at solar panels on the sides. \nSuch a gargantuan engineering project is probably beyond the means of any one nation and would require unprecedented international cooperation. The base of a space elevator would be a tempting target for terrorists and rogue nations and would need to be heavily defended. In many ways, these political obstacles may prove more difficult to overcome than the practical challenges.\nThis article is adapted from Colin Stuart\u2019s book, \u201cHow to Live in Space: Everything You Need to Know for the Not-So-Distant Future,\u201d to be published Sept. 25 by Smithsonian Books. Researchers are working on lifts that would travel up a cable anchored above the Earth\u2019s orbit, paving the way for extra-planetary travel ",
        "author": "Colin Stuart"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flying Motorcycles, Better E-Bikes and More Personal Transportation to Come (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8538",
        "date": "2021-11-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/flying-motorcycles-better-e-bikes-and-more-personal-transportation-to-come-11636390829?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=11",
        "text": "Smarter, Safer Wheelchairs\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLUCI, an accessory that mounts on power wheelchairs, uses different technologies to map the chair\u2019s surroundings.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Luci\n \n\n\n\nBetween 65% and 80% of wheelchair users injure themselves each year with tips or falls, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. LUCI, an accessory that mounts on power wheelchairs, uses stereovision, infrared, ultrasonic and radar sensors, and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Intel Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n RealSense cameras to map the chair\u2019s surroundings so it can better navigate curbs, obstacles and tipping scenarios. It offers audible anti-tipping alerts, low-battery alerts, automated speed control and location monitors for users and caregivers in case of tips. Available since February for $8,445, LUCI has prevented over 10,000 accidents, says co-founder Barry Dean. \n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNext year, Mr. Dean and his engineer brother, Jered Dean, plan to launch additional products that automatically unload pressure to shift the user\u2019s weight and prevent pressure sores. The team is working with the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance to map the accessibility of \u201cforgotten spaces\u201d like sidewalks and alleys. \u201cThis type of information not only gives wheelchair users more independence, but can be applicable to delivery bots or parents with a stroller,\u201d Jered Dean says. Manual wheelchairs are also getting upgrades. U.K.-based Phoenix Instinct is set to debut in 2023 a smart wheelchair that adjusts its center of gravity when the chair is on a slope and slows down. And \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Toyota Motor Corp.\n\n\n is developing a device that attaches to a chair\u2019s leg rests and will stop or slow to avoid obstacles, reducing stress on a user\u2019s arms. \n\n\n\n\nScoot Along in Style\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA visitor tries the Segway S-Pod motorized chair at the tech trade show CES in Las Vegas in early 2020.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n etienne laurent/Shutterstock\n \n\n\n\nSegway\u2019s latest crack at urban mobility is the S-Pod, an electric-powered, egg-shaped armchair on wheels. Aimed at an older demographic, the self-balancing device can travel 43 miles at speeds of up to 24 mph on a single charge. Riders navigate using a joystick. Segway first plans to roll out S-Pods at airports, shopping malls, theme parks and corporate campuses as early as next year. Autonomous versions for city use are years away. Toyota\u2019s C+walk, a three-wheeled standing electric scooter developed for the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, went on sale in October in Japan for around $3,000. The company is developing a seated version for commercial use that will have three speed settings that max out at 4 mph, spokesman Aaron Fowles says. Both models are intended for pedestrian-friendly zones.\n\n\n\n\nFloat on the Air\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLexus and a team of magnetic-levitation scientists developed a prototype hoverboard for an advertising campaign.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Lexus\n \n\n\n\nWill a hoverboard that effortlessly floats above the ground ever be reality? Lexus and a team of magnetic-levitation scientists spent 18 months developing a prototype called the Slide. The board contains blocks of a superconductive metal alloy cooled to -197 degrees Celsius (-322.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by reservoirs of liquid nitrogen inside the board. The team constructed a hoverpark with a magnetic track beneath the surface. When a superconductor is cooled and placed in a magnetic field, an interaction known as the Meissner effect repels the force of gravity and allows the board to levitate. Placed above the track, the Slide hovered about an inch off the ground. When the liquid nitrogen runs out, the superconductors warm and the hoverboard drops to the ground. Lexus developed the technology for an advertising campaign around innovation, and it was ridden by a professional skateboarder. It wasn\u2019t intended for commercial use, says Mr. Fowles. \n\n\n\n\nBetter Electric Motorbikes\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSwedish electric bike company CAKE\u2019s first city bike, the Makka, reaches speeds of 28 mph with a range of up to 30 miles a charge.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Cake\n \n\n\n\nWith lighter, longer lasting batteries, electric motorbikes are starting to get more practical and accessible, promising a widespread, emissions-free alternative for urban commuters. The Xubaka, a two-seater with vintage-cool design from France\u2019s Sodium Cycles, weighs 132 pounds, including the battery, and can hit 50 mph. A passive regeneration system recovers up to 14% of the battery power while braking, and a rear seat can be replaced with utility-oriented accessories, making it more of a cargo scooter. It was launched in Europe in January with prices starting at $6,870. Italian brand Piaggio this summer unveiled a lighter, cheaper version of its electric Vesp Advances in batteries and smart technologies are leading to safer, more planet-friendly mobility devices. ",
        "author": "Jen Murphy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Welcome to Your Home on Mars (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8539",
        "date": "2019-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-your-home-on-mars-11554822013?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=75",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOver the last few years, while scientists have been working on the technology required to get humans to the Red Planet, architects have been turning their minds to what daily life might be like there. Many of their ideas have entered a NASA-sponsored contest called the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, which solicits designs for Martian habitats.\nBehind the contest is the idea that NASA would build structures on Mars using a 3-D printer\u2014the agency would send a cargo ship ahead of the humans, carrying a printer programmed with blueprints. As soon as it landed, the printer would create construction material out of the regolith\u2014the dust, rock and various other junk on top of the surface\u2014to start building homes.\n\nThese NASA competitors and others are scheming and prototyping, going to the far reaches of the Earth to try to understand what life might be like off it. They don\u2019t treat Mars as a science experiment or a place for astronauts to land, plant a flag and head home. Rather, they see the planet as the next outpost of the human race, a way to keep our species alive even in the event of Earth\u2019s extinction. And they want to help make it feel like home. Here\u2019s a look at some designs\u2014including some submitted to the NASA competition and others outside of it.\n\n\n\n\nTHE MODULAR MODEL\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe habitat designed by Team Zopherus would be made of three hexagonal structures.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Team Zopherus\n \n\n\n\nTeam Zopherus in Rogers, Ark., led by architect Trey Lane, imagines a habitat containing three hexagonal structures. The center is the living space: You come through the airlock into the common area, where there\u2019s a large window that provides sunlight both to people and to a hydroponic garden that grows plants and herbs. Off to one side is a second building, housing a laboratory. The third building is the crew\u2019s space, where each person has a small private bedroom and viewport to the outside\u2014it looks a bit like a cruise ship bedroom.\nMr. Lane said psychological comfort was as important a consideration as simple survival. \u201cWe wanted to make sure the astronauts had an area that was private, that was their own personal space,\u201d he said. Many things have double purposes: the storage space in the ceiling also acts as a radiation shield, for instance, and the small hydroponic garden produces both pleasing greenery and oxygen. Composting toilets, another staple of most Martian home designs, get a private area of their own. \nCOOLEST FEATURE: Each building has room for a small airtight hatch that leads to the outside, and adding more space is as simple as printing another hexagonal shell and attaching it to an available hatch. \n\n\n\n\nTHE SKYSCRAPER With the \u201cMarsha\u201d plan, AI SpaceFactory, a technology-focused architecture firm located in New York, envisions life in a large multilevel cylindrical building (at top). It\u2019s made of two shells: an exterior wall that acts as a shield against the elements, and an interior space for humans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn interior of AI SpaceFactory\u2019s design.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n AI SpaceFactory\n \n\n\n\nThe internal area comprises four levels, connected by a long spiral staircase. The ground level, called the garage, is where astronauts and rovers come and go, and where lab work happens. Up a level is another lab, along with the kitchen and the main communal space. Above that are private bedrooms and a garden. On the top floor, beneath a large skylight, astronauts would have a place for exercise and relaxing. \nAI SpaceFactory wants the structure to feel as Earth-like as possible. The space between the two shells helps diffuse light across the habitable space, while each shell has its own air and temperature regulation. \nCOOLEST FEATURE: Marsha has an internal, regulated lighting system that recreates Earth-like light, helping to keep the crew on a normal circadian schedule.\n\n\n\n\nTHE GIANT DOME\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArchitect Bjarke Ingels and his firm are working with the government of the United Arab Emirates to build what they call Mars Science City in the Emirati desert.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group\n \n\n\n\nRather than test its designs in a competition, architect Bjarke Ingels and his firm are heading to the desert outside of Dubai. Working with the government of the United Arab Emirates, they plan to build what they call Mars Science City in the Emirati desert, which has soil and weather more like Mars than almost anywhere on Earth. They\u2019ve designed a community with 1.9 million square feet of space that can test what it might be like to build, settle and live on Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe city starts with several large, overlapping pressurized \u201cbiospheres\u201d that can be tied to the ground and inflated. Inside them, robot machinery can look for water, Never mind how to get there\u2014what will we live in on the Red Planet? Personal Tech columnist David Pierce examines designs from Bjarke Ingels, Foster + Partners and others. ",
        "author": "David Pierce"
    },
    {
        "title": "Welcome to Your Home on Mars (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8540",
        "date": "2019-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-your-home-on-mars-11554822013?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=57",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nOver the last few years, while scientists have been working on the technology required to get humans to the Red Planet, architects have been turning their minds to what daily life might be like there. Many of their ideas have entered a NASA-sponsored contest called the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, which solicits designs for Martian habitats.\nBehind the contest is the idea that NASA would build structures on Mars using a 3-D printer\u2014the agency would send a cargo ship ahead of the humans, carrying a printer programmed with blueprints. As soon as it landed, the printer would create construction material out of the regolith\u2014the dust, rock and various other junk on top of the surface\u2014to start building homes.\n\nThese NASA competitors and others are scheming and prototyping, going to the far reaches of the Earth to try to understand what life might be like off it. They don\u2019t treat Mars as a science experiment or a place for astronauts to land, plant a flag and head home. Rather, they see the planet as the next outpost of the human race, a way to keep our species alive even in the event of Earth\u2019s extinction. And they want to help make it feel like home. Here\u2019s a look at some designs\u2014including some submitted to the NASA competition and others outside of it.\n\n\n\n\nTHE MODULAR MODEL\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe habitat designed by Team Zopherus would be made of three hexagonal structures.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Team Zopherus\n \n\n\n\nTeam Zopherus in Rogers, Ark., led by architect Trey Lane, imagines a habitat containing three hexagonal structures. The center is the living space: You come through the airlock into the common area, where there\u2019s a large window that provides sunlight both to people and to a hydroponic garden that grows plants and herbs. Off to one side is a second building, housing a laboratory. The third building is the crew\u2019s space, where each person has a small private bedroom and viewport to the outside\u2014it looks a bit like a cruise ship bedroom.\nMr. Lane said psychological comfort was as important a consideration as simple survival. \u201cWe wanted to make sure the astronauts had an area that was private, that was their own personal space,\u201d he said. Many things have double purposes: the storage space in the ceiling also acts as a radiation shield, for instance, and the small hydroponic garden produces both pleasing greenery and oxygen. Composting toilets, another staple of most Martian home designs, get a private area of their own. \nCOOLEST FEATURE: Each building has room for a small airtight hatch that leads to the outside, and adding more space is as simple as printing another hexagonal shell and attaching it to an available hatch. \n\n\n\n\nTHE SKYSCRAPER With the \u201cMarsha\u201d plan, AI SpaceFactory, a technology-focused architecture firm located in New York, envisions life in a large multilevel cylindrical building (at top). It\u2019s made of two shells: an exterior wall that acts as a shield against the elements, and an interior space for humans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn interior of AI SpaceFactory\u2019s design.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n AI SpaceFactory\n \n\n\n\nThe internal area comprises four levels, connected by a long spiral staircase. The ground level, called the garage, is where astronauts and rovers come and go, and where lab work happens. Up a level is another lab, along with the kitchen and the main communal space. Above that are private bedrooms and a garden. On the top floor, beneath a large skylight, astronauts would have a place for exercise and relaxing. \nAI SpaceFactory wants the structure to feel as Earth-like as possible. The space between the two shells helps diffuse light across the habitable space, while each shell has its own air and temperature regulation. \nCOOLEST FEATURE: Marsha has an internal, regulated lighting system that recreates Earth-like light, helping to keep the crew on a normal circadian schedule.\n\n\n\n\nTHE GIANT DOME\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArchitect Bjarke Ingels and his firm are working with the government of the United Arab Emirates to build what they call Mars Science City in the Emirati desert.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group\n \n\n\n\nRather than test its designs in a competition, architect Bjarke Ingels and his firm are heading to the desert outside of Dubai. Working with the government of the United Arab Emirates, they plan to build what they call Mars Science City in the Emirati desert, which has soil and weather more like Mars than almost anywhere on Earth. They\u2019ve designed a community with 1.9 million square feet of space that can test what it might be like to build, settle and live on Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe city starts with several large, overlapping pressurized \u201cbiospheres\u201d that can be tied to the ground and inflated. Inside them, robot machinery can look for water, rego Never mind how to get there\u2014what will we live in on the Red Planet? Personal Tech columnist David Pierce examines designs from Bjarke Ingels, Foster + Partners and others. ",
        "author": "David Pierce"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Life off Earth (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8541",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-administrator-jim-bridenstine-on-life-off-earth-11546530870?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=21",
        "text": "Jim Bridenstine, who assumed NASA\u2019s top post in April 2018, is not an astronaut by training. A former U.S. Navy pilot and executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium, he served as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from January 2013 until his confirmation, representing Oklahoma\u2019s first district. The 43-year-old believes that private companies will eventually dominate the marketplace for travel to low Earth orbit, or up to 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) above the earth\u2019s surface. NASA\u2019s priority, he says, is to go further and explore areas for which no commercial market currently exists. Over two interviews in September and December, Bridenstine spoke with The Future of Everything about long-term habitats on Mars, the search for life on other planets and the commercial and scientific endeavors coming to low Earth orbit.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNASA Will Hitch Rides to Low Earth Orbit \n\n\n\nNASA used to own and operate the rocket that launched to low Earth orbit. Now, we\u2019re looking at low Earth orbit entirely differently. We are going to buy access to space by purchasing rides from commercial rockets through our commercial crew program. We want commercial rocket companies to launch our astronauts to the International Space Station. We will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market. And when you\u2019re one customer of many, that drives down the cost. We will have multiple providers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and SpaceX are two companies that will eventually taxi our astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Where there are commercial markets, we want to take advantage of them. Where there are not yet commercial markets, NASA wants to lead the way, retire risk and then commercialize so that we can be a customer again.\nWhere We\u2019ll Find Life Outside Earth (If It Exists)... Right now there\u2019s no commercial market for exploration of Mars or Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter. But these are the two places in the solar system where we are most likely to find life. I\u2019m not saying that life is there. But if there is life on a world that\u2019s not our own that we could possibly discover, it would either be on Mars or Europa, and maybe Enceladus, which is a moon of Saturn. How do we get there to explore? It\u2019s going to depend greatly on the technology for propulsion. \n\n...and Learn to Survive on Mars We also have to figure out technology to protect humans from the radiation environment of deep space. If we do a seven-month journey to Mars and our astronauts land, they will be on the surface of Mars for a period of years before they get to come home, because the Earth and Mars are only on the same side of the sun once every 26 months. This means they\u2019re going to have to learn how to utilize the resources of Mars, especially the water ice. Water represents air to breathe, it represents water to drink and it represents fuel. If you can survive for two years you can survive for a lot longer. But the physiological effects of that are unknown. \nWe\u2019ll Use Reusable Technology for Trips to the Moon We\u2019re going back to the Moon, and we\u2019re going in a way we\u2019ve never done before. We are going sustainably, meaning that we\u2019re not going to leave flags and footprints and come home to not go back again for 50 years. This time we\u2019re going to build an architecture where everything is reusable. We have seen what happens with reusable rockets\u2014the cost of access to space goes down. We want the entire architecture\u2014not just launch\u2014to be reusable. We want reusable tugs that go from Earth orbit to lunar orbit. We are going to build a reusable command module in orbit around the moon. We\u2019re going to have landers that go back and forth from the surface of the moon up to that space station. It\u2019s going to be open architecture, so if there are international partners that want to build their own tugs or landers, they can work with our gateway.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Will Look More Like Average Earthlings We want as many people as possible to experience space without any restrictions. But things happen in a microgravity environment that are challenging. Humans lose 1% to 3% of their bone mass every month. Your immune system deteriorates. Your cardiovascular system gets deconditioned. Your neural vestibular system has significant challenges. A microgravity environment can affect eyesight and other things. At this point, we\u2019ve got to make sure that whoever goes to space is pretty healthy to start with because it\u2019s not easy on your body. But the goal is to make it accessible to more people than ever before. We want the people that are able to go into space to look like the general population, rather than somebody with three PhDs who also happens to be a Navy SEAL.\nTourism, Stem-Cell Research and More Uses for Microgravity Companies are u The former Oklahoma congressman wants to make space accessible to everyone\u2014and (possibly) discover life on other planets. ",
        "author": "Henry Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Life off Earth (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8542",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-administrator-jim-bridenstine-on-life-off-earth-11546530870?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=60",
        "text": "Jim Bridenstine, who assumed NASA\u2019s top post in April 2018, is not an astronaut by training. A former U.S. Navy pilot and executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium, he served as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from January 2013 until his confirmation, representing Oklahoma\u2019s first district. The 43-year-old believes that private companies will eventually dominate the marketplace for travel to low Earth orbit, or up to 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) above the earth\u2019s surface. NASA\u2019s priority, he says, is to go further and explore areas for which no commercial market currently exists. Over two interviews in September and December, Bridenstine spoke with The Future of Everything about long-term habitats on Mars, the search for life on other planets and the commercial and scientific endeavors coming to low Earth orbit.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNASA Will Hitch Rides to Low Earth Orbit NASA used to own and operate the rocket that launched to low Earth orbit. Now, we\u2019re looking at low Earth orbit entirely differently. We are going to buy access to space by purchasing rides from commercial rockets through our commercial crew program. We want commercial rocket companies to launch our astronauts to the International Space Station. We will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market. And when you\u2019re one customer of many, that drives down the cost. We will have multiple providers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and SpaceX are two companies that will eventually taxi our astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Where there are commercial markets, we want to take advantage of them. Where there are not yet commercial markets, NASA wants to lead the way, retire risk and then commercialize so that we can be a customer again.\nWhere We\u2019ll Find Life Outside Earth (If It Exists)... Right now there\u2019s no commercial market for exploration of Mars or Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter. But these are the two places in the solar system where we are most likely to find life. I\u2019m not saying that life is there. But if there is life on a world that\u2019s not our own that we could possibly discover, it would either be on Mars or Europa, and maybe Enceladus, which is a moon of Saturn. How do we get there to explore? It\u2019s going to depend greatly on the technology for propulsion. \n\n...and Learn to Survive on Mars We also have to figure out technology to protect humans from the radiation environment of deep space. If we do a seven-month journey to Mars and our astronauts land, they will be on the surface of Mars for a period of years before they get to come home, because the Earth and Mars are only on the same side of the sun once every 26 months. This means they\u2019re going to have to learn how to utilize the resources of Mars, especially the water ice. Water represents air to breathe, it represents water to drink and it represents fuel. If you can survive for two years you can survive for a lot longer. But the physiological effects of that are unknown. \nWe\u2019ll Use Reusable Technology for Trips to the Moon We\u2019re going back to the Moon, and we\u2019re going in a way we\u2019ve never done before. We are going sustainably, meaning that we\u2019re not going to leave flags and footprints and come home to not go back again for 50 years. This time we\u2019re going to build an architecture where everything is reusable. We have seen what happens with reusable rockets\u2014the cost of access to space goes down. We want the entire architecture\u2014not just launch\u2014to be reusable. We want reusable tugs that go from Earth orbit to lunar orbit. We are going to build a reusable command module in orbit around the moon. We\u2019re going to have landers that go back and forth from the surface of the moon up to that space station. It\u2019s going to be open architecture, so if there are international partners that want to build their own tugs or landers, they can work with our gateway.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Will Look More Like Average Earthlings We want as many people as possible to experience space without any restrictions. But things happen in a microgravity environment that are challenging. Humans lose 1% to 3% of their bone mass every month. Your immune system deteriorates. Your cardiovascular system gets deconditioned. Your neural vestibular system has significant challenges. A microgravity environment can affect eyesight and other things. At this point, we\u2019ve got to make sure that whoever goes to space is pretty healthy to start with because it\u2019s not easy on your body. But the goal is to make it accessible to more people than ever before. We want the people that are able to go into space to look like the general population, rather than somebody with three PhDs who also happens to be a Navy SEAL.\nTourism, Stem-Cell Research and More Uses for Microgravity Companies are using The former Oklahoma congressman wants to make space accessible to everyone\u2014and (possibly) discover life on other planets. ",
        "author": "Henry Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine on Life off Earth (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8543",
        "date": "2019-01-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-administrator-jim-bridenstine-on-life-off-earth-11546530870?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=81",
        "text": "Jim Bridenstine, who assumed NASA\u2019s top post in April 2018, is not an astronaut by training. A former U.S. Navy pilot and executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium, he served as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from January 2013 until his confirmation, representing Oklahoma\u2019s first district. The 43-year-old believes that private companies will eventually dominate the marketplace for travel to low Earth orbit, or up to 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) above the earth\u2019s surface. NASA\u2019s priority, he says, is to go further and explore areas for which no commercial market currently exists. Over two interviews in September and December, Bridenstine spoke with The Future of Everything about long-term habitats on Mars, the search for life on other planets and the commercial and scientific endeavors coming to low Earth orbit.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nNASA Will Hitch Rides to Low Earth Orbit \n\n\n\nNASA used to own and operate the rocket that launched to low Earth orbit. Now, we\u2019re looking at low Earth orbit entirely differently. We are going to buy access to space by purchasing rides from commercial rockets through our commercial crew program. We want commercial rocket companies to launch our astronauts to the International Space Station. We will buy that access and become one customer of many for a robust domestic launch market. And when you\u2019re one customer of many, that drives down the cost. We will have multiple providers.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\n\n\n and SpaceX are two companies that will eventually taxi our astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Where there are commercial markets, we want to take advantage of them. Where there are not yet commercial markets, NASA wants to lead the way, retire risk and then commercialize so that we can be a customer again.\nWhere We\u2019ll Find Life Outside Earth (If It Exists)... Right now there\u2019s no commercial market for exploration of Mars or Europa, which is a moon of Jupiter. But these are the two places in the solar system where we are most likely to find life. I\u2019m not saying that life is there. But if there is life on a world that\u2019s not our own that we could possibly discover, it would either be on Mars or Europa, and maybe Enceladus, which is a moon of Saturn. How do we get there to explore? It\u2019s going to depend greatly on the technology for propulsion. \n\n...and Learn to Survive on Mars We also have to figure out technology to protect humans from the radiation environment of deep space. If we do a seven-month journey to Mars and our astronauts land, they will be on the surface of Mars for a period of years before they get to come home, because the Earth and Mars are only on the same side of the sun once every 26 months. This means they\u2019re going to have to learn how to utilize the resources of Mars, especially the water ice. Water represents air to breathe, it represents water to drink and it represents fuel. If you can survive for two years you can survive for a lot longer. But the physiological effects of that are unknown. \nWe\u2019ll Use Reusable Technology for Trips to the Moon We\u2019re going back to the Moon, and we\u2019re going in a way we\u2019ve never done before. We are going sustainably, meaning that we\u2019re not going to leave flags and footprints and come home to not go back again for 50 years. This time we\u2019re going to build an architecture where everything is reusable. We have seen what happens with reusable rockets\u2014the cost of access to space goes down. We want the entire architecture\u2014not just launch\u2014to be reusable. We want reusable tugs that go from Earth orbit to lunar orbit. We are going to build a reusable command module in orbit around the moon. We\u2019re going to have landers that go back and forth from the surface of the moon up to that space station. It\u2019s going to be open architecture, so if there are international partners that want to build their own tugs or landers, they can work with our gateway.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronauts Will Look More Like Average Earthlings We want as many people as possible to experience space without any restrictions. But things happen in a microgravity environment that are challenging. Humans lose 1% to 3% of their bone mass every month. Your immune system deteriorates. Your cardiovascular system gets deconditioned. Your neural vestibular system has significant challenges. A microgravity environment can affect eyesight and other things. At this point, we\u2019ve got to make sure that whoever goes to space is pretty healthy to start with because it\u2019s not easy on your body. But the goal is to make it accessible to more people than ever before. We want the people that are able to go into space to look like the general population, rather than somebody with three PhDs who also happens to be a Navy SEAL.\nTourism, Stem-Cell Research and More Uses for Microgravity Companies are u The former Oklahoma congressman wants to make space accessible to everyone\u2014and (possibly) discover life on other planets. ",
        "author": "Henry Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "Welcome to Your Home on Mars (WSJ: The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8544",
        "date": "2019-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-your-home-on-mars-11554822013?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=62",
        "text": "Newsletter Sign-up The Future of Everything A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOver the last few years, while scientists have been working on the technology required to get humans to the Red Planet, architects have been turning their minds to what daily life might be like there. Many of their ideas have entered a NASA-sponsored contest called the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, which solicits designs for Martian habitats.\nBehind the contest is the idea that NASA would build structures on Mars using a 3-D printer\u2014the agency would send a cargo ship ahead of the humans, carrying a printer programmed with blueprints. As soon as it landed, the printer would create construction material out of the regolith\u2014the dust, rock and various other junk on top of the surface\u2014to start building homes.\n\nThese NASA competitors and others are scheming and prototyping, going to the far reaches of the Earth to try to understand what life might be like off it. They don\u2019t treat Mars as a science experiment or a place for astronauts to land, plant a flag and head home. Rather, they see the planet as the next outpost of the human race, a way to keep our species alive even in the event of Earth\u2019s extinction. And they want to help make it feel like home. Here\u2019s a look at some designs\u2014including some submitted to the NASA competition and others outside of it.\n\n\n\n\nTHE MODULAR MODEL\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe habitat designed by Team Zopherus would be made of three hexagonal structures.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Team Zopherus\n \n\n\n\nTeam Zopherus in Rogers, Ark., led by architect Trey Lane, imagines a habitat containing three hexagonal structures. The center is the living space: You come through the airlock into the common area, where there\u2019s a large window that provides sunlight both to people and to a hydroponic garden that grows plants and herbs. Off to one side is a second building, housing a laboratory. The third building is the crew\u2019s space, where each person has a small private bedroom and viewport to the outside\u2014it looks a bit like a cruise ship bedroom.\nMr. Lane said psychological comfort was as important a consideration as simple survival. \u201cWe wanted to make sure the astronauts had an area that was private, that was their own personal space,\u201d he said. Many things have double purposes: the storage space in the ceiling also acts as a radiation shield, for instance, and the small hydroponic garden produces both pleasing greenery and oxygen. Composting toilets, another staple of most Martian home designs, get a private area of their own. \nCOOLEST FEATURE: Each building has room for a small airtight hatch that leads to the outside, and adding more space is as simple as printing another hexagonal shell and attaching it to an available hatch. \n\n\n\n\nTHE SKYSCRAPER With the \u201cMarsha\u201d plan, AI SpaceFactory, a technology-focused architecture firm located in New York, envisions life in a large multilevel cylindrical building (at top). It\u2019s made of two shells: an exterior wall that acts as a shield against the elements, and an interior space for humans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn interior of AI SpaceFactory\u2019s design.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n AI SpaceFactory\n \n\n\n\nThe internal area comprises four levels, connected by a long spiral staircase. The ground level, called the garage, is where astronauts and rovers come and go, and where lab work happens. Up a level is another lab, along with the kitchen and the main communal space. Above that are private bedrooms and a garden. On the top floor, beneath a large skylight, astronauts would have a place for exercise and relaxing. \nAI SpaceFactory wants the structure to feel as Earth-like as possible. The space between the two shells helps diffuse light across the habitable space, while each shell has its own air and temperature regulation. \nCOOLEST FEATURE: Marsha has an internal, regulated lighting system that recreates Earth-like light, helping to keep the crew on a normal circadian schedule.\n\n\n\n\nTHE GIANT DOME\n\n\n\n\n\n\nArchitect Bjarke Ingels and his firm are working with the government of the United Arab Emirates to build what they call Mars Science City in the Emirati desert.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group\n \n\n\n\nRather than test its designs in a competition, architect Bjarke Ingels and his firm are heading to the desert outside of Dubai. Working with the government of the United Arab Emirates, they plan to build what they call Mars Science City in the Emirati desert, which has soil and weather more like Mars than almost anywhere on Earth. They\u2019ve designed a community with 1.9 million square feet of space that can test what it might be like to build, settle and live on Mars.\n\n\n\n\n\nThe city starts with several large, overlapping pressurized \u201cbiospheres\u201d that can be tied to the ground and inflated. Inside them, robot machinery can look for water, regolith and more. They would use the local material, simultaneously digging down and building up, to create multilayer buildings, which also act as a progressive shield against radiation\u2014the safest space will be the bottom floors, underground. Education and work would largely happen below the surface, while agriculture and housing would be above-ground. (Digging out a home is more work than building one, and humans might find underground housing depressing.) Most of the core buildings and infrastructure would be 3D-printed, but there\u2019s plenty of space for additional construction within the enormous domes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMars Science City would be made up of several large, overlapping pressurized \u2018biospheres.\u2019\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group\n \n\n\n\nRather than focusing on small individual habitats, Science City opens everything up\u2014with lush foliage indoors and open space, it wouldn\u2019t feel so much like living in an Airstream. Science City is meant as an educational tool, and will house a space museum, but also acts as a place to research everything from food to construction in a Martian-like setting. When it\u2019s ready, a team will live in the domes for a year, trying to learn what it might be like to live on the Red Planet.\nCOOLEST FEATURE: The team ultimately wants to create even larger structures, building super-strong donut-shaped domes called \u201ctoruses\u201d that, when combined, could allow for more than a million people to live in a single community. Some scientists believe the torus is the shape of the universe, which is pretty good inspiration.\n\n\n\n\nTHE INFLATABLE CITY\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA design from architecture firm Foster + Partners.\n\n\n Illustration: \n \n Foster + Partners\n \n\n\n\nArchitecture firm Foster + Partners designed a system in which small pre-made modules would be installed inside a large 3D-printed anti-radiation barrier on Mars\u2019 surface. The modules would then be inflated and connected with airlock tunnels. The whole setup has a kind of glamping vibe, like a yurt designed by a sci-fi author. Inside, it\u2019s all white walls and transparent touch screens next to hydroponic gardens.\nLike many others, the team focused on keeping the Martian radiation and meteorites out. Rather than protect each building individually, they imagined a massive wall, constructed out of local Martian soil, designed to protect entire communities from the sun\u2019s radiation. (Think the Wall from \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d but meant for keeping out sun instead of undead monsters.)\n\n\nMore From The Future of Everything Space Issue Can Jeff Bezos Make Money in Space? What\u2019s Next for the Global Space Race For $50 Million, Book Your Vacation in Space Hate Your Internet Provider? Look to Space The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get it Right. How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers We Were Promised Space Colonies. What Went Wrong? Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence \n\n\nFoster + Partners identified one particularly tricky material to keep out: dust. Sandstorms can destroy machinery, and even dust tracked into a habitat can cause problems. So the team designed a system it called \u201cSuitports,\u201d in which spacesuits are sealed to the outside of the habitat, and astronauts climb into them from the inside like they\u2019re entering a vehicle. That way everything that\u2019s exposed to Mars stays outside.\nCOOLEST FEATURE: The firm designed everything with redundancy in mind. The giant wall would be built by swarms of robot-printers rather than a single device, and the modules can be swapped in and out if something goes wrong. And in space, something always goes wrong. Never mind how to get there\u2014what will we live in on the Red Planet? Personal Tech columnist David Pierce examines designs from Bjarke Ingels, Foster + Partners and others. ",
        "author": "David Pierce"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coronavirus Offers a Clear View of What Causes Air Pollution (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8545",
        "date": "2020-05-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-offers-a-clear-view-of-what-causes-air-pollution-11588498200?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=40",
        "text": "Satellite data from NASA show a significant drop in pollution levels over China after large parts of the country were shut down because of the coronavirus. WSJ explains how some analysts are tracking air quality to measure the economic impact of the epidemic.\n \n\n\n\u201cThere have been some interesting pseudo-experiments, like when Beijing closed its plants for the [2008 Summer] Olympics, but only for a few days,\u201d said Melissa Lunden, chief scientist for Aclima, a San Francisco company that measures pollution with street-level sensors. \u201cNow, everyone on the planet can see the changes.\u201d\nThe reasons, experts say, is that factories have shut down, and people who can\u2019t go to the office, church or restaurants have stopped driving. Vehicle traffic in Los Angeles and New York has plunged about 90% from levels in January 2020, according to data analytics firm StreetLight Data Inc.\n\n\nCreated with Highcharts 6.1.1Percent change in common pollutants sinceJan. 20 in the Bay AreaSource: AQMISCreated with Highcharts 6.1.1%Black carbonCO2NO2Jan. \u201920Feb.MarchApril-1.25-1.00-0.75-0.50-0.250.000.250.50\n\n\n\nOne of the biggest airborne pollutants to fall off has been nitrogen dioxide, which is a byproduct of fossil-fuel emissions that most scientists believe is contributing to climate change. Satellite data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show NO2 levels in the Northeastern U.S. dropped 30% during March from the previous four-year average for the month.\n\n\nSan Francisco-based Aclima has compiled data that shows the NO2 readings dropping in lockstep as the coronavirus swept first from China in January to Europe in February and the U.S. in March. Scientists said it was the first time they could remember so many cities going clean all at once.\nAclima\u2019s most comprehensive data is for its own backyard, the San Francisco Bay Area, home to about eight million people. The region recorded a 31% decline in NO2 during the 10 weekdays ended April 6 compared with the previous three-year average for the same time. In addition, Aclima found a 39% drop in particulate matter such as from smoke and a 41% plunge in soot created by diesel fumes and other human sources. The company\u2019s scientists say they believe those are the lowest levels since the first half of the last century.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFresh Air\nFollowing the state shutdown, stations across California reported lower NO2 levels.\n\n\n\nNO2 parts per billion\n\n\n5\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\nArea of\ndetail\n\n\nFebruary average\n\n\nMarch average\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\nPacific\nOcean\n\n\n50 miles\n\n\n50 km\n\n\n\n\n\nNO2 parts per billion\n\n\nArea of\ndetail\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\n15\n\n\nFebruary average\n\n\nMarch average\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\nPacific\nOcean\n\n\n50 miles\n\n\n50 km\n\n\n\n\n\nNO2 parts per billion\n\n\n5\n\n\n15\n\n\n10\n\n\nFebruary average\n\n\nArea of\ndetail\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\nPacific\nOcean\n\n\n50 miles\n\n\n50 km\n\n\nMarch average\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\n\n\n\nNO2 parts per billion\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\n15\n\n\nAverage NO2 detected in February\n\n\nArea of\ndetail\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\nPacific\nOcean\n\n\n50 miles\n\n\n50 km\n\n\nAverage NO2 detected in March\n\n\nSacramento\n\n\nSan Francisco\n\n\nSan Jose\n\n\n\nSource: AirNow; Aclima\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cWe knew how bad the pollution was,\u201d said Davida Herzl, Aclima\u2019s co-founder and chief executive officer. \u201cWhat we didn\u2019t know was how significantly it could drop.\u201d\nThe reductions in air pollution weren\u2019t evenly distributed in the Bay Area, however. In the northwest corner of Oakland known as West Oakland, the level of human-caused carbon dioxide fell 56% over that April 6 time period compared with 43% for the Bay Area as a whole. Aclima officials attribute the drop to the fact that West Oakland, a majority African-American neighborhood, is in an industrial zone surrounded by ships, trucks, trains and factories.\nEnvironmental activists say the readings support what they have long argued, that lower-income communities such as West Oakland suffer from more pollution than other parts of cities. The rate of childhood asthma in West Oakland is five times higher than the statewide average, according to Brian Beveridge, co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStay-at-home orders meant for thin rush-hour traffic April 14 in Los Angeles\u2014and fresh skies above.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Ringo Chiu/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\n\u201cThis tells me, look, there really is a direct correlation between the health outcomes in communities like West Oakland and the levels of pollution,\u201d Mr. Beveridge said.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat, if any, is the lasting effect of the current drop in air pollution? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nPollution levels will inevitably rise in the U.S., as they have in other parts of the world that have begun to return to normal, Ms. Herzl said. But she said it was likely to be more gradual than the drop, as the economy won\u2019t With the coronavirus shutdowns, scientists are able to see what would happen to the planet if the world\u2019s economy went on hiatus. ",
        "author": "Jim Carlton"
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking for Signs of Alien Technology (WSJ: Wilczek's Universe) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8546",
        "date": "2020-02-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-for-signs-of-alien-technology-11581605907?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=59",
        "text": "New techniques in exoplanetary astronomy now in development will vastly increase the count and give us more detailed information about the objects we discover\u2014not just their masses and sizes but their temperatures and the chemical composition of their atmospheres. Atmospheres are especially significant in the search for alien life because they might be affected by biological processes, the way that photosynthesis on Earth produces nearly all of our planet\u2019s atmospheric oxygen. The search for signs of life is a core subject in astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth. \nBut less consideration has been given to a more spectacular possibility: astrotechnology. Could future exoplanetary exploration turn up evidence of advanced technology outside our solar system? What would such evidence look like? \n\n\n\n\nA technologically advanced civilization born on one planet might want to diversify its portfolio by colonizing other planets nearby. (Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, among others, have advocated that we Earthlings get to work on it.) To make such colonies habitable on a large scale, it would probably be necessary to re-engineer the new planet\u2019s atmosphere to mimic the old one. Such clone exoplanets, with an otherwise inexplicable resemblance between their atmospheres, could be one signature of astrotechnology. \n\n\nMore Wilczek\u2019s Universe\n\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re All Still Living in Euclid\u2019s World\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\nThe Models That Made Modern Science\nDecember 30, 2021 \n\n\nThe Cosmic Origins of Silver and Gold\nNovember 24, 2021 \n\n\nWe Are All Cyborgs \nOctober 14, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nAnother possibility is that an alien civilization might deliberately trigger a greenhouse effect to raise a planet\u2019s temperature. A runaway greenhouse effect caused by an accumulation of water vapor and carbon dioxide turned Venus into a hellish wasteland; notoriously, an accumulation of carbon dioxide is currently warming Earth\u2019s climate. \n\n\nAn advanced alien civilization could use this technique in a more controlled fashion to raise the temperature of a cold planet, making it more favorable for life by allowing it to support liquid water. Alternatively, it might be possible to use atmospheric engineering to produce cooling effects. Exoplanetary exploration could reveal \u201cunnatural\u201d atmospheres of either kind. \nAnomalously high temperatures on an exoplanet could also be a sign that it is using artificial energy sources. Manufacturing powered by nuclear fission or fusion could look like that. Closely related to this concept is the Dyson sphere, a hypothetical structure named after the physicist Freeman Dyson. It involves deploying solar panels in space, on a colossal scale, to trap a significant fraction of a star\u2019s energy output and beam that energy to planetary manufacturing centers.\nThe classic strategy in SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is to look for signals that an advanced technology might broadcast. But this is an inefficient strategy, since almost all of any potential signal would miss our detectors. The pursuit of exoplanetary astronomy suggests a different approach. An alien species that wants to communicate could draw the gaze of exoplanetary astronomers to anomalies in its solar system, effectively using its parent star to focus attention. This might turn out to be the most practical way to open communications across the universe. Unusual changes in the atmosphere and temperature of distant planets might be our first clue to the existence of life beyond Earth. ",
        "author": "Frank Wilczek"
    },
    {
        "title": "The World According to Freeman (WSJ: Wilczek's Universe) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8547",
        "date": "2020-03-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-according-to-freeman-11584635563?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=47",
        "text": "Freeman made many fundamental contributions in physics and mathematics, but in the last years of his life he expressed some doubts about the significance of carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, which put him at odds with most of the scientific community, including myself. Unfortunately, this is now the main thing that many people know him for. Here I will try to frame the scientific issues at stake, in a way I think he might approve. \nAn average human adult consumes about 2,000 calories a day in food. That is roughly enough energy to run a 100-watt lightbulb continuously. Today, human beings use about 25 times that much energy per capita, including as fuel and electricity. In the U.S., the average is more like 95 times. This is a rough but objective indicator of how far our economy has advanced over bare human subsistence. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFreeman Dyson in 2016.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Gary Gershoff/WireImage/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUsing the energy needed for subsistence as our unit, the Sun\u2019s energy output corresponds to some 500 trillion units per capita for the current world population. Of course, the Sun\u2019s output gets radiated into space in all directions. To capture a big fraction of it, we\u2019d need to put gigantic collection devices in space surrounding much of the Sun. Freeman thought about engineering projects of that sort, known as Dyson spheres. Hypothetically, they could support a much bigger economy and a much larger population than we have today. \n\n\nIf, more modestly, we restrict ourselves to the solar energy that reaches Earth, then we find \u201conly\u201d about 10,000 times our current energy consumption. Still, that should do for quite a while. This is the basic reason why sustainable solar energy is extremely promising as a long-term solution to human energy needs. We can put some absorbing panels on Earth and others in space, and gradually work toward a full Dyson sphere if the need arises. \nThus, Freeman believed, with the growth of technology our energy problems will solve themselves. He also had a heterodox view of carbon dioxide, which most scientists see as the chief culprit behind global warming. Freeman loved the idea of growing more trees and lusher vegetation\u2014for food, shelter and spiritual nourishment\u2014so he had a soft spot for carbon dioxide, whose abundance promotes photosynthesis. Freeman\u2019s congenital optimism and visionary tendencies emboldened his brilliance. But they led him, I think, to underestimate the importance and danger of abrupt changes in Earth\u2019s climate due to fossil fuel burning in the meantime.\nIf you would like to get a sense of what it was like to know Freeman, and to hear some wonderful stories and ideas, I strongly recommend that you sample his interviews at the Web of Stories website. When you talked to Freeman, he listened, and he often responded with a twinkle in his eye, especially when he had a chance to surprise or contradict you. It\u2019s an unusual style. I\u2019ll miss him. \n\n\nMore Wilczek\u2019s Universe\n\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re All Still Living in Euclid\u2019s World\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\nThe Models That Made Modern Science\nDecember 30, 2021 \n\n\nThe Cosmic Origins of Silver and Gold\nNovember 24, 2021 \n\n\nWe Are All Cyborgs \nOctober 14, 2021 The physicist Freeman Dyson, who died in late February, believed that scientific ingenuity would find a way to save the planet. ",
        "author": "Frank Wilczek"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why You Don\u2019t Need to Ditch Your Gas Stove (Yet) (NYT: Wirecutter) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8548",
        "date": "2021-06-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/dont-need-ditch-your-gas-stove-yet/",
        "text": "If you\u2019ve been spooked by the stories urging you to \u201ckill your gas stove\u201d because it poses \u201chidden dangers\u201d that are \u201cbad for you and the planet,\u201d you don\u2019t actually need to freak out. Yes, it\u2019s a more environmentally conscious move to ditch your gas stove when it breaks or when you\u2019re renovating, and to... If you\u2019ve been spooked by the stories urging you to \u201ckill your gas stove\u201d because it poses \u201chidden dangers\u201d that are \u201cbad for you and the planet,\u201d you don\u2019t actually need to freak out. Yes, it\u2019s a more environmentally conscious move to ditch your ... If you\u2019ve been spooked by the stories urging you to \u201ckill your gas stove\u201d because it poses \u201chidden dangers\u201d that are \u201cbad for you and the planet,\u201d you don\u2019t actually need to freak out. Yes, it\u2019s a more environmentally conscious move to ditch your gas stove when it breaks or when you\u2019re renovating, and to...",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Hothouse,\u2019 From Steam Baths to Climate Change (WSJ: Word on the Street) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8549",
        "date": "2018-08-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hothouse-from-steam-baths-to-climate-change-1534516399?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=71",
        "text": "The word \u201chothouse\u201d dates back to the 15th century, when it first referred to a type of bathhouse with steam baths\u2014what would later come to be known as a \u201cTurkish bath.\u201d Thanks to the association of such establishments with illicit sex, \u201chothouse\u201d soon became synonymous with \u201cbrothel.\u201d The term also was used to describe a chamber for drying things, such as salt or pottery. \nStarting in the 17th century, early greenhouses began to be built in Europe to regulate the climatic conditions for growing plants, allowing year-round cultivation. \u201cHothouse\u201d came to be used for artificially heated greenhouses, especially useful for cultivating exotic tropical plants. An English guide to gardening from 1629 advised that the \u201cIndian flowering reed\u201d could not \u201cabide the extremities of our winters\u201d unless it was raised in \u201ca hothouse, such as are used in Germany.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nWhen scientists started appreciating the warming effects of atmospheric gases in the 19th century, greenhouses served as a convenient metaphorical comparison. A geologist writing in 1867 observed that increases in carbon dioxide and other gases would heat the planet \u201cprecisely as if we had covered the whole earth with an immense dome of glass, had transformed it into a great Orchid-house.\u201d The term \u201cgreenhouse effect\u201d was introduced by the English physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Henry Poynting\n\n\n\n in 1907, though some scientists preferred to call it the \u201chothouse effect.\u201d (Either way, some have argued the metaphor is inapt, since a greenhouse warms air by keeping it trapped in an unventilated space.)\n\n\nIn 1919, when the test pilot\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roland Rohlfs\n\n\n\n set a world record by flying a plane to an altitude of more than 34,000 feet, the prominent newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane wrote in a syndicated column that Rohlfs had reached the outer limits of \u201cthe thin atmosphere which is the glass of our hothouse earth.\u201d\n\u201cHothouse Earth\u201d took on a more foreboding meaning in 1975, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Howard A. Wilcox,\n\n\n\n a nuclear physicist and marine engineer, used it as the title of a book in which he foresaw a \u201cglobal heat disaster\u201d if humanity didn\u2019t take drastic measures to avoid it. While Wilcox\u2019s book was faulted by critics for lack of reliable evidence, the phrase \u201cHothouse Earth\u201d would continue to rise in popularity. It was pressed into service as a book title again in 1990 for a popular treatment of climate science by the British astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Gribbin.\n\n\n\n \nThe new PNAS study represents a more recent embrace of the phrase by climate scientists, informed by research into how the planet has swung back and forth between extreme climatic states over the course of its history: \u201cIcehouse Earth\u201d (or \u201cSnowball Earth\u201d) at one extreme and \u201cHothouse Earth\u201d at the other. As an evocation of the delicate balancing act required to keep the climate from overheating, \u201chothouse\u201d is a fiery bit of messaging.\n\n\nMore Word on the Street\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Slav\u2019: A Regional Heritage Linked Through Speech\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Tranche\u2019: A Slice of Meat\u2014or a Portion of Punishment \nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Convoy\u2019: Breaker One-Nine, Truckers Are Lining Up Again\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Brinkmanship\u2019: Pushing Danger to Its Farthest Edge\nFebruary 17, 2022 The history of a word that scientists now use to describe a warming planet. ",
        "author": "Ben Zimmer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Zero Carbon Future 4: Adaptation and the Future of Climate Modeling (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8550",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/zero-carbon-future-4-adaptation-and-the-future-of-climate-modeling/8E4BD91E-0CEB-4E49-B492-74F84906FE60?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=10",
        "text": " While world leaders and businesses are making pledges to mitigate climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, many parts of the world are already struggling to adapt to a warming planet. The Far North - places like Siberia and Alaska, parts of which are warming three times faster than the global average - are ground zero. In this episode, we look at how they are dealing with thawing permafrost; the struggle to pay for adaptation in other U.S. cities; and why scientists say future climate models need to become more granular, to help communities prepare. Ann Simmons weighs in from Russia and Georgi Kantchev joins from Germany. Emily Schwing reports from Alaska. With science writer Robert Lee Hotz. Janet Babin hosts ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Zero Carbon Future 4: Adaptation and the Future of Climate Modeling (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8551",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/zero-carbon-future-4-adaptation-and-the-future-of-climate-modeling/8E4BD91E-0CEB-4E49-B492-74F84906FE60?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=8",
        "text": " While world leaders and businesses are making pledges to mitigate climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, many parts of the world are already struggling to adapt to a warming planet. The Far North - places like Siberia and Alaska, parts of which are warming three times faster than the global average - are ground zero. In this episode, we look at how they are dealing with thawing permafrost; the struggle to pay for adaptation in other U.S. cities; and why scientists say future climate models need to become more granular, to help communities prepare. Ann Simmons weighs in from Russia and Georgi Kantchev joins from Germany. Emily Schwing reports from Alaska. With science writer Robert Lee Hotz. Janet Babin hosts ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Zero Carbon Future 4: Adaptation and the Future of Climate Modeling (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8552",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/zero-carbon-future-4-adaptation-and-the-future-of-climate-modeling/8E4BD91E-0CEB-4E49-B492-74F84906FE60?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=11",
        "text": " While world leaders and businesses are making pledges to mitigate climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, many parts of the world are already struggling to adapt to a warming planet. The Far North - places like Siberia and Alaska, parts of which are warming three times faster than the global average - are ground zero. In this episode, we look at how they are dealing with thawing permafrost; the struggle to pay for adaptation in other U.S. cities; and why scientists say future climate models need to become more granular, to help communities prepare. Ann Simmons weighs in from Russia and Georgi Kantchev joins from Germany. Emily Schwing reports from Alaska. With science writer Robert Lee Hotz. Janet Babin hosts ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Zero Carbon Future 4: Adaptation and the Future of Climate Modeling (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8553",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything/zero-carbon-future-4-adaptation-and-the-future-of-climate-modeling/8E4BD91E-0CEB-4E49-B492-74F84906FE60?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=17",
        "text": " While world leaders and businesses are making pledges to mitigate climate change by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, many parts of the world are already struggling to adapt to a warming planet. The Far North - places like Siberia and Alaska, parts of which are warming three times faster than the global average - are ground zero. In this episode, we look at how they are dealing with thawing permafrost; the struggle to pay for adaptation in other U.S. cities; and why scientists say future climate models need to become more granular, to help communities prepare. Ann Simmons weighs in from Russia and Georgi Kantchev joins from Germany. Emily Schwing reports from Alaska. With science writer Robert Lee Hotz. Janet Babin hosts ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Photos: NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Mars Flight (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8554",
        "date": "2021-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/story/photos-historic-nasa-ingenuity-helicopter-to-make-first-flight-on-mars-57179764?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=26",
        "text": " The tiny solar-powered drone became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | \u2018Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets\u2019 is crazy. That\u2019s why you should see it. (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8555",
        "date": "2017-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/07/20/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets-is-crazy-thats-why-you-should-see-it/",
        "text": "This column discusses the plot of \u201cValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,\u201d which must be seen to be believed, in a general way.I\u2019m not entirely sure how to describe a movie that features Ethan Hawke as an intergalactic pimp and a luminous performance by Rihanna as an alien stripper; an alien race whose people look like the\u00a0Maasai by way of Lisa Frank and serve as a stand-in for the Jews after the Holocaust; and jellyfish who provide geolocation services by way of psychic powers. It\u2019s a Luc Besson movie, obviously; an adaptation of a comic strip; and something the rest of pop culture ought to try to emulate if the entertainment industry can actually see what\u2019s going on in it. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,\u201d which stars Dane DeHaan as Major Valerian and Cara Delevingne as Sergeant Laureline, is alternately the most genuinely utopian genre movie I\u2019ve seen in ages and\u00a0an absolute goldmine of potential thinkpieces on issues of race, gender, sex and politics. The movie, which features the pair as space detective-commandos on the hunt for whatever is threatening the existence of an enormous space station, is sincere and mesmerizing, and often\u00a0ridiculous. And in a very silly season in American politics, \u201cValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets\u201d is a brief argument for the virtue of gorgeously executed goofiness, especially in service of optimism.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn both film and television, artists and executives too often seem to assume that the best way to make a point or be taken seriously is to be as grim as possible. Movies such as Christopher Nolan\u2019s Batman trilogy, and television series such as \u201cThe Sopranos,\u201d \u201cBreaking Bad\u201d and \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d have won substantial critical acclaim and highly loyal audiences by focusing on the grimmer aspects of human nature. It\u2019s not wrong for anyone looking at those successes to take away the message that being unsparing is the best route to praise and popularity. And if the aim of an artistic project is to explore toxic ideas of masculinity or the consequences for a society that condones rape and domestic violence, an unsparing vision and somber tone may be critical to getting your point across.But to suggest that there is a neat alignment between grim tone and subject matter and artistic quality isn\u2019t merely creatively stifling. It\u2019s an argument about human nature. If you say that the only way to make a penetrating, clearly observed piece of art is to focus on the worst things people do,\u00a0you\u2019re declaring that humans are fallen and degraded and that to argue anything else is deluded. That\u2019s a thesis that is possible to defend, though it\u2019s rarely advanced directly; instead, it\u2019s an idea that floats around in the background of these discussions.The characters in \u201cValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets\u201d aren\u2019t saints, but they\u2019re generally optimists who believe in duty, and in the utopian mission of Alpha, the space station where much of the action takes place.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlpha is the \u201cCity of a Thousand Planets\u201d of the title. It went into construction in 1975 and, as it grew,\u00a0became the place where citizens of different nations and then different species made contact with each other and built habitats where they could develop their expertise and share their knowledge. This timeline plays out to David Bowie\u2019s \u201cSpace Oddity,\u201d and it\u2019s easily the best prequel to a movie since the one that preceded Zack Snyder\u2019s \u201cWatchmen\u201d; in fact, it may be better.When the movie\u2019s action really kicks off, there appears to be a spot of growing radiation at the center of the station that imperils its existence. Valerian and Laureline\u2019s mission is to figure out what\u2019s happening. When the truth turns out to be far more complicated than they or their immediate superiors expect, everyone behaves in accordance with their own core values. Things blow up, but perpetrators are brought to justice rather than glamorously executed. The people who have been harmed are made as whole as it\u2019s possible for them to be. Valerian decides he wants to be a different kind of person and, after an earnest effort, persuades Laureline to trust that he\u2019s sincere.In fact, for all its surface flash, the weirdest thing about \u201cValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets\u201d in this present environment may be that it\u2019s a blockbuster that insists that acting in good faith is possible; that what\u2019s right matters more than what\u2019s cool; and that you can fight to affirmatively pursue utopian ideals rather than to merely preserve the status quo from evil.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe entertainment industry being what it is, the gutsiest and most visually delightful parts of this movie will probably be disavowed, with blame going to whatever people find most problematic about it, and the exhaustion of Hollywood\u2019s continuing efforts to turn DeHaan into a leading man. That\u2019s too bad: \u201cValerian and the City of a Thousand\u201d planets made my jaw drop in wonder at both its absurdity and its ambition. Sometimes joy and surprise are the most powerful special effects in a movie\u2019s arsenal. I don't even know how to describe this movie, except to say that other blockbusters could learn a ton from it. Opinion: \u2018Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets\u2019 is crazy. That\u2019s why you should see it.",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It\u2019s About Time!\u2019 Betye Saar\u2019s Long Climb to the Summit (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8556",
        "date": "2019-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/arts/design/betye-saar.html",
        "text": "At 93, with major attention finally coming her way, an artist central to the black women\u2019s revolution says she\u2019s waited long enough. At 93, with major attention finally coming her way, an artist central to the black women\u2019s revolution says she\u2019s waited long enough. LOS ANGELES \u2014 I ask the artist Betye Saar, who is 93 and set to open concurrent solo shows this fall at two major museums \u2014 the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art \u2014 if she has any theories as to why big-ticket attention is finally coming her way. She skips mentioning the obvious factors: She\u2019s a woman; she\u2019s black; she\u2019s lived her whole life on what she calls \u201cthe other side of the planet\u201d (Southern California). \u201cBecause it\u2019s about time!\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve had to wait till I\u2019m practically 100.\u201d",
        "author": "By Holland Cotter"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018It\u2019s About Time!\u2019 Betye Saar\u2019s Long Climb to the Summit (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8557",
        "date": "2019-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/arts/design/betye-saar.html",
        "text": "At 93, with major attention finally coming her way, an artist central to the black women\u2019s revolution says she\u2019s waited long enough. At 93, with major attention finally coming her way, an artist central to the black women\u2019s revolution says she\u2019s waited long enough. LOS ANGELES \u2014 I ask the artist Betye Saar, who is 93 and set to open concurrent solo shows this fall at two major museums \u2014 the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art \u2014 if she has any theories as to why big-ticket attention is finally coming her way. She skips mentioning the obvious factors: She\u2019s a woman; she\u2019s black; she\u2019s lived her whole life on what she calls \u201cthe other side of the planet\u201d (Southern California). \u201cBecause it\u2019s about time!\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve had to wait till I\u2019m practically 100.\u201d",
        "author": "By Holland Cotter"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Black Superman? It\u2019s Happened, and Could Again. (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8558",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/arts/black-superman.html",
        "text": "As renewed rumors of a Black Superman movie swirl, here is the complicated history of reimagining the most iconic comic hero as a Black man. As renewed rumors of a Black Superman movie swirl, here is the complicated history of reimagining the most iconic comic hero as a Black man. In 2008, during his presidential campaign, Barack Obama told a joke at a charity event. \u201cContrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger,\u201d he said. \u201cI was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-El, to save the planet Earth.\u201d",
        "author": "By George Gene Gustines"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race\u2019 Season 10, Episode 4: RuPocalypse, Now? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8559",
        "date": "2018-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/arts/rupauls-drag-race-season-10-episode-4-rupocalypse-now.html",
        "text": "When the world is coming to an end, why not throw a ball? When the world is coming to an end, why not throw a ball? Greetings, mother-earthlings. I signal you from the planet Phenylephrine, the foggy orbit of which I have been launched into by the unseasonable cold in my corner of our rapidly-warming globe. Fortunately, our leaders do not deny the forces that are causing these herstoric temperature spikes, and have set about taking immediate action. I am, of course, referring to our RuPresident and his armoire of realness executives.",
        "author": "By Amanda Duarte"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Artists Would Do if They Could Fly to the Moon (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8560",
        "date": "2018-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/arts/design/artists-moon-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. Its ambition is to \u201crevolutionize space travel,\u201d but when it comes to manned missions, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company sometimes seems to have struggled to \u2026 well, to get off the ground. It\u2019s become a major player in satellite launches, and achieved some impressive milestones, but some of the targets and timelines related to its grandest plans have turned out to be wildly optimistic. That\u2019s not even to mention the Tesla chief executive\u2019s recent behavior, which has led some investors to question exactly which planet he is on.",
        "author": "By Andrew Dickson"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Artists Would Do if They Could Fly to the Moon (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8561",
        "date": "2018-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/arts/design/artists-moon-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. Its ambition is to \u201crevolutionize space travel,\u201d but when it comes to manned missions, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company sometimes seems to have struggled to \u2026 well, to get off the ground. It\u2019s become a major player in satellite launches, and achieved some impressive milestones, but some of the targets and timelines related to its grandest plans have turned out to be wildly optimistic. That\u2019s not even to mention the Tesla chief executive\u2019s recent behavior, which has led some investors to question exactly which planet he is on.",
        "author": "By Andrew Dickson"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Artists Would Do if They Could Fly to the Moon (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8562",
        "date": "2018-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/arts/design/artists-moon-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. Its ambition is to \u201crevolutionize space travel,\u201d but when it comes to manned missions, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company sometimes seems to have struggled to \u2026 well, to get off the ground. It\u2019s become a major player in satellite launches, and achieved some impressive milestones, but some of the targets and timelines related to its grandest plans have turned out to be wildly optimistic. That\u2019s not even to mention the Tesla chief executive\u2019s recent behavior, which has led some investors to question exactly which planet he is on.",
        "author": "By Andrew Dickson"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Artists Would Do if They Could Fly to the Moon (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8563",
        "date": "2018-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/arts/design/artists-moon-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. Its ambition is to \u201crevolutionize space travel,\u201d but when it comes to manned missions, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company sometimes seems to have struggled to \u2026 well, to get off the ground. It\u2019s become a major player in satellite launches, and achieved some impressive milestones, but some of the targets and timelines related to its grandest plans have turned out to be wildly optimistic. That\u2019s not even to mention the Tesla chief executive\u2019s recent behavior, which has led some investors to question exactly which planet he is on.",
        "author": "By Andrew Dickson"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Artists Would Do if They Could Fly to the Moon (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8564",
        "date": "2018-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/arts/design/artists-moon-spacex.html",
        "text": "A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. A Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, wants artists to join him on a pioneering spaceflight. We asked some leading candidates about the idea. Its ambition is to \u201crevolutionize space travel,\u201d but when it comes to manned missions, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company sometimes seems to have struggled to \u2026 well, to get off the ground. It\u2019s become a major player in satellite launches, and achieved some impressive milestones, but some of the targets and timelines related to its grandest plans have turned out to be wildly optimistic. That\u2019s not even to mention the Tesla chief executive\u2019s recent behavior, which has led some investors to question exactly which planet he is on.",
        "author": "By Andrew Dickson"
    },
    {
        "title": "His Game Made Beating a Pandemic Fun. Can He Do It for Climate Change? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8565",
        "date": "2021-03-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/arts/matt-leacock-climate-crisis-pandemic.html",
        "text": "Matt Leacock, the inventor of the hit board game Pandemic, has spent the past year making a game about an even weightier subject. Matt Leacock, the inventor of the hit board game Pandemic, has spent the past year making a game about an even weightier subject. The Earth\u2019s average temperature unexpectedly leapt 0.4 degrees Celsius on Saturday afternoon, putting the planet on the brink of catastrophe. Within hours, millions of people would be displaced, crops would fail and sea levels would rise.",
        "author": "By Alex Marshall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Robby the Robot: From \u2018Forbidden Planet\u2019 to Auction Block (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8566",
        "date": "2017-11-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/arts/design/robby-the-robot-auction-bonhams.html",
        "text": "The classic TV and movie automaton will be sold at Bonhams. \u201cIt\u2019s time to think about his future,\u201d says his owner. \u201cWe\u2019re sending Robby to college.\u201d The classic TV and movie automaton will be sold at Bonhams. \u201cIt\u2019s time to think about his future,\u201d says his owner. \u201cWe\u2019re sending Robby to college.\u201d The only cast member of the 1956 science-fiction space epic \u201cForbidden Planet\u201d to receive sole billing in the opening credits is being auctioned. In other words, it\u2019s not Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis or Leslie Nielsen.",
        "author": "By Thomas Vinciguerra"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth Day\u2019s Gone Digital. Here\u2019s Where to Find It. (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8567",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/arts/design/earth-day-digital-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "New York offers many ways to celebrate online. You can hike, play environmental games, conduct experiments, meet scientists and blast into space \u2014 all without leaving home. New York offers many ways to celebrate online. You can hike, play environmental games, conduct experiments, meet scientists and blast into space \u2014 all without leaving home. It seems hard to celebrate the natural world when you\u2019re sheltering in place. But even though many Earth Day events have been canceled, several New York institutions are honoring the holiday\u2019s 50th anniversary online. Here you can learn how to raise butterflies indoors, compete in an Earth trivia contest, join citizen science projects and tour sites as close as the city forests and as distant as other planets. These virtual festivities are free, and some last more than a day. Below are select highlights; more possibilities nationwide are at earthday.org.",
        "author": "By Laurel Graeber"
    },
    {
        "title": "Alicja Kwade Selected for the Met\u2019s Roof Garden Installation (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8568",
        "date": "2019-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/arts/design/met-roof-installation-alicja-kwade.html",
        "text": "Her installation, \u201cParaPivot,\u201d dominated by two large metal frames, will be on view from April 16 through Oct. 27 Her installation, \u201cParaPivot,\u201d dominated by two large metal frames, will be on view from April 16 through Oct. 27 The Met\u2019s Roof Garden Commission is a rite of summer for New Yorkers and a world stage for artists lucky enough to be chosen. This year\u2019s fortunate selection is the Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade, who will be presenting two abstract sculptures dominated by large metal frames that she described as \u201ca kind of planetary system.\u201d",
        "author": "By Robin Pogrebin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Slashing His Way to the Sublime (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8569",
        "date": "2019-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/design/lucio-fontana-met-breuer-el-museo-del-barrio.html",
        "text": "Lucio Fontana made abstraction dangerous by breaking through the surface of a painting. His innovations astound at New York museums. Lucio Fontana made abstraction dangerous by breaking through the surface of a painting. His innovations astound at New York museums. The art of the Argentine-Italian modernist Lucio Fontana looks like it comes from another planet, and it might as well, given how seldom we see it in New York. The exhibition \u201cLucio Fontana: On the Threshold,\u201d at the Met Breuer, with spillovers at the Met Fifth Avenue and El Museo del Barrio, is the artist\u2019s first museum survey here in more than 40 years.",
        "author": "By Holland Cotter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Slashing His Way to the Sublime (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8570",
        "date": "2019-01-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/design/lucio-fontana-met-breuer-el-museo-del-barrio.html",
        "text": "Lucio Fontana made abstraction dangerous by breaking through the surface of a painting. His innovations astound at New York museums. Lucio Fontana made abstraction dangerous by breaking through the surface of a painting. His innovations astound at New York museums. The art of the Argentine-Italian modernist Lucio Fontana looks like it comes from another planet, and it might as well, given how seldom we see it in New York. The exhibition \u201cLucio Fontana: On the Threshold,\u201d at the Met Breuer, with spillovers at the Met Fifth Avenue and El Museo del Barrio, is the artist\u2019s first museum survey here in more than 40 years.",
        "author": "By Holland Cotter"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Tesseract\u2019 Shoots for the Stars, but Half of It Falls to Earth (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8571",
        "date": "2017-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/arts/dance/tesseract-review-brooklyn-academy-of-music.html",
        "text": "The filmmaker Charles Atlas works with the choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener in this multimedia production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The filmmaker Charles Atlas works with the choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener in this multimedia production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Not so very long ago, in a galaxy not so far away \u2014 on our own little planet, in fact \u2014 the choreographer Merce Cunningham radically altered stage space, decentralizing it, seeming to offer theater audiences multiple perspectives at once. Cunningham was interested in technology, too, and with the filmmaker Charles Atlas, he undertook some of the most successful experiments in using television and video as media for high-art dance.",
        "author": "By Brian Seibert"
    },
    {
        "title": "Exploring the Solar System Anew at the Hayden Planetarium (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8572",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/arts/worlds-beyond-earth-hayden-planetarium.html",
        "text": "The American Museum of Natural History\u2019s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth. The American Museum of Natural History\u2019s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth. \u201cWorlds Beyond Earth\u201d is the first new space show at the American Museum of Natural History in more than six years, and if you haven\u2019t been to a planetarium in a while, the experience is a bit like being thrown out of your own orbit.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Exploring the Solar System Anew at the Hayden Planetarium (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8573",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/arts/worlds-beyond-earth-hayden-planetarium.html",
        "text": "The American Museum of Natural History\u2019s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth. The American Museum of Natural History\u2019s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth. \u201cWorlds Beyond Earth\u201d is the first new space show at the American Museum of Natural History in more than six years, and if you haven\u2019t been to a planetarium in a while, the experience is a bit like being thrown out of your own orbit.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Exploring the Solar System Anew at the Hayden Planetarium (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8574",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/arts/worlds-beyond-earth-hayden-planetarium.html",
        "text": "The American Museum of Natural History\u2019s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth. The American Museum of Natural History\u2019s first new space show since 2013 is a head-spinning adventure that makes a statement about the fragility of Earth. \u201cWorlds Beyond Earth\u201d is the first new space show at the American Museum of Natural History in more than six years, and if you haven\u2019t been to a planetarium in a while, the experience is a bit like being thrown out of your own orbit.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "The \u2018Solar Opposites\u2019 Creators Apologize for Their Clairvoyance (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8575",
        "date": "2021-03-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/arts/television/solar-opposites-season-2-roiland-mcmahan.html",
        "text": "Who knew an animated series about misanthropic space aliens could feel so relevant? Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland explained ahead of Season 2 why it isn\u2019t their fault. Who knew an animated series about misanthropic space aliens could feel so relevant? Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland explained ahead of Season 2 why it isn\u2019t their fault. Half of them hate it, half of them love it. But nobody knows more about American pop culture than the aliens in \u201cSolar Opposites,\u201d who have crash-landed in suburbia and absorbed the culture as voraciously as Daryl Hannah\u2019s TV-addicted mermaid in \u201cSplash.\u201d Justin Roiland, who created the animated series for Hulu with Mike McMahan, believes he would do the same thing if he found himself on their home, on the utopian planet of Shlorp.",
        "author": "By Scott Tobias"
    },
    {
        "title": "The \u2018Solar Opposites\u2019 Creators Apologize for Their Clairvoyance (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8576",
        "date": "2021-03-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/arts/television/solar-opposites-season-2-roiland-mcmahan.html",
        "text": "Who knew an animated series about misanthropic space aliens could feel so relevant? Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland explained ahead of Season 2 why it isn\u2019t their fault. Who knew an animated series about misanthropic space aliens could feel so relevant? Mike McMahan and Justin Roiland explained ahead of Season 2 why it isn\u2019t their fault. Half of them hate it, half of them love it. But nobody knows more about American pop culture than the aliens in \u201cSolar Opposites,\u201d who have crash-landed in suburbia and absorbed the culture as voraciously as Daryl Hannah\u2019s TV-addicted mermaid in \u201cSplash.\u201d Justin Roiland, who created the animated series for Hulu with Mike McMahan, believes he would do the same thing if he found himself on their home, on the utopian planet of Shlorp.",
        "author": "By Scott Tobias"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The most welcoming safe space on the planet\u2019: How Sara Bareilles returned to her roots in theater (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8577",
        "date": "2018-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/the-most-welcoming-safe-space-on-the-planet-how-sara-bareilles-returned-to-her-roots-in-theater/2018/05/10/365dade6-520a-11e8-9c91-7dab596e8252_story.html",
        "text": "When Sara Bareilles starred in her musical \u201cWaitress\u201d for the second time this spring, and then was a stunningly effective Mary Magdalene in NBC\u2019s live \u201cJesus Christ Superstar,\u201d and days later got tapped to co-host June\u2019s Tony Awards with Josh Groban, the truth was finally clear. The singer-songwriter of the uplifting cultural anthems \u201cLove Song\u201d and \u201cBrave\u201d has become a bona fide theater person. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI think I\u2019ve always been a theater person,\u201d Bareilles says, affably, in a production office 11 floors above Broadway, with a view of Times Square. In Eureka, Calif., Bareilles\u2019s mom, Bonnie Halvorsen, closed in a local production of \u201cNunsense\u201d the night Bareilles was on TV in \u201cSuperstar.\u201d Sara acted on the same stage as a kid, and she loved the cast parties.\u201cWe always had theater people around the house,\u201d says Halvorsen, 67, \u201cand I think the kids liked the feel of it.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s the most welcoming safe space on the planet,\u201d Bareilles says of theater. \u201cTaking a left turn into a pop artist career is not necessarily what I envisioned for myself.\u201dWhat you should be seeing in D.C. theater this weekIt\u2019s been five years since Bareilles\u2019s last studio album, \u201cThe Blessed Unrest,\u201d because Broadway has so consumed her that Bareilles now categorizes her life into before and after \u201cWaitress\u201d; even her boyfriend Joe Tippett (NBC\u2019s \u201cRise\u201d) comes from the show\u2019s original cast. Bareilles had already unsuccessfully auditioned for the 2012 Shakespeare in the Park production of \u201cInto the Woods\u201d when director Diane Paulus approached her about writing the songs for an adaptation of the quirky 2007 movie \u201cWaitress.\u201d The musical opened two years ago and is still running strong, with Katharine McPhee now starring as the unhappily pregnant waitress Jenna (who has an awful husband and a gift for making pies). \u201cThey\u2019re having a hard time getting rid of me,\u201d Bareilles says. \u201cNow it\u2019s like, \u2018Let go of the baton, Sara.\u2019\u00a0\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBareilles might even have played the part from the beginning, only Paulus wanted the rookie composer to focus on making the show. Still, Paulus says, there were rehearsal nights when almost everyone else had left and she\u2019d coax Bareilles onstage. \u201cBe Jenna for me, Sara,\u201d she\u2019d day, just to hear Bareilles sing the songs. (Bareilles recorded most of the numbers on the 2015 CD \u201cWhat\u2019s Inside.\u201d)Playing Jenna and just plain being Bareilles \u2014 whose star caliber has led to singing her 2007 heartbreaker \u201cGravity\u201d with Elton John and performing at the Oscars and at the White House \u2014 begot the \u201cSuperstar\u201d casting with John Legend and Alice Cooper. Bareilles not only sang \u201cI Don\u2019t Know How to Love Him\u201d with silvery soul but also suggested to a national audience that she can act.\u201cSuperstar\u201d begot the Tonys gig, which in recent years has gone to cutups such as James Corden, Kevin Spacey and Neil Patrick Harris. A more probable model for Bareilles and Groban is the 2015 co-hosting duo of Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI wasn\u2019t not nervous about saying yes, but I don\u2019t know,\u201d she says. \u201cMaybe this is going to suck. I don\u2019t think either of us has the delusion about, \u2018Let\u2019s make this about us.\u2019 Let us be good conduits for that celebration. And, hopefully, we can be conduits to that new audience who maybe doesn\u2019t know so much about theater, but know us.\u201dThat\u2019s the big evolution, 20 years after Paul Simon controversially flopped with his gangster study \u201cThe Capeman\u201d and left complaining that Broadway was an impenetrable insider-y clique. Since then, the ABBA catalogue hit \u201cMamma Mia!\u201d (in 2002) and the Four Seasons\u2019 story \u201cJersey Boys\u201d (2006) proved that audiences would flock to pop hits repurposed on stage; that dubious jukebox trend endures this season with Jimmy Buffett\u2019s \u201cEscape to Margaritaville\u201d and the Donna Summer bio-drama \u201cSummer.\u201dBroadway meets pop cultureBut increasingly this decade, singer-songwriters like Bareilles are writing directly for the stage: Sting (\u201cThe Last Ship\u201d), Edie Brickell (\u201cBright Star\u201d), Sheryl Crow (\u201cDiner\u201d at D.C.\u2019s Signature Theatre), Bono and the Edge (\u201cSpider-Man: Turn Off the Dark\u201d), Trey Anastasio (\u201cHands on a Hardbody,\u201d with Amanda Green), Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard (\u201cGhost\u201d), Bon Jovi\u2019s David Bryan (\u201cMemphis,\u201d with Joe DePietro), and Cyndi Lauper, whose \u201cKinky Boots\u201d won a 2013 Tony Award.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIf there was a perception that wasn\u2019t appropriate, that\u2019s gone,\u201d Paulus says of the pop invasion. She\u2019s speaking from Boston, where her production of Alanis Morissette\u2019s 1995 \u201cJagged Little Pill\u201d is debuting at the Paulus-led American Repertory Theater; Diablo Cody (\u201cJuno\u201d) has stitched a book around Morissette\u2019s album. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting that Broadway songs can have a pulse in pop culture, and to be working with best talent in our country.\u201dPaulus got the \u201cWaitress\u201d material from producer Barry Weissler \u2014 they worked together on the 2013 Broadway revival of \u201cPippin\u201d \u2014 and her first notion for a composer was Bareilles. Paulus asked her to watch the movie and not worry about what might be \u201cright,\u201d but to write from the heart. Weeks later Bareilles emailed an MP3 demo of \u201cShe Used to Be Mine,\u201d the soulful ballad that drives the musical\u2019s climax.\u201cI knew in a heartbeat that we had a show,\u201d Paulus says.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cShe just understands narrative, not only textually with lyrics, but with melody,\u201d says \u201cWaitress\u201d choreographer Lorin Latarro. \u201cShe understood the lead character, and really understood the kind of emotional depth we needed to have on stage to make an impact.\u201d\u201cI think Diane responded to the humor in some of my songs, and had an intuition about where the tone of the show was going to live, which was straddling a more serious piece and also something that is very playful,\u201d Bareilles says. \u201cThat is a good fit for my kind of writing. I don\u2019t think I ever though I was a wrong fit. But there were times where you just don\u2019t know how to solve the puzzle.\u201dIn her 2015 memoir \u201cSounds Like Me,\u201d Bareilles writes about getting it hilariously wrong with a song for Jenna\u2019s sexually eager husband; the number featured dancing sperm. Messing up as part of a team was \u201cexcruciating,\u201d says Bareilles, whose first radio hit, \u201cLove Song,\u201d was an upbeat, defiant ode to independence as she resisted label-sanctioned writing habits.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt got easier,\u201d she says of \u201cWaitress,\u201d which frequently showcases her music by gliding the live band on stage. \u201cSuch a nice takeaway was knowing that not every idea is a good one, and sometimes the bad ideas are a bridge that bring you to somewhere. . . . I definitely fell head over heels for the project,\u201d she adds. \u201cWho knows whether it works or not? I have had songs I was sure were going to be huge hits that didn\u2019t go anywhere, and songs I thought were going to be throwaways that took on a life that I never would have predicted.\u201dGoing back to the studioBareilles studied communications at UCLA but found her calling studying abroad in Italy, when she begged her father to ship her a keyboard so she could play. She finished her degree and expanded from performing on the campus scene to the L.A. scene, building a band and writing songs \u2014 confessional, jazzy, lyrically frisky. Who was in her ear?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFiona Apple,\u201d she says immediately, while tipping her cap to Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Paul Simon and Billy Joel. (She is a self-taught pianist; \u201cI\u2019m so far from being Billy Joel it\u2019s not even funny,\u201d she says.)\u201cLove Song\u201d put her on the map in 2007, eventually receiving a Grammy nomination as Song of the Year. She fretted that \u201cBrave,\u201d from \u201cThe Blessed Unrest,\u201d was somehow formulaic, but the message of courage that she wrote for a friend nervous about coming out as gay quickly became a cultural touchstone.\u201cI want to say \u2018unzipping your soul,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Bareilles says, fumbling toward self-definition. \u201cI have found that my strength is always about sharing what\u2019s vulnerable about me, rather than that I\u2019m some great showman or wildly talented entertainer.\u201dYou see what she means in a video of her guest appearance during a Taylor Swift concert singing \u201cBrave.\u201d Swift is machine-tooled and arena-ready, glamorously costumed and moving like a model with every step. Bareilles bops along almost like a giddy kid. Would she take a role on Broadway? \u201cTotally,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m lucky that I get to have those conversations now.\u201d Eight shows a week is tough, but compared to touring . . . well, she doesn\u2019t hit the road hard any more, the way she did when she was paying her dues. She voices her fans\u2019 complaints: \u201cYeah, b-, you don\u2019t tour.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInstead, she\u2019s been tapped to pen songs such as the inspiring \u201cIf I Dare\u201d for the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs movie \u201cBattle of the Sexes\u201d and the peppy second-act opening number for Broadway\u2019s cartoony \u201cSpongeBob SquarePants\u201d musical. More intriguing is \u201cSeriously,\u201d which the radio program \u201cThis American Life\u201d asked her to write during the 2016 presidential campaign, imagining what Barack Obama was thinking as Donald Trump captured the Republican base. \u201cHamilton\u201d star Leslie Odom Jr. caressed the lyrics over a light, slick rhythm and a haunting string arrangement by \u201cHamilton\u201d music director Alex Lacamoire: Let\u2019s talk of fear\nAnd why I don\u2019t bring it in here\nIt\u2019s a dangerous word, it spooks the herd\nAnd we all bleed in the stampede\nFear makes a false friend indeed\nAnd I take it seriously\n\u201cI love and respect Barack Obama so much that I just wanted to offer something that would honor him but still speak to the heart of the matter,\u201d Bareilles says. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t meant to be insulting. It was just meant to be an observation. I\u2019m so proud of that song. So proud.\u201dIt\u2019s a reason she\u2019s ready to write more songs and get back to the studio, which is what she\u2019ll do after the Tonys. She\u2019s feeling more focused now than five years ago, when the write-record-tour cycle burned her out. The new album has no shape yet, but Bareilles figures she\u2019ll trust her habit of looking inside. It worked for a decade before Broadway; immediate personal circumstances generated her standbys \u201cLove Song,\u201d \u201cBrave,\u201d and \u201cGravity.\u201d\u201c\u2009\u2018Gravity\u2019 \u2014 I had no intention of making anybody else feel better with that song,\u201d Bareilles says. \u201cI was only self-soothing. They were all teachers to remind me: if I can just speak truthfully to my experience, it will resonate where it needs to resonate.\u201dWaitress May 15 to June 3 at the National Theatre, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Tickets: $48-$203. ",
        "author": "Nelson Pressley"
    },
    {
        "title": "Build the Whole World With Your Hands (and Some Newspaper) (NYT: At Home) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8578",
        "date": "2021-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/at-home/papier-mache-globe.html",
        "text": "Creating a light-up globe from recycled materials is a good reminder of Earth\u2019s beauty. Creating a light-up globe from recycled materials is a good reminder of Earth\u2019s beauty. With the 51st anniversary of Earth Day approaching, many people will be celebrating the planet and focusing on what they can do to protect it. One way to remind yourself of Earth\u2019s beauty is to make a light-up globe \u2014 from recycled newspaper, of course. ",
        "author": "By Christy Harmon"
    },
    {
        "title": "9 New Books We Recommend This Week (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8579",
        "date": "2020-09-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/books/review/9-new-books-we-recommend-this-week.html",
        "text": "Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times. Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times. Our recommended books this week are evenly balanced between questions of race and space. First, the cosmos: In \u201cThe Sirens of Mars,\u201d the planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson evokes the wonders of her work looking for life on other worlds; in \u201cThe End of Everything,\u201d the theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack asks what science can teach us about the likely end of the universe; and in \u201cThe Smallest Lights in the Universe,\u201d the astrophysicist Sara Seager balances an account of her scientific career with a memoir of grief and young widowhood. On the subject of race, Seyward Darby (\u201cSisters in Hate\u201d) and Edward Ball (\u201cLife of a Klansman\u201d) both probe America\u2019s troubled legacy of white supremacy, while Martha S. Jones (\u201cVanguard\u201d) celebrates the Black women who have persevered in the cause of equal justice.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Latest in Science Fiction and Fantasy (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8580",
        "date": "2017-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/books/review/provenance-ann-leckie-best-fantasy-science-fiction.html",
        "text": "Novels, graphic and otherwise, about the world at war, life with no future and imagined universes. Novels, graphic and otherwise, about the world at war, life with no future and imagined universes. Ann Leckie\u2019s latest space romp, PROVENANCE (Orbit, $26), isn\u2019t really a space opera in the same way as the award-winning Imperial Radch trilogy that made her famous. It might be tempting, therefore, to insist that comparisons are unfair. Yet they\u2019re also unavoidable \u2014 largely because, even though \u201cProvenance\u201d centers on non-Radchaai societies, it is effectively a sequel. Now that a treaty has been established between the empire and the enigmatic, violent, technologically superior Presger, countless planets breathe easier. But the peace will last only so long as the \u201ccivilized\u201d races of the universe actually act civilized.",
        "author": "By N.k. Jemisin"
    },
    {
        "title": "It All Started in Omaha (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8581",
        "date": "2019-10-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/books/review/rusty-brown-chris-ware.html",
        "text": "In \u201cRusty Brown,\u201d Chris Ware spans lives, generations and even universes. But somehow all roads lead back to Nebraska, where he grew up. In \u201cRusty Brown,\u201d Chris Ware spans lives, generations and even universes. But somehow all roads lead back to Nebraska, where he grew up. For the graphic novelist Chris Ware, God is in the details. In 2004, he edited a special comics issue of McSweeney\u2019s Quarterly, and as with his own titles, even the unfoldable dust jacket teemed with extra texts and gags. Here, on what normally functions as decoration, Ware concealed a story in which God wonders what happened to \u201cthat planet where I made everyone in my own image. Drolly rendered as a stack of colored circles with stringlike limbs, the supreme creator goes on to muse that Earth had some good things \u2014 including comic strips \u2014 which leads him to pity the sad lives of the slobs who drew them: \u201cI wonder why other people couldn\u2019t see the virtues of an innately democratic pictographic poetry, grounded in a transdimensional metaphysic, anyway?\u201d",
        "author": "By Ed Park"
    },
    {
        "title": "Books That Satisfy Your Yearning for Far-Off Places (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8582",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/travel-books.html",
        "text": "The travels chronicled here include a journey to track snow leopards in Tibet, a trip along Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River and a retracing of Garibaldi\u2019s famous 400-mile retreat through Italy in 1849. The travels chronicled here include a journey to track snow leopards in Tibet, a trip along Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River and a retracing of Garibaldi\u2019s famous 400-mile retreat through Italy in 1849. Last year, as the pandemic put passports in lockdown, the number of international tourist arrivals dropped by more than one billion. But lately Americans have been returning to flight hubs by the millions \u2014 packed, vaccinated and thirsting for a cure for what the Germans call Fernweh: the yearning for far-off places. Still, you don\u2019t need a plane to reactivate your curiosity. Seven fascinating and purposeful new books revive the mystery, the history and the possibilities of the reawakened planet.",
        "author": "By Liesl Schillinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Books That Satisfy Your Yearning for Far-Off Places (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8583",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/travel-books.html",
        "text": "The travels chronicled here include a journey to track snow leopards in Tibet, a trip along Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River and a retracing of Garibaldi\u2019s famous 400-mile retreat through Italy in 1849. The travels chronicled here include a journey to track snow leopards in Tibet, a trip along Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River and a retracing of Garibaldi\u2019s famous 400-mile retreat through Italy in 1849. Last year, as the pandemic put passports in lockdown, the number of international tourist arrivals dropped by more than one billion. But lately Americans have been returning to flight hubs by the millions \u2014 packed, vaccinated and thirsting for a cure for what the Germans call Fernweh: the yearning for far-off places. Still, you don\u2019t need a plane to reactivate your curiosity. Seven fascinating and purposeful new books revive the mystery, the history and the possibilities of the reawakened planet.",
        "author": "By Liesl Schillinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Books That Satisfy Your Yearning for Far-Off Places (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8584",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/books/review/travel-books.html",
        "text": "The travels chronicled here include a journey to track snow leopards in Tibet, a trip along Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River and a retracing of Garibaldi\u2019s famous 400-mile retreat through Italy in 1849. The travels chronicled here include a journey to track snow leopards in Tibet, a trip along Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River and a retracing of Garibaldi\u2019s famous 400-mile retreat through Italy in 1849. Last year, as the pandemic put passports in lockdown, the number of international tourist arrivals dropped by more than one billion. But lately Americans have been returning to flight hubs by the millions \u2014 packed, vaccinated and thirsting for a cure for what the Germans call Fernweh: the yearning for far-off places. Still, you don\u2019t need a plane to reactivate your curiosity. Seven fascinating and purposeful new books revive the mystery, the history and the possibilities of the reawakened planet.",
        "author": "By Liesl Schillinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Century in Stanislaw Lem\u2019s Cosmos (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8585",
        "date": "2021-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/books/stanislaw-lem.html",
        "text": "The \u201cSolaris\u201d author\u2019s centenary is being celebrated from Poland to the International Space Station. The range of his work is similarly dizzying. The \u201cSolaris\u201d author\u2019s centenary is being celebrated from Poland to the International Space Station. The range of his work is similarly dizzying. In \u201cThe Eighth Voyage,\u201d a short story by Stanislaw Lem, aliens from across the universe convene at the General Assembly of the United Planets. Lem\u2019s hero, the space traveler Ijon Tichy, watches as an uninformed but overconfident creature steps forward and makes the case to admit Earth to the organization\u2019s ranks. The planet \u2014 which he mispronounces as \u201cArrth\u201d \u2014 is home to \u201celegant, amiable mammals\u201d with \u201ca deep faith in jergundery, though not devoid of ambifribbis,\u201d the alien tells the delegates.",
        "author": "By Roisin Kiberd"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Friday Briefing (NYT: Briefing) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8586",
        "date": "2021-04-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/briefing/climate-summit-india-surge-ukraine-russia.html",
        "text": "World leaders take on climate change. World leaders take on climate change. President Biden kicked off a two-day climate summit on Thursday by announcing an ambitious plan to cut U.S. emissions at least in half from 2005 levels by 2030. Canada and Japan also announced new targets to reduce planet-warming gases.",
        "author": "By Melina Delkic"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going \u2018Deep Green,\u2019 Office Buildings Give Back to the Planet (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8587",
        "date": "2020-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/deep-green-office-buiding.html",
        "text": "As technology costs have declined, more developers are creating buildings that can benefit the Earth by tackling pollution and save money by producing their own power. As technology costs have declined, more developers are creating buildings that can benefit the Earth by tackling pollution and save money by producing their own power. For a couple of decades, many in the real estate industry have been trying to make buildings \u201cgreen,\u201d replacing conventionally made materials with sustainable ones and installing energy-efficient systems. Buildings have a heavy environmental footprint, so the upshot of all this tinkering has been structures that are less harmful to the planet.",
        "author": "By Jane Margolies"
    },
    {
        "title": "Going \u2018Deep Green,\u2019 Office Buildings Give Back to the Planet (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8588",
        "date": "2020-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/deep-green-office-buiding.html",
        "text": "As technology costs have declined, more developers are creating buildings that can benefit the Earth by tackling pollution and save money by producing their own power. As technology costs have declined, more developers are creating buildings that can benefit the Earth by tackling pollution and save money by producing their own power. For a couple of decades, many in the real estate industry have been trying to make buildings \u201cgreen,\u201d replacing conventionally made materials with sustainable ones and installing energy-efficient systems. Buildings have a heavy environmental footprint, so the upshot of all this tinkering has been structures that are less harmful to the planet.",
        "author": "By Jane Margolies"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Much Will the Planet Warm if Carbon Dioxide Levels Double? (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8589",
        "date": "2020-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/climate/global-warming-temperature-range.html",
        "text": "New research has sharply narrowed the range of outcomes. New research has sharply narrowed the range of outcomes. How much, exactly, will greenhouse gases heat the planet?",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Outdoor Heaters Seem Like a Huge Waste. Are They Really? (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8590",
        "date": "2020-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/climate/outdoor-heaters-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Here are facts about heaters (for outside and inside) and climate change. Here are facts about heaters (for outside and inside) and climate change. It\u2019s getting chilly out there. And whether you\u2019re hosting an alfresco Thanksgiving celebration or just trying not to freeze while working from home, you may be curious about the best way to heat yourself, but not the planet, this winter.",
        "author": "By Susan Shain"
    },
    {
        "title": "2018 Is Shaping Up to Be the Fourth-Hottest Year. Yet We\u2019re Still Not Prepared for Global Warming. (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8591",
        "date": "2018-08-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/climate/summer-heat-global-warming.html",
        "text": "It\u2019s hot. But it may not be the new normal yet. Temperatures are still rising. It\u2019s hot. But it may not be the new normal yet. Temperatures are still rising. This summer of fire and swelter looks a lot like the future that scientists have been warning about in the era of climate change, and it\u2019s revealing in real time how unprepared much of the world remains for life on a hotter planet.",
        "author": "By Somini Sengupta"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Yorkers Got Record Rain, and a Warning: Storms Are Packing More Punch (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8592",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/new-york-rain-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Because of global warming, the heaviest storms can now produce huge amounts of rainfall in a short time. Because of global warming, the heaviest storms can now produce huge amounts of rainfall in a short time. The torrential rains on Wednesday that deluged New York and New Jersey, killing more than three dozen, carried a stark warning about climate change: As the planet gets hotter, heavy rainstorms are dumping more water than ever before, threatening to devastate unprepared cities.",
        "author": "By Brad Plumer"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Yorkers Got Record Rain, and a Warning: Storms Are Packing More Punch (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8593",
        "date": "2021-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/climate/new-york-rain-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Because of global warming, the heaviest storms can now produce huge amounts of rainfall in a short time. Because of global warming, the heaviest storms can now produce huge amounts of rainfall in a short time. The torrential rains on Wednesday that deluged New York and New Jersey, killing more than three dozen, carried a stark warning about climate change: As the planet gets hotter, heavy rainstorms are dumping more water than ever before, threatening to devastate unprepared cities.",
        "author": "By Brad Plumer"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Methane Leak, Seen From Space, Proves to Be Far Larger Than Thought (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8594",
        "date": "2019-12-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/climate/methane-leak-satellite.html",
        "text": "The findings mark a step forward in using space technology to detect leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas sites worldwide. The  findings mark a step forward in using space technology to detect leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas sites worldwide.  The first satellite designed to continuously monitor the planet for methane leaks made a startling discovery last year: A little known gas-well accident at an Ohio fracking site was in fact one of the largest methane leaks ever recorded in the United States. ",
        "author": "By Hiroko Tabuchi"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Evidence Points to China as Source of Ozone-Depleting Gas (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8595",
        "date": "2018-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/climate/china-ozone-cfcs.html",
        "text": "Delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Ecuador to discuss efforts to repair the ozone layer, and the return of a banned chemical will be on the agenda. Delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Ecuador to discuss efforts to repair the ozone layer, and the return of a banned chemical will be on the agenda. BEIJING \u2014 An environmental group says it has new evidence showing that China is behind the resurgence of a banned industrial gas that not only destroys the planet\u2019s protective ozone layer but also contributes to global warming.",
        "author": "By Chris Buckley"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Save? Climate Change Forces Brutal Choices at National Parks. (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8596",
        "date": "2021-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/climate/national-parks-climate-change.html",
        "text": "For decades, the core mission of the Park Service was absolute conservation. Now ecologists are being forced to do triage, deciding what to safeguard \u2014 and what to let slip away. For decades, the core mission of the Park Service was absolute conservation. Now ecologists are being forced to do triage, deciding what to safeguard \u2014 and what to let slip away. For more than a century, the core mission of the National Park Service has been preserving the natural heritage of the United States. But now, as the planet warms, transforming ecosystems, the agency is conceding that its traditional goal of absolute conservation is no longer viable in many cases.",
        "author": "By Zo\u00eb Schlanger"
    },
    {
        "title": "What to Save? Climate Change Forces Brutal Choices at National Parks. (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8597",
        "date": "2021-05-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/climate/national-parks-climate-change.html",
        "text": "For decades, the core mission of the Park Service was absolute conservation. Now ecologists are being forced to do triage, deciding what to safeguard \u2014 and what to let slip away. For decades, the core mission of the Park Service was absolute conservation. Now ecologists are being forced to do triage, deciding what to safeguard \u2014 and what to let slip away. For more than a century, the core mission of the National Park Service has been preserving the natural heritage of the United States. But now, as the planet warms, transforming ecosystems, the agency is conceding that its traditional goal of absolute conservation is no longer viable in many cases.",
        "author": "By Zo\u00eb Schlanger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8598",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/climate/ocean-warming-climate-change.html",
        "text": "An analysis concluded that Earth\u2019s oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago, a finding with dire implications for climate change. An analysis concluded that Earth\u2019s oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago, a finding with dire implications for climate change. Scientists say the world\u2019s oceans are warming far more quickly than previously thought, a finding with dire implications for climate change because almost all the excess heat absorbed by the planet ends up stored in their waters.",
        "author": "By Kendra Pierre-Louis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ocean Warming Is Accelerating Faster Than Thought, New Research Finds (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8599",
        "date": "2019-01-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/climate/ocean-warming-climate-change.html",
        "text": "An analysis concluded that Earth\u2019s oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago, a finding with dire implications for climate change. An analysis concluded that Earth\u2019s oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago, a finding with dire implications for climate change. Scientists say the world\u2019s oceans are warming far more quickly than previously thought, a finding with dire implications for climate change because almost all the excess heat absorbed by the planet ends up stored in their waters.",
        "author": "By Kendra Pierre-Louis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8600",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/science/earth-highest-temperature-record.html",
        "text": "Surface temperatures are heading toward levels that many scientists believe will pose a threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. Surface temperatures are heading toward levels that many scientists believe will pose a threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.",
        "author": "By Justin Gillis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8601",
        "date": "2017-01-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/science/earth-highest-temperature-record.html",
        "text": "Surface temperatures are heading toward levels that many scientists believe will pose a threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. Surface temperatures are heading toward levels that many scientists believe will pose a threat to both the natural world and to human civilization. Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016, trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.",
        "author": "By Justin Gillis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump Signs Executive Order Unwinding Obama Climate Policies (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8602",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/climate/trump-executive-order-climate-change.html",
        "text": "Flanked by coal miners at the Environmental Protection Agency, President Trump signed an order directing the agency to start the process of rewriting the Clean Power Plan. Flanked by coal miners at the Environmental Protection Agency, President Trump signed an order directing the agency to start the process of rewriting the Clean Power Plan. WASHINGTON \u2014 President Trump, flanked by company executives and miners, signed a long-promised executive order on Tuesday to nullify President Barack Obama\u2019s climate change efforts and revive the coal industry, effectively ceding American leadership in the international campaign to curb the dangerous heating of the planet.",
        "author": "By Coral Davenport and Alissa J. Rubin"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Front-Row Seat on the Spectacle of Ice (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8603",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/climate/Ilulissat-Icefjord-Centre-greenland-glacier-sustainable.html",
        "text": "Above the Arctic Circle, in Greenland, a new building dramatizes the impact of climate change. Above the Arctic Circle, in Greenland, a new building dramatizes the impact of climate change. This article is part of a special report on Climate Solutions, which focuses on the changing relationship between the people and the planet.",
        "author": "By Julie Lasky"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Front-Row Seat on the Spectacle of Ice (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8604",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/climate/Ilulissat-Icefjord-Centre-greenland-glacier-sustainable.html",
        "text": "Above the Arctic Circle, in Greenland, a new building dramatizes the impact of climate change. Above the Arctic Circle, in Greenland, a new building dramatizes the impact of climate change. This article is part of a special report on Climate Solutions, which focuses on the changing relationship between the people and the planet.",
        "author": "By Julie Lasky"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Front-Row Seat on the Spectacle of Ice (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8605",
        "date": "2021-06-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/climate/Ilulissat-Icefjord-Centre-greenland-glacier-sustainable.html",
        "text": "Above the Arctic Circle, in Greenland, a new building dramatizes the impact of climate change. Above the Arctic Circle, in Greenland, a new building dramatizes the impact of climate change. This article is part of a special report on Climate Solutions, which focuses on the changing relationship between the people and the planet.",
        "author": "By Julie Lasky"
    },
    {
        "title": "Climate change has destabilized the Earth\u2019s poles, putting the rest of the planet in peril (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8606",
        "date": "2021-12-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/12/14/climate-change-arctic-antarctic-poles/",
        "text": "The ice shelf was cracking up. Surveys showed warm ocean water eroding its underbelly. Satellite imagery revealed long, parallel fissures in the frozen expanse, like scratches from some clawed monster. One fracture grew so big, so fast, scientists took to calling it \u201cthe dagger.\u201dWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cIt was hugely surprising to see things changing that fast,\u201d said Erin Pettit. The Oregon State University glaciologist had chosen this spot for her Antarctic field research precisely because of its stability. While other parts of the infamous Thwaites Glacier crumbled, this wedge of floating ice acted as a brace, slowing the melt. It was supposed to be boring, durable, safe. Now climate change has turned the ice shelf into a threat \u2014 to Pettit\u2019s field work, and to the world.Story continues below advertisementPlanet-warming pollution from burning fossil fuels and other human activities has already raised global temperatures more than 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). But the effects are particularly profound at the poles, where rising temperatures have seriously undermined regions once locked in ice.The Arctic could get more rain and less snow sooner than projected. Here\u2019s why that matters.In research presented this week at the world\u2019s biggest earth science conference, Pettit showed that the Thwaites ice shelf could collapse within the next three to five years, unleashing a river of ice that could dramatically raise sea levels. Aerial surveys document how warmer conditions have allowed beavers to invade the Arctic tundra, flooding the landscape with their dams. Large commercial ships are increasingly infiltrating formerly frozen areas, disturbing wildlife and generating disastrous amounts of trash. In many Alaska Native communities, climate impacts compounded the hardships of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to food shortages among people who have lived off this land for thousands of years.Advertisement\u201cThe very character of these places is changing,\u201d said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and co-editor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual assessment of the state of the top of the world. \u201cWe are seeing conditions unlike those ever seen before.\u201dStory continues below advertisementThe rapid transformation of the Arctic and Antarctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. Sea levels will rise, weather patterns will shift and ecosystems will be altered. Unless humanity acts swiftly to curb emissions, scientists say, the same forces that have destabilized the poles will wreak havoc on the rest of the globe.\u201cThe Arctic is a way to look into the future,\u201d said Matthew Druckenmiller, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and another co-editor of the Arctic Report Card. \u201cSmall changes in temperature can have huge effects in a region that is dominated by ice.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cThe Arctic is a way to look into the future.\u201d\u2014 Matthew Druckenmiller, scientist and Arctic Report Card co-editorThis year\u2019s edition of the report card, which was presented at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting Tuesday, describes a landscape that is transforming so fast scientists struggle to keep up. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as the global average. The period between October and December 2020 was the warmest on record, scientists say.Story continues below advertisementSeparately on Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed a new temperature record for the Arctic: 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk on June 20, 2020.Adrift in the Arctic: The biggest North Pole expedition in history aims to understand climate changeThese warm conditions are catastrophic for the sea ice that usually spans across the North Pole. This past summer saw the second-lowest extent of thick, old sea ice since tracking began in 1985. Large mammals like polar bears go hungry without this crucial platform from which to hunt. Marine life ranging from tiny plankton to giant whales are at risk.Advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s an ecosystem collapse situation,\u201d said Kaare Sikuaq Erickson, whose business Ikaagun Engagement facilitates cooperation between scientists and Alaska Native communities.Story continues below advertisementThe consequences of this loss will be felt far beyond the Arctic. Sea ice has traditionally acted as Earth\u2019s \u201cair conditioner\u201d; it reflects as much as two thirds of the light that hits it, sending huge amounts of solar radiation back into space.By contrast, dark expanses of water absorb heat, and it is difficult for these areas to refreeze. Less sea ice means more open ocean, more heat absorption and more climate change.\u201cWe have a narrow window of time to avoid very costly, deadly and irreversible climate impacts,\u201d National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Rick Spinrad told reporters Tuesday.Record highs have also sounded the death knell for ice on land. Three historic melting episodes struck Greenland in July and August, causing the island\u2019s massive ice sheet to lose about 77 trillion pounds. On Aug. 14, for the first time in recorded history, rain fell at the ice sheet summit.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think my jaw would have hit the floor,\u201d Moon said, imagining what she might have felt had she witnessed the unprecedented event. \u201cThis fundamentally changes the character of that ice sheet surface.\u201dA critical ocean system may be heading for collapse due to Arctic warmingThough the Greenland ice sheet is more than a mile thick at its center, rain can darken the surface, causing the ice to absorb more of the sun\u2019s heat, Moon said. It changes the way snow behaves and slicks the top of the ice.The consequences for people living in the Arctic can be dire. In Greenland and elsewhere, meltwater from shrinking glaciers has deluged rivers and contributed to floods. Retreating ice exposes unstable cliffs that can easily collapse into the ocean, triggering deadly tsunamis. Roads buckle, water systems fail and buildings cave in as the permafrost beneath them thaws.Story continues below advertisementSome 5 million people living in the Arctic\u2019s permafrost regions are at risk from the changes happening at their shores and under their feet.\u201cIt\u2019s not just about polar bears, it\u2019s about actual humans,\u201d said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and another co-editor of the Arctic Report Card. \u201cThese changes are impacting people and their lives and livelihoods from \u2018What\u2019s for dinner tonight?\u2019 up to the international scale.\u201dIn Antarctica, said University of Colorado at Boulder glaciologist Ted Scampos, \u201cclimate change is more about wind changes and ocean changes than warming \u2014 although that is happening in many parts of it as well.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThough the continent stays frozen for much of the year, rising temperatures in the Pacific have changed how air circulates around the South Pole, which in turn affects ocean currents. Warm, deep ocean water is welling up toward coastlines, lapping at the ice sheet\u2019s frozen underbelly, weakening it from below.\u201cThis is triggering the beginnings of a massive collapse,\u201d Scampos wrote in an email from Antarctica\u2019s McMurdo Station, where he is preparing for a field trip to the Thwaites Glacier\u2019s failing ice shelf.The disintegration of the Thwaites ice shelf won\u2019t immediately increase sea levels \u2014 that ice already floats on top of the water, taking up the same amount of space whether it\u2019s solid or liquid. But without the ice shelf acting as a brace, the land-bound parts of the glacier will start to flow more quickly. Thwaites could become vulnerable to ice cliff collapse, a process in which towering walls of ice that directly overlook the ocean start to crumble.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the entire glacier failed, it would raise sea levels by several feet. Island nations and coastal communities would be inundated.\u201cWe don\u2019t know exactly if or when ice cliff failure is going to initiate,\u201d said Anna Crawford, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews who works on models of the process. \u201cBut we\u2019re certain Antarctica is going to change.\u201d\u201cThere\u2019s ample evidence to support reducing emissions,\u201d she added, \u201cbecause it\u2019s giving us enough to be worried about already.\u201dRadical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable groundFor some in the Arctic, this rapid thaw represents opportunity. Tundra vegetation flourishes in the warmer weather. Beavers have migrated northward, digging their paws into the once-frozen earth.Satellite images show that the number of beaver ponds in western Alaska \u2014 formed when the large rodents build their dams along waterways \u2014 has at least doubled since 2000. These ponds can contribute to the rapid thaw of permafrost, unleashing carbon that has been locked in soil for thousands of years. But it\u2019s not yet clear what beaver engineering means for the planet, or even for the ecosystems just downstream.AdvertisementWarmer conditions have also allowed people to infiltrate new environments, and here the detrimental impacts are plain to see. New shipping routes have been established through areas once blocked by sea ice, disrupting wildlife and polluting the ocean with unnatural noise.Passing ships also leave behind huge amounts of garbage; in summer 2020, hundreds of items washed ashore in Alaskan communities along the Bering Strait. Residents \u2014 most of them Alaska Natives \u2014 found clothes, equipment, plastic food packaging and cans of hazardous oils and insecticides in waters where they regularly fish. Labels in English, Russian, Korean and a host of other languages illustrated the international nature of the problem.For many Arctic residents, climate change is a threat multiplier \u2014 worsening the dangers of whatever other crises come their way. Another essay in the Arctic Report Card documents the threats to Alaska Natives\u2019 food security caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Quarantine restrictions prevented people from traveling to their traditional harvesting grounds. Economic upheaval and supply chain issues left many grocery stores with empty shelves.AdvertisementBut the essay, which was co-written by Inupiaq, Hadia, Ahtna and Supiaq researchers, along with experts from other Native communities, also highlights how Indigenous cultural practices helped communities stave off hunger. Existing food sharing networks redoubled their efforts. Harvesting traditions were adapted with public health in mind.Native Americans\u2019 farming practices may help feed a warming world\u201cOur people, we\u2019ve had to have these underlying characteristics of resiliency, sharing, respect,\u201d said Erickson, the Inupiaq researcher. \u201cWe focus on practical solutions, otherwise we won\u2019t survive.\u201d\u201cThe rest of the world,\u201d he added, \u201cis going to have to face that as well.\u201dThough no place on Earth is changing as fast as the Arctic, rising temperatures have already brought similar chaos to more temperate climes as well. Unpredictable weather, unstable landscapes and collapsing ecosystems are becoming facts of life in communities around the globe.None of this represents a \u201cnew normal,\u201d Moon cautioned. It\u2019s merely a pit stop on a path to an even stranger and more dangerous future.Global greenhouse gas emissions are on track to keep rising. Governments and businesses have not taken the steps needed to avert catastrophic warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. There is every reason to believe that instability at the poles \u2014 and around the planet \u2014 will get worse.But achieving the best case climate scenarios could cut the volume of ice lost from Greenland by 75 percent, research suggests. International cooperation could prevent garbage from getting into the oceans and alleviate the effects of marine noise. Better surveillance and early warning systems can keep people safe when melting triggers landslides and floods.\u201cThere\u2019s such a big range and difference in what the future of the Arctic and the future anywhere on our globe can look like,\u201d Moon said. \u201cIt all depends on human actions.\u201d New research shows how rising temperatures have irreversibly altered both the Arctic and Antarctic. Ripple effects will be felt around the globe. Climate change has destabilized the Earth\u2019s poles, putting the rest of the planet in peril",
        "author": "Sarah Kaplan"
    },
    {
        "title": "As the planet warms, doubters launch a new attack on a famous climate change study (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8607",
        "date": "2017-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/07/as-the-planet-warms-doubters-launch-a-new-attack-on-a-famous-climate-change-study/",
        "text": "A former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist has reopened a contentious debate over the validity of a key agency climate change study, asserting that procedures for archiving its data were not properly followed by its authors.10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightThe claims\u00a0by John Bates,\u00a0first published in the Mail on Sunday and later amplified in a blog post he authored, have prompted Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, to criticize NOAA senior officials for \u201cplaying fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.\u201d But many scientists, although hesitant to pronounce on the specific charges about data archiving, have pointed out that the research has been independently confirmed by another recent study \u2014 and that in any case, none of this raises any significant doubt about human-caused climate change. Meanwhile, the researchers behind the original NOAA paper have disagreed strongly with Bates\u2019s charges, as has at least one scientist who worked with the team.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt issue is a 2015 bombshell report from scientists with NOAA\u2019s National Centers for Environmental Information, led by Thomas Karl, then its director. The paper, published in the leading journal Science, addressed a favorite argument from the climate-doubting camp \u2014 the idea that temperature records indicate a slowdown or \u201cpause\u201d in global warming from 1998 on into the 21st century. The Karl paper seemed to lay these arguments to rest by using updated temperature data sets to demonstrate that no pause has occurred and that recent temperature patterns remain in line with the long-term warming trend.The paper caused an immediate firestorm among conservatives upon its publication, prompting Rep. Smith to issue a congressional subpoena to the NOAA administrator aimed at investigating the adjustments the researchers had\u00a0made to the historical data sets.Bates, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, is a longtime NOAA researcher who, before retiring in 2016, was a principal scientist at NCEI. His charges\u00a0have instantly fed into a bitter debate that has been playing out over the timing of the release of the NOAA report and its conclusion, challenging a central assertion of those who are skeptical of global warming.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCharges about data \u2018archiving\u2019Bates\u2019s claims are outlined in\u00a0a guest blog post, which he published on\u00a0retired Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry\u2019s blog over the weekend.\u00a0Many are highly technical in nature. In essence, Bates asserts that\u00a0the paper\u2019s authors failed to comply with certain NOAA policies involving the managing and archiving of climate data and that the study\u2019s results cannot be replicated or verified as a result.\u00a0He also raises concerns about some of the software used in the study\u2019s data processing, including issues involving coding errors and certain procedural issues surrounding the development and use of the programs.Story continues below advertisementFurthermore, Bates implies that the authors manipulated their data to place a greater emphasis on global warming and rushed the paper\u2019s publication to coincide with the 2015 U.N. climate conference, which ultimately led to the adoption of the Paris climate agreement.AdvertisementBut in the few days since the blog post and news reports\u00a0were released, multiple climate scientists \u2014 both involved and uninvolved with the research in question \u2014 have come forward to combat these claims. First, they observe, even if there were procedural issues involved with the management of the data sets used, the data itself \u2014 as well as the study\u2019s results \u2014 appear to be\u00a0sound. And in fact, they\u2019ve already been independently verified by\u00a0at least one other research group.\u201cWere all of NOAA\u2019s internal procedures followed? Answer: We don\u2019t know,\u201d said David Titley, a meteorologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not involved with the 2015 paper, in an email to The Washington Post. \u201cIt\u2019s really not that interesting, and there are established processes and procedures, internal and external to NOAA, to address those allegations.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBut, he said,\u00a0\u201cIs the science bad? Answer: No.\u201dAdvertisementConstructing new data sets for land and oceansIn the Science paper, two major data sets \u2014 which had both been updated or adjusted compared to previous versions \u2014 were used to construct a long-term temperature record that would enable the scientists to observe whether a global warming pause had ever occurred. One of these contained temperature measurements taken over land, and the other contained measurements taken at the surface of the sea.And the result, as NOAA depicted it at the time in one image shared by the agency along with the study:Skeptics have implied\u00a0these data sets may have been manipulated to maximize warming. But several scientists have pointed out that both data sets have already been shown to be sound.Story continues below advertisementFor one thing, the updated land data set used in the paper is similar to previous versions of the same data and \u201cwas responsible for relatively little of the increase in warming they showed,\u201d wrote Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Berkeley Earth temperature analysis project, in a recent blog post for the website Carbon Brief. The sea surface temperature data was substantially updated for the 2015 paper, but those changes have since\u00a0been independently verified in a recent study published by Hausfather and colleagues.Advertisement\u201cIn a paper published last month in the journal Science Advances, we compared the old NOAA record and the new NOAA record to independent instrumentally homogenous records created from buoys, satellite radiometers, and Argo floats,\u201d Hausfather wrote. \u201cOur results\u2026show that the new NOAA record agrees quite well with all of these, while the old NOAA record shows much less warming.\u201dAs we recently reported, the new study \u2014 which was independent from the 2015 paper published in Science \u2014 also concludes that there was no global warming pause. These results provide a \u201cnice validation\u201d of the 2015 study, said Karl, the paper\u2019s lead author, in an interview with The Washington Post. Karl is now retired.Story continues below advertisementAnd\u00a0what about the data archiving charges? There appears to be a dispute on this front between Karl, the former director of NOAA\u2019s National Centers for Environmental Information, and Bates.AdvertisementWhile not all the data used was permanently archived before the study\u2019s publication, it was all readily available to any scientists who requested it at the time, Karl said.\u00a0As for long-term archiving, that happened too, he said, after publication.\u201cThe term \u2018archive\u2019 means a lot of different things to different people. \u2026 In this case, the data were available if anyone asked for it, and then they were archived further down the line after the paper was published,\u201d said Karl.Story continues below advertisementA rush to publication?Karl\u00a0and other scientists involved with the research have also taken issue with the suggestion that the paper was rushed to publication to coincide\u00a0with the Paris climate conference. They claim that the opposite was true \u2014 that, in fact, the procedural issues raised at the time the paper was being put together actually slowed the publication process.Advertisement\u201cThe real problem is that this work was delayed due to the processing concerns that [Bates] raised,\u201d said Thomas Peterson, a retired NOAA research meteorologist and another of the study\u2019s authors, in an email to The Washington Post. \u201cI argued with those pushing process over science for literally years that we were putting out erroneous information because we weren\u2019t allowed to update with new data and algorithms. \u2026 So it really bugs me to hear him say it was rushed when the exact opposite is true.\u201d \u00a0Story continues below advertisementIn any case, the decisions made at the Paris climate conference hardly turned\u00a0on one scientific paper. There\u2019s an enormous volume of research published every year on the subject of climate change and a consensus in the research community that humans are warming the planet, regardless of what may have happened with the rate of warming over relatively short time periods.Multiple other scientists have also come forward and published their own responses to these issues and various other points raised by both Bates and the Mail on Sunday \u2014 here, here and here are a few examples. At least one of these responses, published by scientist Peter Thorne, who has been involved with research related to the 2015 Science paper, also addresses some of the more technical software issues raised by Bates, suggesting that the codes used in the study were publicly available and internally approved at NOAA, with any bugs or errors having been documented. AdvertisementMost important, though, each response defends the scientific integrity of the study, regardless of any disputes about data archiving or other NOAA procedural issues. Curry \u2014 whose blog published Bates\u2019s version of the claims \u2014 published another post\u00a0Monday containing Bates\u2019s emailed responses to some of the criticism his assertions have received. In his responses, he reiterates his concerns about some of the coding and other software issues he raised in his original blog post and suggests that some of the scientists who commented on these issues were not closely or recently enough involved with these NOAA operations to comment.It\u2019s unclear whether an investigation will be launched by NOAA. In a statement to The Washington Post, a NOAA spokesman said that \u201cNOAA takes seriously any allegation that its internal processes have not been followed and will review the matter appropriately.\u201d \u2014 Chris Mooney and Jason Samenow contributed to this report.More from Energy and Environment:\u00a0A new battle over science and politics could be brewing. And scientists are ready for it.Hundreds of current, former EPA employees urge Senate to reject Trump\u2019s nominee for the agencyStanding Rock Sioux want \u2018no forcible removal\u2019 of protesters from Dakota Access pipeline siteFor more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter\u00a0here\u00a0and follow us on Twitter\u00a0here. U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith seizes on new assertions to question a climate study's results. As the planet warms, doubters launch a new attack on a famous climate change study",
        "author": "Chelsea Harvey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Variety: Acrostic (NYT: Crosswords & Games) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8608",
        "date": "2021-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/crosswords/variety-acrostic.html",
        "text": "Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon remind us about what\u2019s really important before we all go interstellar. Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon remind us about what\u2019s really important before we all go interstellar. ACROSTIC \u2014 Today\u2019s passage concerns something that humanity has fixated on since its discovery by Galileo in the 17th century, yet it\u2019s also very timely \u2014 Mars, the red planet, is hosting an elaborate group of mechanical explorers from Earth right now, in preparation for our imminent mass migration. That\u2019s a stretch, but if you read the book excerpted in today\u2019s puzzle, Kate Greene\u2019s \u201cOnce Upon a Time I Lived on Mars,\u201d you might feel a bit better about the possibility of visiting, maybe for a dinner out. Keep in mind that snacking on the way will present a logistical challenge.",
        "author": "By Caitlin Lovinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "When saving the planet spoils the charm of historic houses (WP: D.C., Md. & Va.) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8609",
        "date": "2020-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2020/01/19/solar-panels-historic-houses/",
        "text": "Public apathy, gridlocked politics, wealthy industries devoted to fossil fuels \u2014 the struggle to halt the worst effects of climate change faces a long list of obstacles. But in the U.S. capital, efforts to expand clean energy use must increasingly contend with another question: Just how will they affect the slope of a 1910 mansard roof? WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe dropping cost of solar panels, combined with their promotion by federal and local officials, have brought the sun\u2019s energy within reach of American homeowners as never before. But some D.C. residents trying to embrace solar power are finding themselves at odds with the city\u2019s powerful historic preservation officials, who wield regulatory power over tens of thousands of buildings.It is a debate playing out in towns and cities across the country, as the priorities of historic districts collide with the growing enthusiasm for clean energy. From the Great Lakes to the Black Hills, property owners worried about climate change find themselves debating the fine points of dormer contours and shingle color with preservationists worried about architectural integrity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe conflict is especially acute in Washington, where a concerted push for solar is taking place amid historic preservation agencies that in their territorial and procedural complexity rival the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Some permit seekers have found themselves snarled for months, or even years, trying to convince regulators of the aesthetic merits of proposed solar installations.At an October meeting of the Historic Preservation Review Board, one applicant from the Takoma neighborhood questioned whether global warming might make the visual appeal of his American Foursquare home moot.\u201cMy main concern right now,\u201d Steven Preister said, \u201cis if we do not change and loosen these standards, will the District be habitable in 100 years?\u201dStory continues below advertisementHis application was rejected.Board members reversed themselves in December, signing off on the project after Preister agreed to spend additional money on wrappers that would camouflage the solar cells on the front-facing part of his roof. The board also adopted new standards last month that may provide greater flexibility installing solar atop historic homes.AdvertisementBut both supporters and opponents of expanding solar panels in historic neighborhoods say the new rules are ambiguous. To complicate matters, would-be solar installers may have to seek approval from two other federal organizations \u2014 the Old Georgetown Board and U.S. Commission of Fine Arts \u2014 depending on where they live.Story continues below advertisementThe D.C. Council and mayor last year launched an aggressive push to convert the city to entirely renewable energy sources by 2032, a plan that calls for 10 percent of that energy to be generated by solar panels. Tommy Wells, director of the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment, said those goals will be hard enough to reach without historic preservationists and green-power advocates working at cross purposes.\u201cHaving, truly, the most ambitious goals in the nation for solar deployment within an urban area, that means that we will need as much surface area as possible for solar panels,\u201d Wells said. \u201cA nearly impossible goal was even further out of reach if we started exempting roof space.\u201d2019 capped world\u2019s hottest decade in recorded historySome historic preservationists say they are being unfairly blamed, the latest targets of a doctrinaire urbanism that does not always look kindly on old, single-family homes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cWe\u2019re responsible for the gentrification, there\u2019s no affordable housing \u2014 so they say,\u201d said Sara Green, a Takoma resident who worries about the effects of liberalizing historic preservation standards to allow more solar panels. \u201cNow we\u2019re killing polar bears.\u201dGreen said she has no problem with existing historic district regulations that allow solar cells on flat roofs, where they cannot be seen from the street. But she believes it would be a mistake to permit installations on sloped roofs like those visible on the facades of many bungalows in her neighborhood.\u201cThe impact on the polar bears or on climate change is extremely minor,\u201d Green said. \u201cHowever, the impact of putting solar panels on front-facing elevations in the Takoma historic district is enormous.\u201d\u2018You just throw up your hands'To Marcis Turner, putting solar panels on his 1938 brick rowhouse in Anacostia made sense. A 45-year-old building engineer, Turner liked the idea of doing his small part to cut carbon emissions. He also liked the idea of lowering his monthly electricity bills, which could reach $200 as his window air-conditioning units rattled through the District\u2019s long summers.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe secured a contractor and settled on a design. But on the eve of installation, he learned that the city\u2019s Historic Preservation Office objected to the placement of the structural beams supporting the panels.Turner didn\u2019t grasp the logic behind this aesthetic judgment \u2014 other buildings in his neighborhood are literally crumbling from neglect \u2014 but he said his contractor told him that adjusting the design wasn\u2019t feasible, and he had no desire to spend time appealing the decision.\u201cIt just was one of those things where you just throw up your hands,\u201d he said.Solar installers say they often hear similar sentiments among prospective customers unwilling to navigate the historic review process. Even when there is hope that the nine-member preservation review board might overrule a staff denial, the conditions it imposes can dramatically change the efficiency and economics of a project.\u201cIt\u2019s something that an installer isn\u2019t going to want to deal with, and it\u2019s something that the homeowner probably can\u2019t deal with,\u201d said Kyle Yost, co-founder of the installation firm DC Solar. \u201cCurrently, it takes a customer who really wants to drive it through to make it happen.\u201dMark Chandler and Laurie Wingate applied for solar panels on the roof of their home in Cleveland Park in 2012. After multiple appearances before the historic review board, they finally won approval for a scaled-back installation that Chandler estimated is generating about half as much power as the project they originally proposed.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt took four years.Steve Callcott, deputy preservation officer at the District\u2019s Office of Planning, said 1,500 properties in historic districts have obtained solar permits. Of those, he said, just over a dozen have come before the board for review. Callcott said he could not provide information on how many of the permits required owners to modify their original plans.Preister, 74, has lived in his home on Fifth Street in Northwest Washington for 36 years. A semiretired social worker, he too was bracing for a protracted struggle when he sought to add 12 front-facing solar panels to his roof. He had already installed 35 panels on less conspicuous parts of his house, but board members took a dim view of the more visible proposed additions.Story continues below advertisement\u201cI applaud your greenness, and your desire to save the planet. And I realize that we are in crisis, politically as well as sustainably,\u201d said board member Chris Landis, an architect. \u201cBut I just have this vision of a row of houses with solar panels on the front of them and it just \u2014 it upsets me, as somebody who\u2019s supposed to protect the architectural fabric of a neighborhood.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cStep back, and forget about the energy aspect of this,\u201d said another board member, Outerbridge Horsey, also an architect. \u201cJust think about the color and the texture. Would this board, in a historic district, think about allowing a glass roof on a historic structure? I mean, that\u2019s basically what we\u2019re talking about if you remove the sustainability issues.\u201dAll but one member of the board voted against Preister\u2019s solar panels. Their action drew widespread scorn after it was reported on the blog of Greater Greater Washington, a nonprofit urban policy and advocacy group. In December, Preister returned with a plan to wrap his front-facing solar panels in SolarSkin, a custom-designed sheath that would help the array blend in with his shingle roof. The coverings cost about $1,300, according to Preister\u2019s contractor, Suhaib Shah of the installation firm Solenergi.Story continues below advertisementThe board approved.AdvertisementLandis, whose three-year term ended this month, said in an interview that the scrutiny of Preister\u2019s project had been mischaracterized by environmentalists unfamiliar with the duties of historic preservation officials.\u201cYou could say we\u2019re old-fashioned, or we\u2019re Luddites, or whatever you want to call us. But it\u2019s a slippery slope, too. And once you start a precedent obviously everybody\u2019s going to want it,\u201d said Landis, noting that he has solar panels installed on the roof of his own business in Northeast Washington.\u201cImagine taking a look at a row of houses with, let\u2019s say, these little mansard roofs or hip roofs in front,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you\u2019re just going to see a sea of solar cells down that block. Aesthetically, it\u2019s a huge change.\u201d\u2018Of what use is a fine house \u2026\u2019Such controversies are flaring up around the country, said Sistine Solar chief executive Senthil Balasubramanian, whose company designed the solar-panel wrappers Preister incorporated.Aided by federal tax incentives, local energy credits and new financing options offered by installers, solar panels that once cost tens of thousands of dollars to install can now be had with little to no upfront cost.\u201cAs solar becomes increasingly common, the aesthetic objection starts to happen more frequently,\u201d Balasubramanian said. SolarSkin cuts the efficiency of photovoltaic cells by about 10 percent and can increase the price by roughly 8 percent, he said, but those trade-offs are worth it for customers who otherwise wouldn\u2019t be getting permits at all.AdvertisementIn Hot Springs, S.D., Lucia Stanslaw used SolarSkin to mask the panels she placed on the awning of her boutique for fair-trade goods in a tourist-heavy historic district. Stanslaw said she understood the value of preserving historic buildings, some of which had been razed in her home city of Guadalajara, Mexico.But in the United States, she said, historic preservation officials can become fixated on details that obscure a bigger picture.\u201cI think people just get stuck in trying to preserve a certain look when, gosh, I mean, we do have to evolve,\u201d Stanslaw said. \u201cIf that is going to require that we change our views on what is aesthetically pleasing, we really have to find some common ground.\u201dIn Ann Arbor, Mich., Matt and Kelly Grocoff faced skepticism in 2010 when they sought the blessing of the city\u2019s Historic District Commission for solar panels atop their 1901 Folk Victorian house. Matt Grocoff said that he overcame commissioners\u2019 suspicions in part by making the case for a broader view of preservation.\u201cI quoted Henry David Thoreau: \u2018Of what use is a fine house if you haven\u2019t got a tolerable planet to put it on?\u2019 \u201d Grocoff said. \u201cWith the urgency of the climate crisis, historic districts are really going to have to rethink what they allow. There is a way to preserve heritage, preserve these historic buildings, and still make them workable for the modern world.\u201dStates and cities vary widely in their approach to solar panels on historic buildings. California for decades has barred local officials from placing excessive restrictions on homeowners\u2019 solar installations. Connecticut is trying to give solar adopters greater flexibility by allowing them to offset violations of historic preservation standards with other actions, such as preservation easements, said Todd Levine, a historian in the state\u2019s historic preservation office.Levine noted that solar panels, unlike some other modifications to historic buildings, are easily reversible \u2014 and will inevitably be replaced as technology improves.\u201cAt the end of the day, 20 years from now, they\u2019re all going to be removed,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to have a system where we didn\u2019t slow down the applicants.\u201dAs he waits to install his 12 new solar panels facing the street this spring, Preister said he hopes that D.C. officials will take seriously the need to streamline their own review process \u2014 and to actively encourage residents of historic districts to adopt solar. Without the contributions of those home and business owners, he said, the city\u2019s goal of an all-green energy supply just 12 years from now is likely to prove elusive.\u201cIf they don\u2019t get these people on board,\u201d Preister said, \u201cthey\u2019re not going to make it.\u201dFenit Nirappil contributed to this report.Read more:One D.C. store, 16 surveillance cameras, and two murders in seven monthsD.C. housed the homeless in upscale apartments. It hasn\u2019t gone as planned.She\u2019d lived on this historically black D.C. block for 40 years. Now the city she knew was vanishing, and so was her place in it. Homeowners who want solar panels confront skepticism from local preservation boards in the District and across the country. When saving the planet spoils the charm of historic houses",
        "author": "Peter Jamison"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Could bicycles help save the planet and improve our cities? (WP: Made by History) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8610",
        "date": "2019-09-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/01/could-bicycles-help-save-planet-improve-our-cities/",
        "text": "As Europeans strive to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, cities across the continent are promoting cycling like never before. Yet most American cities lag far behind. Why? It\u2019s not simply that Americans love their cars more and need them to navigate a large nation.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBicycles were once the future of urban transportation, before motor vehicles disastrously supplanted them. If Americans built bike-friendly infrastructure and increased the costs associated with driving to properly incentivize bicycles, we might feel that way about them once again. Starting in the 1860s, Americans developed a burning passion for bicycles. New England was initially the center of innovation for this incredibly popular product. Bikes were a critical step in the advancement of the American system of manufacturing because they placed unique demands on mechanics, leading to major improvements in skills such as sheet-metal stamping and electric resistance welding.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe national obsession with these two-wheeled wonders provided an extremely large customer base, as many Americans discovered a passion for speed. In the 1870s, amateur cycling clubs were established across the country. American Bicycling Journal wrote in its inaugural issue that cyclists could \u201cbenefit themselves and posterity morally, mentally, and physically, by sparing a portion of their time for healthful exercise in the open air, expanding their chests and their hearts.\u201d Millions availed themselves of these benefits as the velocipede craze swept the nation. Soon bicycle racing became the nation\u2019s most popular sport, drawing larger crowds than baseball or horse racing.In the 1880s, it was bicycle \u2014 not automobile \u2014 enthusiasts who started the clamor for improved roads in America. Due to reliance on waterways and railways, politicians had long ignored funding for road construction. Gen. Roy Stone, the first director of the Bureau of Public Roads, argued that the United States had the \u201cworst roads in the civilized world,\u201d which was \u201ca crushing tax on the whole people.\u201d The League of American Wheelmen, a bicycling group, hoped to change that when it began the Good Roads Movement. Within a decade, several states had passed legislation to help fund construction of such roads. With more than 1 million bikes being manufactured every year by the end of the century, the future for this mode of transportation seemed bright.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementUnfortunately, the age of the bicycle was short-lived. Early automobile manufacturers soon adopted key cycling technologies, and the roads that had been championed by wheelmen became clogged with cars in the 20th century. The middle class developed an early appetite for autos because of their speed and the romance of the open road, and it had the money to reject bicycles and streetcars in favor of these conveyances.Over time, it became clear that this transition had many costs. One negative outcome was the steady loss of human-scale cities, as cars took over every aspect of urban growth. Rather than maintain the compact, mixed-use development that had produced our vibrant early cities, the mass adoption of automobiles led to suburban and exurban sprawl. Twentieth century planners such as New York\u2019s Robert Moses cared little for the communities that were devastated as highways came to crisscross the urban landscape. As the wealthy fled to exclusive suburban neighborhoods, the economic and social fabric of entire regions began to fray and collapse.At the same time, as people walked and biked less, human health suffered. Even more significantly, the environmental damage resulting from the adoption of motor vehicles was immense.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe climate crisis provides us with a reason to bring back our compact cities and restore our national love for the bicycle. We can learn lessons from the very organizations and institutions that initially launched the bike\u2019s popularity more than a century ago.The Good Roads Movement was propelled by public sentiment, and it successfully petitioned for better road infrastructure. Today, there is an opportunity to create a modern-day lobby that will promote the bicycle. Many young Americans contend we have allowed cars to dictate the shape of our urban lives far too much. In recent years, there has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the number of 16-year-olds who seek driver\u2019s licenses. Half of young people between the ages of 22 and 37 say car ownership is too expensive. Given that there are other mobility options available, such as car sharing and ride-sharing services, the desire to purchase a car has diminished considerably.This budding movement has also shown that if the public demands space for bikes in cities, urban leaders will listen. During the past two decades, city planners have been working diligently to undo Moses-era mistakes and plan for a return to compact cities with investments in streetcar systems and bike lanes. Even in the suburbs, walkable and bikeable communities are increasingly a selling point.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor this vision to come to fruition, technological innovations in the bike sector must also continue to advance. In the late-19th century, improvements in sheet-metal stamping and electric resistance welding made bicycles cheaper and more accessible. Today, the most exciting advances are in commuter bicycles, where dozens of companies are reshaping our perception of individual mobility with the introduction of cargo bikes that provide serious carrying capacity, foldable bikes that can be easily stored at work and home and family-friendly bikes that can transport kids about town. Perhaps most importantly, there are scores of electric bikes being produced that provide an assist to riders traveling long distances and/or over hilly terrain. Progress in cycling technology means that for the first time in more than a century, bikes are a real alternative to cars within compact urban environments.To incentivize a transition from cars to bicycles, U.S. cities should adopt the best practices of their European counterparts. To be clear, this will be a decades-long process. We know this because in the friendliest cycling cities in the world, which were also once crazy for automobiles, that is how long it took to change attitudes and develop needed infrastructure.In Copenhagen, where more than 60 percent of daily trips are made by bike, leaders began transitioning away from cars nearly a half century ago. They began by slowly but steadily increasing the costs of driving \u2014 mostly by raising automobile and gasoline taxes, but also by reducing parking availability \u2014 and using the revenue to create bike-friendly infrastructure, which includes miles of separate, uninterrupted cycling lanes, as well as dedicated bike tunnels, bridges and traffic lights. These \u201ccomplete streets\u201d and \u201ccycling superhighways\u201d evolved over time to reduce the space available for cars and the speeds at which they could travel. As driving became more frustrating and cycling became more efficient, the number of daily trips made by bike increased significantly.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRekindling Americans\u2019 love for the bicycle may seem far-fetched today, but gradual policy changes, along with a return to human-scale urban design, would make this revival possible over the long term. The embrace of the automobile at the expense of the bicycle shows such a transition is possible: If Americans come to believe a different mode of transportation will improve their lives, then they have proved willing to junk a widespread, popular method.The case can already be made for the bicycle over the automobile: They\u2019re better for the planet, our health and our cities, and speeding around on two-wheels can provide a profound sense of joy and social connection. Though it will take many years to change cultural attitudes and build the needed infrastructure, there is ample evidence that young Americans are ready for policymakers to help the nation revive its past love for cycling. Making it easier to ride bikes and harder to drive cars could have an enormous impact \u2014 as already seen in Europe. Could bicycles help save the planet and improve our cities?",
        "author": "Thor Hogan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage? (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8611",
        "date": "2017-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/magazine/is-an-open-marriage-a-happier-marriage.html",
        "text": "What the experiences of nonmonogamous couples can tell us about jealousy, love, desire and trust. What the experiences of nonmonogamous couples can tell us about jealousy, love, desire and trust. When Daniel and Elizabeth married in 1993, they found it was easy enough to choose a ring for her, but there were far fewer choices for him. Daniel, then a 27-year-old who worked in information technology, decided to design one himself, requesting that tiny stones be placed in a gold band, like planets orbiting in a solar system. He was happy with the ring, and what it represented, until it became obvious after the wedding that he was allergic to the nickel that was mixed in with the gold in the band. As if in revolt, his finger grew red and raw, beneath the circle of metal. He started to think of the ring as if it were radioactive, an object burning holes in his flesh. A month into the marriage, he took it off and never got around to replacing it.",
        "author": "By Susan Dominus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage? (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8612",
        "date": "2017-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/magazine/is-an-open-marriage-a-happier-marriage.html",
        "text": "What the experiences of nonmonogamous couples can tell us about jealousy, love, desire and trust. What the experiences of nonmonogamous couples can tell us about jealousy, love, desire and trust. When Daniel and Elizabeth married in 1993, they found it was easy enough to choose a ring for her, but there were far fewer choices for him. Daniel, then a 27-year-old who worked in information technology, decided to design one himself, requesting that tiny stones be placed in a gold band, like planets orbiting in a solar system. He was happy with the ring, and what it represented, until it became obvious after the wedding that he was allergic to the nickel that was mixed in with the gold in the band. As if in revolt, his finger grew red and raw, beneath the circle of metal. He started to think of the ring as if it were radioactive, an object burning holes in his flesh. A month into the marriage, he took it off and never got around to replacing it.",
        "author": "By Susan Dominus"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Sequel-Mad Hollywood, Even Documentaries Have Follow-Ups (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8613",
        "date": "2017-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/movies/an-inconvenient-truth-al-gore-documentary-sequels.html",
        "text": "New films are expanding on hits like \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth\u201d and \u201cFahrenheit 9/11.\u201d The sequel makers say there is a hunger for long-form journalism. New films are expanding on hits like \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth\u201d and \u201cFahrenheit 9/11.\u201d The sequel makers say there is a hunger for long-form journalism. It could be one of this summer\u2019s hottest sequels: In a world threatened by powerful unseen forces, one man goes on a desperate mission to save the planet. Only the star is former Vice President Al Gore.",
        "author": "By Bruce Fretts"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Sequel-Mad Hollywood, Even Documentaries Have Follow-Ups (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8614",
        "date": "2017-07-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/movies/an-inconvenient-truth-al-gore-documentary-sequels.html",
        "text": "New films are expanding on hits like \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth\u201d and \u201cFahrenheit 9/11.\u201d The sequel makers say there is a hunger for long-form journalism. New films are expanding on hits like \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth\u201d and \u201cFahrenheit 9/11.\u201d The sequel makers say there is a hunger for long-form journalism. It could be one of this summer\u2019s hottest sequels: In a world threatened by powerful unseen forces, one man goes on a desperate mission to save the planet. Only the star is former Vice President Al Gore.",
        "author": "By Bruce Fretts"
    },
    {
        "title": "At the Movies: Our Monsters, Ourselves (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8615",
        "date": "2017-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/movies/at-the-movies-our-monsters-ourselves.html",
        "text": "The new summer season isn\u2019t exactly a monster mash, but a clutch of new creature features has our critics wondering what scares us now and why. The new summer season isn\u2019t exactly a monster mash, but a clutch of new creature features has our critics wondering what scares us now and why. Summer is fast approaching, and so too is a cavalcade of creeping, slithering, stomping monsters. The nifty independent \u201cColossal,\u201d which features a Godzilla-like creature terrorizing Seoul, South Korea, is still in theaters. \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2\u201d and its science-fiction bestiary opened on Friday, May 5. The latest \u201cAlien\u201d movie is drooling in the wings, and \u201cThe Mummy\u201d lands in June. The next \u201cPlanet of the Apes\u201d flick arrives in July, and while that franchise may not feature traditional fiends, it finds the monstrous in a familiar place: human beings. Our chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, discuss monsters and wonder how they could be any more frightening than real life.",
        "author": "By Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: Looking to the Stars, \u2018Cielo\u2019 Can\u2019t Quite Form a Constellation (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8616",
        "date": "2018-08-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/movies/cielo-review.html",
        "text": "Alison McAlpine\u2019s experimental feature tries to film an essentially unfilmable subject: the night sky above the Atacama Desert in Chile. Alison McAlpine\u2019s experimental feature tries to film an essentially unfilmable subject: the night sky above the Atacama Desert in Chile. A heady brew of science and poetry, Alison McAlpine\u2019s experimental feature \u201cCielo\u201d tries to film an essentially unfilmable subject: the night sky above the Atacama Desert in Chile. The absence of visual pollution makes the location an unusually pure spot to see the heavens \u2014 a treasured site for astronomers and stargazers hunting for undiscovered exoplanets, and a place rich in folklore, rock art and mysticism.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Dunkirk\u2019 Exceeds Box Office Expectations as \u2018Valerian\u2019 Bombs (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8617",
        "date": "2017-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/23/movies/dunkirk-girls-trip-valerian-box-office.html",
        "text": "\u201cDunkirk,\u201d a World War II movie directed by Christopher Nolan, found an audience despite being considered a more serious film than usual summer fare. \u201cDunkirk,\u201d a World War II movie directed by Christopher Nolan, found an audience despite being considered a more serious film than usual summer fare. LOS ANGELES \u2014 \u201cDunkirk\u201d and \u201cGirls Trip\u201d won big at the weekend box office by breaking unwritten Hollywood rules about release dates and cast diversity. But another flouter of film industry norms, the surreal, independently financed space adventure \u201cValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,\u201d was dead on arrival.",
        "author": "By Brooks Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018An Inconvenient Sequel,\u2019 With Al Gore Keeping the Pressure On (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8618",
        "date": "2017-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/movies/an-inconvenient-sequel-review-al-gore.html",
        "text": "A follow-up to \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth,\u201d with new information on climate change and even some positive developments. A follow-up to \u201cAn Inconvenient Truth,\u201d with new information on climate change and even some positive developments. In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Captain Marvel\u2019 Review: Brie Larson Takes a Trip to the \u201990s (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8619",
        "date": "2019-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/movies/captain-marvel-review.html",
        "text": "The newest member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes on a nostalgia trip in the company of Samuel L. Jackson and Annette Bening. The newest member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes on a nostalgia trip in the company of Samuel L. Jackson and Annette Bening. One thing we learn in \u201cCaptain Marvel\u201d is that it\u2019s pronounced MarVELL, like the English poet \u2014 or at least it used to be, on distant planets and right here on Earth, a windy rock also known as C-53. That was back in 1995, when most of this movie takes place and when the world as we know it had not yet been colonized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, of course, Marvel Comics had been around for decades, but when the heroine crashes through the roof of the Blockbuster Video store, landing in between the \u201cFamily\u201d and \u201cDrama\u201d sections, there are no Avengers or Iron-Man titles on the shelves.",
        "author": "By A.O. Scott"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Captain Marvel\u2019 Review: Brie Larson Takes a Trip to the \u201990s (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8620",
        "date": "2019-03-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/movies/captain-marvel-review.html",
        "text": "The newest member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes on a nostalgia trip in the company of Samuel L. Jackson and Annette Bening. The newest member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe goes on a nostalgia trip in the company of Samuel L. Jackson and Annette Bening. One thing we learn in \u201cCaptain Marvel\u201d is that it\u2019s pronounced MarVELL, like the English poet \u2014 or at least it used to be, on distant planets and right here on Earth, a windy rock also known as C-53. That was back in 1995, when most of this movie takes place and when the world as we know it had not yet been colonized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes, of course, Marvel Comics had been around for decades, but when the heroine crashes through the roof of the Blockbuster Video store, landing in between the \u201cFamily\u201d and \u201cDrama\u201d sections, there are no Avengers or Iron-Man titles on the shelves.",
        "author": "By A.O. Scott"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018IO\u2019 Review: It\u2019s Eve or Oblivion for the Last Woman on Earth (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8621",
        "date": "2019-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/movies/io-review.html",
        "text": "Netflix\u2019s new sci-fi movie is mostly a lugubrious Adam and Eve story. But the two leads are almost too swamped in ennui to tend the garden. Netflix\u2019s new sci-fi movie is mostly a lugubrious Adam and Eve story. But the two leads are almost too swamped in ennui to tend the garden. On a toxic planet where virtually all of humankind has been either wiped out or slung to a faraway space station, only allegories thrive in the willowy vapors of the Netflix science-fiction film \u201cIO.\u201d",
        "author": "By Scott Tobias"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | In the galleries: Delicate works show concern about the footprints we leave on our planet (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8622",
        "date": "2021-11-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/art-gallery-shows-dc-area/2021/11/23/aeda95b0-4bb0-11ec-b73b-a00d6e559a6e_story.html",
        "text": "Yuriko Yamaguchi\u2019s sculptures have gotten more complex and technological, but their origins in nature remain evident. In fact, many of the artworks in \u201cCoexist,\u201d the Northern Virginia artist\u2019s show at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, incorporate sticks and branches found in local woods. These form the basis, whether actual or conceptual, for airy ",
        "author": "Mark Jenkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Planetarium Opens in New Jersey, Ushering In a New Kind of Star Wars (NYT: New York) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8623",
        "date": "2017-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/nyregion/planetarium-opens-in-new-jersey-ushering-in-a-new-kind-of-star-wars.html",
        "text": "The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City says it\u2019s 110 feet in diameter \u2014 even bigger than one across the river at the Museum of Natural History. The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City says it\u2019s 110 feet in diameter \u2014 even bigger than one across the river at the Museum of Natural History. JERSEY CITY \u2014 Bigger is better when it comes to planetariums \u2014 a bigger dome to make the audience ooh and ahh, more pixels to make the stars and planets sharper, more colors to make them more realistic, more windows on intriguing but distant nebulas, more images of Earth as a shimmering jewel against the dark drape of space.",
        "author": "By James Barron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Planetarium Opens in New Jersey, Ushering In a New Kind of Star Wars (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8624",
        "date": "2017-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/nyregion/planetarium-opens-in-new-jersey-ushering-in-a-new-kind-of-star-wars.html",
        "text": "The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City says it\u2019s 110 feet in diameter \u2014 even bigger than one across the river at the Museum of Natural History. The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City says it\u2019s 110 feet in diameter \u2014 even bigger than one across the river at the Museum of Natural History. JERSEY CITY \u2014 Bigger is better when it comes to planetariums \u2014 a bigger dome to make the audience ooh and ahh, more pixels to make the stars and planets sharper, more colors to make them more realistic, more windows on intriguing but distant nebulas, more images of Earth as a shimmering jewel against the dark drape of space.",
        "author": "By James Barron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Close Up (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8625",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/opinion/editorials/mars-water-life.html",
        "text": "Look skyward and dream. Look skyward and dream.  Mars, the Red Planet named after the Roman god of war, is currently closer to the Earth than it\u2019s been in 15 years, and the millions of people gazing at the bright red dot will once again be wondering, is there life out there?",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Close Up (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8626",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/opinion/editorials/mars-water-life.html",
        "text": "Look skyward and dream. Look skyward and dream.  Mars, the Red Planet named after the Roman god of war, is currently closer to the Earth than it\u2019s been in 15 years, and the millions of people gazing at the bright red dot will once again be wondering, is there life out there?",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mars Close Up (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8627",
        "date": "2018-08-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/opinion/editorials/mars-water-life.html",
        "text": "Look skyward and dream. Look skyward and dream.  Mars, the Red Planet named after the Roman god of war, is currently closer to the Earth than it\u2019s been in 15 years, and the millions of people gazing at the bright red dot will once again be wondering, is there life out there?",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Trappist (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8628",
        "date": "2017-02-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/opinion/twinkle-twinkle-little-trappist.html",
        "text": "Is there anybody or anything out there? Is there anybody or anything out there? So, we may have been looking for alien life in the wrong place! Not long ago, scientists scouring the cosmos for Earth-like planets with the right stuff to generate life were looking around sun-like stars. It turns out that the first such planets they\u2019ve found \u2014 seven of them \u2014 are circling something quite different: what scientists call an \u201cultracool dwarf\u201d in their ultracool terminology, though in this case the reference is to the temperature of a dim star barely one-twelfth the mass of the sun.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cows on Mars! (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8629",
        "date": "2019-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/opinion/mars-methane-gas.html",
        "text": "A European orbiter detected whiffs of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Of undetermined origin. A European orbiter detected whiffs of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Of undetermined origin. Scientists have finally confirmed something they had doubted, that Mars does occasionally emit puffs of methane into its atmosphere. That doesn\u2019t necessarily mean what you presume it means, that the Red Planet is or once was home to alien cows or other forms of life. But it could.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cows on Mars! (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8630",
        "date": "2019-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/opinion/mars-methane-gas.html",
        "text": "A European orbiter detected whiffs of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Of undetermined origin. A European orbiter detected whiffs of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Of undetermined origin. Scientists have finally confirmed something they had doubted, that Mars does occasionally emit puffs of methane into its atmosphere. That doesn\u2019t necessarily mean what you presume it means, that the Red Planet is or once was home to alien cows or other forms of life. But it could.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Cows on Mars! (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8631",
        "date": "2019-04-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/opinion/mars-methane-gas.html",
        "text": "A European orbiter detected whiffs of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Of undetermined origin. A European orbiter detected whiffs of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Of undetermined origin. Scientists have finally confirmed something they had doubted, that Mars does occasionally emit puffs of methane into its atmosphere. That doesn\u2019t necessarily mean what you presume it means, that the Red Planet is or once was home to alien cows or other forms of life. But it could.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Climate Crisis Is Raging, but We Are Not Powerless (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8632",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/opinion/environmental-nonprofits-tennesse-south.html",
        "text": "Our collective efforts\u00a0can\u00a0make a huge difference. Our collective efforts\u00a0can\u00a0make a huge difference.  This article is part of Times Opinion\u2019s Holiday Giving Guide 2021. For other ideas on where to donate this year, please see the rest of our guide here.NASHVILLE \u2014 At this point, you\u2019re probably trying very hard to tread more lightly on this weary and fragile earth. But no matter how much organic produce you buy, or how much plastic you\u2019ve eliminated, or how many native trees you\u2019ve planted, the future seems bleaker and bleaker. The relentless destruction of wildlife habitat picks up pace. The extinction of species escalates. The rapidly heating planet has gone into overdrive.",
        "author": "By Margaret Renkl"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Wars\u2019 Fans Are Angry and Polarized. Like All Americans. (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8633",
        "date": "2019-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/opinion/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker.html",
        "text": "What arguments over the movie series say about our nation. What arguments over the movie series say about our nation. Like a lot of Americans, I have formative memories of my first exposure to George Lucas\u2019s epic tale of space Rebels defeating a planet-destroying Empire. I got so excited as a little kid in 1977 about seeing \u201cStar Wars: A New Hope\u201d that I threw up outside the theater. ",
        "author": "By Annalee Newitz"
    },
    {
        "title": "More Than Twice the Size of Texas (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8634",
        "date": "2020-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/opinion/biden-climate-change-conservation.html",
        "text": "That\u2019s how much land Biden wants to conserve over the next decade. But is it possible? That\u2019s how much land Biden wants to conserve over the next decade. But is it possible? To slow extinctions and climate change, President-elect Joe Biden has embraced a plan to conserve 30 percent of U.S. land and 30 percent of its ocean waters by 2030. It is perhaps the most ambitious commitment to conservation by a U.S. president. How he proceeds will determine whether he unites or further divides Americans in a pivotal decade for the planet.",
        "author": "By Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Trump flies to Kenosha but lands on Planet Zog (WP: Opinions) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8635",
        "date": "2020-09-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/01/trump-flies-kenosha-lands-planet-zog/",
        "text": "President Trump took off on Air Force One on Tuesday morning on his way to Kenosha, Wis. He landed on Planet Zog.In real life, protests (some peaceful, some violent) erupted after police shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, seven times in the back. A Trump-supporting militia member allegedly gunned down three of the protesters, killing two of them. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightBut in the imaginary Kenosha that Trump created Tuesday afternoon at an invitation-only \u201croundtable\u201d \u2014 in a high school cafeteria serving as a government \u201ccommand center\u201d \u2014 things were quite different.There was no pandemic in this Kenosha; at his suggestion, everybody in the roundtable took off their face masks. There was no right-wing violence. (I heard no mention of the killings by the Trump-backing extremist.) There was no such thing as police brutality (Trump quickly swept aside any such notion). And there were hardly any Black people (only two of the 23 in the room).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt quickly became clear that the pair, a pastor and his wife, were to be seen rather than heard. James Ward, who said he is the pastor to Blake\u2019s mother, was asked by Trump to offer a prayer, then offered to discuss \u201cthe real pain that hurts Black Americans.\u201d Trump wasn\u2019t interested.When Trump opened the roundtable to questions, a reporter asked the pastor whether he believed that there is systemic racism in law enforcement.Before Ward could answer, Trump broke in to say there were only \u201csome bad apples\u201d among police, of which \u201cI have the endorsement of so many, maybe everybody.\u201d Follow\u00a0Dana Milbank\u2018s opinionsFollowAddThe reporter tried again. \u201cCould the pastor answer my question, please?\u201d Story continues below advertisementTrump called on another questioner.Then, shutting down the session, Trump turned to the muted pastor he had just used as a prop. \u201cFantastic job,\u201d he said.AdvertisementAs the election gets closer and closer, Trump appears to be getting further and further from reality. Tuesday\u2019s stagecraft in Kenosha was Trump\u2019s most audacious attempt to rearrange reality since \u2026 well, since the night before. On Monday, he informed Fox News\u2019s Laura Ingraham that Joe Biden is the victim of mind control by \u201cpeople that you\u2019ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows.\u201d They are, he said, the same \u201cpeople that are controlling the streets.\u201d Trump further reported the existence of a plane, \u201calmost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms.\u201d He said they \u201cwere on the plane to do big damage.\u201d Story continues below advertisementPressed for details, Trump said he could divulge no more. \u201cI\u2019ll tell you sometime, but it\u2019s under investigation.\u201d As NBC reported, Trump\u2019s fantastical tale closely matched a two-month-old conspiracy theory making the rounds on Facebook.By the time he arrived at Joint Base Andrews for his trip to Wisconsin, Trump had already developed more details about his new conspiracy theory. This time, \u201cthe entire plane filled up with the looters, the anarchists, the rioters.\u201d And Trump said he has a firsthand account from a person on the plane. \u201cMaybe they\u2019ll speak to you and maybe they won\u2019t,\u201d he said. (They didn\u2019t.)AdvertisementArriving in Kenosha, Trump toured a camera shop that had been damaged. There, he chose to speak about Portland, Ore. \u2014 about 2,000 miles away. Portland \u201chas been terrible for a long time, for many decades, actually.\u201d Portland is frequently ranked among the \u201cmost livable cities\u201d in America.Story continues below advertisementTrump didn\u2019t meet with the Blake family, instead moving on to the high school cafeteria, draped with blue curtains and decorated with flags.\u201cI feel so safe,\u201d Trump remarked, after a tour in which he was protected by armored personnel carriers, military trucks and police in camouflage carrying automatic rifles.He received thanks from a participant for \u201csending the National Guard.\u201d (That was actually the work of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who, like Kenosha\u2019s mayor, urged Trump not to visit.)Trump reported that \u201cthere was love on the street, I can tell you, of Wisconsin when we were coming in \u2026 so many African Americans.\u201d According to the \u201cpool\u201d reporters traveling in the president\u2019s motorcade, he had been greeted by friends and foes alike, including one \u201clarge group protesting the president, their middle fingers pointed at motorcade.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe two African Americans in the roundtable did their best to bring Trump around to reality. James Ward prayed for a restoration of \u201cempathy and compassion.\u201d Sharon Ward noted that \u201cit\u2019s important to have Black people at the table\u201d and called it \u201ca good opportunity for us really to solve the problem.\u201d But Trump would not be moved. Asked about nonviolent protests and structural racism, he answered with \u201canarchists,\u201d \u201clooters,\u201d \u201crioters\u201d and \u201cagitators.\u201d He said Democrats like riots and want to close prisons and end immigration enforcement. \u201cThe wall will be finished very shortly,\u201d he added. Maybe that\u2019s true \u2014 on Planet Zog.How do conspiracy theories and racism move from the fringe to a political platform? The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has found the way. (Parjanya Christian Holtz/The Washington Post)Sign up to receive my columns in your inbox as soon as they\u2019re published.Story continues below advertisementRead more:Jennifer Rubin: Trump is too loony even for Laura IngrahamJonathan Capehart: Trump keeps walking into Joe Biden\u2019s trapHenry Olsen: Joe Biden should do more than just speak out against violenceDana Milbank: Trump is acting like a cornered animal. America needs a human being.Max Boot: Trump cannot be allowed to incite his way to reelectionDana Milbank: Trump presented the mother of all fabrications on the White House lawn As the election gets closer and closer, Trump appears to be getting further and further from reality. Opinion: Trump flies to Kenosha but lands on Planet Zog",
        "author": "Dana Milbank"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Is a planetary grand strategy possible? (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8636",
        "date": "2021-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/16/is-planetary-grand-strategy-possible/",
        "text": "Last year Ron Krebs, Randall Schweller and I expressed some skepticism in the pages of Foreign Affairs about whether the United States could sustain a viable grand strategy for the next few decades. Shockingly, our authoritative voice appearing in that authoritative journal failed to dissuade subsequent efforts by others to divine a Biden doctrine. The latest effort to propose a new way of thinking about U.S. grand strategy is ecological. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightProponents argue that climate change is such an existential threat that it should be prioritized and dwarf everything else. Stewart Patrick made this case in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs: \u201cThe natural world obeys no sovereign boundaries, and neither does the worsening ecological crisis. It is time to take bold steps to overcome the disconnect between an international system divided into 195 independent countries. \u2026 It is time to govern the world as if the earth mattered. What the world needs is a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy.\u201dOver the weekend Anne-Marie Slaughter made a similar case in the New York Times: \u201cWhat difference does it make whether the United States \u2018beats China\u2019 if our cities are underwater, the Gulf Stream stops warming northern Europe and the United States, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees are on the move? If we destroy the biodiversity on the planet? If millions more people die from serial pandemics?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSo what is to be done? Both authors suggest a new kind of statecraft that prioritizes these systemic threats over traditional great power politics. Patrick calls for a \u201cnew planetary politics.\u201d Cheekily calling her approach \u201cglobalism,\u201d Slaughter concludes, \u201cBolder thinking is required, thinking that shifts away from states, whether great powers or lesser powers, democracies or autocracies. It is time to put people first.\u201dAs someone who has been thinking and teaching about the end of the world for a spell now, I can sympathize with this approach. There are a lot of ways that the sixth extinction can happen, but climate change seems like the one with the greatest likelihood of happening. It makes sense, on an existential level, to prioritize that above all else.Both authors also make some suggestions that are doable. Patrick urges the United States to follow the lead of more than 85 countries and adopt a \u201cnatural capital account\u201d rubric to properly price damage to our biosphere. Slaughter advocates for prestige competitions as a means of goading China and other climate laggards into more concerted action. Such prestige competitions can lead to a considerable expenditure of resources.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSuch a rethink would have massive implications for international relations and the allocation of national security resources. Both writers are suggesting an unusual doctrine of preemption. Patrick argues that traditional sovereignty norms would have to fall by the wayside if, say, one national leader was copacetic with destroying its rainforest. Slaughter tacks in a different direction, urging an end to traditional geopolitics.Climate change is the most serious existential threat to our way of life \u2014 but does not mean it is the only threat. A lot is happening in the world, and some of those things can lead to short-term outcomes that are far worse than climate change.Just because something is difficult doesn\u2019t mean it is not worth doing. But it is hard to look at a divided country and a national security infrastructure geared toward state-based threats and believe that there can be a sustainable reallocation of resources to combat these kind of systemic threats (there is also the difficulty of repurposing military means to solve a nonmilitary problem).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTaken to its logical extreme, this grand strategy would not just ignore sovereign borders. It would also push aside any pesky legal constraints on domestic action, like a certain senator from West Virginia vetoing steps to replace coal with alternative energy. That way lies untrammeled executive power.Patrick and Slaughter are trying to start a conversation. Maybe securitizing global warming will change some minds in the national security space. Before the United States can pursue a grand strategy abroad, however, there needs to be a stronger consensus at home that something must be done. And as Krebs, Schweller and I noted last year, that conversation will be fantastically difficult. A few thoughts on non-traditional grand strategies. Is a planetary grand strategy possible?",
        "author": "Daniel W. Drezner"
    },
    {
        "title": "Highly religious Americans are less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets, survey says (WP: Religion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8637",
        "date": "2021-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/08/19/religious-americans-intelligent-life-ufos/",
        "text": "Religious traditions have long taught that humans share the universe with angels and demons and other intelligent beings, but a recent survey from the Pew Research Center suggests American adults who are more religious are much more skeptical about the possibility of extraterrestrial life than those who are less religious. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA survey gauging attitudes about the possibility of extraterrestrial life was conducted in June, just before the Defense Department released an official report on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).Americans who attend religious services at least weekly are less likely than those who seldom or never attend services to say that intelligent life exists elsewhere (44 percent vs. 75 percent). And adults who pray daily (54 percent) are also less likely than those who seldom or never pray (80 percent) to say intelligent life exists on other planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists who also study theology say the idea of intelligent life in the universe has been a topic among astronomers for years because it raises all kinds of questions for Christian theologians. Did Jesus die for aliens, too? Do aliens have their own special relationship with God? Would aliens be capable of sinning?Duilia de Mello, an astronomer and physics professor at Catholic University, said she has several seminarians in her classes who often bring up theoretical questions about intelligent life in the universe and debate what it would mean for the Catholic Church. Pope Francis, after all, has said that if an alien wanted to be baptized, he would be willing to do so.\u201cIf we are the products of creation, why couldn\u2019t we have life evolving in other planets as well? There\u2019s nothing that says otherwise,\u201d de Mello said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the past year, Gil Barndollar, a member of the Church of the Advent in Washington, led a group of about a dozen people who discussed Christian science fiction works, in which they read books like C.S. Lewis\u2019s Space Trilogy and Mary Doria Russell\u2019s \u201cThe Sparrow,\u201d about intelligent life in the universe.Barndollar said he believes some biblical fundamentalists or literalists could feel threatened by the idea that there might be something out in the universe that\u2019s not spelled out in the Bible.\u201cOn the face of it, you would think religion would make you more likely to believe in something that could be scoffed at,\u201d Barndollar said. \u201cFor some people, those may be competitive beliefs.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBarndollar said he personally doesn\u2019t know whether he thinks intelligent life could be out there.\u201cI\u2019m pleasantly agnostic about it,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m pretty comfortable with ambiguity and with mystery. I don\u2019t necessarily need a comprehensive rational explanation for everything.\u201dAdvertisementHe said that when the military released its report in June, his group made a couple of jokes about it but never discussed it in detail.Many religious traditions teach that extraterrestrial life is possible, said David Weintraub, professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University and author of the book \u201cReligions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?\u201d However, more conservative Americans, including evangelicals, are far less likely to believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.Just 40 percent of White evangelicals say intelligent life probably exists on other planets compared with White nonevangelical Protestants (65 percent), Catholics (67 percent) and Black Protestants (55 percent). Due to sample-size limitations, Pew did not include some smaller religious groups, including Jewish and Muslim Americans, in its analysis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe idea of intelligent life could be threatening to some conservative Christians\u2019 interpretation of the Bible and how they teach a literal creation of the universe, Weintraub said. Highly religious Americans are also less likely to believe in evolution, according to 2019 research from Pew.\u201cIt\u2019s not about the existence of extraterrestrial life,\u201d Weintraub said. \u201cIt\u2019s about what the piece of information does to the power structure of a particular church.\u201dThe topic of aliens isn\u2019t a pressing one in most Sunday schools, but the idea would present a new philosophical and theological question for religious leaders.\u201cOur knowledge about the likelihood of this [topic] is going to explode,\u201d Weintraub said of scientific research about life in the universe. \u201cIf we suddenly have that information, if that\u2019s a threat theologically, then maybe now is the right time to be talking about it so you\u2019re ready for the answer.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavid Wilkinson, an astrophysicist turned theologian who teaches at Durham University in the United Kingdom, cited many reasons some Christians would find extraterrestrial life threatening or confusing. Many people believe in a literal six-day creation as described in the Bible, where aliens are not mentioned. Some people are worried that if there are other beings, God would not have a special relationship with human beings.It raises theological questions for people, including whether redemption through Jesus\u2019 death and resurrection can be extended to other life-forms. And if there are little green people, would God have appeared in their likeness, just as he came in the flesh as a human being?\u201cIt would be easier for us to say we\u2019re alone in the universe,\u201d Wilkinson said. \u201cGod\u2019s an exciting extravagant God who could create such things.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter all, he said, theologians in the early centuries were open to speculation about other worlds, and authors such as C.S. Lewis used science fiction to explore theology.The U.S. military\u2019s report from June found no evidence of alien beings, but it also wasn\u2019t able to definitively identify all of the flying objects it documented.The vast majority of atheists (85 percent) believe intelligent life exists on other planets, but far fewer (31 percent) say that UFOs reported by the military are likely evidence of that life. Atheists are about as skeptical as White evangelicals (35 percent), who see UFOs as evidence of extraterrestrial life.Donald Barnes, a retired chemist who worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for two decades, said he remembers once walking around his Akron, Ohio, neighborhood when he was doing an elementary school science project and asking people\u2019s opinions about UFOs. Some people, he said, thought they were Russians and some thought it was silly. At 82 years old, he doesn\u2019t think the question will be resolved in his lifetime.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow living in Alexandria, Va., and attending a Southern Baptist church, Barnes said he believes that some of his fellow evangelical believers look to the Bible for detailed answers. For example, the Bible doesn\u2019t say anything about vaccines or masks, so some people believe humans don\u2019t need them.\u201cThe older I get, the more comfortable I get with the ambiguity of life and the ultimate questions. I find some comfort in the lack of precision and leaving it in God\u2019s hands,\u201d he said. \u201cSome astound me in how committed they are to their view. In some sense, it\u2019s admirable. They may be wrong on some occasions, but they\u2019re never in doubt.\u201d Pope Francis has said that if an alien wanted to be baptized, he would be willing to do so. Highly religious Americans are less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets, survey says",
        "author": "Sarah Pulliam Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Highly religious Americans are less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets, survey says (WP: Religion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8638",
        "date": "2021-08-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/08/19/religious-americans-intelligent-life-ufos/",
        "text": "Religious traditions have long taught that humans share the universe with angels and demons and other intelligent beings, but a recent survey from the Pew Research Center suggests American adults who are more religious are much more skeptical about the possibility of extraterrestrial life than those who are less religious. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA survey gauging attitudes about the possibility of extraterrestrial life was conducted in June, just before the Defense Department released an official report on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).Americans who attend religious services at least weekly are less likely than those who seldom or never attend services to say that intelligent life exists elsewhere (44 percent vs. 75 percent). And adults who pray daily (54 percent) are also less likely than those who seldom or never pray (80 percent) to say intelligent life exists on other planets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScientists who also study theology say the idea of intelligent life in the universe has been a topic among astronomers for years because it raises all kinds of questions for Christian theologians. Did Jesus die for aliens, too? Do aliens have their own special relationship with God? Would aliens be capable of sinning?Duilia de Mello, an astronomer and physics professor at Catholic University, said she has several seminarians in her classes who often bring up theoretical questions about intelligent life in the universe and debate what it would mean for the Catholic Church. Pope Francis, after all, has said that if an alien wanted to be baptized, he would be willing to do so.\u201cIf we are the products of creation, why couldn\u2019t we have life evolving in other planets as well? There\u2019s nothing that says otherwise,\u201d de Mello said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDuring the past year, Gil Barndollar, a member of the Church of the Advent in Washington, led a group of about a dozen people who discussed Christian science fiction works, in which they read books like C.S. Lewis\u2019s Space Trilogy and Mary Doria Russell\u2019s \u201cThe Sparrow,\u201d about intelligent life in the universe.Barndollar said he believes some biblical fundamentalists or literalists could feel threatened by the idea that there might be something out in the universe that\u2019s not spelled out in the Bible.\u201cOn the face of it, you would think religion would make you more likely to believe in something that could be scoffed at,\u201d Barndollar said. \u201cFor some people, those may be competitive beliefs.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBarndollar said he personally doesn\u2019t know whether he thinks intelligent life could be out there.\u201cI\u2019m pleasantly agnostic about it,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m pretty comfortable with ambiguity and with mystery. I don\u2019t necessarily need a comprehensive rational explanation for everything.\u201dAdvertisementHe said that when the military released its report in June, his group made a couple of jokes about it but never discussed it in detail.Many religious traditions teach that extraterrestrial life is possible, said David Weintraub, professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University and author of the book \u201cReligions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?\u201d However, more conservative Americans, including evangelicals, are far less likely to believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.Just 40 percent of White evangelicals say intelligent life probably exists on other planets compared with White nonevangelical Protestants (65 percent), Catholics (67 percent) and Black Protestants (55 percent). Due to sample-size limitations, Pew did not include some smaller religious groups, including Jewish and Muslim Americans, in its analysis.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe idea of intelligent life could be threatening to some conservative Christians\u2019 interpretation of the Bible and how they teach a literal creation of the universe, Weintraub said. Highly religious Americans are also less likely to believe in evolution, according to 2019 research from Pew.\u201cIt\u2019s not about the existence of extraterrestrial life,\u201d Weintraub said. \u201cIt\u2019s about what the piece of information does to the power structure of a particular church.\u201dThe topic of aliens isn\u2019t a pressing one in most Sunday schools, but the idea would present a new philosophical and theological question for religious leaders.\u201cOur knowledge about the likelihood of this [topic] is going to explode,\u201d Weintraub said of scientific research about life in the universe. \u201cIf we suddenly have that information, if that\u2019s a threat theologically, then maybe now is the right time to be talking about it so you\u2019re ready for the answer.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementDavid Wilkinson, an astrophysicist turned theologian who teaches at Durham University in the United Kingdom, cited many reasons some Christians would find extraterrestrial life threatening or confusing. Many people believe in a literal six-day creation as described in the Bible, where aliens are not mentioned. Some people are worried that if there are other beings, God would not have a special relationship with human beings.It raises theological questions for people, including whether redemption through Jesus\u2019 death and resurrection can be extended to other life-forms. And if there are little green people, would God have appeared in their likeness, just as he came in the flesh as a human being?\u201cIt would be easier for us to say we\u2019re alone in the universe,\u201d Wilkinson said. \u201cGod\u2019s an exciting extravagant God who could create such things.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAfter all, he said, theologians in the early centuries were open to speculation about other worlds, and authors such as C.S. Lewis used science fiction to explore theology.The U.S. military\u2019s report from June found no evidence of alien beings, but it also wasn\u2019t able to definitively identify all of the flying objects it documented.The vast majority of atheists (85 percent) believe intelligent life exists on other planets, but far fewer (31 percent) say that UFOs reported by the military are likely evidence of that life. Atheists are about as skeptical as White evangelicals (35 percent), who see UFOs as evidence of extraterrestrial life.Donald Barnes, a retired chemist who worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for two decades, said he remembers once walking around his Akron, Ohio, neighborhood when he was doing an elementary school science project and asking people\u2019s opinions about UFOs. Some people, he said, thought they were Russians and some thought it was silly. At 82 years old, he doesn\u2019t think the question will be resolved in his lifetime.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNow living in Alexandria, Va., and attending a Southern Baptist church, Barnes said he believes that some of his fellow evangelical believers look to the Bible for detailed answers. For example, the Bible doesn\u2019t say anything about vaccines or masks, so some people believe humans don\u2019t need them.\u201cThe older I get, the more comfortable I get with the ambiguity of life and the ultimate questions. I find some comfort in the lack of precision and leaving it in God\u2019s hands,\u201d he said. \u201cSome astound me in how committed they are to their view. In some sense, it\u2019s admirable. They may be wrong on some occasions, but they\u2019re never in doubt.\u201d Pope Francis has said that if an alien wanted to be baptized, he would be willing to do so. Highly religious Americans are less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets, survey says",
        "author": "Sarah Pulliam Bailey"
    },
    {
        "title": "I Quit New York (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8639",
        "date": "2020-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/style/quit-new-york.html",
        "text": "Cameron Carling, 38, left to pursue a dream life in Costa Rica. Then he quit that, too. Cameron Carling, 38, left to pursue a dream life in Costa Rica. Then he quit that, too. I moved to New York in 2007 from Los Angeles, where I had been living after college at U.C.L.A. You show up in New York for a week in September, and you\u2019re like, This is the most magical goddamned place on the planet. This is where all of the things are happening in the world.",
        "author": "By Alex Williams"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Time Do Jupiter and Saturn Align? (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8640",
        "date": "2020-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/style/self-care/jupiter-and-saturn-conjunction-christmas-star.html",
        "text": "A celestial meet-cute will unfold before our eyes today. Here\u2019s why you should be excited about that. A celestial meet-cute will unfold before our eyes today. Here\u2019s why you should be excited about that. The last time Saturn and Jupiter, the largest planets in our solar system, orbited as closely as they will on Dec. 21 and were visible in the sky, the year was 1226.",
        "author": "By Sandra E. Garcia"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker\u2019 Review: An Unwieldy Ride (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8641",
        "date": "2020-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/theater/the-transfiguration-of-benjamin-banneker-review.html",
        "text": "A tale about the 18th-century African-American mathematician includes actors, a vibrant marching band and wackadoo puppetry. A tale about the 18th-century African-American mathematician includes actors, a vibrant marching band and wackadoo puppetry. Planets hang from the ceiling. Actors in oversize bobbleheads dance a quadrille. Puppets come in varying shapes and sizes. Then there are projections, a percolating marching band, a pulsing electronic beat: \u201cThe Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker\u201d is pretty trippy.",
        "author": "By Elisabeth Vincentelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "36 Hours in Bangkok (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8642",
        "date": "2018-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/travel/36-hours-what-to-do-in-bangkok.html",
        "text": "From upstart creative spaces and obscure bars to neighborhoods where a surprising urban tranquillity reigns, Bangkok remains ripe for discovery. From upstart creative spaces and obscure bars to neighborhoods where a surprising urban tranquillity reigns, Bangkok remains ripe for discovery. One of the first Thai words that foreigners learn in Bangkok is farang, or foreigner. And no wonder. More than 20 million farang descend on the temples and temptations of Thailand\u2019s capital every year, making it one of the planet\u2019s most visited cities. You run into each other in hotels and restaurants, in the air-conditioned mega-malls of Siam Square, at the teeming Chatuchak outdoor market and the Buddhist sites of Wat Pho and Wat Arun. Together, you jostle through the crowds along the buzzing Sukhumvit strip and the backpacker haven of Khao San Road. And there you are again, venturing into the famous go-go bars of Patpong and Soi Cowboy. Fortunately, Bangkok is vast and fast-evolving, with many remote corners and newly minted hangouts. From upstart creative spaces and restaurants to obscure back street bars to the under-visited Thonburi district, Bangkok remains ripe for discovery.  ",
        "author": "By Seth Sherwood"
    },
    {
        "title": "In Search of Zambia\u2019s Stunning Wildlife: A Virtual Safari (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8643",
        "date": "2020-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/travel/zambia-safari.html",
        "text": "Join us on a virtual safari in Zambia, which\u00a0boasts some of Africa\u2019s best national parks, mainly those along the hippo-infested Luangwa River. Join us on a virtual safari in Zambia, which\u00a0boasts some of Africa\u2019s best national parks, mainly those along the hippo-infested Luangwa River. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. We\u2019re calling this new series \u201cThe World Through a Lens.\u201d This week, the photographer Marcus Westberg shares a collection of wildlife photographs from Zambia, which he\u2019s visited six times in the last decade.",
        "author": "By Marcus Westberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Visual Trek Through the Sweltering Jungle: In Search of Colombia\u2019s \u2018Lost City\u2019 (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8644",
        "date": "2020-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/travel/colombia-lost-city-ciudad-perdida.html",
        "text": "Ciudad Perdida, an ancient city that predates Machu Picchu by several hundred years, has become one of South America\u2019s most rewarding adventure destinations. Ciudad Perdida, an ancient city that predates Machu Picchu by several hundred years, has become one of South America\u2019s most rewarding adventure destinations. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. We\u2019re calling this new series \u201cThe World Through a Lens.\u201d This week, Stephen Hiltner, an editor on the Travel desk, invites you to join him on an arduous multiday hike to an archaeological site in Colombia.",
        "author": "By Stephen Hiltner"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Visual Trek Through the Sweltering Jungle: In Search of Colombia\u2019s \u2018Lost City\u2019 (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8645",
        "date": "2020-04-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/travel/colombia-lost-city-ciudad-perdida.html",
        "text": "Ciudad Perdida, an ancient city that predates Machu Picchu by several hundred years, has become one of South America\u2019s most rewarding adventure destinations. Ciudad Perdida, an ancient city that predates Machu Picchu by several hundred years, has become one of South America\u2019s most rewarding adventure destinations. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. We\u2019re calling this new series \u201cThe World Through a Lens.\u201d This week, Stephen Hiltner, an editor on the Travel desk, invites you to join him on an arduous multiday hike to an archaeological site in Colombia.",
        "author": "By Stephen Hiltner"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Planet Earth, No Tourism Is a Curse and a Blessing (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8646",
        "date": "2021-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/travel/covid-pandemic-environmental-impact.html",
        "text": "From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? For the planet, the year without tourists was a curse and a blessing.",
        "author": "By Lisa W. Foderaro"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Planet Earth, No Tourism Is a Curse and a Blessing (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8647",
        "date": "2021-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/travel/covid-pandemic-environmental-impact.html",
        "text": "From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? For the planet, the year without tourists was a curse and a blessing.",
        "author": "By Lisa W. Foderaro"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Planet Earth, No Tourism Is a Curse and a Blessing (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8648",
        "date": "2021-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/travel/covid-pandemic-environmental-impact.html",
        "text": "From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? For the planet, the year without tourists was a curse and a blessing.",
        "author": "By Lisa W. Foderaro"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Planet Earth, No Tourism Is a Curse and a Blessing (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8649",
        "date": "2021-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/travel/covid-pandemic-environmental-impact.html",
        "text": "From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel\u2019s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish? For the planet, the year without tourists was a curse and a blessing.",
        "author": "By Lisa W. Foderaro"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Visual Dispatch From One of the World\u2019s Most Remote Islands (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8650",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/travel/tristan-da-cunha.html",
        "text": "The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019ve launched a new series, The World Through a Lens, in which photojournalists help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, Andy Isaacson shares a collection of photographs from the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.",
        "author": "By Andy Isaacson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Visual Dispatch From One of the World\u2019s Most Remote Islands (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8651",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/travel/tristan-da-cunha.html",
        "text": "The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019ve launched a new series, The World Through a Lens, in which photojournalists help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, Andy Isaacson shares a collection of photographs from the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.",
        "author": "By Andy Isaacson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Visual Dispatch From One of the World\u2019s Most Remote Islands (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8652",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/travel/tristan-da-cunha.html",
        "text": "The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019ve launched a new series, The World Through a Lens, in which photojournalists help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, Andy Isaacson shares a collection of photographs from the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.",
        "author": "By Andy Isaacson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Visual Dispatch From One of the World\u2019s Most Remote Islands (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8653",
        "date": "2020-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/travel/tristan-da-cunha.html",
        "text": "The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha, which sits in the remote waters of the South Atlantic, are insulated from the coronavirus by an immense moat. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019ve launched a new series, The World Through a Lens, in which photojournalists help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, Andy Isaacson shares a collection of photographs from the remote island of Tristan da Cunha.",
        "author": "By Andy Isaacson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Welcome to Galaxy\u2019s Edge (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8654",
        "date": "2019-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/travel/star-wars-disneyland-galaxys-edge.html",
        "text": "Disneyland\u2019s \u201cStar Wars\u201d expansion is the biggest in the park\u2019s history, and a bet that Wookiees and Stormtroopers will draw visitors as well as princesses. Disneyland\u2019s \u201cStar Wars\u201d expansion is the biggest in the park\u2019s history, and a bet that Wookiees and Stormtroopers will draw visitors as well as princesses. In the summer of 2015, when the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans to build monumental \u201cStar Wars\u201d lands at its California and Florida theme parks, a wave of euphoria washed over the planet. Bob Iger, Disney\u2019s chief executive, made the announcement at a fan convention, revealing that one ride would allow people to pilot the Millennium Falcon. Two men sitting near me started to weep with joy.",
        "author": "By Brooks Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Welcome to Galaxy\u2019s Edge (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8655",
        "date": "2019-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/travel/star-wars-disneyland-galaxys-edge.html",
        "text": "Disneyland\u2019s \u201cStar Wars\u201d expansion is the biggest in the park\u2019s history, and a bet that Wookiees and Stormtroopers will draw visitors as well as princesses. Disneyland\u2019s \u201cStar Wars\u201d expansion is the biggest in the park\u2019s history, and a bet that Wookiees and Stormtroopers will draw visitors as well as princesses. In the summer of 2015, when the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans to build monumental \u201cStar Wars\u201d lands at its California and Florida theme parks, a wave of euphoria washed over the planet. Bob Iger, Disney\u2019s chief executive, made the announcement at a fan convention, revealing that one ride would allow people to pilot the Millennium Falcon. Two men sitting near me started to weep with joy.",
        "author": "By Brooks Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Welcome to Galaxy\u2019s Edge (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8656",
        "date": "2019-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/travel/star-wars-disneyland-galaxys-edge.html",
        "text": "Disneyland\u2019s \u201cStar Wars\u201d expansion is the biggest in the park\u2019s history, and a bet that Wookiees and Stormtroopers will draw visitors as well as princesses. Disneyland\u2019s \u201cStar Wars\u201d expansion is the biggest in the park\u2019s history, and a bet that Wookiees and Stormtroopers will draw visitors as well as princesses. In the summer of 2015, when the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans to build monumental \u201cStar Wars\u201d lands at its California and Florida theme parks, a wave of euphoria washed over the planet. Bob Iger, Disney\u2019s chief executive, made the announcement at a fan convention, revealing that one ride would allow people to pilot the Millennium Falcon. Two men sitting near me started to weep with joy.",
        "author": "By Brooks Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Portrait of a Market in India Run Solely by Women (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8657",
        "date": "2020-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/travel/india-womens-market-imphal.html",
        "text": "Nupi Keithel, or Women\u2019s Market, a 16th-century bazaar in which all of the vendors are women, is a fountainhead of social and political activism in the Indian state of Manipur. Nupi Keithel, or Women\u2019s Market, a 16th-century bazaar in which all of the vendors are women, is a fountainhead of social and political activism in the Indian state of Manipur. At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, with travel restrictions in place worldwide, we launched a new series \u2014 The World Through a Lens \u2014 in which photojournalists help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, Trishna Mohanty shares a collection of images from Imphal, the capital city of Manipur.",
        "author": "By Trishna Mohanty"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Haunting Beauty of a Hut-to-Hut Hike in the Dolomites (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8658",
        "date": "2020-06-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/travel/dolomites-italy-hut-hiking.html",
        "text": "With their colossal limestone walls and gloriously green valleys, Italy\u2019s Dolomites are home to some of the world\u2019s most majestic scenery \u2014 and mountain huts called rifugios make it all the more accessible. With their colossal limestone walls and gloriously green valleys, Italy\u2019s Dolomites are home to some of the world\u2019s most majestic scenery \u2014 and mountain huts called rifugios make it all the more accessible. With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we\u2019ve launched a new series, The World Through a Lens, in which photojournalists help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet\u2019s most beautiful and intriguing places. This week, M\u00f3nica R. Goya shares a series of photographs taken on an extended hike through the Dolomites.",
        "author": "By M\u00f3nica R. Goya"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Is TV getting us emotionally prepared to leave the planet? \u2018Away\u2019 and \u2018Raised by Wolves\u2019 sure make it seem so. (WP: TV) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8659",
        "date": "2020-09-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/away-raised-by-wolves-reviews/2020/09/01/0af6dc3a-eaf2-11ea-ab4e-581edb849379_story.html",
        "text": "Raise your hand if you used to be one of those people who were not at all interested in going to Mars. (Boring, costly and creepy \u2014 right? To say nothing of unviable.)But lately? After those endless refrains of \u201cTomorrow Belongs to Me\u201d during the Republican National Convention? And now armed teenagers going militia on us? And with hurricanes arriving in pairs? Getting off this forsaken planet is looking better all the time. \u201cLove it or leave it\u201d might as well be the new \u201cSmoking or nonsmoking?\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNetflix\u2019s intriguing but overwrought new astronaut drama, \u201cAway,\u201d is a couple of steps ahead of you on this. It\u2019s another melancholy and occasionally triumphant take on the brave souls who will someday set foot on our neighboring Red Planet \u2014 a journey that \u201cAway\u2019s\u201d creator, Andrew Hinderaker, showrunner Jessica Goldberg (\u201cThe Path\u201d), and some big-name collaborators (including \u201cFriday Night Lights\u201d producer Jason Katims and \u201cMy So-Called Life\u2019s\u201d Ed Zwick) present as both a fait accompli and a deadly risk.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEchoing the optimistic rhetoric in political stump speeches, the question is not if we\u2019re ever going, it\u2019s how soon. To emphasize that, \u201cAway\u201d (streaming Friday) is set more or less in the current day, as an international space cooperative prepares to launch a five-person crew on a three-year trip to Mars and back.Somewhat like Sean Penn before her (in Hulu\u2019s deeply doleful 2018 mission-to-Mars series \u201cThe First\u201d), Oscar winner Hilary Swank stars as former Navy pilot Emma Green, the commander-designate of the Atlas I mission. She\u2019s fulfilling a dream that dates back to her Montana girlhood, yet it\u2019s tearing her apart. She\u2019s a wife and mom, you see, and \u201cAway\u201d seems to be counting on her tears (and yours, if you\u2019re an easy mark) as a sustainable form of water supply.\u201cAway\u201d regards the angst of leaving Earth as a more important obsession than the destination; the whole series is built around the pain Emma feels by leaving her husband, Matt Logan (Josh Charles), a mission-control expert and former astronaut who is permanently grounded by a genetic medical condition, and their daughter, Alexis (Talitha Bateman), a high school freshman who deals with her mom\u2019s absence by falling for a cute boy (Adam Irigoyen) who introduces her to the forbidden world of dirt bikes.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s easy to be drawn to \u201cAway\u2019s\u201d determination to dredge through emotions more than the science (too bad, space nerds), because what could be more profound, more unsettling, than to leave one\u2019s planet, knowing that the only way back depends on flawless machinery and math?It\u2019s too bad the series lays everything on so thick, resulting in a work of television that feels far too routine. Ever wondered what it would truly feel like to be on the first trip to Mars? Turns out, it feels a little like a zero-gravity season of \u201cE.R.,\u201d or some other passably decent network drama in which an ensemble of highly trained experts must overcome their personal issues and simmering conflicts to get through another day of urgent crises, of which \u201cAway\u201d offers plenty, from faulty machinery to physical and mental deterioration.While fueling up at NASA\u2019s nifty lunar base, the Atlas craft barely dodges a deadly mishap that has Chinese astronaut Lu Wang (Vivian Wu) and Russian cosmonaut Misha Popov (Mark Ivanir) doubting Emma\u2019s leadership capability \u2014 and filing complaints against her with their superiors back home.Both of these antagonists are clumsily sketched at first, leaning hard toward old stereotypes (the Chinese woman, who also happens to be a wife and mother, suffers from self-imposed rigidity and repression; the Russian man, a grizzled veteran of Soviet-style compliance, is a tightly wound vodka shot of resentment) before the writers begin to grant them more suitably complex backstories.Two other characters on the crew \u2014 Ram Arya (Ray Panthaki), a hotshot Indian fighter pilot, and Kwesi Weisberg-Abban (Ato Essandoh), a Ghanian-born British botanist \u2014 exist mainly to provide trite flashback material, as \u201cAway\u201d methodically and often tediously fills us in on what makes each of these pioneers into the people they are. Many of \u201cAway\u2019s\u201d plot twists and insights can be detected from great distances without the aid of a telescope.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAway\u201d is also earthbound at least as much as it\u2019s in space. While Emma endures the months-long trip to Mars, her husband and daughter experience setbacks (major and minor) that keep her in a suspended state of work/life agony, especially as the Atlas leaves the reach of iPhones and the emails begin to take a half-hour to send and receive. Frankly, that moment can\u2019t come soon enough; the Atlas crew sets off with so much connectivity to home that the series at first resembles an extra-long T-Mobile ad.Rather than lend shape and context to the character, Emma\u2019s constant need to check in with Matt and Alexis \u2014 freaking out when a text goes unanswered for a day \u2014 begins to feel like a sexist form of penance for her \u201cchoice\u201d to leave them. Can we not simply revel in the fact that a woman is leading a mission to Mars and let her daughter fail calculus if need be? Can we not let this crew slip some surly bonds without the guilt? While watching Swank strain to give a meaningful performance, it seems a shame that so much of \u201cAway\u2019s\u201d time dwells on keeping Emma at this needlessly fragile brink.And yet, it is this fraught combination of personality, psychology and physicality that remains \u201cAway\u2019s\u201d strongest thematic anchor, echoing the 2014 Esquire article that inspired the series. Who do we become in space?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWe cannot really know what it will be like to make this trip until someone actually does it. No offense to SpaceX\u2019s summer astro-bros, Bob and Doug (and with the possible exception of that Canadian guy who sang David Bowie songs in orbit), but today\u2019s astronauts tend toward the dutifully bland when describing their experiences, a reminder of Jodie Foster\u2019s best line from the 1997 interstellar encounter movie \u201cContact\u201d: \u201cThey should have sent a poet.\u201d\u201cAway\u201d may not quite catch the poetry it grasps for, but it gives a viewer the feeling that we\u2019re closer to Mars, emotionally, than we\u2019ve ever been.Pushing far forward, from space drama to a welcome dose of high-quality science fiction, a viewer might be more tantalized and even disturbed by the initial episodes of HBO Max's \"Raised by Wolves,\" creator Aaron Guzikowski and executive producer Ridley Scott's baffling story of two 22nd-century androids (Amanda Collin and Abubakar Salim as \"Mother\" and \"Father\") who flee a war-torn Earth for a distant but inhabitable rocky planet called Kepler-22B.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOnce there, Mother and Father have been tasked with raising a six-pack of fetuses (it\u2019s Mother\u2019s job to wire herself up to the amniotic packaging and bring them to term), with the idea of rebooting and repopulating the human race.Programmed to protect and educate their brood according to atheist principles, Mother and Father discover Kepler 22B isn\u2019t as nourishing an environment as their creator might have hoped. They endure the loss of several of their children in the early years, followed by the unwelcome arrival of a space Ark carrying members of a religious sect called the Mithraic.As her protective maternal instincts kick in, Mother reveals an ability to weaponize herself into a flying siren to ward off invaders (Collin gorgeously intuits her character\u2019s artificial command of logic with an Annie Lennox-esque mystique). This means war, instigated by an interloping criminal (enduring \u201cVikings\u201d oddball Travis Fimmel) who has joined the Mithraic with his ruthless companion, Sue (Niamh Algar), as a ticket to escape Earth.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHere, science fiction has every advantage over \u201cAway\u2019s\u201d schmaltzy realism. \u201cRaised by Wolves\u201d (the first three of 10 episodes premiere Thursday) is just as much concerned with the same theme \u2014 the limitations and demands of parenting. But it also gets a chance to devise an entirely new and unfamiliar code of after-Earth ethics and unpredictable responses to love, hate, faith and war. A viewer isn\u2019t sure who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. (As far back as \u201cAlien,\u201d Scott has been warning us about giving Mother our full trust.)Even when \u201cRaised by Wolves\u201d gets bogged down by its frenetic plots and a frigidly brutal vision of what lies ahead, the show seems exactly right about one thing: A whole new world should totally feel like a whole new world \u2014 from the untouched grit beneath one\u2019s boots to a complete reordering of right and wrong. That\u2019s the point of breaking free.\n\nAway (10 episodes) available Friday on Netflix.Raised by Wolves (10 episodes) begins streaming Thursday with Episodes 1-3 on HBO Max. The line starts behind Hilary Swank in Netflix\u2019s \u201cAway,\u201d followed by HBO Max\u2019s Ridley Scott project, \u201cRaised by Wolves.\u201d Is TV getting us emotionally prepared to leave the planet? \u2018Away\u2019 and \u2018Raised by Wolves\u2019 sure make it seem so.",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "Grand Canyon Hike Organizer Violated Covid-19 Restrictions, Officials Say (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8660",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/us/joseph-don-mount-grand-canyon.html",
        "text": "Prosecutors said at least 150 people showed up, astounding rangers and overwhelming visitors who struggled to steer clear of the hikers, many of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing. Prosecutors said at least 150 people showed up, astounding rangers and overwhelming visitors who struggled to steer clear of the hikers, many of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing. The organizer of a Grand Canyon adventure described it as a chance to trek along the South Rim, \u201cone of the greatest hikes in the planet.\u201d",
        "author": "By Maria Cramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Grand Canyon Hike Organizer Violated Covid-19 Restrictions, Officials Say (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8661",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/us/joseph-don-mount-grand-canyon.html",
        "text": "Prosecutors said at least 150 people showed up, astounding rangers and overwhelming visitors who struggled to steer clear of the hikers, many of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing. Prosecutors said at least 150 people showed up, astounding rangers and overwhelming visitors who struggled to steer clear of the hikers, many of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing. The organizer of a Grand Canyon adventure described it as a chance to trek along the South Rim, \u201cone of the greatest hikes in the planet.\u201d",
        "author": "By Maria Cramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Grand Canyon Hike Organizer Violated Covid-19 Restrictions, Officials Say (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8662",
        "date": "2021-05-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/us/joseph-don-mount-grand-canyon.html",
        "text": "Prosecutors said at least 150 people showed up, astounding rangers and overwhelming visitors who struggled to steer clear of the hikers, many of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing. Prosecutors said at least 150 people showed up, astounding rangers and overwhelming visitors who struggled to steer clear of the hikers, many of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing. The organizer of a Grand Canyon adventure described it as a chance to trek along the South Rim, \u201cone of the greatest hikes in the planet.\u201d",
        "author": "By Maria Cramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Protecting Our Planet: Powering Change with Jerome Foster II, Michael S. Regan & Leah Thomas  (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8663",
        "date": "2021-10-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/28/protecting-our-planet-powering-change-with-jerome-foster-ii-michael-s-regan-leah-thomas/",
        "text": "A recent Environmental Protection Agency study warned that people of color are more likely to live in areas hit by flooding, extreme heat and the greatest impacts from climate change. Communities of color and working-class Americans who live in areas with fossil fuel plants also disproportionately suffer from the resultant air and water pollution. Administrator Michael S. Regan joins Washington Post Live to discuss the path forward to transitioning to clean energy and how inequality is contributing to a public health crisis, and young climate activists join to talk about the intersectional environmental movement. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightClick here for transcriptHighlights\u201cThe President is sending the same signal he\u2019s sent since day one which is \u2018Climate Change is a threat\u2026 not just to the United States but to the world\u2026 All of our agencies are there to demonstrate how America will and can lead.\u201d \u2013 Michael Regan (Washington Post Live)\u201cClimate change is indiscriminate, and we know all across the globe that the most vulnerable populations stand to bear the brunt of climate change impacts\u2026 E.J. [environmental justice] is part of the DNA of EPA. And we\u2019re really serious about that.\u201d \u2013 Michael Regan (Washington Post Live)\u201cThere are so many Black and Brown communities that are just living in increased air pollution\u2026 There needs to be bold action at the federal level because again these studies have been there for so long, and there also needs to be increased communication to let people know in these neighborhoods that this is happening and this is something that can change with proper policy protocols.\u201d \u2013 Leah Thomas (Washington Post Live)\u201cReally what needs to happen is for them to say, \u2018Hey, we have a timeline. Before the next midterms, we don\u2019t know if we\u2019ll still have a progressive majority. We need to use this power that we\u2019ve organized\u2026 and really put that petal to the metal.\u2019\u201d \u2013 Jerome Foster II (Washington Post Live)\u201cI want to lead with a little bit of compassion here because I know that there are a lot of people that are making a living in the oil industry. But I think to transition away from oil, there needs to be significant policy that\u2019s bringing renewable energy and also bringing job creation especially to the people that will be losing their jobs as we transition away from oil and gas.\u201d \u2013 Leah Thomas (Washington Post Live)Jerome Foster IIJerome Foster II is an environmental activist and voting rights advocate. He is the youngest White House Advisor in United States history, serving on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Based in New York City but raised in Washington DC, he served as an intern for the late Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis and served as Board Member for the Washington DC State Board of Education throughout his high school years. He is the Executive Director of OneMillionOfUs, an organization working to educate and mobilize young people to become civically active and vote.Michael S. ReganProvided by the U.S. EPA.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMichael S. Regan was sworn in as the 16th Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency on March 11, 2021, becoming the first Black man and second person of color to lead the U.S. EPA.Administrator Regan is a native of Goldsboro, North Carolina, where he developed a passion for the environment while hunting and fishing with his father and grandfather, and exploring the vast lands, waters, and inner Coastal Plain of North Carolina.As the son of two public servants - his mother, a nurse for nearly 30 years, and his father, a retired Colonel with the North Carolina National Guard, Vietnam veteran, and former agricultural extension agent - Michael Regan went on to follow in his parents' footsteps and pursue a life of public service.Story continues below advertisementPrior to his nomination as EPA Administrator, Michael Regan served as the Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).AdvertisementAs Secretary, he spearheaded the development and implementation of North Carolina's seminal plan to address climate change and transition the state to a clean energy economy. Under his leadership, he secured the largest coal ash clean-up in United States history. He led complex negotiations regarding the clean-up of the Cape Fear River, which had been contaminated for years by the toxic chemicals per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS). In addition, he established North Carolina's first-of-its-kind Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory board to better align social inequities, environmental protection, and community empowerment.Previously, Administrator Regan served as Associate Vice President of U.S. Climate and Energy, and as Southeast Regional Director of the Environmental Defense Fund where he convened energy companies, business leaders, environmental and industry groups, and elected officials across the country to achieve pragmatic solutions to the climate crisis.Story continues below advertisementHe began his career with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, eventually becoming a national program manager responsible for designing strategic solutions with industry and corporate stakeholders to reduce air pollution, improve energy efficiency and address climate change.AdvertisementThroughout his career, he has been guided by a belief in forming consensus, fostering an open dialogue rooted in respect for science and the law, and an understanding that environmental protection and economic prosperity go hand in hand.Administrator Regan is a graduate of the North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, making him the first EPA Administrator to have graduated from a Historically Black College and University. He earned a master's degree in Public Administration from The George Washington University.Story continues below advertisementHe and his wife Melvina are proud parents to their son, Matthew.Leah ThomasLeah Thomas is a celebrated environmentalist based in Santa Barbara, CA. Coining the term \u2018eco-communicator\u2019 to describe her style of environmental activism, Leah uses her passion for writing and creativity to explore and advocate for the critical yet often overlooked relationship between social justice and environmentalism. With this intersection in mind, Leah founded and launched Intersectional Environmentalist in 2020, a resource hub and platform that aims to advocate for environmental justice, provide educational resources surrounding intersectional environmentalism, and promote inclusivity and accessibility within environmental education and movements.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementLeah, who is also the founder of eco-lifestyle blog @greengirlleah, uses her multiple years of eco-focused educational and work experience to inform her ever-expanding list of projects, as well as her audience of more than 350k followers. A graduate of Chapman University with a B.S. in Environmental Science & Policy and a cluster in Comparative World Religions, Leah has interned twice with the National Park Service and has worked at leading green companies, including eco-friendly soap company Ecos and most recently, Patagonia. A fundamental optimist and opportunity-maker, Leah used her time after being furloughed during the pandemic to create Intersectional Environmentalist.Leah\u2019s writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and Highsnobiety, and she has been featured in Harper\u2019s Bazaar, W Magazine, Domino, GOOP, and numerous podcasts.Content from EarthjusticeThe following content is produced and paid for by a Washington Post Live event sponsor. The Washington Post newsroom is not involved in the production of this content. (Washington Post Live)Abigail DillenAbigail Dillen is the president of Earthjustice, a national legal nonprofit which represents more than six hundred clients free of charge, harnessing the power of law to force climate solutions while protecting healthy communities and ecosystems.Moderated by Jeanne MeserveJeanne Meserve is a homeland security expert and analyst, moderator, and award-winning journalist. She is currently a Security Expert for Canada\u2019s CTV News and co-host of the SpyTalk podcast. While a correspondent and anchor at CNN and ABC Jeanne earned her profession\u2019s highest honors, including two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. She also contributed to two CNN Peabody Awards.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJeanne is a member of the Homeland Security Experts Group and the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, and serves on the board of the non-profit Space Foundation.She moderates discussions on topics ranging from technology and security, to medicine and the environment. Her clients include AtlanticLIVE, Washington Post Live, the Munich Security Conference, the Halifax International Security Forum, and the global conferences of the International Women\u2019s Forum.At CNN Meserve created the homeland security beat, covering intelligence, law enforcement, cyber, aviation, border and port security. She anchored worldwide coverage of the Yitzhak Rabin assassination and the death of Princess Diana, and was the first to report on the devastating flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She was a key member of the CNN political team during the 1996 and 2000 elections. While at ABC News she covered the State Department and reported from the Middle East, Asia and Europe. A recent Environmental Protection Agency study warned that people of color are more likely to live in areas hit by flooding, extreme heat and the greatest impacts from climate change. Communities of color and working-class Americans who live in areas with fossil fuel plants also disproportionately suffer from the resultant air and water pollution. On Thursday, Oct. 28 at 11:30 a.m. ET, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan joins Washington Post Live to discuss the path forward to transitioning to clean energy and how inequality is contributing to a public health crisis, and young climate activists join to talk about the intersectional environmental movement Protecting Our Planet: Powering Change with Jerome Foster II, Michael S. Regan & Leah Thomas ",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Protecting Our Planet: Role of Business & Investing with Mark Carney & Anne Simpson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8664",
        "date": "2021-10-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/12/protecting-our-planet-role-business-investing-with-mark-carney-anne-simpson/",
        "text": "Corporations across the world have made bold commitments around sustainable investing and business. Mark Carney, U.N. special envoy on climate action and finance, joins Washington Post Live to discuss how companies can meet their goals, the role of private-public cooperation and the stakes at the COP26 talks this November. Anne Simpson, managing investment director of CalPERS, will follow to discuss the growing investment methodology known as the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement, and how one of the world\u2019s largest public funds is using its clout as an investor to push companies to do more to tackle the climate crisis. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightClick here for transcriptHighlights\u201cBasically, the plumbing of the financial system has to be put in place so that financial institutions\u2013whether they\u2019re banks or pension funds or insurers or asset managers\u2013have the information, the tools and the market to take climate change into account. So, in other words it\u2019s a fundamental driver of every investment decision or lending decision.\u201d (Washington Post Live)\u201cThink about: you go shopping to buy a can of beans, you expect to be able to see what\u2019s in the tin. That\u2019s the purpose of the label. When we\u2019re buying investments, we simply don\u2019t have that kind of information that\u2019s going to help us understand risks that are ahead of us.\u201d (Washington Post Live)\u201cWe have a series of supply chain problems with the restart of the global economy\u2026 It underscores the need for an integrated energy transition strategy. And so part of that integrated strategy is a transition which has lower and lower carbon, fossil fuels at their heart, but still some fossil fuels\u2026 It is a reality of where we\u2019re starting from and where we need to get to. So it does need to be integrated.\" (Washington Post Live)\u201cWhen I think about doing investment like a firefighter, the first advice you get from the fire service is protection. You need readiness, you need protection, you need to put resilience in place. And if you think about that\u2026 from an investment point of view, it means you look at the risks your investments are exposed to and think about how can you either mitigate and manage those risks and make sure that you\u2019re being rewarded for taking them\u2026 If we\u2019re running risks that aren\u2019t being recognized, measured, understood and then mitigated, we\u2019re in serious trouble with our fiduciary duty. We have to be able to sustainably pay pensions for two million people over the very long term and generate cash in the short-term.\u201d (Washington Post Live)Mark CarneyProvided by representatives with Mark Carney.Story continues below advertisementMark Carney is currently the U.N. Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and Prime Minister Johnson\u2019s Finance Adviser for COP26. Mark is a member of the Arnhold Distinguished Fellowship Program Board within Conservation International. He is also an external member of Stripe\u2019s Board, a global technology company building economic infrastructure for the internet.AdvertisementMark was previously Governor of the Bank of England (from 2013 to 2020), and Governor of the Bank of Canada (from 2008 to 2013).Internationally, Mark was Chair of the Financial Stability Board (from 2011 to 2018), He chaired the Global Economy Meeting and Economic Consultative Committee of the Bank for International Settlements (from 2018-2020) and was First Vice-Chair of the European Systemic Risk Board (from 2013-2020). He is Vice Chair of Brookfield Asset Management and a member of the Global Advisory Board of PIMCO, the Group of Thirty, the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, as well as the boards of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Hoffman Institute for Global Business and Society at INSEAD.Story continues below advertisementMark was born in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, Canada in 1965. After growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, he obtained a bachelor degree in Economics from Harvard and masters and doctorate degrees in Economics from Oxford.AdvertisementAfter a thirteen-year career with Goldman Sachs, Mark was appointed Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada in 2003. In 2004, he became Senior Associate Deputy Minister of Finance. He held this position until his appointment as Governor of the Bank of Canada in February 2008.Anne SimpsonProvided by CalPERS.Anne is CalPERS\u2019 managing investment director for board governance & sustainability, responsible for strategic initiatives across the total fund where she is a member of the Investment Management Committee and reports to the CEO. Anne leads CalPERS\u2019 Sustainable Investment Strategy, which focuses on long term value creation through the effective management of three forms of capital: financial, human, and natural.Story continues below advertisementAnne currently chairs the Steering Committee and Asia Advisory Group for Climate Action 100+, a global investor alliance of over $55 trillion which CalPERS convened and co-founded. She is a member of the California Governor's Climate Risk Disclosure Advisory Group and the Advisory Council of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF). Anne was recently appointed to the board of Ceres and is a lecturer in Sustainable and Impact Finance at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas Business School, and a visiting fellow at Oxford University, appointed by the Chancellor.AdvertisementAnne is the coauthor of \u201cThe Financial Ecosystem: The Role of Finance in Achieving Sustainability\u201d (Palgrave MacMillan 2019) with Satyajit Bose and Dong Guo; \u201cFair Shares: The Future of Shareholder Power and Responsibility\u201d with Jonathan Charkham (Oxford University Press 1999) and \u201cThe Greening of Global Investment: How the Environment, Ethics, and Politics are Reshaping Strategies\u201d (The Economist Publications 1991). She is an editorial board member of the journal Directors & Boards.She sits on the strategy group for the UN Secretary General\u2019s Global Investors for Sustainable Development, and steering committee for the UN Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance. Anne is a member of the Leadership Council at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.Story continues below advertisementAnne was recognized in 2019 by TIME Magazine as one of 15 women globally leading the fight on climate change and as one of the 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance by Barron\u2019s in 2020. She is cited by the National Association of Corporate Directors as one of the 100 most influential leaders in the boardroom.AdvertisementIn roles prior to joining CalPERS, Anne served as the first executive director of the International Corporate Governance Network, and as the head of the World Bank-OECD Global Corporate Governance Forum. Previously she was Joint Managing Director of Pensions & Investment Research Consultants Ltd. Anne was formerly senior faculty fellow and lecturer at the Yale School of Management, where she taught with Ira Millstein on \u2018The Role of the Corporation in Society\u2019.Anne read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Hilda\u2019s College, Oxford University, where she was awarded a BA and MA, plus a Slater Fellowship at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.Content from KPMGThe following content is produced and paid for by a Washington Post Live event sponsor. The Washington Post newsroom is not involved in the production of this content. (Washington Post Live)Unlocking Value Through KPMG IMPACT\u2019s Solution For A Sustainable FutureCompanies worldwide are increasingly integrating the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) imperative into their broader business strategy to create a more sustainable future for their organizations and communities. Join Paul Knopp, U.S. Chair and Chief Executive Officer of KPMG, as he shares the transformative ESG agenda and holistic solutions offered through KPMG IMPACT to help companies seize this century\u2019s opportunity to enhance stakeholder trust, mitigate risk and unlock new value.Paul Knopp, U.S. Chair and Chief Executive Officer, KPMG U.S.Paul Knopp is Chair and Chief Executive Officer at KPMG LLP \u2013 one of the world\u2019s leading professional services firms, providing innovative business solutions and audit, tax, and advisory services to many of the world\u2019s largest and most prestigious organizations. He also serves as Chair of the Americas region and is a member of both KPMG\u2019s Global Board and Executive Committee. Leading more than 33,000 partners and professionals across the United States, Paul is further strengthening KPMG\u2019s inclusive and values-driven culture. He has extensive experience serving large, multinational clients in a wide variety of complex industries and is recognized for his commitment to excellence and quality and for leading KPMG teams with ethics and integrity. Prior to becoming Chair and CEO, Paul\u2019s career as an audit partner focused on serving leading global companies in the manufacturing, life sciences, transportation, professional services, and technology industries. Additionally, he lends his time and expertise to many civic and charitable organizations. He is a governing board member of the Center for Audit Quality as well as a board member of Catalyst, Partnership for New York City, and the U.S.-India Business Council. He also is a trustee of the U.S. Council for International Business. Paul previously served as a Director and Vice Chairman for the American Cancer Society Chicago Downtown Division\u2019s Board of Directors. Paul holds B.B.A. and M.B.A degrees from the University of Texas at Austin; is a licensed CPA in New York and Texas; and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.Moderated by Jeanne MeserveJeanne Meserve is a homeland security expert and analyst, moderator, and award-winning journalist. She is currently a Security Expert for Canada\u2019s CTV News and co-host of the SpyTalk podcast. While a correspondent and anchor at CNN and ABC Jeanne earned her profession\u2019s highest honors, including two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. She also contributed to two CNN Peabody Awards. Jeanne is a member of the Homeland Security Experts Group and the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity, and serves on the board of the non-profit Space Foundation. She moderates discussions on topics ranging from technology and security, to medicine and the environment. Her clients include AtlanticLIVE, Washington Post Live, the Munich Security Conference, the Halifax International Security Forum, and the global conferences of the International Women\u2019s Forum. At CNN Meserve created the homeland security beat, covering intelligence, law enforcement, cyber, aviation, border and port security. She anchored worldwide coverage of the Yitzhak Rabin assassination and the death of Princess Diana, and was the first to report on the devastating flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She was a key member of the CNN political team during the 1996 and 2000 elections. While at ABC News she covered the State Department and reported from the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Corporations across the world have made bold commitments around sustainable investing and business. On Tuesday, Oct. 12 at 10:00 a.m. ET, Mark Carney, U.N. special envoy on climate action and finance, joins Washington Post Live to discuss how companies can meet their goals, the role of private-public cooperation and the stakes at the COP26 talks this November. Anne Simpson, managing investment director of CalPERS, will follow to discuss the growing investment methodology known as the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement, and how one of the world\u2019s largest public funds is using its clout as an investor to push companies to do more to tackle the climate crisis. Protecting Our Planet: Role of Business & Investing with Mark Carney & Anne Simpson",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Lisa Jackson (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8665",
        "date": "2021-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/04/20/transcript-protecting-our-planet-lisa-jackson/",
        "text": "MR. CAPEHART: Good day. I\u2019m Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live in another installment in our climate series, Protecting Our Planet.Our guest today is the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama. Today, she is vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple and reports directly to CEO Tim Cook. You see her there. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLisa Jackson, welcome to Washington Post Live.MS. JACKSON: Nice to be here. How are you, Jonathan?MR. CAPEHART: I am great. Great to see you.Let's jump right on in it. You released Apple's Environmental Progress Report last Friday detailing your plans to go carbon neutral by 2030. What are some of the key points in that plan?Story continues below advertisementMS. JACKSON: Sure. Well, first off, we are carbon neutral as a corporation, as a company today. Many companies are trying to get to carbon neutral, but we are already. All of our energy use, all of the energy we use for data centers, for our offices, for our stores, that's renewable energy. We're also carbon neutral for our employees' commute and travel, obviously down a bit in the past year, but that will be the case going forward.AdvertisementNow to get to carbon neutral for 2030 means our supply chain and our products, which means making sure that every product that we make is made in a way that adds no carbon to the atmosphere, and the use of our products. That means when you charge it, we want to put clean energy on the grid so that the use of our products is also neutral as well.MR. CAPEHART: You brought that up. You announced--wait, this is April--last month that 110 of your manufacturing partners around the world are adopting 100 percent renewable energy solutions. What requirements will you make of companies in your supply chain?Story continues below advertisementMS. JACKSON: Well, we've already begun, right? We're at 110, been at this for a few years. That's almost 8 gigawatts of clean energy coming on grids around the world. That's like taking 3.2-, 3.3 million cars off the road each year.AdvertisementBut what we're saying to them is, look, first off, we've done it. We've taken our company carbon neutral. Let us help you understand how to do it for yours and do it in a way that makes money, that's profitable, that at a minimum, breaks even with the cost of more conventional, dirtier power, and they love that message because these are businesses. The first thing they want to hear is that it's good for my bottom line. It all starts with efficiency. The energy you never use is always the cleanest.But then we move into showing them how to find source and be a part of good clean energy deals, and we stand side by side with them with governments around the world to ask for them to be able to have access to clean energy.Story continues below advertisementMR. CAPEHART: Okay. You've been doing a lot of announcing. Another thing that you've announced is Apple's new Restore Fund to provide a $200 million investment targeting the development and conservation of sustainable working forests. One, what is a working forest; and two, what's Apple's goal with this newest green initiative?AdvertisementMS. JACKSON: Absolutely. Yeah. This is the time of the year when we're all announcing big things, but we love to make a big deal around Earth Day.Our Restore Fund--it's called--is actually meant to be another business-oriented solution to another problem we have. Even if you change to clean energy, as we have for as much of the energy that we use, there is still emissions that at least standing here today in 2021, we don't know how we're going to be able to remove those CO2-equivalent emissions, and so many companies are saying, look, we are also going to have to remove the carbon that's already in the atmosphere from decades of emissions.Story continues below advertisementNow, we firmly believe that the first thing you should do is switch to clean energy and remove emissions. We'll remove at least 75 percent of our footprint through the switch of our suppliers to clean energy, but there will be some, and so the idea is that a working forest is nature's way of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Forests absorb CO2 as they grow. A working forest is one that's actually meant to be cut, that the products, the trees, the pulp, the wood are meant to be harvested because they can be sold for money. That is actually a good thing as long as the forest is managed in a way that new trees are planted or that harvesting happens at the time in the cycle where the majority of the CO2 has already--the carbon has already been taken out of the air.AdvertisementSo, what we're trying to say to people is, look, we're going to need wood for building. We're going to need wood for products. We're going to need wood pulp for paper. Wouldn't it be great if all of us insisted on investing only in those forest operations, those working forests that are being managed in a way to maximize the removal of carbon at the same time? This fund will have a return, not only a financial return. It will have a positive financial return, but it will also have a demanded return in carbon removed from the atmosphere.MR. CAPEHART: I want to make sure I'm keeping up here. In the last piece, you were talking about in terms of the workable forests, meaning trees that are meant to be cut down, turned into pulp, turned into paper. So, when that tree is cut down, is the intention that that tree will then be replaced either in that same forest or in another forest where it's meant to be one-to-one replacement?Story continues below advertisementMS. JACKSON: Yes, yes. If not two to one, if not more, absolutely. The forest is meant to be there. Think of a sustainable forest. We want it there a hundred years from now. If it's managed well, we believe that that can also serve as a quantifiable. We're big on science and we're big on numbers at Apple, right, a technology company. We want to be able to quantify how the management of that forest has removed carbon from the atmosphere and invest in that. We want to say as a company, we, Apple, already source all of our paper from sustainably managed forests. Now we want to invest in those forests, the way we would invest in any great supplier, because we think that that is what the planet will need, more and more of these sustainably managed forests, working forests in order to help us solve the climate crisis.AdvertisementMR. CAPEHART: Okay. Now, help me out with this a little bit, and I don't mean to be obtuse, but when I think Apple, I don't think paper. I think this. So, what do you need a forest for?MS. JACKSON: Packaging.Story continues below advertisement[Laughter]MS. JACKSON: I hope you think about the fact that that wonderful product arrives to you in a box. We actually use quite a bit of paper products for packaging, and several years ago, my team led the way--it was actually their idea--early on. We had one of our engineers who said, \"What if we bought a forest?\" but we took that idea and said instead of buying a forest, what if we invest in sustainably managed forests and only source our paper needs from pulp that came from sustainably managed forests? So, the package that your Apple product comes in is either recycled paper or it's sustainably managed pulp. Those two things mixed together make the packaging that we use today.AdvertisementMR. CAPEHART: Who else is doing that, going out and either buying forests or having sustainable working forests? Any of your competitors?Story continues below advertisementMS. JACKSON: Look, this is innovative. This approach is innovative. We're trying it ourselves. It's a $200 million bet on the Restore Fund. We believe it's going to make us money, but the real reason we're doing it is to invite others who want to invest in the green future.We hear all this talk about how the economy needs to switch to a green economy. This is one way. We're not asking folks to do it out of the goodness of their heart. We're asking them to do it out of the goodness of their pocketbook as well. If we can show this works, then we think other companies will gladly also want to invest in this approach when it comes to carbon removal in a natural state like trees.AdvertisementMR. CAPEHART: I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about something that Tim Cook announced, and that's Apple's Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. It's $100 million investment fund. You're leading this effort. First, why does equity need to be at the forefront as the world addresses climate change?Story continues below advertisementMS. JACKSON: Well, you know, I think we're learning.When I was running the EPA, we talked a lot about environmental justice, but kudos to the activists of the day who really brought us to understand the importance of climate justice.For too long, climate change was seen as something that happened to be, but other people were part of the solution, and I think for us to really look at the opportunities inherent in this transformation, all Americans have to feel part of the solution and part of the prosperity that can come with addressing climate change head on and in a business-smart manner.AdvertisementWe think equity is code in this way for being inclusive to the communities that are feeling the impacts of climate change. One way we're doing that, just to give you an example, is we have something called the \"Impact Accelerator,\" which is a business accelerator meant to help small businesses owned by Black and brown owners, entrepreneurs to grow in the clean energy and environmental space, because we put a lot of money in this space, and we believe that if more businesses saw a potential to grow their business in the sustainability space and the clean energy space and the sustainable wood packaging space, all those are opportunities to grow jobs, to grow the economy, while addressing climate change, so you don't have to pick between addressing climate change and addressing the economy at the same time.MR. CAPEHART: And this particular issue of racial inequity and justice when it comes to the environment is something that is rather personal to you. You grew up in Louisiana next to an industrial area. Talk about the impact that had on you but also overall the impact that has on communities of color.MS. JACKSON: Absolutely. Look, I grew up in New Orleans, and the house I grew up in is no longer there. It was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. It was in the Ninth Ward where the levees broke. I can tell you firsthand that in a lot of cases when it comes to climate change, the communities that are least economically able to withstand the punch are the ones directly in the low-lying areas that are subject to flood or are in the areas in exurbia where forest fires and wildfires can have a tremendous impact or where drought--if you talk about rural America and our farmers, where drought could have a devastating impact on their family or on their business.So, we know that, historically, communities that have less money--and unfortunately, income and race track together too often together in our country--are the ones directly in the fence line of pollution, traditional pollution or pollution like CO2. So, I always say if you address those communities, you're actually addressing the problem. If you ignore those communities, you are, in effect, ignoring the problem, and you're assuming that because you don't see its impact every day, it's not happening. And it takes a Hurricane Katrina or a devastating wildfire or a horrible drought to make us all realize not only have we not addressed the problem, but it's continued to get worse.It's more than the right thing to do, but honestly, the first and the most important reason is because prosperity has to be shared, and this is the right thing to do.MR. CAPEHART: You and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, you signed a letter asking President Biden to be the climate president. We're just under a hundred days in. How's he doing in that regard, and what else would you like to see him do?MS. JACKSON: Look, I think the infrastructure plans, I think his emphasis on climate as part of his infrastructure proposal is huge. It is a recognition that climate change can be a path to creation of jobs. It is a recognition, frankly, that the business community that many forward-looking parts of the business community are either ahead of that kind of thinking or have been asking for it.For us, it feels like a tailwind because we've been doing a lot of this work, and there are parts of the business community that need that tailwind in order to continue to push suppliers and other people along so that they can get the clean energy that they need.I think the other thing that I really want to acknowledge is his look at equity. I was on a call with Gina McCarthy the other day, and she mentioned 40 percent of investments going to communities that are historically underinvested in, everything from lead pipe replacement--you know, those pipes need to be replaced. They're old. That infrastructure needs to be replaced, anyway, but to do it in a way that takes care of traditional pollution like lead, which is a brain poison. It stops your brain's ability to develop and a child's ability to learn. Or to come further along and say let's build and invest in our highways, but let's do it with an eye toward the transportation of the future, which will certainly be electric propelled, much more so than gas. We're hearing that even from our own car companies. I think both of those are great.I think, obviously, in Washington, the plans are great, and the follow-through is where it counts, but it's off to a great start.MR. CAPEHART: You mentioned Gina McCarthy. She was your successor, if I'm not mistaken, at the EPA, and now she is the, quote/unquote, \"climate czar.\" Since you are a veteran of Washington--and there's a lot of talk about the infrastructure plan or the American Jobs Plan--how likely is it, do you think, that what the president is trying to do will go from ideas that are negotiated and debated to actually a piece of--big piece of legislation he can actually sign into law?MS. JACKSON: I mean, we know that, first off, in Washington, the ability to get anything through Congress has been stymied for quite some time by the division, the partisan divisions in that body.That being said, I think infrastructure traditionally has been a place where both sides see the need for investment. All communities welcome the need, the kind of investment that traditional infrastructure brings to mind, and I think politics is going to have to be the art of the compromise.I know that there are folks lined up on both sides. I don't want to use any of the clich\u00e9s. We've heard them all about perfect and good and all that kind of stuff. I just think that it requires--what I do think is that it requires a single-minded focus on keeping the end goal in mind, which is to address climate change, not to kick the can down the road, to address our nation's needs in infrastructure, to build equity into the solution so that communities that haven't been invested in see investment as a result of infrastructure.But, you know, I fully believe that there's going to be lots of discussion, but I'm hopeful that infrastructure, historically, has been something that we find a way to invest in because it really is an investment in our shared prosperity.MR. CAPEHART: One of the knocks on the American Jobs Plan is that--and this is from Republicans, and that is the actual sort of traditional infrastructure piece is a tiny portion of the American Jobs Plan. Should the administration consider a separate bill, just pulling that piece out and going hard on that to get that done?MS. JACKSON: Yeah. You know, I don't know what \"should\" means. It's the art of the possible.I do want to say this as a working woman. You know, when I was in D.C., our kids were high school age. Mine are now grown. But when I hear things like an infrastructure plan that addresses something that's out of my wheelhouse professionally as eldercare and senior care and realize what it was like for me with my mom trying to make sure, in addition to my family, my immediate family, my kids, my husband, she had the kind of end of life I would want my mom to have.I mean, I see that as part of an investment in a different kind of infrastructure: American families. American families need to be invested in, in this moment. Women have not done well, working women, through COVID. Many of us have had to wear two, three, four, five, six hats, and so a recognition that besides the hard hats and getting the men who wear hard hats back to work is also getting women the opportunity to consider picking up the pieces of their careers and also children, the support they need, and our seniors, the support they need. We have a crisis in this country.Again, nothing to do with my professional knowledge. You're just asking me as a woman.MR. CAPEHART: Right.MS. JACKSON: That's how I feel. I don't think we can separate them if we really want our country to pick up from this horrible time and say we're better off in the future.MR. CAPEHART: You know, there's something else Apple has done, and that is sign on with the hundreds of companies that have joined the effort by Ken Chenault, the former CEO of Amex, American Express, and Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck, calling on corporations to oppose, quote, \"discriminatory legislation that would restrict to prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot.\" What I'm not--well, I'm not surprised Apple/Tim Cook has gotten involved in this way, especially what he did in North Carolina during the, quote/unquote, \"restroom bill\" that was happening there, but do you think that this--and I'm calling it \"corporate activism\"--newfound corporate activism is something that Republicans will listen to?MS. JACKSON: Well, they're certainly hearing it. I mean, I think that it is the topic of the day in many ways, and I think the power in the moment that the Kens--Ken Chenault and Ken Frazier--put up was the voice of Black men who are running Fortune 500, big, big companies saying this is something that is a matter of principle in a democracy.I mean, what they keep saying is that they're tying it to the fact that democracy is based on the belief that each of us has an equal say in what our country does, and if you get to the point where you believe you don't have that, that you don't have that right, then our democracy is threatened. And we've seen so many threats to our democracy.And so, look, I hope that the voice of the business community, which has been, honestly, I think, measured in saying, look, we understand that states are going to look at ways to secure voting, but when \"secure\" is just a code word for clamp down or make more difficult or when we see the kinds of lines we see, people waiting hours upon hours upon hours to vote in this time where technology or some other way could give relief to those people, I think that that is where it becomes of real concern and where anyone of good conscience--you know, I think what they're calling on us to do is step up, and I'm really glad and proud to work at Apple and, of course, not at all surprised that Tim has said this is a matter of conscience and of right or wrong in a democracy.MR. CAPEHART: Mm-hmm. I asked that question because a little while ago, a few days ago, I interviewed another Tim, Tim Ryan, the chairman and senior partner at PwC U.S., asking him about this corporate--I call it, again, \"corporate activism,\" but it's something I don't recall ever seeing. Business used to be very reticent to get involved in anything remotely controversial, and now we are seeing, whether it's Tim Cook or Tim Ryan or Ken--the Tims or the Kens, CEOs feel they have a responsibility to say something. Tim Ryan said that it's based on his values. Do you think that we've turned a corner and that business is not going to remain silent when it comes to issues of conscience?MS. JACKSON: Yeah. Look, I think \"values\" is a great word. When I joined Apple, Tim brought me in to work on environment because he saw it as a core value of the company. A technology company should find a better innovative way forward that takes care of the environment at the same time as taking care of its main business of producing products, and I loved that.We have other values like privacy, accessibility so that people with disabilities can use our products, and of course, human rights, LGBTQ+ issues. This issue now around racial equity and justice, I think--you know, I can't speak for every company. I can only speak for Apple, but I don't see a way that the employees of the future, the companies of the future can turn around from this moment and suddenly say we're not engaged.I like that at Apple, we engage on policies. We don't have a PAC. We don't make political donations as a company, but we do still engage in the policy discussions in our country especially that we think we should weigh in on, and I think it's what our employees expect as well.MR. CAPEHART: Lisa, I'm going to have to ask you to take off your Apple hat and just be--MS. JACKSON: Oh, okay. Take off my glasses.[Laughter]MR. CAPEHART: We've known each other a long time, and I can't have you here and not ask you about the Derek Chauvin trial. The closing arguments are happening before we came on. The defense was making its closing arguments. I would just love to know your feelings in this moment about that trial.MS. JACKSON: Yeah. You know, it is--well, it's not funny. I can't watch it in real time. I can't--you know, I'm working, but that's not the reason. It has been hard enough for me. As I mentioned, I have two sons, two, you know, 20-plus-year-old boys, men now, and it isn't limited to Black men, but certainly, the statistics show that there's a good shot that they could be pulled over. And I know that feeling of not knowing what happens after that, and so, yeah, I can't watch it, but I read the summaries and I read it with some amount of dread because it just--it's like--those poor families, just like reliving over and over again this trauma of a system that does not--that sees us differently and sees us as a threat, no matter--practically no matter how we approach, whether it's in a uniform, a military uniform, or in street clothes or in a hoodie or jogging. There's just--it's hard. It is hard, and I've been working a long time.So, the easiest way for me is to put it aside on a day-to-day basis and try to use the racial equity and justice work. We're funding groups that work on criminal justice reform. We're funding educational opportunities, investments in coding and in HBCUs. We're putting more money into economic empowerment in Black and brown communities, as I mentioned, the Impact Accelerator and venture capital and loan funds to try to do what we can from where we are.But we can't turn our back on the fact that this is a troubling time and that we are transitioning to a world where, as demographics change in our country, these kinds of sort of clashes will be present.MR. CAPEHART: And given all the work that you do and have been doing at Apple since you've been there, does that work give you hope that despite the pain that we're in right now that we're actually on our way moving forward to a better time?MS. JACKSON: Yeah. No, I definitely think we're in a time of transition, and I think the ability of the American sort of psyche, people writ large, to adapt and change and innovate is part of what makes us American, part of why I love Apple, this incredibly innovative company full of folks who see different futures.Yes, I absolutely have hope. I have hope on the environmental side because for the first time maybe in my adult life, clean energy is cheaper than the polluting stuff, and recycled materials and working forests that are sustainably managed can be just as profitable as one that's engaged in clear-cutting forests and conversion of land. It just requires investment and some innovation and imagination and optimism, and so, yeah, I've always believed that we have to be.John Lewis was a friend and a friend of Apple's, and so we also owe it to the folks who came before--to my parents, your parents--to continue to form a more perfect union, as is said so often these days.MR. CAPEHART: Lisa Jackson, vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple, we are out of time, but thank you very much for coming to Washington Post Live and our series, Protecting the Planet.MS. JACKSON: Thank you so much for having me, Jonathan. So wonderful to see you.MR. CAPEHART: You too.And thank you for tuning in. Stay with Washington Post Live. We have a number of interesting programs coming up.Once again, I'm Jonathan Capehart, opinion writer for The Washington Post. Thanks again for tuning into Washington Post Live.[End recorded segment]  Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Lisa Jackson",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: An Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore & Alexandria Villase\u00f1or (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8666",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/25/transcript-protecting-our-planet-an-inconvenient-truth-with-al-gore-alexandria-villaseor/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. We\u2019re less than a week away from the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, so we\u2019re going to focus on our environment today. And I\u2019m joined by Al Gore, the 45th Vice President of the United States, whose 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth about climate change won two Academy Awards and changed the way government officials and private citizens talk and think about the threat to our planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019m also joined by Alexandria Villase\u00f1or, who at 16 co-founded the U.S. youth climate strike movement. Welcome to both of you to Washington Post Live.MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Thank you for having me.Story continues below advertisementMR. GORE: Thank you, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Mr. Vice President, as the UN Climate Change Conference--COP26 we call it in shorthand--convenes on Sunday, you said that you want a concrete action plan to come out of that, and I want to ask you what are a few specific items that you want to see in that action plan.AdvertisementMR. GORE: Great question, David. Thank you so much for having us on.And, Alexandria, I\u2019m so proud of what you\u2019ve been doing. It\u2019s great to share this session with you.David, though, we have already seen some commitments just in the runup to COP26 with the G7 and now China pledging to stop their financing of overseas coal plants. President Biden and his counterparts in many countries have pledged to reduce emissions to zero by 2050 and to reduce them by half in this decade. President Biden has also doubled the U.S. contributions to the so-called hundred-billion-dollar fund to assist developing nations. But more needs to be done. And unfortunately, some of the stars are not aligned as well in advance of this meeting as they were in advance of the historic Paris meeting in 2015. But I still think that some significant progress can be made even if it\u2019s not a grand slam homerun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: So, tell me what the singles and doubles would be. I mean, what\u2019s achievable in terms of new commitments, even want to say enforcement mechanisms. In the arms control world, we have verification schemes. We don\u2019t yet in this climate area. But it certainly is as dangerous as nuclear weapons proliferation. What are the--what are the achievements, the singles and doubles that could happen?MR. GORE: Well, first of all, there is a new coalition called Climate TRACE that I have helped to co-found that will give us the ability to verify where the emissions are coming from, country by country and source by source. We already have the first independent comprehensive global inventory, and it will improve in the months ahead down to what they call the asset level.As for the conference itself, we have been hoping for bolder commitments from all of the nations that signed the Paris Agreement. This meeting was delayed by a year by the pandemic, of course, but it still is the first of the required five-year interval meetings after Paris in which nations are called upon to upgrade and--their commitments and be more ambitious and bolder in the reductions of their emissions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome countries have done that. I expect to see some more before the meting convenes a week from today. But there are some absences, and that\u2019s somewhat disappointing. But as in Paris, David, the business community, the investor community, civil society are all a part of this conference. And we\u2019re seeing some pretty dramatic commitments with the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance, for example, with half--almost half of all of the assets under management worldwide--43 trillion worth--now committed to have all their portfolios aligned with net zero by the middle of this century, some of them well before that. We\u2019re seeing the phase out of coal. And we\u2019re seeing a dramatic increase in the deployment of solar and wind.And may I note that in calendar year 2020, last year, if you look at all of the new electricity generating equipment installed worldwide, 90 percent of it was renewables, almost all of it solar and wind. We\u2019re seeing electric vehicles and batteries ramp up very quickly. All of the major auto manufacturers have announced plans to switch over. And we\u2019re seeing the emergence of promising technologies like green hydrogen made with surplus renewable electricity which will enable the decarbonization of metallurgy and steelmaking, for example. And regenerative agriculture and sustainable forestry are among the solutions that are now being implemented with more ambition. But the crisis is still getting worse faster than we are deploying these solutions. So, we really have to step up the pace quite significantly.MR. IGNATIUS: I want to come back in a moment to the question you mentioned of asset management and the financial side of movement toward net zero. But I want to just ask, Alexandria, as we head toward COP26 what do you--what do you hear from your friends, people in your generation about the progress that\u2019s being made? What would you like to see come out of Glasgow? And what are your worries about lack of progress in some areas?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Well, I think that going up until COP, there\u2019s going to be a lot of youth activists who are going to be there. And this will be the second COP that I\u2019ve gone to, and COP was actually one of the initial reasons that I got motivated to take action. It was after COP24, because that was a huge motivator because of the failures there.And so, right now a lot of youth activists and myself included are not that hopeful for this COP. But specifically, we are not hopeful in some of our world leaders. We\u2019re hopeful for other activists. We\u2019re hopeful for the community of young people who are going to be there. That\u2019s where we get our hope. And many world leaders aren\u2019t attending and commitments aren\u2019t meeting the Paris Agreement, and so because of some of these factors a lot of youth are going to make sure that our voices are heard. And we\u2019re getting prepared to hold our world leaders accountable to make sure that they meet these commitments, though. And we\u2019re not hearing any new commitments, and so we\u2019re going to make sure that we push them to make sure that there\u2019s more that they can do, because there\u2019s always more that we can do.And the last thing that I want to mention on this is, as a youth activist and in the movement, one thing that youth activists are--why it\u2019s so important to have us in these conversations is because we are the moral voice in these decision-making rooms. We\u2019re there making sure that world leaders hear and see the urgency of the climate crisis. And we haven\u2019t really been indoctrinated into the system that so many adults and world leaders are in, and so we bring a factor of authenticity into this.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd we\u2019re the most affected generation. Climate change will affect every aspect of our lives. And that\u2019s why it\u2019s important to have youth in these conversations, and that\u2019s why I\u2019m excited to be there with a global movement of young people.MR. IGANTIUS: And, Alexandria, before I go back to the vice president, so China\u2019s president, Xi Jinping, will not be in Glasgow. China is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. It seems to be backsliding on coal. My question is, will there be young Chinese people in the streets in China demanding action from their leadership? Does your movement have contact with people abroad who could make that happen?MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Well, there are some activists from China who are making their voices heard. Howey is actually in Glasgow. She\u2019s an activist from China who\u2019s going to be there. And so, we--our movement is global. We have activists all around the world, and especially in China. And she\u2019s--Howey Ou specifically has been in jail. She\u2019s been silenced before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, one thing that we are actually talking a lot about is the right to protest and the right to be out there protesting and that there should be more protections. There\u2019s lots of young people like Howey who are going out there and pushing their governments for change but yet they\u2019re being silenced. And there needs to be more protection for activists who are out there pushing for the right thing to do. Our Chinese and Russian activists are in danger and there--our activists in Russia have actually gone to jail before, as well. And so, it\u2019s so important that we have protections for these activists who are going out there and just trying to make sure that we do the right thing, and so they should not be silenced.And I also want to mention that activists are being murdered around the world. There were 227 activists killed last year and so--the most ever. And so, it\u2019s important that we uphold activists\u2019 safety, and that\u2019s going to be a big topic as well at COP that youth activists are going to push for, is for the protection of activists.And specific to China, China isn\u2019t the largest cumulative emitter. We are. China\u2019s only 12 percent of cumulative emissions but we\u2019re 25 percent. And so, it\u2019s important that we get global climate action and that we make sure to push for action from our world leaders. China and the U.S. cumulative emissions are important because CO2 stays in the atmosphere. And so, we need action from all of these world leaders, and especially the ones who are contributing the most to the cumulative emissions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: Helpful answer. Thank you very much.So, Mr. Vice President, I want to come back to you now. You just gave an interview to The Financial Times in which you had some strong words. You called for an overhaul of banking, asset management, accounting standards to meet the net zero 2050 goal. You said, for example, that you thought financial institutions should have to disclose the climate risks in their portfolios. Tell us about the specific changes that will affect financial markets that you\u2019d like to see enacted and how you\u2019re going to proceed to make pressure for those.MR. GORE: Well, thanks for the question. It\u2019s spot on. And there\u2019s widespread consensus among economists that our current accounting standards are not fit for purpose, David. They do not--famously do not include what are called negative externalities. So, if you use the sky as an open sewer for your gassiest waste, you\u2019re allowed to do that for free, and the costs are offloaded on the rest of society, on all of us, especially Alexandria\u2019s generation and those to come. And that needs to be taken into account. And there are financial risks to lenders and others who do not take them into account.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRemember for a moment the subprime mortgage crisis back in 2007-2008, there was kind of a mass delusion among financial institutions who\u2019d decided that if somebody couldn\u2019t make a down payment and couldn\u2019t prove they could make monthly payments, it was still okay to give them a mortgage and then lump millions of them together and pawn them off into the global markets and all the risks would magically disappear. But when a little time passed and people began to look carefully at the worthlessness of those subprime mortgages, all of a sudden there was a collapse, a credit crisis, and that triggered the Great Recession of 2007 and 2008.We now have a subprime carbon bubble many times larger--about $22 trillion worth of carbon assets that cannot be burned, will not be burned but are still valued in the market as if they\u2019re all going to be put to their intended use and contribute to the destruction of the future of human civilization. That\u2019s not going to happen. And regulators and others should step in and address the failure--yet another mass delusion in financial markets--and insist that in protecting the public and the human future that we do have accurate accounting standards.MR. IGNATIUS: Just to push back a moment on that, The Wall Street Journal had a frontpage headline this morning--you may have seen it, Mr. Vice President--but it said climate-focused investors--in other words, the investors you\u2019d like to see focus on these long-term risks--miss the oil and gas rally with the S&P energy sector up 54 percent this year compared to 21 percent from the S&P 500. Now you could say that\u2019s classic short-term thinking. But it\u2019s the reality, as you know better than I, for investors. So how--literally, on a day when you\u2019re saying you have to think long term, The Journal writing for its investing public is saying people who were in these climate-focused funds got slammed and missed an energy rally. What do you say to that?MR. GORE: Well, you said it yourself, they missed a short-term rally. But that doesn\u2019t change the long-term reality or even the mid-term reality. We are seeing nations around the world ban the burning of coal, quite a few of them. We\u2019re seeing nations pledge net zero futures. And perhaps more significantly, David, the cost of electricity from solar and wind was cheaper than electricity from new fossil plants in only 1 percent of the world the year before the Paris Agreement. Five years later, it\u2019s cheaper in two-thirds of the world. Three years from now, it\u2019ll be cheaper in 100 percent of the world. There have been far more new fossil fuel plants canceled than built because the new technologies are better and cheaper, more economical, and they do not pollute.So, the same thing is happening, by the way, in the fossil fuel--the second-largest market they have, and that is transportation. Electric vehicles within the next year and a half to two years, some of the most popular model categories will be cheaper in the EV version than the internal combustion engine version, within four years in all model categories. That\u2019s why virtually every automobile manufacturer in the world is switching over to electric vehicles. We just had a huge new investment here in Tennessee from Ford. Others are following along.And the fossil fuel companies are telling the markets that, yes, they appear to be losing their first and second-largest markets, but they\u2019re going to make it up with more plastics. Petrochemicals is their third-largest market. Seventy-five percent of that is plastics, and that\u2019s not working out so well for us either. And so, this short-term rally may delude some people into thinking that the trend of history may be making a U-turn. It\u2019s not. What we\u2019re doing in using the atmosphere as an open sewer is literally insane. The scientific community has been warning us in every more dire language that we are threatening the survival of human civilization.And by the way, we\u2019re seeing with the flooding in the Northwest today, with what happened in the Northeast just a few weeks ago, 93 percent of the American West is in drought, half of California--a hundred percent of California, half of California in the most extreme form of drought. Six of the seven largest fires in the history of California all took place last year. This cannot go on. And as someone famously said, if something can\u2019t go on, it won\u2019t, and markets have to adjust to this reality.That\u2019s why investors are stepping up, and that\u2019s why a lot of companies are making a hundred percent renewable commitments, beginning with the consumer-facing companies, but others are under pressure from their customers, their employees, their families, their peers. This sustainability revolution--we\u2019re in the early stages now--is the largest new business opportunity in all of history. It has the magnitude of the industrial revolution coupled with the speed of the digital revolution. And anyone is distracted by a short-term flash in the pan because of the uneven recovery from the pandemic and the supply side problems with the ports and fossil fuel supplies, so this is a short-term flash in the pan. The trend of history if very much in the direction of sustainability.MR. IGNATIUS: Let me just ask you one more thing from your FT interview and then I want to play a short clip from your wonderful film, An Inconvenient Truth. But you said something to the FT that I thought was fascinating, which was to basically argue that one of the most popular responses to climate problems--namely carbon offsets, people planting trees to make up for the carbon that they\u2019re putting into the atmosphere--makes no sense. And you had a sharp quote--I\u2019ll just read it for our viewers--\u201cIt\u2019s suicidal for the human race to continue on this track and to pretend that it can somehow be mitigated by promising to plant trees here, there, and everywhere. That is simply not realistic.\u201d So just continue that, if you would, a critique of carbon offsets.MR. GORE: Let me add that in that same interview I also pointed out that offsets do have a role to play. They just can\u2019t be a get out of jail free card.For example, let me give you an example also from the morning news. Shell Petroleum is claiming offsets from a forest that they\u2019re going to protect that was already declared a national park and is already under protection. We have seen forests claimed as offsets in the West that have burned in the last few weeks. So, they do have a role to play. So far, the best technology for sequestering carbon is called a tree. You take it to scale and it\u2019s a forest. So, we do need to plant more trees, and the offset markets can play a role. But they need to be the last resort.Job number one is reducing emissions. We are now putting 162 million tons of man-made global warming pollution into the sky as if it\u2019s an open sewer. You see a picture of the troposphere from the space station behind me, it\u2019s so thin. If you could drive a car straight up in the air at interstate highway speeds, you\u2019d get to the top of that blue line in about five minutes. That\u2019s where all the greenhouse gases congregate. And so, we have to--it\u2019s insane. The cumulative amount that lingers there, as Alexandria said, now traps as much extra heat every day as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours. This is insane. We\u2019re disrupting the water cycle. We\u2019re driving species extinct. The United Nations says that we may have 1 billion climate refugees by the middle of this century. Think of the destabilizing effect that has on political equilibria around the country. We\u2019re--I\u2019ve talked to and welcomed the refugees, and I think that\u2019s correct. But my political experience tells me that too many, too soon can trigger xenophobic reactions. And I think it\u2019s one of the reasons for this wave of populist authoritarianism that is threatening democracy and capitalism.MR. IGNATIUS: People who might imagine that this is a recent set of warnings from you need to take a look at what you were saying in 2006, where you were talking about where carbon dioxide levels might be in 50 years if nothing was done to improve the situation. Let\u2019s take a quick look at the clip from An Inconvenient Truth.[Video plays]MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Vice President, a scary chart. Where are we now on that chart regarding carbon dioxide emission?MR. GORE: Well, to give you a comparison to make those lines meaningful, this much on the coal side has been--was associated in the last ice age with having a mile of ice over your head where you\u2019re located right now. Several times that much on the warm side would lead to the possibility that you--this planet would not be inhabitable by human beings. And we are already at 417 parts per million. That compares to 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution, 260 before the agricultural revolution. And we\u2019re on the way up continually.And those two lines you saw in that graph, they show the lockstep relationship between CO2 and temperature. Now, last year was the hottest year ever measured with instruments. The hottest seven years were the last seven years. We\u2019ve now seen temperatures 125 degrees and above. We\u2019ve seen the heat index reach 165 degrees in some places--the combination of heat and humidity. And that is why there are so many areas that are now in danger of becoming literally unlivable, where human beings can\u2019t survive for more than two or three hours outdoors. And that\u2019s why a lot of them are already migrating. There--last year there were four times as many climate refugees as there were all the refugees from wars and conflicts. We got a lot of them on the southern border of Texas and of the U.S. and Mexico. And they didn\u2019t come from Mexico. They came from Central America, where like many areas in the tropics and subtropics, the combination of these elevated temperatures and droughts and rain bombs from the disruption of the water cycle are driving people away from their homes because they don\u2019t have anything to eat.MR. IGNATIUS: Alexandria, I want to ask you a question about the future politics of this issue. As you know and the vice president and we all know, we\u2019re a very divided country right now. But I\u2019m wondering whether on climate issues you find Republicans, young Republicans your age, feel pretty much the same way you do about these issues--in other words, whether it will be hard for a Republican in the future to get elected without having a more forward-leaning committed position on climate.MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: You know, this is actually something talked about a lot within my organization, Earth Uprising. And we focus a lot on climate education, and so Earth Uprising focuses on climate education peer to peer to empower young people to take direct action. And so, we have youth all across the country, and especially in very conservative neighborhoods.And what we\u2019ve noticed is that they don\u2019t necessarily see climate change as a political issue. Instead, they organize with us, and they look at the science of what is going on. And so, they--as well, what we\u2019re noticing is that they\u2019re influencing their parents as well. All these young people are seeing the science behind what is going on, and they\u2019re going and having conversations with their parents about this. And then they\u2019re influencing their parents on who they vote for and voting for a climate candidate.And so, actually a recent study showed that teenage daughters are the most influential with their parents and are changing their minds as well. And so, it\u2019s definitely the power of young people in persuading those who can vote to do the right thing, because I\u2019m 16. I won\u2019t be able to vote for a couple more years now. And for a lot of young people, we can\u2019t wait for that time. So, we need those who can vote to be able to vote for a climate candidate. And so, I need my parents to vote in my best interests. And those young people are doing the same thing. They\u2019re pushing their parents to vote for the right candidates.MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Vice President, a quick political question for you. We are in the final days, hopefully, of congressional negotiation about an overall budget package, including a reconciliation, social spending portion that\u2019s going to provide for climate spending. A specific point of contention is the so-called CEPP, the Clean Energy Performance Plan I think is what that stands for.Senator Joe Manchin has argued that we\u2019re in a period of transition, that that plan as currently structured puts so much emphasis on renewables that it doesn\u2019t put enough money into so-called firm power--the power that\u2019s available when wind doesn\u2019t blow, the sun doesn\u2019t shine. I find a lot of sensible people who know a lot about energy and the environment think that there\u2019s a point to that, that we do need to have firm power in this plan, some kind of low-carbon fuels. What do you think about that argument?MR. GORE: Well, I think there was a time in the past where there was some merit to that argument, David. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s merit to it now. As Amory Lovins and many others have pointed out, a widely distributed grid takes care of that problem. And more to the point, the incredible advances in battery storage technology now make it possible to use solar power for many more hours after the sun goes down and wind power for many more hours after the wind stops blowing.And the emergence of green hydrogen, which is made from the surplus wind and solar when the demand is low but they\u2019re producing more of it than they can possibly use, is really taking care of that. There are places now that have already switched over to use natural gas peaker plants as a last resort to fill the remaining gaps. But, no, it is now possible to move to a hundred percent renewable energy, and there has been--there have been many studies validating that.You know, you probably knew the late great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He wrote a famous poem called Half Measures about a man leaping a chasm. And the point of it was, don\u2019t try to make that leap in two tranches. You have to clear it. We\u2019re now in a stage where with all the rapid deployment of renewables, it\u2019s still not enough. But we have to go the rest of the way and stop using these dirty fossil fuels. And by the way, the coal pollution is killing 9 million people a year from conventional air pollution. This is good for us in every single way. We just have to move farther and faster.MR. IGNATIUS: I want to ask you a quick question on the way out, Mr. Vice President. President Bill Clinton, with whom you served, just recovered from a health scare. He was diagnosed last week with sepsis. He was discharged from a hospital last week. I\u2019m just wondering if you\u2019ve talked to him, and how he\u2019s doing?MR. GORE: I did talk to him. He\u2019s doing well. He\u2019s looking forward to what his doctors predict will be a full recovery. He\u2019s already out of the woods, and all of us are wishing him well and hoping for a speedy and full recovery.MR. IGNATIUS: So unfortunately, we\u2019re out of time. This has been a fascinating discussion. I want to thank former Vice President Al Gore and Alexandria Villase\u00f1or for a really interesting discussion across the range of climate issues. Thanks for being with us.MR. GORE: Thank you.MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Thank you.MR. GORE: Keep it up, Alexandria!MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Yeah, it was great to see you. Thank you for all you\u2019re doing, Mr. Vice President.MR. IGNATIUS: So, thank you, both. As always, thanks to you, our audience, for watching. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find out more information about our future programming. Thanks for joining us this morning.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: An Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore & Alexandria Villase\u00f1or",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: An Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore & Alexandria Villase\u00f1or (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8667",
        "date": "2021-10-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/25/transcript-protecting-our-planet-an-inconvenient-truth-with-al-gore-alexandria-villaseor/",
        "text": "MR. IGNATIUS: Welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m David Ignatius, a columnist for The Post. We\u2019re less than a week away from the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, so we\u2019re going to focus on our environment today. And I\u2019m joined by Al Gore, the 45th Vice President of the United States, whose 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth about climate change won two Academy Awards and changed the way government officials and private citizens talk and think about the threat to our planet. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI\u2019m also joined by Alexandria Villase\u00f1or, who at 16 co-founded the U.S. youth climate strike movement. Welcome to both of you to Washington Post Live.MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Thank you for having me.Story continues below advertisementMR. GORE: Thank you, David.MR. IGNATIUS: So, Mr. Vice President, as the UN Climate Change Conference--COP26 we call it in shorthand--convenes on Sunday, you said that you want a concrete action plan to come out of that, and I want to ask you what are a few specific items that you want to see in that action plan.AdvertisementMR. GORE: Great question, David. Thank you so much for having us on.And, Alexandria, I\u2019m so proud of what you\u2019ve been doing. It\u2019s great to share this session with you.David, though, we have already seen some commitments just in the runup to COP26 with the G7 and now China pledging to stop their financing of overseas coal plants. President Biden and his counterparts in many countries have pledged to reduce emissions to zero by 2050 and to reduce them by half in this decade. President Biden has also doubled the U.S. contributions to the so-called hundred-billion-dollar fund to assist developing nations. But more needs to be done. And unfortunately, some of the stars are not aligned as well in advance of this meeting as they were in advance of the historic Paris meeting in 2015. But I still think that some significant progress can be made even if it\u2019s not a grand slam homerun.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: So, tell me what the singles and doubles would be. I mean, what\u2019s achievable in terms of new commitments, even want to say enforcement mechanisms. In the arms control world, we have verification schemes. We don\u2019t yet in this climate area. But it certainly is as dangerous as nuclear weapons proliferation. What are the--what are the achievements, the singles and doubles that could happen?MR. GORE: Well, first of all, there is a new coalition called Climate TRACE that I have helped to co-found that will give us the ability to verify where the emissions are coming from, country by country and source by source. We already have the first independent comprehensive global inventory, and it will improve in the months ahead down to what they call the asset level.As for the conference itself, we have been hoping for bolder commitments from all of the nations that signed the Paris Agreement. This meeting was delayed by a year by the pandemic, of course, but it still is the first of the required five-year interval meetings after Paris in which nations are called upon to upgrade and--their commitments and be more ambitious and bolder in the reductions of their emissions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome countries have done that. I expect to see some more before the meting convenes a week from today. But there are some absences, and that\u2019s somewhat disappointing. But as in Paris, David, the business community, the investor community, civil society are all a part of this conference. And we\u2019re seeing some pretty dramatic commitments with the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance, for example, with half--almost half of all of the assets under management worldwide--43 trillion worth--now committed to have all their portfolios aligned with net zero by the middle of this century, some of them well before that. We\u2019re seeing the phase out of coal. And we\u2019re seeing a dramatic increase in the deployment of solar and wind.And may I note that in calendar year 2020, last year, if you look at all of the new electricity generating equipment installed worldwide, 90 percent of it was renewables, almost all of it solar and wind. We\u2019re seeing electric vehicles and batteries ramp up very quickly. All of the major auto manufacturers have announced plans to switch over. And we\u2019re seeing the emergence of promising technologies like green hydrogen made with surplus renewable electricity which will enable the decarbonization of metallurgy and steelmaking, for example. And regenerative agriculture and sustainable forestry are among the solutions that are now being implemented with more ambition. But the crisis is still getting worse faster than we are deploying these solutions. So, we really have to step up the pace quite significantly.MR. IGNATIUS: I want to come back in a moment to the question you mentioned of asset management and the financial side of movement toward net zero. But I want to just ask, Alexandria, as we head toward COP26 what do you--what do you hear from your friends, people in your generation about the progress that\u2019s being made? What would you like to see come out of Glasgow? And what are your worries about lack of progress in some areas?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Well, I think that going up until COP, there\u2019s going to be a lot of youth activists who are going to be there. And this will be the second COP that I\u2019ve gone to, and COP was actually one of the initial reasons that I got motivated to take action. It was after COP24, because that was a huge motivator because of the failures there.And so, right now a lot of youth activists and myself included are not that hopeful for this COP. But specifically, we are not hopeful in some of our world leaders. We\u2019re hopeful for other activists. We\u2019re hopeful for the community of young people who are going to be there. That\u2019s where we get our hope. And many world leaders aren\u2019t attending and commitments aren\u2019t meeting the Paris Agreement, and so because of some of these factors a lot of youth are going to make sure that our voices are heard. And we\u2019re getting prepared to hold our world leaders accountable to make sure that they meet these commitments, though. And we\u2019re not hearing any new commitments, and so we\u2019re going to make sure that we push them to make sure that there\u2019s more that they can do, because there\u2019s always more that we can do.And the last thing that I want to mention on this is, as a youth activist and in the movement, one thing that youth activists are--why it\u2019s so important to have us in these conversations is because we are the moral voice in these decision-making rooms. We\u2019re there making sure that world leaders hear and see the urgency of the climate crisis. And we haven\u2019t really been indoctrinated into the system that so many adults and world leaders are in, and so we bring a factor of authenticity into this.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd we\u2019re the most affected generation. Climate change will affect every aspect of our lives. And that\u2019s why it\u2019s important to have youth in these conversations, and that\u2019s why I\u2019m excited to be there with a global movement of young people.MR. IGANTIUS: And, Alexandria, before I go back to the vice president, so China\u2019s president, Xi Jinping, will not be in Glasgow. China is the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. It seems to be backsliding on coal. My question is, will there be young Chinese people in the streets in China demanding action from their leadership? Does your movement have contact with people abroad who could make that happen?MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Well, there are some activists from China who are making their voices heard. Howey is actually in Glasgow. She\u2019s an activist from China who\u2019s going to be there. And so, we--our movement is global. We have activists all around the world, and especially in China. And she\u2019s--Howey Ou specifically has been in jail. She\u2019s been silenced before.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd so, one thing that we are actually talking a lot about is the right to protest and the right to be out there protesting and that there should be more protections. There\u2019s lots of young people like Howey who are going out there and pushing their governments for change but yet they\u2019re being silenced. And there needs to be more protection for activists who are out there pushing for the right thing to do. Our Chinese and Russian activists are in danger and there--our activists in Russia have actually gone to jail before, as well. And so, it\u2019s so important that we have protections for these activists who are going out there and just trying to make sure that we do the right thing, and so they should not be silenced.And I also want to mention that activists are being murdered around the world. There were 227 activists killed last year and so--the most ever. And so, it\u2019s important that we uphold activists\u2019 safety, and that\u2019s going to be a big topic as well at COP that youth activists are going to push for, is for the protection of activists.And specific to China, China isn\u2019t the largest cumulative emitter. We are. China\u2019s only 12 percent of cumulative emissions but we\u2019re 25 percent. And so, it\u2019s important that we get global climate action and that we make sure to push for action from our world leaders. China and the U.S. cumulative emissions are important because CO2 stays in the atmosphere. And so, we need action from all of these world leaders, and especially the ones who are contributing the most to the cumulative emissions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. IGNATIUS: Helpful answer. Thank you very much.So, Mr. Vice President, I want to come back to you now. You just gave an interview to The Financial Times in which you had some strong words. You called for an overhaul of banking, asset management, accounting standards to meet the net zero 2050 goal. You said, for example, that you thought financial institutions should have to disclose the climate risks in their portfolios. Tell us about the specific changes that will affect financial markets that you\u2019d like to see enacted and how you\u2019re going to proceed to make pressure for those.MR. GORE: Well, thanks for the question. It\u2019s spot on. And there\u2019s widespread consensus among economists that our current accounting standards are not fit for purpose, David. They do not--famously do not include what are called negative externalities. So, if you use the sky as an open sewer for your gassiest waste, you\u2019re allowed to do that for free, and the costs are offloaded on the rest of society, on all of us, especially Alexandria\u2019s generation and those to come. And that needs to be taken into account. And there are financial risks to lenders and others who do not take them into account.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRemember for a moment the subprime mortgage crisis back in 2007-2008, there was kind of a mass delusion among financial institutions who\u2019d decided that if somebody couldn\u2019t make a down payment and couldn\u2019t prove they could make monthly payments, it was still okay to give them a mortgage and then lump millions of them together and pawn them off into the global markets and all the risks would magically disappear. But when a little time passed and people began to look carefully at the worthlessness of those subprime mortgages, all of a sudden there was a collapse, a credit crisis, and that triggered the Great Recession of 2007 and 2008.We now have a subprime carbon bubble many times larger--about $22 trillion worth of carbon assets that cannot be burned, will not be burned but are still valued in the market as if they\u2019re all going to be put to their intended use and contribute to the destruction of the future of human civilization. That\u2019s not going to happen. And regulators and others should step in and address the failure--yet another mass delusion in financial markets--and insist that in protecting the public and the human future that we do have accurate accounting standards.MR. IGNATIUS: Just to push back a moment on that, The Wall Street Journal had a frontpage headline this morning--you may have seen it, Mr. Vice President--but it said climate-focused investors--in other words, the investors you\u2019d like to see focus on these long-term risks--miss the oil and gas rally with the S&P energy sector up 54 percent this year compared to 21 percent from the S&P 500. Now you could say that\u2019s classic short-term thinking. But it\u2019s the reality, as you know better than I, for investors. So how--literally, on a day when you\u2019re saying you have to think long term, The Journal writing for its investing public is saying people who were in these climate-focused funds got slammed and missed an energy rally. What do you say to that?MR. GORE: Well, you said it yourself, they missed a short-term rally. But that doesn\u2019t change the long-term reality or even the mid-term reality. We are seeing nations around the world ban the burning of coal, quite a few of them. We\u2019re seeing nations pledge net zero futures. And perhaps more significantly, David, the cost of electricity from solar and wind was cheaper than electricity from new fossil plants in only 1 percent of the world the year before the Paris Agreement. Five years later, it\u2019s cheaper in two-thirds of the world. Three years from now, it\u2019ll be cheaper in 100 percent of the world. There have been far more new fossil fuel plants canceled than built because the new technologies are better and cheaper, more economical, and they do not pollute.So, the same thing is happening, by the way, in the fossil fuel--the second-largest market they have, and that is transportation. Electric vehicles within the next year and a half to two years, some of the most popular model categories will be cheaper in the EV version than the internal combustion engine version, within four years in all model categories. That\u2019s why virtually every automobile manufacturer in the world is switching over to electric vehicles. We just had a huge new investment here in Tennessee from Ford. Others are following along.And the fossil fuel companies are telling the markets that, yes, they appear to be losing their first and second-largest markets, but they\u2019re going to make it up with more plastics. Petrochemicals is their third-largest market. Seventy-five percent of that is plastics, and that\u2019s not working out so well for us either. And so, this short-term rally may delude some people into thinking that the trend of history may be making a U-turn. It\u2019s not. What we\u2019re doing in using the atmosphere as an open sewer is literally insane. The scientific community has been warning us in every more dire language that we are threatening the survival of human civilization.And by the way, we\u2019re seeing with the flooding in the Northwest today, with what happened in the Northeast just a few weeks ago, 93 percent of the American West is in drought, half of California--a hundred percent of California, half of California in the most extreme form of drought. Six of the seven largest fires in the history of California all took place last year. This cannot go on. And as someone famously said, if something can\u2019t go on, it won\u2019t, and markets have to adjust to this reality.That\u2019s why investors are stepping up, and that\u2019s why a lot of companies are making a hundred percent renewable commitments, beginning with the consumer-facing companies, but others are under pressure from their customers, their employees, their families, their peers. This sustainability revolution--we\u2019re in the early stages now--is the largest new business opportunity in all of history. It has the magnitude of the industrial revolution coupled with the speed of the digital revolution. And anyone is distracted by a short-term flash in the pan because of the uneven recovery from the pandemic and the supply side problems with the ports and fossil fuel supplies, so this is a short-term flash in the pan. The trend of history if very much in the direction of sustainability.MR. IGNATIUS: Let me just ask you one more thing from your FT interview and then I want to play a short clip from your wonderful film, An Inconvenient Truth. But you said something to the FT that I thought was fascinating, which was to basically argue that one of the most popular responses to climate problems--namely carbon offsets, people planting trees to make up for the carbon that they\u2019re putting into the atmosphere--makes no sense. And you had a sharp quote--I\u2019ll just read it for our viewers--\u201cIt\u2019s suicidal for the human race to continue on this track and to pretend that it can somehow be mitigated by promising to plant trees here, there, and everywhere. That is simply not realistic.\u201d So just continue that, if you would, a critique of carbon offsets.MR. GORE: Let me add that in that same interview I also pointed out that offsets do have a role to play. They just can\u2019t be a get out of jail free card.For example, let me give you an example also from the morning news. Shell Petroleum is claiming offsets from a forest that they\u2019re going to protect that was already declared a national park and is already under protection. We have seen forests claimed as offsets in the West that have burned in the last few weeks. So, they do have a role to play. So far, the best technology for sequestering carbon is called a tree. You take it to scale and it\u2019s a forest. So, we do need to plant more trees, and the offset markets can play a role. But they need to be the last resort.Job number one is reducing emissions. We are now putting 162 million tons of man-made global warming pollution into the sky as if it\u2019s an open sewer. You see a picture of the troposphere from the space station behind me, it\u2019s so thin. If you could drive a car straight up in the air at interstate highway speeds, you\u2019d get to the top of that blue line in about five minutes. That\u2019s where all the greenhouse gases congregate. And so, we have to--it\u2019s insane. The cumulative amount that lingers there, as Alexandria said, now traps as much extra heat every day as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours. This is insane. We\u2019re disrupting the water cycle. We\u2019re driving species extinct. The United Nations says that we may have 1 billion climate refugees by the middle of this century. Think of the destabilizing effect that has on political equilibria around the country. We\u2019re--I\u2019ve talked to and welcomed the refugees, and I think that\u2019s correct. But my political experience tells me that too many, too soon can trigger xenophobic reactions. And I think it\u2019s one of the reasons for this wave of populist authoritarianism that is threatening democracy and capitalism.MR. IGNATIUS: People who might imagine that this is a recent set of warnings from you need to take a look at what you were saying in 2006, where you were talking about where carbon dioxide levels might be in 50 years if nothing was done to improve the situation. Let\u2019s take a quick look at the clip from An Inconvenient Truth.[Video plays]MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Vice President, a scary chart. Where are we now on that chart regarding carbon dioxide emission?MR. GORE: Well, to give you a comparison to make those lines meaningful, this much on the coal side has been--was associated in the last ice age with having a mile of ice over your head where you\u2019re located right now. Several times that much on the warm side would lead to the possibility that you--this planet would not be inhabitable by human beings. And we are already at 417 parts per million. That compares to 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution, 260 before the agricultural revolution. And we\u2019re on the way up continually.And those two lines you saw in that graph, they show the lockstep relationship between CO2 and temperature. Now, last year was the hottest year ever measured with instruments. The hottest seven years were the last seven years. We\u2019ve now seen temperatures 125 degrees and above. We\u2019ve seen the heat index reach 165 degrees in some places--the combination of heat and humidity. And that is why there are so many areas that are now in danger of becoming literally unlivable, where human beings can\u2019t survive for more than two or three hours outdoors. And that\u2019s why a lot of them are already migrating. There--last year there were four times as many climate refugees as there were all the refugees from wars and conflicts. We got a lot of them on the southern border of Texas and of the U.S. and Mexico. And they didn\u2019t come from Mexico. They came from Central America, where like many areas in the tropics and subtropics, the combination of these elevated temperatures and droughts and rain bombs from the disruption of the water cycle are driving people away from their homes because they don\u2019t have anything to eat.MR. IGNATIUS: Alexandria, I want to ask you a question about the future politics of this issue. As you know and the vice president and we all know, we\u2019re a very divided country right now. But I\u2019m wondering whether on climate issues you find Republicans, young Republicans your age, feel pretty much the same way you do about these issues--in other words, whether it will be hard for a Republican in the future to get elected without having a more forward-leaning committed position on climate.MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: You know, this is actually something talked about a lot within my organization, Earth Uprising. And we focus a lot on climate education, and so Earth Uprising focuses on climate education peer to peer to empower young people to take direct action. And so, we have youth all across the country, and especially in very conservative neighborhoods.And what we\u2019ve noticed is that they don\u2019t necessarily see climate change as a political issue. Instead, they organize with us, and they look at the science of what is going on. And so, they--as well, what we\u2019re noticing is that they\u2019re influencing their parents as well. All these young people are seeing the science behind what is going on, and they\u2019re going and having conversations with their parents about this. And then they\u2019re influencing their parents on who they vote for and voting for a climate candidate.And so, actually a recent study showed that teenage daughters are the most influential with their parents and are changing their minds as well. And so, it\u2019s definitely the power of young people in persuading those who can vote to do the right thing, because I\u2019m 16. I won\u2019t be able to vote for a couple more years now. And for a lot of young people, we can\u2019t wait for that time. So, we need those who can vote to be able to vote for a climate candidate. And so, I need my parents to vote in my best interests. And those young people are doing the same thing. They\u2019re pushing their parents to vote for the right candidates.MR. IGNATIUS: Mr. Vice President, a quick political question for you. We are in the final days, hopefully, of congressional negotiation about an overall budget package, including a reconciliation, social spending portion that\u2019s going to provide for climate spending. A specific point of contention is the so-called CEPP, the Clean Energy Performance Plan I think is what that stands for.Senator Joe Manchin has argued that we\u2019re in a period of transition, that that plan as currently structured puts so much emphasis on renewables that it doesn\u2019t put enough money into so-called firm power--the power that\u2019s available when wind doesn\u2019t blow, the sun doesn\u2019t shine. I find a lot of sensible people who know a lot about energy and the environment think that there\u2019s a point to that, that we do need to have firm power in this plan, some kind of low-carbon fuels. What do you think about that argument?MR. GORE: Well, I think there was a time in the past where there was some merit to that argument, David. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s merit to it now. As Amory Lovins and many others have pointed out, a widely distributed grid takes care of that problem. And more to the point, the incredible advances in battery storage technology now make it possible to use solar power for many more hours after the sun goes down and wind power for many more hours after the wind stops blowing.And the emergence of green hydrogen, which is made from the surplus wind and solar when the demand is low but they\u2019re producing more of it than they can possibly use, is really taking care of that. There are places now that have already switched over to use natural gas peaker plants as a last resort to fill the remaining gaps. But, no, it is now possible to move to a hundred percent renewable energy, and there has been--there have been many studies validating that.You know, you probably knew the late great Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. He wrote a famous poem called Half Measures about a man leaping a chasm. And the point of it was, don\u2019t try to make that leap in two tranches. You have to clear it. We\u2019re now in a stage where with all the rapid deployment of renewables, it\u2019s still not enough. But we have to go the rest of the way and stop using these dirty fossil fuels. And by the way, the coal pollution is killing 9 million people a year from conventional air pollution. This is good for us in every single way. We just have to move farther and faster.MR. IGNATIUS: I want to ask you a quick question on the way out, Mr. Vice President. President Bill Clinton, with whom you served, just recovered from a health scare. He was diagnosed last week with sepsis. He was discharged from a hospital last week. I\u2019m just wondering if you\u2019ve talked to him, and how he\u2019s doing?MR. GORE: I did talk to him. He\u2019s doing well. He\u2019s looking forward to what his doctors predict will be a full recovery. He\u2019s already out of the woods, and all of us are wishing him well and hoping for a speedy and full recovery.MR. IGNATIUS: So unfortunately, we\u2019re out of time. This has been a fascinating discussion. I want to thank former Vice President Al Gore and Alexandria Villase\u00f1or for a really interesting discussion across the range of climate issues. Thanks for being with us.MR. GORE: Thank you.MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Thank you.MR. GORE: Keep it up, Alexandria!MS. VILLASE\u00d1OR: Yeah, it was great to see you. Thank you for all you\u2019re doing, Mr. Vice President.MR. IGNATIUS: So, thank you, both. As always, thanks to you, our audience, for watching. To check out what interviews we have coming up, please head to WashingtonPostLive.com to register and find out more information about our future programming. Thanks for joining us this morning.[End recorded session.]  Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: An Inconvenient Truth with Al Gore & Alexandria Villase\u00f1or",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Investing in Green Energy with John Doerr & Kelly Speakes-Backman (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8668",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/12/13/transcript-protecting-our-planet-investing-green-energy-with-john-doerr-kelly-speakes-backman/",
        "text": "MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Washington Post. Today, we\u2019re going to be having a timely discussion about investing in green energy. And I\u2019m delighted to welcome my first guest, Kelly Speakes-Backman, who joins us from the Department of Energy. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Speakes-Backman, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Thank you so much for having me today. It's nice to meet you.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Delighted to meet you. So, let's start with President Biden's announcement last week about committing the federal government to investing in clean energy and reducing federal emissions. Why is green energy so very expensive at this point?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, I would say that, actually, green energy, or clean energy, as we call it is, is not necessarily that expensive in all parts of the country. There are--there are technologies such as solar and wind that not only are at par with traditional fossil fuels, but actually are less expensive today in many parts of the country. But what we want to do is get it even further down in cost, and that's what our early--our early R&D work goes toward.AdvertisementBut it's also in recognizing that if we're going to get to our real goal, decarbonization of the grid and of our entire economy, that we need to do more work for other technologies. We can't do this with just solar and wind. We're going to need energy storage, either battery or other longer duration storage. We\u2019re going to need other technologies, waterpower technologies, geothermal. There's just a plethora of different technologies that can be applied. But again, I'd say that, for solar and wind, much of that--much of those technologies in many parts of the country, it is the least expensive technology to be applied today, and that's why we're moving towards more deployment.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, that brings me immediately to another question coming out of the news last week, and that is about inflation and energy prices, rising natural gas in particular, I think, and some of the other forms of energy that many of us depend on. I know you've spoken about short-term fixes, like plugging your windows or looking for leaks, talking to your landlord. But do you think consumers are ready for longer-term fixes, the kind of investments you're talking about?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: I think the most--one of the most exciting things about the bipartisan infrastructure law and what the president has proposed in his Build Back Better Act is actually those longer-term technologies that we can begin to deploy, right? So, within the efficiency--energy efficiency sector, yes, there is weatherization and intergovernmental programs which partners with state and locals to get those technologies that are ready today. And there are programs that local utilities as well as state energy programs, as well as in the Department of Energy, where we can help to offset the costs of that, not just the low and no-cost things that folks can do on them--do by themselves.AdvertisementBut then again, with the--with the just historic--the historic level of investment that the federal government is working to make and has begun through the bipartisan infrastructure law, there are longer-term technologies that we can help to offset these costs and eventually get them to market-ready costs that folks can implement immediately.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I'm longing to dig a little bit more deeply into this notion of bipartisan support. Politicians are notoriously short-sighted sometimes in thinking about what's needed next and thinking about the immediate needs of their constituencies. What sort of sense do you have, if there's another administration in power coming up, that these sorts of changes that the Biden's administration is committing to will be sustained?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: That's an excellent question, and it's one that we think about every day within the Department of Energy, is how do we make the changes that we're--that we're looking to implement durable; and how do we make this to be broader than just what the Department of Energy is putting together or other federal government agencies are putting together. And to me, what that means is cooperation and coordination outside of the federal agencies, to partner with state and local organizations, to partner with local community organizations to make sure that they understand and--they understand the good that this work can do, but also to make sure that the programs and the work and the funding that we are doing is tailored specifically to their needs.AdvertisementAnd so, if we are addressing the needs of the local--of the local communities, then that's something that they're going to be having ownership over, right? So, this is something that we want to embed within the fabric of Americans to be able to work with a cleaner future, to be able to have more jobs that are in that clean energy space, that are able to save money in the wintertime and in the summertime on their energy bills, and to be able to be proud of where they're getting their energy from, that it's from the sun or the wind or from the heat in the ground that we have.MS. STEAD SELLERS: But the infrastructure bill, the $1.2 trillion bill, clearly was a win for clean energy. But how soon--go a little bit farther into this--how soon will the ordinary American feel the impact of this, do you think?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, my gosh, I just--I just left a meeting on our--on some planning with my staff on how we're going to get this to market. This is a once-in-a-generation investment for our nation's infrastructure that's going to create those good paying jobs, it's going to combat climate change, it's going to grow the economy sustainably and equitably. We are hard at work listening to the communities and listening to the states and listening to the stakeholders as a whole industry to best structure how we're going to put this money out on the street. But also, there are some pretty near-term requirements of us: 90-day reports on how we're going to be implementing this plan that we're hard at work on every day, literally every day at 9:30.AdvertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: You mentioned the word \u201cequity\u201d in that, and one of the things certainly in the past two years we've become very aware of is inequities across the country. We should have been aware of them for much longer. But how are you going to make sure that people are able to access clean energy equitably across the country and also profit from its benefit?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: You know, I love that question. We recognize that the most impactful results start with those communities--and that's the entirety of the community, not just those who are most outspoken and already engaged with Department of Energy and their state energy offices. To make sure that we can build this equitable clean energy future, we have to address those--again, those particular needs of every single community. And that's not just for--I should, I should rephrase that. It includes those who have been historically underserved and overburdened by energy costs, but it also includes those who have traditionally worked hard in the fossil industry. How do we get them to transition in a fair and equitable manner?Story continues below advertisementAnd so, the first thing is to really specifically target our programs ensuring that equitable transition, thinking about it ahead of time, not just in the after--at the aftermath. And the second is to make sure that we're incorporating equity considerations through our entire DOE portfolio, thinking about how, even in the regulations that we do on appliance standards, thinking about how that specifically impacts low-income folks or folks in certain areas.AdvertisementWe've done quite a few programs already this year I'm so proud of like the Communities LEAP program, where we have issued a request for information on--for communities as to what issues they may have for this clean energy transition, and how can we provide technical assistance to help them design their own programs that we can implement. There's weatherization assistance for low-income families to help them to implement some of the more costly energy efficiency programs. And then there's the National Community Solar partnership that we've put together, where we can help communities to build solar plants that they can buy into or they can participate in, saving them money, helping them when they might not otherwise be able to put them on the rooftops of their homes and such.MS. STEAD SELLERS: You talk so committedly about this, and of course, you're talking from a federal level. Do you get to go out and see these programs being implemented and visit some of the people who will be affected by them?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, my goodness. I cannot wait to do so. We have been at the Department of Energy in a fully remote atmosphere. And so, I haven't had the privilege to be able to do this in this first year in office. I joined January 20th. But I cannot wait.AdvertisementI was able to make it out of because I was--I was able to join the secretary at the National Renewable Energy Lab, which was really exciting. But what I really want to do is get out into those communities and talk to folks. We have had a lot of stakeholder outreach and discussion virtually thus far. But I'm just so looking forward to being able to get out into the field and really meet people where they are.MS. STEAD SELLERS: And of course, you know, this issue is a global issue as you know far better than I do. But are you working--what is the department doing with other governments or with--across the world to try and make sure there's common understanding about how to move forward?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Yes, there was--I was--I also had the privilege to travel to the Conference of Parties, COP26. It was such an amazing experience to see businesses coming out with their--with their commitments, governments coming out with their commitments.AdvertisementAnd I really believe that President Biden and Secretary Granholm just really showed their return and their leadership to the global stage on decarbonization. There were several initiatives that we announced while we were out there. The Better Climate Challenge: This is an EERE-led challenge from my office, where we challenge organizations to set their own ambitious portfolio-wide greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. That's pretty exciting. The Net Zero World Initiative, where the United States is partnering with countries to rapidly scale up that energy--clean energy deployment and to help develop decarbonization strategies. And DOE-wide we're looking to mobilize our technologies and our world-class expertise from the national laboratories to help us move toward a net-zero world. And third, we announced the carbon-negative Earthshot, which is really exciting. It seeks to achieve durable and scalable carbon dioxide removal for less than $100 per net metric ton within a decade. There's so much that we're doing. H2 Twin Cities. I could go on, but I probably shouldn't.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Kelly, let me get back to the President Biden\u2019s announcement last week. Part of that initiative involves making existing federal buildings more energy efficient. That's a very expensive proposition. What do you say to people who criticize it and say it\u2019s too expensive?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: I say there is no better example of how to lead the world in decarbonization, which is, frankly, critical. We are in an urgent period of climate crisis, and there is no better way to get folks to understand that you can do this affordably and responsibly, and with a lot of fun, actually, if you lead by example. And that\u2019s one of the important elements. And so our Federal Energy Management Program office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy stands by to support agencies to make sure that we can do it in a cost-effective manner, that we are doing it with leverage of private industry dollars so that we are being as responsible as possible. And that we\u2019re doing it in concurrence with the urgency of this moment right now.AdvertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: So part of your initiative involves making renewables more cost-effective. Take us a little bit into the future and tell me when we may be able to see that in communities across the country. What--play to the end of the table a little bit on that. And with what energy sources, do you think? Are we talking solar and wind, or more innovative technologies?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, there are so many fun technologies across the clean energy space, and so I would say, yes, absolutely solar and wind are part of those. Back in--about 10 years ago with the--with the Sunshot, which the Earthshot was somewhat built upon, with the Solarshot we looked to cut in half the cost of solar in 10 years, and we did that actually in seven years. And so just this year we announced more efforts to reduce the cost of solar by half again in the next 10 years, and we believe we can do that.Part of the wind work that we have done is of course consistently on research and development. But we\u2019re also looking at how we can help the demonstration and deployment, moving further down the scale of, like, getting this in the ground. And in part of that we have made a goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind deployment by 2030. So we\u2019re looking at what we can do in this 10-year horizon but also the 2035 goal that we have to decarbonize the grid wholesale by 2035, and the economy, having a net-zero emissions economy by 2050, and that means we\u2019ve got to work with all technologies. Solar\u2019s going to be a big part of it, as will wind. But that\u2019s not going to get us everywhere. First of all, we have to start with energy efficiency. You know, the cheapest kilowatt hour that you use or the cheapest kilowatt hours are the one that you don\u2019t use. But there are also other technologies that are coming up. Hydrogen: We announced a hydrogen Earthshot to get that cost down as well. We are looking at, as I mentioned earlier, carbon dioxide negative Earthshot. We are looking at geothermal. We are looking at marine and hydropower, which, frankly, provides a 24/7 storage. It\u2019s almost like a battery, to really be able to bottle up that solar and wind when you don\u2019t need it and save it for the times that the sun\u2019s not shining and the wind\u2019s not blowing. There are so many technologies. And we\u2019re looking at 2030, we\u2019re looking at 2035, and we\u2019re looking out to 2050 to make sure that we can get to net zero.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So surprise me just quickly. Which technology excites you most?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: So that\u2019s funny, because I have twin girls and I can\u2019t choose between my children. I think all of the technologies are just so exciting. It\u2019s really a matter of how we fit them together and how we integrate them into a grid, and how we think about the timing. So, when you think of some of those of those technologies that are more ready for deployment now--solar and wind, for example--we\u2019re going all out on getting those in the ground.Then we\u2019re working on some of the technologies that need a little bit further push but that can be such an incredibly important element of decarbonization, like hydrogen and like geothermal, getting those technologies to scale. And I didn\u2019t mention but should, as we work through transportation sector and decarb--that\u2019s the highest sector that contributes to our greenhouse gases. So, working through how we can electrify transportation where it can be electrified, but also using electrification through hydrogen production on that, and bioenergy for the airlines industry. So, there\u2019s so many technologies that we need to be able to piece together, and that\u2019s why DOE is so important to our decarbonization strategy, is really thinking about how all of these fit together. Cooperation and collaboration between those offices is just really incredibly important to make sure that we get to zero economy wide.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Kelly, I think I have time for one last question, although I\u2019d love to ask a lot more. When you look overseas, the U.S. has been behind some other countries in terms of developing some clean energies. Which countries do you think are sort of beacons of, in your eyes, virtue in this field and that you see as sort of role models for the way the U.S. could go?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, just as there\u2019s so many different technologies to be working on at various stages in their commercial-ability, I think each country has quite--there are many countries that I--we look to, to learn from, not just to share our own--share our own information with. For example, you know, Europe has--especially Northern Europe has great offshore wind capabilities that we want to learn from to be able to internalize and to be able to bring some of those technologies and the deployment, leapfrog, if you will the capabilities to doing that as cost-effectively as possible. Japan has an amazing hydrogen effort, as do many countries. And so coordinating across all of the countries on how we get more hydrogen into our economy and infrastructures is an important thing. But choosing--again, choosing one country or the other is not necessarily how I can go about it.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I understand completely. I just flew back actually from London recently and was stunned by the wind farms off the coast. But, Kelly Speakes-Backman, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for making it so much fun to talk about clean energy.MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It is a lot of fun. I implore everyone to go to our website and check out all the cool things that we\u2019re doing and we\u2019re up to and reach out if you--if you\u2019re a community in need.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I\u2019ll be back in a few moments with my next guest John Doerr. Stay with us.[Video plays]MS. UMOH: Hello, everyone. I\u2019m Ruth Umoh, editor-in-chief of The Filament. The Earth\u2019s changing climate has major implications for individuals, businesses and policymakers alike and has increasingly prompted companies to embed environmental, social, and governance factors into their very business strategy. Here to discuss this more at length is Erin McGrain, senior vice president and head of SK\u2019s Washington, D.C. office, and former New York Congressman Joe Crowley. A hearty welcome to the both of you. Thank you so much for joining us.MR. CROWLEY: Thank you very much.MS. MCGRAIN: Thank you, Ruth.MS. UMOH: Thank you. Welcome, welcome. Well, let\u2019s jump right into things. Erin, we've all witnessed this, quote-unquote \u201cESG reckoning\u201d in recent years. Why is SK committed to investing in the United States, and why the emphasis on clean energy in particular?MS. MCGRAIN: Sure. Well, SK has been committed to the United States for decades now. At this time, we've invested $16 billion and have over 3,000 American workers. We've got operations and investments in over 21 states, including the District of Columbia. We are committed to investing in the United States for a number of reasons, Ruth, including the skilled workforce here, the friendly business and investment climate, our strong trade ties with South Korea, where, of course, SK is based, and our focus on clean energy and technology innovation.Our chairman has a double bottom line philosophy that measures not only economic value, but social value. This is in part why SK is emphasizing clean energy solutions that will help to address climate change on a global scale and create high-skilled jobs in clean energy for the future here in the United States.MS. UMOH: Congressman Crowley, let me pivot to you for your stance from the policy side. ESG activity has undoubtedly accelerated under the Biden administration. How do investments from companies like SK support the current administration's priorities within this realm?MR. CROWLEY: Well, thank you, Ruth. And as--I think as Erin mentioned, you know, SK and the Biden administration really share the important goal of investing in clean energy technologies of the future, which will build upon, quite frankly, the U.S.\u2019s history of being a world leader in innovation. The Biden administration understands that the private sector engagement from industry leaders like SK are going to be crucial to transitioning the American workforce to high-skilled, high-paying jobs of the future, especially for next generation clean energy manufacturing. SK\u2019s commitment to technologies like EV batteries, hydrogen, and energy storage system really aligns closely with the recent enactment of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and certain key provisions that are in the BBB or the Build Back Better legislation that's before Congress right now. And it really underscores that the administration, the Biden administration, and the private sector really share this focus on addressing climate change through not only innovation but also to investment.MS. UMOH: Certainly. Well, this heightened scrutiny and increased focus around ESG is still in its relatively nascent stages. So, let's wrap up this conversation by looking ahead. What are the clean energy technologies that will power our future world? And more importantly, how else can companies and government collaborate to nurture said innovation?MS. MCGRAIN: Well, Ruth, SK is focused on some of these exact technologies, as the congressman mentioned earlier--EV batteries, the hydrogen economy, and energy storage systems, as well as other important areas like carbon sequestration, solar, and next-generation recycling. To nurture these technologies, companies like SK are focused heavily on workforce development and education, including partnering with technical colleges, trade schools, and other community institutions to do our part to transition the American workforce to these more high-skilled, high-paying clean energy jobs.MS. UMOH: And, Congressman, from the government side.MR. CROWLEY: No, I agree, Ruth. I agree with Erin. I think the Workforce Development and STEM education are areas in which this administration, the Biden administration, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and companies like SK, they all share a common goal here and can and ought to be and should be working closely together.Another area that I think enjoys bipartisan support is the public private partnerships, the three P's. As Erin mentioned, companies invest in the U.S. for strong, innovative institutions. So enhanced public private partnerships, I think are going to be critical to developing and commercialization of clean energy technologies going forward.MS. UMOH: Absolutely. Both very well said. And as we've seen historically, public-private collaborations allow for more comprehensive and large-scale projects which can truly be transformative as we look at how to tackle climate issues. Erin, Congressman Crowley, thank you both for your time and your insights. I'll now hand things back over to The Washington Post. Thank you.MR. CROWLEY: Thanks, Ruth.MS. MCGRAIN: Thank you, Ruth.[Video plays]MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Post. Joining me now to further this discussion about investing in clean energy is author of \"Speed & Scale,\" John Doerr. John, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live.MR. DOERR: Well, thank you for having me here, Frances.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, it's a very timely discussion, and you have a book just out. We\u2019re thrilled to have you. I'd like to touch to start by talking about COP26, which wound up last month, and talk very much about government's investing in sustainable energy. What do you think the role of the public sector is moving ahead? Can it cope with the climate crisis we see ahead of us?MR. DOERR: The public sector is vital among the various actors that must come together in what I consider to be the largest mobilization that we've ever witnessed on the planet--a transformation of society greater than what the allied forces took on when they defeated the Nazi Axis in World War II. The public sector, I believe, is lagging behind the private sector and the actions of investors, and especially lagging behind impassioned youth. But COP convening, it really signaled an intention to raise the ambition and objectives. And we more than welcome it. We need it.MS. STEAD SELLERS: We just talked with Kelly from the Department of Energy about President Biden's initiative which he announced last week to green the federal government. What was your impression of that--sorry, excuse me--initiative? Do you believe that President Biden went far enough with it?MR. DOERR: Well, I think that President Biden, Secretary Granholm, Kelly, they have laid out the most ambitious agenda for energy policy the nation has ever had. And so, I'm very enthused about the Build Back Better bill. I'm very enthused about the infrastructure bill. We need all these, and we need them now.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, let's get to your book. You talk in your book about how individuals and private companies can invest and commit to this kind of future. And I'm curious about your optimism, because it certainly shines through there. Why don't you throw your hands up, why--and said we can't do it? What is the commitment, and what's the path forward that you are trying to show through that book?MR. DOERR: Well, this is a transformation unlike any other that we've witnessed or taken on. But we've had the benefit of work and researched lots of really great goals, the Paris goals, goals in the climate community. What's been lacking until now is a plan, and that's what this book, speedandscale.com offers: a clear, pragmatic, ambitious set of 10 great big objectives. Six of them are removing carbon. And each of those is then supported by some key results.I might early on in our conversation invite the readers to get a free copy of the plan. This is available now on the website speedandscale.com, to download it, and we could--we could talk more about it. But there's pretty broad agreement that we need to electrify transportation, decarbonize the grid, fix our food system, and then protect nature, clean up dirty parts of industry--how we make steel and concrete--and then--and then tackle the hard problem of carbon removal. But I want to emphasize, Frances, this can be done. We are not on track to avoid catastrophic climate crisis, but it's--we still barely have time.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I love the fact you picked up the poster, and I saw how you could click on it on the website. But going to--dig a little deeper into those, the OKRs, I guess, and maybe you can explain them as a business proposition and now as a proposition that you're looking at for curing the climate crisis.MR. DOERR: Sure. OKRs stands for objectives and key results, and they're at the heart of the book and the heart of the plan. This is a system for setting ambitious goals that was invented by a mentor of mine, Andy Grove, who was regarded at Intel company as maybe the best of his generation or are all managers. And Andy ran a chip company. When you're making computer chips, tens of thousands of people have got to get lines that are one millionth of a meter, one micron wide exactly right, or nothing works. So, he came up with this system of clearly identifying the objectives--that's what you want to have accomplished--and the key results.And so, we have six big objectives in the plan, in this plan to get us to net zero. And then there are four accelerators to make sure that we get it done in time. For every one of these objectives, there's a handful, say three to five specific timebound measurable key results.I could pick an example of one, for example. Let's do the first: electrified transportation. If the world--and this is a global plan--if the world succeeds in doing this, we can take 8 gigatons per year, and reduce it to 2 gigatons by converting all vehicles from running on gas and diesel to running on electricity from batteries. And to do that, we know we've got to get them price performance parity with the old fossil-based internal combustion engine vehicles.And the plan calls for us to do that by 2024 in the U.S. That means $35,000 per vehicle. And in China and India, by 2030, that would be $11,000 per vehicle. So, it illustrates that these big audacious objectives are teed up against a set of 55 measurable key results.The beauty of the measurability is we can track our progress along the way. And if we're falling behind, we can make mid-course corrections. We will not succeed at all these. They're ambitious, but we\u2019ll excel at some and make up for shortfalls with others. That's the plan.MS. STEAD SELLERS: John describe that for us again. At the bottom on the flip side, I saw \"innovate\" and \"invest,\" and you have great exclamation points after that. Tell me about that, the exclamation points and why investment is so important at this point.MR. DOERR: Well, let me take each of them in turn. There are some who would say we have all the technology we need today to get to net zero. That's not putting any more carbon in the atmosphere by 2050, and importantly, to get halfway there by 2030, just eight years from now. And I say rubbish. That's not true. We have many of the technologies, and the advances in wind and solar, principally advances in how cheap they are in their cost, are stunning, and they give us great hope.But we do not have all the technologies we need. And so, we need to encourage new companies being formed, research and development done by existing organizations. Let me--let me--let me just call out a couple of the of the innovations that are needed. We need to produce 10,000 gigawatt hours of batteries at less than $80 per kilowatt hour by 2035. We need to take the cost of engineered carbon dioxide removal down to $100 per ton by 2030, $50 per ton by 2040. So, I'm optimistic that this innovation can be done if we increase the funding, the federal funding, and that's part of the legislation that the Biden administration is advocating.The next area with an exclamation point is investing. And we need more global government subsidies for clean energy. We need to increase research and development. We need to grow the amount of venture capital, project financing, and philanthropic investing. And so the book lays out with not just technocratic goals, but also with, I think, memorable stories of innovators, of, of entrepreneurs, of leaders of Indigenous tribes, of impassioned, outraged youth, how our society can come together to solve this mother of all challenges.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, you're such an experienced investor. What sort of commitments do you look for in companies that you're thinking about investing in for clean energy benefit?MR. DOERR: Well, I--the first thing that I do is I form a judgment about the leadership, because no matter how excellent the plans are, plans will encounter reality and new problems and opportunities will emerge. But once you're satisfied that you have a team that wants to excel in solving these problems, then you turn to the marketplace. Will their innovation, will their contribution to the to the brutally competitive marketplace allow them to lower the cost of a clean solution? If you have the leadership right and you have the market, right, then you're off to the races, the great race of our lifetime--namely, can we get to a 50 percent reduction in emissions by the end of 2030?MS. STEAD SELLERS: And what are the major considerations that you see holding companies back from transferring themselves to sustainable practices?MR. DOERR: Well, I think the companies, the corporate sector as a constituency is responsible for some 70 percent of the emissions that come out of our business activities. And I frankly have been impressed by the actions of both large and small companies to get ahead of the governmental agreements.Now, in fairness, it's hard for our political leaders to get very far ahead of the body politic. And as the book points out, in most places in the world, climate is not a top-two voting issue. It is in Europe. It is not in the US. It is not in China. It is not in India. And so we have work to do on the ground as the world endures increasing storms and hurr",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Investing in Green Energy with John Doerr & Kelly Speakes-Backman (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8669",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/12/13/transcript-protecting-our-planet-investing-green-energy-with-john-doerr-kelly-speakes-backman/",
        "text": "MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Washington Post. Today, we\u2019re going to be having a timely discussion about investing in green energy. And I\u2019m delighted to welcome my first guest, Kelly Speakes-Backman, who joins us from the Department of Energy. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Speakes-Backman, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Thank you so much for having me today. It's nice to meet you.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Delighted to meet you. So, let's start with President Biden's announcement last week about committing the federal government to investing in clean energy and reducing federal emissions. Why is green energy so very expensive at this point?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, I would say that, actually, green energy, or clean energy, as we call it is, is not necessarily that expensive in all parts of the country. There are--there are technologies such as solar and wind that not only are at par with traditional fossil fuels, but actually are less expensive today in many parts of the country. But what we want to do is get it even further down in cost, and that's what our early--our early R&D work goes toward.AdvertisementBut it's also in recognizing that if we're going to get to our real goal, decarbonization of the grid and of our entire economy, that we need to do more work for other technologies. We can't do this with just solar and wind. We're going to need energy storage, either battery or other longer duration storage. We\u2019re going to need other technologies, waterpower technologies, geothermal. There's just a plethora of different technologies that can be applied. But again, I'd say that, for solar and wind, much of that--much of those technologies in many parts of the country, it is the least expensive technology to be applied today, and that's why we're moving towards more deployment.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, that brings me immediately to another question coming out of the news last week, and that is about inflation and energy prices, rising natural gas in particular, I think, and some of the other forms of energy that many of us depend on. I know you've spoken about short-term fixes, like plugging your windows or looking for leaks, talking to your landlord. But do you think consumers are ready for longer-term fixes, the kind of investments you're talking about?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: I think the most--one of the most exciting things about the bipartisan infrastructure law and what the president has proposed in his Build Back Better Act is actually those longer-term technologies that we can begin to deploy, right? So, within the efficiency--energy efficiency sector, yes, there is weatherization and intergovernmental programs which partners with state and locals to get those technologies that are ready today. And there are programs that local utilities as well as state energy programs, as well as in the Department of Energy, where we can help to offset the costs of that, not just the low and no-cost things that folks can do on them--do by themselves.AdvertisementBut then again, with the--with the just historic--the historic level of investment that the federal government is working to make and has begun through the bipartisan infrastructure law, there are longer-term technologies that we can help to offset these costs and eventually get them to market-ready costs that folks can implement immediately.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I'm longing to dig a little bit more deeply into this notion of bipartisan support. Politicians are notoriously short-sighted sometimes in thinking about what's needed next and thinking about the immediate needs of their constituencies. What sort of sense do you have, if there's another administration in power coming up, that these sorts of changes that the Biden's administration is committing to will be sustained?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: That's an excellent question, and it's one that we think about every day within the Department of Energy, is how do we make the changes that we're--that we're looking to implement durable; and how do we make this to be broader than just what the Department of Energy is putting together or other federal government agencies are putting together. And to me, what that means is cooperation and coordination outside of the federal agencies, to partner with state and local organizations, to partner with local community organizations to make sure that they understand and--they understand the good that this work can do, but also to make sure that the programs and the work and the funding that we are doing is tailored specifically to their needs.AdvertisementAnd so, if we are addressing the needs of the local--of the local communities, then that's something that they're going to be having ownership over, right? So, this is something that we want to embed within the fabric of Americans to be able to work with a cleaner future, to be able to have more jobs that are in that clean energy space, that are able to save money in the wintertime and in the summertime on their energy bills, and to be able to be proud of where they're getting their energy from, that it's from the sun or the wind or from the heat in the ground that we have.MS. STEAD SELLERS: But the infrastructure bill, the $1.2 trillion bill, clearly was a win for clean energy. But how soon--go a little bit farther into this--how soon will the ordinary American feel the impact of this, do you think?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, my gosh, I just--I just left a meeting on our--on some planning with my staff on how we're going to get this to market. This is a once-in-a-generation investment for our nation's infrastructure that's going to create those good paying jobs, it's going to combat climate change, it's going to grow the economy sustainably and equitably. We are hard at work listening to the communities and listening to the states and listening to the stakeholders as a whole industry to best structure how we're going to put this money out on the street. But also, there are some pretty near-term requirements of us: 90-day reports on how we're going to be implementing this plan that we're hard at work on every day, literally every day at 9:30.AdvertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: You mentioned the word \u201cequity\u201d in that, and one of the things certainly in the past two years we've become very aware of is inequities across the country. We should have been aware of them for much longer. But how are you going to make sure that people are able to access clean energy equitably across the country and also profit from its benefit?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: You know, I love that question. We recognize that the most impactful results start with those communities--and that's the entirety of the community, not just those who are most outspoken and already engaged with Department of Energy and their state energy offices. To make sure that we can build this equitable clean energy future, we have to address those--again, those particular needs of every single community. And that's not just for--I should, I should rephrase that. It includes those who have been historically underserved and overburdened by energy costs, but it also includes those who have traditionally worked hard in the fossil industry. How do we get them to transition in a fair and equitable manner?Story continues below advertisementAnd so, the first thing is to really specifically target our programs ensuring that equitable transition, thinking about it ahead of time, not just in the after--at the aftermath. And the second is to make sure that we're incorporating equity considerations through our entire DOE portfolio, thinking about how, even in the regulations that we do on appliance standards, thinking about how that specifically impacts low-income folks or folks in certain areas.AdvertisementWe've done quite a few programs already this year I'm so proud of like the Communities LEAP program, where we have issued a request for information on--for communities as to what issues they may have for this clean energy transition, and how can we provide technical assistance to help them design their own programs that we can implement. There's weatherization assistance for low-income families to help them to implement some of the more costly energy efficiency programs. And then there's the National Community Solar partnership that we've put together, where we can help communities to build solar plants that they can buy into or they can participate in, saving them money, helping them when they might not otherwise be able to put them on the rooftops of their homes and such.MS. STEAD SELLERS: You talk so committedly about this, and of course, you're talking from a federal level. Do you get to go out and see these programs being implemented and visit some of the people who will be affected by them?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, my goodness. I cannot wait to do so. We have been at the Department of Energy in a fully remote atmosphere. And so, I haven't had the privilege to be able to do this in this first year in office. I joined January 20th. But I cannot wait.AdvertisementI was able to make it out of because I was--I was able to join the secretary at the National Renewable Energy Lab, which was really exciting. But what I really want to do is get out into those communities and talk to folks. We have had a lot of stakeholder outreach and discussion virtually thus far. But I'm just so looking forward to being able to get out into the field and really meet people where they are.MS. STEAD SELLERS: And of course, you know, this issue is a global issue as you know far better than I do. But are you working--what is the department doing with other governments or with--across the world to try and make sure there's common understanding about how to move forward?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Yes, there was--I was--I also had the privilege to travel to the Conference of Parties, COP26. It was such an amazing experience to see businesses coming out with their--with their commitments, governments coming out with their commitments.AdvertisementAnd I really believe that President Biden and Secretary Granholm just really showed their return and their leadership to the global stage on decarbonization. There were several initiatives that we announced while we were out there. The Better Climate Challenge: This is an EERE-led challenge from my office, where we challenge organizations to set their own ambitious portfolio-wide greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. That's pretty exciting. The Net Zero World Initiative, where the United States is partnering with countries to rapidly scale up that energy--clean energy deployment and to help develop decarbonization strategies. And DOE-wide we're looking to mobilize our technologies and our world-class expertise from the national laboratories to help us move toward a net-zero world. And third, we announced the carbon-negative Earthshot, which is really exciting. It seeks to achieve durable and scalable carbon dioxide removal for less than $100 per net metric ton within a decade. There's so much that we're doing. H2 Twin Cities. I could go on, but I probably shouldn't.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Kelly, let me get back to the President Biden\u2019s announcement last week. Part of that initiative involves making existing federal buildings more energy efficient. That's a very expensive proposition. What do you say to people who criticize it and say it\u2019s too expensive?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: I say there is no better example of how to lead the world in decarbonization, which is, frankly, critical. We are in an urgent period of climate crisis, and there is no better way to get folks to understand that you can do this affordably and responsibly, and with a lot of fun, actually, if you lead by example. And that\u2019s one of the important elements. And so our Federal Energy Management Program office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy stands by to support agencies to make sure that we can do it in a cost-effective manner, that we are doing it with leverage of private industry dollars so that we are being as responsible as possible. And that we\u2019re doing it in concurrence with the urgency of this moment right now.AdvertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: So part of your initiative involves making renewables more cost-effective. Take us a little bit into the future and tell me when we may be able to see that in communities across the country. What--play to the end of the table a little bit on that. And with what energy sources, do you think? Are we talking solar and wind, or more innovative technologies?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, there are so many fun technologies across the clean energy space, and so I would say, yes, absolutely solar and wind are part of those. Back in--about 10 years ago with the--with the Sunshot, which the Earthshot was somewhat built upon, with the Solarshot we looked to cut in half the cost of solar in 10 years, and we did that actually in seven years. And so just this year we announced more efforts to reduce the cost of solar by half again in the next 10 years, and we believe we can do that.Part of the wind work that we have done is of course consistently on research and development. But we\u2019re also looking at how we can help the demonstration and deployment, moving further down the scale of, like, getting this in the ground. And in part of that we have made a goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind deployment by 2030. So we\u2019re looking at what we can do in this 10-year horizon but also the 2035 goal that we have to decarbonize the grid wholesale by 2035, and the economy, having a net-zero emissions economy by 2050, and that means we\u2019ve got to work with all technologies. Solar\u2019s going to be a big part of it, as will wind. But that\u2019s not going to get us everywhere. First of all, we have to start with energy efficiency. You know, the cheapest kilowatt hour that you use or the cheapest kilowatt hours are the one that you don\u2019t use. But there are also other technologies that are coming up. Hydrogen: We announced a hydrogen Earthshot to get that cost down as well. We are looking at, as I mentioned earlier, carbon dioxide negative Earthshot. We are looking at geothermal. We are looking at marine and hydropower, which, frankly, provides a 24/7 storage. It\u2019s almost like a battery, to really be able to bottle up that solar and wind when you don\u2019t need it and save it for the times that the sun\u2019s not shining and the wind\u2019s not blowing. There are so many technologies. And we\u2019re looking at 2030, we\u2019re looking at 2035, and we\u2019re looking out to 2050 to make sure that we can get to net zero.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So surprise me just quickly. Which technology excites you most?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: So that\u2019s funny, because I have twin girls and I can\u2019t choose between my children. I think all of the technologies are just so exciting. It\u2019s really a matter of how we fit them together and how we integrate them into a grid, and how we think about the timing. So, when you think of some of those of those technologies that are more ready for deployment now--solar and wind, for example--we\u2019re going all out on getting those in the ground.Then we\u2019re working on some of the technologies that need a little bit further push but that can be such an incredibly important element of decarbonization, like hydrogen and like geothermal, getting those technologies to scale. And I didn\u2019t mention but should, as we work through transportation sector and decarb--that\u2019s the highest sector that contributes to our greenhouse gases. So, working through how we can electrify transportation where it can be electrified, but also using electrification through hydrogen production on that, and bioenergy for the airlines industry. So, there\u2019s so many technologies that we need to be able to piece together, and that\u2019s why DOE is so important to our decarbonization strategy, is really thinking about how all of these fit together. Cooperation and collaboration between those offices is just really incredibly important to make sure that we get to zero economy wide.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Kelly, I think I have time for one last question, although I\u2019d love to ask a lot more. When you look overseas, the U.S. has been behind some other countries in terms of developing some clean energies. Which countries do you think are sort of beacons of, in your eyes, virtue in this field and that you see as sort of role models for the way the U.S. could go?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, just as there\u2019s so many different technologies to be working on at various stages in their commercial-ability, I think each country has quite--there are many countries that I--we look to, to learn from, not just to share our own--share our own information with. For example, you know, Europe has--especially Northern Europe has great offshore wind capabilities that we want to learn from to be able to internalize and to be able to bring some of those technologies and the deployment, leapfrog, if you will the capabilities to doing that as cost-effectively as possible. Japan has an amazing hydrogen effort, as do many countries. And so coordinating across all of the countries on how we get more hydrogen into our economy and infrastructures is an important thing. But choosing--again, choosing one country or the other is not necessarily how I can go about it.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I understand completely. I just flew back actually from London recently and was stunned by the wind farms off the coast. But, Kelly Speakes-Backman, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for making it so much fun to talk about clean energy.MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It is a lot of fun. I implore everyone to go to our website and check out all the cool things that we\u2019re doing and we\u2019re up to and reach out if you--if you\u2019re a community in need.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I\u2019ll be back in a few moments with my next guest John Doerr. Stay with us.[Video plays]MS. UMOH: Hello, everyone. I\u2019m Ruth Umoh, editor-in-chief of The Filament. The Earth\u2019s changing climate has major implications for individuals, businesses and policymakers alike and has increasingly prompted companies to embed environmental, social, and governance factors into their very business strategy. Here to discuss this more at length is Erin McGrain, senior vice president and head of SK\u2019s Washington, D.C. office, and former New York Congressman Joe Crowley. A hearty welcome to the both of you. Thank you so much for joining us.MR. CROWLEY: Thank you very much.MS. MCGRAIN: Thank you, Ruth.MS. UMOH: Thank you. Welcome, welcome. Well, let\u2019s jump right into things. Erin, we've all witnessed this, quote-unquote \u201cESG reckoning\u201d in recent years. Why is SK committed to investing in the United States, and why the emphasis on clean energy in particular?MS. MCGRAIN: Sure. Well, SK has been committed to the United States for decades now. At this time, we've invested $16 billion and have over 3,000 American workers. We've got operations and investments in over 21 states, including the District of Columbia. We are committed to investing in the United States for a number of reasons, Ruth, including the skilled workforce here, the friendly business and investment climate, our strong trade ties with South Korea, where, of course, SK is based, and our focus on clean energy and technology innovation.Our chairman has a double bottom line philosophy that measures not only economic value, but social value. This is in part why SK is emphasizing clean energy solutions that will help to address climate change on a global scale and create high-skilled jobs in clean energy for the future here in the United States.MS. UMOH: Congressman Crowley, let me pivot to you for your stance from the policy side. ESG activity has undoubtedly accelerated under the Biden administration. How do investments from companies like SK support the current administration's priorities within this realm?MR. CROWLEY: Well, thank you, Ruth. And as--I think as Erin mentioned, you know, SK and the Biden administration really share the important goal of investing in clean energy technologies of the future, which will build upon, quite frankly, the U.S.\u2019s history of being a world leader in innovation. The Biden administration understands that the private sector engagement from industry leaders like SK are going to be crucial to transitioning the American workforce to high-skilled, high-paying jobs of the future, especially for next generation clean energy manufacturing. SK\u2019s commitment to technologies like EV batteries, hydrogen, and energy storage system really aligns closely with the recent enactment of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and certain key provisions that are in the BBB or the Build Back Better legislation that's before Congress right now. And it really underscores that the administration, the Biden administration, and the private sector really share this focus on addressing climate change through not only innovation but also to investment.MS. UMOH: Certainly. Well, this heightened scrutiny and increased focus around ESG is still in its relatively nascent stages. So, let's wrap up this conversation by looking ahead. What are the clean energy technologies that will power our future world? And more importantly, how else can companies and government collaborate to nurture said innovation?MS. MCGRAIN: Well, Ruth, SK is focused on some of these exact technologies, as the congressman mentioned earlier--EV batteries, the hydrogen economy, and energy storage systems, as well as other important areas like carbon sequestration, solar, and next-generation recycling. To nurture these technologies, companies like SK are focused heavily on workforce development and education, including partnering with technical colleges, trade schools, and other community institutions to do our part to transition the American workforce to these more high-skilled, high-paying clean energy jobs.MS. UMOH: And, Congressman, from the government side.MR. CROWLEY: No, I agree, Ruth. I agree with Erin. I think the Workforce Development and STEM education are areas in which this administration, the Biden administration, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and companies like SK, they all share a common goal here and can and ought to be and should be working closely together.Another area that I think enjoys bipartisan support is the public private partnerships, the three P's. As Erin mentioned, companies invest in the U.S. for strong, innovative institutions. So enhanced public private partnerships, I think are going to be critical to developing and commercialization of clean energy technologies going forward.MS. UMOH: Absolutely. Both very well said. And as we've seen historically, public-private collaborations allow for more comprehensive and large-scale projects which can truly be transformative as we look at how to tackle climate issues. Erin, Congressman Crowley, thank you both for your time and your insights. I'll now hand things back over to The Washington Post. Thank you.MR. CROWLEY: Thanks, Ruth.MS. MCGRAIN: Thank you, Ruth.[Video plays]MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Post. Joining me now to further this discussion about investing in clean energy is author of \"Speed & Scale,\" John Doerr. John, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live.MR. DOERR: Well, thank you for having me here, Frances.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, it's a very timely discussion, and you have a book just out. We\u2019re thrilled to have you. I'd like to touch to start by talking about COP26, which wound up last month, and talk very much about government's investing in sustainable energy. What do you think the role of the public sector is moving ahead? Can it cope with the climate crisis we see ahead of us?MR. DOERR: The public sector is vital among the various actors that must come together in what I consider to be the largest mobilization that we've ever witnessed on the planet--a transformation of society greater than what the allied forces took on when they defeated the Nazi Axis in World War II. The public sector, I believe, is lagging behind the private sector and the actions of investors, and especially lagging behind impassioned youth. But COP convening, it really signaled an intention to raise the ambition and objectives. And we more than welcome it. We need it.MS. STEAD SELLERS: We just talked with Kelly from the Department of Energy about President Biden's initiative which he announced last week to green the federal government. What was your impression of that--sorry, excuse me--initiative? Do you believe that President Biden went far enough with it?MR. DOERR: Well, I think that President Biden, Secretary Granholm, Kelly, they have laid out the most ambitious agenda for energy policy the nation has ever had. And so, I'm very enthused about the Build Back Better bill. I'm very enthused about the infrastructure bill. We need all these, and we need them now.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, let's get to your book. You talk in your book about how individuals and private companies can invest and commit to this kind of future. And I'm curious about your optimism, because it certainly shines through there. Why don't you throw your hands up, why--and said we can't do it? What is the commitment, and what's the path forward that you are trying to show through that book?MR. DOERR: Well, this is a transformation unlike any other that we've witnessed or taken on. But we've had the benefit of work and researched lots of really great goals, the Paris goals, goals in the climate community. What's been lacking until now is a plan, and that's what this book, speedandscale.com offers: a clear, pragmatic, ambitious set of 10 great big objectives. Six of them are removing carbon. And each of those is then supported by some key results.I might early on in our conversation invite the readers to get a free copy of the plan. This is available now on the website speedandscale.com, to download it, and we could--we could talk more about it. But there's pretty broad agreement that we need to electrify transportation, decarbonize the grid, fix our food system, and then protect nature, clean up dirty parts of industry--how we make steel and concrete--and then--and then tackle the hard problem of carbon removal. But I want to emphasize, Frances, this can be done. We are not on track to avoid catastrophic climate crisis, but it's--we still barely have time.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I love the fact you picked up the poster, and I saw how you could click on it on the website. But going to--dig a little deeper into those, the OKRs, I guess, and maybe you can explain them as a business proposition and now as a proposition that you're looking at for curing the climate crisis.MR. DOERR: Sure. OKRs stands for objectives and key results, and they're at the heart of the book and the heart of the plan. This is a system for setting ambitious goals that was invented by a mentor of mine, Andy Grove, who was regarded at Intel company as maybe the best of his generation or are all managers. And Andy ran a chip company. When you're making computer chips, tens of thousands of people have got to get lines that are one millionth of a meter, one micron wide exactly right, or nothing works. So, he came up with this system of clearly identifying the objectives--that's what you want to have accomplished--and the key results.And so, we have six big objectives in the plan, in this plan to get us to net zero. And then there are four accelerators to make sure that we get it done in time. For every one of these objectives, there's a handful, say three to five specific timebound measurable key results.I could pick an example of one, for example. Let's do the first: electrified transportation. If the world--and this is a global plan--if the world succeeds in doing this, we can take 8 gigatons per year, and reduce it to 2 gigatons by converting all vehicles from running on gas and diesel to running on electricity from batteries. And to do that, we know we've got to get them price performance parity with the old fossil-based internal combustion engine vehicles.And the plan calls for us to do that by 2024 in the U.S. That means $35,000 per vehicle. And in China and India, by 2030, that would be $11,000 per vehicle. So, it illustrates that these big audacious objectives are teed up against a set of 55 measurable key results.The beauty of the measurability is we can track our progress along the way. And if we're falling behind, we can make mid-course corrections. We will not succeed at all these. They're ambitious, but we\u2019ll excel at some and make up for shortfalls with others. That's the plan.MS. STEAD SELLERS: John describe that for us again. At the bottom on the flip side, I saw \"innovate\" and \"invest,\" and you have great exclamation points after that. Tell me about that, the exclamation points and why investment is so important at this point.MR. DOERR: Well, let me take each of them in turn. There are some who would say we have all the technology we need today to get to net zero. That's not putting any more carbon in the atmosphere by 2050, and importantly, to get halfway there by 2030, just eight years from now. And I say rubbish. That's not true. We have many of the technologies, and the advances in wind and solar, principally advances in how cheap they are in their cost, are stunning, and they give us great hope.But we do not have all the technologies we need. And so, we need to encourage new companies being formed, research and development done by existing organizations. Let me--let me--let me just call out a couple of the of the innovations that are needed. We need to produce 10,000 gigawatt hours of batteries at less than $80 per kilowatt hour by 2035. We need to take the cost of engineered carbon dioxide removal down to $100 per ton by 2030, $50 per ton by 2040. So, I'm optimistic that this innovation can be done if we increase the funding, the federal funding, and that's part of the legislation that the Biden administration is advocating.The next area with an exclamation point is investing. And we need more global government subsidies for clean energy. We need to increase research and development. We need to grow the amount of venture capital, project financing, and philanthropic investing. And so the book lays out with not just technocratic goals, but also with, I think, memorable stories of innovators, of, of entrepreneurs, of leaders of Indigenous tribes, of impassioned, outraged youth, how our society can come together to solve this mother of all challenges.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, you're such an experienced investor. What sort of commitments do you look for in companies that you're thinking about investing in for clean energy benefit?MR. DOERR: Well, I--the first thing that I do is I form a judgment about the leadership, because no matter how excellent the plans are, plans will encounter reality and new problems and opportunities will emerge. But once you're satisfied that you have a team that wants to excel in solving these problems, then you turn to the marketplace. Will their innovation, will their contribution to the to the brutally competitive marketplace allow them to lower the cost of a clean solution? If you have the leadership right and you have the market, right, then you're off to the races, the great race of our lifetime--namely, can we get to a 50 percent reduction in emissions by the end of 2030?MS. STEAD SELLERS: And what are the major considerations that you see holding companies back from transferring themselves to sustainable practices?MR. DOERR: Well, I think the companies, the corporate sector as a constituency is responsible for some 70 percent of the emissions that come out of our business activities. And I frankly have been impressed by the actions of both large and small companies to get ahead of the governmental agreements.Now, in fairness, it's hard for our political leaders to get very far ahead of the body politic. And as the book points out, in most places in the world, climate is not a top-two voting issue. It is in Europe. It is not in the US. It is not in China. It is not in India. And so we have work to do on the ground as the world endures increasing storms and hurr",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Investing in Green Energy with John Doerr & Kelly Speakes-Backman (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8670",
        "date": "2021-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/12/13/transcript-protecting-our-planet-investing-green-energy-with-john-doerr-kelly-speakes-backman/",
        "text": "MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Washington Post. Today, we\u2019re going to be having a timely discussion about investing in green energy. And I\u2019m delighted to welcome my first guest, Kelly Speakes-Backman, who joins us from the Department of Energy. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Speakes-Backman, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Thank you so much for having me today. It's nice to meet you.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Delighted to meet you. So, let's start with President Biden's announcement last week about committing the federal government to investing in clean energy and reducing federal emissions. Why is green energy so very expensive at this point?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, I would say that, actually, green energy, or clean energy, as we call it is, is not necessarily that expensive in all parts of the country. There are--there are technologies such as solar and wind that not only are at par with traditional fossil fuels, but actually are less expensive today in many parts of the country. But what we want to do is get it even further down in cost, and that's what our early--our early R&D work goes toward.AdvertisementBut it's also in recognizing that if we're going to get to our real goal, decarbonization of the grid and of our entire economy, that we need to do more work for other technologies. We can't do this with just solar and wind. We're going to need energy storage, either battery or other longer duration storage. We\u2019re going to need other technologies, waterpower technologies, geothermal. There's just a plethora of different technologies that can be applied. But again, I'd say that, for solar and wind, much of that--much of those technologies in many parts of the country, it is the least expensive technology to be applied today, and that's why we're moving towards more deployment.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, that brings me immediately to another question coming out of the news last week, and that is about inflation and energy prices, rising natural gas in particular, I think, and some of the other forms of energy that many of us depend on. I know you've spoken about short-term fixes, like plugging your windows or looking for leaks, talking to your landlord. But do you think consumers are ready for longer-term fixes, the kind of investments you're talking about?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: I think the most--one of the most exciting things about the bipartisan infrastructure law and what the president has proposed in his Build Back Better Act is actually those longer-term technologies that we can begin to deploy, right? So, within the efficiency--energy efficiency sector, yes, there is weatherization and intergovernmental programs which partners with state and locals to get those technologies that are ready today. And there are programs that local utilities as well as state energy programs, as well as in the Department of Energy, where we can help to offset the costs of that, not just the low and no-cost things that folks can do on them--do by themselves.AdvertisementBut then again, with the--with the just historic--the historic level of investment that the federal government is working to make and has begun through the bipartisan infrastructure law, there are longer-term technologies that we can help to offset these costs and eventually get them to market-ready costs that folks can implement immediately.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I'm longing to dig a little bit more deeply into this notion of bipartisan support. Politicians are notoriously short-sighted sometimes in thinking about what's needed next and thinking about the immediate needs of their constituencies. What sort of sense do you have, if there's another administration in power coming up, that these sorts of changes that the Biden's administration is committing to will be sustained?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: That's an excellent question, and it's one that we think about every day within the Department of Energy, is how do we make the changes that we're--that we're looking to implement durable; and how do we make this to be broader than just what the Department of Energy is putting together or other federal government agencies are putting together. And to me, what that means is cooperation and coordination outside of the federal agencies, to partner with state and local organizations, to partner with local community organizations to make sure that they understand and--they understand the good that this work can do, but also to make sure that the programs and the work and the funding that we are doing is tailored specifically to their needs.AdvertisementAnd so, if we are addressing the needs of the local--of the local communities, then that's something that they're going to be having ownership over, right? So, this is something that we want to embed within the fabric of Americans to be able to work with a cleaner future, to be able to have more jobs that are in that clean energy space, that are able to save money in the wintertime and in the summertime on their energy bills, and to be able to be proud of where they're getting their energy from, that it's from the sun or the wind or from the heat in the ground that we have.MS. STEAD SELLERS: But the infrastructure bill, the $1.2 trillion bill, clearly was a win for clean energy. But how soon--go a little bit farther into this--how soon will the ordinary American feel the impact of this, do you think?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, my gosh, I just--I just left a meeting on our--on some planning with my staff on how we're going to get this to market. This is a once-in-a-generation investment for our nation's infrastructure that's going to create those good paying jobs, it's going to combat climate change, it's going to grow the economy sustainably and equitably. We are hard at work listening to the communities and listening to the states and listening to the stakeholders as a whole industry to best structure how we're going to put this money out on the street. But also, there are some pretty near-term requirements of us: 90-day reports on how we're going to be implementing this plan that we're hard at work on every day, literally every day at 9:30.AdvertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: You mentioned the word \u201cequity\u201d in that, and one of the things certainly in the past two years we've become very aware of is inequities across the country. We should have been aware of them for much longer. But how are you going to make sure that people are able to access clean energy equitably across the country and also profit from its benefit?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: You know, I love that question. We recognize that the most impactful results start with those communities--and that's the entirety of the community, not just those who are most outspoken and already engaged with Department of Energy and their state energy offices. To make sure that we can build this equitable clean energy future, we have to address those--again, those particular needs of every single community. And that's not just for--I should, I should rephrase that. It includes those who have been historically underserved and overburdened by energy costs, but it also includes those who have traditionally worked hard in the fossil industry. How do we get them to transition in a fair and equitable manner?Story continues below advertisementAnd so, the first thing is to really specifically target our programs ensuring that equitable transition, thinking about it ahead of time, not just in the after--at the aftermath. And the second is to make sure that we're incorporating equity considerations through our entire DOE portfolio, thinking about how, even in the regulations that we do on appliance standards, thinking about how that specifically impacts low-income folks or folks in certain areas.AdvertisementWe've done quite a few programs already this year I'm so proud of like the Communities LEAP program, where we have issued a request for information on--for communities as to what issues they may have for this clean energy transition, and how can we provide technical assistance to help them design their own programs that we can implement. There's weatherization assistance for low-income families to help them to implement some of the more costly energy efficiency programs. And then there's the National Community Solar partnership that we've put together, where we can help communities to build solar plants that they can buy into or they can participate in, saving them money, helping them when they might not otherwise be able to put them on the rooftops of their homes and such.MS. STEAD SELLERS: You talk so committedly about this, and of course, you're talking from a federal level. Do you get to go out and see these programs being implemented and visit some of the people who will be affected by them?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, my goodness. I cannot wait to do so. We have been at the Department of Energy in a fully remote atmosphere. And so, I haven't had the privilege to be able to do this in this first year in office. I joined January 20th. But I cannot wait.AdvertisementI was able to make it out of because I was--I was able to join the secretary at the National Renewable Energy Lab, which was really exciting. But what I really want to do is get out into those communities and talk to folks. We have had a lot of stakeholder outreach and discussion virtually thus far. But I'm just so looking forward to being able to get out into the field and really meet people where they are.MS. STEAD SELLERS: And of course, you know, this issue is a global issue as you know far better than I do. But are you working--what is the department doing with other governments or with--across the world to try and make sure there's common understanding about how to move forward?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Yes, there was--I was--I also had the privilege to travel to the Conference of Parties, COP26. It was such an amazing experience to see businesses coming out with their--with their commitments, governments coming out with their commitments.AdvertisementAnd I really believe that President Biden and Secretary Granholm just really showed their return and their leadership to the global stage on decarbonization. There were several initiatives that we announced while we were out there. The Better Climate Challenge: This is an EERE-led challenge from my office, where we challenge organizations to set their own ambitious portfolio-wide greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. That's pretty exciting. The Net Zero World Initiative, where the United States is partnering with countries to rapidly scale up that energy--clean energy deployment and to help develop decarbonization strategies. And DOE-wide we're looking to mobilize our technologies and our world-class expertise from the national laboratories to help us move toward a net-zero world. And third, we announced the carbon-negative Earthshot, which is really exciting. It seeks to achieve durable and scalable carbon dioxide removal for less than $100 per net metric ton within a decade. There's so much that we're doing. H2 Twin Cities. I could go on, but I probably shouldn't.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, Kelly, let me get back to the President Biden\u2019s announcement last week. Part of that initiative involves making existing federal buildings more energy efficient. That's a very expensive proposition. What do you say to people who criticize it and say it\u2019s too expensive?Story continues below advertisementMS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: I say there is no better example of how to lead the world in decarbonization, which is, frankly, critical. We are in an urgent period of climate crisis, and there is no better way to get folks to understand that you can do this affordably and responsibly, and with a lot of fun, actually, if you lead by example. And that\u2019s one of the important elements. And so our Federal Energy Management Program office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy stands by to support agencies to make sure that we can do it in a cost-effective manner, that we are doing it with leverage of private industry dollars so that we are being as responsible as possible. And that we\u2019re doing it in concurrence with the urgency of this moment right now.AdvertisementMS. STEAD SELLERS: So part of your initiative involves making renewables more cost-effective. Take us a little bit into the future and tell me when we may be able to see that in communities across the country. What--play to the end of the table a little bit on that. And with what energy sources, do you think? Are we talking solar and wind, or more innovative technologies?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, there are so many fun technologies across the clean energy space, and so I would say, yes, absolutely solar and wind are part of those. Back in--about 10 years ago with the--with the Sunshot, which the Earthshot was somewhat built upon, with the Solarshot we looked to cut in half the cost of solar in 10 years, and we did that actually in seven years. And so just this year we announced more efforts to reduce the cost of solar by half again in the next 10 years, and we believe we can do that.Part of the wind work that we have done is of course consistently on research and development. But we\u2019re also looking at how we can help the demonstration and deployment, moving further down the scale of, like, getting this in the ground. And in part of that we have made a goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind deployment by 2030. So we\u2019re looking at what we can do in this 10-year horizon but also the 2035 goal that we have to decarbonize the grid wholesale by 2035, and the economy, having a net-zero emissions economy by 2050, and that means we\u2019ve got to work with all technologies. Solar\u2019s going to be a big part of it, as will wind. But that\u2019s not going to get us everywhere. First of all, we have to start with energy efficiency. You know, the cheapest kilowatt hour that you use or the cheapest kilowatt hours are the one that you don\u2019t use. But there are also other technologies that are coming up. Hydrogen: We announced a hydrogen Earthshot to get that cost down as well. We are looking at, as I mentioned earlier, carbon dioxide negative Earthshot. We are looking at geothermal. We are looking at marine and hydropower, which, frankly, provides a 24/7 storage. It\u2019s almost like a battery, to really be able to bottle up that solar and wind when you don\u2019t need it and save it for the times that the sun\u2019s not shining and the wind\u2019s not blowing. There are so many technologies. And we\u2019re looking at 2030, we\u2019re looking at 2035, and we\u2019re looking out to 2050 to make sure that we can get to net zero.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So surprise me just quickly. Which technology excites you most?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: So that\u2019s funny, because I have twin girls and I can\u2019t choose between my children. I think all of the technologies are just so exciting. It\u2019s really a matter of how we fit them together and how we integrate them into a grid, and how we think about the timing. So, when you think of some of those of those technologies that are more ready for deployment now--solar and wind, for example--we\u2019re going all out on getting those in the ground.Then we\u2019re working on some of the technologies that need a little bit further push but that can be such an incredibly important element of decarbonization, like hydrogen and like geothermal, getting those technologies to scale. And I didn\u2019t mention but should, as we work through transportation sector and decarb--that\u2019s the highest sector that contributes to our greenhouse gases. So, working through how we can electrify transportation where it can be electrified, but also using electrification through hydrogen production on that, and bioenergy for the airlines industry. So, there\u2019s so many technologies that we need to be able to piece together, and that\u2019s why DOE is so important to our decarbonization strategy, is really thinking about how all of these fit together. Cooperation and collaboration between those offices is just really incredibly important to make sure that we get to zero economy wide.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Kelly, I think I have time for one last question, although I\u2019d love to ask a lot more. When you look overseas, the U.S. has been behind some other countries in terms of developing some clean energies. Which countries do you think are sort of beacons of, in your eyes, virtue in this field and that you see as sort of role models for the way the U.S. could go?MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Well, just as there\u2019s so many different technologies to be working on at various stages in their commercial-ability, I think each country has quite--there are many countries that I--we look to, to learn from, not just to share our own--share our own information with. For example, you know, Europe has--especially Northern Europe has great offshore wind capabilities that we want to learn from to be able to internalize and to be able to bring some of those technologies and the deployment, leapfrog, if you will the capabilities to doing that as cost-effectively as possible. Japan has an amazing hydrogen effort, as do many countries. And so coordinating across all of the countries on how we get more hydrogen into our economy and infrastructures is an important thing. But choosing--again, choosing one country or the other is not necessarily how I can go about it.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I understand completely. I just flew back actually from London recently and was stunned by the wind farms off the coast. But, Kelly Speakes-Backman, thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for making it so much fun to talk about clean energy.MS. SPEAKES-BACKMAN: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It is a lot of fun. I implore everyone to go to our website and check out all the cool things that we\u2019re doing and we\u2019re up to and reach out if you--if you\u2019re a community in need.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I\u2019ll be back in a few moments with my next guest John Doerr. Stay with us.[Video plays]MS. UMOH: Hello, everyone. I\u2019m Ruth Umoh, editor-in-chief of The Filament. The Earth\u2019s changing climate has major implications for individuals, businesses and policymakers alike and has increasingly prompted companies to embed environmental, social, and governance factors into their very business strategy. Here to discuss this more at length is Erin McGrain, senior vice president and head of SK\u2019s Washington, D.C. office, and former New York Congressman Joe Crowley. A hearty welcome to the both of you. Thank you so much for joining us.MR. CROWLEY: Thank you very much.MS. MCGRAIN: Thank you, Ruth.MS. UMOH: Thank you. Welcome, welcome. Well, let\u2019s jump right into things. Erin, we've all witnessed this, quote-unquote \u201cESG reckoning\u201d in recent years. Why is SK committed to investing in the United States, and why the emphasis on clean energy in particular?MS. MCGRAIN: Sure. Well, SK has been committed to the United States for decades now. At this time, we've invested $16 billion and have over 3,000 American workers. We've got operations and investments in over 21 states, including the District of Columbia. We are committed to investing in the United States for a number of reasons, Ruth, including the skilled workforce here, the friendly business and investment climate, our strong trade ties with South Korea, where, of course, SK is based, and our focus on clean energy and technology innovation.Our chairman has a double bottom line philosophy that measures not only economic value, but social value. This is in part why SK is emphasizing clean energy solutions that will help to address climate change on a global scale and create high-skilled jobs in clean energy for the future here in the United States.MS. UMOH: Congressman Crowley, let me pivot to you for your stance from the policy side. ESG activity has undoubtedly accelerated under the Biden administration. How do investments from companies like SK support the current administration's priorities within this realm?MR. CROWLEY: Well, thank you, Ruth. And as--I think as Erin mentioned, you know, SK and the Biden administration really share the important goal of investing in clean energy technologies of the future, which will build upon, quite frankly, the U.S.\u2019s history of being a world leader in innovation. The Biden administration understands that the private sector engagement from industry leaders like SK are going to be crucial to transitioning the American workforce to high-skilled, high-paying jobs of the future, especially for next generation clean energy manufacturing. SK\u2019s commitment to technologies like EV batteries, hydrogen, and energy storage system really aligns closely with the recent enactment of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and certain key provisions that are in the BBB or the Build Back Better legislation that's before Congress right now. And it really underscores that the administration, the Biden administration, and the private sector really share this focus on addressing climate change through not only innovation but also to investment.MS. UMOH: Certainly. Well, this heightened scrutiny and increased focus around ESG is still in its relatively nascent stages. So, let's wrap up this conversation by looking ahead. What are the clean energy technologies that will power our future world? And more importantly, how else can companies and government collaborate to nurture said innovation?MS. MCGRAIN: Well, Ruth, SK is focused on some of these exact technologies, as the congressman mentioned earlier--EV batteries, the hydrogen economy, and energy storage systems, as well as other important areas like carbon sequestration, solar, and next-generation recycling. To nurture these technologies, companies like SK are focused heavily on workforce development and education, including partnering with technical colleges, trade schools, and other community institutions to do our part to transition the American workforce to these more high-skilled, high-paying clean energy jobs.MS. UMOH: And, Congressman, from the government side.MR. CROWLEY: No, I agree, Ruth. I agree with Erin. I think the Workforce Development and STEM education are areas in which this administration, the Biden administration, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and companies like SK, they all share a common goal here and can and ought to be and should be working closely together.Another area that I think enjoys bipartisan support is the public private partnerships, the three P's. As Erin mentioned, companies invest in the U.S. for strong, innovative institutions. So enhanced public private partnerships, I think are going to be critical to developing and commercialization of clean energy technologies going forward.MS. UMOH: Absolutely. Both very well said. And as we've seen historically, public-private collaborations allow for more comprehensive and large-scale projects which can truly be transformative as we look at how to tackle climate issues. Erin, Congressman Crowley, thank you both for your time and your insights. I'll now hand things back over to The Washington Post. Thank you.MR. CROWLEY: Thanks, Ruth.MS. MCGRAIN: Thank you, Ruth.[Video plays]MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Post. Joining me now to further this discussion about investing in clean energy is author of \"Speed & Scale,\" John Doerr. John, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live.MR. DOERR: Well, thank you for having me here, Frances.MS. STEAD SELLERS: Well, it's a very timely discussion, and you have a book just out. We\u2019re thrilled to have you. I'd like to touch to start by talking about COP26, which wound up last month, and talk very much about government's investing in sustainable energy. What do you think the role of the public sector is moving ahead? Can it cope with the climate crisis we see ahead of us?MR. DOERR: The public sector is vital among the various actors that must come together in what I consider to be the largest mobilization that we've ever witnessed on the planet--a transformation of society greater than what the allied forces took on when they defeated the Nazi Axis in World War II. The public sector, I believe, is lagging behind the private sector and the actions of investors, and especially lagging behind impassioned youth. But COP convening, it really signaled an intention to raise the ambition and objectives. And we more than welcome it. We need it.MS. STEAD SELLERS: We just talked with Kelly from the Department of Energy about President Biden's initiative which he announced last week to green the federal government. What was your impression of that--sorry, excuse me--initiative? Do you believe that President Biden went far enough with it?MR. DOERR: Well, I think that President Biden, Secretary Granholm, Kelly, they have laid out the most ambitious agenda for energy policy the nation has ever had. And so, I'm very enthused about the Build Back Better bill. I'm very enthused about the infrastructure bill. We need all these, and we need them now.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, let's get to your book. You talk in your book about how individuals and private companies can invest and commit to this kind of future. And I'm curious about your optimism, because it certainly shines through there. Why don't you throw your hands up, why--and said we can't do it? What is the commitment, and what's the path forward that you are trying to show through that book?MR. DOERR: Well, this is a transformation unlike any other that we've witnessed or taken on. But we've had the benefit of work and researched lots of really great goals, the Paris goals, goals in the climate community. What's been lacking until now is a plan, and that's what this book, speedandscale.com offers: a clear, pragmatic, ambitious set of 10 great big objectives. Six of them are removing carbon. And each of those is then supported by some key results.I might early on in our conversation invite the readers to get a free copy of the plan. This is available now on the website speedandscale.com, to download it, and we could--we could talk more about it. But there's pretty broad agreement that we need to electrify transportation, decarbonize the grid, fix our food system, and then protect nature, clean up dirty parts of industry--how we make steel and concrete--and then--and then tackle the hard problem of carbon removal. But I want to emphasize, Frances, this can be done. We are not on track to avoid catastrophic climate crisis, but it's--we still barely have time.MS. STEAD SELLERS: I love the fact you picked up the poster, and I saw how you could click on it on the website. But going to--dig a little deeper into those, the OKRs, I guess, and maybe you can explain them as a business proposition and now as a proposition that you're looking at for curing the climate crisis.MR. DOERR: Sure. OKRs stands for objectives and key results, and they're at the heart of the book and the heart of the plan. This is a system for setting ambitious goals that was invented by a mentor of mine, Andy Grove, who was regarded at Intel company as maybe the best of his generation or are all managers. And Andy ran a chip company. When you're making computer chips, tens of thousands of people have got to get lines that are one millionth of a meter, one micron wide exactly right, or nothing works. So, he came up with this system of clearly identifying the objectives--that's what you want to have accomplished--and the key results.And so, we have six big objectives in the plan, in this plan to get us to net zero. And then there are four accelerators to make sure that we get it done in time. For every one of these objectives, there's a handful, say three to five specific timebound measurable key results.I could pick an example of one, for example. Let's do the first: electrified transportation. If the world--and this is a global plan--if the world succeeds in doing this, we can take 8 gigatons per year, and reduce it to 2 gigatons by converting all vehicles from running on gas and diesel to running on electricity from batteries. And to do that, we know we've got to get them price performance parity with the old fossil-based internal combustion engine vehicles.And the plan calls for us to do that by 2024 in the U.S. That means $35,000 per vehicle. And in China and India, by 2030, that would be $11,000 per vehicle. So, it illustrates that these big audacious objectives are teed up against a set of 55 measurable key results.The beauty of the measurability is we can track our progress along the way. And if we're falling behind, we can make mid-course corrections. We will not succeed at all these. They're ambitious, but we\u2019ll excel at some and make up for shortfalls with others. That's the plan.MS. STEAD SELLERS: John describe that for us again. At the bottom on the flip side, I saw \"innovate\" and \"invest,\" and you have great exclamation points after that. Tell me about that, the exclamation points and why investment is so important at this point.MR. DOERR: Well, let me take each of them in turn. There are some who would say we have all the technology we need today to get to net zero. That's not putting any more carbon in the atmosphere by 2050, and importantly, to get halfway there by 2030, just eight years from now. And I say rubbish. That's not true. We have many of the technologies, and the advances in wind and solar, principally advances in how cheap they are in their cost, are stunning, and they give us great hope.But we do not have all the technologies we need. And so, we need to encourage new companies being formed, research and development done by existing organizations. Let me--let me--let me just call out a couple of the of the innovations that are needed. We need to produce 10,000 gigawatt hours of batteries at less than $80 per kilowatt hour by 2035. We need to take the cost of engineered carbon dioxide removal down to $100 per ton by 2030, $50 per ton by 2040. So, I'm optimistic that this innovation can be done if we increase the funding, the federal funding, and that's part of the legislation that the Biden administration is advocating.The next area with an exclamation point is investing. And we need more global government subsidies for clean energy. We need to increase research and development. We need to grow the amount of venture capital, project financing, and philanthropic investing. And so the book lays out with not just technocratic goals, but also with, I think, memorable stories of innovators, of, of entrepreneurs, of leaders of Indigenous tribes, of impassioned, outraged youth, how our society can come together to solve this mother of all challenges.MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, you're such an experienced investor. What sort of commitments do you look for in companies that you're thinking about investing in for clean energy benefit?MR. DOERR: Well, I--the first thing that I do is I form a judgment about the leadership, because no matter how excellent the plans are, plans will encounter reality and new problems and opportunities will emerge. But once you're satisfied that you have a team that wants to excel in solving these problems, then you turn to the marketplace. Will their innovation, will their contribution to the to the brutally competitive marketplace allow them to lower the cost of a clean solution? If you have the leadership right and you have the market, right, then you're off to the races, the great race of our lifetime--namely, can we get to a 50 percent reduction in emissions by the end of 2030?MS. STEAD SELLERS: And what are the major considerations that you see holding companies back from transferring themselves to sustainable practices?MR. DOERR: Well, I think the companies, the corporate sector as a constituency is responsible for some 70 percent of the emissions that come out of our business activities. And I frankly have been impressed by the actions of both large and small companies to get ahead of the governmental agreements.Now, in fairness, it's hard for our political leaders to get very far ahead of the body politic. And as the book points out, in most places in the world, climate is not a top-two voting issue. It is in Europe. It is not in the US. It is not in China. It is not in India. And so we have work to do on the ground as the world endures increasing storms and hurr",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Powering Change with Jerome Foster II, Michael S. Regan & Leah Thomas (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8671",
        "date": "2021-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/28/transcript-protecting-our-planet-powering-change-with-jerome-foster-ii-michael-s-regan-leah-thomas/",
        "text": "MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Brady Dennis, a national environmental reporter here at The Post. I\u2019m delighted to be hosting this two-part conversation today about climate change and environmental justice.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOur first guest today is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and, as it happens, a fellow North Carolinian, Michael Regan. Administrator Regan, thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Washington Post Live. MR. REGAN: Well, thank you, Brady. I'm delighted to be here today.MR. DENNIS: Before we get to the main topic, environmental justice, today I want to turn to a related, of course, but current environmental story that's in the news, the UN climate summit that's coming up beginning next week in Scotland. Countries from around the world are gathering, facing pressure to do more and do more quickly on climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Biden administration is taking a large crew to this event: yourself, of course; and a large number of other cabinet members. And I'd like to hear from you what message the president is trying to send with such a large contingent, and what message you yourself will be taking to that climate summit.MR. REGAN: Well, you know, the president is sending the same signal he sent from day one, which is climate change is a threat, a threat not just to the United States, but to the world. And he has a whole-of-government approach. And I think when you look at the delegation that will be going to Glasgow, you will see a full show of force that all of our agencies have taken climate change seriously and that we're going to be there in support of the president's very ambitious goal and agenda.And EPA will definitely be there to demonstrate that we have a significant role in terms of our regulatory authority and encouraging our corporate partners to exercise voluntary measures, as well. We are there to support the President's NDA, and we're going to be there in full force to demonstrate that it's more than rhetoric, that all of our agencies are there to demonstrate how America will and can lead, and demonstrate to the world that we are working as one government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. DENNIS: So, you mentioned the concrete things the U.S. will try to display and talk about at that global climate summit. The U.S. has certainly faced a lack of trust on this topic. In recent years we, under the Trump administration, walked away from the Paris Climate Accord. Of course, under President Biden, now came back and the president has said this is one of his main priorities and pledged to sharply cut the greenhouse gas emissions of the country going forward.But at the same time, as we're seeing every day in the news, Congress has not yet funded some of those key proposals that would allow that to happen. And I just wonder, again, as you go onto this global stage, and this president does, as well, what are you to tell allies who have expressed doubts that the U.S. will follow through on the promises that the president is making?MR. REGAN: You know, if there's anyone that knows how to deal with Congress and get the best deal, it's President Biden, and he's still in there every single minute fighting for the best deal for the American people. So, I have the confidence that the president and the United States will go to COP26 with the ability to show that we are all in when it comes to building back better and when it comes to tackling climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut irrespective of what Congress does, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has ample authority, statutory authority, legal obligations to move forward as quickly as possible to tackle the climate crisis. And so, we're prepared; we're ready. And EPA will move forward with a very aggressive agenda and complement to whatever Congress eventually passes.MR. DENNIS: I want to follow up on that a little bit. You said often that you consider yourself to be a consensus-maker, more of a consensus-seeker than a crusader. But obviously, as we've seen with the uncertainty in Congress, and you just alluded to, a key piece of meeting these climate and environmental goals is going to be using the authority that the EPA and other agencies already have.And so, in some sense, what is more effective enforcing this kind of action? Is it seeking consensus or exercising executive authority? How much is achievable without Congress and the courts? And how far are you willing to go in your own role to see that we begin this shift toward lower emissions in the future?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. REGAN: You know, I've always found success in having everyone at the table and moving forward in a very transparent manner. And sometimes consensus is really focused on principles to follow through on everyone having a seat at the table and being transparent. We recognize we're not all going to agree, but I think most around the table understand that climate change is a significant threat, and there are multiple ways to get at that threat.I have been very clear since day one that I will be transparent, I will follow the science, I will follow the law, and that this country will move forward on climate change and combatting climate change and looking at ways to build jobs and increase our global competitiveness. And so, I will push the envelope. I will move forward as quickly as possible, as aggressively as possible, using the authorities that Congress has given us.And so, I've been very transparent with our regulative community, and I believe that they understand that we're here to do a job and that we're going to talk to them about what the best path forward is to do that, recognizing that EPA has a job to do.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. DENNIS: One last question on the international front, if I may. The U.S. and other developed countries around the world have not yet lived up to financial promises that they made to small and vulnerable countries, developing countries around the world, more than a decade ago, which would be to provide $100 billion a year in aid both for dealing with climate impacts that these places are already seeing and helping to fund the shift toward a greener--you know, greener economies.The U.S. and other countries have not yet lived up to that; although, the president has said he will greatly increase that funding. I ask you about this because some of these nations that are really on the frontlines of climate change are home to people of color, the most vulnerable populations around the world, people who in some cases may already be displaced from their homes. Given this administration's focus on environmental justice, how important is it to live up to the promises for environmental justice abroad, as well as here at home?MR. REGAN: It's extremely important, and this president has promised that racial justice and equity and environmental justice will be central to the administration's priorities and goals.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president's stepping up on the international stage and committing that financial assistance to those countries that are the most vulnerable is a critical step forward in answering and following through on the promises that were made; so, it's very important. Climate change is indiscriminate, and we know all across the globe that the most vulnerable populations stand to bear the brunt of climate change impacts. So, we must do all that we can, both domestically and internationally to protect our most vulnerable.The president has stepped up and made a pledge financially to help do that on the international stage. And here, domestically, we have made it a centerpiece of EPA's mission. EJ is part of the DNA of EPA. And we're really serious about that and we're moving forward.MR. DENNIS: Well, let's turn to that front, domestically. An EPA report from September, I believe, found that people of color in the United States are exposed to much higher levels of air pollution, regardless of their region or income level. This is one of any number of academic studies that have shown that such communities are bombarded by environmental factors. What does that report and others like it tell us about systemic racism and really how it affects health around the United States?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. REGAN: It tells us that the data is there. It's more than a feeling; it's more than perception. The data calls it out. And this report, this EJ report that EPA just released, one of the most in-depth reports ever done on the topic of environmental justice. It demonstrates that if we see a 2-degrees Celsius warming from climate change and global warming that 34 percent of Black and African-Americans are more likely to live in communities that will see an increase in childhood asthma. Forty percent, if we see the 2-degree increase, 40 percent of Blacks and African-Americans are more likely to live in communities or be exposed to heat-related deaths. We've seen that, you know, 34 percent of our Latinx community are more likely to see labor shortages because of the impacts to industries like agriculture and construction. So, there's a 40 percent more likelihood that all of these things will occur in these communities of color. This is very, very important data and information that we must incorporate into our regulations, into our policies, into our laws. And so, this is a critical moment and we are prepared to meet the moment.MR. DENNIS: When you talk about meeting the moment, the Biden administration has promised to fund environmental justice initiatives and projects around the country. I'd like to hear from you a little bit about how that will work, in what ways that might already be happening. You know, and even more specifically, how can the federal government ensure that the funds that get delivered to states through governors who may have different priorities actually end up in the hands of the groups that need it? And how soon can that process begin? I assume, in a lot of ways, it also depends on Congress and the funding.MR. REGAN: You know, Congress has already acted in the past to recognize that this is an important issue and EPA's role. During the American Rescue Plan, EPA was given $100 million to focus on environmental justice issues, 50 million specifically to focus on air quality monitoring and air quality issues; and then 50 million to focus on partnership opportunities with state, locals, nonprofits on tackling environmental justice issues in general. So, we've got $100 million down payment from Congress. The president has requested a 20-percent increase in EPA's budget overall. And given that we are looking at all of our issues through the lens of environmental justice, those resources will be integrated into our program so that we see action on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut then, we take a step back and look at what's been discussed with budget reconciliation and the Build Back Better--I'm sorry, the bipartisan infrastructure deal. Over $55 billion--$55 billion--for water infrastructure improvements. And the president has pledged to eradicate the exposure of lead pipelines which, you know, impacts close to 6- to 10 million people. $21 billion to clean up legacy pollution in our communities of color; $17 billion focused on congestion and port-related issues. And so, we have the will to move forward. The American Rescue Plan is a down payment. The budget conversation shows the roadmap, and the bipartisan infrastructure deal does, as well.To round all of that out, the president has a Justice40 Initiative, which has focused all of our agencies to develop criteria and a wherewithal and a willpower to look at how 40 percent of all of these investments stay in these communities of color or these communities that have been disproportionately impacted for generations. That's not solely to reduce pollution, but it's also to invest in economic development, to create jobs to pour into environmental education so that we have more sustainable communities that are better educated on how to protect themselves, as well. So, this is a whole-of-government approach, but it's also a very thoughtful approach, starting with the American Rescue Plan, moving through the budget request for EPA, and hopefully rounding out in this Build Back Better agenda that's playing out through budget reconciliation and the bipartisan infrastructure deal.MR. DENNIS: The Biden administration has promised a year-end report card of environmental justice achievements--every year, I think, in fact. This first year in office, when should we expect that? I say \"we,\" the public. When should the public expect that? What might it say? What do you think are the high marks and places that probably need work on that report card, whatever it may look like?MR. REGAN: Well, you know, I'll leave it to the White House when they plan to publish their scorecard. But what you can anticipate are seeing many of the actions that agencies like EPA have already taken. You will see a scorecard that looks at how we have allocated that $100 million that came to us through the American Rescue Plan. You'll see how we have been very reflective and retooled our own grantmaking processes here in the agency to get more resources to more people, newer organizations that have never had an opportunity to get grant dollars. You will see the forward progress that we've made on creating an environmental justice and equity program that is equivalent to our air, water, and land programs. You'll also see a much stronger record on enforcement, and how we've really ramped up enforcing the existing laws on the books. Perfect examples are our intervention in Chicago with the car-shredding company where the Mayor of Chicago needed help from EPA in terms of partnering technical analysis and thinking through legal and strategic ways that we can better protect the southeast side of Chicago.The same with, you know, the refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands and how we had to step in there and really ensure that Limetree Bay was doing right by its citizens and really doing what needs to be done to protect these communities that have been overburdened.So, you know, EPA has a very proud track record. We know that we're just getting started, and there's a lot of work that needs to be done, but that report card will reflect the actions that this administration has taken over the first eight months.MR. DENNIS: So, both while campaigning and while president, yes, President Biden has made pretty clear that one of his main priorities is to help, like, low-income, minority communities, vulnerable communities around the country, that are disproportionately impacted by climate change. I think, you know, quite a bit of the legacy pollution that you mentioned is well documented: lead lines, superfund sites, polluted air from various industrial operations.I'm curious, in particular, what impact you're seeing on some of these communities from climate change in particular. What does that look like? Why does it hit these communities harder, and what are you doing about that, or what do you have planned to do about that?MR. REGAN: You know, we understand that, with climate change, the impacts are so diverse to these communities that have been disproportionately impacted. Where we see extreme temperatures, we already understand that our Black, our Latinx, our tribal communities are already more vulnerable because of health disparities. Higher asthma rates, higher rates of heart and lung disease, the heat just puts added stress and pressure on that. So, we're seeing those impacts from climate change.We're seeing the impacts from these very intense storms and these floods. Those who are least financially able to rebuild and recover are getting hit the hardest. And so, we're seeing that right now play out. When we look at our wildfires, and not only the destruction that's caused by the fire in these communities that are less prepared to rebuild, but we're seeing the air quality impacts hundreds and hundreds of miles away, again, really impacting these communities of colors that have long borne the disproportionate impacts. And so, we are seeing the impacts play out right now. You don't have to be a scientist to appreciate what's going on. All you have to do is look out your window and you can see the storms. You can see the rains, the floods, the hurricanes, and the intensity. People are feeling it in terms of the increased asthma or respiratory illnesses, hospital visits.And so, we must do a better job in terms of reducing pollution that exacerbates these health disparities in these communities of color and help them be better prepared to deal with the implications of climate change. But we also must ramp up our efforts to regulate and get deep emission cuts in these pollutants that exacerbate climate change and push climate change at a much faster rate than otherwise. Which is why we are excited that we finalized our proposal of HFCs to reduce 85 percent of HFCs in the next 15 years. HFCs are really potent greenhouse gases. We are really tackling the tailpipe emissions from light-duty vehicles and we're tackling the greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-duty vehicles, as well as health pollutants like NOx from heavy-duty vehicles. Soon, we'll be releasing a proposed rulemaking that will get deep emission cuts in methane from both new and existing oil and gas facilities.And so, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. We really need to help our communities be prepared, what we're seeing today, but we also have to move really aggressively to regulate these greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the exacerbation that we're seeing with climate change.MR. DENNIS: You mentioned any number of priorities there, you know, doing more to get lead out of water, tackling greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, or maybe it's power plants and you mentioned methane, specifically. Like you said, a lot of things in the pipeline.I'm wondering, there's a reality in every presidential administration that time is always of the essence and time is always running short. I wonder for you what you're hoping to take care of or finalize before the end of this presidential term. I mean, what are the--in your eyes, the priorities when it comes to the environment and climate change that absolutely have to get done, and what are the hurdles to that?We saw in the Obama administration and in the Trump administration the courts really slowed down what each of those administrations were trying to do, even though their goals were quite opposite. How do you navigate that, and what is, like, at the top of your list of what you must finish before time runs too short?MR. REGAN: Well, you know, I think the takeaway for me is we've learned lessons from the previous administration in terms of how the courts will respond and the legal arguments that will be made. And so, it's very important for me to really follow suit with what we've done on HFCs with other regulations. On our tailpipe emission standards, we really need to have durable regulations that really usher in zero-emitting technologies for our vehicle fleets for the foreseeable future.We really have to have a very strong methane regulation that is durable and will withstand a lot of the legal challenges. And we will revisit our carbon reduction strategy for coal plants. We've learned from previous attempts what the courts will do and won't tolerate. And we're going to apply those lessons moving forward. And so, before the end of this term, I'd like to have durable regulations in place that can withstand the test of time and withstand litigation, and I believe we can do that.We also have to prioritize eradicating these lead service lines. We have to really focus on looking at how we begin to regulate these forever chemicals. And with the resources that will come from the Build Back Better agenda, you know, over $5 billion focused specifically on brownfield and superfund sites, all of these are really important because climate change has the ability to exacerbate exposure to polluted lands, fragile water infrastructure. And so, while we're combatting climate change, it's really important that we rebuild infrastructure in a much more resilient way. We have to get it all done. We have a workforce that is enthusiastic, has their sleeves rolled up and ready to tackle these issues. And so, we're really optimistic that we will do so successfully.MR. DENNIS: Just a last question, here. You mentioned your workforce, and I wanted to ask you, you know, you came into this position promising to, quote, \"restore science and transparency at the EPA\" after the Trump administration left office. You promised to rebuild an agency that had seen quite a few employees leave or retire in recent years. Talk to us about how that's going. What has that effort looked like, why it matters, and, frankly, how the public can know the progress that's being made.MR. REGAN: You know, I love this agency. I started my first internship--was with EPA, and I spent close to a decade here before I left. When I returned, it wasn't the same agency. Morale was low.We have really ramped up our transparency with our employees. We brought them back to the table, reminded them why some of them have 20-, 30-, 40-year careers, and have involved them in how we're moving forward. That has been a significant boost to morale. Reestablishing scientific integrity; you know, reestablishing policies that specifically say, we will not tolerate political interference or bullying. It has really reinvigorated the workforce, here. And we have a very smart, strategic plan for how we continue to bring in new talent, not the talent of yesteryear, but the talent of the future, or for the future. And so, we're working very hard, each and every day, because we understand that if we're going to accomplish the president's goals, it cannot be done without a healthy workforce.We're laser-focused on rebuilding our workforce. So far, we're seeing the morale shoot back up to the roof. And we're going to continue to feed our staff with information, accessibility, and treat them as real team members. And I think we're going to be well on our way.MR. DENNIS: So many more questions, but I think that's all the time we have for this particular conversation. Thanks so much, Administrator Regan, for joining us today.MR. REGAN: Well, thank you all for having me.MR. DENNIS: And I'll be back in a minute with our next guests. Please stay with us.[Video plays]MS. MESERVE: Hello, I'm Jeanne Meserve. With the UN Climate Conference just days away, The Lancet, the British medical journal, has issued a sobering warning that climate change could have an impact on human health that dwarfs the impact of the coronavirus and that different communities will be impacted differently.Here with me to discuss the interlocking issues of environmental justice and climate change is Abigail Dillen. She is President of Earthjustice. Thanks so much for joining us.MS. DILLEN: Thanks, Jeanne.MS. MESERVE: So, the Biden administration has said it is launching an all-of-government approach to climate change. How do you feel that environmental justice is essential to U.S. leadership on the issue?MS. DILLEN: Well, you can't lead on climate, or make progress, if you aren't taking on the unjust systems that are propelling climate change. When we choose to power this country with oil and gas and coal, we choose, inevitably, poisoned air and water and ravaged lands. Not for everyone, but for too many communities, and they are most often Black, brown, and Indigenous communities who are now also contending with climate change.And the way the fossil fuel industry maintains its power, the only way it can operate, is if we enforce our health and safety standards unequally. And so, what that means is if you're living next to a coal mine or a coal plant or a fracking field or a refinery, a petrochemical plant, you or someone you love has cancer or asthma, and too many people around you are dying too young. That's the devil's bargain that we make with fossil fuels, and that's what we have to change. And as we do, clean energy will become the only alternative.But it won't be enough just to make that shift. We've got to repair and invest in the communities that have been most hard hit by fossil fuels, and the communities that are waiting to see what their role in a new economy can be. And as long as there are people who feel that they may be left out or they may lose out in a transition to a clean energy economy, it won't emerge.MS. MESERVE: So, let's make this a little more concrete. How does it look like in practice to advance equity and justice in climate policy?MS. DILLEN: Well, in the next few days and weeks, it looks like passing the build back better act. We're reading, we're hearing so much about the political machinations in Congress right now, but we're not hearing enough about what's actually in this package. It is the biggest single thing we could do to advance climate justice in this country.And I'll just give a couple of examples. Our transportation sector is now the biggest carbon pollution problem we have, and our freight corridors and our busy ports are some of the most dangerous places in the country to live because they're so polluted. This act would provide the federal funding to switch out the dirty trucks and polluting port equipment with zero-emissions equipment for the future. Same with our city bus fleets, our school buses; same with the transportation systems that have never worked in low-income communities and communities of color. We can be making massive investments in EV charging infrastructure, and making it affordable to actually own an EV.And one particular program that's close to my heart are grants for communities that want to exercise their vision for the future. And the reason the communities are so important is because they are driving some of the most profound and fast change in the country. We have the privilege to represent them.MS. MESERVE: And what else does the Biden administration have to do to deliver on its promises regarding climate and environmental justice? And what are the challenges to doing that?MS. DILLEN: Well, I think they have to stay true to the commitments they made. The president ran on a platform that centered, for the very first time, climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality. And that platform resonated because it's real. It's the true problem that we face. And so, step one is to get the build back better act over the finish line, and then it's to really use the full force of the Executive Branch, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Interior, of course the EPA--to use every power we have to get at fossil fuel pollution and advance the solutions that we have.Our problems right now are not technological; they are political and cultural. And if the government really invests in doing things a different way, we can see change materialize very quickly. I trust Administrator Regan is behind that, particularly bringing in the people who are most impacted by the problems to help fashion the solutions.MS. MESERVE: This isn't about one administration. This is a long-term issue, a set of long-term problems. Looking in that longer term, what do you see as the opportunities and the priority?MS. DILLEN: I think we have to really dig in to belief in local solutions paired with federal action. And I'll give you two examples why. One is that what we're seeing is tribal communities, local communities, nurses, doctors uniting around solutions they know will work for their communities. And when they do that, they're achieving extraordinary things against the odds. But for organizing and litigation in the Pacific Northwest, we would see that region be a fossil fuel hub, facilitating U.S. oil and gas and coal to Asian markets. But for the courageous work of Rise St. James in Louisiana and an incredible coalition in the South, we would see new petrochemical facilities being built, expanding our carbon footprint, our cancer-causing pollution, and plastic manufacture. So, really investing in the climate action that's coming up through the grassroots and creating a system for it to flourish is the opportunity that we have before us now.And I'll leave your audience with one last point. We can't do any of this good work without strong laws and fair courts. And just as we understand that voting rights and reproductive rights depend on the courts, we have to understand that climate progress does, too.MS. MESERVE: Abigail Dillen, President of Earthjustice. And now, back to The Washington Post.[Video plays]MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Brady Dennis, national environmental reporter here at The Post.My next guests today are here to talk us through the complexities and the opportunities of climate justice and environmental intersectionalism. Jerome Foster II is an environmental justice advisor to the Biden administration; and Leah Thomas is a writer and activist who focuses on educating the next generation of environmental advocates on how to create meaningful change.To you both, welcome to Washington Post Live.MS. THOMAS: Hi, thanks for having us.MR. FOSTER: Great to be here.MR. DENNIS: Jerome, let's start with you. I want to start with the biggest environmental story in the news certainly this week and in the weeks ahead, the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Scotland. It has been described by some as perhaps one of the last, best chances to put the planet on a sustainable path for the future. And I notice that you tweeted that you're planning to be there, I believe. In any case, what type of action are you hoping to see from that gathering? And in particular, what concrete promises do you want or expect President Biden to deliver on that international stage?MR. FOSTER: Yeah, so, when it comes to COP26 and what the youth movement is demanding specifically is an end to fossil fuel subsidies. And because of the fact that we talk about free markets and having the capitalism be on the transition on to climate justice, it really is not that.We have to make sure that we're playing on a level playing field. Solar can't just be the next coal barons. We have to make it more rooted in communities, so we're asking for an end to subsidies, there. Also, we're demanding an end to the production of oil pipelines, like fracked oil that's going through America right now through Line 3 or the North Brooklyn Pipeline, and on the international stage with Nord Stream 2. There's so many bills that we're trying to pass nationally in the United States that we also need to see on the international stage, when it comes to giving funding to frontline communities in countries that are seeing the climate crisis at their front doorstep right now, and that they need international aid as we see it and as we need equity-based and real climate solutions given through aid to them.MR. DENNIS: Just to follow up, I'm curious how you are planning to spend your time in the lead-up here to COP26, and how do you plan to spend these coming weeks, you know, focusing and drawing attention to the issues that you just highlighted while there is this sort of global spotlight on this? How do you plan to do that?MR. FOSTER: So, yesterday evening, we just kicked off COP26 here in Los Angeles with the Mayor of Los Angeles, Mayor Garcetti; and also, the UK Consulate General.And really, over the next coming weeks, the biggest change we're going to see, especially from young people, is demanding not just a talk around what climate justice solutions must look like, but really understanding the implementation process, and not just focusing on the fact that we have to protect animals but also protecting communities. Because when we talk about climate justice, especially from the previous COPs, there's only really been a focus on how do we continue to lower our emissions, without the aspects of equity or justice or jobs ever really mentioned in a meaningful or substantive way. And that's really what the push is for the next couple of weeks from us, is, one, making our voices heard by organizing mass mobilizations at COP26; and two, making sure that our voices are heard inside the room, as well.Me being a White House climate advisor, I was selected by the youth mo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Powering Change with Jerome Foster II, Michael S. Regan & Leah Thomas (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8672",
        "date": "2021-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/28/transcript-protecting-our-planet-powering-change-with-jerome-foster-ii-michael-s-regan-leah-thomas/",
        "text": "MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Brady Dennis, a national environmental reporter here at The Post. I\u2019m delighted to be hosting this two-part conversation today about climate change and environmental justice.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOur first guest today is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and, as it happens, a fellow North Carolinian, Michael Regan. Administrator Regan, thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Washington Post Live. MR. REGAN: Well, thank you, Brady. I'm delighted to be here today.MR. DENNIS: Before we get to the main topic, environmental justice, today I want to turn to a related, of course, but current environmental story that's in the news, the UN climate summit that's coming up beginning next week in Scotland. Countries from around the world are gathering, facing pressure to do more and do more quickly on climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Biden administration is taking a large crew to this event: yourself, of course; and a large number of other cabinet members. And I'd like to hear from you what message the president is trying to send with such a large contingent, and what message you yourself will be taking to that climate summit.MR. REGAN: Well, you know, the president is sending the same signal he sent from day one, which is climate change is a threat, a threat not just to the United States, but to the world. And he has a whole-of-government approach. And I think when you look at the delegation that will be going to Glasgow, you will see a full show of force that all of our agencies have taken climate change seriously and that we're going to be there in support of the president's very ambitious goal and agenda.And EPA will definitely be there to demonstrate that we have a significant role in terms of our regulatory authority and encouraging our corporate partners to exercise voluntary measures, as well. We are there to support the President's NDA, and we're going to be there in full force to demonstrate that it's more than rhetoric, that all of our agencies are there to demonstrate how America will and can lead, and demonstrate to the world that we are working as one government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. DENNIS: So, you mentioned the concrete things the U.S. will try to display and talk about at that global climate summit. The U.S. has certainly faced a lack of trust on this topic. In recent years we, under the Trump administration, walked away from the Paris Climate Accord. Of course, under President Biden, now came back and the president has said this is one of his main priorities and pledged to sharply cut the greenhouse gas emissions of the country going forward.But at the same time, as we're seeing every day in the news, Congress has not yet funded some of those key proposals that would allow that to happen. And I just wonder, again, as you go onto this global stage, and this president does, as well, what are you to tell allies who have expressed doubts that the U.S. will follow through on the promises that the president is making?MR. REGAN: You know, if there's anyone that knows how to deal with Congress and get the best deal, it's President Biden, and he's still in there every single minute fighting for the best deal for the American people. So, I have the confidence that the president and the United States will go to COP26 with the ability to show that we are all in when it comes to building back better and when it comes to tackling climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut irrespective of what Congress does, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has ample authority, statutory authority, legal obligations to move forward as quickly as possible to tackle the climate crisis. And so, we're prepared; we're ready. And EPA will move forward with a very aggressive agenda and complement to whatever Congress eventually passes.MR. DENNIS: I want to follow up on that a little bit. You said often that you consider yourself to be a consensus-maker, more of a consensus-seeker than a crusader. But obviously, as we've seen with the uncertainty in Congress, and you just alluded to, a key piece of meeting these climate and environmental goals is going to be using the authority that the EPA and other agencies already have.And so, in some sense, what is more effective enforcing this kind of action? Is it seeking consensus or exercising executive authority? How much is achievable without Congress and the courts? And how far are you willing to go in your own role to see that we begin this shift toward lower emissions in the future?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. REGAN: You know, I've always found success in having everyone at the table and moving forward in a very transparent manner. And sometimes consensus is really focused on principles to follow through on everyone having a seat at the table and being transparent. We recognize we're not all going to agree, but I think most around the table understand that climate change is a significant threat, and there are multiple ways to get at that threat.I have been very clear since day one that I will be transparent, I will follow the science, I will follow the law, and that this country will move forward on climate change and combatting climate change and looking at ways to build jobs and increase our global competitiveness. And so, I will push the envelope. I will move forward as quickly as possible, as aggressively as possible, using the authorities that Congress has given us.And so, I've been very transparent with our regulative community, and I believe that they understand that we're here to do a job and that we're going to talk to them about what the best path forward is to do that, recognizing that EPA has a job to do.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. DENNIS: One last question on the international front, if I may. The U.S. and other developed countries around the world have not yet lived up to financial promises that they made to small and vulnerable countries, developing countries around the world, more than a decade ago, which would be to provide $100 billion a year in aid both for dealing with climate impacts that these places are already seeing and helping to fund the shift toward a greener--you know, greener economies.The U.S. and other countries have not yet lived up to that; although, the president has said he will greatly increase that funding. I ask you about this because some of these nations that are really on the frontlines of climate change are home to people of color, the most vulnerable populations around the world, people who in some cases may already be displaced from their homes. Given this administration's focus on environmental justice, how important is it to live up to the promises for environmental justice abroad, as well as here at home?MR. REGAN: It's extremely important, and this president has promised that racial justice and equity and environmental justice will be central to the administration's priorities and goals.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president's stepping up on the international stage and committing that financial assistance to those countries that are the most vulnerable is a critical step forward in answering and following through on the promises that were made; so, it's very important. Climate change is indiscriminate, and we know all across the globe that the most vulnerable populations stand to bear the brunt of climate change impacts. So, we must do all that we can, both domestically and internationally to protect our most vulnerable.The president has stepped up and made a pledge financially to help do that on the international stage. And here, domestically, we have made it a centerpiece of EPA's mission. EJ is part of the DNA of EPA. And we're really serious about that and we're moving forward.MR. DENNIS: Well, let's turn to that front, domestically. An EPA report from September, I believe, found that people of color in the United States are exposed to much higher levels of air pollution, regardless of their region or income level. This is one of any number of academic studies that have shown that such communities are bombarded by environmental factors. What does that report and others like it tell us about systemic racism and really how it affects health around the United States?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. REGAN: It tells us that the data is there. It's more than a feeling; it's more than perception. The data calls it out. And this report, this EJ report that EPA just released, one of the most in-depth reports ever done on the topic of environmental justice. It demonstrates that if we see a 2-degrees Celsius warming from climate change and global warming that 34 percent of Black and African-Americans are more likely to live in communities that will see an increase in childhood asthma. Forty percent, if we see the 2-degree increase, 40 percent of Blacks and African-Americans are more likely to live in communities or be exposed to heat-related deaths. We've seen that, you know, 34 percent of our Latinx community are more likely to see labor shortages because of the impacts to industries like agriculture and construction. So, there's a 40 percent more likelihood that all of these things will occur in these communities of color. This is very, very important data and information that we must incorporate into our regulations, into our policies, into our laws. And so, this is a critical moment and we are prepared to meet the moment.MR. DENNIS: When you talk about meeting the moment, the Biden administration has promised to fund environmental justice initiatives and projects around the country. I'd like to hear from you a little bit about how that will work, in what ways that might already be happening. You know, and even more specifically, how can the federal government ensure that the funds that get delivered to states through governors who may have different priorities actually end up in the hands of the groups that need it? And how soon can that process begin? I assume, in a lot of ways, it also depends on Congress and the funding.MR. REGAN: You know, Congress has already acted in the past to recognize that this is an important issue and EPA's role. During the American Rescue Plan, EPA was given $100 million to focus on environmental justice issues, 50 million specifically to focus on air quality monitoring and air quality issues; and then 50 million to focus on partnership opportunities with state, locals, nonprofits on tackling environmental justice issues in general. So, we've got $100 million down payment from Congress. The president has requested a 20-percent increase in EPA's budget overall. And given that we are looking at all of our issues through the lens of environmental justice, those resources will be integrated into our program so that we see action on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut then, we take a step back and look at what's been discussed with budget reconciliation and the Build Back Better--I'm sorry, the bipartisan infrastructure deal. Over $55 billion--$55 billion--for water infrastructure improvements. And the president has pledged to eradicate the exposure of lead pipelines which, you know, impacts close to 6- to 10 million people. $21 billion to clean up legacy pollution in our communities of color; $17 billion focused on congestion and port-related issues. And so, we have the will to move forward. The American Rescue Plan is a down payment. The budget conversation shows the roadmap, and the bipartisan infrastructure deal does, as well.To round all of that out, the president has a Justice40 Initiative, which has focused all of our agencies to develop criteria and a wherewithal and a willpower to look at how 40 percent of all of these investments stay in these communities of color or these communities that have been disproportionately impacted for generations. That's not solely to reduce pollution, but it's also to invest in economic development, to create jobs to pour into environmental education so that we have more sustainable communities that are better educated on how to protect themselves, as well. So, this is a whole-of-government approach, but it's also a very thoughtful approach, starting with the American Rescue Plan, moving through the budget request for EPA, and hopefully rounding out in this Build Back Better agenda that's playing out through budget reconciliation and the bipartisan infrastructure deal.MR. DENNIS: The Biden administration has promised a year-end report card of environmental justice achievements--every year, I think, in fact. This first year in office, when should we expect that? I say \"we,\" the public. When should the public expect that? What might it say? What do you think are the high marks and places that probably need work on that report card, whatever it may look like?MR. REGAN: Well, you know, I'll leave it to the White House when they plan to publish their scorecard. But what you can anticipate are seeing many of the actions that agencies like EPA have already taken. You will see a scorecard that looks at how we have allocated that $100 million that came to us through the American Rescue Plan. You'll see how we have been very reflective and retooled our own grantmaking processes here in the agency to get more resources to more people, newer organizations that have never had an opportunity to get grant dollars. You will see the forward progress that we've made on creating an environmental justice and equity program that is equivalent to our air, water, and land programs. You'll also see a much stronger record on enforcement, and how we've really ramped up enforcing the existing laws on the books. Perfect examples are our intervention in Chicago with the car-shredding company where the Mayor of Chicago needed help from EPA in terms of partnering technical analysis and thinking through legal and strategic ways that we can better protect the southeast side of Chicago.The same with, you know, the refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands and how we had to step in there and really ensure that Limetree Bay was doing right by its citizens and really doing what needs to be done to protect these communities that have been overburdened.So, you know, EPA has a very proud track record. We know that we're just getting started, and there's a lot of work that needs to be done, but that report card will reflect the actions that this administration has taken over the first eight months.MR. DENNIS: So, both while campaigning and while president, yes, President Biden has made pretty clear that one of his main priorities is to help, like, low-income, minority communities, vulnerable communities around the country, that are disproportionately impacted by climate change. I think, you know, quite a bit of the legacy pollution that you mentioned is well documented: lead lines, superfund sites, polluted air from various industrial operations.I'm curious, in particular, what impact you're seeing on some of these communities from climate change in particular. What does that look like? Why does it hit these communities harder, and what are you doing about that, or what do you have planned to do about that?MR. REGAN: You know, we understand that, with climate change, the impacts are so diverse to these communities that have been disproportionately impacted. Where we see extreme temperatures, we already understand that our Black, our Latinx, our tribal communities are already more vulnerable because of health disparities. Higher asthma rates, higher rates of heart and lung disease, the heat just puts added stress and pressure on that. So, we're seeing those impacts from climate change.We're seeing the impacts from these very intense storms and these floods. Those who are least financially able to rebuild and recover are getting hit the hardest. And so, we're seeing that right now play out. When we look at our wildfires, and not only the destruction that's caused by the fire in these communities that are less prepared to rebuild, but we're seeing the air quality impacts hundreds and hundreds of miles away, again, really impacting these communities of colors that have long borne the disproportionate impacts. And so, we are seeing the impacts play out right now. You don't have to be a scientist to appreciate what's going on. All you have to do is look out your window and you can see the storms. You can see the rains, the floods, the hurricanes, and the intensity. People are feeling it in terms of the increased asthma or respiratory illnesses, hospital visits.And so, we must do a better job in terms of reducing pollution that exacerbates these health disparities in these communities of color and help them be better prepared to deal with the implications of climate change. But we also must ramp up our efforts to regulate and get deep emission cuts in these pollutants that exacerbate climate change and push climate change at a much faster rate than otherwise. Which is why we are excited that we finalized our proposal of HFCs to reduce 85 percent of HFCs in the next 15 years. HFCs are really potent greenhouse gases. We are really tackling the tailpipe emissions from light-duty vehicles and we're tackling the greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-duty vehicles, as well as health pollutants like NOx from heavy-duty vehicles. Soon, we'll be releasing a proposed rulemaking that will get deep emission cuts in methane from both new and existing oil and gas facilities.And so, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. We really need to help our communities be prepared, what we're seeing today, but we also have to move really aggressively to regulate these greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the exacerbation that we're seeing with climate change.MR. DENNIS: You mentioned any number of priorities there, you know, doing more to get lead out of water, tackling greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, or maybe it's power plants and you mentioned methane, specifically. Like you said, a lot of things in the pipeline.I'm wondering, there's a reality in every presidential administration that time is always of the essence and time is always running short. I wonder for you what you're hoping to take care of or finalize before the end of this presidential term. I mean, what are the--in your eyes, the priorities when it comes to the environment and climate change that absolutely have to get done, and what are the hurdles to that?We saw in the Obama administration and in the Trump administration the courts really slowed down what each of those administrations were trying to do, even though their goals were quite opposite. How do you navigate that, and what is, like, at the top of your list of what you must finish before time runs too short?MR. REGAN: Well, you know, I think the takeaway for me is we've learned lessons from the previous administration in terms of how the courts will respond and the legal arguments that will be made. And so, it's very important for me to really follow suit with what we've done on HFCs with other regulations. On our tailpipe emission standards, we really need to have durable regulations that really usher in zero-emitting technologies for our vehicle fleets for the foreseeable future.We really have to have a very strong methane regulation that is durable and will withstand a lot of the legal challenges. And we will revisit our carbon reduction strategy for coal plants. We've learned from previous attempts what the courts will do and won't tolerate. And we're going to apply those lessons moving forward. And so, before the end of this term, I'd like to have durable regulations in place that can withstand the test of time and withstand litigation, and I believe we can do that.We also have to prioritize eradicating these lead service lines. We have to really focus on looking at how we begin to regulate these forever chemicals. And with the resources that will come from the Build Back Better agenda, you know, over $5 billion focused specifically on brownfield and superfund sites, all of these are really important because climate change has the ability to exacerbate exposure to polluted lands, fragile water infrastructure. And so, while we're combatting climate change, it's really important that we rebuild infrastructure in a much more resilient way. We have to get it all done. We have a workforce that is enthusiastic, has their sleeves rolled up and ready to tackle these issues. And so, we're really optimistic that we will do so successfully.MR. DENNIS: Just a last question, here. You mentioned your workforce, and I wanted to ask you, you know, you came into this position promising to, quote, \"restore science and transparency at the EPA\" after the Trump administration left office. You promised to rebuild an agency that had seen quite a few employees leave or retire in recent years. Talk to us about how that's going. What has that effort looked like, why it matters, and, frankly, how the public can know the progress that's being made.MR. REGAN: You know, I love this agency. I started my first internship--was with EPA, and I spent close to a decade here before I left. When I returned, it wasn't the same agency. Morale was low.We have really ramped up our transparency with our employees. We brought them back to the table, reminded them why some of them have 20-, 30-, 40-year careers, and have involved them in how we're moving forward. That has been a significant boost to morale. Reestablishing scientific integrity; you know, reestablishing policies that specifically say, we will not tolerate political interference or bullying. It has really reinvigorated the workforce, here. And we have a very smart, strategic plan for how we continue to bring in new talent, not the talent of yesteryear, but the talent of the future, or for the future. And so, we're working very hard, each and every day, because we understand that if we're going to accomplish the president's goals, it cannot be done without a healthy workforce.We're laser-focused on rebuilding our workforce. So far, we're seeing the morale shoot back up to the roof. And we're going to continue to feed our staff with information, accessibility, and treat them as real team members. And I think we're going to be well on our way.MR. DENNIS: So many more questions, but I think that's all the time we have for this particular conversation. Thanks so much, Administrator Regan, for joining us today.MR. REGAN: Well, thank you all for having me.MR. DENNIS: And I'll be back in a minute with our next guests. Please stay with us.[Video plays]MS. MESERVE: Hello, I'm Jeanne Meserve. With the UN Climate Conference just days away, The Lancet, the British medical journal, has issued a sobering warning that climate change could have an impact on human health that dwarfs the impact of the coronavirus and that different communities will be impacted differently.Here with me to discuss the interlocking issues of environmental justice and climate change is Abigail Dillen. She is President of Earthjustice. Thanks so much for joining us.MS. DILLEN: Thanks, Jeanne.MS. MESERVE: So, the Biden administration has said it is launching an all-of-government approach to climate change. How do you feel that environmental justice is essential to U.S. leadership on the issue?MS. DILLEN: Well, you can't lead on climate, or make progress, if you aren't taking on the unjust systems that are propelling climate change. When we choose to power this country with oil and gas and coal, we choose, inevitably, poisoned air and water and ravaged lands. Not for everyone, but for too many communities, and they are most often Black, brown, and Indigenous communities who are now also contending with climate change.And the way the fossil fuel industry maintains its power, the only way it can operate, is if we enforce our health and safety standards unequally. And so, what that means is if you're living next to a coal mine or a coal plant or a fracking field or a refinery, a petrochemical plant, you or someone you love has cancer or asthma, and too many people around you are dying too young. That's the devil's bargain that we make with fossil fuels, and that's what we have to change. And as we do, clean energy will become the only alternative.But it won't be enough just to make that shift. We've got to repair and invest in the communities that have been most hard hit by fossil fuels, and the communities that are waiting to see what their role in a new economy can be. And as long as there are people who feel that they may be left out or they may lose out in a transition to a clean energy economy, it won't emerge.MS. MESERVE: So, let's make this a little more concrete. How does it look like in practice to advance equity and justice in climate policy?MS. DILLEN: Well, in the next few days and weeks, it looks like passing the build back better act. We're reading, we're hearing so much about the political machinations in Congress right now, but we're not hearing enough about what's actually in this package. It is the biggest single thing we could do to advance climate justice in this country.And I'll just give a couple of examples. Our transportation sector is now the biggest carbon pollution problem we have, and our freight corridors and our busy ports are some of the most dangerous places in the country to live because they're so polluted. This act would provide the federal funding to switch out the dirty trucks and polluting port equipment with zero-emissions equipment for the future. Same with our city bus fleets, our school buses; same with the transportation systems that have never worked in low-income communities and communities of color. We can be making massive investments in EV charging infrastructure, and making it affordable to actually own an EV.And one particular program that's close to my heart are grants for communities that want to exercise their vision for the future. And the reason the communities are so important is because they are driving some of the most profound and fast change in the country. We have the privilege to represent them.MS. MESERVE: And what else does the Biden administration have to do to deliver on its promises regarding climate and environmental justice? And what are the challenges to doing that?MS. DILLEN: Well, I think they have to stay true to the commitments they made. The president ran on a platform that centered, for the very first time, climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality. And that platform resonated because it's real. It's the true problem that we face. And so, step one is to get the build back better act over the finish line, and then it's to really use the full force of the Executive Branch, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Interior, of course the EPA--to use every power we have to get at fossil fuel pollution and advance the solutions that we have.Our problems right now are not technological; they are political and cultural. And if the government really invests in doing things a different way, we can see change materialize very quickly. I trust Administrator Regan is behind that, particularly bringing in the people who are most impacted by the problems to help fashion the solutions.MS. MESERVE: This isn't about one administration. This is a long-term issue, a set of long-term problems. Looking in that longer term, what do you see as the opportunities and the priority?MS. DILLEN: I think we have to really dig in to belief in local solutions paired with federal action. And I'll give you two examples why. One is that what we're seeing is tribal communities, local communities, nurses, doctors uniting around solutions they know will work for their communities. And when they do that, they're achieving extraordinary things against the odds. But for organizing and litigation in the Pacific Northwest, we would see that region be a fossil fuel hub, facilitating U.S. oil and gas and coal to Asian markets. But for the courageous work of Rise St. James in Louisiana and an incredible coalition in the South, we would see new petrochemical facilities being built, expanding our carbon footprint, our cancer-causing pollution, and plastic manufacture. So, really investing in the climate action that's coming up through the grassroots and creating a system for it to flourish is the opportunity that we have before us now.And I'll leave your audience with one last point. We can't do any of this good work without strong laws and fair courts. And just as we understand that voting rights and reproductive rights depend on the courts, we have to understand that climate progress does, too.MS. MESERVE: Abigail Dillen, President of Earthjustice. And now, back to The Washington Post.[Video plays]MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Brady Dennis, national environmental reporter here at The Post.My next guests today are here to talk us through the complexities and the opportunities of climate justice and environmental intersectionalism. Jerome Foster II is an environmental justice advisor to the Biden administration; and Leah Thomas is a writer and activist who focuses on educating the next generation of environmental advocates on how to create meaningful change.To you both, welcome to Washington Post Live.MS. THOMAS: Hi, thanks for having us.MR. FOSTER: Great to be here.MR. DENNIS: Jerome, let's start with you. I want to start with the biggest environmental story in the news certainly this week and in the weeks ahead, the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Scotland. It has been described by some as perhaps one of the last, best chances to put the planet on a sustainable path for the future. And I notice that you tweeted that you're planning to be there, I believe. In any case, what type of action are you hoping to see from that gathering? And in particular, what concrete promises do you want or expect President Biden to deliver on that international stage?MR. FOSTER: Yeah, so, when it comes to COP26 and what the youth movement is demanding specifically is an end to fossil fuel subsidies. And because of the fact that we talk about free markets and having the capitalism be on the transition on to climate justice, it really is not that.We have to make sure that we're playing on a level playing field. Solar can't just be the next coal barons. We have to make it more rooted in communities, so we're asking for an end to subsidies, there. Also, we're demanding an end to the production of oil pipelines, like fracked oil that's going through America right now through Line 3 or the North Brooklyn Pipeline, and on the international stage with Nord Stream 2. There's so many bills that we're trying to pass nationally in the United States that we also need to see on the international stage, when it comes to giving funding to frontline communities in countries that are seeing the climate crisis at their front doorstep right now, and that they need international aid as we see it and as we need equity-based and real climate solutions given through aid to them.MR. DENNIS: Just to follow up, I'm curious how you are planning to spend your time in the lead-up here to COP26, and how do you plan to spend these coming weeks, you know, focusing and drawing attention to the issues that you just highlighted while there is this sort of global spotlight on this? How do you plan to do that?MR. FOSTER: So, yesterday evening, we just kicked off COP26 here in Los Angeles with the Mayor of Los Angeles, Mayor Garcetti; and also, the UK Consulate General.And really, over the next coming weeks, the biggest change we're going to see, especially from young people, is demanding not just a talk around what climate justice solutions must look like, but really understanding the implementation process, and not just focusing on the fact that we have to protect animals but also protecting communities. Because when we talk about climate justice, especially from the previous COPs, there's only really been a focus on how do we continue to lower our emissions, without the aspects of equity or justice or jobs ever really mentioned in a meaningful or substantive way. And that's really what the push is for the next couple of weeks from us, is, one, making our voices heard by organizing mass mobilizations at COP26; and two, making sure that our voices are heard inside the room, as well.Me being a White House climate advisor, I was selected by the youth mo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Powering Change with Jerome Foster II, Michael S. Regan & Leah Thomas (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8673",
        "date": "2021-10-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/10/28/transcript-protecting-our-planet-powering-change-with-jerome-foster-ii-michael-s-regan-leah-thomas/",
        "text": "MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Brady Dennis, a national environmental reporter here at The Post. I\u2019m delighted to be hosting this two-part conversation today about climate change and environmental justice.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOur first guest today is the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and, as it happens, a fellow North Carolinian, Michael Regan. Administrator Regan, thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Washington Post Live. MR. REGAN: Well, thank you, Brady. I'm delighted to be here today.MR. DENNIS: Before we get to the main topic, environmental justice, today I want to turn to a related, of course, but current environmental story that's in the news, the UN climate summit that's coming up beginning next week in Scotland. Countries from around the world are gathering, facing pressure to do more and do more quickly on climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Biden administration is taking a large crew to this event: yourself, of course; and a large number of other cabinet members. And I'd like to hear from you what message the president is trying to send with such a large contingent, and what message you yourself will be taking to that climate summit.MR. REGAN: Well, you know, the president is sending the same signal he sent from day one, which is climate change is a threat, a threat not just to the United States, but to the world. And he has a whole-of-government approach. And I think when you look at the delegation that will be going to Glasgow, you will see a full show of force that all of our agencies have taken climate change seriously and that we're going to be there in support of the president's very ambitious goal and agenda.And EPA will definitely be there to demonstrate that we have a significant role in terms of our regulatory authority and encouraging our corporate partners to exercise voluntary measures, as well. We are there to support the President's NDA, and we're going to be there in full force to demonstrate that it's more than rhetoric, that all of our agencies are there to demonstrate how America will and can lead, and demonstrate to the world that we are working as one government.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. DENNIS: So, you mentioned the concrete things the U.S. will try to display and talk about at that global climate summit. The U.S. has certainly faced a lack of trust on this topic. In recent years we, under the Trump administration, walked away from the Paris Climate Accord. Of course, under President Biden, now came back and the president has said this is one of his main priorities and pledged to sharply cut the greenhouse gas emissions of the country going forward.But at the same time, as we're seeing every day in the news, Congress has not yet funded some of those key proposals that would allow that to happen. And I just wonder, again, as you go onto this global stage, and this president does, as well, what are you to tell allies who have expressed doubts that the U.S. will follow through on the promises that the president is making?MR. REGAN: You know, if there's anyone that knows how to deal with Congress and get the best deal, it's President Biden, and he's still in there every single minute fighting for the best deal for the American people. So, I have the confidence that the president and the United States will go to COP26 with the ability to show that we are all in when it comes to building back better and when it comes to tackling climate change.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut irrespective of what Congress does, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has ample authority, statutory authority, legal obligations to move forward as quickly as possible to tackle the climate crisis. And so, we're prepared; we're ready. And EPA will move forward with a very aggressive agenda and complement to whatever Congress eventually passes.MR. DENNIS: I want to follow up on that a little bit. You said often that you consider yourself to be a consensus-maker, more of a consensus-seeker than a crusader. But obviously, as we've seen with the uncertainty in Congress, and you just alluded to, a key piece of meeting these climate and environmental goals is going to be using the authority that the EPA and other agencies already have.And so, in some sense, what is more effective enforcing this kind of action? Is it seeking consensus or exercising executive authority? How much is achievable without Congress and the courts? And how far are you willing to go in your own role to see that we begin this shift toward lower emissions in the future?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. REGAN: You know, I've always found success in having everyone at the table and moving forward in a very transparent manner. And sometimes consensus is really focused on principles to follow through on everyone having a seat at the table and being transparent. We recognize we're not all going to agree, but I think most around the table understand that climate change is a significant threat, and there are multiple ways to get at that threat.I have been very clear since day one that I will be transparent, I will follow the science, I will follow the law, and that this country will move forward on climate change and combatting climate change and looking at ways to build jobs and increase our global competitiveness. And so, I will push the envelope. I will move forward as quickly as possible, as aggressively as possible, using the authorities that Congress has given us.And so, I've been very transparent with our regulative community, and I believe that they understand that we're here to do a job and that we're going to talk to them about what the best path forward is to do that, recognizing that EPA has a job to do.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. DENNIS: One last question on the international front, if I may. The U.S. and other developed countries around the world have not yet lived up to financial promises that they made to small and vulnerable countries, developing countries around the world, more than a decade ago, which would be to provide $100 billion a year in aid both for dealing with climate impacts that these places are already seeing and helping to fund the shift toward a greener--you know, greener economies.The U.S. and other countries have not yet lived up to that; although, the president has said he will greatly increase that funding. I ask you about this because some of these nations that are really on the frontlines of climate change are home to people of color, the most vulnerable populations around the world, people who in some cases may already be displaced from their homes. Given this administration's focus on environmental justice, how important is it to live up to the promises for environmental justice abroad, as well as here at home?MR. REGAN: It's extremely important, and this president has promised that racial justice and equity and environmental justice will be central to the administration's priorities and goals.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe president's stepping up on the international stage and committing that financial assistance to those countries that are the most vulnerable is a critical step forward in answering and following through on the promises that were made; so, it's very important. Climate change is indiscriminate, and we know all across the globe that the most vulnerable populations stand to bear the brunt of climate change impacts. So, we must do all that we can, both domestically and internationally to protect our most vulnerable.The president has stepped up and made a pledge financially to help do that on the international stage. And here, domestically, we have made it a centerpiece of EPA's mission. EJ is part of the DNA of EPA. And we're really serious about that and we're moving forward.MR. DENNIS: Well, let's turn to that front, domestically. An EPA report from September, I believe, found that people of color in the United States are exposed to much higher levels of air pollution, regardless of their region or income level. This is one of any number of academic studies that have shown that such communities are bombarded by environmental factors. What does that report and others like it tell us about systemic racism and really how it affects health around the United States?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMR. REGAN: It tells us that the data is there. It's more than a feeling; it's more than perception. The data calls it out. And this report, this EJ report that EPA just released, one of the most in-depth reports ever done on the topic of environmental justice. It demonstrates that if we see a 2-degrees Celsius warming from climate change and global warming that 34 percent of Black and African-Americans are more likely to live in communities that will see an increase in childhood asthma. Forty percent, if we see the 2-degree increase, 40 percent of Blacks and African-Americans are more likely to live in communities or be exposed to heat-related deaths. We've seen that, you know, 34 percent of our Latinx community are more likely to see labor shortages because of the impacts to industries like agriculture and construction. So, there's a 40 percent more likelihood that all of these things will occur in these communities of color. This is very, very important data and information that we must incorporate into our regulations, into our policies, into our laws. And so, this is a critical moment and we are prepared to meet the moment.MR. DENNIS: When you talk about meeting the moment, the Biden administration has promised to fund environmental justice initiatives and projects around the country. I'd like to hear from you a little bit about how that will work, in what ways that might already be happening. You know, and even more specifically, how can the federal government ensure that the funds that get delivered to states through governors who may have different priorities actually end up in the hands of the groups that need it? And how soon can that process begin? I assume, in a lot of ways, it also depends on Congress and the funding.MR. REGAN: You know, Congress has already acted in the past to recognize that this is an important issue and EPA's role. During the American Rescue Plan, EPA was given $100 million to focus on environmental justice issues, 50 million specifically to focus on air quality monitoring and air quality issues; and then 50 million to focus on partnership opportunities with state, locals, nonprofits on tackling environmental justice issues in general. So, we've got $100 million down payment from Congress. The president has requested a 20-percent increase in EPA's budget overall. And given that we are looking at all of our issues through the lens of environmental justice, those resources will be integrated into our program so that we see action on the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut then, we take a step back and look at what's been discussed with budget reconciliation and the Build Back Better--I'm sorry, the bipartisan infrastructure deal. Over $55 billion--$55 billion--for water infrastructure improvements. And the president has pledged to eradicate the exposure of lead pipelines which, you know, impacts close to 6- to 10 million people. $21 billion to clean up legacy pollution in our communities of color; $17 billion focused on congestion and port-related issues. And so, we have the will to move forward. The American Rescue Plan is a down payment. The budget conversation shows the roadmap, and the bipartisan infrastructure deal does, as well.To round all of that out, the president has a Justice40 Initiative, which has focused all of our agencies to develop criteria and a wherewithal and a willpower to look at how 40 percent of all of these investments stay in these communities of color or these communities that have been disproportionately impacted for generations. That's not solely to reduce pollution, but it's also to invest in economic development, to create jobs to pour into environmental education so that we have more sustainable communities that are better educated on how to protect themselves, as well. So, this is a whole-of-government approach, but it's also a very thoughtful approach, starting with the American Rescue Plan, moving through the budget request for EPA, and hopefully rounding out in this Build Back Better agenda that's playing out through budget reconciliation and the bipartisan infrastructure deal.MR. DENNIS: The Biden administration has promised a year-end report card of environmental justice achievements--every year, I think, in fact. This first year in office, when should we expect that? I say \"we,\" the public. When should the public expect that? What might it say? What do you think are the high marks and places that probably need work on that report card, whatever it may look like?MR. REGAN: Well, you know, I'll leave it to the White House when they plan to publish their scorecard. But what you can anticipate are seeing many of the actions that agencies like EPA have already taken. You will see a scorecard that looks at how we have allocated that $100 million that came to us through the American Rescue Plan. You'll see how we have been very reflective and retooled our own grantmaking processes here in the agency to get more resources to more people, newer organizations that have never had an opportunity to get grant dollars. You will see the forward progress that we've made on creating an environmental justice and equity program that is equivalent to our air, water, and land programs. You'll also see a much stronger record on enforcement, and how we've really ramped up enforcing the existing laws on the books. Perfect examples are our intervention in Chicago with the car-shredding company where the Mayor of Chicago needed help from EPA in terms of partnering technical analysis and thinking through legal and strategic ways that we can better protect the southeast side of Chicago.The same with, you know, the refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands and how we had to step in there and really ensure that Limetree Bay was doing right by its citizens and really doing what needs to be done to protect these communities that have been overburdened.So, you know, EPA has a very proud track record. We know that we're just getting started, and there's a lot of work that needs to be done, but that report card will reflect the actions that this administration has taken over the first eight months.MR. DENNIS: So, both while campaigning and while president, yes, President Biden has made pretty clear that one of his main priorities is to help, like, low-income, minority communities, vulnerable communities around the country, that are disproportionately impacted by climate change. I think, you know, quite a bit of the legacy pollution that you mentioned is well documented: lead lines, superfund sites, polluted air from various industrial operations.I'm curious, in particular, what impact you're seeing on some of these communities from climate change in particular. What does that look like? Why does it hit these communities harder, and what are you doing about that, or what do you have planned to do about that?MR. REGAN: You know, we understand that, with climate change, the impacts are so diverse to these communities that have been disproportionately impacted. Where we see extreme temperatures, we already understand that our Black, our Latinx, our tribal communities are already more vulnerable because of health disparities. Higher asthma rates, higher rates of heart and lung disease, the heat just puts added stress and pressure on that. So, we're seeing those impacts from climate change.We're seeing the impacts from these very intense storms and these floods. Those who are least financially able to rebuild and recover are getting hit the hardest. And so, we're seeing that right now play out. When we look at our wildfires, and not only the destruction that's caused by the fire in these communities that are less prepared to rebuild, but we're seeing the air quality impacts hundreds and hundreds of miles away, again, really impacting these communities of colors that have long borne the disproportionate impacts. And so, we are seeing the impacts play out right now. You don't have to be a scientist to appreciate what's going on. All you have to do is look out your window and you can see the storms. You can see the rains, the floods, the hurricanes, and the intensity. People are feeling it in terms of the increased asthma or respiratory illnesses, hospital visits.And so, we must do a better job in terms of reducing pollution that exacerbates these health disparities in these communities of color and help them be better prepared to deal with the implications of climate change. But we also must ramp up our efforts to regulate and get deep emission cuts in these pollutants that exacerbate climate change and push climate change at a much faster rate than otherwise. Which is why we are excited that we finalized our proposal of HFCs to reduce 85 percent of HFCs in the next 15 years. HFCs are really potent greenhouse gases. We are really tackling the tailpipe emissions from light-duty vehicles and we're tackling the greenhouse gas emissions from heavy-duty vehicles, as well as health pollutants like NOx from heavy-duty vehicles. Soon, we'll be releasing a proposed rulemaking that will get deep emission cuts in methane from both new and existing oil and gas facilities.And so, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. We really need to help our communities be prepared, what we're seeing today, but we also have to move really aggressively to regulate these greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the exacerbation that we're seeing with climate change.MR. DENNIS: You mentioned any number of priorities there, you know, doing more to get lead out of water, tackling greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, or maybe it's power plants and you mentioned methane, specifically. Like you said, a lot of things in the pipeline.I'm wondering, there's a reality in every presidential administration that time is always of the essence and time is always running short. I wonder for you what you're hoping to take care of or finalize before the end of this presidential term. I mean, what are the--in your eyes, the priorities when it comes to the environment and climate change that absolutely have to get done, and what are the hurdles to that?We saw in the Obama administration and in the Trump administration the courts really slowed down what each of those administrations were trying to do, even though their goals were quite opposite. How do you navigate that, and what is, like, at the top of your list of what you must finish before time runs too short?MR. REGAN: Well, you know, I think the takeaway for me is we've learned lessons from the previous administration in terms of how the courts will respond and the legal arguments that will be made. And so, it's very important for me to really follow suit with what we've done on HFCs with other regulations. On our tailpipe emission standards, we really need to have durable regulations that really usher in zero-emitting technologies for our vehicle fleets for the foreseeable future.We really have to have a very strong methane regulation that is durable and will withstand a lot of the legal challenges. And we will revisit our carbon reduction strategy for coal plants. We've learned from previous attempts what the courts will do and won't tolerate. And we're going to apply those lessons moving forward. And so, before the end of this term, I'd like to have durable regulations in place that can withstand the test of time and withstand litigation, and I believe we can do that.We also have to prioritize eradicating these lead service lines. We have to really focus on looking at how we begin to regulate these forever chemicals. And with the resources that will come from the Build Back Better agenda, you know, over $5 billion focused specifically on brownfield and superfund sites, all of these are really important because climate change has the ability to exacerbate exposure to polluted lands, fragile water infrastructure. And so, while we're combatting climate change, it's really important that we rebuild infrastructure in a much more resilient way. We have to get it all done. We have a workforce that is enthusiastic, has their sleeves rolled up and ready to tackle these issues. And so, we're really optimistic that we will do so successfully.MR. DENNIS: Just a last question, here. You mentioned your workforce, and I wanted to ask you, you know, you came into this position promising to, quote, \"restore science and transparency at the EPA\" after the Trump administration left office. You promised to rebuild an agency that had seen quite a few employees leave or retire in recent years. Talk to us about how that's going. What has that effort looked like, why it matters, and, frankly, how the public can know the progress that's being made.MR. REGAN: You know, I love this agency. I started my first internship--was with EPA, and I spent close to a decade here before I left. When I returned, it wasn't the same agency. Morale was low.We have really ramped up our transparency with our employees. We brought them back to the table, reminded them why some of them have 20-, 30-, 40-year careers, and have involved them in how we're moving forward. That has been a significant boost to morale. Reestablishing scientific integrity; you know, reestablishing policies that specifically say, we will not tolerate political interference or bullying. It has really reinvigorated the workforce, here. And we have a very smart, strategic plan for how we continue to bring in new talent, not the talent of yesteryear, but the talent of the future, or for the future. And so, we're working very hard, each and every day, because we understand that if we're going to accomplish the president's goals, it cannot be done without a healthy workforce.We're laser-focused on rebuilding our workforce. So far, we're seeing the morale shoot back up to the roof. And we're going to continue to feed our staff with information, accessibility, and treat them as real team members. And I think we're going to be well on our way.MR. DENNIS: So many more questions, but I think that's all the time we have for this particular conversation. Thanks so much, Administrator Regan, for joining us today.MR. REGAN: Well, thank you all for having me.MR. DENNIS: And I'll be back in a minute with our next guests. Please stay with us.[Video plays]MS. MESERVE: Hello, I'm Jeanne Meserve. With the UN Climate Conference just days away, The Lancet, the British medical journal, has issued a sobering warning that climate change could have an impact on human health that dwarfs the impact of the coronavirus and that different communities will be impacted differently.Here with me to discuss the interlocking issues of environmental justice and climate change is Abigail Dillen. She is President of Earthjustice. Thanks so much for joining us.MS. DILLEN: Thanks, Jeanne.MS. MESERVE: So, the Biden administration has said it is launching an all-of-government approach to climate change. How do you feel that environmental justice is essential to U.S. leadership on the issue?MS. DILLEN: Well, you can't lead on climate, or make progress, if you aren't taking on the unjust systems that are propelling climate change. When we choose to power this country with oil and gas and coal, we choose, inevitably, poisoned air and water and ravaged lands. Not for everyone, but for too many communities, and they are most often Black, brown, and Indigenous communities who are now also contending with climate change.And the way the fossil fuel industry maintains its power, the only way it can operate, is if we enforce our health and safety standards unequally. And so, what that means is if you're living next to a coal mine or a coal plant or a fracking field or a refinery, a petrochemical plant, you or someone you love has cancer or asthma, and too many people around you are dying too young. That's the devil's bargain that we make with fossil fuels, and that's what we have to change. And as we do, clean energy will become the only alternative.But it won't be enough just to make that shift. We've got to repair and invest in the communities that have been most hard hit by fossil fuels, and the communities that are waiting to see what their role in a new economy can be. And as long as there are people who feel that they may be left out or they may lose out in a transition to a clean energy economy, it won't emerge.MS. MESERVE: So, let's make this a little more concrete. How does it look like in practice to advance equity and justice in climate policy?MS. DILLEN: Well, in the next few days and weeks, it looks like passing the build back better act. We're reading, we're hearing so much about the political machinations in Congress right now, but we're not hearing enough about what's actually in this package. It is the biggest single thing we could do to advance climate justice in this country.And I'll just give a couple of examples. Our transportation sector is now the biggest carbon pollution problem we have, and our freight corridors and our busy ports are some of the most dangerous places in the country to live because they're so polluted. This act would provide the federal funding to switch out the dirty trucks and polluting port equipment with zero-emissions equipment for the future. Same with our city bus fleets, our school buses; same with the transportation systems that have never worked in low-income communities and communities of color. We can be making massive investments in EV charging infrastructure, and making it affordable to actually own an EV.And one particular program that's close to my heart are grants for communities that want to exercise their vision for the future. And the reason the communities are so important is because they are driving some of the most profound and fast change in the country. We have the privilege to represent them.MS. MESERVE: And what else does the Biden administration have to do to deliver on its promises regarding climate and environmental justice? And what are the challenges to doing that?MS. DILLEN: Well, I think they have to stay true to the commitments they made. The president ran on a platform that centered, for the very first time, climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality. And that platform resonated because it's real. It's the true problem that we face. And so, step one is to get the build back better act over the finish line, and then it's to really use the full force of the Executive Branch, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Interior, of course the EPA--to use every power we have to get at fossil fuel pollution and advance the solutions that we have.Our problems right now are not technological; they are political and cultural. And if the government really invests in doing things a different way, we can see change materialize very quickly. I trust Administrator Regan is behind that, particularly bringing in the people who are most impacted by the problems to help fashion the solutions.MS. MESERVE: This isn't about one administration. This is a long-term issue, a set of long-term problems. Looking in that longer term, what do you see as the opportunities and the priority?MS. DILLEN: I think we have to really dig in to belief in local solutions paired with federal action. And I'll give you two examples why. One is that what we're seeing is tribal communities, local communities, nurses, doctors uniting around solutions they know will work for their communities. And when they do that, they're achieving extraordinary things against the odds. But for organizing and litigation in the Pacific Northwest, we would see that region be a fossil fuel hub, facilitating U.S. oil and gas and coal to Asian markets. But for the courageous work of Rise St. James in Louisiana and an incredible coalition in the South, we would see new petrochemical facilities being built, expanding our carbon footprint, our cancer-causing pollution, and plastic manufacture. So, really investing in the climate action that's coming up through the grassroots and creating a system for it to flourish is the opportunity that we have before us now.And I'll leave your audience with one last point. We can't do any of this good work without strong laws and fair courts. And just as we understand that voting rights and reproductive rights depend on the courts, we have to understand that climate progress does, too.MS. MESERVE: Abigail Dillen, President of Earthjustice. And now, back to The Washington Post.[Video plays]MR. DENNIS: Hello, and welcome back to Washington Post Live. For those of you just joining us, I'm Brady Dennis, national environmental reporter here at The Post.My next guests today are here to talk us through the complexities and the opportunities of climate justice and environmental intersectionalism. Jerome Foster II is an environmental justice advisor to the Biden administration; and Leah Thomas is a writer and activist who focuses on educating the next generation of environmental advocates on how to create meaningful change.To you both, welcome to Washington Post Live.MS. THOMAS: Hi, thanks for having us.MR. FOSTER: Great to be here.MR. DENNIS: Jerome, let's start with you. I want to start with the biggest environmental story in the news certainly this week and in the weeks ahead, the COP26 UN Climate Summit in Scotland. It has been described by some as perhaps one of the last, best chances to put the planet on a sustainable path for the future. And I notice that you tweeted that you're planning to be there, I believe. In any case, what type of action are you hoping to see from that gathering? And in particular, what concrete promises do you want or expect President Biden to deliver on that international stage?MR. FOSTER: Yeah, so, when it comes to COP26 and what the youth movement is demanding specifically is an end to fossil fuel subsidies. And because of the fact that we talk about free markets and having the capitalism be on the transition on to climate justice, it really is not that.We have to make sure that we're playing on a level playing field. Solar can't just be the next coal barons. We have to make it more rooted in communities, so we're asking for an end to subsidies, there. Also, we're demanding an end to the production of oil pipelines, like fracked oil that's going through America right now through Line 3 or the North Brooklyn Pipeline, and on the international stage with Nord Stream 2. There's so many bills that we're trying to pass nationally in the United States that we also need to see on the international stage, when it comes to giving funding to frontline communities in countries that are seeing the climate crisis at their front doorstep right now, and that they need international aid as we see it and as we need equity-based and real climate solutions given through aid to them.MR. DENNIS: Just to follow up, I'm curious how you are planning to spend your time in the lead-up here to COP26, and how do you plan to spend these coming weeks, you know, focusing and drawing attention to the issues that you just highlighted while there is this sort of global spotlight on this? How do you plan to do that?MR. FOSTER: So, yesterday evening, we just kicked off COP26 here in Los Angeles with the Mayor of Los Angeles, Mayor Garcetti; and also, the UK Consulate General.And really, over the next coming weeks, the biggest change we're going to see, especially from young people, is demanding not just a talk around what climate justice solutions must look like, but really understanding the implementation process, and not just focusing on the fact that we have to protect animals but also protecting communities. Because when we talk about climate justice, especially from the previous COPs, there's only really been a focus on how do we continue to lower our emissions, without the aspects of equity or justice or jobs ever really mentioned in a meaningful or substantive way. And that's really what the push is for the next couple of weeks from us, is, one, making our voices heard by organizing mass mobilizations at COP26; and two, making sure that our voices are heard inside the room, as well.Me being a White House climate advisor, I was selected by the youth mo",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Energy Efficiency with David Hochschild & Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8674",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/11/15/transcript-protecting-our-planet-energy-efficiency-with-david-hochschild-bristol-mayor-marvin-rees/",
        "text": "MS. EILPERIN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Juliet Eilperin, climate and environment deputy editor here at The Post. Thanks for joining us today for our two-part series on energy efficiency. Joining me now on the heels of COP26 to talk about how his city has championed energy efficiency standards is Mayor Marvin Rees, the mayor of Bristol, England. Mayor Rees, thanks so much for joining us here on Washington Post Live. We really appreciate it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMAYOR REES: Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.MS. EILPERIN: Excellent. What we want to talk about is that, obviously, let's start with the--with the news that we have. Seeing that COP26 just wrapped up this weekend, we'd love to know what are your takeaways on what was accomplished during this summit of nearly 200 nations, and what do you think might have been lacking out of the final agreement that was just forged on Saturday?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMAYOR REES: Well, while there's some debate about it, I think, clear they've kept 1.5 on the table, which is both the claim and the missed opportunity, isn't it? So, it's still on the table. We're still talking about it. But getting to the specific commitment to move away from coal and fossil fuels is obviously a little bit watered down.What I think was missing actually was not in the commitments but was in the ability to recognize the leadership role of cities in delivering decarbonization. I think that the focus has been on national governments coming to an agreement between national governments when--which in and of itself is problematic. It needs to happen, but this zero-sum game between nation states holds the conversation back because they can't work without global interdependence.But we went there with C40, with Mayors Migration Council, with UK Cities Climate Investment Commission, with the argument that actually if you focus on cities and the decarbonization of cities, then work out how you get mayors to finance to be able to lead those processes of decarbonization. It doesn't matter if national--well, it does matter. But it's--it takes the pressure off of national leaders getting the deals done, because mayors will actually begin to deliver. And I think that cities' voice, that cities' leadership was the bit that was missing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: So you raise an excellent point. And I think for--you know, for folks coming in fresh to these kinds of international UN negotiations, they might miss some of the details that you're pointing out now, the idea that this is really a bottom-up process. I mean, the fact of the matter is, you have this agreement that, you know, gives a few details on what our overarching goals are. But both it is each individual nation that needs to deliver on the commitments that that country is making, and more importantly, it's really the local and, you know, regional officials that have to put the policies in place along with national leaders to make sure the greenhouse gas emissions are cut. So, could you detail in, you know, a little bit more when you're looking at it in terms of what local leaders can do to ensure that we're headed on this path to sustainability? What are some of the kind of most important contributions you think local leaders can do to ensure that these nations, whether they are large or small, are delivering on those climate commitments in the context of this UN process?MAYOR REES: Well, the specific things we need to do at the city level are build homes, retrofit homes, put the right homes in the right places. So, we will build more densely on brownfield sites rather than sprawling. Building dependency on transport systems will also deliver mass transit systems, decarbonized transport offers.Even today, I was talking with my team, and we've just announced that our meals on wheels service that takes meals out to older people who might be easily isolated, less able to cook--our fleet of vehicles that are going to be delivering those meals are moving over to electric. And we've been able to do that. It's not just a case of having the engine. Those vehicles need to have heating facilities and refrigeration facilities to make sure the food arrives fresh. So, from the big infrastructure projects, like putting in heat networks, ground source heat, water source heat, decarbonized heat sources and distribution, to what we do with people's homes are all what we do at the--at the city level.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut can I just say--I\u2019ll just flipped it a little bit. I don't think it is simply the case of city leaders doing, delivering what national leaders actually put in policy. That that model of governance, we've moved on from that. In many ways, it's the cities that are pushing and asking national government to support them to get done what they want to get done.In my city of Bristol, we've mapped out our roadmap to decarbonization, but it costs 10 billion pounds to get there. I work with a network in the UK called The UK Cities Climate Investment Commission. We've mapped out 205 billion pounds worth of decarbonization opportunities across the 11 biggest cities in the UK, which would have a massive impact on the UK\u2019s carbon emissions. We've mapped it out. But as cities, we don't have access to that finance. So, the work we've been doing is, is focusing on what national governments need to do to support cities, not to just get public money, but how they can support us to go and get that international finance. That's the same story for, say, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown in Sierra Leone as well. How do these cities in the Global South get access to that finance? In many ways, national governments will have to catch up with the scale and pace of delivery that city leaders, you know, have aspirations for.MS. EILPERIN: Well, you're touching on a really interesting theme, right? Because the whole idea of how to mobilize the money for these climate friendly investments was a huge issue in the ongoing discussions. And again, as part of both national discussions we're having here in the United States right now, as we're debating whether we--whether President Biden and Democrats are going to be able to pass a massive tax and spending bill that would make these kinds of investments. So, when you look at what's happening in England, is your sense that basically, you're getting policy support from national leaders, but the money is not entirely there for you to pursue everything that you're trying to do? And to what extent do you think that the private sector can provide money for the innovations you're doing? Or is this really something where you're going to have to have governments, whether it's in Britain, in other countries, both rich and developing, that are going to have to, you know, really provide the funds to execute on the plans that you've outlined?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMAYOR REES: Well, the policy support is a mixed bag. You know, it's--and it cannot be separated from finance. Making a commitment or setting a standard but then not talking about how you're going to get it done and it all has to be paid for is meaningless. That's just a gesture. So that's a--that's a major--you know, major issue for us. As myself with other cities, we're going into COP saying any commitments on decarbonization, be they a national level or an international level, have to be matched to real places, right? They have to be matched to Philadelphia, Bristol, Freetown, Lahore--decarbonization hubs in real places, not in international abstracts. They have to be attached to measurable outcomes they'll set against actual dates, and all that needs to be set to finance. If any of those are missing, we've got a problem. No business would go into a future without all those things being in place. We can't tackle an issue as challenging, as potentially chaotic as decarbonization without that kind of a structure.So it is a--the private sector, it absolutely has to be in the game. One is, it's in private--it's in the private sector\u2019s self-interest, right? They want stable markets [audio interference] consumers. A businessman in Bristol once said riots are not good for him with investment. Chaos is not good for the economy. We've seen that with COVID. So, they need to invest in a more stable future.But the sums of money we are talking about are not in the public sector alone, either. So they have to step up, whether it be, you know, a commercial investment, or whether it be a philanthropic investment in the ability of--and I'm going to focus on it because that's where I'm at, cities--to deliver the mass transit systems, the organized urbanization to--that will allow us to develop, to provide homes to meet our populations\u2019 needs in a way that doesn't destroy nature, and doesn't drive more carbon into the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: Let's talk about buildings and net-zero goals, given that buildings are such a critical part of this equation, right? They're responsible for something like 40 percent of the global energy consumption and one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. So, is green, renovating or green building something that can really help countries achieve the kinds of net-zero goals that they're striving for when it comes to the mid-century, to 2050? What do you--what do you think about that?MAYOR REES: Well, it has to be. And so we're--I take my city as an example. It's a challenge I put to people all the time. As you know, as a mayor, I've got to deal with, you know, 102 priorities, right? I got a single issue [audio interference] coming in. So, we're a city of 42 square miles. We're a population of 465,000 people. That population--we have a housing crisis today. Bristol is one of the most unaffordable cities in the UK for housing. We have 15,000 on the waiting list. We have over 1,000 households in temporary accommodation. One in four children in my city live in poverty. So, we have all these--we have great wealth and big inequality within Bristol. We have to meet that housing crisis.But the city is not getting any bigger, right? But we have to meet that challenge in the face of a climate and ecological emergency. So, the question is not do you build houses or not? We have to build houses, right? The question is, what kind of homes do you build, and where do you build them? So, it does mean that we have to build net-zero housing. Then the challenge for me comes in that those can be more expensive to build. So, I may go into a deal with a developer and they say, well, if you were building houses, you know that reduce carbon emissions by 80--you know, 80 percent, you could have 35 percent affordable. If you're going to ask for 100 percent, you can only have 20 percent affordable. So, you can see the money begins to bite, and some groups don't that understand this. So, we have to have put money into those--into the more efficient housing. And we know that that's essential, because we need affordable but we need decarbonized housing as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe other complexity comes when we begin to look at brownfield sites in the middle of the city, put in zero-carbon homes four miles from the main retail/residential/entertainment zone, it defeats its own purpose. We need to build like the World Bank says, you know, pyramids, not pancakes, on brownfield sites in the middle of the city. But brownfield sites can be more complicated to bring forward, particularly in a city like Bristol when they\u2019re former industrial sites, and we have diesel in the ground, or arsenic, or we even found a cholera pit underneath, you know, a site in the middle the city. So again, it takes more money to make sure that we get our share of affordable and with decarbonization. So, we're doing the environmental justice and the social justice, what we call the just transition in our journey.MS. EILPERIN: That's a really good point. And so when you see--you know, when you talk about exactly kind of tackling a few different things at this time--right?--kind of the communities that have been most hurt by traditional pollution as well as greenhouse gas pollution, and how to address that, is there an example--for example, you know, could you detail a little bit more how there's one project that is now--you know, whether it's dealing with these [unclear] or something else--that's made a concrete impact on Bristol residents\u2019 lives that, again, could potentially be replicated when this conversation is something that so many countries across the world are now having about how to address historic injustices and shift our trajectory so that we're going to a place where we're tackling those at the same time we're addressing climate change?MAYOR REES: Yeah, so I\u2019ll give you one. It\u2019s tackling fuel poverty within the city. And it is a very real example. I was being visited by Labour leadership not too long ago, and I went to a home, and I was going to--one of our housing developments Ashton Rise, which is just on the edge--well, on the edge of the city boundary. I knocked on the door. The woman that came to the door was a Syrian, had come to the UK as part of, you know, the refugee crisis. As her door opened up in the winter period, heat came out from the door. When I talked to her, these are the homes that have ground source heat. She didn't even have the heating and turned on. When I talked to her, these are the homes that have ground source heat. She didn't even have the heating turned on. But the efficiency of the home, the source of the heat, the decarbonized source coming from ground source heat was providing a home, a warm home, which means that people aren\u2019t choosing between heating and eating, which is hugely important. This is the dilemmas that many, many mayors will know that some of the poorest people in their cities face. I guess in hot cities it\u2019s between heating and cooling their homes as well if they have air conditioning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd I think, again, at COP, one of the messages we gave is there was a perversity or a collection of perversities in this climate challenge. And it's that in the exploitation of the planet has happened hand in glove with the exploitation of people. And actually, the robbery of human rights has been a pathway to the exploitation of the planet--probably most explicitly shown in the plight of Indigenous peoples.The perversity comes then that those same peoples are getting hit first and hardest by the consequences of climate change. Not just indigenous peoples, but people who live on the most marginal land prone to flooding, or those people that live who are going to be most susceptible to overheating cities as well. It\u2019s the poorest and most vulnerable who've been exploited then suffer from the consequences of climate change.Now, the danger we face is that those very same people who are going to be most at risk from falling on the wrong side of the economic restructuring we have to go through if we're going to decarbonize the way our economy works, they'll be most vulnerable to not having the skills to transition to decarbonize the economy, losing their jobs. So, there's a moral importance to making sure we have a just transition. But I'd say there's a political importance, because if people start losing out economically, we'll have predatory opportunistic extremist politicians coming around trying to hoover them up in their loss of hope. We've seen it in the UK around Brexit. Dare I say we saw it in the U.S. with your own previous president.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: Right. And before we run out of time, I want to ask you a politics question, which is, since you entered public life, can you give a sense of how being, for example, green-minded has become more important? And what role has it played as you've been in office? I mean, one of the interesting issues here--right?--is that how much tension and pressure do you feel to deliver on pledges which are tied to, for example, being fulfilled by 2050? I'm sure you might be reelected many times. But I don't know if you're planning on being in office three decades from now. So, if you could talk a little about, you know, what you've seen for--whether it's for you or other British politicians, when they're running for office and setting these kinds of climate-oriented agendas?MAYOR REES: Oh, there's huge pressure. And it's--but it's a welcome pressure, just like there's pressure to make sure our children are fed, you know, and people aren't dying in the streets from getting caught up in gang culture. I mean, this is just one of those things that we have to do that\u2019s massively, you know, hugely important. So, it's a pressure we welcome.I think me, from where I am on the political spectrum, the point I make there and my challenge to environmental groups is you cannot--you cannot step into people's lives if their biggest threat, work concern is how they're going to feed their children tonight and say I know you've got a problem with feeding your family, but I've got a bigger problem; there's an existential threat to the planet, because they're worried about their kids getting enough to eat today. So, from my position on the political spectrum, it's to stress to the environmental movement, it has to be inclusive, and it has to take poverty seriously, because if it doesn't, it's a middle-class luxury, and quite often a White middle-class luxury to be perfectly frank. So we--you know, that's our--that's our mission. We take it centrally, but it has to fit within that broader suite of challenges we all take on as city leaders.MS. EILPERIN: Well, thanks so much. That's all the time we have today. So, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much, Mayor Rees, for joining us here today.MAYOR REES: Thank you. My pleasure to be with you.MS. EILPERIN: Glad to have you. And I'll be back in a moment with our next guest, David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission. Stay with us.[Video plays]MS. ODUAH: Hello, everyone, I'm Chika Oduah. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jens Birgersson. He's the president and CEO of ROCKWOOL Group. It's one of the world's largest makers of insulation materials. He's going to talk to us about how we can actually use buildings to help mitigate climate change through energy performance. Jens, thank you so much for joining us today.MR. BIRGERSSON: Thank you.MS. ODUAH: Alright, let's get started. We're hearing this phrase \u201cgreen transition\u201d more and more these days. Of course, this conveys the idea of how governments and businesses can actually utilize technology to help protect the natural world that we all share and live in. But a lot of these conversations around climate change usually focus on reducing toxic carbon emissions. But I understand that the ROCKWOOL Group is actually looking at something different. You all are looking at how to reduce overall energy demands in buildings. Can you talk about how this also plays a role in the green transition?MR. BIRGERSSON: Yeah, the built environment today emits about one-third of the CO2, the carbon emissions, and it also consumes about one-third of the energy. By doing energy renovation, you will reduce those emissions. And if you look at the building stock, 75 percent are energy efficient. And the planet is limited, we cannot tear them all down and just re-build them to new standards. So, we need to fix them. And we can do that with the existing renovation technologies, and all the technology is already there.MS. ODUAH: Excellent. And in terms of policy, it definitely looks as though Europe is progressing much faster than the rest of the world. For example, in 2020, you know that the European Commission published what's called the renovation strategy to improve the energy performance of buildings, and that aligns with the Fit for 55, which I understand is a package of legislation to help the EU to reach a 2030 target of reducing emissions by at least 55 percent. That's a very ambitious target. Why do you think that we're not yet seeing such ambitious moves, at least on a national level from the United States?MR. BIRGERSSON: I think part of it is I think Europe, the governments have realized the multiple benefits of building renovation is a good way to stimulate jobs in the local regions. It removes energy poverty. It reduces the impact of expensive energy bills for the people. And it creates healthy living environments. And Europe has certainly understood that more. But if you look at the challenges, you see in Europe that Italy is moving very fast. California, New York, Seattle, New York, Boston are moving in the U.S. And in a way, the challenge is the same in both places. We need to move beyond pledges and get going with the action today on both--in both regions.MS. ODUAH: I'm glad you mentioned reducing expensive bills. That's a very good incentive for everyone. Can you talk about what we can all do in our individual capacities to do what your company calls doing innovation renovation right?MR. BIRGERSSON: Yeah, first thing is when you renovate, you need to do a deep renovation. That means not only paint the house. You need to reduce the energy consumption with at least 60 percent so that it's down and it really has the impact. The second aspect is you need to pick good sustainable circular material that lasts for a long time. If you do those two, you know that every house you renovate will contribute towards reaching the goal. We provide some of those products. Stonewood, for example, is firesafe, circular insulation material that fits perfect for that type of renovation.MS. ODUAH: Very good. So, we should do more than just painting our houses. Excellent, excellent point.MR. BIRGERSSON: That\u2019s right.MS. ODUAH: Yes. Great. Thank you so much for that for that takeaway. So, Jens, thank you so much for sharing your expertise. I hope that you enjoyed this just as much as I did.MR. BIRGERSSON: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Have a good day.MS. ODUAH: And back to The Washington Post.[Video plays]MS. EILPERIN: Hello, and welcome back. For those of you just joining us, I'm Juliet Eilperin, climate and environment deputy editor here at The Post. Joining me now to talk about city planning and energy efficiency is the chair of the California Energy Commission. Chair David Hochschild, welcome to Washington Post Live.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Good morning.MS. EILPERIN: Now, I know you're getting up a little early for this. So, we appreciate it.MR. HOCHSCHILD: You know, I'm on--I'm on Glasgow time, so it's okay.MS. EILPERIN: I\u2019m sure your day starts much earlier. We want to talk about what the state of California has done in terms of leading the charge for many other states in curbing its energy consumption. And to begin, we're wondering if you could tell us about how the shift to renewable energy has helped the state achieve some of its ambitious climate goals.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, happy to do that. But first, let me just offer my congratulations to Mayor Rees. What an inspiration. I--you know, that's the kind of person I'd love to see run for Prime Minister of the UK one day. And I think he really articulated an important and underappreciated principle here, which is that local and state leadership is really how change happens in our world. It's really from the bottom, up. And what we need at the local and state level is support from national government.And just to share with you an example, you know, in California, we've leaned in very heavily to renewable. So the modern global solar industry was born in California. The first utility-scale projects in the world were here. Same thing with wind, first utility scale wind projects here. They have grown, you know, expanded around the country and around the world, now are the lowest-cost, fastest-growing energy industries in the world. And the same is true with electric vehicles, which is now our number-one export.But the basic vision that we have in California is to get to 100 percent clean energy grid, and then electrify almost everything and so--and run it off this clean grid. And we're making a lot of headway. Today in California, we're at 63 percent carbon-free electricity on the grid on route to 100 percent. And at the same time, we're expanding the reach of that clean electricity into new sectors like transportation. So, we just hit this month a very significant milestone, reaching 1 million electric vehicles sold in California. We're adding about 650 electric vehicles a day. And we're also extending the reach into the building sector. And our newest energy code that we adopted in August mandates electrification, you know, in the building sector, and that's an important step forward as we move beyond fossil fuels.MS. EILPERIN: Great. And recently, as you're kind of alluding to, you announced new energy efficiency standards aimed at expanding electric appliances, for example, in new homes and businesses. And obviously, this is a shift away from fossil fuels, including natural gas. Could you talk a little about what's the concrete impact of those new efficiency standards on the climate?MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, so this was a historic code that we adopted in August. So, every three years, the Energy Commission sets the energy code for new construction in California. We build about 100,000 new homes a year, in our state, new buildings a year, most of those being homes. And what we did, first of all, we added to our solar mandate. Three years ago, we mandated solar in every new home. Now we've extended that to all buildings, all new buildings in California--commercial and other non-residential buildings. And that's getting us about half a gigawatt a year. So just for perspective, the peak load of a city like San Francisco is about a gigawatt a year. So just for this one code on new construction with the solar mandate on rooftops, we're getting, you know, the amount to power San Francisco essentially every two years.In addition to that, we are requiring greater electrification. So, we're making every home electric-ready, which means you have to have electric panels sufficient to support an EV charger, electric induction cooktop, you know, heating, ventilation, water heating, etc. And we're requiring that one of those major end uses--the two biggest being water heating and space heating--has to switch to electric. So, we're estimating that today in California, less than 5 percent of homes are all electric. This will get us to close to half of new homes being all electric. And this is really building off the leadership of nearly 50 cities in California that have gone out ahead of the state and are doing their own electrification preferences or mandates on new construction. And that's, I think, been a model for us as well. It happened with the solar mandate three years ago. We had a number of cities get out ahead and do these solar mandates and really paved the way. So, we're building on that on that momentum.MS. EILPERIN: What will it take for the state to mandate an all-out ban on natural gas in new construction in California? You know, I'm curious of kind of what pushback you've encountered along the way. Our colleague Erica Werner just did a really interesting story, looking at how Los Angeles aims to become the first major carbon-neutral city in the United States by 2035 and wrote a lot about kind of the back and forth with the natural gas industry in LA as it tries to make this transition. So, if you could talk about what that back and forth has been like and what it means for new construction as you're trying to shift to all electric, that would be great.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, well, some of this, of course, is taking place in the courtroom. We did get sued by Southern California Gas Company, a lawsuit they ultimately backed out of. But I will say I think it's important when we do these transitions, that it be done in a planned way and in a graduated way. And one of the things that we\u2019re very attentive to is that the transition be predictable, and that builders be brought along.And so we have a very, very robust public process that we run. For every code cycle--this last code, I think we did 35 public workshops around the state. We take input from everyone, including builders, architects, environmental justice groups, environmental groups, utilities, and the gas industry, extensive engagement with them. And at the end of the day, we--I think there's a lot of embedded wisdom in the code as a consequence of this.One of the things that is really exciting to me when we look ahead is the potential for cost reduction. And just to take as an example, I think the solar industry is an excellent example of that. So I come out of the solar industry. I was in Silicon Valley before come to the Energy Commission. I got into the field 20 years ago, and at that time, the price of utility scale solar was 50 cents a kilowatt hour. It was the most expensive energy resource on the grid. Today, it's two cents a kilowatt hour. It's the cheapest source of energy on the grid.And that kind of market transformation is not actually that complicated. The cost reduction is driven by three things. It's innovation, automation, and scale. And it's mostly scale. And the same thing is true for electrification. When you look at appliances, like heat pump water heaters, which have come down significantly in cost, as we create codes and invest in R&D, the cost of those appliances is going to continue to come down. There's huge opportunity for further cost reduction. And ultimately, these technologies are going to win on price alone in the interim as we're coming down, because that's where I think the role of government needs to be, which is just on driving those costs down, working with stakeholders to bring it mainstream.So, to answer your question, I mean, we are headed for and need to get to a world beyond fossil fuels. I will just tell you living in California as a native Californian, you know, for people who are not on the West Coast of the United States and haven't experienced these fires, this is--it is unbelievable. I've never--I live in the Bay Area. I've never in my life seen wildfire smoke in the Bay Area until three years ago. Now we\u2019ve had three summers in a row. You know, my family got sick. We had to--we had to leave for a couple of weeks. You know, watching your kids go through that is horrific.And I think there is an incredible sense of urgency that all of us in California feel because we're living through it and we're breathing this air. And so that has changed the politics around this. And you're having major companies--just as an example, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which is one of the largest gas utilities in the country, wrote me a letter in support of an all-electric building code. I mean, this is just a sea change in the dynamics. And so the direction we're going is clearly beyond fossil fuels. But we want to do that in a way that really makes sense, gets us there quickly, and can work in the marketplace.MS. EILPERIN: Since the average Californian uses 31 percent less electricity than the average American, what are Californians doing that the rest of us aren\u2019t?MR. HOCHSCHILD: Well, one thing our agency--so I chair the Energy Commission, which is a 700-person state agency focused on getting us to 100 percent clean energy future, and one of the features that is unique to California, we have vested in our commission the authority to set energy efficiency codes and standards. And so we do that for new buildings. We also do it for appliances. And a lot of this is completely below the radar, but it's very significant.So, take TV standards, which we adopted a few years back. We said to the television manufacturers, you can't sell into our market of 40 million people--the fifth largest economy in the world--unless you meet these very stringent standards for your appliance. And that cut the energy use of TVs in half, saves a billion dollars a year. And actually, one of the nice features of being a big state like this is that manufacturers don't want to manufacture just for one market like California. In many cases, they end up upgrading their whole manufacturing lines for the North American market or the global market as a consequence. So, we've done that with a bunch of different appliances, from, you know, used to be a couple years ago, you plug in your cell phone or your shaver, and even when it's fully charged, it wou",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Energy Efficiency with David Hochschild & Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8675",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/11/15/transcript-protecting-our-planet-energy-efficiency-with-david-hochschild-bristol-mayor-marvin-rees/",
        "text": "MS. EILPERIN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Juliet Eilperin, climate and environment deputy editor here at The Post. Thanks for joining us today for our two-part series on energy efficiency. Joining me now on the heels of COP26 to talk about how his city has championed energy efficiency standards is Mayor Marvin Rees, the mayor of Bristol, England. Mayor Rees, thanks so much for joining us here on Washington Post Live. We really appreciate it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMAYOR REES: Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.MS. EILPERIN: Excellent. What we want to talk about is that, obviously, let's start with the--with the news that we have. Seeing that COP26 just wrapped up this weekend, we'd love to know what are your takeaways on what was accomplished during this summit of nearly 200 nations, and what do you think might have been lacking out of the final agreement that was just forged on Saturday?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMAYOR REES: Well, while there's some debate about it, I think, clear they've kept 1.5 on the table, which is both the claim and the missed opportunity, isn't it? So, it's still on the table. We're still talking about it. But getting to the specific commitment to move away from coal and fossil fuels is obviously a little bit watered down.What I think was missing actually was not in the commitments but was in the ability to recognize the leadership role of cities in delivering decarbonization. I think that the focus has been on national governments coming to an agreement between national governments when--which in and of itself is problematic. It needs to happen, but this zero-sum game between nation states holds the conversation back because they can't work without global interdependence.But we went there with C40, with Mayors Migration Council, with UK Cities Climate Investment Commission, with the argument that actually if you focus on cities and the decarbonization of cities, then work out how you get mayors to finance to be able to lead those processes of decarbonization. It doesn't matter if national--well, it does matter. But it's--it takes the pressure off of national leaders getting the deals done, because mayors will actually begin to deliver. And I think that cities' voice, that cities' leadership was the bit that was missing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: So you raise an excellent point. And I think for--you know, for folks coming in fresh to these kinds of international UN negotiations, they might miss some of the details that you're pointing out now, the idea that this is really a bottom-up process. I mean, the fact of the matter is, you have this agreement that, you know, gives a few details on what our overarching goals are. But both it is each individual nation that needs to deliver on the commitments that that country is making, and more importantly, it's really the local and, you know, regional officials that have to put the policies in place along with national leaders to make sure the greenhouse gas emissions are cut. So, could you detail in, you know, a little bit more when you're looking at it in terms of what local leaders can do to ensure that we're headed on this path to sustainability? What are some of the kind of most important contributions you think local leaders can do to ensure that these nations, whether they are large or small, are delivering on those climate commitments in the context of this UN process?MAYOR REES: Well, the specific things we need to do at the city level are build homes, retrofit homes, put the right homes in the right places. So, we will build more densely on brownfield sites rather than sprawling. Building dependency on transport systems will also deliver mass transit systems, decarbonized transport offers.Even today, I was talking with my team, and we've just announced that our meals on wheels service that takes meals out to older people who might be easily isolated, less able to cook--our fleet of vehicles that are going to be delivering those meals are moving over to electric. And we've been able to do that. It's not just a case of having the engine. Those vehicles need to have heating facilities and refrigeration facilities to make sure the food arrives fresh. So, from the big infrastructure projects, like putting in heat networks, ground source heat, water source heat, decarbonized heat sources and distribution, to what we do with people's homes are all what we do at the--at the city level.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut can I just say--I\u2019ll just flipped it a little bit. I don't think it is simply the case of city leaders doing, delivering what national leaders actually put in policy. That that model of governance, we've moved on from that. In many ways, it's the cities that are pushing and asking national government to support them to get done what they want to get done.In my city of Bristol, we've mapped out our roadmap to decarbonization, but it costs 10 billion pounds to get there. I work with a network in the UK called The UK Cities Climate Investment Commission. We've mapped out 205 billion pounds worth of decarbonization opportunities across the 11 biggest cities in the UK, which would have a massive impact on the UK\u2019s carbon emissions. We've mapped it out. But as cities, we don't have access to that finance. So, the work we've been doing is, is focusing on what national governments need to do to support cities, not to just get public money, but how they can support us to go and get that international finance. That's the same story for, say, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown in Sierra Leone as well. How do these cities in the Global South get access to that finance? In many ways, national governments will have to catch up with the scale and pace of delivery that city leaders, you know, have aspirations for.MS. EILPERIN: Well, you're touching on a really interesting theme, right? Because the whole idea of how to mobilize the money for these climate friendly investments was a huge issue in the ongoing discussions. And again, as part of both national discussions we're having here in the United States right now, as we're debating whether we--whether President Biden and Democrats are going to be able to pass a massive tax and spending bill that would make these kinds of investments. So, when you look at what's happening in England, is your sense that basically, you're getting policy support from national leaders, but the money is not entirely there for you to pursue everything that you're trying to do? And to what extent do you think that the private sector can provide money for the innovations you're doing? Or is this really something where you're going to have to have governments, whether it's in Britain, in other countries, both rich and developing, that are going to have to, you know, really provide the funds to execute on the plans that you've outlined?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMAYOR REES: Well, the policy support is a mixed bag. You know, it's--and it cannot be separated from finance. Making a commitment or setting a standard but then not talking about how you're going to get it done and it all has to be paid for is meaningless. That's just a gesture. So that's a--that's a major--you know, major issue for us. As myself with other cities, we're going into COP saying any commitments on decarbonization, be they a national level or an international level, have to be matched to real places, right? They have to be matched to Philadelphia, Bristol, Freetown, Lahore--decarbonization hubs in real places, not in international abstracts. They have to be attached to measurable outcomes they'll set against actual dates, and all that needs to be set to finance. If any of those are missing, we've got a problem. No business would go into a future without all those things being in place. We can't tackle an issue as challenging, as potentially chaotic as decarbonization without that kind of a structure.So it is a--the private sector, it absolutely has to be in the game. One is, it's in private--it's in the private sector\u2019s self-interest, right? They want stable markets [audio interference] consumers. A businessman in Bristol once said riots are not good for him with investment. Chaos is not good for the economy. We've seen that with COVID. So, they need to invest in a more stable future.But the sums of money we are talking about are not in the public sector alone, either. So they have to step up, whether it be, you know, a commercial investment, or whether it be a philanthropic investment in the ability of--and I'm going to focus on it because that's where I'm at, cities--to deliver the mass transit systems, the organized urbanization to--that will allow us to develop, to provide homes to meet our populations\u2019 needs in a way that doesn't destroy nature, and doesn't drive more carbon into the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: Let's talk about buildings and net-zero goals, given that buildings are such a critical part of this equation, right? They're responsible for something like 40 percent of the global energy consumption and one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. So, is green, renovating or green building something that can really help countries achieve the kinds of net-zero goals that they're striving for when it comes to the mid-century, to 2050? What do you--what do you think about that?MAYOR REES: Well, it has to be. And so we're--I take my city as an example. It's a challenge I put to people all the time. As you know, as a mayor, I've got to deal with, you know, 102 priorities, right? I got a single issue [audio interference] coming in. So, we're a city of 42 square miles. We're a population of 465,000 people. That population--we have a housing crisis today. Bristol is one of the most unaffordable cities in the UK for housing. We have 15,000 on the waiting list. We have over 1,000 households in temporary accommodation. One in four children in my city live in poverty. So, we have all these--we have great wealth and big inequality within Bristol. We have to meet that housing crisis.But the city is not getting any bigger, right? But we have to meet that challenge in the face of a climate and ecological emergency. So, the question is not do you build houses or not? We have to build houses, right? The question is, what kind of homes do you build, and where do you build them? So, it does mean that we have to build net-zero housing. Then the challenge for me comes in that those can be more expensive to build. So, I may go into a deal with a developer and they say, well, if you were building houses, you know that reduce carbon emissions by 80--you know, 80 percent, you could have 35 percent affordable. If you're going to ask for 100 percent, you can only have 20 percent affordable. So, you can see the money begins to bite, and some groups don't that understand this. So, we have to have put money into those--into the more efficient housing. And we know that that's essential, because we need affordable but we need decarbonized housing as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe other complexity comes when we begin to look at brownfield sites in the middle of the city, put in zero-carbon homes four miles from the main retail/residential/entertainment zone, it defeats its own purpose. We need to build like the World Bank says, you know, pyramids, not pancakes, on brownfield sites in the middle of the city. But brownfield sites can be more complicated to bring forward, particularly in a city like Bristol when they\u2019re former industrial sites, and we have diesel in the ground, or arsenic, or we even found a cholera pit underneath, you know, a site in the middle the city. So again, it takes more money to make sure that we get our share of affordable and with decarbonization. So, we're doing the environmental justice and the social justice, what we call the just transition in our journey.MS. EILPERIN: That's a really good point. And so when you see--you know, when you talk about exactly kind of tackling a few different things at this time--right?--kind of the communities that have been most hurt by traditional pollution as well as greenhouse gas pollution, and how to address that, is there an example--for example, you know, could you detail a little bit more how there's one project that is now--you know, whether it's dealing with these [unclear] or something else--that's made a concrete impact on Bristol residents\u2019 lives that, again, could potentially be replicated when this conversation is something that so many countries across the world are now having about how to address historic injustices and shift our trajectory so that we're going to a place where we're tackling those at the same time we're addressing climate change?MAYOR REES: Yeah, so I\u2019ll give you one. It\u2019s tackling fuel poverty within the city. And it is a very real example. I was being visited by Labour leadership not too long ago, and I went to a home, and I was going to--one of our housing developments Ashton Rise, which is just on the edge--well, on the edge of the city boundary. I knocked on the door. The woman that came to the door was a Syrian, had come to the UK as part of, you know, the refugee crisis. As her door opened up in the winter period, heat came out from the door. When I talked to her, these are the homes that have ground source heat. She didn't even have the heating and turned on. When I talked to her, these are the homes that have ground source heat. She didn't even have the heating turned on. But the efficiency of the home, the source of the heat, the decarbonized source coming from ground source heat was providing a home, a warm home, which means that people aren\u2019t choosing between heating and eating, which is hugely important. This is the dilemmas that many, many mayors will know that some of the poorest people in their cities face. I guess in hot cities it\u2019s between heating and cooling their homes as well if they have air conditioning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd I think, again, at COP, one of the messages we gave is there was a perversity or a collection of perversities in this climate challenge. And it's that in the exploitation of the planet has happened hand in glove with the exploitation of people. And actually, the robbery of human rights has been a pathway to the exploitation of the planet--probably most explicitly shown in the plight of Indigenous peoples.The perversity comes then that those same peoples are getting hit first and hardest by the consequences of climate change. Not just indigenous peoples, but people who live on the most marginal land prone to flooding, or those people that live who are going to be most susceptible to overheating cities as well. It\u2019s the poorest and most vulnerable who've been exploited then suffer from the consequences of climate change.Now, the danger we face is that those very same people who are going to be most at risk from falling on the wrong side of the economic restructuring we have to go through if we're going to decarbonize the way our economy works, they'll be most vulnerable to not having the skills to transition to decarbonize the economy, losing their jobs. So, there's a moral importance to making sure we have a just transition. But I'd say there's a political importance, because if people start losing out economically, we'll have predatory opportunistic extremist politicians coming around trying to hoover them up in their loss of hope. We've seen it in the UK around Brexit. Dare I say we saw it in the U.S. with your own previous president.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: Right. And before we run out of time, I want to ask you a politics question, which is, since you entered public life, can you give a sense of how being, for example, green-minded has become more important? And what role has it played as you've been in office? I mean, one of the interesting issues here--right?--is that how much tension and pressure do you feel to deliver on pledges which are tied to, for example, being fulfilled by 2050? I'm sure you might be reelected many times. But I don't know if you're planning on being in office three decades from now. So, if you could talk a little about, you know, what you've seen for--whether it's for you or other British politicians, when they're running for office and setting these kinds of climate-oriented agendas?MAYOR REES: Oh, there's huge pressure. And it's--but it's a welcome pressure, just like there's pressure to make sure our children are fed, you know, and people aren't dying in the streets from getting caught up in gang culture. I mean, this is just one of those things that we have to do that\u2019s massively, you know, hugely important. So, it's a pressure we welcome.I think me, from where I am on the political spectrum, the point I make there and my challenge to environmental groups is you cannot--you cannot step into people's lives if their biggest threat, work concern is how they're going to feed their children tonight and say I know you've got a problem with feeding your family, but I've got a bigger problem; there's an existential threat to the planet, because they're worried about their kids getting enough to eat today. So, from my position on the political spectrum, it's to stress to the environmental movement, it has to be inclusive, and it has to take poverty seriously, because if it doesn't, it's a middle-class luxury, and quite often a White middle-class luxury to be perfectly frank. So we--you know, that's our--that's our mission. We take it centrally, but it has to fit within that broader suite of challenges we all take on as city leaders.MS. EILPERIN: Well, thanks so much. That's all the time we have today. So, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much, Mayor Rees, for joining us here today.MAYOR REES: Thank you. My pleasure to be with you.MS. EILPERIN: Glad to have you. And I'll be back in a moment with our next guest, David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission. Stay with us.[Video plays]MS. ODUAH: Hello, everyone, I'm Chika Oduah. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jens Birgersson. He's the president and CEO of ROCKWOOL Group. It's one of the world's largest makers of insulation materials. He's going to talk to us about how we can actually use buildings to help mitigate climate change through energy performance. Jens, thank you so much for joining us today.MR. BIRGERSSON: Thank you.MS. ODUAH: Alright, let's get started. We're hearing this phrase \u201cgreen transition\u201d more and more these days. Of course, this conveys the idea of how governments and businesses can actually utilize technology to help protect the natural world that we all share and live in. But a lot of these conversations around climate change usually focus on reducing toxic carbon emissions. But I understand that the ROCKWOOL Group is actually looking at something different. You all are looking at how to reduce overall energy demands in buildings. Can you talk about how this also plays a role in the green transition?MR. BIRGERSSON: Yeah, the built environment today emits about one-third of the CO2, the carbon emissions, and it also consumes about one-third of the energy. By doing energy renovation, you will reduce those emissions. And if you look at the building stock, 75 percent are energy efficient. And the planet is limited, we cannot tear them all down and just re-build them to new standards. So, we need to fix them. And we can do that with the existing renovation technologies, and all the technology is already there.MS. ODUAH: Excellent. And in terms of policy, it definitely looks as though Europe is progressing much faster than the rest of the world. For example, in 2020, you know that the European Commission published what's called the renovation strategy to improve the energy performance of buildings, and that aligns with the Fit for 55, which I understand is a package of legislation to help the EU to reach a 2030 target of reducing emissions by at least 55 percent. That's a very ambitious target. Why do you think that we're not yet seeing such ambitious moves, at least on a national level from the United States?MR. BIRGERSSON: I think part of it is I think Europe, the governments have realized the multiple benefits of building renovation is a good way to stimulate jobs in the local regions. It removes energy poverty. It reduces the impact of expensive energy bills for the people. And it creates healthy living environments. And Europe has certainly understood that more. But if you look at the challenges, you see in Europe that Italy is moving very fast. California, New York, Seattle, New York, Boston are moving in the U.S. And in a way, the challenge is the same in both places. We need to move beyond pledges and get going with the action today on both--in both regions.MS. ODUAH: I'm glad you mentioned reducing expensive bills. That's a very good incentive for everyone. Can you talk about what we can all do in our individual capacities to do what your company calls doing innovation renovation right?MR. BIRGERSSON: Yeah, first thing is when you renovate, you need to do a deep renovation. That means not only paint the house. You need to reduce the energy consumption with at least 60 percent so that it's down and it really has the impact. The second aspect is you need to pick good sustainable circular material that lasts for a long time. If you do those two, you know that every house you renovate will contribute towards reaching the goal. We provide some of those products. Stonewood, for example, is firesafe, circular insulation material that fits perfect for that type of renovation.MS. ODUAH: Very good. So, we should do more than just painting our houses. Excellent, excellent point.MR. BIRGERSSON: That\u2019s right.MS. ODUAH: Yes. Great. Thank you so much for that for that takeaway. So, Jens, thank you so much for sharing your expertise. I hope that you enjoyed this just as much as I did.MR. BIRGERSSON: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Have a good day.MS. ODUAH: And back to The Washington Post.[Video plays]MS. EILPERIN: Hello, and welcome back. For those of you just joining us, I'm Juliet Eilperin, climate and environment deputy editor here at The Post. Joining me now to talk about city planning and energy efficiency is the chair of the California Energy Commission. Chair David Hochschild, welcome to Washington Post Live.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Good morning.MS. EILPERIN: Now, I know you're getting up a little early for this. So, we appreciate it.MR. HOCHSCHILD: You know, I'm on--I'm on Glasgow time, so it's okay.MS. EILPERIN: I\u2019m sure your day starts much earlier. We want to talk about what the state of California has done in terms of leading the charge for many other states in curbing its energy consumption. And to begin, we're wondering if you could tell us about how the shift to renewable energy has helped the state achieve some of its ambitious climate goals.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, happy to do that. But first, let me just offer my congratulations to Mayor Rees. What an inspiration. I--you know, that's the kind of person I'd love to see run for Prime Minister of the UK one day. And I think he really articulated an important and underappreciated principle here, which is that local and state leadership is really how change happens in our world. It's really from the bottom, up. And what we need at the local and state level is support from national government.And just to share with you an example, you know, in California, we've leaned in very heavily to renewable. So the modern global solar industry was born in California. The first utility-scale projects in the world were here. Same thing with wind, first utility scale wind projects here. They have grown, you know, expanded around the country and around the world, now are the lowest-cost, fastest-growing energy industries in the world. And the same is true with electric vehicles, which is now our number-one export.But the basic vision that we have in California is to get to 100 percent clean energy grid, and then electrify almost everything and so--and run it off this clean grid. And we're making a lot of headway. Today in California, we're at 63 percent carbon-free electricity on the grid on route to 100 percent. And at the same time, we're expanding the reach of that clean electricity into new sectors like transportation. So, we just hit this month a very significant milestone, reaching 1 million electric vehicles sold in California. We're adding about 650 electric vehicles a day. And we're also extending the reach into the building sector. And our newest energy code that we adopted in August mandates electrification, you know, in the building sector, and that's an important step forward as we move beyond fossil fuels.MS. EILPERIN: Great. And recently, as you're kind of alluding to, you announced new energy efficiency standards aimed at expanding electric appliances, for example, in new homes and businesses. And obviously, this is a shift away from fossil fuels, including natural gas. Could you talk a little about what's the concrete impact of those new efficiency standards on the climate?MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, so this was a historic code that we adopted in August. So, every three years, the Energy Commission sets the energy code for new construction in California. We build about 100,000 new homes a year, in our state, new buildings a year, most of those being homes. And what we did, first of all, we added to our solar mandate. Three years ago, we mandated solar in every new home. Now we've extended that to all buildings, all new buildings in California--commercial and other non-residential buildings. And that's getting us about half a gigawatt a year. So just for perspective, the peak load of a city like San Francisco is about a gigawatt a year. So just for this one code on new construction with the solar mandate on rooftops, we're getting, you know, the amount to power San Francisco essentially every two years.In addition to that, we are requiring greater electrification. So, we're making every home electric-ready, which means you have to have electric panels sufficient to support an EV charger, electric induction cooktop, you know, heating, ventilation, water heating, etc. And we're requiring that one of those major end uses--the two biggest being water heating and space heating--has to switch to electric. So, we're estimating that today in California, less than 5 percent of homes are all electric. This will get us to close to half of new homes being all electric. And this is really building off the leadership of nearly 50 cities in California that have gone out ahead of the state and are doing their own electrification preferences or mandates on new construction. And that's, I think, been a model for us as well. It happened with the solar mandate three years ago. We had a number of cities get out ahead and do these solar mandates and really paved the way. So, we're building on that on that momentum.MS. EILPERIN: What will it take for the state to mandate an all-out ban on natural gas in new construction in California? You know, I'm curious of kind of what pushback you've encountered along the way. Our colleague Erica Werner just did a really interesting story, looking at how Los Angeles aims to become the first major carbon-neutral city in the United States by 2035 and wrote a lot about kind of the back and forth with the natural gas industry in LA as it tries to make this transition. So, if you could talk about what that back and forth has been like and what it means for new construction as you're trying to shift to all electric, that would be great.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, well, some of this, of course, is taking place in the courtroom. We did get sued by Southern California Gas Company, a lawsuit they ultimately backed out of. But I will say I think it's important when we do these transitions, that it be done in a planned way and in a graduated way. And one of the things that we\u2019re very attentive to is that the transition be predictable, and that builders be brought along.And so we have a very, very robust public process that we run. For every code cycle--this last code, I think we did 35 public workshops around the state. We take input from everyone, including builders, architects, environmental justice groups, environmental groups, utilities, and the gas industry, extensive engagement with them. And at the end of the day, we--I think there's a lot of embedded wisdom in the code as a consequence of this.One of the things that is really exciting to me when we look ahead is the potential for cost reduction. And just to take as an example, I think the solar industry is an excellent example of that. So I come out of the solar industry. I was in Silicon Valley before come to the Energy Commission. I got into the field 20 years ago, and at that time, the price of utility scale solar was 50 cents a kilowatt hour. It was the most expensive energy resource on the grid. Today, it's two cents a kilowatt hour. It's the cheapest source of energy on the grid.And that kind of market transformation is not actually that complicated. The cost reduction is driven by three things. It's innovation, automation, and scale. And it's mostly scale. And the same thing is true for electrification. When you look at appliances, like heat pump water heaters, which have come down significantly in cost, as we create codes and invest in R&D, the cost of those appliances is going to continue to come down. There's huge opportunity for further cost reduction. And ultimately, these technologies are going to win on price alone in the interim as we're coming down, because that's where I think the role of government needs to be, which is just on driving those costs down, working with stakeholders to bring it mainstream.So, to answer your question, I mean, we are headed for and need to get to a world beyond fossil fuels. I will just tell you living in California as a native Californian, you know, for people who are not on the West Coast of the United States and haven't experienced these fires, this is--it is unbelievable. I've never--I live in the Bay Area. I've never in my life seen wildfire smoke in the Bay Area until three years ago. Now we\u2019ve had three summers in a row. You know, my family got sick. We had to--we had to leave for a couple of weeks. You know, watching your kids go through that is horrific.And I think there is an incredible sense of urgency that all of us in California feel because we're living through it and we're breathing this air. And so that has changed the politics around this. And you're having major companies--just as an example, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which is one of the largest gas utilities in the country, wrote me a letter in support of an all-electric building code. I mean, this is just a sea change in the dynamics. And so the direction we're going is clearly beyond fossil fuels. But we want to do that in a way that really makes sense, gets us there quickly, and can work in the marketplace.MS. EILPERIN: Since the average Californian uses 31 percent less electricity than the average American, what are Californians doing that the rest of us aren\u2019t?MR. HOCHSCHILD: Well, one thing our agency--so I chair the Energy Commission, which is a 700-person state agency focused on getting us to 100 percent clean energy future, and one of the features that is unique to California, we have vested in our commission the authority to set energy efficiency codes and standards. And so we do that for new buildings. We also do it for appliances. And a lot of this is completely below the radar, but it's very significant.So, take TV standards, which we adopted a few years back. We said to the television manufacturers, you can't sell into our market of 40 million people--the fifth largest economy in the world--unless you meet these very stringent standards for your appliance. And that cut the energy use of TVs in half, saves a billion dollars a year. And actually, one of the nice features of being a big state like this is that manufacturers don't want to manufacture just for one market like California. In many cases, they end up upgrading their whole manufacturing lines for the North American market or the global market as a consequence. So, we've done that with a bunch of different appliances, from, you know, used to be a couple years ago, you plug in your cell phone or your shaver, and even when it's fully charged, it wou",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Transcript: Protecting Our Planet: Energy Efficiency with David Hochschild & Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8676",
        "date": "2021-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/11/15/transcript-protecting-our-planet-energy-efficiency-with-david-hochschild-bristol-mayor-marvin-rees/",
        "text": "MS. EILPERIN: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I\u2019m Juliet Eilperin, climate and environment deputy editor here at The Post. Thanks for joining us today for our two-part series on energy efficiency. Joining me now on the heels of COP26 to talk about how his city has championed energy efficiency standards is Mayor Marvin Rees, the mayor of Bristol, England. Mayor Rees, thanks so much for joining us here on Washington Post Live. We really appreciate it. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMAYOR REES: Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.MS. EILPERIN: Excellent. What we want to talk about is that, obviously, let's start with the--with the news that we have. Seeing that COP26 just wrapped up this weekend, we'd love to know what are your takeaways on what was accomplished during this summit of nearly 200 nations, and what do you think might have been lacking out of the final agreement that was just forged on Saturday?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMAYOR REES: Well, while there's some debate about it, I think, clear they've kept 1.5 on the table, which is both the claim and the missed opportunity, isn't it? So, it's still on the table. We're still talking about it. But getting to the specific commitment to move away from coal and fossil fuels is obviously a little bit watered down.What I think was missing actually was not in the commitments but was in the ability to recognize the leadership role of cities in delivering decarbonization. I think that the focus has been on national governments coming to an agreement between national governments when--which in and of itself is problematic. It needs to happen, but this zero-sum game between nation states holds the conversation back because they can't work without global interdependence.But we went there with C40, with Mayors Migration Council, with UK Cities Climate Investment Commission, with the argument that actually if you focus on cities and the decarbonization of cities, then work out how you get mayors to finance to be able to lead those processes of decarbonization. It doesn't matter if national--well, it does matter. But it's--it takes the pressure off of national leaders getting the deals done, because mayors will actually begin to deliver. And I think that cities' voice, that cities' leadership was the bit that was missing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: So you raise an excellent point. And I think for--you know, for folks coming in fresh to these kinds of international UN negotiations, they might miss some of the details that you're pointing out now, the idea that this is really a bottom-up process. I mean, the fact of the matter is, you have this agreement that, you know, gives a few details on what our overarching goals are. But both it is each individual nation that needs to deliver on the commitments that that country is making, and more importantly, it's really the local and, you know, regional officials that have to put the policies in place along with national leaders to make sure the greenhouse gas emissions are cut. So, could you detail in, you know, a little bit more when you're looking at it in terms of what local leaders can do to ensure that we're headed on this path to sustainability? What are some of the kind of most important contributions you think local leaders can do to ensure that these nations, whether they are large or small, are delivering on those climate commitments in the context of this UN process?MAYOR REES: Well, the specific things we need to do at the city level are build homes, retrofit homes, put the right homes in the right places. So, we will build more densely on brownfield sites rather than sprawling. Building dependency on transport systems will also deliver mass transit systems, decarbonized transport offers.Even today, I was talking with my team, and we've just announced that our meals on wheels service that takes meals out to older people who might be easily isolated, less able to cook--our fleet of vehicles that are going to be delivering those meals are moving over to electric. And we've been able to do that. It's not just a case of having the engine. Those vehicles need to have heating facilities and refrigeration facilities to make sure the food arrives fresh. So, from the big infrastructure projects, like putting in heat networks, ground source heat, water source heat, decarbonized heat sources and distribution, to what we do with people's homes are all what we do at the--at the city level.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut can I just say--I\u2019ll just flipped it a little bit. I don't think it is simply the case of city leaders doing, delivering what national leaders actually put in policy. That that model of governance, we've moved on from that. In many ways, it's the cities that are pushing and asking national government to support them to get done what they want to get done.In my city of Bristol, we've mapped out our roadmap to decarbonization, but it costs 10 billion pounds to get there. I work with a network in the UK called The UK Cities Climate Investment Commission. We've mapped out 205 billion pounds worth of decarbonization opportunities across the 11 biggest cities in the UK, which would have a massive impact on the UK\u2019s carbon emissions. We've mapped it out. But as cities, we don't have access to that finance. So, the work we've been doing is, is focusing on what national governments need to do to support cities, not to just get public money, but how they can support us to go and get that international finance. That's the same story for, say, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr of Freetown in Sierra Leone as well. How do these cities in the Global South get access to that finance? In many ways, national governments will have to catch up with the scale and pace of delivery that city leaders, you know, have aspirations for.MS. EILPERIN: Well, you're touching on a really interesting theme, right? Because the whole idea of how to mobilize the money for these climate friendly investments was a huge issue in the ongoing discussions. And again, as part of both national discussions we're having here in the United States right now, as we're debating whether we--whether President Biden and Democrats are going to be able to pass a massive tax and spending bill that would make these kinds of investments. So, when you look at what's happening in England, is your sense that basically, you're getting policy support from national leaders, but the money is not entirely there for you to pursue everything that you're trying to do? And to what extent do you think that the private sector can provide money for the innovations you're doing? Or is this really something where you're going to have to have governments, whether it's in Britain, in other countries, both rich and developing, that are going to have to, you know, really provide the funds to execute on the plans that you've outlined?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMAYOR REES: Well, the policy support is a mixed bag. You know, it's--and it cannot be separated from finance. Making a commitment or setting a standard but then not talking about how you're going to get it done and it all has to be paid for is meaningless. That's just a gesture. So that's a--that's a major--you know, major issue for us. As myself with other cities, we're going into COP saying any commitments on decarbonization, be they a national level or an international level, have to be matched to real places, right? They have to be matched to Philadelphia, Bristol, Freetown, Lahore--decarbonization hubs in real places, not in international abstracts. They have to be attached to measurable outcomes they'll set against actual dates, and all that needs to be set to finance. If any of those are missing, we've got a problem. No business would go into a future without all those things being in place. We can't tackle an issue as challenging, as potentially chaotic as decarbonization without that kind of a structure.So it is a--the private sector, it absolutely has to be in the game. One is, it's in private--it's in the private sector\u2019s self-interest, right? They want stable markets [audio interference] consumers. A businessman in Bristol once said riots are not good for him with investment. Chaos is not good for the economy. We've seen that with COVID. So, they need to invest in a more stable future.But the sums of money we are talking about are not in the public sector alone, either. So they have to step up, whether it be, you know, a commercial investment, or whether it be a philanthropic investment in the ability of--and I'm going to focus on it because that's where I'm at, cities--to deliver the mass transit systems, the organized urbanization to--that will allow us to develop, to provide homes to meet our populations\u2019 needs in a way that doesn't destroy nature, and doesn't drive more carbon into the atmosphere.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: Let's talk about buildings and net-zero goals, given that buildings are such a critical part of this equation, right? They're responsible for something like 40 percent of the global energy consumption and one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. So, is green, renovating or green building something that can really help countries achieve the kinds of net-zero goals that they're striving for when it comes to the mid-century, to 2050? What do you--what do you think about that?MAYOR REES: Well, it has to be. And so we're--I take my city as an example. It's a challenge I put to people all the time. As you know, as a mayor, I've got to deal with, you know, 102 priorities, right? I got a single issue [audio interference] coming in. So, we're a city of 42 square miles. We're a population of 465,000 people. That population--we have a housing crisis today. Bristol is one of the most unaffordable cities in the UK for housing. We have 15,000 on the waiting list. We have over 1,000 households in temporary accommodation. One in four children in my city live in poverty. So, we have all these--we have great wealth and big inequality within Bristol. We have to meet that housing crisis.But the city is not getting any bigger, right? But we have to meet that challenge in the face of a climate and ecological emergency. So, the question is not do you build houses or not? We have to build houses, right? The question is, what kind of homes do you build, and where do you build them? So, it does mean that we have to build net-zero housing. Then the challenge for me comes in that those can be more expensive to build. So, I may go into a deal with a developer and they say, well, if you were building houses, you know that reduce carbon emissions by 80--you know, 80 percent, you could have 35 percent affordable. If you're going to ask for 100 percent, you can only have 20 percent affordable. So, you can see the money begins to bite, and some groups don't that understand this. So, we have to have put money into those--into the more efficient housing. And we know that that's essential, because we need affordable but we need decarbonized housing as well.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe other complexity comes when we begin to look at brownfield sites in the middle of the city, put in zero-carbon homes four miles from the main retail/residential/entertainment zone, it defeats its own purpose. We need to build like the World Bank says, you know, pyramids, not pancakes, on brownfield sites in the middle of the city. But brownfield sites can be more complicated to bring forward, particularly in a city like Bristol when they\u2019re former industrial sites, and we have diesel in the ground, or arsenic, or we even found a cholera pit underneath, you know, a site in the middle the city. So again, it takes more money to make sure that we get our share of affordable and with decarbonization. So, we're doing the environmental justice and the social justice, what we call the just transition in our journey.MS. EILPERIN: That's a really good point. And so when you see--you know, when you talk about exactly kind of tackling a few different things at this time--right?--kind of the communities that have been most hurt by traditional pollution as well as greenhouse gas pollution, and how to address that, is there an example--for example, you know, could you detail a little bit more how there's one project that is now--you know, whether it's dealing with these [unclear] or something else--that's made a concrete impact on Bristol residents\u2019 lives that, again, could potentially be replicated when this conversation is something that so many countries across the world are now having about how to address historic injustices and shift our trajectory so that we're going to a place where we're tackling those at the same time we're addressing climate change?MAYOR REES: Yeah, so I\u2019ll give you one. It\u2019s tackling fuel poverty within the city. And it is a very real example. I was being visited by Labour leadership not too long ago, and I went to a home, and I was going to--one of our housing developments Ashton Rise, which is just on the edge--well, on the edge of the city boundary. I knocked on the door. The woman that came to the door was a Syrian, had come to the UK as part of, you know, the refugee crisis. As her door opened up in the winter period, heat came out from the door. When I talked to her, these are the homes that have ground source heat. She didn't even have the heating and turned on. When I talked to her, these are the homes that have ground source heat. She didn't even have the heating turned on. But the efficiency of the home, the source of the heat, the decarbonized source coming from ground source heat was providing a home, a warm home, which means that people aren\u2019t choosing between heating and eating, which is hugely important. This is the dilemmas that many, many mayors will know that some of the poorest people in their cities face. I guess in hot cities it\u2019s between heating and cooling their homes as well if they have air conditioning.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd I think, again, at COP, one of the messages we gave is there was a perversity or a collection of perversities in this climate challenge. And it's that in the exploitation of the planet has happened hand in glove with the exploitation of people. And actually, the robbery of human rights has been a pathway to the exploitation of the planet--probably most explicitly shown in the plight of Indigenous peoples.The perversity comes then that those same peoples are getting hit first and hardest by the consequences of climate change. Not just indigenous peoples, but people who live on the most marginal land prone to flooding, or those people that live who are going to be most susceptible to overheating cities as well. It\u2019s the poorest and most vulnerable who've been exploited then suffer from the consequences of climate change.Now, the danger we face is that those very same people who are going to be most at risk from falling on the wrong side of the economic restructuring we have to go through if we're going to decarbonize the way our economy works, they'll be most vulnerable to not having the skills to transition to decarbonize the economy, losing their jobs. So, there's a moral importance to making sure we have a just transition. But I'd say there's a political importance, because if people start losing out economically, we'll have predatory opportunistic extremist politicians coming around trying to hoover them up in their loss of hope. We've seen it in the UK around Brexit. Dare I say we saw it in the U.S. with your own previous president.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMS. EILPERIN: Right. And before we run out of time, I want to ask you a politics question, which is, since you entered public life, can you give a sense of how being, for example, green-minded has become more important? And what role has it played as you've been in office? I mean, one of the interesting issues here--right?--is that how much tension and pressure do you feel to deliver on pledges which are tied to, for example, being fulfilled by 2050? I'm sure you might be reelected many times. But I don't know if you're planning on being in office three decades from now. So, if you could talk a little about, you know, what you've seen for--whether it's for you or other British politicians, when they're running for office and setting these kinds of climate-oriented agendas?MAYOR REES: Oh, there's huge pressure. And it's--but it's a welcome pressure, just like there's pressure to make sure our children are fed, you know, and people aren't dying in the streets from getting caught up in gang culture. I mean, this is just one of those things that we have to do that\u2019s massively, you know, hugely important. So, it's a pressure we welcome.I think me, from where I am on the political spectrum, the point I make there and my challenge to environmental groups is you cannot--you cannot step into people's lives if their biggest threat, work concern is how they're going to feed their children tonight and say I know you've got a problem with feeding your family, but I've got a bigger problem; there's an existential threat to the planet, because they're worried about their kids getting enough to eat today. So, from my position on the political spectrum, it's to stress to the environmental movement, it has to be inclusive, and it has to take poverty seriously, because if it doesn't, it's a middle-class luxury, and quite often a White middle-class luxury to be perfectly frank. So we--you know, that's our--that's our mission. We take it centrally, but it has to fit within that broader suite of challenges we all take on as city leaders.MS. EILPERIN: Well, thanks so much. That's all the time we have today. So, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much, Mayor Rees, for joining us here today.MAYOR REES: Thank you. My pleasure to be with you.MS. EILPERIN: Glad to have you. And I'll be back in a moment with our next guest, David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission. Stay with us.[Video plays]MS. ODUAH: Hello, everyone, I'm Chika Oduah. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Jens Birgersson. He's the president and CEO of ROCKWOOL Group. It's one of the world's largest makers of insulation materials. He's going to talk to us about how we can actually use buildings to help mitigate climate change through energy performance. Jens, thank you so much for joining us today.MR. BIRGERSSON: Thank you.MS. ODUAH: Alright, let's get started. We're hearing this phrase \u201cgreen transition\u201d more and more these days. Of course, this conveys the idea of how governments and businesses can actually utilize technology to help protect the natural world that we all share and live in. But a lot of these conversations around climate change usually focus on reducing toxic carbon emissions. But I understand that the ROCKWOOL Group is actually looking at something different. You all are looking at how to reduce overall energy demands in buildings. Can you talk about how this also plays a role in the green transition?MR. BIRGERSSON: Yeah, the built environment today emits about one-third of the CO2, the carbon emissions, and it also consumes about one-third of the energy. By doing energy renovation, you will reduce those emissions. And if you look at the building stock, 75 percent are energy efficient. And the planet is limited, we cannot tear them all down and just re-build them to new standards. So, we need to fix them. And we can do that with the existing renovation technologies, and all the technology is already there.MS. ODUAH: Excellent. And in terms of policy, it definitely looks as though Europe is progressing much faster than the rest of the world. For example, in 2020, you know that the European Commission published what's called the renovation strategy to improve the energy performance of buildings, and that aligns with the Fit for 55, which I understand is a package of legislation to help the EU to reach a 2030 target of reducing emissions by at least 55 percent. That's a very ambitious target. Why do you think that we're not yet seeing such ambitious moves, at least on a national level from the United States?MR. BIRGERSSON: I think part of it is I think Europe, the governments have realized the multiple benefits of building renovation is a good way to stimulate jobs in the local regions. It removes energy poverty. It reduces the impact of expensive energy bills for the people. And it creates healthy living environments. And Europe has certainly understood that more. But if you look at the challenges, you see in Europe that Italy is moving very fast. California, New York, Seattle, New York, Boston are moving in the U.S. And in a way, the challenge is the same in both places. We need to move beyond pledges and get going with the action today on both--in both regions.MS. ODUAH: I'm glad you mentioned reducing expensive bills. That's a very good incentive for everyone. Can you talk about what we can all do in our individual capacities to do what your company calls doing innovation renovation right?MR. BIRGERSSON: Yeah, first thing is when you renovate, you need to do a deep renovation. That means not only paint the house. You need to reduce the energy consumption with at least 60 percent so that it's down and it really has the impact. The second aspect is you need to pick good sustainable circular material that lasts for a long time. If you do those two, you know that every house you renovate will contribute towards reaching the goal. We provide some of those products. Stonewood, for example, is firesafe, circular insulation material that fits perfect for that type of renovation.MS. ODUAH: Very good. So, we should do more than just painting our houses. Excellent, excellent point.MR. BIRGERSSON: That\u2019s right.MS. ODUAH: Yes. Great. Thank you so much for that for that takeaway. So, Jens, thank you so much for sharing your expertise. I hope that you enjoyed this just as much as I did.MR. BIRGERSSON: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Have a good day.MS. ODUAH: And back to The Washington Post.[Video plays]MS. EILPERIN: Hello, and welcome back. For those of you just joining us, I'm Juliet Eilperin, climate and environment deputy editor here at The Post. Joining me now to talk about city planning and energy efficiency is the chair of the California Energy Commission. Chair David Hochschild, welcome to Washington Post Live.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Good morning.MS. EILPERIN: Now, I know you're getting up a little early for this. So, we appreciate it.MR. HOCHSCHILD: You know, I'm on--I'm on Glasgow time, so it's okay.MS. EILPERIN: I\u2019m sure your day starts much earlier. We want to talk about what the state of California has done in terms of leading the charge for many other states in curbing its energy consumption. And to begin, we're wondering if you could tell us about how the shift to renewable energy has helped the state achieve some of its ambitious climate goals.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, happy to do that. But first, let me just offer my congratulations to Mayor Rees. What an inspiration. I--you know, that's the kind of person I'd love to see run for Prime Minister of the UK one day. And I think he really articulated an important and underappreciated principle here, which is that local and state leadership is really how change happens in our world. It's really from the bottom, up. And what we need at the local and state level is support from national government.And just to share with you an example, you know, in California, we've leaned in very heavily to renewable. So the modern global solar industry was born in California. The first utility-scale projects in the world were here. Same thing with wind, first utility scale wind projects here. They have grown, you know, expanded around the country and around the world, now are the lowest-cost, fastest-growing energy industries in the world. And the same is true with electric vehicles, which is now our number-one export.But the basic vision that we have in California is to get to 100 percent clean energy grid, and then electrify almost everything and so--and run it off this clean grid. And we're making a lot of headway. Today in California, we're at 63 percent carbon-free electricity on the grid on route to 100 percent. And at the same time, we're expanding the reach of that clean electricity into new sectors like transportation. So, we just hit this month a very significant milestone, reaching 1 million electric vehicles sold in California. We're adding about 650 electric vehicles a day. And we're also extending the reach into the building sector. And our newest energy code that we adopted in August mandates electrification, you know, in the building sector, and that's an important step forward as we move beyond fossil fuels.MS. EILPERIN: Great. And recently, as you're kind of alluding to, you announced new energy efficiency standards aimed at expanding electric appliances, for example, in new homes and businesses. And obviously, this is a shift away from fossil fuels, including natural gas. Could you talk a little about what's the concrete impact of those new efficiency standards on the climate?MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, so this was a historic code that we adopted in August. So, every three years, the Energy Commission sets the energy code for new construction in California. We build about 100,000 new homes a year, in our state, new buildings a year, most of those being homes. And what we did, first of all, we added to our solar mandate. Three years ago, we mandated solar in every new home. Now we've extended that to all buildings, all new buildings in California--commercial and other non-residential buildings. And that's getting us about half a gigawatt a year. So just for perspective, the peak load of a city like San Francisco is about a gigawatt a year. So just for this one code on new construction with the solar mandate on rooftops, we're getting, you know, the amount to power San Francisco essentially every two years.In addition to that, we are requiring greater electrification. So, we're making every home electric-ready, which means you have to have electric panels sufficient to support an EV charger, electric induction cooktop, you know, heating, ventilation, water heating, etc. And we're requiring that one of those major end uses--the two biggest being water heating and space heating--has to switch to electric. So, we're estimating that today in California, less than 5 percent of homes are all electric. This will get us to close to half of new homes being all electric. And this is really building off the leadership of nearly 50 cities in California that have gone out ahead of the state and are doing their own electrification preferences or mandates on new construction. And that's, I think, been a model for us as well. It happened with the solar mandate three years ago. We had a number of cities get out ahead and do these solar mandates and really paved the way. So, we're building on that on that momentum.MS. EILPERIN: What will it take for the state to mandate an all-out ban on natural gas in new construction in California? You know, I'm curious of kind of what pushback you've encountered along the way. Our colleague Erica Werner just did a really interesting story, looking at how Los Angeles aims to become the first major carbon-neutral city in the United States by 2035 and wrote a lot about kind of the back and forth with the natural gas industry in LA as it tries to make this transition. So, if you could talk about what that back and forth has been like and what it means for new construction as you're trying to shift to all electric, that would be great.MR. HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, well, some of this, of course, is taking place in the courtroom. We did get sued by Southern California Gas Company, a lawsuit they ultimately backed out of. But I will say I think it's important when we do these transitions, that it be done in a planned way and in a graduated way. And one of the things that we\u2019re very attentive to is that the transition be predictable, and that builders be brought along.And so we have a very, very robust public process that we run. For every code cycle--this last code, I think we did 35 public workshops around the state. We take input from everyone, including builders, architects, environmental justice groups, environmental groups, utilities, and the gas industry, extensive engagement with them. And at the end of the day, we--I think there's a lot of embedded wisdom in the code as a consequence of this.One of the things that is really exciting to me when we look ahead is the potential for cost reduction. And just to take as an example, I think the solar industry is an excellent example of that. So I come out of the solar industry. I was in Silicon Valley before come to the Energy Commission. I got into the field 20 years ago, and at that time, the price of utility scale solar was 50 cents a kilowatt hour. It was the most expensive energy resource on the grid. Today, it's two cents a kilowatt hour. It's the cheapest source of energy on the grid.And that kind of market transformation is not actually that complicated. The cost reduction is driven by three things. It's innovation, automation, and scale. And it's mostly scale. And the same thing is true for electrification. When you look at appliances, like heat pump water heaters, which have come down significantly in cost, as we create codes and invest in R&D, the cost of those appliances is going to continue to come down. There's huge opportunity for further cost reduction. And ultimately, these technologies are going to win on price alone in the interim as we're coming down, because that's where I think the role of government needs to be, which is just on driving those costs down, working with stakeholders to bring it mainstream.So, to answer your question, I mean, we are headed for and need to get to a world beyond fossil fuels. I will just tell you living in California as a native Californian, you know, for people who are not on the West Coast of the United States and haven't experienced these fires, this is--it is unbelievable. I've never--I live in the Bay Area. I've never in my life seen wildfire smoke in the Bay Area until three years ago. Now we\u2019ve had three summers in a row. You know, my family got sick. We had to--we had to leave for a couple of weeks. You know, watching your kids go through that is horrific.And I think there is an incredible sense of urgency that all of us in California feel because we're living through it and we're breathing this air. And so that has changed the politics around this. And you're having major companies--just as an example, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which is one of the largest gas utilities in the country, wrote me a letter in support of an all-electric building code. I mean, this is just a sea change in the dynamics. And so the direction we're going is clearly beyond fossil fuels. But we want to do that in a way that really makes sense, gets us there quickly, and can work in the marketplace.MS. EILPERIN: Since the average Californian uses 31 percent less electricity than the average American, what are Californians doing that the rest of us aren\u2019t?MR. HOCHSCHILD: Well, one thing our agency--so I chair the Energy Commission, which is a 700-person state agency focused on getting us to 100 percent clean energy future, and one of the features that is unique to California, we have vested in our commission the authority to set energy efficiency codes and standards. And so we do that for new buildings. We also do it for appliances. And a lot of this is completely below the radar, but it's very significant.So, take TV standards, which we adopted a few years back. We said to the television manufacturers, you can't sell into our market of 40 million people--the fifth largest economy in the world--unless you meet these very stringent standards for your appliance. And that cut the energy use of TVs in half, saves a billion dollars a year. And actually, one of the nice features of being a big state like this is that manufacturers don't want to manufacture just for one market like California. In many cases, they end up upgrading their whole manufacturing lines for the North American market or the global market as a consequence. So, we've done that with a bunch of different appliances, from, you know, used to be a couple years ago, you plug in your cell phone or your shaver, and even when it's fully charged, it wou",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos, who recently flew into space, vows to do more to protect the Earth. (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8677",
        "date": "2021-11-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/world/europe/cop26-jeff-bezos-climate.html",
        "text": "The billionaire called the loss of Earth\u2019s forests \u201ca profound and urgent danger to us all.\u201d The billionaire called the loss of Earth\u2019s forests \u201ca profound and urgent danger to us all.\u201d Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, and who started his financial empire by selling books online, pledged $2 billion to restoring natural habitats and transforming food systems at the climate summit in Glasgow on Tuesday.",
        "author": "By Marc Santora and Nicholas Kulish"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can a Tiny Territory in the South Pacific Power Tesla\u2019s Ambitions? (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8678",
        "date": "2021-12-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/30/world/asia/tesla-batteries-nickel-new-caledonia.html",
        "text": "Nickel is vital to electric car batteries, but extracting it is dirty and destructive. A plant with a turbulent history in New Caledonia is about to become an experiment in doing it better. Nickel is vital to electric car batteries, but extracting it is dirty and destructive. A plant with a turbulent history in New Caledonia is about to become an experiment in doing it better. GORO, New Caledonia \u2014 From the reef-fringed coast of New Caledonia, the Coral Sea stretches into the South Pacific. Slender native pines, listing like whimsical Christmas trees, punctuate the shoreline. The landscape, one of the most biodiverse on the planet, is astonishingly beautiful until the crest of a hill where a different vista unfolds: a gouged red earth pierced by belching smokestacks and giant trucks rumbling across the lunar-like terrain.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Can \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Chart a Way Forward? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8679",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/arts/television/star-trek-picard.html",
        "text": "With \u201cPicard,\u201d a spinoff following Patrick Stewart\u2019s Starfleet officer, the franchise is trying to rediscover its place in a universe it effectively invented. With \u201cPicard,\u201d a spinoff following Patrick Stewart\u2019s Starfleet officer, the franchise is trying to rediscover its place in a universe it effectively invented. SANTA CLARITA, Calif. \u2014 Michael Chabon\u2019s job used to consist of writing novels, earning literary acclaim and receiving the occasional prestigious award. But this past June he was racing around the soundstages here at \u201cStar Trek: Picard,\u201d where he was working as an executive producer.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Chart a Way Forward? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8680",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/arts/television/star-trek-picard.html",
        "text": "With \u201cPicard,\u201d a spinoff following Patrick Stewart\u2019s Starfleet officer, the franchise is trying to rediscover its place in a universe it effectively invented. With \u201cPicard,\u201d a spinoff following Patrick Stewart\u2019s Starfleet officer, the franchise is trying to rediscover its place in a universe it effectively invented. SANTA CLARITA, Calif. \u2014 Michael Chabon\u2019s job used to consist of writing novels, earning literary acclaim and receiving the occasional prestigious award. But this past June he was racing around the soundstages here at \u201cStar Trek: Picard,\u201d where he was working as an executive producer.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Can \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Chart a Way Forward? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8681",
        "date": "2020-01-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/arts/television/star-trek-picard.html",
        "text": "With \u201cPicard,\u201d a spinoff following Patrick Stewart\u2019s Starfleet officer, the franchise is trying to rediscover its place in a universe it effectively invented. With \u201cPicard,\u201d a spinoff following Patrick Stewart\u2019s Starfleet officer, the franchise is trying to rediscover its place in a universe it effectively invented. SANTA CLARITA, Calif. \u2014 Michael Chabon\u2019s job used to consist of writing novels, earning literary acclaim and receiving the occasional prestigious award. But this past June he was racing around the soundstages here at \u201cStar Trek: Picard,\u201d where he was working as an executive producer.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "On \u2018Star Trek: Discovery,\u2019 a Franchise Boldly Goes Into the Serial TV Era (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8682",
        "date": "2017-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/arts/television/star-trek-discovery.html",
        "text": "The first new \u201cStar Trek\u201d series in more than a decade deals with the demands of long-form storytelling and confronts earthbound production problems. The first new \u201cStar Trek\u201d series in more than a decade deals with the demands of long-form storytelling and confronts earthbound production problems. Space, in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe, may be an alluring and infinite frontier, but time is a much rarer and more vexing commodity.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "On \u2018Star Trek: Discovery,\u2019 a Franchise Boldly Goes Into the Serial TV Era (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8683",
        "date": "2017-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/21/arts/television/star-trek-discovery.html",
        "text": "The first new \u201cStar Trek\u201d series in more than a decade deals with the demands of long-form storytelling and confronts earthbound production problems. The first new \u201cStar Trek\u201d series in more than a decade deals with the demands of long-form storytelling and confronts earthbound production problems. Space, in the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe, may be an alluring and infinite frontier, but time is a much rarer and more vexing commodity.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 6: What\u2019s Up With Sarek? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8684",
        "date": "2017-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-6-recap.html",
        "text": "We learn more about a beloved \u201cStar Trek\u201d character in this week\u2019s clunky episode. We learn more about a beloved \u201cStar Trek\u201d character in this week\u2019s clunky episode. With so many different casts, episodes, shows, movies and novels over the course of several decades, when it comes to \u201cStar Trek,\u201d there are bound to be violations of canon and plot holes that viewers just have to live with. Some are flagrant (The Enterprise being inexplicably kept from the Earth battle in \u201cFirst Contact\u201d) and others less so (Geordi La Forge saying Romulan ale is illegal in \u201cNemesis,\u201d even though in \u201cDeep Space Nine,\u201d an admiral says this is no longer the case.)",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 6: What\u2019s Up With Sarek? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8685",
        "date": "2017-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-6-recap.html",
        "text": "We learn more about a beloved \u201cStar Trek\u201d character in this week\u2019s clunky episode. We learn more about a beloved \u201cStar Trek\u201d character in this week\u2019s clunky episode. With so many different casts, episodes, shows, movies and novels over the course of several decades, when it comes to \u201cStar Trek,\u201d there are bound to be violations of canon and plot holes that viewers just have to live with. Some are flagrant (The Enterprise being inexplicably kept from the Earth battle in \u201cFirst Contact\u201d) and others less so (Geordi La Forge saying Romulan ale is illegal in \u201cNemesis,\u201d even though in \u201cDeep Space Nine,\u201d an admiral says this is no longer the case.)",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 6: What\u2019s Up With Sarek? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8686",
        "date": "2017-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-6-recap.html",
        "text": "We learn more about a beloved \u201cStar Trek\u201d character in this week\u2019s clunky episode. We learn more about a beloved \u201cStar Trek\u201d character in this week\u2019s clunky episode. With so many different casts, episodes, shows, movies and novels over the course of several decades, when it comes to \u201cStar Trek,\u201d there are bound to be violations of canon and plot holes that viewers just have to live with. Some are flagrant (The Enterprise being inexplicably kept from the Earth battle in \u201cFirst Contact\u201d) and others less so (Geordi La Forge saying Romulan ale is illegal in \u201cNemesis,\u201d even though in \u201cDeep Space Nine,\u201d an admiral says this is no longer the case.)",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 2: Battles Begin (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8687",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-2-recap.html",
        "text": "The second episode leaves a lot of questions unanswered but keeps the dazzling visual effects coming. The second episode leaves a lot of questions unanswered but keeps the dazzling visual effects coming. Early in the run of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d it is clear that character development will be a slow burn. In the franchise\u2019s first serialized television show, everything else takes a back seat to action. For now, fans will have to be patient and just enjoy the dazzling special effects.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 2: Battles Begin (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8688",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-2-recap.html",
        "text": "The second episode leaves a lot of questions unanswered but keeps the dazzling visual effects coming. The second episode leaves a lot of questions unanswered but keeps the dazzling visual effects coming. Early in the run of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d it is clear that character development will be a slow burn. In the franchise\u2019s first serialized television show, everything else takes a back seat to action. For now, fans will have to be patient and just enjoy the dazzling special effects.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 2: Battles Begin (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8689",
        "date": "2017-09-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-2-recap.html",
        "text": "The second episode leaves a lot of questions unanswered but keeps the dazzling visual effects coming. The second episode leaves a lot of questions unanswered but keeps the dazzling visual effects coming. Early in the run of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d it is clear that character development will be a slow burn. In the franchise\u2019s first serialized television show, everything else takes a back seat to action. For now, fans will have to be patient and just enjoy the dazzling special effects.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "Tracking the Vocabulary of Sci-Fi, from Aerocar to Zero-Gravity (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8690",
        "date": "2021-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/arts/science-fiction-dictionary.html",
        "text": "The new online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction probes the speculative corners of the lexicographic universe. The new online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction probes the speculative corners of the lexicographic universe. \u201cWarp speed\u201d may be a term of the moment, thanks to the federal coronavirus vaccine program. But it\u2019s also one with a history \u2014 which goes back farther than \u201cStar Trek,\u201d to a forgotten 1952 science fiction story in the pulp magazine Imagination.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Schuessler"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 5: Saru\u2019s Moment (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8691",
        "date": "2017-10-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-5-recap.html",
        "text": "Saru finds himself in command of the Discovery, while we learn something rather explosive about Lorca. Saru finds himself in command of the Discovery, while we learn something rather explosive about Lorca. One of the best episodes of \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation\u201d was the two-part \u201cThe Best of Both Worlds,\u201d in which the Borg kidnap Picard and turn him into Locutus. Through a different lens, though, this was a story about Riker (Jonathan Frakes), who is forced to take command of the Enterprise and is unsure whether he is ready to do so. On its surface, the story was about the lengths a crew will go to save Picard and the potential destruction of the Federation. But it was also, if not more so, about seeing Riker develop beyond just a competent first officer. (Part of this was due to Patrick Stewart\u2019s contract negotiations.)",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Picard\u2019 Recap: Getting the Band Together (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8692",
        "date": "2020-02-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/arts/television/star-trek-picard-the-end-is-the-beginning-recap.html",
        "text": "Jean-Luc officially begins his quest \u2014 and looks more comfortable than he did at the vineyard. Jean-Luc officially begins his quest \u2014 and looks more comfortable than he did at the vineyard. The first three episodes of \u201cStar Trek: Picard\u201d feel like a long pilot unto themselves. We establish what Picard has been up to. We establish several new characters, the central conflict and the circumstances which led to the conflict; in this case, Picard\u2019s efforts to rescue Romulus from the supernova. By the conclusion of \u201cThe End Is the Beginning\u201d \u2014 an apt title \u2014 we have our central arc: Picard has formed a ragtag group of outsiders to solve this thing on their own.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Picard\u2019 Season 1, Episode 8 Recap: That Escalated Quickly (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8693",
        "date": "2020-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/arts/television/star-trek-picard-episode-8-recap.html",
        "text": "The central mystery is further unraveled by the La Sirena crew. But are they moving quickly enough? The central mystery is further unraveled by the La Sirena crew. But are they moving quickly enough? Man, \u201cStar Trek: Picard\u201d is dark. That is the thought that kept running through my head during this week\u2019s episode. There have been other dark moments throughout the series \u2014 but this is the episode when the darkness really stood out. From the start of the episode \u2014 when several Romulans stand in a circle, go insane and commit suicide \u2014 to Admiral Clancy\u2019s randomly telling Picard to shut up with an unnecessary expletive, I kept thinking that this is a grim world Picard inhabits \u2014 and a much different one than the franchise creator, Gene Roddenberry, had in mind decades ago.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 9: Sloppy Showdowns (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8694",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-9-recap.html",
        "text": "In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. One of the issues with the maiden voyage of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is that the show doesn\u2019t appear to understand what motivates its characters. As a result, we don\u2019t understand what motivates them. That\u2019s not a problem that is unique to this iteration of \u201cStar Trek\u201d \u2014 \u201cVoyager\u201d and \u201cEnterprise\u201d also struggled with this early on \u2014 nor is this an issue limited to this television franchise.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 9: Sloppy Showdowns (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8695",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-9-recap.html",
        "text": "In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. One of the issues with the maiden voyage of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is that the show doesn\u2019t appear to understand what motivates its characters. As a result, we don\u2019t understand what motivates them. That\u2019s not a problem that is unique to this iteration of \u201cStar Trek\u201d \u2014 \u201cVoyager\u201d and \u201cEnterprise\u201d also struggled with this early on \u2014 nor is this an issue limited to this television franchise.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 9: Sloppy Showdowns (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8696",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-9-recap.html",
        "text": "In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. One of the issues with the maiden voyage of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is that the show doesn\u2019t appear to understand what motivates its characters. As a result, we don\u2019t understand what motivates them. That\u2019s not a problem that is unique to this iteration of \u201cStar Trek\u201d \u2014 \u201cVoyager\u201d and \u201cEnterprise\u201d also struggled with this early on \u2014 nor is this an issue limited to this television franchise.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 9: Sloppy Showdowns (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8697",
        "date": "2017-11-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-9-recap.html",
        "text": "In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. In its midseason finale, the show continued to stumble in presenting coherent versions of its main characters. One of the issues with the maiden voyage of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is that the show doesn\u2019t appear to understand what motivates its characters. As a result, we don\u2019t understand what motivates them. That\u2019s not a problem that is unique to this iteration of \u201cStar Trek\u201d \u2014 \u201cVoyager\u201d and \u201cEnterprise\u201d also struggled with this early on \u2014 nor is this an issue limited to this television franchise.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 1: Engaging the Klingon (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8698",
        "date": "2017-09-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-episode-1-recap.html",
        "text": "The first episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was promising and worrisome at the same time, with great performances to boot. The first episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was promising and worrisome at the same time, with great performances to boot. After multiple stops and starts the highly anticipated \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d finally hit impulse speed on Sunday and this recapper set his phasers on disbelief.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 10: Mirrors! (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8699",
        "date": "2018-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-recap-despite-yourself.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s episode, directed by the Trek veteran Jonathan Frakes, unfolded in a parallel universe filled with plot twists and death. This week\u2019s episode, directed by the Trek veteran Jonathan Frakes, unfolded in a parallel universe filled with plot twists and death. The mirror universe has offered some of the most ambitious story lines across multiple \u201cStar Trek\u201d generations, allowing both the writers and the actors to reimagine established characters, or even briefly turn them upside down.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 10: Mirrors! (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8700",
        "date": "2018-01-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-recap-despite-yourself.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s episode, directed by the Trek veteran Jonathan Frakes, unfolded in a parallel universe filled with plot twists and death. This week\u2019s episode, directed by the Trek veteran Jonathan Frakes, unfolded in a parallel universe filled with plot twists and death. The mirror universe has offered some of the most ambitious story lines across multiple \u201cStar Trek\u201d generations, allowing both the writers and the actors to reimagine established characters, or even briefly turn them upside down.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 3: Sometimes Down Is Up (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8701",
        "date": "2017-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-3-recap.html",
        "text": "The third episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is a gloomy hour of television, but has two very important callbacks for fans. The third episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is a gloomy hour of television, but has two very important callbacks for fans. One of my early complaints about \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is that we don\u2019t know much about character motivations. This week\u2019s episode three is titled, aptly, \u201cContext Is for Kings,\u201d and offers more information about where the show is headed.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 3: Sometimes Down Is Up (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8702",
        "date": "2017-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-3-recap.html",
        "text": "The third episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is a gloomy hour of television, but has two very important callbacks for fans. The third episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is a gloomy hour of television, but has two very important callbacks for fans. One of my early complaints about \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is that we don\u2019t know much about character motivations. This week\u2019s episode three is titled, aptly, \u201cContext Is for Kings,\u201d and offers more information about where the show is headed.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 3: Sometimes Down Is Up (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8703",
        "date": "2017-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-3-recap.html",
        "text": "The third episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is a gloomy hour of television, but has two very important callbacks for fans. The third episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is a gloomy hour of television, but has two very important callbacks for fans. One of my early complaints about \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d is that we don\u2019t know much about character motivations. This week\u2019s episode three is titled, aptly, \u201cContext Is for Kings,\u201d and offers more information about where the show is headed.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 2, Episode 2: Keeping the Faith (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8704",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-2-episode-2-new-eden-recap.html",
        "text": "The second episode of the new \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d deepens a mystery surrounding Spock, while Pike battles with whether to reveal a big secret. The second episode of the new \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d deepens a mystery surrounding Spock, while Pike battles with whether to reveal a big secret. Faith was the central theme of the strong second episode of the new season of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery.\u201d Faith in a higher being. Faith in your commander. Faith in those you command. Faith that when Sylvia Tilly storms onto the bridge without a uniform on, she knows what she\u2019s doing.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 2, Episode 2: Keeping the Faith (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8705",
        "date": "2019-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-2-episode-2-new-eden-recap.html",
        "text": "The second episode of the new \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d deepens a mystery surrounding Spock, while Pike battles with whether to reveal a big secret. The second episode of the new \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d deepens a mystery surrounding Spock, while Pike battles with whether to reveal a big secret. Faith was the central theme of the strong second episode of the new season of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery.\u201d Faith in a higher being. Faith in your commander. Faith in those you command. Faith that when Sylvia Tilly storms onto the bridge without a uniform on, she knows what she\u2019s doing.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Picard\u2019 Is, Finally, \u2018Star Trek: Peak TV\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8706",
        "date": "2020-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/arts/television/star-trek-picard-review.html",
        "text": "The seventh live-action \u201cStar Trek\u201d series offers some fan service for franchise nostalgists, but Patrick Stewart is just about the only thing that hasn\u2019t changed. The seventh live-action \u201cStar Trek\u201d series offers some fan service for franchise nostalgists, but Patrick Stewart is just about the only thing that hasn\u2019t changed. \u201cStar Trek: Picard\u201d opens with Jean-Luc Picard, former captain of the Starship Enterprise, having a nightmare, and doesn\u2019t that sound right. Through seven seasons of \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation\u201d and four movies, Starfleet\u2019s most stalwart officer seemed always to be tripping out at key moments: pinging between time streams or dreaming alternate lives; forced into hallucinations by the Ferengi or assimilated by the Borg.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Picard\u2019 Is, Finally, \u2018Star Trek: Peak TV\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8707",
        "date": "2020-01-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/arts/television/star-trek-picard-review.html",
        "text": "The seventh live-action \u201cStar Trek\u201d series offers some fan service for franchise nostalgists, but Patrick Stewart is just about the only thing that hasn\u2019t changed. The seventh live-action \u201cStar Trek\u201d series offers some fan service for franchise nostalgists, but Patrick Stewart is just about the only thing that hasn\u2019t changed. \u201cStar Trek: Picard\u201d opens with Jean-Luc Picard, former captain of the Starship Enterprise, having a nightmare, and doesn\u2019t that sound right. Through seven seasons of \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation\u201d and four movies, Starfleet\u2019s most stalwart officer seemed always to be tripping out at key moments: pinging between time streams or dreaming alternate lives; forced into hallucinations by the Ferengi or assimilated by the Borg.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 2, Episode 5: A Trek KGB (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8708",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-saints-of-imperfection-recap.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d gives us an extended look at Section 31. But trust us: It\u2019s not the one we saw in \u201cDeep Space Nine.\u201d This week\u2019s episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d gives us an extended look at Section 31. But trust us: It\u2019s not the one we saw in \u201cDeep Space Nine.\u201d No one ever really dies in \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d apparently. Even the characters who do die.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "How \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Pushed Cory Booker to Make It So (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8709",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/arts/television/cory-booker-star-trek.html",
        "text": "His favorite captain is Jean-Luc Picard. He thinks President Trump has a little Ferengi in him. A conversation with Senator Cory Booker about hope, \u201cStar Trek\u201d and his father. His favorite captain is Jean-Luc Picard. He thinks President Trump has a little Ferengi in him. A conversation with Senator Cory Booker about hope, \u201cStar Trek\u201d and his father. NEWARK \u2014 In the month before officially becoming a presidential candidate, Senator Cory Booker spent his nights rewatching all 172 episodes of \u201cStar Trek: Voyager.\u201d ",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "How \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Pushed Cory Booker to Make It So (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8710",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/arts/television/cory-booker-star-trek.html",
        "text": "His favorite captain is Jean-Luc Picard. He thinks President Trump has a little Ferengi in him. A conversation with Senator Cory Booker about hope, \u201cStar Trek\u201d and his father. His favorite captain is Jean-Luc Picard. He thinks President Trump has a little Ferengi in him. A conversation with Senator Cory Booker about hope, \u201cStar Trek\u201d and his father. NEWARK \u2014 In the month before officially becoming a presidential candidate, Senator Cory Booker spent his nights rewatching all 172 episodes of \u201cStar Trek: Voyager.\u201d ",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "D.C. Fontana, First Female \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Writer, Dies at 80 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8711",
        "date": "2019-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/arts/dc-fontana-star-trek.html",
        "text": "Ms. Fontana, who was part of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe from its early days, was best known for her work on Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. Ms. Fontana, who was part of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe from its early days, was best known for her work on Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. D.C. Fontana, who helped craft the lore of the 1960s television series \u201cStar Trek\u201d and developed one of its signature characters, Spock, as the show\u2019s first female writer, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 80.",
        "author": "By Liam Stack"
    },
    {
        "title": "D.C. Fontana, First Female \u2018Star Trek\u2019 Writer, Dies at 80 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8712",
        "date": "2019-12-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/arts/dc-fontana-star-trek.html",
        "text": "Ms. Fontana, who was part of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe from its early days, was best known for her work on Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. Ms. Fontana, who was part of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d universe from its early days, was best known for her work on Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. D.C. Fontana, who helped craft the lore of the 1960s television series \u201cStar Trek\u201d and developed one of its signature characters, Spock, as the show\u2019s first female writer, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 80.",
        "author": "By Liam Stack"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Picard\u2019 Season 1, Episode 7 Recap: Will Riker Makes Pizza (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8713",
        "date": "2020-03-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/arts/television/star-trek-picard-nepenthe-recap.html",
        "text": "In this week\u2019s episode, Picard reunites with his old Number One and his trusted counselor, Deanna Troi. In this week\u2019s episode, Picard reunites with his old Number One and his trusted counselor, Deanna Troi. This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Picard\u201d is less about the central story arc and more about taking stock of who Picard is at this point in his life, as well as his android friend. The series creators have said that the show should be viewed more as a character study than anything else. And who better to assess the captain than his former \u201cNumber One,\u201d William Riker? And his former ship\u2019s counselor, Deanna Troi, the Betazoid who can sense emotions?",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Mundos Alternos,\u2019 Where Other Worlds Come to Life (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8714",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/arts/design/mundos-alternos-queens-museum-review.html",
        "text": "Science fiction illuminates reality by imagining the unreal in a mind-bending show at the Queens Museum. Science fiction illuminates reality by imagining the unreal in a mind-bending show at the Queens Museum. The cast of the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d television series is the classic example of science fiction\u2019s myopia. A mostly male, mostly white crew on an interstellar exploration vessel seems to assume that American society as it was in the 1960s could go on forever. But as an insight into the time that produced it, the vision was pretty sharp \u2014 and the same is true of the Queens Museum\u2019s sprawling, consistently mind-bending \u201cMundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas.\u201d ",
        "author": "By Will Heinrich"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Mundos Alternos,\u2019 Where Other Worlds Come to Life (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8715",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/arts/design/mundos-alternos-queens-museum-review.html",
        "text": "Science fiction illuminates reality by imagining the unreal in a mind-bending show at the Queens Museum. Science fiction illuminates reality by imagining the unreal in a mind-bending show at the Queens Museum. The cast of the original \u201cStar Trek\u201d television series is the classic example of science fiction\u2019s myopia. A mostly male, mostly white crew on an interstellar exploration vessel seems to assume that American society as it was in the 1960s could go on forever. But as an insight into the time that produced it, the vision was pretty sharp \u2014 and the same is true of the Queens Museum\u2019s sprawling, consistently mind-bending \u201cMundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas.\u201d ",
        "author": "By Will Heinrich"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Slowly Goes Where Dark TV Has Gone Before (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8716",
        "date": "2017-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-review-cbs-all-access.html",
        "text": "Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Capt. Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who commands the starship that gives \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d its title, injured his eyes in a battle. This requires him to work in a dimmed light that gives his vessel the techno-noir moodiness of a dystopian dance club. In the fifth episode, his old friend Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook) asked him what I\u2019d been wondering: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you get your damn eyes fixed?\u201d",
        "author": "By James Poniewozik"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Slowly Goes Where Dark TV Has Gone Before (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8717",
        "date": "2017-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-review-cbs-all-access.html",
        "text": "Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Capt. Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who commands the starship that gives \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d its title, injured his eyes in a battle. This requires him to work in a dimmed light that gives his vessel the techno-noir moodiness of a dystopian dance club. In the fifth episode, his old friend Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook) asked him what I\u2019d been wondering: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you get your damn eyes fixed?\u201d",
        "author": "By James Poniewozik"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Slowly Goes Where Dark TV Has Gone Before (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8718",
        "date": "2017-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-review-cbs-all-access.html",
        "text": "Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Capt. Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who commands the starship that gives \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d its title, injured his eyes in a battle. This requires him to work in a dimmed light that gives his vessel the techno-noir moodiness of a dystopian dance club. In the fifth episode, his old friend Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook) asked him what I\u2019d been wondering: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you get your damn eyes fixed?\u201d",
        "author": "By James Poniewozik"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Slowly Goes Where Dark TV Has Gone Before (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8719",
        "date": "2017-10-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-review-cbs-all-access.html",
        "text": "Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Through its first five episodes, this moody series has some good ideas as it tries to adapt the franchise to the times. But it could use an energy boost. Capt. Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who commands the starship that gives \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d its title, injured his eyes in a battle. This requires him to work in a dimmed light that gives his vessel the techno-noir moodiness of a dystopian dance club. In the fifth episode, his old friend Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook) asked him what I\u2019d been wondering: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you get your damn eyes fixed?\u201d",
        "author": "By James Poniewozik"
    },
    {
        "title": "Got Any Time-Travel Plans This Summer? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8720",
        "date": "2019-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/books/review/new-science-fiction-time-travel.html",
        "text": "Let this spate of science fiction transport you to another era. Let this spate of science fiction transport you to another era. The last few years have seen an uptick in pop culture stories featuring time travel, from the repetitions and revisions of \u201cThe Good Place\u201d and \u201cRussian Doll\u201d to developments in \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d and \u201cAvengers: Endgame.\u201d Sometimes the MacGuffin by which we get to play with anachronism, but often also rooted in questions of free will and determinism, time travel is a fascinating springboard for fiction: Are there many futures, or just one? Can you change the past without changing the future, or yourself? This column brings together books about time fractured and out of joint, time as an unbroken lineage resisting empire, and time travel glimpsed through the overlapping lenses of psychology, philosophy and physics.",
        "author": "By Amal El-Mohtar"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019: These fearless female leaders run a tight ship (WP: Express) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8721",
        "date": "2017-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/10/01/star-trek-discovery-these-fearless-female-leaders-run-a-tight-ship/",
        "text": "Critic\u2019s log, stardate 10022017.Watched \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d a prequel to the 1966 series that got the phasers firing. CBS aired the first episode on network TV, but now fans must sign up for CBS All Access to catch the rest (episodes stream at 8:30 p.m. Sundays). That\u2019s $5.99 a month with commercials, although you can get a week for free. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe opening featured the warrior race Klingons speaking Klingon, or, as it sounded to me, \u201cHoo mah whip choo!\u201d Even with subtitles, I am bored by Klingon dialogue.Aside from that, the first episode was a brilliant reinvention of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d legend. Two awesome women run the ship: Captain Philippa Georgiou (the formidable Michelle Yeoh) and her Number 1, half human/half Vulcan Michael Burnham (super-chill Sonequa Martin-Green). The crewmen exist merely to do their bidding.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe series looks gorgeous. When Georgiou and Burnham trek across the desert as storm clouds loom, the scene looks like an apocalyptic Renaissance painting, if they had CGI back in the 1600s. And the reflection of the galaxy in an eyeball \u2014 to crib a line from Burnham, \u201cThe only word to effectively describe it is: \u2018Wow!\u2019 \u201dBut much of the dialogue is pretentious in the worst Star Trek tradition: \u201cThis is Federation space. Retreat is not an option.\u201d And as \u201cStar Trek\u201d captain James T. Kirk might put it in his dramatically paced speaking style: The plot pace is sometimes. A. Little. Slow.Martin-Green is clearly the star. Her logical Vulcan brain and emotional human heart battle it out. And she\u2019s fearless, venturing into space to investigate a threat even though if she stays out more than 20 minutes, radiation will cause her DNA to \u201cunravel like noodles.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe big question: Will the new series evolve into a predictable Federation vs. Klingon dust-up or will the USS Discovery discover really cool stuff?Meanwhile, significant changes occur in Episode 2. They definitely make you want to boldly go to CBS All Access and start paying after that first free week.More of Marc\u2019s TV musings:These \u2018Vice Principals\u2019 want all the powerTrue crime satire \u2018American Vandal\u2019 will suck you into its mysteryDon\u2019t be ashamed to watch these six TV shows this fall The crewmen exist merely to do their bidding. \u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019: These fearless female leaders run a tight ship",
        "author": "Marc Silver"
    },
    {
        "title": "Trump reveals Space Force logo, and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans aren\u2019t  happy (WP: Military) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8722",
        "date": "2020-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/01/25/space-force-logo/",
        "text": "After consultation with our Great Military Leaders, designers, and others, I am pleased to present the new logo for the United States Space Force, the Sixth Branch of our Magnificent Military! pic.twitter.com/TC8pT4yHFT\u2014 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2020\n\nPresident Trump unveiled the new U.S. Space Force logo on Friday, and the Internet didn\u2019t take kindly to it.The design for the newly minted sixth branch of the military looked an awful lot like the Starfleet Command insignia from the Star Trek series and movies, depicting a delta and a globe encircled by a rocket and set against a backdrop of stars. Minutes after Trump tweeted out the image, a chorus of observers rushed in to ridicule the similarities. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was an \u201cobvious Star Trek knockoff,\u201d one user wrote. \u201cBoldly going where we\u2019ve gone before,\u201d quipped another. Even actor George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu in the original series, joked that the franchise was \u201cexpecting some royalties from this. \u201dGeorge Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.But the new logo is really just a riff on the original U.S. Air Force Space Command emblem, which dates back decades. And among the people to point that out was Michael Okuda, a longtime Star Trek graphic designer who in the 1990s created the Starfleet Command logo for Paramount, which itself was derived from older designs.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe arrowhead in the U.S. Space Force logo appears to be borrowed from the U.S. Air Force Space Command emblem, which has been in use since the 1980s,\u201d Okuda, who has also designed emblems for NASA, wrote on Facebook.\u201cArrowheads and swooshes and orbits and stars and planets have been used in space emblems long before either of these emblems,\u201d he wrote. \u201cFor whatever it\u2019s worth \u2014 and I do not own the intellectual property rights in most of my Star Trek work \u2014 I\u2019m not offended by the similarities, nor would I accuse the Space Force of plagiarism. I\u2019m just amused. It ain\u2019t that serious.\u201dPresident Trump signed the defense spending bill on Dec. 20, which included the creation of Space Force as a new branch of the military. (The Washington Post)Indeed, neither Star Trek nor the U.S. government can claim pure originality when it comes to the design of their space emblems. If anything, they seem to have spent decades taking cues from each other.It's almost comical. Almost. pic.twitter.com/0odsqdjsDE\u2014 Task & Purpose (@TaskandPurpose) January 24, 2020\n\nThe original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, which debuted in 1966, appears to have drawn inspiration for the legendary Starfleet insignia worn by the show\u2019s characters from early NASA emblems.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA 2018 post on the show\u2019s official website says that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and producer Robert Justman based the insignia in part on NASA\u2019s gold astronaut pins, which are awarded to astronauts who fly into space.\u201cThe insignia worn on Starfleet uniforms is the equivalent of the badges worn by U.S. Service members \u2014 to show how they serve, not where they serve,\u201d the post read, noting that Roddenberry and Justman had served in World War II. \u201cIn the 1960s, the Starfleet delta had far more in common with the golden pin awarded to a NASA astronaut than a simple mission patch, and it was intended to equal that proud emblem in both use and sentiment.\u201dSpace Force\u2019s camouflage uniforms won\u2019t help its members hide in orbit. They\u2019re not supposed toThe NASA pins, first awarded in 1963, feature \u201ca trio of trajectories merging in infinite space, capped by a bright shining star and encircled by an elliptical wreath denoting orbital flight,\u201d as described by NASA at the time. A similar shooting star appears in the Starfleet insignia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA\u2019s original seal, rolled out in 1959, also contains some of the same design elements. The red delta-like shape in the agency\u2019s famed \u201cmeatball\u201d logo represented an air foil, surrounded by white stars and a white orbital path. In the fictional Star Trek universe, the Starfleet insignia is meant to be a \u201cdirect descendant\u201d of the logo, according to the Star Trek website.The Pentagon\u2019s space units make use of similar imagery.When the U.S. Air Force created Space Command in 1982, Pentagon leaders had only a few months to create all the paraphernalia, according to a history on the Air Force\u2019s website. So the final Space Command emblem ended up drawing heavily from the Air Force\u2019s space operator\u2019s badge, depicting a globe with two orbital ellipses, satellites, stars, and a delta.George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.According to the Air Force, the design was loaded with meaning. \u201cThe slight tapering of the orbital ellipses represents the characteristic eastward motion,\u201d the Air Force\u2019s history read. \u201cThe centrally superimposed deltoid symbolizes both the Air Force upward thrust into space and the launch vehicles needed to place all satellites in orbit. The distinctive dark blue background shading, small globe, and stars symbolize the space environment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat emblem was in use until December, when the Space Force became a its own branch.In what may be the biggest testament to the artistic overlap between Star Trek and the government\u2019s space efforts, NASA in the early 2000s hired Okuda, the Star Trek designer, to work on logos for a series of missions and programs.Over several years, Okuda created program emblems for the Constellation, Ares, Orion and Altair programs, as well as the emblem for the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2009, NASA awarded him the agency\u2019s public service medal for \u201cexceptional contributions to the mission of NASA.\u201dHis response on Friday to the new Space Force logo was lighthearted: \u201cWell, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!\u201dRead moreThousands of gallons of wine spill into a California riverTwo fatalities confirmed after explosion at a Houston manufacturing plantHe settled a racial discrimination lawsuit. When he tried to deposit the checks, police were called. \"I\u2019m not offended by the similarities, nor would I accuse the Space Force of plagiarism,\" the designer of one of Star Trek's logos said. \"I\u2019m just amused. It ain\u2019t that serious.\u201d Trump reveals Space Force logo, and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans aren\u2019t  happy",
        "author": "Derek Hawkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watching While White: How Movies Tackled Race and Class in 2016 (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8723",
        "date": "2017-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/movies/how-movies-tackled-race-and-class-in-2016.html",
        "text": "2016 was a good year for movies \u2014 not from major studios \u2014 exploring race and class. 2016 was a good year for movies \u2014 not from major studios \u2014 exploring race and class. A. O. SCOTT Last year at this time, you and I were cheering for Hollywood, specifically the range and quality of large-scale, big-money commercial movies, including new entries in ancient franchises like \u201cMad Max\u201d and \u201cRocky.\u201d In the past year, the big studios reverted to type, with decidedly uninspiring (though hardly unprofitable) iterations of the Marvel and DC comic-book universes, meh new \u201cStar Trek\u201d and \u201cStar Wars\u201d episodes and the profoundly inconsequential returns of Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher and Bad Santa.",
        "author": "By A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.   (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8724",
        "date": "2020-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/25/george-takei-star-trek-vision-was-hopeful-trumps-is-mirror-image/",
        "text": "There\u2019s a famous episode of \u201cStar Trek: The Original Series\u201d called \u201cMirror, Mirror,\u201d in which half the bridge crew of the USS Enterprise suddenly find themselves in a parallel universe where the peaceful United Federation of Planets is now an \u201cEmpire.\u201d In this terrifying version of reality, violence and cruelty have displaced peace and diplomacy as the hallmarks of governance. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cevil\u201d version of my own character, Sulu, plots to kill both Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock so that he can take command of the ship. In classic \u201cStar Trek\u201d style, the script for this episode carried loaded meaning. The writers were issuing a warning: A free and democratic society can flip in the blink of an ion storm, and all that we take for granted about the rule of law, the chain of command and the civilized functions of government can be gone in an instant.I thought of \u201cMirror, Mirror\u201d after seeing the Trump administration\u2019s new Space Force logo, which the president tweeted out Friday with a characteristically awkward nod to our \u201cGreat Military Leaders\u201d of the \u201cSixth Branch of our Magnificent Military!\u201d (caps and punctuation his). Within minutes, the logo was lampooned widely for appearing to rip off the logo for Starfleet Command from \u201cStar Trek.\u201d Indeed, with the two logos placed side by side, the resemblance is so remarkable that I had to wonder whether Melania Trump was part of the design committee:Oh wow. pic.twitter.com/uiJfOS1L1H\u2014 Miriam Kramer (@mirikramer) January 24, 2020\n\nApparently, the new logo is just another iteration on the former Air Force Space Command logo, which also featured an upward pointing delta, but the final product with its concentric rings and swooping orbits looks so much like Starfleet\u2019s, I fear it could easily confuse any Vulcans and Klingons who see it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump reveals Space Force logo, and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans aren\u2019t happyThis somewhat comical appropriation of \u201cStar Trek\u201d imagery carries a certain irony. The universe of \u201cStar Trek\u201d has always provided a hopeful, near-utopian vision for humanity, where we have finally learned to set aside things like racial prejudice and gender inequality, and we all work together toward a common purpose and quest. Money is a thing of the past because no one wants for any material need, and we have united much of the galaxy in a peaceful assembly of sovereign worlds.Contrast that for a moment with the current administration\u2019s values and practices: racial resentments and fear stoked for cynical political purposes, the wealthy made even more obscenely so through grift and political influence, coarse and bullying behavior masquerading as diplomacy, to name but a few. Even the notion of a \u201cSpace Force\u201d seems patently absurd coming from an administration where science is mocked and disregarded.They interned my family. Don't let them do it to Muslims.At times it truly feels like the past three years have had us beamed into a parallel universe, where instead of a president we have a mendacious thug, and where notions like the U.S. Senate being a deliberate, serious body that serves as a vital check on presidential power now seem quaint and naive.\"Star Trek\" icon George Takei is on a mission to ensure America doesn't forget its shameful legacy of internment camps. (The Washington Post)True to the \u201cStar Trek\u201d vision, \u201cMirror, Mirror\u201d has a hopeful ending. The \u201cevil\u201d version of Spock, having Vulcan-mind-melded with Dr. McCoy to understand why someone would spare the life of his enemy, has an epiphany. After listening to an impassioned Kirk argue that the overthrow of the empire is inevitable, the evil Spock helps the \u201cgood\u201d bridge crew escape. The optimism and message is unmistakable: The nightmare will end if we work to end it. Normalcy can be restored if we believe in the goodness of humankind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year seems like a good time to test that lesson. We have not slipped so far into the mirror universe that we do not recognize ourselves or our institutions. As Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) told the Senate this week, what is right still matters. The truth still matters. Most Americans still want to hear the truth. They still want President Trump to be held accountable, and many even want him removed from office for his actions. Overthrowing Trump is something we can achieve at the ballot box this November. We can find our way back to our familiar, normal universe.In the meantime, may I suggest that Trump find inspiration from a more politically aligned logo for his Space Force? If you don\u2019t recognize the emblem on the character below, it\u2019s the imperial sigil from that \u201cother\u201d space fiction franchise. I\u2019m sure Lord Vader won\u2019t mind.Read more:The top 10 \u2018Star Trek\u2019 episodes everThe first \u2018Star Trek\u2019 film took off from an unlikely location: WashingtonSome white \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans are unhappy about remake\u2019s diversity The new Space Force logo may look like Starfleet\u2019s, but the similarities end there. George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.  ",
        "author": "George Takei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.   (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8725",
        "date": "2020-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/25/george-takei-star-trek-vision-was-hopeful-trumps-is-mirror-image/",
        "text": "There\u2019s a famous episode of \u201cStar Trek: The Original Series\u201d called \u201cMirror, Mirror,\u201d in which half the bridge crew of the USS Enterprise suddenly find themselves in a parallel universe where the peaceful United Federation of Planets is now an \u201cEmpire.\u201d In this terrifying version of reality, violence and cruelty have displaced peace and diplomacy as the hallmarks of governance. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cevil\u201d version of my own character, Sulu, plots to kill both Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock so that he can take command of the ship. In classic \u201cStar Trek\u201d style, the script for this episode carried loaded meaning. The writers were issuing a warning: A free and democratic society can flip in the blink of an ion storm, and all that we take for granted about the rule of law, the chain of command and the civilized functions of government can be gone in an instant.I thought of \u201cMirror, Mirror\u201d after seeing the Trump administration\u2019s new Space Force logo, which the president tweeted out Friday with a characteristically awkward nod to our \u201cGreat Military Leaders\u201d of the \u201cSixth Branch of our Magnificent Military!\u201d (caps and punctuation his). Within minutes, the logo was lampooned widely for appearing to rip off the logo for Starfleet Command from \u201cStar Trek.\u201d Indeed, with the two logos placed side by side, the resemblance is so remarkable that I had to wonder whether Melania Trump was part of the design committee:Oh wow. pic.twitter.com/uiJfOS1L1H\u2014 Miriam Kramer (@mirikramer) January 24, 2020\n\nApparently, the new logo is just another iteration on the former Air Force Space Command logo, which also featured an upward pointing delta, but the final product with its concentric rings and swooping orbits looks so much like Starfleet\u2019s, I fear it could easily confuse any Vulcans and Klingons who see it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump reveals Space Force logo, and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans aren\u2019t happyThis somewhat comical appropriation of \u201cStar Trek\u201d imagery carries a certain irony. The universe of \u201cStar Trek\u201d has always provided a hopeful, near-utopian vision for humanity, where we have finally learned to set aside things like racial prejudice and gender inequality, and we all work together toward a common purpose and quest. Money is a thing of the past because no one wants for any material need, and we have united much of the galaxy in a peaceful assembly of sovereign worlds.Contrast that for a moment with the current administration\u2019s values and practices: racial resentments and fear stoked for cynical political purposes, the wealthy made even more obscenely so through grift and political influence, coarse and bullying behavior masquerading as diplomacy, to name but a few. Even the notion of a \u201cSpace Force\u201d seems patently absurd coming from an administration where science is mocked and disregarded.They interned my family. Don't let them do it to Muslims.At times it truly feels like the past three years have had us beamed into a parallel universe, where instead of a president we have a mendacious thug, and where notions like the U.S. Senate being a deliberate, serious body that serves as a vital check on presidential power now seem quaint and naive.\"Star Trek\" icon George Takei is on a mission to ensure America doesn't forget its shameful legacy of internment camps. (The Washington Post)True to the \u201cStar Trek\u201d vision, \u201cMirror, Mirror\u201d has a hopeful ending. The \u201cevil\u201d version of Spock, having Vulcan-mind-melded with Dr. McCoy to understand why someone would spare the life of his enemy, has an epiphany. After listening to an impassioned Kirk argue that the overthrow of the empire is inevitable, the evil Spock helps the \u201cgood\u201d bridge crew escape. The optimism and message is unmistakable: The nightmare will end if we work to end it. Normalcy can be restored if we believe in the goodness of humankind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year seems like a good time to test that lesson. We have not slipped so far into the mirror universe that we do not recognize ourselves or our institutions. As Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) told the Senate this week, what is right still matters. The truth still matters. Most Americans still want to hear the truth. They still want President Trump to be held accountable, and many even want him removed from office for his actions. Overthrowing Trump is something we can achieve at the ballot box this November. We can find our way back to our familiar, normal universe.In the meantime, may I suggest that Trump find inspiration from a more politically aligned logo for his Space Force? If you don\u2019t recognize the emblem on the character below, it\u2019s the imperial sigil from that \u201cother\u201d space fiction franchise. I\u2019m sure Lord Vader won\u2019t mind.Read more:The top 10 \u2018Star Trek\u2019 episodes everThe first \u2018Star Trek\u2019 film took off from an unlikely location: WashingtonSome white \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans are unhappy about remake\u2019s diversity The new Space Force logo may look like Starfleet\u2019s, but the similarities end there. George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.  ",
        "author": "George Takei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.   (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8726",
        "date": "2020-01-25",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/01/25/george-takei-star-trek-vision-was-hopeful-trumps-is-mirror-image/",
        "text": "There\u2019s a famous episode of \u201cStar Trek: The Original Series\u201d called \u201cMirror, Mirror,\u201d in which half the bridge crew of the USS Enterprise suddenly find themselves in a parallel universe where the peaceful United Federation of Planets is now an \u201cEmpire.\u201d In this terrifying version of reality, violence and cruelty have displaced peace and diplomacy as the hallmarks of governance. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe \u201cevil\u201d version of my own character, Sulu, plots to kill both Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock so that he can take command of the ship. In classic \u201cStar Trek\u201d style, the script for this episode carried loaded meaning. The writers were issuing a warning: A free and democratic society can flip in the blink of an ion storm, and all that we take for granted about the rule of law, the chain of command and the civilized functions of government can be gone in an instant.I thought of \u201cMirror, Mirror\u201d after seeing the Trump administration\u2019s new Space Force logo, which the president tweeted out Friday with a characteristically awkward nod to our \u201cGreat Military Leaders\u201d of the \u201cSixth Branch of our Magnificent Military!\u201d (caps and punctuation his). Within minutes, the logo was lampooned widely for appearing to rip off the logo for Starfleet Command from \u201cStar Trek.\u201d Indeed, with the two logos placed side by side, the resemblance is so remarkable that I had to wonder whether Melania Trump was part of the design committee:Oh wow. pic.twitter.com/uiJfOS1L1H\u2014 Miriam Kramer (@mirikramer) January 24, 2020\n\nApparently, the new logo is just another iteration on the former Air Force Space Command logo, which also featured an upward pointing delta, but the final product with its concentric rings and swooping orbits looks so much like Starfleet\u2019s, I fear it could easily confuse any Vulcans and Klingons who see it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTrump reveals Space Force logo, and \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans aren\u2019t happyThis somewhat comical appropriation of \u201cStar Trek\u201d imagery carries a certain irony. The universe of \u201cStar Trek\u201d has always provided a hopeful, near-utopian vision for humanity, where we have finally learned to set aside things like racial prejudice and gender inequality, and we all work together toward a common purpose and quest. Money is a thing of the past because no one wants for any material need, and we have united much of the galaxy in a peaceful assembly of sovereign worlds.Contrast that for a moment with the current administration\u2019s values and practices: racial resentments and fear stoked for cynical political purposes, the wealthy made even more obscenely so through grift and political influence, coarse and bullying behavior masquerading as diplomacy, to name but a few. Even the notion of a \u201cSpace Force\u201d seems patently absurd coming from an administration where science is mocked and disregarded.They interned my family. Don't let them do it to Muslims.At times it truly feels like the past three years have had us beamed into a parallel universe, where instead of a president we have a mendacious thug, and where notions like the U.S. Senate being a deliberate, serious body that serves as a vital check on presidential power now seem quaint and naive.\"Star Trek\" icon George Takei is on a mission to ensure America doesn't forget its shameful legacy of internment camps. (The Washington Post)True to the \u201cStar Trek\u201d vision, \u201cMirror, Mirror\u201d has a hopeful ending. The \u201cevil\u201d version of Spock, having Vulcan-mind-melded with Dr. McCoy to understand why someone would spare the life of his enemy, has an epiphany. After listening to an impassioned Kirk argue that the overthrow of the empire is inevitable, the evil Spock helps the \u201cgood\u201d bridge crew escape. The optimism and message is unmistakable: The nightmare will end if we work to end it. Normalcy can be restored if we believe in the goodness of humankind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis year seems like a good time to test that lesson. We have not slipped so far into the mirror universe that we do not recognize ourselves or our institutions. As Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) told the Senate this week, what is right still matters. The truth still matters. Most Americans still want to hear the truth. They still want President Trump to be held accountable, and many even want him removed from office for his actions. Overthrowing Trump is something we can achieve at the ballot box this November. We can find our way back to our familiar, normal universe.In the meantime, may I suggest that Trump find inspiration from a more politically aligned logo for his Space Force? If you don\u2019t recognize the emblem on the character below, it\u2019s the imperial sigil from that \u201cother\u201d space fiction franchise. I\u2019m sure Lord Vader won\u2019t mind.Read more:The top 10 \u2018Star Trek\u2019 episodes everThe first \u2018Star Trek\u2019 film took off from an unlikely location: WashingtonSome white \u2018Star Trek\u2019 fans are unhappy about remake\u2019s diversity The new Space Force logo may look like Starfleet\u2019s, but the similarities end there. George Takei: The \u2018Star Trek\u2019 vision was hopeful. Trump\u2019s is the mirror image.  ",
        "author": "George Takei"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Reaches for a Star (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8727",
        "date": "2021-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/style/shatner-bezos-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? On the morning of Oct. 12, William Shatner, best known for his role as the Star Trek franchise\u2019s original Captain Kirk, will take a seat atop the New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle, built by Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 space concern.",
        "author": "By John Herrman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Reaches for a Star (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8728",
        "date": "2021-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/style/shatner-bezos-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? On the morning of Oct. 12, William Shatner, best known for his role as the Star Trek franchise\u2019s original Captain Kirk, will take a seat atop the New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle, built by Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 space concern.",
        "author": "By John Herrman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Reaches for a Star (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8729",
        "date": "2021-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/style/shatner-bezos-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? On the morning of Oct. 12, William Shatner, best known for his role as the Star Trek franchise\u2019s original Captain Kirk, will take a seat atop the New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle, built by Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 space concern.",
        "author": "By John Herrman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Reaches for a Star (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8730",
        "date": "2021-10-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/style/shatner-bezos-blue-origin.html",
        "text": "In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? In a thoroughly modern blurring of reality and fiction, William Shatner will soar to space with Blue Origin. Do you care? On the morning of Oct. 12, William Shatner, best known for his role as the Star Trek franchise\u2019s original Captain Kirk, will take a seat atop the New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle, built by Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019 space concern.",
        "author": "By John Herrman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Camille Saviola, \u2018Deep Space Nine\u2019 and Stage Actor, Dies at 71 (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8731",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/theater/camille-saviola-dead.html",
        "text": "She was known for her comic work in cabarets, for her performance in the musical \u201cNine\u201d on Broadway and for her role in a \u201cStar Trek\u201d spinoff. She was known for her comic work in cabarets, for her performance in the musical \u201cNine\u201d on Broadway and for her role in a \u201cStar Trek\u201d spinoff. Camille Saviola, an actress and singer who made an impression in the musical \u201cNine\u201d on Broadway, in assorted cabaret spoofs and on television in \u201cStar Trek: Deep Space Nine\u201d and other series, died on Oct. 28 in a hospital in North Bergen, N.J. She was 71.",
        "author": "By Neil Genzlinger"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8732",
        "date": "2019-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/politics/stacey-abrams-star-trek.html",
        "text": "She nearly became Georgia\u2019s governor. She might run for senator or president. But she\u2019d probably trade it all for the bridge on the Enterprise. She nearly became Georgia\u2019s governor. She might run for senator or president. But she\u2019d probably trade it all for the bridge on the Enterprise. She has seen every iteration of \u201cStar Trek\u201d and can recite with picayune detail the obscure plot points from incidents buried deep in the canon. She likes space-time anomalies. She admires Captain Picard but reveres Admiral Janeway. One of her favorite things is \u201cShattered,\u201d the 157th episode of \u201cVoyager,\u201d in which the ship goes through a temporal rift that tantalizingly splits it into different timelines.",
        "author": "By Sarah Lyall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stacey Abrams, Star Trek Nerd, Is Traveling at Warp Speed (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8733",
        "date": "2019-03-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/politics/stacey-abrams-star-trek.html",
        "text": "She nearly became Georgia\u2019s governor. She might run for senator or president. But she\u2019d probably trade it all for the bridge on the Enterprise. She nearly became Georgia\u2019s governor. She might run for senator or president. But she\u2019d probably trade it all for the bridge on the Enterprise. She has seen every iteration of \u201cStar Trek\u201d and can recite with picayune detail the obscure plot points from incidents buried deep in the canon. She likes space-time anomalies. She admires Captain Picard but reveres Admiral Janeway. One of her favorite things is \u201cShattered,\u201d the 157th episode of \u201cVoyager,\u201d in which the ship goes through a temporal rift that tantalizingly splits it into different timelines.",
        "author": "By Sarah Lyall"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | How to tell if you\u2019re going to like \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8734",
        "date": "2017-12-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/12/12/how-to-tell-if-youre-going-to-like-star-wars-the-last-jedi/",
        "text": "This post discusses the plot of \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d only in the broadest possible outlines discernible from the trailers for the movie: for example, that the First Order still exists, that lightsabers exist and people use them, that there are porgs and they are adorable. I\u2019ll write another column discussing the movie\u2019s plot in intense and finicky detail on Monday. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cWe are what they grow beyond,\u201d one older character says to another at a turning point during \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi.\u201d That person is reflecting on the inevitable transition between the generations, and the unavoidable differences between mentors and the people they hope to shape and nurture. But that simple sentence is also a stark reminder of what the newest \u201cStar Wars\u201d movies have been fundamentally unable to do: break away from not merely the templates but also the exact concepts and story beats that defined George Lucas\u2019s original trilogy. Whether you think that\u2019s fine or a problem, and what you consider the best, most intriguing elements of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe will largely determine whether you think \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d is a triumph or a mess.Given that, I think it\u2019s fair to tell you where I stand: For me, the essence of \u201cStar Wars\u201d is not the conflict between the Empire (or the First Order, an Empire knockoff) and the Rebellion (or New Republic, or Resistance), nor even the struggle between the Dark and Light sides of the Force. All of these concepts can be handled in interesting ways, of course. But what I love best about the \u201cStar Wars\u201d franchise was the way the universe in which it took place arrived feeling fully realized and capable of unfolding in near-infinite directions. Even a pair of sentences as simple as \u201cYou\u2019ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? \u2026 It\u2019s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs\u201d teems with possibility, implying a world where people\u00a0do know about this ship, suggesting a regular route through space and suggesting a common understanding of top speed. I love the now-abandoned \u201cStar Wars\u201d Expanded Universe\u00a0for its willingness to push into the corners of that universe, and its ability to evolve\u00a0beyond those core dynamics.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll of which means that the extent to which \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d feels the need to gesture back to the original trilogy, and in particular to the best of the bunch, \u201cEmpire Strikes Back,\u201d felt to me less satisfying than conservative \u2014 I recognized the reactions people around me were having to various callbacks, but I simply didn\u2019t share them.When the movie starts (and really when it ends), the basic conflict differs only in intensity from where we left our heroes: The Resistance, led by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) is increasingly pressured by the First Order, led by Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) and with military campaigns executed by General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and a conflicted Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, outstanding as always and providing lots of fodder for Alexandra Petri\u2019s Emo Kylo Ren Twitter feed). The Jedi are hermetic, the bad guys\u2019 weapons are oversized, and our heroes are all above average.The desire to preserve this dynamic lets \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d re-create moments like the Stalingrad-with-walkers homage from \u201cEmpire Strikes Back\u201d and show us lots of crisp black First Order uniforms. It also raises questions the movie isn\u2019t really comfortable tackling, like at what point and what scale the Resistance seeks to be a meaningful political or military force in the galaxy. Sticking to this fundamental conflict also means that \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d frequently feels constricted for all of its grand scope and opulent battle sequences: The movie zips through other locations and backstories but fills them out with exposition rather than actually spending time and energy making these diversions\u00a0feel real and vital. You can paint on a big canvas, and you can even paint with visual skill and intelligence as director Rian Johnson so often does here, and still make your ambitions for and curiosity about a fictional world feel awfully cramped.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPart of what made \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d a frustrating experience for me is that it has genuinely thrilling sequences. The opening battle is\u00a0crisply and unflinchingly shot and sets up a theme the movie develops fairly well: the hideously high costs of a losing military campaign, and the different ways people react to being in a situation where victory is truly out of reach. A later battle concludes in a way that feels first startling, then inevitable and deeply sad, a decision underscored by Johnson\u2019s wise decision to lay off the movie\u2019s iconic score. \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d features what is arguably the most exciting lightsaber fight in the entire franchise, a scene that is even more striking for the way it emerges from a moment of genuine ambiguity and\u00a0refuses to resolve\u00a0in a way that would provide easy satisfaction. The movie even managed to surprise me at a crucial juncture. There\u2019s a lot of terrific, melancholy acting, particularly from Driver, Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Daisy Ridley as Rey and Fisher. The porgs are as cute as advertised.But the contrast between these elements and what feel like fundamental failures of movie writing is stark to the point of being jarring.Whatever is going on at Lucasfilm, the franchise still regularly struggles to provide dialogue that sounds like\u00a0a plausible exchange between actual humans (or aliens). I adore Oscar Isaac, but the character of Poe Dameron appears to be whatever the \u201cStar Wars\u201d equivalent of kryptonite is for him, turning him wooden, shouty and one-note. Finn (John Boyega) is even more underdeveloped, and \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d saddles him with a plot that has literally no impact on the actual course of the movie and provides him with no discernible character development: The whole thing could have been excised from the\u00a0film, and the only difference would have been a zippier run time, a smaller special-effects budget and a tighter story. The movie throws off threads ranging from a\u00a0distinctive lapel pin to a bunch of missing people with abandon and then never follows up on them. And it also manages to undercut some of its strongest decisions in truly baffling ways.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne way to look at \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d is that it\u2019s a movie for the fans, in that it\u2019s largely concerned with playing variations on familiar themes, and sometimes succeeds in breathing new, even beautiful, life into them. Another way to judge it is to suggest that it\u2019s a betrayal of the franchise\u2019s most loyal fans, in that it\u2019s frequently sloppy and frayed,\u00a0full of ideas and events that fall apart the minute you start to examine them in any detail. \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d probably works best if it\u2019s a movie you want to surrender to, rather than one you want to ponder deeply. The difference between those two kinds of fandom is as vast as the gulf between the Dark and Light sides of the Force. If you want it to feel familiar, you may be very happy. If you want to see the \"Star Wars\" franchise live up to its ambition and potential, not so much. Opinion: How to tell if you\u2019re going to like \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | It\u2019s time to stop grading movies like \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 on a curve (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8735",
        "date": "2017-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/12/18/its-time-to-stop-grading-movies-like-star-wars-the-last-jedi-on-a-curve/",
        "text": "This post discusses the events of \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d in obsessive detail.Last week, I wrote a spoiler-free exploration of why \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d simply didn\u2019t\u00a0work for me, which basically boiled down to this: Whether you like \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d will depend on whether you simply want to surrender to its pleasures,\u00a0or whether you want to think hard about it. It\u2019s hard to\u00a0explain exactly what frustrated me so deeply about \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d\u00a0without talking about the details of the movie, so that\u2019s what I want to do today. I don\u2019t intend to spoil\u00a0it for you in the traditional sense of making it impossible for you to continue to enjoy something that you\u2019ve loved. But I do want to be clear about what I think\u00a0are the film\u2019s considerable flaws, because fans of action blockbusters and genre fiction deserve much better, and we won\u2019t get it unless we ask for it. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d is full of \u2014 and, in fact, depends on \u2014 plot contrivances, some of which merely test the\u00a0forbearance of the audience, others of which actively waste its time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe central pursuit between the forces of the First Order and the fleeing remnants of the Resistance relies on the idea that the ships of both parties can travel only at\u00a0an identical maximum speed, meaning that for much of the movie, they\u2019re moving through space at a constant distance from each other. The \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe has multiple models of ships with obviously different capacities, so there\u2019s something genuinely bizarre about seeing a movie play for time in this fashion, even if it does pay off in the form of Vice Admiral Holdo\u2019s (Laura Dern) spectacular act of self-sacrifice.Where does \"Star Wars: The Last Jedi\" rank among the other Star Wars movies? The Post's Comic Riffs duo square off as they rank all nine films. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)Far more egregious is literally everything about Finn\u2019s (John Boyega) experience in the movie. \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d could have simply stashed him in a coma, after all; Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) spent most of \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d in captivity. Instead, it sends him on a red herring of an adventure with Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, who, like nearly everyone in this movie, deserved better writing than she was given).It\u2019s really worth taking a moment to see just how spectacularly this plot goes wrong, from a simple storytelling perspective. In order to thwart a tracking device the First\u00a0Order has used to trace the Resistance ships, the pair call up Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong\u2019o), who suggests that they go to the casino world of Canto Bight to enlist the services of a\u00a0singularly talented hacker who can be identified by the plum lapel blossom he always wears.\u00a0The whole thing is a little \u201cMurder on the Orient Express\u201d for a \u201cStar Wars\u201d movie, but sure, fine. Of course, once they get there, Finn and Rose spot the Slicer (Justin Theroux) for approximately five seconds, then after they are locked up for \u2014 I truly wish I was making this up \u2014 a parking violation,\u00a0they don\u2019t bother to find him again and accept an offer of services from a completely random person with whom they have been imprisoned (Benicio Del Toro)\u00a0because he says he can do it. The Resistance really needs to work on its operational security. After breaking out of jail, sneaking their way onto Supreme Leader Snoke\u2019s (Andy Serkis) flag ship, and preparing to disarm the beacon, said completely random person sells Finn and Rose out. This renders the entire plot we\u2019ve seen pointless, but it does give Finn an opportunity to bash his former Imperial commander, Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie, criminally underused), in the face, because\u00a0clearly this could not have been accomplished in any other way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot only does this diversion literally end up having no impact on the plot at all, but it also becomes an excuse for Rose to monologue about the immorality of weapons dealers and inequality, and for \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d to suggest that the future of the Resistance lies in some scrappy stable kids (to which I\u2019ll return in a moment). \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back\u201d conveyed the immorality\u00a0of apolitical space capitalism\u00a0in approximately eight lines delivered with Lando Calrissian\u2019s (Billy Dee Williams) panache, a special effect infinitely more powerful than anything \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d spent in millions of dollars, Del Toro\u2019s mumbling and a half-hour of this over-long movie to get across. The whole thing is just a disgracefully bad bit of storytelling.Finn\u2019s storyline is probably the most purely wasteful odd decision that director Rian Johnson makes in \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d but even the more efficient strange decisions are still confounding.Upsetting your viewers\u2019 expectations can be a good thing, as is the case with Kylo Ren\u2019s (Adam Driver) revelation that Rey\u2019s (Daisy Ridley) parents were not important figures, nor were they coming back for her. That storytelling move, in addition to producing a highly poignant scene, undercuts the assumption that Rey must be heir to some sterling Jedi legacy, simultaneously democratizing the Jedi tradition and refusing, for once, to insist that the new trilogy follow exactly in the tradition of the old.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut there\u2019s a difference between doing something surprising and fresh like that*\u00a0and undermining your own big reveals and emotional choices,\u00a0which \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d does all too often.Take what at first appears to be General Leia\u2019s (Carrie Fisher) death scene. Her ship is hit by First Order forces and she\u2019s sucked out into the vacuum of space, where the cold has simultaneously destroyed her spark and frozen her into a sort of timeless perfection. If the scene had ended there, it would have been devastating,\u00a0underscoring just how desperate and vulnerable the Resistance had become\u00a0and leaving the\u00a0warmest, most charismatic character to appear on screen in \u201cStar Wars\u201d forever silenced by the void.Instead, Leia pulls herself back from the brink of death with the Force and manages to fly herself to the safety of one of the few remaining resistance ships. \u201cStar Wars\u201d is one of those franchises where there is\u00a0both technology that is seemingly indistinguishable from magic and the Force, which feels a lot like magic. But even so, this seems like the wrong\u00a0kind of magic for \u201cStar Wars,\u201d which has always acknowledged the limitations of the Force and even suggested that they drove Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) to the Dark Side. Maybe it\u2019s just that this choice looks worse since Fisher\u2019s untimely death means that Leia\u2019s resurrection creates one heck of a narrative problem for the next installment in this series. But it also indicates a kind of cowardice in what\u2019s supposed to be one of the darkest \u201cStar Wars\u201d movies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo a lesser extent, the same is true of Luke Skywalker\u2019s (Mark Hamill)\u00a0actual death, which comes after the reveal that his exciting faceoff with Kylo Ren wasn\u2019t in person, but rather the result of the most intense meditation session in movie history. There\u2019s a good potential explanation for this choice: that Luke wants to face down and apologize to his former pupil without putting Kylo Ren in a situation where he could kill another person, and further, that Luke wants to die on his own terms instead. Unfortunately, this isn\u2019t a rational move that appears in the text of the movie, which instead makes it look as if Luke pulled off this jazzy astral projection for no particular reason. If the new trilogy was committed to killing off one of its own triumvirate per movie, they picked the wrong Skywalker, for reasons of both real-world logistics and thematic coherence.Beyond these\u00a0mystifying choices, there\u2019s also the matter of how \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d handles the central political conflict that is supposed to be animating this trilogy.The original sin of the reconstituted \u201cStar Wars\u201d live-action movies was the choice to replicate the conflict between the scrappy, democratic Rebellion (now the Resistance) and the fascist Empire (now the First Order), rather than to actually move the world forward and explore the problems that would inevitably flow from the New Republic\u2019s attempts to reunify the galaxy and mop up the fragments of the Empire. That decision has been compounded by Lucasfilm\u2019s highly conservative need to replicate the aesthetics of both movements, and the action beats of the original trilogy, sapping our sense that this is supposed to be at least a new phase of an ongoing conflict.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d takes this bad impulse to a place that I\u2019m not sure the franchise can recover from in a plausible way. Though the movie\u2019s opening sequence is admirably clear-eyed about what happens when\u00a0an organization gambles on a spectacular gambit and largely fails, almost everything that follows in \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d represents a failure of political nerve.By any reasonable lights, this is a movie that decimates the Resistance as a viable political movement and as a meaningful military power. By the end of the film, so many Resistance leaders have been killed, and they\u2019re so low on material and equipment, that what\u2019s left of them literally flee in the Millennium Falcon. The\u00a0most concrete sign \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d has given us that the fight against the First Order can plausibly continue is a trio of small children working in the stables on Canto Bight who respond to Rose\u2019s secret Resistance emblem decoder ring. It\u2019s one thing to suggest that the spirit of hope persists if \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d is where the story ends. But if Episode IX is going to come along in two years and insist that the Resistance is still a going concern without doing any of the work to explore how that could possibly be the case, it\u2019ll be an argument that J.J. Abrams and the Lucasfilm brass expect \u201cStar Wars\u201d audiences to be more anesthetized than engaged.**And look, maybe they do! Little in the overwhelmingly positive critical reviews for \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d gives Disney any incentive to try to turn the \u201cStar Wars\u201d movies into anything smarter or more coherent than a series of attractive setpieces. Little in the box office likely will, either.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI understand why, as novelist John Scalzi wrote with regard to \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d some viewers regard \u201cStar Wars\u201d as \u201cmythology, i.e., stories presented through such a deep filter of time and oral tradition that to expect logic is almost aside the point.\u201dBut it\u2019s not quite true, as Scalzi suggests, that \u201cYou don\u2019t expect logic from \u2018Star Wars\u2019 any more than you expect it out of, say, \u2018Jason and the Argonauts.\u2019 \u201d Part of what makes\u00a0an epic like the \u201cIliad\u201d continually compelling both as a specific story and as an enduring form that other artists use as the basis for their own stories is the stuff that happens in between the big battles and that make it clear why a conflict unfolds, and ultimately ends, the way it does. You have to understand why the Trojans would accept the mysterious gift of a big wooden horse, even if it means a little divine intervention to tip the scales on their decision-making.You might not have seen every creature in the galaxy in the original \u201cStar Wars\u201d trilogy, but you could see in Princess Leia\u2019s networks, the effects of Imperial repression on individuals, and even in the Ewoks\u2019 asymmetrical warfare how and why the Empire might eventually fall.\u00a0The strength of \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d is that it manages to make the personal journeys of Rey, Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker feel as hugely consequential as the galaxy itself. Its fatal flaw is in lacking the thought or ambition to give that same thought to the galaxy itself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement*Or like having Kylo Ren kill Supreme Leader Snoke but then\u00a0not be redeemed to the light. Adam Driver is great in these movies, and he feels like one of the few characters the franchise genuinely has figured out.**Because this piece is talking about storytelling mechanics, I\u2019m not going to get into how annoying it is that after being hugely wrong and unstrategic about everything for the entire movie, as well as acting like a massive jerk, Poe Dameron somehow gets promoted to be head of the entire Resistance, ending the long tradition of female leadership of this movement. But let me tell you, I noticed. We should be clear-eyed about \"The Last Jedi's\" wasteful plot diversions, Swiss-cheese storytelling and inability to stick to its darkest insights. Opinion: It\u2019s time to stop grading movies like \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 on a curve",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | It\u2019s time to stop grading movies like \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 on a curve (WP: Act Four) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8736",
        "date": "2017-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/12/18/its-time-to-stop-grading-movies-like-star-wars-the-last-jedi-on-a-curve/",
        "text": "This post discusses the events of \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d in obsessive detail.Last week, I wrote a spoiler-free exploration of why \u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d simply didn\u2019t\u00a0work for me, which basically boiled down to this: Whether you like \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d will depend on whether you simply want to surrender to its pleasures,\u00a0or whether you want to think hard about it. It\u2019s hard to\u00a0explain exactly what frustrated me so deeply about \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d\u00a0without talking about the details of the movie, so that\u2019s what I want to do today. I don\u2019t intend to spoil\u00a0it for you in the traditional sense of making it impossible for you to continue to enjoy something that you\u2019ve loved. But I do want to be clear about what I think\u00a0are the film\u2019s considerable flaws, because fans of action blockbusters and genre fiction deserve much better, and we won\u2019t get it unless we ask for it. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRight\u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d is full of \u2014 and, in fact, depends on \u2014 plot contrivances, some of which merely test the\u00a0forbearance of the audience, others of which actively waste its time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe central pursuit between the forces of the First Order and the fleeing remnants of the Resistance relies on the idea that the ships of both parties can travel only at\u00a0an identical maximum speed, meaning that for much of the movie, they\u2019re moving through space at a constant distance from each other. The \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe has multiple models of ships with obviously different capacities, so there\u2019s something genuinely bizarre about seeing a movie play for time in this fashion, even if it does pay off in the form of Vice Admiral Holdo\u2019s (Laura Dern) spectacular act of self-sacrifice.Where does \"Star Wars: The Last Jedi\" rank among the other Star Wars movies? The Post's Comic Riffs duo square off as they rank all nine films. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)Far more egregious is literally everything about Finn\u2019s (John Boyega) experience in the movie. \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d could have simply stashed him in a coma, after all; Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) spent most of \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d in captivity. Instead, it sends him on a red herring of an adventure with Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, who, like nearly everyone in this movie, deserved better writing than she was given).It\u2019s really worth taking a moment to see just how spectacularly this plot goes wrong, from a simple storytelling perspective. In order to thwart a tracking device the First\u00a0Order has used to trace the Resistance ships, the pair call up Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong\u2019o), who suggests that they go to the casino world of Canto Bight to enlist the services of a\u00a0singularly talented hacker who can be identified by the plum lapel blossom he always wears.\u00a0The whole thing is a little \u201cMurder on the Orient Express\u201d for a \u201cStar Wars\u201d movie, but sure, fine. Of course, once they get there, Finn and Rose spot the Slicer (Justin Theroux) for approximately five seconds, then after they are locked up for \u2014 I truly wish I was making this up \u2014 a parking violation,\u00a0they don\u2019t bother to find him again and accept an offer of services from a completely random person with whom they have been imprisoned (Benicio Del Toro)\u00a0because he says he can do it. The Resistance really needs to work on its operational security. After breaking out of jail, sneaking their way onto Supreme Leader Snoke\u2019s (Andy Serkis) flag ship, and preparing to disarm the beacon, said completely random person sells Finn and Rose out. This renders the entire plot we\u2019ve seen pointless, but it does give Finn an opportunity to bash his former Imperial commander, Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie, criminally underused), in the face, because\u00a0clearly this could not have been accomplished in any other way.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNot only does this diversion literally end up having no impact on the plot at all, but it also becomes an excuse for Rose to monologue about the immorality of weapons dealers and inequality, and for \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d to suggest that the future of the Resistance lies in some scrappy stable kids (to which I\u2019ll return in a moment). \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back\u201d conveyed the immorality\u00a0of apolitical space capitalism\u00a0in approximately eight lines delivered with Lando Calrissian\u2019s (Billy Dee Williams) panache, a special effect infinitely more powerful than anything \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d spent in millions of dollars, Del Toro\u2019s mumbling and a half-hour of this over-long movie to get across. The whole thing is just a disgracefully bad bit of storytelling.Finn\u2019s storyline is probably the most purely wasteful odd decision that director Rian Johnson makes in \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d but even the more efficient strange decisions are still confounding.Upsetting your viewers\u2019 expectations can be a good thing, as is the case with Kylo Ren\u2019s (Adam Driver) revelation that Rey\u2019s (Daisy Ridley) parents were not important figures, nor were they coming back for her. That storytelling move, in addition to producing a highly poignant scene, undercuts the assumption that Rey must be heir to some sterling Jedi legacy, simultaneously democratizing the Jedi tradition and refusing, for once, to insist that the new trilogy follow exactly in the tradition of the old.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut there\u2019s a difference between doing something surprising and fresh like that*\u00a0and undermining your own big reveals and emotional choices,\u00a0which \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d does all too often.Take what at first appears to be General Leia\u2019s (Carrie Fisher) death scene. Her ship is hit by First Order forces and she\u2019s sucked out into the vacuum of space, where the cold has simultaneously destroyed her spark and frozen her into a sort of timeless perfection. If the scene had ended there, it would have been devastating,\u00a0underscoring just how desperate and vulnerable the Resistance had become\u00a0and leaving the\u00a0warmest, most charismatic character to appear on screen in \u201cStar Wars\u201d forever silenced by the void.Instead, Leia pulls herself back from the brink of death with the Force and manages to fly herself to the safety of one of the few remaining resistance ships. \u201cStar Wars\u201d is one of those franchises where there is\u00a0both technology that is seemingly indistinguishable from magic and the Force, which feels a lot like magic. But even so, this seems like the wrong\u00a0kind of magic for \u201cStar Wars,\u201d which has always acknowledged the limitations of the Force and even suggested that they drove Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) to the Dark Side. Maybe it\u2019s just that this choice looks worse since Fisher\u2019s untimely death means that Leia\u2019s resurrection creates one heck of a narrative problem for the next installment in this series. But it also indicates a kind of cowardice in what\u2019s supposed to be one of the darkest \u201cStar Wars\u201d movies.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo a lesser extent, the same is true of Luke Skywalker\u2019s (Mark Hamill)\u00a0actual death, which comes after the reveal that his exciting faceoff with Kylo Ren wasn\u2019t in person, but rather the result of the most intense meditation session in movie history. There\u2019s a good potential explanation for this choice: that Luke wants to face down and apologize to his former pupil without putting Kylo Ren in a situation where he could kill another person, and further, that Luke wants to die on his own terms instead. Unfortunately, this isn\u2019t a rational move that appears in the text of the movie, which instead makes it look as if Luke pulled off this jazzy astral projection for no particular reason. If the new trilogy was committed to killing off one of its own triumvirate per movie, they picked the wrong Skywalker, for reasons of both real-world logistics and thematic coherence.Beyond these\u00a0mystifying choices, there\u2019s also the matter of how \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d handles the central political conflict that is supposed to be animating this trilogy.The original sin of the reconstituted \u201cStar Wars\u201d live-action movies was the choice to replicate the conflict between the scrappy, democratic Rebellion (now the Resistance) and the fascist Empire (now the First Order), rather than to actually move the world forward and explore the problems that would inevitably flow from the New Republic\u2019s attempts to reunify the galaxy and mop up the fragments of the Empire. That decision has been compounded by Lucasfilm\u2019s highly conservative need to replicate the aesthetics of both movements, and the action beats of the original trilogy, sapping our sense that this is supposed to be at least a new phase of an ongoing conflict.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d takes this bad impulse to a place that I\u2019m not sure the franchise can recover from in a plausible way. Though the movie\u2019s opening sequence is admirably clear-eyed about what happens when\u00a0an organization gambles on a spectacular gambit and largely fails, almost everything that follows in \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d represents a failure of political nerve.By any reasonable lights, this is a movie that decimates the Resistance as a viable political movement and as a meaningful military power. By the end of the film, so many Resistance leaders have been killed, and they\u2019re so low on material and equipment, that what\u2019s left of them literally flee in the Millennium Falcon. The\u00a0most concrete sign \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d has given us that the fight against the First Order can plausibly continue is a trio of small children working in the stables on Canto Bight who respond to Rose\u2019s secret Resistance emblem decoder ring. It\u2019s one thing to suggest that the spirit of hope persists if \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d is where the story ends. But if Episode IX is going to come along in two years and insist that the Resistance is still a going concern without doing any of the work to explore how that could possibly be the case, it\u2019ll be an argument that J.J. Abrams and the Lucasfilm brass expect \u201cStar Wars\u201d audiences to be more anesthetized than engaged.**And look, maybe they do! Little in the overwhelmingly positive critical reviews for \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d gives Disney any incentive to try to turn the \u201cStar Wars\u201d movies into anything smarter or more coherent than a series of attractive setpieces. Little in the box office likely will, either.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI understand why, as novelist John Scalzi wrote with regard to \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d some viewers regard \u201cStar Wars\u201d as \u201cmythology, i.e., stories presented through such a deep filter of time and oral tradition that to expect logic is almost aside the point.\u201dBut it\u2019s not quite true, as Scalzi suggests, that \u201cYou don\u2019t expect logic from \u2018Star Wars\u2019 any more than you expect it out of, say, \u2018Jason and the Argonauts.\u2019 \u201d Part of what makes\u00a0an epic like the \u201cIliad\u201d continually compelling both as a specific story and as an enduring form that other artists use as the basis for their own stories is the stuff that happens in between the big battles and that make it clear why a conflict unfolds, and ultimately ends, the way it does. You have to understand why the Trojans would accept the mysterious gift of a big wooden horse, even if it means a little divine intervention to tip the scales on their decision-making.You might not have seen every creature in the galaxy in the original \u201cStar Wars\u201d trilogy, but you could see in Princess Leia\u2019s networks, the effects of Imperial repression on individuals, and even in the Ewoks\u2019 asymmetrical warfare how and why the Empire might eventually fall.\u00a0The strength of \u201cThe Last Jedi\u201d is that it manages to make the personal journeys of Rey, Kylo Ren and Luke Skywalker feel as hugely consequential as the galaxy itself. Its fatal flaw is in lacking the thought or ambition to give that same thought to the galaxy itself.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement*Or like having Kylo Ren kill Supreme Leader Snoke but then\u00a0not be redeemed to the light. Adam Driver is great in these movies, and he feels like one of the few characters the franchise genuinely has figured out.**Because this piece is talking about storytelling mechanics, I\u2019m not going to get into how annoying it is that after being hugely wrong and unstrategic about everything for the entire movie, as well as acting like a massive jerk, Poe Dameron somehow gets promoted to be head of the entire Resistance, ending the long tradition of female leadership of this movement. But let me tell you, I noticed. We should be clear-eyed about \"The Last Jedi's\" wasteful plot diversions, Swiss-cheese storytelling and inability to stick to its darkest insights. Opinion: It\u2019s time to stop grading movies like \u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 on a curve",
        "author": "Alyssa Rosenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Mandalorian\u2019 Season Finale: A Force to Be Reckoned With (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8737",
        "date": "2020-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/arts/television/the-mandalorian-season-finale.html",
        "text": "The Season 2 finale brought back multiple Star Wars legends and pointed toward new frontiers for Baby Yoda, among others. The Season 2 finale brought back multiple Star Wars legends and pointed toward new frontiers for Baby Yoda, among others. Throughout this season of \u201cThe Mandalorian,\u201d I\u2019ve seen some beefing online about how the show\u2019s creator Jon Favreau has been bringing in pre-existing characters and ideas from the larger \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe. The essence of the complaint is that to understand all the nuances of the story now \u2014 to get all the references to \u201cGrand Admiral Thrawn\u201d and \u201cOperation Cinder\u201d and the like \u2014 you\u2019ll need to have seen all the cartoons, played all the video games and read all the novels and comics.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018The Mandalorian\u2019 Season Finale: A Force to Be Reckoned With (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8738",
        "date": "2020-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/arts/television/the-mandalorian-season-finale.html",
        "text": "The Season 2 finale brought back multiple Star Wars legends and pointed toward new frontiers for Baby Yoda, among others. The Season 2 finale brought back multiple Star Wars legends and pointed toward new frontiers for Baby Yoda, among others. Throughout this season of \u201cThe Mandalorian,\u201d I\u2019ve seen some beefing online about how the show\u2019s creator Jon Favreau has been bringing in pre-existing characters and ideas from the larger \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe. The essence of the complaint is that to understand all the nuances of the story now \u2014 to get all the references to \u201cGrand Admiral Thrawn\u201d and \u201cOperation Cinder\u201d and the like \u2014 you\u2019ll need to have seen all the cartoons, played all the video games and read all the novels and comics.",
        "author": "By Noel Murray"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Long Time Ago in Drawings Far Far Away \u2026 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8739",
        "date": "2018-11-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/arts/design/star-wars-john-mollo-sketches-auction.html",
        "text": "See the early looks for Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader and other \u201cStar Wars\u201d favorites, from the Oscar-winning John Mollo\u2019s sketchbooks. See the early looks for Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader and other \u201cStar Wars\u201d favorites, from the Oscar-winning John Mollo\u2019s sketchbooks. When George Lucas conceived \u201cStar Wars\u201d in the early 1970s, he had to create an entirely different look for an entirely different galaxy. That included the costumes. The film\u2019s production illustrator, Ralph McQuarrie, did the groundwork. The execution went to John Mollo, a British military illustrator and cinematic wardrobe consultant who would win the 1978 Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Mr. Lucas\u2019s space epic.",
        "author": "By Thomas Vinciguerra"
    },
    {
        "title": "Comfort Viewing: 3 Reasons I Love \u2018Firefly\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8740",
        "date": "2021-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/arts/television/firefly-rewatch.html",
        "text": "An Emmy-winning space western that was canceled after one season, the series is a perfect mix of palliative and palate cleanser. An Emmy-winning space western that was canceled after one season, the series is a perfect mix of palliative and palate cleanser. If, as a young teen, you experienced a fiery sexual awakening the first time you set eyes on Harrison Ford\u2019s fitted pants in \u201cStar Wars,\u201d you should make Joss Whedon\u2019s \u201cFirefly\u201d your next pandemic binge.",
        "author": "By Coralie Kraft"
    },
    {
        "title": "Comfort Viewing: 3 Reasons I Love \u2018Firefly\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8741",
        "date": "2021-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/arts/television/firefly-rewatch.html",
        "text": "An Emmy-winning space western that was canceled after one season, the series is a perfect mix of palliative and palate cleanser. An Emmy-winning space western that was canceled after one season, the series is a perfect mix of palliative and palate cleanser. If, as a young teen, you experienced a fiery sexual awakening the first time you set eyes on Harrison Ford\u2019s fitted pants in \u201cStar Wars,\u201d you should make Joss Whedon\u2019s \u201cFirefly\u201d your next pandemic binge.",
        "author": "By Coralie Kraft"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: What if \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Really Were Japanese? (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8742",
        "date": "2021-09-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/arts/television/star-wars-japanese.html",
        "text": "\u201cStar Wars: Visions,\u201d a collection of short films on Disney+, lets Japanese animators play with a franchise that has deep roots in their country\u2019s storytelling traditions. \u201cStar Wars: Visions,\u201d a collection of short films on Disney+, lets Japanese animators play with a franchise that has deep roots in their country\u2019s storytelling traditions. \u201cIntellectual property\u201d probably wasn\u2019t a term anyone thought to apply to \u201cStar Wars\u201d when the first movie premiered back in May 1977. More than 40 years of films, books, television series, toys, games, trading cards and theme park rides later, it\u2019s hard to think of George Lucas\u2019s outer-space saga as anything but.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Kitsch vs. Antiques: Tourist Trade Threatens Portobello Market (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8743",
        "date": "2017-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/arts/portobello-market-london-souvenirs.html",
        "text": "Hordes of visitors descend on the famous stalls in the Notting Hill area of London, but many come for the cheap souvenirs rather than the valuable vintage goods. Hordes of visitors descend on the famous stalls in the Notting Hill area of London, but many come for the cheap souvenirs rather than the valuable vintage goods. LONDON \u2014 The World Famous Portobello Market isn\u2019t what it used to be. At 10 a.m. on a dank January day here, there weren\u2019t many puffer-jacketed tourists browsing, let alone buying its framed \u201cStar Wars\u201d posters (8 pounds, or about $10, each), handbags shaped as puppy heads (\u00a330 each) or Banksy fridge magnets (\u00a34 each, or three for \u00a310).",
        "author": "By Scott Reyburn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Grant Imahara, Engineer Who Co-Hosted \u2018MythBusters,\u2019 Dies at 49 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8744",
        "date": "2020-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/arts/television/grant-imahara-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Imahara also worked behind the scenes on the \u201cMatrix\u201d sequels, among other films, and operated the robot R2-D2 in the \u201cStar Wars\u201d prequels. Mr. Imahara also worked behind the scenes on the \u201cMatrix\u201d sequels, among other films, and operated the robot R2-D2 in the \u201cStar Wars\u201d prequels. Grant Imahara, an electrical engineer who co-hosted the pop science show \u201cMythBusters\u201d on the Discovery Channel and operated robots in the \u201cStar Wars\u201d prequels and other major Hollywood films, has died. He was 49.",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Latest in Science Fiction and Fantasy (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8745",
        "date": "2017-01-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/books/review/the-latest-in-science-fiction-and-fantasy.html",
        "text": "A graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler, a new novel from the author of the Divergent series and more. A graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler, a new novel from the author of the Divergent series and more. Just in time to surf the wake of the latest Star Wars film comes GALACTIC EMPIRES (Night Shade, paper, $17.99), a collection of compact space epics anthologized by Neil Clarke and written by some of the biggest stars and up-and-comers in the genre. The 22 stories featured are all stand-alones, though several are set in pre-existing fictional universes: Ann Leckie\u2019s Imperial Radch is here, as is Neal Asher\u2019s Polity. All of the stories range widely in theme and style, sharing only the experience of sudden, sometimes jolting immersion into complex societies and exotic circumstances in the far future.",
        "author": "By N.k. Jemisin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bob Iger Thought He Was Leaving on Top. Now, He\u2019s Fighting for Disney\u2019s Life. (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8746",
        "date": "2020-04-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/business/media/disney-ceo-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "The former C.E.O. thought he was riding into the sunset. Now he\u2019s reasserting control and reimagining Disney as a company with fewer employees and more thermometers. The former C.E.O. thought he was riding into the sunset. Now he\u2019s reasserting control and reimagining Disney as a company with fewer employees and more thermometers. The Walt Disney Company turned franchises like Marvel and \u201cStar Wars\u201d into the biggest media business in the world, and last fall it was putting the finishing touches on the image of a storied character: its chief executive, Bob Iger.",
        "author": "By Ben Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "Is Carbon Capture Here? (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8747",
        "date": "2021-10-31",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/climate/is-carbon-capture-here.html",
        "text": "A Swiss company is operating a device in Iceland that sucks CO2 from the air and shoots it into the ground, where it turns into rock. A Swiss company is operating a device in Iceland that sucks CO2 from the air and shoots it into the ground, where it turns into rock. Stephan Hitz paused from his work operating an odd-looking machine in an otherworldly landscape in Iceland and reached for a \u201cStar Wars\u201d analogy to explain his job at the frontier of climate technology.",
        "author": "By Peter Wilson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The next Pok\u00e9mon Go? Star Wars unveils a massive \u2018Last Jedi\u2019 augmented-reality game (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8748",
        "date": "2017-08-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/08/24/the-next-pokemon-go-star-wars-unveils-a-massive-last-jedi-augmented-reality-game/",
        "text": "If it can work for Pok\u00e9mon, then why not for the world of Obi-Wan?An augmented-reality experience as real-world physical hunt is being rolled out next month by another global entertainment franchise, with the next Star Wars film, \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d on the near horizon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightLast summer, as the AR scavenger hunt from Pikachu\u2019s universe exploded \u2014 spurring a $7.5 billion market-value surge for maker Nintendo \u2014 The Washington Post\u2019s Comic Riffs asked: \u201cNow, what\u2019s to keep the Comcasts and Apples and Amazons and Disneys of the world from making our naturally 3-D world the exciting new area of augmented exploration on a scale as massive as Pok\u00e9mon Go?\u201d After watching teens play \u2018Pok\u00e9mon Go,\u2019 I\u2019m convinced it shows the future of gaming \u2014 and moreThe short answer from Disney, one year later: Apparently nothing. Because the Mouse House is unveiling its promotional stunt of a free \u201ctreasure hunt\u201d on a rather massive scale, the company announced early Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe campaign\u2019s basics, by the numbers: As the first wave of \u201cLast Jedi\u201d merchandise lands Sept. 1 (a.k.a. \u201cForce Friday II\u201d), the \u201cFind the Force\u201d AR game \u2014 involving about 20,000 stores in 30 countries \u2014 will let participants hunt down 15 Star Wars characters, two are which are new. (Is that the Admiral Ackbar you\u2019re looking for?)To play, fans will download the Star Wars smartphone app, head to one of a fleet of participating stores (full list here) and uncover potentially talking virtual characters by pointing the phone at the \u201cFind the Force\u201d placard. The app encourages social-media sharing of your character experiences, with the big carrot urging that you share being a sweepstakes contest that closes Sept. 3.\u201cWe are excited that augmented reality will allow fans to experience the universe in a whole new way,\u201d Kathleen Kennedy, president of Disney-owned Lucasfilm, said in a statement Thursday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe original \u201cStar Wars\u201d, of course, birthed the entire modern era of movie tie-in merchandise four decades ago, so it\u2019s only apt that this franchise is aiming to push the AR promotional game to a new level.Star Wars at 40: Fans recall the magic of seeing the film during that first summerPlus, after the \u201cForce Awakens\u201d merchandising success of adorable new droid BB-8, Disney/Lucasfilm is now poised to capitalize on the introduction of furry new \u201cLast Jedi\u201d characters the Porgs \u2014 wet-eyed space puffins from Planet Ahch-To that appear Imagineered to be an ideal stocking stuffer.\u201cStar Wars: The Last Jedi\u201d opens Dec. 15, and some stores will participate in the game till then.Read more:Why George Lucas\u2019s new museum has a crucial mission that goes way beyond Star Wars Disney announces an international smartphone-app game that will launch Sept. 1.  The next Pok\u00e9mon Go? Star Wars unveils a massive \u2018Last Jedi\u2019 augmented-reality game",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Stick the Landing? J.J. Abrams Will Try (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8749",
        "date": "2019-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/movies/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-jj-abrams.html",
        "text": "A creative shake-up, last-minute rewrites and a director not known for great endings: J.J. Abrams and company get real about the making of \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker.\u201d A creative shake-up, last-minute rewrites and a director not known for great endings: J.J. Abrams and company get real about the making of \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker.\u201d J.J. Abrams knows what audiences think of him. \u201cI\u2019ve never been great at endings,\u201d the filmmaker said just hours after delivering a finished version of \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.\u201d With some hesitation, Abrams added, \u201cI don\u2019t actually think I\u2019m good at anything, but I know how to begin a story. Ending a story is tough.\u201d",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Will \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Stick the Landing? J.J. Abrams Will Try (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8750",
        "date": "2019-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/movies/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-jj-abrams.html",
        "text": "A creative shake-up, last-minute rewrites and a director not known for great endings: J.J. Abrams and company get real about the making of \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker.\u201d A creative shake-up, last-minute rewrites and a director not known for great endings: J.J. Abrams and company get real about the making of \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker.\u201d J.J. Abrams knows what audiences think of him. \u201cI\u2019ve never been great at endings,\u201d the filmmaker said just hours after delivering a finished version of \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.\u201d With some hesitation, Abrams added, \u201cI don\u2019t actually think I\u2019m good at anything, but I know how to begin a story. Ending a story is tough.\u201d",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Hans Zimmer Conjured the Otherworldly Sounds of \u2018Dune\u2019 (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8751",
        "date": "2021-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/movies/hans-zimmer-dune.html",
        "text": "The composer worked with a far-flung \u201cband\u201d of collaborators who sung, scraped metal, invented instruments and more for the score. The composer worked with a far-flung \u201cband\u201d of collaborators who sung, scraped metal, invented instruments and more for the score. When the composer Hans Zimmer was approached to score \u201cDune,\u201d the new movie adaptation of Frank Herbert\u2019s epic sci-fi novel, he knew one thing absolutely: It would not sound like \u201cStar Wars.\u201d Musically, those films drew on influences that ranged from Holst and Stravinsky to classic movie scores of the \u201930s and \u201940s. Even the rollicking tune performed by the bug-eyed creatures in the Cantina was inspired by Benny Goodman.",
        "author": "By Darryn King"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Wars: The Last Jedi\u2019 Movie Trailer Is Released (NYT: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8752",
        "date": "2017-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/movies/trailer-star-wars-last-jedi.html",
        "text": "The official trailer is filled with images of characters from \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d but leaves plenty of mystery about what is to come. The official trailer is filled with images of characters from \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d but leaves plenty of mystery about what is to come. The official trailer for the latest installment of the \u201cStar Wars\u201d movie franchise was released on Friday, and the social media universe roared its approval like a Wookiee playing a holographic chess game.",
        "author": "By Christopher Mele"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Shaft,\u2019 \u2018Dirty Harry\u2019 and the Rise of the Supercop (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8753",
        "date": "2020-11-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/movies/french-connection-shaft.html",
        "text": "In 1971, the lawman who does as he pleases strutted through movies like \u2018The French Connection.\u2019 But Black filmmakers found an alternative version. In 1971, the lawman who does as he pleases strutted through movies like \u2018The French Connection.\u2019 But Black filmmakers found an alternative version. Anybody sifting through the 1970s for American movies\u2019 most definitive year might start with \u201972: \u201cThe Godfather,\u201d \u201cThe Poseidon Adventure,\u201d \u201cDeliverance,\u201d \u201cPink Flamingos,\u201d \u201cDeep Throat.\u201d Or \u201975: \u201cJaws,\u201d \u201cNashville,\u201d \u201cDolemite,\u201d \u201cDog Day Afternoon,\u201d \u201cShampoo,\u201d \u201cBarry Lyndon.\u201d Or \u201877: \u201cStar Wars,\u201d \u201cSaturday Night Fever,\u201d \u201cClose Encounters of the Third Kind,\u201d \u201cSmokey and the Bandit,\u201d \u201cAnnie Hall.\u201d",
        "author": "By Wesley Morris"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Solo\u2019 Sputters at Box Office, Raising Worries of \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Fatigue (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8754",
        "date": "2018-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/movies/solo-a-star-wars-story-sputters-at-box-office.html",
        "text": "Ticket sales for \u201cSolo\u201d were big, but by \u201cStar Wars\u201d standards they fell far short. Multiplex gridlock and disgruntled fans were among possible explanations. Ticket sales for \u201cSolo\u201d were big, but by \u201cStar Wars\u201d standards they fell far short. Multiplex gridlock and disgruntled fans were among possible explanations. LOS ANGELES \u2014 \u201cStar Wars\u201d just fell to earth.",
        "author": "By Brooks Barnes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Watch Movies in 4DX and You\u2019ll Get an Education in Filmmaking (NYT: Movies) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8755",
        "date": "2020-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/movies/4dx-movie-lessons.html",
        "text": "Shaking seats and flashing lights may seem gimmicky, but in fact the format\u2019s effects let you feel physically how a feature has been directed. Shaking seats and flashing lights may seem gimmicky, but in fact the format\u2019s effects let you feel physically how a feature has been directed. If you\u2019re expecting seatbelts at the 4DX screening of \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,\u201d you\u2019ll be disappointed. Unlike 2018\u2019s wildly intense \u201cMission: Impossible \u2014 Fallout,\u201d which actually required them, you won\u2019t slam into your neighbor. You won\u2019t nearly fall out of your chair. But you won\u2019t be watching a very good movie either. And the 4DX format\u2019s effects will illustrate exactly why.",
        "author": "By Melissa Powers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Solo: A Star Wars Story\u2019 Answers Questions You May Not Have Asked (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8756",
        "date": "2018-05-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/movies/solo-a-star-wars-story-review.html",
        "text": "Where did Han Solo get his last name? How did he and Chewbacca meet? What was the hand of Sabacc that won him the Millennium Falcon? Where did Han Solo get his last name? How did he and Chewbacca meet? What was the hand of Sabacc that won him the Millennium Falcon? \u201cThis was never about you,\u201d someone says to Han Solo, which is odd since the movie is called \u201cSolo.\u201d I don\u2019t want to make this about me, but there are a lot of questions that, in the 41 years since I saw the first \u201cStar Wars\u201d movie \u2014 fine! the fourth one; \u201cA New Hope\u201d; jeez! \u2014 it has never occurred to me to ask. Where did Han Solo get his last name? How did he and Chewbacca meet? What was the winning hand in the game of Sabacc that gave him possession of the Millennium Falcon? How exactly did he make the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs?",
        "author": "By A.O. Scott"
    },
    {
        "title": "John Mollo, Whose Costumes Made \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Seem Real, Dies at 86 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8757",
        "date": "2017-11-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/obituaries/john-mollo-whose-costumes-made-star-wars-seem-real-dies-at-86.html",
        "text": "An authority on military uniforms, Mr. Mollo was adept at creating verisimilitude in worlds both imagined and remembered. An authority on military uniforms, Mr. Mollo was adept at creating verisimilitude in worlds both imagined and remembered. John Mollo, a largely self-taught historian whose expertise on military uniforms led George Lucas to choose him to design costumes for \u201cStar Wars,\u201d winning Mr. Mollo the first of two Academy Awards, died on Oct. 25 in Froxfield, Wiltshire, England. He was 86.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik"
    },
    {
        "title": "Gary Kurtz, Hands-On \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Producer, Is Dead at 78 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8758",
        "date": "2018-10-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/obituaries/gary-kurtz-dead.html",
        "text": "Mr. Kurtz worked closely with George Lucas on the first two films in one of the most successful franchises in history. Mr. Kurtz worked closely with George Lucas on the first two films in one of the most successful franchises in history. Gary Kurtz, who produced \u201cStar Wars\u201d and \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back,\u201d helping George Lucas create one of the most successful franchises in movie history, died on Sept. 23 at a care facility near his home in London. He was 78.",
        "author": "By Daniel E. Slotnik"
    },
    {
        "title": "Charles Lippincott, movie publicist and a force behind \u2018Star Wars,\u2019 dies at 80 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8759",
        "date": "2020-06-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/charles-lippincott-movie-publicist-and-a-force-behind-star-wars-dies-at-80/2020/06/04/a59266b4-a66f-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html",
        "text": "It was a strange little space movie, according to the Hollywood rumor mill, a pastiche of 1930s science-fiction serials, Arthurian legend and religious mysticism made by a 33-year-old filmmaker who was in over his head.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut when George Lucas\u2019s new movie opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1977, audiences flocked to see \u201cStar Wars,\u201d an interstellar fairy tale starring a trio of relative unknowns \u2014 Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher \u2014 and set \u201ca long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.\u201d Local television crews interviewed fans waiting in line for repeat viewings (novelist Jonathan Lethem later recalled seeing the movie 21 times the summer it premiered), and \u201cStar Wars\u201d went on to make more than half a billion dollars worldwide, spawning one of the most lucrative movie franchises in history.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut for all its on-screen magic \u2014 its John Williams trumpet blasts, breathtaking dogfights, Laurel and Hardyesque droids, and menagerie of slimy, furry, blaster-wielding aliens \u2014 the movie\u2019s early success was in large part the result of Charles Lippincott, a former law student who helped pioneer a new way of promoting movies.Mr. Lippincott, who died May 19 at age 80, spearheaded a whole universe of \u201cStar Wars\u201d action figures, comic books, lunchboxes, watches, belt buckles and toy lightsabers. Promoting a science-fiction movie at a time when few studio executives took the genre seriously, he drummed up interest at science-fiction and comics conventions, developing a blueprint that has since been replicated for Marvel superhero movies and television series like \u201cDoctor Who.\u201d\u201cCharley was one of the founding pillars of the Star Wars films and phenomenon,\u201d Lucas said in a tribute last month. \u201cHe began in earnest the concept of licensing motion pictures at a time when the only other company doing so was Disney. Charley was the one who said early on that \u2018we can make this work\u2019 and was the first person to both develop Star Wars licensing and engage with the fans. He had insights into marketing and public relations that were truly unparalleled.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Lippincott later publicized science-fiction films such as \u201cAlien\u201d (1979) and \u201cFlash Gordon\u201d (1980), and produced movies including the zombie comedy \u201cNight Life\u201d (1989) and the comic book adaptation \u201cJudge Dredd\u201d (1995), starring Sylvester Stallone.But he was most closely identified with \u201cStar Wars,\u201d later known as \u201cEpisode IV: A New Hope.\u201d Mr. Lippincott had gone to film school at the University of Southern California with producer Gary Kurtz and Lucas, who hired him in late 1975 to oversee advertising, publicity, promotion and merchandising, months before filming began in the Tunisian desert and at a studio outside London.Crucially, Lucas had turned down a more lucrative writer\u2019s and director\u2019s fee to secure the sequel and merchandising rights for \u201cStar Wars,\u201d later telling Rolling Stone that he \u201chad visions of R2-D2 mugs and little windup robots\u201d while writing the screenplay.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Lippincott helped bring those toy ideas to life. Well before the film\u2019s release, he negotiated with Ballantine Books to release a \u201cStar Wars\u201d novel and worked with Marvel to publish a \u201cStar Wars\u201d comic book series. He also struck a deal with Kenner, then a subsidiary of General Mills, to release \u201cStar Wars\u201d action figures and toys.Recalling that the \u201cStar Trek\u201d television series had inspired a raft of unofficial products, Mr. Lippincott said he copyrighted \u201ceverything I could think of,\u201d enabling Lucas\u2019s company, now known as Lucasfilm, to control the \u201cStar Wars\u201d brand and flood the market with toys and tie-ins. The licensing deals promoted the movie and went on to make a fortune for Lucas, whose net worth is estimated at $5.7 billion.\u201cJust as \u2018Star Wars\u2019 became far more popular than anyone expected it could, the licensing became far more financially successful than anyone had imagined,\u201d said Craig Miller, a publicity consultant who became Lucasfilm\u2019s first director of fan relations. \u201cBut to a great extent,\u201d he added by phone, \u201c \u2018Star Wars\u2019 had the opportunity to be successful because Charley convinced people to be there that opening week.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith few bankable stars that he could pitch to magazine writers or talk-show producers, Mr. Lippincott developed a novel publicity strategy, taking \u201cStar Wars\u201d to San Diego Comic-Con and other conventions to show film clips and announce the movie\u2019s upcoming premiere. He was often accompanied by Hamill, a comics fan who played the film\u2019s lightsaber-wielding hero, Luke Skywalker.\u201cHe became a legend of marketing for a reason,\u201d Hamill said last month. \u201cHe was brilliant at what he did. We traveled the world together promoting \u2018Star Wars\u2019 before anyone knew what it was.\u201dAfter the movie\u2019s release, Mr. Lippincott oversaw a flurry of publicity requests, joining an actor playing Darth Vader, the black-helmeted villain, when the character left its footprints in wet cement outside Grauman\u2019s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIn our wildest dreams,\u201d he wrote in a 2015 blog post, \u201cwe could not have predicted how massive a hit we had on our hands.\u201dYet while \u201cStar Wars\u201d broke box office records, Mr. Lippincott said his relationship with Lucasfilm soured, amid accusations that he had signed a toy deal with Kenner too soon, costing the company millions of dollars. He left after Fox offered him a job on \u201cAlien\u201d and was not involved with the \u201cStar Wars\u201d sequels.\u201cThe more I read of Star Wars\u2019 financial success, the bitterer I get \u2014 especially during times when I\u2019m so broke I\u2019m eating ramen and living on borrowed money,\u201d he wrote in 2015, recalling his mind-set in the years after the film\u2019s release. \u201cI know people who have been able to retire off of points from a successful film who did less than I. I know, had I been given my due for building the Star Wars franchise, I would be eating better than instant noodles. But, what\u2019s the point in making myself miserable? Like old girlfriends, it\u2019s behind me.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCharles Myers Lippincott Jr. was born Oct. 28, 1939. Little information is available about his early life, but the New York Times reported that he was born in the Berkshires town of Adams, Mass., where his mother was a nurse and his father a businessman. The family later settled in the Chicago suburb of Oswego, Ill.In 1961, Mr. Lippincott received a bachelor\u2019s degree in anthropology from Northwestern University in nearby Evanston. He attended law school before changing course and entering USC, where one of his professors helped him land a job as a publicist at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, leading to work on movies including \u201cWestworld\u201d (1973) and \u201cFamily Plot\u201d (1976), Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s last film.His death was announced on social media by his wife, Geraldine \u201cBumpy\u201d Lippincott, who said that he had been hospitalized and had a heart attack. Additional information was not immediately available, but the Lippincotts had been living in Vermont, according to the Hollywood Reporter.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMr. Lippincott was a comic book fan who produced and co-wrote the documentary \u201cComic Book Confidential\u201d (1988), a survey of the medium. But he said that his first love was music, especially jazz. He had 20,000 vinyl records at his home, by one count, and said he would have loved to own a horn played on by his idols Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman.\u201cI suppose my getting a thrill out of putting my lips to the mouthpiece Miles used to perform Sketches of Spain would be the same as someone wanting the T-shirt I wore at Grauman\u2019s during the footprint ceremony,\u201d he wrote in 2015. \u201cI can\u2019t understand it, but that\u2019s because I don\u2019t think of myself in the same way as I think of Miles. I\u2019m just a dweeb who happened to work on a movie you like.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituaries:Peter Mayhew, known for playing Chewbacca in Star Wars, dies at 74Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia of \u2018Star Wars,\u2019 chronicler of her own excess, dies at 60\u2018Star Wars\u2019 actor Erik Bauersfeld \u2014 \u2018It\u2019s a trap!\u2019 \u2014 dead at 93 He drove interest in George Lucas\u2019s 1977 blockbuster, visiting science fiction and comic book conventions well before its release. Charles Lippincott, movie publicist and a force behind \u2018Star Wars,\u2019 dies at 80",
        "author": "Harrison Smith"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Can\u2019t See \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Anymore (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8760",
        "date": "2019-12-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/star-wars-movie.html",
        "text": "The cultural industry that the 1977 film spawned has ground its original charm and wonder out of existence. The cultural industry that the 1977 film spawned has ground its original charm and wonder out of existence. The release of the latest, and allegedly last, installment in the \u201cSkywalker Saga,\u201d comprising the canonical triad of trilogies in the eternally expanding \u201cStar Wars\u201d universe, seems like an appropriate time to pose a wistful little thought experiment: What if \u201cStar Wars\u201d \u2014 the original 1977 film \u2014 had performed at the box office about as everyone expected, in the range of a \u201970s Disney film, earning, say, $16 million? Let\u2019s imagine that some film historian or revisionist critic circa 2019 were to rediscover this forgotten gem, an oddity of \u201970s cinema buried among all the Watergate-paranoia thrillers, demonic horror films and disaster blockbusters. Can we, with 40 years\u2019 retrospect, evaluate it as a film instead of a phenomenon?",
        "author": "By Tim Kreider"
    },
    {
        "title": "Witches Are Having Their Hour (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8761",
        "date": "2019-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/style/pam-grossman-witch-feminism.html",
        "text": "Pam Grossman, author and host of the popular \u201cThe Witch Wave\u201d podcast, said witches are having a resurgence among feminists who want authority over their lives. Pam Grossman, author and host of the popular \u201cThe Witch Wave\u201d podcast, said witches are having a resurgence among feminists who want authority over their lives. Pam Grossman lives on a quiet street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, next door to a Mexican restaurant that sells cheap burritos and $3 bottles of Mexican cola. She is soft-spoken with long, dark hair, wears punk black boots and is married to a man who collects \u201cStar Wars\u201d figurines, which he lines up on a dresser in their bedroom.",
        "author": "By Laura M. Holson"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Year Women Got \u2018Horny\u2019 (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8762",
        "date": "2019-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/style/horny-women.html",
        "text": "Women reclaimed a word once the province of crass boys and men who are boys. Women reclaimed a word once the province of crass boys and men who are boys. Coffee, \u201cStar Wars,\u201d turtlenecks, grief: These four seemingly unrelated things are \u201chorny\u201d \u2014 or induce horniness \u2014 at least according to many young women online, who are openly asserting their desires with a term long thought of as crass and juvenile. ",
        "author": "By Tracie Egan Morrissey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | What we want from Ubisoft Massive\u2019s open world Star Wars game (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8763",
        "date": "2021-01-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/01/13/star-wars-open-world-ubisoft/",
        "text": "The news Wednesday of a new Star Wars open world game was a surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one. The news that it would be made by Ubisoft Massive was a little less welcome.Massive most recently gave us the meticulously crafted open world wasteland of Washington, D.C., via \u201cTom Clancy\u2019s The Division 2,\u201d a map that was fun to behold for its lifelikeness of The District. It was also a game that was pretty meh overall, with a story that was far from memorable. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThat got us thinking: Given how tantalizing the idea of an open world Star Wars game is, what would we want in one? Let\u2019s start with a strong story.Star Wars fans have been spoiled lately. \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d rivals (or surpasses) much of the canon in terms of rich storytelling, awe-striking environments and thrilling action. Oh, that Jon Favreau would supervise the script, or that Dave Filoni (the creator of \u201cStar Wars Rebels\u201d who worked on the animated \u201cClone Wars\u201d series, as well as \u201cThe Mandalorian) would pen it. Respawn also nailed the script for its Star Wars game, \u201cJedi Fallen Order.\u201d The bar is high for a game that could command upward of 50 hours of playing time.'The Rise of Skywalker' embraces all the worst parts of video game storytellingIt seems unlikely any of the writers above will be involved in this (though with Lucasfilm retaining final say over everything, who knows?) so we\u2019ll simply ask for a story that is on par with those of Sony\u2019s memorable first-party tales like \u201cGod of War\u201d and \u201cThe Last of Us.\u201d Okay, so that\u2019s still shooting for the moon, but a tale of that kind is what a Star Wars open world game deserves. It can\u2019t just be a collection of side missions (which is pretty much what \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker\u201d was).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf Ubisoft Massive only gets one thing right about this game, the story should be it. Here\u2019s what else we\u2019re hoping for whenever this game lands.Please, no loot grindIn contrast to the 007 game announcement from IO Interactive, which was a match made in heaven, the response to the announcement of this game has been a bit more muted. The developers of \u201cThe Division\u201d series have not had a great track record for releasing games that live up to expectations. The first game took about a year to right its ship and develop a healthy online community. The second game removed much of what the first game (eventually) got right, and although it was received critically well at the start, the game floundered as a live service quickly.Story continues below advertisementGreat \u201cStar Wars\u201d stories are not about finding loot. \u201cStar Wars\u201d stories have never been about chasing that next awesome weapon, which is what makes up the core of loot grind games. \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker\u201d was widely panned because the entire plot revolved around finding a ship to find a thing to go to another planet to find another thing to find the last boss. I hope we\u2019ve learned our lesson.AdvertisementThe loot premise works with games like \u201cBorderlands\u201d that revolve entirely around getting new guns. It would absolutely feel silly in a \u201cStar Wars\u201d adventure, no matter how many different types of kyber crystals exist. Whatever this open-world adventure may be, loot grinds (complete with color-coded \u201cstatistics\u201d) should be hopefully, completely off the table. \u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed: Valhalla\u201d shows that Ubisoft is capable of moving away from this premise, and here\u2019s hoping they stick to that lesson.Space travel and combat, not just hyperspaceStory continues below advertisementFast travel can\u2019t get much faster than hyperspace. And it would be very easy to make a game in which worlds are connected by a single nav map and players just jump from one to another via lightspeed (a la \u201cStar Wars Jedi Fallen Order\u201d). That would do any open world Star Wars game a major disservice.AdvertisementThe Star Wars universe consists of two foundational environments: Exotic worlds populated by diverse, fantastic beings and space. Every major Star Wars movie begins in space. It deserves to be a key component of this game.Review: 'Star Wars Squadrons' is (almost) the starfighter sim I've been looking forAcquiring, maintaining and upgrading a space ship is a core fantasy for any Star Wars fan, and it would seem to sync well with an open world game. EA\u2019s Motive got this part spot on when it released \u201cStar Wars Squadrons,\u201d which allowed players to personalize their fighters with various weaponry, defensive measures and cosmetics. Merging that with ground combat would create the ultimate power in the gaming universe.All that said, the technical readouts requirements to allow a game to take place both in space and on land is significant. What\u2019s promising is the power of solid state drives, which could better facilitate a game where players not only can play in both environments, but seamlessly move between them, taking off and landing on planets and space stations or capital ships without so much as a load screen, or at least a minimal one. Just imagine descending from orbit into the jungles of Yavin IV.Lightsabers (and suitable counter weapons)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJust as important as space travel/combat is Star Wars\u2019 iconic laser sword. No true open world game would be complete without them, even if the game doesn\u2019t include Jedi/Sith/The Force (though given the link between open world games and skill trees, that too seems like a natural). So much of gaming is a power fantasy, and there\u2019s no weapon more overpowered than a lightsaber, which can cut through (virtually) anything and deflect lasers.But obviously games need to be balanced, so alongside lightsabers there should be suitable countermeasures. In \u201cThe Mandalorian\u201d we\u2019ve seen Beskar armor and weaponry fill such a role. The early expanded universe used a material called cortosis that basically disabled a lightsaber on contact. In the movies we\u2019ve seen various energy weapons deployed by Supreme Leader Snoke\u2019s honor guard capably combat lightsabers. Give us lightsabers. Give us all of it.Speeder bikes \u2026 and blurrgs!AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe worst part of open world games? Walking. Yeah, it\u2019s nice to stop and appreciate the scenery every once in a while, but blazing through Beggar\u2019s Canyon on a speeder would be equally fun. And when traveling from point to point on a map is a central part of a game, efficiency and enjoyment of travel should be a focal point. Case in point: It\u2019s way more fun to swing through New York City as Spider-Man than it is to ride through the American Southwest as Arthur Morgan, and both experiences are beautiful.Adding some fun options (like speeder bikes, troop transports, AT-STs or even mounting the oh-so-odd blurrg) would be a welcome component.No Skywalkers \u2026 or people calling themselves SkywalkerStory continues below advertisementLet\u2019s leave Luke and Leia\u2019s lightsabers buried in the Tatooine sand and move on. Regardless of exactly how long, long ago this particular game\u2019s timeline falls \u2014 Old Republic, Empire, New Republic, Post-Republic, etc. \u2014 let\u2019s agree to let go of the family around which the galaxy far, far away has revolved since its inception.What do you want to see from Launcher in 2021? Take our brief survey.Cameos would be okay, but there are so many great threads from Star Wars spinoffs that could be woven into this game\u2019s story. An Ezra Bridger-centered story following his fight with Grand Admiral Thrawn would be one fun approach. But give us something other than Anakin, Luke, Leia and Rey\u2019s stolen identity.AdvertisementThat said, I wouldn\u2019t mind hearing about the characters that have comprised the saga\u2019s main story line via interactions with non-player characters. It would actually be pretty great to have a kind of \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d-style, word of mouth storytelling device where the game\u2019s protagonist hears tales of these legendary figures, but not everything is 100-percent accurate. That kind of device made Westeros so much more interesting, hearing one story about a character and then later learning the tale or their reputation didn\u2019t quite match.Story continues below advertisementSabacc, anyone?One of the small but extremely enjoyable elements of \u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed: Valhalla\u201d is ability to play a dice-based minigame called Orlog. Star Wars has two famous games in its universe, Dejarik (the holographic chess-like game played by Chewbacca and C-3PO) and Sabacc, the card game played by Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, among many others.AdvertisementWhile Orlog was created specifically for \u201cValhalla,\u201d (though it\u2019s coming to the real world soon) there are already decks of Sabacc cards floating around the Internet. An in-game diversion like that would be a great addition and way to acquire some credits via betting.Prioritize this over the \u2018Avatar\u2019 gameStory continues below advertisementIn 2017, Ubisoft Massive announced that they were working on \u201cProject A,\u201d a massive open-world game based on James Cameron\u2019s \u201cAvatar,\u201d the blockbuster, box-office-buster of a film that no one remembers watching.From the studio\u2019s page, it seems as though it\u2019s still hiring for that project, though there\u2019s been very little news. We\u2019re hoping that Massive can focus on one massive brand at a time. Regardless of how large the studio is, a focused studio is likely to turn out a better product.Jedi: Fallen Order wasn\u2019t going to be a Star Wars game. Now it\u2019s part of the canon.Have a distinctive art styleAdvertisementThe game will run on Ubisoft\u2019s Snowdrop engine, which powers the publisher\u2019s other massive series like \u201cThe Division\u201d and \u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed,\u201d as well as all the Tom Clancy titles. All of the characters in these games look alike. The Snowdrop engine also powers games as diverse as \u201cImmortals Fenyx Rising\u201d and \u201cMario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle\u201d for the Nintendo Switch. It\u2019s a powerful, versatile tool.Star Wars is known for having unique character designs, fashion and distinctive looks. While EA has been a decent steward of the Star Wars franchise, its storytelling in cutscenes left a bit to be desired, mostly because of how flat the \u201crealism\u201d of the world looked. While it\u2019s not necessary, it\u2019d be fascinating to see a game using the aesthetics from the excellent animated efforts in \u201cStar Wars,\u201d namely \u201cThe Clone Wars\u201d and \u201cRebels.\u201d This is a chance to give us something we haven\u2019t seen before, plus it frees up the studio to be more creative in its world design.A hope that Ubisoft\u2019s open-world excellence could attract even a non-Star Wars fanUbisoft has established itself as one of the best studios when it comes to crafting open worlds, whether via historical destinations in \u201cAssassin\u2019s Creed\u201d like Ancient Greece, or modern settings like San Francisco in \u201cWatch Dogs 2.\u201d If Ubisoft Massive makes a compelling product, it could be the \u201cStar Wars\u201d game that draws in newcomers to the \u201cStar Wars\u201d franchise.Say what you will about Ubisoft Massive\u2019s storytelling in \u201cThe Division 2,\u201d but from an open-world design perspective, this game could play to the studio\u2019s strength. The Washington, D.C., portrayed in \u201cThe Division 2\u201d is impressive. Here\u2019s hoping the new \u201cStar Wars\u201d game continues along a similar path.What do you want to see from an open world Star Wars game? Leave your thoughts in the comments.Read more:\u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 creators talk about storytelling challenges from a pilot\u2019s viewThe most anticipated games of 2021Eight fun party games you can play over Zoom with friends and family We've got a list, but please, please, please just make sure there's a strong story. What we want from Ubisoft Massive\u2019s open world Star Wars game",
        "author": "Mike Hume"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a good game. So why am I so unhappy playing it? (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8764",
        "date": "2019-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order-is-good-game-so-why-am-i-so-unhappy-playing-it/",
        "text": "To fully understand the quality, and your potential enjoyment, of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, you first must decide how you define the term \u201cgood.\u201d If you define the term technically, as a label applied to something worthy of merit, then you will appreciate Fallen Order. It may even wow you at times. If you ultimately define that term as happiness, as Aristotle did, Fallen Order will likely leave you wanting, or more likely, hurting. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe people who will embrace the latter definition and still see the game as enjoyable are people who derive pleasure from testing their limits. Given how often Fallen Order\u2019s mechanics induced mental anguish, this game should similarly appeal to masochists. The game is far more grind than joyride, more effort than ease, and as a result takes far more time than a casual gamer will like to reap its full rewards. However, those rewards \u2014 primarily a strong, Star Wars-worthy story \u2014 make the painstaking struggle worthwhile, if not enjoyable.Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a trying game. Virtually nothing is easy. Even its easy mode can kill you repeatedly if you don\u2019t take the time to learn the game\u2019s required movement and combat techniques. Even then, you\u2019ll likely die multiple times in frustrating ways.Xbox Black Friday deals worth consideringThat the Respawn team chose to tweak the third-person melee model of previous Star Wars games is commendable. Given the long drought in Star Wars games, a recycled version of The Force Unleashed probably would have been welcomed by a mass audience. Introducing melee mechanics similar to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice that encourage a timing-based, defense-first approach to combat was a potentially brilliant decision. However, the precision required in duels \u2014 or the inconsistency with which the game recognizes a player\u2019s inputs \u2014 prevent Fallen Order from reaching its full potential from the perspective of a Star Wars fan who doesn\u2019t have much time to invest in mastering extremely challenging fundamentals.Timing is of the essence for this game, but someone\u2019s watch is broken, either mine or the game\u2019s. Given how often my commands went unanswered on my PS4 Pro, it sure felt like it was the game.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt appeared both in combat and in movement challenges. In fights, it seemed I was always a hair off. If you parry precisely, you can dispatch your enemies quickly and cinematically. That rarely happened. Instead, my foes would often slip past my defenses, then wallop me while my Jedi reeled. If I was pushed into a corner or pinned along a wall after the combo blows, I was in trouble. If there were multiple enemies around me in the corner or near a cliff, I was dead. Even in easy mode, where the timing is supposed to be the most forgiving, it was difficult to properly time parries. And some of the movement issues seemed to indicate something was slightly out of sync between the game and the controls.Early on, the player is challenged to leap and grasp various surfaces in order to climb up or around obstacles. Once in the air, no matter when I seemed to press the \u201cgrasp\u201d button (L2 on the PlayStation 4) I always fell. So, I learned to hold it down. That\u2019s fine, lesson learned. But then when I\u2019d repeat that move in several other sequences \u2014 trying to latch on to a creature to stop a free fall, for example \u2014 it wouldn\u2019t register. I tried to time it to when an on-screen prompt appeared. That too didn\u2019t work. And so, for a solid two minutes my Jedi would plummet downward, clench his arms around nothing but air, and fall into the abyss. He\u2019d then respawn above the beast to try again, only to fail. Down and up he\u2019d go, a dizzying cycle, until by some miraculous coincidence, the command finally registered and he caught hold. Then, a short time later, the beast would knock him back into the air and the sequence repeated \u2026 and with similar results. That was not enjoyable, but it was not the most anger the game coaxed from me.The frustrations of climbing and grasping were nothing compared to sliding. And, man, does this game love to make you slide. As you go skidding down the many (many) slippery surfaces of this universe, you have little control. Slight adjustments would often turn into overcorrections and send my Jedi skidding to his doom. (Falling into oblivion is my Jedi\u2019s super power.) Timing again comes into play, as you\u2019d often have to leap to safety at the end of the slide. Eventually every slope felt like a death sentence. If the game intended to inject some adrenaline and adventure with these sequences, it only got anxiety from me. Yoda\u2019s mantra from The Phantom Menace \u2014 \u201cFear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.\u201d \u2014 frequently came to mind.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFortunately, falling to your demise doesn\u2019t force you back to your last save point (which are infrequent). If it did, I would have quit the game outright. Ultimately, I endured and was rewarded by a strong Star Wars story.Jedi: Fallen Order wasn\u2019t going to be a Star Wars game. Now it\u2019s part of the canon.The beauty of the script stems from the story\u2019s themes, rather than plot points. In fact, the story perfectly aligns with Fallen Order\u2019s challenging game play. Playing as Cal Kestis, you\u2019re a half-trained Jedi who is forced from hiding in the dark days after the Emperor\u2019s minions obliterated the Jedi Order. At the outset, he\u2019s merely trying to survive rather than become a hero. And both through the game\u2019s limits on his early abilities, and the times you get your butt whopped by stormtroopers and mini-bosses, you\u2019re frequently humbled.Failure is at the core of this game, as is the way in which Cal/we handle that failure and move on. Both Cal and his companion, Cere, must come to terms with incidents from their past that have both shamed and cowed them. To atone for her failure, Cere cuts herself off from The Force. Over the course of the game, through their actions and interactions, the two learn how to cope and support one another through their trials, which are as much spiritual as physical. It culminates in a sensational and cinematic finale that will thrill any Star Wars fan, one that again reminds you of your limits.As someone with limited time to play games, the shame of Fallen Order stems from multiple frustrations. It\u2019s hard to fight and, worse, it\u2019s hard to move. The game\u2019s timing issues distracted me from both the story and the beautifully constructed worlds; I was too focused on simply staying alive. My many (many, many, many) deaths discouraged me from exploring worlds \u2014 all of them beautiful \u2014 as did the simple fact that traveling by foot (even a Jedi\u2019s Force-enhanced feet) takes forever.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementI really wish the game handled traversal better. I nearly 100-percent-ed Spider-Man because I l-o-v-e-d swinging down Fifth Avenue and could always hop a subway if I was in a hurry. Here, if I want to wander, not only is there no fast travel (note to Cal Kestis: You have a space ship. Use it.) but there\u2019s a good chance I\u2019ll find doom instead of some cool treasure. And aside from the lightsaber mods, the loot you find is all kind of blah anyway. What\u2019s the incentive if all I get is a slightly different design of the same boring poncho?Thanks to its theme-rich story, the game does have a redeeming quality that serves up enough of a reward to make all the suffering worthwhile. The shame of it is that if the combat and movement were just a little tighter, a little more forgiving, this could have been one of the better games of the year. As it is, I\u2019ll look forward to a sequel with equal amounts of excitement, dread and hope for improvement.Read more:The best Black Friday deals for video gamersPok\u00e9mon Sword and Shield show the turbulent road to Internet and esports stardomUnplayable at times, magical in others: Stadia\u2019s dream is still in the clouds For both good and bad, Respawn's newest Star Wars game is complicated. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a good game. So why am I so unhappy playing it?",
        "author": "Mike Hume"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 early impressions: Don\u2019t buy it for the story (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8765",
        "date": "2020-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/star-wars-squadrons-story-impressions/",
        "text": "On the PlayStation 4, to double up your deflector shields in the front or back, hold square, press up or down with the left thumbstick and release square. To rapidly boost your speed, press left on the D-pad to give more power to the engines and click the left thumbstick to activate the boost. To select the types of targets you want to track, hold down the L2 trigger and select the desired type on the target wheel. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIf you find the opening to this article off-putting, it is going to be hard for you to endure the story of \u201cStar Wars: Squadrons.\u201d The game\u2019s single-player campaign is a series of largely forgettable missions in which the goal is to teach players the game\u2019s controls and mechanics to prepare them for the multiplayer mode, rather than provide an intriguing tale set in the Star Wars universe. To be fair, \u201cSquadrons\u201d was always about creating an enduring multiplayer starfighter sim. But if you\u2019re into the game for the single-player missions, just know that they are functional, not fun. They\u2019re the vegetables you\u2019re forced to eat.I wanted to feast on another Star Wars story like that of \u201cJedi: Fallen Order.\u201d The problem with the \u201cSquadrons\u201d story is that it never delivers a main course to sink your teeth into. Even the elective dessert of optional dialogue scenes provides little sweetness. Instead, the non-player characters spout off, unasked by your silent protagonist, about backstories that have little to do with the missions you just completed or the story\u2019s larger arc. They talk at you, like a series of bad speed dates, offering little information that has any impact on anything in the game, droning on about their backstories, that seemingly exist only to elevate them beyond anonymity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s a shame too. There seemed to be potential, with characters like the mysterious, battle-scarred Shen, who keeps coming back to fly for the Empire after multiple crashes and lost dog fights. But the game just doesn\u2019t succeed at bringing players deeper into the Star Wars world.\u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 creators talk about storytelling challenges from a pilot\u2019s viewThe plot centers on Captains Lindon Javes and Terisa Kerrill and their competing squadrons as the newly minted New Republic tries to stamp out the last vestiges of the Empire. The plot picks up right after the destruction of Alderaan when Javes, an imperial pilot, suddenly grows a conscience and defects. The plot jumps ahead to a series of events after the Battle of Endor. Javes and Vanguard Squadron (of which the player is a part) help protect a new, supersecret capital ship from Javes\u2019s former Imperial protege, Kerrill, and the pilots of Titan Squadron (of which the player is also a part, as a different character). The missions bounce back and forth between the New Republic and Empire, teaching the player how to use the systems of various starfighters while their squadron mates prattle on during optional dialogue scenes about past exploits. What\u2019s worse is that the NPCs hold these one-sided expositional conversations in almost an arrhythmic fashion, emphasizing odd words and pausing so long after sentences it made me feel the game was trying to load the next line from a CD-ROM.And the vast majority of these conversations are delivered not through cinematics or cut scenes, but simply in front of mostly static backdrops while the NPC gesticulates like an animatronic mannequin on a Disney World ride. Even in virtual reality, which the game offers via PSVR, the story fails to be immersive. The game\u2019s redeeming quality, though, is that the story is not the product\u2019s focus.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEven as it squanders the wonderful storytelling potential the Star Wars universe provides, it\u2019s clear \u201cSquadrons\u201d was created primarily to serve as a multiplayer platform. Servers were open for only a limited time before the game\u2019s Friday release, so views on that portion of the game will follow next week. But you could get a good feel of the spaceflight sim via the campaign. Though similar to many of the controls veterans of \u201cStar Wars Battlefront\u201d experienced when piloting starfighters, the physics, first-person perspective and more intricate environments make navigating missions far more challenging. It hews much closer to older Lucas Arts titles like \u201cX-Wing\u201d and \u201cTIE-Fighter\u201d than arcade-like \u201cRogue Squadron\u201d on Nintendo 64. There will be a steep learning curve as players adapt to using different classes of fighters \u2014 the A-wing, X-wing, Y-wing and U-wing for the Republic, and the Tie Interceptor, Fighter, Bomber and Reaper.If flying is your main focus, the game will be fun \u2014 once you adapt to it. And for that reason, the campaign serves a purpose, even if it\u2019s not a particularly enjoyable one.'Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order\" impressions: I am the worst Jedi everStart with the flight controls. On the PlayStation, the default controls assign throttle controls and rolling to the left thumb stick, while the right handles pitch and yaw. It\u2019s an unwieldy combo that led me to performing, let\u2019s say, unorthodox maneuvers instead of simply making the ship go where I wanted. I also had a tendency to spin like crazy. While young Anakin would have been proud of me, it was a little frustrating at first. One mission, which requires you to rotate your Y-wing to drop downward-firing bombs while skimming the trench-like surface of a space station, resulted in more than a few crashes. Often I\u2019d inadvertently accelerate as I tried to spin, or slow accidentally and present myself as an easy target to enemy fighters. I found more success linking the roll controls to the right stick and flying more like a fighter plane in EA\u2019s \u201cBattlefield\u201d series. You can customize your controls even more to your liking, which you may want to do because it\u2019s hard to manage your speed or keep it consistent when your thumb is so frequently manipulating the left stick. What I really wanted was a joystick and throttle instead of a controller. I was encouraged to read that \u201cSquadrons\u201d would support that setup.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSome of the additional systems \u2014 like the targeting wheel that breaks down radar blips into categories like allies, objectives or even critical components on capital ships like turbo lasers and shield generators \u2014 can be hard to handle in the middle of a dogfight because of the throttle link on the left stick. In addition to the targeting wheel, you also use the stick for things like angling deflector shields or shunting power to your engines or weapon systems. It\u2019s a lot to remember, but it\u2019s also tough to go from accelerating with the left stick pressed forward, to shifting power to your back shields (which requires the left stick pulled down) when you\u2019re being tailed by an enemy fighter.The weapons systems, which consist of various configurations of lasers, missiles, mines, bombs and ship-disabling ion cannons, are easy to use, though the targeting reticle is a little clunky looking in some ships. Splashing starfighters, monitoring your own ship\u2019s health and calling for resupply and repairs are simple to master and it\u2019s satisfying when you take down opposing fighters. Some of the more intricate mechanics (the targeting wheel, shunting power to shields and optimizing your speed for increased maneuverability) are much harder to master while staying focused on targets or threats.The ultimate guide to your Star Wars bingeWith multiplayer serving as the centerpiece of the game, customization will be key to keep users happy well into the future. That part looks promising, as users can customize weapon loadouts, utilities (like a repair droid or a tactical shield the Tie Reaper can attach to normally unshielded TIEs), countermeasures, shields (for those ships that have them), armor and engines. Experimenting with different combinations there will be more of a factor in multiplayer than it has been in the single-player campaign, as teammates can construct complementary classes and loadouts.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCosmetically, players will be able to apply paint jobs, stickers, holograms and tchotchkes to their fighters. You can even get a hanging bauble, like a Kyber crystal or carving of the Millennium Falcon. I, personally will be waiting to see if (or, more realistically, when) they add Han Solo\u2019s lucky dice.The time for \u201cSquadrons\u201d to shine will clearly be when multiplayer servers are turned on in full. That\u2019s when the game can be properly judged. We will revisit that portion for a full review next week. For now, the single-player mode just feels onerous, existing solely for players to better learn the game\u2019s mechanics and different ships\u2019 abilities rather than adding any substance. A strong story could have made this a really fun process, an opportunity to show a different side of the Empire and Republic beyond the Evil-vs.-Good framework Star Wars has so often embraced. It could have created a character worth investing in and provided a story like those found in the \u201cRogue Squadron\u201d book series.Instead, the most memorable moments from the campaign can best be described as an instruction manual. If those instructions allow for an enduring, enjoyable, months-long experience in multiplayer, the story will have served its purpose and I\u2019ll probably remember it a little more favorably. But there\u2019s little I want to remember right now beyond the starfighters\u2019 controls.Read more:What we talk about when we talk about \u2018Ghost of Tsushima\u2019\u2018Genshin Impact\u2019 tries an interesting live service trick: Make a good game at launchOverwatch, Call of Duty League teams can defer multimillion-dollar franchise fees due to covid-19 The only thing from the \"Star Wars: Squadrons\" story that's really memorable is the controls. \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 early impressions: Don\u2019t buy it for the story",
        "author": "Mike Hume"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 is (almost) the starfighter sim I\u2019ve been looking for (WP: Video Game Reviews) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8766",
        "date": "2020-10-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/star-wars-squadrons-review/",
        "text": "At first blush, there is a lot to like about \u201cStar Wars: Squadrons,\u201d EA\u2019s new starfighter simulation set in the galaxy, far, far away. There\u2019s the familiar sound of the screaming TIE Fighter; the whir of the X-wing\u2019s S-foils locking into attack position; the thrum of the Star Destroyer engines rumbling as you fly by. Then there\u2019s the first-person feel of sliding into a cockpit and manipulating the controls to make your A-Wing dance through a dogfight, tinkering with your speed, stabilizing your shields and blasting away at enemy fighters. Getting to do all of that in VR adds another thrill. There is pure satisfaction seeing your first foe evaporate into a cloud of sparks and shrapnel. It\u2019s enough to make you whoop like Luke Skywalker gunning down pursuers from the turret of the Millennium Falcon. Then you repeat the exercise. Again. Once more. The thrill starts to fade. Even after only a week, you want something \u2026 different. Something new. And there\u2019s nothing \u201cSquadrons\u201d really provides to fill that vacuum, nor does it plan to in the future. The game itself is solid, but it feels like merely the start of something truly special. A player\u2019s joy will likely derive from how much they want to work to create their own new experiences and how much they delight in testing their mettle against other like-minded opponents or flying with their friends. Absent either of those desires, the reasons to keep climbing into the cockpit are relatively limited, even with the added wrinkle of VR.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFor as fun as it is to first sit in a virtual X-Wing cockpit, overall, the VR element feels like it restricted the game more than it enhanced it. The story mode\u2019s stagnant dialogue scenes, in which conversations take place against blah backdrops, seem like a function of Motive making those scenes work for VR, rather than making VR work for the game. To accommodate the technology, it feels like the developers had to compromise. But if I had to choose between VR and a more engaging, dynamic story, I\u2019d choose the latter every time.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace flight in VR I can take or leave, too. The first few times, it\u2019s a very cool experience, and it\u2019s definitely easier to track what\u2019s happening around your ship (i.e. tracking opposing fighters) by using your eyes instead of futilely panning the camera with a controller. But after that? I reverted to the standard mode. Playing more than two matches in VR made me feel unsettled. I really just wanted to pick up the controller and play rather than don the VR gear again.\u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 early impressions: Don\u2019t buy it for the storyWhile other reviews have noted the game\u2019s wonderful visuals, playing on a PS4 Pro, it seemed to me that the starships and objects like asteroids and space stations were light on detail and texture. I couldn\u2019t help but wonder if that was another concession for VR, particularly since the PSVR resolution is lower than that of most PC VR headsets.While the frills and finer points may fall short, the foundation of the game \u2014 intricate flight/fighting mechanics and an engaging multiplayer mode \u2014 is good, but to a point. Players can test their creativity with custom loadouts, as well as their skill on the flightstick (or controller) and communication/coordination with their teammates via two kill-or-be-killed options: a 5-vs.-5 dogfight mode featuring only fightercrafts, or a multistage, back-and-forth space battle that incorporates AI pilots and capital ships and is decided when one side destroys the other\u2019s flagship. Both are enjoyable for their own reasons \u2014 dogfights for a quick test of skill and Fleet Battles for a more enduring, immersive, strategic experience.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFleet Battles in particular obligate players to think unselfishly. If you plunge headlong into a firefight, savvier foes are going to pound you into oblivion, which costs your team \u201cmorale\u201d points and brings the enemy closer to achieving one of their three stage goals. Teams in Fleet Battles must first win fighter superiority via a dogfight in the middle of the map, then press on to destroy two small capital ships. Succeed there and players will be tasked with taking down a Star Destroyer or Mon Calamari Cruiser. Should the attackers lose too many fighters when fighting the capital ships, they\u2019ll need to retreat to the defensive and recapture the advantage before renewing the attack.The format is exciting and rewards players who put thought into their loadout and squadron composition. If everyone wants to fly an A-Wing or TIE Interceptor \u2014 the fastest and lightest fighters available \u2014 they\u2019ll have a hard time taking down the well-shielded capital ships and need to return to their own to resupply. Variety in both ships (the bomber classes for both sides are versatile enough to take on both fighters and capital ships) and loadouts (heavy ordinance like Proton Torpedoes is more effective against bigger targets, and complementary gadgets like tactical shields and jammers can help defend your squadron) is critical to success.The loadout element, however, leads to one of the game\u2019s early frustrations. You must unlock new loadout options via requisition points, granted when your character levels up. Each new level grants access to new loadout options of your choosing, so you can usually snag what you want for your favorite fighter by Level 3 or 4. But with a number of equipment options and eight different ships spanning four classes, there\u2019s a lot you\u2019ll need to get to make other fighters useful that more experienced players will already have.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis imbalance produced some high-blood-pressure moments. In one memorable fight, I found myself pounding away on a fighter\u2019s upgraded shields using standard cannons and missiles, only for the pilot to double back and melt me with a rotary cannon. (Note to new players: the rotary cannon is \u201cthe way,\u201d and on the whole, TIE Bombers and Y-Wings are good entry-level ships, particularly with multi-lock missiles that can quickly target multiple enemies at once.) Once you\u2019ve tricked out your top ship though, the playing field levels pretty quickly, assisted by balanced matchmaking as well.\u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 creators talk about storytelling challenges from a pilot\u2019s viewThe more time you spend in the cockpit, the more comfortable you\u2019ll get with the traits of each fighter. To that end, it\u2019s worthwhile to endure the story/campaign, but unless you really care, I\u2019d skip the optional dialogue scenes to focus on flying and learning the controls. As I\u2019ve noted before, there is a considerable learning curve. Even the basics can take time to develop. Turning is more far more challenging than any space flight in the \u201cBattlefront\u201d series given the impact of momentum. Go full throttle in one direction and that thrust will continue to carry you on that vector even if you begin to turn your craft in another. The mechanics are even more challenging than what we saw in the old-school \u201cX-Wing vs. TIE Fighter\u201d game, where you could nimbly twist and turn as you pleased with little regard for physics. It\u2019s a change for the better, but one that takes some getting used to.Because of this, regulating your speed is essential, but that can be tough to do with the thumbstick on a PS4 controller. You don\u2019t need to keep your left stick pinned all the way up to maintain 100% velocity, but it\u2019s almost impossible to find the 50% mark (the optimal speed for turning) without staring at the speed readout on your fighter\u2019s dashboard. And if you\u2019re staring at your instruments, you\u2019re not watching your enemies, who are trying to obliterate you. With a joystick and throttle, you\u2019d have a tactile way to gauge your set speed. Not so with a thumbstick that is constantly used to either roll (the default setting) or turn (the optional Aviator setting I preferred). More often than not I found myself flying too fast to turn quickly, or halted altogether, an easy target.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementTo become a true space ace, you\u2019ll need to master a number of other systems as well. Shielded crafts can boost their protection in the front or aft of their ship, which is handy when being tailed or when making an attack run on a capital ship. Pilots can also prioritize energy flowing to their lasers, engines or shields (if their ship has them), granting each of those systems faster regeneration or an overcharged boost. Want to make a quick escape? Shift your shields to the rear, shunt the power to the engines, wait for the boost to fill, then speed off with the press of a button (L3 on PS4). It\u2019s logical, and satisfying when you pull it off, but there are just a lot of steps for pilots that want to maximize their moves.Take, for example, attacking a Star Destroyer. Sure, you can just point your ship at it and spray it with your lasers. That won\u2019t do much though. The better path, one that is encouraged and most rewarded by the game, is to first target one of its systems (say, the shield generators), flip your deflector shields to the front, boost the engines to enhance your speed and maneuverability to avoid incoming fire, fire off a guided warhead like a Proton Torpedo, sneak inside the ship\u2019s shields for maximum damage, level your shields (because now there are turrets on both sides of you), speed boost and then cut the engines and turn hard to drift around the tower, prolonging the time you can fire on it, redirect power from your engines to your lasers and blast away until you\u2019re either out of range or your power is depleted, point your fighter away from the Star Destroyer, shift the shields back to your rear, redirect power back to the engines and speed away. When you\u2019re finally out of range, maybe redirect power to your shields to recharge them, if you\u2019re not being pursued by an enemy fighter. Then get ready for another run. It\u2019s that simple.Much like reading that sentence, it\u2019s a breathless chain of events. And it\u2019s fun, when it works. But getting to that point takes a lot of memorization and practice. Players are going to have to enjoy the learning process to really appreciate the best parts of \u201cSquadrons,\u201d because they do not come easily.Coronavirus may just sink the world\u2019s video game museumsAnd ultimately, that\u2019s the shame of it, because once you do start to master your ship, customize it to your liking, even accessorize it with fun little cosmetics like a carving of a porg, you feel like you\u2019ve experienced all the game has to offer. There\u2019s not much new to enjoy. There are no modes beyond dogfighting and space battles. There are no new missions for the campaign. There are no new pilots or outfits or ships to unlock beyond what comes with the game. There is no live service, nor planned downloadable content of any kind for the game according to an EA spokesperson.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhat\u2019s in the game already is enjoyable, but there\u2019s not a lot that calls me to come back to it. The maps are fine, ranging from a wide-open skirmish over the gas planet Yavin to a debris-filled, asteroid-littered nebula, or a pair that center on a space station and shipyard (which you can fly through). I\u2019m curious though if better players have or are creating specialized strategies for each of them, because most players I saw took the same approach with every map. The lack of variety made for a similar experience over and over. It feels like \u201cSquadrons\u201d will need an injection of something new at some point if it\u2019s to succeed long-term.And that\u2019s the disappointing part for me, a big Star Wars fan. \u201cSquadrons\u201d is good, but it could have been truly special. As enjoyable as the learning process and first dozen or so multiplayer matches are, over time \u201cSquadrons\u201d starts to settle into a less impressive experience. After working hard to \u201cget good,\u201d that\u2019s kind of the end of the line. Just as you get primed to get the most from the game, it leaves players to their own devices in a Star Wars universe that could provide so much more.Imagine a multiplayer campaign where two sides engage in various mission types (escort missions, raids, recon) where each result shapes a multi-battle war between the Empire and Republic. The story mode even teased as much with the confrontations between Titan and Vanguard/Anvil squadrons. Stitch several such missions together and you could have a Star Wars-themed version of \u201cBattlefield 1\u2032s\u201d Operations mode, where ultimate victory required success from one side throughout multiple missions on multiple maps. There\u2019s nothing like that in \u201cSquadrons,\u201d and without continued support or content coming from Motive/EA, it appears we\u2019ll never see anything beyond dogfights or Fleet Battles.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause of that, the enjoyment derived from \u201cSquadrons\u201d will stem more from the game\u2019s community than from the game. If a player loves the Star Wars universe, loves starfighter sims, loves socializing and strategizing with squadmates and doesn\u2019t mind the limited modes available to them, \u201cSquadrons\u201d is worth picking up and investing in. But if you\u2019re the kind of player who needs a reason to grind \u2014 new loot, new content, new anything \u2014 your enjoyment of \u201cSquadrons\u201d is going to be pretty fleeting.Read more:Playing \u201cAmong Us?\u201d Here are some tips and alternate rules to up the ante.The Overwatch League\u2019s lesson from 2020: Plan for literally anythingHere\u2019s how to get the most out of Animal Crossing\u2019s Halloween event Star Wars: Squadrons' falls well short of its full potential. \u2018Star Wars: Squadrons\u2019 is (almost) the starfighter sim I\u2019ve been looking for",
        "author": "Mike Hume"
    },
    {
        "title": "Riz Ahmed Acts His Way Out of Every Cultural Pigeonhole (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8767",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/29/magazine/riz-ahmed-actor-rapper-venom.html",
        "text": "From HBO to \u2018Star Wars\u2019 to Shakspeare, he has discovered how to excel beyond tidy genres. From HBO to \u2018Star Wars\u2019 to Shakspeare, he has discovered how to excel beyond tidy genres. From HBO to \u2018Star Wars\u2019 to Shakspeare, he has discovered how to excel beyond tidy genres.",
        "author": "By Carvell Wallace"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lego Isn\u2019t Just for Kids. Here\u2019s How to Become an Adult Lego Master. (NYT: Wirecutter) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8768",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/adult-lego-masters/",
        "text": "Like many Gen Xers, I rediscovered my childhood love of Lego when the company began releasing Star Wars\u2013themed sets back in 1999.1 That specific licensing, combined with the soothing nature of building the sets, was a double dopamine hit of nostalgia for this \u201980s kid. And from then on I\u2019d pick up a couple of... Like many Gen Xers, I rediscovered my childhood love of Lego when the company began releasing Star Wars\u2013themed sets back in 1999.1 That specific licensing, combined with the soothing nature of building the sets, was a double dopamine hit of nostal... Like many Gen Xers, I rediscovered my childhood love of Lego when the company began releasing Star Wars\u2013themed sets back in 1999.1 That specific licensing, combined with the soothing nature of building the sets, was a double dopamine hit of nostalgia for this \u201980s kid. And from then on I\u2019d pick up a couple of...",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Lego Isn\u2019t Just for Kids. Here\u2019s How to Become an Adult Lego Master. (NYT: Wirecutter) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8769",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/adult-lego-masters/",
        "text": "Like many Gen Xers, I rediscovered my childhood love of Lego when the company began releasing Star Wars\u2013themed sets back in 1999.1 That specific licensing, combined with the soothing nature of building the sets, was a double dopamine hit of nostalgia for this \u201980s kid. And from then on I\u2019d pick up a couple of... Like many Gen Xers, I rediscovered my childhood love of Lego when the company began releasing Star Wars\u2013themed sets back in 1999.1 That specific licensing, combined with the soothing nature of building the sets, was a double dopamine hit of nostal... Like many Gen Xers, I rediscovered my childhood love of Lego when the company began releasing Star Wars\u2013themed sets back in 1999.1 That specific licensing, combined with the soothing nature of building the sets, was a double dopamine hit of nostalgia for this \u201980s kid. And from then on I\u2019d pick up a couple of...",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Ready for the Solar Eclipse? \u2018Nova\u2019 on PBS Has You Covered (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8770",
        "date": "2017-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/arts/television/ready-for-the-solar-eclipse-nova-on-pbs-has-you-covered.html",
        "text": "On Aug. 21, when a coast-to-coast total solar eclipse crossed the United States, PBS will provide a companion show. On Aug. 21, when a coast-to-coast total solar eclipse crossed the United States, PBS will provide a companion show. For those stuck under a rock on Aug. 21 when the Eclipse Across America plunges moongazers along the narrow \u201cpath of totality\u201d into darkness (and the rest of us into various shades of dim), \u201cNova\u201d is coming to the rescue. That evening, the PBS science show will present a companion to this celestial experience \u2014 the first time since June 8, 1918, that a coast-to-coast total solar eclipse has occurred in North America \u2014 featuring footage shot earlier in the day by NASA and local public television stations in the path.",
        "author": "By Kathryn Shattuck"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ellen Stofan, Former NASA Chief Scientist, to Head National Air and Space Museum (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8771",
        "date": "2018-04-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/arts/design/ellen-stofan-former-nasa-chief-scientist-to-head-national-air-and-space-museum.html",
        "text": "Ellen Stofan will become the first woman to head the National Air and Space Museum. Ellen Stofan will become the first woman to head the National Air and Space Museum. Dr. Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist at NASA, will become the first woman to lead the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian Institution announced on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "Unforgettable Images From 1860s Strife to Today\u2019s Runways (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8772",
        "date": "2019-07-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/arts/design/fashion-phaidon-rauschenberg-matthew-marks-photography-moon-pop-art.html",
        "text": "Three shows and one new book vividly illustrate how photography and art can capture the moment, whether it\u2019s men going to the moon or models striding a catwalk. Three shows and one new book vividly illustrate how photography and art can capture the moment, whether it\u2019s men going to the moon or models striding a catwalk. NASA invited the artist Robert Rauschenberg to Cape Kennedy, Fla., for the launch of Apollo 11, the first manned spaceflight to the moon, in July 1969, hoping that the experience would inspire him to commemorate it in art.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Covid Testing Slump (NYT: Briefing) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8773",
        "date": "2021-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/briefing/jessica-walter-suez-canal-usc-gynecologist.html",
        "text": "Covid-19 testing is on the decline. That\u2019s a problem. Covid-19 testing is on the decline. That\u2019s a problem. A few weeks ago, Citigroup began providing at-home Covid-19 testing kits to many of its workers in Chicago and New York. Each kit includes a nasal swab, a paper strip and a liquid solution, and people get a result within minutes. \u201cIt looks a little like a pregnancy test,\u201d Dr. Lori Zimmerman, Citigroup\u2019s medical director, told me.",
        "author": "By David Leonhardt"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Covid Testing Slump (NYT: Briefing) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8774",
        "date": "2021-03-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/briefing/jessica-walter-suez-canal-usc-gynecologist.html",
        "text": "Covid-19 testing is on the decline. That\u2019s a problem. Covid-19 testing is on the decline. That\u2019s a problem. A few weeks ago, Citigroup began providing at-home Covid-19 testing kits to many of its workers in Chicago and New York. Each kit includes a nasal swab, a paper strip and a liquid solution, and people get a result within minutes. \u201cIt looks a little like a pregnancy test,\u201d Dr. Lori Zimmerman, Citigroup\u2019s medical director, told me.",
        "author": "By David Leonhardt"
    },
    {
        "title": "Energy Idea for Mars Yields a Clue for Powering Data Centers (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8775",
        "date": "2017-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/energy-environment/data-center-energy.html",
        "text": "The use of natural gas in fuel cells, producing electricity through a chemical reaction, will be given a try at a dozen locations. The use of natural gas in fuel cells, producing electricity through a chemical reaction, will be given a try at a dozen locations. SUNNYVALE, Calif. \u2014 As a scientist working for NASA in the 1990s, K. R. Sridhar developed a contraption that could use energy from the sun to transform the elements of the Martian atmosphere into breathable air or propulsion fuel.",
        "author": "By Diane Cardwell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Energy Idea for Mars Yields a Clue for Powering Data Centers (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8776",
        "date": "2017-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/energy-environment/data-center-energy.html",
        "text": "The use of natural gas in fuel cells, producing electricity through a chemical reaction, will be given a try at a dozen locations. The use of natural gas in fuel cells, producing electricity through a chemical reaction, will be given a try at a dozen locations. SUNNYVALE, Calif. \u2014 As a scientist working for NASA in the 1990s, K. R. Sridhar developed a contraption that could use energy from the sun to transform the elements of the Martian atmosphere into breathable air or propulsion fuel.",
        "author": "By Diane Cardwell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Energy Idea for Mars Yields a Clue for Powering Data Centers (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8777",
        "date": "2017-11-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/business/energy-environment/data-center-energy.html",
        "text": "The use of natural gas in fuel cells, producing electricity through a chemical reaction, will be given a try at a dozen locations. The use of natural gas in fuel cells, producing electricity through a chemical reaction, will be given a try at a dozen locations. SUNNYVALE, Calif. \u2014 As a scientist working for NASA in the 1990s, K. R. Sridhar developed a contraption that could use energy from the sun to transform the elements of the Martian atmosphere into breathable air or propulsion fuel.",
        "author": "By Diane Cardwell"
    },
    {
        "title": "A NASA satellite just caught this awesome solar eclipse from space (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8778",
        "date": "2017-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/05/26/a-nasa-satellite-just-caught-this-incredible-solar-eclipse-from-space/",
        "text": "There\u2019s a satellite hovering over the tropical Pacific near South America whose only job is to monitor the sun. It sounds simple, but its mission is complex: to investigate how the sun\u2019s magnetic field is generated, how it\u2019s structured and what happens when it burps magnetic energy out into space \u2014 sometimes straight toward Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOur star is active, complex and sometimes threatening, and the Solar Dynamics Observatory is one of just a few ways scientists are able to monitor it.On Thursday afternoon, the SDO saw something much more simple than solar irradiance fluctuations or extreme ultraviolet variability \u2014 the moon blocking out the sun in a solar eclipse only visible from the satellite.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThe lunar transit lasted almost an hour, between 2:24 and 3:17 p.m. EDT, with the moon covering about 89 percent of the sun at the peak of its journey across the sun\u2019s face,\u201d NASA wrote. \u201cThe moon\u2019s crisp horizon can be seen from this view because the moon has no atmosphere to distort the sunlight.\u201dAlso neat: Because the images were taken with a very, very high-resolution camera, you can actually see the bumps and valleys in the outline of the moon, which it turns out is a pretty rugged place.You can always see what the sun looks like at this very moment, including sunspots and coronal holes, on the NASA SDO website.This story originally misstated the day the eclipse was seen. The eclipse was only visible from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. A NASA satellite just caught this awesome solar eclipse from space",
        "author": "Angela Fritz"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA chief: \u2018No changes\u2019 to space station launches after dramatic Soyuz rocket failure (WP: Europe) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8779",
        "date": "2018-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/nasa-chief-no-changes-to-space-station-launches-after-dramatic-soyuz-rocket-failure/2018/10/12/8d8434b6-ce09-11e8-920f-dd52e1ae4570_story.html",
        "text": "MOSCOW \u2014 NASA\u2019s top official suggested Friday that a new mission to the International Space Station could take place this year after Russian experts address the cause of a Soyuz rocket malfunction, which sent the crew on a harrowing escape from the outer edge of the stratosphere.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI fully anticipate that we will fly again on a Soyuz rocket, and I have no reason to believe at this point that it will not be on schedule,\u201d NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters.\u00a0 That could mean another launch before mid-December, when the three-member crew on the space station \u2014 an American, Russian and German \u2014 was scheduled to end a six-month mission.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNo changes have been made. The investigation is underway,\u201d Bridenstine added.Russian space launches were suspended Thursday after the booster malfunctioned about two minutes from liftoff \u2014 about 31 miles above the surface \u2014 with NASA\u2019s Tyler N.\u00a0\u201cNick\u201d Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin aboard. Both men landed safely on the grassy steppes of Kazakhstan after jettisoning away in their capsule.\u00a0AdvertisementRussian rockets are the only way to reach the orbiting laboratory, but Bridenstine said the rocket failure \u2014 Russia\u2019s first such incident in the post-Soviet era \u2014 had not tarnished his view of the venerable Soyuz rockets.\u00a0\u201cNot every mission that fails ends up so successful,\u201d he said, referring to the safe return of Hague and Ovchinin.How the Russian rocket failure roils NASAThe capsule\u2019s parachutes deployed, but the descent was steep and fast. NASA said Hague and Ovchinin experienced more than six times the force of gravity before tumbling onto an expanse more than 200 miles from the Russian-operated Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.Story continues below advertisementRussian technicians are conducting an investigation into the rocket failure. Bridenstine said they have a\u00a0\u201creally good idea\u201d on the cause.\u00a0\u201cI think the investigation is going to go swiftly,\u201d he said, but gave no further details on the preliminary findings.AdvertisementSergei Krikalyov, the head of manned programs for Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said one of the rocket\u2019s four boosters failed to separate from the main stage. All Soyuz flights, both manned and those carrying vital supplies such as food and equipment, have been suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.Hague and Ovchinin remained under medical observation Friday.\u00a0\u00a0Recalling the moment Bridenstine realized something had gone awry with the launch, he said hearing Hague speak Russian confirmed his fears.\u00a0Story continues below advertisement\u201cMy immediate reaction was,\u00a0\u2018Things are not going well. He\u2019s not speaking English.\u2019\u2008\u201d Hague\u2019s words \u2014 in which he described the sharp drop in gravity \u2014 were then translated into English.\u00a0All members of the Soyuz crew must learn Russian.Dmitry Rogozin, the chief of Roscosmos, promised that both men will be given another chance to reach the space station.Advertisement\u201cThe boys will certainly fly their mission,\u201d Rogozin tweeted, posting a picture in which he sits with the two astronauts aboard a Moscow-bound plane. \u201cWe plan that they will fly in the spring.\u201dBridenstine also heaped praise on the relationship Washington and Moscow enjoy in the frontier of space, free from the deepening political disputes \u201cwe have terrestrial.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cTo keep space separate from the political environment has always been our tradition, and we want to keep that going forward,\u201d he said.Astronauts make harrowing escape, but Russian rocket failure roils NASANASA talking to private companies about taking over International Space Station opsSpace, nuclear and polar bears: The U.S. and Russia agree on some thingsToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news Jim Bridenstine told reporters that Russian experts have a \u201creally good idea\u201d of what caused the rocket to malfunction, sending the two-member crew on a hurtling escape back to earth. NASA chief: \u2018No changes\u2019 to space station launches after dramatic Soyuz rocket failure",
        "author": "Amie Ferris-Rotman"
    },
    {
        "title": "This Week\u2019s Wedding Announcements (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8780",
        "date": "2019-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/fashion/weddings/this-weeks-wedding-announcements.html",
        "text": "All of the weddings right here on one handy page for you. All of the weddings right here on one handy page for you. Though Lisa Patrice Goldstein and Peter Andrew Nosal lived in the same dorm at the University of Vermont, they did not meet until they were introduced through the dating app Bumble in July 2016. Ms. Goldstein, who has a passion for travel, said she was \u201cintrigued,\u201d by the many places that Mr. Nosal had visited as she perused his dating profile. Included were photos of the pyramids in Egypt, camels in Thailand and tropical beaches in South Korea, where Mr. Nasal lived from 2011 to 2013.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "This Week\u2019s Wedding Announcements (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8781",
        "date": "2019-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/fashion/weddings/this-weeks-wedding-announcements.html",
        "text": "All of the weddings right here on one handy page for you. All of the weddings right here on one handy page for you. Though Lisa Patrice Goldstein and Peter Andrew Nosal lived in the same dorm at the University of Vermont, they did not meet until they were introduced through the dating app Bumble in July 2016. Ms. Goldstein, who has a passion for travel, said she was \u201cintrigued,\u201d by the many places that Mr. Nosal had visited as she perused his dating profile. Included were photos of the pyramids in Egypt, camels in Thailand and tropical beaches in South Korea, where Mr. Nasal lived from 2011 to 2013.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Probing questions about NASA\u2019s space probe (WP: Letters to the Editor) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8782",
        "date": "2021-05-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/probing-questions-about-nasas-space-probe/2021/05/19/89c510ce-b8b8-11eb-bc4a-62849cf6cca9_story.html",
        "text": "Regarding the May 18 Health & Science article \u201cNASA\u00a0craft\u00a0sets course for home from asteroid\u201d:The space probe in question (the size of an SUV, no less) was guided to a landing 178 million miles away on a rock 1,600 feet wide.\u00a0My subjective feel for distance fades at 10,000, but 10,000\u2009times 10,000 miles is less than that distance.\u00a0And I could walk 1,600 feet in about six minutes.\u00a0 Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightAlso note that, if something starts going wrong during the probe landing, given the speed of radio waves, the controllers would not know about it until 16 minutes later.All of which leads me to muse: These are very clever folks indeed who made this happen.Robert McDonough, Gaithersburg\nRead more letters to the editor.\n  Opinion: Probing questions about NASA\u2019s space probe",
        "author": "Letters to the Editor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA\u2019s Voyager Probes Across the Universe (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8783",
        "date": "2017-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html",
        "text": "As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla., in his Toyota Corolla. A Los Angeles native, he had never ventured as far as Tijuana, but he had a per diem, and he liked to drive. Just east of Orlando, a causeway carried him over the Indian and Banana Rivers to a triangular spit of sand jutting into the Atlantic, where the Air Force keeps a base. His journey terminated at a cavernous military hangar.",
        "author": "By Kim Tingley"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA\u2019s Voyager Probes Across the Universe (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8784",
        "date": "2017-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html",
        "text": "As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla., in his Toyota Corolla. A Los Angeles native, he had never ventured as far as Tijuana, but he had a per diem, and he liked to drive. Just east of Orlando, a causeway carried him over the Indian and Banana Rivers to a triangular spit of sand jutting into the Atlantic, where the Air Force keeps a base. His journey terminated at a cavernous military hangar.",
        "author": "By Kim Tingley"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA\u2019s Voyager Probes Across the Universe (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8785",
        "date": "2017-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html",
        "text": "As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla., in his Toyota Corolla. A Los Angeles native, he had never ventured as far as Tijuana, but he had a per diem, and he liked to drive. Just east of Orlando, a causeway carried him over the Indian and Banana Rivers to a triangular spit of sand jutting into the Atlantic, where the Air Force keeps a base. His journey terminated at a cavernous military hangar.",
        "author": "By Kim Tingley"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA\u2019s Voyager Probes Across the Universe (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8786",
        "date": "2017-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html",
        "text": "As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla., in his Toyota Corolla. A Los Angeles native, he had never ventured as far as Tijuana, but he had a per diem, and he liked to drive. Just east of Orlando, a causeway carried him over the Indian and Banana Rivers to a triangular spit of sand jutting into the Atlantic, where the Air Force keeps a base. His journey terminated at a cavernous military hangar.",
        "author": "By Kim Tingley"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA\u2019s Voyager Probes Across the Universe (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8787",
        "date": "2017-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html",
        "text": "As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy. In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla., in his Toyota Corolla. A Los Angeles native, he had never ventured as far as Tijuana, but he had a per diem, and he liked to drive. Just east of Orlando, a causeway carried him over the Indian and Banana Rivers to a triangular spit of sand jutting into the Atlantic, where the Air Force keeps a base. His journey terminated at a cavernous military hangar.",
        "author": "By Kim Tingley"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s \u2018space poop challenge\u2019 is over, and it went boldly beyond the diaper (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8788",
        "date": "2017-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/16/nasas-space-poop-challenge-is-over-and-it-went-boldly-beyond-the-diaper/",
        "text": "And on the sixth day of the Apollo 10 mission, the identifiable floating object struck.It was May 1969. As the Apollo crew headed\u00a0back to Earth after a\u00a0successful moon orbit, the three astronauts discovered it had joined them\u00a0aboard the command module.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCommander Thomas P. Stafford, his microgravity\u00a0reflexes honed on two\u00a0prior spaceflights, jumped to action. \u201cGive me a napkin quick,\u201d Stafford said, according to the flight transcript.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s a turd floating through the air.\u201d After bickering about who did not properly use the adhesive toilet bag \u2014 an abortive attempt to deduce the poop\u2019s creator based upon its consistency \u2014 the astronauts wrangled the IFO into the waste compartment. (This was the first of two Apollo 10\u00a0fecal escapees.) Story continues below advertisementNearly 50 years later the matter of space pooping is not completely solved. Inside a habitable satellite, such as the International Space Station,\u00a0toilets with suction-generating fans collect and dump solid waste, which may incinerate in the atmosphere like shooting stars. During a rocket launch or\u00a0spacewalks, however, adult diapers remain the best technology available.AdvertisementAvailable \u2014\u00a0but not ideal. Diapers may pose a risk of irritation or infection when astronauts are confined to their suits for long durations. In preparation for expeditions such as the\u00a0Orion mission, which will send astronauts to space beyond the moon,\u00a0the\u00a0National Aeronautics and Space Administration sought a new way for space suits to contain fecal, urine and menstrual waste for 144 hours at a go.Pooping in deep space has NASA stumped. The \u2018Space Poop Challenge\u2019 is your way to help.Enter the Space Poop Challenge, led by crowdfunding\u00a0platform HeroX with the support of NASA. During the\u00a060-day challenge, 19,000 thinkers and inventors submitted 5,000 possible solutions. Some pooled their resources, working as\u00a0teams. Others, like first-place designer Col. Thatcher R. Cardon, a physician and officer in the U.S. Air Force, thought up his design solo. Cardon\u2019s design, and the two other winning technologies, were\u00a0announced Wednesday.Story continues below advertisementCardon\u2019s two-part design hinged on a machine he called the perineal access port. This access port would cover an area of the astronaut called the\u00a0perineum, the crotch zone below the tailbone and frontward, occasionally described as the \u201cfig leaf area.\u201d The port was two flaps and a tiny valve \u2014\u00a0essentially, a small\u00a0airlock to expel waste from the suit without losing precious oxygen supply.AdvertisementHe turned to\u00a0minimally invasive surgery for inspiration. \u201cYou have to do a lot of complex things in a very small opening,\u201d Cardon told The Washington Post by phone.Like building a ship in a bottle or repairing a heart valve through a blood vessel, the access port would require specialized tools to work. To get from the biological business end through the weenie airlock and into space, Cardon devised a second class of devices he called introducers.Story continues below advertisementOne introducer was \u201ca device that rides in the butt-crack, for lack of a better term,\u201d Cardon said. (Medically speaking, he added, that term for the butt groove is the \u201cgluteal cleft.\u201d) The \u201chygiene wand\u201d was fabric bunched below the\u00a0perineum that would reveal fresh layers when tugged. But introducers could take any of several forms, such as\u00a0gender-specific urinary catheters to suck up urine.AdvertisementFor his efforts, Cardon scored\u00a0$15,000.\u00a0The second place design, created by a group in Texas calling themselves the Space Poop Unification of Doctors, or SPUDs, involved an air flow system that pushed waste away from the astronaut and into a storage\u00a0compartment within the suit. The third place design also planned to\u00a0store waste, rather than expel it. British product designer Hugo Shelley came up with the \u201cSWIMSuit \u2014 Zero Gravity Underwear,\u201d which disinfected and drew out bodily fluids into a compressible pouch.Though none of these technologies will necessarily be directly implemented. Kirstyn Johnson, a NASA engineer specializing in space suit technology, said in a news release that \u201cwe\u2019ll be able to use aspects of the winning designs to develop future waste management systems for use in the suit.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA may again enlist the public\u00a0to tackle future problems. \u201cOthers at NASA are now thinking about ways we can leverage a crowdsourcing approach to solve some more of our space flight challenges,\u201d Johnson said.AdvertisementMore from Morning Mix\u2018Yet another innocent child\u2019: Toddler among two killed in Chicago shooting streamed on Facebook liveHoward Stern sued for airing confidential call between IRS agent and taxpayerForget eggs. 245 million years ago, this long-necked sea creature gave birth to live babies. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration sought a new way for space suits to contain fecal, urine and menstrual waste for 144 hours at a go. NASA\u2019s \u2018space poop challenge\u2019 is over, and it went boldly beyond the diaper",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA\u2019s \u2018space poop challenge\u2019 is over, and it went boldly beyond the diaper (WP: Morning Mix) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8789",
        "date": "2017-02-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/16/nasas-space-poop-challenge-is-over-and-it-went-boldly-beyond-the-diaper/",
        "text": "And on the sixth day of the Apollo 10 mission, the identifiable floating object struck.It was May 1969. As the Apollo crew headed\u00a0back to Earth after a\u00a0successful moon orbit, the three astronauts discovered it had joined them\u00a0aboard the command module.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightCommander Thomas P. Stafford, his microgravity\u00a0reflexes honed on two\u00a0prior spaceflights, jumped to action. \u201cGive me a napkin quick,\u201d Stafford said, according to the flight transcript.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s a turd floating through the air.\u201d After bickering about who did not properly use the adhesive toilet bag \u2014 an abortive attempt to deduce the poop\u2019s creator based upon its consistency \u2014 the astronauts wrangled the IFO into the waste compartment. (This was the first of two Apollo 10\u00a0fecal escapees.) Story continues below advertisementNearly 50 years later the matter of space pooping is not completely solved. Inside a habitable satellite, such as the International Space Station,\u00a0toilets with suction-generating fans collect and dump solid waste, which may incinerate in the atmosphere like shooting stars. During a rocket launch or\u00a0spacewalks, however, adult diapers remain the best technology available.AdvertisementAvailable \u2014\u00a0but not ideal. Diapers may pose a risk of irritation or infection when astronauts are confined to their suits for long durations. In preparation for expeditions such as the\u00a0Orion mission, which will send astronauts to space beyond the moon,\u00a0the\u00a0National Aeronautics and Space Administration sought a new way for space suits to contain fecal, urine and menstrual waste for 144 hours at a go.Pooping in deep space has NASA stumped. The \u2018Space Poop Challenge\u2019 is your way to help.Enter the Space Poop Challenge, led by crowdfunding\u00a0platform HeroX with the support of NASA. During the\u00a060-day challenge, 19,000 thinkers and inventors submitted 5,000 possible solutions. Some pooled their resources, working as\u00a0teams. Others, like first-place designer Col. Thatcher R. Cardon, a physician and officer in the U.S. Air Force, thought up his design solo. Cardon\u2019s design, and the two other winning technologies, were\u00a0announced Wednesday.Story continues below advertisementCardon\u2019s two-part design hinged on a machine he called the perineal access port. This access port would cover an area of the astronaut called the\u00a0perineum, the crotch zone below the tailbone and frontward, occasionally described as the \u201cfig leaf area.\u201d The port was two flaps and a tiny valve \u2014\u00a0essentially, a small\u00a0airlock to expel waste from the suit without losing precious oxygen supply.AdvertisementHe turned to\u00a0minimally invasive surgery for inspiration. \u201cYou have to do a lot of complex things in a very small opening,\u201d Cardon told The Washington Post by phone.Like building a ship in a bottle or repairing a heart valve through a blood vessel, the access port would require specialized tools to work. To get from the biological business end through the weenie airlock and into space, Cardon devised a second class of devices he called introducers.Story continues below advertisementOne introducer was \u201ca device that rides in the butt-crack, for lack of a better term,\u201d Cardon said. (Medically speaking, he added, that term for the butt groove is the \u201cgluteal cleft.\u201d) The \u201chygiene wand\u201d was fabric bunched below the\u00a0perineum that would reveal fresh layers when tugged. But introducers could take any of several forms, such as\u00a0gender-specific urinary catheters to suck up urine.AdvertisementFor his efforts, Cardon scored\u00a0$15,000.\u00a0The second place design, created by a group in Texas calling themselves the Space Poop Unification of Doctors, or SPUDs, involved an air flow system that pushed waste away from the astronaut and into a storage\u00a0compartment within the suit. The third place design also planned to\u00a0store waste, rather than expel it. British product designer Hugo Shelley came up with the \u201cSWIMSuit \u2014 Zero Gravity Underwear,\u201d which disinfected and drew out bodily fluids into a compressible pouch.Though none of these technologies will necessarily be directly implemented. Kirstyn Johnson, a NASA engineer specializing in space suit technology, said in a news release that \u201cwe\u2019ll be able to use aspects of the winning designs to develop future waste management systems for use in the suit.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNASA may again enlist the public\u00a0to tackle future problems. \u201cOthers at NASA are now thinking about ways we can leverage a crowdsourcing approach to solve some more of our space flight challenges,\u201d Johnson said.AdvertisementMore from Morning Mix\u2018Yet another innocent child\u2019: Toddler among two killed in Chicago shooting streamed on Facebook liveHoward Stern sued for airing confidential call between IRS agent and taxpayerForget eggs. 245 million years ago, this long-necked sea creature gave birth to live babies. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration sought a new way for space suits to contain fecal, urine and menstrual waste for 144 hours at a go. NASA\u2019s \u2018space poop challenge\u2019 is over, and it went boldly beyond the diaper",
        "author": "Ben Guarino"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Above and Beyond,\u2019 a Heartening Salute to NASA (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8790",
        "date": "2018-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/movies/above-and-beyond-nasas-journey-to-tomorrow-review.html",
        "text": "Rory Kennedy\u2019s new documentary is an informative chronicle of American achievements in space. Rory Kennedy\u2019s new documentary is an informative chronicle of American achievements in space. The director Rory Kennedy has a personal connection to the subject of her latest documentary. \u201cAbove and Beyond: NASA\u2019s Journey to Tomorrow\u201d is a 60th-anniversary celebration of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration \u2014 NASA, that is. While the agency was founded during the Eisenhower administration, it was President John F. Kennedy, Ms. Kennedy\u2019s uncle (the filmmaker is the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy), who defined NASA\u2019s mission for the better part of a generation by instructing it to set its sights on a manned mission to Earth\u2019s moon.",
        "author": "By Glenn Kenny"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018Above and Beyond,\u2019 a Heartening Salute to NASA (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8791",
        "date": "2018-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/movies/above-and-beyond-nasas-journey-to-tomorrow-review.html",
        "text": "Rory Kennedy\u2019s new documentary is an informative chronicle of American achievements in space. Rory Kennedy\u2019s new documentary is an informative chronicle of American achievements in space. The director Rory Kennedy has a personal connection to the subject of her latest documentary. \u201cAbove and Beyond: NASA\u2019s Journey to Tomorrow\u201d is a 60th-anniversary celebration of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration \u2014 NASA, that is. While the agency was founded during the Eisenhower administration, it was President John F. Kennedy, Ms. Kennedy\u2019s uncle (the filmmaker is the daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy), who defined NASA\u2019s mission for the better part of a generation by instructing it to set its sights on a manned mission to Earth\u2019s moon.",
        "author": "By Glenn Kenny"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rethinking How Science Is Seen (NYT: Multimedia/Photos) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8792",
        "date": "2017-05-23",
        "link": "https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/rethinking-how-science-is-seen/",
        "text": "Since their earliest days, photography and science have been intertwined, going from single images of fleeting phenomena to using cameras that shoot a trillion frames per second. Since their earliest days, photography and science have been intertwined, going from single images of fleeting phenomena to using cameras that shoot a trillion frames per second. Photographs in and about science have long influenced the trajectory of discovery and of public opinion and policy, too. In 1948, Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer, made an astonishing prediction: \u201cOnce a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.\u201d Two decades later, NASA photographs such as The Blue Marble (1972) \u2014 one of the most widely reproduced images ever \u2014 did just that, startling us with dramatically new perspectives on our place in the broader scheme of things.",
        "author": "By Marvin Heiferman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rethinking How Science Is Seen (NYT: Multimedia/Photos) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8793",
        "date": "2017-05-23",
        "link": "https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/rethinking-how-science-is-seen/",
        "text": "Since their earliest days, photography and science have been intertwined, going from single images of fleeting phenomena to using cameras that shoot a trillion frames per second. Since their earliest days, photography and science have been intertwined, going from single images of fleeting phenomena to using cameras that shoot a trillion frames per second. Photographs in and about science have long influenced the trajectory of discovery and of public opinion and policy, too. In 1948, Fred Hoyle, a British astronomer, made an astonishing prediction: \u201cOnce a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.\u201d Two decades later, NASA photographs such as The Blue Marble (1972) \u2014 one of the most widely reproduced images ever \u2014 did just that, startling us with dramatically new perspectives on our place in the broader scheme of things.",
        "author": "By Marvin Heiferman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Gordon, Astronaut Who Reached for Moon and Very Nearly Made It, Dies at 88 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8794",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/obituaries/richard-gordon-gemini-and-apollo-astronaut-dies-at-88.html",
        "text": "Mr. Gordon undertook a harrowing spacewalk in 1966 and orbited the moon in 1969, but he never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface. Mr. Gordon undertook a harrowing spacewalk in 1966 and orbited the moon in 1969, but he never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface. Richard Gordon, who undertook what became a harrowing and abortive spacewalk in a 1966 NASA mission, then orbited the moon three years later, but never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface, died on Monday at his home in San Marcos, Calif., near San Diego. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Gordon, Astronaut Who Reached for Moon and Very Nearly Made It, Dies at 88 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8795",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/obituaries/richard-gordon-gemini-and-apollo-astronaut-dies-at-88.html",
        "text": "Mr. Gordon undertook a harrowing spacewalk in 1966 and orbited the moon in 1969, but he never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface. Mr. Gordon undertook a harrowing spacewalk in 1966 and orbited the moon in 1969, but he never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface. Richard Gordon, who undertook what became a harrowing and abortive spacewalk in a 1966 NASA mission, then orbited the moon three years later, but never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface, died on Monday at his home in San Marcos, Calif., near San Diego. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Gordon, Astronaut Who Reached for Moon and Very Nearly Made It, Dies at 88 (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8796",
        "date": "2017-11-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/obituaries/richard-gordon-gemini-and-apollo-astronaut-dies-at-88.html",
        "text": "Mr. Gordon undertook a harrowing spacewalk in 1966 and orbited the moon in 1969, but he never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface. Mr. Gordon undertook a harrowing spacewalk in 1966 and orbited the moon in 1969, but he never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface. Richard Gordon, who undertook what became a harrowing and abortive spacewalk in a 1966 NASA mission, then orbited the moon three years later, but never achieved his dream of walking on the lunar surface, died on Monday at his home in San Marcos, Calif., near San Diego. He was 88.",
        "author": "By Richard Goldstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Bay Area Billionaires Are Breaking My Heart (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8797",
        "date": "2020-05-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/opinion/inequality-san-francisco-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Looking for hope in San Francisco. Looking for hope in San Francisco. One sun-drenched afternoon last month, I took a long solo bike ride through the San Francisco Bay Area. I rode from my home to Mountain View, near the once-desolate stretch of marsh that Google has leased from NASA to build a monumental new campus. It looks like a collection of lunar bases made out of origami.",
        "author": "By Farhad Manjoo"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Failed All-Female Spacewalk Tells Us About Office Temperature (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8798",
        "date": "2019-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/opinion/nasa-female-spacewalk.html",
        "text": "In a for-men, by-men world, the little things still really do hurt women. In a for-men, by-men world, the little things still really do hurt women. Over the past few weeks, NASA has been celebrating a pending milestone: the first-ever all-female spacewalk (just in time for Women\u2019s History Month, even!). It wasn\u2019t until Monday, just a few days before this week\u2019s planned mission to have two women step into space to install powerful batteries on the International Space Station\u2019s solar panels, that the crew realized the highly publicized plan had a major problem.",
        "author": "By Marisa Porges"
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Failed All-Female Spacewalk Tells Us About Office Temperature (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8799",
        "date": "2019-03-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/opinion/nasa-female-spacewalk.html",
        "text": "In a for-men, by-men world, the little things still really do hurt women. In a for-men, by-men world, the little things still really do hurt women. Over the past few weeks, NASA has been celebrating a pending milestone: the first-ever all-female spacewalk (just in time for Women\u2019s History Month, even!). It wasn\u2019t until Monday, just a few days before this week\u2019s planned mission to have two women step into space to install powerful batteries on the International Space Station\u2019s solar panels, that the crew realized the highly publicized plan had a major problem.",
        "author": "By Marisa Porges"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Frigid Mars Is the Perfect Place to Look for Ancient Life (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8800",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/opinion/mars-perseverance-ancient-life.html",
        "text": "Our early days on Earth have almost entirely disappeared, but on Mars, the past is entombed. Our early days on Earth have almost entirely disappeared, but on Mars, the past is entombed. Tomorrow afternoon, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will hopefully come to rest beneath a butterscotch sky on Mars. I\u2019ll watch the landing unfold on a livestream through Zoom, while the world outside is encased in ice, the trees like pieces of crystal. An ice storm passed through a week ago and the temperature shows no inclination to rise. The deep freeze of February feels like a fitting backdrop for this particular rover\u2019s arrival on Mars.",
        "author": "By Sarah Stewart Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why Frigid Mars Is the Perfect Place to Look for Ancient Life (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8801",
        "date": "2021-02-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/opinion/mars-perseverance-ancient-life.html",
        "text": "Our early days on Earth have almost entirely disappeared, but on Mars, the past is entombed. Our early days on Earth have almost entirely disappeared, but on Mars, the past is entombed. Tomorrow afternoon, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover will hopefully come to rest beneath a butterscotch sky on Mars. I\u2019ll watch the landing unfold on a livestream through Zoom, while the world outside is encased in ice, the trees like pieces of crystal. An ice storm passed through a week ago and the temperature shows no inclination to rise. The deep freeze of February feels like a fitting backdrop for this particular rover\u2019s arrival on Mars.",
        "author": "By Sarah Stewart Johnson"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Are All Riders on the Same Planet  (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8802",
        "date": "2018-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/earth-space-christmas-eve-apollo-8.html",
        "text": "Seen from space 50 years ago, Earth appeared as a gift to preserve and cherish. What happened? Seen from space 50 years ago, Earth appeared as a gift to preserve and cherish. What happened? On Christmas Eve 1968, human beings orbited the moon for the first time. News of the feat of NASA\u2019s Apollo 8 mission dominated the front page of The New York Times the next day. Tucked away below the fold was an essay by the poet Archibald MacLeish, a reflection inspired by what he\u2019d seen and heard the night before.",
        "author": "By Matthew Myer Boulton and Joseph Heithaus"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Are All Riders on the Same Planet  (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8803",
        "date": "2018-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/earth-space-christmas-eve-apollo-8.html",
        "text": "Seen from space 50 years ago, Earth appeared as a gift to preserve and cherish. What happened? Seen from space 50 years ago, Earth appeared as a gift to preserve and cherish. What happened? On Christmas Eve 1968, human beings orbited the moon for the first time. News of the feat of NASA\u2019s Apollo 8 mission dominated the front page of The New York Times the next day. Tucked away below the fold was an essay by the poet Archibald MacLeish, a reflection inspired by what he\u2019d seen and heard the night before.",
        "author": "By Matthew Myer Boulton and Joseph Heithaus"
    },
    {
        "title": "We Are All Riders on the Same Planet  (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8804",
        "date": "2018-12-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/opinion/earth-space-christmas-eve-apollo-8.html",
        "text": "Seen from space 50 years ago, Earth appeared as a gift to preserve and cherish. What happened? Seen from space 50 years ago, Earth appeared as a gift to preserve and cherish. What happened? On Christmas Eve 1968, human beings orbited the moon for the first time. News of the feat of NASA\u2019s Apollo 8 mission dominated the front page of The New York Times the next day. Tucked away below the fold was an essay by the poet Archibald MacLeish, a reflection inspired by what he\u2019d seen and heard the night before.",
        "author": "By Matthew Myer Boulton and Joseph Heithaus"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8805",
        "date": "2019-07-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/forget-new-manned-missions-in-space-nasa-should-focus-on-saving-earth/2019/07/18/79e55eb8-a995-11e9-9214-246e594de5d5_story.html",
        "text": "Lori Garver is chief executive at Earthrise Alliance and was deputy NASA administrator from 2009 to 2013.\nNASA was not created to do something again. It was created to push the limits of human understanding \u2014 to help the nation solve big, impossible problems that require advances in science and technology. Fifty years ago, the impossible problem was putting a human on the moon to win the space race, and all of humanity has benefited from the accomplishment. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe impossible problem today is not the moon. And it\u2019s not Mars. It\u2019s our home planet, and NASA can once again be of service for the betterment of all.Let\u2019s remember our history. We went to the moon 50 years ago in response to the Soviet Union\u2019s perceived domination of spaceflight. The 12 Americans who walked on the moon brought back 842 pounds of lunar material (rocks and dust), learned about our closest planetary body\u2019s geology and gave us a view of the Earth that changed our perspective. But that\u2019s not what drove NASA spending to 4 percent of the federal budget in 1965. We were willing to stake so much on the moon landing \u2014 only because there was so much at stake.AdvertisementWith extreme weather ravaging parts of the country in recent weeks, climate change has become one of the most pressing public health challenge, American Public Health Associated Executive Director Dr. Georges C. Benjamin said. Drexel University Research Professor Dr. Shiriki Kumanyika added that people who are the least powerful and the most vulnerable often can\u2019t rebound from the effects of the extreme weather cause by climate change. (Washington Post Live)Story continues below advertisementAfter accomplishing this amazing feat, the aerospace community has again and again sought presidential proclamations to go further. President Trump is the fifth president to proclaim we will send humans to the moon and/or Mars within a specific time frame, a decree without a value proposition that has never inspired broad public support nor come close to coming true.NASA remains one the most revered and valuable brands in the world, and the agency is at its best when given a purpose. But the public doesn\u2019t understand the purpose of spending massive amounts of money to send a few astronauts to the moon or Mars. Are we in another race, and if so, is this the most valuable display of our scientific and technological leadership? If science is the rationale, we can send robots for pennies on the dollar. In a July Pew Research Center study, 63\u2009percent of respondents said monitoring key parts of Earth\u2019s climate system should be the highest priority for the United States\u2019 space agency \u2014 sending astronauts to the moon was their lowest priority, at 13\u2009percent\n; 18\u2009percent favor Mars.The public is right about this. Climate change \u2014 not Russia, much less China \u2014 is today\u2019s existential threat. Data from NASA satellites show that future generations here on Earth will suffer from food and water shortages, increased disease and conflict over diminished resources. In 2018, the National Academy of Sciences released its decadal survey for Earth science and declared that NASA should prioritize the study of the global hydrological cycle; distribution and movement of mass between oceans, ice sheets, ground water and atmosphere; and changes in surface biology and geology. Immediately developing these sensors and satellites while extending existing missions would increase the cadence of new, more precise measurements and contribute to critical, higher-fidelity climate models.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA could also move beyond measurement and into action \u2014 focusing on solutions for communities at the front lines of drought, flooding and heat extremes. It could develop and disseminate standardized applications that provide actionable information to populations that are the most vulnerable. NASA could create a Climate Corps \u2014 modeled after the Peace Corps \u2014 in which scientists and engineers spend two years in local communities understanding the unique challenges they face, training local populations and connecting them with the data and science needed to support smart, local decision-making.The fragmented system of roles and responsibilities related to handing the massive amounts of Earth science data is severely hampering global efforts required to make significant progress. The U.S. government role in addressing this challenge is foundering without leadership. Standardizing data collection and coordinating its storage, analysis and distribution require experience working across disciplines, government agencies and universities as well as the private sector and international community. Only NASA has done this sort of thing before; only NASA has the credibility and expertise to do it again.Assigning NASA this task would require an Apollo-scale change \u2014 but could be accomplished within its existing mandate and by shifting funding priorities. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 supports expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and phenomena in the atmosphere and directs the agency to develop and carry out a comprehensive program of research, technology and monitoring to understand and maintain the integrity of the Earth\u2019s atmosphere. The act requires NASA to work with other federal agencies, academia and the private sector to make the necessary observations, disseminate their results and enlist the support and cooperation of appropriate scientists and engineers of other countries and international organizations.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementApollo\u2019s legacy should not be more meaningless new goals and arbitrary deadlines. Let\u2019s not repeat the past. Let\u2019s try to save our future. Besides, humanity\u2019s intrinsic need to explore is driven by our need to survive.Read more: George F. Will: Apollo 11\u2019s achievement still dazzlesDavid Von Drehle: 50 years after the moon landing, Apollo 11 remains a miracleMax Boot: Faith in government powered Apollo 11. We don\u2019t have that anymore.The Post\u2019s View: Global warming led to scorching heat in Europe. Leaders must take it seriously.Lynne Carter: Hurricanes are dramatic. But they aren\u2019t the only way to measure the impact of climate change. Climate change is today\u2019s existential threat. Opinion: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth.",
        "author": "Lori Garver"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | How NASA could help stop climate change with solar satellites (WP: PostEverything) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8806",
        "date": "2019-10-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/23/how-nasa-could-help-stop-climate-change-with-solar-satellites/",
        "text": "Just two months after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told leaders gathered at the United Nations that they had stolen her dreams by not figuring out how to stop climate change within her eight-year deadline. Today, Congress can give Greta her climate dream back. The key is President Trump\u2019s plan to have NASA return Americans to the moon by 2024. But this time, we shouldn\u2019t go just to get there: Instead, we should set off with a plan to kick-start a technological plan that has been in the works for decades. 10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightThat tech is solar satellites. As first conceptualized in 1968 by Peter Glaser, an engineer, these huge arrays \u2014 lightweight frames several miles across that would hold thin panels \u2014 would orbit 22,000 miles above the equator in a geosynchronous orbit. Because of the Earth\u2019s tilt, satellites in this orbit are never in its shadow. That means they would be constantly exposed to sunlight, which they would convert into electricity. They would then use a cellphone-like microwave signal to send that electricity safely down to equally large antennas on the ground below them anywhere on the planet, and into the grid. Each of these satellites would transmit 3,000 to 15,000 megawatts to the ground, enough to power several cities. Today, 1,000 megawatts will supply 1 million American homes with constant power.(Wireless energy transmission may seem implausible, but we\u2019ve had the capacity to pull it off as far back as 1975. That\u2019s when NASA and the Raytheon used satellite components to send a wireless microwave electric signal across a mile-wide valley in Goldstone, Calif.)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGlaser spent decades testifying before Congress about the engineering and environmental benefits of these satellites, as did Ralph Nansen, who headed Boeing\u2019s solar satellite program in the 1980s and 1990s, and John Mankins, who headed NASA\u2019s Advanced Programs Office in the 1990s and early 2000s. As the oil embargo hit the United States in the 1970s (when much of our electricity came from burning oil), Congress asked NASA\u2019s contractors to update Glaser\u2019s plan.How photos of the Earth from space changed humans' view of their life on the planetThe proposals that General Dynamics, Boeing and others dreamed up built on our previous experience with moon exploration by astronauts, which ended in 1972, and NASA\u2019s first space station, Skylab, which launched in 1973. With these past successes, some posited that astronauts could build Skylab-like space stations in Low Earth Orbit 200 miles up, where crews and robots would assemble the enormous satellites. Then rockets would slowly boost the finished satellites up to their 22,000-mile home. The General Dynamics proposal even suggested that factories could be built on the moon, 220,000 miles from Earth. They would manufacture solar satellite components from local materials, then launch them back toward earth and into their geosynchronous orbit. Because of the moon\u2019s very low gravity and lack of atmosphere, costs would be 10 percent of launching from Earth. Though that doesn\u2019t account for the costs and complexities of setting up manufacturing facilities on the moon, it\u2019s still a huge deal, given that satellites would weigh tens of thousands of tons each.As aerospace engineers of the era knew all too well, though, the real limit wasn\u2019t the sky; it was the federal budget. These plans would have cost more than the entire Apollo program. But the real showstopper was that solar satellite electricity would have cost far more than electricity produced on the ground, so the designs were shelved.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn every decade since then, Mankins and others reran the numbers using improved rockets and lighter sat components. Costs dropped, but not enough. In 2014, Mankins\u2019s book \u201cThe Case For Space Solar Power\u201d used even better numbers. But he was still five years too early.Last year, Paul Jaffe at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, another Glaser fan, developed solar satellite components that weigh a tenth as much as they did five years ago. A group at Caltech did the same. Glaser\u2019s proposed 10-mile-wide satellites would be 1,000 to 3,000 yards across, depending on the design. Today, private rocket companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin use reusable rockets to launch satellites for a third of the 2014 cost. According to NASA, the Block 2 versions of their huge new SLS rocket, if mass-produced for this market, could match or beat those costs. Jaffe and Mankins say these improvements will now let this constant solar satellite power better the price of fossil fuel and nuclear power around the world.NASA\u2019s current plan to return astronauts to the moon in 2024 could be modified to seek out sites to manufacture solar satellites. During the past decade, satellites orbiting the moon have discovered enormous caves, called lava tubes, which could house these factories and protect them from the radiation and wild temperature swings on the surface. The interiors of some of these caves are over a mile high and many miles long. Other lunar satellites have analyzed metal ores on the surface that can be processed and used to build solar satellite components. They\u2019ve even found ice in deep craters. Once processed, this would sustain the astronauts, and would provide rocket fuel to launch the components.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIf the United States did pursue such projects, we would be joining a new space race that\u2019s already in progress. China announced plans this year to build its own solar satellites, which could allow it to dominate today\u2019s $4 trillion electricity market, just as it dominates the solar panel market today. But because our space tech is so much better than China\u2019s, our solar satellites could grab that market \u2014 and the high-wage aerospace jobs that would come with it \u2014 before 2030.Five myths about the moonThen there\u2019s the Green New Deal, which calls for trillions of taxpayer dollars to be spent developing an as-yet unknown technology to cut America\u2019s carbon dioxide emissions and save the planet. We produce only 15 percent of worldwide emissions, but we could sell our solar satellites and their fishnet-like suspended ground antennas to all the nations on Earth. Farming and ranching could safely continue beneath these antennas, while trillions of income tax dollars could flow into, instead of out of, U.S. federal coffers.Congress could tell NASA to get the first assembly station and solar satellite prototype in orbit by 2024 with, say, an extra $20 billion a year for a decade. That $200 billion is big bucks, but it\u2019s far from the GND trillions. As a comparative percentage of today\u2019s gross domestic product, the Apollo program would cost $702.3 billion today. Once that solar sat infrastructure is in place, it\u2019s very likely that private investors would surface to take over this technology, just as they\u2019ve done with NASA\u2019s communications satellites.Congress could hold early hearings on this topic in December, during the next big U.N. climate meeting (COP 25) in Chile. Mankins, Jaffe and others could testify, along with the head of NASA. Thunberg herself might be glad to learn that the U.S. Congress and NASA want to bring her dreams back from the moon. Some say that\u2019s where all the lost things go. It starts with a technology that we've been working on for decades. How NASA could help stop climate change with solar satellites",
        "author": "Eugene Meyers"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8807",
        "date": "2017-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/05/i-wanted-to-serve-these-deaf-men-helped-nasa-understand-motion-sickness-in-space/",
        "text": "Barron Gulak remembers one experiment,\u00a0which did not take place in a lab.In 1964, Gulak\u00a0and the other test subjects for the research were sent out on a boat, which traveled through rough waters off the coast Nova Scotia.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightReally rough waters.Just super bad.Listen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d: For more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More optionsThe ship rolled and pitched about in a storm, tilting back and forth. But those who\u2019d volunteered for the research were immune to motion sickness.\u201cHonestly, it was a wonderful time,\u201d said Gulak, who, along with the other\u00a0research test subjects, is deaf.Story continues below advertisementIt is, however, probably safe to assume that those who were conducting the research, who were not immune to motion sickness, did not share this view.Advertisement\u201cWe were enjoying ourselves,\u201d Gulak recalled. \u201cWe actually had meals during the storm. And when they saw us eating, it made them even more sick, and they were vomiting.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteFor years, Gulak and others took part in\u00a0research conducted by the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine, conducted during the early days of the American space program more than a half-century ago. By extension, these test subjects helped NASA, which sponsored the work, according to Bill Barry,\u00a0NASA\u2019s chief historian.\u00a0They spent days in rotating rooms. They went up on parabolic flights, floating in zero gravity. And they rocked on that boat out in the angry waters.A group of deaf men participated in a series of experiments to help researchers understand how humans could survive in space. (Gallaudet University)\u201cThey were interested in researching balance and motion sickness, sea sickness and the like. That kind of thing,\u201d said 79-year-old Harry Larson, who took part in the research. \u201cBecause NASA wanted to know more about how man could perform in a zero gravity environment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe research and the stories of the participants are detailed in an on-campus exhibit at Gallaudet University, which opened in April.\u201cI\u2019m a red-blooded American,\u201d Gulak said. \u201cI wanted to serve our country the best that I could. Being that I\u2019m deaf, I could not join the military. \u2026 It was my way of serving.\u201d View this post on Instagram A post shared by GallaudetU (@gallaudetu)\nThe research has deep ties with Gallaudet University, the nation\u2019s premier college for the deaf and hard of hearing. Many of those who participated were selected when officials came to the Washington, D.C., campus in search of\u00a0test subjects.\u201cAll of those experiments we went through, none of us got sick,\u201d said 80-year-old David Myers, another participant. \u201cThere would be two groups, my group and the hearing group, and the hearing group, many of them would always get sick. And we never got sick. So that, essentially, was the whole purpose of research, was to find out ways to prevent motion sickness.\u201dHere\u2019s the gist of how this all came to be: In 1961, a doctor named Ashton Graybiel and other personnel from the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine visited Gallaudet, Jean Bergey, associate director of the Drs. John S. & Betty J. Schuchman Deaf Documentary Center, said in an email to The Washington Post.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOfficials tested more than 100 students, faculty and staff and narrowed the group down to a handful who were selected, which was mostly made up\u00a0of students. The research with that group continued for years.When Henrietta Lacks had cervical cancer, it was a \u2018death sentence.\u2019 Her cells would help change that.\u201cAll but one of the selected test subjects became deaf from spinal meningitis, which impacted their inner ear physiology,\u201d Bergey wrote in an online post on the National Air and Space Museum website. \u201cThis meant they could endure motion and gravitational forces that make most people nauseous.\u201dShe continued: \u201cThe ability to withstand intense movement turned the so-called \u2018labyrinthine defect\u2019 into a valuable research asset \u2014 no matter the test of equilibrium, the deaf participants simply never got sick.\u201dThe test subjects, Bergey wrote, were selected for \u201cweightlessness, balance, and motion sickness experiments.\u201d\u201cHarry Larson, one of the research participants, explained, \u2018We were different in a way they needed,'\u201d she wrote. \u201cIndeed, their difference made it possible for researchers to explore human reactions to weightless environments and extreme motion and to better understand the complexity of entangled human sensory systems.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBergey said in an email that she wasn\u2019t aware of any other research projects that involved Gallaudet and the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine or NASA.Hearing loss wasn\u2019t really a factor in the research, said Myers, one of the participants. Instead, those who were involved didn\u2019t have a functioning vestibular system.(Do you know what the vestibular system is? It\u2019s a\u00a0pretty neat thing, science-wise. The participants didn\u2019t have functioning vestibular systems, which meant their balance and sense of movement were\u00a0affected, and they didn\u2019t get motion sick.)Myers also explained in an email that this happened at a time when \u201cinterpreter services was neither a right nor expected by our group.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cAbout the only interpreting made available was by hearing family members who by growing up in a deaf family learned sign language and could serve as interpreter for a deaf family member,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSome churches would ask family members to interpret church services for their deaf members. Interpreting as an occupation was unheard of as interpreter jobs did not exist.\u201dAdvertisementThe group for Gallaudet, he wrote, participated\u00a0in the\u00a0research with \u201climited preparation and understanding of the tasks at hand.\u201d\u201cBrief written instructions were often provided \u00a0which focused \u00a0mostly on what we were supposed to do rather than providing an understanding of the nature of the tasks,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThis lack of interpreter services was a reflection of the times rather than any denial of that need for the services.\u201dStory continues below advertisement(Some interviews for this story, including in-person conversations with Myers, Larson and Gulak, were done with through interpreters.)Larson remembers when the Navy came to the Gallaudet campus, looking for volunteers to be part of a space research program. At the time, he was a senior at the university; it was the spring of 1961. Larson volunteered, he said, \u201cjust for fun.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cOverall, I have to say, I was really pleased to be able to go on the different trips,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was an adventure to us. We certainly weren\u2019t thinking about any of the danger. It was more of like, fun things to do.\u201dLarson was also on the ship that was tossed in waters off Nova Scotia and remembers traveling to Ohio for zero-gravity flights. He recalled one project, in which he had to stand up against a post. He was strapped to the post with Velcro, it was the first time he\u2019d seen the material. Larson said he spent hours like that, while others took pictures of his eyes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThat was really tough,\u201d he said, \u201cjust having to stand for that long.\u201dMyers, another one of the subjects, recalled a rotating room, where those involved in the research would stay \u2014 even to eat and sleep \u2014 for days. Initially, he said, it was tough to walk, but by the second or third day, the research subjects started to adapt.Advertisement\u201cIt was a lot of work. A lot of hard work,\u201d he said. \u201cFor\u00a0the [hearing group of participants], many of them got extremely ill in that room.\u201dMyers said he once met with John Glenn, a Marine Corps fighter pilot and the first American to orbit Earth. Glenn, he recalled, told Myers that he had heard about the Gallaudet research subjects.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOnce he got word that there was a group of deaf folks who would never get sick,\u201d Myers said, \u201che quote \u2018envied\u2019 us.\u201dResearch on this type of stuff can be found today at the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory, located at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Paul DiZio, an associate professor at Brandeis and associate director of the lab, attended the opening of the Gallaudet exhibit and told the crowd that the work of these research subjects comes up quite frequently, even decades\u00a0later.Advertisement\u201cThe conversation gets difficult, and we forget where we are, and\u00a0we say to ourselves, well, what do we know?\u201d he said. \u201cWhat it comes down to is what we learned from these people.\u201dRead more Retropolis:Hillary Clinton decried the forces that cost her the presidency. So did Andrew Jackson.A young photographer took this harrowing image of the Vietnam War. He didn\u2019t live to see it published.The U.S. has invaded Britain just once. It didn\u2019t go well.Great God, he is alive!\u201d\u00a0The first man executed by electric chair died slower than Thomas Edison expected.Gen. George Patton\u2019s wife put a Hawaiian curse on his ex-mistress. She was dead within days. Rotating rooms. A boat out in waters off Nova Scotia. Zero-g flights. This is how U.S. officials researched motion sickness, using test subjects who were immune to it.  \u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space",
        "author": "Sarah Larimer"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space (WP: Retropolis) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8808",
        "date": "2017-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/05/i-wanted-to-serve-these-deaf-men-helped-nasa-understand-motion-sickness-in-space/",
        "text": "Barron Gulak remembers one experiment,\u00a0which did not take place in a lab.In 1964, Gulak\u00a0and the other test subjects for the research were sent out on a boat, which traveled through rough waters off the coast Nova Scotia.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightReally rough waters.Just super bad.Listen to this story on \u201cRetropod\u201d: For more forgotten stories from history, listen online or subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | More optionsThe ship rolled and pitched about in a storm, tilting back and forth. But those who\u2019d volunteered for the research were immune to motion sickness.\u201cHonestly, it was a wonderful time,\u201d said Gulak, who, along with the other\u00a0research test subjects, is deaf.Story continues below advertisementIt is, however, probably safe to assume that those who were conducting the research, who were not immune to motion sickness, did not share this view.Advertisement\u201cWe were enjoying ourselves,\u201d Gulak recalled. \u201cWe actually had meals during the storm. And when they saw us eating, it made them even more sick, and they were vomiting.\u201d\u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019: The amazing history of the iconic Apollo 13 misquoteFor years, Gulak and others took part in\u00a0research conducted by the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine, conducted during the early days of the American space program more than a half-century ago. By extension, these test subjects helped NASA, which sponsored the work, according to Bill Barry,\u00a0NASA\u2019s chief historian.\u00a0They spent days in rotating rooms. They went up on parabolic flights, floating in zero gravity. And they rocked on that boat out in the angry waters.A group of deaf men participated in a series of experiments to help researchers understand how humans could survive in space. (Gallaudet University)\u201cThey were interested in researching balance and motion sickness, sea sickness and the like. That kind of thing,\u201d said 79-year-old Harry Larson, who took part in the research. \u201cBecause NASA wanted to know more about how man could perform in a zero gravity environment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe research and the stories of the participants are detailed in an on-campus exhibit at Gallaudet University, which opened in April.\u201cI\u2019m a red-blooded American,\u201d Gulak said. \u201cI wanted to serve our country the best that I could. Being that I\u2019m deaf, I could not join the military. \u2026 It was my way of serving.\u201d View this post on Instagram A post shared by GallaudetU (@gallaudetu)\nThe research has deep ties with Gallaudet University, the nation\u2019s premier college for the deaf and hard of hearing. Many of those who participated were selected when officials came to the Washington, D.C., campus in search of\u00a0test subjects.\u201cAll of those experiments we went through, none of us got sick,\u201d said 80-year-old David Myers, another participant. \u201cThere would be two groups, my group and the hearing group, and the hearing group, many of them would always get sick. And we never got sick. So that, essentially, was the whole purpose of research, was to find out ways to prevent motion sickness.\u201dHere\u2019s the gist of how this all came to be: In 1961, a doctor named Ashton Graybiel and other personnel from the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine visited Gallaudet, Jean Bergey, associate director of the Drs. John S. & Betty J. Schuchman Deaf Documentary Center, said in an email to The Washington Post.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOfficials tested more than 100 students, faculty and staff and narrowed the group down to a handful who were selected, which was mostly made up\u00a0of students. The research with that group continued for years.When Henrietta Lacks had cervical cancer, it was a \u2018death sentence.\u2019 Her cells would help change that.\u201cAll but one of the selected test subjects became deaf from spinal meningitis, which impacted their inner ear physiology,\u201d Bergey wrote in an online post on the National Air and Space Museum website. \u201cThis meant they could endure motion and gravitational forces that make most people nauseous.\u201dShe continued: \u201cThe ability to withstand intense movement turned the so-called \u2018labyrinthine defect\u2019 into a valuable research asset \u2014 no matter the test of equilibrium, the deaf participants simply never got sick.\u201dThe test subjects, Bergey wrote, were selected for \u201cweightlessness, balance, and motion sickness experiments.\u201d\u201cHarry Larson, one of the research participants, explained, \u2018We were different in a way they needed,'\u201d she wrote. \u201cIndeed, their difference made it possible for researchers to explore human reactions to weightless environments and extreme motion and to better understand the complexity of entangled human sensory systems.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBergey said in an email that she wasn\u2019t aware of any other research projects that involved Gallaudet and the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine or NASA.Hearing loss wasn\u2019t really a factor in the research, said Myers, one of the participants. Instead, those who were involved didn\u2019t have a functioning vestibular system.(Do you know what the vestibular system is? It\u2019s a\u00a0pretty neat thing, science-wise. The participants didn\u2019t have functioning vestibular systems, which meant their balance and sense of movement were\u00a0affected, and they didn\u2019t get motion sick.)Myers also explained in an email that this happened at a time when \u201cinterpreter services was neither a right nor expected by our group.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cAbout the only interpreting made available was by hearing family members who by growing up in a deaf family learned sign language and could serve as interpreter for a deaf family member,\u201d he wrote. \u201cSome churches would ask family members to interpret church services for their deaf members. Interpreting as an occupation was unheard of as interpreter jobs did not exist.\u201dAdvertisementThe group for Gallaudet, he wrote, participated\u00a0in the\u00a0research with \u201climited preparation and understanding of the tasks at hand.\u201d\u201cBrief written instructions were often provided \u00a0which focused \u00a0mostly on what we were supposed to do rather than providing an understanding of the nature of the tasks,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThis lack of interpreter services was a reflection of the times rather than any denial of that need for the services.\u201dStory continues below advertisement(Some interviews for this story, including in-person conversations with Myers, Larson and Gulak, were done with through interpreters.)Larson remembers when the Navy came to the Gallaudet campus, looking for volunteers to be part of a space research program. At the time, he was a senior at the university; it was the spring of 1961. Larson volunteered, he said, \u201cjust for fun.\u201dAdvertisement\u201cOverall, I have to say, I was really pleased to be able to go on the different trips,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was an adventure to us. We certainly weren\u2019t thinking about any of the danger. It was more of like, fun things to do.\u201dLarson was also on the ship that was tossed in waters off Nova Scotia and remembers traveling to Ohio for zero-gravity flights. He recalled one project, in which he had to stand up against a post. He was strapped to the post with Velcro, it was the first time he\u2019d seen the material. Larson said he spent hours like that, while others took pictures of his eyes.Story continues below advertisement\u201cThat was really tough,\u201d he said, \u201cjust having to stand for that long.\u201dMyers, another one of the subjects, recalled a rotating room, where those involved in the research would stay \u2014 even to eat and sleep \u2014 for days. Initially, he said, it was tough to walk, but by the second or third day, the research subjects started to adapt.Advertisement\u201cIt was a lot of work. A lot of hard work,\u201d he said. \u201cFor\u00a0the [hearing group of participants], many of them got extremely ill in that room.\u201dMyers said he once met with John Glenn, a Marine Corps fighter pilot and the first American to orbit Earth. Glenn, he recalled, told Myers that he had heard about the Gallaudet research subjects.Story continues below advertisement\u201cOnce he got word that there was a group of deaf folks who would never get sick,\u201d Myers said, \u201che quote \u2018envied\u2019 us.\u201dResearch on this type of stuff can be found today at the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory, located at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Paul DiZio, an associate professor at Brandeis and associate director of the lab, attended the opening of the Gallaudet exhibit and told the crowd that the work of these research subjects comes up quite frequently, even decades\u00a0later.Advertisement\u201cThe conversation gets difficult, and we forget where we are, and\u00a0we say to ourselves, well, what do we know?\u201d he said. \u201cWhat it comes down to is what we learned from these people.\u201dRead more Retropolis:Hillary Clinton decried the forces that cost her the presidency. So did Andrew Jackson.A young photographer took this harrowing image of the Vietnam War. He didn\u2019t live to see it published.The U.S. has invaded Britain just once. It didn\u2019t go well.Great God, he is alive!\u201d\u00a0The first man executed by electric chair died slower than Thomas Edison expected.Gen. George Patton\u2019s wife put a Hawaiian curse on his ex-mistress. She was dead within days. Rotating rooms. A boat out in waters off Nova Scotia. Zero-g flights. This is how U.S. officials researched motion sickness, using test subjects who were immune to it.  \u2018I wanted to serve\u2019: These deaf men helped NASA understand motion sickness in space",
        "author": "Sarah Larimer"
    },
    {
        "title": "T Suggests: Perfect Quilts, a New (Affordable) Design Fair and More (NYT: T Magazine) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8809",
        "date": "2019-04-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/t-magazine/stephen-malkmus-apc-quilts-editors-picks.html",
        "text": "A roundup of things our editors \u2014 and a few contributors \u2014 are excited about in a given week. A roundup of things our editors \u2014 and a few contributors \u2014 are excited about in a given week. The artist Peter Shire\u2019s rainbow-colored abstract sculptures often sell for more than the price of a modest car. But at Echo Park Pottery, his ceramics studio in Los Angeles, he also makes chunky, colorfully glazed mugs that go for under $100. Pieces from both parts of Shire\u2019s practice will be for sale in New York next month at the new design fair Object & Thing, whose founder, Abby Bangser, a former artistic director of the Frieze art fairs, hopes to \u201cbreak down the hierarchy between art and design objects by exhibiting everything equally together.\u201d Held in the Brooklyn venue 99 Scott from May 3 to May 5, the event will showcase over 200 objects, consigned by 32 top-tier international galleries and created by a diverse range of artist-designers and designer-artists. There will be shaggy fabric-adorned chairs by the American painter Lucy Dodd, NASA-inspired vessels by the artist Tom Sachs, kachina dolls by the Navajo artists of Shiprock Santa Fe gallery, and fabric sculptures by the Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes.",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run venture, NASA document shows (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8810",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/11/the-trump-administration-wants-to-turn-the-international-space-station-into-a-commercially-run-venture/",
        "text": "The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting\u00a0real estate\u00a0venture run not by the government, but by private industry.The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe decision to end direct federal support for the ISS in 2025 does not imply that the platform itself will be deorbited at that time\u00a0\u2014 it is possible that industry could continue to operate certain elements or capabilities of the ISS as part of a future commercial platform,\u201d the document states. \u201cNASA will expand international and commercial partnerships over the next seven years in order to ensure continued human access to and presence in low Earth orbit.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its budget request, to be released Monday, the administration would request $150 million in fiscal year 2019, with more in additional years \u201cto enable the development and maturation of commercial entities and capabilities which will ensure that commercial successors to the ISS \u2014 potentially including elements of the ISS \u2014 are operational when they are needed.\u201dThe plan to privatize the station is likely to run into a wall of opposition, especially\u00a0because\u00a0the United States has spent nearly $100 billion to build and operate it. Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said he hoped recent reports of NASA\u2019s decision to end funding of the station \u201cprove as unfounded as Bigfoot.\u201d He said the decision was the result of \u201cnumskulls\u201d at the Office of Management and Budget.\u201cAs a fiscal conservative, you know one of the dumbest things you can to is cancel programs after billions in investment when there is still serious usable life ahead,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen asked about the possibility of a public-private\u00a0partnership, he said, \u201cI think all of us are open to reasonable proposals that are cost effective and that are utilizing the investments we made in a way that maximize their effectiveness.\"President Trump said on Dec. 11 that the U.S. space policy is about \"dreaming big\" and \"reclaiming America's proud destiny in space.\" (The Washington Post)NASA is studying whether the life of the station could be extended to 2028 or beyond, and\u00a0Cruz said any decision should hinge on that report.But some questioned who would want to take over the station.\u201cThe ISS is built for science and human exploration, it\u2019s not built for profit seeking,\u201d said Andrew Rush, the chief executive of Made In Space, a company that uses 3-D printing to manufacture objects on the space station.Story continues below advertisementFrank Slazer, the vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association, said the plan also could prove sticky with the station\u2019s international partners.Advertisement\u201cIt will be very hard to turn ISS into a truly commercial outpost because of the international agreements that the United States is involved in,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s inherently always going to be an international construct that requires U.S. government involvement and multinational cooperation.\u201dBoeing, which has been involved with the station since 1995, operates the station for NASA, which costs the agency $3 billion to $4 billion annually. Last month, as reports circulated about NASA pulling the plug on the station, Mark Mulqueen, Boeing\u2019s space station program manager, said \u201cwalking away from the International Space Station now would be a mistake, threatening American leadership and hurting the commercial market as well as the scientific community.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a statement on Sunday, he said that \"handing over a rare national asset to commercial enterprises before the private sector is ready to support it could have disastrous consequences for American leadership in space and for the chances of building space-focused private enterprise.\"AdvertisementThe internal NASA document has scant details over how the privatization of the station would work. As it prepares a transition plan, the White House said it \u201cwill request market analysis and business plans from the commercial sector and solicit plans from commercial industry.\u201dThe transition of the station would mark another bold step for NASA in turning over access to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit to the private sector so that the space agency could focus its resources on exploring deep space. Under President George W. Bush, NASA took the first steps to outsource cargo supply flights to the station to SpaceX and Orbital ATK. President Barack Obama extended that model to hire Boeing and SpaceX to fly astronauts there.Story continues below advertisementNow, the Trump administration wants to push that public-private partnership even further to encourage \u201cthe emergence of an environment in [low Earth orbit] where NASA is one of many customers of a non-governmental human space flight managed and operated enterprise, while providing a smooth and uninterrupted transition,\u201d the document said.It didn\u2019t immediately propose what private enterprise might do with the station or what companies might take it over.NASA astronaut and Expedition 51 commander Peggy Whitson handed over command of the International Space Station to Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin on June 1 (Reuters) The White House's plan to end federal support of the orbiting laboratory and privatize it would probably run into strong opposition. The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run venture, NASA document shows",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run venture, NASA document shows (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8811",
        "date": "2018-02-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/11/the-trump-administration-wants-to-turn-the-international-space-station-into-a-commercially-run-venture/",
        "text": "The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a kind of orbiting\u00a0real estate\u00a0venture run not by the government, but by private industry.The White House plans to stop funding the station after 2024, ending direct federal support of the orbiting laboratory. But it does not intend to abandon the orbiting laboratory altogether and is working on a transition plan that could turn the station over to the private sector, according to an internal NASA document obtained by The Washington Post. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cThe decision to end direct federal support for the ISS in 2025 does not imply that the platform itself will be deorbited at that time\u00a0\u2014 it is possible that industry could continue to operate certain elements or capabilities of the ISS as part of a future commercial platform,\u201d the document states. \u201cNASA will expand international and commercial partnerships over the next seven years in order to ensure continued human access to and presence in low Earth orbit.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its budget request, to be released Monday, the administration would request $150 million in fiscal year 2019, with more in additional years \u201cto enable the development and maturation of commercial entities and capabilities which will ensure that commercial successors to the ISS \u2014 potentially including elements of the ISS \u2014 are operational when they are needed.\u201dThe plan to privatize the station is likely to run into a wall of opposition, especially\u00a0because\u00a0the United States has spent nearly $100 billion to build and operate it. Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said he hoped recent reports of NASA\u2019s decision to end funding of the station \u201cprove as unfounded as Bigfoot.\u201d He said the decision was the result of \u201cnumskulls\u201d at the Office of Management and Budget.\u201cAs a fiscal conservative, you know one of the dumbest things you can to is cancel programs after billions in investment when there is still serious usable life ahead,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhen asked about the possibility of a public-private\u00a0partnership, he said, \u201cI think all of us are open to reasonable proposals that are cost effective and that are utilizing the investments we made in a way that maximize their effectiveness.\"President Trump said on Dec. 11 that the U.S. space policy is about \"dreaming big\" and \"reclaiming America's proud destiny in space.\" (The Washington Post)NASA is studying whether the life of the station could be extended to 2028 or beyond, and\u00a0Cruz said any decision should hinge on that report.But some questioned who would want to take over the station.\u201cThe ISS is built for science and human exploration, it\u2019s not built for profit seeking,\u201d said Andrew Rush, the chief executive of Made In Space, a company that uses 3-D printing to manufacture objects on the space station.Story continues below advertisementFrank Slazer, the vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association, said the plan also could prove sticky with the station\u2019s international partners.Advertisement\u201cIt will be very hard to turn ISS into a truly commercial outpost because of the international agreements that the United States is involved in,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s inherently always going to be an international construct that requires U.S. government involvement and multinational cooperation.\u201dBoeing, which has been involved with the station since 1995, operates the station for NASA, which costs the agency $3 billion to $4 billion annually. Last month, as reports circulated about NASA pulling the plug on the station, Mark Mulqueen, Boeing\u2019s space station program manager, said \u201cwalking away from the International Space Station now would be a mistake, threatening American leadership and hurting the commercial market as well as the scientific community.\u201dStory continues below advertisementIn a statement on Sunday, he said that \"handing over a rare national asset to commercial enterprises before the private sector is ready to support it could have disastrous consequences for American leadership in space and for the chances of building space-focused private enterprise.\"AdvertisementThe internal NASA document has scant details over how the privatization of the station would work. As it prepares a transition plan, the White House said it \u201cwill request market analysis and business plans from the commercial sector and solicit plans from commercial industry.\u201dThe transition of the station would mark another bold step for NASA in turning over access to what\u2019s known as low Earth orbit to the private sector so that the space agency could focus its resources on exploring deep space. Under President George W. Bush, NASA took the first steps to outsource cargo supply flights to the station to SpaceX and Orbital ATK. President Barack Obama extended that model to hire Boeing and SpaceX to fly astronauts there.Story continues below advertisementNow, the Trump administration wants to push that public-private partnership even further to encourage \u201cthe emergence of an environment in [low Earth orbit] where NASA is one of many customers of a non-governmental human space flight managed and operated enterprise, while providing a smooth and uninterrupted transition,\u201d the document said.It didn\u2019t immediately propose what private enterprise might do with the station or what companies might take it over.NASA astronaut and Expedition 51 commander Peggy Whitson handed over command of the International Space Station to Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin on June 1 (Reuters) The White House's plan to end federal support of the orbiting laboratory and privatize it would probably run into strong opposition. The Trump administration wants to turn the International Space Station into a commercially run venture, NASA document shows",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | The Energy 202: NASA and NOAA are still talking about climate change. That's notable. (WP: The 202s) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8812",
        "date": "2020-07-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-energy-202/2017/12/19/the-energy-202-nasa-and-noaa-are-still-talking-about-climate-change-that-s-notable/5a3831ab30fb0469e883fc4d/",
        "text": "with Paulina FiroziTHE LIGHTBULBWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNote to readers: Dino is on vacation this week. Brady Dennis, a\u00a0Washington Post national affairs correspondent focused on the environment, science and public health\u00a0wrote today's Lightbulb. Follow him\u00a0here.A sprawling report published last week, as thousands of researchers gathered for a scientific conference in New Orleans, stretched more than 150 pages but its title carried a clear message: \u201cExplaining Extreme Events in 2016 from a Climate Perspective.\u201d In chapter after chapter, the report\u00a0details how events such as heat waves in Alaska and intense droughts in parts of Africa probably would not have happened \u2014 or\u00a0certainly wouldn't have been as severe \u2014 without the human activity fueling the warming of the planet. Numerous authors behind the report work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat same week, NASA's social media feed was busy as usual, tweeting out an animated series about the consequences of climate change and highlighting data showing that last month \u201cwas the third-warmest November in the 137 years of modern record-keeping.\u201dGot a minute for #climatechange? This animated series breaks down global warming, sea level rise, Greenland's ice melt and more to the basics: https://t.co/mvvEbremyS pic.twitter.com/7LxFCRXMkJ\u2014 NASA Climate (@NASAClimate) December 15, 2017\n\nThe first 10\u00a0months of the Trump administration have not exactly seen a warm embrace of\u00a0climate scientists. At the Environmental Protection Agency, officials have\u00a0forbidden agency scientists\u00a0from presenting about climate change at a conference,\u00a0removed\u00a0climate science information from the website and\u00a0repeatedly floated\u00a0the idea of a \u201cred team, blue team\u201d exercise to relitigate what most of the scientific world considers a consensus about the role humans play in fueling the globe's warming.At the Interior Department, the inspector general has said the agency should be paying more attention to the \u201ccrosscutting, complex\u201d problems posed by climate change. This year, the agency\u00a0took offline\u00a0an ecological assessment of the impacts of climate change in the Southwest.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMeanwhile, in an odd bit of cognitive dissonance, scientists at NASA and NOAA have been able to carry on with their climate research \u2014 and to talk about it freely and publicly, even on government social media accounts.\u201cNobody has tried to interfere with anything we\u2019re doing. Nobody has made any comments on it,\u201d said\u00a0Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a prolific tweeter about climate change. \u201cNobody has told us\u00a0to stop doing it, so we\u2019re just going to continue on doing the best science we can ... and communicate those results to as wide an audience of interested people as we can.\u201dNASA employs more than 18,000 people across its nine centers and seven test and research facilities. NOAA employs another 12,000, more than half of whom are scientists and engineers \u201cstudying and monitoring our evolving planet,\u201d according to the agency.GISTEMP 2017 annual mean will almost certainly (>98%) be the second warmest on record. pic.twitter.com/BcSNtiPT2F\u2014 Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) December 18, 2017\n\nSo, why the difference across agencies?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOne potential explanation is that unlike at EPA or Interior, both NASA and NOAA continue to operate without confirmed leaders in place.Barry Myers, chief executive of the private forecasting firm AccuWeather, is President Trump's choice to head NOAA. But he\u00a0has drawn sharp criticism\u00a0from past agency leaders over potential conflicts of interest. Trump's pick to head NASA, former pilot and conservative Rep. Jim Bridenstine\u00a0(R-Okla.), has\u00a0expressed doubts\u00a0on the House floor about the extent to which humans contribute to climate change. Both have said that they will not interfere in the work of agency scientists, but the Senate has yet to confirm either nominee.Aside from leadership, there's another reason NASA and NOAA have experienced relatively little political meddling this year: They are not policymaking agencies. Environmental rules and regulations emanate largely from the EPA and the Interior Department, and the Trump administration has focused its energy there in an effort to scale back Obama-era efforts to regulate climate change and reduce\u00a0drilling on public\u00a0lands.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe White House might not care for some of the scientific conclusions coming out of NASA and NOAA, but it appears to have made few attempts to censor those findings. It\u00a0even\u00a0signed off last month\u00a0on a dire government\u00a0report calling human activity the dominant driver of global warming.Even so, says Michael Halpern,\u00a0deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Trump administration is attacking science on a broader scale.\u201cNOAA and NASA scientists\u2019 work does not happen in a vacuum,\u201d he said in an email. \u201cScientists work on projects across agencies, so political interference in scientific work at the Department of Energy has a ripple effect at NASA and NOAA. At NOAA and NASA, targeted budget cuts and staffing reductions would further imperil the federal research enterprise. If the money and people aren\u2019t there to do the research and collect the data, there\u2019s no science to censor or spin.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHe added that the Trump administration's proposals to slash scientific budgets could have far-reaching consequences, making researchers \u201cless likely to propose ambitious projects, or to pose innovative research questions, when they feel that their entire field of research is about to get hacked to pieces.\u201dFor now, the Trump administration's mixed reactions to climate science and the effects of climate change continue.Last week,\u00a0Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, the acting administrator of NOAA, said the findings in a new report from federal scientists about unprecedented warming in the Arctic were important for reasons that \u201cdirectly relate to the priorities of this administration\u201d \u2014 namely, its implications for national and economic security.Story continues below advertisementOn Monday, however,\u00a0Trump\u00a0unveiled\u00a0his national security strategy. In a notable break from the past, climate change was no longer listed as a serious threat.AdvertisementThis former\u00a0foreign policy adviser to then-President Obama\u00a0responded this way:The problem with removal of climate as a national security threat is that it willfully ignores the fact of extreme weather events, migration flows and conflict that are significantly exacerbated by a changing climate. Not to mention cost to US leadership in abandoning Paris https://t.co/PjsPlW8ACR\u2014 Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) December 18, 2017\n\n \n \n \n You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment. \n \n \n Not a regular subscriber? \n \n \n \n \n \n \n SIGN UP NOW \n \n \n \n \n \n\n POWER PLAYS\n--EPA starts process of\u00a0replacing\u00a0CPP: The Trump administration formally announced that it's\u00a0considering replacing\u00a0the Clean Power Plan -- a landmark effort by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.In an \"advanced notice of proposed rule-making,\" which is the first step in the lengthy process of issuing new policy, EPA\u00a0 requested\u00a0public comment for 60 days \"on the proper and respective roles of the state and federal governments\" in establishing limits on\u00a0greenhouse gases, reported Inside Climate Wire. Before the notice, it was unclear whether EPA would simply seek to repeal the plan without trying to replacement (always the trickier part, politically speaking).\u00a0Read the notice here via E&E News.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cToday\u2019s move ensures adequate and early opportunity for public comment from all stakeholders about next steps the Agency might take to limit greenhouse gases from stationary sources, in a way that properly stays within the law, and the bounds of the authority provided to EPA by Congress,\u201d EPA head Scott Pruitt said Monday.The notice's \"main effect may be to leave the Obama rule in limbo,\" writes Georgina Gustin. \"The Clean Power Plan was\u00a0put on hold\u00a0by the Supreme Court pending litigation that was under way before\u00a0Donald Trump\u00a0took office on a promise to undo it.Pruitt has said he wants to repeal the Obama plan, but it's clear the agency is also weighing replacement options\u2014options that would weaken regulations. The [CPP]\u00a0allows states to design their own strategies for cutting emissions, but Monday's notice signals that the Trump EPA believes states have 'considerable flexibility'\u00a0in implementing emissions-cutting plans and, in some cases, can make them less stringent.\"AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe EPA is required to regulate\u00a0emissions in some fashion after a 2009 \"endangerment finding\" by the Supreme Court ruling that carbon dioxide is a threat to human health.This a high-stakes process with strong advocates and detractors on both sides.Here's how it\u2019s playing:\u00a0\u00a0David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the move \u201cjust another \u2018repeal and replace\u2019 scam.\u201dEarthjustice President Trip Van Noppen said the EPA is \u201cstubbornly marching backwards\u201d and warned the notice suggests Pruitt \u201cmay not put anything at all in the Plan's place \u2014 or may delay for years and issue a do-nothing substitute that won't make meaningful cuts in the carbon pollution that's driving dangerous climate change.\u201dFrom the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association's Jim Matheson:\u00a0\u201cWe are pleased that EPA has taken this necessary step to replace the Clean Power Plan. America\u2019s electric cooperatives support the development of a common-sense, durable policy that is focused on improvements that are specific to each electric-generating unit.\"Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber\u2019s Global Energy Institute said the move would start \u201cthe process of developing a better way to approach greenhouse gas regulations than the Clean Power Plan.\u201dSome colorful tweets were also making the rounds:Ouch, from the Sierra Club:Our Nation\u2019s Biggest Climate Action Is Under Attack. Take Action to Defend It: https://t.co/9rv9ZrUXCO #ProtectCPP pic.twitter.com/u0iPbhivc7\u2014 Sierra Club (@SierraClub) December 18, 2017\n\nFrom the group founded by Al Gore:Say \u201cno\u201d to the administration\u2019s plan to repeal America\u2019s Clean Power Plan! https://t.co/VTHb61gkYO #ClimateChange #ProtectCPP pic.twitter.com/YRwausSHPD\u2014 Climate Reality (@ClimateReality) December 18, 2017\n\n-- Anybody there? Meanwhile, Pruitt reportedly had his office swept for listening devices, reports The Hill. \"The EPA paid $3,000 in March to Edwin Steinmetz Associates to do a \u201csweep for covert/illegal surveillance devices\u201d documents provided to the publication show, reports Timothy Cama. \"The EPA source who\u00a0provided the documents on the condition of anonymity said the sweep, which came weeks after Pruitt\u2019s arrival at the agency, did not uncover any bugs ...\u00a0Like other security measures, the EPA defended the surveillance sweep as a response to unprecedented threats against Pruitt, whose aggressive deregulatory agenda has angered environmentalists and many others.\u00a0'Administrator Pruitt has received an unprecedented amount of threats against him and security decisions are made by EPA\u2019s Protective Service Detail,'\u00a0EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said, noting Obama EPA head Lisa Jackson also conducted a similar security sweep.President Trump spoke Dec. 18 on what his administration has done and what he plans to do to protect national security. Here are key moments from his speech. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)-- Climate change, omitted: In a speech yesterday\u00a0focused on U.S. global economic dominance, and an \u201cAmerica First,\u201d strategy, President Trump dropped climate change and global warming from his new national security strategy. The move signaled a departure\u00a0from the Obama administration, which\u00a0in 2015 listed climate change as an \"urgent and growing threat to our national security,\" the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile,\u00a0Trump boasted of his intention to withdraw from the \u201cvery expensive and unfair Paris climate accord,\u201d report\u00a0The Post\u2019s Anne Gearan and Steven Mufson.Gearan and Mufson note that \u201csupporters of the accord say it is a small step toward slowing global warming that could prove catastrophic economically as well as from a climate view. And Obama repeatedly argued that denial of climate science would undercut renewable energy technologies that the U.S. economy needs to remain competitive in the future.\u201dThe AP notes that Trump's new strategy does reference the environment in some parts,\u00a0pointing out the document \"recognizes the importance of environmental stewardship\" and says \"climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system.\"Read more about the speech from The Post\u00a0herePuerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossell\u00f3 ordered a review and recount of the Hurricane Maria death toll on Dec. 18. (Monica Akhtar, Arelis Hernandez/The Washington Post)--Movement on hurricane relief aid: House lawmakers last night\u00a0released a massive a $81 billion disaster aid package, Politico reported, noting it would be the largest single funding request in response to natural disasters in the nation\u2019s history. The package, if passed by, would bring the total aid approved by lawmakers to more than $130 billion in response to this year\u2019s hurricanes and wildfires, exceeding the amount of funding that was passed following Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, Politico reported.The package also far exceeds the $44 billion in relief funding the White House requested last month.It\u2019s not\u00a0clear, Politico\u2019s Sarah Ferris and John Bresnahan report, whether lawmakers will be able to pass the package before leaving Washington at the end of the week. Ferris reported last week that Texas and Florida lawmakers were anxious about the possibility of relief aid being delayed until next year. (Congress just has a few other small items on its to-do list like passing its tax overhaul and a bill to keep the government open).-- Meanwhile, Gov. Ricardo Rossell\u00f3 has ordered a review of the deaths caused by Hurricane Maria, warning that the government\u2019s official count may be drastically underestimating storm fatalities. It's been\u00a090 days since the storm touched down on the island, and the official toll has remained at 64. But several news organizations, including the New York Times, CNN and Vox.com, have reported that the number of storm-related deaths could be more than 1,000 people.\u201cThis is about more than numbers, these are lives: real people, leaving behind loved ones and families,\u201d Rossell\u00f3 said in a statement, the Times reported early Monday.Times reporter Patricia Mazzei noted that until now, Puerto Rico\u2019s local government has defended its death count:The governor acknowledged the death toll \u201cmay be higher than the official count certified to date.\u201d His administration has spent months stubbornly defending its counting method, which has pegged the official death toll at 64. https://t.co/iEcIKf9BYN\u2014 Patricia Mazzei (@PatriciaMazzei) December 18, 2017\n\nBut Rossell\u00f3 called for the Demographic Registry and Public Safety Department to reexamine all the deaths since the storm.The Times noted that the methodology for storm death tolls can differ by state and locality -- some locations may only include direct deaths, such as drowning in storm floodst. In Puerto Rico, the report adds, some indirect deaths such as suicide are also included.-- Two members of President Trump's administration,\u00a0Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, will visit the island on Tuesday, according to Reuters.\u00a0-- FEMA pushes back on relief criticism: A spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency is dismissing a report from Refugees International that criticized the hurricane response in Puerto Rico. The Associated Press reported over the weekend that Refugees International had found sub-par relief efforts were to blame for the residents still in urgent need of housing and other resources. But agency spokesman Daniel Llargues defended the federal response, noting that FEMA\u00a0approved $1 billion in assistance, and had delivered more than 120,000 tarps, 920 generators, 56 million liters of water and 49 million meals, per the AP.-- \u201cWhy does this story sound so darned familiar?:\u201d Mother Jones\u2019s Rebecca Leber and AJ Vicens flash back to the 2009 \"Climategate\" scandal, during which emails from climate scientists were hacked and shared online in an effort to discredit the scientists who wrote them. That year, Donald Trump called into Fox News to mock the hacked emails and dismiss climate change, Leber and Vicens write.\u201cIn hindsight, the Climategate hack, clearly timed to disrupt the Copenhagen negotiations, looks like a precursor to the hack that helped shape the outcome of the 2016 election,\u201d they continue. \u201cThe parallels go beyond the hacks themselves\u2026 At the time, some observers openly wondered whether Russia might have orchestrated the Climategate hack. Investigators and other experts haven\u2019t found much to support that hypothesis\u2014the true culprit remains a mystery. [Penn state professor Michael] Mann himself has pointed to the incident\u2019s \u201ccurious connections\u201d to Russia and WikiLeaks, but he, too, notes there\u2019s no specific evidence that Moscow was to blame. Still, Mann sees other ways in which the episode was similar to what Hillary Clinton experienced in 2016. Both hacks, he notes, were \u201cintended to impact the global political scene in a significant manner.\u201dHere's what Mann tweeted last June, days after President Trump announced he planned to withdraw the United States\u00a0from the Paris climate accord, as stories poured in about Russia\u2019s meddling in the presidential election: #Russia #Wikileaks #HackedEmails #Sabotaged #ClimateAgreements. Why does this story sound so darned familiar? https://t.co/YFqChmc9B2#HSCW\u2014 Michael E. Mann (@MichaelEMann) June 3, 2017\n\nAP FACT CHECK: The energy boom didn't start with Trump (Associated Press)Senate intel committee investigating Jill Stein campaign for possible collusion with the Russians (Karoun Demirjian)Puerto Rico governor vows to make Florida Republicans pay for supporting tax bill (Miami Herald)\n THERMOMETER\n-- California is still burning:\u00a0The Thomas Fire, which has raged across Southern California for two weeks, was halfway contained on Monday. Calmer winds allowed fire crews to make progress on the blaze, which still remains on track to become the largest wildfire in the state\u2019s modern history, according to the Los Angeles Times.Cal Fire officials said the fire had burned through 271,000 acres:#ThomasFire [update] north of Santa Paula (Ventura and Santa Barbara County) is now 271,00 acres & 50% contained. Unified Command: CAL FIRE, @VCFD_PIO, @LosPadresNF, @VenturaCityFD, and Santa Barbara County Fire (@EliasonMike). https://t.co/E53h65FpCi pic.twitter.com/HDbRIvcHgA\u2014 CAL FIRE (@CAL_FIRE) December 19, 2017\n\nThe National Weather Service warned of stronger winds starting on Wednesday:Gusty N winds expected in the wake of a trough crossing the area Wed. Sundowner winds Wed night into Thu morning may create critical fire conditions for southern Santa Barbara Co. and the #ThomasFire. #CAwx #CAfire pic.twitter.com/ExHxu6oB9s\u2014 NWS Los Angeles (@NWSLosAngeles) December 19, 2017\n\nHere\u2019s an image of the fire from the NOAA\u2019s satellites:#Wildifre update: The #ThomasFire has been burning for 15 days now and is currently the 3rd largest fire in the history of #California at over 270,00 acres with 45% containment. Suomi NPP satellite captured the expansion this morning. More imagery: https://t.co/eRJpPpx698 pic.twitter.com/wu6yRg60cr\u2014 NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) December 18, 2017\n\nCal Fire officials said Monday that they are not expecting the fire to be fully contained until Jan. 7.\u00a0Weather forecasting faces a new world of challenges ahead (Eric Webster)\n LOCAL ENVIRONS\nThe power at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport was restored nearly 11 hours after the outage began on Dec. 17. (Instagram/Tariq Rasheed Ali)--The latest in Atlanta:\u00a0Georgia Power said Monday that the major power outage at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was the result of failed switchgear that caused a fire to spread to cables coming in from two substations,\u00a0per the Associated Press. The switchgear helps manage the flow of electricity.The Washington Post\u2019s Dana Hedgpeth\u00a0reported\u00a0the Department of Homeland Security said it didn't think the outage was the result of an \u201cattack or other nefarious act.\u201dBut it did\u00a0lead to another 400 canceled flights after more than 1,000 flights were grounded Sunday.Georgia Power said the utility\u2019s backup equipment was\u00a0damaged in the fire, with a spokesman saying\u00a0the company\u00a0was working to \u201cmake sure this never happens again,\u201d per The Post\u2019s Lori Aratani.\u00a0Local WSB-TV reporter Aaron Diamant shared a video from Georgia Power as crews made repairs:This is NEW VIDEO from @GeorgiaPower inside @ATLairport service tunnel where crews are working on repairs after fire caused massive Sunday blackout.@wsbtv pic.twitter.com/XcnG33EO5M\u2014 Aaron Diamant (@AaronDiamantWSB) December 18, 2017\n\n\n DAYBOOK\nComing UpThe Energy Department\u2019s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy holds a \u00a0U.S. Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium Informational\u00a0Webinar\u00a0on\u00a0Wednesday.The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Transportation & Infrastructure will hold a hearing on freight movement on\u00a0Wednesday.\n EXTRA MILEAGE\nDonors lined up Monday to give blood to the Amtrak derailment victims in Washington state:At least 3 people were killed in DuPont, Wash. after a train derailed, spilling rail cars onto a busy highway. (Melissa Macaya/The Washington Post)Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said there is a \u201ccriminal cabal\u201d in the FBI and the Justice Department:Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on Dec. 16 that there is a \u201ccriminal cabal\u201d in the FBI and the Justice Department. (Patrick Martin/The Washington Post)Thousands participated in a Christmas-themed charity race to buy presents for children of low-income families in Mexico:Thousands of people participated in a Christmas-themed charity race to buy presents for children of low-income families in Mexico on Dec. 17. (Reuters)Trevor Noah reflects on the first year of the Trump administration: Other Trump government entities have altered their language around global warming. The Energy 202: NASA and NOAA are still talking about climate change. That's notable.",
        "author": "Dino Grandoni"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Know What London Looks Like. But Have You Really Heard It? (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8813",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/travel/sonic-tour-london.html",
        "text": "The musician Dessa took a sensory tour in the city with the synesthete LJ Rich. Here is how it sounded. The musician Dessa took a sensory tour in the city with the synesthete LJ Rich. Here is how it sounded. On the NASA website, LJ Rich\u2019s profile lists \u201crecreational lock picking\u201d as a hobby. She has glossy dark hair, a compact build, a master\u2019s degree from Oxford and synesthesia: an unusual condition that blurs and blends sense perception. A synesthete might report that the sound of the letter B tastes like mashed potatoes. Or that magenta smells like cedar wood. The incoming stimulus of one sense jumps its lane to trigger perception in another. For LJ, shapes, colors, textures and flavors set off a concert in her head. ",
        "author": "By Dessa"
    },
    {
        "title": "You Know What London Looks Like. But Have You Really Heard It? (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8814",
        "date": "2018-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/travel/sonic-tour-london.html",
        "text": "The musician Dessa took a sensory tour in the city with the synesthete LJ Rich. Here is how it sounded. The musician Dessa took a sensory tour in the city with the synesthete LJ Rich. Here is how it sounded. On the NASA website, LJ Rich\u2019s profile lists \u201crecreational lock picking\u201d as a hobby. She has glossy dark hair, a compact build, a master\u2019s degree from Oxford and synesthesia: an unusual condition that blurs and blends sense perception. A synesthete might report that the sound of the letter B tastes like mashed potatoes. Or that magenta smells like cedar wood. The incoming stimulus of one sense jumps its lane to trigger perception in another. For LJ, shapes, colors, textures and flavors set off a concert in her head. ",
        "author": "By Dessa"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Would Dad Approve?\u2019 Neil Armstrong\u2019s Heirs Divide Over a Lucrative Legacy (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8815",
        "date": "2019-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/us/neil-armstrong-heirs.html",
        "text": "Mr. Armstrong was averse to cashing in on his celebrity. But as the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approached, his sons began auctioning off his memorabilia. Mr. Armstrong was averse to cashing in on his celebrity. But as the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approached, his sons began auctioning off his memorabilia. Last fall, Neil Armstrong\u2019s two sons began a round of media appearances to promote a venture that would make them millions of dollars: a series of auctions of about 3,000 mementos from their father\u2019s moon mission and NASA career.",
        "author": "By Scott Shane, Sarah Kliff and Susanne Craig"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Would Dad Approve?\u2019 Neil Armstrong\u2019s Heirs Divide Over a Lucrative Legacy (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8816",
        "date": "2019-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/us/neil-armstrong-heirs.html",
        "text": "Mr. Armstrong was averse to cashing in on his celebrity. But as the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approached, his sons began auctioning off his memorabilia. Mr. Armstrong was averse to cashing in on his celebrity. But as the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approached, his sons began auctioning off his memorabilia. Last fall, Neil Armstrong\u2019s two sons began a round of media appearances to promote a venture that would make them millions of dollars: a series of auctions of about 3,000 mementos from their father\u2019s moon mission and NASA career.",
        "author": "By Scott Shane, Sarah Kliff and Susanne Craig"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8817",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-sinking.html",
        "text": "The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. CORCORAN, Calif. \u2014 In California\u2019s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.",
        "author": "By Lois Henry and Ryan Christopher Jones"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8818",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-sinking.html",
        "text": "The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. CORCORAN, Calif. \u2014 In California\u2019s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.",
        "author": "By Lois Henry and Ryan Christopher Jones"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8819",
        "date": "2021-05-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/us/corcoran-california-sinking.html",
        "text": "The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. CORCORAN, Calif. \u2014 In California\u2019s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.",
        "author": "By Lois Henry and Ryan Christopher Jones"
    },
    {
        "title": "For Latinos and Covid-19, Doctors Are Seeing an \u2018Alarming\u2019 Disparity (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8820",
        "date": "2020-05-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/coronavirus-latinos-disparity.html",
        "text": "The outsized infection rate among Hispanics in some states could hobble efforts to quash the spread of Covid-19, prompting states like Oregon to step up testing and take emergency measures. The outsized infection rate among Hispanics in some states could hobble efforts to quash the spread of Covid-19, prompting states like Oregon to step up testing and take emergency measures. Dr. Eva Galvez works as a family physician for a network of clinics in northwestern Oregon, where low-income patients have been streaming in for nasal swabs over the past several weeks to test for the coronavirus.",
        "author": "By Miriam Jordan and Richard A. Oppel Jr"
    },
    {
        "title": "Businesses Brace for Possible Limits on Foreign Worker Visas (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8821",
        "date": "2020-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/us/foreign-worker-visas-trump-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Citing the economic slump, the president could act this week to limit H-1B, L-1 and other visas as well as a program allowing foreign students to work in the United States after they graduate. Citing the economic slump, the president could act this week to limit H-1B, L-1 and other visas as well as a program allowing foreign students to work in the United States after they graduate. Maya Nasr was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 16 to study aerospace engineering. Currently a doctoral student there, she has been working on NASA\u2019s next Mars rover, slated for launch this summer.",
        "author": "By Miriam Jordan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Businesses Brace for Possible Limits on Foreign Worker Visas (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8822",
        "date": "2020-06-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/us/foreign-worker-visas-trump-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "Citing the economic slump, the president could act this week to limit H-1B, L-1 and other visas as well as a program allowing foreign students to work in the United States after they graduate. Citing the economic slump, the president could act this week to limit H-1B, L-1 and other visas as well as a program allowing foreign students to work in the United States after they graduate. Maya Nasr was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at 16 to study aerospace engineering. Currently a doctoral student there, she has been working on NASA\u2019s next Mars rover, slated for launch this summer.",
        "author": "By Miriam Jordan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Young Migrants Crowd Shelters, Posing Test for Biden (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8823",
        "date": "2021-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/politics/biden-immigration.html",
        "text": "The administration is under intensifying pressure to expand its capacity to care for as many as 35,000 unaccompanied minors, part of a wave of people crossing the border. The administration is under intensifying pressure to expand its capacity to care for as many as 35,000 unaccompanied minors, part of a wave of people crossing the border. WASHINGTON \u2014 The desperate plea landed this week in the email inboxes of employees in government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and NASA: Will you consider taking a four-month paid leave from your job to help care for migrant children in government-run shelters packed with new arrivals at the border?",
        "author": "By Michael D. Shear, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Eileen Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Young Migrants Crowd Shelters, Posing Test for Biden (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8824",
        "date": "2021-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/us/politics/biden-immigration.html",
        "text": "The administration is under intensifying pressure to expand its capacity to care for as many as 35,000 unaccompanied minors, part of a wave of people crossing the border. The administration is under intensifying pressure to expand its capacity to care for as many as 35,000 unaccompanied minors, part of a wave of people crossing the border. WASHINGTON \u2014 The desperate plea landed this week in the email inboxes of employees in government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and NASA: Will you consider taking a four-month paid leave from your job to help care for migrant children in government-run shelters packed with new arrivals at the border?",
        "author": "By Michael D. Shear, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Eileen Sullivan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, Once a Space Superpower, Turns to China for Missions (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8825",
        "date": "2021-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/world/asia/china-russia-space.html",
        "text": "The two countries have pledged to cooperate on expeditions to the moon and to an asteroid, setting the stage for a new space race with the United States and its partners. The two countries have pledged to cooperate on expeditions to the moon and to an asteroid, setting the stage for a new space race with the United States and its partners. MOSCOW \u2014 Sixty-three years ago, the Soviet Union put the first satellite in space. Nearly four years later, it sent the first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin. It fell behind NASA in the space race that followed, but even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remained a reliable space power, joining with the United States to build and operate the International Space Station for the last two decades.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer and Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, Once a Space Superpower, Turns to China for Missions (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8826",
        "date": "2021-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/world/asia/china-russia-space.html",
        "text": "The two countries have pledged to cooperate on expeditions to the moon and to an asteroid, setting the stage for a new space race with the United States and its partners. The two countries have pledged to cooperate on expeditions to the moon and to an asteroid, setting the stage for a new space race with the United States and its partners. MOSCOW \u2014 Sixty-three years ago, the Soviet Union put the first satellite in space. Nearly four years later, it sent the first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin. It fell behind NASA in the space race that followed, but even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remained a reliable space power, joining with the United States to build and operate the International Space Station for the last two decades.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer and Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Russia, Once a Space Superpower, Turns to China for Missions (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8827",
        "date": "2021-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/world/asia/china-russia-space.html",
        "text": "The two countries have pledged to cooperate on expeditions to the moon and to an asteroid, setting the stage for a new space race with the United States and its partners. The two countries have pledged to cooperate on expeditions to the moon and to an asteroid, setting the stage for a new space race with the United States and its partners. MOSCOW \u2014 Sixty-three years ago, the Soviet Union put the first satellite in space. Nearly four years later, it sent the first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin. It fell behind NASA in the space race that followed, but even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remained a reliable space power, joining with the United States to build and operate the International Space Station for the last two decades.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer and Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 8: A Little Harmony (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8828",
        "date": "2017-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-8-recap.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was a more conventional \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode: exploring a new world and new civilization. This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was a more conventional \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode: exploring a new world and new civilization. In very conventional \u201cTrek\u201d fashion, we find ourselves on an away mission to a strange new world in this week\u2019s episode. There lives a species previously unknown to Starfleet.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 8: A Little Harmony (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8829",
        "date": "2017-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-8-recap.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was a more conventional \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode: exploring a new world and new civilization. This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was a more conventional \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode: exploring a new world and new civilization. In very conventional \u201cTrek\u201d fashion, we find ourselves on an away mission to a strange new world in this week\u2019s episode. There lives a species previously unknown to Starfleet.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 8: A Little Harmony (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8830",
        "date": "2017-11-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-8-recap.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was a more conventional \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode: exploring a new world and new civilization. This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d was a more conventional \u201cStar Trek\u201d episode: exploring a new world and new civilization. In very conventional \u201cTrek\u201d fashion, we find ourselves on an away mission to a strange new world in this week\u2019s episode. There lives a species previously unknown to Starfleet.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 2, Episode 9: Angry, Illogical Spock (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8831",
        "date": "2019-03-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-recap.html",
        "text": "This episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d features a Spock that even Burnham admits is \u201centirely out of character.\u201d Audiences will likely agree. This episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d features a Spock that even Burnham admits is \u201centirely out of character.\u201d Audiences will likely agree. \u201cI refuse to take this posturing seriously,\u201d Burnham says to Spock at the midway point of this week\u2019s episode. \u201cIt\u2019s entirely out of character.\u201d",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 13: Another Death, Another Twist, Another Shrug (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8832",
        "date": "2018-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-13-recap.html",
        "text": "In a messy episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d we have yet another plot twist in the mirror universe and an untimely death. In a messy episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d we have yet another plot twist in the mirror universe and an untimely death. \u201cWe would have helped you get home if you had asked,\u201d Burnham tells Lorca, right before he is killed.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 13: Another Death, Another Twist, Another Shrug (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8833",
        "date": "2018-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-13-recap.html",
        "text": "In a messy episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d we have yet another plot twist in the mirror universe and an untimely death. In a messy episode of \u201cStar Trek: Discovery,\u201d we have yet another plot twist in the mirror universe and an untimely death. \u201cWe would have helped you get home if you had asked,\u201d Burnham tells Lorca, right before he is killed.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Trek: Discovery\u2019 Season 1, Episode 14: I\u2019m Captain Now (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8834",
        "date": "2018-02-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/arts/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-14-recap.html",
        "text": "This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d brought us back to the Prime Universe, where everyone is suspiciously acting like we are in the Mirror Universe. This week\u2019s \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d brought us back to the Prime Universe, where everyone is suspiciously acting like we are in the Mirror Universe. After a three-episode stint in the Mirror Universe \u2014 where Burnham went to great lengths to extol the virtues of the Good Universe \u2014 we return to the space of morality where the Federation doesn\u2019t behave with the impulsive savagery of the Terrans. And as soon as the Discovery re-emerges, we\u2019re treated to a scene where Sarek, a logical, rational Vulcan, forces Saru onto his knees for an involuntary mindmeld. So there\u2019s that.",
        "author": "By Sopan Deb"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, at 90, keeps seeking that next personal frontier (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8835",
        "date": "2021-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/08/20/willam-shatner-awesome-con/",
        "text": "One of the hardest-working men in Hollywood hasn\u2019t been slowed so much by the pandemic. He has two television shows going. He released a movie several months back and will release an album next month. Lately he has traveled by land with his horses and by sea swimming with sharks, and he casts a hopeful eye on heading to space \u2014 but not before recording an A.I.-driven version of himself for future generations to hear. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDid we mention he also eased up long enough in March to celebrate turning 90?Listen to William Shatner wax effusive by phone from his Los Angeles home office \u2014 his easy robust rhythm stopping only for the signature dramatic pause \u2014 and you begin to wonder whether there is any place he wouldn\u2019t boldly go.Shatner has even embraced his recent return to the fan convention circuit. On Friday evening, he will be a spotlight guest at Washington\u2019s Awesome Con, talking about his seven-decade career in show business, including his iconic run as Capt. James (pause) T. (pause) Kirk of \u201cStar Trek\u201d on screens big and small, beginning with the original series in the \u201860s. He\u2019ll also be on hand Saturday for more photo ops and autographs for fans. (His \u201cStar Trek\u201d castmate George Takei is also scheduled to appear at Awesome Con.)Shatner takes on new projects like a tireless force of nature, though he says life during the coronavirus shutdowns prompted him to stop and especially appreciate the \u201cprecious\u201d details of living: \u201cThe pandemic slowed everybody down and you begin to focus on important things.\u201d For him, that included riding some of the horses he owns without hurry or worry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the Montreal-born actor does need his fresh adventures. So he traveled to the Bahamas to co-host the Discovery special \u201cExpedition Unknown: Shark Trek,\u201d which aired last month. \u201cI got bitten by the urge to go,\u201d he says, laughing as he momentarily hams up his answer. \u201cI was invited to go swim with the sharks and it was a life-changing opportunity: I was down there with 18-foot tiger sharks and smaller sharks that were put on my lap to pet.\u201dThe man who also performed across several decades as captain of the starship Enterprise says he would welcome space as his next frontier. He says a \u201cvery enterprising and entrepreneurial friend\u201d \u2014 he drops the Star Trek pun without breaking full vocal gallop \u2014 once explored how Shatner could get aboard a civilian flight: \u201cI would have liked it. I love the idea of being able to look at the blue orb.\u201dBook review: William Shatner has advice on how to live well. Should we listen?Much like Kirk, Shatner is a man of science who has long cared about humanity\u2019s impact on the blue orb. \u201cStar Trek: The Original Series\u201d is set in the 23rd century. Will humankind be around to see it?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think that\u2019s part of the charm and part of the reason for the enduring popularity of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 \u2014 is that it suggests we will be there,\u201d says Shatner, who cites reading Rachel Carson\u2019s \u201cSilent Spring\u201d more than a half-century ago as an eye-opener. \u201cI read it and began to bleat about the warming of the planet. But nobody took it seriously.\"Has he learned anything about humanity that he didn\u2019t know before the pandemic and current headlines about climate change? \u201cNo. No. Humanity is so complex that there is a dichotomy between the good and the positive and the bad and the negative. Most people fall in between. \u2018What should I do? What should I do?\u2019 is the middle ground.\u201dSo what might the late \u201cStar Trek\u201d creator Gene Roddenberry think of the current state of the world? \u201cSome of this stuff he wouldn\u2019t put in a screenplay, because it\u2019s too outlandish.\u201dWhat would Gene Roddenberry think of 21st-century life?Shatner says he chooses screen projects that engage his curiosity about how the world works. He hosts a new show called \u201cI Don\u2019t Understand\u201d that explores eclectic questions of history and science. (The show generated some controversy recently because it\u2019s airing on RT, which critics have called propaganda; Shatner has said in interviews he created the show for Ora TV at the time, even tweeting an explanation.) He also hosts the History Channel\u2019s \u201cThe UnXplained,\u201d which delves into mystifying phenomena.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShatner, a veteran performer of spoken-word tunes, has an album due out next month simply called \u201cBill.\u201d Some of the songs are inspired by events in his life, and his collaborators included They Might Be Giants songwriter-musician Dan Miller.He also enjoyed teaming with the L.A.-based company StoryFile to spend five days recording answers for interactive conversational-video technology. He was filmed with 3-D cameras so his words can be delivered via hologram.The idea, he says, is that people will be able to push a button and ask questions of a virtual celebrity \u2014 like \u201casking Grandpa questions at his gravestone,\u201d but with technologically advanced replies.Shatner speaks of the legacy he will leave even as some of his \u201cStar Trek\u201d co-stars have died in recent years, including Leonard Nimoy in 2015, and others face their mortality; Nichelle Nichols is reportedly in a conservatorship battle as she fights dementia.And he especially embraces interacting with fans again, such as at Awesome Con, where other guests will include Christopher Lloyd, Shatner\u2019s co-star in the recent film \u201cSenior Moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will be a \u201cspontaneous performance \u2014 how do you speak for an hour?\u201d he says.He pauses.\u201cI find that the most challenging.\u201dShatner will appear at Awesome Con at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on the main stage Friday at 5 p.m., and will meet fans Friday and Saturday.Read more:How Star Trek embraced diversity 50 years ago \u2014 and continues to do so todayGeorge Takei has talked about his family\u2019s internment before. But never quite like this.Seven \u2018Twilight Zone\u2019 episodes that are eerily timely during the coronavirus pandemic The pandemic has barely slowed the beloved \"Star Trek\" icon, who dreams of going to space himself. William Shatner, at 90, keeps seeking that next personal frontier",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "William Shatner, at 90, keeps seeking that next personal frontier (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8836",
        "date": "2021-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/08/20/willam-shatner-awesome-con/",
        "text": "One of the hardest-working men in Hollywood hasn\u2019t been slowed so much by the pandemic. He has two television shows going. He released a movie several months back and will release an album next month. Lately he has traveled by land with his horses and by sea swimming with sharks, and he casts a hopeful eye on heading to space \u2014 but not before recording an A.I.-driven version of himself for future generations to hear. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightDid we mention he also eased up long enough in March to celebrate turning 90?Listen to William Shatner wax effusive by phone from his Los Angeles home office \u2014 his easy robust rhythm stopping only for the signature dramatic pause \u2014 and you begin to wonder whether there is any place he wouldn\u2019t boldly go.Shatner has even embraced his recent return to the fan convention circuit. On Friday evening, he will be a spotlight guest at Washington\u2019s Awesome Con, talking about his seven-decade career in show business, including his iconic run as Capt. James (pause) T. (pause) Kirk of \u201cStar Trek\u201d on screens big and small, beginning with the original series in the \u201860s. He\u2019ll also be on hand Saturday for more photo ops and autographs for fans. (His \u201cStar Trek\u201d castmate George Takei is also scheduled to appear at Awesome Con.)Shatner takes on new projects like a tireless force of nature, though he says life during the coronavirus shutdowns prompted him to stop and especially appreciate the \u201cprecious\u201d details of living: \u201cThe pandemic slowed everybody down and you begin to focus on important things.\u201d For him, that included riding some of the horses he owns without hurry or worry.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the Montreal-born actor does need his fresh adventures. So he traveled to the Bahamas to co-host the Discovery special \u201cExpedition Unknown: Shark Trek,\u201d which aired last month. \u201cI got bitten by the urge to go,\u201d he says, laughing as he momentarily hams up his answer. \u201cI was invited to go swim with the sharks and it was a life-changing opportunity: I was down there with 18-foot tiger sharks and smaller sharks that were put on my lap to pet.\u201dThe man who also performed across several decades as captain of the starship Enterprise says he would welcome space as his next frontier. He says a \u201cvery enterprising and entrepreneurial friend\u201d \u2014 he drops the Star Trek pun without breaking full vocal gallop \u2014 once explored how Shatner could get aboard a civilian flight: \u201cI would have liked it. I love the idea of being able to look at the blue orb.\u201dBook review: William Shatner has advice on how to live well. Should we listen?Much like Kirk, Shatner is a man of science who has long cared about humanity\u2019s impact on the blue orb. \u201cStar Trek: The Original Series\u201d is set in the 23rd century. Will humankind be around to see it?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think that\u2019s part of the charm and part of the reason for the enduring popularity of \u2018Star Trek\u2019 \u2014 is that it suggests we will be there,\u201d says Shatner, who cites reading Rachel Carson\u2019s \u201cSilent Spring\u201d more than a half-century ago as an eye-opener. \u201cI read it and began to bleat about the warming of the planet. But nobody took it seriously.\"Has he learned anything about humanity that he didn\u2019t know before the pandemic and current headlines about climate change? \u201cNo. No. Humanity is so complex that there is a dichotomy between the good and the positive and the bad and the negative. Most people fall in between. \u2018What should I do? What should I do?\u2019 is the middle ground.\u201dSo what might the late \u201cStar Trek\u201d creator Gene Roddenberry think of the current state of the world? \u201cSome of this stuff he wouldn\u2019t put in a screenplay, because it\u2019s too outlandish.\u201dWhat would Gene Roddenberry think of 21st-century life?Shatner says he chooses screen projects that engage his curiosity about how the world works. He hosts a new show called \u201cI Don\u2019t Understand\u201d that explores eclectic questions of history and science. (The show generated some controversy recently because it\u2019s airing on RT, which critics have called propaganda; Shatner has said in interviews he created the show for Ora TV at the time, even tweeting an explanation.) He also hosts the History Channel\u2019s \u201cThe UnXplained,\u201d which delves into mystifying phenomena.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementShatner, a veteran performer of spoken-word tunes, has an album due out next month simply called \u201cBill.\u201d Some of the songs are inspired by events in his life, and his collaborators included They Might Be Giants songwriter-musician Dan Miller.He also enjoyed teaming with the L.A.-based company StoryFile to spend five days recording answers for interactive conversational-video technology. He was filmed with 3-D cameras so his words can be delivered via hologram.The idea, he says, is that people will be able to push a button and ask questions of a virtual celebrity \u2014 like \u201casking Grandpa questions at his gravestone,\u201d but with technologically advanced replies.Shatner speaks of the legacy he will leave even as some of his \u201cStar Trek\u201d co-stars have died in recent years, including Leonard Nimoy in 2015, and others face their mortality; Nichelle Nichols is reportedly in a conservatorship battle as she fights dementia.And he especially embraces interacting with fans again, such as at Awesome Con, where other guests will include Christopher Lloyd, Shatner\u2019s co-star in the recent film \u201cSenior Moment.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt will be a \u201cspontaneous performance \u2014 how do you speak for an hour?\u201d he says.He pauses.\u201cI find that the most challenging.\u201dShatner will appear at Awesome Con at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on the main stage Friday at 5 p.m., and will meet fans Friday and Saturday.Read more:How Star Trek embraced diversity 50 years ago \u2014 and continues to do so todayGeorge Takei has talked about his family\u2019s internment before. But never quite like this.Seven \u2018Twilight Zone\u2019 episodes that are eerily timely during the coronavirus pandemic The pandemic has barely slowed the beloved \"Star Trek\" icon, who dreams of going to space himself. William Shatner, at 90, keeps seeking that next personal frontier",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Force Uniforms Meant to Capture the Vastness of Space (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8837",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/fashion/space-force-uniforms.html",
        "text": "Any similarities to Star Trek are a coincidence. Any similarities to Star Trek are a coincidence. When President Donald J. Trump signed the act establishing the United States Space Force in 2019, he made not only a sixth branch of the military but also a design challenge for the ages. The visual identity for a new armed service would have to be created from scratch, for the first time since the Air Force became independent from the Army in 1947.",
        "author": "By Steven Kurutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Force Uniforms Meant to Capture the Vastness of Space (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8838",
        "date": "2021-10-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/fashion/space-force-uniforms.html",
        "text": "Any similarities to Star Trek are a coincidence. Any similarities to Star Trek are a coincidence. When President Donald J. Trump signed the act establishing the United States Space Force in 2019, he made not only a sixth branch of the military but also a design challenge for the ages. The visual identity for a new armed service would have to be created from scratch, for the first time since the Air Force became independent from the Army in 1947.",
        "author": "By Steven Kurutz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner\u2019s Crew Mate on Space Trip Dies in Plane Crash (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8839",
        "date": "2021-11-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/nyregion/glen-de-vries-plane-crash.html",
        "text": "Glen de Vries was one of three people who joined the former \u201cStar Trek\u201d star on a Blue Origin flight last month. Glen de Vries was one of three people who joined the former \u201cStar Trek\u201d star on a Blue Origin flight last month. A month after traveling to space and back aboard a Blue Origin rocket, a 49-year-old software executive was killed on Thursday when a single-engine plane he was traveling in crashed in a wooded section of northern New Jersey, officials said.",
        "author": "By Ed Shanahan"
    },
    {
        "title": "CBS Bets Big on \u2018Star Trek: Picard\u2019 to Boost Streaming (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8840",
        "date": "2020-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cbs-bets-big-on-star-trek-picard-to-boost-streaming-business-11579689000?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=46",
        "text": "The next big test comes Thursday with the much-anticipated debut of \u201cStar Trek: Picard,\u201d which stars\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Stewart\n\n\n\n reprising his role as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard from an earlier edition of the series. The series is exclusive to All Access. A separate \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, \u201cDiscovery,\u201d has aired exclusively on All Access since 2017, and an animated comedy called \u201cLower Decks,\u201d about support staff on a Star Trek starship, is in the works. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWith established series like \u201cStar Trek,\u201d how would you continue to make content that pleases the existing fan base but also looks to expand it? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe goal is to have a Star Trek series on All Access throughout the year so fans don\u2019t sign up for just a few months and then cancel\u2014an issue that all streaming services confront. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to have something on all the time that gives people a reason to stay,\u201d Mr. Kurtzman said. \u201cStar Trek allows them to have a constant flow of audience.\u201d\n\n\nWhat \u201cStar Wars\u201d and \u201cThe Avengers\u201d are to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walt Disney Co.\n\n\n , and \u201cBatman\u201d and \u201cSuperman\u201d are to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AT&T Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n WarnerMedia, \u201cStar Trek\u201d is to ViacomCBS\u2014a franchise with a rich history and a built-in audience. More than 50 years after creator Gene Roddenberry\u2019s original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series set off to boldly go where no man had gone before, and after a host of TV series and movies that followed over several decades, there is still an insatiable appetite for the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo Boldly Go\nFor over five decades, TV series and movies have mined the Star Trek universe, capitalizing on its enduring appeal to fans.\n\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly every two years.\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next Generation\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly\nevery two years.\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly every two years.\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n1966\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Tre As the overseer of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d properties, Alex Kurtzman is charged with updating the space drama for a new generation without alienating its hard-core fans. But there\u2019s much more at stake as ViacomCBS counts on the franchise to bolster its streaming service. ",
        "author": "Joe Flint"
    },
    {
        "title": "CBS Bets Big on \u2018Star Trek: Picard\u2019 to Boost Streaming (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8841",
        "date": "2020-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cbs-bets-big-on-star-trek-picard-to-boost-streaming-business-11579689000?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=47",
        "text": "The next big test comes Thursday with the much-anticipated debut of \u201cStar Trek: Picard,\u201d which stars\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Stewart\n\n\n\n reprising his role as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard from an earlier edition of the series. The series is exclusive to All Access. A separate \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, \u201cDiscovery,\u201d has aired exclusively on All Access since 2017, and an animated comedy called \u201cLower Decks,\u201d about support staff on a Star Trek starship, is in the works. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWith established series like \u201cStar Trek,\u201d how would you continue to make content that pleases the existing fan base but also looks to expand it? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe goal is to have a Star Trek series on All Access throughout the year so fans don\u2019t sign up for just a few months and then cancel\u2014an issue that all streaming services confront. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to have something on all the time that gives people a reason to stay,\u201d Mr. Kurtzman said. \u201cStar Trek allows them to have a constant flow of audience.\u201d\n\n\nWhat \u201cStar Wars\u201d and \u201cThe Avengers\u201d are to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walt Disney Co.\n\n\n , and \u201cBatman\u201d and \u201cSuperman\u201d are to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AT&T Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n WarnerMedia, \u201cStar Trek\u201d is to ViacomCBS\u2014a franchise with a rich history and a built-in audience. More than 50 years after creator Gene Roddenberry\u2019s original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series set off to boldly go where no man had gone before, and after a host of TV series and movies that followed over several decades, there is still an insatiable appetite for the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo Boldly Go\nFor over five decades, TV series and movies have mined the Star Trek universe, capitalizing on its enduring appeal to fans.\n\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly every two years.\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next Generation\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly\nevery two years.\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly every two years.\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n1966\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Tre As the overseer of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d properties, Alex Kurtzman is charged with updating the space drama for a new generation without alienating its hard-core fans. But there\u2019s much more at stake as ViacomCBS counts on the franchise to bolster its streaming service. ",
        "author": "Joe Flint"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner Reaches Final Frontier on Blue Origin Rocket (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8842",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-set-to-send-william-shatner-to-edge-of-space-11634117401?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=13",
        "text": "Blue Origin launched the passengers at 10:49 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s facility in West Texas. It brought them back around 10 minutes later in a passenger capsule that deployed parachutes for the landing. At its peak, the capsule transporting the passengers reached an altitude of 66.5 miles, according to the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Everyone in the world needs to do this,\u2019 William Shatner told Jeff Bezos after landing on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n jose romero/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Shatner, 90 years old, is now the oldest person to reach space. After he exited the capsule Wednesday morning, he said he was struck by the contrast of the blue atmosphere with the black expanse of space.\n\n\u201cEverybody in the world needs to do this,\u201d he told Mr. Bezos, who accompanied the passengers until they boarded the capsule for the flight and met them after the landing.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder exploring the final frontier? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe mission follows other privately orchestrated space flights carrying people who aren\u2019t traditional astronauts. Blue Origin launched Mr. Bezos in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n separately flew its founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n to the edge of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX last month completed a three-day orbital mission paid for by the billionaire chief executive of a payments company.\nBlue Origin\u2019s launch of Mr. Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u2019\u2019 series, and three others made Wednesday\u2019s flight a high-profile event in news coverage and on social-media platforms. The company livestreamed the flight with its own hosts discussing the effort, similar to how other space companies, including SpaceX, have promoted their own launches to wider audiences.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHaving someone like Mr. Shatner on board helps generate attention for the flight, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joseph Czabovsky,\n\n\n\n an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who worked with the Harris Poll to measure public perceptions private space flights after Messrs. Bezos and Branson flew this summer. \u201cFor better or worse, celebrity matters,\u201d Mr. Czabovsky said.\nMr. Shatner, along with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Audrey Powers,\n\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, didn\u2019t pay for Wednesday\u2019s flight, with the company previously describing them as guests for the trip.\nTwo others\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Glen de Vries,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the clinical-research software company Medidata Solutions, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Boshuizen,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the Earth data company Planet Labs Inc.\u2014paid for their tickets, according to Blue Origin. The company hasn\u2019t disclosed prices, and Messrs. Boshuizen and de Vries declined to comment on the costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStar Trek actor William Shatner experiences weightlessness with three other passengers during the apogee of the Blue Origin New Shepard mission NS-18 suborbital flight near Van Horn, Texas, U.S. in a still image from video October 13, 2021.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nMr. Boshuizen said in an interview earlier this month that he believes human spaceflight will become more accessible over time because companies like Blue Origin are reusing vehicles for multiple trips. \u201cI want people to know it\u2019s for them as well,\u201d he said of such launches.\nIn a letter posted online in September, some current and former Blue Origin employees alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company and criticized its safety practices.\nAccording to the letter, which one of the people signed publicly, a desire to compete with Mr. Musk and demonstrate progress to Mr. Bezos \u201cseemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule.\u201d\nThe Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates space launches and re-entries, is looking into the safety allegations. A spokesman for the agency said the review is continuing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nBlue Origin has said it doesn\u2019t tolerate discrimination or harassment and has many ways for employees to report misconduct. The company said it believes in its safety record. The New Shepard, the rocket that took up Mr. Bezos in July and launched the crew Wednesday, is the safest space vehicle ever designed, Blue Origin said.\nWednesday\u2019s flight was the second time Blue Origin has transported people to space and the company\u2019s 19th consecutive completion of a successful landing for its crew capsule, Blue Origin said. That vehicle is stacked atop one of the New Shepard rockets for space The 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor is the oldest person to reach space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s company conducted the flight as aviation regulators assess recent allegations about Blue Origin\u2019s safety record. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner Reaches Final Frontier on Blue Origin Rocket (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8843",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-set-to-send-william-shatner-to-edge-of-space-11634117401?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=3",
        "text": "Blue Origin launched the passengers at 10:49 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s facility in West Texas. It brought them back around 10 minutes later in a passenger capsule that deployed parachutes for the landing. At its peak, the capsule transporting the passengers reached an altitude of 66.5 miles, according to the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Everyone in the world needs to do this,\u2019 William Shatner told Jeff Bezos after landing on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n jose romero/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Shatner, 90 years old, is now the oldest person to reach space. After he exited the capsule Wednesday morning, he said he was struck by the contrast of the blue atmosphere with the black expanse of space.\n\n\u201cEverybody in the world needs to do this,\u201d he told Mr. Bezos, who accompanied the passengers until they boarded the capsule for the flight and met them after the landing.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder exploring the final frontier? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe mission follows other privately orchestrated space flights carrying people who aren\u2019t traditional astronauts. Blue Origin launched Mr. Bezos in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n separately flew its founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n to the edge of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX last month completed a three-day orbital mission paid for by the billionaire chief executive of a payments company.\nBlue Origin\u2019s launch of Mr. Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u2019\u2019 series, and three others made Wednesday\u2019s flight a high-profile event in news coverage and on social-media platforms. The company livestreamed the flight with its own hosts discussing the effort, similar to how other space companies, including SpaceX, have promoted their own launches to wider audiences.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHaving someone like Mr. Shatner on board helps generate attention for the flight, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joseph Czabovsky,\n\n\n\n an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who worked with the Harris Poll to measure public perceptions private space flights after Messrs. Bezos and Branson flew this summer. \u201cFor better or worse, celebrity matters,\u201d Mr. Czabovsky said.\nMr. Shatner, along with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Audrey Powers,\n\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, didn\u2019t pay for Wednesday\u2019s flight, with the company previously describing them as guests for the trip.\nTwo others\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Glen de Vries,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the clinical-research software company Medidata Solutions, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Boshuizen,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the Earth data company Planet Labs Inc.\u2014paid for their tickets, according to Blue Origin. The company hasn\u2019t disclosed prices, and Messrs. Boshuizen and de Vries declined to comment on the costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStar Trek actor William Shatner experiences weightlessness with three other passengers during the apogee of the Blue Origin New Shepard mission NS-18 suborbital flight near Van Horn, Texas, U.S. in a still image from video October 13, 2021.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nMr. Boshuizen said in an interview earlier this month that he believes human spaceflight will become more accessible over time because companies like Blue Origin are reusing vehicles for multiple trips. \u201cI want people to know it\u2019s for them as well,\u201d he said of such launches.\nIn a letter posted online in September, some current and former Blue Origin employees alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company and criticized its safety practices.\nAccording to the letter, which one of the people signed publicly, a desire to compete with Mr. Musk and demonstrate progress to Mr. Bezos \u201cseemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule.\u201d\nThe Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates space launches and re-entries, is looking into the safety allegations. A spokesman for the agency said the review is continuing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nBlue Origin has said it doesn\u2019t tolerate discrimination or harassment and has many ways for employees to report misconduct. The company said it believes in its safety record. The New Shepard, the rocket that took up Mr. Bezos in July and launched the crew Wednesday, is the safest space vehicle ever designed, Blue Origin said.\nWednesday\u2019s flight was the second time Blue Origin has transported people to space and the company\u2019s 19th consecutive completion of a successful landing for its crew capsule, Blue Origin said. That vehicle is stacked atop one of the New Shepard rockets for space The 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor is the oldest person to reach space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s company conducted the flight as aviation regulators assess recent allegations about Blue Origin\u2019s safety record. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner Reaches Final Frontier on Blue Origin Rocket (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8844",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-set-to-send-william-shatner-to-edge-of-space-11634117401?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=20",
        "text": "Blue Origin launched the passengers at 10:49 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s facility in West Texas. It brought them back around 10 minutes later in a passenger capsule that deployed parachutes for the landing. At its peak, the capsule transporting the passengers reached an altitude of 66.5 miles, according to the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Everyone in the world needs to do this,\u2019 William Shatner told Jeff Bezos after landing on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n jose romero/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Shatner, 90 years old, is now the oldest person to reach space. After he exited the capsule Wednesday morning, he said he was struck by the contrast of the blue atmosphere with the black expanse of space.\n\n\u201cEverybody in the world needs to do this,\u201d he told Mr. Bezos, who accompanied the passengers until they boarded the capsule for the flight and met them after the landing.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder exploring the final frontier? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe mission follows other privately orchestrated space flights carrying people who aren\u2019t traditional astronauts. Blue Origin launched Mr. Bezos in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n separately flew its founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n to the edge of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX last month completed a three-day orbital mission paid for by the billionaire chief executive of a payments company.\nBlue Origin\u2019s launch of Mr. Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u2019\u2019 series, and three others made Wednesday\u2019s flight a high-profile event in news coverage and on social-media platforms. The company livestreamed the flight with its own hosts discussing the effort, similar to how other space companies, including SpaceX, have promoted their own launches to wider audiences.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHaving someone like Mr. Shatner on board helps generate attention for the flight, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joseph Czabovsky,\n\n\n\n an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who worked with the Harris Poll to measure public perceptions private space flights after Messrs. Bezos and Branson flew this summer. \u201cFor better or worse, celebrity matters,\u201d Mr. Czabovsky said.\nMr. Shatner, along with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Audrey Powers,\n\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, didn\u2019t pay for Wednesday\u2019s flight, with the company previously describing them as guests for the trip.\nTwo others\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Glen de Vries,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the clinical-research software company Medidata Solutions, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Boshuizen,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the Earth data company Planet Labs Inc.\u2014paid for their tickets, according to Blue Origin. The company hasn\u2019t disclosed prices, and Messrs. Boshuizen and de Vries declined to comment on the costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStar Trek actor William Shatner experiences weightlessness with three other passengers during the apogee of the Blue Origin New Shepard mission NS-18 suborbital flight near Van Horn, Texas, U.S. in a still image from video October 13, 2021.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nMr. Boshuizen said in an interview earlier this month that he believes human spaceflight will become more accessible over time because companies like Blue Origin are reusing vehicles for multiple trips. \u201cI want people to know it\u2019s for them as well,\u201d he said of such launches.\nIn a letter posted online in September, some current and former Blue Origin employees alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company and criticized its safety practices.\nAccording to the letter, which one of the people signed publicly, a desire to compete with Mr. Musk and demonstrate progress to Mr. Bezos \u201cseemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule.\u201d\nThe Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates space launches and re-entries, is looking into the safety allegations. A spokesman for the agency said the review is continuing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nBlue Origin has said it doesn\u2019t tolerate discrimination or harassment and has many ways for employees to report misconduct. The company said it believes in its safety record. The New Shepard, the rocket that took up Mr. Bezos in July and launched the crew Wednesday, is the safest space vehicle ever designed, Blue Origin said.\nWednesday\u2019s flight was the second time Blue Origin has transported people to space and the company\u2019s 19th consecutive completion of a successful landing for its crew capsule, Blue Origin said. That vehicle is stacked atop one of the New Shepard rockets for space The 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor is the oldest person to reach space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s company conducted the flight as aviation regulators assess recent allegations about Blue Origin\u2019s safety record. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shatner Reaches Final Frontier on Blue Origin Rocket (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8845",
        "date": "2021-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-set-to-send-william-shatner-to-edge-of-space-11634117401?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=20",
        "text": "Blue Origin launched the passengers at 10:49 a.m. ET from the company\u2019s facility in West Texas. It brought them back around 10 minutes later in a passenger capsule that deployed parachutes for the landing. At its peak, the capsule transporting the passengers reached an altitude of 66.5 miles, according to the company.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Everyone in the world needs to do this,\u2019 William Shatner told Jeff Bezos after landing on Wednesday.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n jose romero/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nMr. Shatner, 90 years old, is now the oldest person to reach space. After he exited the capsule Wednesday morning, he said he was struck by the contrast of the blue atmosphere with the black expanse of space.\n\n\u201cEverybody in the world needs to do this,\u201d he told Mr. Bezos, who accompanied the passengers until they boarded the capsule for the flight and met them after the landing.\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWill billionaire-funded space trips help or hinder exploring the final frontier? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe mission follows other privately orchestrated space flights carrying people who aren\u2019t traditional astronauts. Blue Origin launched Mr. Bezos in July, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.\n\n\n separately flew its founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n to the edge of space.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX last month completed a three-day orbital mission paid for by the billionaire chief executive of a payments company.\nBlue Origin\u2019s launch of Mr. Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on the original \u201cStar Trek\u2019\u2019 series, and three others made Wednesday\u2019s flight a high-profile event in news coverage and on social-media platforms. The company livestreamed the flight with its own hosts discussing the effort, similar to how other space companies, including SpaceX, have promoted their own launches to wider audiences.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHaving someone like Mr. Shatner on board helps generate attention for the flight, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joseph Czabovsky,\n\n\n\n an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who worked with the Harris Poll to measure public perceptions private space flights after Messrs. Bezos and Branson flew this summer. \u201cFor better or worse, celebrity matters,\u201d Mr. Czabovsky said.\nMr. Shatner, along with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Audrey Powers,\n\n\n\n Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of mission and flight operations, didn\u2019t pay for Wednesday\u2019s flight, with the company previously describing them as guests for the trip.\nTwo others\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Glen de Vries,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the clinical-research software company Medidata Solutions, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Boshuizen,\n\n\n\n co-founder of the Earth data company Planet Labs Inc.\u2014paid for their tickets, according to Blue Origin. The company hasn\u2019t disclosed prices, and Messrs. Boshuizen and de Vries declined to comment on the costs.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStar Trek actor William Shatner experiences weightlessness with three other passengers during the apogee of the Blue Origin New Shepard mission NS-18 suborbital flight near Van Horn, Texas, U.S. in a still image from video October 13, 2021.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n BLUE ORIGIN/REUTERS\n \n\n\n\nMr. Boshuizen said in an interview earlier this month that he believes human spaceflight will become more accessible over time because companies like Blue Origin are reusing vehicles for multiple trips. \u201cI want people to know it\u2019s for them as well,\u201d he said of such launches.\nIn a letter posted online in September, some current and former Blue Origin employees alleged instances of sexual harassment at the company and criticized its safety practices.\nAccording to the letter, which one of the people signed publicly, a desire to compete with Mr. Musk and demonstrate progress to Mr. Bezos \u201cseemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule.\u201d\nThe Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates space launches and re-entries, is looking into the safety allegations. A spokesman for the agency said the review is continuing.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin all demonstrated this summer that they are capable of putting billionaires into space. WSJ's George Downs walks through what each company is offering to those who want to reach for the stars.\n \n\n\nBlue Origin has said it doesn\u2019t tolerate discrimination or harassment and has many ways for employees to report misconduct. The company said it believes in its safety record. The New Shepard, the rocket that took up Mr. Bezos in July and launched the crew Wednesday, is the safest space vehicle ever designed, Blue Origin said.\nWednesday\u2019s flight was the second time Blue Origin has transported people to space and the company\u2019s 19th consecutive completion of a successful landing for its crew capsule, Blue Origin said. That vehicle is stacked atop one of the New Shepard rockets for space tou The 90-year-old \u201cStar Trek\u201d actor is the oldest person to reach space. Jeff Bezos\u2019s company conducted the flight as aviation regulators assess recent allegations about Blue Origin\u2019s safety record. ",
        "author": "Micah Maidenberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "CBS Bets Big on \u2018Star Trek: Picard\u2019 to Boost Streaming (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8846",
        "date": "2020-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cbs-bets-big-on-star-trek-picard-to-boost-streaming-business-11579689000?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=50",
        "text": "The next big test comes Thursday with the much-anticipated debut of \u201cStar Trek: Picard,\u201d which stars\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick Stewart\n\n\n\n reprising his role as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard from an earlier edition of the series. The series is exclusive to All Access. A separate \u201cStar Trek\u201d series, \u201cDiscovery,\u201d has aired exclusively on All Access since 2017, and an animated comedy called \u201cLower Decks,\u201d about support staff on a Star Trek starship, is in the works. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWith established series like \u201cStar Trek,\u201d how would you continue to make content that pleases the existing fan base but also looks to expand it? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nThe goal is to have a Star Trek series on All Access throughout the year so fans don\u2019t sign up for just a few months and then cancel\u2014an issue that all streaming services confront. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to have something on all the time that gives people a reason to stay,\u201d Mr. Kurtzman said. \u201cStar Trek allows them to have a constant flow of audience.\u201d\n\n\nWhat \u201cStar Wars\u201d and \u201cThe Avengers\u201d are to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walt Disney Co.\n\n\n , and \u201cBatman\u201d and \u201cSuperman\u201d are to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AT&T Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n WarnerMedia, \u201cStar Trek\u201d is to ViacomCBS\u2014a franchise with a rich history and a built-in audience. More than 50 years after creator Gene Roddenberry\u2019s original \u201cStar Trek\u201d series set off to boldly go where no man had gone before, and after a host of TV series and movies that followed over several decades, there is still an insatiable appetite for the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTo Boldly Go\nFor over five decades, TV series and movies have mined the Star Trek universe, capitalizing on its enduring appeal to fans.\n\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly every two years.\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next Generation\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly\nevery two years.\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\n1966\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content, with three TV series and films nearly every two years.\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\nRotten Tomatoes audience scores\n\n\nFilms\n\n\nTelevision season\n\n\n0\n\n\n20\n\n\n40\n\n\n60\n\n\n80\n\n\n100\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\n1966\n\n\nPremiering in 1966, the first Star Trek series lasted three seasons until it was canceled due to low ratings. The show became more popular once its reruns started airing.\n\n\n\u201970\n\n\nThe Motion Picture\n\n\n\u201980\n\n\nThe Wrath of Khan\n\n\nThe Search For Spock\n\n\nThe Voyage Home\n\n\nThe Next\nGeneration\n\n\nThe Final Frontier\n\n\nThe Undiscovered Country\n\n\n\u201990\n\n\nDeep Space Nine\n\n\nGenerations\n\n\nThe 1990s saw the highest concentration of Star Trek content.\n\n\nFirst Contact\n\n\nInsurrection\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\n2000\n\n\nNemesis\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nStar Trek\n\n\nFollowing popular film reboots, CBS began developing new TV series for its All Access streaming service, starting with \u2018Discovery.\u2019\n\n\n\u201910\n\n\nInto Darkness\n\n\nBeyond\n\n\nDiscovery\n\n\n2020\n\n\nSource: Rotten Tomatoes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor ViacomCBS Inc., which grew out of the merger of CBS Corp. and Viacom Inc. last year, \u201cStar Trek\u201d is its best weapon in a crowded streaming battlefield where current combatants like\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix Inc.,\nAmazon.com Inc.,\n\n\n Disney\u2019s Disney+ and Hulu will soon be joined by AT&T Inc.\u2019s HBO Max and Comcast Corp.\u2019s Peacock. \nViacomCBS hasn\u2019t disclosed how many subscribers All Access has, but people familiar with the service put the figure around five million. Netflix has more than 158 million subscribers globally, and Hulu has 28.5 million in the U.S. Disney+ signed up 10 million users in the day following its launch, Disney said. \nMr. Kurtzman\u2019s first \u201cStar Trek\u201d missions were co-writing the J.J. Abrams-directed 2009 feature film \u201cStar Trek\u201d and 2013\u2019s \u201cStar Trek into Darkness\u201d with his then-producing partner\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roberto Orci.\n\n\n\n When CBS later decided to use \u201cStar Trek\u201d as the flagship for its streaming service, it reached out to Mr. Kurtzman.\n\u201cDiscovery\u201d and \u201cStar Trek: Picard\u201d are easily the most expensive programming on All Access, costing between $8 million and $9 million an episode, according to a person familiar with the matter.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPatrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard and Mr. Kurtzman behind the scenes of \u2018Star Trek: Picard.\u2019 The franchise is the best weapon ViacomCBS has in a field packed with rival streaming services.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Trae Patton/CBS Interactive, Inc.\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIf you\u2019re going to ask people to pay $10 a month for content, you better deliver them content they are not going to get on network television,\u201d Mr. Kurtzman said. CBS All Access, which also carries live CBS broadcast programming, costs $5.99 with ads and $9.99 a month for a commercial-free version.\nViacomCBS doesn\u2019t have the same content arsenal of its bigger rivals\u2014and isn\u2019t churning out as many originals for its platform. But ViacomCBS Chief Digital Officer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Marc DeBevoise\n\n\n\n said people are underestimating the company: All Access will have a new original every month, he said, and tentpole shows such as \u201cPicard\u201d every quarter. \n\u201cThere is more than one seat on the streaming rocket ship,\u201d Mr. DeBevoise said at a recent television industry event.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n The streaming wars might mean you have way more options when it comes to platforms and content for entertainment. But ultimately, paying for all those options is going to look a lot like the high prices you used to pay for your old-school cable package. Photo: Alexandra Cardinale\n \n\n\nStarfleet Command for the 46-year-old Mr. Kurtzman is a pair of nondescript brick buildings in Santa Monica, Calif. Inside the 15,000-square-foot space are enough tchotchkes, toys and props for a \u201cStar Trek\u201d convention ranging from lunchboxes and pinball machines to tribbles, a Borg Regeneration Alcove and a full-size T\u2019Kuvma Klingon statue. \nThere are also multiple writers rooms and edit bays that Mr. Kurtzman visits for his many projects. Besides the All Access series, he is developing the cartoon \u201cStar Trek Prodigy\u201d for ViacomCBS\u2019s Nickelodeon network; a miniseries based on former FBI Director\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Comey\u2019s\n\n\n\n book \u201cA Higher Loyalty;\u201d and a CBS crime drama about the character Clarice Starling from the \u201cSilence of the Lambs\u201d movie. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nViewership of Star Trek shows has declined over time, reflecting greater competition for audiences in an expanding TV landscape.\n\n\nHousehold rating by series*\n\n\n0\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\nThe Next Generation\n\n\nDeep Space\nNine\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\n*The estimate of the percentage of households that watch a particular show.\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nSource: Nielsen\n\n\n\n\n\nViewership of Star Trek shows has declined over time, reflecting greater competition for audiences in an expanding TV landscape.\n\n\nHousehold rating by series*\n\n\n0\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\nThe Next Generation\n\n\nDeep Space\nNine\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\n*The estimate of the percentage of households that watch a particular show.\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nSource: Nielsen\n\n\n\n\n\nViewership of Star Trek shows has declined over time, reflecting greater competition for audiences in an expanding TV landscape.\n\n\nHousehold rating by series*\n\n\n0\n\n\n5\n\n\n10\n\n\n15\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\nThe Next Generation\n\n\nDeep Space\nNine\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\n*The estimate of the percentage of households that watch a particular show.\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nSource: Nielsen\n\n\n\n\n\nViewership of Star Trek shows has declined over time, reflecting greater competition for audiences in an expanding TV landscape.\n\n\nHousehold rating by series*\n\n\n0\n\n\n10\n\n\n20\n\n\nThe Original Series\n\n\nThe Next Generation\n\n\nDeep Space\nNine\n\n\nVoyager\n\n\n*The estimate of the percentage of households that watch a particular show.\n\n\nEnterprise\n\n\nSource: Nielsen\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cHe is building an empire,\u201d said David Stapf, president of CBS Television Studios, where Mr. Kurtzman is based. \u201cHe\u2019s capable of doing more than one thing at a time, which makes him incredibly valuable to us.\u201d\nA Los Angeles native, Mr. Kurtzman was a latecomer to Star Trek. His tastes initially ran more toward independent film and personal stories. He gained an appreciation for science fiction and fantasy as a writer and producer on the shows \u201cHercules: The Legendary Journeys\u201d and \u201cXena: Warrior Princess.\u201d\nMr. Kurtzman later ended up working on Mr. Abrams\u2019s television shows \u201cAlias\u201d and \u201cFringe,\u201d as well as the \u201cStar Trek\u201d feature films, which was when he took a crash course in the show\u2019s rich culture. \nConvincing Mr. Stewart to reprise his role from \u201cStar Trek: The Next Generation,\u201d a hit that ran in syndication from 1987 to 1994, wasn\u2019t easy. Mr. Kurtzman and his team pitched the idea of a show about Capt. Picard in the twilight of his life, second-guessing his leadership as a new mystery arises. \n\u201cHe listened carefully. And he said, \u2019Thank you, no,\u2019\u201d Mr. Kurtzman said. A few days later, Mr. Stewart\u2019s agent called and asked to see some pages outlining an idea. Mr. Kurtzman sent over 34 pages, and Mr. Stewart was sold.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nConvincing Mr. Stewart to reprise his role as Picard wasn\u2019t easy. One concession made to the 79-year-old actor: He rarely wears his old uniform in the new series.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Trae Patton/CBS Interactive|, Inc.\n \n\n\n\n\u201cI think he understood we were not looking to repeat anything,\u201d Mr. Kurtzman said. One concession made to the 79-year-old Mr. Stewart: He rarely wears his old uniform on the show. \n\u201cStar Trek\u201d has often sought to address social and political issues, and \u201cPicard\u201d is no exception as some of the story line echoes the U.S. immigration debate. The show \u201chas always been an amazing mirror that holds itself up to our modern world as it exists now,\u201d Mr. Kurtzman said.\nLike all hard-core fans of something, Trekkers\u2014who eschew the Trekkies moniker\u2014can be a difficult bunch to please. Earlier this month, Mr. Kurtzman\u2019s Wikipedia page was vandalized and changed from \u201cbest known for executive producing\u201d the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise to \u201cbest known for ruining\u201d it.\nMr. Kurtzman takes it in stride and is devoted to the fans, even if the affection isn\u2019t always mutual. \u201cThe fans are the true owners of \u2019Star Trek,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t want people to think I\u2019ve dishonored something that\u2019s meaningful to them.\u201d \nWrite to Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com As the overseer of the \u201cStar Trek\u201d properties, Alex Kurtzman is charged with updating the space drama for a new generation without alienating its hard-core fans. But there\u2019s much more at stake as ViacomCBS counts on the franchise to bolster its streaming service. ",
        "author": "Joe Flint"
    },
    {
        "title": "Women Drive The Action In \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8847",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/cbs/women-drive-the-action-in-star-trek-discovery.html",
        "text": "With its latest series, the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise enhances its proud legacy of inclusion.\n With its latest series, the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise enhances its proud legacy of inclusion.\n ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Women Drive The Action In \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8848",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/cbs/women-drive-the-action-in-star-trek-discovery.html",
        "text": "With its latest series, the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise enhances its proud legacy of inclusion.\n With its latest series, the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise enhances its proud legacy of inclusion.\n ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Women Drive The Action In \u201cStar Trek: Discovery\u201d (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8849",
        "date": "2019-01-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/cbs/women-drive-the-action-in-star-trek-discovery.html",
        "text": "With its latest series, the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise enhances its proud legacy of inclusion.\n With its latest series, the \u201cStar Trek\u201d franchise enhances its proud legacy of inclusion.\n ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Cinematographer Bradford Young Creates a \u2018Healing\u2019 Work of Art (WSJ: Art) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8850",
        "date": "2019-09-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/cinematographer-bradford-young-creates-a-healing-work-of-art-11569157202?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=66",
        "text": "His multi-screen installation, \u201cBack and Song,\u201d will be unveiled Oct. 5 in the soaring stone chapel of Girard College, a Philadelphia boarding school. The project, a commission of the art organization Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University, subtly nods to the history of U.S. medical schools and hospitals treating\u2014and mistreating\u2014black patients.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe chapel at Girard College, a Philadelphia boarding school, is where the \u2018Back and Song\u2019 multi-screen installation will be displayed.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Girard College\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Young and a collaborating artist, Elissa Blount Moorhead, have been layering archival footage of traditional black healers with recent clips of black cultural leaders to illustrate the cathartic ways black communities seek healing on their own terms.\n\nMr. Young said he was motivated to explore the issue after reading a 2016 study by University of Virginia researchers that detailed the troubling reasons why black people are often under-treated for pain. (In the study of 222 white medical students and residents around the country, 40% of the students and 25% of the residents told researchers they thought black people\u2019s skin was thicker than that of white people.) After mulling the sad statistics and conferring with his wife, who works as a midwife, Mr. Young said he and Ms. Blount Moorhead decided they wanted the piece to \u201cturn away from what had been done to our bodies and look closer at the rituals and music that help us get through trauma.\u201d\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat intrigues you most about the \u201cBack and Song\u201d multi-screen installation and Mr. Young\u2019s expansion into contemporary art from cinematography? Join the discussion below. \n\n\nNext month, visitors entering the gilt-ceiling chapel will encounter a quartet of screens playing clips of figures from jazz legend John Coltrane to harpist Brandee Younger to Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, who dispensed nutrition tips in his 1967 book, \u201cHow to Eat to Live.\u201d The pair are still finalizing the montage but he said the environment will include elements of color therapy\u2014anything to conjure \u201cwhat healing looks and sounds like to me.\u201d\nGrief and cultural mending are familiar themes for Mr. Young, who spent much of his childhood in the Louisville funeral home owned by his grandparents, who hosted traveling jazz musicians who weren\u2019t allowed to stay at local hotels. They also collected art by modern mainstays like Romare Bearden, Charles White and Aaron Douglas. As a boy, Mr. Young said, he spent hours leafing through his grandmother\u2019s coffee-table books on Renaissance artists and black photographers. His early favorites included Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava, who chronicled everyday black life in moody spotlight and shadow.\nPhotography led Mr. Young to study filmmaking at Howard University. In 2010 he wielded the camera for artist Leslie Hewitt\u2019s ode to Harlem, \u201cUntitled (Level),\u201d a film installation later exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The collaborative experience was eye-opening, he said, because Ms. Hewitt \u201csaw me as more than a cameraman; she saw a tension in my work I could unpack.\u201d\nThe following year, he got his independent-film breakthrough with \u201cPariah,\u201d a coming-of-age story about a black lesbian directed by Dee Rees, who would go on to write and direct \u201cMudbound.\u201d Bigger films followed, including \u201cArrival,\u201d for which he became the second black cinematographer nominated for an Oscar. (He lost to Linus Sandgren and \u201cLa La Land.\u201d) Recently, he shot \u201cSolo: A Star Wars Story.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHe met Ms. Blount Moorhead after she and curator Rashida Bumbray invited him to make a work for an exhibition that took place in several art spaces across Brooklyn in 2014: \u201cFunk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn.\u201d \nHe asked Ms. Blount Moorhead to join him in the \u201cBack and Song\u201d commission for Philadelphia. They have relished \u201cexcavating the margins of history\u201d for footage, she said, adding, \u201cWe\u2019re both intellectually thirsty.\u201d \nWrite to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com Bradford Young, the cinematographer of \u201cArrival\u201d and \u201cSolo: A Star Wars Story,\u201d is preparing a multi-screen art installation that examines how black communities seek healing. ",
        "author": "Kelly Crow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: \u2018The Mandalorian,\u2019 a Gunslinger in a Galaxy Far, Far Away (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8851",
        "date": "2019-11-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/arts/television/review-mandalorian-disney-plus.html",
        "text": "The highly entertaining new \u201cStar Wars\u201d series, the marquee attraction of the Disney Plus originals, is a test of the limits of franchise extension. The highly entertaining new \u201cStar Wars\u201d series, the marquee attraction of the Disney Plus originals, is a test of the limits of franchise extension. Before we get to \u201cThe Mandalorian,\u201d let\u2019s talk for a minute about Martin Scorsese.",
        "author": "By Mike Hale"
    },
    {
        "title": "Analysis | How \u2018The Last Jedi\u2019 created a powerful farewell to Carrie Fisher (WP: Comics) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8852",
        "date": "2017-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2017/12/19/how-the-last-jedi-created-a-powerful-farewell-to-carrie-fisher/",
        "text": "Major spoilers abound.IF THE moment does not move you, you\u2019ve got a heart as cold as planet Hoth.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhether you love or hate \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d it\u2019s near impossible not to experience a jolt when reality crashes into fantasy as we witness the near-death of Leia Organa, as portrayed through the most affecting Star Wars performance Carrie Fisher ever delivered. Next week will mark the first anniversary of Fisher\u2019s death\u00a0from cardiac arrest, at age 60, after a flight home to Los Angeles. It is a testament to how beloved Fisher was, as performer and writer and raconteur, that her sudden passing still feels so unreal to many fans, and that she still feels so very much with us. Who within the Star Wars family, or fandom, did not love Carrie?Story continues below advertisementNow, the long shadow of her passing hovers over \u201cThe Last Jedi.\u201d When we see Leia critically injured in the film\u2019s first reel, blasted by the First Order immediately after her Dark Side son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) refuses to shoot her and the bridge of her command ship, we are momentarily thunderstruck.AdvertisementAre we about to mourn the character who is so inextricably linked to the actress we are still mourning?What follows that strike is an effect that has proved divisive among viewers: Leia, who up till now in the franchise has never fully revealed her Force powers, is floating in frigid space \u2014 as if nodding to frozen\u00a0Superman\u00a0\u2014 before creating a Force-bubble and floating her way toward a Resistance ship. (Did your audience cheer, weep, gasp or laugh when her pointed hand moved? My audiences let out a range of such reactions.)Story continues below advertisementDirector Rian Johnson has said that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy was persuasive in suggesting that this was an ideal moment for Leia to reveal her Force powers, especially because Luke had previously mentioned her Force potential as a twin Skywalker herself. And so, the director has said, Leia saving herself became akin to a person finding previously untapped superhuman strength to hoist a car to save a life.AdvertisementLeia goes into\u00a0a coma, and we are brought back to a year ago, when Fisher held on before succumbing, after four days of fan thoughts and prayers and heartfelt hashtags on social media.Then in the film, when the Resistance needs her most, Leia returns like Lazarus, her cooler (bandaged) head prevailing after hotly wired pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) has scrambled to try to save the dwindling forces and even staged a mutiny.Story continues below advertisementThe close-ups of Leia while she\u2019s in a coma, and then when she returns to the bridge,\u00a0are so moving that we half-wonder whether the writer-director altered any of the story after Fisher\u2019s death. The filmmakers have insisted that Johnson did not. Fisher had completed filming shortly before her death, and the eerie scenes are said to be just a function of coincidence.Later in the film, Leia and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) share a touching farewell scene when Holdo stays behind as the Resistance escapes to planet Crait. And Leia ultimately gets a powerful reunion scene of sorts with her long reclusive sibling Luke (Mark Hamill), as the characters\u2019 joint theme song swells.Lucasfilm had planned for the next episode, J.J. Abrams\u2019s 2019 release, to be \u201cLeia\u2019s film.\u201d But through the power of visual and story and performance, Episode VIII will stand largely as Leia\u2019s film \u2014 and Fisher\u2019s.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cShe was amazing \u2026 ,\u201d \u201cLast Jedi\u201d cinematographer Steve Yedlin says of working with Fisher. \u201cShe is such an expressive person, as much off camera as on. She\u2019s a pleasure to light and to interact with.\u201dSo what was his secret to creating such an emotionally moving luminosity around Fisher\u2019s Leia? \u201cI just tried,\u201d he says simply, \u201cto put that love [of hers] in the light.\u201dLucasfilm has said that Fisher will not appear in the saga\u2019s next episode. And \u201cLast Jedi\u201d producer Ram Bergman says that no CGI creation of Leia was needed for \u201cLast Jedi,\u201d adding about Fisher: \u201cWe got what we needed from her.\u201dBergman notes that the bond that Johnson built with Fisher, as he spent long hours at her home, helped elevate Fisher\u2019s farewell as Leia.\u201cThey loved each other,\u201d says Bergman, adding: \u201cThey truly built trust. She felt really safe and confident [that he would] get the best out of her.\u201cWe all adored her.\u201dRead more:How \u2018The Last Jedi\u2019 became the most divisive Star Wars movie yetMark Hamill\u2019s return as Luke Skywalker in \u2018The Last Jedi\u2019 is a revelationCarrie Fisher, Princess Leia of \u2018Star Wars,\u2019 chronicler of her own excess, dies at 60 Fisher died a year ago, and some of the new Star Wars movie's most poignant moments involve the collision of fact and fiction.  How \u2018The Last Jedi\u2019 created a powerful farewell to Carrie Fisher",
        "author": "Michael Cavna"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fall Movies 2019: Here\u2019s What\u2019s Coming Soon to Theaters (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8853",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/movies/fall-movies.html",
        "text": "We\u2019ve picked out the films you need to know about, from the most anticipated (\u201cThe Irishman,\u201d \u201cStar Wars\u201d) to the most curious (\u201cCats,\u201d paws down). We\u2019ve picked out the films you need to know about, from the most anticipated (\u201cThe Irishman,\u201d \u201cStar Wars\u201d) to the most curious (\u201cCats,\u201d paws down). Here is a highly select list of noteworthy films due out this season. Release dates are subject to change and reflect the latest information as of deadline.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fall Movies 2019: Here\u2019s What\u2019s Coming Soon to Theaters (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8854",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/movies/fall-movies.html",
        "text": "We\u2019ve picked out the films you need to know about, from the most anticipated (\u201cThe Irishman,\u201d \u201cStar Wars\u201d) to the most curious (\u201cCats,\u201d paws down). We\u2019ve picked out the films you need to know about, from the most anticipated (\u201cThe Irishman,\u201d \u201cStar Wars\u201d) to the most curious (\u201cCats,\u201d paws down). Here is a highly select list of noteworthy films due out this season. Release dates are subject to change and reflect the latest information as of deadline.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fall Movies 2019: Here\u2019s What\u2019s Coming Soon to Theaters (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8855",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/movies/fall-movies.html",
        "text": "We\u2019ve picked out the films you need to know about, from the most anticipated (\u201cThe Irishman,\u201d \u201cStar Wars\u201d) to the most curious (\u201cCats,\u201d paws down). We\u2019ve picked out the films you need to know about, from the most anticipated (\u201cThe Irishman,\u201d \u201cStar Wars\u201d) to the most curious (\u201cCats,\u201d paws down). Here is a highly select list of noteworthy films due out this season. Release dates are subject to change and reflect the latest information as of deadline.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Luke Skywalker Speaks (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8856",
        "date": "2017-10-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/movies/star-wars-the-last-jedi-luke-skywalker-mark-hamill.html",
        "text": "Mark Hamill has always embraced his \u201cStar Wars\u201d legacy, but when he was invited back for \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d and \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d he hesitated: \u201cI was just really scared.\u201d Mark Hamill has always embraced his \u201cStar Wars\u201d legacy, but when he was invited back for \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d and \u201cThe Last Jedi,\u201d he hesitated: \u201cI was just really scared.\u201d MALIBU, Calif. \u2014 It was maybe the longest buildup in movie history.",
        "author": "By Dave Itzkoff"
    },
    {
        "title": "Holiday Movies 2019: Here\u2019s What\u2019s Coming Soon to Theaters (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8857",
        "date": "2019-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/movies/holiday-movies.html",
        "text": "The \u201cStar Wars\u201d Skywalker saga is coming to an end, \u201cFrozen\u201d is getting a sequel and \u201cThe Shining\u201d characters are baaaaaack. Here\u2019s what you need to know about the season in cinema. The \u201cStar Wars\u201d Skywalker saga is coming to an end, \u201cFrozen\u201d is getting a sequel and \u201cThe Shining\u201d characters are baaaaaack. Here\u2019s what you need to know about the season in cinema. Here is a highly select list of noteworthy films due out this season. Release dates are subject to change and reflect the latest information as of deadline.",
        "author": "By Ben Kenigsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 50 Best TV Shows and Movies to Watch on Disney+ Right Now (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8858",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-tv-shows-movies-disney-plus.html",
        "text": "The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites. The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites. Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.",
        "author": "By Scott Tobias"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 50 Best TV Shows and Movies to Watch on Disney+ Right Now (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8859",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-tv-shows-movies-disney-plus.html",
        "text": "The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites. The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites. Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.",
        "author": "By Scott Tobias"
    },
    {
        "title": "The 50 Best TV Shows and Movies to Watch on Disney+ Right Now (NYT: Movies) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8860",
        "date": "2020-09-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/article/best-tv-shows-movies-disney-plus.html",
        "text": "The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites. The Disney streaming platform has hundreds of movie and TV titles, drawing from its own deep reservoir classics and from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and more. These are our favorites. Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.",
        "author": "By Scott Tobias"
    },
    {
        "title": "New York Today: Preparing for President Trump (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8861",
        "date": "2017-05-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/nyregion/new-york-today-preparing-for-president-trump.html",
        "text": "Thursday: President Trump\u2019s return, Star Wars Day, and a hometown hero. Thursday: President Trump\u2019s return, Star Wars Day, and a hometown hero. Updated, 11:46 a.m.",
        "author": "By Jonathan Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "David Prowse, English actor and weightlifter who embodied Darth Vader, dies at 85 (WP: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8862",
        "date": "2020-11-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/dave-prowse-dies/2020/11/29/33c8c842-323e-11eb-a997-1f4c53d2a747_story.html",
        "text": "David Prowse, an English actor and competitive weightlifter who used his towering height and broad shoulders to portray the bionic body of the evil Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, died Nov. 28 at a hospital in London. He was 85.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightHis agent, Thomas Bowington, confirmed the death but did not provide an immediate cause. Mr. Prowse announced in 2014 that he had dementia, following an earlier bout of prostate cancer. The phenomenal success of the Star Wars series after its launch in 1977 made the Dark Lord of the Sith, as Mr. Prowse\u2019s character was also known, one of cinema\u2019s most instantly recognizable villains \u2014 even as Mr. Prowse remained largely unknown to moviegoers because of his full-body costume.Story continues below advertisementAt 6-foot-7 and weighing 275 pounds, he used his imposing physique to give shape and form to Darth Vader\u2019s threatening presence on screen as the embodiment of the Evil Empire. His costume featured a menacing grilled mask, a glistening black helmet modeled after samurai headgear, a leather jumpsuit, black gloves, knee-high boots, a sweeping cape and a flashing electronic chest panel on a fiberglass breastplate.Advertisement\u201cThe only way of presenting Darth Vader as the ultimate baddie was to show virtually everyone else either terrified or completely awestruck whenever he was around,\u201d Mr. Prowse wrote in his 2011 autobiography, \u201cStraight From the Force\u2019s Mouth.\u201dAdding to the ominous presence of Darth Vader was his signature mechanical breathing, which was created by sound designer Ben Burtt recording himself inhaling and exhaling through an old Dacor scuba regulator. The dialogue delivered originally in Mr. Prowse\u2019s West Country English accent was dubbed in postproduction editing using the sonorous voice of American actor James Earl Jones.Story continues below advertisementStar Wars creator George Lucas viewed Darth Vader as the product of a collaboration by a team of artists. In addition to Jones, the team included British fencing coach Bob Anderson, who played Darth Vader in many lightsaber duels, and veteran stage actor Sebastian Shaw, who in \u201cReturn of the Jedi\u201d (1983) \u2014 the final installment in the original trilogy \u2014 provided the face of a dying Darth Vader.AdvertisementThe decisions to use Jones and Shaw came as surprises to Mr. Prowse and contributed to his strained relationship with the movies\u2019 producers.Mr. Prowse met Lucas at Twentieth Century Fox\u2019s offices in London in the summer of 1976. He was 40 and had appeared on screen in minor roles as brutes and monsters. His most noted performance was a brief turn as a bodyguard in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201cA Clockwork Orange\u201d (1971).Story continues below advertisementLucas offered Mr. Prowse a choice between two roles for his upcoming movie, \u201cStar Wars,\u201d which was being shot partly at a soundstage north of London. The first option was the furry Chewbacca character, but the thought of spending London\u2019s hot summer sweating in a hairy costume led Mr. Prowse to select option two: Darth Vader.As it turned out, the Vader outfit, weighing about 40 pounds, trapped so much body heat and provided so little ventilation that the mask\u2019s eye lenses frequently fogged up, making it difficult for Mr. Prowse to hit his marks.AdvertisementUnable to use facial expressions, he said he carefully considered his walk and swagger. He drew on his experience as a bodybuilder to convey Darth Vader\u2019s intimidating aura.Story continues below advertisementHe appeared on screen for only 12 minutes in \u201cStar Wars\u201d (1977) but became a more central character three years later in \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back,\u201d when the father-son relationship between Darth Vader and his young nemesis Luke Skywalker is revealed.Mr. Prowse wrote that his worst filming experience came during the making of \u201cReturn of the Jedi\u201d (1983). He said a Daily Mail reporter told him that Darth Vader was being killed off in the movie and that an actor was performing the death scene at a secret location. The subsequent article \u201cwas written in such a way that it looked as though all the information had come from me,\u201d Mr. Prowse wrote in his book.AdvertisementHe said that he felt ostracized for the rest of the production of the film with his stuntman increasingly doubling in for him. \u201cReturn of the Jedi\u201d would be the last movie to feature Mr. Prowse as Darth Vader, although the next three chronologically released movies in the Star Wars franchise explored the backstory of Darth Vader as a young Anakin Skywalker.Story continues below advertisementMr. Prowse said he was later banned from official Lucasfilm Star Wars conventions, but he continued for years to travel around the world as a featured guest at other science fiction and space-fantasy fan events. He regularly signed promotional photographs \u201cDave Prowse Is Darth Vader.\u201dDavid Charles Prowse was born in Bristol, England, on July 1, 1935. His father was a sheet metal worker at a Bristol Aeroplane assembly plant.After his father died in 1940 while recovering from surgery for a duodenal ulcer, his mother took in lodgers to support the family. By age 12, the young Mr. Prowse was a swift rugby player and exceptional track and field sprinter and long jumper.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut his dreams of one day playing for England\u2019s national rugby team were dashed after he developed persistent swelling in his left knee. He spent 10 months in a tuberculosis sanatorium with his leg immobilized in a splint, but a cause for his knee ailment was never determined. To address his atrophied muscles, he took up swimming and, home after a workout one day, became captivated by a magazine cover of French bodybuilder Robert Duranton in a newspaper shop\u2019s window display.\u201cAll I knew at that moment was that I wanted to be just like him, with a great physique and two good legs,\u201d Mr. Prowse wrote in his book.He trained as a bodybuilder for more than 10 years before focusing on competitive weightlifting, eventually becoming Britain\u2019s top heavyweight weightlifter in the early 1960s. He competed in national and international competitions until he was passed over to represent Britain at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHis exploits as a weightlifter caught the attention of an advertising agency, which, he said, hired him to do a TV commercial for a washing machine and dryer company with the tag line: \u201cEven Britain\u2019s strongest man cannot wring water out of a towel that has been spin-dried by the Hot Spinner.\u201dWhile pursuing a career in show business, he also opened a gym and sold fitness equipment at Harrods department store in London.In 1963, he married Norma Scammell. In addition to his wife, survivors include three children, a brother and grandchildren.Mr. Prowse said the most satisfying period of his acting career was the years he spent playing the Green Cross Code Man, a cape-wearing superhero who warns children to follow safety rules when crossing streets. The character became a staple of TV ads from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and led to his frequent visits to schools. In 2000, he was honored as a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to charity and to road safety.\u201cThe kids loved being talked to by Darth Vader,\u201d he told the Western Daily Press. \u201cWe reduced road accidents for children from over 40,000 per year to 20,000, saving thousands of lives. That has been my greatest achievement.\u201d\n\nRead more Washington Post obituaries The actor used his towering height and broad shoulders to portray the bionic body of the evil Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. David Prowse, English actor and weightlifter who embodied Darth Vader, dies at 85",
        "author": "Louie Estrada"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming Soon to a Hallowed Hall of Spaceflight: An X-Wing Fighter (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8863",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/star-wars-smithsonian-x-wing.html",
        "text": "Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The National Air and Space Museum holds some of the most hallowed objects of the aerial age.",
        "author": "By Michael Levenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming Soon to a Hallowed Hall of Spaceflight: An X-Wing Fighter (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8864",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/star-wars-smithsonian-x-wing.html",
        "text": "Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The National Air and Space Museum holds some of the most hallowed objects of the aerial age.",
        "author": "By Michael Levenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming Soon to a Hallowed Hall of Spaceflight: An X-Wing Fighter (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8865",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/star-wars-smithsonian-x-wing.html",
        "text": "Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The National Air and Space Museum holds some of the most hallowed objects of the aerial age.",
        "author": "By Michael Levenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coming Soon to a Hallowed Hall of Spaceflight: An X-Wing Fighter (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8866",
        "date": "2021-05-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/star-wars-smithsonian-x-wing.html",
        "text": "Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Starting late next year, an X-wing from \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The National Air and Space Museum holds some of the most hallowed objects of the aerial age.",
        "author": "By Michael Levenson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Disney\u2019s Next Big Remake: Itself (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8867",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-battle-netflix-disney-goes-for-the-big-remake-itself-11554909176?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=57",
        "text": "One thing is already clear: The undertaking requires a whole new set of skills, and a major cultural shake-up. Disney must transform itself from a company in which every movie and theme-park ride is produced to perfection to a tech company capable of moving nimbly in a hypercompetitive space. Employees from the backlots in Burbank to technology centers in Nebraska say the pressure is on to make it work. Disney has given producers approval to make a big-ticket \u201cStar Wars\u201d spinoff series that will bypass theaters and TV and go directly to the service. It is offering bonuses for the services of directors and showrunners to work on the offerings it thinks it needs to lure customers away from Netflix. And it has told its software developers to dial back other projects to make sure the service can handle millions of subscribers when it launches. All across Hollywood, movie studios are rethinking their missions. Century-old companies are rushing to compete in the streaming business, convinced that the future of entertainment will require them to pipe programming directly into the home. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Comcast Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n NBCUniversal and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n AT&T Inc.\u2019s\n\n\n WarnerMedia also have announced plans to enter the sector now dominated by tech-focused services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. If the strategy works, it could pump billions of dollars in subscriber fees into the studios. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough to make up for the revenue lost from cable fees, Netflix payments and\u2014if the strategy keeps people home from the multiplex\u2014movie tickets. \n\n\n Screen Contest Disney's best-known cable channels have lost subscribers, while streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have grown rapidly. U.S. subscribers 120 \u00a0million Netflix Hulu ESPN Disney Channel 100 80 60 40 20 0 \u201916 \u201918 2014 \u201916 \u201918 2014 \u201916 \u201918 2014 \u201916 \u201918 2014 U.S. subscribers \u00a0million 120 Hulu Netflix ESPN Disney Channel 100 80 60 40 20 0 2014 \u201918 \u201916 \u201916 2014 \u201918 \u201916 \u201918 2014 \u201918 \u201916 2014 U.S. subscribers \u00a0million 120 ESPN Hulu Netflix Disney Channel 100 80 60 40 20 0 \u201918 2014 2014 \u201916 \u201916 2014 \u201918 \u201916 \u201918 2014 \u201918 \u201916 U.S. subscribers ESPN Hulu Netflix Disney Channel \u00a0million 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 \u201917 \u201916 \u201914 \u201918 2013 \u201915 Source: the companies \n\n\nDisney Chief Executive \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Iger\n\n\n\n has called Disney+ his No. 1 priority. He spent $71.3 billion on 21st Century Fox to boost the number of movies and shows it can offer, has given up hundreds of millions of dollars in Netflix licensing fees to hold on to Disney content for the new service, and has even delayed his own retirement to see it through. Disney franchises such as \u201cStar Wars\u201d and \u201cHigh School Musical\u201d will anchor the monthly subscription service, which will launch in November. It aims to take on Netflix in family programming, an area of intense competition among streaming sites. On Tuesday, in a sign of a Disney-versus-Netflix battle emerging in Hollywood, Netflix announced it had signed a deal with \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kenny Ortega,\n\n\n\n a producer and director best known for shaping Disney television franchises such as \u201cHigh School Musical\u201d and movies such as \u201cNewsies.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDisney Chief Executive Robert Iger, center, appeared with the stars of Marvel Studios superhero movies at Disneyland earlier this month.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeff Gritchen/SCNG/Zuma Press\n \n\n\n\nA cultural shift will be necessary if Disney is to turn itself into a major player in the streaming market. In years past, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Lasseter,\n\n\n\n then chief creative officer of Disney\u2019s Pixar Animation unit, would unapologetically delay a movie\u2019s release until he was satisfied it was the best it could be. Disney theme parks are similarly obsessed with getting every detail just right. \u201cBut done is not a thing in tech,\u201d said one longtime Disney employee who left last year. \u201cIt\u2019s like oil and water. Two completely different management philosophies.\u201d Disney already operates ESPN+, a streaming supplement designed to mitigate the sports channel\u2019s declining subscriber numbers, and has assumed majority control of streaming service Hulu.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA new series based on Disney\u2019s mid-2000s hit franchise \u2018High School Musical\u2019 will be a key component of the Disney+ launch.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Troy Harvey/Disney+\n \n\n\n\nIn November 2015, Disney launched in the U.K. its first effort at a stand-alone streaming service, called DisneyLife. It offers access to roughly 400 movies, 6,000 songs, 4,000 TV episodes and 250 books, initially for about \u00a310 (about $13) a month. It used the service to cross-promote other products. It hawked new theatrical releases with The entertainment giant rose to the top of Hollywood on the strength of its ability to pack movie theaters and theme parks. Now it is betting that to stay on top, it needs to come to you\u2014by launching a new streaming service built around popular franchises, from \u201cStar Wars\u201d to \u201cHigh School Musical.\u201d ",
        "author": "Erich Schwartzel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Star Wars Novelists Seek Years of Missing Royalties From Disney (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8868",
        "date": "2020-12-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-wars-novelists-seek-years-of-missing-royalty-payments-from-disney-11608393600?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=31",
        "text": "Alan Dean Foster\u2019s copy of \u2018Star Wars\u2019 was signed by Carrie Fisher, George Lucas, Harrison Ford and others.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Caitlin O'Hara for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nThen, in 2012, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Walt Disney Co.\n\n DIS -0.01%\n\n\n bought Lucasfilm Ltd.\u2014and the royalty checks stopped. Now, Mr. Foster and other authors from \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Disney\n\n DIS -0.01%\n\n\n -purchased franchises are in a heated dispute with Hollywood\u2019s biggest empire, which they say refuses to pay royalties on book contracts it absorbed in the $4 billion Lucasfilm deal and other acquisitions. The amount of money at stake is minuscule to a company of Disney\u2019s size but important to the writers seeking it. While Disney has mined Lucasfilm for new movies that have collectively grossed nearly $6 billion at the world-wide box office, these writers say the company has delayed dealing with their complaints and stiffed them on checks that rarely total a few thousand bucks apiece. Since Mr. Foster\u2019s dispute was taken public by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association, other authors of books tied to projects from Indiana Jones to \u201cBuffy the Vampire Slayer\u201d have come forward with similar stories of royalty checks that stopped after Disney acquired the properties. In each case, Disney threatens to alienate an obscure but vital tentacle of the franchises, as these novelizations helped build and maintain fan loyalty. Complicating matters: The exact amount of money at stake is unknown, since sales and royalties for the books involved have fluctuated wildly over time.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSince Alan Dean Foster\u2019s dispute with Disney became public, other authors of books tied to franchises now owned by the company have come forward with similar stories of halted royalty checks.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Caitlin O'Hara for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nA Disney spokesman said: \u201cWe are carefully reviewing whether any royalty payments may have been missed as a result of acquisition integration and will take appropriate remedial steps if that is the case.\u201d Mr. Foster, who is well-known to longtime Star Wars fans, says Disney is ignoring the workaday players who help build intergenerational connections to beloved characters. He and his wife are both in poor health, and he said the royalty earnings could come in handy for medical expenses. \u201cI\u2019m not Steve Spielberg. I\u2019m not Steve King. I don\u2019t even have a name that starts with Steve,\u201d he said. The dispute began in the summer of 2019, when Mr. Foster\u2019s literary agent, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vaughne Hansen,\n\n\n\n first asked Disney why he had stopped receiving royalty checks on three novels he had written tied to \u201cAlien,\u201d the outer-space horror series produced by Twentieth Century Fox, the studio Disney bought as part of a $71.3 billion deal in 2019. Mr. Foster and his agent then realized the same thing had occurred to his royalties for two Star Wars books after Disney bought Lucasfilm. In response to queries about the \u201cAlien\u201d checks, a Disney attorney told Mr. Foster that the company had acquired the rights to these books, but not the obligations to pay out royalties. But in the case of \u201cAlien,\u201d Ms. Hansen said, the rights to Mr. Foster\u2019s novels had been reassigned several times, with no interruption of royalty checks, before Disney bought Fox.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSHow do you think the dispute between the authors and Disney can be fairly resolved? Join the conversation below.\n\n\n\u201cDisney has acquired a house with a mortgage on it. They want to keep living in the house. They don\u2019t want to pay the mortgage,\u201d Mr. Foster said. The writers group says a similar pattern has emerged following other Disney acquisitions. At least a half dozen writers across a range of Disney-owned properties have since said they are in the same boat, said \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mary Robinette Kowal,\n\n\n\n president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan Dean Foster, showing off a 30 million-year-old spider embedded in amber, also wrote three novels tied to the \u2018Alien\u2019 films.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Caitlin O'Hara for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nDisney has begun reviewing the \u201cAlien\u201d case, but there is a line of writers behind Mr. Foster waiting for a turn at the negotiating table. In total, Ms. Hansen estimates her client had made more than $50,000 in royalties on the original Star Wars novelization alone before the checks stopped in 2012. If Disney agrees to calculate the missing royalties, it faces a daunting task tracking down sales that cover six years and, in Mr. Foster\u2019s case alone, five novels published in dozens of international markets. Donald Glut, a writer who novelized 1980\u2019s \u201cThe Empire Strikes Back,\u201d and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Kahn,\n\n\n\n who adapted the third film of the original trilogy, \u201cReturn of the Jedi,\u201d both have said they are missing royalty checks, too. If a resolution isn\u2019t reached, the writers association could take further action, said Ms. Kowal, including putting Disney on a list of publishers it tells its members to avoid. The term given to such a designation: \u201cWriter Beware.\u201d Write to Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com Authors of books tied to big film franchises such as Star Wars stopped receiving checks after Disney acquired Lucasfilm and Twentieth Century Fox. ",
        "author": "Erich Schwartzel | Photographs by Caitlin O\u2019Hara for The Wall Street Journal"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Star Wars\u2019 Leads Box Office With Disappointing $175.5 Million (WSJ: Media & Marketing) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8869",
        "date": "2019-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/star-wars-opens-to-massivebut-series-low-175-5-million-11577039960?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=61",
        "text": "A new big-screen adaptation of the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Lloyd Webber\n\n\n\n musical \u201cCats,\u201d attracted sizable attention for all the wrong reasons. It drew some of the harshest\u2014and most bewildered\u2014critical reviews in recent history and lost all nine lives in its debut, grossing $6.5 million.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cBombshell,\u201d the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.\n\n LGF.B 0.84%\n\n\n dramatization of the sexual-harassment crisis at Fox News, lived up to at least part of its name and also sputtered at the box office, collecting $5.1 million.\n\n\nIt was a lackluster start to Hollywood\u2019s busiest season. Poor word-of-mouth can make or break a release heading into the holiday, when normal weekdays perform like Saturday nights at the theater since children are out of school and many parents take vacation time. The last two weeks of the calendar year are typically a boon to a struggling exhibition industry, which has seen grosses dip about 5% so far this year and faces an unpromising slate of releases in 2020. That Star Wars and a musical starring Taylor Swift failed to attract audiences as robustly as expected is particularly worrisome at a time when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Netflix Inc.\n\n\n and even Disney itself offer big-budget releases streamed directly into the home, forcing studios to make the case to consumers to get off the couch with each new release.\n\n\nStar Wars: Full Coverage\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Lucasfilm / Everett Collection\n \n\n\n Latest News and Top Stories \u2018The Rise of Skywalker\u2019 Review: Old Friends United Disney Disturbs the Force: Pleasing Star Wars Fans Complicates Saga Star Wars Fans Want Baby Yoda. DIY Versions Are Their Only Hope. \n\n\nThough massive by most standards, the \u201cSkywalker\u201d opening fell short of exhibitor hopes, considering it was the culmination of a series accustomed to record-setting openings.\nIt will also be the last Star Wars movie until 2022, since Disney decided to put the series on a \u201chiatus\u201d after \u201cSkywalker,\u201d and the downward trend of Star Wars openings appears to affirm that decision.\nDisney has faced long-term issues with Lucasfilm Ltd., the Star Wars production company it purchased for $4 billion in 2012.\n\u201cSkywalker\u201d is Disney\u2019s fifth Star Wars movie in four years, and the onslaught has depleted enthusiasm among some fans, many of whom thought the trilogy\u2019s story line went in surprising and upsetting directions in the second installment, released in 2017. Disney\u2019s own \u201cThe Mandalorian,\u201d which premiered on the company\u2019s new streaming service last month, may have also sucked up some of the fan appetite for more Star Wars stories. \n\u201cThis is such a beloved story ingrained in pop culture, and you\u2019re never going to satisfy everyone,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cathleen Taff,\n\n\n\n Disney\u2019s head of distribution.\nOpening-weekend audiences gave \u201cSkywalker\u201d a B+ grade, according to the CinemaScore market research firm, the first non-A grade for any Star Wars film tracked by the service, including\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Lucas\u2019s\n\n\n\n prequels and the others produced by Disney.\nOverseas grosses added $198 million to the weekend total. In China, \u201cThe Rise of Skywalker\u201d faltered as previous installments have, opening in the country to a paltry $12.1 million.\nDisney has struggled to win fans of the franchise in China, home to the world\u2019s second-largest box office, since few consumers there saw the original trilogy and have little nostalgia for classic characters making their reappearance like Han Solo and C-3PO.\u00a0It has led to depleted revenue from the country, which has overwhelmingly embraced other Disney franchises like the Marvel Studios comic-book adaptations.\nThe tone and approach of \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d is aligned with the more traditional story lines of the space opera, a fan-friendly approach that may attract repeat moviegoers.\n\u201cWe want to look at it at the end of its run, not the beginning,\u201d said Ms. Taff.\nMichael Taylor, a warehouse worker in Ann Arbor, Mich., went to see the movie three times on Thursday and Friday and predicts he\u2019ll catch a few more screenings before it leaves theaters.\n\u201cIt has some plot issues you can pick apart, but who cares?\u201d said Mr. Taylor, a die-hard Star Wars fan who even has a tattoo of prequel character Jar Jar Binks on his right biceps. \u201cI loved it.\u201d\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSDid lackluster reviews sway your decision to see \u2018The Rise of Skywalker\u2019 on opening weekend? Join the conversation below.\n\n\nFor \u201cCats,\u201d the opening-weekend gross was hardly surprising, given that the movie became a punchline almost as soon as early trailers appeared in July, showing actors such as Jennifer Hudson and Judi Dench singing and dancing in what the studio behind the filmmakers called \u201cdigital fur technology.\u201d\nIt was released by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Comcast Corp.\u2019s\n\n\n Universal Pictures, which will have another chance at the holida After mixed fan reaction and thumbs-down from most critics, \u201cStar Wars: The Rise of Skywalker\u201d took in an estimated $175.5 million in the U.S. and Canada, the lowest opening of the trilogy produced by Disney. ",
        "author": "Erich Schwartzel"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Face Masks for Kids\u2014According to Kids (WSJ: Pop the Question) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8870",
        "date": "2020-12-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-face-masks-for-kidsaccording-to-kids-11607616534?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=28",
        "text": "Izzy Washington, 5Atlanta\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMilla Wilkes-Davis Mask\n\u201cMy mask is sparkly and pink, my favorite color (Mask, $8, The Turning Pointe, 803-782-8188). It has ballerinas on it and I\u2019m a ballerina. They\u2019re doing pli\u00e9s, first position, arabesque and second position. It feels rough on the outside because of the sparkles but soft inside. [Parents] should look for masks that have things their kids like on them.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nNatalie Rodier, 5New York City\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUniqlo Mask\n\n\n\u201cMy favorite mask is white and soft and comfortable (Mask, $15 for 3, uniqlo.com). I wear it outside, to school and to the park. When I wear it, I can still breathe. I can even smell the computer through it; it smells tech-y. At the park, I can smell the monkey bars; they smell like metal. Sometimes I have to flip it, because my drool gets on it during soccer.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nCharlie Diamond, 7Westport, Conn.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nStar Wars Mask\n\u201cMy favorite is a Star Wars mask (Holly Rowan Mask, from $7, etsy.com). It\u2019s all about the ears\u2014that part needs to feel comfortable. Big masks that wrap around your head are the worst. My mask has a bunch of ships on it. I could name every ship but I\u2019m not going to. Well, actually, let\u2019s see: X-Wing, TIE Fighter\u2026\u201d \n\n\n\n\nPablo Bordes, 9New York City\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nUntold Horizons Mask\n\u201cMy mask is very comfy (Mask, $25 for 5, untoldhorizons.com). It\u2019s breathable, has two filters and doesn\u2019t hurt my ears. Some masks aren\u2019t adjustable and the part behind the ear hurts. The size is important. If it\u2019s too big it will cover your face. If it\u2019s too small it will rub and be annoying.\u201d \u2014Edited from interviews by Sara Bosworth\nThe Wall Street Journal is not compensated by retailers listed in its articles as outlets for products. Listed retailers frequently are not the sole retail outlets.\n\n\nMore in Style & Fashion\n\n\n\n\nThe Best Detective Stories Ever in Books, Movies and Television\nOctober 29, 2020 \n\n\nJohn Waters\u2019s Favorite American Road Trip Is Predictably Surprising \nSeptember 30, 2020 \n\n\nSix TV Shows to Watch Now That Will Satisfy the Travel Itch \nSeptember 23, 2020 \n\n\nPassionate Page-Turners: Books About Great Love Affairs\nAugust 26, 2020 \n\n\nThese Books on Friendship Will Cure Quarantine Loneliness\nAugust 12, 2020 Four outspoken children on their favorite face coverings, including styles peppered with Star Wars space ships and pli\u00e9ing ballerinas. ",
        "author": "Sara Bosworth"
    },
    {
        "title": "EA Delays \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Game, Clouding Hopes for New Revenue (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8871",
        "date": "2017-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ea-star-wars-delay-stirs-unease-over-industry-shift-to-service-model-1508351695?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=75",
        "text": "The surprise decision to put the game on hold indefinitely\u2014it originally was due in late fiscal 2019\u2014comes as publishers in the console segment of the $100 billion videogame industry experiment with new ways to make money off blockbuster titles.\nIncreasingly, they are looking to transform their biggest games into everlasting experiences\u2014so-called games as a service\u2014with ways for players to continuously open their wallets, such as by spending on virtual weapons, side missions and other items.\n\n\n\nMorgan Stanley\n\n\n lowered its outlook for fiscal 2019 per-share earnings by 8% to $5.36 and cut its price target on EA stock by $2 to $126 in light of the delay. Wall Street thwacked the shares, which were up 38% from a year ago as of Tuesday\u2019s close. The stock Wednesday slid 3.4% to $113.\nFeedback from players testing the game prompted the change, EA said. \u201cIt has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design,\u201d EA said Tuesday in announcing its decision.\nThere are risks to developing games that nudge players to repeatedly spend, Cowen analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Creutz\n\n\n\n said. \u201cMany gamers already feel like the implicit contract between them and publishers is being abused by all these monetization practices,\u201d Mr. Creutz said. \u201cThe industry is running some risk of killing the Golden Goose.\u201d\nIndustry observers and fans lashed out on social media over the studio shutdown and game delay, speculating EA was trying to force Visceral to embrace games as a service. \nEA never specified what the revamped experience will entail. The company already took flak from gamers playing an early version of \u201cStar Wars Battlefront II\u201d over the shooter game\u2019s inclusion of buyable \u201ccrates\u201d of virtual cards that enhance characters\u2019 appearance and abilities. In response, EA said it would refine the experience before the expected launch Nov. 17, so players don\u2019t feel they need to buy the most powerful game items to succeed.\nIt is the latest game to draw a rebuke over extra paid content, joining Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment\u2019s \u201cMiddle-Earth: Shadow of War\u201d and Take-Two Interactive Inc.\u2019s \u201cNBA 2K18.\u201d\nVisceral was well known for creating \u201cDead Space,\u201d a popular science-fiction horror franchise. A studio in Vancouver will take over development of the untitled Star Wars game. A spokesman for EA said the company is in discussions with Ms. Hennig about her next role.\nEA had high hopes for the game financially. On a company conference call nearly a year ago, finance chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blake Jorgensen\n\n\n\n said it is a \u201chuge opportunity for us to grow out in a much\u2014a very large franchise, a very large part of the market.\u201d\nAnalysts said the game\u2019s delay could damp EA\u2019s future earnings, and are waiting to hear what the company has to say when it reports fiscal second-quarter results Oct. 31. Wedbush Securities\u2019\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Pachter\n\n\n\n had projected the game would sell around 7 million copies.\n\u201cThis is a negative,\u201d Macquarie Securities analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ben Schachter\n\n\n\n said. The delay suggests Visceral has been struggling to adapt the game to support the kind of \u201clive services\u201d model that is now standard in videogames, he said.\nIn a note to investors,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Credit Suisse\n\n\n said there could be a silver lining to the delay. \u201cWhile this is not the desired result,\u201d the bank said, \u201cthis does relieve what we thought to be an overloaded release schedule for the next fiscal year.\u201d\nWrite to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com Electronic Arts\u2019 sudden decision to put a highly anticipated Star Wars game on ice comes as videogame makers experiment with new ways to make money off blockbuster titles. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "EA Delays \u2018Star Wars\u2019 Game, Clouding Hopes for New Revenue (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8872",
        "date": "2017-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/ea-star-wars-delay-stirs-unease-over-industry-shift-to-service-model-1508351695?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=85",
        "text": "The surprise decision to put the game on hold indefinitely\u2014it originally was due in late fiscal 2019\u2014comes as publishers in the console segment of the $100 billion videogame industry experiment with new ways to make money off blockbuster titles.\n\n\n\n\nIncreasingly, they are looking to transform their biggest games into everlasting experiences\u2014so-called games as a service\u2014with ways for players to continuously open their wallets, such as by spending on virtual weapons, side missions and other items.\n\n\n\nMorgan Stanley\n\n\n lowered its outlook for fiscal 2019 per-share earnings by 8% to $5.36 and cut its price target on EA stock by $2 to $126 in light of the delay. Wall Street thwacked the shares, which were up 38% from a year ago as of Tuesday\u2019s close. The stock Wednesday slid 3.4% to $113.\nFeedback from players testing the game prompted the change, EA said. \u201cIt has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design,\u201d EA said Tuesday in announcing its decision.\nThere are risks to developing games that nudge players to repeatedly spend, Cowen analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Doug Creutz\n\n\n\n said. \u201cMany gamers already feel like the implicit contract between them and publishers is being abused by all these monetization practices,\u201d Mr. Creutz said. \u201cThe industry is running some risk of killing the Golden Goose.\u201d\nIndustry observers and fans lashed out on social media over the studio shutdown and game delay, speculating EA was trying to force Visceral to embrace games as a service. \nEA never specified what the revamped experience will entail. The company already took flak from gamers playing an early version of \u201cStar Wars Battlefront II\u201d over the shooter game\u2019s inclusion of buyable \u201ccrates\u201d of virtual cards that enhance characters\u2019 appearance and abilities. In response, EA said it would refine the experience before the expected launch Nov. 17, so players don\u2019t feel they need to buy the most powerful game items to succeed.\nIt is the latest game to draw a rebuke over extra paid content, joining Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment\u2019s \u201cMiddle-Earth: Shadow of War\u201d and Take-Two Interactive Inc.\u2019s \u201cNBA 2K18.\u201d\nVisceral was well known for creating \u201cDead Space,\u201d a popular science-fiction horror franchise. A studio in Vancouver will take over development of the untitled Star Wars game. A spokesman for EA said the company is in discussions with Ms. Hennig about her next role.\nEA had high hopes for the game financially. On a company conference call nearly a year ago, finance chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Blake Jorgensen\n\n\n\n said it is a \u201chuge opportunity for us to grow out in a much\u2014a very large franchise, a very large part of the market.\u201d\nAnalysts said the game\u2019s delay could damp EA\u2019s future earnings, and are waiting to hear what the company has to say when it reports fiscal second-quarter results Oct. 31. Wedbush Securities\u2019\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Pachter\n\n\n\n had projected the game would sell around 7 million copies.\n\u201cThis is a negative,\u201d Macquarie Securities analyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ben Schachter\n\n\n\n said. The delay suggests Visceral has been struggling to adapt the game to support the kind of \u201clive services\u201d model that is now standard in videogames, he said.\nIn a note to investors,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Credit Suisse\n\n\n said there could be a silver lining to the delay. \u201cWhile this is not the desired result,\u201d the bank said, \u201cthis does relieve what we thought to be an overloaded release schedule for the next fiscal year.\u201d\nWrite to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com Electronic Arts\u2019 sudden decision to put a highly anticipated Star Wars game on ice comes as videogame makers experiment with new ways to make money off blockbuster titles. ",
        "author": "Sarah E. Needleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jedi Mystery Meat, Blue Milk and the Makings of a Star Wars Menu (WSJ: Travel) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8873",
        "date": "2019-05-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jedi-mystery-meat-blue-milk-and-the-makings-of-a-star-wars-menu-11559155286?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=58",
        "text": "In California\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Disney\n\n\n land this May 31, and in Florida\u2019s Walt Disney World on August 29, Disney will open Star Wars: Galaxy\u2019s Edge, the largest themed expansions in Disney Parks history. Visitors to either park will find themselves transported to a location as painstakingly and stunningly realized as any in the films.\n\u201cGuests are going to be completely immersed in the experience,\u201d says Brian Piasecki, one of the chefs on the Disney Parks food and beverage team. \u201cEvery corner they go around there\u2019s going to be something that continues the story. The food and beverage is no exception.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBlue Milk and Green Milk\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Roark/Disney Parks\n \n\n\n\nTogether, Disney\u2019s research and design team, better known as Imagineers, and the Lucasfilm Story Group have brought the location of Black Spire Outpost on the remote planet Batuu to detailed life. Although the region has not yet been seen in the films, according to the mythology, it is a bustling space port which has become something of an interstellar foodie\u2019s hot spot. Imagineers\u2019 research trips to Morocco and Istanbul, Turkey\u2014specifically, their vibrant food markets\u2014particularly influenced the look and feel of the Black Spire Outpost\u2019s own food hub.\n\n\n\u201cThe markets [in Morocco and Istanbul] are this kind of gathering place for all of these amazing cultures,\u201d says Chris Beatty, executive creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering. \u201cThe food is so eclectic and inspired from all over the world. That was really kind of how we came to came to think about our own offerings in the land.\u201d\nIn addition to the market, there\u2019s Docking Bay 7 Food and Cargo, a diner in a cavernous cargo crate-filled space, and Ronto Roasters. The latter restaurant features a fantastical meat-cooking apparatus that\u2019s droid-operated and incorporates what looks like the giant repurposed engine of a podracer from 1999\u2019s The Phantom Menace.\nThe dishes throughout Galaxy\u2019s Edge offer earthbound ingredients with a sci-fi twist. The so-called Fried Endorian Tip-yip, for example, served with roasted vegetable potato mash and herb gravy, is a completely boneless white meat, served in a bizarre rectangular block. Similarly, the Smoked Kaadu Ribs don\u2019t really resemble the ribs of any animal on earth. \nThe dishes are just chicken and pork, respectively, but their unique presentation is the result of long negotiations between Disney Parks and their meat suppliers, and new outside-the-box ways of cutting and carving meat and bone. \u201cThe Smoked Kaadu Ribs are cut across the bone horizontally so that the ribs look different than anything on the market,\u201d says Piasecki, \u201cwhile the Fried Endorian Tip-yip is an all-natural chicken breast meat that is compressed and formed into blocks so when we bread and fry, it has a very unique shape. It was all about taking something that was familiar but making it a little bit different.\u201d\nTo help maintain the illusion, menus will be written in the fictional language of Aurebesh, with grudging translations in \u201ccommon language\u201d underneath, in the manner of international cities catering to English-speaking tourists. \nMercifully, Porgs\u2014the endearing puffin-like creatures that Chewbacca roasts in The Last Jedi\u2014won\u2019t appear on any of them. Their likeness does, however, adorn the Tiki-looking drinking vessels that contain the non-alcoholic Cliff Dweller cocktail at the main bar in Galaxy\u2019s Edge.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Fried Endorian Tip-Yip, found at Docking Bay 7 Food and Cargo\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Roark/Disney Parks\n \n\n\n\nThe park\u2019s opening will mark the first time that alcohol has been on offer for guests at Disneyland. Oga\u2019s Cantina, the bar on site, will evoke the buzzing watering hole in Mos Eisley, the spaceport that Obi-Wan Kenobi describes as a \u201cwretched hive of scum and villainy\u201d in the original film. Its design was based on decades-old concept art by celebrated Star Wars production designer Ralph McQuarrie, whose art was essential to the DNA of the original trilogy. In particular, the design was shaped by a sketch of the interior of the palace of Jabba the Hutt, with its heavy architecture, plenty of shadows and dramatic lighting.\n\u201cI love it because it truly is as if Ralph had a hand in developing the look of something that\u2019s in the land,\u201d says Beatty. \u201cYou can see his fingerprints placed all over the look of it.\u201d\nThe cocktail list will provide guests ample opportunity to reminisce about their favorite characters or scenes from the films. There\u2019s the Bloody Rancor, a reference to Jabba the Hutt\u2019s dungeon-dwelling beast in Return of the Jedi, which comes garnished with a bone\u2014like the one Luke uses to escape the clutches of the monster, except this one is edible. And, in reference to Han Solo\u2019s frozen-carbonite tomb in The Empire Strikes Back, a Carbon Freeze mocktail, which arrives shrouded in dry ice, is on offer. There\u2019s also the Fuzzy Tauntaun, a relative of the F At the new \u201cStar Wars\u201d theme parks, you can live out your intergalactic fantasy and eat like Luke and Leia. Here\u2019s How Disney made the magic happen ",
        "author": "Darryn King"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do eclipses drive animals wild? Here\u2019s how you can help scientists find out. (WP: Animals) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8874",
        "date": "2017-08-07",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/08/07/do-eclipses-drive-animals-wild-heres-how-you-can-help-scientists-find-out/",
        "text": "In 1994, Doug Duncan was standing on the Bolivian Altiplano with of group of fellow astronomers. The scientists had come to witness a total solar eclipse, and as such, most of their gazes were turned skyward as the totality approached. That is, until a woman starting shouting, \u201cLook down! Look down!\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI can still hear her voice,\u201d said Duncan, the director of the Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado. \u201cSo, we look down and \u2026 llamas. Llamas all over the place.\u201dThey were surrounded by llamas \u2014 but not for long. After a few minutes, the moon\u2019s 70-mile-wide shadow passed on and light returned to the plateau, at which point the llamas formed a sort of procession and marched away. Duncan, who has witnessed 10 total solar eclipses, said he still has no idea where the animals came from or what their behavior meant, if anything. But even as a scientist who knows more about space than camelids, he thought the way the llamas\u2019 behaved was certainly weird.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnother time, in the Gal\u00e1pagos Islands, Duncan watched as a bunch of whales and dolphins surfaced and started cruising back and forth in front of the ship he was on about five minutes before a total eclipse. A\u00a0few minutes after the sun had come back out and it was clear the world was not ending, the marine mammals disappeared, just as the Bolivian llamas had.There are lots of these kinds of stories \u2014 anecdotal reports\u00a0of animals behaving strangely in the moments leading up to and after a solar eclipse. Some say\u00a0that when the moon scoots in front of the sun and the world goes dark, as it will across the United States on Aug. 21, birds stop singing and cows and horses start returning to their barns as though it were time for bed.These are pretty common and consistent observations, said Angela Speck, director of astronomy at the University of Missouri. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t seem to matter whether it\u2019s happening in a rural area or a city,\u201d she said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut when you start looking for rigorous research on animal behavior during eclipses, the pickings are slim. One study found that colonial orb-weaving spiders appeared to start deconstructing their webs during an eclipse in Mexico in 1991. Another study, from 1984, noted that a group of captive chimpanzees in Georgia all seemed to congregate on a climbing structure during the totality. But a study of rumination and grazing behavior in cattle during Europe\u2019s 1999 eclipse found no effect. Similarly, a group of captive baboons in Chile seemed decidedly meh about the eclipse in 1994.The thing is, the world only gets a total solar eclipse approximately every 18 months, and the path of totality varies\u00a0depending on where and when the moon crosses the sun\u2019s rays. This makes studying animal behavior during an eclipse rather difficult. The\u00a0best experiments require scientists to control for variables and repeat the test many times to evaluate its validity. So even if we get some really good observations this time around of, say, moose,\u00a0the next total solar eclipse won\u2019t be until July\u00a02019, and its path of totality drifts over Chile and Argentina, neither of which is home to moose.All of that said, scientists are well accustomed to making the best out of imperfect study conditions.\u00a0And this year, technological advances\u00a0may help us gather data about eclipse-experiencing critters like never before. In fact,\u00a0scientists are hoping you might\u00a0donate a little data to\u00a0the cause.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAll you have to do, they say, is whip out your smartphone and download the iNaturalist app. Created by the California Academy of Sciences, iNaturalist allows anyone to take a picture of an animal (or plant or fungi or whatever) and make an attempt to identify it. Then others, including experts, weigh in on whether your ID is correct or not. Think of it as a bit like Pok\u00e9mon Go, only you\u2019re trying to \u201ccatch\u201d real creatures instead of Charizards and Vaporeons.On the day of the eclipse, the\u00a0app will feature a special drawdown menu that allows you to record observations leading up to, during, and after the astronomical event. Simply keep an eye out for any interesting or unusual behavior and snap a few pics while you enjoy the show.\u201cWe\u2019re hoping this is a way for people to be curious and make observations and think about how animal behavior is related to the sun,\u201d said Rebecca Johnson, citizen scientist research coordinator for the California Academy of Sciences.What\u2019s more, Johnson said, all of the thousands of notes resulting from this project, which they are calling Life Responds, could\u00a0allow researchers to establish a baseline of behavior that they can measure future eclipses against. It\u2019s only through this massive aggregation of data \u2014 which has never before been possible \u2014 that they can start to recognize patterns and draw conclusions.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cThe whole idea of science, of course, is to turn something from anecdote into real data that you can study,\u201d said Michelle Thaller, deputy director of science for communications at NASA, which is including the Life Responds project as part of its citizen science outreach in conjunction with the eclipse.If you\u2019re looking for places to find animals during the eclipse, here\u2019s a list of more than a dozen wildlife refuges within the path of totality.\u00a0If getting outdoors isn\u2019t really your thing, you can participate by going to places like the Nashville Zoo, which is encouraging visitors to\u00a0log observations by using the iNaturalist app or tagging the zoo on social media with the hashtags #NashvilleZoo or #NZooEclipse. While the zoo is home to plenty of big animals like primates and giraffes, it\u2019s the birds that might be the most interesting.\u201cI don\u2019t think anybody knows for sure what the animals will do,\u201d said Jim Bartoo, the zoo\u2019s\u00a0marketing and public relations director, \u201cbut my bet would be to watch the flamingoes and the rhinoceros hornbills.\u201dCapital Weather Gang's Angela Fritz breaks down what will happen when a total solar eclipse crosses the U.S. on Aug. 21. (Claritza Jimenez, Daron Taylor, Angela Fritz/The Washington Post)Bartoo said the zoo\u2019s avian staff thinks\u00a0the birds may be more affected than other animals because they\u2019re used to being brought inside as the sun sets. And while zoo animals obviously aren\u2019t perfect substitutes for understanding the behavior of their wild counterparts, the eclipse offers an opportunity to study animals that have become used to the rhythms of captivity. The zoo\u2019s rhinoceroses, for instance, come outside each day at 9 a.m. and return to their paddock each night at 6 p.m. Who knows how they\u2019ll react to a few minutes of unscheduled darkness?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementOf course, it\u2019s entirely possible that the squirrel, blue jay, rattlesnake or rhino you\u2019re watching doesn\u2019t do a darn thing when the big moment comes. Don\u2019t worry, but do take notes. After all, logging the absence of weird behavior is important to science, too. (Good news: You don\u2019t even have to be in the line of totality to log animal behavior observations.)One\u00a0thing all the experts agree on is that if you\u2019re going to attempt to watch the solar eclipse this month, be sure to wear proper eye protection. But don\u2019t worry about getting a pair of glasses for Fido.\u201cAnimals are actually quite a bit smarter than we are when it comes to looking directly at the sun,\u201d says Thaller.Read more:\u00a0A total solar eclipse is happening Aug. 21, and here\u2019s what you need to knowThe path of the solar eclipse is already altering real-world behaviorWant to use your phone to photograph the solar eclipse? Read this first.America\u2019s greatest eclipse is coming, and this man wants you to see itHere\u2019s every total solar eclipse happening in your lifetime. Is this year your best chance? Anecdotal reports of animals behaving strangely in the moments before and after a solar eclipse are common. Good data is not.  Do eclipses drive animals wild? Here\u2019s how you can help scientists find out.",
        "author": "Jason Bittel"
    },
    {
        "title": "Total solar eclipse to bring black sun, sudden nightfall to Antarctica (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8875",
        "date": "2021-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/12/03/total-solar-eclipse-antarctica/",
        "text": "Day will turn to night for a few fleeting moments Saturday in Antarctica as the new moon intercedes between the Earth and sun. Daylight will be extinguished during the ephemeral total solar eclipse, the last worldwide until April 2023.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUnlike recent total eclipses seen from the United States and South America, only a select few will enjoy this one \u2014 and doing so required months or years of careful planning. Total solar eclipses occur worldwide about once every 18 months. They\u2019re not terribly rare, but their paths are quite narrow \u2014 sometimes only a few miles wide. That means any given location on the globe will witness a total eclipse only once every 375 years.It was real, and it was spectacular. Remembering the 2019 solar eclipse over Chile.Saturday\u2019s eclipse in Antarctica falls nearly a year after the Dec. 14, 2020, eclipse that darkened skies over Chile and Argentina, although an atmospheric river spoiled the show with cloud cover remaining thick for some sky watchers.Total solar eclipses occur when the moon fully blocks sunlight from reaching a narrow sliver of Earth. While the sun is 400 times wider than the moon, the moon is 400 times closer. That near perfect match allows for the moon to occult the sun for seconds on the minute. The longest that totality can theoretically last during a total solar eclipse is 7 minutes 32 seconds. Saturday\u2019s will bring only up to 1 minute 54 seconds of totality.Solar eclipses are special because they afford Earth dwellers the chance to bask in the moon\u2019s shadow while simultaneously viewing the atmosphere of the sun. The solar \u201ccorona\u201d is millions of degrees hot and can be seen radiating into space, its milky-white luminance resembling hair blowing in the wind as solar plasma traces lines of magnetic field.Total eclipses are the only time the corona can be seen from Earth, making each an extremely important opportunity for astronomers and solar scientists. Predictive Science, a California-based company, released forecasts of how the corona will look.It\u2019s the first total solar eclipse to occur in Antarctica since Nov. 23, 2003, when a picturesque sunrise total eclipse left a jet-black void in the sky where the sun otherwise would have appeared. Because the corona\u2019s light was shining though greater lengths of the atmosphere, it appeared tinged with amber hues.In 2003, the Sun, the Moon, Antarctica and two photographers, all lined up for a total solar eclipse at end of the World. This picture by Fred Bruenjes is one of best shots of that day [source, read more: https://t.co/IOi44IRTVu] pic.twitter.com/tTSiOVr9vh\u2014 Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 5, 2021\n\nThis time around, the shadow, or umbra, will make landfall over Antarctica near Berkner Island, and exit the continent near Shepard Island. The path of totality will be up to 260 miles wide.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBecause of the atypically large shadow, any fringes of daylight will be suppressed near the horizon, squashing back the prodigal \u201c360 degree sunrise\u201d that accompanies solar eclipses. It will also render totality darker, which amplifies the possibility that the aurora australis, or southern lights, may be visible simultaneously.Unfortunately for sky watchers, getting to Antarctica isn\u2019t an easy task. Only the most affluent and intrepid will be able to experience Saturday\u2019s eclipse, and even the lucky few that can are facing major travel complications involving the novel coronavirus and its newly detected omicron variant.Sky and Telescope Magazine had chartered a flight into totality that was to leave from Chile, but travel uncertainty forced its cancellation.Story continues below advertisementDirect Travel, which operates the website EclipseTours.com, advertised a cruise to the Southern Ocean to rendezvous with the moon\u2019s shadow. Weather may be a challenge in the notoriously tempestuous region, but the cruise, which departs from Argentina, also features other sights, including a meeting with penguins on Antarctica\u2019s Palmer Peninsula. Prices range between $13,000 and $33,000 per person.The last total solar eclipse in the United States dazzled sky watchers from Oregon to South Carolina in 2017. The next U.S. total solar eclipse will take a path from Texas to Maine on April 8, 2024.Missed the solar eclipse? You won\u2019t have to wait too long for the next one. It\u2019s the last solar eclipse until 2023, but precious few will be in position to see it. Total solar eclipse to bring black sun, sudden nightfall to Antarctica",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Great American Eclipse Is Almost Here. This Is Your Complete Guide. (NYT: Smarter Living) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8876",
        "date": "2017-08-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/smarter-living/american-eclipse-guide.html",
        "text": "Welcome to the solar eclipse edition of the Smarter Living newsletter. Welcome to the solar eclipse edition of the Smarter Living newsletter. Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter. Editor Tim Herrera emails readers once a week with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Monday morning.",
        "author": "By Tim Herrera"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jimmy Walker\u2019s Hobby Takes a Back Seat to His Health (NYT: Sports) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8877",
        "date": "2017-08-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/sports/golf/jimmy-walker-astrophotography.html",
        "text": "Walker, perhaps the PGA Tour\u2019s only photographer of celestial events, missed the total solar eclipse on Monday to see a doctor about his Lyme disease. Walker, perhaps the PGA Tour\u2019s only photographer of celestial events, missed the total solar eclipse on Monday to see a doctor about his Lyme disease. OLD WESTBURY, N.Y. \u2014 As the first total eclipse of the sun in 38 years traced its arc across the United States on Monday, Jimmy Walker sat in a doctor\u2019s office in Wilton, Conn., hoping for good news about his yearlong bout with Lyme disease.",
        "author": "By Zach Schonbrun"
    },
    {
        "title": "17 Million Frozen Sperm Await the Perfect Moment (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8878",
        "date": "2017-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/style/modern-love-17-million-frozen-sperm.html",
        "text": "A woman trying to get pregnant on her own finds connection and hope during a total solar eclipse. A woman trying to get pregnant on her own finds connection and hope during a total solar eclipse. Every other month I receive two vials of frozen sperm in a nitrogen tank, which is then emptied, the vials labeled and kept frozen until the exact time of month I\u2019m ready for them. This window of readiness is brief: 12 to 24 hours. When I detect that ovulation is imminent, the vial is defrosted. Ninety minutes later, 17 million sperm are inserted into my uterus via a catheter.",
        "author": "By Laurie Wax"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Were You During the Great American Eclipse of 2017? (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8879",
        "date": "2017-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/insider/where-were-you-during-the-great-american-eclipse-of-2017.html",
        "text": "Journalists who helped put together The New York Times\u2019s solar eclipse-themed special section reflect on the cosmic event\u2019s earthbound delights. Journalists who helped put together The New York Times\u2019s solar eclipse-themed special section reflect on the cosmic event\u2019s earthbound delights. As an eerie midday twilight settled over Baker, Ore., on June 8, 1918, the hearts of a group of astronomers began to sink. Clouds became dense, and their chance to watch the sun wink out was in jeopardy.",
        "author": "By Remy Tumin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Where Were You During the Great American Eclipse of 2017? (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8880",
        "date": "2017-08-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/insider/where-were-you-during-the-great-american-eclipse-of-2017.html",
        "text": "Journalists who helped put together The New York Times\u2019s solar eclipse-themed special section reflect on the cosmic event\u2019s earthbound delights. Journalists who helped put together The New York Times\u2019s solar eclipse-themed special section reflect on the cosmic event\u2019s earthbound delights. As an eerie midday twilight settled over Baker, Ore., on June 8, 1918, the hearts of a group of astronomers began to sink. Clouds became dense, and their chance to watch the sun wink out was in jeopardy.",
        "author": "By Remy Tumin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeing the Total Eclipse Through 28,000 Eyes (NYT: Times Insider) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8881",
        "date": "2017-08-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/insider/solar-eclipse-carbondale.html",
        "text": "For Nicholas St. Fleur, a science reporter for The Times, reporting on the solar eclipse was a journey from anxiety to disappointment to awe. For Nicholas St. Fleur, a science reporter for The Times, reporting on the solar eclipse was a journey from anxiety to disappointment to awe. For the past six months, I had been preparing for two minutes and 38 seconds of darkness.",
        "author": "By Nicholas St. Fleur"
    },
    {
        "title": "Canada Letter: Stage Lights, Sunlight and Opening Shots (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8882",
        "date": "2017-08-18",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/world/canada/canada-letter-stratford-nafta-eclipse.html",
        "text": "A New York Times theater critic visits the Stratford Festival, describing it as a \u201cbucket-list chance.\u201d Trade talks resumed, and Canada is preparing for a view of the solar eclipse. A New York Times theater critic visits the Stratford Festival, describing it as a \u201cbucket-list chance.\u201d Trade talks resumed, and Canada is preparing for a view of the solar eclipse. Jesse Green, who became The Times\u2019s co-chief theater critic in May, recently made his first trip to the Stratford Festival. He was impressed by one of the few remaining repertory theater companies in North America, describing his visit to Stratford, Ontario, as a \u201cbucket-list chance.\u201d",
        "author": "By Ian Austen"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Greatest Show on Earth (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8883",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-sun-and-moon-bookshelf-1502477875?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=89",
        "text": "Eclipses represent an Earth-centric outlook on the sun and moon; they are reduced to a pair of moving sky-disks that occasionally intersect. But these celestial bodies are fascinating in their own right. We ponder how and when the sun formed, what sort of central inferno powers its steadfast glow, and whether a time will come when it might stray from this life-sustaining stability. \u2018The Sun\u2019s Heartbeat\u2019 (2011), by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bob Berman,\n\n\n\n answers these and many other questions. \u2018Everything about the Sun is either amazing or useful,\u2019 he writes, channeling the high-school science teacher we all wish we had. He offers plenty of historical context, from the ancients\u2019 sun worship to the modern scientific view of the sun as a ball of gas subservient to the laws of physics. \nAlso on the solar reading list is \u2018Nearest Star\u2019 (2001), by astronomers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Leon Golub\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jay Pasachoff.\n\n\n\n The book opens with a rundown of the sun\u2019s quantitative properties and the ways in which astronomers, over centuries, determined these numbers. Topics continue with the sun\u2019s visible face, formation, energy production, evolution and eventual death. The science is deftly presented and not too detailed for general readers. Mr. Pasachoff, who has seen more total solar eclipses than anyone in history (33 so far), also wrote \u2018The Complete Idiot\u2019s Guide \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tto the Sun\u2019 (2003), which is out \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tof print but can be downloaded or viewed online. \n\n\n\n\nThe moon delights astronomy enthusiasts with its vertiginous, crater-pocked landscapes. But in terms of human affairs, the most notable thing about the moon is that we\u2019ve been there. How we succeeded in the face \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tof daunting risk, huge expense and the loss of three astronauts is the subject of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Andrew Chaikin\u2019s\n\n\n\n authoritative \u2018A Man on the Moon\u2019 (1994). Mr. Chaikin, a space historian, spent nearly a decade interviewing Apollo flight crews and reveals the particular combination of smarts, competitiveness and gumption that moved these men to undertake humanity\u2019s greatest technological challenge. Short of virtual-reality goggles and a lunar-gravity harness, this narrative is the closest you can \n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\tget to a walk on the moon. \n\n\n\u2014A.H. On Aug. 21, millions of Americans will flock to see a total solar eclipse. A book-lover\u2019s guide to the spectacle. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "The Greatest Show on Earth (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8884",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-greatest-show-on-earth-1502477589?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=116",
        "text": "EclipseBy Frank Close\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOxford, 219 pages, $21.95 In the Shadow of the Moon\n\n\n\nBy Anthony Aveni\n\t\t\n\t\t\tYale, 312 pages, $28 Mask of the SunBy John Dvorak\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPegasus, 272 pages, $27.95\n\n\nGiven our restrictive vantage point on space and time\u2014not to mention the distractions of daily life\u2014it\u2019s not often that we groundlings get to be intimate with the celestial, with a phenomenon \u201cout there\u201d affecting us down here. Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs experienced that cosmic connection in the form of a planet-smacking asteroid. But there is one astral communion sure to elicit astonishment without brutal consequences: a total solar eclipse. \nWhile a solar eclipse is a less brazen cosmic emissary than an asteroid or a meteor storm\u2014Earth is \u201cstruck\u201d only by the moon\u2019s shadow\u2014it nonetheless seizes upon the senses. An apocalyptic gloom sweeps in from the west, daylight dims to twilight, the temperature drops, a breeze rises, animals adopt their evening ways. The astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maria Mitchell,\n\n\n\n in her memoir about an 1878 eclipse expedition to Colorado, suggests that \u201ceven the ant pauses with his burden and no longer gives the lesson to the sluggard.\u201d All of this is added to the visual spectacle of the eclipse itself: the utterly unnerving sight of a blacked-out sun. \nOn Monday, Aug. 21, millions will flock to a 60-mile-wide strip across our nation\u2019s heartland to witness the first total solar eclipse to darken the continental U.S. since 1979. Not until 2024 will North Americans again be presented such a favorable viewing opportunity. With the moon\u2019s shadow speeding across the landscape at over 2,000 miles an hour, complete blockage of the sun\u2019s disk\u2014\u201ctotality\u201d\u2014will last just 2\u00bd minutes along the midline of its path, and less toward the edges. \n\n\nResidents of Salem, Ore., Nashville, Tenn., and Columbia, S.C., plus a string of locales in between, can view the eclipse right from home, while those in the outskirts of Kansas City and St. Louis might have to edge a few miles into the path of totality. Carbondale, Ill., where visitors are invited to experience the event en masse in a stadium, has the distinction of lying at the intersection of this year\u2019s eclipse path and the one in 2024. Given good weather, the nation will host an outsize astronomical Woodstock, with eclipse-themed festivals, concerts and lectures.\n\n\nA Sun and Moon BookshelfWith the sun-moon duo center-stage this month in the Great American Eclipse, it\u2019s no surprise that the engine of commerce has spun out an abundance of resources in advance of this celestial performance. A worthwhile addition to the eclipse books reviewed here is Tyler Nordgren\u2019s \u2018Sun Moon Earth\u2019 (2016), described in these pages last year as a concise \u2018philosophical, historical and speculative meditation on the roots of scientific thinking and the development of astronomical theory and practice.\u2019 Eclipses represent an Earth-centric outlook on the sun and moon; they are reduced to a pair of moving sky-disks that occasionally intersect. But these celestial bodies are fascinating in their own right. We ponder how and when the sun formed, what sort of central inferno powers its steadfast glow, and whether a time will come when it might stray from this life-sustaining stability. \u2018The Sun\u2019s Heartbeat\u2019 (2011), by Bob Berman, answers these and many other questions. \u2018Everything about the Sun is either amazing or useful,\u2019 he writes, channeling the high-school science teacher we all wish we had. He offers plenty of historical context, from the ancients\u2019 sun worship to the modern scientific view of the sun as a ball of gas subservient to the laws of physics. Also on the solar reading list is \u2018Nearest Star\u2019 (2001), by astronomers Leon Golub and Jay Pasachoff. The book opens with a rundown of the sun\u2019s quantitative properties and the ways in which astronomers, over centuries, determined these numbers. Topics continue with the sun\u2019s visible face, formation, energy production, evolution and eventual death. The science is deftly presented and not too detailed for general readers. Mr. Pasachoff, who has seen more total solar eclipses than anyone in history (33 so far), also wrote \u2018The Complete Idiot\u2019s Guide to the Sun\u2019 (2003), which is out of print but can be downloaded or viewed online. The moon delights astronomy enthusiasts with its vertiginous, crater-pocked landscapes. But in terms of human affairs, the most notable thing about the moon is that we\u2019ve been there. How we succeeded in the face of daunting risk, huge expense and the loss of three astronauts is the subject of Andrew Chaikin\u2019s authoritative \u2018A Man on the Moon\u2019 (1994). Mr. Chaikin, a space historian, spent nearly a decade interviewing Apollo flight crews and reveals the particular combination of smarts, competitiveness and gumption that moved these men to undertake humanity\u2019s greatest technological challenge. Short of virtual-reality goggles and a lunar-gravity harness, this narrative is the closest On Aug. 21, millions of Americans will flock to see a total solar eclipse. A book-lover\u2019s guide to the spectacle. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Greatest Show on Earth (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8885",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-greatest-show-on-earth-1502477589?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=82",
        "text": "EclipseBy Frank Close\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOxford, 219 pages, $21.95 In the Shadow of the MoonBy Anthony Aveni\n\t\t\n\t\t\tYale, 312 pages, $28 Mask of the SunBy John Dvorak\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPegasus, 272 pages, $27.95\n\n\nGiven our restrictive vantage point on space and time\u2014not to mention the distractions of daily life\u2014it\u2019s not often that we groundlings get to be intimate with the celestial, with a phenomenon \u201cout there\u201d affecting us down here. Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs experienced that cosmic connection in the form of a planet-smacking asteroid. But there is one astral communion sure to elicit astonishment without brutal consequences: a total solar eclipse. \nWhile a solar eclipse is a less brazen cosmic emissary than an asteroid or a meteor storm\u2014Earth is \u201cstruck\u201d only by the moon\u2019s shadow\u2014it nonetheless seizes upon the senses. An apocalyptic gloom sweeps in from the west, daylight dims to twilight, the temperature drops, a breeze rises, animals adopt their evening ways. The astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maria Mitchell,\n\n\n\n in her memoir about an 1878 eclipse expedition to Colorado, suggests that \u201ceven the ant pauses with his burden and no longer gives the lesson to the sluggard.\u201d All of this is added to the visual spectacle of the eclipse itself: the utterly unnerving sight of a blacked-out sun. \nOn Monday, Aug. 21, millions will flock to a 60-mile-wide strip across our nation\u2019s heartland to witness the first total solar eclipse to darken the continental U.S. since 1979. Not until 2024 will North Americans again be presented such a favorable viewing opportunity. With the moon\u2019s shadow speeding across the landscape at over 2,000 miles an hour, complete blockage of the sun\u2019s disk\u2014\u201ctotality\u201d\u2014will last just 2\u00bd minutes along the midline of its path, and less toward the edges. \n\n\nResidents of Salem, Ore., Nashville, Tenn., and Columbia, S.C., plus a string of locales in between, can view the eclipse right from home, while those in the outskirts of Kansas City and St. Louis might have to edge a few miles into the path of totality. Carbondale, Ill., where visitors are invited to experience the event en masse in a stadium, has the distinction of lying at the intersection of this year\u2019s eclipse path and the one in 2024. Given good weather, the nation will host an outsize astronomical Woodstock, with eclipse-themed festivals, concerts and lectures.\n\n\nA Sun and Moon BookshelfWith the sun-moon duo center-stage this month in the Great American Eclipse, it\u2019s no surprise that the engine of commerce has spun out an abundance of resources in advance of this celestial performance. A worthwhile addition to the eclipse books reviewed here is Tyler Nordgren\u2019s \u2018Sun Moon Earth\u2019 (2016), described in these pages last year as a concise \u2018philosophical, historical and speculative meditation on the roots of scientific thinking and the development of astronomical theory and practice.\u2019 Eclipses represent an Earth-centric outlook on the sun and moon; they are reduced to a pair of moving sky-disks that occasionally intersect. But these celestial bodies are fascinating in their own right. We ponder how and when the sun formed, what sort of central inferno powers its steadfast glow, and whether a time will come when it might stray from this life-sustaining stability. \u2018The Sun\u2019s Heartbeat\u2019 (2011), by Bob Berman, answers these and many other questions. \u2018Everything about the Sun is either amazing or useful,\u2019 he writes, channeling the high-school science teacher we all wish we had. He offers plenty of historical context, from the ancients\u2019 sun worship to the modern scientific view of the sun as a ball of gas subservient to the laws of physics. Also on the solar reading list is \u2018Nearest Star\u2019 (2001), by astronomers Leon Golub and Jay Pasachoff. The book opens with a rundown of the sun\u2019s quantitative properties and the ways in which astronomers, over centuries, determined these numbers. Topics continue with the sun\u2019s visible face, formation, energy production, evolution and eventual death. The science is deftly presented and not too detailed for general readers. Mr. Pasachoff, who has seen more total solar eclipses than anyone in history (33 so far), also wrote \u2018The Complete Idiot\u2019s Guide to the Sun\u2019 (2003), which is out of print but can be downloaded or viewed online. The moon delights astronomy enthusiasts with its vertiginous, crater-pocked landscapes. But in terms of human affairs, the most notable thing about the moon is that we\u2019ve been there. How we succeeded in the face of daunting risk, huge expense and the loss of three astronauts is the subject of Andrew Chaikin\u2019s authoritative \u2018A Man on the Moon\u2019 (1994). Mr. Chaikin, a space historian, spent nearly a decade interviewing Apollo flight crews and reveals the particular combination of smarts, competitiveness and gumption that moved these men to undertake humanity\u2019s greatest technological challenge. Short of virtual-reality goggles and a lunar-gravity harness, this narrative is the closest you On Aug. 21, millions of Americans will flock to see a total solar eclipse. A book-lover\u2019s guide to the spectacle. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Greatest Show on Earth (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8886",
        "date": "2017-08-11",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-greatest-show-on-earth-1502477589?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=89",
        "text": "EclipseBy Frank Close\n\t\t\n\t\t\tOxford, 219 pages, $21.95 In the Shadow of the Moon\n\n\n\nBy Anthony Aveni\n\t\t\n\t\t\tYale, 312 pages, $28 Mask of the SunBy John Dvorak\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPegasus, 272 pages, $27.95\n\n\nGiven our restrictive vantage point on space and time\u2014not to mention the distractions of daily life\u2014it\u2019s not often that we groundlings get to be intimate with the celestial, with a phenomenon \u201cout there\u201d affecting us down here. Sixty-five million years ago, the dinosaurs experienced that cosmic connection in the form of a planet-smacking asteroid. But there is one astral communion sure to elicit astonishment without brutal consequences: a total solar eclipse. \nWhile a solar eclipse is a less brazen cosmic emissary than an asteroid or a meteor storm\u2014Earth is \u201cstruck\u201d only by the moon\u2019s shadow\u2014it nonetheless seizes upon the senses. An apocalyptic gloom sweeps in from the west, daylight dims to twilight, the temperature drops, a breeze rises, animals adopt their evening ways. The astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maria Mitchell,\n\n\n\n in her memoir about an 1878 eclipse expedition to Colorado, suggests that \u201ceven the ant pauses with his burden and no longer gives the lesson to the sluggard.\u201d All of this is added to the visual spectacle of the eclipse itself: the utterly unnerving sight of a blacked-out sun. \nOn Monday, Aug. 21, millions will flock to a 60-mile-wide strip across our nation\u2019s heartland to witness the first total solar eclipse to darken the continental U.S. since 1979. Not until 2024 will North Americans again be presented such a favorable viewing opportunity. With the moon\u2019s shadow speeding across the landscape at over 2,000 miles an hour, complete blockage of the sun\u2019s disk\u2014\u201ctotality\u201d\u2014will last just 2\u00bd minutes along the midline of its path, and less toward the edges. \n\n\nResidents of Salem, Ore., Nashville, Tenn., and Columbia, S.C., plus a string of locales in between, can view the eclipse right from home, while those in the outskirts of Kansas City and St. Louis might have to edge a few miles into the path of totality. Carbondale, Ill., where visitors are invited to experience the event en masse in a stadium, has the distinction of lying at the intersection of this year\u2019s eclipse path and the one in 2024. Given good weather, the nation will host an outsize astronomical Woodstock, with eclipse-themed festivals, concerts and lectures.\n\n\nA Sun and Moon BookshelfWith the sun-moon duo center-stage this month in the Great American Eclipse, it\u2019s no surprise that the engine of commerce has spun out an abundance of resources in advance of this celestial performance. A worthwhile addition to the eclipse books reviewed here is Tyler Nordgren\u2019s \u2018Sun Moon Earth\u2019 (2016), described in these pages last year as a concise \u2018philosophical, historical and speculative meditation on the roots of scientific thinking and the development of astronomical theory and practice.\u2019 Eclipses represent an Earth-centric outlook on the sun and moon; they are reduced to a pair of moving sky-disks that occasionally intersect. But these celestial bodies are fascinating in their own right. We ponder how and when the sun formed, what sort of central inferno powers its steadfast glow, and whether a time will come when it might stray from this life-sustaining stability. \u2018The Sun\u2019s Heartbeat\u2019 (2011), by Bob Berman, answers these and many other questions. \u2018Everything about the Sun is either amazing or useful,\u2019 he writes, channeling the high-school science teacher we all wish we had. He offers plenty of historical context, from the ancients\u2019 sun worship to the modern scientific view of the sun as a ball of gas subservient to the laws of physics. Also on the solar reading list is \u2018Nearest Star\u2019 (2001), by astronomers Leon Golub and Jay Pasachoff. The book opens with a rundown of the sun\u2019s quantitative properties and the ways in which astronomers, over centuries, determined these numbers. Topics continue with the sun\u2019s visible face, formation, energy production, evolution and eventual death. The science is deftly presented and not too detailed for general readers. Mr. Pasachoff, who has seen more total solar eclipses than anyone in history (33 so far), also wrote \u2018The Complete Idiot\u2019s Guide to the Sun\u2019 (2003), which is out of print but can be downloaded or viewed online. The moon delights astronomy enthusiasts with its vertiginous, crater-pocked landscapes. But in terms of human affairs, the most notable thing about the moon is that we\u2019ve been there. How we succeeded in the face of daunting risk, huge expense and the loss of three astronauts is the subject of Andrew Chaikin\u2019s authoritative \u2018A Man on the Moon\u2019 (1994). Mr. Chaikin, a space historian, spent nearly a decade interviewing Apollo flight crews and reveals the particular combination of smarts, competitiveness and gumption that moved these men to undertake humanity\u2019s greatest technological challenge. Short of virtual-reality goggles and a lunar-gravity harness, this narrative is the closest you can get to a walk on the moon. --A.H. \n\n\nResources on eclipse science, history and lore abound, including a raft of new books in advance of this year\u2019s event. \u201cEclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon,\u201d by Frank Close, a theoretical physicist at Oxford, is part autobiography, part travelogue. Mr. Close\u2019s tale opens on June 30, 1954, at a schoolyard in Peterborough, England, where the 8-year-old future scientist watched a partial solar eclipse through a piece of welder\u2019s glass. So enchanted was he by his teacher\u2019s description of a total solar eclipse slated for Aug. 11, 1999, that he added the date to his juvenile bucket list. Whisk ahead 45 years and we find a dejected Mr. Close, under predictably overcast skies above Cornwall, catching a momentary glimpse of the sun\u2019s occluded face. This disappointment only hardened his resolve to lose what he archly calls his \u201ceclipse virginity\u201d\u2014and with that, we\u2019re off on a rollicking adventure toward fulfillment of his dream.\nA total solar eclipse occurs, on average, about once every 18 months somewhere on Earth, yet infrequently in the same location. So Mr. Close joins the ranks of the globe-trotting fraternity of eclipse chasers. We make a bone-rattling excursion to a bush-camp in Zambia on the banks of the Zambezi River; a sand-strewn journey into the Libyan desert in 2006, complete with a helicopter-borne appearance by Moammar Gadhafi; and ocean voyages off Tahiti and Fiji, the ships\u2019 captains zigzagging to find the clearest sky and the steadiest sea. Along the way, he communes with fellow scientists and eclipse junkies and is accosted by UFO abductees, New Agers and loopy\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Einstein\n\n\n\n wannabes. Mr. Close is amusingly frank about his lunatic obsession: \u201cTen years earlier I would have regarded such activity as sign of mental imbalance.\u201d \nEmbedded throughout Mr. Close\u2019s personal saga are concise explanations of the geometric and cyclical nature of eclipses and a condensed history of eclipse prediction, along with tips and precautions for observing solar eclipses. (The greatest danger to one\u2019s eyesight, he explains, occurs the instant totality ends and light from the solar disk explodes back into view.) Mr. Close describes the \u201cJoshua illusion,\u201d the seemingly instantaneous appearance of the moon at the onset of totality. Before this moment, he writes, the solar glare tricks us into perceiving the eclipsed portion of the sun as part of the sky rather than the solid body it is. Indeed, he equates the sensory wallop of this phenomenon to witnessing the birth of a child.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Anthony Aveni\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the Shadow of the Moon: The Science, Magic, and Mystery of Solar Eclipses\u201d is another worthwhile eclipse resource. Mr. Aveni, a pioneer in the field of cultural astronomy, casts a scholarly eye over the history and societal impact of eclipse observations. \u201cCultural astronomers,\u201d he explains, \u201care more interested in what people believe about celestial happenings than the happenings themselves.\u201d His decipherments have confirmed that ancient astronomers, using minimal technology, predicted approximate dates of eclipses hundreds of years in advance. Mr. Aveni holds up a mirror to the conventional \u201cscientific view of nature as a world where things happen without regard to human affairs.\u201d In doing so, he examines how past civilizations made sense of the sun\u2019s occasional disappearance. Each pre-scientific society conjured its own astral entity that consumed, then disgorged, the sun.\nThe bulk of Mr. Aveni\u2019s book lays out the historical chronology of eclipse studies, starting with both the verified and conjectured astronomical aspects of Stonehenge, then moving from the ancient world\u2014Babylonia, Greece, Mesoamerica, China\u2014to Arab, European and American astronomers before and after the Renaissance. It was during this latter age that the problematic interface between science and religion shifted inexorably toward the secular; an eclipse became a thing in nature devoid of mystical connotations, yet no less wondrous for it. This attitudinal change was anticipated centuries earlier by Aristotle\u2019s surmise that the curved shadow of a lunar eclipse is that of a spherical Earth.\nEclipse prediction was a serious business in ancient societies, where the sovereign abhorred surprise admonitions from the gods. Like today\u2019s midlevel corporate executives, court astronomers took the fall for erroneous forecasts and were accordingly diligent in keeping eclipse records. By the 16th century, lunar eclipses were sufficiently predictable that, in 1504,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christopher Columbus\n\n\n\n could pretend to summon one at will to intimidate Jamaicans into feeding his shipwrecked crew. Eight decades on, the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean was measured by timing the occurrence of a lunar eclipse from the ocean\u2019s eastern and western shorelines.\nA turning point in eclipse history came during the Newtonian era, when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edmond Halley\u2019s\n\n\n\n mathematical model of lunar motion foresaw a total solar eclipse over England on May 3, 1715. Seeking hard data that might reveal subtle irregularities in the moon\u2019s path, Halley resorted to pre-internet crowdsourcing: He issued pamphlets, broadsides and maps asking viewers to record the beginning- and end-times of totality in various locations. In that era of political discord, Halley also reassured the public that the \u201csuddain darkness\u201d had nothing to do with human affairs but was an inevitable consequence of the celestial clockwork.\nOnce refined, the computational algorithms used to predict eclipses spun out a retro-database of past eclipses, reaching back to antiquity. Historians now had a celestial timeline with which to date any recorded event whose description referred to an eclipse. (Thus the battle between the Medes and the Lydians, interrupted by a solar eclipse, must have occurred on May 28, 585 B.C.) Mr. Aveni explores eclipse references in historical, literary and artistic works, including the Bible and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edvard Munch\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Scream,\u201d and concludes that attempts to date past events based on vague, perhaps allegorical, allusions to a darkened sun or blood-red moon often devolve into a search for unicorns. \nFor a deeper dive into the history of eclipse observations, there is \u201cMask of the Sun: The Science, History, and Forgotten Lore of Eclipses,\u201d by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Dvorak,\n\n\n\n a former member of the observatory staff at the University of Hawaii. The book kicks off with an entertaining prologue about the so-called New York City eclipse of 1925, which appeared total only to viewers above 96th Street. The eclipse was filmed by a cameraman strapped atop a Navy dirigible who afterward testified that he had lost all sense of time and place once inside the shadow. After this kinetic start, Mr. Dvorak\u2019s narrative goes granular with detail, a protracted unfolding suited to readers with a high tolerance for historical particularities. \nWith improvements in rail and ship travel, Mr. Dvorak writes, Victorian-era astronomers toted equipment overland and overseas to capture the moon\u2019s fleeting shadow. Among them was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mabel Loomis Todd,\n\n\n\n the wife of the Amherst astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Todd\n\n\n\n and the editor of posthumous editions of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Emily Dickinson\u2019s\n\n\n\n poetry. No poetic slouch herself, Mabel wrote about her seven eclipse expeditions and the \u201cstartling nearness [she felt] to the gigantic forces of nature and their inconceivable operation.\u201d\nBy the 1870s, the camera and the spectroscope had become essential tools, the former to gauge the dimensions and shape of the solar corona (the sun\u2019s tenuous outer atmosphere, which becomes readily visible during totality), the latter to reveal the corona\u2019s temperature and chemical composition. Among the major eclipse-related questions of the age were whether the corona belongs to the sun or the moon (it\u2019s the sun) and whether there is a planet between the sun and Mercury (there isn\u2019t). As Messrs. Close, Aveni and Dvorak all acknowledge, eclipse studies stepped fully into the modern astrophysical age with the famous eclipse of 1919: Photographs showed that the positions of stars near the sun\u2019s rim were slightly shifted, in accordance with Albert Einstein\u2019s relativistic assertion that the sun\u2019s gravity warps the space around it.\nAsk anyone who has seen a total solar eclipse and they will affirm that no turn of phrase conveys the eerie majesty of the event; totality must be experienced in its all-enveloping splendor to be understood. While I\u2019ve marveled at the Grand Canyon, wandered among the sequoias and basked in the glow of the Milky Way, I\u2019ve never witnessed a total solar eclipse. On Aug. 21, I will join my fellow earthlings in that shadow-swept stretch of countryside where nature will once again remind us of the profound privilege of being alive.\n\u2014Mr. Hirshfeld, a professor at UMass Dartmouth, is the author of \u201cStarlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe.\u201d On Aug. 21, millions of Americans will flock to see a total solar eclipse. A book-lover\u2019s guide to the spectacle. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "Counterfeiters Cast Shadow Over Sales of Eclipse Glasses (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8887",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/counterfeiters-cast-a-shadow-on-booming-sales-of-eclipse-glasses-1502366402?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=116",
        "text": "Dozens of models are sold via\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Wal-Mart Stores Inc.,\n\n\n Toys \u201cR\u201d Us Inc.,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and other retailers, plus museums and science groups. The most popular are versions selling for as little as $1 to $4 a pair that use thin filter film set in foldable paper frames.\n\n\n\n\nBrands\u00a0such as Celestron LLC, Explore Scientific LLC and American Paper Optics LLC\u00a0say they have sold tens of millions in recent months. But cranking out the glasses\u2014which must meet strict safety standards\u2014as well as a raft of other eclipse-themed novelties like T-shirts and jewelry poses logistical challenges, and some makers are struggling to meet demand.\n\n\nLance Lucero, product manager for astronomy at\u00a0Torrance, Calif.-based\u00a0Celestron, an optical-products manufacturer and distributor, said he wished his company had planned to make more glasses early on.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n As spectators prepare for the first total solar eclipse in the continental U.S. since 1979, WSJ's Dipti Kapadia explains how to watch this astronomical event without damaging your eyes. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\n\u201cWe are kind of kicking ourselves because we\u2019re in a position where we\u2019re actually selling out of most of our shelves,\u201d said Mr. Lucero, whose Celestron glasses were picked up by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Best Buy Co.\n\n\n among others. Celestron won\u2019t be able to produce more glasses in time for the Aug. 21 event, he said, estimating the company may have missed out on selling \u201cmillions\u201d more.\nA large part of production time is devoted to making the filter material itself, which must meet safety standards published by the\u00a0Geneva-based\u00a0International Organization for Standardization. These specify how much light and solar radiation eclipse glasses must block out, plus the types of testing manufacturers must do.\n\u201cDealing with trying to make so much of something in such a short time is a lot,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Roberts,\n\n\n\n president and founder of telescope manufacturer Explore Scientific,\u00a0based in Springdale, Ark.,\u00a0which also sells paper viewers. \u201cThere was a nervousness,\u201d Mr. Roberts said, about how many rolls of the filter film to buy, and how much to invest up front for the event.\nExplore Scientific has sold 4\u00bd million pairs of glasses over the past six months direct to consumers as well as to companies such as Toys \u201cR\u201d Us and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kroger Co.\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s the first time in my company where we\u2019ve had such a huge bump like that,\u201d said Mr. Roberts,\u00a0who believes he will have enough supply.\n\n\n The 2017 Eclipse If skies are clear during the Aug. 21 solar eclipse, the entire U.S. will be able to see at least partial obscuration. Percentage of the sun\u2019s area that will be covered by the moon during the event: 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Chicago New York San Francisco 90% Denver 90% Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Chicago New York San Francisco 90% Denver Los Angeles 90% 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Chicago New York 90% Denver San Francisco 90% Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% Portland 60% Chicago 80% New York San Francisco Denver Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 60% Houston 40% Source: NASA \n\n\nAmerican Paper Optics,\u00a0based in Bartlett, Tenn.,\u00a0has doubled its head count to 70, with most of the new temporary workers printing, cutting, gluing and packaging glasses. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Jerit\n\n\n\n estimated 7,000 to 8,000 dealers are buying custom-printed glasses, on top of direct-to-consumer sales. As of\u00a0July 25, the company had sold about 40 million eclipse glasses and expects to sell one million more.\nE-commerce, especially via Amazon.com, has streamlined logistics, allowing sellers without sophisticated distribution channels to reach consumers, Mr. Jerit said.\u00a0That trend also has given rise to more counterfeit and substandard products, say manufacturers and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which warned on its website of \u201cunsafe paper solar glasses being distributed.\u201d\u00a0\nThe agency issued the warning after \u201cmembers of the American Astronomical Society and NASA bought random pairs from places like Amazon\u201d and found that they let in too much light when worn outside, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Young\n\n\n\n of NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA also\u00a0issued guidelines on how to view the event safely.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe total solar eclipse of March 9, 2016, as seen from aboard a cruise ship in the Molucca Sea off the coast of Indonesia.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rick Fienberg/TravelQuest International/Wilderness Travel\n \n\n\n\nEclipse viewers filter out tens of thousands of times as much light from the sun as sunglas Demand for special glasses to view the coming solar eclipse is stretching manufacturers and prompting warnings of fake products that could threaten viewers\u2019 eyesight. ",
        "author": "Michelle Ma and Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Counterfeiters Cast Shadow Over Sales of Eclipse Glasses (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8888",
        "date": "2017-08-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/counterfeiters-cast-a-shadow-on-booming-sales-of-eclipse-glasses-1502366402?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=90",
        "text": "Dozens of models are sold via\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Wal-Mart Stores Inc.,\n\n\n Toys \u201cR\u201d Us Inc.,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n and other retailers, plus museums and science groups. The most popular are versions selling for as little as $1 to $4 a pair that use thin filter film set in foldable paper frames.\nBrands\u00a0such as Celestron LLC, Explore Scientific LLC and American Paper Optics LLC\u00a0say they have sold tens of millions in recent months. But cranking out the glasses\u2014which must meet strict safety standards\u2014as well as a raft of other eclipse-themed novelties like T-shirts and jewelry poses logistical challenges, and some makers are struggling to meet demand.\n\n\nLance Lucero, product manager for astronomy at\u00a0Torrance, Calif.-based\u00a0Celestron, an optical-products manufacturer and distributor, said he wished his company had planned to make more glasses early on.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n As spectators prepare for the first total solar eclipse in the continental U.S. since 1979, WSJ's Dipti Kapadia explains how to watch this astronomical event without damaging your eyes. Photo: Getty Images\n \n\n\n\u201cWe are kind of kicking ourselves because we\u2019re in a position where we\u2019re actually selling out of most of our shelves,\u201d said Mr. Lucero, whose Celestron glasses were picked up by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Best Buy Co.\n\n\n among others. Celestron won\u2019t be able to produce more glasses in time for the Aug. 21 event, he said, estimating the company may have missed out on selling \u201cmillions\u201d more.\nA large part of production time is devoted to making the filter material itself, which must meet safety standards published by the\u00a0Geneva-based\u00a0International Organization for Standardization. These specify how much light and solar radiation eclipse glasses must block out, plus the types of testing manufacturers must do.\n\u201cDealing with trying to make so much of something in such a short time is a lot,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Scott Roberts,\n\n\n\n president and founder of telescope manufacturer Explore Scientific,\u00a0based in Springdale, Ark.,\u00a0which also sells paper viewers. \u201cThere was a nervousness,\u201d Mr. Roberts said, about how many rolls of the filter film to buy, and how much to invest up front for the event.\nExplore Scientific has sold 4\u00bd million pairs of glasses over the past six months direct to consumers as well as to companies such as Toys \u201cR\u201d Us and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kroger Co.\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s the first time in my company where we\u2019ve had such a huge bump like that,\u201d said Mr. Roberts,\u00a0who believes he will have enough supply.\n\n\n The 2017 Eclipse If skies are clear during the Aug. 21 solar eclipse, the entire U.S. will be able to see at least partial obscuration. Percentage of the sun\u2019s area that will be covered by the moon during the event: 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Chicago New York San Francisco 90% Denver 90% Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Chicago New York San Francisco 90% Denver Los Angeles 90% 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% 50% Portland 60% 70% 80% Chicago New York 90% Denver San Francisco 90% Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 70% Dallas 60% Houston 50% 40% 30% Portland 60% Chicago 80% New York San Francisco Denver Los Angeles 80% Phoenix 60% Houston 40% Source: NASA \n\n\nAmerican Paper Optics,\u00a0based in Bartlett, Tenn.,\u00a0has doubled its head count to 70, with most of the new temporary workers printing, cutting, gluing and packaging glasses. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Jerit\n\n\n\n estimated 7,000 to 8,000 dealers are buying custom-printed glasses, on top of direct-to-consumer sales. As of\u00a0July 25, the company had sold about 40 million eclipse glasses and expects to sell one million more.\nE-commerce, especially via Amazon.com, has streamlined logistics, allowing sellers without sophisticated distribution channels to reach consumers, Mr. Jerit said.\u00a0That trend also has given rise to more counterfeit and substandard products, say manufacturers and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which warned on its website of \u201cunsafe paper solar glasses being distributed.\u201d\u00a0\nThe agency issued the warning after \u201cmembers of the American Astronomical Society and NASA bought random pairs from places like Amazon\u201d and found that they let in too much light when worn outside, according to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alex Young\n\n\n\n of NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA also\u00a0issued guidelines on how to view the event safely.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe total solar eclipse of March 9, 2016, as seen from aboard a cruise ship in the Molucca Sea off the coast of Indonesia.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rick Fienberg/TravelQuest International/Wilderness Travel\n \n\n\n\nEclipse viewers filter out tens of thousands of times as much light from the sun as sunglasses. When wearing the proper type, consumers shouldn\u2019t be able to see anything other than the sun and other sources of bright light, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rick Fienberg,\n\n\n\n a spokesman for AAS.\nMr. Jerit said some dealers on Amazon have created copycat versions of his company\u2019s Soluna brand of eclipse glasses, sold by GSM Sales LLC.\u00a0He says\u00a0the knockoff Solunas are replicas down to the logo, design and product information printed on the frames, and often are sold at much lower prices. A pack of 10 legitimate Soluna eclipse viewers cost $39.95 on Amazon as of Aug. 4.\nAccording to Jason Mitchell, partner of GSM Sales, Amazon has since restricted the sale of Soluna glasses to his company, so all Solunas on the site as of Thursday are legitimate.\nIn an emailed statement, Amazon said, \u201cWe remove suspected counterfeit items as soon as we become aware of them, suspend or block bad actors suspected of engaging in illegal behavior and/or withhold remittances and payments.\u201d The company didn\u2019t confirm whether it has seen counterfeit glasses on its site.\nAmazon later added, \u201cEclipse glasses sold on Amazon.com are required to comply with the relevant ISO standard.\u201d\nThe American Astronomical Society recommends\u00a012 brands, including American Paper Optics, Rainbow Symphony, Thousand Oaks Optical, TSE 17 and\u00a0Lunt Solar Systems, all of which meet safety standards.\u00a0AAS advises consumers to stick to these verified sellers because counterfeit eclipse glasses are \u201cflooding the market,\u201d Dr. Fienberg said. It has also compiled a list of retailers that sell glasses from verified brands.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tExplore Scientific is based in Springdale, Ark. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated it was based in Arizona. (Aug. 10, 2017)\nWrite to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com and Michelle Ma at Michelle.Ma@wsj.com Demand for special glasses to view the coming solar eclipse is stretching manufacturers and prompting warnings of fake products that could threaten viewers\u2019 eyesight. ",
        "author": "Michelle Ma and Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "2020\u2019s Only Total Solar Eclipse Plunges South America Into Darkness (WSJ: NA NATPKG) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8889",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/2020s-only-total-solar-eclipse-plunges-south-america-into-darkness/822CAD80-0416-4FFA-AC92-74F598EBE739?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=40",
        "text": " South Americans had a rare chance to watch a total solar eclipse, the first and only one in 2020. The next time the moon will completely cover the disk of the sun is expected at the end of next year. Photo: AFP/Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Light Falls\u2019 Reviews: Looking to the Stars (WSJ: Television Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8890",
        "date": "2019-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/light-falls-reviews-looking-to-the-stars-11558638319?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=60",
        "text": "Light Falls Wednesday, 10 p.m., PBS\n\n\n\n\nMore Television Reviews\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey\u2019 Review: A Mind Racing Against the Clock\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018The Adam Project\u2019 Review: Getting to Know Oneself\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018That Dirty Black Bag\u2019 Review: Tipping a 10-Gallon Hat to Spaghetti Westerns\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\n\n\n\u201cLight Falls\u201d celebrates the centenary of this, one of scientific history\u2019s most consequential moments, in a multimedia stage-show-cum-lecture hosted by physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Brian Greene,\n\n\n\n a specialist in string theory, professor at Columbia and chairman of the World Science Festival (which co-produced the TV presentation with PBS). The 85-minute immersion in time, space and biography also celebrates Einstein, of course, who remains a mythic and lovable figure 64 years after his death; some might argue for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charles Chaplin\n\n\n\n or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Charlie Parker,\n\n\n\n but Einstein represents the quintessence of genius in the 20th century.\nThere are no pictures of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Archimedes\n\n\n\n in the bathtub, or Newton under an apple tree, but there\u2019s an abundant visual record of Einstein, shaggy headed and smiling; his brand, as it were, was obliviously geeky cool. But photographs\u2014other than Eddington\u2019s\u2014are of little help to Prof. Greene and company, who are out to explain what Einstein meant, and why his theories are so important. How they go about it\u2014partly with kinetic-cum-antic moving imagery representing the relationship between acceleration and gravity, or the curvature of space and time\u2014is entrancing, even if many of the subtler concepts seemed to evanesce in this viewer\u2019s head just as they were being explained. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nBrian Avers and Michael Winther\n\n\n Photo: \n \n World Science Festival/Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade\n \n\n\n\nProf. Greene is a genial host and is probably a terrific teacher; he didn\u2019t need the laugh track, which becomes an irritation. The flesh-and-blood players in this salute to theoretical physics include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Winther,\n\n\n\n Brian Avers and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francesca Faridany,\n\n\n\n Mr. Winther looking nothing at all like Einstein and Ms. Faridany in no danger of being mistaken for\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Hilbert\n\n\n\n (German mathematician),\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Dyson\n\n\n\n (English astronomer) or a barking reporter for the Chicago Tribune. But that\u2019s who they play and it\u2019s all relative\u2014we\u2019ve come for the content, not impersonations. And the infidelity to personal resemblance actually keeps things light, in a show with no shortage of gravity\u2014aren\u2019t we all the same atoms in different arrangements? The immersive animations/projections are by 59 Productions (\u201cWar Horse\u201d), the score is by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jeff Beal\n\n\n\n (\u201cHouse of Cards\u201d), and violinist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Joanna Kaczorowska\u2019s\n\n\n\n performance of a\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bach\n\n\n\n partita, coming where it does, seems to stop time. This PBS program celebrates Einstein and the centennial of the solar eclipse that helped confirm his general theory of relativity. ",
        "author": "John Anderson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Millions in U.S. Look Skyward During Solar Eclipse (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8891",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-in-u-s-look-skyward-during-solar-eclipse-1503346888?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=78",
        "text": "Related Solar Eclipse 2017: Live Coverage Slideshow: Eyes on the Skies Marketers Embrace the Eclipse for Their Brands \n\n\nAll told, 200 million people were within a day\u2019s drive of the zone of totality, as the area of complete darkness during a total eclipse is called, but the epic traffic jams feared by state and federal highway officials failed to materialize. Indeed, morning traffic along several major highways to key viewing areas appeared relatively light.\nEven so, satellite images taken by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DigitalGlobe Inc.\n\n\n showed overflow crowds at choice viewing sites in Oregon and elsewhere along the narrow 2,400-mile-long corridor of totality. Many people pulled over to the side of the road to watch. At one rest area along I-95 near Santee, S.C., cars were parked four deep in places by midmorning.\n\n\nFor many of those who made a special pilgrimage to campgrounds, mountain peaks and parks, or who simply paused in their errands to gawk along sidewalks and roadsides, the fleeting minutes when the sun revealed its halo offered a moment of community, inspired by the clockwork movements of our sun, moon and home planet.\n\u201cThere were maybe 40 million people across the U.S. looking at the same thing at the same time,\u201d said astrophysicist Ed Guinan at Villanova University who has seen eight total eclipses. \u201cThat gives me goose bumps.\u201d\nIt was the first time since 1918 that a total solar eclipse crossed the U.S. coast to coast. From Oregon to South Carolina, many people hit their pause button for a day of awe and high jinks. Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. estimated the cost of the day\u2019s lost productivity at $694 million.\nStargazers started gathering along the airstrip at Glendo, Wyo.\u2014smack in the middle of the 70-mile-wide path of totality\u2014before dawn Monday. From the backs of trailers and vans, amateur stargazers set up long-lens cameras on tripods and high-powered telescopes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSatellite images show Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Madras, Ore., on Aug. 16 and Aug. 20, 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n DigitalGlobe\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like a Star Trek convention combined with Backpacking World,\u201d said Kip Tani, who made the three-hour drive up from Fort Collins, Colo., starting at 4 a.m., with his family. \u201cIt\u2019s quite a scene.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSatellite images show preparations for the Big Summit Prairie Festival in Big Summit Prairie, Ore., on Aug. 16 and Aug. 20.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n DigitalGlobe\n \n\n\n\nIn the Cascade Range highlands near Madras, Ore, 10 wingsuit enthusiasts attempted a coordinated group flight at the height of the eclipse, in a stunt organized by Outside TV. In Ketchum, Idaho, the local Sawtooth Brewery tapped the last kegs of its \u201cTotal Eclipse of the Hop\u201d beer for celebratory toasts. And in Carbondale, Ill.\u2014where the eclipse\u2019s duration of totality likely lasted longer than anywhere else in the country\u2014roughly 14,000 people congregated in Saluki Stadium for, among other eclipse-themed activities, a mass moonwalk set to a Michael Jackson medley.\nFor young Devlin McKim of Marin, Calif., the day had added significance. The eclipse fell on his eighth birthday. To celebrate, his parents arranged a trek of family and friends to a prime viewing spot in Corvallis, Ore. Their outing carried with it the promise of the ultimate trick birthday candle: the solar light overhead snuffed by the moon, only to flare anew as the sun emerged from the lunar shadow.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople watch the final moments before the total eclipse at the football stadium at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Reuters\n \n\n\n\nFor thousands of astronomers and solar physicists, it was a rare opportunity to study the tenuous outer atmosphere of the sun\u2014the corona\u2014normally obscured by the star\u2019s blinding light. Researchers scrutinized many aspects of the eclipse with 11 orbiting satellites, the international space station, sensors aboard 50 high-altitude balloons and thousands of ground-based telescopes.\nAstrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, watched the eclipse aboard an agency jet flying at 35,000 feet off the Oregon coast. \u201cI saw the atmosphere of our star for the first time with my own eyes,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw the lunar shadow sweep over the clouds at the speed of darkness.\u201d\nAtop Vinegar Mountain in eastern Oregon, astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick McCarthy,\n\n\n\n director of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, could hardly contain his emotion. \u201cAs soon as we hit totality, we all yelled out. It was such a visceral reaction. The corona was brighter today than I would have expected.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\nAt the same time, thousands of student astronomers and volunteer sky watchers collected data through telescopes, other high-altitude balloons and personal smartphone cameras. They also studied how animals reacted to an eclipse.\nAt California\u2019s Oakland Zoo, a troop of hamadryas Eyes skyward, millions of Americans were transfixed by the spectacle of a total solar eclipse midday Monday, as the moon\u2019s shadow raced from coast to coast like a brush stroke across the canvas of the continent. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Millions in U.S. Look Skyward During Solar Eclipse (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8892",
        "date": "2017-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/millions-in-u-s-look-skyward-during-solar-eclipse-1503346888?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=89",
        "text": "Related Solar Eclipse 2017: Live Coverage Slideshow: Eyes on the Skies Marketers Embrace the Eclipse for Their Brands \n\n\n\n\n\n\nAll told, 200 million people were within a day\u2019s drive of the zone of totality, as the area of complete darkness during a total eclipse is called, but the epic traffic jams feared by state and federal highway officials failed to materialize. Indeed, morning traffic along several major highways to key viewing areas appeared relatively light.\nEven so, satellite images taken by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n DigitalGlobe Inc.\n\n\n showed overflow crowds at choice viewing sites in Oregon and elsewhere along the narrow 2,400-mile-long corridor of totality. Many people pulled over to the side of the road to watch. At one rest area along I-95 near Santee, S.C., cars were parked four deep in places by midmorning.\n\n\nFor many of those who made a special pilgrimage to campgrounds, mountain peaks and parks, or who simply paused in their errands to gawk along sidewalks and roadsides, the fleeting minutes when the sun revealed its halo offered a moment of community, inspired by the clockwork movements of our sun, moon and home planet.\n\u201cThere were maybe 40 million people across the U.S. looking at the same thing at the same time,\u201d said astrophysicist Ed Guinan at Villanova University who has seen eight total eclipses. \u201cThat gives me goose bumps.\u201d\nIt was the first time since 1918 that a total solar eclipse crossed the U.S. coast to coast. From Oregon to South Carolina, many people hit their pause button for a day of awe and high jinks. Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. estimated the cost of the day\u2019s lost productivity at $694 million.\nStargazers started gathering along the airstrip at Glendo, Wyo.\u2014smack in the middle of the 70-mile-wide path of totality\u2014before dawn Monday. From the backs of trailers and vans, amateur stargazers set up long-lens cameras on tripods and high-powered telescopes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSatellite images show Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Madras, Ore., on Aug. 16 and Aug. 20, 2017.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n DigitalGlobe\n \n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like a Star Trek convention combined with Backpacking World,\u201d said Kip Tani, who made the three-hour drive up from Fort Collins, Colo., starting at 4 a.m., with his family. \u201cIt\u2019s quite a scene.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSatellite images show preparations for the Big Summit Prairie Festival in Big Summit Prairie, Ore., on Aug. 16 and Aug. 20.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n DigitalGlobe\n \n\n\n\nIn the Cascade Range highlands near Madras, Ore, 10 wingsuit enthusiasts attempted a coordinated group flight at the height of the eclipse, in a stunt organized by Outside TV. In Ketchum, Idaho, the local Sawtooth Brewery tapped the last kegs of its \u201cTotal Eclipse of the Hop\u201d beer for celebratory toasts. And in Carbondale, Ill.\u2014where the eclipse\u2019s duration of totality likely lasted longer than anywhere else in the country\u2014roughly 14,000 people congregated in Saluki Stadium for, among other eclipse-themed activities, a mass moonwalk set to a Michael Jackson medley.\nFor young Devlin McKim of Marin, Calif., the day had added significance. The eclipse fell on his eighth birthday. To celebrate, his parents arranged a trek of family and friends to a prime viewing spot in Corvallis, Ore. Their outing carried with it the promise of the ultimate trick birthday candle: the solar light overhead snuffed by the moon, only to flare anew as the sun emerged from the lunar shadow.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPeople watch the final moments before the total eclipse at the football stadium at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Reuters\n \n\n\n\nFor thousands of astronomers and solar physicists, it was a rare opportunity to study the tenuous outer atmosphere of the sun\u2014the corona\u2014normally obscured by the star\u2019s blinding light. Researchers scrutinized many aspects of the eclipse with 11 orbiting satellites, the international space station, sensors aboard 50 high-altitude balloons and thousands of ground-based telescopes.\nAstrophysicist Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA\u2019s science mission directorate, watched the eclipse aboard an agency jet flying at 35,000 feet off the Oregon coast. \u201cI saw the atmosphere of our star for the first time with my own eyes,\u201d he said. \u201cI saw the lunar shadow sweep over the clouds at the speed of darkness.\u201d\nAtop Vinegar Mountain in eastern Oregon, astrophysicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Patrick McCarthy,\n\n\n\n director of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, could hardly contain his emotion. \u201cAs soon as we hit totality, we all yelled out. It was such a visceral reaction. The corona was brighter today than I would have expected.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\nAt the same time, thousands of student astronomers and volunteer sky watchers collected data through telescopes, other high-altitude balloons and personal smartphone cameras. They also studied how animals reacted to an eclipse.\nAt California\u2019s Oakland Zoo, a troop of hamadryas baboons seemed listless, with many of them in hiding at the height of a partial eclipse there that darkened the skies like sunset. Nearby, three camels also displayed unusual behavior, huddling together and swinging their necks around.\n\u201cThe camels are acting weird,\u201d said zoo spokeswoman Erin Harrison.\u00a0\nAt Trinity Lutheran Church in Dallas, Ore., about 300 people showed up Monday to watch the eclipse and share moon pies, some of the visitors coming from as far away as Minnesota.\n\u201cWe\u2019re coming out of totality right now,\u201d church treasurer Janet Brunner said at midday. \u201cKind of eerie.\u201d\nIn Salem, Ore., people looking for a view of the eclipse overran the grounds of Morning Star Community Church. As the moon released the sun from shadow, Morning Star\u2019s pastor Jared Boltman began to cry.\n\u201cIt was amazing. I\u2019ve never seen anything like it,\u201d he said.\n\u2014Daniela Hernandez, Ian Lovett, Quint Forgey, Alexander Davis, Ashby Jones, Ben Leubsdorf, Jim Carlton and Christopher Zinsli contributed to this article.\nWrite to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com Eyes skyward, millions of Americans were transfixed by the spectacle of a total solar eclipse midday Monday, as the moon\u2019s shadow raced from coast to coast like a brush stroke across the canvas of the continent. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Solar Eclipse: Views and Reactions From Coast to Coast (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8893",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/solar-eclipse-views-and-reactions-from-coast-to-coast/47FA10EE-92F9-467E-AC19-F90AB4BAB140.html?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=89",
        "text": " Millions of Americans were transfixed by a total solar eclipse on Monday, which swept the country from Oregon to South Carolina. Here's a look at spectacular views of the eclipse and notable reactions. Photo: Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Solar Eclipse: Views and Reactions From Coast to Coast (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8894",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/solar-eclipse-views-and-reactions-from-coast-to-coast/47FA10EE-92F9-467E-AC19-F90AB4BAB140.html?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=115",
        "text": " Millions of Americans were transfixed by a total solar eclipse on Monday, which swept the country from Oregon to South Carolina. Here's a look at spectacular views of the eclipse and notable reactions. Photo: Reuters ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s on TV Monday: \u2018Scream\u2019 and \u2018Chasing the Moon\u2019 (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8895",
        "date": "2019-07-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/arts/television/whats-on-tv-monday-scream-and-chasing-the-moon.html",
        "text": "The \u201cScream\u201d reboot returns for a third season. And a new documentary series about the space race comes to PBS. The \u201cScream\u201d reboot returns for a third season. And a new documentary series about the space race comes to PBS. SCREAM: RESURRECTION 9 p.m. on VH1. When this television adaptation of Wes Craven\u2019s horror franchise debuted in 2015, critics argued that the story didn\u2019t pack the same punch on the small screen. Some said the series lacked novelty and that the Ghostface killer doesn\u2019t send chills down your spine over 10 drawn-out episodes. Season 3 brings the show from MTV to VH1 and packs terror in three two-hour episodes airing over three nights. The unlucky protagonist is Deion (RJ Cyler), a high school jock in Atlanta who is haunted by the death of his brother and by a mysterious killer who is sending him eerie messages. After Deion lands in detention, he and a few classmates form the \u201cDeadfast Club\u201d and set out to find the man behind the mask. As in previous seasons, \u201cResurrection\u201d offers plenty of meta references: One character plainly states, \u201cWe\u2019re in a horror movie.\u201d Another says, \u201cThis here is a reboot, and reboots don\u2019t play by your rules.\u201d ",
        "author": "By Sara Aridi"
    },
    {
        "title": "Are You Ready to Eat Meat Grown in a Lab? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8896",
        "date": "2020-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/books/review/billion-dolllar-burger-chase-purdy.html",
        "text": "In \u201cBillion Dollar Burger,\u201d Chase Purdy explores the \u201cedible space race\u201d to grow cell-cultured meat. In \u201cBillion Dollar Burger,\u201d Chase Purdy explores the \u201cedible space race\u201d to grow cell-cultured meat. BILLION DOLLAR BURGERInside Big Tech\u2019s Race for the Future of FoodBy Chase Purdy",
        "author": "By Bee Wilson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Last Stop on the Way to the Cosmos? No Thanks. (NYT: Style) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8897",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/style/space-race-cumberland-island-georgia.html",
        "text": "A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. On an isolated archipelago off the coast of Georgia, where the vestiges of America\u2019s Gilded Age aristocracy keep sprawling estates in tropical wilds, a controversy is roiling over a proposed spaceport.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Marvar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Last Stop on the Way to the Cosmos? No Thanks. (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8898",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/style/space-race-cumberland-island-georgia.html",
        "text": "A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. On an isolated archipelago off the coast of Georgia, where the vestiges of America\u2019s Gilded Age aristocracy keep sprawling estates in tropical wilds, a controversy is roiling over a proposed spaceport.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Marvar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Last Stop on the Way to the Cosmos? No Thanks. (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8899",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/style/space-race-cumberland-island-georgia.html",
        "text": "A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. On an isolated archipelago off the coast of Georgia, where the vestiges of America\u2019s Gilded Age aristocracy keep sprawling estates in tropical wilds, a controversy is roiling over a proposed spaceport.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Marvar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Last Stop on the Way to the Cosmos? No Thanks. (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8900",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/style/space-race-cumberland-island-georgia.html",
        "text": "A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. On an isolated archipelago off the coast of Georgia, where the vestiges of America\u2019s Gilded Age aristocracy keep sprawling estates in tropical wilds, a controversy is roiling over a proposed spaceport.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Marvar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Last Stop on the Way to the Cosmos? No Thanks. (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8901",
        "date": "2021-08-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/21/style/space-race-cumberland-island-georgia.html",
        "text": "A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. A small Southern county hopes to land a starring role in the commercial space race. But for residents of the exclusive islands in the flight path, the stakes feel sky-high. On an isolated archipelago off the coast of Georgia, where the vestiges of America\u2019s Gilded Age aristocracy keep sprawling estates in tropical wilds, a controversy is roiling over a proposed spaceport.",
        "author": "By Alexandra Marvar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Explore the Space Race With The New York Times\u2019s Archive (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8902",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/lesson-plans/explore-the-space-race-with-the-new-york-timess-archive.html",
        "text": "In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. Fifty-two years ago, the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon \u2014 the culmination of a decade-long \u201cspace race\u201d between the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 widely regarded as one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements. Today, there is a different kind of race being run, as private companies compete to take ordinary citizens to space, the moon, Mars and beyond.",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Explore the Space Race With The New York Times\u2019s Archive (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8903",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/lesson-plans/explore-the-space-race-with-the-new-york-timess-archive.html",
        "text": "In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. Fifty-two years ago, the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon \u2014 the culmination of a decade-long \u201cspace race\u201d between the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 widely regarded as one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements. Today, there is a different kind of race being run, as private companies compete to take ordinary citizens to space, the moon, Mars and beyond.",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Explore the Space Race With The New York Times\u2019s Archive (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8904",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/lesson-plans/explore-the-space-race-with-the-new-york-timess-archive.html",
        "text": "In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. Fifty-two years ago, the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon \u2014 the culmination of a decade-long \u201cspace race\u201d between the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 widely regarded as one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements. Today, there is a different kind of race being run, as private companies compete to take ordinary citizens to space, the moon, Mars and beyond.",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Explore the Space Race With The New York Times\u2019s Archive (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8905",
        "date": "2021-09-28",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/learning/lesson-plans/explore-the-space-race-with-the-new-york-timess-archive.html",
        "text": "In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. In this extended lesson plan, students will use the Times archive to explore the questions: What was the space race? Who won it? And why did it matter? Then they will connect the past to the current competition for space. Fifty-two years ago, the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon \u2014 the culmination of a decade-long \u201cspace race\u201d between the United States and the Soviet Union \u2014 widely regarded as one of humanity\u2019s greatest achievements. Today, there is a different kind of race being run, as private companies compete to take ordinary citizens to space, the moon, Mars and beyond.",
        "author": "By Jeremy Engle"
    },
    {
        "title": "On the Menu in Moscow, Soviet-Era Nostalgia (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8906",
        "date": "2019-12-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/travel/moscow-restaurants-nostalgia.html",
        "text": "Themed eateries in the Russian capital cater to a taste for the past, recalling Black Sea vacations, Space Race euphoria and the days of service without a smile. Themed eateries in the Russian capital cater to a taste for the past, recalling Black Sea vacations, Space Race euphoria and the days of service without a smile. It\u2019s lunchtime in Moscow and the line for Stolovaya 57 is out the door \u2014 a 20-person long struggle for borscht, jellied pork, soft boiled vegetables and grated cabbage. Though it might be hard to imagine that people would wait any amount of time for a tray of food served by a stern-faced Russian woman in a dowdy canteen, this restaurant in Moscow\u2019s historic GUM department store is proving otherwise.",
        "author": "By Anastasia Miari"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ed Dwight Was Set to Be the First Black Astronaut. Here\u2019s Why That Never Happened. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8907",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/ed-dwight-was-set-to-be-the-first-black-astronaut-heres-why-that-never-happened.html",
        "text": "For a brief moment, the civil rights movement and the space race came together. For a brief moment, the civil rights movement and the space race came together. The bone-rattling trip to the upper reaches of Earth\u2019s atmosphere used to require a steady hand, a powerful jet and the precision of an airman ready to dodge enemy fire.",
        "author": "By Emily Ludolph"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ed Dwight Was Set to Be the First Black Astronaut. Here\u2019s Why That Never Happened. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8908",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/ed-dwight-was-set-to-be-the-first-black-astronaut-heres-why-that-never-happened.html",
        "text": "For a brief moment, the civil rights movement and the space race came together. For a brief moment, the civil rights movement and the space race came together. The bone-rattling trip to the upper reaches of Earth\u2019s atmosphere used to require a steady hand, a powerful jet and the precision of an airman ready to dodge enemy fire.",
        "author": "By Emily Ludolph"
    },
    {
        "title": "Ed Dwight Was Set to Be the First Black Astronaut. Here\u2019s Why That Never Happened. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8909",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/ed-dwight-was-set-to-be-the-first-black-astronaut-heres-why-that-never-happened.html",
        "text": "For a brief moment, the civil rights movement and the space race came together. For a brief moment, the civil rights movement and the space race came together. The bone-rattling trip to the upper reaches of Earth\u2019s atmosphere used to require a steady hand, a powerful jet and the precision of an airman ready to dodge enemy fire.",
        "author": "By Emily Ludolph"
    },
    {
        "title": "First Look with The Post\u2019s Jonathan Capehart, E.J. Dionne, Olivier Knox\u00a0& Megan McArdle (WP: Washington Post Live) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8910",
        "date": "2021-07-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2021/07/16/first-look-with-posts-jonathan-capehart-megan-mcardle/",
        "text": "Jonathan Capehart sits down with Washington Post correspondents and columnists to discuss the latest on the infrastructure bill, voting rights and the billionaire space race.Jonathan CapehartWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is a member of The Washington Post editorial board, writes about politics and social issues, and hosts the \u201cCape Up\u201d podcast. He is also an MSNBC Contributor, who regularly serves as a substitute anchor, and has served as a guest host on \u201cMidday on WNYC\u201d on New York Public Radio. Capehart is a regular moderator of panels at the Aspen Ideas Festival and for the Aspen Institute, the Center for American Progress and at the Atlantic Dialogues conference and the Brussels Forum of the German Marshall Fund. He has also moderated sessions at the Atlantic\u2019s Washington Ideas Forum and for the Connecticut Forum. Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News from 2002 to 2004, and served on that paper\u2019s editorial board from 1993 to 2000. In 1999, his 16-month editorial campaign to save the famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem earned him and the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Capehart left the Daily News in July 2000 to become the national affairs columnist at Bloomberg News, and took a leave from this position in February 2001 to serve as a policy adviser to Michael Bloomberg in his first successful campaign for New York City mayor. E.J. DionneE.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post. He is also a government professor at Georgetown University, a visiting professor at Harvard University, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio and MSNBC. His book \u201cCode Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country\u201d was published by St. Martin\u2019s Press in February.Before joining The Post in 1990 as a political reporter, Dionne spent 14 years at the New York Times, where he covered politics and reported from Albany, Washington, Paris, Rome and Beirut. His coverage of the Vatican was described by the Los Angeles Times as the best in two decades. In 2014-2015, Dionne was the vice president of the American Political Science Association. He is the author of seven books. His most recent are \u201cOne Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported\u201d (co-authored with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, 2017) and \u201cWhy the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism \u2013 From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond\u201d (2016). Dionne is the editor of seven additional volumes, including \u201cWe Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama\u201d (2017), co-edited with MSNBC\u2019s Joy-Ann Reid, and \u201cWhat\u2019s God Got to Do with the American Experiment\u201d (2000), co-edited with John J. DiIulio. He grew up in Fall River, Mass., attended Harvard College and was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He lives in Bethesda, Md., with his wife, Mary Boyle. They have three children, James, Julia and Margot.Olivier KnoxOlivier Knox is National Political Correspondent and Anchor of The Daily 202. He previously hosted a national SiriusXM show focused on politics and policy. Before that, he covered politics and policy at Yahoo News and at Agence France-Presse.Megan McArdleMegan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and the author of \u201cThe Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.\u201d Jonathan Capehart sits down with Washington Post correspondents and columnists to discuss the latest on the infrastructure bill, voting rights and the billionaire space race. First Look with The Post\u2019s Jonathan Capehart, E.J. Dionne, Olivier Knox\u00a0& Megan McArdle",
        "author": "Washington Post Live"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Launches Mission to Land a Rover on Moon\u2019s South Pole (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8911",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-launches-mission-to-land-a-rover-on-moons-south-pole-11563798356?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=58",
        "text": "Those watching from near the launch site on Sriharikota, an island on the country\u2019s east coast, cheered and clapped as the rocket took off. Live coverage of the launch was broadcast on most news channels and showed scientists clapping, shaking hands and hugging.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt is the beginning of a historical journey of India towards [the] moon and to land at a place near [the] south pole to carry out scientific experiments to explore [the] unexplored,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n K. Sivan,\n\n\n\n chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation said on television after the launch.\n\n\nIf successful, the mission will make India the fourth country to make a soft landing on the moon, after the U.S., Russia and China. It would also be the first mission to make a soft landing on the moon\u2019s southern polar region, the ISRO said.\nA flurry of tweets appeared on Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account after the launch. \u201cSpecial moments that will be etched in the annals of our glorious history! The launch of #Chandrayaan2 illustrates the prowess of our scientists and the determination of [1.3 billion] Indians to scale new frontiers of science. Every Indian is immensely proud today!\u201d one of his tweets said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndian students waved an Indian national flag as the Chandrayaan 2 was launched.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n arun sankar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nJust over 16 minutes after blasting off, Chandrayaan 2, or Moon Chariot 2 in Hindi, separated from the rocket, about 113 miles above the earth.\nThe mission is taking a slow route to the moon by using the earth\u2019s gravity. It will take 48 days to make it to the surface of the moon, the ISRO said.\nThe next big challenge will be landing the launcher and rover on the moon. \u201cD-Day will come, and that day we are going to experience 15 minutes terror to ensure the landing is safely near the south pole,\u201d Mr. Sivan said.\nThe rover is to spend 14 days carrying out experiments on the surface, analyzing minerals and the topography. \n\u201cWe are making the Indian flag flying high in this specific technology area,\u201d said Mr. Sivan.\nIt was the second attempt to launch the mission. The launch of Chandrayaan 2 was postponed last week less than an hour before its planned departure time because of a small problem with an air-pressure tank, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivek Singh,\n\n\n\n media director at ISRO said. \u201cIf it was not a minor observation then we would not have come back so fast,\u201d he said.\nIndia wants to keep up in a global space race that has been gaining speed in recent years. China earlier this year became the first country to deploy a probe on the far side of the moon and is now competing with the U.S. to become the second nation to send a manned mission to the moon almost half a century since the first landings.\nChina plans to start building a lunar base by 2025, while the U.S. plans to return to the moon around 2023.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, K. Sivan\n\n\n Photo: \n \n manjunath kiran/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIndia, meanwhile, has shown in recent years how to launch budget missions. In 2014, ISRO successfully put a space probe into orbit around Mars for a cost of $74 million, compared with the $828 million that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent on a rover for its Mars program.\nISRO said its latest moon mission will cost around $130 million.\nThe organization keeps its costs down by making its equipment locally, sending smaller payloads than NASA and paying local wages, analysts said.\nIndia\u2019s first lunar mission, Chandrayaan 1, was launched in 2008 and orbited the moon about 3,200 times. It confirmed the presence of water molecules on the moon\u2019s surface.\nGovernments and private companies are now eager to learn whether lunar mining might one day be possible, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan,\n\n\n\n head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank.\nIndia\u2019s inexpensive missions have served as an advertisement for its capabilities and have prompted other countries to ask India to launch their satellites, she said. The country also wants to keep up in the space race to ensure it has a place in the conversation about space governance and to be able to counter China\u2019s moves, said Ms. Rajagopalan.\nBuilding India\u2019s space program has become part of Prime Minister Modi\u2019s agenda. In March, he made a televised address ahead of national elections stating that India had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile. He has also pledged to send manned craft into space by 2022.\n\u2014Vibhuti Agarwal in New Delhi contributed to this article.\nWrite to Corinne Abrams at corinne.abrams@wsj.com India\u2019s latest lunar mission blasted off as the country seeks to land a rover on the south pole of the moon and keep up in an increasingly competitive space race. ",
        "author": "Corinne Abrams"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Launches Mission to Land a Rover on Moon\u2019s South Pole (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8912",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-launches-mission-to-land-a-rover-on-moons-south-pole-11563798356?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=52",
        "text": "Those watching from near the launch site on Sriharikota, an island on the country\u2019s east coast, cheered and clapped as the rocket took off. Live coverage of the launch was broadcast on most news channels and showed scientists clapping, shaking hands and hugging.\n\u201cIt is the beginning of a historical journey of India towards [the] moon and to land at a place near [the] south pole to carry out scientific experiments to explore [the] unexplored,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n K. Sivan,\n\n\n\n chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation said on television after the launch.\n\n\nIf successful, the mission will make India the fourth country to make a soft landing on the moon, after the U.S., Russia and China. It would also be the first mission to make a soft landing on the moon\u2019s southern polar region, the ISRO said.\nA flurry of tweets appeared on Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account after the launch. \u201cSpecial moments that will be etched in the annals of our glorious history! The launch of #Chandrayaan2 illustrates the prowess of our scientists and the determination of [1.3 billion] Indians to scale new frontiers of science. Every Indian is immensely proud today!\u201d one of his tweets said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndian students waved an Indian national flag as the Chandrayaan 2 was launched.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n arun sankar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nJust over 16 minutes after blasting off, Chandrayaan 2, or Moon Chariot 2 in Hindi, separated from the rocket, about 113 miles above the earth.\nThe mission is taking a slow route to the moon by using the earth\u2019s gravity. It will take 48 days to make it to the surface of the moon, the ISRO said.\nThe next big challenge will be landing the launcher and rover on the moon. \u201cD-Day will come, and that day we are going to experience 15 minutes terror to ensure the landing is safely near the south pole,\u201d Mr. Sivan said.\nThe rover is to spend 14 days carrying out experiments on the surface, analyzing minerals and the topography. \n\u201cWe are making the Indian flag flying high in this specific technology area,\u201d said Mr. Sivan.\nIt was the second attempt to launch the mission. The launch of Chandrayaan 2 was postponed last week less than an hour before its planned departure time because of a small problem with an air-pressure tank, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivek Singh,\n\n\n\n media director at ISRO said. \u201cIf it was not a minor observation then we would not have come back so fast,\u201d he said.\nIndia wants to keep up in a global space race that has been gaining speed in recent years. China earlier this year became the first country to deploy a probe on the far side of the moon and is now competing with the U.S. to become the second nation to send a manned mission to the moon almost half a century since the first landings.\nChina plans to start building a lunar base by 2025, while the U.S. plans to return to the moon around 2023.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, K. Sivan\n\n\n Photo: \n \n manjunath kiran/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIndia, meanwhile, has shown in recent years how to launch budget missions. In 2014, ISRO successfully put a space probe into orbit around Mars for a cost of $74 million, compared with the $828 million that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent on a rover for its Mars program.\nISRO said its latest moon mission will cost around $130 million.\nThe organization keeps its costs down by making its equipment locally, sending smaller payloads than NASA and paying local wages, analysts said.\nIndia\u2019s first lunar mission, Chandrayaan 1, was launched in 2008 and orbited the moon about 3,200 times. It confirmed the presence of water molecules on the moon\u2019s surface.\nGovernments and private companies are now eager to learn whether lunar mining might one day be possible, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan,\n\n\n\n head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank.\nIndia\u2019s inexpensive missions have served as an advertisement for its capabilities and have prompted other countries to ask India to launch their satellites, she said. The country also wants to keep up in the space race to ensure it has a place in the conversation about space governance and to be able to counter China\u2019s moves, said Ms. Rajagopalan.\nBuilding India\u2019s space program has become part of Prime Minister Modi\u2019s agenda. In March, he made a televised address ahead of national elections stating that India had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile. He has also pledged to send manned craft into space by 2022.\n\u2014Vibhuti Agarwal in New Delhi contributed to this article.\nWrite to Corinne Abrams at corinne.abrams@wsj.com India\u2019s latest lunar mission blasted off as the country seeks to land a rover on the south pole of the moon and keep up in an increasingly competitive space race. ",
        "author": "Corinne Abrams"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Launches Mission to Land a Rover on Moon\u2019s South Pole (WSJ: Asia) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8913",
        "date": "2019-07-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-launches-mission-to-land-a-rover-on-moons-south-pole-11563798356?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=69",
        "text": "Those watching from near the launch site on Sriharikota, an island on the country\u2019s east coast, cheered and clapped as the rocket took off. Live coverage of the launch was broadcast on most news channels and showed scientists clapping, shaking hands and hugging.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cIt is the beginning of a historical journey of India towards [the] moon and to land at a place near [the] south pole to carry out scientific experiments to explore [the] unexplored,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n K. Sivan,\n\n\n\n chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation said on television after the launch.\n\n\nIf successful, the mission will make India the fourth country to make a soft landing on the moon, after the U.S., Russia and China. It would also be the first mission to make a soft landing on the moon\u2019s southern polar region, the ISRO said.\nA flurry of tweets appeared on Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n account after the launch. \u201cSpecial moments that will be etched in the annals of our glorious history! The launch of #Chandrayaan2 illustrates the prowess of our scientists and the determination of [1.3 billion] Indians to scale new frontiers of science. Every Indian is immensely proud today!\u201d one of his tweets said.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndian students waved an Indian national flag as the Chandrayaan 2 was launched.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n arun sankar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nJust over 16 minutes after blasting off, Chandrayaan 2, or Moon Chariot 2 in Hindi, separated from the rocket, about 113 miles above the earth.\nThe mission is taking a slow route to the moon by using the earth\u2019s gravity. It will take 48 days to make it to the surface of the moon, the ISRO said.\nThe next big challenge will be landing the launcher and rover on the moon. \u201cD-Day will come, and that day we are going to experience 15 minutes terror to ensure the landing is safely near the south pole,\u201d Mr. Sivan said.\nThe rover is to spend 14 days carrying out experiments on the surface, analyzing minerals and the topography. \n\u201cWe are making the Indian flag flying high in this specific technology area,\u201d said Mr. Sivan.\nIt was the second attempt to launch the mission. The launch of Chandrayaan 2 was postponed last week less than an hour before its planned departure time because of a small problem with an air-pressure tank, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivek Singh,\n\n\n\n media director at ISRO said. \u201cIf it was not a minor observation then we would not have come back so fast,\u201d he said.\nIndia wants to keep up in a global space race that has been gaining speed in recent years. China earlier this year became the first country to deploy a probe on the far side of the moon and is now competing with the U.S. to become the second nation to send a manned mission to the moon almost half a century since the first landings.\nChina plans to start building a lunar base by 2025, while the U.S. plans to return to the moon around 2023.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, K. Sivan\n\n\n Photo: \n \n manjunath kiran/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nIndia, meanwhile, has shown in recent years how to launch budget missions. In 2014, ISRO successfully put a space probe into orbit around Mars for a cost of $74 million, compared with the $828 million that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent on a rover for its Mars program.\nISRO said its latest moon mission will cost around $130 million.\nThe organization keeps its costs down by making its equipment locally, sending smaller payloads than NASA and paying local wages, analysts said.\nIndia\u2019s first lunar mission, Chandrayaan 1, was launched in 2008 and orbited the moon about 3,200 times. It confirmed the presence of water molecules on the moon\u2019s surface.\nGovernments and private companies are now eager to learn whether lunar mining might one day be possible, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan,\n\n\n\n head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank.\nIndia\u2019s inexpensive missions have served as an advertisement for its capabilities and have prompted other countries to ask India to launch their satellites, she said. The country also wants to keep up in the space race to ensure it has a place in the conversation about space governance and to be able to counter China\u2019s moves, said Ms. Rajagopalan.\nBuilding India\u2019s space program has become part of Prime Minister Modi\u2019s agenda. In March, he made a televised address ahead of national elections stating that India had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile. He has also pledged to send manned craft into space by 2022.\n\u2014Vibhuti Agarwal in New Delhi contributed to this article.\nWrite to Corinne Abrams at corinne.abrams@wsj.com India\u2019s latest lunar mission blasted off as the country seeks to land a rover on the south pole of the moon and keep up in an increasingly competitive space race. ",
        "author": "Corinne Abrams"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: U.S. Ramps Up Supercomputer Development as China Seeks Leadership in Technology (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8914",
        "date": "2017-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-u-s-ramps-up-supercomputer-development-as-china-seeks-leadership-in-technology-1497615962?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=120",
        "text": "\"U.S. government leaders warned in a September 2016 technical meeting convened by the National Security Agency and the DOE that the country was in danger of losing its leadership in supercomputers to China,\" Ms. King reports. The systems can be used to crack codes and develop nuclear weapons, explore for oil, and design autos. China is producing supercomputers without relying on U.S. chips, a sign of its growing technical prowess.\nThe fastest U.S. computer, the basketball-court sized Titan, built by Cray, can handle 17,590 trillion calculations per second.\u00a0By 2021, the U.S. plans to deliver at least one \u201cexascale\u201d system which performs one quintillion\u2014a billion billion\u2014calculations per second. That would be\u00a0one year later\u00a0than when China has said it plans to deploy its first system. That is only part of the competitive effort. Within a few years, companies hope to commercialize the development of quantum\u00a0computers that can solve problems beyond the scope of any computer in operation today, as CIO Journal reported\u00a0Tuesday.\u00a0 (What is quantum computing? Read this.)\n\n\n\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFacebook has increased its reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify terrorist propaganda and even block and delete users who post it. PHOTO: REUTERS/REGIS DUVIGNAU\n\n\n\nFacebook deploys AI to combat terrorist propaganda. Under intense political pressure to better block terrorist propaganda on the internet, Facebook Inc. is leaning more on artificial intelligence, reports WSJ\u2019s Sam Schechner. Facebook said Thursday it has expanded its use of AI in recent months to identify potential terrorist postings and accounts on its platform \u2014 and at times to delete or block them without review by a human. In the past, Facebook and other tech giants relied mostly on users and human moderators to identify offensive content.\n\nGoogle faces record antitrust fine from EU.\u00a0The fine for manipulating search results to favor its own comparison-shopping service could reach as high as 10% of the company's yearly revenue, which stood at $90.27 billion last year, the Journal\u2019s Natalia Drozdiak reports. The penalty against Google is expected to top the European Union's previous record fine levied on a company allegedly abusing its dominance: about $1.18 billion against Intel Corp. in 2009.\nChina bets on quantum science to build secure network. Chinese scientists have succeeded in sending specially linked pairs of light particles from space to Earth, an achievement experts in the field say gives China a leg up in using quantum technology to build an \u201cunhackable\u201d global communications network, WSJ\u2019s Josh Chin reports. The result is an important breakthrough that establishes China as a pioneer in efforts to harness the enigmatic properties of matter and energy at the subatomic level, the experts said. To read more about corporate adoption of quantum computing, read CIO Journal\u2019s latest coverage of Biogen.\nAmazon eyeing a Slack buyout.Slack Technologies Inc. has received inquiries about a potential takeover from technology companies including Amazon.com Inc., according to Bloomberg. The workplace communications platform could be valued at least $9 billion in a sale, sources told Bloomberg. An acquisition of Slack could help Amazon bolster its enterprise services as it competes with Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google, Bloomberg reports.\nBitcoin sees biggest dip since 2015. Bitcoin sank as much as 19% on Thursday, putting the digital currency on pace for its worst week since January 2015, reports Bloomberg. The cryptocurrency retreated to $2,076.16 in intraday trading in a decline that coincides with a dip in technology stocks. Analysts at Morgan Stanley have said bitcoin needs government support and regulation.\nVerizon to take a $500 million charge related to Yahoo.Verizon Communications Inc. expects to take a $500 million charge in the second quarter to cover expenses related to the $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo Inc., according to Bloomberg. The charges were related to severance and integration expenses. Verizon expects to see about $1 billion in operating cost savings through 2020 from the Yahoo deal, Bloomberg reports.\nUniversity College London faces ransomware attack. A ransomware attack brought down University College London\u2019s shared drives and student management system this week, The Guardian reports. The attack stemmed from a phishing email and spread through the university\u2019s network and shared drives, which were made available in read-only mode for students and staff.\nWHAT YOUR CEO IS READING\nEvery week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.\nPaying a price for 8 days of flying in America.\u00a0To understand the joys of flying in America today,\u00a0the New York Times\u2019s Sarah Lyall spent\u00a0eight days flying around the country in economy class. She compares the journey to an ear Supercomputing appears to be the modern version of the 1960s Space Race as the U.S. and China attempt to build the most powerful computer in the world. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Morning Download: U.S. Ramps Up Supercomputer Development as China Seeks Leadership in Technology (WSJ: Cio Blog) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8915",
        "date": "2017-06-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-morning-download-u-s-ramps-up-supercomputer-development-as-china-seeks-leadership-in-technology-1497615962?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=92",
        "text": "\"U.S. government leaders warned in a September 2016 technical meeting convened by the National Security Agency and the DOE that the country was in danger of losing its leadership in supercomputers to China,\" Ms. King reports. The systems can be used to crack codes and develop nuclear weapons, explore for oil, and design autos. China is producing supercomputers without relying on U.S. chips, a sign of its growing technical prowess.\nThe fastest U.S. computer, the basketball-court sized Titan, built by Cray, can handle 17,590 trillion calculations per second.\u00a0By 2021, the U.S. plans to deliver at least one \u201cexascale\u201d system which performs one quintillion\u2014a billion billion\u2014calculations per second. That would be\u00a0one year later\u00a0than when China has said it plans to deploy its first system. That is only part of the competitive effort. Within a few years, companies hope to commercialize the development of quantum\u00a0computers that can solve problems beyond the scope of any computer in operation today, as CIO Journal reported\u00a0Tuesday.\u00a0 (What is quantum computing? Read this.)\n\n\n\n\nTECHNOLOGY NEWS\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFacebook has increased its reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify terrorist propaganda and even block and delete users who post it. PHOTO: REUTERS/REGIS DUVIGNAU\n\n\n\nFacebook deploys AI to combat terrorist propaganda. Under intense political pressure to better block terrorist propaganda on the internet, Facebook Inc. is leaning more on artificial intelligence, reports WSJ\u2019s Sam Schechner. Facebook said Thursday it has expanded its use of AI in recent months to identify potential terrorist postings and accounts on its platform \u2014 and at times to delete or block them without review by a human. In the past, Facebook and other tech giants relied mostly on users and human moderators to identify offensive content.\n\nGoogle faces record antitrust fine from EU.\u00a0The fine for manipulating search results to favor its own comparison-shopping service could reach as high as 10% of the company's yearly revenue, which stood at $90.27 billion last year, the Journal\u2019s Natalia Drozdiak reports. The penalty against Google is expected to top the European Union's previous record fine levied on a company allegedly abusing its dominance: about $1.18 billion against Intel Corp. in 2009.\nChina bets on quantum science to build secure network. Chinese scientists have succeeded in sending specially linked pairs of light particles from space to Earth, an achievement experts in the field say gives China a leg up in using quantum technology to build an \u201cunhackable\u201d global communications network, WSJ\u2019s Josh Chin reports. The result is an important breakthrough that establishes China as a pioneer in efforts to harness the enigmatic properties of matter and energy at the subatomic level, the experts said. To read more about corporate adoption of quantum computing, read CIO Journal\u2019s latest coverage of Biogen.\nAmazon eyeing a Slack buyout.Slack Technologies Inc. has received inquiries about a potential takeover from technology companies including Amazon.com Inc., according to Bloomberg. The workplace communications platform could be valued at least $9 billion in a sale, sources told Bloomberg. An acquisition of Slack could help Amazon bolster its enterprise services as it competes with Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google, Bloomberg reports.\nBitcoin sees biggest dip since 2015. Bitcoin sank as much as 19% on Thursday, putting the digital currency on pace for its worst week since January 2015, reports Bloomberg. The cryptocurrency retreated to $2,076.16 in intraday trading in a decline that coincides with a dip in technology stocks. Analysts at Morgan Stanley have said bitcoin needs government support and regulation.\nVerizon to take a $500 million charge related to Yahoo.Verizon Communications Inc. expects to take a $500 million charge in the second quarter to cover expenses related to the $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo Inc., according to Bloomberg. The charges were related to severance and integration expenses. Verizon expects to see about $1 billion in operating cost savings through 2020 from the Yahoo deal, Bloomberg reports.\nUniversity College London faces ransomware attack. A ransomware attack brought down University College London\u2019s shared drives and student management system this week, The Guardian reports. The attack stemmed from a phishing email and spread through the university\u2019s network and shared drives, which were made available in read-only mode for students and staff.\nWHAT YOUR CEO IS READING\nEvery week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, general interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.\nPaying a price for 8 days of flying in America.\u00a0To understand the joys of flying in America today,\u00a0the New York Times\u2019s Sarah Lyall spent\u00a0eight days flying around the country in economy class. She compares the journey to an earlier story she wrote about tracking a bag of garbage from Long Island to a landfill in Illinois: \"I thought of it as I disembarked in Phoenix, yogurt on my pants. The stories had a pleasing parallelism to them \u2014 the random travel from place to place, the studious tracking of the specimen. This time, perhaps, I was the specimen.\u201d\nWhen ping pong tables are not enough.\u00a0Leave it to a technology firm to take corporate America\u2019s current fixation on remote work to its extreme.\u00a0Quartz\u2019s Oliver Staley reports\u00a0that\u00a0Automattic, owner of the WordPress blog platform, is selling its 15,000 square foot, reconverted warehouse in San Francisco because only five employees use it. Says CEO Matt Mullenweg:\u00a0\u201cThey get like 3,000 square feet each\u2026there are as many gaming tables as there are people.\u201d Mr. Staley adds that the company, with similar offices in South Africa and Maine, provides its 550 employees a $250-a-month stipend if they choose to rent offices elsewhere. Apparently the San Francisco warehouse, with its Aeron chairs, comfy leather couches, high ceilings and a polished concrete floor that looks clean enough to lick Soylent off of just wasn\u2019t good enough.\u00a0\nLeaders: Can't live with 'em. Can't live without 'em.\u00a0Talented executives and managers may dazzle higher-ups and land important positions. But employees don't really care for their bosses. Harvard Business Review lays it out: \"In America, 75%\u00a0of employees report that their direct line manager is the worst part of their job, and 65%\u00a0would happily take a pay cut if they could replace their boss with someone better,\"\u00a0write Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Clarke Murphy.\u00a0The problem boils down to executives, especially those who join from outside the company, not fitting in. Hiring managers do a poor job of assessing an executive's values and motives but these are big factors in whether they fit a given culture. Often, hiring managers themselves don't even understand the corporate culture. Sigh.\nEVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW\nNestl\u00e9 SA put its U.S. candy business up for sale, looking to shed its Butterfinger and Crunch candy bars as it grapples with how to cater to U.S. consumers\u2019 increasing demand for healthy snacks. (WSJ)\u00a0\nKroger Co. shares slide 19% as grocer posts second straight quarter of same-store sales declines and is battered by price fight. (WSJ)\nPresident Donald Trump signs executive order to boost apprenticeships, directing companies and unions to develop guidelines. (WSJ)\nForecasts from the Federal Reserve for long-term growth are at odds with -- and not as rosy as -- those from the Trump administration. (WSJ)\nThe Morning Download is edited by CIO Journal\u2019s Kim S. Nash\u00a0and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking\u00a0http://wsj.com/TheMorningDownload. Supercomputing appears to be the modern version of the 1960s Space Race as the U.S. and China attempt to build the most powerful computer in the world. ",
        "author": "Steve RosenbushEditor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Covid Is the 21st Century\u2019s Sputnik (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8916",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-pandemic-darpa-nih-advanced-research-projects-agency-for-health-11627401881?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=25",
        "text": "On Friday, Oct. 4, 1957, those beeps from the first artificial satellite\u2014Sputnik 1\u2014signaled that the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. to space.\nSputnik frightened Americans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Dickson\u2019s\n\n\n\n history of the event, \u201cSputnik: The Shock of the Century,\u201d likened the psychological impact to Pearl Harbor. The R-7 rocket that propelled Sputnik to space was powerful enough to drop nuclear weapons on U.S. cities. I was concerned and wrote a letter to President Eisenhower offering to help. Though only 11, I was obsessed with math and science, especially the concept of space travel, and wanted to join the space effort. \n\n\n\n\nWe now know that Moscow\u2019s moment of apparent triumph was the beginning of the end for the Soviet communist system. Their claims of scientific superiority woke the U.S. up. In 1958 Congress established NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Both organizations were designed to assure that America would never again fall behind in scientific and military leadership. Eisenhower also signed the National Defense Education Act that year, which injected $1 billion into science and technology education.\n\n\nAlthough well known for successful moon landings, NASA\u2019s greatest legacy may be how it expanded understanding of the universe and the technologies needed for its exploration. Darpa\u2019s inventions are woven into our daily lives: the internet, the Global Positioning System, graphical user interfaces, and practical applications of artificial intelligence like Siri and Alexa. \nThe ascendant science of the 20th century was physics, which was used to split the atom, create the transistor, revolutionize communication, and speed development of lifesaving medical devices. After Sputnik, it became cool to be a scientist, mathematician or engineer. \nThe current battle against Covid\u2014our new wake-up call\u2014should mirror the response to Sputnik. Just as the U.S. could have created NASA and Darpa well before 1957 if our leaders had better understood the global challenge, the worst of Covid-19 could have been prevented if the country had prepared earlier. Better late than never, Darpa was launched in 1958 on a venture-capital model that funded risky innovative projects and had a high fail rate. Free from the constraints of the Defense Department\u2019s risk-averse processes, Darpa soon became a crucial component of U.S. national security. A medical equivalent of Darpa could become a crucial component of U.S. health security. \nPresident Biden\u2019s 2022 federal budget proposal includes $6.5 billion for a new Darpa-like group under the National Institutes of Health. Called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, its current proposed funding recently approved by a House panel is $3 billion. That is a tiny fraction of the roughly $4 trillion the U.S. spent on healthcare last year. This new health agency would pursue the greatest challenges of medical science\u2014Alzheimer\u2019s, cancer, diabetes, pandemics, rare diseases and more. It could encompass projects like the development of mRNA vaccines to prevent most cancers, molecular \u201cZIP Codes\u201d that target drugs to specific cell types, and new brain imaging.\nThe NIH must provide careful management of the government\u2019s medical-research budget, just as the Defense Department must coordinate America\u2019s military programs. But this new group would be separate from the incremental, hypothesis-driven structure of the NIH. To its credit, under the leadership of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Collins,\n\n\n\n NIH responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with remarkable speed. The agency launched two industry-nonprofit partnership programs (ACTIV and RADx) that helped to organize work on therapies, establish protocols, and push diagnostic technologies through the development pipeline. \nBut the NIH was never meant to be a risk-taking enterprise that would confront major diseases directly. Its primary role is support of biomedical research, not cutting-edge product development. A classic example is the monumental Human Genome Project, the first draft of which occupied Dr. Collins and other researchers for more than a decade. Clinical applications were left to others.\nThis new health agency can help ensure America\u2019s continued pre-eminence in bioscience. The economic historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Angus Maddison\n\n\n\n estimated that half of all economic growth over the past 200 years is directly linked to advances in medical research and public health. Future progress will produce more than medical breakthroughs. It will also help solve the seemingly intractable global issues of unclean water, unstable food production, bioterrorism, renewable energy supply and environmental sustainability.\nWhen my colleagues and I formalized our support of research on life-threatening diseases in 1982, we began deliberately. The Milken Family Foundation\u2019s early grants to prominent medical scientists were effective in advan The space race spawned Darpa. The pandemic proved we need an agency for health innovation. ",
        "author": "Michael Milken"
    },
    {
        "title": "Covid Is the 21st Century\u2019s Sputnik (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8917",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-pandemic-darpa-nih-advanced-research-projects-agency-for-health-11627401881?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=18",
        "text": "On Friday, Oct. 4, 1957, those beeps from the first artificial satellite\u2014Sputnik 1\u2014signaled that the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S. to space.\nSputnik frightened Americans.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Dickson\u2019s\n\n\n\n history of the event, \u201cSputnik: The Shock of the Century,\u201d likened the psychological impact to Pearl Harbor. The R-7 rocket that propelled Sputnik to space was powerful enough to drop nuclear weapons on U.S. cities. I was concerned and wrote a letter to President Eisenhower offering to help. Though only 11, I was obsessed with math and science, especially the concept of space travel, and wanted to join the space effort. \n\n\n\n\nWe now know that Moscow\u2019s moment of apparent triumph was the beginning of the end for the Soviet communist system. Their claims of scientific superiority woke the U.S. up. In 1958 Congress established NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Both organizations were designed to assure that America would never again fall behind in scientific and military leadership. Eisenhower also signed the National Defense Education Act that year, which injected $1 billion into science and technology education.\n\n\nAlthough well known for successful moon landings, NASA\u2019s greatest legacy may be how it expanded understanding of the universe and the technologies needed for its exploration. Darpa\u2019s inventions are woven into our daily lives: the internet, the Global Positioning System, graphical user interfaces, and practical applications of artificial intelligence like Siri and Alexa. \nThe ascendant science of the 20th century was physics, which was used to split the atom, create the transistor, revolutionize communication, and speed development of lifesaving medical devices. After Sputnik, it became cool to be a scientist, mathematician or engineer. \nThe current battle against Covid\u2014our new wake-up call\u2014should mirror the response to Sputnik. Just as the U.S. could have created NASA and Darpa well before 1957 if our leaders had better understood the global challenge, the worst of Covid-19 could have been prevented if the country had prepared earlier. Better late than never, Darpa was launched in 1958 on a venture-capital model that funded risky innovative projects and had a high fail rate. Free from the constraints of the Defense Department\u2019s risk-averse processes, Darpa soon became a crucial component of U.S. national security. A medical equivalent of Darpa could become a crucial component of U.S. health security. \nPresident Biden\u2019s 2022 federal budget proposal includes $6.5 billion for a new Darpa-like group under the National Institutes of Health. Called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, its current proposed funding recently approved by a House panel is $3 billion. That is a tiny fraction of the roughly $4 trillion the U.S. spent on healthcare last year. This new health agency would pursue the greatest challenges of medical science\u2014Alzheimer\u2019s, cancer, diabetes, pandemics, rare diseases and more. It could encompass projects like the development of mRNA vaccines to prevent most cancers, molecular \u201cZIP Codes\u201d that target drugs to specific cell types, and new brain imaging.\nThe NIH must provide careful management of the government\u2019s medical-research budget, just as the Defense Department must coordinate America\u2019s military programs. But this new group would be separate from the incremental, hypothesis-driven structure of the NIH. To its credit, under the leadership of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Francis Collins,\n\n\n\n NIH responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with remarkable speed. The agency launched two industry-nonprofit partnership programs (ACTIV and RADx) that helped to organize work on therapies, establish protocols, and push diagnostic technologies through the development pipeline. \nBut the NIH was never meant to be a risk-taking enterprise that would confront major diseases directly. Its primary role is support of biomedical research, not cutting-edge product development. A classic example is the monumental Human Genome Project, the first draft of which occupied Dr. Collins and other researchers for more than a decade. Clinical applications were left to others.\nThis new health agency can help ensure America\u2019s continued pre-eminence in bioscience. The economic historian\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Angus Maddison\n\n\n\n estimated that half of all economic growth over the past 200 years is directly linked to advances in medical research and public health. Future progress will produce more than medical breakthroughs. It will also help solve the seemingly intractable global issues of unclean water, unstable food production, bioterrorism, renewable energy supply and environmental sustainability.\nWhen my colleagues and I formalized our support of research on life-threatening diseases in 1982, we began deliberately. The Milken Family Foundation\u2019s early grants to prominent medical scientists were effective in advancing important work such as the drug Herceptin, a breakthrough breast-cancer treatment. But by 1993 I concluded that progress was still too slow. We needed to break the mold as Darpa had. That called for a new type of organization. \nWhat began as a group called CaP CURE evolved over the decades into organizations including FasterCures, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, the Melanoma Research Alliance and several other centers of the Milken Institute. Our funding demanded research collaboration, a willingness to accept early failures, and an unprecedented sense of urgency. Instead of slowing progress by negotiating for intellectual-property rights, we left them with academic research centers and took no equity. The grant process encouraged early-career researchers, eliminated bureaucracy, gave patients a greater role in clinical trial design, and built closer ties among industry, government agencies and academics.\nOur initiatives were some of the driving forces behind the doubling of the NIH budget between 1998 and 2003, the creation of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences in 2011, and the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016. This expansion has played a significant role in developing dozens of lifesaving drugs and has contributed to rapid progress on Covid vaccines and therapies. \nThe Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is the next step toward faster cures. It would be a beacon as bright as the one that excited millions of young future scientists after Sputnik. As Covid has shown, time equals lives. Prompt establishment of this agency will save lives by saving time.\nMr. Milken is chairman of the Milken Institute.\nCorrection\n\t\t\n\tThe U.S. spent $4 trillion on healthcare last year, including both private and government money. Because of an editing error, an earlier version described the figure inaccurately.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Wonder Land (12/02/20): The pharmaceutical industry scientists who created the coronavirus vaccines deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Images: Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The space race spawned Darpa. The pandemic proved we need an agency for health innovation. ",
        "author": "Michael Milken"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Florida Launched a Technological Revolution (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8918",
        "date": "2017-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/enterprise-florida/ul/how-florida-launched-a-technological-revolution.html",
        "text": "Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How Florida Launched a Technological Revolution (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8919",
        "date": "2017-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/enterprise-florida/ul/how-florida-launched-a-technological-revolution.html",
        "text": "Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How Florida Launched a Technological Revolution (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8920",
        "date": "2017-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/enterprise-florida/ul/how-florida-launched-a-technological-revolution.html",
        "text": "Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "How Florida Launched a Technological Revolution (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8921",
        "date": "2017-08-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/enterprise-florida/ul/how-florida-launched-a-technological-revolution.html",
        "text": "Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. Florida led America into a space race. Here\u2019s how it intends to blast off once again. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos' Blue Origin Takes Off (WSJ: The Journal) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8922",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/bezos-blue-origin-takes-off/EE993A66-D7E7-41C4-8432-1F0FABCA509D?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=6",
        "text": " Blue Origin is set to launch founder Jeff Bezos into space tomorrow, about a week after Virgin Galactic sent its own founder to the stars. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains how Blue Origin stacks up in the commercial space race. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos' Blue Origin Takes Off (WSJ: The Journal) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8923",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/bezos-blue-origin-takes-off/EE993A66-D7E7-41C4-8432-1F0FABCA509D?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=6",
        "text": " Blue Origin is set to launch founder Jeff Bezos into space tomorrow, about a week after Virgin Galactic sent its own founder to the stars. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains how Blue Origin stacks up in the commercial space race. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos' Blue Origin Takes Off (WSJ: The Journal) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8924",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/bezos-blue-origin-takes-off/EE993A66-D7E7-41C4-8432-1F0FABCA509D?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=17",
        "text": " Blue Origin is set to launch founder Jeff Bezos into space tomorrow, about a week after Virgin Galactic sent its own founder to the stars. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains how Blue Origin stacks up in the commercial space race. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos' Blue Origin Takes Off (WSJ: The Journal) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8925",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/bezos-blue-origin-takes-off/EE993A66-D7E7-41C4-8432-1F0FABCA509D?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=26",
        "text": " Blue Origin is set to launch founder Jeff Bezos into space tomorrow, about a week after Virgin Galactic sent its own founder to the stars. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains how Blue Origin stacks up in the commercial space race. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos' Blue Origin Takes Off (WSJ: The Journal) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8926",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/bezos-blue-origin-takes-off/EE993A66-D7E7-41C4-8432-1F0FABCA509D?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=26",
        "text": " Blue Origin is set to launch founder Jeff Bezos into space tomorrow, about a week after Virgin Galactic sent its own founder to the stars. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg explains how Blue Origin stacks up in the commercial space race. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk, Bezos and Branson: Who Will Dominate Space Tourism? (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8927",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/musk-bezos-and-branson-who-will-dominate-space-tourism/1D994A7C-C476-41AC-B839-AAF38929E359.html?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=20",
        "text": " Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk, Bezos and Branson: Who Will Dominate Space Tourism? (WSJ: WSJ The Future of Everything) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8928",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/musk-bezos-and-branson-who-will-dominate-space-tourism/1D994A7C-C476-41AC-B839-AAF38929E359.html?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=58",
        "text": " Billionaire CEOs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are on a mission to send tourists to the stars. Here's how each company is approaching the new space race. Photo composite: Heather Seidel/The Wall Street Journal ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China Makes Historic Moon Landing, Boosting Rivalry With U.S. (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8929",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/china-makes-historic-moon-landing-boosting-rivalry-with-us/2F611BA4-1FBD-4CF2-BD71-99E3A0B5B437.html?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=60",
        "text": " China gained on the U.S. in the new space race by making the first-ever landing on the far side of the moon. What's driving China\u2019s ambitions and should the U.S. be nervous? The WSJ explains. Photo: CHINA NATIONAL SPACE ADMINISTRAT/SHUTTERSTOCK ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What Tops the Agenda for a New Space Colony? A Debate Over Taxes (WSJ: A-hed) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8930",
        "date": "2017-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-oddity-futuristic-colony-buffeted-by-debate-over-taxes-and-politics-1504026949?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=78",
        "text": "Igor Ashurbeyli\n\n\n\nThe scale of the human task is dawning on Russian businessman and scientist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Igor Ashurbeyli,\n\n\n\n who last year drew headlines with his plan for a peaceful democratic utopia dubbed Asgardia above the stratosphere.\nMore than 300,000 people from 217 countries and territories signed up online to be Asgardians\u2014among them starry-eyed dreamers, sci-fi fans and political idealists\u2014and 110,000 of them are now officially citizens.\n\nWhile Dr. Ashurbeyli\u2019s lofty plan involves launching \u201cSpace Arks\u201d into lower Earth orbit by 2025, he has found himself caught up in earthly debates among his people about pesky details such as the space nation\u2019s constitution and potential taxes. \nNot to mention its prospective shortage of women.\nAmong problems facing Asgardia, \u201cthe biggest is self-organization,\u201d said Dr. Ashurbeyli, 53, \u201cbecause no one has ever tried organizing\u2026what is today 100,000 citizens from 200 countries who don\u2019t know each other and live in different places on Earth.\u201d\nDr. Ashurbeyli, based in Moscow, has few details about how Asgardia, named after Asgard, the godly realm of Norse mythology, would be built, launched and run. Specifics are to be decided by the nation\u2019s parliament. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOne mission: Guard against space threats like asteroids. \u201cMy task is to defend planet Earth and defend humanity,\u201d Dr. Ashurbeyli said in a phone interview, \u201cnothing more.\u201d \nBefore liftoff, the Soviet-trained engineer wants the United Nations to recognize Asgardia as a country. He plans to establish a government online and devise a flag, anthem and currency. Initially, citizens will get to send data into space on a satellite he plans to launch from the U.S. this fall.\nDr. Ashurbeyli, who owns an industrial company he values at $200 million, insists he is deadly serious. He is the sole funder and pays about 50 people to manage Asgardia\u2019s affairs. His plan is to pay for launches through crowdfunding. \nOthers are skeptical of the project\u2019s success. \u201cI think the initiators don\u2019t have any idea what they are doing, legally speaking,\u201d said space-law professor Frans von der Dunk of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.\nAnd earthbound Asgardians, it turns out, are a fractious lot. Hailing from Tulsa to Turkey to East Timor, they speak different languages and can\u2019t agree on basic policies. Hotly debated issues include the merits of establishing diplomatic relations with extraterrestrials, whether refugees should be welcomed and what role cryptocurrencies should play.\nThe biggest fault line is Asgardia\u2019s constitution, which Dr. Ashurbeyli and his advisers wrote. Unveiled in June, it met opprobrium from rebellious corners of the would-be nation.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019d say the community is very divided,\u201d said Chris Hawkes, 58, a teacher from Preston, England, who joined because he liked the idea of a \u201csocietal restart.\u201d\nMr. Hawkes said the constitution accords too much power to Dr. Ashurbeyli by declaring Asgardia a \u201cSpace Kingdom\u201d\u2014giving him extensive rights to determine the composition of the powerful Supreme Space Council. \u201cThere\u2019s so much mishmash in the constitution,\u201d he said.\nDebate raged on other aspects of the constitution, from its minimum age of 40 for parliamentarians to worries that Asgardia would impose taxes before launch.\nSuch a levy, fretted one Asgardian online, would mean citizens supporting a nation \u201cthat has few assets, no territory, no institutions and no international recognition.\u201d The constitution states that paying taxes is voluntary.\nCritics\u2019 online clashes with those loyal to the founder got heated. The disputes delayed ratification of the constitution, which was scheduled for June 18, for almost six weeks.\nOf the over 300,000 who became Asgardians by signing up online, only the 110,000 who finally voted to approve the constitution were granted official citizenship.\nJenn Roznicki, 40, a child-care provider in Calgary, Canada, quit Asgardia when it was revealed that those who didn\u2019t approve the constitution would be considered tourists, not citizens.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIgor Ashurbeyli introduces the Asgardian Calendar.\n\n\n\n\u201cI was sad that it happened because I had so much hope for Asgardia,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen I joined a year ago, my husband said, \u2018You know it\u2019s going to descend into madness,\u2019 and I said, \u2018No, I have faith!\u2019\u00a0\u201d\nDr. Ashurbeyli said he simply wants to establish a more structured society and would serve only one five-year term. As for anointing himself king, he said Asgardia would be a constitutional monarchy similar to those in Europe.\n\n\nTake a Look at Other Recent A-Heds Thanks for Making Me a Kentucky Colonel. What Do I Do Now? Battling Bands: This Next Song is Dedicated to Our Therapist Gown Girl: How a Miami Bankruptcy Lawyer Bailed Out Hundreds of Brides \n\n\nHe has created a Vienna-based group\u2014named NGO Asgardia\u2014to manage the nation. It is now holding parliamentary elections, with almost 4,000 running for seats, with candidates including an Indian computer scientist, an American h A Russian businessman plans to put in orbit a utopia called Asgardia. If only he could get his citizens to agree on how to run it. ",
        "author": "Charles Rollet"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Brilliant, Incendiary Joan of Arc Story for a Ravaged Earth (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8931",
        "date": "2017-04-25",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/books/review/book-of-joan-of-arc-lidia-yuknavitch.html",
        "text": "In Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s novel \u201cThe Book of Joan,\u201d a space colony of survivors orbits a post-apocalyptic Earth. In Lidia Yuknavitch\u2019s novel \u201cThe Book of Joan,\u201d a space colony of survivors orbits a post-apocalyptic Earth. THE BOOK OF JOAN By Lidia Yuknavitch 266 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.",
        "author": "By Jeff VanderMeer"
    },
    {
        "title": "Mystery Boxes and Budding Loves: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8932",
        "date": "2021-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/books/review/elizabeth-knox-everina-maxwell.html",
        "text": "\u201cThe Absolute Book,\u201d by Elizabeth Knox, takes on a number of genres, while \u201cWinter\u2019s Orbit,\u201d by Everina Maxwell, stays true to one. \u201cThe Absolute Book,\u201d by Elizabeth Knox, takes on a number of genres, while \u201cWinter\u2019s Orbit,\u201d by Everina Maxwell, stays true to one. Here are two novels that are, in some ways, opposites: one by an author who\u2019s been publishing celebrated work for 40 years, and one a debut; one that blends numerous genres with a skillful and inquiring hand, and one that glories in modeling a single genre by hitting every one of its notes. Between them they contrast the pleasures of surprise with those of satisfied expectations.",
        "author": "By Amal El-Mohtar"
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | Credible climate scientists need to boycott biased congressional hearings (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8933",
        "date": "2017-03-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2017/03/28/credible-climate-scientists-need-to-boycott-biased-congressional-hearings/",
        "text": "David W. Titley is a retired rear admiral for the Navy. He currently serves as a professor of practice in the department of meteorology at Penn State, and is the founding director of its Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightUnless you\u2019ve been living under a (melting) ice shelf recently, you know by now the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science Space and Technology is holding a climate science hearing\u00a0Wednesday to probe the \u201cassumptions, policy implications and scientific method.\u201d This hearing, whose witnesses consist of one mainstream climate scientist and three other witnesses whose views are very much in the minority, is remarkably similar in structure and scope to the climate hearing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) conducted in December 2015\u00a0titled \u201cData or Dogma\u201d? So similar that two of the five witnesses from the Cruz hearing will also testify on Wednesday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn the past, the science community has participated in these hearings, even though questioning the basics of climate change is akin to holding a hearing to examine whether Earth orbits the sun.Enough!For years, these hearings have been designed not to provide new information or different perspectives to members of Congress but, rather, to perpetuate the myth that there is a substantive and serious debate within the science community regarding the fundamental causes or existence of human-caused climate change.We should no longer be duped into playing along with this strategy.Despite sending many skilled science communicators to testify at the hearings over the years and even when scoring tactical victories, the strategic effect of participating at these hearings has been to sustain the perception of false equivalence, a perception only exaggerated by the majority\u2019s ability to select a grossly disproportionate number of witnesses far removed from mainstream science (it\u2019s not coincidence that Judith Curry, professor emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology, and John Christy, professor of atmospheric sciences, University of Alabama at\u00a0Huntsville, are called upon so often by the Republicans).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementA better response would be to simply boycott future hearings of this kind and to call out these hearings for what they are:\u00a0a tactic to distract the public from a serious policy debate over how to manage both the short- and long-term risks of climate change.\u00a0These hearings are designed to provide theatrics, question knowledge that has been well understood for more than 150 years, and leave the public with a false sense that significant uncertainty and contention exist within the science community on this issue.House Science Committee to hold climate change hearing from which we\u2019ll learn nothingIf similar hearings are scheduled in the future, there are much more constructive ways to use the time and generate attention.We could examine the cutting-edge science linking different weather conditions to a changing climate, update Congress on the risk of oceans rising more rapidly than stated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports\u00a0or examine the very contentious issues surrounding \u201cclimate intervention\u201d or geoengineering.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCongress could hold hearings on how to best adapt to the known changes already baked into the climate while preventing even more serious impacts by stabilizing Earth\u2019s climate.There are risks, of course, with boycotting any congressional hearing or invitation to testify. There could be a loss of exposure and of facts not being entered into the congressional record. People can reasonably argue that, with the right message and the right messenger, there could possibly be a turning point in the public\u2019s perception of this issue. While never giving up hope, we have yet to see that outcome \u2014 and continually sending scientists to testify about the reality of climate change has not yet generated that moment (I tried).\u00a0It is unlikely that continuing to do what we have always done will ever shift this debate.It\u2019s time to say \u201cenough,\u201d try something new, and stop being the sucker at the climate hearing poker table.Follow David Titley on Twitter (@dwtitley). Hearings on the basics of climate change are akin to examining whether Earth orbits the sun. Credible climate scientists need to boycott biased congressional hearings",
        "author": "David W. Titley"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Amazonification of Space Begins in Earnest (NYT: Technology) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8934",
        "date": "2021-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/technology/the-amazonification-of-space.html",
        "text": "With the suborbital flights made by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson this month, the privatization of the space industry has crossed the point of no return. With the suborbital flights made by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson this month, the privatization of the space industry has crossed the point of no return. The anniversary of the Apollo moon landing marked one small step for space travel but a giant leap for space billionaires.",
        "author": "By David Streitfeld and Erin Woo"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Amazonification of Space Begins in Earnest (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8935",
        "date": "2021-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/technology/the-amazonification-of-space.html",
        "text": "With the suborbital flights made by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson this month, the privatization of the space industry has crossed the point of no return. With the suborbital flights made by Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson this month, the privatization of the space industry has crossed the point of no return. The anniversary of the Apollo moon landing marked one small step for space travel but a giant leap for space billionaires.",
        "author": "By David Streitfeld and Erin Woo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Soyuz Rocket Launches Flawlessly, Weeks After Malfunction (NYT: World) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8936",
        "date": "2018-12-03",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/world/europe/russia-soyuz-rocket-launch.html",
        "text": "The Russian rocket carried a three-person crew into orbit on Monday, making a successful return to flight following a dramatic failure. The Russian rocket carried a three-person crew into orbit on Monday, making a successful return to flight following a dramatic failure. MOSCOW \u2014 An American, a Canadian and a Russian blasted into orbit on Monday in the first launch of a piloted Russian Soyuz rocket since a dramatic failure in October, when a booster failed to separate smoothly and the crew plummeted to Earth in an emergency return.",
        "author": "By Andrew E. Kramer"
    },
    {
        "title": "China and Russia Agree to Explore the Moon Together (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8937",
        "date": "2021-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/world/asia/china-russia-moon.html",
        "text": "The two countries, moving increasingly closer, signed a memorandum of agreement to collaborate on lunar missions, including the establishment of a research station in orbit or on the surface of the moon. The two countries, moving increasingly closer, signed a memorandum of agreement to collaborate on lunar missions, including the establishment of a research station in orbit or on the surface of the moon. China and Russia have agreed to jointly build a research station on or around the moon, setting the stage for a new space race.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China and Russia Agree to Explore the Moon Together (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8938",
        "date": "2021-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/world/asia/china-russia-moon.html",
        "text": "The two countries, moving increasingly closer, signed a memorandum of agreement to collaborate on lunar missions, including the establishment of a research station in orbit or on the surface of the moon. The two countries, moving increasingly closer, signed a memorandum of agreement to collaborate on lunar missions, including the establishment of a research station in orbit or on the surface of the moon. China and Russia have agreed to jointly build a research station on or around the moon, setting the stage for a new space race.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "China and Russia Agree to Explore the Moon Together (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8939",
        "date": "2021-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/world/asia/china-russia-moon.html",
        "text": "The two countries, moving increasingly closer, signed a memorandum of agreement to collaborate on lunar missions, including the establishment of a research station in orbit or on the surface of the moon. The two countries, moving increasingly closer, signed a memorandum of agreement to collaborate on lunar missions, including the establishment of a research station in orbit or on the surface of the moon. China and Russia have agreed to jointly build a research station on or around the moon, setting the stage for a new space race.",
        "author": "By Steven Lee Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman to Buy Orbital ATK (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8940",
        "date": "2017-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/northrop-grumman-nears-deal-to-buy-orbital-atk-1505686431?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=87",
        "text": "The deal follows another big aerospace union announced earlier this month when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Technologies Corp.\n\n\n agreed to buy\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Rockwell Collins Inc.\n\n\n for about $23 billion.\n\n\n\n\nA purchase of Orbital would add to Northrop Grumman\u2019s existing focus on military aircraft and space systems, expanding the franchise to include more fast-growing missile-defense business.\n\n\nOrbital provides space rocket motors and other parts for offensive and defensive missile systems, as well as satellites for military and commercial space operations. It was formed in 2015 from the merger of two missile and space specialists, Alliant Techsystems and Orbital Sciences. Orbital ATK employs about 13,000 and is targeting sales this year of $4.6 billion.\nIts role in space and missile systems has led some analysts to view the company as a potential takeover target for big customers such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n or Northrop.\nNorthrop, which beat out Boeing and Lockheed to build the new B-21 Raider long-range bomber, is also competing to build a new fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles for the U.S.\nNorthrop is vying with Boeing for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent nuclear missile program and has joined with Orbital and fellow rocket maker Aerojet Rocketdyne Inc. during the current development phase of the $80 billion program.\nDomestic and international defense budgets are starting to climb because of tensions in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and East Asia, with missile defense a priority for many nations.\nMeanwhile, some defense contractors are seeking to become more vertically integrated, bringing production in house to give them better control of the supply chain and an ability to capture extra profits from repair work; this deal would fit into that pattern as well.\nThe planned purchase of Orbital marks a departure for Northrop, which has focused heavily on share buybacks, retiring around 25% of its stock over the past three years.\nA deal involving the big prime defense contractors may be less likely to attract antitrust scrutiny than other proposed mergers because of their limited product overlap, though the Pentagon has in recent years become more involved in scrutinizing transactions.\nWrite to Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com and Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com Northrop Grumman has agreed to buy Orbital ATK for $7.8 billion in cash, expanding its focus on military aircraft to include the fast-growing missile-defense business. ",
        "author": "Dana Mattioli and Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Plans Next SPAC Deal, This Time for Virgin Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8941",
        "date": "2021-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-plans-next-spac-deal-this-time-for-virgin-orbit-11615569059?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=9",
        "text": "Then in February, a Virgin-backed blank check company said it would merge with 23andMe Inc. in a deal that valued the genetic-testing company at $3.5 billion, including debt. \n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s two U.S. space companies\u2014Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic\u2014have been bright spots in an empire otherwise hobbled by the pandemic. The spread of the new coronavirus and resulting lockdowns around the world have hit the airline, tourism and gym businesses that are at the core of Virgin Group. \n\n\nVirgin Orbit has hired Credit Suisse Group AG and LionTree LLC, and is shopping for a SPAC merger partner that could take it public with a value ranging from $2.5 billion to over $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.\nMr. Branson\u2019s company owns 80% of Virgin Orbit, with Mubadala Investment Co., the United Arab Emirates sovereign-wealth fund, owning the rest.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe targeted valuation would mark a significant jump from the $1 billion the rocket startup had been aiming for last year, from a previously planned private fundraising. The company still hasn\u2019t ruled out a private fundraising but is now focused on a SPAC, these people said. \nReaching the target valuation is far from guaranteed. Virgin Orbit still has to reach an agreement with a specific SPAC to do a deal and then secure the additional outside investment that usually comes alongside a SPAC merger.\nVirgin Orbit is seeking a higher valuation after a successful January test launch of one of its satellite-carrying rockets. That flight lifted the\u00a0company into a small group of small-satellite launch providers able to offer flight-proven hardware.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Southern California-based company uses a launch method unique from its competitors. A converted jumbo jet releases a rocket, which then\u00a0fires up and carries its\u00a0payload of small satellites into orbit. \nVirgin Orbit\u2019s focus on a merger with a SPAC comes as investors increasingly bet on the falling costs of accessing space for business, tourism and scientific research to fuel the industry\u2019s growth.\nSPACs\u00a0have proven to be a popular route for space-related startups. In February, Astra Space Inc. agreed to merge with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Holicity Inc.,\n\n\n a SPAC backed by billionaire telecommunications investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig McCaw,\n\n\n\n to list on the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nasdaq\n\n\n Stock Market. The tie-up values the privately held rocket launch startup at $2.1 billion including debt.\nMomentus Inc., a developer of technology to propel small satellites into orbit, agreed in October to merge with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Stable Road Acquisition Corp.\n\n\n , a SPAC, to go public on Nasdaq, valuing it at $1.2 billion including debt. And in December, AST & Science LLC agreed to merge with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n New Providence Acquisition Corp.\n\n\n , another SPAC. The deal valued the builder of a space-based cellular broadband network at $1.4 billion including debt.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com and Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tVirgin Orbit is based in Southern California. An earlier version of this article incorrectly called it a South Carolina-based company. (Corrected on March 12) Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit has hired bankers to help it go public this year through a special-purpose acquisition company, his latest effort to take advantage of a recent boom in similar, blank-check listings. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald and Ben Dummett"
    },
    {
        "title": "Richard Branson Plans Next SPAC Deal, This Time for Virgin Orbit (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8942",
        "date": "2021-03-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/richard-branson-plans-next-spac-deal-this-time-for-virgin-orbit-11615569059?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=26",
        "text": "Then in February, a Virgin-backed blank check company said it would merge with 23andMe Inc. in a deal that valued the genetic-testing company at $3.5 billion, including debt. \n\n\n\n\nMr. Branson\u2019s two U.S. space companies\u2014Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic\u2014have been bright spots in an empire otherwise hobbled by the pandemic. The spread of the new coronavirus and resulting lockdowns around the world have hit the airline, tourism and gym businesses that are at the core of Virgin Group. \n\n\nVirgin Orbit has hired Credit Suisse Group AG and LionTree LLC, and is shopping for a SPAC merger partner that could take it public with a value ranging from $2.5 billion to over $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.\nMr. Branson\u2019s company owns 80% of Virgin Orbit, with Mubadala Investment Co., the United Arab Emirates sovereign-wealth fund, owning the rest.\n\n\n\n\n\n Related Video\n \n\n\n\n\n\n Private companies are flooding to special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, to bypass the traditional IPO process and gain a public listing. WSJ explains why some critics say investing in these so-called blank-check companies isn\u2019t worth the risk. Illustration: Zo\u00eb Soriano/WSJ\n \n\n\nThe targeted valuation would mark a significant jump from the $1 billion the rocket startup had been aiming for last year, from a previously planned private fundraising. The company still hasn\u2019t ruled out a private fundraising but is now focused on a SPAC, these people said. \nReaching the target valuation is far from guaranteed. Virgin Orbit still has to reach an agreement with a specific SPAC to do a deal and then secure the additional outside investment that usually comes alongside a SPAC merger.\nVirgin Orbit is seeking a higher valuation after a successful January test launch of one of its satellite-carrying rockets. That flight lifted the\u00a0company into a small group of small-satellite launch providers able to offer flight-proven hardware.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Southern California-based company uses a launch method unique from its competitors. A converted jumbo jet releases a rocket, which then\u00a0fires up and carries its\u00a0payload of small satellites into orbit. \nVirgin Orbit\u2019s focus on a merger with a SPAC comes as investors increasingly bet on the falling costs of accessing space for business, tourism and scientific research to fuel the industry\u2019s growth.\nSPACs\u00a0have proven to be a popular route for space-related startups. In February, Astra Space Inc. agreed to merge with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Holicity Inc.,\n\n\n a SPAC backed by billionaire telecommunications investor\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Craig McCaw,\n\n\n\n to list on the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Nasdaq\n\n\n Stock Market. The tie-up values the privately held rocket launch startup at $2.1 billion including debt.\nMomentus Inc., a developer of technology to propel small satellites into orbit, agreed in October to merge with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Stable Road Acquisition Corp.\n\n\n , a SPAC, to go public on Nasdaq, valuing it at $1.2 billion including debt. And in December, AST & Science LLC agreed to merge with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n New Providence Acquisition Corp.\n\n\n , another SPAC. The deal valued the builder of a space-based cellular broadband network at $1.4 billion including debt.\nWrite to Alistair MacDonald at alistair.macdonald@wsj.com and Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tVirgin Orbit is based in Southern California. An earlier version of this article incorrectly called it a South Carolina-based company. (Corrected on March 12) Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Orbit has hired bankers to help it go public this year through a special-purpose acquisition company, his latest effort to take advantage of a recent boom in similar, blank-check listings. ",
        "author": "Alistair MacDonald and Ben Dummett"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman to Buy Orbital ATK for $7.8 Billion (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8943",
        "date": "2017-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/northrop-grumman-to-buy-orbital-atk-for-7-8-billion-1505734675?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=87",
        "text": "The two defense contractors said Monday their boards approved an all-cash tie-up. The Wall Street Journal first reported the companies were nearing a deal Sunday. \n\n\n\n\nThe news sent Orbital shares up more than 20% in late morning trading Monday. Orbital has a market value of $6.3 billion while Northrop has a market capitalization of more than $45 billion. \n\n\nThe impending deal, which the companies expect to close in the first half of 2018, comes on the heels of another big aerospace union just announced earlier this month when\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n United Technologies Corp.\nagreed to buy\nRockwell Collins Inc.\n\n\n for about $23 billion. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOrbital\u2019s role in space and missile systems has led some analysts to view the company as a potential takeover target.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Steve Helber/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\nPurchasing Orbital will add to Northrop Grumman\u2019s existing focus on military aircraft and space systems, expanding the franchise with more fast-growing missile-defense business.\nNorthrop Grumman said it plans to establish Orbital as a distinct business sector. The company expects the deal to be accretive to earnings per share in its first full year and yield annual cost savings of $150 million by 2020. \nOrbital provides space rocket motors and other parts for offensive and defensive missile systems, as well as satellites for military and commercial space operations. It was formed in 2015 from the merger of two missile and space specialists, Alliant Techsystems and Orbital Sciences. Orbital ATK employs about 13,000 and is targeting sales this year of $4.6 billion.\nIts role in space and missile systems has led some analysts to view the company as a potential takeover target for big customers such as\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , or Northrop.\nNorthrop, which beat out Boeing and Lockheed to build the new B-21 Raider long-range bomber, is also competing to build a new fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles for the U.S.\nNorthrop is vying with Boeing for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent nuclear missile program, and has joined with Orbital and fellow rocket maker Aerojet Rocketdyne Inc. during the current development phase of the $80 billion program.\nDomestic and international defense budgets are starting to climb because of tensions in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and East Asia, with missile defense a priority for many nations.\nMeanwhile, some defense contractors are seeking to become more vertically integrated, bringing production in house to give them better control of the supply chain and an ability to capture extra profits from repair work; this deal would fit into that pattern as well.\nThe planned purchase of Orbital marks a departure for Northrop, which has focused heavily on share buybacks, retiring around 25% of its stock over the past three years.\nA deal involving the big prime defense contractors may be less likely to attract antitrust scrutiny than other proposed mergers because of their limited product overlap, though the Pentagon has in recent years become more involved in scrutinizing transactions.\nOrbital will owe Northrop Grumman a $275 million termination fee if the deal falls through, according to company filings. \nPerella Weinberg Partners LP is acting as exclusive financial adviser to Northrop Grumman. Citigroup is acting as exclusive financial adviser to Orbital ATK.\nWrite to Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com, Doug Cameron at doug.cameron@wsj.com and Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com Northrop Grumman said it agreed to buy Orbital ATK for $7.8 billion, as merger activity in the aerospace industry heats up. ",
        "author": "Dana Mattioli, Doug Cameron and Cara Lombardo"
    },
    {
        "title": "Northrop Grumman Move to Acquire Rocket Maker Reflects Military Space Race (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8944",
        "date": "2017-09-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/northrop-grumman-looks-to-get-foothold-in-military-space-race-1505752445?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=113",
        "text": "Northrop\u2019s proposed $7.8 billion acquisition of Orbital, announced Monday, would help Northrop to produce and launch large and small spy and communications satellites and develop new high-speed weapons and missile-defense systems to deter potential adversaries such as Russia, China and North Korea. \n\n\n\n\nThe proposed deal is the largest with a big military space element since\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Harris Corp.\n\n\n agreed to buy Exelis Inc. for $4.6 billion in 2015.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNorthrop is the fourth-largest U.S. defense company by sales after\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n LMT -0.40%\n\n\n ,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing Co.\n\n BA -0.46%\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Raytheon Co.\n\n\n , all of which have been investing in new space-related capabilities.\n\n\nNorthrop, based in Falls Church, Va., makes fuselages and radars for the F-35 combat jet, large military drones, and satellites along with surveillance and communications systems, many of them classified. Dulles, Va.-based Orbital ATK produces space rockets, engines for missiles, and smaller satellites.\nAerospace and defense companies are combining to respond to pressure from commercial and government customers to cut costs, and to vertically integrate their operations and gain more control of their supply chains.\nChina and Russia have been investing heavily in space capabilities, and Pentagon leaders have expressed concern about the U.S. losing its technological advantage.\nThe Pentagon is also looking to make U.S. space assets less vulnerable by launching larger numbers of smaller satellites, and pursuing research into new weapons such as hypersonic missiles able to travel at more than 5,000 miles an hour. That would enable them to hit any target on the globe in minutes.\nPentagon officials have been pushing for more, warning of falling behind in space. \u201cThe No. 1 problem we face is being outpaced by our adversaries,\u201d Air Force Gen. John Hyten, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in an August speech in Huntsville, Ala. \u201cThe actions we take today will assure continued American dominance, especially in the critical domain of space.\u201d\nMilitary budgets in Russia and China have been climbing faster than Pentagon spending, allowing them to close the technology gap with the U.S. However, there is a concerted effort among lawmakers and military leaders to reduce the Pentagon\u2019s costs and secure weapons faster and cheaper.\nThe heightened attention to space-based weaponry mirrors a push in Washington, where both the Trump administration and Congress have signaled the likelihood of spending increases.\nSpending on classified military projects, many of them space-focused, has outpaced broader military spending and accounts for more than 10% of the Pentagon weapons and research budget, according to consultant Avascent.\n\u201cFor fiscal year 2018, the U.S. Air Force has requested approximately $7.75 billion, an approximately 20% increase from fiscal year 2017, for space-related procurement and research, development, test, and evaluation,\u201d said Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, declining to break down the request.\nNorthrop\u2019s proposed acquisition also represents the first test of the Trump\u2019s administration\u2019s views on industry consolidation as it would increase the company\u2019s role in key programs such as a new, long-range bomber. \n\u201cOrbital ATK is the fit,\u201d Northrop Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Wes Bush\n\n\n\n said on an investor call Monday. He noted the company hadn\u2019t previously spotted attractive acquisition targets before opening talks with the company earlier this year. Orbital wasn\u2019t put up for sale, said CEO David Thompson.\nNorthrop aims to close the deal in the first half of next year, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals.\nU.S. defense companies are returning to growth after five years of federal-government budget pressures. But big opportunities are scarce and focused on a handful of large programs such as the Lockheed Martin F-35, replacing U.S. nuclear weapons and strengthening its space-based capabilities. Pentagon leaders have discouraged any further consolidation among the largest defense companies since a series of huge deals in the 1990s. However, analysts said Northrop\u2019s move could trigger interest in other smaller, space-focused companies such as Harris.\nAnalyst\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cai von Rumohr\n\n\n\n at Cowen & Co. said he expected the proposed deal to be cleared as there was little overlap between Northrop and Orbital ATK. \u201cThe acquisition gives Northrop more options in [Department of Defense] growth segments, such as missile defense,\u201d he said in a client note. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe proposed deal puts pressure on other defense contractors to boost their space capabilities, said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Philip Finnegan,\n\n\n\n director of corporate analysis at the Teal Group, a Fairfax, Va.-based consultant.\nMr. Finnegan said it would allow Northrop to offer a broader range of products in areas where t Northrop Grumman plans to acquire Orbital ATK for around $7.8 billion in a bid to position itself for the new military battleground: space. ",
        "author": "Doug Cameron"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Advances Space Station Ambition With Module Launch (WSJ: China) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8945",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-advances-space-station-ambition-with-module-launch-11619699757?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=8",
        "text": "China is planning a series of other launches into orbit this year, some of which will combine with Tianhe to form the Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, space station. The country plans for the permanent space base to be operational by next year. It is seen as a rival to the much larger International Space Station, the multinational base involving\u00a0space agencies including NASA.\n\u201cThe successful launch of the Tianhe core module indicates that the construction of our country\u2019s space station has entered the stage of full implementation and lays a solid foundation for subsequent missions,\u201d Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n was quoted as saying by state media agency Xinhua.\n\n\nMr. Xi said that the construction of the space station and the completion of a national space laboratory were important goals for China\u2019s manned spaceflight project and an important step toward the nation becoming powerful in science, technology and aerospace.\nChina\u2019s space program has made strides in the past few years. The China National Space Administration currently has a mission to Mars, known as Tianwen-1. It plans to land a rover on the red planet as early as May.\nTiangong will be China\u2019s first self-developed space station, independently constructed and operated by China. Its successful launch is seen as a source of national pride. Premier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Li Keqiang\n\n\n\n and other top leaders watched the launch live from a control center in Beijing, state media footage showed. Over the past decade, China has launched two experimental modules into space to prepare for a permanent station.\nSince 2011, China has been excluded from working with NASA by U.S. law.\nChina\u2019s push into space comes as the U.S. also passes new milestones. NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history on Mars earlier this month when the drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world.\nIn the coming months, China plans additional launches to send cargo and crew to the Tianhe module, including the other two core modules that will form the bulk of the space station.\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com The nation sent a core component of its new space station into orbit, marking a key milestone in China\u2019s ambitions to establish a permanent presence in space. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Advances Space Station Ambition With Module Launch (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8946",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-advances-space-station-ambition-with-module-launch-11619699757?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=23",
        "text": "China is planning a series of other launches into orbit this year, some of which will combine with Tianhe to form the Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, space station. The country plans for the permanent space base to be operational by next year. It is seen as a rival to the much larger International Space Station, the multinational base involving\u00a0space agencies including NASA.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe successful launch of the Tianhe core module indicates that the construction of our country\u2019s space station has entered the stage of full implementation and lays a solid foundation for subsequent missions,\u201d Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n was quoted as saying by state media agency Xinhua.\n\n\nMr. Xi said that the construction of the space station and the completion of a national space laboratory were important goals for China\u2019s manned spaceflight project and an important step toward the nation becoming powerful in science, technology and aerospace.\nChina\u2019s space program has made strides in the past few years. The China National Space Administration currently has a mission to Mars, known as Tianwen-1. It plans to land a rover on the red planet as early as May.\nTiangong will be China\u2019s first self-developed space station, independently constructed and operated by China. Its successful launch is seen as a source of national pride. Premier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Li Keqiang\n\n\n\n and other top leaders watched the launch live from a control center in Beijing, state media footage showed. Over the past decade, China has launched two experimental modules into space to prepare for a permanent station.\nSince 2011, China has been excluded from working with NASA by U.S. law.\nChina\u2019s push into space comes as the U.S. also passes new milestones. NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history on Mars earlier this month when the drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world.\nIn the coming months, China plans additional launches to send cargo and crew to the Tianhe module, including the other two core modules that will form the bulk of the space station.\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com The nation sent a core component of its new space station into orbit, marking a key milestone in China\u2019s ambitions to establish a permanent presence in space. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "China Advances Space Station Ambition With Module Launch (WSJ: China) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8947",
        "date": "2021-04-29",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-advances-space-station-ambition-with-module-launch-11619699757?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=31",
        "text": "China is planning a series of other launches into orbit this year, some of which will combine with Tianhe to form the Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, space station. The country plans for the permanent space base to be operational by next year. It is seen as a rival to the much larger International Space Station, the multinational base involving\u00a0space agencies including NASA.\n\u201cThe successful launch of the Tianhe core module indicates that the construction of our country\u2019s space station has entered the stage of full implementation and lays a solid foundation for subsequent missions,\u201d Chinese President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Xi Jinping\n\n\n\n was quoted as saying by state media agency Xinhua.\n\n\nMr. Xi said that the construction of the space station and the completion of a national space laboratory were important goals for China\u2019s manned spaceflight project and an important step toward the nation becoming powerful in science, technology and aerospace.\nChina\u2019s space program has made strides in the past few years. The China National Space Administration currently has a mission to Mars, known as Tianwen-1. It plans to land a rover on the red planet as early as May.\nTiangong will be China\u2019s first self-developed space station, independently constructed and operated by China. Its successful launch is seen as a source of national pride. Premier\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Li Keqiang\n\n\n\n and other top leaders watched the launch live from a control center in Beijing, state media footage showed. Over the past decade, China has launched two experimental modules into space to prepare for a permanent station.\nSince 2011, China has been excluded from working with NASA by U.S. law.\nChina\u2019s push into space comes as the U.S. also passes new milestones. NASA\u2019s Mars Ingenuity helicopter made history on Mars earlier this month when the drone became the first powered craft to fly on another world.\nIn the coming months, China plans additional launches to send cargo and crew to the Tianhe module, including the other two core modules that will form the bulk of the space station.\nWrite to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com The nation sent a core component of its new space station into orbit, marking a key milestone in China\u2019s ambitions to establish a permanent presence in space. ",
        "author": "Natasha Khan"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Space Junk Solution Using a Harpoon and Net (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8948",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-a-harpoon-and-net-solve-the-space-junk-problem-1515761458?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=74",
        "text": "The Surrey Space Centre has shipped a RemoveDebris device to NASA in the U.S. with the aim of sending it to the International Space Station in March. \n\n\nMore From Science\n\n\n\n\nOzone Hole Above Antarctica Shrinks to Smallest Size on Record \nOctober 23, 2019 \n\n\nBird Populations Plunge in North America\nSeptember 19, 2019 \n\n\nClimate Experts Advise Eating More Vegetables, Less Meat \nAugust 8, 2019 \n\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth\n Write to Dipti Kapadia at dipti.kapadia@wsj.com With an estimated 100 million pieces of debris orbiting the earth it\u2019s clear: Space has a junk problem. We visit the U.K.\u2019s Surrey Space Centre for a behind-the-scenes look at a new device that it hopes is a cost-effective solution. ",
        "author": "Dipti Kapadia"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Space Junk Solution Using a Harpoon and Net (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8949",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-a-harpoon-and-net-solve-the-space-junk-problem-1515761458?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=72",
        "text": "The Surrey Space Centre has shipped a RemoveDebris device to NASA in the U.S. with the aim of sending it to the International Space Station in March. \n\n\nMore From Science\n\n\n\n\nOzone Hole Above Antarctica Shrinks to Smallest Size on Record \nOctober 23, 2019 \n\n\nBird Populations Plunge in North America\nSeptember 19, 2019 \n\n\nClimate Experts Advise Eating More Vegetables, Less Meat \nAugust 8, 2019 \n\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth\n Write to Dipti Kapadia at dipti.kapadia@wsj.com With an estimated 100 million pieces of debris orbiting the earth it\u2019s clear: Space has a junk problem. We visit the U.K.\u2019s Surrey Space Centre for a behind-the-scenes look at a new device that it hopes is a cost-effective solution. ",
        "author": "Dipti Kapadia"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Space Junk Solution Using a Harpoon and Net (WSJ: Environment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8950",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-a-harpoon-and-net-solve-the-space-junk-problem-1515761458?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=81",
        "text": "The Surrey Space Centre has shipped a RemoveDebris device to NASA in the U.S. with the aim of sending it to the International Space Station in March. \n\n\nMore From Science\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nOzone Hole Above Antarctica Shrinks to Smallest Size on Record \nOctober 23, 2019 \n\n\nBird Populations Plunge in North America\nSeptember 19, 2019 \n\n\nClimate Experts Advise Eating More Vegetables, Less Meat \nAugust 8, 2019 \n\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth\n Write to Dipti Kapadia at dipti.kapadia@wsj.com With an estimated 100 million pieces of debris orbiting the earth it\u2019s clear: Space has a junk problem. We visit the U.K.\u2019s Surrey Space Centre for a behind-the-scenes look at a new device that it hopes is a cost-effective solution. ",
        "author": "Dipti Kapadia"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 Review: Breaking Barriers of Space, Race and Gender (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8951",
        "date": "2017-01-05",
        "link": "http://www.wsj.com/articles/hidden-figures-review-breaking-barriers-of-space-race-and-gender-1483638262?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=90",
        "text": "More Film Reviews\n\n\n\n\nPixar\u2019s \u2018Turning Red\u2019 Review: Showing Your True Colors\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\u2018Great Freedom\u2019 Review: Repeat Offenses\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nKinuyo Tanaka Gets a Close-Up\nMarch 9, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nThis remarkable story within a story focuses on three of the women:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Katherine Johnson\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Taraji P. Henson\n\n\n\n ), whom Glenn considered indispensable to his Friendship 7 mission;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dorothy Vaughan\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Octavia Spencer\n\n\n\n ), who mastered computer language early on and eventually\u2014meaning ever so belatedly\u2014became NASA\u2019s first black supervisor; and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mary Jackson\n\n\n\n (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Janelle Mon\u00e1e\n\n\n\n ), who, by way of becoming a graduate engineer, had been forced to petition the city of Hampton in order to take extension courses she needed, since they were being given in an all-white high school.\n\n\nRelated Reading The Best Films of 2016 Video:\u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 Director Ted Melfi on John Glenn Video:Janelle Mon\u00e1e on the Real Story Behind \u2018Hidden Figures\u2019 \n\n\nAs is inevitably the case when a fiction film is based on a nonfiction book, events have been telescoped and dramatic liberties taken. (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Theodore Melfi\n\n\n\n directed from a screenplay that he and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Allison Schroeder\n\n\n\n adapted from the book by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Margot Lee Shetterly.\n\n\n\n The cinematographer was\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mandy Walker.\n\n\n\n ) The tone is earnest, with dialogue that sometimes plods when you want it to fly\u2014a running time of 127 minutes doesn\u2019t help the pacing\u2014and a couple of pieces of casting are infelicitous:\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Parsons\n\n\n\n gives a flat performance as the fictional\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul Stafford,\n\n\n\n NASA\u2019s lead engineer, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Glen Powell\n\n\n\n is years too young to play John Glenn, who looks like a gung-ho frat boy. (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kevin Costner,\n\n\n\n by contrast, brings a dry wit and some needed bite to another fictional role, that of NASA manager\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Al Harrison.\n\n\n\n )\nStill, the film hews closely to the facts in important respects, and evokes the outrages of the Jim Crow era, as well as the feverish competition of the space race, through the fascinating work of its extraordinary heroines. So is \u201cHidden Figures\u201d about work, rockets or racism? Yes, yes and yes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nKatherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), flanked by fellow mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Mon\u00e1e) meet the man they helped send into orbit, John Glenn (Glen Powell).\n\n\n Photo: \n \n 20th Century Fox\n \n\n\n\nA gentle preface introduces Katherine as a gifted child; she\u2019s played charmingly by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lidya Jewett.\n\n\n\n The sequence would be affecting even if Katherine weren\u2019t gifted; kicking a pine cone down the road on her way to grade school in West Virginia in the 1920s, she\u2019s blissfully unaware of the opportunities, and frustrations, that lie ahead. But this sixth grader notes prime numbers as she counts her pine-cone kicks out loud. When her teacher hands her a piece of chalk, she marches to the blackboard and solves a quadratic equation with aplomb. This child lives a rich life in the realm of abstract concepts; it\u2019s \u201cA Beautiful Mind\u201d minus mental illness.\n\nYears later at NASA, though, Katherine is confronted with the concrete obstacles of institutionalized racism: separate drinking fountains and toilets, even a separate coffee pot. When she enters her new office for the first time, a white engineer hands her a trash basket on the assumption that any black woman on the premises must be a custodian. It\u2019s all the more moving, then, when Al Harrison hands his suddenly indispensable colleague another piece of chalk at a Pentagon briefing so she can calculate\u2014on the fly, without benefit of notes or calculators\u2014the parameters of the splashdown zone for John Glenn\u2019s impending mission. Later still, when computers are available to calculate flight paths, Glenn insists that Katherine recheck their calculations before his rocket blasts off. (In 2015, at the age of 97, Katherine Johnson, who is still very much with us, was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Obama\n\n\n\n in a ceremony at the White House.)\nIn that Pentagon briefing, and throughout the film, Ms. Henson\u2019s performance is a model of quiet wit and vivid intelligence. It\u2019s interesting, but not always credible, when characters in movies use incomprehensible technical terms. When Ms. Henson\u2019s Katherine says she prefers a certain algorithm over Euclidean coordinates, you really think well of that algorithm. The cast includes\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kirsten Dunst\n\n\n\n as a rigid NASA bureaucrat;\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mahershala Ali\n\n\n\n as Col.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Johnson,\n\n\n\n How three black women in the segregated South helped put a man into orbit ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Coming Launch (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8952",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/elon-musk-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-coming-launch/80265B77-6100-431F-B241-529C002DE46E?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=4",
        "text": " The flight is expected to send four civilians into orbit about 360 miles from Earth for at least three days. WSJ What's News host Marc Stewart talks to WSJ reporter Micah Maidenberg about the significance of the effort on the space industry. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Coming Launch (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8953",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/elon-musk-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-coming-launch/80265B77-6100-431F-B241-529C002DE46E?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=15",
        "text": " The flight is expected to send four civilians into orbit about 360 miles from Earth for at least three days. WSJ What's News host Marc Stewart talks to WSJ reporter Micah Maidenberg about the significance of the effort on the space industry. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Coming Launch (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8954",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/elon-musk-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-coming-launch/80265B77-6100-431F-B241-529C002DE46E?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=23",
        "text": " The flight is expected to send four civilians into orbit about 360 miles from Earth for at least three days. WSJ What's News host Marc Stewart talks to WSJ reporter Micah Maidenberg about the significance of the effort on the space industry. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Most Advanced Space Technology Teaches Us About Talent Development (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8955",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/northrop-grumman/project-blue-chip/what-the-most-advanced-space-technology-teaches-us-about-talent-development.html",
        "text": "More than 22,000 miles above the Earth, in a place called the geoorbital graveyard, history was made on February 25, 2020. Northrop Grummans MEV-1 More than 22,000 miles above the Earth, in a place called the geoorbital graveyard, history was made on February 25, 2020. Northrop Grummans MEV-1 ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "What the Most Advanced Space Technology Teaches Us About Talent Development (NYT: T Brand) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8956",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/northrop-grumman/project-blue-chip/what-the-most-advanced-space-technology-teaches-us-about-talent-development.html",
        "text": "More than 22,000 miles above the Earth, in a place called the geoorbital graveyard, history was made on February 25, 2020. Northrop Grummans MEV-1 More than 22,000 miles above the Earth, in a place called the geoorbital graveyard, history was made on February 25, 2020. Northrop Grummans MEV-1 ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Puts Satellites in Orbit for First Time (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8957",
        "date": "2018-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-rocket-lab-puts-satellites-in-orbit-for-first-time-in-successful-test-flight-1516507208?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=80",
        "text": "At roughly 2:45 p.m. local time Sunday, the countdown proceeded smoothly\u2014following a number of temporary glitches and delays the day before\u2014and Electron\u2019s navigation equipment, other hardware and software systems appeared to work as designed.\nThe nearly 60-foot tall Electron booster\u2014which also uses carbon composite materials and battery-powered fuel pumps\u2014flew for roughly two minutes and 30 seconds before its nine main engines shut down as planned.\n\n\nAfter the lower part of the rocket separated and the second stage\u2019s single Rutherford engine fired up and burned for more than five minutes, three small satellites made it into orbit as flight controllers in Auckland, New Zealand, clapped and cheered.\nPrevious launch scrubs stretched back to before Christmas, with reasons ranging from weather issues to fuel-temperature problems to boats wandering into the restricted zone down range from the launchpad. \nElectron\u2019s maiden launch occurred last May, when both stages operated well but the test flight failed to reach orbit. The mission was terminated early because of a snafu with ground systems.\nBackers of the closely held U.S.-New Zealand company, which include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , see it promoting a revolution for researchers, entrepreneurs and fledgling commercial projects operating beyond the atmosphere. The 10-year-old company seeks to usher in an era of weekly\u2014or ultimately even more frequent\u2014launches of imaging, weather and other types of low-earth-orbit satellites weighing dozens of pounds to hundreds of pounds each. The projected price tag is about $5 million a launch.\nThat price is a fraction of the cost for a dedicated launch on existing larger rockets. Small payloads typically share a ride with heavier ones on such boosters, but their schedules can be uncertain and often provide little flexibility for customers hitching a ride with the primary customer.\nIn a release after the launch, Mr. Beck said, \u201creaching orbit on a second test flight is significant on its own, but successfully deploying customer payloads so early in a new rocket program is almost unprecedented.\u201d\nMr. Beck hopes to ride a global upsurge of interest in small satellites and he sees the company eventually providing essential launch services for major aerospace companies.\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot more interest coming from the more traditional players,\u201d Mr. Beck said in an interview nine days before the launch. He added that statistics indicate Electron rockets are capable of launching nearly two-thirds of all commercial, scientific and military satellites blasted into space annually.\nA number of U.S. startups, including an affiliate of British billionaire Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic LLC, are seeking to benefit from the trend toward smaller payloads. India and Brazil, among other countries, also are striving to develop vehicles to put small satellites in orbit.\nFast-growing Rocket Lab has invested roughly $100 million in the venture so far, supports a growing payroll of about 200 employees and has about half a dozen rockets currently in production. The engines and electronic components are produced in the U.S, but structural parts are manufactured in New Zealand where final assembly of the rocket takes place.\nMr. Beck\u2019s team also has constructed a private launch facility on the remote Mahia Peninsula\u2014believed to be the world\u2019s most extensive nongovernmental facility exclusively set up to handle vertical rocket launches\u2014amid farmland surrounded by mountains.\nThe Electron program began less than six years ago, with the goal of setting up a highly vertically-integrated manufacturing plan to turn out unusually light, easy to assemble boosters. Nearly all the parts are produced by Rocket Lab and the company has said that, without fuel, an Electron weighs less than some subcompact cars.\nHistorically, newly designed rockets on average experience one failure during the first three flights. Other statistics indicate that, from 1990 to 2010, roughly two-thirds of maiden rocket launches were unsuccessful.\nDescribing his concerns before the launch, Mr. Beck sounded surprisingly upbeat about the rocket\u2019s performance or potential technical headaches. He said he was \u201cless concerned about the vehicle\u201d than \u201cscaling the company fast enough to meet the demand\u201d for economical launches. He added that Rocket Lab already was targeting doubling its production capacity by the summer.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Puts Satellites in Orbit for First Time (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8958",
        "date": "2018-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-rocket-lab-puts-satellites-in-orbit-for-first-time-in-successful-test-flight-1516507208?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=72",
        "text": "At roughly 2:45 p.m. local time Sunday, the countdown proceeded smoothly\u2014following a number of temporary glitches and delays the day before\u2014and Electron\u2019s navigation equipment, other hardware and software systems appeared to work as designed.\nThe nearly 60-foot tall Electron booster\u2014which also uses carbon composite materials and battery-powered fuel pumps\u2014flew for roughly two minutes and 30 seconds before its nine main engines shut down as planned.\n\n\nAfter the lower part of the rocket separated and the second stage\u2019s single Rutherford engine fired up and burned for more than five minutes, three small satellites made it into orbit as flight controllers in Auckland, New Zealand, clapped and cheered.\nPrevious launch scrubs stretched back to before Christmas, with reasons ranging from weather issues to fuel-temperature problems to boats wandering into the restricted zone down range from the launchpad. \nElectron\u2019s maiden launch occurred last May, when both stages operated well but the test flight failed to reach orbit. The mission was terminated early because of a snafu with ground systems.\nBackers of the closely held U.S.-New Zealand company, which include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , see it promoting a revolution for researchers, entrepreneurs and fledgling commercial projects operating beyond the atmosphere. The 10-year-old company seeks to usher in an era of weekly\u2014or ultimately even more frequent\u2014launches of imaging, weather and other types of low-earth-orbit satellites weighing dozens of pounds to hundreds of pounds each. The projected price tag is about $5 million a launch.\nThat price is a fraction of the cost for a dedicated launch on existing larger rockets. Small payloads typically share a ride with heavier ones on such boosters, but their schedules can be uncertain and often provide little flexibility for customers hitching a ride with the primary customer.\nIn a release after the launch, Mr. Beck said, \u201creaching orbit on a second test flight is significant on its own, but successfully deploying customer payloads so early in a new rocket program is almost unprecedented.\u201d\nMr. Beck hopes to ride a global upsurge of interest in small satellites and he sees the company eventually providing essential launch services for major aerospace companies.\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot more interest coming from the more traditional players,\u201d Mr. Beck said in an interview nine days before the launch. He added that statistics indicate Electron rockets are capable of launching nearly two-thirds of all commercial, scientific and military satellites blasted into space annually.\nA number of U.S. startups, including an affiliate of British billionaire Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic LLC, are seeking to benefit from the trend toward smaller payloads. India and Brazil, among other countries, also are striving to develop vehicles to put small satellites in orbit.\nFast-growing Rocket Lab has invested roughly $100 million in the venture so far, supports a growing payroll of about 200 employees and has about half a dozen rockets currently in production. The engines and electronic components are produced in the U.S, but structural parts are manufactured in New Zealand where final assembly of the rocket takes place.\nMr. Beck\u2019s team also has constructed a private launch facility on the remote Mahia Peninsula\u2014believed to be the world\u2019s most extensive nongovernmental facility exclusively set up to handle vertical rocket launches\u2014amid farmland surrounded by mountains.\nThe Electron program began less than six years ago, with the goal of setting up a highly vertically-integrated manufacturing plan to turn out unusually light, easy to assemble boosters. Nearly all the parts are produced by Rocket Lab and the company has said that, without fuel, an Electron weighs less than some subcompact cars.\nHistorically, newly designed rockets on average experience one failure during the first three flights. Other statistics indicate that, from 1990 to 2010, roughly two-thirds of maiden rocket launches were unsuccessful.\nDescribing his concerns before the launch, Mr. Beck sounded surprisingly upbeat about the rocket\u2019s performance or potential technical headaches. He said he was \u201cless concerned about the vehicle\u201d than \u201cscaling the company fast enough to meet the demand\u201d for economical launches. He added that Rocket Lab already was targeting doubling its production capacity by the summer.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Rocket Lab Puts Satellites in Orbit for First Time (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8959",
        "date": "2018-01-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-rocket-lab-puts-satellites-in-orbit-for-first-time-in-successful-test-flight-1516507208?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=104",
        "text": "At roughly 2:45 p.m. local time Sunday, the countdown proceeded smoothly\u2014following a number of temporary glitches and delays the day before\u2014and Electron\u2019s navigation equipment, other hardware and software systems appeared to work as designed.\n\n\n\n\nThe nearly 60-foot tall Electron booster\u2014which also uses carbon composite materials and battery-powered fuel pumps\u2014flew for roughly two minutes and 30 seconds before its nine main engines shut down as planned.\n\n\nAfter the lower part of the rocket separated and the second stage\u2019s single Rutherford engine fired up and burned for more than five minutes, three small satellites made it into orbit as flight controllers in Auckland, New Zealand, clapped and cheered.\nPrevious launch scrubs stretched back to before Christmas, with reasons ranging from weather issues to fuel-temperature problems to boats wandering into the restricted zone down range from the launchpad. \nElectron\u2019s maiden launch occurred last May, when both stages operated well but the test flight failed to reach orbit. The mission was terminated early because of a snafu with ground systems.\nBackers of the closely held U.S.-New Zealand company, which include\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , see it promoting a revolution for researchers, entrepreneurs and fledgling commercial projects operating beyond the atmosphere. The 10-year-old company seeks to usher in an era of weekly\u2014or ultimately even more frequent\u2014launches of imaging, weather and other types of low-earth-orbit satellites weighing dozens of pounds to hundreds of pounds each. The projected price tag is about $5 million a launch.\nThat price is a fraction of the cost for a dedicated launch on existing larger rockets. Small payloads typically share a ride with heavier ones on such boosters, but their schedules can be uncertain and often provide little flexibility for customers hitching a ride with the primary customer.\nIn a release after the launch, Mr. Beck said, \u201creaching orbit on a second test flight is significant on its own, but successfully deploying customer payloads so early in a new rocket program is almost unprecedented.\u201d\nMr. Beck hopes to ride a global upsurge of interest in small satellites and he sees the company eventually providing essential launch services for major aerospace companies.\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing a lot more interest coming from the more traditional players,\u201d Mr. Beck said in an interview nine days before the launch. He added that statistics indicate Electron rockets are capable of launching nearly two-thirds of all commercial, scientific and military satellites blasted into space annually.\nA number of U.S. startups, including an affiliate of British billionaire Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic LLC, are seeking to benefit from the trend toward smaller payloads. India and Brazil, among other countries, also are striving to develop vehicles to put small satellites in orbit.\nFast-growing Rocket Lab has invested roughly $100 million in the venture so far, supports a growing payroll of about 200 employees and has about half a dozen rockets currently in production. The engines and electronic components are produced in the U.S, but structural parts are manufactured in New Zealand where final assembly of the rocket takes place.\nMr. Beck\u2019s team also has constructed a private launch facility on the remote Mahia Peninsula\u2014believed to be the world\u2019s most extensive nongovernmental facility exclusively set up to handle vertical rocket launches\u2014amid farmland surrounded by mountains.\nThe Electron program began less than six years ago, with the goal of setting up a highly vertically-integrated manufacturing plan to turn out unusually light, easy to assemble boosters. Nearly all the parts are produced by Rocket Lab and the company has said that, without fuel, an Electron weighs less than some subcompact cars.\nHistorically, newly designed rockets on average experience one failure during the first three flights. Other statistics indicate that, from 1990 to 2010, roughly two-thirds of maiden rocket launches were unsuccessful.\nDescribing his concerns before the launch, Mr. Beck sounded surprisingly upbeat about the rocket\u2019s performance or potential technical headaches. He said he was \u201cless concerned about the vehicle\u201d than \u201cscaling the company fast enough to meet the demand\u201d for economical launches. He added that Rocket Lab already was targeting doubling its production capacity by the summer.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Rocket Lab, a space-transportation startup promising frequent, economical launches on rockets featuring 3-D printed engine parts, successfully blasted its first payload into orbit from a remote New Zealand pad. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Coming Launch (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8960",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/elon-musk-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-coming-launch/77BF1DC3-5025-48BA-87EA-EBACA4FF06D8?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=4",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Sept. 14. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg discusses the flight that is expected to send four civilians into orbit for several days and then return them to Earth. Where things stand with inflation, and what the future might hold for it. And, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes ditches her signature black turtleneck. Marc Stewart hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Coming Launch (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8961",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/elon-musk-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-coming-launch/77BF1DC3-5025-48BA-87EA-EBACA4FF06D8?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=15",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Sept. 14. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg discusses the flight that is expected to send four civilians into orbit for several days and then return them to Earth. Where things stand with inflation, and what the future might hold for it. And, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes ditches her signature black turtleneck. Marc Stewart hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Coming Launch (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8962",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/elon-musk-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-coming-launch/77BF1DC3-5025-48BA-87EA-EBACA4FF06D8?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=13",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Sept. 14. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg discusses the flight that is expected to send four civilians into orbit for several days and then return them to Earth. Where things stand with inflation, and what the future might hold for it. And, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes ditches her signature black turtleneck. Marc Stewart hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk's SpaceX Seeks Next Space Milestone With Coming Launch (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8963",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/elon-musk-spacex-seeks-next-space-milestone-with-coming-launch/77BF1DC3-5025-48BA-87EA-EBACA4FF06D8?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=23",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Sept. 14. WSJ's Micah Maidenberg discusses the flight that is expected to send four civilians into orbit for several days and then return them to Earth. Where things stand with inflation, and what the future might hold for it. And, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes ditches her signature black turtleneck. Marc Stewart hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Companies Prioritize Premium Products Amid Supply Crunch (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8964",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/companies-prioritize-premium-products-amid-supply-crunch/AF8EFB65-6044-48C3-8AE1-F65498E3DEBD?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=4",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Oct. 5. WSJ's Sharon Terlep explains why companies are increasingly prioritizing high-end appliances to cover growing costs. A federal jury finds Tesla subjected a Black worker to a racially hostile work environment. Plus, a Russian actress and her director are launched into space to film the world's first movie in orbit. Peter Granitz hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Companies Prioritize Premium Products Amid Supply Crunch (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8965",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/companies-prioritize-premium-products-amid-supply-crunch/AF8EFB65-6044-48C3-8AE1-F65498E3DEBD?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=14",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Oct. 5. WSJ's Sharon Terlep explains why companies are increasingly prioritizing high-end appliances to cover growing costs. A federal jury finds Tesla subjected a Black worker to a racially hostile work environment. Plus, a Russian actress and her director are launched into space to film the world's first movie in orbit. Peter Granitz hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Companies Prioritize Premium Products Amid Supply Crunch (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8966",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/companies-prioritize-premium-products-amid-supply-crunch/AF8EFB65-6044-48C3-8AE1-F65498E3DEBD?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=11",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for Oct. 5. WSJ's Sharon Terlep explains why companies are increasingly prioritizing high-end appliances to cover growing costs. A federal jury finds Tesla subjected a Black worker to a racially hostile work environment. Plus, a Russian actress and her director are launched into space to film the world's first movie in orbit. Peter Granitz hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "U.S. Stocks End Mostly Lower After Early Bump From Powell Nomination (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8967",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/us-stocks-end-mostly-lower-after-early-bump-from-powell-nomination/2B10948A-D2E3-4F56-B896-4914347E4824?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=10",
        "text": " Elon Musk says Tesla's Model S Plaid to launch in China next year. Rivian shares fall after scrapping of Ford deal. Astra Space completes first commercial orbital launch for U.S. Space Force. J.R. Whalen reports. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Expected to Unveil More Space Exploration Plans (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8968",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/bezos-expected-to-unveil-more-space-exploration-plans/6037B087-1513-4C27-A509-71FFEA28A7B7.html?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=28",
        "text": " Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Bezos Expected to Unveil More Space Exploration Plans (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8969",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/bezos-expected-to-unveil-more-space-exploration-plans/6037B087-1513-4C27-A509-71FFEA28A7B7.html?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=128",
        "text": " Amazon Inc. chairman and self-proclaimed \"space geek\" Jeff Bezos is expected to soon announce new initiatives tied to Blue Origins, which offers reusable rockets for suborbital voyages. WSJ's Lee Hawkins explains. Photo: Getty Images ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Tackling Space Junk With a High-Tech Harpoon and Net (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8970",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/tackling-space-junk-with-a-high-tech-harpoon-and-net/7BD2A4A2-E56E-42EB-B305-A23794CA35B0.html?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=72",
        "text": " ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "China Makes Historic Moon Landing, Boosting Rivalry With U.S. (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8971",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/china-makes-historic-moon-landing-boosting-rivalry-with-us/2F611BA4-1FBD-4CF2-BD71-99E3A0B5B437.html?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=81",
        "text": " China gained on the U.S. in the new space race by making the first-ever landing on the far side of the moon. What's driving China\u2019s ambitions and should the U.S. be nervous? The WSJ explains. Photo: CHINA NATIONAL SPACE ADMINISTRAT/SHUTTERSTOCK ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "These Auction Items Are Out of This World. No, Really. (NYT: Arts) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8972",
        "date": "2020-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/arts/meteorites-collectors-auction-christies.html",
        "text": "Collectors know that meteorites, proof of where art and science intersect, aren\u2019t just for museums anymore. Collectors know that meteorites, proof of where art and science intersect, aren\u2019t just for museums anymore. After an immeasurable journey through time and space, a craggy gray rock fell to Earth, landing in the Sahara. No one saw it fall, and no one knows how long it lay in the sand before it was found three years ago by a nomad.",
        "author": "By Kevin Coyne"
    },
    {
        "title": "Plan Your Summer (NYT: At Home) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8973",
        "date": "2021-05-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/at-home/things-to-do-this-summer.html",
        "text": "In-person events are returning. You can attend a rodeo, watch the Perseid meteor shower or immerse yourself in the art of Vincent van Gogh. Here are suggestions for three months of fun. In-person events are returning. You can attend a rodeo, watch the Perseid meteor shower or immerse yourself in the art of Vincent van Gogh. Here are suggestions for three months of fun. Here is a sampling of events from now through Labor Day and how to attend or tune in (all times are local). Note that events are subject to change after publication.",
        "author": "By Emma Grillo and Danya Issawi"
    },
    {
        "title": "All the World Needs Is a Glowing Blue Supermetal From Space (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8974",
        "date": "2021-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/books/review/benjamin-percy-ninth-metal.html",
        "text": "Benjamin Percy\u2019s novel \u201cThe Ninth Metal\u201d imagines a cutthroat race for meteor deposits with extraordinary properties. Benjamin Percy\u2019s novel \u201cThe Ninth Metal\u201d imagines a cutthroat race for meteor deposits with extraordinary properties. THE NINTH METALBy Benjamin Percy",
        "author": "By Ben H. Winters"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Aged: Bottle of Wine From Space Station Could Sell for $1 Million (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "8975",
        "date": "2021-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/business/international-space-station-wine-auction.html",
        "text": "The bottle of P\u00e9trus from 2000 \u2014 which is being sold by Christie\u2019s \u2014 comes with a second bottle of \u201cterrestrial\u201d wine, a custom trunk, a decanter, glasses and a corkscrew crafted from a meteorite. The bottle of P\u00e9trus from 2000 \u2014 which is being sold by Christie\u2019s \u2014 comes with a second bottle of \u201cterrestrial\u201d wine, a custom trunk, a decanter, glasses and a corkscrew crafted from a meteorite. It was a cool and dark environment, but not your traditional wine cellar.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Aged: Bottle of Wine From Space Station Could Sell for $1 Million (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8976",
        "date": "2021-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/business/international-space-station-wine-auction.html",
        "text": "The bottle of P\u00e9trus from 2000 \u2014 which is being sold by Christie\u2019s \u2014 comes with a second bottle of \u201cterrestrial\u201d wine, a custom trunk, a decanter, glasses and a corkscrew crafted from a meteorite. The bottle of P\u00e9trus from 2000 \u2014 which is being sold by Christie\u2019s \u2014 comes with a second bottle of \u201cterrestrial\u201d wine, a custom trunk, a decanter, glasses and a corkscrew crafted from a meteorite. It was a cool and dark environment, but not your traditional wine cellar.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Aged: Bottle of Wine From Space Station Could Sell for $1 Million (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8977",
        "date": "2021-05-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/business/international-space-station-wine-auction.html",
        "text": "The bottle of P\u00e9trus from 2000 \u2014 which is being sold by Christie\u2019s \u2014 comes with a second bottle of \u201cterrestrial\u201d wine, a custom trunk, a decanter, glasses and a corkscrew crafted from a meteorite. The bottle of P\u00e9trus from 2000 \u2014 which is being sold by Christie\u2019s \u2014 comes with a second bottle of \u201cterrestrial\u201d wine, a custom trunk, a decanter, glasses and a corkscrew crafted from a meteorite. It was a cool and dark environment, but not your traditional wine cellar.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Photographer captures fireball photobombing SpaceX launch (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8978",
        "date": "2021-11-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/11/11/fireball-meteor-spacex-launch-nasa/",
        "text": "Photographer Peter Forister has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He has captured foreboding supercell thunderstorms, Mid-Atlantic tornadoes, comets, fall foliage and everything in between. On Wednesday night, he got a bit extra lucky.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightForister had set out to rural central Virginia to photograph a joint SpaceX and NASA launch. Four astronauts were aboard the Dragon Crew-3 mission, which will dock at the International Space Station shortly after 7 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. The Falcon-9 rocket was launched from Complex 39A at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX launches another astronaut crew to the International Space StationHe had been aiming for an 80-second exposure showing a time lapse of the rocket as it sailed northeast parallel to the East Coast. Midway through his capture from Gordonsville, Va., a flash of blue light illuminated everything in sight.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt was super, super bright, brighter than the moon,\u201d Forister said in a phone interview on Thursday morning. The American Meteor Society has already received 379 reports of the brilliant fireball between Georgia and New York state. Forister\u2019s camera was trained on the exact spot the meteor slashed through the skies.Closeup of the meteor. Hard to describe what catching something like this feels like as a photographer!! pic.twitter.com/xjMiIqceuj\u2014 Peter Forister \ud83c\udf41\ud83c\udf42\ud83c\udf41 (@forecaster25) November 11, 2021\n\n\u201cI imagine I would have been able to read [by the light of the meteor],\u201d Forister said. \u201cI was able to see details in the ground.\u201dHe explained that it was visible for about three seconds, eventually fragmenting as the meteor\u2019s swift speed through the atmosphere resulted in air resistance and friction, causing it to heat up and explode.Story continues below advertisement\u201cIt was a fairly slow meteor; a lot of the long-streaking meteors I see are only half a second,\u201d Forister said. \u201cThen there were visible chunks falling off and glowing red.\u201dAdvertisementA reddish tinge can be seen on the bottom right of the meteor\u2019s path in his image where fragmentation occurred. Several pulses of light also mark where the \u201cbolide\u201d meteor exploded multiple times.SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station from the Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 10. (The Washington Post)The American Meteor Society utilized data from NASA cameras and eyewitness accounts to stitch together the path the meteor probably took. They say it first became visible 48 miles above Greenville, N.C., and moved northwest at 33,000 mph before disintegrating near Macclesfield, a few towns to the west.Story continues below advertisementMany people in Raleigh, N.C., Richmond, Washington and Baltimore witnessed the spectacle.Based on the brightness, the Society concluded the comparatively slow-moving meteor, which may have once been part of an asteroid, weighed about 45 pounds and measured roughly 10 inches in diameter. It\u2019s estimated that fireballs this bright, which are somewhat rare, may only be seen an average of once every 200 hours or so of skywatching.Forister thinks the meteor he captured may have been a leftover from the Taurids shower, which peaks in early- to mid-November. The shower doesn\u2019t produce many shooting stars, but is known for occasionally slinging bright fireballs across the sky. NASA\u2019s All-Sky Fireball Network tracked five Taurid fireballs over the Lower 48 on Wednesday night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs for Forister, whose collection of photography can be found here, it\u2019s not his first chance encounter with a fireball \u2014 and odds are won\u2019t be his last.\u201cI actually saw a fireball over South Carolina a month ago that was equally as bright, but nobody got a photo of that one,\u201d he said. \u201cSo this one is actually the second that I\u2019ve seen in a super short period of time. I\u2019m lucky, but I\u2019m also [always] prepared for this moment. I had a strategy, I executed the strategy. If you do that enough times, you eventually catch a shot like this.\u201dForister can check another \u201ccareer shot\u201d off his photography bucket list, but he still has a few more dream shots he hopes to pursue.\u201cI have never seen the northern lights,\u201d he laughed. \u201cNot just a little glow. I want purple columns. Once Canada\u2019s open, I\u2019m going.\u201dCheck out these other shots of the meteor captured across the Mid-Atlantic:PhotosSimply incredible. Jason Rinehart set out to get a glimpse of the #Falcon rocket launch from Florida sending 4 astronauts to the Space Station, and ended up with a meteorite photobombing the shot. This was taken along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Botetourt Co. @SpaceX @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/huRxre8jkD\u2014 Brent Watts WDBJ (@wattsupbrent) November 11, 2021\n\nIncredible long exposure photo of last night's sky. Left is the @SpaceX rocket, center is the #fireball and right is the first phase re-entry. Photo: Mike Coleman - Fancy Gap pic.twitter.com/B6iUnmErYW\u2014 Chris Michaels (@WSLS_Michaels) November 11, 2021\n\n#Crew3 on the left, and a huge fireball meteor on the right!@SpaceX @Chesapecten @Astroguyz @NASA @DamAstronomy pic.twitter.com/wQhrmbyXgl\u2014 Christopher Becke (@BeckePhysics) November 11, 2021\n\nVideosCaught this green meteor fireball tonight over downtown Raleigh while photographing the SpaceX launch. \u2604\ufe0f\ud83d\ude80 #meteor #spacex pic.twitter.com/wYAbiH6ryK\u2014 Matt Robinson (@metroscenes) November 11, 2021\n\nHere's the meteor from tonight! Great video from Shaun Draughn Pastor at Sycamore Baptist Church in Stuart, VA.9:11pm. Did you see it?@wfmy @wfmyweather #ncwx #vawx #meteor #fireball pic.twitter.com/kJGTICoc2I\u2014 Tim Buckley (@TimBuckleyWX) November 11, 2021\n\nFIREBALL: As many stepped outside to catch a glimpse of four astronauts heading to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, they got another surprise. >>> https://t.co/vP58BnCfrS pic.twitter.com/YhjBNebkIt\u2014 WRAL NEWS in NC (@WRAL) November 11, 2021\n\nCaptured the SpaceX rocket AND a meteor on my camera tonight! pic.twitter.com/TAOLYqlX2Y\u2014 Ricky Matthews (@wxrjm) November 11, 2021\n\n More than 200 meteor reports streamed in from 13 states. Photographer captures fireball photobombing SpaceX launch",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Heat Wave, the Coronavirus: Double Spikes of Risk Hit Communities (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8979",
        "date": "2020-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/climate/heatwave-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "The South and Southwest hit record temperatures over the weekend and meteorologists warned that heat will rise in the East and High Plains. The South and Southwest hit record temperatures over the weekend and meteorologists warned that heat will rise in the East and High Plains. For much of the United States, the last several days have been brutal: record temperatures recorded around the country, and coronavirus case numbers are on the rise as well, complicating efforts to protect people at risk.",
        "author": "By John Schwartz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space X sent a cute red Tesla Roadster into space. Here\u2019s what\u2019ll probably happen to it (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8980",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/heres-what-will-happen-to-space-xs-red-tesla-roadster-in-space/2018/02/08/7fd4499e-0c2d-11e8-8b0d-891602206fb7_story.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s a midnight cherry Tesla Roadster hurtling toward deep space right now, the first payload of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket. It\u2019s worth asking what is going to happen to this electric sports car condemned to what could be a billion-year elliptical journey.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI\u2019m not so worried about the vacuum [of space] itself,\u201d said William Carroll, a chemist at Indiana University and an expert in plastics and organic molecules. People tend to experience some pretty grisly effects in a vacuum. But that has more to do with our internal pressures no longer getting counteracted by an atmosphere, Carroll said, than any direct effects of the vacuum itself. Cars just don\u2019t have those kinds of internal pressures.Story continues below advertisementThe real forces that will tear the car apart over hundreds of millions of years in space, Carroll said, are solid objects and \u2014 most important \u2014 radiation.Photos of Space X?s most powerful rocket launchShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe SpaceX Falcon Heavy rests on Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center before blast off. SpaceX is poised for the first test launch of its Falcon Heavy, which aims to become the world\u2019s most powerful rocket in operation, capable of ferrying people to the Moon or Mars some day. (Jim Watson)AdvertisementIt\u2019s unlikely that the vehicle could avoid the kind of collisions with micrometeoroids that leave space junk riddled with craters over time, Carroll said. But assuming those collisions don\u2019t tear the car apart, the radiation will.On Earth, a powerful magnetic field and the atmosphere largely protect humans (and Tesla Roadsters) from the harsh radiation of the sun and cosmic rays. But objects in space have no such protections.\u201cAll of the organics will be subjected to degradation by the various kinds of radiation that you will run into there,\u201d Carroll said.Story continues below advertisementOrganics, in this case, doesn\u2019t mean the bits of the car that came from animals, such as its leathers. Instead, it includes all the plastics in the sports car and even its carbon-fiber frame. Those materials \u201care made up largely of carbon-carbon bonds and carbon-hydrogen bonds,\u201d Carroll said.AdvertisementThe energy of stellar radiation can cause those bonds to snap. And that can cause the car to fall to bits as effectively as if it were attacked with a massive knife.\u201cWhen you cut something with a knife, in the end, you\u2019re cutting some chemical bonds,\u201d Carroll said.A knife cuts those bonds in a straight line. But radiation will split them at random, causing organic materials \u2014 leather seats, rubber tires, paints, perhaps even the carbon-fiber body \u2014 to discolor, flake and splinter away.Story continues below advertisementAnd under the harsh glare of the unshielded sun, Carroll said, that process could happen fast. \u201cThose organics, in that environment, I wouldn\u2019t give them a year,\u201d he said.Materials with fewer bonds holding them together will disintegrate first, Carroll said. Anything hidden behind an inorganic (no carbon bonds) shield would last longer, though eventually even the plastic woven into the convertible\u2019s glass windshield would discolor and come apart. The sturdy carbon-fiber parts would probably be the last to go, he said.AdvertisementEventually, the Roadster would probably be reduced to just its well-secured inorganic parts: the aluminum frame, internal metals and any glass parts that don\u2019t shatter under meteor impacts. (The idea that glass melts over long time spans is a myth, he said.)Story continues below advertisementRichard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society\u2019s panel of experts, largely agreed with Carroll\u2019s assessment, though he did suggest it would probably still be somewhat recognizable, at least after a million years.\u201cA billion years is a long, LONG time,\u201d Sachleben wrote in an email, \u201cso no telling what it will be like by then.\u201dCarroll said that the question of whether the car remains recognizable also depends on who is around to recognize it.\u201cRemember, our history with tools as a race only goes back about, you know, 2\u00bd million years,\u201d Carroll said, \u201cso what someone would recognize a million years from now if they found it is another story altogether.\u201dSachleben was more optimistic, writing, \u201cThere is always the possibility that some future, space-venturing car enthusiast may decide Elon\u2019s Roadster would make a nice addition to his/her collection.\u201d\u2014Live Science\nToo much sapce travel is bad for your eyeballsSpace radiation makes Mars mission hazardousBacteria get dangerously weird in space Assuming it avoids being destroyed by micrometeoroids, radiation will make it fall to bits. Space X sent a cute red Tesla Roadster into space. Here\u2019s what\u2019ll probably happen to it",
        "author": "Rafi Letzter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space X sent a cute red Tesla Roadster into space. Here\u2019s what\u2019ll probably happen to it (WP: Health and Science) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8981",
        "date": "2018-02-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/heres-what-will-happen-to-space-xs-red-tesla-roadster-in-space/2018/02/08/7fd4499e-0c2d-11e8-8b0d-891602206fb7_story.html",
        "text": "There\u2019s a midnight cherry Tesla Roadster hurtling toward deep space right now, the first payload of SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy rocket. It\u2019s worth asking what is going to happen to this electric sports car condemned to what could be a billion-year elliptical journey.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cI\u2019m not so worried about the vacuum [of space] itself,\u201d said William Carroll, a chemist at Indiana University and an expert in plastics and organic molecules. People tend to experience some pretty grisly effects in a vacuum. But that has more to do with our internal pressures no longer getting counteracted by an atmosphere, Carroll said, than any direct effects of the vacuum itself. Cars just don\u2019t have those kinds of internal pressures.Story continues below advertisementThe real forces that will tear the car apart over hundreds of millions of years in space, Carroll said, are solid objects and \u2014 most important \u2014 radiation.Photos of Space X?s most powerful rocket launchShareShareView PhotosView PhotosNext ImageThe SpaceX Falcon Heavy rests on Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center before blast off. SpaceX is poised for the first test launch of its Falcon Heavy, which aims to become the world\u2019s most powerful rocket in operation, capable of ferrying people to the Moon or Mars some day. (Jim Watson)AdvertisementIt\u2019s unlikely that the vehicle could avoid the kind of collisions with micrometeoroids that leave space junk riddled with craters over time, Carroll said. But assuming those collisions don\u2019t tear the car apart, the radiation will.On Earth, a powerful magnetic field and the atmosphere largely protect humans (and Tesla Roadsters) from the harsh radiation of the sun and cosmic rays. But objects in space have no such protections.\u201cAll of the organics will be subjected to degradation by the various kinds of radiation that you will run into there,\u201d Carroll said.Story continues below advertisementOrganics, in this case, doesn\u2019t mean the bits of the car that came from animals, such as its leathers. Instead, it includes all the plastics in the sports car and even its carbon-fiber frame. Those materials \u201care made up largely of carbon-carbon bonds and carbon-hydrogen bonds,\u201d Carroll said.AdvertisementThe energy of stellar radiation can cause those bonds to snap. And that can cause the car to fall to bits as effectively as if it were attacked with a massive knife.\u201cWhen you cut something with a knife, in the end, you\u2019re cutting some chemical bonds,\u201d Carroll said.A knife cuts those bonds in a straight line. But radiation will split them at random, causing organic materials \u2014 leather seats, rubber tires, paints, perhaps even the carbon-fiber body \u2014 to discolor, flake and splinter away.Story continues below advertisementAnd under the harsh glare of the unshielded sun, Carroll said, that process could happen fast. \u201cThose organics, in that environment, I wouldn\u2019t give them a year,\u201d he said.Materials with fewer bonds holding them together will disintegrate first, Carroll said. Anything hidden behind an inorganic (no carbon bonds) shield would last longer, though eventually even the plastic woven into the convertible\u2019s glass windshield would discolor and come apart. The sturdy carbon-fiber parts would probably be the last to go, he said.AdvertisementEventually, the Roadster would probably be reduced to just its well-secured inorganic parts: the aluminum frame, internal metals and any glass parts that don\u2019t shatter under meteor impacts. (The idea that glass melts over long time spans is a myth, he said.)Story continues below advertisementRichard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society\u2019s panel of experts, largely agreed with Carroll\u2019s assessment, though he did suggest it would probably still be somewhat recognizable, at least after a million years.\u201cA billion years is a long, LONG time,\u201d Sachleben wrote in an email, \u201cso no telling what it will be like by then.\u201dCarroll said that the question of whether the car remains recognizable also depends on who is around to recognize it.\u201cRemember, our history with tools as a race only goes back about, you know, 2\u00bd million years,\u201d Carroll said, \u201cso what someone would recognize a million years from now if they found it is another story altogether.\u201dSachleben was more optimistic, writing, \u201cThere is always the possibility that some future, space-venturing car enthusiast may decide Elon\u2019s Roadster would make a nice addition to his/her collection.\u201d\u2014Live Science\nToo much sapce travel is bad for your eyeballsSpace radiation makes Mars mission hazardousBacteria get dangerously weird in space Assuming it avoids being destroyed by micrometeoroids, radiation will make it fall to bits. Space X sent a cute red Tesla Roadster into space. Here\u2019s what\u2019ll probably happen to it",
        "author": "Rafi Letzter"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | In the galleries: Artechouse\u2019s \u2018Infinite Space\u2019 has waves of natural influences (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8982",
        "date": "2019-08-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/in-the-galleries-artechouses-infinite-space-has-waves-of-natural-influences/2019/08/08/4e6d3838-b786-11e9-8e83-4e6687e99814_story.html",
        "text": "The centerpieces of \u201cInfinite Space,\u201d media artist Refik Anadol\u2019s retrospective at Artechouse, include a virtual sea of data, aptly titled \u201cBosphorus.\u201d This and two other video projections ebb and flow in the venue\u2019s main room, whose walls serve as two-story screens. Yet the installations that just might sweep viewers away are smaller ones in the side rooms of the digital-art venue. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn its two years of operation, Artechouse has often exhibited high-tech simulations of natural phenomena. Computer-generated cherry blossoms and autumn leaves have cascaded on the towering screens. Anadol, a Turkey-bred Los Angeles artist, incorporates ocean currents and real-time meteorological reports into his visual collages, but he works mostly in black and white and doesn\u2019t imitate organic forms. Nature information is interlaced with images from the International Space Station and photographs and documents from a Turkish historical archive.All of the data is from public sources and thus available on any device with Internet access. The 150 million bits of commonly shared knowledge used in this show are, in a sense, found objects. The goal, Anadol says, is \u201cto make the invisible visible with algorithms.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAlthough \u201cBosphorous\u201d and its companion pieces are vast enough to immerse the observer, two other attractions really deliver on the show\u2019s title, which is a reference to William Blake. (\u201cIf the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is \u2014 infinite,\u201d the poet wrote.) To the left, the hallway that leads to Artechouse\u2019s media lab has been transformed into a \u201cData Tunnel\u201d; on the right is an \u201cInfinity Room.\u201d Both combine algorithmically generated light and sound with a more venerable technology: mirrors. The floors, ceilings and walls are all reflective.Intentionally disorienting, Anadol\u2019s simulations of endlessness undermine the participant\u2019s depth perception by projecting ever-changing white lines on the mirrored surfaces. The light drawings may march in rigid mathematical patterns or switch to fluid undulations. They can appear close or distant, beckoning or imprisoning. Adopting a fetal position is optional, but crouching inside the \u201cInfinity Room\u201d suggests gestating in a cyborg\u2019s womb.Anadol is not the first post-painting artist to toy with perspective, updating a technique originally meant to enhance realism so that it instead produces psychedelic visions. He follows Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell, who employed mirrors and lights to collapse the viewer\u2019s sense of place. To their innovations, Anadol adds real-world data that appears to shimmer and surge. Anyone who gets swept under is drowning, not in fantasy, but in actuality.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInfinite Space Through Sept. 2 at Artechouse, 1238 Maryland Ave. SW.Summer showsSlow periods lead to busy walls at local galleries, where summer group exhibitions showcase dozens of artists. There\u2019s no particular method to these surveys, although most of this year\u2019s feature examples of an intriguing series.Hemphill Fine Arts\u2019 \u201cSummer Show 2019\u201d includes two eye-popping prints by Linling Lu in which her trademark targets, composed of rings of pure color in varying widths, are supplemented by lineups of dots. There\u2019s one small circle with each of the hues employed in the main piece, an act of deconstruction that also yields a handsome design.Also at Hemphill are fine abstractions by such contemporary local painters as Ryan Crotty, Steve Cushner, Robin Rose and Julie Wolfe, interspersed with the work of color-field precursors including Thomas Downing, Paul Reed and Alma Woodsey Thomas. Teetering on the edge of abstraction is an evocative William Christenberry encaustic that can be read as pure form or as a distilled landscape.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSusan Calloway Fine Arts\u2019 \u201cSummer Interlude\u201d features Matthew Langley\u2019s \u201cA Painting a Day\u201d series of stripe pictures, essentially sketches for larger works such as the assured, precisely rendered \u201cPort of Call.\u201d The other artists are David Bell and Karen Silve, who make exuberant abstractions, and Leslie Nolan, whose brushwork is equally free but figurative.Four of Sarah Dolan\u2019s pictures of 100 things important to her infant daughter are among the many modestly sized offerings in Adah Rose Gallery\u2019s \u201cCharmed, I\u2019m Sure.\u201d The smallish venue has papered its walls with artworks, some of which will rotate. There\u2019s much patterned abstraction, including Lisa Rosenstein\u2019s circular torn-paper collage and Joe Shetler\u2019s blue-pencil grid of squares and diamonds. Less orderly are a thickly impastoed Wayson Jones miniature and a vivid Hyegyeong Choi picture that juxtaposes realist and abstract modes.The selection also includes a few works whose technique, and sometimes subject matter, are traditional. Jay Birch painstakingly depicts a woodpecker and Sarah Jameson remakes a detail from the Sistine Chapel, while Timothy Verneulyn renders a modern \u201cSisyphus\u201d whose milieu is suburban and whose curse is ecological. The artist\u2019s Renaissance-style method, which entails multiple layers of translucent glazes, heightens the satirical incongruity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAddison/Ripley Fine Art\u2019s \u201cSummer Selections\u201d offers prints by 25 artists, most of whom show regularly at the gallery. These include traditional lithographs and woodblocks as well as computer-generated imagery and photos such as one of Frank Hallam Day\u2019s close-ups of a ship\u2019s hull, its metallic tones a symphony of rust.As at Adah Rose, orderly abstract designs are common. Tom Green writes aqua glyphs on two shades of brown, Mira Hecht arrays circles and figure-eights, Carol Brown Goldberg interlocks repeated patterns and Dan Treado splits vine-like forms across a two-part composition. Sometimes foreground and background merge: Dan Rizzie outlines a chair on a wood-grained field, and David Shapiro\u2019s delicate forms nearly fuse with handmade paper. In these elegant prints, the motif is the message.Summer Show 2019 Through Aug. 23 at Hemphill Fine Arts, 1515 14th St. NW.Summer Interlude Through Aug. 27 at Susan Calloway Fine Arts, 1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW.Charmed, I\u2019m Sure Through Aug. 31 at Adah Rose Gallery, 3766 Howard Ave., Kensington.Summer Selections Through Aug. 23 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW. Artist Refik Anadol\u2019s retrospective draws from ocean currents and meteorological reports. In the galleries: Artechouse\u2019s \u2018Infinite Space\u2019 has waves of natural influences",
        "author": "Mark Jenkins"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Mountain Bike Cure: Exercise, Fresh Air and Fellowship (NYT: Travel) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "8983",
        "date": "2021-05-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/travel/mountain-biking-vacation.html",
        "text": "Thanks to more trails, better bikes and a rise of high-school interest, mountain biking has experienced a meteoric rise of popularity in the past decade. The pandemic added fuel to the fire. Thanks to more trails, better bikes and a rise of high-school interest, mountain biking has experienced a meteoric rise of popularity in the past decade. The pandemic added fuel to the fire. Last summer, Cat Rainwater was overweight and going through menopause at an accelerated clip. That, on top of the stresses of pandemic lockdown, was leading to a mental health crisis.",
        "author": "By Lauren Sloss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Did a Meteor Explode Over New Hampshire? That May Explain the Boom. (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8984",
        "date": "2021-10-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/boom-new-hampshire-massachussetts-meteor-shower.html",
        "text": "Meteorologists said that a bolide, a type of large meteor explosion in the atmosphere, might have been the source of a disturbance that was widely reported on Sunday. Meteorologists said that a bolide, a type of large meteor explosion in the atmosphere, might have been the source of a disturbance that was widely reported on Sunday. The theories lit up the internet: An earthquake must have caused a prolonged boom that shook homes on Sunday morning in New Hampshire and at least one neighboring state.",
        "author": "By Neil Vigdor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Hurricane Dorian Raises Question: Should There Be a Category 6? (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8985",
        "date": "2019-09-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-dorian-raises-question-should-there-be-a-category-6-11567504800?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=56",
        "text": "But he and other meteorologists say it is hard to think of anything worse than a Category 5, the highest rating, which is defined as causing \u201ccatastrophic damage.\u201d\n\u201cYou can\u2019t obliterate obliteration,\u201d Dr. Maue said. \u201cThat\u2019s it. That\u2019s a Category 5.\u201d\n\n\nDorian was a Category 5 for more than 24 hours, hitting the Bahamas with maximum sustained wind speeds that reached 185 miles on Sunday before being downgraded to a Category 4 on Monday. The hurricane is the strongest in modern record-keeping to hit the Caribbean country.\n\n\n Measuring Hurricane DamageMeteorologists rate hurricanes from Category 1 to 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale based on sustained wind damage. Each category brings a higher level of potential damage.Category 1 (Wind speed: 74-95 mph)\nDamage: Tree branches and leaves snap off; potential for shingle and gutter damage; damage to power lines likely.Category 2 (Wind speed: 96-110 mph)\nDamage: Roof and siding damage to homes; small trees uprooted; near total power loss expected with outages lasting several days.Category 3 (Wind speed: 111-129 mph)\nDamage: Major damage to roof and home sidings; numerous trees snapped or uprooted; potential for water service to cease.Category 4 (Wind speed: 130-156 mph)\nDamage: Loss of most of the roof and some exterior walls; most trees snapped or uprooted; power outages lasting weeks.Category 5 (Wind speed: 157 mph or higher)\nDamage: A high percentage of homes will be destroyed with fallen roofs and walls; affected areas uninhabitable for weeks or months.\n\n\n\u201cThe only hurricane to make landfall with winds that strong in the continental U.S. was the Labor Day hurricane of 1935,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Phil Klotzbach,\n\n\n\n a research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. \u201cDorian\u2019s max winds of 185 miles per hour were also the second strongest on record for any Atlantic hurricane behind only Allen of 1980.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Timothy Hall,\n\n\n\n a senior scientist with NASA\u2019s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the rarity of Category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. also raises the question of the need for a higher rating.\n\u201cI don\u2019t think we have enough of them right now to make that extra level of partitioning them worthwhile,\u201d he said.\nDespite the storm\u2019s intensity\u2014and that of other major storms in recent years\u2014\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Dennis Feltgen,\n\n\n\n a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center,\u00a0agreed that there isn\u2019t a clear need for a Category 6. But, he added, federal forecasters recognize that a storm\u2019s sustained winds aren\u2019t the only risks posed by a hurricane\u2014they\u2019re not even the worst.\nWater, including flooding, he said, tends to be the more dangerous hazard, causing about 90% of tropical cyclone deaths in the U.S.\n\n\nRelated Hurricane Dorian Death Toll at Five in Bahamas With Hurricane Dorian Heading to East Coast, 2016\u2019s Matthew Offers Lessons Scenes: Hurricane Dorian Bears Down on Florida \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nHow to Tell if a Hurricane Is Headed Your Way What you need to know about forecast maps and storm paths \n\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve tried to steer the focus toward the individual hazards, which include storm surge, wind, rainfall, tornadoes and rip currents, instead of the particular category of the storm, which only provides information about the hazard from wind,\u201d Mr. Feltgen said.\nDorian was expected to move dangerously close to the Florida coast late Tuesday, though forecasts don\u2019t show it making landfall in the state.\nForecasters and other hurricane watchers have been warning anyone in Dorian\u2019s path to stay alert.\n\u201cIt\u2019s obviously really important that people take a storm like Dorian very seriously. Don\u2019t get caught up in the fact that the center might not come onshore,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Megan Linkin,\n\n\n\n a senior underwriter of natural catastrophes for Swiss Re Corporate Solutions. \u201cIt\u2019s not worth your life.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nPhotos: Hurricane Dorian Lashes East Coast, Bahamas ReelPowerful storm is causing flooding, tornadoes and power outages as it moves north\u00a0\u00a0A vehicle drives through floodwaters during Hurricane Dorian in Charleston,S.C., on Thursday. Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News1 of 19\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 19Show CaptionA vehicle drives through floodwaters during Hurricane Dorian in Charleston,S.C., on Thursday. Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News\n\n\nWrite to Erin Ailworth at Erin.Ailworth@wsj.com Hurricane Dorian is reviving a question that arises whenever the U.S. is threatened by the fiercest of hurricanes. \u201cThis comes up every year whenever we have a Category 5,\u201d said Ryan Maue, a meteorologist. ",
        "author": "Erin Ailworth"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fifty Years Ago We Landed on the Moon. Why Should We Care Now? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8986",
        "date": "2019-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/books/review/moon-landing-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Jill Lepore explores the many new accounts of the Apollo 11 mission on its 50th anniversary, including Douglas Brinkley\u2019s \u201cAmerican Moonshot.\u201d Jill Lepore explores the many new accounts of the Apollo 11 mission on its 50th anniversary, including Douglas Brinkley\u2019s \u201cAmerican Moonshot.\u201d The footprints are still there, the striped tread of Neil Armstrong\u2019s boots, caked into dust. There\u2019s no atmosphere on the moon, no wind and no water. Footprints don\u2019t blow away and they don\u2019t wash away and there\u2019s no one up there to trample them. Superfast micrometeorites, miniature particles traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, are bombarding the surface of the moon all the time, but they\u2019re so infinitesimal that they erode things only at the more or less unobservable rate of 0.04 inches every million years. So unless those footprints are hit by a meteor and blasted into a crater, they\u2019ll last for tens of millions of years.",
        "author": "By Jill Lepore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fifty Years Ago We Landed on the Moon. Why Should We Care Now? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8987",
        "date": "2019-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/books/review/moon-landing-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Jill Lepore explores the many new accounts of the Apollo 11 mission on its 50th anniversary, including Douglas Brinkley\u2019s \u201cAmerican Moonshot.\u201d Jill Lepore explores the many new accounts of the Apollo 11 mission on its 50th anniversary, including Douglas Brinkley\u2019s \u201cAmerican Moonshot.\u201d The footprints are still there, the striped tread of Neil Armstrong\u2019s boots, caked into dust. There\u2019s no atmosphere on the moon, no wind and no water. Footprints don\u2019t blow away and they don\u2019t wash away and there\u2019s no one up there to trample them. Superfast micrometeorites, miniature particles traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, are bombarding the surface of the moon all the time, but they\u2019re so infinitesimal that they erode things only at the more or less unobservable rate of 0.04 inches every million years. So unless those footprints are hit by a meteor and blasted into a crater, they\u2019ll last for tens of millions of years.",
        "author": "By Jill Lepore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Fifty Years Ago We Landed on the Moon. Why Should We Care Now? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "8988",
        "date": "2019-06-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/books/review/moon-landing-anniversary.html",
        "text": "Jill Lepore explores the many new accounts of the Apollo 11 mission on its 50th anniversary, including Douglas Brinkley\u2019s \u201cAmerican Moonshot.\u201d Jill Lepore explores the many new accounts of the Apollo 11 mission on its 50th anniversary, including Douglas Brinkley\u2019s \u201cAmerican Moonshot.\u201d The footprints are still there, the striped tread of Neil Armstrong\u2019s boots, caked into dust. There\u2019s no atmosphere on the moon, no wind and no water. Footprints don\u2019t blow away and they don\u2019t wash away and there\u2019s no one up there to trample them. Superfast micrometeorites, miniature particles traveling at 33,000 miles per hour, are bombarding the surface of the moon all the time, but they\u2019re so infinitesimal that they erode things only at the more or less unobservable rate of 0.04 inches every million years. So unless those footprints are hit by a meteor and blasted into a crater, they\u2019ll last for tens of millions of years.",
        "author": "By Jill Lepore"
    },
    {
        "title": "Why are more than 100 television meteorologists around the world wearing this tie? (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "8989",
        "date": "2018-06-21",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/06/21/why-are-over-100-television-meteorologists-around-the-world-wearing-this-tie/",
        "text": "On the first day of summer, midway through another historically hot year for the planet, meteorologists worldwide are wearing global warming-themed ties to raise awareness about climate change.The ties are striped, color-coded from blue to red, to show how the planet has warmed since the late 1800s. Blue stripes represent cool years, and red stripes portray the warm years. The progression from blue to red is clear, unambiguously displaying the long-term warm signal on Earth. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightWhile male meteorologists don ties, women are sporting pins and necklaces. Some meteorologists are displaying coffee mugs with the pattern. Cuff links and\u00a0earrings are available, too.You may see this a lot on your feed today. This \"warming stripes\" design was created @ed_hawkins. It shows the average global temperature from 1850 to 2017. The earth IS getting hotter #MetsUnite @WeatherProf pic.twitter.com/SsH1Pk8bo9\u2014 Lauren Olesky (@LoleskyWX) June 21, 2018\n\nThe pattern of stripes was developed by Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in Britain. \u201cThis visualization removes all the distractions of standard graphs and allows the viewer to just see the long-term trends and variations in temperature without needing to interpret anything else,\u201d he told the Capital Weather Gang.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJeff Berardelli, broadcast meteorologist for the CBS affiliate in Palm Beach, Fla., was inspired by the pattern. \u201cIt struck me as an opportunity to communicate climate change in the simplest way possible,\u201d he said. He then organized the global effort to bring it inside the living rooms of television viewers.As the pattern emblazoned on the ties shows, the world has witnessed the four warmest years on record over the past four years, and 17 of the 18 warmest years since 2001.\u201cIn the past few years, it seems the impacts of climate change have accelerated,\u201d Berardelli said. \u201cAnd most climate scientists agree we have literally no time to spare to turn the ship around. When we look back, we will view 2015 to 2017 as the turning point years; the years when climate change \u2018got real.\u2019 \u201dToday is #SummerSolstice. If you see your weather presenter wearing an item of clothing like this tie, it's because he or she is visualising global temperature change >> https://t.co/JI7I9dK9J7 @CLIMATEwBORDERS #MetsUnite #ClimateChange pic.twitter.com/aUkcG2ClLF\u2014 UN Climate Change (@UNFCCC) June 21, 2018\n\nBerardelli used his social network and the help of Climate Central, a nonprofit climate-change communication firm that conducts outreach to meteorologists, to publicize the tie-wearing initiative. On social media, meteorologists are using the hashtag #MetsUnite to draw attention to it.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementInternational participants include meteorologists in Canada, Belgium, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany and South Africa.The dozens of meteorologists enthusiastically supporting this effort is symbolic of a sea change in their views about climate change.Less than a decade ago, many broadcast meteorologists viewed climate change skeptically. In 2010, a study led by George Mason University found that about half of the weathercasters surveyed thought global warming was happening, and fewer than a third thought it was caused mostly by human activities.But a study published late in 2017, also led by George Mason, concluded that the view of broadcast meteorologists had \u201crapidly\u201d evolved.Story continues below advertisement\u201cNewer results show that approximately 80 percent of weathercasters are convinced of human-caused climate change,\u201d the study concluded.Broadcast meteorologists increasingly convinced manmade climate change is happeningBerardelli wants his colleagues to not only accept the science of climate change but also to proactively communicate about it. \u201cIt occurs to me that TV meteorologists are experts in two things: the atmosphere and communication,\u201d he said. \u201cThe question is: Why are we not leading the charge on climate change communication?\u201dAdvertisementHe continued: \u201cIt is time broadcast meteorologists .\u2009.\u2009. take ownership of this conversation; not to push an agenda but to deliver honest, unbiased science information. There is so much misinformation out there. People need to hear the message from the horse\u2019s mouth. As long as we are straightforward and balanced, our audiences will gravitate towards their trusted, local credible source.\u201d\u201cI hope this effort is the kick-start needed to give our colleagues the confidence and motivation to lead on this vital issue.\u201dMeteorologists shouldn\u2019t just \u2018stick to the weather,\u2019 they should openly discuss climate changePhotosHere is the Climate Changd Tie that #MetsUnite will be wearing. A great idea by ",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Jacobs, meteorologist and acting head of NOAA during a turbulent time, nominated to lead the agency (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8990",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/18/neil-jacobs-meteorologist-acting-head-noaa-during-turbulent-time-nominated-lead-agency/",
        "text": "Less than a month after Barry Myers, the controversial pick to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, withdrew from consideration, President Trump has nominated acting administrator Neil Jacobs to lead the agency.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJacobs, a meteorologist, has been the acting head of NOAA since 2018, but the agency has been without a permanent leader since Trump was inaugurated, the longest rudderless stretch in its history. The agency is tasked with a diverse range of duties, including forecasting the weather, conducting climate research, managing the nation\u2019s fisheries and more. Jacobs sailed through Senate confirmation to serve as the assistant secretary of commerce or, in his current official capacity, acting head of NOAA. However, to be confirmed as permanent NOAA administrator, he will require a new confirmation vote.Commerce Department aides knew Alabama hurricane forecasters were not responding to Trump, but still rebuked themAlthough previously considered noncontroversial, Jacobs was embroiled in the scandal that broke out during Hurricane Dorian, in which NOAA released an unsigned statement rebuking Weather Service forecasters for seeming to contradict Trump\u2019s incorrect tweet that Alabama was at great risk from the hurricane. The forecasters had subsequently tweeted that Alabama was not at risk, appearing to contradict the president, although they were unaware of his tweet at the time. Instead, they responded to concerned residents who were calling the office to find out more about the forecast.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe controversy took on the name Sharpiegate after Trump displayed a hurricane forecast map to the news media that had been altered with a black Sharpie marker to show the potential for the storm to track across Alabama.Jacobs was involved in drafting that unsigned statement but had resisted including language admonishing the forecasters. Officials at the Commerce Department insisted on including the language. They were acting on behalf of Trump who, through acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, had directed the department to deal with the issue.As the imbroglio regarding Hurricane Dorian and Alabama raged, Jacobs attempted to walk the fine line between supporting Weather Service forecasters, whose morale was damaged by the unsigned statement, and not crossing the president.Story continues below advertisementAt a meeting of the National Weather Association just days after the statement was released, Jacobs stated: \u201cThe purpose of the NOAA statement was to clarify the technical aspects of the potential impacts of Dorian. What it did not say, however, is that we understand and fully support the good intent of the Birmingham weather office, which was to calm fears and support public safety.\u201dWeather is turning into big business. And that could be trouble for the public.The Hurricane Dorian controversy has prompted investigations from the Commerce Department inspector general, the acting chief scientist of NOAA and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. All of them are ongoing.AdvertisementOne of Jacobs\u2019s key priorities is how to improve the accuracy of weather forecasting modeling within NOAA. At the moment, the National Weather Service\u2019s flagship computer model ranks either third or fourth place in accuracy, behind models operated in Europe and sometimes Canada.Story continues below advertisementHe is the champion and primary architect behind a fledgling initiative known as the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), which would establish a \u201ccommunity modeling\u201d effort, drawing in resources from the academic and private sectors to build a world-class computer model while leveraging cloud computing.This work earned praise from Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who also endorsed Jacobs\u2019 nomination. \u201cNeil is a terrific choice. It is imperative for the United States to close the forecasting gap with our overseas competitors, and Neil has the necessary expertise to coordinate the efforts of NOAA with private weather companies and university researchers as we all focus on restoring the nation to weather forecasting preeminence,\u201d he said in a statement, calling EPIC \u201csorely needed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to computer modeling, Jacobs also has been working to protect the scientific use of a portion of the radio spectrum the agency uses for sensing water vapor via satellites. Telecommunications companies plan to use similar frequency bands for developing 5G networks, and a behind-the-scenes fight has played out between NOAA, NASA, the Federal Communications Commission and the White House.Trump administration has EPIC plan to develop the world\u2019s smartest weather forecasting modelAccording to D. James Baker, who served as the NOAA administrator for President Bill Clinton, Jacobs has the potential to be a \u201cgood leader for the agency.\u201d\u201cIn my view, Neil Jacobs is a technically competent meteorologist who has been a strong proponent of protecting the spectrum NWS needs for forecasts. He had a misstep over the false Hurricane Dorian forecast when he didn\u2019t protect his forecast office from political interference. If he can learn from that mistake, he could be a good leader for the agency. NOAA needs to have an Administrator in these turbulent times. I would support him,\u201d Baker said via email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJ. Marshall Shepherd, former president of the American Meteorological Society, also endorsed Jacobs\u2019s nomination. \u201cNeil has effectively been serving in this role for months and has a good feel for the issues NOAA and the broader enterprise face. I think he is the right person for the job under current circumstances and believe that he will do a great job,\u201d Shepherd said in a statement.Before joining NOAA, Jacobs was chief scientist at Panasonic Avionics, where he led the development of its computer modeling framework. He holds a PhD in meteorology from North Carolina State University.The initial selection of the businessman Myers to lead the agency was mired in controversy. The nomination broke from a long-standing tradition of choosing a scientist to run the agency. In addition, concerns were raised about Myers\u2019s potential conflicts of interest in leading the agency, as he had served as chief executive and held an ownership stake in AccuWeather, which relies on information from the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA.Although Myers\u2019s nomination had twice been voted through the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, he was never brought up for a floor vote. He withdrew because of health considerations.Correction: A previous version of this post misspelled the last name of J. Marshall Shepherd, former president of the American Meteorological Society. President Trump is nominating acting NOAA head Neil Jacobs to lead the weather and oceans agency on a permanent basis. Neil Jacobs, meteorologist and acting head of NOAA during a turbulent time, nominated to lead the agency",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Jacobs, meteorologist and acting head of NOAA during a turbulent time, nominated to lead the agency (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8991",
        "date": "2019-12-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/18/neil-jacobs-meteorologist-acting-head-noaa-during-turbulent-time-nominated-lead-agency/",
        "text": "Less than a month after Barry Myers, the controversial pick to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, withdrew from consideration, President Trump has nominated acting administrator Neil Jacobs to lead the agency.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightJacobs, a meteorologist, has been the acting head of NOAA since 2018, but the agency has been without a permanent leader since Trump was inaugurated, the longest rudderless stretch in its history. The agency is tasked with a diverse range of duties, including forecasting the weather, conducting climate research, managing the nation\u2019s fisheries and more. Jacobs sailed through Senate confirmation to serve as the assistant secretary of commerce or, in his current official capacity, acting head of NOAA. However, to be confirmed as permanent NOAA administrator, he will require a new confirmation vote.Commerce Department aides knew Alabama hurricane forecasters were not responding to Trump, but still rebuked themAlthough previously considered noncontroversial, Jacobs was embroiled in the scandal that broke out during Hurricane Dorian, in which NOAA released an unsigned statement rebuking Weather Service forecasters for seeming to contradict Trump\u2019s incorrect tweet that Alabama was at great risk from the hurricane. The forecasters had subsequently tweeted that Alabama was not at risk, appearing to contradict the president, although they were unaware of his tweet at the time. Instead, they responded to concerned residents who were calling the office to find out more about the forecast.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe controversy took on the name Sharpiegate after Trump displayed a hurricane forecast map to the news media that had been altered with a black Sharpie marker to show the potential for the storm to track across Alabama.Jacobs was involved in drafting that unsigned statement but had resisted including language admonishing the forecasters. Officials at the Commerce Department insisted on including the language. They were acting on behalf of Trump who, through acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, had directed the department to deal with the issue.As the imbroglio regarding Hurricane Dorian and Alabama raged, Jacobs attempted to walk the fine line between supporting Weather Service forecasters, whose morale was damaged by the unsigned statement, and not crossing the president.Story continues below advertisementAt a meeting of the National Weather Association just days after the statement was released, Jacobs stated: \u201cThe purpose of the NOAA statement was to clarify the technical aspects of the potential impacts of Dorian. What it did not say, however, is that we understand and fully support the good intent of the Birmingham weather office, which was to calm fears and support public safety.\u201dWeather is turning into big business. And that could be trouble for the public.The Hurricane Dorian controversy has prompted investigations from the Commerce Department inspector general, the acting chief scientist of NOAA and the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. All of them are ongoing.AdvertisementOne of Jacobs\u2019s key priorities is how to improve the accuracy of weather forecasting modeling within NOAA. At the moment, the National Weather Service\u2019s flagship computer model ranks either third or fourth place in accuracy, behind models operated in Europe and sometimes Canada.Story continues below advertisementHe is the champion and primary architect behind a fledgling initiative known as the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), which would establish a \u201ccommunity modeling\u201d effort, drawing in resources from the academic and private sectors to build a world-class computer model while leveraging cloud computing.This work earned praise from Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who also endorsed Jacobs\u2019 nomination. \u201cNeil is a terrific choice. It is imperative for the United States to close the forecasting gap with our overseas competitors, and Neil has the necessary expertise to coordinate the efforts of NOAA with private weather companies and university researchers as we all focus on restoring the nation to weather forecasting preeminence,\u201d he said in a statement, calling EPIC \u201csorely needed.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn addition to computer modeling, Jacobs also has been working to protect the scientific use of a portion of the radio spectrum the agency uses for sensing water vapor via satellites. Telecommunications companies plan to use similar frequency bands for developing 5G networks, and a behind-the-scenes fight has played out between NOAA, NASA, the Federal Communications Commission and the White House.Trump administration has EPIC plan to develop the world\u2019s smartest weather forecasting modelAccording to D. James Baker, who served as the NOAA administrator for President Bill Clinton, Jacobs has the potential to be a \u201cgood leader for the agency.\u201d\u201cIn my view, Neil Jacobs is a technically competent meteorologist who has been a strong proponent of protecting the spectrum NWS needs for forecasts. He had a misstep over the false Hurricane Dorian forecast when he didn\u2019t protect his forecast office from political interference. If he can learn from that mistake, he could be a good leader for the agency. NOAA needs to have an Administrator in these turbulent times. I would support him,\u201d Baker said via email.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementJ. Marshall Shepherd, former president of the American Meteorological Society, also endorsed Jacobs\u2019s nomination. \u201cNeil has effectively been serving in this role for months and has a good feel for the issues NOAA and the broader enterprise face. I think he is the right person for the job under current circumstances and believe that he will do a great job,\u201d Shepherd said in a statement.Before joining NOAA, Jacobs was chief scientist at Panasonic Avionics, where he led the development of its computer modeling framework. He holds a PhD in meteorology from North Carolina State University.The initial selection of the businessman Myers to lead the agency was mired in controversy. The nomination broke from a long-standing tradition of choosing a scientist to run the agency. In addition, concerns were raised about Myers\u2019s potential conflicts of interest in leading the agency, as he had served as chief executive and held an ownership stake in AccuWeather, which relies on information from the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA.Although Myers\u2019s nomination had twice been voted through the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, he was never brought up for a floor vote. He withdrew because of health considerations.Correction: A previous version of this post misspelled the last name of J. Marshall Shepherd, former president of the American Meteorological Society. President Trump is nominating acting NOAA head Neil Jacobs to lead the weather and oceans agency on a permanent basis. Neil Jacobs, meteorologist and acting head of NOAA during a turbulent time, nominated to lead the agency",
        "author": "Jason Samenow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Some Famous Gems Get a New Setting (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8992",
        "date": "2021-05-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/fashion/jewelry-gems-american-museum-of-natural-history.html",
        "text": "The Star of India, the Patricia Emerald and others return to public view in the newly redesigned halls at the American Museum of Natural History. The Star of India, the Patricia Emerald and others return to public view in the newly redesigned halls at the American Museum of Natural History. To reach one of the most anticipated new destinations in New York City, you have to sidestep dinosaur fossils and hang a right at the cluster of meteorites. It\u2019s a long and winding road to a gemstone jackpot.",
        "author": "By Tanya Dukes"
    },
    {
        "title": "Meteorite stolen from exhibit at Science Museum of Virginia (WP: Local Crime & Public Safety) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8993",
        "date": "2018-03-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/meteorite-stolen-from-richmond-museum/2018/03/16/6f634460-2957-11e8-8478-892125e3f2ba_story.html",
        "text": "A meteorite has been stolen from the space-themed \u201cSpeed\u201d exhibit at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond, authorities said Friday.The iron-nickel meteorite, worth $1,500, was taken from the museum in the 2500 block of West Broad Street on Thursday between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., according to a news release from the Virginia Capitol Police. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe space rock had been in the main hall of the museum\u2019s first floor in a secure, metal display stand. Employees found the stand disassembled and the rock removed.Joe Macenka, spokesman for the Virginia Capitol Police, said he was told that the meteorite was worth $1,500 and was part of a popular exhibit that includes an Apollo capsule.\u201cThey did a nice job with this stuff,\u201d he said of the exhibit. \u201cThese things happen.\u201dPolice asked that anyone with information about the meteorite contact them at 804-786-2120. The space rock was part of the space-themed \u201cSpeed\u201d exhibit. Meteorite stolen from exhibit at Science Museum of Virginia",
        "author": "Justin Wm. Moyer"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Can New York City Prepare for the Next Ida? Here\u2019s a To-Do List. (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "8994",
        "date": "2021-09-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/nyregion/nyc-flooding-infrastructure.html",
        "text": "The recipe sounds simple: Improve drainage. Use plants, tanks and barriers to slow water. But it takes money and cooperation. The recipe sounds simple: Improve drainage. Use plants, tanks and barriers to slow water. But it takes money and cooperation. When the remnants of Hurricane Ida swept into New York this month, the storm\u2019s ferocity shocked the city. Even with meteorologists warning of intense rains and flooding, the swiftness with which the storm turned streets into rushing \u2014 and deadly \u2014 rivers caught officials and residents off guard.",
        "author": "By Anne Barnard, Michael Gold and Winnie Hu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shopping, Bravery, Conspiracy Theories and Robots: Our Favorite Student Comments This Week (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8995",
        "date": "2018-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/learning/shopping-bravery-conspiracy-theories-and-robots-our-favorite-student-comments-this-week.html",
        "text": "Our favorite student comments from last week, and an invitation to join the conversation this week. Our favorite student comments from last week, and an invitation to join the conversation this week. Happy New Year, and welcome back \u2014 even if for many the first week of school has been disrupted by what some meteorologists classified as a \u201cbomb cyclone.\u201d",
        "author": "By The Learning Network"
    },
    {
        "title": "Shopping, Bravery, Conspiracy Theories and Robots: Our Favorite Student Comments This Week (NYT: The Learning Network) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "8996",
        "date": "2018-01-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/learning/shopping-bravery-conspiracy-theories-and-robots-our-favorite-student-comments-this-week.html",
        "text": "Our favorite student comments from last week, and an invitation to join the conversation this week. Our favorite student comments from last week, and an invitation to join the conversation this week. Happy New Year, and welcome back \u2014 even if for many the first week of school has been disrupted by what some meteorologists classified as a \u201cbomb cyclone.\u201d",
        "author": "By The Learning Network"
    },
    {
        "title": "Toll on Science and Research Mounts as Government Shutdown Continues (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8997",
        "date": "2019-01-05",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/us/government-shutdown-science.html",
        "text": "The partial shutdown has emptied laboratories across the country, forced scientists from the field and upended several scientific conferences. The partial shutdown has emptied laboratories across the country, forced scientists from the field and upended several scientific conferences. One of the first sessions of the American Meteorological Society\u2019s annual conference in Phoenix this weekend seemed like just the sort to attract plenty of government scientists: \u201cBuilding Resilience to Extreme Political Weather: Advice for Unpredictable Times.\u201d",
        "author": "By Alan Blinder"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flock to a Bird Fest or a Country Music Concert (NYT: At Home) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8998",
        "date": "2020-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/at-home/things-to-do-at-home-this-week.html",
        "text": "This week, meet the feathered residents of the Pacific Northwest, remember the victims of 9/11, rock out to Margo Price and uncover the secrets of asteroids over a meal. This week, meet the feathered residents of the Pacific Northwest, remember the victims of 9/11, rock out to Margo Price and uncover the secrets of asteroids over a meal. Here is a sampling of the week\u2019s events and how to tune in (all times are Eastern). Note that events are subject to change after publication.",
        "author": "By Adriana Balsamo and Hilary Moss"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth Must Intervene in Space Company Towns (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "8999",
        "date": "2019-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/opinion/future-space-mining.html",
        "text": "In the Asteroid Belt, exploited miners are working in dangerous conditions. In the Asteroid Belt, exploited miners are working in dangerous conditions. Editors\u2019 note: This is part of the Op-Eds From the Future series, in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary \u2014 for now \u2014 but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.",
        "author": "By Patrick S. Tomlinson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Earth Must Intervene in Space Company Towns (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9000",
        "date": "2019-09-09",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/opinion/future-space-mining.html",
        "text": "In the Asteroid Belt, exploited miners are working in dangerous conditions. In the Asteroid Belt, exploited miners are working in dangerous conditions. Editors\u2019 note: This is part of the Op-Eds From the Future series, in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary \u2014 for now \u2014 but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The opinion piece below is a work of fiction.",
        "author": "By Patrick S. Tomlinson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2019The Outer Worlds\u2019 is getting its first story DLC, coming this September (WP: Video Game News) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9001",
        "date": "2020-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/07/23/outer-worlds-is-getting-its-first-story-dlc-coming-this-september/",
        "text": "\u201cThe Outer Worlds,\u201d Obsidian\u2019s sharp and zany role-playing adventure in space, is receiving its first DLC September 9. Releasing on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, \u201cPeril on Gorgon\u201d will have players journeying to the Gorgon asteroid after finding a severed arm and a mysterious message. There, they explore an abandoned Spacer\u2019s Choice (one of the game\u2019s factions) facility where a science project went horribly wrong. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight\u201cPeril on Gorgon\" comes with new characters, weapons and armor sets, as well as raises the level cap to 33 for the full game, to support new perks and flaws (both are status effects for your character). With the introduction of three new science weapons (kooky gadgets that help you out in battle), players can approach fights differently in the DLC. For example, one of them is called P.E.T., a pest extermination tool.Expanse of choices helps The Outer Worlds transcend in a familiar universeUpon arriving on Gorgon, you meet Minnie Ambrose, whom publisher Private Division described as a \u201cwealthy recluse\u201d in a press release. She tasks you with solving the mysterious disappearance of her mother, who was the head of a secret science project that aimed to develop a powerful new drug strain for Spacer\u2019s Choice. The spaces you explore are \u201ceerie,\u201d art director Matt Hansen describes.\u201cPlayers who enjoyed the dark humor of \u2018The Outer Worlds,\u2019 the corporate satire and some of the wilder or more absurd moments from the base game, they\u2019ll definitely see more of that on Gorgon,\" game director and narrative designer Carrie Patel said.As an asteroid, Gorgon is \u201cprimarily rocky\" with a pulp-noir aesthetic, Hansen explained. Mini, lush biomes scattered around the environment bring more color and diversity to the locale. Players can also expect hidden pathways, dungeons, tall cliffs and canyons that add more verticality than the game had previously.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s been taken over by some interesting wildlife, marauders and the occasional very bold and adventurous scrapper trying to make some serious bank harvesting these old facilities,\" Hansen said.For those hoping this DLC comes to Switch, Obsidian confirmed that they are having an \u201copen conversation\u201d about it, and plan to port the DLC to the device at a later, unspecified date. \u201cPeril on Gorgon\u201d will cost $14.99, and Xbox Game Pass users will receive a 10 percent discount. An expansion pass can be purchased as well, which will include \u201cPeril on Gorgon\u201d and a future, unannounced DLC for a total price of $24.99. Read more:\u2018The Last of Us Part II\u2019 handles Ellie\u2019s coming out story with care. It reminded me of my own.Fans have been craving classic \u2018Paper Mario.\u2019 Indie games are filling that void.\u2018What a save!\u2019 Rocket League will soon be free to play \"Peril on Gorgon\" transports players to a large asteroid where a science project has gone terribly wrong. \u2019The Outer Worlds\u2019 is getting its first story DLC, coming this September",
        "author": "Elise Favis"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Vatican\u2019s Astronomer on God and the Stars (WSJ: The Weekend Interview) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9002",
        "date": "2018-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-astronomers-view-of-the-christmas-sky-11545435357?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=67",
        "text": "A supernova, the last detonation of a dying sun? No. \u201cWhen supernovas occur, they leave a remnant,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says. The magnificent Crab Nebula consists of the glowing ashes of a supernova that Chinese astronomers noted in 1054. Nothing similar is contemporaneous with Jesus: \u201cOur radio surveys of the sky are complete enough, we would have seen the radio signal.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nMight the star have been a comet, blazing past Earth the way Hale-Bopp did in 1997? Probably not, given a lack of historical corroboration. \u201cNobody else talks about such a comet,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says. Worse, spotting one in the ancient world wasn\u2019t a good tiding: \u201cComets are always described as arbiters of doom.\u201d\n\n\nMaybe the star was a planetary conjunction\u2014say, in 6 B.C., when calculations show that Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn gathered together. This theory, Brother Consolmagno says, is everybody\u2019s favorite. \u201cThe particular one in 6 B.C. that\u2019s attractive is\u2014they\u2019re all right next to the sun, which explains why nobody actually saw it in the sky,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the astrologers who can calculate these things would have calculated that they should all be there.\u201d\nThen again, perhaps the Star of Bethlehem was purely a literary symbol. \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Caesar Augustus\n\n\n\n used a story like this, too,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says, \u201cas propaganda for why he should be the emperor and not his rivals. Maybe Matthew is saying: \u2018Better than Caesar Augustus, we\u2019ve got astrologers who could say this about Christ.\u2019\u00a0\u201d\nIt might seem an odd line of inquiry, especially to a secular world that sees science and religion as separate, if not conflicting, domains. But Brother Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory and thus the pope\u2019s chief astronomer, is accustomed to fielding offbeat questions with good humor. One of his books is titled \u201cWould You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?\u201d His short answer: \u201cOnly if she asks!\u201d\nBrother Consolmagno, 66, grew up in Detroit as a self-described \u201cSputnik kid.\u201d He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona, and then, at 37, joined the Jesuit order. At conferences or when meeting newsmen, he pairs a clerical collar with an MIT class ring. The outfit, along with his thick beard, has a way of confounding expectations.\nA desire to integrate science and faith publicly was part of the reason the Vatican established the observatory in 1891, though the church\u2019s study of astronomy long precedes that. The Gregorian calendar used today was instituted in 1582 by Pope\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gregory XIII\n\n\n\n to correct the old Julian system, which by that point had drifted out of season by 10 days.\nBut as the 19th century waned, two things happened. \u201cOne was, the unification of Italy meant that the Holy See was desperate to be still recognized as an independent country,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says. \u201cHaving a national observatory was a sign of nationhood.\u201d The same era \u201cwas really the first time that people had this idea that church and science might be at war, and the pope wanted a physical way of saying, \u2018No, we support science.\u2019\u00a0\u201d\nTelescopes were initially placed atop towers in the Vatican. After relations with Italy normalized in 1929, the astronomers fled Rome\u2019s light pollution by moving 15 miles southeast to the papal summer home here in the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alban Hills.\n\n\n\n As visitors coming by train round the bend, they can see the palace perched over a shimmering volcanic lake. Two telescope domes, each about 25 feet across, poke up from the roof. Two more domes, which will open to tour groups in 2019, stand in the gardens, past the cows and chickens that contribute to the pontifical sup. Pope\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Paul VI\n\n\n\n watched the moon landing here in 1969.\nSince the original equipment is outmoded, the Vatican runs a newer telescope, built in the \u201980s, on a mountaintop near Tucson, Ariz., where Brother Consolmagno studied for his doctorate and now spends part of each year. All in all, the observatory and its dozen Jesuit staff run on an annual budget of roughly \u20ac1.5 million ($1.7 million), a third from private donors. \u201cFor 12 people, that\u2019s remarkable\u2014but we come cheap,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says, alluding to their religious vow of poverty. \u201cJesuits all live together, and we get just basically a token salary from the Vatican.\u201d\nThis setup allows the astronomers to pursue science that would struggle to get funding elsewhere. Take Brother Consolmagno\u2019s early work on meteorites, the chunks of alien rock and metal that hit Earth after a meteor burns through the atmosphere. The Vatican has one of the world\u2019s largest meteorite collections, more than 1,000 samples in baggies and small vials, cataloged by the drawerful. When Brother Consolmagno arrived in the 1990s, he began systematically measuring their densities.\nMost meteorites, he says, originate in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which he calls \u201cthe junk-pile scrap heap of the planets.\u201d Scientists hunt for them in Antarctica, where the black rocks stand out on the ice, untouched for millennia after falling from the sky. Brother Consolmagno, after many days weighing and calculating, amassed hundreds of data points. \u201cThe first time I presented my preliminary results at a big meeting,\u201d he says, \u201cone of the grand old men of the field came up and said, \u2018Guy, why are you measuring density? Nobody does that.\u2019\u00a0\u201d\nBut the data proved interesting. \u201cMeteorites are more dense than a typical rock, and much more dense than the asteroids they came from,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says. \u201cAnd that means that the asteroids that you look at in space are not just a big meteorite, but they\u2019re actually a pile of rubble with a lot of empty space\u2014lots of cracks, lots of voids and, as I joke, something big enough for the Millennium Falcon to hide in.\u201d\nA floating debris pile may sound easier to blow up, should the need to save humanity arise, but it isn\u2019t: \u201cWhen you have loose material, it can absorb impacts without shattering.\u201d So what to do if an asteroid hurtles our way? \u201cPlan B is to perturb it out of its orbit,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s easy to do if it\u2019s a pile of rubble, because you have a little machine that throws dirt in one direction and makes the asteroid go in the other direction\u2014like some sort of mass launcher, a wood chipper.\u201d\nA faithful Catholic since childhood, Brother Consolmagno pursued astronomy without cognitive dissonance. That science might conflict with his faith \u201cnever occurred to me,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was the nuns who taught me science when I was in grade school.\u201d Upon entering religious life, he was surprised at the reactions: \u201cSo many of my science friends, once they knew I was a Jesuit, started telling me about the churches they went to. I had no idea they were churchgoers.\u201d\nHow, then, did it become a trope to speak of a war between science and religion? There are many threads here to pull, from pop culture to anti-immigration rhetoric in the U.S. near the turn of the 20th century. \u201cThey wanted to keep people like my great-grandfather out of America,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says\u2014\u201cpeople with funny last names who were Catholics.\u201d \nLet\u2019s begin earlier, though, with another question he frequently gets: What about\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Galileo\n\n\n\n ? \nThe church was wrong, Brother Consolmagno says, to put Galileo on trial in 1633 for promoting Copernican heliocentrism. Yet he says the affair was more complicated than some Enlightenment morality play. For one thing, the science was inconclusive. Competing with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Copernicus\n\n\n\n was a nearly equivalent geocentric model. Proposed by the Danish astronomer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tycho Brahe,\n\n\n\n it featured the same orbits without Earthly motion. The sun revolved around us, and the other planets circled the sun.\n\u201cThere\u2019s only one difference between that and Copernicus,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says. \u201cThe only thing you have to look at is the distant stars. If Copernicus is right, then when the Earth moves around the sun, you should see a slight shifting in the positions of the stars.\u201d Because the stars are so far away, the effect was too faint to pick up: \u201cNobody could see that at the time of Galileo, or for hundreds of years after.\u201d Brahe\u2014and the church\u2014was mistaken, but not obviously so.\nBrother Consolmagno speculates that politics somehow also came into play. \u201cThere\u2019s no argument in Galileo\u2019s trial about any of the science. Anyone can pick up a copy and read the transcript,\u201d he says, offering alternative theories: \u201cWas it a personal politics, that he had insulted the pope? Was it the global politics, that this was happening right in the middle of the Thirty Years War?\u201d\nAdding to the perception of a science-faith conflict, deists began reading a Creator into gaps in scientific understanding\u2014which meant that new knowledge kept squeezing God out. Newton suggested the solar system needed divine intervention to stay aligned: \u201cHe understood that planets are attracted to the sun. How come the planets don\u2019t pull on each other and mess all of this up?\u201d Brother Consolmagno says. \u201cHis math wasn\u2019t good enough to calculate how big an effect that would be. The answer is, not very big.\u201d\nBrother Consolmagno sees a similar trap in arguments for \u201cintelligent design,\u201d such as the claim that the universe is \u201cfine tuned\u201d for life. Ditto on citing the Big Bang as proof of a \u201cprime mover.\u201d In fact it was a Belgian priest and physicist,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Georges Lema\u00eetre,\n\n\n\n who extrapolated backward in the 1920s to suggest the universe began in a \u201cprimeval atom.\u201d Brother Consolmagno says Lema\u00eetre eventually \u201cspoke personally to Pope\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pius XII\n\n\n\n \u201d and urged him not to trumpet this news as evidence of a Creator.\nA third contributing factor, in his view, was the rise of a peculiar sort of literalism. \u201cThe idea that you read the Bible like it was the Chilton\u2019s manual for how to repair your\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Volkswagen\n\n\n \u2014that\u2019s literalism. It\u2019s a very modern idea,\u201d he says. \u201cYou don\u2019t find that in the church fathers. You don\u2019t find that in the rabbis of the time of Jesus. That\u2019s not the way they interpreted it. All literature in ancient times started out as poetry.\u201d\nA minute later he extends the thought: \u201cScience is also poetry. When I describe the path of a falling rock using Newton\u2019s law of gravity, I\u2019m saying the path that the rock makes when it falls is like the solution to this equation. It\u2019s simile. The rock is not the equation, and the equation is not the rock.\u201d The implication is that these two poetic ways of understanding the world perhaps flow toward a unified truth.\nIf so, it points to a deeper problem with dragging cosmology into religious arguments. \u201cIt always makes the science come first and God come at the end of your chain of reasoning,\u201d Brother Consolmagno says. \u201cTo a scientist who\u2019s a believer, it goes the other way around. I\u2019ve already experienced God. I\u2019ve already had religious experiences. I\u2019ve already had things that have made me look at the universe and say: \u2018What\u2019s going on?\u2019\u00a0Whether they\u2019re tragedies like the death of a loved one or miracles like the birth of a loved one, there are things that make you say, \u2018I\u2019m experiencing something that\u2019s more than physical things can explain. Where did this come from?\u2019 Or maybe it\u2019s just something as simple as: \u2018I exist. Why do I exist? Why does anything exist? Why does existence itself exist?\u2019\u00a0\u201d\nFacing such questions, he offers a hypothesis: \u201cLet\u2019s assume that there\u2019s a God that\u2019s outside nature, who is responsible for the existence of the universe,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I start with that axiom, does the universe make sense? Does the universe make more sense than if I assume it\u2019s all done by random chance? Am I able to see things I couldn\u2019t see before? Am I able to understand things I couldn\u2019t understand before? Is it an axiom that works?\n\u201cAnd to me, yes\u2014that\u2019s the answer.\u201d\nMr. Peterson is a member of the Journal\u2019s editorial board. The pope\u2019s chief stargazer, Br. Guy Consolmagno, discusses what the Wise Men saw, how to deflect an asteroid, and why science and faith are more than compatible. ",
        "author": "Kyle Peterson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Has Physics Lost Its Way? (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9003",
        "date": "2020-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/books/review/dream-universe-david-lindley.html",
        "text": "In \u201cThe Dream Universe,\u201d David Lindley argues that physicists have become too enamored of theoretical phenomena like parallel universes and black holes. In \u201cThe Dream Universe,\u201d David Lindley argues that physicists have become too enamored of theoretical phenomena like parallel universes and black holes. THE DREAM UNIVERSE How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way By David Lindley",
        "author": "By Jim Al-Khalili"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here's a look at some amazing space images from 2019 (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9004",
        "date": "2019-06-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/heres-a-look-at-some-of-the-most-amazing-space-photos-from-2019-so-far/2019/06/11/980227a6-6b73-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_gallery.html",
        "text": " This year, scientists have recorded and observed galactic interactions, atmospheric phenomena and the first images of a black hole. Here's a look at some amazing space images from 2019",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Riccardo Giacconi, 87, Explorer of the Universe Through X-Rays, Dies (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9005",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/science/riccardo-giacconi-dead.html",
        "text": "A Nobel laureate, he traced the X-rays emitted by black holes, exploding stars and other violent actors to help understand the workings of the cosmos. A Nobel laureate, he traced the X-rays emitted by black holes, exploding stars and other violent actors to help understand the workings of the cosmos. Riccardo Giacconi, an astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering the study of the universe through the X-rays emitted by the most violent actors in the cosmos, including black holes, exploding stars and galumphing clouds of galaxies, died on Sunday in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 87.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Riccardo Giacconi, 87, Explorer of the Universe Through X-Rays, Dies (NYT: Obituaries) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9006",
        "date": "2018-12-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/science/riccardo-giacconi-dead.html",
        "text": "A Nobel laureate, he traced the X-rays emitted by black holes, exploding stars and other violent actors to help understand the workings of the cosmos. A Nobel laureate, he traced the X-rays emitted by black holes, exploding stars and other violent actors to help understand the workings of the cosmos. Riccardo Giacconi, an astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize for pioneering the study of the universe through the X-rays emitted by the most violent actors in the cosmos, including black holes, exploding stars and galumphing clouds of galaxies, died on Sunday in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 87.",
        "author": "By Dennis Overbye"
    },
    {
        "title": "Book Review: Feeling Gravity\u2019s Pull (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9007",
        "date": "2018-11-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-feeling-gravitys-pull-1542376468?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=68",
        "text": "Fast-forward the cosmic clock, compressing eons into seconds, and the stars of the night sky would wink out one by one, as the central, stabilizing inferno within each one sputters and dies. Five billion years hence, our sun, too, will exhaust its thermonuclear fuel supply. The sun and most of its stellar kin will quietly shrivel into dim, planet-size embers. Their heavier counterparts will explode, sometimes leaving in place nature\u2019s ultimate rebuke to the stars\u2019 luminescent flamboyance: black holes. \n\n\nEinstein\u2019s MonstersBy Chris Impey\n\t\t\n\t\t\tNorton, 295 pages, $26.95 Einstein\u2019s Shadow\n\n\n\nBy Seth Fletcher\n\t\t\n\t\t\tEcco, 255 pages, $26.99 \n\n\nBlack holes are clefts in the continuum of space-time from which neither light nor matter can escape; as such, they are invisible. What Harry Potter manages with a flip of his magical cloak, nature does with gravity, only on a scale that enshrouds the substance of an entire star and in some cases more than a million stars. The concept of black holes stems from the fertile imagination of 18th-century English cleric\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Michell.\n\n\n\n Starting with the belief that light consists of material particles, Michell reasoned that if one were to add sufficient mass to the sun, gravity would escalate so as to trap the sun\u2019s luminous emissions. Even after light was proved to be a particle-wave chimera,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Albert Einstein\n\n\n\n determined that Michell\u2019s conjecture about \u201cdark stars\u201d remained valid in principle (although\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Einstein\n\n\n\n himself doubted that they existed).\nGravity is to a black hole what a grin is to the Cheshire Cat: that which is left behind when all else disappears. The cat is surely there\u2014the bough on which it rests bends under its weight\u2014only its contours have vanished. Likewise, a black hole\u2019s presence is inferred from its gravitational exertions on its surroundings: It gobbles up matter, deflects stars from their paths and twists the cosmic backdrop into a Dal\u00ed-esque mishmash of forms.\n\n\nTo the number of fine books about these extraterrestrial oddities can now be added a worthy pair for a general readership, one that recounts the history and present state of black-hole research and the other that peers into its near future. \nDespite its tabloid title, Chris Impey\u2019s \u201cEinstein\u2019s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes\u201d is a sober-minded, thoroughly researched and highly readable treatment of this multifaceted topic. While it\u2019s tempting to ascribe a Shakespearean malevolence to black holes, given their lusty appetite for stars and planets, their voraciousness is nothing but workaday gravity amplified to the extreme. Indeed, Mr. Impey, a veteran research astronomer and author, views black holes as a \u201cgift from the universe.\u201d Not only have these unruly beasts been corralled by astronomers, he explains, they have been domesticated, their gravitational muscle used to plow fertile fields of cosmic research. \nThe book opens with a capsule history of theories about black holes, from Michell\u2019s long-ago surmise, through Einstein-era inquiries into their origin and structure, to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Hawking\u2019s\n\n\n\n latter-day insight that these purported gravity traps do radiate energy and thus evaporate over time. Readers must whack their way through a thicket of complexities that lies at the confluence of general relativity and quantum theory. But Mr. Impey is a competent guide, avoiding the weedy undergrowth of mathematics to offer a qualitative appraisal of singularities, virtual particles, event horizons, wormholes and the like. \nFrom the astrophysicist\u2019s perspective, black holes must be real, for their absence would leave a huge gap in our understanding of the stars. As to their detection, Mr. Impey describes astronomers\u2019 longtime focus on binary star systems, twirling stellar duos locked in a gravitational embrace; here the veiled presence of a black hole is occasionally betrayed by the orbital swaying of its visible partner. It\u2019s no easy task: Of the hundred million black holes presumed to exist in our galaxy, only about 30 have been observationally confirmed.\nMr. Impey enumerates the technological advances that have propelled the search for black holes: the growth of radio-wave and X-ray astronomy, the enlargement of optical telescopes, the development of ultrasensitive cameras, and the utilization of superfast computers. The latter half of the book presents an array of thought-provoking topics, including gravity waves (\u201cripples in space-time\u201d), primordial stars, the physics of the 2014 movie \u201cInterstellar\u201d and the feasibility of extracting energy from black holes.\nThe universe also offers a jumbo-size manifestation of these umbral beasts: the supermassive black hole. At the center of our galaxy\u2014and presumably most other galaxies\u2014lies a collapsed object with the mass of several million suns. Within a few light-years of this weighty body, which goes by the anodyne moniker Sagittarius A* (pronounced \u201cA-star\u201d), circulate some 10 million stars, coursing through its intense gravitational field at breakneck speed. Our view of this hyperactive region is obscured by interstellar dust particles, which together absorb virtually every photon streaking toward Earth. But millimeter-length radio waves pierce this dusty barrier and could, in theory, be used to generate a grainy portrait of Sagittarius A*. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seth Fletcher\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cEinstein\u2019s Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable\u201d is a science journalist\u2019s account of the long-running campaign to photograph our Milky Way\u2019s core inhabitant from its radio emissions. The \u201ccamera\u201d for this project is the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global consortium of giant radio dishes operating in unison. This battery of instruments effectively acts as a single Earth-wide astronomical eye on the Sagittarius A* region. \nThe event horizon targeted by the EHT is the black hole\u2019s \u201csurface,\u201d the boundary within which gravity prevents the escape of matter and energy. The EHT\u2019s objective, a full-on photo of a black hole, might recall the proverbial snapshot of a black cat in a pitch-dark room. But, as Mr. Fletcher explains, the gravitational disturbance of space around the black hole warps the glittering backdrop of stars into a maelstrom of light, which may show Sagittarius A* in silhouette. The result would be no mere picture but a trove of pixels against which to test our ideas about gravity, relativity and the behavior of matter in extremis.\nThe book\u2019s focal character is\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shep Doeleman,\n\n\n\n director of the EHT project, whose career arc forms the answer to the author\u2019s question \u201cWhat sort of person makes it his life\u2019s work to build an Earth-size telescope to take a picture of a black hole?\u201d As Mr. Fletcher\u2019s narrative reveals, Mr. Doeleman\u2019s single-minded pursuit of Sagittarius A* makes Capt. Ahab look like a piker. His venture has been running for more than 10 years and now involves hundreds of astronomers at observatories world-wide. \u201cEinstein\u2019s Shadow\u201d is an intimate portrayal of a \u201cBig Science\u201d enterprise whose aspirational, at times contentious, practitioners share \u201ca restless energy, a tolerance for risk and discomfort, and a gnawing need for validation.\u201d\nThe EHT project is now in the data-analysis phase, its multitude of observations being synthesized into a coherent image. Whether the profile of Sagittarius A* will emerge out of this sea of computer bits remains unknown. In the meantime, Mr. Doeleman\u2019s team continues its collection of radio waves from the galactic center, their labors aptly characterized decades ago by cosmic pioneer\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Edwin Hubble\n\n\n\n : \u201cEventually, we reach the dim boundary\u2014the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.\u201d\n\u2014Mr. Hirshfeld, a professor of physics at UMass Dartmouth, is the author of \u201cStarlight Detectives: How Astronomers, Inventors, and Eccentrics Discovered the Modern Universe.\u201d Of the 100,000,000 black holes presumed to exist in our galaxy, we\u2019ve been able to detect only 30. ",
        "author": "Alan Hirshfeld"
    },
    {
        "title": "Stephen Hawking Bridged Science and Popular Culture (WSJ: Obituaries) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9008",
        "date": "2018-03-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/stephen-hawking-who-bridged-science-and-popular-culture-dies-at-age-76-1521000561?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=100",
        "text": "Physicist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Stephen Hawking,\n\n\n\n who made complicated concepts like black holes, time and the history of the cosmos accessible to the masses, has died at the age of 76. \nDr. Hawking \u201cdied peacefully at his home in Cambridge,\u201d according to a statement provided by his family. \n\u201cWe are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years,\u201d said his children, Lucy, Robert and Tim, in a statement. \u201cWe will miss him forever.\u201d \n\n\n\n\nDr. Hawking\u2019s health had been deteriorating in recent years. In 2015, he canceled a series of lectures because of poor health. In 2009, he was hospitalized due to an infection.\n\n\nThe University of Cambridge professor was an iconic figure in both the scientific community and in popular culture, known for his keen mind and humor, as well as his striking physical challenges. Dr. Hawking had long battled with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which left him wheelchair-bound for most of his life. Commonly known as Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease or motor neuron disease, the condition damages the nerves that control movement and results in paralysis.\nPatients with ALS typically die within five years of diagnosis. Dr. Hawking, who was diagnosed in 1963 at the age of 21, is believed to have been the longest-living survivor, a fact that still perplexes neurologists.\n\n\nBook Excerpt Why God Did Not Create the Universe \n\n\nNevertheless, he continued to work and produced widely influential theses and books about the nature of time and space even as his condition deteriorated. In 1985, he lost the ability to speak following a tracheotomy. Since then, he communicated through a computerized voice synthesizer. His robotic voice became a defining characteristic of his public persona.\n\u201cFrom his wheelchair, he\u2019s led us on a journey to the farthest and strangest reaches of the cosmos,\u201d President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Barack Obama\n\n\n\n said of Dr. Hawking in 2009 during a ceremony in which the cosmologist received the Medal of Freedom. \u201cIn so doing, he has stirred our imagination and shown us the power of the human spirit here on Earth.\u201d\nDuring his long career, Dr. Hawking devised seminal theories that have shaped scientists\u2019 and the public\u2019s understanding of black holes and the beginning of the universe.\n\u201cHe has pioneered completely new areas in physics,\u201d Caltech physicist Kip Thorne said in 2015.\nBorn in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942\u2014the 300th anniversary of Galileo\u2019s death\u2014Dr. Hawking loved playing with model trains, airplanes and boats as a youngster. He also enjoyed inventing games, including some dealing with manufacturing processes and feudal societies.\n\n\n\n\nRemembering Physicist Stephen Hawking in PhotosThe professor, who brought complicated concepts in science and mathematics to the masses, dies at 76\u00a0\u00a0Physicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York in April 2016. Dr. Hawking has died at the age of 76.Lucas Jackson/Reuters1 of 12\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u00a0\u00a01 of 12Hide CaptionPhysicist Stephen Hawking sits on stage during an announcement of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative with investor Yuri Milner in New York in April 2016. Dr. Hawking has died at the age of 76.Lucas Jackson/Reuters\n\n\n\u201cI think these games, as well as the trains, boats, and airplanes, came from an urge to know how systems worked and how to control them,\u201d he wrote in his short autobiography, \u201cMy Brief History.\u201d He\u2019d later channel this fascination into his work on deciphering how the universe works.\nDr. Hawking studied physics at University College, Oxford and later earned his Ph.D. in cosmology from the University of Cambridge. There, he started developing the theories on the nature of black holes that would eventually earn him fame.\nAmong his most important scientific contributions are his singularity theorems, which help explain concepts like the beginning of time.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThey prove quite solidly that general relativity does predict the existence of black holes and of the Big Bang,\u201d said Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist and author in 2016. \u201cThis was previously strongly suspected, but not truly proven mathematically. Today these theorems are commonly recognized as an important piece of our knowledge of the theory of general relativity.\u201d \nGeneral relativity refers to a theory that an object\u2019s gravity can bend time and space.\nIn recent years, he also partnered with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs on high-risk science initiatives. At a conference in April 2016 for one such project, Dr. Hawking said he wanted to be remembered for his work on Hawking radiation, a theory on how information might escape a black hole\u2019s powerful grip. Hawking radiation-leaking black holes offer an explanation to the long-perplexing information paradox: If black holes eventually disappear and the laws of physics state that the universe\u2019s amount of informatio Physicist Stephen Hawking, who made complicated concepts like black holes, time and the history of the cosmos accessible to the masses, has died at the age of 76. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Release First Image of a Black Hole (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9009",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-release-first-image-of-a-black-hole-11554908995?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=75",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s the first time we actually have an image of such an important and fascinating object. Every single image you\u2019ve ever seen\u2014whether it\u2019s been in scientific releases or TV shows or movies\u2014has been an artist\u2019s impression. This is actually seeing the thing itself,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clifford Johnson,\n\n\n\n a physicist and black-hole expert at the University of Southern California, said in an interview.\n\n\n\n\nUntil now, scientists had only indirect evidence of the existence of black holes, such as gravitational waves emanating from them. The image constitutes the first direct evidence of one, according to Dr. Johnson, who wasn\u2019t involved in the work.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNational Science Foundation Director France Cordova addresses Wednesday\u2019s news conference.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAmong researchers who have spent years trying to learn more about the objects, the image evoked a sense of astonishment, wonder, disbelief and surprise.\n\n\n\u201cIt did bring tears to my eyes,\u201d said France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research. \u201cThis is a very big deal.\u201d \nA black hole is a region of space so dense and compact that it creates a gravitational pull from which matter or even light can\u2019t escape.\nEvery large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, researchers believe. Many other black holes, called stellar black holes, are caused by stars collapsing in on themselves.\nDespite their omnipresence, the objects have been a source of scientific mystery. They had long been considered unseeable because of their light-devouring nature. Einstein himself didn\u2019t like the idea of black holes, though his theory of general relativity predicted them.\nMounting evidence, however, began supporting the prediction, and the first black hole was detected in 1971.\nNevertheless, scientists were forced to rely for years on mathematical predictions to understand the properties of the stellar objects. \u201cIt\u2019s extraordinary to find ourselves when it\u2019s not just math anymore,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Larson,\n\n\n\n a Northwestern University astrophysicist who wasn\u2019t involved in capturing the image.\nThe international collaboration of researchers who managed to capture an image of a black hole took advantage of some properties that allowed for this kind of photo, including black holes\u2019 ability to heat their surroundings to extreme temperatures.\n\u201cWe can only see it by looking at its ecosystem,\u201d said Daryl Haggard, a project collaborator who is a McGill University physics professor.\nThe image isn\u2019t like the kind people take on their cellphones\u2014of light reflecting off an object. Instead, it was created by capturing radio waves.\nNor is the image a snapshot taken by a single camera. Rather, it was taken by radio telescopes scattered around the planet that were linked together to form a giant, Earth-size virtual telescope.\nTo get the image, scientists trained their telescopes on the black hole for roughly two weeks. The data from the telescopes were combined by supercomputers in Germany and the U.S., and were then used to produce the image. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis April 2019 photo provided by Mauna Kea Observatories shows the Submillimeter Array, part of the Event Horizon Telescope network on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Maunakea Observatories/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\nWhat Made It WorkThe creation of the first-ever picture of a black hole was enabled by key technologies. Atomic clocks: The radio telescopes that collected the data used to create the image were scattered across the globe. These had to be synchronized very precisely. Atomic clocks are the most precise time pieces. They rely on the frequencies of vibrating atoms as their electrons change energy levels, which occurs with almost exact consistency; Cesium atomic clocks are the most common. Things like GPS navigation and the internet also rely on atomic clocks. Interferometry: An interferometer is a powerful, \u201cvirtual\u201d telescope that\u2019s created by linking two or more radio antennas (eight in this case), even if they\u2019re spread out across the globe. Wave patterns from the antennas overlap in the spaces between them, making the signal more powerful. The more radio antennas, the clearer the picture. The interferometer provides more detailed data when the radio antennas are spaced farther apart, like the zoom lens on a camera. --Brianna Abbott \n\n\nThe dark center inside the ring captured by the image is known as the black hole\u2019s shadow, which is where matter and light are trapped. The ring is created by the massive gravitational pull bending light as it approaches the black hole. \nThe scene looks as if particles of light, called photons, were trying to climb out of the black hole.\nEinstein\u2019s equations predicted the appearance of the photon ring and its accompanying shadow.\nThe object in the image is 6.5 billion times as massive as the Sun, Scientists revealed the first-ever image of a black hole in what experts called a monumental discovery that confirms some of Albert Einstein\u2019s longstanding theories about general relativity. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez and Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Scientists Release First Image of a Black Hole (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9010",
        "date": "2019-04-10",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-release-first-image-of-a-black-hole-11554908995?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=62",
        "text": "\u201cIt\u2019s the first time we actually have an image of such an important and fascinating object. Every single image you\u2019ve ever seen\u2014whether it\u2019s been in scientific releases or TV shows or movies\u2014has been an artist\u2019s impression. This is actually seeing the thing itself,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Clifford Johnson,\n\n\n\n a physicist and black-hole expert at the University of Southern California, said in an interview.\nUntil now, scientists had only indirect evidence of the existence of black holes, such as gravitational waves emanating from them. The image constitutes the first direct evidence of one, according to Dr. Johnson, who wasn\u2019t involved in the work.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNational Science Foundation Director France Cordova addresses Wednesday\u2019s news conference.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nAmong researchers who have spent years trying to learn more about the objects, the image evoked a sense of astonishment, wonder, disbelief and surprise.\n\n\n\u201cIt did bring tears to my eyes,\u201d said France Cordova, director of the National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research. \u201cThis is a very big deal.\u201d \nA black hole is a region of space so dense and compact that it creates a gravitational pull from which matter or even light can\u2019t escape.\nEvery large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, researchers believe. Many other black holes, called stellar black holes, are caused by stars collapsing in on themselves.\nDespite their omnipresence, the objects have been a source of scientific mystery. They had long been considered unseeable because of their light-devouring nature. Einstein himself didn\u2019t like the idea of black holes, though his theory of general relativity predicted them.\nMounting evidence, however, began supporting the prediction, and the first black hole was detected in 1971.\nNevertheless, scientists were forced to rely for years on mathematical predictions to understand the properties of the stellar objects. \u201cIt\u2019s extraordinary to find ourselves when it\u2019s not just math anymore,\u201d said\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shane Larson,\n\n\n\n a Northwestern University astrophysicist who wasn\u2019t involved in capturing the image.\nThe international collaboration of researchers who managed to capture an image of a black hole took advantage of some properties that allowed for this kind of photo, including black holes\u2019 ability to heat their surroundings to extreme temperatures.\n\u201cWe can only see it by looking at its ecosystem,\u201d said Daryl Haggard, a project collaborator who is a McGill University physics professor.\nThe image isn\u2019t like the kind people take on their cellphones\u2014of light reflecting off an object. Instead, it was created by capturing radio waves.\nNor is the image a snapshot taken by a single camera. Rather, it was taken by radio telescopes scattered around the planet that were linked together to form a giant, Earth-size virtual telescope.\nTo get the image, scientists trained their telescopes on the black hole for roughly two weeks. The data from the telescopes were combined by supercomputers in Germany and the U.S., and were then used to produce the image. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis April 2019 photo provided by Mauna Kea Observatories shows the Submillimeter Array, part of the Event Horizon Telescope network on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Maunakea Observatories/Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\nWhat Made It WorkThe creation of the first-ever picture of a black hole was enabled by key technologies. Atomic clocks: The radio telescopes that collected the data used to create the image were scattered across the globe. These had to be synchronized very precisely. Atomic clocks are the most precise time pieces. They rely on the frequencies of vibrating atoms as their electrons change energy levels, which occurs with almost exact consistency; Cesium atomic clocks are the most common. Things like GPS navigation and the internet also rely on atomic clocks. Interferometry: An interferometer is a powerful, \u201cvirtual\u201d telescope that\u2019s created by linking two or more radio antennas (eight in this case), even if they\u2019re spread out across the globe. Wave patterns from the antennas overlap in the spaces between them, making the signal more powerful. The more radio antennas, the clearer the picture. The interferometer provides more detailed data when the radio antennas are spaced farther apart, like the zoom lens on a camera. --Brianna Abbott \n\n\nThe dark center inside the ring captured by the image is known as the black hole\u2019s shadow, which is where matter and light are trapped. The ring is created by the massive gravitational pull bending light as it approaches the black hole. \nThe scene looks as if particles of light, called photons, were trying to climb out of the black hole.\nEinstein\u2019s equations predicted the appearance of the photon ring and its accompanying shadow.\nThe object in the image is 6.5 billion times as massive as the Sun, according to the researchers. \nScientists emphasized that the image\u2014and six studies that were published to accompany the announcement\u2014were a kickoff to more scientific exploration to come. \nMuch remains unknown about the objects. It is unclear, for example, how supermassive black holes like the one pictured form and gain mass. Researchers also debate the physics of black holes.\nAnother goal is capturing even better images, researchers said. They also hope to use algorithms to sharpen the pictures. They plan to add more telescopes to the network to improve resolution, they said, and would like to put a telescope in orbit eventually.\n\n\nRelated Computer Scientists Play Key Role in First Image of Black Hole A Researcher\u2019s Hunt for Extraterrestrial Intelligence The Hunt for Alien Life Starts in Earth\u2019s Most Extreme Places Welcome to Your Home on Mars How a Robotic Tail Could Help Future Space Travelers Fifty Years After Apollo 11, the Moon Is More Important Than Ever How JFK Sent the U.S. to the Moon Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let\u2019s Get It Right. \n\n\nWrite to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com Scientists revealed the first-ever image of a black hole in what experts called a monumental discovery that confirms some of Albert Einstein\u2019s longstanding theories about general relativity. ",
        "author": "Daniela Hernandez and Brianna Abbott"
    },
    {
        "title": "Face to Face with a Cosmic Wonder (WSJ: Wilczek's Universe) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9011",
        "date": "2019-04-17",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/face-to-face-with-a-cosmic-wonder-11555514924?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=62",
        "text": "The making of the image was a tour de force of science and technology. The black hole is enormous, with a radius of roughly 9 billion miles (or one hundred times the distance from the Earth to the sun) and a mass equivalent to two quadrillion Earths. But because it is so far away, it occupies only a tiny portion of the sky, so we must use a very large, exotic telescope to see it. In fact, the Event Horizon Telescope isn\u2019t a single instrument but a system of eight radio dishes at six far-flung locations in Hawaii, Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile and Antarctica. Astronomers used precise atomic clocks, accurate within a trillionth of a second, to synchronize data from all these places and then stitched it all together using supercomputers.\n\n\n\n\u201cSeeing the black hole image, my mind flashed back to an earlier iconic image, the \u201cEarthrise\u201d captured by Apollo 8.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe concept of a black hole goes back to the 18th century, when the English astronomer-clergyman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Michell\n\n\n\n calculated that a sufficiently large star couldn't shine because light wouldn\u2019t move fast enough to \u201clift off\u201d and escape the star\u2019s gravity. But Michell\u2019s conjecture outran the physics of its time, which didn\u2019t understand light, gravity or stars well enough to support it. \nThe foundations for the modern understanding of black holes weren\u2019t laid until the early 20th century, building on\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n James Clerk Maxwell\u2019s\n\n\n\n theory of electromagnetism and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Albert Einstein\u2019s\n\n\n\n theory of relativity. In 1939,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n J. Robert Oppenheimer\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Hartland Snyder\n\n\n\n wrote \u201cOn Continued Gravitational Contraction,\u201d the most important paper in the history of black holes. They considered what would happen to a dust cloud of any size and uniform density as it collapses through the force of gravity. Observers within the dust cloud would find themselves surrounded by matter, and they would experience a universe broadly resembling our own, which would eventually end in a \u201cbig crunch.\u201d But observers outside the collapsing cloud would see it wink out into a black hole, as gravity at its boundary increases beyond the ability of light\u2014or any form of matter\u2014to escape. \n\n\nOppenheimer and Snyder\u2019s work made it clear that black holes were a plausible outcome of known physical processes. It also makes the astonishing suggestion that a black hole can be a universe and vice versa, differently viewed. I don\u2019t think physics has fully digested this idea, even today. \nIt would be surprising if M87\u2019s black hole revealed fundamentally new physical processes. Such gigantic black holes have low density and exert only weak forces on the outside, albeit on a grand scale. But by comparing and contrasting the central black holes in different galaxies, we will learn about how galaxies form and evolve. Our own Milky Way galaxy also harbors a central, giant black hole, hidden from direct observation by enshrouding dust. \nSeeing the black hole image, my mind flashed back to an earlier iconic image, the \u201cEarthrise\u201d captured by Apollo 8. The black hole is much bigger and more imposing, as a physical object, but also much less complex\u2014not to mention less user-friendly\u2014than our Earth. It\u2019s a wonderful world that is home to both.\nDr. Wilczek is Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004.\n\n\nMore Wilczek\u2019s Universe\n\n\n\n\nWe\u2019re All Still Living in Euclid\u2019s World\nFebruary 4, 2022 \n\n\nThe Models That Made Modern Science\nDecember 30, 2021 \n\n\nThe Cosmic Origins of Silver and Gold\nNovember 24, 2021 \n\n\nWe Are All Cyborgs \nOctober 14, 2021 Physicists have been theorizing about black holes for generations. Now science has made it possible to see one. ",
        "author": "Frank Wilczek"
    },
    {
        "title": "#24: The First Black Hole, The Worst Car Dashboards (WSJ: WSJ Instant Message) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9012",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/instant-message/24-the-first-black-hole-the-worst-car-dashboards/D60737A0-E718-447C-85B1-323C396548BD?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=62",
        "text": " First, the Wall Street Journal's digital science editor Daniela Hernandez joins David, Joanna and Christopher with all details of the first-ever image of a black hole -- and why it's made everyone space and science nerds again. Plus, WSJ's automotive reporter Tim Higgins explains how tech companies are trying to claim new territory: the dashboard of your car. Then, Wiebe Wakker tells David about completing the world's longest electric car journey, making it from the Netherlands to Australia with nothing but the help of strangers (and electricity) along the way. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: May 22, 2021 (WP: National) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9013",
        "date": "2021-05-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-may-22-2021/2021/05/22/fc4a1050-bb05-11eb-a5fe-bb49dc89a248_story.html",
        "text": "Zhurong rover begins exploring on MarsWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightChina became the second nation to deploy a vehicle on the surface of Mars when its solar-powered rover began searching for potential evidence of life. The Zhurong rover started roaming the Red Planet late Saturday morning Beijing time, Chinese authorities said.China is the only country to have successfully orbited, landed and deployed a land vehicle on its debut Mars mission, according to Reuters. Zhurong, which is named after the Chinese god of fire, is equipped with ground-penetrative radar and a topography camera for a mission that is scheduled for 90 days. The Chinese rover is situated on Utopia Planitia, a plain on Mars that scientists see as a relatively smooth spot for a first landing. The United States has previously used the basin to land a mission.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA has operated three rover missions on Mars, as well as a helicopter. The European Space Agency and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, plan to jointly land a rover on Mars next year.\u2014 Katerina Ang2 strong quakes strike overnightChina was jolted by two sizable earthquakes in a 24-hour period, with aftershocks continuing into Saturday.A strong, shallow quake shook southwestern China near the border with Myanmar, killing at least three people and injuring more than two dozen as authorities rushed relief goods including tents to the area. The Yunnan province seismological bureau gave the magnitude of the Friday night quake as 6.4.A second, 7.3-magnitude quake hit early Saturday in the southern part of Qinghai province in central China. While there were no reports of casualties, roads were damaged in Maduo county. Aftershocks continued into Saturday.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressMount Nyiragongo erupts near Goma Lava from a volcanic eruption approached the airport of eastern Congo\u2019s main city of Goma late on Saturday, and the government urged residents to evacuate.As the red glow of Mount Nyiragongo tinged the night sky above the lakeside city of about 2 million, thousands of Goma residents carrying mattresses and other belongings fled the city on foot \u2014 many toward the frontier with Rwanda.Nyiragongo\u2019s last eruption in 2002 killed 250 people and left 120,000 homeless. It is one of the world\u2019s most active volcanoes and is considered among the most dangerous.Rwanda\u2019s Ministry in Charge of Emergency Management said more than 3,500 Congolese have crossed the border. Rwandan state media said they would be lodged in schools and places of worship.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNew fractures were opening in the volcano, letting lava flow south toward the city after initially flowing east toward Rwanda, said Dario Tedesco, a volcanologist based in Goma.\u2014 ReutersLebanese authorities seize 4 tons of hashish: Lebanon has foiled a plot to smuggle 4 tons of hashish from Sidon to the Egyptian port of Alexandria, a presidency statement said. Lebanon's leaders have called for a renewed push against the drugs trade after Saudi Arabia banned imports of Lebanese agricultural produce in April due to smuggling, shutting off a major market for Lebanese farmers. The Saudi ban came after 5.3\u00a0million Captagon pills were found in pomegranate shipments.Story continues below advertisementGerman authorities investigate, condemn rising antisemitism: Police in Germany are investigating a Jewish man's report of being punched in the face and abused with antisemitic language while walking home in Berlin early Saturday. German Chancellor Angela Merkel used her weekly video podcast to condemn anti-Jewish statements heard at protests over the recent fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants. \"Whoever takes hatred of Jews to our streets places himself outside our constitutional order,\" Merkel said.AdvertisementItalian band wins post-pandemic Eurovision: A four-piece band of Italian rockers won the Eurovision Song Contest in the early hours of Sunday, giving one of the countries hit hardest in Europe by the coronavirus pandemic reason to cheer. The music festival was canceled last year amid the pandemic but this year's event in Rotterdam's Ahoy arena, with testing and strict hygiene protocols, was seen as a step toward a post-covid-19 return to live entertainment.\u2014 From news services Chinese rover begins exploring Mars; volcano erupts in eastern Congo World Digest: May 22, 2021",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "An Intrepid Explorer of Mars Falls Silent (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9014",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/opinion/mars-rover-opportunity.html",
        "text": "How the jaunty rover Opportunity captured the world\u2019s imagination. How the jaunty rover Opportunity captured the world\u2019s imagination. Opportunity, formally known as Mars Exploration Rover B but as Oppy to its many friends and admirers, was pronounced dead on Wednesday after a final round of beamed commands, and a farewell broadcast of Billie Holiday\u2019s rendition of \u201cI\u2019ll Be Seeing You,\u201d failed to elicit a response. Oppy was 5,352 Martian days old, a bit more than 15 Earth years, and had worked tirelessly through its long and productive life, despite bouts of amnesia in its later years, before succumbing to an epic summer dust storm last June.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Intrepid Explorer of Mars Falls Silent (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9015",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/opinion/mars-rover-opportunity.html",
        "text": "How the jaunty rover Opportunity captured the world\u2019s imagination. How the jaunty rover Opportunity captured the world\u2019s imagination. Opportunity, formally known as Mars Exploration Rover B but as Oppy to its many friends and admirers, was pronounced dead on Wednesday after a final round of beamed commands, and a farewell broadcast of Billie Holiday\u2019s rendition of \u201cI\u2019ll Be Seeing You,\u201d failed to elicit a response. Oppy was 5,352 Martian days old, a bit more than 15 Earth years, and had worked tirelessly through its long and productive life, despite bouts of amnesia in its later years, before succumbing to an epic summer dust storm last June.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "An Intrepid Explorer of Mars Falls Silent (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9016",
        "date": "2019-02-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/opinion/mars-rover-opportunity.html",
        "text": "How the jaunty rover Opportunity captured the world\u2019s imagination. How the jaunty rover Opportunity captured the world\u2019s imagination. Opportunity, formally known as Mars Exploration Rover B but as Oppy to its many friends and admirers, was pronounced dead on Wednesday after a final round of beamed commands, and a farewell broadcast of Billie Holiday\u2019s rendition of \u201cI\u2019ll Be Seeing You,\u201d failed to elicit a response. Oppy was 5,352 Martian days old, a bit more than 15 Earth years, and had worked tirelessly through its long and productive life, despite bouts of amnesia in its later years, before succumbing to an epic summer dust storm last June.",
        "author": "By The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Shooting for the Moon, and the Country Is Pumped (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9017",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/world/asia/india-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The country\u2019s plans to launch an uncrewed rover into space were delayed at the last moment, but it is determined to join a select group of nations. The country\u2019s plans to launch an uncrewed rover into space were delayed at the last moment, but it is determined to join a select group of nations. NEW DELHI \u2014 It was 10 a.m. on a muggy Delhi day, and it was time for space class.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Shooting for the Moon, and the Country Is Pumped (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9018",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/world/asia/india-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The country\u2019s plans to launch an uncrewed rover into space were delayed at the last moment, but it is determined to join a select group of nations. The country\u2019s plans to launch an uncrewed rover into space were delayed at the last moment, but it is determined to join a select group of nations. NEW DELHI \u2014 It was 10 a.m. on a muggy Delhi day, and it was time for space class.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "India\u2019s Shooting for the Moon, and the Country Is Pumped (NYT: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9019",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/world/asia/india-moon-landing.html",
        "text": "The country\u2019s plans to launch an uncrewed rover into space were delayed at the last moment, but it is determined to join a select group of nations. The country\u2019s plans to launch an uncrewed rover into space were delayed at the last moment, but it is determined to join a select group of nations. NEW DELHI \u2014 It was 10 a.m. on a muggy Delhi day, and it was time for space class.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Seeking Dad, and Alien Life, in a Middle-Grade Novel (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9020",
        "date": "2017-05-11",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/11/books/review/see-you-in-the-cosmos-jack-cheng.html",
        "text": "A quest to connect with alien life turns into a family affair in the middle-grade novel \u201cSee You in the Cosmos.\u201d A quest to connect with alien life turns into a family affair in the middle-grade novel \u201cSee You in the Cosmos.\u201d SEE YOU IN THE COSMOS By Jack Cheng 316 pp. Dial. $16.99. (Middle grade; ages 8 to 12)",
        "author": "By Natalie Standiford"
    },
    {
        "title": "What UFOs can tell us about life on Earth (WP: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9021",
        "date": "2020-04-09",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/what-ufos-can-tell-us-about-life-on-earth/2020/04/09/40d4d6ba-324a-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html",
        "text": "UFO sightings happen in clusters. The same is true of books about UFOs. While clusters of UFO sightings are called \u201cflaps,\u201d there is no similar term for clusters of UFO books. I propose calling them a \u201cSagan\u201d (despite the risk of implying that there are billions and billions of them).WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe 1950s saw one Sagan, with Gray Barker and Frank Scully shaping our idea of flying saucers while skeptics sought to expose them as Barnum-esque bunk-peddlers. Another occurred in the 1970s, with Erich von Daniken and Charles Berlitz pointing to phenomena like the carved stone heads on Easter Island as evidence that ancient astronauts influenced the development of humanity. In the 1990s, Whitley Strieber\u2019s \u201cCommunion,\u201d first published in 1987, ushered in a host of alien abduction books. In each of these Sagans, half the authors required only observed phenomena to believe in extraterrestrial contact, while the skeptics worked to show that the reports were false or had alternative, more likely explanations. We are in the midst of a new Sagan of UFO books that is different and, frankly, more interesting. The central concern in these books is not truth but meaning. UFOlogy is similar in many ways to religion. While writers from Thomas Aquinas to Richard Dawkins argue for and against belief in God, a different approach was taken by William James, who sets aside concern about God\u2019s existence and starts from the fact that people do have religious experiences. Whether or not there is a God, James asks, what does it mean that there are so many who have these transcendent experiences? Sarah Scoles\u2019s \u201cThey Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers,\u201d David J. Halperin\u2019s \u201cIntimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO\u201d and Keith Cooper\u2019s \u201cThe Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence\u201d take a similar approach to the question of UFOs. Maybe we have been visited, maybe not (probably not), but regardless, what does it mean that so many of us have these experiences and beliefs?AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementScoles treats UFOlogy sincerely as a religion replete with congregations and sects, holy sites, sacred texts, and theological debates. A lapsed Mormon, Scoles sees parallels between her religion and UFOlogy, both derived from American culture, not Middle Eastern antiquity. \u201cThey Are Already Here\u201d presents the reader with an exploration of this new religion \u2014 its leaders, schisms and followers \u2014 while reading like a travel narrative. Scoles, often accompanied by her sister, visits Area 51, Roswell, UFO conventions and offbeat roadside attractions. She does not get into Area 51 or provide insider information about government coverups or alien autopsies. Rather, she camps in the vicinity, takes sketchy private tours, gets approached by park rangers and federal agents, gets scared by trucks rumbling by during the night, and chats with lots of people. Her interest is not in supporting or debunking claims, but in understanding the beliefs and the believers.Scoles successfully navigates between otherizing (making people into bizarre, foreign objects) and going native (becoming one of the group observed). She is charitable, treating those she meets as rounded individuals full of hope and pain, not as a motley collection of rubes and charlatans to be mocked. Yet, she maintains her position as an outsider journalist making sense of the intricate stew of conspiracy theory, spectacle and kitsch. Scoles marries a thoughtful objectivity with a warm subjectivity as she talks to serious-minded UFO report investigators, tour guides for ET sightseers, and movers and shakers in the UFOlogy community.Where Scoles is always careful to distance herself from the UFOlogist congregants, Halperin admits to being a lifelong member. Growing up a smart but alienated child with a terminally ill mother in the early 1960s, he buried himself in the world of ETs, full of mystery. He became a professor of religious studies, researching Jewish mysticism \u2014 and realizing that his youthful fascination and professional studies were intertwined.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHalperin considers extraterrestrials to be a myth. But where we commonly use that word to mean a false story, he takes it as a technical term from a Jungian perspective. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung held that there is a universally shared portion of the unconscious mind that connects all people and shows itself in myths: deep-seated mental constructs used to make sense of the world.UFOs, Halperin argues, are such myths. They do not come from space but from the human mind. This does not make them false, he contends; quite the opposite. What they expose about us individually and collectively is, in fact, a much deeper truth.Those who seek to debunk UFO claims focus wrongly on the object of the experience (flying saucers, aliens with large eyes, men in black). But whether or not the object of the experience is real, the experience itself certainly is. Indeed, the experiences are held to be deeply meaningful. We can suspend belief about the object of an experience while honoring the experience itself as worthy of intellectual analysis. Whether aliens have visited Earth or not, what do the commonalities in the experiences of those who have engaged with UFOs say about us?The first promoted story of alien abduction involved Barney and Betty Hill, a mixed-race couple, in 1961. Shortly after an uncomfortable experience with racist ruffians, the Hills claimed, they were abducted by a UFO. Halperin examines the transcripts of the Hills under hypnosis, noting language that uncannily connects to the experiences of enslaved Africans. Could such experiences be buried in the subconscious of those whose ancestors lived through them? Do our UFO experiences allow us to direct away from Earth that which we need to unearth within ourselves?In \u201cThe Contact Paradox,\u201d Cooper approaches the question from the opposite direction. Where Scoles and Halperin look at past claims of extraterrestrial interactions, Cooper looks at those who are seeking them using our best current theories and tools. The editor of Astronomy Now and Astrobiology Magazine, Cooper examines the assumptions and inferences made by the professional researchers engaged in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project. The presuppositions of scientists seeking evidence of life beyond Earth tell us a lot about what we consider the essence of the life-forms doing the looking.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSearching for evidence of extraterrestrial life is trickier than it would seem. Just listen for a signal, we say. But what kind of signal? How do we know if it is a signal? What would be used to send the signal? We think automatically of large radio telescopes, their concave dishes pointing skyward. But what frequency should we monitor looking for non-random noise?Scientists have reasoned that you often find different kinds of life around a water hole, so we should look at the telescopic water hole. Chemical elements emit telltale frequencies when excited. Hydrogen peaks at 1420 MHz and a molecule of hydrogen and oxygen at 1666 MHz. Since the two combine to create water, the radio telescopes keep track of what they hear between those two frequencies \u2014 the water hole. It would make sense if there was someone out there like us trying to contact us.But would the life out there be like us? What other kinds of intelligences could there be? Cooper points out that there are other sorts of intelligences right here on Earth: dolphins, octopi, elephants. We need to understand how they think to broaden our sense of what we might be looking for.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd what has been the result of contact between earthly cultures? Sometimes the interactions are friendly, but often they are exploitative. Should we be afraid of extraterrestrial life? Are we better off not knowing whether there is anyone out there, lest they actually be like us? Cooper weaves together the thoughts of leading scientists, science fiction writers and social scientists to ponder these questions.The great virtue of Cooper\u2019s discussion is that it gives readers a picture of living science. Too often, science is presented as fixed, solved, completed. Cooper shows us scientists disagreeing, presenting and supporting alternative theories, and gives clear discussions of the differing views, letting the science live.So, is there intelligent life beyond Earth? This Sagan of books will not answer that question. But what these three books will do is make you think much more deeply about what such questions mean. If you look into a telescope backward, it becomes a microscope. Looking from both ends can be the source of fascinating insights.UFO Culture and Why We See SaucersBy Sarah ScolesPegasus. 248 pp. $27.95The Hidden Story of the UFO By David J. HalperinStanford. 292 pp. $26Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence By Keith CooperBloomsbury. 336 pp. $28 Three books explore the meanings of alien encounters \u2014 real or otherwise. What UFOs can tell us about life on Earth",
        "author": "Steven Gimbel"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Whimsical Wordsmith Charts a Course Beyond Twitter (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9022",
        "date": "2017-06-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/magazine/a-whimsical-wordsmith-charts-a-course-beyond-twitter.html",
        "text": "Jonny Sun\u2019s online personality \u2014 a sentimental alien \u2014 has attracted a huge following. Now he\u2019s trying to figure out what comes next. Jonny Sun\u2019s online personality \u2014 a sentimental alien \u2014 has attracted a huge following. Now he\u2019s trying to figure out what comes next. There are a few things we should clear up about the Twitter humorist known as \u201cjomny sun.\u201d Although sun\u2019s Twitter bio describes him as an \u201caliebn confuesed abot humamn lamgauge,\u201d and his avatar is a line drawing of a smiling alien in a T-shirt, he is, in fact, a real person, and that really is his name. Also, he knows how to spell.",
        "author": "By Jesse Lichtenstein"
    },
    {
        "title": "Flying Saucers and Other Fairy Tales (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9023",
        "date": "2017-12-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/opinion/alien-encounters-christmas-ufo.html",
        "text": "Why ancient folklore might tell us more than federal research about alien encounters. Why ancient folklore might tell us more than federal research about alien encounters. I am completely in favor of federal spending on U.F.O. research, an outlay whose existence was revealed to surprisingly little paranoid excitement by this newspaper last week. It is a sign of civilizational health to devote excess dollars to the scientific fringe, and to hope that bizarre secrets still await discovery even in our satellite-surveilled world. So good for Harry Reid and his little-green-men-obsessed billionaire pal for keeping the flame of weird curiosity alive.",
        "author": "By Ross Douthat"
    },
    {
        "title": "Beyond the Drag Event Horizon (NYT: Style) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9024",
        "date": "2017-12-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/style/drag-queens-are-goth.html",
        "text": "Filthy scary alien monster cyborg goth drag is in the club. Filthy scary alien monster cyborg goth drag is in the club. In six-inch platform stiletto boots, corset and Elizabethan collar, a tall and thin figure towered over the crowd like an alien monarch.",
        "author": "By Eileen Townsend"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: First Impressions (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9025",
        "date": "2020-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-first-impressions-11601649541?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=36",
        "text": "Just to stress the implausibility of what\u2019s happened, Mr. Paolini made his name with \u201cEragon,\u201d a dragon-fantasy written when he was a teenager; he followed that with three sequels in the same world. Switching from sci-fi to fantasy is familiar enough\u2014think George R.R. Martin. Sci-fi fans mutter, though, that with elves and dragons, you can just make it up as you go along. (\u201cQuarter the work, 10 times the money,\u201d as one such genre-switcher is reported to have said.) But if you\u2019re going to do proper science fiction, you\u2019re operating within constraints: what\u2019s known, what\u2019s possible, what\u2019s theorized. Readers will wonder, has Mr. Paolini done his homework? \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThey need not. The appendices at the back of the book set up a timeline\u2014as important in future fiction as a map is for fantasy\u2014but these supporting materials also offer a rationalization about faster-than-light travel, based on a unified field theory yet to be discovered. These provide the constraints of the story, and lead on to a discussion of space combat, which is not as simple as it might look in \u201cStar Wars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThat\u2019s all built in from the start of the story, but that start takes place with a character named Kira, on a moon in a star-system far from Earth, who makes First Contact with aliens by falling into an abandoned artifact. That sets off an alien alarm, and right away First Contact has turned into First Combat. The extra twist, though, is that Kira now has alien in her, a nano-presence she calls Soft Blade. And this being is not a creation of the attacking aliens, the Jellies, or of the Nightmares who soon follow them. (There are several sides in this combat, and Kira is poised between them all.)\n\n\nThe key for Kira may well be the Staff of Blue, and her alien sensorium knows where it is. But looking for it draws in the Old Ones, who made the Staff (and were responsible for the Jellies and the Nightmares as well). Mr. Paolini keeps reaching deeper and deeper, slowly uncovering the history and nature of each alien group.\nFirst Contact is an old theme in sci-fi, and the Nightmares recall Fred Saberhagen\u2019s life-hating Berserkers, as the Old Ones do Larry Niven\u2019s Thrintun. Arthur C. Clarke\u2019s \u201c2001\u201d also included the idea of an alien trip-wire\u2014the black monolith on the Moon. Mr. Paolini\u2019s reading seems to have gone well beyond sci-fi classics, however. Undset Station? Is that a nod to the author of the Norwegian epic \u201cKristin Lavransdatter\u201d? Jeeves and Wooster fans also will be delighted to learn of Fink-Nottle\u2019s Pious Newt Emporium. Fans of all kinds, one can be sure, will come to question, and stay to explore.\n\n\nRead More: Fall Books\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Greg Newbold for The Wall Street Journal From the author of \u2018Eragon,\u2019 a star-spanning epic of alien contact and combat. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "Science Fiction: First Impressions (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9026",
        "date": "2020-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/science-fiction-first-impressions-11601649541?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=46",
        "text": "Just to stress the implausibility of what\u2019s happened, Mr. Paolini made his name with \u201cEragon,\u201d a dragon-fantasy written when he was a teenager; he followed that with three sequels in the same world. Switching from sci-fi to fantasy is familiar enough\u2014think George R.R. Martin. Sci-fi fans mutter, though, that with elves and dragons, you can just make it up as you go along. (\u201cQuarter the work, 10 times the money,\u201d as one such genre-switcher is reported to have said.) But if you\u2019re going to do proper science fiction, you\u2019re operating within constraints: what\u2019s known, what\u2019s possible, what\u2019s theorized. Readers will wonder, has Mr. Paolini done his homework? \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThey need not. The appendices at the back of the book set up a timeline\u2014as important in future fiction as a map is for fantasy\u2014but these supporting materials also offer a rationalization about faster-than-light travel, based on a unified field theory yet to be discovered. These provide the constraints of the story, and lead on to a discussion of space combat, which is not as simple as it might look in \u201cStar Wars.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nThat\u2019s all built in from the start of the story, but that start takes place with a character named Kira, on a moon in a star-system far from Earth, who makes First Contact with aliens by falling into an abandoned artifact. That sets off an alien alarm, and right away First Contact has turned into First Combat. The extra twist, though, is that Kira now has alien in her, a nano-presence she calls Soft Blade. And this being is not a creation of the attacking aliens, the Jellies, or of the Nightmares who soon follow them. (There are several sides in this combat, and Kira is poised between them all.)\n\n\nThe key for Kira may well be the Staff of Blue, and her alien sensorium knows where it is. But looking for it draws in the Old Ones, who made the Staff (and were responsible for the Jellies and the Nightmares as well). Mr. Paolini keeps reaching deeper and deeper, slowly uncovering the history and nature of each alien group.\nFirst Contact is an old theme in sci-fi, and the Nightmares recall Fred Saberhagen\u2019s life-hating Berserkers, as the Old Ones do Larry Niven\u2019s Thrintun. Arthur C. Clarke\u2019s \u201c2001\u201d also included the idea of an alien trip-wire\u2014the black monolith on the Moon. Mr. Paolini\u2019s reading seems to have gone well beyond sci-fi classics, however. Undset Station? Is that a nod to the author of the Norwegian epic \u201cKristin Lavransdatter\u201d? Jeeves and Wooster fans also will be delighted to learn of Fink-Nottle\u2019s Pious Newt Emporium. Fans of all kinds, one can be sure, will come to question, and stay to explore.\n\n\nRead More: Fall Books\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Greg Newbold for The Wall Street Journal From the author of \u2018Eragon,\u2019 a star-spanning epic of alien contact and combat. ",
        "author": "Tom Shippey"
    },
    {
        "title": "In the Series \u2018Devs,\u2019 a Sci-Fi Muse Tackles a Tech Drama (WSJ: Television) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9027",
        "date": "2020-03-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-the-series-devs-a-sci-fi-muse-tackles-a-tech-drama-11583347014?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=47",
        "text": "Ms. Mizuno, a former ballerina, says she can only guess why she emerged as a sort of muse of the uncanny, including in a music video for electronic duo the Chemical Brothers that finds her transforming into a cyborg as she dances. \u201cI think there\u2019s maybe a strangeness about me,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s suited to worlds that have these mind-bending spaces.\u201d\n\n\n\n\nSix years after leaving a career in dance, Ms. Mizuno now appears in a sci-fi story rooted in heady arguments about determinism vs. free will. In \u201cDevs,\u201d an eight-episode TV series premiering Thursday, Ms. Mizuno plays Lily Chan, a software engineer desperate to learn the purpose of a secret development project within the tech company she works for. \n\nFX will release weekly episodes of \u2018Devs\u2019 on the cable network\u2019s new streaming TV hub called FX on Hulu. \u201cDevs\u201d is the third release Ms. Mizuno has worked on with Alex Garland, who wrote and directed the TV series. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nNick Offerman, who plays a tech titan, with Ms. Mizuno in \u2018Devs.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n FX\n \n\n\n\nIn discussing her science fiction roles, the half-Japanese actor touches on the genre\u2019s history of exoticism and \u201cthe way that Asians have been perceived as futuristic\u201d by Hollywood. Though such stereotypes have receded, she says, Asian actors are still underrepresented in leading roles across genres. The growing number of exceptions to that includes the hit movie \u201cCrazy Rich Asians,\u201d which featured Ms. Mizuno in one of her non sci-fi roles, as the bride in over-the-top wedding proceedings in Singapore.\nOver the years, Ms. Mizuno and Mr. Garland say, they have discussed their industry\u2019s need for more Asian actors in leading roles. However, her role in \u201cDevs\u201d wasn\u2019t guaranteed. The director says many actors\u2014all of Asian descent\u2014were considered for the role of Lily, and narrowed down to a final four who auditioned for the part.\n\u201cI try to go into other auditions with the mind-set that the job is not mine anyway, so it\u2019s not a big deal if I don\u2019t get it,\u201d she says. \u201cWith this one I knew what it meant to get the job. I felt like I had something to lose.\u201d \nIt\u2019s the 33-year-old actor\u2019s first leading role. And, unlike some of her previous supporting characters who were wordless or otherworldly, Ms. Mizuno\u2019s protagonist in \u201cDevs\u201d goes through painfully human emotions as she struggles to solve a mystery that causes many casualties around her. \n\u201cEx Machina,\u201d released in 2015, was the directorial debut for Mr. Garland, a British novelist-turned-screenwriter, and Ms. Mizuno\u2019s debut as an actor. She played an automaton who turns on her creator, and co-starred with Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander. In the second movie directed by Mr. Garland, \u201cAnnihilation,\u201d Ms. Mizuno was unrecognizable as a humanoid whose movements grotesquely mirror those of its prey, a character played by Natalie Portman. \nWhile Ms. Mizuno\u2019s grounding in dance helped shape some of her earliest screen performances, her physical presence is only one aspect of what sets her apart from other actors, Mr. Garland says: \u201cIn the vibe she projects, she\u2019s atypical and she\u2019s got a different energy.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBorn in Tokyo to a Japanese father and an English-Argentine mother, Ms. Mizuno was raised in England after her parents divorced. From ages 9 to 20 she trained at the Royal Ballet School in London, then danced professionally with the English National Ballet and companies in Germany and Scotland. She quit the Scottish Ballet in order to go shoot \u201cEx Machina.\u201d She had been offered a minor part in the movie, but didn\u2019t yet know that she would be promoted to the supporting role of Kyoko, who shares a memorable dance routine with Mr. Isaac\u2019s character.\n\u201cI had to get on that plane and I knew that nothing else was waiting for me after \u2018Ex Machina,\u2019 but I still knew it was the right thing to do,\u201d Ms. Mizuno recalls.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMs. Mizuno and Justin Theroux in \u2018Maniac.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Netflix\n \n\n\n\nIn \u201cDevs,\u201d the explosion of Lily\u2019s life is caused by the disappearance of her coder boyfriend (Karl Glusman). He disappears shortly after joining an elite division within a Bay Area tech company overseen by a shaggy visionary (Nick Offerman) and his lieutenant (Alison Pill). The project leads to multiple murders and a corporate conspiracy involving big data. Despite such thriller elements the series is often quiet and hypnotic, and revolves around philosophical questions and quantum physics. \nMr. Garland says his production crew accentuated the \u201cinbuilt oddness\u201d of Lily\u2019s character in Ms. Mizuno\u2019s look in \u201cDevs\u201d: hair cropped short, a lack of makeup, simple unisex outfits, often in white. \u201cAll that is to project a kind of protagonist that people feel unfamiliar with and think, \u2018I don\u2019t know how this one works,\u2019\u201d the director says. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWith longevity as her prevailing career goal, Ms. Mizuno says she is looking to do theater, and for more characters dealing with \u201ceveryday circumstances\u201d beyond sci fi. Mr. Garland says he plans to reassemble the cast and crew members of \u201cDevs\u201d for another TV series featuring a different title and premise. He says he has already written two episodes, so a return to the genre for Ms. Mizuno could be predetermined. \nWrite to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com\n\n\nShare Your ThoughtsWhat upcoming sci-fi projects are you looking forward to seeing this year and why? Join the conversation below. Sonoya Mizuno has played a robot, an alien and other uncanny characters. In the new FX series, the half-Japanese actress is on ",
        "author": "John Jurgensen"
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars? These Tubes Are Critical to Finding Answers (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9028",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/daniela-hernandez/life-on-mars-these-tubes-are-critical-to-finding-answers/38923BB5-61C2-4825-928E-0F0F1B4C1A59?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=14",
        "text": " Humanity has been on a long-running hunt for answers to the question: are we alone in the universe? Now, scientists have a new, unassuming tool to help them figure out if there\u2019s alien life. WSJ\u2019s Daniela Hernandez explains. Illustration: Sebastian Vega/WSJ ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Life on Mars? These Tubes Are Critical to Finding Answers (WSJ: section n/a) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9029",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/video/series/daniela-hernandez/life-on-mars-these-tubes-are-critical-to-finding-answers/38923BB5-61C2-4825-928E-0F0F1B4C1A59?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=20",
        "text": " Humanity has been on a long-running hunt for answers to the question: are we alone in the universe? Now, scientists have a new, unassuming tool to help them figure out if there\u2019s alien life. WSJ\u2019s Daniela Hernandez explains. Illustration: Sebastian Vega/WSJ ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Looking Anew at Contemporary Art at the Rubell Museum (WSJ: Art Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9030",
        "date": "2020-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/looking-anew-at-contemporary-art-at-the-rubell-museum-11581159600?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=59",
        "text": "Not enough praise can be lavished, then, on the recently opened Rubell Museum, which bucks that trend with truly stunning results. Spread across six former industrial buildings reimagined by Selldorf Architects, the 100,000-square-foot campus in the Allapattah neighborhood takes over as the home for the collection of Mera and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Don Rubell,\n\n\n\n which had been located at a former DEA warehouse in nearby Wynwood since 1993.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMera and Don Rubell\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Rubell Museum\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe couple\u2019s art interests began humbly, when they started setting aside $25 a week from Ms. Rubell\u2019s salary as a teacher. In 1965 they acquired their first work, a painting by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ira Kaufman,\n\n\n\n and since then the collection has grown to include over 7,200 pieces by more than 1,000 artists, offering a broad view of the contemporary world, from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cindy Sherman\u2019s\n\n\n\n iconic early photography to 3-D printed sculptures by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Josh Kline.\n\n\n\n \n\nMore impressive than those numbers, though, is the discernment that they\u2019ve evinced in their acquisitions, an eye and knowledge of art that\u2019s on full display here across nearly 300 works by over 100 artists in 40 galleries. Even better is the fact that they have created an institution\u2014not a word lightly applied to a fledgling museum\u2014that elevates visitors, taking them and the work seriously, refusing to hand-hold but encouraging a true experience with art.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nYayoi Kusama\u2019s \u2018Infinity Mirrored Room\u2014Let's Survive Forever\u2019 (2017)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Yayoi Kusama/Rubell Museum\n \n\n\n\nOne of the first things you\u2019ll notice at the new Rubell is, paradoxically, what isn\u2019t there. \u201cWhat is this?\u201d asks a brief wall text near the entrance. \u201cThe simple answer is that this is a collection of contemporary art.\u201d From that point, the tone is set: We are expected to see, think and judge for ourselves\u2014not be explained to. Text is nearly nonexistent; beside the labels, with name/title/date, almost all the information here is casual in tone and comes from artists themselves: notes on the creative process, diaristic recollections surrounding a piece\u2019s making, memories of the Rubells. Here, visitors are invited to be part of the imaginative cosmos of art instead of outsiders looking in.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\nJeff Koons\u2019s \u2018New Hoover Convertible\u2019 (1980)\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jeff Koons Studio/Rubell Museum\n \n\n\n\nDespite the lack of explicit guidance when it comes to individual works and entire galleries, spaces can generally be sorted into those dedicated to one artist and those exploring one theme. Any doubts about this laissez-faire curatorial approach are washed away after the first few galleries. We draw connections between pieces and establish frameworks for each room because we want to, not because we are told to.\u2028\nFor example, an early gallery can be seen to deal with black experience, its most impressive works the plaster-based sculptures of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Karon Davis\n\n\n\n and the massive 12-panel colored woodcut by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Kerry James Marshall.\n\n\n\n Ms. Davis\u2019s \u201cBeth and Solomon\u201d (2018) has a base reminiscent of flowing water, with a waist-deep figure holding the hand of another person who\u2019s submerged to his shins. A grand tension\u2014is the former trying to pull the other back into the depths, or vice versa?\u2014contrasts starkly with the domestic scene of calm that plays out, panel by panel, in the interior of a high-rise in Mr. Marshall\u2019s untitled work of 1998-99.\u00a0\u2028\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA gallery with sculptures by\u00a0Thomas Houseago and\u00a0George Condo\u2019s \u2018Big Reclining Nude\u2019 (1988), among other works\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Chi Lam/Rubell Museum\n \n\n\n\nThe best of these thematic spaces is the one dedicated to shape and the human form. Walking into the gallery is diving into a pool of pink and beige and mocha, all sensual curves and bony angles. George Condo\u2019s \u201cBig Reclining Nude\u201d (1988) is all about geometry, rendering shapes sexy\u2014wide hips, thin waist, flaunting.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Houseago\u2019s\n\n\n\n 2006 group of monochromatic Tuf-Cal sculptures at the center of the room also mix sharp edges with rounded bulges, but in a way that embodies the ache of joints, cartilage and tendons. We\u2019re surrounded by ideas about the body that remind us that pleasure and pain are born of the same flesh.\u2028\nArtist-focused galleries are equally impressive. The portraits by Ghanaian painter\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Amoako Boafo,\n\n\n\n the Rubell\u2019s 2019 artist in residence, have loosely painted faces that are hyper-expressive, underscoring the posturing of their flat, patterned or monochromatic, torsos. The combinations make the people in his portraits vibrate. He\u2019s fully earned his rising-star status on the contemporary scene. A smaller room with\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neo Rauch\u2019s\n\n\n\n oversize w At the recently opened Rubell Museum, visitors are invited to be part of the creative cosmos of art instead of outsiders looking in. ",
        "author": "Brian P. Kelly"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Fundamentals\u2019 Review: The Simplicity of Abundance (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9031",
        "date": "2021-01-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/fundamentals-review-the-simplicity-of-abundance-11611183509?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=30",
        "text": "Within this guild,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frank Wilczek\n\n\n\n enjoys a singular distinction. In 2004 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, with two other scientists, for his contribution to quantum chromodynamics\u2014a theory about the strong interaction between certain subatomic particles. In the past year, for the first time, scientists observed the anyon, a quasi-particle whose existence Mr. Wilczek proposed nearly 40 years ago. In addition to conducting his research, he writes for the general public: magazine articles and popular books (e.g., 2015\u2019s \u201cA Beautiful Question\u201d)\u2014and, of course, a monthly column for The Wall Street Journal called Wilczek\u2019s Universe.\nIn \u201cFundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality,\u201d Mr. Wilczek presents an approachable introduction to modern physics, taking pains to address readers who are curious about, but unfamiliar with, our current understanding of the universe. He aspires to convey the central findings of cosmology and quantum mechanics, among much else, as simply and accurately as possible. \n\n\n\n\nThe narrative is, at times, remarkably personal. As always, Mr. Wilczek\u2019s prose pulses with enthusiasm for its subject. But \u201cFundamentals\u201d is somehow more intimate, an exercise that \u201cbegan as an exposition but grew into a contemplation.\u201d Writing it, he notes, \u201cchanged my perception of the world.\u201d \n\n\nThe book is structured around 10 longstanding questions and addresses each by way of modern physics. Along the way, Mr. Wilczek investigates the nature of time and space, the qualities of matter and energy, and the origins and likely endings of cosmic history. Each chapter describes the current state of knowledge, the ways in which the information came to be discovered, and the possible direction of future research. Our understanding of the physical world, he makes clear, is dynamic rather than static: ever shifting and growing. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nFundamentals: Ten Keys to RealityBy Frank Wilczek\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPenguin Press, 254 pages, $26\n\n\nThroughout, Mr. Wilczek returns to the theme of abundance. Centuries of scientific investigation, he says, have revealed a universe so vast as to defy our imagination. The Earth\u2019s radius is around 4,000 miles, roughly the distance from New York to Stockholm\u2014or a billionth of a light year (the distance light travels in a year). The universe, by contrast, stretches across many billions of light years. Time, too, is seemingly abundant. Humankind began to emerge around 300,000 years ago, so the history of Homo sapiens is but a tiny fraction of our planet\u2019s roughly five billion years.\nBut immensity is not merely outward. As Mr. Wilczek notes, every person contains an inner vastness. The human body consists of some 10 octillion atoms (think of \u201c1\u201d followed by 28 zeroes), an amount roughly a million times larger than the number of stars in the visible universe. And while a human lifetime is dwarfed by the age of the cosmos, it is long enough for the brain to process about 100 billion distinct moments of consciousness. The daunting scale of the universe, Mr. Wilczek suggests, can be met with the comforting reassurance of our own internal grandeur. \nAnd yet, despite such abundance, the universe is surprisingly uniform. Physical laws obtain equally through all of the cosmos. At the subatomic level, the elementary particles of matter are the same on Earth as they are in the farthest galaxies. And they are not themselves abundant. Electrons, photons, gluons and two types of quarks: These are the five elementary particles that make up all of the matter we experience in our day-to-day lives. In Mr. Wilczek\u2019s pithy formula, there are \u201cvery few ingredients.\u201d\nLearning to see the universe as a physicist, Mr. Wilczek says, requires one to be \u201cborn again, in the way of science.\u201d Our ordinary intuitions about the physical world, while sufficient for mundane purposes, fail us when we perceive time, matter and energy at the smallest and largest scales. To understand atoms, or astronomy, it is necessary to construct new models for understanding reality. In this sense, the intellect must be re-born, and the mind must begin anew. \nBut Mr. Wilczek\u2019s call for rebirth involves another sense, one closer to a spiritual awakening. \u201cIn studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is,\u201d he writes. \u201cIn that spirit, we can interpret the search for knowledge as a form of worship, and our discoveries as revelations.\u201d This spiritual sensibility suffuses \u201cFundamentals.\u201d Mr. Wilczek was raised in the Catholic Church, and he expresses gratitude for the feeling of cosmic grandeur and hidden meaning it imparted to him. Today he describes himself as a pantheist. To such a mind, the universe is identical to the divine: There is no distinction between God and the cosmos. Little wonder that he always capitalizes the word \u201cNature.\u201d \nMr. Wilczek closes with a meditation on complementarity. Viewed from multiple perspectives, a single object may be perceived as having inconsistent, even contradictory, properties. It is an important\u2014and mathematically validated\u2014principle of quantum mechanics. Mr. Wilczek believes that the principle can be applied to other domains. \u201cWhy not,\u201d he asks, \u201cbring this spirit to supposed conflicts between art and science, or philosophy and science, or religion A and religion B, or religion and science?\u201d Although science has revealed the fundamental structures and laws of the physical world, it doesn\u2019t contain the sum total of all possible human knowledge. \u201cIt can be illuminating,\u201d Mr. Wilczek concludes, \u201cto look at the world in different ways.\u201d\nMr. Levenick is the director of public engagement at the John Templeton Foundation. The cosmos is so vast as to defy the imagination. So too the atomic realm, with its inner vastness. Yet the \u2018ingredients\u2019 are few. ",
        "author": "Christopher Levenick"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coldplay\u2019s \u2018Music of the Spheres\u2019 Review: An Over-the-Top Cosmic Lovefest (WSJ: Music Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9032",
        "date": "2021-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/music-of-the-spheres-review-an-over-the-top-cosmic-lovefest-coldplay-chris-martin-selena-gomez-we-are-king-max-martin-higher-power-parachutes-everyday-life-11634588857?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=20",
        "text": "The new LP comes with its own cosmology\u2014the cover features an arrangement of planets, moons and satellites in a solar system, each corresponding to a song. In May, the band even introduced a single, \u201cHigher Power,\u201d on the International Space Station. But while the record\u2019s content is connected to the wonders of the universe as uncovered by science, producer Max Martin (no relationship to Chris) is the man who handles the logistics. The Swedish song doctor, with a huge string of hits stretching from Britney Spears\u2019s 1998 single \u201c. . . Baby One More Time\u201d to the Weeknd\u2019s 2020 No. 1 \u201cBlinding Lights,\u201d is known for bringing mathematical precision to music-making. With Max Martin in charge, you can be sure that every chorus will explode at the optimal moment to maximize its impact on the pop listener\u2019s pleasure center. \nThat said, while there are singles here with the broad gestures necessary for chart success, there\u2019s a progressive rock undercurrent, with instrumental interludes that connect the songs and give the record a cinematic bent. One of these, \u201cMusic of the Spheres I,\u201d opens the album, setting the tone with a gurgling synthesizer pattern and a robotic voice speaking the record\u2019s title. This ambient teaser fades into \u201cHigher Power,\u201d which has a towering and undeniable chorus that introduces the LP\u2019s primary theme: Love is ultimately the binding force in the universe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Music of the Spheres\u2019 album cover\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Atlantic Records\n \n\n\n\nBy the time the following track, the equally anthemic \u201cHumankind,\u201d kicks in, the album has reached escape velocity. On the page, the latter\u2019s lyrics are muddled and a little silly\u2014\u201cA DJ a star away is / Playing it to turn us on\u201d goes an early line, while the chorus answers with \u201cI know I know I know / We\u2019re only human / But from another planet / Still they call us Humankind\u201d\u2014but the musical structure is perfectly designed for stadium singalongs. \n\nThe instrumental \u201cAlien Choir\u201d is one of five of the record\u2019s songs titled with emojis (the written titles are shared elsewhere but don\u2019t appear on the sleeve or on most streaming platforms). These include an image of Saturn for the opening track, a heart for \u201cHuman Heart,\u201d and an infinity sign for a track late in the set. Something about this gesture feels a little awkward and possibly even desperate, as if Coldplay were worried about becoming a band for old people that today\u2019s kids wouldn\u2019t understand. And to an extent, this anxiety extends to the record\u2019s choice of guests. \nThe best outside contribution comes from R&B duo We Are King on \u201cHuman Heart,\u201d an a cappella number that combines layered harmonies with digital processing to sound ancient and futuristic simultaneously. Singer Selena Gomez appears on \u201cLet Somebody Go,\u201d a cloying ballad that is among the record\u2019s worst tracks, and superstar Korean boy band BTS guests on the explosive single \u201cMy Universe,\u201d which, fueled by that group\u2019s devout fans, has already topped the Billboard Hot 100. Despite energetic singing and rapping from BTS, \u201cMy Universe\u201d is mostly an excuse for its massive and indelible chorus. It\u2019s alternately compelling and annoying, driving home how the LP is hampered by its marriage of relentless positivity and over-the-top sonics.\nThere\u2019s beauty in this music\u2014the mix of rock instrumentation and electronics can be stunning, bringing to mind the production mastery of Tame Impala. But there\u2019s remarkably little tension. In the world of this record, problems have already been solved, and there\u2019s no real messiness or uncertainty. This interstellar fantasy grows numbing as the record runs on. It doesn\u2019t help that the bad songs here are really bad\u2014\u201cPeople of the Pride,\u201d a cringe-inducing number about corrupt leaders that is propelled by a dull glam-rock guitar line, is perhaps the worst offender. \u201cBiutyful,\u201d a \u201cForever Young\u201d-like wish for the future happiness of a loved one, erases its pleasant message when Chris Martin duets with an annoyingly cartoonish pitched-up version of his own voice.\nThe instrumental \u201cInfinity Sign\u201d bleeds into the 10-minute closer \u201cColoratura,\u201d a wonderfully constructed epic offering a vision of paradise (\u201cIt\u2019s the end of death and doubt / And loneliness is out\u201d) that hints at the better record that could have been. It sounds like something that might provide the soundtrack at a light show in a planetarium, moving through pulsing synths and washes of drone while a proper song surfaces and then retreats. Coldplay\u2019s mission is seemingly to connect with as many people as possible\u2014it didn\u2019t become one of the biggest rock bands on the planet by accident\u2014and some of the singles here, goosed by Max Martin\u2019s ear for mass appeal, will surely further that goal. But there are moments of musical and textural invention on \u201cMusic of the Spheres\u201d that one wishes were built out further. Perhaps one day they will be, on a future Coldplay concept album that avoids the most obvious choices. \n\u2014Mr. Richardson is The band\u2019s new album takes the cosmos as its latest concept, but the interstellar lovefest grows numbing as the record runs on ",
        "author": "Mark Richardson"
    },
    {
        "title": "Coldplay\u2019s \u2018Music of the Spheres\u2019 Review: An Over-the-Top Cosmic Lovefest (WSJ: Music Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9033",
        "date": "2021-10-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/music-of-the-spheres-review-an-over-the-top-cosmic-lovefest-coldplay-chris-martin-selena-gomez-we-are-king-max-martin-higher-power-parachutes-everyday-life-11634588857?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=14",
        "text": "The new LP comes with its own cosmology\u2014the cover features an arrangement of planets, moons and satellites in a solar system, each corresponding to a song. In May, the band even introduced a single, \u201cHigher Power,\u201d on the International Space Station. But while the record\u2019s content is connected to the wonders of the universe as uncovered by science, producer Max Martin (no relationship to Chris) is the man who handles the logistics. The Swedish song doctor, with a huge string of hits stretching from Britney Spears\u2019s 1998 single \u201c. . . Baby One More Time\u201d to the Weeknd\u2019s 2020 No. 1 \u201cBlinding Lights,\u201d is known for bringing mathematical precision to music-making. With Max Martin in charge, you can be sure that every chorus will explode at the optimal moment to maximize its impact on the pop listener\u2019s pleasure center. \nThat said, while there are singles here with the broad gestures necessary for chart success, there\u2019s a progressive rock undercurrent, with instrumental interludes that connect the songs and give the record a cinematic bent. One of these, \u201cMusic of the Spheres I,\u201d opens the album, setting the tone with a gurgling synthesizer pattern and a robotic voice speaking the record\u2019s title. This ambient teaser fades into \u201cHigher Power,\u201d which has a towering and undeniable chorus that introduces the LP\u2019s primary theme: Love is ultimately the binding force in the universe.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Music of the Spheres\u2019 album cover\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Atlantic Records\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBy the time the following track, the equally anthemic \u201cHumankind,\u201d kicks in, the album has reached escape velocity. On the page, the latter\u2019s lyrics are muddled and a little silly\u2014\u201cA DJ a star away is / Playing it to turn us on\u201d goes an early line, while the chorus answers with \u201cI know I know I know / We\u2019re only human / But from another planet / Still they call us Humankind\u201d\u2014but the musical structure is perfectly designed for stadium singalongs. \n\nThe instrumental \u201cAlien Choir\u201d is one of five of the record\u2019s songs titled with emojis (the written titles are shared elsewhere but don\u2019t appear on the sleeve or on most streaming platforms). These include an image of Saturn for the opening track, a heart for \u201cHuman Heart,\u201d and an infinity sign for a track late in the set. Something about this gesture feels a little awkward and possibly even desperate, as if Coldplay were worried about becoming a band for old people that today\u2019s kids wouldn\u2019t understand. And to an extent, this anxiety extends to the record\u2019s choice of guests. \nThe best outside contribution comes from R&B duo We Are King on \u201cHuman Heart,\u201d an a cappella number that combines layered harmonies with digital processing to sound ancient and futuristic simultaneously. Singer Selena Gomez appears on \u201cLet Somebody Go,\u201d a cloying ballad that is among the record\u2019s worst tracks, and superstar Korean boy band BTS guests on the explosive single \u201cMy Universe,\u201d which, fueled by that group\u2019s devout fans, has already topped the Billboard Hot 100. Despite energetic singing and rapping from BTS, \u201cMy Universe\u201d is mostly an excuse for its massive and indelible chorus. It\u2019s alternately compelling and annoying, driving home how the LP is hampered by its marriage of relentless positivity and over-the-top sonics.\nThere\u2019s beauty in this music\u2014the mix of rock instrumentation and electronics can be stunning, bringing to mind the production mastery of Tame Impala. But there\u2019s remarkably little tension. In the world of this record, problems have already been solved, and there\u2019s no real messiness or uncertainty. This interstellar fantasy grows numbing as the record runs on. It doesn\u2019t help that the bad songs here are really bad\u2014\u201cPeople of the Pride,\u201d a cringe-inducing number about corrupt leaders that is propelled by a dull glam-rock guitar line, is perhaps the worst offender. \u201cBiutyful,\u201d a \u201cForever Young\u201d-like wish for the future happiness of a loved one, erases its pleasant message when Chris Martin duets with an annoyingly cartoonish pitched-up version of his own voice.\nThe instrumental \u201cInfinity Sign\u201d bleeds into the 10-minute closer \u201cColoratura,\u201d a wonderfully constructed epic offering a vision of paradise (\u201cIt\u2019s the end of death and doubt / And loneliness is out\u201d) that hints at the better record that could have been. It sounds like something that might provide the soundtrack at a light show in a planetarium, moving through pulsing synths and washes of drone while a proper song surfaces and then retreats. Coldplay\u2019s mission is seemingly to connect with as many people as possible\u2014it didn\u2019t become one of the biggest rock bands on the planet by accident\u2014and some of the singles here, goosed by Max Martin\u2019s ear for mass appeal, will surely further that goal. But there are moments of musical and textural invention on \u201cMusic of the Spheres\u201d that one wishes were built out further. Perhaps one day they will be, on a future Coldplay concept album that avoids the most obvious choices. \n\u2014Mr. Richardson is the Journal\u2019s rock and pop music critic. Follow him on Twitter @MarkRichardson. The band\u2019s new album takes the cosmos as its latest concept, but the interstellar lovefest grows numbing as the record runs on ",
        "author": "Mark Richardson"
    },
    {
        "title": "A Dispatch From Outer Space (NYT: Podcasts) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9034",
        "date": "2020-07-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/podcasts/daily-newsletter-NASA-space-coronavirus.html",
        "text": "A producer reflects on his childhood dream coming true on The Daily\u2019s interstellar phone call. A producer reflects on his childhood dream coming true on The Daily\u2019s interstellar phone call. Space, for the most part, is silent. The airless voids between galaxies are scattered with star dust \u2014 tiny molecules incapable of carrying sound waves through the dark.",
        "author": "By Robert Jimison"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review: This \u2018Elephant Room\u2019 Sequel Is a Goofball Epic (NYT: Theater) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9035",
        "date": "2020-09-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/theater/elephant-room-dust-from-the-stars-review.html",
        "text": "The interstellar adventure deftly mixes the lo-fi aesthetics of budget science fiction with dopey humor and experimental theater\u2019s sensibility. The interstellar adventure deftly mixes the lo-fi aesthetics of budget science fiction with dopey humor and experimental theater\u2019s sensibility. If even the mildest, most intimate play struggles to translate online, you\u2019d think a comic interstellar adventure would be impossible to pull off. And yet.",
        "author": "By Elisabeth Vincentelli"
    },
    {
        "title": "Failure to Launch: India\u2019s Second Moon Shot Is Delayed (WSJ: India) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9036",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-second-moon-shot-delayed-by-snag-11563201250?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=53",
        "text": "\u201cA technical snag was observed in launch vehicle system at 1 hour before the launch. As a measure of abundant precaution, #Chandrayaan2 launch has been called off for today,\u201d the Indian Space Research Organization said in a tweet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivek Singh,\n\n\n\n ISRO\u2019s media director, said engineers were looking into the problem and a new launch date would be set in the next few days.\n\n\nThe mission had been scheduled to arrive on the moon on Sept. 6. When it finally arrives, the rover is to spend 14 days carrying out experiments on the surface, analyzing minerals and the topography. \nThe mission will also look for evidence of water molecules, which could exist in areas that are permanently shadowed in the southern pole, ISRO said. The orbiter is set to be operational for a year.\nIndia\u2019s second lunar mission is the latest effort in the country\u2019s ambitious space program. It follows the success of its first, Chandrayaan 1, which was launched in 2008, orbited the moon about 3,200 times and confirmed the presence of water molecules on the surface.\nIn 2014, ISRO successfully put a space probe into orbit around Mars. That mission cost $74 million, compared with the $828 million the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent on a rover for its Mars program. NASA has launched several Mars missions.\nISRO\u2019s latest mission costs 9 billion rupees ($130 million), according to the agency, and comes almost 50 years after the U.S. made the first manned moon landings.\nIndian Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\n\n\n\n is seeking to show India\u2019s strength in defense and space. In March, he made a televised address to reveal ahead of elections that India had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile. The news made India the fourth country after the U.S., Russia and China to develop such technology.\nHe has also pledged to send manned craft into space by 2022. \nThe space race is ratcheting up among several countries as they compete in a new age of exploration. China earlier this year became the first country to deploy a probe on the far side of the moon. It is now competing with the U.S. as it seeks to become the second to send a manned mission to the moon almost half a century since the first landings. China plans to start building a lunar base by 2025, while the U.S. plans to return to the moon around 2023.\nIndia spent around 90.34 billion rupees on its space program in the financial year ended March 31, 2018. While supporters say the efforts show India is developing technology that can push the country forward, critics say the money would be better spent on infrastructure to help its vast population.\nWrite to Corinne Abrams at corinne.abrams@wsj.com India postponed the launch of its second lunar mission Monday, putting on hold its hopes to make a soft landing on the moon\u2019s southern polar region. ",
        "author": "Corinne Abrams"
    },
    {
        "title": "Failure to Launch: India\u2019s Second Moon Shot Is Delayed (WSJ: India) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9037",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-second-moon-shot-delayed-by-snag-11563201250?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=69",
        "text": "\u201cA technical snag was observed in launch vehicle system at 1 hour before the launch. As a measure of abundant precaution, #Chandrayaan2 launch has been called off for today,\u201d the Indian Space Research Organization said in a tweet.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Vivek Singh,\n\n\n\n ISRO\u2019s media director, said engineers were looking into the problem and a new launch date would be set in the next few days.\n\n\nThe mission had been scheduled to arrive on the moon on Sept. 6. When it finally arrives, the rover is to spend 14 days carrying out experiments on the surface, analyzing minerals and the topography. \nThe mission will also look for evidence of water molecules, which could exist in areas that are permanently shadowed in the southern pole, ISRO said. The orbiter is set to be operational for a year.\nIndia\u2019s second lunar mission is the latest effort in the country\u2019s ambitious space program. It follows the success of its first, Chandrayaan 1, which was launched in 2008, orbited the moon about 3,200 times and confirmed the presence of water molecules on the surface.\nIn 2014, ISRO successfully put a space probe into orbit around Mars. That mission cost $74 million, compared with the $828 million the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent on a rover for its Mars program. NASA has launched several Mars missions.\nISRO\u2019s latest mission costs 9 billion rupees ($130 million), according to the agency, and comes almost 50 years after the U.S. made the first manned moon landings.\nIndian Prime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\n\n\n\n is seeking to show India\u2019s strength in defense and space. In March, he made a televised address to reveal ahead of elections that India had successfully tested a satellite-destroying missile. The news made India the fourth country after the U.S., Russia and China to develop such technology.\nHe has also pledged to send manned craft into space by 2022. \nThe space race is ratcheting up among several countries as they compete in a new age of exploration. China earlier this year became the first country to deploy a probe on the far side of the moon. It is now competing with the U.S. as it seeks to become the second to send a manned mission to the moon almost half a century since the first landings. China plans to start building a lunar base by 2025, while the U.S. plans to return to the moon around 2023.\nIndia spent around 90.34 billion rupees on its space program in the financial year ended March 31, 2018. While supporters say the efforts show India is developing technology that can push the country forward, critics say the money would be better spent on infrastructure to help its vast population.\nWrite to Corinne Abrams at corinne.abrams@wsj.com India postponed the launch of its second lunar mission Monday, putting on hold its hopes to make a soft landing on the moon\u2019s southern polar region. ",
        "author": "Corinne Abrams"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bag With Moon Dust in It Fetches $1.8 Million From a Mystery Buyer (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9038",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/us/moon-bag-auction-sothebys.html",
        "text": "A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A small white bag that has been to the moon and back \u2014 both literally and metaphorically \u2014 was purchased by an anonymous buyer for $1,812,500 (including a premium of $312,500) at auction at Sotheby\u2019s on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bag With Moon Dust in It Fetches $1.8 Million From a Mystery Buyer (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9039",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/us/moon-bag-auction-sothebys.html",
        "text": "A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A small white bag that has been to the moon and back \u2014 both literally and metaphorically \u2014 was purchased by an anonymous buyer for $1,812,500 (including a premium of $312,500) at auction at Sotheby\u2019s on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bag With Moon Dust in It Fetches $1.8 Million From a Mystery Buyer (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9040",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/us/moon-bag-auction-sothebys.html",
        "text": "A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A small white bag that has been to the moon and back \u2014 both literally and metaphorically \u2014 was purchased by an anonymous buyer for $1,812,500 (including a premium of $312,500) at auction at Sotheby\u2019s on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Bag With Moon Dust in It Fetches $1.8 Million From a Mystery Buyer (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9041",
        "date": "2017-07-21",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/us/moon-bag-auction-sothebys.html",
        "text": "A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A lunar landing, a museum loan, a theft, a critical error, a legal battle \u2014 and now, a sale at auction. What\u2019s next for this bag of moon dust? A small white bag that has been to the moon and back \u2014 both literally and metaphorically \u2014 was purchased by an anonymous buyer for $1,812,500 (including a premium of $312,500) at auction at Sotheby\u2019s on Thursday.",
        "author": "By Jacey Fortin"
    },
    {
        "title": "Time for Another Trip to the Moon? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9042",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/letters/moon-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "A reporter who covered the Apollo 11 lunar mission 50 years ago and other readers offer their opinions. A reporter who covered the Apollo 11 lunar mission 50 years ago and other readers offer their opinions. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Time for Another Trip to the Moon? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9043",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/letters/moon-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "A reporter who covered the Apollo 11 lunar mission 50 years ago and other readers offer their opinions. A reporter who covered the Apollo 11 lunar mission 50 years ago and other readers offer their opinions. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Time for Another Trip to the Moon? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9044",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/letters/moon-apollo-11.html",
        "text": "A reporter who covered the Apollo 11 lunar mission 50 years ago and other readers offer their opinions. A reporter who covered the Apollo 11 lunar mission 50 years ago and other readers offer their opinions. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "A Super Blood Moon Dazzles Earthlings (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9045",
        "date": "2021-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/world/super-blood-moon-lunar-eclipse.html",
        "text": "A supermoon and total lunar eclipse combined to put on a big red show. A supermoon and total lunar eclipse combined to put on a big red show. Australians were among those lucky enough to see it on Wednesday evening, a rare astronomical event marked by a dazzling array of sunset colors like red and burnt orange: a \u201csuper blood moon.\u201d",
        "author": "By Livia Albeck-Ripka"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9046",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-loses-contact-with-probe-just-as-it-prepares-to-land-on-moon-11567805330?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=51",
        "text": "After more than 20 tense minutes during which the leaders of India\u2019s space program looked confused, and huddled in groups apparently discussing what was happening, ISRO chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n K. Sivan\n\n\n\n made a simple announcement: The lander got to around 2.1 kilometers (about 1.3 miles) from its destination, then stopped sending signals.\n\u201cThe communication from lander to ground station was lost,\u201d he said. \u201cThe data is being analyzed.\u201d\n\n\nPrime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\n\n\n\n was also at the space center, monitoring the mission\u2019s progress. \u201cWhat you have done is not a small achievement,\u201d he told the scientists after the loss of communications was announced. \u201cOur journey will continue.\u201d\nAfter Russia, the U.S. and China, India is trying to become the fourth country to land an unmanned craft on the moon. The lander had a small lunar rover in its belly. It was scheduled to move around and analyze the nearby terrain and minerals for two weeks.\nAuthorities offered no further details and asked the journalists gathered in the monitoring center in Bangalore to go home. A scheduled news conference was canceled.\nThe experts and other space enthusiasts on Indian television news shows tried to put a positive spin on the development. Some said they hoped communication could be restored and the mission completed, but even if that didn\u2019t happen India should be proud at how close it got. \nLanding on the moon has proven to be tricky, said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, the head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank. \n\u201cSince there was a deviation from the planned trajectory, the central engine could have malfunctioned. The other thing could be that the data transmission link got lost,\u201d she said. \u201cIt could just be the communication link getting snapped but things being normal. It\u2019s still difficult to say with certainty what could have gone wrong.\u201d\nLanding on the moon is particularly difficult because it has almost no atmosphere. That means parachutes can\u2019t be used, so landers depend on thrusters to set them down at the proper speed and in the right place. Transmissions to and from Earth take more than a second, so the lander cannot be controlled in real time. The Indian lander was programmed to scan for a suitable spot to land and reach it automatically.\nA similar Israeli mission failed earlier this year at around the same stage. As it descended to the lunar surface, it lost communications and hit the moon at too high a speed.\n\u201cThese are challenging matters and it could happen even to more experienced countries,\u201d said Ram S. Jakhu, former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal. \u201cKnowing something in theory and doing it in practice is different.\u201d\nIndia was hoping its arrival on its surface would highlight its high-tech chops as interest in space is growing. \nTechnology has made it cheaper and easier to attempt to explore and potentially make money away from Earth. China has announced grand plans to do more in space, and the U.S. is trying to keep its lead. The private sector also has a number of initiatives. \nChina landed a rover on the far side of the moon in January and next year, it plans to send one to Mars. It is even planning a lunar base and a space station above Earth. Japan hopes to land its first probe on the moon in 2021. Meanwhile, the U.S. wants to build a space station orbiting the moon by 2023, make a manned moon landing the same year and even land a person on Mars by 2033.\nIndia targeted the moon\u2019s south pole because it would have been a first for any country and there is evidence that it has water. If the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter and rover could confirm the location of pockets of water\u2014scientists say it is likely within craters\u2014it would be useful for future missions. The ice could be turned into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe.\nEven if the lander is lost, India should be able to continue to survey the moon\u2019s surface with the orbiter. That would provide more clues not only about what happened to the lander but also for the future of space travel.\n\u201cWe remain hopeful and will continue working hard on our space programme,\u201d Prime Minister Modi said in a tweet.\n\u2014Vibhuti Agarwal contributed to this article.\nWrite to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com India may have failed at its attempt to land a probe on the moon: It has lost communication with the lunar lander minutes before it was supposed to reach the lunar surface. ",
        "author": "Eric Bellman"
    },
    {
        "title": "India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon (WSJ: World) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9047",
        "date": "2019-09-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-loses-contact-with-probe-just-as-it-prepares-to-land-on-moon-11567805330?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=67",
        "text": "After more than 20 tense minutes during which the leaders of India\u2019s space program looked confused, and huddled in groups apparently discussing what was happening, ISRO chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n K. Sivan\n\n\n\n made a simple announcement: The lander got to around 2.1 kilometers (about 1.3 miles) from its destination, then stopped sending signals.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThe communication from lander to ground station was lost,\u201d he said. \u201cThe data is being analyzed.\u201d\n\n\nPrime Minister\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Narendra Modi\n\n\n\n was also at the space center, monitoring the mission\u2019s progress. \u201cWhat you have done is not a small achievement,\u201d he told the scientists after the loss of communications was announced. \u201cOur journey will continue.\u201d\nAfter Russia, the U.S. and China, India is trying to become the fourth country to land an unmanned craft on the moon. The lander had a small lunar rover in its belly. It was scheduled to move around and analyze the nearby terrain and minerals for two weeks.\nAuthorities offered no further details and asked the journalists gathered in the monitoring center in Bangalore to go home. A scheduled news conference was canceled.\nThe experts and other space enthusiasts on Indian television news shows tried to put a positive spin on the development. Some said they hoped communication could be restored and the mission completed, but even if that didn\u2019t happen India should be proud at how close it got. \nLanding on the moon has proven to be tricky, said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, the head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank. \n\u201cSince there was a deviation from the planned trajectory, the central engine could have malfunctioned. The other thing could be that the data transmission link got lost,\u201d she said. \u201cIt could just be the communication link getting snapped but things being normal. It\u2019s still difficult to say with certainty what could have gone wrong.\u201d\nLanding on the moon is particularly difficult because it has almost no atmosphere. That means parachutes can\u2019t be used, so landers depend on thrusters to set them down at the proper speed and in the right place. Transmissions to and from Earth take more than a second, so the lander cannot be controlled in real time. The Indian lander was programmed to scan for a suitable spot to land and reach it automatically.\nA similar Israeli mission failed earlier this year at around the same stage. As it descended to the lunar surface, it lost communications and hit the moon at too high a speed.\n\u201cThese are challenging matters and it could happen even to more experienced countries,\u201d said Ram S. Jakhu, former director of the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University in Montreal. \u201cKnowing something in theory and doing it in practice is different.\u201d\nIndia was hoping its arrival on its surface would highlight its high-tech chops as interest in space is growing. \nTechnology has made it cheaper and easier to attempt to explore and potentially make money away from Earth. China has announced grand plans to do more in space, and the U.S. is trying to keep its lead. The private sector also has a number of initiatives. \nChina landed a rover on the far side of the moon in January and next year, it plans to send one to Mars. It is even planning a lunar base and a space station above Earth. Japan hopes to land its first probe on the moon in 2021. Meanwhile, the U.S. wants to build a space station orbiting the moon by 2023, make a manned moon landing the same year and even land a person on Mars by 2033.\nIndia targeted the moon\u2019s south pole because it would have been a first for any country and there is evidence that it has water. If the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter and rover could confirm the location of pockets of water\u2014scientists say it is likely within craters\u2014it would be useful for future missions. The ice could be turned into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen to breathe.\nEven if the lander is lost, India should be able to continue to survey the moon\u2019s surface with the orbiter. That would provide more clues not only about what happened to the lander but also for the future of space travel.\n\u201cWe remain hopeful and will continue working hard on our space programme,\u201d Prime Minister Modi said in a tweet.\n\u2014Vibhuti Agarwal contributed to this article.\nWrite to Eric Bellman at eric.bellman@wsj.com India may have failed at its attempt to land a probe on the moon: It has lost communication with the lunar lander minutes before it was supposed to reach the lunar surface. ",
        "author": "Eric Bellman"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Sold the Science and Glamour of Space Travel (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9048",
        "date": "2019-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/us/marketing-moon.html",
        "text": "At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. On an October Friday in 1957, Americans discovered that while they had been busy making weekend plans, their country had become the tortoise to the Soviet Union hare. Soviet scientists that day shot into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, a beeping metallic ball not quite two feet in diameter that circled the globe every hour and a half at 18,000 miles per hour. It was called Sputnik, \u201ctraveling companion\u201d in Russian.",
        "author": "By Clyde Haberman"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Sold the Science and Glamour of Space Travel (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9049",
        "date": "2019-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/us/marketing-moon.html",
        "text": "At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. On an October Friday in 1957, Americans discovered that while they had been busy making weekend plans, their country had become the tortoise to the Soviet Union hare. Soviet scientists that day shot into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, a beeping metallic ball not quite two feet in diameter that circled the globe every hour and a half at 18,000 miles per hour. It was called Sputnik, \u201ctraveling companion\u201d in Russian.",
        "author": "By Clyde Haberman"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Sold the Science and Glamour of Space Travel (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9050",
        "date": "2019-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/us/marketing-moon.html",
        "text": "At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. On an October Friday in 1957, Americans discovered that while they had been busy making weekend plans, their country had become the tortoise to the Soviet Union hare. Soviet scientists that day shot into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, a beeping metallic ball not quite two feet in diameter that circled the globe every hour and a half at 18,000 miles per hour. It was called Sputnik, \u201ctraveling companion\u201d in Russian.",
        "author": "By Clyde Haberman"
    },
    {
        "title": "How NASA Sold the Science and Glamour of Space Travel (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9051",
        "date": "2019-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/us/marketing-moon.html",
        "text": "At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. At the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission in the 1960s, some Americans had reservations about the wisdom of reaching for the stars when troubles swelled on Earth. On an October Friday in 1957, Americans discovered that while they had been busy making weekend plans, their country had become the tortoise to the Soviet Union hare. Soviet scientists that day shot into orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, a beeping metallic ball not quite two feet in diameter that circled the globe every hour and a half at 18,000 miles per hour. It was called Sputnik, \u201ctraveling companion\u201d in Russian.",
        "author": "By Clyde Haberman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Children\u2019s Books: Young Minds and Skyward Thoughts (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9052",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-young-minds-and-skyward-thoughts-11563548695?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=53",
        "text": "Brian Floca\n\n\n\n probably does the best job of capturing the intense preparations and explosive thrill of Apollo 11 in \u201cMoonshot\u201d (Atheneum, 54 pages, $19.99), a revamped edition of his 2009 picture book. With delicate, color-daubed line drawings and emotion-stirring text, this superb account focuses on the events of that single mission.\n\n\n \"Moonshot\" (Atheneum)\"Go for the Moon\" (Roaring Brook)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Seymour Simon\n\n\n\n pulls the camera back a bit for \u201cDestination: Moon\u201d (Harper, 56 pages, $17.99), a picture book that sets Apollo 11 in the context of both the space program and the space race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In these pages, in archival photos, readers ages 6-11 will see Russian cosmonaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Yuri Gagarin,\n\n\n\n the beaming swagger of the Mercury Seven (the test pilots with the \u201cright stuff\u201d), and the ticker-tape parade that celebrated the Apollo 11 men upon their return. \nA heftier volume,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Suzanne Slade\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cCountdown: 2979 Days to the Moon\u201d (Peachtree, 144 pages, $22.95), starts with President Kennedy\u2019s vow to put an astronaut on the moon within a decade and ends with an image of that New York ticker-tape parade. In between, with dramatic collage-style illustrations by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Gonzalez\n\n\n\n and occasional photos, readers ages 8-14 will see each stage of NASA\u2019s progression in detail, from the tragedy of Apollo 1 and the deaths of astronauts\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gus Grissom,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ed White\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Roger Chaffee\n\n\n\n to the splash of Apollo 11\u2019s returning command module in the Pacific Ocean. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Chris Gall\n\n\n\n tells a more personal story in \u201cGo for the Moon\u201d (Roaring Brook, 48 pages, $19.99), a picture book about Apollo 11 that captures the era\u2019s fascination with rocketry. In colorful, stylized illustrations (see left), readers ages 5 to 9 will follow the parallel activities of a young boy readying an amateur rocket launch and the herculean efforts at NASA. In a nice touch that will ping a nostalgic nerve, the boy in the book drinks Tang, that powder-based drink that made so many children of the time feel that they had a special connection with the space program. \nIn the graphic novel \u201cRocket to the Moon!\u201d (Abrams, 129 pages, $13.99),\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Don Brown\n\n\n\n tracks the idea and history of shooting things skyward, with special emphasis on the influence of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jules Verne\u2019s\n\n\n\n futuristic 1865 story \u201cFrom the Earth to the Moon.\u201d Inspired by Verne, scientists in Russia, America and Europe sought, \u201cindependently and without personal contact with one another,\u201d Mr. Brown notes, to work out how to make space flight a reality. This accessible work for readers ages 8-12 takes the story all the way through to Dec. 14, 1972, when American Gene Cernan became the last man to walk on the moon\u2014so far. \n\n\n \n\n\n\u201cI am too old to fly to Mars, and I regret that. But I still think I have been very, very lucky,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Michael Collins\n\n\n\n writes in his new preface to \u201cFlying to the Moon\u201d (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 208 pages, $19.99), an entertaining firsthand account of space travel for readers ages 10-16 based on the astronaut\u2019s 1974 memoir, \u201cCarrying the Fire: An Astronaut\u2019s Journeys.\u201d While Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin were leaving boot prints on the moon\u2019s dusty surface, Mr. Collins was waiting inside the command module for their eventual rendezvous. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel lonely or left out, because I knew that my job was very important, and that Neil and Buzz could never get home without me,\u201d he writes of those hours. \u201cI was proud. . . . I felt like the base-camp operator on a mountain-climbing expedition.\u201d This affable account includes details of undoubted interest to readers ages 10-16: how the future Apollo 11 crew member ate iguana during jungle training (\u201ctender flesh, with a taste somewhat like chicken\u201d); how the swoop of parabolas in flight simulation made most trainees throw up; and what it\u2019s like to hydrate freeze-dried soup in your mouth using a water gun. \nOn July 20, 1969, NASA mathematician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Katherine Johnson\n\n\n\n was in the Poconos with her sorority sisters watching the moon landing on a black-and-white TV as if she were any other citizen. \u201cNone of the women had any idea quite how nervous I was as I watched Armstrong,\u201d confesses the woman who helped to calculate his trajectory of getting there in \u201cReaching for the Moon\u201d (Atheneum, 249 pages $17.99). Now famous as one of NASA\u2019s \u201chidden figures\u201d (aka \u201ccomputers with skirts\u201d), Ms. Johnson, in this captivating autobiography, describes her childhood precocity with numbers, her education-oriented upbringing in segregated West Virginia, the anguish of discovering why her father had disapproved of her choice of husband\u2014and the joy of pushing past societal barriers, as she did, to make a career at the highest leve A fleet of books evoke the drama of the first lunar landing. ",
        "author": "Meghan Cox Gurdon"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo 11\u2019 Review: Houston, We\u2019ve Got a Classic (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9053",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-review-houston-weve-got-a-classic-11551384513?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=58",
        "text": "More Film Reviews Greta Woman at War \n\n\nIn contrast to the astonishing vistas, the film\u2019s style is nothing fancy, and that\u2019s meant as high praise. Mr. Miller and his colleagues allow the images to speak for themselves, accompanied only by audio tracks that have similarly been liberated from long archival confinement. (With the landing area in sight, Houston authorizes powered descent with a laconic \u201cgo, lookin\u2019 good\u201d; it\u2019s part of a thrilling chorus of crackly voiced \u201cGo\u2019s\u201d as a succession of supervisors delivers positive status reports.) There\u2019s no narration, no intrusion by talking heads, only the voices of the astronauts, the controllers and, from time to time, the CBS anchorman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Cronkite,\n\n\n\n who was the closest thing this country had back then, and maybe since then, to a universally trusted authority figure.\nLast year \u201cFirst Man,\u201d the fine feature directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Damien Chazelle,\n\n\n\n focused on Armstrong, played by Ryan Gosling, to dramatize the mission\u2019s emotional cost. \u201cApollo 11,\u201d in which Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are entirely themselves, dramatizes the magnitude of the event from the start, as the towering Saturn V rocket is trundled on gargantuan caterpillar treads from the vehicle assembly building toward the launch pad; through the astronauts\u2019 transition from terrestrial gravity to \u201cthe lunar sphere of influence\u201d (what a wonderful phrase, intoned by a Houston controller) and their spectacular landing at Tranquility Base; to their triumphant return to the planet that had sent them on their perilous way.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Apollo 11.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Neon\n \n\n\n\nThe peril is implicit in the photogenic complexity of the undertaking, in the thundering of the rocket as it takes off. (No microphone or sound system could capture that sound, which was literally bone-rattling: I was there, closer to the launchpad than I was supposed to be, and my bones were rattled to a scary degree.) By contrast, any sense of danger is muted in the matter-of-fact exchanges between Houston and the lunar voyagers. Even periodic outbursts of joy\u2014at the landing, the second liftoff that begins the trip back home, the docking that reunites the lander with the command module, the end-of-mission splashdown\u2014are relatively restrained: no high-fives, no pumped fists, none of the ritual emotional inflation of our time. Only cheers, applause and incandescent smiles at the wonder of the achievement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Michael Collins, left, command module pilot of the flight, in \u2018Apollo 11.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Neon\n \n\n\n\nYet the film generates an immensity of emotion in the course of its meticulous depiction. \u201cIt\u2019s a happy home up here,\u201d says Collins, alone in the command module in the silent grandeur of lunar orbit as Armstrong and Aldrin explore the powdery precincts of their new environment. \u201cOK, Houston,\u201d Armstrong says as he prepares to take that first fateful step, \u201cI\u2019m on the porch\u201d; it sounds as if he\u2019s in turn-of-the-century Kansas, where the weather has turned summery. And \u201cApollo 11\u201d gives us ample footage, as \u201cFirst Man\u201d did not, of the Stars and Stripes being planted on the moon, then flying flaplessly in the solar wind. Indeed, the film celebrates the crew\u2019s return in a sudden upsurge of song\u2014John Stewart\u2019s \u201cMother Country,\u201d with its last, repeated lines, \u201cOh mother country, I do love you.\u201d The sentiment isn\u2019t subtle, but it\u2019s a powerful expression, passionately sung, of humanity\u2019s longest round trip.\n\nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com A documentary, best seen in IMAX, forgoes hype and conjures the lunar adventure with spectacular, previously unseen footage. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Apollo 11\u2019 Review: Houston, We\u2019ve Got a Classic (WSJ: Film Review) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9054",
        "date": "2019-02-28",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-review-houston-weve-got-a-classic-11551384513?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=77",
        "text": "More Film Reviews Greta Woman at War \n\n\nIn contrast to the astonishing vistas, the film\u2019s style is nothing fancy, and that\u2019s meant as high praise. Mr. Miller and his colleagues allow the images to speak for themselves, accompanied only by audio tracks that have similarly been liberated from long archival confinement. (With the landing area in sight, Houston authorizes powered descent with a laconic \u201cgo, lookin\u2019 good\u201d; it\u2019s part of a thrilling chorus of crackly voiced \u201cGo\u2019s\u201d as a succession of supervisors delivers positive status reports.) There\u2019s no narration, no intrusion by talking heads, only the voices of the astronauts, the controllers and, from time to time, the CBS anchorman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Cronkite,\n\n\n\n who was the closest thing this country had back then, and maybe since then, to a universally trusted authority figure.\n\n\n\n\nLast year \u201cFirst Man,\u201d the fine feature directed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Damien Chazelle,\n\n\n\n focused on Armstrong, played by Ryan Gosling, to dramatize the mission\u2019s emotional cost. \u201cApollo 11,\u201d in which Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are entirely themselves, dramatizes the magnitude of the event from the start, as the towering Saturn V rocket is trundled on gargantuan caterpillar treads from the vehicle assembly building toward the launch pad; through the astronauts\u2019 transition from terrestrial gravity to \u201cthe lunar sphere of influence\u201d (what a wonderful phrase, intoned by a Houston controller) and their spectacular landing at Tranquility Base; to their triumphant return to the planet that had sent them on their perilous way.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA scene from \u2018Apollo 11.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Neon\n \n\n\n\nThe peril is implicit in the photogenic complexity of the undertaking, in the thundering of the rocket as it takes off. (No microphone or sound system could capture that sound, which was literally bone-rattling: I was there, closer to the launchpad than I was supposed to be, and my bones were rattled to a scary degree.) By contrast, any sense of danger is muted in the matter-of-fact exchanges between Houston and the lunar voyagers. Even periodic outbursts of joy\u2014at the landing, the second liftoff that begins the trip back home, the docking that reunites the lander with the command module, the end-of-mission splashdown\u2014are relatively restrained: no high-fives, no pumped fists, none of the ritual emotional inflation of our time. Only cheers, applause and incandescent smiles at the wonder of the achievement.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Michael Collins, left, command module pilot of the flight, in \u2018Apollo 11.\u2019\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Neon\n \n\n\n\nYet the film generates an immensity of emotion in the course of its meticulous depiction. \u201cIt\u2019s a happy home up here,\u201d says Collins, alone in the command module in the silent grandeur of lunar orbit as Armstrong and Aldrin explore the powdery precincts of their new environment. \u201cOK, Houston,\u201d Armstrong says as he prepares to take that first fateful step, \u201cI\u2019m on the porch\u201d; it sounds as if he\u2019s in turn-of-the-century Kansas, where the weather has turned summery. And \u201cApollo 11\u201d gives us ample footage, as \u201cFirst Man\u201d did not, of the Stars and Stripes being planted on the moon, then flying flaplessly in the solar wind. Indeed, the film celebrates the crew\u2019s return in a sudden upsurge of song\u2014John Stewart\u2019s \u201cMother Country,\u201d with its last, repeated lines, \u201cOh mother country, I do love you.\u201d The sentiment isn\u2019t subtle, but it\u2019s a powerful expression, passionately sung, of humanity\u2019s longest round trip.\n\nWrite to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com A documentary, best seen in IMAX, forgoes hype and conjures the lunar adventure with spectacular, previously unseen footage. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Movies About the Moon (in Honor of Apollo 11\u2019s Anniversary) (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9055",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-the-moon-landing-anniversary-the-best-moon-movies-11563152700?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=70",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nVicariousness is the movie critic\u2019s curse\u2014so many places virtually visited, so many feelings virtually felt. The big exception in my life, though, was the Apollo 11 launch. I was at Cape Kennedy 50 years ago, covering the event for Newsweek. Sitting cross-legged in the grass as the Saturn V rocket blasted off, I thought my body would be shaken apart, and I wept in sudden ecstasy. The experience was bigger, louder and more beautiful than I could have imagined, and my connection with moon movies has never been the same since that long-ago morning, when science, technology and government joined forces to expand our understanding of where we belong in the grandest scheme of things.\nThe moon seems to elevate the filmmaking game. Not always, of course; for every \u201cApollo 11\u201d there\u2019s a \u201cNude on the Moon.\u201d (You didn\u2019t know the moon was inhabited by naked women?) Still, good moon movies are easy to find, and ever more so with the Apollo 11 anniversary upon us. Here are five of my favorites, in chronological order of their release.\nA Trip to the Moon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018A Trip to the Moon\u2019 (1902) resembled nothing before it.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNo list of moon movies would be complete without it. Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s made his film in the world\u2019s first movie studio, a greenhouse-like structure that he built in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. As we watch the nine-minute trailblazer now, 117 years later, the science component might seem ever so slightly naive. Six astronomers, wearing frock coats and carrying umbrellas to protect them from the vicissitudes of space, climb into a cannon shell which is shot by a giant cannon. The shell, upon reaching the lunar orb moments later, hits the man in the moon smack in the eye. But the fiction part of the film explodes with joyous discovery upon discovery: how to make a technically complex motion picture that resembles nothing before it; how to tell an unearthly story that inflames earthbound imaginations. (Martin Scorsese reproduced the studio and the making of the film, with scrupulous attention to historical detail, in his 2011 fantasy \u201cHugo.\u201d)\n\nApollo 13\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Apollo 13\u2019 (1995) combines vast technical information and a classic tale of heroism.\n\n\n\nThe more I see this 1995 account of the disaster that befell three American astronauts on their way to a lunar landing in 1970\u2014and I feel compelled to watch at least a few scenes every time I come across it on TV\u2014the more I marvel at its seamless conjunction of elements that would seem to be mutually exclusive. The script, by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert, conveys great gobs of information with perfect clarity. We understand not only the nature of the disaster, but the specifics of the plan, improvised step by desperate step, that will bring the seemingly doomed crew safely back to Earth. The drama, directed by Ron Howard, is understated moment by moment, yet shattering in its cumulative effect. Here\u2019s a fiction film that has it both ways, as a trove of technical fact made comprehensible, and a classic tale of heroism in the face of hitherto unimaginable danger.\nMoon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Moon\u2019 (2009) has a virtuoso performance from Sam Rockwell.\n\n\n\nDuncan Jones directed this 2009 study in haunting ambiguity from a screenplay by Nathan Parker. In a genre where visual splendor usually reigns\u2014the pre-eminent example being, of course, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d\u2014\u201cMoon\u201d shines for having been made on a shoestring. It\u2019s a one-man show, though not necessarily a one-character show, in which Sam Rockwell gives a virtuoso performance as an astronaut, Sam Bell, who\u2019s near the end of a three-year tour of solitary duty on the moon; he\u2019s been supervising machines that mine helium-3 for fusion power on Earth. Suddenly, however, he falls ill, then discovers, during his computer-aided recuperation, that he\u2019s not alone. Another Sam Bell has appeared, an apparent clone who insists, altogether convincingly, that he isn\u2019t a clone at all. The film creates vast vistas with modest resources, and touches on the elusive question of human identity: Who am I, who made me, and where do I belong in the impassive cosmos?\nFirst Man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018First Man\u2019 (2018) tells the story of mankind\u2019s boldest adventure through a taciturn hero.\n\n\n\nWhile \u201cApollo 13\u201d is a model of mating fact and fiction in a single feature film, \u201cFirst Man\u201d exemplifies the power of fiction to illuminate the essence of people and events we previously knew only from the outside. The radical notion behind Damien Chazelle\u2019s film, as I wrote in my review, was to tell the story of mankind\u2019s boldest adventure thus far, but tell it through a taciturn, emotionally closed-off hero, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the lunar surface. The casting is ideal\u2014an intensely private actor, Ryan Gosling, playing a tightly focused problem solver who is, before and after everything else, an engineer. Ye For over a century, filmmakers have been obsessed with lunar voyages. Here are Journal critic Joe Morgenstern\u2019s five favorite journeys. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Best Movies About the Moon (in Honor of Apollo 11\u2019s Anniversary) (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9056",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-the-moon-landing-anniversary-the-best-moon-movies-11563152700?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=54",
        "text": "Related Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\nVicariousness is the movie critic\u2019s curse\u2014so many places virtually visited, so many feelings virtually felt. The big exception in my life, though, was the Apollo 11 launch. I was at Cape Kennedy 50 years ago, covering the event for Newsweek. Sitting cross-legged in the grass as the Saturn V rocket blasted off, I thought my body would be shaken apart, and I wept in sudden ecstasy. The experience was bigger, louder and more beautiful than I could have imagined, and my connection with moon movies has never been the same since that long-ago morning, when science, technology and government joined forces to expand our understanding of where we belong in the grandest scheme of things.\nThe moon seems to elevate the filmmaking game. Not always, of course; for every \u201cApollo 11\u201d there\u2019s a \u201cNude on the Moon.\u201d (You didn\u2019t know the moon was inhabited by naked women?) Still, good moon movies are easy to find, and ever more so with the Apollo 11 anniversary upon us. Here are five of my favorites, in chronological order of their release.\nA Trip to the Moon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018A Trip to the Moon\u2019 (1902) resembled nothing before it.\n\n\n\nNo list of moon movies would be complete without it. Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s made his film in the world\u2019s first movie studio, a greenhouse-like structure that he built in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. As we watch the nine-minute trailblazer now, 117 years later, the science component might seem ever so slightly naive. Six astronomers, wearing frock coats and carrying umbrellas to protect them from the vicissitudes of space, climb into a cannon shell which is shot by a giant cannon. The shell, upon reaching the lunar orb moments later, hits the man in the moon smack in the eye. But the fiction part of the film explodes with joyous discovery upon discovery: how to make a technically complex motion picture that resembles nothing before it; how to tell an unearthly story that inflames earthbound imaginations. (Martin Scorsese reproduced the studio and the making of the film, with scrupulous attention to historical detail, in his 2011 fantasy \u201cHugo.\u201d)\n\nApollo 13\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Apollo 13\u2019 (1995) combines vast technical information and a classic tale of heroism.\n\n\n\nThe more I see this 1995 account of the disaster that befell three American astronauts on their way to a lunar landing in 1970\u2014and I feel compelled to watch at least a few scenes every time I come across it on TV\u2014the more I marvel at its seamless conjunction of elements that would seem to be mutually exclusive. The script, by William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert, conveys great gobs of information with perfect clarity. We understand not only the nature of the disaster, but the specifics of the plan, improvised step by desperate step, that will bring the seemingly doomed crew safely back to Earth. The drama, directed by Ron Howard, is understated moment by moment, yet shattering in its cumulative effect. Here\u2019s a fiction film that has it both ways, as a trove of technical fact made comprehensible, and a classic tale of heroism in the face of hitherto unimaginable danger.\nMoon\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018Moon\u2019 (2009) has a virtuoso performance from Sam Rockwell.\n\n\n\nDuncan Jones directed this 2009 study in haunting ambiguity from a screenplay by Nathan Parker. In a genre where visual splendor usually reigns\u2014the pre-eminent example being, of course, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d\u2014\u201cMoon\u201d shines for having been made on a shoestring. It\u2019s a one-man show, though not necessarily a one-character show, in which Sam Rockwell gives a virtuoso performance as an astronaut, Sam Bell, who\u2019s near the end of a three-year tour of solitary duty on the moon; he\u2019s been supervising machines that mine helium-3 for fusion power on Earth. Suddenly, however, he falls ill, then discovers, during his computer-aided recuperation, that he\u2019s not alone. Another Sam Bell has appeared, an apparent clone who insists, altogether convincingly, that he isn\u2019t a clone at all. The film creates vast vistas with modest resources, and touches on the elusive question of human identity: Who am I, who made me, and where do I belong in the impassive cosmos?\nFirst Man\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u2018First Man\u2019 (2018) tells the story of mankind\u2019s boldest adventure through a taciturn hero.\n\n\n\nWhile \u201cApollo 13\u201d is a model of mating fact and fiction in a single feature film, \u201cFirst Man\u201d exemplifies the power of fiction to illuminate the essence of people and events we previously knew only from the outside. The radical notion behind Damien Chazelle\u2019s film, as I wrote in my review, was to tell the story of mankind\u2019s boldest adventure thus far, but tell it through a taciturn, emotionally closed-off hero, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the lunar surface. The casting is ideal\u2014an intensely private actor, Ryan Gosling, playing a tightly focused problem solver who is, before and after everything else, an engineer. Yet th For over a century, filmmakers have been obsessed with lunar voyages. Here are Journal critic Joe Morgenstern\u2019s five favorite journeys. ",
        "author": "Joe Morgenstern"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Delay of Chandrayaan-2 Launch, Indians Are Disappointed but Confident (NYT: World) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9057",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/world/asia/india-moon-rocket-launch-delayed.html",
        "text": "The country had been watching, eager for India to seize its place in space with a lunar landing. Scientists say the mission is still on \u2014 they just don\u2019t know when. The country had been watching, eager for India to seize its place in space with a lunar landing. Scientists say the mission is still on \u2014 they just don\u2019t know when. NEW DELHI \u2014 With the minutes ticking down, less than an hour to launch time and scores of top scientists and V.I.P.s gathered at a remote coastal site, it appeared that all systems were go.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Delay of Chandrayaan-2 Launch, Indians Are Disappointed but Confident (NYT: World) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9058",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/world/asia/india-moon-rocket-launch-delayed.html",
        "text": "The country had been watching, eager for India to seize its place in space with a lunar landing. Scientists say the mission is still on \u2014 they just don\u2019t know when. The country had been watching, eager for India to seize its place in space with a lunar landing. Scientists say the mission is still on \u2014 they just don\u2019t know when. NEW DELHI \u2014 With the minutes ticking down, less than an hour to launch time and scores of top scientists and V.I.P.s gathered at a remote coastal site, it appeared that all systems were go.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "After Delay of Chandrayaan-2 Launch, Indians Are Disappointed but Confident (NYT: World) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9059",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/world/asia/india-moon-rocket-launch-delayed.html",
        "text": "The country had been watching, eager for India to seize its place in space with a lunar landing. Scientists say the mission is still on \u2014 they just don\u2019t know when. The country had been watching, eager for India to seize its place in space with a lunar landing. Scientists say the mission is still on \u2014 they just don\u2019t know when. NEW DELHI \u2014 With the minutes ticking down, less than an hour to launch time and scores of top scientists and V.I.P.s gathered at a remote coastal site, it appeared that all systems were go.",
        "author": "By Jeffrey Gettleman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eugene Cernan, Last Human to Walk on Moon, Dies at 82 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9060",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/eugene-cernan-death.html",
        "text": "A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission in 1972 and the last human to walk on the moon, died on Monday in Houston. He was 82.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eugene Cernan, Last Human to Walk on Moon, Dies at 82 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9061",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/eugene-cernan-death.html",
        "text": "A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission in 1972 and the last human to walk on the moon, died on Monday in Houston. He was 82.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eugene Cernan, Last Human to Walk on Moon, Dies at 82 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9062",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/eugene-cernan-death.html",
        "text": "A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission in 1972 and the last human to walk on the moon, died on Monday in Houston. He was 82.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eugene Cernan, Last Human to Walk on Moon, Dies at 82 (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9063",
        "date": "2017-01-17",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/us/eugene-cernan-death.html",
        "text": "A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. A ferocious competitor, Mr. Cernan rocketed into space three times, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of the Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission in 1972 and the last human to walk on the moon, died on Monday in Houston. He was 82.",
        "author": "By Robert D. McFadden"
    },
    {
        "title": "Moon-rock hunter\u2019s close to finding the last missing lunar souvenirs (WP: KidsPost) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9064",
        "date": "2018-09-13",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/moon-rock-hunter-close-to-finding-the-last-missing-lunar-souvenirs/2018/09/13/d0cfabbc-b764-11e8-94eb-3bd52dfe917b_story.html",
        "text": "A strange thing happened after Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew returned from the moon with lunar rocks: Many of the souvenirs given to every U.S. state vanished. Now, after years of searching, a former NASA investigator is closing in on his goal of locating the whereabouts of all 50. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn recent weeks, two of the rocks that disappeared after the 1969 mission were located in Louisiana and Utah, leaving only New York and Delaware with unaccounted-for rocks.Attorney and moon rock hunter Joseph Gutheinz says it \u201cblows his mind,\u201d that the rocks were not carefully documented and saved by some of the states that received them. But he is hopeful the last two can be located before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission next summer.\u201cIt\u2019s a tangible piece of history,\u201d he said. \u201cNeil Armstrong\u2019s first mission ... was to reach down and grab some rocks and dust in case they needed to make an emergency takeoff.\u201dMany of the Apollo 11 rocks have turned up in unexpected places: with ex-governors in West Virginia and Colorado, in a military-artifact storage building in Minnesota and with a former crab boat captain from TV\u2019s \u201cDeadliest Catch\u201d in Alaska.In New York, officials who oversee the state museum have no record of that state\u2019s Apollo 11 rock. In Delaware, the rock was stolen from its state museum on September 22, 1977. Police were contacted, but it was never found.President Richard Nixon\u2019s administration presented the tiny lunar samples to all 50 states and 135 countries, but few were officially recorded and most disappeared, Gutheinz said.Each state got a tiny sample encased in acrylic and mounted on a wooden plaque, along with the state flag. Some were placed in museums, while others went on display in state capitols.But almost no state entered the rocks collected by Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin into archival records, and Gutheinz said many lost track of them.When Gutheinz started leading the effort to find them in 2002, he estimates 40 states had lost track of the rocks.\u201cI think part of it was, we honestly believed that going back to the moon was going to be a regular occurrence,\u201d Gutheinz said.But there were only five more journeys before the last moon landing, Apollo 17, in 1972.Authentic moon rocks are considered national treasures and cannot legally be sold in the United States, Gutheinz said.Now a lawyer near Houston, Texas, he\u2019s also a college instructor who\u2019s enlisted the help of his students. They record their findings of the whereabouts of the discovered moon gems in a database.\u201cThe people of the world deserve this,\u201d he said. \u201cThey deserve to see something that our astronauts accomplished and be a part it.\u201d\n\nMore in KidsPostNASA crews show their creativity in long history of mission patchesDesign a mission patch for KidsPostEver wondered what\u2019s floating around in space? The 50 states each received tiny pieces from Apollo 11 mission to display but many disappeared. Moon-rock hunter\u2019s close to finding the last missing lunar souvenirs",
        "author": "Associated Press"
    },
    {
        "title": "For \u2018leftover\u2019 single women in China, Lunar New Year brings dread of facing their families (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9065",
        "date": "2019-01-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/for-leftover-single-women-in-china-the-lunar-new-year-brings-dread-of-returning-home-alone/2019/01/29/b85c33f4-1f0e-11e9-a759-2b8541bbbe20_story.html",
        "text": "BEIJING \u2014 Spare a thought for the single Chinese woman this Lunar New Year holiday.The remonstrations over their unwed status and the pressure on them to get married are so intense that some of these \u201cleftover women\u201d \u2014 the name for women not married by their late 20s \u2014 are searching for ways to avoid this family badgering. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSome are asking their bosses for extra work during China\u2019s biggest holiday, which falls on Feb. 5 this year. Others are inventing boyfriends.But still, the pressure mounts. Hospitals are reporting a spike in young people seeking treatment for anxiety.\u201cI was so afraid last year that I didn\u2019t go home. I don\u2019t want to go home this year either, but there\u2019s no way to avoid going back,\u201d said Emily Liu, a 31-year-old who works at a state-owned enterprise and will return to her hometown of Dalian next month.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u00a0\u201cMy parents say, \u2018Your classmates have children, you don\u2019t even have a boyfriend,\u2019 \u201d she said. \u201cThis is the only topic when I am back home, and they even mobilize all the relatives. The pressure is too great.\u201dWomen are considered \u201cleftover\u201d in many parts of Asia if they haven\u2019t married by their mid-20s.But China\u2019s economic gains over the past few decades and the creation of a huge middle class have led many women to pursue careers instead of getting married early. Or at all.This is contributing to a rapid decline in the number of births in China. There were 15.2 million live births in China last year, an astonishing 2 million fewer than the previous year, according to official statistics released last week.Story continues below advertisementThe Chinese government, concerned that this is creating a demographic time bomb as the population ages, abandoned its one-child policy several years ago in an effort to encourage bigger families.AdvertisementDespite the fact that there are about 33 million more men than women in China, the result of a preference for boys exacerbated by the one-child policy, it is the women who are considered \u201cleftover\u201d rather than the men.The \u2018bride price\u2019 in China keeps rising. Some villages want to put a cap on it.\n\nJust as the government campaign to nudge up the birthrate has yet to show much progress, the government \u2014 and parents \u2014 haven\u2019t had much success in encouraging young women to get hitched early. The number of weddings in China has fallen for five years straight. There are 200\u00a0million single adults in ",
        "author": "Anna Fifield"
    },
    {
        "title": "Your Monday Briefing (NYT: Briefing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9066",
        "date": "2020-02-10",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/10/briefing/coronavirus-ireland-oscars.html",
        "text": "Coronavirus, Ireland, Oscars: Here\u2019s what you need to know. Coronavirus, Ireland, Oscars: Here\u2019s what you need to know. As many people across China return to work today after an already-extended Lunar New Year break, the country is confronting two bleak statistics:",
        "author": "By Mike Ives"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Is Cooler Than Ryan Gosling (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9067",
        "date": "2018-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/nasa-is-cooler-than-ryan-gosling.html",
        "text": "Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Hollywood\u2019s latest space film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in an intense battle between earthly priorities and the sublime possibilities of the Apollo mission, much like his nation. Naturally, its most glorious scene is the moon landing: the moment he takes that final, hesitant leap and we see his white boot press into the fine lunar soil before we gently pan over Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Is Cooler Than Ryan Gosling (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9068",
        "date": "2018-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/nasa-is-cooler-than-ryan-gosling.html",
        "text": "Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Hollywood\u2019s latest space film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in an intense battle between earthly priorities and the sublime possibilities of the Apollo mission, much like his nation. Naturally, its most glorious scene is the moon landing: the moment he takes that final, hesitant leap and we see his white boot press into the fine lunar soil before we gently pan over Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Is Cooler Than Ryan Gosling (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9069",
        "date": "2018-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/nasa-is-cooler-than-ryan-gosling.html",
        "text": "Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Hollywood\u2019s latest space film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in an intense battle between earthly priorities and the sublime possibilities of the Apollo mission, much like his nation. Naturally, its most glorious scene is the moon landing: the moment he takes that final, hesitant leap and we see his white boot press into the fine lunar soil before we gently pan over Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Is Cooler Than Ryan Gosling (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9070",
        "date": "2018-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/nasa-is-cooler-than-ryan-gosling.html",
        "text": "Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Hollywood\u2019s latest space film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in an intense battle between earthly priorities and the sublime possibilities of the Apollo mission, much like his nation. Naturally, its most glorious scene is the moon landing: the moment he takes that final, hesitant leap and we see his white boot press into the fine lunar soil before we gently pan over Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Is Cooler Than Ryan Gosling (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9071",
        "date": "2018-10-13",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/nasa-is-cooler-than-ryan-gosling.html",
        "text": "Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Heralded in film for its past, but underfunded and underappreciated, the agency continues to give us insight and breakthroughs. Hollywood\u2019s latest space film, \u201cFirst Man,\u201d stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong in an intense battle between earthly priorities and the sublime possibilities of the Apollo mission, much like his nation. Naturally, its most glorious scene is the moon landing: the moment he takes that final, hesitant leap and we see his white boot press into the fine lunar soil before we gently pan over Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space.",
        "author": "By Shannon Stirone"
    },
    {
        "title": "Letter of Recommendation: Personality Cafe (NYT: Magazine) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9072",
        "date": "2019-04-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-personality-cafe.html",
        "text": "How I found a road map to my emotions on a decade-old online message board. How I found a road map to my emotions on a decade-old online message board. Hollywood would have no trouble adapting the story of how my last relationship ended. There was a fateful trip to Hawaii. A lunar eclipse. A betrayal. But in reality, things did not feel like a movie. We had been dating for nearly five years, and the surprising revelations had a way of destabilizing my grip on the real world. How many parts of my life, I wondered, were mere illusions? I started to see duplicity everywhere. Surely my roommate, my friends and the mailwoman were all quietly plotting against me.",
        "author": "By Jeff Ihaza"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launch (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9073",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-delhi-we-have-a-problem-india-calls-off-lunar-mission-an-hour-before-launch/2019/07/15/de86692e-a6b7-11e9-8733-48c87235f396_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 India called off the launch of its much-awaited second lunar mission shortly before liftoff Monday, citing a technical snag, in a setback for the country\u2019s growing ambitions in space.The countdown clock for the Chandrayaan-2 mission \u2014 which had been due to blast off from the country\u2019s east coast at 2:51\u00a0a.m. \u2014 was halted with 56 minutes, 24\u00a0seconds remaining. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Indian Space Research Organization, which had planned to live-stream the event for online viewers,\u00a0said in a tweet that a problem had been detected in the launch vehicle system and that officials had postponed the mission \u201cas a measure of abundant precaution.\u201d A new date is expected to be announced soon.Story continues below advertisementThe abortive launch represents a blow to India\u2019s quest to build its capabilities in space. With Chandrayaan-2, India was hoping to become the fourth nation after the United States, Russia and China to soft-land on the moon\u2019s surface.\u00a0AdvertisementIndia\u2019s past successes in space have come from low-cost, homegrown technology that has helped to achieve breakthroughs such as the discovery of\u00a0water on the surface of the moon. The space program, a source of national pride, has allowed the country to develop more accurate weather forecasting and improve navigation systems for its missiles.\u00a0Many Indians replied to the agency\u2019s tweet Monday with messages of support.President Ram Nath Kovind was at the Satish Dhawan Space Center, north of the city of Chennai, for the planned launch.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementPallava Bagla, science editor of news channel NDTV, reporting from the site, said the fault appeared to be in the cryogenic engine stage \u2014 the final stage of the space launch vehicle.Up to that point, the space agency\u2019s\u00a0last update had been about completing the filling of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Bagla said a second attempt could take place this month.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cEven if it were to get postponed by a year, it wouldn\u2019t make much difference,\u201d he said, adding that no other mission would be able to reach the targeted lunar region before then. \u201cIt is rocket science, after all.\u201dThe space agency didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. K.\u00a0Sivan, its chief, had earlier indicated the mission would have been India\u2019s\u00a0most complex to date. Made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, Chandrayaan-2 was to be launched by the country\u2019s most powerful rocket, known as Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. At a height of 144 feet, it weighs over 640 tons, about 1.5 times that of a fully loaded Boeing 747 jet.India\u2019s Moon mission signals growing space ambitionsA former official of India\u2019s defense research organization, Ravi Gupta, told local news agency ANI that the countdown was stopped at the \u201cright time\u201d before any big problem occurred.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChaitanya Giri, a fellow of the space and ocean studies program at the Mumbai-based think tank Gateway House, had called Chandrayaan-2 a \u201cpioneering mission for human habitation beyond Earth.\u201d If successful, he said, India would become the first country to land on the lunar south pole.\u00a0The mission, costing $141\u00a0million, is far below NASA\u2019s spending of\u00a0$25\u00a0billion on its Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s. India increased its space budget this year to $1.8\u00a0billion, but that remains a\u00a0fraction of what the United States spends.\u00a0\u201cIt is said that sky is the limit. It was apt earlier, but now India is taking a leap forward to reach space,\u201d Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the Group of 20 summit in Japan last month.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIn March, following a flare-up in tensions with archrival Pakistan, Modi announced that India had joined the United States, China and Russia in mastering the ability to shoot down a low-orbit satellite with a missile.\u00a0AdvertisementLast year, the prime minister pledged that by 2022, India will send a manned mission into space. Rakesh Sharma, the only Indian to have been to space, was part of a Russian mission in 1984.India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news Chandrayaan-2 was to blast off Monday, headed for the Moon\u2019s south polar region. New Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launch",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "New Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launch (WP: Asia) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9074",
        "date": "2019-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-delhi-we-have-a-problem-india-calls-off-lunar-mission-an-hour-before-launch/2019/07/15/de86692e-a6b7-11e9-8733-48c87235f396_story.html",
        "text": "NEW DELHI \u2014 India called off the launch of its much-awaited second lunar mission shortly before liftoff Monday, citing a technical snag, in a setback for the country\u2019s growing ambitions in space.The countdown clock for the Chandrayaan-2 mission \u2014 which had been due to blast off from the country\u2019s east coast at 2:51\u00a0a.m. \u2014 was halted with 56 minutes, 24\u00a0seconds remaining. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe Indian Space Research Organization, which had planned to live-stream the event for online viewers,\u00a0said in a tweet that a problem had been detected in the launch vehicle system and that officials had postponed the mission \u201cas a measure of abundant precaution.\u201d A new date is expected to be announced soon.Story continues below advertisementThe abortive launch represents a blow to India\u2019s quest to build its capabilities in space. With Chandrayaan-2, India was hoping to become the fourth nation after the United States, Russia and China to soft-land on the moon\u2019s surface.\u00a0AdvertisementIndia\u2019s past successes in space have come from low-cost, homegrown technology that has helped to achieve breakthroughs such as the discovery of\u00a0water on the surface of the moon. The space program, a source of national pride, has allowed the country to develop more accurate weather forecasting and improve navigation systems for its missiles.\u00a0Many Indians replied to the agency\u2019s tweet Monday with messages of support.President Ram Nath Kovind was at the Satish Dhawan Space Center, north of the city of Chennai, for the planned launch.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementPallava Bagla, science editor of news channel NDTV, reporting from the site, said the fault appeared to be in the cryogenic engine stage \u2014 the final stage of the space launch vehicle.Up to that point, the space agency\u2019s\u00a0last update had been about completing the filling of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Bagla said a second attempt could take place this month.\u00a0Advertisement\u201cEven if it were to get postponed by a year, it wouldn\u2019t make much difference,\u201d he said, adding that no other mission would be able to reach the targeted lunar region before then. \u201cIt is rocket science, after all.\u201dThe space agency didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment. K.\u00a0Sivan, its chief, had earlier indicated the mission would have been India\u2019s\u00a0most complex to date. Made up of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, Chandrayaan-2 was to be launched by the country\u2019s most powerful rocket, known as Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III. At a height of 144 feet, it weighs over 640 tons, about 1.5 times that of a fully loaded Boeing 747 jet.India\u2019s Moon mission signals growing space ambitionsA former official of India\u2019s defense research organization, Ravi Gupta, told local news agency ANI that the countdown was stopped at the \u201cright time\u201d before any big problem occurred.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementChaitanya Giri, a fellow of the space and ocean studies program at the Mumbai-based think tank Gateway House, had called Chandrayaan-2 a \u201cpioneering mission for human habitation beyond Earth.\u201d If successful, he said, India would become the first country to land on the lunar south pole.\u00a0The mission, costing $141\u00a0million, is far below NASA\u2019s spending of\u00a0$25\u00a0billion on its Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s. India increased its space budget this year to $1.8\u00a0billion, but that remains a\u00a0fraction of what the United States spends.\u00a0\u201cIt is said that sky is the limit. It was apt earlier, but now India is taking a leap forward to reach space,\u201d Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at the Group of 20 summit in Japan last month.\u00a0Story continues below advertisementIn March, following a flare-up in tensions with archrival Pakistan, Modi announced that India had joined the United States, China and Russia in mastering the ability to shoot down a low-orbit satellite with a missile.\u00a0AdvertisementLast year, the prime minister pledged that by 2022, India will send a manned mission into space. Rakesh Sharma, the only Indian to have been to space, was part of a Russian mission in 1984.India\u2019s Moon mission signals country\u2019s growing space ambitionsIndia shoots down satellite in test of space defense, Modi announcesIndia just launched a record-breaking 104 satellites into space atop one rocketToday\u2019s coverage from Post correspondents around the worldLike Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news Chandrayaan-2 was to blast off Monday, headed for the Moon\u2019s south polar region. New Delhi, we have a problem: India calls off lunar mission an hour before launch",
        "author": "Niha Masih"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rise of the Stressed-Out Urban Camper (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9075",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/nyregion/the-rise-of-the-stressed-out-urban-camper.html",
        "text": "New Yorkers are increasingly desperate to get back to nature. And if that means \u201cglamping\u201d at a $650-a-night campsite inside the city limits \u2014 well, it\u2019s a start. New Yorkers are increasingly desperate to get back to nature. And if that means \u201cglamping\u201d at a $650-a-night campsite inside the city limits \u2014 well, it\u2019s a start. It was opening weekend for glamping on Governors Island, and things were a bit rocky. First, there were the rocks. Thanks to weeks of alternating torrential rain and baking sun, the grass hadn\u2019t come in, creating a lunar landscape around the tents. Then the liquor license hadn\u2019t come through, leaving the beautiful new wooden bar high and dry. Finally, there was the throbbing bass of house music coming from the raucous Pinknic ros\u00e9 festival on an adjacent plot of land.",
        "author": "By Helene Stapinski and Ramsay de Give"
    },
    {
        "title": "The Rise of the Stressed-Out Urban Camper (NYT: New York) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9076",
        "date": "2018-07-06",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/nyregion/the-rise-of-the-stressed-out-urban-camper.html",
        "text": "New Yorkers are increasingly desperate to get back to nature. And if that means \u201cglamping\u201d at a $650-a-night campsite inside the city limits \u2014 well, it\u2019s a start. New Yorkers are increasingly desperate to get back to nature. And if that means \u201cglamping\u201d at a $650-a-night campsite inside the city limits \u2014 well, it\u2019s a start. It was opening weekend for glamping on Governors Island, and things were a bit rocky. First, there were the rocks. Thanks to weeks of alternating torrential rain and baking sun, the grass hadn\u2019t come in, creating a lunar landscape around the tents. Then the liquor license hadn\u2019t come through, leaving the beautiful new wooden bar high and dry. Finally, there was the throbbing bass of house music coming from the raucous Pinknic ros\u00e9 festival on an adjacent plot of land.",
        "author": "By Helene Stapinski and Ramsay de Give"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese New Year: Inside the World\u2019s Largest Trek (NYT: World) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9077",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/world/asia/chinese-new-year-home-lunar.html",
        "text": "Tens of millions are traveling from industrial regions to their hometowns to celebrate. The holiday rush is not a tranquil experience, but it has become more orderly. Tens of millions are traveling from industrial regions to their hometowns to celebrate. The holiday rush is not a tranquil experience, but it has become more orderly. BEIJING \u2014 Xu Zhengming was lugging a 36-inch flat-screen television through the Beijing West Railway Station on his way home for China\u2019s Lunar New Year. Another passenger was hauling a tub of meat. And many migrant workers returning to their home villages carried bundles of clothes and gifts for children they see maybe once a year.",
        "author": "By Chris Buckley and Adam Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "Chinese New Year: Inside the World\u2019s Largest Trek (NYT: World) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9078",
        "date": "2017-01-26",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/world/asia/chinese-new-year-home-lunar.html",
        "text": "Tens of millions are traveling from industrial regions to their hometowns to celebrate. The holiday rush is not a tranquil experience, but it has become more orderly. Tens of millions are traveling from industrial regions to their hometowns to celebrate. The holiday rush is not a tranquil experience, but it has become more orderly. BEIJING \u2014 Xu Zhengming was lugging a 36-inch flat-screen television through the Beijing West Railway Station on his way home for China\u2019s Lunar New Year. Another passenger was hauling a tub of meat. And many migrant workers returning to their home villages carried bundles of clothes and gifts for children they see maybe once a year.",
        "author": "By Chris Buckley and Adam Wu"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years After the Moon Landing, What Kids Should Know About the Apollo Missions (NYT: Books) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9079",
        "date": "2019-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/books/review/moon-landing-picture-books.html",
        "text": "These picture books show young readers the historic journey of the first moon landing \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible. These picture books show young readers the historic journey of the first moon landing \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible. Half a century later, the story of the first lunar landing still has the capacity to astound. These picture books, many with all-ages appeal, combine artful, accurate texts and wondrous images to introduce a new generation to the Apollo program \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible.",
        "author": "By Gillian Engberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years After the Moon Landing, What Kids Should Know About the Apollo Missions (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9080",
        "date": "2019-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/books/review/moon-landing-picture-books.html",
        "text": "These picture books show young readers the historic journey of the first moon landing \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible. These picture books show young readers the historic journey of the first moon landing \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible. Half a century later, the story of the first lunar landing still has the capacity to astound. These picture books, many with all-ages appeal, combine artful, accurate texts and wondrous images to introduce a new generation to the Apollo program \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible.",
        "author": "By Gillian Engberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "50 Years After the Moon Landing, What Kids Should Know About the Apollo Missions (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9081",
        "date": "2019-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/books/review/moon-landing-picture-books.html",
        "text": "These picture books show young readers the historic journey of the first moon landing \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible. These picture books show young readers the historic journey of the first moon landing \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible. Half a century later, the story of the first lunar landing still has the capacity to astound. These picture books, many with all-ages appeal, combine artful, accurate texts and wondrous images to introduce a new generation to the Apollo program \u2014 and some of the 410,000 people who made it possible.",
        "author": "By Gillian Engberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for space (WP: Business) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9082",
        "date": "2018-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/11/19/feature/virgin-galactic-space-tourism/",
        "text": " Richard Branson knows the agony of space flight. Now he\u2019s set on triumph. Virgin Galactic\u2019s quest for space",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Teaching Students About Racism in America (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9083",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/opinion/letters/racism-education.html",
        "text": "Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Teaching Students About Racism in America (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9084",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/opinion/letters/racism-education.html",
        "text": "Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Teaching Students About Racism in America (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9085",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/opinion/letters/racism-education.html",
        "text": "Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Teaching Students About Racism in America (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9086",
        "date": "2021-06-08",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/opinion/letters/racism-education.html",
        "text": "Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. Educators criticize G.O.P. efforts to block teaching race theory. Also: The Roth biography; Leonard Slatkin, on American music; Bezos's space flight; the other Hamptons; diversifying physics. To the Editor:",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Weight Loss Is Harder Than Rocket Science (WSJ: Everyday Math) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9087",
        "date": "2020-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/weight-loss-is-harder-than-rocket-science-11580396067?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=50",
        "text": "Mathematically, areas increase according to length squared, but volumes according to length cubed. A 12-inch pizza isn\u2019t twice the size of a 6-inch pizza, but four times the size, whereas a 12-inch watermelon would be about eight times the volume of a 6-inch one. \n\n\n\n\nHumans are three-dimensional, not flat like pizzas, but the formula for BMI seems to treat us as two-dimensional objects. One mathematical interpretation of the formula is that as humans get taller, their measurements should not scale up in all directions. Perhaps we expect tall people to be wider but not thicker from front to back. \n\n\nThe idea behind BMI was proposed in 1832 by the statistician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Adolphe Quetelet,\n\n\n\n who wasn\u2019t trying to define a healthy weight but to model a bell curve or normal distribution of human body sizes. He studied heights and weights and observed that weight tended to increase not according to the cube of height but with its square. The Quetelet index was renamed the body-mass index in 1972 by physiologist\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ancel Keys,\n\n\n\n but it still wasn\u2019t meant to measure the health of individuals, only to show trends among populations.\n\n\nMore Everyday Math\n\n\n\n\nNot Every Shape Can Tile a Wall\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nThe Best Route for an Optimal Result\nFebruary 10, 2022 \n\n\nTransmitting Information by Packing Spheres\nJanuary 13, 2022 \n\n\nAbstractions Are Good for Goodness\u2019 Sake\nDecember 10, 2021 \n\n\n\n\nOne reason the BMI model runs into problems when applied to individuals is because it doesn\u2019t take body composition into account. It uses the crude measure of weight without distinguishing between muscle and fat, even though excess fat is much more likely to be detrimental to health than large amounts of muscle. Measuring fat composition directly comes with its own problems, however, so BMI is used as a simpler model. \nThe variations in our individual biology are always going to make it hard to model anything about humans precisely. It is sometimes said that \u201closing weight isn\u2019t rocket science\u201d\u2014a field that is popularly invoked to indicate extreme difficulty. It\u2019s true that rocket science involves much more complicated formulas than the one for BMI. But rocket science is arguably simpler than weight loss, in the sense that it involves less unpredictability and variation. We control how rockets are made, and they don\u2019t change their material composition over time. \nThat is why the relationship between math and physics is generally much closer than the relationship between math and biology. But mathematical models are still helpful even when caveats and exceptions are needed. Just because an idea is expressed mathematically doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s always right; but equally, just because a mathematical model isn\u2019t always right doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s completely wrong. The point of a mathematical model is to produce a theoretical version of a real-life situation, which sometimes involves trading precision for simplicity. It\u2019s easy to dismiss BMI out of hand because of its flaws, but it\u2019s more productive for us to use math appropriately, in full awareness of both its shortcomings and its many benefits. The equation behind body-mass index is simpler than the math used in space flight, but measuring human bodies is a tricky business. ",
        "author": "Eugenia Cheng"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9088",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/3E132275-FF86-4FB8-B5B2-1C1518A0ADCF?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=2",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? Wall Street Journal aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9089",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/3E132275-FF86-4FB8-B5B2-1C1518A0ADCF?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=5",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? Wall Street Journal aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9090",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/3E132275-FF86-4FB8-B5B2-1C1518A0ADCF?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=1",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? Wall Street Journal aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: Google News Update) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9091",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/google-news-update/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/3E132275-FF86-4FB8-B5B2-1C1518A0ADCF?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=10",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? Wall Street Journal aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins WSJ Tech News Briefing host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9092",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/5D1BF615-D5F8-4B11-A9F8-8687E1B1F77F?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=2",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? WSJ aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9093",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/5D1BF615-D5F8-4B11-A9F8-8687E1B1F77F?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=5",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? WSJ aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9094",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/5D1BF615-D5F8-4B11-A9F8-8687E1B1F77F?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=1",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? WSJ aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Industry's Banner Year: What Comes Next? (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Tech Talk) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9095",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/tech-news-briefing/space-industry-banner-year-what-comes-next/5D1BF615-D5F8-4B11-A9F8-8687E1B1F77F?mod=Searchresults_pos20&page=10",
        "text": " There have been more human space flights this year than any other, and private companies with paying customers are starting to make their mark on the industry. So what comes next for the space sector and humanity's ambitions among the stars? WSJ aerospace reporter Micah Maidenberg joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Global Tax Deal Heads Down Perilous Path in Congress (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9096",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/global-tax-deal-heads-down-perilous-path-in-congress/EDD0F148-0868-4634-999D-228B9827CFB0?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=6",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for July 12. WSJ's Paul Hannon on how the international plan for a corporate minimum tax may face hurdles with U.S. lawmakers. Billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space flight. Big U.S. bank earnings are expected this week. Companies see business opportunities in stressed-out Americans. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Global Tax Deal Heads Down Perilous Path in Congress (WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Whats News) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9097",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/global-tax-deal-heads-down-perilous-path-in-congress/EDD0F148-0868-4634-999D-228B9827CFB0?mod=Searchresults_pos17&page=6",
        "text": " A.M. Edition for July 12. WSJ's Paul Hannon on how the international plan for a corporate minimum tax may face hurdles with U.S. lawmakers. Billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space flight. Big U.S. bank earnings are expected this week. Companies see business opportunities in stressed-out Americans. Keith Collins hosts. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Dow Rebounds After Biggest One-Day Decline in Months (WSJ: WSJ Minute Briefing) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9098",
        "date": "2023-01-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/minute-briefing/dow-rebounds-after-biggest-one-day-decline-in-months/9BA11068-05F3-4FF0-90D4-258F5192CC3D?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=26",
        "text": " Plus: India's Covid-19 death toll is likely in the millions, study finds. Jeff Bezos and crew complete successful Blue Origin space flight. J.R. Whalen reports. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "A tissue-box-size lab is circling the Earth conducting tiny experiments (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9099",
        "date": "2017-03-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/a-tissue-box-size-lab-is-circling-the-earth-conducting-tiny-experiments/2017/03/17/3e1db5e4-0a6c-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html",
        "text": " Researchers take advantage of how molecules behave differently in space. A tissue-box-size lab is circling the Earth conducting tiny experiments",
        "author": "Reuters"
    },
    {
        "title": "American Airlines plane veers off runway, gets stuck in mud; SpaceX launches recycled cargo ship (WP: National) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9100",
        "date": "2017-06-03",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/american-airlines-plane-veers-off-runway-gets-stuck-in-mud-spacex-launches-recycled-cargo-ship/2017/06/03/2e9b69d8-4890-11e7-bcde-624ad94170ab_story.html",
        "text": " A roundup of news from across the nation. American Airlines plane veers off runway, gets stuck in mud; SpaceX launches recycled cargo ship",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | 21 good things that happened in 2021 (WP: The Post's View) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9101",
        "date": "2021-12-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/22/good-news-2021-vaccines-environment-juneteenth/",
        "text": "1VaccinesReturn to menuYes, we\u2019re starting \u2014 like last time around \u2014 with a silver lining on a worldwide plague: the coronavirus vaccines! The Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson shots that gained widespread distribution this past spring arrived as medical triumphs, achieved in record speed through global cooperation and scientific gumption. Finally, after more than a year in which people were isolated from each other, restaurants could reopen; grandparents could hug their grandkids; normal life, or at least a tentative semblance of it, could resume. We\u2019d also be remiss not to note the remarkable progress in preventing diseases less present in today\u2019s headlines \u2014 malaria and HIV/AIDS foremost among them.2InnovationsReturn to menuAll that time apart taught us things we\u2019ll hang on to, even after that dreamed-of day sometime in the future when we can all discard our masks. The need to find a vaccine, fast, spurred scientists to impressive advances in coding diseases. The rest of us learned how to take advantage of the digital age: innovations abounded in telemedicine and remote work, and we began to commune as never before with faraway friends and family. We can keep that up in sickness and in health.3A fresh startReturn to menuPresident Biden was inaugurated, marking the beginning of what we still hope can become \u2014 despite the bumps along the way in 2021 \u2014 an era of healing, restored global leadership and good old-fashioned governing.4Curbing emissionsReturn to menuTo kick off that renaissance, the United States reentered the Paris climate agreement. That\u2019s only one step toward preventing the planet from warming past a critical threshold; the country must do more to curb emissions here and push others to cut down in equal measure. Even the executive order signed this month tasking the government with reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 isn\u2019t enough without Congress passing a comprehensive policy that charts a national transition off polluting energy. But restored regulations and new goals embraced by this administration are a sharp and welcome turn from the total abdication of responsibility by its predecessor.5Protecting our environmentReturn to menuSo, too, should we celebrate the White House bringing back protection to Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and other monuments \u2014 protecting natural grandeur, Indigenous tribes\u2019 sacred land and delicate ecosystems along with it.6A more diverse White HouseReturn to menuThe new White House filled its ranks with an unprecedentedly diverse group of public servants. This year saw the country\u2019s first female vice president \u2014 as well as its first Black and South Asian one \u2014 in Kamala D. Harris, along with its first female treasury secretary in Janet L. Yellen and its first Native American Cabinet secretary in Deb Haaland at the Interior Department.7The coup failedReturn to menuA violent insurrection attempted to circumvent the democratic processes under which the new administration would be formally authorized to assemble. The good news: The coup egged on by lame-duck President Donald Trump failed. Congress came back into session after a mid-certification siege on the U.S. Capitol, and Vice President Mike Pence did his ceremonial job of counting the electoral votes, despite pressure to overturn the legitimate 2020 election result and declare his boss victorious.8The few brave RepublicansReturn to menuThe Republican Party mostly bought into \u2014 or at least indulged \u2014 the \u201cbig lie\u201d of a stolen election, in a dispiriting betrayal of democracy. Still, a principled few of them refused to fall in line. Conservatives such as Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) and Liz Cheney (Wyo.) deserve praise for speaking out against the GOP\u2019s corrupt new orthodoxy \u2014 even when it cost them politically, which in Ms. Cheney\u2019s case included being stripped of her leadership position in the House Republican Conference.9Bipartisan compromiseReturn to menuAnd who says one party\u2019s descent into unreality means compromise is impossible? After years of empty promises from both parties, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and the other members of a bipartisan group managed to push a massive infrastructure package through Congress and onto Mr. Biden\u2019s desk, to the tune of $1.2 trillion. The merits of what was left in and what was left out are obviously up for debate, but the achievement represented by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act\u2019s passage was remarkable in an era otherwise marred by partisan gridlock.10Worker empowermentReturn to menuSpeaking of jobs, 2021 saw a record number of Americans quitting them. That might sound like bad news, but maybe not. Workers took advantage of the fact that there were far more job openings than people looking for work \u2014 empowered at last to take a stand for better pay and better labor conditions. And pay did rise substantially this year, especially for the lowest-paid laborers. This year alone can\u2019t compensate for decades of meager growth in worker pay, but the improvement is encouraging.11EntrepreneurshipReturn to menuAnother example of a new sense of economic empowerment: Americans are starting businesses at the fastest pace in years. There has been an especially large jump in people working for themselves as consultants and other sole proprietorships, as well as people entering arts businesses such as selling crafts on Etsy. Not all of these ventures are likely to survive. Still, it\u2019s inspiring to see individuals \u2014 many of whom gained a sense during the pandemic that they should live their dreams now or never \u2014 feeling confident enough to try building something of their own.12Cultural innovationReturn to menuOkay, we\u2019re cheating a little with this one. Netflix\u2019s hit show \u201cBridgerton\u201d technically came out at the very end of 2020, but it was the talk of the world in early 2021 as viewers delighted in the Regency-era romance\u2019s reinvention of the period drama \u2014 made modern by its soundtrack but also by its multiracial cast. Showrunner Shonda Rhimes proved that casting actors of all backgrounds in leading roles that once went only to White actors is about more than equality: It enhances the storytelling. And as storytelling goes, the movie revival of \u201cWest Side Story\u201d arrived to critical acclaim to close off the year \u2014 respecting the much-loved original while respecting Puerto Rican culture, and sensitively if imperfectly exploring racial power dynamics, in a manner the 1961 film did not.13Free BritneyReturn to menuThere\u2019s more pop culture out there to take note of, but an icon of a decade gone by deserves a mention as this one dawns: Britney Spears was released from a cruel and unjust conservatorship. Her testimony in court also made achingly clear the fact that the singer was subject to callous treatment from the media at the peak of her stardom in the 2000s; now, a keener understanding of misogyny as well as the stigma surrounding mental health issues has engendered the empathy she always deserved and that we can hope will benefit others.14Lessons in compassionReturn to menuSimone Biles and Naomi Osaka helped this understanding grow by speaking out during the Olympics about their own psychological struggles \u2014 the gymnastics star and tennis phenom both stepping back from competition, choosing what they knew was best for them rather than buckling to the demands of a society that too often views top-tier athletes as objects for public consumption rather than human beings. We\u2019re crossing our fingers we\u2019ve learned a lesson about treating each other and ourselves with compassion.15The Chauvin verdictReturn to menuDerek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts in the murder of George Floyd \u2014 whose death when the then-Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes set off a summer of protests against the too-frequent exercise of anti-Black police brutality nationwide. The verdict could never make up for a life unjustly taken. Nor is it an indictment of all law enforcement officers everywhere, most of whom do vital public safety work with honor and decency. But the jury\u2019s refusal to accept that the officer was merely doing his job represented progress on which the country must continue to build as it strives to improve policing and reckon more broadly with its racist past and present. The same glimmer of promise emerged when in December three White men were convicted of murder for pursuing and killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery while he was on a jog in their suburban neighborhood.16Another independence dayReturn to menuJuneteenth was made a national holiday. June 19 is the anniversary of the 1865 day when enslaved Black people in Galveston, Tex., finally heard of the Emancipation Proclamation issued two years before. The recognition of what many Black Americans have long honored informally as their real independence day was a long time coming, just as liberation itself was more than a century and a half ago.17Farewell to Confederate relicsReturn to menuThe same goes for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond. This relic of the post-Confederate era didn\u2019t deserve its place of honor; the removal of the 40-foot stone pedestal covered in protest-art graffiti along with the general was more controversial than it should have been. Now, the city must make sure its history isn\u2019t erased but rather confronted with honesty and humility.18Cuomo resignsReturn to menuAnother point for accountability: New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) resigned following revelations of serial sexual harassment, showing that even the most powerful men can\u2019t get away with abusing their power. At least, not always.19Exploring MarsReturn to menuA helicopter called Ingenuity lifted off the surface of Mars, representing an opportunity for exploration whose import dwarfs the small but mighty machine. The success shows how much robots can achieve even in the most inhospitable conditions \u2014 and humanity played no small part.20A near missReturn to menuA less friendly missive from space arrived this month when a surprise asteroid almost hit Earth. The good news, of course, is it missed. See? 2021 could have been so much worse.21And last \u2026Return to menuAll the same, let\u2019s not forget the very best thing about this year: It\u2019s almost over! The best thing that might be said about 2021 may be that it wasn\u2019t 2020. Opinion: 21 good things that happened in 2021",
        "author": "Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Style Conversational Week 1411:  Getting our wit together  (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9102",
        "date": "2020-11-19",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/11/19/style-conversational-week-1411-getting-our-wit-together/",
        "text": "Ad from space: \u201cA great void. We make it happen. Ex-lax.\u201d (Kevin Dopart, Washington)It struck me that Kevin\u2019s Lose Cannon winner for Week 1407 today (results here) is the epitome of Style Invitational humor: It\u2019s a pun \u2014 a double pun, really: not just on \u201cvoid,\u201d but also \u201cgreat,\u201d as in great-big / great-fantastic. It plays off our culture, spoofing so well the terse, declamatory taglines of commercials; you can imagine, say, James Earl Jones\u2019s authoritative voice intoning the slogan. And, of course: poop. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightPoop punning: It\u2019s what we do. The Style Invitational. And what Kevin does is win the Invite: This week\u2019s Lose Cannon gives him his 32nd first prize, and with two honorable mentions this week as well, he\u2019s blotted up somewhere north of 1,560 Invitational inks. Story continues below advertisementScatological humor \u2014 usually but not always more sophisticated than your usual potty joke \u2014 has been a hallmark of The Style Invitational since its founding by the Czar in 1993. Here\u2019s Gene Weingarten on the topic in his newly defunct weekly online chat, back in 2002: Advertisement\u201cI once gave a talk to American newspaper feature editors, and I began by asking \u2018Why is poop funny'? Everyone laughed (thereby confirming the premise) but no one offered an explanation. My explanation was this: Humans spend much of their lives preening and posturing, pretending that we are a hugely sophisticated organism, greatly distanced from common beasts. And yet we all have to do this ludicrous thing. (It\u2019s the same reason sex is funny.) Basically, we are pompous asses. And poop proves it.\u201d The Czar\u2019s attraction to bodily function humor was so immediately clear that Elden Carnahan got ink with this \u201cand last\u201d entry in Week 69: Principles of how the world works (1994): \u201cCarnahan\u2019s Rule Of Three: The longer one works to bring ironic Talmudic allusion and elegant Chaucerian wit to one\u2019s entry, the greater the likelihood the winner will prominently feature \u201cdrool,\u201d \u201csnot\u201d or \u201cpoopy.\u201d Story continues below advertisementAfter I ascended to the throne as Empress in December 2003, some in the Loser Community were concerned that a woman \u2014 or heck, a non-Weingarten \u2014 would be too prim to continue with the toilet jokes, but I don\u2019t think I cut back on them to any great extent. (This week, we have not just Kevin\u2019s Ex-lax joke but also Frank Mann\u2019s space-set ad for Imodium: \u201cYou\u2019ll never have to tell Houston you have a problem.\u201d)AdvertisementHere\u2019s just a small sampling of scatological humor \u2014 a stool sampling! hahahahah! \u2014 from the past 1,400 contests, found by searching on \u201cEx-lax,\u201d \u201claxative,\u201d \u201cpoop,\u201d \u201ctoilet,\u201d \u201clog,\u201d etc. Good idea: Shampoo. Bad idea: Shampoop. (Dave Zarrow)Story continues below advertisement Good idea: Wash hands after using toilet. Bad idea: Wash hands using toilet. (Jay Snyder)Combine the beginning and end of two words: Ene-mans: Ex-Lax coffee cake. (Chris Doyle)Puns on book titles: What did we say when we were very young and constipated? We Need a Poo. (Chris Doyle) Insert product placements into biblical and other literary passages. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. Thanks, Ex-Lax! (Russell Beland)Redefine a product name as a word: Ex-Lax: A listing of the shortcomings of a former spouse. (Randal Wetzel) AdvertisementPortmanteau words: Pooperfume: A scent so awful that they should have called it Chanel No. 2. (Chris Doyle)Story continues below advertisementWarning labels: Camping toilet: \u201cDo NOT void where prohibited.\u201d (Kevin Dopart; Chris Doyle)A & Q with Shakespeare: A. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. (\u201cThe Merchant of Venice\u201d)Q. What happens when you flush an airplane toilet? (Gary Crockett)Excuses to miss a day of work: \u201cWhen I got up this morning, I took two Ex-Lax in addition to my Prozac. I can\u2019t get off the john, but I feel good about it.\u201d (Chuck Smith) A. Because It Didn\u2019t Rhyme.Q. Why did Mother Goose reject the rhyme \u201cMary, Mary Quite Constipated\u201d? (Jeff Brechlin)A. The Heimlich Manure.Q. What is the name of Henry Heimlich\u2019s second most important contribution to emergency medicine, a procedure to alleviate acute constipation? (Chuck Smith)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cJoint legislation\u201d combining the names of two new members of Congress: The Castor-Corker Law to help prevent laxative overdoses. (Cited as submitted by too many people.)Redefine a word: Logarithm: A series of exertions on the john. (Vic Krysko)Move the last letter of a word to the beginning Scatalog: Improvised toilet paper. (Jeff Contompasis)Crapture: The bliss of becoming unconstipated, as in Philippians 1:22: \u201cBut if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labor.\u201d (Kevin Dopart) Poems on spelling bee words:Jalap (JA-lupp), a laxative made from a Mexican plant With its purgative properties, jalapSends you off to the loo at a gallop,For it's quite unsurpassed \u2014Story continues below advertisementIn fact, it's a blast \u2014At freeing a laggardly bowel up. (Frank Osen) \u201cUntrue confessions\u201d: I like to fill an unused poop bag with Tootsie Rolls and eat them at the dog park. (Frank Osen)AdvertisementIn public toilets I belt out \u201cElmo\u2019s Potty Time Song\u201d",
        "author": "Pat Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "How do scientists know what they know? (NYT: Climate) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9103",
        "date": "2020-04-20",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/19/climate/climate-crash-course-2.html",
        "text": "\u00a0To answer the next big question, Kendra Peirre-Louis explains how redundancy helps scientists recreate temperatures from years, decades and centuries past.\u00a0 \u00a0To answer the next big question, Kendra Peirre-Louis explains how redundancy helps scientists recreate temperatures from years, decades and centuries past.\u00a0 \u00a0To answer the next big question, Kendra Peirre-Louis explains how redundancy helps scientists recreate temperatures from years, decades and centuries past.\u00a0",
        "author": "By Kendra Pierre-Louis"
    },
    {
        "title": "Amazon Announces Plans to Create 2,000 New Jobs at Austin Tech Hub (WSJ: BW Wire) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9104",
        "date": "2021-12-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-announces-plans-to-create-2-000-new-jobs-at-austin-tech-hub-01640081108?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=4",
        "text": "\"Our continued investment in Austin is a testament to the amazing talent and amenities that this city has to offer,\" said Doug Gray, site lead for Amazon's Austin Tech Hub. \"With more than 3,000 jobs already created and more than 1,000 corporate and technology roles currently available, we're looking forward to continue offering exciting career opportunities to local residents.\" \n\n\n\n\n\n To accommodate its growth in Austin, Amazon has signed on to lease 330,000 square feet of space at a new building developed by Cousins Properties at The Domain in Austin. The new office space is expected to open for employees in early 2024. Amazon currently has more than 3,000 tech and corporate employees working at its Austin Tech Hub. This latest investment will join Amazon's three existing locations in Austin at The Domain, which provides access to local retail, restaurants, entertainment, and more. \n\n\n As part of its recruitment and hiring efforts, Amazon is constantly innovating and creating new programs to provide candidates of all backgrounds and levels of experience the opportunity to join the company. Two of the latest programs include: \n -- Amazon Returnship, an initiative to help professionals get back to work \n after they lost or left their jobs--including people displaced by the \n impacts of COVID-19. Through this 16-week paid initiative, Amazon is \n offering the program to people who have been without a job or \n underemployed for at least a year. The initiative provides them a new \n opportunity to rejoin the workforce by restarting their careers at \n Amazon. Candidates go through a customized and abbreviated interview \n process that takes into account their career trajectory. Once they start \n in their new role, they receive dedicated support and personalized \n coaching. During the program, returners work on a specific project and, \n after four months, have the possibility to move into full-time positions \n at Amazon. \n \n -- Best Fit, a new program that allows software engineers to apply once and \n be considered for thousands of jobs across hundreds of teams within the \n company--including some roles they may not have even thought of. \n This investment at Amazon's Austin Tech Hub is part of a multi-city expansion across the country and company. The company plans to create 3,000 jobs across Austin, Chicago, and Phoenix in the next few years. In the last 18 months, Amazon also announced expansions of its offices in Houston (150 new jobs) and Dallas (600 new jobs). Those interested in applying can learn more here. \n\n Committed to Austin \n\n Beyond its efforts to create jobs, Amazon continues to provide support for organizations in the Austin community, including the Austin LGBT Chamber of Commerce, the Equality Texas Foundation, and the University of Texas through the university's We Teach CS Conference. Amazon also worked with United Way and the City of Georgetown to donate relief supplies for those affected by winter storm Uri in February 2021. Additionally, Amazon has donated transportation services to deliver more than 80,000 meals to vulnerable groups across the Austin region through the Community Delivery program. \n\n Amazon also supports local schools through Amazon Future Engineer, a global computer science education program designed to inspire and educate millions of students each year to try computer science and coding. The program supports more than 20 schools across Austin, reaching almost 1,300 students with high-quality computer science curriculum, robotics clubs, and project-based learning. \n\n Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 70,000 full- and part-time jobs in Texas and invested more than $29 billion across the state, including infrastructure from fulfillment centers, Whole Foods Market locations, and three tech hubs. These investments have contributed an additional $34 billion to the Texas economy and have supported 136,000 indirect jobs--in addition to the employees the company directly employs--from jobs in construction to positions in logistics and professional services. Currently, more than 112,000 independent authors and small and medium-sized businesses in Texas are growing their businesses with Amazon. \n\n View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211221005234/en/ \n \n CONTACT: Media inquiries: \n Zach Goldsztejn \n\n amazon-pr@amazon.com \n \n SOURCE: Amazon \nCopyright Business Wire 2021  ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Perspective | About those mysterious fast radio bursts from deep space \u2026 (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9105",
        "date": "2017-03-10",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2017/03/10/about-those-mysterious-fast-radio-bursts-from-deep-space/",
        "text": "[Programming note: We have a newly extended list of options for labeling our blog items. After the old standard categories of \u201cnews\" and \u201copinion,\" we also have the categories of \u201canalysis,\" \u201cperspective\" and \u201creview.\" For some reason my blogging software defaults to \u201cperspective,\" which sounds to my ear like \u201copinion lite.\" No raving allowed. No promiscuous opinionating. I will continue to lobby for a \u201cblather\" category. And \u201cdrivel.\"] WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThursday,\u00a0the inbox featured a bulletin from Harvard, saying scientists think the Fast Radio Bursts from deep space could conceivably be coming from aliens zooming around the cosmos in laser-powered light-sails. I think I am summarizing this accurately and without exaggeration. Hang on, let me call up the news\u00a0release. Oh, yeah, here it is:\u201cCould Fast Radio Bursts Be Powering Alien Probes?\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFrowny-faced skeptic though I may be, one can make the case that the detection of alien civilizations would involve something like this \u2014 anomalies picked up by telescopes for which there is no obvious natural explanation. That\u2019s what Freeman Dyson told me something like 20 years ago: Someday we\u2019ll see something. The something in this case are the FRBs, first detected in 2007. They\u2019re very brief flashes of light in the radio portion of the spectrum. There may be hundreds of thousands of them pinging the Earth every day from all points of the heavens. If the FRBs are artificial in origin, the implication is that the universe is lousy with alien light sails. From the news release:To power a light sail, the transmitter would need to focus a beam on it continuously. Observers on Earth would see a brief flash because the sail and its host planet, star and galaxy are all moving relative to us. As a result, the beam sweeps across the sky and only points in our direction for a moment. Repeated appearances of the beam, which were observed but cannot be explained by cataclysmic astrophysical events, might provide important clues about its artificial origin.[Harvard professor Avi] Loeb admits that this work is speculative. When asked whether he really believes that any fast radio bursts are due to aliens, he replied, \u201cScience isn\u2019t a matter of belief, it\u2019s a matter of evidence. Deciding what\u2019s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It\u2019s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.\u201dI did what I always do in a situation like this, which is write to Seth Shostak, ace astronomer at the SETI Institute. Seth has spent his career looking for signals from advanced civilizations, so this is right up his alley. Seth quickly wrote back, saying this was \u201ca neat idea\u201d but expressing a fair bit of skepticism:So \u2026 could it be that we\u2019re looking at Klingon Cape Canaverals?\u00a0 That we are occasionally catching the flash of the mother-of-all-lasers as they boost alien craft to speeds that would allow them to travel from star to star quickly enough that the passengers who boarded would still be alive to get off at the other end?\u00a0 Yes, that\u2019s possible.\u00a0 But on the other hand, it\u2019s just about always possible (and inevitably tempting) to ascribe puzzling astronomical discoveries to the work of advanced beings.\u00a0 It was much more exciting to think that pulsars might be messaging apparatus used by extraterrestrials, or that flickering quasars were just another effort by cosmic company to get in touch.\u00a0 But in the end, it turns out that Nature is both ingenious and full of surprises, so I\u2019d keep the \u201calien explanation\u201d for FRBs at the bottom of the drawer for now.In addition, the repeated nature of at least one of these FRBs would require a fairly specific (and therefore, suspect) geometry as well as a busy schedule on the part of the supposed alien launch team.Never say never, of course, and this is an appealing idea.\u00a0 But my first reaction is to bet on the workings of Nature, rather than that of aliens with a hankering to roam.So let\u2019s go with that for now.Further reading:New planet reminds us that the universe isn\u2019t about usBig universe, eerie silence: More thoughts on the search for alien civilizationsMore about the Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox Do we really want to know if we\u2019re not alone in the universe? Expert says: Bet on nature, not Klingons. About those mysterious fast radio bursts from deep space \u2026",
        "author": "Joel Achenbach"
    },
    {
        "title": "Musk Cuts White House Ties After Trump Exits Climate Accord (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9106",
        "date": "2017-06-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-quits-work-with-white-house-after-trump-exits-climate-accord-1496349053?mod=Searchresults_pos14&page=121",
        "text": "\u201cClimate change is real,\u201d Mr. Musk tweeted shortly after Mr. Trump\u2019s speech at the White House. \u201cLeaving Paris is not good for America or the world.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accord on Thursday. The decision shows the weight of influence of the \u201ceconomic nationalists\u201d worldview. WSJ\u2019s Jason Bellini reports. Photo: Associated Press\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Robert Iger,\n\n\n\n chief executive of Walt\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Disney Co.\n\n\n , also said Thursday that he would resign from the president\u2019s business advisory council, as \u201ca matter of principle.\u201d \n\n\nWhen Mr. Trump took office in January, Mr. Musk and Mr. Iger were criticized for being among the U.S. business leaders trying to advise the administration. Mr. Musk was named to groups looking at manufacturing, government innovation and economics, while Mr. Iger, a Democrat, served on the council.\nMr. Iger responded to his critics at Disney\u2019s annual meeting of shareholders in March. He said he decided to remain on the council \u201cto have the opportunity to present specific points of view directly to the president\u201d and said his membership didn\u2019t indicate his or his company\u2019s support for any specific policies.\n\u201cI think actually it\u2019s a privileged opportunity to have a voice in the room,\u201d he said.\nMr. Iger and Mr. Musk weren\u2019t alone in facing criticism for their roles. Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Travis Kalanick\n\n\n\n stepped down from Trump\u2019s Strategic and Policy Forum in February after calls by users to delete the ride-hailing service\u2019s app. The criticism was over the belief that he supported the Trump administration and its order that aimed to ban citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. because of terrorism concerns. \n\n\n Trump Pulls U.S. From Paris Climate Accord Putin Backs Trump on Climate Decision Tillerson Urges Climate Decision \u2018Perspective\u2019 Trump Quits Climate Deal U.S. States, Cities Vow to Press Ahead to Address Climate Issues U.S. Climate Pivot Puts a Reluctant China in Driver\u2019s Seat Companies Expect Little Change U.S. Withdrawal Draws Rebuke, Resolve From World Leaders Heard on the Street: Why Paris Matters Less Than it Seems Leaving Accord Takes Time Musk Quits Work With White House Trump Has Long History of Climate Skepticism \n\n\nMr. Musk, who oversees businesses that operate in heavily regulated industries including clean energy, tried to perform a balancing act in public, arguing that engaging with the president on important issues could be more productive than attacking him. He surprised many followers by supporting\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rex Tillerson,\n\n\n\n the former head of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Exxon Mobil Corp.\n\n\n , to become secretary of state.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n President Donald Trump is facing backlash from many business leaders following his move to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. WSJ's Shelby Holliday reports. Photo: Taylor Weidman/ Bloomberg News\n \n\n\nMr. Musk is a close associate of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Peter Thiel,\n\n\n\n the tech investor and entrepreneur who backed Mr. Trump during the campaign and has helped advise the president. Mr. Thiel and Mr. Musk were founders of payments company\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n PayPal Inc.,\n\n\n and Mr. Thiel\u2019s venture-capital firm Founders Fund backs SpaceX. \nMr. Musk seemed to acknowledge on Twitter in January a realization that some of his fans were unhappy with him, when one person on Twitter told him he was losing credibility. \u201cYeah, am hearing from a lot of people & it\u2019s getting me down,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to make a positive contribution & hope good comes of it.\u201d \nIn February, he said he had raised climate issues at one council meeting and would stay on. \u201cI believe this is doing good, so will remain on council & keep at it,\u201d he tweeted. \u201cDoing otherwise would be wrong.\u201d \nBut the expected withdrawal from the Paris accord was too much for Mr. Musk. The Paris accord by dozens of countries aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as part of an effort to fight climate change. The U.S. had pledged to cut emissions by 2025 between 26% and 28% from their 2005 levels. Each participating country determines its own targets. \nOn Wednesday, Mr. Musk,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Apple Inc.\n\n\n CEO\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Tim Cook\n\n\n\n and other business leaders placed urgent phone calls to the White House in an effort to persuade the president to reconsider, The Wall Street Journal reported. \nMr. Trump, who made pulling out of the accord a campaign promise, on Thursday called the climate deal \u201cdraconian\u201d and said he would begin negotiations to either re-enter the agreement or craft a new deal.\n\u2014Ben Fritz contributed to this article. \nWrite to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com The chief executive of Tesla Inc. said he would step down from his roles working with White House advisory groups, shortly after President Trump said\u00a0the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. ",
        "author": "Tim Higgins"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Here\u2019s the case against the Green New Deal, by analogy (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9107",
        "date": "2019-02-08",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/08/heres-case-against-green-new-deal-by-analogy/",
        "text": "\u201cI believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.\u201d \u2014 President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThis is a nice-sounding idea, but it is not fully fleshed out. There are scant details about how Kennedy proposes to actually achieve this, nor is there any evidence of widespread public demand for it. The time frame he outlines \u2014 10 years! \u2014 sounds wildly over-optimistic, and arbitrary in any case. Even he admits that it will be expensive, but he doesn\u2019t say exactly how expensive or how we will pay for it.Nobody is arguing that landing a man on the moon would not be a stirring national achievement. But since when is inspiration a justification for national policy? Far more sensible would be to attempt to get a man a quarter of the way to the moon in 20 years, with a longer-term project to get a full three-quarters of the way there by the year 2000. In point of fact, the technology to get anyone to the moon and back simply does not exist, and there is no proof it will ever exist. Rocket science is incredibly complex, which is why everything else is now described as \u201cit\u2019s not rocket science.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAnd what good would it do to get to the moon if America has to shoulder a disproportionate share of the cost? Arguments about leadership are just talk. Arguments about spinoff benefits such as communications satellites and whatnot are mere speculation.\u201cIn a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon \u2014 if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.\u201d This sounds all well and good in theory, but as a concrete plan of action it is nothing more than grandiose talk, and frankly irresponsible in comparison with the more modest space goals on the table.So there you have it. The only real difference between the moon landing and combating climate change is that the moon landing was optional. Stopping the runaway climate catastrophe is survival.More cartoons and blog posts from Tom Toles:The climate change evidence piles up. So does the denial.A Green New Deal is the infrastructure plan we need to be thinking aboutHere\u2019s the trouble with \u2018Here\u2019s the Trouble\u2019-ismThe place where Trump\u2019s words failed us the worst It's impossible. Right? (BLOG POST) Opinion: Here\u2019s the case against the Green New Deal, by analogy",
        "author": "Tom Toles"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Humans don\u2019t have to set foot on Mars to visit it (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9108",
        "date": "2020-12-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/humans-dont-have-to-set-foot-on-mars-to-visit-it/2020/12/15/b1df2afe-3f05-11eb-9453-fc36ba051781_story.html",
        "text": "A dozen or so years is not much time to solve a long list of currently insuperable scientific and technological problems. That is bad news for NASA\u2019s wildly ambitious timetable to begin human spaceflight to Mars by the mid-2030s. Time flies when you\u2019re stuck in low Earth orbit, as humanity has been for nearly 50 years. The International Space Station is approximately 240 miles away \u2014 roughly the distance from D.C. to New York. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe daunting obstacles between us and Mars begin with the simple problem of weight. A flimsy lunar lander won\u2019t get the job done on Mars. Though it is the most livable non-Earth planet within our grasp, Mars is brutally hostile to life: It is as cold as Antarctica, has less oxygen than Mount Everest, is prone to hurricanes of toxic dust and suffers constant bombardment from lethal radiation. Infrastructure for even the grimmest human existence must be ferried from Earth. Before humans could build housing from Mars bricks or plant crops in Martian soil, they would need brickmaking machines and greenhouses. A Mars mission demands vastly more material than humans have ever boosted into space, weight that presents engineering challenges on both ends of the journey. We need larger rockets to escape Earth, heat shields to enter the Martian atmosphere and some sort of braking system to land safely. We have none of these ready yet.To write that paragraph, I had to gloss over a raft of more complicated challenges. In the absence of sufficient oxygen, astronauts on Mars would probably rely on solar panels to generate electricity for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. So add solar panels to the freight manifest. Also ice-mining equipment to recover frozen water from underground. And a high-tech home gym to fight the wasting effects on human muscle and bone mass of long stays in low gravity.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMars colonists will also need currently nonexistent lightweight materials to shield them from radiation far more deadly than any that can penetrate Earth\u2019s protective atmosphere and magnetic field. As for farming: another unsolved challenge. Topsoil sampled by Mars rovers reveals that a toxic chemical called calcium perchlorate is nearly ubiquitous; this must be neutralized somehow even before the thin, cold dust can be fortified and coaxed into germinating seeds. Far easier to farm Death Valley.Because of the great distance involved \u2014 Mars at its nearest is about 150 times farther away than the moon \u2014 a mission to the Red Planet has no room for error. NASA can\u2019t just send more supplies on the next rocket, as is possible at the nearby space station. Thus, it\u2019s not enough to find theoretical solutions to the problems of human life on Mars. It\u2019s not enough even to find good solutions to these challenges. Perfect solutions are necessary \u2014 even if the mission is a one-way trip. To send humans and bring them back to Earth is a far more complex proposition.But technological trends point to a more plausible Martian future. All of the most difficult challenges around travel to Mars stem from a single fact: The human body can\u2019t survive there. The problems of freight and infrastructure; of food, water and oxygen; of deadly radiation \u2014 all of it vanishes once you remove the meat from the equation.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe related fields of robotics and haptics are moving rapidly in the direction of hybrid astronauts \u2014 machines that can take the human consciousness in real time to another planet.While humans have been stuck in low orbit for half a century, robots have been working miracles in space. NASA probes have been exploring Mars for decades; the latest mission, launched this year, is designed to scoop soil samples into sealed containers for future collection and return to Earth. In recent years, robots have landed on a comet, sampled an asteroid, visited Jupiter and flown beyond the solar system.Haptics is the field of computer science that translates data into human sensation \u2014 the feeling of touching something a robot touches, of seeing through a robot\u2019s eyes, of hearing what a robot hears. It\u2019s inevitable that the convergence of robots and haptics will produce in the not-too-distant future interplanetary probes that allow humans to visit other worlds, to \u201ctouch\u201d and \u201csee\u201d them, via hardware on the surface and software in the ether.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cFuture exploration of planets will most probably involve robots that are controlled by humans orbiting the planet above,\u201d the European Space Agency predicts in a blog. Though complex, traveling into orbit around Mars would be far simpler than a landing. Engineers can also work on ways to speed data from robots on Mars to humans on Earth.Exploration is human nature \u2014 but so is the use of tools. Let\u2019s be smart and build tools to take us to Mars without the likelihood of dying there.\n\nRead more from David Von Drehle\u2019s archive.Read more:Read a letter responding to this column: Let the robots go to MarsBuzz Aldrin: It\u2019s time to focus on the great migration of humankind to MarsJason Filiatrault: Goodbye, Opportunity Rover. Thank you for letting humanity see Mars with your eyes.The Post\u2019s View: NASA keeps falling victim to presidential whimsDavid Von Drehle: The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankindLetters to the Editor: NASA\u2019s Mars achievement is an example for us all Exploration is human nature. But so is the use of tools. Opinion: Humans don\u2019t have to set foot on Mars to visit it",
        "author": "David Von Drehle"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX rocket launch stuns East Coast skywatchers (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9109",
        "date": "2021-04-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/04/23/spacex-rocket-launch-mid-atlantic/",
        "text": "A much-anticipated rocket launch dazzled Friday morning, when skywatchers from the Florida Peninsula to the Mid-Atlantic were treated to an epic display of engineering marvel and natural beauty.A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 5:49 a.m. Friday, carrying four astronauts bound for the International Space Station. It marked the first time a rocket booster \u2014 dubbed B1061 by SpaceX \u2014 was reused to transport humans to space. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightA rocket launch, shooting stars and the space station? Big sky show Friday morning in Southeast, Mid-Atlantic.The four astronauts are slated to arrive at the International Space Station on Saturday after a period of orbiting and docking.The launch prompted many to venture outdoors before dawn Friday in hopes of catching the spectacle. Last month, on March 14, a similar launch carrying a payload of five dozen Starlink Internet satellites captured similar attention after producing a mesmerizing display.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThis time, bright skies illuminated by nautical twilight washed out much of the rocket\u2019s plume when viewed north of the Mid-Atlantic. Farther south, where the sky was darker because of a later sunrise, the sunlit rocket plume stood emblazoned against the contrast of a deep azure sky.Brad Panovich, chief meteorologist at the NBC affiliate in Charlotte, captured the launch using cameras and his home\u2019s Nest cam. It made for an otherworldly, alien-like sight as it raced across the morning sky.Chris Jackson, a storm chaser based in South Carolina, got an equally stunning shot, even managing to photograph what appears to be the booster returning to Earth.Friday morning featured expansive clear skies across much of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, a rarity during the month of April. Dry, crisp air behind Wednesday\u2019s cold front made for opportune viewing.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe same type of Falcon 9 heavy rocket has been used dozens of times in the past several years to carry payloads to space. Starlink, a broadband Internet service, is working with SpaceX to launch thousands of small satellites in an attempt to bring \u201cnear global [Internet] coverage to the populated world\u201d by late 2021.Some watchers even managed to snag a view of the International Space Station, too. It flew over the East Coast shortly before 5:15 a.m.The ISS over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge this morning @hbwx @Eileen7News @capitalweather @JustinWeather #SpaceX #ISS #NASA @spann pic.twitter.com/52oF0Rzbwu\u2014 Jeff Norman (@dcsplicer) April 23, 2021\n\nCheck out these views from across the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast:Incredibly gorgeous view of the rocket launch this morning over the ICW in Myrtle Beach via April Henderson. #SpaceX pic.twitter.com/dhJkTs1912\u2014 Ed Piotrowski (@EdPiotrowski) April 23, 2021\n\nOne of my stills from my iPhone #spacex #falcon9 pic.twitter.com/t5WKMhBFKm\u2014 Brad Panovich (@wxbrad) April 23, 2021\n\nFalcon-9 launch of Dragon en-route to the ISS captured with Jupiter on a pre-dawn launch from KSC, visible from Amelia County VA. @AndrewNBC12 @spann @stormhour #nasa #nikon #SpaceX #RVA pic.twitter.com/fCOxDUU2sF\u2014 Central Virginia Storm Chasers (@CentVAstorm) April 23, 2021\n\nSPACEX launch this morning from NoVA.#SpaceX @capitalweather pic.twitter.com/SBAZBkrZ5S\u2014 Joe (@joebarti) April 23, 2021\n\nJust watched @Commercial_Crew fly @SpaceX to get to the @Space_Station from Fairfax VA approx 7 min after launch. Spectacular sight. It has been 10 years (sts 133) since Ive seen a crewed mission \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 \ud83e\udd29\ud83d\ude80\ud83d\udc69",
        "author": "Matthew Cappucci"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blast from the Past: Watch a SpaceX Rocket Launch in Florida (WSJ: Off Duty Travel) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9110",
        "date": "2017-10-04",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/blast-from-the-past-watch-a-rocket-launch-on-floridas-revitalized-space-coast-1507125924?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=86",
        "text": "And if it doesn\u2019t go to plan? That could be just as exciting, suggested\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk,\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX\u2019s CEO, during a Q&A at an international space station development conference this past July. \u201cThe simultaneous ignition of 27 orbit class engines\u2014there\u2019s a lot that can go wrong there. There\u2019s a real good chance that vehicle does not make it to orbit. I hope that it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider even that a win, to be honest. Major pucker factor.\u201d\nIn late August, my visit to Cape Canaveral to watch a night launch of a Minotaur IV rocket served as a keen reminder of the power of such events. Even the ascent of a smaller rocket\u2014the Minotaur was powered largely by ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) engines\u2014is still the greatest show on (and off) earth: a perfect fusion of science and spectacle. \n\n\n\n\nAlthough I grew up in Florida during the Shuttle era, I\u2019d never witnessed a launch. It\u2019s an omission that feels unpatriotic, like living in New York having never climbed the Statue of Liberty or in Arizona having shunned the Grand Canyon. It was a hole in my childhood CV that I wanted to spare my son, who was about to enter high school. \n\n\nKnowing little about where and when to go for the Minotaur\u2019s (or any rocket\u2019s) launch, I checked in with local photographer Ben Cooper, who has shot more than 175 blastoffs. \u201cAs a general rule, you want to get as close as possible,\u201d he told me. Because the Minotaur was going up from Spaceport Florida Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral\u2019s eastern edge, he said the optimal viewing spot was from Jetty Park, 5 miles from the launchpad as the rocket flies.\nThe launch window\u2014the time when the rocket\u2019s target in orbit is within range\u2014spanned four hours, from 11:15 p.m. to 3:15 a.m. Launch night, my son and I got to the Jetty Park about 10:15, hoping for a good viewing spot. People sat in cars lining the waterfront, facing the night sky as if it were the screen of a drive-in movie theater. About 80 others gathered on the concrete pier (now closed for post-Hurricane Irma repairs) some with beach chairs, beer, fishing rods. At the end of the pier, a few watchers balanced expensive cameras with enormous telephoto lenses on tripods. A man with a gray mustache wearing a fishing vest claimed a prime corner spot. Periodically, he\u2019d pull a flip phone from his vest for launch-status update calls, seemingly from an inside source. Early on, he gave word that there\u2019d be no launch until after 2 a.m.\nThe delay gave the crowd time to socialize. I talked with Mark Connor, an aerospace engineer who had driven down from Savannah, Ga., with his wife for the launch\u2014his first since witnessing the Shuttle Discovery take off as a child. If anything, his training as an engineer increased his awe at this one. \u201cI don\u2019t think most people understand the difficulty of doing this. This is a little rocket, and it\u2019s still 96 tons. To take that much weight and throw it up 600 kilometers that way?\u201d he said, pointing toward a patch of starry sky visible through the clouds.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe Minotaur, like a falling star in reverse, arced silently into the sky.\u201d\n\n\n\nNearby, a pair of aerospace engineering students from the University of Central Florida held forth in head-spinning detail on spaceflight gossip and technology (\u201cWhen you have smaller cores, you have a worse mass fraction because the surface area to volume ratio is higher\u2026\u201d) Listening in was Anthony Trichter, a manager at an investment bank in New York who said that seeing a launch was on his bucket list. He was in Florida vacationing with family and friends, all of whom were asleep in a hotel in Orlando, about an hour\u2019s drive away. \u201cMy mate was supposed to be coming with me [but] he was tired, so I made this a solo mission.\u201d \nAt 2:04 a.m., the horizon brightened. The Minotaur, like a falling star in reverse, arced silently into the sky (remember, sound travels more slowly than light.) My son looked up from his phone (one small step for the kid, one giant leap for dad-kind). After about 30 seconds, once the low clouds had been set aglow and the rocket neared four times the speed of sound, the roar of the engines washed over us, and was met with a round of cheers. We heard the rumble for another 90 seconds, by which time the rocket was at the edge of space, traveling more than 8,000 mph.\nAs the Minotaur became indistinguishable from the other stars in the sky, the mood remained jubilant. People, walking back to their cars swapped email addresses and social media handles to share pictures with each other, while I, trying to make up for lost time, committed myself to seeing as many launches as possible. I don\u2019t have to wait long\u2014there\u2019s another one scheduled for next week. \n\n\n\n\nTHE LOWDOWN // Having a Blast on Florida\u2019s Space Coast Getting There Both Kennedy Space Center and Cocoa Beach are less than an hour\u2019s drive from Orlando International Airport, and about three hours from Miami International Airport.\nStaying There Cocoa Beach, just south of Cape Canaveral still retains a beach-town feel, with plenty of reminders of the town\u2019s 1960s \u201cThe Right Stuff\u201d heyday. La Quinta Inn Cocoa Beach\u2013Port Canaveral, a clean, well-updated motel with a swimming pool and shuffleboard in the courtyard was, in its early incarnation as the Cape Colony Inn, partly owned by the Mercury Seven astronauts (from $85 a night, laquintacocoabeachportcanaveral.com). More upmarket is the 296 room Hilton Cocoa Beach Oceanfront, with a tiki bar just steps from the ocean (from $159 a night, hilton.com).\nEating There Though you can still wear shorts to The Fat Snook, the atmosphere and the food is a cut above most other beach eats. Try the seafood charcuterie platter, which includes octopus terrine and that Florida staple, smoked fish dip. Leave room for key lime pie, topped with a curling wave of Italian meringue (2464 S. Atlantic Ave., Cocoa Beach, thefatsnook.com). Over in Titusville, the Playalinda Brewing Company\u2019s Brix Project brewery and restaurant in a former lumberyard offers burgers, board games and a broad assortment of beer (5220 S. Washington Ave., Titusville, playalindabrewingcompany.com). Stop for diner-style breakfast of pancakes or shrimp and grits at Barrier Jack\u2019s, across the street from the statue of Cocoa Beach\u2019s favorite son, surf legend Kelly Slater (410 N. Atlantic Ave, Cocoa Beach, barrierjacks.com).\nSightseeing There The Kennedy Space Center is a fascinating, inspiring, and at times, deeply moving window into people and science behind America\u2019s space program. For some launches, guests can buy passes to up-close viewing sites for an extra $20-$49 per person ($50 adults, $40 children; kennedyspacecenter.com). Particularly for SpaceX launches, one of the best public launch viewing spots is Playalinda beach at the southern end of the 24-mile-long, pristine Canaveral National Seashore (nps.gov/cana). Watch Falcon 9 rockets land while sipping a Mai Tai at the Rikki Tiki Tavern, a thatch-roof bar at the end of the Cocoa Beach Pier (cocoabeachpier.com/dining/rikki-tiki-tavern).\nTwo rockets, an Atlas V and a Falcon 9, will take off from Kennedy Space Center this week. Ben Cooper\u2019s website, launchphotography.com, is an essential resource for finding the best on- and off-site viewing areas. For details on the latest schedule changes and upcoming launches, check spaceflightnow.com.\nCorrections & Amplifications \n\t\t\n\tLaunches scheduled for Oct. 5 and 7 have been rescheduled for later in the month. An earlier version of this article contained the original launch information.\n\n\nMore in Off Duty Travel\n\n\n\n\nWashington, D.C., Hotels Worth Lingering In\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\nIstanbul\u2019s Latest Reinvention: A Luxury Tourist Destination\nMarch 4, 2022 \n\n\nIn Miami, a Search for a Perfect Mojito \nMarch 1, 2022 \n\n\nAntarctica Is the Ultimate Family Vacation for Bonding, Adventure and Bragging Rights\nFebruary 25, 2022 \n\n\nThe Spa Getaway That\u2019s Been a Hollywood Hideout Since the 1940s\nFebruary 18, 2022 On a trip to Cape Canaveral, a writer introduces his son to the thrill of the new space age. Plus: A spectacle-seeker\u2019s guide to upcoming launches ",
        "author": "Matthew Kronsberg"
    },
    {
        "title": "Eyes on the Sky (WSJ: Art Review) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9111",
        "date": "2019-07-13",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollos-muse-the-moon-in-the-age-of-photography-and-by-the-light-of-the-silvery-moon-a-century-of-lunar-photographs-review-eyes-on-the-prize-11563015601?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=58",
        "text": "Apollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography \n\n\n\nThe Met Fifth Avenue, through Sept. 22 By the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of Lunar Photographs National Gallery of Art, through Jan. 5, 2020\n\n\nIt was photography that pushed the moon into the center of the frame. Whether harnessed to telescopes, mounted on probes, or strapped to the chests of astronauts plodding along the lunar surface, cameras have described the moon with a detail that could not be imagined, creating pictures of startling variety that have enriched scientific knowledge and, parenthetically, art. \nTwo marvelous exhibitions, commemorating the Apollo 11 mission, present this history of ingenuity with dozens of images that seldom leave library archives. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nGarry Winogrand\u2019s 'Apollo 11 Moon Shot, Cape Kennedy, Florida,' (1969), gelatin silver print\n\n\n Photo: \n \n The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco\n \n\n\n\n\u201cApollo\u2019s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,\u201d at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and \u201cBy the Light of the Silvery Moon: A Century of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Luna\n\n\n\n r Photographs,\u201d at the National Gallery of Art, both illustrate what a technical challenge it was for astronomers throughout the 19th century to capture distant, reflected light from a moving satellite and, once they had mastered the difficulties, how vital a role the camera played during the 1960s in fulfilling the successful dream of landing human beings on the moon. \n\nThe Met\u2019s is the more ambitious, provocative and lively show. More than 170 photographs, along with paintings, drawings, books, astronomical instruments, and videos are spread across five galleries. In the highly readable catalog and on the walls,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mia Fineman,\n\n\n\n curator of photographs, assisted by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Beth Saunders,\n\n\n\n curator of special collections at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, presents the moon as an object of study for astronomers, of romance for adventure writers and film directors, as a propaganda battleground for the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, and for spoofs and whimsy by artists in the post-Apollo era. \nThe first room contains numerous delicacies, beginning with two\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Galileo\n\n\n\n drawings of the waxing moon, reproduced in his 1610 book \u201cThe Starry Messenger.\u201d For centuries, images done by hand with the aid of a telescope were the sharpest images astronomers could hope for. Early efforts by photographers were clearly inferior.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Samuel Dwight Humphrey\u2019s\n\n\n\n daguerreotype from 1849 captured nine exposures of the moon during its travels. It\u2019s among the loveliest pictures in the show, albeit nearly useless for science. Only in the 1850s and \u201960s was the moon\u2019s surface pictured with fidelity, by observatories as well as by inventive, wealthy amateurs, such as Warren De La Rue in England and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Lewis Morris Rutherfurd\n\n\n\n in the U.S. \n\u201cDaydreams by Moonlight\u201d is a gallery devoted to fantasies that the moon has provoked, among painters (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Casper David Friedrich\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Thomas Rowlandson\n\n\n\n ), writers (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jules Verne\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Rudolf Erich Raspe\n\n\n\n ), and filmmakers (\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Fritz Lang\n\n\n\n ). Hanging on one wall, and bound to attract crowds, are also dozens of postcard portraits from the 1900s-40s of visitors to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Luna Park\n\n\n\n in Coney Island posed with a \u201cMan in the Moon\u201d paper backdrop. \nThe photography behind the space race, though, could be as strange as anything in science fiction. The room titled \u201cMoonshot\u201d has a 1959 print from the Soviet probe Luna 3. The first image ever made of the far side of the moon, it is likened by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ms. Fineman\n\n\n\n to a \u201cfetal sonogram.\u201d Released by the government press agency TASS, it is an abnormal example of the Soviets revealing anything about the technical capabilities of their space program. \nIn preparing for the moon landing, NASA inadvertently produced photographs that now look more like art. It\u2019s hard to look at the maps from the Lunar Orbiter missions (1966-67), composed of black-and-white bands, or the fish-scale mosaic of the moon\u2019s barren surface from the Surveyor probes (1966-68), and not think of the austere work by Minimalists and Land artists in the 1970s or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David Hockney\u2019s\n\n\n\n Polaroid collages from the 1980s. \nMs. Fineman has boldly (and rightly) decided to fill an entire room with 71 photogravures from \u201cPhotographic Atlas of the Moon\u201d by the French astronomers\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Maurice Loewy\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Pierre Puiseux.\n\n\n\n Published between 1894 and 1908, a masterpiece of observation and printing, it\u2019s a portrait of the moon as a cold but regal object worthy of our veneration. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nHenry Draper\u2019s 'Full Moon,' (1860) stereoscopic albumen prints\n\n\n Photo: \n \n National Gallery of Art, Washington\n \n\n\n\nThe National Gallery show is more compact, with only 50 photographs in two rooms. There is a lot of overlap with the Met, from the early 20th century moon atlases to examples from the NASA probes. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Diane Waggoner,\n\n\n\n curator of 19th-century photographs, has uncovered one rare item not seen in New York, however: a group of stereoscopic color glass transparencies of the lunar surface made during Apollo 11 in 1969.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Kodak\n\n\n designed special stereo cameras for the astronauts that allowed resolution down to 3 square inches. The chance to see the ridged terrain and glittering particles of \u201cmoon dust\u201d in 3-D is worth a visit. \nBoth shows feature the photograph taken by astronaut\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Harrison Schmitt,\n\n\n\n who aimed his Hasselblad toward Earth while orbiting aboard Apollo 17 in 1972. \u201cBlue Marble,\u201d as it\u2019s nicknamed, is reputed to be the most reproduced photograph in history. \nThe image could only have been made from space, a perspective that is both triumphant and humbling. As Ms. Fineman notes in the Met catalog: \u201cIn one of the great ironies of the Apollo era, the photographs that struck public and astronauts alike as the most beautiful, poignant, and awe-inspiring were not of the moon but of our home planet.\u201d \n\u2014Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York. In exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery commemorating the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the images straddle the line between science and art. ",
        "author": "Richard B. Woodward"
    },
    {
        "title": "The SpaceX spacesuit Elon Musk just revealed looks absolutely nothing like his competitor\u2019s (WP: Innovations) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9112",
        "date": "2017-08-24",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/08/23/the-spacex-spacesuit-elon-musk-just-revealed-looks-absolutely-nothing-like-his-competitors/",
        "text": "Astronauts traveling aboard Elon Musk\u2019s Dragon Capsule will wear form-fitting white-and-black spacesuits that bear little resemblance to their NASA forebears,\u00a0the\u00a0SpaceX founder revealed Wednesday, a pivotal development in his quest to launch crewed missions to and from the\u00a0International Space Station and beyond.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightAlthough he offered few details in his sneak-peek Instagram post \u2014\u00a0\u201cMore in the days to follow,\u201d a brief message promises\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the tech billionaire, who is also chief executive\u00a0of automaker Tesla,\u00a0indicated that his spacesuit is functional and tested to withstand pressure loss while traveling through space. And in a nod to the design, he noted how \u201cincredibly hard\u201d it was to marry aesthetics and survivability. The\u00a0unveiling comes as SpaceX and aeronautics giant Boeing\u00a0each have struggled to meet deadlines for NASA\u2019s Commercial Crew Program, a cost-savings partnership between the agency and private industry focused on facilitating travel to the space station.\u00a0It could be 2019 before either\u00a0is certified to fly astronauts there, although both hope\u00a0to conduct\u00a0their first\u00a0crewed test flights next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBoeing, maker of the\u00a0Starliner space capsule, unveiled its minimalist \u201cBoeing Blue\u201d spacesuit\u00a0in January.\u00a0Like the new SpaceX suit, Boeing\u2019s product is lighter, and more tailored and flexible, than the\u00a0cumbersome gear NASA astronauts have worn since the 1960s.That\u2019s because they\u2019re built for a\u00a0distinctive mission.\u00a0For commercial flights to and from the space station, these suits will be worn during launch and reentry, or if\u00a0a problem occurs causing the\u00a0capsule to depressurize. As Thuy Ong notes for the Verge, this gear is specifically not intended for spacewalks, so it\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0need to provide the\u00a0same\u00a0bulky\u00a0protection from dust and debris, or\u00a0temperature fluctuation.New spacesuits unveiled for NASA astronauts. (The Washington Post)Photos of the SpaceX suit (or an early incarnation) first\u00a0surfaced many months ago on\u00a0Reddit, where observers were struck by its futuristic appearance. Like science fiction, some said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementMusk might disagree. The image he released Wednesday is refined, exhibiting the\u00a0considerable attention he gives not only to his products\u2019 function but to the sophistication and simplicity of their design.Consider, for instance, some early feedback on his newest electric car, the Tesla Model 3, in which nearly all functions \u2014 from the wiper blades to the air conditioning\u00a0and stereo \u2014 are controlled via a small touch display beside the steering wheel. Musk has called the car \u201ca very simple, clean design.\u201d That\u2019s\u00a0deliberately so, he said in July, an effort to\u00a0recognize that \u201cin the future \u2014 really, the future being now \u2014 the cars will be increasingly autonomous.\u201dI spent three minutes inside Tesla\u2019s Model 3 \u2014 and I\u2019m still thinking about it a day laterIndeed, after a three-minute test ride in the\u00a0Model 3, The Washington Post\u2019s Peter Holley\u00a0observed the following:Story continues below advertisementIt\u2019s not so much that Tesla is ushering in the future. \u2026 I\u2019m more inclined to think that Tesla is single-handedly pulling the automotive industry into the present.The SpaceX Dragon was built to shuttle cargo into space, which it accomplished for the first time in 2012. It\u00a0can be configured to carry a crew of seven.AdvertisementBeyond the space station, Musk\u00a0has said he wants to launch a human mission to\u00a0Mars by 2025, a much more ambitious schedule than NASA envisions.\u00a0Perfecting the spacesuit technology was seen as a vital benchmark.Read more:NASA is funding this research. It could make or break the mission to MarsNASA is hiring a \u2018planetary protection officer\u2019 to guard us against alien life \u2014 and vice versaElon Musk calls for ban on killer robots before \u2018weapons of terror\u2019 are unleashed It's a pivotal development in the billionaire's quest to launch crewed missions to and from the International Space Station. The SpaceX spacesuit Elon Musk just revealed looks absolutely nothing like his competitor\u2019s",
        "author": "Andrew deGrandpre"
    },
    {
        "title": "At Mars, Jeff Bezos Hosted Roboticists, Astronauts, Other Brainiacs and Me (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9113",
        "date": "2018-03-22",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/technology/at-mars-jeff-bezos-hosted-roboticists-astronauts-other-brainiacs-and-me.html",
        "text": "At the exclusive three-day conference run by Amazon in the California desert, the merely brilliant rub shoulders with the geniuses. At the exclusive three-day conference run by Amazon in the California desert, the merely brilliant rub shoulders with the geniuses. PALM SPRINGS, Calif. \u2014 \u201cI get invited to everything, and everywhere I go, everyone wishes they had my job. But that\u2019s not true here,\u201d said Pablos Holman, a self-described futurist and inventor who has worked on lasers that kill mosquitoes and machines that suppress hurricanes.",
        "author": "By Jack Nicas"
    },
    {
        "title": "An 18-year-old is flying to space with Jeff Bezos after the winner of a $28 million auction defers first flight (WP: Space) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9114",
        "date": "2021-07-15",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/15/blueoriginjeffbezos28millionauctionspace/",
        "text": "Blue Origin announced Thursday that 18-year-old Oliver Daemen of the Netherlands will be joining founder Jeff Bezos on the company\u2019s first crewed spaceflight after the winner of a $28 million auction postponed.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBlue Origin said the auction winner, who has asked to remain anonymous, would fly \u201con a future mission due to scheduling conflicts.\u201d A company spokesman said Daemen, an incoming physics and innovation management student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, had participated in the auction and \u201csecured a seat on the second flight. We moved him up when this seat on the first flight became available.\u201d The company would not say how much the bid was. His father is Joes Daemen, the founder and chief executive of Somerset Capital Partners, which invests in real estate, private equity and financial markets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe flight is scheduled for Tuesday from the company\u2019s launch site in West Texas.Daemen will travel with Bezos (who also founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post), his brother Mark Bezos and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator and member of the Mercury 13 \u2014 a group of women who had been privately trained for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race. Though they were put through the same rigorous testing as the Mercury 7, the women, unlike the men, never got the chance to fly.Daemen would become Blue Origin\u2019s first paying customer and the youngest person ever to fly to space.\u201cAt 18-years-old and 82-years-young, Oliver Daemen and Wally Funk represent the youngest and oldest astronauts to travel to space,\u201d Blue Origin said in a statement.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin described Daemen as a lifelong space enthusiast and said he took a gap year after graduating from high school in 2020 to obtain his private pilot\u2019s license. On his LinkedIn page, Daemen lists NASA, Boeing, Tesla and Blue Origin as interests.AdvertisementThe $28 million paid by the unnamed auction winner is extraordinarily high for a suborbital flight that lasts roughly 10 minutes and affords just three or four minutes in space. Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic had been charging $250,000 for similar flights. And Houston-based Axiom Space has sold week-long trips to the International Space Station for $55 million.Blue Origin has said auction proceeds would go to its nonprofit, Club for the Future, which promotes careers in science, technology, math and engineering. On Wednesday, it announced it was awarding $1 million grants to 19 nonprofits, including the National Space Society, Space Camp, the Planetary Society and Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, a college group that Bezos was part of while an undergraduate at Princeton University.Story continues below advertisementBlue Origin said 7,600 bidders from 159 countries took part in the auction.AdvertisementThe flight is scheduled to coincide with the July 20 anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.\u201cThis marks the beginning of commercial operations for New Shepard, and Oliver represents a new generation of people who will help us build a road to space,\u201d Bob Smith, Blue Origin\u2019s CEO, said in a statement, referring to the rocket system that will carry the passengers.Alice Crites contributed to this report. Oliver Daemen, who is poised to attend college in the Netherlands, would travel with the Blue Origin founder, his brother Mark Bezos and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator. An 18-year-old is flying to space with Jeff Bezos after the winner of a $28 million auction defers first flight",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "When humans reach Mars, Budweiser wants to make sure there will be beer (WP: Food) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9115",
        "date": "2017-11-27",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/11/27/when-man-reaches-mars-budweiser-wants-to-make-sure-there-will-be-beer/",
        "text": "Budweiser made a bold announcement last spring when the company said that when humans reach Mars, its beer will also be there.The company that makes Budweiser\u00a0is now saying it will follow up on that ambitious goal by sending barley seeds, one of the beer\u2019s key ingredients, on a rocket to the International Space Station \u2014 the first step\u00a0in its research on microgravity beer. Twenty\u00a0barley seeds will be sent to space aboard Space X\u2019s cargo supply mission, which will launch Dec. 4 from Cape Canaveral in Florida. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightMissouri-based Anheuser-Busch said it plans two experiments on the International Space Station, which orbits at about 220 miles above the Earth. One is to analyze how the seeds react once exposed to a zero-to-low gravity environment; the other\u00a0is to test\u00a0if they would germinate.Story continues below advertisementThe seeds would be in orbit for a month before they\u2019re brought back to Earth for analysis.Advertisement\u201cNot only will the research offer insights on steps to creating beer on the Red Planet, but it could also provide valuable information on the production of barley and the larger agricultural community here on Earth,\u201d Anheuser-Busch said in a news release last week.NASA launched this record into space in 1977. Now, you can own your own copy.Budweiser\u00a0acknowledged that\u00a0sending beer to the Red Planet would entail several logistical and physical challenges, however. How the ingredients needed to make Budweiser would be cultivated in\u00a0a place devoid of life remains\u00a0a big question.Budweiser has\u00a0five ingredients: water, barley, rice, yeast and hops. Water on the Red Planet\u00a0is both limited and salty like ocean water, meaning brewing a beer that\u2019s 90 percent water would\u00a0not only be difficult, but the final product would be bitter, according to Budweiser.Story continues below advertisementGrowing hops on Mars would be difficult because sunlight wouldn\u2019t\u00a0be nearly\u00a0as abundant. Among other challenges, the sun is 142 million miles away from Mars, about 49 million miles\u00a0more than the sun-to-Earth distance.AdvertisementAlso, the experience of drinking beer would not be the same. The taste would be different, perhaps nonexistent. Astronauts\u2019 nasal passages get clogged up in space because there\u2019s no gravity to pull body fluids downward. Much like when you have a cold, it\u2019s difficult to taste food and drinks.Since\u00a0Mars and space have significantly less atmospheric pressure than Earth, the bubbles we see in carbonated drinks would not rise and would just be, in Budweiser\u2019s own words, a \u201cfoamy slop.\u201dStory continues below advertisement\u201cThat crisp sound you get from opening an ice-cold Budweiser wouldn\u2019t happen,\u201d Budweiser\u00a0said.Ice cream, pizza launched into space from VirginiaAnd because of Mars\u2019s extreme weather, with nighttime temperatures plummeting to -100 degrees Fahrenheit, Budweiser said keeping beers in their desired coldness, 38 to 40 degrees, would be very difficult.NASA\u2019s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. That gives Budweiser more than a decade, although President Trump has said he wants NASA to send humans to Mars sooner \u2014 by his second term \u201cat worst.\u201dAdvertisementBudweiser isn\u2019t\u00a0the only company to think about alcohol in space.Scottish distiller Ardbeg sent a vial of whisky to the International Space Station in 2011 and another vial was kept at the distillery to see how differently the two samples would age after three years.Story continues below advertisementThe Earth sample, according to notes from the experiment, \u201chad a woody aroma, reminiscent of an aged Ardbeg style, with hints of cedar, sweet smoke and aged balsamic vinegar, as well as raisins, treacle toffee, vanilla and burnt oranges.\u201dThe space sample \u201chints of antiseptic smoke, rubber and smoked fish, along with a curious, perfumed note, like violet or cassis, and powerful woody tones, leading to a meaty aroma.\u201dRead more:Trump wants NASA to send humans to Mars pronto \u2014 by his second term \u2018at worst\u2019Trump signs NASA bill aimed at sending people to MarsNASA wanted to talk about science. A congressman wanted to ask about Martian civilizations. Budweiser's ambitious goal is to brew beer on Mars.  When humans reach Mars, Budweiser wants to make sure there will be beer",
        "author": "Kristine Phillips"
    },
    {
        "title": "Wally Funk was supposed to go to space 60 years ago. Now she\u2019s going with Jeff Bezos. (WP: Business) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9116",
        "date": "2021-07-01",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/01/wally-funk-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space/",
        "text": "By most accounts, Wally Funk should have been to space by now.In 1961, Funk was the youngest member of the \u201cMercury 13,\u201d a group of 13 women privately tested and trained by a team of aviation medical experts for NASA\u2019s astronaut program at the height of the space race. But the program, which put the women through the same rigorous testing as the Mercury 7, NASA\u2019s all-male team of original astronauts, was canceled. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSixty years later, Funk, 82, is poised to become the oldest person to reach space. Jeff Bezos announced in an Instagram post Thursday that Funk would be joining him, his brother, Mark, and the unnamed winner of an auction aboard Blue Origin\u2019s first crewed spaceflight on July 20, the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin\u2019s Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.A seat to fly with Jeff Bezos to space sells at auction for $28 millionFunk is a pioneer in aviation: She was the first female Federal Aviation Administration inspector and first female National Transportation Safety Board air safety investigator. She has logged 19,600 hours of flight time and taught more than 3,000 people to fly, she said in Bezos\u2019s Instagram video.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cEverything that the FAA has, I\u2019ve got the license for,\u201d Funk says in the video. \u201cAnd, I can outrun you!\u201d View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)\nIn the Instagram video, Bezos describes the plan for the New Shepard\u2019s journey to a wide-eyed Funk, down to the moment when the rocket returns to the desert surface and its doors open.\u201cWe open the hatch, and you step outside. What\u2019s the first thing you say?\u201d Bezos asks Funk. She does not hesitate.Jeff Bezos announces he\u2019ll be on first crewed spaceflight of Blue Origin rocket\u201cI will say, \u2018Honey, that\u2019s the best thing that ever happened to me!\u2019 \u201d Funk declares, pulling Bezos into a bear hug.Funk is Bezos\u2019s \u201chonored guest\u201d on the flight, which will also be joined by the winner of Blue Origin\u2019s auction for his company\u2019s nonprofit foundation. Nearly 7,600 bidders from 159 countries participated in the auction, which topped out at $28 million. (Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post).AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin has said travelers must be able to endure three times the force of gravity for two minutes on ascent and 5\u00bd times the force of gravity for a few seconds on the way down. Participants must be between 5 feet and 6-feet-4-inches tall and weigh between 110 and 223 pounds. As a young girl, Funk used to jump off the roof of her parents\u2019 barn in a Superman cape, pretending to fly. She loved to build model planes and ships, became an \u201cexpert marksman\u201d at 14 and skied competitively for the United States in slalom and downhill races. She has been flying since 1957. She is also an antique car enthusiast and \u201cavid zipliner,\u201d according to her website.When NASA finally opened its programs to women in 1976, Funk applied four times and received four rejections. But she has never been the type to let anything stand in her way, she says in the video.\u201cI like to do things that nobody has ever done,\u201d Funk said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe July 20 flight would have made Bezos the first of the billionaire \u201cspace barons\u201d to go to space, a significant milestone for him and Blue Origin, which lags behind Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX in the competition for billions of dollars in NASA and Pentagon contracts and which flies a more powerful rocket capable of taking people and supplies into orbit. But hours after the announcement that Funk would be on the flight, Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson, who will turn 71 July 18, announced that he plans to be aboard his company\u2019s space plane on its next test flight, now scheduled for July 11. That would place him in space ahead of Bezos.Bezos has long been fascinated with space. An avid science fiction reader and big \u201cStar Trek\u201d fan as a child, he has called watching the Apollo 11 moon landing a seminal moment for him, even though he was just 5 years old at the time. He chose \u201cGoddard\u201d as the middle name for one of his sons in homage to Robert Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry.The New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who became the first American to go to space in 1961. Like that first suborbital flight, New Shepard shoots straight up, flying past 60 miles to reach the edge of space before falling back to Earth. The flight takes about 10 minutes in all, with a few minutes of weightlessness in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNeither Musk nor Virgin Galactic\u2019s Richard Branson have ridden on their companies\u2019 rockets, though there is speculation Branson may be trying to beat Bezos with a secretive launch in the coming weeks. In late June, Virgin Galactic won FAA approval to take customers to space, making it the first spaceline to cross that hurdle.In 2010, Funk put down $200,000 for a future Virgin Galactic flight. She has spent years waiting and visiting Spaceport America, anticipating what she thought would be her first trip to space. But by the time she gets to cash in that ticket, she will already be an astronaut.Christian Davenport contributed to this report. At 82, the \"Mercury 13\" pioneer is poised to become the oldest person to reach space when the first crewed Blue Origin rocket takes flight this month. Wally Funk was supposed to go to space 60 years ago. Now she\u2019s going with Jeff Bezos.",
        "author": "Taylor Telford"
    },
    {
        "title": "Extremely Wealthy Person Hosts Live Television Show (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9117",
        "date": "2021-05-09",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-saturday-night-live-tesla-dogecoin-crypto-11620569869?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=30",
        "text": "Can a tech zillionaire be funny? It\u2019s never been a prerequisite for the job, but Musk seemed open to try, striding onto the iconic Studio 8H stage in a black double-breasted suit that appeared borrowed from the rack at Armani Mars. He proudly said he was the first person to host \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d with Asperger\u2019s syndrome\u2014\u201cor at least the first to admit it\u201d\u2014and leaned into jokes about his social awkwardness and his unpredictable outbursts on Twitter. (\u201cWe\u2019re actually live right now, which means I could say something truly shocking\u2026Like I drive a Prius.\u201d) He brought on his mother, Maye (the whole SNL opener was a big Mother\u2019s Day tribute, with cast moms) who reminded the world of the $500 that a 12-year-old Elon once won for designing a videogame, and expressed excitement at what her son would get her for Mother\u2019s Day.\n\u201cI just hope it\u2019s not dogecoin,\u201d Maye Musk said.\n\u201cIt is,\u201d Elon Musk said.\n\n\nAnd there it was: the crossing of the streams, the first mention of the cryptocurrency Musk had helped shoot to the moon and which had soared in advance of his SNL appearance. There really were two concurrent events to monitor Saturday night\u2014Musk on TV, making jokes, and also the dogecoin roller coaster during the show. And it was a roller coaster: the Robinhood trading app briefly hit pause amid a flurry of activity. Historically, this has not been how money, or SNL, is experienced, but whatever. Welcome to 2021, where the stodgy are no match for the stonky.\nStill, the preshow frenzy over Musk\u2019s appearance\u2014was he a worthy host, a poor choice, a ratings grab, some combination of all of the above, and most of all, WHAT WOULD ELON SAY?\u2014didn\u2019t recognize a critical truth: SNL is a rather staid vessel. The casts and the jokes change, but every host is strapped into a standard cockpit: do some jokes, read the cards, change clothes a bunch of times, introduce the musical guest, and then, at the end, say goodbye. Steve Forbes managed to host \u201cSaturday Night Live.\u201d As Musk pointed out in his monologue, so did, uh, O.J. Simpson. SNL has highs, lows, and plenty of middling middle, but the NBC program is an institution in its 46th year, and wired to a lot of tradition. As its creator, Lorne Michaels, famously says: \u201cThe show doesn\u2019t go on because it\u2019s ready; it goes on because it\u2019s 11:30.\u201d\u00a0\nWhich is to say, Musk adapted to SNL more than SNL adapted to Musk, and things never got too weird. The first few sketches involving him were clunkers\u2014I\u2019m still trying to figure out the Icelandic talk show one\u2014with gags that had little or no relation to Musk or the expanded Musk universe. It wasn\u2019t until later that SNL dared to engage the ludicrous mode\u2014during the \u201cWeekend Update\u201d news segment, when Musk appeared as a finance guru named \u201cLloyd Ostertag.\u201d Here was Musk in the frothy sweet spot everyone wanted to see: being grilled by a pair of skeptical anchormen about a crypto that was chaotically trading based upon what Musk was saying and doing on SNL at that very moment:\n\u201cNow, what is dogecoin?\u201d asked co-anchor Michael Che.\n\u201cWell, it actually started as a joke, based on an internet meme,\u201d said Musk, er, Lloyd Ostertag. \u201cBut now it\u2019s taken off in a very real way.\u201d\n\u201cOK. But what is dogecoin?\u201d Che asked again.\n\u201cWell, it was created in 2013, and has a circulating supply of 117 billion coins, of which 113 billion have already been mined,\u201d Musk said.\n\u201cAlright, cool,\u201d said Che. \u201cSo what is dogecoin?\u201d\u00a0\nThe climatic line was Musk, I mean, Lloyd, shrugging and admitting \u201cYeah, it\u2019s a hustle,\u201d which the internet seemed to think was a moment, or maybe just a joke, but who can really say at this point? This is the world we now inhabit, in which a celebrity plutocrat with 53 million Twitter followers holds a spectacular amount of cultural and economic sway, and if you\u2019re going to spend time, and personal fortune, parsing a line offered after midnight on an iconic comedy program to intuit where it takes a currency, please have fun, and good luck, but do not take any advice from me, ask another Journal Jason, Zweig, who is far better equipped.\u00a0\u00a0\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMusk would appear in a few more sketches, including one in which he spoofed his Mars colony mission, and another in which he joked about his penchant for futuristic tunnels, and it started to feel as if \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d had saved its better Elon stuff for early Sunday. All of the Musk mocking was tonally light, and almost all of it was straight from the man himself, and if you were worried heading into the show that Musk\u2019s SNL appearance was canny PR to try to soften his enormous wealth and controversial past comments, it\u2019s likely you still feel the same.\u00a0\nAt least you can now say you\u2019ve now seen Elon Musk do a monologue, play an Icelandic talk show producer, a Mario Brothers villain, and introduce Miley Cyrus. You never really knew you needed it, and you\u2019re not sure if you got half of it. Of course, you probably thought the same thing about the coin with the dog.\n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat did you Elon Musk appears on \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d causing a surreal buzz on TV and in the crypto world. ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "What\u2019s Better, a Prize or a Patent? (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9118",
        "date": "2021-08-30",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/elon-musk-prize-patent.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk has put up $100 million in prize money for a way to extract carbon from the atmosphere. Elon Musk has put up $100 million in prize money for a way to extract carbon from the atmosphere. Earlier this year, Elon Musk, the billionaire co-founder and chief executive of Tesla, promised $100 million in prizes to inventors who come up with ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The rewards, which will be awarded by the X Prize Foundation, are part of a cornucopia of cash that\u2019s being dangled to induce innovation around the world. The European Innovation Council, the MacArthur Foundation, and the U.S. government through the America Competes Reauthorization Act of 2010 are among those splashing around big bucks.",
        "author": "By Peter Coy"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk wants YOU to build a brain-computer interface (WP: Climate & Environment) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9119",
        "date": "2020-08-29",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/elon-musk-wants-you-to-build-a-brain-computer-interface/2020/08/28/5a085d66-e98b-11ea-bf44-0d31c85838a5_story.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk isn\u2019t content with electric cars, shooting people into orbit, populating Mars and building underground tunnels to solve traffic problems. He also wants to get inside your brain.His startup, Neuralink, wants to one day implant computer chips inside the human brain. The goal is to develop implants that can treat neural disorders \u2014 and that may one day be powerful enough to put humanity on a more even footing with possible future superintelligent computers. 10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprintArrowRightNot that it\u2019s anywhere close to that yet.In a video demonstration Friday explicitly aimed at recruiting new employees, Musk showed off a prototype of the device. About the size of a large coin, it\u2019s designed to be implanted in a person\u2019s skull. Ultra-thin wires hanging form the device would go directly into the brain. An earlier version of the device would have been placed behind an ear like a hearing aid.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut the startup is far from a having commercial product, which would involve complex human trials and FDA approval among many other things. Friday\u2019s demonstration featured three pigs. One, named Gertrude, had a Neuralink implant.Musk, a founder of both the electric car company Tesla Motors and the private space-exploration firm SpaceX, has become an outspoken doomsayer about the threat artificial intelligence might one day pose to the human race. Continued growth in AI cognitive capabilities, he and like-minded critics suggest, could lead to machines that can outthink and outmaneuver humans with whom they might have little in common. The proposed solution? Link computers to our brains so we can keep up.Musk urged coders, engineers and especially people with experience having \u201cshipped\u201d (that is, actually created) a product to apply. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to have brain experience,\u201d he said, adding that this is something that can be learned on the job.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHooking a brain up directly to electronics is not new. Doctors implant electrodes in brains to deliver stimulation for treating such conditions as Parkinson\u2019s disease, epilepsy and chronic pain. In experiments, implanted sensors have let paralyzed people use brain signals to operate computers and move robotic arms. In 2016, researchers reported that a man regained some movement in his own hand with a brain implant.But Musk\u2019s proposal goes beyond this. Neuralink wants to build on those existing medical treatments as well as one day work on surgeries that could improve cognitive functioning, according to a Wall Street Journal article on the company\u2019s launch.While there are endless, outlandish applications to brain-computer interfaces \u2014 gaming, or as someone on Twitter asked Musk, summoning your Tesla \u2014 Neuralink wants to first use the device with people who have severe spinal cord injury to help them talk, type and move using their brain waves.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI am confident that long term it would be possible to restore someone\u2019s full-body motion,\u201d said Musk, who\u2019s also famously said that he wants to \u201cdie on Mars, just not on impact.\u201dNeuralink is not the only company working on artificial intelligence for the brain. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who sold his previous payments startup Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, started Kernel, a company working on \u201cadvanced neural interfaces\u201d to treat disease and extend cognition, in 2016. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also interested in the space. Facebook bought CTRL-labs, a startup developing non-invasive neural interfaces, in 2019 and folded it into Facebook\u2019s Reality Labs, whose goal is to \u201cfundamentally transform the way we interact with devices.\u201dThat might be an easier sell than the Neuralink device, which would require recipients to agree to have the device implanted in their brain, possibly by a robot surgeon. Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. Elon Musk\u2019s young startup, Neuralink, wants to one day implant computer chips inside people\u2019s brain Elon Musk wants YOU to build a brain-computer interface",
        "author": "Barbara Ortutay\u2009|\u2009AP"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Is Now One of the World\u2019s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies (NYT: Technology) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9120",
        "date": "2017-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/technology/spacex-is-now-one-of-the-worlds-most-valuable-privately-held-companies.html",
        "text": "Elon Musk\u2019s rocket company raised $350 million in new financing, raising its valuation to about $21 billion. Elon Musk\u2019s rocket company raised $350 million in new financing, raising its valuation to about $21 billion. SAN FRANCISCO \u2014 SpaceX, the rocket maker founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has raised up to $350 million in new financing and is now valued at around $21 billion, making it one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world.",
        "author": "By Katie Benner and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "A scientist\u2019s viral tweet called Elon Musk \u2018Space Karen\u2019 \u2014 as a way to defend science (WP: Internet Culture) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9121",
        "date": "2020-11-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/space-karen-elon-musk/",
        "text": "Emma Bell usually uses Twitter the way most of us do: for browsing funny web comics, procrastinating and communicating with their colleagues in the scientific community. Bell, a postdoctoral fellow who researches cancer genomics using bioinformatics at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto, will also occasionally correct a bit of misinformation they see online. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOn Sunday, that misinformation came from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who tweeted about rapid antigen tests to his more than 40 million followers. \u201cSomething extremely bogus is going on,\u201d Musk wrote. \u201cWas tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD.\u201dThis is a fairly expected result from certain rapid antigen tests, experts say. As the FDA has noted, antigen tests, which can give results quickly, \u201care not as sensitive as molecular tests,\u201d which often take days. \u201cThis means that a positive result is highly accurate, but a negative result does not rule out infection.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBell quickly noted this in a retweet, writing, \u201cRapid antigen tests trade sensitivity for speed. They return a result in <30 minutes, but can only detect COVID-19 when you\u2019re absolutely riddled with it. What\u2019s bogus is that Space Karen didn\u2019t read up on the test before complaining to his millions of followers.\u201dRapid antigen tests trade sensitivity for speed. They return a result in <30 minutes, but can only detect COVID-19 when you're absolutely riddled with it. What's bogus is that Space Karen didn't read up on the test before complaining to his millions of followers. pic.twitter.com/a1Snfpm03h\u2014 Emma Bell PhD (@emmabell42) November 14, 2020\n\nBell\u2019s immediate reaction to Musk\u2019s post was frustration.\u201cPeople like Elon Musk, fabulously intelligent people who can use social media avidly, should know better, should know that whatever comes out of their Twitter account has an impact on the wider world,\u201d Bell told The Washington Post. \u201cThese actions have consequences.\u201dBell also posted a short piece to Medium titled \u201cNo, Elon Musk is not about to blow this COVID-19 testing thing wide open,\u201d in which they explained in further detail why results from rapid antigen tests can vary.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cI think we\u2019ve pretty much thoroughly proved that Twitter is not the place for nuanced discourse,\u201d Bell said. \u201cThere is a need to be even more careful about what you\u2019re saying and how you say it when you have such little room to express a complex idea.\u201dUsually, Bell said a few friends will respond to their tweets. But suddenly Bell\u2019s tweet was trending under the term \u201cSpace Karen,\u201d and their follower count shot up from about 1,000 to more than 7,000 in three days.The term had been around for a while (since May, according to Know Your Meme) and Bell said it simply came to mind when writing the tweet.\u201cI thought it was funny, and I thought it was an apt description for that sort of behavior,\u201d Bell said. \u201cIt was just an off-the-cuff remark.\u201dStory continues below advertisementRegardless of its origin, Twitter users certainly appreciated it.Advertisement\u201cThe academic who called Elon Musk \u2018Space Karen\u2019 won Monday for me,\u201d tweeted writer Zamandlovu Ndlovu.\u201cI will never not laugh at Space Karen,\u201d tweeted digital artist Dan Hett, who included a meme of Musk in a \u201cspeak to the manager\u201d haircut, which \u201crefers to variations of a women\u2019s haircut style that is short in the back and longer in the front\u201d and \u201cis often mocked as representative of middle-aged women who insist on complaining to managers at retail stores and restaurants,\u201d according to Know Your Meme.I will never not laugh at Space Karen https://t.co/InvR5sTRMy pic.twitter.com/92vQfIyzHi\u2014 dan hett (@danhett) November 16, 2020\n\n\u201cRemember last year when space karen said covid-19 was no biggie? I do,\u201d tweeted Daily Beast editor-at-large Molly Jong-Fast.Story continues below advertisementIndeed, Musk, who did not respond to Bell\u2019s tweet or to The Post\u2019s request for comment, has long downplayed the pandemic. In early March, he tweeted, \u201cThe coronavirus panic is dumb.\u201d (The disease has now killed at least 247,000 Americans.) Musk also complained about lockdowns in an April earnings call and an episode of Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast in May.AdvertisementBell said they\u2019ve gotten some insulting messages from people who screenshot Bell\u2019s Twitter profile, which reads in part \u201cnonbinary + queer + #firstgen + depression/anxiety,\u201d but, for the most part, the experience of going viral has been positive.\u201cTwitter itself has done a pretty good job of filtering out the less pleasant comments that I\u2019ve been getting,\u201d Bell said. \u201cAnd to be honest, they\u2019ve mostly been drowned out by people tweeting out the response and other people\u2019s jokes relating to it.\u201dStory continues below advertisementBell plans to use their new following to write more and spend a bit more time discussing science online.\u201cI have a little more power to be able to spread a little more knowledge about scientific subjects, about the research I\u2019m interested in,\u201d Bell said.\u201cI want to be a visible research scientist, a visible person as a science communicator, based on my various identities,\u201d they added. \u201cIt\u2019s really important to me that I\u2019m a visible influence in my little corner of science so that other people who may be of an ethnic minority that\u2019s underrepresented in science or has mental health issues or are of a marginalized gender or sexuality see that they do have a place here.\u201d People like Elon Musk \u201cshould know that whatever comes out of their Twitter account has an impact on the wider world,\u201d Emma Bell told The Washington Post. A scientist\u2019s viral tweet called Elon Musk \u2018Space Karen\u2019 \u2014 as a way to defend science",
        "author": "Travis M. Andrews"
    },
    {
        "title": "Apollo 11 Had a Hidden Hero: Software (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9122",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/apollo-11-had-a-hidden-hero-software-11563153001?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=15",
        "text": "Five times the onboard computer signaled an emergency like none Armstrong and crewmate \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Buzz Aldrin\n\n\n\n had practiced. In that moment, the lives of two astronauts, the efforts of more than 300,000 technicians, the labor of eight years at a cost of $25 billion, and the pride of a nation depended on a few lines of pioneering computer code.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAn 18-inch-thick printout in Don Eyles\u2019s loft shows some of the computer code that controlled the Apollo lunar module\u2019s descent to the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nHumans had never risked so much on zeros and ones. Yet they decided to trust the machine and the binary two-digit code, and Armstrong and Mr. Aldrin reaped the glory as the first people to walk on the moon. \u201cThe software saved the mission,\u201d says Fred Martin, 85, who managed much of the Apollo software development. From the vantage of 50 years, we view the leap to another world as a singular triumph of humankind. By almost any standard, though, it is a victory for the machine, too, marking the most important 15 minutes in the history of computing. \u201cThey\u2019d put the computer at the center of this hugely ambitious project,\u201d says \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n David C. Brock,\n\n\n\n director of the Computer History Museum\u2019s software history center. \u201cIt was a real test of that technology and everyone\u2019s beliefs and aspirations for it.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nApollo 11\u2019s lunar module, Eagle, photographed from the command module after separating to begin its computer-guided descent to the lunar surface.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThe Apollo guidance computer\u2014the first digital general-purpose, multitasking, interactive portable computer\u2014laid the foundations of much of the digital world we know today, from the fly-by-wire cockpits of commercial jetliners to the multitasking smartphones we carry in our pockets. In the airless void above the moon, wafer-thin silicon and the code that powered it came of age.Letting \u2018the kids\u2019 thrive Don Eyles unfurled a half-century-old, 18-inch-thick computer printout on a table in his loft on the Boston waterfront earlier this year.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingMoonshot: How Apollo Launched the Digital RevolutionThe Apollo program to go to the moon marks the only time humans have left our home planet to set foot on another world. The biggest effect of this voyage was transforming the civilization it left behind.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nThe 75-year-old traced the maze of terse commands with his finger, proud of how little memory the interlocking tasks and routines required to land on the moon. It was poetry in the enigmatic commands of machine language. \u201cThey had to gamble that the kids would rise to the occasion,\u201d says Mr. Eyles. \u201cWe were brought into a sort of loose managerial situation and allowed to thrive.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDon Eyles, in his Boston loft, was just out of college when he went to work for MIT\u2019s Instrumentation Lab and helped write the code that guided men to the moon.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Tony Luong for The Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\n\nIn the summer of 1966, he was a 23-year-old math major with a taste for opera and fast cars, looking for work. Fresh out of college, he had many things about life yet to learn. Computer code was one. So was space travel. He applied to the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose job it was to guide the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. It took more than big rockets to put humans on the moon, they told him. It took code. And, to his surprise, they hired him.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nDan Lickly, shown circa the 1960s, says there was an art to finding people who could turn engineering equations into code for a journey to another world..\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Draper\n \n\n\n\nThe I-Lab, as everyone called the place, was housed in a former underwear factory overlooking the Charles River, now long since demolished. The Apollo engineers and programmers labored at scuffed metal desks in cubicles with code scribbled on the chalkboard, slide rules on the table, cigarette butts on the linoleum floor. Fanfold computer printouts were stacked up to 6 feet high, like termite mounds. The lab had pioneered inertial guidance systems for the nuclear-warhead-tipped missiles of the Cold War, such as the submarine-launched Polaris intercontinental ballistic missiles. Funded by the U.S. Air Force, it also developed a plan in the late 1950s to fly a computerized probe to Mars and back. MIT received the first major Apollo contract, the only one awarded to a university, and the only one given without competitive bidding. In an era when a computer used fragile tubes, ran on punch cards and filled an entire room, the I-Lab engineers had invented a br The moon landing was one of the most important moments in the history of computing, laying the foundations for everything from fly-by-wire cockpits to the smartphones in our hands. ",
        "author": "Robert Lee Hotz"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk Is Building a Sci-Fi World, and the Rest of Us Are Trapped in It (NYT: Opinion) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9123",
        "date": "2021-11-04",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/elon-musk-capitalism.html",
        "text": "From Mars to the metaverse, tech moguls are forging a new kind of capitalism: an extreme, extraterrestrial version. From Mars to the metaverse, tech moguls are forging a new kind of capitalism: an extreme, extraterrestrial version. The last week of October, Bill Gates (net worth: $138 billion) celebrated his 66th birthday in a cove off the coast of Turkey, ferrying guests from his rented yacht to a beach resort by private helicopter. Guests, according to local reports, included Jeff Bezos (net worth: $197 billion), who after the party flew back to his own yacht, not to be confused with the \u201csuperyacht\u201d he is building at a cost of more than $500 million.",
        "author": "By Jill Lepore"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Beyond\u2019 Review: Cold War Cosmonaut (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9124",
        "date": "2021-04-18",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-review-cold-war-cosmonaut-11618783134?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=32",
        "text": "Gagarin\u2019s value was primarily symbolic. He was not only the embodiment of humanity\u2019s scientific progress, but a living demonstration that the Soviets offered a better, faster path to the future than the U.S. His mission was to return alive, uninjured\u2014and sane. To that end, during his training Gagarin, like other aspiring cosmonauts, was subjected to almost every brutality\u2014physical and psychological\u2014that his doctors could think up.\n\n\n\n\nLike their American counterparts, the first Soviet spacemen had to be advertisements for the system in which they were raised, but more so. They had to fit, not just literally (Gagarin, at 5-foot-5, was two inches shorter than the maximum height allowed), but politically and personally. With his dazzling smile, charm, cheerfulness and peasant background, Gagarin was picked as the first to fly, over his friend Gherman Titov, who was more cerebral, more of a loner, more independent-minded, the son of a teacher. As Mr. Walker notes in \u201cBeyond,\u201d \u201cGagarin knew how to cast iron. Titov knew how to recite Pushkin,\u201d a \u201csuspiciously bourgeois\u201d display of erudition. What\u2019s more, \u201cGagarin had two healthy daughters. Titov\u2019s only infant child had recently died and now he had no children, a bleak narrative for a would-be supreme representative of the Soviet state.\u201d\n\n\nThat said, the runner-up was, on balance, the stronger character, and thus Titov, though only 25, was thought more suitable than Gagarin to cope with the next mission\u201417 orbits rather than one (Gagarin\u2019s flight was over in under two hours, Titov\u2019s took more than a day). This may, however, have been a lesser ordeal than the one that Mr. Walker describes well: Titov\u2019s lifelong burden of only having been second into orbit, forever Buzz to Gagarin\u2019s Neil.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Photo: \n \n WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\n\nBeyondBy Stephen Walker\n\t\t\n\t\t\tHarper, 502 pages, $29.99\n\n\nThe story of the early space race (and particularly, perhaps, to a Western audience, its lesser-known Soviet side) is of such intrinsic interest that it would be difficult to make it dull, and Mr. Walker, a documentary filmmaker as well as a writer of nonfiction, does not. On the contrary, he tells his tale with verve, and he includes a mass of detail, some technical, much of it\u2014the depiction, say, of \u201cCape cookies\u201d in Florida hoping to meet an astronaut at the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn bar\u2014decidedly not. And then there\u2019s the saga of the \u201ccreepily lifelike\u201d Ivan Ivanovich, the first mannequin in orbit . . .\nSwitching his attention back and forth between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., Mr. Walker chronicles the Cold War contest to be the first to master manned spaceflight. The result is not exactly a surprise, but \u201cBeyond\u201d unexpectedly maintains the suspense. Similarly, Gagarin\u2019s flight is transformed into a cliffhanger, even though we already know that \u201cYura\u201d made it back home. Just how close it came to disaster was not revealed until after the Soviet collapse.\nThat Gagarin\u2019s orbit was also a triumph for a totalitarian empire is not something that Mr. Walker stresses, but he does not need to. The oppressive, paranoid style of the Soviet regime is evident enough in his narrative, as are the strange twists that it created. Sergei Korolev was, more than anyone else, responsible for the astonishing series of early Soviet successes in space\u2014and is, in many respects, the most intriguing individual in this book. The Kremlin considered him of such importance that his identity was shrouded in secrecy so deep that very few knew who he was.\nSome 20 years before, Korolev had been a different kind of nonperson. He was working on rockets, but after his arrest during the Stalinist terror, confessed, after torture, to \u201csabotage\u201d and was sent to mine gold in Kolyma, perhaps the worst of all the Gulag\u2019s hells. Korolev\u2019s life was almost certainly saved by his transfer to a sharashka, a laboratory within the Gulag, where his engineering expertise could be deployed in the service of the state. He was eventually released and given a new job in a department dedicated to developing missiles for the military. Among those freed with Korolev was someone who had denounced him to the secret police. That man now became, for a time, his boss: The Soviet Union was what it was.\nIn captivity, Korolev had, Mr. Walker relates, \u201clearned to compromise where necessary, to exploit others if required, and sometimes to lie, cheat and deceive to get his own way. He learned to be pragmatic and political.\u201d As \u201cthe chief of chief designers\u201d of the U.S.S.R.\u2019s strategic missiles, Korolev explained that his R-7, the first ICBM, could also be used to launch a satellite into orbit ahead of the Americans. He knew that Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, would take delight at the prospect of humiliating the U.S., and Khrushchev agreed to support this effort as long as it did not detract from the work on missiles. Korolev performed this balancing act brilliantly, piggybacking off a military program to pursue his Yuri Gagarin, the \ufb01rst man in space, held symbolic value for the Soviet Union, which claimed to offer a better system than the U.S. ",
        "author": "Andrew Stuttaford"
    },
    {
        "title": "He wanted to fly around the moon. He ended up in court instead. (WP: Local Crime & Public Safety) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9125",
        "date": "2019-05-26",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/he-wanted-to-fly-around-the-moon-he-ended-up-in-court-instead/2019/05/26/8afe5450-517c-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html",
        "text": "Harald McPike had been to the North Pole. The South Pole. Climbed the tallest peak in Africa, the volcano that is the highest point on Earth and the mountain that\u2019s not Everest but gives you a great view of its deadly face. What was left? He wanted to hit the moon with a tennis ball. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightSo when the Northern Virginia company Space Adventures told McPike he could get into lunar orbit for $150 million, the Bahamas-based, Austrian-born billionaire trader put\u00a0down\u00a0a $7\u00a0million deposit.Five years later, McPike has settled a lawsuit against entrepreneur Eric Anderson\u2019s company after spending two years in litigation trying to get his deposit back. McPike\u2019s not going around the moon. When any private traveler might is unclear.Story continues below advertisementThe lawsuit in federal court in Alexandria shows how precarious the world of commercial space travel is, in which customers hoping for the ultimate exclusive vacation fund technological projects both uncertain and extremely expensive.AdvertisementIn litigation, lawyers for the company said McPike had bought not a seat but \u201can opportunity\u201d to be part of a potential mission.\u201cIt is an undeniable fact that the Russians have never sent a man around the Moon and that the U.S. had not done so in forty years,\u201d they wrote in one filing.Space Adventures declined to comment for this article. In one court hearing, an attorney for the company said it is \u201cnot in the business of litigating, they\u2019re in the business of getting people to space.\u201dRead Harald McPike\u2019s lawsuit against Space AdventuresUnlike Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures is not trying to build its own tourist rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The company contracts with the Russian government, which uses investments from tourists to modernize. NASA also buys seats on Russian rockets.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut Anderson, the co-founder and chairman, is the first and only entrepreneur to successfully send tourists \u2014 seven of them \u2014 to the International Space Station. He set out to be the first to get them to the moon.Anderson has founded several other companies, with mixed success. Planetary Resources, an ",
        "author": "Rachel Weiner"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX Chief Sets Out Benefits, Challenges of Reusing Rockets (WSJ: Tech) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9126",
        "date": "2017-03-31",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/spacex-chief-elon-musk-sets-out-benefits-challenges-of-reusing-rockets-1490931516?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=85",
        "text": "His answers revealed a cutting-edge company driven by startling ambitions\u2014perhaps more sweeping than many outsiders have surmised\u2014but also beset with financial and operational challenges that SpaceX management hasn\u2019t fully spelled out.\n\n\nOther Tech News\n\n\n\n\nUber Imposes New Customer Fees to Offset Gas Prices\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nGoogle-Facebook Ad Deal Is Investigated by EU, U.K. \nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nUber, Lyft Drivers Clash With Riders Over Masks as States Lift Mandates\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nAmazon\u2019s Washington Strategy Wins Few New Friends in the Biden Era\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nRegarding development of the Falcon Heavy rocket, comprising three Falcon 9 boosters and still waiting for its maiden flight, Mr. Musk said \u201cat first it sounded easy\u201d to pursue such a project. But later, he told reporters, it turned out to \u201cshockingly difficult\u201d and \u201ccrazy hard\u201d to get all 27 engines to work precisely together.\n\n\nWith those problems seemingly resolved, he reiterated that SpaceX is now looking toward a late-summer demonstration launch but repeatedly referred to it as \u201chigh risk.\u201d\nIn discussing his concept of establishing a human colony on Mars, Mr. Musk appeared more explicit than before in painting the promise but also pinpointing some of the challenges of bankrolling the effort.\nAs he has said over the years, SpaceX\u2019s management remains focused on rocket reusability as the backbone of any Mars settlement. For the first time, Mr. Musk volunteered that each of the giant rockets envisioned for those trips\u2014which haven\u2019t yet been designed\u2014are expected to fly as many as 1,000 missions.\nYet in projecting a timeline, Mr. Musk half-jokingly said his goal is to establish a city on Mars before he is dead and the company goes bankrupt. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to kill the company in the process,\u201d he said with a chuckle.\nDiscussing SpaceX\u2019s more mundane daily operations, Mr. Musk acknowledged that \u201csome customers will want to see a lot more flights\u201d of refurbished boosters before they are comfortable putting expensive satellites on top of them. Still, he indicated the company expects to fly roughly four commercial missions this year and maybe twice as many next year using refurbished rockets.\nThroughout the session, Mr. Musk, who also founded auto maker\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Tesla Inc.,\n\n\n kept returning to the notion of slashing the cost of space access to allow humans to explore the solar system and, as he put it, \u201cbe out there among the stars.\u201d\nBefore SpaceX led the way, according to Mr. Musk, established aerospace contractors were convinced reusable rockets\u00a0were \u201creally too hard and not really feasible.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\nBut \u201conce it\u2019s clear something can be done,\u201d he said, naysayers need to follow the path to remain competitive.\nAppearing to issue a backhanded compliment to\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon.com Inc.\n\n\n Chairman\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos,\n \n\n\n\n whose private space company also is pushing hard on reusability, Mr. Musk said, \u201cIf a company shows a path is working, other companies should follow that.\u201d\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Elon Musk laid out his vision of how such reusable launch systems would change space travel in a candid press conference that ranged from generalities about colonizing Mars to the technical hurdles of developing a 27-engine rocket. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Style Conversational Week 1407: Ad astra (WP: Arts & Entertainment) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9127",
        "date": "2020-10-22",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/10/22/style-conversational-week-1407-ad-astera/",
        "text": "I heard an interview the other Sunday on NPR\u2019s \u201cWeekend Edition\u201d with the acting director of the International Space Station, Robyn Gatens, about the recent shipment of Estee Lauder Advanced Night Repair Synchronized Multi-Recovery Complex up to space \u2014 not to be used on the sleeping skin of the astronauts, but only to be marketed by them, in the form of photos to be used in Estee Lauder\u2019s social-media ads. As I\u2019ve tended to do for the past 17 years, I immediately thought: \u201cContest?\u201d WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightI don\u2019t think The Style Invitational has done a contest just like Week 1407, in which you\u2019re invited to come up with a slogan, pitch, jingle, whatever for a product placement or endorsement in space, a kindergarten, or several other unlikely venues. (Just be funny!) But the Invite does have some classic ink with advertising themes. Here\u2019s a selection.Report from Week 910 [2011], in which we asked you to alter a well-known ad slogan slightly and assign it to someone else: Many suggested \u201cYou deserve a brake today\u201d for Toyota, \u201cWe\u2019ll leave the lights off for you\u201d as perfect for Pepco, and, for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, \u201cLook for the union libel.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe winner of the Inker: TSA airport security: If we don\u2019t pet it, you don\u2019t jet it. (Rachel Braun, Silver Spring, a First Offender) 2. Bud Selig: The boor that made Milwaukee famous. (Roy Ashley, Washington)3. Nordic Flex: Your weak end just got better. (Barbara Turner, Takoma Park)4. U.S. Postal Service: \u201cWhen it absolutely, positively has to be there eventually.\u201d (Trevor Kerr, Chesapeake, Va.)P.T. Barnum: You deserve a freak today. (Malcolm Fleschner, Palo Alto, Calif.)Next Day Blinds: Because love is not a spectator sport. (Dave Coutts, Severna Park, a First Offender)Rahm Emanuel: Let your finger do the talking. (Michael Greene, Alexandria)Story continues below advertisementCharlie Sheen: Sometimes you feel like a nut. Other times you may also. (Jeff Contompasis, Ashburn)National Bar Association: Fee all that you can fee. (Dion Black, Washington; Paulette Rainie, McLean, a First Offender)AdvertisementPropecia: Say no to rugs. (Seth Tucker, Washington)The British monarchy: When it reigns, it bores. (Gary Crockett)Agriculture lobby: Please don\u2019t squeeze the farmin\u2019. (Mae Scanlan, Washington)Washington Fertility Center: When it absolutely, positively has to be their ova night. (Chris Doyle, Ponder, Tex.)TSA: Reach out and touch someone\u2019s \u2026 (Seth Tucker)Al\u2019s shoeshine stand: Pardon me, do you have any stray poop on? (Dave Prevar, Annapolis)Story continues below advertisement---Week 1003 (2013) repurposed ad slogans without changing them: The winner of the Inkin\u2019 Memorial: Find Your Own Road (Saab) for the D.C. snow removal office. (Brendan Beary, Great Mills, Md.)2. It Keeps Going and Going and Going (Energizer batteries) for Viper Car Alarms (Neal Starkman, Seattle)3. If Only Everything in Life Were as Reliable as a Volkswagen (VW) for Viagra (Dana Austin, Falls Church, Va.)Advertisement4. Blow Your Own Bubble (Bubble Yum) for Fannie Mae (Steve Heyman, Chicago*)When It Absolutely, Positively Has to Be There Overnight (Federal Express) for Santa\u2019s Workshop (Cheryl Davis, Arlington, Va.)Take Aim Against Cavities (Aim toothpaste) for the TSA (Brendan Beary)Story continues below advertisementCover the Earth (Sherwin-Williams) for BP (David Kleinbard, Jersey City)Sooner or Later, You\u2019ll Own Generals (General Tire) for Lockheed Martin (Dion Black, Washington; Joe Godles, Bethesda, Md.)Born 1820, Still Going Strong (Johnnie Walker) for Hugh Hefner (Amanda Yanovitch, Midlothian, Va.)Think Outside the Box (Apple) for Maryland Cremation Services (Mike Gips, Bethesda, Md.; Jerry Birchmore, Springfield, Va.)Because That\u2019s the Kind of Mom You Are (Rice Krispies) for Boone\u2019s Farm (Jeff Brechlin, Eagan, Minn.)Like a Rock (Chevy trucks) for Bisquick (Ed Rader, Alexandria, Va.)AdvertisementHave It Your Way (Burger King) for the National Association of Certified Professional Midwives (Susan Vavrick, Springfield, Va.)Story continues below advertisementAnd back from my very first year as Empress, a simply contest for a sign or slogan for a business (Week 559, 2004): Fourth runner-up: Botox clinic: For That Frosty Mug Sensation! (Elden Carnahan, Laurel)Third runner-up: Reddi-Wip: From Our Can to Yours (Jean Sorensen, Herndon)Second runner-up: Outside a mousetrap factory: Line Forms on Beaten Path (Russell Beland, Springfield)First runner-up, winner of the dead-minnow tie clip: Anesthesiologist: We Conk to Stupor (Sue Lin Chong, Washington)And the winner of the Inker: Sunshine Veggie Burgers and Dogs: You\u2019ll Hardly Know You Aren\u2019t Eating a Dead Animal (Eric Murphy, Chicago)Auto mechanic: If It Ain\u2019t Broke, We Fix It (Russell Beland)AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCicada Exterminators Inc.: 16-Year Guarantee! (Bill Clark, Kensington)Credit card company: We Take an Interest in You Forever (Paul Kocak, Syracuse, N.Y.)Department of Motor Vehicles: We\u2019re Not Happy Till You\u2019re Not Happy! (Lynn Dawson, Centreville)Larry\u2019s Lumberjacks: We\u2019re Okay! (Peter Metrinko, Plymouth, Minn.)NRA: Guns Don\u2019t Kill People. Sucking Chest Wounds Kill People. (Chuck Smith, Woodbridge)Anger management clinic: Bilious and Bilious Served (Tom Witte, Montgomery Village)Discount Funerals Inc.: A Little Slab\u2019ll Do Ya (Allan Moore, Washington)Cover Girl Cosmetics: Because You\u2019re Not as Pretty as You Think (Jean Sorensen)Dermatology clinic: A Watched Boil Never Pops (Peter Metrinko)Story continues below advertisementOncology clinic: We\u2019re a Large Growth Company (Cecil J. Clark, Arlington)Urology clinic: Winning the Admiration of Our Peers (Brendan Beary, Great Mills)AdvertisementEye, ear, nose and throat clinic: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil? We Can Help! (Dot Yufer, Newton, W.Va.)Tie shop: 10 Percent Off Your Neck\u2019s Order (John O\u2019Byrne, Dublin)Pooper Scoopers Inc.: Celebrating 35 Years in Business (Russell Beland)Endocrinology clinic: Gland Opening! (Brendan Beary)Podcast news! A special guestAfter a few weeks\u2019 pause, the podcast \u201cYou\u2019re Invited\u201d will be back Tuesday morning, Oct. 27, with Episode 5: Host and longtime Loser Mike Gips will spend the half-hour with Gene Weingarten, founder of The Style Invitational and its Czar for the contest\u2019s first 11 years. Gene has a few other claims to fame, like the two Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing, his long-running humor column in The Washington Post Magazine, his also long-running online chat on Tuesdays on washingtonpost.com, his daily comic strip \u201cBarney and Clyde,\u201d and his string of books, most recently the acclaimed \u201cOne Day,\u201d in which he tracks down and tells a series of riveting tales about things that happened to have happened on the randomly chosen Dec. 28, 1986. But the Invite was a special passion for Gene, and I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll have lots to share about his Czardom as well as the current contest.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFind the Gene interview (to be done tomorrow) next Tuesday \u2014 along with the four previous episodes \u2014 at bit.ly/invite-podcast or at Apple Podcasts.Viewer indiscretion advised*: The results of Week 1403*Non-inking headline by Tom WitteAs I\u2019d predicted (and encouraged), it was the old stuff that was funniest to apply to the Covid Era in our Week 1403 contest (results here) for plots of TV series that focused on the coronavirus or other \u201chighlights\u201d of our current age. A shout-out to newbie Loser Bill Bouyer for suggesting the contest; unfortunately, I\u2019ll have to hold off on giving him the usual suggestion prize of taking him out for ice cream, given that he lives in Florida.I\u2019m glad that I broadened the topic from the virus to any current issue; this allowed for a lively variety of entertaining \u2014 though sometimes pretty dark \u2014 entries including the California wildfires, police malfeasance, QAnon, science denial, Zoom, Mean Ellen DeGeneres, and of course You Know Who and his lies, nepotism, compromising debt, and employees who are vampires.AdvertisementThe contest brought out lots of new people \u2014 we have four First Offenders this week \u2014 and among the 165 who entered, many sent full 25-entry \u201cdance cards,\u201d as Loser Jeff Contompasis calls his. And many of them were clever, imaginative ideas; the printout of my \u201cshortlist\u201d ran almost 10 pages (last week it ran 4). And so many inkworthy entries \u2014 and entrants \u2014 got robbed this week even though the 34 inking entries are by 30 different Losers.He hasn\u2019t been frequenting the Invitational like in the old days \u2014 as in 2005-06, when he scored 179 blots of ink just that year \u2014 but Brendan Beary clearly hasn\u2019t lost a wit-step, as he proved with his \u2026 oh, it\u2019s his FORTIETH first-place win! \u2026 for his teaser line for \u201cAll in the Family\u201d: After a change of heart, the bigoted guy from Queens lets his meathead son-in-law be in charge of everything.Another Loser with roots back in the Czarist era \u2014 but has been inking it up since his return \u2014 is Sue Lin Chong, who wins (ha!) a funny face mask for her ironic take on the resourceful MacGyver: \u201cThe world hangs in the balance trying to find a way to protect itself from covid-19. But Angus faces his most daunting challenge yet: He has only a square of cloth and two elastic bands.\u201d That\u2019s Ink No. 191 for Sue Lin, and her 31st \u201cabove the fold.\u201dAnd one more! While Allen Breon\u2019s scenario of Elly May Clampett fleeing the L.A. wildfires brings him just his 12th blot of Invite Ink, the first one was in Week 86. MWAH, Allen! Compared with those three, runner-up Jon Gearhart is a babe in the Invite woods \u2014 but he\u2019s been blotting up the ink more often than not ever since his debut in Week 1081. And given that Jon was recently in the hospital, his entry about Marcus Welby\u2019s citing a near future without Obamacare carries an extra sting.What Doug Dug: Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood tells me that he especially enjoyed Brendan Beary\u2019s winner, Sue Lin Chong\u2019s \u201cMacGyver\u201d joke and, from among the honorable mentions, Mike Phillips\u2019s Zooming \u201cBrady Bunch\u201d (my choice among numerous Brady/Zoom entries), Duncan Stevens\u2019s Buffy being daunted by vampire Stephen Miller, Frank Mann\u2019s fire-Obama \u201cApprentice,\u201d Ben Aronin\u2019s dark take on \u201cThe Cosby Show\u201d; and Steve Smith\u2019s dig at mean-boss Ellen.At least somewhat fitting and proper: The Losers take GettysburgLoserdom took its first steps toward returning to a corporeal community when more than a dozen Losers and various auxiliaries joined the Royal Consort and me at the annual Loser Brunch in Gettysburg, Pa., where G\u2019burger and Loser Roger Dalrymple had arranged for us to have an outdoor lunch and a tour of the battlefields, complete with the whole step-by-step story of what happened there in July 1863.Roger had even arranged for absolutely perfect weather \u2014 never a given in October, though he could count on the spectacular foliage of the Pennsylvania countryside. We commandeered four or five of the spaced-out picnic tables in the Appalachian Brewing Company\u2019s beer garden, and I was able to present a Lose Cannon \u2014 so Civil Warry! \u2014 to last week\u2019s winner, Stephen Dudzik, before we commenced on an all-afternoon drive-and-stop tour of variousbattle sites and landmarks, at each stop getting a lesson from Roger (who\u2019s been giving tours for many years) on the buildup, the fighting and the aftermath of those three horrible but consequential days.Aside from the fabulous fall setting and the enlightening afternoon, it just felt so good to be chatting up the Losers again, not to mention receiving numerous excellent second-place prizes from Marleen May \u2014 whose Petey P. Cup cuddly urine-sample beaker was immediately put into action this week \u2014 and Dave Prevar (hat! ridiculous board game! etc.!). It\u2019s probably too late in the year to schedule another outside sit-down activity in 2020, but perhaps some Losers would like to gather for a hike or some other distant-droplet excursion? Let\u2019s discuss. And of course, hope for Some Breakthrough for 2021. The Empress of The Style Invitational on this week's space-ad contest and winning updated TV show plots. Style Conversational Week 1407: Ad astra",
        "author": "Pat Myers"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | Steve Carell\u2019s \u2018Space Force\u2019 has a troubled launch, even with heroic efforts from John Malkovich (WP: TV) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9128",
        "date": "2020-05-28",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/space-force-review/2020/05/28/4e034738-9f8f-11ea-b5c9-570a91917d8d_story.html",
        "text": "I was as disappointed as anyone when NASA scrubbed Wednesday afternoon\u2019s exciting launch of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX rocket, upon which a hipster-era capsule named the Dragon, sitting atop a booster named after Han Solo\u2019s hot-rod, would have carried two American astronauts, whom we all simply refer to as Bob and Doug, up to the International Space Station, after a decade in which our trips to orbit have meant hitching rides with Russia. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightEven our national bad-luck charm, President Trump, flew to Cape Canaveral to witness this historic moment in the history of the public-private sphere.There is so much to satirize in all this, right? Elon, the Donald, Bob-\u2019n\u2019-Doug, the Dragon on the Falcon, the logos, the lightning strikes, the weird melding of corporate uptalk and official NASA-speak \u2014 why, one could almost write the jokes in one\u2019s sleep. Unfortunately, that seems to be precisely what co-creators Greg Daniels and Steve Carell have done with their disappointingly clunky new Netflix comedy series, \u201cSpace Force,\u201d which spends a lot of effort just trying to get off the ground.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHow could this show have failed?A commission will have to be appointed to conduct a more formal inquiry, but, as NASA might remind us, don\u2019t overlook the most likely cause: When an obvious joke has already been made in real life, it\u2019s probably not a great idea to try to make the same joke over and over again, two years later, for 10 whole episodes.\u201cSpace Force\u201d is of course ripe with satirical potential \u2014 both as a TV show, which premieres Friday, and as the newest branch of the U.S. military, as put forward by the Trump administration in 2018 and established late last year with the dubious goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024.Carell and Daniels\u2019s wicked little hearts are absolutely in the right place, as the show attempts to lampoon such stalwart disgraces as unchecked military spending, anti-science nincompoops elected to high office, outmoded organizational structures, Silicon Valley-style overconfidence and the way 21st-century PR management (via Twitter) has contaminated trustworthy information.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCarell, forever beloved for his Emmy-nominated work as paper-supply regional office manager Michael Scott on \u201cThe Office,\u201d stars here as decorated Air Force Gen. Mark Naird. Expecting to be promoted to head the Air Force, Naird is devastated to learn that he has instead been chosen as the first to command the new U.S. Space Force, headquartered at a remote facility in Colorado.Naird\u2019s peers in the other military branches openly mock his appointment (they are played by Noah Emmerich, Jane Lynch and Patrick Warburton \u2014 \u201cSpace Force\u201d is strewn with impressive but largely superficial cameos). The general\u2019s wife, Maggie (Lisa Kudrow), weeps quietly in bed as the news of the assignment sinks in.Leaping forward a year, the Space Force is pretty much the expensive boondoggle everyone assumed it would be. Naird is under pressure to put those \u201cboots on the moon,\u201d while meeting steadfast resistance from a morally conflicted chief scientist, Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich). Enduring the daily, bumbling efforts of his social media manager, F. Tony Scarapiducci (Ben Schwartz) and the taunts of the Chinese space force, the general occasionally copes by singing pop ditties to himself, such the Beach Boys\u2019s \u201cKokomo\u201d or the Four Seasons\u2019s \u201cBig Girls Don\u2019t Cry\u201d \u2014 the aural equivalent of margarita mix for his wearied yet stringent psyche.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe adjustment has been a disaster for his family, with Maggie Naird now serving a 40- to 60-year sentence in a nearby maximum-security prison (for what crime, viewers cannot know, which becomes a running untold joke), leaving the general to care for the couple\u2019s peevish teenage daughter, Erin (Diana Silvers).Eventually the formalities subside and Gen. Naird just becomes \u201cMark,\u201d a stressed-out protagonist needing our sympathies for the many challenges \u201cSpace Force\u201d has heaped upon him. There\u2019s a shady Russian military officer (Alex Sparrow), sent by the White House, who insists he\u2019s not a spy, and others who try to thwart the general\u2019s leadership and decisions.Carell brings recognizable traces of Michael Scott to the role, including a vulnerability that makes up for the incompetence. To this he has added a more gruff and occasionally bullheaded personality, and it can be quite funny in fleeting doses, such as when he\u2019s barking orders at a disobedient space monkey. Yet something about Carell\u2019s character never quite clicks.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIt\u2019s Malkovich \u2014 as both the voice of reason and the character most galled by the absurdities of the Space Force mission \u2014 who truly rises above the show\u2019s difficulties with pace and tone, and thereby generates the most laughs. This is something of a revelation to those of us who run rather hot or cold on Malkovich; until the covid-19 shutdown, I was still considering forming a support group of viewers agonized by his work in HBO\u2019s \u201cThe New Pope.\u201d Forget all that. Here, he\u2019s the real hero.While there\u2019s no limit to \u201cSpace Force\u2019s\u201d premise and the talent available to execute it (including \u201cSilicon Valley\u2019s\u201d Jimmy O. Yang as a scientist; Tawny Newsome as a helicopter pilot who dreams of helming the Space Force\u2019s crew of lunar colonists; and brief appearances from the late, great Fred Willard, as Mark\u2019s senile father), the show seems to work against itself, trying too hard for something that seems like it should have been easy, while juggling far too many characters and side-plots. You watch the episodes with a forced smile, wishing it would just get better.And to some extent it does, more than midway through this batch of episodes, as Mark is faced with a series of professional and personal choices that require him to act against his sense of duty and instead follow his conscience. This development is hardly a spoiler, as most of \u201cSpace Force\u2019s\u201d efforts can be seen coming from light-years away \u2014 ending on a ho-hum cliffhanger that suggests there\u2019s more to come.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThat\u2019s probably an acceptable decision, especially when one considers those first, shakier seasons of such like-minded comedies as \u201c30 Rock\u201d and \u201cParks and Recreation,\u201d which got better as they learned to float free. Even \u201cThe Office\u201d had to flex a bit before it found its comfort zone. \u201cSpace Force\u2019s\u201d failures may appear to be critical, but let\u2019s not cancel the whole program just yet. There are parts worth saving.\n\nSpace Force (10 episodes) available for streaming Friday on Netflix. In Netflix\u2019s comedy \u201cSpace Force,\u201d Carell plays a bullheaded general. But it\u2019s Malkovich, as a scientist, who gives it spark. Steve Carell\u2019s \u2018Space Force\u2019 has a troubled launch, even with heroic efforts from John Malkovich",
        "author": "Hank Stuever"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Confirmation Hearing Takes Unusual Partisan Turn (WSJ: Politics) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9129",
        "date": "2017-11-01",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-confirmation-hearing-takes-unusual-partisan-turn-1509571987?mod=Searchresults_pos11&page=109",
        "text": "Instead of lawmakers tussling over spending priorities or space-exploration goals, the session was dominated by clashes over Rep. Bridenstine\u2019s comments in previous years championing conservative social principles and questioning the primary cause of climate change. A former combat pilot with scant management experience, Rep. Bridenstine also has a record as an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, though he has pledged to strictly follow nondiscrimination laws as NASA administrator.\n\n\n\n\nIf he gets the job, the nominee pledged to \u201cconduct myself in a very nonpartisan way doing what is in the best interests of the United States of America exclusively.\u201d\n\n\nRep. Bridenstine said his goal was to forge a broad consensus on space policy, use his congressional experience to reach out to Democrats and create an agency culture in which \u201csafety, transparency and independent oversight are celebrated.\u201d\nBut Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Bill Nelson,\n\n\n\n the Florida Democrat leading the fight against the nomination, criticized Rep. Bridenstine\u2019s record and behavior in Congress \u201cas divisive and extreme as any in Washington.\u201d Sen. Nelson said \u201cNASA is one of the last refuges from partisan politics. And when it has gotten partisan in the past, we have gotten in trouble.\u201d\nThe nominee\u2019s current views on manned missions to the moon or Mars\u2014or the importance of public-private partnerships\u2014received short shrift, while earlier statements such as those criticizing the morality of transgender relationships or opposing bipartisan immigration reform sparked the brunt of Democratic attacks.\nWith a budget of more than $19 billion and around 18,000 employees, NASA\u2019s purview includes climate-change research in addition to manned and robotic space initiatives.\nEven during President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Donald Trump\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n divisive administration, House and Senate leaders have reached across the aisle to forge bipartisan bills charting a long-term course for NASA and laying the groundwork for eventually sending astronauts to Mars. But Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ted Cruz,\n\n\n\n the Texas Republican who chairs a NASA subcommittee and has worked closely with Sen. Nelson in the past, on Wednesday suggested a bitter confirmation fight could end that spirit of cooperation.\n\n\nRelated Reading Vice President Pence Says U.S. Wants to Return Humans to the Moon SpaceX\u2019s Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA\u2019s Manned Exploration Programs White House Likely to Name Rep. Jim Bridenstine NASA Chief by Next Month \n\n\nDescribing what he called \u201cthis committee\u2019s sorry performance\u201d in \u201cattempting to malign your character,\u201d Sen Cruz said \u201cif the confirmation ends up going down as a party-line vote, I think that would be deeply unfortunate for NASA and for the space community.\u201d\nThe full panel is likely to approve the nomination shortly, but a floor vote hasn\u2019t yet been scheduled and Democratic opponents of Rep. Bridenstine contend they have a chance to siphon off some Republican votes and potentially block the nomination.\nNear the end of the hearing, Sen. Cruz told Rep. Bridenstine: \u201cI believe you\u2019re going to get confirmed.\u201d\nRegardless of the final tally, Wednesday\u2019s hearing underscored that NASA is now caught up in many of the same conservative versus liberal arguments at the core of other high-profile debates on Capitol Hill.\nAt a minimum, Democratic foes can delay floor action for weeks or longer, which would keep Rep. Bridenstine from having meaningful input into the fiscal 2019 budget package slated to be unveiled in February. With a number of GOP Senators reportedly leaning against the nomination or planning to vote no, some Democrats predict a potentially unpredictable, drawn-out process.\nDespite efforts to portray himself as a nonpartisan voice on space policy who supports international cooperation and whose views on climate change have evolved during three terms in the House, Democratic critics faulted Rep. Bridenstine for removing certain controversial materials from his social media accounts after his nomination was announced.\nRep. Bridenstine was repeatedly pressed on his record questioning whether emissions from human activity were the primary cause of climate change. He pledged to strictly follow scientific findings and ensure NASA researchers have the independence to pursue their work regardless of White House pressure.\nResponding to questions from Democratic Sen.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Ed Markey\n\n\n\n of Massachusetts, Rep. Bridenstine promised that gay or transgender employees \u201cwill be treated fairly and equally\u201d and will be fully protected from discrimination. Sen. Markey went on to argue that \u201cfear is rampant among our government scientists,\u201d who worry \u201cthey are going to be punished if they speak publicly about their work on climate change.\u201d\n\u201cI will not punish them\u201d or reassign them, Rep. Bridenstine responded.\nThe Trump administration has trimmed some programs focusing on global warming, but NASA\u2019s budgets for such research are Arguments over gay rights, climate change and other hot-button partisan issues sparked an escalating fight over Oklahoma GOP Rep. James Bridenstine\u2019s bid to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX Suit Is Like a Tuxedo for the Starship Enterprise (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9130",
        "date": "2020-05-27",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/fashion/SpaceX-Dragon-Suits.html",
        "text": "It also may herald the return of wearable tech. It also may herald the return of wearable tech. Michael Bay, the director of the 1998 cosmic disaster movie \u201cArmageddon,\u201d once gave an interview discussing the worst crisis in the making of the film.",
        "author": "By Vanessa Friedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here Are the 18 African-American Astronauts (NYT: U.S.) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9131",
        "date": "2019-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/african-american-astronauts.html",
        "text": "It was 22 years after Alan Shepard\u2019s first space trip that the U.S. sent a person of color up. It was 22 years after Alan Shepard\u2019s first space trip that the U.S. sent a person of color up. After Ed Dwight\u2019s journey to become the first African-American in space ended, Maj. Robert H. Lawrence Jr. was selected, on June 30, 1967, for the Department of Defense\u2019s Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. But on Dec. 8 of that year, he was training another pilot when their F-104 Starfighter jet crashed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Lawrence was killed.",
        "author": "By Jennifer Harlan"
    },
    {
        "title": "Thank You for Flying SpaceX (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9132",
        "date": "2020-04-21",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/thank-you-for-flying-spacex-11587511128?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=17",
        "text": "It\u2019s also a giant leap for private spaceflight. In a demonstration last year, SpaceX sent an unmanned Crew Dragon capsule, filled with supplies, to rendezvous with the space station. The launch next month is billed as a second demonstration, before NASA puts four astronauts on board for an operational mission.\n\n\n\n\nNASA is calling it \u201ca new era of human spaceflight,\u201d and the agency is right.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s\n\n\n competing crew capsule, the Starliner, is undergoing unmanned tests but could welcome astronauts as soon as 2021. Competition will boost innovation, while helping to keep NASA\u2019s costs in check.\n\n\nOn a lower trajectory, Virgin Galactic wants to take paying customers for weightless joy rides on its suborbital spaceplane. About 600 seats have been sold, reportedly at prices up to $250,000, and flights could begin this year. Blue Origin has similar tourism plans for its New Shepard capsule.\n\nElon Musk\n \n\n\n\n talks about going to Mars, and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n last year unveiled a mock-up of a Blue Origin moon lander. Private spaceflight is still in its infancy. But if all goes well with next month\u2019s SpaceX launch, Americans might look back at it as a momentous first step. It\u2019s a small step for man, but a giant leap for private spaceflight. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Billionaires . . . in Outer Space! (WSJ: Review & Outlook) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9133",
        "date": "2021-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-rocket-flight-outer-space-11626819724?mod=Searchresults_pos16&page=5",
        "text": "It\u2019s easy to dismiss this as a joy ride, which in part it was, or as the indulgence of a rich man with attention-deficit disorder. But as billionaires\u2019 hobbies go, this is more productive than, well, owning the Washington Post. \u201cThe architecture and the technology we have chosen,\u201d Mr. Bezos said, \u201cis complete overkill for a suborbital tourism mission.\u201d That\u2019s because the mission isn\u2019t limited to expensive thrills.\n\n\n\n\nTourism is merely the first rung of the space ladder. Blue Origin has two more manned flights on the schedule for this year, and Mr. Bezos said the company is approaching $100 million in private sales. Virgin Galactic has presold hundreds of tickets for its space plane, which flew its founder,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Richard Branson,\n\n\n\n to weightlessness last week.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n SpaceX has ferried NASA astronauts to orbit, but it has private flights on the calendar, too.\n\n\nIt isn\u2019t clear how big this tourism market will be, but the competition is clearly on, as Blue Origin brags that its capsule has bigger windows than the other guy\u2019s. As these companies strive to outdo each other, costs will fall. Engineering advances, such as reusable rockets that land vertically, have already slashed the price of getting cargo to space.\nThe money paid by wealthy passengers will also help these companies go higher. Blue Origin has other projects in the works, including a New Glenn rocket that will be big enough to put satellites into orbit. Mr. Musk, as everyone knows, is aiming for Mars. The benefits of all this are hard to say precisely, but that\u2019s the nature of exploration and entrepreneurial risk-taking.\nSeveral companies are working on constellations of small satellites that could beam fast internet to remote areas that lack it. Novel uses of technology are harder to predict, but surprises happen when smart people are trying to be the first to achieve some milestone. Nobody working on America\u2019s first satellite missions in the 1950s and \u201960s could have ever imagined that the Global Positioning System, or GPS, would one day keep millions of people and Uber drivers from getting lost. \nMr. Bezos has reportedly been putting around $1 billion a year into Blue Origin, which is no small sum, but it will pay dividends to have another competitor reaching for the stars. It might look like one small jaunt for Mr. Bezos, but it\u2019s another big leap for America\u2019s commercial space business.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Peterson, Mary O'Grady and Dan Henninger. Image: Virgin Galactic/EPA/Shutterstock/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson get a thrill, but they\u2019re also pushing flight forward. ",
        "author": "The Editorial Board"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk is set to launch his Falcon Heavy rocket, a flamethrower of another sort (WP: Tech Policy) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9134",
        "date": "2018-01-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/30/elon-musk-is-set-to-launch-his-falcon-heavy-rocket-a-flamethrower-of-another-sort/",
        "text": "It's not enough that SpaceX plans to launch its so-called Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time next week from the historic Kennedy Space Center launchpad in Florida that once sent Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightFounder Elon Musk is loading the rocket with his other passion \u2014 a Tesla Roadster \u2014 and promising to\u00a0deliver the pricey cargo to Mars, all to the tune of\u00a0David Bowie's \u201cSpace Oddity.\u201d \u201cA red car for a red planet,\u201d Musk, the co-founder of Tesla, wrote on Twitter.The cross-promotional publicity stunt is part circus and part theater,\u00a0but hardly out of character for a showman who recently started selling $500 flamethrowers for\u00a0kicks.\u00a0Musk\u2019s latest antics are being watched by lots of high-profile people, including some in the Pentagon and the White House as well as Bill Nye, the bow-tied celebrity \u201cScience Guy.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cIt\u2019s cool. It\u2019s really cool,\u201d Nye said. \u201cEveryone is taking about it, and that\u2019s really good.\u201dOften new rockets launch test dummies on first flights, relying on\u00a0inexpensive payloads to simulate the mass of a satellite. But launching a cherry red Tesla Roadster is completely different.\u201cI love the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future,\u201d Musk tweeted.Some have wondered why he wouldn't launch something more useful than a $200,000 sports car, or at least auction the car to raise money for science.\u00a0\u201cThis is a chance to do something that really resonates with people,\u201d Keith Cowing\u00a0wrote on his blog, NASA Watch. \u201cInstead a lot of people will see some guy throw his expensive car away in space or make a shiny red reef in the Atlantic.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementPhil Plait, an astronomer, wrote on his SYFY blog that he was \u201cconcerned at first that putting a car into orbit around Mars seemed, well, profligate. Why not put up some sort of basic scientific package, or even better a CARE package for future astronauts loaded with water, food, and equipment?\u201dBut he added that \u201csince the payload will just be on an interplanetary orbit, there\u2019s no real need for that. As a bonus, launching a car shows just how powerful the rocket is. As a PR stunt, it\u2019s a clever one; it\u2019s actually Musk\u2019s own car.\u201dFor all of Musk's products and pursuits, from electric cars and space to linking human brains to computers, to a tunneling company and concerns over the rise of artificial intelligence, there is nothing quite like the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful American rocket since the Apollo-era Saturn V. With 27 engines, the rocket is three times more powerful than the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket the company has been flying since 2010. If it can launch successfully, the Pentagon wants to use it to launch national security satellites. Musk has said he plans to use it to fly cargo to Mars and an undisclosed couple of people in a tourist jaunt around the moon.A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was successfully launched into space on Jan. 7, to deliver a secret U.S. government satellite. (Reuters)It could also play a part in the Trump administration\u2019s plans to return to the moon. Over the weekend, Nick Ayers, Vice President Pence\u2019s chief of staff, tweeted that the rocket would have \u201cmajor (positive) ramifications for US space industry if this goes according to plan.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpaceX has said that the Falcon Heavy would cost $90 million a launch, a fraction of what NASA\u2019s more powerful Space Launch System would cost. Last year, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said the SLS rocket would cost about $1 billion per launch. With such a vast difference in price, some have wondered if the Falcon Heavy obviates the need for SLS.\u201cIf the SpaceX model works, it creates direct competition to SLS,\u201d said Howard McCurdy, a professor of public affairs at American University.Given its relatively low price, the Falcon Heavy could\u00a0be a real boon to NASA\u2019s moon plans, said Charles Miller, the president of NextGen Space, a consulting company. \u201cThe only way NASA is going to go back to the moon in a sustainable manner is by leveraging commercial heavy lift and commercial space flight in general.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Heavy is made up of three Falcon 9 rocket \u201ccores,\u201d the long tubes that hold the engines and propellant, that sit alongside each other, providing 5.1 million pounds of thrust, or the equivalent of the power of 18 747 airplanes.The chance of failure of new rockets has been exceedingly high, especially in the early days of the Space Age. Between 1957 and 1966, the United States attempted to launch 424 rockets to orbit. Of those, 343 were successful, meaning there was a failure rate of nearly 20 percent. The average number of failures during\u00a0that time was about eight per year, according to Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm.SpaceX knows both failure and triumph. Its Falcon 1 rocket launched three times before reaching orbit on the fourth try. But its Falcon 9, a far more complicated vehicle, was successful on its first launch.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Falcon Heavy, though, is another beast altogether \u2014 so complicated that its launch has been repeatedly delayed. Last year, Musk said\u00a0preparing the rocket for launch was \u201cway, way more difficult than we originally thought. We were pretty naive about that.\u201dHe said the chances of an explosion on the first flight are high. \u201cI hope it makes it far enough from the pad that it does not cause pad damage. I would consider that a win,\u201d he said. \u201cMajor pucker factor, really. There\u2019s no other way to describe it.\u201dThen again, if SpaceX is able to pull of a successful launch, now scheduled for Tuesday, it would be an extraordinary show. During a recent engine test firing, a massive plume of smoke could be seen for miles. As part of the mission, SpaceX will attempt to land all three first-stage boosters so that they could be reused.Two would fly back to Cape Canaveral, to touch down on landing pads along the coastline, while a third would land on a ship at sea. If it doesn't explode, the massive, new rocket would shoot a Tesla Roadster to Mars. Elon Musk is set to launch his Falcon Heavy rocket, a flamethrower of another sort",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Elon Musk on EV Subsidies, Corporate Titles and China: The Full Transcript (WSJ: Business) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9135",
        "date": "2021-12-08",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-on-ev-subsidies-corporate-titles-and-china-the-full-transcript-11639012832?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=9",
        "text": "Joanna Stern\n\nHi Elon, how are you?\nElon Musk\nGood, how are you?\nJoanna Stern\nPretty good. Pretty good. Thank you so\u00a0much for being here. And by here I mean...\nElon Musk\nSure. Electronically.\nJoanna Stern\nAnd where are you right now?\nElon Musk\nI\u2019m at the Tesla Giga Texas factory that we\u2019re about to complete. So, yeah. What you see behind me is the factory, basically. We have the office space and the factory kind of together. So I think this is kind of important, that we don\u2019t have ivory tower management or engineering and that the management and engineering is as close to the factory as possible. So, yeah. So you can see what\u2019s going on in the factory and stay grounded.\nJoanna Stern\nAll right. Well, I\u2019m in the ivory tower here in front of a lot of CEOs and a live audience here in Washington, D.C. And we are also joined by lots of people all over the internet. We are streaming this to WSJ.com,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter\n\n\n and YouTube. So we have a very brief amount of time. Only 30 minutes.\nBut I\u2019m very excited to talk about a wide\u00a0range of things. I want to start with talking about our world, the world we currently live in. Then I want to move to the future of the world. And then talk a little bit about your world.\nAnd so we\u2019ll start right here in Washington, D.C., where everyone is talking about the infrastructure plan and the bill. And I wanted to ask you, you know, say tomorrow you get a phone call from\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Joe Biden\n \n\n\n\n and he says...\nElon Musk\nI think that\u2019s unlikely, but sure.\nJoanna Stern\nOkay. You know, he just gives you a call. And he says, \u201cYou know, I haven\u2019t been talking a lot about Tesla lately, but, you know, what do you need from this bill? What are your needs?\u201d What do you answer him?\nElon Musk\nWell, to be totally frank, no one at Tesla\u2019s actually brought up whether they care about this bill or not. I think if this bill happened or didn\u2019t happen, we don\u2019t think about it at all, really.\nJoanna Stern\nOkay.\nElon Musk\nIt might be better, honestly, if the bill doesn\u2019t pass. Because we\u2019ve spent so much money, you know. It\u2019s like the federal budget deficit is insane. You know, it\u2019s like $3 trillion federal expenditures, or $7 trillion. Federal revenue is $4 trillion. If this was a company, it\u2019d be a $3 trillion loss.\nSo I don\u2019t know if we should be adding to that loss. That seems pretty crazy. Something\u2019s got to give. You can\u2019t just spend $3 trillion more than you earn every year and don\u2019t expect something bad to happen. I think, you know, this is not good.\nJoanna Stern\nWell,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mitch McConnell\n\n\n\n is actually saying\u2026\nElon Musk\nAnd in fact, if I may elaborate on that, the deficit is more than $3 trillion when you look at the future obligations. So it\u2019s $7 trillion of current expenditures, but it\u2019s much more than that if you look at future obligations for social security, Medicare and so forth. So we\u2019re running this incredible deficit. Something\u2019s got to give. This can\u2019t keep going.\nJoanna Stern\nWell, Mitch McConnell said something similar. Not as extreme as you. But OK, so let\u2019s say his follow up question is, \u201cOkay Elon, you don\u2019t think we need to spend anything on the infrastructure?\u201d If he says to you, \u201cWhat is the biggest improvement we can make to the U.S. infrastructure, what do you say?\u201d\nElon Musk\nI think we generally could have better airports, better highways. Especially in cities that are congested, we\u2019ve got to do something to deal with extreme traffic, which, I think, is some combination of double-deckering freeways and building tunnels.\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.Tech News BriefingElon Musk on Federal EV Support, Telepathy and Reusable RocketsTesla CEO Elon Musk says the electric-vehicle market would be better off without government support or intervention. He spoke with the WSJ's Senior Personal Tech Columnist Joanna Stern at the WSJ's CEO Council Summit about a wide range of topics, from innovation and leadership to telepathy and reusable rockets. Zoe Thomas hosts.Read TranscriptADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSSAmazon Alexa\n\n\n\nBut if we don\u2019t do something, we will be stuck in traffic forever. And as autonomous vehicles come to the fore, and it\u2019s easier to drive without going through the pain of\u00a0having to drive yourself, which is absolutely coming and will be one of the biggest transformations ever in human civilization. There will be more cars on the road. And, the traffic will get much worse. And so we really need to do some combination of tunnels or, like I said, double-deckering\u00a0freeways.\nI\u2019m not a big believer in flying\u00a0cars. They\u2019re basically helicopters with wheels. And people don\u2019t want the skies to be swarming with helicopters.\u00a0So it\u2019s tunnels and double-deckering\u00a0freeways. We don\u2019t have a traffic problem in\u00a0suburbs, we have a traffic problem on freeways because they\u2019re just too small and\u00a0did not anticipate the size of the urban\u00a0environments that we currently experience. So, yeah. But I don\u2019t see a strong effort in\u00a0this direction.\nJoanna Stern\nWell, I want to come back to autonomous\u00a0vehicles, but wanted to just stay a little bit\u00a0more on the role of government. You said at this conference, actually, a year ago, that\u00a0you think the government should really just be\u00a0hands off when it comes to innovation. Though with this bill, there is a lot of\u00a0support for EVs and it could be the biggest change that we\u2019ve seen throughout the\u00a0country in terms of the infrastructure of EVs. And it helps Tesla. What do you think\u00a0the role of government should be?\nElon Musk\nI think the role of government should be that\u00a0of, like, a referee. But not a player on the\u00a0field. So generally, government should just try to get out of the way and not impede\u00a0progress. I think there\u2019s a general problem, not just in the U.S., but in most countries,\u00a0where the rules and regulations keep\u00a0increasing every year.\nRules and regulations are immortal. They\u00a0don\u2019t die. Occasionally you see a law with a\u00a0sunset provision, but really, otherwise, the\u00a0vast majority of rules and regulations live\u00a0forever. And so if more rules and regulations are applied every year and it just\u00a0keeps growing and growing, eventually it\u00a0just takes longer and longer and it\u2019s harder\u00a0to do things.\nAnd there\u2019s not really an effective garbage\u00a0collection system for removing rules and\u00a0regulations. And so gradually this hardens\u00a0the arteries of civilization, where you\u2019re able to do less and less over time. So I think governments should be really trying hard to\u00a0get rid of rules and regulations that perhaps\u00a0had some merit at some point but don\u2019t have merit currently. But there\u2019s very little\u00a0effort in this direction. This is a big problem.\n\n\nElon Musk Says Regulations Shouldn't Be ImmortalSkip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 1:32ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.Elon Musk Says Regulations Shouldn't Be ImmortalPlay video: Elon Musk Says Regulations Shouldn't Be Immortal\n\n The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX said in an interview at the WSJ CEO Council summit that government should take a more hands-off approach to innovation, adding that rules and regulations are becoming a growing problem that \"hardens the arteries of civilization.\"\n \n\n\nJoanna Stern\nAnd I also want to come back to later, I\u00a0know that you do have some other stance\u00a0on AI and the rules and regulations we\u00a0should have on that. But right now you\u2019re\u00a0sitting in a Tesla factory, how are you spending your time these days? Between\u00a0the split between Space X and Tesla?\nElon Musk\nYeah, it\u2019s about even between Space X and Tesla. It depends on what is the crisis of the\u00a0moment. So some weeks will be more\u00a0Tesla, more Space X. But I work a lot. I work\u00a0seven days a week and put in some pretty\u00a0crazy hours. But it really depends on where I\u2019m needed most.\nI basically just triage the tasks and try to do\u00a0things that are most useful or where I\u2019m\u00a0most needed. It varies from one week to the\u00a0next.\nBut just going back to that infrastructure bill for a second, because sometimes the criticism of Tesla is like,\u00a0\u201cHey, Tesla gets all these subsidies.\u201d But it\u2019s worth noting that for the vehicle\u00a0purchase tax credit, the $7,500, Tesla\u00a0stopped getting that, like, two years ago. Whereas everyone else, I think, except for GM, still gets the $7,500 tax credit. So all of\u00a0our sales this year and I think last year had nothing to do with the tax credit because we were no longer eligible because we had made so many electric cars.\nTesla has made roughly two-thirds of all the\u00a0electric cars in the United States. I\u2019m not sure most people are aware of that. So,\u00a0yeah. So Tesla\u2019s made basically twice as\u00a0many electric vehicles as the rest of [the] industry combined. And we don\u2019t need the\u00a0$7,500 tax credit. I would say honestly, I\u00a0would just can this whole bill. Don\u2019t pass it. That\u2019s my recommendation.\nJoanna Stern\nWhat about the support though for the charging network? I mean, there are parts of this bill...\nElon Musk\nUnnecessary.\nJoanna Stern\nNo?\nElon Musk\nNo. I mean, do we need support for gas\u00a0stations? We don\u2019t. So there\u2019s no need for\u00a0support for a charging network. I would\u00a0delete it. Delete.\nJoanna Stern\nOkay. All right.\nElon Musk\nI\u2019m literally saying get rid of all subsidies.\nJoanna Stern\nAnd...\nElon Musk\nBut also for oil and gas.\nJoanna Stern\nIf you think about how this affects your\u00a0competitors, does that impact some of your\u00a0view on this?\nElon Musk\nI mean, maybe they need it. I don\u2019t know. But I think just generally I\u2019m in favor of\u00a0deleting subsidies. I mean, when we started Tesla, there were no EV subsidies at all. And\u00a0gasoline was super cheap. We did not anticipate any subsidies. That came later. And the $7,500 tax credit came as a result,\u00a0not of Tesla activity, but of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n General Motors\n\n\n lobbying for it. So I would just say just\u00a0delete [th]em all.\nJoanna Stern\nAll right. But there are some other good\u00a0things in this bill that some would argue. I\u00a0mean, a lot of money earmarked for R&D. Would you want to put that towards\u00a0something?\nElon Musk\nNo.\n\n\nElon Musk Opposes Infrastructure SpendingSkip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 2:27ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.Elon Musk Opposes Infrastructure SpendingPlay video: Elon Musk Opposes Infrastructure Spending\n\n The Tesla CEO railed against a Biden Administration spending bill, including subsidies aimed at supporting the adoption of electric vehicles.\n \n\n\nJoanna Stern\nOkay. All right. We\u2019re going to move on from\u00a0the bill, because I think we get what you\u2019re\u00a0saying...\nElon Musk\nSeriously, we shouldn\u2019t...\nJoanna Stern\n...on it...\nElon Musk\nPass it. In general, if we don\u2019t cut\u00a0government spending, something really\u00a0bad\u2019s going to happen. This is crazy. Our\u00a0spending is so far in excess of revenue, it\u2019s\u00a0insane. Like, you could zero out all billionaires in the country.\nThere\u2019s all this\u00a0anti-billionaire B.S. Well, if you zeroed out all\u00a0the billionaires, you still wouldn\u2019t solve the deficit.\nJoanna Stern\nAll right, I\u2019ll ask you another question around\u00a0the billionaire B.S. Say tomorrow you get\u00a0the phone call from President Biden. Next\u00a0day, actually, we elect you to Congress. Somehow this happens. You\u2019re now working\u00a0on tax bills. You\u2019re working on tax policy.\u00a0How do you tax someone like you? How do you tax billionaires?\nElon Musk\nFirst of all, I pay a lot of tax. I mean, my\u00a0marginal tax rate is, like, 53%. So that\u2019s not\u00a0trivial. And then obviously there\u2019s asset-based taxes. The sales tax and everything\u00a0else. There\u2019s also the estate tax. And generally, I think the estate tax is a good\u00a0tax.\nLike, if you think of assets beyond a certain\u00a0level that are far beyond, let\u2019s say,\u00a0somebody\u2019s ability to consume, then at a\u00a0certain point, really what you\u2019re doing is\u00a0capital allocation. So it\u2019s not money for personal expenditures, what you\u2019re doing is\u00a0capital allocation.\nAnd it does not make sense to take the job\u00a0of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill in capital\u00a0allocation and give it to an entity that has\u00a0demonstrated very poor skill in capital allocation, which is the government. I mean,\u00a0you could think of the government essentially as a corporation. The government is simply the biggest corporation with the monopoly on violence. And where you have no recourse. So how\u00a0much money do you want to...\nJoanna Stern\nCan you explain that last part?\nElon Musk\n...give that entity?\nJoanna Stern\nCould you explain the last part, quickly? And\u00a0then I want to move on to some product\u00a0stuff.\nElon Musk\nSure. And I can talk for a bit longer, if you\u2019d like, than the half an hour. If you\u2019re worried\u00a0about getting through other questions. But...\nJoanna Stern\nI hear we have nobody else joining us at this conference.\nElon Musk\nYeah. I mean, government is a corporation in the limit. So it is the most corporate thing.\u00a0It is maximum corporation. But it\u2019s also a monopoly. And also it\u2019s the only one that\u2019s\u00a0allowed legally to do violence. So why would\u00a0you want to give a corporation with no\u00a0competition, that can\u2019t even really go\u00a0bankrupt, more money?\nNow, it\u2019s not necessary that I think the government shouldn\u2019t exist, or that there are\u00a0not good things that the government can do, or things that are necessary for the government to do. You know, for example, science programs where we send a probe to Mars.\n\n\n\nNewsletter Sign-up The 10-Point. A personal, guided tour to the best scoops and stories every day in The Wall Street Journal. PREVIEWSUBSCRIBE\n\n\nAnd the value of that is ... it\u2019s a small amount of value for all citizens. But it would be inefficient to sort of go and collect, you know, $10 from every citizen for a Mars\u00a0probe. So therefore it\u2019s better to have the government do something like that, you\u00a0know, like a heavy science program, rather\u00a0than try to collect small amounts of money from everyone.\nSo I\u2019m not somebody who\u2019s sort of an\u00a0extreme libertarian and thinks the government should not do anything, I just\u00a0think we should minimize what the\u00a0government does. Because the\u00a0government\u2019s efficiency at spending is just\u00a0going to be lower than a competitive\u00a0commercial company. By a lot.\nIf you look at, say, East Germany versus\u00a0West Germany, or North Korea versus South Korea, and you look at the GDP per capita of\u00a0East and West Germany or North and South\u00a0Korea, the difference is gigantic. And that\u2019s\u00a0just the difference between East and West Germany.\nIt\u2019s like a random line was drawn, basically,\u00a0depending on where the Red Army was and\u00a0where the Allied troops were. And East\u00a0Germany\u2019s productivity was at least five times worse than West Germany\u2019s. And it\u2019s\u00a0 not like West Germany was, like, some\u00a0bastion of capitalism. They were quite\u00a0socialist, really. So there may be as much as\u00a0an order of magnitude difference between\u00a0the efficiency of a competitive private company versus the government.\nJoanna Stern\nI\u2019m going to shift away from government,\u00a0come back to your world. Just thinking\u00a0about, sort of, how you juggle Tesla and Space X. And you\u2019ve said along the way that\u00a0the workload at Tesla is quite a lot. And I\u00a0know now you could regain the chairman\u00a0position. Have you thought about that?\u00a0Have you thought about your, sort of, your title and your position there right now?\nElon Musk\nI mean, it\u2019s interesting, these titles. You\u00a0know that there\u2019s actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a\u00a0corporation? It\u2019s president, secretary, and treasurer. And technically they can be the same person. And all these other titles are just basically made up. So CEO is a made\u00a0up title, CFO is a made up title. General\u00a0Counsel, a made up title. [Titles] Don\u2019t mean\u00a0anything.\nJoanna Stern\nThat\u2019s amazing. I think a room of CEOs are... how we feel about that? Yep?\nElon Musk\nIt was obviously just somebody\u2019s marketing\u00a0experiment.\nJoanna Stern\nSo I guess I\u2019ll be more direct. Are you\u00a0considering stepping down as CEO? Would\u00a0you transfer, be chairman, and think about\u00a0being chief product officer? Since CEO title doesn\u2019t matter anyway...\nElon Musk\nWell, I mean, technically I changed my title\u00a0to Technoking. And by the way, this is a\u00a0formal SEC filing. I\u2019m legally, or whatever,\u00a0Technoking. I just did that as kind of like a\u00a0joke, just to show that these titles don\u2019t mean a lot. You can see what is actually\u00a0legally necessary if you fill out the form for creating a C-Corp. And then you\u2019ll see it\u2019s president, treasurer and secretary. And you\u00a0need a director too. But that\u2019s basically it. And then all these other, you know, chief\u00a0whatever officer are basically just made up.\n\n\nElon Musk Calls CEO a 'Made-Up Title'Skip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 1:57ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.Elon Musk Calls CEO a 'Made-Up Title'Play video: Elon Musk Calls CEO a 'Made-Up Title'\n\n The Tesla chief executive tells WSJ's Joanna Stern that many corporate titles \"don't mean anything,\" at the WSJ CEO Council summit. Photo: Ralph Alswang for the Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nJoanna Stern\nIs the Tesla Bot in the running for any of these titles?\nElon Musk\nNot yet. Maybe in the future.\nJoanna Stern\nBut speaking of the Tesla Bot, I know you\u2019ve\u00a0talked about the importance of creating this\u00a0bot for the future of AI. Tell me a little bit about where you\u2019re at with this project and\u00a0what we can expect in the next coming\u00a0months?\nElon Musk\nWell, with the Tesla autopilot or full self-driving, we\u2019re effectively, I think, creating the\u00a0most advanced, practical AI for navigating\u00a0the real world. And you can almost think of\u00a0Tesla as, like, the world\u2019s biggest robot company. Or a semi-sentient robot company. The car is kind of a robot on four wheels. And so then we could probably take that same technology and put it in a humanoid robot and have that robot be useful. So\u00a0essentially to have the humanoid part, we\u00a0need to develop some custom actuators\u00a0and sensors and then essentially use the Tesla full self driving or autopilot or, just generally\u00a0speaking, real-world navigation AI in the\u00a0humanoid robot.\nAnd I think this could be\u00a0quite profound. I don\u2019t know exactly when we will get this right, but we will get it right.\nJoanna Stern\nAnd you\u2019ve said also that it will solve some labor issues. I mean, what are some things\u00a0that you envision this bot doing?\nElon Musk\nWell, it has the potential to be a generalized substitute for human labor over time. And\u00a0the foundation of the economy is labor. I\u00a0mean, capital equipment is essentially\u00a0distilled labor. I asked a friend of mine\u00a0actually to say, you know, just, \u201cWhat should\u00a0we optimize for?\u201d\nAnd what he said was gross profit per\u00a0employee. Fully considered. So you\u2019ve got to include the supply chain in that. The fundamental constraint is labor. There are\u00a0not enough people. I can\u2019t emphasize this\u00a0enough. There are not enough people. And I think one of the biggest risks to\u00a0civilization is the low birthrate and the rapidly declining birthrate. And yet so many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and\u00a0think that the population is growing out of\u00a0control. It\u2019s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers. If people don\u2019t have\u00a0more children, civilization is going to\u00a0crumble. Mark my words.\nJoanna Stern\nIs this why you have so many children?\nElon Musk\nI\u2019m trying to set a good example. Yeah. You\u00a0know, gotta practice what I preach.\nJoanna Stern\nI won\u2019t ask you to predict how many more children you\u2019re going to have tonight, but I\u00a0want to move on to some future talk. That\u2019s part of where I\u2019m going with this Tesla Bot. I\u2019m not as good at Twitter as you are, but people on Twitter are asking me what\u2019s going to happen on 12/9. Can you tell me\u00a0what\u2019s going to happen on 12/9?\nElon Musk\nNothing, as far as I know. I don\u2019t know where this came from. I think this is just one\u00a0of those memes that, I don\u2019t know. It came out of nowhere. But as far as I know,\u00a0nothing. But maybe something will happen that I\u2019m not aware of.\nJoanna Stern\nAll right. So I want to ask now a little bit\u00a0farther out in the future, into 2022. And we\u00a0can\u2019t get to all your future projects, but I\u00a0thought a fun way to do this might be I\u2019m going to name some of the projects, I\u2019m going to give you 60 seconds, and you tell me what your plan is in 2022 to move that project along and what we can expect from\u00a0it.\nElon Musk\nOkay...\nJoanna Stern\nBut 60 seconds. You only get 60 seconds.\nElon Musk\nOkay.\nJoanna Stern\nYou going to do it? All right, here we...\nElon Musk\nSure...\nJoanna Stern\n...go. So the first one is... hold on. I think I\u00a0know how to work this Apple Watch. Sixty seconds and Cybertruck.\nElon Musk\nCybertruck. Cyber truck\u2019s going to be an\u00a0incredible product. I think it may be our best\u00a0product ever. I think it probably will be. It\u00a0has a lot of new technology, so it\u2019s a hard car to make. But it will be awesome. And I think I\u2019ve said before, but, you know, we\u2019re\u00a0aiming for volume production in 2023. And I will provide a more detailed product\u00a0update at the Tesla earnings call early next\u00a0year. So I wish it could be sooner, but that\u2019s\u00a0most likely when it happens. It\u2019ll be\u00a0something really special, just one of those\u00a0rare products that happens once in a while that\u2019s really special.\nJoanna Stern\nOkay. That was about 60 seconds. I don\u2019t\u00a0know what\u2019s going on with my watch, but\u00a0now we\u2019re onto Neuralink.\nElon Musk\nOkay. Okay, so...\nJoanna Stern\nYeah, so the big question is in 2022, how\u00a0are you pushing that project along? What happens?\nElon Musk\nSo Neuralink. Neuralink\u2019s working well in\u00a0monkeys. And we\u2019re obviously doing just a lot of testing. And just confirming that it\u2019s\u00a0very safe and reliable and that the Neuralink\u00a0device can be removed safely. People may\u00a0have seen the demo that we published earlier this year: the video of a monkey\u00a0playing the videogame Pong telepathically using the Neuralink in its brain.\nAnd it\u2019s completely wireless. Charges\u00a0inductively. But basically, the monkey looks\u00a0completely normal. And yet it\u2019s playing a\u00a0videogame telepathically. Which is, I think,\u00a0quite profound. We hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries.\nLike tetraplegics, quadriplegics, next year,\u00a0pending FDA approval. And I should say, our standards for implanting the device are\u00a0substantially higher than what the FDA requires. Just as our standards for safety with Tesla are much higher than what the\u00a0U.S. government requires. And I\u2019ve taken a\u00a0little bit more than 60 seconds.\n\n\nElon Musk Hopes Neuralink Will Help Paralyzed Walk AgainSkip Ad in 15You may also likeCloseCreated with sketchtool.Up NextCloseCreated with sketchtool.Your browser does not support HTML5 video.0:00PlayCreated with sketchtool.PausedSound OnCreated with sketchtool.0:00 / 2:02ShareCreated with sketchtool.Closed Captions InactiveCreated with sketchtool.Elon Musk Hopes Neuralink Will Help Paralyzed Walk AgainPlay video: Elon Musk Hopes Neuralink Will Help Paralyzed Walk Again\n\n Tesla's Elon Musk told the WSJ CEO Council Summit that he hopes to have the implantable technology in humans by 2022. Photo: Ralph Alswang for the Wall Street Journal\n \n\n\nJoanna Stern\nYes. I\u2019m about to cut you off.\nElon Musk\nBecause I think there\u2019s something that\u2019s, I think, pretty cool. And I do want to say I\u2019m,\u00a0emphasis on, cautiously optimistic about this. I think we have a chance, with\u00a0Neuralink, of being able to restore full body functionality to someone who has a spinal\u00a0cord injury. Meaning I think we have a chance, I emphasize, a chance, of being able\u00a0to allow someone who cannot walk or use\u00a0their arms to be able to walk again.\u00a0Naturally.\nJoanna Stern\nOkay. I\u2019m not going to cut that. I can\u2019t really cut you off when you\u2019re talking about that. So...\nElon Musk\nIt\u2019s a super big deal. And I don\u2019t want to raise hopes unreasonably, but I\u2019m\u00a0increasingly convinced that this can be\u00a0done.\nJoanna Stern\nAll right. So the last one is Starship.\nElon Musk\nSure.\nJoanna Stern\nBecause there\u2019s a lot happening in 2022 on Starship, right?\nElon Musk\nYes. Man. Starship is a hard, hard, hard,\u00a0hard project. This is the biggest rocket ever\u00a0made. It will have a thrust and mass double\u00a0that of a Saturn V, which is the largest\u00a0rocket to reach orbit, and is intended to be fully and rapidly reusable.\nIf we are successful with this, which I think we will be, I don\u2019t know if we will be there in\u00a02022. I hope so. This is a profound\u00a0revolution in access to orbit. There has\u00a0never been a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle. This is the holy grail of space\u00a0technology.\nIt is the fundamental breakthrough that is\u00a0necessary for humanity to become a space civilization. This absorbs more\u00a0of my mental energy than probably any\u00a0other single thing. But it is so\u00a0preposterously difficult that there are times\u00a0where I wonder whether we can actually do\u00a0this.\nJoanna Stern\nAnd if you had to summarize very quickly,\u00a0what is so hard about it for just a normal\u00a0person to understand? What is so hard\u00a0about it?\nElon Musk\nWell, this\u2019ll take a lot more than 60 seconds, but...\nJoanna Stern\nBut now I\u2019m so interested.\nElon Musk\nOkay. Well...\nJoanna Stern\nOh, no...\nElon Musk\nOkay, so. Okay. I am overdue for doing a Starship update. So we live in a planet\u00a0where the gravity is actually very strong. We actually live on the densest planet in the\u00a0solar system. Our atmosphere is very thick. And what this comes down to is, you know, a typical orbital rocket might be able to put\u00a0about 2% of its liftoff mass into orbit. And then this is with smart people trying\u00a0hard. Maybe 2, 2.5%. And no rocket, to the best of my knowledge, has ever gotten\u00a0above 4% of its liftoff mass to orbit. So in order to make a rocket fully reusable, you\u2019ve\u00a0got to basically create a rocket that can do\u00a0about 4%, if not more than 4%, of its liftoff\u00a0mass to orbit. Which hasn\u2019t happened before.\nSo that means you have to have basically A+s across the board. Incredibly efficient\u00a0engines, incredibly efficient structure. You\u00a0do need scale, because there are some efficiencies of scale. That\u2019s part of why Starship is so gigantic.\nBecause, for example, the brain of the\u00a0rocket really weighs about the same if it\u2019s a\u00a0small rocket or a big rocket. So with the big\u00a0rocket, you get to have the avionics be,\u00a0basically, we round down to 0%. Or be inconsequential in the mass of the vehicle. Then you need to make an incredibly light\u00a0heat shield. And there are so many things\u00a0that need to be done to have both the\u00a0booster and the upper stage, or shuttle, be reusable. Insanely difficult. Many super\u00a0smart people have tried to do this before\u00a0and no one has succeeded.\nAnd most of the time they\u2019ve just given up\u00a0part way through. But if full and rapid\u00a0reusability can be achieved, it reduces the\u00a0cost of access to orbit by a factor of a\u00a0hundred or more. So...\nJoanna Stern\nSo more of us...\nElon Musk\n...it\u2019s just like...\nJoanna Stern\n\u2026could go. Eventually...\nElon Musk\nYeah, it\u2019s like an aircraft. Imagine if an\u00a0aircraft, or a car, or any form of transport\u00a0was not reusable. Imagine if you had to buy\u00a0a new plane every time you flew. That would\u00a0make air flight insanely experience. Or a car,\u00a0if you had to get a new car every time you drove somewhere, that would be\u00a0unbelievably expensive, as opposed to simply refueling it.\nSo we\u2019ve got to get rockets to the point where we simply refuel the rocket and we don\u2019t throw\u00a0it away. And with Falcon 9, we\u2019ve managed to make the booster reusable and the fairing\u00a0nose cone reusable.\nBut with Starship, we\u2019re hoping to make the whole thing reusable. This is profound. Like I said, it\u2019s the difference between humanity being a single planet species and a multi-planet species. It\u2019s really that big of a deal.\nJoanna Stern\nAll right. Well, Elon, they\u2019re running the clock\u00a0down on me, so I want to ask you one last\u00a0question and then we\u2019ll try to go to at least one or two audience questions. I wanted to\u00a0ask you a little bit about humor. You\u2019re a\u00a0pretty funny guy. You show it on Twitter a\u00a0lot. You\u2019ve hosted SNL. And I\u2019m wondering\u00a0how that plays into your management style. Would your co-workers say you\u2019re funny? Is\u00a0this something you\u2019re, sort of, bringing to the office now? Has it helped with managing your teams?\nElon Musk\nI mean, I think I\u2019m funny. I find my jokes funny. I don\u2019t know. I guess, yeah. I do crack\u00a0a lot of jokes. They don\u2019t all land, but I am aspirationally funny. So, yeah. We try to\u00a0have a good sense of humor at the office too. Yeah.\nJoanna Stern\nYou know, I also wanted to ask that lately\u00a0on Twitter, you\u2019ve been poking fun at people\u00a0for their age quite a bit. And I wanted to\u00a0have a sense of, do you not plan to age? And how are you combating aging? Is there\u00a0some secret technology we don\u2019t know about that you\u2019ve got?\nElon Musk\nI am not aware of any secret technology to combat aging. And I don\u2019t know that we should really try to live for a super long time.\u00a0I think it is important for us to die because\u00a0most of the time, people don\u2019t change their mind, they just die.\nAnd so if we live forever, then we might\u00a0become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed. But I\u2019m not poking\u00a0fun at aging, I\u2019m just saying, if we\u2019ve got\u00a0people in very important positions that have\u00a0to make decisions that are critical to the security of the country, then they need to\u00a0have sufficient presence of mind and cognitive ability to make those decisions well. Because the whole country\u2019s\u00a0depending on them.\nJoanna Stern\nWell, I thought you might say psychedelics\u00a0were your way of not aging, but I would like to just go if anyone\u2019s got one or two\u00a0questions for this guy...\nElon Musk\nI don\u2019t think bumping acid makes you age\u00a0less. So. I think drugs fully make you age\u00a0more, not less. But...\nJoanna Stern\nAll right. Any? Okay. Well, Elon, thank you so much for being with us here tonight. Oh, there is a question. Sorry. I did not see any hands up.\nAudience Member\nThank you. Bal Das, from BGD Holdings. First, let me thank you for what you\u2019re doing in terms of your breakthrough for humanity. But I am curious about your views on China. And the United\u00a0States. Just on a free-flowing basis, if you\u00a0want to share a few thoughts.\nElon Musk\nYeah. I mean, I think we\u2019re at an interesting point in history where the United States has\u00a0been the world\u2019s largest economy for as\u00a0long as anyone can remember. And I think\u00a0the U.S. became the largest economy, I don\u2019t know, probably 120, 130 years ago. And there\u2019s nobody really anymore who can\u00a0remember a time when the United States\u00a0was not the world\u2019s biggest economy. Now, we\u2019re heading towards the situation where\u00a0China\u2019s going to probably have an economy\u00a0two to three times the size of the United\u00a0States.\nAnd so that\u2019s just a different world. I do\u00a0think there are a lot of people in the government in China who kind of grew up\u00a0with China being a small economy. And maybe who feel like China was pushed around a lot. But they haven\u2019t fully appreciated the fact that China is really\u00a0going to be the big kid on the block.\nAnd so if you\u2019re going to be the big kid on\u00a0the block, you can really be pretty chill about things. Other countries are not really a\u00a0threat to you, if you\u2019re by far the biggest kid on the block. So I would say that\u2019s kind of an important mind-set change hopefully that China goes through.\nIs just, you know, to think, how would you want the biggest kid on the block to\u00a0behave? And if you are going to be the biggest kid on the block, then wouldn\u2019t you want to behave like you would have wanted the biggest kid on the block to behave? I think that\u2019s pretty important. Overall, I think\u00a0Tesla has a good relationship with China. And I don\u2019t mean to endorse everything that\u00a0China does any more than I would, say, endorse everything the United States does. Or any country. But overall, I think we are headed to an interesting and different\u00a0world. And I hope that we can remember that we\u2019re all human beings and let\u2019s just try\u00a0to have as positive a relationship as\u00a0possible and work towards mutual\u00a0prosperity of humanity as a whole.\nJoanna Stern\nWell, Elon, thank you so much for being here tonight. Or where you are. And thank you, everybody. And we hope to see you next\u00a0year. The entrepreneur joined The Wall Street Journal\u2019s CEO Council Summit virtually on Monday for an interview with columnist Joanna Stern. Here is the transcript of that interview. ",
        "author": "WSJ Staff"
    },
    {
        "title": "How to Beat the High Cost of Gravity (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9136",
        "date": "2017-07-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-beat-the-high-cost-of-gravity-1500592209?mod=Searchresults_pos19&page=25",
        "text": "Messrs. Bezos and Musk are both committed to spreading civilization beyond Earth. Mr. Musk wants to colonize Mars, while Mr. Bezos wants to develop an extraterrestrial economy with asteroid mining and space manufacturing. There are other, poorer entrepreneurs, sometimes called \u201cnew space,\u201d dedicated to these goals. \n\n\n\n\nIf SpaceX keeps gaining market share and Blue Origins builds and launches its New Glenn rocket, the cost of getting off the ground (literally) will be dramatically reduced, possibly to as little as $10 a pound to low-Earth orbit. That would make the dreams of both Messrs. Musk and Bezos possible, indeed highly profitable. \n\n\nLow-cost access to space also has military implications. For the U.S., it will be easier for the Pentagon to deploy communications, navigation and reconnaissance satellites. This will be especially useful if the Defense Department follows through on evident congressional desire to develop and deploy a comprehensive set of space-based missile-defense sensors to guide America\u2019s next generation of interceptor missiles. \nEuropeans are also interested in reducing the cost of launching. They\u2019re working on an Ariane 6 launch vehicle they hope will allow them to regain some of the market share they have lost to SpaceX. China and Russia are developing new rockets no doubt to imitate the American billionaires\u2019 success. Aviation Week reports China may be getting serious about developing its own reusable launch vehicles. \nFurther, China and Russia are reportedly working hard on a variety of antisatellite weapons. The debris from China\u2019s 2007 test of a kinetic space weapon is still floating around, a reminder of what the effects of a space war might be. \nCheap access to space will make it easier to put a variety of weapons into orbit\u2014not just missile defense but space-to-Earth weapons. The high military value of space assets makes them obvious targets in any future conflict. \nThe temptation to believe that arms-control agreements could prevent a so-called arms race in space is strong, but in recent years we\u2019ve watched while some of the most significant arms-control agreements have been trashed. In Syria the Chemical Weapons Convention was ignored with minimal consequences. Russia has almost certainly violated the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement and both Iran and North Korean have reaped considerable benefits from departing, informally or formally, from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any agreement to control arms in space would be useless.\nFor good or ill, humanity is expanding into the solar system. Americans should hope for the best, but the future may not be peaceful, on Earth or in space. On June 30 President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Trump\n\n\n\n kept his promise to re-establish the National Space Council, with Vice President\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Mike Pence\n \n\n\n\n as chairman. Its most important job will be to reconcile America\u2019s scientific, commercial and military interests in space. If currently pending legislation is enacted, the Space Council will have a role to play in establishing a new branch of the armed forces, the Space Corps. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Mr. Dinerman\n\n\n\n writes on space policy and national security. Space is a happening place\u2014from Musk to Bezos to Trump. ",
        "author": "Taylor Dinerman"
    },
    {
        "title": "Neil Armstrong\u2019s \u2018Small Step\u2019 Brought the Moon Down to Earth (WSJ: Commentary) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9137",
        "date": "2019-07-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/neil-armstrongs-small-step-brought-the-moon-down-to-earth-11563573775?mod=Searchresults_pos13&page=19",
        "text": "Moonrise, the most elegant ceremony in the heavens, is the monthly ancient dream. Here I am, the moon announces, the Expected One. \nThe coyotes went silent after their first outburst. Fireflies blinked in the humid summer night. Mosquitoes came to us to claim their drop of blood.\n\n\n\n\nThen the clouds cleared away, except for the crocodile\u2019s head. And the full moon, with impassive serenity, ascended, like a great communion wafer, into the cloud crocodile\u2019s jaws. \n\n\nThe moon for eons was a distant, mystic object and a metaphor\u2014a favorite of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Shakespeare\u2019s\n\n\n\n , as in \u201cA Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u201d or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Cleopatra\u2019s\n\n\n\n \u201cvisiting moon.\u201d It was the force that caused the tides to surge and heave, and the Earth to bulge, like a child\u2019s iridescent soap bubble drawn swiftly through the air; it was the mysterious presence that caused lunatics in psychiatric wards\u2014the \u201cmoon mad\u201d\u2014to grow crazier, so that nurses worked double shifts. The moon was Earth\u2019s calendar and measured out months as history cycled along through time. Time is, in part, the moon\u2019s invention. Its enigmatic brilliance and regularity called forth a pagan reverence. The moon was primordial and mysterious\u2014intimate to women\u2019s physiology and their life force. It became a romantic and a sentimental totem, the objective correlative of love. \nBut after men landed on the moon 50 years ago Saturday, the metaphysics seemed to change. Even the moon\u2019s gender seemed to change. \u201cOne small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Neil Armstrong\n\n\n\n said as his space boots pressed down into the powder. \nMaybe that moment signaled the old order\u2019s last unambiguous moment of glory. People didn\u2019t think it odd in those days that virtually everyone involved\u2014at Mission Control in Houston, at the launch site near Cape Canaveral, Fla. and where the rocket was built in Huntsville, Ala.\u2014was white, male and American. Life magazine followed the astronauts minutely, at work and at home. The men wore buzz cuts and short-sleeve shirts and drove Mustangs or Corvettes, and their wives had beehive hairdos. The moon program was driven by an immense cultural self-confidence, now vanished.\nWith the lunar module\u2019s landing half a century ago, the moon that had earlier been poetic and mythic and religious entered into a different dimension altogether\u2014that of the strategic, the military, the geopolitical, the merely technological. Today interest in the moon may be mostly commercial. \nThe race to the moon started with the Soviets\u2019 orbiting of Sputnik in 1957. Control of space, from which nuclear weapons might be launched, became an urgent new aspect of the Cold War. But\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John F. Kennedy\u2019s\n\n\n\n promise to send a man to the moon by the end of the 1960s reasserted the idea of space as a setting for romance and adventure.\nIn his inaugural address, JFK said we will go anywhere, \u201cpay any price.\u201d Anywhere included the moon. The New Frontier had a new frontier. The space program represented the clean and heroic and virtuous exercise of American wealth and power aiming at the stars. Americans called their rockets Apollo, after the Greek god of such good things as healing and poetry and sun and light and knowledge. The war in Vietnam, pursued simultaneously, was a sort of anti-moonshot\u2014unclean, unheroic and unvirtuous, a descent into humiliation and quagmire.\nThe Apollo program became expensive (the mathematician\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Norbert Wiener\n\n\n\n called it the \u201cmoondoggle\u201d). It cost $150 billion in today\u2019s dollars, which was still a good deal less than the price of the war. America would lose in Vietnam\u2014that was clear by the summer of \u201969. It was some consolation to have the countervailing victory in space. The moon mission was a magnificent feat of applied science, technology, skill, daring, discipline, ingenuity, focus and political will\u2014the final manifestation, it may be, of an American near-unanimity that had prevailed from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and made possible the winning of World War II. \nYet the final achievement sabotaged the old mystique. The Victorian critic\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Walter Bagehot\n\n\n\n said of the British monarchy, \u201cWe must not let daylight in upon magic.\u201d The result is apt to be banal and debunking\u2014the effect Toto achieved by drawing aside the curtain and revealing the Wizard of Oz as he worked his thunder machine. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, at the moment they made history, at the same time brought on a curious bathos. They let daylight in upon the magic of the moon. They walked about for a little while on the pockmarked desolation, a lifeless moonscape that, seen up close on black-and-white TV sets, had none of the formerly imagined charm or mystery. The astronauts might as well have set down in the ugliest patch of Utah. \nBut no doubt the moon can be improved on. Fifty years on, it is left to entrepreneurial imaginations, like those of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Apollo 11 was the apogee of an era of dreams and the start of an age of division and small-mindedness. ",
        "author": "Lance Morrow"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos Will Fly Aboard Blue Origin\u2019s First Human Trip to Space (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9138",
        "date": "2021-06-07",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/business/jeff-bezos-space.html",
        "text": "Mr. Bezos and his brother, Mark, will be on board when his rocket company launches its first human spaceflight next month, shortly after he steps down as chief executive of Amazon. Mr. Bezos and his brother, Mark, will be on board when his rocket company launches its first human spaceflight next month, shortly after he steps down as chief executive of Amazon. In the battle of billionaires with rocket companies, Jeff Bezos will finally beat Elon Musk.",
        "author": "By Derrick Bryson Taylor and Kenneth Chang"
    },
    {
        "title": "From Mars, That Dress Looks Awesome (NYT: Fashion & Style) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9139",
        "date": "2017-10-02",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/fashion/paris-fashion-week-valentino-celine.html",
        "text": "New perspectives and experimentation at Valentino, Stella McCartney and C\u00e9line. New perspectives and experimentation at Valentino, Stella McCartney and C\u00e9line. PARIS \u2014 Elon Musk is not the only guy thinking about the importance of space travel.",
        "author": "By Vanessa Friedman"
    },
    {
        "title": "NASA Mulls A New Deep-Space Rocket Test Despite Technical Concerns (WSJ: U.S.) / search: 'space+transportation'",
        "uid": "9140",
        "date": "2021-01-19",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-considers-redoing-test-for-troubled-deep-space-rocket-11611091340?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=29",
        "text": "Outgoing National Aeronautics and Space Administration chief\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Jim Bridenstine\n\n\n\n and some top aides emphasized that on top of probable schedule delays, extra testing could stress parts of the 212-foot rocket to the point that performing its mission could be problematic.\nThe agency didn\u2019t give a timeline for a decision, though some of its internal safety guidelines suggest that typically a new test would be necessary to demonstrate reliability of the booster\u2019s primary propulsion system.\n\n\nThe looming trade-offs over testing present engineering and political challenges for NASA as well as Boeing, even as new appointees in a Biden administration are expected to reassess the status of the troubled multibillion-dollar SLS program. \n\n\nSetback for NASA and Boeing NASA\u2019s Delayed Deep-Space Rocket Suffers Test Failure on the Ground \n\n\nResponding to questions about the automated shutdowns that occurred about a minute into what was supposed to be an eight-minute test on Saturday, Mr. Bridenstine and other agency leaders placed the blame on test parameters that were intentionally conservative to protect the booster section. When a sensor recorded excessive stress on the hydraulic system that adjusts the engines, a cascade of protective computer messages followed, almost instantly shutting them all down. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Shannon,\n\n\n\n Boeing\u2019s SLS program manager, told reporters \u201cthere is a judgment call\u201d in seeking to extract maximum data under such test situations while also \u201cmaking sure that the hardware stays in good shape\u201d for its ultimate flight. \nThere was an unrelated problem much earlier in the test. A different sensor monitoring another engine indicated a major component failure. NASA said Tuesday that based on preliminary data, there was no such failure and the sensor provided incorrect information to onboard computers. During an actual blastoff count, according to the agency, the malfunctioning sensor likely would have caused an abort of the launch.\nRetesting the engines could further delay a program that is already years behind schedule and, by some measures, about 30% over budget. Last weekend\u2019s test in Mississippi was earlier delayed for technical reasons and then by the pandemic. Now, NASA officials must decide whether to ship the booster to the launch site in Florida without getting all the test data they initially indicated would be necessary to determine the reliability of its propulsion system. NASA officials have said preparing for a retest would take at least a month. Industry officials watching the program have said they anticipate a longer delay.\nNASA\u2019s latest statements, however, provide some relatively good news for backers of the SLS booster, which agency and congressional investigators have said experienced persistent management problems and significant technical setbacks. NASA said the engines weren\u2019t damaged during the test, while other details indicate the shutdown didn\u2019t point to a fundamental design problem with the engines, fuel system or supporting structures.\nSLS is more powerful than the Saturn V that blasted Apollo astronauts toward the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was slated for its first uncrewed launch late this year, but that schedule is now in flux.\n\u201cThe fact that we learned and are learning\u201d from the data collected on Saturday \u201cmeans this was a great test,\u201d according to Kathy Lueders, head of NASA\u2019s human exploration programs. \u201cWe have a shot at flying this year,\u201d she said, though none of the NASA or industry experts at the press conference vouched for that schedule.\nPolitical and budget pressures on the program\u2014projected to cost a total of between $19 billion and $23 billion\u2014were already increasing. The system has been under development for more than a decade without yet getting airborne. Each launch is projected to cost in excess of $1 billion, according to agency officials and NASA\u2019s inspector general\u2019s office.\nSLS boosters are intended to carry astronauts inside the Orion capsule, built by a team headed by\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Lockheed Martin Corp.\n\n\n , to the moon and eventually to Mars. But the program is expected to face stepped-up congressional scrutiny and escalating competition from rival space-transportation companies.\nCompanies headed by billionaires\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n are separately working on smaller rockets that potentially could be tapped by NASA to participate in early lunar missions.\nWrite to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com Retesting the booster\u2019s engines could further delay the Space Launch System program, which on Saturday suffered another setback. ",
        "author": "Andy Pasztor"
    },
    {
        "title": "Space Travel Isn\u2019t Only for Astronauts (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9141",
        "date": "2021-07-27",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-flight-risk-astronauts-11627334688?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=5",
        "text": "Perhaps, as Mr. Cook contends,\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Christa McAuliffe\n\n\n\n did not fully understand the risks she was taking on the Challenger mission. If so, shame on everyone. But maybe she did. Certainly she had the intellectual capacity to do so, and her mission was worthwhile: communicating from a nontechnical perspective the wonders of space to a broad audience, and especially to children, where her expertise would have been invaluable.\nRichard Hazleton\n\n\n\n\nNaples, Fla. There are always risks. But would America even exist if the ships crossing the Atlantic in the 17th century were limited to maritime professionals? ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Reach for the Moon: Four Lives, the Space Race and a Chaotic Decade (WSJ: Moon Landing) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9142",
        "date": "2019-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-moon-landing-shaped-four-americans-lives-11563152941?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=15",
        "text": "Reaching for the moon would help fortify capitalism and democracy in an uncertain world. Just a month before, in April 1961, the Soviet Union had put the first human in space, and a U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba had foundered at the Bay of Pigs. \u201cIn a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon\u2026it will be an entire nation,\u201d Mr. Kennedy said. Over the next eight years, success depended upon people like \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Morgan Watson,\n\n\n\n a black man from the segregated schoolhouses of rural Louisiana; \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Frances \u201cPoppy\u201d Northcutt,\n\n\n\n a high-school valedictorian and onetime beauty contestant from the Texas oil patch; \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Alan Contessa,\n\n\n\n a working-class kid from New York City\u2019s outer boroughs; and \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n John Wolfram,\n\n\n\n a rebel with a patriotic streak from the Wisconsin countryside. \u201cFresh out of the cotton fields of Louisiana,\u201d Mr. Watson says, \u201cI thought it was out of the range for me at that time.\u201d Ultimately, he and the others would boost the Apollo 11 astronauts into space, land them on the moon, plot their course home and pluck them from the sea.\n\n\nRelated Coverage A chronicle of what was happening in the Apollo 11 mission and back on Earth. Check out the day-by-day experience. \n\n\n\n\nYour browser does not support the audio tag.WSJ\u2019s The Future of EverythingMoonshot: How Apollo Launched the Digital RevolutionThe Apollo program to go to the moon marks the only time humans have left our home planet to set foot on another world. The biggest effect of this voyage was transforming the civilization it left behind.ADLoading advertisement...00:001xSubscribeApple PodcastsGoogle PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadioTuneInStitcherRSS\n\n\n\nThey joined more than 300,000 Americans from seamstresses to scientists, welded in common purpose. Racism, sexism, shrinking opportunity, drugs and war frayed the nation. But the moonshot remained a rare fixed point in a turbulent decade, an audacious pursuit unmatched in the 50 years since humans first walked another world. \u201cIt was a chaotic time,\u201d Mr. Wolfram says. \u201cThere was this wonderful moment that everyone was proud of in the midst of race riots and war protests.\u201d\u2018A little uncomfortable\u2019 Morgan Watson watched with thousands of others from the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1965 as orange flames billowed from a Saturn V rocket bound to the Earth by a towering concrete test stand. With five engines generating 7.6 million pounds of thrust, the ground shook and the sky filled with steam and smoke and thunder. The crowd erupted. Months testing hundreds of thousands of parts had paid off. \u201cYou can\u2019t imagine all the \u2018Attaboys,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Watson says. He was raised in St. Joseph, a small town on the Mississippi River in northern Louisiana, where he, his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had picked cotton.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMr. Watson as an intern in the visitors lobby of NASA\u2019s Huntsville, Ala., facility in 1964. He became one of NASA\u2019s first African-American engineers.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Morgan Watson\n \n\n\n\nThe fall after President Kennedy\u2019s speech, Mr. Watson, a freshman on scholarship at all-black Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., joined more than 1,000 students who marched two by two around the Old State Capitol protesting segregation. Police teargassed them, and Mr. Watson, dressed in a dark suit, ran 7 miles back to campus. In January 1964, two months after President Kennedy was assassinated, Mr. Watson, then a college junior, arrived at Marshall in Huntsville, the northern Alabama town called Rocket City. The federal government required the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its contractors to hire African-Americans as it created 200,000 jobs in the Deep South. Students from Southern were recruited as interns because it was hard to attract black engineers to Alabama, a state whose governor, \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n George Wallace,\n\n\n\n proclaimed \u201csegregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever\u201d in his 1963 inaugural address. \u201cThere were no other black engineers and technicians,\u201d Mr. Watson says. \u201cFailure was not an option.\u201d He worked in the quality-assurance lab checking rocket components\u2014wires, screws, hoses\u2014before moving to the propulsion and vehicle engineering lab, developing ways to keep the rocket from exploding. \u201cI don\u2019t remember seeing another black person there,\u201d he says of the hundreds in the warehouse-size lab. \u201cIt was a little uncomfortable.\u201d But engineers spoke the same language, he could sit where he wanted in the cafeteria, and everyone used the same restrooms. He and his classmates had to take aptitude tests that white interns didn\u2019t, though. Apartment owners wouldn\u2019t rent to the interns. The black community took them in. Mr. Watson shared a bunk bed with another Southern student in a bootlegger\u2019s home. When Mr. Watson went to a Ray Charles concert at the civic center, \u201cthere was a rope right down the A cross-section of the nation\u2014more than 300,000 people\u2014joined forces to make Apollo 11 possible. Here are some of their stories. ",
        "author": "Clare Ansberry"
    },
    {
        "title": "World Digest: July 30, 2021 (WP: National) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9143",
        "date": "2021-07-30",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/world-digest-july-30-2021/2021/07/30/599f9278-f145-11eb-bf80-e3877d9c5f06_story.html",
        "text": "Software failure cited in space station woesWpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightRussia on Friday blamed a software failure for an incident that briefly knocked the International Space Station off course and said it was pressing ahead with work to activate the newly attached module at the center of the episode.The space station was thrown off track Thursday about three hours after the Russian Nauka, or \u201cScience,\u201d research module had latched onto the station. Mission control in Moscow was performing post-docking \u201creconfiguration\u201d procedures when Nauka\u2019s jet thrusters inadvertently fired, causing the station to pitch out of position. The space station crew \u2014 two Russian cosmonauts, three NASA astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and a European Space Agency astronaut from France \u2014 were never in any immediate danger, according to NASA and Russia.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u2014 ReutersProtester gets 9 years under security law A pro-democracy protester was sentenced to nine years in prison in the closely watched first prosecution under Hong Kong\u2019s national security law as China\u2019s ruling Communist Party tightens its control over the territory.Tong Ying-kit, 24, was convicted of inciting secession and terrorism for driving his motorcycle into a group of police officers at a July 1, 2020, rally. He carried a flag bearing the banned slogan \u201cLiberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.\u201dTong\u2019s sentence, announced by Judge Esther Toh in the Hong Kong High Court, was longer than the three years requested by the prosecution.Story continues below advertisement\u2014 Associated PressPolice arrested in Haiti assassination probe: A dozen Haitian police officers have been arrested in the investigation into who killed President Jovenel Mo\u00efse, the Haiti National Police said. Police spokeswoman Michelle Verrier said some of the officers were arrested because Colombian commandos detained in the killing say the officers accompanied them as they entered Mo\u00efse's hilltop home during the July 7 attack. Others were arrested because they did not do what they were supposed to do that night, Verrier said. In all, more than 44 individuals have been arrested in the ongoing investigation.AdvertisementOver 100,000 children face hunger in Ethiopia, U.N. warns: The U.N. children's agency says more than 100,000 children in Ethiopia's embattled northern region of Tigray could suffer life-threatening malnutrition in the next 12 months, a tenfold increase from normal numbers. Agency spokeswoman Marixie Mercado said 1 in 2 pregnant or breastfeeding women screened in Tigray were acutely malnourished. Fighting between rebellious regional forces and federal troops has roiled the region since November.Story continues below advertisementMonsoon displaces thousands of Rohingya refugees: Heavy monsoon rains triggered landslides and flash floods in refugees camps this week, displacing thousands of Rohingya Muslims living in southeastern Bangladesh, U.N. and other officials said. At least six Rohingya were killed and more than 200,000 people were left stranded in Cox's Bazar.Russia begins action against WhatsApp: Russia has launched administrative proceedings against Facebook's WhatsApp for what it said was a failure to localize data of Russian users in Russian territory, the Interfax news agency reported.\u2014 From news services Russia blames software failure for space station woes; Hong Kong pro-democracy protester gets 9 years under security law. World Digest: July 30, 2021",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | We all have a stake in SpaceX\u2019s success. The pandemic ought to make clear why. (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9144",
        "date": "2020-08-04",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-all-have-a-stake-in-spacexs-success-the-pandemic-ought-to-make-clear-why/2020/08/04/c6fe49fa-d683-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html",
        "text": "Something amazing happened on Sunday, and almost no one seemed to care.Two men had burst out of Earth\u2019s stratosphere in May, propelled by more than 1.7 million pounds of rocket-fueled thrust. On Sunday, they returned safely. The joint mission between NASA and SpaceX was the first time in nine years that the United States had sent astronauts to the International Space Station under our own power, rather than snagging a ride on a Russian rocket. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightFifty-one years ago, 63 percent of U.S. households watched at least some part of Apollo 11\u2019s historic trip to the moon. Sunday\u2019s return, by contrast, mostly enthralled space geeks who\u2019ve been planning to colonize Mars since they were old enough to read their first science fiction.Story continues below advertisementAmerica is rather busy with other things, of course, such as a pandemic. But it\u2019s actually the pandemic that shows us just how important it is to keep humanity moving along the road to the stars.AdvertisementPerhaps this seems overblown to you; perhaps you think that space travel is a government boondoggle, a nerd equivalent of agriculture subsidies that siphons off taxpayer dollars from domestic social spending. Perhaps, too, you think that it\u2019s hardly fair to compare the attention lavished on humanity\u2019s first moonwalk with our relative indifference toward one more visit to the space station.Yet the flight of the Dragon was also a major milestone, marking both the revitalization of our government\u2019s crewed space program, and the sustained entrance of commercial enterprises into the field. The more players there are on that field, the more trips we will make into space, and the more likely it becomes that we\u2019ll develop the expertise to finally realize those science-fiction dreams of space colonies and even interstellar travel.Story continues below advertisementThough this may seem rather remote and non-urgent compared with suffering in the here and now, it\u2019s actually human welfare that makes the most clear and pressing argument for developing our space capabilities. Human spaceflight is not just a gee-whiz cool, but fantastically expensive, way to flex our technical capabilities. It\u2019s a necessary \u2014 though, yes, costly \u2014 insurance policy against planetary catastrophe.AdvertisementWhen space enthusiasts say this (and full disclosure, I was one of those 8-year-olds who fully expected to be colonizing another planet by now), our skeptics often hear an excuse for gross abdication of our ecological obligations \u2014 use up this planet, then skip happily onward to the next one. But many of us believe that humanity should spend its money on space flight and environmental causes, and for the same reason. Because one of the mass extinctions we worry about is the die-off that extinguished the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period.Most scientists now believe this was caused by a massive meteor, more than six miles across, that crashed into Earth near what is now the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula. New mountains were thrown up in an instant, tsunamis battered the coasts, forest fires ravaged the continental interiors, aerosols were thrown skyward that, along with the smoke from the fires, dimmed the sun and lowered temperatures. Most of the planet\u2019s known species weren\u2019t adapted for this harsh new environment, and in the aftermath of the great meteor, approximately three-quarters vanished.Story continues below advertisementMost educated people are aware that a meteor killed the dinosaurs, but prefer not to meditate on its corollary: If another meteor like that hits, humanity might well be among the species that go extinct. Such collisions are a regular event in the long history of our planet; even now, astronomers keep recording a disconcerting number of near misses.AdvertisementA robust space program thus offers us two kinds of important protection: First, we could eventually develop the capacity to detect and deflect a potential collision; and second, even if we were unable to do so, part of humanity could be elsewhere when disaster hit, allowing the species to survive. It may seem silly to plan against a cosmic disaster that last happened millions of years ago \u2014 especially when there is a microscopic yet deadly threat stalking us right now. But note that until March, it struck most people as pretty silly to worry more about a pandemic than about threats from overgrown bureaucracy or the seasonal flu.And indeed, modern public health efforts had lowered the yearly risk of such a contagion significantly. It\u2019s just that over a sufficiently long timespan, those low annual risks accumulate into something more like a certainty \u2014 and you never know, in a given year, whether this is the time humanity wins the lottery \u2014 or, rather, loses it. So even if your spirit isn\u2019t moved by the thought that a species of weak and hairless plains ape has somehow managed to vault itself once again toward the stars, you should still care about our progress in that direction. The more people we can put into space, the more likely it becomes that we will be able to keep everyone safe at home.Story continues below advertisementRead more from Megan McArdle\u2019s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook.AdvertisementRead more:Megan McArdle: Big tech has no friends in WashingtonRobert Zubrin and Homer Hickam: Send the SpaceX Dragon to the moonMarc A. Thiessen: SpaceX\u2019s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalismDiane McWhorter: As astronauts rocket into space, protesters are beaten in the street \u2014 just like beforeLori Garver: Forget new crewed missions in space. NASA should focus on saving Earth. We can care about Earth while guarding against mass extinction. Opinion: We all have a stake in SpaceX\u2019s success. The pandemic ought to make clear why.",
        "author": "Megan McArdle"
    },
    {
        "title": "Do All the Billionaires Belong in Space? (WSJ: Jason Gay) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9145",
        "date": "2021-07-16",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-all-the-billionaires-belong-in-space-11626450308?mod=Searchresults_pos9&page=17",
        "text": "Space has become all the plutocrat rage. Richard Branson launched the other day, now it\u2019s\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\u2019s\n \n\n\n\n turn to project himself heavenward.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Elon Musk\n \n\n\n\n is primed to go. I\u2019m not sure about the plans of\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Oprah Winfrey\n\n\n\n and\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Warren Buffett,\n\n\n\n but who knows? Maybe Oprah and Warren are in Omaha, doing zero-gravity training as we speak. \nNot long ago, billionaires used to argue about simple matters, like Aspen driveways and whose plane could fly from Singapore to Vegas without a refuel. Now it\u2019s all about hiring aeronautical engineers, crafting bespoke space ships, and spending too much time in the desert. The goal posts for personal extravagance have shot skyward, and I\u2019m sure not every billionaire is on board. I bet there are some billionaires who are like, Space? Can\u2019t I just buy a remote archipelago, fund some really bad movies and wallpaper my bedroom with 1952 Mickey Mantle cards?\nThere\u2019s also this: The public seems mixed about billionaire space travel. A lot of people think it\u2019s an enormous waste of money. They worry that this private space race is bad for the environment. Branson is facing criticism for pretending to ride a bicycle to his launchpad the other day (his prelaunch bike ride, it turns out, was prerecorded). Imagine that! You managed to get yourself to space, and everyone\u2019s mad at you about a bike ride. \n\n\n\n\u201cSpace just seems like a lot, and for what? Some breakfast bragging at Sun Valley?\u201d\n\n\n\nThen there\u2019s the whole argument about whether or not the billionaires are actually reaching bona fide \u201cspace.\u201d Bezos is set to fly higher than Branson did, crossing something called the \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n K\u00e1rm\u00e1n\n\n\n\n line,\u201d but neither one is barreling into spacey-space-space, like Buzz Aldrin did, or\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Sigourney Weaver.\n\n\n\n It\u2019s more like space-adjacent, space-ish, space on the verge, or \u201ctechnically space\u201d\u2014not the Moon, definitely not Mars, but slightly more exotic than the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. \n\n\nDon\u2019t get me wrong. What they\u2019re doing is adventurous! It is not without personal risk. They are definitely going higher than the 5 p.m. shuttle between Newark and Syracuse. But I bet it would be annoying, if you flew into space, and you had to listen to some know-it-all on the couch saying, Well, actually\u2026\nAlso: You don\u2019t get anything for going to space. There\u2019s no gift shop, T-shirt or cultural signifier. There\u2019s no \u201cACK\u201d bumper sticker to throw on the back of the Cayenne. \n\n\nMore from Jason Gay\n\n\n\n\nThe Over-the-Top Stress of College Acceptance Season\nMarch 11, 2022 \n\n\nLive Under the Sea? Not for Me.\nFebruary 18, 2022 \n\n\nThe Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club\nJanuary 28, 2022 \n\n\nStop Reading This Lousy Column, and Read a Book Instead\nJanuary 14, 2022 \n\n\n\n\nSpace just seems like a lot, and for what? Some breakfast bragging at Sun Valley? Being a billionaire is already competitive enough, and now there\u2019s this whole different playing field, with vague definitions, extraordinary costs and significant potential for backlash. It seems like it would just be simpler to chill in Muskoka for the summer, or find a more popular idea, like grabbing some of your billionaire pals and launching a breakaway \u201cSuper League\u201d in European soccer. \nFor the spacebound: safe travels. Wear your seat belt, bring a camera and take a few nice photos for your Instagram. I don\u2019t want to diminish anyone\u2019s excitement or dissuade anyone from chasing a dream. Space may, in fact, be the place. I just think sitting by a pool, next to a T-Rex fossil, is nice, too. \n\n\nSHARE YOUR THOUGHTSWhat do you think of the blllionaire \u201cspace race?\u201d Join the conversation below. \n\n\nWrite to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com Branson and Bezos are chasing the next frontier, but it might not be for everyone. ",
        "author": "Jason Gay"
    },
    {
        "title": "GAO sustains a protest by Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company over lucrative Pentagon launch contracts (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9146",
        "date": "2019-11-18",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/18/gao-sustains-protest-by-jeff-bezos-space-company-over-lucrative-pentagon-launch-contracts/",
        "text": "The Air Force plans to revise a key provision of a lucrative launch contract solicitation after the Government Accountability Office sustained a legal challenge filed by Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space company that argued it created an unfair competition.WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBlue Origin filed the legal challenge in August, alleging that the Air Force was \u201cpursuing a flawed acquisition strategy\u201d that discriminated against new bidders, limited competition and had ambiguous criteria that prevented the companies from competing on the merits. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) The bid protest draws attention the high stakes competition for the military launch contracts and could help re-shape the industry, as a handful of deep-pocketed companies fight for dominance in a broader $4 billion-a-year military space market. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementCurrently, there are only two companies certified to compete for the Air Force launch contracts, Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. ULA and Lockheed are the largest recipients of military space funding by a wide margin, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Government. Blue Origin has received about $180 million from the Defense Department so far in 2019, compared to $1.6 billion for United Launch Alliance. The Air Force is looking to expand the number of potential bidders for the next round of contracts to include Northrop Grumman and Blue Origin, both of which are developing new rockets with significant Air Force investment.Ultimately, though, starting next year the Air Force intends to choose just two companies for its next patch of contracts, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn its ruling, released publicly Nov. 15, the GAO denied many of Blue Origin\u2019s arguments, but upheld one about the selection criteria used to pick the two companies that would be able to compete for the launch contracts. As part of the selection criteria, the Air Force said it was going to not only evaluate the strength each company\u2019s offering individually but also what ones provided the best value \u201cwhen combined\u201d with another.The GAO found that since the companies\u2019 bids are proprietary it would be impossible for them to know how they best combined with another offering. \u201cIndeed, short of colluding with other potential offerors to coordinate their respective proposals, it is not apparent how an offeror could intelligently compete,\u201d the GAO found.In a statement, Will Roper, the Air Force\u2019s acquisition chief said the service would amend the solicitation and that it would not \u201cmaterially delay\u201d the award. \u201cThe Air Force will evaluate each offeror independently against the RFP evaluation criteria based on the merits of its own proposal and will amend the solicitation to make clear that each award will be made solely on the basis of the defined criteria,\u201d he said.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBlue Origin welcomed the decision. \u201cWe want to thank GAO for their careful consideration of these serious issues, thoroughly reviewing the facts of the case, and recognizing the importance of ensuring evaluation criteria that are unambiguous and comply with federal procurement statutes and regulations,\u201d Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said in a statement. \u201cThis is an important mission to Blue Origin, and we remain committed to our long-term partnership with the Air Force and to working with them as they address the GAO\u2019s recommendations.\u201dIn announcing the protest in August, before any contracts were even awarded, Blue Origin said in a statement that \u201cunless the Air Force changes its approach, this procurement will perpetuate a market duopoly in national security space launch well into the next decade, causing higher launch prices, less assured access to space and a missed opportunity to expand our national security interests and bolster U.S. leadership in space.\u201dIt\u2019s the second large-scale Pentagon contract that has drawn a legal challenge from Bezos.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementEarlier this month, Amazon said it would challenge the award to rival Microsoft of a contract to provide cloud-computing services to the Pentagon worth as much as $10 billion. Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services (AWS) subsidiary has deep experience in cloud computing, said the Pentagon decision was tainted by \u201cunmistakable bias\u201d and \u201cpolitical influence.\u201dUnlike AWS, one of the nation\u2019s largest cloud providers, Blue Origin is a relative newcomer to the national security launch industry. Its New Glenn rocket is not expected to fly until 2021, and it is only beginning to enter the market and line up customers.For a decade, ULA had a virtual monopoly on the contracts until SpaceX came along. Musk sued the Air Force in 2014 for the right to compete. The parties settled, and SpaceX has competed for several missions. The bid protest comes as the Air Force is seeking more choices in the lucrative market for national security launch services. GAO sustains a protest by Jeff Bezos\u2019s space company over lucrative Pentagon launch contracts",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "SpaceX, Elon Musk\u2019s Rocket Company, Cuts 10 Percent of Its Work Force (NYT: Business Day) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9147",
        "date": "2019-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/12/business/spacex-layoffs-elon-musk.html",
        "text": "The private company, which aims to send humans to Mars, will have about 6,000 employees remaining after the companywide layoffs. The private company, which aims to send humans to Mars, will have about 6,000 employees remaining after the companywide layoffs. SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by the billionaire Elon Musk, is laying off about 10 percent of its work force in what it framed as a necessary cutback to position the company for an unchartered future.",
        "author": "By Sarah Mervosh"
    },
    {
        "title": "Blue Origin rocket moves closer to flying humans with latest launch (WP: Space) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9148",
        "date": "2021-04-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/14/blue-origin-rehearsal-flight/",
        "text": "The promise of private space travel may be edging closer to reality.Blue Origin, the rocket venture founded by Amazon\u2019s Jeff Bezos, executed what it called an \u201castronaut rehearsal\u201d Wednesday of its suborbital New Shepard rocket, launching the craft to the edge of space after having employees board as if they were going to travel with it, then disembarking before liftoff. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIt was the second time this year that the rocket had launched successfully as Blue Origin prepares for what it hopes one day will be missions carrying paying passengers. The demonstration took place at Blue Origin\u2019s launch site in West Texas. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.)Story continues below advertisement\u201cAs part of today\u2019s rehearsals, our stand-in astronauts went through the exact same movements as future customers will experience on launch day,\u201d the company said. The company live-streamed the event, including images of the capsule\u2019s soft landing in a cloud of dust.AdvertisementBefore the launch, the \u201cstand-in astronauts\u201d climbed the launch tower, stepped into the crew chamber, buckled their harnesses and performed a communications check with the command center. They briefly closed the hatch, before exiting the crew quarters atop the 60-foot-tall rocket.Instead of having actual people on board during the mission, Blue Origin sent up a test dummy named \u201cMannequin Skywalker.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNew Shepard took flight shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern time, shooting more than 60 miles into the air toward the Karman line, which is widely recognized as the point where space begins. The boosters then separated from the crew capsule and glided back to a soft vertical landing on Earth.NASA again postpones historic Ingenuity helicopter flight on MarsDetached from the engine system, the crew capsule hovered in microgravity before parachuting to the ground a few minutes later. Total trip time: just over 10 minutes.AdvertisementBlue Origin\u2019s stand-in astronauts were then driven to the crew chambers to rehearse recovery procedures such as hatch opening and exiting the capsule.The practice run dubbed \u201cNS-15\u201d was the company\u2019s 15th test flight since 2015. The company promises the vehicle will carry passengers to space \u201csoon.\u201dStory continues below advertisementNew Shepard is designed to carry six passengers and has large windows to allow the people aboard to see out. The vehicle is named for Alan Shepard, the first American to fly in space in 1961.After decades as a government monopoly, human space flight may soon become a private venture too. SpaceX is planning to carry the first all-civilian crew to space, perhaps before the end of this year. Virgin Galactic, founded by British entrepreneur Richard Branson, also is working to conduct suborbital flights to the edge of space.\u201cThere will be many players in this human endeavor to go to space to benefit Earth,\u201d Blue Origin says on its website. \u201cWe will go about this step by step because it is an illusion that skipping steps gets us there faster. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.\u201d Blue Origin completed its fifteenth rocket flight to the edge of space hoping to welcome private passengers onboard \"soon.\" Blue Origin rocket moves closer to flying humans with latest launch",
        "author": "Dalvin Brown"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | Americans should worry more about China than Russia. The new space race shows why. (WP: Global Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9149",
        "date": "2021-06-23",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/23/americans-should-worry-more-about-china-than-russia-new-space-race-shows-why/",
        "text": "The salute was carried live to 1 billion people but went unnoticed by most of the world.Three astronauts aboard China\u2019s new rival to the International Space Station gave military salutes to President Xi Jinping during a videoconference broadcast Wednesday on state television. \u201cWe in Beijing await your triumphant return,\u201d Xi told the three officers of the People\u2019s Liberation Army standing in front of Communist Party flags as they orbited 242 miles above Earth. Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightLast week\u2019s launch from a base in the Gobi Desert was followed obsessively inside China but largely overlooked in the United States \u2014 overshadowed by President Biden\u2019s summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Although both adversaries threaten U.S. interests, Americans need to worry more about a rising and militarizing China than a revanchist Russia. The new space race helps illustrate why.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThe Chinese didn\u2019t put an astronaut into space until 2003, 42 years after the Soviets, but Beijing has been making cosmic strides that, unlike the Kremlin\u2019s advances during the Cold War, have yet to rouse Washington out of its relative complacency.Last month, China landed a rover on Mars \u2014 becoming the only nation besides ours to do so. Last September,the Chinese launched and recovered a spaceplane that spent two days in low-Earth orbit. In 2019, China became the first country to land a craft on the far side of the moon.The same day Biden met with Putin, Russian and Chinese officials unveiled a roadmap in St. Petersburg to jointly build a lunar base that could accommodate humans by 2036. The Chinese have also conducted tests that indicate advanced capabilities to knock out U.S. satellites. Last June, they launched the last in a constellation of 35 satellites to create a rival network to our GPS system.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementIn April, the U.S. intelligence community\u2019s annual threat assessment warned that \u201cBeijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.\u201dFollow\u00a0James Hohmann\u2018s opinionsFollowAddThis threat isn\u2019t limited to the vacuum of space. China\u2019s efforts must be viewed in the context of its ongoing genocide in Xinjiang, smothering of Hong Kong, saber-rattling against Taiwan and obstruction of independent investigations into the origins of the coronavirus.Fortunately, most leaders in both U.S. political parties recognize the need to counter China and support our space program. In 2019, the Trump administration moved up by four years, to 2024, the timetable for returning astronauts to the moon. The Biden team embraces this aggressive, if underfunded, goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementNASA Administrator Bill Nelson held up a photograph of China\u2019s Mars rover during a recent House hearing as he requested more funding for the Human Landing System. \u201cThat should tell us something about our need to get off our duff,\u201d he testified. NASA wants $11 billion in the infrastructure package, in addition to its annual budget request of $24.7 billion, a 6 percent increase from the current fiscal year.If we are to maintain U.S. supremacy in space, we should also try to learn from our early setbacks. Jeff Shesol\u2019s \u201cMercury Rising,\u201d published this month, tells the fascinating backstory of how John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962. Even though John F. Kennedy campaigned on closing the space gap, his initial commitment seemed more rhetorical than real. Kennedy\u2019s budget director resisted spending on manned spaceflight.When Kennedy told a joint session of Congress that America should try to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, he and his top aides were struck by the lack of applause in the chamber. The Democratic chairman of the House Appropriations Committee called Kennedy\u2019s budget request \u201cwholly unrealistic and fantastic beyond measure.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGallup polling in 1961 found that almost 6 in 10 Americans opposed spending the $40 billion they were told it would cost to put men on the moon. When respondents ranked the issues for which they\u2019d be willing to pay more taxes, space came in fifth. Early media coverage focused on the expense, not excitement, of a mission whose prospects were considered remote.The success of Glenn\u2019s Friendship 7 mission created momentum and built support for additional spending. \u201cEverything in retrospect has an air of inevitability, but it wasn\u2019t,\u201d Shesol said in an interview.Even after Glenn\u2019s achievement, many Americans remained skeptical about exploring the final frontier. Shesol said that\u2019s why Kennedy delivered what became his famous \u201cwe choose to go to the moon\u201d address at Rice University. \u201cThis generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space,\u201d Kennedy declared. \u201cThe exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not. \u2026 No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementHalf a century later, in the face of a different communist threat, another new age is dawning. Yes, Russia remains a threat. The global pandemic is still with us. And red ink is spilling for decades to come. But for all the competing budget and political concerns, the martyred president\u2019s words feel freshly urgent.Read more:Robert Barnett: It\u2019s time to sound the alarm over Chinese intrigues in the HimalayasBarkha Dutt: If Biden wants to counter China, he needs to look to IndiaDana Milbank: Why does Biden hate the flag, family, grace, God and America?Greg Sargent: Kyrsten Sinema accidentally reveals the huge hole in her filibuster defenseCatherine Rampell: Manchin got Republicans to admit to the \u2018big lie.\u2019 Democrats should celebrate. Americans need to worry more about a rising and militarizing China than a revanchist Russia. Opinion: Americans should worry more about China than Russia. The new space race shows why.",
        "author": "James Hohmann"
    },
    {
        "title": "Jeff Bezos donates $200 million to Air and Space Museum in largest gift to the Smithsonian since its founding (WP: Museums) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9150",
        "date": "2021-07-14",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/bezos-smithsonian-donation-air-and-space-museum/2021/07/14/405ac38a-e4c2-11eb-b722-89ea0dde7771_story.html",
        "text": "The Smithsonian Institution announced Wednesday that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and spaceflight company Blue Origin, is donating $200\u00a0million to the National Air and Space Museum \u2014 the largest donation to the Smithsonian since the founding gift from James Smithson in 1846. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightOf the total, $70 million will support the museum\u2019s ongoing renovation and $130 million will establish an education center called the Bezos Learning Center. The announcement of the donation comes less than a week before Bezos, who stepped down from Amazon on July 5, will travel into space aboard the New Shepard rocket on Blue Origin\u2019s first passenger flight. Meanwhile, the Air and Space Museum, one of the most popular Smithsonians, is preparing to reopen July 30 for the first time since the pandemic shutdowns began in March 2020. It also comes during ongoing debate over the role of wealthy philanthropists in museum funding and whose names are honored on the walls of many public institutions. (The Freer/Sackler gallery, named partially after collector Arthur M. Sackler, rebranded as the National Museum of Asian Art in 2019.)Final phase of Smithsonian reopening begins in June, including popular Natural History MuseumOther large gifts to the Smithsonian include $65 million from Steven F. Udvar-Hazy in 1999 for the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., as well as $45\u00a0million in 2001 from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation for the building that houses the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\u201cAlmost 175 years ago, Mr. Smithson\u2019s inaugural gift laid the groundwork for this innovative approach, bringing together private philanthropy and public funding,\u201d Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said in a statement Wednesday.\u201cToday, as we emerge from a pivotal moment in history, Jeff\u2019s donation builds on that original tradition and will help us reimagine and transform the Smithsonian. This historic gift will help the Smithsonian achieve its goal of reaching every classroom in America by creating a world-class learning center with access and inspiration at its heart.\u201dBezos\u2019s gift coincides with a wider public interest in space travel. Blue Origin is among a handful of companies, including Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX, planning to launch commercial spaceflights. A seat on Blue Origin\u2019s July 20 passenger flight was auctioned off for $28\u00a0million.The Air and Space Museum, which is housed in a 45-year-old building on the Mall, has been under extensive renovations since 2018, and when it reopens to the public at the end of the month, about 60 percent of its exhibition space will still be closed. The renovations are projected to cost $1\u00a0billion. Counting the $70 million from Bezos\u2019s gift, the museum is now $15 million shy of its $250 million private funding goal.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWith the renovations, the Smithsonian hopes to create new interactive experiences and enhance technological interconnectivity across the museum and with the public at home. Chris Browne, the museum\u2019s acting director, sees the institution\u2019s mission as both forward-looking and historical.\u201cWe believe the museum, in addition to celebrating incredible feats of the past, should also have a rich collection and presentation of what\u2019s happening right now,\u201d he said in an interview. An Innovations Gallery, which the museum hopes to open in 2024, will have rotating exhibits on a 24-month timetable covering contemporary topics such as climate change.The Bezos Learning Center will offer STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) programming and activities that engage the museum\u2019s collection and encourage young people to pursue innovation and explore related careers.\u201cThe ability to scale the educational richness of what the Smithsonian has to offer is what really excites me,\u201d Browne says. \u201cWe see the museum as inspiring tomorrow\u2019s innovators and explorers \u2014 whether space bound or Earth bound.\u201d\n\n The gift announcement comes just days before Bezos takes off for space and as the museum prepares to reopen July 30. Jeff Bezos donates $200 million to Air and Space Museum in largest gift to the Smithsonian since its founding",
        "author": "Kelsey Ables"
    },
    {
        "title": "Lost in space? Questions mount over fate of secret satellite as SpaceX pushes ahead (WP: Business) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9151",
        "date": "2018-01-12",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/lost-in-space-questions-mount-over-fate-of-secret-satellite-as-spacex-pushes-ahead/2018/01/12/c7b42cde-f729-11e7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html",
        "text": "The top-secret satellite known only by a code name, \"Zuma,\" was a mystery from the start. Its classified mission was intentionally inscrutable, whether to detect missile launches, spy on adversaries or track ships at sea with a space radar. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightThe satellite was so highly secretive that it was not publicly released which government agency \u2014 The National Reconnaissance Office? The CIA? \u2014 was responsible for it. During the launch on the evening of Jan. 7, SpaceX cut short its webcast so that it wouldn't reveal details of where the satellite was going or what it looked like. Now there's another mystery: What happened to Zuma?After reports Monday that the satellite suffered some sort of failure, SpaceX rushed to defend its reputation, denying that it had done anything wrong. Its Falcon 9 rocket \"performed nominally,\" it said. AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementThen, on Tuesday morning, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell issued a more strongly worded statement, saying: \"For clarity: after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night. If we or others find otherwise based on further review, we will report it immediately.\"Shotwell pushed back on reports that seemed to implicate SpaceX with the satellite's demise, saying \"information published that is contrary to this statement is categorically false.\"The mystery behind the fate of a top-secret satellite comes at the height of one of Elon Musk\u2019s biggest rivalriesNorthrop Grumman, the satellite's manufacturer, said it could not comment on a classified mission. As members of Congress began requesting classified briefings about what, if anything, went wrong, Pentagon officials were also mum.Story continues below advertisementFor SpaceX, the stakes are especially high \u2014 not just because a valuable national security asset valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, that it was hired to launch was possibly lost. It had fought so hard for the right to compete for national security launches. After a bitter legal and lobbying battle, the Pentagon certified SpaceX's Falcon 9 for the missions and now is relying on SpaceX to reliably fly its satellites to orbit.AdvertisementFurthermore, NASA is counting on Elon Musk's company to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, with test flights as early as this year.U.S. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), who said he received a \"preliminary briefing,\" had two concerns about the possible loss of the satellite. Story continues below advertisement\"One is the loss of the intelligence that would have been available,\" he said. \"The second concern is the reliability of the delivery systems. And that issue is being debated between the contractors, SpaceX and the satellite manufacturer, Northrop.\" While he said he did not know who was to blame, he indicated that the dispute might lead to litigation. \"Those two companies are going to have a long and, I suspect, very expensive discussion,\" he said.SpaceX's resolve and relentless drive were unchanged by the mystery surrounding Zuma (which included the possibility that nothing went wrong and that the satellite was, indeed, in orbit). Last year, the company launched 18 times successfully, a record for SpaceX. This year, it plans to break that record, continuing its disruption of an industry Musk first targeted when he founded SpaceX in 2002.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs critics were quick to call SpaceX's reliability into question, the company rolled its new powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, onto the same launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center that hoisted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. An engine test fire had been postponed earlier in the week and was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Despite the Zuma mystery, SpaceX vowed to continue with its manifest without delay.That in itself was a statement: \"They're not going to launch again if they think there's a chance it was their fault,\" said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.Matt Desch, the chief executive of Iridium, a communications satellite company that is one of SpaceX's biggest customers, said in an interview that he \"absolutely\" had full confidence in SpaceX and that he had no qualms about proceeding with the four launches Iridium has on the Falcon 9 this year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisement\"We're moving forward with plans for our next launch,\" he said. \"I know there are people who would love SpaceX to be taken down a few notches. And I'd be glad to hold them accountable for things they should be held accountable for. But this isn't one. I believe they weren't really responsible.\"Meanwhile, SpaceX's chief rival made a statement of its own on Friday. After a couple-day delay, the United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, launched a Delta IV rocket carrying a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.After a successful liftoff, the rocket was traveling at Mach 1, the speed of sound, within 49 seconds, as it burned through propellant at a rate of 1,950 pounds per second. Story continues below advertisement\"Delta is ripping the sky at incredible speed,\" Tory Bruno, the United Launch Alliance's chief executive, wrote on Twitter.'What an incredible way to start off 2018'On Jan. 7, the SpaceX launch appeared to go smoothly. The company cheered a successful liftoff and then the touchdown of its first-stage booster back on land so that it could be flown again, a practice designed to lower the cost of spaceflight. AdvertisementMusk on Monday tweeted a long-exposure picture of the launch showing its fiery trail to space \u2014 and then the return of the booster, which has become routine for the company.The Air Force's 45th Space Wing congratulated SpaceX in a tweet: \"What an incredible way to start off 2018 w/the world's 1st successful launch and landing of this year!\"Story continues below advertisementThe launch was an important one for the California-based company founded nearly 16 years ago. Since its early days, Musk has waged war against the traditional contractors, namely the United Launch Alliance, in an attempt to compete for national security launch contracts, generally worth hundreds of millions of dollars.For years, Musk proclaimed that SpaceX could save taxpayers millions by offering the Pentagon launches for far less than its rival. Meanwhile, the United Launch Alliance maintained that responsibility for vital national security satellites that cost hundreds of millions should not be decided on just price.AdvertisementMore than 10 years ago, even before it had flown a rocket to space successfully, SpaceX sued Boeing and Lockheed Martin in an attempt to block the formation of the United Launch Alliance, which it said was using \"strong-armed tactics to demand that the Air Force grant them exclusive long-term contracts.\" But SpaceX was derided as an \"ankle biter\" by its competitors, and the lawsuit went nowhere.Story continues below advertisementIn 2014, SpaceX sued again in an attempt to end the nearly decade-long monopoly the United Launch Alliance held on national security launches, arguing that it should be able to compete for the launch contracts. By that point, SpaceX had been flying its Falcon 9 rocket successfully, and the Air Force settled the case with SpaceX, eventually granting it the certification required for it to compete.Under mounting pressure from SpaceX, Bruno vowed to \"literally transform\" the company to compete \u2014 and he also continued to champion the firm's track record of more than 100 successful launches in a row.AdvertisementSince the contracts became competitively bid, SpaceX has won two of three contests.'Space is a risky business'But it has also had its setbacks. In 2015, a Falcon 9 rocket blew up while carrying cargo to the space station. Then, in 2016, another rocket exploded while being fueled ahead of an engine test. No one was hurt in either explosion, but the payloads, worth millions of dollars, were lost.In both cases, the company was grounded while it investigated the cause of the problems. As of now, SpaceX is moving ahead with its launch manifest.\"Since the data reviewed so far indicates that no design, operational or other changes are needed, we do not anticipate any impact on the upcoming launch schedule,\" Shotwell said.As for Zuma's fate, little is known. This week, members of Congress began receiving briefings but were tight-lipped about the classified sessions.AdvertisementU.S. Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, said in a statement that while he couldn't comment on classified matters, \"space is a risky business.\" He said his committee would provide \"rigorous oversight that accounts for that risk and ensures that we can meet all of our national security space requirements as the Air Force looks to competitively procure space launch services in the future.\"Harrison, the defense analyst, said that SpaceX is in a frustrating position because it is limited in what it can say publicly about what happened.\"It's a particular nightmare if nothing went wrong on their part and they can't prove it because of the classified nature of the mission,\" he said. The classified mission is shrouded in secrecy, so speculation of a failure \u2014 and responsibility for it \u2014 lingers. Lost in space? Questions mount over fate of secret satellite as SpaceX pushes ahead",
        "author": "Christian Davenport"
    },
    {
        "title": "Opinion | The Space Force is ready to launch (WP: Opinions) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9152",
        "date": "2020-04-16",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/with-its-first-graduates-the-space-force-is-ready-to-launch/2020/04/16/df07d7b6-801e-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html",
        "text": "The U.S. Space Force \u2014 which has been dismissed variously as a fantasy, a presidential folly and a prospective Pentagon turf war \u2014 will finally launch for real on Saturday, as 86 newly minted space warriors graduate from the Air Force Academy.Opinions to start the day, in your inbox. Sign up.ArrowRightThe surprise in this space start-up, so far, is that most of the bad things that were predicted haven\u2019t happened. The turf battles have been minimal, and the politicians have mostly stayed quiet. While the world has been hunkered down with the novel coronavirus, the new space commander, Gen.\u00a0John W.\u00a0\u201cJay\u201d Raymond, has been keeping his eyes on the heavens, literally and figuratively. The Space Force was a pet project of President Trump\u2019s, and there has been more talk about new uniforms and logos than the mission. But that\u2019s about to change: Sadly, for a generation that grew up watching Apollo astronauts walking on the moon, space is now a contested domain. The latest sign was Russia\u2019s launch of an anti-satellite missile on Wednesday, joining China in demonstrating war-fighting capability in space.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGlobal Opinions writer Josh Rogin has obtained a 2018 U.S. diplomatic cable urging Washington to better support a Chinese lab researching bat coronaviruses. (The Washington Post)The new Space Force graduates will be welcomed Saturday by Raymond, who became chief of space operations in December. Joining him will be Gen.\u00a0David L. Goldfein, the Air Force chief of staff. The ability of these two to work together has helped avert the bureaucratic wrangling that many feared.The Air Force brass initially had sharp elbows, arguing, in effect, that when it came to space, \u201cwe\u2019ve got this.\u201d But Trump wanted a new service, and Goldfein says that as he pondered the need for speed and agility, he decided the advocates of a new force were right. \u201cI started in a different place than I ended up,\u201d he told me in an interview this week.Goldfein said that a key moment on his \u201cjourney\u201d to embracing the new force came when he visited Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and talked with a group of young officers training for space operations. He asked how many favored a separate service, and every hand went up but three. He concluded that with his Air Force baggage, \u201cthere was a potential that I was going to slow this down.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementRaymond said in an interview this week that his biggest challenge is to \u201cthink boldly\u201d about building a new service from the ground up \u2014 a lean, digital network of people and systems without the legacy weapons and culture of the Air Force. One creative idea is allowing lateral transfers from the space business \u2014 recruiting a vice president at a fast-growing technology company, say, to become a part-time colonel, sharing his expertise.The space business is hot right now, with launch costs plummeting and new commercial projects booming. Raymond wants to tap this. The force recently posted an announcement of 53\u00a0civilian jobs and received 8,144\u00a0applications.Raymond says he wants to be highly selective, \u201ckeep our numbers small\u201d and build a \u201clean, agile service.\u201d The force will probably be 10,000 to 15,000, tiny by comparison with other military services, and many members will be civilians.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementFor a military that is burdened by wildly expensive aircraft carriers and fighter jets, the Space Force is a chance to start from scratch. \u201cThe challenge for the Space Force leadership will be to break with the status quo, embrace new ideas and technology, and reimagine how our military operates in space. Raymond gets this. The hardest part is actually doing it,\u201d messaged Christian Brose, the former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a champion of military modernization.We\u2019re used to thinking of space as a benign, boundless environment, where the biggest danger is that satellites will collide with debris. But Raymond warned Congress in February that China has systems in space \u201ccapable of damaging, disrupting or destroying satellites as far out as geosynchronous orbit.\u201d The Chinese also have jammers to disrupt space communications and lasers that can blind U.S. satellite sensors.Goldfein said at a defense forum that the United States needs to \u201cpunch back.\u201d The Space Force deployed its first offensive weapon, a jamming system, in March, and is readying a space-based reconnaissance system called Silent Barker that can maneuver among satellites and investigate their capabilities and threats.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementSpace weapons are highly classified, and Raymond wouldn\u2019t discuss how the United States might disable or destroy hostile forces in space. But he said that to deter adversaries, the United States must message its capabilities. \u201cThey have to know what you have,\u201d he told me.War in space would be catastrophic. Goldfein said that in every war game that involves space, \u201cwe\u2019ve never come out winning.\u201d But this week\u2019s Russian anti-satellite missile, and Saturday\u2019s graduation ceremony, remind us that like it or not, we\u2019re entering a new military era.Read more from David Ignatius\u2019s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.Read more: Max Boot: Covid-19 is killing off our traditional notions of national defenseNamrata Goswami: The Space Force\u2019s rocky start is bad news for AmericaMichael O\u2019Hanlon: The Space Force is a misguided idea. Congress should turn it down.Phil Plait: 50 years ago, we were on the moon. Where are we going next?Peter Wismer: Please, President Trump, don\u2019t bring war to space The United States is entering a new military era. Opinion: The Space Force is ready to launch",
        "author": "David Ignatius"
    },
    {
        "title": "Picturing Outer Space (WSJ: Exhibit) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9153",
        "date": "2017-10-06",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/picturing-outer-space-1507301321?mod=Searchresults_pos12&page=86",
        "text": "This 1969 poster, given away as a promotional gift in U.S. gas stations by oil company Esso, shows the stages of the Apollo 11 mission.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n David Rumsey Map Collection\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChinese landscape art of the Ming Dynasty often included phenomena like comets and sunspots. These works, from around 1425, were in a handbook for astrologers, who studied the skies to advise the emperor on auspicious times to take action and make decisions.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Jonathan A. Hill\n \n\n\n\n\n\nMore From Exhibit\n\n\n\n\nPortraits in Depth\nMarch 15, 2019 \n\n\nLeaps for Humankind\nFebruary 22, 2019 \n\n\nHow George Lucas Created \u2018Star Wars\u2019\nJanuary 18, 2019 \n\n\nChickens With a Surprisingly Literary Look\nDecember 27, 2018 \n\n\nAnimal Magnetism: This Year\u2019s Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards \nNovember 23, 2018 The new book \u2019Universe: Exploring the World\u2019 traces the history of our relationship with space through art and scientific images. ",
        "author": "Alexandra Wolfe"
    },
    {
        "title": "How Bezos\u2019 Space Watch Became a Marketing Win for Omega (WSJ: On Trend) / search: 'space+ship'",
        "uid": "9154",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-jeff-bezoss-space-watch-became-a-marketing-win-for-omega-11627058918?mod=Searchresults_pos15&page=16",
        "text": "Through a representative, the Swiss luxury watch brand confirmed that Blue Origin outfitted Mr. Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, pilot Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daeman with the customized stainless steel Speedmaster Moonwatch chronograph wristwatches, but it would not say whether the watches were gifted or purchased by the company. Regardless of their origin, the Blue Origin crew\u2019s watches proved to be a publicity boon for Omega. \nGoogle Trends, the search engine\u2019s in house measurement of interest, showed a big spike in searches of \u201cBezos Watch\u201d and \u201c\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Jeff Bezos\n \n\n\n\n Watch\u201d on the morning of the Blue Origin\u2019s launch. In a sign that at least some keen-eyed watch aficionados were watching the proceedings, Google Trends also showed a healthy number of searches for the more specific \u201cJeff Bezos Omega.\u201d \n\n\n\n\n\n\nApollo astronauts, like Neil Armstrong (foreground), commonly wore their watches over their spacesuits.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n Getty Images\n \n\n\n\nOn Tuesday, Hodinkee, a watch publication beloved by horological nerds, ran an online story about the crew\u2019s Omegas, which became the site\u2019s most read story that day, said Danny Milton the article\u2019s author. (Mr. Milton noted that the publication saw similar traffic when it correctly identified the Rolex worn by president Joe Biden at his inauguration.) \n\n\nOmega has a longstanding affiliation with space travel, dating back to 1962 when NASA astronaut Walter Schirra wore an Omega Speedmaster into space. But thanks to the wall-to-wall coverage of Mr. Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin launch, Omega\u2019s public moment was closer in spirit to its associations with Hollywood. Omega\u2019s roster of celebrity backers includes Daniel Craig, George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, generating steady interest in the brand from fans who want to copy their favorite star\u2019s favorite watch.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe Blue Origin Omegas were customized with branded Velcro straps.\n\n\n\nFor one morning at least, Mr. Bezos found himself in this crowd, with viewers wondering \u201cwhat is that shiny watch?\u201d Unfortunately, these specialized Speedmasters which featured Blue Origin branded velcro straps and were engraved with the wearer\u2019s name, flight number and the space company\u2019s feather logo are not available for sale. A classic all-steel Moonwatch retails for $6,300.\nNot all the comments about Mr. Bezos\u2019s watch were about the watch itself. Many viewers noted with curiosity that the\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Amazon\n\n\n founder had strapped his watch on the exterior of his jumpsuit. (On\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Twitter,\n\n\n countless users also commented on Mr. Bezos\u2019s curled cowboy hat, which made the tech titan look as if he was about to enter a rodeo, not board a rocket ship.) This watch-on-the-outside move called to mind\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n Gianni Agnelli,\n\n\n\n the late, incomparably-stylish president of Fiat, who famously clamped his big-face wrist watches over his pressed dress shirt cuffs. Mr. Agnelli\u2014who was at one point the richest man in Italy\u2014had his shirts tailored so tightly at the cuffs that his beefy watches simply wouldn\u2019t fit underneath.\nSome viewers speculated that Mr. Bezos velcroed his watch on the outside as a way of flexing his vast wealth. \u201cBezos wearing his watch over his space suit, just incase [sic] you didn\u2019t realise he\u2019s filthy rich,\u201d quipped Anja Madhvani on Twitter. But historically astronauts do tend to wear their wristwatches on the outside of their spacesuits for maximum legibility. Past photos of Mr. Aldrin, Jim Lovell and other Apollo astronauts show their timepieces strapped around the marshmellowy sleeves of their spacesuits. In this regard, Mr. Bezos was again just keeping with tradition. \n\n\n\n\n\n Expensive materials, delicate craftsmanship, and an economic principle that turns the usual equation of supply and demand on its head. WSJ explains why some watchmakers can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single timepiece. Illustration: Alex Kuzoian/WSJ\n \n\n\n\n\nMore in Style & Fashion\n\n\n\n\nWith Its \u2018Satan Shoes,\u2019 Art Collective MSCHF Went Viral. Next Up: A Footwear Empire?\nMarch 10, 2022 \n\n\nDistressed, Ripped Jeans: They\u2019re Happening Again\nMarch 8, 2022 \n\n\nBirkin Bros: Why Men Covet Wildly Extravagant Herm\u00e8s Handbags\nMarch 7, 2022 \n\n\nParis Fashion Week Was All About Kanye, Julia Fox, Pusha T\u2014and Oh, Yeah, Some Clothes\nJanuary 26, 2022 \n\n\nWhy Are Rich Guys So Obsessed With These Boring-Looking Shoes?\nJanuary 24, 2022 The Blue Origin and Amazon founder\u2019s conspicuous wristwatch led to a surge of interest in the Swiss watchmaker. ",
        "author": "Jacob Gallagher"
    },
    {
        "title": "In This Space Race, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk Are Competing to Take You There (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9155",
        "date": "2018-04-24",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/books/review/space-barons-christian-davenport-rocket-billionaires-tim-fernholz.html",
        "text": "Two new books, \u201cThe Space Barons\u201d and \u201cRocket Billionaires,\u201d tell the story of the entrepreneurial push to leave Earth. Two new books, \u201cThe Space Barons\u201d and \u201cRocket Billionaires,\u201d tell the story of the entrepreneurial push to leave Earth. THE SPACE BARONS Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos By Christian Davenport Illustrated. 308 pp. PublicAffairs. $28.",
        "author": "By Walter Isaacson"
    },
    {
        "title": "What Makes Elon Musk Different (NYT: Books) / search: 'space+science'",
        "uid": "9156",
        "date": "2021-07-23",
        "link": "https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/books/review/eric-berger-liftoff-tim-higgins-power-play.html",
        "text": "Two new books, Eric Berger\u2019s \u201cLiftoff\u201d and Tim Higgins\u2019s \u201cPower Play,\u201d explore Musk\u2019s terrestrial and extraterrestrial pursuits \u2014 and what has made him so successful. Two new books, Eric Berger\u2019s \u201cLiftoff\u201d and Tim Higgins\u2019s \u201cPower Play,\u201d explore Musk\u2019s terrestrial and extraterrestrial pursuits \u2014 and what has made him so successful. LIFTOFF Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceXBy Eric Berger",
        "author": "By Walter Isaacson"
    },
    {
        "title": "\u2018Across the Airless Wilds\u2019 Review: The Ultimate Road Trip (WSJ: Bookshelf) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9157",
        "date": "2021-07-02",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/across-the-airless-wilds-review-the-ultimate-road-trip-11625237594?mod=Searchresults_pos18&page=27",
        "text": "What rekindled interest in the space program was that most American of conveyances: the automobile. The lunar rover, built by contractors for $40 million on a frantic 17-month schedule, was a car for the moon. It reinvigorated the final three Apollo missions, from 1971 to 1972. The rover allowed for better communications, longer time on the lunar surface, and, most important, a vastly expanded range. In his compelling history of the rover\u2019s place in the space program, \u201cAcross the Airless Wilds,\u201d Earl Swift writes that, during Apollo 15, 16 and 17, astronauts drove it over 56 miles.\n\n\nAcross the Airless WildsBy Earl Swift\n\t\t\n\t\t\tCustom House, 372 pages, $28.99\n\n\n\n\nWhat to Read This Week\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\nDriving on the moon, America\u2019s early divide, a tale of Crazy Horse from the author of \u2018The Revenant,\u2019 letters from Willie Nelson and more.\n\n\nContrast that with Armstrong\u2019s and Aldrin\u2019s bipedal wanderings. They estimated that they could cover only a half-mile on foot in their heavy, pressurized suits. Yet the moon\u2019s surface was far more dynamic than the Sea of Tranquility, and deserved a thoroughgoing exploration. Its features include massive canyons and towering mountain ranges. Astronauts on Apollo 15 collected a 4 x 2-inch chunk of crystal anorthosite over 4 billion years old. NASA sought evidence of volcanic activity and detailed samples of the lunar crust. Such scientific discoveries were a far cry from Alan Shepard\u2019s 6-iron, which became the corny star of Apollo 14. That was before astronauts could drive. \nMr. Swift, the author of seven previous works of nonfiction, lays out the genesis of the lunar rover and introduces the engineers who conceived and built it. He notes pointedly that many of them, like M.G. Bekker and Ferenc Pavlics, were immigrants. Unlike other landmark books about the space program, \u201cAirless Wilds\u201d is not a story of fighter pilots or sudden explosions. Instead it is a chronicle of incremental progress: meticulous planning, working under deadline, the satisfactions of a job well done. Such are Mr. Swift\u2019s narrative talents and the bounties of the source material that the book is a joy to read from beginning to end.\n\n\nEarly concepts for some sort of moon vehicle ranged from the creative to the absurd. Mr. Swift situates readers in an analog era of gray space suits and crooked antennae dreamed up by men in thin neckties. One design in the mid-1950s showed a car \u201cshaped like an overgrown Tootsie Pop, with its spherical cabin up top of a single long leg, which in turn was mounted on a caterpillar-tread foot.\u201d It would leap as high as 410 feet. Another early idea featured \u201ca triangular rover that high-stepped along on six jointed legs\u201d and explored with \u201ccrablike pincers.\u201d NASA became serious about building a rover in the late 1960s and issued a request for proposals. Firms like Bendix, Chrysler and Grumman submitted detailed bids, but Boeing and its subcontractor General Motors won the commission.\nThe chapters on the construction and delivery of the vehicle from 1969 to 1971 describe a near-fiasco. Although Boeing completed the rover two weeks ahead of schedule, it more than doubled its projected budget of $18.7 million. In addition to suffering failures of project management, the company struggled with one of NASA\u2019s immovable specifications: the rover must weigh no more than 400 pounds. It would carry two astronauts, each weighing 370 pounds in his space suit, not to mention a payload of equipment and rocks. This meant the rover would have to support much more than its own weight on the lunar surface. As Mr. Swift notes, \u201ccars and trucks on Earth are rarely called upon to carry more than half their weight.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAstronaut Dave Scott checks the fit of the folded rover in the lunar module, 1972.\n\n\n Photo: \n \n NASA\n \n\n\n\nThere were other design challenges. Solar radiation and temperature extremes would destroy rubber tires, while those pumped with air could not be refilled in the event of a flat. Hence, fabricating durable and extremely lightweight wheels became a critical component of the project. NASA built three crater fields in Arizona for test drives. Then there was the question of finding room for the rover on the landing module. Mr. Pavlics solved this problem over a four-month period by using a 1:6 scale model and testing various configurations. The eventual rover could fold in on itself, with the wheels resting on top of the chassis. The scale model included a G.I. Joe action figure in the cockpit wearing a silver Gemini space suit.\nThe rover made its debut in July 1971 on Apollo 15. The chapters on its near-flawless performance are the best in the book. Mr. Swift describes the unnatural challenges that astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin faced while driving on the lunar surface. \u201cThe moon played tricks on them. The horizon was weirdly close. The sky was utterly black. The gray surface concealed its features behind swells and declivities. And th Walking on the moon was a historic feat\u2014but Americans like to get behind the wheel. ",
        "author": "Michael O\u2019Donnell"
    },
    {
        "title": "Review | A look at the maps that shaped our world (WP: Books) / search: 'space+exploration'",
        "uid": "9158",
        "date": "2018-12-06",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-look-at-the-maps-that-shaped-our-world/2018/12/05/de09f524-f4ce-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html",
        "text": "When Apollo 8 launched Dec. 21, 1968, the first manned flight to leave low Earth orbit gave its astronauts an unprecedented view: the entire planet. It\u2019s strange to think that only 50 years have passed since humans were first able to see the whole globe, especially considering how long they have been drawing maps. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightIn his gorgeous book, \u201cTheater of the World,\u201d Thomas Reinertsen Berg provides dozens of full-color maps along with fascinating details about the history of attempts to represent geographical space. Early maps \u2014 including one carved into a mammoth tusk nearly 38,000 years ago \u2014 focused on the heavens, the one area for which early mapmakers had a long-range view.But humans eventually turned their attention to the land beneath their feet. Ancient Greeks, including Ptolemy, a renowned mapmaker and astronomer who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, created images that reflected increased knowledge of far-off lands. During the Middle Ages, clerics and cartographers tried to locate such biblical sites as the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden. \u201cThe question of where to place paradise became more problematic for cartographers as the Far East became better known \u2014 not least after The Travels of Marco Polo was published around the year 1300,\u201d Berg writes. \u201cSome started to draw Eden in southern Africa, which was still largely unknown.\u201dThe first map to depict America as a separate continent \u2014 and the first to call it \u201cAmerica\u201d \u2014 was created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseem\u00fcller in 1507. In 2001, the Library of Congress reached an agreement to acquire the only known copy of the map, deemed \u201cAmerica\u2019s birth certificate,\u201d for $10 million.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAs the Age of Exploration dawned, cartographers used information gleaned from long journeys to supplement the knowledge inherited from their forebears to create more ambitious maps.Berg has a fascinating chapter on the creation of the first atlas, assembled by Abraham Ortelius and published in Antwerp (in what today is Belgium) in 1570. Ortelius drew upon the work of 89 cartographers to create 69 uncolored maps.The resulting Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of the World) has a frontispiece that depicts the known continents as allegorical female figures.\u201cAt the top, Europe sits on a throne, wearing a crown,\u201d and she holds an orb with a cross, \u201cas she\u2019s responsible,\u201d Berg says \u201cfor bringing Christianity to the world. Asia is \u201cclothed in noble robes,\u201d he says, \u201cbut she wears a tiara rather than a crown and is subordinate to the European queen.\u201d Africa, also subordinate to Europe, is \u201cmore sparsely clad and wearing a halo inspired by the sun to emphasize the heat.\u201dAdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt the bottom, America, only recently discovered and named, is depicted, Berg says, \u201cas primitive, cannibalistic .\u2009.\u2009. holding a European man\u2019s head in her hand.\u201d Next to America is a bust that represents \u201cTerra australis nondum cognita\u201d \u2014 a \u201csouthern land not yet known.\u201dThe inclusion of a quotation from Cicero \u2014 \u201cFor what human affairs can seem important to a man who keeps all eternity before his eyes and knows the vastness of the universe?\u201d \u2014 provides \u201ca glimpse of the deeper meaning Ortelius saw in cartography,\u201d Berg says.Berg makes a strong case that maps served many purposes beyond representing geographical space.Readers can expect to spend happy hours with this book, tracing routes and reading reports of adventuring navigators.Lorraine Berry\u2009has written about books for the Guardian and Salon, among other outlets, and tweets at @BerryFLW.By Thomas Reinertsen BergLittle, Brown. 384 pp. $35. Thomas Reinertsen Berg\u2019s \u201cTheater of the World\u201d looks at man\u2019s quest to capture geographical space. A look at the maps that shaped our world",
        "author": "Lorraine Berry"
    },
    {
        "title": "Here\u2019s how to watch the full flower \u2018blue moon\u2019 Saturday night (WP: Capital Weather Gang) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9159",
        "date": "2019-05-17",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/05/17/heres-how-watch-full-flower-blue-moon-saturday-night/",
        "text": "When the moon is full on Saturday, Earth\u2019s lunar companion becomes a \u201cblue\u201d moon \u2014 in a floral, seasonal way.Popular folklore holds that the second full moon in a given month is a blue moon, but this Saturday\u2019s blue moon has another definition. It is the third of four full moons in a given season. In most seasons, there are just three full moons. WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightBut this spring, there are four full moons between the vernal equinox on March 20 and the summer solstice on June 21. The third of the four full moons gets the blue designation \u2014 as a kind of placeholder \u2014 so named moons like the harvest moon, the snow moon and the wolf moon don\u2019t become out of sync with their usual companion month, said astronomer Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory.Story continues below advertisementThe seasonal blue moons occur every two to three years on average. The next one is set for Aug. 22, 2021.AdvertisementChester said this seasonal blue moon \u2014 which is the original definition of a blue moon \u2014 was first dreamed up by the Maine Farmer\u2019s Almanac in the early 20th century.Thus, May\u2019s usual flower moon becomes a blue flower moon, if we conform to the farmers\u2019 almanacs.\u201cThe blue moon is an interesting bit of scientific trivia for those that keep track of these kinds of things,\u201d Chester said. \u201cThere is nothing particularly special about it. Somewhere along the line you\u2019ve got to have an extra moon.\u201dFor Washington, the moon officially becomes full at 5:11 p.m., but starts to rise Saturday at 8:10 p.m., according to the Naval Observatory.Sky conditions should allow for good viewing in most of the eastern United States, but clouds will obscure the night sky in much of the western two-thirds of the nation.Brian Murphy, a professor of physics and astronomy at Butler University in Indiana, notes that when this full moon first rises, it might have an orange tint as it starts to ascend the eastern horizon.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementWhile the sun is setting in the western sky, the full moon will be rising in the eastern sky, then the atmosphere scatters blue light and we can see the red wavelengths, Murphy said. \u201cThat\u2019s why you see the sun or the moon \u2014 when rising or setting \u2014 taking on an orange hue,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen the sun or the moon go to their higher places in the sky, they take on their normal colors.\u201dFor much of Saturday night, it will appear as a normal full moon. \u201cThere is not going to be anything odd about it,\u201d Murphy said. \u201cThere won\u2019t be color, as the moon will be its typical grayish white.\u201dIf you can, find a clear eastern horizon, such as a beach. Look to the east-southeast to see the full moon rising at the horizon. By 9 p.m., the moon will be several degrees above the southeastern horizon.Space station makes for night sky double featureThere will be more than one reason to look up into the evening sky Saturday night.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementAt about 9:27 p.m. Saturday in Washington (check NASA\u2019s Spot the Station website for times at other locations), you might be able to spot the International Space Station. It will look similar to an airplane crossing the sky, but it will be a moving bright dot \u2014 lit by the sun. It will not have the telltale blinking lights of a jetliner. Look just above the horizon in the northwest sky. The space station should be visible for about six minutes before setting in the eastern part of the northern sky.The space station will also make a lengthy pass over Washington on Friday night starting at 10:17 p.m., rising in the west-southwest sky and setting six minutes later to the northeast.A lunar anniversaryChester said that Saturday is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 10 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. With astronauts Thomas P. Stafford, John W. Young and Eugene Cernan, the Apollo 10 mission conducted NASA\u2019s dress rehearsal for the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969. They tested in lunar orbit how to rendezvous and dock the command module Charlie Brown and the lunar module Snoopy. The International Space Station will also pass through the sky Here\u2019s how to watch the full flower \u2018blue moon\u2019 Saturday night",
        "author": "Blaine Friedlander"
    },
    {
        "title": "Excited about \u2018First Man\u2019? You\u2019re going to want to see Apollo 11 artifacts and pieces of the moon, too. (WP: Going Out Guide) / search: 'space+mission'",
        "uid": "9160",
        "date": "2018-10-11",
        "link": "https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/going-out-guide/wp/2018/10/11/excited-about-first-man-youre-going-to-want-to-see-apollo-11-artifacts-and-pieces-of-the-moon-too/",
        "text": "With \u201cFirst Man\u201d earning rave reviews, it's sure to spark a renewed interest in Neil Armstrong's one giant leap for mankind, especially with the 50th anniversary of the moon landings arriving in 2019. Not surprisingly, the Washington area is home to numerous NASA-related artifacts and multiple pieces of the moon. Here's where you can see them: WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRightNational Air and Space Museum: \u201cFirst Man,\u201d which stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, opens today in Air and Space's Imax theaters\u00a0on the Mall and at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Dulles. At 10:30 a.m. today, the D.C. museum hosts the unveiling of a new U.S. Mint coin commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo missions. Astronaut Walt Cunningham, who piloted Apollo 7, is the guest speaker.Those hoping to pair a screening of \u201cFirst Man\u201d with a closer look at the Apollo 11 command module will be disappointed: Columbia is currently on view in Pittsburgh as part of the touring \u201cDestination Moon\u201d exhibition. Another important artifact from the mission, Armstrong's spacesuit, is currently being restored by Smithsonian conservationists, with the hope that it can go back on view next year.AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementBut even without those two items, the museum has a sizable number of objects related to Apollo 11 in its second-floor \u201cApollo to the Moon\u201d gallery, which closes for an extended renovation on Dec. 3\u00a0and is scheduled to reopen on January 2022. (In other words, if you haven't visited recently, do it now.) The Apollo Lunar Module LM-2, a test version of the craft that carried astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon's surface and back, remains on display in the Milestones of Flight Hall, along with the touchable moon rock (brought back by the crew of Apollo 17).Washington National Cathedral: Five years after the first moonwalk, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin presented Washington National Cathedral with a seven-gram sliver of basalt rock, collected during their historic mission. The rock, sealed in a nitrogen-filled capsule, sits at the heart of a colorful custom-made stained glass window in the south transept.[Think you know D.C.? You\u2019ve probably never seen these 15 unexpected things.]AdvertisementStory continues below advertisementGoddard Space Flight Center: NASA's oldest space flight facility is home to an interesting visitors center and museum, and its outdoor \u201cRocket Garden\u201d includes a collection of full-size rockets and hardware for visitors to explore. The star is what NASA calls \u201ca genuine nonflying 'boilerplate' mock-up\u201d of the Apollo crew capsule, which was used for training. Inside the museum, visitors can climb inside a Gemini capsule \u2014 Armstrong was the commander of Gemini 8, a precursor to the Apollo program \u2014 and touch a piece of moon rock that was brought back to Earth by the crew of Apollo 14.On Oct. 20, Goddard will be open from 6 to 9 p.m. for International Observe the Moon Night, which includes hands-on family activities, speakers sharing memories of moon landings and special telescopes for observing the night sky. Admission is free, and no RSVP is required. Washington is home to plenty of space history, and it's not all on the Mall. Excited about \u2018First Man\u2019? You\u2019re going to want to see Apollo 11 artifacts and pieces of the moon, too.",
        "author": "Fritz Hahn"
    },
    {
        "title": "Politicians Can\u2019t Hurt Us From Outer Space (WSJ: Letters) / search: 'space+tourism'",
        "uid": "9161",
        "date": "2021-08-03",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-travel-tourism-politicians-11627939845?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=5",
        "text": " Don\u2019t hold back. Send the entire Congress. ",
        "author": ""
    },
    {
        "title": "Soviets in Outer Space (WSJ: Slideshow) / search: 'spacecraft'",
        "uid": "9162",
        "date": "2020-03-20",
        "link": "https://www.wsj.com/articles/soviets-in-outer-space-11584714761?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=13",
        "text": " Illustrations from the new book \u2018Soviet Space Graphics\u2019 show how science magazines in the U.S.S.R. celebrated the country\u2019s achievements and imagined its future among the stars. ",
        "author": ""
    }
]